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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/28/nationalising-probation-service-not-enough-to-fix-flaws-warns-watchdog | Society | 2021-06-27T23:01:36.000Z | Jamie Grierson | Nationalising probation service not enough to fix flaws, warns watchdog | Renationalising the management of offenders in the community will not be enough to put right the flaws of disastrous privatisation reforms introduced by the former Conservative minister Chris Grayling, the probation watchdog has warned.
As the reunified service launches on Monday, the chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell, said the move to renationalise the service was welcome but will not be without its challenges.
Under Grayling’s widely derided shake-up in 2014, the probation sector was separated into a public sector organisation, the National Probation Service (NPS) managing high-risk criminals, and 21 private companies responsible for the supervision of 150,000 low to medium-risk offenders.
From today, the supervision of all 220,000 offenders on probation and the delivery of unpaid work and rehab programmes will be conducted by the public sector. This broadly mirrors the arrangement that existed prior to Grayling’s “transforming rehabilitation” process several years ago.
The changes come after a turbulent time for the probation service, with failings in high-profile cases, such as the terrorist Usman Khan and the serial rapist Joseph McCann, underlining the difficulties faced in the sector.
Launching the reunified service, the justice secretary, Robert Buckland, said the public would be better protected and that crime would be cut, adding that more than £300m in extra funding had been pumped into the service since July 2019.
But Russell, who has been the head of HM Inspectorate of Probation since June 2019, warned that any cash investment would have to be sustained to correct the mistakes of the past.
He said: “The government’s decision to bring probation back together – though welcome – will not be without its challenges. Challenges that should not be underestimated.
‘There are no magic bullets here: structural change needs to be backed by sustained investment for there to be true improvement. Real transformation is a long-term commitment, and unification is just the beginning of that journey.”
Russell said Grayling’s overhaul was “fundamentally flawed”.
“Squeezed budgets have meant falling probation officer numbers; staff under relentless pressure and unacceptably high caseloads. This has inevitably resulted in poorer quality supervision, with over half of the cases we inspected in the private sector probation companies being unsatisfactory on some key aspect of quality.”
The funding injected into the probation service so far is helping to more than double the recruitment of officers, from the usual annual intake of 600 trainees to 1,000 last year with plans to recruit a further 1,500 in the current financial year.
Buckland said: “The work probation does to protect the public from harm and rehabilitate offenders is too often overlooked but it is vitally important given 80% of crime is reoffending.
“The government is backing the new Probation Service with more money and more staff so that the public is better protected, crime is cut and fewer people become victims.”
Grayling ignored significant warnings from within his department to push through his reforms in 2014. MPs on the public accounts committee said the changes were rushed through at breakneck speed, taking “unacceptable risks” with taxpayers’ money. The justice committee described the overhaul as a “mess” and warned it might never work.
Since the reforms were introduced, the government has had to bail out the private providers, known as community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), by more than £500m.
More than 7,000 staff from CRCs will come together with 3,500 probation officers already in the public sector under the new Probation Service. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/sep/23/jacoby-brissett-new-england-patriots-thumb-injury-texans | Sport | 2016-09-23T21:09:45.000Z | Guardian sport | Patriots could be down to fourth-string quarterback after Brissett injury | The New England Patriots could be down to their fourth-string quarterback after third-stringer Jacoby Brissett reportedly injured his right thumb in Thursday night’s win over the Houston Texans.
Patriots make light of Brady and Garoppolo absences to beat Texans
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Brissett, who completed 11 of 19 passes for 103 yards and rushed for a 27-yard touchdown in the 27-0 win, suffered an injury to his right thumb, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported on Friday citing multiple sources.
Brissett was shown on the sidelines with the training staff having the thumb examined during the game and spoke at his locker afterward without any bandage or ice on his hand.
New England improved to 3-0 while four-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady is serving his Deflategate suspension. Jimmy Garoppolo started the first two games but left with a right shoulder injury after being slammed to the turf by Dolphins linebacker Kiko Alonso in Week 2.
The Patriots did not have a backup quarterback on the depth chart for Thursday night’s game. They next play the Buffalo Bills on 2 October. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/generational-inequality-housing-inheritance-tax | Opinion | 2024-01-03T10:00:18.000Z | Elle Hunt | With inheritance about to divide millennials into haves and have-nots, solidarity comes at a price | Elle Hunt | The millennial generation, we’ve long been told, is also generation rent: prevented from buying a home of their own, and growing their wealth with it, by an unfavourable economy or too much avocado toast, depending on who you ask.
The stats are by now familiar, but dismal nonetheless. The rate of home ownership has plummeted due to coalescing crises of pricing and supply. Few millennials own homes. In 2017, 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds were homeowners, compared with 55% in 1997. Similarly, they make up just a fraction of property owners overall. In 2022, just 10% of homeowners in England were aged under 35.
City-dwelling millennials, in particular, can seem darkly resigned to their fates as lifelong renters: according to a Zoopla survey, just one in five adults aged under 40 believe they will “definitely” be able to buy their own home in the next decade.
The economic short straw drawn by the millennial generation has been one of its defining traits, and source of fractious comparison with baby boomers in particular. The divide often described between the two – the “warfare” of poor, precarious millennials versus rich, oblivious boomers – was always a simplification, but now it’s breaking down as older generations begin to share their good fortune with their children.
The image of millennials as reluctant forever-renters is increasingly being tested by the transfer of intergenerational wealth, always looming but hastened by the pandemic.
Coronavirus caused the biggest loss of life in the UK since the second world war, but it was not what demographers would call evenly distributed. Of the 208,000 “excess deaths” recorded in the UK between March 2020 and May 2023, the majority were elderly people. These deaths are no less tragic or untimely for their advanced age, and must be acknowledged and mourned. But one other consequences of this premature loss of life evaded mainstream scrutiny: the mushrooming amount of inheritance tax, indicating – to use the language favoured by accountancy firms – a rise in “wealth transfers” downward.
According to Treasury figures, inheritance tax (IHT) reached a record £7.1bn in the most recent tax year. The 2021-22 year was also record-breaking, with £6.1bn: itself an increase of 14% on the preceding period. Investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown concluded in an analysis that “the peaks in IHT revenue align with surges in deaths due to the virus”.
With the pandemic, the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next was suddenly and unexpectedly sped up, and many members of generation rent have found themselves beneficiaries of a windfall they might not have expected – for decades to come, or ever.
As you’d expect, inheritance tax is a concern only for the wealthiest Britons, with the vast majority of estates processed worth under £1m. But properties worth less are also being traded between generations; many wealthy families also engage in “giving while living” so as to minimise tax. A study recently published in the Economic Journal found that £11bn of bequests are made annually in these sorts of private transfers, on top of a further £99bn given through wills. Separately, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that parents give away or loan about £17bn to their adult children every year.
For millennial solidarity, it’s all a fly in the avocado toast. For the best part of a decade, we have been characterised (and characterised ourselves) as struggling and structurally disadvantaged. For many, of course, that remains the case. But the uneven distribution of Covid-driven change means that many people in their 20s and 30s, who might truthfully have said in 2019 that they had no hope of ever getting on the property ladder, have since had their fortunes unexpectedly changed.
The £1.2bn luxury development in central London with no social housing – video
It forces the question of how we talk about generational inequality, and how we act when it no longer applies to us. Increasingly, in this so-called “asset economy”, family wealth, inheritance and class are being recognised as more relevant to your disadvantage than the year in which you were born.
As acknowledged by the Pew Research Center’s recent changes to its research on generations and groups, labels like millennials, zoomers and boomers are often invoked cynically to stoke tensions, emphasising minor points of difference to distract from similarities or nuance.
Responding to findings of “giving while living”, Prof James Sefton, of Imperial College Business School, suggested that the fact that older generations are “passing down what they can” was proof that the divide between boomers and millennials was overstated, if not unnecessary. Again, whether you agree no doubt depends on whether your parents are living and giving.
The “wealth transfer” under way is driving an increasingly pointy wedge between us, challenging the ways we’ve always conceived of ourselves as a group. Increasingly, we millennials will face a choice. Will those who find themselves lifted up on to the property ladder continue to act in the interests of those lifelong renters, whose ranks they’d always believed they’d belong to? Or will they act to protect their new assets?
The potential for impact is significant as millennials come into institutional and structural power. Already we are 26% of the UK’s adult population, and make up the largest cohort in 51% of constituencies. An analysis by the centre-right thinktank Onward gives reason for optimism. It declares millennials to be “the first generation not to become rightwing as they age”, with housing and taxation identified as being of particular importance. The question is whether that trend will persist through the continuing wealth transfer.
Keir Milburn, author of Generation Left and co-director of Abundance, believes that it will, in part because of younger people’s awareness, unlike any generation before them, of the randomness of fortune.
He says that millennials who inherit property are less likely to believe that it is “deserved or legitimate in any way”. (In contrast, a recent survey by King’s College London found that half the UK public believes that young adults can’t afford homes because of their frivolous spending on Netflix and takeaways, as though those would make a meaningful dent in a deposit.)
The Observer view on abolishing inheritance tax: a handout to the wealthy
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While older people benefited from asset price inflation through the 1990s and early 2000s, compensating for stagnant wages, those who are younger – having had their expectations of home ownership severely curtailed – know that housing and wealth have little to do with hard work, sensible money management or moral fibre.
That kind of a structural lens on societal inequalities and outcomes is “the sort of thing that leads you to the left”, says Milburn. Younger people generally understand that “individual outcomes have structural causes”, and economic disadvantage is rarely overcome by willpower alone. The Onward report corroborates this, finding that millennials believe “that a person’s position in society is due to outside factors” and equality should be prioritised over economic growth.
Only time will tell if millennials will remain so fair-minded at the expense of their own pocket linings – but coming into baby-boomer wealth doesn’t have to mean taking on their politics. You’d suspect that millennials will be unlikely to forget their years of renting and feeling shut out of home ownership, even if they should find themselves unexpectedly on the other side of the fence.
In the meantime, we should try to do away with superficial divisions between generations, and seek solidarity along more meaningful lines than the year we were born.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/20/artsfeatures | Film | 2000-07-20T14:27:53.000Z | Derek Malcolm | Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers | Few fictional films look more like documentary than Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, and very few indeed which have this kind of socio-political structure and recount old, half-forgotten conflicts have achieved such lasting fame. Pontecorvo never managed to repeat the trick, though Queimada!, for which he hired Marlon Brando to play a British agent sent to the Caribbean to stir up rebellion against the Portuguese, was at least a partial success three years later.
The Battle of Algiers, however, remains the basis of Pontecorvo's fame - a model of how, without prejudice or compromise, a film-maker can illuminate history and tell us how we repeat the same mistakes. In fact, this study of the Algerian guerrilla struggle against the French colonialists in the 50s ought to be looked at not just as pure cinema but as a warning to those who seek by force to crush independence movements.
We know, of course, that Algeria was eventually liberated from the French, but Pontecorvo relegates that to an epilogue. He concentrates instead on the years between 1954 and 1957 when the freedom fighters regrouped and expanded into the casbah, only to face a systematic attempt by French paratroopers to wipe them out. His highly dramatic film is about the organisation of a guerrilla movement and the methods used to decimate it by the colonial power.
Its stance is as fair as any such film could be, despite the fact that Pontecorvo was a member of the Italian communist party at the time and thus was implicitly on the side of the independence movement. There is, though, no caricature and no glamorisation of either side - just a feeling of palpable horror evoked by urgent images and Ennio Morricone's dramatic but never melodramatic score. Pontecorvo sees the colonialists as victims of their own system, and the rebels as taking on some of the excesses used against them.
In one scene, a group of ordinary people, French and Algerian, are enjoying coffee and conversation near the casbah when a rebel bomb explodes among them. The shock of this sequence is even worse than the scenes of the French using torture.
The film is preceded by a message from the film-maker stating that "not one foot" of newsreel footage was used, but Marcello Gatti's grainy, black-and-white camera work in the actual locations of the struggle, and the pioneering use of a hand-held camera for the crowd scenes, makes it seem as if events are being recorded as they occur. The mixture of amateurs and professionals in the cast works admirably too.
In a way this is all cheating, and Pontecorvo once received as much criticism as praise. The left wanted more commitment to the rebel cause; the right complained that there was too much objectivity. Now, however, The Battle of Algiers is regarded as the precursor of films such as Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano and Costa-Gavras's Z - a film that allows its viewers to re-examine their own attitudes towards their times while making it clear that no one can prevent the march of history.
The film, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, was banned in France for some time and the torture scenes were cut from versions distributed in Britain and America. It can now be seen whole and is often shown as a model to those who wish to make either fiction or docudrama.
Credits
Writer-director Gillo Pontecorvo
Starring Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi
Original music Ennio Morricone
Italy/Algeria, 1965, 136 minutes | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2010/dec/02/independent-on-sunday-cambodia | Media | 2010-12-02T08:10:00.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Should journalists honour their word to a mass murderer? | Ihave just set my City University students their winter assignments and one of the questions concerns the ethical dilemma faced by a journalist who had to decide whether to breach the confidentiality of a source who had confessed to a murder.
By coincidence, just before I posted the assignment on the university website, I had read an article in the Independent on Sunday by Andrew Johnson about journalists confronted by the same predicament.
I say the same, but Nuon Chea – as second-in-command to the Cambodian despot Pol Pot – was responsible for the killing of many hundreds of thousands of people.
And he confessed his part in mass murder to the Cambodian journalist, Thet Sambath, on the condition that it could only be used as a historical record. It must not be used against him.
Sambath agreed, and went on to interview Chea in such detail that he recorded some 160 hours of filmed footage.
Then, together with an English-based film producer, Rob Lemkin, he made a film Enemies of the People, described as "one man's journey into the heart of the killing fields."
The film, which has won seven festival awards, is due to be shown in British cinemas from 10 December.
Now the United Nations has requested that Sambath and Lemkin hand over all their original footage to be used as evidence in next year's trial of 84-year-old Chea for genocide. They have refused, explaining that they are honouring their promise to Chea.
But is it right to honour a promise to a man who has admitted such heinous crimes?
Lemkin says: "It's essential as a journalist or filmmaker, that if you give an assurance, you don't change the goal posts after you've made the film."
And Sambath says: "I don't think revenge is good for anyone. My work was focused on gaining as complete an account of the Killing Fields as I could. Revenge has no part in that.
"I think the court is focused on justice, which is okay. But I think reconciliation would be a better end result. For reconciliation to take place we need first the truth."
It is thought that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge murdered 2m people between 1975 and 1979. Among them were Sambath's own family.
Source: Independent on Sunday | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/20/budget-2014-pensions-annuity-market-life-insurance-george-osborne | Business | 2014-03-20T10:44:07.000Z | Hilary Osborne | Budget 2014: pensions shakeup could kill off annuity market, say analysts | Major changes to pension rules announced in the budget could lead to the demise of the annuity market, but investors in some of the UK's largest life insurance companies have no need to panic, analysts have said.
Shares in pension and retirement companies plummeted on Wednesday after George Osborne's surprise announcement that retirees would no longer be forced to buy an annuity with their pension fund, and there were continued falls when the market opened on Thursday morning.
Partnership Assurance, the leading annuities provider, fell 10% on Thursday, on top of a 55% fall in the hours after the chancellor's speech. Shares in the firm which were worth £3 at the start of the week have fallen to just 128p.
Shares in the big pension providers – Legal & General, Aviva and Standard Life – fell between 3.12% and 8.37% on Wednesday and remained down first thing on Thursday.
Analysts said the decision to give pensioners complete freedom to do what they want with their funds had serious implications for Partnership and Just Retirement, another firm focused on providing annuities.
Barclays Equity Research said the change had "the potential to lead to the demise of the UK individual annuity market" and would be painful for businesses such as Partnership "where the business model is potentially irrevocably damaged". They added: "Our base case is now that the individual annuity market could decline by two-thirds from £12bn to £4bn per annum within the next 18 months.
"In the US, where there is no compulsion to buy an immediate annuity [the US equivalent of an individual annuity], immediate annuities only comprise 3.6% or $8bn [£4.8bn] of total annuity sales."
However, they said the impact on large, established UK life companies such as Legal & General would be "modest" and the share price move on Wednesday "was an overreaction and provides an attractive entry point".
Barclays said it believed the £8bn coming out of annuities would go into other pension products such as self-invested and drawdown schemes, and that for this reason wealth management fims including St James's Place, Hargreaves Lansdown and Old Mutual would all be clear winners.
Legal & General insisted it was well-placed to cope with the changes.
The company said the need for consumers to save was as great as ever, and it was in a position to develop products for retirees who did not want to buy an annuity.
"Legal & General is well-placed to continue to develop a product suite that includes good-value drawdown and protection against longevity risk as well as provision of investment income," it said.
Shore Capital Stockbrokers said it believed the falls in the stock prices of both L&G and Prudential were overreactions: "Both have other avenues for capital allocation and the asset managers of both companies [LGIM and M&G] are likely beneficiaries of such changes."
Oriel Securities described the budget announcement as "potentially bad news" for the life insurance industry.
Its analyst Marcus Barnard said in a statement: "Annuities are high-margin products and are a big source of both new business profit (future value) and cash profit (or in-force profit) for life insurers.
"This in-force profit will continue (annuities cannot be surrendered or cancelled), but without new annuity sales, the fall in share prices can be attributed to lower future growth prospects."
Barnard said the news was "potentially devastating" for Partnership and Just Retirement. "Any individual facing uncertainty over future morbidity and mortality is likely to conclude that an accelerated drawdown route will potentially be a much better option than an enhanced or individually underwritten annuity.
"While these two stocks will continue with their in-force books, they face an uncertain new business outlook and may ultimately become high-yield stocks." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/may/18/panorama-paintings-grand-views-exhibition-california | Art and design | 2023-05-18T08:06:53.000Z | Veronica Esposito | ‘Visceral and powerful’: the everlasting appeal of giant art panoramas | “S
o much of the panorama experience is visceral and powerful, being transported in front of these massive works of art,” enthused James Fishburne, co-curator of Forest Lawn’s new exhibition Grand Views: The Immersive World of Panoramas. Fishburne spoke with me about this little-known but spectacular art form, taking me behind the scenes of the exhibition he co-curated in conjunction with the Velaslavasay Panorama.
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Grand Views offers audiences a rare chance to immerse themselves in the fascinating world of panoramas. The show centers around Forest Lawn’s Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection – which has displayed two enormous panoramas for decades – and it also offers other enormous works, like the Panorama of the Valley of the Smokes, made by artist Sara Velas in 2000. In addition, the show provides a rich assortment of broadsides, rare objects and ephemera from the 19th-century world of panoramas that help audiences truly get inside the creation and exhibition of these massive pieces.
Curating the show, Fishburne worked alongside panorama artist Sara Velas and writer Ruby Carlson, both of whom co-curate the Velaslavasay Panorama – a museum dedicated to panoramas located in nearby Los Angeles. According to Velas, her love of panoramas goes back to her early childhood, and getting to show her work in this exhibit alongside ephemera from panorama history is something of a full-circle moment. “I knew I wanted to make things since I was a child, and being in St Louis I learned about the 19th-century panorama tradition. I went on this huge pilgrimage to Europe when I graduated college to try and visit as many of the panoramas as I could from this era. Remarkably, a lot of the artifacts and things we’re displaying in this exhibit are tied to things that I saw in that self-assigned pilgrimage.”
Federated Press, Montreal, Cyclorama Building, Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, c 1920. Photograph: Courtesy of Forest Lawn Museum
Carlson, who has served as secretary-general of the International Panorama Council and who writes on numerous subjects, including panoramas, realized she wanted to dedicate herself to panoramas during a chance visit to the Velaslavasay Panorama, where she had a transformative encounter with the massive Effulgence of the North. “Me and my friends were the only people there at the time, and we spent a good hour in the panorama itself,” she told me. “It was just an incredible atmosphere, unlike anything I’d ever been to before and spending that time with a couple of my favorite people just made it very magical. I spent a lot of time at the Velaslavasay Panorama that day, and as we were leaving, I thought to myself, ‘I want to be here more.’”
With Grand Views: The Immersive World of Panoramas, Fishburne, Velas and Carlson hope to help others understand just how wonderful this largescale artform is, while communicating the long and rich history behind it. Due to the Covid-19 lockdowns, the curators had more time than expected to piece the exhibition together, letting them trace the rich web of connections between panoramas and much of Los Angeles history. “The fun part was the early stage, thinking about the connections we want to make,” said Fishburne. “There’s been so many incredible threads that we’ve been able to combine, since we got to let the whole thing marinate for an extra year-and-a-half during the pandemic. I think it really helped to enrich it.”
Ryan Schude, Façade of the Union Theatre (home of the Velaslavasay Panorama 2004-present), 2021. Photograph: Courtesy of Velaslavasay Panorama / Sean Teegarden Photography
One of those threads is the history of Los Angeles film-making, which is woven into the history of panoramas in California. Grand Views exhibits a Hollywood backdrop, as well as numerous cinematic artefacts, letting audiences see how these huge artworks have contributed to the development and evolution of film. The exhibition also offers a sketch for a panorama made by Disney imagineer Herbert Ryman, who is celebrated as being the first artist to ever visualize Walt Disney’s aspiration to create a theme park. “It’s really fascinating that between Disney, Hollywood, Forest Lawn, etc there’s this sort of cross-pollination among these worlds. And the final product is different for each of them, but they’re all sort of these very powerful, immersive, moving experiences. For Grand Views, we took slices of panorama history that are also interwoven with LA history.”
A major piece shown in Grand Views is the monumental crucifixion panorama painted by Polish artist Jan Styka – at 195ft by 45ft, it is one of the largest paintings ever created. Simply titled Crucifixion, the work’s immense size and impressive detail give it a dramatic, cinematic air, heightened by the immense hall that Forest Lawn created to house it and the dramatic show it uses to present the work to viewers.
Jan Styka, the Crucifixion (detail of central scene), 1896. Photograph: Courtesy of Forest Lawn Museum
According to Fishburne, “Crucifixion is one of the only four surviving crucifixion panoramas in the world.” He went on to detail how, in contrast to the other three, which are exhibited in a circular format, Forest Lawn’s hall draws from LA inspiration. “You step into this building, which uses ecclesiastical architecture, but then it also uses very Los Angeles–inspired architecture. The panorama’s theater space is essentially a movie palace. It’s a panorama presented in the way of a cinematic format.”
Grand Views offers substantial context on the making of Crucifixion, as well as offering windows into the other three major crucifixion panoramas, all currently in Europe. “Through Sara and Ruby’s contacts with the International Panorama Council, we were able to get artefacts and ephemera from the three others,” said Fishburne. “You get a really rich sense of the history surrounding these works. It’s the behind the scenes look at how these incredible artworks were created and presented.”
In a world where digital experiences are more and more becoming the norm, and where artistic innovations of the 19th century may seem as antiquated as the Pony Express in a world of text messaging, Grand Views offers viewers the chance to challenge their expectations and experience something both old and new. “What I really like about panoramas is that it frames the experience of going to see a painting more theatrically,” said Velas. “I think in particular it’s feeling very special right now because we’re spending so much time in this digital space.”
Grand Views: The Immersive World of Panoramas is on show at Forest Lawn, California, until 10 September | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/23/daniel-radcliffe-freddie-mercury-sacha-baron-cohen | Film | 2013-09-23T15:02:33.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Daniel Radcliffe aims for a new kind of magic in Freddie Mercury biopic | Daniel Radcliffe is the latest name in the frame for the planned film biopic of the late Queen singer Freddie Mercury, it has been reported. The Daily Star claimed a source told the paper: "Daniel has been told the part is his if he wants it."
Radcliffe's possible casting follows the news in July that original star Sacha Baron Cohen pulled out of the project, citing a clash between his desire to make a "racy" biopic in contrast to Mercury's erstwhile bandmates, who are said to want a more "family-friendly" approach.
Radcliffe, of course, is familiar to family audiences through his role in the Harry Potter films, but recently gained credibility as a dramatic actor by taking on the role of gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, which involved some explicit sex scenes.
The Star went on to quote it source as saying: "Plus, he's closer in height to Freddie than Sacha, who's much taller. Daniel can really sing, too." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2014/feb/13/small-businesses-benefits-flexible-working | Guardian Small Business Network | 2014-02-13T15:58:00.000Z | Claire Burke | Small businesses: what are the benefits of introducing flexible working? | Being able to avoid the hectic morning commute is just one of the many advantages that flexible working can bring. And it's not only staff who get a good deal. The time it takes getting to and from work can be transformed into valuable and productive time if an employee is working from home - bringing benefits to the company as a whole.
The right to request flexible working is expected to be extended to all employees, if they have been with their employer for 26 weeks or more, later this year. The move could see alternative ways of working becoming the norm. While this might seem a daunting prospect for small businesses, in practice it could bring many rewards. Our next live Q&A session will explore the benefits of flexible working and how small businesses can embrace them.
Flexible working covers a wide range of working practices, including working part-time, flexi-time, working compressed hours - working contracted weekly hours in fewer longer working days - and working from home. We've assembled a panel of experts to debate the likes of how flexible working affects staff morale and wellbeing, the impact can it have on retaining talented staff and how it can enable businesses to run more efficiently.
We'll also discuss how employers can make sure flexible working boosts productivity and how they can effectively manage staff from a distance. There will be the opportunity to explore the wide range of tools out there to facilitate remote working and ensure teams can collaborate effectively, no matter where they are based. So, join us between 1pm and 2:30pm on Wednesday 26 February or post your question below now.
Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox.
Our panel
Robert Gorby is marketing director at Powwownow, which offers instant, contract-free, conference calling
Amanda Brown is head of content for Audioboo - the platform for recording, uploading and sharing all types of audio. She manages a team of 12 including employees in the US and Australia
Rob Strachan is marketing director at Regus, a provider of flexible workspaces. The company has more than 220 centres across the UK, supporting thousands of small businesses to work flexibly
Mike Cherry is the national policy chairman for the Federation of Small Businesses. He leads the policy team to make sure small business issues are understood and represented in Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels
Barnaby Lashbrooke is the founder of Time Etc, a new platform that enables business owners to grow and manage remote workforces online
Jonathan Swan is policy and research officer for the charity Working Families. He has researched and written on a range of work-life issues, including: fathers and work, flexible working in senior roles, productivity and performance, organisational culture and active ageing
Les Potton is director and managing consultant at Target HR which provides HR consultancy, training and administration to SMEs. He has 22 years of experience in HR consultancy, training, coaching and line management
Frank Fenten is managing director of digital marketing agency We Love the Web. Over the past decade, Frank and his team have delivered more than 500 web projects from their offices in Hebden Bridge for clients ranging from Adidas to Yorkshire Water
Lyndsey Haskell is the owner of What You Sow, an online shop selling gifts for gardeners. Lyndsey, a proponent of flexible working practices, also carries out freelance work managing social media accounts for charities and small businesses
Hilary Humphrey is director at Seofon Business Services, which provides a flexible and supportive back office support system for small to medium growing businesses | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/this-coronavirus-crisis-has-forced-the-retirement-of-pantomime-johnson | Opinion | 2020-03-15T08:30:52.000Z | Andrew Rawnsley | This coronavirus crisis has forced the retirement of pantomime Johnson | Andrew Rawnsley | Apandemic is testing global leadership and its capacity to rise to the challenge of “the worst public health crisis for a generation”. To some surprise, the man who said that is addressing the emergency in a more mature fashion than many anticipated when it first began to unfold. Boris Johnson has abandoned the “invisible man” act for which I mocked him a fortnight ago and located the serious side of his character. The pantomime Johnson has been retired from public spectacle and replaced with the sombre Johnson we now see at news conferences. At his most recent, he struck an appropriately sober tone when he warned: “I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”, words prime ministers usually don’t expect to utter outside wartime. Candour, not a quality always associated with this prime minister, is essential. Fear, panic and conspiracy theories are fomented when people suspect that their leaders are not telling them the truth. The Opinium poll that we publish today suggests that more people than not have confidence in the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, but the margin is not a very solid one.
The prime minister has been flattered by comparison with Donald Trump. His multiple flaws are being pitilessly highlighted by a crisis that a man who does not believe in scientific evidence or international cooperation is hopelessly ill-equipped to handle. Variously dismissing the coronavirus as “a hoax” cooked up by his opponents to deny him re-election or no worse than the flu, he has swung from juvenile denialism to blaming it on foreigners and Democrats. Then he suddenly announced travel bans and declared a “national emergency”.
The ineffable American president is the quintessential example of a stretch of world history in which populist blowhards have prospered at the ballot box by stoking division, promoting polarisation, scorning expertise and championing ignorance. This crisis, one that now touches every continent on Earth apart from Antarctica, demands leaders who are willing to listen to professional advice, capable of fostering national cohesion at a time of emergency, and skilled at seeking international cooperation. The luckier countries will be those blessed with competent, honest and intelligent leadership. One of the possible positives to come out of this crisis – I put it no higher than possible at this stage – is that it will decrease the public appetite for bombastic charlatans and increase demand for serious leaders who respect expertise. If it does, that will be bad for populist hucksters more generally.
The hope is to reduce the scale of the spike and delay it to a warmer month so that the health service isn't overwhelmed
Mr Johnson has often aped Trumpian populism when he has seen political advantage in doing so, but he is smart enough to grasp that something more grown up is now required. People present at Cobra meetings and other decision-making moments generally report being impressed by the way he conducts himself. I asked one witness, who is not an instinctive cheerleader for this prime minister, how they thought he was doing. The reply came: “Pretty well. He is listening intently to the science.” In this respect, Dominic Cummings, his chief adviser and a fervent admirer of science, is acting as a positive influence on the prime minister, rather than a baleful one. Whenever he addresses the country from the state dining room, he has come flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer. Thrust into the spotlight in a way neither man can have anticipated, they have both impressed with the clear and calm way they have talked to the nation. They can explain the reasoning for the strategy and how it is evolving with much more credibility than any politician. The polls tell us they will be much more likely to be believed. The government’s senior scientists also serve as the prime minister’s human shields against accusations that he is acting out of ideological fixations or for partisan advantage. No wonder he is clinging to them.
The past few days have brought both more clarity and more controversy about their strategy. There is still consensus around one key component – to try to spread out the rate of infection: “flattening the peak”. The hope is to reduce the scale of the spike and delay it to a warmer month so that the health service is not overwhelmed with patients requiring critical care. In his budget, an event all but eclipsed by the crisis, Rishi Sunak promised the NHS “whatever it takes… millions or billions” to tackle the coronavirus, but you can’t spend that money overnight. The NHS needs to increase its intensive care capacity, but that requires more staff, more equipment and more time. The crisis in Italy, whose leadership was slow to realise that they had a problem and who have now imposed an almost total lockdown of the entire country, has shocked ministers. It is widely assumed that Britain is about four weeks behind Italy in terms of infection, though that doesn’t mean we have to end up in the same grisly place.
There is not consensus, but mounting controversy, about another critical element of the government’s strategy. Britain has adopted a strikingly different approach to the many other countries that are implementing faster and more sweeping programmes to curtail human contact. These include Ireland, France and Belgium, all close neighbours.
That has fuelled the rising pressure on the prime minister to take much more stringent steps here. The pressure is coming both from Labour and from within the government’s own ranks. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, has been the loudest voice asking why we are not seeking to emulate Asian states, such as Singapore and South Korea, that seem to have had some success in snuffing out the spread of the virus.
The government is moving towards banning sports fixtures and other mass gatherings, but is still resistant to a more comprehensive shutdown. The scientific reasoning behind Britain’s approach is that more draconian steps won’t make that much difference at this stage, are not sustainable over the longer term, and may well turn out to be counterproductive because it will lead to a second wave of infections when restrictions are eased – possibly in winter, when the NHS is most stretched.
Sir Patrick has lucidly explained what the strategy is designed to achieve. It expects those on whom the disease has mild effects, the great majority, to be gradually exposed to the virus, building up “herd immunity”. Over time, this will lower the risk of infection for the vulnerable. While this is going on, they will do what they can to protect those for whom the coronavirus could be fatal. Perhaps the most important advice given by the government last week was the simplest. That was to tell people who have flu-type symptoms, however slight, that they should stay at home for seven days. “That’s not trivial,” says one of those involved in this decision. “That is a significant amount of social distancing.”
Faced with an invisible menace with extremely visible impacts, a clamour for instant and total shutdowns is understandable. But it comes accompanied by the danger that kneejerk responses by frantic governments can end up doing more harm than good. One scientist drew my attention to the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011. Later studies found that around 20 people died from radiation. Many more, about a thousand, lost their lives as a result of the decision to evacuate: casualties of car crashes, heart attacks and other medical emergencies triggered by trying to clear the area in a rush. Sometimes the obvious reaction to a crisis will not be the correct one.
Many lives depend on getting this right. The government can’t be blamed for the virus, but there will be fierce scrutiny of its responses. There are risks with the strategy it has adopted – and huge ones for the reputation of Mr Johnson if the public concludes that his handling of the crisis led to avoidable deaths. There are hazards, too, with the alternative approaches. Various models for tackling the pandemic are now being live trialled around the world by governments of many different complexions and levels of competence. It will likely be a year or so before we will gain an understanding of which of the plans was the smartest. My conversations have convinced me that the British approach is rooted in scientific logic and a careful calibration of the different risks. I’m no epidemiologist so I won’t pretend to be a qualified judge of whether they are doing the right thing. I am persuaded that they are sincerely endeavouring to do the right thing.
Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/may/19/ida-fossil-messel-missing-link | Science | 2009-05-19T15:30:48.000Z | James Randerson | Fossil Ida's world of pygmy horses and rodents with trunks | The world in which Ida lived was a critical time in primate evolution, but all around her was a riot of evolutionary experimentation by other mammal groups. It was a through-the-looking glass world of half-familiar, half-bizarre beasts with Mr Potato Head combinations of characteristics such as pygmy horses and rodents with trunks – and many of them were soon to die out.
A naturalist transported back in time would have found wandering through the steamy, sub-tropical jungle that Ida inhabited 47m years ago a deeply strange experience, says Jørn Hurum at the University of Oslo, the scientist who saved the Ida specimen for science. "There are some weirdos, but there are some things you would recognise," he says.
"It is a wonderful situation because you have all these paleocene mammals, these old-timers from the beginning of the big mammal explosion after the dinosaurs went extinct – they are still present. And then you have all the more modern mammals who are just appearing," he said. Some of these were herds of pygmy horses that trotted through the undergrowth. "The biggest ones were like sheep," says Hurum.
Sir David Attenborough, who is narrating a major BBC documentary about the early primate specimen, says: "At the end of the demise of the dinosaurs [65m years ago] ... suddenly the domination of the earth, as it were, was up for grabs. The reptiles had come to the end of their dominance. What was going to succeed them?"
At the Messel pit near Darmstadt, Germany, where Ida was excavated, palaeontologists have found a treasure trove of countless specimens, including more than 60 fossils of pygmy horses, some of which were pregnant mares and foals. Sharing the forest floor was a bizarre leaping rodent called Leptictidium that had a pointed head and may have sported a trunk. And our time-travelling zoologist would surely have been struck by a metre-long squirrel-like creature called Kopidodon that had opposable thumbs and big toes.
The forest around the Messel lake was even home to four species of marsupial and an anteater – both creatures that no longer appear in Europe.
Our intrepid explorer would have had to look out for eight different species of crocodiles – some of which lived exclusively on land. Diplocynodon darwini, whose name means "double dog tooth" grew to a fearsome 5m long. And crawling through the undergrowth was another giant, relatively speaking. Queens of the largest ant that has ever crawled the earth, Formicium, grew up to 2.5 centimetres long and had a wingspan over six times that.
The reason palaeontologists know so much detail about Ida and her contemporaries is the unique characteristics of the location where she died and was fossilised. In the Eocene period, Messel pit was a lake, formed after a massive volcanic explosion left a deep, steep sided crater. For much of the time, the surface layers of the lake were a hospitable place for fish, turtles, crocodiles, insects and many other creatures to inhabit. But Messel had a deadly secret. From time to time it would let forth a giant belch of poisonous volcanic gases.
"Anything that went to the lake to drink or flew across the surface or indeed lived on the surface would have been overcome by it," says Dr Philip Wilby, an expert in the process of fossilisation at the British Geological Survey in Keyworth. The thousands of bat specimens preserved at the site and many more flying insects are testament to how swift these deadly, suffocating events would have been, he said. The creatures would simply have dropped out of the sky.
"It was a lethal place," says Attenborough, but also unique. "There are categories of animals that occur in Messel that have never been seen anywhere else as fossils."
Killing off its inhabitants was not enough though. What made Messel pit really special is what happened next. Once the corpses had drifted down to the soft sediment at the bottom, they were not picked over by scavengers. Because of the Messel lake's great depth and the lack of oxygen at the bottom, there were no large creatures to disturb them – just the bacteria that slowly devoured them.
And these were key. "The bacteria are actually involved in preserving the fossil, by moulding or casting the tissues that would normally decay away," says Wilby. So in many Messel specimens, it is possible to make out the details of hair, skin – and in Ida's case even her stomach contents – that palaeontologists normally have no hope of seeing. What ends up being fossilised is not the hairs themselves but the mineral wastes excreted by bacteria that leave a detailed shadow in the shape of the soft parts they were devouring.
"It truly is one of the world's most remarkable fossil sites," says Wilby, "It's difficult to convey the excitement one feels when you split a slab of the shale in the pit to reveal a perfectly preserved fish skeleton or a brilliant metallic green beetle."
In 1995 Unesco-designated Messel pit (or Grube Messel to give it its German name) as a world heritage site. The citation stated that "the site is of outstanding universal value as the single best site which contributes to the understanding of the Eocene, when mammals became firmly established."
After decades of use as a quarry for oil shale, the local government had planned to use the site for landfill and had even got as far as building access roads for the garbage trucks. Only a concerted campaign by local scientists succeeded in mobilising an international effort to save the site.
The Unesco decision was a great relief says Wilby. "To have lost it would have been an absolute travesty."
Atlantic Productions' programme, Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, will be broadcast in the UK on Tuesday, 26 May at 9pm on BBC1. The full scientific paper on Ida is published in the journal PLoS ONE. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2015/jan/28/ftse-cautious-after-us-fall-but-arm-jumps-after-bumper-apple-results | Business | 2015-01-28T09:50:48.000Z | Nick Fletcher | FTSE cautious after US fall but Arm jumps after bumper Apple results | Markets are making an uncertain start after an overnight plunge on Wall Street and continuing concerns about the implications of the Greek election victory by anti-austerity party Syriza.
US markets were unsettled by a series of poor results from a number of household names - from Procter & Gamble to Microsoft to Caterpillar - but one company managed to shine through.
That company was of course Apple, which reported the biggest quarterly profit in history, boosted by better than expected sales of the new iPhone - up 46% to 74m compared to forecasts of 64.9m.
Suppliers to the US group are benefiting from the news, with chip designer Arm up 21p at £10.52, rival Imagination Technologies 8p better at 250.5p and Laird 3.2p higher at 319.3p.
Arm has already added 35% since October, and Liberum - a consistent seller of the shares - has not changed its view:
The most Apple exposed stocks in UK tech are: Imagination (around 35% of revenue), Laird (around 20% of revenue) and Arm (less than 10% of revenue). Largest beneficiary from Apple strength is Imagination given its significant revenue weighting and high operational gearing. The weak pound is also helpful for Imagination which combined with Apple strength may put upward pressure on estimates. Imagination may also see a higher royalty from the iPhone 6 (uses new intellectual property - GX6450) than the iPhone 5s (G6430) so royalty revenue growth from Apple could be more than the 16% increase in Apple’s combined volume (iPad plus iPhone).
Laird seems to have partially missed the strong Apple fourth quarter as it is one of the only Apple suppliers not to have beaten/raised guidance which is a bit of a worry. Arm is in every mobile phone (Samsung, Apple, Sony) so the fact that Apple is taking share from Samsung should net off. Also Apple moved to Arm’s higher royalty V8 architecture in 2013 with the iPhone 5s so Arm is unlikely to get a higher royalty from Apple.
Overall the FTSE 100 is currently down 3.02 points at 6808.59, ahead of the US Federal Reserve meeting later. The Fed is not expected to raise rates, but with recent economic data it might be more cautious about when they will increase. Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, said:
Any increase in US rates this year would appear to be unlikely at a time when growth globally appears to be showing some signs of weakness, and while inflation appears to be heading lower, and as such those looking for clues about the timing of a rate hike are unlikely to get any comfort from this evenings Fed statement.
Elsewhere Experian has added 55p to £12.20 after an upbeat statement at an investor meeting, including a promise to “progress the ordinary dividend payout” given its strong cash generation. It also unveiled a $600m share buyback programme.
Miners had some support from a rise in the copper price, with Anglo American up 17p at £11.07 after a better than expected rise in annual production, despite saying the recent sharp drop in commodity prices would probably lead to impairment charges. Societe Generale raised its recommendation from sell to buy.
But Antofagasta has fallen 21.5p to 672p after saying it would report a smaller than expected increase in production this year.
Johnson Matthey has dropped 230p to £32.67 despite saying it would report a rise in full year profits after a 1% increase in third quarter earnings.
Among the mid-caps, property portal Rightmove has fallen 93p to £23.50 after Panmure cut from buy to sell and Citigroup moved its price target from £21.75 to £21.15.
Rival Zoopla is down 6.6p to 183.4p as Citi cut from 200p to 165p.
Both shares had risen on Tuesday as investors shrugged off the threat of newly launched rival OnTheMarket. But Panmure Gordon analyst Jonathan Helliwell said:
OnTheMarket has launched with an estimated 4,500 estate agency branches but some clear shortfalls in its competitive offer to house buyers, house sellers and agents. However, we see scope for it to improve its model over time (dropping the ‘one other portal only’ rule, extending the ‘exclusive to OTM for a few days’ approach) and to stick around for some time given its economics. This will impact the incumbents’ profits in terms of lost customers and higher marketing spend.
Initial signs are that OnTheMarket is hurting Zoopla much more than Right Move. Right Move still looks well placed to hold on to its market leadership in the UK property portal sector. However, this is already discounted in its valuation today in our view, even after the partial de-rating of the stock in the last year. Zoopla shares offer much better upside, taking a longer term view that OTM does not succeed – but it is being disrupted much more in the near term.
We see both stocks moving lower over the next 6-12 months. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/20/edward-st-aubyn-i-never-read-things-about-myself-because-im-so-easily-crushed | Books | 2021-03-20T11:00:24.000Z | Hadley Freeman | Edward St Aubyn: 'I never read things about myself because I’m so easily crushed' | Most interviews in the lockdown era are conducted by video, but the novelist Edward St Aubyn and I are talking by old-fashioned telephone because, his publicist warns me beforehand, “Teddy doesn’t do Zoom.” Of course he doesn’t. In truth, it’s a surprise that Teddy does telephones, because he often gives the impression that his presence in prosaic 21st-century London – as opposed to early 20th-century Russia alongside his great-uncle Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, or 19th-century Britain with his great-grandfather, the Liberal MP Sir John St Aubyn, first Baron St Levan – is an administrative error shortly to be rectified.
His novels satirise the foibles of the world around him with the savagery of a true insider, such as when he takes on the petty snobberies of social climbers, and the bemusement of one who finds the modern world a frequent source of frustration. Mother’s Milk – the fourth book in his Patrick Melrose series – was nominated for the Booker prize in 2006; it didn’t win, but he metabolised the experience into 2014’s Lost for Words, in which he described literary prize-givings with the horrified amusement of an alien gazing upon bizarre human rituals. (Alas, not even mockery could save him from being subjected to such indignities again: Lost for Words won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.)
His accent out-poshes the royal family: “house” is “hice”, “haven’t” is “huffn’t”, as in “I huffn’t got a second hice to escape to,” which he says to me, twice, when discussing his experience of lockdown. He says this with the wistfulness of one who lives in a milieu in which multiple homes are the norm, but also with the self-mockery of a man burdened with the kind of painful self-awareness not usually associated with his class. Judging purely from his background (aristocratic) and schooling (Westminster, Oxford), St Aubyn should be a paragon of privilege. But appearances are deceptive. He has a habit of hesitancy that I initially mistake for aloofness but turns out to be anxiety: “I’m always so nervous in interviews because I assume I’m going to make a fool out of myself. It’s odd, it hasn’t got any better since we last spoke. Yah! You would have thought that my paranoia would get eroded over time, but it remains defiant,” he says with an embarrassed laugh.
This is the second time I have interviewed St Aubyn, and although he sweetly pretends to remember our encounter 14 years ago (“But of course!”), he didn’t read the interview. “I never read things about myself. Not because I’m so lofty – on the contrary, it’s because I’m so easily crushed,” he says, and I believe him. Behind the plaster prestige is a fragile core that he works very hard to stabilise. He used to do this by alternately injecting speed and heroin, but he’s been clean since 1988 and so now relies on coffee “to try to be intelligent” followed by beta blockers “which then make me feel stupid”, he sighs.
Benedict Cumberbatch in a scene from Patrick Melrose. Photograph: Ollie Upton/AP
His novels have a similar push and pull dynamic. Alongside the outwardly directed satire, the writing plunges inwards and excavates wounds, not least in the Melrose books, in which he fictionalised his own life, from being sexually abused by his father, to extreme drug addiction in his 20s, to anxious but loving fatherhood (St Aubyn has two children from previous relationships). But his books are not navel-gazing and the perspective often swoops between the characters, creating a mosaic of voices.
“That’s probably due to the disastrous plasticity of my personality, which was once completely shattered,” he says. He depicts this shattering in Bad News, the second Melrose book, in which Patrick, strung out on drugs, is tormented by dozens of internal voices. “I glued myself together again, but some of that plasticity is still there, and I do slip into the characters and feel like I’m hearing what they’re saying. There are levels of excitement in that: I can become molten.”
St Aubyn is talking to me from his home in west London, hiding in the smallest room in the house, “because tree surgeons are amputating the beautiful branches I look at from my bedroom. So rather than be caught choking with tears, I’ve moved upstairs to avoid the chainsaws,” he says. Even aside from the truncation of his tree, he is especially nervous today because he is promoting (“defending”, as he puts it) his new novel, Double Blind, which he sweated over for seven years. “There’s a danger of my other books getting ignored because the five Melroses have such a gravitational field to them. I knew Lost for Words and Dunbar wouldn’t achieve escape velocity from Planet Melrose,” he says, referring to the books he’s written since publishing the final part of the Melrose series, At Last, in 2012. “But I hope that Double Blind will.”
I hope so too. Writing about his past helped to free St Aubyn from it emotionally, but he did it so well that he doomed himself to being asked about it forever by journalists and fans, especially since 2018, when the Melrose books were turned into a series for Sky Atlantic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and written by David Nicholls. When I ask one too many questions about Planet Melrose and its connections to his past, St Aubyn gently reminds me he’s been talking about all this since 1994, so would be ever so grateful if people occasionally asked him about something else. “But I totally understand Melrose has to be acknowledged, so please don’t delete your next five questions,” he says, as I delete my next five questions.
When he was eight he told his father to stop assaulting him, and he did: 'It was a short speech. But it changed the world'
Yet the awkward truth is that his non-Melrose, non-autobiographical books, and Double Blind is his fifth, have not found as much favour with readers and critics, and despite avoiding reviews, St Aubyn knows this. When I mention that I’ve read On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit, his first two non-Melrose books, he almost shouts in shock: “Oh my God! Well now I know of four people who have read them.”
Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades. He tells me several times that Double Blind is very different from the Melrose books, and it is, but all of St Aubyn’s books are ultimately about the desire to break beyond the prison of one’s own subjectivity. He once described his mind as “a nest of scorpions” and the only drugs he feels nostalgia for – and he writes about them fondly in Double Blind – are “ones from the psychedelic realm, because they’re the quickest way to dissolve the subject/object division: you imagine the racing heart of the bird on the branch and you flow into the bird and the bird flows into you,” he trails off wistfully. These days, instead, he flows into his novels’ characters and the characters flow into him.
A desire to escape oneself begins with a desire to escape unhappiness. “Obviously if you think: ‘It’s absolutely great being me and there’s no room for improvement’” – he laughs at the thought – “then there’s little incentive. But that’s not been my problem.” His books stare hard at his deepest fears and dearest longings: “It isn’t worth writing a novel unless you’re saying what you assume is impossible to express,” he says.
St Aubyn grew up in London and France. His mother, Lorna, was an American heiress whose maternal skills he describes as “incompetent”, and his father, Roger, was a frustrated musician and a rapist. The first time he raped his son, St Aubyn was five years old. He describes this in Never Mind, the first Melrose book, and young Patrick imagines he is a gecko climbing the wall, “watching with detachment the punishment inflicted by the strange man on a small boy”. Patrick’s sense of self shatters, and in Double Blind St Aubyn looks into the connection between childhood abuse and schizophrenia. His father continued to abuse him for years.
As a child, St Aubyn dreamed of being the prime minister, “now rather a discredited ambition”, because he wanted to make speeches that would change the world. “I suppose that has an obvious psychological origin, in that I so much wanted to persuade everyone around me to behave radically differently,” he says. When he realised he had “a mortal terror of speaking in public”, he focused instead on writing. But he did make one monumental speech: when he was eight he told his father to stop assaulting him, and he did. “It was a short speech. But it changed the world,” he says.
It has long been rumoured that St Aubyn wrote another world-stopping speech: the eulogy read by his friend Charles Spencer at his sister Princess Diana’s funeral.
“Absolutely not, and I’m really bored on Charlie’s behalf that that rumour has gone around. He’s an excellent writer, he didn’t need me to write that speech,” St Aubyn says, and for the first time I catch a glimpse of something close to the imperiousness of his class.
Being admiring is always a sign of strength, whereas other people feel they’re losing something if they admire someone else
Most of St Aubyn’s books include a thank you to the writer Francis Wyndham, who died in 2017 and was one of many quasi-paternal figures in his life. “I think inevitably someone like me who had an unsatisfactory relationship with their father will look for benign adults who do things normal fathers do,” he says. Other father figures included the director Mike Nichols and the artist Lucian Freud, and the quality that united them was their “unalloyed support and enthusiasm” for St Aubyn (his own father, of course, gave him neither). “Being admiring is always a sign of strength, whereas other people feel they’re losing something if they admire someone else,” he says.
One person who perhaps demonstrates the latter tendency is St Aubyn’s former friend, Will Self. The two knew one another at university and shared a similar taste for drugs, but grew apart. In Self’s 2018 memoir, Will, he writes about a man called “Caius” who bears an unmistakeable resemblance to St Aubyn. When Caius eventually tells him that his father sexually abused him, Self’s response is to sulk: “[Caius] got everything, whether they be material things and even these extreme experiences, which, self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good copy.”
Did St Aubyn read the book?
“No, but there was a very mysterious period of my life when people were making bleak allusions to Will Self and raising their eyebrows at me, and I had no idea why,” he says with a mischievous chuckle. “Then somebody told me the fuller story. He wrote something nasty about me in – it’s an autobiography, isn’t it?”
I tell him that it was the most bizarrely bitter thing I’d ever read.
“What a pity. He’s an odd person. I think he’s very unhappy and I’m sorry about that, but he certainly doesn’t go to any trouble to disguise it,” he says.
St Aubyn is currently enduring the enervating effects of long Covid, “which have certainly gone on long enough for me”, yet our conversation continues long past our allotted time slot, and the more we talk, the less anxious he sounds. Before I leave him to recuperate I ask why his parents gave him the cuddly nickname “Teddy”, given how uncuddly they were. “It came about because the ancestor I’m named after was known as Teddy, so there was that. It is a cuddly name but it’s not a guarantee of cuddliness: Teddy Roosevelt used to go off shooting elephants! But I hope I make the grade,” he says, and he makes another self-mocking laugh, but this time it’s shot through with something that sounds almost like optimism.
Double Blind is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply, | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/22/lucian-freud-death-best-web | Art and design | 2011-07-22T15:34:36.000Z | Leo Benedictus | Lucian Freud: the best of the web | Lucian Freud was a fundamentalist in his belief that thoughts of the artist should never be allowed to interfere with their art. They should appear "no more than God in nature", he once wrote. So it was probably as well that he seldom gave interviews, because there was certainly a lot to talk about. Freud was famously gregarious, and loved the good life, including expensive food and cars. (His regular table at the Wolseley was said to be set with a black cloth last night.) And "it is thought", in the cautious words of this BBC profile, that he fathered "dozens" of children.
The legends about his ramshackle (some would say disgusting) studio were also true – as you can see from the dirt and paint that cakes the walls in this extract from Tim Meara's film Small Gestures in Bare Rooms. For a fuller profile, the best film available online is Jake Auerbach's Portraits (2004), made up of interviews with his friends and family. Part one includes, among other things, the memory of his friend, the novelist Francis Wyndham, being taken to the River Cafe in Freud's glamorous car. "You know how frightening he can be as a driver," Wyndham says. In the second part, fellow artist David Hockney remembers sitting for Freud, and is full of praise for his work. "I think they're as good portraits as have been done by anybody, actually," he says. The third part is here.
Among critics, the London Review of Books art writer Peter Campbell made a superbly detailed study of Freud's technique, following his visit to Tate Britain's 2002 retrospective. There is also this film on YouTube, which is far from slick – indeed it's annoyingly shoddy – but it does give a good summary of Freud's influences and development.
The Today programme this morning carried a clutch of interviews, including with Sue Tilley, the subject of several of Freud's portraits. Most notable among them was Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which became the most expensive painting by a living artist ever sold when it was bought for £17m in 2008, reportedly by Roman Abramovic at the instigation of his girlfriend, collector and millionairess Dasha Zhukova.
Tilley also spoke in more depth to BBC Breakfast this morning, revealing that the famously protracted process of sitting for Freud was not exaggerated – taking "three days a week for nine months" in her case. "You'd think he was a very serious person," she adds, "but his excitement when he met Kylie Minogue beggared belief."
Perhaps his closest literary counterpart, when it came to documenting the grotesque glory of the human body, was John Updike. And maybe it's a fitting way to say goodbye to one of the greatest British painters ever to read this short poem, in which the writer pays tribute to Freud's work. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/14/investigators-of-alleged-war-crimes-by-australians-in-afghanistan-set-to-hand-over-first-brief-of-evidence | Australia news | 2023-02-14T02:57:38.000Z | Ben Doherty | Investigators of alleged war crimes by Australians in Afghanistan set to hand over first brief of evidence | The government agency investigating alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan expects to hand its first brief of evidence to commonwealth prosecutors by the middle of this year.
The Office of the Special Investigator – established in the wake of the Brereton report, which found “credible” evidence to support allegations that 39 Afghan civilians were unlawfully killed by Australian special forces soldiers – is investigating “between 40 and 50” alleged offences.
Appearing before Senate estimates late Monday, the director general of the OSI, Chris Moraitis, said he expected to hand a first, single brief of evidence to commonwealth prosecutors by the middle of 2023.
Australia looking to compensate Afghanistan war crime victims’ families
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“I’m quietly confident of a brief of evidence in the first half of this year.”
He said “at this stage” it would be a single brief for prosecutors.
Moraitis declined to say how many Australians were being investigated, telling the Senate the alleged offences were a “complex web”.
He said some of the allegations under “active investigation” had been raised in the Brereton report, while others “have come to our attention through other avenues”.
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Moraitis said “anywhere between 40 and 50” alleged offences were being investigated, some of which may have had multiple participants.
“Investigations are under ongoing review and that number may increase if additional matters are raised, but over time I expect it will reduce overall as it becomes clear which allegations may be substantiated to the high threshold required for a criminal justice process.
“As always, we are conscious of the potential impact on anyone affected by our investigations and my teams are unwavering in their commitment to ensuring allegations of war crimes within our remit are subject to fair, thorough and impartial investigation without unnecessary delay.”
Moraitis said the OSI was limited in its capacity to gather evidence inside Afghanistan, since the fall of that country’s republican government to the Taliban in August 2021. Investigators had not been able to go into the country.
“We’re not a humanitarian agency, we’re not a special rapporteur, we’re not an NGO; we’re an investigative body trying to enforce Australian criminal law, and that brings its own dynamic.
“I’m not stratified that the necessary conditions for engaging in that country, at this stage, exist.”
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However, the OSI has interviewed witnesses who are currently outside of Afghanistan: “Investigators have travelled outside Australia and not Afghanistan.”
Key findings of the Brereton report into allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan
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Questioned by the Greens senator David Shoebridge about the possibility of using technology to interview witnesses and gather evidence from inside Afghanistan, Moraitis said there were legal barriers to that course of action.
“I think you need a formal arrangement with the host country to seek evidence and to adduce evidence that can be used in a court of law in Australia.
“There are some legal problems with that. We need to have a relationship with the state to do that, for that to be admissible.”
The four-year Brereton inquiry – led by the New South Wales court of appeal judge Major General Paul Brereton – reported in 2020 that it had found “credible information” to implicate 25 current or former Australian Defence Force personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 people in Afghanistan.
The inquiry recommended that allegations against 19 of those individuals be referred for criminal investigation. The government established the Office of the Special Investigator in response.
Anyone affected by the Brereton report should call Hayat Line on 1300 993 398, a free and confidential line for those going through difficulties. In Australia, support and counselling for veterans and their families is available 24 hours a day from Open Arms on 1800 011 046 or www.openarms.gov.au and Safe Zone Support on 1800 142 072 or https://www.openarms.gov.au/safe-zone-support | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/mar/17/breakfast-briefing | Technology | 2010-03-17T07:30:00.000Z | Bobbie Johnson | Spotify still working on US launch | It's been a while since we talked about Spotify, which has been putting a lot of energy into gearing up to launch in America. With co-founder Daniel Ek talking at South by South West yesterday, people thought the company might launch itself in the states - but no such luck. Ek
said the service was doing well, but that relationships with US music publishers were tricky. He also said Spotify now had more than 320,000 paying subscribers.
Has Google's Nexus One phone been a flop or not? Flurry, a mobile analytics company, estimates that sales are at around 135,000 since launch - just a smidgen of the numbers shifted by other handsets like the iPhone and Droid over the same period. Ryan Block, formerly of Engadget and now with GDGT, says that's not failure - after all, Google is only selling it online and not giving it the huge push other handsets get. Still seems like the company wouldn't want to put in so much effort for so little payoff. One thing we do know for certain, though: Google has had its attempt to trademark the Nexus One name rejected, though it's got nothing to do with Philip K Dick.
And... it's almost a year since Microsoft took the great leap forward and introduced Internet Explorer 8. Now the company is forging ahead with IE9. You can see some demos and read more about what it can do in these guides. Some stuff in there about HTML5 support, CSS3 and SVG. One note - perhaps unsurprising - is that it will not support Windows XP.
You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter (@guardiantech, @gdngames or our personal accounts) or by watching our Delicious feed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/23/va-museum-seeks-swiftie-to-advise-on-taylor-swift-fan-culture | Music | 2024-02-23T09:33:36.000Z | Laura Snapes | V&A museum seeks Swiftie to advise on Taylor Swift fan culture | The Victoria and Albert museum in London is seeking a British “Swiftie” to advise on the fan culture around Taylor Swift.
The position will be filled before Swift begins the European leg of her Eras tour in May. Beyond the three-hour performance put in by the 34-year-old pop star, the shows have become notable for fans swapping friendship bracelets (inspired by a lyric in her 2022 song You’re on Your Own, Kid), wearing Swift-themed costumes and painting homemade signs – artefacts the museum is said to be interested in.
The post will be one of five superfan advisers that the museum is appointing to inform the collection at the V&A and “the current cultural trends that will inform the future of museum collecting”. The other subjects are Crocs, tufting, drag and emojis.
Four previous roles – advising on toby jugs, Pokémon cards, Lego and gorpcore clothing – the trend of wearing outdoor wear as streetwear – have already been filled.
The museum’s director Dr Tristram Hunt said: “These new advisory roles will help us celebrate and discover more about the enormous, and often surprising, creative diversity on offer at the V&A, as well as helping us to learn more about the design stories that are relevant to our audiences today.”
Successful applicants for the Swift role will surely evince a depth of knowledge dating back nearly two decades: literacy in “No it’s Becky”, the alleged secret album Karma, the “scrunchie theory”, “maple latte” and “I ♥ TS”.
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Successful applicants will be paid per session. Applications close on 7 March. For non-Swifties, the museum is also hiring several roles pertaining to its David Bowie archive. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/19/from-tomb-raider-to-a-wrinkle-in-time-why-hollywood-has-daddy-issues | Film | 2018-03-19T10:00:16.000Z | Steve Rose | From Tomb Raider to A Wrinkle in Time: why Hollywood has daddy issues | While Hollywood has been smashing its own patriarchy off-screen, we’ve also been seeing a curious absence of fathers on it lately. Especially in family movies. Dead parents have long been a reliable source of sympathy for young heroes, but it’s dads who seem to be dying or disappearing right now. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Tomb Raider review – Alicia Vikander's Lara Croft is a badass bore
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This week it’s the rebooted Tomb Raider – the quarry of Lara Croft’s intrepid adventure is not some priceless artefact but her missing-presumed-dead father, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Once Lara gets an inkling of where he went, it’s anchors aweigh.
Next week we’ve got another missing dad: Chris Pine, playing a scientist who got lost somewhere in the fifth dimension while mucking about with quantum entanglement, or something. Again, his daughter Meg’s mission to find him sets in motion A Wrinkle in Time, Disney’s expensive sci-fi extravaganza. Like Lara Croft, Meg is not a sweet, innocent girl. She’s stubborn, angry, and resentful – all principally as a result of her absent father, who others assume has abandoned his family. The story’s original author, Madeleine L’Engle, was shipped off to a Swiss boarding school aged 12, ostensibly on account of her father’s ill health. Her fiction is full of searches for fathers.
Anyone who saw last year’s amazing documentary The Work, in which tearful prisoners in an intense therapy workshop all blamed their fathers for their criminality, will know how deep this issue runs. In family movies, absent fathers are often the root of problems. In The Hunger Games, Katniss’s dad dies in a mining accident when she’s 11; her mum is virtually catatonic with depression. Chris Pratt spends the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie haunted by his father’s mysterious absence, and the second one haunted by his presence. Star Wars has built a whole universe on daddy issues.
And let’s not forget the daddy of all dad-issue film-makers: Steven Spielberg. Absent or distant fathers are a running theme throughout his work, from Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters and Roy Scheider in Jaws (who abandon their families to go hunting aliens and sharks, respectively), to the orphaned heroine of The BFG (who finds a BF father figure). Then there’s Indiana Jones who, like Lara Croft, goes on a quest to rescue his long-disappeared father in The Last Crusade. Indy then becomes an absent father himself in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (his son grows up to be Shia LaBeouf, which kind of explains things). No surprise that Spielberg’s next movie, Ready Player One, centres on a teenage hero who lives with his aunt and is drawn into a virtual world created by a wise old man.
But nowhere did Spielberg play out his father fixation as magnificently as in ET. Poor Elliott is in yet another single-parent family, with a working mum just about holding it together. When they ridicule his alien sighting, Elliott glumly says, “Dad would believe me,” and everybody stops laughing. Sure enough, ET becomes the stand-in man of the house. He unites the family, offers Elliott companionship and advice, and then, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movies, abandons him again. Spielberg once described ET as “my story about my parents who got divorced when I was a teenager … and the effect it had on me … that picture was about looking for a surrogate father, looking for someone to fill the void of the missing parent.”
These stories often spring from that void, but they can help fill it, too.
Tomb Raider is in cinemas now | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/17/bafta-award-predictions-who-will-win-and-who-should-win | Film | 2023-02-17T11:35:20.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Peter Bradshaw’s Bafta predictions: who will win – and who should? | Best film
Will win Tár
Should win Tár
Shoulda been a contender Aftersun
Best director
Will win Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Should win Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave
Shoulda been a contender Chinonye Chukwu, Till
Outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer
Will win Charlotte Wells, Aftersun
Should win Charlotte Wells, Aftersun
Shoulda been a contender Ruth Paxton, A Banquet
Best British film
Will win Living
Should win Living
Shoulda been a contender Emily
Best supporting actor? … Brendan Gleeson (right) with Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
Best film not in the English language
Will win All Quiet on the Western Front
Should win The Quiet Girl
Shoulda been a contender The Innocents
Best documentary
Will win Fire of Love
Should win Moonage Daydream
Shoulda been a contender Three Minutes: A Lengthening
Best animated film
Will win Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Should win Marcel the Shell with Shoes on
Shoulda been a contender Apollo 10 1/2
Best original screenplay
Will win Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Should win Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Shoulda been a contender Owen Kline, Funny Pages
Outstanding British debut? … Aftersun. Photograph: Sarah Makharine
Best adapted screenplay
Will win Edward Berger, Ian Stokell, Lesley Paterson, All Quiet on the Western Front
Should win Kazuo Ishiguro, Living
Shoulda been a contender Sjón and Robert Eggers, The Northman
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Best actor
Will win Austin Butler, Elvis
Should win Bill Nighy, Living
Shoulda been a contender Tom Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick
Best actress
Will win Cate Blanchett, Tár
Should win Cate Blanchett, Tár
Shoulda been a contender Tang Wei, Decision to Leave
Best supporting actor
Will win Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Should win Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Shoulda been a contender Mark Rylance, Bones and All
Best supporting actress
Will win Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Should win Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Shoulda been a contender Janelle Monáe, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Best music
Will win Carter Burwell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Should win Carter Burwell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Shoulda been a contender John Williams, The Fabelmans
Best cinematography
Will win Roger Deakins, Empire of Light
Should win Roger Deakins, Empire of Light
Shoulda been a contender Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl
The Baftas ceremony is on Sunday 19 February and will be broadcast on BBC One and iPlayer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/02/lizzo-dancers-lawsuit-harassment-body-shaming | Music | 2023-08-02T20:09:01.000Z | Erum Salam | ‘I was mortified’: former dancers for Lizzo detail alleged harassment | Former dancers for Lizzo are speaking out after they sued the artist for sexual harassment, racial discrimination and fostering a hostile work environment.
Two plaintiffs in the case, Arianna Davis, 24, and Crystal Williams, 26, talked openly in interviews about the suffering they said they endured by Lizzo, whose legal name is Melissa Jefferson.
Lizzo accused of sexual harassment and weight-shaming by former dancers
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Despite the singer’s body-positive rhetoric, Davis alleged she was fat-shamed by Jefferson.
Davis and Williams, both contestants on Jefferson’s Amazon Prime reality TV show, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, were also accused of “drinking on the job”, which they vehemently deny. “Alcohol wasn’t even allowed in our dressing room,” Davis told CBS News in an interview.
In another instance, Davis told CBS she was pressured to go to a club and touch the breasts of a nude performer against her will after Jefferson incited others to chant Davis’s name. The lawsuit says: “The chant grew louder and more strident, demanding a visibly uncomfortable Ms Davis to engage with the performer.”
“I was mortified,” Davis said.
Davis and Williams said they were afraid to speak out earlier because they feared for their jobs. Williams was ultimately fired in a hotel lobby.
“I just couldn’t sit with the fact that this was happening behind the scenes … she’s kind of contradicting everything she stands for,” Williams said.
The suit also names Noelle Rodriguez, another dancer and third plaintiff, as well as additional defendants: production company Big GRRRL Big Touring Inc, and Shirlene Quigley, Jefferson’s dance captain.
Rodriguez claims she was made to conform to Quigley’s dogmatic religious beliefs like being forced to lead a group prayer.
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“While it was not an official requirement for team members to participate in these prayers, it became clear that engagement was compulsory,” the lawsuit states.
Quigley is also accused of making “constant sexually inappropriate comments”.
Jefferson and her team have not yet publicly commented on the allegations. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/30/olivia-pratt-korbel-police-issue-warning-about-battlefield-weaponry-on-streets | UK news | 2023-03-30T14:02:16.000Z | Robyn Vinter | Olivia Pratt-Korbel: police issue warning about ‘battlefield weaponry’ on streets | Police have issued a stark warning about the increasingly deadly weapons circulating on Britain’s streets in the aftermath of the murder of Olivia Pratt-Korbel.
Gangs in Merseyside are using battlefield submachine guns capable of firing 850 rounds a minute to target each other, and it will not be long before such weapons are as common in other areas, officers have warned.
DCS Mark Kameen, the lead investigator on the Olivia Pratt-Korbel case, said Czech-manufactured Skorpion machine pistols were increasingly being used by criminals.
“If you start bringing that sort of battlefield military weaponry into communities and discharging it … You add that to the chaotic nature, lack of training, no moral compass, that’s where you get now the last three times a Skorpion has been used in Merseyside someone’s been killed every single time,” he said. “Is it any wonder when this gun’s firing 12 or 13 rounds in less than a second?”
Merseyside police have seized seven guns since the beginning of the year, including a Skorpion.
Nine-year-old Olivia was not killed by a Skorpion – she was shot with a revolver that was never recovered – but three other people gunned down in Liverpool last year were. Like Olivia, at least two of these were not the intended target of the gunman.
Ashley Dale, a council worker, was killed in the back garden of her home on 21 August, the day before Olivia’s murder, and Elle Edwards was fatally injured when a gunman opened fire outside the Lighthouse pub in Wallasey on Christmas Eve.
Kameen said: “We had people firing at cars driving past, putting bullets through windows or people’s front doors – anyone could be behind. That’s just the madness and complete lack of moral compass these people have we are dealing with.”
Serena Kennedy, the Merseyside police chief constable, agreed, adding: “They have no regard to the impact and the devastating consequences that using a gun on the streets of Merseyside could have. They are not bothered. They are cowards and they have no regard for people.”
She said her force had seized five Skorpion-type machine pistols in the last two years. “Let’s face it, people aren’t going out and being trained on how to use those weapons. So I think we are seeing the impact of those weapons on the streets of Merseyside.”
Kennedy said despite such shocking high-profile shootings, gun crime in the area had fallen substantially and 2021 had the lowest level of firearms discharges in 21 years.
However, some police force areas have recorded huge rises. Last year, a Guardian investigation found two in three police force areas in England and Wales were experiencing rising gun crime, with one force facing levels six times higher than a decade ago.
While firearms offences had fallen 14% on the whole in the past 10 years – helped by a big fall in gun crime in London – 29 out of 43 police forces recorded an increase in gun crime during that time. In eight of these it had more than doubled.
These gang wars are fuelled by recreational drug users, the Merseyside assistant chief constable Chris Green said. Cashman was a cannabis dealer making upwards of £150,000 a year operating in just a few streets in Dovecot. While these drugs often come from overseas, every drug taker in the UK plays a part.
Green said: “There’s a strong message, if those individuals who at the weekend are partying out in clubs or socialising in houses think they’re not doing any harm by having a line of cocaine or doing whatever they want to do … Everyone involved in the chain is responsible.
“That is the reality. If there wasn’t demand there wouldn’t be supply.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/01/readers-recommend-share-your-songs-influenced-by-dub | Music | 2017-06-01T19:00:03.000Z | Guardian music | Readers recommend: share your songs influenced by dub | This week we’re looking at dub – and the music it has influenced over the past 60 years or so.
You have until 11pm on Monday 5 June to post your nomination and make your justification. RR contributor George Boyland (who posts as sonofwebcore in the comments) will select from your recommendations and produce a playlist, to be published on 8 June.
Our guru adds a note on how he will interpret the theme:
All musical genres will be considered as long as the song’s arrangement is demonstrably influenced by dub. So we’re not just looking for Jamaican instrumentals, but songs from anywhere and everywhere that fit the bill.
Here is a list of all songs previously picked and therefore ineligible for the series.
If you want to volunteer to compile a playlist from readers’ suggestions – and potentially blog about the process/selection for the Guardian – please email [email protected] with the subject line “RR guru”, or make yourself known in the comments.
Here’s a reminder of the guidelines for RR:
Tell us why it’s a worthy contender.
Quote lyrics if helpful, but for copyright reasons no more than a third of a song’s words. If sharing links, make sure there is appropriate copyright permission.
Listen to others people’s suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist.
If you have a good theme, or if you’d like to volunteer to compile a playlist from readers’ suggestions, please email [email protected]
There’s a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are “zedded”, at the Marconium. It also tells you the meaning of “zedded” (picked for a previous playlist so ineligible), “donds” and other strange words used by RR regulars.
Many RR regulars also congregate at the ’Spill blog. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/09/fat-white-family-every-one-of-us-had-a-hard-drug-or-drink-problem | Music | 2019-05-09T15:17:39.000Z | John Doran | Fat White Family: 'Every one of us had a hard drug or drink problem' | Sweat drips off the brows of Lias and Nathan Saoudi, the current core of the Fat White Family. Their bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Alex White, groans as he holds his head in his hands. We are crammed into a dingy room that is bare except for wooden furniture and some half-empty bottles. The space is lit by a single low-watt bulb. A fug in the air stings the eyes. And the heroin talk isn’t helping anyone.
“At least we have always tried to maintain a no-spiking policy,” sighs singer Lias, explaining his band’s “line in the sand” stance on intravenous drug use, perspiration rolling into his eyes. “There’s a certain amount of … harm reduction available to you if you only chase.”
“I’d snort it if I had the choice,” says keyboard player Nathan glumly, wiping at his forehead.
But after 20 minutes, the distressing conversation is cut short. The last few grains of sand trickle through the wall-mounted hourglass and we all file out of the roasting hot sauna cubicle. We shower one by one, before jumping into the pool of their local health spa.
“That’s why I’m so glad we’re done with all that,” says Lias, swimming backstroke, as I struggle to keep pace with him. “By the time we went our separate ways two and a half years ago [after the release of their second album Songs for Our Mothers and a headline show at Brixton Academy], every one of us had a serious hard drug or drink problem.”
“Well, the drummer was completely clean,” shouts Nathan from the other end of the pool.
“Oh yeah,” says Lias. “His problem was veganism, wasn’t it?”
I’m in Sheffield to experience a day in the life of the band, which not only includes a sauna and swim in Nether Edge, but Turkish food at the Zeugma restaurant in Highfield. During the pleasant walk from the spa to the restaurant, Lias assures me that everyone’s clean, including guitarist Saul Adamczewski. He’s back in London tonight, as is lone-wolf guitarist Adam Harmer, along with the latest members of their ever-shifting Spinal Tap-esque rhythm section.
When the band formed in a Peckham squat in 2011, Adamczewski and the charismatic and messianic Lias were the creative dynamo at the heart of the project, with significantly younger keyboard player Nathan acting as the social lubricant who enabled them to work together despite their fractious relationship. The south London band rose to notoriety with a scabrous mix of class-war politics, provocation, hard drugs and sensational word-of-mouth pub gigs. Debut album Champagne Holocaust surfaced in 2013, drawing together garage rock, cult American psych and lo-fi country. Amid the Beefheartian murk and the Fall-esque clangor, a pop sensibility began to emerge on singles such as I Am Mark E Smith and Touch the Leather in 2014. But second album Songs for Our Mothers (2016) bludgeoned any anthemic melody back into bloody submission, in favour of caustic noise (disco-influenced single Whitest Boy on the Beach notwithstanding). It seemed that FWF were the Nirvana who revelled in releasing In Utero, but felt that Nevermind was beneath them. They finessed their aesthetic of taking extreme rightwing philosophy and symbolism and then parodying it from a staunchly leftist perspective in order to comment on austerity Britain and dysfunctional relationships. It was a creative strategy that won them more enemies than friends.
Adamczewski, the most mercurial member of the group, has had lengthy absences since the Brixton show due to his problems with crack cocaine and heroin, but was welcomed back into the fold last year to work on Serfs Up!, their new album. “I’m clean now but I have ups and downs like any addict,” he tells me later over the phone. “I realise now that addiction is here to stay, one way or another.”
Adamczewski’s influence has tended to come from his interest in abrasive music and extreme culture in general; Nathan made the band more self-sufficient (he was the driving force behind them setting up their Champzone studio in Sheffield’s Attercliffe district) and pushed them in a more polished, pop direction. Adamczewski is diplomatic about this, to a degree. “I wrote songs to fit on Serfs Up!, so there was something kind of inorganic about that. I didn’t like the way the label and management pushed to make Serfs Up! cleaner and poppier at every given opportunity, but to be fair, I did want to go in that direction myself. Though I do sometimes look at Alex when he’s doing a flute solo and think: how did this happen?”
There appears to be some tension left simmering, not just between Nathan and Adamczewski, but also the different potential paths for the band. Do Fat White Family want to be an ambitious rock band, or freak-flag standard bearers?
Recent live shows suggest that Britain’s unhealthiest band really are getting their act together. Nathan is cagey, but concedes that his time coming off heroin after the Brixton show was “a year of misery”. He admits to almost immediately replacing his heroin habit with a damaging skunk one, all of which contributed to him having a nervous breakdown and being absent for the second half of Serfs Up!’s production.
Fat White Family at End of the Road, 2018. Photograph: Burak Çıngı/Redferns
That said, things began optimistically when they first moved to Sheffield in 2017. South Yorkshire was attractive because it was affordable: for the price of an unfurnished cupboard in London’s zone 2, they could rent an entire house in Sharrow, a nice suburb of Sheffield – and still have enough money left over to build their own studio on an industrial estate in the less-nice Attercliffe. “It was just far enough away from London to keep smack out of proceedings,” reasons Lias. “But not far enough away to stop people from coming up to visit or help out with the record.”
In the beginning, Nathan thrived on the extra responsibility, if Feet, one of the first tracks he helped write, is anything to go by. Musically, it is an Algerian rai-influenced disco track, with a respectful nod to late-period Leonard Cohen. The lyrics paint a torrid, magic realist vision of migration, triggered by Lias reading Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet’s posthumously published account of being embedded with Palestinian fighters in a Jordanian refugee camp in the 1970s. One line in particular stands out: “I hope your children wash up bloated on my shore / Caucasian sashimi in a sand nigger storm.”
Lias is half-Algerian and the band’s lyric writer. He says: “When I was about 12, we moved to Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and [the bigotry] was on another fucking level, man. The people who lived there were vehemently racist. And this is what they called us: sand nigger.”
If the lyric refers to a troublesome memory from the Saoudi childhood, however, it is refracted through a much more recent prism. The band got sucked into a sandstorm of their own in 2017 after Boris Johnson joked at a Conservative party conference event that the Libyan city of Sirte had the potential to become a “new Dubai” – all they needed to do was clean up the dead bodies. Lias satirically tweeted in response: “Only a peppering of sand nigger carcasses to shift and we’ve got ourselves a new Dubai gentlemen! Onwards!!!”
Idles? We should crush them. It’s our job to crush them
“It was pernicious, of course, but it was intended to show exactly what I felt he was driving at in as explicit a manner as possible,” Lias says. “The next day my manager got in touch and said: ‘Yeah, there’s a race row erupted over this. Just don’t respond.’ I looked at [the story on Pitchfork] and thought: ‘I’ll fucking respond all right, man.’”
The almost permanently jocular Lias stops smiling and spits sourly. “To have an organisation like that try and brand me as a racist, having been pilloried, abused and bullied with that phrase my whole life? This absurd PC bullshit … It’s bad enough to be a victim of being called this stuff in the first place, but to have it levelled at me twice? I will use that phrase at my fucking leisure.”
I have seen several people dismiss Fat White Family as white edge-lord student music, but to what extent are they even a white group? Lias explains: “I can’t identify as white because that wasn’t my experience growing up. The implications race had for us were massive and affected everything for my family … [Racist thugs] tried to kick my big brother out of my mother when she lived in Huddersfield, you know? I understand why some people might find this terminology extreme but that kind of abuse was the reality for us and I’m not going to shy away from that as an artist. I’m not white, my dad is from Algeria. I’m British North African.” Nathan nods, laughing: “And I’m tanned Irish.”
While the first two singles on the album (Feet and Tastes Good With the Money) were written between the brothers, the pace of creation was still slow and it took Adamczewski rejoining to see the album get completed. Nathan proselytises about the potential of the band, though, to still get bigger and bigger. He states firmly that their job is like that of travelling preachers, always moving on, heading from town to town, spreading the good word. He is contemptuous of their peers. “Idles? We should crush them. It’s our job to crush them.” But given that the industry has become hollowed out to the extent that there is little middle ground left for bands such as FWF to occupy, how will he know when Serfs Up! has done all it can do?
Nathan considers this for a while before concluding: “I just want to be able to afford to buy a dog with gold teeth.” And with that, Alex and Lias crack up, their laughter powered by nothing stronger than some lamb shish, a few cans of Coke and a bottle or two of beer.
Serfs Up! is out on Domino | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/25/sci-fi-tv-greatest-characters-max-headroom | Culture | 2023-07-25T15:00:41.000Z | Luke Buckmaster | Max Headroom: one of sci-fi TV’s strangest characters deserves a comeback | I’m usually not one to advocate for more remakes, but when it comes to the gloriously strange and prophetic Max Headroom I’ll make an exception. If conducted in the right spirit, a remake of this 80s cyberpunk series – nay, pop culture phenomenon – would feel less like the return of a famous IP than the completion of a prophecy: a step forward into a Max Headroomian world, famously billed as taking place “20 minutes into the future”.
Premiering his career in 1985, Headroom was a real – but fake – TV host (still with me?) who was advertised as “the first computer-generated TV presenter”. Which he wasn’t: technology in the 80s was incapable of producing an actual CGI character, so actor Matt Frewer was hired to play the part, and through a combination of prosthetics and filming techniques was made to look like a glitching and stuttering computer-generated creation.
The original Max Headroom. Photograph: Channel 4
Headroom made his debut in a UK-produced TV origins movie which gave audiences his backstory. Then, after three seasons hosting a talk show and music video program – conducting bizarre interviews with celebrities such as Sting and Michael Caine – an American narrative series was commissioned that remade the UK movie and extended the narrative, retaining Frewer and running for two seasons.
The setup in the US version goes like this: Edison Carter (played by Frewer, and actually the protagonist) is an investigative journalist for high-rating Network 23, who works alongside long-suffering colleagues Theora (Amanda Pays) and his stressed-out producer Murray (Jeffrey Tambor). After Carter obtains incriminating evidence of the network’s involvement in a new form of commercials that cause some viewers’ heads to explode (go with it), he crashes his motorcycle into a sign that reads “MAX HEADROOM 2.3M”, an accident which comatoses him.
The network’s young tech guru (Chris Young) uploads all Carter’s memories into a computer and regenerates him on screen, with the intention of finding out what he knows before the real Carter wakes up. Enter Max Headroom, who pops up on various screens – sometimes to spur on the plot, sometimes for comic relief. The show is a zany dystopian narrative and an ode to old-school journalistic integrity, following Carter’s Fox Mulder-ish desire to unearth the truth (then broadcast it).
A crumbling future world is illustrated using a familiar cyberpunk aesthetic crossed with a more junkyard, Mad Maxian look. In this society, many of our worst fears have come to pass: there’s an (even more) terrible divide between rich and poor and technology is being used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. The way the series explores creepy applications of technology makes it comparable, in today’s terms, to Black Mirror: another show that gazes into a crystal ball and sees all sorts of technological terrors.
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For instance, in War (episode five, season one), a smaller network keeps mysteriously obtaining on-the-scene footage of terrorist attacks well before Network 23. Carter’s investigations lead him to discover that the supposed terrorists are actually TV producers, creating fake footage. In The Blanks (episode six, season one) a key plotline is resolved by Carter’s team creating a deepfake (decades before that word even existed) video of a politician announcing the release of hostages. In Deities (episode two, season two), Carter investigates a new age church that claims it can digitally resurrect people and give them a virtual afterlife (again, decades before real-life initiatives).
Matt Frewer as Edison Carter and Amanda Pays as Theora Jones in Max Headroom. Photograph: ABC
As both a cinephile and a virtual reality enthusiast, I love Dream Thieves (episode four, season two), which begins with Carter conducting a live broadcast in front of a decrepit, broken-down building. This, he explains, is what used to be called a cinema or picture palace. “It must’ve been a weird experience,” he says, “people watching the same screen and the same program.” Inside, the space is now being used for cutting edge VR-esque experiences, viewers donning lightweight headsets and drinking a potion to help them dream while awake. This technology is great, but, oh drat, it sends some people to the great beyond.
The show’s greatest innovation – or pseudo innovation – is of course the wild and weird Monsieur Headroom, an awesomely unreal character who pops up from time to time in events as varied as a real-life TV signal hijacking (in the late 80s) and a cameo in a 2015 Adam Sandler movie. Did I mention that Headroom was once interviewed by David Letterman and became a shill for Coca-Cola, appearing in a commercial directed by Ridley Scott?
Recent advancement of generative AI tools raises endless possibilities for a remake; perhaps Headroom can finally fulfil his destiny as a “real” CG being. Headroom was written as caustic and erratic, but a ChatGPT version could be genuinely unpredictable – delivering off-the-cuff responses crafted in real-time. Producers might be wary of live broadcasts, for good reasons, but that shouldn’t stop the belated comeback of one of sci-fi television’s strangest characters. His story is far from over.
Max Headroom is available on Apple TV and YouTube | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/16/inflation-warning-state-pension-increase | Money | 2012-10-16T12:37:02.000Z | Jill Insley | Inflation warning over 2.5% increase in state pension | Pensioner representatives have warned that people relying on the state pension for the bulk or all of their income could struggle to pay for food and energy in 2013 if the basic state pension rises as expected by just 2.5%, to £110 a week.
The warnings follow publication of the consumer price index (CPI) inflation figure for September, one of the benchmarks in the government's "triple lock" guarantee used to set the annual increase in the basic state pension.
The guarantee, which means the state pension will rise in line with whichever is higher out of prices inflation, earnings or 2.5%, was introduced in 2010. Until now it has been set in line with the rate of CPI as measured every September: state pensions increased by 5.2% last April, the rate of CPI in September 2011.
But last month the rate fell to 2.2%, so the benchmark used will be the 2.5% minimum level of increase, the highest out of the three triple lock benchmarks. The provisional earnings inflation figure released last month was 1.5%, and the revised rate is not expected to exceed the 2.5% triple lock minimum.
The fall in the CPI reflects a sharp decline in gas and electricity price inflation, as increases introduced in September 2012 have now dropped out of the calculation. But Vince Smith-Hughes of the insurer Prudential said pensioners are likely to be hit by a fresh round of rising prices.
Four energy providers, British Gas, NPower, Scottish Power and SSE, have all recently announced increases in the cost of gas and electricity, ranging from 6% to 9.1%.
Food prices are also expected to soar this autumn following a drought in the US and Russia, and cold wet weather in the UK. The United Nations has warned that the price of wheat has already risen 25% in 2012, and maize 13%, while dairy prices rose 7% just last month. It says that food reserves, held to provide a buffer against rising price, are at a critically low level.
Smith-Hughes pointed out that the 2.5% increase would be less than half that received last year, and added: "Pensioners typically spend a higher proportion of their income on fuel and other essentials and this can result in inflation typically costing pensioners around £1,000 a year more than the rest of the population."
Until the introduction of the triple lock, state pensions rose in line with the retail prices index, which has been consistently higher than the CPI and was 2.6% in September. The National Pensioners Convention said the switch from RPI to the triple lock guarantee meant pensioners would miss out on an additional £5.20 a year, but that the effect would be greater for millions of older women who don't qualify for a full state pension.
"Their increase will be just £1.60 a week. In addition, the state second pension and millions of public sector pensions won't even rise by the 2.5% – but by the CPI figure of 2.2%," the organisation said.
Saga has calculated an inflation index based on the spending patterns of older people: this indicates that inflation has risen by 19.9% for those aged 50 to 64 since September 2007, 23.2% for those aged 65 to 74 and by 22.9% for those aged 75 and over. The retail prices index, which is higher than CPI, has risen by 17.4% for the whole population.
Dot Gibson, NPC general secretary, said: "While the difference might not sound very much to government ministers, we know that over 2 million pensioners are living in poverty, 3 million pensioner households are in fuel poverty and millions more are struggling to make ends meet. The change from the RPI to the CPI was a cynical move that almost overnight weakened virtually every single pension scheme in the country and its effect will be far reaching for years to come as people see their incomes fall by around 15% over just ten years."
Most other benefits and tax credits, including unemployment benefit and disability living allowance, will be raised in line with the September CPI rate of 2.2% next April. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jun/23/miss-revolutionary-idol-berserker-review-merciless-japanese-pop-culture-sendup | Stage | 2016-06-23T14:33:10.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker review – merciless Japanese pop-culture sendup | We are often told, “you will never have seen anything like this before”, but it turns out to be true in the case of this frenetic 45 minutes hailing from Japan that arrives in London as part of LIFT festival. It’s like mainlining a mashup of High School Musical, an extreme Japanese TV reality show, a cheesy pop video and an out-take from Les Misérables in the company of a group of hyperactive under-fives who are having a food fight with the volume pumped up to maximum.
There’s a very good reason why you are offered plastic macs and earplugs: buckets of water are sloshed around, glitter confetti is sprayed across the audience, and we are liberally doused in tofu and seaweed. It might look like utter chaos, but it’s not. The large cast of ever-smiling, good-looking young people are tightly drilled in a production by Toco Nikaido that knows exactly what it’s doing as it simultaneously celebrates the aspirations of Japanese pop-idol culture and mercilessly sends up its vacant heart.
With a magpie tendency to alight upon the shiny shards of western culture that have taken over the Japanese brain like knotweed, this short, sharp theatrical shock cleverly tries to make us conform, even as it smilingly reminds that an audience being sold manufactured idols and dreams is an audience who will never rebel. Exhausting, but pretty unforgettable, not least for the faint smell of seaweed that followed me for hours after.
The Pit, London, until 2 July. Box office: 020-7638 8891. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/26/female-writers-directors-film-bfi | Film | 2013-11-26T09:28:00.000Z | Catherine Shoard | Women successful yet sidelined in film writing and directing | Employing women in writing and directing roles makes business sense, yet is still relatively rare, suggests a new study by the BFI. The report, Succes de plume? Female Screenwriters and Directors of UK Films 2010-2012, indicates 30% of the most successful and profitable independent British films of the period had a female screenwriter and/or director.
The disproportion comes from a comparison of the percentage of female directors (11%) and writers (16%) of all UK indies in that period with the equivalent stats for the top 20 films at the box office. Of these, 18% had a female director and 37% a female writer.
Kick-Ass writer Jane Goldman. Photograph: Richard Saker
Key figures boosting the stats include Emma Thompson, who wrote both Arthur Christmas and the Nanny McPhee sequel, and Jane Goldman, who penned the original Kick-Ass. Significant directors included Debbie Isitt (Nativity 2), Lone Scherfig (One Day), and Phyllida Lloyd, who took the reins on The Iron Lady. The screenplay for that film was written by Abi Morgan, who was the sole British winner at the Emmys earlier this year for her script for TV drama The Hour. Morgan, who has previously scripted Shame and the BBC adaptation of Birdsong, has a new play, The Mistress Contract, opening in the spring, as well as her new film, The Invisible Woman, adapted from the non-fiction book about Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin.
The research found that women who had made inroads in the field were more likely to have credits on platforms other than just cinema, and also highlighted the crucial role of key commissioners such as Christine Langan at BBC Films, and Tessa Ross and Katherine Butler at Film4.
Said Maria Miller, culture minister and minister for women and equalities: "The creative industries underpin this country's economic growth and are increasingly front and centre in representing Britain on the world stage. Of course, there is still a long way to go to address under-representation across the sector in general, but with the number of women being employed within the creative industries growing year by year, I know we can look forward to a future for film where the talent of women can shine."
Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as PL Travers in Saving Mr Banks.
Her words were backed by BFI CEO Amanda Nevill, who expressed frustration that "overall the numbers of women in writing and directing roles remains low". At the BFI London film festival in October, festival director Clare Stewart introduced a keynote speech from producer Alison Owen, who focused not on gender inequality but the fallacy of a battle for audiences posed by the internet. Owen's latest film, Saving Mr Banks, opens this Friday in the UK and has been praised for the central role it gives to a middle-aged woman (PL Travers, played by Emma Thompson). The Oscar-hopeful was scripted by the Brit Kelly Marcel, who has also adapted the EL James book Fifty Shades of Grey for Sam Taylor-Johnson's film version. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/feb/25/arinze-kene-gods-property | Stage | 2013-02-25T18:59:00.000Z | Maddy Costa | Arinze Kene: 'At home, I'm Nigerian. I go out and I'm a British kid' | When Arinze Kene began writing plays in his teens, he started working his way through bookshelves of British drama. What he encountered was a thrilling document of the 20th century, but he also noticed an absence – "gaping holes when it comes to black culture and black history".
He was then working as an actor; EastEnders fans will remember him as Connor, the gang member who had an affair with an older woman, Carol Jackson, in 2010. But he quickly became frustrated with the one-dimensional characters that came his way. "I found that if I was young and black, I was going to have to be bad, dealing or whatever," Kene says. So he set about creating alternatives.
His new play God's Property is set in Deptford, south London, in 1982, and tells the story of two brothers born to an Irish mother and Nigerian father, struggling to assimilate with the white community around them. Kene, who was born in Lagos in 1987 (his parents emigrated in 1991), says he chose the period because "there was a lot of racial tension, which peaked with the riots in 1981 and '85. It's almost as if Britain was going through growing pains." What's striking about the play is how familiar it still feels: although people no longer describe themselves as "half-caste" and the skinhead uniform worn by one of the brothers has dated, the strained social atmosphere, the sense of inequality and confused personal identity have echoes today.
Not that Kene drew any deliberate parallels; if anything, he made a conscious effort to avoid them. "Earlier drafts had almost aspirational bits," he says, "where characters spoke about what they can hope for in the future. But I took them out because they felt like spoon-feeding the audience. I talked to a lot of people about what it was like then, and things haven't changed that much, and I'm not sure if they ever will."
That makes him sound pessimistic, though; sitting in the bar of Soho theatre in London, the 25-year-old talks enthusiastically of wanting to create new narratives for black people. "A lot of writers like myself – young, from London – write ourselves into a corner. We write what is expected of us, and often what's expected is knife-crime stories." There's a reason for this, he admits: "I can speak from experience and say that it's easier to be listened to, to get your work on stage, if you depict the same old shit." Meanwhile, he argues, large realms of black experience are being ignored.
He points to his own family: they have lived in east London since his parents emigrated from Nigeria, yet none of his siblings has ever been involved in violent crime; two of them are graduates, and his brother is a photographer. "What about those stories?" he asks. "They're just as interesting." But he admits that he grew up surrounded by "bad influences", and came close to trouble himself: if he is a successful writer and actor now, it is partly down to the luck of never having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His parents were bent on academic success for their children, but at 18 Kene argued his way into a gap year from studying science. His first play, Estate Rules, took more than two years to write and was largely autobiographical. "The lead character has one foot in the world of violence and the other foot in wanting to make it." He didn't grow up on an estate himself, but as a teenager his bedroom window looked out on to the estate where his friends lived – an experience that is typical, he says, of his mixed-up youth.
Like many first-generation Londoners, he experienced a divided sense of nationality. "At home, I'm very Nigerian. You'll hear Nigerian music, my parents speak in Igbo, my mum's got her wrap on and cooks Nigerian food. Then I leave the house and I'm Arinze, the British kid." It's a division that is embedded in his plays: the dialogue is very London, but the storytelling, he explains, is more influenced by the structure of African folk stories, particularly the way a narrative isn't resolved but remains open-ended.
He is also much inspired by the writing of Langston Hughes, a key figure in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. "You can tell he loves black people. He understands that there is a lot out there saying you shouldn't like yourself – and he writes because he wants us to love ourselves." The same love pulsed through Kene's second play, Little Baby Jesus, which depicted the loss of innocence of a group of black teenagers, and it's there again in God's Property. "Yes, I'm writing about inner-city characters, but I'm celebrating those characters," he says. His mission is to encourage other young black writers to do the same. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/04/tony-bellew-cause-havoc-david-haye-rematch | Sport | 2018-05-04T21:29:33.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | Tony Bellew says David Haye will ‘pay for every word’ in grudge rematch | The conversation with Tony Bellew was idling towards an emotional conclusion as he reflected on what mattered to him in life: family, home, friends, Everton Football Club. And then the fighter detailed in a chilling blast of invective what he was going to do to David Haye at the O2 Arena in London on Saturday night.
“I want to cause havoc,” he said, eyes on fire. “I want to cause mayhem – and I mean the worst mayhem you can see. Something happens to me [in the ring]. I’m gonna flick a switch. I want to do damage. I swear when I get him on Saturday, he’s going to pay for every word. I’m going to smash him. And I’m not going to stop. He’s finished. He has no idea what’s coming.
“I know what I’m capable of. I’m a horrible fucker when I’ve got boxing gloves on. I’ve let sparring partners off the [hook] so many times in this camp. I’ve wobbled them, rocked them. Without being big-headed I could have rendered every single sparring partner unconscious if I chose to. I’ve been that sharp and that vicious. I’m telling you now, Saturday I will knock the shit out of this fella. I will take him out and it’s going to be horrible. That’s not nice. I just wish this fucking anger and rage would go, but it won’t.”
David Haye has one last chance to win back fans against Tony Bellew
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It was a tirade only a fighter could properly defend, or understand – and it sounded so much like Haye in his pomp.
Moments earlier, Bellew had spoken with quiet sorrow about the death of his brother-in-law, Ashley, who fell to his death from a balcony on a family holiday in Cancun last August.
“What my family’s been through I can’t even put into words. We’re very close. It’s really, really hard. It’s in my thoughts, when I’m sitting here. I think about Ashley’s mum and dad. I really do.”
He spoke, too, about how his 12-year-old son was being ragged at school before the first fight, taunted that his father was going to be knocked out.
“Our Corey likes to think he can have a fight, the fact is he couldn’t fight sleep. He’s a lovely looking boy. Looks just like his mother, a handsome kid. I wouldn’t be fighting if I had his looks when I was a kid.”
Friday’s weigh-in passed without incident, although they managed a few ritual verbals. Away from the microphone, Haye whispered to Bellew: “I’m going to take my time with you. I’m going to chop you down. It’s going to be slow and painful. I’m going to make sure you suffer.”
Haye looked his body-beautiful self at 15st 10lb, a stone lighter than 14 months ago. Bellew weighed just over 15st, three pounds lighter than in March 2017.
Bellew knocks down Haye
during last year’s fight. Photograph: Andrew Couldridge/Reuters
The numbers that will count will be heavy blows landed, and Haye reckons his new Cuban coach, Ismael Salas, has fixed a long-standing fault in his footwork that will enable him to get more leverage on his already awesome punches.
“I fought like a lunatic in the first fight. All the shots I was missing are going to be landing. Ismael has rewired my legs,” Haye said. “In the first fight – and even in the two previous fights – my legs weren’t connected. He’s noticed that. This is the best I’ve felt in 10 years. A lot of operations, a lot of punches in that time. But it feels right – and it will feel very wrong for Tony.”
While Bellew has raged this time, Haye has gone for an almost super-soft approach. He has praised his conqueror repeatedly, only to be rebuffed. Bellew, a master of intransigence, picks at his ego, agreeing with nothing, arguing over nothing too.
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“In all honesty he’s a proper gobshite,” Bellew says. “I think he’s a tit. He’s got a mask on. He’s doing really well hiding his feelings and emotions. Why is he having to answer to me, a little fat Scouser? It shows how far back he’s gone. It infuriates him that I’ve got any kind of demands at all over him.
“He knows he can’t say all the things he said last time because the media won’t absorb it. I’m not here for the media. I’m not here for the public. I’m here because this is my job. I just tell the truth. Some people don’t like it. Some people do. I’m just telling you exactly how I feel.”
Bellew is scornful too that Haye is still fighting six years after he said he would be out of the business at 31.
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“Why can’t he just be honest and say: ‘Listen, I’ve earned £20m, I’ve pissed it up the wall, I’ve gone through a few things and I need to get more money.’ Just be humble and say it. I wouldn’t be fighting. My legacy is secure. I don’t give a shit if everyone remembers me or not. That’s what these fights are about. Money. Don’t get me wrong: I want to win, and I’ll do whatever it takes. But I know what I’m saying: he’s back for money.”
Haye’s response was quick and quiet. “People have been saying that for years.” For the only time in his career, Haye has been out-talked this week. As Salas says: “Actions speak louder than words.” And there will be more of the former on Saturday night, with the latter reserved to announce the winner. I expect that to be Haye, pushed near to the limit over 12 rounds, and maybe persuaded that, finally, he has survived long enough in this business. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/07/boris-johnson-warmly-authentic-devious-and-corrupt | Opinion | 2022-07-07T12:58:55.000Z | Simon Jenkins | The public saw Boris Johnson as warmly authentic, then devious and corrupt | Simon Jenkins | Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. It was chaotic. Boris Johnson’s last hours in office were palpably staged, not to ease his party’s torrid history or respect the dignity of his office. They were fashioned as the opening chapter of his memoirs: “How the bastards tried to oust me.” It has been Boris in full flow, two fingers to his colleagues, rhubarb to parliament and to politics in general, bombastic towards his critics to the last on the steps of Downing Street: “When the herd moves, it moves.” It has all been a cynical game, a singing, dancing music-hall turn.
Despite Johnson’s declared intention to continue until a successor is chosen, it is hard to see how that is possible given the manner of his departure. Many of the senior officers of state have resigned, been sacked or indicated no faith in him. Some departments such as housing and education are scrambling after a disconcerting period of having no ministers at all. Government is a team effort and requires order and leadership. It has disintegrated. Today it was clear Johnson simply cannot continue any longer and should be replaced by a stand-in deputy.
Downing Street has seen no shortage of egotists, from Disraeli and Lloyd George to Churchill and Eden. But behind the mirrors have been executive prime ministers of substance. Behind Johnson’s mirrors are more mirrors. Each act in his political career has seen an ideological emptiness filled with self-promotion. The abuse of power has been total, from favours for lovers to contracts for friends. He has abused everything from the honours system to international law. Even his erstwhile profession, journalism, has almost universally called for him to go.
The case for the defence should be heard. Johnson’s public persona has been undeniably likable to some. As mayor of London and then as Tory leader, he converted charisma into electoral gain, from working-class and former Labour voters as few Tories have done. He did so not through policy but despite a privileged background by appearing as a regular if unserious individual, a so-called “authentic” whose presence made those around him smile. He lightened an often wooden political mood, turned sour by a (by then) grumpy and habitually divisive Ken Livingstone. He turned sunny politics into a potent weapon; no mean feat. Charm is a quality whose potency is much underrated in British politics.
As such, Johnson in 2019 rescued his party from the doldrums into which a succession of mediocre leaders had driven it, propped up by Labour’s inability to fashion a remotely plausible claim to power. He had been an acceptable London mayor and as leader was able to convert a modest 300,000 advance on Theresa May’s Tory vote into a Commons majority of 80, much of it in “red wall” territory. A seismic political shift beckoned, casting the Tories as a party of poor northerners against Labour of the graduate southerners. On that shift, only time will tell.
History will find it hard to disentangle the Johnson era – or rather episode – from the exceptional circumstances in which it occurred. An upheaval in the nation’s trading economy, a global pandemic, a war in eastern Europe and an inflationary crisis would have tested any nation’s leadership. Though flustered and indecisive, what we know of Johnson’s pandemic does not seem appreciably worse than that elsewhere in Europe and was later rescued by the enterprise of Britain’s vaccine scientists. Johnson’s hijacking of Ukraine’s defiance of Moscow was outrageous if understandable, and the war was hardly his fault, any more than was the savage backlash from sanctions. As for the soaring cost of living, he has seemed no more or less at sea than the bankers, pundits and his own chancellor.
The reality is that Johnson’s failings were personal rather than political. He could never handle rivals near him, and his dismissal of May’s abler ministers deprived him, and the UK, of experience and ability in favour of second-rate acolytes. As for the depiction of Downing Street that emerged from Partygate, it was of a bunch of squatters taking over a national treasure. It genuinely shocked the country.
The historian Anthony Seldon has argued that the premiership is the “lived experience” of a particular individual. That experience must respect Westminster or the chemistry will simply reject it. Johnson has been instinctively presidential in style, with daily photo opportunities and cabinet meetings broadcast on television. His apparent contempt for parliament, his absurd peerages, his casual treatment of sexual misbehaviour, his simple inability to be open with the truth, all defied his celebrated “authenticity”. They made him seem devious and corrupt.
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Just as no one should underrate the qualities that brought Johnson to prominence, so no one should underrate those that have brought his downfall. It is easy to talk down the current generation of British politicians but they have lived and worked through a uniquely difficult decade, with uncertain leadership on both sides of the House of Commons. It is perhaps the price paid by constitutional monarchies, though the US is passing through an agony of presidential course correction.
Britain’s political leadership is once again in doubt, in the case of Labour through the inexcusable delay in a Durham police investigation of Keir Starmer. But the parliamentary system has delivered as it should. While voters may be sovereign every five years, the majority party’s duty is to interpret the voters’ choice. That includes its own judgment of who should run the country. The trial has been messy but the sullen ranks of jurors on the Tory benches on Wednesday said it all. Johnson’s herd did move. The Conservative party’s verdict has been emphatic and its sentence swift. But its record of five leaders in 20 years is not good. The country awaits the next with trepidation.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/29/the-miracle-cure-for-lifes-problems-more-of-what-youre-already-doing | Life and style | 2020-05-29T14:00:16.000Z | Oliver Burkeman | The miracle cure for life's problems? More of what you're already doing | Oliver Burkeman | “W
hat brings you here?” is the question, according to cliche, with which therapists always begin a first session with a client (or did, anyway, until sessions all moved on to Zoom). But in the 1970s, a therapist based in Milwaukee, Steve de Shazer, began to experiment with another approach. Instead of the standard question – which is pretty much destined to get clients detailing their problems – he started asking what not having problems would look like. Over time, one version of this inquiry became codified as the Miracle Question, which runs as follows: “Suppose that one night, while you were asleep, there was a miracle, and this problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different?”
To be honest, this sort of thing raises my hackles. It smacks of magical thinking, and positive visualisation, and somehow catapulting yourself out of the real circumstances of your life (including your rung on the economic ladder) into a realm of unalloyed bliss. But that wasn’t what happened. More often than not, Shazer’s clients came up with strikingly modest visions. In their imagined miracle worlds, one client might wake up and realise she looked forward to the day, instead of dreading it. Another would find that when she talked to her children, they responded; another might find herself standing up to a workplace bully.
Perhaps part of the reason was the shift in viewpoint caused by looking for signs of change, rather than ways to change. This jolts you out of a first-person perspective into a third-person one – from where it’s also often easier to identify practical next steps you might take.
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Even more intriguingly, Shazer, and his wife, Insoo Kim Berg, with whom he went on to found “solution-focused brief therapy”, realised not only that their clients knew what a solution would look like, but that it was often already happening, if only occasionally. A parent who felt they couldn’t cope any more manifestly was coping, some of the time. The couple who fought all the time could remember a pleasant shared evening three months ago. The agoraphobe who never left the house except to buy milk was evidently doing something right: she managed to buy milk, after all. Even when serious depression made life feel joyless, moments of joy could usually be called to mind. (As the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa liked to say: “Everyone loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”)
Or, to quote one team of solution-focused therapists, we humans are so imperfect that “we cannot even do our problems perfectly: however chronic, serious, debilitating or complex they are, there are always times when they are less debilitating”. In other words: you must know what to do, because you’re already doing it. So do more of that!
This is an especially useful thought in times like these, given that anyone reading this is likelier than usual to have some problems – and to feel that they are wholly at the mercy of vast natural or economic forces that dwarf their inner resources. Left-of-centre types are more prone to this, I suspect, as we rail at the notion that pull-your-socks-up personal responsibility is a panacea. It isn’t. But the Miracle Question is a reminder that there are, nonetheless, things you could do to make life better. In fact, you’re almost certainly already doing them.
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The therapist Linda Metcalf explains how to discover the problem-solving strategies you already know, but don’t know you know, in her book The Miracle Question. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/24/energy-support-uk-government-spending-interest-payments | Business | 2023-01-24T07:54:02.000Z | Larry Elliott | Energy support sends UK government borrowing to December record | Government payments to soften the impact of rocketing energy bills helped send UK public borrowing soaring to more than £27bn last month – the highest figure for December since modern records began 30 years ago.
The latest bulletin on the health of the UK’s finances from the Office for National Statistics showed government spending last month exceeded receipts by £27.4bn.
The December 2022 figure was up on the £16.7bn borrowed in December 2021 and higher than the £24bn recorded in December 2020, when four million workers were on the government’s wage-subsidy furlough scheme.
Jeremy Hunt dropped a strong hint in his response to the ONS data that there would be no scope for a generous giveaway when he gives his first budget in March.
The chancellor of the exchequer said: “Right now we are helping millions of families with the cost of living, but we must also ensure that our level of debt is fair for future generations.
“We have already taken some tough decisions to get debt falling, and it is vital that we stick to this plan so we can halve inflation this year and get growth going again – creating better-paid jobs across the country.”
Tax receipts in December were up slightly on December 2021 at more than £74bn, but energy support schemes for households and businesses added just over £9bn to public spending, according to the official data.
The CBI is right. The UK needs a growth plan
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Higher interest payments of £17.3bn on the UK’s £2tn-plus national debt also contributed to a higher than expected borrowing total, the ONS added. Some of the bonds – or gilts – sold by the government to finance its spending have interest payments linked to inflation as measured by the retail prices index, which has been rising since the middle of 2021 and hit a peak of 14.2% last October.
The ONS said debt interest payments were double the figure for the same month a year earlier and the second-highest monthly figure on record, beaten only by the £20bn figure for June 2022.
The December shortfall meant that in the first nine months of the 2022-23 financial year, public borrowing stood at £128.1bn – £5bn higher than in the same period of 2021-22, but £2.7bn less than forecast by the government’s independent watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility.
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The OBR said that it had revised down its previous estimates of borrowing for the current financial year by £4.6bn following upward revisions to receipts, particularly the corporation tax paid on profits.
In November, at the time of the Treasury’s autumn statement, the OBR said it anticipated government borrowing of £177bn for the full 2022-23 financial year – almost £49bn up on the previous year.
The amount the government borrows adds to the national debt, which rose by 0.2 percentage points to 99.5% of the economy’s annual output (gross domestic product) over the year to December.
Ruth Gregory, a UK analyst at Capital Economics, said it was the third month in a row borrowing had been higher than the same month a year earlier. “December’s public finances figures provided more evidence that the government’s fiscal position is deteriorating fast,” Gregory said.
“Overall, today’s worse-than-expected public finances figures will only embolden the chancellor in the budget on 15 March to keep a tight grip on the public finances and mean that he waits until closer to the next general election, perhaps in 2024, before announcing any significant tax cuts.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/28/hijack-review-idris-elba-makes-this-beautifully-daft-plane-thriller-soar | Television & radio | 2023-06-28T05:00:55.000Z | Lucy Mangan | Hijack review – Idris Elba makes this beautifully daft plane thriller soar | Apple TV+’s latest offering is Idris Elba on a Plane. He plays ordinary guy Sam Nelson – known for his business negotiating skills back on Earth – who finds himself trapped on a hijacked flight and forced into the role of reluctant hero. So it’s Idris Elba in Die Hard, too. And the seven-hour journey plays out in almost real time, so he is also Kiefer Sutherland in 24. Or rather it’s Idris Elba in 7, but the actual title of this brilliantly executed, suspenseful, daft and wholly convincing ride is Hijack. It doesn’t even have an exclamation mark.
I don’t know what the marketing people were thinking, but the casting folk played a blinder. Only Elba could carry this perfect piece of summer insanity off. Even then, it requires every ounce of his physically and metaphorically massive presence to do so.
To believe in the premise of Hijack for even one moment, you see, requires you to believe several difficult things. One: that there exists a man so potently charismatic he can persuade anyone – arrogant posh boy playing video games too loud, frantic passengers, jittery and bloodied hijackers, desperate people locking themselves in various unhelpful places – to listen to him and his reasonable proposals for turning down the video games, taking a deep breath, unlocking the door and generally trying to find a way to de-hijack the plane and not kill any of the 200-odd people on board.
Two: that there is a man so keenly alert and intelligent that he can deduce that a violent takeover is brewing from the presence of an unnaturally furrowed brow three rows down, and an aberrant washbag.
Three: that he could then keep his head sufficiently to orchestrate various plays, offences, measures and countermeasures up and down a plane among a disparate group of panicking passengers as the aisles are patrolled by an increasingly strung-out set of plane-nobblers.
(I cannot keep reusing the word “hijackers”, you see, and “terrorist” has a specific meaning with which this politics-free slice of bonkers fun does not want to pollute itself.)
But of course, Elba is – innately, majestically, irreducibly – all these things. And upon this rock, seven hours of preposterousness can safely be built. Which is not to say the creators have not taken their responsibilities seriously. It marshals its secondary characters with aplomb. The priest, the red herring (or is it two? Or three?), the stressed family of four either suffering marital difficulties or just having two children on a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London, the kind young single lady, the vulnerable schoolgirls, the stewardess having an affair with the captain (Ben Miles) are all given just enough personality to stop them becoming ciphers, but not enough to get in the way of the action. We care, but we are not asked to invest in any cumbersome way.
Hijack unfolds perfectly. Suspense builds, is released, builds again, a little more tension, a little longer wait until the elastic snaps back each time. Just when everything is at the point of being absolutely too much and you’re at the point of switching off and going out for a walk to recover, it will cut to a domestic scene involving the boring family to which Sam is inexplicably wanting to get back safely. Or if it just wants to keep the motor purring, a scene with the increasingly concerned people on the ground – including Alice (Eve Myles), the air traffic controller who first notices something’s amiss, counter-terrorism officer Zahra (Archie Panjabi) and eventually various government ministers trying to decide whether to shoot the plane down over water or let it crash into buildings.
Not a moment, not a drinks carton, not an in-flight entertainment system is wasted. Narrative seeds are sown, allowed to ripen and harvested at just the right moment. It works like clockwork without the (plentiful) larger twists being predictable. The only duff note is the brutal outbreak of violence from Captain Robin in the first episode, which stands out both for its moral and physical nastiness, and for the fact that nothing else in the remaining six-and-a-half hours suggests he is that type of man. Like everything else in Hijack, it serves to further the plot, but unlike everything else in Hijack, it comes at the cost of taking you out of the moment. And that is something you cannot afford to do too often when you are asking an audience to buy into Hijack’s level of absurdity for the duration.
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After that, the journey is seamless. All turbulence is intended and the landing – for I binged all seven episodes in one sitting, and I bet you will too – impeccable. Perfect nonsense, to be enjoyed wholeheartedly – though probably, for anxious passengers, on terra firma.
Hijack is on Apple TV+. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/25/when-good-tv-goes-bad-ally-mcbeal | Television & radio | 2017-09-25T12:00:13.000Z | Julia Raeside | When good TV goes bad: how Ally McBeal lost its lust for life | Calista Flockhart bounced on to our screens in 1997, wearing oversized pyjamas, mouth permanently pouted in a kiss or ooh-ing along to her favourite tune, as David E Kelley’s pint-sized lawyer Ally McBeal. She opened doors with her bottom while carrying too many packages, was frequently caught out talking and/or dancing to herself when she thought no one was looking, and her reaction to finding someone attractive was usually to fall over.
She sounds annoying, but to millions of women in their 20s, she was the diminutive embodiment of our inner angst: about how to be a grown up when we felt like children; how to function single when every indication from the universe told us to couple up. Time magazine tagged her as one of the death knells of feminism, which seems harsh. But she sure was hung up on those boys. Well, one in particular.
Happy birthday to Ally McBeal: a show well ahead of its time
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McBeal was a legal eagle at Boston firm Cage & Fish and the cast was jammed with comic talent – the show launched the careers of Jane Krakowski, Lucy Liu and Portia de Rossi to name but three. Plus Greg Germann as Richard Fish and Peter MacNicol as John Cage formed my favourite, quip-trading TV double act of the decade.
They all got to shine, but it was the neurotic McBeal – who could barely keep her mind on the job, so busy was she swinging from the cubicles in the same-sex bathrooms and dancing away her cares about fertility – who really owned this show. In Ally’s universe, weird things happened. Hallucinations, dance routines, dream sequences, everything was possible. No 90s veteran will ever erase from their minds the image of that ghostly dancing baby who used to visit Ally’s apartment late at night, heralded by strange tribal chanting before throwing some sassy moves on her carpet and disappearing again. Yes, Ally McBeal was weird and that’s why we loved it. A show willing to portray humans as pleasingly flawed and prone to bad decisions, but somehow celebrating that, rather than passing judgment.
Then, midway through season three, the love of Ally’s life, Billy Thomas, dropped dead of a brain tumour while declaring his lifelong adoration for everyone’s favourite kooky twiglet in the middle of a court hearing, even though he’d gone on to marry someone else. Game over. The grief didn’t sit well, apart from allowing Billy to pop back and haunt Ally now and again.
Kelley tried repeatedly to reintroduce romantic tension into her life, first with Robert Downey Jr as Larry Paul. Although he was charming and cute and every bit as quirky as the legal pixie, he committed the unforgivable sin of recruiting Sting to sing Every Breath You Take to her during one of her many visits to the piano bar near work where such things were commonplace.
Larry was written out of the show shortly thereafter, but because of Downey Jr’s substance difficulties rather than crimes against music. In the last gasps, Jon Bon Jovi with a haircut was wheeled out to bedazzle Ally with his soulful sincerity, but no one’s heart was really in it by then and he didn’t even make it to season’s end. The show fizzled after five seasons when it should have kablooey-ed loudly and proudly after three. It’s always a shame when the party goes on too long. You’re drunk, McBeal. Go home. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/28/edinburgh-councils-leader-calls-for-tourist-tax-to-fund-citys-festivals | UK news | 2023-12-28T14:45:37.000Z | Severin Carrell | Edinburgh council’s leader calls for tourist tax to fund city’s festivals | Edinburgh’s council leader has called for a new visitor levy to be introduced urgently to help the city fund its festivals, including this weekend’s loss-making Hogmanay street parties.
Cammy Day, leader of Edinburgh’s Labour administration, said the proposed visitor levy could help the city raise about £25m in extra funding for services and to subsidise tourism infrastructure.
The Scottish parliament is studying plans to empower councils to introduce the UK’s first transient visitor levy, a daily surcharge put on hotel and guesthouse beds very similar to tourism taxes in other European cities.
Successive council leaders in Edinburgh have been the most vociferous campaigners for the new powers, arguing that a levy would help the city cope with the 4 million tourists who now visit each year.
The council has faced fresh pressure from the organisers of this weekend’s four-day Hogmanay festival – who predict they will lose £500,000 staging it – to increase its subsidies. All its events on New Year’s Day are free.
The levy had been resisted by the city’s hoteliers, who argued it would put off tourists at a time of rapidly rising costs. Its supporters counter that the hotel groups which dominate the sector make significant profits in Edinburgh; the city has very high bed-occupancy rates and seasonal prices.
Day said he welcomed recent calls from a cross-party committee of MSPs for ministers to rethink their original proposals for an 18-month delay between a city setting up a levy and it coming into force in 2026.
But he was disappointed that the committee, in a report published just before Christmas, had not made a final decision on whether the levy should be a flat-rate or a percentage tax on beds per night.
Day said he preferred a percentage rate of perhaps 3-4%. A flat rate levy would be regressive since it meant someone staying in a luxury hotel would pay the same rate as someone in a low-cost hostel.
He admitted there were also significant demands for the levy to be spent on other public services. Most residents do not benefit from the festivals economy but experience much higher accommodation costs because tourism greatly distorts the property market.
Day said the proposed legislation, expected to be passed by Holyrood in 2024, stipulated that any levy had to help support tourism infrastructure. But it could also be spent on improving parks or streets that would be used for festivals.
“I say the whole city should benefit. The tax for me is to grow and promote responsible tourism but also to benefit the city,” he said. “There’s a lobby of people who think the 18-month time period is way too excessive: we’re ready to go now.”
The festival, now in its 30th year and famous for its midnight fireworks display and open air concert on New Year’s Eve, to be headlined this year by Pulp, has previously been sponsored by brands such as Johnnie Walker whisky.
Bill Burdett-Coutts, one of its organisers, said the Covid crisis and general economic situation had meant commercial sponsors were hard to find, while the event’s costs had grown by 20-25%, making the need for public sector support even more pressing, he said.
“We know the council is cash-strapped, so I understand their position completely,” he added. “I certainly think a tourist tax is a good idea, and if used wisely would be a good thing.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/02/csiro-has-become-extravagant-consulting-company-one-of-its-former-top-climate-scientist-says | Australia news | 2022-05-01T17:30:32.000Z | Adam Morton | CSIRO has become ‘extravagant consulting company’, one of its former top climate scientists says | A leading Australian climate scientist says the national science agency, CSIRO, has been turned into a “very extravagant consulting company” under the Coalition, with its scientists barred from speaking publicly about government policy.
The warning from Prof David Karoly follows his retirement from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in February after more than 40 years as one of the most respected voices in climate science.
Karoly, who worked on four of the six major assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, returned to CSIRO in 2018. He agreed to head its Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub in the wake of the chief executive, Larry Marshall, making deep cuts to the organisation’s climate science capacity on the grounds the problem was “proven”. That push was partially reversed after public and political pressure, with Marshall later acknowledging it had been a mistake. Karoly signed on to help build a new program.
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In an interview with Guardian Australia, Karoly says he knew the job would be challenging, and some people “questioned my sanity” for taking it on. He says he found budget cuts and changes in management had transformed CSIRO from a body focused on public good science into one reliant on external contracts to survive.
While he is proud he helped secure an effective 50% funding increase to be spent on a new climate systems hub, he says the cuts had been “stupid” and had a lasting impact. He says staff in CSIRO’s oceans and atmosphere unit were last year told 70% of CSIRO funding now had to come from external earnings – contracts with industry and government agencies – rather than core funding for a project to be approved. Historically, there had been about 30% external funding.
Karoly argues it has fundamentally changed an organisation that was once known for its international-standard “public good” science. Famously, CSIRO radio astronomers accidentally invented what became wi-fi while doing unrelated public good research. Karoly says that sort of work is now less likely.
“CSIRO’s approach is now to make money,” he says. “It’s essentially a very extravagant consulting company, and unless it has large enough external earnings science doesn’t go ahead. It means public good science has disappeared from CSIRO unless someone else is willing to pay for it.”
He says focus on “customer-driven science” is not limited to the federal Coalition, but it had accelerated the shift. “It’s not just a Liberal National party government perspective, it’s also a Labor party perspective: that the users should drive the science to answer the questions that are important for them,” he says.
Australian scientists say logging, mining and climate advice is being suppressed
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Karoly says scientists at CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are routinely blocked from speaking publicly and have their work suppressed if it could be interpreted as at odds with government policy. As one of CSIRO’s top climate scientists, Karoly was allowed to talk about global greenhouse gas emissions and the urgent need to reduce them, but not allowed to talk about Australia’s approach to the issue or performance in cutting emissions.
“We were not allowed to talk about Australian government policy on anything, whether it was Australian government policy on Covid, or Australian government policy on seasonal climate forecasts, or Australian government policy on emissions,” he says.
He says the suppression had “certainly got worse in the last decade” under the Coalition. “Part of that has been to do with CSIRO’s nervousness about funding. I think that explains why the CSIRO chief executive did not want to focus on climate change, and was willing at that point to say ‘we know enough about climate change science and we can reduce staff numbers by 50%’,” he says.
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Karoly was not always deemed to have stayed within CSIRO guidelines on what he could publicly say. In late 2020, a peer-reviewed scientific paper documented claims by Australian scientists that their evidence and advice on the impact of logging, forest destruction and mining had been suppressed in a variety of ways.
Karoly posted a comment in response to a piece on the issue published by The Conversation, thanking the authors for “shining a spotlight on the key issue” and pointing out commenting on science issues was restricted for public service employees. “This is not news for climate scientists, particularly those in the Bureau of Meteorology and in CSIRO, and has a long and interesting history,” he wrote.
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He says within 24 hours he had a phone call from his manager at CSIRO relaying a message from the organisation’s executive that he had breached the organisation’s public comment policy by commenting on something he didn’t have expertise in.
“It was a classical catch-22. They suppressed my commenting on a paper that said there was suppression of science,” Karoly says. “I think it was absolutely stupid but, yes, what CSIRO was trying to do was to suppress science. It makes no sense that we have some of the country’s best climate scientists in the Bureau of Meteorology and in the CSIRO and they can’t talk openly about the links between science and public policy.”
A CSIRO spokesperson says scientists are “actively encouraged” to communicate their scientific work to government, industry and the community, but to remain a trusted independent and bipartisan advisor to government the organisation needs to remain impartial.
“We therefore ask that our people do not advocate, defend or publicly canvass the merits of government or opposition policies,” the spokeperson says.
On funding, the spokesperson says the CSIRO has “a variety of funding arrangements in place, depending on the nature of the research”, that each year about 35-40% of the money invested in research came from external revenue sources and that ratio had been consistent “for many years”. They did not respond directly to Karoly saying the oceans and atmosphere unit had been told that would be lifted to 70%.
Some of CSIRO’s external funding comes from fossil fuel companies. The organisation says on its website it is “developing more efficient and sustainable fossil fuel technologies and helping industry to safely access and extract Australia’s rich resources, including oil, gas and coal”.
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Karoly says he could have continued his connection with CSIRO as a post-retirement fellow but chose to cut ties so he could speak freely. His return to commenting on government policy began last month.
In the foreword of a Climate Council report on the Coalition’s failure to deal with the climate crisis, Karoly drew a sharp contrast between the major parties. He wrote that a decade ago under a minority Labor government the country had clear plans to deal with the climate crisis, including an emissions trading scheme, and was joining with others in the global community in recognising that much stronger action was needed to “avoid the unmanageable and to manage the unavoidable”. He was appointed as an inaugural member of the Climate Change Authority, which was created to advise government on policy, during this time.
He said the Coalition had abolished the carbon pricing scheme despite evidence it was working, ignored advice on climate targets, closed a 27-year-old climate science program, cut funding for research and appointed its supporters to climate advisory roles.
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“The Liberal National government, throughout its time in office, has been making choices that make global warming worse. And that has been to the great detriment of our country,” he wrote.
Karoly’s career was honoured at a retirement symposium as he left CSIRO. Former colleagues praised not only his contribution to scientific knowledge, but his support for early-career scientists, particularly women, and desire to push boundaries to improve science communication. Freed from CSIRO, he says he now sees building public understanding as the most vital part of his work.
“I would describe it as building climate literacy or climate understanding,” he says. “Maybe that is advocacy, but it’s not just speaking publicly it’s also working in the business sector and with local government and across a whole range of community groups and organisations about the urgency of action on climate change.
“That, in my view, is where the rubber hits the road. We can only have a concerted, coordinated government action if enough people understand why it’s important to them, important to the community, important to the world and important to the environment. Working on that is what I see is now my most important legacy.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/venice-to-limit-tourist-group-size-to-25-to-protect-historic-city | World news | 2023-12-31T16:50:08.000Z | Angelique Chrisafis | Venice to limit tourist group size to 25 to protect historic city | Venice is to limit the size of tourist groups in an attempt to reduce the pressure of thousands of visitors crowding its squares, bridges and narrow walkways each day.
From June, groups visiting the Italian canal city will be limited to 25 people, or roughly half the capacity of a tourist bus, the city announced this weekend. The use of loudspeakers, popular among tour groups but “which can generate confusion and disturbances”, will be banned in the city and on nearby islands, officials said in a statement.
Elisabetta Pesce, in charge of security in Venice, said the policies were aimed at improving the movement of groups through the historic centre as well as the heavily visited islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello. She said the decision was about “the need to protect residents” and better manage the flow of visitors walking around the city.
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“It is an important measure aimed at improving the management of groups in the historic centre and on the islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello,” Pesce said. “It’s about promoting sustainable tourism and guaranteeing the protection and safety of the city.”
Authorities in Venice have for years sought to ease the pressure of mass tourism and the vast numbers of visitors flocking to sights including the Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square. About 3.2 million people stayed overnight in Venice’s historic centre in 2022, but about 30 million people visit each year, with a majority of the city’s tourists coming for just the day.
Venice, once the heart of a powerful maritime republic, has been on the Unesco world heritage list since 1987 as an “extraordinary architectural masterpiece”. But Unesco has since warned that tourism’s impact on the fragile lagoon city is a major issue and has twice considered placing Venice on its list of heritage sites in danger.
To avoid being put on the danger list, the city has moved to reduce the impact of tourism. First, it limited the arrival of large cruise ships through the Giudecca canal. Cruise ships, which once dropped off thousands of visitors a day, have now been rerouted to an industrial port.
Then, in September, Venice announced a day-tripper charge which will be tested from spring.
Day visitors will be charged €5 (£4.30) to enter the city’s historic centre in an attempt to reduce tourist numbers. A 30-day trial of the entrance fee will be spread across public holidays and weekends in the spring and summer. Residents, commuters, students and children under the age of 14 will be exempt, as will tourists who stay in the city overnight.
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Venetians have held several protests in recent years against a tourism industry which they argue has eroded their quality of life, damaged the environment and driven residents away. On some days, the current population of just over 49,000 – down from about 175,000 in the post-second-world-war years – is dwarfed by the number of tourists.
In September, it emerged that the number of beds available to tourists on Venice’s main island had surpassed the number of year-round residents for the first time. According to figures from the activist group Venessia.com, last autumn there were 49,693 tourist beds across hotels and rented holiday homes, compared with 49,304 inhabitants.
There was a dip in visitor numbers to Venice linked to severe flooding in 2019 and another fall in numbers due to the disruption of the 2020 Covid pandemic. But high visitor numbers returned last summer. An average of 40,000 day- trippers pour into the city on peak days. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/05/how-we-made-red-dwarf-doug-naylor-craig-charles-bbc | Television & radio | 2019-03-05T08:00:45.000Z | Rich Pelley | How we made Red Dwarf | Doug Naylor, co-creator/writer
Rob Grant and I were writing a Radio 4 comedy show called Son of Cliché in which there was a recurring sketch called Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, a parody of Alien, with a lone survivor and a computer, voiced by Chris Barrie. I remember watching [70s sci-fi comedy movie] Dark Star and saying: “It’s crazy no one’s done a sitcom like that.” Then we went to the pub and forgot all about it.
Years later, Rob and I were writing for Spitting Image, and we wanted to do a sitcom. We had been introduced to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour. They told us how they created Steptoe: they just started to write. First they just had two blokes, then they became brothers, then father and son, then rag and bone men. We were like: “Wow! Aren’t you supposed to have your goals, obstacles and character flaws all mapped out?”
All space shows have a genius computer, so we made ours, Holly, an idiot
My parents had a cottage halfway up a mountain in Wales, so Rob and I went there for a week to write. We didn’t want aliens, so we made the character Rimmer a hologram. He was a complete jobsworth, so Lister is the opposite, a slob. All space shows have a genius computer, so we made ours, Holly, an idiot. We also wanted someone cool, like they’d evolved from cats – hence the Cat.
It went off to BBC comedy producers John Lloyd and Paul Jackson, who both loved it. John said: “I’ll be disappointed if you cast any of the Oxbridge people. It needs to be completely fresh.” He’d just done Blackadder and I think he was worried we would steal his cast.
We thought: “How can this fail?” But the BBC rejected it three times. Alan Rickman and Alfred Molina liked the script so we considered casting them as Rimmer and Lister. Rickman wanted to be Lister because he thought playing Rimmer would be too easy. In the end, Craig Charles and Chris Barrie just seemed a better double act.
We had a great fantasy that the original crew would be hugely famous comedy names – like Ronnie Barker, Leonard Rossiter and John Cleese – so that people would be going: “I must tune into this.” Then they all die after 10 minutes and you’re left with this bunch of unknowns. “Craig Charles? Never heard of him.”
Oxbridge not allowed … a scene from series II. Photograph: UKTV
Craig Charles, played Dave Lister
I was a regular on Saturday Live, Channel 4’s riotous alternative comedy show. There was Ben Elton, Fry and Laurie, Harry Enfield, Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall. They were all quite a bit older than me, and all friends. I was the odd one out, doing controversial, edgy poems about Margaret Thatcher and South Africa.
Saturday Live’s producer, Paul Jackson, was leaving to do this curious little project on BBC2 called Red Dwarf, a science-fiction sitcom set in space. They had a lot of trouble getting it off the ground. The head of comedy at the BBC – a guy called Gareth Gwenlan – was a mainstay of sofa-based sitcoms. He said it’ll only work if you have a sofa and the camera pans out through the windows to show you’re on a spaceship. Rob and Doug said: “You don’t have sofas on spaceships.” He said: “That’s why it won’t work.”
We just play caricatures of ourselves – it’s very method
But they eventually got the money through BBC North West. I said to Jackson: “Got any parts going?” He said: “No, but I would like you to read the script and tell me if the part of the Cat is racist.” He sent me the script and it was just brilliant. I said: “The Cat’s not racist, he’s really cool. Can I be Lister?” His reply began with an F and finished with two Fs. But I begged and begged for an audition, and in the end he relented.
I’d never acted before. None of us had really. Chris Barrie was an impressionist. I was a standup poet. Rob Llewellyn was in an awful comedy troupe called the Joeys and Danny John-Jules was a dancer. We just play caricatures of ourselves – it’s very method. There’s an awful lot of Lister in me, a lot of Rimmer in Barrie, although he’d hate me for saying it. There’s plenty of the Cat in Danny, unfortunately. And Rob is just full of middle-class angst and guilt, so perfect for Kryten.
I don’t think Alan Rickman and Alfred Molina lost too much sleep over not getting cast. They went off to fantastic film careers and here I am still peddling this old mining ship in space.
Red Dwarf: The Complete Series I-VIII is available on Blu-ray. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/28/time-seems-to-catch-up-with-serena-williams-in-defeat-by-harmony-tan | Sport | 2022-06-28T22:01:00.000Z | Tumaini Carayol | Serena Williams loses epic to Harmony Tan as time catches up with 40-year-old | There are few things in this world that Serena Williams has enjoyed more than a comeback throughout her career. She underwent knee surgery in 2003, yet within a year of her return she was a grand slam champion again. After arriving at the 2007 Australian Open ranked 81st, she left with the title. She nearly died from a pulmonary embolism in 2011, but she toiled back to enjoy her greatest years. In 2017, she survived a life-threatening childbirth, yet she recovered to reach four grand slam finals.
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Over the course of her 27 years as a professional tennis player, Williams has seen generations rise and fall, with most of her contemporaries over a decade into retirement. But time comes for us all, and in a torrid evening on Centre Court showed the challenge before her in the final chapter of her career.
After tearing a hamstring in a fall on Centre Court last year and then not playing another singles match for 52 weeks, on Tuesday she made her singles return in the same venue. Rusty and short of confidence against a player who gave her none, Williams recovered from a set down and fought her heart out before falling in the first round 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (7) to France’s Harmony Tan.
In terms of ranking and experience, the world No 115 Tan was one of the better draws Williams could have received. But Tan is a tricky player with a deep toolbox of varied shots, slices and spins, and as Williams tried to find her range after a one-year layoff, she raised her level and offered no rhythm at all.
“When I saw the draw, I was really scared,” said Tan afterwards. “Because it’s Serena Williams, she’s a legend. I was like, oh my God. How can I play? If I could win one game, or two games, it’s really good for me.’
Harmony Tan celebrates following her victory. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Despite struggling early on, Williams led 4-2, 40-15 in the first set and it seemed she had taken control. Instead, Tan continued to work Williams with drop shots and slices off both wings, forcing her to move forward and bend her knees, arresting her rhythm. She took the set by dragging Williams forward and angling a forehand passing shot winner.
As Williams seethed, the roof was closed over Centre Court. She broke serve for 2-0 after a seemingly endless 20-minute game on Tan’s serve that required seven break points and was sealed in comical fashion with a high, loopy backhand that elicited a shanked forehand from Tan.
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With the break secured, Williams seemed to settle. Her serve began to fire as she dictated from the baseline instead of chasing Tan’s slice around. But she first lost her 3-1 lead, then she served for the match and Tan wrestled it from her with a backhand passing shot.
As Tan edged ahead 6-5 with a drop-shot winner, Williams served to stay in the match and fought hard, boldly saving a match point with a forehand drive volley winner as the Centre Court crowd roared as loud as they ever have for the seven-time champion. But with so few matches behind her, Williams faltered in the tight moments as Tan remained rock solid in the decisive tie-break.
“Today I gave all I could do,” said Williams. “Maybe tomorrow I could have gave more. Maybe a week ago I could have gave more. But today was what I could do. At some point you have to be able to be OK with that. And that’s all I can do.”
Williams was asked if she will be back at Wimbledon, a question she did not have the answer to. “That’s a question I can’t answer,” she said. “Like, I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows where I’ll pop up.”
Serena Williams fought back from one set down to force a thrilling tiebreak in the third. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Despite her uncertainty, Williams did say that a tight defeat in her first match back motivated her to return to the practice court and to improve for the US Open to come. “It definitely makes me want to hit the practice courts because when you’re playing not bad and you’re so close. Like I said, any other opponent probably would have suited my game better. So, yeah, I feel like that it’s actually kind of like, ‘OK, Serena, you can do this if you want.’”
In her press conferences over the past week, she has insisted that she has no idea exactly how long she intends to continue.
She runs a venture capital company now, Serena Ventures, which takes up an immense amount of time. She said that she has put on her out-of-office message for a few weeks, but then she will be back.
She has ensured that she will be stimulated when her career finally comes to an end. But there is nothing like walking out on to Centre Court and finding a way and the will to drag out the best tennis in herself, and so she keeps on coming back.
The question after her loss is what exactly she does want and whether this new comeback will turn out to be a farewell to Wimbledon. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/mar/12/patriotgames | Opinion | 2008-03-12T10:30:00.000Z | Josh Freedman Berthoud | Patriot games | Iwouldn't really describe myself as a patriot. At least, I'm not the type to fly the Union Jack from my window, chant songs of imperial dominance, or confess my undying love for the old woman on the postage stamps. That is, I'm not the kind of patriot that the government seems to want me to be.
I guess I'm more of a Breton kind of a Briton - who, like the surrealist, would arrogantly redraw the map of his home country in the shape of his home town, the capital city. Obnoxious as this London-England might seem to those not from London, England, how many people would honestly argue that their national pride stems from the entire nation, and not from their specific region or home town?
Scousers don't spend their time celebrating the beauty of the cliffs of Dover - they boast of Liverpool FC and the culture capital and, generally, of being Liverpudlian. Geordies don't while away the hours eulogising Devon's rolling hills - they boast of their unique nightlife, their charismatic warmth and their remarkable capacity to wear T-shirts in the snow.
Devon's residents, conversely, cherish their relaxed pace of life and the fact that people would sooner chat to you in the street than stab you. And that's not to mention those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Moreover, if anyone finds my place descriptions woefully ignorant, they may well do so, for my Britain is basically London - and North London at that. Britain is a local place for local people - where local pride ranks far higher than national.
Thus, the American Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson was right to claim this week that "people (in Britain) have more allegiance to football teams than they do to Great Britain". Football teams in this country represent our local area and are a source of the kind of pride that Britons prefer to indulge in - a regional kind. Indeed, you might argue that my team - Arsenal - has nothing to do with England at all and yet, in a way, it has quite a lot in common with the London I know - firmly rooted in the area, with a proud tradition of cultural and racial variety.
In conversation with Italian, French and American friends, I am often surprised to discover how different the international perception of Britain is to the place I know and love. My country is portrayed as one uniform mass of queen-loving, mildly unattractive tea drinkers, who moan about queuing but would never dream of stepping out of line.
At this point, my nationalism invariably kicks in and I find myself extolling everything I can - our music, our varied culture and food, our lack of fascistic history - I even find myself defending our weather and prices, though admittedly such arguments are difficult to sustain.
At no point, however, do I find myself defending the image which our tourist board and elements of our film industry apparently work so hard to maintain: an homogenous England of mild manners and three-piece suits; of polite conversation and deference to the landed gentry; of bad hair and bad teeth, china teapots and over-boiled carrots.
A closer look at everything I do defend - music, the Premiership, arts and culture, food, politics - reveals that all my sources of national pride depend in some way on national tolerance, acceptance and absorption of various cultures. Yes, Italy might have exceptional national cuisine - but their curries are crap. Ok, America has an impressive sense of national pride and allegiance to the flag, etc, but racially their cities are some of the most ghettoised in the western world. France might boast of the purity of its cultural history, but the NF is ever present, as alienated African French youths torch cars and community centres weekly in city suburbs.
Personally, I prefer it our way. And there you go - I'm being patriotic. I like the local pride that we exhibit as a nation of regions. I appreciate the diversity and wealth that immigration has brought to cities throughout Britain's tolerant history. I cherish the decline in aggressive nationalism in this country, as Britishness has become multiplicate in meaning. And I am grateful for the creativity that results from this cultural fusion, as well as the open minded attitude that sponsors it. Despite thousands of wrongs in our country, it is the rights that unite us and give us a sense of national pride.
So why the government's fixation on false and anachronistic symbols of our unity? Why a pledge to the queen, when not only is she, as Roy Greenslade observes, the symbol of class-based division, but is also largely irrelevant to most of us and does nothing to focus on our common values? And why more pompous ceremonies and jingoistic anthems when we really need to focus on the emergent pride in our modern country?
Social cohesion arises through shared values and experiences, not through vacuous, artificial notions of unifying national symbols. Britain at its best celebrates diversity, regional variety and the availability of something for everyone - this needs to be encouraged and augmented. Britain does not desperately seek one defining motif, particularly a monarch that represents an age-old England, rather than a modern Britain. Indeed the Sex Pistols' anarchistic cover would be a more fitting anthem than its irrelevant original.
In Britain as we know it, some Britons love the queen. Others hate her. But both groups cherish the Britain that gives them the freedom to do so. Isn't that the point? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/sep/01/steve-smith-ashes-fourth-test-old-trafford-ben-stokes-joe-root | Sport | 2019-09-01T16:04:12.000Z | Matthew Engel | Australia’s Steve Smith seizes second chance in Ashes tale of two redemptions | Matthew Engel | For tonight we’ll merry merry be,
For tonight we’ll merry merry be,
For tonight we’ll merry merry be...
Tomorrow we’ll be sober. (old drinking song)
And now tomorrow is almost upon us. (Wednesday this time, cricket likes to keep its followers guessing). New game; fresh start; all square. England have momentum which indeed proved decisive in 1981 and 2005 when England also hit back spectacularly. On the other hand, as Mike Tyson almost said, everyone has momentum until they get a punch in the mouth.
And England have already had one hefty blow: the news that Jimmy Anderson is out of the series and, perhaps, gone from Test cricket. That seems one portent of ill-omen, like a black cat mewing at midnight. Meanwhile, Australia will welcome back Steve Smith, the overwhelmingly dominant figure of the series until he himself got whacked.
Returning Steve Smith plays down impact of Jofra Archer bouncer
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It is imprudent to erase the despair that engulfed England less than 10 days ago. They produced a one-day performance with the bat on the Friday at Headingley and then another one on the Sunday. The first was disgraceful; the second was (insert adulatory adjective of choice from Roget). The first, reproduced again, is likely to get the same result. The second might not: Ben Stokes was (insert different adulatory adjective). But he had to get lucky every hit and did; the Aussies only had to get lucky once and didn’t.
England’s response is to choose a squad with no unforced changes, and probably the same team, Jason Roy and all. Not that they had much choice. The main purpose of playing county cricket over four days not three (since 1994) and in two divisions (2000) was to elevate quality over quantity and provide an efficient flow of talent into the England team.
Steve Smith takes a blow to the head while trying to avoid a delivery from England’s Jofra Archer during the second Test at Lord’s. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
So that’s gone well. There has been one single round of Championship matches since 13 July, 18 days before the Ashes began, and there will not be another until 10 September, two days before the final Test. Dominic Sibley of Warwickshire, considered a front‑runner as a possible next opener, scored 0 and nine in his one match during that break, which happens. This is clearly insane and will get even more insane next year when the Horrible Hundred starts.
Earlier this decade, there were three Ashes series in two years, the purpose being to realign the schedule and yank the premier Test series away from the World Cup in the quadrennial cycle. This summer the two were separated by just over a fortnight, a period dominated by Twenty20 matches. The upshot was that England’s home advantage was negated, and they arrived at Edgbaston both underdone and overdone, like a badly barbecued steak.
In spite of Headingley, they remain the team under most pressure. Australia, as the team in possession, can lose at Old Trafford and stay alive; England can’t. Still, momentum does have a good record in the Ashes. There has not been a drawn series in the last 24, going back to 1972, which is either a statistical quirk or an indication of the extent to which the losing team gets deflated. The good news is that England have not actually lost the Ashes at the Oval (if they held out that long) since 1934. The bad news is the same cannot be said of Old Trafford.
There have been 2,358 Tests since 1877 and this was the greatest of them all
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It would be terrific for cricket if England can get out of Manchester alive. Why, the TV audience for the decider would be ... oh dear. Sky reported a Test match record of more than two million viewers for the closing stages of Headingley. Which is a bit like me claiming a record for the 1500 metres. It would be more accurate to refer to a personal best.
That figure means just over 3% of the population aged four and up watched the most compelling sports event of the year (except perhaps for the previous cricket thriller). There were a peak of eight million for that one, the World Cup final, thanks to the one‑off broadcast on Channel 4, whose last Test, the Oval in 2005, peaked at 10 million. As ye sow, England and Wales Cricket Board, so shall ye reap.
As ever, there will be fascinating subplots. For both sides, the captaincy is now an issue. Joe Root, the conventional wisdom now goes: fine bat, nice chap, not one of God’s captains. This drumbeat will get more urgent if England succumb. But if not Root, who else? The screwed-up system is causing problems here too. Playing for England cuts off the chance to get captaincy experience. Rory Burns ticks that box, but has no settled place; Jos Buttler is also now just clinging on. As for Stokes, the lesson of the dire Botham and Flintoff reigns is that the soldier leading the charge should not also be field marshal.
As doubts over Joe Root’s captaincy gather, Ben Stokes could be in line, but the lesson of the Botham and Flintoff reigns is that the soldier leading the charge should not also be field marshal. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
Root’s opposite number, Tim Paine, was only ever a stopgap and Australia will have a different captain soon enough. The theme of the series so far has above all been of redemption, first for Smith then for Stokes. There is a growing sense that the captaincy will pass back to Smith.
Even illicit sandpaper users deserve a second chance in life. The halfwits will doubtless keep booing Smith, in keeping with Britain’s coarse mood. Decent people should salute a brave and brilliant cricketer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/15/owen-farrell-boots-england-into-world-cup-semi-final-after-fiji-fightback | Sport | 2023-10-15T17:17:26.000Z | Robert Kitson | Owen Farrell boots England into World Cup semi-final after Fiji fightback | When England touched down in France in late August they would definitely have settled for where they sit now. World Cup semi-finalists, five wins on the spin and, in theory, the chance of reaching a second successive final. It is not their concern that, as demonstrated again by New Zealand and Ireland on Saturday night, the gulf in quality between the two halves of the draw has been so pronounced.
This, either way, was a nerve-jangling quarter-final, Fiji pulling back to 24-24 with 11 minutes left only for a drop-goal and a penalty, his fifth of the evening, from their captain, Owen Farrell, to restore some order. First-half tries from Manu Tuilagi and Joe Marchant had initially given them control of a hard‑edged contest but the sense of red rose relief at the final whistle was entirely genuine.
England 30-24 Fiji: Rugby World Cup 2023 – as it happened
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Without Farrell’s right boot and a dramatic late interception and 50-metre burst from Ben Earl which tilted the contest back in England’s favour at its most delicate point, it might have been a wholly different scenario. As it is, Steve Borthwick’s side are just 80 minutes away from making a final which even their closest friends and families would not have dared to contemplate seven weeks ago.
It was uncomfortably tight, though, with Fiji enjoying a late 15-phase attack which kept the English defence honest right until the end. If nothing about the game was ever quite as spectacular as Fiji’s kit, a glorious erupting volcano of black and glowing lava, England were clearly energised by the possibility this might prove their last chance saloon and challenged Fiji’s big men with some no-nonsense physicality of their own.
They will also be encouraged by the way they nullified their opponents’ attacking threat at key moments. The foundations of good sides are built on defence and, aside from some second-half wobbles, England were enthusiastically resolute. It was certainly an improvement on the previous week’s effort against Samoa and their 30-22 defeat against the same opponents at Twickenham in August.
England's Manu Tuilagi dives in to score the first try of the quarter-final against Fiji. Photograph: David Davies/PA
Despite that ominous precedent, thousands of white-shirted England fans had made the hopeful pilgrimage to the south of France. Spotted on the metro was none other than Mick Skinner, who knows a little about big hits in World Cup quarter‑finals. The former Harlequins “bosh” merchant would have relished some of the early exchanges, with his compatriots clearly keen to make an early impact with and without the ball.
Their reward was two tries within the opening 23 minutes, the first a skittling score from a rolling Tuilagi in the left corner and the second a stretching effort from Marchant to reward a prolonged period of pressure in the Fijian 22. The Pacific islanders were also creating their own self-inflicted problems, the wing Vinaya Habosi being sent to the sin-bin following head contact with Marcus Smith and Frank Lomani missing two of his first three penalty shots.
Aside from a no-arms tackle on Josua Tuisova by Tom Curry, England’s line speed and discipline were also proving effective after a couple of early breakdown penalties in their opponents’ favour. At 15‑3 down 14-man Fiji badly needed some kind of pressure release and found it when Viliame Mata straightened and drove hard to score just before the half‑hour.
With Courtney Lawes being unceremoniously dumped over the sideline by a posse of tacklers, England were suddenly having to weather a mini-storm. A couple of Farrell penalties had increased their lead to 21-10 by the interval and the odds on a repeat of their Twickenham shocker began to lengthen.
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To the Fijians’ lasting credit, though, they were far from finished. Two tries in the space of five minutes, the first from the replacement prop Peni Ravai and the second courtesy of their lively fly-half, Vilimoni Botitu, dragged England back into the trenches. Would this be the last stand for some of their older figures? No sooner had the thought occurred than Earl and Farrell, Saracens’ teammates and never knowingly beaten, intervened to sooth English nerves.
This, though, was a Fiji side who lost to Portugal in their last match and, like England, changed their head coach only months out from the World Cup. Simon Raiwalui deserves enormous credit for strengthening his team’s foundations but his side are still required to overcome logistical obstacles their English counterparts can barely conceive.
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Beneath the curved roof of this steep-tiered venue, for all those reasons, England’s performance must be viewed in relative terms. They remain cussed, stubborn and admirably up for the fight, with Farrell suddenly the only member of his family left in the tournament. It still requires a huge leap of the imagination, even so, to see them hoisting the Webb Ellis Cup in a fortnight’s time. Better, perhaps, to take it one game at a time, congratulate Fiji on their gallantry and wait and see what miracles the semi-final weekend may conceivably bring. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/06/retrofitting-old-buildings-uk-energy-efficiency | Business | 2023-03-06T06:00:21.000Z | Julia Kollewe | How retrofitting the UK’s old buildings can generate an extra £35bn in new money | Retrofitting the UK’s historical buildings, from Georgian townhouses to the mills and factories that kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, could generate £35bn of economic output a year, create jobs and play a crucial role in achieving climate targets, research has found.
Improving the energy efficiency of historical properties – those built before 1919 – could reduce carbon emissions from the UK’s buildings by 5% each year and make older homes warmer and cheaper to run, according to a report commissioned by the National Trust, Historic England and leading property organisations.
Nearly a quarter of all UK homes, 6.2m properties, were built before 1919 and almost a third of commercial properties, about 600,000, are also historical sites. They are responsible for about a fifth of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, with old buildings accounting for a significant proportion.
Flaxmill Maltings in Shrewsbury, England. Photograph: Steven Baker/Historic England Archive, Steven Baker
Retrofitting older buildings – such as ensuring their windows and heating systems are more energy efficient – lowers emissions and can prolong their lifespan. It avoids the carbon emissions caused by knocking down and building from scratch, in particular the large amount emitted from cement and steel produced by construction.
A national retrofitting campaign would lead to an extra £35bn of economic output annually, through construction activity and knock-on benefits for the tourism and hospitality sectors, according to the report, whose backers include the housing association Peabody, the crown estate and Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster’s property firm.
Master of all trades: retrofit firm tackles climate and cost of living crises
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Peabody Avenue in Pimlico in London, two terraces of staircase-access flats built in 1876 and owned by Peabody, was used as part of a pilot to understand how to sensitively retrofit heritage buildings. Meanwhile, work is under way at the Grade II-listed Canada House in Manchester, built in 1909 and owned by Grosvenor, to improve its environmental performance, while Historic England has restored several listed buildings at the 18th-century Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, including the main mill and kiln.
Lime plastering workshop at the Heritage Skills Centre in Oxfordshire. Photograph: James Dobson/National Trust Images/James Dob
Bob Kerslake, chair of Peabody, said: “Making these buildings energy efficient will stimulate spending in the construction industry, support about 290,000 jobs in supply chains and boost heritage-related tourism and hospitality.
“And where needed, making older homes more energy efficient will transform the lives of the people who live and work in them, reducing household energy bills and improving health and wellbeing.”
Peabody Avenue in Pimlico in London, two terraces of staircase-access flats built in 1876 and owned by Peabody, was used as part of a pilot to understand how to sensitively retrofit heritage buildings Photograph: Miles Willis/Miles Willis Photography
The organisations behind the report are calling on the government to work with industry to package together skills, training, funding, standards and advice into a national retrofit strategy, as the UK only has half the skilled workers needed to retrofit all old buildings.
The report, which will be formally launched at an event at the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday, shows that more than 105,000 new workers, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters and scaffolders, will be needed to work solely on revamping the UK’s historical buildings every year for the next three decades for the UK to meet its 2050 net zero target. This includes 14,500 more electricians and 14,300 plumbers.
An estimated 100,000 people now work on historical buildings. But adapting the buildings requires more specialist skills and training. Plumbers will need to be able to work with heat pumps and hydrogen boilers, and many workers will need to be taught additional specialist skills to ensure heritage characteristics are protected.
The Heritage Skills Centre, at the Buscot and Coleshill estate in Oxfordshire. Photograph: James Dobson/National Trust
The industry has long complained of skills shortages due to an ageing workforce, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit.
One of the key differences between old and modern buildings is how each building type manages air flow and moisture: new buildings are built to be airtight. As living standards have changed, with showers, heating, washers and dryers in people’s homes, the risk of moisture buildup in older homes has gone up.
The organisations want the government to make the apprenticeship levy more flexible, allowing unspent funds to be channelled into training more people in the heritage retrofit field, such as funding six- to eight-week bootcamps. About £3.3bn in unused funds from the levy was returned to the Treasury between May 2019 and July 2022. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/18/uk-would-lose-36bn-in-tax-receipts-if-it-left-eu-treasury-report-says | Politics | 2016-04-18T16:50:08.000Z | Anushka Asthana | George Osborne says UK would lose £36bn in tax receipts if it left EU | George Osborne has said the British government would lose £36bn in net tax receipts, equivalent to 8p on the basic rate of income tax or 7p on VAT, if the UK leaves the EU and negotiates a bilateral trade agreement with the bloc.
The chancellor said a 200-page Treasury analysis of the impact of Brexit showed it would make British families poorer, and he accused leave campaigners of believing that was a price worth paying. But out campaigners said that the chancellor was talking down the British economy in an unpatriotic way.
The study concluded that a Canadian-style model, in which the UK negotiated a new trade deal with the EU that did not require freedom of movement, would reduce Britain’s GDP by 6.2%.
“Under any alternative, we’d trade less, do less business and receive less investment, and the price would be paid by British families,” Osborne said. “Wages would be lower and prices would be higher.
“The most likely result is that Britain would be poorer by £4,300 per household. That is £4,300 worse off every year, a bill paid year after year by the working people of Britain.”
Osborne pointed out that a net loss of £36bn a year was the equivalent of a third of the annual budget for NHS England.
He said the study showed that whatever model Britain opted for after Brexit would result in significant barriers to the country’s most important export market, with 500 million consumers.
A Conservative minister said the analysis was unfair and biased, and argued that the government ought to provide both sides of the story if it wanted Britons to have a truly free vote. Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister, said remain supporters were talking down the economy in an unpatriotic way.
“This Treasury report is extraordinary,” she said. “For a start, it is only looking at one issue, which is their thesis on what happens if we leave. A Treasury report that is a genuine choice for the people should look at the impact if we remain.”
Howard Archer, economist at the consultancy IHS Global Insight, said nobody knew how the UK economy would fare post a Brexit-vote. He said that the “meaningful approach is to focus on the factors that will most influence how the UK economy will perform and to highlight the issues”.
He added: “To this end, the Treasury’s report does bring useful analysis to the table, and it steps up pressure on the campaigners for the UK to leave the EU to come up with more rigorous economic analysis that supports their case.”
The Treasury’s study is published as opinion polls point to an uncomfortably tight referendum for the chancellor and the prime minister. A new Guardian/ICM telephone poll, conducted over the weekend, puts remain on 54% and leave on 46% once the don’t knows are excluded.
In parallel, ICM released a second poll conducted online that points to a dead heat, with 50% of respondents plumping for remain, and 50% for leave.
Prof John Curtice calculates a weighted average of all published polls, and says the new data from ICM is very much in line with what he is seeing elsewhere. Remain had been running at around 54% overall in his series at the start of the year, and has now dropped to 51%, a figure that means “this referendum is now an awful lot closer than it was meant to be”.
The tightening, Curtice explains, is entirely explained by movement in telephone surveys. “Whereas internet polls have for months been suggesting a country that is split down the middle, until recently this was offset by the surveys done over the phone, which were recording a far higher share for Remain, sometimes approaching 60%”. But with the last few telephone polls, this proportion has dipped below 55%, a trend confirmed in Monday’s Guardian survey.
The government analysis also looked at the potential impact of a Norway-style model that would require freedom of movement, and signing up to a World Trade Organisation model.
It concluded that the WTO option would lead to a £45bn drop in tax receipts, and a 7.5% drop in GDP, a position Crabb described as extreme. Even the Norway model would mean a £20bn drop in receipts and a 3.8% hit to the economy.
Osborne said the EU was Britain’s most important trading partner, and that under the Norway model free movement would still have to be followed.
“We are not Canada,” he said, pointing out that the deal would not include services. He said British families would pay a heavy price and would be poorer if the UK left the EU.
Asked whether the government was abusing its power by producing the Treasury document, David Cameron’s official spokeswoman said: “In response to the debate in parliament as the EU referendum bill was being taken through in order to become an act, we committed to producing this.
“In the debate in parliament, which MPs and peers were involved in, a number expressed an interest in hearing more about the economic consequences of our membership and we committed then to doing this.”
Gisela Stuart, a Labour MP and chair of the Vote Leave campaign, called for the government to speed up the publication of a report on the impact of migration on school places, after allegations it was being delayed until after the referendum.
“I’m deeply concerned to hear of yet another example of the government seeking to sway the debate by hiding inconvenient facts from the British people,” she said. “This has become a clear pattern of behaviour, and it is ill befitting of a government that claims to want to have an open and honest debate.
“It is vital this report is released before the referendum so people can make an informed decision, and I urge Nicky Morgan to publish without further delay.”
The former chancellor Norman Lamont described the Treasury predictions as “spurious and entirely unbelievable”.
“They say economists put a decimal point in their forecasts to show that they have a sense of humour,” Lord Lamont said.
“The chancellor has endorsed a forecast which looks 14 years ahead and predicts a fall in GDP of less than 0.5% a year, well within the margin of error. Few forecasts are right for 14 months, let alone 14 years.”
Vote Leave, the leading out campaign, claimed that the £4,300 figure was based on the assumption that the government would break its promise of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands.
It claimed that if migration did fall there would be no additional cost for families, and said the Treasury had failed to account for savings from lower regulation if Britain were to leave the EU. It also accused officials of failing to look at potential benefits from trade deals with other non-EU countries.
Matthew Elliott, Vote Leave’s chief executive, said: “The headline figures in this report are deeply flawed. It is not credible to make these claims without showing your workings or the alternative you are comparing it to. It also ignores the Treasury’s own analysis that EU regulation costs the UK economy much more, a staggering £125bn a year.”
He said Britain was the fifth biggest economy in the world. “If we vote leave we will also be able to do deals with growing countries like China and India, which will help businesses to grow, create jobs and make our economy stronger.”
Another group, Grassroots Out, argued that the £4,300 figure amounted to 21p a person a day in return for national sovereignty.
For general election voting intention, ICM’s telephone poll puts the Conservatives on 38%, Labour on 33%, Ukip on 13%, the Lib Dems on 7%, the Scottish Nationalists on 5%, the Greens on 3% and Plaid Cymru on 1%.
Monday’s five-point lead for the Tories comes after a difficult couple of month for the government since the budget, and contrasts with some other recent polls, which actually put Labour ahead.
It is, however, in line with ICM’s online voting intentions, which the company publishes for the first time on Monday. These figures put the Conservatives on 36%, Labour on 31%, Ukip 16%, the Lib Dems 7%, the SNP 4%, the Greens 4%, Plaid Cymru 1% and others on 1%. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/11/top-gear-magazine-sales-chris-evans-bbc-worldwide-radio-times | Media | 2016-08-11T13:02:06.000Z | Jasper Jackson | Top Gear magazine's sales hit skids during Chris Evans era | Top Gear magazine saw a large drop in UK sales during the six months in which the revamped show starring Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc was on screens.
The magazine, which is run by Immediate Media but owned by BBC commercial arm BBC Worldwide, saw sales in the UK and Ireland drop below 100,000 for the first six months of the year, falling to 89,506, down 15% compared with the previous six months.
Total international sales remained above 103,000, though there was still an almost 14% fall in circulation, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures published on Thursday.
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The period coincided with a disappointing performance for the new series without Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. The show began with an audience of more than 4 million overnight, but fell to less than 2 million. It also lost a third of its audience on iPlayer during the run. Evans quit the show shortly after the series ended, saying he had given it his “best shot”.
The magazine’s publishing director Simon Carrington said the magazine continued to dominate the motoring market.
He added: “In print we’ve cemented our position as the world’s premier motoring title by adding four new partners to our growing list of international publishing partners this year whilst a brand new website has enabled our audience to engage with our content across multiple digital platforms.”
Immediate Media’s biggest earner, the Radio Times, also took a big hit, with circulation falling almost 9% to 668,526 compared to the previous six months. On a year-on-year basis, which doesn’t include the traditional Christmas bump for the magazine, circulation was down 6.2%.
However, Immediate said the title had outperformed the rest of the premium market, and pointed to a 5.1% rise in subscribers, accounting for more than 40% of its circulation and making it the UK’s largest subscription title.
Meanwhile the women’s market continued to see falls almost across the board. OK! magazine saw a sharp fall in sales, down more than 36% to 171,909 copies, as did another title owned by Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, Star, which saw a fall of more than 15% to 124,649 copies.
Northern & Shell head of magazines and women’s media Sarah Perry conceded that print magazines were facing tough conditions, but said OK! was outperforming its competitors on social media and other digital platforms.
She said: “Despite a generally tough trading climate industry-wide, we are witnessing audiences continuing to adapt the way they engage with OK! as a multiplatform brand, to best suit their mobile lifestyles.
“Over the last 18 months, OK! has witnessed its multiplatform audiences grow by 21%, now reaching an industry leading 6.3m UK adults every month and delivering some of the best video content on celebrity news with over 2.2m monthly views.
“Furthermore, OK! leads the industry in social media audience engagement with over 200,000 more followers across a combined Facebook, Instagram and Twitter than its nearest rival in Hello.”
Across the rest of the women’s titles, Heat, Best and Glamour all saw double-digit falls in circulation, while Closer magazine fared slightly better, losing 8% of its circulation as did Hello, down 5% and Bella which was down 4%.
However, Cosmopolitan managed to buck the trend with a small 1.5% rise in circulation to 407,010, as did Elle, which saw sales rise almost 4% to 167,791. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/21/toy-story-4-trailer-pixar-spork-forky | Film | 2019-03-21T07:00:11.000Z | Ben Child | Toy Story 4: has Pixar forked it up? | Laying into Toy Story is a bit like dissing the Beatles or picking holes in a Picasso painting. The Pixar series is an institution, a gilded saga that ushered in the modern era of CGI animation and introduced us to some of the most beloved characters of all time in the form of Tom Hanks’ rootin’ tootin’ cowboy Woody and his ever-expanding motley gang of plastic playmates. Without John Lasseter’s 1995 film we wouldn’t have The Incredibles, Wreck It Ralph or the Despicable Me films, Disney might still be putting out second-rate sequels to its classic hand-drawn fare, and Batman would exist only in live action form. It’s enough to make one shudder at the very thought.
And yet there’s something about the first full-length trailer for Toy Story 4, which dropped earlier this week, that makes me a little uneasy. Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy by the film-makers to shake up a franchise that’s now been going for the best part of a quarter of a century. Maybe it’s the way Pixar seems to have redesigned Andy (unless that’s Andy’s son?) so that he looks nothing like his youthful self in the earlier films. Perhaps it’s the notable absence of Ken and Barbie, by far the most vibrant toys from the last full-length instalment, 2010’s operatic Toy Story 3. (That toy with the handlebar moustache is not a hairy Ken, by the way, but rather Keanu Reeves’ Duke Caboom).
But mostly it’s the fact that the storyline here seems to be based around a moany spork named Forky who is apparently suffering from an existential crisis (after being transformed into a toy by Bonnie, the new owner of Andy’s erstwhile playthings). Doesn’t this seem like a creative decision from way left field? Perhaps all will become clear when we get to see the final movie and the Tony Hale-voiced Forky will end up as much loved as Woody, Buzz Lightyear and those cute little three-eyed aliens from Pizza Planet. But right now this seems like the new addition is only there to get Woody out of his comfort zone, and that this could easily be the moment the saga also gets a little lost.
Perhaps that’s why, elsewhere, the story seems to be retreading familiar territory, in a desperate attempt to get back on track. But do we really need to see another Toy Story movie in which Woody is tempted to leave behind his old life and venture into pastures new, a la his flirtation with the Roundup Gang in Toy Story 2? Must the villain of the piece really be a toy who seems innocuous at first, but ends up being evil and won’t let Woody leave – Christina Hendricks’s Gabby Gabby here; Lots-o-Huggin’ Bear in Toy Story 3?
Ducky (Keegan-Michael Key) and Bunny (Jordan Peele) are among the new toys joining the motley gang of plastic playmates in Toy Story 4. Photograph: PIxar
Perhaps Pixar is making use of smoke and mirrors here: teasing us with what appear to be recycled tropes before hitting us with a tale so original that we wonder how we ever doubted them. Perhaps.
Intriguingly, Toy Story 4 was originally tipped to be a standalone sequel that would bid farewell to Woody, Buzz et al. But that was back when Lasseter was in line to return as director. Since then the Pixar creative head honcho has left the company he founded after being embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal, leaving Inside Out screenwriter Josh Cooley to pick up the reins.
That Pixar has gone back to basics with the fourth instalment is perhaps unsurprising, given the project’s difficult history. And the studio has turned round troubled projects in the past: the Oscar-winning Brave lost a director and went through radical story changes before finally emerging as a barnstorming medieval fantasy in 2012; The Good Dinosaur fell only just short of greatness after following a similar path to production in 2015. So there’s hope left yet that Toy Story isn’t jumping the spork this time around. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/22/giving-nhs-charity-fundraising-coronavirus-state-taxes | Opinion | 2020-04-22T15:00:48.000Z | David Ainsworth | Giving is good – but we should never forget that the NHS is not a charity | David Ainsworth | In recent weeks, giving to the NHS has gone through the roof. A grateful nation, watching the way doctors and nurses have put their lives on the line, feels inspired to give something back. The 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore marching around his garden has captured our imagination, and people across the UK have put their hands in their pockets and donated more than £28m to his campaign. All told, between Captain Tom and others, more than £80m has been raised so far, and will be distributed via the NHS Charities Together Covid-19 appeal.
NHS charities have a venerable history. Until 1948, when they were folded into the new health service, charities provided much of the UK’s healthcare. Nowadays, every NHS trust has a charity attached, and many survive from that time. Perhaps the most famous is the children’s charity associated with Great Ormond Street hospital, which dates back to 1852.
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Nowadays, NHS charities provide everything from capital funding for experimental technology to counselling and respite care for the hard-pressed health workers who are currently giving so much.
But the NHS itself is not a charity. It shouldn’t have to be relying on charitable money to provide essential services to the British people.
Unfortunately there’s a bad history of exactly that happening. Too often, in recent years as governments have cut back provision, donated money has had to go on providing essential services that are the role of the state. Charities – not just in the NHS, but in education, social care and many other domains – are using their resources to fill in around a system that can no longer quite cope.
A 2018 poll of charity finance teams, for example, found that it was common for government bodies to ask charities to carry out services such as care and advice on their behalf, and that more than half of all charities subsidised those public services with donated money.
This isn’t right. There needs to be a clear division between what charities are for, and what the state is for.
Charities are a vital force in the UK. In 2016-17 they spent more than £48bn to help bring communities together, provide vital emergency aid, and lobby and campaign for a better world. They’ve helped those who are struggling in ways that the monolithic institutions of the state are often simply not able to do.
But charities are not there to replace universal state intervention. They are there to do what the state cannot.
The argument over charitable funds is laid clear when it comes to personal protective equipment (PPE), which the NHS has been desperately short of during this pandemic. There’s been some discussion of the fact that under charity law, money raised for the NHS can’t be spent on PPE.
And this makes sense: PPE is an essential, lifesaving tool. It shouldn’t be funded out of the chance generosity of ordinary people clubbing together. It should come out of a properly planned, properly resourced core budget. And for this to happen, that budget must be paid for, and that means taxes.
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Take the Duke of Westminster, who has received praise for a £12.5m donation to NHS charities recently. He didn’t have to do it and his contribution should be applauded. But it’s also worth remembering that his £10bn fortune is due in part to the fact that he has benefitted from the UK’s tax laws, which can be relatively generous to those like himself who inherit very significant wealth. Under a more progressive tax structure, his contribution would rise by many multiples of his recent giving.
We all use the NHS. We must ensure government spends enough to fund it.
David Ainsworth is a journalist and charity worker who writes about social and economic issues | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/18/half-meat-products-contained-dna-wrong-animals-council-survey | World news | 2014-03-18T16:19:37.000Z | Felicity Lawrence | Half of meat product samples contained DNA of wrong animals, council finds | Half of the meat samples tested by a local authority food safety team last year contained species of animals not identified on their labels.
Beefburgers and sausages sampled by Leicester Trading Standards contained undeclared chicken, while samples of lamb curry were found to contain cheaper beef or a mix of beef and lamb or turkey.
Leicester city council is the latest authority to publish results from a targeted survey of meat products on sale in its area in 2013, which shows that gross contamination of meat is widespread.
The findings follow similar results from West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and West Sussex councils that also found consumers were regularly being misled about the contents of their food.
Minced beef samples were found in Leicester that were a mix of meat from three species; beef, chicken and lamb. Lamb mince samples contained not only lamb but also beef, chicken and turkey. Twelve out of 20 samples of doner kebab meat also failed to meet legal requirements because the species of animals used were misdescribed.
In total, 105 samples of meat products were collected from butchers, retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, fast food shops and caterers in Leicester and tested by the public analyst. Of these, 50 samples failed to meet legal requirements for composition and labelling, 47 of them because they contained undeclared species of animal.
Leicester council says deliberate deception is likely to be the cause in several cases, while in others failure to clean machines properly between processing batches of different meats may be the explanation.
In 18 samples, meat of an undeclared species was a major ingredient, accounting for levels of between 60% and 100%. The rest of the failed samples tested positive for the presence of at least one type of undeclared meat at medium (30-60%) or minor (5-30%) levels.
One sample returned no DNA result in the tests as the meat ingredient had been so heavily processed it was marked down as denatured.
Last month the Guardian revealed that hundreds of food tests carried out by West Yorkshire councils had also found the routine adulteration of food and drink. Over a third of nearly 900 samples collected in that area were not what they claimed to be or were mislabelled in some way.
The regulator, the Food Standards Agency, which defines any level of DNA of undeclared species of over 1% as "gross adulteration", said the failure rate found by Leicester and West Yorkshire is higher than the picture overall because its sampling programmes were targeted at categories of produce where problems are already suspected. The overall failure rate for meat in 2013 in local authority testing held by the FSA was 13.5%, it said.
It added: "The Food Standards Agency and Defra are helping target local authority resources through greater central coordination of intelligence, giving additional support for complex investigations, and additional funding. The government has increased support to the national coordinated programme of food sampling by local authorities from £1.6m to £2.2m in 2013-14."
Leicester city council's head of regulation, Roman Leszczyszyn said trading standards officers had been encouraged by central government to pursue a policy of intelligence-led enforcement rather than random sampling to "reduce the burden on business and remove unnecessary inspection".
"That's led us to look to the Food Standards Agency for intelligence. Meat composition has never come up on our horizon before," he said.
In line with other authorities, Leicester Trading Standards has seen a steady reduction in resources, with the number of officers employed reduced from 31 in 1997 to 14 currently. Official figures, released in response to a parliamentary question from Labour MP for Bristol East Kerry McCarthy, show that the number of tests carried out by local authorities to check the composition of food roughly halved between 2008-9 and 2012-13. Five years ago 32,600 products were tested to check their composition, but last year just under 17,000 were tested.
Leicester council undertook the sampling programme after the horsemeat scandal when it discovered that lamb burgers being served in local schools and labelled as halal in fact contained undeclared pork DNA. Although its subsequent tests uncovered widespread adulteration with the wrong species, it did not find any other cases of undeclared pork or of horsemeat.
Professor Chris Elliott, who has been commissioned by the government to review the food system in response to the horsemeat scandal, warned that the Leicester results showed takeaways and butchers were still open to deliberate adulteration. "It's clear that big retailers have put good measures in place now against species substitution but it's also clear some places are very vulnerable. It is of paramount importance that local authorities conduct regular scrutiny of outlets in their areas," he said.
In the West Yorkshire findings, illegal examples included mozzarella that was less than half real cheese, ham on pizzas that was either poultry or "meat emulsion" instead of pork, frozen prawns that were 50% water, minced beef adulterated with pork or poultry, fruit juices that contained illegal additives, counterfeit vodka, and a herbal slimming tea that was neither herb nor tea but glucose powder laced with a withdrawn prescription drug for obesity at 13 times the normal dose. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/that-1980s-sports-blog/2017/jun/15/golf-us-open-1985-ball-drop-denis-watson | Sport | 2017-06-15T09:28:56.000Z | Steven Pye | The golfer who didn't win the US Open because he waited for his ball to drop | The final round of the 1985 US Open was anything but dull. Nerves frayed as each of the main protagonists took it in turns to seemingly blow their chance of glory. As Denis Watson sat in the clubhouse, wondering if his even-par total would be enough to earn him his first major, his mind must surely have also drifted back to the eighth hole of his first round on the Thursday.
Watson had a 10-foot putt on the eighth for a par four on the eighth but he left it agonisingly short. He walked up to the hole to tap in for a bogey but, as he arrived at his ball, Watson paused. It would turn out to be a crucial moment of the 1985 US Open. “I walked up to see how close it was and said, ‘I think it’s still moving,’ and backed off,” he later reflected. “It didn’t fall, so I stepped up to knock it in – then it fell in the hole.” Unfortunately for Watson, he would pay for his pause. The ball dropped into the hole but Watson had left it teetering on the edge of the cup for longer than the 10 seconds allowed by USGA rules, so he was given a two-stroke penalty.
“The rule is a little cranky,” said Watson. “An official came up and told me I’d taken too long – that I’d stood there 35 seconds when the rule is 10 seconds – whether the ball is still moving or not. That’s the rule, so I was wrong, but I think the way it was handled was disappointing. I was quite upset at the time and bogeyed the next two holes.” On a day where only seven men broke 70, Watson’s penalty looked costly. His two-over-par 72 meant he wasn’t out of contention but Watson needed to put the disappointment behind him and react well on the Friday.
And what a reaction he produced. Watson equalled the course record 65 – which had been set by TC Chen the day before – to move into fifth place, as players such as Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus, Bernhard Langer, Lee Trevino, Craig Stadler and Ben Crenshaw missed the cut. Watson had made just 23 putts in his second round but the press only wanted to talk about one from the day before.
“Once the round was over and the penalty was official, I forgot it,” said Watson. “Golf is a very tormenting game. If you dwell on things like that, you lose sight of your reason for playing, which is to play the game one shot at a time against the golf course.” Watson had moved on and now sat just three shots behind surprise leader Chen with two rounds done and two to play.
Fans use periscopes to watch the action at the 1985 US Open at Oakland Hills Golf Club in Michigan. Photograph: Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Watson carded a 73 on Saturday and a 70 on Sunday to leave him on even par after 72 holes. Seve Ballesteros, Tom Kite, Payne Stewart and Lanny Wadkins all tried to beat his score but they all failed. With each new arrival in the clubhouse, Watson looked more well placed to win his first major championship – especially when you consider the trials his three main contenders were suffering on the course.
Everything had been going so well for Chen. The first ever albatross in a US Open had helped him shoot a 65 in the opening round and his totals of 134 after two rounds and 203 after three rounds equalled the lowest 36- and 54-hole scores in the tournament’s history. He was leading by four shots when he stepped up to play the fifth hole on Sunday and was looking good to become the first wire-to-wire champion since Tony Jacklin in 1970. But then the wheels came off.
Chipping on to the fifth green, Chen followed through on his shot and struck the ball when it was in mid-air, the double-hit costing him another stroke on the way to a disastrous quadruple-bogey eight. “When I arrived today, I didn’t feel what you call ‘the Open pressure’,” he said. “I was confident until the fifth hole. After that, all my confidence was gone.” Chen bogeyed the next three holes. He recovered slightly, and tied Watson’s total, but his 77 was not good enough to win the title and left him with the nickname “Two Chip” Chen.
Canadian Dave Barr also spurned his opportunity. Leading with six holes remaining, he bogeyed three holes – including the 17th and 18th – to end up on level par alongside Watson and Chen. All three had come so close in their different ways, but it was left to Andy North to somehow crawl below the finishing tape. The only man under par for the tournament, North bogeyed the final hole to sneak home by a shot, winning his second major with just eight birdies all week.
North’s triumph was not universally popular. “The winner didn’t win it, he inherited it,” wrote Jim Murray in the LA Times. “Andrew Stewart North just thinks he won the 1985 National Open. You don’t have to be an accountant to figure out that Denis Watson lost this tournament to a pencil.”
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Shav Glick, writing in the same paper, also argued the case for Watson. “Can a player take only 278 strokes during 72 holes of the US Open and lose to a player who takes 279 strokes? Yes, if the golfer is Denis Watson.” The USGA later reduced the punishment for breaking the “10-second rule” to one shot, but it was too little too late for the Zimbabwean.
Sadly, things were about to get much worse for Watson. Playing in the Goodyear Classic in South Africa, he struck a hidden tree stump with great force, leading to a serious whiplash injury. The damage to his neck, wrist and elbow was so severe that a doctor told Watson that he would never play competitively again. Watson defied that prediction and returned to the top level but his professional career was never the same again. “That one swing changed my life,” Watson later admitted.
To his great credit, Watson went on to enjoy great success on the Seniors Tour, even winning the 2007 PGA Championship and becoming a major champion 22 years after his cruel fate at Oakland Hills. Golf is a game of ifs and putts, and we will never know what would have happened if Watson had struck that putt a touch softer or harder. But the whole of 1985 remains a what-if for Watson, from that putt to that tree stump.
This article appeared first on That 1980s Sports Blog
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/27/gorillaz-humanz-review-damon-albarn | Music | 2017-04-27T14:00:08.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Gorillaz: Humanz review – a party album for a world gone mad | Alexis Petridis' album of the week | It is easy to forget that, on arrival in 2000, Gorillaz looked suspiciously like a self-indulgent novelty turn, the kind of project record labels feel impelled to let rock stars do when they’ve shifted so much product that “no” isn’t really an option any more.
It was a Britpop frontman and his artist flatmate’s sneery joke at the expense of manufactured pop, with cartoon figures replacing the hapless, manipulated band members and interviews conducted, a little wearyingly, in character. You would have got pretty long odds on it still existing 17 years on, longer odds still on their fifth album being a politically charged conceptual work that variously touches on the topics of racism (courtesy of rapper Vince Staples on apocalyptic choir-assisted opener Ascension), mental illness, the pernicious influence of the internet “echo chamber”, western military intervention in the Middle East, the “alt-right” belief that China has fabricated global warming, and the importance of soul music in the Thatcherite heartlands of 80s Essex (the improbable latter topic surfaces on a lovely track called Andromeda, named after a defunct Colchester nightclub, which also finds Albarn ruminating on the deaths of both his partner’s mother and Bobby Womack over a four-to-the-floor house beat and frail electronics).
And you would have been laughed out of the bookies had you suggested that it might feature among its stellar cast Noel Gallagher, a man keen to offer interviewers his considered critical appraisal both of Gorillaz’s eponymous debut (“appalling – music for fucking 12-year-olds”) and its mastermind, Damon Albarn (“That cunt is like, ‘Is there a bandwagon passing? Park it outside my house.’”) And yet, there he is, on Humanz’s rousing closing track, the unlikeliness of the situation compounded further by the fact that he’s singing: “We’ve got the power to be loving each other no matter what happens” in unison with his former nemesis.
But as Albarn would concede that things don’t always turn out as you expect. He is, after all, currently promoting a Gorillaz album whose concept was based around conjuring up the dystopia that might ensue if Donald Trump became US president. This was a notion that seemed so ridiculous and inconceivable it caused widespread hilarity in the studio when he announced it. Rather than a knowing joke, Gorillaz turned out to be the smartest artistic move of Albarn’s career, emancipating him from the Britpop millstone, revealing him not as a bandwagon jumper, but as the one inarguable musical polymath that maligned era produced. It is possible that he might have gone on to work in Afrobeat and Syrian orchestral music and write operas based on Chinese folk music had Gorillaz not been a vast transatlantic success, but it’s certainly harder to imagine.
Humanz demonstrates the pros and cons of Albarn’s musical restlessness. As usual, he displays exquisite taste in collaborators – everyone from fast-rising rapper DRAM to dancehall singer Popcaan to old-school Chicago house legend Jamie Principle – and an impressive ability to get the best out of them by throwing them into unlikely circumstances. It’s tempting to suggest that Submission is precisely the kind of out-and-out pop song that alt-R&B vocalist Kelela’s career has thus far lacked. Grace Jones sounds particularly magnificent improvising a vocal around a post-punk-y distorted guitar line, with Albarn singing in blank-eyed cockney Syd Barrett mode on Charger, while the conjunction of De La Soul, a relentless distorted techno beat and synthesiser, courtesy of Jean-Michel Jarre, on Momentz is dazzling.
On the downside, it seems a little light on hooks, as if the business of experimenting with production and the excitement of juxtaposing incongruous musical bedfellows took precedence over writing hits. It is a shame, because when Albarn remembers to come up with melodies, his trademark languid melancholy is as affecting as ever: Hallelujah Money and Sex Murder Party offer particularly haunting examples. In addition, Humanz can feel a bit like a scattershot collection of tracks, rather than a coherent album. It is a state of affairs compounded by the fact that, as is usual with concept albums, the concept doesn’t always hold up over the full 49 minutes. Some tracks fit the party-album-for-a-world-gone-mad concept, others are patently off-topic – and the spoken-word interludes, which reference everything from the Clash’s London Calling album to the old crowd shouting “Yes – we are all individuals!” joke from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, don’t make a vast amount of sense.
Then again, you could argue that is less a failing than evidence of Albarn’s ability to move with the times. After all, we live in an era where the world’s biggest stars refer to their new releases as playlists, rather than albums. And the one thing Humanz never does is suggest a decline in inspiration on the part of the man behind it. Quite the opposite: the ideas are still coming in such abundance, it seems to occasionally prove a struggle to marshal them. There are substantially worse problems for an artist to have than that. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/29/nicolas-jaar-the-only-thing-i-was-excited-about-was-can-electronic-music-be-political | Music | 2016-09-29T16:28:00.000Z | Seth Colter Walls | Nicolas Jaar: ‘The only thing I was excited about was, can electronic music be political?’ | Nicolas Jaar approaches our interview with the wariness of an artist who suspects those writing about him have not always been well informed. After walking into the Brooklyn coffee shop where we meet, he asks: “Have you heard my record?” Then, not long after: “When did you get the record?” And finally: “What did you think of the record?”
Nicolas Jaar: Sirens review – electronic noodling hypnotises, frustrates, dazzles
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I answer him directly. Sirens, the official follow-up to the 26-year-old’s 2011 electronic breakout Space Is Only Noise, is a focused and surprising album that builds on Jaar’s talent for crafting spacious, occasionally danceable soundscapes. The appearance of political commentary and dark humour herald an advance in the Chilean/American DJ/producer/songwriter’s sometimes insular aesthetic. The album’s opening and closing tracks reference the ravages of political inequality: Killing Time introduces the record with the words: “I think we’re just out of time/Says the officer to the kids/Ahmed was almost 15 and handcuffed.” Then there is a shift of scene, and perspective, and the addition of a bass-heavy percussive trudge to the gallows: “But comfort says we’re fine/And Angela said to open the door/Money, it seems, needs its working class.”
The closing track, History Lesson, satirically surveys the low likelihood of accountability for various crimes against humanity. In between these uncommonly direct statements, Jaar delves into the more personal concerns that have animated his previous work. It is as if facing up to the grimness of certain global realities can’t be done, each and every hour of the day.
Jaar brightens when I say: “You [started] with what I feel like is the crux of the whole thing.” He says the album is, in part, the result of becoming bored with his own self-obsession. “I felt I cannot be talking about me, me, me – my feelings, my private thing. When I had finished Pomegranates and Nymphs – two records that I made in between 2011 and 2015 – my first thought was: these records are extremely personal to me. They’re about my own experience as one human being.” With Sirens, he “wanted to really look out – but then weirdly, when I started looking out, I started looking even deeper in somehow. And that was a surprise.”
Other surprises include the lack of sampling. Aside from a “song from the Andes mountains” (included on the track No) and a vintage audio recording of Jaar and his father talking, just before his parents’ separation – a reference to an oft-reported source of his melancholy – every sound on the standard edition of Sirens is pure Jaar.
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Though Sirens mixes languages and styles, it has a sonic throughline, thanks to Jaar’s reliance on modular synths and selective approach to sampling. “With Space, if I wanted a snare, I would fucking go steal a snare,” he says. “I just like took a bunch of sounds from shit.” For Sirens, he envisioned a “a multiplicity of voices” in the service of a coherent sound. “If you maybe just listen to it on a surface level, it’s like: ‘Oh, there’s the reggaeton song and then there’s the punk song,’” Jaar says. “I hope we can go a little deeper than that.”
He credits a stint teaching at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2015 for helping him think about his approach. “I took the job but I was like: I’m going to hang out with these people. I don’t know what I could ever teach to these people. Some of them were more advanced than me. It was really humbling and fun.” But in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, says Jaar, “The only question I was excited about, for whatever reason, in the moment, was: Can – or should – electronic music be political? Can we protest through instrumental music, for example? And how would you do that?”
Jaar says one of his students “was seen as maybe a similar ethnicity” to the perpetrators of the violence, and felt profiled in the community in its aftermath. “That’s what he talked about. We were like how would you even – or why would we – put that into music? I have more questions about it now. I’m excited to see what this record does out in the world. Are people gonna take it as: ‘We don’t need this in music’? Or as: ‘We already think this. So why are you talking?’”
Jaar performing at the Barbican in London in 2013. Photograph: Hex/Corbis via Getty Images
He also says he will welcome negative responses to Sirens. Noting that he has navigated his way through several releases with a side-project feel – an ambient record (Pomegranates), a series of singles (Nymphs) and his Darkside band (a collaboration with guitarist Dave Harrington) – Jaar says he has tried to put elements from all those efforts to use on the new record. “I’m just not there yet. I failed at doing a combination of ‘looking out,’ still being as experimental, being as emotive as the Nymphs series is, potentially. It’s just this path, this formula that I’m trying to get.”
Failure is something he feels “on an emotional level, more than a theoretical” one. “When I was making Pomegranates, for example, I failed at doing the kind of ambient record I really wanted to do. But I have this [thought] in me: ‘I can’t wait to make the next one.’ I already know the title of the next ambient record.”
He talks of his differing musical identities and the attempt to make them cohere, but says he has realised that coherence doesn’t matter: “How do I reconcile these things? And now I’m realising: fuck reconciling.”
Sirens is released tomorrow. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/10/state-schooling-private-education | Life and style | 2009-01-10T00:01:00.000Z | Melissa Benn | Melissa Benn on the emotional fallout of state schooling and private education | Afew years ago, Amanda Snow's parents-in-law handed her an oddly burdensome gift. They offered to pay for her child to go to the prep school that her husband's father had attended, for which he still nursed strong nostalgic feelings. There was one snag. Amanda Snow has not one but three children, and her parents-in-law made it clear: this offer was for only one child and only one purpose. "We've always struggled financially," says Snow, "but this was not to go towards a new car, a family holiday or to help with the bills. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a glitzy, hugely privileged, £6,000-a-term school. Or nothing."
Add to this the fact that all three of the Snow children were "very happy at the local primary school" and Amanda was a stalwart of the PTA. "I also have quite strong feelings - political, ideological - about private schools and the way they cream off the middle classes. The system is very unfair. On the other hand, however much I believe in state education, there was always a part of me that looked over the fence and thought: what if?"
The family eventually agreed that they would accept the grandparents' offer and picked their son, and youngest child, then aged six, to take up the place. "We both felt we could justify it as a boys' thing; there was a lot of sport on offer, plus he was the one who needed a kick up the behind academically, which is just what he got."
A few years later, the family faced a new dilemma, as their son's time at prep school came to an end and there was "the awful pressure of the common entrance", the exam private-sector pupils take at 13 to determine their entrance to a range of public schools. "Suddenly, there was a chance of a scholarship, which would have meant keeping him in the private system, but paying for part of it ourselves," says Snow. "It wasn't the money that worried us, although that was a factor. It was the other two children. By then, our two eldest were at the very good local state school. So we sat all the children down and asked them what they thought. One joked, 'Well, he'll have good-looking friends ... ' But my elder daughter came out and said, 'It's really, really unfair.' And that was it for us."
Snow adds: "One thing I've always been good at is putting myself in the future and looking back, to see how decisions taken now might affect my children down the years. And we could see in terms of family fairness and the children's life identity that this was the wrong thing to do. Also, we felt if we had any extra family cash, we should do something that benefited all the children, not just one."
The Snows' dilemma was unusual, but the state/private divide affects a surprisingly large number of middle-class families. Just under 7% of children in the UK are educated privately, but in some parts of the country the numbers are far higher. In some wealthy London boroughs, for example, more than 40% of children attend an independent school. Even in more mixed-income boroughs, the figure can be as high as 30%.
This means that it is not that unusual to find one sibling at a private school and another at a selective, faith or local school. And also, since the economic downturn, families who might prefer private education are turning to the state sector, for purely economic reasons, for younger siblings. Choice of schools can just as easily affect the extended family. One set of cousins might be educated privately and another in the state sector, with the differences between them becoming starker as the children grow up.
So how does the state/private issue, with all its complex social and ideological overtones, affect relations at this intimate family level? Education is a notorious friendship buster, especially among the liberal middle classes, where each is acutely aware of the meaning of their own and other choices. State-school parents can be resentful and envious of the superior resources and smaller classes of private schools. They frequently bemoan what they see as the arrogance, smugness and often narrow perspective of the privately educated.
Meanwhile, private- school parents can feel uneasy at the educational and social apartheid they have, literally, bought into. In private, however, they may express relief at getting away from "chav culture" and what they argue are the unacceptably low academic and behavioural standards of some state schools.
No surprise then, that reaction to the choices of "the other side" range from strained politeness to passionate antagonism. The anguished grimace of Lesley, a state-school parent of liberal views, whose best friend has recently decided to send her son to private school, says it all. "I love my friend, but I hate what she is doing. But I can't - I daren't - bring it up. It would almost certainly lead to the Big Row ... "
Meanwhile, Alexandra, a left-leaning policy maker, talks of feeling like "a social pariah" among family and friends because she has chosen private education for her children. "They saw me as letting the side down. But before I had kids I used to do the same [attack friends who went private], so I can't really moan."
But given that friendship is often about shared values, while family is so often about shared DNA, might this issue be less problematic within the family? "It's not a problem for now," says Angela, whose elder child is at an expensive day school, while her younger goes to a comprehensive. "One is a league plummier than the other, whose language can be quite sloppy. Socially, the private school has been difficult for my elder child, who is quite bookish and shy and found it difficult being away from old friends at first. My younger child, who is anyway a great joiner in, went up to the local school with a large group, so it's been much easier to make the adjustment."
Does the subject ever come up between them? "Just occasionally, when the older one wants to have a go, they will say to the younger one, 'Well, you couldn't get into a good school ...' Actually, our elder child's school was less hard to get into than some: it's not highly competitive in terms of the entrance exam. Our younger child was trying for schools that were far more over-subscribed."
Other parents report similar teasing among siblings. Says one, "My daughter, who is at a private school, is keen to point out to her younger sister that her education is, in her view, superior because she gets far more homework, and thinks she is being more stretched than her sister."
David, a divorced parent of three, has three sons, and has "always lived near the edge financially speaking. It's been a perpetual struggle." But all three of his sons have won scholarships to private schools. A couple of years ago, however, his eldest son transferred to a state sixth form.
"Many of the teachers in my younger two children's schools are wonderfully erudite and when my marriage was in free fall a few years ago, the pastoral care was outstanding. But what I call the 'stench of entitlement' you get with a lot of private school kids has definitely affected my children. I see it now that my eldest son is at a state sixth form. He is so happy. He finally has friends.
"That's made it difficult for my middle child. He wants to go where his brother has gone for sixth form but he's torn between the wider range of academic choices and the sport on offer at his current school and the fact that he would like to make similar friends. For instance, it would be a relief for him to meet other children who do money-earning jobs at the weekend, which he has done for years."
What about the extended family? Given that wider family life is so often about exercising tolerance in mildly testing circumstances, shouldn't education be just one more difference among many to accommodate?
For some, though the differences are apparent, there is little obvious tension. Annie's daughters go to a comprehensive, but all their cousins are in private schools. "The cousins are definitely posher. My kids are much more 'street'," she says. "But when they all sit round the table my children always have something to say. Confidence is not an issue."
Diane, however, pulls a face when she is asked about her family situation. "Gosh, it's such a sensitive matter, isn't it? In our family, my brother has sent his son, an only child, to a private school. He didn't get into the state secondary school they had hoped to get him into and didn't like the alternative - even though it's a perfectly solid comprehensive - so felt justified in choosing a private school.
"We, on the other hand, have sent all of our three children to the same state secondary school - and though we've had our worries, like any parent, everything has been generally fine. We wouldn't have ever done otherwise, and are still quite shocked at the route my brother took.
"In truth, I think they're a bit embarrassed about the choice they made and because I'm a nice sister who doesn't want to hurt her little brother or make things unpleasant, I avoid the subject. But there's always been this undercurrent that their boy is somehow special and requires something better than the average child, ie mine, which is horrible.
"It hasn't caused a dramatic falling-out between us, but it has created a distance. I try very hard to protect my nephew from my negative feelings. It's not his fault and he's a great kid, whatever school he goes to. But sometimes I make a throwaway comment or observation to do with education - like whenever there are stories to do with private schools' charitable status, for example - and I end up having a bit of a rant in my brother's kitchen, like I would with my friends, and there's this sort of embarrassed silence because I've forgotten that he's 'one of them'."
Susan's husband went to "one of the most elite schools in the country. He was really unhappy there but he has never been able to tell his parents that. They worked so hard to send him there. But he was very clear that he wanted his own children to have a different experience."
Susan and her husband have chosen a state school for their children, while all her husband's siblings have followed the family tradition and gone to boarding school. "My parents-in-law don't go to the children's school often, but when they do there is a palpable sense of dismay, even though it has some of the most outstanding exam results in the country.
"The buildings and classrooms are so scruffy compared with what they're used to. They simply can't understand what we're doing. They can't understand our lives. I feel as if we are living in parallel Englands," she says.
Do they discuss it? "Absolutely not. It's much too difficult although everyone is intensely aware of it. It is obvious that they think we are letting our children down, that we are naive and foolishly idealistic."
Does the "parallel Englands" argument have any resonance for parents with children in both state and private schools? Not for Sandra, who has an elder child in a grammar school and a younger at a private school. "My two haven't had a problem about it because my younger child didn't get into the elder child's school, so it wasn't as if we didn't try to put them both into the same system. I think the important thing, within a family, is that it isn't done to favour one child over another."
Angela is slightly more cautious: "We recognise it could be an issue in the future, although it's not something that particularly worries us right now. For now, we try to focus on the advantages of both individual schools rather than making direct comparisons."
Of course, you can never crudely predict the future consequences of school choice. It might be that a favourite child is sent to a state school, or the private option might be reserved for a child with obvious learning or social difficulties; equally a child's academic education might be marred by a poor social experience, or vice versa.
But given the emotional and social freight of education in this country, surely the fact that parents have paid for the education of one child and not another must emerge further down the line? "You'd be amazed how often this issue arises during the course of therapy," says a psychotherapist in private practice.
"I often see people very resentful about the schools that a sibling was sent to. Or there's this idea, that can linger for decades, that someone in the family is the 'clever one'.
"Just occasionally, I will see clients who remain haunted by their failure to get into the apparently 'better' school. All these things contribute to their feelings that they're not good enough, even when they are doing pretty well in life by anyone else's standards."
Mary is now in her 40s, and a parent of two: "Both my brothers went to very smart private schools while mine had lousy facilities and crass teachers, on the whole. As a result, both boys appeared to be taken so much more seriously than I was. They got a lot of attention from their teachers. It was so different from my experience.
"I wonder if that's left me with a lifetime of feeling that I'm on the edges, and not able to believe that my contribution is as valid as anyone else's. I think it went in deep. I was very aware that I wasn't offered as thorough an intellectual grounding as my brothers. I don't believe my brothers ever really thought about the different experience I was having."
That is one problem that Amanda Snow will no longer have to face. All three of her children are now in the same school, all happy and doing well. "Our children are having the same education, the same chances and good chances. And that means everything for their future as adults."
All names and some details have been changed | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/29/re-vamped-british-horror-film-makers-hammer-and-amicus-are-back-from-the-dead | Film | 2023-10-29T16:00:48.000Z | David Barnett | Re-vamped: British horror film-makers Hammer and Amicus are back from the dead | Think of a classic horror film with an archetypal character such as Frankenstein or Dracula, or a movie with a name that does what it says on the tin, like Tales from the Crypt or Beyond the Grave, and the chances are you are thinking of a product by one of the “twins of evil”.
Hammer and Amicus were the studios that defined British horror cinema and bestrode the 1960s and 1970s, employing a wealth of British acting talent including Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Casts included names such as Michael Gough, Ralph Bates, Ingrid Pitt, Patrick Magee and Joan Collins.
Hammer is famous for its gothic output, which often took as its starting point the classics of supernatural literature, especially Frankenstein and Dracula, with Christopher Lee taking the role of the Transylvanian bloodsucker in seven movies beginning with 1958’s Dracula.
But by the late 1970s, the landscape of supernatural cinema was changing. The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen had redefined horror and the schlocky period scares of Hammer and Amicus fell out of favour. Now, after decades in the wilderness – aside from the Hammer name’s brief resurgence in 2012 with the Daniel Radcliffe-led adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black – both film houses are, well, back from the dead.
Christopher Lee and Caroline Munro in Dracula A.D. 1972. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Hammer has been revived with a bang with its first new movie – Doctor Jekyll – hitting cinemas this week, following the announcement in August that the studio had been taken over by the John Gore Organisation, primarily known as a producer of blockbuster Broadway and West End theatre shows.
For John Gore himself, though, acquiring Hammer has been a long-held dream. “My first ambition was film, but theatre took over,” he says. “And I have loved Hammer since I was a kid, since I first saw Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Dracula.”
Doctor Jekyll – starring comedian Eddie Izzard as Nina Jekyll, disgraced chief executive of a big pharma company with a mind-bending secret – is the first release by the new Hammer. It is at work on developing a slate of new horror movies, about which Gore can reveal little. He can say, though, that the plan is to have a big Hammer horror release around Halloween every year.
And what of Amicus? It, too, is back, but on a slightly smaller scale.
“Can we elevate Amicus Productions beyond the confines of what the BBC labelled in 1971 as Britain’s ‘tiniest film studio’?” says Lawrie Brewster, the man behind the revival. “Unquestionably. Our primary aim is to create films that respect and honour the legacy of Amicus. We don’t aspire to outshine the Amicus classics – that’s not our prerogative. Our mission is to craft films that celebrate the golden era of British horror, paying respect to the rich traditions of yesteryear.”
Eddie Izzard in Doctor Jekyll. Photograph: Amanda Searle
Can either Hammer or Amicus be relevant to modern audiences? There’s certainly the nostalgia factor to take into account. Jeremy Dyson of The League of Gentlemen, co-author of the novel The Warlock Effect with Andy Nyman, is one of many people working in TV and film today who remembers them fondly.
“Both Hammer and Amicus were so much a part of my imaginative landscape,” says Dyson. “My first introduction to them was through books, in which were frozen these stills from the movies, which fascinated me long before I got to watch the films.
“These studios were the British film industry for many years, and even so a lot of these films were considered down and dirty, and disregarded by the establishment. Can they come back? They’re just names, really, so it means getting as talented a group of people working on them as they had in their heyday, and if they can do that, I don’t see why not, if the stars are aligned.”
Hammer, especially, was famous for actresses who appeared heaving of bosom and in a state of undress – so much so that websites, Facebook groups and books are devoted to the “Hammer Glamour” scream queens such as Pitt, Valerie Leon, Madeline Smith and Caroline Munro.
Munro presents the Friday night Cellar Club segment on Talking Pictures TV, introducing old horror and thriller movies. She starred in films for Hammer – Dracula AD 1972 and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter – and in Amicus’s At The Earth’s Core. She runs a lively Facebook group and regularly attends conventions where Hammer fans queue up for her autograph.
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“I think it’s wonderful that both names are coming back,” she says. “It’s a huge boost for the British film industry, and I think there is massive potential for both Hammer and Amicus to rise again.
“They are still both very well-regarded names, and if those running them now can make films with the same love and care that Hammer and Amicus did in their prime, I would love to see them succeed.”
At 74, Munro is still acting in horror movies – she is in a new movie to be released in 2024, The Presence of Snowgood. But perhaps the days of Munro in thigh-high boots and not much else, as she appeared in Dracula AD 1972, and the other scream queens who typified 1970s horror,may prove slightly more problematic today.
For Jamie-Lee Nardone, a self-confessed “horror nerd” who runs a book PR agency dealing with horror and fantasy fiction, the return of both studios is not surprising.
She says: “There’s a current horror boom which is incredibly exciting; films are topping the box office, women in the industry are more successful than ever, genre publishing is growing exponentially, theme park rides have been inspired by franchises.
“And though the horror movie landscape is very different to what it was, the shadow of Hammer and Amicus still looms over it.
“Watch any recent horror film or TV show and you can see the callbacks and influences – they were hugely instrumental to the creation of our contemporary industry, and continue to be,” says Nardone. “Without them, would we now have the wealth of talent today? The inspiration is everywhere – from Inside No 9 and Black Mirror, to the films of Jason Blum, , Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter, and Guillermo del Toro.”
Perhaps it’s Amicus, the studio once famous for depicting on-screen blood, gore and nudity, that will be the torchbearer for the golden age, he suggests. “It appears to want to cater as more of a homage in terms of bosoms and blood, bringing something once dead back to life, and transporting us back to that time.
“And there’s definitely a place for that. When it comes to horror, nostalgia is still king, but let’s hope with a little more diversity and forward-thinking – it doesn’t necessarily have to stay in the past. Sometimes things stay dead for a reason.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/03/life-and-death-in-sarajevo | World news | 2012-04-03T19:00:00.000Z | Barbara Demick | Life and death on my street in Sarajevo | In 1991, the year that the Soviet Union broke up, a nationalist revival was sweeping eastern Europe. It found its most pernicious expression in Yugoslavia, a country patched together in 1943 out of six republics. Slovenia, the richest and most westernised, extricated itself after only a 10-day war. Croatia's war was longer and deadlier. The Yugoslav National Army, dominated by Serbs, put up more of a fight to hold on to the boomerang-shaped republic that included most of the Adriatic coastline.
The savagery reached its height the following year when Bosnia declared its independence from the country that had been collapsing around it. Bosnia was the most ethnically diverse of the republics and its leaders proposed that it would be in effect a mini-Yugoslavia of Serbs, Croats and Muslims living together. Nationalists in the Serb population wanted to remain with Serbia and formed a breakaway republic, the Republika Srpska. With the tacit support of Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic, they commandeered much of the weaponry of the disbanding Yugoslav National Army and launched a campaign to erase the Muslim presence on the lands they claimed for their own. Concentration camps and mass graves returned to Europe for the first time since the second world war. The beautiful city of Sarajevo, with its mosques, synagogues, Orthodox and Catholic churches, was besieged for three and a half years from April 1992, its food and electricity supplies cut off, its civilian population relentlessly bombarded.
A whole generation of war correspondents cut their teeth covering Bosnia. It was so difficult to get in and out of Sarajevo that a huge press corps simply moved into the Holiday Inn and became part of the story; I experienced the siege with the Sarajevans. True, we had electricity, some food and occasional running water and many of us drove around in armoured cars, but we were as vulnerable as anybody to the constant mortar fire.
From the outside, the conflict seemed very complicated – ancient Balkan hatreds, geopolitical fault lines – but when you were actually there, it was simple. Civilians were trapped inside the city; people with guns were shooting at them – and us. The Sarajevans were impressive. Well into the war, when idealism should have been shattered, most Sarajevans still believed they could preserve a multicultural space in their city.
When I arrived in January 1994, an "empathy fatigue", as they called it in the humanitarian aid business, had settled over Bosnia. Readers around the world were numbed to the suffering of a people whose names they couldn't pronounce in a place they had never been. To bring home the reality of the war, my editors at the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested I pick a street in Sarajevo and profile the people living there, describing their lives.
Barbara Demick at work in the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo, 1994. Photograph: John Costello
I knew the street I wanted to write about the first time I walked up it. Even battered by war, it was a beautiful street, rising uphill at a perfect perpendicular angle from the main thoroughfare, three white minarets piercing the sky above red rooftops. I spent the better part of two years on Logavina Street, knocking on doors, drinking coffee from people who could barely afford it, hearing their tragedies. Their stories formed the basis of a series of articles and later were woven into a book. In early 1995, after a ceasefire made the city a little safer, I moved out of the Holiday Inn into a flat around the corner from Logavina; later, I rented a room in the house of the first couple I had met, Jela and Zijo Džino.
The war ended in 1995. After more than 100,000 deaths and a massacre in which 8,000 unarmed Muslim men were murdered in the town of Srebrenica, Nato finally intervened in August with air strikes against the Serbs. Today, all six republics are individual countries – Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia, as well as Bosnia, although Bosnia is partitioned into separate republics for Serbs, and for Croats and Muslims. Kosovo, which is largely Albanian, broke off in 2008, although Serbia has not recognised its independence. The region is more or less at peace, with the exception of occasional skirmishes in Kosovo, where international peacekeepers are still present.
Since the 90s I have been back to Sarajevo twice, once in 2007 and more recently in 2011. Each time, I was struck by how much it looked and felt the same. The city is timeless, almost immutable. Along the stone alleys of the Bašcaršija, the jewellers are tapping away behind shopfronts with the same names: Kasumagic, Cengic. Even the music is the same 1980s technopop.
So little has changed on Logavina Street that I can almost navigate my way with my eyes closed. At the foot of the street, there's the Caffe Elvis. Overhead, a messy cat's cradle of electric wires. In front of the mosque on the first corner is a pack of half a dozen of the same dun-coloured stray dogs, or perhaps their descendants, glaring at me through half-closed eyes.
From the outside the grocery doesn't look much different from the days when it distributed humanitarian aid. Underneath a car parked on the pavement, I can see where the tarmac was gouged out by a mortar shell, the shrapnel splashing out in a circular pattern from the point of impact. A civic group that started up in the mid-90s poured red resin into the indentations to make them into a memorial – they call them "Sarajevo roses", though I think "pawprints", the old name we used during the war, is truer to their appearance.
Jela and Zijo Džino are the people on Logavina Street with whom I have stayed most closely in touch. Zijo is a Muslim from an old Sarajevo family that had lived in the same house for two centuries. Jela is a Catholic from Šibenik, on the Croatian coast. They met in 1956 when Zijo was on holiday at a seaside motel. Jela was working there as a waitress. He thought she looked like an actress. She thought he was too skinny, and brought him extra portions of dinner. When they married, nobody in their respective families raised objections about religious differences between the two.
Their house is far from the grandest on the street, though it is painted in a confident fin-de-siècle pink. Despite their advancing years, they have kept up the garden that sustained them through the war. Onions, chard, beans and squash are planted in tidy rows, although the flowers are wild, a profusion of blue hydrangeas and yellow rhododendron.
Jela and Zijo Dzino during the siege in 1995, washing their ill son Nermin. Photograph: John Costello
During the war, Jela and Zijo spent most of their time in the small kitchen downstairs because it was safer; now it is more convenient because it saves Jela the trouble of climbing the stairs. She has pain where her left leg was injured by a mortar shell and she is broader in the hips than before. Zijo is sprightly, but while he keeps his weight low and doesn't smoke, he has had a heart attack and his overall health isn't as good as his wife's.
Although I have forgotten most of what little Serbo-Croatian I knew, it is easy to understand them because the refrain is the same as during the war. "Nema ništa" – "There's nothing". Jela takes a drag of her cigarette, now a fancy-looking new brand called Aura instead of her old Drinas. "The economy collapsed during the war and it continues to go down."
The Džinos live on modest pensions from the state-owned factories where they worked before retiring. Jela's textile factory and Zijo's housewares company both closed down after the war. To the extent that new businesses have come in, they're small – cafés, boutiques. The timeless quality about Sarajevo that I selfishly find so appealing, Jela points out, is the mark of a failed economy.
Only because they were sent money by their daughter Alma, a psychiatrist living in South Africa, were they able to patch over the hole where the mortar shell slammed into their kitchen. Many of their neighbours' houses still have war damage for lack of money for repairs.
The statistics bear out what Jela is saying. Salaries in Bosnia are among the lowest in Europe, between €300 to €400 (£250-£330) a month, and unemployment about the highest, 46%. The World Bank, in its annual Ease of Doing Business Index, ranked Bosnia and Herzegovnia 110th out of 187 countries in 2010, the lowest of the six former republics of Yugoslavia. One reason is the Rube Goldbergian political system set up by the Dayton peace accord. In order to keep the Bosnian-Croat Federation and 10 separate cantons (they were apparently aspiring to Switzerland when they picked the term) and a separate government for the small city of Brcko that nobody could agree on, the pact created 14 separate governments. "It is the most complicated political system I have ever seen," a US official told me. "You need to have something like 50 documents to open any kind of business."
The Džinos's son Nermin, although he speaks fluent English as a result of a stint living with his sister, could only get a job when he returned as a driver for the state court. It pays so poorly that he can barely support his partner and their infant son. "I make in a month what my sister makes in a week," Nermin complains.
The following weekend I finally get to meet Alma, who is visiting with her husband Siniša and two daughters. If anything, Alma seems more traumatised by the war than her battle-scarred parents or veteran brother. This is something I notice in many people I meet. For those who drop in every year or so, everything reminds them of the war that they missed and the experience feels fresher and more vivid. Alma left Sarajevo on Saturday 4 April 1992. Two weeks later, she was in Belgrade watching Serbian TV when she saw a report from the city. "There was this house with a hole in it. And I thought: 'Oh my God, that's my parents' house.' I called my mother-in-law and she said, 'No, I'm sure you're wrong.' Then I saw shots from the hospital. There was my father, naked, with a sheet over his genitals."
Alma's husband fled Sarajevo in mid-May to join her. The family never came back except for holidays.
A 'Sarajevo rose', the red resin filling in the holes left by a mortar blast. Photograph: Reuters
We have got far enough into the conversation without talking about ethnicity, which hangs like a foul miasma, low over Sarajevo. You might not notice it immediately and once you're in Sarajevo a while, you may forget it at times, but questions about who is Serb, Croat or Muslim lurk in the background. People avoid talking about ethnicity. They steer the conversation away. Or else they speak with excruciating political correctness, using so much euphemism it is hard to grasp their intent. You don't say Bosnian Muslim any more; you say Bosniak (a cumbersome word we journalists ridiculed during the war). You say "Bosnian of Serbian nationality" for a Serb who still lives in Sarajevo, or "Serb aggressor" for somebody who fought on the other side.
Alma is a direct person, so she plunges into the subject. Siniša is a Serb – at least he identifies himself as such, although his mother is Catholic. Although he wasn't one of the Serbs who went over to the other side, he didn't stay and help either. Six weeks after Alma left, he managed to sneak out of the city by slipping into a convoy of departing Yugoslav National Army vehicles. "He never did anything bad. His name is still clean. Everybody likes him," says Alma. "We had friends who left because they went over to the Serb side of Sarajevo. As long as they didn't do any harm, it is OK."
Yet the ethnic question isn't dismissed so easily. Everybody knows who's who. Both Alma and Siniša worry about the influence of Wahhabism, the Sunni fundamentalist doctrine from Saudi Arabia. "Now everybody is so preoccupied with religion. They are supposed to invest in industry. Instead they are building mosques," he says.
Just how many Serbs still live in Sarajevo? Bosnia hasn't done a census since 1991, so nobody quite knows or is even willing to hazard a guess, although it is assumed the number is a fraction of the pre-war population of 157,000. Logavina Street's Serb population has been reduced as much by old age as ethnic tension. Many of the Sarajevo Serbs have moved out of the centre of the city to Pale, the skiing village that was Radovan Karadžic's headquarters during the war, and to other Sarajevo neighbourhoods that have been assigned to Republika Srpska.
The whole area is now called "Eastern Sarajevo". Many of the Serbs who work in government jobs in central Sarajevo feel more comfortable living in Republika Srpska and so they commute back and forth. The licence plates are the same on both sides; in a brilliant bit of Balkan diplomacy, they use the letters T, K, J, O and A – which happen to be the same in the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets – so that nobody knows who's who from their car.
Ethnic tension is especially pronounced in the workplace, where jobs are often allocated by nationality. The system had its genesis in Communist times and was reinstated after the war in a misguided attempt to achieve ethnic balance. In the Dayton peace accord, it applied to elected political offices, namely the tripartite presidency in which a Muslim, a Serb and a Croat share power. It has been expanded since to include military, police and other civil service jobs. Departments have to be filled with "x" number of Muslims, "y" number of Croats, "z" number of Serbs. Known as the "national key", the system is dysfunctional and discriminatory, widely ridiculed and subject to legal challenges.
In 1990, before the break-up of Yugoslavia, 13% of marriages were mixed, and in Sarajevo the figure was above 30%. The Džinos's son Nermin is among those who refused to be categorised. Rather than choose between his Muslim father and Catholic mother, he listed himself as "other". He and his girlfriend, also mixed, picked the name Darian for their infant son, which isn't associated with any of the three ethnic groups.
Others pick an identity for pragmatic reasons rather than religious. There are never quite enough Serbs and Croats to fill the positions since the quotas are based on a census taken in 1991, back when Muslims were only 50% of the population. If you're a half-Muslim, do you declare yourself Muslim to enjoy the confidence of being in the majority, or do you chose to be a minority, a Serb or a Croat, for the positive discrimination that will help you get a job? And, of course, the preference for Serbs and Croats builds ethnic resentment.
"When they open a new job and a Bosnian Croat or Bosnian Serb gets it, you can overhear people talking about it. They'll say: 'Do you see that guy? He's a Serb'," says Nermin.
On bad days during the siege of Sarajevo, as many as 3,500 shells rained down on the city. You could duck snipers by staying away from exposed junctions, but no one could predict where a shell might land. At the upper end of Logavina Street, a bomb shelter was set up in a former orphanage, a place bleaker than anything imagined by Charles Dickens. The walls were a sallow, institutional green and seemed to exude a century's misery.
The building was perched – haunted-house style – atop a ridge, above a weed-strewn vacant lot. So little daylight penetrated the dank halls that you needed to navigate by torchlight, even on the sunniest days. Built in the 1890s, the orphanage housed refugees during both world wars. It briefly functioned as a jail. Many Logavina residents thought the building was cursed with bad karma and would not go near it.
Delila Lacevic (at left) with her cousins during the siege of Sarajevo, flinching at the sound of a nearby explosion. Photograph: John Costello/Granta
Delila Lacevic, then 19 years old, lived next door to the orphanage with her grandmother in an old family house. During the first winter of the war, she and her 11-year-old brother Berin and their parents had all gone together to a brewery across the river that was one of the only places during the siege that had water. As they waited their turn, mortar shells came slamming into a brick wall above them. Delila grabbed her brother and fell to the ground. When the whirlwind of brick and shrapnel stopped, they looked for their parents.
"Are Mummy and Daddy OK?" Berin asked.
"Can't you see they're dead? Daddy has no head," Delila snapped back.
Eight people were killed at the brewery on 15 January 1993. Footage of the shelling, and of Berin at his parents' funeral, was broadcast around the world. A retired couple in Kansas saw it on television and vowed they would evacuate the orphaned boy from Sarajevo. They didn't realise at the time that Berin had a sister. Delila was badly injured herself in the shelling and was in the hospital during the funeral. After Berin arrived in the US, they vowed to rectify their mistake and bring out Delila as well. When I met her in 1994, she was curled up inside the house with her brother's cat, studying English in anticipation of her new life. She told me once she left Sarajevo, she would never return. In fact, she came back only once, in 2007, to show her American husband and mother-in-law around Sarajevo. They were supposed to stay for two weeks. They left after five days.
She couldn't even take the sight of the gravestone she and Berin had purchased for their parents – topped with a Turkish fez in the traditional Bosnian Muslim style. After a decade without cigarettes, she started chain-smoking again. "I can't forget. I can't forgive. I can't get over it. I don't want to stare at it," Delila told me about her trip. She didn't want to hang around Sarajevo feeling sorry for herself. "Shit happens. Kids in Srebrenica are still waiting for their dads' body parts. At least I know where my parents are buried." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/02/claridges-hotel-breastfeeding-woman-cover-up | Life and style | 2014-12-02T11:30:49.000Z | Mark Tran | Claridge’s hotel criticised after telling breastfeeding woman to cover up | A woman has described how she felt humiliated after being asked to cover up while breastfeeding at Claridge’s, the luxury hotel in London.
Louise Burns, 35, who tweeted pictures of herself and her 12-week-old baby, said she was having a Christmas tea treat at the hotel with her mother and sister when her infant needed feeding.
Asked to cover up with this ridiculous shroud while #breastfeeding so not to cause offence @ClaridgesHotel today.. pic.twitter.com/Is8GWUaGag
— Lou Burns (@Andysrelation) December 1, 2014
“I started feeding her very discreetly when the waiter hurried over with a huge napkin, knelt down and said it was policy to cover up,” she told the Guardian. “My initial reaction was to burst into tears. This was my third baby. I had trouble breastfeeding the first two but this was going well. I didn’t expect to be admonished in a central London hotel.”
Burns, from Streatham, south London, who worked in financial services, said she felt very awkward and wanted to leave, but her mother and sister had come from the Midlands for their Christmas treat at Claridge’s at some expense, something they had liked doing for the past few years.
She said the waiter was polite, as was a supervisor who was very apologetic but stated that it was hotel policy for mothers to cover up while breastfeeding.
...SO much more obvious with it than without! Such a shame I can never go back.... @ClaridgesHotel #breastfeeding pic.twitter.com/1DyNQUMYL4
— Lou Burns (@Andysrelation) December 1, 2014
“By then I had calmed down, but I felt so humiliated. I was being so discreet. No one should be made to feel like that in this day and age, especially when mothers are under pressure to breastfeed.”
On its website, the NHS says: “You shouldn’t ever be made to feel uncomfortable about breastfeeding in public. In fact, the Equality Act 2010 has made it illegal for anyone to ask a breastfeeding woman to leave a public place such as a cafe, shop or public transport.”
The Mumsnet website is also emphatic on the right to breastfeed in public: “Remember, it’s not illegal or immoral to breastfeed your baby in public and in many countries, including Scotland, it’s your legal right to be left to do so in peace. It is important you feel comfortable and happy feeding your baby.
“Try to develop a thick skin … Remind yourself that what you’re doing is a completely natural part of being a mum. Remember, most people won’t bat an eyelid and will let you feed your baby in peace.”
A Claridge’s spokeswoman declined to discuss the incident, but said it did allow breastfeeding. “It is our policy never to talk about our guests,” she said.
Burns said the hotel did offer a £75 discount and the supervisor expressed the hope that she would come again. But she tweeted: “Such a shame I can never go back.”
She said she was not carrying out a big crusade, but wanted an apology. “It was a Christmas treat. No one should be made to feel like that.”
Burns, whose husband Nick is an actor known for playing the comic character Nathan Barley, has received many messages of support.
One tweeter wrote: “You are absolutely right. They shouldn’t have made you feed in a way you didn’t want to, it’s illegal.”
.@Andysrelation you are absolutely right.They shldn’t have made you feed in a way you didn’t want to, it’s illegal: http://t.co/HqGAfBUxK2
— Tooting Baby (@Tootingbaby) December 1, 2014
Another said: “How can the sight of mother feeding her child do anything else than make people feel good! @ClaridgesHotel apologies needed.”
Lucy Bunting said: “Under the 2010 discrimination act, asking a bf’ing mother to cover up is illegal and disgusting behaviour!!! This is clearly their policy not just a rogue member of staff! Even more unacceptable!”
Another tweeter, @rosedeirdre, wrote: “It’s sad, because it’s the first a woman will do, to create a bond with & nourish baby & shamed 4 it.”
A Guardian commenter, Gré Tee, said: “I just don’t understand why this is still an issue in 2014? This is a woman breastfeeding, seriously, if it ‘puts you off’ your food, it is absolutely OK not to look.
“I am just completely amazed by the lack of empathy in some people … it is not always possible to manage feeding times when it suits absolutely everyone in the mother’s environment … Could we just all get over it and stop acting like this is some sort of shameful thing that we need to cover up???”
Others criticised the hotel. “Shame on you Claridge’s: asked to cover up while #breastfeeding so not to cause offence,” tweeted Zoe Crawford, while @berrykirei said: “Something human & natural made 2 look shameful, apology not good enough.”
Travelodge Hotels said it “had no policy whatsoever about breastfeeding” and that their customers can breastfeed their children “as and when they like”.
The NHS points out that breastfeeding is the healthiest way to feed a baby and it recommends feeding a baby only breast milk for around the first six months. After that, it advises giving breast milk alongside other food to help the baby continue to grow and develop.
Additional reporting by Ashley Chalmers | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jun/02/fifa-jerome-valcke-under-pressure-10m-bribe | Football | 2015-06-02T10:34:12.000Z | Owen Gibson | Fifa’s secretary general Jérôme Valcke under new pressure over $10m ‘bribe’ | The position of Fifa’s powerful secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, is likely to come under intense pressure after new evidence emerged that showed he was aware of a $10m payment from South African officials to Jack Warner described by US investigators as a bribe.
The revelation will also put the embattled Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, recently re-elected for a fifth term, under renewed pressure over whether he knew about the 2008 payment and what it was for.
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Just an hour after Fifa had released a statement denying that Valcke authorised the transfer of $10m to a Bank of America account linked to Warner, a letter from the South African Football Association was obtained by the Press Association that was addressed to the longstanding Fifa secretary general. It showed he was aware of it and contained detailed instructions for payment.
Fifa’s statement had said neither Valcke, Blatter’s longtime closest ally and fixer, nor the president himself “were involved in the initiation, approval and implementation of the above project”.
The payment is at the heart of the Fifa bribery scandal - a US department of justice indictment of 18 people, including 13 Fifa executives, on corruption charges says the money was paid to Warner and his deputy, Chuck Blazer, in return for them voting for the 2010 World Cup to be played in South Africa.
The indictment states that “a high-ranking Fifa official caused payments … totalling $10m – to be wired from a Fifa account in Switzerland to a Bank of America correspondent account in New York … controlled by Jack Warner”.
The letter, seen by the Guardian, was dated 4 March 2008 and contained detailed instructions on how the money should be paid. The SAFA president, Molefi Oliphant, asks for the $10m to be deducted from the $423m due to the organisers of the World Cup by Fifa and instead routed to a “diaspora legacy programme” controlled by Jack Warner, the disgraced former president of Concacaf.
BOMBSHELL: Letter from South Africa FA to FIFA instructing $10m payment to Warner WAS addressed to Jerome Valcke pic.twitter.com/b0yKBPRAcA
— Martyn Ziegler (@martynziegler) June 2, 2015
The letter from Oliphant to Valcke reads: “In view of the decision by the South African government that an amount of USD 10million from the organising committee’s future operational budget funding and thereafter advances the amount to the Diaspora Legacy Programme. In addition, SAFA requests that the Diaspora Legacy Programme be administered and implemented directly by the President of Concacaf who shall act as a fiduciary of the Fund.”
A Fifa response read: “The letter is consistent to our statement where we underlined that the Fifa Finance Committee made the final approval.”
According to the US indictment, the money was siphoned off into Warner’s personal accounts and he paid $750,000 of a promised $1m to Blazer.
Warner, among those charged in the US, said after his arrest last week: “If I have been thieving money for 30 years, who gave me the money? How come he is not charged?”
American prosecutors last week accused nine senior current or former Fifa officials – seven of whom, including the Fifa vice-presidents Jeffrey Webb and Eugenio Figueredo, were arrested in dawn raids at a five-star hotel in Switzerland – of “hijacking” international football to run “a World Cup of fraud” to line their pockets by $150m.
In the indictment that followed the arrests last Wednesday, it was alleged that the $10m payment from South Africa was routed to the Caribbean in return for World Cup votes.
Fifa’s statement, released this morning in the wake of overnight reports in the New York Times that Valcke was the unnamed senior official named in the indictment, said the French secretary general was not involved.
It said the payment was made at the request of the South African government and FA, and authorised by the Argentinian Julio Grondona, the former chairman of Fifa’s finance committee and long-time ally of president Sepp Blatter. Grondona died last year.
Fifa insisted Valcke nor any other senior management figure was involved. At a press conference on Saturday Blatter was asked about his knowledge of the $10m payment and replied: “Definitely that’s not me. I have no $10m.”
The Fifa statement said: “The payments totalling USD 10m were authorised by the then chairman of the Finance Committee and executed in accordance with the organisation regulations of Fifa. Fifa did not incur any costs as a result of South Africa’s request because the funds belonged to the LOC. Both the LOC and SAFA adhered to the necessary formalities for the budgetary amendment.
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“Neither the Secretary General Jerome Valcke nor any other member of Fifa’s senior management were involved in the initiation, approval and implementation of the above project.”
It also said: “SAFA instructed Fifa that the Diaspora Legacy Programme should be administered and implemented directly by the President of Concacaf who at that time was Deputy Chairman of the Finance Committee and who should act as the fiduciary of the Diaspora Legacy Programme Fund of USD 10m.”
The reference to Warner, who as deputy chairman of the finance committee was involved in discussions over effectively approving a $10m payment to himself, itself raises questions about Fifa’s processes.
In Paraguay on Monday a judge ordered house arrest for the former president of South America’s soccer federation Nicolás Leoz, accused of involvement in the scandal. And in Brazil, a new inquiry has been launched into the controversial dealings of Ricardo Teixeira, the former head of the Brazilian football association, who is accused of making $150m in kickbacks. One of his successors, José Maria Marin, was among those arrested last week.
Following Blatter’s re-election as Fifa president the English Football Association’s chairman, Greg Dyke, said his organisation would support any boycott led by Uefa, who will meet on Saturday in Berlin ahead of the Champions League final.
The English Football Association board member Heather Rabbatts announced she was withdrawing from Fifa’s task force against racism and discrimination with immediate effect. “Like many in the game I find it unacceptable that so little has been done to reform Fifa,” she said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/football-league-blog/2021/dec/24/championship-at-halfway-blackburn-nottingham-forest-fulham | Football | 2021-12-24T08:00:50.000Z | Ben Fisher | Championship at halfway: Blackburn surge and remarkable Forest revival | PacesettersNot so fast. The stuttering form of leaders Fulham and second-placed Bournemouth – neither have won any of their past five matches – has knitted things together towards the summit to tee up an intriguing second half of the season. A four-point blanket covers the top four, with Blackburn nestled in third above West Brom after bouncing back from a freak 7-0 trouncing by Fulham last month (it was only the second time they had lost a league game by more than a single goal since October 2020) by recording six wins in seven games, conceding twice. Among those on the Fulham scoresheet was Aleksandar Mitrovic, who has 25 goals in 27 games for club and country this season and whose league tally of 22 means he has outscored four strugglers in the division: Hull, Peterborough, Barnsley and Derby.
Blackburn, who finished 15th last season, are the surprise package. In the summer they reinvested £400,000 of the £15m they received for talisman Adam Armstrong on a left-back from League One (Tayo Edun from Lincoln), Harvey Elliott and Taylor Harwood-Bellis exited after productive loan spells, a dozen senior players departed and yet they are mounting an unlikely promotion charge. Ben Brereton Díaz, the Stoke-born former England Under-19s striker turned Chile sensation, has provided a stream of goals, and the home-grown midfielders Lewis Travis and John Buckley have also impressed. Brereton Díaz has scored 19 in 23 games since adding his mother’s maiden name to his shirt in August, compared with nine in his previous 80 matches.
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West Brom are strong defensively but urgently require a bona fide No 9 to kill teams off, with Valérien Ismaël keen on reuniting with Daryl Dike. Bournemouth seemed untouchable for so long, Lloyd Kelly and Gary Cahill forming a peerless partnership, but defensive sloppiness has crept in. Fulham’s lead may have been shredded but budging them off pole position is another thing. They are blessed with midfield options, including the rejuvenated Jean Michaël Seri, the often-overlooked Neeskens Kebano, and Harry Wilson, who tends to enjoy himself at this level. Then there is Mitrovic.
Play-off chasers
Five points separate fifth-placed Queens Park Rangers and Blackpool, who continue to make impressive strides under Neil Critchley, in 13th but the former can point to two games in hand on most rivals as an opportunity to move level with West Brom. Nottingham Forest were bottom with a solitary point when Chris Hughton was sacked in mid-September but a few months on the outlook is distinctly different. Steve Cooper’s side are motoring in the rear-view mirror of sixth-placed Stoke City, who seem to have struck a healthy balance between experience and youthful exuberance – they have not paid a fee for any player over the age of 23 since Michael O’Neill took charge two years ago – with Mario Vrancic and Josh Tymon impressing at either end of the scale.
Sheffield United are brimming with confidence after replacing Slavisa Jokanovic with Paul Heckingbottom and look well stocked to push on from mid-table. The majority of the squad that won promotion to the Premier League under Chris Wilder remain – Billy Sharp, Ollie Norwood and John Egan continue to be key pillars – but in Iliman Ndiaye who, like Sorba Thomas at Huddersfield, made big strides at non-league Boreham Wood, they possess a welcome unpredictability. The 21-year-old forward ran from inside his own half on Monday to beat Fulham and earn a fourth straight win. “You’ve not seen the best of him yet,” was Heckingbottom’s verdict.
Iliman Ndiaye (right), in action here against Preston, offers Sheffield United unpredictability. Photograph: Jez Tighe/ProSports/REX/Shutterstock
Wilder is now at Middlesbrough and has overseen an impressive upturn, which has restored optimism, though they may need to bolster their forward line to sustain their push. Coventry City have lost momentum in recent weeks but Mark Robins’ side, for whom Callum O’Hare has been particularly instrumental, remain very much in the conversation. Their unlikely ascent towards the top is one of the stories of the season. Millwall and Huddersfield appear too inconsistent to trouble the top six.
Strugglers
Weighed down by a 21-point penalty, Derby County’s primary focus is on surviving as a club, never mind in the division. Any hopes of staying up vanished a long time ago but Wayne Rooney continues to pull results out of the bag with a mishmash of a squad. The administrators, Quantuma, remain confident of selling the club in January. Last month supporters clubbed together to pay off the club’s £8,304 debt to St John Ambulance, one of dozens of creditors.
Reading are another side nursing a points deduction for breaching financial rules. They have no shortage of pedigree – Andy Carroll, Junior Hoilett, Danny Drinkwater, Scott Dann, Alen Halilovic, Baba Rahman, George Puscas, the list goes on – but a team that began last season so promisingly have shown few signs of taking flight, even if the midfielder John Swift has been one of the division’s standout performers for a team one place above the drop.
Keane Lewis-Potter celebrates after scoring the goal that gave Hull victory over another struggling team, Cardiff, last month. Photograph: James Marsh/Rex/Shutterstock
Peterborough are leaking goals but are in no way adrift and will hope to drag Cardiff, Hull, who have lost only one of their past seven games, Bristol City and Birmingham into trouble. Second-bottom Barnsley have got nowhere near replicating a memorable last campaign – they have won one of their past 21 matches and are the division’s lowest scorers – but the head coach, Poya Asbaghi, can see green shoots. “I’m sure when we start winning that we can create a machine that goes on and on,” he says.
Pos Team P GD Pts
1 Fulham 23 32 45
2 AFC Bournemouth 23 17 43
3 Blackburn 23 14 42
4 West Brom 23 13 41
5 QPR 21 6 35
6 Stoke 22 5 35
7 Nottm Forest 23 7 34
8 Coventry 22 3 34
9 Middlesbrough 23 2 33
10 Huddersfield 23 1 33
11 Sheff Utd 22 1 32
12 Millwall 22 0 30
13 Blackpool 23 -4 30
14 Luton 22 4 29
15 Preston North End 22 -4 28
16 Swansea 22 -5 27
17 Birmingham 23 -8 27
18 Bristol City 23 -9 27
19 Hull 23 -8 23
20 Cardiff 22 -14 22
21 Reading 22 -7 21
22 Peterborough 23 -24 19
23 Barnsley 23 -19 14
24 Derby 22 -3 4 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/mar/13/charlie-brooker-man-v-food | Television & radio | 2010-03-13T00:05:08.000Z | Charlie Brooker | Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Man v Food | Eating huge quantities of food is an unobtainable fantasy for some and an everyday luxury for others. To Adam Richman, voracious host of Man V Food (Mon, 9pm, Good Food), it's a career choice.
Man V Food is obscene on many levels, but daft on several more. The format couldn't be much simpler: every week, Richman travels to a city (Memphis this time) and samples its most notorious "pig out joints": the sort of quintessentially American restaurants where everything is charbroiled or smoked or sizzled to death in a deep fat fryer vat the size of a swimming pool; places where each mammoth portion comes with a side order of type two diabetes. Establishments of this kind often tend to have a "challenge" item on the menu – a dish so offensively huge, anyone who successfully manages to eat it has their portrait hung on the wall. The end of each episode sees Richman taking on one of these challenges, hence the title. That's all there is to it.
Essentially this is Top Gear for food: a jokey, blokey exercise in excessive indulgence. It's all sensation, sensation, sensation. Just as Clarkson emits orgasmic whimpers when his driver's seat judders on acceleration, so Richman groans like a man having his perineum tongued by three cheerleaders as he ingests each warm mouthful of stodge. If food is the new porn, this is an all-out orgy between wobbling gutsos and farmyard animals – a snuff orgy, no less, since the latter end up sawn in half and smothered in BBQ sauce.
Plenty of cattle get eaten; at times Richman may as well lie down, open his gob and let a herd stampede directly into his stomach. Entire carcasses are greedily consumed by overweight folk with juice dribbling down their chins, tearing flesh from charred bones with their glistening teeth. It's like sitting in Sawney Bean's cave. Meat and skeletons, meat and skeletons. A sequence in which Richman peers inside an oven at Memphis's premier rib joint to witness a landscape of scorched and smouldering ribcages almost resembles the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing. This is definitely not a programme for vegetarians.
Things reach an insane peak (or more accurately, trough), as Richman takes on the eating challenge. This week he faces the 7 ½ pound "Sasquatch Burger" at the Big Foot Lodge. 1,300 people have attempted to eat one; only four have succeeded. This high failure rate is hardly surprising when you see the bloody thing: it's the size of a sofa cushion. The bun alone accounts for two pounds. The burger itself is an ominous cake of mashed cow as thick as your thigh. When he first tucks in, Richman is chirpy and cocky, shovelling handfuls of meat down his neck with the gluttonous abandon of a self-aware Homer Simpson. Several minutes later, as it becomes clear he still has an immense mountain of food to get through, he appears sickened and woozy – presumably because his blood sugar levels have hit a dangerously narcotic high as his stomach desperately tries to break down the busload of beef that's just appeared inside it. This is the point at which the show stops being fun. It's like watching a man dealing with an instant, unexpected pregnancy.
But what I'd really like to see is what happens the next morning, when the show presumably turns into Man V Poo, as Richman empties the dauntingly substantial, hopelessly compacted contents of his engorged colon, clenching the bathroom doorhandle between his teeth as he attempts to give birth to a leg-sized hunk of fecal sod without killing himself. Cue footage of him sweating, shaking and sobbing like a man impaled on a clay tree, before eventually squeezing out a log with the dimensions and weight of a dead gazelle in a greased sleeping bag. As he mops his brow (and backside), he smiles weakly with exhausted triumph, whispers farewell, and the credits roll. And we've all learned something about the price of excess. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/18/the-royal-ballet-back-on-stage-review-an-exuberant-return | Stage | 2020-10-18T08:00:45.000Z | Sarah Crompton | The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage review – an exuberant return | The history of the Royal Ballet is entwined with the fortunes of the Royal Opera House. The reopening of Covent Garden at the end of the second world war was marked by a performance of The Sleeping Beauty; 53 years later, Darcey Bussell’s Lilac Fairy brought the theatre back to life after a two-year closure for redevelopment.
The Royal Ballet’s current director, Kevin O’Hare, was alert to the significance of yet another reawakening gala, with dance performed in front of a live audience (400 of us, including health workers) for the first time since Covid-19 forced closure in March. He acknowledged as much by opening with Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty overture, soaring upwards from the stalls where the orchestra sat in socially distanced pomp.
The ensuing three hours made the future look suddenly brighter, as the dancers once again spread their wings, unleashing profound emotion, finding expression beyond words. Love for ballet itself was there, particularly in a Don Quixote pas de deux, dazzlingly performed by Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov, finding intimacy and pleasure in ballet’s most formal steps. Ecstatic love was there too, especially when Francesca Hayward skimmed around the stage opposite Cesar Corrales in Romeo and Juliet.
Watch a trailer for The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage.
The tension between love and suffering illuminated Edward Watson’s searing performance in a snippet from Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, alongside an outstanding Calvin Richardson as his lost lover; it blew the roof off in Kenneth MacMillan’s pas de deux from Carousel, with Mayara Magri and Matthew Ball excelling both in pyrotechnics and subtle drama.
Simple joy was there, too, notably in a glorious section from La Fille mal gardée performed with brio by Marcelino Sambé and Anna Rose O’Sullivan and a people-packed rendition of MacMillan’s exuberant Elite Syncopations. The dancers shimmered with profligate energy, sharing their collective liberation with their audience. You can still watch online for £16. It’s glorious – and therapeutic.
The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage is streaming on the Royal Opera House website until 8 November | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/19/kaylea-titford-parents-jail-terms-increased-manslaughter-daughter | UK news | 2023-05-19T13:57:23.000Z | Helen Pidd | Kaylea Titford: jail terms increased for parents who killed daughter by neglect | Parents jailed for leaving their daughter to die in squalor have had their sentences increased at the court of appeal.
Kaylea Titford, 16, was found in conditions described as “unfit for any animal”, after her death at the family home in Newtown, Powys, in October 2020.
Her mother, Sarah Lloyd-Jones, 40, watched via videolink as three appeal court judges increased her sentence from six to eight years on Friday.
Her father, Alun Titford, 45, did not attend the hearing, during which his jail term was increased from seven and a half years to 10 years.
He received a longer sentence because he pleaded not guilty to gross negligence manslaughter and was convicted at trial by a jury at Mold crown court in February. Lloyd-Jones pleaded guilty before the trial started.
Alun Titford and Sarah Lloyd-Jones. Photograph: Heddlu Dyfed Powys Police/PA
Lord Justice Popplewell, sitting with Mrs Justice McGowan and His Honour Judge Bate, said at the court of appeal: “The circumstances can only be categorised as extreme, Kaylea was living in unimaginable squalor.”
William Emlyn Jones KC, representing the attorney general’s office, said: “By virtue of the combination of the duration of the neglect, the nature of the victim’s prolonged suffering, the extent of the victim’s vulnerability and absolute dependence on her parents for care, and ultimately, the appalling conditions in which she was left to live and ultimately die, this is an offence which falls into the definition of ‘extreme’.”
Lewis Power KC and David Elias KC, representing Lloyd-Jones and Titford respectively, argued the original sentences were “well placed”.
Emlyn Jones said the original sentences were “unduly lenient”, concluding they failed to reflect “culpability, the seriousness of the offending and the gravity of the aggravating features”.
Popplewell said Kaylea was in “very considerable pain, misery and distress”, and in an “utterly degrading” condition, despite being vulnerable.
Kaylea, who had spina bifida and used a wheelchair, died after experiencing inflammation and infection from ulceration, arising from obesity and immobility. She weighed 152kg (22st 13lb), with a BMI of 70, when she died. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/oct/16/charlie-brooker-best-screen-burn | Television & radio | 2010-10-16T05:10:00.000Z | Tim Lusher | Charlie Brooker: 10 of the best Screen Burn columns | Rereading Charlie's TV columns in the Guide from 2000 to 2010, the striking thing is how quickly and incisively he skewered the core of each show, pinpointing either its brilliance or boneheadedness. His merciless verdicts on formats and faces still feel as sharp, funny and original as they did when they first appeared. These are just a few of hundreds he wrote. Tell us which others were among your favourites.
Popstars, 2001
The contestants in ITV's prototype singing contest don't escape Charlie's disdain ("anxious Dixons trainee") but it's judge "Nasty" Nigel Lythgoe who gets the harshest verdict: "He looks like Eric Idle watching a dog drown."
TV haiku, 2001
In a noble attempt to revolutionise the art of the TV listing, Charlie asks readers to send in 17-syllable poetry about shows, offering a few inspirational stanzas to get things started.
For The National Lottery show:
"Applause explodes
as bubblegum balls fall in line;
you have won fuck all"
And for Changing Rooms:
"Here's a makeover –
brand new title, free of charge:
Brighten Your Prole Hole"
What Not to Wear, 2001
An early example of the rage that posh people – especially bossy ones like Trinny and Susannah – have always induced in our TV critic: "Whatever it is they're saying, all your brain actually hears is 'tra la la, I live in a bubble, tra la la, murder a fox...'"
Blind Date, 2002
Veteran telly fixture Cilla Black is described as "the result of a unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig". The sexual prowess of boy band Blue is weighed against that of the Wombles. Hard to know who comes off worst in this column.
24, 2003
In series one, Charlie boggled at Jack Bauer's gadget-laden car ("like the Innovations catalogue on wheels"). Here, in series two, he is transfixed by Jack's mental derangement/facial hair ("like a piece of Shredded Wheat impersonating Kris Kristofferson").
Friends, 2004
The one where he bids a surprisingly fond farewell to the sitcom he tried to loathe but in the end couldn't resist.
The Apprentice, 2005
An early salute to the "surprisingly enjoyable backstabbing reality show" in which Alan Sugar joins the ranks of "celebrity bollockers". Also includes a lament to Charlie's defunct Amstrad home computer.
Nigella, 2005
"Like a minor royal who's somehow been coerced into presenting a Christmas edition of Blue Peter." The domestic godess – aka HRH Ovenglove – gets a delicious roasting for her shortlived cookery chatshow.
I'm a Celebrity, X Factor, 2009
"Rubbery pirate ship figurehead" Jordan and Simon Cowell ("he prepares for each episode by dipping his head in matt-black Dulux and painting his dressing room wall with it") are the hapless cannon fodder in this double-barrelled reality showdown.
Big Brother, 2010
From Craig in 2000 ("a knee where his brain should be") to Stephen Baldwin in 2010 ("looks and sounds like an escaped serial killer"), via Pete Burns ("Janice from the Muppet Show"), Charlie recaps his own most withering assessments from a decade watching fame-hungry halfwits and eccentrics.
Order Screen Burn from the Guardian bookshop | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/06/credit-rating-agencies | Opinion | 2012-12-06T12:45:01.000Z | Natalie Hanman | Do you care if credit rating agencies downgrade Britain? | Debate of the day | The credit rating agency Fitch has said that Britain is at risk of a downgrade, after the Office for Budget Responsibility again cut its predictions for UK economic growth and George Osborne announced in his autumn statement that the government's austerity programme would be extended until 2018.
The BBC explains: "A cut to the credit rating would mean that the country is perceived as more risky to lend to, thereby raising the cost of borrowing from international investors."
The chancellor has always insisted that keeping Britain's top AAA credit rating is a crucial reason to make spending cuts, however this morning he downplayed its significance. "It wouldn't be a good thing but the credit rating is one of a number of ways in which people look at countries," he said. "Because when people look around the world and they look at countries to invest in they think Britain is a good investment."
Isabel Hardman writes on the Spectator's Coffee House blog:
"Ratings agencies aren't the be-all-and-end-all by any means, and Osborne could quite easily point to just how wrong they were before the crash, giving collateralised debt obligations high ratings. But the problem is that the chancellor tends to wheel out their approval to shore up his own position, pointing to the UK's AAA rating as a sign that he is pursuing the right economic policy. If Fitch does strip Britain of its AAA rating, it will mean the chancellor will have to change his message … Expect more damage limitation exercises like the one attempted by Danny Alexander in August, in which Treasury ministers suddenly discover a new cynicism about the verdicts delivered by Fitch and other organisations."
Previously, Mehdi Hasan has written for the Guardian about the power of the credit rating agencies Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor: "By what right do they decide on the fate of governments, economies, debts and peoples?"
What do you think the real consequences – politically and economically – would be if Fitch does downgrade our triple AAA rating? Do you care what the credit rating agencies think of Britain?
This is a Comment is free experiment – tell us if you would like to see a "Debate of the day" every day | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/22/radical-pay-what-you-can-restaurant-faces-eviction-from-mill-it-refurbished | Society | 2024-03-22T07:00:29.000Z | Damien Gayle | Radical pay-what-you-can restaurant faces eviction from mill it refurbished | A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.
The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month, has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud – even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.
It means the mill will be transformed from a valued community resource – it also houses a bike workshop, secondhand children’s gear supplier and a furniture bank – into a warehouse for a local business that has bought the site.
When the community group moved into the mill, it was a derelict site. Photograph: Supplied
More than 50 jobs are at risk if its businesses are forced to close.
Tom Herbert, the co-founder of The Long Table, said the community had ploughed in thousands of hours of work and as much as £300,000 in cash over three years in order to transform Brimscombe Mill from a derelict site into a bustling social centre.
“It had been derelict for 30 years, roof falling in, no services, no electricity, no water,” Herbert said.
“It had been used as a place for local kids to hang out and play their music. There were people sleeping rough in it, it had human excrement in it. The place was a shithole basically, that no one else wanted.”
Brimscombe Mill renovations. Photograph: Supplied
Faced with security problems that made the site a liability, the landlord gave The Long Table and its partner businesses a five-year lease, with a break clause at years three and four, at a near peppercorn rent of £15,000 a year. “The community rolled up their sleeves, people put in cash … it was just amazing,” said Herbert.
“We spent several hundred thousand [pounds] on making the building habitable, fixing up the roof, fixing up the flooring, which had big puddles in it and great big holes, painting the whole thing white so it looks clean, and then a lot of electrics and putting in a kitchen and things like that.”
The work was done in good faith, said Herbert, and on the hope that there would be the opportunity to extend the lease, or to be given the option to buy it if the landlord chose to sell. Meanwhile the popularity and reputation of the restaurant and the other businesses continued to grow.
‘We spent several hundred thousand [pounds] on making the building habitable … fixing up the flooring, which had big puddles in it and great big holes.’ Photograph: Supplied
It was the day after the Guardian’s story on The Long Table was published that they were given notice to leave. Now they have until 25 August to pack up and find somewhere new. Until then, Herbert says, it is “Operation Fill the Mill”.
“We want more events, more activities, more people [coming] that have heard about us but haven’t got around to it to come and visit us,” he said. The mill will be holding two community events in an effort to figure out its next steps, and where local people will be invited along to share ideas.
Herbert still holds out hope they will be able to find a way to stay in the building. Members of the community in Stroud have already begun soliciting signatures for an open letter to the site’s new owner calling on him to let them stay.
“That’s part of what the community consultation and conversation is, to listen to people and see, if people are signing letters of support, can we get a toe in the door with the new landlord and say: ‘Come on mate, be the hero. We’ll name a building after you if you sell it to us,’” Herbert said.
The Guardian has approached the landlord for comment.
A bustling Brimscombe Mill. Photograph: Supplied
Meanwhile, the search is on for a new home. But Herbert remains optimistic.
“The team are really feeling hurt and shocked by what’s happened, and powerless,” he said. “[But] the support of our community has just been phenomenal, and that makes us feel like … it really makes us feel hopeful.
“And the thing I love to say is that amazing things happen when we eat together … I want to find ways of growing the table longer and longer and longer, and the more people that eat together, the better.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/11/jack-steinberger-obituary | Science | 2021-01-11T17:58:48.000Z | Frank Close | Jack Steinberger obituary | Jack Steinberger, who has died aged 99, was one of the three winners of the Nobel prize for physics in 1988 for their work with neutrinos and the discovery of the muon-neutrino. This research did much to advance understanding of fundamental particles.
The reality of the ghostly neutrino was not confirmed experimentally until 1956, but back in 1948, working at the University of Chicago, Steinberger had first given indirect hints of its presence in his measurement of decays of the muon – a heavy sibling of the electron. He showed that when a muon converts into an electron, two very light, possibly massless, electrically neutral particles are also produced. These, it was later shown, are neutrinos.
With his demonstration that the muon did not decay by the more direct route of radiating a photon, Steinberger had unwittingly also given the first clue that a muon is not simply a heavy version of the electron but has some intrinsic “muon flavour”. What that “flavour” is remains a mystery, but it has become a staple of modern particle physics theory.
Soon theorists suspected that the two neutrinos produced in the muon decay could not be identical. The idea emerged that there are two flavours of neutrino: the “electron-neutrino” with affinity for the electron, and its sibling the “muon-neutrino”, analogously paired with the muon. The experimental proof of this fundamental key to the pattern of fundamental particles came in 1962 thanks to Steinberger and his colleagues Melvin Schwartz and Leon Lederman.
At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, the trio developed techniques for producing intense beams of high energy neutrinos. At high energies, the chance of neutrinos interacting with material targets increases to a level that makes them experimentally viable. Their breakthrough inspired decades of experimental work involving neutrinos, and their first experiment with high energy neutrinos confirmed the distinctive identities of the electron-neutrino and muon-neutrino.
In essence, there were two ways of producing neutrinos, one where they emerge in association with a muon, another where they come with an electron. According to the theory, the former are muon-neutrinos, the latter electron-neutrinos. What Steinberger and his colleagues discovered was that when beams of the former variety – muon-neutrinos – hit targets and picked up electric charge, the charge was invariably carried by a muon, whereas in the other case, the charge was carried by an electron.
This confirmed that neutrinos carry a memory of their birth, some metaphorical DNA that is passed on to progeny in subsequent interactions. This DNA analogue is known as “flavour” and became a key property in the modern Standard Model of fundamental particles.
He was born Hans Jakob Steinberger in Bad Kissingen, a Bavarian spa settlement in Germany, the son of May and Ludwig Steinberger. His father, a teacher from the town’s small Jewish community, had been a veteran of the German army in the first world war, but with the rise of the Nazis the Steinberger family had no future in their country. In 1934 Hans and his older brother headed for the US, sponsored by an American organisation that had volunteered to bring 300 Jewish children to the country. The rest of the family joined them a year later.
His parents subsequently ran a delicatessen in Winnetka, Illinois, where Jack – as he was known after his arrival in the US – attended New Trier high school and what was then the Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, before entering the University of Chicago. There he gained a chemistry degree and made a computation of the lifetime of the electrically neutral pi meson, which later played a significant role in the development of theoretical particle physics. Nonetheless, Steinberger felt he was not good enough to shine at theory, and instead focused on experiments. During the second world war he worked on the development of radar in the radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to Chicago to study physics under Enrico Fermi, gaining his doctorate in 1948.
He then went to the University of California at Berkeley for a year but left because, though not a communist, he refused on principle to sign a loyalty oath attesting to the fact. He moved to Columbia University, New York, joining the faculty in 1950 and eventually becoming a full professor there. He left Columbia to take up a post at the European centre for particle physics, Cern, in Geneva, in 1968.
Jack Steinberger, left, in conversation with fellow physicist Lev Landau of the Soviet Union, right, at a scientific conference on high energy particles in 1956. Photograph: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Rex/Shutterstock
In 1988 Steinberger was one of the prime movers behind the Aleph collaboration of more than 300 physicists working at Cern’s electron-positron collider, LEP, then under construction. LEP was specially designed to produce the massive Z boson, which is a key agent in the weak nuclear force and is also a portal into studying neutrinos. From the precision measurements of the Z boson’s properties came proof that there are not two but three – and no more than three – varieties of lightweight neutrinos. In so doing, particle physics established a modern analogue of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, whose capstone, the Higgs boson, was discovered in 2012.
Steinberger never forgot his reception in the US as a refugee. He donated his Nobel prize medal to his old school, noting that its “good beginning was one of several important privileges in my life”.
He remained active in research and was a regular presence at Cern lectures into his 90s.
His first marriage, to Joan Beauregard, ended in divorce, after which he married Cynthia Alff, a biologist. He is survived by his four children, two from each marriage.
Jack Steinberger, physicist, born 25 May 1921; died 12 December 2020
This article was amended on 22 January 2021 to correct details of Jack Steinberger’s early years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/25/does-your-child-have-a-question-for-our-new-kids-quiz | Life and style | 2021-09-25T06:01:34.000Z | Guardian community team | Does your child have a question for our new kids’ quiz? | Each week Molly Oldfield, host of the hit children’s podcast Everything Under the Sun hosts a quiz for the Guardian in which she answers the questions that kids have about the world around us. Like “how much bamboo can a giant panda eat?” “Do aliens exist?” or “Why is the sky blue?”
Do you have a child aged 3-13? Do they have a question they would like to share with the world? Please fill in the form below on their behalf and it could appear soon as part of the Guardian’s kids quiz.
We will only use the data provided for the purpose of creating the Quiz, we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For more information please see our terms of service and privacy policy
Share your child’s questions
You can get in touch by filling in the form. Your responses are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions.
One of our journalists will be in contact before we publish, so please do leave contact details.
If you’re having trouble using the form, click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/feb/19/osher-gunsberg-the-tv-host-on-anxiety-dating-and-if-therell-be-a-gay-bachelor | Television & radio | 2019-02-18T17:00:15.000Z | Brigid Delaney | Osher Günsberg: the TV host on anxiety, dating and if there'll be a gay Bachelor | The best television hosts are, in many ways, the most bland. They are the filler between the contestants, the banter before the ad break; they conduct the benign interviews with those about to be booted off the show. In the role of television host, it’s necessary to skate smoothly along the surface.
It’s notable then that one of Australia’s most enduring and successful TV hosts also openly chronicles his emotional and mental challenges with a bracing frankness.
Last year Osher Günsberg, 44, formerly known as Andrew G and host of The Bachelor Australia franchises and Australian Idol, published a book about his struggles with and triumphs over mental illness. Back, After the Break chronicles addiction, divorce, body image, isolation, delusions and recovery.
It’s a bestseller, and Günsberg has been able to reach a large audience through his podcast, speaking gigs and television roles. His signing queues after speaking events would make most writers weep with envy, but his great gift as a writer and a speaker is to make people feel less alone.
Behind the scenes of reality TV: 'You're a little bit daft to apply'
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Even now he is surprised at the book’s reception. “I’m white cis-het [cisgender heterosexual] male that grew up in a suburb in Brisbane,” he tells Guardian Australia. “Now, I’m getting all sorts of people saying ‘this was just like me’, and it’s spooky.”
He says his book has not just helped people with mental illness but also their friends and family.
“People say, ‘I never understood the person in my life who was going through anxiety, depression or drinking’. I’ve had the most extraordinary, touching conversations with people after the shows. Wives saying about their husbands, ‘I never understood that person until I read your book’.”
So why has Günsberg’s story resonated with so many people?
“I’m writing about a vulnerable subject – living with a brain that isn’t 100%,” he says. “I started talking about it on my podcast years before and as I got better at it, and the more powerfully I stood when I talked about this, the safer it was to listen and the safer it made people feel about considering their own situation. Previously, anyone talking about a less-than-superbly functioning emotional system had a fair bit of stigma. But its self-stigma. People are really hard on themselves.”
Günsberg is so open about his struggles with addiction and mental illness that on Tuesday night in Sydney he is giving a lecture for the School of Life on the topic of vulnerability. He will also be a guest at All About Women in March, appearing on a panel discussing toxic masculinity.
“I’m no anthropologist but I feel that deep within our survival code there’s an awareness that showing weakness is bad for our survival,” he says.
I would love it if we could make a gay Bachelor. I think it might take off
Osher Günsberg
American researcher Brené Brown has argued in her wildly popular books and TED talks that vulnerability is a key to living an authentic life. But Günsberg says that the pressure to be vulnerable can be yet another difficult task for people who are already struggling. “Just getting out of the house can be a gigantic task for some people. It might be all you can do to look someone in the eye.”
Günsberg’s life is full of positivity: last week he announced that he is about to become a father (he is also a stepdad to his wife’s first child) and he is busy in pre-production for the next series of The Bachelor. But he says he still has to work hard to maintain a good mental state, and some days are better than others.
His coping strategies include vigorous exercise. “I get on my bike and train. I am better to be around and I’m better in my own head. It’s not a secret that our bodies are designed to move. For me, dealing with anxiety is about a lack of control. So we can control what we eat, we can control how much we sleep, we can control how much our bodies move, and who we spend time with, we can control how we feel about things. By trying to get control over these things, the less we feel that the world is spinning away from us.”
But does Günsberg perceive a conflict between his role as a mental health ambassador – especially as a director of mental health charity SANE – and the reality television shows he hosts, such as The Bachelor? After all, last year’s Bachelor Nick Cummins emerged from the show saying he had “never been in a mental space as low” as during his time there.
Günsberg, right, with The Bachelor Australia’s 2017 bachelor, Matty J. Photograph: Network Ten
“I see the amount of support that people on the show get. The executive team and editorial production crew are largely women and the support we have on set is huge. So many women in that mansion are wearing something other than a ballgown,” Günsberg says.
While some viewers may squirm at the often traditional and binary dynamics that play out in the mansion, Günsberg – who believes he is not typical of mainstream Australia, as he’s “a left-leaning vegan coeliac doing an interview with the Guardian” – says the show reflects what’s happening in the world. “What I find really powerful about the show [is] you are able to take that stuff and then have a conversation about it. It’s such a popular program because it opens up discussion. It allows us to feel less alone in that [dating] experience.”
Dating can suck, hard. Günsberg has his own horror stories of online dating after his first marriage broke down. “I hated it so much. I was in LA and I was single, using an app. Three out of four women had boyfriends or husbands and they were like, ‘My boyfriend is away.’ And I was like ‘What?’ It was absolutely awful.”
Nick Cummins proved too sensitive for the nightmarish Bachelor
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He has also noticed a “fascinating” double standard in response to The Bachelor shows, when outcry followed the depiction of a woman kissing multiple men, and then a deafening silence when a man kissed multiple women.
So when will there be a gay Bachelor? And would he host it?
Günsberg is enthusiastic about the prospect. “I would love it if we could make a gay Bachelor. I think it might take off. I have nothing to do with the casting of our shows and we are limited by who applies, yet overall the diversity in casting in Australian television has changed so much in five years. We are starting to move the needle in that direction. I feel that the path to same sex reality-TV dating starts with showing more diversity across the board, and it’s really encouraging to see this happening already, not only in reality but in drama and in advertising.”
Osher Günsberg is giving his talk On Vulnerability, co-presented by The School of Life and Dumbo Feather, in Sydney on Tuesday 19 February and in Melbourne on Thursday 21 February. He will also appear at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/11/dementia-next-global-pandemic-aids-peter-piot | Society | 2013-12-11T08:59:00.000Z | Saba Salman | Dementia is the next global pandemic, says Aids prevention pioneer | Saba Salman | Peter Piot has spent four decades investigating the world's deadliest diseases. Now, the man who discovered the fatal Ebola virus, and whose pioneering work made HIV/Aids a global priority, is warning about the next pandemic – dementia.
"There's not enough awareness of how bad the problem is," warns Piot, a global health expert and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
One in three of us will develop the disease – 135 million people by 2050, according to Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI)– while its worldwide health and social-care cost in 2010 was estimated at £400bn.
Our ageing population means it will get worse, yet no one is ready for the impact of dementia, he says. "We're on a very bad trajectory … one of the achievements of civilisation, society and technology is that we live a longer and healthier life."
The 64-year-old professor's warning coincides with today's G8 summit on dementia in London. The UK has focused on dementia during its year-long presidency of the forum, aiming to encourage an international approach to research, prevention and treatment.
Global challenge
As Piot says, "diseases don't respect national boundaries"; dementia is a global challenge, so the world's biggest powers must tackle it together. "I applaud the G8, it's very significant that the UK has taken the lead."
Piot has become an unofficial dementia ambassador since being asked to speak at the 2012 ADI conference. "I said 'I know nothing about it', [although] I've got some personal experience; my father in law [has dementia]."
He wants better research, treatment, prevention and cultural change which, when combined, he says, might create a tipping point for dementia. It is "the most neglected of all the neglected health problems and it's a hidden problem because people are at home – they're already written off by society".
He describes the loneliness and discrimination experienced by those with dementia as a "human rights violation" and says stigma must be eradicated. And awareness is crucial; both Piot's father-in-law and the wider family were initially "in denial" when the first signs emerged. Dementia starts with mood changes and difficulties with daily tasks, then the brain shuts down and sufferers lose their personality and perception. He says the 79-year-old former Anglican minister, cared for at home in the US, was once a civil rights activist and film maker but is now, "just sitting there…". The words hang before he adds: "It is a lottery."
As well as awareness campaigns and encouraging health and social care practitioners to recognise the signs of dementia sooner, Piot believes that people need earlier diagnosis and better information and support to live well with the condition.
Governments have a funding and leadership role (the UK government plans to spend £66m on dementia research by 2015 – just an eighth of its expenditure on cancer research) and Piot praises the UK-based Medical Research Council funding for dementia studies, such as investigation into drug treatments to manage Alzheimer's, but wants this replicated internationally.
He welcomes drives such as the prime minister's awareness-raising dementia challenge, launched last year, and the concept of "dementia friendly communities", but says housing should be improved for ageing occupants, making living with the condition more comfortable.
Dementia, he stresses, "is not just a medical problem". There's a need for advocacy "so as a minimum one could have a special envoy to the [UN] secretary general … who can go into countries and push [asking] 'do you have a plan?'"
Surely Piot, who as the founding executive director of the United Nations agency UNAids, from 1995 until 2008, helped to turn the tide on HIV/Aids by encouraging funding for research and treatment and engaging grassroots and governments, is the man for the job?
"No," he replies firmly. "I have a full-time job … but [I will be involved] wherever I can be helpful to make sure dementia gets on the top agenda and also to stimulate research; it's about finding a practical solution."
There are lessons from the fight against Aids, he says, when an international action plan reduced death and infection rates. Between 2001 and 2012, infection fell by 33%, from 3.4m to 2.3m, and Aids-related deaths from 2.3m in 2005 to 1.6m last year. Looking back, Piot says 2001 was a "tipping point" in funding and access to treatment, but now there is only "gradual incremental progress".
Solutions, social justice and travel are what drive Piot, a trained microbiologist. His childhood icons were the globe-trotting comic book hero Tintin and Flemish missionary Father Damien, who worked with lepers in 19th-century Hawaii. Piot grew up in a "small, conservative, very Catholic, suffocating" Belgian farming village and his only goal was to leave.
His memoir, No Time To Lose, published last year, details both the harrowing experience of investigating Ebola and the bureaucracy involved in negotiating with world leaders over HIV/Aids. There are humorous moments, such as Piot's inept attempts at collecting bats in Africa for testing. He describes himself with understatement as "an infectious diseases guy", but his achievements led to a knighthood in his native Belgium.
His demands for action to tackle the global health crisis combines the problem-solving approach of a research scientist with the fervour of a social campaigner: "It's one of those things that is everywhere, and yet it isn't and no one wants to know," he says of dementia, "it's not something that's hypothetical so we must act now – and we can do something about it."
Curriculum vitae
Age 64.
Family Married, two adult children from first marriage.
Home London.
Education Koninklijk Atheneum Keerbergen (school); University of Ghent, medicine; University of Antwerp, microbiology PhD.
Career 2010-present: director, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; 2009–10: director, Institute for Global Health, Imperial College, London; 1995-2008: founding executive director, UNAids and under secretary-general, United Nations; 1987-94: various roles including director, division of research and intervention development, and associate director, Global Programme on Aids, World Health Organisation, Geneva; 1980–86: professor of microbiology, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp.
Interests Collecting Tintin covers, cooking, cycling, reading, music, opera. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/28/who-knew-that-a-woman-playing-dr-who-could-drive-boys-to | Opinion | 2021-11-28T07:30:20.000Z | Marie Le Conte | Who knew that a woman playing Dr Who could drive boys to crime? | Maria Le Conte | I’ll always remember my last bank robbery; it took place in June 2017 and was the last time I picked up a gun. A month later, the BBC announced that Jodie Whittaker would become the first woman to play the eponymous Doctor in Doctor Who and suddenly I saw the error of my ways. I have been a law-abiding journalist ever since.
If this chain of events sounds somewhat far-fetched to you, Nick Fletcher is here to set you straight. In a debate on International Men’s Day in Westminster Hall last week, the Conservative MP said: “In recent years, we have seen Doctor Who, the Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker and The Equalizer all replaced by women, and men are left with the Krays and Tommy Shelby. Is it any wonder that so many young men are committing crimes?”
There are several points to make here. First, Skywalker did in fact feature in all parts of the latest Star Wars trilogy and Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman is hardly an inspirational character. Second, there are still countless mainstream movies in which male protagonists are the good guys, as evidenced by the roughly 7,000 Marvel movies produced in the past decade.
More broadly, the Don Valley MP’s comment felt especially tone deaf because it came mere months after the Euros, during which the country rallied around the nicest football team ever seen on a pitch.
Should young men be taught that education matters? They can look to Bukayo Saka, who got four A*s and three As in his GCSEs. Should they learn from a young age that it is important to care about the less fortunate? Then there is Marcus Rashford, who campaigned tirelessly for free school meals.
Should they be told about the importance of doing what is right? They need look no further than Harry Kane, who wore a rainbow armband during the Germany game. Hell, should they realise that even if you are impossibly talented, it is always wise to have a back-up plan? Former part-time mortgage adviser Tyrone Mings is there for all to see.
The England football squad, led by the equally inspiring Gareth Southgate, showcased masculinity at its best
In fact, it doesn’t even have to be about each individual player; watching this group of young men from all backgrounds and corners of the country get along, work together and care about each other was enough. The England football squad, led by the equally inspiring Gareth Southgate, showcased masculinity at its best.
But perhaps that was not what Fletcher had in mind anyway. Instead, looking at the first report published by the all-party parliamentary group on issues affecting men and boys, which he co-chaired and which was behind the Westminster Hall event, provides some clues. In it, psychotherapist Martin Seager argues that “we are now at a cultural low point”.
“Even the celebration of heroes (and it was recently D-Day #77) is never made a gender issue in terms of positive masculinity. We talk about the ‘men and women heroes’ even when females made up less than a tenth of a percent (2 in 22,000),” Seager is quoted as saying. “Rather than focus on the sacrifice and heroism of the 99.99% men and praise their gender, we describe this event in gender-neutral terms but would not do the same if the genders were reversed.”
Elsewhere, policy recommendations include “the need to tackle growing societal and gender stereotypical norms that view men, boys and masculinity as inherently bad/negative”. Clearly, the men Fletcher and his colleagues like the most are made of straw.
It is frustrating because both Fletcher’s speech and the report did identify some very real societal issues. As he pointed out, 13% of men are not in employment or education (compared to 10% of women), suicide rates for men are three times higher than they are for women, life expectancy for a man today is four years lower than for a woman, 83% of rough sleepers are men and 96% of the prison population is male. These are staggering figures.
Though he probably wouldn’t want them as fellow travellers, Fletcher could even get many progressives on board with his argument that “we should need fewer police, not more; we should need fewer courts, not more; we should need fewer prisons, not more”.
Instead, most of his utterances on the topic seem to – sometimes implicitly, sometimes not – put the blame on those dreadful feminists who never care about poor, stupid men. Men are vilified because women talk about their experiences of rape and sexual abuse; they are left behind because women want more representation in popular culture and so on.
It is a disappointing and self-defeating approach. It is absolutely possible to care about the needs of women and those of men. Treating the issue as a zero-sum game helps no one, least of all the boys Fletcher cares about so much. A world in which more men are happy and fulfilled would be a happier and more fulfilling world for women as well; there is a way to do this in which everyone wins.
This was not the point he set out to make, but in a way Fletcher has made a solid case for the need of more male role models in today’s Britain. There are issues that affect men specifically and must be dealt with, but they will not be solved by men who believe that a female Time Lord is turning boys to crime.
The very phrase “men’s right activist” reads like the reddest of flags because too often, the men who purport to care about men only do so because they resent women. It needn’t be the case; there is a space for men to help each other without bringing anyone else down. We need fewer Nicks and more Gareths.
Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/19/the-state-of-the-oscars-race-whos-in-the-lead-after-the-big-film-festivals | Film | 2017-09-19T10:00:14.000Z | Benjamin Lee | The state of the Oscars race: who's in the lead after the big film festivals? | By the end of September last year, after the annual onslaught of festival premieres, we’d already seen seven of the year’s nine best picture nominees. Again, we’re back at the informed speculation stage: the reviews are in, the first trophies have been handed out and we can start to assemble a loose, yet likely, list of potential candidates.
The race officially kicked off in January and although Sundance has become a less reliable starting point for awards-friendly films, this year did offer up three major contenders. The most ecstatic reviews were given to I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino’s heartfelt gay romance Call Me by Your Name, which also received special notices for leads Armie Hammer and breakout star Timothee Chalamet. Both could be in with a chance but the buzz is strongest around A Serious Man star Michael Stuhlbarg who is close to being a best supporting actor lock for an emotive, much-talked-about scene at the end of the film.
54:39
The Guardian at Tiff 2017: cast and crew of Call Me by Your Name
The festival also saw the premiere of Mudbound, a second world war-set drama about racial division in Mississippi, which opened to acclaim for director Dee Rees, who could become the first black woman to receive a nomination for best director (there’s also best supporting actress heat around star Mary J Blige). It was bought by Netflix for an ambitious $12.5m but the company has struggled to break through to the Academy with any of their fiction films so far – unlike Amazon, who scored their first Oscar last year for Manchester by the Sea. The company was also the toast of Sundance with Kumail Nanjiani’s crowd-pleasing comedy The Big Sick, which became one of the summer’s big sleeper hits. Oscar-wise, Holly Hunter has a decent chance of a best supporting actress nod and the screenplay could get recognition while the film is likely to make a showing at the Golden Globes, given the often limited comedic contenders.
Cannes was low on awards-aiming films with Todd Haynes’s fantasy Wonderstruck failing to gather much support, but Tangerine director Sean Baker’s comedy drama The Florida Project was warmly received and star Willem Dafoe is likely to get a best supporting actor nod.
The opening film at Venice has become something of an Oscar indicator with Gravity, Birdman and La La Land all occupying the slot. This year saw the premiere of Alexander Payne’s high concept comedy Downsizing, which stars Matt Damon as a man who decides to be shrunk, and while initial reviews were warm, it lost steam in Telluride and Toronto. The film that emerged from the festival with most acclaim was Guillermo del Toro’s 60s-set romance/fantasy/horror hybrid The Shape of Water which picked up the festival’s major prize, the Golden Lion. It also continued to impress audiences in Telluride and Toronto and star Sally Hawkins is an early lock for best actress for her role as a mute cleaner who falls in love with a sea creature.
Venice also saw Frances McDormand secure a place in the category with a foul-mouthed performance as a grieving mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, a film that also generated buzz for co-star Sam Rockwell. It went on to win the people’s choice award at Toronto, a prize that’s previously been awarded to Room, La La Land and The Imitation Game. The debut of Darren Aronofsky’s darkly comic surrealist assault Mother! was met with divisive reviews and while most were impressed with Jennifer Lawrence, the film is too strange to repeat any Black Swan-style Oscar success. Michelle Pfeiffer’s sinister turn could sneak into the best supporting actress category, however. George Clooney’s Suburbicon was dead on arrival with middling reviews despite a cast including Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac, while Stephen Frears is unlikely to continue his streak of directing older female actors all the way to the best actress race, with Victoria and Abdul gaining little heat for star Judi Dench.
At Telluride, the best actor race gained its frontrunner with Gary Oldman’s transformative portrayal of Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour and co-star Ben Mendelsohn heading for a best supporting actor nomination as well. Reviews have been strong and it’s exactly the sort of prestige British drama that the Academy likes to reward. There was also a warm reception for Annette Bening’s performance as Oscar-winning actor Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool but the film itself is small and in a tough category she might struggle.
The Colorado-based festival saw the premiere of fact-based tennis drama Battle of the Sexes, a timely crowdpleaser that could see last year’s best actress winner Emma Stone get a nomination and Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird which has two awards-worthy performances from Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf as mother and daughter. The film continued to generate heat in Toronto, the press screenings proving the hardest to get into throughout the fest.
Almost immediately after, the best actress race became even more confused in Toronto with the arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly’s Game, which propelled two-time Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain into the race with her role as a resourceful “poker princess”. The film itself is likely to be an adapted screenplay contender as well and could nab Idris Elba a best supporting actor nomination. His other film at the festival, the romantic adventure The Mountain Between Us, emerged as a non-starter despite chemistry between him and Kate Winslet. It didn’t bomb quite as hard as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Thomas Edison biopic The Current War which was seen as one of the festival’s biggest disappointments alongside Halle Berry and Daniel Craig’s LA riots drama Kings.
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Toronto then saw yet another big star added to the best actress race: six-time nominee Glenn Close. Her performance in marital drama The Wife was heaped with praise but the film still doesn’t have a distributor so her place in the race will depend on who, if anyone, picks it up in time. In a similar boat is Hostiles, a grim western with Christian Bale that’s been scoring fine reviews but also lacks distribution. If it’s bought in time then Bale could be joining Oldman and previous nominee James Franco who entered the fray with his role as Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist which will benefit from the Academy’s obsession with rewarding films about films. They’re also joined by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose performance in Boston marathon bombing drama Stronger was universally praised. The Tonya Harding skating comedy I, Tonya picked up some positive reviews but might prove too crude for the Academy. Allison Janney is a likely lock, however, for her role as Harding’s vicious mother.
Outside of the festivals, Christopher Nolan’s second world war hit Dunkirk is a strong contender for best picture and will also score well in many of the technical categories. A similar summer release failed to launch Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit which was a box office disappointment and didn’t receive the acclaim it needs for a big awards push. There’s been buzz around Get Out becoming a rare horror film to sneak in given its critical acclaim, but it seems like original screenplay recognition might be the most likely way in.
There are still a number of unseen films to come. The New York Film Festival will launch two major premieres: Richard Linklater’s road trip drama Last Flag Flying and Woody Allen’s 50s-set Wonder Wheel. There are also three films from Academy-approved directors on the way. Steven Spielberg’s political drama The Post
(Which could see nods for Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep), Ridley Scott’s fact-based crime drama All the Money in the World (which could do well for stars Kevin Spacey, Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s fashion-themed Phantom Thread (which is likely to thrust Daniel Day-Lewis to the front of the race).
Ten safe nominee bets
Gary Oldman – best actor, Darkest Hour
Sally Hawkins – best actress, The Shape of Water
Jessica Chastain – best actress, Molly’s Game
Jake Gyllenhaal – best actor, Stronger
Michael Stuhlbarg – best supporting actor, Call Me by Your Name
Christopher Nolan – best director, Dunkirk
Allison Janney – best supporting actress, I, Tonya
Laurie Metcalf – best supporting actress, Lady Bird
Aaron Sorkin – best adapted screenplay, Molly’s Game
Willem Dafoe – best supporting actor, The Florida Project | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/21/drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-review | Books | 2018-09-21T06:30:19.000Z | Sarah Perry | Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – the entire cosmic catastrophe | Olga Tokarczuk, whose 2007 novel Flights was awarded the International Man Booker in 2018, is a figure of considerable stature and controversy in her native Poland. An outspoken feminist and public intellectual, she has been castigated as a targowiczanin: an ancient term for a traitor. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – first published in 2009, and now arriving in a deft and sensitive English translation – provides an extraordinary display of the qualities that have made Tokarczuk so notable a presence in contemporary literature.
When a victim is found with deerprints all around him, it seems entirely feasible that animals are committing murder
The novel is almost impossible to categorise. It is, in effect, a murder mystery: in the bleak Polish midwinter, men in an isolated village are being murdered, and it is left to Janina Duszejko, a kind of eastern European Miss Marple, to identify the murderer. But a mere whodunit would hardly satisfy a novelist who said “just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time”, and so it is also a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake.
Janina tells us on the first page that she is “already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night”. A bridge engineer turned schoolteacher, now reluctantly in retirement, she is devoted to Blake, and to studying astrological charts in order to make sense out of chaos. Her narrative voice gives the novel an instant propulsive charm: she exists, immediately, on the page – forthright, brilliant, funny, given to capitalising words in a fashion that recalls Tristram Shandy (“I combine the Practical and the Sentimental”). Deeply troubled about the world, her place in it and the hierarchy of humans among their fellow animals, she is often moved to dreadful melancholy, such as when she watches a pregnant woman reading a newspaper, and wonders: “How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?”
‘A woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.’ Olga Tokarczuk. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
She is also chronically sick, with an illness that is never defined and seems to constitute an essential part of her character: but she entertains no self-pity, writing: “Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.” She christens her friends and neighbours according to their nature – Big Foot, Oddball, Dizzy, Good News – and has an intense affinity for the local deer, whom she calls her “young ladies”. When Big Foot is found murdered, a shard of bone jammed down his throat, in the first of a spate of violent deaths, Janina believes that the key to the mystery lies in her village’s love of hunting, both for sport and for meat. The reader wonders if the novel will take a turn towards magic realism: when a victim is found with deerprints hectically marking the snow all around him, it seems entirely feasible that, as Janina professes to believe, animals are committing murder. It is fitting that the spirit of Blake is so insistently present in the novel (the title is taken from his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and each chapter is headed by a Blake quotation): he wrote that “all wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap”, and would have shared the narrator’s horror at the village’s macho hunting culture.
Though the book functions perfectly as noir crime – moving towards a denouement that, for sleight of hand and shock, should draw admiration from the most seasoned Christie devotee – its chief preoccupation is with unanswerable questions of free will versus determinism, and with existential unease. What, it asks, does it mean to be human, and what is it to be an animal, and what objective distinctions can be made between the two? Why is the killing of a deer mere sport, and the killing of a human murder? And if animal rights are elevated to those of human rights, would animals then be subject to criminal and human law – if an animal can be said to have been murdered, might it equally be charged with murder? What, moreover, are we for? Janina opens a kitchen drawer and looks at the “long spoons, spatulas and strange hooks” and thinks, in a moment of purest Sartre: “I would really like to be one of those Utensils.” She knows herself to be trapped – “I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful” – but refuses to be a dutiful prisoner of society and gender.
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In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice. It also contains perhaps the most bravura translation performance I have ever seen, when Janina and her companion repeatedly attempt to translate a passage of Blake: several versions of a particular verse are rendered in English, which has been translated from the Polish, which in turn has been translated from English. It is difficult to imagine a more tricky task for a translator, or one undertaken with more skill.
That this novel caused such a stir in Poland is no surprise. There, the political compass has swung violently to the right, and the rights of women and of animals are under attack (the novel’s 2017 film adaptation, Spoor, caused one journalist to remark that it was “a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism”). It is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility. Her subject is the entire “cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its being”. As she asks: “How could we possibly understand it all?”
This article was amended on 5 April 2021. It is Big Foot who is first found murdered, not Oddball as stated in an earlier version.
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is published by Serpent’s Tail in October. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. To order a copy for £11.17 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/dec/11/joe-hart-manchester-city-coming-of-age | Football | 2014-12-11T11:53:00.000Z | Jamie Jackson | Joe Hart hails Manchester City’s ‘coming of age’ against Roma | Joe Hart believes Manchester City’s 2-0 win over Roma at the Stadio Olimpico was a “coming of age” display in the Champions League as Manuel Pellegrini’s side reached the knockout stage of the competition.
This is the second consecutive season City have done so after the manager guided the club to the last 16 for a first time last year. The English champions finished second in Group E, three points better off than CSKA Moscow who lost at Bayern Munich, the team City memorably defeated 3-2 in their previous match to keep their hopes in the competition alive.
But after soaking up incessant pressure from Roma, particularly during the first half at a hostile Olimpico, a fine Samir Nasri strike on the hour and Pablo Zabaleta’s late second confirmed City’s qualification.
Asked if it had been a coming of age performance, away in the Champions League, Hart said: “Yeah it was about time we did. We can’t get away from the fact we started the campaign poorly but we have come good at the right time when we needed to and we have won the game.”
For Hart this was a defining European performance. “Yeah it was, but we need to build on it now,” he added. “We got ourselves all the way through last time and we struggled against Barcelona so we have to look to go positive and see what we can do.
“It’s where we want to be. As much as an achievement it is, it is where we should be. I think we can’t get away from the fact we were poor to start with but we have come good at the right time and the boys are playing well.”
City’s win came without the starting XI featuring Vincent Kompany, David Silva, Yaya Touré and Sergio Agüero because of injury. “We can’t get away from that fact, they are four players who would get into most teams in the world,” said Hart. “But the boys, we have always shown we are a strong squad and that’s how you win things and we have won things recently by doing that. We look forward to carrying on.”
Of City’s possible opponents after Monday’s draw when the Champions League resumes in the new year, Hart said: “The draw is going to take care of itself. It is what it is and we are just happy we are in it. We are confident we can do well against anyone but it is Leicester now [on Saturday] and we have to turn our eyes to that. That’s our next big game.”
This was a sixth consecutive win in all competitions for the Premier League champions and Hart admitted City have grown in confidence. “After the international break [of last month] – we went into it having struggled a bit if I’m honest,” said Hart. “We struggled at West Ham [losing] and QPR [a draw] was a good result for us. Since then we have not really looked back. We got that win against Swansea. The [Jonjo] Shelvey free-kick at the end of the game, I thought it was in, it wasn’t and we won the game. We have not looked back since.”
Of his own form – Hart made a fine save from José Holebas’s header on to a post when City led 1-0 – he said: “I feel good at the moment, I feel like I am doing my bit for the team. When the team is working well, I am doing my bit and the boys are doing it at the other end – thought Martín [Demichelis] and Elia [Managala] were brilliant today as well as [Pablo] Zabaleta and Gaël [Clichy].” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/15/bbc-rippper-street-cancelled-crime-drama | Media | 2013-12-15T00:05:51.000Z | Peter Preston | Hack the Ripper: another long-term planning crime by the BBC | ITV and BBC both know where there's bonus money to be made: by selling series, formats, bright ideas to television companies around the globe. And ITV's Adam Crozier, in particular, excoriates one-off drama that comes, costs a bomb, and vanishes in a trice.
So what are we to conclude as the BBC cancels Ripper Street after a mere 16 episodes, just as it cancelled The Hour after 12? Surely ITV is hugging itself in glee as the inevitable BBC spokesman talks of "making room for creative renewal" on the schedules. Wasn't Ripper Street aimed specifically at the lucrative US market? Didn't The Hour – co-produced with BBC America – win one Emmy and garner nominations for several more? Yet supposedly disappointing UK ratings, with the Rippers up against celebs eating beetles Down Under, see the corporation abandon ship.
A new clutch of Golden Globe nominations don't alter the equation. It doesn't make sense. Not to Amazon's LoveFilm, who may yet fund a third series the BBC can pick up on later. And not to anyone examining the standard spiel of "creative renewal". The BBC's most touted triumph, Sherlock, was first announced in 2008. There have been two series, a mere six episodes, since. Add an imminent Christmas mini-special plus three more episodes and that's nine-and-a-bit over six years. By contrast, America's own Breaking Bad managed five increasingly triumphant series and 62 episodes in five years of concentrated, audience-building creativity.
Something doesn't seem to make much commercial sense here, Holmes.
Timid commissioning, short attention spans, constipated production times, I fear. Elementary, Watson. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/04/donald-trump-jr-trophy-hunting-auction-nevada-aoe | Environment | 2020-02-04T11:00:39.000Z | Patrick Greenfield | Trophy hunting event to auction 'dream hunt' with Donald Trump Jr | A week-long “dream hunt” with the US president’s son Donald Trump Jr is being auctioned at an annual trophy hunting convention in Reno, Nevada alongside expeditions to shoot elephants, bears and giraffes.
The four-day event organized by Safari Club International (SCI) and advertised as a “hunters’ heaven”, will culminate on Saturday with an auction for a week-long Sitka black-tailed deer hunt in Alaska with Trump Jr, his son and a guide. At the time of writing, bidding for the yacht-based expedition stands at $10,000 (£7,685).
Donald Trump Jr killed rare endangered sheep in Mongolia with special permit
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Other prizes include the chance to shoot an elephant on a 14-day trip in Namibia, an all-inclusive hunt package to Zimbabwe to kill buffalo, giraffe and wildebeest, and a 10-day crocodile hunting expedition in South Africa. The proceeds from the auction, which campaigners say could exceed $5m, will fund SCI’s “hunter advocacy and wildlife conservation efforts”, according to the organization.
Thousands of hunters from around the world are expected to attend the convention which begins on Wednesday, where Trump Jr, an avid trophy hunter, is set to give a keynote address.
The description of the auction prize states: “This year we will be featuring Donald Trump Jr, a man who needs no introduction, and whose passion for the outdoors makes him the number one ambassador for our way of life.
“Don Jr shares this heritage with his son and believes in handing down these lessons to young hunters. Don Jr and his son will be hosting this year’s hunt along with Keegan [the guide] in Alaska.”
It comes just weeks after ProPublica revealed Trump Jr killed a rare species of endangered sheep during a hunting trip to Mongolia last summer.
Last week, anti-hunting campaigners condemned the annual SCI convention, and Brian Wilson and Al Jardine backed a boycott of their former band the Beach Boys, who are scheduled to appear at the event.
A screengrab of an advertisement for the auction. Photograph: Safari Club International
Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, said: “This annual event is the largest meeting in the world of people who celebrate the senseless killing, buying and selling of dead animals for bragging rights.
“As our planet suffers an extinction crisis, it is business as usual for the trophy hunting industry and SCI, who continue to revel in spending millions of dollars every year to destroy imperiled wildlife.”
SCI hit back at the criticisms and called them the “height of hypocrisy”, arguing that hunting makes enormous contributions to conservation and described Trump Jr as “an accomplished conservationist”.
The regulations around importing hunting trophies has been loosened under Donald Trump, though he has previously described the practice as a “horror show” despite his sons’ affection for big-game hunting. In 2018 the administration moved to make it easier to import trophies from exotic big-game animals such as elephants and lions.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/public-services/older-workers | Society | 2010-07-07T08:48:49.000Z | Jo Adetunji | Public sector urged to tap experience of older workers | Jean Skinner, 64, of Hertfordshire county council, which has age-friendly policies. Photograph: Zak Waters
An increasingly older workforce and a higher state pension age means public sector organisations need to improve performance management and think creatively about how to make best use of the experience and skills of older workers.
"The message is not to think of older workers in stereotypical terms, or that they are a liability," says Mike Emmett, adviser on public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. "They bring experience and skills that can be passed to younger workers."
Other recognised benefits of extended working include a ready resource of skilled staff to fill shortages, particularly through job redeployment. According to the Centre for Research into the Older Workforce, employees are also more likely to stay once they are trained and more willing to share knowledge across the workforce. The centre estimates that around £31bn could be saved annually if the proportion of 50- to 69-year-olds in work increased by 0.25%.
But despite such benefits, fears over fewer vacancies for younger staff and static senior roles persist. Other concerns include having to pay higher rates for older staff and a shortage of people leaving the payroll through predictable retirement at a certain age, which has previously enabled organisations to have the money to pay new recruits.
The issue is sometimes described as older staff "blocking" jobs – but should be reframed, according to some employment experts, to be about whether organisations risk losing experience, skills and talent by not engaging older workers.
Introducing flexible working policies can also create movement. "We haven't found things to be that static," says Caroline Butler, HR manager at Hertfordshire county council (the majority of its workforce is over 45, with around 13% over 65). "We've had managers, who have chosen flexitime and gone back to being social workers, or fire service people who have become retained staff."
Along with flexible working, other age-friendly policies include age-neutral recruitment, staff redeployment options and health and wellbeing schemes. Removing the mandatory retirement age can also cut bureaucracy and encourage longer working.
Staying on
"We had a policy where people could request to stay beyond 65," says Kate Paxton, acting deputy HR director for South Downs Health NHS trust (it employs more than 2,000 staff up to the age of 74 and has abolished a mandatory retirement age).
"There was the whole palaver of formfilling and assessments. Their health didn't just drop off because they turned 65. At the time we were also finding it quite hard to recruit into certain positions. Some just wanted to work an extra couple of years. We removed bureaucratic barriers where staff were put off and particular skills would have been lost."
Flexible working requests at the trust are also only turned down if they affect the service adversely. 0lder staff benefit from training and other support services and this can be embedded into the organisational culture, says Emmett. "The elephant in the room is health. Intellectual functions can change but people can compensate. And when energy levels do sink, they might be happy to go to a three-day week, rather than falling off a cliff."
Hertfordshire council also says it has a holistic approach to staff support. "We have an employee assistance programme that includes retirement planning," says Butler. "We don't tend to target specific groups, although some health and wellbeing initiatives might be more relevant to older staff."
There is also a clear consensus that better performance management is a key part of creating more confidence for both managers and staff within organisations.
At South Downs, says Paxton, there were difficulties managing poor performance from people who were due to retire. "But now, regardless of age, if someone isn't performing well we need to have a sensitive discussion," she says. "Not that we have any ongoing problems with people performing badly – it's more a perception. People do develop health conditions and, if an issue arises, both parties want to know how this will be managed. We already have health policies in place to deal with sickness, and if there are health reasons we can look at alternatives like redeploying or adjusting the job.
"It's more about time than direct cost. But if you manage that, then you get to keep that person and their skills."
Return to the home page for more on public services | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/23/black-cab-sessions-natalie-prass-performs-never-over-you | Music | 2015-03-23T15:28:56.000Z | Guardian music | Black Cab Sessions: Natalie Prass performs Never Over You | The Black Cab Sessions are back and this week it’s Natalie Prass’s turn to take a tuneful trip around town.
A new addition to the esteemed Spacebomb collective, she performs Never Over You, taken from her critically acclaimed new album, a self-titled collection of songs drawing from that ceaselessly fruitful source of inspiration: misery and heartache.
Guardian critic Tim Jonze considered her debut album so good he gave it five stars: “The touchstones here, such as Dusty in Memphis, are all records that revel in a particular kind of musicality, yet this is a record that never feels retro, just timeless.”
In the latest of 12 freshly commissioned episodes, Prass follows Elliphant and Songhoy Blues’ sessions set in the back of a London taxi. Take a look at the video and let us know what you make of it in the comments below.
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Allow and continue | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jan/03/fa-cup-third-round-magic-gone-saturday-kick-offs-wembley | Football | 2019-01-03T11:11:11.000Z | Paul Wilson | Decline of Saturday spectacle shows the FA Cup is not what it used to be | Paul Wilson | Some weird things have been happening to the FA Cup of late, with fifth-round replays being arbitrarily abolished and the final being played at Tottenham’s home ground last season. Nothing will make football followers of a certain age feel quite as seasick, though, as contemplating this weekend’s third-round programme.
That word is a bit of a giveaway there, because the FA Cup third round never used to be a programme – it used to be a fixed point in the football season and perhaps the most eagerly anticipated one at that. It would probably be wise to keep the nostalgia to a minimum here, but for the benefit of younger readers, this is what used to happen.
Plan to scrap FA Cup fifth-round replays brought forward to this season
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The Monday lunchtime when the third-round draw was made would feature transistor radios being sneaked into workplaces and schools, because people all over the country could not bear to be kept waiting for a second too long before finding out which opponents their team had been assigned.
The FA Cup was important then, you see. It had glamour. The chance of ending up at Wembley was a thing, even for supporters of big clubs. It was tradition, it was history, it was English football coming together, and it would all take place at 3pm on the first Saturday in January.
With 32 ties in the third round, 64 teams would be involved. That meant slightly more than two-thirds of the professional teams in the country would line up against each other in a random format with an unpredictable outcome. The piquancy of the mix was usually enhanced by non-league part-timers who had battled through the earlier rounds, complete with unsuitable stadiums, bumpy surfaces, inclement weather and hordes of adolescents awaiting their chance to stage a pitch invasion and make a brief appearance on Match of the Day.
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This used to be how the season annually renewed itself at the halfway stage. By then it was usually clear to most supporters that their chances of league glory might have to wait another year or two, but a Cup run could happen to almost anyone. And, as previously advertised, when the whistle went at 3pm everyone was in it together – at least until 5pm, by which time dreams had died or miracles had taken place, and the identity of the 32 teams still left in the competition was known – apart from the ones who would have to do it all again in a replay.
You can probably see where this is going. There are still 32 ties and 64 teams involved in this weekend’s third round, but a measly 10 of the games will kick off at 3pm on Saturday, as a new six-season overseas broadcast deal comes into effect. Seven ties start earlier, five later, there are eight games on Sunday, one on Friday night and one on Monday. There is no point getting upset about it – we live in the television era now and the FA Cup is no one’s idea of a big deal anyway.
The nation no longer comes together on Cup final day in the way it used to, because live football on TV is not a magnetic rarity any more. When many of the bigger teams in the third round will be fielding weakened teams because they regard the competition as an inessential inconvenience, it would obviously be silly to pine for a time when 3pm on one particular Saturday used to rival the Grand National for tales of the unexpected.
The Knowledge: heavy FA Cup upsets and long-distance journeymen
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So no more sepia-toned longing for the land of lost content – the FA Cup is not what it used to be and that is all there is to it. You will hear a lot about magic and romance this weekend, but it will mostly be the TV rights holders trying to inject some semblance of life into a clearly stiffening corpse. We all know deep down there are not going to be any updates to the stock images of Ronnie Radford’s goal, John Motson’s sheepskin coat or pitches being inundated by parka wearers, yet perhaps that fondly recalled folk history is not really where the magic used to lie.
What was actually special about the FA Cup once was that it brought everyone together. Everyone was in it, everyone wanted to win it and even getting close enough to Wembley to be able to sniff the hot dogs, as Everton’s former manager Gordon Lee once put it, was a thrill.
Football is not the same sort of community any more. The advent of the Premier League and Champions League shifted priorities and encouraged leading clubs to pursue their own interests. The FA Cup was a loser in that process and it is hard to see how its former grandeur can ever return, though without a day to celebrate the fact that everyone is supposed to be playing the same game, we have all lost out a little. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/nov/08/zanele-muholi-tate-modern-review-south-africa | Art and design | 2020-11-08T09:00:36.000Z | Laura Cumming | Zanele Muholi review – portraiture as activism | There is an image so astonishing in this epochal exhibition you can hardly tear your eyes away. It is a self-portrait by the great South African photographer Zanele Muholi. The non-binary artist appears in profile like the head on a medal, lips white, skin black, against a grainy monochrome ground. Their hair flares upwards in flames so bright they appear virtually silver in the darkness.
Or so it seems at first. Perhaps the effect is more like a towering crown, a luminous diadem or a highly patterned headdress. The cultural overtones keep on running, all the way from ancient statues to vorticist painting. But the moment you notice that this hair is in fact a complicated arrangement of afro combs, the political nuances start to ramify. The self-portrait deepens as you look.
Muholi was born in Durban in 1972. Their self-portraits have extraordinary graphic force, increasing the contrast so that the artist appears stunningly black in all their regal strength and stoicism. Here is Muholi got up as a black-and-white minstrel, a tribesperson with coils of sinister rope nooses for hair, or with fuse wire around their neck. In one image, only the whites of the eyes are visible; in another, the artist appears in a miner’s helmet, with the implication that they have just risen up from the darkest depths of the earth, bearing the coal dust of their labour.
Thulani II, Parktown, 2015. Photograph: Zanele Muholi/Courtesy of the artist, Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York
This is an act of solidarity, an honouring of the 34 striking miners murdered by South African police at the Marikana mine in 2012. Muholi has also appeared in necklaces of tyres, and wearing a wooden stool on their head in sardonic pastiche of western ideas of darkest Africa. A tremendously strong self-portrait at Tate Modern looks like an ethnographic photograph taken by some Victorian explorer. It shows the artist’s head bristling with what might be bones or sticks, but are in fact pens.
This double take is as mordant as the work’s title, Nolwazi, which translates as “knowledge”. The photograph refers to the dehumanising “pencil test” practice used by the South African government in racial classification under apartheid. If authorities weren’t sure whether someone was truly white, a pencil would be inserted in their hair. If it dropped out, the person “passed” as white.
It would be an understatement to say these images make you think twice about race, colour, imperialist oppression, state cruelties – historic and continuous – of all kinds. Just to stand before any of the self-portraits in this lifetime survey is to be confronted by images of exceptional beauty – exquisitely lit, brilliantly conceived, in all their profound intelligence – yet never to be lost in simple admiration. This is an art of agency, meant to stir; this is portraiture as activism.
It begins in the opening gallery, filled with images of such gentle grace you might not immediately realise that these are the victims of sexual violence. A curving thigh, stitched and scarred, but bathed in the soft light of Muholi’s vision; a figure bent down, trying to wash out something dark in a basin of water; the forearms of a patient braceleted with hospital name bands. These are some of the people subjected to the horrendous ordeal of “corrective rape” in a country still notoriously homophobic, and violently opposed to any kind of gender non-conformity.
Aftermath, 2004. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York © Zanele Muholi
Kissing, twining, loving, deep in laughter or conversation, clothed and naked, young and old: this is the LGBTQIA community in South Africa, Muholi’s earliest and most enduring subject. These photographs, beginning around 2003, were intensely controversial because of the relationships they showed. But they would hold the power of revelation in any country, for they depict tender and jubilant love affairs with the utmost empathy. Muholi’s art is devoted to individual dignity; this is nothing like Nan Goldin’s bruised and weary Manhattan demi-monde.
And among them are stunning photographs of what it is to have a body, struggle with it, care for it, even just to see it. One sequence shows the artist’s vertiginous view of their own feet, and the difficulty of getting a good view of one’s back.
There are glorious gay weddings, courageous protest marches, bleak funerals held outside the city limits in hard-baked landscapes. A phenomenal photograph, magnified to billboard scale, shows gay beauty queens at the beach, a triumphant party nearly camouflaged (but for Muholi’s compositional lineup) among the seaside throng.
In 2010, South Africa’s then minister of arts and culture, Lulu Xingwana, denounced as “immoral and offensive” one of Muholi’s shows because it included images of gay couples. One of their most celebrated series, Faces and Phases, rises as a magnificent retort. The walls of a vast gallery at Tate Modern are entirely hung with black-and-white photographs of numerous colleagues and friends. Lifesize and loving, each is a superbly concise portrait of the sitter, with a discreet observation of character. The long-weary minister, in clerical robes; the teenager, with razor cut and tense expression; the poet, the painter, the matriarch.
Muholi is there too, belonging with them, commemorating their faces and personalities with all the subtlety and depth of a classical photographer such as August Sander. But these photos do not stand alone. They are united in a unique installation that registers the passage of time. Each sitter appears twice, years passing between the two images; except that here and there comes a space where a face should have been. You miss that portrait and that long-gone person. For the work is a monument both to the still living and the vanished dead.
Muholi’s Two Beaulahs, 2006. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York
“We should be counted and certainly counted on to write our own history.” So runs the artist’s statement along one wall. And this tremendous exhibition (temporarily suspended, alas, but worth however long the waiting) records that history as a visual narrative evolving from room to room. Characters emerge, disappear and resurface later on. Sitters win your heart. The man who weaves a couple of metres of clingfilm into a costume fit for a silver screen goddess. The township boys delicately plucking a barbed wire fence as if it were a musical instrument. Above all, the artist themself.
The last gallery is filled with self-portraits that stand somewhere between fiction and truth. Muholi bound up in a flag or concealed inside a striped prison blanket. Wearing electric cables, cowry shells or safety pins as ominous jewellery. Peering out, sorrowfully, from a strange wreath of rags that turns out to be the discarded luggage wrapping from a harrowing flight. Indelible in their burning blacks and whites, each image is as condensed as an epigram: once seen, never forgotten.
Zanele Muholi is at Tate Modern, London, until 7 March 2021 (opening temporarily postponed) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/apr/10/five-little-pigs-wallingford-the-cooking-really-is-up-to-scratch-restaurant-review | Food | 2022-04-10T05:00:12.000Z | Jay Rayner | Five Little Pigs, Wallingford: ‘The cooking really is up to scratch’ – restaurant review | Five Little Pigs, 26 St Mary’s Street, Wallingford OX10 0ET (01491 833 999). Starters £3.50-£8.50, mains £12-£25, desserts £7-£8, wines from £22.50
It’s always good to acknowledge your weaknesses. I’m beginning to think melted cheese might be one of mine. The menu at Five Little Pigs, a well-dressed, smart little bistro in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, lists many interesting-sounding things among the starters: fried anchovies with sage and a bone-marrow aioli catch my eye, as does the scotch egg, enriched with haggis, alongside their own brown sauce. It lists among the snacks, deep-fried olives, stuffed with capers and marjoram. We get some of those to nibble on casually, like deep-fried olives are something we always do, while giving the menu the attention it deserves. They are golden, panko bread-crumbed, salty sour, quail egg-sized orbs of brackish loveliness. They are a good sign.
It’s while I’m preparing to take another, that our waiter announces one of the specials: a toastie made with cheese from the nearby Nettlebed Creamery, plus apple and a few dandelion leaves, alongside a dandelion salad. I know immediately that this is going to happen, because it’s a toastie and I am literally incapable of saying no to one of those, even if I should. It’s the utterly domestic, made public. It’s booze food. It’s the thing you eat before going on the lash; the thing you eat while the blood alcohol is peaking, because it seems like a bloody good idea at the time, and always is; the thing you eat the morning after the night before.
‘Rich, salty cheese has leaked out and made direct searing contact with the iron’: cheese toastie. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
And now here it is being brought into the polite society of the restaurant, with a dandelion salad. It’s like your dissolute uncle, the outrageous one who never quite worked out where boundaries lay, but who nevertheless manages to comb their hair and put on a suit for a family wedding. But you know that underneath the sweet waft of dry-cleaning fluid and Paco Rabanne, it’s still him. Even as you shake your head at his behaviour, you know you’d be a little disappointed if he cleaned up his act.
There is no elevated form of the cheese toastie; no, gastronomically evolved version. Sure, you can forage leaves from the hedgerows of Oxfordshire for the salad, and take care over the choice of cheese, but it still must be its rude, coarse self. The Five Little Pigs toastie is exactly that: golden and a little oily, and crusted in places with rich, salty cheese that has leaked out and made direct searing contact with the iron. The bright, lightly bitter salad does mitigate the richness, but if you didn’t want richness, you shouldn’t have bloody ordered a cheese toastie, should you?
‘Properly blistered and burnt’: torched mackerel. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
The only problem is that it’s so engrossing, so damn good, it might limit space for all the other good things on offer here. But hey: I have a job to do and I will damn well do it. I’ve trained at low altitude. Five Little Pigs, partly named after the nursery rhyme, and partly named after the novel by Agatha Christie, who lived in Wallingford, opened in May 2021, after a successful crowdfunder. It’s a partnership between the owners of The Keep, a local craft beer and gin bar, and the restaurateur Aimee Hunt, who also has Lata Lata in High Wycombe.
They make much of their local sourcing, not just from the Nettlebed Creamery, but also fruit and veg from the Clays, a market garden just three miles away run by a former maths teacher, plus Dexter beef and Gloucester Old Spot pork from Blue Tin Produce, five miles away. All of this is a terrific story. It supports the local community and does mean greater transparency in the food chain, even if the claims about carbon sustainability may not bear massive scrutiny; the transport of food is far less important to its carbon footprint than how it’s raised.
‘The best kind of nourishing’: venison ragu with polenta. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
Certainly, none of this virtuous purchasing matters if the cooking isn’t up to scratch. Here, it really is. Alongside the toastie, which I might already have mentioned, we have the torched, oily mackerel, its skin properly blistered and burnt, with a buttercup-yellow whorl of aioli, and a pile of crisp pickled vegetables. We have slices of seared lamb heart, deep and crimson at the centre, with a few bitter leaves, a little blood orange dressing and a dollop of crunchy green relish.
Among the mains is a dark, caramelised venison ragu, which must have started cooking the day before, or the day before that. Or the day before that. It comes on a big heap of soft, buttery polenta, whipped to within an inch of its life, and then lightly sprinkled by a grating of hard cheese, like a snow shower just passed through. No knife required. Fork it away. It’s the best kind of nourishing, invalid food, and supremely comforting even if you’re not under the weather. Another main of a trout fillet, the colour of orange sherbet, comes with fronds of chard, the stems a cheery deep red, slices of potato and a yoghurt dressing. If the venison ragu is designed to make the poorly feel better, the trout dish is just designed to make you feel better about yourself, whatever.
‘An appropriate bookend to lunch’: rhubarb doughnut. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
It should come as no surprise that, after all the hot cheese toastie action, dessert space is limited. Here, it’s all about rice pudding and ginger cake, and a dark chocolate delice with more of the blood orange that turned up with the lamb hearts. We just about manage to share their big, sugar-crusted doughnut, the winter jam filling of which alters depending on what’s most available. Today it’s rhubarb and there’s a little cardamom-flavoured custard on the side. It feels like another domestic dish brought out into the world of the restaurant. It’s an appropriate bookend to lunch.
Pricing for this quality of cooking, with starters firmly in single digits and most of the mains in the mid-teens, is thoroughly appealing. The speed of the kitchen is, I’m afraid, rather less so and I wouldn’t be telling the whole story if I brushed over that. It takes 45 minutes for the starters to turn up. Curiously, I put this down to the restaurant being completely empty when we arrived, and not being especially troubled by much custom after that. The fact is kitchens really get a move on when they are under pressure; when the orders are flying in and the plates are flying out. The old saying, that if you want a job done quickly you should give it to someone who’s busy, applies equally to restaurant kitchens. This one fully deserves to be very busy indeed.
News bites
Liverpool is to host a new food festival across the Jubilee weekend from 2-5 June, with chef Paul Askew of the city’s Art School restaurant serving as patron. Taste Liverpool. Drink Bordeaux will take over Hope, Bold and Castle Streets in the city centre, with a range of cookery demonstrations, street food menus and cultural events. As the Bordeaux Wine Council and French Government have chucked some funds into the pot, there will also be wine tastings and masterclasses. Find out more at visitliverpool.com/tasteliverpool.
The Seafood PubCo, which originated in the English northwest before falling into administration and being taken over by the Oakman Group, is continuing to expand across the south. Having taken over the Pointer at Brill in Buckinghamshire last October, they have now brought their fish-heavy menu, led by a fruits de mer to share for £79.95, to the Grand Junction Arms in the Hertfordshire town of Tring. At thegrandjunctionarmstring.co.uk.
And sad but understandable news from Sowerby Bridge where the Moorcock Inn, much loved by many when it opened five years ago including me, has announced it is to close in January of 2023. The menu, built around live fire cookery, wild ingredients, fermenting and preserving, found many fans but, according to a statement from co-owner Aimee Turford, trading conditions have just become too tough, with the double challenge of supply issues and rising costs. ‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘it’s just no time to be running a business like ours.’ At themoorcock.co.uk.
Email Jay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/27/employee-pay-cuts-work-from-home | Opinion | 2021-09-27T10:15:37.000Z | Tayo Bero | Employees are accepting pay cuts to keep working from home. They shouldn’t | Tayo Bero | After months of remote work, many Americans are less than thrilled at the prospect of returning to the office. Despite the efforts of many employers and government officials to bring people back into the physical workplace, the last thing many employees who are at home want to do is start commuting again.
What is surprising, though, is just how much some workers are willing to surrender to their employers in order to keep the remote work arrangement going. A recent GoodHire study found that 61% of survey respondents would be willing to take a pay cut to maintain remote working status. Seventy percent of those surveyed also said that they would forfeit benefits like health insurance, paid time off and retirement accounts in order to keep working remotely.
And this isn’t purely hypothetical. The risk of having to make that tough choice is very real, with companies like Google already threatening to cut workers’ pay by up to 25% should they choose to work from home permanently. Still, it’s not hard to see why some workers would be so desperate to keep working from home that they would consider an up to 50% pay cut in some cases.
Aside from reducing the risk of being exposed to Covid-19, remote work gives employees far more flexibility during their work day, a fact that has proven to have no bearing on their productivity. In fact, research has found that productivity is often higher when employees are permitted to work from home. Parents also save a ton of money on before- and after-school childcare, and can free themselves of sometimes long and grueling commutes.
For Black women, staying at home has meant a reprieve from some of the microaggressions that they would typically face in an in-person work environment. Other workers of color have also found it a welcome relief to not have to code-switch or keep up a performance of white-centric “professionalism”.
Aside from the fact that remote work simply makes workers’ lives easier, it seems like it’s just a more sensible alternative for most employers. Companies save serious money in overhead like office space and other administrative costs. And aside from being able to physically monitor their workers during work hours, is there any real reason why bosses have to hover over their employees day in and day out?
Thankfully, many workers are seeing this bigger picture, and choosing to do what’s best for them. According to the GoodHire study, 45% of Americans would either quit their job or immediately start a remote-work job-search if they were forced to return to their office full-time. And it’s already happening. Nearly 4 million Americans quit their jobs this past July, part of what some economists are calling the “Great Resignation”. For some workers, this mass exodus was brought on by the fact that the pandemic caused them to rethink their priorities, perhaps focusing on finding their “dream job” as opposed to the one that simply pays the bills. But for many others, the decision to leave came specifically because they were asked to come back into the office.
This is exactly the kind of defiant thinking that should be applied if workers are forced to decide between coming into the office and taking a pay cut. While I wouldn’t advocate quitting your job in these precarious times, employees should absolutely not take any kind of pay reduction or changes to their benefits package in order to be able to work from home.
From needing to have reliable internet connection, to providing your own supplies, to organizing and cleaning your own workplace, there is a lot that is required of a person who is working remotely.
And with women still responsible for the vast majority of unpaid domestic work worldwide, working from home has meant that they are doing even more parenting alongside work-related duties under the same roof. In one pandemic study, 80% of mothers who were spending more time at home with their kids reported that they are experiencing more stress during the pandemic, with 72% reporting increased anxiety. More than half reported that they are experiencing more frustrations with their kids. With this in mind, the obvious question is: why should women have to pay to do double the amount of work?
Working from home has made life easier for a lot of people. But easier or more convenient working conditions shouldn’t come at a cost to workers; they should simply be a part of good corporate practice.
Tayo Bero is a freelance journalist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/04/alain-juppe-french-presidential-uk-leave-eu | World news | 2016-07-04T18:54:29.000Z | Patrick Wintour | French presidential favourite says UK needs to leave EU quickly | Alain Juppé, the favourite to win the French presidential election next year, has said Britain needs to leave the European Union as quickly as possible, arguing that a long period of uncertainty would be damaging to the markets and economic growth.
On a visit to London on Monday, Juppé, who is tipped to win a centre-right primary against Nicolas Sarkozy later this year, said procrastination on Brexit would not be permitted.
“When you get divorced, you do not get to stay at home,” he declared. “You have to leave the common house”.
The French politician, seen as most likely to succeed president François Hollande in May, reiterated his demand that the Le Touquet accords – under which the UK border force is allowed to operate in Calais – be torn up.
He did not rule out a deal that allowed the UK access to the EU single market, even if it rejected the free movement of workers, but said he did not want to set out the results of a negotiation before it had started.
The two options, he said, were for the UK to join countries such as Norway in the European Economic Area or to sign a bilateral agreement such as the Swiss has with the EU. Neither agreement, however, allows for restrictions on free movement.
With his remarks on the speed of the Brexit negotiations, Juppé added his voice to the chorus of those calling for Britain to start the process quickly.
The mayor of Bordeaux and former prime minister warned that the UK faced hard choices: “You cannot be outside and inside. Britain has chosen to be outside so we now have to negotiate an agreement to organise the relations between a country that is outside the EU.”
He insisted that although there was no desire to punish the UK, there was an urgency since the markets detested uncertainty.
The German government, led by chancellor Angela Merkel, has taken a more relaxed approach to the timetable, with her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, saying on Monday: “Political respect for our British friends means we should not interfere and we should give Great Britain the time it needs.”
An even more divergent view came from the Austrian finance minister, Hans Joerg Schelling, who said he did not believe Britain would leave the EU at all. “Britain will remain a member of the EU in the future,” he was quoted as saying in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, predicting there would “still be 28 member states” in five years’ time.
Juppé, who was in London in part to hear the concerns of the large French community about Brexit, including their worries about future employment and residence status, showed more flexibility than the UK government by suggesting it would be possible for the UK and the EU to reach a temporary agreement on the status of migrants in each other’s jurisdiction before the full agreement was complete.
“British people are welcome in France. I do not see a difficulty there,” he said. “We want to keep them. They are part of the life of the little villages. They are very well integrated in our daily lives.”
In perhaps his clearest challenge to the existing bilateral agreement with the UK, he said the Le Touquet agreement would have to be renegotiated. Juppé made this call months ago, but said Brexit gave the French government a fresh reason to end “an unsatisfactory agreement”. His comments raise the prospect – rejected by the current French government – of the refugee camp at Calais being relocated to Britain.
“We cannot continue with a system in which on French territory the British authorities decide the people that can be welcomed and can be rejected. That is not acceptable,” he said.
Juppé described his vision for a new chapter in EU history, setting out how it needed to be reformed in light of Brexit, culminating in a referendum in all the member states willing to take the next steps to integration.
“It would be a mistake for EU to continue as if nothing has happened,: he said. “Many in EU see the EU as bureaucratic, undemocratic, far from the daily concerns of and powerless to solve major issues such as migration.”
His new chapter included stopping “any further enlargement of Europe – we have to say to Turkey it will not be possible to welcome this country into the future.”
He added: “We need to find a new distribution of power between the union and member states. The union needs to implement the famous principle of subsidiarity, not just talk about it. We need to enforce and strengthen the eurozone by greater convergence of tax and social systems. It is not possible to have common borders which are inefficient”, suggesting this may require a new elite Schengen area representing only the states that “could prove they could control their borders”.
This article was amended on 5 July 2016. An earlier version said an option for Britain was to join Sweden in the European Economic Area. That has been corrected to refer to Norway; Sweden is a member of the EU. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/10/young-footballers-starting-careers-empty-stadiums | Football | 2020-12-10T10:32:53.000Z | Dani Garavelli | The young footballers starting their careers in empty stadiums | It is the dream that has sustained you through many a sodden Saturday. Your first senior start. The roar of a crowd. Now, it is one blow of the referee’s whistle from becoming a reality. You are standing in the tunnel, a breeze gusting round your ears, your limbs pulsing like fibre optic cables. Before you lies the pitch. You clench your fists, raise your head and run out into ... silence.
The German word for football played behind closed doors is Geisterspiele or ghost stadiums. Thanks to Covid, cacophonous cathedrals have been transformed into echoey hangars. Gone are the cheering and the jeering; the clamour and the cussing. There is no Fratellis blaring from the Tannoy, or shouts of “ Where’s your guide dog?” at the linesman. No mass rising of fans, like startled birds, as the ball hurtles towards the net; and no gruff threnody as it is skied over the bar. In some grounds, cardboard fans cut spectral figures in desolate stands, while canned oohing and ahh-ing heightens the air of unreality.
“It’s eerie,” says 18-year-old Josh Doig, who scored his first senior goal for Hibs in a friendly at Parkhead, shortly after football resumed in July. Doig, a left-back, put his team in front after 15 minutes. Look closely at the footage and you can see him – a tiny figure in a vast arena – hovering near the edge of the box, then volleying the ball into the bottom right hand corner. A dazzling achievement, marked with a couple of diffident high-fives. “I wanted to do a massive knee-slide at the corner flag but obviously I couldn’t.”
The age of the Geisterspiele is tough on fans for whom going to the game is a sacred ritual. It is tough on the managers being asked to deliver results with depleted resources. But it is toughest on those teenagers, such as Doig, on the cusp of glory, playing their first big season on a phantom field of phantom dreams.
Josh Doig photographed at the Hibs training centre. Photograph: Alan McCredie/Nutmeg
“To sit in a dugout without fans is surreal,” says George Cairns, head of youth for Hamilton Academical. “There are days you hear the referee blow the whistle and you think: is this game really happening?” Hamilton’s first league match of the season was at Celtic Park. Performed to no one, the ceremonies to fête last year’s champions were stripped of significance. The guard of honour, the positioning of the trophy on the centre spot, the letting off of a handful of fireworks were little more than a going-through of the motions, as players looked awkwardly on. “It was strange to see Celtic unfolding the flag in an empty stadium,” Cairns says.
He feels sorry for the young players, who triumphed over adversity only to have Covid rob them of their prize; and for the families, who cheered them on through rainy days, only to miss out on their moment in the sun. “When these young lads make their debut, or score their first senior goal, they will immediately look for a mother or father, a sister or brother, a granny or a grandpa, but there’s no one there, just the coaches and the other players,” he says. “I know everyone is in the same predicament, but it’s still a shame for them, and a tough environment to play in.”
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It’s an environment of constant uncertainty. “So what, isn’t it always?” you might say. Young players are only ever a few below-par games away from being dropped. By the time they reach the first team they will have tholed myriad setbacks. Doig had spent seven years with the Hearts Academy when he was told he should find another team. Injuries may strike just as they are hitting their stride: a groin strain, a pulled hamstring, the misery of a broken metatarsal. But Covid has amped up the stress and disappointment.
Tests twice a week are a burden as well as a privilege. “Everyone thinks it’s great they are being tested, and of course it is, but the tests are unpleasant, and then they spend the next 24 hours worrying if they are negative,” Cairns says. They feel a sense of responsibility not only to themselves and their families, but also to their teammates. “And of course, if they test positive, they have to self-isolate for 14 days – that’s 14 days they cannot train.”
The pandemic magnifies the sport’s highs and lows, as Kyle Munro – aka The Bull – will tell you. Munro, also 18, is a rising star at Hamilton. Scouted by Celtic from Clydebank Boys’ Club at Under-11s, he was dropped after a year. He returned to Clydebank, but was quickly picked up by Dumbarton. Then Dumbarton ran into financial difficulties and its youth operation folded.
Kyle Munro celebrates after scoring. Photograph: Alex Todd/SPP/REX/Shutterstock
Back at Clydebank for a third time, Munro resolved to play for the fun of it; but he was scoring hat-tricks every week. By the time Hamilton came knocking, he had several offers. “I chose Hamilton because they are so good at bringing the youth through,” he says. Munro was 15 then. When he turned 16, he was offered a professional contract.
In 2018, Munro – now a left-back – played in the home-leg of the Uefa Youth League against Basel. The club had given away free tickets so the home stand was full. Hamilton were 2-1 down, until Sean Slaven scored with the last kick of the match, making an aggregate of 4-4. It went to penalties before Accies prevailed. The crowd went crazy. “I still watch the video of that final goal,” he says.
Last season, Munro was out on loan to Clydebank. He came back to Hamilton in time to play a handful of games for the reserves before lockdown. While on furlough, manager Brian Rice phoned him to tell him he was putting him in the first-team squad the following season. On 29 August, he was on the bench for the home game against Rangers, the team his family supports, when Scott McMann was sent off. “I was thinking, hopefully it’ll be me, hopefully it’ll be me,’” Munro says. “Then the gaffer shouted, and it was me, and I couldn’t believe it. To make my debut against Rangers. I was buzzing.”
Munro was on a roll. With McMann suspended, he was chosen to start the next match away to Livingston. With five minutes to go, and the score at 1-1 ... well, I’ll let him tell you. “There was a free-kick. I wanted to take it, but the gaffer was screaming: ‘Get in the box, get in the box’, so I went into the box, and then, funnily enough, round the back post, it comes right to me. As soon as I scored, I looked at the linesman thinking: ‘Am I offside?’ But the flag didn’t go up. I didn’t know what to do. I just saw everybody running towards me, and I had scored the winner.”
What happened next proved controversial. In the desire to celebrate a fellow player’s success, a number of teammates piled on in a non-socially distanced fashion. “They shouldn’t have done that but you just don’t think,” Cairns says. “To score the winning goal on your first start is amazing – passions were running high.”
The safety breach might have gone unremarked if Munro hadn’t tested positive for Covid two days later. Although he had no symptoms, he had to self-isolate along with his father, mother, brother and the players involved in the pile-on. “To go from scoring my first senior goal on the Saturday to testing positive on the Monday was the biggest comedown ever,” he says. “My family was raging – though it wasn’t my fault – and I spent the time worrying: is that me lost my place in the team?”
In the end, Munro did start against Dundee United – the first match after he came out of isolation, and he has been in and out of the team ever since. But lessons were learned. “I got a picture taken – I was giving him a hug after the game – and that went viral,” Cairns says. “They were saying: ‘You shouldn’t have hugged him,’ but it was an instinctive reaction. We’ve had to stop that now, and the celebrations. It’s sad, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Back at the start of the new season – before Marcus Rashford single-handedly atoned for the sins of the entire footballing fraternity – players were being painted as the bad boys of the pandemic; entitled young men who believed the rules did not apply to them. Eight Aberdeen players were castigated by first minister Nicola Sturgeon after they went on an unofficial “team night out” to a city bar; two of them tested positive and all eight were forced to self-isolate. Then, to compound the shame, Celtic player Boli Bolingoli sneaked off to Spain, then played against Kilmarnock without quarantining.
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However, for most young players, the months since March have been as fraught as for everyone else. While the job they do comes with many advantages, it also comes with its own specific challenges. Unable to train with their teammates during lockdown, the players had to find the means and motivation to keep fit. “In one sense, it was easy because the only thing you could do was go out and run and play football, but trying to motivate yourself over a long period of time was tough,” says Munro. “When you are with someone else you want to do better than them, but when you are just doing it yourself you want to stop when you are tired.”
Doig has gym equipment in his garage, and says he’s good with self-discipline. “But some days you would wake up and think: there’s no date to go back – what’s the point, nothing’s going to come of it. Those were the days you had to dig deep.”
Connor Smith, 18, currently on loan to Arbroath from Hearts, was luckier than some. His older brother Callum plays for Hamilton, so the two of them could train together at a nearby park. And their father used to play junior football. “He knows what me and Callum need to do to progress,” Smith says. “He used to take us running through lockdown. After that I felt fitter than anything.”
Connor Smith in Hearts colours. Photograph: Scottish Borders Media/Alamy
Since lockdown, however, life has become lonelier. Smith, who has to travel between Hearts and Arbroath, has moved out to a flat, which he shares with a Dunfermline player. It has its bonuses but he misses the old post-match family debriefs. “It used to be that one [of my parents] would go to my brother’s match, one would go to mine, then we would go back to the house,” he says. “It was always best when both of us had won. Other times one of us would be happy, the other raging.” What would happen then? “We would wind each other up,” he laughs, then stops. “No, we did try to help each other.”
Since Covid, their parents can only watch them play via the teams’ live streams. And Smith cannot go to his family home. He meets his mum for the occasional coffee. “There was a friendly the other week, and my dad asked the manager if he could stand behind the gate and watch from there,” he says. “I spoke to him after that.”
At the clubs, the atmosphere is subdued. Munro and Doig have moved up, but they have been unable to spend much time getting to know the older players. Early on the teams were split between home and away dressing rooms for social distancing purposes and, even now, there’s not much opportunity for banter. “You try to make the most of the time you have with them but it’s just breakfast, train and go home,” Doig says.
The young players are also hyper-aware of the extra scrutiny that falls on them as footballers. They see people eyeing them up on the street. They know their Instagram accounts will be trawled for evidence of rule-breaking in a way their peers’ are not. So, they worry about doing anything that might be misconstrued. “Sometimes my flatmate and I go to Asda: that’s how bored we are,” Smith says. All Doig does is eat, sleep, train, repeat. “All eyes are on football. My worst nightmare is to wake up to the headline: ‘Josh Doig doesn’t care about the elderly,’” he says.
When I speak to him, Doig is on the last day of a fortnight’s self-isolation. He was in the ill-fated under-19s Scotland squad whose friendly against England was called off mid-game in October. Another crushing disappointment.
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“I was delighted when I was told I was in the team,” he says. “There was a boy from Hearts I was pally with who was picked as well, so I texted him and said: ‘We’ll get a room together’, but then, of course, we were told it was individual rooms, and we weren’t allowed to leave them, which was frustrating because, when you go away, you are supposed to be bonding.”
Despite this, the trip got off to a good start. The squad had two training sessions at the FA’s state-of-the-art facilities at St George’s Park in Staffordshire. The game itself was less promising. Half an hour in, Scotland were already 2-1 down when one of their players got sent off. England scored a third, but then the referee blew the whistle, stopping play. The teams were told to sit down on the pitch. No one knew what was going on. “At first I thought it was a bomb scare,” Doig says. Then Scotland’s Covid officer went round telling them someone had tested positive. “Our coach [Billy Stark] was standing on the hill away from everyone with this big mask on, so everyone clocked right away who it was.”
The dramatic intervention came because the test result, which was supposed to have arrived earlier in the day, had been delayed. The players were taken to their hotel and given 20 minutes to collect their things before getting back on the coach and going home. They were gutted.
Issue 18 of Nutmeg is out now.
Now Doig, who has been gaining in confidence, is fretful again. His is the distinctive cry of the fledgling: “Will I start? Will I start? Will I start?” But – like everyone else – his expectations have been managed; his dreams downsized. For the moment he is just looking forward to stepping over the threshold. “To take a drive, to feel the air, to have a bit of freedom.”
He’s an optimist too. He looks to a day beyond the pandemic, when he can reclaim the rites of passage Covid has snatched away. Doig made his competitive debut at the opening game of the season: Hibernian 2-1 Kilmarnock. A great victory on home turf. But what is football without the fans? “I know it wasn’t the full experience,” he says. “But there is time yet. Hopefully I will have a long career.”
This article appeared first in Nutmeg magazine
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Follow Dani Garavelli on Twitter | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/13/baftas-2022-the-power-of-the-dog-wins-best-picture-and-director | Film | 2022-03-13T19:49:46.000Z | Catherine Shoard | Baftas 2022: The Power of the Dog wins best picture and director | The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s slow-burn western starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a ferocious rancher in 1920s Montana, has taken the top two prizes at this year’s Baftas: best film and best director.
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Cumberbatch accepted the award for director the absence of Campion, who was still in Los Angeles having attended the Directors Guild America awards there on Saturday.
Cumberbatch missed out in the leading actor category, losing to Will Smith for his performance as the father of Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard. The win makes Smith a huge favourite to triumph at the Oscars in a fortnight, where Campion is also heavily tipped to win.
Reinaldo Marcus Green, the director of King Richard, picked up the prize in place of the actor who, he said, “when he put on those short shorts, was like Superman”.
Joanna Scanlan poses in the winners room after winning best actress for After Love. Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
Best actress was awarded to Joanna Scanlan, the veteran Welsh star of stage and small screen for her astonishing performance as a bereaved Muslim convert in Aleem Khan’s debut, After Love. Scanlan gave thanks to Khan as well as her parents and her husband, Neil, “who is living proof there is no such thing as after love”.
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Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi extravaganza starring Timothée Chalamet, took the most awards of the night – five – sweeping the board in the technical categories including cinematography, production design, visual effects and sound.
Kenneth Branagh won outstanding British film for his autobiographical drama, Belfast, and used his speech to thank cinemagoers for heading out to see it. Advances in streaming were admirable, said Branagh, but “all hail the big screen too! It’s alive! And long may they live together!”
Kenneth Branagh collects the gong for Belfast. Photograph: Guy Levy/Shutterstock for BAFTA
He continued: “A black-and-white film about the Troubles [was] not an easy pitch, but if you build it they will come”. Film-makers, he said, needed to “believe in the imagination of the public to embrace any and every kind of story, well told”.
Sunday night’s event was a confident return to real-life razzmatazz for the Baftas, presented with brio to a receptive, full-capacity crowd at the Albert Hall. An 85-year-old Shirley Bassey opened proceedings with a performance of Diamonds Are Forever to mark 60 years since Dr No, which set the tone for an excitable and ebullient ceremony.
There were scant references to the pandemic and only fleeting mentions of the invasion of Ukraine, including a dig at home secretary Priti Patel’s immigrant policy from Andy Serkis, as well as from host Rebel Wilson.
Wilson, seen as a bold hire by Bafta following a badly received two-year stint by Joanna Lumley, won her biggest round of applause after she raised a middle finger and explained “in all sign languages, this is the international sign for Putin”.
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Baftas 2022: Rebel Wilson hosts awards as Power of the Dog wins best movie – video highlights
This was blurred out in the pre-watershed TV broadcast, which Wilson had previously vowed would not prevent her from delivering as risque a ceremony as possible. She sailed close to the wind in her opening monologue, expressing a desire to sit on Daniel Craig’s face and drawing a pair of nipples on the 007 logo.
Later, Wilson unveiled a cake she had made in the shape of Cumberbatch’s face, the cheekbone of which she then devoured “so I can tell people I had him inside me”.
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She also made reference to disgraced actor Armie Hammer, the open marriage of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, the lockdown parties at Downing Street and JK Rowling’s contributions on the transgender debate. Prince Andrew’s evening at Pizza Express in Woking also merited a mention, as did Oprah Winfrey’s TV interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the drama and tension of which Wilson praised.
Prince William, the president of Bafta, did not attend the ceremony due to “diary constraints” but did make an appearance by video link in which he expressed his pride in Bafta’s mentoring scheme, Breakthrough.
Shirley Bassey opens the show. Photograph: Guy Levy/Shutterstock for BAFTA
Troy Kotsur became the first deaf actor to win a Bafta for his role in family drama Coda, pushing him into pole position at the Oscars. Kotsur is the second ever deaf actor to be nominated for an Academy Award after his Coda co-star Marlee Matlin, who won 35 years ago. The film also took best adapted screenplay.
Supporting actress went to Ariana DeBose, whose turn in West Side Story was her screen debut. DeBose paid tribute to the film’s casting director, Cindy Tolan, who earlier in the evening triumphed in her category. Tolan noted that Steven Spielberg’s update of the musical was the first film for 50 members of its cast, selected from some 30,000 hopefuls.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Encanto was named best animation. Speaking on the podium, composer Germaine Franco said she had wanted to make a film that tells “my beautiful brown children they are seen and heard and they’re important”.
Ariana DeBose poses with her award for best supporting actress. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters
Paul Thomas Anderson was a surprise winner in the original screenplay category for his coming-of-age comedy drama Licorice Pizza. The film’s star Alana Haim and composer Jonny Greenwood picked up the prize in his absence.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi won the award for best film in a foreign language for Drive My Car, his epic road movie based on the Haruki Murakami short story. The film is seen as a successor to the likes of Parasite in moving from acclaim at Cannes, where it took three prizes, to a substantial showing at the Oscars, where it is up for four awards including best picture and best director. It is the first Japanese film up for the former while Hamaguchi is only the country’s third ever director nominated – and the first since Akira Kurosawa in 1985.
The awards were decided by the 7,000 members of the British Film Academy, which has undergone a considerable behind-the-scenes overhaul since the backlash to the lack of diversity in its shortlists two years ago. A raft of 220 new rules and regulations were brought in, including quotas for film-makers and the compulsory viewing by voters of at least 15 randomly selected titles in contention. Such measures were credited with this year’s notably wide-ranging set of nominees.
Join Peter Bradshaw and fellow Guardian film critics for a Guardian Live online event ahead of the Oscars on Thursday 24 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/02/hundreds-of-thousands-may-be-missing-out-on-energy-bill-concessions-worth-up-to-372-a-year | Australia news | 2022-11-01T14:00:37.000Z | Stephanie Convery | Hundreds of thousands may be missing out on energy bill discounts up to $372 | Hundreds of thousands of Australians eligible for concessions on their energy bills may not be receiving them, with more than 35% of potential recipients missing out on critical cost-of-living relief in some states, according to new research.
A paper released on Wednesday by the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC) examined the eligibility criteria for concession or rebate schemes available in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT and estimated how many people were receiving the discounts based on publicly available concession and energy-retailer performance data.
The paper found the largest gap was in the ACT, where 41% of those eligible for energy concessions were not receiving them. The discounts available in the territory could be worth up to $750 a year for a household.
The next largest gap was in South Australia, where 38% of eligible consumers were not receiving rebates they were entitled to, followed by 35% of those in NSW. In SA, rebates could be worth up to $241.63 a year, while in NSW it was $285.
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In Queensland, 29% of eligible consumers were estimated to be missing out on rebates of up to $372.20 on electricity and $80.77 on gas.
The gap was smaller in Tasmania, where 19% of people with an eligible concession did not receive their entitlements, which are calculated on a cents-a-day basis.
In Victoria, CPRC analysis suggested at least 7% of eligible Victorians did not receive a concession on their electricity, 12% were missing out on concessions on their gas bill and 22% on their water bill, though they warned this was likely an underestimate.
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The research comes in the wake of warnings in last week’s federal budget that electricity prices were expected to rise by 56% over the next two years and gas prices by 40%.
Australians are increasingly struggling with cost of living pressures: inflation hit a 32-year high of 7.3% last week, largely driven by energy costs. Meanwhile, rents continue to rise, food banks deal with increasing requests for assistance and the federal government refrains from raising the rate of jobseeker and other below-poverty-line welfare payments.
CPRC’s broader research came after they ran an outreach program to help vulnerable Victorians access the one-off $250 power saving bonus from the Victorian government. They found up to one-third of the people they helped were eligible for energy concessions but did not have this entitlement applied to their bills.
Erin Turner, chief executive of CPRC, said the concession system was far too complex for the public to navigate, not least because eligibility differed substantially from state to state.
“There doesn’t appear to be a consistent logic about who’s in and who’s out,” Turner said.
“Concessions should apply to the same groups everywhere. It shouldn’t be so hard to figure it out.”
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Australia a wealthy country? Only if you forget the poor – and poorest
Jessica Rozen
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The report found that reducing barriers to access – reducing corporate or bureaucratic “sludge” in sign-up and service processes – was essential to ensure people were receiving the concessions they were entitled to.
It also recommended that the federal government work with the states and territories to review, streamline and unify the concessions framework.
Energy retailers, too, needed to make sure eligible consumers were receiving the concessions they were entitled to, and should invest in systems that helped people understand what they were eligible for, Turner said.
“We found examples where people in really tough situations had already made the request of their retailer, and through bureaucracy or transfers or a bad system, it hadn’t been applied.”
Turner said federal and state governments could make the process vastly easier for the public.
“Even just the information on government websites is all really convoluted,” she said.
“We’re having a national conversation about the cost of living and rising energy prices. One thing we can do immediately to help people is make the concession system better. It would be instant cost-of-living relief.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/07/england-attacking-intent-alex-mitchell-start-argentina-rugby-world-cup | Sport | 2023-09-07T17:46:25.000Z | Gerard Meagher | Mitchell and May to start as England go ‘all guns blazing’ for Argentina opener | England have vowed to come out “all guns blazing” against Argentina in Saturday’s crunch World Cup opener after claiming they have been written off too early amid a desperate buildup to the tournament.
The head coach, Steve Borthwick, has handed a surprise start to the livewire scrum-half Alex Mitchell and struck a defiant tone on Thursday following widespread criticism of England’s performances since he took over in December. Tom Curry has also been chosen for his first England appearance under Borthwick, having recovered from an ankle injury, while Jonny May – like Mitchell – will start despite missing out on the initial 33-man World Cup squad.
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England’s farewell match before departing for France was a humiliating defeat by Fiji, rounding off a disappointing warm-up campaign in which they lost three of their four games. Defensively they were dreadful against Fiji while they have yet to click in an attacking sense but Mitchell’s selection hints at a more dynamic approach and Courtney Lawes, who captains the side with Owen Farrell suspended, has sent a strong message to supporters who have rapidly been losing faith.
“It is going to be a hell of a spectacle, so enjoy it,” said Lawes. “We are going out all guns blazing and we are going to give it everything we have got. There is definitely a frustration. We feel it as much as anybody. We are in the thick of it and we are doing everything we can to make sure come this weekend we are firing on all cylinders.
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“[The criticism is] obviously a bit of fuel for the fire and gives us motivation. Obviously we want to perform for each other, mainly. As I said previously we’ve had a really good training week this week, things feel like they’re starting to fall into place, so we’ve got some genuine excitement going into the weekend. We know we’re facing a good team, but we know we’ve got as good a chance as any of coming away with a win.”
Borthwick was in a similarly determined mood and provided an example, close to home, of why supporters have not yet completely given up on his side.
Under Borthwick, England have lost six of their nine matches, including five of their last six, and Argentina are favourites for Saturday’s clash in Marseille, but the head coach said: “One of my boys [Hunter] wrote a letter to Anthony Watson, because of how much he felt, because Anthony had to be withdrawn from the squad. People in this country feel an attachment to this team, they feel a passion for this team. I know on Saturday night these guys are going to bring all their passion.
Jonny May (centre) takes on Jack Walker and Jack Willis in training. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
“There is a feeling among the players that they’ve been written off too early. People have called time on them a bit too early. I think there is a lot of class in this squad. The players have a hell of a lot more to go. I sense the frustration about what people have been saying about them, and right now as I sit here and prepare, and coach this team this last week, I have an expectation that they will go and perform with the quality that they have this week. There is a huge number in this squad who are just like [Courtney], made of tough stuff.”
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The selection of Mitchell is a considerable show of faith by Borthwick given the 26-year-old has made just one previous start – against Fiji – and has only six caps to date. Danny Care – who is on the bench – and Ben Youngs have a combined total of 214 by way of comparison but when Jack van Poortvliet was ruled out of the tournament with an ankle injury in mid-August, Mitchell was called up and has seized his chance.
“Immense credit to Mitch in that he was incredibly disappointed not to make the original 33-man squad,” added Borthwick. “One of the positives that came out of that Fiji game was his performance. He was a dangerous running threat, everyone knows he is a dangerous running threat.”
May, meanwhile, was called in for Watson, who also had to withdraw from the squad through injury. He revealed earlier this week how he almost told Borthwick he was leaving the England camp upon learning he would not make the initial World Cup squad but is selected on the right wing with Elliot Daly – back after a knee injury – on the left. “Jonny’s preparation on a daily basis is an example to everyone,” said Borthwick. “He has been fantastic.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/feb/04/super-bowl-trailers-oz-ranger | Film | 2013-02-04T12:32:38.000Z | Adam Boult | Super Bowl trailers: which one do you like best? | The commercial breaks during the Super Bowl are some of TV's most prized – and most expensive – advertising time, with companies paying $4m (£2.5m) for a 30-second spot.
Studios shelled out to promote a number of films to this year's Super Bowl audience, including Iron Man 3, new comedy Identity Thief, zombie epic World War Z – and these six forthcoming blockbusters:
Oz the Great and Powerful
Out on 8 March, Sam Raimi's Wizard of Oz prequel stars James Franco as the future man-behind-the-curtain. Judging from the trailer (see above) this CGI extravaganza will be distinctly more action-oriented than the original Oz.
Reading on a mobile? Watch here
The Lone Ranger
"From the team that bought you Pirates of the Caribbean" – whether that's a recommendation will depend on your appreciation of films built entirely on Johnny Depp's charisma and a bucketload of action set-pieces. Early signs are that The Lone Ranger is going to involve a lot of running after, through and on top of trains.
Reading on a mobile? Watch here
Fast and Furious 6
Cars smashing into each other, spectacular stunts, women not wearing very much, Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson and Ludacris: no obvious signs that the franchise will be making any major changes as it reaches its sixth – sixth! – instalment.
Reading on a mobile? Watch here
Star Trek Into Darkness
Benedict Cumberbatch grumbles menacingly at Chris Pine's Captain Kirk, while a stricken USS Enterprise crashes into a city. Not much in the way of plot, but there are hints JJ Abrams's follow-up to his 2009 Trek reboot will build on the success of the first film.
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World War Z
Brad Pitt vs a worldwide zombie epidemic – there's not much to go on in this 30-second teaser, but it does like it might have more the feel of a disaster film like The Day After Tomorrow or 2012 rather than a straight-up zombie horror.
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Iron Man 3
The Iron Man trailer kicks off a lengthy bad visual pun – one costing $135,000 a second to broadcast. In fairness, that kind of flamboyant money-burning is in keeping with the tone of the franchise.
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What do you make of the trailers? Excited about seeing any of the films? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2019/jul/08/should-we-take-our-sex-dreams-seriously | Life and style | 2019-07-08T16:21:39.000Z | Emine Saner | Should we take our sex dreams seriously? | In certain areas of analysis, it has long been thought that dreams are a window into our unconscious desires. Which is troubling if you have just had a saucy dream about someone you really shouldn’t have. And a new study has suggested that women are having more erotic dreams than ever before (although still less than men). In a paper published in the Psychology & Sexuality journal, Michael Schredl, a sleep researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany, found that the average frequency of erotic dreams for the 2,907 participants was about 18%.
Younger people had more erotic dreams than older people. The researchers raised reasons for all of this – that feminism had made women less likely to be reticent in reporting erotic dreams, and that sex was not as big a part of waking life for older people as it was for younger ones.
Mark Blagrove, a professor of psychology at Swansea University, says we should be cautious of retrospective studies – where people report remembered dreams, rather than keep a diary. In a 2007 study of more than 3,500 dream reports by Antonio Zadra, a researcher at the University of Montreal, the frequency of erotic dreams was 8% for both men and women. Women were more likely to have erotic dreams about current or previous partners; men were more likely to dream about multiple sex partners.
Blagrove says he would have expected the figure to be higher than 8%, from work he has done on dreams. “You tend to dream of what’s more emotional to you. For that reason, you might expect there to be more erotic content than there actually is.”
Tension or problems in waking life may also be more likely to make it into your dreams. So an averagely happy sex life may not lead to X-rated dreams “because there’s nothing there that’s any concern or cause of tension”. Blagrove says it’s only about 15% of a dream “that you can actually relate to recent waking life concerns and events”.
A 2014 study by Dylan Selterman at the University of Maryland looked at how dreams – particularly those about infidelity – affected participants’ behaviour with their partners the next day. What Blagrove found interesting was when they looked at participants’ previous day activities. “They couldn’t find anything that predicted erotic content. This means that erotic content does not have a simple one-to-one relationship with events or concerns of the previous day.”
Does this mean there is no significance to erotic dreams? “From [this] study, I would say there is no simple relationship.” Dreaming of erotic content “may be almost by chance, or as a depiction of an important waking life concern or event.” Although he adds: “It may well mean something to the individual.”
Enjoy, and be thankful that it could be worse – Schredl found 4% of his participants’ dreams were about politics. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/26/civil-service-unions-to-enter-new-pay-talks-with-uk-government | Politics | 2023-05-26T17:23:31.000Z | Rowena Mason | Civil service unions enter new pay talks with UK government | Civil service unions have entered talks with the government on pay, believing ministers may finally be willing to offer more money to match rises given to health and teaching staff.
Two unions, Prospect and the FDA, said they would be suspending strike action and ballots because the government said it was willing to engage in “meaningful” talks.
PCS, the biggest civil service union with more than 100,000 members, also confirmed it had received the offer of talks and would be attending.
Mike Clancy, the general secretary of Prospect, which represents tens of thousands of technical and specialist staff such as government scientists, said his union was “entering these talks in good faith, hence our calling off the strike action due for 7 June”.
He added, however: “We will maintain our action short of a strike and review that position in light of the talks that are promised. Throughout this dispute, we have made clear that our members should not be treated worse than other workers in the public sector and that they deserve a pay deal that recognises the cost of living crisis that began last year.”
The FDA, which represents senior civil servants, said its executive voted on Friday to suspend the ballot for strikes.
Dave Penman, its general secretary, said the union’s decision to ballot nationally for industrial action over pay had been the first in 40 years.
He said: “It was intended to send a clear message to the government that enough was enough, as they had failed to demonstrate that they valued the civil service equally with the rest of the public sector. The invitation to talks is the first indication that this message has been heard.
“Industrial action is never an end in itself, it is a means to an end. All we have asked is for the civil service to be treated fairly and with respect – the approach to pay in 2023 was one way of demonstrating this.”
Unions were involved in talks earlier in the spring but were blindsided in May with a pay offer that was substantially less generous than for other public sector workers. The deal imposed an average pay rise of between 4.5% and 5%, without any lump sum cost of living payment, and was presented as non-negotiable.
At the time, Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS, said it was an “insulting proposal” and would “serve only to anger PCS members, stiffen their resolve ahead of the forthcoming reballot and increase the likelihood of a new wave of sustained strike action”.
The PCS action has hit a range of public services in recent months, from border checks to driving tests.
The first meeting between the unions and the Cabinet Office took place on Friday afternoon.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The government has maintained an open dialogue with unions and as part of this ongoing engagement we have met with the respective unions to understand what role the Cabinet Office may play in resolving their concerns and avoiding industrial action wherever possible.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/01/ben-roberts-smith-loses-defamation-case-with-judge-saying-newspapers-established-truth-of-some-murders | Australia news | 2023-06-01T10:40:59.000Z | Ben Doherty | Ben Roberts-Smith loses defamation case, with judge finding former SAS soldier committed war crimes | Ben Roberts-Smith VC, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, murdered unarmed civilians while serving in the military in Afghanistan, a federal court judge has found.
Sitting in Sydney, Justice Anthony Besanko found that on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in Darwan in 2012 before ordering a subordinate Australian soldier to shoot the injured man dead.
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And in 2009, Roberts-Smith ordered the killing of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel in a bombed-out compound codenamed “Whiskey 108”, as well as murdering a disabled man with a prosthetic leg during the same mission, using a para machine gun.
The judgment, which came after a mammoth year-long defamation trial, is not a criminal finding of guilt, but a determination on the civil standard of the “balance of probabilities”.
A summary of the judgment has been published by the federal court. The full reasons will be published on Monday afternoon, after the commonwealth has checked the judgment for national security concerns.
Lawyers for the three newspapers – the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times – who were sued by Roberts-Smith, have asked for several weeks to determine applications around costs of the trial.
Part one: reputation
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The civil judgment is likely to see Roberts-Smith liable to pay millions of dollars in costs to the newspapers. The cost of the trial is estimated to be upwards of $35m (£18.3m).
The former SAS corporal had taken out a loan, believed to be $2m, from his employer, Channel Seven owner Kerry Stokes, to fund his defamation case. He appears now almost certain to lose his Victoria Cross medal that he surrendered as collateral.
An appeal by Roberts-Smith to the full bench of the federal court appears likely.
The former soldier was not in the courtroom in Sydney for the judgment. He is currently on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, with some media publishing screengrabs of him on a sun lounger. He was not under any obligation to attend the hearing.
The judge found it proved that Roberts-Smith was a “criminal” who “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” over an incident at Chenartu in 2012, which resulted in the execution of an Afghan man who was being held prisoner.
In his summary Besanko ruled that allegations Roberts-Smith was complicit in further murders in Syahchow and Fasil, all in southern Afghanistan in 2012, were not proven.
But the judge found the newspapers had proven that Roberts-Smith bullied and assaulted his comrades.
Besanko ruled the newspapers however had failed to prove their allegation that Roberts-Smith committed an act of domestic violence in 2018 against a woman with whom he was having an affair. Nevertheless the newspapers succeeded on a contextual truth defence and their publication of the allegation did not defame him.
Darwan in Uruzgan province of Afghanistan. The village was raided on 11 September 2012 by Australian SAS troops searching for rogue Afghan soldier Hekmatullah, who had killed three Australian soldiers a fortnight earlier. Photograph: Federal court of Australia
Roberts-Smith is Australia’s most decorated living soldier and the recipient of the Victoria Cross for “most conspicuous gallantry” during the battle of Tizak in 2010.
Ben Roberts-Smith committed war crimes in my country – his targets are the forgotten victims of Australia’s Afghan war
Shadi Khan Saif
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He had enjoyed a stellar public reputation, lionised as the exemplar of Australia’s ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, held up as the modern embodiment of Australia’s Anzac legend. The most famous soldier of his generation, Roberts-Smith was also named Father of the Year and served as chair of the government’s Australia Day Council.
But in 2018, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times published a series of articles that alleged he engaged in war crimes, including murdering civilians and ordering subordinate soldiers under his command to kill civilians in so-called “blooding” incidents.
Roberts-Smith sued the newspapers, telling the court their stories portrayed him as a criminal “who broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and “disgraced” his country and its army.
The newspapers defended their reporting as true.
The trial heard more than 100 days of evidence over more than a year, including extraordinary testimony of killing performed by Australian soldiers, and of a spiteful, factionalised SAS regiment, deeply riven by internecine fighting over decorations and medals and in thrall, on some evidence, to a “warrior culture” steeped in violence.
Dramatically, three SAS soldiers accused of murder on separate missions refused in court to answer questions about what they did in Afghanistan, objecting on the grounds that any truthful answer they gave would be self-incriminatory. Each was permitted by Besanko not to answer.
The most high-profile allegation proved in court was that Roberts-Smith, on a mission to the southern Afghan village of Darwan in 2012, marched a handcuffed man named Ali Jan to the edge of a 10-metre precipice that dropped down to a dry river bed below.
Roberts-Smith then kicked Ali Jan in the chest, sending him falling backwards over the cliff, his face hitting the cliff as he fell, before he landed on the ground below.
The Hon Justice Anthony Besanko. Photograph: Federal court of Australia
Ali Jan survived the fall, though he was badly injured, and was trying to get to his feet when the Australian soldiers, having walked down a diagonal footpath cut across the cliff, reached him.
Roberts-Smith ordered a soldier under his command, known before the court as Person 11, to shoot Ali Jan dead, an order that was followed. Ali Jan’s body was then dragged to a nearby field.
The other major allegation concerned a raid on a bombed-out compound code-named Whiskey 108 in 2009.
Two men were found hiding in a tunnel: one, an elderly man, the other a younger man with a prosthetic leg. The men came out of the tunnel unarmed and surrendered.
Besanko found that Roberts-Smith ordered a junior soldier on his patrol to shoot the old man, before he forcibly manhandled the disabled man outside the walls of the compound where he threw him to the ground and fired his para machine gun into his prone body, killing him.
The disabled man’s leg was later souvenired by another soldier and used by Australian SAS troops as a macabre celebratory drinking vessel at their on-base bar, The Fat Ladies Arms.
Ben Roberts-Smith: the explosive allegations of war crimes at the heart of defamation case
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The onus of proof in the defamation case rested with the newspapers, who were required to prove to the civil standard of “balance of probabilities” that the allegations they had published were true.
Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, two of the journalists at the centre of the trial, spoke outside court on Thursday.
“Today is a day of justice,” McKenzie said. “None of the SAS witnesses wanted to go to court. Ben Roberts-Smith brought this case, he came almost every day. But he did not come today. He’s in Bali, doing whatever he’s doing.”
Masters thanked the newspapers and their legal team. “It was a great call back in June 2018 to run this story. I think it will go down in the history of the news business as one of the great calls,” Masters said.
Robert-Smith’s barrister, Arthur Moses SC, said: “We’ll obviously consider the lengthy judgment that his honour has delivered and look at issues.”
Additional reporting by Elias Visontay.
Guardian Australia will publish a special episode of the podcast Ben Roberts-Smith v the media on Friday morning. Subscribe to Ben Roberts-Smith v the media to catch up on the court case and be notified of new episodes | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/dec/30/katine-guardian-project-rural-uganda | Global development | 2017-12-30T09:00:08.000Z | Liz Ford | Now Katine is famous': how a Guardian project wrought change in rural Uganda | Liz Ford | Joyce Abiro was among the first to join the Katine farmers’ cooperative in 2010. She’s since been able to take out loans to buy seeds and equipment, store what she produces in the community warehouse so that it keeps dry and clean, and sell her crops when the price is right.
This has allowed the 52-year old, who lives in Ajobi village, to send her children to school, pay any medical bills, and build a more secure brick house for the family.
Katine villagers receive £60,000 following Guardian and Observer Christmas appeal
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“I can produce [crops] and have a place to sell them. The cooperative gives me a market for my produce,” says Abiro.
“I was able to build that brick house,” she says, pointing to a structure in the centre of her compound, which she shares with her husband, mother-in law, and six of her 10 children. “Before, I was living in a mud hut.”
The Katine Joint Farmers Cooperative Society was established to improve the quality and quantity of food produced in this rural sub-county of north-east Uganda. The cooperative also manages the 1,000-ton capacity produce store, a whitewashed brick building, officially opened in 2011, which sits beside the main road that cuts through Katine on its way north to Lira.
The cooperative, and the produce store, are arguably the most successful examples of a development project launched 10 years ago with the support of Guardian and Observer readers, and Barclays.
In 2007, the Guardian and Observer began raising money through its Christmas appeals for two NGOs – the African Medical and Research Foundation and Farm Africa – to fund a three-year project to improve the lives of the 27,000 people who lived in Katine. At the time, the sub-county had some of the worse health and living conditions in Uganda. Katine had also suffered an attack by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army a few years earlier, and been plagued by cattle rustlers.
The project, which was extended until 2013, led to the creation of village health teams, small microfinance programmes and farmers’ groups. Healthcare workers were trained, schools built and boreholes dug.
The catalyst for long-term change, however, has been supporting farmers to produce better crops and, crucially, get them to market and sold at competitive prices.
The cooperative now has 876 individual members and 71 groups on its books. In return for an annual fee, members are able to borrow and save money - the cooperative offers lower interest rates than banks - store excess produce and receive training and advice on growing crops. A small shop on the premises allows them to buy equipment without having to travel to Soroti town, about 30km away.
Farmers also have the option to sell crops to the cooperative management team, which means they have a ready market and don’t get ripped off by middlemen. Managers sell in bulk when the price is right, creating more profit to plough back into the cooperative. Another fundraising effort by Guardian readers, in 2013, provided a £60,000 deposit fund at a local bank, ensuring the cooperative had additional funds to borrow against to build the business.
Through Farm Africa, which has continued to support Katine farmers, the cooperative is now involved in the FoodTrade east and southern Africa programme. Last year, farmers involved in the scheme were among the winners of a contract to export green grams and groundnuts to Kenya. The cooperative has also applied to supply produce to the UN World Food Programme – unthinkable a decade ago.
‘I can afford to go for private treatment’: Joyce Abiro at her home in Ajobi village, Katine. Photograph: Liz Ford/The Guardian
“Katine is now famous in the area,” says Mary Aleto, general manager of the cooperative since 2014. “Now the farmers are happy because services have been brought nearer to them. They are able to bring crops to us, to avoid middlemen, and market their produce.
“Farmers’ standard of living is higher, people have taken loans to build houses … [they are] able to improve their produce now, able to increase productivity and get the right fertiliser. People are able to educate their children.”
When drought hit the region last year and crops were invaded by armyworm, the cooperative provided a lifeline.
“My family never went hungry,” says John Opio Eluru, who manages the cooperative shop. He had grown and stored crops so that, when difficult times came, he had “enough to meet [school] fees and [pay for] medical care and feed everyone at home, so we could manage the drought”.
Life in Katine remains challenging and the cooperative’s success is only a small step. Poverty levels are still high. The largest medical facility, Tiriri health centre, remains understaffed and, while the operating theatre now has water, it is still without a regular electricity supply. The fridge at Ojom health centre, already fixed once, has developed another fault and can’t store vaccines.
But having money in the community has created a buzz and optimism for the future.
Abiro has put some of her profit from selling crops into her cooperative savings. Last year’s drought meant she had to uproot her cassava early to eat, but she says she had the resources to buy and sell other crops to make money.
“Before the cooperative it was not fine, not like it is now,” she says. “After the cooperative came in we got knowledge about how to save money in groups. There was no market for our product, compared to now. We could take things up to [market in] Soroti but now the market is here.”
And, she adds, if she gets sick she doesn’t need to worry about long queues or drug stockouts at the health centres. “I can afford to go for private treatment.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/07/breitbart-threat-to-europe-postwar-liberal-consensus | Opinion | 2017-03-07T15:23:59.000Z | Joe Mulhall | Breitbart’s click-hate echo chamber is a threat to Europe. Here’s why | Joe Mulhall | Breitbart is not a news website. Nor is it a media outlet, and its staff are not ordinary journalists. Breitbart is a political project, with a specific political agenda, and staffed by willing propagandists.
As Hope not Hate’s new report, Breitbart: A rightwing plot to shape Europe’s future shows, while ostensibly a rightwing news outlet like any other, Breitbart is in reality part of a transatlantic political movement with a common worldview and coordinated objectives. It doesn’t just report on events: it seeks to make them and (mis-)shape them.
Indeed, Breitbart publishes falsehoods and peddles half-truths. Its unsubstantiated conclusions are drawn from its existing prejudices and published to advance its agenda; Breitbart is a click-hate echo chamber.
Reading Breitbart for 48 hours will convince you the world is terrible
Adam Gabbatt
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It fits comfortably within a contemporary movement of people, political parties and philosophical currents that seemingly aim to undermine the current liberal democratic progressive consensus and the societal norms that are derived from it.
While Breitbart regularly publishes content that is anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, central to its politics is a rejection of multiculturalism, manifest as opposition to immigration and liberal refugee policies.
As shown by an analysis of the last 500 articles published on Breitbart London in our new report, one of the website’s main focuses is on migration, especially Muslim immigration into Europe. The heavy focus on the issue is probably derived from the outlook of former Breitbart executive chair Steve Bannon, who believes we are in the grip of a civilisational conflict between the west and the Muslim world.
Whatever the driving force behind it, Breitbart’s “reporting” related to Islam and Muslims is often completely indistinguishable from the anti-Muslim “counter-jihad” movement’s rhetoric (a movement we recently profiled), or even that of the extreme far right.
Take for example the Breitbart article, “Political Correctness Protects Muslim rape Culture”. Based on an unsubstantiated claim that there is indeed a “rape epidemic”, the piece states that “the epidemic is a byproduct of the influx into Europe of a million, mostly Muslim, migrants”, arguing that: “It’s just not politically correct to talk openly about Islam’s rape culture” and that “like honor killings, with massive Muslim immigration on the horizon, it could be coming to a town near you all too soon”.
Can Marine Le Pen win the French presidential election? Guardian
In stark contrast to the website’s regular downplaying of “the radical feminist ‘rape culture’ panic” – despite research suggesting that 23% of female undergraduate students in the US have reported experiencing sexual assault since enrolling in college – the portrayal of Muslims as not just culturally different but also a physical and sexual threat (a traditional tactic of the anti-immigrant far right) is commonplace on Breitbart.
While it is a digital platform, it would be wrong to see Breitbart’s threat as merely online. In February 2014 it opened its first international section with the launch of Breitbart London. At the time of its launch, along with a new branch in Texas, Bannon made clear the motivation for the expansion across the Atlantic: “We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war.” The establishment of a British branch was accelerated in order to support a “nascent European Tea Party” before the May 2015 elections.
The offline soldiers in his “political war” here in the UK have been Ukip. “We effectively became the Ukip comms office,” one Breitbart employee told the Spectator following the 2015 general election. “Any criticism of the sainted Farage was completely banned,” said another.
Plans have also been announced (though have yet failed to materialise) to expand the Breitbart brand to the continent, with editions planned in France and Germany. Both countries have elections soon. It has also emerged that there are plans to launch in Italy, too, with the country facing growing economic issues and the increased likelihood of elections this year.
Wanted: strong centrist European leaders with star quality
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Despite these announcements, the chance of a French Breitbart opening in time for the elections is slim, though this has certainly not stopped its existing platforms providing plenty of coverage to the Front National. In the last year alone, Breitbart has published more than 200 articles with Le Pen in the title and many more where she and her party are mentioned. Last November, a tweet by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen – a prominent Front National official who is also a niece of Marine Le Pen – fuelled speculation about a link-up between Breitbart and the party. Maréchal-Le Pen said she had an accepted an invitation to work together with Bannon, who had described her as a “rising star” (Bannon later denied, via an aide, reaching out to her).
Similar exposure has been given to Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – who is also a Breitbart columnist – predicted to poll well in next week’s Dutch elections; and the anti-Islam Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, while strong support was offered to Norbert Hofer, the far-right Freedom party candidate, during his failed bid to become Austrian president last year.
Along with far-right and populist parties, Breitbart poses a threat to the liberal progressive consensus established after the second world war, and with it protections offered to vulnerable minorities, especially Muslims. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/26/rex-patrick-to-challenge-denial-of-foi-requests-based-on-ministerial-portfolio-changes | Australia news | 2023-06-25T15:00:39.000Z | Christopher Knaus | Rex Patrick to challenge denial of FoI requests based on ministerial portfolio changes | The practice of using ministerial portfolio changes to keep large swathes of government documents secret is severely undermining transparency and accountability, the federal court will hear on Monday.
Rex Patrick, who marked himself as a transparency campaigner during his time in the Senate, is mounting a legal challenge against a common method of denying freedom of information requests for documents held by government ministers.
When a minister leaves a portfolio, any document held by them during their time in office is deemed to be impervious to FoI requests, because it is no longer considered to be in the possession of their successor.
Government use of VIP jets open to potential misuse as defence stops publishing passenger lists
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The rule keeps large swathes of government documents held in ministerial offices out of reach of the public. Its impact is compounded by vast delays at various stages of the FoI process, which create windows for ministerial changes to take place.
Patrick is challenging a single FoI decision relating to a request for documents on the sports rorts affair. In 2020, he sought access to the advice given by the then attorney general, Christian Porter, to Scott Morrison about the grants program.
Patrick was refused access to the documents and sought a review from the FoI watchdog, the office of the Australian information commissioner. The OAIC’s review took so long that the holder of the attorney general portfolio changed twice, first to Michaelia Cash and then to Mark Dreyfus.
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This year, the OAIC ruled that the portfolio changes meant the documents were no longer in the possession of the attorney general and therefore could not be released.
Patrick told Guardian Australia that the inordinate delays in the FoI regime were exacerbating the problem. “I’m in this situation because the information commissioner took so long to conduct the review that the office of the attorney general changed twice, first to Michaelia Cash and [then] Mark Dreyfus,” said.
Patrick is being represented by Maurice Blackburn, and the case is being supported by the Grata Fund, which finances public interest litigation.
Jacinta Lewin, principal lawyer with Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, said the case was designed to ensure that a change of job could not be used to deny access to information.
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FOI commissioner complained of being ignored and ‘limited’ staff before resigning, tense emails reveal
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“Robust FoI laws are integral to a strong democracy. Journalists and ordinary Australians need lasting access to information to hold governments to account for the decisions they make,” Lewin said.
Greens senator David Shoebridge raised the case with the OAIC in Senate estimates last month, asking information commissioner Angelene Falk about the delays in her office reviewing the FoI decision.
“It comes back to this continual issue with your office – the inordinate delay in decision-making. In this case, the delay in decision-making in your office created this whole mess,” Shoebridge said. “If you’d made a decision promptly – within a month or two months of having the review brought – none of this would have happened, would it?”
Falk acknowledged that the “effluxion of time is an issue” in reviewing FoI decisions, but said suggestions that it should have been reviewed within a number of weeks or months were “not realistic in any FoI processing regime”.
The Grata Fund executive director Isabelle Reinecke said the laws were untenable in a healthy democracy.
“This loophole is a major roadblock to a functional FoI system and has created a significant gap in the accountability of government and the public service,” she said.
The case will be heard on Monday in the federal court in Adelaide. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/sep/07/venicefilmfestival2004.londonfilmfestival2004 | Film | 2004-09-07T15:24:43.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Vera Drake | Mike Leigh's new film is a stunningly acted and heart-wrenchingly powerful drama about postwar working-class life in London. Imelda Staunton must surely be in contention for major awards for her performance as Vera Drake, the modest, hard-working cleaning lady in 1950 who has a hidden life.
For decades, Vera has been cheerfully getting on with things: popping in to help neighbours, nursing her elderly mother, looking after her family. But that life has co-existed with (to paraphrase another Leigh title) a secret and a lie. With a hidden kit-bag of syringe and carbolic soap she also quietly "helps out" wretched girls who've "got themselves into trouble". With a chirpy smile, Vera arrives in their flats, puts the kettle on - for all the world as if she was making a nice cup of tea - and tells them briskly to pop themselves on the bed and take their underwear off. Vera doesn't see anything wrong with it, and conceals this business from everyone as naturally and unworriedly as a midwife might conceal the moment of childbirth from the expectant father.
When the police finally confront her, her face has the stricken look of someone finally forced to identify the elephant in the living room. Even before we realise Vera's secret vocation as an abortionist, her simple daily life is as gripping and fascinating as any thriller. I have seen nothing as compelling since Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven. Leigh pitilessly captures the shame and fear to which working women were subject - and which those with money and contacts could avoid - and with a tragedian's ruthlessness he etches that shame and fear on Drake's face, when nemesis arrives in the form of the police. It's a devastating reminder of the hypocrisy of Britain before the Abortion Act. Clarity of dramatic language and superb, humane performances are the bedrock of this outstanding film. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/12/bees-scream-murder-hornets-attack-study | Environment | 2021-11-12T19:38:42.000Z | Maya Yang | Sound the alarm: bees ‘scream’ when murder hornets attack, study finds | A study has revealed a new defense mechanism used by bees when attacked by giant “murder” hornets: screaming.
When left unchecked, the giant Asian hornets can destroy a honeybee hive in hours, feeding on larvae and decapitating bees in what scientists call a “slaughter phase”. The hornets then feed severed body parts to their young.
How the death’s head hawkmoth transmits terror and confusion
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The study, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal this week, revealed that bees release a “rallying call for collective defence” against the hornets. The previously undiscovered signal, now known as an “anti-predator pipe, shares acoustic traits with alarm shrieks, fear screams and panic calls of primates, birds and meerkats,” according to the study.
Bees produce the sound by vibrating their wings or thorax, elevating their abdomens and exposing a gland to release a pheromone.
“It’s alarming to hear,” Heather Mattila, a co-author of the study, told Gizmodo. “It’s characterized by rapid bursts of high-pitched sounds that change unpredictably in frequency – they’re quite harsh and noisy.”
According to the study, signal rates increase seven- to eight-fold during a hornet attack. In addition to anti-predator pipes, bees resort to “fecal spotting” – a defense mechanism in which they collect animal feces and apply it to the entrance of their hives to deter the hornets.
Other measures include “balling”, where bees will form into a cluster and smother the hornet by vibrating their wing muscles. The vibration-fueled heat, which can reach up to 46C, coupled with the carbon dioxide produced by the bees, can kill a hornet in 30 minutes.
Washington to destroy third murder hornet nest in battle to save bees
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In recent months, giant hornets have increasingly emerged in the Pacific north-west region of the US. In September, the third giant hornet nest to be discovered in the country this year was found in Washington state. The hornets are an invasive species with nests that are very difficult to locate, as they tend to be in forested areas.
In addition to causing devastating harm to bee colonies, the giant hornet can harm humans, at times causing fatalities. One entomologist has described the feeling of being stung by a murder hornet as like “having hot tacks pushed into my flesh”. The hornets can also eject venom. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/11/disney-set-to-lose-up-to-140m-on-tomorrowland | Film | 2015-06-11T07:20:22.000Z | Ben Child | Disney set to lose up to $140m on Tomorrowland | Disney is expected to lose up to $140m (£90m) on the George Clooney futuristic fantasy Tomorrowland, its biggest loss in two years, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow
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Brad Bird’s film, about an inventor (Clooney) who travels with a teenage girl to a strange utopia, cost $180m to produce but also featured a staggering $150m marketing budget. So far it has made back just $170m in three weeks at the global box office, with future returns unlikely to radically change the financial picture. The film opened to just $40m at the US box office on 26 May, and failed to find its feet in China, the world’s second-largest film market, where it scored just $13.8m on debut earlier this month, to open behind the Japanese anime Stand By Me Doraemon.
The predicted loss of between $120m and $140m, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s sources, would be Disney’s biggest since Johnny Depp vehicle The Lone Ranger faltered in 2013, leading to a $150m writedown. Prior to that, the studio reportedly lost $200m on space fantasy John Carter following a misfiring marketing campaign for Andrew Stanton’s riff on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulpy Martian adventures.
However, Disney is having an excellent year at the box office, with superhero epic The Avengers: Age of Ultron having scored $1.3bn worldwide and fairytale fantasy Cinderella rifling past $500m in April. The studio also has Star Wars adventure The Force Awakens, the bookies’ runaway favourite to be 2015’s highest-grossing film, set to debut in December. Moreover, Inside Out and Ant-Man will both be expected to perform well when they arrive in cinemas in June and July respectively.
Tomorrowland’s failure also marks another low point in Clooney’s career after the actor-director’s film The Monuments Men failed to win over audiences or critics last year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2005/jun/19/golf.usopengolf2005 | Sport | 2005-06-19T01:16:01.000Z | Bill Elliott | Golf: Jacobsen rocks on as Goosen glides along | Peter Jacobsen, the 51-year old veteran, more than slightly surprised himself when he returned a 69, one under par, in his third round at the United States Open here in North Carolina. His score, achieved thanks to some cracking play and highlighted by a hole in one, lifted the rather depressing mood that had begun to drift across Pinehurst's No 2 course.
If American golf's oldest rocker - his band Jake Trout And The Flounders rip it out every other week on the Seniors Tour - can make it round this beautiful test of a golf course then why cannot some of the young guys show the courage to do much the same?
OK, Jacobsen is long since gone as a major contender so that in a sense he was just out there having fun, but his round was studded with the sort of controlled aggression that was increasingly being beaten out of the current posse of superstars.
Why? Well, this really is a demanding course, the options fine, the penalties severe, the rewards few and several miles between. After the opening two days of 'one step forward, two strides back', too many of the contenders seem to have begun to build small barricades around what score they have made. The idea is to give as little away as possible which, though wise enough, leads to the sort of defensive golf that encourages even the most committed of observers to start to nod off.
To be fair, the United States Golf Association appear to have recognised the fact that although Pinehurst is an exam paper worthy of the most accomplished candidates, it presents a puzzle that fails to resonate with a television audience grown fat on birdies and eagles and even the occasional albatross. Between Friday and yesterday they decided to do something about it. This something mostly was serious watering of the greens to make them just a tad more receptive to a decently struck approach shot and it was this easing up by the hard men in blazers that Jacobsen capitalised on yesterday.
'If they had left the course as it was then I don't think anyone would have been under par today, especially not me,' he said. 'But the greens are noticeably softer and the putts slower than they have been. You still have to play awfully well to get under par here, but at least now you have a chance.' At four over par after 54 holes, Jacobsen most definitely still has a chance.
It is not beyond the bounds of reason that four over par could actually win this US Open. Improbable, but not impossible.
While Retief Goosen remains the most likely champion, there are enough players within sniping range to form one of the Baptist choirs they so enjoy in this part of the world. These include Lee Westwood and Sergio Garcia as well as Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods.
Westwood always has maintained that if he ever is to win a major then he fancies his chances of a US Open more than anything else, and despite a bad chest cold and a sore throat that makes him sound like Kermit the Frog after a heavy night, the yeoman from Worksop is enjoying a good time here in North Carolina.
'There's no other course in the world with greens like these - or at least if there is then I haven't played it,' he said. 'This is so difficult that it is hard to describe. I suppose the scores say it all. Yeah, I know the last Brit, indeed the last European, golfer to win this was Tony Jacklin a thousand years ago (1970 to be historically accurate) but, you know, Monty could have won two, Faldo could have won one and so could Woosie. Maybe luck just hasn't been on our side and maybe that's about to change. It's certainly time.'
Talking about luck Jason 'Al' Gore is making his own outrageous good fortune here this week. If Gore was any more of a journeyman pro then he would spend his life in a caravan on Route 66. As it is, he arrived here via sectional qualifying more unheralded than a mid-winter dawn in Caerphilly.
He even managed to make it minus his clothes after his car was broken into while he overnighted in an econo-motel somewhere dark and dodgy.
Considering he has spent his eight years as a pro playing on second division tours where the prize money is right up there with a Saturday night bingo hall, this was a hard blow for him to absorb.
That he has is to his credit. 'Worse things happen in life,' he said. Like the voluminous white trousers he bought to replace the nicked ones. At 6ft 1in and 17st light, Gore is sturdily built so that he often heaves into view here with all the impact of a Spanish galleon rounding the Horn.
Still, his upbeat attitude is hugely refreshing and his golf suddenly is just huge. Big enough to lift him into joint leadership of this Open alongside Goosen as they ploughed their way through the third day and good enough now surely to guarantee him the single biggest cheque of his life.
More lottery than bingo at last. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/10/gurinder-chadha-most-satisfying-thing-i-have-done-bend-it-like-beckham-musical- | Stage | 2015-05-10T07:45:07.000Z | Corinne Jones | Gurinder Chadha: ‘It’s been the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done’ | Seven years ago, when Gurinder Chadha was in hospital, about to give birth, one of the doctors recognised her as the director of Bend It Like Beckham, and made a confession. “She said, ‘You know, when I had my child, I could take in [to hospital] three possessions, and the one thing I wanted to take was Bend It Like Beckham. I watched the film over and over, and my child came into the world with the goodness of this movie.’”
Chadha, 55, beams as she retells the story. “I’ve met people in all corners of the world who bang on about the first time they saw it, but I was quite astounded…”
Looking back at reviews from its release in 2002, some critics were flippant about the film, comparing it unfavourably to East is East. But it smashed expectations: the British public adored it and it was an international success, taking over $70m in the box office worldwide and making waves in the US even though the two leads were unknown – as was Beckham, at that point.
Later this month, Bend It Like Beckham will reappear in our lives as a musical, with excitement peaking recently when the director posted a selfie with Zayn Malik on Twitter, saying the former One Directioner was coming to see it. It’s Chadha’s first stage production and, she says, “It has been the most creatively satisfying thing I’ve ever done. I wanted to be part of the fantastic West End tradition, and just open it up a bit to bring in that part of west London to the West End.” That part being Southall, Hounslow, Middlesex – Chadha’s home turf, and the story’s multicultural setting. “When it comes to who we are as a nation, I think the film had something to do with making the ‘norm’ of our country this massive, diverse sort of melting pot,” she says, later relating it to the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony: “What Danny [Boyle] created was that sense of inclusion for everybody… it was such a fantastic moment.”
Gurinder Chadha and Howard Goodall talk about bringing Bend It Like Beckham to the stage.
I remind Chadha of an article she wrote just before the film’s UK release, in which she argued that Britain was a much better place to make multicultural films than the US. Does she still think that? Since then, Keira Knightley has become an international star, whereas Parminder Nagra has mainly found success on American TV (she was one of ER’s longest-serving actors). Chadha muses on this. “I think it’s a tragedy that we don’t have a bigger, better British film industry that is about all kinds of voices – northern, southern, black, white – that reflect us.”
Bend It Like Beckham explores more than just race. “Parents struggle to find material that gives their daughters positive images,” Chadha says (she has a daughter of her own), “and I see this show as a way of addressing that… What I’m waiting for is that row of young women just agog because they’ve never seen girls on stage reflecting them before – not being all about looking beautiful, but being dynamic.” She smiles. “I can see myself as if I was that age, watching this; I’d be like, ‘Fuck! Girls can do anything.’”
Bend It Like Beckham previews at the Phoenix Theatre, London from 15 May | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2018/may/15/a-matter-of-waste-how-smart-scales-are-helping-restaurants-bin-less | Guardian Small Business Network | 2018-05-15T06:30:49.000Z | Anne Cassidy | Could this startup shame restaurants into wasting less food? | Marc Zornes has a confession to make: he found some mince in his fridge the other day that was a few days past its use-by date and had to be thrown out. Some might consider this a relatively minor slip-up – but for Zornes, the co-founder of a startup combating food waste, it represented an affront to his principles. “It was devastating,” he says. “I don’t claim to be perfect at home, but that doesn’t happen very often.”
Tackling food waste around the world: our top 10 apps
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Zornes’s company, Winnow, provides technology that helps restaurants cut food waste. In the UK, where £13bn worth of food is thrown away every year, the hospitality sector alone is wasting £2.5bn of food. Zornes, a former business consultant, launched Winnow in London in 2013, with co-founder Kevin Duffy. Starting the business was like a calling for him: “There are a lot of things someone could be doing with their life. Me, I want to see this food-waste issue fixed,” Zornes says.
Winnow’s technology involves a scale that weighs food waste bins and a touchscreen where kitchen staff can log the type of food they are throwing away. The tech then assesses the value of what’s being dumped, both in terms of cost and environmental impact. Chefs can use the resulting analytics, which take into account the restaurant’s menu, to make their kitchens run more efficiently; this, Zornes says, enables them to cut food waste by between 40% and 70%.
The smart tech system tackles food waste in the restaurant industry. Photograph: Winnow
Their clients include Compass Group, the contract caterer, hotel giant Accor, and Ikea, which has become as famous for its meatballs as its flat-packed furniture. Ikea recently credited Winnow with helping it save the equivalent of 350,000 meals in its in-store restaurants in eight months. The tech also has the support of big-name chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who described Winnow as a “no-brainer for the hospitality industry”.
Fighting food waste with an app… and a measuring spoon
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One of the biggest crimes against food in the industry is caused by what Zornes describes as “the fear of running out”. This is when a kitchen produces too much of a dish in case there won’t be enough to meet demand, resulting in trays of leftover food. “That happens all the time in kitchens – it’s a well-known operational phenomenon,” says Zornes. Edible food getting chucked during the production process is another issue. One kitchen they worked with was using the juice and seeds from tomatoes as an ingredient for a dish and throwing out the leftover pulp. When Zornes asked if there could be a use for the pulp, the staff realised it could be used to make a sauce, turning a waste product into a valuable ingredient.
Marc Zornes.
Awareness around food waste was low when Winnow launched. Zornes, who is from Missouri, had experience in the food industry, having worked at US food wholesaler C&S Wholesale Grocers in his early career, but it was while he was a consultant at McKinsey that he got the idea for the business. A report he was working on highlighted food waste as a major opportunity; it also revealed that there were few companies, apart from US tech startup LeanPath, working in the sector.
One of the big initial challenges was convincing chefs how much was being thrown away. “Waste is one of these things that by definition is boxed and taken away quietly,” says Zornes. “You ask people what they throw away and they say they think it’s 3-5% of what they buy, when the reality is somewhere between 5% and 20% – most of it happening before it even gets to a plate.”
Now there’s a growing number of food waste startups – with one, Toast Ale, which produces a beer made from leftover bread, sharing the same office as Winnow. Others include Rubies in the Rubble, which turns surplus food into jams and chutneys, and Too Good To Go, an app that enables people to buy food from restaurants that would otherwise go to waste. Zornes believes it will take an army of startups like these to bring the $1tn worth of food wasted worldwide every year down to an acceptable level.
$1tn worth of food is wasted worldwide every year
Winnow saves the 1,000-plus kitchens it works with an estimated £12m a year, but this is just “scratching the surface”, says Zornes: “In the [global] hospitality industry alone it’s a $100bn problem.” The fact that cutting waste saves companies money is clearly helping drive change, however. “We are starting to move [food waste reduction] from something that was niche a couple of years ago to something organisations are starting to take a serious look at,” he says.
Bringing the technology to other sectors and into homes, which the company trialled in partnership with Sainsbury’s, is not in the immediate plans, but is something Zornes “keeps an open mind” about. It has just received $7.4m (£5.6m) in funding, to be invested into the technology and the expansion of the company, which has offices in London, Asia and the Middle East.
Zornes gets satisfaction out of the fact that making a profit and keeping investors happy directly aligns with his ideals. But what motivates him is simple. “I think food is too valuable to waste,” he says. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/29/british-airways-owner-iag-annual-profits-soar-leisure | Business | 2024-02-29T14:22:40.000Z | Gwyn Topham | British Airways owner’s annual profits soar to £2.3bn on leisure boom | The owner of British Airways has announced bumper profits for 2023 on the back of sustained demand for leisure flights, with operating profits doubling year on year and exceeding 2019’s pre-Covid haul.
IAG reported an annual profit of €2.7bn (£2.3bn) after tax, on operating profits of €3.5bn (£3bn), with high fares and premium leisure travel compensating for smaller numbers of business travellers.
The airline group said demand continued to be strong, despite the impact of a recession in the UK, although it did not expect a further significant rise in fares after large increases in 2023.
Luis Gallego, IAG’s chief executive, said: “We don’t see any weakness in the market.”
He said the group had last year “more than doubled its operating margin and profits compared with 2022, generated excellent free cashflow and strengthened its balance sheet position, recovering capacity to close to pre-Covid-19 levels in most of its core markets”.
British Airways, which retired its Boeing 747 jumbos during the pandemic, was flying at only 90% of its previous capacity, partly because of the continued weakness or closure of some destinations in Asia, but would return to near 2019 levels this year, with more frequencies on transatlantic routes.
IAG’s chief financial officer, Nicholas Cadbury, said: “With a good fare increase over the last year, right now we are looking at growing our capacity by about 7%. We’re seeing fares being sustained at the moment … So it’s good news, but our priority is to make sure we just fill in that additional capacity.”
The British national carrier is also planning a £7bn overhaul over the next few years, including the purchase of new planes but also investing in updating its business-class seats, lounges and food. It is also revamping its IT systems after a series of high-profile problems in recent years.
Gallego said: “British Airways is our biggest asset with huge potential and that’s the reason we are investing.”
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Meanwhile, IAG announced the appointment of new chief executives for British Airways’s Spanish sister airlines in the group, with the Vueling boss, Marco Sansavini, taking over at Iberia, replacing the interim chief, Fernando Candela, who moves to run Level, while a former British Airways director, Carolina Martinoli, takes over at Vueling. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/dec/09/the-10-best-films-of-2014-no-4-whiplash | Film | 2014-12-09T14:46:46.000Z | Catherine Shoard | The 10 best films of 2014: No 4 – Whiplash | “There are no two words in the English language,” says JK Simmons’s music teacher in Whiplash, “more harmful than ‘good job’”. So we won’t use them. After all, they’d be inappropriate. It’s fitting a film that bangs the drum so hard for bloodshed in the service of excellence succeeds so soundly the regular set of superlatives are redundant. “Job”, too. This is not a job. This is something you choose to do every waking moment. To which your dreams are also devoted.
JK Simmons plays Terence Fletcher: bald, burly, terrifying; the conductor of the jazz band at a top conservatoire. Fletcher is a raging bullhead, glowering down on a full metal drumkit in tight T-shirt from the moral high ground. On the stool is newbie Andrew (Miles Teller): desperate to impress, prepared to sacrifice everything for a shot at Buddy Rich-ish brilliance.
Damian Chazelle’s movie comes with a bracingly unfashionable message: it is worth working yourself into an early grave in the pursuit of virtuosity. More than that: it is essential. There is no room for compassion here. Whiplash is a smack in the face for an “award for participation” society, a world in which you get a slap on the back for showing up. Fletcher is the film’s grand baddie and its vindicated hero. He is hated and venerated. He is an absolutely fantastic creation.
Chazelle was 28 when he shot this (in 19 days, it was then edited and submitted to Sundance within another 50). It’s his second feature, and it’s a doozy. It stands out among this year’s crop like a thunder rumble in white noise. Its ancestor is not something like Beasts of the Southern Wild, the other recent Sundance-spawned enfant terrible which turned into an Oscar contender, but Gravity. It is just as immersive an experience. You exit the cinema reeling, exhausted, whooping (there’s no drop-off here; the final 20 minutes are the best).
Cymbolic imagery … Whiplash
Whiplash may look like a musical, but scratch beneath the surface and this is all movie; as sweaty and bruising as the best macho smackdown thriller, as brutal and rootable as the finest sports drama. While other awards films this year labour the point, this proceeds at a lick (106 minutes), neither dragging nor rushing, taut as a new snare. It’s a movie of military precision about the quest for it. Anyone in its crosshairs doesn’t stand a chance.
Can it sustain momentum right through to next year’s Oscars, like its Sundance sister, Boyhood? It ought to. To see this is to be converted into a cheerleader, regardless of reciprocation. Andrew hoovers up a crumb of praise as if it’s crack. Whiplash delivers the purest hit of cinematic exhilaration this season.
Whiplash is released in the UK on 16 January. The Guardian’s top 10 of the year is based on the 2014 season of films as measured by the Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes, according to US release dates. A separate, 2014 UK release specific top 10 will appear in Film&Music and online on 12 December.
Which film has topped your own list? Tell us in the form below, and we’ll round up your favourites in a readers’ choice list. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/oct/27/have-you-been-using-the-pandemic-to-catch-up-on-long-classic-novels | Books | 2020-10-27T13:27:52.000Z | Alison Flood | Have you been using the pandemic to catch up on long classic novels? | What have people been doing to pass all these extra hours at home? Burying ourselves in ultra-long novels such as War and Peace and Don Quixote, apparently. At the start of lockdown No 1, all the way back in March, we reported that readers were starting to stock up on longer novels and classic fiction. More than seven months on, Penguin Random House says that sales of its edition of War and Peace – which runs to 1,440 pages – have boomed by 69% in the UK so far this year: according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, they’ve gone from 3,700 copies sold in 2019 to 6,300 in 2020 so far.
The publisher has also seen an uplift in sales of Don Quixote (1,056 pages, up 53%) Anna Karenina (865 pages, up 52%), Middlemarch (880 pages, up 40%) and Crime and Punishment (720 pages, up 35%).
“We were expecting possibly to see a spike in comfort reads, like cosy crime or light comic novels. Instead it seems that readers have been inspired in lockdown to tackle the great literary monuments – the books that maybe they’d always intended to read, but never before now had the time to embark on,” says Penguin Classics editorial director Jess Harrison.
Whether readers are finishing their odysseys remains to be seen. But there are some success stories, such as the more than 3,000 readers who participated in Tolstoy Together, a group reading of War and Peace overseen by the novelist Yiyun Li, who assigned them 10-15 pages of daily reading over 85 consecutive days
“I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide,” says Li. “In these times, one does want to read an author who is so deeply moved by the world that he could appear unmoved in his writing.”
This has certainly been true for me. After burying myself in the immersive joy of Mary Stewart’s Merlin books (my omnibus edition runs to more than 900 pages) earlier this summer, I’m currently nearing the end of a Dune reread. Only 600-odd pages, so somewhat paltry compared to Li’s journey to 19th-century Russia, but my lord, sinking back into Frank Herbert’s world of sand worms and spice, ’thopters and Bene Gesserit “witches”, has been absolutely what I needed. As I tend to do every time I reread Dune, I’ve found myself muttering apposite lines to myself – “Fear is the little death” – and slyly practising my Fremen sand walk when I’m at the playground with my kids: “They must sound like the natural shifting of sand … like the wind … Step … drag … drag … step … step … wait.” After all, you never know when Shai-Hulud will show his face.
What literary classics have you read during lockdown?
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Following up Dune with the likes of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune would up my page-count to levels more worthy of the War and Peace crew, but I’m not convinced yet that I’ll continue on to Herbert’s (inferior, in my memory) sequels: I’m certainly not delving back into the ones written after his death. But another long read certainly tempts. What are your favourite long books? Have you been finding solace in novels that require both hands to hold? | Full |
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