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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/may/11/deflategate-tom-brady-gets-four-game-ban-patriots-lose-first-round-pick | Sport | 2015-05-12T07:18:15.000Z | Tom Lutz | Deflategate: Tom Brady banned for four games, Patriots lose first-round pick | The NFL has come down heavily on one of the league’s biggest stars, suspending Tom Brady for four games for his part in the Deflategate scandal.
The league has also stripped Brady’s team, the New England Patriots, of their first-round draft pick in 2016, their fourth-round pick in 2017 and fined the team $1m.
“We reached these decisions after extensive discussion with [NFL executive vice president of football operations] Troy Vincent and many others,” the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, said. “We relied on the critical importance of protecting the integrity of the game and the thoroughness and independence of the Wells report.”
Last week, the NFL’s report into the Deflategate scandal found “it is more probable than not” that at least two New England Patriots employees improperly deflated footballs in the team’s AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts and that Brady was “at least generally aware” of the wrongdoing.
“The report documents your failure to cooperate fully and candidly with the investigation, including by refusing to produce any relevant electronic evidence (emails, texts, etc), despite being offered extraordinary safeguards by the investigators to protect unrelated personal information, and by providing testimony that the report concludes was not plausible and contradicted by other evidence,” wrote Vincent, in a letter to Brady.
“Your actions as set forth in the report clearly constitute conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the game of professional football,” continued Vincent’s letter. “The integrity of the game is of paramount importance to everyone in our league, and requires unshakable commitment to fairness and compliance with the playing rules. Each player, no matter how accomplished and otherwise respected, has an obligation to comply with the rules and must be held accountable for his actions when those rules are violated and the public’s confidence in the game is called into question.”
Why Tom Brady's Deflategate ban may well help the New England Patriots
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Vincent also wrote to the Patriots, saying they had to accept responsibility for the scandal. “It remains a fundamental principle that the club is responsible for the actions of club employees,” wrote Vincent. “This principle has been applied to many prior cases. Thus, while no discipline should or will be imposed personally on any owner or executive at the Patriots, discipline is appropriately imposed on the club.”
Many have questioned how long the practice had been going on for, and Vincent indicated he does not believe it was a one-off. “While we cannot be certain when the activity began, the evidence suggests that 18 January was not the first and only occasion when this occurred, particularly in light of the evidence referring to deflation of footballs going back to before the beginning of the 2014 season,” he wrote.
Vincent did, however, acknowledge that the Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, was clear of any wrongdoing. “In accepting the findings of the report, we note that the report identified no evidence of wrongdoing or knowledge of wrongdoing on the part of any member of the coaching staff, including head coach Bill Belichick, or by any Patriots staff member other than [equipment manager John] Jastremski and [locker room attendant Jim] McNally, including head equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld.”
Brady’s agent, Don Yee, attacked his client’s punishment and said they would contest the suspension. “The discipline is ridiculous and has no legitimate basis. In my opinion, this outcome was pre-determined; there was no fairness in the Wells investigation whatsoever,” said Yee.
“There is no evidence that Tom directed footballs be set at pressures below the allowable limit ... We will appeal, and if the hearing officer is completely independent and neutral, I am very confident the Wells Report will be exposed as an incredibly frail exercise in fact-finding and logic.”
The Patriots put their support behind Brady. “Despite our conviction that there was no tampering with footballs, it was our intention to accept any discipline levied by the league,” a team statement said.
“Today’s punishment, however, far exceeded any reasonable expectation. It was based completely on circumstantial rather than hard or conclusive evidence. Tom Brady has our unconditional support. Our belief in him has not wavered.”
McNally and Jastremski have been indefinitely suspended by the league.
At a speaking engagement last week Brady denied the report had tarnished his team’s Super Bowl win last season. “Absolutely not,” said an adamant Brady. “We earned everything we got and achieved as a team, and I am proud of that and so are our fans,” he added. Yee, said the report was a “sting operation”.
The Patriots must now make plans following a decision that leaves them without their best player for a quarter of next season. Brady’s back-up, Jimmy Garoppolo, has attempted just 27 passes in his NFL career, while the Patriots’ AFC East rivals should all be stronger in 2015 than they were last season.
If Brady serves his full suspension, he will be able to return on 18 October. His opponents will be, of course, the Colts.
Twitter reacts to Brady’s ban
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!!! SMH 😡 #PATSNATION STAND UP!!!!!
— LeGarrette Blount (@LG_Blount) May 11, 2015
You have to the love the patriots . They do anything to win a Super Bowl . #mytypeofteam😊
— DARNELL DOCKETT (@ddockett) May 11, 2015
Well done @NFL ..........#DeflateGate
— Patrick Peterson (@RealPeterson21) May 11, 2015
They had no definitive proof against Tom Brady or #patriots. If Hillary doesn't have to produce Emails, why should Tom? Very unfair!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 11, 2015 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/sep/19/medellin-colombia-city-not-dangerous-but-lively | Travel | 2015-09-19T06:00:09.000Z | Chris Moss | Medellín, Colombia: a miracle of reinvention | Ihad my doubts about Medellín. Next time someone says “most dangerous city on earth”, I’ll pull a machine gun on them – that spurious claim was made over a quarter of a century ago, in Time magazine in March 1988. Like Bogotá and Santiago de Cali, Medellín is a much wealthier, safer and more fashionable city these days, and its year-round summery climate, nearby forests and bird reserves and, indeed, the fact that it hasn’t been backpackered into oblivion – unlike Cusco, say – makes it a rather more desirable destination.
But I was also dubious about claims that the city is the epitome of the “Colombian miracle” – shorthand for the quelling of violence of the left-wing Farc and paramilitary forces. In just a quick glance around Medellín I saw sizable shanty towns, and the heavy presence of cops in the centre indicates that vigilance is vital to keeping up appearances.
However, on a balmy Sunday morning in the zen-inspired, “interactive” Parque de los Pies Descalzos (Barefoot Park), I started to believe that Colombia’s second city might have something interesting to tell me after all.
The zen-’interactive’ Parque de los Pies Descalzos (Barefoot Park). Photograph: Chris Moss
It began with me removing my shoes to stroll along a footpath of pebbles lined by native guadua bamboo. The stones and slimy mud were sort of soothing. Next, I walked out on to a lawn which, according to Adriana, my guide, “absorbed static energy”. A larger group led by two of the park’s official guides (provided free of charge) was hugging some trees. Next came a maze, which visitors are encouraged to cross with closed eyes, using only touch, sound and instinct. Finally I dipped my lower legs into a cooling footbath.
It sounds hippyish, but Adriana gave it an urban slant. “How much time do you dedicate in a whole week to your feet?” she asked. “Consider all that they do for you.”
This all took place in the heart of the city, in the shadow of a utilities company building, for whose employees the park was originally created. With cafes and restaurants close by, it has become a focal point for workers as well as tourists. On that Sunday, the visitors were mainly families with small kids; in fact, it would make anyone feel like a small kid.
The Charlee hotel
Round the corner was an eco-árbol, a tall, hi-tech tree-like structure that purifies 22,000 cubic metres of air every hour by removing carbon dioxide and traffic toxins. Built by a company called ConTreeBute, it was developed with help from Italian engineers. When, in 2013, Medellín was hailed as “most innovative city in the world” by the influential non-profit Urban Land Institute – beating New York and Tel Aviv to the title – its civic spaces were praised. The eco-tree, and other urban installations around the city such as the Orquideorama, a wooden meshwork of modular “flower-tree” structures in the botanical gardens, are part of this image rebuild.
Not that good old consumerism was in small supply. I was staying at striking US-owned hotel, The Charlee (surely an expat joke), in the leafy Parque Lleras area of El Poblado, an upscale residential district south of the centre. All around are independent boutiques and interiors stores, art supplies outlets, bars and clubs, loads of places to eat and even a Belgian coffee shop. I skipped the sushi and ceviches and went to Mondongos (Calle 10, 38, mondongos.com.co) for a bandeja paisa – an orgy of fried pork, beans, egg, black pudding, maize buns and plantain. It was a Saturday night, clubbing night, and the whole area was throbbing, despite torrential rain. The sheer bulk of my dinner precluded any notion of dancing.
El Poblado was lively and comfortingly middle class, but more interesting – and indigenous – was Comuna 1, a working-class suburb on the north-eastern edge of the city which had served as a recruiting ground for local drug lord Pablo Escobar. I travelled there on Line K, part of the city’s new cable-car network. From my little pod I surveyed a vast acreage of gimcrack houses and, beyond, the densely forested peaks of the mountains that surround Medellín.
The cable car system has cut journey times in the hilly city. Photograph: imagebroker / Alamy/Alamy
At the top is the eyecatching and award-winning Parque Biblioteca España or Spain Library-Park, an arts-cum-community centre funded by the Spanish government and opened by the king and queen of Spain in 2007. Inside I watched a funny little play for children that made them laugh while teaching them about hygiene. Outside I took in the street art. One mural by young artists celebrated the World Urban Forum of 2014. Another commemorated flood victims and displaced persons who had been victims of violence in Comuna 1 in the past.
The smell of meat empanadas and roasting chicken mixed with fresh mountain breezes blowing through this once disaffected, disconnected poverty-stricken sprawl. On the way back down, a man returning from a visit to friends said the journey to the barrio had been reduced from an hour or more on foot to 10 minutes by cable car. Comuna 1 belongs to Medellín now, and vice versa.
Artist Fernando Botero is the Beryl Cook of Colombia, known for paintings and sculptures of figures of exaggerated volume. He provides a useful commentary on Medellín’s sense of self and the body. In the south-west corner of central Parque Berrío is his Torso Femenino, a bronze sculpture of a very inflated female form nicknamed La Gorda (The Fat Lady) by locals. It was given to the city in 1987 – the first of many donations by Botero, who was born here in 1932. On nearby Botero Plaza are more of his bronzes – of men, women, a cat, a Roman soldier. Adriana told me some of the sexier figures had become meeting points for couples. “Local men like voluptuous women,” she said.
Boteros figure in Plaza Botero. Photograph: Alamy
In Plaza de San Antonio stand two bronze birds by Botero. At first they look similar but as you approach you see that one is intact and the other is all twisted, with bits broken off. In 1995, a bomb – planted allegedly by Farc militants – killed 23 people attending a concert and destroyed the statue. It has been left as a “homage to the barbarians”. In 2000, Botero had an intact version of the sculpture placed in the park as a symbol of peace.
Under the tropical noonday sun, you can only do so much outdoors. I slipped into the Museo de Antioquia (an art museum with lots of Botero oil paintings) for a coffee – a good one. Colombians are beginning to take their best-known (legal) export seriously, training baristas and toasting the beans with care.
There is plenty more art here, if you want it. The Museo de Arte Moderno (MAMM), housed in a repurposed steel factory, has just opened a new wing to house a permanent display of Colombian artists, making it the largest in the country – and the city’s vibrant art scene now rivals Bogotá’s.
Fernando Botero’s outsized figures adorn a wall in Medellín, with the Andes in the background. Photograph: Chris Moss
Medellín is also known for its textiles industry, which has been established for more than a century. In recent years this has developed into a fashion scene. El Poblado’s Vía Primavera (also called Carrera 37) is an open-air space for independent designers – especially of shoes, leatherware and accessories – trying to tempt shoppers away from the huge malls that dominate the city. Local designer Camilo Álvarez, whose silky, summery couture opened last year’s Colombiamoda (the country’s biggest fashion show held in Medellín), says: “The local paisa style is most evident in underwear and swimwear, sexy with a rich mix of textures.” The sea is many miles and quite a few Andean mountains away from Medellín, but the penchant for skimpy bikinis is of a piece with Botero’s love of “voluminous” women.
All this enterprise and creativity give Medellín a tangible, youthful energy. In three days I’d done no ordinary touristy things – no souvenir shopping, no ancient ruins, no major museums, no trendy galleries, no folksy dance and music – but I liked this city and felt I was getting to know it.
Medellín says something original about regeneration and tourism. In future, perhaps other cities will invite visitors to feel and sense things, to meet people and learn about them, to visit the margins as well as the museums of the centre. I hope so, because that would reopen a lot of places that have become jaded or bloated or just boring. Medellín is definitely not the most dangerous city in the world. It’s not even the most dangerous city in Colombia. But it’s almost certainly the most interesting and innovative one.
The trip was provided by Miraviva
(020-7186 1111, miravivatravel.com) which has seven days in Colombia, including flights and three nights in Medellín, from £1,995pp. The Charlee
hotel (+574 444 4968, thecharlee.com)has doubles from £72. More information at
colombia.travel | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/29/usa-iran-world-cup-2022-qatar-soccer-christian-pulisic | Football | 2022-11-30T00:24:48.000Z | Bryan Armen Graham | Christian Pulisic’s bravery the difference in World Cup’s Great Satan v Iran II | It was never going to be easy. Then again, neither has the grinding pressure of being American soccer’s chosen one. But when the right opportunity arrived, Christian Pulisic surrendered his body for his team and finally took hold of his signature moment on the international stage.
With the temperature of this geopolitical proxy war between the United States and Iran at the Middle East’s first World Cup having risen to a boiling point, Pulisic turned the volume down with a goal the United States desperately had to have, making the difference in a tense and riveting win-or-go-home showdown for the Americans. When Sergiño Dest directed a header toward goal off Weston McKennie’s floated pass in the 38th minute, an onrushing Pulisic burst through a thicket of white shirts and struck home what proved to be the winner while barreling into the Iranian keeper. Pulisic then lay sprawled in the goalmouth for nearly four minutes.
He was taken to hospital at half-time with dizziness and to receive a precautionary abdominal scan. But once the US held off a heart-pounding Iranian onslaught late in the second half, sealing their progress to the knockout stage and a date with the Netherlands on Saturday, the fallen winger joined the rollicking locker-room celebration over FaceTime and was already back at the team hotel by the time they arrived. US Soccer later said Pulisic is “day-to-day” and had suffered a “pelvic contusion”.
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“Christian makes those runs,” USA manager Gregg Berhalter said after the game. “That’s what he does. That’s the special quality he has. As soon as the ball is wide, he goes in with intensity into the penalty box and good things happen and you score goals. We’ve seen at Chelsea he’s scored a number of goals on the same types of runs. He crashes the box and makes it really difficult for defenders with his change of pace.”
The 24-year-old from Hershey, Pennsylvania, remains the frontman of a romper room that’s been breathlessly touted as America’s golden generation. More than half of Berhalter’s 26-man squad compete in the world’s top five leagues, including Pulisic (Chelsea), Dest (Milan), McKennie (Juventus) and captain Tyler Adams (Leeds United). It’s a set-up designed at least in part for the next World Cup, when the US will be co-hosts and today’s core players will be in their presumptive primes, even if Berhalter resists the notion. “We want to build a ton of momentum going into 2026,” he said last week. “But it all starts now.”
Christian Pulisic strike guides USA past Iran to set up Netherlands meeting
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And how. Berhalter has selected the three youngest lineups of all the games played in Qatar and Tuesday’s was the youngest one yet with an average age of under 25 years old: the first ever American side at World Cup where all 11 starters featured for European clubs. Each of them levelled up on a night when the thorny political underpinnings were uncomfortably thrust to the fore. The atmosphere in and around many of the stadiums at the Qatar World Cup has been oddly flat. That was not the case on Tuesday, to the extent it almost felt like a different tournament altogether. It was clear outside the Al Thumama Stadium more than three hours before kickoff that US fans would be vastly outnumbered by the Iranian supporters and the many neutrals brought into their fold. They turned the 44,400-seat venue into a cauldron of noise: a neutral site in name only.
Coming off a draw with Wales that felt like a loss and another with England that felt like a win, the United States were always going to face an uphill climb in the group-stage finale, needing three points against Asia’s highest-ranked team. Iran would almost certainly progress with a draw, meaning they could pack players behind the ball in the type of low block the United States have consistently struggled against. But the hostile roars and ear-splitting cacophony of vuvuzelas and drums made it that much harder. Welcome to Great Satan v Iran II, a rematch a quarter-century in the making.
The first half hour unfolded on a knife’s edge, with the counter-attacking threat from Iran’s forward pairing of Sardar Azmoun and Mehdi Taremi looming over the US team’s promising start, but the Americans were not in awe of the occasion. The itinerant Adams took command in midfield. McKennie made the lung-busting box-to-box runs that have become his calling card. The prodigious Yunah Musah, celebrating his 20th birthday, dribbled out of pressure and fearlessly ran at defenders.
The US celebrate after clinching victory against Iran. Photograph: Ashley Landis/AP
By the 35th minute they’d already peppered the Iran goal with as many shots as in the entire Wales game, but the agita mounted with each missed finishing touch. Until that moment. For all the precocious talent in their ranks – so young and ambitious, unscarred by failure, with the note-perfect blend of confidence and humility – Pulisic remains the bellwether; as he goes, so go the Americans. It’s not an accident the US team have won eight straight matches in which he’s scored.
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“What I saw from the group was a tremendous amount of focus, especially leading into the game: you could tell they were locked in,” Berhalter said. “The end of the game is really what I’m most proud of because it’s the mark of determination and an extreme amount of effort and resiliency to hang in there and get the win and not buckle. You know, that’s the first time in 92 years that we’ve gotten two shutouts at a World Cup, so the boys are doing something right.”
It’s the fifth time the United States have reached the knockouts since 1994 – which puts them in some elite company – but this one means so much more after the gloomy nadir of five years ago when they failed to qualify for Russia with a dour defeat at Trinidad & Tobago. Pulisic is one of only four holdovers from that traumatic night in Couva and the wait surely makes his maiden World Cup goal that much sweeter.
And now? The Americans enter the business end of the tournament on a tailwind of confidence, wanting for goals but having yet to concede from open play. Berhalter, who will forever be remembered by supporters as the player whose left foot nearly sent the US into the semi-finals back in 2002, is confident this team can follow that path.
“From here, anything can happen,” Berhalter said. “All we need to do is play one game at a time and there’s no need to even project how far this team can go, because the next match is against Holland and that’s our main focus. It’s great to be in this knockout format. We relish this. It’s an opportunity for our guys to keep grinding and stick together and enjoy this experience.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/07/rich-poor-play-election-inequality-trevor-nunn | Opinion | 2017-07-07T17:22:48.000Z | Trevor Nunn | The gulf between rich and poor is vast and growing. Where will it end? | Trevor Nunn | From the very beginning, our species behaved hierarchically, just like chimpanzees, with whom we share a common ancestor. We have always colluded in the principle that some people are much more important than the rest, that some deserve the jewels, the gold, the wealth; and in a pyramid formation, society should be upheld by the have-not masses forming the base. These thoughts are very much on my mind as I direct a new play by Oliver Cotton that asks searching questions about inequality. I am, of course, wary of entering such a fray. “Oh, those know all-know-nothing theatre people getting involved in politics, when all they are about is red carpets and self-publicity.” But I feel it’s safe to venture a few observations about the world we are living in.
Why, with our brain power, didn’t we humans collectively agree from the outset that we should all be equal? Or at least that those at the pinnacle of the pyramid shouldn’t have too much, and those at the base shouldn’t have too little? Our species is bewilderingly flawed, capable of things angelic, equally capable of behaving like beasts. The shockingly unfair world we live in is, regrettably, entirely of our own making.
Why wealth is the enemy of the young
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Every revolutionary attempt across the world and down the ages to unmake what we humans have made has pretty much ended in disaster: venality, corruption, dictatorship. Religions, the framers of new constitutions, and revolutionary movements all declare our equality. And yet, even in our enlightened social democratic western world, we remain utterly unequal – probably more so now than at any previous time.
I’m not being a Corbynista when I register incomprehension at the man who so commendably started a company he called Amazon in his garage, and who now has a personal fortune of $83bn. Are there countless people out there who want one day to be able to say, “I’m worth $83bn”? Is it possible that the world’s wealth will, in some not-distant future, be concentrated in the hands of even fewer people than it is now?
I have had my share of good luck. As a working-class boy, I was in a state of disbelief when two shows I directed – Les Misérables and Cats – enjoyed international commercial success. But my surprise didn’t become a determination to get richer.
I have to presume that the motive for acquisition is competition: that driving force, that god in Margaret Thatcher’s universe, the market. Competition to defeat all your rivals, competition to be able to declare you have more wealth than anybody except Bill Gates, competition to get more than Bill Gates.
Whenever I visit Paris, I contemplate the sheer scale of the Louvre. It is vast, tentacular, comprising hundreds of rooms, surrounding dumbfoundingly huge halls. This was once the home of French royalty. It is overwhelmingly unnecessary, grotesquely out of proportion. The excess is so palpable, it’s not really surprising that the reaction against such opulence ultimately culminated in the French Revolution.
When does excess become unbearable for the multitude to accept? When is too much, too much? That question is at the heart of Cotton’s play, Dessert – a title cunningly containing two meanings. The event taking place as the play begins is a dinner party, and the delicious sweet course is about to be served. But as the evening takes a very alarming turn, the word dessert comes to evoke something about what we deserve.
Shakespeare's Timon of Athens bitterly says that if we believe only in money, there is indeed no such thing as society
To those who sat up most of the night watching the results of last month’s general election, it became progressively clearer that the national mood was changing. In particular, the needs of the many against the claims of the few were finding expression. Cotton’s play is very much of that mood and of the moment.
Having so recently been amazed by the political relevance of a 1944 Terence Rattigan play, Love in Idleness, I am feeling yet more connected to the present, as Cotton’s play dominates my vision. I find myself reading the business sections of newspapers as never before. William Shakespeare wrote about a market-dominated world in Timon of Athens, which tells us bitterly that if we believe only in money, there indeed is no such thing as society. In our computerised world, we so want to believe that we humans are creating the ultimate civilisation. But has anything changed since Timon? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/nov/04/goodies-baddies-tv-heroes-justified | Television & radio | 2013-11-04T16:40:03.000Z | Darragh McManus | Goodies v baddies: in defence of TV heroes | Folksy but malevolent Mags Bennett, pinch-faced creep Wynn Duffy, terrifying sociopath Robert Quarles and, of course, the charming, slippery, dangerous Boyd Crowder. The quality of villains in Justified, where the baddies are as central as the heroes, presents viewers with a sumptuous rogues gallery. The show, about US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), is one of the best dramas I've ever watched.
While the baddies are colourful and complex, Givens is the truly compelling character because he's gone to the good from a bad background. His father Arlo was a drunken, violent criminal. Raylan was shovelling coal in his teens, palling with Boyd, eking out an existence in poverty-stricken Kentucky. The boy seemed set for a life of ill-deeds. Then Aunt Helen gave him money and an ultimatum: escape to a better life. So Justified opens with Raylan the man – and marshal – returning home to dispense that particularly American brand of rough justice.
He's no angel: Raylan is hot-tempered, has something of a God complex and provokes deadly confrontation. He kills lawbreakers when necessary, and doesn't lose sleep over it. Other characters describe Raylan as a criminal with a badge, one step away from Boyd. But I saw a fundamentally kind, idealistic, courageous man. And a good man is infinitely more interesting than a bad one.
Many great shows are centred on villains, or at least anti-heroes: Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Stringer Bell. Supposed heroes are often flawed, sometimes grievously: Cracker's Fitz, Jack Bauer, Dexter (he probably qualifies as all of the above). Moral corruption is fascinating, whether we come in when it's complete or observe from inception; even the title Breaking Bad references a term for a solid citizen gone rogue. TV has been inspired to genius by the subject. Everyone loves a good baddie.
For me, though, the heroes win my attention almost every time. There is something intriguing about people deciding to do right, especially against the odds, as with Raylan. It is easy to do wrong; simple self-interest explains it, if nothing else. But people inspired by principle, love, self-sacrifice: I find them harder to understand, and therefore more interesting. Is it innate, or do they choose? Is it circumstance, blind fate? What makes them take up that struggle? In short, what makes them good?
As far back as 1990's Wiseguy, while schoolmates would eulogise their favourite mobster, I was gobsmacked by Vinnie Terranova and his hair-raisingly dangerous job. Why would someone go undercover? What motivates them? And where on Earth do you get cojones that big?
Throughout Twin Peaks, I had a major man-crush on Agent Cooper. In the midst of all that evil and murkiness, he was always resolute, courageous, cheerful and sweet-natured. The camaraderie between Cooper, Sheriff Truman and other "good" characters was genuinely moving; maybe it sated some naive desire for the triumph of hope, or even the hope of hope, in a hard, cynical world.
There are more, too many to list: Daenerys and Tyrion in Game of Thrones, rising above every instinct of blood and heritage by being decent human beings. Peter in Fringe, his sarky righteousness so much more intriguing than, say, Jones's sub-Moriarty scheming. Anyone from Star Trek (Picard is a personal favourite). Grissom, McNulty, Cagney and Lacey. And who isn't fond of Columbo?
I've no interest in "black hat, white hat" moral simplicity – Michael Landon in Bonanza was a bit of a pain, really – but the hero needn't always be compromised, nor the villain venerated. And we needn't spend all our time gazing into the heart of darkness. Sometimes you want to see a good person doing good things for good reasons. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/sep/02/david-dunn-relishing-chance-to-lead-barrow-after-48-years-in-wilderness | Football | 2020-09-02T08:39:23.000Z | Ben Fisher | David Dunn relishing chance to lead Barrow after 48 years in wilderness | Ben Fisher | Last week Barrow’s players spent a couple of hours navigating the treetops of Windermere, zip-wiring through the Lake District in the name of team-building, but as the start of the new season moves into full view they are preparing for a League Two adventure after scaling the heights of non-league last season. The manager who led them to the National League title, Ian Evatt, has departed for Bolton but his successor, David Dunn, is determined to carry on where they left off. “Hopefully we can build on what was a fantastic campaign last season,” he says.
For hardy Barrow followers there is a sense they are back where they belong. After controversially being voted out of the Football League in 1972, when a second ballot led to the now-defunct Hereford United taking their place – finances and the Cumbrian club’s remote location at the end of the Furness peninsula facing the Irish Sea are often cited as factors – they were shafted into the wilderness and for years yo-yoed around the fifth and sixth tiers. It is apt then that a vote ultimately led them back to the league, with Barrow named champions after a points-per-game system determined the final standings.
David Dunn appointed as manager of Football League returnee Barrow
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Barrow was Evatt’s first managerial post and, despite Dunn spending four months in charge of Oldham in League One, initially as a player-manager, he says this feels like his first “proper go” at a top job. Dunn joined Barrow from Blackpool, where he was first-team coach, a role he previously held under Tony Mowbray at Blackburn Rovers, where he started his playing career and worked in the academy after retiring.
“I had a bad taste in the back of my mouth after the Oldham one but I’ve really enjoyed coaching for the last three or four years and when the opportunity arose, I thought it’s something I needed to do,” he says. “I feel totally different now. I was inexperienced. Looking back at it, in my time there, I wasn’t ready. But now I think my experience from coaching at different levels will stand me in good stead.”
First is a trip to Derby in the Carabao Cup on Saturday. It would have been the perfect tie for the former Barrow captain John Rooney, Wayne’s younger brother who departed for Stockport in the summer, but, regardless, it is arguably the pick of the first round. “I’m sure the players will be thinking they want to be on the same pitch as Wayne, to test themselves against a top, top player. It has come around quickly but it is a great occasion for the players and myself.”
David Dunn in action during his one England cap against Portugal in 2002. ‘England had some fantastic players and probably should have won something.’ Photograph: Mooneyphoto for The FA/Shutterstock
Dunn made almost 400 league appearances for Blackburn and Birmingham – the majority in the Premier League – and acknowledges he could hardly have had a better coaching education given he played for Sam Allardyce, Mark Hughes, Steve Bruce and Graeme Souness, who have taken charge of almost 3,500 games between them.
“I’m sure if I needed their advice, they would be there for me. I really enjoyed my time with Big Sam. People say he is a long-ball manager but it’s nonsense. Sam always encouraged you to make the right decisions at the right time. Sometimes you might have to put your foot through it but he also encouraged you to play as well. He was way ahead of his time in terms of sports science. I remember once he had me doing altitude training and we would take home this breathing apparatus. He was always one of the pioneers of trying to get that little edge.”
Barrow back in Football League thanks to miracle man Ian Evatt
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Dunn won promotion to the top flight in 2001 and lifted the League Cup a year later playing for Souness, before earning a solitary England cap after replacing Steven Gerrard against Portugal in September 2002, around the era of the so-called “golden generation”. On the opposite team that day was Nuno Gomes, who later became a teammate at Blackburn. “England had some fantastic players at the time and probably should have won something. I’m disappointed I only got one cap but it was difficult to get in front of a lot of very good players. Could I have been a little bit more dedicated to give myself the best chance to perform? Maybe.”
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Barrow train in Rochdale, a couple of hours south, in order to make the club more attractive to players and Dunn has beefed up the squad with eight signings, including the former Carlisle midfielder Mike Jones, with whom he played at Oldham, and the striker Luke James, who had a fruitful loan at the club in 2017-18. Off the pitch they have been busy bringing their 111-year-old stadium up to scratch, adding a roof to the Holker Street End previously open to the elements.
Under Evatt, a front-foot style led supporters to nickname them Barrowcelona but Dunn’s focus is on ensuring they are competitive in the league after 48 years away. For an industrial town renowned for its shipbuilding heritage, it is almost time to sink or swim. “We would all like to play really attractive football but I’m not naive enough to think we can do that all the time because at times you need to mix the game up,” he says. “First and foremost you want to play winning football. I’m not here to change loads of stuff but to carry on and try and make the players better.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/27/heathrow-third-runway-not-happening | Opinion | 2012-03-27T13:10:09.000Z | John Stewart | Heathrow's third runway is not happening – move on | John Stewart | Rumours that the government was about to perform a U-turn on its decision to scrap a third runway at Heathrow crescendoed over the weekend. It turns out that's all they were: rumours. The Financial Times quotes George Osborne's office: "There is no softening on the question of a third runway at Heathrow." This is significant, as the chancellor was the man consistently fingered as pushing for a review of the policy on Heathrow.
So where did the rumours come from? They have been spread as part of a sustained campaign by the aviation industry to overturn the third runway decision. But they were given impetus by Osborne's autumn statement last year, in which he signalled that new runways in the south-east of England, ruled out in the coalition agreement, were a possibility. He said the government would "explore all options for maintaining the UK's aviation hub status, with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow". Although the statement specifically excluded Heathrow, it allowed the industry to claim that the pro-growth chancellor was secretly trying to engineer a reversal of the decision to scrap a third runway.
It has always been naive of the industry to believe it could force a change of heart on Heathrow. The Liberal Democrats would not tolerate it. For the Conservatives, it would be politically untenable. The transport secretary, Justine Greening, a long-standing and vocal opponent of Heathrow expansion, would need to resign. Zac Goldsmith, the MP for Richmond Park, has said he would step down and force a by-election. The party would lose votes and seats. But, more importantly, all political parties now accept the reality: the Heathrow battle has been fought; the third runway question has been settled.
This doomed industry campaign for a third runway has tended to obscure the change of thinking that is taking place within government. This month, as part of a major speech on infrastructure, David Cameron said: "I'm not blind to the need to increase airport capacity, particularly in the south-east … Gatwick is emerging as a business airport for London, under a new owner competing with Heathrow."
It is the Osborne message: no to Heathrow but we will no longer rule out all runway capacity in the south-east. This theme will be developed further when the government publishes its draft aviation policy this summer. Greening will seek evidence-based views on whether there is a need for more airport capacity in London and the south-east.
It is the critical question. The high-profile industry campaign has not produced any convincing evidence to back up its vociferous claims that the UK economy will suffer unless there is additional runway capacity. Arguments that Heathrow has fewer flights to second-tier cities in China than Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle are no substitute for sound analysis.
The evidence that does exist shows that London continues to be the best connected city in the world. An influential survey by global property consultants Cushman & Wakefield concluded: "London is still ranked – by some distance from its closest competitors – as the leading city in which to do business."
Another recent report, International Air Connectivity for Business, published by WWF, found Heathrow had more flights to the world's key business destinations than any other airport in Europe – in fact, more than the combined total of its two nearest rivals, Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt.
The aviation industry, and some business interests, will argue that London will not retain its premier position without more runways. Greening is right to call for evidence on this. It is a complex question. The air travel industry of the next half century is going to look very different to that of the past 50 years. The debate will need to look forward to a world in which oil prices are increasing; climate targets are more pressing; the use of video-conferencing by business continues to rise; high-speed rail has the potential to replace many short-haul flights; the development of new airports, with their own hubs, in the fast-developing economies of the global south becomes a fact of life. It's a world away from the distracting, marketing-based campaign for a third runway at Heathrow that the aviation industry has been running. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/25/labour-party-catastrophic-loss-of-working-class-support | Politics | 2017-02-25T22:00:12.000Z | Toby Helm | Labour faces catastrophic loss of working-class support | Halifax has a proud place in Labour history, and its voters have duly dispatched Labour MPs to Westminster for the last 30 years. A textile town with a radical tradition, it was an early focal point for the Independent Labour Party, formed in 1893. But historical loyalties count for less on its streets these days.
The Observer view on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn
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On Saturday morning, two days after its disastrous byelection loss to the Tories more than 100 miles away in Copeland, Cumbria – an area that had been Labour since 1935 – there was little enthusiasm for the party or its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in the west Yorkshire town – and, equally strikingly, a waning antipathy to Theresa May’s Conservatives.
Bryan Smith is a Labour councillor in Halifax and worries that, nationally, his party is an incoherent, ineffective opposition. “They’re mumbling, basically,” he said. “I don’t think Labour are in the good books with anyone at the moment. I think most people are disappointed with the leadership. Lots of them turn around and say they won’t vote Labour unless there’s a change of leadership. Unfortunately, people aren’t listening at the top.”
Unlike Copeland, which should have been safe for Labour, Halifax is already a marginal seat and is vulnerable. The Tories came a close second in 2015, and Smith is under no illusions about his party’s chances of holding them off next time. “At this point in time I think it would be very difficult to retain the seat. That’s because while most people won’t vote against Labour, I’ve got the impression that they won’t vote at all.”
Outside the town’s borough market, Michael Ward, a former pipe fitter, 63, proves him right. He is a lifelong Labour supporter but says there is no way he could vote for a party with Corbyn as leader. “I’d give it a miss. I wouldn’t vote at all. Until Labour sort themselves out – and I’ve always been a devoted Labour person – they’ll never get in power again. Not the way they are at the moment.”
The Tories in the town are sensing their moment. Ward’s view is commonplace. There may be more than three years to go until the next general election but local Conservatives head out to campaign every weekend, buoyed by Theresa May, and determined to take advantage. “I think people are seeing the Conservatives as not being the nasty party any more,” says Geraldine Carter, Conservative councillor for Ryburn and deputy mayor of Calderdale. “I think we had a banner for a long time as the nasty party. Theresa May is getting through that and saying – we are for you, as an ordinary working person.”
This weekend, while Jeremy Corbyn vows to soldier on, angst is growing at the top of Labour. Corbyn declared himself disappointed by the Copeland result on Friday but delighted that the party had held off Ukip in a second byelection in its rock-solid stronghold of Stoke-on-Trent Central.
Others, however, are not so relaxed. In a speech to Scottish Labour Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson, had a more sobering, critical message. Stoke and Copeland had shown it was not Ukip that was now the main threat to Labour in its heartlands, as many had feared, but, perhaps more ominously still, the Conservatives.
Working-class desertion of Labour started before Corbyn
James Morris
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Watson raised the spectre of Labour suffering a similar fate in England to the wipe-out of its vote in Scotland in 2015. “Here in Scotland, you’ve seen what happens when Labour’s long-term supporters stop voting Labour,” the Labour deputy leader said. “We can’t afford to have that happen in England too.” Corbyn and the entire leadership could no longer pretend all was fine. “That means that all of us with leadership roles in the Labour party need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and ask what’s not working,” he declared. “Seven years into a Tory government, we shouldn’t be facing questions about whether we can hold the seats we already hold.”
While most Labour MPs are observing a disciplined vow of silence, leaving Corbyn and his team to absorb the flak, the party’s Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer, added his voice to those calling for deeper self-examination. “The Labour party exists to change people’s lives. But we can’t do that if we don’t win elections,” Starmer said in a speech in London. “Copeland was a very bad result for Labour. I don’t think we’ve been honest enough about how bad it was. The worst thing that could happen for Labour is to normalise defeat and walk past results we know are letting down the people that most need a Labour government.”
May and the Conservatives, a party previously riven by splits over Europe but now more united since Brexit, believe they, not Labour, now identify with working people’s concerns over immigration and their need for bold, clear leadership. That appeals in places like Halifax. In the budget next week there will be a renewed emphasis on helping working people, remodelling the ex-nasty party’s image away from the metropolitan preoccupations of the David Cameron years.
Across the north of England and the Midlands, scores of seats that are less marginal than Halifax are now in Tory sights. As one Labour MP in a vulnerable seat put it, it was “horrifying” to think that after seven years of Tory austerity May’s party swept Labour aside in one heartland seat (Copeland) and increased its vote in the other (Stoke). “There are dozens of our bastions we could lose if this goes on,” said the MP. “It is astounding to think that a party [the Conservatives] with a majority of just 17 in the Commons can now look ahead to the next election entirely confident of smashing Her Majesty’s opposition.”
That Ukip imploded in Stoke is some comfort to Labour nationally, but the party’s chaotic first period under new leader Paul Nuttall could also help the Tories. Voters turned off by Nuttall seem to be heading instead to the Tories, applauding May’s clear messages on Brexit, which contrast with Labour’s strained attempts to find consensus.
Corbyn told: take blame for Copeland byelection flop or we face disaster
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Writing in these pages today, the former Labour pollster James Morris says the erosion of Labour support among its traditional base is truly alarming. “Labour’s collapse among working class voters is catastrophic,” he says. “According to YouGov, just 16% would vote Labour at the moment. That’s troubling enough for ‘the party of working people’, but it is made doubly damaging because, contrary to expectations, Ukip is not proving the main beneficiary. These voters are increasingly voting Conservative. After seven years of Tory austerity, Labour is 15 points behind the Conservatives among working-class likely voters, having been ahead in 2015. While the proportion of the population that is working class is falling steadily, it remains hard to see a route to power for a Labour party if it cannot secure a majority in this group.”
Disdain for Corbyn on the doorsteps is “remarkable”, Morris says. He has found evidence of this in focus groups. “There is no sense that he is on their side, or has any of the capabilities they expect of a prime minister. As one woman from Rochdale put it, he ‘should be sat on a barge somewhere floating up and down’. Corbyn is now 36 points behind Theresa May as preferred prime minister among working-class voters.”
Labour’s paralysis, under a leader who has won two leadership elections but whose MPs mostly have no faith in his ability to deliver, is the Tories’ opportunity. They are enjoying their current successes but one good byelection week is not fooling anyone. Political tides can turn fast. Brexit could still floor Theresa May. It is less than three months since the Tories lost the Richmond byelection in leafy south-west London to the Liberal Democrats as Remain voters deserted en masse. But there is one constant: Labour performed disastrously in Richmond too, losing its deposit.
Back in Halifax on Saturday , there was a sense of support slipping slowly but surely away from Jeremy Corbyn and the party which the town helped to form. There are also signs of party supporters looking for the first time at previously unthinkable options. Margaret Schofield, 67, who worked as a weaver for 47 years, used to vote Labour and more recently has backed Ukip. Now she is thinking about Theresa May. “Labour just aren’t for the working class any more. I wouldn’t trust Corbyn at all,” she says. “I wish Theresa May would get on with Brexit. I would vote for her, and will see how she gets on.”
Chris Anderson, a teacher and floating voter, backed Remain but said he liked the way May was handling Brexit. “I didn’t vote for Brexit, but I’m glad they’re doing it and I think she’ll steer us through it,” he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/11/daryl-mccormack-interview | Life and style | 2023-02-11T09:30:50.000Z | Rosanna Greenstreet | Actor Daryl McCormack: ‘I long to be connected to people and sometimes I don’t read the room’ | Born in Ireland, Daryl McCormack, 30, studied theatre and performance in Dublin. In 2018, he made his West End debut in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and in 2019 he was cast as Isaiah Jesus in Peaky Blinders. He stars opposite Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and is nominated for both rising star and best leading actor at this year’s Bafta film awards, which are on 19 February. He is single and lives in London.
What is your greatest fear?
Not actualising my full potential.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Oversharing. I long to be intimately connected to people and sometimes, among strangers, I don’t read the room.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lying.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
Missing a cue on stage. I had to come on and move a piece of furniture with another actor and I completely forgot. I looked at the monitor and said, “Why is he standing on his own?” And somebody said, “Aren’t you meant to help him?”
Describe yourself in three words
Attentive, encouraging and ambitious.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My nose. My mum always got teased for her nose, and she used to tell me we have the same nose, so I’m conscious of it.
What has been your closest brush with the law?
Stealing a bar of chocolate at the cinema when I was 10 or 11. I didn’t get caught.
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
I haven’t read a Jane Austen.
What is your most unappealing habit?
Sometimes I zone out.
What scares you about getting older?
Regret.
What do you owe your parents?
I owe my mum my best effort at everything, because she raised me as a single parent.
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Acting.
What does love feel like?
A sense of home.
Have you ever said “I love you” without meaning it?
Yes, sadly.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Take care.
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Matthew Modine: ‘It’s fascinating watching the sack of flesh I live in showing signs of wear’
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What is the worst job you’ve done?
I once had to dress up as [fast food chain] Supermac’s bunny during a St Patrick’s Day parade and shake people’s hands. Kids kept trying to take off my gloves and punching my bunny head. It was awful.
How often do you have sex?
It’s been a while. Let’s just say, I’m focusing on myself.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Less phone use.
What keeps you awake at night?
Weirdly, sometimes exhaustion keeps me awake. If I am really tired, I won’t sleep well.
Would you rather have more sex, money or fame?
Money.
How would you like to be remembered?
For being joyful.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
To trust in the process.
Tell us a joke
I lost a very good mate recently; he had acid reflux. I’m sad that Gaviscon. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/22/fast-food-the-new-wave-of-delivery-services-bringing-groceries-in-minutes | Business | 2021-05-22T06:00:53.000Z | Sarah Butler | Fast food: the new wave of delivery services bringing groceries in minutes | Cheap groceries, free delivery, on your the doorstep in 10 to 20 minutes. Fast-track grocery services have sprung up like weeds during the pandemic with players pulling out all the stops to tempt in shoppers.
At least seven key players are vying for dominance in the UK. Most are currently focused on London, with only Weezy, Fancy and Gorillas venturing outside the capital so far. But all the major players, who also include Getir, Dija, Zapp and Jiffy, are planning to expand into new cities this year with Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and beyond in their sights.
Jiffy and Getir are both aiming to open more than 90 hubs across the country with Dija is aiming for every major city by the end of the year.
Gorillas - the on demand grocery delivery service. Photograph: Paleworks/Gorillas
Expansion is being pumped up by $14bn (£9.8bn) of investment into this hot new market globally since the beginning of the pandemic, according to financial industry analysts PitchBook. Getir’s latest funding round valued the Turkish company at $2.6bn, Gorillas has splashed out on a major television advertising campaign.
Online supermarket orders and deliveries may now be an ordinary part of many families’ lives, accounting for about 14% of the entire grocery market. But these new “quick commerce” players are gunning for the corner shop, aiming to make ordering a pint of milk, a bottle of wine and some crisps via your phone as natural as a turning to Spotify or Netflix.
Just Eat to offer 1,500 Liverpool couriers minimum hourly rate and sick pay
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Regular Getir user Steve Thomas, 41, in Hackney, east London, says he uses the app to buy specialist beers such as Beavertown and Brewdog as, with the current offer of free delivery, he can get them cheaper via the app than popping to a convenience store or via services such as Deliveroo or Uber Eats.
“Prices are extremely reasonable,” he says. “It’s great if you are watching the football or a few friends pop round.”
Gorillas staff pack orders. Photograph: PALEWORKS/Gorillas
The apps may appear similar to Ocado’s Zoom or Sainsbury’s Chop Chop, which both offer grocery deliveries in under an hour, or buying groceries from Waitrose, the Co-op or Aldi via Deliveroo. Their point of difference is a faster and, arguably, more reliable service using “dark stores” – small very local distribution centres.
They stock no more than about 4,000 different items, 10 to 15 times fewer than a typical supermarket, but can target ranges to suit local shoppers and are far less likely to make substitutions because they know exactly what is in stock. Some, notably Weezy and Gorillas, supplement their offer with products from local specialists such as bakers or pizza makers. Delivery charges can be lower too: Weezy charges £2.95, others as little as 99p.
Shoppers range from students to harried parents stuck at home with kids, to young professionals wanting a quick meal after work or dinner party hosts in a last-minute panic over a forgotten ingredient.
Unlike takeaway food delivery firms, nearly all the grocery businesses employ their riders directly, paying by the hour, and providing them with electric bikes or electric mopeds.
“You can’t offer consistency and wow customers every time by sending gig riders into stores,” says Steve O’Hear at Zapp. Couriers delivering from shops cannot be sure if goods are in stock and will always take longer to deliver, he claims.
Groceries processed and delivered by online supermarket Weezy in London. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
These start-ups only account for a tiny slice of the spend via takeaway delivery apps such as Deliveroo – less than 0.4%, according to analysts at Kantar. However, they are rapidly expanding. Some estimates suggest they could eventually account for up to half the UK’s online grocery market – currently valued at almost £18bn.
Getir, the most established of the European quick-commerce groups, has signed up 3.9m new shoppers so far this year on Android phones, according analysts at App Radar.
Parcels 'through the roof' and lonely shielders: delivery drivers' busy year
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Weezy co-founder Alec Dent says growth, initially spurred by stay-at-home orders, has continued as lockdowns eased.
“If anything we see growth picking up. People are now used to ordering online for a big weekly shop but don’t want the constraint of [waiting in for it if they are not working from home].”
The phenomenon is international. In Moscow, 30% of its online grocery market is already taken up by quick commerce. Jiffy co-founder Vladimir Kholyaznikov, who previously worked on Russian food delivery service Foodza, believes it will be a “significant part of the market”. He adds: “Nobody can win this alone. There will be multiple successful companies.”
Eleanor Cooke, a lawyer in Battersea, south London, who now uses Weezy three or four times a week, says the app has become a habit after signing up for a money-off deal. “It has been a gamechanger. I started using it for snacks, crisps and a bottle of wine. I’ve been using it for six months and its just grown and grown.”
However, one supermarket boss expressed sceptism that quick-commerce could grab as much as half of the online market. “People who want to raise money for their brilliant idea need predictions like that,” he said.
“It sounds like an urban offer and not for the suburban family.”
Urban or suburban, many more families will be getting a chance to judge if it’s for them this year.
UK fast-track grocery courier Getir. Photograph: Getir
Runners and Riders
Dija
Launched in March 2021 by former Deliveroo executives, Dija raised $20m of seed funding in December. It is currently operating in London, Paris and Madrid, opens in Cambridge on Monday after buying local operator Genie, and plans to enter all major UK cities by the end of this year, including Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Edinburgh.
Stocks 4,000 different products delivered within 10 minutes for a 99p fee.
Fancy
Launched January 2020, Fancy was bought by US operator GoPuff in May 2021. GoPuff is now valued at $8.9bn after raising $3.9bn in October last year. Currently making deliveries in Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, and Birmingham , with planned openings in London, Sheffield, and Nottingham, among others, in coming months.
Choice of more than 1,000 products which can be delivered within 30 minutes for £2 fee.
Getir
Founded in Turkey in 2015, where it already serves 25 cities, Getir launched in the UK in February this year. It already has 25 dark stores , in the capital, and is opening in Birmingham and Manchester in the coming months. Within a year, it hopes to have reached 15-20 UK cities including Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. The company raised $300m in March in a deal valuing it at $2.6bn, just two months after raising $128m.
A choice of 1,500 items in 15 minutes. Delivery is currently free, £1.99 fee in future.
Gorillas
Founded last spring in Berlin by Kağan Sümer and Jörg Kattner, Gorillas launched in the UK in March this year. It serves London and Manchester , and is already advertising for staff in Bristol, Cambridge, Nottingham and Southampton. The company raised $290m in March valuing it at more than $1bn.
With over 2000 products, Gorillas delivers within 10 mins for charge of £1.80.
Jiffy
Jiffy’s co-founder Vladimir Kholyaznikov ran a similar start-up in Moscow before launching Jiffy in London in April 2021. The company is planning up to 100 dark stores in London and other cities this year. It raised £2.6m in seed funding in March.
Holds more than 1,200 items, delivers within 10 to 15 minutes and free first month then £1.99
Weezy
Already serving London, Manchester and Brighton, with plans to be in other major cities including Birmingham and Edinburgh by the end of the year, Weezy launched in July 2020. Co-founder Alec Dent previously worked at ride sharing app BlaBlaCar, and the firm raised $20m in January 2021.
Delivers up to 2,000 products within 15 minutes for £2.95 charge.
Zapp
Launched in London last summer by a team including former managers from Amazon and the Nigerian online grocer Jumia, Zapp is currently recruiting in Manchester. It raised new funds in March taking total backing to $100m since launch.
A range of 1,000 products, within 20 minutes for £1.99 fee. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/01/talking-horses-cracking-rhapsody-can-call-tune-in-morebattle-handicap | Sport | 2024-03-01T16:40:58.000Z | Greg Wood | Cracking Rhapsody can call tune while Constitution Hill faces ‘acid test’ | Aboost to the prize fund, a big bonus linked to Cheltenham and the switch to a handicap has transformed the Morebattle Handicap at Kelso, and the 18-strong field for the latest renewal on Saturday is two more than lined up for the past four runnings as a non-handicap put together.
Nicky Henderson has yet to add to his three winners of the race – at 4-11, 2-7 and 1-4 – since the conditions changed in 2021, but has an obvious chance this time around with the mare Under Control, the likely favourite and one of six horses in the field with an entry at Cheltenham in a fortnight’s time.
Talking Horses: racing’s affordability checks debate divides Westminster
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The five-year-old put up a career-best in a Grade Two at Doncaster last time but Saturday’s race is a very different test, off 10lb more than her last winning mark. Following Constitution Hill’s lacklustre gallop earlier in the week, meanwhile, it is also hard to overlook the fact that six of Henderson’s past nine runners have been pulled up.
Black Hawk Eagle, still in the early stages of his career with Kerry Lee, is an obvious alternative at a similar price, but there are similarly unexposed runners at bigger odds too, including Ewan Whillans’s Cracking Rhapsody (nap, 2.50) at around 16-1.
The five-year-old improved from his handicap debut to record a cosy success over track and trip last month, is just 4lb higher in the weights on Saturday and has a clear chance to show further improvement on what will be only his fifth start in all over hurdles.
Quick Guide
Greg Wood's tips for Monday
Show
Newbury 1.20 Several of these have questions to answer and Commodore, who has run well fresh in the past, could be overpriced at around 7-1.
Kelso 1.42 Patrick Wadge’s 3lb claim could tip the balance aboard Serious Operator after a promising run in the Lanzarote at Kempton last time.
Newbury 1.55 Grandeur D’Ame deserves another chance to back up an excellent run at Cheltenham in December after his early departure last time.
Kelso 2.17 The fast-improving Brucio could further improve County Antrim-based Stuart Crawford’s excellent record with runners in Britain.
Doncaster 2.35 A small field but competitive all the same, and course-and-distance winner Tommy’s Oscar could be the safest option.
Doncaster 3.10 Lunar Discovery, the only runner with an entry at Cheltenham, can make her class tell as she steps up in trip.
Kelso 3.25 Aye Right has the upper hand on ratings but the progressive Monbeg Genius should be able to bridge the gap and book a place in the field for the Grand National.
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Doncaster 3.40 The fast-improving Some Scope has taken another hike in the weights but this step up to three-and-a-quarter miles could well see sufficient progress to overcome a 10lb rise.
Quick Guide
Greg Wood's Sunday tips
Show
Constitution Hill awaits ‘acid test’
Nicky Henderson expects a second blood test on Monday to be the “acid test” in Constitution Hill’s race against time to be fit for the Cheltenham Festival. The unbeaten and defending Champion Hurdle winner worked poorly at Kempton on Tuesday, putting his participation at the showpiece meeting in major doubt. A scope showed mucus in his lungs and despite slightly more positive news in the following days, results of a blood test on Thursday proved to be another blow.
In a statement issued on X on Friday, Henderson revealed the results of a second scope were more encouraging, but admits his stable star is still “unwell” with his intended return to action in the Cotswolds a little over a week away.
Henderson said: “On what was about as foul and filthy morning as you can imagine at Seven Barrows, Constitution Hill had a light exercise and was rescoped afterwards as planned. This showed the Neutrophil percentage, indicative of infection, was back to normal parameters with no mucus evident. This is obviously positive news but we cannot hide behind yesterday’s blood test which basically reveals that, in simple terms, our horse is ‘unwell’.
“He will have a quiet weekend and we propose, as originally planned, to take a further blood test on Monday which I believe will be the acid test. Therefore I think we might leave it until then to keep everybody updated on the situation.” PA Media | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/13/super-rich-spend-2m-on-whisky-wealth-tax-pandemic | Opinion | 2022-01-13T08:00:12.000Z | Owen Jones | As things fall apart, the super-rich spend $2m on whisky. We need a wealth tax | Owen Jones | You may need a stiff drink to believe this. Last October, a new record was set: a cask of Macallan 1991 whisky sold for a cool $2.33m. At least this was an entire cask of premium liquor: earlier last year, a luxury case of 30-year-old Irish malt featuring a gold Fabergé egg was auctioned off for $2m, only slightly more than a single bottle of scotch at the end of 2019.
Is whisky really worth 2m big ones? As any economist will tell you, the value of something is determined by how much someone is prepared to pay for it, and all that money sloshing around at the top has to go somewhere. The crises of our time have been kind to the uber-rich: while British workers have suffered a near unprecedented squeeze in their wages, the richest 1,000 people saw their fortunes double in the first seven years after the financial crash. Covid has proved little different: Britain produced a record number of new billionaires in the pandemic, while their US counterparts enjoyed almost a two-thirds jump in their wealth during the first 18 months of the crisis. At $4.8tn, the combined fortunes of US billionaires are almost equivalent to the size of the entire Japanese economy.
RING THE BELL.
You're looking at the new world record for a #whisky cask sold at auction.
$2,327,563 cask. Divided by the 608 bottles, that's $5,705 per bottle.
Smashing the previous record of $574k/$2,845, achieved @Bonhams1793.
An amazing #NFT collab w/ @TrevorJonesArt.🔥 pic.twitter.com/Q7KuzihE7r
— Metacask (@metacask) October 22, 2021
It’s not just expensive bottles of whisky attracting the wallets of the thriving mega-rich. When the Chinese billionaire Cheung Chung-kiu snapped up a 62,000 sq ft mansion in Hyde Park for a cool $275m back in 2020, he understandably wanted to make sure it was just right, so last year he commenced a renovation estimated to cost nearly as much as the original asking price. Last year, 11 Picassos were auctioned off in Las Vegas for $100m, while a 1958 Ferrari found a new home in exchange for $6m.
Perhaps such ludicrously expensive items will provoke baffled shrugs.Wealthy people splash their seemingly limitless fortunes on frivolous items with extortionate price tags – so what? Sure, it’s a symptom of the growth in wealth inequality since the 1980s, encouraged by the decline in progressive taxation, the deregulation of finance, the shattered power of trade unions, diluted antitrust legislation, and the rise of large quasi-monopolistic businesses such as Facebook and Amazon. No, a hyperactive work ethic and dazzling entrepreneurial acumen does not explain the explosion in billionaires’ wealth during the pandemic: no-strings government help for businesses and quantitative easing policies that drove up asset prices are more plausible explanations. And, yes, watching the wealth collectively produced by the hard graft of billions of people hoovered up by a select few is undoubtedly a moral affront. But does it matter?
The simple answer is yes. Buying whisky for $2m doesn’t simply underline an inverse correlation between money and sense on the part of the super-rich: it represents the red lights flashing on the dashboard of an entire economic model. Gary Stevenson should know: formerly Citibank’s most profitable trader, he made millions betting against economic recovery after Lehman Brothers detonated in the heart of the financial sector. Among the bigwigs of big finance, the consensus was that near-zero interest rates were an extraordinary measure that would be soon reversed as the economy recovered.
But Stevenson was a dissenter: he believed the continued parlous state of the economy would halt any interest rate hikes. The reason? Because when ordinary people receive money, they spend it, stimulating the economy, while the wealthy tend to save it. But our economic model promotes the concentration of wealth among a select few at the expense of everybody else’s living standards. If working-class people don’t have the money to spend, they won’t; and as they’re plunged into debt simply to cover their families’ cost of living, consumer demand is sucked out of an economy based upon it. In an amusing paradox, Stevenson’s belief that inequality was crippling the economy literally made him millions.
The cost-of-living crisis is going to upend British politics in 2022
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As Stevenson emphasised, the super-rich tend not to invest all that hoovered up wealth into productive parts of the economy: they instead throw it at property or, yes, $2m bottles of whisky, driving up asset prices. “What you have to understand is that saving is not the same as investing,” the chartered accountant Richard Murphy says. “Investment is the creation of new capacity to undertake economic activity, which is almost universally funded by new bank loans. It’s very rarely funded by share capital, except generally with very small microbusinesses.” The entire economy has been designed to funnel wealth generated by the team effort of millions into the bank accounts of a tiny few, whose whims and hobby horses have no social value whatsoever.
While many people have experienced bereavement, loneliness and insecurity during the pandemic, Covid-19 has proved just the latest lucrative boon for billionaires’ wealth portfolios. And that’s why an economic case – rather than simply a moral case – for a wealth tax desperately needs to be made. All that wealth could play a pivotal role in the post-Covid recovery. It could be put towards drastically expanding the capacity of the NHS, ventilating all schools and businesses, and funding the transition to a green economy. Instead, a tiny elite are clocking up many more billions just by sitting on their assets, frittering wealth away on $2m bottles of whisky featuring gold Fabergé eggs. It’s not simply immoral: it’s utterly irrational.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/25/carey-mulligan-suffragette-film-the-fury | Film | 2013-07-25T10:43:20.000Z | Henry Barnes | Carey Mulligan lines up suffragette film The Fury | Carey Mulligan is considering taking on The Fury, a film about the suffragist movement, according to Deadline.
Originally titled Suffragettes, the drama is reported to be an ensemble piece featuring key figures from the womens' enfranchisement movement. It's been penned by Abi Morgan, writer of The Iron Lady and co-writer of Shame, which Mulligan starred in. Details of Mulligan's potential role in The Fury have not been revealed, but it will be directed by Sarah Gavron, the film-maker behind Brick Lane, which was also co-written by Morgan.
Mulligan, who recently appeared as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's extravagent adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, will next appear in Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers' film about the New York folk scene of the early 1960s. She plays Jean Berkey, a grumpy singer-songwriter who has a stormy relationship with the titular character, played by Oscar Isaac. After that we'll see Mulligan in Festen director Thomas Vinterberg's Far From the Madding Crowd. The film, an adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel, has Mulligan playing Bathsheba Everdene, a beautiful young woman who is romanced by a humble shepherd, a prosperous farmer and a dashing soldier. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/24/republican-hopefuls-shrug-when-asked-about-climate-crisis-during-debate | US news | 2023-08-24T11:00:38.000Z | Maanvi Singh | Republican hopefuls shrug when asked about climate crisis during debate | Unlike in recent election cycles, most Republican presidential hopefuls this time around didn’t flat out deny that the climate crisis is real. But on the Fox News debate stage, they made clear that they’re not interested in dwelling on the issues – or doing much about it.
On Tuesday night, the eight candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed in the reality of human-caused global heating. They all punted.
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The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, immediately derailed efforts to elicit a clear yes or no response. “Let’s have this debate,” he said, before proceeding not to have it at all, instead criticising Joe Biden’s response to the fires in Maui.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was notably the only candidate to full-throatedly deny climate science, making the unsubstantiated claim that “more people are dying due to bad climate change policies than they are due to actual climate change”.
There’s no discernible trend of deaths linked to policies encouraging renewable energy. However, extreme heat – fueled by the climate crisis – killed about 1,500 people last year, according to Centers for Disease Control records. Researchers estimate that the true figure is closer to 10,000 people every year.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, on the other hand, said “climate change is real” but then pushed off all responsibility to take care of it on India and China. Both those countries have lower per-capita carbon emissions than the US. And as of the latest figures, from 2021, no country had emitted more carbon dioxide since 1850 than the US.
The South Carolina senator Tim Scott didn’t offer much in terms of solutions earlier, pointing a finger at the continent of Africa, as well as India and China. Africa accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population and produces about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, while disproportionately experiencing the consequences of climate chaos. The US is responsible for about 14% of global emissions.
Nobody meaningfully addressed the question posed by Alexander Diaz of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organisation: “How will you as both president of the United States and leader of the Republican party calm their fears that the Republican party doesn’t care about climate change?”
In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 35% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they think climate change is a major factor in the extreme heat that the US has experienced recently, compared with 85% of those who lean Democratic. Overall, nearly two-thirds of Americans who experienced extremely hot days said climate change was a major factor.
Young Republican voters, however, seem increasingly concerned about the climate crisis. A 2022 Pew poll found that 73% of Republicans aged 18-39 thought climate change was an extremely/very or somewhat serious issue.
Meanwhile, the rightwing groups have been working to boost the fossil fuel industry while undermining the energy transition. Project 2025, a $22m endeavor by the climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, has developed a presidential proposal that lays out how a Republican president could dismantle US climate policy within their first 180 days in office.
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The GOP candidates who have held public office have already given voters a glimpse of how they might approach the climate crisis. Governor DeSantis has supported projects to build seawalls and improve drainage systems as Florida faces increasingly powerful hurricanes and storm surges, as well as threats from sea level rise. But he has refused to acknowledge the role of global heating on these disasters, scoffing at the “politicization of the weather” and pushing bills banning Florida cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals. He also barred the state’s pension fund from considering the climate crisis when making investment decisions.
Donald Trump, who did not attend the debate, has done even more to impede climate action. As president, he rolled back nearly 100 climate regulations, according a New York Times tally.
Among the candidates who do support doing anything about the climate crisis, most think that thing should be carbon capture. Haley, who as US ambassador to the United Nations helped orchestrate the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement, has presented carbon capture technologies and tree planting as a way to keep burning fossil fuels while slowing the climate crisis.
The consensus among climate scientists is that while such technologies could be a tool in fighting global heating, an overreliance on them could cause the world to surpass climate tipping points.
This article was amended on 31 August 2023 to correct a reference to the International Energy Agency; not Association as an earlier version had. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia | Technology | 2007-07-25T09:29:57.000Z | Sarah Phillips | A brief history of Facebook | Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Coursematch, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Facemash, where you could rate people's attractiveness.
In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.
The network was promptly extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League and eventually all US universities. It became Facebook.com in August 2005 after the address was purchased for $200,000. US high schools could sign up from September 2005, then it began to spread worldwide, reaching UK universities the following month.
As of September 2006, the network was extended beyond educational institutions to anyone with a registered email address. The site remains free to join, and makes a profit through advertising revenue. Yahoo and Google are among companies which have expressed interest in a buy-out, with rumoured figures of around $2bn (£975m) being discussed. Mr Zuckerberg has so far refused to sell.
The site's features have continued to develop during 2007. Users can now give gifts to friends, post free classified advertisements and even develop their own applications - graffiti and Scrabble are particularly popular.
This month the company announced that the number of registered users had reached 30 million, making it the largest social-networking site with an education focus.
Earlier in the year there were rumours that Prince William had registered, but it was later revealed to be a mere impostor. The MP David Miliband, the radio DJ Jo Whiley, the actor Orlando Bloom, the artist Tracey Emin and the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, are among confirmed high-profile members.
This month officials banned a flash-mob-style water fight in Hyde Park, organised through Facebook, due to public safety fears. And there was further controversy at Oxford as students became aware that university authorities were checking their Facebook profiles.
The legal case against Facebook dates back to September 2004, when Divya Narendra, and the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the social-networking site ConnectU, accused Mr Zuckerberg of copying their ideas and coding. Mr Zuckerberg had worked as a computer programmer for them when they were all at Harvard before Facebook was created.
The case was dismissed due to a technicality in March 2007 but without a ruling. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/03/bitcoin-and-robinhood-will-end-badly-for-those-who-can-least-afford-it | Business | 2021-03-03T06:00:10.000Z | Nouriel Roubini | Bitcoin and Robinhood will end badly for those who can least afford it | The US economy’s K-shaped recovery is under way. Those with stable full-time jobs, benefits, and a financial cushion are faring well as stock markets climb to new highs. Those who are unemployed or partially employed in low-value-added blue-collar and service jobs – the new “precariat” – are saddled with debt, have little financial wealth, and face diminishing economic prospects.
These trends indicate a growing disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street. The new stock market highs mean nothing to most people. The bottom 50% of the wealth distribution holds just 0.7% of total equity market assets, whereas the top 10% commands 87.2%, and the top 1% holds 51.8%. The 50 richest people have as much wealth as the 165 million people at the bottom.
Rising inequality has followed the ascent of “big tech”. As many as three retail jobs are lost for every job that Amazon creates, and similar dynamics hold true in other sectors dominated by tech giants. But today’s social and economic stresses are not new. For decades, strapped workers have not been able to keep up with the Joneses, owing to the stagnation of real (inflation-adjusted) median income alongside rising costs of living and spending expectations.
For decades, the “solution” to this problem was to “democratise” finance so that poor and struggling households could borrow more to buy homes they couldn’t afford, and then use those homes as cash machines. This expansion of consumer credit – mortgages and other debt – resulted in a bubble that ended with the 2008 financial crisis, when millions lost their jobs, homes, and savings.
Now, the same millennials who were shafted over a decade ago are being duped again. Workers who rely on gig, part-time, or freelance “employment” are being offered a new rope with which to hang themselves in the name of “financial democratization.” Millions have opened accounts on Robinhood and other investment apps, where they can leverage their scant savings and incomes several times over to speculate on worthless stocks.
The recent GameStop narrative, featuring a united front of heroic small day traders fighting evil short-selling hedge funds, masks the ugly reality that a cohort of hopeless, jobless, skill-less, debt-burdened individuals is being exploited once again. Many have been convinced that financial success lies not in good jobs, hard work, and patient saving and investment, but in get-rich-quick schemes and wagers on inherently worthless assets such as cryptocurrencies (or “shitcoins” as I prefer to call them).
Wall Street versus the Redditors: the GameStop goldrush
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Make no mistake: The populist meme in which an army of millennial Davids takes down a Wall Street Goliath is merely serving another scheme to fleece clueless amateur investors. As in 2008, the inevitable result will be another asset bubble. The difference is that this time, recklessly populist members of Congress have taken to inveighing against financial intermediaries for not permitting the vulnerable to leverage themselves even more.
Making matters worse, markets are starting to worry about the massive experiment in budget-deficit monetisation being carried out by the US Federal Reserve and Department of the Treasury through quantitative easing (a form of Modern Monetary Theory or “helicopter money”). A growing chorus of critics warns that this approach could overheat the economy, forcing the Fed to hike interest rates sooner than expected. Nominal and real bond yields are already rising, and this has shaken risky assets such as equities. Owing to these concerns about a Fed-led taper tantrum, a recovery that was supposed to be good for markets is now giving way to a market correction.
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are moving ahead with a $1.9tn rescue package that will include additional direct support to households. But with millions already in arrears on rent and utilities payments or in moratoria on their mortgages, credit cards, and other loans, a significant share of these disbursements will go toward debt repayment and saving, with only around one-third of the stimulus likely to be translated into actual spending.
Why the GameStop affair is a perfect example of 'platform populism'
Evgeny Morozov
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This implies that the package’s effects on growth, inflation, and bond yields will be smaller than expected. And because the additional savings will end up being funneled back into purchases of government bonds, what was meant to be a bailout for strapped households will in effect become a bailout for banks and other lenders.
To be sure, inflation may eventually still emerge if the effects of monetized fiscal deficits combine with negative supply shocks to produce stagflation. The risk of such shocks has risen as a result of the new Sino-American cold war, which threatens to trigger a process of deglobalization and economic Balkanisation as countries pursue renewed protectionism and the re-shoring of investments and manufacturing operations. But this is a story for the medium term, not for 2021.
When it comes to this year, growth may yet fall short of expectations. New strains of the coronavirus continue to emerge, raising concerns that existing vaccines may no longer be sufficient to end the pandemic. Repeated stop-go cycles undermine confidence, and political pressure to reopen the economy before the virus is contained will continue to build. Many small- and medium-size enterprises are still at risk of going bust, and far too many people are facing the prospects of long-term unemployment. The list of pathologies afflicting the economy is long and includes rising inequality, deleveraging by debt-burdened firms and workers, and political and geopolitical risks.
The GameStop affair is like tulip mania on steroids
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Asset markets remain frothy – if not outright bubbly – because they are being fed by super-accommodative monetary policies. But today’s price/earnings ratios are as high they were in the bubbles preceding the busts of 1929 and 2000. Between ever-rising leverage and the potential for bubbles in special-purpose acquisition companies, tech stocks, and cryptocurrencies, today’s market mania offers plenty of cause for concern.
Under these conditions, the Fed is probably worried that markets will instantly crash if it takes away the punch bowl. And with the increase in public and private debt preventing the eventual monetary normalization, the likelihood of stagflation in the medium term – and a hard landing for asset markets and economies – continues to increase.
Nouriel Roubini is professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has worked for the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the World Bank.
© Project Syndicate | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/06/edinburgh-venue-to-tighten-security-for-gender-critical-snp-mp-joanna-cherry | Culture | 2023-08-06T16:42:23.000Z | Nadeem Badshah | Edinburgh venue to tighten security for gender-critical SNP MP Joanna Cherry | Heightened security measures will be placed at the SNP MP Joanna Cherry’s Edinburgh fringe show, due to safety concerns after staff at the venue felt uncomfortable with her “gender-critical” views.
The MP is scheduled to speak at the Stand Comedy Club on Thursday, in a show that was initially cancelled because the concerns of some members of staff.
Cherry, who represents Edinburgh South West, said there were threats to her personal safety as a result of the event. Attenders will have their bags searched and no alcohol will be served while the show, called In Conversation with … Joanna Cherry, takes place.
She had threatened the venue with legal action, saying she was removed from the billing as a result of “being a lesbian with gender-critical views”. The MP has previously said somebody’s sex is immutable and has raised concerns about free speech.
On Sunday, after the heightened security measures were reported in the Herald newspaper, Cherry tweeted: “Today’s Herald reveals the price of free speech in modern Scotland.
“It’s a disgrace that any public speaker should face threats to personal safety on account of their sexuality and feminist beliefs. Those responsible should hang their heads in shame.”
A statement from the Stand said: “Following an external risk assessment and in consultation with Police Scotland, the Stand will employ extra measures to ensure the safety of everyone involved with staging the show and members of the audience.
“Unfortunately, to allow extra bag searches to take place on entrance to the theatre, we have had to close our bar for the hour-long duration of the event which starts at 12 noon on Thursday.
“We apologise for any inconvenience caused to customers but clearly we can’t compromise on safety for this or any other show.”
Cherry has been a vocal critic of the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill which proposes to simplify the process for people to change gender legally and passed through the Scottish parliament last year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/10/new-faces-of-fiction-2016-debut-authors-harry-parker-nadim-safdar-janet-ellis | Books | 2016-01-10T08:30:21.000Z | Hannah Beckerman | Meet the new faces of fiction for 2016 | Harry Parker: ‘I wanted to be seen as someone who could write, not a legless bloke who wrote a book’
Ex-soldier Harry Parker, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, has written a war novel with a difference
“It’s quite a weird book, isn’t it?” suggests Harry Parker in his publisher’s office on a grey Tuesday morning. “Weird” may be overstating things, but Anatomy of a Soldier feels like a new take on the war novel. Following characters from both sides of an unnamed conflict, it’s told from the point of view of various inanimate objects (a bike, dog tags, a bag of fertiliser). The effect is both disorienting and captivating.
Parker’s novel is grounded in grim personal reality. After serving in Iraq, a tour of Afghanistan came shuddering to a halt when the 32-year-old was wounded in the field, losing both legs. “I stepped on a bomb,” he says simply.
Harry Parker: explores ideas of conflict through the voices of inanimate objects. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
It’s a fate that Tom Barnes, the central character, meets too, and his journey from troop leader to amputee is the emotional heart of the novel. In a startling chapter written from the perspective of a bed, Tom returns to his family home after undergoing rehab in hospital. As he starts washing his body, including his “stumps and groin”, with a cold flannel, the full horror of what has occurred hits him and he breaks down in tears. “I feel like I’ve been chosen for a main part I never wanted to play and everyone’s come to watch,” Tom tells his shocked mother. By the end of the chapter, there’s a feeling of catharsis as Tom concludes that, on balance, he wouldn’t change a thing that has happened to him. That was one of the most autobiographical sections of the whole novel, Parker tells me. “That scene happened to me about 10 weeks after I’d got the injuries,” he says. “When I wrote ‘I wouldn’t change a thing’, I definitely felt that. And I feel that more over time, but you have a bad morning when your legs aren’t working properly and you’re instantly jolted back to the time when you got injured.”
You could chuck the chapters into the air and read them in any order – that’s what it’s like to be blown up
Although Parker had written when he was in the army (“blackly comic stuff, like slightly amusing ways of dying”), it was some time before he wrote about his life-altering experiences on the battlefield.
“I had a big resistance to writing about my injuries,” he says. “No one with any sort of disability wants to be defined by their injuries.” He wanted to be seen as someone who could write and not “a legless bloke who wrote a book”.
It took an army-funded creative writing course in 2013 to help him make peace with addressing what had happened to him in Afghanistan. During the course, he wrote about conflict from the point of view of various animals and of a tourniquet, then Anatomy of a Soldier began to take shape. “There was something about telling the story from a fictitious point of view that made it easier to do.”
From that starting point, his bigger idea was to write a book whose chapters could run nonsequentially. “I wanted it to be like you could chuck them into the air and read them in any order, because that’s what it’s like to be blown up. I liked the idea of creating a puzzle with each chapter. I wanted the reader to ask, ‘Where am I?’”
The challenging form of the book also saves it from falling into traps faced by other war novels. “War can be presented as quite black and white, it can be quite ‘them and us’.” Anatomy of a Soldier, meanwhile, is nuanced and wonderfully complex. PE
Anatomy of a Soldier will be published by Faber in the spring, £14.99. Click here to preorder a copy for £11.99
Nadim Safdar: ‘The book’s about love, not suicide bombers’
Nadim Safdar wrote his debut novel in a shed in his garden, and still practises dentistry part-time. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
Dentist Nadim Safdar’s debut is a ‘super-timely’ novel about the radicalisation of a British Muslim
In the early hours of 11 November, Akram Khan, a former British soldier, leaves his wife and West Midlands home for the final time. His aim is simple: to attain martyrdom by detonating a bomb at a Remembrance Day parade. But while there is plenty of grit in 44-year-old Nadim Safdar’s layered, involving debut, it is not quite as bleak as that might sound. “It’s about love; it’s not about suicide bombers,” Safdar stresses: love of God, of Britain, and the love between friends.
Safdar grew up in Stourbridge, a stone’s throw from Cradley Heath, the town at the centre of his novel. His Pakistani parents came to the UK in the 1960s; he was one of six children, and was more interested in boxing than books until he discovered poetry in his teens. But literature took a back seat, of necessity, when he had to make a living: “I thought: ‘This is what I should be doing,’” he says, “and I’ve had a stab at writing, but you quickly fall back into profession, mortgage, family…”
After studying dentistry at Newcastle University, Safdar “knocked about a bit” – something that also involved reading medicine at Wolfson College, Cambridge for a year – before moving to London and, eventually, set up his own dental practice in Harley Street. In 2010 he decided to sell up, build a writing shed in his Clapham garden, and enrol on a “very, very helpful” creative writing MA at Birkbeck.
I was incredibly jammy. It was very, very nice
Safdar’s publication record at that point ran to a 1993 paper on fractured mandibles. He began two novels but scrapped both halfway, and it was as a series of short stories about his protagonist’s childhood friends that Akram’s War began life. One of these – Adrian, son of a local “Paki basher” – goes on to serve alongside Akram in Afghanistan. But parka-wearing playground runt Craig Male also has an important role, opening Akram’s eyes to the wildlife occupying the edgelands of their home town.
There is deep affection in the book for the Black Country’s industrial landscape, although Safdar says he was indifferent to his surroundings as a child – “Growing up there, I didn’t see the beauty of it” – and credits his awakening to the work of the Birmingham-born photographer Richard Billingham, a friend.
As his stories accumulated, Safdar found himself in search of a form that might contain them. The solution – inspired in part by Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North – emerged as a frame narrative, constructed around Akram’s encounter with the significantly named Grace, a troubled prostitute who has been cruelly separated from her beloved daughter. (Safdar, a twice-married father of three, is a former campaigner for Fathers4Justice, although this is a subject – along with his own experience of the military – about which he politely declines to talk.)
Despite the “super-timely” nature of his novel, Safdar wasn’t confident of publication. He recalls how he submitted his manuscript to the agent Anna Webber one Friday in 2014 and received the promise that it would be read “in the next three months”. On the Monday morning, his phone rang. “I was incredibly jammy,” he says, eyes lighting up. “It was very, very nice.”
Nevertheless, Safdar’s editor was keen that he give the novel a happier ending – the right call, Safdar now admits. “I think you have to listen to your betters and your peers,” he says seriously. “It’s a craft: one is learning all the time.”
In tracing the radicalisation of a British Muslim, Safdar knows Akram’s War “will inspire commentary”; but he has no interest in adding to any debate, wishing the book to speak for itself. He is already at work on his next novel, The Journeyman – “about a boxer who always loses”, – and still practises dentistry part-time. To be able to write full-time would be nice, he says, but then reconsiders. “That’s a double-edged sword. Sitting in that shed, which I did for four years, does takes its toll… You need to mix it up a bit.” SC
Akram’s War will be published by Atlantic on 5 May, £12.99.
Fiona Barton: ‘The journalist character Kate’s reactions are not necessarily mine’
Fiona Barton studied body language and speech patterns at many criminal trials during her reporting career. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
News journalist Barton’s spare psychological thriller about child abduction examines the lies we tell ourselves to survive
Fiona Barton’s debut novel, The Widow, is being billed as 2016’s The Girl on the Train. Translation rights have been sold in more than 23 languages and the TV rights have been snapped up.
A psychological crime thriller, it tells the story of Jean, whose husband, Glen, was acquitted of abducting a two-year-old girl. Now he’s dead, she’s preparing to tell her story.
Everyone has their own moral compass, but then you've got a news editor shouting down the phone…
Barton, a former news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and award-winning chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday, has worked on many high-profile trials and crime stories, including the Madeleine McCann disappearance. Over the years, she became a “professional watcher”, studying body language and speech patterns for clues. And, she tells me, she became fascinated by the phenomenon of the wife who stands by a man accused of a terrible crime. What is the psychology of that woman, she wondered. Does she believe he is innocent or is it an abusive relationship?
In court, she’d often think: “Are the family hearing the terrible details for the first time? What are they thinking? What it will be like when they get him home, if he’s found not guilty? That sense of: Oh my God, did I ever know him? Who is he?”
The Widow is beautifully, sparely written, the narrative switching between the widow, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist covering the case, and the mother of the child, revealing the lies people tell themselves to survive.
Barton is sanguine about people assuming the portrait of Kate, the journalist, is autobiographical, but says it’s “an amalgam of dozens of people… I’ve been everywhere that Kate has been, but her reactions are not my reactions, necessarily.”
The book is shot through with gripping detail, from the tabloids vying for an exclusive to an interviewer buying her case study new clothes and taking her to a posh hotel (something Barton has done herself). “Everyone has their own moral compass, but then you’ve got a news editor shouting down the phone, asking: ‘Why didn’t you ask this?”
We never find out the details of Glen’s alleged crime but we know he’s addicted to looking at graphic images of abuse on his laptop (what Jean dismisses as “his nonsense”). For Barton it shows how some men compartmentalise their lives. “When I was doing research, one paedophile in prison called it his ‘cupboard under the stairs’.” Jean is no fool, but childless and lonely at 37, she prefers not to tackle the secrets in her marriage. “She’s a youngish woman, but because she married straight from home she hasn’t had that thing of being young and carefree.”
Barton wrote the book when she and her husband took a two-year career break to work on a VSO project in Sri Lanka. “The kids were starting their own lives, my parents were young enough not to need constant care.”
In Colombo she trained Tamil journalists to produce a radio show and a newspaper for displaced persons living in refugee camps. It was life-changing – and gave her the space to try fiction. “I’d get up at 6am and write for two hours before work.”
When she was shortlisted for 2014’s Richard and Judy’s Search for a Bestseller competition, there was a hotly contested auction for The Widow, won by Transworld’s Bantam Press (which also published The Girl on the Train). Now based in south-west France, Barton still works as a media trainer with reporters living in exile. Her second novel will look at how the online revolution has changed journalism. For all the phone-hacking scandals and celebrity froth, she still has a touching faith in the profession. “Yes, there are bad apples, but I do feel journalists do a good job, often in very difficult circumstances.” LH
The Widow is published on 14 January, Bantam Press, £12.99. Click here to order it for £10.39
Janet Ellis: ‘Inevitably, because I’ve just turned 60, people are going to say, what took you so long?’
Janet Ellis submitted the manuscript for her novel anonymously. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
The actress and presenter’s debut novel is the dark tale of a rebellious girl in 18th-century London
The Butcher’s Hook doesn’t read like a first novel – it is a high-finish performance. Its heroine is an 18th-century teenage girl, who starts demurely although her sex drive turns out to be anything but demure. You need to be braced for violence to rival any Jacobean tragedy: The Butcher’s Hook will hook you. I exclaimed to my husband over one extreme scene, to which he joked: “Isn’t that just what you’d expect from a former Blue Peter presenter?” Between 1983-87, Janet Ellis presented the children’s programme (“the golden years,” she laughs), but submitted her novel anonymously to publishers. She is not the type to rest on her laurels – or, it would seem, to rest at all.
I did that stupid thing of saying I wanted to write a novel… Don't say it… just bloody do it!
We meet at her Chiswick home where she has lived for a quarter of a century (her three children – one is the pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor – are grown up and there are grandchildren). She and her house are a match for each other: pretty, warm and lively. We talk over coffee. Born into an army family, she has wanted to write novels all her life, and “from when I was little” wanted to act. “I was a Kentish maid, though we spent six years on postings in Germany. I went to seven different schools.” At 17, she got into the Central School of Drama where “I practised being afraid”. Her first television role was on Jackanory Playhouse as Princess Griselda (the BBC fought for her Equity card, which was “extraordinary” because “for seven-eighths of Griselda’s story, she is changed into a pot plant”).
As the decades disappeared, she never gave up the idea of becoming a novelist: “I did that stupid thing of saying I wanted to write a novel to my poor family and friends. Don’t say it unless you’re going to do it. Just bloody do it!” A three-month creative writing course run by Curtis Brown, the literary agency, spurred her on (she was selected on the strength of 3,000 words and a synopsis). As a Costa prize judge, she knew how flawed first novels can be. But she now concludes that writers are made as well as born: “I’m the product of everything I’ve read, every conversation, every emotion I’ve felt. Inevitably, because I’ve just turned 60, people will say, what took you so long? My novel needed to be slow-cooked… because of what I didn’t know. The craft frightened me.”
Working with 14 other trainee novelists, two hours a week, she was initially unnerved by criticism. “I had thought if you altered anything, the whole edifice was so fragile it would crumble.” The class workshopped each other’s novels. She saw – still sees – fiction as visceral: “I felt a terrible mixture of vain and terrified, which is the thing that stopped me doing anything at all. This sounds really twee but it was so important, it mattered so much.”
She was drawn to the 18th century because of the “look of it. I walk a lot. I love seeing the layers under London. I wanted to communicate that history is just us, not a special way of thinking.Although, as a girl in that period you were limited in your sphere of influence and your communications. I did some research, read 18th-century letters and diaries…” Her challenge was to create a 19-year-old heroine who did not sound too knowing. When you’re 13, she says, you “feel something is bursting out of you but you don’t know what it is”. The sense of sexuality is a powder keg in the book but she writes so well she’s in no danger of winning the Bad Sex award: “It’s the thing I agonised about most.”
Curtis Brown doesn’t automatically represent its graduates. Yet Gordon Wise, on the strength of 3,000 words, inquired of Ellis last summer: “When could you finish this?” By November, she had delivered 85,000 words. Getting the email from Wise – “Read it. Loved it.” – was the greatest thrill, although it came at a difficult time: her father was dying in hospital. Did he know the novel had been accepted? “Just,” she says.
Did she ever terrify herself with what she wrote? “Yes,” she laughs, “and I know some people will go, ‘How long have you had thoughts like this?’” To which, she imagines herself replying: “Doesn’t everybody?” KK
The Butcher’s Hook is published 25 February, Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99. Click here to preorder it for £11.99
Nicholas Searle: ‘All novelists aspire to tell lies. So in that sense, I do hope I’m a good liar’
Nicholas Searle’s tricky plot is inspired by a conman he encountered in real life. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
The former civil servant’s debut is the story of a conman who hopes to pull off one last job…
Like the protagonist of his first novel, The Good Liar, Nicholas Searle is an international man of mystery. Tantalisingly, his author bio states “he is not allowed to say more about his career than that he was a senior civil servant for many years”.
It was spying, wasn’t it? Searle squirms in his sharp grey suit. “I was working on security matters and that’s the limit of what I can say. You can press me on it if you like, but there are good legal, contractual and ethical reasons for me not talking about my previous work.” The frown softens into a chuckle. “It’s ridiculous, but that’s the position I’m in – as Michael Dobbs might say, ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’”
This “remarkably rewarding” job took him from Cornwall to London to New Zealand and back, until 2011, when Searle decided to move to Yorkshire with his wife and concentrate on writing. He honed his skills with an online creative writing course run by literary agency Curtis Brown. Propelled by a mix of stubbornness and bravado, he sent his manuscript to the CEO of the company, Jonny Geller, agent of the likes of John le Carré and David Mitchell.
Geller got back to him “immediately”, and within 10 days they had deals with HarperCollins in the US and Penguin in the UK. “It was fantastic and kind of befuddling. I thought it must be a wind-up, because this kind of stuff doesn’t really happen.” A few months on, he is now “at an awkward juncture, because the book could absolutely flop, and I’m quite sanguine about that. But if it is reasonably successful, this could be life-changing.”
I don’t lie willy-nilly, but there are times in life when it’s morally sound to do so
At 58, Searle finds himself at the beginning of a second career never having published so much as a short story. The “all-consuming” day job made it difficult to devote much time to writing, yet it was, he says, “a compulsion, which I sublimated over years and years of writing probably the most erudite internal memos inside the civil service” (the novel’s first line features the words “kismet”, “serendipity” and “happenstance”). The book aims to straddle readability and literary ambitions; tellingly, Kate Atkinson and Will Self are both influences.
The snake on the cover is a good indication of the plot: it twists and turns surreptitiously, making it tricky to discuss details (“spoilers are the one thing that have vexed my publishers”). The story was inspired by a true event: an older female relative of Searle’s was duped into a relationship by an octogenarian conman, “by all accounts a real charmer”. But when the family paid a visit, “within 10 seconds I had him fully figured as not exactly the ticket… it became pretty evident he just told lies by instinct”. Eventually it turned out this was the latest in a string of scams, and after a tense negotiation Searle convinced him to leave.
Based on this encounter Searle invented Roy Courtnay, a charming but self-serving, duplicitous character. He devised a backstory for him and two weeks later the plot was fully formed in his head. Was it difficult to inhabit the mind of such a devious, misogynist character? “Perhaps I should plead the fifth here, because it was horrible, but at the same time it wasn’t too difficult – which sounds terrible, but over the years I’ve met my fair share of people like that, so that made it easier to inhabit his mind.”
Considering his former job, and the layers of lies that make up the novel, is Searle himself a good liar? “I don’t lie willy-nilly, but there are times in life when it’s morally sound to do so, in order not to upset or offend someone. In those situations I can lie convincingly and I’m sure you can as well. Most people do lie, even in the most banal of circumstances.”
After some thought, he adds: “All novelists aspire to tell lies in the form of fiction. So in that sense I do hope I’m a good liar, if in no other.”
The Good Liar is published on Thursday by Penguin Viking (£12.99). Click here to order it for £10.39
Kit de Waal: ‘You don’t casually write about vulnerable people for your own entertainment – or anyone else’s’
Kit De Waal drew on experience working in social services, foster care, adoption panels and as a magistrate for her debut novel. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
De Waal’s debut is told from the viewpoint of a boy in care and, with her life and career experience, it didn’t require much research
“If I was 25, I might have thought, ‘I’ll see where this goes,’ but at 51, you’re more like: ‘I haven’t got time to be pissing around, I want to get published!’” Kit de Waal grins, remembering how ambitious she felt at 51, going to university for the first time to do an MA in creative writing. “I remember sitting with some other writers who were either saying, ‘Ooh, I just really love words’ or ‘I just really want to write a book,’ and I was going,” – she hammers her hand on the table to make the point – “‘Book. In. Waterstones.’ It’s not for my drawer!” she laughs, her soft Brummie accent peppering her speech.
Born in 1960, De Waal grew up in Moseley, Birmingham, as one of six children. She left school at 15, went off the rails for a bit, and came around to reading in her early 20s. She spent her first post-hedonistic year consuming sombre military novels recommended by a colleague before discovering – and devouring – the Penguin Classics, and forging a career in criminal and family law: working in social services, training foster carers, being on an adoption panel and becoming a magistrate. This experience, she explains, is why her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, took her less than a year to write. “There was no research to be done at all – to me, it’s all very familiar.”
We had an offer that I was floored by, and I was like, 'Sign it, sign it, sign it – before they change their minds!'
The book is told from the perspective of Leon, nine, who ends up in foster care with his baby brother, Jake, only to discover that social services have arranged for Jake to be adopted by a separate family. Leon becomes vaguely aware that this blond-haired, blue-eyed baby is different from him: Jake’s father is white, Leon’s father is black, and Leon wonders if they’ve been separated because they don’t look like brothers.
With two adopted children of her own, De Waal – who wrote two unpublished “sprawling thrillers” before this – admits she was scared of writing this story. “You don’t casually write about vulnerable people for your own entertainment – or anyone else’s, for that matter. I thought, how am I going to be true to social workers, to foster carers, to birth mothers, to adoptive parents, to black men, to multicultural England? And most of all, how am I going to be true to any child who’s been in care?”
But the novel was an instant hit with publishers. “It was incredible,” De Waal says, wide-eyed. Her agent sent it out on a Monday, and “by Wednesday we had an offer that I was floored by. I was like, ‘sign it, sign it, sign it – before they change their minds!’” Wisely, De Waal’s agent suggested she hold back, and soon her book was at the centre of a six-way auction. “I think people responded to it because it’s a story about a part of society a lot of people don’t think about,” De Waal suggests.
Set in early 80s inner-city Britain, My Name Is Leon balances the gritty with the feelgood; De Waal knew early on that, among the grimness of life as a foster child, there had to be an element of positivity for Leon and for readers. Indeed, Leon’s view of the adults who surround him (in their varying disengaged, awkward, angry, drunk, or lonely states) is perceptive, and, on occasion, startlingly funny. De Waal has a knack for being comical: midway through our interview, she gets up from her chair, hitches up her trousers and crouches to show me how she would get down to Leon’s height when writing to better understand his viewpoint. Even her name embodies her youthful playfulness: Kit is a family nickname she acquired in childhood when she would pronounce St Kitts (where her father is from) “St Kiths”.
Recently, De Waal announced that she would fund a scholarship for a person from a marginalised background to do a creative writing MA at Birkbeck. It’s a way of getting more diverse stories – “which are legion, and don’t often get told” – published, she says. “I wanted to call it the Fat Chance scholarship, because so many people who I’ve suggested should do an MA, say: ‘Fat chance – haven’t got the money!’ My father’s black, my mum’s Irish, and growing up poor, in an all-white neighbourhood, in the 60s, there was rabid racism. Doing an MA for me was a dream, and I wanted to give someone like me that opportunity.” CJ
My Name Is Leon will be published by Viking in June. For scholarship information, click here
Lisa Owens: ‘I wanted to tackle the idea that there’s a dream job out there and you’ll find happiness by locating it’
Lisa Owens was signed by an agent within six months of completing her creative writing MA. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
Owens left her job to write her novel, Not Working, which looks at how endless career options leave many feeling overwhelmed
Lisa Owens had been working in publishing for six years when it began to dawn on her that she wasn’t as ambitious in her chosen field as friends and colleagues appeared to be in theirs.
“There was a sense that maybe I didn’t feel that same drive, and I found myself questioning, ‘Is there something else I really want to do?’” she says.
The question proved to be both a catalyst and an inspiration. Owens realised what she really wanted to do was write, and so resigned from her job to embark on the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Her resulting novel – Not Working – explores the idea that today’s 20- and thirtysomethings are lost in a sea of career options that many find paralysing.
“We were raised to think we could do whatever we wanted to do,” Owens explains. “And I think that pressure is quite difficult, because people think, ‘How do I choose when I could do anything? How do I make the right decision?’ It sounds like a very first-world problem, of which I’m completely aware – I have to caveat it with that!”
People would ask what I was writing, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it really rang true to them
Owens laughs, as she does a lot throughout our interview. She has a natural warmth and wit that leaps off the pages of Not Working, a novel as insightful about the contemporary dilemmas facing young professionals as it is sharp, incisive and laugh-out-loud funny. And it’s Not Working’s humour that gives its protagonist, Claire Flannery, such a fresh voice. In the novel, Claire gives up her job in marketing to try to find her real vocation, only to struggle locating it. Much of the book – told in vignette form – follows Claire’s job-search, and is filled with blisteringly acute observations of the mundane thoughts and obsessions that fill the lives of people with too much time on their hands.
Owens didn’t, however, always intend her debut novel to be comedic. She’s a fan of “sparse Irish domestic fiction” and had imagined she’d write something in that vein. But for years she’d been noting down snippets of random observations and when she came to read them collectively, realised they were all in the same, compelling voice.
“There was something about this voice and this world that felt immediate, that felt truthful. People would ask what I was writing, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it really rang true to them.”
The book struck such a chord that within six months of completing the MA – and based on only the first 1,500 words of her manuscript – Owens was signed by agent Jane Finigan. Just over a year later, Not Working was the subject of a fierce eight-way auction and has sold in 10 foreign territories.
“It was an amazing experience because I had no idea that anyone would like it,” Owens reflects. “It was overwhelming to have people be so positive about it.”
Owens cites her influences as American writers such as Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore and AM Homes “who manage to have that wit but also literariness”. One also senses the impact of Lena Dunham; Not Working could be described as Girls with English eccentricity and a particularly British brand of social awkwardness – there are plenty of cringeworthy set pieces.
“I do like that kind of comedy of manners,” Owens says, laughing. “The Office, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I do probably take a perverse pleasure in them.”
For now, a different kind of pleasure awaits the state-school-educated Cambridge graduate. I’m meeting her just four days before she and her husband – the actor and comedian Simon Bird – are expecting their first baby. When I ask whether she’s already working on her second novel, Owens laughs again: “It’s at the back of my mind, but I have other, more immediate, demands on my time. I definitely want to write another book.”
What does she hope readers will take away from Not Working?
“What I really wanted to tackle was this idea that there’s a dream job out there and that you will find happiness through locating that. Work doesn’t have to equal happiness, work doesn’t have to completely define you. There are lots of other ways of being fulfilled.” HB
Not Working will be published by Picador on 21 April, £12.99. Click here to preorder a copy for £10.39
Joanna Cannon: ‘We need to be kinder to the people who stand at the edge of the dancefloor’
Joanna Cannon was inspired by Alan Bennett’s use of words in Talking Heads. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
Derbyshire psychiatrist Cannon brings outsiders centre stage in her tale about a disappearance during the heatwave of 1976
“People’s narratives have always fascinated me – ordinary people, not kings and queens. People on the edge of society all have a story about how they got there,” says Joanna Cannon. Eloquent and witty over tea in the Observer offices, she shares her own: “I left school at 15 with one O-level. I worked in various jobs – when you work in bars, and deliver takeaways, and shovel dog poo you meet people from all walks of life. I listened to their stories. It made me interested in the human psyche and in narrative.”
Growing up in a small town in the Peak District she became interested in how people feel threatened by strangers. Outsiders people the pages of her debut novel, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep. Set in the 70s – “a time of huge change” – it explores themes of bigotry and belonging through the disappearance of Mrs Creasy, and the arrival of a new family, the Kapoors. The word “unbelonger” echoes throughout. Does she feel a sense of “unbelonging”? “Oh, God, every day. I think all writers have felt they’re on the outside looking in, that’s how you learn to observe things.
When the box of proofs arrived, my mother picked one up and said: "Imagine, all that came out of your head!"
“I was an only child and so was my mother. I wasn’t good at joining in. Some of my best friends were in the pages of books. I had Aslan and Mowgli and Meg. My mum and dad were wise and generous enough to take me to the library and that’s where I found the words. We could never have afforded to buy many books – my mum worked at Woolworth’s and my dad was a plumber. I was like Grace in the novel. I was the first person in our family to go to university. My dad read to me and when we ran out of stories he’d make his own up, which had all sorts of great morals, like most fairy stories. He came from a poor background and left school at 13 to earn a living, but he encouraged me to take the path I wanted and not worry about being a ‘goat’ [‘goat’ is the term for the novel’s outsiders].”
Watching Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads also “opened a door”: “I could see the power of words and how they can switch your perception and you can understand another human being through them. I wished I had the ability to harness that power and use words so beautifully.”
In her 30s, she went back to college, did her A-levels, applied for medical school and is now a psychiatrist (“I had to work while I was at med school, so I delivered pizzas – I still do now if they’re short-staffed!”). On the wards the first thing she had to do was certify a death: “I thought I was going under – I’d come home and cry. I thought, I’ve either got to lose that sensitivity or find a way of processing it, so I did what I always do – write.” She wrote in car parks in her lunch break, on night shifts on the rare occasion that everyone was asleep, and still gets up at 3am to write. “We need to be kinder to people who stand at the edge of the dance floor. Mental illness doesn’t get the compassion other illnesses do. Social isolation is so damaging. The judgments we make of people aren’t always right. I wanted to convey that in a story.”
Another lucky twist in Cannon’s tale was receiving an unexpected tax rebate: “I thought I could either have ballroom dancing lessons or write a book. I did an online Faber course. That disciplined me.” Mentoring was also vital: “The writer Kerry Hudson set up WoMentoring: it’s so important for people who don’t have the opportunities, to enable people who have got talent to have a chance to use it.” Cannon loves to play guitar and piano, and when writing the novel made a Spotify playlist full of 70s music: “I have to write in silence – even the sound of my own breathing irritates me. But when I’m thinking, I like music to help me visit certain eras.”
She finds it both “strange and incredibly moving” to hear from people who have read the book, not least her mother: “When the box of proofs arrived, my mother picked one up and said: ‘Imagine, all that came out of your head!’” AS
The Trouble With Goats and Sheep is published 28 January by Harper Collins, £12.99. Click here to preorder it for £10.39 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/mar/09/gary-lineker-says-he-stands-by-remarks-about-immigration-policy-bbc | Football | 2023-03-09T23:49:12.000Z | Mark Sweney | Gary Lineker stands by his immigration policy remarks | Gary Lineker has said he will stand his ground after a day of attacks from ministers over tweets he posted earlier this week criticising the government’s asylum policy, and dismissed suggestions he could face suspension from his £1.35m-a-year job at the BBC.
Gary Lineker responds to critics of his immigration policy comments
Read more
Pressure continues to mount on Lineker, with the culture secretary, the home secretary and two former BBC directors adding to the criticism of the Match of the Day presenter’s comments on social media, in which he likened the language used to set out the government’s immigration plans to “that used by Germany in the 30s”.
However, support for Lineker has come from media figures including Piers Morgan and the former Sky News presenter Adam Boulton.
On Thursday, Lineker suggested he was not facing any sanction or suspension. “Happy that this ridiculously out of proportion story seems to be abating and very much looking forward to presenting [Match of the Day] on Saturday. Thanks again for all your incredible support. It’s been overwhelming,” he tweeted.
Lineker also responded to questions from journalists outside his home on Thursday morning.
Asked whether he stood by what he said in his tweets, the football pundit replied: “Of course.” He was then asked if he feared being suspended. Lineker told reporters: “No.”
A BBC insider said that while senior managers had had conversations with Lineker the matter was yet to be resolved and no course of action had yet been determined.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, who has previously been criticised by a Holocaust survivor for the language used about refugees, claimed Lineker’s tweets “diminishes the unspeakable tragedy” of the Holocaust, calling the comparison he made to 30s Germany “lazy and unhelpful”.
“I think it is, from a personal point of view, to hear that characterisation is offensive because – as you said – my husband is Jewish, my children are therefore directly descendant from people who were murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust,” she told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast.
“To kind of throw out those kind of flippant analogies diminishes the unspeakable tragedy that millions of people went through and I don’t think anything that is happening in the UK today can come close to what happened in the Holocaust.”
Speaking in the Commons earlier on Thursday, the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, said it was important for the BBC to maintain impartiality if it was to retain the trust of the public who paid the licence fee.
She added: “As somebody whose grandmother escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s, I think it’s really disappointing and inappropriate to compare government policy on immigration to events in Germany in the 1930s.
“The BBC is operationally independent and I’m pleased the BBC will be speaking to Gary Lineker to remind him of his responsibilities in relation to social media.”
Former BBC bosses also voiced their concerns over the blurring of Lineker’s personal views and impartiality issues in his role as one of the corporation’s most well-known stars.
Last year he was named as the BBC’s top earning on-air talent for the fifth consecutive year, and was paid between £1,350,000 and £1,354,999 in 2021-22 for Match of the Day and Sports Personality of the Year.
Richard Ayre, the former BBC controller of editorial policy, said it was unacceptable for a BBC employee to “compare Suella Braverman to the Third Reich” and that Lineker had to decide if he wants to remain employed at the corporation or “become a social media influencer”.
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Roger Mosey, the former head of BBC television news and director of sport, said while he sympathised with Lineker’s views and did not support calls for him to be sacked, his lack of impartiality was a legitimate concern for the corporation.
“What if he was tweeting ‘Brexit is working, Suella Braverman is right, refugees should go back to Calais’?,” said Mosey, speaking to Times Radio. “[Impartiality] can be tough sometimes but it’s the best policy in difficult circumstances for the BBC … If you receive £1.4m from the BBC, you need to abide by the BBC’s rules.”
Despite the criticism Lineker has remained steadfastly unbowed over his social media salvo, backing up his original tweet with a subsequent post thanking those supporting him and vowing not to be silenced.
“I’ll continue to try and speak up for those poor souls that have no choice,” he tweeted.
Lineker has also received wide-ranging support for voicing his views. Morgan said despite the pundit’s comments being “clearly incendiary” they should not bother the corporation as he was not a news reporter.
While Boulton pointed out that the corporation did not attempt to gag or censure the “frequently voiced views of BBC actors”.
Meanwhile, Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter, pointed out that the corporation was fine with Lineker raising questions about Qatar’s human rights record during the World Cup.
Curious that @GaryLineker was free to raise questions about Qatar’s human rights record - with the blessing of the bbc - over the World Cup , but cannot raise questions of human rights in this country if it involves criticism of government policy … https://t.co/wkm60i4hp6
— emily m (@maitlis) March 8, 2023
Ayre, a former member of broadcasting regulator Ofcom’s content board and BBC trustee, said the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, may be forced to fire Lineker.
Last year, Davie told a committee of MPs that he had talked to Lineker about the BBC’s editorial social media guidelines but admitted cracking down on his politicised tweeting was a “work in progress”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/10/perfecting-the-gothic-glam-beauty-look | Life and style | 2023-12-10T06:00:43.000Z | Funmi Fetto | Unleash your inner gothic glam | The goth glam trend, inspired by the Addams family, was all over AW23’s runways. The word “trend” makes me shudder, but I get the need to modernise a look. Just don’t be too literal. For a festive iteration, think: what would happen if Wednesday Addams met Studio 54 and a bit of restraint? So if you go for the goth eyes try a sheer finish. If black’s too much, try dark bronze. And if dark lipstick strikes fear, go nude. Morticia would be mortified, but at least you’ll look like you.
1. Vieve Eye Wand in Raven £23, vieve.co.uk
2. RMS Beauty Legendary Serum Lipstick £33, spacenk.com
3. Ruby Hammer Precision Liquid Eyeliner £19, rubyhammer.co.uk
4. Chanel Le Vernis Long Wear Nail Colour in Sequins £29, chanel.com
5. Victoria Beckham Lid Lustre in Mink £33, victoriabeckhambeauty.com
I can’t do without… A moisturising mask that actually does live up to the hype
As a beauty journalist, I pride myself on not recommending a beauty brand or product simply because it is big on social media. That said, when you consistently hear about a product going viral across the digital landscape, it becomes impossible for your ears not to prick up. Bubble Skincare is one such brand. In the past six months, it has gained 1.4m followers on TikTok, its fun, bouncy content has garnered more than 1bn views and its packaging is cute, compact and colourful. It is oh so easy to dismiss the hype around it to the youthful over exuberance of its community. But I’ve tried the products. The hype is justified; it is also the fastest-growing skincare brand in the US – and you don’t have to be of the TikTok generation for it to work for you. I am particularly taken with the Hydrating Sleep Mask. The texture is very creamy, but not heavy, so no fear of greasiness. Ingredients include Maple Sap – protects the skin barrier – and mandelic and kojic acids (wonderful for skin brightening). It hydrates dry skin, balances oiliness and stands up to extreme situations – I tested it out on a 12-hour flight and I couldn’t believe how rested I looked when I got off the plane. As with all Bubble’s skincare products, this mask falls under the £20 mark. Considering all the benefits, it is an easy win. Bubble Overnight Hydrating Sleep Mask, £19, beautybay.com
On my radar… star products for a smoother face and soft hands
Surface tension Relevant, the skincare line by beauty veteran Nyakio Grieco, has launched in the UK. This resurfacing toner, which refines skin texture and combats discoloration, is excellent. Relevant Sol Tone Resurface & Glow Solution, £56, sephora.co.uk
While you sleep With liquorice and narcissus to even skin tone, bakuchiol (a plant alternative to retinol) to improve skin elasticity and hyaluronic acid to plump skin, this is the ultimate night serum. Votary Night Star Serum, £105, votary.co.uk
Hand in hand If you can bear to give it away, this luxe handcream – a blend of bergamot, blackcurrant, shea butter, rosehip and almond oils – would make a great gift. Dries van Noten Soie Malaquais, £48, driesvannoten.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/aug/25/waterman-of-india-rajendra-singh-stockholm-water-prize | Global Development Professionals Network | 2015-08-25T13:17:03.000Z | Karl Mathiesen | Rajendra Singh: Clean flowing rivers must be a human right | The “waterman of India” will walk across five continents to raise awareness for his campaign to have the human rights to river water and access to nature recognised by the UN.
“Nature cannot fulfil greed,” Rajendra Singh said on Monday at World Water Week, where he will accept the Stockholm Water Prize on Wednesday. Singh argued that communities facing water crises should resist the money and technological solutions offered by corporations. Instead, he told the Guardian, they must find ways to help themselves.
The three wonders of the ancient world solving modern water problems
Read more
“The companies always bother about the profit, they are not bothered about our common future,” he said. “They use the name of social corporate responsibility – but this is not sufficient for life. This is not sufficient for a better common future. They are using very good jargon. But they are only meeting, eating and cheating.”
Thirty-five years ago, Singh revived an ancient dam technology in his hot, dry home state of Rajasthan in north-west India. Working with local people he has returned water to more than 1,200 villages. The landscape and climate have been transformed; seven long-dead rivers have begun to flow, wells are full and once-parched fields are now fertile.
Singh said he would now embark on a five-year odyssey across five continents. In the tradition of his hero, Mahatma Gandhi, Singh has long advocated the technique of walking through landscapes.
“Walking connects you to the heart of the earth and the heart of the human,” he said. Each of his World Water Peace Walks will visit grassroots solutions to water challenges.
In 2017, Singh will visit the office of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights in Geneva to push for the recognition of the right to river water and access to nature. The recently recognised human right to water and sanitation is dependent on a clean environment and flowing river, Singh said.
“On paper, you have declared water is a human right. But water as a human right is only possible after river rights and nature rights. Without the clean flow of the river you can’t ensure the human right,” he said.
Rajendra Singh was part of the successful campaign that halted the construction of hydro-power plant that would have affected the Bhagirathi River in northern India, the source of the Ganges. Photograph: Wikipedia user Atarax42
A draft text of the rights Singh is campaigning for will be written in the coming months. But in practice, Singh said it would require industry to declare the resources they used and replace them. Key to Singh’s success in India has been a reinvigoration of local democracy, centred on the collective ownership and management of river water. He said the government of Uttar Pradesh had called him on Sunday to tell him the state would recognise river rights by law.
UN special rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, said the right to water implied controls on pollution but human rights law does not prefer public or private ownership of a resource.
“Technically speaking human rights apply to people. There are discussions at the UN about the recognition of the right to a clean environment. But I’m not sure that this position is right,” said Albuquerque.
Singh quietly began the walks in the UK earlier in August. The first took place on the island of Lindisfarne, where St Cuthbert is said to have raised a spring to save the islanders from a seventh-century drought. He then met locals in Belford, Northumberland who have developed a cheap, effective system of “bunds” to protect themselves from flooding and in the Dearne Valley, Yorkshire where similar work is proposed.
“The problem is climate change. Our problem is global, but the solution is local. The solution is traditional,” he said.
Minni Jain, director of the Flow Partnership, which has helped Singh plan the walks, said the project did not discriminate between the struggles of communities in poor or rich countries.
Borewells run dry? Crops failing? The Water Doctor will see you now
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“How can we make this movement - the bringing back of resource ownership into the hands of the common man - global? In India it’s possible. Is it possible in the west? That’s a tricky question, because it’s a different kind of system altogether. You have privatisation of companies, lots of vested interests, lots of big corporations. It’s a really stuck system,” she said.
The director of the $150,000 Stockholm Water Prize, Jens Berggren, said he agreed that local people must play a bigger role. However “the private sector can contribute with a lot of resources, with a lot of know how. At the same time they must be [subject to] regulation and enforcement”.
Singh will now return to India, to the memorial site of Gandhi in Delhi, and journey to the Kumbh, a hugely important Hindu religious festival where people bathe in the Ganges river.
“I will start my journey from my idol Mahatma Gandhi’s samādhi [the ultimate stage of meditation],” he said.
In September Singh goes to the US, followed by Germany and Morocco. He said the need for the project was urgent, because water was already driving conflict across the globe towards a “third-world water war”. In May, US president Barack Obama said climate-driven drought had aggravated conflict and terror in Nigeria and Syria.
Since first picking up a shovel alongside a village elder 35 years ago, Singh has been a passionate advocate for community driven, low-tech solutions to the global water crisis. A system of johads, earthen dams that hold water and allow it to percolate down replenishing the aquifer, had once allowed the region to stay green despite minimal rainfall. But the johads fell into disrepair a century ago during the consolidation of British rule and land management in India.
Decade of drought: a global tour of seven recent water crises
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To repair them had been his life’s work, he said: “You can change history very quickly, but changing the geography takes time.”
Now, with Rajasthan green, it was his ambition to spread his techniques across the world. “I’m spending the rest of life on this. It’s my motivation to change war to peace. I don’t know if it is possible in my life or not. But we will try.”
Karl Mathiesen is reporting from SIWI World Water Week.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter, and have your say on issues around water in development using #H2Oideas. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/Century | World news | 2014-07-30T23:30:10.000Z | Harry Slater | Guardian Century: how the Guardian saw the 20th century | 1899-1909
1899 - American Imperialism
Fighting at Manila
“The Filipinos attacked the American position around this city at half-past eight last night. It began with sharp firing on the outposts from several quarters at once, and grew to a furious conflict as the night advanced. The insurgents fought savagely, but the defending lines, which have been ready for this for weeks, held their own steadily. At this hour there is still hot firing. The Americans are still successfully repelling the assault.”
1900 - The Boer War
The relief of Ladysmith
“To describe with any degree of adequacy the excitement in London, and indeed throughout the country, consequent upon the announcement yesterday of the relief of Ladysmith would be an almost impossible task. The news was made known a few minutes before ten o’clock at the War Office, and soon after the hour the welcome intelligence was proclaimed by the Lord Mayor from a window of the Mansion House.”
1901 - Queen Victoria dies
Death of the Queen
“The Lord Mayor of London last night received the following:- Osborne, Tuesday, 6.45pm. The Prince of Wales to the Lord Mayor. My beloved mother the Queen has just passed away, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. (signed) Albert Edward.”
1902 - End of the Boer War
Conclusion of peace
“The announcement of peace was made at the evening service at St. Paul’s Cathedral to a fairly large congregation. Apparently the message came as a surprise, as evensong had commenced before the gratifying tidings were generally known even in the central parts of the City. There was an audible murmur of satisfaction when the telegram from Pretoria was read by the Bishop of Stepney.”
1903 - Race hate in the US
Anti-negro riots in the United States
“The town of Evansville, in Indiana, has been the scene for several days of anti-negro riots, which have been attended by the loss of ten lives. A negro was imprisoned in the gaol on a charge of murdering a policeman who was endeavouring to arrest him, and on Sunday a mob set out to break into the gaol and lynch the negro.”
1904 - The Russo-Japanese War
The war in the Far East
“According to a St. Petersburg telegram, the Russians are far from intending to allow the Japanese to advance unmolested from the Yalu to Feng-huang-cheng - General Kuropatkin’s first line of defence. On the contrary, it is declared they mean to offer serious resistance either at Antung or Shakhedz.”
1905 - Pogroms in the Ukraine
Days of terror
“The events in the Odessa suburbs of Moldavanka, Slobodka, and Bugaieoka last night were of a most terrible nature. Immense bands of ruffians, accompanied by policemen, invaded all the Jewish houses and mercilessly slaughtered the occupants.”
1906 - The Big ‘Quake
Earthquake in San Francisco
“San Francisco has been devastated by an earthquake. The shock occurred shortly after five o’clock yesterday morning, and lasted three minutes.”
1907 - Millions starve in China
The famine in China
“It is estimated that four millions are starving and tens of thousands reduced to utter destitution wandering over the country, in the North of Anhui, the East of Honan, and the whole of the North of Kiang-Su provinces of China.”
1908 - The Persian civil war
Fighting in Teheran
“Fighting between Royalist and Parliamentary forces began at Teheran yesterday morning. The Shah and his ministers have been preparing for a coup d’etat for the last week or two.”
1909 - Bleriot’s cross-channel flight
Airship feat
“The feat of flying across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air machine, a thing which had never before been done, was accomplished yesterday morning by M. Louis Bleriot, in a monoplane of his own construction.”
1910-19
Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie riding in an open carriage at Sarajevo shortly before their assassination in 1914. Photograph: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images Photograph: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images
1910 - The murderous Dr Crippen
Crippen & Miss le Neve
“A great crowd assembled early yesterday morning outside the famous police court in Bow street, London, where Dr. Crippen and Miss Le Neve were to be brought before the magistrate later in the day in connection with the mystery surrounding the discovery of human remains in the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road.”
1911 - Churchill, have-a-go Home Secretary
Murderers’ siege in London
“A raid made by London police early yesterday morning on a house in Stepney - 100, Sidney-street - in which two of the gang that murdered the three police offficers in Houndsditch last month were believed to be hiding, developed into a pitched battle or siege.”
1912 - Sinking of the Titanic
The Titanic sunk
“The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster. An unofficial message from Cape Race, Newfoundland, stated that only 675 have been saved out of 2,200 to 2,400 persons on board.”
1913 - Scott of the Antarctic
Captain Scott’s last journey
“Captain R. F. Scott, the famous Antarctic explorer, and four other members of the British South Polar Expedition have died amidst the Southern ice. The five men were the whole Southern party. They had reached the Pole on January 18, 1912, just over a month after Captain Amundsen, the Norwegian, and had struggled far back towards safety when they were overcome.”
1914 - The Great War
Assassination of the Austrian royal heir and wife
“The Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, nephew of the aged Emperor and heir to the throne, was assassinated in the streets of Sarayevo, the Bosnian capital, yesterday afternoon. His wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, was killed by the same assassin. Some reports say the Duchess was deliberately shielding her husband from the second shot when she was killed.”
1915 - Sinking of the Lusitania
The Lusitania disaster
“The death roll in the Lusitania disaster is still not certainly known. About 750 persons were rescued, but of these some 50 have died since they were landed. Over 2,150 men, women and children were on the liner when she left New York, and since the living do not number more than 710, the dead cannot be fewer than 1,450.”
1916 - The Easter Rising
Sinn Fein outbreak in Dublin
“A very serious outbreak organised by Sinn Feiners occurred in Dublin on Monday. A large body of men, mostly armed, seized St. Stephen’s Green and the Post Office, and also houses in St Stephen’s Green, Sackville Street (where the Post Office is situated), the adjacent Abbey Street, and on the quays along the Liffey. The telegraph and telephone lines were cut.”
1917 - The Russian Revolution
How the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace
“The Palace was pillaged and devastated from top to bottom by the Bolshevik armed mob, as though by a horde of barbarians. All the State papers were destroyed. Priceless pictures were ripped from their frames by bayonets.”
1918 - The Armistice
The end of the war
“The war is over, and in a million households fathers and mothers, wives and sisters, will breathe freely, relieved at length of all dread of that curt message which has shattered the hope and joy of so many.”
1919 - First transatlantic flight
Manchester men first to fly Atlantic direct
“The first direct Transatlantic flight from America to Europe has been achieved by Captain Alcock, D.S.C., a Manchester pilot flying the Vickers Vimy-Rolls aeroplane with Lieutenant A. W. Brown as navigator.”
1920-29
After Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle ensued, with Stalin emerging as his successor. Photograph: AP Photo/Sovfoto Photograph: AP Photo/Sovfoto
1920 - The Prohibition
America ‘dry’ tonight
“One minute after midnight tonight America will become an entirely arid desert as far as alcoholics are concerned, any drinkable containing more than half of 1 per cent alcohol being forbidden.”
1921 - Speech hits the movies
The talking kinema
“The invention of the talking kinema - reported the other day from Sweden - promises to endow the art of the actor with some sort of immortality.”
1922 - The rise of Fascism
Italy in Fascist control
“At the moment when Mussolini, the leader of the Italian Fascisti, was seizing control of the country by force, the governing authority has been placed in his hands by the King, who yesterday asked him to form a Cabinet.”
1923 - The Beerkeller putsch
Bavarian monarchist rising broken
“The German reactionaries have struck and failed. News of their overthrow comes close upon the heels of the announcement of the coup, which appeared in our later editions yesterday. The coup’s leaders, Ludendorff and Hitler, were captured.”
1924 - Stalin succeeds Lenin
Death of Lenin
“Lenin, who was at Gorki, a village twenty miles from Moscow, had a sudden relapse yesterday, became unconscious, and died an hour later, just before seven in the evening.”
1925 - Advances in atomic science
Remarkable claims for new ray
“The remarkable discovery of Dr. Millikan, a Nobel prize-winner for physic, of new penetrating rays far shorter and more powerful than any hitherto known, has aroused the keenest interest of authorities in this country.”
1926 - The General Strike
Ugly disturbances
“The first day of the strike passed off, in a sense, uneventfully. The absence of trains and trams is not a new thing; it was borne good humouredly, and in no part of the country did any kind of serious disturbance occur. Already, by the second day, there have been ominous signs that this peaceful state of affairs is gradually giving way to a more dangerous temper.”
1927 - Lindbergh flies the Ocean, solo
Alone across the Atlantic
“Captain Lindbergh, the young United States airman, reached Paris at 10.22 on Saturday night on his non-stop flight from New York. He is the first pilot to have crossed the Atlantic by himself, the first to fly from America to France, and the first to make an uninterrupted flight of 3,600 miles. The journey took 33 hours.”
1928 - Hirohito takes the throne
Japan’s emperor
“The enthronement of Emperor Hirohito was the culminating ceremony here to-day. It was cold but bright with a passing shower. Over a thousand people assembled at the Shishinden, or Throne Hall, your correspondent being one of a privileged group viewing the ceremony through the Kemei Gate.”
1929 - The great Crash
£1,000,000,000 crash on New York stock exchange
“The heavy break on the New York Stock Exchange, which began on Saturday and has been increased on each succeeding day except Tuesday, when there was a slight recovery, reached catastrophic proportions yesterday with a crash described as the worst in the history of the Exchange. It is estimated that £1,000,000,000 in paper values had been swept away by the close of the market.”
1930-39
Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain 1937-1940. Photograph: Getty/Hulton Archive Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
1930 - Gandhi and civil disobedience
Gandhi’s march to the sea
“At 6.30 yesterday morning “Mahatma” Gandhi left Ahmedabad on foot at the head of a band of civil resistance volunteers on a 100-mile march to the sea at Jalalpur, on the Gulf of Cambay.”
1931 - The depression
Huge increase in unemployment
“The unemployed total on Monday, December 29 - 2,643,127 - was the highest recorded since the unemployment insurance statistics began in 1921.”
1932 - The Five-year Plan
Soviet output to be trebled
“Instructions by the Soviet Premier, Mr. Molotoff, and head of the State Planning Commission, Mr. Kuibisheff, for the second Five-year Plan were published to-day.”
1933 - Persecution of Jews begins in earnest
Anti-semitism in Berlin
“Demonstrations against the big stores in Berlin to-day developed later in the evening into an active outbreak of anti-Semitism.”
1934 - A foretaste of Nazism
Dachau concentration camp
“The concentration camp at Dachau is often represented as a model of its kind. The truth is that this camp is in no sense a model, although it is no worse than many of the Hitlerite concentration camps. The total number of prisoners who have been killed or who have died of their injuries at Dachau cannot be far short of fifty.”
1935 - Fascist expansionism begins
Fascist troops march into Ethiopia
“Mussolini’s Fascist troops marched into Ethiopia today - and as the war-drums called Emperor Haile Selassie’s people to fight, the League of Nations in Geneva was facing its greatest test since it was formed in 1919.”
1936 - Franco’s rebellion in Spain
Civil war in Spain
“On July 12 Calvo Sotelo was taken from his house by night and shot. There is some mystery in this assassination.”
1937 - The Middle Eastern question
Partition of Palestine
“Partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews and the termination of the mandate are recommended by the Royal Commission, whose unanimous report is published to-day.”
1938 - “Peace for our time”?
Return from Munich
“Mr. Chamberlain went to a first-floor window and leaned forward happily smiling on the people. ‘My good friends,’ he said - it took some time to still the clamour so that he might be heard - ‘this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany ‘peace with honour.’ I believe it is peace for our time.’”
1939 - The declaration of war
Britain at war with Germany
“Britain and France are now at war with Germany. The British ultimatum expired at 11 a.m. yesterday, and France entered the war six hours later - at 5 p.m.”
1940-49
A mushroom cloud rises more than 60,000 feet into the air over Nagasaki, Japan after an atomic bomb was dropped by the US bomber Enola Gay, 9 August 1945. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Feature Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
1940 - The Battle of Britain
Never in the field of human conflict ...
“The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unweakened by their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1941 - The attack on Pearl Harbor
Japan declares war on United States and Britain
“The Japanese, without any warning, yesterday afternoon began war on the United States with air attacks on the naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, and the adjacent city of Honolulu.”
1942 - The Holocaust
The German massacres of Jews in Poland
“The Note on Jewish persecution in Poland which the Polish Government in London has addressed to the respective Governments of the United Nations contains a comprehensive account of the horrors being perpetrated by the Germans on Polish soil.”
1943 - Italy defeated
Italy surrenders unconditionally
“Italy has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, and hostilities between the United Nations and Italy ended early yesterday evening. There were unconfirmed reports this morning of new Allied landings at several points north and south of Rome.”
1944 - D-day
Weather held up invasion for 24 hours
“There is a feeling of confidence at this headquarters to-night. No one imagines that the supreme battle which began on the beaches of of Normandy early this morning will be won by the Allies without bitter fighting against a determined and desperate enemy, but there is a general sense that the ‘first hurdles’ of invasion of the European Continent have been successfully surmounted.”
1945 - The atomic bomb
Destruction at Hiroshima
“One hundred thousand Japanese may have been killed or wounded by the single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This was the unofficial estimate at Guam to-night after reports of the tremendous devastation wrought had come in.”
1946 - The Iron Curtain descends
The Cold War
“In Czechoslovakia life is normal. This does not seem so surprising if you go from London to Prague by air, travelling more easily and more quickly, than from London to Edinburgh. It is incredible and bewildering if you come to Prague overland through the chaos and starvation of any of the surrounding countries.”
1947 - Independence for India and Pakistan
India and Pakistan celebrate
“British rule in India ended at midnight last night after 163 years. To-day the new Dominions of India and Pakistan are in being. At midnight in Delhi, capital of India, Lord Mountbatten ceased to be the Viceroy and became Governor General of India.”
1948 - The State of Israel proclaimed
The Jewish state born
“The Jews yesterday proclaimed in Tel Aviv the new State of Israel. It was formally recognised last night by the United States. In Jerusalem firing began as soon as the Army and the police left and increased steadily as the Jews began to take buildings in the central zone and to hoist the Zionist flag on them.”
1949 - The Berlin airlift
Blockade of Berlin over
“The blockade of Berlin ended at one minute past midnight this morning when a British convoy started its journey through the Soviet zone. Less than two hours later the first cars had reached Berlin without incident.”
1950-59
Black students are escorted into Little Rock High School, Arkansas in 1957 having previously been prevented from entering by the state governor. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
1950 - TV viewing habits
Television tastes
“Owners of television sets seldom switch off even programmes which they admit to disliking, so that the extent to which television is watched seems to depend only to a limited extent upon the nature of the programme transmitted, said Mr Robert Silvey, head of Audience Research, B.B.C., when he addressed the Manchester Statistical Society last night on methods of viewer research employed by the corporation.”
1951 - Theft and return of the Stone of Destiny
Return of the Stone
“Three and a half months after its removal from the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey early on Christmas morning, the Stone of Scone was to-day deposited in Arbroath Abbey in Scotland. Three men drove up to the abbey and carried the stone, which was draped in a St. Andrew’s flag along the main aisle before laying it at the high altar.”
1952 - The death of Evita
Eva Peron’s lying-in-state
“Senora Peron’s body was brought to the Ministry to-day from the Presidential Palace. It will lie in state, in a coffin draped with the Argentine flag and white orchids and other flowers, until Tuesday.”
1953 - The death of Stalin
How Moscow broke the news
“The news of Stalin’s death had just been released to the outside world by Moscow’s foreign services. Now, surely, was the moment for the Russians to be told. But they were not told anything - except perhaps by implication.”
1954 - The four-minute mile
The mile in 3min. 59.4sec.
“Roger Bannister, aged 25, to-day became the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. His time at the Iffley Road track, Oxford, in the annual match between the Amateur Athletic Association and Oxford University, was 3min. 59.4sec.”
1955 - ITV launched
ITV makes its bow
“One thing must be said immediately. In 365 days’ time, Independent Television will have been with us for a year. So far, it has been with us for a bare hand-count of hours, and although the conclusions are crying to be jumped to, the temptation to jump must be resisted.”
1956 - The Hungarian rising
Soviet tanks crush resistance
“At 8 p.m. yesterday the Soviet High Command in Hungary ordered Mr Nagy’s Government to surrender by noon “or Budapest will be bombed.” Soviet armoured forces then went into action.”
1957 - Little Rock
Heavier guard for negroes
“About 75 white pupils walked out of the Central High School in Little Rock after eight Negroes went in to-day, and one boy hung a straw effigy of a Negro from a tree.”
1958 - Music in stereo
Stereophonic sound
“Within a few months, so we are promised by the big record companies, stereophonic discs will be available in this country. The question all record-collectors will want to ask is whether we are going to be faced with yet another gramophone upheaval on the scale of the L.P. revolution.”
1959 - The Cuban revolution
Castro in control of Cuba
“All of Cuba to-day was under the precarious control of Fidel Castro, the 31-year-old rebel whom the Batista Government pictured to its graceless end as a ragamuffin hiding in the scrub hills of Oriente Province.”
1960-69
Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, 1969. Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP/Press Association Images Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP/Press Association Images
1960 - UK seeks entry to Europe
Britain will ask to join EEC
“Mr Macmillan, a weary-looking father figure, at last held out his hand yesterday and offered to try to lead the Commons and the country into Europe, if he can find the way. There was a good deal of kicking and screaming and this was to be expected.”
1961 - Russia puts a man in orbit
What it feels like in space
“Major Yuri Gagarin described today how it felt to be the first man in space - how he was able to write and work and how he burst out singing for joy as his ship plunged back towards the earth. ‘Everything was easier to perform? legs and arms weighed nothing,’ he told an interviewer.”
1962 - The Cuban missile crisis
The Cuban crisis
“People who thought the Cuban crisis was easing - and who sent Stock Exchange prices rising - had better think again. The situation is still full of danger.”
1963 - The shooting of JFK
President Kennedy assassinated
“President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot during a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas this afternoon. He died in the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital 32 minutes after the attack. He was 46 years old.”
1964 - Beatlemania
Beatle hysteria hits US
“Physically, the Beatle invasion was launched just after 1 p.m. when their air liner touched down to pandemonium at Kennedy Airport. But in fact New York has been in the tightening grip of Beatlemania for some weeks.”
1965 - The Vietnam war
US paratroops go into attack against Vietcong
“An Australian battalion joined United States paratroops and South Vietnamese forces today in an attack on a Vietcong stronghold about 30 miles north of Saigon. This was the first time US troops were employed in an offensive role.”
1966 - England wins the World Cup
Let Us Now Praise Famous Footballers
“To the accompaniment of expressions of praise, thanksgiving, and, in some cases, undisguised disbelief, England became football champions of the world by defeating West Germany 4-2 on Saturday at Wembley.”
1967 - The six-day war
Israeli forces hit back - and cut off Gaza town
“Fighting broke out today on all Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbours. Official Israeli statements said that attacks had been launched in the area of the Negev, in Jerusalem, and along the Syrian border near Dagania.”
1968 - The soixante-huitards
Paris gripped by insurrection
“An insurrection, there is no other word for it, swept a stupefied Paris last night in the hours that followed General de Gaulle’s television address.”
1969 - Neil Armstrong takes one small step
The Moonwalkers
“Men are on the moon. At 3:39 am this morning - nearly four hours ahead of schedule - Armstrong, the lunar module commander, opened the hatch and clambered slowly down to the surface of the moon.”
1970-1979
Margaret Thatcher, with husband Denis Thatcher, waves to well-wishers outside 10 Downing Street following her election victory, on 4 May 1979. Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images
1970 - Beginning a decade of industrial action
Hospitals work by candle
“Nationwide power cuts averaged 31 per cent yesterday, with 40 per cent in some areas, and hospitals faced their most critical 24 hours of the strike so far with staff struggling to keep going by candle and battery power.”
1971 - The Vietnam war drags on
What Vietnam does to a man
“The men of D company were discussing the question of why in hell they had had no beer, or at least soda, for a whole month when I arrived on their hill. They wanted to tell me about those in the rear who were stealing the beer and soda from them, but I wanted to talk about ‘the action.’”
1972 - Bloody Sunday
13 killed as paratroops break riot
“The tragic and inevitable doomsday situation which has been universally forecast for Northern Ireland arrived in Londonderry yesterday afternoon when soldiers firing into a large crowd of civil rights demonstrators, shot and killed 13 civilians.”
1973 - Britain joins the EEC
We’re in - but without the fireworks
“Britain passed peacefully into Europe at midnight last night without any special celebration. It was difficult to tell that anything of importance had occurred, and a date which will be entered in the history books as long as histories of Britain are written, was taken by most people as a matter of course.”
1974 - The end of Tricky Dicky
Nixon resigns
“The last that we saw of him as President was his limp right hand flapping occasionally like a dying fish, trying to wave a laconic farewell through the bulletproof glass of the shiny green helicopter.”
1975 - Indonesia invades East Timor
Indonesians capture capital in air-sea invasion of Timor
“An Indonesian-supported force launched a full-scale attack by air and sea on the former Portuguese colony of Timor at dawn today. More than 1,000 army commandos parachuted into the capital of Dili in the first wave of the attack.”
1976 - The death of Chairman Mao
Power vacuum after Mao’s death
“The Chinese people, sad but hardly surprised, began to consider their future last night without their country’s great helmsman.”
1977 - Punk hits Britain
Punk record is a load of legal trouble
“The manager of a record shop in Nottingham who displayed in his window the new best-selling LP record by the Sex Pistols, which displays on its sleeve the title ‘Never mind the Bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols’ has been charged with offences under the 1889 Indecent Advertisement Act.”
1978 - The Met’s attitude to race relations
Race causes an initial confusion
“The man who answered ‘human race’ when asked to what race he belonged would get short shrift at West End Central police station, London. For there human classifications have achieved an elaborate formality, as a bemused magistrate heard yesterday.”
1979 - Thatcher in power
Thatcher takes over No.10
“Mrs Margaret Thatcher looks certain this morning to be the next tenant of 10 Downing Street and the first woman prime minister in the western world.”
1980-89
A man stopping a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, 5 June 1989. Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos
1980 - The Iran - Iraq war
Open war as Iraq is bombed
“The border conflict between Iraq and Iran turned into a full-scale war yesterday after both sides bombed each other’s airbases and clashed repeatedly on the ground and at sea along the 720-mile frontier.”
1981 - The Brixton riots
How smouldering tension erupted to set Brixton aflame
“On Friday afternoon, a police patrol in Brixton stopped to help a black youth who had been stabbed in the back. The incident marked the beginning of a build-up of police strength and a confrontation began which erupted into violence on Saturday afternoon when a black youth was arrested outside a minicab office.”
1982 - The Falklands war
Patriotism has worked its old magic
“A thousand dead, terrible wounds; the Union Jack flying again over the Falklands (pop. 1,800); rejoicing and mutual congratulation in the House of Commons; champagne and Rule Britannia in Downing Street - each must draw his or her own balance sheet and historians must decide where to place the Falklands War in the annals of Britain’s post-1945 adjustment to her reduced circumstances as a declining power.”
1983 - The AIDS epidemic
The lurking killer without a cure
“Aids surfaced in Haiti. West Coast homosexuals brought it back to San Francisco. Cheap transatlantic travel flew it into England. And next year the handful of known cases will become hundreds as the four-year incubation period comes to an end for gays, and maybe even for their heterosexual partners.”
1984 - The apogee of Thatcherism
Commentary
“One of Thatcherism’s most startling gifts to British society is to have thoroughly politicised it. Little now occurs, in large reaches of public and sometimes private life which does not have political importance and is not subjected to a test of its relevance to the prevailing ideology.”
1985 - The miners’ strike
Pit strike ends in defiance and tears
“One of the most significant chapters in Britain’s trade union history was closed last night when the miners reluctantly agreed to call off their strike in a mood of bitterness and tears, almost a year after it had begun.”
1986 - The Chernobyl meltdown
Russia admits blast as death fears rise
“After three days of virtual news blackout, the Soviet authorities finally admitted last night what Scandinavia had already deduced from radioactive fallout - that the Chernobyl nuclear accident is a “disaster”, that some people have been killed and thousands evacuated.”
1987 - The Stock Market crash
Black Monday
“A record #50.6 billion rout on the London Stock Exchange yesterday was followed by a fall on Wall Street which far exceeded the 1929 crash.”
1988 - Reagan’s second term ends
Goodbye, Ronald Reagan
“As Ronald Reagan journeyed triumphally from Texas to California in the closing hours of campaign ‘88, tipping his stetson to the crowds lining the streets for a glimpse of the Gipper on his last hurrah, it was plain that, whatever his failings, the American people are both forgiving and adoring.”
1989 - The Tiananmen Square massacre
The horror of a people attacked by its own army
“Students had been bayoneted to death, others had set fire to two armoured personnel carriers and trucks, tanks had crushed to death 11 students who had left the square and were lagging behind the others, more students had been crushed to death in their tents. ‘How could the Communist Party do this? How could they shoot children?’ asked a worker in blue overalls.”
1990-99
Nelson Mandela and his then wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela raising fists upon his release from 27 years of imprisonment, 11 February 1990. Photograph: Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images
1990 - South Africa releases Mandela
Mandela free after 27 years
“Mr Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man yesterday, and within hours told an ecstatic crowd of supporters in Cape Town that the armed struggle against apartheid would continue.”
1991 - Allies attack Iraq
Kuwait’s liberation begun, says US
“Bombs rained down on Baghdad and other targets in Iraq and Kuwait early today as the long months of waiting in the Gulf crisis finally ended. Allied planes launched wave after wave of air attacks on the city and on Iraq’s Scud missile bases.”
1992 - War in Bosnia
Escape from Sarajevo
“Jordi had his doubts on Sunday morning. He wanted to leave. At 12.10 on Sunday afternoon a mortar bomb dropped out of the sky like a shot putt and killed him.”
1993 - The middle-east peace process
Symbolic gesture seals hopes to end blood and tears
“With faith, hope and a careworn charity, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organisation shook hands on a joint accord at the White House yesterday and rolled the dice of history in what President Bill Clinton called ‘a brave gamble for peace’.”
1994 - Genocide in Rwanda
Rwandan PM killed as troops wreak carnage
“The Rwandan capital of Kigali descended into chaos yesterday as troops, presidential guards and gendarmes swept through the suburbs killing the prime minister, United Nations peacekeepers and scores of civilians.”
1995 - Unstoppable rise of Microsoft
Bill Gates: The world’s richest private individual
“Bill Gates, founder of the Microsoft Corporation, is the world’s richest private individual, with $12.9 billion ($8.3 billion).”
1996 - The Dunblane massacre
Schoolchildren shot dead
“The small Scottish town of Dunblane was racked with grief and horror last night as details emerged of the killer who had lived in their midst until yesterday, when he shot dead 16 small children and a teacher in three minutes of carnage in a primary school gym.”
1997 - Hong Kong transferred to China
A last hurrah and an empire closes down
“With a clenched-jaw nod from the Prince of Wales, a last rendition of God Save the Queen, and a wind machine to keep the Union flag flying for a final 16 minutes of indoor pomp, Britain last night at midnight shut down the empire that once encompassed a quarter of the globe.”
1998 - Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky
Zippergate is a scandal for him, for her and for us
“Insomniacs and obsessives couldn’t wait till the morning. They stayed up until 3am to watch Bill Clinton give his TV address live - and they weren’t disappointed. It made gripping viewing.”
1999 - Allies attack Serbia over Kosovo
Defeating Milosevic: Troops may be needed
“As the bombers go in, for the first time in the long evolution of the Balkan crisis, the outside powers are directly confronting the author of that crisis. Always before, the Serbian leader has distanced himself from the tragic situations which he has played such a large part in creating.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/feb/27/brighton-festival-2013-michael-rosen | Culture | 2013-02-27T10:57:07.000Z | Charlotte Higgins | Brighton festival 2013 takes off, with Michael Rosen at helm | Emil and the Detectives – Erich Kästner's 1929 classic story about a boy who enlists the help of friends to foil a bank robber – is the book at the heart of this year's Brighton festival, which is guest-directed by author, broadcaster and former children's laureate Michael Rosen.
Rosen, who was read the book in weekly instalments by his class teacher when he was nine – and who remembers elaborating and acting out episodes of it with his friends – said the book was "very special in a variety of ways. It was the first of its kind: the first book in which children are detectives and solve a crime. And it was completely new in its attitude to the city. There's a tradition in literature of cities being described as dens of iniquity. Very few cities, when Kästner was writing, were celebrated for their vivacity, but this is what he did."
The work had a huge influence, he said, on writing for children from Enid Blyton to Charlie Higson; its celebration of the sounds and textures of urban life make it a truly modernist tale.
The centre of the celebrations of Emil and the Detectives (an adaptation of which, coincidentally, will be this winter's Christmas show at the National Theatre) will be a schools event with Rosen at Theatre Royal Brighton. But the festival, which runs from 4 to 26 May, will also explore Emil's world in other ways: Kästner was also an adult novelist, a poet, a pacifist, an author of cabaret songs – and a critic of the Nazi regime, whose books were burned. The entire 15-and-a-half hours of Fassbinder's classic TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz will be screened, and an evening of Brecht and Weill songs, performed by Nina Hagen, David McAlmont, and Jamie McDermott and his band the Irrepressibles will summon up the sounds of the Weimar Republic's counterculture.
Rosen will also host an appearance by Judith Kerr, the author of the famous children's war story When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, her semi-autobiographical tale about the rise of Hitler. "She is a living link with the Weimar Republic," said Rosen of the 89-year-old writer.
By coincidence, Billy Wilder's 1931 screen adaptation of Emil and the Detectives was Benjamin Britten's favourite film, and in the composer's centenary year Brighton festival presents a version of his Canticles with singers including tenor Ian Bostridge, staged by Brighton-based director Neil Bartlett with lighting designer Paule Constable and the war artist John Keane.
Other theatrical highlights of the festival, for which the Guardian is media partner, include the UK premiere of a new work devised by acclaimed Argentinian writer and director Lola Arias, bringing her work to Britain for the first time. My Life After draws on the memories and family lives of a group of actors brought up in the 1970s and 80s – some whose families were associated with the military, and some whose parents suffered under the junta.
Rosen will also co-create The Great Enormo: A Kerfuffle in B Flat for Orchestra, Wasps and Soprano – a children's guide to the orchestra. "Orchestral music has tried to invent ways of introducing children to the orchestra," he said. We all know about Peter and the Wolf and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. There's been a bit of a gap in recent years in finding ways to do it." His version will narrate the tale of Mr Enormo Biggins, as he attempts to find a theme tune to go with his new time-travel theme park. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/against-a-surging-omicron-adept-at-immune-escapism-boosters-and-masks-are-australias-best-weapons | Opinion | 2022-07-10T02:54:04.000Z | Catherine Bennett | Against a surging Omicron adept at immune escapism, boosters and masks are Australia’s best weapons | Catherine Bennett | Living with Covid has taken on a whole new meaning in 2022.
We had been prepared for the virus remaining in our communities, but Omicron has taken this to a different level. This is what “vaccine-escape” looks like.
As we watched the Delta outbreaks in New South Wales and Victoria slowly come under control in 2021 with the rise in the number of people completing our primary course of vaccination, we had every reason to be optimistic for some relief over summer, even with international and state borders opening.
Australians over 70 granted access to Covid antiviral treatments
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But this was dashed with the arrival of Omicron before the year was even over.
Omicron took off in South Africa, where first reported, then progressively made its way around the world, peaking in Australia on 14 January this year. It was worryingly capable of establishing vast waves quickly wherever it landed, and not just because it was intrinsically more adept at spreading. It is most successful because of its ability to evade our immunity.
Neither prior infection nor vaccination provides much protection from infection with this variant. This is immune escapism, which comes from being physically different enough from other variants that our immune system doesn’t immediately recognise them to mount an attack, and Omicron represents a bigger step change than we saw in the previous immune escape creep with Delta – so much so some are arguing Omicron should not be lumped together with the other Sars-CoV-2 variants seen in this pandemic at all.
Immune escape undermines the immune system’s ability to ward off an infection, but thankfully we still have enough cross immunity from vaccination, infection, or both, to reduce our risk of serious illness. In the peak last January, we had more than 50 times the infections reported in the Delta wave, but only one-third more people in ICU.
What is even more quirky about this Omicron variant, and all its subvariant spinoffs, is that an Omicron infection does boost our immunity against coronavirus infection, just not against Omicron. You are less likely to get Delta after an Omicron infection, but reinfection with Omicron is still on the cards, especially with the succession of new subvariants that have followed BA.1.
This means Omicron can keep holding the pandemic centre stage, not just by being more transmissible, but by actively elbowing out other variants.
On the upside, this might also be knocking out other potentially nasty mutant variants that never get a foothold. But it is the ability to cause reinfections, even in those who have had a recent infection, that keeps Omicron infection rates high, creating the long outbreak we have seen persist from the day it landed on our shores.
With the arrival of Omicron, the booster vaccine dose suddenly became important for all of us.
It not only protected against waning immunity, but the booster also elicits a different type of immune response than the first paired doses. Remarkably, it not only boosts protection from serious illness back up to the levels seen with Delta, it also, at least for a short time, restores some protection from infection, reducing infection rates by 40% or so for the first couple of months.
Reducing risk might be the difference between having an exposure and having an infection
Not as good as the impact on controlling the Delta outbreak, but not bad now we are in the shadow of the next looming BA.5 subvariant peak.
This different infection world we find ourselves in now is the same challenge faced across the globe. We were ahead for a while in current infection rates as the northern hemisphere went into summer, and are currently sitting behind France, New Zealand and Singapore. We drop to 16th in the world when we look at the latest data on new death reports per capita, behind European countries still in summer.
We also only have half the daily death rate of New Zealand.
Australia’s death rate has climbed with successive Omicron waves, and we are not yet back up to the peak rate of three deaths per million we saw then. Other countries in their last winter when the first Omicron wave hit saw death rates between four and 18 per million.
We are doing comparatively well, despite having our own turn now at facing Omicron in winter.
We are also nowhere near the total death reports per capita seen across the globe, clustering with Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand among the few countries that have less than 400 deaths per million population.
Canada is over 1,000, France and UK over 2,000, and the US has seen in total over 3,000 deaths among every million Americans.
This doesn’t make the news that we have now had more than 10,000 Covid-19 deaths in Australia any easier, but apply the statistics from these other countries to our population size and it reaffirms the lives we have also saved.
If we matched Canada or Denmark’s death rates, we would have had nearly 30,000 Covid-19 deaths in Australia by now, 45,000 with German rates, or 70,000 with UK.
The Sweden death rate translates to nearly 50,000 total deaths in a population the size of Australia, yet many still hold this up as some sort of template of success.
So, what does come next?
Well, if everyone eligible for a booster went out and had it tomorrow, we might keep a lid on the BA.5 wave. If those at more risk of serious illness all had their winter dose, we would also see less people ending up in hospital as infection rates rise.
New Covid subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are the most contagious yet – and driving Australia’s third Omicron wave
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There are no guarantees that you can prevent infection, and we are now exposed most places we go, especially in larger cities. But reducing risk might be the difference between having an exposure and having an infection. Or between having one infection, or multiple.
There are between 600 and 900 active cases reported per 100,000 people in Victoria now, and you can double or triple that to have an idea of what the actual infection rates likely are. That’s between 1 and 2% of the population.
Some will isolate, some will not, and many will not even know they are infected.
In NSW, new reported cases in the last four weeks exceed 100 per thousand in metropolitan Sydney, and 50 in many regional areas. That’s between 5 and 10% of these populations who have reported a recent infection, which likely translates to up to a quarter of the population.
Masks, boosters and general precautions won’t stop Omicron, but will reduce our risk of reinfection and help us get through winter.
Antivirals are also an important secondary prevention step for those who are infected and are at risk of serious illnesses. If we can keep a lid on infections and reduce the risk of disease escalation in the vulnerable, we will be able to undermine Omicron’s main weapon, reinfection.
Catherine Bennett is chair in epidemiology at Deakin University | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/26/scientist-banned-revealing-codes-cars | Technology | 2013-07-26T17:18:20.000Z | Lisa O'Carroll | Scientist banned from revealing codes used to start luxury cars | A British-based computer scientist has been banned from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis as it could lead to the theft of millions of vehicles, a judge has ruled.
The high court imposed an injunction on the University of Birmingham's Flavio Garcia, a lecturer in computer science, who has cracked the security system by discovering the unique algorithm that allows the car to verify the identity of the ignition key.
The UK injunction is an interim step in a case launched by Volkswagen's parent, which owns the four luxury marques, against Garcia and two other cryptography experts from a Dutch university.
It complained that the publication could "allow someone, especially a sophisticated criminal gang with the right tools, to break the security and steal a car". The cars are protected by a system called Megamos Crypto, an algorithm which works out the codes that are sent between the key and the car.
The scientists wanted to publish their paper at the well-respected Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC in August, but the court has imposed an interim injunction. Volkswagen had asked the scientists to publish a redacted version of their paper – Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser – without the codes, but they declined.
Volkswagen told the court that the technology they examined was used in a number of its vehicles and other mass market cars manufactured by itself and others.
Garcia and his colleagues from the Stichting Katholieke Universiteit, Baris Ege and Roel Verdult, said they were "responsible, legitimate academics doing responsible, legitimate academic work" and their aim was to improve security for everyone, not to give criminals a helping hand at hacking into high-end cars that can cost their owners £250,000.
They argued that "the public have a right to see weaknesses in security on which they rely exposed". Otherwise, the "industry and criminals know security is weak but the public do not".
It emerged in court that their complex mathematical investigation examined the software behind the code. It has been available on the internet since 2009.
The scientists said it had probably used a technique called "chip slicing" which involves analysing a chip under a microscope and taking it to pieces and inferring the algorithm from the arrangement of the microscopic transistors on the chip itself – a process that costs around £50,000. The judgment was handed down three weeks ago without attracting any publicity, but has now become part of a wider discussion about car manufacturers' responsibilities relating to car security.
The scientists said they examined security on everything from Oyster cards to cars to enable manufacturers to identify weaknesses and improve on them.
Finding in Volkswagen's favour, Mr Justice Birss said he recognised the importance of the right for academics to publish, but it would mean "that car crime will be facilitated". A Volkswagen spokesman declined to comment on the interim injunction. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/cuba-internet-millennials-revolution | Opinion | 2014-12-19T17:47:16.000Z | Julia Cooke | Cuba's internet is awful. Now its clever millennials can start a real revolution | Julia Cooke | This week, Barack Obama announced – among other dramatic, all-of-a-sudden, once-in-a-lifetime policy changes – sweeping new rules for American telecommunications companies and hardware and software exports to Cuba. According to Obama, increasing Cuba’s internet penetration – just 5% of its 11m citizens have regular access to the internet – would be a focus of thawed, modern US-Cuba relations.
Raúl Castro seemed to agree. In his coordinated speech back in Havana, he called upon the US government to “remove the obstacles hindering or restricting ties between peoples, families, and citizens of both countries, particularly restrictions on travelling, direct post services, and telecommunications”.
But young Cubans have long found creative ways to communicate with the outside world: I get regular emails from a friend’s mother-in-law’s work email and send messages to Spanish Yahoo accounts. My friend Raúl, when he was still on the island, kept a blog for five years, persistently finding ways to connect to the internet via friends and school – however slowly. Now young Cubans suddenly find themselves looking at an immediate future that includes increased visits from American relatives, more remittances and possibly more and better internet. Most importantly, that future includes the dismantling of an entire propaganda machine that blamed Uncle Sam for any and all of its ills – the same propaganda machine that insisted the US embargo was to blame for the poor state of Cuban connectivity in the first place.
As Raúl – blogger, not president – posted on Facebook just after Wednesday’s speeches, “Ahora descubriremos” – now we will discover – “that not having the internet was never the fault of the embargo”.
I met Raúl six years ago through mutual friends on G Street in Havana. When I lived in Cuba, researching a book on the last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro, G Street more or less was the Internet: email, Facebook and YouTube in one. In reality, it’s just a broad, majestic avenue that climbs up a low rolling hill from the sea in central downtown Vedado, studded with topiary trees and statues of national heroes. And the public space it offers – a lush, green median – is a main gathering spot for Cubans between 14 and 40 years of age, and never much older. It’s a place for party planning and public identity shaping, to find an audience for whatever you want to perform, or to trace the interlocking circles of friend groups.
Yet G Street was alive in a way the internet could never be. The punk rock fans in attendance didn’t have to talk to the preps on the opposite street corner for their joint presence to say, We are here, and there are so many of us. Even Communist Party cars slowed down around its major intersections on Friday nights because the streets were so swollen with people. But G Street was vulnerable to its physicality, too. Over the years I spent in and out of Cuba, the government would install floodlights on street corners and sharp rocks in the concrete retaining walls in order to discourage sitting.
Places like G Street are the skeletal civic structures that threaten single-party rule. Cubans have evolved tremendously sophisticated analogs to the internet. Collective taxis in Cuba’s cities are much more than mere transportation. A ride in an old car that sails down Havana’s potholed streets, often with a picturesquely patchwork paint job or mismatching hood ornament, is the first step to finding anything out or solving any logistical problem in Havana. Máquinas, as they’re called, are the locus of radio bemba, lip radio, the gossip newswire: who’s selling what on the black market, how to unblock an American cellphone, baseball statistics. And there’s fact-checking of the news in that morning’s issue of Granma – the eminently untrustworthy state newspaper – provided by a man whose sister lives in Miami or a woman who works in a hotel, and watches CNN during slow hours with the German tourist who doesn’t like sightseeing.
Americans often forget that the rest of the world has been visiting Cuba for quite some time now. After the economic crisis of the early 90s, when the USSR fell, Cuba opened up to tourists, mostly from Europe, Latin America and Canada. The isolation tactics of a repressive regime began to crack in that moment, when TVs were installed in Spanish joint-venture hotels. The internet began to push through Cuban society back then, though its pace has been slow.
Future change will likely come more quickly, now that the embargo has begun to crumble. But increased access to the internet alone won’t dramatically change Cubans’ daily lives all of a sudden, the way that being able to hail an Uber doesn’t change anything at all, really. A paycheck that can’t stretch to put food on tables will still be more of a priority than sending an email or browsing YouTube, and a lot of smartphones and personal laptops would be required for the internet to match the interconnectedness and efficacy of G Street or máquinas.
But the internet as an indication of bilateral cooperation, as a tool of self-sufficiency, as an identifiable symbol of a government’s concession of control over its citizens – that’s what will get the punks on G Street and the hotel employees in máquinas talking. That, as Raúl said, promises speedy change – because the “progress made in our exchanges proves that it is possible to find solutions.”
Raúl Castro said that, not Raúl the blogger. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2007/jun/15/gamesthataren1 | Technology | 2007-06-15T08:21:01.000Z | Aleks Krotoski | Games that aren't | There's a lot of post-modern self-analysis going on in the games development community at the moment. Perhaps it's because we're in the middle of that strange time of year that's after Easter and before Christmas (or Thanksgiving in the US), when releases are few and far between and pre-holiday crunches are still a distant nightmare. Perhaps it's because the industry as a whole and the employees individually are at that point their lifecycles where they are able to deconstruct the mechanics which characterise their art form, much as Bergman, De Mille and Welles did in the early days of cinema. Perhaps I'm just tapping into this undercurrent that's been flowing around my ankles unnoticed for a long time.
But what I'm starting to wallow in is an increasingly active population that is trying to make games better by really taking apart what games are. Can there be, for example, a role playing game without the "treadmill" as Raph Koster puts it on his blog (who also sniffs it in the air), a board game without the board or an online game without the "spoon"?
There are, of course, examples. Below are a few. Raph discusses some of the first category, focussing on the output of experiments in non-grind software:
...people have made games without treadmills, and usually they fall into two broad categories.
* Games of skill. The treadmill is usually defined as playing a game that requires minimal skill, doing a fairly repetitive task over and over again in order to receive arbitrary rewards and climb higher up a ladder. Effectively, the treadmill is designed to reward devotion; you cannot really fail at it if you just persist in whatever you are doing. Games of skill, such as a player-vs-player game of any sort, are usually not classified this way, because there's real odds of failure. * Gameless games, which are presented purely experientially; there's no rewards, no ladders to climb, and so on.
In terms of the second category, my friend Jim recently introduced me to two "traditional" games which set out to break the rules, both created by Looney Labs, designers of one of my favourite party games, Werewolf. Fluxx is "the card game with ever-changing rules":
When the game begins, the only rules are that you draw 1 card per turn and play 1 card per turn. But when you play a New Rule, these rules are either changed or added to. New Rules change the number of cards drawn and played per turn as well as the number of cards you are allowed to hold in your hand, the number of Keepers you can have, bonuses for players who have particular Keepers, and more.
There are also blank cards, which allow the players to create their own rules as the game goes along.
The other is Icehouse, a game "system" of plastic pyramids which can be used to play hundreds of different games. We played a version called Treehouse. According to Jim, the developers actively set out to create something that was as un-game-y as possible, to completely strip it down to the basic ludology in order to see what happened. Thus, like a pack of playing cards, they created a blank slate that could be coloured in and improved upon by the players. They are creating, in essence, the template for ludic spray.
Finally, the creators of social virtual worlds are well aware of what happens when online products are released without an overarching storyline: enormous communities arise out of the platform to create their own emergent narratives and goal systems.
Yet this self-analysis need not be motivated towards creating whole new genres. A great gamasutra feature by Harmonix (Guitar Hero) designer Chris Canfield seeks to muck around with the old standards in well-established genres in order to ensure the success of a product in an over-saturated area. By taking things out and putting new stuff in, you create a novel experience in a familiar setting.
Perhaps this sense of self-understanding has arisen because games are an increasingly powerful playing card in the new interactivity across media and public participation. The playful web movement, characterised by socially-centred and creator-designed artefacts like ARGs, folksonomies, social networking, YouTube and other Web 2.0 applications - all aimed at developing community involvement and application stickiness - is increasingly turning to games people and asking for the secrets to their compelling content. With all these questions floating around from outsiders, is it not surprising that these issues, which have largely been ignored but replicated over the past several decades of commercial gaming, are starting to be the focus of real scrutiny and - dare I say it - play.
The deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the more sheer variety of playful experiences we will all have, in ways that surely will confound our imaginations. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/15/bb-king-obituary-mississippi-farmhand-blues-legend | Music | 2015-05-15T06:41:36.000Z | Tony Russell | BB King obituary | BB King, who has died aged 89, was the most influential blues musician of his generation and the music’s most potent symbol. He represented the blues as Louis Armstrong once represented jazz, a single performer who could nevertheless stand, and speak, for the whole genre.
'We all have the blues': tributes pour in after BB King dies aged 89
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Although much of his work, and arguably nearly all the best of it, was firmly within the discipline of the blues, King was unfailingly open-minded and interested when he found himself in other settings, bridging musical and cultural differences with affability and skill untainted by self-importance. More than 50 years ago the death of Big Bill Broonzy prompted writers to speak of “the last of the bluesmen”: it was premature then, as it would be to say it now, but it is hard to imagine any future blues artist matching King’s sway, in a career spanning 65 years, over musicians by the thousand and audiences by the million.
Son of Albert and Nora Ella, Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) was born near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and grew up with the limited prospects of an African-American agricultural worker, a barrier he gradually worked to overcome as he learned the basics of guitar from a family friend and honed his singing with a quartet, the St John Gospel Singers of Indianola. In his early 20s he moved to Memphis, at first staying with the blues singer and guitarist Booker White, his cousin.
Within a couple of years, thanks to some help from Sonny Boy Williamson, he had secured a residency at the Sixteenth Street Grill in West Memphis, Arkansas. He also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on the Memphis radio station WDIA. His billing, “The Beale Street Blues Boy”, was whittled down to “Blues Boy King” and thence to “BB”. After a single session in 1949 for the Nashville label Bullet, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
BB King was that rare thing – a game-changer who was also beloved
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He had his first hit in 1952, with a dramatic rearrangement of Lowell Fulson’s Three O’Clock Blues, which topped the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it headed a list of successes such as Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby, Ten Long Years, Sweet Little Angel and Sweet Sixteen. On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history. He was always ready to extol the musicians who had influenced him, and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first.
“I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close, but never quite got it.” In an interview in the Guardian in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
Disarmingly, he once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole or Al Hibbler and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose buoyant, funny music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on the circuit of black-patronised theatres and clubs, wearing out buses, if not bandsmen, on interminable series of one-nighters. In 1956 he is supposed to have filled 342 engagements. In 1962. he ventured to change that working pattern, rather like Ray Charles, by signing with a major label, ABC, but the first records under that contract, which tried to reshape him as a mainstream pop singer, were as unsatisfactory to his admirers as they were to ABC’s accountants.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, proved the durability of King’s core blues repertoire as well as his magisterial stage presence, and has become iconic, a turning-point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get?, Don’t Answer the Door and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss, and in 1969 he hit the upper reaches of the pop charts – territory where no blues artist had stepped for many years – with the subtly orchestrated The Thrill Is Gone.
BB King performs The Thrill Is Gone in 1993
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience, for whom the blues was largely defined by the Chicago school of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but he was brought forcibly to their attention by musicians who admired him. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “all of a sudden kids started coming up to me saying, ‘You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.’ And I’d say, ‘Who told you that?’ And they’d say, ‘Mike Bloomfield’, or ‘Eric Clapton’. It’s due to these youngsters that I owe my new popularity.” He acquired further rock credibility with the 1970 album Indianola Mississippi Seeds, on which he collaborated with Carole King and Joe Walsh and scored another enduring hit with Leon Russell’s song Hummingbird.
BB King at 87: the last of the great bluesmen
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From then on, King was immovably established as, in someone’s neat phrase, “the chairman of the board of blues singers”. Imaginatively steered by his manager Sidney Seidenberg, he embarked on international concert tours that took him to Japan and Australia, and eventually to China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, experiences that led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.
A dedicated player of Gibson guitars, he was featured in advertisements for the company, which created a special model named after the succession of Gibson ES 355s that he called Lucille. He also lent his name to advertising campaigns for Pepsi-Cola, the AT&T communications network and Cutty Sark whisky, and to clubs in Memphis and Los Angeles.
The “chitlin circuit” now far behind him, he appeared at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, won approving notices from Playboy magazine, sang the theme-song for the television sitcom The Associates and the title number of the 1985 film Into the Night, was elected an honorary doctor of music at Yale and received innumerable awards from blues and guitar magazines. He recorded prolifically with luminaries in other fields, from the Crusaders, Branford Marsalis and Stevie Wonder to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson and U2, with the last of whom he made the exuberant When Love Comes to Town in 1988.
In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring, but not so much that his followers outside the US could not catch up with him every year or two. Though he would now deliver most of his act seated, the strength of his singing and the fluency of his playing were only very gradually diminished. The celebrations for his 80th birthday in 2005 included a Grammy award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, a garland of tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “farewell tour” that proved not to be a farewell at all.
In 2008, the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center was opened in Indianola, and in 2009 King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012 he was celebrated in the documentary The Life of Riley; and also performed at a concert at the White House, where the US president, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago.
King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others predeceased him.
BB King (Riley King), blues musician, born 16 September 1925; died 14 May 2015 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/03/coachella-2017-lineup-beyonce-radiohead-kendrick-lamar | Music | 2017-01-03T19:21:35.000Z | Guardian music | Coachella 2017: Beyoncé, Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar to headline festival | Beyoncé, Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar have been announced as headliners for this year’s Coachella festival.
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The 18th annual event will take place over two consecutive weekends in April at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. It will be the third time Radiohead have headlined while Beyoncé and Lamar have both made special appearances at the festival in previous years.
Beyoncé will become only the second female headliner since it was founded in 1999, following in the footsteps of Björk who played the festival in 2002 and 2007. Radiohead have also been confirmed as a headliner for this year’s Glastonbury music festival.
Last year saw LCD Soundsystem, Calvin Harris and Guns ’n’ Roses headline. The festival was also highlighted by notable tributes to Prince.
The full lineup also includes appearances from Lorde, Bon Iver, Gucci Mane, Mac Miller, Father John Misty, Justice, New Order, Travis Scott, the Avalanches, Future Islands, Two Door Cinema Club, Porter Robinson, Empire of the Sun, Schoolboy Q, DJ Khaled and the composer Hans Zimmer.
Tickets go on sale on 4 January. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/04/self-driving-buses-to-serve-route-in-scotland-in-world-first | Technology | 2023-04-04T17:03:29.000Z | Rachel Hall | Self-driving buses to serve 14-mile Edinburgh route in UK first | Self-driving buses will begin carrying passengers over the Forth road bridge next month in what is being hailed as a significant milestone for the technology in the UK.
Five single-decker buses will cover the 14-mile route from 15 May, carrying up to 10,000 passengers every week between the Ferrytoll park and ride in Fife and the Edinburgh Park train and tram interchange.
However, although the vehicles will use sensors to travel on pre-selected roads at up to 50mph, they will still need to be operated by two members of staff, twice as many as a normal bus.
This includes a safety driver in the driver’s seat to monitor the technology, and a bus captain to help passengers with boarding, buying tickets and queries.
Currently, fully driverless cars are not legally permitted in the UK, and a safety driver is required at all times in all autonomous vehicles, although the government is working on an updated legal and assurance framework.
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Stagecoach, the UK’s largest bus and coach operator, which is running the service, said the second member of staff would demonstrate what an autonomous service would feel like in the future when the driver can leave the cab. As the initiative is a trial to see how the technology works, there are no immediate plans to remove the driver from the cab.
Kevin Stewart, transport minister for the Scottish government, said the “innovative and ambitious project” was an “exciting milestone”, which he hoped would help Scotland “establish its credentials on the world stage” as the country’s road network covers a wide range of environments, which can provide a good testing ground for self-driving vehicles.
Stagecoach said it considered the project to be one of the most complex worldwide, as well as the first registered service in the UK to use full-sized autonomous buses. The UK government said it would be the first full-size, self-driving public bus service in the world.
Carla Stockton-Jones, the Stagecoach managing director, said the company was “proud to be at the forefront of transport innovation with this project that marks a significant milestone for public transport”.
Alongside six other projects, the Edinburgh bus service was awarded a share of £81m in joint UK government and industry support to speed up the commercialisation of self-driving transport technology.
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Ministers hope that the vehicles will eventually offer consumers more convenience by making journeys faster and more reliable, as well as improving safety, since 88% of road collisions are currently caused by human error; and sustainability, by encouraging more people to use public transport.
Other cities are also exploring introducing driverless buses, though these are not thought to be as advanced as the project in Edinburgh. In 2025, 45 driverless electric minibuses will be programmed to run for a year in three European cities: Geneva, Switzerland; Kronach, Germany; and Oslo, Norway. There have also been short trials in several cities, including Rome and Seoul.
This article was amended on 13 April 2023 to remove references in the text and headline that the Edinburgh driverless bus trial is the first of its kind globally. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/mar/30/man-like-mobeen-guz-khan-as-a-child-of-immigrants-i-cant-help-but-be-politicised | Stage | 2019-03-30T06:59:27.000Z | Yasmeen Khan | Man Like Mobeen’s Guz Khan: ‘As a child of immigrants, I can’t help but be politicised’ | Former teacher Guz Khan is recalling the time he legged it out of an A-level class. He had organised an interview about his fictional character Mobeen, after the two comedy videos he’d posted online had caught the eye of his local news programme in the West Midlands.
“I asked the teacher in the next classroom: ‘Yo, listen, you’ve got to hold it down, make sure this lot don’t beat each other up,’’’ he says. “I ran out to do the interview. At that point I’d done a couple of Mobeen videos but I wasn’t a YouTuber by any means because I was a teacher. I was marking books, feeding the family – that was real life.”
Those early videos eventually led to Man Like Mobeen, the BBC Three comedy he created and stars in, set in Small Heath, Birmingham. Mobeen, a bearded Muslim man, attempts to live a good life and single-handedly look after his younger sister, Aks (Dúaa Karim), all while trying to escape his criminal past and avoid being landed in more trouble by his mates Eight (Tez Ilyas) and Nate (Tolu Ogunmefun).
Today, wearing oversized, yellow-framed glasses that would make Deirdre Barlow jealous, Khan marvels at how quickly those two videos led to two series of Man Like Mobeen (he’s about to embark on a third). There’s also a starring role alongside Idris Elba in Netflix’s Turn Up Charlie, in which Elba plays a washed-up, one-hit-wonder DJ and Khan plays his loafer mate Del, plus a part in a new Hulu series and a standup tour.
As a child, Khan says that he never saw someone like him on telly. “It wasn’t just about race; I never saw anybody on TV who was working class,” he says. “To make it, you had to be posh, and acting is posh, isn’t it?”
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Despite spending his youth in the ethnically mixed, working-class suburb of Hillfields in Coventry, it wasn’t much different at his school. “There were only six or seven non-white kids there,” he says. “There was this one white kid whose birthday party it was. He came out to the playground with a Kwik Save bag and started pulling out invites. Everyone got one except for me. He goes: ‘I wanted to invite you but my dad said he doesn’t want any Pakis at the party.’ And I was like: ‘Oh shit … I’m different.’ That’s the first time it ever struck me as being an issue.”
When he told the story to his family, they had pretty strong advice: “‘You have to stand up for yourself if somebody is going to violate you racially,’ they told me. I was always so grateful for that mentality because if I’d have just thought that accepting that kind of racial discrimination was part of life, it might have made me feel like less of a person; that there’s something wrong with my skin.”
He is open about some of the other challenges he faced as he got older. “I was never on the more violent end of the spectrum, but could I have gone down the wrong path? Hundred per cent,” he says. “I often reflect on friends who did and who are still currently facing different levels of criminal charges. That’s our life, this is our reality.”
Being at the helm of a classroom also formed his views on what he sees as a breakdown of community. “We may not have had money, but there was a community feeling – if you didn’t see your mum for a couple of hours some auntie would check in on you, whether it was one from a south Asian family, a Caribbean or a white, working-class, Irish family. Somebody would be there for you,” he explains. “We generally never saw the levels of abuse and violence and temptation that this current generation sees, despite struggling financially.”
We talk about the disconnect between families and the ills of children spending time on tablets and phones, and he confesses that, as a parent himself, he juggles the usefulness of distracting a child for a few minutes with an iPad while also trying to explain that life online isn’t real.
He laughs when I ask him about his own social-media use and his comments on British Asian politicians (he tweeted a picture of Sajid Javid and wrote: “This sellout may have come from hardworking Pakistani immigrant parents, but he left all of that behind long ago … You aren’t supported by the working class, and you aren’t welcome in the hood”). “Politicians are constantly telling their colleagues: ‘I’m just like you,’” he says, “but when it comes to the people they’re supposed to represent, they are so dismissive of them. The whole ‘I am the son of a bus driver’ thing is so tokenistic.”
Has he thought of going into politics himself? “A hundred per cent. As a child of immigrants I can’t help but be politicised, I can’t avoid it.” I ask whether he feels a duty to represent Asian and Muslim people. “There is so much negative pressure on [Muslims] in society, we have to be the responsible voice,” he says, “because with what happened in Christchurch, we do have an obligation.”
Man Like Mobeen. Photograph: BBC
The talk moves on to what he thinks about other Asian sitcoms and he sighs as he talks about Citizen Khan, the BBC One comedy about a Muslim community leader that ran to five series.
“[Citizen Khan] plays on stereotypes, so when an audience watches it they expect to see that old uncle-ji [respectable term for a male elder] in real life.” He affects an Indian head wobble. “It’s a fundamental issue of it not going to be representative of the people it’s supposed to be about.”
He tells me about watching an old episode of Only Fools and Horses that features a visit to a doctor and how it reinforces old stereotypes about immigrants, with a line from Del Boy about getting a council house that goes: “Well, good luck with that doctor. If you spoke a foreign language and popped nine kids out you’d have a chance!”
“I’m watching it thinking that those same frames of reference are still being used now: ‘They get fucking benefits, they have 12 kids, they get the houses before us … ’ It was in Only Fools, one of my favourite British comedies of all time and it’s still here now,” he says. “Those frames of reference push people to the margin.”
The link between Khan’s comedy and his desire to shift those parameters are obvious when you watch Man Like Mobeen, but he also isn’t afraid of portraying negative pictures from within his own community.
“My faith tells me that all you’re really asked to do in this life is be truthful – it’s one of the strongest elements of piety,” he says. “If in my storywriting I’m telling the truth of what it’s like for young men in Birmingham who go to jummah salah [Friday prayers] but are selling heroin throughout the week, well, you might get upset because you don’t want me to bring that kind of heat on the community. But why should I be worried about what people think if it’s the truth?”
We turn our focus to other barriers to good representation of minorities.
“Wait, who is the old dude who married his assistant?”
Paul Daniels?
“Yes, that’s him! Why do I know more about his life than someone like Idris Elba? Idris has an amazing life story: he came from one of the hardest council blocks in London and worked 20 years in the industry before things really started working for him – why didn’t we know about that story? Because nobody thought it important enough that a talented, working-class, black man from an immigrant family in this country was an important story to tell.”
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Listing off his work – a third series of Man Like Mobeen to write; starring in Turn Up Charlie with Idris Elba; embarking on Persons of Interest, a standup tour with fellow comedian Mo Amer; and finishing up his role in Mindy Kaling’s Four Weddings and a Funeral miniseries for Hulu – life must feel pretty sweet right now?
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“Can you believe this face is gonna be part of a Hollywood production on Hulu?” He shakes his head as he wipes his glasses. “This coming September, it will only be four years since I left teaching,” he says. “For some people this is going to sound lame, but I believe that everything I went through – from not being invited to that party as six-year-old to now – were little building blocks that have led to this guy who’s able to make social commentary from comedy.”
He seems acutely aware of the pitfalls of fast success. “Look, if it all disappears for me tomorrow I won’t really care. The main thing for me is: are people at home healthy and happy? Are my kids and my nieces and nephews doing their best to be good people? That’s the real win.”
He insists that he doesn’t see himself being in front of the camera for that long, that he’d rather focus on supporting the next generation of authentic working-class voices to make it. Guz Khan, it seems, wants to invite everyone to his party.
Series one and two of Man Like Mobeen are available on BBC iPlayer. Mo Amer & Guz Khan: Persons of Interest is touring to 13 April | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/oct/17/blue-warmest-colour-lesbian-bad-sex | Film | 2013-10-17T15:38:16.000Z | Stephanie Theobald | Blue's lesbian lovemaking doesn't hit the spot. For better sex head for the lake | Blue might be the warmest colour, but Abdellatif Kechiche's new film is more like the Black and White Minstrel Show of lesbian films. This is lesbian life painted so that straight people can understand it: the traumatic coming-out scenes at school, the nervous sortie into the provincial lesbian bar (I have travelled the dyke world, by the way, and this Sapphic Studio 54 only exists in a horny chick's dreams).
I was hoping things might improve when we got to the sex scenes, but although they are, as the press has excitedly reported, long and relentless, they are also muted and unsweaty. No deranged cries of "Bouffe ma chatte, putain!" No damp, desperate skin. Léa Seydoux, who plays art student Emma, has complained that Kechiche made her wear a prosthetic vagina for hours, so maybe that's why the sex feels so vanilla.
The characters keep talking about the "great sex" they're having, but you think, "What great sex?" Sure, they rim each other, but that just makes you think back to the gratuitous food scenes littering this film. What's with all the shots of Adèle sucking strands of spaghetti coated in nasty-looking bolognaise sauce? It's not as if Adèle, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, has the pulpeuse mouth of Beatrice Dalle in her Betty Blue heyday. Exarchopoulos is bovine in appearance, although actually everything is ugly in this film: the houses, the food, the weather.
Which brings me to the other big French film of 2013: L'Inconnu du Lac, or Stranger by the Lake. It is also a gay film and its director, Alain Giraudie, also won a prize at this year's Cannes (it's out here next March). It's beautifully shot and its subject matter is gayboy cruising. Giraudie doesn't feel the need to explain that gay men often have sex in bushes in secluded places. He just gets on with the story, powerful in its simplicity, about how one of the cruisers turns out to be a murderer.
A top subject on this summer's Parisian terrasses was how the sex was "too realistic". Pornographic even. Such comments reveal the truth that just as the French often eat crap food (this was the only thing Kechiche got right in Blue) they are also not the libertines we think of. Lesbian frolics are the meat and pommes de terre of movieland but proper man-on-man action is still viewed as shocking.
Stranger by the Lake is clever and sexy. Occasionally you see erect cocks bathed in late afternoon sunlight by a shimmering lake and hypnotic sounds of cicadas mixed with men grunting as they shoot their load. Stranger is also better than Blue because there's humour in it, such as the hissy fit from one of the regular cruisers who's too late to get the man he wants.
Real lesbian life: VS Brodie and Guinevere Turner in Go Fish! (1994). Photograph: Rex/Moviestore Collection
If you want to see a credible film about lesbian life, then get a copy of 1994's Go Fish! Like Lena Dunham's Girls but more realistic and with black women in, Guinevere Turner (later to make her name as the screenwriter of American Psycho) plays the cool 90s New York dyke in back-to-front baseball cap and big boots trying to get laid. Mainly it's about the great feeling of having a lesbian gang of friends you feel at home with and don't have to explain yourself to. Some of the script is terrible but at least a dyke can watch it and not have to wade through a bunch of blacked-up lesbians.
If you're looking for something French, try Les Biches. Claude Chabrol's 1968 piece of total French art house madness, is the tale of sadistic bourgeoise Stéphane Audran's obsession with moody art student Jacqueline Sassard. They never have sex but the unrequited encounters, like the one with Sassard in the bath as green-eyeshadowed Audran looks lubriciously on, are worth all the prosthetic vaginas Kechiche could throw at you. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2021/sep/27/crosswords-for-beginners-meet-the-letter-m | Crosswords | 2021-09-27T10:26:33.000Z | Alan Connor | Crosswords for beginners: meet the letter M | You’ve met A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. Now it’s time for the voiced bilabial nasal, better known as M.
Morning, M. Got any missions for me?
Mm, you’re making a Bond reference, I think. Sorry, but it’s not really my place to …
Don’t mention it. Just a bon mot. You materialise quite a lot in crosswords.
Hmm, I’m actually right in the middle, when it comes to letter frequency.
I meant more that there are many words that appear in clues that might indicate an M in the answer. A T-shirt is MEDIUM, a family tree is MARRIED, a dictionary is MASCULINE and so on. But why don’t you tell us about your life?
Mm-hm, OK. Since you mention “masculine”, in Anglo-Saxon runes, I’m ᛗ, which means “man”, although before that I was a wiggly line named MEM; the Phoenicians used me to mean “water”. I mean, they probably did. It was many moons ago.
Water, I see. Is that because you’re wishy-washy?
What do you mean?
Ignore me. Unlike C, say, if a down clue gives us an M in an across answer, we know how you will be pronounced there.
Mostly. I’m silent at the beginning of words like “mnemonic”.
Words like “mnemonic” … and?
Hmmm, Mnium? It’s a moss genus. Of the family Mniaceae. I don’t think either has ever been used in a crossword, I just thought I’d mention it. Oh, and sometimes there’s a “mm” sound when I’m not in the answer. Like CHICKENPOX or GUNPOWDER.
Is there? I suppose. Do you have many mates?
Which letters do I mingle with? It varies. If you’ve got me from a crossing answer, I’ll probably be followed by a vowel, most likely E; otherwise, think about P. If you do find me as part of an MP, I’ll be preceded by a vowel. Um, or sometimes an R.
Sometimes?
Erm, armpit.
I know there’s another.
Ringworm porrigo?
Moving on. What kind of words in a clue might mean an M in the answer?
Well, there’s a thousand. Not 1,000 words; the word “thousand”. Although, of course, “thousand” might equally mean there’s a K, because …
I think we want to offer less ambiguous advice. Allow me: MILLION. Also, from measuring: METRE, MILES, MASS. Then we have MONTH …
… um, month could be MAY. Or MAR, actually.
Let’s go international. There’s MIKE via the Nato alphabet and MARK from the currency. The car sticker gives us MALTA, and “monsieur” gives us FRENCHMAN. “Frenchman” might also mean LUC or RENE.
And there’s MARRIED. Oh, and MEMBER. And, yes, before you mention it, M: “member” might also be MP. Wishy-washy point taken.
And MBE. Also ARM and LEG. Another abbreviation for member is my original name, MEM. Which is where we came in. I mean, roughly. There was the bit about the spymaster first.
Maybe a good place to leave things for now.
Agreed. Although …
Mañana, M.
More guidance
Cryptic devices: hidden answers; double definitions; cryptic definitions; soundalikes; initial letters; spoonerisms; containers; reversals; alternate letters; cycling; stuttering; taking most of a word; naked words; first and last letters
Bits and bobs: Roman numerals; Nato alphabet; Greek letters; chemistry; abbreviations for countries; points of the compass; playing cards; capital letters; apostrophes; cricket; alcohol; the church; royals; newspapers; doctors; drugs; music; animals; cars; cities; rivers; boats; when the setter’s name appears; when the solver appears; “cheating”
Individual letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be obtained from the Guardian Bookshop. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/11/jon-stewart-daily-show-return | Media | 2024-02-11T13:00:13.000Z | David Smith | Return of the zing: Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, amid a changed world | Barack Obama was US president. Britain was a lynchpin of the European Union. Harvey Weinstein was a powerful movie mogul. Meghan Markle was starring in Suits. “TikTok” did not mean anything and fake news meant a satirical TV program with pretend reporters.
That was the world Jon Stewart left behind when he hosted his last episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central network on 6 August 2015, denying a legion of fans his lacerating take on the election, presidency, impeachment, defeat, impeachment again and comeback of Donald Trump.
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On Monday, however, Stewart gets a second bite. The 61-year-old is returning to his throne at The Daily Show as a weekly host and executive producer for the 2024 election cycle. For millions of liberal Americans panicking about Joe Biden’s age and living in dread of Trump, it may prove a welcome comfort blanket.
One test will be whether Stewart’s satire will still cut through in a post-pandemic world of disinformation, polarisation and fragmented media – cable TV, which gave rise to Comedy Central and the news it lampooned, appears to be in terminal decline – or if he will resemble an ageing rocker straining to recapture past glories.
“The world has changed a great deal politically, and late-night comedy has changed along with it,” said Stephen Farnsworth, author of Late Night With Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency. “It is a much darker and more cynical environment than it was before Donald Trump became president.
“It’ll be interesting to see how the new version of Jon Stewart differs from the old. The jokes that he levied against George W Bush, about a bumbling fellow kind of out of his depth, are not the same kind of jokes late-night comics are directing at Donald Trump as a menace to democratic society.”
The Daily Show – first hosted by Craig Kilborn, then Stewart, then South African comedian Trevor Noah – has long skewered the left and right by parodying TV news shows and playing it absolutely straight, no matter how absurd.
The show’s alumni of mock correspondents, who often stand against an obviously false backdrop, now read like a who’s who of American comedy. It has nurtured the likes of Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Olivia Munn, Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr and Aasif Mandvi.
Barack Obama, left, talks with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on 21 July 2015, in New York City. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Hillary Clinton reacts to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, on 15 July 2014 in New York City. Photograph: Frank Franklin II/AP
Stewart was host from 1999 to 2015 and offered a young, politically engaged generation an alternative to the cliches of TV news, seizing the role of court jester to call out hypocrisy and speak truths that establishment media could not or would not.
With a quiver of smartly edited video clips, a wide-eyed look of incredulity and an exclamation of “Are you insane?!”, he also gave the definitive running commentary on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its pernicious influence on the Republican party (former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly used to call viewers of The Daily Show “stoned slackers”).
David Litt, a former White House speechwriter who was described as Obama’s “comic muse”, said: “I’m 37 and I remember during the Iraq war watching Comedy Central – probably the reruns because I wasn’t cool enough to stay up that late – and Jon Stewart both being funny but also willing to cut through the nonsense and be honest when it felt like a lot of the mainstream media would defer to authority.
“That’s a double-edged sword but it was important at the time, and particularly Jon Stewart was the most effective media critic of a generation. There was a very long time where he was a check on not just Fox News but also the New York Times or CNN or nonpartisan media that often tends to find equivalencies in both-sides issues. To me, that’s the biggest thing that disappeared when he left.”
Jon Stewart, right, steadies former NYPD bomb squad detective Louis Alvarez in Washington DC on 11 June 2019. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Studies found that The Daily Show, which interviewed presidents and presidential candidates, was a key news source for many young Americans. An opinion poll ranked him as the most trusted journalist in America – even though he always protested that he was not a journalist.
Sophia McClennen, a professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University, said: “Jon Stewart on The Daily Show redefined the genre of satire news and made it not just a comment on the news but a source of it. We have really conclusive data that people were actually going to it first as a source of news.
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“We also have the fact that the viewers of that show were more informed than viewers of cable news. The data is conclusive on that too: the people who watched the show knew the issues better than the majority of other mainstream news sources other than, say, something like NPR [National Public Radio].”
After 16 years at the helm, Stewart departed in style, signing off with a prophetic monologue that began with “Bullshit is everywhere,” and closed with “So I say to you tonight, friends, the best defence against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.” Trump was elected three months later.
What a time to leave. In a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Stewart explained why he walked away when he did: “It’s not like I thought the show wasn’t working any more, or that I didn’t know how to do it. It was more, ‘Yup, it’s working. But I’m not getting the same satisfaction.’”
The decade since has had its ups and downs. Stewart became an activist on behalf of rescue workers from the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. But a foray into Hollywood had mixed results. Irresistible, a 2020 film written and directed by Stewart, was described by the New York Times as “a political satire so broad and blunt that it flattens every joke and deflates every setup”.
Jon Stewart at the New York public library in New York City on 28 September 2023. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Then, The Problem With Jon Stewart, an hour-long current affairs show that debuted in 2021 and took on topics such as racism, climate change, mass incarceration and gun control, was cancelled by the Apple TV+ streaming service.
Stewart never expressed regret over leaving The Daily Show but did tell the Strike Force Five podcast during the Hollywood strikes last year: “When you lose that structure, you’re untethered from the thing that prevents the bad mind from doing its corrupt best. It goes south and dark really fast.”
The show, which won an Emmy award this month for best talk series, has not had a permanent host since Noah left last year. Current correspondents include Desi Lydic, Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng and Jordan Klepper. Stewart will host on Mondays while a rotating lineup of show regulars will be in the chair for the rest of the week.
Many viewers now consume clips online rather than watch them at the time of broadcast. Stewart had more than 1.3 million viewers in his last season; Noah was down to 372,000 in 2022. But McClennen, author of Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn’t, is optimistic about Stewart’s return to the throne before an election that could test American democracy to its breaking point.
“He certainly is the master, and to have the founding father of US satire news – not to forget the contributions of Michael Moore – is certainly valuable in the current landscape,” she said. “First of all, it’s not like Jon Stewart went under a rock. He did have his own show. He’s been out there. Second of all, I think he’s going to make a lot of jokes about being old. Let’s hope that they’re funnier than Biden’s.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/business-locked-into-unsustainable-carbon-heavy-cycles | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2012-09-07T16:39:05.000Z | Alison Kemper | Why business is locked into unsustainable and carbon-heavy cycles | After disappointing results in Copenhagen (2010) and Durban (2011), the world awaited Rio+20 with far less anticipation than we had for the Euro 2012 semi-finals, the successful crossing of Niagara Falls by Nik Wallenda, or the return of lunch blogger Martha Payne. Sustainable business, like all other business, has been riveted by the electoral politics of Greece and France and the more or less fictional pronouncements of G20 finance ministers. It was never likely that Rio+20 would change anything.
We know that the international discourse about sustainability will not reverse decades of inaction, that governments will not likely guide us from economic and environmental disaster into a new world order of hope and quality of life. Our deep cynicism is well founded; we have seen too many pronouncements fail.
Yet there is no human who does not prefer to live in hope. No business wants to discount its calculations of the net present value of future income streams by the absence of a future. No political leader wants to see the local impact of economic and environmental decline.
How is it that time and again we are unable to achieve what so many of us want? Why can we not achieve an agenda which is likely the only way forward into prosperity?
At the recent conference of the International Society of New Institutional Economists, Shi-Ling Hsu presented a paper looking at why we cannot get the answer right. In Physical, Human, and Social Capital as Barriers to Environmental Policy Change, he theorises that "environmentally harmful products and practices persist because firms and people have so much invested in their persistence". We lock in unsustainable technologies and ways of life because capital is too expensive to write off without threatening the viability of a firm or a consumer. Oil companies and coal mine operators cannot afford to lose the value of their investments. State-owned enterprises are no less dependent on the value of carbon deposits than are for-profit companies.
Fishing villages and logging towns around the world want to maintain their livelihoods which depend on the extraction of decreasingly available stocks. Families who are making large mortgage and loan payments on suburban homes and cars are not easily convinced to leave their commitments and reinvest in housing and transport with a smaller carbon footprint.
Hsu suggests that we are locked into our carbon-hungry lives and our extractive livelihoods by specific and pervasive public policies which favour the creation and stability of capital. Grandfathering the use of old technology allows firms and their customers to get by with processes and equipment which are far worse than their replacements. Tax credits for extractive industries slow the movement of our economies into more sustainable industries. Capital gains taxes provide incentives to retain capital long past its "best before date" to avoid triggering tax penalties.
Too often firms must retain their holdings in assets that unnecessarily deplete natural resources or burn carbon in order to maintain healthy balance sheets. They cannot easily invest in new capital when governments allow them generous tax concessions on outdated technology.
We can better align incentives so that business will move out of the status quo and into more sustainable methods. Governments need not continue to support and subsidise outdated industries and processes. Instead, they might identify "environmentally-stranded capital" and let it be written down to zero over a relatively short period of time – if it is taken out of operation forever. If we really want companies to change, we must demand accelerated write-off schedules for investments in coal mines and trawlers.
One way forward is through better accounting standards. GDP+, the UK environment minister's proposal to enter natural resources into a national chart of accounts, had the potential to resolve some of the tension between the desire of business to innovate and capital policies which lock us into old technology. When a nation assigns a value to its natural resources, it may be more likely to drop incentives which encourage resource depletion. Nick Clegg took the proposal to Rio. After appeals by Clegg and Joseph Stiglitz, the final text of the conference recognised the need for "broader measures of progress to complement GDP". It referred the problem to the UN Statistical Commission.
Until our various legislators and regulators reconsider their capital-related policies, we will have fewer financial incentives than we need. Until we stop being rewarded for maintaining old equipment, investments and industries, we have little reason to reinvest or to favour the substantive change which Rio+20 might have brought. Without fixing financial regulations and accounting schemes, we cannot easily fix the earth.
Alison Kemper teaches management at York University and has worked with the Michael Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School since 2005. Her professional background is in advocacy and NGO management.
Roger Martin is dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and is academic director of the school's Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship. His research work is in integrative thinking, business design, corporate social responsibility and country competitiveness. His most recent book is Fixing the Game.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/trump-iowa-win-republicans-what-it-means | Opinion | 2024-01-16T04:55:56.000Z | Arwa Mahdawi | Trump’s Iowa win marks a comeback for him and a step backwards for the country | Arwa Mahdawi: an incredible comeback for Trump
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who was in Iowa on Monday night as a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign, may have summed up the night the best. “Tonight’s contest,” Pritzker said, “is simply a question of whether you like your Maga Trump agenda wrapped in the original packaging, or with high heels or lifts in their boots”.
There were no meaningful differences between the three frontrunners (Trump, Ron “rumoured to wear leg-lengthening lifts” DeSantis, and Nikki Haley). And, in the end, Iowa, as was much predicted, went for the original packaging – by a landslide.
So does this mean Trump is a shoo-in for the Republican nominee? Not necessarily. There have been numerous instances where the winner of the Iowa caucus isn’t the eventual nominee – including 2016, when Ted Cruz won. Still, Trump’s victory on Monday night makes it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. And this, let us not forget, is despite the fact that Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four separate cases covering everything from conspiring to overturn the 2020 election to falsifying records in connection to hush money paid to an adult film star. Oh, and let’s not forget that last year a New York jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing the advice columnist E Jean Carroll. However, it seems none of that is a deal-breaker for the Republican voters in Iowa.
All in all? Monday night marked an incredible comeback for the disgraced former president and an enormous step backwards for the country.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
Lloyd Green: ‘Nikki Haley is too out of touch to win’
Donald Trump romped to victory in the Iowa caucus. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis vie for a distant second. Haley may best Trump in next week’s New Hampshire primary, but she won’t derail him. Her candidacy is a magnet for disaffected Republicans and high-end independents, constituencies too small to matter in this year’s nominating process but who may determine the outcome of the general election.
She is the wine-track candidate in a Joe Six-pack Republican party, out of step with the party’s working-class and white evangelical base. Her backers emphatically oppose a national six-week abortion ban, which Iowa Republicans embrace. In a similar vein, a majority of Haley voters believe Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020, placing them at odds with the rest of caucusgoers.
As ever, class and culture count. Haley nearly matched Trump with college graduates. By contrast, she only eked out the support of one in eight voters without a four-year degree. Jesus and Nascar get you the “W” in Trump-centric Iowa. Pearls and garden parties, not so much.
Looking ahead, a Trump loss in New Hampshire would be a mere speed bump. In 2000, George W Bush won Iowa, slipped in New Hampshire, then rallied in South Carolina. He never looked back. This year, Haley trails Trump by nearly 30 points in South Carolina, her home.
Meanwhile, the 45th president’s legal woes remain the soundtrack of 2024’s political calendar. In the coming hours, his latest defamation trial will kick off in Manhattan. His sexual assault of E Jean Carroll haunts decades later.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Trump will remain unstoppable’
Of course Donald Trump won big today. He’s running for the candidacy of a Republican party that he’s all but created.
Some in the Trump 2016 campaign such as Steve Bannon wanted to realign American politics in a new way: to win so decisively among (particularly white) working-class voters to permanently change the electoral map. For the moment, at least, they failed in their ambitions. Rhetoric and disregard for institutional order aside, on the policy front Trump governed more like a business Republican and less like populist firebrand. But it’s clear that he did permanently change the Republican party.
Trump’s style – his personal attacks on opponents, railings against establishment media, attacks on the “deep state” and the election system itself – all built on existing trends within the Republican party, but he took them to new extremes and made personal loyalty to his brand a litmus test in the party.
He’s done to his party something very unusual in American politics. Instead of hobbling together a loose coalition like Joe Biden, Trump made the Republicans a coherent, largely unified entity, bound together by a worldview and a leader.
Iowa’s results make it plainly clear that Trump will remain unstoppable in Republican primaries unless he’s kept off ballots by the courts. Outside of the judicial system there is no elite media or RNC cabal nearly strong enough to defeat him.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities
Ben Davis: ‘This is a race in name only’
The Iowa caucuses show what we all knew: this year’s Republican primary is a race in name only. Trump’s landslide victory felt inevitable and was even bigger than most expected. He was able to win without participating in debates or even running much of a primary-focused campaign, preferring to act as if he was already the nominee.
Most Americans are barely aware there’s even a primary race going on. Caucus turnout has plummeted since 2016. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. He’s already led a coup attempt, been indicted with dozens of counts of various felonies and even compared his views on immigrants to Hitler’s. It hasn’t hurt his standing with Republicans at all.
While the Iowa caucuses, with their social pressure, heavily white and evangelical electorate, and brutal negative temperatures, are particularly friendly to Trump, there’s very little chance he has to break a sweat to win the nomination. Under the hood, the caucus results show the Republican base is still divided and changing.
In heavily college-educated areas, Trump’s vote share plummeted. While this matters little in the Republican primary, it’s a sign that Trump could still struggle to win even Republican-leaning voters in the general election in highly educated areas. These are voters who, unlike millions of others, still haven’t been alienated enough to stop caucusing in the Republican primary, and even still, they reject Trump. It remains to be seen if the unpopular Biden can do enough to win these voters back over.
This primary race that never took off serves as yet another rebuke of the wealthy elites in the Republican party, who have used the party as a vehicle to promote market-friendly policy above all else. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Ron DeSantis campaign, and the results were a spectacular failure. It’s not their party anymore. The Republican party is now a vehicle primarily for the politics of cultural grievance and petty reaction.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
Geoffrey Kabaservice: ‘It’s impossible to out-Trump Trump’
Anyone surprised by Donald Trump’s blowout victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses shouldn’t have been. The other candidates’ failure to criticize him in any meaningful way amounted to a pre-emptive surrender to his brand of populism, and the election results showed that it’s impossible to out-Trump Trump. In fact, dislodging Trump was always going to be enormously difficult because he has remade not only the Republican party but Republican voters themselves.
Trump lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 – finishing behind Ted Cruz and barely ahead of Marco Rubio – because enough voters still believed in other versions of the Republican party, whether represented by the muscular internationalism and sunny optimism of a Ronald Reagan or the pious evangelicalism and fiscal austerity of a Mike Pence. Now Trump has persuaded a critical mass of those same voters to reject the beliefs they once held, on issues ranging from free trade to international alliances to constitutional democracy. Many would deny they ever believed otherwise.
In hindsight, Ron DeSantis might have been a more formidable contender if he’d made a stronger claim to represent conservative competence in government; Nikki Haley for her part might have more forcefully argued against Maga isolationism. But they only could have displaced Trump by demanding that Republicans reject him along with much of what he stands for – by arguing for example that his election denialism and role in the January 6 insurrection made him unfit for office.
But that would have risked splitting the party, and Trump is the only figure in the Republican party who has been willing to take that risk – perhaps because he understands that absolute control over a thing derives from a willingness to utterly destroy it, to paraphrase Frank Herbert’s Dune. Perhaps Trump also understands the other candidates better than they understand themselves. As he is reported to have said of other would-be challengers and holdouts in the Republican party: “They always bend the knee.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington DC as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/oct/23/brian-cox-jeff-forshaw-answers | Science | 2011-10-22T23:06:00.000Z | Brian Cox | Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw explain the big bang | It was a scientific match made if not in heaven, then in manmade conditions approaching the big bang: Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw first met at a particle collider in Hamburg 15 years ago. They have collaborated on various scientific projects ever since and are now both professors at Manchester University's Particle Physics Group and are involved in research projects at Large Hadron Collider at Cern, Geneva.
Jeff explains their relationship thus: "Apart from Brian's pretty face, it's the fact that we both have this very direct, visceral love of physics, so we both really love what we're doing."
Their second book together, The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, is published by Allen Lane on Thursday. It's as breezily a written accessible account of the theory of quantum mechanics as you could wish for – from the Planck constant to the Higgs particle and everything theoretically in between. Observers looking for evidence that science is the new rock'n'roll should note that the book jacket is designed by Peter Saville of Factory Records fame.
Brian's frequent TV appearances, handsome features and drainpipes have led to him being described as "something of a sex symbol" by the Daily Mail, a spoof column in New Scientist and satirical YouTube clips. Jeff, however, cuts a more conservative jib.
We asked readers to send in questions via email, theguardian.com and Twitter and you responded magnificently with queries both theoretical and practical, covering subjects from the subatomic to the infinite. Here is a selection of their replies.
Physics
Is there a centre of the universe?
Marjorie Ainsworth, via email
JF: It's a common misunderstanding of the big bang that the universe exploded into something, like a firework went off or something like that, and there was a centre that spewed out into something.
BC: That seems to imply that everything is flying away from us and we're therefore somehow in a privileged position; that isn't true. The way it's often described is if you imagine some bread with raisins in it that you're baking in the oven and as you heat it, it expands. On any particular raisin, if you look, you can see all the other raisins receding from it. So it's space that stretching, it's not that everything's flying away.
JF: It's the big stretch, not the big bang.
If everything came from a singularity, what created it?
bbmatt, via web
JF: What created the singularity? No idea. But that doesn't mean that some people haven't tried to come up with ideas. Anyway, everything coming from a singularity is a confusing line of questioning because the universe was probably infinite at the time of the big bang so it didn't really come from a singularity. It came from a singularity in the density, but I expect that the person who's asked that question imagined that the universe came from a point.
… but that's very unlikely. We don't know what happens deep inside a black hole, so when the density of the universe gets very, very large then our calculations cease to work, so the honest answer is that before we reach the singularity, our ability to calculate fails. But that's not to undermine how accurately we can calculate, because we claim to understand the behaviour of the entire visible universe winding back through the big bang to a time when it was the size of a beach ball. So that's all the billions of galaxies and all the billions of stars in the galaxies compressed to about the size of a beach ball, which is pretty impressive.
BC: General relativity, quantum mechanics, those things break down in there, so the idea that there is such a thing as a singularity in nature is unlikely. A lot of people think that if you have a proper theory of gravity that works smaller than the beach ball metaphor then you don't have these issues, but it's not known.
JF: Another misunderstanding, which stems from that question, is the idea that the universe was small at the big bang. What was small at the time of the big bang was the entire visible universe, so everything we can see now, which is about 14bn light years away, all of that was compressed to the size of a pinhead. But it was one pinhead in an infinite space, so there's an infinite amount of stuff, as far as we can tell, outside our universe. So it's right to say that it's 14bn years old, but it's wrong to say that it's 14bn light years in size because it's probably infinitely big.
However, the question that's probably been asked is what happened before the beginning and the answer to that is that nobody has a clue – so that's the honest answer.
If there exists some particle that can travel faster than light, then surely there should be a way of sending information into the past?
jamma88 via web
BC: Yes, that's true. If you don't modify Einstein's theory of relativity and you take it at face value and send something faster than light, then yes, you can send messages into the past. So, if the current result is shown to be correct, then probably what you're saying is that you want a new theory of space and time, and then, who knows?
JF: In a nutshell, if Einstein is right, then yes is the answer to the question. But you'd be very hard pressed to find a physicist who thought that Einstein is right if you find a particle travelling faster than the speed of light. What that means is that Einstein is wrong because you can't travel back into the past and so there's some new theory that comes into play, which protects the law of cause and effect. It's very hard to conceive of a logical universe in which cause and effect doesn't hold.
What does no Higgs mean for physics? What are the other theories?
Jason Mickler via email
JF: No Higgs would be very exciting.
BC: It could be more exciting than finding it. The favoured candidate for the something new that we know must exist at the Large Hadron Collider is the Higgs, but it could be something else.
We've written several papers together and our most cited one is what would happen if there isn't a Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider and how we might explore the physics that must be there if there isn't one. It's very rare that you get to build an experiment in science where you're guaranteed to discover something new. The Large Hadron Collider is such an experiment, in that the standard model of particle physics predicts that there's going to be a Higgs particle. But it's not necessarily going to be there and if you take away the Higgs particle out of our standard theory, you take away all the maths and throw it in the bin and see what's left… and what's left is a theory that doesn't make sense.
JF: Something will show up sooner rather than later. If the Higgs particle is relatively light, there's a range of masses we expect it to have and we should see it very soon, we could even see it before Christmas. If it's heavy or if the alternative to it is heavy, then it could take a few more years before we find it. We're closing in on it fast now though – the machine is working absolutely wonderfully, it really is.
How do you feel about scientists who blog their research rather than waiting to publish their final results?
Stephen Marks via email
BC: The peer review process works and I'm an enormous supporter of it. If you try to circumvent the process, that's a recipe for disaster. Often, it's based on a suspicion of the scientific community and the scientific method. They often see themselves as the hero outside of science, cutting through the jungle of bureaucracy. That's nonsense: science is a very open pursuit, but peer review is there to ensure some kind of minimal standard of professionalism.
JF: I think it's unfair for people to blog. People have overstepped the mark and leaked results, and that's just not fair on their collaborators who are working to get the result into a publishable form.
Scientists use supernova explosions to measure how far away supernovas are. The distance depends on how bright they appear against how bright they really are. How do scientists know how bright the supernova explosions should be?
Bas Bouma via email
JF: When stars explode in a particular way (called Type Ia supernovae) they do so in a remarkably consistent manner – that is to say one such explosion looks pretty much the same as any other. That means that if we can measure the distance to a "nearby" supernova using some other method (and not its brightness) then we can use that to calibrate things and determine the distance to more distant supernovae using only their brightness. Incidentally, these supernovae are remarkable events. White dwarf stars are small dead stars and they survive purely as a consequence of quantum mechanics but only if they weigh less than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. If this thing accretes matter and sneaks past the magic 1.4 solar masses then the electrons within the star start to move close to the speed of light and that triggers a catastrophic collapse – the supernova.
If question-asking is so fundamental to science, why has there been no research into how we might improve question-asking for learners in our places of education?
Laurence Smith via email
BC: I think, for example, quantum mechanics should be taught in schools for this reason. One of the reasons is that it's a great way of seeing how the data from experiments can drive you to a rather counterintuitive picture of the world. For example, the rules of quantum physics are not by themselves complicated, but they are philosophically challenging. I think the scientific method is more important to teach than facts. I'm not that bothered if people know about the structure of the atom or whatever but I want people to understand how you get to these conclusions about the world.
Mathematics
My question is: I cannot perceive or understand infinity. For man, everything has a beginning and an end. Answer, please!
Harry, via web
JF: The reality is that we don't know for certain what's outside the 14 billion years' worth of what we can see, so there could be an edge to the universe, it's possible, but there's no evidence in any of the data.
BC: The universe was opaque about 380,000 years after the big bang and at that point became diffuse enough that light could travel through it. And we can see that light, people measure it in great detail, and you could see if the universe had an edge in that data, but there's no sign of it.
The physics behind the current understanding of the universe isn't complete, but do you think that a new kind of mathematics will be needed, and what kind of mathematics might that be?
John Read, via email
JF: There isn't a Nobel prize for mathematics, its equivalent is called the Fields Medal and people who are working on fundamental questions in physics, string theory in particular, have won that prize in recent times, so it already is the case that physicists are breaking new ground within mathematics. People are trying to understand the universe at its birth – the behaviour of phenomena down to mind-bogglingly small scales – we're talking like 10-40cm. So new mathematics may well be needed and people are inventing new mathematics.
But it should be stressed that the known physics, the physics that we've measured in experiments, none of that really has mandated in any particularly significant way our theories of mathematics. There are exceptions, such as the idea that numbers have the property of commutativity, which means that 2x3 is equal to 3x2, but the theory of elementary particles used, for example, at the Large Hadron Collider utilises a mathematics where in the product of two numbers the order matters, so X times Y doesn't equal Y times X.
Astronomy
How do we know what shape the Milky Way is? I've seen many illustrations of our galaxy as a spiral, but how can we tell what it looks like when we're deeply embedded inside it?
Chris Muggleton, via email
JF: If you lived in an omelette, and you lived on the edge of that omelette, you could measure the distance between all the pieces of mushroom in the omelette. If you were clever enough to work out how far it was to all the different parts of the omelette, you'd be able to reconstruct it. So it's all a question of measuring the distance between the stars. Because they don't move any significant distance in the time you're measuring them [relatively speaking], to get the shape of it, all you need to know is the distance.
How do you feel about amateur astronomers, in today's hi-tech society?
Duncan Jones, via email
JF: Years ago, amateurs played a big part in the understanding of the cosmos, with observations and the recording of events. Unfortunately, with the advent of modern technology, the role of the amateur has been left far behind.
BC: In things such as astronomy, there's always been a place for amateur observers because there's a lot of sky. Certainly in searching for things such as new comets, they do make a contribution.
In particle physics, it's impossible for amateurs to be involved in the data because there's too much infrastructure required. In theoretical physics, Jeff might want to comment, and in theory the amateur could make a contribution because you don't have to be an academic to submit to a academic journal. If the paper makes sense then it can be published.
JF: I get a lot of papers sent to me by amateur scientists. But they've usually not got the scientific background or the training to make a contribution in theoretical physics, so it's very hard unless you've got that training.
Politics and economics
How likely is it that we'll be able to harness fusion power before we run out of fossil fuels?
@craighitchings via Twitter
BC: If we were to invest in it properly, then I'd say very likely, because the technology has been proved. In fact, the most effective fusion reactor at the moment is still in Oxford, which is where it's been for more than 30 years – and it works.
The problem is that it's not a very good commercial option at the moment because no one's demonstrated that you can build a commercially viable reactor. That's why government money has always been needed – because it's a 20- to 30-year investment. That's not the way you do things in private companies but governments can certainly help; we're talking single-figure billions, not going to the moon. So in my view, the technology has been demonstrated and it's simply a question of working out how to build industrial-scale plants that can return profit.
The real problem is that you have to contain plasma that's at a very high temperature – dismembered gas, basically. So it's very difficult to model and there are real engineering challenges. We need to understand what happens to this plasma.
Is the €75bn spent on the Large Hadron Collider worth the investment?
Oliver Gerrard via email
BC: The UK spends about £70m a year on the LHC. We spend less in Britain each year on Cern than we do on peanuts, literally, so it's a very tiny amount of money. A lot of that money funds PhD students and a lot of it pays for academics in universities – the bulk of the money actually stays in Britain. So breaking it down, it costs very little.
The other thing to understand is that the LHC is often portrayed as the search for another esoteric particle and that's nonsense. It's been built to solve a specific problem in our understanding of three of the four forces of nature. And there are all sorts of theories about how that might work, the Higgs being one of them. To portray it as some kind of esoteric hunt for an elusive particle is nonsense: it's the mainline of physics, which has arguably created wealth beyond anyone's wildest dreams and will continue to do so.
Can science save the economy?
Andrea via email
Both: Yes!
BC: It's the foundation of the economy for a start, so it'll have to! Nothing else will save it. The modern world is based on science, so that's it – there is nothing else.
JF: Yes, I'd be that definitive. For example, a significant fraction of the global economy relies upon the existence of a transistor – the world has been revolutionised by fundamental research into quantum physics done 60 years ago and now there are billions of transistors inside very home computer. They are a key ingredient of the microchip.
BC: It's science and engineering, you've got to put them together. Science and engineering together are the economy. Earlier this month, George Osborne announced the funding for science projects, including £50m for research into graphene, a material that has the potential to revolutionise the 21st century. More powerful electronics, stronger aeroplanes… pretty much anything you can think of, graphene can improve.
We are one of the world's leading scientific nations and it's my view that we should aspire to be the best.
Actually, George Osborne and this government are beginning to show signs of believing that. I think a lot of credit goes to the science minister, David Willetts, for making his point over and over again. I think it's beginning to bear fruit and we're starting to invest even at this difficult time – in fact especially at this difficult time, as that's what you need to do. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/20/johnny-depp-kevin-smith-daughters-yoga-hosers-tusk | Film | 2014-08-20T07:57:36.000Z | Ben Beaumont-Thomas | Johnny Depp and Kevin Smith to work alongside daughters in Yoga Hosers | Johnny Depp and Kevin Smith are to work alongside their own daughters on Smith’s new film Yoga Hosers, an action-adventure movie based around a pair of teen yoga fanatics.
Depp’s daughter Lily-Rose and Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn take the lead roles in the comic book-style film, in which the aforementioned yoga nuts must battle an ancient evil that rises from underground and threatens a planned party. Depp also stars as an ex-cop and man-hunter, Guy Lapointe, who aids the pair in their quest.
Smith, meanwhile, has written the film and will direct it, making it the second in a trilogy of films set in rural Canada. The first, Tusk, premieres at the Toronto film festival in September, and overlaps with Yoga Hosers. Depp again stars as Lapointe, this time helping out a duo whose friend, played by Justin Long, has gone missing after trying to interview a demented seafarer – who intends to turn him into a walrus.
Watch the trailer for Tusk
Smith had an unusual inspiration for Tusk, namely a Gumtree advert in Brighton that asked for a person to dress up like a walrus, and make walrus noises, for two hours a day at a private residence. Smith said it “got my creative juices flowing”, and he has reimagined the story as “an old British Hammer horror film”. In a letter to Smith confirming his involvement, Long described the film in vivid terms: “I didn’t think Ed Gein and Boxing Helena would ever fuck and have a more deranged baby.”
Tusk also features that spiritual core of Smith movies, the convenience store, where the characters played by Lily-Rose and Harley Quinn work. Following their appearance in Tusk, Yoga Hosers centres the action on them.
“People always ask me ‘Are you ever going to make a comic-book movie?’”, Smith said in a statement. “This is it – but instead of yet another dude saving the day, our antiheroes are the most feared and formidable creatures man has ever encountered: two 15-year-old girls.”
Harley Quinn Smith (left) and Lily-Rose Depp in Tusk. Photograph: Demerest Films Photograph: Demerest Films/PR
Yoga Hosers also features much of the Tusk cast, including Long, Michael Parks and Haley Joel Osment. It will also star Tony Hale, known for his hapless characters in Arrested Development and Veep, and Natasha Lyonne, currently enjoying a career renaissance for her role in Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Jason Mewes is also confirmed, perhaps hinting at the return of Jay and Silent Bob. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/09/morrisons-asda-owners-mccolls-administration | Business | 2022-05-09T17:22:49.000Z | Joanna Partridge | Morrisons wins race to buy McColl’s ahead of Asda owners | Morrisons has beaten the owners of Asda in the race to buy McColl’s after the struggling convenience store chain fell into administration.
Morrisons’ final offer for McColl’s was selected ahead of an improved bid made over the weekend by EG Group, the petrol forecourts operator owned by the Blackburn-based Issa Brothers, who also own Asda.
All 16,000 McColl’s staff will be transferred to Morrisons, while all of the Scotland-based retailer’s 1,160 UK convenience stores and newsagents will continue trading. Morrisons has also agreed to rescue the company’s two pension schemes, which have about 2,000 members.
McColl’s was sold via a pre-pack administration, after the retailer’s lenders, which include Barclays, HSBC and partially state-owned bank NatWest, declined a request to restructure its debt, sparking a bidding war for the London-listed company.
Morrisons, Britain’s fourth biggest grocer, had an existing supply agreement with McColl’s, for which it provided a range of products under the Safeway brand. Morrisons is owned by the the US private equity group Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which won a takeover battle for control of the chain last year.
The professional services firm PwC was appointed as administrator to McColl’s on Monday, and sold the company’s business and assets to Alliance Property Holdings, which is part of the Morrisons group.
The administration process was initiated by McColl’s board on Friday, after the group’s lenders withdrew their support for the business, pushing it into administration. The lenders will now be repaid in full following the sale to Morrisons.
Morrisons is understood to have previously offered to take on McColl’s as a going concern, which would have included assuming its debts and responsibility for its pension scheme.
David Potts, Morrisons chief executive, said he had hoped to buy the business before it collapsed into administration. “Although we are disappointed that the business was put into administration, we believe this is a good outcome for McColl’s and all its stakeholders. This transaction offers stability and continuity for the McColl’s business and, in particular, a better outcome for its colleagues and pensioners,” Potts said.
The majority of McColl’s stores trade under its brand name, although some 270 of the shops currently operate as Morrisons Daily outlets.
Morrisons said its wholesale supply agreement with McColl’s would now continue without interruption, and Potts said the retailer now intended to build on its Morrisons Daily store format.
As part of its winning offer, it is understood that Morrisons agreed to waive the money it was owed by McColl’s – thought to be as much as £150m – thereby allowing the administrators to distribute more money to other unsecured creditors.
Initially, it had looked as though EG Group, owned by the brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa, was leading the race to buy McColl’s, after offering to repay its lenders in full. However this bid was subsequently matched by Morrisons.
Toby Banfield, Rachael Wilkinson and Rob Lewis of PwC were appointed as joint administrators of McColl’s on Monday. Lewis said the sale to Morrisons provided “much-needed certainty to McColl’s 16,000 staff after a period of understandable concern following the group’s challenges over the past months”.
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He added: “As well as saving thousands of jobs, this deal secures a platform for the trustees of the group’s pension schemes to enter into arrangements which will protect the pensions entitlements of so many people.”
McColl’s had been suffering from financial pressures for some time before its collapse into administration. It was hit by supply chain difficulties during the pandemic, resulting in gaps on the shelves and poor sales. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/11/the-guardian-thursday-quiz-general-knowledge-topical-news-trivia-142 | Life and style | 2024-01-11T11:00:18.000Z | Martin Belam | Lunar woes, returning gongs and a Welsh rugby legend – take the Thursday quiz | We are barely a few days away from people starting to peddle the “blue Monday” hokum about the most miserable day of the year, so ignore that and concentrate instead on “quiz Thursday”. Fifteen questions with varying degrees of topicality, obscurity and political point-scoring await you. Remember, it is strictly for fun and there are no prizes. Let us know how you get on in the comments!
The Thursday quiz, No 142
1.Who is the new French prime minister (not pictured)?
Bruno Le Maire
Léon Colbert
Gabriel Attal
Gérald Darmanin
Reveal
2.Russell Crowe has claimed that he is a direct descendant of who?
Simon Fraser, the acting-lieutenant who led the mutiny on the Bounty
Simon Fraser, the first actor recorded to have played the role of Hamlet
Simon Fraser, the pirate better known as Captain Blackbeard
Simon Fraser, the last man to be executed by beheading in England
Reveal
3.The BFI in London (not pictured, that's the lovely Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds) has put a blanket trigger warning on a season of films that include movies from which popular franchise?
Star Wars
James Bond
Despicable Me
Pirates of the Caribbean
Reveal
4.United Launch Alliance put its Vulcan Centaur rocket (pictured) into space this week, and part of the mission was to try to send a lunar lander on its way. What is the name of the Astrobotic lunar lander that it was carrying, which will sadly never reach the moon?
Peregrine
Merlin
Falcon
Osprey
Reveal
5.Talking of space, what have scientists recently discovered is almost the same blue colour as Uranus?
A frozen methane sea on the moon Titan
The surface of Halley's Comet
The planet Neptune
The dwarf planet Sedna
Reveal
6.Despite it being in the news for years, now there has been a high-profile ITV drama about it, Rishi Sunak seems almost poised to act at some point soon probably over the Post Office IT scandal in the UK. Which tech provider (pictured) developed the Horizon IT system, installed in the late 1990s?
Oracle
Fujitsu
SAP
Del Boy and Rodney from Trotters Independent Traders
Reveal
7.Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells has sheepishly handed back her CBE mere years after the Post Office Horizon IT scandal broke. Which Conservative prime minister was in power when she was awarded the CBE?
David Cameron
Theresa May
Boris Johnson
Liz Truss
Rishi Sunak
Reveal
8.Who has the Conservative party chosen as its candidate for the Wellingborough byelection to replace disgraced former MP Peter Bone?
Peter Bone's daughter
Peter Bone's partner
Peter Bone's sister
Peter Bone's very naughty miniature dachshund
Reveal
9.One question about every country taking part in the Euro 2024 finals this summer. This week: Belgium. Which of these Belgian cities is farthest north?
Bruges
Ghent
Brussels
Liège
Reveal
10.The first episode of Friends is officially known as The Pilot, but what is it more commonly known as …
The One with the Monkey
The One Where Rachel Finds Out
The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate
The One with Ron from Sparks
Reveal
11.When did the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman premiere?
1939
1949
1959
1969
Reveal
12.The world of rugby union, and in particular Wales, is mourning the death of the great full-back from the legendary 1970s Welsh team, JPR Williams. But what did the JPR stand for?
John Peter Rhys
John Paul Rhyan
John Peter Rhodri
John Paul Rhett
Reveal
13.The UK's parliament in Westminster very rarely sits on a Saturday these days. The last time was in 2019 to discuss Brexit shenanigans. What caused the Saturday sitting before that?
Falklands war
The Suez crisis
The outbreak of the second world war
The 30-50 feral hogs crisis
Reveal
14.A tribute concert to Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan has been announced for March. Where will it take place?
New York
Dublin
London
Rome
Reveal
15.This is Willow, the official dog of the Guardian Thursday quiz. She knows you were expecting a question about the shed-tidying mouse. She also knows you weren't expecting it to be: what is the Latin name for a house mouse native to the UK?
Myodes glareolus
Micromys minutus
Mus musculus
Romanes eunt domus
Reveal
If you really do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers – and can show your working – feel free to email [email protected], but remember the quiz master’s word is final and he can’t stop listening to Veronica Mars by Blondshell. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/02/joe-biden-judge-picks-federal-courts-supreme-court | US news | 2021-03-02T08:00:43.000Z | Tom McCarthy | Biden under pressure from progressives as he prepares to pick first judges | Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletter
Donald Trump’s historic shakeup of the roster of US federal judges will not soon be reversed, despite his exit from the White House.
In just one term, Trump managed to replace more than 25% of federal judges overall and more than 30% of powerful circuit court judges. His picks were disproportionately white men with conservative views on immigration, abortion and the environment. With lifetime appointments, those judges will have a strong influence on the course of American life for decades to come.
But Joe Biden has an opportunity to reverse some of the damage, as progressives see it.
While Trump and his Republican accomplices left a small number of judicial vacancies on the table, additional vacancies have already arisen as judges retire or take “senior status” with curtailed workloads – steps certain judges were known to be putting off as long as Trump was in office.
This past weekend, Judge Barbara Keenan of the fourth circuit court of appeals, a Barack Obama appointee, announced that she would take senior status in August, creating a 10th vacancy at the appeals court level for Biden to fill.
“I certainly think it’s a factor that judges held off on taking senior status” when Trump was in office, said Daniel L Goldberg, legal director of the progressive Alliance For Justice, “so they could not be replaced by an ultra-conservative judge who wished to turn back the clock on so many of our rights.”
Judicial watchdog groups see early promising signs in the Biden administration’s approach to the challenge. Incoming Biden administration lawyers sent a letter to senators in December requesting a racially and ethnically diverse pool of judicial recommendations, just as Barack Obama had done before Trump’s white male makeover.
The Biden letter also asked for judges from outside the Ivy League and corporate pipeline, which was not a priority for Obama.
“We are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench,” the Biden letter said, “including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”
On Monday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said judicial nominees were something Biden was “focused on personally”.
But as Biden prepares to make his first judicial nominations, advocacy groups are watching carefully to see whether he follows through on that stated priority. And the first recommendation to come Biden’s way to be made public has drawn objections in some progressive circles.
To fill a vacancy on Colorado’s federal district court, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat, recommended Regina Rodriguez, a former federal prosecutor originally nominated by Obama, whose mother was detained in a Japanese internment camp and who would be the second Latina in history to serve on the court.
But Rodriguez, currently a partner at the multinational WilmerHale law firm, also has roots in the corporate world, drawing accusations that her advancement exemplified “fealty to big law”.
The progressive judicial advocacy group Demand Justice has produced a video ad opposing the recommendation – which is not yet an official nomination.
“President Biden is ready to make a change, restoring balance to the courts by appointing lawyers who stand up for regular people,” the ad says. “But Bennet is standing in the way, demanding Biden appoint another corporate law partner.”
Through the lens of Trump’s appointments, Rodriguez would be a favorable shift for progressives but progressive groups have served notice that Biden must aim for a different standard.
That pressure could collide with political reality. With a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate, Biden cannot afford to lose the support of a single Democrat for any of his nominees, if Republicans stay unified in opposition. That dynamic could drive nominations toward the center.
Advocacy groups have praised the new administration for announcing it would bypass a review process by the American Bar Association (ABA), the country’s largest legal professional group, on potential judicial nominees.
The ABA review process, used by past administrations, has been criticized on the left as a pipeline for the halls of corporate law to the federal bench. But ABA recommendations have also been rejected on the right as too liberal, and Trump ignored the organization in favor of candidates hand-picked by the conservative Federalist Society.
Biden, for now, has a relatively limited ability to remake the courts. Long gone is the dream of some Democrats to win a decisive Senate majority in the election last November and pass legislation that would add seats to the US supreme court. Instead, Biden must work with the limited number of vacancies he has.
There are 10 vacancies at the circuit court level, counting one active judge who has announced he will semi-retire this summer. That compares with dozens of circuit vacancies Trump found when he came into office, thanks to obstruction of Obama nominees by the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Trump installed 24 circuit judges in his first two years.
“Biden has a tremendous opportunity right off the bat to put on the bench individuals with a demonstrated commitment to equal justice who, as Donald Trump knows –long after Joe Biden leaves the White House, the people he puts on the bench will have the ability to make a difference in the lives of the American people,” said Goldberg.
As for the supreme court, all eyes are on a potential retirement announcement from the liberal justice Stephen Breyer, 82. Biden has promised to nominate an African American woman, the first in history, to the court as soon as possible. There is already pressure from Democratic lawmakers in Congress for Biden to line up a nominee for the next vacancy.
Merrick Garland vows to target white supremacists as attorney general
Read more
In the chess game of judicial appointments, the identity of that potential nominee could depend on the confirmation of Biden’s attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland.
Garland is a judge on the District of Columbia circuit court, which has jurisdiction over many cases involving the federal government and has traditionally served as a staging ground for future supreme court nominees. His confirmation would create a vacancy on the court.
Widely seen as a potential replacement for Garland is Ketanji Brown Jackson, a district judge in Washington DC.
Jackson was one of the few Black women to be vetted by Obama for a potential supreme court nomination. And as a widely respected judge, a former public defender and working mother, she appears to fit the description of the kind of candidate Biden would be looking for if he has the chance to fill a supreme court seat.
“The Biden administration seems to be ready to prioritize judges like never before,” said Goldberg. “Every signal we’ve received is that they are moving as expeditiously as possible to identify and nominate and, hopefully, confirm.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/03/steve-reich-80-birthday-best-works-pieces | Music | 2016-10-03T09:00:13.000Z | Andrew Clements | Steve Reich – 10 of the best | Steve Reich celebrates his 80th birthday today. Together with Terry Riley and Philip Glass, he was one of the founders of minimalism in the 1960s, and he has been at the forefront of American music ever since. The succession of utterly distinctive works Reich has composed in the last half century includes some of the most remarkable music of our time, their influence continues to cross continents and almost all musical boundaries. Here are 10 highlights, mapping a remarkable creative career.
It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
Where it all began, when Reich was playing around with a tape loop of a revivalist preacher shouting “It’s gonna rain!”, playing it back simultaneously on two machines, one running slightly faster than the other. As the two tapes moved out of phase, and eventually back together again, he noticed the teasingly ambiguous range of rhythmic and tonal effects created. It became the basis of a tape piece, and phasing was born.
Piano Phase (1967)
After a series of tape pieces Reich made the crucial switch to working with live instruments, applying the phasing techniques he had perfected in the studio to sequences of pitches played on two pianos moving steadily in and out of sync, generating an ever-changing sequence of unexpected shapes and gestures along the way.
Drumming (1970-71)
In 1970 Reich won a scholarship to study west African drumming techniques in Ghana. On his return to the US he put what he had learnt into his most ambitious work to date. Drumming shows that the techniques of minimalism he’d been developing could be used as the basis of large-scale musical structures all derived from a single tiny rhythmic cell. The result is one of the enduring classics of pure minimalism.
Music for 18 Musicians (1976)
Not only Reich’s greatest achievement, but one of the landmarks of 20th-century music, Music for 18 Musicians is a richly exuberant and alluring ensemble piece, which gives the pulsing layers of his instrumental writing a genuinely expressive and harmonically meaningful large-scale architecture, and demonstrated that minimalism was so much more than an ephemeral musical fashion.
Tehillim (1981)
In his earlier works Reich used voices as more or less an instrumental tone colour, embedding them as another strand in his pulsing textures. But in the psalm settings of Tehillim, the first work in which Reich explored his Jewish heritage, a quartet of women’s voices takes centre stage for the first time, in music that derives its rhythms from the inflections of the Hebrew text, which is delivered without vibrato in a timeless way.
The Desert Music (1984)
Reich has composed relatively few pieces for full orchestra, generally preferring to work with smaller ensembles that can more easily achieve the high levels of precision his music demands. The Desert Music, though, is one of his grandest conceptions, using a chorus and a huge orchestra for settings of poems by William Carlos Williams that trace out a 45-minute arch form.
Different Trains (1988)
Both a memory of the train journeys across the US that Reich undertook as a child in the 1940s, and a reflection that had he grown up in Europe, as a Jew Reich’s train journeys would have been very different, Different Trains is perhaps the most personal of his works. It marked a return to the use of sampling, using train whistles and interviews with Holocaust survivors and US train workers as part of an electronic soundtrack that’s juxtaposed with string-quartet writing derived from the speech rhythms on tape.
Three Tales (2002)
Reich and his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, made their first foray into music theatre with The Cave in 1993, an exploration of the Old Testament story of Abraham combining interviews and documentary film with Reich’s music. Four years later they completed a far more ambitious video triptych – Hindenburg, Bikini and Dolly – examining the impact of technology on life in the 20th century.
Double Sextet (2007)
The piece that won Reich the 2009 Pulitzer prize for music, which may either by played by two identical groups of winds, strings, vibraphone and piano, or with one of the sextet pre-recorded on tape. The pairs of pianos and vibraphones provide the driving impulse and map out the tonal shifts of the music, while the other instruments pick out melodic shapes above them.
Radio Rewrite (2012)
Reich’s influence on successive generations of pop musicians has been profound, and in turn he has always been aware of that influence and appreciates it. Radio Rewrite repays that compliment by using a pair of songs by Radiohead, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, and Everything in its Right Place, as the basis for a five-movement work for an 11-piece ensemble. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/17/hereditary-review-mark-kermode-horror-toni-collette-gabriel-byrne | Film | 2018-06-17T07:00:07.000Z | Mark Kermode | Hereditary review – shock horror? Only up to a point... | Breathless comparisons to The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho do this fitfully frightening yet ultimately frustrating chiller few favours. Talented writer-director Ari Aster’s flawed feature debut has more in common with such recently challenging titles as The Witch or It Comes at Night (both also distributed in the US by indie-kings A24), although this tale of a cursed family possesses neither the sustained bone-chilling intensity of the former nor the sociopolitical dread of the latter. Veering erratically between promising setups and disappointing payoffs, it shifts from something reminiscent of the scary satire of Ira Levin toward the altogether dopier domain of Dennis Wheatley. Ironically, it’s the very things that Hereditary gets just right that make its clunkier missteps seem so wrong.
We start in fine form, with an Ordinary People-style opening that seems to ask: “What’s wrong with this picture?” Following the death of her mother, Ellen, a secretive woman with “private rituals, private friends”, artist Annie (Toni Collette) feels her world falling apart. Unable to mourn (“Should I be sadder?”) and prone to sleepwalking, she pours her troubles into her work, building small-world miniatures that resemble doll’s houses designed by Diane Arbus. It’s into one of these models that cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski’s camera creeps in the opening sequence, segueing seamlessly into the internecine action, suggesting that everything we see is happening in a weirdly artificial world, constructed by Annie’s inherited anxieties.
Plaudits are due to the cast maintaining an air of realistic derangement as the plot parts company with credibility
That sense of unease grows as Annie’s family scuttle around the shadows of their haunted home. Her disconnected daughter, Charlie (arresting Broadway star Milly Shapiro), cries out for her grandma, and makes strange clucking sounds while fashioning morbid totems. Husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), has the air of a condemned man as he fields calls from the cemetery about Ellen’s last resting place. As for teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff), he just wants to get stoned with his buddies, clearly unable to deal with the unspoken secrets lurking in his family’s past (“Nobody admits anything they’ve done!”). And then something happens that turns grief into traumatised terror, reopening old wounds and inviting in new horrors.
To reveal specifics would risk spoiling one of the most genuinely alarming sequences I’ve seen in recent years – a breathtaking jolt that made me gasp and recoil, intensified by the protracted shell-shocked silence that follows. It’s a bravura cinematic coup, setting the scene for a spine-tingling meditation on grief and guilt, our senses sharpened by the promise of further scares. Those familiar with Aster’s short films The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen will be primed for a poisonous dissection of twisted family rituals.
Elsewhere, a 90-degree camera-tilt mirrors a memorable moment from Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow, an astute point of reference from another tale of a besieged mother. All the more disappointing, then, that what follows gradually downshifts into generic cliche, abandoning well-mapped psychogeography for psychokinetic silliness and superfluous plot exposition.
Hereditary trailer.
Plaudits are due to the ensemble cast for maintaining an air of realistic distress and derangement, even as the plot parts company with credibility. Collette is terrific as the tortuously conflicted mother whose performance recalls the intensity of Essie Davis in The Babadook, a superior film to which this clearly owes a debt. Scenes between Collette and Shapiro have rich emotional resonance, while Wolff brings a sense of bewildered anger to the family table, matching Gabriel Byrne’s hangdog exasperation. Meanwhile, Ann Dowd, who recently earned an Emmy for TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale, has a tougher time as Joan, a broad-stroke character who appears to have wandered straight off the set of Rosemary’s Baby.
A groaning atonal soundtrack, full of rising polyphonic crescendos and harsh cuts, provides a heartbeat of horror that pulses through a film that wears its influences on its sleeve. Yet those lured in by the quivering quotes on the posters run the risk of being underwhelmed by Hereditary, which, for all its stylistic strengths and subversive subtexts, scares only sporadically. Oh, and for the record, it’s William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III (rather than William Friedkin’s epochal original) that is most clearly evoked in a couple of creepy-crawly scenes. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/10/modigliani-painting-reclining-nude-chinese-billionaire | Art and design | 2015-11-10T19:10:56.000Z | Hannah Ellis-Petersen | Modigliani painting sells to Chinese billionaire for record breaking $170m | A Chinese taxi driver turned billionaire art collector has paid a record-breaking $170m (£113m) for a painting of a nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani at an auction in New York.
Reclining Nude was sold at Christie’s on Monday after a protracted, nine-minute bidding battle, eventually going to Liu Yiqian, who has built a reputation as one of China’s most ostentatious billionaires.
Modigliani's Reclining Nude fetches second-highest ever art auction price
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The 1917-1918 painting is considered one of Modigliani’s best-known works and nearly created a scandal when it was first exhibited in Paris. Interest from five buyers pushed the price for Nu Couché far above the previous $71m record auction price for the Italian artist.
The sale also made the painting the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction and is one of only 10 pieces of art to sell for a nine-figure sum. Nu Couché sold just short of the auction industry’s current overall titleholder, Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O), which sold at Christie’s in May for nearly $180m.
The Chinese collector told the New York Times he planned to exhibit the work in one of the two private museums he owns in Shanghai.
“We are planning to exhibit it for the museum’s fifth anniversary,” Liu said. “It will be an opportunity for Chinese art lovers to see good artworks without having to leave the country, which is one of the main reasons why we founded the museums.”
Liu, 52, may be one of China’s most profligate art collectors but he boasts a classic rags-to-riches story. Having dropped out of school, he started his professional life selling handbags on the street and then drove a taxi. He later went on to make billions on the Chinese stock market in the 1980s and 90s, trading in real estate and pharmaceuticals.
According to the 2015 Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Liu is worth at least $1.5bn.
It is estimated the collector has spent more than $100m on his collection just in the past year. His taste in art ranges from ancient Chinese scrolls and imperial ceramics to contemporary western artists such as Jeff Koons and has so far filled his two museums with more than 2,300 pieces of art. At an auction at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2014, he bought a 15th-century silk hanging for $45m, setting a new international record for the auction house.
Liu and his wife Wang Wei have raised eyebrows in China for their extravagant spending, particularly in light of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption in recent years. He was the subject of a recent online scandal after a photograph of him drinking tea out of an antique bowl he had recently purchased for $36m went viral on the internet.
Liu has openly spoken of his ambitions to create a Chinese museum that could rival the Guggenheim or MoMA in New York but has admitted that he has no idea how much his 2,300-strong collection is worth.
In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year, he said: “It must be a very, very huge figure, but I don’t give it much thought, because I won’t be selling the collection.
“I don’t care about the value, nor do I care about the money I spent buying it in the first place.”
Reclining Nude will be the most expensive piece in Liu’s collection. It had formerly belonged to art historian Laura Mattioli Rossi, daughter of acclaimed Italian collector Gianni Mattioli, and had belonged to the Mattioli family for six decades.
The nine-figure sum is also a far cry from the price paid for Modigliani’s paintings in the Italian artist’s short lifetime. In 1918, the struggling painter tried to sell the whole contents of his studio for just £100 ($150) but apparently could never find a buyer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/13/babylon-breakout-star-diego-calva-i-owe-this-role-to-margot-robbie-something-happened-between-us | Film | 2023-01-13T08:00:10.000Z | Ryan Gilbey | Babylon breakout star Diego Calva: ‘I owe this role to Margot Robbie. Something happened between us’ | Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, a three-hour extravaganza about Hollywood hedonism in the silent era and beyond, could never be accused of subtlety. There is, though, a flash of understatement near the beginning of the film, when Nellie, a dizzy ingenue played by Margot Robbie, turns to Manny, the indefatigable studio dogsbody, and tells him: “You know, you’re not bad-looking.” Manny is played by the smouldering newcomer Diego Calva. How handsome is he? Put it this way: one smile from him, even on a fuzzy and faltering video call, and it is as if Ramon Novarro never existed.
The 30-year-old actor is under the weather today, but his whopping hazel eyes still gleam beneath their sleepy lids, and his voice sounds darting and musical, sandpaper-scratchy though it is. “I feel a little sick but we’re good to go,” he says through his sniffles. Calva was meant to be in Los Angeles but illness has kept him in his New York hotel room, where he squints into his webcam as we talk, and pads around restlessly in nothing but a pistachio-coloured sweater and his underwear. The impulse to hop on a flight to JFK bearing soup and a blanket is not an easy one to suppress.
It is less than a fortnight before Christmas, and only a day since Calva heard that he is in the running for a Golden Globe – the sole newbie, and the one nominee of colour, in a category that also included Daniel Craig, Adam Driver, (the eventual winner) Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. “Babylon is the first time I’ve been involved with a movie that has chances,” he says blearily. False modesty this is not. Aside from a handful of screen appearances, including his role as a real-life drug lord in the third season of Narcos: Mexico, he is fresh out of the wrapper.
He laughs now at the sense of wonder he felt on Narcos. “That was the first time I was on a set with a lot of big toys. On other shows, you only get to fire the guns three or four times, even in a violent scene, because the bullets are so expensive. Narcos was the first job where they told me: ‘Fire a hundred bullets if you like!’”
Babylon represents an escalation in scale, as well as a turbo-booster for Calva’s career. Chazelle, the director of La La Land, spotted the actor’s headshot when he was searching for a newcomer to play Manny, who climbs the industry ladder from lackey to studio executive. Along the way, he also becomes personal assistant to the hell-raising screen idol Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt, and tries to save Nellie from herself.
Calva began auditioning in 2019. “Then during the pandemic, I didn’t hear from Damien for a few months,” he says. “I thought: ‘OK, he cast someone else.’” When the film-maker got back in touch, he asked Calva to send more videos of himself performing scenes from the script, and to brush up on his patchy English. Finally, he was flown to LA for a chemistry reading with Robbie. “I owe this role to Margot because something happened between me and her. That day in Damien’s back yard, I reached a whole new level. Like a video game, you know?”
‘She is going to go in the books of history’ … Calva with Margot Robbie in Babylon. Photograph: Scott Garfield/AP
Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerley, also rescued the poor lost lamb during his early days on set. “Margot saw that I was going back to my hotel alone each night after shooting. She realised I was in a lonely place so she invited me to live with her and Tom. We cooked, played cards, went to the beach. I met her friends.” He is practically swooning. “She is a true artist. She is able to be so vulnerable and then so, like …” He searches for the right word, then starts growling: “Grrrr! Big! Scary! She is going to go in the books of history.”
The poignancy of Calva’s performance is informed by the similarities between him and his character. Before drifting into acting, he studied screenwriting in Mexico City, then helped on any set that would have him. In 2015, he bagged the lead role in I Promise You Anarchy, an indie feature where he and his childhood amigo Eduardo Eliseo Martinez play gay skateboarders embroiled in a blood-donor racket, of all things.
Wherever he looked, there were parallels between him and Manny. “One day he is cleaning up elephant shit, the next he’s with Jack. As for me, I was living in Mexico City and then I’m having dinner with Brad Pitt.” Or flying on a private jet with Pitt, Robbie and Jean Smart, who plays a gossip columnist in the movie. “Everyone realised it was my first time on a private jet, so they were all talking about their first times. It was like when you compare your first time getting drunk.” Where actor and character differ is in their experiences as Mexicans in Hollywood. Calva insists he has never curbed or compromised his identity, whereas Manny disavows his full name (Manuel) and claims to have been born in Madrid. “He starts losing his soul. He corrupts himself to the point where he lies about who he is.”
Babylon’s orgy sequence, which features a cream-spurting pogo-stick phallus and a spot of watersports, has earned the film an 18 certificate here and an R rating in the US. Do parties like this still happen in Hollywood? “Ah, unfortunately not,” he grins. “Maybe I haven’t been here long enough. But I tell you, shooting the party scene was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. It went on for two weeks. No windows, so I never knew what time of day it was. I thought for the rest of my life I would be chasing that chicken.” This is no euphemism: he really does chase a chicken. But then animals figure strongly in Babylon – Manny is defecated on by an elephant, menaced by an alligator, and watches a man eating a live rat. The overall impression is rather as if Noah’s ark had run aground at Stringfellows.
With Brad Pitt in Babylon. Photograph: Scott Garfield/AP
When we speak, Babylon has not yet been released in the US. But it is already clear that it will be divisive, with early critical reactions ranging from “delightfully delicious” to “truly monstrous”. (The film-maker Paul Schrader later calls it “misconceived” and questions its historical veracity, though he also adds “imaginative, daring and fearless” to its list of qualities.) Even these conflicted responses can’t harsh Calva’s mellow. “My life feels like a movie,” he says. “For the first time, I prefer to be awake rather than sleeping.”
It isn’t until I listen back to the recording of our conversation that it strikes me how sad a sentiment that is. When we catch up by phone a month later, I ask him about his remark. Was life before Babylon so unhappy that he really didn’t want to leave his bed?
“I’ve always been honest with my family so they know I deal with depression sometimes,” he says. “There are moments in life when you want to sleep because of what’s going on inside your head. Since Babylon, I want every day to be 48 hours long because I’m enjoying it so much. Maybe it will be like this for ever or it will just be a moment, but anything that happens from now on I’m going to try to enjoy.” It’s for that reason, he says, that he didn’t make any wishes or resolutions at the start of the new year. “Most of my wishes already came true.”
Babylon is released in the UK on 20 January | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/21/tom-clancy-rainbow-six-siege-review-multiplayer-microtransactions | Games | 2015-12-21T12:36:08.000Z | Rich Stanton | Rainbow Six: Siege review – a serious contender, hamstrung by microtransactions | Death is a contradiction in the modern competitive shooter. Call of Duty and Battlefront, the big mainstream titles, are all about empowering the player and making them feel like a one-man army – easy enough in single-player, if your explosions are big enough, but much harder in multiplayer. And so dying becomes an inconvenience, with near-instant respawns alongside constant experience points for common in-game actions. Even if someone plays badly, goes the reasoning, it should still be rewarding.
You won’t find such sunshine and lollipops in the Rainbow Six: Siege. The earlier entries in this Tom Clancy-branded series were popular for their unforgiving, simulation-heavy approach to virtual combat, and when later titles attempted to make this more accessible, they predictably flailed (with the exception of the excellent R6: Vegas). Siege is not just a return to form, but a return to first principles – and it’s not aiming at Call of Duty, but at Counter-Strike.
To this end Siege has minimal single-player content – 10 scenario missions, set across the 10 multiplayer maps, which introduce mechanics like breaching. This is more of a training mode than anything, with the only long-term option for solo players being the Terrorist Hunt mode – which allows you to choose a map and difficulty level, then clear out AI terrorists. This streamlining actually feels like a positive, because it shows how focused Siege is on delivering a special multiplayer experience. And does it ever.
The most striking aspect of Siege is its buildings: each level is constructed around one or more structures, which have to be assaulted by an attacking team and held by the defenders. In Siege, the attacking operators can rappel up and down the building, enter through windows or certain walls, and once inside even blow through the floors. They can hang upside down, smash a hole through a boarded-up window and shoot from that position. If attackers are rushing past the wall next to you, providing it’s not reinforced, you can give them the surprise of their soon-to-be-over lives by unloading through it.
Such flexibility of approach flows out of the destruction system at the core of Siege’s gunplay. Boarded-up windows and doors can be destroyed by gunfire, or melee attacks, and bullets will go through all manner of surfaces – wood, glass and certain types of wall. In addition to this, breach charges can be used to blow out windows or non-reinforced walls. The number of ways a given position can be approached is enormous.
This makes Siege a game where the defending team has an obvious advantage – the enemy must come to them – but the attackers can choose how and when to go about it. Engagements are fast and brutal, with one headshot or a few body shots securing the kill, and so the key skill is knowing where the enemy is rather than twitch aiming. Matches take place over up to five rounds, with the teams switching roles, and death means you sit out the rest of that round – gung-ho stuff, as new players learn, has no place whatsoever.
This is reflected in the controls and movement. In Siege, the characters don’t hop around like other games, or appear to glide while running, but move efficiently and with a deliberate weight – even something like bringing up your scope takes a second, rather than being an insta-switch. And they don’t run along the tops of walls, bunny-hop, or perform flying dives into a firing position – not that any of these things are necessarily bad, but the more realistic approach of Siege fits perfectly. Minor movements really matter: while aiming, you can lean to either side to acquire sightlines while minimising exposure, a tiny edge that provides innumerable kills.
Fear and camping
Tension – and release … Rainbow Six: Siege. Photograph: AP
In essence the controls and the style of Siege make a virtue of something that many FPS players hate – camping, which is to say hiding in one spot and waiting for other players to come to you. This blends with the cluttered interiors and broken-up sightlines, but most of all the exceptional sound design. The greatest asset a defender has is often their sense of hearing, with footsteps and even slight movements audible from every direction – including above and below. You can hear kit being deployed, drones running around and the distant splintering of a wooden barricade. Before you ever see the operators, you know they’re coming.
This flips the nature of camping by making it scary (as well as allowing for misdirection), and Siege isn’t done yet. One of its neatest touches is a brief period at the start of each round where the defenders dig-in to their position by reinforcing walls, setting up booby traps and picking their hidey-holes – while the attackers pilot small tube-shaped drones around the level and try to find them. In each round the terrorists will have to stay near to the objective – a hostage, a bomb, or some hazardous material – and so finding it means the attackers know exactly where to focus the assault. The drones are a delight to control with smooth handling and neat quirks (like looking up when jumping for a height boost). They’re effectively a minigame in themselves, not least because terrorists can shoot them.
Siege’s gadgets and unlock structure is built around the operators. Each is distinguished by their own tool, some of which are one-use heavy-hitting weapons and some of which dictate the whole playing style. The attacker Ash, for example, can fire two wall-breaching charges and her kit is built around shock-and-awe entrances. Blitz, on the other hand, has a big riot shield that can “flash” enemies and take enormous punishment – but he’s slow and has to expose his head to aim his pistol (rather than hip-firing it). The difference in how you approach a given situation as a particular attacker is enormous, and the defenders are equally bespoke – some set traps, one focuses on jamming drones, one has a mounted gun, one gives out armour and so on.
The defenders have limits on how many fortifications and traps they can set, and ditto for the attackers’ gadgets – meaning that as you get better at the game, so too does the use scale. Bad defenders will place gear willy-nilly, while more experienced teams will cover common approach routes such that – even if it doesn’t take out the attacking team – you slow them down and know where the assault’s coming from.
Such anticipation is what makes Siege a special game. So much tension is created by the sound design and cramped environments that the moment where two teams clash is always a genuine thrill – a test of nerves as much as a test of aim.
The hostage scenario is the most interesting way to play Rainbow Six: Siege Photograph: AP
Hostage scenario is the most interesting game type, because in that kind of situation stray fire can kill the hostage easily – one popular attacker has a cluster bomb, and it’s always a joy to see him picked for these. Another part of Siege’s charm is you can be blown to smithereens by a boatload of explosives, and win because the hostage died too. The attackers also have to extract the hostage from the building, leading them by the hand, which is a great last chance moment for any surviving defenders. Next to this the bomb defusal and control modes, which both boil down to holding an area, feel more expected. All deliver great matches, however, because 90% of the time Siege boils down to one of the teams being wiped out.
This is not a game where players run at each other, but a tactical shooter built around the element of surprise. The scenario means that at some point attack must confront defence, but the possible vectors of approach and different gadgets let either team spring surprises. The destruction technology is no mere gimmick, but used to give Siege’s levels a dynamism that contrasts sharply with the ‘static’ maps of Counter-Strike.
Sadly, Siege has a few problems, and the biggest might be publisher Ubisoft itself. Despite retailing as a full-price game, Siege contains microtransactions which can speed up the levelling process and unlock cosmetic items, which on top of the ‘season pass’ (for future DLC) feels more than a little mean. Counter-Strike GO looms large in the background of much of what Siege does, and that game supports a miniature economy of skins and other items – but also built a following for a dozen years over several entries before this. Ubisoft has actively harmed this game’s chances of success by pushing such stuff when what it should be focusing on is building a player base. The recent “free” weekend on PC may be a sign of things to come and, if so, how convenient that a free-to-play business model will fit this economy so well.
On top of this, Siege incorporates Uplay, Ubisoft’s hopeless Steam competitor, which must be installed and running whenever the game is – and has to be used, most unforgivably, for the glitchy party system. As if things couldn’t get worse, the matchmaking is often slow and in Casual matches – which you have to play a lot of before the Ranked playlists – there are frequent drop-outs during matches. A recent patch made matters worse, introducing several minor but irritating glitches as it fixed some old ones. This year has already seen Evolve, a promising competitive shooter that didn’t build a community because it was widely seen as price-gouging consumers. It would be a crying shame if the same fate awaits Siege, but you can’t say it wasn’t warned.
The pity is that underneath everything is is one of the best games Ubisoft has made in years, and a spectacular return to form for Rainbow Six. This is a shooter with consequences – one where a bad angle or a predictable position kills you long before the bullet lands, and where death is everything rather than an inconvenience. Counter-Strike remains the king of the competitive FPS but, with a little love and better business decisions, Rainbow Six: Siege may be a serious contender.
Ubisoft; PC (version tested)/PS4/Xbox One; £26 (PC)/£40 (console); Pegi rating: 18+ | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/26/toxic-culture-of-disbelief-persists-at-top-of-post-office-mps-told-horizon | UK news | 2024-02-26T19:39:36.000Z | Ben Quinn | ‘Toxic culture of disbelief’ persists at top of Post Office, MPs told | Newly published documents show that a “toxic culture of disbelief” persists at the top of the Post Office when it comes to wronged post office operators, MPs have been told.
Post Office board members complained of being “tired and constantly distracted by historical issues, short-term crisis management and funding issues”, minutes of one of their meetings last year show.
They were among documents released by the business select committee before an appearance on Tuesday by the former Post Office chair Henry Staunton, who is engaged in a war of words with the cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch over his claims that the government wanted to stall payouts to victims of the Horizon scandal.
Liam Byrne, the chair of the committee, told parliament on Monday that the truth was that redress for post office operators was too slow and offers were too low, as he and other MPs heaped pressure on the government to remove the Post Office from the compensation scheme.
Other evidence cited by Byrne as evidence of a toxic culture at the post office board includes a note from Staunton, shared with the committee, in which the then Post Office chair claimed a view persisted in the organisation that post office operators who had not come forward to be exonerated were “guilty as charged”.
“It is a view deep in the culture of the organisation [including] at board level) that post masters are not to be trusted,” the note read.
Byrne called on the Post Office minister, Kevin Hollinrake, to ensure that the Post Office was removed from every one of the compensation schemes “and a hardwired instruction to deliver with a fixed legally binding timetable is written on to the face of the bill”.
Hollinrake denied that compensation payments were being made too slowly and argued that “any scheme will not be 100% perfect” and that figures indicated a good take-up of compensation offers.
In a statement to MPs, he said legislation to overturn Horizon-related convictions en masse was expected to be introduced as soon as next month and he had instructed his department to ensure that its first offers of compensation were full and fair.
“It is early days, but the numbers suggest that we are achieving that. Over 70% of our initial offers are accepted by postmasters,” Hollinrake said. He said the Horizon compensation advisory board had met last Thursday and “strongly supported” the government’s approach.
In an earlier written statement, he announced further details of the planned legislation. As well as requirements relating to people eligible for exoneration under the legislation, Hollinrake said those affected would have to sign a statement to the effect that they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted before they could receive financial redress.
If they were subsequently found to have signed the statement falsely, he said, they “may be guilty of fraud”.
A member of the advisory board, the Labour MP Kevan Jones, raised concern about the plight of post office operators convicted over losses involving another IT system, Capture, which preceded the Horizon system.
“Those individuals need to be included in any overturned convictions and also to get compensation. The evidence for them I am slowly getting out of the Post Office and individual cases and it comes back to the point about the role of the Post Office,” he said. “That toxic culture is still there and until they are taken out of this process altogether and forced to regurgitate the information there, nothing will change.”
MPs criticised a letter from the Post Office to ministers last month in which it said it would stand by the prosecution of more than half of the post office operators targeted during the Horizon scandal.
Hollinrake said he was aware of the letter from the Post Office CEO: “it was his choice to write that letter. I think today’s statement and Thursday’s statements shows that has had no influence on us. We think it’s the right thing to do.”
The shadow business minister, Rushanara Ali, asked Hollinrake to clarify why convictions prosecuted by the Department for Work and Pensions – as opposed to the larger number pursued by the Post Office itself – were excluded from the legislation.
Hollinrake said there was a different standard of evidence, because DWP cases drew on material including surveillance of suspects and witness statements rather than the flawed Horizon system, and he noted that those convicted could still appeal in the courts. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business-to-business/2018/mar/29/i-work-therefore-i-am-why-businesses-are-hiring-philosophers | Business to business | 2018-03-29T06:30:07.000Z | Louise Tickle | I work therefore I am: why businesses are hiring philosophers | Who should a business leader turn to in times of crisis? You might presume a lawyer or a coach – but how about a philosopher?
Busy executives in Silicon Valley and beyond are enlisting the services of “practical philosophers” to help them work through difficult decisions.
“This is a generation of pioneering philosophers, if you like, entrepreneurial philosophers,” says Prof Lou Marinoff, who has been advocating philosophy with businesses since 2000, and has worked with organisations such as the World Economic Forum in Geneva and Davos and the Comisión Federal de Electricidad in Mexico.
He doesn’t offer solutions; he asks questions that help the client gain fresh perspectives and insight. There’s a focus on critical thinking and examining values to explore what’s right and fair.
“These are very intelligent people, who are also overworked, more so than most of us. And they don’t have enough time to reflect. A lot of what we do is to create reflective space,” says Marinoff, professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author of Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems. Marinoff is also president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which has trained 400 philosophers to practise this kind of service.
In the UK, Joe Garner, chief executive of building society Nationwide, formerly of BT Openreach and HSBC, has worked over a number of years with Prof Roger Steare, philosopher in residence at Cass Business School and author of the book Ethicability. When Garner spoke to the New City Agenda group in Westminster last October about decision-making, he insisted that values – the mutual’s social conscience – must be part of the process. “It’s about logic, it’s about the law, but it’s also about love.”
Steare has also consulted for large multinationals, including BP following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. One can quite see why big corporates – whose failings have wreaked devastation – might want to interrogate their principles.
But what use, in truth, is a philosopher – whose focus is on ethics – to a businessperson or entrepreneur, whose overriding purpose is to make a profit?
“There’s an assumption there that profits and philosophy are incompatible,” says Steare. “The tension is not between philosophy and profit, but between deep wisdom and short-term profit maximisation, instead of long-term sustainable value creation.”
In sectors such as technology, where businesses can grow at breakneck speed, it’s perhaps a way of holding leaders to account: are their founding principles holding fast, or being subsumed by a race towards profit at any cost? A philosopher can “direct a business toward innovation that combines a good purpose and a real business opportunity”, says Christian Vögtlin, associate professor in corporate social responsibility at Audencia Business School in France. “Philosophical thinking can also guide technology [entrepreneurs] to define boundaries; this can range from questions about privacy rights to teaching virtual intelligence systems about humanistic values,” he adds.
Marinoff works with senior leadership teams and managers, as well as CEOs. This might take the form of creating a mission statement, implementing a code of ethics in an organisation or working on corporate responsibility.
But why would a company choose a philosopher over another type of business coach?
A philosopher can nudge and question, take leaders on uncomfortable journeys, even be a disruptive force – and they should, suggests US-based Andrew Taggart, who consults for organisations in Silicon Valley on how to use philosophy in a practical context.
“Doing philosophy as a way of life is inherently challenging and can, at times, be deeply puzzling,” he says. “I see it as my responsibility to push you to think harder and much more clearly about yourself and the world.”
In the midst of business pressures, are you someone who will pursue the truth, even if it means discovering painful things about yourself? A tough question, especially when shareholders and HMRC are banging on the door for your quarterly accounts.
Short-term financial accounting requirements, are, says Steare, one of the underlying problems facing leaders who wish to be ethical, because what benefits people and the planet in the long term is not usually going to be what’s required to turn a profit in the short term.
Bringing a philosopher on board is not for the faint-hearted: the practical application of philosophical thinking, Taggart explains, demands that business leaders interrogate the role played by their product or service in the global scheme of things, “not only to see whether something makes sense in the marketplace, but also to see whether its existence is actually justified”.
Practical philosophers tend to be employed as consultants at the moment, and it’s still quite niche, but Marinoff says he would love to see corporates employ their own in-house “chief philosophy officer”, or “philosopher in residence”.
“We’re not that expensive compared to other professionals,” he laughs. “There are composers in residence, poets in residence and artists in residence – why not a philosopher in residence?” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/12/the-deadly-efficiency-of-isis-and-how-it-grew-on-the-global-stage | World news | 2016-03-11T21:31:25.000Z | David Kilcullen | The deadly efficiency of Isis and how it grew on the global stage | David Kilcullen | During 2014-15 Isis was building a three-level structure: a state-like core entity in Syria-Iraq, external territories in other countries, and an ad hoc global network of supporters and sympathisers, which I began calling the “Isis Internationale.”
Isis Overseas Territories, 2015
By mid-2015, Isis had been established in separate provinces in Libya, as well as in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt’s Sinai desert, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan–Pakistan (Khorasan), Nigeria, and the Caucasus.
There were also numerous Isis wilayat within the core Isis territory in Syria–Iraq, acting as administrative subdivisions of the Islamic State.
Despite a superficial similarity to the Al Qaida (AQ) “franchises” that still existed in some of the same areas, Isis wilayat were different in concept and purpose.
AQ’s franchises were guerrilla or terror groups operating in their own way, in their own region, furthering their own interests but as part of a global insurgent strategy – a confederation of independent groups, united not by a parent political entity, but by the informal AQ “aggregation” model that disaggregation was designed to destroy.
By contrast, Isis wilayat were more like overseas provinces of an empire, or colonial possessions of a nation state, pursuing the parent state’s interest even at the expense of their own agenda. The term wilayat (meaning governorate, province, or authority) was used under the Ottoman Empire and older caliphates to describe provinces, each with a governor (wali) exercising day-today authority under the suzerainty of the caliph.
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This isn’t the only way the word can be used – wilayat also means “authority” in Shi’ism and Sufism, for example – but this is the sense in which Isis understands it. Isis wilayat were formal territorial, legal and political entities within the caliphate, with defined borders and populations, administered by governors appointed or approved by Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, governing in line with Isis policy, and conducting operations within a well defined set of strategic guidelines.
As of late 2015, the wilayat also acted as catchment areas for flows of fighters trying to join Isis but unable to make it all the way to Syria or Iraq, as rally points for recruits wanting to bring Isis to their own countries, or for fighters returning from Syria-Iraq. Most importantly, they were bridgeheads-in-depth – outposts behind enemy lines that distracted Isis adversaries from the main fight in Syria-Iraq, diverted resources that might otherwise have been used against the caliphate, and mounted attacks to support Isis offensives or relieve pressure on its defences.
The wilayat could also serve as points of attraction for disillusioned members of rival groups. This may have been what happened in the worst Isis inspired attack on Western civilians to occur in the first half of 2015 – the massacre at Sousse, in Tunisia.
Since the fall of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s regime at the very outset of the Arab Spring, Tunisia had made huge progress toward democracy, making it a bright spot among the failures of the wider regional protest movements. But there were danger signs: secular democrats weren’t the only ones opposed to Ben Ali.
Islamic state fighters dismantling the border between Syria and Iraq in 2014. Photograph: Medyan Dairieh/Zuma Press/Corbis
As in the other Arab Spring uprisings, Salafi-jihadists had a very different idea of post-revolutionary Tunisia from that of the people power movements. They organised Ansar al-Sharia (AS, “supporters of Islamic law”) in April 2011, a loose movement of like-minded groups with chapters in Yemen, Mali, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Syria, Egypt and Libya.
AS Tunisia (AST) focused on propaganda to society at large, as well as vigilantism against individuals whom the group saw as transgressing Islamic norms.
In May 2012, AST held a major rally in the town of Kairouan, calling for the Islamisation of all aspects of Tunisian society. Over the next year, the group ratcheted up the violence – something its leaders (including its founder, Seifallah Ben Hassine) could get away with at first, since they practiced a form of leaderless resistance that let them avoid responsibility for supporters’ actions.
But this pose – unconvincing from the outset – was impossible to sustain. In September 2012, Ben Hassine led a mob that stormed the US Embassy in Tunis, in a riot that left four dead and forty-six injured. The pretext was a YouTube video, “The Innocence of Muslims”, which AS branches exploited to incite similar protests in Egypt, Sudan, Yemen and India, using social media to manipulate public outrage and trigger deadly riots.
These also provided background cover for Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and AS Libya’s pre-planned assault on the US facility in Benghazi. Indeed, the close collaboration (and overlapping networks) between AS in Tunisia and Libya mean that to fully understand one we need to briefly explore the other as well. The Benghazi attacks were an example of the broader phenomenon I mentioned earlier, where larger numbers of self-radicalised attacks camouflaged more serious, premeditated terrorist plots.
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Initial field reporting (subsequently very controversial) seems to have suggested that a spontaneous protest in Benghazi had spiralled into lethal violence; later reports showed there was never a spontaneous demonstration in Benghazi and that the incident was a preplanned AQIM/Ansar al-Sharia Libya attack.
As of late 2015, questions remained about when policy-makers in Washington realised Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and why (or whether) they avoided acknowledging that fact.
It’s certainly possible that administration spin linking the attack to the YouTube video – which continued, based on emails released in October 2015, for at least five days after Secretary Clinton knew that “two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al-Queda-like [sic] group” – was part of an operational cover for the existence of a then-unacknowledged CIA facility in Benghazi (where two of the Americans lost in the attack were killed).
Critics of the administration, however, saw the YouTube story as part of a broader attempt to maintain the narrative of reduced terrorism threat after bin Laden’s death. Benghazi occurred only two months out from a closely fought election in which reducing terrorism and ending the nation’s wars were key administration talking points, and in which Libya (and Secretary Clinton’s key role in it) was put forward as a foreign policy achievement.
In any case, my own US government service suggested to me that error was at least as likely an explanation as malice. On balance, US Government reaction to Benghazi was probably not (or not only) an effect of the ideological bent of particular policy-makers – it was also an artefact of the new environment where larger numbers of spontaneous, self-radicalised attackers raised the background clutter, letting more serious adversaries (AQIM and AS Libya) fly under the radar.
This was yet another failure of disaggregation: the strategy had reduced the size of attacks, but the atomised threat made it extraordinarily hard to predict or track smaller attacks, and – big or small – each plot required roughly the same intelligence effort, so that the proliferation of smaller plots made it more likely that overstretched intelligence services would miss the big ones when they came along.
Screengrab taken from the Site Intelligence Group website purporting to show the Tunisian hotel gunman Seifeddine Rezgui. Photograph: Site Intelligence Group/PA
To my mind this (at least as much as ideological bias or political ass-covering) explains Benghazi. Back in Tunisia, a few months after Benghazi, AST assassinated two politicians in February and July 2013. The Tunisian government banned the group and launched a crackdown, scattering AST operatives – some to Libya to train with Ansar al-Sharia there, others to Isis in Syria. This deepened links between AST and Isis: even as the United States, UK, UAE and UN designated AST a terrorist organisation, its leaders travelled to Syria and pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, well before his proclamation of the caliphate.
When the caliphate was announced in July 2014, AST spokesman Seifeddine Rais immediately offered bayat to Baghdadi. AST – allied to Isis but not yet a wilayat –then launched a campaign of attacks on tourists and public places. The first major attack was on 18 March 2015, when three gunmen stormed the Bardo Museum in Tunis, killing twenty-two (including seventeen Western tourists) and injuring fifty.
Isis claimed the attack, though its involvement remains unproven. The attack used tactics – mobile active shooter, urban siege, diversionary assault, supporting propaganda on social media – like those seen in Paris and Copenhagen. It also signalled the formation of an Isis wilayat in Tunisia: after the attack, an organisation calling itself “soldiers of the Caliphate in Africa” posted images of weapons and ammunition on Twitter, under a tourism hashtag (#IWillComeToTunisiaThisSummer), as if to say “we’ll be waiting for you.”
The group linked Tunisia to the US-led air campaign against Isis: “To the Christians planning their summer vacations in Tunisia, we cant accept u in our land while your jets keep killing our Muslim Brothers in Iraq & Sham. But if u insist on coming then beware because we are planning for u something that will make you forget #Bardoattack.”
In early May 2015, analysts warned that Isis was setting up a Tunisian province – Wilayat al-Ifriqiya – noting that this would escalate the competition between Isis and AQ (whose regional affiliate, AQIM, was already active in Tunisia) and could lead to increased violence as each group sought to outdo the other.
The Isis papers: a masterplan for consolidating power
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Then Seifallah Ben Hassine was killed in a US airstrike in Libya intended for Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the AQIM leader, who’d been flirting with switching allegiance to Isis. Two weeks after Ben Hassine’s death, on Friday 26 June, Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi – a Tunisian educated in the AST stronghold of Kairouan and trained in Libya – attacked the el-Kantaoui beach resort near Sousse, on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast.
Disguised as a tourist, Rezgui infiltrated the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, concealing an AK-47 in a beach umbrella.14 After socialising at the bar, he pulled out the weapon and methodically swept the beachfront, pool and bar area, shooting hotel patrons and calmly reloading three times. He was killed by police, but not before murdering thirty-eight people (thirty of whom were British tourists) and wounding thirty-nine.
Sousse was the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Tunisian history. It brought Isis huge gain for tiny input – at a cost of one attacker, one rifle and four magazines of ammunition, Isis had established itself in Tunisia, out-competed its rival AQIM, and retaliated against a country (Britain) that was attacking it in Iraq.
The low-cost, high-impact method exploited electronic connectivity to achieve a bang-for-the-buck far in excess of either traditional expeditionary terrorism or the evolved guerrilla terrorism of the post-9/11 era. And Sousse was only one of three Isis attacks that day, which included a beheading and bombing at a US-owned factory near Lyon in France, and a suicide bombing at a Shi’a mosque in Kuwait that killed twenty-seven and wounded 227. Isis claimed all three incidents, while supporters crowed about the triple attacks – which they dubbed “Black Friday” – on social media.
Coming three days after Isis spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani had called for worldwide attacks during Ramadan, Black Friday seemed to signal an expansion of Isis reach, and the extension of its operations and propaganda to the global stage.
Blood Year
What was impressive was not that Isis could coordinate simultaneous attacks in multiple countries – indeed, there’s no evidence that the attacks were formally synchronised or coordinated in that way. Rather, the attacks showed that Isis had perfected leaderless resistance, remote radicalisation and guerrilla-style terrorism to the point where a central organisation no longer even needed to coordinate such attacks: the caliphate spokesman could simply issue a public call, and the Internationale and the wilayat structure would act without further direction.
By September, Isis had active provinces in eleven countries (the wilayat level of its three-tier structure) and had inspired or directed (via the Internationale) seventy-nine successful or attempted terrorist attacks, in twenty-six countries, since the declaration of the caliphate.
But it was at the third, central tier of its structure, and in just three of these countries – Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – that Isis would transform the terms of the conflict in 2015.
This is an edited extract of Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror by David Kilcullen (Black Inc.). | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/05/grammys-2024-who-was-snubbed | Music | 2024-02-05T13:24:34.000Z | Guardian community team | Tell us: who was snubbed at the 2024 Grammys? | Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, SZA and Miley Cyrus won the major awards at the Grammys this year with Swift making history as the first artist to win album of the year for the fourth time.
Now the winners have been announced – but were the winners deserving? We would like to hear which artist missed out in their category and why you think this was unjust.
This Community callout closed on 16 February 2024.
You can see the article that included respondents to this callout here.
You can contribute to open Community callouts here or Share a story here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/20/opera-defund-top-companies-funds-politics-artists | Opinion | 2023-02-20T08:00:32.000Z | Charlotte Higgins | If we defund opera saying it is for toffs, then only the toffs will go. Where’s the sense in that? | Charlotte Higgins | If you happen to travel through Paris on the Métro, as I did recently, you’ll see huge, distinctive posters for this year’s Aix-en-Provence opera festival flash past. Sandwiched round “Stravinsky – Ballets Russes”, you’ll see the names of two British composers, George Benjamin and Philip Venables, writ large and proud – doubtless in the expectation that Parisian commuters will be sufficiently intrigued to plan a summer trip to the opposite end of the country to see their new operas.
Both premieres are actually coproductions, with the Royal Opera House and Manchester international festival respectively, so they will wend their way to the UK in due course. But it is hard to imagine they’ll get quite as much fanfare on British mass transportation systems.
Benjamin himself has just won the Siemens prize, which is a major award given annually to a prominent figure in classical music. Some of the field’s greatest names – Ligeti, Stockhausen, Abbado – have won it over the past 50 years. It is worth €250,000 (£220,000), compared with £50,000 for the Booker and £40,000 for the Turner prize. Would you know about this accolade from reading the British press? You would not. Still, it so happens that the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung thinks Benjamin compelling enough to have run a piece, as does German broadcaster NDR.
A performance of Handel’s Alcina at Glyndebourne in 2022. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Have you heard the story about the choreographer smearing a critic’s face with dog faeces? If curious, you might have Googled the theatre in whose foyer this nasty act took place: Hanover state opera house. Leaving aside the incident itself – which resulted in the perpetrator being fired – consider that in a city roughly the size of Bristol or Sheffield, there is an opera house employing a permanent ensemble of 30 singers, along with another 30 dancers in its resident ballet company. Pop in and see a production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, if you like.
I am used to the massive disparity in standing of opera, in particular, and classical music, in general, between the UK and our neighbours. But the sight of Venables’ and Benjamin’s names pasted to the walls of the Paris Métro, just at a time when England seems to be doing its best to dismantle what little it comparatively has of operatic infrastructure, struck me peculiarly painfully.
Since November, when Arts Council England (ACE) announced it was removing its regular funding from English National Opera to make it a smaller operation based somewhere outside the capital, Glyndebourne Opera has also, in the face of a 50% cut to its grant, announced it is cancelling its annual tour – a remarkable irony given that hitherto it has been taking its excellent-quality work to venues only outside London.
The company has been touring since 1968; no longer. Farewell, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Norwich and Canterbury. Farewell, what had been an extraordinary nursery of talent, in which brilliant young singers and conductors cut their teeth and developed their careers. Welsh National Opera, too, has had a 35% cut to its ACE grant. It has already announced the end of touring to Liverpool, and two other venues hang in the balance.
Companies can only take so much of this: one opera boss gloomily told me they now feared they were in a “downward spiral”. The young British tenor starring in a new production of Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, David Butt Philip, said in an interview last week that his best advice to young British classical musicians was to move out of the UK as fast as they could. On Saturday, I went to a devastatingly brilliant production of Wagner’s Rhinegold at ENO, so powerful it left me speechless and in tears. But in the wake of the funding announcement the company’s full Ring Cycle, barring miracles, is cancelled, and also at the Metropolitan Opera, the cycle’s co-producer.
English National Opera’s production of The Rhinegold at the London Coliseum, February 2023. Photograph: Jane Hobson/Rex/Shutterstock
No one seems to think this little operatic revolution is going well. Nadine Dorries, whose instruction as culture secretary to ACE to remove resources from London resulted in the body cutting ENO, has (conveniently) washed her hands of the matter, calling ACE’s decision shocking, lazy and politically motivated. ENO has also managed to annoy the mayor of Greater Manchester, a region early on mooted as a possible new home. “If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all,” said Andy Burnham. (An understandable reaction – though, since ENO has had this dumped on it from above, it is not surprising it shouldn’t seem wildly keen.) Maybe people in Stoke or Blackpool or other places that have seen their arts funding increase as a result of the government’s levelling-up agenda are secretly rubbing their hands gleefully at the thought of carpenters or flautists or lighting technicians or wardrobe specialists working in opera losing their jobs. But I suspect not.
At the Arts Council, there’s an impatience with all the criticism: the old operatic touring model wasn’t working, the big old theatres weren’t filling, it argues. (Paradoxically, it is now commissioning an analysis of opera and music theatre, which you might have thought would precede rather than follow a series of grave decisions.) And of course its hand was forced, in that Dorries insisted that £24m of arts funding should be taken out of London. Someone had to take the hit and ENO was the low-hanging fruit, according to this logic.
Depriving London’s theatres of funds is not ‘levelling up’ – it shortchanges us all
Michael Billington
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ACE, in its mysterious recent guise not as a “funder” but as a “development agency”, seems to have decided that the Dorries intervention could be used to do some much needed breaking of eggs – shaking up the opera sector and moving it away from the thing that happens with orchestras in big theatres. Which after all is embarrassing, unwieldy and expensive, and hopelessly elitist – sentiments unvoiced, but that always sit in the air when discussing opera in Britain. The energy in opera, the council argues, is with the smaller, nimbler companies making work in found spaces: “opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet”, as the chief executive of ACE, Darren Henley put it.
But, however brilliant the reimaginings of opera in smaller or found spaces, the thing that happens with orchestras in theatres is the art form. The form as artists have conceived it, all the way from Handel and Mozart to George Benjamin – notwithstanding a wonderful, and growing, smaller-scale repertoire.
Of course, if you starve something, run it down constantly, gradually reduce the provision of it so that few can afford it, it becomes “elitist”: it’s a closed loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself. It is absolutely extrinsic to the art form, and precisely the result of neglect, and underfunding, and starving of resources, and shame, and embarrassment, and lack of care.
Which is what we’ve been drifting towards in Britain for years – and is how you end up with the names of great British operatic creators, while we still have them, plastered proudly over the Paris Métro, but barely recognised here.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/02/big-day-for-uk-seas-as-bottom-trawling-ban-in-four-protected-areas-proposed | Environment | 2021-02-02T13:03:58.000Z | Karen McVeigh | ‘Big day for UK seas’ as bottom trawling ban in four protected areas proposed | Government proposals to ban destructive bottom trawling fishing in the Dogger Bank, announced on Monday, marked a “really big day” for Britain’s seas, conservationists said.
Under proposed bylaws put out for consultation by Britain’s Marine Management Organisation (MMO), bottom trawling, which involves weighted nets being dragged over the sea bed, would be prohibited in the Dogger Bank special conservation area, alongside three other English marine protected areas (MPAs). There are 40 offshore MPAs in England and 76 in the UK.
Conservationists said the move to properly protect an area the size of south Wales would help restore and preserve important habitats. The Dogger Bank MPA, which is 12,300 km2, is a vital North Sea breeding ground for commercial species including cod and whiting as well as sand eels, a food source enjoyed by kittiwakes, puffins and porpoises. But they warned that the proposals, put forward under the Fisheries Act, to give proper protection to just four MPAs would only tackle the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of reversing declines in marine wildlife.
Nearly a quarter of UK territorial waters are covered by MPAs, set up to protect vital ecosystems and species, including harbour porpoises and dolphins. This network of parks is a symbol of the government’s “world leading” target to protect 30% of ocean biodiversity by 2030.
Dogger bank is a breeding ground for species such as sand eels, a popular food source for puffins. Photograph: Capture That - WIldlife/Alamy
But more than 97% of British marine protected areas are being dredged and bottom trawled, according to data shared with the Guardian.
Conservationists, who describe MPAs as “paper parks”, called for a total fishing ban in protected areas. The government argued that, before Brexit, it did not have control over fishing rights.
The environment secretary, George Eustice, said: “Now that we have left the common fisheries policy, we are able to deliver on our commitment to achieve a healthy, thriving and sustainable marine environment.
“The UK has already established an impressive ‘blue belt’ covering 38% of our waters and our Fisheries Act has provided us with additional powers to go further to protect our seas around England. This proposal to introduce bylaws to safeguard four of our precious offshore marine protected areas shows how we are putting these powers into action.”
Revealed: 97% of UK marine protected areas subject to bottom-trawling
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In a statement issued by the MMO, the chief executive, Tom McCormack, said: “This consultation is a big step forward in agreeing measures that will help protect and revive important marine habitats, vital to the unique and vibrant marine life that live within them.”
Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, a specialist in MPAs at the Marine Conservation Society, said: “It is a really big day for Britain’s seas, where bottom trawling has degraded the environment for 100 years. It’s the start of us having a pride in our seas again and it makes my job worthwhile.”
“The Dogger Bank is the size of south Wales, so what’s very exciting is that, at last, we have a conservation measure that will recover something. It’s good for recovery of biodiversity and for resilience.”
Chris Thorne, an oceans campaigner at Greenpeace UK, welcomed the news but said the four MPAs were the “tip of the iceberg” and urged the government to go further.
“We need to see the detail of these proposals, but if the government is indeed considering a total ban on bottom trawling in these four protected areas, then it’s good news,” he said.
It showed the government was prepared to use its new Brexit powers to properly protect our seas, he said, and called for all MPAs to be properly protected.
“If the government chooses to follow this consultation approach for a handful of marine protected areas at a time, it will be many years before the entire network is properly protected. Our oceans can’t wait that long.”
Last September Greenpeace dropped giant boulders from its ship into the Dogger Bank MPA in order to create an exclusion zone for trawlers.
A number of NGOs, including WWF and the Marine Conservation Society, have accused the UK, the Netherlands and Germany of breaching the EU habitats directive by failing to protect Dogger Bank from bottom-impact fishing, while the Blue Marine Foundation mounted a legal challenge to what it claimed was illegal fishing in the area.
Covering an area the size of south Wales, Dogger Bank in the North Sea has been subject to damaging fishing practices for decades. Photograph: Bill Davis/Alamy
Melissa Moore, head of policy UK at Oceana, said: “Government bylaws to ban bottom-towed gear in four marine protected areas are welcome, but they urgently need to introduce bylaws to ban this activity in all MPAs, not just a few.
“We were shocked that [the] government recently issued new licences for UK and EU vessels to continue fishing in UK waters regardless of the impact of bottom-towed fishing gear on marine protected areas, which is contrary to national and international conservation laws and agreements, so there’s a legal as well as scientific imperative for an immediate ban across all MPAs.”
The MMO’s proposed bylaws seek to prohibit the use of bottom-towed fishing gear in all four sites and introduce additional restrictions for static gear in two of the sites. The other MPAs are the Inner Dowsing, Race Bank and North Ridge special area of conservation, off the Lincolnshire and north Norfolk coasts, the South Dorset MPA and the Canyons MPA, off the coast of Cornwall.
The proposal was condemned by the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations (NFFO), which described it as taking a “sledgehammer” to the fishing industry, already suffering from export delays for fish and shellfish post Brexit.
Dale Rodmell, assistant chief executive at the NFFO, said the fishing community had not been warned about the move. He said: “This changes the whole calculus on where it was expected the balance would lie for sustainable fisheries access in meeting site conservation objectives. The proposals amount to a further sellout of fishing. It augurs ominously for other areas and for fishing communities in our increasingly crowded seas.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/16/efforts-to-avoid-grenfell-scale-tragedy-not-taken-seriously-says-ex-mandarin | UK news | 2023-10-16T05:00:33.000Z | Peter Apps | Efforts to avoid ‘Grenfell-scale tragedy’ not taken seriously, says ex-mandarin | Potentially catastrophic building safety risks, including the chance of a collapse causing a “Grenfell-scale tragedy”, are not being properly addressed by the government, a civil servant has warned in a resignation letter seen by the Guardian.
The building safety minister, Lee Rowley, was reminded of the government’s safety duty after his office responded to civil servants’ calls for checks on the collapse risk of buildings by saying one option that should be considered was to “do nothing”.
Leaked correspondence reveals a senior civil servant made a formal submission to Rowley last December that called on him to approve a nationwide programme to investigate crumbling concrete in schools and public buildings, and the safety of ageing social housing blocks built with the same concrete panels that caused the fatal Ronan Point collapse in 1968.
But Rowley sent it back in January for a “substantial rewrite” and his private office told officials to “include the ‘do nothing’ [option]”.
The internal exchange triggered the official’s resignation with a letter warning that civil servants working on policy with “potentially catastrophic life-safety implications” were not being allowed to address them “in a meaningful way”. There were “wide-ranging flaws” in the building safety system, they said.
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) said including the “do nothing” option was “standard practice” in policy development, and that it was untrue that civil servants were not being allowed to address building safety risks or that the system was flawed.
The clash will raise fresh questions about the government’s approach to building safety since the June 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy, in which 72 people died. The failure of previous government ministers to toughen fire regulations before the fire has already been highlighted in the public inquiry.
Eight months after Rowley sent back the officials’ call for structural checks, more than 150 schools were found to have reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) due to a separate programme of investigation led by the Department for Education, leading to last-minute classroom closures which disrupted the start of term for thousands of pupils.
In the January submission, the civil servant also said the department should remind the owners of thousands of homes built from the 1960s onwards using “large panel systems” of the need for structural surveys and, potentially, strengthening works.
Successive governments have failed to ensure this has been done and several blocks have recently been found to be unsafe and demolished, with residents rehoused.
The civil servant resigned on 20 January, telling their seniors in the department: “It is clearly not desirable to have the responsibility [on civil servants] illustrated by the Grenfell inquiry combined with an organisational structure which does not allow for an efficient decision-making process and means of enacting change.”
The submission to Rowley’s office had followed a year’s debate by an expert structural safety working group commissioned by the department.
It had raised concerns about a range of risks including brick-effect cladding panels, which could fall from buildings and injure people below, and flagged that new methods of construction involving lightweight timber and steel buildings could suffer “disproportionate collapse” in fires.
They resolved to ask the department to begin research into large panel system buildings and Raac, which they believed to be the most urgent concerns.
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Rowley’s office summarised the minister’s response by saying: “We have known about this problem for 55 years, we haven’t been able to quantify it, we’re not clear who is responsible for it and now we want to spend a year collecting data on it, but we don’t know what we’re going to do when we get it.”
The email asked civil servants to produce a new submission that explained the department’s “objective” in getting involved and to set out “what meaningful options are available, including ‘do nothing’”.
The civil servant responded: “The department’s objective could be seen as the avoidance of another Grenfell-scale tragedy. We will reassess the options proposed. Particularly with regard to the [large panel systems], the ‘do nothing’ [option] is not one I recommend based on the evidence we have.”
Whitehall sources said the Cabinet Office had warned property leaders about safety alerts on Raac in 2021 and 2022.
A spokesperson for the DLUHC said: “It is standard practice in policy development to understand the impact of a potential action compared with the status quo. Following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the government introduced some of the toughest building safety regulations in the world through its landmark Building Safety Act.
“The act also introduced a new building safety regulator to assess the safety and standards of all buildings, as well as monitor and investigate any potential risks or changes that may affect residents’ safety.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/24/i-curled-up-with-my-sister-and-we-opened-our-stockings-together-one-last-time-the-christmas-present-ill-never-forget | Life and style | 2022-12-24T08:00:27.000Z | Bibi van der Zee | I curled up with my sister and we opened our stockings together one last time – the Christmas present I’ll never forget | We didn’t know until the very last minute whether my sister would be let out of hospital for Christmas.
It was 1991 and we were camping in a house in London that a friend had lent my parents, waiting to find out. Home, in theory, was Rome for my parents, Edinburgh for me – but in practice, a year and a bit into my sister’s leukaemia, home was wherever Ninka was being treated. There had been a brief, sunny period in the summer where she had been in remission. When the cancer came back, Mum just put her into the car and drove her from Italy to the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Now, after other treatments had failed, the hospital was preparing her for a bone-marrow transplant. That meant blasting her with chemo and keeping her in isolation. That’s what I remember, anyway. In my memories, which are not perfectly intact, she was in a kind of tank, like in a science-fiction film. We could still go in to visit her, wearing aprons and gloves, but she was not supposed to leave the tank. We didn’t know it then, but the transplant would only work for a few months before the cancer would come back again, more aggressive than ever, and would take her away from us for good. But we didn’t need to be told this could be her last Christmas. Everyone who has been through this knows the way in which, from the moment you hear the news, you are constantly braced.
We were not the most functional of families most of the time, but before and after her diagnosis at the age of 16, my sister was the thoughtful, kind person who held the rest of us together (although she could also be a proper pain in the arse). I had combined the worst of my parents – bad-tempered, impatient, my mum’s pear shape – while Ninka had inherited Mum’s sweetness and my father’s occasional, wonderful silliness. She had inherited my dad’s height and long legs, too, overtaking me a couple of years earlier. My father openly said she was his favourite, and that seemed fair enough because I preferred her to everyone else too.
Bibi van der Zee’s sister Ninka in hospital
I don’t remember much about the wait to find out whether she’d be let out but I remember the bolt of joy when the doctors, at the absolute last minute, confirmed we could take her home. On Christmas Eve we bundled her up in blankets and wheeled her off the ward. She was all long, skinny arms and legs, tiny duckling tufts of hair left clinging to her skull, pale with nausea – the chemo made her wretchedly sick – but still full of stupid Ninka jokes, still failing to take me anything like as seriously as I was pretty sure I deserved, given that, at 19, I was a year and a half older than her.
She and I had an unbreakable ritual on Christmas mornings, after sharing a bedroom for the first 12 years of our childhood, and this year was no different. We would leave our Christmas stockings at the ends of our beds to be filled, and then get into bed together in the morning and go through them, taking it in turns and opening one gift at a time. Mum (or Santa Claus) wrapped each little thing up in red and green tissue paper – a tiny finger puppet, a packet of Smarties, a pouch of nice felt-tips … always, always a tangerine. Anything big and serious went under the tree for later, but this was just the two of us, snuggled up, toasty warm under our duvet, messing around with bits of tissue and chocolate coins.
And that was my best present ever. I wish I could remember every detail of that Christmas but the memories are vague. We had immutable traditions for every part of the day: buck’s fizz for breakfast, my father pretending not to want to open the presents, and then, finally, the presents and a beautifully decorated table for lunch. We were not in our own home, but Papa was a genius at making a room gezillig – Dutch and candle-lit and cosy. There would probably have been one of our obscure family games or Trivial Pursuit in the afternoon. Christmas was one of the times when we all tried hard to make it work, and that particular year we found our best selves for her.
We only talked once about death – not then, but a few months later. God, Ninka was so magnificent. Thirty years later, I’m awed all over again at her courage: she never complained, never sulked. But when we knew the bone marrow transplant had failed, and her body began to fall apart like a clown car, she tried to joke about it and told me I had to marry someone she liked, someone who ate McDonald’s and wine gums or she’d come back and haunt me. She only let herself have one moment of self-pity, telling me: “I’m too young to die.” That was it.
But clear and golden and absolutely real in my mind is Christmas morning and my sister, tucked up in bed, with the tufts of hair on her head, her long fragile fingers, our great, great love for each other, the warmth of the duvet, the smell of tangerine, the rustle of the paper. The amazing thing is that that memory never ever dims. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jan/30/andy-murray-coach-amelie-mauresmo | Sport | 2015-01-31T00:12:00.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | Andy Murray was brave to employ me as coach, admits Amélie Mauresmo | The women in Andy Murray’s life – his mother Judy, fiancee Kim Sears and coach Amélie Mauresmo – will probably look at Sunday’s final of the Australian Open and think: “Oh, fiddlesticks, it’s the flipping Serb again” ... or some variant.
It was not only that Kim swore so fruitily at Tomas Berdych the other night that provided such juicy copy and the sort of stilted debate that would sound silly even on Downton Abbey. It was that those words, familiar to everyone, could pop from someone so quiet and demure and gleamingly, tooth-perfectly nice.
How dare she not fit her stereotype? And how dare Murray keep bringing his mum to the tennis – not to mention that French woman?
So, by delicious aggregation of circumstance and crazy conflation of various moral dilemmas, Murray, brought up to be polite and considerate to everyone but the poor opponents he regularly tries to grind into the court, is no longer a mere tennis player but the accidental feminist. Overnight he has become the champion of multiple worthy causes. When he steps on to Rod Laver Arena against Novak Djokovic, at least half the crowd will be potential friends for a few hours or so.
Their matches here have swung between the one-sided, 159-minute three-set final in 2011, the 290-minute war over five sets in the semi-final three years ago and the final in 2013, which lasted four sets and 220 minutes. Djokovic won them all, although Murray came desperately close in 2012, which was the best of the three in terms of sustained quality and entertainment.
Judy will watch on television this time, having left for London to prepare the Great Britain Federation Cup team for their tie against Liechtenstein next week. Sears will be courtside (possibly with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth) and Mauresmo will look down on events with all the quiet authority she has shown in the seven months she has been in one of the most interesting jobs in tennis.
On Friday she spoke briefly about that experience. She was visibly touched that Murray made a point of thanking her on court immediately after beating Berdych in what many regard as his best all-round performance since winning Wimbledon in 2013, the last major contribution of her predecessor as coach, Ivan Lendl.
Could there be more polar opposites? Lendl and Mauresmo are former world No1s but he is an unsmiling martinet with a cutting line in sarcasm, she a mentor who chooses her words like a schoolteacher. Mauresmo is calm and controlled and could not be happier about Murray’s reinvigoration after a worryingly long period of struggle.
“I was surprised, actually,” she said of Murray’s public plaudits. “I didn’t expect it all because, between us, [her appointment as his coach] has never been the fuss that was going on around us. It was never an issue, never a talk or a discussion.
“So I was kind of surprised that he did that but also I appreciated the gesture. I think he probably also did it for himself because, again, every time I think he was in press conference since Wimbledon last year, the questions are really questioning me and the good decision he made or not. He probably had enough of that. I’m sure the results. It’s always better to show than to respond vocally. So he’s showing right now.”
It is not entirely accurate to say the media constantly quizzed Murray about the wisdom of having a woman as a coach; he has friends, in print and digital media, who have invariably been supportive. But she is right to say his racket has been his most eloquent weapon. And how it spoke to dissect the man who had not only asked Lendl to be his coach but, it is said, asked Lendl to ask Dani Vallverdu to be his coach – although Berdych vehemently denies the rumours.
Mauresmo now knows Murray pretty well and can quickly spot his tics, moods and the little changes he makes in his game. Unlike some players, Murray is a superb analyst of his own tennis, often hypercritical and rarely complacent, even in moments of grand achievement. Mauresmo guides him, where Lendl drove him with the force of his aura.
That is what led him to give Mauresmo the job in the first place. He wanted some understanding, a gentler presence in his team. He had heard all the criticism and, as he said the other night, he was not bothered a bit. Some called it “brave”, although few called it “wise” or “forward-looking” or “inspired”. There were – and still are – doubters.
Asked if she felt the novel arrangement was brave on her part, Mauresmo replied: “When it happened, not really; looking back now, yeah. When it happened, because of the talk we both had, we were really on the same page of why he was asking me and so I really thought I could really help him in these different areas that he was looking to improve, so it was not an issue for me.
“And then when I heard or read a little bit about the comments and stuff, I thought, ‘Wow, it’s not that easy.’ In terms of where the society is right now, it’s still not that easy and hopefully it will make things easier now.”
Did she think Murray was brave? “Yeah, he was also brave. Definitely, I think. But he’s not scared of those things. He has his own ideas and beliefs and he’s pretty strong about those. I think he was brave but I also believe he was just moving forward with what he thought was the best thing to do.
“I wasn’t thinking about coaching. I wasn’t thinking about travelling that much again. I had no proper experience of coaching – Fed Cup captain is one thing; having to plan things, sessions, weeks, months ahead and develop a player’s game – I’ve never done it. So those questions were really in my head and, again, we talked more and more. I told him those things and we thought that still on the areas that he wanted to improve on I could be good.”
As for the mood of a player who could be painfully insular and inward looking, Mauresmo sees only a mature and contented professional athlete. “He is in a better place now,” she said. “I think he’s happy. He’s also relaxed, in his own way. He’s focused, intense, committed, like I haven’t seen him when I was with him in the second part of last year. He’s sticking to his choices and I think that makes him strong.”
As strong as his fiancee’s language, perhaps. But they are, without argument, all “pulling in the same direction”, a tight-knit group unconcerned about the judgment of others.
When Murray’s friend Billy Connolly opened his act at the Hamer Hall in Melbourne on Friday night he started the ball rolling with, “That Andy Murray ... fucking great, eh?” The Latin root of profanity, profanus, means outside the temple. When those inside the temple are pompous hypocrites, maybe it is the better place to be.
Djokovic, meanwhile, is fully aware of the threat Murray will pose on Sunday. “He’s been playing some great tennis the past couple of weeks and I’m going to have to be at my best,” the world No1 said. “I have a slight mental edge, maybe, but not much.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/27/how-to-skip-the-too-hard-basket-and-recycle-australias-most-challenging-household-items | Australia news | 2024-01-26T14:00:08.000Z | Koren Helbig | How to skip the too-hard basket and recycle Australia’s most challenging household items | When it comes time to ditch items that can’t go in the council kerbside recycling bin – an old mattress, say, or your running shoes – don’t throw them in the too-hard basket.
Only 42.1% of Australian household waste is recycled, according to the latest national waste report, yet many binned things could be sent to alternative recycling systems.
Jenny Geddes, Clean Up Australia’s chief executive, says harder-to-recycle items often require extra steps or running around from consumers because a hodgepodge of recycling systems operate across different municipalities.
“It’s challenging, but it’s incredible what actually can be recycled once you look into it,” she says. “And when you toss something into your red bin because it’s too difficult, that resource is gone for ever.”
Here are tips for recycling some of the most challenging household items.
Clothing, shoes and fashion accessories
Worn-out sports shoes can be dropped at one of TreadLightly’s 800 collection sites nationally, for recycling on-shore into new products, such as rubber flooring, shock pads and playground underlays. Or, if your shoes still have a little life left, try donating to Shoes for Planet Earth.
Clothing is a huge landfill contributor – 100,000 tonnes of clothing go straight to the tip each year – but Geddes urged consumers to avoid “wish-cycling”: dumping old, unusable items on to charities, which then bear the cost of landfill disposal.
Clothing retailers H&M and Zara will take textiles in any condition for reuse or recycling. Or box up worn-out clothing, bras, shoes, bathers, linen and even mattress protectors and couch covers for Upparel – you will need to pay $35 for each 10kg of textiles sent for recycling.
Good-condition spectacles and sunglasses can be donated to Lions Clubs’ Recycle for Sight, although broken glasses must go into landfill.
Mattresses, cookware and car seats
Steel springs and polyurethane foam can be recovered from old mattresses for reuse, which helps reduce the bulk of leftover materials dumped into landfill. The Australian Bedding Stewardship Council has approved six recycling bodies that collect unwanted mattresses for under $100 in most states and territories.
Nonstick cookware won’t be accepted by recycling plants unless stripped of their coating – so best to buy longer-lasting wrought-iron, cast-iron or stainless steel pans, which can be recycled via initiatives such as the Great Pan Exchange and Tefal’s Act Together program.
‘People see rubbish, but I see money’: the professional recyclers cashing in on Australia’s bottles and cans
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An estimated 200,000 child car seats are binned each year, even though 80% of their components are recyclable. Car seats have been listed on climate change minister Chris Bowen’s priority list since 2020, but last year’s recycling trial conducted with manufacturers and retailers was not rolled out nationally as foreshadowed. For now, check with local councils and car seat suppliers – and even the RAA motoring body in South Australia – as some offer recycling for a small fee.
Soft plastics, packaging and office materials
Since the REDcycle soft plastics recycling scheme collapsed last November, governments and major supermarkets have scrambled to find an alternative. Limited kerbside soft plastics collection trials are now under way in six local government areas across Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia via the Curby initiative. Petstock has also started collecting wet and dry pet food plastic bags and pouches.
But for most Australians, landfill is now the only option for soft plastics – so “refusing to use” by choosing “nude” produce and unpackaged items is more important than ever.
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Officeworks collects pens and markers, computers, mobile phones, printer cartridges and even old USBs and hard drives. Batteries – which leak toxic chemicals when dumped into landfill – can be dropped at B-cycle collection points nationwide.
Other hard-to-recycle bathroom and household packaging items, such as medical blister packs, toothpaste tubes, electric toothbrush heads, mascara tubes, plastic razors, coffee pods and plastic bread tags, can be recycled via Banish, which charges $15 per box of items.
For a free option, check if your local council is funding RecycleSmart, which collects bags of hard-to-recycle things such as soft plastics, clothing, e-waste and polystyrene from your doorstep.
Karen Murphy, who co-runs the popular Refuse Reduce Reuse Recycle in Adelaide Facebook group, says expanding government and corporate-funded collection services is key to upping Australia’s household recycling rates. “There is currently too much onus on the consumer. It’s too hard and too time-consuming for most,” she says. “The lack of consistency across Australia makes people frustrated.”
Helpful recycling option finder tools
Murphy says consumers need to remember kerbside collection systems are for a specific set of recyclables – usually paper, aluminium, steel, cardboard, glass and rigid plastics – rather than “anything and everything that can be recycled”.
Beyond those basics, a little research will probably be needed to see if an alternative recycling option exists near you.
The free Recycle Mate app, developed by the Australian Council of Recycling, allows you to upload a photo of your item for AI to crosscheck against more than 4,000 products, before suggesting local recycling options. Planet Ark’s Recycling Near You website also contains a useful recyclable products directory and postcode searcher.
Solutions often exist at a hyper-local level too, facilitated by local governments, community groups or passionate volunteers. Call your council or community centre to find out what’s operating in your neighbourhood.
If you’re still in doubt after researching your item, it’s best placed in the red landfill bin, says Geddes. “Putting the wrong item into kerbside recycling could contaminate a whole truck – and then the whole truck ends up going into landfill,” she says. “But there are a lot of different [recycling] options now. So do take that extra step to think: how can we give this resource another life?”
Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint. Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/dec/20/steve-smith-edges-closer-to-bradman-with-new-icc-rankings-high | Sport | 2017-12-20T00:29:51.000Z | Guardian sport | Steve Smith edges closer to Bradman with new ICC rankings high | Steve Smith’s imperious Ashes form has seen him move level with Len Hutton and closer to Don Bradman at the top of the ICC’s Test player rankings system. The Australian captain’s 239 in the series-winning third Test in Perth saw him reach a career-best 945 points, just 16 shy the highest ever rating achieved by Bradman back in 1948.
Steve Smith goes to 'another level' as Australia mould into cohesive unit
Read more
Smith’s double century at the Waca, which helped Australia to a series victory over England after three Tests, propelled him to a new high after his knock of 143 in the first Test had lifted him to 941 points – equal fifth best of all time.
A brief dip after returns of 40 and six in Adelaide followed, but his innings in Perth took him above the likes of Peter May, Jack Hobbs and Ricky Ponting, level with former England opener Hutton, and closer to Bradman’s benchmark – set after a stunning run of Test scores against India in 1948.
Sir Clyde Walcott, Sir Viv Richards, Sir Garfield Sobers and Kumar Sangakkara complete an illustrious top 10.
Smith is also second only to Bradman in terms of career batting average for players with over 20 Test matches under their belt and he has been the world’s No1-ranked batsman for nearly two years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/may/30/yinka-shonibare-alexander-melamid | Art and design | 2010-05-29T23:05:21.000Z | Laura Cumming | Alexander Melamid and Yinka Shonibare | Art review | Komar and Melamid – those great Russian satirists – are back! Or, at least, one half of the duo has returned. For decades, they conspired to send up official Soviet art with their marvellous parodies of socialist realism in tones of borscht and grey; mock-heroic portraits of bureaucrats and commissars; visions of the Kremlin kissed by glowing sun. Until the police bulldozed their famous "unofficial" art show in 1974, whereupon they decamped and continued in the west.
In America, they mocked the art world too, establishing a market for paintings that turned out to have been made by trained elephants. They used polling companies to establish the least and most popular traits of art according to country (in China, they liked blue paintings; in America, they preferred winter landscapes) and then worked up the supposedly "ideal" results.
In 2003, they parted after 30 years of more or less humorous projects. Vitaly Komar carried on exhibiting, typically portraits of Stalin tweaking Marx by the nose. Alexander Melamid seemed to disappear underground.
But it turned out that he was working on what might seem to be the least probable of all his subjects thus far, namely American rappers. Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Kanye West: all submitted to the scrutiny of this Russian star of whom they had probably never heard. There were tales of Melamid being kept waiting in the night while the musicians attended their muse. There were high prices and highly successful shows.
And now there is one in London where you can judge for yourself what is really going on in these works. Oh My God – note the lack of an exclamation mark, ebullient laughter implied but not stated – contains 30 lifesize portraits. Some are of rapper royalty, others depict Russian art dealers and oligarchs, rabbis and priests. Religion is equated with culture and both with power.
But there is also a lifesize bull nosing along beneath a blazing red sky, a painting that apparently represents nothing but hot air and a huge close-up of a horse's arse. The catalogue essay is written by the renowned aesthetician Boris Groys. One therefore proceeds with caution.
At first glance, these portraits recall the kitsch pictures of Stalin, Lenin and co from the early Komar and Melamid days, in that each makes a monument of the subject. The clerics wear their vestments and the rappers too, with their rings, caps and outsize T-shirts. Each is depicted alone, sometimes enthroned, in the same generalised but anonymous space: a backdrop from the theatre perhaps or the grand traditions of painting.
Which is where the first note of comedy comes in – the apparent mismatch of modern money-makers with old master conventions. Each painting is worked up from dark to light, ending with a rich glow in the manner of a Rembrandt. Each has this abstract space – no walls, no place – like a Velázquez. The figures are loosely worked, their spectacles and Rolexes and signet rings glimmering like the jewels in society portraits.
The idea of Melamid as court portraitist to anyone is inherently absurd. The instinct is to assume that he is mocking the rapper's brooding solemnity or the rabbi's know-it-all smile; that the Russian newspaper proprietor (and government economic adviser) Konstantin Remchukov, red-eyed, grinning and wine glass in hand, is some sort of Faust.
The white light of destiny glows behind the businessman. The oligarch chooses to pose like the rapper.
But the paintings are more ambiguous. No matter how bulky a presence, each figure appears peculiarly weightless. And then again, each image feels pressurised, built up with a deep red, the colour of iron ore, that makes very heavy weather of the atmosphere.
And there is a twinkle in the eye of the Maltese priest that Melamid has not put there, just as the rappers appear both morose and yet faintly baffled. The formality remains constant, but with this opposing hint of gleeful personal insight.
The key to this show, as it seems to me, is the sudden appearance of a painting of a statue instead of a living person – a Roman hero carved out of stone, standing in just the same baleful light. The point is that everyone gets identical treatment – the format remains the same whether you're a bull or a bureaucrat.
Melamid suppresses the momentary vitality of his sitters in favour of ceremonial stillness, turning each into an effigy of the same size and proportions. And what is so neat about his parody of official portraiture is that one can easily imagine some of the sitters admiring their own images without irony or any sense that they might be looking at pictorial conventions that run all the way back to Stalin. The ultimate clue, though, is in Melamid's signature: kitsch, florid and running like a comedy punchline across the bottom of each work.
No jokes in Trafalgar Square as the latest fourth plinth project was unveiled last week – except, of course, those cracked by Boris Johnson, who took the words out of every news reporter's account with his puns on messages and bottles. Johnson appeared not to notice, however, the one point that the artist was attempting to make with serious intent. The sails of Yinka Shonibare's replica of Nelson's HMS Victory in a gigantic bottle are cut out of densely patterned – and very recognisably African – fabric: the history of black Africans conjured in the multicultural present.
It is a sweet thing, this quaint sculpture on its plinth. The perspex is delicate, the vessel frail, the fabric looks unexpectedly chintzy in the London light. Beneath it is one of those mock seas made of resin that you see in museums and beneath that the sort of wooden stand on which sportsmen rest their trophies.
Seen from below at a certain angle, the frigate appears to sail on the wild blue of the sky itself. At a distance, it shrinks right back to what it simply is: an updated antique, a piece of familiar British bric-a-brac.
The artist has signed it with a flourish – YS MBE is inscribed on both cork and bottle – and it is absolutely of a piece with his stock in trade, which is to cover mannequins of European folk out of history or art in patently African fabric. You get the visual dissonance immediately. It is where his work begins and ends. And it is quite possibly just what this site requires, with its fast-moving stream of passers-by: an admirable trophy to the nearby admiral on his column and for our island today. It is pertinent, correct, on both a local and national scale.
But scale is the problem. Since it would clearly be dangerous to have a gigantic model of a proper rum bottle projecting out over the edge of the plinth, what you see is more like a little keg or preservative jar. It is, in short, limited by the constraints of the plinth itself. Health and safety have come between art and daring and reduced Shonibare to his own small message. "Our culture is global," as he incontrovertibly stated. "I don't really have more to say." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/may/25/germans-wembley-champions-league-final | Football | 2013-05-25T21:48:00.000Z | Owen Gibson | Champions League: the day London became just a small town in Germany | For one day only, the Wembley Tavern was a sea of garish yellow and black on Saturday as it played host to chanting Borussia Dortmund fans, while Thirsty Eddie's on the High Road was reserved for Bayern Munich supporters.
But by the end of the night, it was the red half of Wembley that was celebrating loudly into the night after 90 pulsating minutes of football played to a raucous soundtrack from the stands.
Dutch winger Arjen Robben, who missed a penalty in last year's Champions League final, found redemption by scoring in the final minutes to seal a 2-1 victory for Bayern and leave the previously deafening Dortmund fans momentarily silent and bereft.
Wembley Stadium, celebrating 90 years since it originally opened, had felt like little Germany for the night. At the end, as their team lifted the European Cup, triumphant Bayern fans sang "football's coming home" – the Euro '96 England anthem adopted by the Germans.
Amid a surge of support for Germany's premier league, the Bundesliga, an estimated 150,000 Germans – Dortmund fans in bright yellow sunhats and shades and Bayern followers in red, some in Lederhosen – had earlier taken over the capital for the day.
Inside the stadium, Dortmund recreated their "yellow wall" to relentless drums, while Bayern fans bounced in unison, as for once even Wembley's corporate "ring of indifference" failed to dampen the atmosphere.
Dortmund, famous for their vociferous support and charismatic young coach, Jürgen Klopp, had arrived with a poster saying: "You were hoping for a final between two English teams. Or at least for a stadium full of hot Spanish chicks. Instead, you got the Krauts. Have fun."
But domestic enthusiasm for the all-German clash, between an all-conquering Bayern side who beat Barcelona 7-0 on aggregate in the semi-finals and a swashbuckling young Dortmund team, had slowly grown before the match.
Many outside The Globe in Marylebone Road, a traditional pre-match Wembley watering hole, said the fact that it was an all-German final added spice. "If you lose against Barcelona or Chelsea you can get rid of them fast. But if you lose to Dortmund, you have it for a year," said Bayern fan Arne Gesemann. "It is a good time for football in Germany. We've got to enjoy it while it lasts."
The debate about whether the Bundesliga, with its safe standing areas, affordable prices and vibrant atmosphere, has stolen a march on the Premier League's array of overseas talent, had been a feature of the buildup.
"It's great to see the English people are really behind us. As a young child I was a fan of Liverpool and I'm really sad that when I was here last year, I had to pay a fortune for a ticket," said Dortmund fan Ralf Baudzus.
Outside Wembley, amid the corporate sponsorship and hospitality apparatus that now accompanies any major sporting event, vans carrying mobile billboards thanked the English for inventing the game 150 years ago and proclaimed "From Dortmund with Love".
But while Dortmund's underdogs may have won the battle for hearts and minds, it was Germany's most successful club who eventually avenged the memory of narrow defeats in 2010 and 2012.
On Wembley Way the party atmosphere had been briefly punctuated by a skirmish between rival fans. Police on horseback quickly restored order and by kick-off there had been only 13 football-related arrests across the capital.
In Stratford, sport earlier collided with commerce at the Uefa-sanctioned "Champions Festival" on a concrete expanse between the Olympic Park and Westfield shopping centre.
Several thousand German fans, plus some curious locals, had made their way to a heavily promoted event that acted as a cross between a showcase for Champions League sponsors and a celebration of the history of the European Cup.
It was part of a conscious attempt by Uefa to make what it claims is the biggest sporting event in the world into a week-long celebration for the host city.
As families queued to have their pictures taken with the European Cup and visitors pondered paying £5 for a pint of beer or £100 for a replica match ball, a group of Munich fans insisted their reputation for arrogance was undeserved – before predicting an easy victory.
On police advice, Uefa had turned down applications for public viewing areas on big screens and some pubs in central London were not admitting supporters, leaving some unsure how to prepare for the big match.
"There is no atmosphere on the streets here because everything is forbidden. We hope we can enjoy the game but the day is not so nice. Nobody knows where to go," said Sarah Thoms, who had travelled from Dortmund.
But some football cliches are the same the world over. Andreas Spiekermann, an office worker from Dortmund, had got lucky in the club's ballot after 500,000 fans had applied for 24,000 tickets. "I hope it will be a good match. But whichever side wins, German football is the winner," he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/28/andy-fairweather-low-jimi-hendrix-sidled-over-and-politely-told-me-youre-in-the-wrong-key | Music | 2023-02-28T08:38:05.000Z | Dave Simpson | Andy Fairweather Low: ‘Jimi Hendrix sidled over and politely told me: you’re in the wrong key’ | At the age of 74, Andy Fairweather Low didn’t expect to see in 2023 as a viral sensation. He was on Jools’ Annual Hootenanny, performing his new song Got Me a Party and his old band Amen Corner’s 1969 chart-topper (If Paradise Is) Half As Nice. His appearance was so well received that he trended on Twitter. On New Year’s Day, his Wikipedia page was the second most trending in the UK.
“I was oblivious,” he chuckles, “because I don’t do Twitter and all that.” The broadcast had been filmed in mid-December. Low had appeared on Later … With Jools Holland before, with Eric Clapton, but never on his own. “I said to Jools: ‘It’s taken me 74 years to get here.’”
It is just another chapter in a remarkable musical life. Low has topped the charts twice with Amen Corner and became a solo star in the 1970s with Wide Eyed and Legless. Since then, he has become the ultimate musicians’ musician, playing with the likes of Clapton, George Harrison, Stevie Nicks, two Pink Floyd legends, various Rolling Stones and many, many more. He has played the Royal Albert Hall 116 times, played football with George Best, snooker with Alex “Hurricane” Higgins at Phil Lynott’s house and even jammed with Jimi Hendrix. “He sidled over and politely told me: ‘You’re in the wrong key.’”
The amiable Welshman carries all this very lightly. He turns up for our interview in a Cardiff City top and is fantastic company, which is why musicians like him.
“I know I’m good, but there are better players than I am,” he says. “But on a world tour whoever you’re working for doesn’t want to be looking after you and they’ve got to like your company. Most of the people I’ve played with have become my friends.”
Low’s gregarious but quietly determined good nature shines through Flang Dang, his first solo album in 17 years. He plays everything apart from drums and sings soulful R&B about how he is “trying to make the most of what I’ve got before I die”. He wrote the songs during lockdown and recorded in Rockfield, Monmouthshire, where he previously recorded in 1965. Countryfile came down to speak to me,” he grins. “Afterwards people kept saying, ‘I saw you on Countryfile. I thought you were dead.’”
Andy Fairweather Low performs on Jools’ Annual Hootenanny, broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2022. Photograph: Michael Leckie/BBC
Low grew up in Ystrad Mynach, Glamorgan, in a council house with no heating and an outside loo: “So when it was cold you had to really need to go.” His life changed when he saw the Rolling Stones at Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens in 1964, aged 15. “From that moment, my education was finished. I stopped revising, everything.” A job in a music shop gave him access to guitars and he formed the Taff Beats, the Firebrands and the Sect Maniacs before becoming a teenage idol with psychedelic era popsters Amen Corner. “Our house had the curtains closed because [the fans] were all outside camping on the lawn,” he says.
Amen Corner played themselves in horror film Scream and Scream Again alongside Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee and experienced the dark side of the music business for real. “We never saw any royalties and ended up £12,000 in debt. Our manager, Terry the Pill, was threatened with a sword stick. The only way out of it was to break up the band.”
He formed Fair Weather, clearing the debt with the 1970 smash hit Natural Sinner before they split in more Spinal Tap fashion. “There were five of us and it took four to carry the Hammond organ, so one got a free pass. Then one night in Scarborough there was this huge argument about whose turn it was to carry it. I thought: ‘I’m done with this.’”
Amen Corner, pictured in the 1960s in Australia: (from left) Alan Jones, Dennis Bryon, Clive Taylor (top), Neil Jones (below), Low, Blue Weaver and Mike Smith. Photograph: GAB Archive/Redferns
He went back to live with his mum, then reached No 6 with 1975’s Wide Eyed and Legless, one of the great pop songs about drinking. “But I started living my own record,” he sighs. “I became wide-eyed and legless.”
The turning point was the birth of his son. “I was on the baby shift, drinking vodka, watching the tennis and went: ‘Yeahhhh!’ Broken glass everywhere. I thought: ‘I can’t keep doing this.’” He had already stopped smoking in 1971 after coughing up blood. “You need the moment to be bad enough that you remember it.”
After his career was derailed by punk (“they spat at me in the street”), he glimpsed a different sort of musical career when the Who invited him to sing on the 1978 album Who Are You. “Keith Moon was fabulous,” Low grins. “He came to one of my gigs with Lionel Bart. ‘Dear boy!’ I never got involved in the madness, but witnessing Pete Townshend in full flow was magical. I felt the same as when I saw them as a teenager in Porthcawl … I’ve never lost that.”
Low (left) playing with Eric Clapton at the Crossroads festival at Madison Square Garden, New York, in April 2013. Photograph: Greg Allen/Shutterstock
Stars feel kindly towards him. When Low was on his uppers, Clapton sent a telegram of encouragement before a chance meeting in a studio led to a 30-plus year working relationship. Low played with Roger Waters for 23 years. “A lot of people don’t take to Roger for many reasons, but he treated me unbelievably well,” he says.
In the 80s, Low turned up to audition at George Harrison’s mansion in a VW Polo. He puts on a dry Scouse accent. “He went: ‘Do you have to drive that?’ But we got on. After we toured Japan, George stood up and said: ‘Andy, you weren’t my first choice. You were my seventh choice.’ Then he went: ‘But you were the right choice.’” Low adored the late Beatle. “He made me feel really, really good.”
When Kate Bush rang to ask him to sing on 50 Words for Snow, he thought it was a joke. “Because one of my mates once rang up pretending to be John McEnroe, and I fell for it, but she said she liked my voice.” Paul Weller sent him the song Testify to work on for 2021’s Fat Pop and then met him with a cheeky: “Where’s your hair gone?”
In an all-star lineup at a charity concert for Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis, at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983: (from left) Steve Winwood (keyboards), Low (standing in front of Jimmy Page), Kenney Jones (drums), Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts (drums), Bill Wyman and Jeff Beck. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
He played in Bob Dylan’s band for a charity gig at Madison Square Garden in 1999. “Bob was fabulous and talkative,” he remembers. “He wanted to know about a particular chord I played on Malted Milk, on Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album – a favourite song. He knew who I was.” On stage for the gig, Low says that Dylan would shout, “God – go,” at his band, leaving Low and the other musicians thinking: “Which one? He’s got three songs with God in the title!”
Low has loved every minute, although he stopped world touring in 2006 after consecutive final outings with Waters and Clapton. “I left two of the best-paying gigs. People thought I was mad.” But he had grown tired of the “boom-crunch” of arenas and wanted to perform his own material: “I wanted to get back to playing.”
Having once performed The Wall in Berlin with Waters to 450,000 people, his first gig with his own band the Low Riders in 2007 was to 20 people in a 2,000-seater in Rhyl. Gradually, though, they built it up to “300 to 400 people every night, which is great at my age”. Lately, he has been off the road to become primary carer to Barbara, his wife of 50 years, who has terminal motor neurone disease. It is a task he is no doubt undertaking as gracefully and diligently as all the others.
“I got to where I dreamed,” he says, “but I’m not finished yet.”
Flang Dang is out now via Last Music Company
This article was updated on 28 February with a correction: the Bob Dylan charity gig was in 1999, not 1989. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/nov/23/rsc-shows-off-revamp | Stage | 2010-11-23T20:04:41.000Z | Charlotte Higgins | RSC shows off £112m revamp | A new chapter dawns tomorrow in the 49-year history of the Royal Shakespeare Company as its Stratford-upon-Avon theatre flings open its doors to the public after a £112m revamp.
Visitors will be able to admire public spaces lightened and smartened, the drab carpark in front of the theatre transformed into pleasant gardens, and the restaurants and toilets immeasurably improved. But the real test of the theatre – at least before audiences have the chance to experience full-scale plays in it from next April – is, perhaps, the response of its actors. Nick Asbury – who was part of the ensemble for the complete Shakespeare history plays recently staged by the RSC – was one of a group of actors, including the great John Barton, who gave the Seven Ages of Man speech at a test run for the theatre last week.
"I came offstage and the first thing I said to Michael Boyd [the artistic director] was 'it works'," said Asbury. "I came in booming. I found I had to drop it down. You can, finally, be subtle. Not something I've ever been accused of before."
The first production in the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2011 – the company's 50th birthday year– will be Macbeth, directed by Boyd and starring Jonathan Slinger. Enron director Rupert Goold will tackle The Merchant of Venice, and Nancy Meckler A Midsummer Night's Dream. There will also be a celebration through 2011 of plays commissioned by the RSC over its history, including Pinter's The Homecoming, directed by David Farr.
The biggest change to the auditorium itself is the introduction of a thrust stage – one that extends, almost like a catwalk – and the removal of some of the most distant seats to create a more intimate relationship between actors and audience. "You feel in touch with absolutely every person," said Boyd.
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Sir Peter Hall, who was the company's artistic director at its founding in 1961, told Radio 4's Front Row on Monday that he did not favour a deep thrust stage, which he likened to "a diving board". Directors, he said, are obliged to keep the actors moving simply in order to deal with the sightlines – "not because what the characters are feeling but because what the lady in row A is feeling about not seeing them".
Boyd said: "Peter is the artistic director who has inspired me the most, so I am perfectly happy to take the odd criticism from him – and ignore it." He added: "I love the marriage of the dance of human behaviour and the words. Peter enjoys better the words. It is not entirely a generational thing, but two things have happened in theatre since 1961: Pan's People and Pina Bausch" – referring to the late German avant-garde choreographer.
However, Boyd added, the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage can be reconfigured to create a shallower thrust, which he hoped would tempt Hall back to direct there. "I'd love him to," said Boyd, "but we haven't quite made it work yet."
The company still has the final £3.5m of its renovations bill to find, and its funding cut of 6.9% from Arts Council England over the next financial year will see its income drop by round £1m.
"We are in a paradoxical position, expanding but at the same time freezing pay and not replacing jobs," said Boyd. The company hopes that Tim Minchin's musical Matilda, now previewing in the company's temporary Courtyard Theatre in Stratford to standing ovations, will eventually transfer to the West End and bring in much-needed income. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/26/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-visual-guide | US news | 2024-03-26T20:10:24.000Z | Lucy Swan | How Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapsed – a visual guide | What happened in Baltimore on Tuesday morning?
A major bridge in Baltimore in the US state of Maryland collapsed after a container ship collided with it early on Tuesday, sending a number of vehicles into the chilly waters.
The vessel crashed into the bridge at about 1.30am. Video: YouTube | StreamTime Live
Have you been affected by the Baltimore bridge collapse?
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Rescuers pulled out two survivors, and were searching for more in the Patapsco River after reports that a 948ft Singapore-flagged container ship leaving port on its way to Sri Lanka had crashed into the 1.6-mile (2.57-km) Francis Scott Key Bridge, named after the author of the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.
The state’s governor has declared a state of emergency to get federal resources quickly deployed. Joe Biden said search and rescue efforts were a “top priority” and that all indications were that the episode was a “terrible accident”.
What do we know about casualties?
Six people remain unaccounted for after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, authorities said – all believed to be construction workers who had been repairing potholes on the bridge. Two people have been rescued so far, with one of them in serious condition.
The temperature in the river was about 47F (8C) in the early hours of Tuesday, according to a buoy that collects data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Several vehicles were on the bridge at the time of the crash, including one the size of a tractor-trailer.
Rescue personnel gather on the shore of the Patapsco River. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
What do we know about the ship and the cause of the collision?
Ship-tracking data showed the Dali – a 290-metre (948ft) cargo ship with a capacity of 10,000 containers – was at the location of the bridge where the accident occurred at about 1.30am ET (0530 GMT) on Tuesday. The vessel had left Baltimore at 1am and was headed for the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, according to the maritime data platform MarineTraffic.
Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, said a preliminary investigation into the Key Bridge collapse “points to an accident”, and the FBI in Baltimore said the collapse of the bridge was not a result of terrorism.
The ship’s crew reported losing power and issued a mayday call moments before the crash took down the bridge, enabling authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span, Moore said.
Video posted on social media showed the vessel ploughing into one of the bridge’s central supports in darkness, causing much of the bridge to give way as a number of vehicles fell into the Patapsco River below and the ship caught fire. Synergy Marine Group, the manager of the Dali, confirmed it had collided with one of the pillars of the bridge.
The same vessel was also involved in a collision while leaving the port of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2016.
How important is Baltimore port and what will the impact be on trade there?
The bridge leads to the Baltimore port, one of the busiest in the country and an important hub for shipping on the US east coast, especially in transporting road vehicles.
It is also the largest US port by volume for handling farm and construction machinery, as well as agricultural products, and a cruise terminal, according to Reuters.
An aerial view of the collapsed bridge. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Port traffic was suspended until further notice following the bridge collapse, and there will probably be grave consequences on commerce in the region.
The bridge’s collapse has revived scrutiny not just of this specific structure but also the overall health of bridges across the US, many of which are considered to be in poor condition. Maryland’s governor has said the bridge was “fully up to code”, while some experts have pointed out that the span, completed in 1977, was conceived before an age of supersized container ships.
What are the implications for road transport in Maryland?
With four lanes, the bridge is part of Interstate 695 and serves as a major route along the ring road that encircles the city. The bridge carries 11.3m vehicles a year, according to the Maryland transportation authority.
Authorities have called the incident a “major traffic alert” and closed all lanes in both directions of the I-695 Francis Scott Key Bridge. Highway signs as far south as Virginia have warned drivers of delays. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/jun/15/jude-bellingham-makes-pitch-perfect-start-to-epic-adventure-at-real-madrid | Football | 2023-06-15T14:50:48.000Z | Sid Lowe | Jude Bellingham makes pitch-perfect start to epic adventure at Real Madrid | Sid Lowe | Mark Bellingham’s not crying, honest. There was a moment during Jude Bellingham’s presentation at Real Madrid, not long after he had stood up and offered his first, brief words in Spanish, when the cameras showed his father’s face and there was the tiniest hint of a tear, which well there might be.
His son, though, was not so sure. “I don’t know if it was just sweat, to be fair: he doesn’t cry often,” the 19-year-old said, another smile creeping across his face on a morning when there were many of them. “I’m going to have to watch it back closely and maybe give him some banter.”
Tales of yore will tell of the plot twists in this Mbappé to Real Madrid saga
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If he does watch it back, he will see that his first performance as a Real Madrid player was flawless; the impact on everyone here immediate. And if his dad was crying, well, why not? That’s his son up there holding the No 5 shirt once worn by Zinedine Zidane, enjoying what he called the most important day of his life. “It means a lot to them because it means a lot to me,” Bellingham said. Denise and Mark had seen the whole thing through, too, this the culmination of their work as well as his. There had also been discussions with England teammates trying to convince him to play in the Premier League, with Gareth Southgate, Carlo Ancelotti and even briefly with Zidane, he revealed, but now it was done.
It had all started 15 months ago. “I had always been aware of interest from England, so that was pretty normal,” Bellingham said. “But it was a bit of a surprise when Dad sat me down and told me about Madrid. I got goosebumps, my heart was close to stopping. It’s just something you don’t expect, to be able to play for a team like this. So when it actually manifests itself, it’s an amazing feeling.”
When you actually turn up, even more so. Asked what had most struck him on his first day, Bellingham replied: “The room I signed the contract in has all 14 of the [European Cup] trophies. They’re staring at you and you can’t wait to get your hands on one.
Bellingham shows off his shirt number, chosen as an echo of history. Photograph: Pedro Castillo/Real Madrid/Getty Images
“Lots of teams are interested in you,” he continued. “I don’t think about money: never have, never will. I play for pure love. I loved the feeling I got from the club, I told them almost straight away and I wanted it to happen quickly. It’s not the case that other teams are bad, it’s just that Real Madrid are the greatest. You grow up, watch games, and that’s what appealed to me. It has a great history and you want to be a player who adds to that. When they pitched the vision of the team, I was all in. It’s not just the fact that it’s Real Madrid – although that is enough – but the ideas they have, the respect they treated my family with. It was seamless. It’s so exciting.”
Not that the decision went unchallenged, of course. “At the World Cup, with the national team, it is hard,” Bellingham said. “They all wanted me to come back to England and play for their team but I like the idea of being out of my comfort zone. Maybe it’s easier to go back to the Premier League but I just couldn’t turn down Madrid. The exact moment it was done is hard to say, but I had the meeting when they came to my house and I was sold [on the idea], to be honest. The [2022] final when they beat Liverpool was a huge factor but there are a load of things that go into making the decision.”
Bellingham is presented to the media alongside Florentino Pérez, the Real Madrid president. Photograph: Helios de la Rubia/Real Madrid/Getty Images
That day in Paris, Bellingham had spoken to the man whose shirt he will wear. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The shirt he has belongs to Jesús Vallejo, or it did – and almost the first thing he did was say thanks, another of many small gestures that he handled well here. “I contacted him to see if that was OK and he was so nice about it,” Bellingham said. “In my heart I am still a 22, just wearing a five on the back. We’ll see in future what number I wear.” Then he revealed: “There was a little question [asked of] Zidane in the final. I didn’t want to make it too obvious. If he had let me, I would have talked his ear off. It’s a big honour to wear his number.”
A big pressure too? If so, it didn’t show. “I know the demands are great but I think it’s a brilliant responsibility and I will embrace that. When you play in a professional environment with grown men from 15, 16 you learn to grow up faster,” he said, a smoothness, a confidence, an ease about him, every response pitch perfect. There was enthusiasm and openness too, this whole adventure seen not as something to fear but to embrace. It may help internationally as well, Bellingham talking about how he could give England “a different football culture, a different style”, while his teammates can bring the “Premier League side”. That suits Southgate: “I spoke to Gareth quite a bit recently and he has always been so supportive. He texted me this morning to wish me well.
1:58
'The proudest day of my life': Jude Bellingham unveiled by Real Madrid – video
“I have had a little bit of contact with Ancelotti and he’s an amazing coach: his CV, his record, speaks for itself. It’s a brilliant opportunity to work with one of the greatest coaches there has been and I’m really looking forward to it. I am a midfielder who can do a bit of everything, whatever the manager asks for. I’ll do it with no fuss, anything to help the team really. And working with [Luka] Modric and [Toni] Kroos is invaluable, unbelievable for their knowledge of the game, their experience, the way they play. I will try to steal everything they have got. They’ll probably get annoyed with me for the first week.”
'I'm a big fan, by the way.'
When Real Madrid's Jude Bellingham met @sidlowe … pic.twitter.com/sXsVW8h0Zu
— Guardian sport (@guardian_sport) June 15, 2023
He neatly dribbled round inquiries on Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappé. That was “none of my business”, he said, while describing the Englishman as “a world-class player, my captain with the national team; I love him as a player and a person”, and replying to the inevitable question about wanting to play with the Frenchman with a simple: “Who wouldn’t?” He said he didn’t even know the exact amount he had cost, and didn’t much care either: “I am a footballer, not a lawyer or an accountant and it is my job to take my football on to the pitch.” As for the No 5, well, he insisted: “This [Madrid] shirt is enough responsibility in itself. Maybe for you guys I have put myself in an uncomfortable position but for me it is just a bit of a homage.”
“I’m just trying to be Jude,” Mark and Denise Bellingham’s son said, and on this evidence that will do very nicely. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/07/xenophon-plan-to-halt-import-of-flammable-cladding-impractical-coalition-says | Australia news | 2017-09-07T02:26:16.000Z | Christopher Knaus | Xenophon plan to halt import of flammable cladding ‘impractical’, Coalition says | The federal government has warned border controls on dangerous, combustible cladding products are neither practical or possible.
A Senate inquiry into the dangerous cladding delivered its report on Wednesday night, calling for an urgent ban on the sale, use and import of polyethylene composite panels in Australia.
The inquiry, initiated by the 2014 Lacrosse fire in Melbourne, warned lives were being put at risk by flammable cladding, which greatly accelerates the spread of fires, particularly in high-rise buildings.
Australia must ban cladding of type linked to Grenfell disaster, inquiry finds
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The issue was given new urgency by the Grenfell disaster in London earlier this year, which killed at least 80 people.
On Thursday, the senator Nick Xenophon announced he would introduce an amendment to custom laws to stop the import of unsafe cladding products.
“Unless the states act with a greater sense of urgency, the only way is to legislate to stop bringing this potentially lethal product into the country,” Xenophon said. “We cannot under any circumstances bear the tragedy that occurred in London. We must prevent any risk of that happening here,” he said.
The intent of the bill won immediate support from the Greens, although they will wait to see the final wording before giving a final position.
Kim Carr, the shadow industry minister, also expressed support for the inquiry’s recommendation for a ban, but said: “If [assistant industry minister, Craig Laundy] took action and banned this dangerous product, there would be no need for a private member’s bills to fix what is fundamentally a government responsibility – ensuring public safety.”
Craig Laundy quickly dismissed the proposed import ban. A spokesman for Laundy described such a ban as impractical and impossible and said the majority of complaints about dangerous building materials concerned locally manufactured products.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection had also advised that such import restrictions were difficult and impractical. The government also fears the ban would impose costs on industry, slow down clearance times for imports and divert the resources of law enforcement.
“Calls to ban materials at the border will not work,” Laundy said. “Firstly, these materials are used for all sorts of applications, for instance, signage. Secondly, some of these materials are made in Australia. And thirdly there are a lot of other products that are combustible that shouldn’t be put on the outside of multi-storey buildings, like timber,” he said.
Stemming the imports of unsafe building products is one part of the solution.
The government is also under pressure to act on systemic weaknesses in the building sector, which Carr and others say have been caused by deregulation and privatisation, including of building certification.
The inquiry heard in July that fraudulent certification of building products was widespread. Mandatory inspections of buildings have reduced, and the certification regime had been weakened. Australia’s building standards were also lagging behind new developments in the industry.
State and territory governments are engaged in a series of audits to determine the extent of the prevalence of cladding in existing buildings.
The use of combustible cladding is banned in high-rise buildings, but allowed in low-rise. Regardless of the restrictions, early indictions from state and territory audits suggest it is present in thousands of buildings across the country. In an audit of Adelaide’s CBD, dangerous cladding was found in 77 buildings, including the Royal Adelaide hospital.
But Xenophon said the audits were happening too slowly and were not comprehensive enough.
“It is taking far too long. I am not satisfied it has been as comprehensive as it could have been. We need to know now if these buildings are safe,” Xenophon said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jun/13/spain-holland-world-cup-2014-group-b-match-report | Football | 2014-06-13T21:05:59.000Z | Paul Wilson | Spain 1-5 Holland | World Cup 2014 Group B match report | Redemption for Arjen Robben and Holland arrived in the form of an emphatic reversal of fortunes from the 2010 final and a much better game of football. This match deserves to be remembered as a World Cup classic – Robin van Persie’s first goal and Robben’s second just might be – and it certainly provided more entertainment than the kickfest in Johannesburg.
There were times when Spain looked superior and times when Holland looked desperate enough to revert to old habits, but in coming back from a goal down to win the match quite handsomely Louis van Gaal’s side showed character and application. As the new Manchester United manager had said they would.
Robben and Holland looked pleased enough just to be winning 2-1 when the former struck to put them in the lead for the first time, but by the end of the game, with Iker Casillas making a second mistake in misjudging a back pass and presenting Van Persie with a second goal for a scoreline of 4-1, the Dutch looked conspicuously like dangerous tournament underdogs and all talk of Spain being among the favourites looked plain silly.
Yes, Spain opened with a defeat in South Africa four years ago and went on to win the competition, but this was a rout. And Diego Costa had the unhappiest of competition debuts, mitigated only by the misery Casillas must have been feeling. With the match won at 4-1, Robben outsprinted the Dutch defence from the halfway line, sent Casillas crawling the wrong way twice, and joined Van Persie on two goals for the night. He may now regret saying a qualifying game could never be compared to a World Cup final, because this was an occasion for everyone in orange to savour.
Robben spoke before the game of the still-vivid memory of Casillas denying him the chance to give Holland a potentially winning lead in the World Cup final of four years ago, describing it as a snapshot he will never forget but one which now belongs to the past tense. He gave Wesley Sneijder a chance to help make amends after just nine minutes, threading a perfect pass through the square Spain defence, and memories must have come flooding back as the Galatasaray midfielder lined up a shot with all the time in the world but still hit it too close to the goalkeeper. Casillas stood his ground well and made a decent save, though the goalkeeper hardly moved except to fling out an arm and Sneijder will know he should have done better.
The game looked as though it might bring back plenty more memories of 2010 when Ron Vlaar clattered Diego Costa after just 13 seconds, though the Dutch settled down quite quickly and Vlaar had every reason to be proud of his next challenge on Costa, a block to prevent the Atlético Madrid striker getting in a shot after David Silva and Andrés Iniesta had combined to give him a decent opportunity. In truth the opportunity was so inviting Costa should probably have made something of it before Vlaar came across, but his first touch was indecisive and the Aston Villa defender was always in charge once his opponent had been forced on to his left foot.
The first goal arrived just before the half-hour and with it the almost obligatory controversy. Xavi played a magnificent pass to Costa, whose turn in the area was far too quick for Stefan de Vrij, and when the defender’s trailing leg brought the striker down the Italian referee pointed straight to the spot. It seemed a reasonable decision at first sight, yet though replays established De Vrij had made contact, it was fairly minimal and there was a suggestion that Costa had actually played for the decision by hooking his foot behind his opponent’s. Such is a referee’s life these days.
The goalline technology was able to establish that the ball crossed the line when Xabi Alonso beat Jasper Cillessen from the spot, even though the goalkeeper went the right way, but that was the redundant part of the argument. The technology that can help referees make correct decisions in every aspect of open play is probably as far away as ever.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter the fact is that Spain went ahead and were worth their lead. Xavi, Iniesta and Alonso were finding each other quite easily and always looking likely to find gaps in the Dutch back line. Jonathan de Guzmán was booked for a foul on Iniesta and when De Vrij joined him for a quite cynical block after being turned by Silva it appeared Dutch frustration might once again get the better of them. There is, as Van Gaal was saying beforehand, a place for physical aggression in football and it is up to the referee to draw the line, but Nicola Rizzoli was given little option as Holland greeted Spanish sophistication with roughhouse spoiling.
Spain at their sophisticated best should really have doubled their lead before the interval. Iniesta played a peach of a reverse pass to play Silva clear on goal, but the Manchester City player went for a stylish finish with an attempted chip, only to see Cillessen get a glove to the ball and divert it for a corner. Almost instantly Spain had cause to regret that miss when the Dutch equalised with a goal from nothing on right on the stroke of the break. From a Spanish point of view it came from nothing anyway, though Daley Blind must be congratulated on a stunning diagonal ball from halfway on the left touchline. Robin van Persie’s run picked it up almost magnetically and though Blind probably had a volley in mind when he played the pass, the ball was not in quite the right place and the Manchester United striker repositioned himself expertly to beat Casillas with a diving header instead. It could almost be described as a headed volley, the last thing Spain were expecting, and it put Holland right back in the game.
The second half began in one of the sudden downpours typical of the region, it is the rainy season after all, and though the sky cleared in a matter of minutes both benches took an unexpected soaking. Iniesta tried his luck with a daisy cutter on the wet turf but found Cillessen equal to it, before Holland gave Spain a taste of their own medicine by keeping hold of the ball through a couple of dozen passes – allowing for a throw-in that Spain won then uncharacteristically gave straight back to their opponents – before Blind once again popped up with a killer final ball, this time to find Robben in the centre. The Bayern Munich forward brought down the ball effortlessly with one foot, turned past Gerard Piqué with the other before joyously finding the net as Sergio Ramos moved in with a shot straight down the middle that Casillas could not reach.
Robben’s reaction suggested he enjoyed his shot at redemption, and he was involved again as Holland came looking for a third, helping to find Van Persie on the right for a shot that crashed against the bar. Much to the crowd’s delight – Brazil don’t think much of him either – Costa made way for Fernando Torres after that, the Chelsea player arriving on the pitch just in time to see Holland increase their lead when De Vrij squeezed in a far-post header after Casillas had missed Sneijder’s free-kick cross. If that looked ominous for Spain, few in the stadium realised how bad things were going to get. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/18/corby-byelection-result-parties-react-eu | Opinion | 2012-11-18T20:45:03.000Z | Jackie Ashley | Does the Corby byelection matter? We'll know by next spring | Jackie Ashley | The general view of the main parties' performance after the recent Corby byelection could be summed up as: bad but not really worrying for the Tories, catastrophic for the Liberal Democrats, good for Ukip and for Labour. Overall, as the grim reality of growthlessness grinds on, people are recoiling from the coalition and looking at more radical alternatives – to right and left.
The Tories assert that Corby wasn't really too bad. True or not true? (The safe-seat Labour Manchester and Cardiff contests are almost irrelevant because of the very low turnout.) At bellwether Corby, Team Cameron suffered a 12% swing away. Yes, that's less than the anti-Labour swing of 17.6% at Crewe and Nantwich back in 2008. Add in the self-inflicted embarrassment of Louise Mensch's departure, and some Tories are taking this almost as a victory.
But this is silly. Crewe merely makes the point that byelections are a poor predictor of anything – the Tories didn't manage, after all, to actually win the general election that followed Crewe and Nantwich. In the real world, bad is bad.
The real issue is what the parties learn from byelections, and whether by adjusting their behaviour they can change their fate. Serious Conservatives admit privately they have a growing problem with the opposition. Ed Miliband's "one nation Labour" rebranding felt thin at the party conference but already, relentlessly repeated on posters, is beginning to look as if it might cut through. Corby as a one-off result may not mean a lot, but you have to add it to months of strong Labour polling.
The Tory charge that the two Eds are heading a party of reckless promises seems increasingly risible. And on Monday Miliband will recognise the new Eurosceptic landscape in a speech to the CBI when, warning against sleepwalking out of the EU, he still warns that Eurosceptics must be taken seriously. This isn't (I'm assured) a lurch in policy. Labour remains committed to staying in Europe while pushing for changes inside the union. But it is sensible and timely acknowledgement of a changed public mood.
So how are the Tories going to react? Rather usefully for Labour, it looks as if they are fated to respond with another round of culture wars.
Osborne and the metropolitans have raised gay marriage as a touchstone issue; their enemies in the party agree about that at least, but of course hold the opposite point of view. Cameron seems increasingly confused. He knows very well that he has to keep pushing towards the centre, but has now hired Lynton Crosby as his election guru. Yet Crosby is famed for his dog-whistle politics – something that helped him lose an election for Michael Howard, though he did successfully mastermind Boris Johnson's mayoral triumphs.
The Tories have forgotten the affection felt for traditional public service – not just teachers and postal workers, but the police too – and have failed to provide any kind of optimistic economic agenda. How are they going to radically change their message to win back the middle-British, middle-income people they are currently losing?
One tempting way is by taking a more populist tone on Europe. Eurosceptics in the party, including David Davis, have been working on a more carefully thought through plan for a series of demands on the repatriation of powers, which would then go to a referendum before negotiations started, and would be followed by another plebiscite. How serious is all this? The prospect of a decisive push, at a time when the eurozone is in turmoil, would surely tempt many current ministers, including future leadership contenders such as Michael Gove.
If Cameron swallowed hard after what will surely be a really difficult set of talks this week on the proposed EU budget – and see the views of the Polish foreign minister, just one of those he'll face, on the opposite page – and went for this wider assault on the structure of the current EU, then Ukip might take a hit. But Cameron's problem, of course, would be Nick Clegg, one of the most Europhile, Eurofluent politicians on these islands.
And Clegg's party is, by common consent, the real loser. Its candidate lost her deposit at Corby and came fourth behind Ukip. The Lib Dems are doing dreadfully in national polls. Switching leaders from Clegg to Cable would, according to Guardian commissioned polling, bring a significant improvement – and the anti-Clegg plotters are planning to use a motion at the spring conference next March to start bringing him down.
Well, it may happen. But under Clegg, Cable or AN Other, the Lib Dems inside the coalition would have no option but to try to distinguish themselves further from the Conservatives; they would have no option, therefore, but to go to war with Cameron if he tried to open up a major renegotiation with Brussels. For if they are not the pro-European party, what the hell are they?
What we know is that the coalition's original path to success is now blocked. As the Bank of England's Mervyn King put it, this is a long and winding road we are now trudging along. It isn't all home made. Looking at next year, the still-hideous eurozone crisis, and a stand-off over the debt ceiling in Washington, may prove as serious for Britain as anything our own government does or doesn't do. But domestic politicians will be blamed first.
So yes, I do think Corby will matter. Not directly for its psephology, but for how the parties react. By next spring, I predict a hugely volatile European argument at Westminster and perhaps a leadership putsch inside the Lib Dems. Labour has policy work to do of its own. But the best prediction is plenty more "one nation". It's early days, but so far the signs are that it's working.
Twitter: @jackieashley | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/aug/08/highly-rated-academy-over-aided-sats-pupils-inquiry-finds | Education | 2018-08-08T16:37:20.000Z | David Batty | Highly rated academy gave Sats pupils too much help – inquiry | A primary school praised by ministers as a model academy “over-aided” pupils in this year’s national tests, a government investigation has concluded.
Year 6 pupils at Harris Academy Philip Lane in Tottenham, north London, were given too much help in their English reading and maths reasoning Sats, according to the Standards and Testing Agency (STA).
As a result, pupils’ scores in those papers have been expunged and they will receive scores only for their spelling, punctuation and grammar tests.
In a letter sent to parents on Monday, the academy’s chair of governors, Susan Head, described the investigation findings as “deeply regrettable and disappointing”.
She said the findings were being taken “extremely seriously” and responsibility lay with the academy rather than pupils. She said the school was “determined to get to the bottom of what has happened”.
The school’s principal, Emma Penzer, wrote to parents before the summer holiday to tell them the Sats results would be delayed because of the investigation.
The Harris Federation is often hailed as one of the most successful academy trusts in England. But Simon O’Hara, of the Anti Academies Alliance, which published the letter on Twitter, said: “What confidence can other parents whose children attend Harris academies have in what is going on in their schools? Academisation is becoming increasingly mired in cronyism and corruption. We believe that all schools should be returned to local democratic control.”
The investigation findings have infuriated campaigners who opposed the forced academisation of the school in Haringey, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, six years ago. The then education secretary, Michael Gove, ordered the former Downhills school’s takeover by the Harris Federation despite the opposition of 94% of parents.
The move came after an Ofsted investigation declared the school to be failing. Academies are accountable to central government rather than a local authority.
The ’lunatic’ Gove cut his teeth in the fight to hand over Downhills to Harris Federation. In the face of overwhelming opposition he forced academisation. He promised a better education. This is what happened: @cyclingkev @schooltruth @DavidLammy pic.twitter.com/13W8dhQVFH
— Anti Academies (@antiacademies) August 8, 2018
Fiona Millar, a school governor and campaigner on education issues, said: “A lot of us have been concerned that certain academy chains have been held up as an example of what everyone else should be as good as. I’m a governor of two London schools and I’ve scrutinised their data and wondered how they get these results with similar cohorts of pupils. Increasingly we see they do it by this unethical behaviour. It’s really hard on the schools that are playing by the rules because they can never hope to compete.”
Madeleine Holt, an education campaigner and co-founder of Rescue Our Schools, said: “If you create a high-stakes system where schools are punitively judged on Sats scores, gaming and cheating is one of the many damaging consequences. There are better ways to judge schools and students – for example in New Zealand, where they have got rid of their equivalent of Sats and are developing broader and fairer ways of evaluating education. This can’t happen soon enough in England’s primaries.”
The Harris Federation said it was “shocked and dismayed to hear of the over-aiding” and would conduct an internal investigation in light of the STA’s finding. “This will begin in the autumn term and we will not hesitate to take the very toughest action wherever this is appropriate,” a spokeswoman said.
She said the academy had apologised to families whose children had not received their maths or English reading Sats results. “Pupils have been given accurate teacher assessments and these have been provided to the secondary schools they are moving on to, along with their grammar, punctuation and spelling results. This will ensure their transition to secondary school is not affected.”
A Department for Education spokesman said: “Teachers and parents must have confidence in the integrity of the assessment system, which is why we take allegations such as this very seriously. Following an investigation by the Standards and Testing Agency, several key stage 2 papers were annulled. This will not, however, adversely affect any of the pupils as the school can provide teaching assessment data to show the pupils’ progress in these subjects.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jan/18/dun-dun-duuun-where-did-pop-cultures-most-dramatic-sound-come-from | Music | 2022-01-18T10:42:56.000Z | Amelia Tait | Dun, Dun Duuun! Where did pop culture’s most dramatic sound come from? | There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognisable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognisable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!
On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.
Taken together, these three duns are what’s known as a sting – a brief bit of music that media producers can use to break up the action or punctuate a theatrical moment. While today’s dun dun duuuns are often employed jokingly to parody the dramas of days gone by, the suspenseful sound was once legitimately used to frighten and thrill.
“One of the challenges of radio – and it’s the same now as it was 100 years ago – is how do you hook the listener?” says Richard Hand, a media professor at the University of East Anglia and author of Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Alongside orchestral stings, sound effects such as clock chimes, claps of thunder, and whistling wind were used to grab the audience’s attention in the early days of radio, as the medium has always invited multitasking.“Those dramatic organ stings could have a powerful effect.”
Before the development of sound libraries, many of these stings were performed live. “They became cliched and we laugh at them, but actually what soundscapes can do can be extraordinary.”
Suspense, an American horror show broadcast on CBS Radio between 1942 and 1962, was filled to the brim with sound effects and dramatic stings. Just over three minutes into its first episode (after bells, the sound of a train, and plenty of piano), a three-beat sting lingers on its last note when a man discovers his wife is potentially an undead poisoner. But it’s difficult to pinpoint the very first on-air dun dun duuun, and it’s likely the musical phrase predates the radio. Hand says the medium tended to adopt already popular tropes to entice listeners. “They imported that musical structure and musical language,” he says, pointing to Victorian stage melodramas.
In fact, Patrick Feaster – an expert in the preservation of early sound media, and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative – argues that dun dun duuun could have been a cliche long before the advent of radio drama. Though he doesn’t know when or where the three duns arose, he points out that stings “that work in much the same way” appeared in the 1912 melodrama parody Desperate Desmond by comedian Fred Duprez.
Dramatic punctuation … The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images
In a recording of the sketch which can be heard on the US Library of Congress website, Duprez mocks melodramas by telling a story and rebutting the incongruous sounds that play between the action (when a villain enters with a dramatic sting and a clip-clop, he exasperatedly says, “Not on a horse! Just on his feet!”).
Though the stings heard in this sketch are single duns (sans the follow -up dun and duuun), Feaster says: “It seems stinger chords must have been entrenched enough in melodrama by 1912 to invite parody.” He guesses that the three-beat version may have then come to be preferred for satire, “because it’s more conspicuous than a single all-at-once chord would be.”
Producers continued to enjoy parodying dramatic stings on radio shows throughout the 20th century – The Goon Show in the 1950s regularly ridiculed audio tropes in mock detective stories such as The Dreaded Piano Clubber. Occasionally, three duns were still used for dramatic effect in film: In 1940’s Fantasia, Disney’s recording of Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring emphasised two duns and a lingering duuun at the end of a dinosaur battle (though the composer’s original features a similar three beats, they’re not as pronounced or as recognisable as the sound we know today). From Tom and Jerry to Ren and Stimpy, dun dun duuuns also cropped up in cartoons, ensuring the sound became a television mainstay. Young Frankenstein’s version debuted in the 1970s, and it was this recording that was used for the dramatic prairie dog viral vid. But since 1984, if you’ve heard a dun dun duuun vibrating from your television set, it’s likely it came from one specific source.
‘Like having a Penguin Classic’ … Beavis and Butt-Head. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
“It’s like having a Penguin Classic,” says 74-year-old composer Dick Walter, who has arranged music for programmes such as The Two Ronnies and The Morecambe & Wise Show. In 1983, recordings library KPM Music asked Walter to produce four vinyl albums of musical phrases known as The Editor’s Companion. With an orchestral lineup of around 35 to 40 people, Walter recorded hundreds of tracks over the course of 18 months, including chase music, sleighbells, and a four-second, three-beat sting called Shock Horror (A) that comprises the notes D#, C and F#.
“It’s musical shorthand which says a lot very quickly,” Walter says of the first of five melodramatic exclamations that run all the way down to Shock Horror (E). But where did he find the inspiration? Walter’s mother, an amateur pianist, used to play Edwardian and Victorian melodrama in the house, while he was a lover of jazz as a teen. He explains that for centuries, composers have used a particular musical interval to denote tension. Its name? Diabolus in musica – or “the devil’s interval” to you and me.
The devil’s interval is a dissonant combination of tones that unsettles the listener because it is unresolved. You’ve likely heard the devil’s interval as the opening two notes to The Simpson’s theme tune, as well as the beginning of Maria from West Side Story (Walter helpfully sings both). Yet in both cases, the tension is immediately resolved with the next note, producing a pleasant effect. “But if you don’t resolve it, you’re left feeling unsatisfied,” Walter explains, “That’s what it boils down to.”
When Walter was charged with creating horror stings for The Editor’s Companion, “the obvious thing to do” for Shock Horror (A) was use the interval – his is “just an extremely abbreviated version, about as short as you can get”. A few years ago, he was happy to hear his sting played on BBC radio show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, realising “it’s obviously become a bit of a go-to thing”.
This is an understatement – The recording has since been used in SpongeBob SquarePants, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Beavis and Butt-Head, as well as adverts for cereal, snacks and a home improvement store. While some producers may prefer to create their own version, Walter’s sting has become an easy staple – the bread and butter of dun, dun, duuuns. There is – dramatic pause! – no way of knowing where it will end up next.
“I think the thing that makes Shock Horror eminently usable is that it’s orchestral, so it’s quite big,” Walter says of the track’s appeal. “So in one sense, it doesn’t date. It’s sort of timeless.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/07/if-black-lives-really-matter-in-australia-its-time-we-owned-up-to-our-history | Opinion | 2015-08-07T04:37:08.000Z | Jeff Sparrow | If black lives matter in Australia, it's time we owned up to our history | Jeff Sparrow | In the US, the Black Lives Matter campaign is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with that country’s history, with (in the wake of the Charleston massacre, in particular), activists launching a new conversation about the Civil War iconography that litters much of the South.
Already, the Confederate flag’s gone from the South Carolina state house. In Kentucky, talk’s turned to the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue. In New Orleans, pressure is building on the memorial to Robert E Lee while Memphis ponders the future of its multiple statues of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. In communities across the south, public history is suddenly up for debate.
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The fissures revealed by the Adam Goodes controversy suggests the need for a similar project here. As it happens, in his new book Australian Confederates, journalist Terry Smyth draws out some fascinating connections between Australia and the American south.
Smyth focuses, in particular, on the 42 Australians who, in 1865, secretly enlisted to fight for the slave-owning states when the Confederate ship Shenandoah docked in Port Phillip Bay. In passing, however, he acknowledges the broader significance of the Civil War, which opened sudden opportunities for another nations to export agricultural crops.
As historian Kay Saunders has said, the northern blockade of Confederate cotton and sugar meant that “Queensland was regarded potentially as a second Louisiana”.
Aspiring local planters tried to seize the moment, inducing British mill workers to immigrate and establish a local cotton industry. But they quickly discovered that men from England’s industrial towns would not accept the conditions prevailing on plantations in the Australian rural north.
“In 1863,” Smyth writes, “shipping magnate and entrepreneur Robert Towns established a cotton plantation on the Logan River, in Queensland. Convinced that the venture would never turn a profit if he paid white man’s wages, he sent a schooner to the South Pacific to recruit Islanders. The ship returned with 67 Melanesian men who were put to work picking Towns’ cotton. ‘Kanakas’, they were called – originally Hawaiian for ‘free man’ but used by whites as a derogatory term akin to ‘nigger’.
“Although Towns’ islander labourers were offered wages, food and housing and a promise they could return home if they wished, the practice of so-called indentured labour, as it spread throughout eastern Australia, soon degenerated into a form of slavery called ‘blackbirding’.”
Australian South Sea Islanders at Farnborough, Queensland, circa 1895.
Between 1863 and 1904, 62,000 South Sea Islanders were brought to Australia, landing in Brisbane, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Innisfail and Cairns. The majority of the indentured labourers came from today’s Vanuatu, with a substantial proportion from the Solomons, as well as smaller islands. Some came voluntarily (even accepting multiple trips). Others did not – and varying degrees of deception and outright coercion were used by blackbirders to persuade them.
By the 1890s, the so-called “Kanakas” were providing 85% of the workforce for the sugar industry.
The conditions the Islanders faced in Australia were extraordinarily harsh.
Smyth describes a notorious case in which “a certain John Tancred was charged with stealing an islander boy named Towhey, the property of Arthur Gossett. The complainant swore he could prove his ownership of the boy because he had branded him not once but twice – on the leg and on the side – which he demonstrated to the court. The judge fined Tancred 10 pounds for theft, and Gossett walked way with his young slave in tow.
“The press report of the case heartily approved of the outcome, helpfully suggesting: ‘perhaps it may not yet be too late for the Assembly to insert a ‘branding’ clause in the Polynesian Labourers Bill.’”
Not all sugar growers conducted themselves like southern slave owners. But, by definition, indentured labour in Queensland was, as the academic Tracey Banivanua Mar argues, “a legalised system that bound mainly young men to three years of coercive labour under physical conditions considered to be fatal to Europeans, and in standards of accommodation and care that were largely negligent and often fatal”.
Between 1868 and 1889, Islanders’ mortality rate in Queensland was something like 19%. There’s no mystery as to why. In a July 1880 discussion of high death rates on plantations owned by R Cran and Company, the liberal Queenslander newspaper explained that the “the islanders were being killed mainly by overwork, insufficient or improper food, bad water, absence of medical attention when sick, and general neglect”.
If this history isn’t generally known, we shouldn’t be surprised.
At federation, the fate of the Islanders – many of whom had by that time lived in Australia for decades – was hotly contested. Edmund Barton, the first prime minister, argued for their deportation in order to preserve the racial purity of White Australia. In doing so, he explicitly referenced the experience of the American south.
“The negro cannot be deported now because of his numbers, and because his race has become rooted in American soil,” he said. “We do not propose that either of these conditions should ever arise in Australia.”
Thus a key piece of legislation in the first ever parliament was the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, which mandated the forcible deportation of 7,500 Pacific Islanders and banned the entry of any other Islanders after 1904.
“The country did not feel the need of the imported nigger before he came and his loss will not be felt when his gone,” explained the West Australian Sunday Times.
“We do the nigger no injustice by deporting him to his native land in better condition than when he left it.”
What does this have to do with Adam Goodes? A recent survey by regional newspapers in Victoria showed a great majority of respondents saw nothing racist about the hostility directed by fans at Goodes.
Godfrey Charles Mundy’s depiction of the 1838 Slaughterhouse Creek massacre. Illustration: Godfrey Charles Mundy/Australian War Memorial
In the US, many whites have reacted to the Black Lives Matter campaign with similar incomprehension. They’ve never had any trouble with the police – and they don’t see why the experiences of African Americans should be any different.
The debate about southern history taking place across America matters because it provides that missing context.
As Brent Staples says in the New York Times, the confederate monuments were mostly erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the period in which the former slave states were introducing, usually with great violence, so-called Jim Crow laws to abolish voting and other rights for African Americans.
The statues, in other words, were an adjunct to a racialised terror enforced by the police as much as by the KKK. That’s what Angela Davis means when she says “there is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan”.
In the same way, white Australians might think nothing of being called an “ape”. But Goodes’s response to the taunt arises from a history that shares far more with the US south than we’d like to think.
In 1960, Faith Bandler, who would become a crucial campaigner for Aboriginal rights, met the legendary African American singer and polymath Paul Robeson during his only Australian tour. Robeson was the child of a slave.
So, too, was Bandler. Her father had been blackbirded from his island in the New Hebrides and then had escaped deportation by fleeing to northern NSW. Faith grew up in a country town shaped by de facto segregation – and, because of that, always identified with Robeson and other American civil rights activists.
She later recalled her meeting with him:
I had an occasion to … show him a film that was made on the Warburton Ranges. And I shall never forget his reaction to that film, never. It was a film taken on a mission station where the people were ragged and unhealthy and sick, very sick. And we took this film and we showed it to him. [A]s he watched the film the tears came to his eyes and when the film finished he stood up and he pulled his cap off and he threw it in his rage on the floor and trod on it and he asked for a cigarette from someone. Well a lot of people smoked in those days so there was no shortage of cigarettes and [his wife Eslanda] said to me, ‘Well it’s many years since I’ve seen him do that’. He was so angry and he said to me, ‘I’ll go away now, but when I come back I’ll give you a hand’. He was beautiful, but he died and he didn’t come back.
Robeson was a long-time campaigner for African American rights. He knew the appalling conditions in the deep south – but the situation facing Indigenous Australia still moved him to tears.
Indeed, historically, the local press openly acknowledged that Aboriginal people were treated far worse than even the Islanders imported to make Queensland a “second Louisiana”.
For instance, in 1880, the Queenslander launched a campaign against what it called “the sickening and brutal war of races that is carried on in our outside settlements”. This, it said, “is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there.”
‘It’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.’ Photograph: Nla
A prolonged debate ensued in its pages, with some correspondents minimising or justifying the violence, and others providing astonishingly frank accounts of frontier atrocities.
On 2 October 1880, for instance, one contributor wrote:
I am no sentimental black protector, and have lived in this Cook district since 1873, when it was first settled. … We are in this district in a state of open warfare with the natives, and if I met a mob anywhere in the bush I should feel justified in firing on them. But there are things done to blacks and black women by some of the police which equal the Bulgarian atrocities that thrilled Europe with horror. In this district a cattleowner who often has to do his own ‘dispersing’ made a raid about a year ago on the blacks, and captured a young gin. She was brought home to the station, and was employed carrying water from the river to the house during the day, and at night was chained by the leg to a verandah post, to prevent her escaping and to ‘civilize’ her. One of the boys employed on the station took a fancy to her, and she was looked on as his wife.
He goes on to outline, in the polite euphemisms of the 19th century, a horrific account of sex slavery and gang rape.
The series of articles concluded on 20 November 1880 with the editorialist writing:
[P]roperty acquired by conquest, no less than that which is transmitted by inheritance, has its duties as well as its rights, and ... we, in common with the other States on this continent, have shamefully fallen short of our duty towards the inferior race whom we have dispossessed. That it should be necessary for any section of the Press, in order to ensure a hearing at all, to argue on purely utilitarian grounds against the policy of deliberate extermination that has been unremittingly pursued hitherto; that it should have been incumbent on us to lay stress, not so much on the wickedness and cowardice as on the unprofitableness of shooting down like vermin the helpless savages whose homes we have invaded – all this is evidence of a blunting of the moral perceptions of our own community such as would appear morbid and unnatural if manifested in any other sphere of human relations.
The peculiar reference to “unprofitableness” probably harks back to a debate in the Queensland parliament in the previous month.
There, on 21 October, the MP John Douglas (who would later go on to become premier), had explained, as Hansard put it:
The colony was now introducing Polynesians, and he did not believe that there was any such great distinction between them and the aborigines of Northern Australia as to prevent the hope that some use might be made of the latter. In Western Australia the natives had been, he believed, in some cases captured, and as prisoners of war had been compelled to submit to a period of pupilage, afterwards becoming useful settlers. … It would be quite possible to take the natives prisoners, instead of shooting down and killing them, though he doubted whether the House would sanction a law by which these people, taken in open warfare, might be kept in a state of captivity. At all events, that would be a more benevolent process than shooting them down and taking their lives. No doubt to shoot them down was the easiest way of getting rid of them.
Here, then, was the liberal position: Queenslanders should cease murdering Indigenous people. Instead, they should enslave them, thus sparing themselves the necessity of blackbirding indentured labour.
That’s the context in which a racialised insult flung at Goodes possesses rather more power than, say, the mean remarks that Andrew Bolt sometimes finds in his comments threads.
In his recent book Forgotten War, Henry Reynolds notes the obvious disparity between Australia’s commemoration of the first world war (something that has now cost nearly half a billion dollars) and the almost complete indifference shown to the frontier wars fought by settlers against Indigenous people, even though the latter possesses far more significance in the development of the nation.
Just as most towns in the American south boast a cairn to the Confederate dead, every tiny community in regional Australia has its a shrine to the dead of the Great War. But it’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.
As Reynolds says, the Australian War Museum honours farcical engagements like the Sudanese war but makes no reference to the “sickening and brutal war of races” the Queenslander so openly discussed, even though the frontier war was clearly the most important conflict in Australian history.
Tony Abbott famously thinks that, before the arrival of Europeans, Australia was “nothing but bush”. It would be foolish indeed to expect the prime minister to commemorate people he seems to believe never existed.
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But what’s fascinating about the debates taking place in the US is that they’re driven by ordinary people rather than politicians. The Confederate flag at South Carolina’s State House was first lowered not by a legislator but by African American activist Bree Newsome, who went to jail as a result. All across the country, it’s Black Lives Matter campaigners who are insisting on a discussion of the nation’s history, precisely because that discussion necessarily intersects with politics today.
The Frontier Wars in Australia were fought out with different tactics in different places at different times. Remembering the conflict thus necessitates localised histories, specific accounts of what was done in specific places. An official statement about the past is all too likely to dissolve into platitudes and empty symbolism.
But a grassroots campaign to identify and commemorate particular histories would take on a different dynamic. It would necessitate an engagement with the community, for a start: a serious public debate about historical injustice. It would also link the past with the present, inevitably posing questions that go beyond the treatment of Adam Goodes into the shocking statistics about, for instance, Indigenous unemployment and incarceration.
Australian history and American history are not the same. But it’s very hard to read, say, Amy McQuire’s account of the death last year of Julieka Dhu in police custody without asking the questions currently being posed in the US: do black lives matter or not? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/atmospheric-sound-channels-good-for-sleuths-but-not-ufos | News | 2017-07-11T20:30:05.000Z | David Hambling | Atmospheric sound channels – good for sleuths but not UFOs | Seventy years ago a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, found some peculiar wreckage of silver foil and sticks. An official US army statement claimed it was a “flying disc”, leading to headlines that an alien flying saucer had been captured.
A second statement said the debris was just a weather balloon. The media accepted this version, although UFO enthusiasts still believe the Pentagon has a crashed extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
The second explanation was correct if misleading. It was an exotic weather balloon from a classified military programme, the existence of which was not revealed until 1994. The secret Project Mogul involved a cluster of meteorological balloons designed to carry microphones to a high altitude.
Aliens join the 2000 festival in Roswell, New Mexico, which celebrates the 1947 crashed balloon, first passed off by the army as a UFO. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty
In the oceans there is a layer called the “deep sound channel”, which can carry sound for long distances, allowing submarines to be detected at long range. Scientists thought there might be a similar layer in the atmosphere which would channel loud noises – specifically Russian ballistic missile launches and nuclear tests. They calculated that such launches could be located from thousands of miles away.
Unfortunately the atmospheric sound channels, located in the 1960s, proved too high for the Mogul balloons. One channel was found at an altitude of 45-50 kilometres (28-31 miles), another at 80-90 kilometres (50-56 miles).
Raising instruments to these altitudes is impractical, but Swedish scientists have been using the sound channels for more than 30 years, catching reflections from them at ground stations. The equipment can track reflected infrasound from distant thunderstorms, meteors and volcanoes, and even pick up sonic booms from Concorde flights. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/21/newly-released-chinese-covid-data-infected-animals-wuhan | World news | 2023-03-21T12:54:52.000Z | Peter Beaumont | Newly released Chinese Covid data points to infected animals in Wuhan | Newly released data from early in the Covid-19 pandemic has offered a crucial insight into the outbreak’s origins, suggesting that Covid-infected animals were present at a market in Wuhan and could have been a “potential source of human infections”.
A pre-print report on Monday by a team of international researchers fleshed out analysis of previously unseen genomic samples collected by Chinese scientists at the Huanan market in Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic.
Initially leaked last week after a meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) committee studying the origins of the outbreak, it appeared to show a likelihood that racoon dogs and other species were present at the market and potentially infected.
“This adds to the body of evidence identifying the Huanan market as the spillover location of Sars-CoV-2 and the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said the report.
The latest research on Covid-19’s origins came as the US president, Joe Biden, signed into law a bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. This follows reports that the US Department of Energy had assessed with “low confidence” that the laboratory may have been linked to the outbreak.
“We need to get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins … including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible.”
Biden’s move came as newly updated genetic material from Wuhan’s Huanan market from China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was briefly released on a globally accessible database. The Chinese CDC presented those findings at a meeting of WHO experts researching the virus’s origins.
The new research examined genomic sequences from the newly released material, which was collected at the Wuhan market.
The research looked at samples including swabs from stalls at the market, sewage systems and 18 specific to animals – both frozen carcasses and live – around the site, including strays around the market.
What is significant about the new research is that it identifies high levels of DNA from several species that were not identified as having been tested during the original sampling.
That includes racoon dogs, which it is speculated may have been present at the market before it was cleared early in the outbreak as part of the Chinese health authorities’ immediate intervention.
Although some of the material was leaked last week, the new report adds more detail about other animals present at the market, as well as showing that some of the Sars-CoV-2 positive environmental samples had more animal than human genetic material in them, which the researchers said was consistent with the animals being infected.
The release of the new research followed a statement from the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens two days ago assessing the importance of what they had been shown.
“The presentations from China CDC and invited international researchers indicated that there were newly available data from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market,” it said.
“Analyses of these data suggest that, apart from Sars-CoV-2 sequences, some samples also contained human DNA, as well as mitochondrial DNA of several animal species, including some that are known to be susceptible to Sars-CoV-2.
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“This included DNA from wild raccoon dogs, Malaysian porcupine and bamboo rats among others, in SarsS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples.
“Although this does not provide conclusive evidence as to the intermediate host or origins of the virus, the data provide further evidence of the presence of susceptible animals at the market that may have been a source of human infections.”
The new material is significant as a search for an intermediary animal host has been one of the twin focuses of investigations into Covid’s origins along with the lab leak theory. However, scientific consensus on the outbreak has leaned towards the theory that it was most likely zoonotic in origin, jumping from an animal to humans, as has occurred with other similar viruses.
The release of the new data – amid longstanding and well-aired concerns about China’s transparency around its own research into the outbreak – leaves many questions unanswered, not least why it has taken so long for the genetic sequences to emerge.
“The data does point even further to a market origin,” Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research, who attended the WHO meeting earlier this month and is one of the scientists who has examined the samples, told the journal Science last week.
Like the new data, the Biden administration move to declassify US intelligence on the source of the outbreak is unlikely to be the last word in either the scientific debate or the highly polarised political debate over the origins.
While considerable attention was paid to the disclosure that the US Department of Energy had assessed a lab leak as the source – albeit with low confidence, backing a similar assessment by the FBI – a majority of US agencies lean towards the outbreak being a natural event. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/joanna-rakoff-journalism-novelist-author-writer-career-advice | Guardian Careers | 2014-07-30T06:00:00.000Z | Hannah Friend | Joanna Rakoff: from literary agent to bestselling author | Like a lot of young people, Rakoff took the first job she was offered, at one of New York's oldest literary agencies. But she had no idea what the business entailed. She didn't realise this agency represented the celebrated J D Salinger, author of the Catcher in the Rye, or that it would be the first stepping stone on the way to becoming a writer and later, the novelist she is today.
After a plethora of odd jobs at college, from retail roles to pulling pints, for a short time Rakoff was a personal assistant on a big budget Barbra Streisand film. This extinguished her aspirations of possibly going into film and acting. Just a month into this venture, while at a party, a friend of a friend told her about a vacancy at a local literary agency. Like many young people it wasn't her dream to get into publishing, but it was a job and she thought: "Why not?"
Despite the ups and downs, she gave it her all. A recurring theme throughout her memoir is that her boss was challenging, to say the least. "The thing that worked when my boss was being difficult was remembering it wasn't personal. Usually, it's not about you, it's them," she advises anyone in a similar situation.
Being a manager and editor herself later in her career also helped to make sense of what happened years before: "It's really hard managing a lot of people. I had a lot more sympathy for my former boss after that. You don't know everything that's going on with them, and remember they're a person too."
After only a year, she realised she was not "an agency person" as her manager had believed, but it had planted the seed; she left with dreams of becoming a writer and a real insight into the world of glossy magazines.
While studying an MFA (master of fine arts) in creative writing at Columbia University she took classes with a writer and an editor from the weekly magazine the New Yorker. "Although I still thought of myself as an academic at that time, they both said to me: 'You should think about writing for magazines, you're good at it.' It was a revolutionary moment because I had been struggling, and everything snapped into place," explains the author of My Salinger Year. Combined with a love of critical reviews and culture, journalism seemed like the perfect path to take.
Rakoff rose from writing magazine articles to features editor, and later editor-in-chief. Dreams of one day writing fiction remained and her journey into journalism helped her reach the stage of writing her first novel, A Fortunate Age. "Writing pieces for magazines really helped me to become an author; it helped make writing less scary. When you write regularly and have deadlines, it really teaches you that sometimes you have to sit down and just do it," she says.
With all the pressure on young people these days, it's important to remember you don't have to be in the perfect job straight away. "I feel people in their 20s are so much more professionally focused than when I was that age. There's also fear around career paths that are unconventional."
What's more, you don't need to know what you want to be or do for a career as soon as you finish university or school. Rakoff explains how many of her hugely successful friends found different paths towards becoming fiction writers. There's also nothing wrong with having a job to keep you busy and pay the bills while you work out where your passions lie.
So what would be her advice for aspiring writers? "If you want to be an author, or do anything in the arts professionally, the most important thing is to actually do the work. And make sure it's good."
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more content and advice like this direct to your inbox, sign up for our weekly update and careers ebook. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/11/giles-watling-conservatives-clacton-douglas-carswell-ukip | Politics | 2014-09-11T20:05:15.000Z | Rowena Mason | Conservatives select former 1980s television star to fight Ukip in Clacton | The Conservatives election machine has finally swung into action in Clacton as the party picked former 1980s television star Giles Watling as their candidate to fight Ukip defector Douglas Carswell, and despatched more than 30 MPs in an attempt to love-bomb the seaside resort.
The party is playing catch-up against Carswell, who is well ahead in the polls and was the town's popular MP before he resigned as a Conservative to re-contest the seat for Ukip.
Conservative sources said they believe the seat to be winnable and that their candidate will benefit from tactical voting among residents wanting to keep out Ukip. However, they are suffering backlash after former Tory MP Matthew Parris suggested in a Times article the party should turn its back on a town and its people who are "going nowhere".
Michael Gove, the Conservative chief whip, dismissed the comments as ridiculous when questioned about it by a local reporter.
Giles Watling with fellow Bread actor Melanie Hill in 1990. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/REX
Watling, a director and actor, is best known for playing Oswald the vicar in the 1980s television sitcom Bread, and is described on his website as a keen sailor who owns two small yachts.
He was selected out of a choice of just two candidates, both vetted by the party headquarters, at a US-style open primary meeting attended by around 240 residents.
It was picketed by a group of Ukip supporters from the north-east, who had travelled down by minibus to express their delight that Nigel Farage's insurgent party is on course to win its first parliamentary election.
Carswell has retained a large amount of support in Clacton, with residents honking their horns and approaching him with their best wishes as he canvassed around the town.
But Ann Walters, a 74-year-old Clacton resident attending the Conservative open primary, said Carswell is "an honourable gentleman but naive."
"Ukip supporters are stupid ... How dare Farage say there's too many immigrants? We've always had immigrants," she said, on her way into the meeting.
However, another resident, Steve Delarossi, drove down to the public meeting to tell the Conservatives that their leaflets were a "tissue of lies" over their claims about freezing council tax. The 51-year-old, who is suffering from lung disease and heart disease, said people on disability benefits have had to pay more in council tax. He has voted for Labour in the past, for the Conservatives in 2010 and will now give his vote to Ukip. Several voters cited Parris's inflammatory article as a reason why they would not be supporting the Conservatives.
Carswell said he did not want to "have a pop" at Parris, but added: "I think it's very sad that the party I spent twentysomething years being a part [had its] selection meetings chaired by someone who clearly holds those views."
The Ukip candidate said he was trying to counter the view that Nigel Farage's party was backward-looking and reactionary – by offering a sense of hope in contrast to the "absurdly patronising" attitude of those at the top of the Conservative party towards those who they stereotype as "white-van Essex men".
"Look around you, the customer hasn't got what it asked for," Carswell said. "There is a sense of alienation. I don't want to harbour that sense of alienation and stoke it up. I am trying to say to some very pessimistic people, 'let's do this together, let's change things'. On one of my leaflets, underneath the Matthew Parris article, I've actually got the slogan: Don't get angry, let's change things."
Clacton has been identified by the Manchester University academic Matthew Goodwin as the seat in England most likely to be receptive to Ukip because it has "lots of pensioners, lots of voters without a degree, lots of voters with no educational qualifications, and higher than average levels of economic disadvantage and unemployment".
Labour is third in the polls, about seven points behind the Conservatives. Tim Young, the party's candidate and another Colchester councillor who was born in Clacton, said his focus on the cost of living and the coalition's failures on the NHS was gaining support with voters.
He was scornful of Carswell's anti-establishment position, arguing that the former Tory had voted for coalition measures that had left people worse off. Young said he was stressing the rightwing nature of Ukip's policies and its record of "spreading fear" about immigration.
Asked why Labour is not performing better in the town and the south in general, he said: "There are issues in the south, but Clacton is a wide and diverse constituency. If you go to places like Frinton, places like that are not typically urban and lots of deprivation. It isn't a natural Labour seat. It's somewhere where Labour can get a lot of votes but I wouldn't pick it out as natural Labour territory … The cost-of-living is resonating without a doubt. People are on their uppers here." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/23/invertebrates-decline-stream-cunsey-beck-lake-windermere | Environment | 2024-01-23T07:00:41.000Z | Sandra Laville | Huge loss of invertebrates detected in stream feeding into Windermere | Testing by citizen scientists of a beck that feeds into Windermere has revealed a huge loss in invertebrate life in the lake in Cumbria that campaigners say is being caused by sewage discharges.
Save Windermere and WildFish carried out testing for invertebrates in Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), in order to assess the impact on its freshwater ecology of the Near Sawrey wastewater treatment works, owned and operated by United Utilities.
Their first year results showed a decline of 76% in riverfly species and a 33% reduction in riverfly diversity in samples taken below the sewage outlet compared with samples taken above it.
They said the permit issued by the Environment Agency – outlining when raw sewage can be discharged legally from the treatment works and providing limits for toxic pollutants – is not fit for purpose. The Environment Agency denies this.
Save Windermere and WildFish say their findings suggest chronic damage to Cunsey Beck as a result of the regulatory failure of the EA. The stream was hit by a serious pollution event in 2022 that killed hundreds of fish, while Lake Windermere has become the focus of national concerns over sewage dumping and extensive algae.
Like all rivers in England Cunsey Beck is being affected by pollution from sewage – both raw and treated – and agricultural runoff. No river in England passes pollution tests for chemical and biological pollutants.
Cunsey Beck at dusk. It is categorised as having a ‘poor’ ecological status. Photograph: Keith Taylor/Alamy
Cunsey Beck is categorised under the pollution tests in the EU-derived water framework directive as having a “poor” ecological status. But despite the plight of the stream, which feeds directly into Lake Windermere, the campaigners say the agency has not carried out any invertebrate sample testing in the river for 10 years.
“Time and time again the Environment Agency has demonstrated that they are not fit for purpose. Not only should they review this permit immediately, they should have never allowed it in the first place. They are failing to protect our natural world and this is particularly distressing within the Windermere catchment,” said Matt Staniek of the Save Windermere campaign.
Save Windermere is calling for urgent reform of the regulator and a public inquiry. In its analysis the campaign group along with Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, (Wasp), reviewed the EA permit for the Near Sawrey treatment works. The groups believe the permit is not adequate to protect the SSSI.
The limit for ammoniacal nitrogen, a toxic pollutant, for the works is 30mg a litre. The groups compared this with permits for Thames Water where only one site had a similar limit, while 222 other permits had limits of 18mg/l or lower. Staniek said the limit for discharging into an SSSI was inappropriate.
Sam Green, an ecologist from WildFish said: “The data from our SmartRivers monitoring shows freshwater invertebrates are being negatively impacted by water quality in the Windermere catchment, and this is particularly apparent downstream of United Utilities assets. Biodiverse invertebrate communities are a keystone of healthy freshwater ecosystems. We urgently need action to improve the ecological condition of these waterways.”
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Cunsey Beck near Hawkshead in the Lake District, Cumbria. Photograph: Simon Whaley
Revelations about the permit and the impact of pollution on the invertebrate population in the beck come after an internal report found there had been a series of failures by the EA in the way it investigated the serious pollution of the beck in 2022.
The independent report, obtained under freedom of information legislation by WildFish, found the EA failed to properly investigate the serious pollution in the summer of 2022. The report by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency said the failures meant no source of the pollution was identified. The EA said at the time that it recognised there were things it should have done better and that improvements were being made.
A United Utilities spokesperson said: “The Near Sawrey wastewater treatment plant operates in line with its environmental permit, as set by the Environment Agency.”
An EA spokesperson said: “These allegations are untrue. The United Utilities permit already considers the SSSI status of Cunsey Beck, with recent modelling showing our limits ensure a good ecological status for ammonia. We have carried out invertebrate sampling in Cunsey Beck as recently as June 2023.
“We are committed to further improving the water quality in Lake Windermere and are working closely with several organisations as part of the Love Windermere Partnership to do so. As part of this work, we have started the process of reviewing all the permits for this Lake to identify whether there is any further action we can take.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/14/mbongwana-star-from-kinshasa-review | Music | 2015-05-14T14:00:17.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa review – thrillingly wrong-footing Congolese music | Alexis Petridis | The video for Mbongwana Star’s debut single, Malukayi, was a mysterious and rather compelling thing. Figures loom out of a low-lit, smoke-wreathed gloom: a dancer, a frantic percussionist, a couple of middle-aged men in wheelchairs, and, most intriguingly, a spaceman wandering the streets of Kinshasa. The latter seemed like the perfect metaphor for a track that seemed to have fallen out of the sky, that somehow managed to be both identifiably Congolese – you can’t mistake the amplified likembes of guest stars Konono No 1 – and utterly unlike anything else the fertile Kinshasa music scene had yet produced: hypnotic rhythm patterns that clattered and echoed as if they were being played at the end of a vast tunnel; vocals coated with so much distortion they sounded like something picked up on a shortwave radio; a beautiful, keening male voice marooned over spacey electronics and mournful gusts of feedback to eerie effect.
Mbongwana Star – From Kinshasa: exclusive album stream
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It turned out to be the work of Coco Ngambali and Theo Nsituvuidi, formerly famed as two of the guys in the souped-up tricycle wheelchairs from Staff Benda Bilili, the band of paraplegic and homeless musicians whose rise from grinding poverty in Kinshasa to global recognition was one of the more startling musical stories of recent years. After their acrimonious departure from Staff Benda Bilili in 2013 over management disputes – anyone in the market for horrible irony might note that it took the good old music industry less than four years to break up a band that had previously stuck together for six on the streets of one of the poorest cities in the world – the fiftysomething Ngambali and Nsituvuidi recruited younger musicians from their hometown, apparently intent on making something radically different to Staff Benda Bilili’s stew of Congolese rumba and R&B. The other main protagonist on From Kinshasa appears to be Dublin-born, Paris-based Liam Farrell, once the drummer with Les Rita Mitsouko, subsequently a trip-hop producer and latterly a collaborator with Afrobeat legend Tony Allen.
In recent years, westerners attempting to capture the music pouring out of the Democratic Republic of Congo have tended to use a touch that was light to point of transparency. Vincent Kenis, producer of both Staff Benda Bilili’s albums and Crammed Disc’s celebrated Congotronics series – which alerted the wider world to Konono No 1 and the Kasai Allstars –even forwent a studio, preferring to set up his laptop and microphones in the open air and record the artists live. Farrell, on the other hand, seems to have placed himself slap in the middle of the action. He produces the album in a way that couldn’t be further from Kenis’s verité, pretend-I’m-not-here approach, slathering on the reverb and echo, wilfully coating rhythms and vocals alike in overdriven fuzz: even the album’s most ostensibly straightforward track, an astonishingly lovely ballad called Coco Blues, comes backed by a rhythm that’s been warped until it sounds as if it’s made up of shuffling footsteps. Kenis once paid Kinshasa street kids to try and stamp on some toads who were making their presence known during a Staff Benda Bilili recording session; Farrell, on the other hand, claims to have woven deliberately distorted recordings of Kinshasa itself into Mbongwana Star’s sound. He also performs on it, and appears in the accompanying press shots as a band member.
But quite what Farrell plays on the album isn’t entirely clear. If that sounds like a criticism, it isn’t meant that way. Quite the opposite: it tells you something about why From Kinshasa is such a success. Collaborations between musicians from wildly differing cultures – particularly from the west and Africa – are almost always done with the best intentions, but they run the risk of sounding artificial, as if one element has been grafted on to the other. On From Kinshasa, it’s almost impossible to work out where the Congolese musicians end and the European guy begins. The sounds on the album – whether scratchy samples of breathing, or effortlessly fluid soukous guitar lines, bursts of electronic noise or frantic call-and-response vocals in Lingala – wind around each other into a knot you can’t really unpick. It doesn’t sound like a European producer twisting Congolese music to his own ends; it sounds like the work of a band, albeit one intent on doing something not many bands in 2015 seem that interested in doing – jolting the listener with the shock of the new.
There are certainly noises that feel oddly recognisable to western ears in Mbongwana Star’s dense mesh of sound. Put through a distortion pedal, Ngambali and Nsituvuidi’s guitar lines frequently bear a weird resemblance to the itchy, agitated sound of post-punk: a track called Kimpala revolves around a wah-wah guitar riff that might have stepped off a late 60s acid-rock album. Opening track From Kinshasa to the Moon points up the similarity between the basslines of Congolese rumba and reggae, while Suzanna takes a frantic, tribal rhythm track and distorts it until it sounds like something that might have been released on German techno label Basic Channel. Whether these similarities are intentional – knowing references, cannily designed to appeal to a hip European audience – or completely coincidental, they’re not really the point of From Kinshasa. As soon as a little burst of familiarity appears, Mbongwana Star have a winning habit of snatching it away, wrongfooting you, shifting their music somewhere you don’t expect. Suzanna’s dark, techno-like pounding is topped off with an unexpectedly pretty, honeyed vocal, the appearance of which changes the track’s mood entirely.
At other points, From Kinshasa defies comparison, because it doesn’t really sound like anything else. Nganshe is built around an ominous bass pulse, clattering percussion, and a bizarrely hypnotic squeaking sound, somewhere between a Brazillian cuica drum and the scrape of fingers moving about an electric guitar’s fretboard. Over the top, voices chatter, while harmony vocals, flurries of distorted guitar and likembe fade in and out. As with a lot of From Kinshasa, listening to it feels like arriving in a bustling, unfamiliar city, a very long way from home: a gripping mix of excitement, apprehension and sensory overload. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/feb/25/religion-christianity-orissa-persecution | Opinion | 2009-02-26T09:00:00.000Z | Jenny Taylor | Jenny Taylor: Around the world, Christians face terrible stresses. In Britain, we have very little to complain about | The question: Are Christians persecuted in the UK?
The banality of the current debate about Christian persecution in the UK is an affront to those who stare death in the face every day in countries like India and Pakistan – just for thinking the wrong things about life.
I came home to this debate at the end of January after visiting the displacement camps in Orissa, southeast India in which thousands still live, months after the first massacres by Hindu nationalists in August last year.
Dignified old grandmothers and grandfathers told me what persecution is. It is watching the hands, feet, nose, ears, arms and legs of your child being chopped off piece by agonising piece over six hours – for refusing to convert to a virulent strain of Hinduism.
It's being burned to death with kerosene for daring to protest about the destruction of your orphanage and the battering of the Catholic father who built it with his own hands.
It is watching helpless while police do nothing as the local school – built by the church for everyone – is torched and smashed and a man climbs on top of the roof to push the crucifix off. It is watching the saffron flag, the emblem of the nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, being tied to that cross with his loincloth and left fluttering in the smoky breeze.
It is finding yourself unable to go back to the villages you fled, along with 50,000 others, in a country being considered for entry to the G8 group of nations - for fear of forced conversion with an axe at your neck.
Persecution is a law that says if you become a Christian in order to escape the hideous caste system, you lose any benefits the government patronisingly bestows on you as a so-called scheduled caste.
Persecution is everywhere people escape from to come to Britain to be free of it.
In Pakistan persecution is finding yourself in gaol on a trumped-up charge of blasphemy because someone who had a business grudge against you daubed an anti-Qur'anic slogan on a wall – and accused you of doing it. You are a Christian and therefore of less worth in a court of law than a "good Muslim".
Of course, lawyers in Britain who are trying to build a practice around irritating new religious hatred and discrimination laws will happily cry wolf every time some company or local authority does something daft in the name of multiculturalism.
And there is an unpleasant undertone of antipathy against Christians arising from a quite shocking level of ignorance and prejudice.
But what mainstream Christians in the UK are experiencing is not "persecution".
Clearly if I had had my livelihood snatched from me by the busy-body state because the Muslim child I was fostering decided at the age of 16 that she wanted to become a Christian, despite my best efforts to stop her, I'd feel very aggrieved.
If, as has happened, my drug rehab project has gone to the wall after being denied funding because I prayed my clients into detox, and prayer is not allowed on taxpayers' money, I would be sad. I'd think it was a stupid decision knowing that prayer works – but I'd have to accept the state is a very blunt instrument by which to seek out and cure the root of human pain, and I'd try and raise funding from some other source.
No. The British Airways crucifix affair was a put-up job. If the rules on uniform decree no personal necklace to be worn – and I had signed up to that, then tough. If my school decrees no rings – whether a "Silver Ring Thing" ring or not – I'd bow to that.
Fortunately my religion does not dictate any outward show of membership. The only external sign that matters to me is the mysterious ritual of baptism by which I demonstrate to the world that I have "died" to my own sin and selfishness.
Nadia Eweida, the stroppy British Airways hostess who caused her employers such a headache, is Egyptian. In Egypt outward signs of Christian belonging are often heroic markers of solidarity with the terribly poor in a cruel world of rules and fear.
Nadia was represented by Paul Diamond, a British Jew from north London whose family have also experienced the vicious reality of oppression and are understandably therefore on the look-out for it.
Rather than litigating against the nation's confusion, and adopting the victim pose that demeans our faith in a Lord who rejoiced in martyrdom, we should use our strength trying to model real Christianity – chastity, hope, poverty, stability and love.
Then we'd really get up people's noses. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/03/beauty-spot-eyebrow-essentials-10-of-the-best | Life and style | 2024-03-03T06:30:04.000Z | Bemi Shaw | Eyebrow essentials: 10 of the best | Eyebrows have the ability to transform a face – define, sculpt or shape, depending on how you style them. At the moment brows are big, bold and fluffy but it’s a tricky trend to pull off if you’ve over-plucked in the past. Permanent brow treatments are always an option. Microshading, microblading, or ombre brows are excellent alternatives for those of us who’d prefer not to do the work. It is an effort, whether you pluck, tweeze or thread, but given what a difference it can make, it’s worth it in the long run.
Crucially you need to decide what sort of brow suits your features – it’s all in the shape that you choose
Crucially you need to decide what sort of brow suits your features – it’s all in the shape that you choose. Seeking an expert and getting some advice can really help. Lastly, pick products that feel right for you, whether a gel, pencil or powder. Experiment a little, make sure it’s the correct shade, apply it with precision and you’re good to go.
1. Refy Brow Pomade £14, refybeauty.com
2. NYX The Brow Glue £6, lookfantastic.com
3. Champo Pitta Brow Serum £24, champohaircare.com
4. Huda Beauty Bomb Brows Microshade Pencil £15, sephora.co.uk
5. Anastasia Beverly Hills Dipbrow Pomade £19, anastasiabeverlyhills.co.uk
6. Diorshow On Set Brow Mascara £28, dior.com
7. Kosas Air Brow Tinted Volumizing Treatment Gel £19, cultbeauty.co.uk
8. Jones Road Beauty The Brow Pencil £22, jonesroadbeauty.com
9. Pink Honey ‘Honey Glue’ Original Superhold £10, beautybay.com
10. Urban Decay Brow Blade £18, boots.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/28/poem-india-pandemic-gujarati-covid-narendra-modi | Opinion | 2021-05-28T12:07:09.000Z | Salil Tripathi | The poem that’s channelling India’s anger about the pandemic | Salil Tripathi | Parul Khakhar had little idea of the storm her 14-line poem would unleash. Posted on 11 May on social media, the Gujarati-language dirge expresses heartfelt despair and outrage over the pandemic deaths in India. Shab-vahini Ganga (“A Hearse Called Ganga”, as the river Ganges is known across India) is hauntingly rhythmic and charged with emotion, lamenting the tragedy that has stunned Indians.
India was spared the first wave of Covid-19, and the Narendra Modi administration rather smugly thought the country would be immune. Modi had hosted the then president, Donald Trump, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, at a large rally in February 2020, weeks before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. In the months since, other than declaring a brutal lockdown that disrupted the lives of millions of India’s internal migrant workers, the government carried on business as usual, permitting the world’s largest religious festival and holding vast political rallies for elections earlier this year (in which it suffered major setbacks). Modi donated vaccines to other countries, perhaps fancying the Nobel Prize for himself, and in January at the virtual World Economic Forum boasted that India had overcome the pandemic.
That was an act of hubris, as the world – and India – have discovered. Within days, it was clear that the emperor indeed had no clothes (Khakhar alludes to Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale in her poem). India turned from being the “world’s pharmacy” into a recipient of charity, with massive shortages of oxygen, medicines and ambulances. Not only did patients have to queue for beds in hospitals’ intensive care units (some died on the doorsteps of hospitals, waiting in ambulances or cars), mourners had to queue up for spots at crematoriums, which were running out of wood and whose furnaces were melting, the trees surrounding the crematoriums turning ashen.
Khakhar does not name Modi, but her anguish and anger are palpable in her poem. What’s remarkable is that she wrote it in Gujarati: Modi continues to be immensely popular in his home state, which his Bharatiya Janata party has ruled almost uninterrupted since 1995. He was himself the state’s chief minister from late 2001 till 2014, when he was elected India’s prime minister. The poem has wider ramifications; it has revealed to Indians how unpopular he is becoming in his own state, which goes to elections late next year.
‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe
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The poem has set Gujarati society apart, with many cheering it quietly, and many more openly abusing its author. It has emboldened Modi’s opponents within the state to be more vocal. At the same time, Modi’s supporters have doubled down. They have written responses, including some verses of indifferent quality, vilifying Khakhar, comparing her with a demoness, besides the usual misogynistic, vulgar and crude imagery that trolls on the internet often invoke when they come across a spunky woman who says things they don’t want to hear. Indeed, she has already reportedly attracted more than 28,000 hate-filled messages, making it perhaps the most criticised poem of all time, at least in India.
Meanwhile, the poem has spread across India with the speed of the virus itself. It has been translated into at least seven languages – Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Malayalam and Tamil, and been set to music in Gujarati and Punjabi. I translated it into English, and it appeared with a few other translations on the independent publication, the Wire. While many leading Gujarati authors have remained silent, some have spoken up. Khakhar has had to lock her social media profile. She responded politely to my emails but chose not to comment in public – preferring to let her words speak for herself. As the attacks against her mounted relentlessly, last week she posted a spirited verse on her Facebook page: “Blessed and content that Parul is still alive; even though many daggers were drawn carrying her name.”
Salman Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses in 1988 that a poet’s work is “to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep”.
Khakhar’s verse is doing just that.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York and chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/29/lords-committee-urges-end-to-brexit-barriers-for-musicians-and-young-people | Politics | 2023-04-29T06:00:28.000Z | Lisa O'Carroll | Lords committee urges end to Brexit barriers for musicians and young people | An influential House of Lords committee is urging the government to start working with EU capitals to remove Brexit barriers that block musicians, young people and professionals working easily in Europe.
After six months of research and evidence from 40 witnesses the European affairs committee says it has identified 72 areas where small changes could make a huge difference in areas of cultural and educational interests on both sides of the Channel.
The chair, Lord Kinnoull, said the report, The future UK-EU relationship, was not about the big “reset moment” in 2025 when the trade deal is renegotiated – a move that would risk the wrath of Brexiters.
“The report is really a laundry list of lots and lots of small suggestions, which you can put in place, that are actually mutually beneficial ideas,” he said.
“It is not going to be snowstorm. It will be a gradual thing because this trust rebuilding must go on,” he added, talking of the thawing of relations between the UK and the EU since the Windsor agreement on Northern Ireland was sealed last month.
Brexit stage left: British band tells of farcical barriers encountered on EU tour
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He said the committee of 13 “cross-party Brexiters, remainers and beyonders” believed all 72 recommendations were achievable.
Top of the list is getting music and theatre tours moving again in both directions and school coach trips from the continent to the UK back on the road.
It expressed particular disappointment at the lack of progress to enable musicians to tour Europe easily again after the end of free movement, a benefit of the single market.
“It’s not about the Beyoncés of this world. They can cope with the rules. It’s for the small bands, for the vast majority of musicians. The travel is not about a huge economic activity,” said Kinnoull.
Much travel could resume if the rules were simplified, centralised and made easier to navigate, the report found.
Post-Brexit changes to immigration rules also triggered a collapse in bookings for school trips from the continent because the border force will no longer accept ID cards, and instead requires passports and visas for non-EU children on the school trips.
The government told the committee the ban on ID cards was because of the high incidence of document fraud but the committee urged the government to revisit the matter.
“We were not able to find any evidence schoolchildren engage in ID card fraud and there were at least two members of the committee that are exceptionally interested in this area,” said Kinnoull.
He said the benefits for loosening the rules for children would go in both directions across the Channel, given the difficulties British schools are also having with delays at Dover.
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“We are talking about travel through liberal democracies in Europe. We think we can do better and we must do better, and we have the mechanics to do better,” he said.
Other recommendations include renewed efforts to launch mobility schemes between individual EU countries and the UK, allowing adults under 30 to work for a short stint in each other’s country.
“The UK has got such a scheme with Australia and New Zealand, and France has it with Canada. There is no reason why these schemes could not be in place between EU countries and the UK,” said Kinnoull.
Other recommendations include an expansion of Turing, the replacement to the Erasmus student placement programme scheme, to allow EU students come to the UK, and an intensification of foreign, defence and diplomatic cooperation.
Trust after the turmoil of Brexit is still an issue, with EU sources pushing back on suggestions last week that UK travellers could soon be using e-gates at airports.
“An improved atmosphere doesn’t mean rebuilding trust in itself,” said Kinnoull.
“What one has got to do is start doing a few deals and to build that trust by getting into the meeting room and talking.
“Of the 24 committees under the trade and cooperation agreement, 22 have been pretty well sitting doing nothing because of the impasse over the Northern Ireland protocol,” he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/27/karim-sahloul-tunisian-rescued-tourists-terror-attack-hotel-receptionist | World news | 2015-12-27T11:10:00.000Z | Chris Stephen | The Tunisian who rescued tourists after terror attack: what happened next | Until a few shattering moments shortly before midday on Friday 26 June, Karim Sahloul’s life had been pretty good. Aged 38, he worked at the reception desk at the Palm Marina, one of a cluster of luxury hotels at the northern end of the Tunisian resort of Sousse.
Sahloul was born just a stone’s throw away, in the picturesque Port El Kantaoui, and as he grew up he had watched hotel construction eat its way up from Sousse to envelop the port, bringing prosperity with it. Trained in information technology, he had worked for 11 years at the Palm Marina, throughout the 2010 Arab Spring revolution that toppled dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, bringing democracy but also chaos and upheaval to Tunisia.
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Then in March two suicide gunmen rampaged through the capital’s Bardo museum, slaughtering 23 people. Sousse held its breath, fearing the attack would sweep away the tourists. But summer kicked in and the coaches arrived once again. “Life was very good, life was very nice, we had a lot of guests,” says Sahloul. “A lot of the British people come back year after year.”
They are not likely, however, to do so next year. On 26 June, a serene day of sunshine, blue skies, tourists lounging by the pool, the picture changed in an instant. Suddenly, Sahloul remembers, “everybody was running in from the beach, waving arms, shouting”.
Empty sun loungers on the beach in Sousse. Photograph: Andreas Gebert/DPA/Corbis
A thick wall of glass behind the Palm Marina’s reception desk blocked the sound of screams and shooting. On the beach, gunman Seifeddine Rezgui was mowing down tourists with a Kalashnikov.
Sahloul stood transfixed, the scene unfolding like a silent movie in front of him. He bolted out from behind the desk, through the lobby, down a set of steps and outside, arriving into bedlam. Panicking tourists rushed past. The air was filled with the staccato hammer of gunfire.
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Sahloul struggled through the panicking throng to the beach. To his left, outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel, dead and dying tourists were lying amid bloody overturned sun loungers. Pounding across the sand, he found Allison Heathcote, a British woman from Felixstowe who had come to Sousse for her 30th wedding anniversary.
Using his first aid training, and common sense, Karim cleared Heathcote’s airway and kept her talking, determined she would not pass out. He found a discarded water bottle and used beach towels to staunch the blood. She survived, despite suffering five bullet wounds, and became known as a “miracle patient”. Her husband, Phil, was killed in the massacre, along with 37 others, 29 of them also British.
Holidaymakers lay flowers on Marhaba beach, where 38 people were killed in a terrorist attack. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
The rest of the day is now a blur in Sahloul’s memory; he recalls shouting for people to clear a path for the ambulance crew. Then police arrived, bodies were bagged up, and the shock kicked in. It has never truly subsided. For several weeks he had problems sleeping, images of slain tourists seared in his mind.
Then came the second impact. The massacre saw visitors desert Tunisia en masse. Hotels closed, thousands were laid off, and in the months that followed, a depression descended on the former boom town. “Everything in Sousse depends on hotels – shops, taxis, markets – everything,” says Sahloul. “If the tourism disappears, big problem.”
He was luckier than most: getting winter work on the security staff when the Palm Marina closed its doors in September. But like everyone in Sousse, he fears for the future, worried there will be no work if the hotels stay closed next year. The most difficult part of this waiting is that Sahloul feels the shootings have robbed him of his self-reliance.
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His maxim had always been: work hard, work well, and you will prosper. But the terror attacks have changed the equation. Now, he feels his future is no longer in his hands, depending instead on upheavals far beyond his control. All he can do is wait and hope. “A lot of families in Sousse, they are crying for everything that happened, for the deaths on the beach, for our future,” he says. “It’s a very hard situation.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/23/jim-oneill-resigns-treasury-minister-conservative-whip-theresa-may-tensions | Politics | 2016-09-23T11:46:15.000Z | Rowena Mason | Jim O'Neill resigns Treasury post and Tory whip | Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs chief economist, has stepped down as a Treasury minister and resigned the Conservative whip amid reported tensions over Theresa May’s approach to China.
The high-profile businessman was given a peerage and appointed to George Osborne’s Treasury team last year with responsibility for the “northern powerhouse” project.
He is known for coining the phrase “Brics”, an acronym for the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
However, he resigned his post as commercial secretary to the Treasury on Friday without giving a reason for his departure, apart from saying he had successfully completed a review of antimicrobial resistance, which he started before he was a minister.
In his letter to the prime minister, he played down speculation that he was unhappy in the job because of her cautious approach towards Chinese investment, and her replacement of Osborne’s focus on the north with a broader industrial strategy across the whole country.
Jim O’Neill (second from left) on the former chancellor George Osborne’s team in March. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
“I primarily joined, however, for the specific purpose of helping deliver the northern powerhouse, and to help boost our economic ties with key growing economies around the world, especially China and India, and other rapidly emerging economies,” Lord O’Neill wrote.
“The case for both to be at the heart of British economic policy is even stronger following the referendum, and I am pleased that, despite speculation to the contrary, both appear to be commanding your personal attention. I am leaving knowing that I can play some role supporting these critical initiatives as a non-governmental person.”
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George Osborne
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However, there has been persistent speculation that O’Neill would step down following a Financial Times report in July that cited his unhappiness with May’s approach to China, exposed by her handling of plans for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point.
His decision to resign the Conservative whip and sit as a crossbencher in the House of Lords also suggests an ideological break with May’s Conservatives in comparison with the party’s approach under David Cameron and Osborne.
May said she was sorry about O’Neill’s resignation and thanked him for his service. She wrote: “You have made a significant contribution to driving forward the government’s work on delivering growth beyond the south-east through the northern powerhouse and on promoting stronger economic links with emerging economies, including China and India. You have laid important foundations in these areas, and the government will build on them.
“I would particularly like to pay tribute to your ground-breaking work on antimicrobial resistance. You should take great pride in seeing your review culminate this week in the UN high level agreement.
“You have played a vital role in building global consensus on this important issue, which will have long-lasting benefits.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/may/26/cannes-film-festival-lars-von-trier | Film | 2011-05-26T12:06:18.000Z | Catherine Shoard | Lars von Trier will return – but can Cannes cope without him? | Did Lars von Trier overstep the mark in his jokey association with Hitler? At a week's distance from the hoo-hah, it looks like the wrong question. What perhaps ought to be asked is: can Cannes afford to exile its own enfant terrible at a potentially vulnerable time for the festival?
For despite Von Trier's hat-trick of apologies, the board's decision to declare him persona non grata is beginning to look like an own goal. Von Trier is, along with Pedro Almodóvar and Michael Haneke, one of a few semi-mainstream European auteurs who've been championed by Cannes so long and so fruitfully they'd be damned if they were to defect to a rival event. Now, Von Trier's loyalty to the Riviera need never be tested.
What the incident does, now the dust has settled, is highlight the shifting sands of various festivals. The obvious relocation destination for future Von Trier premieres is Venice, which begins in early September: a touch more glam than Berlin in February, though still close enough to home to mean Von Trier (who doesn't fly) could put in an appearance. Yet Venice itself is increasingly vulnerable to the ascendancy of Toronto, which kicks off just as the credits roll on the Lido and is increasingly seen as the launchpad of choice ahead of awards season – especially, and crucially, when it comes to US films.
And it's with the Americans that Cannes appears to be losing most ground. There were only two US films in competition this year, one of which won the Palme d'Or, the other the best director award (and the man in the chair for that one, Nicolas Winding Refn, is actually from Copenhagen).
The number has diminished rapidly over the past decade. Last year there was only one (Doug Liman's duffer Fair Game), the previous year two (Inglourious Basterds, Taking Woodstock). But in 2008 there were four (Changeling, Che, Synecdoche, New York and Two Lovers), five in 2007 (Death Proof, No Country for Old Men, Paranoid Park, We Own the Night, Zodiac) and six in 2005 (Broken Flowers, Don't Come Knocking, Last Days, Sin City, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, A History of Violence).
The logic is a no-brainer. Launching in May either means the movie will be rushed out stateside (as with The Tree of Life, which opens over there and in most of the rest of Europe in the next couple of weeks) or that the buzz will have dangerously quietened by the time the more usual autumn release comes around, and be muted even further when Oscars voters are scratching their heads in the spring (remember The Social Network's early-ish release was credited with causing a drop in momentum that cost it dearly at this year's Academy Awards).
Not that directors themselves wouldn't like to debut at Cannes: one rumour doing the rounds this year was that Alexander Payne, whose About Schmidt was in competition in 2002, was refused permission by his studio to premiere The Descendants in France. For US titles, it's increasingly either a case of getting them out in time for Sundance and hoping for a slow-burn Precious effect, or saving them up for Toronto or Venice.
Does it matter? A little. The London film festival is also losing out to those two big-hitters, despite actually coming afterwards (last year's event had no big premieres at all – not even of British titles such as Submarine, Made in Dagenham or Never Let Me Go, all of which premiered a few weeks before at Toronto).
Cannes will survive, of course, and its reputation as the classiest European festival may well be enhanced by the fact it will need to fill the programme with arthouse fare in lieu of big titles from across the pond. If so, it needs to ensure it keeps a check on that strange symbiotic relationship that sees it regularly used as a sun-dappled, out-of-competition berth for early summer blockbusters of dubious quality (Pirates 4 this year; Indiana Jones 4 and Star Wars 6 in recent memory). That's fine – fun, even. But if those were the only US films screening, Cannes could be in trouble. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/14/marlon-james-marley-murder-and-me | Life and style | 2015-10-14T18:43:08.000Z | Paula Cocozza | Booker winner Marlon James: ‘I was the nerd, I wasn’t into sports, assumed gay’ | Marlon James’s third novel is epic: hefty in grammes, timespan, ambition and structure. It has been described as a cacophony, a din of voices, telling their stories, often in patois; and in tangent, the story of the 1976 assassination attempt on the singer Bob Marley. Some passages are almost made for singing. Odd pairs of words are spliced in rhyme: lockdown and downtown, sistren and shitstem. There are so many voices. The book’s cast list names 76 characters. Fifteen have speaking parts. Even James used to open his laptop and think: “Who am I going to see today?” The effect is clamorous. And as the death toll mounts, each name at the head of a new chapter is as ominous as an engraving on a tombstone.
So it comes as a surprise when James says that A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the Man Booker prize 2015 on Tuesday night, began life with only one voice, one character, to whom the story wholly belonged.
His novel was not the favourite for the award (that was Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life), but there were whoops in the audience when he was announced as the winner.
To whom, though, did his story first belong? Could it be Papa-Lo, the gang don who finds his softer side and is punished with deposition? Nina Burgess, the anchor who helped pull James through the whole novel? Or the appalling Dr Love, whose shadow lengthens across those mighty 688 pages?
Marley onstage around 1971. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
James shakes his head.
“John-John K. He was the first.”
There is a pause; John-John K is a minor character who figures only in the book’s final third. “I usually am surprised, too,” he says. “Page 458. First page I wrote! I was writing a totally different kind of novel.”
The discovery that John-John K was the originating voice casts the novel’s trajectory in fresh light. A gay hitman from Chicago, John-John K performs two crucial jobs, one of which is to help Weeper, a gay gangster who has moved to the US from Jamaica, to affirm a kind of peace with his sexuality. (James laughs when he says that this fourth part was the only one he vetoed his mother from reading.) When James started writing A Brief History, with John-John K as the main character, did he mean to write a “gay” novel?
“If I’m going to go by how the book really started, yes,” he says. “It was a gay hitman going through boyfriend troubles, trying to kill someone. When the overall architecture showed up, it made sense to me. All of those tricky sexualities, the things we do to get accepted, and the things we do that make us acceptable, I really wanted to talk about that.” He says A Brief History is “a novel of exile”. (He once described himself as “post-postcolonial” but now rejects that label because “it implies that whatever you’re doing, it’s the still-dominant context”.)
Weeper’s meanness eases as he learns to accept himself. “From the get-go he was a gay character. And not just a gay character,” James says. “When people talk about homosexuality, the perception of homosexuality itself is one thing, but then there’s the perception of the role you play. Are you the top, the bottom? Are you submissive? There’s always someone who’s doing it and a person who it’s being done to. I deliberately played with that.”
James, 45, was born in Jamaica in 1970, and grew up in Portmore, an affluent suburb of Kingston: “a classic sort of suburb, like you see on the outskirts of London.” Big house, garage for the car, that sort of thing. “My dad got busy,” he says, so there were four children in the house, plus four further siblings from other relationships.
James was six at the time of Marley’s attempted assassination. The news reverberated around the house; not surprising given that his mother worked as a detective and his father at law school (he would become Justice James). “I like to think I was a pretty smart six,” James says. “I certainly knew what a criminal was. I certainly knew what a gunman was.” But the newsreel of the assassination attempt “made no sense. Adults weren’t giving us context.” The plot, his sense of his parents’ struggle to understand it, struck him with force. “You remember the first time your dad is no longer Superman,” he says. The look on his parents’ faces was pure uncertainty. “What is going to happen?”
James with the 2015 Man Booker prize. Photograph: Neil Hall/AFP/Getty Images
Some reviewers have disliked the fact that James refers to Marley throughout A Brief History as The Singer, but James says that when he tried writing out Marley’s name, “it felt wrong. I wanted the Marley I knew. And the fact is, the Marley I knew was not a real person. I never touched him, I never heard him, I was never in the same room with him. By 1976, Marley was a kind of fable. The Marley I knew is what I saw on TV, heard in clubs. He was very much a virtual. Everywhere and nowhere. And for most people, the Marley that I write about is the Marley they know.”
James has said that in the lefthand corner of his manuscripts, he likes to jot down the music he listened to while writing. For A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustus Pablo’s John Peel sessions helped to see him through. “I grew up with reggae,” he says. “Reggae is like family. I know it and there’s a type of love and familiarity, but sometimes you want to hang out with other people.”
It was not reggae but pop, for instance, that helped him through his difficult teenage years. In a 2006 blog, uploaded the year after his debut novel, John Crow’s Devil, was published, James described how he was bullied at school. The tone is jocular, but one sentence leaps out. “I think the only reason I’m still here,” he wrote, “is my cowardice about suicide.”
“Is that [blog] still up?” he asks, sounding surprised. Then he drops his voice to a whisper. “My God, it must be so embarrassing now.”
Day after day, at Wolmers Boys School, the torments and taunts mounted. Why? “I was the nerd,” he says. “Because I was reading. I wasn’t into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.” To cope with the bullying, he read more and more. “Let’s just say I was in the world of books far more than I was in the real world. It became a sort of addiction. I just couldn’t deal with the present tense. Jeanette Winterson says this somewhere, that reading is an act of liberation, but it’s also a private act. I really did end up losing myself that way.”
Marley onstage with the Wailers during the One Love peace concert in Kingston with Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley (far left) and his political opponent Edward Seaga (third from left). Photograph: Echoes/Redferns
His other saviour was music. “The single high point of my day was staying up till 12 o’clock when Jeanie Hastings came on the radio and played usually pop music. Eurythmics. Pet Shop Boys.” It was, he says, another “opportunity to vanish”.
It must have been frightening to contemplate where the instinct to vanish might lead, and it is impossible not to wonder how seriously he intended his remark about suicide.
“You don’t want to make lightly of suicidal feelings,” he says. “A bad day is the worst day ever at 14.” Then he corrects himself. “That is actually not bad. The drama is fine. If I go” – and he adopts a theatrical voice – “‘I feel like I want to kill myself!’, that’s fine. It’s when you come to peace with it?” He presents this last statement as a question, as if there might be something else to say, but there is no answer, no end to the sentence. What does he mean?
“This is one of the reasons I’ve been really good – that sounds like I’m giving myself credit – but I have been able to recognise sometimes when students are about to cross that line.”
For the past eight years, James has taught creative writing and literature at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. When students are in trouble, he says, “everybody is looking for the noise and the histrionics and the tears. I’m like, no. I’m looking for the person who’s too calm.”
He begins to address a third person, who might be this speculative student who is in trouble, or, who knows, might be James’s teenage self, or the equally troubled James of his twenties. “You’re a little too at ease,” he says, “and I know what’s going on in your life. You’re letting go, aren’t you? And that I know. It’s a weird sort of peace. I’m going to take myself out.”
James did not come out as gay in Jamaica. Like his character Weeper, he waited till he got to the US. And then he waited some more. Having gone there as a creative writing student, then converted to teaching and finally grown into a feted author, earlier this year, he came out. The New York Times commissioned an article. They “just gave me a prompt,” he says. “‘Voyage to myself,’ I thought. And that’s where I came out. A small coming out. Just 50 million people.” You can hear Minnesota creeping into James’s voice, alongside Jamaica.
Jamaica Daily News, the day after Bob Marley was shot. Photograph: Jamaica Daily News
It is interesting that this act coincided with the widespread and wholehearted approval of his work by the literary world. How fitting that his mouthpiece should be the New York Times. And yet, James might never have been discovered if it were not for a quirk of fate that brought the American novelist Kaylie Jones to Jamaica’s Calabash book festival in 2003. Back then, James was 33 and had written off his own writing career after receiving 78 rejections from US publishers for his novel John Crow’s Devil. The last said – and maybe the remark seemed to be addressed to his person as well as his work – “Not for us”. He deleted his manuscript.
It is testimony to his thoroughness, commitment and possibly a destructive streak, that James not only disposed of the novel on his own computer but “went to all my friends’ houses and took it off their computers too. Erased any trace of it. I just thought if so many people thought this was not good, it couldn’t possibly be good. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a writer.”
Surely there was something of himself in there that he would want to save, if only to lock away in a hidden box or drawer?
“No! No,” he says, shaking his head, as if it is the question that is mystifying. “This is why I tell students when they ask for advice, if you’re a writer, you have to believe in yourself.” He bangs accompaniment to the last three words with his hand on the table. “Because if you’re a writer, you’re going to come across that moment where you’re the only one who does.” He sounds freshly disappointed when he adds: “And I failed that test.”
Failed? The words seems misplaced, especially the morning after winning the Booker. But maybe that is understandable, because his escape was such a close thing. When Jones arrived at the Calabash book festival 12 years ago, James went to her creative writing workshop only because he had been accepted the year before and attendance seemed preferable to rudeness. He took no manuscript. In his new identity as failed writer, he worked as a copywriter, graphic designer and location scout. (This last put him on familiar terms with the ghettos and slums of A Brief History. He says that film crews would turn up and exclaim: “‘Oh my God, it’s not violent at all! It’s so peaceful!’, unaware that “the night before I went to every gunman and gave them $200 and said: ‘Just don’t do anything today.’”) So James attended Jones’s class, completed the set exercises. “This is really great,” she told him. “Do you have anything I can read?”
He said he did not.
“He wrote a novel! He just doesn’t want you to see!” his classmates chimed.
James went home and managed to track down the one friend who had disobeyed or neglected his injunction to destroy the text. He gave it to Jones on a Sunday. She read it in three days, then called two friends. One was an editor, the other an agent. In 2005, John Crow’s Devil was published.
I called Jones 20 minutes after James was announced as the Booker winner. She was crying when she said: “His writing was so confident. There was not one word that wasn’t precise. That voice was already there.” Crying with happiness, and because she knows what James endured before the literary world decided to accept him. “I was stunned that nobody had said, we should take this seriously, that nobody had recognised his talent. Everything he has now and is now, he was then.”
On Tuesday night James described his Booker win as “affirming”. He uses the same word when he talks about Jones’s initial interest. The process of affirmation has been a long one. “It’s not like I’m sitting on, waiting for foreigners to tell me I’m good. But I’m sitting on waiting for people who are participating in the world language of literature to say: ‘This can stand up’.”
Not for us, someone said. Luckily for them, James can’t remember their name. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/history-empire-pride-guilt-truth-oxford-nigel-biggar | Opinion | 2018-01-03T18:20:34.000Z | James McDougall | The history of empire isn’t about pride – or guilt | James McDougall | There is something ironic about an Oxford theologian being portrayed as persecuted for arguing that Britain should be proud of its imperial past, when 59% of the population agree with him. But it’s no laughing matter.
Oxford’s Ethics and Empire project, announced last month by Prof Nigel Biggar, has drawn widespread concern from historians of all stripes. And, as expected, it attracted some fierce criticism from academics. An open letter from 58 Oxford scholars of empire registered disagreement with the project’s aims and preconceptions. I was its principal author. Co-signatories included world-renowned professors and younger researchers doing cutting-edge work in the field.
Britain does need a public debate about the realities and legacies of its imperial past
Predictably, the subsequent media furore ignored the issues at stake. We were attacked for denying freedom of expression to views we oppose – when in fact we expressly affirmed it – or for holding “unbalanced”, prejudiced views of the history we have spent our professional lives studying.
It’s unsurprising that once again, “experts” who argue from evidence against the national-populist mood should be vilified in the rightwing press. It’s also dangerous, and not only for universities, to dismiss critical history in favour of a rehabilitation of imperialism as a morally justifiable enterprise, serving a sense of national pride. Equally unhelpful is the assertion that if we’re not proud of the empire, we must feel guilty about it. History is not about how people feel.
For 40 years, scholars of empire have reassessed and reinterpreted what imperial rule, colonial settlement, conquest, administration, and decolonisation have meant in different periods across the world. Empires have been nearly ubiquitous in history, much older than nations. Colonial empires provided the matrix of the modern world in the 19th century, and their effects still influence the shape of the world and the division of privilege across it today.
To evaluate so complex a process by moral measurement – how much suffering was offset by how much “progress”? – is, for most historians, irrelevant as well as inadequate. Equally inadequate and irrelevant is the preoccupation – almost an obsession for the Brexit-Britain right – with the role of empire in an integrating “island story” of plucky white British patriots and globalisers. Even at the height of the Victorian empire, some figures who are now held up by empire nostalgics as inviolable national icons, most notably Cecil Rhodes, were criticised by their compatriots as acting more in their own than in the national interest. When Rhodes, already censured by a parliamentary select committee, was proposed for an honorary degree at Oxford in 1899, there was vocal protest from 92 academics (none of whom were Corbynistas.)
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Britain, like France, the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy, does need a public debate about the realities and legacies of its imperial past. We need a fuller public understanding of what Britain’s empire was, and how its aftereffects have influenced Britain’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society, its inequalities and injustices as well as its commonalities and opportunities.
That debate should be equitable, rational and based on all the available evidence. It should not be about apportioning blame, instilling guilt or recovering pride. We also need to see that history as part of a larger, longer, global history of empire, not as something peculiar to us. It’s important in understanding our collective present that we know what forces shaped it. But historical understanding is about recapturing the sense of things done by, and done to, other people at other times. It’s not about us, and how we feel about it is entirely irrelevant.
James McDougall is associate professor, fellow and tutor in modern history at Trinity College, Oxford | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jul/21/landmark-buildings-weapons-in-new-gulf-war | Art and design | 2018-07-21T15:00:42.000Z | Rowan Moore | How landmark buildings became weapons in a new Gulf war | On the Doha corniche, on the route into the city from its airport, a monumental pile of fibre-cement discs is nearing completion. It is the new National Museum of Qatar, where the country’s “cultural heritage, diverse history and modern developments” are to be displayed. It will, says its silver-tongued Parisian architect Jean Nouvel, “symbolise the mysteries of the desert’s concretions and crystallisations, suggesting the interlocking pattern of the blade-like petals of the desert rose”. It does indeed look like the clusters of sandy crystals that go by that name.
This is the same Jean Nouvel whose outpost of the Louvre opened last year in Abu Dhabi, which for now is one of Qatar’s enemies. He also designed the 238-metre Burj Doha, completed in 2012, which is from the same genre of anatomically suggestive towers as his Torre Glòries in Barcelona and Norman Foster’s Gherkin in London. The burj is the most memorable building in an instant downtown called West Bay, an extravagantly variegated constellation of vertical glass of a type now familiar from China to the Gulf to the US to London.
The museums and towers are at once expressions of progress and weapons in a cultural and architectural arms race. They combine good intentions and political calculation. They are signs of a hunger for identity and status in lands transformed within a lifetime by oil wealth. They are currency in the tricky and obscure negotiations that the leaders of the Gulf nations conduct, between conservative forms of Islam, authoritarian rule and selective versions of western liberalism. These states are surrounded by convulsions and conflicts in which they are themselves implicated, while aiming at home for prosperity, stability and the survival of their ruling regimes.
The physical transformations are manifestations of a fantastically speeded-up version of the processes by which cities were historically made, an evolution at x64 speed from small coastal towns to metropolises furnished with skyscrapers and universities. It is hard to overstate how radical this change is: these regions were at the limits of human habitation, made harsh and lightly populated by extreme heat and aridity. Oil and air conditioning have brought both physical comfort and influxes of migrants and expatriates, but the numbers of native Emiratis, Qataris and Kuwaitis remain small. There are, for example, 300,000 Qatari citizens, which is rather less than the 580,000-odd population of Luxembourg.
‘Mysteries of the desert’: Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar nears completion. Photograph: Iwan Baan
As one involved in their development puts it, these are “very small populations with very big ambitions”. They find themselves with power and influence disproportionate to their size, beyond the imagination of recent generations and outside the scope of traditional mechanisms of government. Their cities are therefore works in progress, raw and unprocessed, in which assertions of possible futures jostle for priority. Readymade chunks of imported building types – malls, museums – appear without much thought to the spaces between them. And, always, they need to deal with the environmental factor that governs everything else in the region: sheer, overwhelming, dominating heat.
Gulf cities and states are, importantly, not identical. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, though both within the United Arab Emirates, differ, the former favouring tearaway private enterprise, the latter more stately public investments. Qatar, with works such as the 2008 Museum of Islamic Art, has been the most consistent patron of culture. Oman, seeking to stay out of trouble, is the least ostentatious. A number of these states are currently in conflict – Qatar is the subject of a blockade by several neighbours on the grounds that it supports extremism and terrorism. Coming from the likes of Saudi Arabia, this accusation is rich.
The wealthy dynasties who rule the Gulf states have their reasons for such huge investments
At the same time, Gulf cities follow similar patterns. They have been through identifiable phases, starting 60 years ago when they were still coastal towns, clinging to the margin between sea and desert, living off fishing, pearl-diving and/or piracy. Their low buildings, mostly built of mud and rubble, huddled against the heat. Bahrain airport, recalls one who knew it in the 60s, consisted of two Nissen huts, one for buying Coke and another for getting your passport stamped.
In the 70s and 80s came an influx of hotels and office blocks, mostly by western architects, who added Arab styling and space age flourishes to generic corporate boxes. From the 90s onwards, Dubai pioneered the attention-grabbing landmarks, Instagram-friendly avant la lettre: the sail-shaped Burj al Arab hotel, the artificial islands shaped like palm trees and a map of the world, culminating in the pride and hubris of the tallest building on the planet, the 830-metre Burj Khalifa. Others follow similar paths – a pearl-shaped island in Doha, for example, and that Nouvel tower.
This century has seen the rise of the sporting icon – the stadiums for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup, the Formula One circuits in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain that manage to make races look weirdly like computer game versions of themselves – and of the cultural icon, the Louvre Abu Dhabi above all. Famous brands such as Formula One, Fifa and the Louvre are supported by the branded styles of the most famous possible architects – Nouvel, the late Zaha Hadid for one of the football stadiums, Frank Gehry for a currently stalled Abu Dhabi Guggenheim. All are winners of the Pritzker prize, the most prestigious of their profession, the widely recognised imprimatur of the iconicity of an architect.
Inside Rem Koolhaas’s Qatar National Library, which aims to be ‘a place where community can gather’. Photograph: OMA
Both the trading of respected cultural names and their reinforcement by iconic architecture are games developed elsewhere in the two decades since Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim started them off in northern Spain. But the Gulf countries play them with particular aplomb. The deal for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, whereby name, expertise and exhibits are being lent in return for (it is reported) a billion or so dollars, is the most audacious yet, both because of the great fame of the mother museum and the previous improbability of seeing canonical classical painting and sculpture in this Muslim desert emirate. It is also one of the most spectacular and, by many accounts, successful works of Nouvel’s hit-and-miss oeuvre, with dappled light filtering through a great perforated dome into courts cooled by pools of water. “An Arabic-Galactic wonder”, wrote the New York Times.
The exact purpose of this magnificence is a subject of debate. At one level, the Louvre does what great museums do everywhere, which is to give the public access to the beauties of art and to a shared social space. It gives another dimension to the somewhat depthless cultural life of what is mostly a very new city. Jonathan Jones, art critic for the Guardian, saw it as “a turning point in cultural history… to create a new global museum in the Arab world with an Arab perspective is a revolutionary subversion of the old European imperialism of knowledge”.
It would, however, be naive to see this (or any major museum, the original Louvre included) as an expression of pure love of either art or the common people. The wealthy dynasties who rule the United Arab Emirates and the other Gulf states have their reasons for such huge investments, such as the stabilities of their societies, their perception abroad and their continued grip on power. According, for example, to Alexandre Kazerouni, a French academic of Iranian origin, projects like the Louvre are about strengthening the authority of the ruling classes by putting culture within their control. He also points out, in his book Le miroir des cheikhs, that the funds for Abu Dhabi’s cultural projects come from payments foreign governments have to make when they sell the UAE arms, which are managed by something called the Offset Program Bureau.
Similar complexities arise in Doha, where, in a grand ceremony in April, the emir inaugurated the Qatar National Library. I was one of a group of foreign journalists flown in by the Qatar Foundation. Tech guru Nicholas Negroponte, who once declared the death of the book, was paid a reportedly vast fee to speak for a few minutes on how, after all, the book was still alive. The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy mingled with other eminent guests. If the event was ruffled by a denunciation of authoritarian power from the Palestinian poet Tamim al-Barghouti, it was soothed again when it became clear that he was referring to Israel.
The building suggests both fortified power and a complex intelligence that may or may not be benevolent
The library is the culmination of more than two decades of patronage of education projects led by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned, whose husband, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, was the ruling emir of Qatar until he stepped aside in 2013. The sheikha has received more than her share of puff and guff, getting called a “glamorous ambassador”, “the actual ruler of Qatar” and, in the Huffington Post in 2011, “First Lady of the World … a doting mother, a global visionary and an international inspiration”. She has achieved both a George Bush award for excellence in public service and an induction into the Vanity Fair international best-dressed hall of fame.
Since 1995, Sheikha Mozah has been head of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, an organisation that has created Education City, a zone of 14 sq kms that contains branches of such major academic institutions as University College London, Georgetown University and the Weill Cornell Medical Center. Masterplanned by the Japanese architect Arata Isosaki, the complex also includes schools, an equestrian centre, well-tended parks and a mosque designed by London-based practice Mangera Yvars in a style of “Islamic modernity”, whose swooping, soaring, organic lines try hard to resemble as little as possible traditional motifs of dome and minaret.
Brooding like a rectangularised brain over one end of Education City is the headquarters of the Qatar Foundation, an inscrutable whitish cube perforated by square openings and sliced by a long horizontal slit. Designed by the Dutch practice OMA, it suggests both fortified power and a complex intelligence that may or may not be benevolent. Towards the middle of the campus is the national library, also by OMA, a dynamic lozenge whose corners are raised off the ground to create sheltered approaches underneath. The library’s intentions, in contrast to the HQ, are about openness. “It is about access to everyone, from a six-year-old child to an 80-year-old researcher,” says Sheikha Hind bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Sheikha Mozah’s daughter, who is vice-chairperson and CEO of the foundation.
The Qatar Foundation HQ looks like a ‘rectangularised brain’. Photograph: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti © OMA
The aim is to create “a place where a community can gather”, as Ellen van Loon, the OMA partner in charge of the project puts it. “We want children to run and shout,” says Ibrahim al-Jaidah, an architect who works with the foundation. “We want their voices to be heard.” The library thus becomes a kind of civic place in an area where summer temperatures of 40-50C make European-style public squares quixotic and the shopping malls, with their mechanical coolness, become the main zones of gathering. The library, like a mall, is a managed space, but less controlling in its experiences and less prescriptive in its products.
“The idea of a library has changed,” says Rem Koolhaas, OMA’s Pritzker-winning leader, “from a place that imprisons books to one that is a place of learning in any way you like.” The design creates an “arena” in which shelves full of the those humble-looking and allegedly endangered objects – books – rise up in great shallow terraces under a single ceiling, in what OMA says is the biggest single room it has so far created. A “theatre” it also calls it, in which books occupy the space of spectators and readers that of actors.
There are subtleties and inflections within this simple idea, its grandeur unbending enough to allow more intimate spaces for reading the books once you’ve picked them up from the open-access shelves. A primary condition of architecture in these regions is expanse – the feeling that terrain continues indefinitely into the desert, that a settlement might as well be elsewhere as somewhere and can therefore seem both puny and random. The library deals with this phenomenon nicely, by extending views to the horizon through glass walls, while also suggesting a distinct place through its folds and surfaces. It implies more than encloses, as a landscape does.
Reflective surfaces in ceiling and floor multiply the inner life of the building. In the centre, formed out of the ground like an archaeological dig, are marble-lined spaces containing a collection of rare books and documents. It is a moment of rootedness, a symbolic foundation in a building that elsewhere wants to levitate. It adds another element to a building that Koolhaas calls “almost Roman in its dimensions”, that is “transparent” but has “depth”. “You could therefore live in so many worlds in this volume,” he says.
Doha’s Msheireb development – a ‘game-changer’ according to its British architect. Photograph: Gerry O'Leary
It’s a striking-looking object that flirts with the easy metaphors that tend to thrive in locations parched of historical references – a Bedouin tent, a spaceship – without succumbing to them. For me, it’s part of the design’s skill that it engages with the Gulfian desire for spectacle while also realising a serious idea of what a library might be. Koolhaas bristles, however, at the implication that this might be another in the world’s ever more wearying list of architectural icons. “It’s a very direct approach to making reading more attractive,” he says. “It’s about generosity rather than spectacle.”
The Qatar National Library poses, as does the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the great Gulf question: to what extent is this institution, which embraces the ideals of the European Enlightenment, for real? To what extent is it a vast act of sophisticated PR and soft power, part of a game of influence that also includes patronage of al-Jazeera and the acquisition of property landmarks such as the Shard in London? How far can it go, in a country where homosexuality is a crime and the government supports Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist Islam?
Sheikha Hind says the Qatar Foundation wants to “encourage a generation that will debate and think for themselves”, but how free can they be when her family is permanently in charge of culture, government, business and city planning? All over the city, storeys-high on buildings and on the sides of cars, are emblazoned stylised images that portray her brother, the reigning emir, somewhat firmer-jawed and more dashing than in reality, as an unlikely sort of Che Guevara. The story is that this image, known as “Tamim the Glorious”, is the creation of a local artist that was spontaneously adopted by the Qatari people. But giant images of rulers tend not to be signs of open societies.
Then there is the question that rightly dogs every building project which claims to be progressive – the region’s notorious labour practices, whereby migrant workers are deprived of rights and can lose their lives on dangerous sites. Architects involved in Gulf projects tend to express both regret and the view that things are getting better, but that there is not much they can do about it.
Many questions you ask receive answers satisfying to a European liberal. Does the library contain Lolita and the works of Salman Rushdie? I ask its executive director Sohair Wastawy. Yes, she says. And 60% of students in Education City, says Sheikha Hind, are women. Koolhaas says he has never worked on a building project where so many of the leading decision-makers were female. Qatar, along with other Gulf countries, is generally considered to be highly patriarchal.
The dilemma is that posed by China, or Azerbaijan or any number of repressive regimes: is it better to avoid or engage?
There is much to like, too, about the newest phase of Gulf urbanism, which is to challenge the car-based and energy-hungry imitations of north American cities that have dominated until recently. Abu Dhabi has for some time been building the Foster-designed Masdar City, a satellite that aims for exemplary sustainable design and planning. In Doha, the Qatar Foundation is trying to revitalise the oldest part of the city with Msheireb, a development between the country’s seat of government, the Amiri Diwan, and the main souk. The British architect Graham Morrison, whose practice Allies and Morrison helped design it, calls the project a “game-changer”. In West Bay, the skyscraper district that includes Nouvel’s Burj Doha, you can’t walk from one building to another across the multi-lane highways. In Msheireb, the aim is to adapt traditional principles to achieve an environment in which it is pleasant to walk, achieved with the help of natural means.
Shade and wind direction are used, as in traditional Arab cities, to lower the temperature, along with technology that uses the spare cooling capacity of the air conditioning that, inevitably, is used inside the buildings. A square, shaded by something resembling horizontal Venetian blinds, creates a type of outdoor gathering space not seen before in these parts. A consistent palette of off-white stone and render is used throughout, to create what Morrison calls “a proper piece of city-making”.
Much of the approach could be called common sense, the application of good practice with the help of budgets that allow a degree of quality in the finishes, except that it is something not much seen in the Gulf or indeed in many other parts of the world until now. He calls Msheireb “several steps in the right direction” and a “platform” for the future development of Middle Eastern cities. As evidence, he cites Madinat al Irfan, a much bigger project in Oman, on which Allies and Morrison are working. Here, a residential population of 60,000 people are to be housed along similar principles to Msheireb’s.
“What’s not to like?” asks Morrison about the investment of oil wealth in good city building. Msheireb, the library and the Louvre Abu Dhabi walk the walks of their cultural proclamations enough that they should not be easily reversed. “I find it surprising that countries such as Qatar and the Emirates,” Koolhaas has said, “are attacked when they are trying to make Islam and modernity compatible.” The Louvre Abu Dhabi gets criticised, he tells me, for only showing “three naked men.” But “you could say it’s fantastic to have that many.”
Qatar’s National Library: European enlightenment or vast act of PR? Photograph: OMA
The New Yorker, in an article on the ethical issues of Gulf art projects, quoted the take of Mishaal al Gergawi, an Emirati intellectual, on his government’s perspective: “You sit there on the throne, thinking, My country is only 45 years old and I’m trying to fight Isis, develop a post-oil economy, foster a tolerant society by building museums and universities, and I’m getting criticised for labour issues? Give me a break.”
The dilemma in other words is that posed by China, or Azerbaijan or any number of repressive regimes, which is whether it is better to avoid or engage. Should well-intentioned and influential outsiders refuse to legitimise what should be challenged or might they hope that (for example) the conditions of migrant workers will be improved through the attention brought by the Louvre and the World Cup? Does the presence of Nabokov on the library shelves outweigh governmental support for extremism? Where on the scale from Faustian to Abrahamic is the bargain being struck?
The truthful answer is that nobody knows, including those ruling families who are playing multi-sided games of which libraries, universities and museums are part. Because these games are ongoing, their outcome uncertain and because these families and the societies they rule are not themselves homogeneous but contain different aspirations and ambitions. What can be said is that these cultural and architectural projects are, in themselves, for the good. There doesn’t seem much to be gained by wishing they weren’t there. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/27/mystery-of-agatha-christie-disappearance | Books | 2022-08-27T08:00:23.000Z | Lucy Worsley | ‘I just wanted my life to end’: the mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance | Agatha Christie was sitting quietly on a train when she overheard a stranger saying her name. In the carriage, she said, were “two women discussing me, both with copies of my paperback editions on their knees”. They had no idea of the identity of their fellow passenger, and proceeded to discuss the most famous author in the world. “I hear,” said one of the ladies, “she drinks like a fish.”
I love this story because it sums up so much about Agatha Christie’s life. They both had her paperbacks. Of course they did. Christie wrote more than 80 books, outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible, so the cliche runs. And she wasn’t just a novelist, either: she remains history’s most performed female playwright. She was so successful people think of her as an institution, not as a breaker of new ground. But she was both.
And then, in the railway carriage, there’s the watchful presence of Christie herself, unnoticed. Yes, she was easy to overlook, as is the case with nearly any woman past middle age. But she deliberately played on the fact that she seemed so ordinary. It was a public image she carefully crafted to conceal her real self.
If the women on the train had asked her profession, she’d have said she had none. When an official form required her to put down what she did, the woman who is estimated to have sold 2bn copies always wrote “housewife”. Despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker. She sidestepped a world that tried to define her.
When I told people I was writing about Christie, their first questions were often about the 11 dramatic days in 1926 when she “disappeared” at the height of her writing career, causing a nationwide hunt for her corpse. It’s a mystery that has obsessed her fans ever since.
By this stage, Christie was already a celebrity. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her ingenious masterpiece, had just been published and her literary agent was pushing for a follow-up. There were photos of her in the Daily Mail, a new publishing contract with William Collins and a £500 advance for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit that paid for a Morris Cowley car.
Christie’s husband confessed that he was in love with someone else – and he wanted a divorce
But by December 1926, her marriage to Archie Christie was in trouble. She herself, she later wrote, was “at the beginning of a nervous breakdown”. The couple had moved to a grand 12-bedroom house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they named Styles, but Archie was often absent and Agatha was increasingly unhappy there. The death of her beloved mother, and Archie’s unsympathetic response (he didn’t even go to the funeral), had strained their relationship almost to breaking point when Archie confessed that he was in love with someone else – a young woman called Nancy Neele – and wanted a divorce.
It has often been claimed that Christie went into hiding in order to frame her husband for her murder. Was this true? It’s also frequently said that Christie remained silent about this notorious incident for the rest of her life. But that’s incorrect, and I’ve pieced together the surprising number of statements she did in fact make about it.
What Christie said has the unfortunate effect of sounding like one of her novels, in which the “loss of memory” plot would feature time and time again. But her writings about her life have had this novelising tendency all along. It doesn’t mean she is lying.
Where to start with: Agatha Christie
Read more
“I
just wanted my life to end,” she explained. “All that night I drove aimlessly about … In my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove automatically down roads I knew … to Maidenhead, where I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in, but realised that I could swim too well to drown … then back to London again, and then on to Sunningdale. From there I went to Newlands Corner.”
She was tired; she was in deep distress. At last, she put into action a vague plan that had occupied her thoughts for the previous 24 hours.
“When I reached a point in the road which I thought was near the quarry I had seen in the afternoon, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something.”
Christie’s car was found lodged in a hedge, its front wheels “over the edge of the chalk pit”. Had it not been for the hedge, “the car would have plunged over and been smashed to pieces”. It seems that Christie shocked herself into realising that whatever happened, life was worth living.
And so, dazed, distressed, but alive, she got out of her car. With injuries from the impact to her head and chest, she walked through the wintry countryside in a dreamlike state. She was reborn. “Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie,” she explains. Now, she had sloughed off the past like a dead skin. Only that way could she survive. She abandoned her car and walked away, out of her old life. This was the action that would leave her family, friends and the police absolutely flummoxed.
F
or a long time, people investigating Christie’s disappearance have tended towards one of two positions. One is that, in the days after the crash, she was experiencing the specific condition of dissociative fugue – a state brought on by trauma and stress, in which you literally forget who you are. The alternative position is that she was faking it, even trying to frame Archie for killing her. Only one thing can be said for certain: on Saturday 4 December 1926, and for some days thereafter, Christie experienced a distressing episode of mental illness, brought on by the trauma of the death of her mother and the breakdown of her marriage. She lost her way of life and her sense of self.
Christie reported that on the Saturday morning, while police were investigating her abandoned car, she had ‘lost her memory’
So what should we believe? Christie reported that on that Saturday morning, while the police were investigating her abandoned car, she had “lost her memory”. With the help of a psychotherapist, she would later begin to put together a narrative of the movements she had blanked out. “I remember arriving at a big railway station,” she recalled, eventually, “and being surprised to learn it was Waterloo.”
“It is strange,” she said, that “the railway authorities there did not recall me, as I was covered with mud and I had smeared blood on my face from a cut on my hand.”
Christie’s mind began to protect itself from further pain by inventing a new identity. “I had now become in my mind Mrs Teresa Neele of South Africa,” she says. Someone who had the same surname as Archie’s lover, someone who came from a place where she and Archie had been happy. “You can’t write your fate,” Christie would say, years later, but “you can do what you like with the characters you create”. So she created a new character for herself, a character as which she could do what she wanted. What she wanted most of all was to escape from the unbearable life of Mrs Christie.
“Teresa Neele” went to King’s Cross and bought a ticket for the spa resort of Harrogate.
‘She changed her name, went to King’s Cross and bought a ticket to the spa resort of Harrogate.’ Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL/Getty Images
The winter light must have faded by the time her train arrived. She took a taxi to a hotel, apparently picked at random, called the Hydropathic. She’d always liked the anonymity of hotels, where she’d often stayed, alone, writing.
Christie arrived with no suitcase, but explained she had recently come from South Africa and had left her luggage with friends. She gave her name as Mrs Teresa Neele, signing the register in her usual handwriting.
Mr W Taylor, the hotel’s manager, stated later that his guest took a “good room on the first floor, fitted with hot and cold water”. The price of seven guineas a week caused her no hesitation: “She seemed to have as much money as she wanted.”
Christie’s room was serviced by a young chambermaid named Rosie Asher, who seems to have kept a particularly close eye on her. Asher spotted that “Mrs Neele” had brought hardly anything with her. But she was desperate for her life to unfold in an orderly fashion. So she went down for dinner, and even took part in the evening’s dancing. The guests, who were also referred to as “patients”, embraced this single woman in their midst. “I danced with Mrs Christie the evening she arrived,” one of them said later. “She does the Charleston, but not very well.”
Christie seemed to enjoy her life in limbo. Her chambermaid noted that on Sunday, while police were searching the Surrey Downs for her, or her body, she “slept until 10am, had breakfast in bed and then went out”.
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On Monday morning, Asher noticed Christie had the “London newspaper taken up with breakfast in bed”. It would have been hard to avoid the story about Mrs Christie’s disappearance, but she somehow managed to set the knowledge aside. She began to equip herself with a new wardrobe. Later that day, after a visit to the shops, packages began to be delivered to her room: “new hat, coat, evening shoes, books and magazines, pencil and fruit, and various toilet requisites”.
People noticed that she usually had a book in her hand. She’d been to the WH Smith Library in Parliament Street, where the librarian “gathered from her selections that she had a taste for novels of sensation and mystery”.
Hotel staff would report that ‘she has made a number of friends’ – she played billiards and even sang aloud
That evening, Christie came down to dinner in a proper evening dress, with a new “fancy scarf”. Hotel staff would report that “she has made a number of friends”. She played billiards and even sang aloud. Miss Corbett, the hotel’s entertainment hostess, spotted that “Mrs Neele” still had the price – 75 shillings – pinned to her new shawl. “Is that all you are worth?” asked one of the guests. “I think I am worth more than that,” was her answer.
At the Hydro, people were beginning to suspect who “Mrs Neele” really was. After all, on Tuesday 7 December, a portrait had appeared on the Daily Express’s front page. The resemblance was unmissable. “When she had been here about four days,” recalled the hotel’s manager, “my wife said to me: ‘I believe that lady is Mrs Christie!’” Mr Taylor thought his wife was being “absurd”, but she wasn’t the only one to have worked it out.
The following day the Westminster Gazette reported that no fewer than 300 police officers and special constables had taken part in a search in Surrey. They were pretty certain they were hunting for a corpse.
But Christie was oblivious. Life was much better now. “As Mrs Neele,” she said later, “I was very happy and contented.”
“At Harrogate,” she said, “I read every day about Mrs Christie’s disappearance … I regarded her as having acted stupidly.” A fellow guest remembered her saying that “Mrs Christie is a very elusive person. I cannot be bothered with her.” Also, according to this witness, Christie was beginning to show signs of mental distress. She “would press her hand to her forehead and say: ‘It is my head. I cannot remember.’”
Meanwhile Archie, stressed and terrified that his infidelity would be revealed by the papers, had made an awful mistake. He had given an ill-advised interview to the Daily Mail. Perhaps hoping to divert attention away from Nancy Neele, he introduced the idea that maybe his wife had deliberately disappeared.
Christie in the news. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“My wife,” he’d said to a reporter, “had discussed the possibility of disappearing at will … engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally, I feel that is what happened.”
And he now defended himself against the charge that he’d been a bad husband: “
It is absolutely untrue to suggest that there was anything in the nature of a row or a tiff between my wife and myself on Friday morning … I strongly depreciate introducing any tittle-tattle into this matter … ”
Readers must have thought he protested far too much.
On the morning of Saturday 11 December, the Telegraph carried a big advert for a forthcoming serialisation of The Murder on the Links. It was trumpeted as the work of “Agatha Christie the Missing Novelist”. These were obviously the words of Christie’s publishers, not Christie herself. But readers could be forgiven for thinking the author was somehow cashing in on her new notoriety.
The author herself had had enough of reading the papers. At the Hydro, on the Sunday morning, no newspaper was taken up to the bedroom.
On the Tuesday, the Daily Mail ran an editorial. If Christie were alive, its writer argued, “she must be ready to inflict intense anxiety on her relatives and heavy expenditure on the public” in “a heartless practical joke”.
In the spotlight … Agatha Christie became a new kind of media celebrity. Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy
Unfortunately for Christie’s lasting reputation, many of her biographers, notably her male ones, have been as heavily invested in this narrative as the male police officers and journalists who made it into such a sensation at the time. “She set out deliberately – the facts shout it – to throw murder suspicion upon her husband,” says one of these writers.
From there, the idea has spread into films and novels. The milder have her down as a woman wronged, with an understandable desire for revenge. The more extreme – notably the feature film Agatha, made in 1979 – present her as the would-be murderer of Nancy Neele. And so the injustice has been perpetuated.
It’s time to do something radical: to listen to what Christie says, to understand she had a range of experiences unhelpfully labelled as “loss of memory”, and, perhaps most importantly, when she says she was suffering, to believe her.
Unbeknown to the police and public who were looking for her in Surrey, matters in Yorkshire were moving swiftly towards a denouement. That Sunday evening, two men went to Harrogate police station to report their suspicion that Mrs Christie was staying in the hotel where they worked.
Christie’s “disappearance” had the impact it did because of the 1920s context that saw a new kind of media celebrity being created. She wasn’t alone in becoming an author-as-celebrity. It may have been accidental, and deeply unpleasant, but it would also become a central plank of her massive success.
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley is published by Hodder & Stoughton. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/14/tipsy-at-30000ft-its-the-british-way | World news | 2021-11-14T07:15:26.000Z | Ed Cumming | Tipsy at 30,000ft? It’s the British way | Like every soldier, Ben Wallace knows that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. As Owen Paterson’s inferno of sleaze engulfed the Tories, the defence secretary lit a little tealight of his own. It was put about that a couple of SNP MPs, David Linden and Drew Hendry, and Labour MP Charlotte Nichols got pissed on a ministerial trip to Gibraltar. Like anyone who has been accused of being smashed on a flight, they deny the allegations. Wallace said the alleged conduct risked “undermining respect for parliament”.
Rubbish. The only lapse of judgment is Wallace’s, in thinking anyone would care. If there is a cause that enjoys comprehensive cross-party, cross-demographic national support, it is drinking on the plane. Well, that and drinking at the airport. Not yet in the cab to the airport, although driverless cars may change that. But everyone knows that once you get through security, the complicated part of the trip is over.
You are in the hands of the authorities, and the chief authority in the departure lounge is JD Wetherspoon: the Beehive at Gatwick, the Windmill at Stansted: resonant names for the traveller.
Any time of the day or night, you can guarantee that these bastions will be standing room only. It is a myth that airport drinking is the preserve of stags and hens. Young and old, rich and poor, men and women, champagne in the lounge, bloody mary after take-off, sundry tinnies: there’s something for everyone. If it is good enough for Kate Moss, it’s good enough for you.
The hierarchy of travel experiences is directly related to booze. At the bottom of the table are Ryanair and EasyJet, where you have to pay for your drinks on the plane, or beforehand – for the nervous – in the form of a reassuring voucher. Then there is British Airways and other normal carriers, where drinks are included in the price of a ticket, correctly understood to be a marker of high civilisation.
Kate Moss was met by police after ‘disruptive behaviour’ on an easyJet flight from Turkey to the UK. Photograph: Beretta/Sims/REX/Shutterstock
In business class, the free drinks start at the airport in a private lounge, for a better sort of alcoholic. After that, the drinks continue, relentlessly, until you land in a confusion of body and soul from which it takes the whole holiday to recover. One shudders to think what the situation is like on private jets. In fact, practically the only way to signify that you are very important is not to get battered on the plane. Nothing is more suspicious than a British person quietly going to sleep.
Where does it come from? Unlike other behaviours, which on closer examination turn out to be universal, getting flight-pissed does seem to be curiously British. The Danes and Germans enjoy a pint as much as the next northern European, yet their airport bars are not chocker with multigenerational legions of battered travellers. Well, sometimes they are, but only if they’re Brits.
The British state of nature is to be drunk, which is why we invent little rules to convince ourselves otherwise, like waiting until the sun is “over the yardarm” – incidentally, an expression which most people take to mean some point in the afternoon but in fact refers to 11am.
I suspect that modern travel drinking began with the defence of the realm act 1914. The regulations were designed to curb our natural instincts to help with the war effort. By limiting pub opening times and weakening drinks, the new wartime rules traumatised the population for many generations to come.
‘Unruly and unsafe’ behavior leads FAA to ask for alcohol monitoring at airports
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In the same way that displaced peoples favour art and jewellery – wealth they can take with them when they are next invaded ≠ Brits know that the right to a pint might be seized at any moment, without warning.
In this light, drinking on a plane, where alcohol is freely available and you can be confident you won’t have to drive for a couple of hours, becomes less of a happy luxury and more of a moral imperative. Enjoy this Carling now, child, it could be your last.
Speaking of defence of the realm, the best drink I’ve ever had on a plane was a gin and tonic on an RAF flight, where guests are still trusted with heavy crystal tumblers and spirits are poured freely from large bottles.
If Ben Wallace is really worried about respect and parliament, perhaps he should start there.
He might also remember that another key part of the defence of the realm act was not spreading rumours about military matters. As everyone in the Windmill at Stansted knows: what goes on tour stays on tour. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/apr/30/doves-announce-two-year-hiatus | Music | 2010-04-30T10:25:26.000Z | Sean Michaels | Doves announce two-year hiatus | Although Doves are not splitting up, the Mancunian band are taking a two-year break from recording, they revealed yesterday. "We just [want] to get off that whole album-tour-album-tour treadmill," singer Jimi Goodwin said.
Doves have always been the slow and steady types. They have released a fairly modest four albums in 10 years and their most recent, 2009's Kingdom of Rust, took four years to make. Earlier this month, the group released their first compilation, The Places Between, which they are currently touring.
"None of us are ready to face going into the studio for another two years," Goodwin told the Daily Record. "This [compilation] is wiping the slate clean – we have nothing else in the vaults now. That is it. Whatever we do from now on will be a new start."
While Doves may not be re-entering the studio, Goodwin will stay busy. After talking about it "endlessly for years", he and Elbow's Guy Garvey hope to finally work together. "There are a couple of tracks that we have passed back and forwards to each other but it's having the time," he said. "We keep trying to get our diaries together. Who knows if it will ever get released? I'm just waiting to see what might happen." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/nov/03/architecture.regeneration | Art and design | 2003-11-03T12:51:47.000Z | Jonathan Glancey | The hotch-potch rebuilding of Paternoster Square | In 1666, the City of London burned down - yet, in the blink of a Cornhill book-keeper's eye, it was back to business as usual. Quick-fix new buildings, largely of brick and stone rather than timber and plaster, were raced up to satisfy the most avid merchant and cash-strapped banker. Sir Christopher Wren's grand plan to recreate the Square Mile in the guise of some ideal Italian renaissance city went by the board. Even the inventive architect's new cathedral ended up as a Gothic design in Baroque fancy dress. His mighty dome, though, was a work of supreme artistry and engineering. For 300 years, it has ridden serenely over the City skyline, over Queen Anne, Georgian, Regency, Victorian, Edwardian, neo-Georgian and, finally, Elizabethan roofs.
During those centuries, as London grew and prospered, the dome of St Paul's became its symbol. Famous photographs taken when the streets were smashed by the Luftwaffe show the dome riding the Nazi storm. In fact, the cathedral was hit by incendiaries and the damage was not made good until 1962.
Five years later, the area around St Paul's had been rebuilt. This was not exactly the broad, sunlit uplands post-war urban planning might have been; more the grim, windswept plazas of contemporary Fleet Street cliche. Yet at least the glum offices offered no threat to Wren's monument.
From this week, everything has changed. After a protracted struggle, Paternoster Square Mk2 is finally complete - and St Paul's is now flanked to its north by a gathering of burly office blocks clad in the architectural equivalent of tweed coats. The odd bit of classical paste and some bizarre 1930s Italian fascist-style posturing help complete the look of this architectural fancy dress party.
Many visitors to the new-look Paternoster Square will be surprised to hear negative comments. Surely, here are some of the best-mannered new office blocks in Britain, designed by such polite and even gracious architects as William Whitfield, Richard MacCormac, Eric Parry and Allies and Morrison. Here are neat arrangements of well-laid bricks, Portland stone, granite, marble, slate, York stone and bronze. Here is a new city square with star-patterned paving, sturdy benches, arcades for rainy days, and, at its heart, a Corinthian column rising from a stone-stepped base and crowned with a torch of gilded fire. Surely, after long years of debate, competitions, demolition, criticism and construction, this is what St Paul's, the City of London and those who come here to work or gawp want.
Climb, though, to the Stone Gallery on top of the dome of St Paul's and look again. Down below, in Wren's long shadow, are the ocean-scaled roofs of the brave new offices. Free of rooftop gardens, terraces or habitation - human or otherwise - they are, seen from on high, numbing planes of steel and slate that shine like shaken foil in the sun, and hurt the eye.
But then, these are factories. Behind their superficially modest facades are muscular machines for making money. And when, with heroic exceptions, were factories ever really meant to be looked at long and hard?
The City of London is itself such a factory, so perhaps this is truly the architecture it wants and deserves. Between these hulks are what Paternoster Square's planner, William Whitfield, and its architects like to call streets. In reality, these are alleys separating one beefy office block from the next. Hopefully, they will come alive with coffee houses and bookshops, but there is no guarantee. That some of them frame stirring views of St Paul's is not in doubt, though.
The City having a sheltered new square is also something to enjoy. There are no homes here and the place threatens to be as dead as a dodo on weekends, or at least whenever a fresh security scare prunes and thins tour buses.
But there is something wrong with the design of Paternoster Square. At the top of Ludgate Hill is the new Juxon House. A mockery of the language of classical architecture, this Paternoster office block is kitsch writ gross, a kind of two fingers up to Wren and Hawksmoor, who worked so hard to create the peerless dome and west towers of St Paul's.
What seems sad is that, after so many years, Paternoster Square is not half as good as it should be. What were its architects, planners and developers thinking of? A part of the problem is that the valuable land it occupies has changed hands promiscuously over the past 20 years. At the beginning of the 1980s when the idea of demolishing the postwar offices and shops here was nurtured, the land was owned by the Church Commissioners. In 1985, the Mountleigh Group took a 250-year lease on the core of the site. This company asked Stuart Lipton, developer of Broadgate, the broad-shouldered office scheme alongside and over Liverpool Street station, to organise a competition to find a firm of "masterplanner" architects.
Architecture's big guns were drawn: Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, the late James Stirling, Arata Isozaki, Richard MacCormac, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, and Arup Associates. Arup was chosen. Its surprisingly soft-centred postmodern classical plan was presented dimly to the public at St Paul's in 1988. It was hard to understand. The Prince of Wales countered with a plan dreamed up by his then advisors, Dan Cruickshank and Leon Krier, and drawn up by the neoclassical architect John Simpson. A purring public lapped up this bowl of classical cream. Capped with offices and homes in the guise of a three-cornered hat, it was essentially a concrete megastructure, complete with a US-style underground shopping mall.
The scheme failed to get planning permission. A succession of South American, Japanese-American and British developers came and went before William Whitfield - a veteran British planner and architect, Royal Fine Art commissioner and former surveyor of St Paul's itself - took control. He gathered around him a team of decent, if carefully muzzled, architects, and the result is the curate's egg you see today.
It might seem unnecessary to get so worked up about a jostle of new counting houses. Yet, unlike their predecessors, either pre- or post-blitz, these new buildings are self-conscious design statements writ larger than any advertising hoarding, and a challenge to the integrity of St Paul's itself. Some of the individual buildings are clearly better than others, but this is not the point, as the whole scheme is - in design, if not altogether in planning terms - kitsch. Like a pack of sneering, up-to-no-good teenagers, dressed unconvincingly in pretend bespoke suits, the porky new office blocks of Paternoster Square deserve no quarter. Especially not the quarter that is London EC4. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/nov/26/pack-a-punch-chetna-makans-christmas-chutney-gifts-recipes | Food | 2022-11-26T10:00:24.000Z | Chetna Makan | Pack a punch: Chetna Makan’s Christmas chutney gifts – recipes | To me, a chutney is a fresh condiment that makes any meal sing. Most chutneys in India are freshly prepared, ready in minutes and still pack a punch, so I was surprised to find that in Britain chutneys are made to have a long shelf life, and contain vinegar and sugar to preserve their fresh ingredients. Here I am sharing a wider variety, with a bit of sweet, sour and spicy; they’ll be great for your festive table or jarred up as little gifts.
Apple, mango and pineapple chutney
Prep 15 min
Cook 1 hr 20 min
Makes 2 x 300g jars
Keep 2 weeks
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
4 cardamom pods
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp onion seeds
1 onion, finely chopped
½ tsp turmeric powder
2 eating apples (I used jazz), peeled and chopped into 1cm pieces
1 mango, peeled and chopped into 1cm pieces
200g pineapple (about half a fresh one, but you could also use tinned), chopped into 1 cm pieces
2 birds-eye red chillies, finely chopped
200g caster sugar
200ml white wine vinegar
Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/gas 6. Wash some jam jars with their lids, put them on a baking tray into the hot oven for 15 minutes until dry. Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat and add the cardamom, cumin, coriander and onion seeds.
Sizzle for a few seconds, then add the chopped onions and cook over a low heat for eight to 10 minutes, until completely soft. Add the turmeric, apples and 300ml boiling water, cover and cook for 20 minutes, until the apples have softened.
Now add the mango, pineapple and chilli, cover and cook over a low heat for 20 minutes, until all the fruits are soft and yielding.
Next, add the sugar and vinegar and cook over a medium-high heat for 30 minutes until the chutney is more gloopy than liquid. Divide this between two sterilised jars and store in the fridge for up to a month.
Ginger and chilli chutney
You can find jaggery online or in Asian supermarkets.
Prep 10 min
Cook 20 min
Makes 1 x 400g jar
Keep 1 month
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
120g ginger, thinly sliced
10 dried red chillies
100g jaggery, grated (or 100g dark brown sugar)
2 tbsp tamarind paste
¼ tsp salt
To finish
2 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 tsp sesame seeds
Wash and sterilise a jar as in the first recipe. Heat the four tablespoons of oil in a frying pan and add the ginger. Cook over a low heat for eight to 10 minutes until the ginger starts to change colour.
Add the chillies and cook for another minute. Blitz this to a paste with four to five tablespoons of water. Return the paste to the same pan and add the jaggery, tamarind and salt, and cook for five minutes, until the jaggery has melted and the mixture starts to bubble up. Pour this into a serving bowl.
Heat the two tablespoons of oil and add the sesame seeds. Cook for a minute over a low heat; as soon as they start to change colour, pour the infused oil over the chutney. You can serve this warm but cooled down would be much better.
This will store in an airtight box or a jar in the fridge for up to two weeks. You can add a few drops of more water if you want a thinner consistency.
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Peanut and onion chutney
Prep 15 min
Cook 20 min
Makes 1 x 400g jar
Keep 5-6 days
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 medium onions, roughly chopped
10 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
6 dried red chillies
½ tsp salt
100 g roasted salted peanuts (skinless)
To finish
2 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 tsp black mustard seeds
4 dried red chillies, broken into half
Wash and sterilise a jar as in the first recipe. Heat the oil in a pan and add the onions. Cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes until golden.
Add the garlic and chillies and cook for another five minutes until deeply golden in colour. Now add the salt and the peanuts and cook for a minute. Leave to cool slightly. Blitz with 120ml water to a smooth chutney.
Heat the oil in a pan and add the mustard seeds. Once they start to pop, add the chillies and leave to sizzle for a minute. Pour this over the chutney and serve.
You can transfer this to jars and store in the fridge for five or six days. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/13/holding-back-the-tears-with-trademark-dignity-world-cup-fiver | Football | 2018-07-13T11:52:40.000Z | Paul Doyle | Holding back the tears with trademark dignity | World Cup Fiver | POLISHING A THIRD
For their latest and trickiest trick at an Ethics World Cup in which they have dazzled with their PR skills, England must find a way of generating excitement about Saturday’s third-place play-off against Belgium. It is a match that traditionally features reluctant participants who are not particularly interested in winning the prize, like a custody battle for a foul-tempered hamster. So let’s see how canny Gareth Southgate’s selling it, shall we?
“It’s the chance to have our second best-ever finish and the chance for the players to get a medal!” he whooped, attaching tassels to his waistcoat to reflect the prestige of the occasion. “And there’s the pride in playing for your country again!” he continued as Steve Holland played It’s Coming Home on a plastic party whistle. “So we’ll try and get the team that is best able to do the job,” he concluded, holding back the tears with trademark dignity.
Even brighter England future? Players who could break through and shine
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Word is England’s team will include Trent Alexander-Arnold, Danny Rose and Eric Dier, owing to knack for Kieran Trippier, Ashley Young and Jordan Henderson. But playmaker Jordan Pickford is fit and you know that Harry Kane wants to start, what with him being two penalties clear of Romelu Lukaku in the race for the Golden Boot. “The third-place game is not a match we wanted to be in,” Kane confessed. “But we will try to play with as much pride as we can and finish on a high. We will still be thinking of the semi-final defeat, and what could have been, but of course I want to play.” Another free shot from the spot and the Boot, at least, will be coming home. Although given how it’ll have been won, perhaps that, too, should be bronze.
Elsewhere, France and Croatia are preparing for Sunday’s Big One. Mindful of the way Croatia’s players were spurred on in the semi-final by hubris from English pundits and hacks, French mouthpieces will be sure to avoid giving their opponents any further inspiration before the final. Right? “Nothing and no one can stop Les Bleus!” roared Patrick Vieira. D’oh!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“[Thibaut] Courtois used to play at Atlético. And does he think he plays Barça-style at Chelsea? I want the star [on the jersey] and if I get it, I won’t give a $hit [what anyone thinks]” – Antoine Griezmann gets his right of reply after Belgium’s hot post-semi-final chat.
RECOMMENDED LOOKING
It’s your penultimate David Squires of the season.
ITV! Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Here’s the latest World Cup Football Daily podcast, with Max Rushden and co, and you can find it in this general area on Saturday and Sunday evening.
SUPPORT THE GUARDIAN
Producing the Guardian’s thoughtful, in-depth journalism [the stuff not normally found in this email, obviously – Fiver Ed] is expensive, but supporting us isn’t. If you value our journalism, please support us. In return we can hopefully arm you with the kind of knowledge that makes you sound slightly less uninformed during those hot reactive gegenpress chats you so enjoy. And if you think what we do is enjoyable [again, etc and so on – Fiver Ed], please help us keep coming back here to give you more of the same.
FIVEЯ LETTERS
“The aim of The Fiver should be to make readers laugh. Well, The Fiver has never made me laugh before. The emotions The Fiver had always provoked in me ranged from disappointment to disgust, pity and anger. But yesterday The Fiver made me sad” – Frank Chibundu Agu.
“Has anyone in World Cup history ever played the same opposition twice with both teams not wanting to win on both occasions?” – Noble Francis.
Send your letters to [email protected]. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet The Fiver. Today’s winner of our letter o’the day and, with it, a copy of World Cup Nuggets by Richard Foster is … Noble Francis.
BITS AND BOBS
It’s wholly unmeasurable but apparently this is now the best World Cup ever, according to Fifa overlord Gianni Infantino. “For a couple of years I have been saying this will be the best World Cup ever and today I can say that with conviction – it is the best World Cup ever,” he roared.
‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Clearly terrified of raising the ire of Luka Modric, France’s Blaise Matuidi isn’t expecting three knockout games with extra-time to impact Croatia. “I don’t think it’s a factor,” he sighed. “It will be a match they will be ready for and I don’t think extra-time or penalties has been or will be a handicap for them.”
Argentinian official Néstor Pitana will referee Sunday’s final in Moscow.
England set-piece specialist Kieran Trippier is set to be granted the freedom of his hometown, Bury, allowing him to take his lambs down through the market and earning him free black pudding for life. Other recipients of the accolade include Jill Neville, mother of Gary and Phil.
FC Mordovia Saransk (average gate 3,700) are set to inherit the city’s shiny new 44,000-seater World Cup stadium. “The arena will not turn into a white elephant, that’s for sure,” tooted government minister Alexei Merkushkin. “It won’t be a football-only ground, it will be multi-faceted.”
Non-World Cup dept: Chelsea have ushered Antonio Conte through the revolving Do One door at Stamford Bridge with a 52-word statement lacking a single word of thanks.
And non-World Cup dept: $tevie Mbe’s Pope’s Newc O’Rangers reign kicked off with a 2-0 win over Shkupi, whose name seems like Steve McClaren’s aborted European canine mess collection business.
STILL WANT MORE?
Seven reasons for England to be cheerful, courtesy of Dominic Fifield.
Four of them for starters. Composite: Getty Images
France v Croatia is the final a World Cup full of surprises deserves, writes Thomas Hitzlsperger.
Gareth Southgate’s next challenge is bridging promise and triumph, reckons Barney Ronay.
Proper Journalism’s David Conn on English unity in these toxic times.
A Moscow refugee tournament has thrown stark light on Russia’s migrant policy, reports Shaun Walker.
Which is the best World Cup ever? Rating contenders from 1954 to 2014. Not you, Gianni!
Quiz! Quiz! Quiz!
And Paolo Bandini on what Chelsea can expect from Maurizio Sarri.
Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace. And INSTACHAT, TOO!
NORMAL ‘SERVICE’ MONDAY | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/feb/12/strange-undoing-of-prudencia-hart-review | Stage | 2011-02-12T11:51:44.000Z | Mark Fisher | The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart – review | Asmall academic industry is building around the work of David Greig. Books are appearing with titles such as The Sense of Place and Identity in David Greig's Plays and the forthcoming Transnational Identities. You can imagine the playwright himself would be bemused by such attention. It doesn't seem quite in the self-reflexive spirit of The Cosmonaut's Last Message, let alone the throwaway charm of The Monster in the Hall. Perhaps that is why Greig sets The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart in a world of academic pedants, a place of memes, signifiers and post-post-structuralists, where the head triumphs over the heart every time.
The setting for this raucous story is Kelso in the Scottish Borders, where the folk-studies community has gathered for a symposium on "The Borders ballad: neither border nor ballad", a title that perfectly satirises the empty dichotomies of the career academic. Poor Prudencia Hart wants to celebrate the narrative art of the ballad tradition, but to her elitist colleagues, notably the testosterone-driven Colin Syme, such an approach is dated, sentimental and gauche.
In true ballad fashion, Greig sets all this in verse. Using the kind of cheeky rhyming that can match "plectrum" with "autistic spectrum", he subverts the traditional poetic form with references to Facebook, Asda and bed-and-breakfast jigsaws. This scores many a laugh in Wils Wilson's rough-and-ready production for the National Theatre of Scotland, which is touring the bar-rooms of Scotland for added authenticity, wild musical outbursts and all. It also parodies the modern-day folk fan who goes in search of a genuine expression of community identity and finds only Katy Perry karaoke.
Yet the culture-clash comedy goes on for only so long. This play has its own ballad to tell: on a dark and snowbound winter solstice (snowflakes courtesy of the audience's torn-up napkins), Madeleine Worrall's buttoned-up Prudencia goes on an archetypal journey of self-discovery, housing estates and car parks notwithstanding.
Beguiled by a mysterious stranger, she sups with the devil and releases her own inner sexual power, as the play switches from brash comedy to an eroticised version of Sartre's Huis Clos by way of Burns's Tam o' Shanter. By the end, she has gone from detached academic observer to the protagonist of her own story, finding an animal passion for the swarthy Syme and an unlikely sensitivity to the work of Kylie Minogue. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2018/mar/01/gkn-shareholders-arent-quite-in-the-mood-for-love-yet | Business | 2018-03-02T12:06:51.000Z | Nils Pratley | GKN's defence is starting to look more credible | Nils Pratley | It would be an exaggeration to say GKN’s shareholders, after being blasted by management presentations for the past week, have suddenly fallen in love with their misfiring engineering giant. But something may be stirring.
For almost the first time since Melrose launched its £7bn reverse takeover bid, GKN’s shares are trading consistently above the value of the offer. GKN closed on Thursday at 435p versus an offer, which is mostly in the form of Melrose shares, worth 413p. And that was before the FT’s report on Thursday night that GKN is talking to US group Dana about a deal to sell or combine its automotive division. The gap isn’t huge, but the position is more encouraging for GKN than a fortnight ago.
GKN rejects £7bn hostile approach from rival Melrose
Read more
Back then, it was too easy for Melrose to portray GKN’s chief executive, Anne Stevens, as a semi-retired recruit hauled from the non-executive benches and who could make only vague promises about corporate self-improvement.
GKN’s big plan, called Project Boost, does still require investors to take a lot on trust. But there were clear long-term cashflow forecasts in the mix, a promise to return £2.5bn to shareholders plus a firm commitment to demerge the two halves of the company – aerospace and automotive – by the middle of next year.
A demerger in itself should add no value. In practice, the move would address the old complaint that the stock market awards the lower rating - in this case, an automotive one - to any engineering group that serves two markets. Life shouldn’t work that way, but sometimes does.
Project Boost won’t convince everybody, but it prompted Jefferies’ analyst, for example, to place a valuation range of 448p to 523p on GKN’s stock. At the very least, it is probably safe to assume, even if Melrose were to walk away tomorrow, that GKN’s shares wouldn’t tumble all the way back to their pre-action level of 326p. A price around 370p or 380p might be more like it.
Viewed that way, Melrose’s current offer worth 413p looks outright mean. The real takeover premium is miserable.
Yes, as the bidder keeps saying, one can view share-based takeover offers as a debate about which management team to prefer. On that score, Melrose’s record of enriching investors still puts it ahead in City eyes. But takeovers are also about fundamental value. In this case, all that has really happened is that Melrose has spotted an undervalued business and is offering lowball terms to own it. The 57% share of the pie that would go to GKN shareholders is short by several slices.
The business select committee will hear from both sets of management next Tuesday. Melrose’s crew, presumably, will be quizzed about asset-stripping, debt, pensions and the rest of it. And, if they’re being fair, MPs will also give Stevens a hard time over whether her demerger plan for GKN is any less dangerous to the long-term interests of UK manufacturing.
In the absence of a wider public interest test on takeovers that Theresa May has failed to deliver, that encounter is important. MPs may be able to extract a few long-term promises from Melrose about investment in research and development in the UK that can be turned into binding commitments by the Takeover Panel.
But there’s also the here-and-now question of value. That one seems straightforward. GKN’s defence is hopeful, but not wildly so. As things stand, Melrose isn’t offering enough. Nothing like.
Zero-based budgeters
It was not a pretty year, says Sir Martin Sorrell. He wasn’t talking about his pay packet - which will probably still count as beautiful by conventional standards - but about the advertising giant WPP’s results for 2017. He’s right. Everything from revenues to profits to margins went roughly flat.
The intriguing part, however, was Sorrell’s explanation. He said it had little to do with attempts by Google and Facebook to cut out agencies by luring advertisers directly to their doors. Instead, he blamed cost-cutting by big multinationals under siege from “zero-based budgeters, activist investors and private equity”.
The latter phenomenon is clearly genuine. Unilever, Nestle and Procter & Gamble, in various ways, are under pressure from investors to boost profit margins. Trimming perceived fat from advertising budgets is an easy short-term win, even if Sorrell thinks it is self-defeating in the long-term.
Yet he should surely be more cynical about the ambitions of Google and Facebook and their digital co-travellers, consultancies. A large chunk of his presentation was devoted to reasons for the technology giants not wanting to “disintermediate” advertising agencies and see them instead as partners. He even offered supporting quotes.
Good luck. Once upon a time, executives in other corners of the media world have also trusted the friendly talk. The plot didn’t usually work out happily for the old guard. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/07/jemima-khan-cuts-links-with-the-crown-over-treatment-of-dianas-final-years | Television & radio | 2021-11-07T12:08:17.000Z | Mark Brown | Jemima Khan cuts links with The Crown over treatment of Diana’s final years | Jemima Khan, a close friend of Princess Diana, pulled out of helping to script Netflix’s The Crown because the story was not being handled “as respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped, she has said.
Khan said she was brought in to help the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, write the script of the fifth series, which includes the years leading up to Diana's death in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Khan, a well-connected film and television producer, was part of Diana’s social circle at the time. She has never spoken publicly about their friendship but, she told the Sunday Times: “It was really important to me that the final years of my friend’s life be portrayed accurately and with compassion, as has not always happened in the past.”
Queen Olivia Colman, an epic budget and a cast of thousands: a year behind the scenes on The Crown
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Those years include Diana’s romances with the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan and Dodi Fayed, the son of the billionaire owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al Fayed. There was also the Panorama interview with Martin Bashir when, referencing Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana said: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Khan said once she had realised that the stories were going in a direction she did not agree with she requested that all her contributions be removed and asked not to have a writing credit.
“In 2019, Peter Morgan asked me to co-write on the fifth series of The Crown, particularly those episodes which concerned Princess Diana’s last years before she died,” she said. “After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute.
“We worked together on the outline and scripts from September 2020 until February 2021. When our co-writing agreement was not honoured, and when I realised that particular storyline would not necessarily be told as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped, I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit.”
The next series is expected in November 2022. The Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, who came to prominence after her portrayal of Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s film The Great Gatsby and later The Night Manager and Tenet, will play Diana, taking over from Emma Corrin.
Filming for the series began in July, with Dominic West taking over from Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles. Imelda Staunton succeeded Olivia Colman as the Queen, Jonathan Pryce replaced Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip and Lesley Manville took over from Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret. Also in the cast are Jonny Lee Miller as John Major and Bertie Carvel as Tony Blair.
Khan is the daughter of the late Eurosceptic financier Sir James Goldsmith, the sister of the former minister Zac Goldsmith and ex-wife of Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan.
In a statement to the Sunday Times, a spokesperson for The Crown said: “Jemima Khan has been a friend, fan and a vocal public supporter of The Crown since season one. She has been part of a wide network of well-informed and varied sources who have provided extensive background information to our writers and research tea, providing context for the drama that is The Crown. She has never been contracted as a writer on the series.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/jan/21/artsfeatures.popandrock1 | Music | 2003-01-21T11:33:53.000Z | Caroline Sullivan | Audioslave, Astoria, London | Take three former members of politically correct punk-rappers Rage Against the Machine and add the singer from proto-grungists Soundgarden, and you have got the first grunge-metal supergroup. In theory, Audioslave are pure heaven for those who think metal lost its radical-left soul the day Rage Against the Machine split up. But they will be distraught to learn that Soundgarden's Chris Cornell joined only on the condition that the songs would be free of political content.
Cornell got his way, as evinced by his navel-gazing lyrics on Audioslave's self-titled debut. But ex-Rage members Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk had the last word, setting up a large stall in the foyer on behalf of anti-capitalism group Corporate Watch. Times have changed, though: the audience surged past with barely a glance at the forlorn fair-trade petitions. They were after the more visceral pleasures of humungous riffs, and there were more than enough of those. Cornell, musclebound in a little white vest that was wasted on the predominantly male audience, seems to have unchained the animal in the other three. Bludgeoning slabs of noise? They got 'em. Gut-wrenching bass guitar to the fore? That too.
This is not Rage Against the Machine mark 2, but a slightly dated rock band in its own right - and Audioslave just want to have fun. At the Astoria, Cornell, who is blessed with one of those preternaturally powerful alpha-male voices, went to town. His abyssal howl on Set It Off burned with commitment. Cochise, inspired by a native American uprising, was thrillingly monstrous, swept along as Cornell wailed to Morello's guitar. He even made a decent job of generic grunge fare like What You Are, caressing the line "When you wanted blood, I cut my veins" as if it brought back memories of some spectacular lost night.
That Audioslave are in the first flush of enthusiasm was evident; whether they can sustain it is anybody's guess. But here they did everything right: they rocked like they meant it, and left before they got dull. They may have become part of the machine they once raged against, but that is a matter for them and their consciences. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/11/toni-morrison-tributes-leading-writers-tracy-k-smith | Books | 2019-08-11T08:00:46.000Z | Tracy K Smith | Toni Morrison remembered: ‘Her irreverence was godly’ | Tracy K Smith: ‘What consoles in the wake of her death is the monument she has left us, a lifetime of work’
The 22nd poet laureate of the US, from 2017 to 2019, Smith is the author of four books of poetry, including the Pulitzer prize-winning Life on Mars (2011)
The realisation has recurred in various forms now that Toni Morrison has died. There will be no more novels, no more essays, no more occasions where her living voice reaches across time and space to pierce us with insight. I feel the collective mind wrestling with disbelief, the way my own mind did in the days after my father died. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe someone will tell us very soon that she has come back.
What consoles in the wake of her death – which I want to think of as her ascension – is the monument Morrison has left us here on Earth, a lifetime of work in inspired exploration of selfhood and nationhood as informed by notions of race. In America, a country whose founding fallacies of white versus black, dominion versus enslavement and superiority versus inferiority reverberate ceaselessly through the fabric of daily life, there is no topic more urgently relevant. And yet, there is no topic that has been more consciously and unconsciously eschewed, mishandled or contested.
In the preface to her 1992 essay collection Playing in the Dark, Morrison writes: “Until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination.”
Across her celebrated career, in terms both critical and creative, Morrison went to work upon the question of what race has done to the American mind. “My project,” She wrote in that volume’s closing essay, “is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.”
Her critical project empowered readers to recognise that it is the needs and fantasies of whiteness that determine the manner in which blackness is depicted in the canon of American literature. And her novels chose black lives as their central subjects, enthralling readers with her commitment to the inner lives of black characters.
I was in Morrison’s presence just a few times. I joined Princeton’s creative writing faculty just as Morrison was retiring from teaching, though she remained a presence on campus, and returned occasionally to the classroom. One afternoon, as I sat with my own students in what was essentially the anteroom outside Morrison’s office, she walked through the space. I had been making some point about poetry. I had been very confident in the moments just prior to the sighting, then I felt myself grow small, afraid in the way that certain mountains, even from a distance, can make one feel the fear of falling.
Once, before a reading on campus by a young black novelist in whom Morrison had taken an interest, the three of us sat on a bench smoking cigarettes. Stupefying awe having already set in, the most I had mustered to say was: “It’s an honour to meet you.” I sat silently as the two of them chatted, thinking it remarkable that Toni Morrison could do just that – chat – so easily, so naturally, like an ordinary mortal.
Ten years later, I interviewed her onstage. I cringe recalling how I kept asking her, in each of my questions, to solve our nation’s moral problems, to predict its future, when perhaps what she had wanted to talk about were her characters, her sentences, her ways of capturing the very real voices of her –our – richly varied people.
I didn’t know Toni Morrison. But in another sense – one everyone who has read and loved her work will recognise – she and I were intimates. Near the end of my first marriage, I read Jazz, a novel about passion and violence, transcendence and futility. A part of me grew pained and alert when, in the final pages, the narrator admits to the wish to say, openly, “that I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me.”
During the year between the death of my father and the birth of my daughter, I sat in a different marriage, surrendering myself to the layers of feeling and consequence which speak directly to the condition of motherhood in Morrison’s novels. If they had been visible to me before, now they stirred a layer of spirit I hadn’t previously understood myself to possess. The new life dawning in me, ghostly and mysterious, was touched and classified by Morrison’s voice. “I’m here. I lasted,” says Sethe once she has claimed Beloved as her own true daughter returned from the dead. “Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too.”
Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Great novels enter us. They reconfigure our sense of who we are and what we feel. They urge a part of ourselves to take flight, to merge with something alive outside of us, the proxy for which is often the novelist herself. In this way, great literature helps us to feel recognised, comprehended, accompanied.
In the days after Morrison’s death was announced, I sat down to reread The Bluest Eye. It’s a first novel and yet – astoundingly – everything is there. The voices, nimbly alive, don’t just mimic or signal black life, but, rather, invoke and rejoice in it. The clarity and urgency of characters is telegraphed through indelible gestures: three pennies guarded in a child’s shoe, the poor hunched shoulders and tilted head of the girl Pecola, who’s lived her whole short life with an internalised sense of ugly unlovability. The various forms of rage that rise up in the face of lack stand revealed, as do the barbarous social conditions in place to perpetuate such lack – not just in America but everywhere that difference between people is recognised and leveraged.
She was herself even then.
What is she now? I find myself asking these days when the reality of her absence remains tenuous. Today, I believe her to be an abiding source of insight and force, coaxing still, from wherever she has gone.
Jason Reynolds: ‘She told those of us who would grow up to become black writers that we were free’
Acclaimed American author of novels and poetry for young adults. His 2016 story Ghost was a National Book Award finalist in the US for young people’s literature
I didn’t encounter Toni Morrison’s work until I was in my early 20s. I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid, let alone a reader of something as complex as Toni Morrison’s work, so I came to it a little late. The first book I read was The Bluest Eye, which I found while working in a book store, and I loved it. After that, I read Sula, which is probably my favourite of her novels, but it took me much longer to read Beloved. I felt like I had to grow into it. I would try it over and over and it would fit a little better each time, and eventually it fit perfectly.
For me, there is an audacity to her work. She was a maverick and she had an ability to write really complex and painful things in a way that felt boundless. For so long, we had been told how writers were supposed to write – this is the way it’s supposed to sound, to look, to move – and she up-ended all those things, in Beloved in particular. I’m thinking of the way she bleeds and conflates time, and the idea of spirit – how in our tradition, spirit doesn’t necessarily mean something that is gone, but something that is present, that is always there.
She really pushed the limits and told those of us who would grow up to become black writers that we were free – free to write however and whatever we wanted to write. There is only one other person that gave me that same feeling of freedom, and that’s James Baldwin, but Baldwin pretty much kept with the concrete, whereas Morrison bled into the surrealism and the magic – the magic that makes us who we are.
If you are a writer, and specifically a black writer, it feels almost impossible not to be influenced by Toni Morrison. There’s that line in Beloved, one her most quoted sentences, where a character says: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man.” I think about that sentence all the time. It speaks to her ability to describe a man who is trying to express love. How does he articulate this love with limited language? Actually, that language is not so limited: it becomes expansive because he’s forced to get creative in his explanation. So in trying to describe love, he says, “She gather me.” None of us could ever come up with that.
For a lot of us now, when we’re approaching the page, we don’t have to be afraid of our poetry. We don’t have to be afraid to stretch language. And in being stretched, the language becomes more real. In my own book, Ghost, a young person is trying to describe his anger and he says: “I got so much mad in me.” I don’t get to say that without Toni Morrison – I don’t get to have the freedom to make the language feel familiar and fantastic at the exact same time.
Morrison with her sons, Slade and Ford, at her home in December 1978. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
I wish I’d met her. I’ve got a lot of friends who knew her, but unfortunately I was never in a situation to shake her hand and say thank you. Several years back, I was at an event where they were auctioning a first edition, mint condition, signed copy of Beloved. I bid for it and won the bid, and I remember my friends saying: “You paid way too much money for that.” But I looked at that book last night and thought, man, what a treasure. That’s the closest I’m ever going to come to her.
I think she’ll be remembered as someone who loved us – and loved us enough to scare us. I know that she scared the white establishment, and that made me feel safe. It made us feel bigger. She was unafraid.
In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, she said: “What are you without racism? … If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is that white people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.”
As a kid of 18 or 19 watching that, and even now as a 35-year-old repeating that, I feel emboldened. Toni’s irreverence was godly. Her irreverence felt miraculous. And I think it helped to spark the magic in a lot of us, who had been told over and over again, by every other faction in life, that we were less than and that we deserved invisibility.
Bryan Stevenson: ‘She was fearless. She said you can be black and great. And she never stopped saying that’
Campaigning lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which has overturned the wrongful convictions of 135 prisoners on death row in the American south. Stevenson, 59, chose words by Toni Morrison for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, the first official monument to the 4,000 black Americans murdered by lynching
The first book of Toni Morrison’s I read was The Bluest Eye, and what amazed me about it was the honesty with which she expressed what it is like to be black in a world that so clearly values whiteness. I was 17 or 18, just heading to college. In the previously segregated school where I grew up in Delaware we were not exposed to black authors. I had to go and find Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for myself, for example.
I think because Morrison had worked as an editor in publishing she was mindful of an absence of a particular voice in that literature, a way of thinking and a way of talking. Storytelling is such a rich part of the tradition of any child of parents who grew up in the south; you were surrounded by adults who told stories with a particular kind of melody and magic. When my mother and her sisters and the neighbours in our community got talking together it would have that quality to it – there was nothing more entertaining or engaging than being at the table while these black women spoke to each other and expressed their fears and their sorrows and their joys and their insights. It was a truth-telling space. Toni Morrison brought that voice out into the world.
We never met but we had hoped to honour her at our annual dinner for the Equal Justice Initiative in New York next month. When we opened our museum and memorial in Montgomery we had these monuments and sculptures and descriptions of the lynchings, and I felt like we needed something powerful to say to people when they left this really intense experience. I had read a little book Toni Morrison had put out just a couple of years ago of a lecture she had just done at Harvard, “The Origin of Others”, and there was a quote from Beloved in it that was just so perfect for what we wanted to say. When we approached her for permission she could not have been more supportive and encouraging of us using it there, and was hoping to come to see it for herself. The quote contains an exhortation: “And O, my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck... hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” This idea that if you have survived this violence and terror you can’t just run and hide, you are actually going to have to dig deep and love the parts of yourself that other people would exploit and brutalise and injure – I just thought it was such a powerful way of suggesting how you could recover from that history.
Morrison with Barack Obama before being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House
She was fearless, always an activist. Even in simply saying “I am a black woman writer” she was rejecting the opportunity to be swallowed up by all of these institutions and spaces that might have wanted to embrace her talent but minimise her race or gender. I think that modelled an identity that has been hugely important for many of us who have been made to think that we have to choose between being a great lawyer and a black lawyer, or a great writer and a black writer. She just rejected that dichotomy. She said you can be black and great. And she never stopped saying that. Right to the end she concerned herself with the day-to-day experience of people; I think what was going on at any moment in the lives of black people always shaped her writing and her vision for what was necessary. At a time when we are engaged in a new struggle over the narrative of our history of bigotry she showed what America can be. I loved her for that; we all did.
Kwame Kwei-Armah: ‘She is magnificent. Her emotional intelligence is second to none’
Artistic director of the Young Vic. In 2017, while Kwei-Armah was artistic director of Center Stage theatre in Baltimore, he directed an adaptation of Morrison’s 1992 novel, Jazz
She came into my life in the late 80s when I was given a copy of Beloved. That was the first book of hers I read and in truth I was stunned by it. I didn’t quite know how to negotiate it, in fact. At that point, there was so little literature about slavery and very little literature about people in slavery making huge decisions. From then on, of course, she became the thing, the being that you went to when you wanted absolute truth and poetry.
She was an influence in that she affected my ability to not see myself as a minority when it came to writing, to not always centralise my fears around reaction to my work from, as she called it, “the white gaze”. Also, I felt that while some of her contemporaries placed the black male as the antithesis of goodness or had [their characters] having to negotiate their way to freedom through or over the black male, Toni Morrison treated me – a black man – like a mother would, like a sister or a lover. She loved me for my flaws and explained them and the reasons for them to me and that’s why she was my go-to writer. Every time she had a new novel I couldn’t wait to read it because I knew there would be a part of my story that was new to me.
My favourite book is Jazz because she’s not writing for the audience. Song of Solomon is similar. Most people I knew had to pick up Jazz three or four times before they got through it, but when you did there’s a complexity to the storytelling. I think I read it maybe six times and then I directed its world premiere on stage. Right at the beginning of the process, she said: “Listen, theatre’s not my thing so… off you go. Don’t worry about me.” Which was just magnificent for the writer and magnificent for me as the director and producer of it. Later, she sent a beautiful message congratulating us on finding a way to tell our version of her story.
When I met her at Princeton, she thanked me personally and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was with a group of writers who were involved with The Princeton Slavery project, where the university was doing an investigation into it’s links to slavery and asked us to take a moment in that history to write about. There were six of us, we each wrote a play and Toni introduced them.
I have only been completely overawed by two people in my life – one was August Wilson and the other was Toni Morrison. As I was about to be introduced I tried to hide a bit. I wanted to observe her rather than meet her, but she was extraordinarily warm. She had this twinkle in her eye like she enjoyed being her. She had nothing to prove to anyone.
For me, her legacy is total excellence. Technically, she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery – she didn’t care what people thought, be that the reader or not, she just told the truth as she saw it – was equal to her artistry.
As my own little tribute, to celebrate her life, I’m going to carry a different Toni Morrison book in my bag every day. Today, it’s Song of Solomon. That’s what I’m walking with today.
Remembering Toni Morrison – Shared Readings in Celebration of Toni Morrison’s Life and Work is at the Young Vic, London, SE1, 5 September, 6.30pm | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/jun/30/euro-2016-poland-portugal-wales-belgium-germany-italy-france-iceland | Football | 2016-06-30T08:47:19.000Z | Guardian sport | Euro 2016 quarter-finals: who will win? | Poland v Portugal, Thursday 8pm BST, Marseille
Wales v Belgium, Friday 8pm, Lille
Germany v Italy, Saturday 8pm, Bordeaux
France v Iceland, Sunday 8pm, Saint-Denis | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/03/martin-sorrell-wpp-rupert-murdoch-fox-facebook-snap-forecast-2017 | Business | 2017-03-03T08:33:39.000Z | Mark Sweney | Sorrell: companies that offend good governance tend to perform better | WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell has said that companies with dominant shareholders or owners such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, Facebook and Snap that “offend” good corporate governance practices take more risks and tend to perform better financially.
Sorrell was speaking the day after Snapchat parent Snap floated on Wall Street, with the offering oversubscribed and the share price rising more than 44% to $24 (£19.5) on its first day of trading, despite co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy and early investors keeping total control of voting rights.
He said that WPP has found over a decade of measuring brand valuations that when markets hit tough patches it is companies with dominant shareholders or owners that tend to continue to invest perform best.
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“The strongest innovators and strongest brands generate the strongest total shareholder returns,” he said. “Perhaps surprisingly, corporate structures that seem to offend customary good corporate governance may deliver better long-term results.
“Controlled companies like the Murdochs’ News Corp and Fox or the Roberts’ Comcast or [Mark] Zuckerberg’s Facebook or [Sergey] Brin and [Larry] Page’s Google or, now, [Evan] Spiegel’s Snap may provide the confidence and stability needed to take the appropriate level of risk. Investing in innovation and strong brands yields enhanced returns.”
Sorrell made the comments as WPP, the world’s largest marketing services group, said that it was lowering its growth forecast for this year below City expectations as advertisers remain jittery in the face of market uncertainty, following the election of Donald Trump as US president and the UK’s vote to leave the EU.
WPP hit its target of 3.1% net sales growth, the key metric watched by analysts and investors, but said a slow start to 2017 has seen that figure fall to 1.2%.
Sorrell said that for 2017 net sales and revenues at around 2% growth. The City expected growth to be set at the 3% mark.
Sorrell said that the 1% downgrade could largely be attributed to the loss of income after losing the AT&T and VW advertising accounts.
“The move from 3% organic growth outlook to 2%, in practice, does not have a huge impact on forecasts,” said Thomas Singlehurst, an analyst at Citi. “But there is no hiding from the fact that a reversal of momentum is deeply unhelpful.”
Sorrell said that the Trump administration is more pro-business than Barack Obama’s government, but that uncertainty remains in a number of markets. WPP has also been hit by a lower level of new business in the second half of 2016, which would have fuelled this year’s figures.
“The prospects in the UK are more mixed as the post-Brexit vote scenarios will play out over the next two years and uncertainties about the possible outcomes increase,” he said.
WPP blamed “Brexit uncertainties” for UK revenue growth turning negative in the final quarter last year (-0.6%), with all the company’s other geographic areas reporting growth. Full year revenues in the UK grew 1.8%.
“The four leading western continental European economies – Germany, France, Italy and Spain – let alone the Netherlands and Greece, also all face political uncertainty, although Germany and Spain are strengthening economically. In these circumstances, clients face challenging top-line growth opportunities and uncertainties.”
WPP reported total like-for-like revenue growth, stripping out factors such as currency effects and acquisitions, of 3% to £14.4bn. Pre-tax profits rose 26.7% to £1.89bn.
Its shares plunged by almost 6% to 1,800p in early trading, making it the biggest faller in the FTSE100.
Sorrell said that last year WPP spent $5bn (£4.1bn) of its clients’ advertising and marketing money with Google, its biggest single investment, and expects this to increase to $6bn in 2017.
Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox are WPP’s second biggest investment, at $2.25bn, with spend expected to remain about the same.
WPP spent about $1.7bn on Facebook last year, a figure which could increase to $2.5bn this year. The company spent just $90m on Snapchat last year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/06/riveting-laugh-out-loud-beautifully-written-the-best-australian-books-out-in-september | Books | 2022-09-05T17:30:36.000Z | Steph Harmon | ‘Riveting’, ‘laugh-out-loud’, ‘beautifully written’: the best Australian books out in September | This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Fiction, Ultimo Press, $32.99
In This Devastating Fever – which took Sophie Cunningham 16 years to write – a fictional author named Alice (who seems a stand-in for Cunningham) spends 16 years writing a book, titled … This Devastating Fever. The book is to be about Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, which would be a difficult sell anyway – but Alice’s research becomes an obsession, interrupting her deadlines with red-herring rabbit holes and international trips to far-flung archives, as her publisher’s impatience reaches tipping point.
“More sex!” her publisher demands – and so we get four pages of dot points about the Bloomsbury group titled “Who’s fucking who”. “Less footnotes!” her publisher proclaims – but Alice (read: Sophie) can’t seem to kill her darlings. This is queer historical fiction about the Woolfs, yes – but it also blends autofiction with metafiction about the writing of the book. It’s very funny, very clever and surprisingly moving too. – Steph Harmon
Marshmallow by Victoria Hannan
Fiction, Hachette, $29.99
It’s the stuff of nightmares: after a busy birthday party for two-year-old Toby, his young parents and their friends gather outside for a beer, a joint and a wind-down. Inside, unsupervised for a moment, the little boy has found a stray marshmallow, choked on it, and died. No one is to blame. Everyone is to blame.
Her first book since her acclaimed debut, 2020’s Kokomo, Victoria Hannan’s Marshmallow deals with the fallout for each of the five friends, who – in chapters alternating between them – are dealing or not-dealing with the trauma, on the first anniversary of Toby’s death. With easy comparisons to be made to Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, it’s a riveting, tender and empathic take on how grief and guilt affect everyone differently – and how tragedy can bring us together, or wrench us apart. – SH
Harold Holt by Ross Walker
Biography, Black Inc, $34.99
While writing this surprising, literary and fresh-feeling biography, Walker aimed to “a midway point between biography and narrative nonfiction – history told as a story”. Much of it is focused on who Holt was before he became Australian prime minister in 1966, a year before his notorious disappearance at sea. Though there is a lot about that too: Walker shows how Holt was drawn to water all his life – practising holding his breath while bored in parliament, and scaring the bejeezus out of his wife when she found him submerged in the bathtub.
They are small examples of the man Walker reveals to be adventurous, stoic and kind by nature, fine character traits overshadowed by the circumstances of his death. Where there are gaps in first-hand accounts, Walker makes astute observations of how Holt may have behaved or responded by using what is known. It is a confident book, and often beautifully written – unexpectedly so for a political biography. – Sian Cain
Wildflowers by Peggy Frew
Fiction, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
All of Peggy Frew’s novels, in one way or another, explore the dynamics between families, looking through a variety of lenses to reveal the complex, struggling individuals at their heart. Wildflowers is a culmination of Frew’s best qualities – beautifully, deeply observed; brimming with tension; profoundly domestic.
In it, three sisters – Meg, Nina and Amber – drive to an isolated holiday house in far north Queensland in an attempt to right past wrongs and reconnect. Frew has, once again, demonstrated her remarkable insight into the conflicted individual lives and trauma that lie beneath the surface of families. – Bec Kavanagh
Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn
Short stories, UQP, $32.99
Chris Flynn’s last book Mammoth was narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon – and so well did he capture the personality of old bones that the author ended up with a side job at Museums Victoria. Here Be Leviathans is a collection that picks up where that experiment left off, as Flynn gives voice to the voiceless: a self-aggrandising monkey about to be shot into space; an aeroplane chair that lands in the Siberian forest after an explosive crash; a family of sassy otters with a flair for the visual arts; and – in a particularly prescient story – a saber-toothed tiger stalking a Jurassic Park-like playground for the awful rich.
The cute premise would be cloying from a lesser writer, but Flynn works in such humour, voice and empathy that the stories can’t help but move you. – SH
Bon and Lesley by Shaun Prescott
Fiction, Giramondo, $29.95
Shaun Prescott’s 2017 debut the Town was an evocative, strange satire about Australian regional towns – capturing both the listless suffocation of being trapped in them (geographically; psychologically), and the tendency they have to disappear. The book won global distribution, critical acclaim and comparisons to Gerald Murnane’s The Plains – so his follow-up five years later represents a bit of a lit world moment.
I haven’t read this one yet, but on first glance Bon and Lesley presents as a companion; again surreal and deadpan and dark; again set in a desolate regional Australian town, where character Bon finds himself after a bushfire stops a train he’s fleeing the city on. The author describes it as his “doom metal novel … I could not write anything else until it was out of my way.” – SH
Against Disappearance, edited by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez
Essays, Pantera Press, $32.99
This collection of First Nations writers and writers of colour – the 20 longlistees of the Liminal and Pantera Press nonfiction prize – contains incredible writing. Contributors include Hasib Hourani, who made me laugh out loud with reflections that are as funny as they are serious, lonely and acerbic; and Kasumi Borczyk, who inventively layers family narratives atop, and across, of one another. Lur Alghurabi writes with pathos and intelligence, and Brandon K Liew offers a piece of Melbourne history that is also something that could never belong to the city: an intimate account of a specific time and a place; a family history only he could bring to life.
Buy a copy for yourself, buy a copy for your friends, and prepare to be overwhelmed. – Declan Fry.
People Who Lunch by Sally Olds
Essays, Upswell, $29.99
The Melbourne-based critic’s debut runs a gamut of social scenes (most of them pretty club-heavy): secret societies to art fairs to crypto. Every piece in the collection – subtitled “essays on work, leisure & loose living” – asks you to think harder about the ways we earn money, party, and look out for each other. Olds’ writing is relaxed and direct, driven by sharp intellect and a radiant, unaffected interest in the world around her. With enviable clarity and style, she pares back assumptions about class and sex.
And she is unafraid of taking the scalpel to her own life – questioning, in a riveting essay on polyamory, the political potential we might seize, or miss, in the ways we structure our closest relationships. Another writer once described Olds to me as “very underrated” – this book should sort that out. (Plus: the year’s best cover? I think yes.) – Imogen Dewey | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/08/no-deal-brexit-would-trigger-wave-of-red-tape-for-uk-drivers-and-hauliers | Politics | 2018-02-08T20:00:36.000Z | Dan Roberts | No-deal Brexit would trigger wave of red tape for UK drivers and hauliers | British drivers may need new licences and registration certificates to travel in Europe after Brexit under contingency plans being drawn up by the government that experts warn would create “extremely labour-intensive” extra red tape.
In the first of a series of steps to deal with the possibility of failing to reach a deal with the EU, the UK is signing up to a United Nations convention on road traffic, which theoretically also affects zebra crossings and parking.
The 1968 Vienna convention, which Britain previously avoided joining because it was too burdensome, has become an urgent necessity because the EU will no longer recognise UK-issued licences after Brexit and could ban all drivers and vehicles without an alternative agreement.
Though the UK still hopes for a “deep and special” trade deal to replace existing EU rules after a transition period, it has just a few days left to ratify the UN convention in time before the planned final departure next March.
Hard Brexit would cost public finances £80bn, says secret analysis
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After a 21-day scrutiny period in parliament and up to a year to pass enabling legislation, the convention requires the setting up of a new system for registration of trailers and the issuing of international driving permits (IDPs) if the EU refuses to recognise UK licences.
Insiders say the prospect of triggering this wave of extra red tape had led to furious rows within Whitehall but the lack of alternatives has forced proposed legislation – the haulage permits and trailer registration bill – to be rushed into the Lords.
“There will be some costs in relation to the provision of a new system for issuing 1968 convention compliant IDPs, and the provision of a registration system for trailers travelling overseas,” said an accompanying government memo published on Wednesday.
Officials have insisted that it was not the government’s intention for UK drivers to need IDPs in Europe, but in an EU notice issued last month, the European commission said: “A driving licence issued by the United Kingdom will no longer be recognised by the member states.”
Without a recognised licence, travellers to Europe could find themselves unable to hire cars or take insurance, as has happened in some US states such as Florida, although some countries may choose not to enforce the convention.
The paper-based IDP can currently be obtained from a limited number of post offices as well as the AA and RAC for a charge of £5.50 and after tackling various bureaucratic hurdles.
“It’s extremely labour-intensive,” said AA spokesman, Ian Crowder. “It’s certainly a possibility that an IDP will be required in Europe, although we think it’s unlikely because we hope they will reach a deal.”
The Vienna convention requires drivers of certain trailers to seek a separate vehicle registration when travelling abroad. The government has said this will be mandatory for commercial drivers and larger non-commercial drivers, and voluntary for smaller caravans and horse boxes.
“The extra time and hassle if you have a fleet of several thousand trailers would be tremendous,” said James Hookham, the deputy chief executive of the Freight Transport Association.
The Vienna convention also contains measures that the UK hopes to seek an exemption from. These require different rules for pedestrian crossings, for drivers on different sides of the road to park in the same direction, and for lights to be used when parking, going through tunnels or carrying loads. The government’s intention “to enter reservations” against these rules could be challenged by other countries.
But the biggest long-term challenge for the UK freight industry is the tiny number of travel permits potentially available for British truck drivers if there is no other solution found through an EU trade deal.
Under existing international treaties there are between 103 and 1,224 permits a year available to deal with more than 300,000 journeys by 75,000 British trucks.
“British businesses have heard enough talking – what’s needed now is a concrete solution to enable all those involved in moving goods and services across the UK’s borders to plan with certainty for a post-Brexit future,” said Hookham. “The time for discussions is over – what the country’s businesses need now is action, to keep trading Britain trading without penalty or hindrance.”
Legislation to run a rationing scheme for the tiny number of permits is part of the new bill introduced into the Lords on Wednesday, but the government insists it is only a precaution.
The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, said: “We believe reaching an agreement to continue the liberal access enjoyed by both sides is in everyone’s interests and remain confident we will do so.
“But I also understand that hauliers are planning for the years ahead and want to have certainty that any future deal can be implemented smoothly – so this bill ensures we have plans in place if the deal requires a permitting system.” | Full |
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