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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/23/the-guardian-view-on-davos-elites-without-answers | Opinion | 2019-01-23T18:30:22.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on Davos: elites without answers | Editorial | Any advantage that politicians see in attending the World Economic Forum are these days weighed against the disadvantage of being seen to attend. Brexit has kept Theresa May away from Davos this year. The gilets jaunes protests have persuaded Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to give it a miss. Both leaders are too busy grappling with crises born in a backlash against globalisation to visit a jamboree for business elites.
Of western Europe’s three most powerful states, only Germany is represented by the head of government. In a sombre speech on Wednesday, Angela Merkel warned of brittleness in the international rules-based order. She pledged to defend the “global architecture” but warned also that reform is essential to win back legitimacy in the eyes of people who feel financially insecure, left behind, and who turn to extremists for redress.
This is a familiar diagnosis, even in Davos, but there is not much consensus on remedies. The forum itself can hardly advertise itself as a place of antidotes to nationalist demagoguery when its keynote speaker this year was Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president. Last year that role was taken by Donald Trump. Both were given sycophantic receptions, yet these men embody the problem that Mrs Merkel identified. They are not interested in healing social division when stoking grievance is the means by which they take power.
There is no mystery over the policy areas that need most urgent attention: the distributional mechanisms – progressive taxation and public investment – that functioned as social stabilisers through the second half of the 20th century. Partly the cause is ideological aversion to any kind of state intervention, partly the problem is the capacity of multinationals to shop between national jurisdictions and deprive governments of revenue. There are non-economic features of popular discontent, most prominently in hostility to immigration. But the cultural backlash against globalisation is inseparable from inequalities that can be addressed through extra spending and by tackling injustice through the tax system.
There will not be any progress on those fronts at Davos. It is not a place where politicians coordinate policies as a counterweight to the might of big business. But without such coordination national governments are diddled by the hyper-mobility of global capital. The competition to secure investment easily becomes a race to the bottom in terms of workers’ rights, pay and tax receipts. That is why there is immense soft power in the EU’s single market. Alignment of rules on a continental scale allows for more meaningful regulation of multinational behaviour, as has been demonstrated by robust European commission action against tech giants such as Google and Apple on matters of fair competition and unpaid tax.
In British politics, there is a myth that “Europe” shrinks national sovereignty. So entrenched is it that MPs sometimes struggle to conceive of Brussels as a place where nation states’ power is enhanced. But they will find it out soon enough if Brexit goes ahead, when the effects of political and economic detachment from the European project become clear. A delegation of Conservative ministers, including the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and international trade secretary, Liam Fox, are passing through Davos this week, where they will make the now familiar pitch that Britain is open for business. What they mean, in reality, is that Brexit Britain, having rashly given up its seat in the most powerful rule-making chambers of Europe, will be ever more at the mercy of global capital. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/amc-stocks-drop-sharply-meme-stock | Business | 2022-08-22T16:54:16.000Z | Edward Helmore | AMC stocks drop sharply as investors sour on ‘meme-stock’ rally | The “meme-stock” reprise of 2022 took another beating on Monday as shares in the movie theatre chain AMC, one of the companies driven to dizzying heights by a social media-fueled investing frenzy last year, dropped sharply again as investors soured on its recent rally.
AMC Entertainment shares soar in latest GameStop-style frenzy
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Shares of the world’s largest theater chain dropped 31% after the UK-owned rival Cineworld, operator of Regal cinemas in the US, warned of potential bankruptcy filing as it struggles to cut debts that soared during the pandemic.
The performance of the two cinema companies is strikingly different. AMC shares are up over 150% since the end of 2019 and it has been able to borrow $1.8bn, while Cineworld’s stock is down 99% over the same period and it has struggled to raise additional funding.
Separately, shares in the retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond – another stock favoured by meme investors who chased returns on Reddit and other social media platforms – have fallen more than 40% since Thursday, days after stock in the struggling housewares retailer more than doubled. The fall came after investor and “meme-lord” Ryan Cohen announced plans to sell off his position.
CNBC calculated that Cohen made as much as $59m from 9.8% investment in the company – a stake that has led thousands of online investors to follow his lead. Since 2015, stock in Bed, Bath & Beyond has dropped from $77 a share to around $10.
Both companies, along with the game retailer GameStop, are strongly associated with the meme-stop frenzy of 2021. The return of their popularity among small investors, perplexing to many, came as US markets have enjoyed a 20% rise in value since June when high inflation and rising interest rates triggered fears of an impending recession.
The fall in meme-stock values came as more than 90% of stocks on the S&P 500 posted losses on Monday. The index was down 1.6% by mid-morning, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 438 points.
The market swings indicate that investors are attempting to gauge the US economy as the Fed raises interest rates into a maze of conflicting signals, including record high inflation, low unemployment, poor consumer confidence, resilient consumer spending and weakening economic activity. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/27/the-guardian-view-on-australias-election-labor-needs-to-go-bigger-on-climate | Opinion | 2022-05-27T17:30:08.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on Australia’s election: Labor needs to go bigger on climate | Editorial | In his victory speech on election night last Saturday, Labor’s Anthony Albanese promised to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower” and end a decade of “climate wars”. This was good news. Under rightwing Coalition governments – an enduring alliance between the Liberal and National parties – Australia was seen as a climate pariah on the world stage. The new prime minister will have to do very little to raise his country’s standing.
From a global perspective, Mr Albanese’s most important policy is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Mr Albanese’s goal is not as ambitious as the UK’s or the EU’s. But it is a marked improvement on the last government and will be well received in neighbouring Pacific nations tired of seeing existential threats from rising sea levels dismissed in Canberra. The Coalition government led by Scott Morrison promised that Australia would reach net zero by 2050, which at best would have seen a 28% cut in climate-altering emissions by the end of the decade. But significantly there were no new policies under that administration to meet this distant objective.
On climate, Labor offered reform, not revolution, to Australian voters. This modest approach was born of bitter experience. The party went down to a surprise defeat in 2019. In that election Labor’s bold environmental policies were successfully demonised by Coalition adversaries. This time, the new prime minister was more cautious. Labor has few specific policies about how to reduce emissions from farming. Mr Albanese offered only slightly more onerous targets for decarbonising industry than Mr Morrison. It is true that he has some big ideas. Labor’s flagship policy of a public corporation to invest $20bn (£11bn) in modernising the electricity grid – and unlocking renewable energy supplies – is striking but unlikely to make the change that is needed without controversial policies such as carbon pricing.
For the rest of the world, Labor’s general lack of ambition is not good enough. Neither should it be for Australians, who have experienced bushfires, floods, drought and bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef. Mr Albanese’s policy puts him on course to meet the 2016 Paris agreement goal of keeping temperature rises to 2C compared with preindustrial levels. But the world has moved on. Cop26 saw leaders pledge to limit global heating to 1.5C. If Mr Albanese wants to host Cop29 in 2024, he will have to adopt the more aggressive emission reduction plans of the Greens and the “teal” independents, whose rise shows the environment is not just a leftwing cause.
Mr Morrison lost for doing too little, rather than too much, on climate. He hid behind claims that Australia was responsible for just 1% of global carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel exports are included, Australia is behind 4% of global greenhouse gases. The country has more than 100 new gas and coal mining projects in the pipeline. Ending its dependence on coal for electricity generation by 2030, says Climate Analytics, is the most important contribution Australia could make to global efforts to limit global heating to 1.5C. Labor’s plans for the natural gas industry, a powerful lobby within the party, remain opaque. Mr Albanese’s government must find ways for communities that currently benefit economically from fossil fuels to benefit similarly from renewables. If it succeeds, it will earn the country’s – and the world’s – gratitude. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/30/extreme-weather-could-push-uk-food-prices-up-this-year-say-farmers | Environment | 2018-07-30T10:24:22.000Z | Fiona Harvey | Extreme weather could push UK food prices up this year, say farmers | Staple foods from bread to potatoes, onions, milk and meat may be in shorter supply than usual this year and prices to consumers may have to rise, farmers have said, as they count the cost of the two-month drought and heatwave across the UK.
There will be little respite from the hot weather in many areas of the country, even as thunderstorms and heavy rains spread from the east, as farmers have seen their crops wilt, their fields parched and livestock struggle in the extreme conditions.
Although it is too early to say precisely what price rises may come, the National Farmers’ Union said farmgate prices were likely to increase. Retailers will have to decide whether to pass such rises on to consumers.
Anand Dossa, economist at the NFU, said early indications were that harvesting for staples such as grains was taking place early, but it was too early to say exactly what the yields would be. “These are challenging conditions, and we would expect to see an effect,” he said. He added that sheep meat production was down 16% this year.
Following the year’s wet and cold spring, many livestock farmers have had to dip into their stores of winter feed early, said Robert Martin, who keeps a 120-strong herd of dairy cattle near Carlisle. “Milk yields are down because of the conditions,” he added. “People are coming to market early with cattle because they can’t afford to carry passengers.”
Tim Mead, of the organic dairy company Yeo Valley, said a 10% reduction in milk yield was common but “there is still plenty of milk around”. Many farmers were still in debt as a result of low prices in the last few years, however, and this year’s conditions would hurt them further. George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, said confidence in the beef market had also “taken a hit”, the result of lower supplies of fodder and very little grass. “Store markets are well down in price, which may lead to shortages into next year,” he warned.
Another problem for livestock farmers is the lack of straw, used for bedding. “Straw length is short because of the impact of the hot weather on the growth of wheat and barley, and straw was already in desperately short supply because of the previous year’s wet harvest,” said Zoe Davies, chief executive of the National Pig Association. “We are encouraging anyone who can to bale straw to try to make more available. The last thing we want is for the large number of our members reliant on straw to be outbid on it by subsidised straw-burning [power] plants, which will only exacerbate the issue.”
Potatoes are watered as another dry summer day draws to a close in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. Photograph: Chris Strickland/Alamy
Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, warned of impacts across the market for vegetables. “As a broad generalisation, volumes [of crops harvested] will be down and for the majority of crops costs will be up.”
The next few months would be crucial, he said. “Brassicas, such as broccoli and cabbage, are down in volume. With salad, growers are having difficulty just keeping the plants alive. But there is still time for potatoes to bulk up, and onions,” he said. “That will depend on the weather in August and September.”
Many farmers are having to harvest crops, particularly grain, early this year because the hot conditions have caused them to ripen sooner, but without time to “bulk up” to their usual size. This is likely to depress the yield on such crops, which could in turn raise prices.
The widespread nature of the heatwave across Europe and beyond would mean retailers cannot simply pick up cheaper food elsewhere to put on their shelves, said Liz Bowles, head of farming at the Soil Association. “Many food exporter regions around the globe are being affected, so we could see pressure on prices for consumers,” she said.
Farm economics are also much affected by the weak pound, added Dossa, which he called a “double-edged sword”, because while it makes exports more profitable, it raises the cost of inputs such as feed, fuel and fertiliser. Meanwhile, the uncertainty over Brexit has resulted in a slump in confidence among farmers, with the NFU’s latest survey in April showing confidence at its lowest in eight years. Low confidence translates to lower investment, which could have a long-term dampening effect on productivity.
Parched soil in a wheat field in Suffolk. Photograph: Graham Turner/Alamy
Farming leaders have warned that thousands of rural families may face hardship as a result of this year’s conditions. Malcolm Thomas, chairman of the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, which provided £2m in help to farming families last year, said: “I envisage a busy autumn and winter [for us], with many livestock farmers already forced to feed winter rations to their stock. Having to buy more feed will quickly drive up overheads. We’ve not seen weather like this in decades, and it’s worth remembering it comes hot on the heels of a long cold winter and a particularly wet spring, which resulted in floods in many areas.”
Farmers are used to dealing with the vagaries of the weather, but the long winter and cold spring, followed by the heatwave, has produced a meteorological double whammy that has sent many reeling. That would have been bad enough, but the added effects of Brexit are creating turmoil. Thomas said: “Reacting to what the elements throw at you is part of a farmer’s life, and most accept that. However, extreme weather creates extreme challenges that make it impossible to plan for anything. There’s already tremendous uncertainty about the future due to Brexit and the implications of a possible no deal outcome.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/nov/27/music-grow-up-by | Music | 2011-11-27T21:45:00.000Z | Laura Barton | Music to grow up by | Laura Barton
Laura Barton and her dad
In the evenings, after he had set down his briefcase and taken his first sip of gin and tonic, my dad would teach me how to rock'n'roll dance in the living room. I would be swooshed into the air, shown how to twist right down to the floor on one leg, while we played Chubby Checker, Chuck Berry, the Big Bopper up loud on the stereo.
Music was a constant presence in my childhood home, soundtracking Sunday lunches, housework, homework, afternoons in the garden. It was a rush of Graceland, Supertramp, Kate Bush; Sgt Pepper, Duffy Power, doo-wop. It was Tango in the Night and Jazz on a Summer's Day, and all four of us crammed in the car, singing a little ditty, 'bout Jack and Diane.
Some moments seem scored on my memory: my dad playing Sixteen Candles on my birthday; a school morning with my mum as she played Phil Collins's No Jacket Required. And when I stop to consider it now, I see how much music has fed and shaped and enriched my relationship with my parents.
I often think it was my mum who gave me lyrics, who gave me Leonard Cohen and Dory Previn: a delight in the sound and colour and weight of words. My dad gave me music: song as a physical experience, as rhythm, as the beat and the off-beat drummed against the car steering wheel. He gave me jazz, and blues, and rock'n'roll, Dion, John Lee Hooker and Thelonious Monk. He would take me to record fairs, where I would stand quietly among the rows and listen to the flick-flick-flick of the vinyl-hunters. He would make me compilations, send me messages about his latest musical infatuation, greet my return home with a casual, "Have you heard the new Kanye?"
My dad and I are still talking about music. When I went home recently we sat at the kitchen table sipping red wine while he explained what he loved about Wu-Lyf's intros. And when my parents went to see Bon Iver play in Manchester this autumn, he emailed me the following morning to rave and to rhapsodise, to try to articulate his awe at the previous night's show.
It was my mum who introduced my dad to the music of Van Morrison: some time around 1970 she bought a copy of Astral Weeks in HMV in Manchester and forced him to listen to it. Ever since, Morrison's music has been a beam, a bolster between my parents, our family.
For my whole life, this is music that has somehow shouldered our relationship; his music has become part of our family language every bit as much as bad puns, Monty Python jokes and references to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. We'll talk about "gardens all misty-wet with rain" and of being "famished before dinner" and "meet me down by the pylons".
And still, now, some of the happiest sounds in the world to me remain those late-night murmurings – drifting up the stairs, pressing up between the floorboards, the sound of wine glasses, low voices, the muffled lyrics, rhythms, raptures of Into the Music playing on the stereo: "When you hear the music ringing in your soul," Morrison sings, "And you feel it in your heart and it grows and grows/ And it came from the backstreet rock'n'roll/ And the healing has begun …"
Laura Barton is a journalist and author
Tim Jonze
Tim Jonze (aged five) with his mum Trudy and his brother Nick
It's probably stretching it somewhat to say that, when I was a kid, my mum listened to a lot of 1960s teen idol Adam Faith. Truth is, with the sole exception of the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber, she never played any music in the house. The same goes for my dad, whose professed love for the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan rarely stretched to him actually taking their records out of the sleeve and, you know, putting them on the turntable.
We got a good dose of Simon and Garfunkel during car journeys to destinations such as Warwick Castle, too, as well as frequent plays of a Country Classics compilation that was probably bought in a petrol station somewhere for 59p, yet has stayed with me forever, because it included Anne Murray's beautiful song Snowbird. At home, without the need to distract two easily bored boys on the backseat, music was rarely played.
And yet I've somehow grown up under the impression that my mum was one of the world's biggest Adam Faith fans. It's been a regular joke in our family ever since I can remember: how embarrassing it must have been for mum to have frittered away her impressionable years caring about such fluff. Until recently though, I'd never knowingly heard a note of his music. For all I knew, he might have been bloody brilliant.
Admittedly, I had seen pictures of the chap that suggested he probably wasn't tearing Stockhausen a new one with his electronic tape compositions. But he might have been behind a good pop tune or two. I decided to do what all good rock'n'roll journalists in search of a story should. I called my mum.
"He was very good-looking. And sexy," was her opening gambit. "And at the time he was different. OK, not different, just cute."
I see. Anything more, well, musical?
"He had a style of his own. He wasn't the best of singers, but he was different to Cliff Richard or Marty Wilde, he stood out. Then again, back then you didn't have so much to choose from."
After such a glowing appraisal, I had to find out more. Faith's first No 1, What Do You Want, came along in 1959, followed by a string of hits in the early 60s. A colleague pointed me towards Faith's later stuff – notably, the psychedelic 1967 track Cowman Milk Your Cow – but much as I enjoyed it, this wouldn't be the kind of thing my mum was listening to. She was into the teen pop stuff, songs such as Poor Me and Someone Else's Baby: pizzicato strings and vocals that have that Buddy Hollyish tendency to sing as if you've got a live eel down your kecks.
Faith had a good team behind him; his early hits were penned by Les Vandyke and arranged by a young John Barry. But for me, he's just not as good as Holly: his clean-cut style is slightly detached from the meaning of the songs (think X Factor contestants smiling inanely as they perform heartbreak ballads), while Holly's delivery came straight from the heart.
And yet falling in love with pop music, especially when you're a teenager, is always about more than the music. I loved Michael Jackson's songs when I was growing up, but the fact he hung out with a chimp probably helped. Later on, when I fell for Oasis, it was about the fights and the tabloid drama as much as the music. (I also liked the fact my parents dismissed them as "Beatles rip-offs".)
When my mum was teased about Adam Faith, my dad would sometimes say something along the lines of: "She only ever liked him because he was good-looking." I remember the last time he said this, a year ago, with my mum in earshot. "Of course," she said, "that was the whole point!" She might not play his music these days, but my mum clearly had a better grasp of what makes a great pop star than either of us.
Tim Jonze is editor of guardian.co.uk/music
Bob Stanley
Bob Stanley's dad
The first record I ever owned, courtesy of my great-grandmother, was Ernie by Benny Hill. But the first records I got to play on my own record player were a bunch of EPs by Chris Barber's Jazz Band. My parents weren't exactly beatniks – there was houseroom for Rock Around the Clock and Sixteen Tons, too – but their teenage passion was trad jazz and, in particular, the work of the fatherly‑looking Barber. The EPs were affordable, featured decent interpretations of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet, and had great covers, too. They looked important and sounded like a whole heap of fun; titles such as Whistling Rufus and Hiawatha Rag were solid family favourites.
Mum and Dad went to see the Chris Barber band play at the Dorking Halls during their courtship, and still have the programme to prove it. Dad's Dixieland dream was sacrificed when he sold his clarinet to buy an engagement ring. He also gave up on the idea of going to art school so he could afford to have a family; I've always felt a little haunted by this.
Neither of them had any time for modern jazz. What Dad liked about trad, he explained, was that every time you listened to it you could follow a different instrument, there was so much going on. The "Moderns" left him cold.
He also scorned Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk as "not serious". Barber and his band, though, were the real thing, no matter that they were from the home counties rather than bayou country. When I was older and realised the singular role Barber played in bringing skiffle to the masses, bringing blues singers such as Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy over to Britain for the first time, and thus inspiring the next wave of British rock, I was quietly impressed with my dad's judgment.
My parents' record collection went down an entirely different route once they married: long players only and a lot of Wagner, which proved just the stuff to test out Dad's Rogers amp and Bang & Olufsen deck. The scratchy old jazz EPs, along with a clutch of 45s and 78s by the Shadows, Sandy Nelson and Johnny and the Hurricanes, were handed down to me as fuel for my Dansette.
The few pop records my parents picked up through my childhood were by Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Diamond, on heavy rotation every Sunday. Gradually, the size of my own record collection overtook my parents', and a line was crossed. Now I sometimes envy their compact cupboard of vinyl, especially when I'm moving house.
For my dad's birthday a few years back, I took him and mum to the 100 Club to see Chris Barber for the first time in 40-odd years. He even got to chat to the great man after the show, with some arcane question that had been bugging him for years about a tune they'd played called Black and Tan Fantasy. Whatever the answer was, Dad looked pretty happy.
Bob Stanley is a music writer and member of Saint Etienne.
Jude Rogers
Jude Rogers takes her mum Alison to see singer Ralph McTell at the Newport Riverfront Theatre in Gwent, south Wales. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/D Legakis Photography/Athena
Newport's Riverfront theatre, South Wales, on a bright Friday evening. My mother – bouncy-haired, in her best top – is about to meet her musical hero. Just as momentously for me, so am I.
Before I reached my mid-teens, we both adored Ralph McTell. He sang on children's TV shows Tickle on the Tum and Alphabet Zoo; I would watch until my eyes went square. The vivid characters in his 1974 smash Streets of London got under my skin – the old man drinking tea alone in the all-night cafe, the old girl with her "home in two carrier bags". The sound got to me, too – those full, rounded, arpeggios on the acoustic guitar, McTell's voice gentle and warm. But by the mid-1990s, that was that. REM, the Smiths, Kraftwerk: these were my bands.
When I went to university my mother would play McTell's 1995 album, Sand in Your Shoes. She liked An Irish Blessing so much she stuck its lyrics on our fridge. They began: "How my life is changing now/ My young ones start to leave their home/ I wish that their uncertain road/ Was one that I could tread with them." Years later she told me that it gave her comfort, and it did again when my two brothers followed me.
Now I am all grown up, and McTell is sitting in front of me; my mother waiting outside. He is a cheerful 67, in a T-shirt and hooped earrings. He laughs about how old I'm making him feel, as I recall his songs. We talk about Alphabet Zoo being inspired by Woody Guthrie, and I think of my record collection now, full of folk. Then McTell remembers 40 years of gigs, including a show in Barry Island in 1972, which my mother attended, aged 21. She met up with a fellow fan called Roy there, who became her husband, my father.
McTell understands that certain songs bring generations together. "I love that humility about music," he says. "Music has been there before you, and it will be there after you."
The theatre door opens and my mum comes in. In her eyes, I see me, meeting my heroes through my job, trying to keep the fan inside me at bay. I think how her love for her favourite musician deepened my love for mine, and made me want to write about them. When I was young, Mam didn't talk a lot about her heroes, but she revelled in music in a way that was infectious.
And now here McTell is, in 3D, giving her a hug, talking to her about a 1972 gig where she met my father. Internally, I beg her not to cry. She doesn't, but when we leave the theatre a while later, she shrieks girlishly with joy. This makes me happy: truly, I am my mother's daughter.
Ralph McTell plays the Cadogan Hall, London SW1 (020-7730 4500) on 11 December. Jude Rogers is a music writer and Mercury prize judge.
Rosie Swash
Rosie Swash as a baby and her Dad Tony Swash
It's funny how you can share a love of a certain musician with someone you're close to and never really discuss why. When I finally ask my dad, who I remember dancing (quite well) and singing (quite badly) along to Neil Young throughout my childhood, what it is he loves about the keening Canadian, he says it's Young's capacity to make sweet the sound of "loss and regret".
"I would often play After the Gold Rush when you were small," he explains. "Life then felt complicated and demanding. I had two kids and a marriage to cope with. We had no money, I had to work all the time and I felt I never had time to catch up with life or with myself. These were the Thatcher years, and all we could see was the defeat of all our hopes and dreams. So I would do the washing up and play After the Gold Rush and feel OK."
This was the mid-80s, more than 10 years after that album's release. Neil Young wasn't exactly going through his halcyon period by then; Trans, the Vocoder-heavy 1982 album, was followed by a rockabilly concept album, Everybody's Rockin', in 1983. "For quite a while back in the 1980s Neil Young, like Leonard Cohen, was considered unfashionable. He was regarded by some as an old hippy," says my dad. "So listening to him felt a bit like defending something from my youth."
Young's wasn't the only music to grace our house, but he was the only one I went on to like. My mum favoured Nanci Griffith, who I liked a lot at the time – not any more. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, was torturous on a child's ears, especially as my parents played it really, really loudly.
My own teenage years were given over to 1990s pop; Björk, Pulp, Whigfield. But later, my love for Neil Young was reignited. Rediscovering his albums was almost like remembering an old love, this time with renewed meaning. I think his appeal is timeless, in part because he has always sounded like an old man with a restlessly young spirit. "Hey, hey, my my," he sings, "rock'n'roll can never die." It's nice to know that while my dad was reliving his past over the Fairy Liquid, he was creating what feels like such an important part of mine.
"Like all great songs and great artists, each of his songs can be rediscovered as you encounter each stage of life and its passing," my dad tells me now. It's almost enough to make me forgive him for forgetting I'd got us tickets to see Neil Young in concert in 2008, and going off to Scarborough for the weekend instead. Almost.
Rosie Swash is editor of guardian.co.uk/fashion
This article was amended on 28 November 2011. The original said that Jude Rogers's mother met her boyfriend at a Ralf McTell concert. In fact they met up at the concert; they were already courting. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/apr/22/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries | Global | 2005-04-21T23:03:49.000Z | David Nice | Obituary: Sixten Ehrling | Sixten Ehrling, who has died aged 86, was dubbed "the dour Swede" in the United States, feared in his homeland as a rigorous conductor who did not suffer fools gladly, and respected in both countries. His phenomenal technique and formidable memory contributed to a widely held view of his interpretations as over-intellectualised, but both in Stockholm and Detroit, where he held his longest tenures, his legacy of high orchestral standards was a lasting one.
Ehrling's father was a Malmo banker who finally submitted to his son's musicality and bought him a Steinway grand piano. From 1936, he studied at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, in Stockholm, effortlessly combining studies in violin, piano, organ, composing and conducting; in 1939, he received the prestigious Jenny Lind scholarship. Having gained practical experience as a repetiteur at the Stockholm Royal Opera, he pursued his studies, in 1941 with Karl Boehm in Dresden - Sweden having taken a neutral role in the war - and later with Albert Wolff in Paris.
The breakthrough at home came in 1950, when Ehrling conducted Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a work Sweden hardly knew. Two years later, recording the first cycle of Sibelius symphonies, he shared drinks and cigars with the veteran Finnish composer.
Inevitably, Ehrling's role as music director of the Stockholm Royal Opera, a post he held from 1953 until 1960, meant that he was adept both in new works and core repertoire, where he acted as firm support to such home-grown talent as tenor Jussi Bjoerling - Ehrling's Carmen and Rigoletto were just as celebrated as his performances of Berg's Wozzeck and Swedish composer Blomdahl's "space-opera" Aniara, which Ehrling also brought to the 1959 Edinburgh festival and Covent Garden.
Ehrling applied his accustomed rigour throughout; stopwatch records revealed that his performances of the longest score in the operatic canon, Wagner's Die Meistersinger, varied by less than a minute over the course of more than four hours.
Fondly remembered as the company's golden age, the Ehrling era in Stockholm was never without its tensions. It came to an abrupt end when, as he drily told a Swedish newspaper, "they wanted me to apologise for the way I led the orchestra. I refused, and moved to America instead."
He showed a similar intractibility in 1988 with a late-arriving Gothenburg Opera audience, refusing to wait while they settled in their seats; an ultimatum from the management followed.
The American musicians destined to fear and respect him were those of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, already in good shape from the more benevolent guidance of Paul Paray when Ehrling arrived in 1963. Times may have become more stringent, but Detroit proved responsive to more new music: among the 24 premieres Ehrling con ducted were symphonies by the Swede Sten Broman and the American Benjamin Lees, and he brought Luciano Berio to Detroit for a short residency.
Then New York welcomed him both as teacher and opera conductor. His Metropolitan Opera debut, with Jon Vickers in Britten's Peter Grimes (1973), was followed by several cycles of Wagner's Ring, in which his textural clarity was highly praised, and the first performance there of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.
Among Ehrling's conducting pupils at the Juilliard School of Music, between 1973 and 1987, were many who went on to international careers, not least Myung-Whun Chung and Andrew Litton.
Increasingly, in later years, Ehrling was welcomed back in Sweden, where he conducted his last performance at the Royal Opera last October, and continued to guest with the American orchestras he already knew so well. A remark on one of those occasions to the bass clarinetist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra might well stand as his epitaph: "Give my regards to anybody - if they deserve it."
He is survived by his wife, the former Stockholm opera ballerina Gunnel Lindgren, and two daughters.
· Sixten Ehrling, conductor, born April 3 1918; died February 13 2005 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/31/sheffield-wednesday-hit-with-12-point-deduction-for-next-season | Football | 2020-07-31T18:25:23.000Z | David Conn | Sheffield Wednesday's delayed 12-point deduction angers Charlton | Sheffield Wednesday have been docked 12 points for a financial irregularity committed when the owner, Dejphon Chansiri, bought the Hillsborough stadium from the club for £60m in June 2019 and the profit was backdated to the previous season’s accounts.
Crucially, the points deduction will take effect next season, 2020-21, not in the season just concluded, when such a penalty would have relegated Wednesday. They finished 16th in the Championship, eight points clear of 22nd-place Charlton, who released a statement on Friday night saying they are considering a legal challenge to Wednesday’s sanction not taking effect immediately.
The EFL charged Wednesday in November over Chansiri’s purchase of the stadium, a practice employed by several Championship club owners that turned heavy financial losses into a profit.
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Chansiri’s £60m acquisition of Hillsborough in June 2019 was valued as a £38m profit to the club, recorded in the accounts for the previous year, 2017-18. The Championship’s “profitability and sustainability” regulations limit losses to £39m over a rolling three-year period. The profit from Chansiri buying the ground turned a £35.4m loss in 2017-18 into a £2.6m profit.
The club was not found guilty of a charge alleging dishonesty in its dealings over the stadium, which would have incurred a heavier penalty.
“An independent disciplinary commission, appointed under EFL regulations, has ruled that Sheffield Wednesday will receive a 12 point deduction for breaching the League’s profitability and sustainability rules for the three season reporting period ending with season 2017/18,” the EFL said in a statement.
“The club was charged in November 2019 and referred to an independent disciplinary commission, which conducted a full hearing at the end of June 2020, before finding the club guilty based on the fact that the club should not have included profits from the sale of Hillsborough Stadium in financial statements for the period ending July 2018.
“The club was found not guilty of a further charge of breaching its duty of utmost good faith to the EFL by deliberately concealing information from the League in respect of filings made in respect of the profitability and sustainability rules.”
Wednesday issued a statement effectively disputing the outcome and suggesting they may appeal. “The club is extremely disappointed the commission has imposed a 12-point deduction to be applied next season and awaits the written reasons for this decision,” it read. “The club welcomes the decision that the commission cleared Sheffield Wednesday of the charge of acting in bad faith in its dealings with the EFL.
“Further, the commission decided not to apply a 12-point deduction this season, thereby imposing relegation. The club will await the written reasons for the sanction and upon receipt will digest and consider the full detail with its legal advisers before making any further comment.”
Charlton’s statement read: “Sheffield Wednesday were charged in November 2019 for breaching rules for the three-season reporting period ending with season 2017-18. We fail to understand why the deduction will take place next season rather than the current season, which seems to be irrational, and are writing to the EFL to get an explanation of the justification. The club will keep fans updated on any further action.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/coronavirus-latest-at-a-glance-2m-cases | World news | 2020-04-15T17:00:03.000Z | Kevin Rawlinson | Coronavirus 15 April: at a glance | Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak today include:
Confirmed cases worldwide top 2m
The latest numbers from Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the spread of the virus, put the confirmed global total of cases at 2,008,850. The researchers say at least 129,045 people have died since the start of the outbreak.
The figures are being compiled from official releases and media reports from around the world. Due to suspected underreporting and differing testing regimes, the figures are likely to underestimate the true scale of the pandemic.
G20 suspends debt payments
G20 finance ministers agree to suspend poorer countries’ debt payments from 1 May until the end of the year as they prepare for increased spending on healthcare systems.
UK hospital death toll rises by 761
The Department of Health and Social Care says a total of 12,868 people have now died in hospitals around the UK. The 761 new deaths announced on Wednesday represent a fall on the equivalent figure reported yesterday; 778. The figure is likely to rise once deaths in other settings are taken into account.
The chief medical officer for England, Prof Chris Whitty, says he thinks the death toll is probably reaching its peak, though high numbers of deaths will continue to occur.
NYC adds thousands to death toll
New York City has revised its death toll sharply upwards, to more than 10,000 people, adding 3,778 people who were not tested but who are nevertheless presumed to have died from Covid-19.
Italy reports 578 new deaths
The number of fatalities in Italy rises by 578 on Wednesday, 24 fewer than the increase seen on Tuesday, taking the death toll to 21,645.
The number of people who are currently infected has risen by 1.1%, or 1,127, in a day, 525 more than on Tuesday. There have been 165,155 confirmed cases in the country, including the victims and 38,092 people who have recovered.
One year before vaccine, says EU agency
The European Union’s medicine regulator estimates it could take a year for a vaccine to be available for widespread use. The European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has previously claimed a vaccine could be on the market “before autumn”.
Tour de France postponed
The 107th edition of the race is to be put off until August, the world governing body, the UCI, announces. It was due to begin in Nice on 27 June and conclude in Paris on 19 July but the UCI says the opening stage will now start on 29 August and the finale will take place on 20 September.
Oil slumps despite production cuts
Global oil prices fall as traders fear plans for the biggest production cuts in history will fail to offset the deepest slump in demand in 25 years. US oil prices tumble to 18-year lows of $19.20 (£15.33) a barrel on Wednesday morning and the benchmark price for Brent crude dropped by 5% to $28 a barrel amid gloomy forecasts for demand during the pandemic.
Canadian economy slides 9% in a month
Canada’s statistics agency says the country’s economy suffered a decline of nearly 9% in March – the worst figure ever recorded. While the agency says its March numbers are calculated differently than normal GDP figures, the data nonetheless capture the scope of economic contraction.
EU-UK Brexit talks scheduled
A joint statement from the parties reveals they plan to hold three more rounds of talks via video conference. Both sides say they remain committed to reviewing progress in June.
The special committee set up under the withdrawal agreement to oversee the plan that will leave Northern Ireland in the single market, creating a de facto customs border down the Irish Sea, is due to meet soon. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/15/tony-blair-west-has-fortnight-to-help-end-war-in-ukraine | World news | 2022-03-15T19:53:16.000Z | Nadeem Badshah | Tony Blair: west has fortnight to help end war in Ukraine | Tony Blair believes that the next fortnight could be the last chance for the west to agree a peace deal with Russia to end the Ukraine invasion before the conflict escalates.
The former prime minister said that Nato should not rule out intervening in the war but has also called on the west to not give up on the prospect of negotiating a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.
Moscow and Ukraine officials held a further round of talks on Tuesday in an attempt to end the conflict which has entered its 20th day.
In a lengthy essay on his thinktank’s website, Blair believes that the next two weeks may be the last chance to agree a negotiated settlement “before the assault on Kyiv becomes worse, the Ukrainian people become hostile to any negotiation, or Putin faces a binary choice between “‘double down’ or retreat”.
He wrote: “And we should not underestimate the real economic price the world will pay for continued conflict with steep rises in fuel prices, food prices, global trade and inflation, as ever hitting the poorest in our society the worst …”
The former Labour prime minister also believes that it is a mistake for Nato to be as specific as it has been about not getting involved in the conflict.
He argued that the future status of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine could be part of successfully brokering a peace deal with the Russian president.
Blair – who served as prime minister between 1997 and 2007 and took the decision for the UK to join the 2003 Iraq war – said that he understands and accepts there is not any political support for direct military engagement by Nato but the west should be “clear-eyed about what Putin is doing.”
He wrote: “He is using our correct desire not to provoke escalation alongside his willingness to escalate as a bargaining chip against us.
“When he is threatening Nato, even stoking fears of nuclear conflict, in pursuit of his attempt to topple by force a peaceful nation’s democratically elected president and wage war on its people, there is something incongruous about our repeated reassurance to him that we will not react with force.
“I accept the reasoning behind our stance. But suppose he uses chemical weapons or a tactical nuclear weapon, or tries to destroy Kyiv as he did Aleppo in Syria, without any regard to the loss of civilian life – is it sensible to tell him in advance that whatever he does militarily, we will rule out any form of military response?
“Maybe that is our position and maybe that is the right position, but continually signalling it, and removing doubt in his mind, is a strange tactic.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/15/son-of-saul-review-an-outstanding-excoriating-look-at-evil-in-auchwitz | Film | 2015-05-15T04:41:03.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Son of Saul review: an outstanding, excoriating look at evil in Auschwitz | Aseason in hell is what this devastating and terrifying film offers – as well as an occasion for meditating on representations of the Holocaust, on Wittgenstein’s dictum about matters whereof we cannot speak, and on whether these unimaginable and unthinkable horrors can or even should be made imaginable and thinkable in a drama. There is an argument that any such work, however serious its moral intentions, risks looking obtuse or diminishing its subject, although this is not a charge that can be levelled at Son of Saul.
By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable. Director László Nemes’s film has the power of Elem Klimov’s Come and See – which surely inspired its final sequence – and perhaps of Lajos Koltai’s Fateless. It also has the severity of Béla Tarr, to whom Nemes was for two years an assistant, but without Tarr’s glacial pace: Nemes is concerned at some level with exerting a conventional sort of narrative grip which does not interest Tarr.
Son of Saul is set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944, and one Hungarian Jewish prisoner named Saul (played by Géza Röhrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners given humiliating and illusory privileges as trusties, with minor increases in food ration in return for their carrying the bodies from the gas chambers to pyres to be burned, then carting the ashes away to be dumped. The task is carried out at a frantic, ever-accelerating rate around the clock, as the Allies close in. Among the dead, Saul discovers the body of his young son, and sets out to find a rabbi among the prisoners to give the boy a proper burial in secret, using pleas, threats, blackmail and bribes – with jewellery (called the “shiny”) that he steals from the bodies – to achieve his aim. Saul’s desperate mission is carried out with the same urgent, hoarse whispers and mutterings as another plot in progress: a planned uprising, which Saul’s intentions may upset. And all the time, the Sonderkommando are aware, through this network of whispers, that they themselves will be executed in due course by their Nazi captors.
For most of the film, Nemes shows us Saul’s agonised face, in a shallow focus, tracked through long takes, with the surrounding and background details often left blurred or indistinctly glimpsed: a muzzle flash, a uniform, a naked body. Sometimes we see his back, with the red X marked on his jacket to indicate his status. His is a face from which all emotion appears to have been scorched away – it looks like the face of a pterodactyl. This, the film appears to be saying, is what the face of a survivor looks like, and indeed what the face of a non-survivor looks like: a dehumanised face. And yet Saul is to show another expression in the film’s final moments. In a way, this is how Nemes finesses the aesthetic or ethical question of how to create an individual drama within the horror, how to show and yet not show the horror itself: with intense, constrained focus.
One of the most devastating and deeply shocking aspects of Son of Saul is that it begins with a gas chamber scene; another film might have opted to end with this kind of scenario, or to finish just before showing it. Nemes’s film allows us to grasp only belatedly that this is what is happening – we glimpse it at the edge of the frame which is largely dominated by Saul’s face. Prisoners are stripped and herded as if part of an industrial process of evil: the Nazi officers are all the time tricking and pacifying them with nonsense about how they are to be fed, clothed and used as craftsmen. And the awful truth is the presence of the Sonderkommando, helping to superintend this business and to hoodwink and reassure. It is a theatre of pure evil, all but unwatchable.
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Everything has to be hidden: in a way, the drama is hidden as well. Another reason for Nemes’s closeup procedure is that we, the audience, have to get in close to hear the conspiracy. A rare outburst comes when Saul confronts another prisoner at the lakeside where the ash is being disposed of, an exchange that results in an anguished attempt at suicide, a moment that finds its own heartstopping narrative echo in the last sequence. And it also results in a more familiar wartime-drama scene as a hatchet-faced SS officer, making sneering remarks about the elegance of the Hungarian language, attempts to interrogate the prisoners about what has just gone on: rather similar, in fact, to Ralph Fiennes’s icy character in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But Nemes calmly controls the juxtaposition of this traditional dialogue scene with the rest of the wordless inferno.
Son of Saul appears at a moment when the debate about cinema and the Holocaust has been revived with the restoration of Sidney Bernstein’s all-but-lost explicit official documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey and Andre Singer’s Night Will Fall, the documentary about the way in which this film was conceived and then nervously suppressed after the war.
Jean-Luc Godard believed that cinema’s essential failure was that it did not document the Holocaust in the hope of preventing it. In our time, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah is widely considered the most aesthetically successful approach because of the honesty and clarity of its testimony, which has no need for the (potentially facile) mechanisms of drama. Nemes’s film has found a way to create a fictional drama with a gaunt, fierce kind of courage – the kind of courage, perhaps, that it takes to watch it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/davehillblog/2015/feb/16/london-may-be-rich-but-many-of-its-people-are-poor | UK news | 2015-02-16T21:31:41.000Z | Dave Hill | London may be rich but many of its people are poor | It is the start of Fair Pay Fortnight, two weeks of union-led campaigning to highlight the failure of British wages to keep up with the rising cost of living. In London, Labour MP and mayoral contender Tessa Jowell has released figures from House of Commons library researchers based on Office for National Statistics data showing that during last year 18.3% of jobs in the capital paid below the London Living Wage (LLW), with the Outer London figure rising to 25.8%.
Boris Johnson has embraced the campaign for the living wage, pledging to make it the norm by 2020. Nice idea, but those percentages show that there’s a long way to go. Recent estimates suggest the actual number of jobs in the capital that don’t pay up to the mark is 640,000 at least.
The worst paid jobs in London’s economy are concentrated in cleaning, retail, hospitality and catering and social care, with women and part-time workers predominating. These people’s labour matters. As Liberal Democrat AM Stephen Knight put it last year when he was chair of the London Assembly’s economy committee: “A functioning city is dependent on workers from these sectors to meet our basic needs”. His successor as chair, the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, has taken the message to Oxford Street.
There has been some high profile progress. Recently, Premier League football clubs Chelsea and West Ham have signed up as living wage employers. Yet the committee’s report showed that the proportion of low paid jobs in those four worst-paying occupations had increased significantly since the late 1990s. It also pointed out that low pay contributes to poverty in London, a category into which over two million Londoners fall out of a population of 8.6 million. Over half of those two million live in households where at least one person has a job, according to the London Poverty Profile.
The committee report was supported by research by senior Greater London Authority economist Jonathan Hoffman. This showed, among much else, that cleaners are the most likely to be low paid - defined as below the 20th percentile point in the pay range distribution for all London employees - with rates between 75% and 85%. It also found that from 2003 to 2005, median hourly pay in catering and hospitality was above LLW levels but has been “persistently below it” since. The analysis also revealed that older employees were more likely to be in persistent low pay than younger ones.
Not for the first time we may ponder the contrast between the resilient and expanding London economy hailed as leading the country out of the recession and the staggering facts that its poverty rate outstrips that of the rest of England, that seven of the 20 English local authority areas topping the child poverty league are in London and that unemployment in the Olympic boroughs of Newham and Barking and Dagenham was recently measured at 10% higher than in any of England’s other major cities.
We can add to all this London School of Economics research showing that the net incomes of the poorest 10% of Londoners dropped by nearly 28% between 2007-8 and 2010, the year before the present government came to power. London is routinely called “a great city”. Not at this rate. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2016/mar/22/show-contrition-george-osborne-what-did-they-mean-politics-sketch | Politics | 2016-03-22T18:13:23.000Z | John Crace | Show contrition' said George Osborne's notes – but what did that mean? | ‘I’m the first chancellor to speak on the closing day of the budget debate for 20 years,” said George Osborne, trying to make it sound as if he was pleased with this break in tradition.
His first attempt at a breezy smile died as a thin-lipped sneer; sticking a finger into each side of his mouth to stretch it open wasn’t a great improvement.
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This wasn’t the day George had planned. He had wanted to put his feet up for the afternoon while fitting in some forward planning for his leadership bid, but because his latest budget had fallen apart even quicker than some of his previous ones he had been forced back into the Commons.
George glanced at his speech. The words “Show some contrition” had been helpfully red-inked on the top of the first page by one of his advisers. George frowned. “What’s that mean?” he asked Michael Gove, who had been forced into making a rare appearance in the chamber to make it look as if the Tories were one big happy family. Europe, what Europe? Gove shrugged. He’d never done sorry either.
“I’m here …” said George. That much was true, though he didn’t quite know why. Sure he’d been caught out by a few Eurosceptics trying to nick £4.4bn from the disabled, but he couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
What had a disabled person ever done for him? “I’m here to deliver my strong and compassionate budget all over again,” he continued. “A budget that will offer tax breaks for the rich.”
Loud cries of “Hear, hear” erupted from the less than packed Conservative benches. The Tory whips had been out in force – “Fancy a knighthood anyone?’ – rounding up the loyal and the dim, often one and the same, and handing them helpful interventions notes. “Does the chancellor agree with me that the chancellor is a genius and Labour is totally useless?” piped up one of the loyal and dim. George nodded solemnly, as if this was a telling observation.
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George turned the page. There was the red ink again. Show some contrition. George paused. The words must must mean something, but he couldn’t think for the life of him what.
“I’d just like to say how wonderful Princess Duncan Smith has been and how much I have enjoyed thinking up ways to cut the welfare budget with him over the last six years,” he said. “I’m sure he has his reasons for suddenly discovering he quite likes disabled people, but I can’t think for the life of me what they are.”
Govey and Chris Grayling nodded enthusiastically. They too couldn’t quite remember why they were suddenly so keen on disabled people – hadn’t PDS suggested a rent-a-disabled-person-home-for-the-weekend scheme? – though they were certain it couldn’t have had anything to do with the EU referendum.
Labour’s Chris Leslie, Yvette Cooper and Wes Streeting all intervened to suggest it might help if he was to say sorry for having terrified so many disabled people and, while he was about it, explain how he was going to fill the black hole that had opened up in his budget.
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“Why don’t you say sorry?” George replied, at his sparkling, petulant best. Govey and Grayling punched the air with excitement. That was telling those pinko dimwits!
“Does the chancellor agree with me that it’s Labour who should be apologising?” said another paid-up member of the Tory loyal and dim squad.
George nodded absent-mindedly, his eye caught yet again by the words “Show some contrition” that now appeared on the top of yet another page. He flicked through the rest of his speech and there were the same words on every page. George rifled his brain. They must mean something. They really must. But George’s computer still said no.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, stood up to give a far stronger and more measured performance than the previous day. But George didn’t care. “I’m not listening,” he sniggered as he shared a joke with Govey. He couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
Being chancellor was all just a game and the money would either appear from down the back of the sofa or not. He wasn’t that bothered either way. But he was bothered by “Show some contrition”. He must remember to ask someone what it meant when he got home. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/10/housebuilder-persimmon-cuts-jobs-drop-demand | Business | 2023-08-10T13:19:54.000Z | Kalyeena Makortoff | Housebuilder Persimmon cuts almost 300 jobs after drop in demand | Persimmon, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders, has cut almost 300 jobs as weak demand linked to the fallout from the government’s autumn mini-budget sent half-year profits plunging by 65%.
The company said the reduction in headcount was due to efforts to cut £25m from annual costs in response to the downturn, as it decided not to replace workers who had quit their jobs or retired in the first half of the year. Persimmon had more than 5,860 employees as of December.
Persimmon has been grappling with a drop in the number of customers committed to buying homes after the market meltdown, which has pushed up interest rates and made mortgages more expensive for prospective homeowners.
The effect, which was compounded by the expiry of the government’s help-to-buy scheme, resulted in Persimmon building just 4,249 homes in the first half of 2023, marking a 36% drop compared with the same period last year.
The slump in demand filtered through to Persimmon’s profits, which fell almost two-thirds to £151m from £440m a year earlier.
Persimmon said it would continue its cost-cutting drive, but that it was ready to ramp up construction if demand rebounded. “We will continue to balance the need for cost savings with our aim of ensuring the company has the ability to respond quickly to an improvement in the market to achieve our objective of growing fastest in the industry – while delivering industry-leading margins – as market conditions improve,” the company said in a statement.
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Persimmon’s workforce reductions follow similar moves by its fellow housebuilder Bellway, which revealed on Wednesday that it was cutting jobs and shutting two of its divisions amid fears that house completions would “decrease materially” over the next 12 months.
Housebuilders have been feeling the knock-on effects of 14 consecutive interest rate rises by the Bank of England, which raised the base rate to 5.25% last week as part of its efforts to lower inflation.
That has pushed up mortgage costs, with the average rate on new two-year fixed-rate deals now at 6.83%, while the typical rate on a new five-year fix is at 6.33%, according to Moneyfacts.
However, lenders including Halifax, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC have started to cut their mortgage rates in light of data indicating improved inflation, which could also soon lead to the Bank of England ending its rate-raising streak.
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Persimmon shares rose 3.7% on Thursday morning, valuing the company at £3.7bn.
Investors appeared to be encouraged by comments from the chief executive, Dean Finch, who said the UK’s chronic home shortage would continue to propel the housing market.
“With the historic under-supply of homes, the longer-term outlook for housing remains positive,” Finch said. “Persimmon has a proven track record of delivering strong returns through the cycle. I am confident that the combination of a relentless focus on our key enduring strengths while enhancing key capabilities will again drive strong returns through the next cycle.”
He added that the housebuilder was still on track to meet profit forecasts for the full year and said Persimmon was “building a platform for future growth”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/18/how-we-met-i-really-wanted-to-be-her-friend-but-i-wasnt-sure-i-was-cool-enough | Life and style | 2023-05-18T15:02:51.000Z | Lizzie Cernik | How we met: ‘I really wanted to be her friend but I wasn’t sure I was cool enough’ | Ever since buying her Northampton flat in 2018, Gemma had struggled with unpredictable gas bills. When her bill went up to six times the average rate at the start of last year, she had no idea it would start a new friendship.
“I was crying on the phone to the management company trying to get it sorted out,” she says. “It turned out we were being charged commercial rates instead of residential.”
She soon discovered others in her building were having the same problem, including Annie, who owned a one-bedroom flat on a different floor. “When I got a bill that went from £50 to £500, I went on a bit of a rampage,” Annie says. “I was working for a housing association at the time, so I organised a meeting with the local councillor in June and put notes under doors inviting my neighbours to come.”
The pair on a spring walk in Northamptonshire.
Gemma decided to attend and was pleasantly surprised to discover that Annie was of a similar age. “I sat next to her in the meeting because I really wanted to be her friend,” she laughs, “though I thought she seemed quite alternative and might not find me cool enough.”
After the meeting, Annie invited Gemma for a glass of wine on her balcony. “I discovered we were both single, and thought it would be really nice to get to know her as we were in the same situation,” she says. “I also found her hilarious.” From that day, the pair hit it off and quickly became close friends.
“We are both strong and independent, with a similar sense of humour,” says Annie. “We talked about what a shame it was we hadn’t met earlier, as we could have bubbled together during the lockdowns.” Gemma says they bonded quickly over their common interests. “We both love music and play instruments; I play the piano, and Annie plays guitar.”
Over the summer, they took regular trips together, including a visit to a farm and a wine tasting. “It’s nice to have someone to plan adventures with,” says Gemma. “We also spend a lot of time having drinks and dinner at each other’s flats and laughing at Annie’s guinea pigs.”
We were really frugal, so we’d just heat one flat. We ended up binge-watching The Traitors together
During the winter, anxious about the rising cost of gas, they saved money by spending time together. “We were really frugal. We were still worried about getting crazy bills because of this communal heating system, so we’d just heat one flat,” says Annie. “We ended up binge-watching The Traitors together.”
Gemma works in product development for Avon, while Annie now works in the press office at Warwick University. “When Annie got a new job, we celebrated,” says Gemma. “It’s nice that we can celebrate each other’s successes together.”
Annie loves that her friend is arty and quirky. “She’s a great interior designer and she’s always helping me pick up these great little bargains for my flat,” she says. They also both appreciate how invested they are in the friendship. “I have been dating, but it doesn’t feel essential to meet someone,” says Annie. “We have come to realise that friendship is just as important as a romantic relationships.”
Gemma believes that society places too much emphasis on the importance of falling in love. “I really think people should put more into other relationships, because they’re so rewarding,” she says. “You usually only have one romantic relationship at a time, but you can have many friends. Good friendships last a lifetime, so they’re worth investing in. Annie is kind, generous, funny and really smart, so we always have fun together.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/26/james-whitbourn-obituary | Music | 2024-03-26T17:13:19.000Z | Stephen Pritchard | James Whitbourn obituary | In the pre-internet 1980s, listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Daily Service would often phone in, eager to know about a new piece of choral music they had just heard. They would ask if it was published or available on record, only to be told it had been written by the programme’s young director of music, James Whitbourn, sometimes only hours before.
When he took up the job straight from university, he discovered that few suitable two-minute pieces existed for the BBC Singers, so he set about writing his own. That positive reaction from the audience encouraged him to think there might be a future for his style of tonal composition, where he sought to say new things using established musical language.
Whitbourn, who has died aged 60 from cancer, carried on composing in that innovative yet accessible manner even while his work at the BBC expanded to encompass editing, conducting, producing and presenting. From 1990 to 2001 he ran the Choral Evensong radio series and developed a close association with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, where he produced the Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, driving the precious tape of the live broadcast back to Broadcasting House overnight for the Christmas Day repeat.
For a man who grew up in a household with no television, he found himself working increasingly in that medium, for 30 years producing the TV specials Carols from King’s and Easter from King’s. He also wrote the title music for large events, including Bridge Over Tay, for the coverage of the funeral of the Queen Mother in 2002, and D-day 60, which marked the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
His piece for saxophone and choir, Living Voices, was commissioned by Westminster Abbey for its 9/11 commemoration service in 2001, and repeated a year later in New York at the site of the attacks.
Whitbourn’s score for the BBC Discovery Channel series Son of God evolved into his Son of God Mass (2001), which inspired the poet Melanie Challenger to ask him to collaborate on what was to become his most enduring work, Annelies, his 2005 concert-length setting of the diary of Anne Frank, now claimed to be one of the most sung large-scale choral works of the 21st century, with more than 40 performances taking place somewhere in the world every year.
The Son of God Mass opened other doors. The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, recorded it under Timothy Brown, who showed the piece to the conductor James Jordan at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, and a long association with the US began. Jordan commissioned Luminosity, a seven-movement multi-media celebration of the power of creative love, and recorded Annelies, winning a Grammy nomination, one of four that Whitbourn received in a broad career in which he was also made executive producer of the Royal Opera House’s cinema and video label Opus Arte.
His scholarly curiosity took him in many different directions and produced work that ranged from Pika (2000), a large-scale orchestral piece that commemorated the bombing of Hiroshima, to Zahr Al-Khayal (Flowers of Imagination), for soprano and symphony orchestra, a product of a research fellowship into the music of Egypt, premiered last year at the Kontzerthaus Berlin.
Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, James was the younger of the two children of Anne (nee Marks), an agricultural magazine editor, and Philip Whitbourn, a conservation architect. So keen was he to play the piano that his parents found a teacher, Beatrice Leach, who agreed to take him at the age of four. There was much family music-making at home, and he sang in the choir at St James’s Church, Tunbridge Wells, where he learned the organ with Derek Baldwin, and began conducting.
He started composing when at grammar school, crediting teachers Christopher Harris and Jared Armstrong at Skinners’ school with pushing him beyond A-level. A choral scholarship took him into the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied music, before joining the BBC, where he met Alison Jones, a production assistant. They married in 1991 and set up home near Sevenoaks, Kent. Later he returned to Oxford, directing the music at St Edmund Hall and Harris Manchester College, and engaging in research at the theological foundation St Stephen’s House.
In 2020 this modest, likeable man gave me an insight into his compositional technique:
“I like to know the choir I am writing for, and to have its sound in my mind. I think of the way the singers breathe; their facial expressions. I like to know for what occasion the piece is commissioned and to try to picture its first performance and what it might feel like to be there.”
He would then create a dedicated notebook, with the text of the commission on the right hand page and five staves on the left. “I build up a series of ideas, and often have several versions of the same piece in one notebook,” he said. “But then comes the difficult moment when you have to choose what to keep and what to discard.”
His last work, Requiem, drawing on his Requiem Canticorum (2010) and Son of God Mass, was orchestrated by John Rutter and will be performed at Carnegie Hall, New York, on 13 April.
Whitbourn is survived by Alison, their children, Hannah, Naomi and Simeon, his sister, Katherine, and his parents.
James Philip Edwin Whitbourn, composer and conductor, born 17 August 1963; died 12 March 2024 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/06/john-bruer-growing-up-poverty-not-damage-brain-irretrievably | Society | 2014-05-06T14:59:00.000Z | Laura Smith | John Bruer: 'Growing up in poverty does not damage your brain irretrievably | Laura Smith | US philosopher, John Bruer (pictured, right), believes that babies need somebody to care for them, but it doesn't matter who that person is; early experiences are important but probably do not set your patterns for life; and young children do not need any special stimulation in order to develop normally.
At a time when parent has become a verb, such views verge on the heretical. And certainly that is the way his book, The Myth of the First Three Years, was greeted in some circles. Published in 1999, it was his response to what he saw as the growing influence of neuroscience on parenting and family policy in the US, spearheaded by the Clintons during the 1990s. It dismantled what he describes as the myths behind the misuse of neuroscience by politicians and policymakers. It saw him branded a rightwing mouthpiece. "Where I come from they see me as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun," he jokes.
Bruer's interest in this field comes from a solidly academic perspective. For nearly 30 years, he has been the president of the private James S McDonnell Foundation, based in St Louis, Missouri, which funds scientific and educational research.
When he looked into it, what he found was that findings from this new and growing scientific field were being "selected very carefully to support certain policy ends that people found valuable". Research into the development of the visual system of cats, for example, in which kittens had one eye stitched shut to establish the effects of a lack of visual stimulation in early life, was being cited as evidence that there are "critical periods" in early human brain development that "slam shut" after toddlerhood.
The overall impression given by many of the influential US reports was that if you miss the crucial window of opportunity to influence a developing brain in its first three years, the door closes forever. These, according to Bruer, are wild extrapolations, not supported by the evidence. But that didn't stop them being used to argue that the solution to a range of social problems was an expansion of support into the early years, to prevent bad early childhood experiences, primarily among those living in poverty.
Bruer who was in London in March to speak at a Kent University conference, The Uses and Abuses of Biology, about neuroscience, parenting and family policy in Britain, believes that his criticisms still stand, 15 years after the publication of the book. And they apply increasingly to the UK, where policymakers are drawing on what he sees as the flawed US reports to promote early intervention with disadvantaged families. One of the most popular figures quoted by early interventionists is that "the human brain has developed to 85% of its potential by age three". But Bruer points out that the figure applies to the "volume or weight of the adult brain. It says nothing about brain capacity."
But if such arguments are being used to support much-needed help for disadvantaged families, where is the harm? "Yes, people need help," he says. "And we should do something to provide that help. But the basis for our claims should be reasonable. We have to avoid this implicit assumption that growing up in poverty damages your brain – irreversibly." Bruer says he is not arguing that experiences in early life do not have an impact, but says they are "probabilistic, not deterministic. And there are things that can have a considerable impact on changing whatever it was that occurred earlier in life."
A simplistic focus may also skew public funding to the detriment of other priorities, he warns. "In the States there were people arguing (that) we might as well stop educational programmes in prison because there's nothing we can do for these people, it's too late." .
Bruer himself grew up in a working-class family in the then small town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His father was a postal worker, his mother stayed at home to bring up Bruer and his younger brother. It is clear that his own background has made him question prevailing assumptions. "I think there are these generalisations made by academics who have very little experience of what it's like to be from a working-class home or an impoverished background, and they are attempting to impose these middle-class views on everybody, and I'm not sure that's warranted," he says. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/14/childhood-stimulation-key-brain-development | Science | 2012-10-14T20:30:00.000Z | Alok Jha | Childhood stimulation key to brain development, study finds | An early childhood surrounded by books and educational toys will leave positive fingerprints on a person's brain well into their late teens, a two-decade-long research study has shown.
Scientists found that the more mental stimulation a child gets around the age of four, the more developed the parts of their brains dedicated to language and cognition will be in the decades ahead.
It is known that childhood experience influences brain development but the only evidence scientists have had for this has usually come from extreme cases such as children who had been abused or suffered trauma. Martha Farah, director of the centre for neuroscience and society at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the latest study, wanted to find out how a normal range of experiences in childhood might influence the development of the brain.
Farah took data from surveys of home life and brain scans of 64 participants carried out over the course of 20 years. Her results, presented on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, showed that cognitive stimulation from parents at the age of four was the key factor in predicting the development of several parts of the cortex – the layer of grey matter on the outside of the brain – 15 years later.
The participants had been tracked since they were four years old. Researchers had visited their homes and recorded a series of details about their lives to measure cognitive stimulation, details such as the number of children's books they had, whether they had toys that taught them about colours, numbers or letters, or whether they played with real or toy musical instruments.
The researchers also scored the participants on "parental nurturance" – how much warmth, support or care the child got from the parent. The researchers carried out the same surveys when the children were eight years old. When the participants were between 17 and 19, they had their brains scanned.
Farah's results showed that the development of the cortex in late teens was closely correlated with a child's cognitive stimulation at the age of four. All other factors including parental nurturance at all ages and cognitive stimulation at age eight – had no effect. Farah said her results were evidence for the existence of a sensitive period, early in a person's life, that determined the optimal development of the cortex. "It really does support the idea that those early years are especially influential."
As the brain matures during childhood and adolescence, brain cells in the cortex are pruned back and, as unnecessary cells are eliminated, the cortex gets thinner. Farah found that the more cognitive stimulation a participant had had at the age of four, the thinner, and therefore more developed, their cortex. "It almost looks like whatever the normal developmental process is, has either accelerated or gone further in the kids with the better cognitive stimulation," she said.
The most strongly affected region was the lateral left temporal cortex, which is on the surface of the brain, behind the ear. This region is involved in semantic memory, processing word meanings and general knowledge about the world.
Around the time the participants had their brains scanned in their late teens, they were also given language tests and, Farah said, the thinner their cortex, the better their language comprehension.
Andrea Danese, a clinical lecturer in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, said the study suggested that the experience of a nurturing home environment could have an effect on brain development regardless of familial, perhaps genetic, predispositions to better brains. Danese added that this kind of research highlighted the "tremendous role" that parents and carers had to play in enabling children to develop their cognitive, social, and emotional skills by providing safe, predictable, stimulating, and responsive personal interactions with children.
"Parents may not be around when their teenage children are faced with important choices about choosing peers, experimenting with drugs, engaging in sexual relationships, or staying in education," said Danese. "Yet, parents can lay the foundations for their teenage children to take good decisions, for example by promoting their ability to retain and elaborate information, or to balance the desire for immediate reward with the one for greater, long-term goals since a young age."
Bruce Hood, an experimental psychologist who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of Bristol, said his advice to parents was just to "be kind to your children. Unless you raise them in a cardboard box without any stimulation or interaction, then they will probably be just fine." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/13/a-moment-that-changed-me-patrick-stewart-on-the-teacher-who-spotted-his-talent-and-saved-him | Life and style | 2021-10-13T06:00:13.000Z | Patrick Stewart | A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent – and saved him | Inever sat my 11-plus. On the day of the test, I wandered around the hills near the golf club above my home town of Mirfield in West Yorkshire. I ate my lunch sitting against a dry stone wall, looking down on the town, where I could see my school pals in the playground during a break in the exams. I doubt if I would have passed, anyway. And, frankly, I just didn’t see myself as a grammar-school boy.
Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. It was The Merchant of Venice. He gave copies to most of us and told us to look up Act 4 Scene 1 (or the famous trial scene, as I was to learn). He cast all the speaking roles and told us to start reading. We all did, but silently. “No, no, you idiots, not to yourselves!” he yelled. “Out loud! This is a play, not a poem. It’s life. It’s real.”
The first words – “I have possessed your grace of what I purpose” – was the first line of Shakespeare I ever read. I barely understood a word, but I loved the feel of the words and sounds in my mouth. A 400-year-old writer reached out a hand in invitation to me that morning. I felt a sense of an internal, private me being released and connecting with something mysterious, alien and exciting. I was hooked.
Patrick Stewart, pictured with his parents, Alfred and Gladys, in 1954. Photograph: Courtesy of Patrick Stewart's family
“Cec”, as we called him, was my form master and my English teacher. I liked him at once, as did most of the children he taught. His style was very relaxed, funny and provocative, but when it came to teaching he was articulate, interesting, engaging and, most of all, passionate.
I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too.
The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. I played a young pupil named Hopcroft Minor. There were 100 or more people in the audience, which should have been unnerving and intimidating, but I felt fearless and entirely at home. I felt safe on stage and I always have since. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t being Patrick Stewart but Hopcroft Minor.
Not long afterwards, Cec called me to the headmaster’s office, where I met another influencer of my youth, Gerald Tyler, the county drama adviser. He told me that the council was going to run an eight-day residential drama course at Calder high school, in Mytholmroyd, during the Easter break. The head said I could go as a representative of the school. This was where I first had formal acting lessons. Many years later, I learned that Cec must have paid for me to go on the course himself.
Patrick Stewart, centre front, in the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School production of Sheridan’s play The Critic, 1959. Photograph: Courtesy of University of Bristol Theatre Collection
I was not the only person in my one-up, one-down house who benefited from Cec’s encouragement and kindness. He persuaded my older brother, Trevor, to have a go at getting into Dewsbury technical college, which he did, to great success. He also encouraged my father to become chair of the PTA. He had been a superstar in the British army – regimental sergeant major of the parachute regiment. But, by this point in his life, he was nobody. The role gave him importance and some dignity back.
A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship. Usually the recipients were exclusively Oxbridge students, but they believed I had something that, perhaps, fitted in with other young people they encountered – although from a very different background.
Patrick Stewart and Cecil Dormand in 2004 at the University of Huddersfield graduation ceremony, when the retired headteacher was made an honorary Doctor of Letters.
Photograph: Courtesy of the University of Huddersfield
It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: “What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!”
Cec passed away a few weeks ago, at the age of 96. He saved me when I was a boy and my education was failing – and has without doubt been the most significant person in my life. If I had not met Cec, what would have happened to me? I am so grateful for his belief in me. Rest in peace, Sir. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/13/wetherspoons-says-johnsons-lockdown-by-stealth-will-hit-pubs-profits | Business | 2021-12-13T13:24:08.000Z | Rob Davies | Wetherspoons says Johnson’s ‘lockdown by stealth’ will hit pubs’ profits | The founder of Wetherspoons, Tim Martin, has criticised restrictions designed to curb the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 as “arbitrary”, warning that the pub chain’s first half profits could be wiped out by what he called “lockdown by stealth”.
In an update to the stock market, JD Wetherspoon told investors that “uncertainty, and the introduction of radical changes of direction by the government, make predictions for sales and profits hazardous”.
Staff shortages: small restaurants forced to offer £1,000 sign-on bonuses
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The company, which consistently reported soaring sales before the pandemic, suffered a £105.4m loss in the year to July 2020 followed by a record £195m deficit the year after, as coronavirus restrictions took their toll.
It had been hoping to rebound from the impact of the pandemic this year but told investors that the government’s plan B for tackling Omicron, including guidance to work from home where possible, meant it was likely to be “loss-making or marginally profitable” for the first half of its financial year.
Martin has been one of the most high-profile Brexiters in British business, a role that had previously seen him endorse Boris Johnson. But he has since become an outspoken critic of the prime minister over Covid-19 measures affecting the hospitality industry, which he claims is not a significant source of outbreaks of the disease.
“The typical British pub, contrary to received opinion in academia, is usually a bastion of social distancing,” he said on Monday.
“However, the repeated warnings and calls for restrictions, mainly from Sage [committee] members and academics, combined with arbitrary changes of direction from the government, invariably at short notice, affect customer sentiment and trade.
“In effect, the country appears to be heading towards a lockdown by stealth.”
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He cited comments made by Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, who has said the Omicron variant does not warrant the “extreme action” taken by the UK government.
Martin added: “For reasons best known to themselves, perhaps in order to encourage more vaccinations, the UK government and its advisers are creating an entirely different and more frightening impression of the variant, which appears to be at odds with the South African experience.
“In spite of these problems, booster vaccinations and better weather in the spring are likely to have a positive impact [on Wetherspoons’ trading] in the coming months.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/02/kosovos-troubles-may-not-have-come-to-a-head-but-the-crisis-still-festers | World news | 2023-10-02T05:00:05.000Z | Julian Borger | Kosovo’s troubles may not have come to a head, but the crisis still festers | The signs this weekend suggest that the immediate crisis over Kosovo has been defused. Some Serbian troops are pulling back from the border, and the threat of a return to armed conflict has receded for now.
The Biden administration acted decisively on Friday, drawing on some of the lessons from the run-up to the Ukraine invasion, going public with US intelligence on Serbian troops movements, and calling Belgrade to threaten sanctions and ostracism. The Nato peacekeeping force, Kfor, was immediately reinforced by the transfer of command of a battalion of British troops who were in the region for training.
While the immediate danger may have passed however, the chronic crisis over Kosovo continues to fester. Fifteen years after the former Serbian province declared independence, Kosovo is still in limbo on the world stage, with recognition from just over half the UN’s 193 member states.
In the late 1990s, Serbia fought to stop it breaking away after years of oppression of its ethnic Albanian population. Belgrade’s brutal counter-insurgency and campaign of ethnic cleansing triggered a Nato intervention and aerial bombing campaign in 1999 that ultimately led to Serbian withdrawal.
Kosovo’s formal independence only came nine years later after UN-sponsored consultations and a plan designed to give substantial protections to the new country’s Serb minority.
Since then Serbia and its principal backer, Russia, have fought a rearguard campaign to block Kosovo’s membership of international bodies, boosted by fears of many states, including five EU members, that recognition will set a precedent for their own ethnic minorities to secede.
Belgrade has also kept the situation in four northern majority-Serb municipalities in a constant state of foment, sometimes helped by heavy-handed efforts to demonstrate sovereignty by the government in Pristina. Kosovo still cannot take its own existence for granted.
The events of the past week could be an inflection point, depending on whether they lead to a policy rethink in Washington and Brussels.
Both have been heavily invested in a Franco-German plan for normalising relations, in which Serbia would not have to grant full recognition but at least recognise Kosovo’s passports, flag and other attributes of nationhood, Belgrade would stop blocking Kosovo from membership of multilateral institutions, and in return Pristina would allow an association of Serb-majority municipalities, solidifying their autonomy.
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, and the Kosovan prime minister, Albin Kurti, agreed to these principles in EU-brokered meetings, but Vučić refused to sign any document, and reassured his own public he would never allow Kosovo to become a UN member.
Kurti consequently refused to go ahead with the association of Serb municipalities, refusing to trust assurances from EU mediators that Serbia would fulfil its own promises at a later date.
The response from Washington and Brussels was to put exclusive blame on Kurti, largely because Vučić has been able to play off western governments against Russia and China in competition for Belgrade’s favour. The US for example was grateful for Serbian votes against Russia in UN general assembly debates on Ukraine, despite Belgrade’s staunch opposition to sanctions on Moscow.
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The Biden administration and the EU must now examine whether they have been taken for a ride. While Vučić said all the right things in private, the government was building up the Serbian military, and flooding the country’s media with hate and fear of Kosovo, falsely accusing Kurti of carrying out “brutal ethnic cleansing”.
On 24 September a paramilitary group of well-armed Kosovo Serbs ambushed a Kosovan police patrol, and in the fight that followed, one police officer and three Serb gunmen were killed. The Kosovan government presented evidence to show that the group had been armed and controlled from Belgrade, and US officials have privately made clear they find that evidence compelling.
The ambush could have been designed to ignite a conflict in northern Kosovo that would give cover for Belgrade to send in troops ostensibly to protect ethnic Serbs. An alternative aim could have been to force Kfor to bolster its presence and take back primary responsibility for security in northern Kosovo from Pristina. That would be a step backwards for the country’s sovereignty.
If the latter was the case, Vučić has already partly succeeded. Whether he wins entirely depends now on the direction of western policy. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/09/six-ways-boris-johnson-could-evade-block-on-no-deal-brexit | Politics | 2019-09-09T10:39:26.000Z | Peter Walker | Six ways Boris Johnson could evade block on no-deal Brexit | The strongly pro-Brexit Tory MP Nigel Evans has claimed he and colleagues have come up with “about 20” ways Boris Johnson could get around a rebel backbench bill due to become law on Monday, mandating the prime minister to seek an extension to Brexit. Evans did not spell all of them out, but here are some of the ideas that have been floated – and their pitfalls.
Ignore the bill completely when it becomes law
This has been mooted by anonymous sources, but No 10 has said the PM would abide by the rule of law. Aside from the constitutional and political storm it would create – and the potential precedent for future governments – it would be hugely risky for Johnson, who could expect very robust court action, even going to jail. It’s hard to see how even becoming a Brexit martyr would make it worthwhile.
Send a second letter to the EU
This is being considered as an option and has been briefed to papers: when Johnson is obliged to formally seek a Brexit extension, he attaches a second letter saying, in effect: “Ignore the request – we don’t want it.” This would seem unlikely to go down well with EU leaders, and would be seen to go completely against the spirit of the law. As the former supreme court justice Lord Sumption said on Monday: “You’ve got to realise that the courts are not very fond of loopholes.”
Find another way to call an election
Johnson was to try again on Monday to call a snap election for 15 October via the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (FTPA), which requires two-thirds of MPs to back it. With opposition parties pledging to oppose this, it seems destined to fail. One idea mentioned by Evans would be to table a one-line bill amending the FTPA, calling an election in this one case. The benefit for Johnson is that this would need a simple majority in the Commons to pass. The downside is that even a majority could be beyond the government now, and that as a bill the measure could be amended, for example to fix a post-31 October election, or other complications.
Call a no-confidence vote in his own government
Another idea floated by Evans, this would involve using the provision in the FTPA under which the opposition can call a confidence vote, but have the government do this itself. This might just work under the law, but would seem pretty odd and could bring curious scenes in which government MPs are ordered to vote against their own PM while the opposition backs him. Even if Johnson did win the vote and the government then fell, the FTPA puts in place a 14-day period before an election, during which opposition MPs would have a chance to put together a caretaker government.
Resign
A parallel plan, this would involve Johnson resigning rather than having to ask the EU for an extension, and obliging someone else – probably Jeremy Corbyn – to do this in his place, paving the way for an election in which Labour could be blamed for the Brexit delay. There are obvious downsides to this, not least that it would probably install Corbyn as PM. If things turned out relatively smoothly for a few weeks or months, then the Conservatives’ many predictions of immediate chaos under a Corbyn government could start to look a bit hollow.
Ask another EU country to block the extension
This was first raised as an idea by the Tory Brexiter Daniel Kawczynski before the delay forced on Theresa May. He said he had approached the government of Poland, where he was born, to block the idea, as an extension needs unanimous agreement from the EU27. However, it did not happen, and it seems unlikely to be different this time. While it is possible the EU as a whole could block an extension, it would be a big ask for even a relatively maverick member state such as Hungary to damage relations with the other 26 members – especially Ireland – by forcing a no-deal Brexit, and all as a favour for a UK government which could be out of power a few weeks later. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/04/chief-nursing-officer-jane-cummings | Society | 2013-06-04T14:30:01.000Z | Kate Murray | Chief nursing officer: 'Nobody can say care is brilliant all the time' | Kate Murray | England's chief nursing officer, Jane Cummings, is the first to admit that the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal and other care failings have rocked both public confidence and staff morale in nursing.
"It was very clear that nursing was getting a bit of a bad name and it felt like the profession was being quite beleaguered and criticised," says Cummings. "Nurses felt frustrated about that, but we also knew that we had evidence from Mid Staffs, from the first report, that actually care had been bad. Nobody in this country can say that care is brilliant all of the time."
In response, Cummings used her new role at the National Commissioning Board, the body that now runs the NHS in England following the radical reorganisation of the health service earlier this year, to devise a strategy designed to set a strong direction for nursing, and to improve patient care.
"I wanted to see something that both addressed the need for leadership and direction, and what we can practically do that will improve the care we give," she says.
The six Cs
Built around the six Cs – care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment – her "compassion in practice" plan sounds a bit motherhood and apple pie, but Cummings insists there is substance behind the fine words.
She points to implementation plans in six areas and a communication hub to share good practice across the country that will be launched this summer. She concedes that there's a bit of "gimmicky terminology" in the creation of the Care Makers – a group of young volunteers spreading the caring message in a similar way to the Olympics Games Makers. But she insists such practical initiatives to engage the profession are already making their mark. "We will have 1,000 Care Makers by next March, working in their different hospitals, communities or in their universities," she says. "They are really pushing the six Cs and the commitment and care agenda, and the impact they are having is just amazing."
Cummings' own role is somewhat different from chief nursing officers of the past, courtesy of the NHS reforms. She has a counterpart at the Department of Health, Viv Bennett, who is responsible for the public health side of the profession, while Cummings is based at NHS England. As she sits in her office at its Leeds headquarters, locally nicknamed the Kremlin, she reflects on how much of a voice for frontline nursing she offers.
"Can I be truly independent [of government]? I think it's quite difficult to do – and it's also worth pointing out that I'm not nurses' trade union rep," she says. "There are trade unions that nurses belong to and that's a different role, but certainly from a professional and leadership role I can and do talk about what's important to frontline staff. I see it day in, day out. I spend a significant amount of my time out in organisations talking to frontline staff and making presentations at their events."
She is not afraid to speak out, certainly, against what she calls "the myth" around nurses' training. In its response to the Francis report on Mid Staffordshire, the government announced it would be piloting a programme requiring students to spend up to a year as a healthcare assistant before they were funded for a nursing degree. Cummings says offering school-leavers, who might never have come into contact with a patient, some caring experience is welcome. But she points out that the vast majority of student nurses and midwives starting a degree are already assessed for their values and caring behaviour, and that many students may be older and have significant life experience behind them. "Student nurses spend 50% of their degree time working in clinical placements, working with patients, being shown how to care for people practically. They don't spend all of their time in university. I've spent lot of time with student nurses and midwives and I have to say I'm truly overwhelmed by their compassion and caring ability."
On staffing levels, though, where many have argued poor care is down to overwork and understaffing rather than nurses' values and behaviour, her views may resonate less positively. The Safe Staffing Alliance, which includes the Royal College of Nursing, says any more than eight patients per member of staff is unsafe, while a recent Unison survey of 1,500 nurses, midwives and care staff found that almost a fifth felt care failings in their organisation were on a par with Mid Staffs – and 85% backed minimum staffing levels. But the government says hospitals should have the flexibility to make their own arrangements and Cummings, too, says she would not support required minimum ratios.
"I think there is a lot more to providing great quality care than just staffing numbers," she says. "So, yes, you need to have enough and you need to have the right mix of staff, but you also need to have the right culture, the right environment, the right training and education. There is no point having a ward, or a service, that has the [right] number of staff but they are not trained properly, or they are not supported properly, or the environment in which they work doesn't allow them to flourish."
She can see why nurses might feel targeted. "Some nurses feel a bit … I wouldn't say victimised, I think that's probably too strong, but some feel there's been a significant amount of pressure on our profession and less so on others, and I can understand why some people might feel like that," she says. "But as a profession we are not in a position where we can say we provide the best care we can all of the time every time, and until we do it's actually quite difficult to complain if people start to have a go at nursing."
Personal vision
When Cummings, 52, talks about the compassion nurses need to demonstrate, it is clearly a very personal vision, informed not only by her time as an accident and emergency nurse, but by the way she was able to care for her husband at home before his death seven years ago.
"I got him back home and I looked after him with support from community nurses, district nurses and Macmillan," she says. "One thing people will never forget is what happens when a loved one dies. There are many things we do as nurses and midwives, but if we can manage that and provide that support to people, it's a huge privilege. I do feel really passionate about it."
After 34 years in the NHS and just under a year in her current job, that desire to make a difference for patients and their families still gets her out of bed in the mornings, she says.
Nursing has changed significantly for the better since she was a student, she insists. As she takes her three-year strategy forward, she hopes the profession will become a genuine career of choice.
"Yes, they will be working under pressure," she says. "But I want nurses, midwives and care staff to be really proud of their work, in an environment where we are open and transparent, where people are happy to say what's going well and what isn't going well. We are the only profession that works with people from birth to death and everything in between. I think that's a massive privilege that should never be underestimated."
Curriculum vitae
Age 52.
Family Widow, no children.
Home Leeds.
Education Southmead hospital, Bristol; postgraduate nursing, London University.
Career 2012: chief nursing officer, NHS England; 2011-12: director of nursing, NHS North of England; 2007-11: chief nurse and deputy chief executive, NHS North-West; 2005-07: national implementation director, choice and 'choose and book' scheme, Department of Health; 2004-05: NHS national lead, emergency care, DoH; 2002-04: nursing adviser/intensive support, emergency care, DoH/NHS Modernisation Agency; 1996-2002: number of nursing roles including director of nursing/director of commissioning and director of nursing and patient care, Royal United hospital Bath NHS trust.
Public life Trustee, Over the Wall charity, volunteer nurse.
Interests Theatre, reading, time with family and friends, and keeping fit. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/19/ecstasy-wilko-johnson-review-mark-kermode | Film | 2015-07-19T08:00:08.000Z | Mark Kermode | The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson review – rocking against the dying of the light | “B
loody hell, man, I’m supposed to be dead!” Following the recent London premiere of Julien Temple’s latest kaleidoscopic documentary, Wilko Johnson played a sweat-streaked gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, strutting up and down the small stage like a berserker, swapping gleeful looks with the great Blockheads bassist, Norman Watt-Roy, machine-gunning the audience with the staccato strumming of his black Telecaster. It was an extraordinary show, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Johnson wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Indeed, Temple’s unexpectedly celebratory film began life as a chronicle of a death foretold, doctors having given Wilko less than a year to live following a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Yet here he was – larger than life, stranger than fiction, and cooler than Canvey Island on a rainswept afternoon.
Temple previously documented Johnson’s life and works in 2009’s Oil City Confidential, a blistering account of the “Thames Delta” blues that once made Dr Feelgood Britain’s best live act. Using scattershot movie clips (a directorial trademark) to emphasise the band’s outlaw status, Temple painted Wilko as a star-gazing seer – a one-time teacher and future astronomer; erudite, energetic and electrifying. In some ways, this companion piece is more universal, its focus broadened from the deconstruction of 12-bar blues to wider issues of the soul.
Significantly, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death proves an alchemical element amid a brilliantly chosen blizzard of clips from FW Murnau, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky et al (although I could have lived without the decapitated chickens of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates). Meanwhile, a motif inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal places Wilko on a sea wall playing chess with Death, reflecting playfully upon the transformative power of mortality.
Talking to Temple, Johnson seems like a man whose eyes have been opened for the first time
Sidestepping the five phases of the oft-quoted Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), Johnson reacts to his own diagnosis with a sense of elation, a euphoric awareness of life. Refusing treatment (“If it’s gonna kill me, I don’t want it to bore me”), he embarks on a farewell tour, serenading international crowds with Bye Bye Johnny and recording the new album Going Back Home with Roger Daltrey.
Talking to Temple, Johnson seems like a man whose eyes have been opened for the first time, finally relishing the experience of life on Earth. Images of nature flash before us – magnified and intensified – but it’s Wilko’s voice that captivates, quoting Donne, Blake and Milton as readily as Muddy Waters, contemplating the strange beauty of towers burning at the break of day. At one point, recalling a light snowfall in a remote Japanese retreat, he rejoices that he had no camera to capture the moment, leaving the business of future record to Temple, freed by the apparent imminence of oblivion.
Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson on Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto
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It’s significant that while recording Wilko’s putative last will and testament, Temple was facing up to the loss of his mother (to whom this film is dedicated), clearly drawing strength from Johnson’s life-affirming spirit. All the more ironic, then, that the prospect of an 11th-hour reprieve allows the first note of doubt to seep into this symphony of sanguine acceptance. Only when offered the Blade Runner-esque possibility of “more life” does Johnson briefly lose his positive focus, the rigours of surgery and the luxury of time allowing the demons of depression to encroach briefly upon his state of grace. The real battle, he realises, is to appreciate life in the absence of death, something that proves a lot trickier than it sounds.
On the evidence of his performance at the 100 Club, it’s a trick Johnson will yet have many years to perfect; at the age of 68, he seems more alive than when I first saw him at the Hammersmith Odeon in the 70s, his bald head more youthful than the pudding bowl that once shivered preposterously atop his quivering frame. As for Temple, he has proved himself one of Britain’s most distinctively dramatic documentarians, with works such as Requiem for Detroit? and The Filth and the Fury exhibiting a Wellesian love of the intersection between art and reality. Like Wilko, his films exude an irrepressibly punky joie de vivre. Encore! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/nov/05/injury-dawid-malan-england-t20-world-cup-semi-final-cricket | Sport | 2022-11-05T14:26:14.000Z | Simon Burnton | ‘Too early to tell’ if injury has ruled Dawid Malan out of England’s semi | England will contest Thursday’s T20 World Cup semi-final in Adelaide after a nervy four-wicket win over Sri Lanka in their final game of the Super 12s saw them pip Australia to second place in their group, but they may have to do so without Dawid Malan, whose future in the competition is in peril after he sustained a groin injury while fielding. The 35-year-old did not bat as England scored 144 for six, reaching their target with two balls remaining.
England will travel to Adelaide on Sunday, after which Malan will undergo tests to determine the severity of the injury. “It’s too early to tell,” captain Jos Buttler said, “but hopefully he’ll pull up well. He would have batted if he’d needed to. Running would have been difficult, but he would have gone out there.”
Stokes sends England past Sri Lanka into semi-final at expense of Australia
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England battled back after conceding 54 runs in the powerplay to restrict Sri Lanka to 141, but after reaching 70 without loss by the end of the sixth over they also struggled, losing wickets and impetus until Ben Stokes, who scored a vital 42 from 36 balls, carried them over the line.
It was a potentially awkward occasion for Chris Silverwood, who started the year as England’s coach and now occupies the same position with Sri Lanka. “I didn’t feel anything to be honest,” he said of coming up against his former charges, but he also reported feeling little by way of tension as England struggled to get over the finish line.
“You have to say Ben had it under control,” he said. “Maybe if we’d got one more wicket it might have made things very interesting.”
As important as Stokes’s contribution at the end of England’s innings was Alex Hales’s at the start, the opener scoring 47 off 30 to quickly bring the required run rate below six an over.
“You could tell from the first innings that it was a lot easier to bat in the powerplay, so my gameplan was to get ahead of the game, try to kill it as much as possible, and look to be positive against the seamers,” he said. “Fortunately that plan worked.”
India are England’s likely opponents in the final four, needing to beat Zimbabwe in Melbourne on Sunday to win their group. An improvement on this performance will be necessary if England are to progress beyond the final four, but at least there is plenty of potential still untapped.
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“I think our best game is ahead of us in the tournament,” Buttler said. “We can put in more complete performances than we have. We have done enough to get through, and now it’s about going to the real knockout stage and expressing ourselves.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/nice-attacker-plotted-for-months-and-had-accomplices-prosecutor | World news | 2016-07-21T18:04:15.000Z | Kim Willsher | Nice attacker 'plotted for months and had accomplices' | The man who drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more, had help planning the attack, the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, has revealed.
Evidence from mobile phones and computer records suggested that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not a recently radicalised “lone wolf”, as previously thought, but had several accomplices and had planned his attack for up to a year.
Molins told a press conference on Thursday that after the attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015, in which 12 people died, Bouhlel sent a text message to one suspect that read: “I am not Charlie. I’m happy they have brought some of Allah’s soldiers to finish the job.”
The prosecutor revealed what he described as “significant advances” in the inquiry, as four men and a woman suspected of helping Bouhlel appeared before a judge in Paris accused of being involved in a terrorist operation.
Bastille Day truck attack: what happened in Nice Guardian
The suspects, whose full names were not given, were still being questioned by an anti-terrorism judge in Paris as Molins gave details of their alleged contact with the attacker.
They are expected to be formally mis en examen – put under investigation – as accomplices to murder and being part of a terrorist organisation, and to be remanded in police custody for further questioning.
The five were in contact with Lahouaiej-Bouhlel shortly before he ploughed into crowds gathered for the traditional Bastille Day fireworks last week along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where the Tunisian man lived. Seconds before he drove the truck for almost 2km through groups of people, he sent two “odious messages” that appeared to have been pre-recorded on his mobile phone, Molins said.
The prosecutor said it was increasingly evident that Bouhlel’s attack was premeditated and that he had logistical and planning support from the five others, with whom he had been in regular contact. “He seems to have envisaged and developed his criminal plans several months before carrying them out,” Molins said.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was living in France on a residency permit. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images
The five people include a married couple from Albania, accused of supplying the automatic pistol that Bouhlel used to shoot at police, two French-Tunisian men and a Tunisian man. None were known to the French security or intelligence services and only one, a 41-year-old French-Tunisian, had a criminal record, for robbery, theft, assault and drug offences.
“The investigation since the night of July 14 has kept moving forward and allowed us not only to confirm again the premeditated nature of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s deadly act, but also to establish that he benefited from support and had accomplices in the preparation and carrying out of his criminal act,” Molins said.
Photographs and searches on the attacker’s mobile phone included pictures of the Bastille Day fireworks in July 2015, and an article referring to the “magic potion called Captagon”, which Molins said was a drug “used by certain jihadis preparing terrorist attacks”.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel and an unidentified man in the truck used in the Nice attack. Photograph: TF1
The prosecutor said he was considering bringing charges of “participating in a terrorist organisation with a view to preparing one or more crimes against the public” against the five suspects.
At the home of one of the men, detectives reportedly found drugs, €2,600 in cash and 11 mobile phones, French press reported. One photograph discovered by investigators showed one of the suspects in the cab of the truck used to carry out the massacre, taken three hours before the attack.
Molins confirmed that although Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the massacre, detectives had not yet established a direct link between Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the suspects and the terrorist group.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel poses outside the truck with another man. Photograph: TF1
France’s interior minister has acknowledged that there was no national police presence at the entrance to the pedestrianised walkway in Nice during the attack. In what represents a backtracking on his previous claim that national police were present, Bernard Cazeneuve said local police, who are more lightly armed, were guarding the entrance through which Bouhlel drove his truck.
Cazeneuve had earlier defended himself against accusations in the French newspaper Libération that he lied publicly about there being a national police presence at the entry point, with their cars blocking the road. In a statement, Cazeneuve accused the paper of conspiracy theories and maintained that several “heroic” national police – who shot dead the attacker – were stationed further down the promenade.
The local prefect, Adolphe Colrat, also disputed the paper’s report. “At no moment have the authorities lied,” Colrat said, adding that the row was “unfair and damaging” for the police.Cazeneuve has ordered an investigation and a “technical evaluation” of security on the promenade on 14 July.
Motorcyclist attempts to stop killer truck driver in Nice Guardian
Meanwhile, the 51-year-old motorcyclist who tried to stop the attacker spoke about his experience to Nice-Matin. Franck, an airport worker whose surname was not given, said: “I wanted to stop him at any price … my aim was to get to the [driver’s] cabin. When I drew level with him, I asked myself, what are you going to do with your poor scooter, so I threw it against the lorry and continued to run after him.
“Finally I grabbed on to the cabin. I was on the steps at the level of the open window facing him. I hit and hit him and hit him again. With all my strength, with my left hand in the face. He said nothing. He didn’t even flinch. He had his gun in his hand but the pistol was not working. I had the impression he was trying to fiddle with it, I don’t know. He pointed it at me and pulled on the trigger but it didn’t work.
“I was ready to die. I was conscious and ready to die to stop him and I kept hitting him. I tried to drag him out through the window because I couldn’t open the bloody door. I kept hitting him. Then he finally hit me on the head with the butt.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/17/prime-minister-vows-to-put-final-brexit-deal-before-parliament | Politics | 2017-01-18T07:17:32.000Z | Anushka Asthana | Brexit: May’s threat to Europe: 'no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal' | Theresa May warned European leaders that the UK is prepared to crash out of the EU if she cannot negotiate a reasonable exit deal in a speech where her tough talking rhetoric prompted key figures in Brussels to say that the country was on track for a “hard Brexit”.
Theresa May's Brexit speech shows UK getting 'more realistic', says Tusk – as it happened
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The prime minister told EU counterparts that any attempt to inflict a punitive outcome on the UK would be an “act of calamitous self-harm” because it would then slash taxes to attract companies from across the world, in a one-hour address intended to spell out the country’s negotiating strategy.
Although May said that the UK could be the EU’s “best friend” if the article 50 divorce talks went well, she also said she was prepared to walk away. “And while I am confident that this scenario need never arise – while I am sure a positive agreement can be reached – I am equally clear that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain,” she said.
Eurosceptic ministers and backbenchers were quick to praise May, but her remarks also triggered a backlash from lead European parliament negotiator on Brexit, Guy Verhofstadt. “Britain has chosen a hard Brexit. May’s clarity is welcome – but the days of UK cherry-picking and Europe a la cart [sic] are over,” he said.
May can think big all she likes. Britain’s about to find out just how small it is
Rafael Behr
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Verhofstadt also delivered a tough response to May’s point about business. “Threatening to turn the UK into a deregulated tax heaven will not only hurt British people – it is a counterproductive negotiating tactic,” he tweeted, urging May to consider the concerns of 48% who voted remain.
Speaking at Lancaster House, London, the prime minister also committed to give both houses of parliament a vote on the final Brexit deal – prompting the pound to soar – although Downing Street was clear that the alternative to a negotiated exit would be defaulting onto the higher tariffs of World Trade Organisation rules.
Setting out her government’s 12 priorities for crunch negotiations with the EU 27, May made it clear that the UK would:
Take back control of borders, arguing that record levels of migration had “put pressure on public services”
No longer be under the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, because “we will not have truly left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws”
“Explicitly rule out membership of the EU’s single market” because that is incompatible with migration controls
Not stay in the customs union, but try to strike a separate deal as an “associate member” to make trading as “frictionless as possible”
Not be required to “contribute huge sums to the EU budget” but simply pay towards specific programmes
But would seek a “new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement” with the EU, and build trading relationships with countries beyond Europe as part of a “global Britain” strategy
Key points from May's Brexit speech: what have we learned?
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Prominent Brexit supporters said the speech represented a clean break from the EU. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, who led the Leave campaign, praised a “fantastic speech” on Facebook. He has been keen for the prime minister to make a clean break with the EU, rather than seeking to remain inside the single market.
The former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said: “I can hardly believe that the PM is now using the phrases and words that I’ve been mocked for using for years. Real progress.”
However, remain supporters in the Conservative party insisted the plan for Britain’s future economic relationship with the EU amounted to “single market lite”. Anna Soubry, who is a key remain supporter, welcomed the “language and tone” of the speech.
“What I am agitated about is that I believe that immigration benefits British business and I think we are making a serious and grave mistake by thinking we can cut the number of migrant workers without damaging our economy,” she added.
This position was echoed by Labour’s Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, who argued that May was right to attempt to replicate the “attributes of the single market” in a trade deal.
Starmer said May had committed to something that would mimic full membership. “The ball is in her court to deliver. We will hold her to that,” he said. However, he and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were deeply critical of the threat to slash taxes, which Corbyn said would turn Britain into a “bargain basement tax haven on the shores of Europe”.
The prime minister said she also wanted to secure the rights of the 3 million-plus EU citizens who live in the UK, suggesting that “one or two” countries, thought to include Germany, had refused to negotiate an early agreement over the issue.
May said she would accept a phased process of implementation of the Brexit agreement after 2019 but not an unlimited transitional deal that could plunge Britain into “permanent political purgatory”.
She also called on leave and remain campaigners to put the divisions of the hard-fought referendum behind them. “The victors have the responsibility to act magnanimously. The losers have the responsibility to respect the legitimacy of the outcome,” she said, claiming that business, MPs and the public wanted to “get on with it”.
Calling for unity in the UK, May said: “Because this is not a game or a time for opposition for opposition’s sake. It is a crucial and sensitive negotiation that will define the interests and the success of our country for many years to come. And it is vital that we maintain our discipline.”
The prime minister attempted to strike a conciliatory tone with the EU by promising to be a “best friend” to the bloc after Brexit. But she also claimed the EU had been too unbending in respecting the needs of a diverse set of nations, and too inflexible for British voters. She urged European leaders to learn from Brexit by not “tightening a vice-like grip that ends up crushing into tiny pieces the very things you want to protect”.
After delivering her speech, May spoke to Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, the presidents of the European commission and council, as well as to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and French president, Francois Hollande. A Downing Street spokesperson said she had told them that she understood Britain could not remain in the single market but wanted a deal in everyone’s interests, and said they had welcomed clarity and that Tusk was looking forward to “negotiating in a spirit of goodwill”.
Tusk also said it marked the start of a “sad process” but said that at least May was now being realistic.
Other European figures who reacted to the speech included the Czech Europe minister, Tomáš Prouza, who tweeted: “UK’s plan seems a bit ambitious. Trade as free as possible, full control on immigration... where is the give for all the take?”
The Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, added that Britain was not just leaving the EU but also the common market and “everything”. “It appears that Theresa May’s intention through negotiations with the EU at the end of March is ‘a hard Brexit’ – a very hard Brexit indeed.”
One of the biggest challenges for May will be the Irish question. A statement from the Irish government welcomed May’s commitment to retain close relations with the EU, saying it was an ambition they shared. It said it was ready to “intensify” engagement with other EU countries, adding: “Ireland will negotiate from a position of strength, as one of the 27 member states firmly in, and committed to, the European Union.”
Sterling was up nearly 3% to around 1.238 US dollars following May’s speech, although it dipped back to $1.234 in Asian trading overnight. It also rose 2% against the euro at 1.158.
Some Labour backbenchers were despairing about their party’s response, with one passionate remainer describing it as “shambolic”. Others were more constructive.
The former shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, said Labour couldn’t provide May with an “alibi” for her hard Brexit plan.
“We should be trying to salvage membership of the single market but to throw in the towel and not even try to stay a member of the single market is sacrificing Britain’s economic future,” he said, arguing that some EU countries might accept reforms towards managed migration.
“Italy, Greece, Germany might think about amending that fourth pillar – and not to even attempt to ask them is waving the white flag. This is a massively important market – we need a bit of fight.”
He is planning to lay down an amendment calling for a better deal if the government is forced by the Supreme court to publish an act of parliament before triggering article 50.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, said it was wrong that there would be no referendum on the final deal. “The people voted for departure, they should be given a vote on the destination. This is a theft of democracy.”
Downing Street sources said the prime minister had discussed the speech with both the leaders of the Scottish and Welsh administrations on Tuesday morning. But despite these conversations, May received an immediate rebuke from Nicola Sturgeon who warned the plan could be “economically catastrophic”.
Claiming that May was being driven by the “obsessions of the hard right of the Tory party”, Sturgeon argued that her demands for a special deal for Scotland were not being listened to. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/29/why-little-women-should-win-the-best-picture-oscar | Film | 2020-01-29T06:00:40.000Z | Laura Snapes | Why Little Women should win the best picture Oscar | Greta Gerwig embarked upon her remake of Little Women with fanatical attention to detail. She took the cast on tours of Louisa May Alcott’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, and wangled the budget to shoot the film nearby. She gave her actors extracurricular reading to get into character. She even had Alcott’s and her own birth charts compared (Gerwig is probably the only director who could say something so wafty and not make me pull a muscle rolling my eyes).
Clearly, she had also anticipated the resistance that her Little Women would engender: a film about women’s domestic lives remade at a time when it seems as if the greatest accolade available to female directors and actors is helming a superhero movie and proving they can play with the boys. It’s there in the first scene of her reordered adaptation: the adult Jo March (Saoirse Ronan, now 25, in what may prove to be her last great girlhood role) stands off against a publisher who scoffs at her “moral” stories and rewrites one to enhance its commercial viability.
But Gerwig has a more interesting antagonist in her sights than masculine disapproval: namely, the lifelong tension between youthful idealism and adulthood’s inevitable compromises; how loneliness and the need to survive can create a constant hum of betrayal in the background of one’s life. Gerwig and her cast essay the March sisters’ childhood in such ruddy physicality that the forced poise and distance of adulthood comes as its own bereavement: how Timothée Chalamet’s impish Laurie sneakily sniffs Jo’s hair as they watch Meg through the curtains at the debutante ball; their pimpled skin (also a fixture of Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird); plaid puddles of girls shrieking with laughter on the floor; Jo’s inky fingers.
Poised … Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Timothée Chalamet as Laurie in Little Women. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia Pictures
Gerwig’s decision to splice two timelines doesn’t just bring exhilaration to a narrative that everyone down to Friends’ Joey Tribbiani knows, but affirms what is at stake for each character in maturity, especially in the tightly interwoven scenes of Beth fighting illness as a girl and later a young woman. At first, the young Jo awakes from her lapsed bedside watch to empty sheets, and sprints downstairs to find a wan, smiling Beth at the breakfast table. Years later, the grownup Jo goes down and finds Marmee alone. It’s a gut-punch familiar to anyone who has nursed a dying relative at home and then returned to their empty room; and an instant dissolution of childhood naivety.
In her biggest change to Alcott’s narrative, Gerwig reconciles the unease between Jo’s teenage passions and grownup reality by having her refuse to marry Professor Bhaer or to wed the heroine in the story she sells: she has said she wanted viewers to feel the same thrill over “girl gets book” as they usually would when “girl gets boy”. Her decision has been praised for recognising Alcott’s feminist intentions and for validating a woman’s mind over her romantic potential; it’s also been criticised for perpetuating lean-in feminism and, in its own way, devaluing the original text.
There’s truth to both arguments. But then, many of this year’s best picture nominees want to have it both ways: Jojo Rabbit teeters on a knife edge between cutesiness and confrontation. Joker counterbalances its inflammatory right-wing ethos with laboured mourning for the welfare state. The existence and success of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood undermines Tarantino’s begrudging lament for a macho culture that supposedly could never exist today. Marriage Story’s Charlie Barber is a MacArthur fellowship-certified genius and controlling director who we’re expected to believe is flummoxed by his cruel wife’s unsparing attitude to divorce. If Gerwig has overcorrected, it’s only because she honoured Alcott over her text, a noble impulse that embodies Little Women’s spirited and ongoing battle between the head and the heart. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/the-cat-person-debate-shows-how-fiction-writers-use-real-life-does-matter | Books | 2021-07-09T12:15:02.000Z | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter | Since its publication in the New Yorker nearly four years ago, Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person remains the most discussed short story ever to have hit the internet. Roupenian’s portrayal of an encounter between a young woman called Margot and an older man called Robert rode the wave of the #MeToo movement, and as a result readers often seem to use the work as a vessel for their own projections. The story provoked widespread anger among some men for its negative depiction of Robert, the man who shows his true colours at the end of the story, and whose wounded reaction to Margot’s rejection resonated with many women.
Why is ‘Cat Person’ going viral again?
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This week, the story has been given an even more tangled afterlife in the form of a Slate essay by Alexis Nowicki, which alleges that biographical details in the story were taken from her life and relationship with an older man, whom she calls Charles. Nowicki had never met Roupenian, but came from the same small home town, lived in the same college dorms, and worked at the same theatre as Margot. And like Robert, Charles was tall and slightly overweight and sometimes wore a rabbit fur hat. His mannerisms were familiar, as was his home: “fairy lights over the porch, a large board game collection, framed posters”.
“Could it be a wild coincidence?” Nowicki asked. “Or did Roupenian, a person I’d never met, somehow know about me?”
As it turns out, Roupenian did know Charles and told Nowicki that she had gleaned details of her previous relationship with Charles through social media. It’s a sad story, especially as Charles died suddenly last year and Nowicki clearly desires to set the record straight about a man she felt was kind and decent, unlike Robert. “What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialised in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger,” she writes. “Meanwhile, I’m alone with my memories of what really happened – just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding on to the parts of a person that only you knew.”
I'm alone with my memories of what really happened – just like any death leaves you burdened
Alexis Nowicki
Again, social media exploded about Cat Person. Some argued that using someone else’s story in this way was unethical. Others argued that writers do this all the time and always have, and that just because someone’s biographical information was used doesn’t mean that the story is about them. Some worried that Roupenian would be subjected to even more misogynist abuse. Some questioned Nowicki’s motives for writing the essay.
As a writer of fiction, I have skin in the game. I believe that the transfiguration of lived experience is essential in writing. I have been in situations where people in my life have been mistaken for characters in my novel and, while they have taken it with good humour, it is not always a comfortable experience. This is something that writers grapple with all the time: there’s a reason that so many plots revolve around the fallout from a writer using a real person as inspiration.
To me, the most interesting question that Nowicki’s essay raises is: how do you go about reconciling the necessary use of real human experience as a way of exploring human psychology while doing right by people? Furthermore, does it matter less when that person is a stranger rather than a friend or family member? Would any of this matter if the story had never gone beyond a writers’ workshop?
I don’t know the answers. I do think the tendency of readers to assume that fiction is based on reality is fairly natural; though, as a female writer, you do seem to find yourself protesting “it’s fiction!” quite often (many people seemed to read Cat Person not as a work of fiction, but as a personal essay). In her essay The I Who Is Not Me, Zadie Smith writes that, when reading other people’s novels, she is liable to make what she calls The Autobiographical Error. “If a friend and peer writes a novel set in space among a race of monopods called the Dinglebots, I am still liable to think to myself: Yes, yes, very well, I see what you’ve done there with those Dinglebots – but isn’t this all about your recent divorce?”
It was Graham Greene who wrote that every writer has a splinter of ice in their heart. I think he was right: you have to have it, otherwise you would spend all your time worrying about the impact of your work on others and you would never write at all. At the same time, it cannot be easy to find yourself and your dead ex identifiable in a spectacularly successful piece of writing, when it would have been so easy to change some of the more recognisable biographical details (for which Roupenian apologised). Writers can only hope that the people they use as fictional fodder are as gracious and mature as Nowicki has shown herself to be. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/21/alternative-oscars-2018-observer-critics | Film | 2018-01-21T08:00:15.000Z | Mark Kermode | Academy of excellence… The Observer’s alternative Oscars | Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
Raw
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape of Water
The Florida Project
Hope Dickson Leach’s brilliant The Levelling (which was ludicrously overlooked in the Bafta nominations) isn’t one of the 341 films eligible for this year’s Oscars. Neither are Maysaloun Hamoud’s In Between and Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch in the running, although both were among my highlights of the year. However, my favourite film of 2017 is a nominal contender, although it has zero chance of earning any nominations: Julia Ducournau’s ravenous French-Belgian masterpiece Raw, which marked the arrival of a major new film-making talent.
Will win: Lady Bird
Raw: watch a clip from the feminist cannibal horror film Guardian
Best director
Julia Ducournau – Raw
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Jordan Peele – Get Out
Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Depressingly, both the Baftas and Golden Globes had male-only best director shortlists – a miserable result in a year that boasted such diverse offerings as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Dee Rees’s Mudbound, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, and Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. I suspect that on Oscar night Christopher Nolan will triumph for Dunkirk, although I’d be happy to see the award go to Gerwig, or Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water.
Will win: Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Best actor
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
David Oyelowo – A United Kingdom
Andy Serkis – War for the Planet of the Apes
Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom featured in my best of 2016 Observer roundup, but didn’t open in the US until 2017, so it’s only now that I can nominate David Oyelowo for his brilliant performance as Seretse Khama. Andy Serkis is long overdue recognition for his motion-capture work, particularly in the rebooted Apes series, but the Academy isn’t yet ready to make that technological leap. Harris Dickinson is a star of tomorrow, but my vote goes to British actor Daniel Kaluuya for his utterly engaging central performance in Get Out.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Ahn Seo Hyun – Okja
Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
An extraordinary central performance by Florence Pugh provided the beating heart of William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth – bold, fearless and commanding. Sally Hawkins is sublime in Guillermo del Toro’s magical fantasy The Shape of Water, while young Ahn Seo Hyun works wonders in Bong Joon Ho’s creature feature Okja. But Frances McDormand will be the one to beat on Oscar night, with Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri providing her best role since Fargo.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth. Photograph: Allstar/Sixty Six Pictures
Best supporting actor
Wes Studi – Hostiles
John Boyega – Detroit
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Will Poulter – Detroit
There has been little awards support for Kathryn Bigelow’s increasingly horrifying “anatomy of an uprising” Detroit, but among the accomplished ensemble cast I found both John Boyega and Will Poulter to be utterly engrossing. Barry Keoghan is convincingly creepy in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Willem Dafoe is on course for Oscar victory in The Florida Project. But it’s Wes Studi’s Chief Yellow Hawk in Hostiles that proved most arresting for me.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Carmen Ejogo – It Comes at Night
Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Newcomer Taliah Lennice Webster was extraordinary in her debut role in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, holding her own against seasoned performer Robert Pattinson. Octavia Spencer won a supporting actress Oscar for The Help and was nominated again for Hidden Figures - her winning role in The Shape of Water confirms her versatility. But my vote goes to Lesley Manville, who provides the perfect foil for a prickly Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf –
Lady Bird
Other categories: best score
Hans Zimmer – Dunkirk
Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread
Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) – Good Time
Tamar-Kali – Mudbound
Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water
This was the most difficult category for me – I would love to have been able to find space for such eclectic work as Max Richter’s music for Hostiles, Nitin Sawhney’s score for Breathe, Rachel Portman’s accompaniment to Their Finest, or Mica Levi’s contribution to Marjorie Prime. But I think this is the one category in which the Oscar voters and I may be in tune, with the prize on the night going to Hans Zimmer for his soul-shattering score for Dunkirk.
Will win: Hans Zimmer
–
Dunkirk
Hans Zimmer, composer of the score for Dunkirk. Photograph: Rob Ball/Redferns
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
Call Me By Your Name
The Florida Project
Get Out
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Luca Guadagnino’s love story Call Me By Your Name, starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, seduces and overwhelms: the 80s-set story of a young man’s passionate adoration for the older grad student who has come to stay at his parents’ house in Italy. It has an unashamed sensuality which isn’t often available in the cinema, promoting the cultivation of knowledge and pleasure and making them the same thing. Its languorous caress is a marvel.
Will win: The Shape of Water
Best director
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Michael Haneke – Happy End
Dee Rees – Mudbound
Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water
It’s fashionable to mock the idea of auteurisme, but Greta Gerwig brings a masterly personal control to this autobiographical coming-of-age comedy: her direction gets the very best from two great performers, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, and her writing is zingingly terrific, both in its line-by-line pleasure and its narrative shape.
Will win: Guillermo Del Toro – The Shape of Water
Greta Gerwig, director of Lady Bird. Photograph: Merie Wallace/AP
Best actor
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Colin Farrell – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Jason Mitchell – Mudbound
Daniel Day-Lewis brings a gripping theatricality and self-awareness to this outrageously enjoyable performance, though without anything as obvious as camp. He plays a fictional 50s couturier for whom falling in love represents something he most fears: loss of control. Something to compare with Laurence Olivier in Rebecca or Orson Welles in The Third Man.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Jennifer Lawrence – Mother!
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
No fireworks, no grandstanding, but a quietly overwhelming performance of great intelligence and potency: the kind of acting that looks like real life. Stewart plays a fashion assistant — and she is also a medium, making contact with the ghost of her dead twin brother. It becomes a supernatural tale and a stalker nightmare. Stewart, in her superbly unaffected ordinariness, holds it together. Acting like this hardly ever wins prizes. But it should.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Christopher Plummer – All the Money in the World
Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
Fabrice Luchini – Slack Bay
Willem Dafoe is the gold standard for a certain kind of naturalistic acting: intelligent, understated, calmly centred, his face radiating a fierce compression of emotion and integrity. And so it is with his tremendous portrayal of the motel manager in The Florida Project: exasperated about the neglected kids, while looking out for them — and guilty about having neglected his own grownup son.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project. Photograph: AP
Best supporting actress
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Catherine Keener – Get Out
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Slack Bay
Laurie Metcalf gives the performance of a lifetime as Lady Bird’s mother —passionate, devoted, controlling, a little jealous maybe, caught between the parent’s eternal dilemma of holding on and letting go. Her spasms of temper, sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel — and the counter-rages from her daughter — are compelling.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Other categories: best documentary
City of Ghosts
Safari
Cameraperson
Machines
Whitney: Can I Be Me?
Matthew Heinemann’s documentary about the Isis stronghold of Raqqa in Syria is devastating — and absolutely indispensable. He recounts the struggle of the citizen-journalist collective called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, who uploaded video showing the brutality of Isis: beheadings, executions, mock crucifixions and Nazi-style placard shaming. They took on the theocrat-tyrants in the digital media war. An education.
Will win: City of Ghosts
City Of Ghosts. Photograph: Dogwoof films
Wendy Ide, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
Lady Bird
120 Beats Per Minute
Call Me By Your Name
The Florida Project
Get Out
With this year’s wide-open best picture race and establishment-shaking revelations, there could hardly be a better moment for the Academy voters to venture out of their comfort zone. It has been a landmark year for LGBTQ-themed film-making: 120 BPM and Call Me By Your Name are exceptional. The Florida Project and Get Out tackle issues with originality. But my pick is Lady Bird, which, like its teenage central character, is raw, funny, infuriating and completely irresistible.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best director
Robin Campillo – 120 BPM
Sean Baker – The Florida Project
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Luca Guadagnino – Call Me By Your Name
Jordan Peele – Get Out
It’s perhaps incongruous to mention auteur cinema when talking about a film that so vibrantly and passionately celebrates collective voices. But Robin Campillo’s vision for 120 BPM, a thrillingly ambitious portrait of Aids activism in 1990s Paris, is present in every frame. Much as I loved the lush intimacy of Call Me By Your Name, and the horrifyingly honed tension of Get Out, it was Campillo’s work on 120 BPM that left me in pieces.
Will win: Christopher Nolan –
Dunkirk
Best actor
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Claes Bang – The Square
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Makis Papadimitriou – Suntan
I’m not sure whether Timothée Chalamet’s assured performance in Call Me By Your Name is all the more remarkable because of his age – he only just turned 22 – or if his youth freed him up to give such a beguiling and uninhibited reading of the character. Either way, it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of acting I have seen this year. Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out is another standout for me.
Will win: Gary Oldman –
Darkest Hour
Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures Classics
Best actress
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Kristen Stewart – Personal Shopper
Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman
I can’t shake my fascination with Kristen Stewart’s mesmerising performance in Personal Shopper, although it’s unlikely to chime with the Academy. Another longshot, is trans actress Daniela Vega who is devastating in the role of a woman fighting for her right to grieve in A Fantastic Woman. The smouldering, almost feral intensity of Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth is a knockout. But Saoirse Ronan is my pick: her mercurial turn in Lady Bird gets more angular and intriguing every time I watch it.
Will win: Frances McDormand –
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actor
Idris Elba – Molly’s Game
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Kelvin Harrison Jr – It Comes at Night
Benny Safdie – Good Time
Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
A great supporting performance might not be the showiest role, but it’s a crucial part of the architecture of a film. Take it away, and the picture will collapse. This is certainly true of Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project – his understated empathy pulls the film together. And Michael Stuhlbarg’s key scene in Call Me By Your Name is a pivotal moment in the movie. But this year, I was smitten by Idris Elba’s cracking, high-wire act of a performance in Molly’s Game.
Will win: Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me By Your Name
Idris Elba, right, and Jessica Chastain in Molly’s Game. Photograph: Michael Gibson/AP
Best supporting actress
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Amira Casar – Call Me By Your Name
Betty Gabriel – Get Out
Rebecca Hall – Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
This year, the supporting actress category is all about the eyes. Betty Gabriel, weeping and smiling, is pure horror in Get Out, while Amira Casar’s searching look in Call Me By Your Name questions both the men in her life. There’s also the moment when Rebecca Hall falls for another woman. But Lesley Manville’s cold, appraising stare in Phantom Thread is like being stabbed with scissors. It’s a performance as immaculate as the tailoring of her dresses.
Will win: Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Other categories: best foreign language film
On Body and Soul
A Fantastic Woman
Félicité
Loveless
The Square
The Academy has, in the past, had something of a tricky relationship with the foreign language category. Traditionally, the voters have proved resistant to anything too, well, foreign. So the chances of the top prize going to a magical realist romance set against the backdrop of a Hungarian abattoir are slim. But although I admired the bracing bleakness of Loveless and the crisp satire of The Square, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s gorgeous oddity On Body and Soul gets my vote.
Will win: In the Fade
On Body and Soul.
Steve Rose, Guardian Film Writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
The Florida Project
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape Of Water
The impoverished, garishly coloured outskirts of Disney World were the perfect setting for a state-of-the-nation movie that combined the incompatible: sunny yet miserable, gritty yet fantastical, optimistic yet despairing. It’ll mostly likely be too unglamorous for the Academy but it was my kind of movie.
Will win: The Shape of Water
Best director
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Sean Baker – The Florida Project
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Denis Villeneuve – Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk was so much the director’s film. There was barely any dialogue and individual performances took a back seat to the grand, ambitious storytelling. To find a novel, thrilling, cinematic, almost avant-garde way of telling what could have been a very familiar story is some achievement.
Will Win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Christopher Nolan and Kenneth Branagh on the set of Dunkirk. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/AP
Best actor
Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Timothée Chalamet –Call Me By Your Name
Jason Mitchell – Mudbound
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
James McAvoy – Split
Everyone agrees it’s his year, and portraying a recognisable historical figure is basically route one to the award, but at the same time, Oldman really gets his teeth into the role, giving us a believably shaded, complex, nuanced Churchill, despite the layers of prosthetics.
Will Win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water
Brooklynn Prince – The Florida Project
Margot Robbie – I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Despite having no lines, Hawkins held the screen with her mischievous allure and dancer’s grace. Mute roles often require an excess of mugging, but Hawkins is such a smart, captivating performer she suggested hidden depths with great subtlety. She’s just got one of those faces, hasn’t she?
Will Win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Best supporting actor
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Ray Romano – The Big Sick
Paul Walter Hauser – I, Tonya
Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water
Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Such a generous, selfless performance from an actor who often tends to steal the limelight – especially considering he’s surrounded by amateurs and child actors. Dafoe’s motel manager was the father figure anchoring the whole film, grouchy and exasperated but ultimately protective.
Will win: Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best supporting actress
Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
Gemma Jones – God’s Own Country
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Mary J Blige – Mudbound
As Tonya Harding’s permanently sour, chain-smoking, monstrously undermining, mother, Janney is a character – and a fancy-dress outfit – for the ages. She could have been a caricature: but Janney makes her a person – a terrible person. When she’s off screen, you’re just waiting for her to come back.
Will win: Allison Janney - I, Tonya
Best film editing
Baby Driver
Dunkirk
Get Out
The Shape Of Water
Thor Ragnarok
It’s the least glamorous Oscar of the night, but Baby Driver really made you think about how hard good editing must be. Its car chases and gunfights were not only quick, precise and visually coherent, they were also perfectly synched to the soundtrack. That takes some doing.
Will win: Dunkirk
Baby Driver. Photograph: Webb/Sony/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Simran Hans, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
Good Time
Get Out
120 BPM
The Florida Project
Mudbound
Best picture winners tend to reflect the Academy’s mood, so it’s my suspicion that, in a post-Weinstein world, grungy crime thriller Good Time is too weird, too scuzzy and too small to make a real impact. Although the film is certainly of its time, I predict voters will plump for a “political” choice – or at least something with more telegraphed messaging. Get Out has a chance, given this year’s diverse cohort of voters, though Three Billboards seems the safe option.
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Watch a trailer for Good Time.
Best director
Jordan Peele – Get Out
Dee Rees – Mudbound
Josh and Benny Safdie – Good Time
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Robin Campillo – 120 BPM
I’m looking for displays of authored image-making and economical storytelling in this category. Rees and Campillo wield complicated historical moments (and sprawling ensemble casts), while the Safdies and Gerwig create tightly controlled universes that sing with specificity. For me, Peele is the most agile, moving between genres and using horror, comedy and magic realism – the “sunken place”, a genius concept, articulated visually and with flair – to explore the social issue of racism with confidence.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Best actor
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart – 120 BPM
Jamie Bell – Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name
Robert Pattinson – Good Time
The Academy likes to award an actor for a body of work (and almost always the wrong film – I’m looking at you, Gary Oldman). I’d like to see actors recognised for character roles and rewarded for performances that are singular without necessarily being showy for showmanship’s sake. As for Kaluuya – his performance in Get Out is deceptively understated. It’s major: exact, moving, and one of the most carefully wrought I’ve seen in a long time.
Will win: Tom Hanks – The Post
Best actress
Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip
Daniela Vega – A Fantastic Woman
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Brooklynn Kimberly Prince – The Florida Project
Cynthia Nixon – A Quiet Passion
Although comedy acting is considerably trickier to pull off than method seriousness, it’s rare to see comedians acknowledged in performance categories. I worry that Tiffany Haddish’s turn as loud-mouthed grapefruit enthusiast Dina in Girls Trip might be written off as everyday ensemble raunch, but those who have seen the film will be aware of just how dexterous her performance is. Haddish has credibility, ease, screwball physicality and sheer star wattage in spades.
Will win: Frances McDormand - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Tiffany Haddish in Girls Trip. Photograph: Michele K. Short/AP
Best supporting actor
Buddy Duress – Good Time
Lil Rel Howery – Get Out
Daniel Craig – Logan Lucky
O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Howery, Craig and Jackson might seem like wildcards here, but all three are goofily loose and giddily funny in their small but neatly formed roles. Dafoe, on the other hand, is an awards-y choice, though he wouldn’t be a bad one – the way he modulates himself to suit non-actors Bria Vinaite and Brooklyn Prince requires skill worth celebrating. My pick? Safdie brothers stalwart Buddy Duress, a magnetic and deliciously unpredictable screen presence as a petty criminal in Good Time.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
Betty Gabriel – Get Out
Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Mary J Blige – Mudbound
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Michelle Pfeiffer – Mother!
Lady Bird is a two-hander, so it’s annoying to have to shift Laurie Metcalf into the supporting actress category, despite her display of wit and precision as Lady Bird’s frustrated mother. For me, though, Betty Gabriel’s Georgina in Get Out was most memorable. Her portrayal of the house help, whose smiley compliance masks a truly sinister predicament, is a technical achievement that cleverly communicates the idea of assimilation as survival.
Will win: Allison Janney – I, Tonya
Other categories: best cinematography
Hélène Louvart – Beach Rats
Sean Price Williams – Good Time
Hoyte van Hoytema – Dunkirk
Darius Khondji – The Lost City of Z
Dan Laustsen – John Wick: Chapter 2
Laustsen was director of photography for The Shape of Water, but it’s the slick neon world he fashioned in the John Wick sequel that I find more impressive. Although VFX has its own category, digital cinematography is often celebrated as boundary pushing by the Academy. Yet photochemical film is thriving, from the large-format 65mm used in Dunkirk to the grainy 16mm used by Hélène Louvart to tell Eliza Hittman’s intimate story of a queer teenager’s Coney Island summer.
Will win: Dan Laustsen – The Shape of Water
Beach Rats.
Guy Lodge, Observer film writer
Best picture – my shortlist (favourite first)
Phantom Thread
The Florida Project
Lady Bird
The Lost City of Z
Mother!
Paul Thomas Anderson’s swoon-worthy story of a toxic male creative ego meeting its match is, for me, the film of the year and one of the pre-eminent American auteur’s most exquisite achievements: sensual, literate, wildly funny, immaculately classical in construction, yet topical in its gender politics. Precursor awards suggest it’s too pristine, too perverse to crack the best picture race; in its absence, Greta Gerwig’s small, perfectly formed Lady Bird will have my heart.
Will win: Get Out
Watch a trailer for Phantom Thread.
Best director
Darren Aronofsky – Mother!
Kitty Green – Casting JonBenét
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Andrey Zvyagintsev – Loveless
Paul Thomas Anderson – Phantom Thread
Having snagged an all-important nod from the Directors Guild of America, Gerwig looks on track to become only the fifth woman in history to score a best director Oscar nomination. She could even take the prize, though she’ll need to overcome the Academy’s recent bias in this category toward swaggering technical showcases with a plethora of moving parts — a department in which Darren Aronofsky’s exhilaratingly demented, ever-expanding psychodrama deserves more credit than it has received.
Will win: Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Director Darren Aronofsky at the UK premiere of Mother! in London. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images
Best actor
Claes Bang – The Square
Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread
Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats
Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out
Channing Tatum – Logan Lucky
Bar the odd exception like Isabelle Huppert in last year’s Elle, outstanding foreign-language performances routinely struggle to gain traction on the infuriatingly anglocentric awards circuit. This explains why Danish star Bang, a deft, urbane, tragicomic revelation as an inwardly collapsing museum curator in Ruben Östlund’s The Square, hasn’t received an infinitesimal fraction of the attention given to Gary Oldman’s hoary,, latex-swaddled Winston Churchill impression in the unbearable Darkest Hour. Same as it ever was.
Will win: Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour
Best actress
Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth
Kirsten Dunst – The Beguiled
Sally Hawkins – Maudie
Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Vicky Krieps – Phantom Thread
After a year in which women took control of Hollywood through the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, how gratifying that best actress is so richly contested. Of my choices, I expect only Ronan to make the Academy’s Oscar lineup, though Hawkins will be nominated for her heart-soaringly wordless turn in The Shape of Water; that I think she’s even better as the socially isolated, arthritis-crippled folk artist Maud Lewis shows what a career-crowning year she’s had.
Will win: Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sally Hawkins, seen here in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Best supporting actor
Jean-Louis Trintignant – Happy End
Austin Abrams – Brad’s Status
Michael Fassbender – Alien: Covenant
O’Shea Jackson Jr – Ingrid Goes West
Barry Keoghan – The Killing of a Sacred Deer
More often than not, this is a category the Academy uses to recognise strong, long-serving character actors they haven’t yet acknowledged. So it is that this looks like a neck-and-neck race between Sam Rockwell (really a lead in Three Billboards) and Willem Dafoe. The 87-year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant is my pie-in-the-sky candidate for such a win, but I was equally wowed by three bright millennial breakouts: Austin Abrams, Barry Keoghan and O’Shea Jackson Jr will surely have their day soon.
Will win: Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project
Best supporting actress
Taliah Lennice Webster – Good Time
Melissa Leo – Novitiate
Lesley Manville – Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Elisabeth Moss – The Square
If you haven’t heard of Novitiate, that’s because Maggie Betts’s stirring, rigorously nuanced convent drama, pitting a draconian Tennessee nunnery against the Vatican’s mid-1960s church reform, has no scheduled UK release. A hit at Sundance last year, the film made scarcely a ripple in American cinemas: if it had, Melissa Leo’s stunning hellfire turn as a venomous Mother Superior would be reaping as many plaudits as Oscar frontrunners Metcalf and Allison Janney. Keep an eye out for it.
Will win: Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird
Taliah Lennice Webster in Good Time.
Other categories: best original screenplay
120 BPM
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Lady Bird
The Ornithologist
Phantom Thread
While this year’s best adapted screenplay race is so sparse that James Ivory’s statuette for Call Me By Your Name has already been sent to the engravers, its original counterpart is so fiercely competitive it’s almost impossible to call. Lady Bird? Get Out? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? I’d plump for the sharp, lively rhetorical to-and-fro of 120 BPM, Robin Campillo’s riveting Aids-activist study, though after the film’s surprise omission from the foreign-film shortlist, that looks less likely than ever.
Will win: Get Out | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/20/trial-opens-in-rome-of-four-egyptians-accused-over-giulio-regeni-killing | World news | 2024-02-20T14:04:35.000Z | Lorenzo Tondo | New trial in Rome of four Egyptians accused over Giulio Regeni killing | Four Egyptian security officials have gone back on trial in absentia in Rome on charges related to the kidnap and murder of an Italian student in Cairo.
Giulio Regeni, 28, had been conducting research when he was abducted in January 2016. His body was found nine days later, dumped on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, bearing extensive signs of torture.
The murder severely strained ties between Italy and Egypt, and Italian MPs later accused Cairo of being “openly hostile” to attempts to try the suspects.
Italian judges threw out the first trial the day it opened in 2021 because prosecutors had not been able to officially inform the four suspects of the procedures against them. But in a significant ruling by the constitutional court last September, it was decided that the trial could proceed even without formal notification to the accused, as Egyptian authorities had failed to provide their whereabouts.
“We had been waiting for this moment for eight years,” Regeni’s lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, told reporters. “We hope to be able to finally have a trial against those who have done all the harm in the world to Giulio.”
The four defendants were named in original court documents as Gen Tariq Sabir, Cols Athar Kamel and Uhsam Helmi, and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. They all face charges of kidnapping, and Sharif is charged also with inflicting the fatal injuries.
As in 2021, they will not attend the trial. “They are absolutely untraceable,” the the defence lawyer Tranquillino Sarno, appointed by the court to represent Kamel, said last week. Because of this, he said, even if they were convicted, they would “certainly not serve their sentences”.
The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and the former foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni are among the names on the witness lists filed by the parties in the trial.
Regeni was in Cairo to research union activities among street vendors as part of his doctoral thesis. He disappeared after leaving his flat in the Dokki neighbourhood of Cairo on his way to meet friends. After a frantic search by his parents and friends, his body was found at the side of a desert highway on 4 February, showing signs of torture. His mother said she could identify him only from “the tip of his nose”.
The precise nature of the torture that Regeni was subjected to and the location where his corpse was found, close to a detention facility used by Egypt’s national security agency, have long drawn suspicions internationally that members of Egypt’s security agencies were responsible for his murder. Yet at home, Egyptian officials offered a very different view.
“The security services are the ones who will say who did it,” the then vice-minister of justice and forensics expert, Shaaban al-Shamy, told the Guardian in 2016. Egypt later admitted that the student had been under surveillance before his death.
Italian prosecutors’ efforts to investigate were frustrated from the start. Italy sent a team of investigators to Cairo in January 2016 but they were forced to run a parallel investigation rather than cooperate fully with their Egyptian counterparts, who performed the initial autopsy on Regeni’s body in Egypt without any Italian officials present.
Italian investigators repeatedly requested CCTV footage from the Cairo metro on the day Regeni disappeared. When Egypt eventually supplied it in 2018, it contained what the Italians described as “unexplained gaps”, rendering it useless as evidence.
An Italian parliamentary commission found in December 2021 – weeks after the first trial was thrown out – that Egypt’s security agency was to blame for Regeni’s death. It accused Egypt’s judiciary of acting in an “obstructive and openly hostile manner” by failing to disclose the whereabouts of the defendants.
In December 2020, all four suspects as well as a fifth were cleared of responsibility for Regeni’s murder by Egypt’s public prosecutor, who said he would drop the case.
Associated Press and Agency France-Presse contributed to this report. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/18/kenny-dalglish-hillsborough-heysel-liverpool-blackburn | Football | 2017-11-18T18:15:38.000Z | Donald McRae | Kenny Dalglish: ‘As long as we’re living we won’t have closure on Hillsborough’ | “I
wanted to do it and they wanted to come,” Kenny Dalglish says simply on a quiet morning in Liverpool as he remembers how, in April 1989, he led his daughter Kelly and son, Paul, past a vast sea of flowers covering the ground at Anfield and headed up onto the Kop to honour the 96 people who had died that month at Hillsborough. “The kids had been at the game and so it was traumatic for them but it was also an unforgettable experience on the Kop.”
Dalglish was then the 38-year-old manager of Liverpool. Kelly was 13 and Paul was 12. Liverpool had asked him to become their player-manager almost four years earlier, on 30 May 1985, the day after the Heysel Stadium disaster when 39 people lost their lives at the club’s European Cup final against Juventus.
Heysel and Hillsborough opened up a compassion and desire in Dalglish to help others that explains why, beyond his sumptuous brilliance as a footballer and the 20 major trophies he inspired Liverpool to win as a player and a manager, he remains so revered on Merseyside. But in his company it is easy to forget the King Kenny mythology and to warm to him as the most human, if complicated, of men.
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A moving and powerful new film, Kenny, captures all that Dalglish achieved and endured during his playing career and first managerial stint at Liverpool. It is made even more resonant by the usually reticent Dalglish’s willingness to talk relatively openly. The participation of his four children and wife, Marina, alongside old family film of them at home, adds to the poignancy.
Dalglish admits he never spoke about Hillsborough. So was his decision to take Kelly and Paul on to the Kop a way of sharing some of his turbulent emotions without discussing them? “I’m sure the deed was greater than a million words about it would have been. The two kids had gone straight back to school after Hillsborough and it felt important to show them how simplistic but beautiful it was on the Kop. It was better than me trying to explain things.”
He smiles wryly. “We took them out of school – and we’d be fined if we did that today. But how great was the education for them that day? Paul said he wanted to put his teddies up. So I took them in on the Friday morning and tied them up before anyone was in.”
There is a pause as the 66-year-old Dalglish remembers tying the teddy bears, one in Celtic hoops and the other in Liverpool red, to the terraces at an empty Anfield all those years ago.
In the film, Paul describes how, on the Kop, he finally broke down and cried in his father’s arms. But as Kelly Cates, Dalglish’s eldest daughter and an accomplished football broadcaster, suggests, her dad never addressed his own grief. “My only thought was to help somebody else,” he says. “If it means you cut yourself out of the deal that was no problem for me. If somebody else needed you, you helped them. Marina and I were brought up that way. Her mum and dad came down from Glasgow to look after the kids while we were at the funerals. I wouldn’t change what I did. Whether or not I’ve missed out looking after myself doesn’t matter. You can handle that.”
Dalglish is a product of his time, and an example of all that is admirable about working-class families in 20th-century Glasgow and Liverpool, but it also means he is hardwired not to speak about his own vulnerabilities. The film ripples with the humour and happy intimacy of family life – despite Dalglish being torn apart on the inside and covered in a rash on the outside. He was not easy to live with during those dark days but the strength of his marriage to Marina seems obvious. Surely they spoke about his feelings after Hillsborough?
“No. We spoke more about the families and what they were going through. We wouldn’t speak about ourselves.”
Kenny Dalglish, whose son was on the Hillsbrough terraces, and Brian Clough after the abandonment of the Liverpool v Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final in April 1989. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
Yet they remembered their worry that Paul might be one of those crushed and suffocated at Hillsborough. How long did Dalglish fear the worst for Paul? Fifteen minutes? “A wee bit longer than that,” he says softly. “But I knew he was OK before I made that announcement [when Dalglish addressed the Hillsborough crowd]. That was before four o’clock because I remember walking through the kitchens and the radio was giving the half-time scores. The trouble started at six minutes past three … so I was worried about Paul for more than half an hour. He was with the Liverpool supporters and had walked through the Leppings Lane end. I saw him in the tunnel and all you heard was me saying: ‘There he is!’”
That moment must have been one of surging relief? “Yeah, but I was lucky I had that moment. Many people did not have that good fortune.”
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The wounds were ripped open again by the lies told by the Sun and the police. Dalglish emits a bleak, incredulous sound. “It was unbelievable. We saw how the Liverpool fans went to help people who were suffering. Ripping up advertising boards to use as stretchers, trying to care for them on the ground. How could others have lied? It was unimaginable.”
He has spoken of his gratitude that many of the families have found, in his word, “closure”, now justice has finally been done. Have Dalglish and his family reached their own closure?
“I don’t know what closure would be for us,” he says. “As long as we’re living we will support the families. So … we wouldn’t have a closure. I wouldn’t have a closure. At least the families have been totally exonerated. The families have been punished doubly by losing their loved ones and by spending the rest of their lives trying to get justice and solace.”
Dalglish’s life has also been tarnished by loss and hurt. Yet, as he and the film convey, it has been lit by happiness and glory. Watching Kenny is a reminder of his greatness as a footballer. He played with such skill and intelligence it’s hard to think of many better players in the history of British football. The dazzling vision and goals he scored illustrate why George Best insisted Dalglish would always be the first player he picked. “For me,” Dalglish says, “the best footage in the film is the private family footage. That’s more important than the football. I’ve seen the football. I know what happens.”
Kenny Dalglish, as Liverpool player-manager, and Ian Rush with the FA Cup after sealing the Double by beating Everton 3-1 in May 1986. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
It’s still a remarkable story of how a Rangers supporter crossed the divide to play for Celtic where, Dalglish believes, “I could not have got a better education in football. Big Jock [Stein] was an encyclopaedia of football – not just facts and figures but of how and where to play. We all loved the ball at Celtic.”
That education was deepened at Liverpool and Dalglish recalls the managers he venerated – with Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan preceding him in a stately line. His own first managerial task was to lay a wreath at Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral for all those who died at Heysel. Before the game a group of Liverpool’s supporters had charged at the Juventus fans – and, in the horrendous crush as a wall collapsed, most of the victims were Italian. Did he felt the weight of his role immediately, aged 34? “No. It was my responsibility. I wanted to do it.”
Dalglish had also been at Ibrox, as a Celtic junior, on the night of a different tragedy when 66 people died in a crush on a stairway as they tried to leave an Old Firm match in 1971. He withstood such adversity, at much personal cost, but the loneliness of management must have been as hard from the start? “No – at the outset it was brilliant. I was well-protected. Peter Robinson [Liverpool’s chief executive at the time] was the best administrator football has seen. Old Bob was upstairs if I needed help and I had Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans in the boot room. It didn’t seem lonely at first.”
Kenny Dalglish takes on Rangers’ John Greig during the 1974 Drybrough Cup final, won by Celtic in a penalty shootout. Photograph: Colorsport/Rex/Shutterstock
Eventually, Hillsborough took its toll and he resigned in February 1991, after a chaotic 4-4 draw with Everton when he felt unable to make any more decisions. Before then he had been successful and resilient – winning the Double in his first season in charge. “Alan Hansen said it was the worst Liverpool team he played in. He was part of it so he made a great contribution [Dalglish laughs]. We’d been in the European Cup final in May 1985 and this was the ’85-86 season. People think there was very little change but Craig Johnston and Jan Molby played more regularly. We signed Steve McMahon, and Alan Kennedy and Phil Neal were replaced by two young full‑backs in Stevie Nicol and Jim Beglin. It was a testing experience for everyone after Heysel but it felt seamless because there was no shouting or bawling. We didn’t do too badly.”
Dalglish created a more thrilling side when, after the sale of Ian Rush to Juventus, “we signed John Aldridge in the January [of 1987] and John Barnes and Peter Beardsley in the summer. I had an idea the chemistry would be good between me, Peter and Aldo … while Barnsey seemed the logical choice to feed goals to Aldo. Then we signed Ray Houghton who’d played with Aldo at Oxford. I tried my best to put together a team that looked good on paper but we had to prove it on the pitch – and they were different class.
“People talk about us beating Nottingham Forest 5-0 as the best but I’ve not got a league table of performances. There was a 4-0 game against QPR when they were top of the table. They came to Anfield early on in the season and, Jesus, Barnsey scored a couple of amazing goals. That wasn’t bad – but beating Forest 5-0 had to be a great performance. Whether it was the best is open to conjecture.”
Dalglish smiles – as he does when remembering his success in managing Blackburn to the Premier League title in 1994-95. “Blackburn was a fairytale. That was romantic. When I was approached to become manager, they were second bottom of what we call the Championship now. I had a few discussions with people there. In the meantime Tony Parks had been caretaker manager and he took them up to mid-table. I thought: ‘Well done, Tony [Dalglish laughs again]. Brilliant. That makes it a wee bit easier.’ I thought I’d have a go on the premise Tony stayed. I also brought in Ray Harford – brilliant feller and a brilliant coach. At the end of the first year we went up through the play‑offs, beating Leicester 1-0. We then signed [Alan] Shearer and were away. Finished fourth, then second, then champions.”
Kenny Dalglish with Tony Parkes, left, and Ray Harford after Blackburn won the title at Anfield in May 1995. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
His humour is evident again even when remembering how he lost his father at Blackburn. “My dad died on a Saturday, watching the scores come through. I think we won as well [Dalglish chuckles]. It was a good way to go.”
Does he miss being a manager? “It’s fantastic working with the players but the demands now, especially from the media, are intense. It’s understandable because when you look at the money being ploughed in you’ve got to pay some penance for that.”
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The bond between players and fans has also diminished. “The biggest factor is cameraphones. Players aren’t allowed to be themselves. As soon as they’re out someone takes a picture. It’s changed from when we had the freedom to enjoy ourselves – and only the manager gave you a bollocking for drinking. Look at social media now. Someone takes a picture and they might not post it for four days or four weeks. But when they do post it people assume it’s live. So footballers are frightened of trying to be normal now. They’re terrified of fabrication.”
Is he hopeful that, in the next few years, Liverpool, now under Jürgen Klopp, might win the league for the first time since they lifted their third title under Dalglish in 1990 – with their last trophy being the League Cup won during his second tenure in 2012? “How long it takes them to win the league again is less important than the fact we have the right guy without a doubt. He’s going to give us the best possible chance to win the title.
“But this season Manchester City have been fantastic. You want your own team to be successful but that doesn’t mean you turn a blind eye to someone playing such entertaining football. City just hit you from everywhere. But as somebody said the other day you’re not competing against owners now. You’re competing against countries. Here’s a wee stat for you. When Man City played Liverpool they had a back five – which cost £210m. Kyle Walker was suspended. That’s another £50m. How can a football team, in three years, spend so much on a defence? We never even counted the new goalie. I don’t know what financial fair play is. Where are the restraints?”
Dalglish says all this without rancour – just in acknowledgement of how much football has changed. But in his own world, where his beloved Liverpool survived Heysel and Hillsborough under his compassionate watch, Dalglish remains constant and steady. “I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I played for Celtic and Liverpool with all those great players and managers. But they were very humble and kind. It seemed not a bad idea to follow their lead.”
Kenny is in cinemas now and available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download from Monday
Kenny Dalglish in action against Tottenham at Wembley in the 1982 Charity Shield, which Liverpool won 1-0. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/04/taylor-swift-spotify-streaming-album-sales-snub | Music | 2014-11-05T20:53:59.000Z | Hannah Ellis-Petersen | Taylor Swift takes a stand over Spotify music royalties | This may well be remembered as the week Taylor Swift established herself as the most powerful 24-year-old in music industry history.
The singer’s latest album, 1989, is expected to have the largest sales week for any album since 2002, when Eminem sold a little over 1.3m copies of The Eminem Show in its first week. It will also be the first album to sell more than 1m copies in the US this year amid declines across the industry.
Yet this week was also marked by Swift’s decision to remove her entire back catalogue from music streaming site Spotify, arguably the biggest growing source of music consumption in the world. It boasts more than 10 million paying subscribers, across 58 countries, on top of the 30 million who access the streaming service for free.
The move has been condemned by some as shortsighted and applauded by others as a savvy way to drive up her album sales.
The singer was one of Spotify’s most popular artists, with 25% of listeners having streamed her songs. Her songs were on 19m playlists and the lead single from 1989, Shake It Off, went straight to number one on Spotify. But the singer’s relationship with the site has always been rocky – Swift initially refused to release her 2012 album Red on Spotify, critising the fact that artists receive between just $0.006 and $0.0084 per song play.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in July this year, the singer said: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Swift is not the first artist to withdraw music from spotify. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke called for a boycott of the service over unfair payment practices, removing all his solo projects from the site and describing it as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”. The Beatles, AC/DC and The Black Keys are also not available to stream on Spotify.
Despite the vast numbers of people streaming her music on the site, David Holmes, an editor for tech publication Pando Daily, did not think Swift removing her back catalogue from Spotify would “have any noticeable impact on her sales”.
He said: “She has probably sold over 1.3m copies of her album in the first week and nobody has done that since Eminem in 2002. She is one of the few artists today who can really drive sales and not just streams, so I don’t think this is a move that will hurt her at all.
“But Taylor Swift is an anomaly. I think you could count on one hand the number of artists that could pull this off and remain popular – as digital download sales are in freefall. I do think eventually every artist is going to have to be on a streaming service … Over time, if artists want their music to be heard in any meaningful way, they need to be on a streaming service.”
But Holmes said the implications of Swift’s move for Spotify could be more serious.
“In terms of Spotify this is really not great news, particularly because iTunes is about to relaunch its own streaming service,” he said. “iTunes is unique from Spotify because they also drive digital downloads, so we could see deals where artists are giving Apple exclusive rights to stream it, on whatever subscription service they create, because they are still focused on people buying their albums. And if Apple was able to get exclusive deals with the kinds of artists that still sell albums – your Beyoncés, your Taylor Swifts, your Lady Gagas – that will really, really hurt Spotify. So there are a few things about this in the long term that may not bode well for Spotify.”
Others have suggested that Swift’s decision to remove her music from Spotify could be tied to the sale of her Nashville-based record label Big Machine, for around $200m. Driving up the instant income from digital downloads, rather than the “steady trickle” from streaming, could boost the profits and value of the label, particularly as Swift, their most valuable asset, is nearing the end of her contract.
Spotify said it hoped that Swift would return to the service, noting that nearly 16 million users have played her songs in the last 30 days. The company claims it paid around $500m in royalties to rights holders last year and $1bn since 2009. It says the biggest album on the service each month typically generates more than $400,000 in royalties.
Jamie Oborne, manager of band The 1975 who also have a big teen following, said that for most musicians Spotify was now an essential part of people discovering and accessing their music and said Swift was “an isolated example”.
“For an artist like The 1975, Spotify is mainly a discovery tool,” he said. “It’s a new mode of consuming music and it obviously has a value. The fact that she had so many millions of subscribers does show there was a real audience for Taylor Swift on Spotify, so it was maybe an odd thing to have done but I wouldn’t say its risky for her.”
Oborne continued: “Spotify is growing in importance for all artists as it represents a cultural change in the way people consume music. We don’t see it as a negative platform – obviously like anyone we’d prefer to see the monetisation of streaming be higher – but I can see no reason the we would ever remove our music from it.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/27/uk-lifeboat-scheme-for-company-pensions-at-risk | Business | 2020-08-26T23:01:37.000Z | Patrick Collinson | UK 'lifeboat' scheme for company pensions at risk | A former minister has warned that the government’s “lifeboat” scheme for company pensions is at risk from a huge wave of corporate defaults which in extreme circumstances could result in a 10% cut to pensioner incomes.
The Pension Protection Fund is the “insurance policy” for millions of people in final salary-style company pension schemes, promising to pay out if the employer becomes insolvent. It is funded by employers, who pay an annual levy which means the scheme is currently around £6bn in surplus.
Around 230,000 people currently rely on the PPF for pension payments, including 11,500 former employees of Kodak, which had a £1.5bn shortfall in its pension when it fell into the PPF in 2019. It also looks after 27,000 members of the Carillion pension scheme, with had an £800m deficit.
Steve Webb, who was pensions minister in the coalition government between 2010 and 2015 and oversaw the PPF, said that a fresh Covid-19-driven spate of company collapses could result in the scheme using up its surplus and resorting to “extreme measures”.
If many more large schemes have to be rescued by the PPF, it will also result in a potentially sharp increase in levies on existing employers, some of them already struggling.
Gloucester MP Richard Graham said a local manufacturing firm, Norville Group, was pushed into administration last month partly because of the levies it had to pay the PPF. “The PPF levy absorbed all Norville profits of the last few years, weakening their balance sheet and paving the way for a cash flow crisis,” said Graham.
Webb, now a consultant for actuaries LCP, modelled two scenarios, one involving a £10bn hit to the PPF from the Covid-19 recession, and one of £20bn. But he added: “If several larger employers were all to face insolvency in the coming years, even the more serious £20bn hit could prove to be an under-estimate.”
The study suggests that the PPF should be able to absorb a £10bn hit from insolvencies, and survive a £20bn hit by raising levies on companies. But above that level of corporate insolvency, it may be forced into the “nuclear” option of cutting payouts to existing pensioners to 90% of their current level, although this would require parliamentary approval.
“The PPF has a range of levers it can pull to absorb increased cost pressures without having to resort to cutting benefits to members. But we cannot be complacent. Recent history has been a reminder that the crucial question is whether the insolvencies which we are likely to see in the coming years will hit firms which also have large DB deficits. There remains a risk that too many such insolvencies could put a serious strain on the system,” said Webb.
David Taylor, PPF Executive Director responsible for the PPF levy said: “Our members, levy payers and those protected by the PPF should not be concerned with speculation about our ability to weather the current economic situation. Our latest modelling shows that we are well-placed to achieve our self-sufficiency target, and our 2020-21 levy estimate remains unchanged from its announcement last year.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/mar/12/i-hate-my-tummy-being-constricted-stylish-women-on-their-most-comfortable-pair-of-underwear | Life and style | 2024-03-11T20:00:46.000Z | Lucianne Tonti | ‘I hate my tummy being constricted’: stylish women on their most comfortable pair of underwear | There are a few small things that can make an otherwise normal day feel luxurious: good coffee, fresh flowers, a morning swim and beautiful, comfortable underwear. All of them make the day feel softer and lighter but access to each can pose its own issues. Arguably, getting your underwear wrong has the most annoying consequences.
Buying the right underwear can be a minefield. Pairs that seem like they will be comfortable all day can cut in along the waist or hips after a few hours of wear, or move in the wrong directions when worn with certain garments.
“The amount of times I’ve tried to wear pairs that just don’t fit right or are super uncomfortable and then spend the rest of the day regretting it is abysmal,” says podcaster and writer Maggie Zhou.
Here, three stylish women share their favourite, comfortable, go-to underwear.
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‘I want to be as comfy as possible’
Fashion Journal editor Cait Emma Burke’s favourite pair of underwear is the mesh high waist brief from the Australian underwear label Nala. “I hate the feeling of my tummy – the biggest part of my body – being constricted by a low or mid-rise pair of underwear,” she says. “It just feels comfier for me to wear high waist and I want to be as comfy as possible.”
Nala uses a mesh that is 82% recycled nylon, andclothing production offcuts that would otherwise end up in landfill. The fabric feels breathable, and the underwear has a cotton gusset – extremely important, according to Burke.
After years making “many” underwear mistakes, like prioritising aesthetics over comfort, Burke has learned to choose the right cuts for her body, in high quality fabrics. “I was always having to re-adjust poorer-quality underwear,” she says. “There’s nothing quite like picking a G-string that feels like a piece of floss out of your arse, multiple times a day!”
Now, when she wants a more cheeky cut, closer to a traditional G-string, but with the comfort of a high waisted style, she wears Le Buns’ organic cotton high cut brief.
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‘An everyday staple’
For day-to-day underwear, cook and author Julia Busuttil Nishimura turns to natural materials such as organic cotton. “My favourite would be the Tani full cut organic cotton brief from Le Buns,” she says. “They are really comfortable and an everyday staple.”
Since she likes to feel held in, she chooses high-waisted, seamless styles made from fabric that is breathable but also feels firm. She tends to choose neutral colours and tones such as beige, grey or black, but she says: “If I’m looking for beautiful pieces or something more embellished, I like Lonely, La Perla and Simone Perele.”
‘The fabric is super soft and lightweight’
Maggie Zhou likes variety in her underwear drawer. “I’m drawn to different pairs for different reasons,” she says. “I’ve got these puffy white bloomers which are very cute, these embroidered silk-like ones which are girly, and old faithfuls I turn to when I need something comfy.”
Having a mix of colours is also important. “I have a variety of black, white, brown and the odd green or purple pair,” she says.
When she wants to be comfortable she reaches for pairs made from cotton or bamboo and lyocell (both types of viscose rayon derived from wood) by brands like Boody and Hara. She prefers their cuts and likes them because they’re more breathable and they biodegrade.
When she’s wearing figure-hugging dresses Zhou turns to Boody’s ribbed high leg brief. “The fabric is super soft and lightweight, making it feel pretty seam free.” And when she’s after something pretty she goes to Hopeless Lingerie. “I love the aesthetic and ethos,” she says. “Their pieces are all made-to-order in Melbourne and they tread the fine line between feminine and romantic, and dark and edgy.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/25/is-democracy-getting-in-the-way-of-saving-the-planet | Opinion | 2021-08-25T07:00:13.000Z | Kate Aronoff | Is democracy getting in the way of saving the planet? | Kate Aronoff | What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one. Sea levels will almost certainly rise and storms will get more intense. Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis. It’s an enticing vision: that governments can forgo the messy, deliberative work of politics in favour of a benign dictatorship of green technocrats who will get emissions down by brute force. With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?
It would be easy to look at the longstanding stalemate around climate policy in the US, the world’s second biggest emitter and embattled superpower, as evidence that something more top-down is needed. Yet the failure isn’t one of too much democracy but too little. The US Senate empowers West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – a man elected by fewer than 300,000 people – to block the agenda of a president elected by more than 80 million. Climate-sceptical Republicans, backed by corporate interests, have attempted to gerrymander their way to electoral dominance, halting progressive climate action in its tracks. The fossil fuel industry can engulf lawmakers with lobbyists and virtually unlimited campaign donations to sway their votes. And as the Republican party’s leading lights flirt with authoritarians like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, comprehensive bipartisan climate action remains a pipe dream.
If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being? Take Spain’s far-right party Vox, the third largest in the country’s parliament. Having tried climate denial and taken regular jabs at environmental movements and policy, it has unveiled a set of proposals for how to deal with rising temperatures. As Lluis de Nadal wrote for openDemocracy recently, the party’s “true ecology” platform aims to create a national “energy autarchy” and mobilise a green manufacturing renaissance. In France, the far-right National Rally – formerly the Front National – has made ecological politics a key part of its rebrand away from Holocaust denial. Jordan Bardella, the party’s vice-president, has called borders “the environment’s greatest ally”, casting foreigners as rootless cosmopolitans divorced from the land. The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.
It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake. Back in 2010, the influential climate scientist James Lovelock suggested that it “may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” to curb emissions. More recently, centrists such as Michael Bloomberg have started to see corporations as more reliable engines of climate progress. As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.
Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands. They share a basic weariness about enthusiastic uses of state power to plan out what it is an economy ought to be doing, and cower in the face of major polluters like carmakers and the fossil fuel industry. There are still plenty of austerians hanging around, too, weary of the deficit spending necessary for decarbonisation.
Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations – not to mention the atrocities that government routinely commits against its own people. In India, now the world’s third biggest emitter, Narendra Modi’s far-right government has balked at setting a mid-century carbon cutting target. Like China, India has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.
There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day. No authoritarians are gunning to decarbonise at the breakneck speed required to avert catastrophe. And no billionaire saviour in the form of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos will rescue our dying planet – they’re both more interested in getting off it than improving it.
The answer, stubbornly, is more democracy – both within and beyond our borders. Countless millions will be displaced as temperatures soar, meaning national boundaries are bound to become more porous. Our conceptions of democracy should too, to see those living downstream from the west’s massive historical emissions as deserving of citizenship and a say in how – and how quickly – decarbonisation happens. “A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”
A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons. In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.
Roads away from democracy all lead to climate chaos. There’s no easy alternative on offer of course. The illiberal right is ascending much faster than the socialist left that has long sought to extend democracy into political systems, homes, and workplaces. The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.
Kate Aronoff is a writing fellow at In These Times
This article was amended on 26 August 2021. An earlier version said incorrectly that Modi’s government had pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/dec/27/piers-morgan-twitter-account-hacked-say-reports | Media | 2022-12-27T17:35:19.000Z | Kevin Rawlinson | Piers Morgan’s Twitter account abuses queen and Ed Sheeran in apparent hack | Piers Morgan’s Twitter account has been wiped of much of its content, amid reports it was hacked.
The former Good Morning Britain (GMB) presenter, 57, who has 8.3 million followers on the social media site, had no profile picture, banner image or posts on Tuesday afternoon. Some tweets containing still and video images remained, as did records of tweets his account had liked.
According to reports, his account shared posts overnight containing false information, racial slurs and abusive messages directed at the late Queen Elizabeth II and the singer Ed Sheeran.
It comes after the account of the UK education secretary, Gillian Keegan, appeared to be hacked on Christmas Day. Her account replied to several tweets with links to websites advertising cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
The tweets on Keegan’s account began appearing shortly before 7.30pm on Christmas Day, and were sent throughout the evening into the early hours on Boxing Day.
Last month the Commons speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, wrote to MPs advising them to ramp up security on their mobile phones with multi-factor verification, as well as update software and delete old messages.
The warning came after Liz Truss’s phone was reportedly hacked by Russians in the summer when she was foreign secretary and frontrunner in the Tory leadership race.
Morgan’s Instagram account appeared to be operating normally.
The presenter, who recently joined TalkTV as the host of its Uncensored show after quitting GMB, has not publicly addressed the apparent hack.
Earlier this month, the Metropolitan police said no further action would be taken against a man suspected of sending death threats to Morgan and his family online.
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On Twitter, Morgan complained there was a “big problem with how big tech operates its safety procedures”.
A spokesperson for TalkTV declined to comment. Neither Morgan nor Twitter have responded to requests for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/23/jeremy-corbyn-grassroots-support-will-help-him-become-pm | Politics | 2017-09-23T13:46:40.000Z | Nadia Khomami | Corbyn says greater role for grassroots will help him become PM | Jeremy Corbyn has said his drive to give Labour members more control over the party will help him enter Downing Street.
He said plans to give his grassroots support a greater role will not only help to oust Theresa May it will also change the “system of inequality and injustice” in society.
The Labour leader, who arrived at the party’s conference in Brighton to the familiar “oh Jeremy Corbyn” chant, hit out at austerity measures that disproportionately hit women.
At the Labour women’s conference, which was taking place before the formal start of the full national event on Sunday, Corbyn said his proposed review of party democracy would ensure wider support for his policies.
He said he wants a “more open, more democratic party” with the “widest possible participation”.
Addressing the women’s conference, he said: “Wide participation in policy-making leads to more support for the policies we get, leads us to that movement that will bring about the end of this government but – beyond that – the end of the system of inequality and injustice in our society.”
Corbyn’s supporters secured an important victory in the party’s ruling national executive committee over changes to the leadership election rules.
In a compromise move, the NEC agreed to a proposal to cut the number of nominations a candidate needs to run from 15% to 10% of the party’s MPs and MEPs.
The change, which now needs to be approved by conference, is expected to make it easier for a leftwing candidate to secure a place on the ballot paper when the 68-year-old Corbyn steps down.
In a further strengthening of the left’s position, the party also increased the number of NEC delegates from members and unions as well as authorising the democracy review.
Corbyn hit out at targets including the Tories and Donald Trump as he addressed the women’s conference.
“It’s without question the Labour party is the party of women’s equality, no matter who else might try to claim that mantle,” he said. “I acknowledge that the Tories have a woman leader, but their policies have actually hurt women a lot.”
Corbyn hit out at the abuse targeted at women Labour MPs including Luciana Berger and the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott.
“The unbelievable and disgusting and disgraceful levels of abuse that women receive in public life is unacceptable – from anybody, to anybody – it has got to stop.”
In a message to some Labour supporters who have engaged in vitriolic attacks on women MPs from other wings of the party, he said: “All women who represent our party deserve our unqualified support.”
Before arriving at the conference centre, Corbyn played table tennis at a club that provides support for people with learning difficulties and refugees.
Meanwhile, the shadow women and equalities minister, Dawn Butler, launched a “period poverty campaign” with a promise to provide funding for free sanitary products for secondary schools, food banks and homeless shelters.
Just announced: We'll end #periodpoverty by funding free sanitary products in secondary schools, homeless shelters & food banks #Lab17 ↓ pic.twitter.com/NchPK764As
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) September 23, 2017
Butler told the Huffington Post: “It is a scandal that women on low incomes are having to deal with the additional burden of struggling to afford sanitary products, and young girls missing school once a month because they can’t afford sanitary protection.
“It’s not a woman’s choice to have a period; it is far from a luxury, and you can be sure that if men had periods this problem would be solved a long time ago.”
The proposal is based on a bill brought to the Scottish parliament by Labour MSP Monica Lennon, which places a legal duty on ministers to provide the “basic right” of universal free sanitary products.
The policy, which would cost an estimated £10m a year, would be funded by scrapping government education projects such as free schools. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2021/mar/29/crossword-blog-is-it-ok-to-when-solving-puzzles | Crosswords | 2021-03-29T12:26:48.000Z | Alan Connor | Crossword blog: is it OK to ‘cheat’ when solving puzzles? | One year ago, we reached out to anyone casually interested in cryptic crosswords and beckoned them to take up the perfect pandemic pastime.
In May, a YouGov survey suggested that puzzling activity had more than doubled since the start of lockdown, at least online. The reason is a very simple puzzle to solve. When you are solving, your thoughts are entirely on the puzzle and not on … anything else. Also, the supply of gratification is effectively limitless.
Even with the friendly counsel of our beginners’ series, though, sometimes we all get stuck. So, people have been asking: when you can’t finish a puzzle by yourself, is it OK to get help?
Can I ask a friend?
Of course you can. One stereotype of the solver is the commuter with furrowed brow, poignantly captured by David Nobbs. But many others solve with workmates, with distant relations, in the pub (when possible), in bed. The Guardian’s crossword app even has a “play together” feature, which rather puts an end to the debate.
If you are solving on paper, find a friend who does the same and get into the habit of daily texting. Small pleasures. Can you ask a friend? You must ask a friend.
What about forums and blogs?
Blogs with the previous day’s puzzles (there is one for the Times, one for the Telegraph, one for the i and one for everything else) are a good friend to the solver. Every clue is briefly dissected before the chat begins; in fact, it is worth thinking about regularly solving yesterday’s puzzle so that you can get enlightenment today, although that denies you the pleasure of waking up to find your sleeping brain has unpacked that tricky bottom-right corner. The Telegraph one, Big Dave, goes as far as giving you a hint so that you can still enjoy the penny-drop moment for yourself.
Then there are the places where you can ask others for help, like the Crossword Clue Solver forum, which are full of exchanges like: “Bonzer94: HELP one left – ‘King’s drink knocked back (5)’ R?G?L” “MissThing: Bonzer it’s regal, lager bkwds” “Bonzer94: Doh of course thx MissThing”.
If you take this path, you can see it as a) not having finished, but at least having understood the stubborn clue, or as b) filling the grid by a mixture of necessary means (also perfectly fine: it is your hobby). The same goes for using the Guardian’s “Reveal this” function online – another reminder that there is no rulebook saying you can’t get a bit of help.
Dictionaries?
Put it this way: I use them. There are some puzzles (quiptic, Everyman, Times 2) where you can expect to be familiar with everything the setter asks of you – and there are those where you might encounter something new.
Google Trends graph for ‘crossword chart’.
What about filling the missing letters? If you have a library card, you can sign in and search the Oxford English Dictionary for R?G?L to rule out RIGEL, RIGOL, ROGAL and RUGEL. A squint at Google Trends shows that searches for “crossword chart” reached an all-time high in May, although I am too cautious to draw any … trends.
Perhaps the nice people at Duke University, North Carolina, who are behind the solving site One Across could tell us if they have been battered with traffic in the past 12 months. And then there is the crossword-solving dog, but that is a topic we will return to anon.
What if it is a prize puzzle?
Simple. If a competition is still open, the blogs won’t mention it, the forums absolutely shouldn’t and friends and dictionaries remain available to you.
Finally, of course, let’s remember that the Guardian’s vibrant below-the-line communities are among the few civilised spaces left on the web. Seasoned solvers, what have I missed?
The latest addition to our Healing Music Recorded in 2020-21 to Accompany a Solve or Even Listen to is from Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds. Suggestions welcome.
Ólafur Arnalds at NPR Music.
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop.
Here is a collection of all our explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/29/amazon-snaps-up-bake-off-sponsorship-in-biggest-uk-tv-deal | Television & radio | 2018-03-29T05:01:05.000Z | Mark Sweney | Amazon snaps up Bake Off sponsorship in biggest UK TV deal | Amazon is seeking to cash in on the success of The Great British Bake Off on Channel 4 by signing up as headline sponsor of the second series, in the US tech giant’s biggest UK TV deal to date.
Amazon is thought to have paid about £5m to secure the deal, making Bake Off one of the most valuable entertainment sponsorships in the UK, alongside Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, after the show’s move from the BBC defied critics by proving to be Channel 4’s biggest hit in decades.
Amazon intends to use the show to push its Echo speakers and the capabilities of the Alexa virtual assistant. Bake Off attracted the largest audience of 16- to 34-year-old viewers of any TV show last year.
The final attracted Channel 4’s second-biggest audience ever, having been watched by 11 million people including those who watched it live, via recordings or repeats. As a result, the broadcaster has been able to raise the price for the second series.
Channel 4 hits sweet spot with Bake Off as it seeks new sponsor
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The new deal with Amazon is a coup for Channel 4, which previously had to settle for splitting the headline sponsorship between two brands not known as major TV advertisers – the German baking ingredients maker Dr Oetker and the kitchen cupboard staple Lyle’s golden syrup – when an expected bidding war failed to materialise. They each paid a bargain £2m.
Channel 4 paid £75m to poach the biggest show on British TV from the BBC. Advertisers initially balked at signing a big sponsorship deal, not knowing if audiences would follow the new-look show to commercial TV. Only one judge, Paul Hollywood, made the move from the BBC.
Rival ITV sniped that Channel 4 had paid for “baking powder and a tent”, while critics were sceptical of the new lineup, which includes new hosts Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding and judge Prue Leith.
“It’s a great testimony to the success of Bake Off’s debut on Channel 4 last year that Amazon will sponsor the Bake Off programme brands this year,” said Jonathan Lewis, the head of digital and partnership innovation at Channel 4.
Amazon’s deal includes sponsorship of the spinoffs Bake Off: An Extra Slice, hosted by Jo Brand, and Bake Off: The Professionals, as well as celebrity and festive specials.
Despite fears of advertisers looking to move away from TV advertising to digital, major online players such as Amazon, Apple and Google have become serious spenders on traditional media.
Amazon is investing the most in traditional media such as TV, cinema, radio, press and outdoor advertisingof all the big online businesses. Its TV ad spend accounts for just under half its total £83m ad spend last year, according to Nielsen figures.
The Bake Off sponsorship is Amazon’s most significant strategic marketing move since the company sponsored ITV’s Downton Abbey in 2014 in a two-year deal worth about £8m.
Channel 4 wins second biggest audience ever with Bake Off
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“The industry spends a lot of time talking about the tech giants and the challenges TV faces from a competition perspective for advertising,” said one senior executive at a major media buying agency. “It is interesting that such a big behemoth like Amazon have targeted one of the biggest shows on TV to promote one of its leading products.”
Amazon is committing tens of millions of pounds to marketing as it seeks to win the battle to keep Echo and Alexa, which can perform functions such as making shopping lists and playing music, ahead of rivals such as Google Home in the hotly contested voice command product market.
Amazon recently spent almost $4m (£2.8m) on a star-studded Super Bowl ad to promote the products – featuring Gordon Ramsay, Rebel Wilson and Sir Anthony Hopkins as well as its founder Jeff Bezos.
The Bake Off deal comes as rival Netflix announced it is to make the first seven series of the show available on its service from Saturday. Netflix was interested in buying the show when it moved from the BBC, but makers Love Productions desired to keep it with a free-to-air broadcaster. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/oct/08/david-hockney-new-5-metre-digital-artwork-self-portrait | Art and design | 2022-10-08T15:00:33.000Z | Dalya Alberge | ‘An incredible work’: David Hockney’s new 5-metre digital artwork unveiled | “Fresh pictures of a very beautiful world” is how the artist David Hockney describes his latest works, a series of digital drawings of flowers that culminated in an extraordinary, 5-metre-long picture of the artist in front of these still-life images, revealed for the first time in the Observer today.
Hockney is teasing the eye and playing with perspective and the passing of time in his newest creation. In a vast photographic drawing, entitled 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed), he has created an enigmatic, striking picture in which the onlooker sees the artist as onlooker, observing his own works.
28th February 2021, Roses in a Blue Vase. Photograph: © David Hockney
Hockney has depicted himself twice, on the right and the left of the composition – seemingly caught in a private moment as he looks at 20 of his own exuberant floral still lifes that hang on a wall in front of him.
In both self-portraits he wears the same blue-checked suit and white flat cap, but he is sitting in different chairs and smoking a cigarette on the left, while an ashtray is among objects on a simple table placed next to his other self. A solitary rose in a blue vase echoes the beautiful blooms captured in pictures on the wall, suggesting their fleeting existence.
From his home in Normandy, where he created the image, he told the Observer: “This is not an ordinary photograph.”
By manipulating numerous photographs on a computer, he played with time, illustrating that a photograph is not “the ultimate depiction of reality”: “You have to look at these through time, unlike an ordinary photograph, which you see all at once.”
25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed) will hang alongside the actual flower pictures depicted within it in a forthcoming major exhibition, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures.
It will be staged next month by Hockney’s London gallery, Annely Juda Fine Art, one of five galleries in five cities worldwide, in an unprecedented collaboration.
The state of the world may be looking grim, but these are flower pictures to lift spirits, each painted with his trademark palette of vibrant colours. He calls them “new-looking fresh pictures of a very beautiful world”.
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20th March 2021, Flowers, Glass Vase on a Table. Photograph: © David Hockney
David Juda, director of Annely Juda Fine Art, has been exhibiting Hockney for 30 years. Commenting on the previously unseen picture, he told the Observer: “It’s an incredible work. It’s about perspective and how we see things. This will take up the whole of a wall because it’s over 3 metres high and 5 metres long. It’s really powerful.”
Juda added: “It isn’t a photograph. It’s a photographic drawing. It’s not someone who’s just taken a snapshot. It’s made up of a lot of photographs to make a photograph. That’s what creates the different perspective. He’s very interested in the perspective of the eye.
“What he’s trying to say is, it’s your eye that sees things, not the camera. The camera can’t move. If you look through your camera, it takes a picture, but that isn’t actually the real picture of what your eye sees because your eye sees a whole load of other things.”
Hockney, 85, is the Bradford boy who set off for Los Angeles and found inspiration in the American dream, swimming pools and sunlight, becoming one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. His masterpieces include A Bigger Splash, in which he captured the shimmering sparkle of a turquoise pool under the intense light of the California sky. In 2018, Hockney became the most highly valued living artist, after one of his swimming pool paintings – Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – sold for $90.3m (£81m) in a New York auction.
A painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, he has shown endless passion for experimentation, using fax machines, laser photocopiers, tablet devices and other digital instruments as artistic tools.
David Hockney: ‘My era was the freest time. I now realise it’s over’
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In the exhibition catalogue, he recalls using an iPad to start the flower pictures in February 2021 at his studio and home in France: “I was just sitting at the table in our house and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table. Being February, the sun was low, casting a deep shadow on the table. I decided to draw it, the background was dark, so I made a rich brown for it. After printing it, I put it on the far wall facing the table. There it stayed for a few days. It looked very beautiful to me…
“A few days later, I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase… I then realised if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water, and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off… It was very cold outside and I could work indoors more comfortably.”
The exhibition is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 3 November to 23 December. Also at Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris; Richard Gray, Chicago; LA Louver, Los Angeles; and Pace, New York. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2024/feb/03/failure-not-an-option-for-the-ecb-as-womens-cricket-faces-yet-more-upheaval | Sport | 2024-02-03T11:00:15.000Z | Raf Nicholson | Failure not an option for the ECB as women’s cricket faces yet more upheaval | Raf Nicholson | The report of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) released last June was shocking for its minutiae: the devil of institutional sexism in cricket is, as they say, in the detail. The report was damning about the culture of the first-class counties, describing “instances of violent and degrading behaviour” towards female staff. One witness reported being forced to lock herself in her office to avoid sexual harassment by the club’s male cricketers; another, being called “an ’effing butch” by a colleague after she raised the issue of gender equity in a meeting.
Women’s cricket to undergo domestic shake-up with teams owned by counties
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So goes county cricket in the 21st century. In the light of this, the decision of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – in a radical shake-up of the domestic system announced this week– to hand over control of women’s cricket away from the independent regions back to the counties may seem questionable.
It makes more sense to turn such thinking on its head and realise that this plan is as much about men’s cricket as it is about the women. “Fundamentally this is a growth plan for cricket,” Beth Barrett‑Wild, the ECB’s director of the women’s professional game, said. “By making this transition, we have an opportunity to really galvanise cultural change through the game.”
Another clue is in the title of the bid document – “Evolving Together” – that has been sent to the 18 first-class counties and the MCC, who are being invited to submit tenders to host one of the eight professional women’s teams. Winning bids will need to demonstrate a commitment to embedding equal opportunity at all levels of the club: what better way to weed out toxic masculinity?
The ECB appears to have learned something from the ICEC’s criticism of the lack of representation of women within cricket’s decision-making structures: the voices of female cricketers have been front and centre while plans for the women’s professional game mark II were made, via consultation with the women’s player committee of the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA).
One member of that committee, the Northern Diamonds’ Katie Levick, says this change feels very different from the transition into the new regional structure in 2020: “In 2019 our [Yorkshire] season finished and we had no idea what was happening. Over the years, we’ve always wondered who is making these choices for us, so to be sat at the table and directly feeding back at every stage of the process was amazing.”
Clearly there are details still to be ironed out. Facilities will be an especially thorny issue. County grounds are at capacity and the women’s game will – quite rightly – demand visibility on the sport’s biggest stages. One source close to the women’s regional game summed up the issue: “Unless there’s money to build another facility, we’re going to have to do a lot of sharing.” Men in cricket have not always been very good at that.
Lancashire Thunder’s Phoebe Graham, another member of the PCA women’s committee, agrees. “We don’t want to be training outside the hours of nine to five,” she says. “We don’t want the graveyard shift in a sports hall because that’s where the counties can fit us in. That’s not where we’re at any more. We need to be more of a priority.”
Graham cites Lancashire as an example of good practice in this regard: by treating the NorthWest Thunder as if they were Lancashire Women, they have generated the kind of belonging lacking elsewhere. “The men and the women train at Emirates Old Trafford as our main ground,” Graham says. “They have been able to create joint commercial opportunities through Hilton and through Sportsbreaks, by promoting the club as one team.
“If anything, Lancashire has probably forced the ECB’s hand by showing how well this model does work.”
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But cultural change is not easy. There must be a risk that some counties pay lip service to developing women’s cricket, win the right to host a tier one side and then use the £1.3m annual ECB investment to fund their men’s teams.
Last year’s Karen Carney review found that the practice of diverting money that was meant to be ringfenced for women’s football back into the men’s game was widespread. The ECB says there will be robust processes in place to ensure that does not occur within cricket, but details are as yet thin on the ground.
Above all, the new model needs to be a success. Undertaking three major upheavals of women’s cricket in eight years has already undermined the ECB’s credibility: failure is simply not an option this time around. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/05/iggy-pop-every-loser-review-atlantic-gold-tooth-19th-solo-album | Music | 2023-01-05T12:00:19.000Z | Dave Simpson | Iggy Pop: Every Loser review | Dave Simpson's album of the week | “I
’m the guy with no shirt who rocks,” announced Iggy Pop ahead of this, his 19th solo album. It’s this perception of the Stooges founder and “Godfather of punk” that’s most cemented in the public consciousness. In recent years, though, the now 75-year-old singer has seemed on a mission to do anything but rock with his shirt off: he turned unlikely jazz crooner for 2009’s Préliminaires, sang Edith Piaf and Beatles covers in French on 2012’s Après and echoed his superlative 1970s David Bowie collaborations on 2016’s Josh Homme-helmed Post Pop Depression. He has also become a much-loved BBC 6 Music DJ and has popped up to provide guest vocals for other artists ranging from Belgian violinist Catherine Graindorge to electronic giants Underworld. On his last solo album, 2019’s quietly reflective Free, he recited poetry by Lou Reed and Dylan Thomas – although it’s hard to tell whether he kept a shirt on while doing so.
Iggy Pop: Every Loser album cover
All of this makes it slightly eyebrow-raising that, at 75, Pop has suddenly returned to harder rocking. When many of his contemporaries are dead or mining their hits in order to continue touring stadiums, rock’s eternal free spirit promises “music made the old-fashioned way”, which will “beat the shit out of you”. His choice of musical foil for this endeavour is one Andrew Watt, the Grammy-winning super-producer whose recent clients have included Miley Cyrus, Morrissey and Elton John. It doesn’t seem the most obvious fit, although Watt’s pedigree with legacy rockers includes Ozzy Osborne’s recent return-to-form solo albums, and he has been highly enthusiastic about working with Pop, a “true fucking icon”. As executive producer, co-writer, guitarist and pianist, Watt has made Iggy Pop’s music sound contemporary but not at the expense of his inimitable voice and character.
Few adult males – never mind septuagenarians – could get away with a lyric like “I’ve got a dick and two balls, that’s more than you all,” on the furious hardcore-ish opener Frenzy, in 2023, but Pop can, and he quickly signals that he won’t enter his later years quietly: “My mind is on fire when I should retire.” The singer is in a similarly time-defying mindset on Modern Day Rip Off, which affectionately pastiches the Raw Power-era Stooges sound down to the plinky-plonk piano, but replaces drugs with a smidgeon of dry self-mockery. As Pop – who gave up substances years ago – drily admits, “I ran out of blow a long time ago / I can’t smoke a J, all my ducks fly away”.
An all-star cast, including Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, infuse Every Loser with a controlled sense of insouciance. On the riotous Neo Punk, the “Godfather” sounds like the bands he influenced while lampooning what the punk movement has become (“My hair is blue, and my prescription, too”), enjoying himself so much you can hear his chuckles on the recording.
But for all the talk of “music that will beat the shit out of you”, there’s more to Every Loser than hard rock. Strung Out Johnny is a sublime rock ballad in the vein of U2’s One. Pop brings a beautifully wearied vocal to the song, which essays the stages of addiction with the candour and experience of someone who’s lived through them (“First time – you do it with a friend, second time – you do it in bed …”) New Atlantis, a heartfelt pop-rock love letter to Pop’s adopted city of Miami, refers to the threat from rising sea levels (“here, a man can be himself, but she’s sinking into the sea”).
Climate change also informs All the Way Down, a dry-sounding, sleazy rocker that wouldn’t sound out of place on 1979’s New Values. The post-punk track Comments and darkly melodic anti-music industry blast The Regency (“I’m alive, uncompromised”) will no doubt attract attention because they may well be late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins’s final recordings. They are also excellent songs in their own right, the latter tracing a compelling arc from an almost doo-wop introduction to its raging “fuck the regency” finale.
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Every Loser’s main flaw is that you’re left wanting more. At around a minute each, curt narratives My Animus and The News for Andy (a Madness-type piano stomp in which Pop deadpans a spoof psychiatry advert) sound underdeveloped. Still, acoustic/piano centrepiece Morning Show is surely one of the most beautifully candid things Pop has ever done. “The pain in my face didn’t come from out of space,” he croons, adding a hint of rawness to the chorus” “I’ll fix my face and go, go and do the morning show.” The song addresses age, vulnerability and the daily grind of being Iggy Pop. In his 76th year, he’s managing it very well.
Alexis Petridis is away | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/04/dune-part-two-review | Film | 2024-03-04T16:15:16.000Z | Adrian Horton | Dune: Part Two: new villain, more worms, another cliffhanger – discuss with spoilers | Three years after Denis Villeneuve left us in the middle of the desert and the story, we’re finally back to the Duniverse. The French-Canadian auteur gambled with the first Dune, adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi tome; Part Two picks up where the first film left off, with Timothée Chalamet’s high-born Paul Atreides stranded on the desert planet Arrakis, attempting to ingratiate himself to the indigenous Fremen with the fate of the universe on his shoulders – if you believe the prophecies.
Dune v Dune: do Denis Villeneuve’s films stay true to the book?
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Like the book, the second half of this grandiose, ambivalent epic deals with shadowy propaganda, the power of faith, the deadly risks of mythic destiny, political insurgencies, atomic weapons and imperial violence. Also, giant sandworms, finally in full battle form. The extremely hype-y trailers, coupled with near-universally glowing reviews, stellar audience scores and a good old-fashioned press blitz by not one but four young movie stars helped Dune: Part Two to a better-than expected box office – $81.5m domestically, $178m total, the biggest opening weekend since Barbie.
It’s hard to qualify for spoilers when the book is nearly 60 years old. But still, spoiler alert, as there was much intrigue to how Villeneuve would handle the second half of the book – how faithful would he be to the material? Do the sandworms live up to the hype? What to make of Austin Butler, or another cliffhanger ending? Now that you’ve seen what is shaping up to be, potentially, the movie-going event of the year, let’s discuss.
Arrival
Before we even get to the Warner Bros title card, we hear a guttural proclamation, translated over black: “Power over spice is power over all.” Blockbuster sci-fi clearly inspired by oil in the Middle East, we are so back! The imperial Princess Irulan, played by series newcomer Florence Pugh (who, as always, manages to appear right at home in whatever century/country/galaxy she’s in), provides a two-minute recap: House Atreides has been all but exterminated on Arrakis, killed in the dark – the secret work of her father, the Emperor, in concert with the overtly villainous Harkonnens.
Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/AP
And then we’re back to where the first film left off, or shortly thereafter – Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) in the open desert, having just recently joined a band of Fremen warriors led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Villeneuve has compressed the timeline on Arrakis from eight or nine years to months, so things get going quickly; the group, still carrying the body of Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun), the warrior Paul killed at the end of Part One, immediately encounter a group of Harkonnens looking to either find Paul, exterminate the Fremen, or both.
Say what you will about Villeneuve’s characterization (or lack thereof) of any Harkonnen foot soldiers or especially the Fremen – the moment when the Harkonnens start flying to the top of a desert mountain is sick. The Fremen attack on a Harkonnen spice harvester is sick. Every battle in this movie is a true visual feast. And the visualization of Fremen harvesting water from Harkonnen bodies adds a touch of visceral body horror to all the big desert set pieces.
Womb with a view
Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica. Photograph: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/AP
I won’t get too in the weeds with differences from the book – my colleague Tom Huddleston broke it down here – but suffice to say, there are some changes for the sake of economy: no Thufir Hawat (played in the first film by Stephen McKinley Henderson), no Leto II (honestly, thank God), no Count Fenring (sorry, Tim Blake Nelson, who was reportedly hired to play him). One of the biggest changes is the portrayal of Alia, Paul’s younger sister, who remains in utero throughout the movie (save an adult cameo, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, in Paul’s worm venom-induced vision). But she still plays a crucial role as an embryo that Villeneuve puts on screen, to demonstrate how Jessica’s consumption of the Water of Life (worm venom) imbues were with “pre-born” powers, as well as explicate her motivations.
Ferguson’s performance is pitch perfectly creepy and intense, as Jessica inherits the memories of centuries of Fremen culture to, by her own admission to Alia, convert vulnerable people into believers of the Lisan al-Ghaib, a prophecy planted for centuries by the shadowy Bene Gesserit. Dune has always been astute on the informal, intangible yet mighty soft power historically wielded by women; Jessica’s transformation into the Reverend Mother, fanning the flames of faith and manipulating cultural memory for her own gain, is a particularly unsettling depiction of colonial violence. The fact that she does so while chatting with her telepathic fetus just adds to the weirdness.
Desert romance
Photograph: Niko Tavernise/AP
Villeneuve has about an hour before he really needs to get off Arrakis and establish everything else going on, and in that time, we need to believe that Paul and Chani, the Fremen warrior played by Zendaya, fall in love. Luckily, Zendaya and Chalamet have a natural chemistry, and Villeneuve affords us a few scenes of flirting around Paul’s numerous desert tests – namely, Chani telling him that he “sandwalks like a drunk lizard” and teaching him to build wind traps.
Unlike Villeneuve’s friend Christopher Nolan, who included the first sex scene of his blockbuster career in last year’s Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two keeps it relatively tame: we get a nice for-the-trailer kiss amid the great desert vistas, several declarations of devotion (“I would very much like to be equal to you,” Paul tells Chani, and that’s when you know this is going nowhere good) and a postcoital tent moment to discuss some classic mother-in-law issues (Chani tells him she’s stirring up trouble; Paul just sighs and looks exasperated).
From Elvis to Feyd-Rautha
Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot Fenring. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/AP
One of the great question marks of Part Two was how Austin Butler, heretofore primarily known for playing Elvis in perpetuity, would embody Baron Harkonnen’s dastardly nephew and heir, na-Baron Feyd-Rautha. The answer is: brilliant, bald, brutal. Slicked in black paint and murderously unpredictable, filmed in monochrome with gleaming white skin and black teeth, Butler looks, frankly, insane. As Princess Irulan puts it maybe too bluntly: “Feyd-Rautha? But he’s psychotic!”
He’s also, crucially, ripped, and brimming with danger. Butler has finally shed his Elvis voice, and instead speaks in a chilling, raspier take on Stellan Skarsgård’s portentous rasp. As reported by the Bene Gesserit: Feyd-Rautha is a highly intelligent sociopath who murdered his mother, craves pain and humiliation, and is sexually vulnerable. And thus to many … hot. If Dune: Part Two is often dry, dutiful and sterile, Butler’s Feyd-Rautha offers a jolt of psychosexual edge. (No wonder his brief moment with Léa Seydoux’s Bene Gesserit seductress Lady Fenring, in which she mindfucks him into the hand-in-the-box test from the first film, has already been memed.)
Christopher Walken is in Dune?
Casting Christopher Walken as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV was a left-field choice for many Dune fans — the 80-year-old actor isn’t exactly known for speaking in the way of blockbuster gravitas. Personally, this was one the film’s few bum notes for me. Walken looks the part of an ageing emperor saddled with secrets, but has a voice that feels as suited for 24,000 years from now as the name “Jessica”. Lines such as “This Muad’Dib, some new Fremen prophet,” hit different in an accent distinctive and famous enough to inspire its own BMW Super Bowl commercial. And yet when the moment calls for it – a wordless, tremulous Emperor literally stomped at by Paul to kiss the ring – Walken is up to the task.
Zendaya’s movie?
Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/AP
One of the main critiques of the first film, particularly from people who didn’t know what they were in for, was that it overly teased Zendaya – other than a few visions, she only appeared as Chani in the last half hour. Part Two is her moment, and still, there could’ve and should’ve been more Zendaya as Chani, as Villeneuve has significantly altered the books to make her the moral heart of the franchise. The Duniverse has always been skeptical of Paul’s destiny and power, of whether his Chosen One arc was fated or manufactured – either way, doesn’t matter, it causes mass destruction. In Villeneuve’s take, Chani is refreshingly skeptical of Paul’s intentions and the fundamentalist Fremen prophecies from the jump – “you want to control people? Tell them a messiah will come,” she says. “Then they’ll wait – for centuries.”
Chani is arguably tasked with carrying too much – she’s supposed to sell the romance with Paul, represent his true connection to the Fremen, embody the anti-colonialist themes of the book, poke fun at Stilgar’s fanaticism for comic relief and undercut the classic Chosen One prophecy narrative with some sense. The fact that Zendaya makes her still feel like a person – one whose heart gets broken as Paul takes over the Imperium, leads the Fremen to more war and proposes to Princess Irulan — is an accomplishment.
The Final Showdown
Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/AP
I don’t have much to say about the final showdown in Arrakeen other than watching legions of warriors ride in on sandworms made me grin like a child. We are blessed to live in the age of big-canvas auteurs and CGI.
Sad boy rules
By the end of the movie, Chalamet’s makeup has changed to reflect the mood — Paul’s face has the pallor of burden (or betrayal?), and Chalamet’s performance is ice-cold (“you die like an animal” is the last thing the Baron hears). It’s a strikingly ambivalent ending to Paul’s arc: he got what he wanted (revenge) and then some, but nothing about it feels triumphant. He’s battered, twice stabbed and dead in the eyes, having betrayed all of his promises to Chani.
Given its subtext, one inescapable reading of Dune for me was as a great parable for mega-fame – what it means to be chosen, willingly or through great effort; what you lose to being known and cherished by millions, to having whole economies and livelihoods depend on an idea of you. Dune might be one of the few films left to refute the “death” of the movie star, but it looks taxing.
Baiting Warner Bros again?
Denis Villeneuve. Photograph: Christinne Muschi/AP
Villeneuve already made a huge gamble in adapting just half of Dune with the first film, despite not having a sequel greenlit – and he appears to be betting on himself again. The final shot of the film belongs not to Paul but to Chani, emotionally calling a sandworm to go her own way, a departure from the books. Villeneuve has been remarkably open about wanting to make a third installment based on Dune: Messiah that will, presumably, follow Chani’s lead. Given Part Two’s performance this weekend, I’m betting on more Dune. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jan/10/125000-pounds-amplifier-naim-audio | Music | 2014-01-10T13:00:00.000Z | Michael Hann | Who wants to spend £125,000 on a new amp for their stereo? | "It's not just for football players and Russian oil barons," says a spokesman for Naim Audio. And that's true. Naim's new Statement amplification system might also be within the price range of hedge fund managers, CEOs of investment banks, lottery winners, anyone who discovers oil in their back garden, and other assorted plutocrats.
The Statement was unveiled this week at the CES 2014 consumer electronics show in Las Vegas – alongside such future necessities as an internet-enabled toothbrush, Bluetooth-enabled jewellery and a GPS-equipped jacket – instantly winning What Hi-Fi's accolade of Star of CES.
And that despite a price tag of $200,000 (the Wiltshire firm will sell it for £125,000 in the UK. A snip, if you ask me), which gets you the NAC S1 preamplifier and two NAP S1 mono power amplifiers. But your spending doesn't stop there. Our man at Naim estimates that to put together a system capable of getting the best out of your statement, you'd be looking to spend around £500,000. For that, of course, you could get your favourite musicians to come and play in your living room, no matter who they are. And if they're not that famous, you could make it a weekly residency.
Oh, and that's still not the end of the spending. "The room is important," the spokesman says, sagely. "People spec and design their rooms, actually. There's no point just putting in your living room – the idea would be to make a room from scratch." Right. Though, apparently, you may be lucky enough to have a spare room with just the right qualities that you can put your system in it, though almost certainly only after having paid for some redesign work.
At this point I could talk you through the technical specifications of the system, but to be honest I simply don't understand any of it (a Cambridge Audio CD player, Denon amp, Project turntable and Mission speakers meet most of my home music needs), so instead I'll offer you some random phrases from the press release. "Massive transformer in the lower section … minimising electromagnetic interaction between components … rated at 746 watts (the equivalent of one horsepower) into 8 ohms and weighs in at 101kg … semiconductors which are typically used in aerospace, military and space exploration applications … the paste used to ensure good thermal conductivity to the heatsink is nano-diamond based."
Don't get me started on the heatsink. Did you know it is cut from a single piece of solid aluminium by a machine that has to be doused with coolant over several hours? Did you? And still your iPod will sound rubbish if you play it through the system (only CD quality, studio quality, or lossless WAV files, I am told, are worth playing through the Statement).
Despite all the technical stuff – and Naim's insistence that the Statement is for serious audiophiles and people who are passionate about music – there's perhaps something telling about both the system's name, and a throwaway remark the Naim spokesman makes about its target audience: "There'll be people who choose to buy it instead of a supercar." And still Naim expects to sell two or three a month.
One last question. Will I be able to get it for £99 in Richer Sounds in a couple of years' time? "No." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/07/labour-landslide-election-victory-poll-keir-starmer-rishi-sunak-conservatives-constituency-boundaries | Politics | 2023-06-07T17:01:11.000Z | Aubrey Allegretti | Labour on course for landslide election victory, megapoll suggests | Keir Starmer is on course to clinch a landslide majority of 140 for Labour at the next UK general election, the first modelling based on a megapoll of new constituency boundaries suggests.
With the Conservatives still suffering from a large polling deficit, Labour’s support was found to be at about 35% – 12% ahead of Rishi Sunak’s party.
However, Labour’s support was said to remain “quite soft”, with a “worst case scenario” model showing it could end up the biggest party in a hung parliament.
Sleaze, scandal and the ghost of Boris Johnson – can ‘hopelessly weak’ Sunak handle the job?
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The results were revealed in an analysis of polling known as multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP), and will boost Starmer’s hopes of victory as the long campaign in the run-up to the next election progresses.
Prof Sir John Curtice said since the sleaze scandals that engulfed Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’s mini-budget, there had been a “very substantial” drop in support for the Tories. Though Sunak had sought to steady the party, Curtice said there had been only “a bit of a narrowing” of Labour’s lead.
The general election poses a headache to pollsters and campaign strategists, as constituency boundaries are being redrawn for the first time in several election cycles.
In the first MRP based on the new boundaries – conducted by FocalData and commissioned by the Best For Britain campaign group – Labour’s potential success was said to be under varying degrees of risk.
If the Reform party – the reincarnation of the Brexit party – repeats the tactic used in 2019 of standing aside in Tory marginals, Labour’s seats would still be at a healthy 401, leaving the Conservatives on 202.
Another scenario has Labour winning 370 seats to the Tories’ 232, based on redistributing undecided voters by their education profile.
If both were combined, under what was billed as Labour’s “worst-case scenario”, the model predicts a hung parliament – with the party about a dozen seats short of a majority, with 316, leaving the Tories at 286.
The poll of 10,140 voters was undertaken between 20 April and 9 May.
Labour is projected to be on course for a major comeback in Scotland. Best for Britain said the poll showed the SNP was “bleeding voters” to “don’t knows”, meaning Labour was likely to pick up as many as 31 seats.
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Sunak was more popular than the Conservatives and therefore “might be able to turn his party around”, said Curtice. But he added that the Tories “are a long way behind”. Stories about Sunak previously possessing a US green card and his wife’s non-dom status “did a damage to him from which he has, frankly, personally never recovered”, said Curtice.
Luke Tryl, the UK director of the More in Common group, said there was “the potential for quite a large” Labour victory – but cautioned the party should not be complacent because it could merely be “winning by default”.
He added Labour’s support remained “quite soft” and that the party that would win the next election was the one that could “best convince people that it’s OK to turn on the six o’clock news and not be worried”.
In focus groups, Tryl said voters found Sunak to be competent and credited him for the furlough scheme, adding that he was outperforming his party. “An emerging theme from the focus groups is ‘is he strong enough?’ And that’s exacerbated by the constant returns to the stage of Boris Johnson.”
In the event of a Tory leadership contest, Tryl said Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt were potential frontrunners, but said of the home secretary, Suella Braverman: “I do know from testing in both focus groups and polling that Suella would be a ‘longest suicide note in history’ type candidate for the Conservative party, simply because she is so polarising.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/02/climate-crisis-siberian-heatwave-led-to-new-methane-emissions-study-says | Environment | 2021-08-02T19:00:35.000Z | Damian Carrington | Climate crisis: Siberian heatwave led to new methane emissions, study says | The Siberian heatwave of 2020 led to new methane emissions from the permafrost, according to research. Emissions of the potent greenhouse gas are currently small, the scientists said, but further research is urgently needed.
Analysis of satellite data indicated that fossil methane gas leaked from rock formations known to be large hydrocarbon reservoirs after the heatwave, which peaked at 6C above normal temperatures. Previous observations of leaks have been from permafrost soil or under shallow seas.
Most scientists think the risk of a “methane bomb” – a rapid eruption of huge volumes of methane causing cataclysmic global heating – is minimal in the coming years. There is little evidence of significantly rising methane emissions from the Arctic and no sign of such a bomb in periods that were even hotter than today over the last 130,000 years.
However, if the climate crisis worsens and temperatures continue to rise, large methane releases remain possibility in the long term and must be better understood, the scientists said.
First active leak of sea-bed methane discovered in Antarctica
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Methane is 84 times more powerful in trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and has caused about 30% of global heating to date. Its concentration in the atmosphere is now at two and a half times pre-industrial levels and continuing to rise, but most of this has come from fossil fuel exploitation, cattle, rice paddies and waste dumps.
Prof Nikolaus Froitzheim, at Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn, Germany, and who led the Siberian research, said: “We observed a significant increase in methane concentration starting last summer. This remained over the winter, so there must have been a steady steady flow of methane from the ground.
“At the moment, these anomalies are not of a very big magnitude, but it shows there is something going on that was not observed before and the carbon stock [of fossil gas] is large.
“We don’t know how dangerous [methane releases] are, because we don’t know how fast the gas can be released. It’s very important to know more about it,” Froitzheim said. If, at some point in the future, large global temperature rises lead to a big volume being released, “this methane would be the difference between catastrophe and apocalypse.”
Methane releases have been considered a possible climate tipping point, in which emissions of the gas cause further warming, which in turn drives even more releases.
However, Prof Gavin Schmidt, at Columbia University in the US, who was involved in the study, said it did not make a methane bomb any more likely: “There is simply no evidence for a big feedback in [climate records going back 130,000 years], when we know that the Arctic was still warmer than today. If temperatures exceed those levels, there aren’t any historical analogues we can use, but we are still some way from those levels.”
The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used satellite data to examine the Taymyr Peninsula and its surroundings in northern Siberia, which was hit by the world’s most extreme heat wave of 2020.
The areas where methane emissions rose coincided very closely with the geological boundaries of limestone formations that are several hundred kilometres long and already exploited by gas drilling at the western end of the basin. Gas stored in fractures in the limestone would be trapped by a solid layer of permafrost. “We think that with this [heatwave], the surface became unstable, which released the methane,” Froitzheim said.
The study concluded with the suggestion that “permafrost thaw does not only release microbial methane from formerly frozen soils, but also, and potentially in much higher amounts, [fossil] methane from reservoirs below. As a result, the permafrost–methane feedback may be much more dangerous than suggested by studies accounting for microbial methane alone.”
Stéphane Germain, the CEO of GHGSat, the company that produced the satellite data, said: “We launched the Pulse tool in the hope that it would raise awareness and stimulate discussions. I am pleased that Prof Froitzheim and his team have been able to make use of it.”
As well as methane from thawing soils and fossil gas, there is a very large reservoir of methane frozen with water in some parts of the world’s oceans. However, scientists believe it will take a long time for global heating to warm up these deeper waters. Even if this happened, they expect much of the released methane to be dissolved into sea water and broken down into CO2 by ocean bacteria before it reaches the atmosphere. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/07/it-was-like-a-monster-hurricane-matthew-leaves-haiti-in-crisis | World news | 2016-10-07T16:40:52.000Z | Sam Jones | It was like a monster': Hurricane Matthew leaves Haiti in crisis | Hurricane Matthew arrived thrashing at the door of Rosemika’s house in Croix-des-Bouquets at 6am on Tuesday.
“It happened so quickly and suddenly,” the 10-year-old told aid workers. “I heard my neighbour screaming: ‘Water! Water everywhere!’ It had completely surrounded us.”
Rosemika and her brothers and sisters ran, terrified, to the sanctuary of the hills. Like some of her friends in Haiti’s Ouest department, they lost their home to the fury of the wind and the rain.
The water “was like a monster, hitting everything violently,” she said.
Three days after the hurricane tore through the poorest country in the western hemisphere, taking with it thousands of homes, the scale of the destruction is only just beginning to emerge.
Natural disasters in Haiti
Haiti is all too accustomed to natural hazards and disasters. It was hit by four storms in 2008 – Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike – which killed more than 800 people. It also suffered dire flooding in 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007. In 1963, Hurricane Flora killed 6,000 people in Haiti and Cuba.
In January 2010, a devastating earthquake flattened parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed at least 90,000 people. In its wake there was a cholera epidemic, unwittingly introduced by UN peacekeepers, which has claimed about 10,000 lives.
Communications in the worst-hit departments of Grand’Anse and Sud are still badly affected and the loss of a bridge connecting the capital, Port-au-Prince, to the south-west is frustrating the relief effort.
There were fears by Friday afternoon that almost 600 people had been killed, but it will take days before a definitive toll can be established.
A Reuters tally of deaths reported by local civil protection officials suggested 842 people had died, but that figure has not been confirmed by the government or the civil protection agency. The government put the figure at nearly 300 and Radio Television Caraibes 264. Hervé Fourcand, a senator for Sud department, said more than 300 people had died in the region alone.
The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimates that more than a million Haitians have been affected, with hundreds of thousands of people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. It has launched a £5.8m appeal to help provide medical relief, shelter, water and sanitation over the next year.
The devastation has prompted the authorities to postpone the presidential election scheduled for Sunday as they try to gauge the scale of the country’s worst natural disaster since a devastating earthquake struck the country in January 2010.
Many victims were killed by falling trees, flying debris and swollen rivers when Matthew hit, bringing winds of 145mph.
Most of the fatalities were in towns and fishing villages around the western end of Tiburon peninsula in the south-west of the country, a region of Caribbean white sand beaches and rivers backed by hills.
Saint-Victor Jeune, an official with the civil protection agency working in the mountains on the outskirts of the devastated city of Jérémie in Grand’Anse department, said his team had found 82 bodies that had not been recorded by authorities in the capital because of patchy communications. Most appeared to have been killed by debris.
“We don’t have any contact with Port-au-Prince yet and there are places we still haven’t reached,” Jeune told the Associated Press as he and his colleagues searched the area.
A man sells brooms at a market in Port-au-Prince. Photograph: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images
The Haitian government, UN agencies and NGOs are now trying to get food, water and temporary shelters to those who have been stranded for three days already.
“We are only now beginning to see the full scale of the damage as we begin to reach more of the communities that have been cut off,” said Marie Therese Frederique Jean Pierre, Plan International’s country director in Haiti.
“Roads and bridges were severely damaged by the hurricane, so there are still some rural areas that we have been unable to reach.”
Prospery Raymond, Christian Aid’s Haiti director, said the charity’s efforts to get vital supplies out of Port-au-Prince were being hindered by traffic jams at river crossings. He also said there was a serious shortage of food in the badly-hit southern port town of Les Cayes.
“People are trying to cope together,” he said. “After the earthquake, some people don’t want to be in camps. They’re living in their gardens even if there’s nothing left and trying to grab protein from breadfruit. But for how long?”
Haiti devastated by Hurricane Matthew – drone video Guardian
Christian Aid has launched an appeal to help see people through the next few months by giving them water, food and cash, but Raymond said that money would also be needed to rebuild houses and buy seeds and livestock for farmers who had lost everything.
One of the biggest concerns is that Hurricane Matthew could provoke a surge in the cholera epidemic that has killed almost 10,000 Haitians since it was unwittingly introduced to the country by UN peacekeepers after the 2010 earthquake. To that end, NGOs and others are distributing soap, chlorine tablets and hygiene kits to the most vulnerable areas.
“Diarrhoea and cholera are a looming threat with flooding causing sewage to flow into the streets,” said Yolette Etienne, ActionAid’s country director. “Continued rain and flooding could cause water-borne disease to spread further.”
The immediate priority will be containing the humanitarian crisis, but work is already under way to try to plan for the coming months and years.
Hurricane Matthew: Haiti needs vaccines to stop deadly cholera spreading
Read more
Yvonne Helle, the UN Development Programme’s Haiti director, said people in Grand’Anse had lost everything - their houses, their fruit trees and their fields. With 80% of the crops in the south thought to have been washed out, its people had “basically lost their entire livelihoods and their food source”.
“It’s devastating,” she said, adding that the residents of the extremely poor rural area had no backup or safety net besides the remittances they receive from relatives overseas.
“Of course we need to focus on the humanitarian and keep everybody alive,” she said. “But we also want to get people back to their homes as soon as possible to rebuild, replant and pick up their lives.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/23/terry-oneill-id-love-to-have-photographed-amy-winehouse | Life and style | 2018-06-23T13:00:07.000Z | Ruth Huntman | Terry O’Neill: ‘I'd love to have photographed Amy Winehouse’ | I was a war baby, literally brought up in an air-raid shelter. The Nazis bombed Heston airfield [near Heathrow] at the bottom of our road every night. I’m lucky I’m here at all.
Mum never lived long enough to see my success. That’s a sadness. She wouldn’t have believed it. She hero-worshipped the kind of stars I’ve photographed and would take me to the stage doors after Saturday matinées to get autographs from the likes of Laurence Olivier.
One of my teachers singled me out to become a priest, along with another boy. After two years I was told I wouldn’t make it because I had too many questions and not enough belief. The other guy became a monsignor.
My reputation was bigger than the Beatles’ when I was sent to shoot them on my first newspaper. I was only 20, and the youngest photographer on Fleet Street. It was obvious that John was the one with the personality, so I put him in the front.
The cultural watershed of the 1960s gave working-class boys like me opportunities we wouldn’t have had otherwise. I wouldn’t have had a prayer of being successful in any other era.
There’s nobody around now I’d want to photograph. Amy Winehouse was the last person – real talent. All the proper stars have gone.
Frank Sinatra’s ex-wife Ava Gardner gave me a letter of introduction. And when Frank read it, he told everyone, “He’s with me.” And I was for the next 30 years. The first three weeks we barely spoke but he let me go everywhere with him. It taught me that a top photographer should “be there” but never get caught up in the lifestyle.
I turned down Marilyn Monroe. My girlfriend at the time was her publicist and she told me Marilyn took all her photographers to bed, so she wouldn’t let me work with her.
Getting romantically involved with people you shoot is a huge mistake. I did it once with my ex-wife, Faye Dunaway. I hated the whole circus after we married. I was becoming Mr Faye Dunaway.
Peter Sellers treated me like his psychiatrist. He’d ring me up at 2am and ask, “Why do all the women fall in love with you, Tel?” He could never understand why women wouldn’t fall in love with him. But I had no trick; I just bluffed it.
Being a Catholic boy I lost my nerve after taking those pictures of Raquel Welch on a giant crucifix, so I didn’t publish them for 30 years. The idea came to me after Raquel told me she thought she would have been crucified for wearing that revealing costume in One Million Years BC.
I turn 80 in July and I’ve no plans to mark it. For my 50th I went to dinner with Eric Clapton, Mickey Rourke and Bernie Ecclestone. Then I descended into a three-day depression. It was a proper midlife crisis. Now I’m at the stage of seeing all my mates die off. Michael Caine always says, “Tel, they’ve started bowling in our alley.” Fab way of putting it.
The Queen is the only person I’ve ever been nervous of photographing. I researched some horse-racing jokes to break the ice and thank God she laughed.
The perfectionist in me always left me thinking I could have taken a better shot. But now when I look at photos of all the icons I’ve shot – like Mandela, Sir Winston Churchill and Sinatra – the memories come flooding back and I think, “Yeah, I did all right.”
My Generation, featuring Terry O’Neill, is available now on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download
The headline to this article was ammended on 20 November 2019 to reflect the fact that Terry O’Neill had in fact photographed Amy Winehouse | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/02/new-wave-of-musical-biopics | Film | 2014-10-02T18:07:00.000Z | Andrew Pulver | From Hank to Hendrix and Joplin to Davis: the new wave of musical biopics | The film industry has always liked a musician biopic: not only do they tend to be inordinately famous (far more so than most authors/scientists/politicians you care to mention) as well as leading extravagantly eventful lives (ditto), they can also be relied on to drag with them a lucrative spin-off soundtrack and inject that indefinable air of louche hipness that other movies almost always lack. If you get it right, a musician biopic can be a peach of a role for someone (as Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, and Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter discovered). We’re currently experiencing a mini-wave of the genre, with films about soul maestro James Brown (Get On Up) and guitar slinger Jimi Hendrix (Jimi: All Is By My Side) making their way into cinemas. And there are more on the way …
HANK WILLIAMS
In between gigs as Loki in innumerable Thor and Avengers movies, housewives’ choice Tom Hiddleston is shooting I Saw the Light, a biopic of pioneering country act Williams who died aged 29 in 1953. Hiddleston’s casting in the role is not without controversy – Williams’ grandson has vociferously objected to a squeaky-voiced Brit playing his grandpa – though Hiddleston does bear a striking resemblance to the singer. Hiddleston has also shown he can carry off a musician role, having played a gaunt, centuries-old rocker in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive – and knocked out the crowd at the Wheatland music festival in Michigan with a couple of Williams classics.
Tom Hiddleston with Rodney Crowell at Wheatland music festival.
FREDDIE MERCURY
This has been bit of a saga. The world first learned that a biopic of the Queen frontman was in serious development when it was revealed in 2010 that Sacha Baron Cohen was due to play the lead role. However, three years later Baron Cohen ducked out after reported disagreements with the surviving members of the band, who were apparently concerned that Baron Cohen was “too recognisable” and would turn Mercury into “a joke”. Ben Whishaw, a more sensitive-seeming figure, has replaced Baron Cohen; the occupant of the director’s chair is yet to be ascertained, as original pick Dexter Fletcher bailed in March. It has heavyweight producers behind it, including actor Robert De Niro, so in all likelihood this won’t run out of steam; it’s just taking its time.
BRIAN WILSON
Ever since the former Beach Boy sensationally re-emerged in 2004 with his long-lost album Smile, after decades of seclusion and rumour, a movie was always going to be on the cards. And so it proved, with producer Bill Pohlad reviving a project that had apparently been sitting around since the late 1980s, and then taking the directorial reins himself. The subsequent film, Love & Mercy, after Wilson’s 1988 single from his first solo album, has turned out to be one of those fashionably non-linear affairs, with Paul Dano playing the fresh-faced 1960s Wilson, breaking musical boundaries with Pet Sounds, and John Cusack the raddled 1980s incarnation, struggling to break his isolation through extended therapy. The reviews have been decent, though hardly ecstatic; with no release date set for the US or UK, it may be a while before everyone else gets a look.
Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy. Photograph: Francois Duhamel/Allstar Picture Library
FRANK SINATRA
For the past half decade, a biopic of the Chairman of the Board has been the property of one man: Martin Scorsese. Ever since it was formally announced in 2009, it has seemed a natural pairing: the greatest Italian-American director on the greatest Italian-American singer. Actually, getting it off the ground has been another story. Scorsese has multiple projects on the go, and getting one of the few A-listers able to carry the film is always going to be tricky – Scorsese reportedly has been considering George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and Al Pacino, with the latter named as Scorsese’s first choice – though of course a multi-stranded Love & Mercy style piece is always an option. Apparently the project is still very much on, but it’s in that will-it-won’t-it grey zone.
MILES DAVIS
A passion project for Don Cheadle – who is credited as director, star, co-writer and producer – this account of the legendary jazz man’s “silent period” in the late 70s is now called Miles Ahead, rather than the tangy Kill the Trumpet Player. It started filming in July this year, ballasted by a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $340,000, with Ewan McGregor (as a music journalist) decorating the cast. Despite his awful cockney accent in the Ocean’s Eleven films, Cheadle is a much-liked figure, and everyone (you would think) will want him to succeed. The Davis family are on his side too, so at least the film can use Davis’s actual music – though Herbie Hancock is on board as composer, so no doubt we’ll find out how the soundtrack has been carved up.
Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead. Photograph: Facebook
JANIS JOPLIN
The raspy-voiced blues moaner has been in Hollywood’s crosshairs for more than a decade, with one project after another biting the dust. Pink, Zooey Deschanel and Renée Zellweger have all been in the frame to play Joplin, who died in 1970 after a heroin overdose, with Fernando Mereilles, Penelope Spheeris and Catherine Hardwicke all possibilities behind the camera. The moving finger, however, seems to have settled on Amy Adams in an effort called Get It While You Can, and though Lee “The Butler” Daniels was being talked up as director back in 2012, his name appears to have disappeared from the credits. That means this one has gone back in the betting, though Adams – thoroughly starrified after her fifth Oscar nomination for American Hustle – ought to have the clout to force it through.
Janis Joplin. Photograph: Peter Larsen/Rex
SUSAN BOYLE
With all those millions of Youtube hits behind her, you’d have thought a Susan Boyle movie would be a safe bet. But as the film industry has learned to its cost, clickthrough doesn’t necessarily translate to box office. That hasn’t stopped a series of properly idiotic attempts at media seeding, with Boyle herself suggesting Meryl Streep was seriously looking at the role. Back on planet Earth, there may be movement on this, as Simon Cowell has definitely got the taste for movie-making, and he’s never been slow to exploit one of his Britain’s Got Talent/X-Factor properties. 20th Century Fox has also shown an interest, particularly in the jukebox musical I Dreamed a Dream, which set out on tour in 2012. One small hurdle – Syco is backed by Fox’s rival studio Sony, so this may take some working out. File under: possible.
Kurt Cobain. Photograph: Terry McGinnis/WireImage
KURT COBAIN
The former Nirvana frontman, who killed himself in 1994, is another one of those tragic-glamour figures who gets film-makers so hot under the collar. Nick Broomfield got his Kurt & Courtney documentary out in 1998 and Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film Last Days was a thinly disguised Cobain pic, featuring Michael Pitt as someone called Blake. Makers of any “official” version will have to make a deal with Courtney Love, and she appears to have settled on Brett Morgen, best know for his documentaries on the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture). The project has landed with Britain’s Working Title and you would think they will set it up with their usual professionalism – though little actual progress appears to have been made, as no writer, director or actors have been announced. Still, Morgen is optimistic, telling the NME that it “will be this generation’s The Wall – a mix of animation and live action that’ll allow the audience to experience Kurt in a way they never have before. It’s very ambitious.”
GREGG ALLMAN
After being given a Hollywood boost by Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (which was partly inspired by Crowe’s Rolling Stone writing assignment to cover an Allman Brothers tour in the early 70s), Allman himself got a film off the ground based on his memoir, My Cross to Bear. However, the whole thing collapsed in February when, shortly after shooting began, camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed by a train on set. Mired in lawsuits and criminal indictments, the film appears to have been abandoned, not least at Allman’s own urging – who, as executive producer, is also a defendant in a wrongful death suit brought by Jones’s parents. The project is not likely to be revived; a sad outcome of a tragic incident. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/05/we-knew-putin-would-attack-ukraine-back-in-2011-says-bill-clinton | World news | 2023-05-05T17:42:23.000Z | Julian Borger | We knew in 2011 Putin would attack Ukraine, says Bill Clinton | Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton three years before his 2014 attack on Ukraine that he was not bound by the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing the country’s territorial integrity, according to the former US president.
The revelation raises questions about whether the US and its European allies should have been more prepared for the 2014 attack, when Russia annexed Crimea and attacked the Donbas.
Clinton said he had talked to the Russian president at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, where Putin brought up the issue of the memorandum, under which Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan agreed in 1994 to give up the nuclear arsenal they inherited on their territory from the Soviet Union, in return for assurances their sovereignty would be respected “within existing borders”.
It was signed by Boris Yeltsin on behalf of Russia, Clinton for the US, and John Major on behalf of the UK, acting as a third guarantor nation.
“Putin told me in 2011, three years before he took Crimea, that he did not agree with the agreement I made with Boris Yeltsin, that they would respect Ukraine’s territory if they gave up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton said on Thursday at a public discussion at 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural and community centre in New York.
“Putin said to me: ‘… I know Boris agreed to go along with you and John Major and Nato, but he never got it through the Duma [Russian parliament]. We have our extreme nationalists too. I don’t agree with it and I do not support it and I’m not bound by it.’
“I knew from that day forward, it was just a matter of time,” the former president said of Putin launching an attack.
The Russian leader had already launched an invasion of Chechnya in 1999, and Georgia in 2008.
After the seizure of Crimea in 2014, Putin claimed Russia was not bound by the Budapest Memorandum because the Maidan revolution and change of government in Kyiv earlier that year meant Ukraine had become a different state. “In respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents,” he said.
However, his conversation with Clinton suggests Putin had decided not to honour the agreement years before the Maidan uprising.
Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said Putin’s remarks to Clinton were not made widely known among members of the Obama administration, but added he assumed the former president must have told his wife, Hillary, who was secretary of state.
Fried, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Putin had threatened Ukrainian territorial integrity three years before the Davos meeting with Clinton, at a Nato-Russia council meeting in April 2008, during the Bush administration. Putin declared that when Crimea had been transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 “not all legal procedures were followed”.
Fried said: “I was present, sitting next to the then Polish national security adviser, Mariusz Handzlik. We both stood up in alarm and turned to each other, saying, ‘Did you just hear what I heard?’
“From that moment, I thought Putin would turn on Ukraine and said so to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley,” he added, referring to the secretary of state and national security adviser respectively in the Bush administration.
“The US government was surprised by the Crimean operation but should not have been, given the warnings,” Fried said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/13/deliver-us-review-delirious-baby-antichrist-horror-smothered-in-surreal-visions | Film | 2024-02-13T13:00:45.000Z | Catherine Bray | Deliver Us review – delirious baby antichrist horror smothered in surreal visions | Expectant parents, look away now. Deliver Us takes a leaf out of the books of the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen by giving us a nun in Russia who is apparently pregnant with twins – one the antichrist, one the son of God. The Vatican sends in Father Fox (Lee Roy Kunz, who also co-directs) to investigate, and all sorts of visions and dreams and shenanigans ensue. If you’ve ever wanted to see a naked bride of Christ plunge deliriously into a cross-shaped hole in the surface of a frozen lake in the dead of night, you’ve come to the right place.
Deliver Us might have a hokey sort of premise, but it’s one that has the potential to spawn a neat little horror movie. However, the film has loftier ambitions, and isn’t quite the silly knockabout schlock you’d expect. Co-directors Cru Ennis and Kunz (with screenplay by Kunz and his brother Kane Kunz) take a deadly serious approach to the material, which in some ways is refreshing: any horror fan will tell you that endlessly camp horror-comedy can wear thin after a while. At first, the gravity with which the ripe material is handled works in the film’s favour. An opening sequence full of out-of-shot beheadings and footage of knives gliding through ritualistically tattooed flesh is realistically staged, and promises a genuinely terrifying film that then largely fails to materialise. The excellent cinematography retains a sense of moody purpose throughout, with plenty of desaturated landscapes recalling Bruegel’s famously wintry Hunters in the Snow.
But as the film progresses, it becomes painfully apparent that the problem is the talkier, plot-based material in between the set-pieces and surreal visions, with a dour screenplay struggling to maintain narrative momentum. The result is that you find yourself just waiting for the next scene with a murderous one-eyed priest, random beartrap or bitey breastfeeding. It’s a shame as this had the potential to be pretty good.
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Deliver Us is released on 19 February on digital platforms | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/30/european-politicians-accused-of-conspiring-with-libyan-coastguard-to-push-back-refugees | World news | 2022-11-30T10:21:57.000Z | Philip Oltermann | European politicians accused of conspiring with Libyan coastguard to push back refugees | High-profile European politicians, including the EU’s former foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, Italy’s current and former interior ministers and the current and former prime ministers of Malta, have been named as the subjects of a criminal complaint at the international criminal court alleging they conspired with Libya’s coastguard to illegally push back refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
The criminal complaint, which was submitted at The Hague by the German NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), accuses the politicians of committing several “crimes against humanity in the form of the severe deprivation of physical liberty” between 2018 and 2021 by systematically intercepting boats in the Med and sending refugees back into detention in Libya.
The pushbacks began in February 2017 when the Italian government struck a deal with Libya, offering to fund, equip and train its coastguard to intercept and bring boats back to a country where aid agencies said they suffered abuse and torture.
A day later, the deal was approved by the European Council.
Marco Minniti, who was the Italian interior minister at the time of the deal, is among the individuals named in the complaint as co-conspirators behind the push-back scheme. Other individuals named as co-conspirators include Matteo Salvini, the far-right leader who served as interior minister in 2018-2019 and his then chief of staff, and Matteo Piantedosi, who is now interior minister.
Minniti told the Guardian: “I don’t know [about the] complaint. I will evaluate it, like the other interior ministers from 2017 until today. At the time, the agreement was signed by the Italian prime minister, [Paolo] Gentiloni, and his counterpart, [Fayez] al-Sarraj. So, from all the records, it appears that I am not the signatory.”
The deal proved successful at reducing migration, with the number of people arriving on Italy’s southern shores during the first half of 2018 falling 81% compared with the same period in 2017. The measure was renewed for a further two years in 2020 and again earlier this month for one year. The pact costs Italy €13m a year.
As part of its complaint the German human rights group has submitted evidence documenting 12 incidents where refugee boats were intercepted in the Mediterranean, including aerial photographs and intercepted radio calls that point to a collusion between European authorities and Libyan coastguards.
In one such radio call, dated 12 February 2020, an EU Frontex aircraft appears to contact Libyan coastguards about a boat, signing off with “mission complete” after it was intercepted.
“This deal is totally in line with the policy of the EU,” said Christopher Hein a professor of law and immigration policies at Luiss University in Rome. “It is a bilateral agreement, but it is supported and co-financed by the EU.”
Hein said “tens of thousands” of people had been intercepted and brought back to Libya since 2017, with 35,000 intercepted so far this year.
A spokesperson for Salvini declined to comment when approached by the Guardian. A spokesperson for Piantedosi said he could not comment on a legal complaint that he had not yet seen.
Malta’s current prime minister, Robert Abela, his predecessor, Joseph Muscat, the former high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy Federica Mogherini, and the former executive director of European border agency Frontex Fabrice Leggeri are also listed.
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If The Hague were to accept the complaint, the listed politicians and officials could in theory become suspects in a criminal trial and be summoned to appear in front of the Netherlands-based international tribunal.
While officials of EU agencies generally have immunity from legal proceedings for acts performed in their official capacity, an agreement between the ICC and the European Commission does allow for immunity to be waived in certain circumstances.
The complaint follows an earlier submission to the ICC in June 2019 by international lawyers Juan Branco and Omer Shatz, which called for the EU to be prosecuted over the deaths of thousands of people who had drowned fleeing Libya on the “world’s deadliest migration route”, although it did not single out individual politicians or officials for specific responsibility.
This article was amended on 2 December 2022 to include reference to the June 2019 submission to the ICC. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/10/hungary-stoops-to-new-low-over-treatment-of-asylum-seekers | World news | 2017-02-10T18:32:04.000Z | Patrick Wintour | Hungary 'stoops to new low' over treatment of asylum seekers | Hungary has been accused of “stooping to a new low” after it announced plans to detain all asylum seekers in shipping containers near the border with Serbia.
The government of prime minister Viktor Orbán says the measure is necessary to secure the EU’s borders and deter migrants coming into the country from the Middle East via Serbia. It has already set up two razor fences on the border with Serbia and is deploying more than 600 soldiers to guard the fence.
But Amnesty International said the measure was in clear contravention of EU law and the Refugee Convention.
According to the AFP news agency, asylum seekers are to be held at four military bases along the fence, where they will be housed in barracks built from shipping containers. Each camp will have room for 150 people, the agency reported.
The government is due to submit its proposal to parliament, which will then debate and vote on the measures within weeks. It will involve taking hundreds of existing asylum seekers to the container camps.
The new regulations will be implemented only as long as the government-declared state of emergency over mass migration is in place, such as the one currently in force.
Hungary submits plans to EU to detain all asylum seekers
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The government’s chief spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, had announced at a briefing in London this week that all asylum seekers will be detained during the entire period of their asylum application, rather than being released pending an appeal.
But giving further details following government meetings Orban’s chief of staff, János Lázár, said all current and future asylum seekers would be transferred to container camps in a so-called “transit zone” near the border, where they would be held for the duration of their asylum application process.
Asylum appeals would by default be conducted with the asylum seeker attending only via a video link to a court, rather than in person.
“People’s freedom of movement will be removed,” said Lázár. “They will be able to stay only in a place designated for them. This place will be the state border, where containers suitable for accommodating 200 to 300 people will be erected. Migrants will have to wait there for a legally binding decision on their claims.”
Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe, said: “Rounding up all men, women and children seeking asylum and detaining them for months on end in container camps is a new low in Hungary’s race to the bottom on asylum seekers and refugees.
A deep new low. #Hungary wants to detain all asylum seekers in containers. https://t.co/XbMnZxsUEn pic.twitter.com/8nKalNHb7y
— Gauri van Gulik (@GaurivanGulik) February 10, 2017
“By amending a raft of laws to lock up all asylum seekers, the Hungarian government will inflict unnecessary trauma, compounding what people seeking protection have already suffered. The government has in no way proven that the detention of each asylum seeker would be reasonable, necessary and proportionate. Detention should always be the last resort and not an knee-jerk reaction, as is the case here.
“This is further evidence that the EU needs to stand firm on Hungary’s flagrant disregard for European and international law.”
People seeking asylum cannot currently be detained in the so-called “transit zones” along Hungary’s border with Serbia for more than four weeks, after which they must be allowed inside the country. The reform under consideration would remove that time limit and introduce mandatory detention for the whole duration of the asylum procedure.
Hungarians fought for freedom in 1956, not Viktor Orbán’s rabble-rousers
George Szirtes
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Access to transit zones set up at the border with Serbia has already been severely restricted, human rights groups claim.
But Kovács said: “What we’ve seen in the past is asylum seekers abusing the legal framework of Hungarian and EU law. Instead of waiting for the final decision, they head for Germany and the Nordic countries and within [the] Schengen [Area] it is impossible to stop this.”
He promised that asylum seekers would be provided with food and education for children during their detention, adding that at any time an asylum seeker would be entitled to return to their country of origin.
Kovács was reluctant to guarantee access to the camps for the international media, but said the determination in Europe to protect its borders was hardening, as shown by the recent EU Malta summit, and challenged the rest of the EU to explain why they had not taken up Hungary’s stance earlier.
German chancellor Angela Merkel this week announced plans to be tougher with processing asylum seekers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/25/we-need-action-immediately-great-barrier-reef-authority-confirms-sixth-mass-coral-bleaching-event | Environment | 2022-03-25T04:14:52.000Z | Graham Readfearn | Great Barrier Reef authority confirms unprecedented sixth mass coral bleaching event | The Great Barrier Reef has been hit with a sixth mass coral bleaching event, the marine park’s authority has confirmed, with aerial surveys showing almost no reefs across a 1,200km stretch escaping the heat.
The Guardian understands a United Nations mission currently under way to check the health and management of the reef will be briefed on the initial findings of the surveys as early as Friday in Townsville.
The confirmation from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) marks an alarming milestone for the ocean icon, with 2022 going down as the first time mass bleaching has happened in a cooler La Niña year which scientists had hoped would be a period of recovery for corals.
Government scientists said the confirmation showed the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions that were driving the repeated mass bleachings.
UN mission must see coral bleaching to get ‘whole picture’ of Great Barrier Reef, experts say
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Dr David Wachenfeld, GBRMPA chief scientist, told the Guardian bleaching wasn’t expected in a La Niña.
“But having said that, the climate is changing and the planet and the reef is about 1.5 degrees centigrade warmer than it was 150 years ago. Because of that, the weather is changing. Unexpected events are now to be expected. Nothing surprises me any more.”
Aerial surveys, mostly using helicopters, were completed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) and GBRMPA on Wednesday along the entire 2,300km length of the marine park covering about 750 individual reefs.
The marine park is divided into four management areas, and Wachenfeld said there was widespread bleaching in all four zones. “Therefore, we can confirm this is the fourth mass bleaching event since 2016 and also the first under La Niña condition,” he said.
Dr Neal Cantin, an Aims research scientist, led one of two observing teams and personally observed reefs from helicopters across 1,800km.
Between the Whitsunday Islands and Cooktown he said he “did not fly over a reef and score it as ‘no bleaching’”.
Reefs closer to the shore between the Whitsunday Islands to Cooktown had seen the most extreme bleaching, but the “spatial footprint of severe bleaching is very wide”.
Most reefs along that stretch were recorded as “severe”, which means at least 60% of an individual reef’s corals had bleached. Some of those reefs also had corals that had bleached and then died in the last few weeks.
But even within this, there was variability between reefs and across individual coral colonies. Bleaching in the southern section of the marine park was much milder than elsewhere, and there were some reefs there with no bleaching at all.
Coral bleaching happens when the animal becomes stressed from above-average water temperatures. The coral animal expels the algae that lives inside them and provides the coral with food and colour.
Corals can survive bleaching and Cantin said between now and the end of the year, scientists at Aims and elsewhere would be carrying out in-water checks to see how many corals survived and regained their colour.
Widespread mass bleaching of corals on the reef was first seen in 1998, and happened again in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and now 2022.
‘It’s not supposed to be white’: one of the Great Barrier Reef’s healthiest reefs succumbs to bleaching
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Scientists started raising the alarm for this year’s event as early as December, when ocean temperatures over the reef hit a record high for that month.
Studies have shown that heat stress can have several “sublethal” effects on corals, including making them more susceptible to disease, slowing their growth and limiting their ability to spawn.
Cantin said it appeared this year’s bleaching had covered a wider area than back-to-back outbreaks in 2016 and 2017, but the intensity of the heat was broadly lower than those years.
“The fact that we are seeing a mass bleaching event in a La Niña year is concerning and a clear sign of the increasing intensity of climate change and ocean warming,” he said.
“I’m extremely concerned – beyond concerned. We need action immediately. We are on bleaching watch every year. The spacial footprint of severe heat is increasing at an alarming rate. It’s also happening faster than was predicted 20 years ago. The severity and frequency is very alarming.”
North of Cooktown many reefs are dominated by a family of boulder-shaped corals called porites, some of which can grow several metres wide and live for centuries. Some porites had bleached, Cantin said.
He said the bleaching along the whole reef strongly overlapped satellite observations of heat stress and ocean temperature from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Wachenfeld said climatologists would study the factors that drove this year’s bleaching to establish statistical probabilities of it happening under a changed climate.
“But in my experience, this could not have happened without climate change,” he said. “We need to see [these events’] as the reef ringing a very loud alarm bell about the impacts of climate change.
“The reef remains a vast and resilient ecosystem. Despite the concerns that we have when we see a climate-driven impact like this, we have to maintain determination and hope for the future.
“But that determination and hope has to be based on the strongest and fastest possible action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally and the ongoing commitments of governments, the community and industry to protect the system.”
Two scientists – one from Unesco and another from the International Union for Conservation of Nature – will be briefed on the findings of the aerial surveys in the coming days as part of their 10-day monitoring mission.
The mission, which started with briefings in Brisbane on Monday, will compile a report to go before the next world heritage meeting currently scheduled for June.
Last year, scientific advisors at Unesco recommended the reef be placed on a list of world heritage sites “in danger” because of impacts from climate change and slow progress on improving water quality.
But fierce and sustained lobbying from the Morrison government saw the 21-country committee go against that advice. The committee said it wanted to see Australia accelerate efforts on climate change through its reef policy.
Australia requested Unesco carry out the monitoring mission, but the UN agency is keeping details of the mission confidential.
Conservation groups and the government’s own reef envoy, Cairns-based MP Warren Entsch, have said the UN mission should be taken to see the bleaching. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/aug/29/placebo-effect-detox-harm | Science | 2011-08-29T12:04:57.000Z | Edzard Ernst | Detox: flushing out poison or absorbing dangerous claptrap? | Colonic irrigation has been the subject of many newspaper articles in recent weeks. So one might think the debate about this subject has come and gone. But, as so often when it comes to alternative medicine, much of what was written did not make a lot of sense. Time, perhaps, to look at this treatment and any new evidence in some detail.
Colonic irrigation is, of course, a "detox" therapy. In medicine, the term detox is used in two different ways. In conventional medicine, it describes a programme of weaning drug-dependent patients off their addiction. In alternative medicine, the term is used for treatments allegedly ridding the body of toxins.
Alternative detox is all the rage and comes in many guises – anything from diet or supplements to steam-baths or ear-candles. The common denominator is that, allegedly, the body is stimulated to eliminate poisonous substances. The claim is that, if we are not treated in this way, such toxins would cause ill health in all of us. Yet, these assumptions are both wrong and dangerous.
Unless someone is very severely ill, the elimination of toxins is most efficiently being taken care of by various organs – for instance, the liver, kidneys, skin, lungs and the gut. In a healthy person, the function of these systems is already optimal. No improvements are needed or can be achieved by detox therapies.
Proponents of alternative detox have never been able to demonstrate that their treatments actually decrease the level of any specific toxin in the body. Yet such studies would be very simple to conduct: name the toxin, measure its level before and after the treatment and compare the readings. Why do such studies not exist? I suspect it is because the promoters of detox treatments know only too well that their results would not confirm their assumptions. And that would, of course, be bad for business.
The concepts of detox are not just wrong but also dangerous. They imply that a person can happily over-indulge, ie poison his/her "system" with toxins, and subsequently put everything right again by applying this or that detox method. This message might prompt people to live unhealthy lifestyles in the belief they are causing no harm to themselves. A recent study concluded that "dietary supplement use may create illusory invulnerability, reducing the self-regulation of smoking". In this trial, 74 smokers were randomised in two groups. One lot were given pills to take and told accurately that they were placebos. The other group were given the same pill but told it was a dietary supplement with positive health effects. Those volunteers thinking they were taking the supplement smoked more as a result. A further experiment then demonstrated that the effect was due to people feeling a higher degree of "invulnerability" when taking a "healthy" supplement.
One of the most popular detox treatments is colonic irrigation. Conventional healthcare describes the technique used for cleansing the colon, for instance, before surgery. In alternative medicine, colonic irrigation is promoted by celebrities, alternative practitioners and their organisations for a very wide range of indications: alcoholism, allergies, arthritis, asthma, backache, bad breath, bloating, coated tongue, colitis, constipation, damage caused by nicotine or other environmental factors, fatigue, headache, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, indigestion, insomnia, joint problems, liver insufficiency, loss of concentration, mental disorders, parasites infestation, proneness to infections, rheumatoid arthritis, sinus congestion, skin problems, ulcerative colitis and many more. However, there is no good evidence from controlled clinical trials to suggest that colonic irrigation lowers toxin levels of the body or that it is an effective therapy for any condition at all. None of the numerous claims made by therapists and their professional organisations are therefore supported by good evidence.
But why not? If the person wants it, or feels better for it, or experiences weight loss after it, then he or she should have it. There are several reasons why this argument is problematic. The perceived benefit after the treatment is based on a wrong impression; even the weight lost is not real, it merely corresponds to the contents of the colon which fills up again in a matter of hours – true body weight loss does not occur. Moreover, there are risks associated with colonic irrigation. The side-effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, nervous disturbances, cramps and irritations as well as electrolyte depletion, water intoxication, bowel perforation and infection, kidney failure, pancreatitis or heart failure. One also wonders what colonic irrigation does to the bacteria on our gut. Severe side-effects might be rare but, considering the lack of true benefit from colonic irrigation, they still mean that the risks of this treatment do not outweigh its benefits.
This brings us back to the recent media attention on colonic irrigation. It was triggered by a paper entitled "The dangers of colon cleansing". It did not refer to "new studies" as Susanne Moore put it but merely reported the cases of two patients for whom this treatment had brought life-threatening side-effects. The authors also confirmed that "no scientifically robust studies in support of this practice" exist.
Writing in the Guardian, Susanne Moore argued that "all the fine doctors and sceptics who rail against such nuttiness never take into account the psychological reasons that people seek out these forms of help". I think she is wrong. Good doctors do just that. Many promoters of "integrated medicine" seem to think that clinicians are either caring or scientific. The undeniable fact, however, is that good doctors are both: they care for their patients (this involves taking into account "psychological reasons" for their actions) and they realise how important science is for optimal healthcare. The notion of "either/or" is nonsense which only serves those who want to smuggle unproven or disproven treatments into the NHS by calling it "integrated medicine".
Edzard Ernst is professor of complementary medicine at Peninsula Medical School, Exeter | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/15/ofm-awards-2017-local-food-hero-pop-up-soup-kitchen-trevor-blaney | Food | 2017-10-15T10:00:28.000Z | Tim Adams | OFM Awards 2017: Local Food Hero – The Pop Up Soup Kitchen | Trevor Blaney sees a different Isle of Wight to the one enjoyed by day trippers and tourists. Driving with him in his 4x4 on one of the last days of summer you start to see his version too. “There’s a lad living in the hedge over there, who we help out,” he will say. Or he will point out derelict holiday chalets or boarded-up hotels in which people have made their homes. Blaney is a native of south Yorkshire but he has lived here for 30 years. He first started to see the island in a new way when he volunteered at a council-backed homeless shelter. “It was OK,” he recalls, “but it was clear that the real problems lay with people who were excluded from the night shelter because of their addictions or mental health. Being a rural place these people take to the woods and the fields rather than shop doorways. They are less visible. I decided to go out and find these people and try to look after them.”
At the end of 2014, Blaney borrowed a catering trailer from a friend and started a Facebook page, with some of the images of people he had found sleeping rough in November – two young men living in a three-sided corrugated-iron shelter, others in makeshift tents in the woods or on the beach. The page had a slow start but it gained momentum. “To begin with only my friends saw it,” Blaney says. “Oddly, people who I had been to school with and hardly seen since, first donated a fiver here and a tenner there.”
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One man's DIY mission to feed the homeless - video
Blaney is an engineer by background. He retired at 50 to live off the income from some of the patents he had established, notably for a bath plug that changes colour if the water temperature is too hot. He is, he insists, not religious and not political – but he saw his Pop Up Soup Kitchen as a way of helping to address one of the island’s most intractable problems. Over the course of that winter, his idea caught the imagination of local people. Supermarkets contacted him to offer the food that was going to waste, and it went from there. “That first winter I fed dozens of people,” Blaney says. “That has now risen to hundreds. One week, I think I did meals for 225 people on the island.”
In the last two years, he has burned out two vans criss-crossing the 20 miles between the island’s coasts. In the summer, he goes out a couple of times a week, in the winter it is every other day. “Soup is very important because I can deliver it in flasks and it keeps warm for the next day,” he says. “When it started, I was making food at home, now it is on more of an industrial scale.” He gets a lot of help from students, some with learning difficulties, at the local institute of technology. “They cook for the soup kitchen, so we take a lot of produce there. At any one time I have about a thousand litres of soup available,” he says. “I give away more than 75 litres a week.” Kale with ginger is a favourite among his regulars, and “obviously chicken and veg”.
He takes me to a little settlement of trailers and shelters hidden behind a superstore, a place you would never guess from the road. The long-term residents of this makeshift settlement have helped him set up a temporary night shelter and alerted him to young people they know who are sleeping rough.
The soup kitchen now has its own food drop-off points, with local businesses getting involved. “I never know,” Blaney says, “when the phone will ring with someone saying, ‘We’ve done a big carvery and we’ve got all this left over,’ or a supermarket will call saying, ‘We have had a freezer break down.’” He’s been called out to take surplus sandwiches from a funeral. “Everyone on the island has me on speed dial,” he says, with a laugh.
The soup kitchen has become something of a local phenomenon, filling a few gaps the austerity council budget can’t reach. It now has a charity shop in Newport. People bring sleeping bags. Hotels that have closed down have given their bedding. Blaney tries to let necessity be the mother of invention.
The first winter I fed dozens of people. That's now risen to hundreds. One week, I did meals for 225 people
He has some ladies in Ryde who make jams and preserves. One particular woman’s jam is so good he discovered that homeless people use it as currency.
He is wary, too, of unintended consequences. The BBC did a feature on the soup kitchen and one result seemed to be that there was an influx of “homeless tourists” who saw the Isle of Wight as a step up from what they were living with on the mainland.
He takes me to another of his initiatives, a “Waste Not Want Not” horsebox-trailer-cum-food-bank which he tours the island with on a rota. Inside, Vicki, a mum of seven kids aged 10 to 19, is picking up a few essentials. She currently lives in a hostel room around the corner with six of the kids. The trailer is looked after by Dave, who along with Blaney’s son is the only other soup kitchen organiser (none of them, including Blaney, take any salary). Dave fought in the Gulf war in 1991, and has severe PTSD. When he first came to the Isle of Wight and found himself homeless, he walked past Blaney’s temporary night shelter in Ryde five times before he plucked up the courage to go in.
The trailer is well stocked. “We try to turn over things quickly,” Blaney says. “We get an abundance of things like eggs and sugar from supermarkets. If one egg gets broken, or a sugar packet splits, they have to throw the lot away. Eggs and flour go to a women’s refuge where they do baking. The sugar I often give to a local Indian restaurant; in return, Abdul who runs it gives me vouchers for homeless people and they can redeem them for a free takeaway. He gets a bit of publicity on our Facebook page – when we launched that idea, it had 66,000 views. I have become a master of social media.”
“I know where all the locations of secret food are,” Dave says, with a smile. “Trevor has freezers everywhere. In the office, we have 600 sausages, 400 litres of soup, ready to go. And we have a couple of phones people can use if they want to get hold of family.” Along with his son, Blaney has developed another rough and ready solution. “If there is a caravan going begging somewhere, we tosh it up and persuade a farmer to put it in the corner of a field and that can be a home for someone, with a heater, a bed.” The size of his operation allows him to move much more quickly and more flexibly than more established charities, he believes. “If someone gets their tent and belongings burned overnight I need to act fast to get them somewhere to stay. Or I will get someone a suit so he has a bit of dignity at his parents’ funeral.”
When people ask Blaney what is the solution to homelessness, he offers no easy answers. “Politicians who suggest there is a magic bullet are wrong. You don’t get rid of the problems that lead to homelessness easily.” The key thing, he believes, is just to make people a bit comfortable and then work from there. “If you get people the basics, some hot food, a decent bed, they can start to cope and a bit more is possible.”
popupsoupkitchen.co.uk | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/15/police-leader-calls-tiktok-investigate-oxford-street-robbery-campaign | UK news | 2023-08-15T09:40:55.000Z | Sammy Gecsoyler | Police leader calls on TikTok to investigate Oxford Street ‘robbery’ campaign | A UK policing leader has called on TikTok to investigate an Oxford Street “robbery” campaign that was supposedly orchestrated on the platform and led to shuttered stores and a number of arrests.
Donna Jones, the chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), said: “If I was a person in charge of governance of TikTok at the moment, I would be running an investigation to find out what has happened, particularly as there are very well known social media influencers on that particular social media channel who are linked directly to what happened in Oxford Street.”
She added: “They have a duty to play here to prevent criminal activity being orchestrated through their channels.”
Last Wednesday, the Metropolitan police arrested nine people and issued 34 dispersal orders after hundreds of teenagers gathered outside JD Sports on the capital’s busiest shopping street in apparent response to widely shared posts on Snapchat and TikTok, which urged users to take part in an “Oxford Circus JD robbery” at 3pm.
Jones also called on parents and guardians whose children may have taken part in the incident to explain to them that it was a criminal act. She said: “I hope that there were parents who were looking at that footage, particularly from Oxford Street last week, to see if their child or someone they are the guardian of was there.
“If they were, I hope multiple conversations have been had with those young people to explain to them how its criminal, and how it must not be repeated. If it is repeated, then it’s quite right that there should be formal criminal sanctions taken against them.”
She said parents who felt they could not control their children was “exactly why we’re having this social breakdown”.
Jones also said she was aware of other “worrying” incidents that were organised on TikTok, with one leading to children being hospitalised.
“In Southampton over the weekend, young people aged between 15 and 17 decided to challenge each other to take a paracetamol overdose to see who could get hospitalised, and who could be hospitalised the longest.
“The person who remained in hospital for the most hours being the person who won said challenge. And of course this is incredibly worrying. It is putting young people’s lives at danger,” she said.
Last Thursday, police in Southend-on-Sea were given new powers to issue dispersal orders that would ban anyone suspected of acting antisocially due to fears of a TikTok-organised gathering. Those who did not comply could be arrested.
According to Jones, who was elected as chair of the APCC last month, a planned incident in Bexleyheath, south-east London, was successfully intercepted by the Met.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, called on those responsible for the Oxford Street incident to be “hunted down and locked up”. On Twitter, which is now known as X, Braverman said: “We cannot allow the kind of lawlessness seen in some American cities to come to the streets of the UK. The police have my full backing to do whatever necessary to ensure public order.”
She added: “Those responsible must be hunted down and locked up. I expect nothing less from the Met and have requested a full incident report.”
TikTok has denied responsibility for the Oxford Street “robbery” campaign. A spokesperson said: “We have seen no evidence to support these claims, and we have zero tolerance for content facilitating or encouraging criminal activities.
“We have over 40,000 safety professionals dedicated to keeping TikTok safe. If we find content of this nature, we remove it and actively engage with law enforcement on these issues.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/french-presidential-election-how-the-candidates-compare | World news | 2017-04-04T10:00:48.000Z | Angelique Chrisafis | French presidential election: how the candidates compare | Voters cast their ballots in the first round of the French presidential election on 23 April, with candidates ranging from far right to hard left vying to reach a second round run-off and, from there, the Elysée Palace.
The policies of the top five contenders – François Fillon, Marine Le Pen, Benoît Hamon, Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon - on state spending, immigration, the environment and the economy reveal their different positions.
François Fillon
Les Républicains
Socially conservative, former prime minister previously seen as favourite after a resounding win in the right's primary. He has been hit by a judicial investigation into allegations of paying his family from public funds.
Labour and welfare
Scrap France’s 35-hour week and allow companies to negotiate staff working hours. Boost businesses by reducing corporate taxes by €40bn (£35bn). Raise the retirement age from 62 to 65. Put a progressive cap on unemployment benefits. Reform the labour code to allow more flexibility for businesses. Reduce social charges on the lowest salaries.
The state, finances and society
French elections: all you need to know
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Reduce public spending by €100bn in five years. Cut 500,000 public sector jobs, or 8% of the public sector workforce. Increase public sector working hours from 35 to 39 hours a week in areas such as health and state administration. Reform social security coverage and health system payments. Streamline benefits by introducing a single payment. Cut benefits to families if a child skips school or commits anti-social behaviour.
Bring back school uniform. Rewrite school history teaching to give more sense of the glorious moments of French history. Maintain the ban on medically assisted procreation such as IVF and the use of sperm donors for single women and women in same-sex relationships. Limit parental rights for same-sex couples.
Europe
Reform the Schengen travel accords to tighten control of the EU’s external borders. Stronger EU cooperation on defence. A political leadership of the eurozone by heads of state and government, with regular summits of eurozone leaders. A stridently positive policy towards Russia. Fillon said before winning his party’s primary race that Moscow was no threat and should be a partner in Syria and that European sanctions should be lifted.
Immigration
Annual quotas set by parliament to keep immigration to a strict minimum. Limit the ability of foreigners to join family members in France. Limit the ability of foreigners to gain French nationality. Renegotiate the Le Touquet accords, the –deal with Britain that keeps border checks, and thousands of refugees and migrants – on the French side of the Channel at Calais. Speed up asylum applications.
Crime and security
Set age of criminal responsibility at 16. Create 16,000 new prison places. Hire 5,000 more police and redeploy another 5,000. Bring intelligence services under one umbrella. Withdraw French nationality from jihadis and prevent them from returning to France. Expel convicted foreign criminals. Set defence spending at 2% of GDP.
Environment
Scale up nuclear energy sites and close coal-fired power stations. Amend the environmental charter added to the French constitution by Jacques Chirac in 2005 that states that if an action is deemed to pose a serious and irreversible threat to the environment, the state can intervene to stop it. Fillon argues that scrapping the clause will allow more innovation on environmental issues. He has also said it is “criminal” for France to ban research on shale gas.
Benoît Hamon
Socialist party
Leftwing rebel who quit François Hollande's government, then beat the former prime minister Manuel Valls to the Socialist party nomination. His platform breaks with Hollande's pro-market, centre-left policies.
Labour and welfare
Universal basic income, initially for low-paid workers and students, then extended to all. Tax on robots to pay for retraining and to underwrite the cost of jobs they replace. Priority for products “made in France”. Fifty per cent of government contracts reserved for small- and medium-sized businesses. Raise the minimum wage. Officially recognise “burnout” at work as an illness and take steps to prevent it. Roll back François Hollande’s loosening of labour laws.
The state, finances, society
Five-year investment plan worth €100bn for urban and environmental renovation. A tax on banks’ “super-profits”. Build 150,000 social housing units a year. Create 40,000 teaching jobs in five years. New citizens’ rights to challenge parliament and push referendums on laws. Hold a referendum on giving foreigners the right to vote in local elections.
Begin talks on overhauling French institutions to create a “sixth republic”, introducing proportional representation and a single seven-year presidential term. Bring in an anti-monopoly law on the media. Lift the ban on medically assisted procreation such as IVF and the use of sperm donors for single women and same-sex women couples. Legalise cannabis. Legalise assisted suicide.
Europe
Switch emphasis from free market to greater social protection. Create a eurozone assembly with powers to control decisions made by heads of state and to fix a budget and harmonise tax. Create a joint European energy and environmental strategy. More defence cooperation.
Immigration
Speed up asylum application process. Set up a new “humanitarian visa” system for refugees. Renegotiate the EU’s Dublin regulations under which asylum seekers have to remain in the first EU country they enter.
Crime and security
Bring back community policing. Create 9,000 more police and gendarme jobs. Monitor stop-and-search operations by making police write reports and receipts each time they stop someone. Improve coordination of intelligence services. Raise defence spending to 2% of GDP.
Environment
Fifty per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2015, and 100% by 2050. Phase out diesel. No new diesel cars after 2025. Phase out nuclear power over 25 years. Ban the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals. Push for alternatives to pesticide.
Marine Le Pen
Front National
The French far-right leader whose hard line on immigration, security and warnings of the threat from Islamic fundamentalism have seen her party make steady gains at each election in the past six years.
Labour and welfare
Give priority to French workers. Make employers who hire foreigners, including EU citizens, pay an extra tax of 10% of the employee’s salary. Lower the retirement age from 62 to 60. Reduce income tax for the lowest earners. Impose an import tax on products made by French firms abroad. Keep the 35-hour week as a base, but allow different professions to negotiate different working hours.
The state, finances, society
A commitment to give “national priority” to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and welfare to be written into the constitution after a referendum. Ban the wearing of all visible religious symbols in all public spaces.
Scrap several tiers of local administration, including the regions. Introduce proportional representation for all elections. Reduce the number of MPs and senators. Fly French flags outside all public buildings and take down EU flags. Cut the price of gas and electricity immediately by 5%. Reintroduce school uniform.
Europe
Launch negotiations with the EU for France to regain border control, economic and monetary sovereignty and authority over laws. Hold an in-out referendum on EU membership within six months of taking power. Leave Schengen and the euro.
Immigration
Reduce legal immigration to 10,000 people a year. Scrap French nationality rights for children born to two foreign parents in France. Stop regularising illegal immigrants. Make foreigners’ children wait two years before they can access free state education. Scrap state medical help for illegal immigrants.
Security and defence
Hire an extra 15,000 police and gendarmes. Create 40,000 more prison places. Withdraw French nationality rights from jihadis who have fought abroad. Expel foreigners whose names are on intelligence lists for suspected radicalisation. Raise defence spending to 3% of GDP. Introduce compulsory military service for at least three months. Pull France out of the Nato command structure.
Environment
Promote nuclear power. Reduce consumption of fossil fuels. Maintain the ban on fracking for shale gas. Promote hydrogen cars, and agriculture on a “human” rather than industrial scale.
Emmanuel Macron
En Marche!
The 39-year-old, former investment banker and economy minister under Hollande is standing as a centrist independent in his first election. Economically liberal but leftwing on social issues.
Labour and welfare
More flexibility on labour laws and a loosening of the 35-hour week. Lower taxes on businesses, and a permanent reduction of companies’ social charges. Reform the unemployment system to extend it to more people, including the self-employed, but with more control to ensure job seekers accept offers and retrain. Keep the retirement age at 62, but smooth over differences between state and private pensions. Increase social mobility by giving companies who hire people from 200 designated poor neighbourhoods a €15,000 bonus over three years.
The state, finances and society
A public investment plan of €50bn over five years. Cut €60bn in public spending through changes to the public sector workforce and cuts to local administration. Scrap 120,000 public sector jobs by 2022. Scrap housing tax for 80% of households. Adapt the wealth tax by focusing it on property. Tax global internet giants on the profits they make in France.
Cut the number of MPs in parliament. Ban MPs and senators from employing family members or working as consultants while in office. Lift the ban on medically assisted procreation such as IVF and the use of sperm donors for single women and same-sex women couples. A €500 “culture pass” for all 18-year-olds with which they can buy books or go to culture events.
Europe
Maintain the Schengen travel area. Boost the EU’s external border controls by creating 5,000 more border guards. Establish a eurozone budget, parliament and economy and finance minister. Create a European security council. Hold citizen “conventions” across Europe to discuss the EU’s future and the importance of the European project.
Immigration
Deal with asylum applications in six months or less. Oblige those applying for French nationality to speak good French.
Security and defence
Restore compulsory military service for a month for all young men and women. Bring defence spending to 2% of GDP. Modernise France’s nuclear arsenal. Create 10,000 more police and gendarmes and improve community policing. Create 15,000 new prison places.
Environment
Insulate 1m homes in five years. Limit advantages to the diesel industry. Give a payment of €1,000 for the purchase of a new or second-hand vehicle that pollutes less. Progressively reduce nuclear energy production. Introduce a single European energy market. Fight the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals and pesticides.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
La France Insoumise
The firebrand orator is the furthest left of the five leading candidates. He is contesting his second presidential election after taking 11% of the vote in 2012. He has refused to join ranks with Hamon to unite the left.
Labour and welfare
Raise the minimum wage and civil servants’ salaries. Lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Scrap Hollande’s labour law changes. Roll back new rules on Sunday working. Give workers an extra week of holiday a year. Hold a consultation on shortening the 35-hour working week to 32 hours. Limit fat-cat pay by fixing maximum salaries in companies. Scrap stock options.
The state, finances and society
Separate retail from investment banking. All French nationals to pay a universal tax, including if they live abroad. Hold a referendum to begin the process of writing a new constitution for a sixth republic. Introduce proportional representation for parliament elections. Lower the voting age to 16. Make voting compulsory. Give foreigners the right to vote in local elections.
Zero homelessness by the end of the presidency. Full reimbursement by the state of all prescribed healthcare costs. Legalise cannabis. Lift the ban on medically assisted procreation such as IVF and the use of sperm donors for single women and same-sex women couples. Hire at least 60,000 teachers.
Europe
Renegotiate the EU treaties. Put the new agreed treaties to a referendum. If the treaty renegotiation fails, consider leaving the EU. Devalue the euroIntroduce a moratorium on debt repayments.
Immigration
Regularise illegal workers. Create a new agency to deal with migration alongside the UN Refugee Agency. Increase civil rescue services to stop migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Build shelters to house asylum seekers to prevent rough-sleeping, along the lines of the centre at Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk.
Crime and security
Bring back community policing. Introduce compulsory receipts for police stop-and-search operations in order to ban the arbitrary targeting of black people and other ethnic minorities. Hire 10,000 police. Allow parliament to vote on ending the state of emergency. Leave Nato.
Environment
Add a new green clause to the constitution that France should not take from nature more than nature can give. Phase out nuclear and fossil-fuel energy. Produce 100% of energy from renewable sources by 2050. Renationalise state utility companies. Stop “useless” big state infrastructure projects. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/apr/27/leinster-clermont-heineken-cup | Sport | 2012-04-27T22:04:02.000Z | Robert Kitson | Clermont sense it could be a vintage year if they triumph in Bordeaux | Sometimes Heineken Cup semi-finals provide richer drama than any showpiece final can offer. Wasps' epic win over Munster in Dublin, Leicester's penalty shoot-out against Cardiff Blues and Munster's extraordinary victory over Toulouse in Bordeaux in 2000 all spring instantly to mind and another potential classic looms this weekend. When Clermont Auvergne and Leinster collide on Sunday, it will rival Barcelona v Chelsea.
Leinster, chasing an unprecedented third European title in four years, would be short-odds favourites to beat anybody else. With Brad Thorn having rumbled into town to lend the pack some All Black steel, the defensive organisation and attacking verve behind the scrum have made the defending champions all but irresistible. They have lost once in their last 25 matches and will break Munster's record of 13 successive Heineken Cup wins if they reach yet another final.
Their only misfortune is to be bumping into the one side in Europe who can respond to that extraordinary record with a nonchalent shrug. Clermont have lost just one Heineken Cup game on French soil in the last six years, have won 42 home games on the bounce and, in their centenary season, appear mentally stronger than at any stage in the past. Their quarter-final demolition of Saracens in Watford was so conclusive the tyre-marks are still visible across the English psyche. To listen to their talisman, Aurélien Rougerie, insisting his team simply cannot be beaten if they arrive in Bordeaux with the right mindset was particularly ominous, although many beaten sides have felt that way prior to big games down the ages. Even before they selected Isaac Boss at scrum-half ahead of Eoin Reddan, Leinster were braced for a contest of rare physicality which could easily be decided by the odd point.
Leinster do at least know Clermont inside out. Joe Schmidt, Leinster's shrewd mastermind, was at the club as an assistant coach to Vern Cotter when Les Jaunards won their long-awaited first Top 14 title in 2010. The two Kiwis are good friends and may feel they are peeking into a mirror when they study their respective opponents. "Both teams will be very strong and I just think the biggest winner is going to be European rugby," admitted Schmidt. "It's going to be a hell of a battle."
It will be tougher still if Leinster emulate Saracens and fall short physically. Between the ears, though, the Irish side retain a keen faith in their ability to find a way out of even the tightest spots. It also does no harm they have beaten Clermont four times in five attempts in this tournament, most memorably in a spectacular quarter-final in Dublin two years ago when Brock James's kicking frailities cost his team a cruel 29-28 defeat despite a hat-trick of tries from Julien Malzieu.
James is still around, with David Skrela out injured, but the range of options around him has multiplied. The All Black winger Sitiveni Sivivatu, the Scotland lock Nathan Hines and Wales's Lee Byrne have added experience and quality, with the uncompromising "enforcer" showdown between Hines, Jamie Cudmore and the gravel-voiced Thorn almost worthy of admission to Bordeaux's Stade Chaban-Delmas on its own.
In the end it comes down to whether Clermont's previous lack of experience at the sharp end of Europe is deemed relevant.Schmidt may be an expert at manipulating space by encouraging dummy runners but Cotter has seen all that before. He will encourage his players to make early physical dents, to test the 10-12 axis of Jonathan Sexton and Gordon D'Arcy and to examine whether Leinster's props have recovered fully from their grim experience against England during the Six Nations. No French team, bar Toulouse, have won the Heineken Cup since Brive way back in 1997. Leinster are class personified but it will require something extra special to stop the "gálacticos" of Clermont reaching Twickenham next month. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/dec/15/50-best-tv-shows-of-2023-no-4-beef | Television & radio | 2023-12-15T10:00:30.000Z | Stuart Heritage | The 50 best TV shows of 2023: No 4 – Beef | By any standard, 2023 has been a phenomenal year for telly, with all manner of old favourites returning to our screens leaner and stronger than ever before. Without exaggeration, when the time comes to write the history of television in the 21st century, you might find half a dozen standout highlights from this year alone.
And yet, pound for pound, they were all outclassed by a contender that came out of nowhere. Nobody knew a thing about Beef before it was plonked ungraciously on to a Netflix submenu. And then, if you watched it, it very quickly became all you could think about. Dense with entertainment, taut with drama, able to escalate vertiginously without warning, Beef is about as good as television gets.
Beef’s premise didn’t inspire a lot of faith on paper. The story of two strangers who endure a moment of road rage and find themselves Tom and Jerrying their way across southern California, Beef had the potential to be soulless and two-dimensional, more spectacle than story. But the show’s genius was its ability to use that inciting incident to show us exactly who these two people are, and then to relentlessly dig down into why they were like that in the first place. Over its run, Beef became a story of failure and frustration and dark obsession – sometimes abandoning traditional storytelling methods altogether – but without ever forgetting its responsibility to entertain.
Icy … Ali Wong in Beef. Photograph: Andrew Cooper/AP
A lot of the credit for this should go to the two leads. Ali Wong and Steven Yeun are both wildly talented performers in their own right – Yeun as the beating heart of The Walking Dead for so many years, Wong as a standup – but here they found characters that fit their skillsets perfectly. Yeun’s Danny Cho was vindictive and frustrated, while Wong’s Amy Lau was imperious and condescending, a shard of ice behind a veneer of success. Awful separately, but somehow able to bring the absolute worst out of each other together. What a potent, combustible mix.
The plotting, too, was confident and twisty, and the level of invention so high that during some episodes it felt like you were watching three genres at once. This was a show that treated haphazard urination with the same severity as a full-scale home break-in, and an ugly vase with the same consequences as an extramarital affair.
In a year where all of Hollywood’s writers downed tools over their increasingly poor working conditions, Beef is also a shining example of the value of traditional writers’ rooms. Creator Lee Sung Jin spent his early career doing stints writing and producing on shows such as Silicon Valley and 2 Broke Girls, before finding his niche on formally daring shows including Tuca and Bertie and Undone. When he was finally given the keys to his own show, he was able to draw on the wealth of experience he’d gained over the previous decade. Beef has the tightness of a network sitcom and the emotional breadth of Undone, but has such a specific point of view – both culturally and energetically – that it couldn’t have come from anyone else.
And then there’s the finale. It’s becoming something of a trope with A24 shows that the final episode of a series will reject the entire plot in favour of a more freeform, experimental denouement. Without spoilers, Beef is also slightly guilty of this, but its woo-woo experimentation never forgot to serve its characters. When the finale’s mysterious, elliptical journey was over, Danny and Amy had a better understanding of each other than ever before, and so did the viewer. The last second of the last scene was gorgeous and ambiguous and, should it be the definitive end, will go down as one of the all-time greats.
Whether it should be a definitive end is another question. Taken as a whole, the 10 episodes of Beef felt satisfyingly complete, but the hunger of the modern television industry – not to mention the eagerness of Netflix to capitalise on a hit – means that we should never say never. Back in August, Lee told reporters that he had one “really big idea” that he would be open to exploring and that, while nothing had been commissioned yet, he had stories planned out for three seasons.
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If I were Lee, I’d leave things be. Beef is such a miraculous show – so inventive and daring and propulsive – that the worst thing in the world would be for it to take another grab at the apple and miss. Perfection like this doesn’t happen very often. Let’s keep it perfect. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/mar/31/royal-wedding-app-mirror | Technology | 2011-03-31T09:01:00.000Z | Stuart Dredge | Royal wedding app launched by Mirror | Trinity Mirror's Digital Media division has launched a universal iOS app for the upcoming royal wedding, blending photo galleries, video clips and audio narrative from its royal correspondent James Whitaker.
Royal Wedding app
Mirror: Wills & Kate a Royal Love Story is being sold for iPhone and iPad on Apple's App Store for £1.19, and launched this morning.
The app's 10 chapters are heavily image-focused, running from William's early years and relationship with his mother and father, through to his romance with Kate Middleton. Sharing features are included, with users able to post content from the app onto Facebook.
The App Store listing hopes it will appeal "to all users, whether they be staunch royalists or just swept up in the fairytale romance between William and Kate".
The Mirror actually released a special edition print magazine with the same title in November 2010, selling it for £4.99. The addition of video and Whitaker's audio narration to the iOS app show it is intended to be more than just an interactive cash-in.
The application's release is another example of a publisher looking for one-shot opportunities on the App Store.
Earlier in March, News Corporation published an iPad app tribute to actress Elizabeth Taylor just two days after her death. Released by its digital news subsidiary the Daily, it too sold on the App Store with a £1.19 price tag. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/12/fisa-surveillance-act-reauthorized | US news | 2024-04-12T17:40:23.000Z | Nick Robins-Early | House votes to reapprove law allowing warrantless surveillance of US citizens | House lawmakers voted on Friday to reauthorize section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa, including a key measure that allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans. The controversial law allows for far-reaching monitoring of foreign communications, but has also led to the collection of US citizens’ messages and phone calls.
Lawmakers voted 273–147 to approve the law, which the Biden administration has for years backed as an important counterterrorism tool. An amendment that would have required authorities seek a warrant failed, in a tied 212-212 vote across party lines.
Donald Trump opposed the reauthorization of the bill, posting to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday: “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!”
The law, which gives the government expansive powers to view emails, calls and texts, has long been divisive and resulted in allegations from civil liberties groups that it violates privacy rights. House Republicans were split in the lead-up to vote over whether to reauthorize section 702, the most contentious aspect of the bill, with Mike Johnson, the House speaker, struggling to unify them around a revised version of the pre-existing law.
Republicans shot down a procedural vote on Wednesday that would have allowed Johnson to put the bill to a floor vote, in a further blow to the speaker’s ability to find compromise within his party. Following the defeat, the bill was changed from a five-year extension to a two-year extension of section 702 – an effort to appease far-right Republicans who believe Trump will be president by the time it expires.
Section 702 allows for government agencies such as the National Security Administration to collect data and monitor the communications of foreign citizens outside of US territory without the need for a warrant, with authorities touting it as a key tool in targeting cybercrime, international drug trafficking and terrorist plots. Since the collection of foreign data can also gather communications between people abroad and those in the US, however, the result of section 702 is that federal law enforcement can also monitor American citizens’ communications.
Section 702 has faced opposition before, but it became especially fraught in the past year after court documents revealed that the FBI had improperly used it almost 300,000 times – targeting racial justice protesters, January 6 suspects and others. That overreach emboldened resistance to the law, especially among far-right Republicans who view intelligence services like the FBI as their opponent.
Trump’s all-caps post further weakened Johnson’s position. Trump’s online remarks appeared to refer to an FBI investigation into a former campaign adviser of his, which was unrelated to section 702. Other far-right Republicans such as Matt Gaetz similarly vowed to derail the legislation, putting its passage in peril.
Meanwhile, the Ohio congressman Mike Turner, Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told lawmakers on Friday that failing to reauthorize the bill would be a gift to China’s government spying programs, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah.
“We will be blind as they try to recruit people for terrorist attacks in the United States,” Turner said on Friday on the House floor.
The California Democratic representative and former speaker Nancy Pelosi also gave a statement in support of passing section 702 with its warrantless surveillance abilities intact, urging lawmakers to vote against an amendment that would weaken its reach.
“I don’t have the time right now, but if members want to know I’ll tell you how we could have been saved from 9/11 if we didn’t have to have the additional warrants,” Pelosi said.
Debate over Section 702 pitted Republicans who alleged that the law was a tool for spying on American citizens against others in the GOP who sided with intelligence officials and deemed it a necessary measure to stop foreign terrorist groups. One proposed amendment called for requiring authorities to secure a warrant before using section 702 to view US citizens’ communications, an idea that intelligence officials oppose as limiting their ability to act quickly. Another sticking point in the debate was whether law enforcement should be prohibited from buying information on American citizens from data broker firms, which amass and sell personal data on tens of millions of people, including phone numbers and email addresses.
Section 702 dates back to the George W Bush administration, which secretly ran warrantless wiretapping and surveillance programs in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. In 2008, Congress passed section 702 as part of the Fisa Amendments Act and put foreign surveillance under more formal government oversight. Lawmakers have renewed the law twice since, including in 2018 when they rejected an amendment that would have required authorities to get warrants for US citizens’ data.
Last year Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, sent a letter to congressional leaders telling them to reauthorize section 702. They claimed that intelligence gained from it resulted in numerous plots against the US being foiled, and that it was partly responsible for facilitating the drone strike that killed the al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2022. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/may/13/zico-brazil-world-cup-nation-team-football | Football | 2014-05-13T11:56:14.000Z | Fernando Duarte | Zico: Brazil must use World Cup to heal rift between nation and the team | Five World Cup titles over five decades have left Brazil with a wide selection of champions of all sizes, ages and colours, who understandably squeeze out trophyless legends from ceremonial roles regarding the country's second hosting of the tournament. But Arthur Antunes Coimbra is not complaining. The veteran of three unsuccessful Seleção campaigns, he nevertheless is getting enough attention to make any of his more garlanded colleagues jealous.
Zico, however, would not touch with a bargepole a place on the organising committee after his experience as leading man of Brazil's ill-fated bid to host to the 2006 tournament, which was curtailed by a voting deal with South Africa with the connivance of the Brazilian FA's president, Ricardo Teixeira, and without Zico's knowledge. "While the team and I were touring the globe trying to amass support for the bid the president decided to pull the bloody plug and do some horse-trading with South Africa without giving us the courtesy of a heads-up. We never spoke again after that," says Zico.
The reason why the former Flamengo, Udinese and Kashima Antlers player decides to start his hour-long conversation with the Guardian – for whom he will write throughout the World Cup – by revisiting one of his less treasured memories, is simple. Although Teixeira has been instrumental in securing the tournament's return to Brazil for the first time in 64 years, Zico does not let a grudge affect his support for the project.
Unlike fellow legends such as Romário – who went from World Cup posterboy to one of its most vocal critics – the 61-year-old still believes his country deserves the opportunity. "For its history in the game, Brazil was overdue a second World Cup. In 1950, when it took place here, the country was by no means what it represents in football today, so it was about time the tournament came back here.
"Regardless of my problems with Teixeira, I never spoke against it. On the contrary, I always had support for having a modern World Cup in Brazil."
Which doesn't mean Zico has got no problems with how Brazil is staging Fifa's flagship competition. Apart from obvious disapproval regarding delays and spiralling costs – a recent report estimates that stadium construction and upgrade costs have jumped 300% since Brazil was awarded the World Cup in October 2007 – the man who served as the country's first government sports tsar in the early 90s rues what he sees as project failures. "We should not have left things until the last minute because this is also the reason why the new stadiums, which Brazilian football badly needed, are costing much more than the organising committee announced. The people also expected the urban development works to be ready on time too, which is not going to happen. It's a huge missed opportunity and people got angry."
Nonetheless, in analysing the violent protests that marred last year's Confederations Cup and threaten to be as regular an occurrence as scenes of supporters wearing silly hats during the tournament, Zico believes some of those opposing it are guilty of opportunism. "I would like to see people protesting every day instead of simply during the World Cup. Because the fact is that the competition is happening and all of a sudden I don't see the same joy around as in previous tournaments, where people decorated the streets with bunting and everything. We need to make this tournament special for the right reasons, because Brazil has a duty to deliver the World Cup. I am not against protesting but perhaps it is time for a truce."
Zico celebrates after opening the scoring against New Zealand during the 1982 World Cup finals. Photograph: Bob Thomas Sports Photography
Zico reckons that truce would be more easily negotiated if the Seleção was not so much a virtual team for many Brazilians these days. While the storied 1982 World Cup side of which he was the leading light had only two players (Falcão and Dirceu) based abroad, the class of 2014 is not only dominated by expats (Luiz Felipe Scolari's 23-man squad has only four "domestic" players) but contains a number of regulars – David Luiz, Dani Alves, Marcelo, Luiz Gustavo, Hulk – who developed their talent abroad and never featured regularly for Brazilian clubs.
Added to the fact that Brazil play the bulk of their friendlies abroad in order to avoid bickering with European clubs – creating handsome paydays for the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol in the process – and you get what Zico calls a lack of familiarity between team and public. "A lot of people talk about what the 1982 team did on the pitch but that side was so dear to Brazilian fans also because it featured players that supporters would see in flesh and bone on a regular basis, either at games or even on the streets. Now they basically only see the Seleção on the TV.
"It is even worse with the current side, because they did not have to play the qualifiers. There is a distance that prevents proper bonding." That can be a big deal for crowds as demanding as Brazilians. Last year the tear-jerking renditions of the national anthem at the Confederations Cup final led Spain's manager, Vicente del Bosque, to give credit to the crowd after the world and European champions were steamrollered by Scolari's side at the Maracanã.
But just a couple of months earlier vicious treatment of the team during a 2-2 draw with Chile in Belo Horizonte, where Neymar was singled out with boos and cries of the Portuguese equivalent of "bottler", led the captain, Thiago Silva, to beg fans to give the players a break. "This has always been typical behaviour from Brazilian fans, even in my day, but if you are not used to the crowd booing it can be pretty daunting. Fortunately, the Confederations Cup title helped to endear this group to the public," says Zico.
Unlike some former Seleção favourites, he is not overly pessimistic about Brazil's chances of a sixth trophy and the chance to at least dilute the painful memories of the 1950 loss to Uruguay at the same Maracanã stadium that will host the 2014 final.
"Scolari's Brazil is a team that is very strong collectively; they put opponents under pressure. They go for the jugular from the start and try to get an early goal instead of waiting to counterattack. That helps with the supporters, who appreciate the boldness. My biggest worry is that this is a group where 17 out of 23 players have never played in a World Cup and two-thirds of our likely starting XI haven't even taken part in a qualifying campaign. That cannot be replaced by Champions League games, I'm afraid. But these are good players who as a group have become very tough to beat."
Much has been said about how the draw could force a meeting between Brazil and Spain in the first knockout game but Zico scoffs at such fears. "You can't win the World Cup without playing the big boys. Indeed, the draw has pitfalls, but you have to remember the European countries will have to handle the experience of playing in South America. Brazil have shown composure and the players understood the responsibility that comes with playing a World Cup at home."
Brazil versus Argentina in the 1982 World Cup. Photograph: Bongarts/Getty Images
The fourth-highest scorer in Seleção history (with 52 goals in 72 games) does not believe that the totem of the 2014 generation, will be more anxious than his peers. "Neymar is in a different situation than Lionel Messi. Messi has Argentina's team built around him while the Seleção is not as dependent on Neymar. Neymar will be instrumental if Brazil want to go far and he has not had any serious injuries. People say that all the controversy around his transfer has affected him but I see a simple case of Neymar having to adapt to a change of country and a move to a club [Barcelona] where the manager [Gerardo Martino] sometimes insists on playing him out of position."
Speaking of Messi, Zico sees Argentina as the biggest danger. "They found a way to get the best of Messi and they have an absurd amount of attacking players. Their group is not difficult [Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran and Nigeria] and they will travel much less than other teams."
He also thinks Spain and Germany are obvious contenders, warns about Italy's resurgence and predicts a few shocks. "The South American sides will cause some surprises. I think Chile might well qualify ahead of Holland in Group B and Uruguay gave Brazil a scare in the Confederations Cup." That is not necessarily horrendous news for England, as Zico sees their group being decided by the fourth country, Costa Rica. "Italy, England and Uruguay are traditional teams and they will probably take points off each other which would make their results against Costa Rica very, very important."
Never shy of complaining about negative tactics, Zico disagrees with claims that Scolari's adaptation of Bayern Munich's high pressing game is "un-Brazilian". "The Seleção has been playing well and I like the way they closed Spain down last year. Football nowadays demands teams attacking and defending more collectively than ever."
He draws a comparison with the recent clash between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich in the Champions League. "Carlo Ancelotti [Real's manager] was criticised in the first game for sitting back too much but it makes sense when you have sprinters like Ronaldo and [Gareth] Bale, who are lethal on the break. But it is also nonsense to say Bayern's defeat represents the end of tiki-taka. I don't think Pep Guardiola needs to remind anyone of how many trophies he won playing this way. He still made it to a Champions League semi-final. Mistakes were made but it doesn't mean a style needs to be killed."
Stylistic consistency is something he has repeated almost to exhaustion in recent decades. The 1982 side failed to win the World Cup but they still won plaudits for their elegance on the ball, and Zico is adamant that the epic 3-2 defeat to Italy in Barcelona 32 years ago was not unfair but did send the wrong message. "Italy played well when it mattered but that should not have invalidated our approach to the game. The fact people still remember ours and the Dutch 1974 squads, for example, shows that there is no shame in dying while being faithful to a philosophy where the result was not an obsession."
As well as three World Cups as a player (1978, '82, and '86) and one as Mário Zagallo's assistant manager (1998), Zico has a World Cup managerial experience on his CV.
It was in Germany 2006, where after taking Japan to an Asian Cup title two years before he had to endure the experience of facing his own country. The images of the former Seleção player singing the Brazil national anthem in Japan kit showed how mixed his feelings were. "That was horrendous. I would hate to go through that experience again," he recalls.
Zico, coaching Japan, watches his players during an official World Cup practice session in Dortmund. Photograph: Kimimasa Mayama/Reuters
Japan failed to win a single game (Brazil hammered them 4-1) and Zico resigned to take over Fenerbahce. His two-year spell at the Turkish club was marked by their 2007-08 Champions League campaign, where they were narrowly defeated by Chelsea in the quarter-finals. His managerial career never again hit the heights and included stints in Greece, Uzbekistan, Russia and with the Iraq national team as well as the Qatari side al-Gharafa, with whom he parted company in January.
Does he miss sitting in the dugout, especially with a World Cup round the corner? "No, I am not in a hurry to return to management at all. It's hard for me to get to grips with how much players have changed since I retired. There are too many annoying habits; the kids are getting rich earlier and earlier, which brings a weird sense of entitlement."
Not even the Seleção job, which will quite likely be available whether or not Scolari becomes the first man since Italy's Vittorio Pozzo in 1938 to win the World Cup twice as manager, seems to entice him, principally because he is dismayed by the current technical levels in Brazilian club football and by the fact managerial positions have a higher turnover rate than the drummer's job in Spinal Tap. "I have always said that to manage Brazil I would have to be managing in Brazil first. And I am not happy at all with the way things are going here now." A month of hosting the world's biggest sporting festival, he hopes, may begin to alter that.
A picture caption was amended on 14 May 2014 to give the details of the match at the 1982 World Cup in which Zico opened the scoring | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/28/do-not-become-alarmed-maile-meloy-review | Books | 2017-06-28T09:00:16.000Z | Julie Myerson | Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy review – the children are missing | Three well-heeled families are on holiday in Central America when all of their children go missing. It’s an arresting premise for Maile Meloy’s new novel and, as everything I’ve read by her has been notable for its energy, wit and fearless emotional precision, I was intrigued to see what she would do with it.
Liv and Nora, thirtysomething cousins from LA, book themselves, husbands and kids onto a two-week cruise down the coast of Mexico and Central America. Once on board, they hook up with another family, wealthy Argentinians with two long-limbed, sporty teenagers. When the husbands go golfing for the day, the mothers take all six kids, aged six to 15, on an excursion. “This is a good country for us to go ashore in,” Liv says. “They call it the Switzerland of Latin America.”
And yes, alarm bells are already ringing. For the unnamed country turns out to be not very Swiss at all, but frighteningly chaotic and sinisterly foreign; you read on with mounting dread, as well as excitement, for it’s impossible not to relish the skill with which Meloy ratchets up the tension.
First, Pedro the well-meaning but lamentably chilled tour guide crashes the car, leaving his charges shaken and marooned without a bus in sight. Next, shepherding them to a pretty little beach at the mouth of a river, where he assures them it’s safe for the children to cool off in the water, he passes round frozen rum and openly flirts with Nora. As the children shriek and splash, Liv and Camila the Argentinian mother doze off in the sun, while Nora heads off into the trees for “a little no-strings attention” from Pedro. A few moments later, all six children are gone.
All credit to Meloy’s glistening prose that every detail of this grisly scene is shudderingly convincing. The sultry afternoon, the beautiful, sheltered Americans knocked off course by a routine accident but left with no choice but to trust in the local, the faint moments of comedy, the momentary lapses of attention – all of it rings uneasily true. Once the children are gone, everything accelerates and the plot unfurls swiftly and sleekly with chapters moving back and forth between adults and children with barely a viewpoint left unturned. As one queasy event follows another, it becomes clear that Meloy is not going to spare us – the children are alive, but for how long? – and there is no question of not reading on. I can’t remember the last time I gobbled a novel down so fast. Sadly, it wasn’t long before I realised I did not like the taste it was leaving.
The problem can be identified in one word: tone. Given the sometimes graphically unpleasant nature of the events she describes, Meloy’s writing begins to lack scope, sensitivity and even, sometimes, heart. It’s almost as if, having decided to explore a subject with such viscerally dark and dramatic potential, she can’t quite trust to the subtlety of her prose and allow less to be more: instead, she loses her nerve, retreating into quips and platitudes. Although we are told that the parents are distraught at having lost their children to this land of hungry crocodiles and ruthless criminals, we never quite feel it. Conversations seem oddly banal and lacking in any real urgency or despair. Yes, the grown-ups bicker and blame themselves and each other, but only in the way you might if your luggage or your iPad had gone missing.
With her children already missing for several days, would Liv really bother to reflect on her “obscene” LA life and have sufficient emotional energy to debate whether her daughter’s “desire to assert herself was fine at a progressive school with feminist teachers but was it working so well for her now?” Meloy’s drive to stop and extract the ethical questions from the situation seems somehow at odds with her determination to confront its high-tension violence.
And although I did believe that Nora might have allowed herself a heat- and alcohol-fuelled lapse with Pedro, it stretches credibility that she would continue any kind of dalliance during the long and terrible days that ensue. The moment when, outside his house in a cab, she translates “Nights in White Satin” into Spanish for the driver and observes to herself that “sappy moustache rock, it never died” plumbs a nadir of crassness. A novel that started out so promisingly develops a cartoon-like brittleness. The baddie is described lazily, almost Trumpishly, as “unredeemably bad” and the Tarantinoesque descriptions of eyeballs popping and blood spurting sit uneasily in a book which, in a real and disturbing way, includes the rape of a minor.
It’s Nora who later observes that losing a child “happens all the time, all over the world ... and people go on. They can’t just drop to the floor and scream for the rest of their lives.” Maybe not, but my hunch is that a little more screaming would have made this novel feel warmer and sadder and ultimately a whole lot more affecting.
Julie Myerson’s The Stopped Heart is published by Vintage.
Do Not Become Alarmed is published by Viking. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/30/crawley-town-preston-johnson-in-dugout-league-two-stevenage | Football | 2022-12-30T21:55:45.000Z | Guardian sport | Crawley co-chairman steps into dugout for defeat amid growing chaos | The Crawley Town co-chairman Preston Johnson stepped into the dugout for Friday’s match against Stevenage, following the departure of manager Matthew Etherington on Thursday. Johnson’s decision to take on a “more direct, hands-on role” did not pay off as Crawley were beaten 3-1 by their promotion-chasing hosts.
Amid growing disarray for the club and its owners Wagmi United, Crawley confirmed before the game that the assistant coach Darren Byfield would take charge at Stevenage and for Monday’s game with Newport, with Johnson “also in the dugout to show his support”. Etherington lasted just 32 days in the role after Kevin Betsy’s departure.
Crawley Town sack manager Matthew Etherington after 32 days in charge
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“It’s no secret that this season hasn’t gone the way any of us who care about the club had hoped or expected,” Johnson added in the statement. “After a half season of consistently unacceptable results, it has become clear that significant changes are required to set things right, both on and off the pitch. That is why I have opted to fly back to the UK and take a more direct, hands-on role during this crucial period.”
Johnson, who intends to appoint a permanent successor to Etherington in the coming weeks, added: “It is imperative that we use these next two games to gather as much information about our current squad as possible to inform our actions in the transfer window. That includes selecting players who have received fewer opportunities in league contests to date.”
“I look forward to working collaboratively with Darren and the staff to ensure that we are utilising this interim period as effectively as possible to set the club up for a productive January and for greater success in the long-term,” added Johnson, a founder of the Wagmi United cryptocurrency investment group that bought the League Two club in April.
“I know that many supporters are disappointed and angry about the current state of the club. I hear you, and I share your frustration and take responsibility for that,” Johnson concluded.
Crawley made five changes from the home defeat to Sutton on Boxing Day but quickly fell behind at the Lamex Stadium, with Jordan Roberts scoring after just 10 minutes. Carl Piergianni secured victory for Stevenage with two headed goals in the 40th and 83rd minutes. Dominic Telford’s late penalty was little consolation for Crawley, who stay 20th in the table.
Crawley co-owner Preston Johnson (centre left) watches the pre-game warmup with interim manager Darren Byfield. Photograph: James Boardman/Shutterstock
After the match, Byfield was keen to play down the notion of interference from the club’s co-chairman. “I don’t know too much about everything. I said the same to the players: don’t let anything outside of the game interfere with what we’re doing out there,” he said.
Preston has flown in … and shown he is dedicated to the football club. I know the fans are upset but whatever I’m told to do here with the players, I’ll do to the best of my ability. The fans pay their money, we clap them, we listen to what’s going on and we just try and implement what we want from the boys.”
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The Stevenage manager, Steve Evans, led Crawley into the Football League in 2011 and expressed concern at the chaos affecting his former club. “I leave here with real genuine thoughts that Crawley Town sort themselves out because it’s a club that’s deep in my heart,” Evans said.
“We can’t stop our players reading what’s been online for a couple of days about the situation with Crawley. I asked our players to ignore it, but sometimes you can’t get it out of their heads. I thought we played really well in patches, not so good in others. Our quality was a little bit missing at certain times tonight.
Johnson’s touchline cameo came the day after Etherington was sacked as manager just three games into his tenure, while the sale of striker Tom Nichols to relegation rivals Gillingham has caused consternation among players and fans. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/gadgets-arent-the-answer-to-all-our-problems-but-who-wouldnt-love-a-voice-activated-bidet | Opinion | 2024-01-10T11:00:31.000Z | Coco Khan | Gadgets aren’t the answer to all our problems – but who wouldn’t love a voice-activated bidet? | Coco Khan | Iam a sucker for a gadget, especially of the domestic kind. So it was a pleasure to read about the gizmos on display recently at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Particular favourites were the voice-activated bidet (I have always believed in water over wiping – better yet, both – and have a theory that we are being brainwashed by “big tissue”); a pillow that adjusts the sleeper if they snore; and a robot mop-vacuum hybrid that claims to seek out stains.
I will admit that there is something of the last days of Rome about CES. Here it is, the culmination of efforts from some of the greatest tech minds of our generation, solving problems that were … not really problems to begin with. Like this year’s much-lauded reveal of the see-through TV. That’s right, it looks like glass when it’s off, finally addressing the issue of a television looking like a television.
Such upgrades are usually just marketing ploys – new ways to sell old things. But I have nearly been had. A few years ago, I sat through a demonstration of a washing machine I couldn’t afford because of its “cutting-edge” gymwear setting. Fortunately, I came to my senses and remembered that the only setting anyone ever needs (or probably uses) is the 45-minute full load. I can just turn it down to 20C, anyway.
I’m 24, but I used a Nokia ‘dumbphone’ for the whole 2010s. Now I long to go back to it
Isabel Brooks
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Despite my oohs and aahs at today’s gadget marvels, I can’t help but grouch at our collective belief in technology’s ability to fix any problem. No wonder tech is always the answer for every politician – it’s an easy way to promise an improved life without tackling the bigger concerns. I like the sound of a robot mop, but I would probably prefer a better work-life balance so I have more time to tend to my home. I will never forget discovering a gadget for elderly care that notified the user’s children if the parent failed to make their morning tea. Someone commented that it would be better to have functioning social care. It’s hard not to agree.
Still, it’s fun to imagine a futuristic Jetson life. A girl can dream. Or, better yet, snore with the comfort of in-built machine-automated disturbance cancellation.
Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/07/alexander-mccall-smith-jane-austen-emma | Books | 2013-10-07T12:03:00.000Z | Liz Bury | Alexander McCall Smith to rewrite Jane Austen's Emma | Mr Woodhouse has an obsession with vitamin pills, Jane Fairfax plays the tenor saxophone and Frank Churchill has been living in Australia: meet the cast of the modern-day Emma, which is to be rewritten for the social media generation by Alexander McCall Smith.
McCall Smith, best known for his No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, is one of four writers so far on board to rework Jane Austen's novels with a contemporary twist as part of a project to open up the stories for modern sensibilities.
"One of the issues, of course, is the erotic tension that pervades the original novel Emma," said McCall Smith. "That is there in large measure and will remain there in my version. And Freud will be looking over my shoulder as I write. I can't wait to begin my encounter with these delicious characters. On which subject, I have great sympathy for Mr Woodhouse. The original felt very anxious about draughts; my Mr Woodhouse is extremely interested in vitamins."
Austen, famed for her sharp social observation, completed six novels in all. Her debut, Sense and Sensibility, first published in 1811 under the pseudonym "A Lady" and featuring the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, has been reimagined by Joanna Trollope in a version to be published by HarperCollins later this month.
"Elinor Dashwood, an architecture student, values discretion above all. Her impulsive sister Marianne displays her creativity everywhere as she dreams of going to art school," runs the cover description.
Queen of psychological thrillers Val McDermid is rewriting Northanger Abbey, about the gothic novel-obsessed Catherine Morland. In her version, Catherine visits the Edinburgh book festival, and the titular gothic mansion is situated in the Scottish borders. On the cover of the book, to be published in spring 2014, Northanger Abbey sports a CCTV camera and satellite TV dishes.
The American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, whose most recent novel, Sisterland, is about prescient identical twins, is reworking Pride and Prejudice for a 21st century version to be published in autumn 2014.
Writers for Mansfield Park and Persuasion, the two remaining Austen novels, will be announced later this year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/apr/16/west-ham-arsenal-premier-league-match-report | Football | 2023-04-16T15:27:49.000Z | David Hytner | Bowen earns West Ham draw and hurts Arsenal’s title bid after Saka miss | If Arsenal’s wait for the Premier League title is to extend beyond the end of the season, this will go down as the day when their challenge faltered. After the 2-2 draw at Liverpool last Sunday, Mikel Arteta and his coaches were happy with the point, even if they accepted that the game management had to improve. There were not so many ‘what ifs?’ – even though they led 2-0.
It was an entirely different feeling here. This was a game that Arsenal held in their palms, initially after they surged into an early 2-0 lead. At that point the West Ham natives were restless, Arsenal’s superiority pronounced to an almost excruciating degree.
Another Arsenal draw shows they are feeling the pain of extended title hunt
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Then, at 2-1 early in the second half, Arsenal did so again as Bukayo Saka stood over a penalty. The club’s player of the season had not missed from the spot since his notorious fail for England in the Euro 2020 final shootout defeat against Italy but his nerve deserted him, his kick pushed past Lukasz Fabianski’s right‑hand post.
How West Ham made him and Arsenal pay. David Moyes’s team – for whom the point and overall performance was huge in their relegation battle – had turned the game on its head when Saïd Benrahma scored for 2-1 from the penalty spot on 33 minutes.
Thereafter, Arsenal lost their way; the control surrendered, the creativity absent. It is difficult to remember them playing so listlessly over a period for as long as 60 minutes or so and West Ham were full value for the draw, their midfield trio of Declan Rice, Tomas Soucek and Lucas Paquetá outstanding to a man.
Jarrod Bowen’s side-on volley secured the point for them and they might have nicked all three late on only for Michail Antonio – who was immense as the lone front‑runner – to head against the outside of post and crossbar.
Arsenal had waltzed into their two‑goal advantage, their pass‑and‑move football on point, simply too much for West Ham. It looked easy and that was surely Arsenal’s mistake. They thought the game was done; they lacked the ruthlessness to ensure it was. The difference between early-game Arsenal and the team after the Benrahma penalty was extraordinary.
Moyes had lost the left-sided centre-halves, Angelo Ogbonna and Nayef Aguerd, to injury – Thilo Kehrer stepped in – and, after the Europa Conference League draw at Gent on Thursday night, they had little time to prepare. The strange thing was that they started well, winning a number of one-on-one duels, Rice particularly prominent. And then they conceded two.
Bukayo Saka sends his penalty wide of the far post. Photograph: Rob Newell/CameraSport/Getty Images
The first was a move from Arsenal’s training ground, Thomas Partey cutting right to left, popping the ball off to Martin Ødegaard, who made the incisive pass to Ben White. The right‑back’s low cross from the byline gave Gabriel Jesus a tap-in.
Moyes wore a thunderous expression when the second went in, presumably directed at Benrahma, who did not fancy tracking Ødegaard’s run. Gabriel Martinelli had crossed once and saw nothing come of it. But when he tried again, Ødegaard – wide open at the far post – got his body into position to volley home.
Moyes had ditched his two-striker experiment from the win at Fulham last weekend, recalling the fit-again Paquetá on the left of the midfield three and Benrahma ahead of him. It all looked to be going wrong for West Ham and there were boos from the home crowd when a long ball forward to nobody on 27 minutes ran through to Aaron Ramsdale.
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Another Arsenal draw shows they are feeling the pain of extended title hunt
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The mood would change sharply when Rice pressed Partey to win the ball high up. Did Rice handle? The VAR would say no. Rice passed into the area to Paquetá and Arsenal were stretched, Gabriel Magalhães going to ground and Paquetá seeing him coming. Gabriel tried to pull out of the challenge but he could not, Paquetá feeling the contact and going down. Benrahma sent Ramsdale the wrong way from the spot.
Suddenly, Arsenal were rattled. Previously, they had enjoyed time and space on the ball; so much, at times, that the sighs from the West Ham support were audible. Now West Ham were tighter and they pushed, Partey and Jesus both booked for fouls to prevent the counterattack. Moyes’s team were also dangerous on set pieces; Antonio might have done better with one header following a free-kick as half-time approached.
Arsenal had the chance to reassert themselves. When Martinelli’s hooked shot hit Antonio’s slightly outstretched arm inside the area after West Ham had half-cleared a corner, it was as if the air had been sucked from the stadium.
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It blew back like a hurricane when Saka flunked the penalty and there was delirium when Bowen found the equaliser almost immediately after Kehrer collected a clearing header from Magalhães and lobbed forward. It was a difficult skill for Bowen to execute, the ball dropping over his shoulder, but the connection was true and the power too much for Ramsdale’s fingertips.
Arsenal groped for the answers and it was easy to feel that it was not their day when Ødegaard sent a straightforward pass into touch on the hour. Arteta made changes, withdrawing all of his attacking players apart from Saka, but what did his team create after the penalty miss?
A stretching Jesus could not reach a low Kieran Tierney cross, Saka shot tamely at Fabianski on the break and it was West Ham who looked the more threatening. For Arsenal, there would only be soul-searching. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/feb/27/russell-kane-comedy-review-fast-and-the-curious-standup-wyvern-theatre-swindon | Stage | 2019-02-27T22:30:32.000Z | Brian Logan | Russell Kane: The Fast and the Curious review – a comedy whirlwind | A“fast, mental, neurotic bastard” is how Russell Kane describes himself – and there’s no sign the 43-year-old will be slowing down any time soon. Yes, he’s moved to Cheshire, fathered a child and is now hobnobbing with Prince Charles – but in this new touring show, his standup is as much of a whirlwind as when he won the Edinburgh comedy award almost a decade ago.
Which is just as well, because there are times in The Fast and the Curious when it’s his hyperactive manner that makes an impression rather than the jokes. His gags about binary personality types, drawing on his opposites-attract relationship with wife Lindsey, rely on strenuous generalisations. The Mallorca holiday routine recycles well-worn Brits-on-the-piss cliches. His contribution to that burgeoning standup sub-genre, the anecdote about going weak-kneed in the presence of royalty, conforms to starstruck convention.
But these lapses in comic quality are seldom keenly felt, because our host works tirelessly to bring the material to over-stimulated life. Characters – including his macho Essex dad, a staple of Kane’s earlier shows – are splayed across the stage like cartoons. Lindsey is a Mancunian accent – and attitude – gone (champagne) supernova. Daughter Mina is a malevolent sprite, whose breath-holding condition wreaks havoc in supermarkets.
Kane’s operatic vomiting routine is revived from his 2016 show, but its pop-eyed, lung-busting body horror justifies a second viewing. Elsewhere, he’s forever clenching his “secret fist” in suppressed fury, at people who take baths, say, or at attention-seekers (himself included) on social media.
The show is bound together only by its cast of recurring characters, the most prominent being Kane himself – an impatient southerner transplanted to the north, a highly strung husband tethered to a carefree wife, and a slave to the cacophonous overthinking going on inside his head. An opening 10 minutes on our EU turmoil – from the “bi-Brexional” perspective of a working-class boy turned liberal elitist – whets the appetite for a show that doesn’t materialise. What we get instead is not Kane’s most ambitious set – but plenty of laughs are won as he brings marriage, early parenthood and the provinces to Looney Tunes life.
Russell Kane is touring until 7 December. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/10/disastrous-truss-budget-forced-uk-councils-to-take-out-massive-loans-at-high-interest-rates | Society | 2024-02-10T14:21:01.000Z | Toby Helm | Disastrous Truss budget forced UK councils to take out massive 50-year loans at soaring rates | Cash-strapped local authorities across the UK took out massive 50-year loans at soaring rates of interest in the aftermath of Liz Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget, according to official figures that reveal more about the long-term cost to the public of her 49 days in office.
Figures from the government’s Debt Management Office show that after the budget on 23 September, 2022, announced by Truss’s chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, 24 50-year loans of between £590,000 and £40m were taken out by councils at interest rates of up to 4.77 %, over the rest of that year.
During 2023, while rates remained high, a further 29 50-year loans, including one of £80m by Lambeth council at an interest rate of more than 5%, were taken out as local authorities remained under severe financial pressure.
The way councils have been pressured by successive Tory governments to take on more debt and to adopt risky strategies to get by will be highlighted this week in a speech by shadow levelling up secretary Angela Rayner.
Rayner will argue that the Truss/Kwarteng budget saw councils locked into high interest loans that people will be paying back for decades to come, and that this was symptomatic of a disregard for local authority finance that goes back to the launch of George Osborne’s austerity drive in 2010.
Since then, local authorities have seen real-terms spending power cuts of more than 50%, meaning huge reductions in services, and leaving many now facing bankruptcy.
Last week Rishi Sunak criticised local authorities for putting up council tax too sharply, by more than 5%, even as some have been left on the brink of financial ruin.
Council leaders looking to raise tax by more than the 5% cap either have to be granted permission by central government or hold a local referendum on doing so. Bedfordshire is the only council to have held a vote, in 2015, which it lost.
Rayner will argue that Tory ministers have not only slashed funding but have failed to supervise it, ending oversight of local council spending and scrapping the Audit Commission.
In a speech to the Labour Local Government Conference in Warwick she will call for a “new partnership” between Labour and councils with a fresh system of “long-term funding settlements”, while warning that the crisis facing local government finance is so deep it will require “a long slog, not a magic wand”.
Rayner’s plan is likely to mean two-year deals for councils, as opposed to one-year settlements. She will also pledge to restore a functioning system for auditing local government finances, after it was revealed that 99% of English councils had not had financial accounts approved on time this year.
She will also pledge to give local leaders more control over housing and planning, skills, energy and transport, as part of Labour’s devolution agenda.
Rayner told the Observer: “The Tories have left working people paying more for less, with councils left picking up the pieces. Local government leaders are fighting to deliver vital services against the tide of a Tory economic mismanagement as demand surges amid the worst cost of living crisis in a generation.
“With the council tax bill set to double since Labour was last in government, any blame for a rise in council tax lies squarely with this Conservative government. The biggest obstacle to resolving the crisis in local government is the Conservative party.
“We will treat local government with the respect it deserves and recognise the vital role councils play in keeping services going, day-in, day-out, but that comes with proper accountability.
“A Labour government will start by providing long-term funding settlements to local leaders, giving them greater certainty and the ability to plan for the long term.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/31/natalie-prass-the-future-and-the-past-review-musical-magpie-channels-karen-and-janet | Music | 2018-05-31T11:00:20.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Natalie Prass: The Future and the Past review – musical magpie channels Karen and Janet | Of the steady trickle of albums to have emerged from Virginia’s Spacebomb Studios in recent years, the best might well be Natalie Prass’s eponymous 2015 debut. It seemed like the perfect collision of artist and place. As much a mad folly as a recording facility, Spacebomb is a studio dedicated to making records in the way they were made in the 1960s and 70s, complete with a house band: in Prass, they found a local songwriter whose tough nine-year apprenticeship in Nashville had left her with an impressive ability to craft songs that weren’t so much retro as timeless. Filled with glancing references to old southern soul, show tunes and classic Brill Building songwriting, you could imagine the songs on her debut tumbling out of a radio at pretty much any point in the last 50 years; its opening tracks My Baby Don’t Understand Me and Bird of Prey imbued with that weird, covetable quality of instant familiarity, sounding on first listen less like a new song than old classic you’d known for years, somehow forgotten about and were charmed to be reminded of.
Natalie Prass review – fighting oppression with a charm offensive
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But her Nashville apprenticeship had also left Prass extremely prolific. By her telling, The Future and the Past isn’t so much the follow-up to her debut as the third album she’s written since it was recorded: only one song on it survives from its two scrapped predecessors, which might account for how different it sounds. There’s a mistaken, if understandable, tendency to view Spacebomb and its artists as a kind of doughty musical equivalent of the arts and crafts movement, fixated on creating Rock the Way It Used to Be, but The Future and the Past gives the lie to that interpretation.
There are certainly areas of the album that feature what you might reasonably call the Spacebomb sound – a swooning, string-section interlude called Your Fire; the ballad Lost, which grows from solo piano to a subtly orchestrated climax – while another track, Far From You, offers up a loving musical homage to its subject, the late Karen Carpenter, possessed of a voice that Prass describes as “the most beautiful sound that I’ve heard”. She amps up the vibrato in her own vocals in imitation and scrambles the lyrics of Carpenters’ hits Close to You and Yesterday Once More, to depict the singer’s desperation to escape a limelight she never sought.
But, elsewhere, if The Future and the Past takes anything as its starting point, it’s the oeuvre of Janet Jackson. Not the first name that gets bandied about whenever the Campaign for Real Rock meet to discuss the hallowed names of yore, but you can’t say Prass didn’t warn you. Around the time of her debut, she quietly released a cover of Jackson’s 1993 single Any Time, Any Place. A rebooted take on the jittery, staccato, then-futuristic sound that production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis constructed for Jackson’s breakthrough album Control fuels opener Oh My, Never Too Late and the concluding Ain’t Nobody. It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to picture Michael’s little sister performing The Fire during the imperial phase of her career. R&B slow jam beats underpin the ballads and the Spacebomb house band turn out to be as irresistibly adept at conjuring up slick, synthy funk as they were at imagining a mythic past in which Harry Nilsson signed to Hi Records. You can trace its musical roots, but The Future and the Past never feels self-consciously retro, never sounds like pastiche.
Prass’s voice and writing are more than capable of handling the stylistic shift she’s initiated: indeed, they frequently feel liberated by it. Her usual vocal style is soft and understated enough that it’s easy to overlook what a fantastic singer she is. No danger of that on Never Too Late, where her voice soars without ever dragging out the melismatic fireworks. It’s all about control, and I’ve got lots of it, as Janet once put it. If every song here is exceptionally well-written – the songs that address the Trump presidency do so pretty deftly, with only Sisters feeling close to rote tub-thumping – the lengthy Ship Go Down and Hot for the Mountain are the most exploratory, off-beam tracks Prass has written to date, slackening the usual verse-chorus structure. The former shifts from eeriness to a gently insistent defiance – “we can take you on,” it repeats, again and again – while the latter starts out jazzy, and slowly builds into a stunning, cathartic final two minutes, as Prass’s wordless vocal wail swims through a woozy, distorted groove that audibly bears the influence of tropicalia, the Brazilian take on psychedelia that’s another of Spacebomb’s touchstones. It’s magnificent, as is the rest of The Future and the Past. Proof that you can be a member of a loose musical collective and out on your own at the same time.
What Alexis listened to this week
Whyte Horses – The Best Of It (feat La Roux)
Odd as it is to hear Elly Jackson’s voice over tumbling guitar pop rather than electronics, this works perfectly. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/oct/30/pele-cruyff-best-barnes-stories-meeting-footballers | Football | 2015-10-30T10:13:44.000Z | Guardian readers | Pelé, Cruyff, Best and Barnes: our readers’ best stories about meeting footballers | Pelé
A couple of years ago I was working at Edinburgh University. We offered Pelé an honorary degree and he said yes, so we put on a fancy ceremony in London at the V&A. Pelé came on, said some stuff and was given the degree. It was my job to get him off the stage and to his car.
Anyway – and perhaps predictably – everyone and his dog wanted a piece of him. Selfies, autographs, the lot. He had a massive smile for everyone, took photos, and signed everything. I finally managed to get him away from the crowds and to his car. My colleague says to him: “[My name], I’m sure you’d like to get a photo with Pele, wouldn’t you?” I mumble something about how I’m just doing my job and wouldn’t want to intrude.
So Pelé gives me a massive grin, and says, “Well [my name], I want a photo with you, OK?” And he shakes my hand and makes me pose for the picture with him. One of the best moments of my life, to be honest. Silencer
Johan Cruyff
Johan Cruyff. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
I met Johan Cruyff as a kid, when he played for Feyenoord. To the great dislike of my family, who were all living in Amsterdam area, I turned into a Feyenoord fan instantly. What can I say? He was the magnificent JC; the club he played for didn’t matter to me.
When signing my T-shirt he asked me if I wanted to become a footballer. I told him I already was one. He said I looked very young to play but for my age I was just very tiny and thin as a pipecleaner. I said I was old enough, just not big enough to become as good as he was. He said that he always was as thin as a straw too, but that it was because it was so difficult against those muscled big players that he became so good eventually.
That simple remark always stayed in the back of my mind. When I was struggling against better or bigger players, I kept going because that was going to make me great. I’m hoping to become a certified trainer this winter and, when I see a youth match, I look at the weakest players going all out and I think, “Keep on struggling, because that is how you get there.” Koeien
Ryan Giggs
I once saw Ryan Giggs in HMV in Manchester Market Street. Looking through the Ryan Giggs calendar. I kid you not. 70114usa
Eric Cantona
Eric Cantona’s first game for Manchester United was an exhibition match in Lisbon against Benfica as part of Eusebio’s 50th birthday celebrations. I gatecrashed the post-match party at the Estoril Casino so that I could ask him why he had left Leeds. “C’est la vie,” was his response. 69and74
Jack Charlton
Jack Charlton. Photograph: David Benett/Getty Images
In about 1999 I was playing a Sunday football match in Regents Park. We were useless – a few of the team and come straight from the Fabric nightclub and, at best, we were hungover. Our opponents that day were all very fit and athletic and, approaching half-time, we were 6-1 down.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a very familiar figure walking towards the pitch with his wife. Jack Charlton and Mrs Charlton stopped on the side of the pitch and watched the last couple of minutes of the half. The ref blew his whistle and we congregated near the touchline for our captain’s team-talk. By then I had pointed out our celebrity football legend standing about five metres away.
Through the cloud of cigarette smoke, I shouted over to him “Jack, what’s your advice here mate? We’re 6-1 down at half-time and they’re all over us.” Jack looked at us, looked at the opposition, then back and forth between the two groups of players several times, before turning to me and in a deadpan voice and saying: “Go home lads!” and walked off. AlexEvs
Graeme Souness
My Mam once thumped Graeme Souness. On a night out in Liverpool with the Pilk Recs rugby league team – for whom my Dad played full-back – my Mam and a pal of hers were accosted at the bar by the mustachioed one and permed runner-arounder Craig Johnston. Suffice to say Mr Souness’s charm wasn’t what he thought it was, and my Mam decided to lamp him one. He took offence, but she reminded him of the crowd of rugby players in the corner and he decided to take one off a lass rather than off St Helens’ finest. She didn’t know he’d later go on to play for Rangers, but I like to think that if she did she’d have hit him twice as hard. Arraiga2
George Best
I met George Best in a bookies’ near Green Park tube station in about 1981. He was on his own minding his own business and I just walked up to him and thanked him for all the brilliant memories he’d given me over the years. I told him that a kid at school once made money by forging his autograph and selling them. He laughed, signed a betting slip and said: “There’s a real one for you.” NapoleonXIV
Stuart Pearce
Two days after England were knocked out of Euro 96 I was crossing a road in Nottingham and I realised the man coming across the other way was none other than Stuart Pearce. As a massive Forest fan, and having watched him score his redemption penalty against Spain only days before, I desperately wanted to say well done, but no words would came out. I had to do with mumbling “that’s was Psycho” to another equally speechless bloke who’d crossed the road at the same time. BigTimmyA
Brian Clough
Brian Clough. Photograph: PA
When I was a sixth form student in the very early 1980s, I wrote for our school magazine and we managed to get Brian Clough to come in for an interview as he lived quite near our school. Aged 17, I was given the job of doing the interview. The first thing he said was, “Have you been smoking young man?” I had and must have stank. He then gave me a lecture on the evils of smoking. By this point I was shitting myself. However, after he had made his point he was a complete gentleman, answered the questions happily and it all turned out well. I can see why his players generally did what he asked – a real force of nature. Markol
Louis van Gaal
When Louis van Gaal was managing Barcelona, I saw him and the rest of the Barça team at the airport boarding a flight to Santander. Knowing this and seeing Van Gaal on his own – Kluivert, Overmars and Mendieta were ambushed by fans, of course – I approached him, heart pounding. I could ask him anything but said: “Who are you playing this weekend, Louis?”
“Racing Santander.”
“Thanks Louis.”
I proceeded to walk away, wanting the ground to swallow me up. Mark Lardner
Bill Shankly
I knocked at Bill Shankly’s house around the corner from Melwood once. He wasn’t in but his lovely wife Nessie invited two scruffy eight-year-olds in for orange juice and biscuits on a hot day. As we were walking back home down his street, Shankly pulled up in his car. He probably noticed our Liverpool scarfs and said: “‘I hope you’re not off to Melwood, training’s finished.”
“No, we’ve just been to yours for orange juice and biscuits Mr Shankly.”
“Oh and I suppose you’ll be around for Sunday dinner.”
“No, I can’t this week because it’s me Ma’s birthday.”
To which he laughed and drove off shouting, “Well give your Ma a big kiss from me.”
My Ma wasn’t best pleased when I told her. She’s an Everton fan. elephantwoman
John Barnes
John Barnes. Photograph: Richard Saker
We were on a family holiday at a Center Parcs in the mid-1990s. My mum and dad were looking to change cars to a Ford Galaxy. My mum spotted a gentleman driving his family in said car in and out of the car park during our stay. Mum was determined to ask him about the car and stopped him on the way into the swimming pool. He was really friendly and gave her a full run-down of the pros and cons of the car, and said that he’d been given it by Ford to try out. She had no idea that it was John Barnes. Scrabopower
Paul Merson
My first job was at the McDonald’s in Teesside Park at the tender age of 16. It was around the time Paul Merson was at Middlesbrough. He came through the drive through, where I was stationed that afternoon. He ordered a couple of meals for his family and I asked him if he wanted Coke with them – as per my training. He gave me a funny look, drove away in disgust and I was promptly called into the manager’s office and told why. I still chuckle now when I see him on Soccer Saturday. Mobatron 3000
Chris Coleman
Chris Coleman bought me a beer and later high-fived me on three different occasions when we were at the same venue for a night out about 10 years ago. Also, when I did make conversation with him at the bar, he put up with me being a bit of a drunken idiot for longer than he really was obliged to before, I think, faking a phone call and leaving me be. GhostWiper
Bert Trautmann
At my parents’ golden wedding celebration by pure coincidence my dad’s boyhood hero, Bert Trautmann, just happened to be in the same hotel restaurant. Bert was a superb gentleman and took time for photos and a chat and even introduced us to his family. Dad died a year before Bert, but the memory of that evening will live with me forever. saraonlydecentfergie
George Best
I was working for a BBC chat show many moons ago where George Best was a guest. In the green room he was on his own, that much of a star that no one would approach him, so I did. “Don’t suppose you’re free next Tuesday, we play five-a-side and if you fancy a game?” I asked. “Love to,” replied George, “But I’ve got a charity do that night with Denis Law and somebody’s got to get Denis home.” thewinslowboy
Bobby Robson
Bobby Robson. Photograph: Alex Morton/Action Images
I went to Portman Road more years ago than I care to remember to Derby play Ipswich and lost my bearings on the way back to the station. After an hour or so, I returned to the football ground to get my bearings and start again. It was pouring rain and I must have been standing there looking lost because this bloke came over to me, umbrella in hand, and said: “Are you lost?”
It was Bobby Robson himself. I explained my situation and he told me to wait there a minute. He came back with a member of staff and said the guy would drive me to the station as it was only 10 minutes away. All I could say was “Thank you” – I even forgot to ask for his autograph!
What a gentleman - one of those few characters in the game that nobody has ever thought badly of. He didn’t have to do what he did. Could just have pointed me in the right direction or ignored me. LordMoore
Johan Cruyff
Me and my old man walked into Ajax’s old Meer Stadium back in the 1970s just before their third European Cup final victory over Milan. We went upstairs to snoop around (something you couldn’t do at an English ground), and lo and behold, there was the one and only Johan Cruyff sat reading the newspaper. He heard my excited gasps, looked up and then invited me to sit down with him and bought me a cola. I can remember I told him I was a Leeds fan, to which he raved about Giles, Bremner and the rest. After a few minutes he invited me and my old man to watch the training, where I got to meet Neeskins, Brandenburg, Kroll and the rest. Talk about being stunned! leedsdevo
Paul Gascoigne
Paul Gascoigne. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer
Back in 1999 a childhood friend of mine was unfortunately diagnosed with leukaemia and I wanted to do something for him that would help lift his spirits. He was a Geordie lad, who loved football and loved Gazza. At the time Gazza had just joined Middlesbrough, my team, so I decided to go along to the training ground to try to get an autograph from him and maybe a little message that I could give to my friend.
So there I was at the training ground in the pouring rain, waiting with a pen and a card for him to sign. He was the last person to come off and, when I told him why I was doing it, he told me and my dad to come inside as it was pouring with rain and to wait at reception for him.
He came back out 15 minutes later, with a few pair of his boots, signed balls and signed shirts, with the card and a very long message and heartfelt message inside it. He then provided me with a bag of treats, including signed balls, signed training gear, a signed home shirt from the entire first team squad and told me it was all for being a good lad.
People always say that you shouldn’t really meet your heroes as they’ll let you down, but I always have this story to fall back on and know that if you’re lucky they can sometimes exceed your expectations. tmilb1989
David James
I was in a pub back in the day watching boxing on TV. We were just down the road from Luton Airport where the England team regularly fly in and out from when David James popped in. He had a bit of a chat with us and was a nice bloke. When he left, after buying a couple of bottles of wine to carry out, he pointed to some beers on the bar and he’d only bought us an unprompted round – top man. thecruiseboy
George Best
It was about 22 years ago and I was flying from Belfast to Heathrow. Having plonked myself down beside a man and his son we soon got chatting. He had the most amazing eyes and a slight Northern Irish accent. He was extremely charming, asking me where I came from and when I said Donegal he said he knew someone from there. I asked who and he said Patrick Bonner. I was so impressed he knew our local hero yet I still didn’t have a clue who this charming man beside me was – until I asked him his name just before we landed. When he said “George Best” I laughed, saying sorry I didn’t have a clue and he thought this was hilarious. When we arrived at Heathrow we left the little plane together to retrieve our bags and when I walked out with him seeing my boyfriends face at the time was priceless. I must say he was by far one of the most charming men I have ever meet – and yes it’s true what they say, he did have a twinkle in his eye. Polly Skene
Alan Hansen
I once met Alan Hansen in Macy’s in New York. It was a Saturday afternoon so I asked him if he had heard any of the football scores. He asked me what team I wanted to know about and I said Forest. He laughed at me and said: “I only look out for scores of the big teams, son,” and walked off! In case you’re wondering, I subsequently found out Forest had lost 2-0 to Watford. peteym
Matt Busby
Matt Busby. Photograph: PA/Empics
My first football match, at the age of four, was Manchester United v Sunderland at Old Trafford in 1991. My dad, a Sunderland supporter who was working in Manchester, had managed to get some tickets in the home end, and warned me before the game that we had to pretend to support United so we didn’t annoy anyone around us.
A couple of goals into the game, my dad realised he had lost his car keys somewhere. Panicking that we’d be stuck in Manchester with no easy way home, he dragged me off to find a steward and see if the keys had been handed in. We were directed into what must have been a hospitality suite to wait, while the steward went to check the lost and found.
While waiting around, an older man came over and spoke to my dad. At some point, he asked me: “Has your daddy been a silly man?” and being four, I mumbled that he had before they carried on chatting.
On returning, the steward told us that no keys had been handed in, and saying goodbye to the older man, we wandered off to look in the car park. Once we were a good distance away, my dad asked me if I knew who we had just met. I had no idea, so he told me it was Matt Busby, and that he was one of the football greats. It took me a good while to learn who this Matt Busby man was, but I’ll always remember him as being that nice man that I met with my dad at my first football match. It didn’t turn me into a United fan though, and a couple of years I settled for Bolton.
In the end, my dad found he’d left the keys in his car door. lukecl
David Moyes
I had a good old chat with David Moyes when he was flying to Italy a few years back. He asked who I supported and, when I said Arsenal, he told me a great story about having Aaron Ramsey and dad in his front room literally poised to sign from Cardiff City when his dad took a call from Arsène Wenger. His came off the phone and, with the contract on the table, said: “Put the pen down Aaron, good boy.” Then told Moyes he was off to sign for Arsenal! Moyes said it was the closest he ever got to signing a player without it actually happening. mattp68
Mario Kempes
Mario Kempes. Photograph: Steve Powell/Getty Images
When Mario Kempes was playing for Valencia, he and his new wife, Mavi, had a flat at the top of the block where a mate of mine lived. We used to see him quite frequently and chat about football. He was a very nice, humble bloke, especially considering that he had just become a global superstar after the 1978 World Cup.
One day, after lunching very well, I headed for home. I tripped at the top of the last half-flight of stairs, rolled down into the foyer and landed flat on my back, just as Mario came in the street door. Fortunately, I could feel no pain. He helped me up and brushed me down. I tried to thank him, but he was laughing so hard that tears were running down his cheeks and he couldn’t talk. After that, he always had a big grin on his face when he saw me. I heard he had serious heart surgery a little while back. Hope he’s well. farabundovive
Alex McLeish
I met Alex McLeish in a queue for food at Lord’s earlier this summer. I turned around and stared fractionally longer than I should have. He smiled and said “Don’t worry lads, I’m supporting England.” Which was nice. tomsmells
Bobby Robson
In September 1986 I was hitching towards Bury St Edmunds and at Royston a smartish Astra pulled over for me. I got into the car and, following a serious double take, I realised that I was riding with Bobby Robson. He talked about rugby and other things now lost in the mists of time, and carefully and politely declined to answer my questions about “the hand of god”.
When he dropped me off he told me to take care and seemed genuinely concerned about my safety. That day he treated me with kindness and courtesy. When we parted I was left reflecting on the fact that I had just spent half an hour with a decent and self effacing man who I was privileged to have met. oleluke
Carlos Queiroz
Me and my girlfriend stayed at the Hilton in Manchester several years ago. Downstairs at breakfast sat the Manchester United squad and staff. As a huge United fan, this was a dream come true. My girlfriend isn’t the keenest follower of football. In the queue for breakfast I noticed assistant manager Carlos Queiroz was in front of my girlfriend.
As we reached the buffet, my girlfriend started a conversation with Queiroz – not knowing who he was. She asked whether he was going to the match and Queiroz said yes. “Where are you sat?” Just as I was about to interrupt, Queiroz stated he was sat, “Next to the boss, Sir Alex.” Just as I couldn’t be more mortified, it got worse. “Wow, what fantastic seats. Have a nice day!” I’ve never eaten breakfast so quickly. ragingcandy
Kenny Dalglish
Graeme Souness, Alan Hansen and Kenny Dalglish. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
I was about 13 and I heard that Kenny Dalglish was signing autographs at the shop around the corner so off I went to have my Liverpool scrapbook signed. I expected a long queue and for him to just sign everyone’s stuff and leave. There was no queue and he was in a talkative mood. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand a word he said so I just nodded and shook my head alternately and hoped I was getting it right. It seemed to go on forever. wonderwife
Bobby Robson
Working as translator at the Stade de France during the 1998 World Cup, I saw various former players at the buffet – Trevor Brooking, Gary Lineker, Ron Atkinson – but the only one who kind of deigned to join us at our table was Bobby Robson. Not only was he natural, pleasant and humorous, he was genuinely curious about the who, why, when and what of our missions. We passed an agreeable hour or so chatting about football and well, life. What a gentleman and a down-to-earth person before him being a football-type. An albeit brief encounter with a legend but one that has stayed with me to this day. Jimmy Armfield joined us for a while and he was equally gregarious and sociable. Men from another age. francaise
Martin Peters
In the late 1970s, Sheffield University had a Spurs Supporters Society, which was a wheeze whereby we got Student Union funds to subsidise our travel to Spurs away games. It was the 1977-78 season and Spurs were briefly in the second division, visiting outlandish places like Oldham. The society (all 12 of us) had a grand end-of-season dinner and invited Martin Peters to attend as guest of honour – no fee involved – which, unbelievably, he did.
Somehow I ended up sitting next to him and still have a signed menu. He was an absolute gentleman to all of us star-struck oiks – friendly, entertaining, patient. The funny thing is, in my memory it was convenient for him to attend because he was at Sheffield United. But I’ve just looked it up and I see that in 1979 he was still at Norwich, which somehow makes his attendance more laudable, and puzzling. Doleywino
Ian Rush
Ian Rush. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
Me, my brother, dad and uncle were in an airport in Zurich in 2003 when my brother spotted Ian Rush about 50 yards away. Me and my brother popped off to go and find something entertaining to do – we were 12 and 13 so a beer was off the cards – during which time my dad and uncle went to speak with Rush and ask him if he could come over and speak to us when we were back.
When we returned, we queued for boarding and felt a tap on our shoulders. We turned round and Rush was standing there. “Excuse me, aren’t you the Milburn brothers – can I have your autographs?” he asked. My brother, quick as a flash, says to him: “Yeah we are, but sorry we’re in a bit of a ‘rush’.” He appreciated the terrible pun and after we had boarded he came and signed our boarding cards for us. tmilb1989
Joe Jordan
In 1974 Joe Jordan was sharing a house in Middleton, Leeds (not something you could ever imagine happening today in Miggy. Even our crap players wouldn’t live there). My mate Mick and I decided to visit for autographs. Mr Jordan, bedecked in 87” flares, 13 hectares of shirt collar and 14” platforms, answered our polite request (“please” and “Mr Jordan”) with a robust: “Fuck off, ah’m his twin brother,” followed by a robust door slamming.
My friend and I (similarly clothed to Jordan, now I think about it) needed two seconds to assess our options; we knocked again. Jordan’s housemate – who I forgot to say was Gordon McQueen – answered and was all charm as he gave us his autograph. My friend said “Can Joe’s twin brother do it too or do we have to fuck off again?” (We were 11, from South Leeds, and hence mouthy). Jordan returned and signed with unsurprising bad grace. MiggyBelleIsle
Martin O’Neill
Martin O’Neill and George Graham pose before the Worthington Cup final. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
My first job at 16 was working for a small, Coventry-based production company. I was a roadie who helped to set up DJ equipment, mostly at weddings. The company had a contract with a hotel in Hinckley, where Leicester City had chosen to host the after-party to the 2000 Worthington Cup final, win or lose. Thankfully they won it.
As a Leicester fan, I naturally bought my Leicester kit along with me and asked my boss if it was OK to drape the kit over the front to the DJ decks. During one of the bands, the club chairman came up to the DJ booth and asked if he could borrow my Leicester top for a few photos as all of the team kits had been left on the bus. I obviously agreed and asked him to please bring it back when the were finished with it.
The night wore on, the dancing got even worse and I started to wonder where my kit was. I went for a wander to see if I could find it and I spotted Matt Elliott taking the cup with my shirt wrapped around it up to his room. I was half chuffed but half kind of wanting my kit back.
The following week I decided to write a letter to the club to explain what had happened. I received a call from Martin O’Neill, who was very apologetic and offered to send me an away kit as all of the home kits had sold out due to the cup victory. I thanked and congratulated him. A couple of months later O’Neill left Leicester for Celtic and I never received the kit! I got a story though. richedwards | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/04/oliver-burkemans-last-column-the-eight-secrets-to-a-fairly-fulfilled-life | Life and style | 2020-09-04T14:00:27.000Z | Oliver Burkeman | Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life | In the very first instalment of my column for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, a dizzying number of years ago now, I wrote that it would continue until I had discovered the secret of human happiness, whereupon it would cease. Typically for me, back then, this was a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness. Obviously, I never expected to find the secret, but on some level I must have known there were questions I needed to confront – about anxiety, commitment-phobia in relationships, control-freakery and building a meaningful life. Writing a column provided the perfect cover for such otherwise embarrassing fare.
I hoped I’d help others too, of course, but I was totally unprepared for how companionable the journey would feel: while I’ve occasionally received requests for help with people’s personal problems, my inbox has mainly been filled with ideas, life stories, quotations and book recommendations from readers often far wiser than me. (Some of you would have been within your rights to charge a standard therapist’s fee.) For all that: thank you.
I am drawing a line today not because I have uncovered all the answers, but because I have a powerful hunch that the moment is right to do so. If nothing else, I hope I’ve acquired sufficient self-knowledge to know when it’s time to move on. So what did I learn? What follows isn’t intended as an exhaustive summary. But these are the principles that surfaced again and again, and that now seem to me most useful for navigating times as baffling and stress-inducing as ours.
There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)
The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)
The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won’t kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance – but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)
It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in terms of what you’ll accomplish, that it soon becomes the more appealing way to live.
The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need. I spent a long time fixated on becoming hyper-productive before I finally started wondering why I was staking so much of my self-worth on my productivity levels. What I needed wasn’t another exciting productivity book, since those just functioned as enablers, but to ask more uncomfortable questions instead.
The broader point here is that it isn’t fun to confront whatever emotional experiences you’re avoiding – if it were, you wouldn’t avoid them – so the advice that could really help is likely to make you uncomfortable. (You may need to introspect with care here, since bad advice from manipulative friends or partners is also likely to make you uncomfortable.)
It’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain
One good question to ask is what kind of practices strike you as intolerably cheesy or self-indulgent: gratitude journals, mindfulness meditation, seeing a therapist? That might mean they are worth pursuing. (I can say from personal experience that all three are worth it.) Oh, and be especially wary of celebrities offering advice in public forums: they probably pursued fame in an effort to fill an inner void, which tends not to work – so they are likely to be more troubled than you are.
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)
It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.
The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one. When I first wrote about how useful it is to remember that everyone is totally just winging it, all the time, we hadn’t yet entered the current era of leaderly incompetence (Brexit, Trump, coronavirus). Now, it’s harder to ignore. But the lesson to be drawn isn’t that we’re doomed to chaos. It’s that you – unconfident, self-conscious, all-too-aware-of-your-flaws – potentially have as much to contribute to your field, or the world, as anyone else.
Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them
Humanity is divided into two: on the one hand, those who are improvising their way through life, patching solutions together and putting out fires as they go, but deluding themselves otherwise; and on the other, those doing exactly the same, except that they know it. It’s infinitely better to be the latter (although too much “assertiveness training” consists of techniques for turning yourself into the former).
Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.
Selflessness is overrated. We respectable types, although women especially, are raised to think a life well spent means helping others – and plenty of self-help gurus stand ready to affirm that kindness, generosity and volunteering are the route to happiness. There’s truth here, but it generally gets tangled up with deep-seated issues of guilt and self-esteem. (Meanwhile, of course, the people who boast all day on Twitter about their charity work or political awareness aren’t being selfless at all; they are burnishing their egos.)
If you’re prone to thinking you should be helping more, that’s probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your idiosyncratic ambitions and enthusiasms. As the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver observes, it’s radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending an hour or day of discretionary time. And the irony is that you don’t actually serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway. More often than not, by doing your thing – as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing – you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.
Know when to move on. And then, finally, there’s the one about knowing when something that’s meant a great deal to you – like writing this column – has reached its natural endpoint, and that the most creative choice would be to turn to what’s next. This is where you find me. Thank you for reading.
Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals will be published next year by The Bodley Head. Find out more at oliverburkeman.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jan/31/the-sims-at-20-two-decades-of-life-love-and-reorganising-the-kitchen | Games | 2020-01-31T09:03:10.000Z | Keza MacDonald | The Sims at 20: two decades of life, love and reorganising the kitchen | Like many girls of my generation, I first played The Sims at a sleepover. It was at my friend Hannah’s house; three 11-year-olds huddled in front of her dad’s bulky old computer monitor at midnight, gazing into a miniature house populated by tiny people going about their inexplicably compelling daily business. We took turns sending them to work, changing the wallpaper, and ordering them to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of leaving them to gather flies. We bought them a little telly, a nice couch, a blender, paging covetously through the game’s furniture catalogue. With a thrill, we discovered we could make Sims “smooch” (though we were disappointed to learn that they couldn’t actually bone down – that wouldn’t happen until The Sims 2). Before we knew it, it was 3am.
Almost everyone has played The Sims. With four main instalments, countless add-ons and spin-offs, and more than 200m sales worldwide, it is equalled perhaps only by Tetris in its universality. One thing creator Will Wright realised very early on was that the game was appealing to a large female audience. Whereas in the past “a large female audience” meant maybe 5% of the user base, with The Sims, women were the majority. A friend’s mother played so much Sims that she forgot to clean the actual house for weeks.
Creator Will Wright … the project started as an architectural simulation, until the development team realised testers were having more fun manipulating the onscreen people. Photograph: Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images
Mortifyingly, some teen pals and I used The Sims 2 to insert ourselves into elaborate Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction. A university classmate created the cast of Friends, and used them to play out a drama that was definitely better than the final season of the show. My own personal obsession with The Sims was so all-consuming that when The Sims 3 arrived in 2009, I had to cut myself off in case I failed my degree. One of my lecturers, spotting The Sims open on my laptop in class, admitted to the worryingly common virtual crime of drowning his Sims in their own pool by deleting the ladders.
The Sims is more than a dolls' house for the digital generation. There is no racial prejudice, no gender pay gap
Part of the appeal of video games is control – not just the act of controlling a character’s actions, but the greater control of understanding a set of rules and systems and bending them to your will. The Sims is so enormously compelling because it offers the fantasy of control over life itself, including all the things that are so maddeningly unpredictable in the real world – relationships, careers, family, house renovations. The rules of The Sims essentially state that if you work hard and do everything you’re supposed to do – get a job, buy a house, progress through the ranks to earn more money and buy more stuff – happiness will follow. It’s a beguiling capitalist fantasy – and even if things aren’t going well, you can always type in the “motherlode” cheat code to shower yourself in riches.
In the 20 years since the original Sims arrived to distract us all from homework and housework (with virtual homework and housework), the series has evolved and expanded, its underlying artificial intelligence code becoming ever more sophisticated. Where originally Sims were miniature automatons, later they developed personalities, aspirations and foibles alongside their basic needs for food, money and toilet facilities. They even developed free will: from The Sims 2 onwards you could flip a switch and the simulation would play out without your input, the Sims making decisions about whom to hook up with and how long to spend in the bath, according to their own virtual whims.
Part dolls house, part reality TV show … The Sims simulates relationships between housemates, families and lovers. Photograph: EA Games
Some of my favourite times with The Sims have come when the little people are operating independently of me, sometimes so uncannily that it freaked me out. Once, as a teen, I created a replica of my real-life home to see what would happen, and it generated such an accurate facsimile of our family dynamic – dad yelling at my slobby brother to get off the couch, me arguing with my mum in the kitchen, me writing furiously in a diary late into the night – that I started to wonder if we weren’t all in a video game all of the time. And I wasn’t even a fan of the Simulation Hypothesis. Or high.
New games have sent Sims off to college, seen them celebrate birthdays and engagements and new year parties, introduced pets and tiny houses and mermaids. And have you seen what Sims fans are doing nowadays? A vast, dedicated community of crafters has made hundreds of thousands of new things to adorn Sim dwellings. Some make an actual living building perfect houses or directing Sims soap operas on YouTube. And of course, they’ve made countless explicit sex mods.
The Sims Mobile … the 2018 release allowed players to take the game with them everywhere, creating stories with other players while on the go. Photograph: Electronic Arts
The Sims is more than a dolls’ house for the digital generation. In many respects it is a post-literate utopia, powered by love and money. There is no racial prejudice, no gender pay gap. Gay marriage arrived in The Sims years before it did in real life. And as its simulation has become ever more clever, it has let players experiment not simply with home decor and fashions, but with human nature and motivation. Players have used The Sims to explore everything from their own gender identity, to complicated family dynamics, to what would happen if you put all the Greek gods in a house and made them have sex.
I sometimes wonder what The Sims would be like if it were closer to how real life actually worked – if it saddled you with crippling university debt, made you pay extortionate rent on a tiny flat instead of letting you build your dream home, had you chasing after people who’ll never love you back and working for years without earning the promotion you deserve. But a more realistic Sims would be depressing to play, because really, the point of The Sims is to make life’s everyday trials, labours and rituals seem fun and full of possibilities. Has a video game ever had a more valuable and worthwhile aim? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/nov/27/the-glass-menagerie-review-ivo-van-hove-isabelle-huppert-ita | Stage | 2021-11-27T13:15:04.000Z | Chris Wiegand | The Glass Menagerie review – Ivo van Hove’s subterranean home blues | Is this a latecomer weaving through the front row of the stalls? No, it’s warehouse poet Tom Wingfield, narrator of Tennessee Williams’s first hit and most autobiographical play. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart – with brush-up hair, scruffy moustache, wry smile and sunken eyes – doesn’t half look like the playwright as he performs an illusion with a scarf and rope, assisted by the audience.
For their own latest magic trick, director Ivo van Hove and designer Jan Versweyveld shrewdly plunge Williams’s 1944 memory play – set a decade earlier, in a St Louis tenement – into a subterranean domain. The family’s Victrola, typewriter and kitchen appliances are present but the floor is earthen, the burrowed walls covered with sketches of the long-gone Mr Wingfield that resemble cave paintings.
As Amanda, the skittish matriarch whom Tom berates for her “hawklike attention”, Isabelle Huppert suggests a woman both striving to rule this underground roost and protect her children. She spoon-feeds them from a bowl and fusses across the stage with the lightness of a bird; her daughter Laura (Justine Bachelet) crawls on all fours and sleeps not on the fold-out sofa imagined by Williams but hidden beneath a brown blanket in a corner nest.
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Tom and Cyril Gueï as Jim in the cavelike apartment designed by Jan Versweyveld. Photograph: Jan Versweyveld
Rarely has this fragile family resembled so closely the collection of glass animals treasured by Laura, whose dress (designed by An D’Huys) similarly catches the light. Their home is as much a refuge from the outside world as a place of confinement. The walls, coloured to match Huppert’s hair, emphasise her paleness. Amanda is living out her claim, on learning Laura has been skipping college classes, that she felt like hiding in a hole in the ground.
Huppert races breathlessly through Amanda’s lines, wired on the promise of gentleman caller Jim (Cyril Gueï). She adds notes of gibberish, with loosey-goosey gestures matching the frilly frivolity of her dress. All of this accentuates the silence that hits like heartburn as she learns about Jim’s betrothed, Betty, and her guttural cries of despair at the play’s end which bring an overdue flood of pity.
Biscayart’s Tom is not a bookish daydreamer but snake-hipped and louche, drunkenly dancing to an R&B slow jam with Laura and bringing home the bliss of nocturnal wanderings halfheartedly disguised as midnight movie trips. Van Hove also underlines his attraction to Jim when Tom writhes in delight at his workmate’s “Shakespeare” nickname for him.
Cyril Gueï as Jim and Justine Bachelet as Laura, whose dress sparkles like her treasured glass menagerie. Photograph: Jan Versweyveld
As Amanda flirts with Jim, who moves on to kiss Laura simply because he knows he can, there is an echo of the household seduced by a stranger in Pasolini’s Theorem – previously adapted by Van Hove – though Jim is not manifestly manipulative and his catlike toying with Laura could be more explicit. Gueï swells in pride, recalling his high-school power over women, just as Huppert writhes on the kitchen sink with memories of jonquils and gentleman callers. Bachelet’s Laura, never wholly meek, shares a playful relationship with Tom and imitates a penguin’s waddle as she boasts – more than confesses – to Amanda of trips to the zoo while skipping classes.
Van Hove’s interval-free, French-language production was created for the Odéon in Paris and delayed because of the pandemic. It is characteristically punctuated with bursts of eclectic music with varying impact, including Debussy (perhaps inspired by that “silver slipper of a moon”) sounding unusually alarming.
If the portraits of the father are a bit distracting, they stress how memories are subjective and how the Wingfields are haunted by the past and left behind while Jim strides into a tech-powered future. Van Hove recognises the individual searches for strength within this fragile family but shows, too, how memories – like this underground lair – can confine as well as comfort.
La Ménagerie de Verre is at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam until 28 November and livestreamed with English subtitles on 27 November | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/mar/19/trip-to-spain-rob-brydon-steve-coogan-i-like-it-when-people-think-this-is-real | Television & radio | 2017-03-19T08:00:03.000Z | Laura Barton | ‘I like it when people think this is real’: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on The Trip to Spain | The rain in Spain falls mainly on the restaurant – a sudden autumn downpour that spills over the sides of the patio awning and swirls around the table legs at Txoko, a popular bistro overlooking the harbour in the Basque town of Getaria. Diners run for cover, waiters hurry tables, chairs, crockery indoors, and Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon stand in the doorway, continuing their lunchtime conversation about the death of Sir Thomas More and how they would each choose to execute the other. “I like it when people think this is real,” says Brydon, as the rain hammers down. “I would never have such a toxic conversation with a friend.”
Since it began in 2010, The Trip has made unexpectedly devotional viewing. It is a curious premise: Brydon and Coogan play exaggerated versions of themselves – two sometime friends, comedians in middle age, dispatched to review restaurants together. First they headed to the north of England, dining at L’Enclume and the Inn at Whitewell and riffing over Wordsworth and Coleridge, Michael Caine and sticky toffee pudding. Next came an adventure through Italy, from Liguria to Capri, filled with seafood linguine and artichokes, Byron and Shelley and Alanis Morissette. It is a show brimming with impressions, niggles, tenderness, and it has proved not only wonderful television and a celebration of regional food, but also a sumptuous portrait of masculinity.
The new season brings changes: this time the pair are travelling through Spain, and the story is that while Brydon is again providing restaurant reviews for the Observer, Coogan is writing about the experience for the New York Times – as well as working on a Laurie Lee-esque memoir, revisiting the country he first explored as a teenager. And while there is a familiar run of impersonations — Al Pacino and Mick Jagger and David Bowie nestling in among the pintxos, Iberico ham and rioja, there are discussions of Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and impassioned renditions of Noel Harrison’s Windmills of Your Mind.
Perhaps the biggest shift, however, is that this time the series will be broadcast on Sky Atlantic rather than the BBC – a decision that was not easily made by the show’s director Michael Winterbottom, and seems now to perplex its stars. “That’s Bake Off, The Voice, The Trip …” Brydon reels off the list of successful shows that have recently made an exodus from the BBC, and later, debating when they should unleash a close-to-the-bone riff about Rolf Harris and Dave Lee Travis he and Coogan have been working on, he nods to it again: “We need some wham-bam moments for episode one, so that the 12,000 people who watch it when it goes out really have something to look forward to.”
When the rain stops, abruptly giving way once more to soft heat and the heavy smell of the harbour, the scene resumes: Coogan and Brydon are re-seated to eat octopus and hake à la plancha and discuss the success of Coogan’s film Philomena – how it “vanquished the competitive streak” he had towards his fellow Brit-comics-turned-Hollywood-stars such as Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg and Sacha Baron-Cohen. “I am freed from the albatross of jokes and having to make people laugh,” he says. “With Philomena I managed to say something of substance.” Brydon regards him steadily. “May I say something?” he says. “Your octopus is getting cold.”
Filming The Trip to Spain at Txoko in Getaria. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer
Much of The Trip relies on this dynamic – Coogan the somewhat grandiose figure, taking himself rather seriously; Brydon content with domestic happiness and more neighbourly fame, delivering the occasional levelling dig to Coogan’s ribs. But over the course of three series this too has evolved. In the first instalment, we saw Coogan in the midst of professional success and personal disillusionment, attempting to shake off the shackles of Alan Partridge. In the last season, it was Brydon who was in flux, risking the contentment of his home life for a fleeting romance with a tour guide.
Spanish food, they say, proved less varied than Italian. “There’s no getting away from it, there was a lot of ham and cheese,” Brydon says. “The best food was the tapas bars,” Coogan adds. “This might be a controversial thing to say, but the culinary tastes of working-class people in some of our neighbouring countries seems to be more sophisticated. Or, let me put it another way, the multinational conglomerate conspiracy to shove crap food down people’s throats is less successful in places like Spain and Italy, because not that they seek out fresh food, it’s just that it’s part of the culture, and it hasn’t really changed very much. You might think of a traditional British place, you might think of a greasy spoon maybe, whereas in Italy and Spain you have tapas food which is just really unadulterated by crap. It’s changing in Britain, but it has been for a long time that among working people food has been just sustenance to give the energy to work and get you through the day, and if it tasted nice that was a sort of bonus, wasn’t it?”
The day before they lunch in Getaria, Coogan and Brydon drift slowly into Santander port aboard a passenger ferry and head for the caves at Altamira. The caves are a Unesco world heritage site, an extraordinary example of paleolithic art, closed to the public in 2002 to protect the 15,000-year-old paintings of bison and bulls. For some while Coogan and Brydon stand in the replica cave adjacent to the original, built to safely receive Altamira’s 250,000 visitors a year, and listen to Victor the tour guide as he cranes his neck towards the ceiling and talks of “the group of bison that is the most evolved example of cave art in the world”. Coogan asks if they might be allowed to see the real caves. “Of course,” says Victor. “I’ll take you there!”
Brydon and Coogan filming at the Altamira caves, in northern Spain. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer
They walk through the mellow afternoon, two men in chinos enjoying the scent of warm grass and eucalyptus trees, the sound of oak leaves crisp underfoot. Across a metal walkway and a wooden bridge they go, until they reach a small door that stands resolutely shut. They cannot go inside, Victor explains: only a handful of people each week, selected by lottery, may enter the real caves, and no appeal by the pair – no claims to fame, nor the sway of Brydon’s large Twitter following – will grant them special access.
It makes for an elegant introduction to this season’s themes: Coogan’s character once again the focus, he is searching for authenticity, hoping to shore up the success of his Oscar-nominated film, to be seen as a writer and an intellectual, seeking purpose and fulfilment. “There’s two things I’m doing,” Coogan says. “One is I’m wanting some stability in my life because I’m getting older – I mean in character,” he clarifies. “In real life I don’t have that anchored family environment but I’m quite happy in work and life – I’m probably more happy than my character is. The other thing is I’m trying desperately to break out of being seen as just being popular entertainment and low-brow. Whereas in reality I’m really happy with having a balance. Put it this way, in The Trip, my character would do Alan Partridge because he has to do Alan Partridge, whereas in real life I do Alan Partridge because I actually quite enjoy it as long as I don’t do it all the time. In The Trip it’s like a desperate lurch in middle age to jump off the cliff and grasp the branch of respectability. It’s almost like I’m desperate for clever Oxbridge types to pat me on the back.”
The caves at Altamira also serve as a gentle reference to the series’ exploration of what is real and what is not. People are confused by the blurring of reality and fiction – an idea they play with, lightly and often, in their frequent celebrity impressions, in the footage shot in the actual restaurant kitchens. But still people wonder, to what extent are Coogan and Brydon acting? Are the personal details true? Are the extras real people or actors?
Brydon has spoken before of how his on-screen fling in season two caused some real-life consternation – his wife, taking their children to school, was surprised by the teacher placing an arm around her and saying: “This must be a very difficult time for you.” Coogan also tells how people will turn up at the Inn at Whitewell and ask if Magda, the receptionist with whom he enjoyed a romantic interlude in season one, still works there. “As if I slept with someone who works at the hotel and there were cameras in the room!” he says, incredulous.
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Early in the new year, some while after I leave them in Spain, I meet Brydon and Coogan again in a photographic studio in west London. They are suited and polished, posing happily with a large Spanish ham and juggling oranges, positioning roses behind their ears like flamenco dancers and ribbing one another with the warmth of friends gladly reunited.
Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer
Brydon has only recently seen the finished version of the series. “There was a ton of stuff that didn’t make it in there at all,” he says sadly. The DLT and Rolf Harris quip, for instance, is nowhere to be seen. “Michael tends to make it all a lot more friendly,” Coogan says. “If there’s anything that’s a bit uncomfortable Michael tends to leave it out. We gave up trying to convince him – he more or less ignores what we say. He just has his own ideas.”
“I’d say it’s an agenda,” says Brydon. “First of all, Rob and I like jokes,” Coogan explains. “And Michael tends to avoid anything that looks like it’s a joke, anything that’s got regular comic structure. Which is basically Rob’s entire thing.”
Brydon laughs exuberantly, like Basil Brush.
“Remember there was all that stuff in the first one,” Coogan continues, “where you said, ‘Why don’t you cut here, because it’s funny …?’”
Though some of the “absurd and spiky” moments that Brydon enjoyed are not in the finished cut, there were, they say, fewer moments of conflict in this series. “Probably because we’ve settled more into who we are a little bit,” Coogan says, and Brydon agrees. “You and I as people get on better than we ever have,” he says. And indeed the ease between them is part of this series’ great charm – moments across the dinner table where Coogan’s attempted air of grandeur is ruined by a burst of laughter at some remark or other made by Brydon.
Since last year, Coogan has been teetotal, and it’s hard not to wonder if this has detracted from the pleasure of making this season of The Trip – as Brydon has merrily sipped away at the finest albarinos and tempranillos, he has stuck resolutely to Diet Coke and water.
“Let me say he’s a much nicer person to be around because he’s not drinking,” Brydon says. “Well,” Coogan says, “I did drugs too, and the thing is between getting – how shall we put it? – ‘off one’s tits’, it’s how you are in the refrain from it. It’s about not liking yourself, and if you like yourself you like other people as well. And when I was drinking … I wouldn’t say I didn’t like myself completely …”
Stylist: Hope Lawrie. Rob Brydon: suit, Paul Smith, mrporter.com; shirt and pocket square both Drakes; shoes, Russell & Bromley; grooming, Joe Mills
Steve Coogan: suit, Paul Smith, matchesfashion.com; shirt, Burberry, mrporter.com; shoes, Grenson; grooming, Simon Maynard at Terri Manduca for Matthew David Salon Mayfair Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer
“No, you were quite fond of yourself,” Brydon interjects. “From where I was standing you were quite enamoured …” Coogan laughs. “I wouldn’t say enamoured,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I liked myself, I’d say I disapproved of other people more.” Brydon nods. “That’s very true. Very true.” “But now,” Coogan continues, “I am just … happier.” He says the word in a small way. Brydon glances at him. “I don’t like the upward inflection there,” he says sternly. “I’m just happier,” Coogan says again, this time more resoundingly. “Thank you,” Brydon says. “You’re better than that. We are not upward inflectors.”
How do they feel about the move of channels?
“Rob feels fine, I feel awkward,” Coogan says firmly, within ear of the Sky press officer. Brydon laughs. “Because you’re more nuanced?” he asks. “No,” Coogan says, “because I don’t like Rupert Murdoch.” Brydon leans back a little in his chair. “Whereas I … I adore the man. Listen, my thing is, if you’ve signed, it’s a bit disingenuous to then take the …” Coogan cuts him off: “Whereas I think it’s more dishonest to reverentially toe the line of your employer. The thing is, it’s not like we’re doing them a favour. We are providing them with ‘content’.” He picks the word up limply.
The series would have been on the BBC, Brydon explains, but the corporation wasn’t prepared to pay. “Essentially they wanted us to do it for less money than last time,” he says. “It’s a quality thing, and it seems like a very bad precedent to set, for everyone, making every programme, if you say, ‘We can give you the same thing for less money.’ Where does that end?”
Coogan smiles. “I wish more people watched Sky,” he says, more gently. “That’s another thing. But maybe they will when The Trip goes out.” He has, after all, already publicly labelled the show “Last of the Summer Wine for Guardian readers”. “It’s my theory that a lot of people who like The Trip are the very demographic who are resolutely non-Sky subscribers. So I think we might just be a cynical ploy by Sky to get them to adopt the platform. If they manage to do that I’ll be very impressed. But it wouldn’t sway me.”
They will be seen plenty elsewhere in the coming months – Coogan is set to play Stan Laurel opposite John C Reilly as Oliver Hardy. “And I’m about to do a little tour of the UK with my stand-up, and then I’m doing a film about synchronised swimming,” Brydon says. “And then I’m doing another series of Would I Lie to You?”
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with taxi drivers about how good Would I Lie to You? is,” says Coogan. “Conversations that I try to curtail.” They are on familiar territory now and Brydon smiles. “It’s not for you,” he says witheringly. “It’s a bit low-brow for you, and I wouldn’t like to think of you sitting down and watching that.”
They bicker back and forth, the kind of warm volleys that have carried them from the Lake District to Liguria to the Basque country. “I’ve told you about that guy who came to my house to do the gas saying, ‘Oh, that Coogan, he’s in another league!’” Brydon remembers. “I told him, ‘He’s not so good on the panel shows, you’ve got to allow me that.’ And he said, ‘He’s above all that.’ I had to put a pained smile on my face and say, ‘Absolutely. Oh absolutely. The problem is,’ I said, ‘try spending time with him.’”
The Trip to Spain begins at 10pm, Thursday 6 April on Sky Atlantic and Now TV, with every episode available on Sky Box Sets | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/17/think-of-the-kids-why-marriage-equality-opponents-are-wrong-on-parenting | Australia news | 2017-08-17T02:41:56.000Z | Nick Evershed | Think of the kids: why marriage equality opponents are wrong on parenting | People opposed to marriage equality have made a few arguments for why it shouldn’t be legalised, including one that doesn’t stack up: that children with same-sex parents are worse off than kids with heterosexual parents.
Sky News presenter Caroline Marcus had this to say in a column: “Decades of scientific research confirm, on average, children have the best outcomes when raised by their married biological mother and father, a point made by 374 members including six past state presidents of peak medical body, the Australian Medical Association (AMA).”
And government MP Kevin Andrews said on Sky News: “What we know from decades of social science research is that the best environment for raising children, the optimal environment for raising children, is having two loving parents. A man and a woman. A husband and wife in a stable relationship.
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“Now that doesn’t mean other relationships aren’t able to be successful for children, but overwhelmingly the social science points to that being the optimal situation.”
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out the marriage equality vote is not about LGBTI parents having children. They are already able to do so, and arguments about parenting aren’t directly relevant to the vote. As AMA president Michael Gannon told Fairfax: “The issue before the Australian people, before the Australian parliament, is not about same-sex parenting. That’s not even the discussion that is being debated.”
Secondly, even if it was about parenting, multiple reviews of research in this area show a broad consensus that children with same-sex parents are no worse off than children with heterosexual parents.
A review of the research by Columbia Law School, last updated in March 2017, looked at 79 studies into the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents. The authors found that 75 of those studies “concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children”. The authors point out that the remaining four studies (including a widely cited paper in the journal Social Science Research) that did find negative outcomes had methodological issues in that they did not control for the influence of divorce, and used questionable definitions for the same-sex parent groups.
Similarly, a review published by the Australian Institute of Family Studies in 2013 concluded: “Overall, research to date considerably challenges the point of view that same-sex-parented families are harmful to children. Children in such families do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers from heterosexual couple families.”
A 2010 meta-analysis of 33 studies, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that “no research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child wellbeing”.
These reviews are supported by comments from prominent health bodies in Australia, with both the AMA and the Australian Psychological Society making similar conclusions.
When Andrews was asked to provide a source for his claims, a spokesperson said it was addressed in his 2012 book Maybe ‘I Do’, but when requested, did not provide detail of any specific studies cited in the book.
Marcus did not respond to a request to provide a source for her claims.
Marriage equality and me: ‘Will 2017 be the year love wins?’ Guardian | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/25/murray-darling-basin-water-pledges-labor-extends | Australia news | 2023-07-25T07:04:26.000Z | Anne Davies | Murray-Darling Basin plan: Labor gives states more time to deliver water pledges despite El Niño fears | The states will be given more time to deliver on their pledges to return water to the environment under the Murray-Darling Basin plan despite concerns another El Niño event could deliver more devastating droughts to eastern Australia.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has formally advised there would be a shortfall of 750 gigalitres – about 25% of the target – by June 2024, when the plan was due to be completed. That’s the equivalent of 300,000 Olympic swimming pools.
The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, declined to say exactly how much longer she was prepared to give the states.
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“We’re certainly not talking five or 10 years,” she said. “We are talking about some extensions with an increased expectation of delivery.
“When the temperature gets hotter again, when the rain stops falling and the river stops flowing, we will seriously regret it if we don’t act now,” she added.
“We don’t want Australians to wake up one day with a dead river system and find out their governments could’ve stopped it.”
The formal advice from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority triggers power for the federal government to buy back more water to achieve the plan’s outcomes, but Plibersek remained coy as to whether she would use this power.
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The decision to give the states more time to implement projects rather than moving to buybacks will disappoint environment groups, which have warned delays “would risk terrible damage to the environment during the next drought”.
“With the UN declaring an El Niño and Australia facing a dry spell, right now is the worst possible time to deprive wetlands and wildlife of the water they will need to survive tough times ahead,” the Conservation Council of South Australia chief executive, Craig Wilkins, said.
Plibersek blamed the shortfalls on the Coalition government, which she claimed “waged a decade-long guerrilla war” on the plan.
She said 84% of water recovered for the plan had happened under Labor, compared with only 16% during nine years of Coalition government.
“The consequences of this are alarming and extreme,” she said.
The states are due to meet with Plibersek in August and, unlike during previous negotiations, all basin states are now controlled by Labor governments, which should increase the chances of cooperation.
However, Victoria is still insisting the final 450GL of environmental water that was agreed to bring South Australia on board is not part of the formal plan.
The Albanese government has already announced a further 49GL of water buybacks to complete the part of the plan known as “Bridging the Gap”, which was always going to be achieved through buybacks, but which was halted by the former Nationals minister, Barnaby Joyce.
But the two other components of the plan – 605GL which was to be achieved by projects that save water or use it more efficiently and the 450GL that also involves efficiency projects – are well behind schedule.
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“It is very clear that to achieve the plan in full, we will have to deliver on infrastructure projects, we have to deliver the water resource plans in New South Wales, and we’ll need to be purchasing water,” Plibersek said, leaving open the door to more buybacks.
The Environment Victoria chief executive, Jono La Nauze, said the 450GL of water mandated for the environment needed to be recovered as quickly as possible using voluntary water purchases.
Plibersek also foreshadowed further action might be needed to ensure the river’s health in the face of climate change.
“If we don’t prepare for those dry years, all Australians will suffer – risking our access to affordable food and water, with mass environmental collapse, dying native animals, choking fish, and intense pressure on river communities,” she said.
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Irrigators welcomed the decision to extend the timeframe for delivery of the plan outcomes but signalled they would fight any further buybacks.
“There are other options to deliver the remainder of the basin plan without one more drop coming from food and fibre production,” the NSW Irrigators’ Council acting chief executive, Christine Freak, said.
The targets in the plan – to recover 3,200GL from agriculture and return it for environmental flows – were due to be realised by June 2024.
About 70% of the water was recovered through buying back entitlements for farmers. Labor completed this task after winning government in 2022.
But two other programs – one involving projects to use water more efficiently and another to recover a further 450GL via on-farm projects, which was the price of South Australia signing up to the plan – have failed to deliver. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/12/the-deuce-season-two-review-punk-disco-and-second-wave-feminism-have-arrived | Television & radio | 2018-09-12T05:00:07.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | The Deuce season two review: punk, disco and second-wave feminism are here | The first season of The Deuce on Sky Atlantic was an elegant, and often brutal, introduction to the street trade of early 1970s New York. It was a story about power, commerce and corruption, wrapped up in a stunningly detailed recreation of the era. Its lawlessness gave some of its characters a cheeky antihero charm, while never letting the audience forget who pulled the strings and who lost out in the hierarchy of sex and exploitation. I loved the scope of it and the fact that it didn’t balk at being big, or complex; for the first few episodes, keeping track of the huge cast of characters was enough of a task to guarantee complete attention, even without all the pimps/mob/porn industry subplots.
Season two jumps forward five years, just like that, which means half a decade’s worth of life has happened to the characters and we have to work out for ourselves where they are. That said, little has really changed for anyone and, with the exception of money and success, the structures in which everyone is working remain roughly the same. As Eileen/Candy, the street walker who sees the potential in porn, Maggie Gyllenhaal easily stole the show first time around, and, as the adult film industry booms around her, she is mesmerising once again. She’s a “triple threat” now – performer, producer and director trying to reinvent porn – and the gorgeous opening pays homage to her power as she glides through the streets of her kingdom, fur-clad as it snows, a minor celebrity in the thriving, decadent Studio 54-ish 366 Club.
Candy is often the source of the show’s most painful scenes, and its funniest ones. Her experiments in film-making are shot down as “Warholian” by Harvey (a barely recognisable David Krumholtz, who has lost a lot of weight in those fictional five years), who balks at her avant garde attempts to film sex as if following the rhythm of a female orgasm. The results are an Adam Curtis collage gone wild. “Congratulations on allowing us to climb inside the female mind on the final stampede towards nirvana,” Harvey says, drolly. There’s a discussion about the purpose of porn and who it is for (spoiler alert: straight men) and then a beat. “That said, the pacing was great.”
Frankie and Vincent are moving up in the world Photograph: Home Box Office/Sky Atlantic
The overriding theme of the episode, though, is that change is on its way. There is a lovely conversation between CC (played by Gary Carr) and a newer pimp, who eschews flashy clothing in favour of “understated elegance”, which has the added benefit of not inviting arrest. Even Vinnie is losing his ability to understand the world around him: girlfriend Abby shows him punk music and paintings that look like vaginas, and he is made to feel old in his bewilderment at both. He’s still a night owl and a party animal, but the drawn look on his face as he talks to the mobsters in the car proves stamina can’t last for ever.
The 50 best TV shows of 2017: No 7 The Deuce
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It’s with Vinnie and his troublesome twin, Frankie, that The Deuce finds itself in a sticky patch. Both characters are played by James Franco, who was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women as the #MeToo movement began to swell. He called these reports “not accurate” and the makers said there was no complaint about him on the set of this particular show. But Franco plays two characters here and, as such, is integral to a show that seems to be more and more about women grabbing at their places in the world. Every relationship is shifting under the weight of new power, whether it’s CC and Lori, or Vinnie and Abby, or Harvey and Candy/Eileen. Franco’s roles seem to have been moved slightly to the margins – they’re certainly among the least interesting characters in this opener – but it is up to viewers to decide whether having him circling a story that is otherwise sensitive and nuanced sits easily with them.
This episode doesn’t do much to open up The Deuce to newcomers, nor does it particularly set out its stall for the season to come. Instead, it reminds us of familiar faces, and it ups the stakes for them by adding more and more pressure: porn and peep shows look like cash cows for now, but punk and disco have arrived, and second-wave feminism is lurking and there’s a new initiative to clean up the streets. None of it bodes well for the long-term future of the Life, as it is known, but it makes for very good drama indeed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/05/fboy-island-copyright-dispute-reality-tv | Television & radio | 2023-06-05T10:00:37.000Z | Victoria Bekiempis | FBoy Island: how a copyright dispute is consuming world of reality TV | Several years ago, aspiring producer Jack Piuggi had an idea for a reality TV show. What if there were a documentary-style “faux” dating competition – that also explored the role of internet fame in romantic pursuits?
“What I was going to do was bring in contestants that we had cast off of Instagram,” said Piuggi, 27. “Next, I was going to have my friends and family sit on a board panel, like American Idol, and we were going to decide whether these were date-worthy women or not.” The competition, however, would also reveal that his male friends would engage in base, selfish behavior and do pretty much anything for a date.
The project, Instafamous, was inspired by Piuggi and his friends’ efforts to avoid boredom during the pandemic. “We had been trying to date through Instagram because – what else were we doing, sitting at home on the couch?” he said.
After several discussions with producers, Piuggi thought Instafamous would be his big break, but these conversations resulted in an even larger heartbreak, he claims. As Piuggi alleges in a recent lawsuit, several producers, in cahoots with entertainment giants, ultimately lifted key elements of his idea to make the smash HBO reality series FBoy Island – a show where women contestants must discern which of the men describe themselves as “nice guys” or “fuck boys”.
“I just gave you guys my baby and you took it,” Piuggi said of his emotional reaction to the alleged idea-theft. “I said to them: ‘Guys, I’ll keep writing the show for free, all I’m asking for is credit because then I have the ability to go on…and I’ll get a job with somebody else at that point. They were like, ‘Sorry, we don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
While Piuggi’s lawsuit alleges typical business claims including copyright infringement, breach of contract, breach of “the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing”, and unjust enrichment, it also gives a unique glimpse into the confusing relationship between intellectual property law and reality TV. More, it raises the question: do intellectual property claims get even more complicated in a world where reality is packaged as art and art is packaged as reality?
Kevin J Greene, professor of law at Southwestern Law School, said that several legal claims could be made over this dispute: one involves theft of the idea, or “idea misappropriation”, and another involves a potential copyright claim.
“Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, and never has and never will,” Greene said. “Things like formats, ways of structuring shows – which is really how the reality TV industry makes its money, it’s the format of the show that sells it, so to speak – are notoriously difficult to protect under copyright law.”
In a New York court, going the idea route would mean treating the idea as “property”. Explains Greene: “You have to show two things: you’ve got to show that the idea is sufficiently novel, and you’ve got to show that it’s concrete, so it has to be delineated, it has to be set forth.”
In California, this claim might have an easier time. “All you have to show is that there was at least an implied agreement that if you submitted the idea, the person who submitted the idea would be compensated.” (The progression of such litigation is also impacted by where it’s filed; as there’s no federal copyright law on exactly this, federal courts would look to their respective states’ authorities.)
“In general, the intersection of what’s art and what’s reality is very common,” said Jeffrey R Bragalone, a partner at Bragalone, Olejko Saad PC. “Whether you’re talking about a reality television show or a documentary or even a Warhol Polaroid, all of those have an intersection of art and reality and typically, a concept or something – like a reality television show – is not in itself copyrightable.”
Things that are copyrightable might include media such as motion pictures, visual works, and sound recordings, among others. “As long as your art is in that media then you can obtain a copyright on it.”
With a concept or idea, Bragalone said, usually one has to pursue a patent to protect it or seek a copyright. With a reality television show, “you have to be very specific and actually write down as much as possible, how the plot would go, show the characters, etc.”.
“I think the success of that [copyright claim] is going to depend on how detailed the individual was in describing his concept or his idea in the plot summary that he copyrighted.”
In Piuggi’s telling, he took steps to protect his concept so that it was his and not something ephemeral that could be up for grabs. Prior to speaking with a producer at Grand Street Media, Piuggi had him sign a non-disclosure agreement. During the call, the producer seemed to understand Piuggi’s concept, describing the program as a “dating show where no one finds love”.
Piuggi also sent a 40-page treatment describing his concept. Grand Street passed on Instafamous but referred Piuggi to another outfit, Good For You Productions, he claims. (Piuggi said he completed registration with the US copyright office in December 2022.)
Not long after Grand allegedly passed, Piuggi had a video call with a producer from Good For You on 15 January 2021 and re-pitched Instafamous, also requiring a non-disclosure agreement beforehand, his suit claims. He also claims that he suggested casting a good friend for the show in a subsequent call.
Just “hours later”, this friend “received a call from [a producer], and it was announced by his girlfriend at the time that he had been cast in HBO’s ‘first ever documentary style reality show’” – later revealed as FBoy Island, the suit contends.
Piuggi then saw that an HBO documentary called Fake Famous was being released which, he alleges, bore striking similarities to Instafamous. Per the lawsuit, Piuggi “realized his concepts were being fed to HBO”.
Grand Street denied having a relationship with Fake Famous or HBO but, Piuggi’s suit charges, the company has close connections with HBO, as its owner is related to a producer who worked on shows for the entertainment giant. Piuggi’s suit alleges that Good For You shared information about his show idea.
“There was no coincidence,” Piuggi said.
However, some might be skeptical as to whether the similarities were intentional. Fake Famous was reportedly in development before Piuggi’s conversation. (The director of Fake Famous, Nick Bilton, told the Guardian that he pitched it in 2018 and started filming in early 2019; it was released in February 2021, which has also been noted by Piuggi’s skeptics.) Again, this points to the complicated relationship between copyright, art and reality TV: -ow can one make a claim that an idea was stolen when ideas and formats could spontaneously overlap?
“This is a frivolous lawsuit. We have no relationship with HBO. Based on publicly available information, the shows in question were developed and in production, or fully filmed, before our limited dealing with Mr Piuggi, nor are they similar to his claimed show idea,” Grand Street said in a statement.
Good For You did not comment. The other defendants in the case responded to requests for comment.
Asked about the timing, Piuggi expressed skepticism and said “there will be more information coming out during the [trial] that will support my allegations”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/sep/21/newsrupt-startup-qluso-app | Media | 2010-09-21T12:38:49.000Z | Jemima Kiss | Elevator Pitch: Newsrupt's tech vision for the future of news | There's no shortage of stories about the travails of news industry but as Belfast-based Newsrupt will tell you, the future lies in building technology to help redefine how the industry operates.
Newsrupt is just a few months old but has already named 'top innovative Irish company' by the Irish Leadership Technology Group in Silicon Valley. Staffed by four full-timers, Newsrupt has been given significant support through Belfast's Start VI startup incubator which has provided mentoring, office space and networking with potential investors.
Chief executive Lyra McKee says the site is self-funded so far but working on the first round of funding, with the first product, Qluso, due to go live on 4 October. McKee says it will have signed up 5,000 freelance journalists and 200 newspaper clients signed up with a year.
Lyra McKee, chief executive of Newsrupt
What's your pitch?
"NewsRupt builds web and mobile applications for newspapers and journalists. Our first app is Qluso, an online app that allows news editors to bid for exclusive stories from freelance journalists. It aims to help news editors find quality stories at the click of a button and help freelancers get the best price for their story and get paid on the same day.
"If you're an editor, log on to Qluso.com, sign up and start bidding. If you're a freelance journalist, log on to Qluso.com, sign up and upload your story. The beta is completely free."
How do you make money?
"From January 2011, newspapers can sign up for a free or premium account on Qluso. All stories sold will have a 15% commission charge with percentage going to the Rape Crisis Centre in Belfast."
How are you surviving the downturn?
"We work hard and we see opportunity everywhere. Not giving up when things are tough; that's the key to surviving any downturn."
What's your background?
"When I was 15, I joined an organisation called Headliners which trains young people in journalism and media production. It changed my life. From the first story I reported on, I knew that media was the one thing I wanted to do - it just made something click inside me. There's a saying that goes, 'Do the thing you love and you'll never work a day in your life' - I've been in the industry five years and I've yet to work a day. I worked in various roles, reporting, producing, and basically learning my craft. In 2006, I won the Sky News Young Journalist of the Year award. It gave me the confidence to go and work for some of the bigger newspapers and broadcasters. If it wasn't for Headliners, I wouldn't be doing what I love now - working at NewsRupt. That thought makes me shudder."
What makes your business unique?
"While profit is important, Newsrupt's overriding priority is to change the world with products that have a positive impact on newspapers, journalists and their work. Companies that are only out to make money are in business for all the wrong reasons. You've got to have a mission that drives you to get out of bed at 6am and work through to 12am the next morning. Dollars doesn't do it for me, but the thought of creating real value for an industry I love does."
Who in the tech business inspires you?
"Chris McCabe, a Facebook developer from Northern Ireland, whose PHP wizardry amazes me. He's completely self taught and an inspiration, especially for journalists thinking of picking up books and teaching themselves to code.
"The work from Rumble Labs, creators of the web design app Onotate, sends shivers down my spine; the work they are doing in user interface design is going to raise the bar for web standards. Their designer Steven Hylands is only 23, but generations of young designers will be mimicking his style in years to come."
What's your biggest challenge?
"There's always a new challenge to be met everyday, but Northern Ireland has a very tight-knit community of entrepreneurs who support and help each other so we have many advisors to call on who help us solve these challenges."
What's the most important web tool that you use each day?
"I couldn't live without Twitter and Dropbox. If I'm ever on Desert Island Discs, I'm bringing those two with me."
Name your closest competitors
"There's a fantastic site in the US called Watchdog City. It's not entirely dissimilar to Qluso, but it's not the same either. Every initiative that promotes journalism in the public interest can only be a good thing."
Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"Either still under our ownership with a product range of five apps, or under the ownership of a company that passionately cares about the future of newspapers and journalism and has a similar mission to NewsRupt."
Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google?
"Google has a philanthropic nature, a genuine interest in the future of news and similar philosophies to NewsRupt, so Google would be high on our list of ideal buyers. But bigger than Google? I wouldn't rule it out!"
Newsrupt.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/18/climate-change-airport-expansion-heathrow | Opinion | 2016-10-18T20:02:37.000Z | George Monbiot | Climate change means no airport expansion – at Heathrow or anywhere | George Monbiot | The correct question is not where, it is whether. And the correct answer is no. The prime minister has just announced that her cabinet will recommend where a new runway should be built. Then there will be a consultation on the decision. There is only one answer that doesn’t involve abandoning our climate change commitments and our moral scruples: nowhere.
The inexorable logic that should rule out new sources of oil, gas and coal also applies to the expansion of airports. In a world seeking to prevent climate breakdown, there is no remaining scope for extending infrastructure that depends on fossil fuels. The prime minister cannot uphold the Paris agreement on climate change, which comes into force next month, and permit the runway to be built.
May puts Heathrow vote on hold to avoid Tory resignations
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While most sectors can replace fossil fuels with other sources, this is not the case for aviation. The airline companies seek to divert us with a series of mumbo-jumbo jets, mythical technologies never destined for life beyond the press release. Solar passenger planes, blended wing bodies, hydrogen jets, algal oils, other biofuels: all are either technically impossible, commercially infeasible, worse than fossil fuels or capable of making scarcely a dent in emissions.
Aviation means kerosene. Using kerosene to hoist human bodies into the air means massive impacts. Improvements in the fuel economy of aircraft have declined to 1% a year or less, greatly outstripped by the growth in aviation. So other means must be found of trying to make it fit.
The government’s decision will be based on the findings of the Airports Commission, which reported last year. It favours a new runway at Heathrow, and proposes two means of ensuring that the extra flights will not conflict with Britain’s climate pledges. Neither is either fair or workable. The first is that the rest of the economy should make extra cuts in greenhouse gases to accommodate aviation. Already the Climate Change Act imposes a legal target of 80% reductions by 2050. But if flights are to keep growing as the commission expects, those cuts would have to rise to 85%. This is fundamentally unjust. Three-quarters of international passengers at the UK’s biggest airports travel for leisure, and they are disproportionately rich: at Heathrow their mean income is £57,000. Just 15% of people in the UK take 70% of international flights. So everyone must pay for the holidays taken by the better off.
Final aiport expansion vote won't happen for at least another year, says No 10 - Politics live
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The alternative strategy is a carbon tax. The commission is remarkably evasive about what this entails, and its reckonings are opaque, contradictory and buried in remote annexes. Perhaps that’s unsurprising. An analysis by the Campaign for Better Transport suggests that the tax required to reconcile a new runway with our carbon commitments is somewhere between £270 and £850 for a return flight for a family of four to New York.
In other words, the Airports Commission plan amounts to increasing airport capacity then pricing people out. Where’s the sense in that?
As the commission doubtless knows, no government would impose such charges, or shut down northern airports to allow Heathrow to grow. Having approved the extra capacity, the government will discover that it’s incompatible with our commitments under the Climate Change Act, mull the consequences for a minute or two, then quietly abandon the commitments. It’s this simple: a third runway at Heathrow means that the UK will not meet its carbon targets. Hold me to that in 2050.
‘For years there has been a lively debate about the noise, local pollution and disruption caused by building a new runway at Heathrow.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
But that’s not the half of it. The Airports Commission based its projections on the work of another government body: the Committee on Climate Change. Last week the committee announced that to meet our commitments under the Paris agreement the UK will need to go much further than the 80% cut envisaged by the Climate Change Act. The Paris deal implies reductions of “at least 90%” by 2050. This is tough under any scenario, simply impossible if airport capacity grows.
It knocks the Airports Commission’s calculations out of court. If the government uses the commission’s figures to justify its decision, it will be relying on estimates that are out of date, invalid and incompatible with its international commitments.
Heathrow or not, have we resolved the human impacts of the third runway?
Andy McDonald
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Don’t expect help from the opposition. On Sunday Labour’s shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, argued that we should pay the environmental consequences of building a new runway “full and proper heed”, then go ahead. The people of future drought zones will feel so much better when they hear about that full and proper heed.
As for the international framework, forget it. Two weeks ago 191 nations struck the world’s only agreement to regulate aviation emissions. It’s voluntary, it’s pathetic, and it relies on planting trees to offset aircraft emissions, which means replacing a highly stable form of carbon storage (leaving oil in the ground) with a highly unstable one vulnerable to loggers, fires and droughts. The meeting at which the deal was done probably caused more emissions than it will save.
For years there has been a lively debate about the noise, local pollution and disruption caused by building a new runway at Heathrow, all of which are valid concerns. But almost everyone ignores the issue that dwarfs all others. Climate change means no new runway.
If our airports are full, there’s an immediate solution. Fly less. The Free Ride campaign has proposed a just means of achieving this: curb demand by taxing frequent flyers but not those who seldom fly. (In case you’re wondering, I limit my flying to once every three years).
Is this beyond contemplation? Are we incapable of making such changes for the sake of others? If so, our ethics are weaker than those of 1791, when 300,000 British people, to dissociate themselves from slavery, stopped using sugar, reducing sales by one-third. They understood the moral implications of an act that carried no ill intent, that seemed sweetly innocent.
The perceptual gulf between us and the distant and future victims of climate change is no wider than the ocean that lay between the people of Britain and the Caribbean. If we do not make the leap of imagination that connects our actions with their consequences, it is not because we can’t, but because we won’t.
But reason has taken flight. The moral compass spins, greed and desire soar towards the stratosphere, and our conscience vanishes in the clouds. Will anyone confront this injustice?
Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot. A fully linked version of this column will be published at monbiot.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/29/raffaele-sollecito-reveals-tears-of-joy-after-meredith-kercher-acquittal | World news | 2015-03-29T18:25:07.000Z | Rosie Scammell | Raffaele Sollecito reveals 'tears of joy' after Meredith Kercher murder acquittal | Raffaele Sollecito said that he burst into “tears of joy” on being acquitted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher on Friday, and that he now wants to build his future after more than seven years “living in fear”.
Sollecito was waiting at home late on Friday night when his sister phoned from Rome’s high court. “My father and I burst into tears of joy,” he said, on realising judges had quashed his 25-year sentence. In the surprise verdict, Italy’s court of cassation also ruled his American former girlfriend Amanda Knox innocent.
Meredith Kercher murder: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito acquitted
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With police waiting outside his home in Puglia, in the heel of Italy’s boot, Sollecito was well aware he would be immediately arrested had the conviction against him been upheld.
Now, for the first time since his original arrest in November 2007, days after Kercher was found stabbed to death in the Perugia home she shared with Knox, Sollecito said he would finally be able to move on.
“For seven years I have had a suspended life, I have lived with the fear of being arrested but knowing I am innocent,” he told Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Sollecito described living “with the anguish that the next day could be the last as a free man” after being “catapulted into a new hell” following the murder of Kercher.
Both Sollecito and Knox spent four years in prison before being freed in 2011, a decision which was followed by a retrial and subsequent guilty verdict last January.
Despite being stopped near the Austrian border just hours after his murder conviction was upheld in 2013, Sollecito said he never planned to go on the run. “Even in the moments in which the desperation was at its heaviest, I didn’t think of escape,” he said.
Amanda Knox is free because she's rich and American, says Patrick Lumumba
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The length of time Sollecito spent in jail has prompted speculation that he could now demand compensation, a decision he said would be left to his lawyers. Newspaper Corriere della Sera on Sunday said the Italian’s legal team may seek as much as €500,000 (£366,000).
Sollecito said he wanted to “finally begin to build a future. Now that my innocence has been recognised I can do that.”
His optimism stands in stark contrast to the reaction of Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mother, who said she remained “under shock” after Friday’s ruling. “Those two young people were already convicted twice by different courts for the murder of Meredith. I wasn’t expecting that now they could be definitively acquitted,” she told La Repubblica. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/aug/30/personal-borrowing-bank-of-england-consumer-credit-cards | Money | 2017-08-30T12:18:30.000Z | Richard Partington | Rapid rise in personal borrowing is cooling, says Bank of England | The rapid growth in borrowing by consumers appears to be slowing amid a squeeze on households, despite remaining at levels unseen since the financial crisis.
The annual rate of growth for consumer borrowing through credit cards, overdrafts and personal loans slowed to 9.8% in July, the lowest rate of expansion since April 2016, according to the Bank of England. The growth rate was a little weaker than in recent months, when the pace of expansion was above 10%.
Spending by British consumers is growing at the weakest rate in almost three years, as households come under pressure to tighten their belts from higher prices fuelled by a drop in the value of the pound since the EU referendum. Wages rose by 2.1% in June, while inflation stood at 2.6% in July, leading to negative earnings growth.
Credit card lenders 'targeting people struggling with debt'
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The figures come as research from Citizens Advice suggests credit card lenders may be targeting people struggling with unaffordable levels of debt, a practice that it said Britain’s financial watchdog should ban.
Weaker levels of growth in consumer credit could relieve pressure on the Bank to raise interest rates to slow the rapid expansion in the supply of money. Sluggish GDP growth and inflation coming close to its peak could put off a rate rise until late 2018, or even early 2019.
Howard Archer, chief economic adviser to the EY Item Club, said the figures would be a relief to the Bank. “While any interest rate hikes would be limited and gradual, even small increases could cause problems for many consumers given high borrowing levels,” he said.
In cash terms, consumer credit increased by £1.2bn last month, below the estimate from a poll of City economists surveyed by Reuters and the smallest rise this year.
Still, at the current pace of expansion, Britons are racking up debt at almost five times the growth rate of earnings. Total unsecured borrowing by consumers also remains at levels unseen since the financial crisis – at £201.5bn, the highest level since December 2008.
Paul Hollingsworth, a UK economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, said: “Given that credit is still rising fairly strongly, it suggests that households are confident enough to borrow in order to maintain spending while real incomes are being squeezed.”
The figures from Threadneedle Street also show lenders approved 68,689 mortgages last month compared with 65,318 in June, returning to levels seen earlier this year. The value of mortgage lending increased by £3.6bn, slowing from £4.1bn in June.
Even so, mortgage approvals remain well below the average monthly levels seen in recent decades. Demand for new home loans could also be being stoked by record low rates on offer, encouraging borrowers to remortgage in order to lock in bargain deals. The effective rate on new individual mortgages was 1.95% in July, according to the Bank, the first time this measure has fallen below 2%.
Archer said: “While July’s marked pick-up in mortgages may ease some concerns over tepid housing market activity, we have doubts that it marks the start of a significant upturn.”
There could also be signs that businesses are about to invest more, as borrowing by firms stood at £8.9bn last month, its highest level since July 2014. However, this may jar with recent indicators of business confidence, while the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal firms’ investment in the UK economy showed no growth at all in the second quarter.
Instead, the surge in corporate borrowing could reflect firms fearing higher interest rates and locking in low borrowing costs, according to Samuel Tombs, the chief UK economist at the consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The risk of a near-term rate hike, however, has receded, suggesting that corporate borrowing will fall back soon,” he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jul/18/sun-newsinternational | Media | 2014-07-18T12:31:00.000Z | Roy Greenslade | The Sun says farewell to Wapping with special souvenir staff issue | Pages 2 and 3 of the special issue produced to commemorate the paper's old home
This is the last day that the entire staff of The Sun will spend at Wapping. From Monday, the paper that has been synonymous for over a quarter of a century with that east London dockland area begins its move south of the Thames to London Bridge.
The front page marks the end of a 28-year stay in east London
To mark the occasion, a limited - a very limited - souvenir edition of the paper has been produced for the current staff with anecdotes and stories by the paper's journalists, both past and present.
I've been given a peek into the 16-page "Farewell to Wapping" issue, which was compiled by the Sun's long-time night editor, Jon Moorhead, who is now head of editorial projects.
The front page is a reminder of one of the Sun's most famous (or notorious, depending on your politics) front pages - the 1992 general election debunking of Labour leader Neil Kinnock: "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights."
This time around, the headline says: "Will the last person to leave Wapping please turn out the lights."
One of inside articles, by associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, recalls the struggle to make the controversial move in January 1986 from Bouverie Street (just off Fleet Street for those too young to remember) to Wapping.
In an accompanying piece, the former chief sub Roger Wood, tells of the time he and two colleagues were physically attacked by pickets.
The serious stuff is followed by a series of amusing anecdotes by Chris Stevens, the former features overlord. Several of his tales, unsurprisingly, involve memories of the man who edited the paper from 1981-94, Kelvin MacKenzie.
The leading article points out the significance of the move in terms of the way papers are now produced in this digital age:
"An industrial revolution brought us to Wapping and an industrial earthquake prompts us to leave. No longer will we talk of back benches, stones and stories. It's hubs, platforms, content."
There are pages devoted to the designers, the people who ran the Bizarre column and the sports sections plus a piece on the history of Wapping itself. The spread contains photos of the current staff, taken by the paper's royal photographer Arthur Edwards.
The back page shows the half-demolished Wapping building
And the back page shows the half-demolished building where the editorial staffs of the Sun and the other News UK titles - the Times, Sunday Times and now-defunct News of the World - were housed until 2010.
They then moved to an adjacent building, Thomas More Square, but were still able to see the old fortress, which has assumed a mythic, even romantic, status. In a quote often repeated by staff in the early days, Rupert Murdoch called the move to Wapping "bloody exciting!"
Soon, all of the Sun staff will share the new excitement of joining other News Corporation employees in The News Building, the newly-adopted formal name for a glass-fronted palace better known by its nickname, the Baby Shard.
To help his colleagues get used to their new home, feature writer Lee Price has compiled 40 facts about the building.
They include, naturally enough, the names of two nearby pubs and, for those who don't drink alcohol, he reveals that there are 21 "tea points" in the building. And "The Hub" itself boasts "a 15ft video wall." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/oct/08/stella-mccartney-launches-a-z-sustainability-manifesto | Fashion | 2020-10-08T16:59:14.000Z | Hannah Marriott | Stella McCartney launches A-Z sustainability manifesto | Stella McCartney has launched a sustainability manifesto in collaboration with artists including Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.
Peter Blake, Olafur Eliasson, Alex Israel, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Joana Vasconcelos, Chantal Joffe and Rashid Johnson also took part in the project, which takes the form of an A-Z and seeks, in part, to drill down on the meaning of certain terms – from A for accountable to Z for zero waste – in an age of mass greenwashing.
Stella McCartney: ‘I barely even know what the word sustainable means any more.’ Photograph: Lauren Maccabee
For timelesness, William Eggleston photographed the back of a street sign at night in the shape of the letter T. For repurpose, US artist Taryn Simon found an R-shaped bird poo.
Conceived in lockdown, the A-Z is also an attempt to represent the pillars of Stella McCartney’s business which, she said, will inform all of the company’s future decisions. McCartney presented her collection with the fashion industry in flux, with sales down 15.9% compared with pre-pandemic levels.
The crisis, said McCartney, at a virtual press conference after her digital spring/summer 21 show, “has led to me asking personal questions, such as ‘why do I do what I do?’ and ‘why do women to come to us?’ We have always been conscious that we had a deeper meaning than creativity alone – that we wanted to change the industry for the better.” After some reflection, “we felt really energised and invigorated and found the fire to come back fighting”.
“I barely even know what the word sustainable means any more,” she added, with confusion and greenwashing rife in the industry. For the fashion industry to be sustainable, she said, “it has to come from a place of honesty, because it’s not easy to work this way, and give the consumer honest information and be completely transparent. It can’t just be for marketing and because the youth of tomorrow will demand it.”
It came at the end of a strange, socially distanced fashion month in which designers’ attempts to predict what the world will be wearing in six months’ time ranged from celebratory party wear to eerie PPE-inspired visors.
McCartney’s take was upbeat. Models were filmed walking around the grounds of Houghton House, in Norfolk, wearing flowing, hot pink dresses, huge hammered brass earrings and thick-soled flip flops which, she said, were made of 50% waste materials. There were Zoom-friendly Anne Boleyn-style necklines on jumpsuits and dresses and innovations including “stellawear”, a 99% zero waste shapewear underlayer which also serves as a swimming costume.
With social distancing now a design consideration, “everyone’s like, ‘don’t do eveningwear’,” said McCartney, “but for me I definitely think there has to be optimism, we’ve still gotta get dressed up, we’ve gotta come out of this not wearing sweatpants. And we will come out of this.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/30/office-of-national-intelligence-climate-crisis-security-threats-report-anthony-albanese-labor-government-refuses-to-release | Australia news | 2023-08-29T15:00:11.000Z | Daniel Hurst | Too hot to handle: climate crisis report so secret Albanese government won’t even reveal date it was completed | The Australian government is refusing to release its secret report on how the climate crisis will fuel national security threats and is also refusing to say when it was completed.
The government insists the date, too, is classified. The approach has sparked claims of a “cult of secrecy in Canberra”.
Anthony Albanese ordered the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) last year to investigate national security threats posed by global heating, in line with an election promise.
Former ADF chief calls for release of secret report into security threat posed by climate crisis
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When it notified the United Nations of Australia’s stronger 2030 emissions reduction target, the government trumpeted its commitment to “an urgent climate risk assessment of the implications of climate change for national security”.
So far, however, the government has rebuffed calls to release the assessment – or even a sanitised public version, as it did with the defence strategic review.
In a new response to Senate questions on notice, the prime minister confirmed the ONI’s climate assessment was finalised “within the last 12 months”. But Albanese added: “The specific timing of the assessment board is classified.”
Five other questions from the Greens’ defence spokesperson, David Shoebridge, were answered with an identical response: “The content and judgments of the assessment are classified.”
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Shoebridge also asked the direct question: “Will the government make a declassified version of the assessment public? If not, why not?”
Albanese responded that the report “contains classified material” but the government continued to consider the issue.
“Along with the government’s climate statement, tabled in parliament on 1 December 2022, there is already considerable material available in the public domain discussing national security threats from climate change,” he said.
A single page of that 80-page climate statement was devoted to national security, saying global heating would “increasingly exacerbate risks” as “geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond”.
The same statement mentioned the ONI’s work in future tense, saying it “will inform how the government considers climate risk”.
Shoebridge said it was “bizarre that the government won’t even reveal the date the climate risk assessment was completed”.
“When you can’t even get the date of a high-profile, publicly acknowledged report then you know that something’s gone wrong with the cult of secrecy in Canberra,” the NSW senator said.
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The intergenerational report says climate is a ‘profound’ risk to Australia. But the full picture may be even worse
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Shoebridge said transparency was less of a risk to national security than “not dealing with the threat of climate change in the first place”.
The independent ACT senator, David Pocock, said providing a declassified version of reports, including a climate risk assessment, was “not an unreasonable ask” and that some of our closest allies, including the US, had already done so.
“This is something I will continue to pursue.”
Both Pocock and Shoebridge proposed Senate motions to order the government to produce key documents, but the major parties combined to defeat them on 10 August.
Albanese has described the climate crisis as “a direct threat to global security” but has also defended the secrecy.
“We make no apologies for not releasing national security advice, which, appropriately, goes to the national security committee,” he told parliament this month.
“That is a position that we have had for a long period of time, and that will remain the position.”
In 2021, the US intelligence community released a report that warned: “Intensifying physical effects will exacerbate geopolitical flashpoints, particularly after 2030, and key countries and regions will face increasing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/16/donald-tusk-led-government-could-bring-radical-change-poland-analysis | World news | 2023-10-16T15:07:12.000Z | Shaun Walker | How a Tusk-led government could bring radical change to Poland | Analysis | Preliminary results suggest Poland is heading for a new government run by Donald Tusk. The change, after eight years of populist rule by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, would be a remarkable political reversal. A potential Tusk government may be restricted in its legislative manoeuvres by the veto of PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, in office until 2025, but would nonetheless radically change Poland’s domestic and foreign policy landscape.
From warmer relations with Brussels and Kyiv, to a relaxation of some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws and the advent of same-sex civil partnerships, we take a closer look at what this new era might look like both at home and abroad.
Relations with Europe
People wave Polish and EU flags outside a TV studio before an election debate debate earlier this month. Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty
Poland’s epic fallout with Brussels and other western partners has been slightly less noticeable over the last 18 months due to Warsaw’s leading place in the pro-Ukraine western coalition, but politicians in many European capitals will be happy to see the back of PiS.
Over the past eight years, the government has clashed with Brussels over rule of law concerns, leading to tens of billions of euros of European funds earmarked for Poland being frozen. In turn, PiS made attacks on the EU and Berlin a key part of its electoral campaign. One PiS campaign ad featured an invented scene of a frustrated German diplomat trying to give orders to the Polish government “like it was under Tusk”, only to be firmly rejected by PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński.
While Tusk is not the German puppet PiS has claimed, he will certainly provide a more familiar and friendly face to Poland’s European partners, many of whom know him well after his five-year stint as European Council president.
“Poland under the new Tusk government will be a more constructive player in EU politics, seeking to mend relations with key partners and restore trust in its pro-European credentials,” said Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
However, Buras noted that there would be a strong and probably vocal rightwing opposition in the provisional new parliament, meaning “European policymaking will be the subject of a polarised political debate which will limit the government’s room for manoeuvre”.
Rule of law
Judge Mariusz Czajka holds a statue of Themis during a September protest in front of a court in Kraków in support of judicial independence in Poland. Photograph: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Over the past eight years, PiS has attempted to install political appointees in various supposedly neutral bodies, most notably courts and legal institutions. Reversing this politicisation has been one of the key promises of the opposition during the election campaign.
“I think it’s extremely important to put forward a new vision of Poland in which the rule of law and the constitution are respected,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s former human rights ombudsman, who stood for election to the senate, the upper house of parliament, from Civic Coalition.
Bodnar said returning the judicial system to normality would be difficult “under pressure of hijacking from the president and the constitutional court”, which has been packed with PiS appointees, and that the new government would have to be clever and flexible. “It will be like a chess game,” he said in an interview before Sunday’s vote.
The new government would also need to decide to what extent it wants to prioritise potential criminal cases for abuses of power during the PiS years.
Women’s rights
Members of the public listen to Donald Tusk delivering a speech during a Women for Elections campaign rally on 10 October in Lodz. Photograph: Omar Marques/Getty Images
Throughout the campaign, Tusk has been unequivocal about his support for relaxing the draconian abortion restrictions introduced by PiS. He has faced criticism from some feminist activists for not going far enough and allowing people with historical anti-abortion positions into his Civic Coalition, but Tusk has insisted that the legalisation of abortion up to 12 weeks would be a priority for a government led by him.
“Abortion is a woman’s decision, not a priest’s, prosecutor’s, policeman’s or party activist’s. And we have written it down as a specific project, we will be ready to propose it to the Sejm on the first day after the next parliamentary elections,” he said in the spring.
Whether Tusk would be able to secure a majority for such a move in the parliament, given the more conservative views of some of the members of Third Way, a potential governing partner in a broad opposition coalition, remains to be seen. There is also the issue of Duda’s veto.
Nevertheless, asked on Sunday night what a new government would mean for Polish women, Civic Coalition MP Barbara Nowacka said: “Safety. Finally, safety. Young women won’t be afraid to get pregnant, young women won’t be afraid to go to the doctor.”
LGBTQ+ rights
People attend a WarsawPride and KyivPride march in Warsaw, Poland on 25 June 2022. Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty
Under PiS, hate speech against LGBTQ+ people has been tolerated and even encouraged. Although it did not feature heavily in the current campaign, the PiS-aligned Duda fought his 2020 presidential campaign on a platform of fighting so-called “LGBT ideology”, which he called more dangerous than communism. Several municipalities set up so-called “LGBT-free zones”, declaring themselves free of the supposed “ideology”.
The messaging has had an effect – in a 2019 survey, when asked to name the biggest threat to Poland, the most popular answer among Polish men under 40 was “the LGBT movement and gender ideology”. Its absence from this more recent election campaign, however, hints that PiS understood that Polish society was changing and that the demonisation of LGBTQ+ people was no longer a sure vote-winner.
Tusk has said a legal bill to introduce same-sex civil partnerships will be a priority for the new government, despite being controversial among conservative Poles and even some elements of his own coalition.
“I know that this is the first step and still not popular in various circles, but we have to show that in matters of dignity, there can no longer be a purely political calculation that, for example, it is not beneficial to make a decision because it won’t have the support of the majority,” Tusk said in June.
Relations with Ukraine
A man and woman wave miniature flags of Ukraine and Poland at the Rava-Ruska station during the launch of train route connecting Lviv and Warsaw at the weekend. Photograph: Ukrinform/Shutterstock
The PiS government was one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Ukraine, with fear of Russia and support for Kyiv one of the few issues that united most of Poland’s polarised society.
However, in recent months, as “Ukraine fatigue” sets in among a growing minority of Poles, PiS toughened its rhetoric, partly to avoid haemorrhaging support to the far-right Confederation, which was openly anti-Ukrainian. This saw president Duda compare Ukraine to a “drowning person” last month, and the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced a halt to arms deliveries to Kyiv amid a spat over grain exports.
Civic Coalition has pledged to maintain support for Ukraine and has criticised PiS for its recent words about Poland’s eastern neighbour. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/mar/06/david-haye-gracious-defeat-time-has-come | Sport | 2017-03-06T10:30:10.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | David Haye gracious in defeat but must realise his time is up | Kevin Mitchell | Two fine fighters of contrasting temperaments but shared instincts – Paulie Malignaggi and Derry Mathews – said their reluctant goodbyes to boxing at the O2 Arena in London and, while both will be missed, they were right to bow to the inevitable. Whether David Haye follows their lead should be learned in the next few days.
In the tumult after Tony Bellew’s measured and universally unexpected deconstruction of Haye in front of 20,000 fans in the main event on Saturday night Haye retreated as graciously as he could to a nearby hospital and underwent surgery on Monday for the damaged achilles that hobbled him from the sixth round to the inglorious end, when he was within four minutes of reaching the final bell.
Tony Bellew contemplates rich future after shock win over David Haye
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Clearly in pain, Haye composed himself afterwards in the ring to pay Bellew his due. “No excuses, the better man won,” he said. But the former world heavyweight champion, who came to this bout with only eight competitive rounds in five years, will do well to rediscover the motivation to carry on. When the Hayemaker turned into the Pacemaker, running on pure heart for the last quarter of an hour, he probably did himself a favour because, at 36, his big-fight options are now limited. He has always been a star but the glow has dimmed.
Haye has given enough, and taken his share, including an estimated £4m of the £7m set aside for the fighters from a pot expected to top £13m after the pay-per-view numbers come in.
It is as good a time as ever to leave for a born playboy who prepared for this fight on a Miami yacht and whose idea of a good late night is in a club rather than a boxing ring. But he can depart with honour.
Hobbling on one good leg after his achilles went, and swinging in vain as Bellew hunted him down to deliver the finishing left hook, Haye could not have done any more to redeem a reputation shredded to the point of derision six years ago, when he claimed a bruised big toe had prevented him performing to his potential against Wladimir Klitschko. Many fans acknowledged his effort; some did not. They are a hard audience.
Bellew, to his credit, did not buy into the universal goading of Haye in 2011 or since, admitting in victory the pre-fight nonsense between them was just that, and their embrace when the fireworks subsided was heartfelt. It remains a minor wonder that anyone falls for the tired schtick of manufactured animosity.
Bellew tags Haye again. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Malignaggi, the slick 36-year-old New Yorker who won world titles at two weights and once said a career in porn was an attractive alternative to the fight game, is no stranger to hype but reality kicked in viciously in his adopted city. Although he has already established a post-fight career behind any microphone presented to him back at the day job, he was reacquainted with a truth any respected analyst would have seen when the younger, stronger, more ambitious Brummie, Sam Eggington, battered him into submission in the ninth round.
Before heading for his Sky Sports commentary spot to offer his thoughts on Haye-Bellew – with trademark shades hiding his bruises – the American who calls the UK his second home, said: “I didn’t want to come in thinking this was my last fight, because then you can’t give your all, but I feel I’ve got a great job ringside, living through the fighters. I’ll make an official announcement this week but I probably am done. There’s not enough time to come back at 36. I finished my career at 36 and 8 and only lost to world champions and this guy.”
He added: “For 15 seconds I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to so badly go out a winner in this arena in front of these fans. I knew when I was going down, he’d got me. It was a big shot. I thought it was a close fight. I don’t have the legs I had. The silver lining is Sam Eggington can go on from here.” Eggington is the mandatory challenger for the European title. “Whatever comes,” he said. Oh, the freedom of youth.
Mathews, as down to earth as his friend Bellew, does not contemplate much glamour after boxing but he is nonetheless content. The 33-year-old Liverpudlian now has to handle a retirement he probably saw coming even before the brash, unbeaten young Londoner O’Hara Davies stopped him with a hook to the head and a body shot in the third round.
Mathews, who held a fringe version of the world featherweight title and two British belts in a 52-fight career, said later: “I wouldn’t say it was so much age, because I live a clean life, but it’s the fights. But listen, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve never ducked anyone. I’ve been in with the best.”
As Bellew said later, Mathews “is one of the nicest guys in boxing”. As for Davies, the former world cruiserweight champion, Johnny Nelson, got it right when he said: “He’s a world champion in the making.” A domestic fight up the road to savour would be against the unbeaten Scottish light-welter Josh Taylor, who fights the South African Warren Joubert for the Commonwealth title in Edinburgh on 24 March.
Lee Selby, uncomfortable with being labelled the Welsh Mayweather, nevertheless continues to impress with his outrageous boxing skills and edges closer to the fight he craves, against the recently dethroned Carl Frampton.
Tony Bellew stops hobbling David Haye in extraordinary boxing upset
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Selby’s defence of his IBF featherweight title, in January on the Las Vegas undercard when Frampton lost his WBA “super” title to Leo Santa Cruz, was scuppered when Jonathan Victor Barros withdrew moments before the weigh-in.
Selby ticked over on Saturday night by stopping the willing Spaniard Andoni Gago López in the ninth of 10 rounds. “I’m looking to be involved in a massive fight against either Carl Frampton, Leo Santa Cruz or Abner Mares [the WBA ‘regular’ champion],” he said. “I’m a gym rat. If I’m not in the gym, I’m at home with my family.”
Nobody could accuse the entertaining heavyweight Dave Evans of hogging the gym but he looked good stopping his fellow Yorkshireman and 6ft 8in former volleyball international David Howe in two rounds, seven days after doing a similar job on the 35-year-old Polish journeyman Lukasz Rusiewicz in front of a few hundred fans at the Ice Arena in Hull. “Outside the local, probably, is the last time I had two fights in a week,” said the ever quotable “White Rhino”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/sep/09/indefinite-sentences-should-be-suicide-risk-factor-says-prisons-watchdog | Law | 2023-09-09T05:00:14.000Z | Simon Hattenstone | Indefinite sentences should be suicide risk factor, says prisons watchdog | Indefinite prison sentences should be considered as a potential risk factor for suicide, the prisons and probation ombudsman has said.
It follows the highest number of self-inflicted deaths by prisoners on indefinite sentences since they were introduced by the Ministry of Justice in 2005. In 2022, there were nine self-inflicted deaths of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences.
The sentence, known as Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP), was introduced in 2005 by the Labour government for offenders who were considered a risk to the public, but whose offences did not merit a life sentence. IPP was so controversial that it was abolished in 2012, though not for people already serving a sentence.
As of 30 June 2023, there are still 2,909 IPP prisoners in England and Wales, more than half of whom (1,597) have been recalled to custody.
IPP prisoners are reportedly two-and-a-half times more likely to self-harm than the general prison population. As of December 2022, there have been 78 self-inflicted deaths since the sentences were introduced in April 2005.
In a Learning Lesson Bulletin published on Friday, the prisons and probation ombudsman, Adrian Usher, said: “A prisoner’s IPP status should be considered as a potential risk factor for suicide and self-harm.
“It is clear there are several risk factors and triggers associated with IPP sentences. HMPPS should use these findings to more clearly inform the risk profile of any individual, and therefore be able to better keep them from harm. It is imperative that HMPPS ensures these high levels of self-inflicted deaths do not continue.”
Usher revealed that of the 19 self-inflicted IPP deaths reviewed for the bulletin, only five of the individuals had been placed on an ACCT (Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork), the support plan set up for prisoners at risk of suicide or self-harm. The bulletin said: “The outcome of a parole hearing and the provision of a release date should be considered a significant risk factor for self-harm.”
Last week the UN torture expert Alice Jill Edwards called on the UK government to urgently review all sentences imposed on prisoners held under IPP. “I’m particularly concerned about the higher rates of self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and actual suicide among the IPP prisoner population,” she said.
Number of offenders with indefinite sentences recalled to prison soars
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In 2021 David Blunkett, the Labour home secretary who introduced IPP, admitted: “I got it wrong”, while in 2020 the late supreme court justice Lord Brown called IPP sentences “the greatest single stain on the justice system”.
Donna Mooney’s brother, Tommy Nicol, took his own life at the age of 37 while serving an IPP sentence. “It’s been almost eight years since Tommy’s suicide due to the IPP sentence. The PPO report is great, but without firm release dates the deaths will continue,” said Mooney, who works with Ungripp, a group campaigning for reform of IPP.
“More lives lost, more lives ruined for a sentence that was abolished 11 years ago.”
Andrea Coomber KC, the chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “This report from the PPO should be a wake-up call for the government. Almost 3,000 people are still stuck inside, with no sense of if or when they will be released, and too many are paying the ultimate price. The fact that nearly 11 years after its abolition people continue to be detained on IPP sentences fundamentally threatens the credibility of our system of justice.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Our thoughts remain with the family and friends of all those who have lost their lives. We have reduced the number of IPP prisoners by three-quarters since we scrapped this sentence in 2012 and, on top of the suicide and self-harm prevention training all prison officers receive, we’re improving guaranteed support for IPP prisoners in particular. We are carefully considering what additional measures might need to be put in place.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/apr/04/national-education-union-neu-teachers-back-palestine-motion | Education | 2024-04-04T18:43:35.000Z | Sally Weale | UK teachers defy minister to back pro-Palestine motion | Teachers at the National Education Union conference have voted in favour of a motion calling for solidarity with Palestine and criticising the Israeli government as racist, and declared they would “take no lectures” from the education secretary.
Gillian Keegan said the motion was “wholly inappropriate” and would cause significant hurt to members of the Jewish community and thousands of Jewish children and parents in British schools.
Speakers at the NEU’s annual conference in Bournemouth on Thursday said there was nothing in the motion that attacked Jewish people or the Jewish religion, and it was carried with overwhelming support.
One speaker who opposed the motion was heckled after he likened the debate to “an anti-Zionist rally”, and he left the stage to a slow handclap.
Peter Block, a retired supply teacher from London, accused fellow delegates of uncritically jumping on the anti-Israel bandwagon and said it amounted it to “a glorification of Hamas”.
Block, who is Jewish, later told reporters: “They’re ignoring the whole picture. They are just taking a very blinkered, biased, one-sided view of everything and there is no opportunity to question, as you saw.”
The successful motion reaffirmed the NEU’s support for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War coalition and called on the union to “publish and circulate educational resources that members can use to increase understanding of Palestine and Israel”.
An amendment that was also carried said attempts to clamp down on the right to protest and discuss the issue must be opposed.
The education secretary criticised the motion for ignoring the attacks committed by Hamas on Israel on 7 October. She said: “These motions reflect the NEU’s divisive ideology, which I don’t believe is representative of our teachers. Teachers have a duty to remain politically impartial and to ensure all sides of contested views are presented fairly and without bias or prejudice.”
Debs Gwynne of Halton in Cheshire, who proposed the motion, responded: “I’m very proud that this trade union has a long history of solidarity with Palestine. Last week Gillian Keegan said she was appalled that this motion was being discussed at conference because it’s inappropriate.”
She said the NEU was in turn appalled that the government had failed to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. “This union will take no lectures from Gillian Keegan and this racist government on what is and what is not appropriate. There’s nothing in this motion that attacks Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” Gwynne said.
Earlier, the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Dr Husam Zomlot, was given a lengthy standing ovation when he addressed delegates, many of whom were wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh and some of whom shouted “Free Palestine”. One person shouted the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/20/aftersun-review-charlotte-wells-luminous-father-daughter-drama-paul-mescal | Film | 2022-11-20T08:00:22.000Z | Mark Kermode | Aftersun review – luminous father-daughter drama starring Paul Mescal | Earlier this month, the debut feature from Scottish-born, New York-based writer-director Charlotte Wells picked up a whopping 16 nominations for the British Independent Film awards, an impressive haul second only to Saint Maud’s record-breaking performance in 2020. It’s easy to see why Aftersun has generated such excitement since premiering at Cannes in May. A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.
We meet young, separated father Calum (Normal People’s Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the late 1990s. Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are sometimes mistaken for siblings) but she’s still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table. As for Calum, his outward calm seems to cover demons of denial; a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into a more chaotic – or euphoric – existence (Moonlight director and Aftersun co-producer Barry Jenkins describes Calum as “wading through wells of quiet anguish”).
Scrappy DV-cam footage offers apparently concrete evidence of the interactions between Sophie and Calum, with both roles being performed with quite breathtaking naturalism. Yet Aftersun is constructed as a very personal recollection, filtered through a haze of memory and imagination by the now-adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on things she didn’t really understand at the time. That tension between fact and fiction – between recorded and remembered events – draws us deep into the drama, causing us to examine every frame as if searching for clues to a hidden truth that remains tantalisingly elusive. It often seems as if the real story is playing out beyond the edges of the frame, dancing in the shadows beyond the confines of the screen. Plaudits to editor Blair McClendon, who juxtaposes scenes and images in almost hyperreal, dreamlike fashion, conjuring a magical space in which time seems to bend emotionally.
Appropriately for a work that is clearly profoundly personal, Wells says the roots of Aftersun lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with “a very beautiful woman right behind me… and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was”. That sense of mystery runs throughout this mesmerising feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, nonetheless feels peculiarly present.
Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn’t actually experience
Some of the groundwork for Aftersun was laid in Wells’s 2015 short film Tuesday (she has called this “a sequel of sorts, in a different place and time”). There’s more than a hint of the tactility of Lynne Ramsay’s early works, with short films such as Gasman (1997) and features such as Ratcatcher (1999) clearly serving as inspirations. Just as Ramsay has an almost uncanny ability to capture the texture of memories on screen, so Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn’t actually experience, while making them feel like they did. There are also clear traces of the films of Margaret Tait in Wells’s craft, specifically Blue Black Permanent (1992), which seems to have served as a tonal reference (a volume of Tait’s writings is prominently displayed on screen).
Gregory Oke’s cinematography captures the colour of memory, with bright exteriors and glowing surfaces carefully graded by Kath Raisch to evoke vivid snapshots of fleeting moments. Composer Oliver Coates weaves his way in and out of the film’s emotional labyrinth, while deftly chosen needle drops (including a mashed-up vocal version of the Queen-David Bowie hit Under Pressure) put us right there in the moment.
Watch a trailer for Aftersun. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/dec/01/helena-bonham-carter-says-the-crown-should-admit-to-viewers-its-a-drama | Television & radio | 2020-12-01T00:09:04.000Z | Harry Taylor | Helena Bonham Carter says The Crown should stress to viewers it's a drama | Helena Bonham Carter has said The Crown has a “moral responsibility” to tell viewers that it is a drama, rather than historical fact, in the wake of calls for a “health warning” for people watching the series.
The actor, who played Princess Margaret in series three and four of the Netflix hit drama, told an official podcast for the show that there was an important distinction between “our version”, and the “real version”.
In the podcast episode, which was released on Monday, Bonham Carter said: “It is dramatised. I do feel very strongly, because I think we have a moral responsibility to say, ‘Hang on guys, this is not … it’s not a drama-doc, we’re making a drama.’ So they are two different entities.”
She called the research by the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, “amazing”, adding: “That is the proper documentary. That is amazing and then Peter switches things up and juggles.”
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Her views came after criticisms of the show’s historical accuracy prompted the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, to say he planned to write to the streaming network to request that a disclaimer was put up before the show was played, so viewers would not misinterpret the portrayal as historical truth.
Dowden told the Mail on Sunday: “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that … Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
Accusations of inaccuracies in Peter Morgan’s production span from repeatedly showing the Queen “wrongly dressed for trooping the colour” to disputes over Prince Charles’s fishing technique.
But the biggest bones of contention have been about the depiction of Charles’s marriage to Diana. He is portrayed phoning Camilla Parker Bowles every day in the early years of the marriage, and Diana is depicted as forcing plans for the couple’s trip to Australia to be changed after throwing a tantrum.
Currently viewers are warned that the show contains nudity, sex, violence and suicide references, and is suitable for viewers aged 15 and above.
Netflix has been contacted for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/feb/02/spain-baltasar-garzon-investigation | Opinion | 2012-02-02T12:03:55.000Z | Miguel-Anxo Murado | Does Spain have the right to look at its past or not? | Miguel-Anxo Murado | Baltasar Garzón: judge on trial - video profile Convict the Judge - JWP for Televisió de Catalunya/RTS www.jwproductions.tv
No habrá paz para los malvados. "No rest for the wicked". That's the biblically inspired title of a recently released Spanish thriller about crime and revenge. But in the real Spain, the wicked may be having some rest after all. While prominent corruption trials come to nothing, star judge Baltasar Garzón, seen all over the world as an embodiment of the principle of universal justice, sits in the dock, facing not one but three separate indictments that are expected to put an abrupt end to his hyperactive judicial career.
Garzón stands accused of opening an investigation into the killings of the Franco dictatorship (1936-1975). You may be surprised to learn that looking into these 114,000 murders is a punishable crime in Spain, but that is how it is. The specific charge against Garzón is "perverting the course of justice".
What Garzón did, at the behest of hundreds of relatives of people who were murdered during and after the civil war, was to open an inquiry to account for the tens of thousands of bodies still scattered around the country, secretly buried by their executors in ravines and ditches. For decades, their loved ones have tried to give them a proper burial. Some bodies have been retrieved with the help of volunteer archaeologists but the law is so fuzzy, and the attitude of many local judges so hostile, that only a fraction of the corpses have been unearthed. Spain continues to be a gigantic neglected graveyard. Garzón, who had helped with the investigation of similar crimes in Argentina and Chile, thought the same principles could be applied to Spain.
We're talking about non-natural deaths here, so the operation had to include a criminal investigation, which meant indicting Franco and his henchmen. When judge Garzón proceeded to do just that, even symbolically – they're all dead now – two far-right organisations sued, one of them the very Falange Española (the Spanish fascist party) which carried out many of the killings back then. Picture Radovan Karadzic successfully suing The Hague.
The fact that Garzón is facing two other charges (one an obscure corruption allegation, the other a rather technical misdemeanour in the handling of a corruption case) detracts from, rather than adds to, the credibility of the case against him. The timing seems all too suspect and the number of simultaneous accusations against a single judge unprecedented in Spain.
But if you think this means the Spanish justice system is still in the hands of ultraconservative judges and Francoist nostalgics you're missing half the picture, because only about half of them are. The other half hates Garzón for other, less ideological, reasons. Some of them have always resented his desire for prominence, or feel his reputation is undeserved. Socialist politicians never forgave him for going after the death squads that were set up in the 1980s to kill the armed Basque separatists of Eta. And he angered the conservatives too when he investigated a corrupt network affecting the now ruling People's party.
I'm not a Garzón fan myself, for my own reasons. I never liked his self-righteousness, and he represents an approach to justice I don't trust: that of the all-powerful judge with a mission. I believe that the ultimate guarantor of justice should be a clear law and not the mood or the idealism of a judge, and I guess Garzón is beginning to agree with me as he is becoming the victim of a confusing law and a few judges with a mission of their own: to put him out of business.
My personal feelings aside, I think there's more at stake here than his professional future, the petty quarrels of his trade or the intractable fuzziness of Spain's laws. What is at stake is whether we have the right to look into our recent past or not, and whether it is not the wicked, but the innocent, who will never be able to rest.
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/12/regeneration-kings-cross-can-other-developers-repeat-trick | Art and design | 2014-10-12T08:30:07.000Z | Rowan Moore | All hail the new King’s Cross – but can other developers repeat the trick? | What have the developers ever done for us? Nothing, except the two schools, the university, the 2,000 new homes, of which 50% are affordable, the swimming pool, jobs, the cookery school, the community garden grown in skips, so it can be moved around, the floodlit sports pitch, the 20 restored historic buildings, the not-bad architecture, the creation of 26 acres of open space, with fountains and trees, in what were partly inaccessible backlands. Apart from that, nothing.
The development of King’s Cross in London, now about half complete, is the most substantial fulfilment yet of an idea that the best way to transform an urban area, and to improve the lives around it with facilities and investment, is for commercial development to take the lead, while working closely with local authorities and local communities. It requires property companies to act like de facto municipalities, while making a profit for their backers. The idea is a manifestation of what Tony Blair called the “third way”, and David Cameron the “big society”, without achieving that much by way of tangible results.
The alternative, as was achieved in Covent Garden in the 1970s, and in the Coin Street area near Waterloo since the 1980s, would be for local communities to form their own development groups, which would change sites incrementally. This is championed by Michael Edwards, a lecturer in planning at University College London, who has been campaigning on King’s Cross for more than two decades. What we get now, he says, “is a very upmarket kind of development, whose services and facilities are for educated, sophisticated people with money in their pockets”.
The modern tycoons in this area are certainly different from their Victorian predecessors, the railway companies who built the great stations of King’s Cross and St Pancras, with their associated tracks, marshalling yards and coal drops, which still define the area. Then, when they needed more space for their operations, they ejected the 2,000 residents of what is now the site of the British Library, greatly exacerbating the overcrowding in the surrounding slums, without so much as a multicoloured consultation leaflet in sight.
The spatial remnants of their casual infrastructural brutality made up the site of the current development, pieces of land left over by the radii of tracks, exploited for subsidiary uses, and occupied by sometimes magnificent structures such as the cast-iron gas holders that used to crown this bit of skyline, and the 1851 Granary Building, where goods were transferred between rail, canal barge and horse-drawn traffic. A canal, sunk into the land, added to the drama. Bits of inhabitation – a row of workers’ houses, an early example of philanthropic housing – attached themselves to the site’s surfaces and crevices. In time film-makers came to like it: see, for example, The Ladykillers.
By the 1980s, much of the industrial use had receded, leaving a part-wilderness with the unintended poetry that comes when mighty works recede, a Campo Vaccino of bricks, iron, weeds and mud. It was a place made of margins, but was near the centre of London. Not that it was all empty. As Mike Leigh’s High Hopes showed, lives were lived here. People had homes, jobs. They did things. There was a nature reserve, formed out of wasteland. The area had a reputation, sometimes exaggerated but nonetheless based in reality, for prostitution and drugs.
The first attempt at comprehensive redevelopment, to plans by Norman Foster, was killed off by the recession of the early 1990s. The second, by the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership, has been in progress since developers Argent were appointed in 2000 to lead the project. Argent’s stated idea was to understand the location and its issues before asking architects to design anything, to which end its chief executive Roger Madelin set about consulting the many interested parties. He went around by bicycle, talking to 7,500 different people, he says, in 353 different meetings.
Madelin also waxes eloquent about the site’s physical and other constraints: tunnels, tracks, service pipes, the canal, listed buildings, contaminated ground, a gas governor that, if wrongly housed, could explode. The site is restricted by viewing corridors, the rules that prevent new buildings interfering with views of St Paul’s Cathedral, in this case from Parliament Hill and Kenwood House. They mean that there can be no towers on the site, except on its northern end.
The ArtHouse, King’s Cross, designed by de Rijke Marsh Morgan.
Argent had at least some time to deal with these complexities, as building the development couldn’t start until completion of the Eurostar line in 2007. Then came another recession, which nearly did for the whole thing. Now, however, it is growing rapidly. In 2012 it was announced that Google, the company that every large development in London wanted on its patch, would honour King’s Cross with its presence.
At its centre, in the Granary Building, is the University of the Arts, the fusion of six different colleges to make the largest school of its kind in Europe. In front is Granary Square, an open space comparable in size to Trafalgar Square, with fountains rising from its stone paving, clipped trees, and steps descending to the canal. Off to one side is the Camley Street nature reserve, retained and flourishing. The gas holders are to be re-erected nearby, three containing flats and a fourth left open, with a garden inside. Apartment buildings – sober, decent, brown-coloured, northern European in feel – are appearing, plus one shiny one by the architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan.
To the south of Granary Square, between King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations, there are office buildings by serious architects. They are oblong for the same reason that the gas holders were cylindrical – it’s the shape that does the job most efficiently – but, lest they be too boxy, some art has gone into their surfaces. David Chipperfield, in what by his standards is a skittish mood, has wrapped his in 396 cast-iron columns, with a sort of basketweave pattern moulded on to them, which are not actually performing columns’ traditional role of holding the building up. Allies and Morrison have lined the window embrasures of their largely white block with gold-coloured panels, so that they dazzle in the sunshine. These two buildings are subtle, intelligent and even sensuous ways of making generic office buildings.
Allies and Morrison were, with classicising architect Demetri Porphyrios, responsible for the masterplan of the whole development. Both they and Argent stress that the most important aspect is to get the spaces between the buildings right, more than the structures themselves. The main elements are a broad boulevard lined with the office blocks and the future Google, which leads to Granary Square, from where a straight leafy avenue is to run north through the brown housing to the furthest end of the site. Smaller streets and squares attach to this main armature.
It is a series of incidents, quite loosely linked, that tries to connect where it can with surrounding districts, using the traditional elements of European cities: streets, squares, avenues. Zaha Hadid has called the result boring. To which Professor Jeremy Till, of the University of the Arts, retorts: “These comments say much more about Zaha than they do about King’s Cross. Here the association of excitement with avant-garde form-making proves redundant.”
One Pancras Square, designed by David Chipperfield, is wrapped in 396 cast-iron columns. Photograph: Sophia Evans/Observer
Till is right, in that the last things you need are extravagant shapes and mannerisms in the presence of structures as powerful as the great stations, the granary and the temporarily absent gas holders. But there is a tendency to normalise, to make a fundamentally extraordinary place too much resemble the received opinion as to what good quality urban space looks like. Take Granary Square, a bold and well-considered space, but paved in tasteful porphyry. Combined with planting and fountains – both nice things to have in themselves – it diminishes the industrial fabric, especially the Granary Building. If it were, say, paved in dark brick, the relief of the fountains would be all the more effective.
There are also the Stanley Buildings, “improved industrial dwellings” of the 1860s, now awkwardly attached to a block of serviced offices, a use to which they have themselves been converted. There can be a mismatch between the architectural variegation and the uses contained: Camden council has located its headquarters here into an unobtrusive building, whereas Chipperfield’s block is the one that looks like a town hall.
The tendency to smooth over makes the not-yet-revealed final designs for the Google building crucial. The cute-and-creepy tech giant is not a normal company, and its site is not normal either – narrow, as long as the Shard is tall, with changes of level and interruptions by railway structures. The task for its architects, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, is to make its multiple unusualness manifest, without resort to tricksiness or funny colours. They need to design the project of their lives.
But if the worst thing that can be said about the architecture of the King’s Cross development is that it is a bit tame, there are many worse things that it could have been. Nor is it surprising, given the multiple complexities with which developers and architects dealt, if they were cautious in their design. Their priorities are hard to fault – making open spaces more important than individual buildings, giving prominence to historic buildings, making connections where possible to surrounding streets, creating a series of places with distinct characteristics.
The bigger question is how well it fulfils the goals set out by Peter Bishop, who when the director of environment at the London borough of Camden worked closely with Argent when it was drawing up the scheme. Bishop says that it has “to feel like a piece of London” to achieve “a social mix”, to have an influence beyond its boundaries and “to be a public bit of London”.
As far as making the place a “piece of London” goes, or at least a vital, not-sterile district, the urban and commercial masterstroke was to bring in the University of the Arts. The university was able to commit to moving there at a time when credit-crunched businesses were not, and its presence is now an attraction for (especially) Google. It also fills the location with instant activity, as thousands of lively students flow in and out.
As to making it “a public bit of London”, the development has gone to some lengths to make it different from Canary Wharf, whose well-defined boundaries are protected by conspicuous security measures. Granary Square is a publoid, rather than public space, publicly accessible but still privately owned and managed, but Bishop says that Camden has the right to take over other streets and spaces in the development. Given that much of the site was formerly closed off, this is far from being the sort of privatisation of the public domain for which other developments are rightly criticised.
‘Children from surrounding estates run through Granary Square’s fountains unchecked by security guards.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
As to “social mix”, Madelin points to the affordable housing in the rarely achieved proportion of 50%, to the various public facilities, the training programmes associated with the development, and the fact that children from surrounding estates run through Granary Square’s fountains unchecked by security guards. There will also, he happily says, be expensive housing, but their residents “will walk the streets and you won’t be able to see that they are very, very wealthy”.
Robert Milne, secretary of the King’s Cross Development Forum, also raises concern that a change of management policy could make the open spaces less inclusive. It is certainly essential that the future managers of the project maintain both this openness and its architectural quality. Milne also objects that the supermarket chain chosen for the site is middle-class Waitrose. Madelin says this was because they were most open to getting involved with community projects, and that the likes of Aldi or Lidl will come too.
Critics of the King’s Cross development say that “it is by no means the worst” (Michael Edwards). Argent’s claims for their good works mostly stand up to examination, and it is impossible to find the outrages of exclusion and bad design that happen in other works of “regeneration”. I’d go further – it is on the way to being a great achievement. Are there other ways of achieving its social objectives? Yes, although I don’t think anyone can confidently say that there would have been more affordable homes, communal facilities, or jobs, if it had been done any other way.
The bigger concern is rather this: there is too little sign of other large developments in London, or other British cities, pursuing social goals to this degree. In the stacked-up units of luxury housing now being waved through by Boris Johnson’s lieutenants, you see nothing of the richness of King’s Cross. An essential part of its success of has been the balance of power between developers and local authorities, in this case Camden, but councils are now so undermined and weakened that that balance no longer exists. King’s Cross is in danger of being the last of its kind. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/feb/15/champions-league-team-of-the-week-foden-mbappe-and-isaksen-shine | Football | 2024-02-15T12:54:50.000Z | John Brewin | Champions League team of the week: Foden, Mbappé and Isaksen shine | The Champions League returned from its winter slumber, though not in the most spectacular style. Tuesday’s matches went much as expected with Real Madrid’s 1-0 win at Leipzig, albeit a narrow one, accompanied by Copenhagen being beaten 3-1 by a slick Manchester City. On Wednesday, with Paris Saint-Germain beating Real Sociedad 2-0, Lazio’s 1-0 home win over Bayern Munich represented the week’s shock.
A selection follows of outstanding performers from the last-16 ties this week.
Goalkeeper: Real Madrid had to suffer for victory in Leipzig, and they did so, aside from the rather dubious decision to rule out an early goal from Benjamin Sesko, thanks to a great performance from Andriy Lunin. The Ukrainian has supplanted Kepa Arrizabalaga as Carlo Ancelotti’s first-choice in the absence of Thibaut Courtois. Sesko versus Lunin was a duel the keeper won hands-down, and he ended up making a total of nine saves in denying Leipzig, more decisive a contribution than any of his all-star teammates.
Defender: Far more than a mere defender, Achraf Hakimi entered the last 16 having created the competition’s most chances from open play, and his status as one of Europe’s most reliable supply lines continued with one beautiful pass that Ousmane Dembélé might have done better with. Paris Saint-Germain did not have it all their own way against Real Sociedad – the Moroccan was asked to do plenty of defending – but an assignment approached nervously ended up being completed to some satisfaction.
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Defender: At the moment, central defenders come at a premium at Real Madrid due to an injury crisis where David Alaba and Éder Militão are recovering from cruciate injuries. Alongside the far more experienced Nacho, Aurélien Tchouaméni, an elite-level defensive midfielder, showed off his versatility by stepping back, just as he did against Girona on Saturday. He was asked to handle the dangerous Sesko in a far more challenging detail than at the weekend, eventually coming through for his team.
Defender: It was tempting to paint Bayern Munich’s second defeat in a week as a failure from their forward line but a disciplined Lazio win was embodied by Alessio Romagnoli. Harry Kane was reduced to potshots from distance and one free-kick during which he slipped rather embarrassingly. Romagnoli was outstanding, delivering some bruising tackles and Bayern did not have a shot on target for the entire game. The Italian international showed off the defensive wiles his country remains famous for.
Defender: Lazio full-backs Adam Marusic and Elseid Hysaj, a Montenegrin and an Albanian, excelled in dealing with attacks down the flanks from Bayern’s Jamal Musiala and Leroy Sane. Hysaj suffered a ropey opening first few minutes, only to pull through before having to leave the field through injury. Marusic moved out left to replace his colleague and, just as he had crunched into Musiala, kept Sane quiet, leading Thomas Tuchel to withdraw the winger as Bayern became increasingly desperate in the closing stages.
Midfielder: As debuts go, Magnus Mattsson had one to remember for Copenhagen. In his first game since joining from NEC Nijmegen, in his new club’s first match after a long winter break, he scored when he was gifted the equaliser by an Ederson error. His finish from the edge of the box was very well-struck. And while City were dominant for large parts of the match, Copenhagen players chasing shadows, Mattsson epitomised the efforts that kept the scoreline close. “I am ready to give everything,” he said of the second leg in Manchester.
Kevin De Bruyne is hitting ominous form for Man City. Photograph: Kieran McManus/REX/Shutterstock
Midfielder: Kevin De Bruyne’s early strike for City in Copenhagen was ominous, as was his overall performance for the holders. The Belgian has unfinished business in the competition, having limped off in last season’s final; he missed the group stages entirely this season. His goal was typically well-taken, drilled in with real venom, and he later managed to be the provider of goals for Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden. That he completed the 90 minutes by supplying the final goal suggests his fitness is holding up, another factor to chill any challengers to City’s throne.
Midfielder: There are no bigger shoes to fill in European football at the moment than those of Jude Bellingham, but Brahim Díaz proved himself an admirable stand-in. The former Manchester City youngster, having got the equaliser in the recent Madrid derby, scored a goal that Bellingham, who is dealing with an ankle problem, would have been proud of, speeding past three defenders before bending in a left-foot shot. It won a game that occasionally threatened to get away from Madrid, though Díaz, having seized his opportunity and even used Bellingham’s trademark celebration, suffered an untimely muscle injury.
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A deserved Player of the Match award for Brahim Díaz. Photograph: Maja Hitij/UEFA/Getty Images
Forward: While De Bruyne and Erling Haaland were out of the City team, it was left to Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden to take up responsibility and nurse Pep Guardiola’s team along. Now that the big two are back Silva and Foden have not let standards drop, and it is a toss-up between which of the pair to include after Copenhagen. Early in the season, there were suggestions Foden would move more centrally, but De Bruyne’s return has shifted him back to the flanks on a more regular basis. His consistency remains awesome.
Forward: The recent talk has been of Kylian Mbappé frittering away his career by remaining at Paris Saint-Germain. His future is likely to lie away from the French capital but in his likely swansong season, he is a leading reason his club have one foot in the quarter-finals. Playing as a centre-forward and in a week decidedly short of top-grade finishing, his volleying technique for PSG’s first goal set him apart. He later hit the bar. He can do far better, but that proved good enough.
Forward: Another player from Denmark’s impressive production line, Gustav Isaksen supplied the key moment in Lazio’s defeat of Bayern Munich by winning a penalty from Dayot Upamecano, a foul that resulted in a red card. Playing off the right wing, Isaksen was a frequent menace to Raphaël Guerreiro and might already have opened the scoring had Manuel Neuer not saved with his legs. Ciro Immobile slotted the winning penalty but the 22-year-old, not yet a full Danish international, gave him the opportunity to do so. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/25/jim-jarmusch-vampires-only-lovers-left-alive-cannes | Film | 2013-05-25T18:16:00.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Cannes 2013: Only Lovers Left Alive a seven year trek says Jim Jarmusch | Jim Jarmusch said today that the Cannes film festival screening of his new film, the vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, was the culmination of a seven-year odyssey.
"The reason it took so long," said Jarmusch, "is that no one wanted to give us the money. It took years to put it together. Its getting more and more difficult for films that are a little unusual, or not predictable, or don't satisfy people's expectations of something. Boy, I wish I had an answer why it took so long. But we're here now."
Producer Reinhard Brundig said that it fell to European financiers to plug the gaps in the film's $7m budget when American backers dropped out. "There were US companies who were initially very keen, but the past few years have been so tough economically everywhere and the situation changed. But in Europe we still have this wonderful system of subsidies and TV stations, and we found a way to do a European co-production." The UK's Jeremy Thomas joined the project in 2010 and, as lead producer, pulled the finance together.
Jarmusch said he was particularly grateful to Swinton and Hurt, who were cast early on and stuck with it throughout the process. "Tilda and John stayed with us the whole time. Tilda would never give up: whenever things would fall apart she would say, 'Oh, that means it's just not the right time to make it, that's a good thing.' John told me, just tell me when and where you're doing it, and i'll be there, and he was."
In Only Lovers Left Alive, with Hiddleston and Swinton as centuries-old vampires named Adam and Eve, holed up in Detroit, Michigan and Tangier respectively. As "21st century vampires" they refuse to feed on living people, instead buying their blood illicitly from hospitals and middlemen, like any other illegal drug.
Joking that he decided to make a vampire film after "we heard you could make a lot of money with them", Jarmusch confessed he had not seen any of what he termed the "current commercial vampire films" such as the Twilight series, but said he had a love for the genre. "There have been a lot of beautiful vampire films," he said
Only Lovers Left Alive is also something of a tribute to Detroit, the now-ravaged Michigan car-making city that among other claims to fame was the home of Motown. Describing Detroit as the "Paris of the midwest" Jarmusch praised its "great spirit" and said: "It has an incredible musical culture, so much amazing American music has come and continues to come from Detroit. If you see what has happened to it it's very shocking and moving. It's kind of a decimated city." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/26/joe-biden-to-visit-australia-in-may-as-sydney-hosts-2023-quad-leaders-summit | Australia news | 2023-04-26T02:34:42.000Z | Daniel Hurst | Joe Biden to visit Australia in May as Sydney hosts 2023 Quad leaders’ summit | The Sydney Opera House will be the focus of a major security operation when the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, welcomes the US president, Joe Biden and the prime ministers of India and Japan for a key diplomatic event.
Albanese said on Wednesday that “Australia’s most recognisable building” would be the venue for the Quad leaders’ summit on 24 May.
It will be Biden’s first visit to Australia as US president and while in the country he is also expected to address a joint sitting of the Australian parliament.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, last visited Australia in 2014 when he addressed parliament and a crowd of more than 20,000 people at Sydney Olympic Park.
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The other attender, Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, visited Perth late last year to deepen security ties with Australia.
The logistical challenges surrounding the event are immense, given the need for strict security arrangements for hosting the leaders.
It will cost Australia an eye-popping $23m to host the summit, including nearly $5m for the Australian federal police to help secure the event, according to the budget announced last October.
The Quad, a previously informal diplomatic group that has become more active over the last few years, brings together Australia, the US, Japan and India for talks focusing on security and other issues across the Indo-Pacific region.
The Quad is viewed warily by Beijing which denounces the initiative as a means to contain China’s rise.
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One of Albanese’s first acts as prime minister was to travel to Tokyo for the previous Quad leaders’ summit, held just days after the May 2022 election.
“Quad partners are deeply invested in the success of the Indo-Pacific,” Albanese said on Wednesday.
“Leveraging our collective strengths helps Australia advance its interests and more effectively respond to the region’s needs.
“We are always better off when we act together with our close friends and partners.”
Albanese said the leaders would use the occasion to discuss the global economic environment and security challenges.
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“We know that we live in a more insecure world with strategic competition in our region, with the ongoing impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
Albanese said the meeting was a chance to “showcase this beautiful city and this wonderful country to the entire world” and would have “spin off” benefits.
The premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, welcomed the announcement, saying it was “fitting the first Quad leaders’ summit on Australian soil will take place in our global city”.
“Our businesses have trading ties that extend across the globe,” Minns said.
“My government and our agencies have been working hard to ensure the success of this significant event over many months.”
Minns said NSW government agencies, including NSW Police and Transport, were in talks with the federal government and would attempt to “minimise disruption to the Sydney community”.
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Biden and Kishida will be travelling to Australia after the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, on 19-21 May, an event that Albanese will also attend.
Asked on Wednesday about Biden’s decision to seek re-election in 2024, Albanese said he regarded the president as a friend but would not comment on US politics.
“President Biden will be a very welcome visitor here in Australia,” Albanese said.
The prime minister also confirmed he would attend the Apec meeting in San Francisco later in the year, and was working on a schedule for a bilateral visit to the US.
Albanese and Biden last met in March in San Diego. The pair joined the UK’s Rishi Sunak to announce the multi-decade plans for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines project under the Aukus deal.
This will be the first time Australia has hosted a Quad leaders’ summit, although the foreign ministers of the four countries met in Melbourne in February 2022.
– with Australian Associated Press | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/01/women-still-earning-two-thirds-less-than-men-top-finance-roles | Business | 2021-03-01T00:01:08.000Z | Joanna Partridge | Women paid two-thirds less than men in top finance roles – report | Female directors at the UK’s largest financial services firms are paid on average two-thirds less than their male counterparts, new research shows, underlining the pay gap that still exists between men and women at the highest levels in the financial sector.
Average pay for female directors at financial services companies stands at £247,100, 66% lower than the average £722,300 paid to male directors, according to research by employment and partnership law firm Fox & Partners.
The significant gender pay gap at firms listed on the FTSE 100 and 250 stock indices suggests there has been slow progress in recruiting women to more senior, higher-paid executive positions.
The vast majority (86%) of the female company directors occupy non-executive roles, according to the research, which tend to be lower paid than executive positions, and involve less day-to-day responsibility for running the business.
The revelations come just days after the final report in the government-backed Hampton-Alexander review into female representation in business showed that women now hold more than a third of roles in the boardrooms of Britain’s top 350 companies.
However, men still dominate the highest levels of business, and the review fell slightly short of its second major target of reaching 33% representation of women on FTSE 350 leadership teams, including positions on executive committees.
The Fox & Partners research underlines that firms are willing to give non-executive roles to women to improve board diversity, but are not appointing them to better-remunerated leadership positions, which also exert more influence within the company.
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“Boards need to be open to challenging themselves by asking honest questions about the barriers in their organisation that might prevent women reaching the very top,” said Catriona Watt, a partner at Fox & Partners.
“To see long-term change, firms must be committed to taking steps that will lead to more women progressing through the ranks, getting into senior executive positions and closing the pay gap,” she said.
One way for firms to promote change would be by signing up to the government’s women in finance charter, under which companies pledge to promote gender diversity by setting internal targets for this in senior management and publishing annual progress reports on the number of women in leadership roles. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/jul/29/anne-boleyn-review | Stage | 2010-07-29T20:29:45.000Z | Michael Billington | Anne Boleyn | Theatre review | As you might expect, Howard Brenton's new play about Anne Boleyn is no mere picturesque romp on the lines of TV's The Tudors. In fact, it's a radically revisionist work that argues that Anne was more Protestant martyr than sexual predator. It both challenges received wisdom and bulges with theatrical vitality.
Avoiding the conventional bio-play format, Brenton presents us with a ghost hunt. On his accession in 1603, James I rummages through a chest that belonged to Anne Boleyn. He discovers, apart from her coronation robe, two books: William Tyndale's once-banned version of the New Testament and an even more subversive volume. Backtracking in time, we discover how Anne used her sexual stranglehold over Henry VIII to pursue the idea of religious reform. Crucial to the story is her secret meeting with Tyndale, who gives her a copy of The Obedience of a Christian Man; and it is this book, claiming that kings are responsible directly to God rather than the pope, that falls into Henry VIII's hands at the very moment when he is seeking to divorce Catherine of Aragon.
I can't help feeling that Brenton slightly overplays his admiration for Anne in suggesting that she was responsible not merely for the Reformation but, in part, for the existence of the King James Bible. But he gets away from the pop image of Anne as the doomed siren to show her as a resolute, deeply religious woman who deployed her sexual power to become a "conspirator for Christ". Brenton's play also sets the historical detail in a wider context. We get fascinating accounts of Tudor contraceptive methods and of Anne's tactical skill in denying Henry consummation for seven years. But Brenton's main point is that Anne helped to shape England's destiny: one of the richest scenes shows James I pursuing her idea of a reformed church and seeking to reconcile warring factions.
John Dove's production matches the play's frontal attack. Miranda Raison, directly addressing the Globe audience whom she sees as "godless demons", creates a rivetingly plausible Anne more concerned with evangelical zeal than missionary positions. And there is fine support from James Garnon as a gay, twitching, scholarly James I, Anthony Howell as a lean, impulsive Henry VIII and John Dougall as a Thomas Cromwell who is both prince of darkness and closet Protestant. Academics may pounce on Brenton's play, but it eschews mock-Tudor costume drama to offer a compelling portrait of a woman contentiously described by James I as "the whore who changed England". | Full |
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