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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/shortcuts/2014/aug/13/no-shampoo-poo-movement-happy-hair-book | Fashion | 2014-08-13T15:52:06.000Z | Sali Hughes | Is it really healthier to live without shampoo? | When I was a teenager in the early 90s, there was a definite trend adopted by a specific type of hippy student I dated, who told themselves and those around them that hair was "self-cleaning". For weeks, even months, they would refuse shampoo, resulting in hair that emitted cheap cider and bong fumes wherever they went and gradually became lanker, greasier and flatter.
The modern no-washing (or "no-poo") movement is based on the same principle, and is not to be confused with the co-washing movement (a significant and increasingly mainstream shift, inspired by an Afro-Caribbean practice, towards washing hair frequently in conditioner instead of with detergent-based shampoos). The no-washing movement (and by that I mean umpteen blogs and online communities) skips the conditioner too, instead using "natural substances" such as egg, bicarbonate of soda, vinegar or just plain water.
Lucy Aitken Read, a blogger herself, is so pleased with the results of her ongoing no-wash experiment (two years and counting) that she has written a book extolling its virtues. In Happy Hair: The Definitive Guide to Giving Up Shampoo, she explains how she quit washing in order to cut down on chemicals in her household and simultaneously address her greasy hair problems. She admits that there was a tricky "smelly stage" during which she could do little but wear a head scarf, but claims that, over time, her (unarguably now lovely) hair became thicker, healthier and shinier as a direct result of not washing it.
The reasoning behind no-pooing is that chemical detergents in shampoo strip hair of its natural oils, causing the scalp to pump out too much, creating lank hair and a greasy scalp. Free of harsh chemicals, the hair restores its own balance, growing lusciously of its own accord. This claim is unproven but the anecdotal evidence is plentiful and compelling. What is not so persuasive is the cheery assertion that one can "push through" an extended period when hair smells like the bins behind a nightclub.
The other flaw in the no-poo argument is that it seems insistent on imagining that all modern shampoos are packed with SLS (a chemical foaming agent), when in fact you can now pick up an SLS-free shampoo for about three quid in Sainsbury's. It also wilfully ignores the much more fragrant co-wash method (see above), and the abundance of modern brands making good shampoos with only natural ingredients and foaming agents (coconut oil being just one of them). All are available to anyone wanting to reduce their chemical intake – and require zero reliance on stinky headscarves.
Do you live without shampoo? Or co-wash? How well does it work for you? Let us know in the comments below. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/30/spotlight-isnt-bad-but-film-thalidomide-scandal-real-must-see-attacking-the-devil | Opinion | 2016-01-30T08:00:20.000Z | Ian Jack | Spotlight isn’t bad – but a film on the thalidomide scandal is the real must-see journalism drama | Two new films take investigative journalism as their subject. The first, Spotlight, is a Hollywood feature that tells how the Boston Globe revealed the sexual abuse committed by hundreds of Catholic priests that until then had been deviously covered up by the hierarchy. Directed by Tom McCarthy, its cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, John Slattery (Roger Sterling in Mad Men) and Rachel McAdams. It appears in many critics’ lists of last year’s top 10 films and has six Oscar nominations, including best picture, which it has been strongly tipped to win. It cost $20m (£14m) to make – a snip by Hollywood standards – and had already taken $31m at the box office by mid-January, two months after its US release. Anyone with only a casual interest in the cinema will have heard of it.
That isn’t the case with the second film, which is far harder to find: during the next month it will appear like an unloved touring rep company for one night only in Oxford, Liverpool, York and Norwich, and equally briefly at one or two small cinemas in London. It’s a documentary directed by the sibling film-makers Jacqui and David Morris, and tells the story of the Sunday Times’ struggle to publish the history of thalidomide and to win proper compensation for the drug’s victims. It cost about $500,000 – a 40th of Spotlight’s budget – and rather than star actors, it features many real heroines and heroes, including its protagonist, the Sunday Times’s then editor Harold Evans.
The worst thing about this film is its title, Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, which manages to be both opaque and catchpenny. In other respects, it seems a far better film than Spotlight – richer, more complicated, more informative and more affecting. Most of this difference is present in the reality that inspired the films. Whatever psychological damage Boston’s paedophile clergy may have inflicted on their victims, its physical invisibility makes it far less startling than the effect of thalidomide on babies in the womb. And however oppressive the behaviour of Boston’s Catholic hierarchy may have been 15 years ago, as an opponent of free reporting, it fell some way short of the enemies Evans had to face in the 1960s and 70s, which was nothing less than Britain’s legal and political establishment standing side by side with the FTSE 100-listed whisky and pharmaceuticals company, Distillers.
Then there’s the question of depiction. As a feature, Spotlight has the job of recreating the process of journalism, both persuasively and interestingly. Unlike the work of deep-sea divers, surgeons or SAS officers, it isn’t naturally pictorial. A film-maker on entering a newspaper office will ask the staff “just to behave as you usually would” before becoming quickly dissatisfied with the laconic talk on the phone, the prolonged staring at computer screens, the quiet clack-clack of the keyboard. Soon there will be requests to liven things up a little. “Couldn’t you two have a cup of coffee and talk about the story?” “Could you look at your watch and mention the deadline?” “Couldn’t you shout into the phone, maybe?”
Spotlight strikes only a few false notes in this department. Rachel McAdams is given the spectacular ability to take down an interview in her notebook and walk at the same time; a priest fesses up instantly on his doorstep after a single question (in my experience, the doorstep confession is unknown); the dialogue is sometimes too expository to be credible. But the film’s big faults lie in the opposite direction. For a film “based on a true story” – a Hollywood slogan that usually precedes a cubist arrangement of the facts – Spotlight is remarkably faithful to the long littleness of life. The reporters in the Spotlight investigations team are a decent and harmonious bunch. The newly arrived editor is decent. The recently departed editor is decent. The owner is exceptionally decent. A different kind of film – one, say, with a permit to invent and embroider – might show the proprietor as a coward and one of the investigating reporters as a mole for Opus Dei, but then that kind of film wouldn’t have actors representing real, named people, who could be awkward and sue.
What little tension there is in the film comes from the argument over when the paper should publish the story: now, when they have the details of the abuse, or later, when the hierarchy’s complicity can be proved. “We gotta nail these scumbags,” says the feistiest reporter (Ruffalo). “We gotta show people that nobody can get away with this, not a priest, or a cardinal, or a freaking pope.” It isn’t a bad film – and its discreet, non-voyeuristic treatment of the abuse is greatly in its favour – but it treats a simple story too simply. Victims come forward, the scumbags are nailed, good journalism triumphs. You think: if verisimilitude is the point, why not lay off all these actors and match archive footage to contemporary interviews (including the priestly culprits so absent in the present film) and make a documentary?
Harold Evans … intelligent journalism, and Evans’ steady nerve, uncovered the truth about an inadequately tested drug. Photograph: Clive Booth
That method works beautifully in the Harold Evans film, which is moving in unexpected ways. The surviving thalidomiders are now all in their 50s; it would be strange not to be moved by their bravery and physical skill, or by the sight of them in their childhood as medical curiosities – “freaks” who, as Evans discovered in his time at the Northern Echo, many people thought should never be seen in a newspaper. One mother describes, in mimes and whispers, how her husband left her and their child (“it’s either him or me”) as that child sits beside her – whether knowing or unknowing is hard to say. Later, in his years at the Sunday Times, Evans probably did more than anyone to soften public distaste towards deformity by publishing pictures of thalidomide children week after week, accompanying interviews by Marjorie Wallace.
Evans believed in the dictum of an American editor that a newspaper campaign only began to be noticed by the public when it had reached the stage of boring its own staff, and I think that those of us on the Sunday Times who weren’t directly involved did indeed begin to be bored. But watching the film this week (and not bored for a minute), I felt how lucky I’d been to work with such a fine editor, however peripherally, on a well-funded newspaper where patient, painstaking and intelligent journalism, together with Evans’s steady nerve, had uncovered the truth about an inadequately tested drug and improved and dignified the lives of its victims.
One message is common to both films: good journalism needs to be paid for. Where its basic instinct – curiosity – comes from is less easy to be sure of, but Evans begins with an illuminating story. In the summer of 1940, his father, a Manchester train driver, took the family on holiday to Rhyl in north Wales. On the beach they meet some soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk. The 12-year-old Evans notices that their conversation about the events in France doesn’t match the bulldog-spirit stories in the newspapers: “Bloody Marvellous!” says the Daily Mirror.
A burst of old black-and-white footage matches the story. A train on Rhyl’s miniature railway curves fuzzily around a bend. To imagine Evans as part of this scene as well as our present lives, and asking questions of both … well, this is moving, too. It isn’t up for an Oscar, but do see this film. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/23/virago-founder-carmen-callil-remembered-friend-rachel-cooke-obituary | Books | 2022-10-23T13:00:38.000Z | Rachel Cooke | Virago founder Carmen Callil remembered by her friend Rachel Cooke: ‘Of course she was difficult’ | I’d love to be able to say that it was Antonia White, or Rosamond Lehmann, or one of the many other women writers she championed who brought us together. But that, alas, would be a lie. In the first instance at least, it is Padma Lakshmi, the TV cook who used to be married to Salman Rushdie, who must take the credit for my friendship with Carmen Callil.
The year was 2004 and I was at a book launch at the Polish Club in South Kensington, trying hard both not to look shy and not to drink the dangerously terrible wine that was in my glass – a tricky proposition, given that the two acts were in direct opposition to one another. The weekend before, the Observer had run a disobliging profile I’d written of Lakshmi, with whom I’d spent a long and humiliating day in New York, and to my amazement, it was this that Carmen brought up when, as the party reached its noisy climax, we were unexpectedly introduced. “Padma Lakshmi!” she all but shouted on hearing my name. And then, with even greater ferocity: “My heroine!” For a few seconds, I was confused. Was she a… fan of Lakshmi? I took a step backwards, just in case. But, no. Her smile (she had the greatest smile in the world) was benign. It appeared to be me she was praising. I decided to drink the awful wine after all.
After this, we began to get acquainted: slowly at first and then quickly. We had friends in common, which helped, and there was work to bind us, too; when her beloved Virago Modern Classics celebrated its 30th birthday in 2008, I went to her house to talk to her for a piece. But really, our relationship, and everything it eventually became, was mostly down to Carmen herself. She had – this cannot be overstated – an extraordinary capacity for friendship. Most people have half a dozen true pals, if they’re lucky. But she had a hundred at least and a way of making each one feel adored and important.
You were a heroine. You were a genius. You may even have been a heroine and a genius. My Liz, she would say, her voice an embrace even before her arms went around the person in question. My Deborah, my Nell, my Sophie. My Peter, my Colm, my Robert. She might well have read everything – it often felt to me as if she had – but she also loved company. Talk was her oxygen. When she asked you a question, it wasn’t to be polite. It was because she wanted to hear your answer.
She was the only person I’ve ever met who actually smacked her lips after eating something
It goes without saying that I was in awe of her brilliant career as a publisher; of all the people she’d known (Rebecca West, for God’s sake); of the way she connected the present to the past, a walking, talking library with a voice, even now, that was straight out of Melbourne (whether ecstatic or furious, she would screech like a parrot). The Virago classics, with their green spines and covers decorated with obscure paintings from even more obscure art galleries (friends gave her postcards as inspiration) had played a big part in my life, as they have in so many people’s.
And talking about books with her was an intense pleasure. One of the happiest memories I have is of the two of us, wedged into a couple of deck chairs in a garden in Saint-Émilion. Carmen was reading Jonathan Coe’s novel Number 11, which I’d just finished, and I was desperate for her to do the same so we could argue about it – or not, as it turned out: she loved it, too.
In the end, though, there was more to it than books. Carmen was a singular person, which makes her easy to describe, but impossible properly to capture. She had a way of getting to the heart of things; an unlikely, erratic wisdom. But she was also incredible fun. If she was a workaholic, she was also a sybarite. She loved the sun and could lie in it, like a lizard, for hours. She loved clothes, always looking fabulous in her – “it’s vintage now, darling” – Missoni coat. She loved food, especially tripe (delivered by her friend Simon Hopkinson), frisée (eaten with her fingers, usually), cheese and pavlova, of which she could easily devour three portions. Taking her out for sushi was like watching a sea lion eat a mackerel, an entire menu disappearing in seconds. She was the only person I’ve ever met who actually smacked her lips after eating something. And then there was wine (never champagne). “I haven’t had a drink in hours!” she once announced plaintively, on finding her glass empty at dinner. This became, among a certain group of us, a catch phrase, deployed in case of thirst, whether extreme or not.
Carmen Callil and Rachel Cooke watching the cricket at Lord’s, 2018. Photograph: Rachel Cooke
She loved games: online Scrabble, bridge with friends. She loved television. She loved the cinema. She loved music. She loved dogs; her terrier, Effie, was with her until the last. And she loved sport, especially cricket. In 2018, we went to Lord’s together for a one-day game (one of her quirks, of which there were many, was that she supported England, not Australia). We weren’t under cover, it was very hot, and I sloped off at about three, feeling faint. But Carmen, 30 years older than me, stayed put. “Goodbye, darling!” she said, somehow peeling her eyes from the pitch.
When she was 80, she had a grand party in the Long Room at Lord’s. On the same night, England were playing Croatia in the semi-finals of the World Cup, which spelled misery for those who didn’t want to miss it (a surprisingly high number of senior novelists were already wondering if they could run, unnoticed, back and forth to the nearest pub). Carmen, though, came to their rescue – and her own – by arranging for a huge screen to be set up next door. England lost, of course, but it was the best party ever, even if what Germaine Greer made of Kieran Trippier’s goal isn’t recorded.
She loved “junking” (her term for rootling in antique markets) and she loved presents (giving and receiving) and took them seriously. She agreed with her friend, the agent Pat Kavanagh: it’s not the thought that counts, it’s the present that counts. The best present she ever gave me was a rolling pin on which is written “les six commandements du mariage”. The best present I ever gave her – or so she told me – was an old wooden kookaburra, originally a child’s toy. Also, the sparkly necklace she wore on the day she got her DBE. As a republican, she pretended to be grumpy about becoming a dame, which happened in 2017. “I went to the palace, YOU NITWIT,” she wrote, in reply to an email in which I’d innocently asked why she’d sent me a picture of herself in a hat (she’d sneaked off there, rather furtively). But she was pleased, really. It was an acknowledgement. She understood that.
She was difficult. She’d had to be. Her story is that of all professional women in the second half of the 20th century
Above all, she loved holidays, preferably to France, where she’d once owned a home. In the strange summer of 2020, when it briefly seemed as if the worst of the pandemic might be over, we flew to stay with friends on the Côte d’Azur. Heathrow airport was hushed, the quiet only broken by an Australian woman talking at the top of her voice about Monoprix and how she absolutely had to get there to buy knickers. That week, somewhat glamorously, we went on a speedboat to the island of Porquerolles (people arranged treats for her, that’s just how it was). Carmen sat up front, the wind blowing in her hair, surrounded by charming young men (the sons of our friends), a look of perfect delight on her face. We took turns holding on to her legs, in case she blew away.
The next holiday we planned – in August, I was to take her to the Languedoc, which she wanted to see again, perhaps for the last time – was cancelled. It was on the day before we were due to leave that she found out about the leukaemia.
I’ve written all this not to rebut the obituaries, which have universally referred to how difficult Carmen could be. She was spiky. I knew that side of her, too. A friend who’d briefly worked for her at Chatto visibly blenched on catching sight of her at a party we threw (there was, everyone agrees, a lot of crying in loos both at Virago, the company she started, and at Chatto, which she ran from 1982). But she had, as all people do, many sides and as she got older, she mellowed. She was still furious: about Brexit, about climate change, about Palestine. Her tolerance for mansplaining ex-public-school boys was even lower than mine. But the clouds would pass quickly now.
And in any case, of course she was difficult. She’d had to be. How else was she to achieve anything? Her story is that of all professional women in the second half of the 20th century: a matter of extreme bravery, of hiding one’s fears and insecurities and of trying one’s best to ignore the chauvinists. She had to work harder than any man and she did.
With Kazuo Ishiguro, Adelaide, March 1988. Photograph: Fairfax Media/Getty Images
She was born in Melbourne in 1938, her mother of Irish descent and her father of Lebanese (it was, she said, thanks to her “Lebanese side” that she was such a canny marketeer). Her father died when she nine, a terrible blow, and she hated her convent school, though she never quite shook off her Catholicism; guilt racked her all her life. At home, the washing and ironing were left to her and her sister, while her brothers went off to play rugby – a situation so boring and unfair, she’d no option but to become a feminist. By the time she’d graduated with an English and history degree from Melbourne University, she was itching to leave Australia. She set sail in 1960.
In London, she worked first for the underground paper Ink and then as a publishing PR (she was a publicity whizz). And then, in 1973, she founded the Virago Press, setting up shop above a pinball arcade in Soho: a publisher whose goal was to deliver to the mass market books by, and for, women. Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Angela Carter were among her authors. In the end, though, it wasn’t new names that made Virago a triumph, but old ones. Her stroke of genius was the Modern Classics list, which republished forgotten and neglected women writers: Willa Cather, EM Delafield, Elizabeth Taylor and dozens more. It was a commercial success. It also changed the way people thought, for ever.
She will be remembered for this, of course, but I always thought what followed was just as awe-inspiring. In 1982, Jonathan Cape bought Virago and she was appointed to run its imprint, Chatto. Five years later, after disagreements with management, she bought Virago back. This wasn’t a success and in 1995 Virago was bought by Little, Brown. Carmen stepped down. In the years that followed, she did some of the usual things, chairing the Booker prize judges in 1996, and joining various boards. But she also wrote two remarkable books.
Bad Faith, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006, describes a suicide attempt Carmen made aged 22, a crisis that led her to see a psychiatrist, Dr Anne Darquier; only later did she find out that her doctor’s father was Louis Darquier, a commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy government who was responsible for sending thousands of French Jews to Nazi concentration camps. In the book, she uses all of her righteous anger to pin this banal monster to the page. Oh Happy Day, which came out in 2020, tells the story of her family’s forced emigration to Australia: a tale of poverty and violence in which she could see painful parallels with today. “It’s very depressing, darling,” she would say to people, her smile the size of New South Wales.
Carmen once told me a story about her earliest days in London, when she was still trying to find her feet, struggling with the awful weather, the awful food and the awful men. She was staying with a cousin and had a temp job at a newspaper, one of whose editors assaulted her after asking her out to lunch. Traumatised, she fled to King’s Cross, getting on the first train she could. It was heading for Cambridge and there, she wandered around, dazed, confused, hardly aware of her surroundings.
Callil speaking at a 2020 event by Extinction Rebellion sub-group Writers Rebel targeting the thinktanks of 55 Tufton Street, London. Photograph: Rachel Cooke
Her cousin was worried. Where was she? What to do? In those days, some newspapers still carried small ads on their front pages and she decided to place one (it may have been in the Evening News, I forget). WOMBAT COME HOME!, it said – Wombat being Carmen’s cousin’s nickname for her. Carmen saw the ad and to London she returned. I always thought Wombat Come Home should be the title of her autobiography, a book she was writing, but will now never finish.
In the days after she died, I kept thinking of this. Wombat come home, I said to myself whenever I cried, which was every five minutes. Where is she? What to do? Carmen used to say that it was easy to publish her authors: all that was required was to care passionately about what they did and to stick up for them. She was my friend, not my editor, but I know all too well how it must have felt to be in her protection.
She was the only person besides my husband who read everything I wrote, who always let me know what she thought of it, and who (this is the important part) understood the effort it might have taken. Her emails and texts, encouraging and enthusiastic, would arrive every Monday almost without fail and inevitably ended the same way: “No need to answer this, I know you are busy.” Somehow, she gave me the ineffable feeling that she always had my back and I wonder now what kind of writer – what kind of person – I will be without her. I hope it isn’t a bad sign that I have found writing this so bloody hard. She was the best person I ever knew and I will miss her for ever. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2011/dec/09/heineken-cup-team-news | Sport | 2011-12-09T16:05:41.000Z | Martin Pengelly | This weekend's Heineken Cup team news | Connacht v Gloucester
Gloucester omit Mike Tindall; Henry Trinder, a bolter for the England elite squad in the new year, takes his place. The Ireland lock Mike McCarthy is back for Connacht.
Match pointers Gloucester have lost four on the trot to Connacht's eight.
Castres v Northampton
Saints are without Chris Ashton and Phil Dowson, who are banned. Tom Wood, despite his red card last week, is at No6. Scott Murray is at lock for Castres.
Match pointers Castres beat Saints 38-9 in a pre-season friendly.
Scarlets v Munster
Jonathan Davies is at centre for Scarlets after missing Wales v Australia; George North returns on the wing. Simon Zebo replaces the injured Doug Howlett on Munster's left wing.
Match pointers Munster won 35-12 in September, in the RaboDirect Pro12.
Racing Métro v London Irish
Irish are promoting a meeting between their forthright No8, Chris Hala'ufia, and Racing's Sébastian Chabal. Chabal, however, will have to come off the bench. Jacques Cronje is at No8.
Match pointers Irish have one win in six matches, Racing one in four.
Saracens v Ospreys
Saracens start with Tinchy Stryder and Ronan Parke; anyone still watching after the pre-match entertainment will see Owen Farrell sit his biggest exam yet at outside-centre and new signing Peter Stringer sit on the bench. The Ospreys will have Shane Williams on the wing.
Match pointers The Ospreys are unbeaten since October; Saracens lost twice in November.
Bath v Leinster
Guy Mercer, filling Lewis Moody's boots at No7 for Bath, has somehow to deal with Sean O'Brien. Heinke van der Merwe starts at loosehead for Leinster, keeping Cian Healy on the bench.
Match pointers Bath have lost four of five; Leinster are unbeaten in nine.
Glasgow v Montpellier
Rory Lamont comes back from Toulon and starts for Glasgow. Needing to win, they will be helped by the otherwise regrettable absence of Mamuka Gorgodze, Montpellier's Georgia flanker, who is suffering from barely believable "fatigue".
Match pointers Glasgow have not lost at home since September; Montpellier won at Biarritz last week.
Clermont Auvergne v Leicester
Manu Tuilagi and Tom Croft start for the Tigers; Martin Castrogiovanni is at tighthead so Dan Cole is on the bench. The All Black Sitiveni Sivivatu is on the Clermont wing.
Match pointers Clermont have won their last nine Heineken home games; Leicester have four wins in a row in all competitions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/mar/21/ukcrime.uknews21 | UK news | 2006-03-21T02:36:03.000Z | Paul Lewis | Court hears how Wearside Jack led Ripper detectives on wild goose chase | The story behind Wearside Jack, the hoaxer who bewildered detectives hunting the Yorkshire Ripper, was unravelled in court yesterday as the man responsible pleaded guilty to four counts of perverting the course of justice.
John Humble, 50, from Sunderland, led detectives on one of the most notorious wild goose chases in criminal history when he sent three letters to police and a tape in which he taunted officers with the words, "I'm Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me."
The voice of Wearside Jack was heard again twice at Leeds crown court yesterday - once when Humble, wearing a baggy blue jumper, admitted the charges, and again as his tape, with its 257-word message, was played.
Peter Sutcliffe, the real Yorkshire Ripper, killed 13 women, three of them after the tape was sent. Sutcliffe later described the hoax communications as "divine intervention" which gave him time to kill more women.
After Humble admitted four charges relating to two letters and a tape sent to the officer in charge of the investigation, assistant chief constable George Oldfield, and a letter sent to the Manchester office of the Mirror newspaper, the court head how he had been driven by a quest for notoriety.
Paul Worsley QC, prosecuting, told the court that when Sutcliffe was asked if he was responsible for the three letters and the tape, he replied: "No, I'm not. While ever that was going on I felt safe. I'm not a Geordie. I was born in Shipley."
The court heard that Humble had a "fascination" with the original Jack the Ripper, who terrorised the streets of London in 1888, and that in 1974 he had borrowed a book from his library on the case.
Mr Worsley added that Humble must have intended to divert police from the real murderer. "After the first two letters were sent the hoaxer did not know whether police were taking them seriously. But when it was revealed that police were taking them seriously, he could have stopped.
"He did not. He was to send another letter and then a tape. That made it clear he wanted to send the police off the trail of the true killer."
But it emerged that Humble also told police in interviews that he had called the police incident rooms anonymously in September 1979 to tell officers that his letters and tape were from a hoaxer.
"I phoned in to tell them that it was a hoax, but they didn't take any notice," he said. Referring to the murder of Barbara Leach, Sutcliffe's eleventh victim, he said: "Because that lass, one of the lasses, was murdered. I blamed myself for it. That's why I phoned in. They took no notice and another two got killed."
Sutcliffe was found by chance while with a prostitute in Sheffield in 1981, and confessed to the murders. By then he had killed 13 women in Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Halifax and Huddersfield.
Convinced that they had the voice of one of Britain's most feared serial killers, officers played the recording in a dramatic press conference and diverted resources in pursuit of a killer they wrongly concluded had a strong Wearside accent and several unique speech impediments.
The focus of the inquiry was diverted to Sunderland, where officers mounted a huge appeal for information from members of the public who, they believed, might recognise Humble's voice.
Leading figures involved in the hunt for Sutcliffe spoke yesterday of how their doubts that Wearside Jack was responsible for the murders were ignored. Retired Northumbria police chief superintendent David Zackrisson, who was then a detective inspector based in Sunderland, said: "There were blatant signs that the letters and tapes were an obvious hoax.
"In September 1979 I submitted a report to Northumbria police that there was a doubt that the letters and tapes were from the killer."
One major clue, he said, was that Humble failed to acknowledge the murder of 21-year-old prostitute Yvonne Pearson in January 1978 in his first letter. If "Jack" had been the real killer he would have known that her body had been lying undiscovered under a settee in Bradford for two months.
Two phonetics experts brought into the inquiry to help identify the location of the accent, Jack Windsor Lewis and Stanley Ellis, also doubted the tape's authenticity.
"They didn't listen to us," Mr Windsor Lewis said yesterday. "They didn't look for people who could have made the tape but, for whatever reason, could not have been the murderer."
However, the officer who was second in command during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry in the 1970s, former Detective Superintendent Dick Holland, now 73, defended his team's decision to divert resources, although he admitted that mistakes were made.
Proceedings were adjourned until today, when Humble will be sentenced.
The letters
Humble sent three letters and a tape professing to be the Ripper. Below are edited extracts of two letters to Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, of West Yorkshire police, who was leading the hunt.
Sent to George Oldfield. Posted from Sunderland on March 8 1978
Dear Sir,
I am sorry I cannot give my name for obvious reasons I am the ripper. Ive been dubbed a maniac by the press but not by you You call me clever and I am. You and your mates havent a clue ... Ive got things to do, My purpose to rid the streets of them sluts ... Warn whores to keep of streets cause I feel it coming on again. Sorry about young lassie.
Yours respectfully
Jack the Ripper
Sent to George Oldfield. Posted from Sunderland on March 23 1979
Dear Officer,
Sorry I havn't written, about a year to be exact but I havn't been up North for quite a while. I was'nt kidding last time I wrote saying the whore would be older this time and maybe I'd strike in Manchester for a change. You should have took heed ...
Jack the Ripper
The tape
Sent to George Oldfield. Posted from Sunderland on June 17 1979
I'm Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord, you are no nearer to catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. Ya can't be much good, can ya? The only time they came near catching me was a few months back in Chapeltown when I was disturbed. Even then it was a uniform copper, not a detective.
I warned you in March that I'd strike again, sorry it wasn't Bradford, I did promise you that but I couldn't get there. I'm not sure when I will strike again but it will definitely be some time this year, maybe September or October ... I'm not sure where. Maybe Manchester; I like there, there's plenty of them knocking about. They never learn, do they, George? ... I can't see myself being nicked just yet. Even if you do get near, I'll probably top myself first.
Well, it's been nice chatting to you, George. Yours, Jack the Ripper.
No good looking for fingerprints, you should know by now it's clean as a whistle. See you soon. 'Bye. Hope you like the catchy tune at the end. Ha-ha!
(Followed by 22 seconds of Thank You For Being A Friend by Andrew Gold) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/22/i-made-a-mistake-but-i-wont-say-sorry-george-osborne-tells-mps | Politics | 2016-03-22T20:27:18.000Z | Anushka Asthana | I made a mistake but I won't say sorry, George Osborne tells MPs | George Osborne has told MPs he was sorry that Iain Duncan Smith had resigned from government but refused to apologise for attempting to save £4.4bn through changes to disability benefit.
In his first House of Commons appearance since the fiasco, the chancellor acknowledged the plans for cuts to personal independence payments (PIPs) were “a mistake” and would be withdrawn.
But he struck a combative tone as he defended the core principles of his tax-cutting budget and overall economic strategy, which Duncan Smith attacked as “deeply unfair” after stepping down as work and pensions secretary.
At the weekend, Duncan Smith, a former party leader, launched a withering attack on Osborne, accusing him of safeguarding wealthy, Tory-voting pensioners at the expense of cuts that hit the working poor and disabled.
The chancellor rejected the claim as he spoke in the Commons, insisting that he represented a “one nation” government, but said there would be no change to the triple lock on the state pension and universal benefits such as free bus passes.
“The truth is that we have made substantial savings from pensioner welfare – half a trillion pounds of savings,” said Osborne.
“They are vital to the long-term sustainability of our public finances but we’ve made these savings in a way that enables us to go on giving people who have worked hard all their lives a decent, generous basic state pension that we committed to in our manifesto, and I am not going to take that away from people.”
He came under sustained pressure from Labour MPs over how he will fill the £4.4bn hole left by the U-turn, with Labour’s former work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper saying he would breach his self-imposed cap on welfare spending.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: “The behaviour of the chancellor over the last 11 days calls into question his fitness for office he now holds.”
The budget was the result of the “grubby, incompetent manipulations of a political chancellor”, he added.
But Osborne was in no mood to apologise despite being pressed several times by Labour and SNP MPs.
On the first occasion, he replied: “I have made it clear that where we’ve made a mistake, where we’ve got things wrong, we listen and we learn. That’s precisely what we’ve done.”
Asked again, he said: “I have already said we are not going ahead with these changes. And I have addressed these issues.”
Pressed for a third time, Osborne added: “I couldn’t have been clearer. We listened, we learned, we made a mistake, we withdrew the proposals.”
Osborne was supported by vocal backbenchers who had turned out to support him following a difficult week in which bookmakers lengthened his odds of becoming the next Conservative leader. Party whips had ensured that all the questions from Tories were positive, with Osborne’s biggest critics absent from the chamber.
Osborne’s budget – without the PIP cuts – did secure Duncan Smith’s vote on Tuesday night in parliament. He joined all other Conservative colleagues in backing the legislation.
The chancellor is also likely to be questioned about the welfare climbdown when he appears in front of the Treasury select committee on Thursday, despite the session focusing largely on Europe. Labour MPs on the committee, such as Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves and John Mann, pushed Osborne on the issue in parliament yesterday.
Mann said MPs had “not homed in precisely enough” on Osborne’s answers about welfare and the chancellor would face more forensic questioning in the committee.
However, he said Osborne could come under even more pressure in two weeks when he faces the committee for a second time, after the dust has settled on the budget.
“It was easier than it should have been today for Osborne to go out and be bold and repackage the same message, not concede anything and pretend nothing’s happened,” he said.
Reeves said she welcomed the climbdown over PIP reforms, but said of Osborne: “Now he has to explain how they are going to fill their £4.4bn hole. Does this mean more taxes, more spending or more borrowing?”
Boris Johnson, a leading campaigner in the push to leave the European Union, will also appear in front of the committee on Wednesday in his role as mayor of London. Mann said he would get a “very tough and difficult ride” as members press him for detail on how the UK would look outside the EU.
“He’s never faced this scrutiny and it’s possible it will be a game changer if he implodes. He has a pretty easy ride if he’s prepared but if he tries to bluster it could hurt him,” Mann said.
Streeting argued that the mayor’s decision to back Brexit was questionable given that it was unpopular among Londoners and would damage the City of London. “The Treasury select committee is forensic – he had better turn up well-prepared,” he said.
Johnson is expected to argue that the UK is part of a global world, and that the City is so strong that it will not be affected by Brexit.
He will say he believes that the EU is heading into ever closer political union that could threaten jobs and growth.
Budget cuts: Cooper and Osborne battle it out over unfairness
Yvette Cooper
“The chancellor boasted when he opened the debate that this was the first time a chancellor had opened the final day of a budget debate.
“He will know that that is because it is also the first time a chancellor has had to drop the biggest revenue-raiser in his budget within two days of announcing it. The former work and pensions secretary, who has just resigned and to whom the chancellor paid great tribute, described the budget as ‘deeply unfair’ and ‘drifting’ in a wrong direction that will divide the country, not unite it.”
George Osborne
“I am glad the right honourable lady intervened, because I have done a little research and, frankly, I wish that when she was the chief secretary to the Treasury we had seen a few more revenue-raisers in budgets.
“During the period in which she was the chief secretary, the deficit went from £76bn a year to £154bn. The measures that my right honourable friend and I have been taking over the last six years are to clear up the mess that she and her colleagues in government left … I have said that when we have made a mistake, we have listened and learned.”
Yvette Cooper
“The chancellor did not address the issue of the unfairness of his budget, so will he address the issue of the revenue behind his budget? He has abandoned £4.4bn in revenue-raisers. Where is that money going to come from, or will he change the scorecard he set out?”
George Osborne
“I will tell you what is unfair: to saddle the next generation with debts you have no way of paying off. That is what the right honourable lady did. That is what she did. I will come on specifically to disability benefits, but let me tell her about fairness and what we have done over the last six years. We have taken action that means 500,000 fewer children are growing up in workless households than when she was at the Treasury, 1 million fewer people are on out-of-work benefits and over 2 million more people are in work.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/26/life-as-an-nhs-nurse-in-the-1960s | Society | 2018-06-26T07:00:28.000Z | Killian Fox | Life as an NHS nurse in the 1960s: ‘I’m glad I had that strictness trained into me’ | When I was a little girl in Grenada, I used to do little deeds of kindness. People said to me: “Oh you’re a very kind girl, you would be a good nurse.” This stuck in my mind. Then, when the quota came from England asking the West Indian girls to come up and help the NHS in a time of short supply, I took advantage.
I came over in 1966 and got a very good training at Farnham in Surrey. Then I went to London and worked at several hospitals before ending up at St George’s in Tooting, where I stayed until I retired in 2005.
Life as an NHS nurse in the 1970s: ‘There was a prejudice that nurses shouldn’t be educated’
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I liked my job very much. They were strict with us where I was trained, but very nice. If you were making the beds and the fold in the sheet was not in the centre of the mattress, God help you – you’d have to undo it and redo it in the sister’s presence, and you’d be shaking like a leaf. When I went to London it was much more relaxed, but I’m glad I had that strictness trained into me.
Over my career, I did cardiac, medical and surgical nursing. The most pressurised was cardiac – you had to be very good with people with heart problems, they would be very unwell. But it’s a very nice job, because the patient comes in at death’s door, and the nurses and doctors work on them, and when you see them go through the door walking again, you feel great: we restored somebody back to their health. You really have to be inside the profession to appreciate that.
I’ve noticed nursing changing over the years. When they brought in the patient’s charter in the 1990s, a lot of discipline was lost on the ward. I think nursing is all about the basics. You have to have so much education to be a nurse now, but I found that when nurses came from university, they had no practical knowledge. For me, training on the job was a good way to learn. Then you could build up your knowledge and do your research as you went along.
The NHS is one of the best organisations in the world. Every country envies it. This is something we have to boast about, therefore we must work to save it. If a young person was considering becoming a nurse today, I would tell them: “You go into nursing my dear, do not listen to what anybody says” – because I tell you, it’s one of the most rewarding jobs. And the money’s not too bad now. In my day, we got hardly any money. But I enjoyed the nursing and I praise the NHS for having me here [from Grenada].
My only regret is that I had to retire. When I go back to the ward to see some old friends, the nurses say to me: “Come on Cecilia, will you get a uniform and come and help us?”
Life as an NHS nurse in the 1940s: ‘You have to forget about yourself’ | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/15/top-10-books-about-homes-ben-highmore | Books | 2014-01-15T15:08:29.000Z | Ben Highmore | The top 10 books about houses | The Great Indoors explores changes in domestic life over the last hundred years or so, and it does so room by room (starting in the hallway and ending in the attic). I was interested in how these "living" rooms have been used, what they have been filled with and what they felt like across the 20th century and into the 21st.
My concern was with the house as it was imagined by advertisers and designers as well as the house as it has actually been lived, and this took me to a variety of archives: the V&A archives in the fantastic Blythe House, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, and that treasure trove of the ordinary the Mass-Observation archive at the University of Sussex.
I was also interested in how home interiors have been the stage for domestic dramas, and for this I looked at novels and films, and especially, sitcoms.
Along the way I developed a fondness for these fellow travellers in scrutinising the domestic scene:
1. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
Today this is often dismissed as part of a 1930s social tourism performed by posh Oxbridge types who wrote for a left-leaning London audience about the horrors to be found "Up North". Actually the book is both a fastidious examination of how humiliation is given material form by impoverished housing and how class might be less a form of consciousness and more a deeply ingrained and embodied set of habits.
2. Exmoor Village by WJ Turner
This book came out in 1947 as part of the work of Mass-Observation. It is an audit of one rural village at the end of the war, accompanied by some tremendous photographs by John Hinde. The village was not supplied by mains gas or electricity, and everybody washed in the scullery sink. Turner's book tells you what was on the bookshelves of the villagers and what furniture they had.
3. The House of Stairs by Barbara Vine
Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine is brilliant at capturing the uncanniness of some houses. Freud wrote a famous essay on the uncanny [PDF] and reminded us that the German word for the uncanny is literally translated as un-homely. For him what is unnerving about the uncanny is that this is strangeness found in familiar places. If you want a sense of that experience then read The House of Stairs.
4. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life by Judy Attfield
Attfield was a design historian who followed ordinary domestic objects into the home. She was less concerned with what designers intended when they produced chairs or rugs than how people used their objects and what these objects meant to them. She was particularly interested in how we get attached to the material world around us, and in one memorable passage she writes about her recently deceased dad's jumper, and how it was the touch and the smell of it that held the trace of him.
5. In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon
I read a number of autobiographies when I was researching The Great Indoors, nearly all of them had incredibly affecting descriptions of the author's childhood home (but sparse description of other homes that the authors must have lived in). Brian Dillon's book is a distillation of this aspect of autobiography, and a wonderful reflection on the power of childhood domestic space to shape and evoke memories.
6. From Mangle to Microwave: The Mechanization of Household Work by Christina Hardyment
Hardyment has published a small raft of books about the history of domestic life. She mines archives to show us what we used to eat, how we use to raise babies and small children and how we have conducted the management of the household. This book is full of great turns of phrase like "gimcrack gadgetry", but the real story is how 19th and 20th century "labour-saving" came with a whole host of added expectations that fulfilled Betty Friedan's reworked Parkinson's Law: "Housewifery expands to fill the time available".
7. The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home by Michael McMillan
A sumptuous array of domestic photographs and oral history telling how Caribbean migrants fashioned their houses in a cold and often unwelcoming Britain in the postwar years. It is interesting to see that in many ways these families were even more traditionally British than their white contemporaries, and while most white families had given up the "kept for best" parlour by the 1960s many Caribbean families maintained these more traditional domestic practices.
8. Life at the Top by John Braine
The 1957 novel Room at the Top gave Braine a massive success. This is the sequel and his ambitious protagonist Joe Lampton is living in middle-class suburbia. It is great on the way that success is sometimes measured in the material accoutrements of domestic life (TV, expensive sofas, and drinks cabinet). In Life at the Top it seems that these furnishings offer no comfort for his emotional restlessness.
9. The Ideal Home through the Twentieth Century by Deborah Sugg Ryan
The Ideal Home Exhibition has been since 1908 (with a few gaps) a perennial showcase of all that is new in home furnishings and domestic culture. It has been an important agent for popularising new fads, such as DIY. There is something magical about the show – the streets of fake-real houses in the main hall – and something banal about the relentless commercialism of it. This magnificently illustrated volume is a rip-roaring tour of both sides.
10. As Long as it's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste by Penny Sparke
It is no wonder that most of the best writers about the house are women – the house has always been the stage for performing our expectations and perceptions about gender – and for this the stakes have been higher for women than for men. After second-wave feminism said the personal is political then the logical object to look was the home. Penny Sparke shows how the world of interior design and household advice is peppered with gendered assumptions, and how "taste" was used to reinforce gendered differences. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/05/strong-case-to-boost-newstart-but-politicians-are-up-to-their-old-games | Australia news | 2018-05-05T00:04:58.000Z | Katharine Murphy | Strong case to boost Newstart but politicians are up to their old games | Katharine Murphy | Let’s be clear about what the Turnbull government wants. Internal intrigues notwithstanding – Peter Dutton’s inclination to spread his wings and Julie Bishop’s equal and opposite inclination to clip them – the objective of the next couple of months is plotting a path to political recovery.
The aim is to set some bedrock, then begin to claw back lost ground. In that environment, pesky strictures such as fiscal rules are so yesterday.
While the government is behind in the polls, and on its worst days can barely mask its internal ambitions and animosities, over on the Labor side there is concern the political contest has tightened in recent months.
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There is an instinct that what happens over the next two or three months will determine the outcome of the next federal election.
So what we see right now is a bunch of politicians very focused on short-term imperatives. Of course portfolio work is going on, and doggedly in some cases, but all eyes are also on the politics, and specifically the politics of the second half of 2018. Not for the first time, the long game is hostage to the short one.
While it’s always very unwise as a commentator to suggest you know the character of a budget you haven’t yet seen, this one feels simple, and deliberately so. The focal points of next Tuesday would seem to be income-tax cuts, infrastructure spending, and bits and pieces, including in health and aged care.
It feels like a “please like me” budget.
But lost in the “please like me” mix, though, is one glaring policy item requiring attention.
There is no indication from the government that the Newstart payment will be increased next week. Perhaps we’ll get a surprise next Tuesday – one can be ever hopeful – but right now, it doesn’t look like it.
Liberal MP Julia Banks' claim she could live on $40 a day rebutted by Business Council
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Just some basic facts to orient us in the debate. The maximum Newstart payment is currently $272.90 a week for a single unemployed person without children. For singles with a dependent child or children it’s $295.20. Just to plot another point in a mental graph, the national minimum wage is currently $694.90 a week.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know we’ve been running around in circles on this issue for at least a decade: a seemingly unending cycle of expert reports, ignored by politicians, followed by people saying stupid things, followed by people trying to counter the stupid things that get said.
Back in 2012, we learned that governments had been sitting on advice since 2009 that there were growing discrepancies between unemployment benefits and other government allowances because of the different methods by which the payments get topped up. Also in 2009, the Henry review of taxation recommended the benefit be increased by about $50 per week.
It’s probably not necessary to remind anyone it’s now 2018, right?
To call the lack of action on dealing with Newstart a disgrace and a failure of the system doesn’t even begin to cut it.
Boosting the payment isn’t about some bleeding heart agenda, about ensuring that every benefit recipient has a lollypop and a pony and a shoulder rub – it’s about being rational.
Despite various politicians declaring blithely at various times that they could live on $40 per day, that’s just crap.
Labor promises 'root and branch' review of inadequate Newstart payment
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I know there are people in Australia who resent other people for claiming benefits, egged on by governments who like to prosecute policy debates in this area by following the time-honoured methodology of the page one welfare cheat smash-up in the Daily Telegraph.
If you are one of these folks discomfited by the idea of your fellow citizens on welfare, my presumption is you’d like them to get a job. I reckon it’s pretty self-evident that would be a positive development for the benefit recipients and the economy.
But imagine trying to get a job interview when you can’t afford credit for your mobile phone, or presentable clothes to wear for a conversation with the prospective boss, or petrol to get yourself across town, and when you lack the networks to overcome your disadvantage.
The poverty trap is obvious. The low rate of the allowance becomes a tangible factor in whether or not you can successfully find work.
This has been the core of the business and economic case for boosting Newstart, articulated very clearly by a range of players in recent years, and as recently as this week, by the respected economist Chris Richardson, who noted the payment had failed to keep up with national living standards for more than a quarter of a century.
Cormann says corporate tax cuts ‘the most important of all’ ahead of budget
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As well as the payment working against the capacity of recipients to find work, there’s another hard-headed argument in favour of a top-up at a time when incomes are being squeezed by low wages growth and the rising cost of living – there would be a modest boost to consumption if the payment went up, which would be beneficial to the economy.
If you think about it for all of two seconds, the case really is compelling.
The government will tell us next week there is sufficient revenue to bake in income-tax cuts and lower tax rates for big companies, citing the little known economic theory known as better out than in. If the government’s own logic holds, it’s a bit hard to comprehend why a boost to Newstart doesn’t qualify for the same attention, except of course, if you think there’s no votes in it.
Again, we can all cross our fingers for a budget miracle.
But the Turnbull government has thus far rejected calls to increase the payment on the rationale that it doesn’t want to encourage people to be content with the stipend and stop looking for work, and also on the basis that Newstart recipients get other forms of income support.
The argument from a succession of social services ministers has been that things aren’t really as dire as the bleeding hearts of the welfare lobby would like to suggest, which strands the conversation firmly in pantomime mode, and conveniently avoids engaging with the expertise in the social services sector and the broad-based coalition in favour of change.
Labor makes the right noises, but thus far has avoided making any concrete commitments.
Now why would that be? Well, the main reason is that boosting Newstart (depending on how much it was increased by, and whether it was also then subjected to regular adjustments) would cost the budget about $3bn a year.
That’s a big whack of cash at a time when Labor wants to reserve fiscal room to offer voters its own version of the income-tax cuts the Coalition will bowl up next week. If it has to account for a particular Newstart increase, its room to move narrows.
What were we saying again about the short term and the long term?
– Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/dec/10/global-warming-unpaused-fast-forward | Environment | 2013-12-10T14:00:00.000Z | Dana Nuccitelli | Global warming is unpaused and stuck on fast forward, new research shows | Dana Nuccitelli | New research by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research investigates how the warming of the Earth's climate has behaved over the past 15 years compared with the previous few decades. They conclude that while the rate of increase of average global surface temperatures has slowed since 1998, melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and warming oceans have continued apace.
The widespread mainstream media focus on the slowed global surface warming has led some climate scientists like Trenberth and Fasullo to investigate its causes and how much various factors have contributed to the so-called 'pause' or 'hiatus.' However, the authors note that while the increase in global temperatures has slowed, the oceans have taken up heat at a faster rate since the turn of the century. Over 90 percent of the overall extra heat goes into the oceans, with only about 2 percent heating the Earth's atmosphere. The myth of the 'pause' is based on ignoring 98 percent of global warming and focusing exclusively on the one bit that's slowed.
Nevertheless, the causes of the slowed global surface temperature increase present an interesting scientific question. In examining changes in the activity of the sun and volcanoes, Trenberth and Fasullo estimated that they can account for no more than a 20 percent reduction in the Earth's energy imbalance, which is what causes global warming. Thus the cause of the slowed surface warming must primarily lie elsewhere, and ocean cycles are the most likely culprit.
Trenberth and Fasullo found that after the massive El Niño event in 1998, the Pacific Ocean appears to have shifted into a new mode of operation. Since that time, Trenberth's research has shown that the deep oceans have absorbed more heat than at any other time in the past 50 years.
As a recent paper published in the journal Nature showed, the Pacific Ocean in particular appears to be the key component of the climate's natural internal variability, and the main culprit behind the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years. However, another important recent paper by Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way showed that the global surface temperature rise has not slowed as much as some previously thought; in fact, the surface warming since 1997 happened more than twice as fast as previous estimates.
Trenberth and Fasullo's new paper also casts doubt on the conclusions a few recent studies that estimated the Earth's climate is less sensitive to the increased greenhouse effect than previously thought. These studies have been based on measurements of recent climate change, including the warming of the oceans. Climate contrarians like Matt Ridley have of course emphasized their results, because these few papers seem to suggest the climate won't warm quite as much over the next century as climate scientists previously thought.
However, the type of approach taken by these studies suffers from some significant drawbacks. Mainly the size of the cooling effect due to human aerosol pollution remains highly uncertain, and while the oceans have been warming rapidly, just how rapidly is another unsettled question.
Previous estimates put the amount of heat accumulated by the world's oceans over the past decade equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second, on average, but Trenberth's research puts the estimate equivalent to more than 6 detonations per second. Trenberth and Fasullo note that using their ocean heating estimate by itself would increase the equilibrium climate sensitivity estimate in the paper referenced by Ridley from 2°C to 2.5°C average global surface warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and using other more widespread accepted values would bring the estimate in line with the standard value of 3°C. They thus note,
"Using short records with uncertain forcings of the Earth system that is not in equilibrium does not (yet) produce reliable estimates of climate sensitivity."
In any case, the main point of the paper is that global warming is stuck on fast forward. Ice continues to melt, sea levels continue to rise, and the oceans continue to warm rapidly. While the warming of global surface temperatures has slowed somewhat, that appears to primarily be due to changing ocean cycles, particularly in the Pacific. However, these changes are mostly just causing the oceans to absorb more heat, leaving less for the atmosphere. As Trenberth and Fasullo conclude,
"[Global warming] is very much alive but being manifested in somewhat different ways than a simple increase in global mean surface temperature." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/18/observer-editorial-eu-referendum-how-to-vote | Opinion | 2016-06-18T23:05:25.000Z | Observer editorial | The Observer view on how to vote in the European Union referendum | Observer editorial | This week, we Britons face the biggest democratic decision of our lifetimes. The outcome of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union will shape our politics, our economy, our society and our role in the world for decades to come. We must be clear about what we would be turning our back on were we to vote to leave.
Much of the case to remain in the EU has been framed in terms of the economic risks of Brexit. Membership of the world’s largest single market has played a critical part in Britain’s transformation from the economic malaise of the 1970s into the world’s fifth largest economy. No one can predict exactly what the costs of leaving that market would be, but there is little doubt that they would be significant. The Bank of England, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, the OECD and the World Bank have all warned of the risks. Nine out of 10 of the 600 economists surveyed for this paper last month think Brexit would damage Britain’s growth prospects.
But the European Union was always much more than an economic project. It was an idealistic undertaking, born out of the desire to never again see the continent racked by war.
This is easily forgotten in an age where the idea of European nations warring against each other seems inconceivable. But our continent faces newer, global challenges: the risks of climate change; the mass movement of people fleeing conflict and abject poverty in Africa and the Middle East; the deadly consequences of microbial resistance; the question of how to hold to account corporate behemoths that trade across national boundaries. The need for a collective of countries to find ways of acting together has never been greater.
What is the EU?
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The Observer has always been proud of its internationalist, liberal worldview – one that looks out on to the world and is open to its cultural, social and political influences. One of the principal dividing lines in this referendum is whether we want to be open, not closed; expansive in thought and deed, not insular, and small.
Many campaigning to leave the EU view it as a way to wrest control from what they see as an elite, bureaucratic institution far removed from Britons’ lives. But they hark back to a world where sovereignty and control can sit neatly within the borders of the nation state. That idea fast becomes meaningless when the big challenges we face are not the atomised products of single societies, but of the frictions that inevitably arise among the 7.4 billion people who share the planet.
The EU is the world’s most successful example of international co-operation. That does not mean it is perfect: of course it is not. Twenty eight countries working together create bureaucratic inefficiencies, costs and frictions. Of course there are people with competing goals and agendas working in European institutions. Of course there may often be a lack of clarity about priorities: in recent years, the union has simultaneously pursued ambitions to deepen and broaden, at cost to both. Of course there have been moments of crisis, such as the refugee and migrant crisis, where the EU has not appeared up to the task. And attempts to establish a single European currency have provoked deep social and political problems.
Despite its many flaws, this paper believes the EU has, without question, been a force for good. It has succeeded in its aim of preventing another European conflict. It has established the world’s biggest single market while preventing a race to the bottom on employment rights. It has brought former satellite states of the USSR within the European fold, nurturing nascent market economies and democracies.
And Britain has been far from being a bystander, watching passively as the EU chalks up its successes. Prime ministers from Thatcher to Blair have played a leading role in the creation of the single market and eastwards expansion. Britain has shaped Europe for the better as much as Europe has shaped Britain.
Our European allies dread Brexit, and they have good reason to fear it
Andrew Rawnsley
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Outside the EU, our role in the world would be diminished. This matters: not as a throwback to bombastic colonialism, but because, as a significant economic power and force for liberal democracy, Britain has global responsibilities. To turn our back on them would be a dereliction of our duty. Internationalism, co-operation and compromise are the tenets of modern diplomacy. Whether or not we choose to live by them will affect the stability of the world our children and grandchildren inherit.
The case for remaining, then, must not just be framed in the language of economics, but in the wider vocabulary of the world we wish to inhabit. Yet the inability of mainstream politicians to address the unequal consequences of globalisation, of which Britain’s EU membership is just one aspect, is one reason why the referendum debate has been so dominated by the issue of immigration.
Immigration has come to symbolise the problems of globalisation. While it has brought net benefits to the economy, it has affected jobs, services and housing in areas that have experienced large amounts of European migration in a short space of time. Moreover, immigration has become a focal point for people distressed by the loss of economic and cultural identity in areas that may have been barely touched by immigration, but which have never recovered from the loss of the industries that shaped their economies.
Politicians from mainstream parties have struggled to address these concerns in the last decade. They have swung between denying the existence of any problem, citing macro statistics, and adopting simplistic and, ultimately, patronising policies, such as a net migration target the government never had any hope of meeting.
In the course of this referendum campaign, something uglier has developed. While both sides stand accused of exaggeration, some politicians in the Leave camp have strayed beyond the realms of decency to stoke up fears about immigration with deliberately misleading campaign material, which borders on the xenophobic and racist. The Leave campaign have also fostered an anti-expert sentiment. In the face of increasingly complex global problems, this position is absurd – to wrestle with issues, among many others, such as climate, gene editing or food scarcity we will need the input, advice and support of experts.
The risks of Brexit go beyond the economic. One of the greatest dishonesties at the heart of the Leave campaign is the claim that many of those whose support it is attempting to attract would fare better in an isolated Britain shaped by the politics of the Brexiters. They wouldn’t. For people who have suffered the raw end of globalisation, there is little of promise in the worldview shared by many Leave politicians: less regulation, fewer employment rights, a greater embrace of the free market and further privatisation of public services.
A serious threat to the future of the United Kingdom also lurks in a vote for Brexit. It seems likely it would be followed by a second Scottish independence referendum.
The Observer view on the future of the EU
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Last, there are risks to the future of the European project. At a time when the case for a European Union is stronger than ever, Europe faces immensely difficult questions over the coming decade. There is a fundamental tension between deepening and broadening the union: the Observer has argued that given the limits of its popular legitimacy, and the growing threat to global stability from Putin’s Russia and the Middle East, the EU must now prioritise broadening over deepening. But this means it must find a way of making the eurozone sustainable without taking steps to further political integration beyond what its citizens would accept. It will likely have to revisit the workings of one of its fundamental principles, the free movement of people.
Europe is fragile and a British exit could prompt its unravelling. Since Churchill’s 1946 address to the University of Zurich, in which he implored France and Germany to build a European family with the full support of Britain, the UK has been at the table to work with our European allies in finding solutions to the big challenges of the age. In the past five years, we have started to step back from that role: British politicians used our opt-out to excuse ourselves from any attempt at a pan-European solution to the refugee crisis.
Leaving Europe while questions hang over its future direction would mark a fundamental shift for the worse in British foreign policy, for Europe and for Britain. Our future is profoundly affected by the fortunes of the continent of which we are a part. Leaving the EU does not change that – it simply means we will have far less influence over how our future pans out.
There is much the referendum result will not settle. The debate has illuminated a growing cleavage in modern Britain, with the winners of globalisation on one side, and the losers on the other. The campaign – and the result – will likely reveal profound divisions in Britain across class, age and geography. Whatever the result, whoever is left holding the reins of power, our leaders will have to find a way of reuniting the country after a divisive campaign and one that showed that economic and cultural stresses can easily loosen the binds that tie us together. As politicians attempt to close the fissures of this campaign once the result is declared, they should bear in mind the words of Jo Cox, brutally killed in the line of duty last week: “We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
It would be disingenuous to say that the choice that Britain faces this week is between a flawless, international union or global isolation; between economic nirvana or ruin; between security in perpetuity or the breakdown of order. No such choice exists.
Rather, it is the choice between going it alone or as part of a messy, imperfect collective, requiring co-operation and compromise. Between meeting the economic challenges all rich developed nations will face, as part of the world’s biggest single economic market, or outside of a trade grouping. Between confronting global insecurity as part of a bloc that shares our liberal democratic values or by ourselves.
Remaining in the EU will not magically eliminate the challenges Britain faces in the years to come. But if we choose to do so, it will keep Britain at the heart of reforming the European project so that the nations of Europe are together better equipped to face them. At its core, the European Union remains a practical expression of the belief that liberal democracies can achieve more acting in concert than they can alone. We must not turn our backs on that. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/sep/01/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries | Global | 2004-09-01T22:57:23.000Z | David Nice | Obituary: Hans Vonk | Hans Vonk, who has died in his native Amsterdam at the age of 63, took up the baton at a time when conductors were polarised between the media-friendly superstar autocrat and the kapellmeister, a much-derided term for a musician working alongside his players to achieve the best possible results for the music itself. Vonk fell unobtrusively into the latter class, and he remained true to his values during the last five years of his career as music director of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, in Missouri.
It was a period he described candidly as having been "the happiest and most fulfilling of my career", at the time the unspecified neurological disease which led to his death became uncontrollable in the spring of 2002. Of his St Louis players, who reciprocated the affection, he once said: "they are a special kind of people, and I am one of them".
Vonk's father, a violinist in Amsterdam's great Concertgebouw Orchestra, died when Hans was three years old. Along with his sister, Vonk followed his mother's wishes by studying law at Amsterdam University, playing jazz piano in his spare time to support himself; music became the centre of his life when he moved to the Amsterdam Conservatory, discovering his true vocation after accompanying for a conducting class. Studies with the rigorous Hermann Scherchen and Franco Ferrara led to his first post with the Dutch Ballet shortly after his graduation in 1966.
There he met and fell in love with the red-headed ballerina Jessie Folkerts, the wife of three decades who survives him. He became an assistant conductor at the Concertgebouw in 1969, and conducted his first opera at the Netherlands Opera in 1971, a Lorca-based drama by the singular German serialist Wolfgang Fortner. Vonk's commitment to contemporary music always came second to his love and understanding of the romantic repertoire, crowned by his Bruckner interpretations, but he remained a stalwart ambassador for Dutch music, of which he has left a central legacy in the shape of a six-CD set.
Alongside further important positions with orchestras in his native land - the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic from 1973, the Hague Residentie Orchestra from 1980 - Vonk now began to appear with orchestras elsewhere in Europe and in America. He made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1974, and was associate conductor of London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1976 to 1979. Among his many recordings from this period is an outstanding, underrated partnership in Rachmaninov with the pianist Ilana Vered and the London Symphony Orchestra.
What should have been the most important move in his conducting career turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice. In 1985 he accepted an invitation from the East German authorities to take on both the Dresden Staatskapelle Orchestra and the Dresden Opera, a double responsibility only the eminent Austrian-born conductor Karl Böhm had undertaken before him. Permitted to talk to players only at rehearsals, Vonk found the results alien to his spirit of cooperative conducting, and he was happier moving to West Germany and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1991.
Nevertheless he achieved many fine things in Dresden, conducting Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the newly renovated Semperoper; a recording was subsequently released. Londoners may also recall a Staatskapelle visit crowned by a performance of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben in the understated, free-flowing tradition of Böhm and Rudolf Kempe.
By the time he left Dresden, Vonk had already been diagnosed with what was then - in 1988 - believed to be Guillain-Barre syndrome; after a year's respite, he was back on the podium. As his St Louis residency progressed, it became clear that the symptoms - increasing muscular weakness starting with the hands and feet - were taking a different course, and his neurological condition was identified as similar to Lou Gehrig's disease.
In February 2002, he had to be helped from the podium after finding he could not turn the pages of a score by Samuel Barber, and he resigned his post shortly before giving his last concert that May. He bowed out in style with a performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
· Hans Vonk, conductor, born 18 June 1941; died 29 August 2004 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/01/world-cup-coming-at-right-time-for-women-says-new-zealand-football-president | Football | 2019-04-30T18:00:24.000Z | Ella Reilly | World Cup coming at right time for women, says New Zealand Football president | Ella Reilly | “O
ne of the things with people is they’re always watching. They’re watching to see ‘have you got what it takes to be a leader? Can you make the hard decisions? Can you make the tough calls?’ And I think I can.”
Talking to Johanna Wood, the recently-elected first woman president of New Zealand Football, you quickly learn that she is used to defying expectations in male environments. “My background is in education,” she says. “When I was appointed principal of a co-ed high school it wasn’t common for women. My husband and I are farmers, so people often wouldn’t speak to me on the telephone because I’m a woman.
“It’s not that long ago, when you start putting it into perspective. And I grew up in an era in which we were told that ‘girls could do anything’. That they’re expecting an audience of one billion with the coming World Cup, there’s lots happening. It just feels that this is the right time for women.”
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The right time indeed. Recent months have seen the profile and popularity of the women’s game explode. New Zealand was gripped by the exploits of the Under-17 team at the end of last year, when they won World Cup bronze in Uruguay to make them the country’s most successful football team of any age group or gender. The winning penalty in their quarter final shootout win was publicly voted as the country’s favourite sporting moment of 2018.
Walk past any large gathering of kids and count the football shirts on display – they vastly outnumber those of any other sport. Football is very much capturing New Zealand’s hearts, possibly by stealth. As Wood puts it, “We’ve got to get people to realise that football is our biggest sport in New Zealand, not rugby.”
In New Zealand there has been a concerted effort to increase the presence of women in sports governance; a government target has been set to see 40% of boards made up of women by 2020. Presently, the only other governing body of a major sport in New Zealand led by a woman is New Zealand Cricket. While acknowledging there is still some way to go before these targets are met by NZF, Wood says that “to have someone who is female and in the role of president says that we’re actually taking these quite seriously”.
“As you have a rotating executive, with people coming on and coming off, you have to look at the skillsets, but also the diversity in gender, as well as other diversities.”
Johanna Wood, New Zealand Football’s first female president. Photograph: David Rowland
Wood’s election to the helm of NZF comes at a time when, in addition to the heightened visibility of women’s football around the world for events on the pitch, national governing bodies have also tended to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
NZF is perhaps more acutely aware than most of how vital it is to have effective governance and diversity, after being subject to an extensive review in 2018 into the national women’s team, the Football Ferns, and the organisation’s culture. But this isn’t a situation isolated to New Zealand, with an allegedly “toxic team culture” contributing to the sacking of Australia’s head coach Alen Stacjic, and, just last month the US women’s national team announced it was suing US Soccer for “institutionalised gender discrimination”.
“If you think about what happened with the Ferns last year,” says Wood, “we’re just a little bit ahead of the game in that way, we’ve identified it a little bit earlier, and started to work and deal with the issues, whereas some of the other countries are just coming on board with some of the same issues.”
While the recommendations have been swiftly addressed by NZF in the months since the review, Wood emphasises that change is ongoing and not simply a ‘tick box’ exercise. “One of the things that I’ve been quite vocal about around the table is that, because a number of those recommendations relate to culture, you cannot say ‘I’ve ticked the box it’s all done’,” she says.
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“We need to continually ‘sense test’. Are we still doing what we said we were doing as a result of the Muir Report? So we have to have processes in place to review that we are, and I’m using an education term here, ‘continually improving’.”
Wood’s forthrightness and willingness to engage in questions and conversation about the game is clearly a hallmark of her leadership style, which marked her entry into football governance over a decade ago when she joined the board of Central Football Federation.
“I remember going to a meeting and I asked some pretty pointed questions of NZF at that time, back in probably 2005, and so I got shoulder tapped by the [Central] chair at the time. We shouldn’t be afraid of questions, we shouldn’t have that default system which says ‘oh they’re asking questions of me, well they’ve got it wrong, so I’m going to tell them that’.”
Increasing the presence of women in decision-making capacities in turn helps to challenge what the game looks like. Wood points to the fact that NZF has a requirement for a women’s football committee “to keep a watching brief over all things to do with women’s football”. While at this point in time the committee is necessary, she notes that success will come when such committees aren’t needed, and when high performance sport, irrespective of whether the athletes are male or female, is seen as the pinnacle.
“I had an interesting experience with our accountant the other day, talking about my roles, talking about about going to the Women’s World Cup, because we’ve got the Fifa congress at the same time. And then he said ‘Oh, so what are you going to do when you go to the real World Cup?’”
“I just said, ‘Excuse me?’. So that’s the mental shift we’ve got to get within our country really. Maybe if there are more women around the sporting governance boards, then we will get rid of that ‘them and us’ sort of culture. But it will take a lot of work.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/jul/08/skins-apprentice-luther-social-tv | Television & radio | 2013-07-08T13:38:00.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | Skins, The Apprentice, Luther: how Twitter watched TV this week | Welcome to Social TV, in which we analyse what people were watching on television over the past seven days by examining how they tweeted about it.
Social TV leaderboard 1-7 July. Photograph: SecondSync
Drama
TV dramas are clearly less talked about than reality and event TV, which have dominated recent leaderboards. But the return of Skins (Monday, E4) – subtitled "Fire", which makes it sound like a knock-off pop star perfume – got 187,959 tweets. That's a little more than the Arctic Monkeys' Glastonbury headlining set received last week. Twitter users were clearly keen to discuss the resurrection of old favourites, with a quote about fan favourite Naomi getting the most retweets, though chat peaked as the show began, with 7,374 tweets per minute at 10pm, compared with an overall average of 1,996 throughout the show. This is a common pattern – people simply want to state that a show is indeed on. The graph below also shows smaller peaks during adverts, suggesting that people are actually concentrating on the drama before tweeting in downtime, which is less common during reality shows.
Skins tweets on Monday 1 July Photograph: SecondSync
There's further positive news for those concerned about waning attention spans, this time from Luther (Tuesday, BBC1). Taking into account the fact that there are no ads, Idris Elba's corduroy copper loosely follows the same shape as Skins – people talking about it before and after, with a low-ish level of chat while the drama is played out.
Luther tweets on Tuesday 2 July. Photograph: SecondSync
However, there was a marked jump at 9.06pm, as Twitter responded to the urban myth shocker of a man slowly crawling out from under the bed with collective horror, and smaller peaks at 9.48pm (blender) and 9.55pm (attic). Luther's also picked up a pop fanbase – Example and Rizzle Kicks were tweeting about it, though most retweeted goes to the great man himself, performing this act of public service.
We're back people!! on now!! @bbcluther
— Idris Elba (@idriselba) July 2, 2013
Reality
While three of the top four shows this week were scripted, reality TV remains dominant. The Apprentice (Wednesday, BBC1) is consistently popular, hovering around the 80,000 mark each week and, as always, hitting its peak immediately after the firing. Towie (Sunday; Wednesday, ITV2) was close to Luther's total – adding a Siouxsie-obsessed serial killer to the cast might just give it the edge, if we're talking tips – while Big Brother (Channel 5) was popular on Monday and Tuesday, for the week's nominations and their aftermath.
Question Time
A return to the leaderboard for Question Time, which this week came from Basildon and continued the gender split we've seen before – 72% of tweeters were male, 28% female. The discussion was consistent throughout, with little distinction between peak tweets per minute (618) and average tweets per minute (431). These provided a level hum of commentary, with minor peaks for politician pay rises, Dimbleby's "put that in your pipe and smoke it" dig, and the NHS, with 902 retweets for this pro-union line.
Hate #TradeUnions? I suggest you hand back the weekend, annual leave, maternity & paternity pay, the minimum wage, the 8 hour day...#bbcqt
— Jon Burke (@jonburkeUK) July 4, 2013
Next week
Luther's peak-time horror show continues, Effy's Skins storyline concludes, and there's music TV from the Proms and T in the Park. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/04/sheryl-lee-ralph-abbott-elementary-dreamgirls | Television & radio | 2022-10-04T05:00:28.000Z | Andrew Lawrence | Sheryl Lee Ralph on Abbott Elementary, being ‘black famous’ and scolding Kimmel | Floral arrangements have been piling up on Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Los Angeles doorstep for the past couple of weeks. “My house is now my own personal rainforest,” she jokes.
The congratulatory bundles haven’t stopped since Ralph grabbed this year’s Emmy for her supporting role in the mockumentary sitcom Abbott Elementary. “I am floating on cloud 999 ever since they said ‘Sheryl Lee Ralph’ from the Emmy stage,” she says.
After nearly five decades in the business, she was so shocked when her name was called that Quinta Brunson, Tyler James Williams and other Abbott castmates had to ease her out of her seat and guide her up to the Microsoft Theater stage. In an acceptance speech for the ages, she launched into song before declaring, “this is what believing looks like … this is what striving looks like. Don’t you ever, ever give up on you.”
Ralph, 65, is the second-ever Black woman to win an Emmy in supporting comedic role. Photograph: Allen J Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
The song she belted out was jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves’s Endangered Species, a suitable choice considering Ralph is the only the second-ever Black woman to take home the trophy in this category. After Ralph’s win Jackée Harry, another estimable peer, reflected on her own “lonely experience” 35 years ago of becoming the first Black woman to win a supporting comedy actor Emmy for her vixen role in the neighborhood sitcom 227 – a part NBC had originally wanted Ralph to play. “It’s come full circle. Congrats, Sheryl & welcome to the club,” Harry tweeted.
The popular refrain on Ralph’s prize is that it was long overdue, or a study in perseverance, as she mentioned in her acceptance speech. But even that doesn’t quite capture why this 65-year-old mega-talent had been so criminally underappreciated to this point. “But isn’t that good?” she says. “Isn’t it such a blessing that I could remain relevant after all of these years?”
It’s not as if Ralph was some diamond in the rough. By 1974, she had been named one of the top 10 college women in America by Glamour magazine and was crowned Miss Black Teen-age New York.
Sidney Poitier gave her her first on-screen break in the 1977 hangout film A Piece of the Action. Scroll her IMDb page, and you’ll see credits for soaps (Search for Tomorrow), sitcoms (Designing Women) and even animated flicks (Disney’s Oliver & Company). But it’s Abbott, in which Ralph steals scenes as uptight doyenne Barbara Howard, that cements her as a crossover star.
Ralph takes sport in guessing her fans’ ages based on which of her many credits they might know her from. Personally, I considered blurting out “Ray Donovan”, but couldn’t stop myself from sputtering about her turn as super stepmom Dee Mitchell on the 90s sitcom Moesha.
Sheryl Lee Ralph circa 1981 with Broadway Dreamgirls cast members Deborah Burrell and Loretta Devine. Photograph: Images Press/Getty Images
That sitcom, a vehicle for the R&B star Brandy and a staple of the 90s Black sitcom boom, has picked up new fans in the streaming era, too – not least Ralph’s young Abbott scene partners. “One day, we came back to work and this little boy looked at me and said, ‘Miss Ralph, I’ve been watching you my whole life,’” she says.
All of which is to say: Ralph has always stood out. Her Broadway performance in the original production of Dreamgirls earned a 1982 Tony nomination, after all. It’s just that in her chosen profession, the slog is always somehow longer for Black actors. Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg are the rare Black actors who were recognized as prodigies and set on an unbroken road to superstardom.
But most every other Black actor who wasn’t already a musician (Ice Cube) or a sports hero (Jim Brown) has to endure, has to survive. That, too, can be exhausting. “In the beginning, they used to say [of Black actors], ‘Just give them a comedy because [Black people] love to laugh,’” Ralph recalls. “‘The dramas … I don’t know. They’re kinda difficult.’ You would hear things like that that, when you say them back now, it’s hurtful.”
After A Piece of the Action, Ralph didn’t land her next film credit until Oliver & Company, which was released in 1988. That drought, she says, “really started me on TV and on stage”. During her Dreamgirls run Ralph fell into anorexia, so great was the pressure to keep thin.
Most heartbreaking of all, she and her castmates sold their stake in the franchise for a dollar. “We don’t participate in the greatness that is Dreamgirls,” she laments. This is the same production that legitimized Beyoncé as a film actor, won Jennifer Hudson an Oscar and is still drawing crowds. “A Chorus Line came about same as Dreamgirls,” Ralph says. “The cast came together for a class-action suit and got their money for what they put into the show. But we just didn’t do that. We signed away our rights when we were very young. That’s just the way that happened.”
Earlier this year, Ralph opened up to the Hollywood Reporter about the plight of being what she calls “Black famous”. In Jamaica, where Ralph split her formative years and has always maintained a loyal following since that first film credit, her Emmy win was both splashed on the front pages of national newspapers and much discussed on the morning shows.
Ralph played no-nonsense stepmom Dee Mitchell on the 90s sitcom Moesha. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images
In the US, notoriety has been far more elusive. She shared an anecdote about her experience working on the short-lived 2019 CBS sitcom Fam and being confronted on the first day by an executive producer who asked, without irony, “So tell me, what have you done?”
“I always knew that Black folks were aware of me and my work, but I always knew I had a certain amount of crossover appeal, too,” she says.
On the night of Abbott’s second season premiere last month, Ralph had a few friends over for a watch party, including one ex-Fam stage manager who had witnessed that producer size up Ralph. “Sheryl, look at you now,” the friend said.
For another friend that story always seemed like the height of privilege.
“What always fascinated him about that moment was that it was his responsibility to know who you are, no matter your color, to make sure his production has absolute success with these millions that are being spent,” Ralph says.
“Now when I look at success, I look at it through the lens of, ‘I know the next time I go on a new set, they will know exactly who I am.’”
O
n Abbott Elementary, show creator and executive producer Quinta Brunson plays a new teacher who unabashedly admires and looks to Ralph’s character for guidance. That’s not too far from reality. Ralph still remembers how awestruck Brunson was when she turned up on the set of A Black Lady Sketch Show in 2019, where Brunson was writing and co-starring at the time. “She just kept looking at me,” Ralph remembers. “Like, she was actually studying me.”
Soon after, Brunson offered her a part in the sitcom she wrote about a ragtag group of Philadelphia primary school teachers fighting hopelessly against the systemic failures in public education. But Ralph says Brunson felt bad about having to ask her to read the Miss Howard part for executives to seal the deal. Worse, Ralph didn’t think the character was especially meaty on the page. “I honestly thought I was going to be invisible,” Ralph says.
Not only did that not happen, but veteran teachers regularly tell her just how much her performance makes them feel seen. “People are like, ‘I’m living for Miss Howard,’” Ralph says. “I had no idea. Ugh, it just makes me feel so good.”
The show debuted to little fanfare last December, but eventually gained its audience and became the first ABC comedy to quadruple its rating after airing. Its pilot episode scored Brunson an Emmy for comedy writing. Like Ralph’s, her golden moment also went viral, albeit against her will. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel thought it would be funny to double down a limp joke by lying on the floor next to Brunson while she delivered her acceptance speech. But no one laughed, and Ralph in particular was not amused. After the awards show she sought Kimmel out, and scolded him for his “disrespect”. A few days later he apologized to Brunson on his show for stealing her spotlight with his “dumb comedy bit”.
“I’m absolutely good with the resolution,” Ralph says now. “As long as Quinta is fine with it, I’m fine with it. But my initial reaction was my initial reaction! You know how mothers are.” For Moesha fans, it was a vintage Dee Mitchell moment.
R
alph’s belated recognition syncs up nicely with Hollywood’s changing attitudes toward young Black stars. Zendaya (Euphoria), Lizzo (Watch Out for the Big Grrrls) and Jerrod Carmichael (Rothaniel) were also big winners on Emmy night. “It’s interesting to be in an era now of such Black excellence and abundance, and for people to not look at you as a fluke any more,” Ralph says. “But to be looked at as the real deal, to be able to get these projects greenlit no matter what color the people are. It’s important.”
And she’s especially thrilled that she got to share her special night with Brunson – who, at 32, is just getting warmed up in the business. “Quinta can do so many things,” Ralph gushes. “Write. Produce. I’m sure there’s a bit of a director in her.”
In ABC’s Abbott Elementary Ralph’s character serves as a reluctant mentor for younger teachers. Photograph: Gilles Mingasson/ABC/Getty Images
Now at least there’s no more discounting the woman who helped set the stage for the current crop of Black prodigies in Hollywood. After Ralph’s Emmy win, Beyoncé, who starred in the 2006 theatrical production of Dreamgirls, sent a bouquet and card “to the original Dreamgirl”. Jennifer Hudson, who co-starred with Beyoncé in the film, had Ralph on her daytime show – where Ralph taught Hudson how to do the Dreamgirls sway. (“I can’t believe I got to have that moment with you,” Hudson shrieked.)
When we spoke, Ralph had yet to celebrate properly with the original Dreamgirls, who are still very much in the game. Jennifer Holliday has reprised her Tony-winning role as Effie White for a current Dreamgirls production in Atlanta. Loretta Devine, who won an Emmy in 2011 for a guest spot on Grey’s Anatomy, is still expanding her range on film and TV – most notably as the matriarch of the popular Netflix sitcom Family Reunion. It’s a testament to true resilience. But for Ralph at least, there was no other option. “This is what I love to do,” she says of performing. “And there was no way I was not going to do it.”
Given Ralph’s versatility, it’s hard not to wonder whether she’ll soon be hoarding every award in sight. Egoting is a real possibility. “You’re not the only person who’s been saying it,” she says. “You can win a Grammy many different ways – reading, for example.” An enterprising music producer could breathe new life into In the Evening, her 1984 pop single that remains a DJ favorite. “The work has been started to find the right projects.”
One of the offers Ralph has been mulling recently would put her back on a Broadway stage alongside the powerhouse actor-singer and Tony-winning phenom Audra McDonald. Now that Ralph is finally getting her flowers, it’s only right that she get to play the one part that has eluded her throughout her career: the shoo-in.
“And you know what’s interesting? The way I got it, people are standing, ‘God, the Emmys have never been so good until this moment,’” she says. “They’re saying that in the year that I was there.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/08/brazil-and-tite-wary-of-croatian-resilience-in-toughest-hurdle-yet | Football | 2022-12-08T17:01:35.000Z | Nick Ames | Brazil and Tite wary of ‘Croatian resilience’ in toughest hurdle yet | Tite had just pledged to dance along with his Brazil squad, and to hell with the churls, when he alighted upon another form of visual display. “When we paint a painting, the entire painting is the athletes,” he said. “They are the ones who are portrayed in this painting and we are just participants. We just contribute to the painting; the painting is just the players themselves.”
If they are to draw a line under two barren decades, Brazil will have to master all the arts. The choreographed routines that greeted each goal against South Korea were looked upon dimly in some quarters but that is a trifling concern. The more pressing theme is whether Croatia, with their savvy and seasoned core, will allow as many opportunities for festivity when they face Tite’s players in the last eight.
The “Croatian resilience” was a theme in his pre-match pronouncements. It will be Brazil’s toughest hurdle yet by some distance: there is no chance Zlatko Dalic will tell his side to leave gaps in the manner of South Korea, who entertained but were glaringly open. Croatia will sit down, strap in and try to lead Brazil along the slow road.
“We want to score goals quickly so later we can feel more comfortable,” Tite said. But unless Vinícius Júnior, Neymar, Richarlison and their cohort can repeat Monday’s explosive start, the momentum may begin to shift glacially.
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That is what happened when Croatia slowly took the wind out of Japan, eking a victory on spot-kicks for the third time in their past five knockout ties. “We have developed a mental strength and a certain consistency in extra time and penalties,” said Luka Modric, who appeared with Dalic moments after Tite.
“So if it comes to that our last match is confirmation we can do it again. We’re prepared for anything.”
Another exit at this stage would not be enough for Brazil, although a garrulous Tite showed little sign of strain. He played along with the suggestion of potential mascot status for the cat that interrupted a Vinícius press conference on Wednesday; if a particularly spicy question, usually on the topic of dancing, came his way he asked his interlocutor’s name and fired back. “I will not make comments to those who do not know Brazilian history and culture,” he told one of them. “I leave that noise aside. We will continue doing things our way.”
Richarlison celebrates after scoring Brazil’s third goal in their 4-1 victory over South Korea in the last 16. Photograph: Manu Fernández/AP
Dalic pointed out that a third quarter-final for a country of 3.9 million people is nothing to be sniffed at. Expectations have been raised by their performance four years ago and he equated Friday’s task with the game that proved their undoing in Russia.
“The match ahead of us will be the most demanding game; I can compare it to France in the final. It’s a great challenge for us. I wish such a difficult match was waiting for us a bit later but we’re one of the teams that has reached this stage and our ambitions will not stop there.”
In a curious climbdown, Dalic apologised for offending anyone in the winter sports fraternity who might have been upset when he said football is “not figure skating, this is a fight for a result” after criticism of Croatia’s muted attacking performance against Japan. They lack a reliable centre-forward and out-and-out pace on the flanks. Croatia are new and old: 18 of the squad were not around for their runners-up finish but five of the remainder have been heavily involved in Qatar. For the last game, Dalic named the oldest starting XI of any last-16 contender at a World Cup since France in the 2006 final.
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Patience may end up being critical for Brazil when faced with those wiles. Joyful exuberance, flicks and forehead keepy-ups will cut less ice now. The critical battle may lie in midfield, where Casemiro will be given the task of holding the fort against Modric, Mateo Kovacic and Marcelo Brozovic.
Casemiro has played with the first two at Real Madrid; all three are battle-hardened and Tite may wrestle with the option of recalling Fred to subdue their influence. Then again, sacrificing a more creative force would risk playing into the opponents’ hands.
That is the balance everyone must strike at this stage: idealism versus the understanding that these evenings often find a way of becoming protracted, tortuous, tense. The fine details matter more than ever.
Tite was accompanied by his assistant Cléber Xavier, who answered a question about how Modric might be stifled. He had begun to suggest work off the ball would rival combinations on it in terms of importance when he was half-jokingly reminded by his boss: “We must not give away our strategy.”
Dalic was far happier to expound his theories on gaining the upper hand. “If we play wide we’ll have great problems, we know that,” he said. “But when they lose the ball they have high pressing and if they do not take control of the ball in the next couple of seconds they have problems as well. We must retain possession.”
Modric is more than capable of that, painting the type of picture Tite would rather not have to admire. It may become an occasion for the cinematic, the moment of brutal, decisive drama, rather than the deftly textured collage Brazil’s manager would like. The Seleção would win awards for self-expression across most media but next comes a challenge in mise-en-scène. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/23/arcadia-owner-tina-green-was-paid-25m-by-taveta-despite-topshop-slump | Business | 2018-05-23T17:53:04.000Z | Sarah Butler | Arcadia owner Tina Green was paid £25m by Taveta despite Topshop slump | Tina Green, the wife of Sir Philip Green and ultimate owner of the Arcadia Group, was paid £25m by the retail empire last year despite a near wipeout of profits at its flagship Topshop brand.
Lady Green, 68, who is based with her 66-year-old husband in the tax haven of Monaco, was made the controlling party of Taveta, the parent of Arcadia, at the turn of the century.
Topshop owner Arcadia's turnover falls as web hits shop sales
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According to accounts filed at Companies House this week, Lady Green received a £25m payment from Taveta linked to transactions involving the collapsed department store chain BHS. Taveta redeemed £20m of loan notes and paid interest of £5m relating to the purchase of BHS from the family in 2009. Accounts show Taveta still owes the Green family nearly £65m for the failed department store, down from £87m last year.
After a tough few years in which Sir Philip agreed to pay £363m to support the BHS’s pension fund after calls for his knighthood to be stripped away, the Green family’s wealth was marked down £787m to £2bn in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.
The Taveta accounts also reveal that a company led by Lady Green’s son from her first marriage, the property developer Brett Palos, was paid almost £900,000 to manage a redevelopment of an unnamed store.
In 2016 Lady Green defended the couple’s use of what has been described as a “complex web” of companies based in tax havens that sit behind the family’s retail empire. She made the statement in response to MPs investigating the collapse of the high street retailer BHS, which Green sold in 2015 to Dominic Chappell, a former racing driver, only for it to fold a year later.
Topshop’s pre-tax profits dived 99% to £909,000 in the year to 26 August 2017
Topshop’s pre-tax profits dived 99% to £909,000 in the year to 26 August 2017 amid rising costs and as sales slid 5.8% to £933.6m, according to the Companies House accounts. Sales in the UK dived nearly 8% to £846m.
The flagship chain’s poor performance contributed to a 5.6% fall in sales at Green’s retail empire – including a 7.3% slide in the UK. Underlying profits for the continuing businesses of Taveta dived 42% to £124m. Pre-tax profits rose from £36.8m to £53.5m after a disastrous 2016. In 2015 the retail group made a profit of £172.2m.
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Taveta’s pension liability fell to £300m from £426.8m a year before as the group topped up its contributions by £25.6m to £50m a year and changed some of the assumptions used to calculate the deficit.
The hefty deficit is likely to remain a potential stumbling block to any sale of Arcadia, which Green is rumoured to be looking to exit. In February, Green denied he was in talks to sell Arcadia to the Chinese textiles firm Shandong Ruyi.
A spokesman for Taveta declined to comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/games-reviews-roundup-pokemon-sun-moon-playstation-4-pro-mekazoo | Games | 2016-11-28T07:00:23.000Z | Matt Kamen | Games reviews roundup: Pokémon Sun and Moon; Playstation 4 Pro; Mekazoo | Pokémon Sun and Moon
3DS, Nintendo, cert: 7, out now
★★★★★
This year marks Pokémon’s 20th anniversary, and this latest pair of games is a truly fitting celebration for old hands. While retaining the familiar formula of the perennially popular series, small changes create huge evolutions. Gone is the rote progression through eight gyms, battling through the Elite Four, and a final clash against your rival. In its place is a story where surprisingly complex characters weave in and out, and your journey across the Alolan Islands is marked by completing challenges that go beyond “defeat enemies”. There’s a much-needed depth that earlier games lacked.
Multiplayer improves too, with four-way Battle Royals joining solo and paired battles, while engaging mini-games – Pokémon Refresh, helping you raise your critters’ affection, and Poké Pelago, in which there are islands to develop like a micro-scale Animal Crossing – add new ways to play. Additionally, new Alolan forms of first-generation Pokémon provide a nostalgic kick for longtime players, joining a host of completely new creatures to catch. The Pokémon series is ageing like a fine wine; two decades in, and these are its greatest games yet. MK
Sony’s new PlayStation 4 console.
PlayStation 4 Pro
Sony, cert: N/A, out now
Concern that your not-so-old, standard model PS4 is already redundant should be set aside with the release of the PlayStation 4 Pro since, at its heart, the new console remains a PS4. The Pro does, though, pack a good deal more power than a standard PS4, sporting 2.1GHz of central processing power and graphics processing that runs at 4.2 teraflops.
The result is a machine optimised for 4K and HDR screens, as well as PlayStation VR. The idea is the bolstered power makes games thunder along with finesse on new display technologies that depart from the convention of 1080p HD resolution. It’s down to individual studios to decide how to harness the Pro’s power, so the difference the system makes varies from game to game. However, the new model does deliver a slightly more fluid VR experience, and there is a notable boon to the visual polish and movement of many non-VR games.
Yet without upgrading to the new visual technology, Sony’s latest isn’t essential, but rather a powerful luxury item with great potential. WF
Keeping it simple: Mekazoo.
Mekazoo
PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, The Good Mood Creators, cert: 7, out now
★★★★
The 2D platformer presents game designers with a testing space in which to innovate. Since Donkey Kong in 1981 there have been enough entries in the genre to make finding a new, distinctive edge increasingly difficult. Indeed, many who try to do so lose sight of the fundamentals and the fun.
Not so Mekazoo, a platformer that keeps things simple. Instead of trying to reinvent the form, the team has focused on getting the genre right, with considered level design and a careful drip-feed of new ideas throughout the game. Focusing on the journey of a band of mechanical animals, Mekazoo has the player leap back and forth between creatures to employ distinct abilities and overcome puzzles. It’s a mechanic that sometimes feels used for its own sake, but when implemented well it adds a good dose of depth.
There is little in the way of innovation here, but Mekazoo succeeds, as Kong did, with a captivating, spirited and unashamedly fun example of its genre. WF | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/feb/04/metamorphoses-minotaur-kim-brandstrup-alina-cojocaru-matthew-ball-minotaur-ustinov-studio-bath-review-la-strada-natalia-horecna-fellini-johan-kobborg | Stage | 2024-02-04T10:00:41.000Z | Sarah Crompton | Metamorphoses/Minotaur; La Strada review – Alina Cojocaru dances with her entire heart and soul | Alina Cojocaru is a wonder. The Romanian former star of the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet is now operating as a freelance and, at the age of 42, is as spellbinding as ever. Last week brought the opportunity to see her in two contrasting works; though they varied massively in quality, her artistry shone through.
The shorter but better of the two came in Bath where, as part of Deborah Warner’s studio season, the Danish choreographer Kim Brandstrup has created a new duet, Metamorphoses, for Cojocaru and the Royal Ballet’s Matthew Ball, using the myth of Cupid and Psyche to weave a compellingly strange picture of attraction and need.
It’s a companion piece to Minotaur, first seen in 2022, where in five neat parts he tells the story of Ariadne, her half-brother the Minotaur, and Theseus, who kills the beast and abandons the woman before an act of heavenly magic makes all well. Now danced by Ball, Kristen McNally (also of the Royal Ballet, and freed from character parts into a melancholy lyricism) and the seemingly ageless Tommy Franzen, it remains a wonder, casting a spell as dazzling as Franzen’s weightless climb across the studio walls.
Cojocaru moves like liquid, her arms and upper body falling into perfect shapes
In Minotaur, Justin Nardella’s set is built around red-spattered painting. In Metamorphoses, the central image is that of a camera shutter, making images from the dark, turning them into light, as blind Cupid cherishes Psyche, on condition that she will not look at him. In Brandstrup’s telling, and Eilon Morris’s sound design, their first Encounter in the Dark is propelled by noise more than sight; Cojocaru floats past a bare-chested Ball like a somnambulist, eyes unseeing. He scratches a wall, or beats his feet together, or flings a cloth past her head so she catches a sense of where he stands.
In Ecstasy, they come together in blind passion; he lifts her in the air or wraps her around his body in gestures of infinite lightness. She flings herself into his arms, shaping her limbs around his rounded form. In Exposure, the movement plays with his groundedness and her fleet grace; he pushes himself off the bench where she sees him, the shafts of Chris Wilkinson’s light falling across his face.
As in Minotaur, the piece progresses through sadness and elegy to a kind of resolution, where Cojocaru cradles Ball in her arms. Brandstrup suggests it is Psyche who brings illumination and forgiveness; it is the man who has most to learn. It’s sumptuous and thoughtful, staying in the mind long after its conclusion. Ball is passionate, playful and strong and Cojocaru is simply transfixing, moving like liquid, her arms and upper body falling into perfect shapes.
Brandstrup’s economy, his ability to conjure entire worlds and complex ideas out of the simplest ingredients, is beautifully served by Cojocaru’s instinctive honesty and openness. Both those qualities are on display in La Strada, a full-length piece she has commissioned for her own production company, ACWorkroom.
‘Pushing back the years’: Cojocaru as Gelsomina with Johan Kobborg as Il Matto in La Strada. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian
It’s arguable that Fellini’s 1954 classic – “one of the most influential films ever made” according to the American Film Institute, and apparently one of Pope Francis’s favourites – isn’t as easy as it appears to turn into a ballet. The plot of an innocent girl (Gelsomina) sold to a brutish circus strongman (Zampanò) relies for its impact on a quasi-poetic, mythological mood that contrasts her constant ability to find goodness with the cruelty of the world in which she finds herself.
Most of that goes missing here in a meandering adaptation by the Slovakian choreographer Natália Horečná, set to a score of excerpts by the film’s composer, Nino Rota. The action is punctuated by long passages where Cojocaru is lifted around the stage by two “angels”; whenever a climax of any kind of called for, a group of circus folk appear and cavort. It is all rather confusing.
Ballet star Alina Cojocaru: ‘When people tell me I’m a natural, I just want to scream’
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But Cojocaru dances with her entire heart and soul, endowing the repetitive steps with integrity. She miraculously captures Gelsomina’s wonder, not just with her enquiring face, but with her whole body, which seems to shrink back to childishness. As Zampanò, Mick Zeni makes a powerful, anguished impact but he doesn’t ever have enough to do.
It’s Cojocaru’s offstage husband, Johan Kobborg, playing the kindly clown Il Matto, who joins her in pushing back the years and filling the stage with life, as he jumps, turns and even unicycles through the action, making each step tell.
Star ratings (out of five)
Metamorphoses ★★★★★
La Strada ★★★
Metamorphoses is at the Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 10 February | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/nov/07/art-galleries-entrepreneurs-small-business-collaboration-royalties | Guardian Small Business Network | 2016-11-07T07:00:38.000Z | Louise Tickle | From leggings to baubles, enterprises offer artists a new canvas | The work of famous artists is recreated in many forms: postcards, placemats, scarves, tea towels – and now, in a more contemporary twist, stretch leggings. If you’re a fan of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, or even Bosschaert the Elder’s A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase, you can now stride out, colourfully adorned in one of the world’s greatest paintings.
The leggings are the result of a collaboration between the National Gallery, where all three canvases hang, and specialist designer-manufacturers Wild Bangarang. The company also makes a range of much sought-after World of Warcraft clothing, in partnership with the game’s original artists.
“The National Gallery came to us,” says David Pearson, co-founder of Wild Bangarang. An agency specialising in licensing had been taken on by the gallery, he explains, which wanted to explore ways innovative products could be used to bring the National Gallery’s collection to new audiences.
It has been a lengthy process that has cost time and money. Wild Bangarang cannot simply copy a picture on to fabric, it will specifically commission illustrators to redraw the art so that the image works perfectly in its new incarnation as clothing. They’ve also spent significant time with the National Gallery’s buyer – a whole day was spent at their printing works “printing and printing again until we got the colours absolutely right,” Pearson says. The leggings will be in the gallery shop from December.
Standing out
So how can other small business owners attract the notice of the UK’s galleries?
“Products happen in a lot of different ways” says Rosey Blackmore, merchandise director for Tate Enterprises, which oversees the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. She explains that the gallery won’t always make use of art they already have hanging on the walls, but will often commission artists to create something bespoke. “Sometimes we have a specific idea of what we think we need, so then I’ll give a very prescriptive brief, but that’s not always the case.
“Later today I’m going to the Royal College of Art to give students a broad brief asking them what would delight them if it was in our shops. And a product will materialise from that. Personally I really love the projects where we give emerging creatives the opportunity and we together create something that’s wonderful for us to have in the shop and very precious to them to have in their portfolio.”
Michelle Cassell was approached by a Royal Academy buyer who was interested in stocking her handpainted Christmas baubles.
Michelle Cassell, the artist behind the label Eat, Pray, Pedal was approached out of the blue by the Royal Academy (RA) earlier this year. A buyer from the gallery’s RAted Range (the RA’s showcase for emerging British design talent) contacted her via Etsy, where she had a listing to sell her work. She wanted to stock Cassell’s handpainted Christmas baubles to complement the gallery’s forthcoming exhibition on abstract expressionism.
Cassell had only sold two of them at a craft market to date, so she wasn’t quite sure whether to believe what she was hearing. And while she is thrilled at the opportunity, selling wholesale to a gallery has been a steep learning curve. “There were months of conversations,” she says . “I’d go six weeks and hear nothing – of course she had to go to meetings her end and pitch to the senior buyers.”
Making it commercially viable
It’s undoubtedly an exciting proposition for an emerging artist, but does it represent a worthwhile business opportunity?
Cassell’s deal was finally signed in August and she is now combining a part-job with painting hundreds of baubles. “It has taken a lot of perseverance to get to this point,” she says. “I’d love to just sit and paint, but I had to learn about wholesale and really think about it from a business perspective.” Galleries, she adds, take a higher margin than other stockists so you have to be prepared to negotiate.
Creating wealth: how artists can become inventive entrepreneurs
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Each relationship is different, says Ella Riley, senior buyer at the Royal Academy. “Some artists will ask for royalty for a product. It is typically quite minimal, but those products that do well can be in the shop for a number of years.” Or the gallery might offer them product in kind (depending on what the artist has designed).
Different artists will also bring their own individual approach to a piece of merchandise, Riley explains. “Ai Wei Wei wanted products that were really affordable and accessible” – (his pieces in the RA shop range from a £15 iPhone cover to a £14,000 ceramic chrysanthemum) – “whereas others might want to create something very high-end, and limited edition or numbered”.
At the Tate, Blackmore says that when the gallery itself creates a product based on a commissioned design, a standard royalty is offered to all artists, no matter how high their profile. Alternatively, she says, artists with strong links to manufacturers and who want to oversee the entire production process may prefer to supply a finished product to the gallery themselves, and make their cut on that basis.
Even in the midst of the excitement of being approached by a world famous gallery, however, Pearson warns that if this type of collaboration is to be a fruitful business prospect, it is vital “to slow everything down and make sure you understand every clause in the contract”. That may not come easy to creatives, but nobody wants to be starving in a garret, while somebody else makes money from your art in a gallery shop.
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/us-news/2017/may/25/trump-worried-about-brexit-impact-on-us-jobs | US news | 2017-05-25T13:15:44.000Z | Daniel Boffey | Trump 'worried about Brexit impact on US jobs' | Donald Trump is said to have told European Union leaders he is worried Americans may lose jobs as a result of Britain leaving the EU, in what would amount to an extraordinary U-turn by the US president.
An EU source said Trump spoke of the risks to the global economy posed by Brexit during a 45-minute meeting in Brussels with Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker, presidents of the European council and European commission respectively.
“Russia, Ukraine and Brexit were covered during the tête-à-tête”, the EU source said. “On Brexit, US expressed concern that jobs in the US would be lost because of Brexit.”
Further details of Trump’s comments were not immediately available but the claim raises questions about whether he still believes the UK made the right decision in the EU referendum last June.
The president was a cheerleader for Brexit, describing June’s voteas a “beautiful, beautiful thing”. After meeting Theresa May at the White House earlier this year, he claimed Brexit would be a “wonderful thing” for Britain.
He also suggested in the past that other countries might follow Britain out of the 28-nation bloc, although in recent weeks he has publicly revised that view, claiming the EU has been doing a “better job” of late.
Those who campaigned for Brexit took succour from Trump’s consistent claims that he would reward the UK’s decision to leave the EU with a swift free trade deal.
EU officials, however, believe that since taking office he has come to a greater appreciation of the value of European integration to the US, whose business leaders have generally supported the way single market rules offer efficiencies for exporters.
It was even claimed by unnamed US officials recently that Britain had been pushed behind the EU in the queue to strike a free trade deal.
During a private conversation last month, Angela Merkel is said to have convinced Trump that talks on a US-EU deal would be easier and more beneficial than he thought.
Merkel and Trump can't hide fundamental differences in first visit
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It was reported that Trump had asked the German chancellor 10 times if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time Merkel reportedly replied: “You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the EU.”
“On the 11th refusal, Trump finally got the message: ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then,’” an unnamed German politician was quoted as saying.
This suggests the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal between the EU and US, shelved after Trump’s election victory, could be revived.
Such a development would be embarrassing to high-profile Brexiters. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, claimed after meeting the president’s advisers in January, that Britain would be “first in line” for a deal and scorned the view of the former president Barack Obama that the UK would be at the back of the queue. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/23/trump-resistance-one-adjective-female-womens-march | Opinion | 2017-07-23T12:01:24.000Z | LA Kauffman | The Trump resistance can be best described in one adjective: female | LA Kauffman | It’s now been six dizzying and nauseating months since Donald Trump took the oath of office, and the brightest spot on the American political landscape is the grassroots resistance that has sprung up to counter his regime. No previous president ever faced so many protests so early in his term, and the millions who have taken to the streets since January can already take significant credit for stalling and frustrating key aspects of Trump’s agenda, from his Muslim ban to his bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
There are numerous qualities that distinguish this organizing upsurge from past waves of protest in the United States, but the most striking and significant is its composition: the resistance, by and large, is women.
The movement kicked off, of course, with massive Women’s Marches in more than 650 cities and towns across the United States the day after the inauguration, which together added up to the single largest day of protest in American history.
Women have anchored nearly every aspect of the resistance work since. Women made up a solid majority of those who marched on Washington time and again last spring: sociologist Dana Fisher found, for instance, that 54% of participants in the Peoples Climate March and 57% of those who attended DC’s March on Science were women. A March survey of phone calls to Congressional offices found an even more striking gender gap, with women constituting 86% of those making calls.
Women have taken the lead in using stronger resistance tactics since the inauguration, from blockading Trump Tower in support of immigrant rights to holding sit-ins against Trumpcare at Senate offices in Washington.
And women have spearheaded many of the most noteworthy creative actions to counter the broader Trump agenda in recent months, from the #MamasDayBailout organized through the Movement for Black Lives network in the spring to counter mass incarceration to the recent Quinceañera-themed immigrant rights protest at the Texas Statehouse organized by 15 young women in splendidly poufy gowns.
Though hard data isn’t available, all indications are that women predominate in the resistance movement’s most distinctive expression: the thousands of small, local groups that have sprung up all around the United States, including more than 5,800 groups aligned with Indivisible, the grassroots project launched by two former Congressional staffers shortly after the November election.
The women behind these ground-level groups are often new to activism, but certainly not to life: many are in their 40s and 50s, seasoned multi-taskers with children or elderly parents or both to care for alongside their other responsibilities.
The sprawling movement they’ve helped build is emphatically decentralized, continuing a decades-long trend in grassroots organizing. It’s tactically nimble and refreshingly pragmatic. Resistance groups are working both outside and inside established channels, marching in the streets while also registering voters and recruiting candidates to run for office. The gender make-up of the resistance isn’t adequate to explain these other movement characteristics, but it’s clearly a factor to consider.
Women, of course, have long played key but under-acknowledged roles in the great movements of American history, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to Ferguson and Standing Rock. With the anti-Trump resistance, though, the preponderance of women is so noteworthy and significant that failing to name it obscures the movement’s basic nature – and distorts the larger political conversation surrounding it.
Why have so many articles, blog posts, and tweets invoked the resistance without acknowledging who is doing most of the day-to-day work of resisting? It might be because the majority of pundits, commentators, and advice-givers on the left still come from the very demographic group that’s so strikingly underrepresented among the forces fighting Trump: men.
If this disparity were more widely noted, just imagine how it might change our discussions. Instead of debating whether the Democratic party should be chasing after white male voters, we might be grappling instead with why men as a group have been comparatively so reluctant to march, organize, or even pick up the phone and make a simple call to Congress in response to the threat of Trump.
In the meantime, each time Trump’s agenda stalls and you find yourself thanking the resistance, remember who you’re thanking.
LA Kauffman is a longtime grassroots organizer and author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism (Verso, 2017).
Sign up for Jessica Valenti’s weekly newsletter on feminism and sexism | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/19/senior-figures-from-across-uk-politics-gather-to-remember-alistair-darling | Politics | 2023-12-19T15:04:59.000Z | Severin Carrell | Senior figures from across UK politics gather to remember Alistair Darling | Keir Starmer, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair joined a host of senior figures from across British politics on Tuesday to pay tribute to Alistair Darling, the former chancellor who died last month aged 70.
A congregation that included Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne and the former Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell gathered for Darling’s memorial service at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh.
In a eulogy that followed tributes from close friends and his children, Anna and Calum, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, described Darling as her mentor, a man of great integrity whose “decency, honesty and shrewd judgment represented the very best of our politics”.
She said Darling, who had built his career on being trusted and unflashy, almost relished being described twice as the most boring politician in Britain by Truckers’ Weekly, though that reputation crumbled in private under his dry, acerbic wit. “After the last few years, perhaps people might like their chancellors a little less exciting,” she said.
Darling was one of only three Labour MPs who served on the frontbench for the full 13 years of the last Labour government, while leading the government through a “generational global financial crisis” in 2008, which drew on his previous training as a lawyer.
He was “a model of calm careful deliberation and strong instincts”, Reeves said. “Those difficult months required courage, the willingness to listen to advice, the intellect to grasp it and the willingness to act with swift bold judgment when called upon and to take responsibility for those momentous decisions.”
George Osborne (right) was among the senior Conservative figures to attend the service. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
He grasped the essential truth “that the most basic precondition [for earning the right to govern] is the public’s trust with taxpayers’ money”, she said.
Darling died of a short illness with an aggressive form of cancer in Edinburgh on 30 November, two days after his 70th birthday. His family held a small, private cremation on Monday, where the funeral service included an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet and the Lou Reed song Perfect Day.
Among the mourners at St Mary’s were the former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson; the former Labour minister and European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson; the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, the authors JK Rowling and Ian Rankin; the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper; and Ed Balls, a potential chancellor at the time of Darling’s appointment to the post in 2007.
The service at St Mary’s also heard from Brian Wilson, the former Labour energy minister and one of Darling’s closest friends. Referring to Darling’s education at Lorretto, a private school in Musselburgh, Wilson said: “Possibly the only advantage to a private education was that it pushed his views well to the left.”
Rather than earn a very comfortable living as an advocate, Darling devoted himself to the Labour party. He swapped the pinstripes of the legal profession to don jeans and jumpers in the evening before embracing the task of making Labour electable again after its heavy defeat in the 1987 general election.
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“Alistair was among those who committed himself to the long hard struggle to ensure we came back from that particular brink under Neil Kinnock’s leadership,” Wilson said. “There were no ifs or buts, no room for self-indulgence or factionalism. Just hard work, a long slog and unrelenting competence.”
There were then 10 long years in opposition. “History repeats itself in disturbingly short intervals,” Wilson added.
Calum Darling told mourners his father was never happier than on his 60th birthday when their close friends George Mackie and Catherine Macleod allowed Darling to use a tractor on their farm in Essex.
“He spent a day digging small holes and then filling them in again,” he recalled. “Our dad was certain this was a vital contribution to the work of the farm. George seemed less certain.”
Darling is survived by his wife Maggie, a former journalist. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/apr/13/youth-watch-first-trailer-new-paolo-sorrentino-film-with-michael-caine | Film | 2015-04-13T15:27:11.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Youth: watch first trailer for new Paolo Sorrentino film with Michael Caine | The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a hard act to follow, what with its astonishing central performance from Toni Servillo (both ecstatic and world-weary) and wonderfully rendered images of a sublimely beautiful Rome. But director Paolo Sorrentino has got to try, and the trailer for his latest, Youth (La Giovinezza), has just emerged – shortly before it will, no doubt, appear in the lineup for Cannes (due to be announced on 16 April).
So what do we make of Youth? We know the plot outline involves Michael Caine playing a semi-retired classical composer, and Harvey Keitel as his film-director pal, on holiday in the Alps; and that Caine gets a summons from the Queen of England for a final concert. The trailer majors on Caine, giving it the full Servillo with mournful gaze and slicked-back grey hair. His is the only dialogue we hear: “You are right. Music is all I understand.” We get glimpses of the cast’s other well-known faces: Rachel Weisz (prone, covered in mud); Keitel and lady companion; Paul Dano, with slightly improbable moustache.
But the impression the trailer-cutters want to give – if not Sorrentino himself – is that this is The Great Beauty 2. Rhythmic editing, scored to plaintive choral phrases, announces that we are witnessing great art. Shots of over-the-hill reprobates lounging in pools and gulping oxygen tell us that civilisation – as in TGB – is wobbling, if not in its death-throes. Other shots of lithe young things imply there’s life in the twitching corpse yet.
Whether Caine, and Sorrentino, can carry off these meditations on life and art remains to be seen: Caine’s occasional attempts at playing sensitive heroes have not always convinced, while Sorrentino’s command of English-language cinema has not, so far, been in the same league as his home-turf Italian films. Presumably, Servillo’s lack of serviceable English meant there was no way he could take the role – and it’s a big loss. But if the fates align, and Youth shows at Cannes, we’ll find out soon enough. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/25/orcas-ramming-yachts-spanish-whale-behaviour-trauma-humans | Opinion | 2023-05-25T13:00:06.000Z | Philip Hoare | Orcas are ramming yachts off the Spanish coast – is the whale world rising up? | Philip Hoare | Recent accounts of “attacks” on vessels by orcas off the Iberian peninsula are challenging the way we expect the natural world to behave. Increasing in number since 2020, from northern Portugal to the strait of Gibraltar, these incidents suggest the need for a cetacean scene investigation team. On 4 May, in one of the most extreme events, orcas sank a yacht.
“There were two smaller orcas and one larger,” the skipper Werner Schaufelberger told German magazine Yacht. “The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the boat with full force from the side.”
The word “attack” used in conjunction with animals is a human judgment; their actions are more likely to be defensive. But there is definitely something strange going on. Andrew Sutton, an experienced underwater photographer with whom I work and who is familiar with these particular orca pods, has noted them “doing weird things” in the strait, including “whacking rudders off and annoying fishermen”.
Having witnessed two big intervention episodes last year, he suspects that an increase in vessels may be a factor – not least because the strait is now the most popular route for migrants setting off from Morocco.
The Grupo Trabajo Orca Atlántica (GTOA, or Atlantic Orca Working Group), a highly respected partnership of Spanish and Portuguese scientists, has recorded hundreds of such reports, with 29 incidents this year around the strait alone. They believe that just 15 individuals, of a population of more than 50, are responsible.
‘Orcas, not us, are probably the most successful mammal on Earth.’ Photograph: Andrew Sutton
Dr Alfredo López Fernandez, of GTOA, told me that they have two hypotheses. One, the orcas “have invented something new and repeat it. This behaviour matches the profile of juveniles.” Or that it is a “response to an adverse situation; one or several individuals have had a bad experience and are trying to stop the boat so as not to repeat it. This behaviour coincides with the profile of adults.”
Either way, it is an astonishing notion. Dr López Fernandez and his team have named, generically, the interacting orcas Gladis (after their original scientific name, Orca gladiator). They suspect an individual, Gladis Blanca, initiated this behaviour after a “critical moment of agony”, perhaps as a result of collison with a vessel; she also has a young daughter, born in 2021. Other Gladis whales have been entangled with fishing gear or suffered lacerations and even amputations. “All this has to make us reflect on the fact that human activities are at the origin of this behaviour.”
The bare bones of Dr López Fernandez’s report evoke a plaintive story. Orca society is matriarchal; it recognises post-menopausal females as the most important members of a pod. Females pass on knowledge of feeding grounds and techniques. In the interventions, “grandmother” orcas have been seen to be observers, as if directing the events.
Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews has studied orcas extensively in the wild. He said that, while we can only speculate about the causes: “The spread of reaction to past trauma by one individual is plausible … but so are other explanations such as curiosity and play.”
Part of me is secretly excited at this idea of nature fighting back. According to the charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation, at least 174 orcas have died in captivity since 1961, having been forced to swim aimlessly about in overgrown swimming pools without any of the peer interaction that defines them.
The first whale I ever saw was an orca named (by humans) Ramu. He was kept in the dolphinarium at Windsor Safari Park (now Legoland) in the 1970s. As I and my whale-besotted sisters watched Ramu jump through his hoop, we realised that a magnificent animal had been reduced to a circus trick.
I’ve spent 20 years seeing and writing about whales, but I didn’t see an orca again until 2017. Andrew Sutton and I were eight nautical miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, diving with a megapod of sperm whales. Close by, we came upon 30 of them surrounded by two pods of orcas trying to predate the sperm whale calves. When one of the orcas headed directly at us, we quickly got back in the boat.
The orcas were defeated by the massed sperm whales. One pod left the scene. The other reassembled nearby. And we followed, out of curiosity. They began to circle us in the same way they had done with the whales, then head-butted our boat three times.
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I was the only one looking over the other side when five of the whales charged at us. It was utterly terrifying. At the last moment they slipped beneath us. As one of the Blue Planet film unit later told me, it is the same technique used by orcas to flip seals off ice floes.
I felt I’d given up all notion of being a “superior” animal. Instead, I was part of this interaction of three cultures: orca, sperm whale and human. Orcas, not us, are probably the most successful mammal on Earth. They’ve been around in their evolved state for 6m years, and are present in every ocean. They have no known predator. Except us.
I’ve no idea if the Iberian orcas are expressing a struggle for survival as we deplete their food sources and pollute their environment. Or just playing with us. But when Ranil Nanayakkara, the scientist with us on the boat, pulled up his underwater microphone after the orcas had gone, he discovered it had been bitten off.
With thanks to Jeroen Hoekendijk
Philip Hoare is the author of several books, including Leviathan, The Sea Inside and Albert and the Whale | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/jul/26/boy-with-a-pearl-earring-walter-raleigh-is-the-new-style-icon-for-men-harry-styles-henry-kitcher | Fashion | 2019-07-26T11:20:47.000Z | Scarlett Conlon | Boy with a pearl earring: Walter Raleigh is the new style icon for men | Could it be the renaissance of the Renaissance? Not since the 1600s when Charles I and Walter Raleigh were seen wearing them has the men’s pearl earring been so popular.
In May, Harry Styles arrived at the Met Gala in New York dressed in head-to-toe Gucci, wearing an ornate teardrop style in his right earlobe (he was rumoured to have pierced his ear specially for the occasion). In June, the single pearl earring popped up on the Givenchy catwalk at the Pitti Uomo spring/summer 2020 showcase in Florence, and over the last month, several influential editors and street style stars have been photographed wearing one.
GQ fashion editor, Ben Schofield – who admits to having a few, “one from a shop in Stoke Newington and the other … from [the jeweller] Alighieri” – is regularly photographed wearing his, and credits the model and artist Henry Kitcher for being the inspiration behind the trend. “I first saw him wearing one that he’d found on the internet around five years ago and thought it was absolutely brilliant and give him full credit for giving me the idea.”
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Kitcher, who’s a favourite with brands including Givenchy, Alexander McQueen and Tom Ford, is not just Schofield’s inspiration, but the big fashion houses too. “Over the years, brands have made their own versions of it for the show that I and others wear,” he says, adding that he is rarely asked to remove it, even when modelling other designers’ clothes. “I enjoy [that], as at least part of ‘me’ remains when I’m wearing an outfit that reflects nothing of my personality.”
Sir Walter Raleigh’s portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA
Kitcher was given his first pearl by his mother, who “compared the likeness to a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh at the National Portrait Gallery in London”, he says. “I wore it every day for a couple of years as I appreciated the gift and enjoyed the link to this great historical figure.”
Raleigh isn’t the only historical figure to have been a forefather of this trend. “The single earring dates right back,” says fashion historian Tony Glenville. “The trophy of the single great pearl represents the wealth of the sea to the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. [But] it’s Renaissance times when men really start to wear a single pearl as a statement, possibly because large pearls are hard to match, possibly because a single bold earring on a man looked less feminine than a pair.”
Wallpaper’s fashion editor, Jason Hughes, who also first noticed the trend on Kitcher years ago, says that its more mainstream adoption points to “the new direction in men’s jewellery [which] fits perfectly with the new gender-fluid times that have opened the door for men to experiment with their dress once again. We’ve moved into more adventurous times, with men exploring new modes of dressing to express themselves beyond what we’re used to seeing. Kitcher concurs. “I think people have taken to the pearl because it reflects a certain elegance that isn’t typically seen on a guy.”
Hughes recommends the exotic black pearl by Hum and other single styles are available from Gucci to Asos, with prices ranging from £6 to £600, as well as markets like Spitalfields, where Kitcher’s first was found.
While in the past, pearls have generally been confined to items such as cufflinks or tie pins, their current popularity is starting to extend beyond earrings to necklaces, which were seen at Kenzo, Comme des Garçons and former Brioni creative director Justin O’Shea’s new brand SSS World Corp.
Glenville heralds it as a progressive evolution of style. “I love the fact that as a part of our examination of gender and masculinity, jewels are being rethought.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/01/mexico-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-president | World news | 2018-12-01T06:30:14.000Z | David Agren | President Amlo takes power with vow to transform Mexico – but can he deliver? | Mexico’s president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador will take power on Saturday on a wave of hope that he can transform the country on behalf of the poor and marginalized – and suspicions that he will not be able to fulfill such great expectations.
The silver-haired 64-year-old, who counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a close friend, won a historic victory in July, bringing the Mexican left to power after 30 years of dashed expectations.
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Figures from around the world have been invited to the inauguration, including US vice-president Mike Pence, first daughter Ivanka Trump, Corbyn and – to the disgust of López Obrador’s domestic critics – Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
The man known as Amlo takes office as international attention focuses on a caravan of Central American migrants camped out at the US-Mexico border – the first foreign policy challenge of his administration.
Pundits had warned Amlo’s election would unleash a wave of latent anti-Americanism in response to Donald Trump’s racist provocations – but Mexicans seem more preoccupied with the domestic problems such as rampant corruption, persistent poverty and a militarized drug war that has left 200,000 dead.
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“We don’t like Trump, but we also understand that he’s a danger for the country – so if you can mollify the danger, so much the better,” said Federico Estévez, political science professor at ITAM, a private university.
With Amlo, “it’s about being Mexico-first, not being anti-gringo”, he added.
Amlo has promised to rule with frugality, selling the presidential plane, swapping limousines for a Volkswagen Jetta and taking a 60% pay cut – forcing other politicians and public servants to follow suit.
He takes power amid astronomical expectations from ordinary Mexicans.
“We need a change, to do what’s never been done before,” said Erik Yniesta, 44, an addictions counsellor.
“He took on the system and beat it. He was the only valid option,” said Eleonora Montes, a sales representative in Tijuana. “All our politicians steal. In a country that’s so poor, they come to power as a way to get rich.”
Such opinions reflect widespread disgust with the country’s mainstream politicians: outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto leaves office with historically low approval ratings.
Peña Nieto was initially feted by international commentators for structural reforms – Time magazine featured him on a cover emblazoned with the words “Saving Mexico” – but his administration quickly became bogged down in corruption scandals and growing anger over the dismal economy.
Meanwhile, the country raced past a series of grim milestones with record numbers of homicides, but the president seemed uninterested in tackling the violence and corruption which beset ordinary Mexicans.
“He simply didn’t know how to deal with the problems his government faced,” said Javier Garza, an editor in the northern city of Torreón.
Amlo promises clean government and has argued that previously corrupt politicians will fall into line if the president sets a proper example.
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But last week, he stunned the country by saying he wouldn’t pursue past cases of corruption, preferring instead to turn the page.
He further dismayed supporters by unveiling a plans for a new militarized national guard under military command – despite mounting evidence that Mexico’s armed forces have committed widespread human rights abuses in the name of the war on organized crimes.
Meanwhile, he has held a string of plebiscites before even taking office – overturning a proposed new airport in Mexico city and rubber-stamping a series of pet projects, including a new refinery in his home state and a “tourist” train to the Mayan ruins of Palenque.
All of the proposals were overwhelmingly approved – but on a turnout in single figures.
“These last few months have made it evident [his] project isn’t very clear,” said Diego Petersen Farah, a columnist with the Guadalajara newspaper El Informador. “There is a lot of improvisation and less intelligence than is necessary.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/blog/2016/aug/25/resentful-americans-turn-blind-eye-donald-trump | US news | 2016-08-25T14:12:19.000Z | Michael White | Resentful Americans turn a blind eye to Trump's faults | Whenever I think about the dysfunctional horror of the looming presidential election in America – so weird that Nigel Farage can pop up in Mississippi on the Trump campaign – I can’t get Susan Sarandon or Plato out of my mind. Let’s talk first about the actor. When did Plato make a decent movie, eh?
A few weeks ago Sarandon gave a magazine interview to an overawed writer in which she set out her well-known political stall as a radical feminist who backed Bernie Sanders and doesn’t think much of Hillary Clinton. “There’s nothing about her I find feminist except that she’s a woman,” she said.
That betrays a casual, right-on ignorance of Clinton’s record over many decades, but never mind, Sarandon’s distaste is shared by many educated American women. “She’s a hawk, she’ll probably get us into another war,” etc etc, all good Islington-to-Santa Monica stuff. What was startling to me was that yet again Sarandon declined to say she’d vote for Clinton in November.
“I go by issues, I don’t vote with my vagina,” Sarandon tells audiences. She did it again in Australia the other day. She’s even hinted that she might vote Trump on the grounds that his election “will bring the revolution immediately”. How flakey is that?
All right, she’s only an actor, they get paid to read other people’s lines. But even though Bernie Sanders himself has finally backed Clinton with grumpy ill-grace, I keep hearing Americans – particularly younger, educated women – saying similar things: that they’ll vote Trump against the “Washington elite” or just abstain.
The Observer’s Nick Cohen recently wrote a belter of a column mocking leading American Republicans who keep busts of Churchill on their desks as a symbol of defiant courage but don’t have the guts to denounce and disown Trump, who has captured the ugly, angry party they spent decades creating for short-term gain.
That’s not quite fair on many Republicans. The Bush family and some other notables are standing aloof. Other figures have publicly stated – at political or personal risk to themselves – that they will vote for Clinton rather than for a man whose dangerous and volatile unsuitability makes him a threat to constitutional government.
There is a pretty disheartening list of rebels and appeasers. At the party convention, Trump’s beaten rival, Senator Ted Cruz, was booed for telling people to “vote your conscience”. Since he’s called Trump “a pathological liar, utterly amoral, a narcissist … and a serial philanderer,” we can take him as a no.
That makes Cruz and rejectionist Republicans better Americans than Susan Sarandon. Her arrogant emphasis on what matters to Susan seems – so far – to obscure her view of the bigger political picture, possibly to link her more closely than she might wish to the “Trump the Selfie” mood that is drawing millions of resentful Americans into a dark and angry narcissism.
Which brings me to Plato. Concerned friends in the US sent me some extracts from a newly published book, A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump – essays by prominent writers, academics and doctors on the polarising disorder they see sweeping their own country – while noting, as both Trump and Farage have done, that Britain’s Brexit vote serves to remind us that the revolt against elites and globalisation exists in Europe too.
A lot of this stuff has been around for decades. As a student 50 years ago I read the American historian Richard Hofstadter’s essay The Paranoid Style of American Politics, in which anti-foreigner nativism could easily be harnessed against newcomers, outsiders, black people, capitalism, Jews, the usual suspects. The leftwing social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism as a consequence of post-war consumer capitalism as long ago as 1979. In Willie Loman, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman created a Trump voter in 1949.
Lasch and Miller lived long enough to experience the Reagan presidency, its negative impacts softened by the incumbent’s relaxed and sunny disposition. The prospect of a Trump victory against Clinton – always a vulnerable candidate in my book – would seriously have frightened, though possibly not surprised, them. It’s been a long time coming and the Reagan/Goldwater wing of the Republican party has made the bouffant-haired Frankenstein possible.
Ted Cruz is not alone in identifying Trump’s very obvious self-absorption, the quality so grotesque it rendered him almost a stealth candidate until too late. What no one understood at first was how much his excesses would appeal to voters – not all of them poor white people whose jobs, prospects and traditions have been attacked or destroyed – who feel marginalised or threatened.
It’s part-cultural, part-economic, but it thrives in the celebrity culture we now inhabit, vastly enhanced by 24/7 social media. As harsh reality becomes more unpleasant, the temptation is to blur the edges between reality and illusion, to retreat into a magic world and the cult of self. Facebook, Google and YouTube make it ever more possible. Even the TV networks are making money out of Trump.
Of course, Plato didn’t do Twitter or have a presence on Facebook. But Andrew Sullivan, the British expat writer in the US, wrote a piece reminding New York magazine’s readers how the great man had warned that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy,” in terms that describe the Trump scenario very well.
Plato was no friend of democracy (as pandering classics professors routinely fail to tell us in their TV series on Greek democracy), not least because it killed his hero Socrates. He saw it as a system that gradually expanded freedom and equality to the point where authority imploded and its ensuing disorders allow a demagogue to seize power, promising to “take back control” or “get our country back”.
Being of the elite himself, Plato explained, but with a populist touch, the emerging tyrant forces the now defenceless elite to compromise, flee or face retribution. Sound familiar? It certainly does. Watch those wobbling Republican millionaires shaking behind their locked gates. In an age that has delivered painful inequality in most advanced societies (unadvanced ones always have it), anger against elite wealth is very real and understandable. Which of us would not see more bankers jailed?
Yet Trump supporters seem even more blind to his faults than Susan Sarandon or Nigel Farage. Trump still hasn’t published his tax return, as all candidates have done for 40 years, and evidence emerges daily of strange financial ties/debts to Russian and Chinese interests. The distinction between fact and fantasy is fast eroding. Trump is behind in most polls and may be rightly thrashed in November, a fading nightmare by Christmas. He may just “do a Brexit” and win. Does Farage get any of this, do you suppose? As a Poundland Trump, Farage tapped into suppressed resentment over “politically incorrect” feelings, but never provided any answers beyond that magic word: Brexit.
Yet on Wednesday night in Mississippi we saw a man whose creed is self-governing “sovereign” states interfering in another country’s sovereignty (he complained when Obama did it in the referendum), not against a candidate whose toxic rage so clearly threatens us all, but on his side. I wish I could say Susan Sarandon showed a better grip on reality. There’s still time. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2024/apr/13/who-needs-perfection-flawed-manchester-city-arsenal-liverpool-bring-drama | Football | 2024-04-13T19:00:30.000Z | Jonathan Wilson | Who needs perfection? Why flawed City, Arsenal and Liverpool bring the drama | Jonathan Wilson | In Chad Harbach’s 2011 novel The Art of Fielding, the shortstop Henry Skrimshander is approaching the US college record for the most consecutive errorless baseball games when a throw inexplicably goes awry and hits a teammate in the dugout. At that, his confidence evaporates to the point that he can no longer execute the most basic skills; he gets the yips. What lingers from the novel, for me, is the crushing sense of pressure of having errors recorded like that, appearing even on the scoreboard, as though the sport had become less about the achievement of glory than about the avoidance of mistakes.
Avoiding mistakes is good. Some people should be judged on the avoidance of mistakes. Postal workers, bus drivers, indexers, especially surgeons and air-traffic controllers, should carry on not getting things wrong. But sport? Shouldn’t sport be about actively creating something?
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Even if we would like our goalkeepers and defenders to be blemish-free, it still tends to be the goals that are remembered rather than the gaffes – and if mistakes do live on in the general consciousness, it’s almost invariably because of the goals they led to.
This may be a subjective view (of a nostalgic fortysomething made anxious by change), but sport has a problem with perfection. Once participants start getting too good, something is lost.
It’s probably not coincidence that snooker’s heyday, for instance, came before there was a near-guarantee of players clearing up once given a chance with the reds open; the greatest snooker in history, the last frame of the 1985 world championship final, was the unimprovable climax that it was precisely because Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor, nerves shredded, missed makeable pot after makeable pot.
The endless sixes of the modern Indian Premier League, the balance between bat and ball destroyed, feel as though they have cheapened the spectacle. As technology has improved, so the strategic challenge of many of the great golf courses has been destroyed while Formula One has felt increasingly predictable.
Sport should not be about perfection. The idea that enhanced technical ability is necessarily desirable is one of the great myths, not unlike, and not unrelated to, capitalism’s demand for constant growth. The priority should be competition, cut and thrust, parry and riposte, a sense of jeopardy; that’s what gives sport its drama and its narrative.
There are limits, of course: nobody’s suggesting television companies should be showing a hard-fought 1-1 draw from a random parks pitch rather than Manchester City battering Bournemouth at home (again) or Liverpool thrashing Sparta Prague. But there is a danger when the concentration of talent becomes too great, when the gulf between the richest and the rest is so vast that games between them are no longer contests. This has been one of the more intriguing Premier League seasons of recent times in part because there are three sides good enough to challenge for the title, but also because all three are flawed. The outcome of far fewer games this season has felt inevitable.
Liverpool concede the first goal in games far too often, they are beginning to look tired and their rejigged forward line remains a work in progress.
Cody Gakpo is yet really to settle, while Mohamed Salah has been nowhere near his best since suffering a hamstring injury at the Africa Cup of Nations. There is much to admire in the energy of Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez, but with calmer, more reliable finishers, Liverpool would surely have won at least one of the two league games against Manchester United, or the home games against Manchester City and Arsenal, in all of which notable chances were squandered.
In all four of those games, they missed their most clinical finisher this season, Diogo Jota. He stands fourth (behind Son Heung-min, Jarrod Bowen and Phil Foden) if players are ranked by non-penalty goals minus xG, a rough measure of striking efficiency. Díaz and Núñez are respectively 554th and 559th of 562.
Kai Havertz, celebrating his goal at Brighton, is showing a cutting edge under Mikel Arteta. Photograph: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC/Getty Images
Arsenal’s £60m signing of Kai Havertz in the summer is beginning to look a slow-burn success. Other than a sympathy penalty at Bournemouth, he didn’t score until late November against Brentford, and the sense was that Mikel Arteta was no closer to working out how to use his unusual bundle of attributes than any of his coaches at Chelsea. But he has five goals in his last seven league games and his ability to operate as a sort of deluxe target man/false 9 hybrid has been a key factor in their form this year.
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Even if the goals have dried up for Gabriel Martinelli, the fact that Gabriel Jesus is no longer a guaranteed starter and that Leandro Trossard has more goals from the bench than any other Premier League player this season suggests they have strength in depth. But a doubt remains over mentality and the tendency to be shaken out of their rhythm by setbacks – as happened against Bayern on Tuesday.
City, meanwhile, have lost their balance. Real Madrid weren’t the first side to expose the space behind their defensive line, an issue that is largely the result of problems higher up the pitch. Erling Haaland may still be the leading scorer in the league, but he went into the weekend only two places above Núñez in that chart of non-penalty goals minus xG.
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He still scores plenty but the problem is that when he isn’t scoring – and his output has dropped significantly by his standards since the end of November – he isn’t doing much at all. He certainly isn’t functioning as an auxiliary midfielder, and the injury that kept John Stones out for months has prevented City from finding that extra man in the back four, while the fact the Norwegian thrives on direct service has created a tension that at times seems as disruptive as it is creative.
None of these are major flaws. They are the kind of problems the vast majority of clubs would love to have. But all three clubs have worked through issues this season. None are entirely reliable. And that has added to the intrigue.
The sense of working things out, correcting, refining, improving, has added to the drama. Perfection is boring: this season has benefited from every side being at least slightly imperfect. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/may/03/itv-kevin-lygo-programmes-inhouse | Media | 2010-05-03T06:00:02.000Z | Steve Hewlett | ITV values Kevin Lygo's skills but will it buy the shows he makes? | That Kevin Lygo would leave Channel 4, once he had lost to David Abraham in the chief executive stakes, was a virtual certainty. Any lingering doubts would have been dispelled by Abraham's very public repudiation of the deal he fashioned to bring Jonathan Ross back to C4. But is Lygo's move to run ITV Studios a good one for ITV – or him?
On the ITV side, the problem with in-house production often appears intractable. In theory, there is a virtuous commercial circle, with programming created and owned in-house, performing well on ITV, then making megabucks when it is sold around the world. I say "in theory" because, with a few, relatively minor exceptions, ITV has proved incapable of making it happen.
And it is not as if executives haven't been trying. "Profitable content" has been at the heart of ITV's corporate strategy ever since it became one company back in 2003. Charles Allen tried it, Michael Grade tried it, and now Archie Norman and Adam Crozier are trying it. But tackling the problem will mean reversing an important long-term trend. ITV Productions' share of ITV's network commissioning has dropped from nearly 70% at the time of the Carlton/Granada merger to just 47% a couple of months ago. Put simply, too many of ITV's hits are made (and ultimately owned) by other people. On the upside, those programmes (think The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent etc) have helped to improve ITV's on-air performance and ad income. On the downside, you can't have a credible "profitable content" growth strategy if you don't own the content. But that tension – between producers incentivised to build their content business and broadcasters strapped to the wheel of maximising on-air performance – has proved impossible to resolve.
So is Lygo the man to do it? That he has an outstanding and deserved creative reputation is not in dispute. However, for the past decade he has been a commissioner rather than a producer. And that switch from buyer to seller, from potentate to supplicant, is notoriously difficult. What's more, the man he will have to sell to, ITV's director of television, Peter Fincham, used to sell programmes to Lygo when at Talkback, since when he's been in competition with him at BBC1 and ITV. There is also speculation that when C4 was looking for its last chief executive, Fincham was in the frame but not favoured by Lygo who, as its programme director, didn't fancy having him as a boss.
So now the tables are turned, much will depend on what kind of relationship they can forge. Norman and Crozier will be keen for two such talented creatives to hit it off, in the hope they will be able to fix ITV's structural production problem. In essence, Lygo will have to deliver programme ideas that are as good as anything ITV can get from outside; no doubt he'll be given cash to try to reverse the flow of key production talent into the independent sector. And improving economic circumstances mean that, unlike his predecessor, Crozier will have some financial cover for such investments – they can be made without seriously damaging the company's bottom line and incurring shareholders' wrath.
But there's the rub. The temptation to pressure ITV commissioners to favour in-house ideas will be hard to resist. But the minute that results in a less than optimal on-air performance, investors will get nervous. Rebuilding ITV as an integrated broadcaster/producer with a meaningful "profitable content" proposition, even if it's possible at all, will take time. Quite possibly more time than the new top team at ITV plc have got. And then there's how Lygo reacts to Fincham turning down his favourite idea … | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/how-to-argue-rhetorical-fallacies | Opinion | 2013-09-13T12:30:00.000Z | Protagoras | Can you spot a rhetorical fallacy? | Protagoras | Everybody knows that attack is the best form of defence. And what's true for war is also true for argument. Why devise artful persuasive tactics when all you need do is find the weakness in your opponent and exploit it?
It is vital then to know something about the fallacies – the linguistic equivocations, distorted appeals and misleading deductions that may be used to win arguments by means foul rather than fair. If you can identify these, point them out to your audience and make plain their implications, you not only inure yourself from their toxicity, you also undermine the character of your opponent, cast doubt on even their most sound arguments and demonstrate your own decency, rationality and clear-headedness.
The authority fallacy
A lot of fallacious forms of argument cluster around the use of "authorities". It is often necessary in argument to make use of some kind of authority – if only because we want to refer to facts and findings. But authorities can also be used as a way to bully opponents by suggesting that in failing to agree with some venerated source they must themselves be weak-minded, ignorant or wildly and dangerously at odds with common standards. The "founding fathers" of the US constitution are often used in this way. In the UK we regularly hear solemn citations of what "the British people" think, feel and believe. The implication is that to depart from their wisdom is to have lost touch with reality (perhaps even to be in thrall to foreign-born "cultural Marxists").
The "limits of debate" fallacy
An increasingly common variant of such a tactic takes the form of a self-designated umpire who joins in with online disputes by asserting their authority to police the limits of debate. They declare that if they (a typical, reasonable and fair-minded person) find something hard to understand then it must be wrong or mere sophistry; that if they find something too extreme it must be completely insane; that if they feel someone has gone too far then they must have. The "concern troll" is a seemingly benign manifestation of this fallacy and one to be watchful for.
The "unseen danger" fallacy
Commonly found in the more fevered corners of political ideology are the various fallacies of danger – those forms of argument that seek to stave off decision by conjuring up all manner of horrors that precipitate change might lead to (or, conversely, the disasters that delay will engender). The 19th-century political thinker and reformer Jeremy Bentham called this "the hobgoblin argument" since it warns of mythical horrors lurking unseen by all but the one kind enough to point them out to us. Thus we are told that same-sex marriage will lead to bestiality and incest, or that anything other than full austerity economics will force us to relive the nightmares of inter-war Weimar.
Bentham (perhaps foreseeing internet messageboards) believed that this was a deception "generally accompanied by personalities of the vituperative kind". This claim confirmed by the ceaseless use of fallacies of danger in arguments even vaguely related to Islam where it is often blended with apocalyptic fantasies that seem to bring great enjoyment to their dreamer.
Fallacy of unripe time
But one should be alert for a milder and thus more effective variant which often hides behind the seeming reasonableness of what Francis Cornford jokingly called the "principle of unripe time". Someone seems to agree with what you propose but urges that now is not the right time, that we pause in order to be sure, await more evidence lest we make mistakes in haste. Make no mistake indeed – this is but a more devious form taken by the hobgoblin.
Begging questions and euphemism
Another class of fallacies are those which (often but not always intentionally) sow confusion. These include the many ways of seeming to say a lot while saying nothing, of avoiding answers by question-begging and of obscuring things by giving them nicer sounding names (like "collateral damage"). A particularly destructive source of confusion is the use of generalities. We often hear how "government" is incapable of doing anything as if "government" were a specific, singular and easily identified bogeyman rather than a vast and varied collection of agencies doing very different things in very different ways with varying degrees of success. See also uses of "religion", "the market" and "the left".
The fallacy fallacy
Comment sections are often full not only of bad grammar and spelling but also all sorts of dubious reasoning: red herrings, bizarre analogies, ludicrous generalisations, ad hominem attacks, straw-men and of course a lot of emotion-laden bile. The exposure of fallacious arguments is a kind of disinfectant for this grubby part of the public sphere, cleansing our arguments and making them usable.
But like any cleansing agent it can be dangerous if applied indiscriminately. The denunciation of fallacies can itself become fallacious.
Ceaseless attack on authorities risks undermining any and all authority until it is impossible for anyone to refer to any prior facts or findings. Combined with fallacies of danger this gives birth to fallacies of mistrust for which anybody who makes any claim to knowledge or expertise is suspicious, most likely self-serving and a "producer interest". Thus we bar the lawyers from speaking about legal aid, the doctors from commenting on healthcare and the teachers from holding opinions about teaching.
Similarly, while generalities can mislead, without them it is impossible to say much about public affairs. The person who demands that you always be more specific and give nothing but particular examples is not taking part in the argument but trying to close it down.
In these respects, fallacy hunting is a conservative strategy. It gives the advantage to those who want only to cast doubt on new claims and criticisms rather than propose their own alternatives. Fallacies dog contemporary public discourse. But this has given birth to the dogged fallacy spotter. We must have good and clear arguments. But we must also be careful lest the purification of argument leads to its erasure. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/18/curbs-on-noisy-protests-may-return-to-commons-after-lords-defeat | UK news | 2022-01-18T12:19:34.000Z | Rajeev Syal | Curbs on ‘noisy protests’ may return to Commons after Lords defeat | Controversial measures including police powers to stop noisy protests could be brought back to the Commons by the government after a series of late-night defeats in the Lords, the justice secretary, Dominic Raab, has said.
Peers rejected a series of measures in the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill that were proposed in response to activist movements such as Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion. The bill will return to the Commons for MPs to decide whether to accept the changes.
Proposed powers that were voted down included allowing police officers to stop and search anyone at a protest “without suspicion” for items used to prevent a person being moved, known as “locking-on”.
A move that would allow individuals with a history of causing serious disruption to be banned by the courts from attending certain protests was also dismissed, along with a proposal to make it an offence for a person to disrupt the operation of key national infrastructure, including airports and newspaper printers.
At least 18 peaceful environmental protesters jailed in UK this year
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In a separate defeat, peers backed restricting the imposition of tougher sentences for blocking a highway to major routes and motorways rather than all roads.
Asked if any measures would be reintroduced through the Commons, the justice secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ll look very carefully at all of that, but, yes, absolutely.
“In relation to noise, of course we support the right to peaceful and rambunctious protest, but it cannot be allowed to interfere with the lives of the law-abiding majority.”
Rejection of the Conservative government’s plans sets the stage for a protracted “ping-pong” parliamentary tussle, whereby legislation passes between the Lords and the Commons until agreement can be reached.
Peers were strongly critical of not only the measures, but also the way they had been introduced at such a late stage of the passage of the bill, after it had already gone through the elected house.
3:35
Why protesters are worried about the police and crime bill – video report
Earlier, the Lords also defeated other contentious curbs on demonstrations proposed in the legislation, including powers to impose conditions on protests judged to be too noisy.
The Labour frontbencher Richard Rosser said the “sweeping, significant and further controversial powers” had not been considered by the Commons and called it an “outrageous way to legislate”.
Rosser said: “We cannot support any of these last-minute, rushed and ill-thought-through broad powers… … with the exception of approving the increased sentences for wilfully obstructing motorways and major roads.”
The independent crossbencher and prominent QC Alex Carlile, who served previously as independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said: “The dilution of without-suspicion stop and search powers is a menacing and dangerous measure.”
Brian Paddick, a Liberal Democrat peer who was a deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan police, said: “If the government is determined to bring in these draconian, anti-democratic laws, reminiscent of cold war eastern bloc police states, they should withdraw them now and introduce them as a separate bill to allow the democratically elected house time to properly consider them.”
Lord Paddick added: “The anti-protest measures in the original bill were dreadful. These measures and the way they have been introduced are outrageous.”
Stressing the need for the protest measures, the Home Office minister Susan Williams argued they were “vitally important in protecting the country from the highly disruptive tactics employed by a small number of people”.
Lady Williams said: “The rights to freedom of speech and assembly are a cornerstone of our democracy and this government will not shrink from defending them.
“But a responsible government, one that stands up for the rule of law, must also defend the rights and freedom of the law-abiding majority.”
Greenpeace UK’s political campaigner, Megan Randles, said nationwide protests against the bill had played a part in stopping curbs on the right to protest.
“It’s so fitting that the many protests staged over the past few days against these outrageous attempts to remove our right to protest played such a key role in defeating the government last night. There couldn’t be a clearer demonstration of why removing these oppressive amendments was so important,” she said.
Fatima Ibrahim from the youth movement Green New Deal Rising, which has challenged leading politicians over their record on the climate crisis, said: “It’s good to see some of the worst elements taken out of this bill last night by the Lords. This wouldn’t have happened without people taking to the streets and building pressure through the ‘Kill the Bill’ movement.
“But the fight continues and this bill is still full of measures to silence protest and attack marginalised groups like Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. So we won’t stop until we kill this bill.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/apr/07/mamma-mia-abba-musical | Stage | 2009-04-07T15:11:03.000Z | Veronica Lee | Mamma Mia! How can I resist you? | It's not often I arrive at the theatre in a grump, but a long and unexplained bus diversion in London's Whitehall – G20 was last week, guys – threatened to make me late for the 10th anniversary performance of Mamma Mia! But I got there in time and, just as I was on 6 April 1999, was immediately transported to a mythical Greek island where a wedding is about to take place.
Ten years on, Mamma Mia! – a love story set to Abba songs – still doesn't rival Sophocles, but it remains as stonkingly, wonderfully, unbelievably good as the first time I saw it. The presence of Abba's Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson at the Prince of Wales theatre merely added to the occasion but, in keeping with their resolute unstarriness, big-name celebs were few and far between in the audience.
I noticed some differences post last year's Meryl Streep film version; the audience was quicker to pick up on the show's several layers of irony and the occasional smutty line. Writer Catherine Johnson's inspired segues into the opening lines of songs were more noisily appreciated than I remember. I had to stop myself singing along to every song and saved myself for the audience singalong at the curtain, when Benny and Björn made sweet speeches of thanks to casts present and previous.
But what is it that makes the show so appealing? Well, quite apart from having some of the finest pop songs ever written, Mamma Mia! is the ultimate feel-good tale of love conquering all. It is completely uncynical and consistently compelling – it's the perfect show for someone who says they don't like theatre, or who "doesn't do musicals". I've seen the show a few times in various locations and, with the exception of last night and the first night in 1999, have paid top dollar for the privilege – a real testimony to its attractions for someone used to seeing shows for free.
I'm not alone: Mamma Mia! has a high percentage of repeat audience members among the 32 million people who have seen it in the 190 cities where it has played, and at any given time it is being performed on at least three continents. Not bad for a show that even Johnson thought might appeal only to Abba fans. How wrong she was, but then again, so was I; when I interviewed her in 1999, keen Abba fan that I was, I had no idea it would be a global hit.
The show has taken a whopping $2bn at the box office. So popular is the phenomenon that it's difficult to find someone who hasn't seen it in London or on tour, or on film, or failing that, on DVD. Is there anyone out there who hasn't experienced the sheer life-affirming joy of Mamma Mia!? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/25/weight-loss-drug-semaglutide-reverses-heart-failure-symptoms-study | Society | 2023-08-25T09:55:30.000Z | Andrew Gregory | Weight-loss drug can reverse heart failure symptoms, study finds | Weight-loss jabs can reverse the symptoms of heart failure, according to a global trial that experts say could revolutionise treatment.
Heart failure is one of the world’s fastest growing health threats. About 65 million people have the condition, with cases soaring in recent years. However, few treatment options are available.
In a study that is the first of its kind, US researchers discovered that semaglutide – sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus – triggers “very large improvements” across a wide range of symptoms.
“We are talking about marked improvements in symptoms such as shortness of breath, fatigue, inability to have physical exertion, swelling,” said the lead author, Dr Mikhail Kosiborod, a cardiologist and vice-president for research at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. “These types of improvements can be very impactful for patients living with heart failure.”
“It is one of the most promising developments in this field,” he added.
The findings were revealed on the first day of the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, the world’s largest heart conference. Experts not involved with the study hailed the breakthrough, saying it could have a “transformational impact” on the lives of many patients.
Overweight adults with high blood pressure a third more likely to die early, study finds
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In the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial – the gold standard of medical studies – researchers used semaglutide to treat patients suffering from heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). This is when the heart pumps normally but is too stiff to fill properly.
As many as half of patients with heart failure worldwide have HFpEF, and most of those are overweight or obese.
The trial included 529 patients from 13 countries in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. All had a body mass index of more than 30, as well as heart failure symptoms and physical limitations. The median age of the group was 69 and the median weight was 105.1kg (231.7lb).
One group was given 2.4mg of semaglutide once a week for a year. The other was given a placebo. Researchers assessed changes in body weight, as well as changes to heart failure-related symptoms using the clinical summary score (CSS) of the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ).
They also looked at whether patients were able to perform better walking for six minutes. After 52 weeks, the mean change on the KCCQ-CSS was 16.6 points for patients on the weight-loss jabs compared with 8.7 points in the placebo group.
Body weight for those on the drugs also reduced by a mean of 13.3% compared with 2.6%.
The mean change to walking distance in six minutes was 21.5 metres for those on Wegovy and 1.2 metres in the placebo group.
Kosiborod said he was “very excited” by the trial results.
“These findings are impressive and impactful. The benefits we observed with semaglutide versus placebo on these very important outcomes for patients with this type of heart failure – their symptoms and physical function – are the largest that we have ever seen with any pharmacologic intervention in this patient population.”
The medication “produced large improvements in symptoms, physical limitations and exercise function, reduced inflammation, and resulted in greater weight loss and fewer serious adverse events as compared with placebo”.
“The magnitude of the benefits we observed is the largest seen with any agent in HFpEF,” he added.
“This will likely have a significant impact on clinical practice, especially since there is a dearth of efficacious therapies in this vulnerable patient group.”
Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation and a consultant cardiologist, welcomed the findings. “Only a few years ago, drugs that could help people to achieve life-changing weight loss felt like a far-off dream,” she said. “But now they are here.
“This study demonstrates that semaglutide is not only safe for people with this type of heart failure but it also has important benefits for their quality of life.
“For some people, living with heart failure can make everyday activities difficult or even impossible. The kind of improvements seen in this study, such as being able to walk further, could have a transformational impact on someone’s life.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/12/android-smartphone-tablet-malware-viruses | Technology | 2014-02-12T17:16:34.000Z | Stuart Dredge | How can I keep my Android tablet or smartphone secure? | Android is the most popular operating system for smartphones, by far, and it's also the most open, in terms of how much you can customise your device – replacing its default keyboard, for example – as well as the approval process for developers to release new apps for it.
This openness is a boon for the tech-savvy Android user, because pretty much anything on their device that they don’t like can be swapped out for something better. They also tend to be pretty good at not installing apps that might play fast and loose with personal data. For them, Android doesn’t have a security problem.
What about everyone else, though? Android’s status as the world’s most popular smartphone OS means it has hundreds of millions of users who aren’t so clued-in on security. They’re not stupid or lazy: they’re just normal people. They’re the reason so many developers of viruses, other malware and privacy-flouting apps are targeting Android.
Cisco’s annual security report claimed in January that 99% of all malware in 2013 targeted Android devices, while security firm Kaspersky Lab suggested a similar figure of 98% in December last year.
"Android ticks all the boxes for cyber criminals – it’s a widely used OS that is easy to use for both app developers and malware authors alike," said Kaspersky's senior virus analyst Christian Funk, at a time when his company was detecting 315,000 new malicious files every day.
So, does Android have a big security problem? This is a question that is complicated by the fact that many of the companies warning about Android malware are also selling apps and services that promise to protect against it. They have a good view of what’s out there, but also an interest in talking up the risks.
But keeping your data safe on an Android device can be more about taking common-sense steps to minimise your risks, rather than assuming you need to splash out on a monthly security subscription – although there are plenty of choices for the latter if you decide that’s the route for you.
With that in mind, here are five tips for ensuring that your Android device is safe:
1. Be cautious when installing apps
Using the Google Play Store to download apps (or Amazon’s Appstore if you own one of its devices) already makes you among the more secure tiers of Android users – many dodgy apps are distributed through third-party Android app stores rather than the official ones.
Still, it’s best to exercise caution, especially when you happen upon what looks like a brand new version of a popular game. Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, Clash of Clans… fake versions of these regularly appear, so if something sets off warning bells (Candy Crush Saga 2, anyone?) it’s worth googling its title and checking its developer’s website to see if it’s a fake.
Also, read the reviews on the Google Play store – a surfeit of one-star reviews is a sign that something's wrong – and check the permissions that an app asks for before you install it. If anything here sets off warning bells – or simply makes you uncomfortable – it's a good prompt to walk away.
2. Watch out for phishing / SMS
Security on Android isn't just about the apps that you install on your phone. As with any device – Android or otherwise – be on your guard for phishing, sites that try to get you to enter personal data and/or credit card details. Text messages and emails can all be phishing methods, and just because you're on your phone doesn't make them less dangerous.
Combating phishing on Android isn't so different from on your computer: useful advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau, Microsoft and Symantec will get you up to speed, while an additional tip is to never tap on a link in a text message from someone you don't know – even if it looks like a company you do business with.
3. Lock screen security
Another point that applies to every smartphone OS, not just Android. Have you got your device's lock-screen settings sorted, so that if it gets stolen, the thief can't access your apps and data? Google’s default settings will see you fair, but there are some third-party apps that take interesting and unusual spins on unlocking the phone.
Picture Password Lockscreen, for example, gets you to unlock your phone by drawing points, lines and circles on any image you like. ERGO scans your ear and then gets you to unlock the device by holding it up to said lug. Fingerprint Scanner LockScreen is a cheeky Android equivalent of Apple’s iPhone 5s’ Touch ID – it pretends to scan your fingerprint, but really it’s just measuring how long your thumb rests on the screen.
4. Consider anti-virus software
If you'd still like to take the extra step of installing anti-virus software – or if you're thinking of putting it on the device of someone else (an older parent, for example) – a number of options are available from the big names of the security world.
AVAST Software's Mobile Security & Antivirus, Bitdefender's Mobile Security & Antivirus, Lookout Security & Antivirus, Kaspersky Internet Security, Trend Micro's Mobile Security & Antivirus, Norton Security antivirus and McAfee Antivirus & Security all have four-star-plus ratings on Google play from thousands of reviewers, with the competitive market meaning they add new features regularly.
Which you choose depends more on which you've used on your computer before, but all offer a good level of security if you're concerned.
5. Consider a parental control app
You can follow many of the steps above, but can your children if they’re using your device, or have their own Android tablet and/or smartphone? A number of companies are trying to help with this challenge too, with parental control software capable of ensuring children don’t install apps that they shouldn’t, or compromise data on a shared device.
Kids Place, Famigo, MMGuardian and Norton Family are four of the most popular examples, with varying features to control what apps are installed, what sites are being visited, and to set time limits on usage – and in some cases, add time as a reward for good behaviour.
Alternatively, you could spend a bit of time getting to grips with Android’s default features to set up different user profiles on a tablet, and make some of them restricted – found via the users option in your settings menu. But parenting skills are also important here: talking to your children about safe usage of their Android device is as important as trying to lock it down for them. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/may/03/when-will-my-shell-energy-smart-meter-become-smart-again | Money | 2022-05-03T06:00:14.000Z | Miles Brignall | When will my Shell Energy smart meter become smart again? | My gas and electricity smart meters became strangely uncommunicative with Shell Energy just days before the 1 April tariff increase.
Shell’s reply to my question about when it expects my smart meters to become smart again seems to suggest there’s a major “industry wide issue” and it is unable to do anything about this. The letter suggests Ofgem is aware of a problem that it is affecting a great many other households. But I don’t remember reading or hearing anything in any news outlet about this. Is this true?
LD, by email
We get the occasional letter from readers whose smart meter has lost its ability to be read remotely, but have not seen a big increase in recent weeks. That said the smart meter programme has been a bit of a disaster so I wouldn’t be surprised if what you have been told is true. The regulator Ofgem said it was “not aware of any issues affecting connectivity or the communications of smart meters”.
Shell Energy also backtracked and now says that your smart meter inquiry could have been handled a lot better, and that it’s “sorry for the incorrect information” you were provided with.
On a positive note it has now promised to get to the bottom of your meter problem and has been in touch. In the meantime have others similarly suffered a loss of smart-ness? Email the usual address.
And finally, part one …
A letter praises the little known French shoe manufacturer Arche, which has just resoled reader BM’s rubber soled sandals for a second time – the only thing it cost her was the postage back to France. “They offer a service to resole most of their shoes for free, which I find good and very ecological. It’s a great service,” she writes.
And finally, part two …
This is my last Consumer Champions column for a few months as I am taking an extended period of leave. My excellent colleague Zoe Wood will be holding the fort in my absence – email your letters to the usual address. I am sorry if I have been unable to publish your complaint this year. Sadly, we can only deal with a fraction of those sent in.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at [email protected] or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/28/was-it-so-wrong-to-pass-on-my-brothers-diagnosis-without-his-consent | Life and style | 2022-01-28T14:16:59.000Z | Annalisa Barbieri | I shared details of my brother’s degenerative disease without his consent | Ask Annalisa Barbieri | My dad died two years ago, exposing a sea of secrets and lies. He’d had a degenerative condition, but was totally in denial – and while it was a known excuse for his moods and lack of interest in his family, he did little in his lifestyle to mitigate its effects.
After he died, we discovered there was a dominant gene he could have passed to his children. My brother and I have been tested – my sister does not want to be – and my brother was found to be positive.
After I had my genetic test, I was advised to contact our extended family. Thinking I was being honest, I emailed our cousins the information, sharing my brother’s diagnosis paperwork to help them get referrals.
Now, my brother is livid that I shared his medical history. I’ve apologised for sharing his information but not for sharing my dad’s. I can’t believe our wider family don’t deserve to know this. A dominant gene is relevant – particularly because it indicates a causal link, but not a definite diagnosis, meaning it could be dormant and be passed down.
I’m writing to ask if I did the right thing and how best to move forward. I’m tired of the legacy my father has left behind but I feel like I’m being punished for doing the right thing.
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I’m sorry to hear about your dad and the legacy he’s left you with. I wonder if you’ve had the results of your test? That must weigh heavily on your mind. But your brother’s testing positive must be a big worry for him, and it sounds, by your own admission, as if that hasn’t been acknowledged.
It’s clear that you’re very angry with your dad, and he’s not here to take it. I wonder if you are now misdirecting it.
To help me answer you I consulted psychotherapist Katherine Walker (psychotherapy.org.uk) and also spoke to several lawyers. While Walker empathised with what you were trying to do, we all agreed that sharing your brother’s information without his consent was a no-no.
It’s important to realise that what you did was wrong and no amount of justification is going to make this right
The fact remains you could have satisfied your need for helping others, and sharing the information about the degenerative condition, without involving your brother and certainly without passing on his medical data. Doing so without his agreement was wrong and no amount of justification can make this right.
“You need to own what you’ve done and take responsibility for it,” says Walker. “You’re trying to correct the generational pattern and right wrongs of the past, but when we do this we sometimes overcompensate. While you’ve avoided secretive behaviour, you’ve invaded your brother’s privacy in pursuit of the truth.”
Walker suggested you try to explain to your brother that you did it with the best intentions but admit that “you went too far and his information wasn’t yours to share”.
My mum has Alzheimer’s. How do I stop her ‘helping’ around the house?
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With a bit of time, you’ll see that a more nuanced approach is best. Discretion and secrecy aren’t the same thing. Also, it’s not up to you to (try to) right your dad’s wrongs. It sounds like your family may have difficult times ahead; I hope you can find a way of supporting each other.
Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a family-related problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa on a family matter, please send your problem to [email protected]. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions: see theguardian.com/letters-terms.
Conversations With Annalisa Barbieri, a new podcast series, is available here.
Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
This article was amended on 27 February 2022 to remove comment on the potential legal position with regard to sharing the medical details of others. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/09/wildflowers-by-peggy-frew-review-a-profound-portrait-of-addiction-family-and-sisterhood | Books | 2022-09-08T17:30:11.000Z | Bec Kavanagh | Wildflowers by Peggy Frew review – a tale of love, disappointment and comfort | Wildflowers, the kind that burst through the swathes of dry grass along stretches of Australian country highways, seem to exist despite the most unforgiving conditions. Where do they come from? And how do they survive? Peggy Frew asks similar questions of the three sisters at the centre of Wildflowers, an intimate story about the roles we are cast in by our family, and our obligations to them.
The Miles Franklin and Stella prize-shortlisted author of Hope Farm has been honing in on questions of identity and familial responsibility for some time now, but in Wildflowers she gets right to the heart of things. Nina is 37 and lives alone, her days defined by a series of increasingly odd routines. She is broken, struggling to find meaning in her life, particularly in the wake of an intensely traumatic trip away, when she and her older sister, Meg, effectively kidnap their younger, wilder sister Amber, in an attempt to force her to stop using drugs. Nina’s present-day apathy bookends the novel, which for the most part is a flashback to that intense, damaging trip to the rainforest of far-north Queensland.
Nina is unable to understand the deep hunger that drives each of her sisters – for Meg this revolves around family and children, and for Amber it is a hunger for intoxication and the spotlight. In contrast, Nina is a detached observer, harbouring a distant curiosity – even about her own life. She describes several formative sexual encounters from the outside in, “watching herself, seeing herself”, as if her body and its actions are autonomous. She has a degree, which she calls “boring”, and seems unambitious almost to the point of catatonia. But Nina’s existence was built on being overlooked, existing in the larger, bolder shadows of each of her sisters.
‘Riveting’, ‘laugh-out-loud’, ‘beautifully written’: the best Australian books out in September
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Frew writes with devastating clarity, articulating the minutiae that speak to our desires – how we wash our hair the day before seeing a crush (rather than the day of, which would leave it too fluffy and soft), how we perform adulthood via lipstick and sex. These tiny, telling details reveal as much about her characters (and readers, perhaps) as the larger intimacies we’re privy to – the noises Amber makes, “like a cow giving birth”, as she enters withdrawal, or Nina – during her deep fuge of “not caring” – furtively consuming pizza crusts and coffee dregs left behind by her colleagues. The characters on the periphery of the story – Nina’s parents, her colleague Ursula and her friend Sidney – are less developed, almost ghostly, but Nina, Amber and Meg are laid completely bare in that way siblings so often are, family ties outstripping privacy or pride.
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Frew examines the moments that define us, those moments we replay over and over, wondering what microcosmic changes we might have made to achieve a different life. She cuts through the intensity of the trip away with flashbacks to scenes from Nina’s past – unfulfilling affairs with mediocre men; failed attempts to reach and rehabilitate Amber – planting the seed that the past repeats itself, regardless of the hopes and good intentions of everyone involved.
Against the deep and unwavering loyalty displayed in the novel, particularly by Meg, Frew asks more discomfiting questions about the arbitrary closeness of family. What is our duty of care towards our immediate family? And how do we balance it against our responsibility to ourselves? Meg justifies her actions as a necessary means to bring their sister back. But where does this leave Amber’s agency? Or Nina’s? Nina grapples with the ethics of their actions and, in turn, the idea that our families retain a version of ourselves that is more real or pure than anything we grow into. More than anything, what the trip away reveals is how little any of them know about each other, and there is a desperation underlying Meg’s attempts to reclaim the lost version of Amber.
When Nina reflects on her own childhood, it isn’t herself she remembers, but Amber. Amber who, “back then, as far as any of them knew, was always going to go on being the Amber she’d always been: an explosion of a person, uncontainably light, harmlessly, gorgeously free”. It’s easy to be fooled, even for most of the book, into thinking that this is a story about Amber, a spirited artist whose trauma and addiction destroys her potential and her relationships. But in a deft sleight of hand Frew keeps our attention on Nina and slowly reveals the woman who is not so easily defined, even to herself.
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Towards the end of the novel, as Nina boards a plane with her sisters, she recedes from a thought that is “so big and terrible and rending that it would break her: it was the apparently impossible combination of love and disappointment”. There is something profoundly comforting here, in the space Frew creates; the idea that disappointment is not antithetical to love, but a part of it.
Wildflowers by Peggy Frew is out now, published by Allen & Unwin | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/01/david-bowie-biopic-stardust-wont-have-any-of-dads-music-says-son-neil-gaiman | Film | 2019-02-01T10:25:41.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Bowie biopic Stardust 'won't have any of dad's music' says son | David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, has said that producers of a proposed biopic about the musician have not secured the rights to use his father’s music or the approval of his family.
Jones was responding to reports that Johnny Flynn, star of successful British independent movie Beast, had been cast to play Bowie in Stardust, a film about Bowie’s 1971 tour of the US. It is to be directed by Death of a President’s Gabriel Range.
Jones wrote on Twitter: “I’m not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn’t know. I’m saying that as it stands, this movie won’t have any of dad’s music in it, & I can’t imagine that changing. If you want to see a biopic without his music or the [family’s] blessing, that’s up to the audience.”
Duncan Jones with his father, David Bowie, in 2009. Photograph: Jim Spellman/Getty Images
A report in Deadline suggested that the film, which is due to feature Jena Malone as Angie Bowie and Glow’s Marc Maron as a publicist, would contain “a small number of Bowie performances”.
A statement issued by Stardust’s producers, UK outfit Salon Pictures said: “We would like to clarify that this film … is a moment in time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music.”
“Much like Nowhere Boy for Lennon, Control for Joy Division, the production uses period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks.”
Jones suggested instead a collaborative animated project between Neil Gaiman and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse director Peter Ramsey.
Gaiman and Ramsey appeared taken by surprise at the message, but each responded positively: Gaiman tweeted: “You are the best”, while Ramsey replied: “I am not worthy!!!!”
Jones, who directed the Netflix sci-fi film Mute, also ruled himself out of taking on a biopic about his father. “I’m not the right person to make it. My perspective is far too uniquely subjective and personal.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/mar/23/akira-kurosawa-100-google-doodle-anniversary | Film | 2010-03-23T13:14:06.000Z | Ben Walters | Akira Kurosawa: 10 essential films for the director's centenary | Ben Walters | 1) Drunken Angel (1948)
The youngest of eight children, Akira Kurosawa grew up in Tokyo where, at the age of 26, he began an apprenticeship at PCL studios. His first features as director, made in wartime, had nationalistic strains but No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and Drunken Angel, about an alcoholic Tokyo doctor trying to get a stagnant pool drained, established a critical engagement with contemporary Japan.
2) Stray Dog (1949)
Drunken Angel inaugurated Kurosawa's working relationship with the actor Toshiro Mifune, which was repeated in this picture, with Mifune playing a policeman on an increasingly obsessive quest to retrieve his stolen gun. Set during a sweltering summer, Kurosawa's breakthrough film confirmed both his feel for contemporary Tokyo and his admiration of American genre pictures.
3) Rashômon (1950)
Recognised at Venice and the Oscars, Rashomon was not just Kurosawa's international breakthrough but the standard-bearer for new Japanese cinema. Recounting a bandit's (Mifune) ambush of a couple in a forest from several contradictory perspectives, its radical challenge to conventional narrative was complemented by beautiful, often stylised photography.
4) The Idiot (1951)
Slashed - to Kurosawa's enduring indignation - from its original length
of more than four hours, The Idiot was an early example of the director's adaptation of European literary sources to a Japanese context. Dostoyevsky's novel is relocated to Hokkaido, with Masayuki Mori as a recently released war criminal and Mifune his temperamental friend.
5) Ikiru (1952)
Centred on the final phase of a middle-aged salaryman's life, Ikiru show Kurosawa in full-blooded humanist mode. Takashi Shimura is the bureaucrat whose diagnosis of terminal cancer initially sends him into alienated despair before he finds a kind of redemption in a project the hero of Drunken Angel might have appreciated.
6) Seven Samurai (1954)
Seven Samurai, about a band of masterless samurai defending a village from bandits, arguably remains Kurosawa's towering cultural achievement. The biggest movie Japan had seen at the time, in terms of budget, production and box-office takings, it was also an enormous influence on Western cinema, as well as enormously influenced by it.
7) Throne of Blood (1957)
Transferring Macbeth to medieval Japan reaps dividends: this is one of the most impressive of all screen adaptations of Shakespeare, streamlining the narrative and expressing it through a series of bravura visual coups. Mifune is the ambitious samurai at the centre of a stark world laced with violence, beauty and irony.
8) The Hidden Fortress (1958)
Another period samurai adventure starring Mifune, The Hidden Fortress was another Kurosawa masterclass in the conflation of Japanese and
Hollywood tropes. The filmmaker's first widescreen effort, its story of a ragtag band trying to transport a princess to safety and eventually help her free her land is the acknowledged source for George Lucas's Star Wars.
9) Yojimbo (1961)
Similarly, Yojimbo drew on film noir and classical Westerns only to
prove massively influential itself, with Sergio Leone taking inspiration from its tale of an effectively nameless lone warrior playing one side of criminals off against another. A funnier, more grotesque sequel, Sanjuro, followed the next year.
10) Ran (1985)
The final decades of Kurosawa's life saw his greatest struggles for artistic freedom, prompting him to look beyond Japan for funding. Shot in colour and influenced by King Lear, Ran, his final grand-scale project, was not without professional and personal cost but confirmed his abilities remained intact.
11) (and one for luck …) Dreams (1990)
One of three more films that followed before his death in 1998, Dreams was an elliptical collection of tales based upon Kurosawa's actual dreams. This is Crow. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/20/lego-movie-snub-animation-oscar | Film | 2015-01-20T12:32:15.000Z | Ben Child | Lego Movie snub signals animation Oscar is growing old before its time | It was the highest-grossing film of 2014 in the UK, holds a staggering rating of 96% “fresh” on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and has been widely praised as a pioneering example of how to mine movie gold from the most unlikely of corporate sources. But The Lego Movie still wasn’t good enough to make the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ list of nominees for the best animated film Oscar.
In one of the biggest snubs of this year’s award season, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s flamboyant tale lost out to Big Hero 6, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and The Boxtrolls, as well as Song of the Sea and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. In fairness, 2014 was one of the strongest years yet for animation – perhaps even the best since 2009, when Up, Coraline and Fantastic Mr Fox competed for the Oscar. But The Lego Movie was expected to challenge for the prize itself, not just place as an also-ran. The anger on Twitter has been palpable, and the snub has already been voted the year’s most spectacular by filmgoers.
What’s even more worrying than a fine movie missing out on its chance for glory – it would hardly be the first time a worthy film missed the Oscars cut – is the sense that the relatively new animation prize is continuing to take a decisive shift towards conservatism as it approaches middle age.
It wasn’t until 2002 that the Academy began to honour animated feature films with its own category, though Toy Story won a special prize in 1996 to celebrate its achievements with then-pioneering CGI. For seven out of the first eight years of the award being presented, only three movies picked up nominations, such was the perceived paucity of quality productions.
It did not take long for attitudes among filmgoers and critics to change. In 2010 six out of the top 10 highest-grossing films across the globe were animated. In the eight years between 2003 and 2010, animated movies were the best-reviewed wide release films seven times, according to Rotten Tomatoes. In the meantime the best animated film Oscar went to sublime Pixar fare such as Wall-E, The Incredibles and Up. These days there are more animated movies being made than ever before, which is one of the reasons we got The Lego Movie in the first place.
The other is that, like Transformers, GI Joe and Battleship before it, Lego is an enormous global brand with the potential to lure filmgoers into cinemas in huge numbers even when the end product is utterly horrendous. The fact that the film refused to follow in the footsteps of its half-cocked predecessors is exactly why it so deserves recognition from the world’s most important movie awards ceremony.
Could it be that The Lego Movie’s corporate origins continued to rankle with Academy voters, even as they were soon forgotten by viewers entranced by the boisterous tale of an ordinary construction worker mini figure who battles to torpedo the evil veil of conformity that has enveloped the once-vibrant Lego universe? This year’s selection seems to go in the exact opposite direction, with an emphasis on the delights of whimsy-packed stop motion (Laika’s admittedly-superb Boxtrolls), far out Celtic fantasy (Song of the Sea) and hypnagogic Studio Ghibli fairytale fable (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya).
These are movies that also deserve recognition – likewise Disney’s ultra-stylised, endearingly unexpected Big Hero 6. But surely The Lego movie might have slipped in ahead of How to Train Your Dragon 2, a fun fantasy sequel but one which, for me, lacked its 2010 predecessor’s soaring emotional impact?
If not, perhaps it’s time for the animation category to expand. Three nominees may not so long ago have been all the industry could muster in a given year, but when one of the best-reviewed and most-discussed movies of the year is missing out there’s an argument that five spots is no longer enough.
Oscar spotlight fails to shine on Australia as Babadook and Lego Movie snubbed
The 10 best films of 2014: No 10 – The Lego Movie | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/30/jim-davidson-celebrity-big-brother-outnumbered | Media | 2014-01-30T10:56:51.000Z | John Plunkett | Jim Davidson's Celebrity Big Brother win nick nicks 3 million viewers | More than 3 million viewers watched Jim Davidson win the final of Channel 5's Celebrity Big Brother on Wednesday night.
The celebrity variant of the reality show, which is now into its 13th series and sixth since the Big Brother format was picked up by Channel 5 after being dumped by Channel 4, had 3.2 million viewers, a 14.2% share of the audience between 9pm and 11pm for Wednesday night's live final.
Davidson beat Dappy into second place in the show, the climax to a series which many critics said was a return to form for the show, which first aired on Channel 4 in 2001. It had a 15 minute peak of 3.8 million viewers from 10pm.
The series has offered up diminishing returns over the years but this year's casting, which also included former world heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield, Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones and Apprentice runner-up Luisa Zissman, was seen as key to its renewed appeal.
Last January's series finale averaged 3.2 million and a 14.6% share, while Celebrity Big Brother's first Channel 5 outing ended with 2.9 million, a 13.8% share, in September 2011.
On Wednesday night Celebrity Big Brother had the better of the channel which turned its back on it, Channel 4, which had 2.1 million viewers for its observational documentary series, 24 Hours in A&E.
The accident and emergency show was also beaten by BBC2 documentary Horizon: Sugar v Fat, which had 2.5 million viewers (10%) between 9pm and 10pm.
Channel 4's own celebrity reality show, winter sports series The Jump, had 2.2 million viewers, an 8.9% share, between 8pm and 9pm.
Outnumbered. By Outnumbered
Celebrity Big Brother was also up against the return of BBC1 sitcom Outnumbered for its final series, watched by 4.8 million viewers, an 18.9% share, between 9pm and 9.30pm.
Over on ITV, the heart of its peaktime schedule was taken up by another outing for Midsomer Murders, seen by 5.4 million viewers (21.6%) between 8pm and 10pm.
All ratings are Barb overnight figures, including live, +1 (except for BBC channels) and same day timeshifted (recorded) viewing, but excluding on demand, or other – unless otherwise stated. Figures for BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 generally include ratings for their HD simulcast services, unless otherwise stated
To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/ppe-could-be-reused-as-last-resort-says-leaked-phe-document | World news | 2020-04-15T14:31:30.000Z | Rowena Mason | NHS and care workers may be asked to reuse PPE, No 10 confirms | No 10 has confirmed that officials are looking at asking NHS staff and care workers to use some personal protective equipment (PPE) more than once, after a leaked Public Health England (PHE) document showed it was being considered as a “last resort”.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said the Health and Safety Executive and Public Health England were investigating how rules could be relaxed to allow some PPE items to be reused but this would only be allowed if it were safe to do so.
The leaked memo, uncovered by the BBC, had revealed that protective masks and gowns may need to be cleaned and reused when stocks run low and admits there is a “reduced ability to resupply” PPE.
UK missed three chances to join EU scheme to bulk-buy PPE
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Downing Street insisted on Wednesday good progress was being made in distributing PPE to care homes as well as hospitals. It also said VAT was still being applied to PPE bought by care homes because of EU procurement rules.
But some hospitals have already begun cleaning single-use gowns to preserve stocks, according to separate emails seen by the BBC.
It is understood that the chief medical officers and chief nurses of the four UK nations recently discussed the issue.
Following the meeting, a draft document written by PHE and dated 13 April suggested solutions for “acute supply shortages” of PPE.
“These are last-resort alternatives, but, given the current in-country stock and the reduced ability to resupply, we are suggesting that these are implemented until confirmation of adequate resupply is in place,” it said.
The plans suggested a series of “last-resort arrangements”, including buying “building” or “sportswear” eye protection with extensions to cover the side of the eyes if there were no available goggles or face shields, and using washable laboratory coats and patient gowns when there were no available disposable gowns or coveralls.
It also suggests repurposing face masks using various disinfection or sterilisation methods, including steam and UV disinfection.
The document said some of the last-resort measures would need to be reviewed and approved by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of vaporised hydrogen peroxide to decontaminate certain masks and respirators for use by staff.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA), told the BBC: “This underlines the urgency with which we need this situation sorted.
“The government must be honest about PPE supplies. If [Public Health England] is proposing the reuse of equipment, it needs to be demonstrably driven by science and the best evidence in keeping with international standards, rather than by availability, and with absolutely no compromise to the protection of healthcare workers.”
In a statement, Dr Susan Hopkins, from PHE, said: “PPE is a precious resource and it is crucial that everyone in health and social care has access to the right protective equipment.
“All options are being considered to ensure this, including the safe reuse of items, but no decisions have been made.”
An HSE spokesman said: “In line with the government’s PPE strategy, it is right that, where possible, strategies for optimising the supply of PPE should be explored.
“We are discussing with Public Health England ways in which pressure can be eased on the supply chain. This includes potentially reusing certain equipment where it is safe to do so.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/29/mozart-in-italy-by-jane-glover-review-the-making-of-a-master | Books | 2023-11-29T07:30:33.000Z | Martin Kettle | Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover review – the making of a master | Of all the stories that are told about Wolfgang Mozart’s visits to Italy, one exceeds all others in fame. It concerns the day in Rome in April 1770 when the 14-year-old Mozart first heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, an unaccompanied nine-part polyphonic setting of a psalm that normally lasts about 13 minutes. The Miserere rises repeatedly to an ethereal top C, a haunting moment that had already given the work Europe-wide mystique in Mozart’s time and ensures that it is still widely performed and recorded today.
The Miserere had been written in the 1630s for the exclusive use of the Sistine Chapel choir and for performance only during Holy Week. The score was a ferociously guarded Vatican secret. No written versions were supposed to exist. Yet, in the chapel that day, young Mozart listened to the Miserere once, then went home to his lodgings and wrote the entire thing down from memory.
Parts of the story are apocryphal – for example a few copies of the score did already exist. But the essence of it is wonderfully true, and rightly so. The tale has become the encapsulation of one of the ways posterity has thought about Mozart, as the composer blessed by God with unique musical gifts who lived too short a time among us before his death at 35 – Mozart as Amadeus rather than as Wolfgang. In her new book, the conductor and author Jane Glover is not in the business of disputing Mozart’s genius. But she makes clear that Mozart lived very much in the real 18th-century world of dirt, illness, bedbugs and discomfort, not permanently wrapped in some fuzzy golden halo of brilliance.
Glover’s account of the Sistine visit is a good example of a humanising tendency that runs throughout her book. She explains, for example, that Wolfgang and his father Leopold would have been tired that day, having just arrived in Rome after a bumpy five-day coach journey in bad weather from Florence. She also records that Wolfgang returned to the Sistine Chapel on Good Friday, with his scribbled-down version hidden in his hat, to check that he had actually got the Miserere exactly right. He was human after all. Nor was his feat a secret. Even the pope got to hear about it, awarding him a papal honour as a result.
Mozart visited Italy three times between 1769 and 1773, and then never again. Yet his time there lived with him – and thus lives with us more than two centuries later. It does so for one fundamental reason: Italy consummated Mozart’s mastery of opera. The things Mozart heard in opera houses from Verona to Naples unlocked his operatic imagination, infused his musical thinking and helped make The Marriage of Figaro possible.
The Mozart who crossed the Brenner Pass for the first time in December 1769 was a touring child prodigy. But the Mozart who left Italy for the final time in March 1773 was an opera composer. Italy was not just the original home of opera, but the part of Europe with the highest orchestral and vocal standards. It was a richly interconnected and competitive artistic world. To work, learn and succeed there was to do so at the very top.In the space of those four years the teenager wrote three operas: Mitridate, re di Ponto in 1770, Ascanio in Alba a year later, and Lucio Silla at the end of 1772. All were great successes. It is impossible to listen to any of them without realising the doors that they were opening to the future.
Glover writes fluently and attractively. She clearly loves Italy almost as much as she loves Mozart. Her accounts of his working methods are particularly fascinating, especially the way his writing lavished such care and attention on the abilities of his individual singers. “I like an aria to fit a singer as perfectly as a well-made suit of clothes,” he once wrote. These were qualities that endured, not least in his dazzling writing for his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer, who sang the Queen of the Night in the 1791 premiere of The Magic Flute. Mozart was a convention-busting operatic master and his Italian years were when he learned his trade.
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Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera by Jane Glover is published by Picador (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jul/17/pinchingpaintingswhenrobber | Art and design | 2008-07-17T12:15:00.000Z | Gareth Harris | Pinching paintings: when robbery pays | Watch out, there's thieves about ... a detail from Edvard Munch's The Scream. Photograph: Solum, Stian Lysberg/AFP/Getty
Forget the lavish exhibition openings and celebrity collectors (who needs Roman Abramovich?). In the art world, a robbery is now apparently the best form of PR. According to a report in the Art Newspaper, Norwegian auction houses believe that works by Edvard Munch have shot up in price as a direct result of the 2004 theft of his paintings The Scream and Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo.
And the proof that crime pays? In May, Munch's Girls on a Bridge, 1902, sold for a hefty $30.8m at Sotheby's, tripling the painter's previous auction record. (The same work was sold in 1996 for a paltry $7.7m.)
Richard Elgheim of Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner (GWPA) in Norway believes the theft helped drive up prices. "Price increases are especially strong since 2005 and at least partly linked to the robbery," he says.
He's not the only one to spot the publicity potential. "[Munch's] works got a lot of attention from the robbery at the Munch Museum in 2004. Attention always drives prices up," says Knut Forsberg of Blomqvist auctions in Oslo.
These claims are, quite frankly, laughable. The Munch crime may well have hit the headlines worldwide (is there anything more glamorous than an art raid?) but the Norwegian expressionist was already a paid-up member of the art A-list.
A blue-chip painter who ticks all the right boxes (dramatic imagery, angst-ridden themes perfect for the gloomy 21st century, a museum staple) his stock has got increasingly hotter.
The robbery simply reflects art market dynamics and the desire for those unscrupulous types to get their hands on the best top-dollar art booty (you're hardly going to target a 16th-century Welsh portraitist over Van Gogh, are you?). Individual works gain notoriety if they're swiped off a museum wall, but established stellar artists don't really need that exposure.
So, will Munch still be on the must-steal list in years to come? Early 20th-century artists are performing well at auction with £102.2m spent at the sale of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in London last month.
And there are plenty of Norwegian oil and shipping magnates reaping the rewards of the current high price per barrel who are keen to bag their own Madonnas. Expect auction sales to reflect that supply and demand. It looks like Munch is set to remain an art market darling for some time - heist or no heist. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2016/mar/21/cryptic-crosswords-for-beginners-capital-letters | Crosswords | 2016-03-21T11:01:13.000Z | Alan Connor | Cryptic crosswords for beginners: capital letters | A reader – actually, the setter David Stickley, known in the Financial Times as Styx – writes regarding our most recent Clue of the Fortnight. This was Picaroon’s ...
11ac Street crossing through radio village, where blues will be playing (8,6)
... where the “radio village” of AMBRIDGE was preceded by an abbreviation for “Street” (ST) and interrupted (“through”) by a word for “crossing” (FORD), yielding STAMFORD BRIDGE – which is where “the blues” play.
Or, perhaps, the Blues.
David notes: “I searched through the Guardian website for Chelsea references and without fail ‘blues’ is referred to as Blues, with a capital.”
Put another way, are the words “the blues” a fair way of getting the solver to think of Chelsea FC? Disclosure: I’m so ignorant of football grammar that I once insisted my erstwhile colleague Robert Peston should treat team names as singular nouns (“Arsenal is”, I fancied, rather than “Arsenal are”). You don’t make that gaffe twice.
Closer inspection tells me that Chelsea play their (not “Chelsea plays its”) home games wearing both shorts and shirts in blue, though few of them appear to have learned their craft in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. How any supporter knows which team to support is probably better dealt with elsewhere.
More importantly, then: how sporting is that lower-case “b”? Certainly, there are setters for whom “blues will be playing” is not cricket, let alone football: redolent too much of Sonny Terry and not enough of John Terry. They don’t think that would be to play fair, and fair play to them.
For others, fancy capitalisation footwork is part of the beautiful cryptic game. A couple of examples: here’s a cheeky capital C from Nutmeg in the Guardian:
22d Cheer as Chronicle leader’s cut (5)
The apparent sense of this clue depends on that capital “C”. The solver, at first, takes “Chronicle leader” to be a newspaper editorial and imagines the newsroom jubilation as this piece of journalism is, well, cut. For the purposes of wordplay, though, we need to imagine a synonym for a lower-case-c “chronicle”, then remove its leading letter. And so RELATE becomes ELATE, indicated by the definition at the beginning (“Cheer” is really a verb here, though it looks like a noun).
That clue sports a capital where there should have been none; for the inverse, here’s Boatman, in a Guardian puzzle themed around many and various interpretations of “sweet”:
1d Type of rock, typically sweet (4)
The lower-case “s” diverts us towards fairground rock; if the “s” were upper-case, the solver might get more quickly – via the glam-rock band known as the Sweet and, when they wanted to be taken more seriously, known as Sweet – to the kind of rock needed: GLAM.
As I said, some setters wouldn’t allow themselves to shrink the Sweet’s “S” to a “s”. You, though – the novice solver – have no way of knowing on any particular day whether you’re dealing with someone who delights in or someone who eschews playing around with capitals. My only advice to a devotee of the Guardian crossword is: be wary. If you’re stuck, imagine the lower-case letters in your clue as upper-case and vice versa.
And, seasoned solvers and setters – playing the ball and not the man – do you have any favourite clues which cunningly respect or disregard case? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/21/roma-and-the-favourite-triumph-at-the-london-film-critics-circle-awards | Film | 2019-01-21T14:26:25.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Roma and The Favourite triumph at the London Film Critics' Circle awards | Alfonso Cuarón’s domestic memoir Roma and scabrous period comedy The Favourite dominated the London Film Critics’ Circle awards, which were handed out on 20 January.
Roma, which has been backed to the hilt by its distributors, Netflix, secured the film of the year award and Cuarón won director of the year. With the Acadmey awards nominations being announced on 22 Jamuary, Roma appears to consolidate its position as an Oscar frontrunner. However, The Favourite, which is also a leading Oscar contender, took home the most awards: four, including actress of the year for Olivia Colman (who plays troubled monarch Queen Anne), supporting actress for Rachel Weisz (who plays power-behind-the-throne Sarah Churchill), and British/Irish film of the year.
Cold War, Paweł Pawlikowski’s lushly filmed black-and-white romance won two awards: foreign-language film of the year as well as the technical achievement award for its cinematographer Łukasz Żal. British veterans Rupert Everett (for his directorial debut The Happy Prince) and Richard E Grant featured among the winners, for British/Irish actor and supporting actor of the year respectively.
The nearest thing to a surprise of the evening was Ethan Hawke’s award for actor of the year, for playing a priest in the throes of a spiritual crisis in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. Hawke competed against Oscar favourite Christian Bale, who was nominated for Vice.
Full list of winners
Film of the year Roma
Foreign-language film Cold War
Documentary Faces Places
British/Irish film The Favourite
Director Alfonso Cuarón for Roma
Screenwriter Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara for The Favourite
Actress Olivia Colman for The Favourite
Actor Ethan Hawke for First Reformed
Supporting actress Rachel Weisz for The Favourite
Supporting actor Richard E Grant for Can You Ever Forgive Me?
British/Irish actress Jessie Buckley for Beast
British/Irish actor Rupert Everett for The Happy Prince
Young British/Irish performer Molly Wright for Apostasy
Breakthrough British/Irish film-maker Michael Pearce for Beast
British/Irish short film Three Centimetres
Technical achievement Cold War for cinematography, by Łukasz Żal
Dilys Powell award for excellence in film Pedro Almodóvar | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/nov/01/manchester-united-newcastle-carabao-cup-fourth-round-match-report | Football | 2023-11-01T22:20:03.000Z | Jamie Jackson | Newcastle thrash Manchester United to turn up heat on Erik ten Hag | This was a triumph for Newcastle and another fiasco from Manchester United. Maybe soon Erik ten Hag will have a real problem of job security, because, after declaring himself confident that he and his players could revive their season after Sunday’s 3-0 humiliation here by Manchester City, continuing their Carabao Cup defence was a prerequisite.
Be knocked out by Newcastle and the vultures would circle over the manager despite Eddie Howe’s side having downed City in the previous round. Yet this is precisely what occurred on a night when all the goals conceded by United were self-inflicted and spoke of a cohesion and confidence paucity.
Manchester United 0-3 Newcastle: Carabao Cup – as it happened
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From the moment Miguel Almirón struck the opener Ten Hag was a man marooned in the technical area, hoping, rather than able, to affect his side. If last season was a triumph of overachievement in finishing third, reaching the FA Cup final and winning this competition, this term is in a rapid reverse the Dutchman has to halt soon.
A second consecutive 3-0 defeat at home unwantedly bridged the gap to October 1962 and the last time this occurred, while five defeats from United’s opening 10 matches at their ground has not happened since 1930.
There were seven changes for United and eight for Newcastle as Ten Hag and Howe each asked a swathe of second-stringers to come in and do the business. For Ten Hag this was more of a gamble because of his side’s travails. From a glass half-full aspect one loss in the last four was acceptable but Sunday’s capitulation plus his players suggesting they are yet to comprehend their manager’s gameplan had him entering the phase that has come to all post-Sir Alex Ferguson managers: the questioning of his smarts.
Newcastle had to overcome the early loss of Matt Targett, who lined up to the left of Anthony Gordon in attack and was replaced by Almirón. They did: thudding the ball about between them, mixing up short- and long-range passing, as Gordon looked to peel off Victor Lindelöf when, say, Tino Livramento punted a high ball in from the back.
A stern looking Erik ten Hag applauds the fans as he heads to the dressing room after the full-time whistle. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images
Newcastle’s 7,000-plus travelling support were in ear-splitting voice, not quietened even when Casemiro took aim and Martin Dubravka saved. This was a rare foray for United fans to cheer as subsequently Joe Willock claimed a free-kick, Joelinton dominated midfield, and Hannibal Mejbri and Casemiro were each booked.
Every time the home team went forward an errant touch from Mason Mount or Alejandro Garnacho stymied them. And, from such play, they were sucker-punched. Garnacho – again – lost the ball on his left wing. Livramento collected and ghosted past Mejbri and Mount and turned the ball across to Almirón: a sluggish Diogo Dalot could do nothing and the substitute found the inside of André Onana’s left side-netting.
“You’re getting sacked in the morning,” Ten Hag was jubilantly informed by Newcastle’s crowd, whose mood soon skyrocketed further. The second goal was as embarrassing as the first for United, because Almirón made total mugs of Casemiro and Dalot by clipping possession between them to Willock. The latter crossed from the left, the ball came to Lewis Hall and he arrowed his volley in.
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Carabao Cup quarter-final draw
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So at the break Ten Hag’s men were as disjointed as they were at the finish on Sunday, each strike a calamity of defending. They walked off to the echoes of Newcastle supporters’ “Olés” that marked their side tapping the ball about, and serial boos from their own contingent.
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Ten Hag’s move for the second half was to change Casemiro and Dalot for Sofyan Amrabat and Aaron Wan-Bissaka, ignoring, for the moment, Bruno Fernandes, Marcus Rashford and Rasmus Højlund, who were also on the bench.
A razor-sharp sequence that featured Antony and Wan-Bissaka and ended with the latter’s ball in was the best yet from United. Could they, then, apply any pressure? The answer, for a while, was a resounding yes.
0:50
'I am a fighter': Erik ten Hag determined to turn around Manchester United's results - video
Sergio Reguilón, Garnacho, and Mount probed along the left channel. Harry Maguire pirouetted gracefully near goal to set up an attack that had United flowing along the same wing but when Amrabat pulled the trigger, following a Mount dink in, he misfired. After a give-and-go Antony blazed over and clutched his head but United were, finally, in the game.
It did not last. Again, this was self-inflicted folly. Amrabat was dispossessed by Joelinton and the ball was spun to Willock, who danced through as United backed off and rolled the finish in from distance, Onana again soundly beaten. Now, surely too late, Ten Hag called for Højlund, Rashford and Fernandes.
“We’re going to Wembley,” sang delirious Newcastle fans. Ten Hag has to get back to the drawing board – and successfully. If not, his position may be under threat, as underlined by the thousands of seats vacated before the end. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/apr/06/pixar-brave-feisty-fairytale | Film | 2012-04-06T09:58:00.000Z | Ben Child | Pixar takes a Brave step with a feisty fairytale | You might expect a studio with films of the quality of Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille and Toy Story 3 to be excused for making the odd turkey, yet there are still those who haven't forgiven Pixar for churning out the distinctly average Cars 2 last year. They're the studio that are often seen as the antidote to bland Hollywood commercialism, so Cars 2's vapidity stuck in the craw of critics almost as much as the sudden availability of entire fleets of branded merchandise. The good news is that the Emeryville-based production company's latest offering, Brave, has the feel of a stout-hearted return to form, one that doesn't look like a strong candidate for a cynical marketing drive.
On paper, the movie appears an easy target for cynics. It began life under a different director, Brenda Chapman, and with a different title, The Bear and the Bow. It will arrive in July almost two years after the release of rival Dreamworks' How to Train Your Dragon, which also featured a largely Scottish cast of rambunctious bruisers and a young hero who did not quite fit in. Brave is Pixar's first fairytale, previously the preserve of the more traditional, less daring Disney (which bought Pixar in 2006). It even has a tough female protagonist known for her skill with a bow and arrow, echoing the plot of this year's biggest blockbuster The Hunger Games. And yet from a few minutes into the half hour of preview footage journalists were shown in central London last month, it became clear that Brave is its own beast.
It offers a delightfully modern, feminist twist on the traditional fairytale princess narrative. Not only is Merida, voiced by Kelly MacDonald, unimpressed by the three suitors sent to battle for her hand in marriage, she's quite capable of knocking all of them on their backsides. Her father King Fergus (voiced by Billy Connolly) is an enormous boisterous man-child with a peg-leg, rather than the bland, majestic figure one might expect from a Disney confection. It is left to the more statesmanlike queen (Emma Thompson) to make her feisty red-headed daughter aware of her duties – the entire kingdom is likely to go up in flames if Merida isn't married – though one gets the impression that Fergus would probably be quite up for the ruck. There is a wonderful back story to that missing leg, by the way: the monarch once fought it out with a demon-like bear king who chomped off his limb and swallowed it whole. When Merida winds up in a murky and mysterious forest after a row with mum, we suspect she may end up bumping into the hideous beast.
Watch the trailer for Brave Disney Pixar
Brave is beautiful to look at – a moving tapestry of pastel curlicues and opaque textures which stand in stark contrast to the sharp, clean lines seen in Cars or Toy Story. The film's look most closely resembles that of Ratatouille, but the colour palette is very different: all blues and greens reflecting the fantasy Scots highland background rather than the urban browns, yellows and oranges of Pixar's take on Paris. Somewhere in northern California I imagine there is an animator whose entire year was spent learning how to billow and tumble Merida's gloriously animate tressles in just the right manner: Pixar boss John Lasseter ought to give them a Christmas bonus.
Brave is the first Pixar movie to be set entirely in the British isles, and there was a sizeable contingent of Scots down in London for last month's preview. They are getting very excited indeed about a film that features an almost exclusively Scottish cast, including Craig Ferguson, Robbie Coltrane and Kevin McKidd as the three rival clan leaders whose sons compete for Merida's hand. The production team have done an honourable job of giving the movie an authentic Celtic feel: director Mark Andrews told us after the screening that the Pixar crew visited a highland games, drank Scotch whisky and went skinny dipping in lochs to pick up a flavour of the local sensibilities. They also watched films like Braveheart, Local Hero and Dear Frankie to analyse how Scots speak.
"When people speak in a Scottish accent, it comes very specifically out of the mouth," said Andrews. "There were some moments recording with Billy, Craig and Robbie when we had to say to slow it down a little. We'd say: 'Let's do it again for middle America,' and they were all fine because at the end of the day, it has to be clear and understandable. But for Kevin, who does both voices of the Lord and the Young MacGuffin, he talks in the Doric dialect from his area. He'd call up his mum to get her to remind him about certain words and accents, and we've left some of it unintelligible because that is the gag."
Andrews seemed a little disappointed when one journalist pointed out that Merida's mischievous triplet brothers are named Hamish, Harris and Hubert, the latter carrying a suspiciously Anglo-Saxon twang, but you cannae win 'em all.
There will be no real compromises for the film in US cinemas then. That rather suits Brave. Pixar's latest feels like a return to movies built on courage, not compromise. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/dec/30/dark-days-are-a-time-to-replenish-how-to-walk-well-in-winter | Travel | 2022-12-30T08:00:44.000Z | Chris Moss | ‘Dark days are a time to replenish’: how to walk well in winter | Iwant to love winter walking, but I have two problems. One, I’m not very keen on winter: it makes me lazy, and probably gives me Sad (seasonal affective disorder). Leaves go mushy, and underfoot becomes slushy. Rain turns torrential, cold and – around Pendle Hill, Lancashire, where I live – slanty. Gales mean mental turbulence, at least for me.
The other, more serious, problem is that I tend to walk too fast. To do that, I need to keep a close eye on the terrain, so I walk with my head bowed (I’m 6ft 3in, so this is almost a reflex). My mind is focused on the summit, even when I pretend it isn’t. If I see a slope, I speed up; once on it, I race against myself. I’m no mountaineer – I’m talking the Pennine moors, not K2. I am assailed by a drive to arrive. Then, I sit down, wolf a sandwich and quaff hot tea. I even do that breathlessly, as if I had an appointment to keep, or a clock to beat.
While aware of all these issues, I’ve never tried anything to change habits acquired over 30-odd years of hillwalking and rambling, until I’m invited to take a mini mindful walk with Stacey McKenna-Seed.
Her Lancashire-based company, Rewilding Outdoor Therapy, works with the Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership (PHLP), a Lottery-backed programme of community-oriented activities and events.
Good walking is about getting out of the head and into the body, and also switching from the wide angle to the smaller details
Stacey McKenna-Seed
On a short walk with a group of about 20 people into a patch of woodland, Stacey helps us to listen to the birds, study fungi and switch off our mental antennae for a few minutes. For once, I manage to zone out and relax while walking. More importantly, I begin to realise that walking well is not just common sense. It can need work, or at least attention.
“Good walking is all about connection and feeling the environment,” says Stacey. “It’s about getting out of the head and into the body, and also switching from the wide angle to the smaller details.”
But it’s even deeper than that. She adds: “We’re ordinarily in fight or flight mode, coping with one thing or another. Being busy has kudos. People think being exhausted is the pinnacle. So I always tell people to slow down. Walking slowly is the most radical thing you can do these days. I often recommend clients find a sit-spot or move slowly through the landscape.
“Winter, especially, is an opportunity to go slowly. We spend all summer squeezing as much as we can out of the warm, long days. Dark days are a time to replenish.”
Walkers at the summit of Pendle Hill. Photograph: Jon Sparks/Alamy
What about my summit-anxiety? “We utilise and exploit and conquer nature to have power over it,” she says. “We should ask ourselves: what are we trying to conquer? We need power with nature, not over it. The best place on Pendle Hill may not be the top, where there’s all that wind and noise, but just down the side, where we can feel protected and enclosed.”
She emphasises that we should all seek to walk in places where we feel “comfortable” and that walking needn’t always be a challenge. “I always ask my clients where they feel safest. For me it’s a coniferous forest because I like to be contained, as if in a womb. It’s a fairytale feeling, and helps me connect with being a child. Ultimately, the best thing about walking in nature is to feel awe and wonder – and we all know how children do that.”
I’ve always tended to think of “mindfulness” as vague and unscientific, I tell Stacey. “I could agree with that,” she concedes. “But all of this is evidence-based: walking makes us switch from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers the creative side of the brain. It can flood the body with happy chemicals.”
These chemicals must flow off Pendle Hill like lava, because another local project, called 72 Seasons, showed me a way to break the winter into manageable chunks and, hopefully, exorcise my Sad.
Kirsty Rose Parker, a Barnoldswick-based creative researcher and founder of The Evaluator agency, came up with the idea when she was tasked by PHLP with answering the question “What’s a Hill Worth?” and asked to focus on community and wellbeing.
One of the 72 Seasons illustrations, by artist Cath Ford
“I came across the idea when a woman from Japan shared it with a Facebook group I belong to,” she says. “It’s an ancient Japanese calendar, and the basic idea is to break the year up into microseasons. I looked up the 72 Seasons app and it was great, but featured Japanese seasons, so there were bears and cherry blossoms. I thought maybe I could translate the idea to the Pendle landscape.
“I worked with over 300 volunteers for a year and together we created our own 72 Seasons – they work for Lancashire and perhaps many places in the north of England. A lovely artist named Cath Ford drew images to represent the seasons.
“The project began during lockdowns and worked through emails, but in the past year we’ve gone out into the landscape. Some people take notebooks; some prefer to look around and think, and chat later. Others use the concept to make them see more precisely or use their senses – to sniff the snowdrops – or they adapt the seasons to their gardening. The seasons, which are only four or five days long, can serve to remind people of traditional holidays like Lammas.”
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“We have recently redesigned how we introduce the seasons so that they work with members of the Asian community and for people who don’t use the internet – whom we missed the first time round. Some people found the seasons worked well with their Muslim faith. We used the Women’s Institute and local walking groups to make contact with local people who are offline.”
Kirsty now shares the seasons on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. A short film shows the sort of things people look out for on their rural psycho-geographic wanderings – guided by the names of the microseasons, which include: “Hedgehogs Shut their Door”, “Morning Grass Glistens” and “Puddles Galore!”
She says: “People have said our 72 Seasons brought them joy, that they slept better and felt less angry. When we evaluated their responses, their wellbeing had increased.
“The reason it works is because it puts people into the present. Instead of horizon-scanning, they can enjoy seeing nature just doing its thing – and that can be comforting.”
She’s now looking at developing 72 Seasons further, to engage more people, in face-to-face sessions, and as a potential toolkit others can adopt.
I wonder if we shouldn’t personalise microseasons. My last week has gone from Rainbow Days to Wuthering Nights to First Frost. I also had a Blitz of Bramblings. For Scottish Highlanders it’ll soon be White Ptarmigan Time. For those on the west Wales coast, Corwynt Bach or Mini-Hurricane. For dwellers in southern climes perhaps Waders and Wet. Seasons to be cheerful, not Sad.
Chris Moss's cat, Pumpkin, exploring at the foot of the Pennines
My third and, for now, final bid for season-aware slowness and wellbeing is homegrown. A year ago I adopted a cat from pet-homing charity Blue Cross. She was already called Pumpkin though she’s a svelte, athletic, four-year-old tabby who can stretch snake-like till she looks more like a sausage than a round vegetable – but I didn’t like to change her name. Pumpkin likes to be accompanied on walks, and so I join her – and my pace, pauses, route choices and scrambles through hedges emulate hers.
It might sound potentially stressful to shadow an animal known for its selfish, stubborn unruliness. But a working relationship has developed and we have a half-dozen routes we now use around the local farmland. She doesn’t go too high up the gnarly trees, she eventually joins me if I sit down for a rest, and she (usually) comes when it’s time to go home.
Numerous studies have shown owning cats to be conducive to people’s psychological health and many people believe therapy cats are as valuable as dogs. I don’t use a harness. As long as you’re careful never to put a cat in awkward situations – ensuring it is able to take flight, avoiding dog encounters and generally following rules – there’s little reason not to be a cat-flâneur . Cats are territorial and prefer to explore within limited parameters. Thanks to Pumpkin, I loitered on a bridge and saw a kingfisher, have learned the names of all the trees and bushes that are used in hedges, and mastered being patient and staring into space. When she makes a sudden burst for the bole of a potentially scalable tree, I admire her the way you would a fell runner or a speed climber.
As for weaving cat-walking into my new worldview, that’s easy. For many of the coming micro-seasons of midwinter, Pumpkin will sleep and eat and drink and sleep some more, perhaps venturing out to test the snow, study a robin, mark her territory. She is closer to nature than even the most rewilded human – and a perfect tutor to help me lose my hangdog attitude. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/30/sas-rogue-heroes-review-is-the-follow-up-to-peaky-blinders-fun-does-arthur-shelby-like-a-drink | Television & radio | 2022-10-30T22:00:38.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | SAS: Rogue Heroes review – is the follow up to Peaky Blinders fun? Does Arthur Shelby like a drink? | SAS: Rogue Heroes (BBC One) might sound like a documentary on some dusty history channel lurking around the last pages of the TV guide, but Steven Knight’s first time back on the BBC since the end of Peaky Blinders is a big and brash adventure drama about the formation of the SAS in 1941. It is witty, pacy, confident, and, as you might expect, occasionally very violent.
The show leans on a number of contemporary TV drama touchstones, from its use of anachronistic music, blasting out metal and rock over action scenes, to the familiar cheeky disclaimer about its veracity. It is, we are promised, “based on a true story” (as told in Ben MacIntyre’s book of the same name), but it is only “mostly true”. In interviews, Knight has said that he had to tone some elements of it down, so that it wouldn’t stretch viewers’ belief.
Such myth-stoking only adds to the fascination, because the story that it does tell is frequently outrageous and often absurd. We begin with a convoy of trucks attempting to make its way from Cairo to the strategic port city of Tobruk, which doesn’t quite go to plan, before it drops into a quick catch-up about the state of the second world war at this point. It does not mince its words. Unless there is a drastic shift in tactics, it is looking like the allies are “fucked”. The swearing, the stencil-stamped title cards, the electric guitars: this is not your everyday war drama.
Enter television’s current favourite actors, ready to form a lads’ army of their own. It centres on the trio of Sex Education’s Connor Swindells, The North Water’s Jack O’Connell and Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen, playing renegade soldiers who each combine a death wish with total disdain for any sense of hierarchy or authority. I’m no military expert, but I always assumed discipline was quite a big deal in these circles. Not so, it turns out. You can smash your senior officer’s head against a piano when he interrupts your chess game, and there’s every chance you’ll manage to wriggle, or more accurately, scrap yourself out of it.
Swindells is Lt Archibald David Stirling, who has daddy issues and a drink problem, and who likes to goad Australians in bars after winning on the horses. O’Connell is Lt Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne, who writes poetry and is, in the words of one of the sets of military police who try to imprison him, “a mental case”. Allen is Lt John Steele “Jock” Lewes, who barely flinches when bombs are dropped within feet of him. These young men are reckless because they can be. War has given them the liberty to behave like “the beasts that we are”, says Stirling, in a rousing if sozzled speech. You can see why Knight, who loves a self-made outsider as much as he loves a bloody dust-up, might be so drawn to the story.
As the fascists are advancing in north Africa, Jock comes up with an idea for “a little experiment”. What if they created a parachute regiment, “answerable to no one”, to attack Nazi supply lines from the desert, rather than from the sea, where the allied forces can be seen coming? The only problem is a lack of parachutes and parachute training. Oh, and a lack of permission. And a lack of volunteers who are “mad as fuck”, as Stirling claims he is. Actually, there are quite a lot of problems. Is that going to stop them? Does Arthur Shelby like a drink?
Welcome to Khaki Blinders. As the three men career around Cairo, or Tobruk, getting themselves into scrapes and sticking two fingers up to anyone who attempts to rein them in, they work their way towards a common cause, while back-talking their superiors, fighting their way out of prison and thieving their supplies. Sofia Boutella plays Eve, a French intelligence officer in a red dress, with red lipstick, who does sexy smoking and knocks back champagne while plotting to send men to their likely deaths. Dominic West turns up in episode two, which ever so slightly shifts the mood, from frantic action to intrigue. For all of the bells and whistles, the bombs and the battles, it was this aspect that had me most gripped. How the SAS came to get the permission it needed to exist is astonishing and very well told.
I thoroughly enjoyed SAS: Rogue Heroes. It is funnier than Peaky Blinders, which dragged itself into the doldrums for its final series, though this still has plenty of its predecessor’s vim. It is a bracing way to spend a Sunday evening, and, to borrow the parlance of one of its leads, a lot of fun, old boy. Indeed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/sep/13/peter-hall-died-british-theatre-rsc | Stage | 2017-09-13T08:36:48.000Z | Michael Billington | Peter Hall: a titan of the theatre and a vulnerable, sensitive man | Peter Hall was a man of infinite contradictions. In public, he exuded confidence, authority and the gift for leadership that enabled him to both found the Royal Shakespeare Company and overcome the manifold crises surrounding the early days of the National Theatre. Yet, having interviewed Hall countless times over the past 40 years, I also saw that he was vulnerable, sensitive and even sometimes strangely solitary. I have a vivid memory of travelling to Athens in the mid-1980s with a party of critics to see Hall’s production of Coriolanus, with Ian McKellen, staged in the Herod Atticus theatre. One morning we announced we were going to Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. “Do you mind if I come with you?” Hall asked, almost apologetically. It was a sudden glimpse into the loneliness of a director once the task of getting the show up and running has been achieved.
Peter Hall: a life in pictures
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Long before I got to know Hall, or even write about his work, I had followed his career. I first saw his work at Stratford in the late 1950s when a slightly chilly Love’s Labour’s Lost was followed by a blissful Twelfth Night, a symphony in russet staged in Caroline costume, and an overwhelming Coriolanus, this time with Laurence Olivier.
Given the two men’s chequered relationship when Hall succeeded Olivier at the National, it is fascinating to recall how much the young director brought out of the great actor. This was vintage Olivier who gave us a Coriolanus full of emotional power, physical audacity and withering irony.
When Hall went on to create the RSC, the production that defined the ensemble spirit of the company was undoubtedly The Wars of the Roses, which offered a conflation, achieved by John Barton, of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.
Ensemble spirit … The Wars of the Roses. Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty Images
Today we expect to see the plays given in their entirety. But Hall’s production was exactly right for the early 1960s. Its cynicism about power-politics coincided with a year of Tory disarray in which Harold Macmillan’s sudden resignation provoked a period of unseemly back-stabbing. Its chauvinist portrait of the perfidious French reminded us of De Gaulle’s peremptory veto of British membership of the EEC. Even the assassination of President Kennedy seemed to chime with the work’s portrayal of power as something subject to arbitrary extinction.
Hall’s work for the RSC was vibrant, urgent and exciting. In 1965, against the advice of all his colleagues, he staged Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming in the large Aldwych theatre: a production of meticulous precision, in which actors such as Paul Rogers, Ian Holm and John Normington applied their Shakespearean expertise to the ambiguities of Pinter’s text. That same year, Hall directed a Stratford Hamlet in which a young David Warner seemed to echo the baffled alienation of a whole 60s generation. In between these productions, Hall directed Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron at Covent Garden with a cast of 300 and an on-stage orgy that induced me to get a standing ticket for the first night.
Peter Hall: the peerless showman who transformed British theatre
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Hall later confessed to me that he left the RSC too early, in 1968: his work was not done but he was exhausted and he had found, in Trevor Nunn, an ideal successor. Unlike King Lear, Hall always had the capacity to relinquish power and to discover talent in the next generation. On that trip to Athens for Coriolanus, I remember Hall gave me an extraordinarily candid interview in which he said he was aiming to leave the National and wanted Richard Eyre to succeed him. “My only fear,” he said, “is that the board may think he is too leftwing.” Happily, Eyre became the duly appointed heir.
Hall’s tenure at the National from 1973 to 1988 is a subject in itself and encompasses a wide range of work. I intemperately loathed his opening masque-like production of The Tempest, when the company was still at the Old Vic, and said it was one of the worst Shakespearean productions I had ever seen: a rash statement given some of the dreck of recent years. Hall went on to do masterly productions of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Marlowe’s impossible Tamburlaine the Great. His work later went into decline with oddly neutral, unimaginative productions of Volpone, The Country Wife and The Cherry Orchard. It may have been because he was spreading himself too thin or because of the pressures in his private life.
But he brought all his operatic instinct to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in 1979 and thereafter recovered his lost form. Jean Seberg in 1983 was a massive musical flop but Hall’s 1987 Antony and Cleopatra, with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins, was magnificent. No production I’ve seen has caught so well the idea that the play’s two principals are steeped in a self-deluding dream or rendered the language with such crystalline clarity.
Judi Dench in Hall’s 1987 production of Antony and Cleopatra. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex Features
Hall’s final achievement was a sequence of Shakespeare’s late plays that were very good at the National and even better when I saw them on tour in Tbilisi where they were stripped of their original set and costumes because of Soviet transport problems. It was a measure of Hall’s rapt attention to the verse, as well as to the resourcefulness of the actors, that they transcended the dearth of decor.
But what I most admired about Hall at the National was his tenacity in withstanding industrial action, persistent attacks from disappointed members of the Olivier regime and media abuse. This came to a head in 1986 with a lead story in the Sunday Times – headlined Laughing all the way to the bank – alleging that both Hall at the National and Trevor Nunn at the RSC were, in effect, exploiting their privileged position for their own commercial advantage. In fact, I think there were loopholes in directors’ contracts that the Cork enquiry into English theatre, of which I was a member, sought to address: we proposed that no director should ever make more money from a commercial transfer than the producing theatre. But what struck me at the time, and does so still, was that the Sunday Times story was intended as an assault on the subsidised sector and used Hall and Nunn as convenient whipping boys.
Shortly after this I made a long TV profile of Hall with Derek Bailey that gave me many insights into the man himself. I remember a rainy day filming at Hall’s Sussex home where his young daughter, Rebecca, showed a remarkable capacity to entertain herself. Hall was also highly critical of his early work: especially his famous 1955 Waiting for Godot which, he said, was over-decorative and filled the silences with wispy fragments of Bartók. But Hall also struck me as a mixture of the adventurous and the conservative: passionate in his belief in new writing but ultra-cautious when I challenged him on the National’s failure to promote women directors.
Tim Pigott-Smith and Michelle Dockery in Pygmalion. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
After he left the National, Hall’s career was peripatetic and periodically productive: he seemed like a director in need of a stable financier. He occasionally found one and did wonderful productions such as a West End Wild Duck in 1990 with Alex Jennings. But the great dream of Hall in his later years was to revivify the Old Vic, and there was a time in the mid-1990s when this started to happen. He initiated a seven-day operation, created a regular company and, with the aid of Dominic Dromgoole, made new plays part of the repertory alongside established classics. It was a bold, imaginative idea and when it fell apart, because the Old Vic’s owners decided to sell the building, Hall was palpably crushed.
'Visionary, master diplomat – and absolute smoothie': stars pay tribute to Peter Hall
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Fortunately he later found a permanent home at the Theatre Royal, Bath, where he approached the standard repertory with fresh insight: never more so than in a Much Ado About Nothing that brought out the latent homosexuality in Don John’s relationship to Claudio or in a Pygmalion that caught Professor Higgins’s ruefulness, as well as delight, in seeing Eliza achieve a spirited independence.
But, inevitably, there was a certain sadness in Hall’s later years. I vividly remember doing a public interview with him at the Galway international arts festival in 2009. It was diplomatically suggested that we should meet for lunch in advance to map out the territory: something unheard of with the highly articulate Hall. On the day all went well until we touched on the subject of Shakespearean verse-speaking. “People sometimes accuse me of being …” said Hall and then suddenly words failed him. “An iambic fundamentalist?” I prompted and Hall, recovering his nerve, said “Yes, that’s it.” It was a small moment but a hint of the onset of dementia.
When I last interviewed him on his 80th birthday, he was mellow, reflective and told me that he had a lot of luck in his life and been blessed with doing the job he adored. What he didn’t say was that he had also made his own luck and left the British theatre, through his work at the RSC and the National and his unremitting championship of the subsidy principle, infinitely richer than he had found it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/09/picture-books-for-children-reviews | Books | 2021-02-09T09:00:08.000Z | Imogen Carter | Picture books for children – reviews | The acclaimed children’s author Tom Percival grew up in a caravan in Shropshire with no electricity or heating. Drinking water came from a spring in the garden and on cold mornings, he says, ice sparkled on the bedposts. While his latest book, The Invisible (Simon & Schuster), isn’t a memoir, his own experiences of being poor are clearly etched throughout this tale about a child whose parents can’t pay the bills – from the beautifully observed frost patterns on the opening pages to the way the pictures glow when the family are together.
Relocated to a grey, depressing neighbourhood after her family have to give up their home, Isabel notices that people look through her. She starts to fade away. But upon encountering others left behind by society – whether old, homeless or refugees – she starts invigorating the community from within, and colour begins to seep back into the washed-out illustrations. In the endnote, Percival says of his own childhood: “there were two things that I had plenty of – love and books”, and while Isabel’s story is a valuable look at the heartbreakingly relevant issue of poverty today, its focus is also on love, family and society.
‘An act of resistance’: I Am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes. Illustration: Gordon C James
“We all belong here” is the final line in Percival’s endnote, but it could just as easily be a line in Derrick Barnes’s pitch-perfect poem about young black boys everywhere, I Am Every Good Thing (Egmont). A celebration of black youth, it is also an act of resistance against those who try to crush their dreams: “I am a nonstop ball of energy. Powerful and full of light. I am a go-getter. A difference-maker. A leader.”
Universal observations combine with lines about specific childhood joys (“I am good to the core, like the centre of a cinnamon roll”) while Gordon C James’s painted portraits brim with spirit and dignity. The result is a truly special book by an American author-illustrator duo at the top of their game, poignantly dedicated to Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and other boys whose lives were taken from them.
In illustrator David Litchfield’s hands, sadness takes the form of a scribbly sort of bean with long limbs and a radiant heart in Anne Booth’s timely A Shelter for Sadness (Templar). Several recent releases have depicted tricky emotions as blobs, or creatures hiding in the shadows, but this one stands out. Profoundly moving and full of depth, it gently explores the need to accept sorrow, live alongside it, rather than chase a cure.
Eco-themed titles continue to be a big trend in children’s publishing, but those with a specific focus and strong narrative usually work best. Omar, the Bees and Me (Owlet, 2 March) by Helen Mortimer, with illustrations by Katie Cottle, is a treasure-trove of facts about bees. It’s also a heartwarming tale of two children with beekeeping grandparents and how this shared experience helps one of them, Omar, settle into a new school far from home. Cottle’s images are a pop of spring sunshine, and the inclusion of a recipe for the honey cake featured in the tale is a lovely touch.
‘Witty’: The Lipstick by Laura Dockrill. Illustration: Maria Karipidou
Bugs of a different sort star in the hilarious Slug in Love (Simon & Schuster) by Rachel Bright with fabulous pictures by Nadia Shireen. All Doug wants is a hug, but despite his charming, toothy grin the other insects find him too “icky and mucky”. That is, until sassy Gail the Snail comes along with her red-hot lippy and winged glasses – surely they’re a perfect, slimy match?
The witty illustrations of Maria Karipidou will also raise a laugh in Laura Dockrill’s The Lipstick (Walker), about an unsupervised toddler doodling with hot-pink lipstick all over the house (“I took the lipstick for a little walk…”). It’s hard not to share the toddler’s thrill as the forbidden squiggles multiply. I just hope it doesn’t give any little locked-down readers naughty ideas. Surely parents have got enough on their plates.
To order most of these titles for a special price click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/dec/04/what-connects-jeremy-renner-to-matt-hancock | Culture | 2021-12-04T13:00:26.000Z | Larry Ryan | What connects Jeremy Renner to Matt Hancock? | Bow selector
The latest instalment in the all-encompassing Marvel Cinematic-and-high-end-streaming-TV Universe is the series Hawkeye, recently debuting on Disney+. It stars Jeremy Renner as the eponymous hero, as seen in many Marvel films. Fellow archer Kate Bishop, played by Hailee Steinfeld, joins him for the ride. Next stop, Marvel’s modern pentathlon?
Jeremy Renner, star of Hawkeye ... Photograph: Marvel Studios 2021
Into the Renner-verse
When not acting, Renner likes a side hustle. There’s an occasional music career – a full-length album landed in 2020. He’s also said to have a lucrative house-flipping hobby, and who could forget his foray into tech with bespoke social networking app Jeremy Renner Official? Despite its cult status, the app – which has inspired a podcast investigation – was shuttered after two years.
... as well as the networking app Jeremy Renner Official ... Photograph: Getty Images
Milkshake brings all the boys to my app
An in no way sinister-sounding company called Escapex built Renner-world and specialised in direct-to-fan social media apps for celebrities and influencers of varying degrees of actual fame, from Kelis to Tommy Chong, via Enrique Iglesias. Though the company seems to have gone quiet of late.
... built by Escapex which also created an app for Kelis ... Photograph: Getty Images
What connects Drive My Car to Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood?
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And then there’s … Hancock
Many may fondly recall when, in 2018, Matt Hancock became the first MP to release his own social network for constituents, called Matt Hancock MP. It’s been an eventful few years for him, having been health secretary during what a Commons committee report called “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” until his resignation in June after breaching social distancing guidance with his close adviser. Michael Winterbottom is turning the government’s handling of the pandemic into a TV drama called This Sceptred Isle. Andrew Buchan (The Crown) will play Hancock; Kenneth Branagh is Boris Johnson.
... while Matt Hancock released his own. Photograph: Shutterstock
Bran management
This year saw the release of Branagh’s black-and-white, semi-autobiographical Troubles drama Belfast (tagline: “I’d like an Oscar”). In 2011, Branagh directed Thor, the fourth film in the comic-book hero series. Alongside its array of stars was a cameo from Renner as Hawkeye, setting up his emergence as a major character in the ever-evolving world. The sun never sets on the Marvel Universe.
Kenneth Branagh directed Thor … with a cameo from Renner. Photograph: Shutterstock
Pairing notes
Watch Renner joins previous collaborator Taylor Sheridan (Wind River) for new crime series Mayor of Kingstown (nothing to do with Easttown), though a UK release is TBC.
Drink While there isn’t an official range of Marvel booze (yet), there is no shortage of themed cocktails online: the Hawkeye riffs on the Black Hawk with bourbon, sloe gin, apple brandy, lemon juice. Hits the spot. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/11/silent-cavalry-review-howell-raines-southern-resistance | Books | 2024-02-11T10:00:09.000Z | Charles Kaiser | Silent Cavalry review: Howell Raines’ fine work on southern resistance | The subtitle of Silent Cavalry is How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta – And Then Got Written out of History. Those startling and nearly unknown stories form the spine of Howell Raines’ tremendous new book, but they were not the fuel that propelled him through decades of painstaking research.
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What drove this Alabama native to write these 477 pages (before the notes) was a need for absolution – a feeling that was especially powerful in a Birmingham native, then 20, who was humiliated when his hometown became world famous. That happened in 1963, when the public safety commissioner, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than a thousand non-violent protesters determined to end the century of white supremacy that followed the American civil war.
Raines is a former executive editor of the New York Times and the author of a much-admired oral history of the civil rights movement whose title gives another clue to his motivation here: My Soul Is Rested.
As a journalist, he was famous for the cut-throat ambition that pushed him to the top of the Times news department – a perch he lost after less than two years when he was unable to contain a scandal produced by a suspiciously energetic reporter who turned out to be a serial fabulist. But Raines’ road to redemption wasn’t very connected to his life as a journalist. From the evidence in his new book, what mattered most was a fierce quest to find as many relatives as possible who fought against the Confederacy 80 years before he was born. That was the most powerful way he could separate himself from the infamous Alabamians of his youth, Bull Connor and George Wallace, the segregationist governor who ran for the White House.
Early discoveries that buoyed Raines included the fact that his ancestors left Methodism for the Church of God, because of its more enlightened attitude towards “colored people”, as his sister put it, and the discovery of a great grandfather, Hiram Raines, who became a draft dodger after the passage of the Confederate Conscription Act.
It was his uncle Brack who first suggested that Raines might be descended from soldiers who fought to preserve the Union rather than to defend slavery. Raines writes: “I can’t overstate the attraction for someone born, as I was, in the war zone of the desegregation crusade of the possibility that my ancestors … might have followed [Abraham] Lincoln rather than [Jefferson] Davis and [Robert E] Lee.” He describes himself as “the moral archaeologist of my family on matters of race”.
A big part of this multi-layered narrative is devoted to the campaign of prominent historians to suppress the story of non-slave-owning Alabamians who supported the Union. That was just one consequence of historians’ larger effort to rebrand the war, to abolish slavery as its cause and instead tell “a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats on their plantations and the dashing knights of the rebel army”.
This was an “epic feat of disinformation” that reached “its apex in Gone with the Wind”, the film Raines correctly identifies as “the greatest single influence on the national imagination” regarding the civil war.
Shelby Foote and Ken Burns, seen in 1990. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Raines cites a plausible estimate of 10,000 unionists in north Alabama in 1862, including deserters from the Confederate army who held a convention at which they waved US flags and voted to remain “neutral”. At least 2,678 white Alabama men enlisted in the Union army, including 2,066 who made up the 1st Alabama cavalry – Raines’ principal focus.
“Every root of my family tree rested in the soil of these 18 jurisdictions of north-central Alabama,” Raines exalts.
There are many other pleasures in this book, including an account of WEB Du Bois offering the only challenge to mainstream historians at a 1909 meeting of the American Historical Society. His paper on Reconstruction and Its Benefits would make him a permanent outsider to a profession dominated by professors who believed Black officeholders had presided over a “tragic decade” of political corruption. Du Bois pointed out that Reconstruction actually produced the first public schools in the south, fairer taxation and advances in public transportation and economic development.
“Seldom in the history of the world has an almost totally illiterate population been given the means of self-education in so short a time,” Du Bois said. Nobody listened.
Raines ends with a description of how Ken Burns continued the distortion of history with his much celebrated documentary series on the civil war. Because he relied so heavily on the southern historian Shelby Foote, Burns consistently favored “nostalgia” over “historical illumination”, according to Eric Foner, a great historian of the civil war and Reconstruction at Columbia University in New York. From Notre Dame, James M Lundberg wrote that because of Burns’s work, his civil war lecture was “always packed – with students raised on your sentimental, romantic, deeply misleading portrait of the conflict”.
‘History is not what happened’: Howell Raines on the civil war and memory
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Worst of all, Burns’s film never mentions the existence of an Alabama regiment in the Union army – because neither he nor his two principal collaborators knew enough to quiz Foote about it. Apparently, they had never seen a 1969 collection, Conversations with Southern Writers, which Raines discovered included this revelation – from Foote:
“I found a whole belt of dissident southerners right along the lower reaches of the Appalachians. It comes down through the end of Tennessee down into northern Alabama and peters out in northern Mississippi. There were a lot of Union-loyal Alabamians, for instance, along that range of hills, and they rode with [Abel] Streight on his raid down there.”
Raines says Foote’s reference to AD Streight, a Union colonel, proves that he knew about the Alabama cavalry in the Union army. But Burns’s viewers never learned about it.
Silent Cavalry is published in the US by Crown | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jul/29/headteacher-defends-policy-of-putting-pupils-in-lunch-isolation | Education | 2016-07-29T17:40:56.000Z | Richard Adams | Headteacher defends policy of putting pupils in 'lunch isolation' | The head of a London secondary school that places pupils in “lunch isolation” if their parents don’t pay for school meals is unapologetic over the policy, arguing that parents who refuse to pay are betraying their children’s education.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela community school in north-west London who imposed the policy, argued that the children affected were from dysfunctional homes and needed the school’s support.
“Should we charge a poor single mum twice so she can pay for Jonny just because she has a sense of personal responsibility and Jonny’s mother doesn’t?” Birbalsingh said.
“Free school meals looks after the poorest. Even then we have all sorts of systems for people who really are in financial need, and I mean the real ones. I don’t mean the ones who are playing the system, trying to get other poor families to pay for their child’s food.”
The controversy surfaced after the Daily Mail reported that a parent of a pupil received a letter from the school’s deputy head saying: “You are currently £75 overdue. If this full amount is not received within this week your child will be placed in lunch isolation.”
The letter sent in June said that pupils in lunch isolation “will receive a sandwich and a piece of fruit only. They will spend the entire 60-minute period in lunch isolation. Only when the entire outstanding amount is paid in full will they be allowed into family lunch with their classmates.”
Michaela community school in Wembley Park, north-west London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
The pupil highlighted by the Daily Mail had not been put in isolation, according to Birbalsingh, though the boy’s family dispute that. The pupil subsequently left the school at the end of the summer term.
Birbalsingh said the policy didn’t apply to pupils on free school meals – more than one in five of those attending the school near Wembley Stadium – or for those with money problems.
“We’ve got three families in the whole of the school where this is the case. They are all families who are betraying their children. One we are reporting to social services,” Birbalsingh said.
“Those children would leave school illiterate if they were at any other schools. At our school that is not the case. Why? Because we force them to go to reading club after school, we force them to do their homework, and we also, during the time we take them out of family lunch, do extra work with them so that they are catching up.”
The “family lunch” is an important part of the school’s day, with pupils serving food and eating alongside teachers, and discussions are held on selected topics. Pupils are not allowed to bring their own lunch to the school.
According to a teacher from another school who visited Michaela, the isolation entails pupils eating a packed lunch in a separate room while doing school work supervised by a teacher.
Katharine Birbalsingh: I regret telling Tories education system was broken
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“It was three or four kids sat in a classroom chatting with their teacher over a sandwich. No one seemed upset and all were looking forward to getting back to family lunch,” the teacher said.
The Department for Education declined to comment on the controversy, though it is likely to seek clarification from the school.
The Education and Inspections Act of 2006 does not allow schools to impose disciplinary punishments for anything other than a pupil’s own conduct. And while schools are obliged by legislation to provide meals for children who request them, parents also have a responsibility to pay.
A policy of feeding only “plain sandwiches” and water to pupils in arrears was introduced in 2012 by a primary school in Scotland but it was quickly scrapped by East Ayrshire council.
Michaela prides itself on rigorous discipline. Its behaviour policy details demerits for daydreaming or slouching in class, or for having a loosely knotted tie. A full detention is earned by poor reading, swearing or lateness.
While schools are obliged by legislation to provide meals for children who request them, parents also have a responsibility to pay. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA
“Families who have difficult children deliberately choose Michaela because they know we will transform them,” Birbalsingh said. “I have mothers breaking down in tears in front of me, saying they don’t know what to do, that their child is going to end up in jail.
“They come to us and they transform. When I say transform I mean they are going to get good GCSEs, they are going to go to university.”
Michaela’s arrears policy was criticised by the National Union of Teachers, which said: “Schools should be careful not to create a situation in which children are stigmatised because of budgetary issues which are beyond their concern.”
Birbalsingh was unrepentant, arguing that her school demanded personal responsibility from pupils and parents.
“They come to us with a reading age of five or six. By the time they have finished year eight with us they have caught up to other 12- and 13-year-olds in their reading ages. As opposed to the rest of the country, where 20% of children leave school illiterate. At our school, nobody is leaving illiterate.
“We do that by holding children and families responsible and by believing in personal responsibility,” she said.
Birbalsingh lost her job as a deputy head after describing states schools as “utterly chaotic” in a speech at the Conservative party conference in 2010.
But she bounced back in 2014 by winning approval to open a free school, which has been regularly lauded by ministers. Most recently the schools minister, Nick Gibb, praised Michaela’s “excellent standard of education”.
Birbalsingh said criticism of the school’s policies such as the lunch isolation sprang from “middle-class liberal guilt”.
“We as headteachers ought to tell parents when they are not doing their jobs as parents – when they are letting their children down. We have a duty to the children we teach to ensure that they can leave school literate and numerate.
“Some families don’t want this for their own children, and the liberals who complain about schools holding these families to account are the problem.
“It’s white, middle-class liberal guilt. They are not actually interested in educating these children. They just want to make themselves feel better about their own privilege.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2007/mar/01/comedy.television | Culture | 2007-03-01T10:50:45.000Z | Brian Logan | The Goodies tell Brian Logan they're back to set the record straight | Icons of British comedy? We'd all say Morecambe and Wise, I'd guess. Dad's Army. Inevitably, Monty Python. But most of our lists would stretch into double figures before reaching the Goodies. The Goodies were prime-time mainstays for a whopping 12 years into the early 1980s, and have been paying the price ever since. The BBC has neither repeated their series nor released their DVDs themselves. The perception took hold that The Goodies was (in the barbed words of John Cleese, in a cameo appearance on the show) "a kids' programme". If the Pythons now tower over British comedy like a marauding giant kitten, the Goodies are a dead parrot.
The Python parallel is irresistible. The Goodies themselves make it, almost obsessively. As their stage show, which starts a national tour this month, makes clear, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor were friends, flatmates and Footlights colleagues of Cleese, Idle, et al.
They performed in the same successful student revue, Cambridge Circus, which ended up on Broadway. Their members wrote for That Was the Week That Was and starred together in a BBC sketch show called Broaden Your Mind.
History could easily have panned out differently. "There's some Python stuff that any of us would have felt comfortable doing," says Oddie. "And some of the Python people would have felt comfortable doing Goodies stuff." According to Brooke-Taylor (who co-scripted the Four Yorkshiremen sketch subsequently performed live by the Pythons), the formation of the two troupes "was about who was available at the right moment. It could have gone a lot of different ways".
Really? The Pythons in dungarees, singing Funky Gibbon on Top of the Pops? The Goodies' Life of Brian? From a distance, their acts seem to inhabit distant universes. Monty Python were the clever-clever literary wits whereas, in Oddie's words, "we were intelligent, but accessible". The Goodies' heroes were Buster Keaton and Tom & Jerry. Their half-sketch show, half-sitcom format, in which the trio play an agency of three bicycling blokes for hire to do "anything, anytime", are like Warner Bros cartoons made flesh. Silly, slapstick and sped-up, the best episodes are freewheeling streams-of-nonsense in which TV conventions are upended, rugs are pulled, and every silent-movie gag in history is lovingly re-created.
Australia realises this. There, the Goodies' anti-establishment irreverence is embraced, says Brooke-Taylor, and the show is broadcast daily. It was Australia that enticed the trio back together for a theatre tour, for which 25,000 tickets sold out in one day. The UK tour of the same show (minus Oddie, who participates via video inserts) is Australian-produced. It's a nostalgic, chatty affair, which screens classic clips, including a movie- pastiche sequence from 1975 that is giddy with its own inventiveness. "Every night onstage," says Brooke-Taylor, "I think, 'How the hell did we do that?'" And a fabulously cheeky broadside against self-appointed 1970s censor Mary Whitehouse, featuring a "gender education" film called How to Make Babies By Doing Dirty Things.
That's what we tend to forget about the Goodies. They weren't silly in a vacuum. They were silly about topical issues. That may be one reason they've dated less well than the Pythons. Another is suggested by one particular episode, entitled South Africa. Ostensibly, this episode attacks apartheid (the Goodies visit South Africa, where the diminutive Oddie is persecuted under the "apart-height" regime), and the Goodies are proud of having broadcast it. But its racial stereotyping and casual use of the word "nig-nog" make it all but unwatchable today.
The trio have admitted to being "slightly embarrassed" by such scenes. "But there were only one or two of them," says Garden - who himself blacked up for the famous Ecky-Thump episode that caused a 50-year-old bricklayer to laugh himself to death. The trio are loath to think that their output has been freeze-dried because of the odd racial (and homophobic) stereotype. After all, the Pythons blacked up, and The Black and White Minstrel Show was one of the most popular broadcasts of the mid-1970s. "We did a minstrel spoof ourselves," says Oddie, "in which Martin Luther King says, 'I have a dream about a world where minstrels will be all sorts of colours, not just black and white.' If someone thinks that's un-PC, then they really are stupid."
Oddie is the most voluble on this subject, as indeed he is on all subjects. He domineers the conversation; Brooke-Taylor pitches in; Garden keeps his counsel. Brooke-Taylor has a stock line about Oddie's non-participation in the stage show - he likes the pre-recorded video Oddie, he says, because it means "we can switch Bill off". This may be a true word spoken in jest.
Reinvented as a wildlife broadcaster, Oddie was recently voted the fourth most trusted person in Britain. But it's not clear that he and his fellow Goodies have always held one another in high esteem. Witness Oddie's sleeve-notes for a CD of the songs he wrote for the series: "I would like to thank the other two Goodies, but I really can't. It would have been so much easier without them."
But today, their camaraderie seems authentic. Brooke-Taylor professes fondness for the Goodies' musical career, even if Garden's gritted-teeth tribute - "I loved every second of it" - isn't even meant to sound convincing. The Goodies were the fifth biggest-grossing pop act of 1975 - or, according to Brooke-Taylor, "the Spice Girls of the 70s". During the same period, they won a Sun award for light entertainment ahead of Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies. They bagged two second-place Silver Roses of Montreux, one of which they sprayed gold on their TV show. "We were robbed," says Oddie now. "I hope you appreciate," says Brooke-Taylor, "that 35 years later we're not remotely bitter!"
Bitter is too strong a word. But they are disappointed at the BBC's disdain, and at the disparity between the Pythons' reputation and their own. Again, Oddie is nearly slanderous on the subject. "Python hoiked themselves up to a different level because of their American connection," he says. "They were financed by Victor Lowndes from Playboy magazine. This is their seedy past." Python's fame is down to their assiduous schmoozing. "I remember going to lunch with Eric [Idle] in the 70s. He said, 'Come over, I've got some friends round,' and it was Paul Simon and Mick Jagger. And John [Cleese] is very comfortable with meeting important people. If he hasn't got Steve Martin round for supper, it's a wasted evening."
The Goodies' brush with Hollywood came when Steven Spielberg, believe it or not, suggested a collaboration. So what went wrong? "I think John and Eric got together and dissuaded him," deadpans Garden. "So he made The Goonies instead." Oddie's explanation is that, unlike the Pythons, "we are a bit low-class. We are not top-of-the-league show people. None of us are natural members of the Groucho club. We do not take drugs or associate with people who do. And half of the Pythons," he goes on, rising in volume, "married big, blonde Americans. None of us married a big, blonde American." Or at least, "not yet", adds Brooke-Taylor.
Brooke-Taylor may not share Oddie's class resentment, but he will agree that "a very big plus for Python was that the viewers' parents didn't like them. Whereas the whole family liked us." Python was cool in a way that a live-action Tom & Jerry could never be. "I'm willing to bet," says Oddie, "that most heads of BBC2 down the years were Python fans who regarded The Goodies as a kids' programme. And they were not going to show us because they were too fucking hip."
I think the Goodies are justified in feeling unfairly rejected. That may indeed be because we live in a culture that prizes the verbal above the visual, the cerebral above the popular. It may also be because the Goodies (unlike Python or Fawlty Towers) overstayed their welcome. In 1982, they took their final series to LWT, where one episode discussed the fact that they were too clapped-out to be Goodies any more.
But now, a little belated recognition is coming their way. A new generation of comics hail them as major influences - the League of Gentlemen and Mike (Austin Powers) Myers are fans, The Mighty Boosh are clearly in their debt, and Little Britain's David Walliams cites seeing the Goodies chased by Dougal from the Magic Roundabout as his pre-eminent comic memory.
The Goodies are gratified by this, but they've had too many false new dawns in the last quarter century to take talk of a revival seriously. "What I find all the time," says Brooke-Taylor, "is that we're driven into this position of having to justify The Goodies." If it were shown, he wouldn't have to. It could speak for, or against, itself. "Because we don't want to oversell it," he says. "But we are very proud of it. And it's so frustrating that it's not seen".
· The Goodies Still Rule OK! is at Princess Theatre, Torquay (0870 145 1163) on March 15, then tours. The Goodies at LWT DVD is released on March 26 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/10/warm-words-in-morrisons-budget-barely-disguise-a-story-of-fiscal-failure | Australia news | 2017-05-09T20:16:55.000Z | Stephen Koukoulas | Warm words in Morrison's budget barely disguise a story of fiscal failure | Stephen Koukoulas | Three years ago, then-treasurer Joe Hockey delivered the first budget of the Abbott government. It was a classic austerity budget, designed to tackle the “debt and deficit disaster” and “fiscal emergency” that it had railed against in opposition. That budget saw a raft of spending cuts, user charges and tax increases as the government tried to fast-track the return to budget surplus.
The effect of the policy changes in that budget saw the forecast for the 2016-17 deficit fall to $10.8bn, and then to a mere $2.8bn in 2017-18. There were budget surpluses forecast in 2018-19 and beyond. According to Hockey, the budget had effectively been fixed and the emergency thwarted.
Or so it seemed.
Federal budget 2017: Morrison hits banks with $6bn tax rise and promises ‘better days ahead’
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Over the intervening three years, the budget bottom line numbers have soured. This is despite the global economy registering solid, unbroken growth that has seen Australian export volumes grow substantially. Domestically, the economy has recorded average gross domestic product (GDP) growth at a reasonable rate, around 2.5% per annum over three years, despite the crash in mining investment and the volatility in commodity prices.
Suffice to say, something has gone badly wrong with budget repair over the past three years.
The budget is characterised by big government spending and high taxes
Treasurer Scott Morrison’s 2017 budget now estimates the 2016-17 budget deficit will be $37.6bn. This is about $27bn more than under the framework outlined by Hockey. For 2017-18, the budget blowout is similarly large – just under $27bn wider. The 2018-19 budget surplus projection is redundant because it was not forecast in 2014, but the current estimate is for a deficit of $21.4bn.
Not only has there been no budget repair, but the deficit and debt levels have blown out to the point where net government debt is now projected to reach a 60-year high of 19.8% of GDP.
Gross government debt, which was $273bn when the Coalition was elected in September 2013, is forecast to reach $537bn in 2017-18, $606bn in 2020-21 and $725bn in 2027-28.
How Joe Hockey's disastrous first budget fell apart, brick by brick
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Part of this fiscal failure is due to many of the measures in the 2014 budget being rejected by the Senate. There was a naivety from the Abbott government that a hostile Senate would pass the bulk of the draconian measures that stripped benefits away from the unemployed, slashed education spending and imposed a co-payment for each visit to the doctor. The Senate rejected these and other measures that were in the budget figuring for the last three years and finally, in the current budget, these have been expunged, which accounts for part of the deficit blowout.
The budget documents note that the impact of the Senate blocking these measures was a mere $2.1bn in 2017-18 and $3.2bn in 2018-19. Small beer in the scheme of things.
Part of the failure to reduce the deficit is linked to the ramping up of government spending, to above 25% of GDP. The Morrison budget is framed around a government spending to GDP ratio of 25% of GDP and higher for at least eight years – something without precedent in budget history.
The revised fiscal framework encompasses big government spending, which reflects a capitulation from the Coalition. It reflects the political reality where the electorate increasingly demands a high and rising service delivery from publicly funded services.
Indeed, in a stark contrast to the 2014 budget, the 2017 budget explicitly states, that “the first duty of a government is to protect and keep Australians safe and ensure the critical services they rely on are guaranteed”.
Those essential and important services are, according to the budget document, “healthcare, housing, disability support, education and employment”.
Budget 2017: Coalition 2.0 reboots in bid to jolt a political recovery
Katharine Murphy
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It is impossible to imagine the 2014 budget containing such rhetoric.
The budget does project a small budget surplus in 2020-21. To get there, Morrison is relying on a surge in tax and other revenue. Total government revenue is forecast to reach 25.4% of GDP in 2020-21, the sixth highest level of revenue on record.
The budget is characterised by big government spending and high taxes. There is also a blowout in debt and deficit reflecting the government’s realisation that the electorate places a higher weight on the government provision of services than an arbitrary return to surplus. This is especially so when the policies to get to surplus are unfair and introduced when the economy is weak.
It is unclear how the ratings agencies will view these developments. They have a focus on bottom line debt and deficit, and to that extent, the triple-A rating must be in jeopardy. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/20/zack-snyder-justice-league-cut-release-hbo-max | Film | 2020-05-20T19:02:34.000Z | Benjamin Lee | Justice League: Zack Snyder's cut to be released after fan campaign | Zack Snyder has revealed that the “Snyder cut” of 2017’s critically loathed DC adventure Justice League will finally see the light of day.
The director, who departed the project during post-production after the death of his daughter, announced during a watch party for 2013’s Man of Steel that a new version would land on HBO Max in 2021.
Justice League review – good, evil and dullness do battle
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“It will be an entirely new thing, and, especially talking to those who have seen the released movie, a new experience apart from that movie,” Snyder said to the Hollywood Reporter about his new version. He has yet to see the cut that was released, one that was ultimately steered by Joss Whedon, writer-director of The Avengers.
After the film received negative reviews and underperformed theatrically in November 2017, rumours spread that Snyder’s original cut was darker and more fulfilling than what was eventually seen. A fan army assembled, using the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut to push Warner Bros for the footage, with 100,000 fans signing a petition within five days of its release and, last year, buying a billboard in Times Square.
For the second anniversary of its release in 2019, stars Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck also joined in, tweeting the hashtag in support. Soon after, Warner Bros’ chairman, Toby Emmerich, contacted Snyder and his wife and producing partner, Deborah. “This is real. People out there want it. Would you guys ever consider doing something?” he asked.
The Snyders are now at work on a new version with sources estimating the cost between $20m-$30m and, while unconfirmed, the new cut is rumoured to come to Warner’s new streaming service in the form of a TV series. The process will involve actors recording additional dialogue as well as new effects being added.
“This return to that pedigree and to let my singular vision of my movie be realized, in this format, in this length, is unprecedented and a brave move,” Snyder said.
Snyder is currently finishing zombie horror Army of the Dead for Netflix. Fan intrigue in the director’s original Justice League cut comes after his last DC project, Batman v Superman, a film fully of his making, received even worse reviews. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/13/how-taylor-swift-became-cabaret-voltaire-vinyl-record-pressing | Music | 2023-07-13T12:57:27.000Z | Daniel Dylan Wray | ‘This is so creepy!’: the Taylor Swift vinyl haunted by Britain’s weirdest musicians | ‘P
lease help me,” pleads Rachel Hunter on a TikTok video now seen by millions, as the sound of ominous drones hum beneath a robotic voice repeatedly asking, “The 70 billion people of Earth … where are they hiding?”
The noises are emitting from a record spinning on a turntable – the brand new vinyl release of Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Speak Now. Except it’s not. It’s the churning sounds of industrial-electro pioneers Cabaret Voltaire sampling the 1963 sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits on their 1992 track Soul Vine (70 Billion People).
A pressing mix-up means Hunter has what’s been printed as a copy of Speak Now, but when played it’s actually the new compilation Happy Land: A Compendium of Electronic Music from the British Isles 1992-1996 (Vol 1). It’s a collection of tunes complete with its own folklore, rather different to that on 2020’s Folklore which Swift fans may be more in tune with. Happy Land taps into an “old weird Britain of rural raves, chalk horses, burial mounds and tense standoffs with the police”, as writer Joe Muggs explored in his review of the album and scene – one he calls “massively druggy” – earlier this year.
True Romance by Thunderhead was the first thing Hunter heard when she played the record. “I thought maybe the vinyl had some sort of special message,” she says. “Because Taylor does that sort of thing. This voice was saying strange things about flesh and anxiety. I was like: this is weird. I thought maybe the other side would be less strange but I flipped it over [to Cabaret Voltaire] and, no, it only got weirder.”
The comments under the video run into the thousands. Words such as “scary”, “terrifying” and “haunted” are plentiful. Released as Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), record has quickly been nicknamed (Cursed Version). But plenty are calling it “fire” and digging Cabaret Voltaire, including Hunter. “I was like: this is so creepy,” she says. “But when the beat kicks in I was like: this is a vibe.”
“My kids in Australia told me about it,” says Stephen Mallinder, co-founder of Cabaret Voltaire, now in Creep Show. “They said, ‘Dad, you’re on a Taylor Swift record and this girl looks really distraught about it’.”
This is the other side, I'm crying 😂 @taylorswift13 @taylornation13 @UMG pic.twitter.com/MDuudAOQZS
— Rachel ✨🌙 London N1 & N5 💜 (@_folklorians) July 10, 2023
The two-volume compilation was released on Above Board, a label run by Dan Hill, and curated by Ed Cartwright and Leon Oakey. “It’s so charming,” Cartwright says. “You couldn’t really have chosen a more perfect compilation of music to mysteriously appear on that record.” Mallinder adds, with a laugh. “It’s possibly the most subversive thing we’ve ever done.”
So, what exactly happened? And why does it only seem to be a mysterious one-off case so far? “We made an assumption it’s a batch,” says Cartwright. “But no others have appeared.” Studies show that around half of the vinyl released bought isn’t actually played, so there’s a chance there are more in circulation unbeknown to owners.
Five hundred copies of Happy Land were pressed originally but who knows how many have accidentally ended up on Swift’s records, which have already shifted blockbuster figures of more than 225,000. Swift’s label released a statement saying: “We are aware that there are an extremely limited number of incorrectly pressed vinyl copies in circulation and have addressed the issue.” The mix-up seemingly occurred at the French plant MPO, which pressed both records (they didn’t respond for comment).
“What I find amusing is the number of people now probably following the same path as Rachel,” laughs Cartwright. “To go to Taylor Swift’s UK web store and order the orchid triple vinyl in the hope they will get this crazy anomaly.”
Cartwright doesn’t have to look too far for examples. “These records are going to be like gold dust,” says Hill. “I’ve bought two, and everyone in my office has bought one. Every single person I know, even those who never buy records, is reaching out to try and get a copy. It’s brilliant. You’ve got these Taylor Swift fans who have been force-fed electronic music and then you’ve got this whole Discogs-digging culture trying to find faulty Taylor Swift records who never in their life would normally buy them.”
These records are going to be like gold dust. I’ve bought two, and everyone in my office has bought one. It’s brilliant
Dan Hill
The rumour mill has been in full churn. “Somebody said maybe it’s Taylor using her powers for good,” chuckles Mallinder. “Which I’m sure isn’t true but I like the sentiment. Other people have said they think it’s a Banksy-type stunt that somebody’s done deliberately.” Cartwright has a background in PR and has even faced accusations of an inside job: “People have been phoning me up and saying, ‘Back to your old tricks again?’”
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From nightmare ticketing to online abuse, being a pop fan is becoming miserable
Kate Solomon
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Where things get really strange is that Hunter’s vinyl copy of Speak Now somehow features Ultramarine’s track Happy Land, featuring Robert Wyatt (Hunter’s least favourite on the album) on both sides.
“That is a whole other Bermuda Triangle of weirdness,” says Hill. “It’s going down some weird vortex I can’t even comprehend. I don’t know how that’s happened because technically it’s impossible.”
Cartwright adds: “That would require a whole new lacquer to have been used that differs from our original album.”
Everyone is stumped. Hunter has even had to prove that her faulty copy of Speak Now is real. “NBC News emailed me asking if it was a meme,” she says. “So I did a TikTok where I slowed down the speed of the vinyl to prove it.”
The mashups have begun. Cabaret Voltaylor takes the Cabs’ proto-industrial banger Nag Nag Nag and smashes it into Swift’s All Too Well. While the name Cabaret Voltaire was under the ownership of band co-founder Richard H Kirk, who died in 2021, can we perhaps expect a Mallinder or Creep Show rework of a Swift original? “We’re up for anything,” says Mallinder. “If Taylor wants a mix, we’ll write some tunes.”
This article was amended on 13 July 2023. Aphex Twin features on Vol 2 of Happy Land, not Vol 1, which appears on some copies of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), as previously stated. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/09/naomi-alderman-the-player | Games | 2010-06-09T18:59:58.000Z | Naomi Alderman | The player: are games just a waste of time? | Ilove video games, but sometimes – especially when the sun is shining – it's good to put down the controller. So, I spent last week in Devon with no electronic entertainment. Returning home, it suddenly became obvious that I had been using these distractions for specific purposes: when exhausted, I zone out with TV; when I feel isolated the internet gives me a sense of connection. And games? They're for when work has gone badly, I'm getting nowhere and need an instant hit of achievement.
Game designers know this, of course. Role-playing games such as World of Warcraft are carefully calibrated so the player is working towards achieving a new level of skill. Console games include lists of achievements to unlock – though sometimes they're meaningless, as satirised by the flash game Achievement Unlocked which gives you credit for achievements such as "scroll the achievements section" and "unlock 10 achievements". But they're part of what makes a game attractive: research in 2008 by EEDAR noted that games with more achievements tend to sell better.
When non-gamers criticise gaming, I think it's often this ersatz sense of achievement that troubles them: the idea that time is being wasted pursuing imaginary goals. As in philosopher Robert Nozick's famous thought experiment The Experience Machine, most people instinctively feel it's wrong to spend our whole lives in a simulation.
But there's another way to view this. Most people don't give up their jobs or families to game. For most, games are not a replacement for life. It's not that endless leisure is threatening our usefulness; it could be that our Protestant work ethic leads us to seek a sense of achievement even in our pastimes. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jul/28/business-schools-islamic-finance | Education | 2009-07-27T23:05:12.000Z | Harriet Swain | Islamic finance courses gives universities a bonus | With global finance on its knees, this summer's business graduates face an even trickier jobs market than most. But there is one area of banking still experiencing boom time – Islamic finance – and universities have been quick to grasp its possibilities.
This September will see new courses and postgraduate qualifications in Islamic finance springing up throughout the UK and elsewhere in Europe, reflecting the fact that it has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global banking industry, expanding by between 15% and 20% a year. Assets held by institutions adhering to Islamic finance principles now amount to nearly 1 trillion dollars.
In the UK, interest in the sector also reflects the government's commitment to promoting Britain as an Islamic finance centre. The UK already leads Europe in the number of Islamic finance training courses it offers, from entry to postgraduate level, and in 2006 saw the launch of the Islamic Finance Qualification, a joint initiative between a Lebanese business school and the Securities and Investment Institute.
London gateway
Last December, the Treasury published a paper setting out the government's aim for London to be "Europe's gateway to international Islamic finance". This acknowledged that the industry was still young and therefore not yet experiencing skills shortages, but predicted that it soon would be. It stated: "The pool of potential applicants in the UK will have to keep up with the rapid growth of the market."
Universities have responded enthusiastically. Newcastle University is offering an MSc in finance and law with Islamic finance from next academic year. Henley Business School at the University of Reading has been offering an MSc in investment banking and Islamic finance since last year, with students spending the second part of the year in Kuala Lumpur. The University of Bangor in Wales has also been running its Islamic finance MA and MSc for a year and is considering introducing a new MBA in the subject, while the first students to take an Islamic finance option as part of an executive MBA offered in Dubai by Cass Business School will graduate this summer. Durham, which has been offering postgraduate research degrees in Islamic finance for some time, is now introducing a taught MA and MSc (the MSc is more quantitative), to respond to demand. Elsewhere in Europe, Reims Management School is offering a new specialist course in Islamic banking and finance for students on its masters in management programme, taught in English.
Student demand is driving the subject as much as any urging from governments. According to Rodney Wilson, founder and director of the Islamic finance programme at Durham, it is coming mainly from south-east Asia, particularly Malaysia, and the Middle East, although there is plenty of interest from the UK as well.
Joanna Gray, professor of financial regulation at Newcastle Law School, says she is keen that their new degree course is not just seen as something for Muslims. "It's for anyone interested in a fast-developing industry that in the UK has been quite busy in the past few years to accommodate forms of investment in finance that are sharia-compliant."
Sharia principles
Islamic finance really dates from the mid-1970s, with attempts to make products available through conventional banking, such as loans and mortgages, compatible with sharia principles. Sharia law prohibits any transaction that involves paying interest or investing in certain economic sectors such as gambling or pornography. It demands that both the investor and recipient of the investment must share any risk, and transactions have to be underpinned by tangible assets.
In the years immediately after 9/11, anything involving money and Muslims was viewed with suspicion by many in the west because of fears about terrorism, and Islamic finance is still taking off faster in the UK and France than in the US. But in the current global financial climate the principles it is based on have struck a chord.
"There is an extent to which, to a westerner, Islamic finance products look very similar to ethical finance products," says Stefan Szymanski, professor of economics at Cass. "There is a demand for morally upright investment vehicles, and Islamic finance is the Islamic version of that."
Philip Molyneux, head of the business school at Bangor, suggests that even if western banks do not want to introduce specific Islamic finance products – and an increasing number do – they still want to know how it is that many Islamic institutions escaped the worst effects of the credit crunch.
He has been surprised that demand for the MA and MSc has come not just from recent graduates and bankers wanting to improve their career prospects, but also from sharia scholars, who play a key role in Islamic finance. Any new financial product must be passed by them as sharia-compliant, so many financial institutions must now have scholars standing by ready to give their verdict. These scholars often disagree, and can even change their minds, but this offers plenty of scope for the kind of intellectual arguments that universities relish, not to mention graduate jobs.
On the whole, most of the new Islamic finance courses steer well clear of religious issues in favour of legal and financial questions because these are what most interest students. Khalid El Sheik applied for Bangor's Islamic finance MA because, having taken a first degree in computer science in Sudan before switching to a career in marketing, he felt his CV needed a business boost. He saw it as a chance to mark himself out from other students and to have a headstart in an area that was likely to offer plenty of future employment opportunities. "I had read about Islamic banking and how it was going to increase in future, and how most of the banking sector is now looking to it," he says. His fellow students at the university, including one from China, had the same idea, he says.
Szymanski agrees that it is the idea of the moment in many universities, and while Cass is still waiting to see how the market develops before introducing any similar courses, it is certainly considering the possibility.
"You just have to measure how many billions of dollars Islamic finance already handles in a year," he says. "If that grows over the years, it will become a universal part of every business school." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/31/deeply-cynical-no-10-report-criticises-use-of-institutional-racism | World news | 2021-03-31T19:04:37.000Z | Aamna Mohdin | No 10's race report widely condemned as 'divisive' | A landmark report on racial disparity has been widely condemned by MPs, unions, and equality campaigners as “divisive” and a missed opportunity for systematic change.
Critics said the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities had failed to acknowledge the “shocking disparities and shocking outcomes in health, education and housing” affecting minority communities in the UK.
Labour also called on the government to explain one of the most contentious passages, which, it alleges, glorifies the slave trade.
Published in full on Wednesday after selective leaks to the media earlier in the week, the report marks a significant shift in government policy, stating its findings “present a new race agenda for the country”.
The review behind the report was set up by Downing Street to investigate racial disparities in the UK in response to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
'Considerable number' giving evidence to race commission said UK is systemically racist – as it happened
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The commission’s report notes that while racism and racial injustice do still exist geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion all have a greater impact on life chances.
In a foreword to the report, commission chairman Dr Tony Sewell said some communities are haunted by historic racism and there was a “reluctance to acknowledge that the UK had become open and fairer”. He said the review found some evidence of bias, but often it was a perception that the wider society could not be trusted.
Simon Woolley, who was head of No 10’s race disparity unit until last summer, criticised the commission for disrespecting and disregarding people’s lived experience.
Lord Woolley said: “If you deny structural race inequality then you’ve got nothing to do and that in of itself is a huge problem. There was structural racism before Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter, in all areas and all levels of our society. There are shocking disparities and shocking outcomes in health, education and housing. That’s why we set up the race and disparity unit in the first place.
“Covid-19 laid bare these structural inequalities in such Technicolor and made them worse, where [BAME communities] are dying in greater numbers, becoming severely ill in greater numbers, and losing their jobs. Then to be not only in denial, but saying: ‘What are you complaining about? We live in a society that is much better than it was 100 years ago’ is monumental disrespect and disregard of people’s lived experiences, but above all a lost opportunity for systemic change.”
The report notes improvements such as increasing diversity in elite profession, a shrinking ethnicity pay gap and that children from many ethnic communities do as well or better than white pupils in compulsory education.
The 258-page report calls on the government to fully fund the Equality and Human Rights Commission, improve training for police officers and include a local residency requirement for recruitment. Within 24 recommendations it advocates establishing an office for health disparities, opening up access to apprenticeships, teaching an “inclusive curriculum”, and putting a stop to use of the term BAME.
It also pushes for a move of focus away from institutions and more towards “the extent [that] individuals and their communities could help themselves through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external forces to assemble to do the job”.
In an open rebuff to the arguments of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd in the US, the report says the “idealism” of “well-intentioned young people” claiming the dominant feature in society is institutional racism achieves little “beyond alienating the decent centre ground”.
The shadow women and equalities secretary, Marsha De Cordova, said: “To downplay institutional racism in a pandemic where black, Asian and ethnic minority people have died disproportionately and are now twice as likely to be unemployed is an insult.”
Responding to one of the most contentious passages in the report, which argues that a “new story” needs to be told about the slave trade, which would highlight cultural transformation of African people, de Cordova said: “The government must urgently explain how they came to publish content which glorifies the slave trade, and immediately disassociate themselves with these remarks.”
The commission focuses significantly on education, which it describes as the single most emphatic success story of the British ethnic minority experience, where children from many ethnic communities do as well or better than white pupils, with black Caribbean students the only group to perform less well.
NHS Providers said it disagreed with the report’s conclusions and said there was “clear and unmistakable” evidence that NHS ethnic minority staff have worse experiences and face more barriers than white counterparts, with deputy chief executive Saffron Cordery warning that denying the link between structural racism and health inequalities is “damaging”.
The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said the commission had “chosen to deny the experiences of black and minority ethnic workers”, adding that institutional racism trapped people in poverty, insecurity and low pay.
The conclusion of the report notes that while most of the Black Lives Matters protesters are young, the bulk of the commission are from “an older generation whose views were formed by growing up in the 1970s and 1980s”. But it states that because of the progress that has been made over the past 50 years “a degree of optimism is justified”.
Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, said: “Black and Asian Britons in our society today face less prejudice than their parents or grandparents, they may well fare better than those in many other countries. But such comparisons make little difference to the lives of ethnic minority Britons in 2021.
“There’s an important success story in education that can rightly be celebrated. But if a graduate in Manchester with an ethnic-sounding surname still gets fewer job interviews than a white classmate with the same CV, why should they feel lucky that the odds might be worse in Milan or Marseille?”
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said he was disappointed by the findings from the summary of the report published, insisting there were structural problems that needed to be addressed.
Rehana Azam, the GMB national secretary for public services, said: “Only this government could produce a report on race in the 21st century that actually gaslights Black, Asian, minority and ethnic people and communities. This feels like a deeply cynical report that not only ignores black and ethnic minority workers’ worries and concerns but is part of an election strategy to divide working-class people and voters. It’s completely irresponsible and immoral.”
The Institute of Race Relations said: “From what we have seen, [the] reports fit neatly with the government’s attempts, post-Brexit, to portray the British nation as a beacon of good race relations and a diversity model, in the report’s words, for ‘white majority countries’ across the globe.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/27/minimum-wage-is-uks-most-successful-economic-policy-in-a-generation | Society | 2024-03-27T05:00:42.000Z | Phillip Inman | Minimum wage is UK’s ‘most successful economic policy in a generation’ | The minimum wage has driven up the pay of millions of Britain’s lowest earners by £6,000 a year, making it the single most successful economic policy in a generation, according to a leading thinktank.
Since its introduction in 1999 by Tony Blair’s first Labour administration the policy has secured cross-party agreement, and should be seen as the basis for further improvements in the welfare of low wage workers, the Resolution Foundation said.
The minimum wage will increase on Monday 1 April as it rises from £10.42 to £11.44, in the third-highest annual change in its history – a rise of 9.8% in cash terms and 7.8% above inflation.
In a study released to mark 25 years since the policy’s introduction, the foundation said workers would have been £6,000 a year worse off since 1999 if their pay had only risen in line with average wages rather than the increases recommended by the independent Low Pay Commission.
Nye Cominetti, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said parliament should use a review of the commission’s remit “to discuss the future of the minimum wage and low pay more widely ahead of the election”.
He said: “Politicians should reflect on why the minimum wage has been so successful – such as the combination of long-term political direction and independent, expert-led oversight – and whether this approach could be broadened to tackle some of the UK’s other low pay challenges.”
The foundation said MPs should consider how the level of statutory sick pay had fallen in relation to average wages and could be brought under the umbrella of the commission.
Some critics of the minimum wage have argued it is too high while others believe it has not risen fast enough to reduce poverty in the UK.
The Living Wage Foundation charity operates the real living wage, which sets a minimum £12 an hour wage across the UK and £13.15 in London.
It is aimed at UK workers aged 18 and over but it is not a legal requirement, and businesses choose whether to pay it.
The charity says more than 460,000 employees working for 14,000 firms currently receive the real living wage.
A report by the International Monetary Fund on the effect of minimum wages across developed and developing countries found that “research spanning several decades has not settled the debate”.
It said that some studies found a minimum wage had significant benefits for workers while “others conclude that it is harmful. Many studies have been inconclusive”.
The Resolution Foundation said analysis of the UK showed that between 1980 and 1998, hourly pay growth in the UK was twice as fast for the highest earners as it was for the lowest earners – 3.1% versus 1.4% a year.
“But since 1999 this trend has reversed, and hourly pay inequality has fallen with pay growth for the lowest earners five times that seen by the highest earners – 1.6% versus 0.3 per cent per year,” it said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/that-1980s-sports-blog/2021/jan/23/everton-sheffield-wednesday-fa-cup-three-replays | Football | 2021-01-23T08:00:12.000Z | Steven Pye | When Everton took three replays to beat Sheffield Wednesday in FA Cup | Even though Everton were the reigning league champions, the summer of 1987 was an unsettling time for the club. Howard Kendall departed for Athletic Bilbao, leaving his former assistant Colin Harvey with the unenviable task of filling his great friend’s shoes. Most of the players stayed but, by the turn of the year, it was apparent that the league title would be going across Stanley Park to Anfield. Liverpool went on to finish 20 points clear of their local rivals, who dropped down to fourth in the table. Although Harvey did have the satisfaction of knocking Liverpool out of the League Cup. And, of course, the FA Cup provided the chance of winning some silverware.
The draw for the third round paired Everton with a club that had suffered a stuttering start to the 1987-88 league campaign. Sheffield Wednesday had won just one of their first 12 league matches – a dire run that included a 4-0 defeat at Everton. Yet their fortunes improved when manager Howard Wilkinson signed centre-back Nigel Pearson from Shrewsbury in October. With Pearson slotted into a five-man defence, Wednesday won eight of their next 11 matches and shot up the table.
They even managed to beat Everton on New Year’s Day. It was their first victory over the Toffeemen in 20 attempts and it gave them a welcome boost before their FA Cup tie at Hillsborough the following weekend. “If Wednesday can beat Everton for the second time in just over a week, a season which began badly for Howard Wilkinson could take on an added glow,” wrote David Lacey in his preview in the Guardian.
Sheffield Wednesday 1–1 Everton, 9 January 1988
The first instalment of the tie was a battle. “Not what you’d call a classic football match,” said Wilkinson. Everton probably had the best of the chances, Dave Watson passing up a glorious opportunity in the first half, Ian Snodin missing twice and Wayne Clarke having a goal ruled out for offside.
With 14 minutes left, Wednesday struck first. A deep Brian Marwood cross was helped back across goal by Lee Chapman, allowing Colin West to head past Southall. But Everton equalised just five minutes later. Martin Hodge parried a shot from Graeme Sharp and Peter Reid scored to force a replay. “I don’t trust my left foot, so I hit it with my right,” Reid admitted later. “The match was scrappy even by early-round Cup standards,” wrote Michael Nally in the Guardian. “Both teams were energetic but unimaginative.” It would be a theme for the first three episodes of the soap opera.
Everton 1–1 Sheffield Wednesday, 13 January 1988
The first replay at Goodison four days later followed the same template. Everton, who had lost skipper Kevin Ratcliffe in the first match, drafted in Neil Pointon and moved Pat Van Den Hauwe to centre-back. Wednesday, in their silver away kit, were tough to break down, their centre-back trio of Pearson, Madden and Larry May absorbing pressure. And up front, targetmen Chapman and West proved a handful.
Chapman gave Wednesday the lead this time, his header from Sterland’s cross in the 32nd minute sending the away fans among the 32,935 gate into raptures. Chapman had a chance to put the tie to bed later in the game but Southall saved his effort and he could only fire the rebound narrowly wide. He must have been kicking himself when Sharp volleyed home a superb equaliser in the 76th minute. The match went into extra-time, but neither side could find a winner. They would have to meet again at the same ground after Everton won the toss to decide the venue for the second replay.
Everton 1–1 Sheffield Wednesday, 25 January 1988
Their third meeting also ended in a 1-1 draw but at least the order of the goals changed. Everton took the lead, Trevor Steven heading in Adrian Heath’s cross just after half time. But, with just five minutes remaining, Chapman deflected Nigel Worthington’s shot past Southall to drag the match into another period of extra time.
When Wolves were trounced 3-0 by non-league Chorley in the FA Cup
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“It is the tie that will not die,” wrote Stephen Bierley in the Guardian. “After 330 minutes of muck and nettles, these two sides will meet again at Hillsborough to decide, if at all possible, who will play Middlesbrough on Saturday. Do not bet on the winner.”
The second replay was watched by 37,414 supporters and, with 38,953 at Hillsborough for the denouement, more than 142,000 spectators went through the turnstiles. The clubs reportedly earned £250,000 each from gate receipts. This would be of little consolation to Wilkinson and his players come the fourth instalment of the tie.
Sheffield Wednesday 0–5 Everton, 27 January 1988
Crucially, Madden missed the third replay with a calf injury, meaning Wilkinson had to revert to a back four, with Mark Chamberlain coming into the team. Everton took advantage in spectacular fashion. West should have fired Wednesday in front after just 15 seconds but, from that moment on, the game was an unmitigated disaster for the home team.
Sharp gave Everton the lead after five minutes and, when Pearson was dispossessed by Steven, Snodin put Heath through on goal to score their second. After 19 minutes of the fourth match, one of the teams finally held a two-goal advantage for the first time.
Pearson’s wobbly night continued. In the 39th minute, Heath dispossessed the Wednesday centre-back and cut the ball back for Sharp to score with a delicious left-footed chip from the edge of the box. Everton were out of sight, but there was still time for two more goals in the first half. Sharp completed his hat-trick, heading in a cross from the superb Steven, and Snodin slotted home after a surging run from midfield to give Everton a 5-0 lead.
The supporters at Hillsborough could barely believe what they had seen in the opening 45 minutes. Not that every Everton fan was able to witness the mayhem. “A lot of Evertonians had encountered problems travelling across the Pennines,” wrote Sharp in his autobiography Sharpy. “And they refused to believe that we were 5-0 up at the break.”
Under the headline “Wednesday at the Sharp end,” Bierley noted that Everton had “made a complete mockery of the three previous tighter-than-tight encounters by completely crushing the life out of Sheffield Wednesday.” Wilkinson described it as “a horrendous affair”.
“It was quality finishing,” said Harvey. “Every chance we got, we took.” Three days later he turned his attention to a fourth-round tie against Middlesbrough. His players could not get enough of the FA Cup, taking another three matches to reach the fifth round, where they were beaten by Liverpool – who would go on to lose to Wimbledon in the final.
Ian Snodin evades a sliding tackle from Barry Venison in the tie between Liverpool and Everton at Goodison in February 1988, which Liverpool won 1-0. Photograph: PA
The Sheffield Wednesday tie had been an epic in its own right, requiring four games in 18 days to separate the teams. A few years later the FA decreed that these marathons would be a thing of the past after another four-match series between Leeds and Arsenal. Wilkinson, who was in charge of Leeds at the time, was probably in full agreement.
This article appeared first on That 1980s Sports Blog
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/31/the-devil-i-know-claire-kilroy-review | Books | 2012-08-31T21:55:05.000Z | Stevie Davies | The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy - review | Tristram Amory St Lawrence, 13th Earl of Howth, latterly of Finnegans Wake, hospitalised dead-drunk in Belgium and generally believed defunct, has been resurrected and dried out – and now returns to his native Ireland, where a gorgeous pint of stout tempts him. There it stands, mouth-wateringly: "My darkest depths were in that vessel, a chalice I had crossed the earth to evade … I was holding my soul, distilled into liquid and aching to be reunited with my body." Tristram refrains from tasting it, though afterwards, on his way to an AA meeting, he surreptitiously "suckled the knuckle the stout had doused". It's only a matter of time, for, suckler or sucker, Tristram shares in the infantilism of his compatriots as they savour Ireland's boom. At the airport to meet the returnee is Hickey, old schoolmate, corrupt builder, with a financial proposition. And on the phone is his unseen mentor and demon, the sinister Monsieur Deauville.
Is it credible that the patrician Tristram is so matey with the foul-mouthed Hickey? Don't ask. There are no realistic characters in The Devil I Know, only savage caricatures. In this carnivalesque allegory of Ireland's property boom, Claire Kilroy presents a satiric danse macabre of brio and linguistic virtuosity. The profiteers are an array of vulpine nasties and asinine greedies who've sold both soul and reason to Old Nick. Tristram, scion of an ancient Anglo-Norman house, has unknowingly sold his birthright for a mess of potage.
As the novel opens, the year is 2016 and Tristram is testifying at a tribunal delving into the Celtic Tiger's dodgy dealings. Kilroy's novel is a fable whose moral we already know: Ireland, spending money it didn't have, lost everything it did have. It's a dark divertimento that runs on linguistic verve and energy, a madly saturnalian style for a berserk era. Her Ireland is populated by ghouls and asses, with Tristram harbouring a bit of both. As in Tristram Shandy, another cock and bull story, the hero's brain is a flimsy organ: Sterne's Tristram acknowledges, "So often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it." Kilroy's Tristram, appointed "Director, Castle Holdings", exists in a state of existential bafflement, goggling at the fact that his shell company "bought nothing, sold nothing, manufactured nothing, did nothing", with tremendous profits. "Me? I was only the conduit," he tells the judge.
But indeed nobody in the book understands the nature of money. Money's something provided by banks, to be handed to corrupt government ministers such as Ray Lawless. This bent politican arrives in person to collect his bribe, a "rain-coloured man" carrying off a Jiffy Bag stuffed with cash "under his arm like a hog". The grand dreams and schemes cherished by Hickey, Viking and the other wannabe-billionaires are all funded by debt.
The prostitution of the motherland to property developers begins in Tristram's cession of his maternal inheritance, Hilltop, for an apartment complex whose value increases exponentially by the day. The ventures of the so-called "Golden Circle" hyperinflate to plans for a new urban quarter for Dublin, "to annex London", "to purchase Britain", Shanghai, the world. The wine drunk by these dreamers is "rich in tannin", blackening their lips, hearts, souls. They laugh "in a medieval display of mettle", padding around the boardroom "in an exhausted delirium, the mark of the plague still staining their lips". A blackly comic afflatus swells until its essential bathos punctures it. I was reminded of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon and the Jacobean world of The Alchemist and Volpone – but Kilroy's banal modern clones lack lascivious imagination. "They are all the same. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler, sitting sharpening their knives."
What The Devil I Know fails to do is to give the reader a sense of how the grand scam affected ordinary people when, with the international banking crisis, the world economy collapsed. On the other hand, its feeling for the rape of nature, both landscape and animals, is powerful and poignant. The scene of lobsters being barbecued is one I shall flinchingly remember: the intoxicated profiteers don't bother to kill them before cooking, and the seared creatures escape, dropping to the floor, scurrying for shelter, stamped on and replaced. And still they won't die. "Christ … it's still alive." The insult to nature is not the least of the squanderers' sins and a sign of their twisted minds. The savage indignation of such a scene taps into the darkness of the finest Irish satire.
Stevie Davies's Into Suez is published by Parthian. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/30/survivors-give-harrowing-testimony-of-darfur-sudan-year-of-hell | Global development | 2023-12-30T13:00:33.000Z | Fred Harter | ‘They told us – you are slaves’: survivors give harrowing testimony of Darfur’s year of hell | Gamar al-Deen was visiting a friend when gunmen poured into his neighbourhood on 27 April 2023. “I came back to find they were all dead,” he says. “My mother, my father, uncles, brothers, sisters. I wanted to die myself in that moment.”
Deen, a teacher, lost a dozen members of his family that day. Several of his neighbours were killed too. At his friend’s during the carnage, he saw a group of fighters strip a woman naked and then rape her in the street. “They told us, ‘This area belongs to us, not you, you are slaves,’” he says.
The attack was one of many by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary organisation, and allied Arab militiamen in El Geneina, capital of Sudan’s West Darfur region, between mid-April and mid-June. Their fighters carried out almost daily raids against areas of the city populated by the Masalit, an African ethnic group, according to former residents.
Gamar al-Deen, a teacher in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, lost a dozen family members on 27 April 2023 in an attack carried out by RSF paramilitaries
The attacks happened as the world’s attention was focused on fighting 700 miles away in the capital, Khartoum, as foreign governments launched frantic airlifts to evacuate their citizens. The scale of the tragedy unfolding in Darfur, a region ravaged by 20 years of genocidal violence, would only begin to emerge weeks later.
Sometimes the attacks were targeted, as the militiamen hunted down educated Masalits on kill lists. Mostly they were not. Masalit men and boys were accused of being fighters and summarily shot. Women and girls were killed. Women were raped near corpses.
There’s nobody in El Geneina. It’s ghostly quiet. It’s horrific to see areas once full of life now totally empty
Aid worker
Mahmoud Adam, a former interpreter with the African Union’s Darfur peacekeeping force, which left at the end of 2020, lived close to an RSF base in the city. He said Arab militia would arrive most mornings on horses and motorbikes before heading out to launch attacks on Masalit neighbours.
“For two months, this was their routine,” says Adam. “I would hear them talking about the number of people they had killed at the end of each day.”
The attacks started on 24 April, according to residents, just over a week after nationwide fighting erupted between the Sudanese military and the RSF. They culminated in mid-June, after the killing of the governor of West Darfur, a Masalit, which prompted a panicked evacuation of El Geneina’s Masalit residents to neighbouring Chad and the outlying district of Ardamata, home to a large military base.
Rape, murder, looting: massacre in Ardamata is the latest chapter in Darfur’s horror story
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Thousands of fleeing civilians made easy pickings for RSF fighters and Arab militia, who fired at the crowds and at passing vehicles, according to survivors. One witness described “a scene from hell” with dozens of bodies along the roadside and washed up on the banks of a nearby river, some with their hands tied.
The hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières in the Chadian town of Adré received more than 850 patients with bullet, stab and shrapnel wounds between 14 and 17 June.
Sexual violence was a feature of the bloodshed with gunmen rounding up and raping women and girls.
El Geneina once had a mixed population of more than half a million. Today, its Masalit neighbourhoods are deserted. “There’s nobody there, it’s ghostly quiet,” says an aid worker who visited recently. “It is horrific to see areas that used to be bustling, full of life, now totally empty.”
Destruction in El Geneina’s marketplace after fighting between the Sudanese army and the RSF on 29 April 2023
The cycle of violence would repeat itself in early November after the RSF captured the military base in Ardamata, a few miles from El Geneina. The garrison fell amid days of killings and looting. Last month, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the UN’s genocide prevention adviser, warned that Darfur risked becoming a “forgotten crisis”.
H
alf a million people now live in hastily assembled camps in Chad. Cash-strapped aid agencies are struggling to respond: the refugees do not have enough mosquito nets, blankets or water. About 175,000 are living in grass huts they weaved themselves.
A Sudanese refugee builds a grass hut in the border town of Adré, eastern Chad, where about 175,000 displaced people live in similar makeshift huts
“Nearly every person who crossed the border has some sort of trauma,” says Eric Kwakya, a psychologist with the International Rescue Committee. “They have seen terrible things.”
Sherif al-Deen, a social worker, was drinking coffee in an El Geneina marketplace when RSF fighters and Arab militia first attacked on 24 April. He raced home, narrowly avoiding bullets ricocheting through the streets. He spent the next seven weeks volunteering at a clinic, collecting the wounded and dead from around the city with a team of volunteers. Bodies were wrapped in blankets and loaded on to donkey carts.
Sherif al-Deen, a social worker, risked his life to help collect the wounded and dead
Sherif saw a group of Arab fighters fire on a crowd with a machine gun, killing eight. Several of his colleagues were shot. “It was very dangerous work, but I had to do it for my people,” he says.
Burying the dead carried risks. To avoid being targeted by snipers, mourners held clandestine funerals for their loved ones at night, says Abdulmonim Adam, a lawyer and human rights monitor, who attended a dozen night burials between April and June.
At one funeral, the mourners came under fire and had to abandon the bodies beside half-dug graves. “If they see you burying the dead – if they see even the flash of a torch – they will kill you,” he says.
One of the deadliest attacks came on 12 and 13 May. At least 280 people were killed over those two days, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Trade Union.
We could hear gunfire for two months but our commanders told us it was a tribal conflict and not for us to intervene
Soldier at Ardamata garrison
Sara Mohamed* described gunmen looting her home on 12 May. During the attack, they shot her neighbour’s 10-year-old daughter. “I rushed to hold her, to stop the bleeding, but she died in my arms,” she says.
Another young girl was wounded, and a woman was shot through the stomach. When the militia returned a few hours later, they shot Mohamed’s father and burned down her home.
The massacre unfolded in stages over several weeks. Throughout the bloodshed, the Sudanese garrison at Ardamata’s military base did not venture beyond its blast walls. “We could hear gunfire for two months,” says one soldier. “But our commanders told us it was a tribal conflict, that it was not for us to intervene.”
People trying to escape the violence in West Darfur cross the border into Adré, Chad, in August 2023
Mohamed and another woman interviewed by the Guardian were raped during the violence. Mohamed was gang-raped at knifepoint. The second woman was abducted off the street by a group of men, who covered her head and bundled her into a car. It was a targeted attack. “They called me by my name,” she says. “They said, ‘We know you are writing about the RSF on Facebook.’” Eventually she was driven back to El Geneina and dumped outside a clinic, hands still tied behind her back.
‘If they see you burying the dead they will kill you’: Abdulmonim Adam, a lawyer and human rights monitor who attended a dozen secret night-time burials
That was not the end of her ordeal. A few days later, as she fled to Chad, her vehicle was stopped by a group of armed Arab villagers. They shot the car’s two male occupants. Then two of the villagers took turns raping her and the other female passenger, a 13-year-old girl, beneath a tree.
One of the attackers was middle-aged; the other looked about 18. “I heard the man talking about how happy he was to rape such a young girl,” she says.
She still receives threatening social media messages from unidentified men in El Geneina. A recent voice note sent on WhatsApp said: “We will find you in Chad. You are a slut. Whenever you come back to Sudan, we will do what we want with you.”
S
ix months on, Sudan’s war is poised to escalate. Having captured most of Darfur, the RSF appears to be cementing its grip over Khartoum. This month, the paramilitaries took Wad Madani, the country’s second city, which had been hosting 500,000 refugees from Khartoum and serving as a logistics hub for aid agencies.
Close to 7 million people have been uprooted across Sudan, the world’s biggest displacement crisis. More than half the population need aid, and 3.5 million children under five are malnourished.
“A country of 46 million people is heading rapidly towards collapse, with very little attention from the outside world,” says Toby Harward, the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. “While acknowledging other crises elsewhere in the world right now, the scale of this crisis is unmatched, and it will have significant ramifications for the region and beyond.”
Sudanese refugees wait for UN World Food Programme food distribution in Adré
The international response to the crisis in Darfur has been “completely absent”, says Cameron Hudson, a former White House official. Hudson is critical of US-led attempts to mediate an “elite deal” between the RSF and the Sudanese military. “The US is worried the RSF won’t keep showing up if it holds them responsible for their atrocities and introduces sanctions,” he says. “They are holding the US government hostage.”
Meanwhile, among the Sudanese refugees camping in the desert in Chad, unease is growing. “Even here, I do not feel safe,” says Gamar al-Deen, the teacher.
* Name has been changed to protect identity
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2021/mar/27/the-joy-of-six-toe-pokes-in-football-and-futsal | Football | 2021-03-27T08:00:08.000Z | Jamie Fahey | The Joy of Six: toe-pokes in football and futsal | Jamie Fahey | It comes from futsal. No space? No time? No backlift? No worries. Boom. The toe-poke finish. Or toe-punt. Or toe-ender. Whatever the name – and there are plenty – its effect is felt before it is seen. As Stuart Dallas showed for Leeds recently, it’s a skill witnessed in “big” football all too rarely. So sit back and marvel at the beauty of this joyfully utilitarian act of predatory pragmatism.
1) Romário, Brazil 3-0 Cameroon, 1994 World Cup
O Baixinho (The Little One) led the line in more ways than one: first futsal-formed Brazilian to excel for Barcelona; most successful importer of the Chute de Bico (beak kick) to the 11-a-side game. Yes, Pelé and Rivellino used 1950s futebol de salão street smarts on the bigger stage. As did the next-generation seleção, the 1982 vintage of Zico, Sócrates and Éder. But it was Romário who seemed to steal every goal with a sneaky toe-poke. Up against Cameroon in the 1994 World Cup, the squat No 11 skipped free after collecting Dunga’s beguiling outside-of-the-foot invitation. Advancing with menace, he awaited goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell’s gamble-tumble before neatly prodding the ball home.
He repeated it against Sweden. With Thomas Ravelli in goal bewildered (check out his “What the hell was that?” face), the camera cuts to the selecão bench, where a 17-year-old Cruzeiro starlet wearing No 20 and “Ronaldo” on his back gawps in admiration. His day would come. This was Romário’s time. Six months after this Pep Guardiola-assisted toe-wonder for Barcelona (in a 5-0 clásico victory), he shot Brazil to glory. Johan Cruyff later anointed Romário the best he’d ever coached, declaring: “You never knew what to expect … his technique was outstanding, and he scored from every possible position, most of them with his toe.”
2) Ronaldinho, Chelsea 4-2 Barcelona, 2005 Champions League
Ronaldinho’s capoeira-style pirouette, jig and shoot routine bamboozled not only Petr Cech but an array of lurking blue shirts and the 40,000 fans in Stamford Bridge. This was unadulterated futsal flair, brought alive for a new, astounded Champions League audience.
It carries no warning. With time standing still – like almost every Chelsea player – the only discernible movements are a young Andrés Iniesta flitting around like he did on the dusty courts of Albacete and Frank Lampard proving he could do it at both ends by arriving fashionably late in the box. The ball trampolines from one side of the net to the other before the referee signals a goal. Although Chelsea prevailed, it was the imperious Barcelona No 10’s night.
1⃣ Ronaldinho magic at Stamford Bridge in 2005 🤯@FCBarcelona | @10Ronaldinho | #UCL pic.twitter.com/0vW0vSwSoh
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) March 21, 2021
Ronaldinho’s artistic foundation on a futsal court got an alternative airing in the Joga Bonito Nike adverts the following year. Celebrated in these parts as one of a select few special goals, Ronaldinho’s dictionary-definition jiggery-pokery moved Daniel Harris to declare him the ultimate “confidence trickster”. Naturally, the Gaúcho boy master of the bola pesada (heavy ball) sees a different picture. It was just one of the “skills and understanding of the game” learned on court. Weeks later, he flaunted two more small-court manoeuvres, the sole control and toe-scoop, to pass the baton of futsal-formed South American style to a 17-year-old boy called Lionel for his first Barcelona goal.
3) Ronaldo, Brazil 1-0 Turkey 2002 World Cup
Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima’s running shunt past the stunned Turkey goalkeeper Rustu sent Brazil towards another World Cup final. It also reopened the Chute de Bico debate. Genius street-court guile or unseemly foul play? Back in España 82, the Tartan Army’s feelings were clear as a chorus of anger greeted Jimmy Hill’s errant dismissal of David Narey’s toes-laces thunderbolt against Zico, Sócrates and Éder’s Brazil as a mere “toe-poke”.
It wasn’t, of course. But even if it were, that’s fine – especially in Brazil, where it’s lauded. So despite the BBC match report labelling the 2002 effort “essentially a weak shot”, Ronaldo O Fenômeno (The Phenomenon) was having none of it. The toe-ender is “the most famous” import from the futsal of his youth, he insisted. The double Ballon d’Or winner also hailed the man he applauded from the bench in Michigan’s Pontiac Silverdome eight years earlier. “It was a Romário-style goal,” he announced. Long since retired, O Fenômeno vowed in 2020 to put futsal – “quick thinking, speed, skill and control of the ball” – centre stage at the academy of Real Valladolid, the Spanish La Liga club he owns.
The toe of genius. Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters
4) Oscar, Brazil 3-1 Croatia 2014 World Cup
This glory-shot in the dying seconds sealed a 3-1 victory, with every goal registered by self-styled Brazilan futsal advocates. Barcelona’s Neymar grabbed Brazil’s first two after Real Madrid’s Marcelo had unintentionally toed one into his own goal. Oscar’s 20-yarder borrowed from the Ronaldinho and Ronaldo textbook, the unseemly power and minimal backlift leaving Croatia’s Stipe Pletikosa collapsing like an unset jelly tipped prematurely out of its mould.
“It was a Romário goal,” Oscar said, to less surprise than he’d inflicted on Pletikosa. “Most of us have played futsal, where you use the toe a lot.” Fifa placed it seventh in its World Cup toe-pokes top 10. Romário’s Cameroon punt is fifth. Ronaldo takes second. Curiously, first place goes to arguably the greatest World Cup goal of all time, Diego Maradona’s hands-free effort against England in 1986. The Joy of Six cries foul. Where’s the sense in defining a goal of such majesty by the 12th and final touch of a 10-second slalom of destruction? By this logic, John Barnes’s samba-style saunter in the Maracanã in 1984 enters the “six-yard tap-ins with the weaker foot” category. Madness. But decide for yourself.
5) Falcão, Argentina 2-3 Brazil 2012 Futsal World Cup
The “Pelé of futsal” at his impeccable best. International goal No 338 for São Paulo-born Alessandro Rosa Vieira, known as Falcão, who retired in 2018 with a record 402 goals for Brazil. His greatest hits make compelling viewing. In 2012, the 34-year-old rescues the seleção at 2-1 to Argentina in the World Cup quarter-final. With six minutes left, he dumps the ball in the net with a swivel and caneta (pen, aka nutmeg), firing through a precise size-4 ball-shaped gap between defender Maximiliano Rescia’s legs. A more routinely audacious sole-control and toe-poke bullet in the final saved eventual champions Brazil at 2-1 down to Spain with three minutes remaining.
Such customary cunning defines the game in Brazil. São Paulo giants and 2020 LNF champions Magnus Sorocaba defeated Turabão in a Chute de Bico festival play-off semi-final: rising star Leozinho plus a 35-metre strike by Brazil captain Rodrigo. Naturally, Turabão’s goal came via Ferrugem’s toe-end.
Falcão in 2016. Photograph: Jan Kruger/Fifa via Getty Images
6) Ricardinho, Portugal 3-2 Spain, 2018 Futsal European Championship
It’s not all about Brazil. Ricardinho is Portugal’s heir to Falcão as best futsal player on the planet, a man nicknamed O Mágico (the Magician) and labelled a hybrid of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, two of the many 11-a-side luminaries with childhood futsal stories. Ricardinho’s boomer, a minute into the 2018 Euros final against Spain, earns adulation for historic impact. Mirroring Ronaldo’s 2016 exploits, he captained Portugal to a first title despite hobbling off injured.
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This list includes edited extracts from Futsal – The Story of an Indoor Football Revolution by Jamie Fahey, which is published by Melville House on 1 July | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/a-green-transition-that-leaves-no-one-behind-world-leaders-release-open-letter | Environment | 2023-06-20T23:01:47.000Z | Emmanuel Macron | ‘A green transition that leaves no one behind’: world leaders release open letter | We are urgently working to deliver more for people and the planet. Multiple, overlapping shocks have strained countries’ ability to address hunger, poverty, and inequality, build resilience and invest in their futures. Debt vulnerabilities in low- and middle-income countries present a major hurdle to their economic recovery, and to their ability to make critical long-term investments.
We are urgently working to fight poverty and inequalities. An estimated 120 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty in the last three years and we are still far from achieving our United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030. We should thus place people at the centre of our strategy to increase human welfare everywhere on the globe.
We want a system that better addresses development needs and vulnerabilities, now heightened by climate risks, which could further weaken countries’ ability to eliminate poverty and achieve inclusive economic growth. Climate change will generate larger and more frequent disasters, and disproportionately affect the poorest, most vulnerable populations around the world. These challenges cross borders and pose existential risks to societies and economies.
We want our system to deliver more for the planet. The transition to a net zero world and the goals of the Paris agreement present an opportunity for this generation to unlock a new era of sustainable global economic growth. We believe that just ecological transitions that leave no one behind can be a powerful force for alleviating poverty and supporting inclusive and sustainable development. This requires long-term investment everywhere to ensure that all countries are able to seize this opportunity. Inspired by the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, we also need new economic models which recognise the immense value of nature for humanity.
We are convinced that poverty reduction and protection of the planet are converging objectives. We must prioritise just and inclusive transitions to ensure that the poor and most vulnerable can fully reap the benefits of this opportunity, rather than disproportionally bearing the cost. We recognise that countries may need to pursue diverse transition paths in line with the 1.5C limit depending on their national circumstances. There will be no transition if there is no solidarity, economic opportunities, or sustainable growth to finance it.
We, leaders of diverse economies from every corner of the world, are united in our determination to forge a new global consensus. We will use the Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact on June 22-23 as a decisive political moment to recover development gains lost in recent years and to accelerate progress towards the SDGs, including just transitions. We are clear on our strategy: development and climate commitments should be fulfilled and, in line with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, we recognise that we need to leverage all sources of finance, including official development assistance, domestic resources and private investment.
Delivering on that consensus should start with existing financial commitments. Collective climate-finance goals must be met in 2023. Our total global ambition of $100bn (£78bn) of voluntary contributions for countries most in need, through a rechannelling of special drawing rights or equivalent budget contributions, should also be reached.
No country should have to wait years for debt relief. We need greater and more timely cooperation on debt, for both low- and middle-income countries. This starts with a swift conclusion of solutions for debt-distressed countries.
A top priority is to continue ambitious reform of our system of multilateral development banks, building on the existing momentum. We are asking development banks to take responsible steps to do much more with existing resources and to increase financing capacity and private capital mobilisation, based on clear targets and strategies in terms of private finance contribution and domestic resource mobilisation. These financial resources are essential, but this reform is about far more than money. It should deliver a more effective operational model, based on a country-led approach. We also need our development banks to work together as an ecosystem, closely with other public agencies and streamlined vertical funds – and, where appropriate, with philanthropists, sovereign wealth funds, private finance and civil society – to deliver the greatest impact.
Technology, skills, sustainability, and public and private investment will be at the core of our partnerships, to promote voluntary technology transfer, a free flow of scientific and technological talents, and contribute to an inclusive, open, fair and non-discriminatory economy. We will promote an agenda of sustainable and inclusive investment in developing and emerging economies, based on local economic value added and local transformation, such as fertiliser value chains. This comprehensive approach will require new metrics to update our accountability instruments.
Public finance will remain essential to achieving our goals. We should start with strengthening our instruments (the International Development Association, the International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust and Resilience and Sustainability Trust, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Green Climate Fund, and other concessional windows of our banks, as well as the Global Shield against Climate Risks). But we acknowledge that meeting our development and climate goals, including the fight against hunger, poverty, and inequality; adapting to climate change; and averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage, will require new, innovative, and sustainable sources of finance, such as debt buy-backs, engagement from sectors that prosper thanks to globalisation, and more trusted carbon- and biodiversity-credit markets.
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Increasing resilience through a comprehensive suite of financial instruments is a priority. We need a stronger global safety net, based on prearranged approaches, to adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change, especially when disasters hit. This implies climate and other disaster-resilient deferral mechanisms, insurance nets and emergency-response financing, including a more sustainable financing model of humanitarian aid.
Achieving our development goals, including climate mitigation, will also depend on scaling up private capital flows. This requires enhanced mobilisation of the private sector with its financial resources and its innovative strength, as promoted by the G20 Compact with Africa. This also requires improving the business environment, implementing common standards and adequate capacity building, and reducing perceived risks, such as in foreign exchange and credit markets. This may require public support, as well as sharing reliable data. Overall, our system needs to lower the cost of capital for sustainable development, including through the green transition in developing and emerging economies.
Our work together is all about solidarity and collective action, to reduce the challenges facing developing countries and to fulfil our global agenda. We will continue to press for progress, leveraging other important events, including the G20 summits in India and Brazil, the SDG summit and the COPs, starting with Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates this year. In all of our upcoming international works and negotiations, we will seek to advance concrete actions that deliver on the promise of the SDGs, for our prosperity, people, and planet.
Emmanuel Macron is president of France. Mia Mottley is prime minister of Barbados. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is president of Brazil. Ursula von der Leyen is president of the European Commission. Charles Michel is president of the European Council. Olaf Scholz is chancellor of Germany. Fumio Kishida is prime minister of Japan. William Ruto is president of Kenya. Macky Sall is president of Senegal. Cyril Ramaphosa is president of South Africa. Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan is president of the United Arab Emirates. Rishi Sunak is prime minister of the UK. Joe Biden is president of the US | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/may/25/james-thierree-room-edinburgh-festival | Stage | 2022-05-25T08:49:46.000Z | Chris Wiegand | ‘Shake it and see what happens’: the confounding world of James Thierrée | At a corner table in a Parisian cafe James Thierrée is swivelling around in his seat. He’s on the lookout for his morning coffee, he explains, swinging back with a raspy laugh. Thierrée has created a series of beguiling stage shows and today has the air of an inventor with his white jacket, round specs and floppy fringe of salt and pepper curls.
His latest concoction is Room, which is on a European tour winding its way to the Edinburgh international festival (EIF) in August. By then, Thierrée explains, his Room will have been somewhat rearranged. “I never want them to be bored,” he says of the musicians and dancers who perform its loose-limbed melee of skits and tricks in a huge salon that is constructed before us on stage then promptly blown apart. “Every afternoon we switch a piece of music. I warned everyone it’s going to be moving all the time.” He assumes the roles of architect and director in the story, attempting to marshal his surroundings but constantly upended by them.
James Thierrée in Au Revoir Parapluie at Sadler’s Wells, London, in 2007. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Thierrée’s visually arresting shows – including Tabac Rouge and The Toad Knew – usually come with threadbare plots. This time, the connection between musical instruments and the instrument of the human body was his starting point for an exploration of “the whim of pleasure and music and nonsense”. His pick ’n’ mix collection of performers arrived for rehearsals in 2020 only to return home the following day because of rising Covid cases. Now, he hopes the piece will chime with pandemic-weary audiences who want to let go a little – although the single-room setting is bound to prompt flashbacks to lockdown. “Those bloody walls!” he groans, remembering his spell of isolation.
In the absence of plot, he likes to give the audience a tempo. “We can follow a beat,” he says, explaining that we are not just creatures of intellect but of “rhythm and unconscious yearnings”. If there is a philosophy to the show, he says, it is to “embrace chaos”. Did he give his performers similar advice for the creation process? “I try to tell them it should be about their head, too. If all I do is direct my dream, it’s kind of a lonely process. I need their madness.” The production has become a cultural exchange of sorts: the musicians roam around the stage, guided by Thierrée, while he is singing on stage for the first time.
“Usually I’m just a guy moving,” he says, somewhat underselling his incredible dexterity. But the rehearsals raised a question: “How about this movement produces a voice too?” Before long he was adding dialogue in various languages and rapping. But none of this should be a surprise, he says. “When you come from circus you try stuff – trapeze, acrobatics, juggling … You just put your hands on something and you shake it and see what happens.”
This attitude is one inheritance from his illustrious family tree. Thierrée is the great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill, the grandson of Charlie Chaplin and the son of Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin, with whose travelling circus he and his sister Aurélia performed from a young age. He glows as he recalls a world where “the act is just the act – a proposal and a response”. In music hall, “anyone with an idea could be a star. That used to fascinate me. Someone could do some funny stuff with a cigar and do that act for 20 years.”
Upended … Thierrée’s Room. Photograph: Richard Haughton
Chocolat, the 2016 film directed by Roschdy Zem and starring Thierrée, explored the durability of those traditions amid changing tastes and new technologies. In it he plays George Foottit, who teams up with Rafael “Chocolat” Padilla (Lupin’s Omar Sy), for a clowning act in belle époque Paris. Both give superb performances – Thierrée is brooding and inscrutable, bottled up for almost the entire movie until he bursts into a smile in its bittersweet climax. The film closes with archive footage of the real-life Foottit and Chocolat performing their act. How much of Thierrée’s own work has been recorded? “I’ve been really bad at it,” he grimaces. Archive recordings serve a purpose but he is sceptical about the artistic merits of filmed theatre – “the beauty of it is that it is ephemeral”, he suggests. “That’s our lot: we need to be very bright and then fade with our absence from stage.”
Playwrights and choreographers leave a legacy in the scripts and steps they create that are handed on to future interpreters. Thierrée’s productions are perhaps trickier to preserve. “Do we need to leave a trace?” he asks. “My grandfather left a trace that is ongoing. From our perspective, it’s fantastic. From his perspective, I don’t know – he’s gone. He can’t enjoy it any more.”
Chaplin managed the transition from vaudeville to silver screen with spectacular success; the music-hall acts in Chocolat fear their artform will be eclipsed by cinema. A century on, it’s the streaming giants who pose a threat but Thierrée still champions the unrivalled mystery of the stage as its USP. “You have to get inside that theatre and take a risk.” His productions become love letters to theatre itself. “It’s a temple and it’s also extremely simple,” he marvels. “The rules of the game in the theatre have always stayed the same, technically. You don’t need many years of training to understand how theatre works: sound, light, set. And yet it keeps renewing. It’s a beautiful subject.” If he ever writes a novel, he says, it will have a stage setting. “Maybe an Agatha Christie inside the theatre,” he cackles.
‘It’s almost overwhelming how free I am’ … Tabac Rouge at Sadler’s Wells in 2014. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
In the meantime he is finishing a screenplay, entitled Grog, that he will direct. It’s an attempt to find a cinematic language that corresponds to the stage work he has created with Compagnie du Hanneton, the outfit he formed in 1998. “Ninety per cent of what I do in theatre I can’t take into cinema,” he reflects. As an actor, his films have ranged from the blockbuster The Emperor of Paris, starring Vincent Cassel, to quirky indies such as Bartleby, Andreas Honneth’s 2010 adaptation of Herman Melville’s story. The latter had a handmade quality, blending silent film techniques, stage trickery and eccentric object theatre in a manner not dissimilar to Thierrée’s shows. His role as Melville’s scrivener, who adopts the line “I would prefer not to” as a menacing mantra, brilliantly matched his beatific yet brooding countenance.
Moonlighting in the movies has, he says, “nourished” his work in theatre. “Being an instrument for the director is interesting – being at the service of someone else’s vision. In my company it’s almost overwhelming how free I am. I don’t even have a play to be faithful to.” He describes the film roles as little missions, whereas he has inhabited the world of Room for more than two years now – and will do for several months yet on the road.
For Thierrée, the apartment in the show is a character with its own agenda – “more than just your own needs” – and, like any room, evokes memories of past occupiers. Much like theatre buildings themselves, then, providing a space for companies to move in, make their mark and move on? He smiles. “Oui, c’est ça.”
Room is touring Europe and is at the King’s theatre, Edinburgh, from 13 to 17 August as part of the Edinburgh international festival. Chris Wiegand’s trip to France was paid for by EIF. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/01/u-turn-rail-ticket-office-closures-public-opinion | Opinion | 2023-11-01T15:07:27.000Z | Zoe Williams | Rejoice at this U-turn over rail ticket office closures – whatever the reasons for it | Zoe Willliams | Iwant to believe in a world where this happened: Mick Lynch, head of the RMT union, did a media round last year so successful, running such effortless rings around Piers Morgan and the bishop of Durham in particular, that he built up his own power base in ambient public popularity, reflected in growing support for the rail strikes. As a result, the government’s previous strategy – to wind back rail subsidies via cuts to wages, jobs and conditions, acting and speaking in lockstep with the industry while stonewalling the union – gradually unravelled over 18 months.
In consequence the transport secretary, Mark Harper, has had to climb down on cuts to ticket offices – 1,000 were due to have been axed; that number is now zero – the government’s previous harmony with the industry is in discord, and Lynch is declaring a “resounding victory”.
I would love it if that were the chain of events: it would be more than a credit to Lynch. It would also prove that the power of withholding labour is timeless, and the fashionable media line – that strikes are silly, actually, and all they do is get people’s backs up – is no greater defence against them than a chiffon pashmina is against Storm Ciarán.
It would bode well for so many other sectors – medics, lecturers, teachers, baggage handlers, bus drivers, all of whom have had similar, bizarre experiences of ministers simply refusing to engage. Pat Cullen, head of the Royal College of Nurses, described to me her first meeting with the health secretary, Steve Barclay, exactly a year ago. She brought up the issue of pay, and recalls, “He said, ‘Let’s talk.’ Then he got up and left.”
The government’s industrial strategy, so far as workers are concerned, has been: ignore them and they’ll go away. Which, you have to admit, is novel.
Rail ticket office closures in England scrapped in government U-turn
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There’s an alternative reading of the climbdown on ticket offices that, if true, would be quite heartening from another perspective: that it was made necessary by a consultation, in which 750,000 responses were almost entirely against the closures, for reasons that often centred on accessibility. Passenger watchdogs Transport Focus and London TravelWatch described “passionate and powerful concerns” for how disabled and elderly passengers would get help if not from a ticket office.
The Tories have created a new poverty – one so deep and vicious it requires Victorian vocabulary
Frances Ryan
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Successive Conservative governments have been completely unresponsive to the impact their policies have had on people with disabilities. From introducing benefit cuts and backlogs to doing nothing to mitigate rising social care costs, no Tory prime minister since 2010 has had any compunction about making disabled people poorer. The writer and campaigner Frances Ryan described disabled people as having “not a cost of living crisis but a cost of staying alive crisis” this year.
The Covid inquiry this week has laid bare an attitude at the highest level of government that, being real, we could all hear at the time: they were using “underlying health issues”, along with “over 80” as code for “they would have died soon anyway”. If we really are witnessing a complete change of heart – where ministers hear concerns, listen to them and act – that is welcome, if pretty stunning.
There is another possible explanation for the U-turn, which isn’t necessarily competing, and which might just be part of the mix: closing ticket offices was unpopular with backbench Tories, the high-profile and noisier ones in particular. September saw the strange alliance between the TSSA union, Priti Patel and Mark Francois, the latter calling the proposals “completely unloved”, “quite, quite the opposite” of popular with backbenchers.
Ticket office U-turn ditches hated rail policy but where will savings come from now?
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Both Patel and Francois are renowned freelancers, and as such are not bad weathervanes for the state of the party, how well it’s living up to its promise. Parking Rishi Sunak’s explicit pledges when he took over as leader, which were mainly to rectify things over which he had little control and which would right themselves eventually anyway, his implicit promise was that he would create a new centre of gravity in the party around the reasonable people, as a result of which rebellions would quieten down and recalcitrant backbenchers would know the peace of their own irrelevance.
Probably through the combination of a lacklustre conference, the byelection defeats, and the canning of HS2 plus the chorus of high-profile internal dismay that came with it, Sunak has failed to deliver on the unity promise. There simply doesn’t seem to be any upside to obedience, particularly for “red wall” MPs who were elected under Boris Johnson’s completely different banner, and will owe whatever scant chance they have next time round to making a name for themselves on quintessentially local issues – like, as a wild for-instance, keeping the station’s ticket office open.
Ultimately, whether Harper is motivated by a new respect for union organising, a proper sensitivity to the needs of disabled people, or a catastrophically weak administration is of second-order importance. I know I speak for 75% of the population (OK, Good Morning Britain viewers, circa nine months ago) when I say: if Mick Lynch is happy, that works for me.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/04/charlotte-church-pay-70-percent-tax-to-protect-public-services | Music | 2015-06-04T14:32:26.000Z | Peter Walker | Charlotte Church says she would pay tax at 70% to protect public services | Charlotte Church’s status as a prominent anti-austerity campaigner has taken another step after the singer announced she would happily pay tax at a rate of 70% if it would protect public services.
Church, who last month won praise for defending herself as a “prosecco” socialist after some media reports accused her of hypocrisy for protesting against cuts while being personally wealthy, was speaking at the launch of another anti-austerity demonstration on Thursday.
I may be a prosecco socialist, but at least I went out to protest
Charlotte Church
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The 29-year-old was asked if she would happily pay more tax to protect services. She replied: “I have paid all my tax since I was 12 years old, and I would certainly be happy if the rate was 60% or 70%. I wouldn’t move away, I wouldn’t have an offshore account.
“That would be totally fine, for better infrastructure and public services and more of a Scandinavian model, which I see as far more progressive than the way we are, I would be absolutely fine with that.”
Great to see @charlottechurch at the #EndAusterityNow demo launch | Join us all on 20 June - http://t.co/WMzOtsEf6s pic.twitter.com/hefqNhdSmA
— Unite the union (@unitetheunion) June 4, 2015
Church was speaking in London alongside the Labour MP Rachael Maskel, the Green party’s deputy leader, Amelia Womack, and Steve Turner, assistant general secretary of the Unite union, to promote an anti-austerity protest planned for 20 June in central London, involving a march from the Bank of England to Parliament Square.
In May, Church joined a similar event in Cardiff. She said: “It was the first rally I have been on since I was nine and it was super fun for a start and it was amazing to be around lots of different types people from different walks of life who just have a common thread of empathy and it was inspiring to be with those people.
“A lot of the time when we think about the welfare state I think a lot of people think those people who are the most vulnerable in society are on benefits. But the welfare state is everything: it’s our fire service, it’s our NHS, our education, our travel, everything we have and we will all be affected by these cuts.
“And as soon as people realise the extent of it and how it really is going to affect all of us, I think there will be a lot of anger and a lot of discontent.”
Church was disparaging about David Cameron, saying she had experienced him as dismissive and sexist when she met him. She said: “I met Cameron at the party conference when I went with Hacked Off. He was gross and really misogynistic.
“All the men were opposite him, and me and [TV presenter] Jacqui Hames sat either side of him for the photo opportunity. He was so dismissive of what I had to say. It just really irked me that whole situation.”
Church reiterated that it was entirely legitimate for her to protest at the cuts while not herself being financially vulnerable: “Is it essential that I should have been through some personal suffering from the cuts to have empathy with everybody else? I don’t think so.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/19/radio-times-german-publisher-hubert-burda-bbc-worldwide-top-gear | Media | 2016-12-19T17:57:07.000Z | Mark Sweney | Radio Times likely to be bought by German media group | The Radio Times is poised to go into foreign ownership, as German publisher Hubert Burda finalises a deal to buy its parent company.
Immediate Media, which struck a £121m deal with BBC Magazines to buy, license or contract publish titles including Top Gear, Top of The Pops and Match of the Day magazines in 2011, could announce the deal before Christmas.
Hubert Burda, which in the UK owns titles including Your Home and HomeStyle, will require final consent from BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm, before it can take formal control of the titles. The deal is potentially worth as much as £275m.
Top Gear magazine's sales hit skids during Chris Evans era
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Immediate Media, which is owned by UK private equity company Exponent, publishes about 60 magazines and digital brands including 220 Triathlon and You and Your Wedding.
However, the jewel in its crown is Radio Times, which the BBC published from 1923 until the sale in 2011. The TV and radio listings title, which is in the process of developing its digital content operation, still sells 660,000 copies a month in print and generates as much as 60% of Immediate Media’s profits.
The Radio Times circulation reached a peak of nearly 9m in the 1950s and, even 25 years after the deregulation of UK TV listings which resulted in the launch of numerous competitors, it remains the UK’s third most popular paid-for magazine after TV Choice and What’s on TV.
Exponent, the previous owner of media jobs website Gorkana and the Times Educational Supplement, set up Immediate Media to take control of 34 magazines from the BBC in a complex deal in 2011.
The Radio Times was one of 11 titles sold outright by the BBC, along with others including food magazine Olive and Gardens Illustrated.
Eighteen BBC programme-branded titles, such as Gardeners’ World and BBC Wildlife, were licensed to Immediate Media.
A third group of titles, including Top Gear and Good Food, were retained by BBC Worldwide but published by Immediate Media under a contract publishing agreement.
Immediate Media, which is run by chief executive Tom Bureau, was formed by Exponent merging it with other publishers it owned, Magicalia and Origin.
The sale of Immediate Media, which several sources said probably would not go through before the new year, to Hubert Burda was first reported by Sky News.
DC Advisory, which is advising Exponent on the sale, declined to comment. Exponent and Burda could not be reached for comment. BBC Worldwide declined to comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2012/sep/14/viral-video-chart-iphone-5-britney | Media | 2012-09-14T06:02:00.000Z | Stuart O'Connor | Guardian Viral Video Chart: iPhone con, screaming sheep and Britney | We all know how … errr, "enthusiastic" … Apple fans are about being the first to get their hands on any new device. So imagine how excited these people were when they got the chance this week to check out the newly announced iPhone 5. And imagine how disappointed they felt when they learned that they had been conned by US late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel.
We've all seen the film The Silence of The Lambs, but have you ever heard a sheep scream? No? Well, now you have. And you'll probably never be able to unhear it, either.
Chances are talk radio host Mike Francesa would have stayed awake had he listened to screaming sheep. Instead he's stuck with the brilliantly named Sweeny Murti dissecting the latest baseball results. Unfortunately for Mike, talk radio is on TV these days. The expression on his face when he wakes up makes watching radio worth it.
Maybe Mike was listening to the snooze-inducing soundtrack of People Are Awesome. The footage, on the other hand, is breathtaking – a collage of, well, awe-inspiring stunts from snowboarders to mountain climbers.
Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and poked into shape with a stick by Stuart and Helienne
1 First look at the iPhone 5
Even Steve Jobs would have got a giggle out of this.
2 The screaming sheep
He's probably just having an existential crisis.
3 Sports talk radio host falls asleep at the mic
Trust us, you didn't miss a thing, Mike.
4 People Are Awesome
Do not try this at home.
5 Tara Palmer-Tomkinson tries her hand at a pop career
We tried to come up with a witty caption for this one, but this video has left us speechless. You decide if it's in a good or a bad way.
6 NASA: Magnificent eruption in full HD
The sun, up close and personal.
7 11-month-old twins dancing to daddy's guitar
Cuteness in stereo – aww-inspiring.
8 Assassin's Creed meets parkour in real life
A contender for a role in the next Bond movie, perhaps?
9 Sky Sports Do Take That
Never forget ... to go back to your day job.
10 Britney learns Gangnam style from Psy
Hit me baby one more time, Gangnam style.
Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 14:00 on 13 September 2012. The Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs, as well as Facebook and Twitter. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/09/spiritualized-review-barbican-london-jason-pierce-ladies-and-gentlemen | Music | 2016-11-09T13:05:58.000Z | Mark Beaumont | Spiritualized review – celestial narco-balladry hits exquisite heights | When most of us turn to intoxicants during a major breakup, we generally wake up with a smashed smartphone full of cry-texts, a reduced number of Twitter followers and a restraining order. It takes the rarefied vision of Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce to emerge clutching one of the most dazzling works of drug-ruined desolation ever recorded.
Intricately entwining his love of roots blues, religious spirituals, free jazz, krautrock drones, Busby Berkeley strings and celestial narco-balladry, Pierce’s 1997 masterstroke Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space was a raw-hearted slab of experimental majesty that seemed caught in the pain of the moment – as indie legend has it, the album documents how Pierce, allegedly addicted to heroin at the time, lost his partner and bandmate Kate Radley to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft. Almost 20 years on, however, it still demands regular event-status performances, befitting its standing as arguably the greatest symphony of the rock’n’roll era. Sorry, Muse.
Jason Pierce: 'My liver was gone'
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The decades have loosened its collar. Given the luxury of two hours, an orchestra and a gospel choir – mirroring its last full performance here in 2009 – Pierce, sitting stoically stage left, lets the album’s alternating ballads and noise pieces ebb, flow, flounder and expand, indulging its cataclysmic freakouts and prolonging euphoric crescendos, forever chasing that exquisite first high. The opening title track swells around its harmonic gospel reworking of Elvis’s Can’t Help Falling in Love like a 10-minute goosebump. Come Together, basically a White Album middle-eight fed amphetamines and tortured at length, stretches the sorry tale of Little Johnny “who dulled the pain but killed the joy” until he sounds like he’s bungee-jumping into the seventh circle. The horn section can’t wait to get throttling geese during the scree jazz jam at the end of Electricity.
The clash of fragility, grandeur and violence that Spiritualized would refine on subsequent albums is at its starkest here. Witness the moment where the glistening I Think I’m in Love collapses into a spent heap after its funky climactic battle between confidence and doubt – “I think I can fly,” warbles Pierce; “probably just falling,” sneers the choir – then is swept up by flocks of cinematic strings on All of My Thoughts.
‘Staggeringly affecting lullabies’ … Spiritualized. Photograph: Mark Allan
Between slabs of free-form noise cower staggeringly affecting lullabies for the lost: an oceanic Cool Waves; opulent country lament Stay With Me; and spaghetti western funeral scene Broken Heart.
Pierce has often dodged the album’s salacious implications, claiming much of it was written pre-split and even arguing that lines like “love in the middle of the afternoon, just me, my spike in my arm and my spoon” weren’t about drugs, which is a bit like the Wurzels claiming that any farming inference drawn from their music is purely down to the media’s tiresome obsession with arable.
Yet a spirit-lifting encore, including Pentecostal hand-waggler Oh Happy Day, marks Pierce’s emotional distance from the record today, closing the book on a modern concerto for future ages to reconstruct. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/25/uk-heart-disease-deaths-fall-by-over-20-since-indoor-smoking-ban | Society | 2017-06-25T17:29:03.000Z | Denis Campbell | UK heart disease deaths fall by over 20% since indoor smoking ban | Deaths from heart disease and strokes caused by smoking have fallen dramatically since lighting up in pubs, restaurants and other enclosed public places in England was banned 10 years ago.
New figures have shown that the number of smokers aged 35 and over dying from heart attacks and other cardiac conditions has dropped by over 20% since 2007 while fatalities from a stroke are almost 14% down.
Smoking rate in UK falls to second-lowest in Europe
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The statistics, which Public Health England (PHE) has shared with the Guardian, come as medical, public health and anti-tobacco groups prepare to mark the 10th anniversary next Friday of smoking being prohibited in indoor public places by Tony Blair’s Labour government on 1 July 2007.
Figures collected by PHE’s Local Tobacco Control Profiles network show that while there were 32,548 deaths from heart disease attributable to smoking in 2007-09, there were 25,777 between 2013 and 2015 – a fall of 20.8%. Similarly, a total of 9,743 smokers died from a stroke in 2007-09, but fewer – 8,334 – between 2013 and 2015, a drop of 14.5%.
Duncan Selbie, PHE’s chief executive, hailed the figures as proof of the ban’s huge beneficial impact on health. “The law has played a key part in the huge cultural change we have seen in the past decade, especially among younger people, a change that has literally saved thousands from disabling chronic diseases and premature death,” he told the Guardian.
“The smokefree legislation has been extraordinary in the way we now experience and enjoy pubs, clubs, restaurants and so many other public places. It was undoubtedly the single most important public health reform in generations,” he added.
The decline in smoking-related heart deaths is especially significant because smoking still accounts for about one in every six deaths in England – about 79,000 people a year. Fatalities due to heart disease make up a substantial proportion of them. Smoking-related deaths are three times more likely to occur among poorer people than those from better-off backgrounds, research showed.
The Health Act 2006, which introduced the ban in England, was the first of 10 pieces of legislation over 10 years that have helped drive down smoking’s popularity to its lowest level ever, Selbie said. The numbers of people across the UK who smoke has fallen over the last year from 17.2% to 15.8%, according to the most recent figures from NHS Digital, published last month.
England was the last UK nation to bring in a ban. Scotland did so in March 2006 and Wales and Northern Ireland followed in April 2007. The Blair government initially considered exempting bars, private clubs and pubs where no food was served. But it instead decided to impose a blanket ban after MPs and doctors criticised the exemptions as unfair, unworkable and likely to harm the health of staff breathing in secondhand smoke in premises where smoking continued.
“We’ve seen cigarettes stubbed out in public places, become far less visible in shops and had large graphic warnings put on packs starkly explaining what these things do to the human body – and all the misery and death they cause,” added Selbie.
“Its legacy has had a phenomenally positive impact on societal attitudes to smoking. Smokers have seized the opportunity by quitting in unprecedented numbers and of those still smoking, half have chosen to smoke outside their own homes to protect their families from secondhand smoke.”
Although fewer people than ever still smoke, PHE is concerned that it remains much more common among certain groups, including younger women, and is a major source of health inequalities.
Smoking causes one in ten deaths globally, major new study reveals
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For example, while just 10% of married people smoke, 21.2% of those who are single do so, as do 18.8% of those who have been widowed, divorced or separated. And while 15.7% of people who live with others smoke, 27.8% of those living alone light up. And the jobless, those in routine and manual jobs and those without a degree are between two and three times more likely than the employed, those in managerial and professional roles and graduates to use cigarettes.
“The decline in deaths since 2007 from smoking-related heart attacks and strokes shows the effectiveness of a comprehensive approach by government to tackle smoking,” said Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the charity Action on Smoking and Health.
“But there are still over 30,000 premature deaths a year from smoking-related heart attacks and stroke, and the government strategy for tackling this public health epidemic expired at the end of 2015. We need an ambitious new government strategy to be put in place immediately if deaths from smoking are to decline as fast in the next decade as they have in the last.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2021/sep/05/numbers-dont-always-mean-what-they-seem-to-mean | From the Observer | 2021-09-05T09:00:22.000Z | David Spiegelhalter | Numbers don’t always mean what they seem to mean | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters | Last Wednesday, the Evening Standard trumpeted “Covid deaths rocket to 207 in deadliest day in nearly 6 months”. In fact, deaths within 28 days of a positive test were slightly down over the previous week. So what did it get wrong?
It appears it fell for the common misunderstanding, even after 18 months of pandemic, that the daily death figure represents those occurring in the last 24 hours, whereas it is deaths that have been reported in that period and reports are fewer on weekends and holidays. The spike of 207 picked up the backlog from the bank holiday weekend – only 50 had been reported the previous day.
Not all statistics mean what they appear to mean. Some do not match common understanding, such as politicians counting a new wing or major refurbishment as a new “hospital”. Others are more subtle, like the BBC headline, “Covid: disabled people account for six in 10 deaths in England last year”, accompanied by a photograph of a person in a wheelchair. In this context, “disability” means something much wider than this may suggest, being defined as some long-term limitation to daily activities, even if related to old age. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows almost as high a share (54%) of non-Covid-19 deaths also met this definition. That reflects the observation that people who die of Covid are similar to those dying from other causes – Covid picks on the weak and vulnerable, just as normal life does. Exceptions include those with an increased risk of catching it.
When analysing the excess risk for people with a severe learning disability, ONS reports “the largest effect was associated with living in a care home or other communal establishment”. Economist Tim Harford talks about the dangers of “premature enumeration” – focusing on the numbers before being clear what they refer to. We are not immune. In last week’s column, we wrote about ethnic groupings of currently or recently pregnant women, but used an inappropriate classification of ethnicity of full-term live births.
It’s best to pause and make sure the numbers really mean what you think they mean.
This article was amended on 12 September 2021. An earlier version referred to “deaths within 24 days of a positive test”, when the intended reference was to deaths within 28 days of a positive test.
David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge. Anthony Masters is statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/apr/29/barca-real-madrid-sociedad-football | Football | 2013-04-29T14:57:13.000Z | Sid Lowe | A mix of Barça and Real Madrid, Real Sociedad put the fun in football | Sid Lowe | Xabi Prieto grinned. "We all knew what he was going to do," Real Sociedad's captain said. If they did, they were the only ones. For everyone else it was a surprise, and for Diego Alves especially, yet when the moment came there was something almost childishly joyous about it, something that felt right. It was Real Sociedad v Valencia, fourth v fifth, a direct battle for the final Champions League place and la Real midfielder Markel Bergara had described it as the most important match this year. A case could be made for calling it the most important in a decade. Victory would virtually ensure a return to Europe's elite almost 10 years later for a side that had been down to the second division and on the verge of disappearance since then.
Valencia had just pulled one back and they were after another, pushing, pushing. For them, gripped by economic crisis, qualification was a must. Four goals in just over two minutes last week had kept their hopes alive against the other side in the fight, Málaga. They trailed here but an equaliser would make the gap only two points with five agonising weeks ahead and there was hope. From 0-1 to 1-1, 2-1 and then 3-1, it was now 3-2, Jonas getting a header in the 88th minute, and Anoeta was whistling, pleading for the final whistle. Valencia had a corner, sending men forward. It was the 90th minute and everyone was getting nervous. Everyone except the Real Sociedad striker Imanol Agirretxe.
The ball was headed out and away he ran, into space. The pitch opened before him, Dani Parejo chased behind him. Some screamed for him to head to the corner; the worst thing that could happen now was that he would lose the ball and give Valencia another chance. He kept on running, on and on. Until he came face to face with Alves, the Valencia goalkeeper ... when he dropped his shoulder and scooped the ball gently up in the air, over the keeper's head and down into the net. So slowly, so smoothly, so softly, it was like he was playing in slippers. There was time to watch it fall gently into the net: you could have read the text on the side of it.
Agirretxe stood, arms out, grinning. How about that, then? In the stands, they went wild. Over on Canal Plus, the commentator almost started laughing. "Congratulations, kid. You have to be very mad to try that," noted one touchline reporter. "Very mad, or very good."
That'll be very good, then.
It was the perfect end to the perfect performance; class and cool in equal measure. It was fitting, the embodiment of Real Sociedad: a player questioned, doubted, unexpected, lifting the ball into the net. A player from Zubieta, the Real Sociedad academy, who had struggled through the second division and now virtually clinched a Champions League place with a goal that made this his best season in the first division. And he had done so in style, a touch of fun. When the ball nestled in the net, la Real climbed five points clear of Valencia but it's effectively six: they have a 9-2 advantage when it comes to head-to-head goal difference. Their lead over Málaga is also five points, plus a head-to-head goal difference of 6-3. "It's a good advantage to have but we know that it is not yet decisive," Philippe Montanier, their coach, said.
It probably is. It is also some achievement. Back in August one season preview summed up Real Sociedad's aims in two words: "No sufrir". Don't suffer. No more, no less. The best they could hope for was that it wasn't entirely hopeless; the height of their ambition was that 2012-13 would not be too painful. "There can," the preview continued, "be no objective beyond scaring off the ghosts that have haunted them since they returned from the second division and continue to hover round Anoeta."
In early November that prediction couldn't have looked more wrong, but by April it was more wrong. The season opened with a 5-1 hammering by Barcelona and Real Sociedad reached week 10 in 17th place; they had won only three times. They looked like they would suffer. Since then they have been beaten only once in 25 – and that was a 4-3 defeat at the Santiago Bernabéu where they probably should have got more. They were the first team to beat Barcelona, the first team to get any points at all off Atlético Madrid and the last Real Sociedad team to ever win at San Mamés. Never mind suffer, how about enjoy?
They have done it all on a budget that their president calls "middle-low." When Real Sociedad went down, their fan base was maintained: in the third season in Segunda they still had 19,000 season ticket holders. Their rightful place is still the first division, in terms of size, history and social base. Yet their annual budget is still less than €40m a year, compared with over €500m at Real Madrid. Of that €40m, almost €5m a year goes on Zubieta, the academy and club HQ where even the chef is pretty special: he is the Spanish cocktail champion.
Relegation proved a watershed, not least because it brought financial crisis with it. La Real turned decisively to youth – partly out of financial necessity, partly out of conviction. La Real ditched their Basque-only policy when they signed John Aldridge and they ditched their Basque and foreigners but no Spaniards policy when they signed Boris from Real Oviedo in 2001. They say that they could not compete without doing so – Athletic Bilbao have greater financial muscle – yet of their current first-team squad, 17 players were raised through the youth system and only Chori Castro, Claudio Bravo and Carlos Vela cost any money. They are that touch of something extra that they still need.
"Our philosophy was: get back to our origins, start again, follow our ideals, deepen them, be who we are," insisted the president, Jokin Aperribay. A superb generation of players was coming through. The technical secretary, Loren Juarros, joked: "I watched Asier Illarramendi and, with that mane, he reminded me of Schuster ... without it, he does too." To Spaniards, there can be few higher compliments: Bernd Schuster was as good a central midfielder as La Liga has seen. Nor is it just Illarramendi; there's Rubén Pardo too and Iñigo Martínez. All three will be Spain internationals within the next couple of years. Antoine Griezmann, also a youth team product although he comes from across the border, will have a big part to play in France's future.
There were doubts about the coach Montanier but he has found the right formula; Prieto's shift inside and a renewed belief in their technical ability have been decisive factors, but he has also maintained key principles even when some called for his head. "Success," he says, "has to be a consequence of what you do not the sole aim of what you do." That fits too with the mentality of Guipuzcoa, the Basque province of which San Sebastián is the capital. Calm, rational, understated.
Right now, you could make the case for saying that Real Sociedad are the best side in Spain. Certainly the best to watch. They have a mix of Barcelona and Madrid: they can keep the ball and move it, quickly and accurately, speeding up and slowing down as they see fit to control the game and deny the opposition possession; but when they break they are deadly, slick and swift, like Madrid, vertical: Vela, Castro and Griezmann are extremely quick. There is something about Real Sociedad that awakens the child in the spectator: put simply, watching them is fun. A glance at their recent scorelines says much: they've had a 4-2, a 2-2, a 4-1, a 3-3 and a 3-1 in their past eight games alone. The victory over Barcelona was 3-2. And the last time the played Valencia they won 5-2.
Sunday's victory over Valencia, their second of the season, was another example. Not only because they won 4-2 but because of the way that they did it. In a round of games marked by a wrist-slittingly awful Madrid derby and a 1-0 win for Celta over Levante that summed up so much of what is wrong with the final weeks of the season, after a week in which the vice-president of the league admitted that games are bought in Spain and that he has been told of cases but nothing was done and there was no outcry, the Sunday night match was a better way to wrap things up. A brilliant match; just really, really good fun. As la Real games so often are.
"I don't know if this is the most special night," Montanier said, "there have been a few of them."
This was a game with chances at each end and superb goals. Roberto Soldado and Martínez scored lovely goals to make it 1-1. Real Sociedad were fortunate not to have Bravo sent off for handling outside his area but this was a superb performance and a deserved victory. "Was football unkind to Valencia today?" Soldado was asked at the final whistle. His answer was eloquent in its directness and simplicity: "No."
The second goal was the perfect example of their ability on the break, Castro and Agirretxe combining perfectly at speed. The final pass could not have been better weighted; Castro's barely perceptible shift of his body weight, letting the ball run across him fractionally, allowed him to leave Alves out of position and score with a finish that looked far easier than it really was. But it was the fourth that summed it up. When Agirretxe ran through, Real Sociedad's players might have known what he was going to do but everyone else was left open mouthed as he scooped in a unexpectedly fitting finish.
Talking points
Madrid derby. Come on, you know the drill by now. Crtl C, Ctrl V. It doesn't matter if Madrid play with subs (although Filipe Luís pointed out, not entirely mathematically correctly, that "their subs cost 10 times more than our squad"), or if Atlético get a three-minute lead, it always ends up the same. Another defeat, another bout of depression. And so the wait goes on. 1999 was the last time Atlético won; they have not claimed one victory over their rivals since they returned to the first division. "Have you passed up a unique opportunity?" Diego Simeone was asked. "There will be another one in a few weeks," he said. "And then two more next season, two more the season after that, two more the season after that …"
At least this "last" game at San Mamés, which was also not the last game at San Mamés, ended in a way that they could remember. Leo Messi came on and changed the match completely, scoring a superb goal into the bargain, but Athletic Bilbao's Ander Herrera got a 90th-minute equaliser to make it 2-2.
Last week, Javier Aguirre said he would ask his Espanyol players if they wanted to fight for a European place having finally clinched survival. Presumably the answer was "no", then.
At last! Rubén Rochina scored an 88th-minute winner to see Zaragoza defeat Mallorca 3-2 in a huge relegation battle. It is their first win in 2013, and means they move to second bottom. Mallorca are back on the bottom.
* And, let's just put up a reminder shall we? Here:
Football matches in Spain are being bought, according to the vice-president of the league. Javier Tebas, who is set to take over as president, has admitted that "more than one" player has informed him of games being fixed but defended the league's lack of action until now on the difference between "legal truth" and "actual truth". He also said that clubs have a tendency to close ranks and protect each other when it came to match-fixing. Tebas insisted that the buying of games, considered to be widespread in the final weeks of the season and given the euphemistic title of "maletines" or briefcases, would be his priority upon taking over.
Asked in an interview with the newspaper Marca whether he has personally been told of incidences of match-fixing by players, Tebas responded: "Yes, and more than one. I am not going to put a pistol to anybody's head to make them make a [formal] complaint but I am grateful that they tell me. I have spoken about it with the AFE [the Spanish players' union] and with directors at clubs. There is a kind of defensive union, a kind of misplaced brotherhood. When teams are on the edge, then you get a league where anything goes.
"We have to end that [and] the clubs agree with me. The most important [priority] is match-fixing. If there is a game that is crooked, that means that this is a competition where things are not in order. From the league and the media we're not giving everything that is needed from us. These are complaints being made by Platini and Blatter too, not just mine."
Tebas has been the de facto head of the Spanish league while serving as its vice-president but defended the failure to prosecute a single person nor launch a full-scale investigation. "The problem is that there is a legal truth and an actual truth," he said. "In the league we have to take a step forward in denouncing what is happening. It's isolated [cases], but it happens.
"Any rumour or call in which I am told that something might have happened I will put in the hands of the relevant authorities and with the stamp of the league. It will be passed on to the police and the anti-corruption attorney. We will do all we can to support that process. We will work without limits and with discretion to uncover these cases. We're making progress; in the past it wasn't even commented upon."
Results: Espanyol 0-1 Granada, Málaga 2-1 Getafe, Real Sociedad 4-2 Valencia, Valladolid 1-1 Sevilla, Athletic Bilbao 2-2 Barcelona, Atlético Madrid 1-2 Real Madrid, Levante 0-1 Celta, Real Zaragoza 3-2 Mallorca, Rayo Vallecano 2-2 Osasuna
Latest La Liga table | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/30/six-times-more-newly-homeless-families-than-new-social-houses-england-data-shows | Society | 2023-11-30T12:33:37.000Z | Robert Booth | Six times more newly homeless families than new social houses, England data shows | Newly homeless families now outnumber newly built social homes by six to one, according to official figures for England released on Thursday that expose the widening gap between increasing need and the availability of cheap homes.
Only 8,386 new social homes were built in England in 2022-23, while in the same period 52,800 households were accepted by councils as requiring help because they were homeless or in danger of becoming homeless. The analysis was conducted by the National Housing Federation.
Matt Downie, the chief executive of Crisis, a homelessness charity, said the construction figures were “a disgrace” and hid the “immeasurable human impact” of homelessness.
The gap is forcing councils to spend £1.7bn a year renting temporary and often overcrowded accommodation for more than 100,000 households, more than at any time in the past 25 years. Councils have warned the bill is forcing many town halls towards bankruptcy.
There has also been a 10% annual increase in the number of households threatened with homelessness because landlords have served them with a no-fault eviction, which the government had pledged to ban. And there has been a 19% annual rise in the number of households to which councils accept they owe a main homelessness duty. The number of households in temporary accommodation also hit a record high.
Homelessness Link, which represents campaigning charities, called the data “shocking”, and added that one consequence was families living in damp and mould. “Whoever forms the next government must build the 90,000 social homes per year we need, so people have affordable, secure homes to live in,” said Rick Henderson, its chief executive.
Social homes are built to provide the cheapest rent – typically at half local market rates – and while there has been a slight increase in construction from the historic low of the pandemic year of 2020-21, the output remains far below the 35,000 built in 2010-11 and the 44,000 built in 1995-96.
Housing associations said the problem was caused by government funding set at historically low levels after a 63% cut to the affordable housing budget in 2010.
Kate Henderson, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said: “The chronic shortage of social housing is having wide-ranging impacts, not only for those becoming homeless and living in poverty and overcrowding, but also in the private rented sector, where increased demand from people who cannot access social housing has pushed up rents and, in turn, house prices. This is also costing the government – and indeed the taxpayer – huge sums, with costs of temporary accommodation, homelessness prevention and the housing benefit bill soaring.”
Last week, Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, announced a programme to help councils buy 10,000 existing private homes over the next decade to boost social housing stock, although that will not increase the overall supply.
The Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “We know building more homes is also a part of the solution and we are doing so as part of our long-term plan for housing. This also includes our multi-billion-pound programme to build thousands of new affordable homes, with a large number for social rent. Our landmark renters reform bill will also give tenants greater security in their home, and last week we increased the local housing allowance so 1.6m low-income households will be around £800 a year better off on average next year.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/whitby-votes-to-limit-sales-of-second-homes | UK news | 2022-06-14T08:37:12.000Z | Josh Halliday | Whitby votes to limit sales of second homes | Whitby has become the latest tourist hotspot to vote for a limit on the sale of second homes as residents sounded a “very loud message that enough is enough”.
Families in the Yorkshire fishing port said they had been priced out of the housing market as wealthy incomers paid exorbitant prices for holiday boltholes.
The medieval town, made famous by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, experienced the second highest house price increase of any coastal resort last year, rising 17% – beaten only by Padstow in Cornwall. About 28% of properties in Whitby are second homes.
In a poll of the town’s residents on Monday, 93% voted to restrict the sale of new-build and additional housing to full-time residents.
The ballot, which had a turnout of 23%, is not legally binding but organisers hope it will influence planning decisions by Whitby town council and Scarborough borough council.
The result is the latest sign of growing unrest in Britain’s tourist hotspots as local families struggle to match the prices paid by those wanting second homes by the sea.
In Cornwall, the honeypot areas of St Ives, Fowey and Mevagissey have voted to limit sales of new builds to full-time residents.
The Welsh government recently increased the maximum level of council tax on second homes from 100-300% over concerns that places such as Anglesey and Gwynedd, home to the stunning Llŷn peninsula, were being overrun with holiday lets.
‘Everyone wants a piece of Cornwall’: locals up in arms over second homes
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Whitby Community Network, the organiser of the poll, said it hoped the results would send a clear message that “change is needed”.
A spokesperson said: “The poll results clearly demonstrate the strength of feeling in the local community … We trust that our elected councillors will take note and take action.”
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The average house price in Whitby is now more than £254,218, according to the property website Rightmove – putting it far beyond the reach of many in a town where the typical salary is just £18,900.
A local estate agent said about 75% of properties on its books were sold as second homes or to investors. Nineteen of 20 new houses in one recent development were sold as holiday lets, according to the Conservative borough councillor Phil Trumper.
Joyce Stangoe, who was born in Whitby and returned to the town to retire after moving away for work, said its future was in peril unless politicians took notice.
“There’s nowhere to rent. There’s nowhere to buy. For people trying to get on the housing ladder, it’s virtually impossible,” she said.
“The biggest problem we’ve got in Whitby is the lack of kids. Our schools are virtually empty. If we don’t do something we’re going have no next generation to supply the workforce – we’re already struggling to get the workforce here.”
Stangoe, the secretary of the Whitby Community Network, compared the anger over second homes to the resentment that led many rural and coastal areas to vote for Brexit.
Of the 2,268 votes cast in Whitby’s referendum, an overwhelming 2,111 supported limits on second homes. The Covid pandemic has exacerbated the housing crisis in coastal communities as thousands of people fled the cities in a “race for space”.
Generation Rent, the housing campaign group, found that 3,000 new holiday and second homes were registered in south-west England during the pandemic, while nearly 1,700 appeared in Wales.
In Cornwall, where 80% of properties in some villages are holiday lets or second homes, campaigners have resorted to direct action by painting graffiti on empty properties. The group First Homes Not Second Homes has been holding monthly marches since September.
Sandra Turner, who has lived in Whitby since she was a child, said residents wanted to send “a very loud message that enough is enough”.
She said: “It’s not that we’re against tourism, we’re not, but we don’t want to give up our town either. We need to be able to live here, we need to be able to work here, families want their families to stay here and not move away and that is what’s happening. People are having to move out of the town to enable themselves to live and own a home.”
A spokesperson for Scarborough borough council said: “The outcome of the poll is no more and no less than an expression of the views of the electorate of the parish who have voted in the poll and is not binding on any organisation.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/03/compass-subsidiary-accused-bribes-kazakhstan | Business | 2014-11-03T19:28:34.000Z | Simon Goodley | Compass subsidiary accused of paying bribes to Kazakhstan officials | A subsidiary of Compass Group, the FTSE 100 catering firm, paid bribes to Kazakhstan government officials and has been reported to the Serious Fraud Office, according to allegations made public by a whistleblower.
The accusations came to light at an employment tribunal on Monday, where a former finance director of a second Compass subsidiary in Kazakhstan was suing his former employer for unfair dismissal.
Legal papers in the case allege that a Kazakhstan government official and his family enjoyed a $19,000 (£12,000) holiday in Dubai at the expense of a Compass venture in Kazakhstan called Kaz Munay Gaz Services Compass (KMGSC); another official is said to have had his son’s US university fees paid by the firm, while the subsidiary also stands accused of “circumvent[ing] government procedures to supply luxury vehicles to KMG, a related government entity”.
Karim Pabani, who was finance director of a second Kazakh subsidiary, ESS Support Services LLP, between 2011 and 2013, also says that profits at KMGSC were inflated and that he was asked to “falsify accounting records”. He claims he was dismissed after repeatedly raising his concerns, which included reporting a “financial exposure [of] £5.4m” in a “major risk assessment report” sent in February 2013 to the office of Mark White, Compass’s general counsel.
The documents add: “KMGSC had previously permitted the supply of food unfit for human consumption through KMGSC at excessive prices. [Pabani’s disclosures on the topic] covered numerous serious stock issues and specifically requested that Anthony Jukic [former managing director of ESS] and Ron Kulkarni [Jukic’s successor] request a repayment of $500,000 from KMGSC for overpayment to suppliers. These suppliers were considered to be associates of Timur Kurenbekov [KMGSC managing director, who is related to a senior figure in the Kazakhstan government].”
A spokesman for Compass Group said: “Compass Group is aware of the allegations which have been made by Mr Pabani in the claim which he has submitted to the employment tribunal and is vigorously defending this claim.”
He would not comment directly on the specific allegations or supply comment on behalf of the individuals named in the claim. The SFO did not comment.
After raising his concerns during a series of disclosures between 2011 and 2013, Pabani says he was asked to attend a meeting with Kulkarni, his direct boss, in May 2013, when he was told he would be dismissed. The documents state: “The claimant informed Mr Kulkarni that he had already documented his concerns in a letter to the Serious Fraud Office.”
Compass Group is one of the largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange with a value of almost £17bn. Its chief executive Richard Cousins has been widely tipped to take on the chairmanship of Tesco.
The caterer has previously had to deal with corruption allegations and in 2006 agreed to pay up to £40m to settle two lawsuits brought against it for allegedly bribing a UN official to win contracts worth millions of pounds to supply UN peacekeepers. Compass did not admit liability in the UN case. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/13/the-spin-surrey-title-march-to-bazball-at-durham-county-cricket-run-in-highlights | Sport | 2023-09-13T09:45:06.000Z | Tanya Aldred | The Spin | From Surrey’s title march to Bazball at Durham – county run-in highlights | And so, suddenly, the County Championship enters the home straight, dusk fast chasing six o’clock stumps. Despite Durham clinching promotion on Monday without playing a ball, courtesy of Leicestershire’s batting malfunction at Hove, there is still plenty to mull over in the last two rounds – from the Oval to Headingley, and everywhere in between.
A victory for Bazball At the start of the season Durham announced they were going to embrace the method championed by their favourite son and throw caution to the wind. Matthew Potts, fresh from touring with England, raised an eyebrow or two when he trumpeted that they would rather lose every game than play for a draw, while the new head coach, Ryan Campbell, revealed: “The players here have a glint in their eye and they want to excite people.” Now, with promotion and six wins from 12 games already under their belt, and only five points away from being crowned Division Two champions, Durham have been as good as their word – cracking along at more than four an over in all but five of their 18 innings, and Alex Lees not only the leading run-scorer in the country but averaging 75 at a strike rate of 73. And if you think Bazball is just for Division Two, think again. “We’re not going … just to survive,” says Campbell, “we’re going to try to win the thing [title], I reckon there’s a lot more exciting cricket to come.”
Surrey’s empire building Surrey strut into the second half of September with an 18-point buffer at the top of Division One. Barring an implosion, a tidal wave of rain in the south-east and Essex winning every point possible, they will collect their second consecutive title, possibly at the Oval next week against the unfortunate Div One cellar-dwellers, Northamptonshire. It would be their third championship in five years, with many more stretching out into the future given the strength of their squad, the excellence of their academy and their big fat wallet. Throw in a fantastic ground, in a central location, a ready, richer-than-average membership and Alec Stewart, director of cricket and quiet excellence since 2014, it is no wonder they are able to add to their homegrown riches with big names. Dan Lawrence being one ready to give up being a big fish in a little pond at Chelmsford to being a little fish in a big one in south London. The only quibble is that there is no space for a genuine spinner, with Daniel Moriarty moving to Yorkshire and Amar Virdi languishing in the second team.
Still room for non-Test match counties Despite the almost-constant rumours of doom and the threat (seen off for now) of the Strauss report, plucky Division Two clubs live on. One other side will win promotion alongside Durham, the most likely of them Worcestershire – provider of bowling attacks to the rest of the country. But the most surprising 2023 renaissance has come from Leicestershire who, despite the mid-season departure of Paul Nixon, have picked themselves off their familiar spot in the bargain basement, dusted themselves down and turned into promotion candidates – at least until they came up against Sussex. They’ve signed Peter Handscomb on a two-year deal, after he warmed hearts leading from the front in an unlikely win against Yorkshire in the opening game, are cherishing, and playing, Rehan Ahmed, and have allowed the former Essex batter Rishi Patel to thrive. What’s more, they compete in the One-Day Cup final on Saturday.
Rishi Patel has prospered for a revitalised Leicestershire. Photograph: David Davies/PA
Pointless? This season saw a rejigging of the points system: with five points available for a draw – down from eight – and a shifting up of the batting bonus points threshold from 200 to 250. The win/draw stats seem to be inconclusive as yet: in 2022 there were 50 draws across the two divisions, and in 2023, as of Tuesday morning, there had been 44 with three rounds to play. Throw in the serious mid-summer rain, stir the pot … and leave it for the England and Wales Cricket Board county cricket committee to work out.
Family firm A few familiar names have appeared on England Under-19s scoresheets in their series against Australia. There at the top of the order in the first Test was Kent’s Jaydn Denly, nephew of Joe, while down at No 10 was the Nottinghamshire off-spinner Farhan Ahmed, brother of Rehan. Also in the one-day squad were Durham’s Mitchell Killeen, son of the seamer Neil, and Essex’s Luc Benkenstein, son of Dale. Not forgetting Thomas Rew, brother of the young Taunton run-machine James, turning out for the Somerset Second XI. But the highest profile member of the family firm is Middlesex’s. Josh de Caires, Michael Atherton’s son, whose off-breaks have ripped through both Hampshire (seven for 144) and Essex (eight for 106) in recent weeks. He also took a wicket with his first championship ball at Old Trafford, telling reporters: “I’ll call my dad tonight and see what he thinks. I’ll probably tell him I’m bowling lob-ups!”
There is life after England Three county captains continue to show that being shown the door by your country is not the be-all and end-all. At the Oval, a soon-to-be-ponytail-less Rory Burns is heading towards his third title as captain and, if he hasn’t had a dream season with the bat, he is thriving as a leader of men. As he said after Surrey thrashed Warwickshire in the last round: “Our desire is certainly there in our dressing room, we love playing four-day cricket for Surrey.” At Southampton James Vince continues to lead nearly-men Hampshire with his shirt untucked from slip, 800 easy-breezy runs under his belt; while at Chelmsford Tom Westley has grown into the role, successfully shepherding a club that consistently punch above their weight, while in touching distance of a thousand runs.
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https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2013/oct/16/social-care-under-pressure | Social Care Network | 2013-10-16T08:00:00.000Z | Kate Murray | Social care: under pressure like never before | Social care is not a career for the faint-hearted, but while working with some of the most vulnerable members of society, in a fierce media spotlight, has never been easy, it has got a whole lot tougher over the past few years. For leaders of children's and adults' services, the stakes are unprecedentedly high.
According to the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass), in the three years to April 2013 £2.7bn has been taken out of English councils' budgets for adult social care alone. An increasing number of referrals, major restructures and high turnover among senior staff are adding to the pressure in adults' and children's services.
Yet, at the same time, professionals are being told they must do better, with regulatory changes creating what some have warned is fast becoming a blame culture in social care departments. Add to that criticism over failings in cases such as the deaths of four-year-old Daniel Pelka, in Coventry, and 81-year-old Gloria Foster, in Surrey, and it's perhaps not surprising that Andrew Webb, president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), says a once-harsh environment is now distinctly hostile.
"The pressure is coming at us from a number of different directions and that makes what's normally a very challenging job really quite exceptionally hard work," Webb says. "What we are having to deal with is a combination of increasing expectations about services and standards, and rapidly reducing resources. The temperature of the environment in which we are operating is going up."
Difficult period
Adass president Sandie Keene says the current environment is the most challenging she has experienced in her 39 years in the profession. "I've never seen the horizon in relation to resources look the way it does now," she says. "I think we would all agree this is the most difficult period ever."
However, as Keene stresses, failure is not an option – and that means new approaches have to be found. For most local authorities, the easiest options to save cash have now been exhausted and they are looking at radical changes to the way they deliver services – through, for example, partnerships with the voluntary and private sectors, and new organisational models.
"We want better services at the end of austerity, not salami-sliced, denuded ones," says Keene. "That means changing what we do. We can't continue with the silo mentality – we need to be looking at the public pound and how we use it together."
For Sarah Norman, strategic director of community at Wolverhampton city council, the need to make savings can be a "lever for change". She says: "The environment of austerity creates additional challenges, but it creates opportunities, too. The financial pressures have forced us to look at some things we should have done before."
Norman is one of an increasing proportion of directors – now approaching half – who have responsibility for both adults' and children's services. It's a trend that critics have warned risks service quality for the sake of financial savings. But Norman says, for her council, the move has been more about strategic direction than cost cutting. For example, Wolverhampton is making the most of its new arrangements with a young people's mental health service straddling both client groups. "For us, it is about a different alignment of services," she says. "The focus needs to be on outcomes for individuals, families and communities."
Webb, who also has responsibility for adults' and children's services in his job as director of services for people at Stockport, warns that capacity to do the core job is being lost across social care, through directors taking on additional responsibilities and because of high turnover. He, too, says directors have got to the stage where they are having to reimagine their approach to services. This is not always an easy thing to do when, as Webb admits, he has often found himself saying to colleagues: "Tell me we're not making any bad decisions today."
"It's a case of 'Let's stay one step ahead of the budget decisions we've got to make to make sure we're not creating problems for ourselves a year or two down the line'," he says. Risk, Webb stresses, can never be entirely managed out of social care. So how, amid this pressure, do directors keep their teams motivated?
For Webb, there's often a pinch of gallows humour among colleagues – and strong mutual support. Keene, too, says resilience and networking are important: "To some extent we are masochists, but most of us enjoy it for the outcomes we achieve."
"We have always had a reputation of supporting each other through tough times," she adds. "Inevitably there's a down side when you are closing services. It can be a lonely role, so it is important for people to feel supported."
Some of that support comes in the shape of leadership training and one such initiative, Leadership for Change, is set to be jointly launched next month by ADCS's "virtual staff college", the National Skills Academy for Social Care, the NHS Leadership Academy and Public Health England.
In the meantime, says Keene, social-care leaders are realistic about the difficulties they face. "In a high-profile role in the public sector, you know that you are going to get criticised if things go wrong and that praise doesn't come as easily."
Culture of leadership
Debbie Sorkin, chief executive of the skills academy, says strong leadership at every level of an organisation is crucial. "Leadership is everybody's business," she argues. "Nobody gets off the hook. You can pre-empt the Winterbourne Views [care scandals] and stop that culture being embedded if you drive a culture of leadership in an organisation, right through from care assistant to director.
"Nobody is being Pollyanna-ish about this: people recognise the huge difficulties around funding and wanting to maintain really good services in spite of the pressures. But we are finding a huge appetite for this, with people looking for ways to make leadership real and to link it to quality improvements."
In this way, Sorkin adds, some of the hostility that social-care professionals experience may be dispelled.
"If you embed good, strong leadership behaviours – and have a confident and skilled workforce on which you can rely to give a really good account of your organisation – that helps to build a positive image of social care, which is what the sector deserves and needs." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/25/trump-insults-bombs-targets-democrats | US news | 2018-10-25T14:24:14.000Z | Amanda Holpuch | How Trump targeted his biggest critics before they were sent pipe bombs | Donald Trump said political figures “must stop treating political opponents as morally defective” as he condemned the attempted bombings of prominent liberals this week. But his own language towards the targets of the bombs has been unusually coarse for a modern US president.
“Any acts or threats of political violence are an attack on our democracy itself,” Trump told a rally on Wednesday, encouraging unity. He continued: “Those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as morally defective.”
Has age of Trump's violent rhetoric brought 'the awful' back to US politics?
Read more
He went on to blame the media for incivility – but he failed to acknowledge his own rhetoric. On Thursday morning, he stood by those comments. Trump tweeted: “It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
So far, the named targets of the attempted bombings by mail are people Trump has publicly attacked.
Robert De Niro
De Niro has long been critical of Trump, and said on stage at the Tony awards in June: “I’m gonna say one thing. Fuck Trump.”
He continued: “It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s fuck Trump.”
Trump responded, calling De Niro “a very Low IQ individual”.
Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received too many shots to the head by real boxers in movies. I watched him last night and truly believe he may be “punch-drunk.” I guess he doesn’t...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Maxine Waters
Trump also called representative Waters, a Democrat from California, “an extraordinarily low IQ person” in a tweet that ended: “Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018
Waters has said people have threatened to assassinate, hang and lynch her because of her criticism of Trump.
'You better shoot straight': how Maxine Waters became Trump's public enemy No 1
Read more
George Soros
In a tweet earlier this month, Trump baselessly accused Soros of paying protesters. He failed to provide evidence.
The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2018
Soros backs progressive causes, which puts him squarely against Trump’s agenda. Soros has also criticized the president in the past.
Eric Holder
Trump threatened the former attorney general after Holder said Democrats need to be more confrontational at a campaign event for Georgia candidates in the midterms.
“Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high,’” Holder said. “No. When they go low, we kick ’em.”
Holder was criticized for advocating violence, which he later said was not his intention. In response to Holder’s remarks, Trump told Fox & Friends: “He better be careful what he’s wishing for.”
John Brennan
Trump frequently criticizes the former CIA director on Twitter.
Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director? He will go down as easily the WORST in history & since getting out, he has become nothing less than a loudmouth, partisan, political hack who cannot be trusted with the secrets to our country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018
Brennan suggested he may have been targeted because of his past criticisms of Trump. “His rhetoric, I think, too frequently fuels these feelings and sentiments that now are bleeding over into, potentially, acts of violence,” Brennan said at an event in Austin, Texas.
2:17
'Words matter': Joe Biden speaks out hours after being targeted with pipe bomb – video
Joe Biden
This weekend, the former vice president mocked Trump as an egotist destroying time-honored and American values. Trump, meanwhile, mocked Biden as “1% Joe.”
In March, Biden threatened to fight Trump if they were still in high school. Trump responded:
Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018
Shortly after, Biden said: “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
Trump has been tweeting criticism of Biden since 2011.
Hillary Clinton
Two years after defeating Clinton in the presidential election, Trump still attacks Clinton at rallies while supporters chant “lock her up” and regularly complains about her on Twitter and in interviews.
As of January, he had mentioned her at least 229 times since taking office, according to an analysis by the Daily Beast.
Clinton has been critical of Trump in interviews, speeches and her book What Happened.
Speaking at an event in Florida on Wednesday, Clinton said the US was in a “troubling time” and condemned divisive rhetoric by politicians. “We have to do everything we can to bring our country together,” said Clinton. “We also have to elect candidates who will try to do the same.”
Barack Obama
Trump criticizes his predecessor frequently, as he did when Obama was in office.
Obama has been critical of Trump’s actions and rhetoric, but rarely mentions his name. He has not tweeted directly about Trump.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
So far, no packages are known to have been addressed to the Democratic congresswoman from Florida, but her office is the return address on some of the packages.
Her office was evacuated on Wednesday after one of the packages was redirected there because of the return address.
Wasserman Schultz has repeatedly criticized Trump’s policies.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Wasserman Schultz and first tweeted about her in 2012, when she was chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is hard to watch or listen to--no wonder our country is going to hell!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2012 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/jul/16/young-female-playwright | Stage | 2009-07-16T14:38:36.000Z | Max Stafford-Clark | Looking for the next bright young female playwright? | Max Stafford-Clark | The recent Observer interview with Lucy Prebble is yet another piece focusing on a bright young female playwright, and labelling her as such, as if part of a group or trend. It is right that we celebrate a new generation of talented female playwrights, but the idea that this is a new phenomenon, or particularly zeitgeisty, is a media construct. It doesn't reflect the truth, and it does the writers it purports to celebrate a disservice.
It's great that Lucy Prebble is writing about serious issues – Enron, in the case of her new play – but let's not forget that Caryl Churchill was writing powerfully about the financial world back in 1987 with Serious Money. Timberlake Wertenbaker charted the venality and vigour of the art world with Three Birds Alighting On a Field in 1992, while the remarkable Andrea Dunbar matched Polly Stenham in the precocity stakes by having a play, The Arbor, on the Royal Court's main stage in 1977 at the age of merely 15.
While the newest generation of female playwrights is not following a well-beaten path, at least it's not a journey without maps. Women have led the way for some time in fusing the political with the personal, falling neither into the "art for art's sake" fallacy nor the "agitprop" fallacy, so succinctly outlined by Ferdinand Mount in the Guardian a few weeks ago. Several plays come immediately to mind: Sarah Daniels's play about pornography, Masterpieces, which follows a woman who becomes involved in that world; April De Angelis's The Positive Hour, a comedy examining gender roles through such characters as a social worker, a failed artist and a single mother who becomes a prostitute; and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, which explored the effects of Thatcherism on feminism. That's also true of Stella Feehily's Dreams of Violence, which I'm directing at Soho theatre, posing as it does questions of personal responsibility within a dysfunctional family, set against a collapsing and irresponsible financial world.
I'm well aware that I'm trying to have it both ways: we in the theatre are eager to hoover up publicity, and yet here I am accusing journalists of irresponsibility. But the truth is, it's very hard for playwrights – male or female – to sustain a career in the theatre. Shakespeare, Shaw and David Hare, who build up a body of excellence over a lifetime, are the exception. Far more typical are the Sheridans, Farquhars, Goldsmiths or Congreves – who write two plays of originality and verve, with a cluster of lesser works.
Let's face facts: journalism has not helped sustain the careers of young female writers. A few years ago, Rebecca Pritchard and Winsome Pinnock shot across the theatrical galaxy like flaming comets. Pinnock was hailed as the first important young black female playwright, while Pritchard began her career with Essex Girls at the Royal Court's Young Writer's festival and was later talked about in the same breath as Mark Ravenhill and Philip Ridley. They are now less visible.
Other writers have spoken to me about the difficulties of living up to the hype. One national paper used to run a feature called The Next Big Thing; while I can see that it would be less appealing to arts editors, a feature called The Next Sustainable Medium-Sized Thing might well be more help. It's also worth noting the particular pressure on female writers to be sexy in a manner that simply isn't there for their male counterparts.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play Her Naked Skin was originally to have had a different title, while even we at the (of course highly principled) Out of Joint, suggested to Stella Feehily that Dreams of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll might be a more appealing title than Dreams of Violence. Such pressures, I suspect, would not be quite the same for a young male playwright.
Let us celebrate youth by all means, but let's strive less for the zeitgeist, and endeavour to support writers of all ages and sexes because they happen to be talented, not because they are new. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/feb/07/whole-government-accounts-public-accounts-committee | News | 2012-02-07T07:30:00.000Z | Simon Rogers | Inside the Whole Government Accounts: why are they so bad? | Imagine a document which can tell you exactly how the government spends its money. That contains crucial information at a time of public spending cuts. Such a report would change the way we see Whitehall, set the agenda and cause debate across the county. It would be waved at the Prime Minister (or the Leader of the Opposition) at Question Time and quoted widely in political discourse.
Well, not exactly.
Remember the Whole Government Accounts? No? It's not surprising. The first attempt at releasing the government's balance sheet was published to deafening silence in November last year, a full 20 months after the end of the financial year it covered.
Twenty months. Britain had a Labour government for the period it covered and a Coalition one for nearly two years by the time it came out.
OK, so it's complicated, 1,500 organisations have to be factored in, etc, but France, the USA and Australia can do it in less than nine months.
That is just one of the criticisms of the Treasury's approach from the Public Accounts Committee today in the first parliamentary assessment of the WGA.
In its report, the Committee highlights some of the key numbers in the report, including:
• At 31 March 2010 the government's public service pensions liability was more than £1,132bn
• The present value of its future commitments under PFI schemes is £131.5bn
• The government wrote off £10.9bn in unpaid taxes
• The government is expected to pay £15.7bn for outstanding clinical negligence claims
Having access to this kind of data should be useful for any organisation running a big budget, right? Not according to the PAC report:
We were surprised to find that Treasury did not have a grip on trends in some key areas of risk or plans for managing them
In effect it's saying that the Treasury has these numbers, which impact greatly on what they do but didn't do anything with the data. We have already criticised the standard of government spending reporting - naming and shaming the worst government annual reports. Apparently those problems apply to the Treasury too.
When the account summary was first released in July last year, Lisa Evans - who has been pursuing WGA for some time - wrote that
There is secrecy about why, in the 10 years of running this exercise, nothing has been published at all. This secrecy seem excessive given the project takes mostly public information from the annual accounts of each public body, and brings them together to form one set of consolidated accounts
The first release in July did give us some interesting information, not least the £1.2 trillion figure for the size of UK assets - and the bigger £2.4 trillion for UK liabilities.
But the National Audit Office - the body which monitors the Government's spending and workings - insisted the reports be qualified. In the language of Whitehall, the judgment is damning:
Of particular concern is that the WGA significantly understates the true value of public assets and liabilities by excluding the publicly owned banks, the Bank of England and Network Rail which, in the opinion of the Comptroller and Auditor General, are owned and controlled by government. It also gives limited analysis of spending across the main functions of government, such as defence and education, or on services such as consultancy, which would make the account more useful to the reader
In other words, the WGA is missing key figures which make up huge amounts of public spending in the UK. The PAC doesn't buy the Treasury's excuse either:
Treasury's explanation that it excluded them to align the scope of the WGA with the statistical measures of public finances prepared by the Office for National Statistics is not convincing because the WGA is a financial statement that ought to be prepared in line with generally accepted accounting practice
The PAC report is worth reading, not least for what it tells us about the way the release of this most significant spending data has been handled.
The specific criticisms it makes are:
• The figures in the first audited WGA are too dated
• The accounts as presented by Treasury are incomplete and these are important omissions
• The way the Treasury predicts costs into the future are full of "instability": "The rationale for settling on a particular discount
rate should be transparent so that its validity can be checked"
• The financial information that Treasury received from Academies, which accounted for £1.2bn of government spending and £2.2bn of assets during 2009-10, was of poor quality as it included unaudited data and some Academies provided no information at all. This shows that there is a gap in accountability
It makes pretty strong recommendations too, which may seem obvious to us but not to those managing Britain's finances. Most importantly, it points out:
Spending Teams within Treasury are responsible for ensuring that Accounting Officers do not commit to major new programmes or projects that could put the government's overall financial position at risk, both in the short term and over time
Meanwhile, in an interview published last December, Treasury's director of financial management and reporting Ken Beeton said the accounts
have the potential to be the permanent basis on which government manages itself and its balance sheet … This is a big step forward in terms of how the government does its business
Even with the "transitional issues" and all its flaws, is he right?
These reports will only get better if people outside the Westminster bubble actually read them, complain about their shortcomings (including being published as a PDF, of course) and demand improvements. By that I mean us and anyone interested in how the government spends our money.
Maybe we get the Whole Government Accounts we deserve.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/dec/26/swansea-city-west-ham-premier-league-match-report | Football | 2016-12-26T17:05:53.000Z | Stuart James | West Ham’s Andy Carroll twists knife into Bob Bradley and Swansea | It was an afternoon when the mood turned ugly in South Wales as Swansea City supporters called for Bob Bradley to be sacked and vented their anger at the members of the board who sold their shares in the summer. “We want Bradley out” and “You greedy bastards get out of our club” were among the chants reverberating around the stadium during another chastening defeat for a team who look resigned to relegation.
Bob Bradley expects crisis talks after Swansea fans demand his sacking
Read more
The only festive cheer was found in the away end, where the euphoric West Ham fans celebrated a third successive victory that lifted Slaven Bilic’s side up to 11th and piled the misery on to Swansea and their American manager. Bradley put on a brave face and all indications are the Swansea board have no desire to dismiss the man who was appointed in October, yet there is no escaping the level of discontent that was swirling around the Liberty Stadium in the second half.
The atmosphere felt poisonous and it was not only the hardcore support, in the upper tier of the East Stand, who were calling for Bradley to go. At one point near the end that “We want Bradley out” chant swept around the stadium as fans railed at the sight of their club sliding towards the Championship.
Bradley was never a popular choice at the outset and the results since his appointment have done nothing to change opinion. Swansea have picked up only eight points from his 11 games in charge and, most damningly of all, conceded 29 goals. The West Ham defeat was the eighth time under his watch that Swansea have shipped three goals or more in a game.
It is a woeful record, yet Bradley is not solely responsible for the way that Swansea’s season has unravelled. Their recruitment in the summer was desperately poor and it is tempting to wonder how much better any other manager would do with the group of players Bradley inherited when he replaced Francesco Guidolin.
André Ayew opens the scoring for West Ham from a yard out against his former club. Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images
Defensively Swansea are a shambles. Bradley has tried just about every permutation possible with the back and yet nothing seems to get any better. Some of his tactics in other areas make no sense and it was a curious decision on Bradley’s part to leave out Fernando Llorente, who had scored four goals in his previous two home matches. Borja, the £15.5m club-record signing who has scored only once all season, started in place of Llorente and was dragged off at half-time.
By that stage Swansea were a goal down after yet another piece of calamitous defending. André Ayew, returning to the club where he finished as top scorer last season, registered his first goal for West Ham with a simple tap-in. Winston Reid added the second early in the second half and it was at that point that the frustration in the stands started to boil over.
Arsenal’s Olivier Giroud snatches late win against West Brom
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Michail Antonio later added a third and although Llorente pulled one back for Swansea late on, Bilic’s side were not finished. Andy Carroll, volleying home at the far post, twisted the knife with a fourth to re-establish their three‑goal advantage.
Swansea face Bournemouth at home on Saturday, and travel to Crystal Palace three days later. Whether Bradley will still be around for both of those games remains to be seen. Whatever the board thinks privately about wanting to give Bradley more time, the manager’s position will become close to untenable if Swansea lose in front of their own fans against Bournemouth. “In terms of trying to win back a bit of belief from the supporters, Bournemouth couldn’t be bigger,” Bradley said.
For West Ham, who have collected 10 points from their past four matches, the world seems a much happier place. They brutally exposed Swansea’s defensive frailties and never looked back from the moment Reid headed in Dimitri Payet’s corner five minutes into the second half.
West Ham’s breakthrough in the first half had owed much to Carroll, who towered above Angel Rangel to head Mark Noble’s diagonal pass back across goal, and also Lukasz Fabianski’s poor goalkeeping. Fabianski carelessly pushed the ball into the path of Ayew, who slotted home from inside the six-yard box.
Chelsea’s Pedro torments Bournemouth to stretch league winning run to 12
Read more
Although Darren Randolph made a couple of decent saves to deny Gylfi Sigurdsson and Jack Cork, Swansea never threatened to mount a fightback. There is no conviction about their play and it was no surprise when Antonio stabbed home a third, turning in Havard Nordtveit’s wayward shot. Llorente, on for Borja, reduced the deficit when he converted Nathan Dyer’s cross but Carroll put a smile back on Bilic’s face with West Ham’s fourth goal.
Not that the West Ham manager is taking anything for granted. “It would be suicidal to think we are safe now and look only who is above us,” Bilic said. “It is still very tight but we have to use this to gain confidence and continue to improve. Only then we will have a chance to finish good.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/19/legendary-us-musician-david-crosby-dies-aged-81 | Music | 2023-01-19T22:22:45.000Z | Tom Ambrose | Legendary US musician David Crosby dies aged 81 | Legendary US musician David Crosby has died aged 81 after a “long illness”.
The singer, guitarist and songwriter was part of the original lineup of the Byrds and appeared on their first five albums, including the 1965 hit cover of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man.
He also co-founded the folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash along with fellow musicians Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. They later added Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young to the lineup.
In a statement to Variety, his widow Jan Dance said: “It is with great sadness after a long illness, that our beloved David (Croz) Crosby has passed away. He was lovingly surrounded by his wife and soulmate Jan and son Django.
“Although he is no longer here with us, his humanity and kind soul will continue to guide and inspire us. His legacy will continue to live on through his legendary music. Peace, love, and harmony to all who knew David and those he touched.
“We will miss him dearly. At this time, we respectfully and kindly ask for privacy as we grieve and try to deal with our profound loss. Thank you for the love and prayers.”
In a statement posted to his website, Young paid tribute to “the soul of CSNY”. “David’s voice and energy were at the heart of our band. His great songs stood for what we believed in and it was always fun and exciting when we got to play together,” he wrote. “We had so many great times, especially in the early years. Crosby was a very supportive friend in my early life, as we bit off big pieces of our experience together. David was the catalyst of many things.”
In a tribute shared on Instagram, Nash wrote of his “profound sadness” at hearing the news.
“I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times, but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together,” Nash wrote. “He leaves behind a tremendous void.”
Statement from Graham Nash: pic.twitter.com/FRmkwNcqCr
— Rob Tannenbaum (@tannenbaumr) January 19, 2023
In a statement to Billboard, Stills wrote: “David and I butted heads a lot over time, but they were mostly glancing blows, yet still left us [with] numb skulls. I was happy to be at peace with him. He was without question a giant of a musician, and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius … I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.”
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys wrote that he was “heartbroken” and “at a loss for words”.
I don’t know what to say other than I’m heartbroken to hear about David Crosby. David was an unbelievable talent - such a great singer and songwriter. And a wonderful person. I just am at a loss for words. Love & Mercy to David’s family and friends. Love, Brian pic.twitter.com/Hjht7LeGiv
— Brian Wilson (@BrianWilsonLive) January 19, 2023
Grateful for the time we had with David Crosby. We’ll miss him a lot.
— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) January 19, 2023
The son of Oscar-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby, David pursued a career in music after dropping out of school in Los Angeles.
He joined the Byrds in 1964 before being dismissed from the band three years later. In the 2019 documentary Remember My Name, Byrds member Roger McGuinn described Crosby and his on-stage political rants as “insufferable”, with fellow band member Chris Hillman saying he harboured a superiority complex.
In 1968, Crosby met Stills and the pair started jamming together. They were soon joined by Nash to form the trio Crosby, Stills & Nash, selling millions of copies of their first two albums: their self-titled debut in 1969, and – joined by Neil Young – Déjà Vu the following year.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young disbanded in 2016 after years of rivalry and tension. In a 2021 interview with the Guardian, Crosby described Nash as “definitely my enemy” and Young as “the most self-centred, self-obsessed, selfish person I know”.
Crosby discovered Joni Mitchell playing in a Florida club in 1967 and helped her secure a record deal before producing her first album, Song to a Seagull. The pair were romantically involved. He recently described Mitchell as “the best singer-songwriter … I don’t think anybody comes close”.
Crosby’s first solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, came out in 1971. He released more solo records through the 80s and 90s, before a 20-year break followed by a prolific late-life period, with five projects released since 2014.
His most recent, For Free, was produced and co-written with James Raymond, a son who was given up for adoption by his mother and who Crosby did not know he had until Raymond was 30. Raymond had been a musician for 20 years before he discovered who his father was, and tracked him down. The pair also released albums with the Lighthouse Band.
“He gave me a chance to earn my way into his life … by making music with him,” Crosby told the Guardian. “Imagine how I feel about my son being that good a writer. I wear it like a garland of flowers on my head. It’s just fucking wonderful.”
Other biological children include a daughter and a son conceived, through Crosby’s sperm donation, by Julie Cypher – the then-partner of musician Melissa Etheridge. Of the two children, the daughter, Bailey Jean Cypher, survives. On Twitter on Thursday, Etheridge posted she was grieving the loss of Crosby. “He gave me the gift of family. I will forever be grateful to him, Django, and Jan. His music and legacy will inspire many generations to come.”
I am grieving the loss of my friend and Bailey’s biological father, David. He gave me the gift of family. I will forever be grateful to him, Django, and Jan. His music and legacy will inspire many generations to come. A true treasure. pic.twitter.com/1e0vbvd2SN
— Melissa Etheridge (@metheridge) January 19, 2023
In 1983, Crosby was convicted of possession of cocaine and a loaded pistol. He fled California to Florida after being released on bail, eventually turning himself into police in December 1985. He served five months of his five-year sentence before being released on parole. This jail sentence was how he got clean. “If you see somebody who’s doing heroin, they’re in pain,” he said in 2021. “I haven’t had a hard drug near me in 35 to 40 years. I’m very glad I got past it.”
In the same interview, Crosby admitted that – after surviving many years of alcohol, cocaine and heroin addictions – he “expected to be dead” at 30. “My skin is like tissue paper, man. It tears or bruises. It’s just part of being old.”
Eight months ago Crosby agreed to be interviewed at a high school in Colorado. He made headlines after answering a student’s question about whether he would tour again, replying: “No. I’m not, because I’m 80.” He also pointed to his age to explain his recent spate of solo albums: “I’m 80 years old so I’m gonna die fairly soon. That’s how that works. And so I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can, as long as it’s really good.”
Crosby was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice and five albums to which he contributed were included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
This article was amended on 20 January 2023. Bailey Cypher is a biological daughter, not son, of David Crosby. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/what-is-brown-butter-and-how-do-i-use-it-kitchen-aide | Food | 2024-02-27T14:00:02.000Z | Anna Berrill | What is brown butter, and how do I use it? | Kitchen aide | What’s the deal with brown butter? I keep seeing it in recipes and on menus.
Ben, Sheffield
Achieved by heating butter until the water evaporates and the milk solids caramelise, brown butter (or beurre noisette) can enhance the flavour of all the good things – cookies, cakes, pasta, pork chops. “It can be a beautiful thing,” agrees baker Lily Jones, of Lily Vanilli in east London, who recently launched an initiative across the capital to get birthday cakes to those who would otherwise go without. “It has a subtle, nutty, toffee caramel flavour that brings extra sweetness and richness.”
You’ll need a heavy-based pan and some good-quality butter cut into pieces. (“Better-quality butter equals better-tasting brown butter,” Jones insists.) As the butter melts, swirl the pan to prevent the milk solids from caramelising too quickly – “It’s ready when clear [separated] and with a nutty aroma.” Easy enough, but you’ll need to exercise patience (and not to use too high a heat), because butter can burn in the blink of an eye, says Mike Davies, chef/director of the Camberwell Arms in south London. “Over a medium heat, it will take five to 10 minutes, but just keep an eye on it,” he advises. “And remember, being a fat, butter retains heat, so it will continue cooking [once off the heat] for some time.” You’re looking for a deep golden colour before pulling the pan off the stove – “Go past that point,” Davies says, “and we’re getting into more considered territory where, for example, you might want a deeper brown butter and so would be after a more chestnut colour.” (You could, he adds, go even further with, for example, Rick Stein’s skate and black butter, but “you’re then getting slightly different flavour notes and more complex, bitter element”.)
You can use brown butter in myriad ways, both sweet and savoury. At the Camberwell Arms, it’s something of a staple seasoning, adding depth and complexity to cabbage, for instance. Sure, greens and butter are always going to be delicious, but browning the butter and caramelising the sugar, Davies says, “gives you this toasted, deep, sweet, nutty flavour that you can’t match”. It’s equally good when used to make scrambled eggs, poured over pasta or gnocchi, stirred into soup, or to dress grains or meaty white fish (it’s especially good in a crab roll, Jones says). Brown butter is also valuable in the likes of hollandaise, Davies adds, to serve with eggs benedict or asparagus (“they’re completely delicious together”), although admittedly we’re a little way off asparagus season.
Of course, brown butter makes all manner of bakes better, the classic financier being a prime example. “It’s a rich, almondy cake/sponge hybrid made with quite a lot of brown butter,” Davies says. Alternatively, Jones would put brown butter to work in brownies “with lots of sea salt”, or a chocolate ganache for filling or icing cakes. Brown butter in biscuits is just plain good sense, and particularly in Davies’ kryptonite, Hobnobs – “I just love them.” Simply make the brown butter, leave it to cool and solidify, then rub into flour, sugar and oats. “Brown butter Hobnobs are a secret weapon level of brilliance.”
Got a culinary dilemma? Email [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/nov/19/lyon-new-gastronomy-centre-france-grand-hotel-dieu-rhone | Travel | 2019-11-19T06:30:07.000Z | Jon Bryant | Food fantasia: Lyon’s new gastronomy centre puts the world on a plate | The Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie is part of a €230m redevelopment of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, a monumental, pale-stone building that was the city’s main hospital until 2007. And it’s well positioned, being right on the Rhône River, in the heart of Lyon.
“It’s not just about Lyon and French cuisine,” says Régis Marcon, Michelin-starred chef and chairperson of the Cité’s strategic orientation committee. “It’s very much an international centre: we will work with other cities celebrated for their food.”
The first guest country – focused on during the autumn – is Japan while, subsequently, each month a different food will be featured: bread throughout November, followed by chocolate in December.
Grand Hôtel-Dieu. Photograph: Vincent Ramet
In line with the building’s former use, the central theme of the Cité is food and health. On the same site in the 12th century, monks were caring for the sick and, when the current building was constructed in the 17th century, patients were looked after by nuns who ensured they ate well and recovered using plants from the medicinal garden. The sisters kept contagious patients apart from the wounded in four huge wards (improving survival rates) beneath a 32-metre-high central dome that forms the principal part of the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie.
Looking up towards the main dome is a floating circle of 13 giant spoons – perhaps more for food tasting than receiving medicine – but both health and eating (combined with the sacred importance of food) are the foundations of the Cité’s exhibits and philosophy. The focus is on wellbeing and eating fresh, local ingredients rather than on the pastry, butter, cream and hefty meat sauces associated with Lyon’s traditional bouchon cuisine.
View of the main dome and a floating circle of 13 giant spoons. Photograph: Thierry Fournier
The French gastronomic meal was added to Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010 and there’s an underlying emphasis in the Cité on the superiority of French cuisine. Lyon’s most famous chef, Paul Bocuse, who died in 2018, appears as a warm-hearted, life-size cutout, as do the Mères Lyonnaises, the famous Mothers of Lyon who, having been let go from household service, opened restaurants serving simple, hearty dishes and enhanced Lyon’s reputation for excellent food.
The visit starts in the Grand Hôtel-Dieu’s wood-panelled 17th-century apothecary with blue-and-white ceramic urns in their original cabinets, where visitors learn about the secrets of medicinal plants. The À Table section looks at the origin of recipes, a virtual food hall with interactive screens linking what’s on your plate with what was once in the field.
Visitors in the À Table section. Photograph: Geoffrey Reynard
L’Atlas Mondial de la Gastronomie examines the rituals related to mealtimes and the different techniques and utensils used around the world. Et demain? looks at the future of food, nutrition, sustainability and ecological transitions. Miam Miam is a floor for children who can play hide-and-seek in a room-size food basket, listen to talking animals, fly on a virtual bumblebee’s back across the globe and play with an interactive tea set.
There are all-day food workshops, talks on understanding food labels, using seasonal produce, cooking demonstrations, visits by chefs and the opportunity to do tastings and masterclasses in the Gastro’Lab. Set over four floors, it’s an imaginative, playful, educational experience with high-tech exhibits set in various rustic, curative or culinary settings within the beautifully renovated building.
The centre’s Miam Miam area, designed for children Photograph: Thierry Fournier
A highlight is the top-floor kitchen where visitors can assist chefs to prepare dishes. The exhibition Revisiting Arcimboldo looks at works by the Renaissance master of the fruit-and-veg portrait and runs from December until May 2020. Organisers hope for around 300,000 visitors per year.
Lyon already hosts Sirha, the world’s largest food and catering trade fair, as well as the Biennale Internationale du Goût (Big) and the Bocuse d’Or, the chefs’ Olympics, every two years.
The Cité’s great cloister Photograph: Thierry Fournier
As for the origin of Lyon’s reputation as the capital of world gastronomy, it came from the pen of turn-of-the 20th-century French journalist and food critic Curnonsky, who was himself voted the Prince of Gastronomes by chefs and restaurateurs in 1927. It certainly came well after Renaissance writer François Rabelais – who revelled in Lyon’s culinary traditions, depicting the tawdry delights of offal and cheap cuts in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, coincidentally, worked as a physician at the original Grand Hôtel-Dieu in the 1530s.
Besides the gastronomy centre, the site incorporates the five-star Hotel InterContinental, which opened in June 2019, private apartments, a conference centre, food hall, 40 courtyard shops and nine restaurants. It has taken more than four years to complete (only the chapel remains to be fully restored) with much of the renovation using the original construction techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries.
At almost the same latitude on the other side of France, Bordeaux’s Cité du Vin has attracted more than 1.3 million visitors since it opened in June 2016. Three other Cités dedicated to food and drink are due to open in Paris-Rungis, Tours and Dijon in the next decade.
Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie, Grand Hôtel-Dieu, Place de l’Hôpital, Lyon. Open daily 10am-7pm (until 10pm on Saturdays). Le Cellier, the centre’s cafe and gift shop, is open daily from 9am to 8pm. Combined entry plus tasting €24. Entrance only, adults €12, 5-16s €8, under 5s free. Eurostar trains run from London St Pancras to Lyon in 4 hours and 41 minutes
Looking for a holiday with a difference? Browse Guardian Holidays to see a range of fantastic trips | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/dec/15/my-favourite-film-koyaanisqatsi | Film | 2011-12-15T12:09:25.000Z | Leo Hickman | My favourite film: Koyaanisqatsi | It's a film without any characters, plot or narrative structure. And its title is notoriously hard to pronounce. What's not to love about Koyaanisqatsi?
I came to Godfrey Reggio's 1982 masterpiece very late. It was actually during a Google search a few years back when looking for timelapse footage of urban traffic (for work rather than pleasure!) that I came across a "cult film", as some online reviewers were calling it. This meant I first watched it as all its loyal fans say not to: on DVD, on a small screen. If ever a film was destined for watching in a cinema, this is it. But, even without the luxury of full immersion, I was still truly captivated by it and, without any exaggeration, I still think about it every day.
Koyaanisqatsi's formula is simple: combine the epic, remarkable cinematography of Ron Fricke with the swelling intensity and repeating motifs of Philip Glass's celebrated original score. There's your mood bomb, right there. But Reggio's directorial vision is key, too. He was the one who drove the project for six years on a small budget as he travelled with Fricke across the US in the mid-to-late 1970s, filming its natural and urban wonders with such originality.
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Personally, I view the film as the quintessential environmental movie – a transformative meditation on the current imbalance between humans and the wider world that supports them (in the Hopi language, "Koyanaanis" means turmoil and "qatsi" means life). But Reggio has rightly refused to define the film's specific meaning; he even fought unsuccessfully with the distributor for the film to have no title. (Incidentally, it was only Francis Ford Coppola's last-minute support that helped push it into mainstream cinemas.)
"It's meant to offer an experience, rather than an idea," said Reggio in a 2002 interview (included with the DVD as a special feature). "For some people, it's an environmental film. For some, it's an ode to technology. For some people, it's a piece of shit. Or it moves people deeply. It depends on who you ask. It is the journey that is the objective."
It's the sort of answer you might expect from someone who was a resident member of the Christian Brothers teaching order from the age of 14 to 28. He also cites Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados as one of his most moving spiritual experiences. But it was his time spent making shorts for the Institute for Regional Education in the early 70s that sparked Koyaanisqatsi. The New Mexico-based institute provided $40,000 of funding after he made them a series of campaign films aimed at raising public awareness about how technology and surveillance were being used to "control behaviour".
The first section of Koyaanisqatsi begins with long, aerial shots of the natural world – cloudscapes, ocean waves, the desert scenery of Monument Valley made so famous by 1950s westerns. Slowly, the presence of mankind drips into the film: we see power lines, mines and atomic explosions. Then, after half an hour or so – yes, this film demands commitment, concentration and utter capitulation – the pace and visual intensity picks up, as some transfixing footage of derelict housing estates being demolished feeds into urban scenes of traffic, shown in either slow motion or rapid timelapse. We see hotdogs and Twinkies being made in a food factory, people spilling out and on to trains and elevators, and jumbo jets taxiing at LAX. And then it climaxes perfectly with archive footage of a Nasa test rocket exploding during takeoff in 1962, with the camera tracking the final flaming piece of debris as it falls back to earth.
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
It may look hackneyed now, as we've become so used to Koyaanisqatsi's much-imitated techniques – Madonna's Ray of Light video, high-definition slow-motion footage of sport, Adam Curtis documentaries. Our minds have been seared by images of the Twin Towers falling and the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles exploding – both prophetically foreshadowed in the film. But still, 30 years on, Koyaanisqatsi can connect with us, perhaps more than ever. And you can't overstate how much Glass's score sets the tone and rhythm for the film's rolling, relentless cycle of imagery.
"I didn't want to show the obviousness of injustice, social deprivation, war, etc," said Reggio. "I wanted to show that which we're most proud of: our shining beast, our way of life. So [the film] is about the beauty of this beast." He clearly thought he might partially disguise his concerns about the direction of mankind within the film. But other statements reveal his true feelings:
"What I tried to show is that the main event today is not seen by those who live in it. We see the surface of the newspapers and the obviousness of conflict, social injustice, the market, the welling up of culture. But for me, the greatest and most important event of perhaps our entire history has fundamentally gone unnoticed: the transiting from old nature – or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation – into a technological milieu, into mass technology, as the environment of life."
The New York Times, in its original 1982 review, was somewhat ambivalent about the film: "Koyaanisqatsi is an oddball and – if one is willing to put up with a certain amount of solemn picturesqueness – entertaining trip." But the film, which is actually the first part of a (long-delayed and, in my view, far less successful) trilogy, has since been added to the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress due to it being "culturally, historically and aesthetically" significant.
My one regret with the film is that I have yet to see it on the big screen. I missed it last year at the Brighton festival – where the Philip Glass Ensemble played the soundtrack live – and again at Edinburgh earlier this year. I am determined not to waste such a chance again. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/27/eliot-mill-floss-biography-tulliver | Books | 2010-03-27T00:05:40.000Z | Kathryn Hughes | Rereading: George Eliot's Mill on the Floss | On 5 March 1860, the scientist and journalist GH Lewes reported to the publisher John Blackwood that "Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning as she lives through her tragic story. But there is such a strain of poetry to relieve the tragedy that the more she cries, and the readers cry, the better say I."
"Mrs Lewes" was, of course, George Eliot, and "the tragic story" on which she was working so damply was The Mill on the Floss, published by Blackwood 150 years ago next week. What was making Eliot cry was having to write the last few pages of her novel in which the heroine Maggie Tulliver and her estranged brother Tom drown in the swollen River Floss, locked together "in an embrace never to be parted".
More than mere melodrama, the watery hug represented a wishful reworking of Eliot's fractured relationship with her own adored brother, with whom she had grown up on the Warwickshire family farm in the 1820s. Ever since she had written to Isaac Evans three years before to explain that she was now cohabiting in London with the married Lewes – "Mrs Lewes" was a term of social convenience, her legal name remained Mary Ann Evans – the rigidly respectable Isaac had refused to have anything to do with her. Even more hurtfully, he had instructed their sister to break off contact too. This silence was to stretch bleakly over the coming quarter of a century. The brother and sister who, like Tom and Maggie, had once "roamed the daisied fields together" in loving childhood, would never meet again.
Unusually for such an intensely autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss was not Eliot's first work of fiction, but her third. Shortly before it came out she explained to a friend that my "mind works with most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past", and her first two novels had indeed truffled her own prehistory. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was drawn from stories circulating around her childhood community about a series of mild scandals that had taken place several decades earlier. Adam Bede (1859) was based on the young adulthood of her father, her uncle and her uncle's wife. It was as if Eliot had been working through what she called the "many strata" of collective memory before she was ready, finally, to confront her own past.
Literary theorists tend not to approve of reading novels as if they were fictionalised autobiography. Still, it is a stern critic who would deny readers the pleasure of spotting which parts of her own childhood George Eliot transferred to Tom and Maggie. The dynamics and personalities of the Tulliver family are remarkably similar to what we know of the Evanses. Mr Tulliver, the hot-headed miller, is described as finding "the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world", and you only have to glance at the diaries of Eliot's father, Robert Evans, to realise that he too was an uncertain penman.
Evans, like Tulliver, was a fond father, who doted on "his little wench", born when he was already middle aged. And while he was far too astute to follow Tulliver's example of mounting ruinous law suits, Evans often found himself called into court to give expert witness on matters of land management.
Then there is Tom Tulliver, whose rigid respectability and lack of capacity for original thought makes him a ringer for Isaac. Some of the best scenes in the book show Tom struggling over schoolboy Latin while the younger Maggie races ahead, exhibiting a cleverness that upsets the gender expectations of her highly conventional family. Isaac, like Tom, grew up to be a practical man of business. Mary Ann, by contrast, followed Maggie into a self-punishing adolescence marked by an intense longing for the kind of intellectual and artistic life not generally available to girls in the muddy backwaters of late-Hanoverian England.
But it is the Dodson aunts who are the real stars of The Mill on the Floss. This bustling trio of self-regarding matrons is one of the great comic creations of 19th-century fiction, as good as anything Dickens ever did. The Dodsons are Mrs Tulliver's married sisters, and regularly descend on the mill in a disapproving chorus, ready to dispense home truths beginning with, "It's for your own good I say this." Devoid of culture or curiosity about lives other than their own, the Dodsons nonetheless know themselves to be experts in everything that really matters, including "obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils".
Behind Eliot's comedy there is, as ever, a more serious intent. As a careful reader of all the new scientific theories, including Darwin's, Eliot wants to show us the Dodsons in their larger historical context. Thirty years ago, she explains, this is how rich Protestant peasants lived in middle England. Fussing over butter-making and swollen ankles, household linen and fashionable bonnets may strike her readers as tiresome and vulgar, but it is important to realise that this way of being represents a particular moment in human development. Now that moment has passed, and, for all their ant-like vitality, the Dodsons and their ilk are as dead as dodos.
The Dodson aunts derive much of their grotesque energy from Eliot's close observations of her own mother's sisters, the Pearsons. This formidable set of women lived in a series of prosperous farmhouses at several miles' distance from the Evanses' own home. Robert Evans's diaries for the early 1830s record a constant round of comings and goings, with aunts and uncles descending periodically just as they do in The Mill on the Floss. In return little Mary Ann is sent on overnight visits, especially to her Aunt Garner, the model for Aunt Deane. Eliot tells us that one of the main planks of Dodson respectability is the desire "to leave an unimpeachable will", so it is nice to report that the real-life model for the stuffiest of all the Dodson aunts, Aunt Glegg, did exactly that.
In 1844 wealthy widow Mary Everard departed the Warwickshire earth, leaving much of her household furniture to be divided between her three nieces: Mary Ann Evans, Mary Ann's elder sister Chrissy (the model for Mr Tulliver's sister Gritty) and their cousin Bessy Garner (possibly the original for the angelic cousin Lucy, whom jealous Maggie pushes into the mud). The will and its codicil comprise a remarkable inventory of Mrs Everard's household goods, written with an attention to detail that would have delighted her fictional counterpart. While Chrissy gets her aunt's best bed, and Bessy gets a wardrobe, Mary Ann gets 12 teaspoons, four saltspoons marked MP (for Mary Pearson) and the clock in the kitchen.
It is, though, Maggie Tulliver who towers over The Mill on the Floss, one of those great literary heroines whom bookish girls grow up wanting to be. Just like Anne of Green Gables or even Jane Eyre, Maggie captures exactly the dilemma of being the clever girl of the family, the ugly duckling, the misplaced foundling who longs to be recognised for the genius she secretly knows herself to be. (Maggie fantasises about writing to Sir Walter Scott, who will naturally recognise her specialness). Several of the most celebrated incidents in Maggie's life are said to be taken straight from Mary Anne's own emotionally jagged childhood – the hacking off of her unruly hair with the scissors, the running away to join the Gypsies, the mortification of being displaced in her brother's affections by a new pony.
The central crisis of the novel is a reworking of the drama that defined Eliot's own adult life. Towards the end of the book, the adult Maggie goes on an ill-advised boat trip with Stephen Guest, her cousin Lucy's beau. "Nothing happens", as we might say today, apart from Stephen begging Maggie to elope with him by heading to Scotland for a quick marriage. Maggie realises just in time that what she is doing is wrong and returns home. However, her absence has caused a storm of gossip and "the world's wife" is busy painting the blackest picture of what really went on during those missing hours. Respectable women turn away from Maggie in the street, and coarse men laugh knowingly. Tom, who is now head of the family, refuses to let his disgraced sister return to the mill, declaring savagely: "I wash my hands of you for ever."
Here, surely, is a fictional transmutation of Eliot's own "elopement" with Lewes in 1854. That, too, had started with a boat trip – to Germany, where the middle-aged couple spent the first few months of their life together. While Maggie commits no actual sin – she has not slept with Stephen – Eliot seems to be making the provocative case that neither has she. Lewes may technically still have been a married man, but that was because his complicated legal situation made divorce impossible. As far as Eliot was concerned, she and Lewes, whom she always referred to as "my husband", had a sacred bond which was more binding than any piece of paper. The "world's wife", though, saw things very differently.
On returning to Britain in the spring of 1855, Eliot found herself the centre of a storm of vicious finger-pointing. As a "fallen woman" she was not welcome in any respectable home, and several of her women friends were forbidden by their fathers from calling on her. Inveterate gossips such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau made things even murkier by adding embellishments, including a fictitious illegitimate baby, to this already most juicy of literary scandals.
That Eliot was often writing about herself when she wrote about Maggie is betrayed by the uneven shape of The Mill on the Floss. The first two sections are leisurely and detailed, studded with examples of the comical Dodsons and the minute plotting of the changing relationship between the young Tullivers. It is as if Eliot is unable to achieve the critical distance required to move her story briskly forward, but instead lingers lovingly over her memories of those early years with Isaac.
And so the ending, when it comes, is rushed and breathless. A terrible tidal flood has marooned Tom in the mill and, in a reversal of the usual rescue plot, Maggie rows out from the town to save her elder brother. On the way back a piece of flotsam breaks off and heads towards their small boat. "'It is coming, Maggie!' Tom said, in a deep, hoarse voice, loosing the oars, and clasping her." The boat sinks, taking Tom and Maggie down in that final embrace. In real life this reunion of brother and sister never took place. Instead, Isaac and Mary Ann Evans spent their adult lives apart, he on the Warwickshire family farm, she as an increasingly successful and fêted author in London. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/27/trumps-budget-54-billion-increase-defense-spending | US news | 2017-02-27T16:52:16.000Z | David Smith | Donald Trump's first budget: big hike for defense spending as most agencies cut | Donald Trump will make his first address to Congress on Tuesday, outlining priorities including a big hike in military spending at the expense of foreign aid and environmental programmes.
Trump White House scrambles to check scandal over FBI inquiry into Russia ties
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In a scene that few imagined possible just a year ago, the brash billionaire will stand where many US presidents have stood before him on Capitol Hill, facing ranks of senators and congressmen, some of whom fiercely oppose him.
Democrats have not announced plans to boycott the address, as many did Trump’s inauguration, but some have pointedly invited guests including an Iraqi-American doctor, a Pakistani-born doctor and an American-born daughter of Palestinian refugees – each giving a human face to those affected by the president’s hardline policies.
But Trump starts with the benefit of Republicans controlling both the House and Senate and is likely to build on an inaugural address that called for an urgent break from the policies of Barack Obama.
“The president will lay out an optimistic vision for the country,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said. “The theme will be a renewal of the American spirit.”
Trump will promise “concrete steps”, Spicer said, and set out a “bold agenda” including tax reform, improving work conditions for working parents, healthcare reform, access to education, rebuilding the military and fulfilling commitments to veterans.
“You will hear a lot about immigration tomorrow night and he will talk about why it matters,” Spicer said.
Trump will also have to make his case to Congress, which has the final say on his budget. On Monday the White House announced he will seek a $54bn hike in spending on tanks, ships and weapons systems while cutting foreign aid, environmental programmes and domestic agencies by the same amount. The US already spends more on the military than the next eight countries combined.
“This budget will be a public safety and national security budget,” Trump said at the White House. “It will include an historic increase in defence spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it.”
This budget will be a public safety and national security budget
Donald Trump
Trump said his budget would put “America first” – a phrase that originated with Nazi sympathisers who sought to keep the US out of the second world war – by focusing on defense, law enforcement and veterans, diverting money previously spent overseas.
“We are going to do more with less and make the government lean and accountable to the people,” he said. “We can do so much more with the money we spend.”
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters the full budget would not be ready until May but priorities would include rebuilding the military and restoring nuclear capabilities. Reductions in non-defence spending would be the biggest since the start of Ronald Reagan’s administration, he said.
Mulvaney cited foreign aid as a target for cutbacks. “You can expect to see exactly what the president said he was going to do,” he said. “When you see these reductions, you’ll be able to tie it back to a speech the president gave. We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars.”
In a conference call with reporters, two administration officials familiar with Trump’s proposal said the planned defence spending increase would be financed partly by “dollar-for-dollar cuts” to the Department of State, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other non-defence programmes.
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Trump’s request for the Pentagon included more money for shipbuilding, military aircraft and establishing “a more robust presence in key international waterways and chokepoints” such as the Strait of Hormuz and South China Sea, one of the officials said. There will also be increases for the homeland security, intelligence and the justice department.
A second official said the state department’s budget could be cut by as much as 30%, which would force a major restructuring and the elimination of some programmes. The US currently spends about $50bn annually on the state department and foreign assistance.
The move was swiftly criticised. More than 120 retired US generals and admirals – including George Casey, former chief of staff of the US army, and David Petraeus, former CIA director and commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – sent a letter to Congress, urging it fully fund US diplomacy and foreign aid.
“Elevating and strengthening diplomacy and development alongside defense are critical to keeping America safe,” they said. “We know from our service in uniform that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone.”
Domestic agencies will also feel the pinch, with the EPA apparently a likely target. On Saturday its new administrator, Scott Pruitt, told conservative activists that climate change and water pollution regulations would be rolled back and they would be “justified” in believing the environmental regulator should be completely disbanded.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said last week that one of key priorities of the White House was the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.
Democrats argue such moves will cut middle-class programmes to make way for huge tax cut for the wealthy.
Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, said: “It is clear from this budget blueprint that President Trump fully intends to break his promises to working families by taking a meat ax to programs that benefit the middle class.
Most Americans didn’t vote to ease up on polluters, or to give Wall Street the green light to rip them off
Chuck Schumer
“A cut this steep almost certainly means cuts to agencies that protect consumers from Wall Street excess and protect clean air and water.
“Most Americans didn’t vote to ease up on polluters, or to give Wall Street the green light to rip them off. They certainly didn’t vote to make all these cuts so that President Trump can hand out a tax break to the wealthiest Americans.”
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi added: “President Trump’s budget blueprint is a prescription for America’s decline. Ransacking America’s investments in jobs and working families will make our nation weaker, not stronger. A $54bn cut will do far-reaching and long-lasting damage to our ability to meet the needs of the American people and win the jobs of the future.”
The president’s request must ultimately be decided by Congress and is likely to face fierce resistance from Democrats and some Republicans. Senate Democrats could use a filibuster to try to force a government shutdown. With tax cuts also in the pipeline, it is unclear how Trump plans to cut the national debt.
The White House was sending Trump’s proposal to federal departments on Monday as he prepared for budget haggling with Congress that often takes months. The administration will leave so-called “entitlements” such as social security and Medicare untouched for now, according to an administration official.
Asked about Trump’s promise of a massive infrastructure programme, the press secretary said it will not be part of the current budget discussion. “That would be a part of a longer-term discussion they would have in the Congress,” the official said.
Trump on replacing healthcare law that took years to craft: 'Nobody knew it could be so complicated'
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Trump held meetings with state governors and health insurance company executives at the White House on Monday. “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” he said, about plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.”
As reporters were being led out of the room, one asked if a special prosecutor should investigate Trump’s ties with Russia. He did not respond immediately, but could then be heard saying: “I haven’t called Russia in 10 years.”
Later, Spicer rejected calls for a special prosecutor to examine the allegation swirling around members of Trump’s election campaign and whether they were in contact with Moscow last year.
“My question would be a special prosecutor for what?” he said. “I think Russia’s involvement in activity has been investigated up and down. There comes a point, if there’s nothing further to investigate, what are you asking people to investigate?”
He added: “There’s nothing new that being reported. It’s the same stuff over and over and over again ... How many people have to say there’s nothing there before you say there’s nothing there?”
Trump: ‘Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated’ Guardian | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/02/books.guardianreview4 | Books | 2002-03-02T01:24:45.000Z | John O'Mahony | The Guardian Profile: Mstislav Rostropovich | A disquieting incident occurs at the tragic end of Prokofiev's ballet Romeo And Juliet in Valencia's Teatre Principal. From the orchestra pit - strategically placed between two dancing areas, so that the musicians are visible throughout - the solitary figure of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich rises slowly, pale and ghostlike. At first there is a suspicion that he has simply come forward too early for his curtain call. Then, as it becomes clear that the episode has been choreographed, there is a fear that an evening of faultless musicality and some sublime dancing will be marred by a mawkish gesture. But as the audience holds its breath, Rostropovich steps forward, kneels down and clasps the lovers' hands together with a poise and simplicity that couldn't be more dignified.
It is difficult to imagine any other conductor pulling this off. Simon Rattle - with his cheeky grin and wild hair? Daniel Barenboim - whose panache might transform a carefully measured moment into a celebrity turn? Definitely not. And if Rostropovich's fellow countryman, the international star Valery Gergiev, dared to extend his iron grip from the pit to the stage, it would be roundly denounced as more evidence of his reputed megalomania.
Rostropovich has got "that grain of genius and prodigious energy that, combined, makes a great musician," says his colleague and friend, the conductor Sir Colin Davis, who this month will participate in a gala concert at the Barbican to celebrate Rostropovich's 75th birthday. "But he also has very profound feelings, particularly about his time in Russia and the suffering that so many musicians endured there. The idea of the joining of hands couldn't possibly mean more to him."
Mstislav Rostropovich has led an extraordinary life. He is a cellist who has not only performed some of the most important music written for the instrument in the 20th century but has also been directly involved in its creation. His close friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich inspired both of the composer's masterful cello concertos, which are dedicated to Rostropovich: "What I value most of all in his playing," Shostakovich wrote, "is the intense, restless mind and the high spirituality that he brings to his mastery - a phenomenal virtuosity combined with a noble and ravishingly beautiful tone."
A subsequent friendship with Sergei Prokofiev led to the composition of his Cello Concertino and Symphony Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, both dedicated to Rostropovich. Britten composed both of his solo cello suites for Rostropovich as well as the intoxicating symphony for cello and orchestra. And he has commissioned work from a generation of younger composers, such as James Macmillan and David Matthews, leading one critic to proclaim that he has single-handedly doubled the repertoire for the cello. "He has shown that there is a primacy and priority to be made in the relationship between performer and composer," says Macmillan. "He has recognised that the vital life blood has been maintained by living composers. And that has been a great encouragement to composers since Britten and Shostakovich, because he has maintained his links with the younger generation."
As a conductor, Rostropovich has repaid his mentors with lifelong devotion to their work, presenting Prokofiev's opera War And Peace for the first time in the composer's original version, prompting Shostakovich to comment: "The opera sounded as it should sound... Here at last was a real conductor on the rostrum, a real musician and interpreter of immense talent." And during his long association with the London Symphony Orchestra Rostropovich has overseen festivals dedicated to Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten.
However, it is as a political dissident - and now almost a modern icon - on a par with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov that Rostropovich has made the most impact on the wider public consciousness. In 1974 he received an award from the International League of Human Rights for sheltering Solzhenitsyn in his dacha outside Moscow, a courageous act which sent Rostropovich into exile, and even today, in the complex atmosphere of post-Communist Russia, causes resentment among the majority who remained silent during the Soviet era. A concert Rostropovich gave in 1998 to commemorate Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday seems to have served as the catalyst that brought these frustrations to the surface:
"The whole point of the concert seemed to be to show our most prominent cellist kissing the great Russian writer," jeered one critic, "and since it was possible to see this kiss on television, there was no real need for people to come to the concert at all."
The ferocity of the critical reaction, which generally accused Rostropovich of "fastening on to any opportunity" for a Russian comeback, led him to vow never to play in the Russian capital again, resulting in a second, self-imposed exile: "I will not look for any more 'opportunities'," he lamented, "I don't want to 'punish' anybody with my concerts."
Known to all by the diminutive "Slava", Rostropovich's warmth and ebullience are legendary. In 1967, he formed a life-long friendship with the far more reticent Solzhenitsyn, by barging into the writer's Ryazan apartment and bellowing: "I'm Rostropovich. I've come to embrace Solzhenitsyn." Since then, scores of musicians, writers, politicians and journalists have found themselves crushed by Rostropovich's bear-hugs and enraptured by his charm.
He is a sparkling raconteur. His eyes fill unashamedly with tears as he tells the story of how his impoverished family was helped on their arrival in Moscow by an Armenian woman. They fill again with tears of laughter as he launches into long, hilarious accounts of youthful amorous adventures in Russia's far east. "He could have been a great clown," Davis says, "he has such a sense for the essence of what is entertainment."
Clive Gillinson, the LSO's man aging director and a former cellist himself, recalls Rostropovich's contribution to a birthday celebration some years ago: "Halfway through the party, this gorilla burst in, apparently a gorilla-gram, and it swung from the door and all the usual stuff. Then somebody picked up a cello and handed it to the gorilla and said, 'Now Clive, to remind you of your past as a cellist, the gorilla will play you something.' But the gorilla didn't know which way round to hold the cello and made a complete hash of it. So I had to show it how to hold the cello, which I did rather patronisingly. And it suddenly played Happy Birthday unbelievably. It was Slava."
Rostropovich is also a shrewd businessman who collects cars, paintings and Russian antique furniture, and owns homes in six cities around the world, including a Maida Vale mansion in London. His 16th arrondissement apartment in Paris, which recalls how Russian aristocrats must have lived in the 19th century, is crammed with Tsarist-era furniture and porcelain. He is also deeply religious and carries with him on his travels a collection of authentic miniature icons: "It is very important for me," he says. "It is the same as my devotion to music. Music is a contact with another world."
His beliefs, he says, are also behind his continued support for his old friend Boris Yeltsin, despite the excesses and corruption of the Yeltsin years: "I think Yeltsin was sent by God's will. The destruction of the Soviet Union could have resulted in the destruction of the planet, because every Soviet republic had its own nuclear forces. If it wasn't for Yeltsin, we would definitely have witnessed a civil war." Rostropovich also believes that the divine has played a role in his own destiny: "When I was told to kick Solzhenitsyn out of my apartment, it would have been logical to do so, to have rented another apartment for him. But someone up there told me, 'don't do this'. If I had, my career would have been very different. I would never have been sent out of the country, I would have received even more honours. But instead, when I left, another era started for me. An even better time began. So, it is best to rely on God's opinion."
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on March 27 1927. His father, Leopold Vitoldovich, had been a child prodigy who gave his first cello recital aged 12, graduated from the St Petersburg conservatory with a gold medal, and later studied the cello in Paris with Pablo Casals. During a concert engagement in the city of Orenburg in the Urals Leopold fell passionately in love with his piano accompanist, Sofia Fedotova, and they married in 1922. After the birth of their first child, Veronika, the Rostropovich family moved in 1926 to Baku, where Leopold became professor of music at the conservatory and Sofia taught piano.
Shortly afterwards, Sofia found that she was pregnant for the second time, but decided that she would prefer not to have another child: "She confessed this to me years later that she tried some makeshift, domestic way to get rid of me," Rostropovich says now, with a certain amount of glee. "When it failed she invited the gynecologist to give her medication so that I wouldn't live. I really had to struggle for life."
Despite evident talent, Leopold Rostropovich's career failed to ignite: "It was a tragedy in a way," his son says. "He was a genius. I still think that I haven't reached his level on the cello. My mother would criticise him when he wouldn't arrange a concert. And he said, 'If they want me they'll come to me.' And I have to say, nobody came." Much of the family's ambitions were transferred to young Slava, who displayed precocious musical abilities and whose energetic character couldn't have been more different from his father's.
At four Slava began studying piano. When he was five, the family moved to Moscow so that he could have an adequate musical education. However, they were so poor that they couldn't afford to rent a room and were forced to approach strangers in Moscow's streets for help: "The four of us - my parents, me and my sister - were standing by the 'Chinese' wall. Everything my parents had brought from Baku was in two big cases. My father was approaching people, saying: 'I am sorry to disturb you, but I have a very talented little son and we just arrived and we have a little bit of money, maybe you could suggest where we could spend the night?'" Eventually, an Armenian woman named Zinaida took pity on them and offered her own cramped communal apartment, "two small rooms so small it was like a train compartment" where they lived for the next two years.
To support the family, Leopold took jobs in various provincial orchestras, sometimes as far afield as Ukraine, often taking his young son with him: "He would take me to rehearsal. I would sit in the orchestra looking at all the instruments and dreaming of become a conductor." However, his father was keen to steer him towards becoming a cellist. Slava began studying under his tutelage when he was eight and by 13 he had made his solo debut playing the Saint-Saëns concerto in Slavyansk. A year later, as Hitler's armies advanced on Moscow, the family was evacuated to Orenburg, where both parents taught at the local music school and Leopold formed a trio to play in cinemas.
However, within a year, disaster struck, as Leopold was beset by a serious heart complaint and died shortly afterwards, in 1942, aged 50: "It had a devastating effect," Rostropovich recalls, "and for a time I too became very ill." At 14, he found himself the family breadwinner. He took over his father's teaching job as well as many of his appointments with a local operatic ensemble. Then, when he was 16, he was accepted by the Moscow conservatory and moved back to the city with his mother and sister. One of his first objectives was to enroll in Class No. 35, then taught by Shostakovich.
"It was after his Seventh Symphony and he was at the height of his career," remembers Rostropovich. "It was impossible to get a place in his class. I asked my cello professor to ask Shostakovich if he could find half an hour so that I could show him the score of a piano concerto I had written. Shostakovich asked me to play it, but I was so embarrassed that I played it unbelievably fast. But he took me into the class."
At the conservatory he had also been introduced to Prokofiev several times "but he kept on forgetting me". However, when he performed the composer's cello concerto in January 1948 it marked the beginning of a close friendship and working relationship. "He was in the audience," Rostropovich recalls, "but as I was playing without my glasses I couldn't see properly and could only make out his bald head. I played five encores, each time directing the applause to this blurry bald head in the front row. When I returned after the fifth encore I saw Prokofiev standing backstage. He growled: 'Young man, how long are you going to wander around the stage?' It turned out the bald man wasn't him at all."
However, just weeks after this concert, the entire musical establishment was rocked by a new wave of cultural repression. Having already purged literature, theatre and film, Stalin's cultural strongman Andrei Zhdanov turned to the Soviet Union's leading composers, including Shostakovich and Prokofiev, accusing them of the mortal sin of "Formalism", defined by the authorities as "anti-democratic tendencies alien to the Soviet people and [its] artistic tastes". Almost overnight, both composers were excised from the repertoires in Moscow, and their classes at the conservatory emptied.
Having already experienced similar vilification in 1936 for his opera Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, Shostakovich took the new onslaught with a certain amount of equanimity. But for the more naive and less sociable Prokofiev, who had been lured back to the USSR in the 1930s with promises of prestige and privilege, the abrupt fall from grace was deeply distressing. "He couldn't understand what had really happened and he didn't understand what they wanted from him," says Rostropovich. "He would say 'I have such a great technique as a composer, you tell me which style you like and I will compose in that style'. He imagined that people were pointing at him in the street and saying: 'There goes that bad formalist composer'."
Throughout this period, Rostropovich was one of the very few to remain steadfast. While working with Prokofiev on his cello sonata during sessions at the composer's dacha, Rostropovich was his only friend. He formed a bond with Shostakovich that endured until the cellist himself was forced into exile in the 1970s. He continued to champion the work of both men, premiering the final version of the Prokofiev in 1950.
One of the reasons why Rostropovich survived unscathed appears to have been his status as a rising young star and potential cultural export. In 1945 he had won the cello gold medal in the first Soviet Union competition for young musicians, and in 1947 travelled to Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1951, he was among the first musicians from Russia to visit Italy since the 1917 Revolution. In 1961 he made his debut as a conductor in the town of Gorky, presiding over Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.
Rostropovich's personal life also began to blossom during this period, when, during a tour to Prague in 1955, he first met the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, already an established name at the Bolshoi Opera. The two met in a restaurant during a government reception: "I had never heard him play," says Vishnevskaya, "and he hadn't heard me sing. So it was not about glory or fame. He decided on the spot that I was for him, and he set to work arranging a series of surprises. The next morning, when I got up and opened my closet door, I discovered my clothes had been completely covered with lilies. The following day I found orchids in all four corners of my room. The third day, the floor was strewn with boxes of chocolates. On the fourth day we decided to get married." They have two daughters, Elena who is a pianist who lives outside Paris, and Olga, a cellist living in the US.
Back in Moscow, Rostropovich took over as Vishnevskaya's rehearsal accompanist so they could spend as much time as possible together. He also conducted her in productions of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Prokofiev's War And Peace at the Bolshoi. Throughout the 60s the pair lived next door to Shostakovich and his wife in Moscow's House of Composers and, after meeting Benjamin Britten at a concert in London in 1961, struck up a friendship which led the great English composer to write his cello concerto for Rostropovich and the soprano part of his War Requiem for Vishnevskaya.
However, this stellar soviet success story was soon to come to an abrupt halt, in a manner that would have seemed desolately familiar to Rostropovich's mentors. In 1967 the cellist met the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose novella One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich had caused a sensation when published in 1962 during the Khrushchev "thaw". In 1969, he discovered that his new friend was living on the outskirts of Moscow in a shack without heat or running water and insisted that Solzhenitsyn move to the Rostropoviches' considerably more sumptuous dacha.
By this time, however, Solzhenitsyn had been expelled from the writers' union and could only publish his work abroad or in hand-typed samizdat [underground editions]. The decision to award Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 further antagonised the authorities and Rostropovich came under increasing official pressure to evict him from the dacha: "I was summoned by the minister of culture and the interior minister," he says, "and they told me that if I wouldn't throw him out I was going to be in big trouble. They wanted me to throw him out on to the street in winter. I simply refused."
Instead, Rostropovich decided to write an "open letter" to the press in defence of his friend. He wrote: "Can it really be that the times we have lived through have not taught us to take a more cautious attitude toward crushing talented people? Not to speak in the name of an entire nation? Not to force people to utter opinions about things they have never read or heard?" he asked. "Each human being must have the right to think for himself and to express his opinion without fear."
Vishnevskaya, who was more acutely aware of the consequences, advised caution: "I said, 'If you want to write a letter, you know that I will always be by your side no matter what.' But I knew what we were risking and knew we would be persecuted." Almost immediately, Rostropovich's name disappeared from the billboards of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's most prestigious venues, and even engagements in lesser halls, such as an invitation to conduct Die Fledermaus at the Operetta theatre, were subject to capricious cancellation because of his "decline as a musician".
To occupy his increasing free time, Rostropovich began to collect porcelain figures, now kept in a magnificent cabinet in his Paris apartment. Though Vishnevskaya was initially allowed to continue performing, her name was expunged from reviews: "I sang the lead role in The Gambler by Prokofiev on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre and my name wasn't even mentioned in the press. It was like the lead character didn't exist," she says.
Solzhenitsyn's arrest and expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974 made the family's situation untenable and shortly afterwards they were granted permission to leave the Soviet Union. Initially, they thought their exile would be temporary: "We were always postponing returning home because we thought the situation in Russia would change," says Galina, "We never planned to stay abroad. Russia is our home. I love the country, the people with their strange ways, the horrible but beautiful history. I love it all." However, while watching television at their home in Paris in 1978, they learned that their Soviet citizenship had been rescinded: "We were cut from our country, as if by a sharp knife," says Rostropovich. "It was a big shock."
On a financial level as well, the move abroad was initially fraught: "When I came over to the west I had nothing," Rostropovich says, "I didn't have any contacts and I had no concerts set up." Soon, however, offers came flooding in and he became chief conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, where he presided for 17 seasons. He also built links with the LSO that eventually led to his Prokofiev and Shostakovich seasons of the 90s. However, just as he had given up all hope of ever returning to Russia, the political landscape began to change again, as Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms began to transform the Soviet bloc. When the Berlin Wall fell, Rostropovich borrowed the private jet of a sympathetic millionaire and, as the concrete barrier was torn down, played his cello in the shadow of the wall through the night, tears streaming down his face.
However, his boldest gesture of support for democratic reforms came with the Moscow White House siege in August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin barricaded himself into Russia's government buildings to thwart a coup aiming to roll back the changes. Rostropovich says: "My daughter called me early in the morning and said: 'Father, something is happening in Russia'. And as soon as I understood that they were trying to bring back the soviet system, I thought I must go there. Galina was in London, and I wrote her a letter saying goodbye. I was sure they were going to kill me. So, I turned up in Moscow without even so much as a visa. At the airport, I convinced them that I was part of a delegation of emigrants."
Yeltsin's welcome was little short of ecstatic. He wrote in his memoir The View From The Kremlin: "Inside and outside the White House, many people found their nerves were giving out. Some just didn't know how to behave in such a stressful situation. There were hysterics. Suddenly, Rostropovich walked in and everything fell into place. All the trivial concerns and inanities fell away. Of course, Rostropovich was a great man who performed a magnanimous, bold deed: he asked for an assault rifle and was loaned one for a time, even though every firearm was needed." Some say Rostropovich's arrival in the White House was a factor in the coup plotters' decision not to shell the building. Even now, however, he has declined offers by the Russian government to restore his citizenship and he and Vishnevskaya travel on a special Swiss passport for foreign nationals.
After a quarter of a century he has become accustomed to wandering the globe from concert to concert. On the eve of his 75th birthday, his wife would prefer him to slow down a little: "He says that he can't turn down any offer to work," she laments. "I think he has to learn to say no. I'm not saying he has to quit music - this is his life. But I worry for his health and therefore I think he has to slow down."
So far, Rostropovich has ignored these entreaties, and continues a punishing schedule. Over the past few weeks, he has performed in Rome, London, Paris, and Barcelona. The birthday celebrations will see concerts at the Barbican and in New York. He is presently in Baku to open a Rostropovich museum in the house where he was born: "I think I can keep up the pace that I am working at now," he says. "Music gives me strength. When I come to a performance, I feel a bit tired but with the first bars I am fresh again. I have no intention of going on vacation until that final and longest of all possible vacations."
Life at a glance Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich
Born: March 27 1927, Baku, Azerbaijan.
Education: Moscow conservatory, 1943-46.
Married: 1955 Galina Vishnevskaya (two daughters Olga b. 1956, Elena b. 1958).
World premieres and commissions include: Prokokiev Symphony Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, 1952; Shostakovich Concerto No1, '59, Concerto No 2 '66; Knipper Concerto '62; Britten Symphony for Cello and Orchestra '63; Dutilleux Tout un Monde Lointain '69; Lutoslawski Cello Concerto '70; Berio Il Ritorno degli snovidenia '76; Bernstein Three Meditations from Mass for Violoncello '77; Penderecki Concerto No 2 '82; Matthews Romanza '90; MacMillan Cello Concerto '96.
Awards include: Stalin Prize, 1951; Lenin Prize, '64; International League of Human Rights award '74.
· Performances in the Rostropovich 75th birthday concert series are at the Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS on March 14,15, 16, 19, 20, 24 and 27 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2016/jun/13/dog-days-are-over-whats-behind-the-decline-in-pets | Life and style | 2016-06-13T06:30:02.000Z | Patrick Barkham | Dog days are over: what’s behind the decline in pets? | Are Bella, Tiddles and Ginger an endangered species? The companion animals of the once great pet-lovers of Britain appear to be falling out of favour.
Pet food sales are in decline and the pet food market is stagnating, according to Mintel’s Lifestyle report on consumer trends. Mintel pinpoints demographic changes: an increase in older people less likely to own a pet and Generation Rent, for whom pet ownership may be prohibited.
Queen Victoria popularised dog ownership and anointed the world’s first animal welfare charity, the RSPCA, but after decades of the number of dogs and cats in Britain increasing (from an estimated 4.7m dogs and 4.1m cats in 1965 to 9m dogs and 7.9m cats in 2014), a Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association survey last year found a fall to 8.5m dogs and 7.4m cats last year.
These stats are based on a relatively small sample, but the trend is mirrored in other affluent, English-speaking countries: dog and cat ownership in the United States, Canada and particularly Australia all seem to be in decline.
But why is this? Urban living may be a factor. “Older people – more than a third of us will be over 55 in the next five years – don’t tend to have really high pet ownership,” says Ina Mitskavets, a senior analyst for Mintel. “The market is driven by families with kids, who tend to have the most pets per household.”
Peak Stuff – the preference for experiences over possessions – may also be reducing the appeal of pets. “I’ve recently got a couple of kittens,” says Mitskavets, “and my life has completely changed. So I can understand it’s a huge commitment, and a lot of people shy away from commitments these days because the pace of life is so incredible.”
Commitment-phobia is also cited by Marc Abraham, the TV vet and animal welfare campaigner. “People are reluctant to commit to pet ownership, especially dogs, because they require walking twice a day and live to 15 years old. That’s a huge commitment, and we want to go on lots of holidays,” he says. “Maybe the human need for companionship is being delivered now more by social media than getting a pet.”
“I can’t bear it, it’s heartbreaking,” says the novelist Jilly Cooper of the decline in pet ownership. Cooper, who campaigned for the Animals in War memorial in London and whose new novel, Mount!, has “dogs on every page”, believes that red tape is contributing to the reduction in the number of dog owners.
“It’s almost impossible to get a dog from a dogs’ home now,” she says. “Friends of mine fell in love with a greyhound [in a sanctuary] and after five meetings and walks and interviews were told they couldn’t have him because they were both out at work.” Many parks and landowners also demand that dogs are walked on a lead and, she says, “walking a dog on a lead is no fun for the dog or anybody”.
Cooper found her greyhound, Bluebell, “a huge comfort” after the death of her husband, Leo, and believes dogs are particularly beneficial for grieving or lonely older people – a view supported by a review of scientific literature in the BMJ. “The one panic for older people is that the dog might outlive them,” says Cooper, “but it’s worth the risk for the joy.”
Abraham agrees with Cooper. The apparent decline in pet ownership is tragic, he says, “not only for the clear health benefits that pets bring to us, but for what it teaches not just children but adults about empathy, compassion, commitment and looking after something more vulnerable than you”.
This article was amended on 13 June 2016. An earlier version said friends of Jilly Cooper were told they could not have a dog from a sanctuary because they were “out of work”. It should have said “out at work”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/28/uk-sea-ports-consider-legal-action-delay-brexit-controls-jacob-rees-mogg | Politics | 2022-04-28T14:28:54.000Z | Joanna Partridge | UK ports consider legal action after Rees-Mogg delays Brexit controls | Some of Britain’s biggest seaports are considering legal action against the government to recover the costs of building border control posts they fear will never be used, after confirmation that post-Brexit import checks will be delayed for a fourth time.
Physical checks on fresh food and plants from the EU were due to begin in July but have been pushed back to the end of 2023, the Brexit opportunities minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, confirmed in a written statement published on Thursday. Instead, he announced plans to digitise all checks and paperwork at the border, with a new strategy published in the autumn.
The decision not to implement controls means Britain will effectively continue to rely on the EU to monitor food and plant safety. Food producers said they were being placed at a disadvantage compared with European competitors who would have less red tape to deal with.
The British Ports Association (BPA), a lobby group for the industry, said it was concerned the expensive border posts, subsidised with nearly £200m from the taxpayer, may never be used. The group said its members would ask for permission to bulldoze the new buildings if the government confirmed this was the case.
Richard Ballantyne, the BPA’s chief executive, said ports had rushed to get infrastructure ready on time: “This announcement is a major policy change, meaning the facilities will effectively become white elephants, wasting millions of pounds of public and private funding”.
Ports had already begun hiring staff in preparation for the additional post-Brexit checks. Meanwhile, the government spent public money building inland border control facilities at sites where there was not enough space for infrastructure next to the quay.
While the EU introduced checks on goods arriving from the UK immediately after Brexit, ministers are now targeting the end of 2023 for a new border control regime, three years after the end of the Brexit transition period. Checks on meat were due to start on 1 July and on dairy on 1 September, with all remaining goods including fish and composite foods to be subject to checks from 1 November. A date for controls on live animals has yet to be agreed.
During a tour of Eurotunnel’s Folkestone facilities on Thursday, Rees-Mogg conceded money had been spent on facilities that now may not be needed.
“I do accept that some money was spent in preparation for 1st July which won’t now be needed, but the ports will benefit, as they are saying at Eurotunnel, from the easing of flow,” he told the Guardian.
Rees-Mogg said the move could save British businesses “up to £1bn in annual costs”, although all post-Brexit paperwork and checks that have already been introduced will remain in place. He said it would be wrong to impose new checks now, during a cost of living crisis, as this could drive up food prices further.
The operator of Eurotunnel, through which a quarter of all trade between the UK and EU passes, welcomed the announcement.
“We would have had to check more certificates, more declarations, and would not have been able to board trucks which didn’t have the right paperwork to go with the goods,” said John Keefe, director of public affairs at Getlink.
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However, the National Farmers’ Union called the move “unacceptable” and said it was another blow for British food producers, as they grapple with soaring costs.
“This is a question of fairness,” said NFU’s president, Minette Batters, calling import controls crucial “to the nation’s biosecurity, animal health and food safety”.
“Our producers have to meet stringent controls to export their own products abroad, all while being left at a continued competitive disadvantage to our EU competitors, who are still enjoying an extended grace period which gives them access to the prized UK market relatively cost and burden free,” she said. “Without them we really do leave ourselves at risk.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/28/the-farewells-lulu-wang-i-would-love-it-if-white-men-were-asked-the-same-questions-as-me | Film | 2019-08-27T18:00:29.000Z | Michael Sun | The Farewell's Lulu Wang: ‘I would love it if white men were asked the same questions as me’ | Changchun, the capital of China’s north-eastern Jilin province, has a name that translates to “long spring”. According to folklore, the name was bestowed by an emperor in recognition of its temperate summer. So mild and pleasant was the city at that time of year that it felt as though spring could stretch on endlessly, without ever morphing into the sticky humidity that beset the rest of the country.
It’s easy to imagine idyllic summers there and Lulu Wang recalls her own with glee. “My grandmother had a house with a garden where we would catch dragonflies in the yard,” she says. “It was sort of the iconic childhood.”
The Farewell review – Awkwafina cements star status in family drama
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The Farewell – Wang’s second feature film after the 2014 art-world satire Posthumous – is also set in Changchun, but here it’s foreign and alienating, as if the city of her memories was merely imagined. Like all of China, it’s modernising at breakneck speed. “Every time I go back, it’s a completely different place, and all the things I once knew are gone,” she says.
This sense of absence permeates the film, which is based on Wang’s own life. Taken literally: absence in the form of grief, as Billi – a Chinese-born, US-raised writer who serves as Wang’s onscreen proxy – returns to Changchun to see her nai nai (Mandarin for grandmother) one last time. Nai Nai is dying, but doesn’t know; in keeping with traditional values of collective over individual suffering, the family keeps her in the dark about her stage-four cancer diagnosis, orchestrating a last-minute wedding as a guise under which everyone reunites. Billi is reluctant to lie but acquiesces – she has no choice when it seems so natural to her relatives.
I had no idea if it would resonate, because it’s such a specific and personal story
Lulu Wang
Absence manifests in other shapes, too. Billi grieves not just for Nai Nai but also for a loss of cultural identity.
“In addition to saying goodbye to grandma, there’s this feeling of sand slipping through your fingers, of being unable to hold on to past memories and feelings – unable to find anything concrete that represents home,” Wang says.
It’s a trauma instantly recognisable to any diaspora – the feeling of suspension between two cultures, and the knowledge that to fully embrace one is to sacrifice the other.
“I think people have this romanticism of the homeland, and that’s just not the reality for me,” Wang says. “Every time I go back to China, I feel more American than ever, so it’s this question of, ‘Well, where is home?’ We’re always searching for it and never fully fitting in.”
The Farewell embraces the feeling of being suspended between two cultures. Photograph: Melbourne international film festival
Initial talks with production studios only furthered Wang’s sense of displacement. In the US, producers pushed for a comedy of errors, something more marketable than The Farewell’s heady, unsolvable mix of emotions. Meanwhile, Chinese executives couldn’t understand why Billi – and by extension, Wang – felt so conflicted. They wanted a heroine who was less “westernised”, who wasn’t afflicted by such guilt.
“Both sides were looking at it in a binary way, where it’s east versus west,” Wang sats. “Versus, as opposed to finding the bridge between the two, or the space in between to be able to navigate both.”
The Farewell feels unique because of its unwillingness to lose either half of its identity. Billi is American, as is Wang, but the film’s dialogue is almost entirely in Mandarin, spoken by an all-east Asian primary cast. It panders to neither US moviegoers nor Chinese audiences, yet it’s become one of this year’s biggest success stories, splintering even Marvel’s stronghold at the US box office. If Crazy Rich Asians proved to studio executives the commercial potential of east Asian narratives, The Farewell is testament to their staying power.
Did Wang expect it to be so universally loved?
Awkwafina as Billi: ‘She feels small.’ Photograph: Melbourne international film festival
“I certainly hoped it would be, but I had no idea if it would resonate, because it’s such a specific and personal story,” she says. “It’s so much easier to tell a fish-out-of-water story when the person is blond and blue-eyed going to an Asian country, for example. But what is it like when you look the same as those people, and you’re expected to fit in? How do you put that interiority on screen?”
In that respect, The Farewell speaks for itself. It’s certainly helped by Awkwafina’s performance – nuanced and restrained, without leaning into the kind of sentiment that seems so easy in a character experiencing grief. Last year’s fast-talking breakout roles in Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians are stripped away, and in their place is a more introverted Awkwafina, who expresses as much through physicality as words.
“She hunched over as soon as we got back to China,” Wang says of her star. “At first, I had no idea why she was doing it; it looked so bad. But it really worked for the character, because she feels small. She doesn’t know her role in China, she’s not allowed to express her voice. She feels the weight on her shoulders of her family and her culture.”
Awkwafina’s Billi is relatable but she’s not an everywoman. Resisting cliched characterisation, Wang fought to centre her own perspective without justifying or explaining it, even if that risked alienating audiences.
“It goes back to that saying: approach everything with the audacity of a mediocre white man,” she says, laughing. “I had to take on that audacity of saying, ‘I don’t care if you don’t understand. This is my reality, and I’m going to assume you do.’” In a landscape where diasporic narratives have been sidelined for too long, The Farewell is a watershed for its centring of second-generation immigrants – third-culture kids for whom surface-level representation is no longer enough.
Australia's creative industry is shockingly white. But don't be discouraged
Beverley Wang
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“People are always asking me about the importance of representation and identity in relation to making The Farewell and of course those things are really important to me – thinking about my identity and exploring my identity in the west,” Wang says. “But I would love it if men – white men – were also asked the same questions as me.
“They should be asked these questions so they can be more conscientious about how they’re representing people, how they’re not representing people, and aware of their own blind spots.”
No single film-maker, Wang says, can shoulder the responsibility of representing an entire culture. “It can be dangerous if we’re reductive about it, or if diversity is looked upon as a trend.”
The Farewell opens in Australian cinemas on 5 September and in the UK on 20 September | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/26/tony-blair-new-labour-hero-political-embarrassment-murdoch | Politics | 2014-02-26T18:45:50.000Z | Andy Beckett | Tony Blair: from New Labour hero to political embarrassment | In Tony Blair's uneven but occasionally startling autobiography, A Journey, published in 2010, there is a chapter that makes particularly interesting reading now. It covers his final, slightly besieged years as prime minister, from mid-2005 to mid-2007. "In this time," writes Blair, "I was trying to wear … a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs. There was courage in [this behaviour] and I look back at it now with pride," he concludes. "I was … not unafraid exactly, but near to being reckless about my own political safety."
The chapter's title is "Toughing It Out". Last week, during the phone-hacking trial of Rebekah Brooks, an email from the former News of the World editor emerged, sent the day after the disgraced rightwing tabloid was shut down in 2011 and six days before she was arrested. To her then boss, James Murdoch, Brooks wrote: "I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair. He said … Keep strong … It will pass. Tough up. He is available for you, KRM [Rupert Murdoch] and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us."
Rebekah Brooks jokes with Tony Blair, 2004. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA
As Labour leader and prime minister, one of Blair's defining characteristics was his readiness – canny or disgraceful, according to political taste – to make accommodations with powerful rightwing interest groups, not least the Murdoch press. The Brooks email, the latest in a succession of sometimes jaw-dropping revelations about Blair's behaviour since he abruptly left Westminster politics seven years ago, suggested that his ease with the left's traditional enemies had in fact deepened: into an instinctive feeling that he and they were on the same side.
With his salesman's smile and large self-belief, his ex-barrister's ability to accept and argue not necessarily compatible things, Blair has always been a slippery and restless public figure. "He's kind of a freewheeler, and always was," says the historian of the Labour party Ross McKibbin. "Being a freewheeler did him well, initially." Yet since Downing Street, Blair's "journey", already often controversial, has taken him into ever more contentious territories.
In 2008, just as bankers were beginning to be seen as the villains of the world economy, he accepted an advisory post at the American investment bank JP Morgan. According to the Financial Times in 2012, it "pays him about £2.5m a year". In 2011, through a consulting firm he swiftly created after Downing Street, Tony Blair Associates, he began advising oil-rich, authoritarian Kazakhstan. "Torture remains commonplace" there, says Amnesty International.
Last month, visiting Egypt, Blair defended the 2013 overthrow of the elected government of Mohamed Morsi: "The fact is, the Muslim Brotherhood tried to take the country away from its basic values … The army have intervened, at the will of the people, but in order to take the country to the next stage of its development, which should be democratic." Even with those last four, slightly hedged words, Blair's argument eerily echoed that notoriously made four decades ago by Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean military, when they overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, an event still notorious in Labour circles: "We justify our intervention to depose a government which is illegitimate, immoral and unrepresentative of the overwhelming sentiment of the nation."
The Blair government once briefly thrilled the left by allowing Pinochet to be arrested in London. But that was in 1998; the days when even the faintest whiff of socialism clung to Blair are long gone. In A Journey, published four months after the coalition took office, he wrote: "If governments don't tackle deficits, the bill is footed by taxpayers." And: "The role of government is to stabilise [the economy] and then get out of the way." A more helpful endorsement of David Cameron's state-shrinking austerity strategy from a non-Tory would be hard to imagine.
Since 2007, during straitened times for most Britons, Blair has seemed increasingly comfortable being around – and being one of – "those with money", as he refers to the super-rich in his book with telling casualness. "Blair mixes with the Buffetts and the Gateses," says John Kampfner, author of Blair's Wars, "where it is seen as matter of no great surprise that you arrive in a private jet. In Blairland, there is a sense of: 'I have become part of the Davos global elite. But I haven't been able to earn properly until now.'"
Blair hotly disputes this picture of his lifestyle. "This notion that I want to be a billionaire with a yacht; I don't! I am never going to be part of the super-rich. I have no interest in that at all," he told the Financial Times in 2012. But his intricate and often secretive set of consulting and speech-making businesses – in 2009 a Blair spokesman declined even to explain the name of one of them, Windrush Ventures, to the Guardian – have helped build a personal fortune "estimated at £70m", reported the Daily Telegraph last month. This also includes a provocative amount of property for a political figure in a crowded country currently going through one of its periodic home-ownership panics. Since moving out of Downing Street, Blair's London home has been a capacious cream and dark brick terrace in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park, with a substantial mews house behind and armed policemen perpetually guarding both. His country residence, acquired in 2008, is even grander: a Queen Anne mansion in Buckinghamshire called South Pavilion, with swimming pool and tennis court. His tycoon's tan and leanness suggest he enjoys both.
Wendi Deng: Blair has repeatedly denied rumours of an affair with the ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch. Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP
The current issue of Vanity Fair magazine quotes an already-infamous swooning note about him reportedly written by Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife Wendi Deng: "He has such good body and he has really really good legs [and] Butt …" Rumours that Blair and Deng had an affair have been around ever since Murdoch suddenly filed for divorce last summer; Blair has repeatedly denied it and Deng told Vanity Fair she would not "engage in public allegations or respond to negative claims". But there is no denying his personal closeness both to Deng and, until the collapse of her marriage, Murdoch himself. In 2010, weeks before the general election at which Murdoch's papers did their best to drive Labour from office, Blair secretly became godfather to one of Deng and Murdoch's daughters.
"You couldn't make it up," says a former member of the New Labour inner circle. "Just when you thought Tony's behaviour couldn't get any more bizarre … His actions would be strange even for the most dyed-in-the-wool capitalist ex-prime minister, but for a Labour one, I think it looks terrible. It makes mugs of many of the people who supported him in office. He's trashed the New Labour brand."
Other Labour ex-premiers have embarrassed the party. Harold Wilson became a famously disastrous chatshow host; Ramsay MacDonald led a Tory-dominated coalition and was expelled from the party – Blair has not done anything so traitorous, so far. Yet McKibbin says that all of them "had a different attitude to money. Wilson was pretty poor when he died. [Jim] Callaghan had quite a nice farm, which he retired to." Even the derided Gordon Brown's near-silence since losing office looks steadily more dignified with each controversy about Blair's new career.
In fact, it does have some high-minded elements. His website lists the Tony Blair Faith Foundation ("to promote respect and understanding about the world's major religions"); the Tony Blair Sports Foundation ("to increase participation in sport … particularly by those who are currently socially excluded"); work on "African governance" and "breaking the climate deadlock"; and his role as representative of the international quartet, on behalf of the UN, EU, the US and Russia, to try to find a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Blair is not paid for any of these roles, which generally receive less press attention. He argues that his richly rewarded commercial work is undertaken mainly to subsidise them. And he says he takes great care to avoid conflicts of interest: for example, doing no business in Israel or the Palestinian territories, to avoid damaging his credibility there as the quartet's representative.
The problem is, his credibility as a sort of freelance super-diplomat in the Middle East and elsewhere is damaged already. His almost unqualified support for Israel as prime minister, his crucial backing then for the invasion of Iraq, his fundamental agreement with the bellicose foreign policy of George Bush – all this historical baggage follows Blair around. "It would be hard for him to move into working for more liberal international institutions," says a former ally, "because he's toxic."
Tony Blair's £4m country home: South Pavilion at Wotton House in Buckinghamshire. Photograph: John O'Reilly/Rex Features
Nor does Blair show much sign of having thought afresh about the shape of the world since leaving office. Last summer, during the clamour for Britain to intervene militarily in Syria, he was one of the loudest hawks. Ed Miliband ignored him. In much of its foreign and domestic policy, Labour is moving politely but firmly away from Blairism now. Miliband's populist leftwing attacks on capitalist "predators" contrast with Blair's insistence in A Journey that during the financial crisis "the 'market' did not fail". Later in the book he adds: "The danger for Labour [after losing the 2010 election] is that we … move decisively … to the left. If we do, we will lose even bigger next time."
We will see. But for now the opinion polls suggest that Blair's warning may look foolish when the votes are counted in 2015. Either way, many in Labour have stopped listening to the man who led them to three handsome general election victories, and who was once one of the most popular figures in British political history. "People I know in the party don't think about him very much nowadays," McKibbin says.
Blair is only 60. One of his problems is probably that he left Downing Street too young. Callaghan was 67 when he stopped being prime minister in 1979. But British political leaders, like bosses in many fields, have become steadily younger since then. Just like Blair, David Cameron and possibly Miliband too will have decades to fill after the Downing Street removal van comes.
A well-connected New Labour source says: "Someone who knows Tony very well said to a friend of mine recently: 'He's very unhappy.' It's a false life he's leading. And the rich are boring. What has happened to Tony has elements of tragedy."
Other Blair-watchers see his trajectory differently. "I don't think what people think of him has ever worried him too much," says McKibbin. Blair's Connaught Square house is right next to Edgware Road, one of the centres of Arab London, and of potential outrage, at the very least, at his Middle East stances. Meanwhile the plush London offices of all his overlapping enterprises are right across from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, as if to taunt critics who claim he is America's poodle.
Last month, Blair was eating with his family and some friends in a London restaurant when a barman working there, inspired by the website arrestblair.org, tried to perform a citizen's arrest on him, for "a crime against peace … namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq". The Daily Mail reported: "Blair attempted to engage in a debate before one of his sons went to get security."
In private, ex-prime minister Blair may be tormented and unfulfilled, but in public he remains a smooth performer. Will that be enough? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/23/how-not-to-be-a-unilad | Education | 2013-09-23T15:52:00.000Z | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | How not to be a UniLad | It's tough work fitting in at university, especially when you're trying to reinvent yourself as an independent adult and not the terrified, sexually insecure, vulnerable young person you are. During the first week, you will often encounter a personality that doesn't quite ring true, the reason being that it was invented by your new mate the night before, halfway up the M6 in their mum's car, as they decided to shake off the shackles of school pigeonholing for good. University is a clean slate, my friend.
Transforming one's personality overnight in order to make friends is a perilous business. There will come a time, probably when a friend from home is visiting, when people will find out your real name and see photographic evidence of how you once starred in an advert for Bazuka gel. But until that moment comes, here are some basic minimum standards of behaviour that you should aim for, based on my experience of the student male. These will not only see you through to the end of your course, but will ensure that you never become that most dreaded of all college compatriots: the macho, stone-age, sexist boozehound with an inferiority complex that is the UniLad. Here's how not to be one.
Never use the term 'banter'
If people find something funny, they won't need it pointed out to them; they'll just laugh. Likewise, don't ever refer to the "banterbus", or declare yourself "Bantersaurus rex" or "the Archbishop of Banterbury". It will single you out and other UniLads will flock towards you, armed with Heineken and jokes about sexual assault. Similarly, if you're keen to meet some normal people, do not follow up everything you do with the exclamation "LAD!".
Say no to costumes
This is non-negotiable, even during fresher's week, when even the most staid of students feels ready to party (in a loincloth). Just don't do it. With the exception of Halloween, a night out is never improved by a costume. It's bad enough that any normal human being who happens to be in the vicinity has to listen to 26 privileged tossers braying about how things aren't looking too good for their mate since (oops!) it turns out it was his DNA on that girl's dress (LAD!), without adding togas into the mix.
Join clubs and societies
This will enable you to meet people who, while they share the UniLad's love of the quadvod, don't always deem it necessary to take their shirt off on the dancefloor of the students' union. These are people who don't drink bodily fluids as part of initiation rituals, and amazingly don't consider the wedgie to be the standard form of greeting. Nice people, real people. Embrace them.
Understand that women are human beings
We really are. I realise that marking us out of 10 for sexual attractiveness reduces the multiflavoured soup of human relationships to an easily understandable number, but it's also very rude. Similarly, referring to women as wenches, whores, hos, bitches, skanks, sluts and slags is not OK. Not ever.
Then treat them as such
This means not banging a gong every time one of you has sex with a lady, not making inquiries into the purchase of Rohypnol (however tentative) and not playing "fat girl rodeo", the incredibly unpleasant "game" whereby one of you jumps on an overweight girl's back while she is trying to enjoy herself at Loose Vodbox, or whatever your university's crappy club night is called. I'd also take down that "Keep calm and sit on my face" poster in your room.
Don't abuse the pre-lash
Otherwise you might have to take a break from air punching to Fatman Scoop in order to do a "tactical chunder" in the carpark. Contrary to what UniLads everywhere say, peaking too early and not being able to hold your drink, resulting in a "total vomcano" (LAD!) does not make you a "legend". Boasting about "freshers' flu", however, is standard for everyone and can usally be cleared up with a vodka berocca followed by a very long snooze and a snivelly phonecall to your mum.
Step away from the funnel
It's just not worth it. Initially it seems like a great idea, but when you're having all the cheap beer pumped out of your stomach while you vomit bile into a cardboard NHS chamber pot, I can guarantee you won't feel like such a #trueLad.
Don't ever complain about the friendzone
Some of the girls that you meet at university are going to think of you as a pretty cool, standup guy, but amazingly, they're still not going to want to sleep with you (I know this sounds incredible). But here's a suggestion: instead of moaning about how that "wench" has "friendzoned" you because you're a "nice guy", why not just, y'know, be her friend? It's revolutionary, I know.
Check your privilege
Leave it at the door, posh boy. Telling people you spent £100 a day on your gap yah ("I thought I was being thrifty") or asking them where they were "schooled" might be normal opening gambits if you're keen to roll with other UniLads, but it is unlikely to wash with the proles. You don't need to hide who you are (unless you are set on rebranding yourself as an anarchist, in which case, you absolutely do), but a little humility goes a long way with the lower orders. As will the pints you have lined up on the bar for them with the help of your dad's credit card.
Use a condom. And get tested
I cannot stress this enough. Far less indiscriminate shagging goes on at university than you might think, but chlamydia is rife in these joints and regular trips to the clap clinic a must. Nothing says #trueLad like a clean bill of health from a medical professional.
Don't wear flip-flops
Just don't. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/01/rental-person-who-does-nothing-by-shoji-morimoto-review-brief-encounters | Books | 2023-07-01T06:30:06.000Z | Sukhdev Sandhu | Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto review – brief encounters | “E
xcuse me,” began the direct message on Twitter, “I may have sex today so could you send me a message at 12 to tell me to cut my nails?” The question wasn’t aimed at a lover, but at Shoji Morimoto, a thirtysomething living in Tokyo who, since 2018, had been offering himself “for rent”. His services involve hanging around clients – watching them, eating with them, mostly listening rather than talking to them. Is this work? He called himself Rental Person Who Does Nothing. News outlets inside and outside Japan rushed to profile him. His story inspired a manga and a television series.
Now, Morimoto has written a memoir that’s neither written (he merely responded to questions posed to him by “S” who, he says, “is not a particular fan of Rental Person”) nor a memoir (it’s about his professional persona more than himself). Rather, it’s a partial inventory of the requests he received and chose to accept. Most are mesmerisingly banal. Someone wants to send him a photo of her pet and have him reply: “That is unbelievably cute!” A worker who’s just lost their job for the 10th time would like to sit and eat a hamburger with him.
Morimoto serves many functions. He’s an ergonomic tool for the lazy writer who says he’ll never finish an assignment unless he’s being watched. He’s an incentiviser for the marathon runner who believes he’ll run quicker if he knows there’s someone waiting for him at the finishing line. He’s an alibi for someone who’d like to sit in the park in the evening breeze with a can of chūhai but suspects it would be weird to drink alone. His anonymity can be arousing: he turns down an offer of sex only to receive a message: “‘Get a job then, dickhead!’ I wasn’t too pleased about that.”
What is Morimoto doing? He insists that he doesn’t dispense life advice to his clients (that would be “doing something” – a category error). He rarely meets them more than once and is involved rather than implicated in their lives. He says he’s happy to have “only the flimsiest connections” with them. It might be possible to describe his work, in today’s corporate jargon, as an example of “active listening”; he, though, would demur – “When I listen, it is always in a passive way. I’m not doing anything.” At one point he distinguishes himself from a copyist named Do-anything-at-all: “Apparently, he’s already given up, because he only got requests for day labour.”
Morimoto describes himself as ‘living without doing anything’ but he emerges as a semi-accidental painter of modern life
In the first half of the book Morimoto seems to have given up, too. If there’s one thing worse than listening to people recount their dreams, it’s reading verbatim tweets they’ve sent or received. The writing is flat, bloggy, affectless. Perhaps this is intentional. Morimoto insists he doesn’t have much of a personality, that he sees himself as a neutral figure in a crowd. When he does reach for metaphors, the results are joltingly odd: pondering if his do-nothing service can have a catalytic effect on clients, he goes full chemistry and likens them to hydrogen peroxide and himself to manganese peroxide. Later, claiming that because he doesn’t say much his clients develop their own idea of what he’s thinking, he essays a comparison to peacocks and jewel beetles who have structural rather than fixed colours.
Over time, biographical details do emerge. Morimoto’s older brother failed his university exams, became depressed, and, although over 40, had never been able to work. His older sister was unable to find the kind of job she craved and ended up killing herself. He studied earthquakes at graduate school, but wound up as a freelance writer producing copy for business pamphlets. His boss told him that he lacked a strong personality and chided him when, at after-hours drinks, he sat alone in silence. At work, his company wanted to outsource simple tasks and have staff focus on creative, high-level projects – “I’m afraid I couldn’t come up with any useful ideas at all.”
Three cheers for Morimoto! What he’s resisting is, in the language of the late David Graeber, bullshit jobs. Upspeak, self-assessment, box-ticking, pompous mission statements, bogus invocations of teamwork and community: bullshit, all of it. “I’d like the world to be one where even if people can’t do anything for others,” he writes, “even if they can make no contribution to society, they can still live stress-free lives.” In Japan, where the culture of what has been called “excess reciprocation” (where “someone receiving a gift will try to reciprocate with a gift of greater value”) is still common, stress permeates waking hours.
Morimoto may describe himself as “living without doing anything”, but that doesn’t stop him from emerging as a semi-accidental painter of modern life. The most poignant service he provides involves a young woman whose grandmother died the very day she flew out of Tokyo to study abroad. Now, after a year away, she is returning. “I’ll be feeling sad when I arrive,” she messages Morimoto, “so it would be nice to have someone waving at me when I get to the airport.”
The two of them go to a karaoke box where she sings and talks about her gran, fondly remembering her generosity when it came to dishing out ice-creams. At first she’s cheery. Then she admits she can’t tell friends how sad she felt about not being able to attend the funeral. She starts to cry. It’s a quietly devastating vignette that’s redolent of a Hirokazu Kore-eda film.
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Rental Person Who Does Nothing starts slowly, seemingly fluff, an attempt to get more mileage out of a fleeting internet story. By its close, Morimoto, though still elusive, emerges as a modern Bartleby, an inadvertent dissident, someone who has come to see his practice as being “about enjoying the absurdity of swimming against the tide of efficiency”.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing: The True Adventures of Japan’s Rental Person by Shoji Morimoto and translated by Don Knotting is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
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