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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jan/23/frost-nixon-film-review | Film | 2009-01-23T00:01:00.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Film review: Frost/Nixon | Ron Howard directs this movie treatment of Peter Morgan's smash-hit stage play about David Frost's television interviews with former President Richard Nixon in 1977, the story of two famous people brought together by the ironies of fate, of politics, of celebrity, of male ego. Frost is played by Michael Sheen and Nixon by the massive, rumbling, fish-eyed Frank Langella. Kevin Bacon plays Nixon's fiercely loyal aide Jack Brennan and Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt are Frost's querulous American researchers. In the mid-70s, Frost's career was waning and he needed a real coup to put him back on top; Nixon was languishing in a post-impeachment twilight and desperate to overturn history's dire verdict. If Frost landed a punch on Tricky Dicky that would set him up for life - but Nixon, that wily old operator, figured he would evade the punch and this servile Englishman would make him look good for posterity. The game was on.
When I saw this at the London film festival last year, I found myself disconcerted and underwhelmed by a hugely anticipated movie. It never quite escapes its stage origins, and under a glitzy surface of period stylings doesn't seem to have much to say, other than to reaffirm the truisms about very famous men being more human and vulnerable than we thought.
Having watched it again, I felt the same way as I had the first time around. There are some very nice performances, particularly from Langella, who enjoys himself hugely in this plum role and radiates a hypnotically conceited ex-Presidential manner. Rockwell and Platt have some great knockabout dialogue as the backstairs political guys, a double-act that might have amused Aaron Sorkin.
But the movie has some awfully laborious faux-documentary-type "talking head" sections in which the main players - still played by the actors, but not apparently much aged reminisce blandly about the action: a gimmick that attempts to confer an unearned aura of reality on the proceedings. And the characters keep giving speeches in which they explain what we are supposed to know and think about the main players. Rebecca Hall is wasted in the vapid role of Frost's girlfriend Caroline, and the lead characters never meet on informal terms, never strike real sparks and each appears to be sealed inside the bell-jar of his reputation.
The big, contrived set-piece is Nixon's drunken late-night phone call to Frost on the eve of battle; he has a big shouty speech, letting rip at the liberal elites sneering at his humble origins - supposedly a bonding moment with the low-born Frost. Sheen is never without style, but his Frosty mannerisms are very pronounced for his first scenes, and then they thaw into something more generic, even rather Blair-ish, as befitting a character whom we are ultimately supposed to take very seriously. I felt that Frost/Nixon was not as rich in dramatic content or insight as Morgan's earlier pairings: Blair/Queen or Brown/Blair. That said, it's an effective showcase for Langella, who may never again get a role as juicy as this. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/09/actors-strike-may-be-over-hollywood-still-in-trouble | Film | 2023-11-09T12:08:06.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The actors’ strike may be over, but Hollywood is still in trouble | Peter Bradshaw | It’s over. The stream of sweatshirted and placard-wielding Instagram no-filter/no-makeup posts from stars is at an end. The Sag-Aftra film and television actors’ strike in Hollywood is paused after four months, with a tentative deal giving actors larger minimum-pay increases, a streaming bonus and “consent and compensation” provisions against AI, although how exactly this last is to be enforced remains to be seen. For those who had thought of Hollywood as the very epitome of free-marketeerism, the spectacle of an actual strike, which remained reasonably popular and un-demonised in the press, and which produced a result, is quite startling. Especially as British Equity doesn’t have this kind of power.
In the movies themselves, from Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront to Sylvester Stallone in FIST to Peter Sellers’ Hitler-moustached shop steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, there is a long tradition of showing unions and union activity as dramatically compromised. The closing scene of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike shows the workers being collectively shot, interspersed with images of a cow being slaughtered. But today’s Hollywood cow is in pretty good shape, despite rumours that studios have been using the strike as a cover to make production cuts.
But what does it mean for the moviegoing public? Well, not perhaps all that much immediately, unlike the writers’ strike in the US where talkshows were suspended and Drew Barrymore was criticised for breaking the strike by attempting to restart her show. Production can reportedly recommence on titles such as Deadpool 3, Gladiator 2 and Wicked which had been stymied, and a release can be scheduled for delayed films including Dune: Part Two – but the unblocking of all these sequels and adaptations does not on the face of it seem like a reflowering of creativity or “storytelling” which industry honchos solemnly declare to be their vocation.
Striking Hollywood actors had been forbidden to make promotional appearances, which had meant not appearing on talkshows. Perhaps British TV audiences for The Graham Norton Show or The Jonathan Ross Show might not have noticed any great difference, but we have seen a greater emphasis on non-film-promo celebrity turns: Arnold Schwarzenegger has been around to boost his self-help book and Dame Judi Dench her work on Shakespeare. And we have been spared that most depressing of phenomena – the group appearance, whereby three or four people from the same film sit grinningly on the sofa and hog all the limelight and turn the programme into an advertorial for their film.
But during the strike, Hollywood stars had been allowed to put their heads over the parapet on the understanding that they were doing so as producers, and film festival selectors had reportedly gone easier on movie stars’ “passion projects” on the understanding that they would be allowed to make a red-carpet appearance as producers. This was surely the case with Chris Pine and his wacky, sub-Lebowski film Poolman this year, in which he was director, star, co-writer and co-producer – and which had people at the London film festival groaning and checking the time on their phones. The strike had given oxygen to Chris Pine and Poolman which should maybe have been withheld. The end of the strike will mean business (almost) as usual: streamers and studios will have drawn in their horns; performers will be encouraged to stay in their lanes, but with the knowledge that this is still a really lucrative industry – and actors have triumphantly restaked their claim in it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/18/cats-and-dogs-make-us-laugh-out-loud-and-cry-inside-a-little | Television & radio | 2015-08-18T08:44:37.000Z | Jazz Twemlow | Cats and dogs make us laugh out loud (and cry inside a little) | Somewhere, in a dark room at Channel Seven, there was panic and confusion. When Restaurant Revolution failed to grab ratings, it was decided the network’s revenge would be served up to its disloyal viewers by way of a TV show so spiritually devastating, we would beg for the return of what may as well have been called Shark Tank Block Chef Rules.
No doubt developed in some ivy-covered, gothic laboratory nestled on a foggy heath in the UK where TV shows are grown on the backs of weeping mice, Cats Make You Laugh Out Loud was precisely the sort of extinction-event television Seven was looking for. Unfortunately, their plan backfired when ratings soared, proving that once our buttocks hit the sofa, we become about as discerning as a starving hog dropped into a dumpster.
Or at least, I hope either revenge or punishment were Seven’s intent; there’s comfort in that. They can’t have actually wanted to fob us off with recycled internet content, can they? And why did we reward them for it? We’re not going to get out of the TV equivalent of a zip mask and ball gag if we keep moaning for more.
There’s only one good thing I can say about CMYLOL’s commitment to lazily harvesting YouTube videos: without having to buy one, for a brief moment I felt like I had a Smart TV (albeit a faulty one that was showing me someone else’s wearisome browsing history).
Complaining about shows like this will almost certainly be met with the usual responses of “Well, what did you expect?” I’ll admit, the show has been titled with such cunning literality as to somehow make it my fault for not liking it should I choose to watch. They could only have signposted the show’s contents more obviously had they named it You’re Going to Watch Cat Videos For the Next 45 Minutes. If the show committed to its own banality, I could almost respect it, but it fails even this simple remit by plopping in running commentary and hiding its shame behind experts such as a pet behaviourist. Nice try. It’s like hiring a male stripper for someone’s birthday and then trying to make it highbrow by reading aloud The History of the Penis as he derobes. Aside from the experts, there’s a “cat video junkie” who helpfully tells us “there are very few things we actually know about cats”, as if the fluffy things we’ve kept as pets for centuries still remain a four-legged Bermuda Triangle. The only genuinely mysterious element here is why the average viewer chose to embrace a show that suggests Seven isn’t just lazy, but is importing the work of even lazier people in the UK: a sort of slothful inversion of an overseas sweatshop.
But watch it we did, and so we can blame ourselves for the fact we’ve got Dogs Make You Laugh Out Loud to look forward to on Tuesday night, presumably followed by a budgerigar special next week.
As long as we keep watching, Seven will continue to punish our loyalty by tossing an entire Noah’s Ark of calamitous animal footage in our general direction. And when the funny fauna run out, I guess we’ll move on to other popular YouTube phenomena. Coming in 2016: Exploding Cysts Will Make You Watch Seven. Bloody hell. I get it now. We should have all watched Restaurant Revolution as a preventative measure.
Dogs Make You Laugh Out Loud airs on Seven on Tuesday at 7.30pm AEST. It’s also available online by typing “funny dog” anywhere on the internet | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/07/labour-three-line-whip-to-force-mps-to-back-unamended-brexit-bill | Politics | 2017-02-07T13:36:54.000Z | Rowena Mason | Labour three-line whip to force MPs to back unamended Brexit bill | Labour MPs will be asked to vote through the Brexit bill at its last stage in the House of Commons regardless of whether any amendments are passed, raising the possibility of further frontbench resignations.
The shadow cabinet agreed that Jeremy Corbyn should impose a three-line whip on the bill at a third reading on Wednesday, even if opposition parties do not manage to make any changes to the legislation over the next two days.
It will create a difficult decision for MPs such as Clive Lewis, the shadow business secretary, who has said he would find it hard to vote for the Brexit bill without amendments. There is also speculation about the way the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, will vote, after she was absent from the first Commons vote with a migraine.
However, one Labour shadow cabinet source said they did not believe Abbott in particular would end up walking away from Corbyn’s leadership team.
At the first vote last week, Corbyn suffered a rebellion of 47 MPs, or one-fifth of the parliamentary party. Three shadow cabinet members, Dawn Butler, Rachael Maskell and Jo Stevens, resigned to vote against the legislation, and a dozen more junior frontbenchers chose to defy the whip.
It is understood that any disciplinary action against MPs who go against the whip will be decided only after Wednesday’s vote.
Opposition parties have several key votes on Tuesday and Wednesday at which they will try to garner enough support to change Theresa May’s Brexit bill, to secure a more meaningful vote at the end of two-year negotiations as well as impact assessments on the cost of leaving the EU and a guarantee of the rights of EU nationals.
Two Labour amendments attempting to bring about regular parliamentary scrutiny of Brexit and more say for the devolved administrations failed on Monday night, losing to government majorities of 49 and 57.
Opposition MPs are more hopeful of gaining support from rebel Tories during the next two days, on the issues of guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals in the UK and a more meaningful vote at the end of the Brexit negotiations.
Some Conservatives have indicated that they could be willing to back amendment 110 tabled by the former shadow chancellor Chris Leslie, calling for “any new deal or treaty” with the EU to be put to a vote before both houses of parliament. This would give MPs the opportunity to reject any exit terms they felt were unsatisfactory.
The government remains fairly confident of seeing off the rebels, but may have to offer some further concessions to dampen down the revolt.
Speaking in the Commons, May hinted that more detail could be given about the form of the vote after negotiations when David Davis, the Brexit secretary, addresses parliament on Tuesday, which may be enough to dissuade backbench Conservatives from rebelling.
May warned MPs not to obstruct the Brexit bill during its second phase of debate in the Commons, arguing that any move to slow down the passage of the bill would be tantamount to obstructing the verdict of the EU referendum.
“Our European partners now want to get on with the negotiations, so do I, and so does this house, which last week voted by a majority of 384 in support of the government triggering article 50,” she said.
“There are of course further stages for the bill in committee and in the Lords, and it is right that this process should be completed properly. But the message is clear to all: this house has spoken and now is not the time to obstruct the democratically expressed wishes of the British people.
“It is time to get on with leaving the European Union and building an independent, self-governing, global Britain.”
Nick Boles, a Conservative former skills minister, who has cancer, said on Tuesday that he is temporarily leaving hospital in the middle of his treatment to attend the third reading vote.
Today, on my own initiative, I am coming out of hospital to support the government on the #Article50 bill. Details: https://t.co/msrUhEYChj pic.twitter.com/mjvjrbFlLK
— Nick Boles (@NickBolesMP) February 7, 2017
“On my own initiative, I am coming out of hospital to support the government on the article 50 bill. I have spent the past week receiving my third round of chemotherapy for the cancer that was discovered last October,” he wrote on Facebook.
“I feel pretty grim and will have to go back to hospital after I have voted. But I want to come to parliament to represent my constituents on this important bill and do my bit to ensure that it is passed without amendment.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/01/hakeem-hussain-child-protection-agencies-failed-birmingham | Society | 2022-09-01T15:07:01.000Z | Jessica Murray | Child protection agencies failed son of drug addict, review finds | A severely asthmatic seven-year-old boy who died “gasping for air” alone at night was failed by child protection agencies who “could and should have done better”, a serious case review has found.
Hakeem Hussain died in the garden of an address where he was staying with his mother, Laura Heath, 40, in the early hours of 26 November 2017.
Heath, who was a heroin addict, was jailed this year for gross negligence manslaughter after being convicted by a jury at Coventry crown court.
“Hakeem should never have been left with me,” Heath told a serious case review into the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, published on Thursday by Birmingham Safeguarding Children Partnership (BSCP).
In the months leading up to Hakeem’s death she was “challenging and difficult to engage”, lied to his school and social services, and intimidated some professionals with her behaviour, the report found.
According to the report, Hakeem had told staff at school when he was six that he was “5% happy, 100% angry and 1,000% scared” and also said: “I have not had any dinner, I sometimes have breakfast, sometimes lunch, but not during Saturdays and Sundays.”
The night her son died, Heath later told police, she had smoked three bags of heroin – two before Hakeem went to bed at 10.30pm and one afterwards – leaving her in a drug-induced sleep.
The serious case review’s independent chair, Penny Thompson, said it was “horrendous” that Hakeem’s “unhappiness and fear of repeated asthma attacks … and the marked reduction in his attendance and performance at school, did not trigger more effective intervention.”
She said: “We have learned all those organisations and individuals who came into professional contact with Hakeem could and should have done better. With the benefit of hindsight, the extent of Hakeem’s neglect was there to be seen well before the decision to place him on a child protection plan two days before his death.”
Thompson highlighted that the boy’s school “did not escalate their concerns effectively” and his GP “did not recognise the need to share important information without consent because of the risk of significant harm”.
She said: “The social worker was trying to work positively with Hakeem’s mother and prioritised [other vulnerable family members] … to the detriment of Hakeem.”
At Heath’s trial it emerged that a nurse had warned that the boy “could die at the weekend” two days before he collapsed.
The alert was made at a child protection conference on a Friday afternoon, which ended with agreement that a social worker would speak to Heath on the Monday, by which time Hakeem had died.
Jurors heard that a nurse, as well as a family outreach worker at Nechells primary school also at the meeting, scored Hakeem’s safety as zero out of 10.
Thompson said the joined-up working needed between different agencies to “enable Hakeem’s needs to be properly seen, and his voice heard, was sadly lacking”.
She said Hakeem’s short life had been lived against a background of his “mother’s drug dependency linked with serious economic hardship, poor housing and personal consequences, competing concerns for other vulnerable family members”.
When taken together with Hakeem’s chronic asthma, the life-threatening condition “finally proved fatal”, she added.
Concluding the lessons-learned review, Thompson said: “A lot has changed [since 2017] and there have also been significant developments and improvements in services.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/03/the-woman-in-the-wall-review-ruth-wilson-magdalene-laundries-david-hockney-a-celebration-sky-melvyn-bragg-the-following-events-are-based-on-a-pack-of-lies-starstruck-ruth-matafeo | Television & radio | 2023-09-03T08:30:07.000Z | Barbara Ellen | The week in TV: The Woman in the Wall; David Hockney: A Celebration; The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies; Starstruck – review | The Woman in the Wall (BBC One) | (iPlayer)
David Hockney: A Celebration (Sky Arts)
The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies (BBC One) | (iPlayer)
Starstruck (BBC Three/BBC One) | (iPlayer)
With a review of a drama about the wrongdoings of the Catholic church comes a confession: there were moments watching Joe Murtagh’s six-part, Irish-set The Woman in the Wall (BBC One) when I thought: would I be putting up with this if Ruth Wilson wasn’t in it?
It’s all so inescapably chaotic. Inspired by the historical outrages of the Catholic church’s Magdalene laundries (where, among other horrors, pregnant girls had newborn babies wrenched away and were then forced to work), there are contradictions, cheap supernatural shivers (the sound of crying babies), unsubtle messages (a portrait of Jesus Christ is stabbed in the face) and less a plot than a tempest of themes broken by disjointed narrative spasms.
Yet still I’m riveted, thanks mainly to Wilson. She plays Lorna, an Irish woman sent to a Magdalene laundry as a pregnant 15-year-old and now a disturbed sleepwalker, first spied waking up in a nightie surrounded by inquisitive cows near the fictional town of Kilkinure. Other Kilkinure women were Magdalene victims (shame drenches the area), but the focus is Lorna: with her darting eyes and raddled energy, she is trauma incarnate. After being contacted by someone who knows what happened to her baby, she wakes to find a dead body in her house and hides it in a wall cavity.
Anyone looking for a drama about the laundries (the last one closed in 1996) may be better served by the Peter Mullan film The Magdalene Sisters. Here, two episodes in (spoiler alert), there are so many questions. Is Lorna a killer? How much of it is real? The shabby-chic-gone-wrong colour palette (muddy browns, septic greens, medicinal greys) seems simultaneously suggestive of Lorna’s decaying mental state, the culpability of the Kilkinure community and the systemic abuse of the church, mainly rendered in flashbacks showing cruel nuns, powerful priests and scared girls.
Wilson is just so good in this – you could watch her unravel for ever
When, elsewhere, a priest is killed, detectives initially lighten the mood with dry-as-dust Banshees of Insherin-style repartee, but then one of them (Daryl McCormack from Bad Sisters) also turns out to be haunted by his past. It’s this overplaying of the narrative hand, not to mention the risibly trowelled-on gothic melodrama (at one point, Lorna scurries around with an axe), that should be the undoing of The Woman in the Wall. It’s saved by explosive arthouse brio and that atomising central performance. Wilson is just so good in this: you could watch her unravel for ever.
Is it OK to call “Britain’s greatest living artist”, 86-year-old David Hockney, “naughty”? That’s what I kept getting, watching him interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for the Sky Arts documentary David Hockney: A Celebration (part of a two-day look at Hockney’s life and work). It’s not just the way Hockney dresses over the course of several conversations (ironic tweed, white flat cap, yellow Minions-style glasses, the general countenance of an aged-up Joe 90). Or the fact that he sparks up a cigarette (ash drooping defiantly). Nor even his “End Bossiness Soon” badge: “If I’d have put ‘End Bossiness Now’, that would have been too bossy, wouldn’t it?
‘Self-made trailblazers’: Melvyn Bragg and David Hockney in David Hockney: A Celebration. Sky Arts
This is about the refusenik spirit that has burned within Hockney his entire life, and which fellow octogenarian Lord Bragg (surely his most frequent interviewer, usually sporting a snappy black polo neck) clearly relishes. What follows is an absorbing profile, taking in Hockney’s Yorkshire roots (he has now returned), the years in California (the incubator for his pool paintings), his defiant “out” homosexuality, his zeal for new mediums and more.
How wonderful to watch two self-made, northern, working-class trailblazers come together. But also poignant. While he’ll still make programmes such as this, Bragg has “stepped down” from The South Bank Show for Sky Arts (it was originally on ITV) by mutual agreement, and it seems the series has come to an end. If so, what a shame. British broadcasting is not overrun with internationally renowned arts interview strands; do we urgently need to lose one to make space for more dystopian sagas? Getting back to the Hockney profile, it all goes by in an accessible but erudite snap. Bragg’s brand in a nutshell.
The second new BBC One drama of the week, The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies, is a five-part thriller with dark comedy licks. Created and written by sisters Penelope and Ginny Skinner, it’s produced by people who’ve worked on Fleabag, This Is Going to Hurt and Flowers.
Rebekah Staton stars as Alice, a PA and would-be designer who spots her runaway husband, Rob (Alistair Petrie), who also embezzled from her and her family. He’s posing as an “eco-preneur” climate scientist and romancing a widowed, vulnerable fantasy author, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. As Alice dons a pink cape and pursues him, what ensues is a dark fable on romance fraud – a female revenge fantasy along the lines of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, combined with more modern fare such as Promising Young Woman.
‘Tar-black humour’: Rebekah Staton as Alice in The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies. BBC/Sister
Alas, the story becomes increasingly unfeasible, not least because Jean-Baptiste’s character seems too intelligent to fall for Rob’s devious twaddle even for a millisecond. Still, the cast is strong (Romola Garai stands out as a creative grotesque), I enjoyed the flurry of homages (most prominently, to Fatal Attraction), and the tar-black humour flows like a river.
On BBC Three (with a repeat on BBC One), it’s the series three return of Starstruck, New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo’s dramedy on millennial love and life, co-written with Alice Snedden and Nic Sampson. In the last series, Matafeo’s character, Jessie, finally got together with famous actor Tom (Nikesh Patel), but here they’re instantly split up in a swift brutal montage, thus engendering heartbreak, angst and funnies, such as Jessie’s useless speech at her best friend’s wedding: “As Ben Affleck once said…”
Rose Matafeo in Starstruck: ‘a slow-burn treat’. BBC/Avalon UK
After some second-series script floppiness, the writing seems sharper, with great cameos – Minnie Driver returning as Tom’s acid agent; John Simm as a pretentious uber-thesp; a new love interest (Lorne MacFadyen) – and serious themes (parenting, evolving friendship groups, growing up). I’m increasingly unsure about Jessie and Tom’s viability even as an odd couple (they’ve got all the sexual chemistry of stewed chai), but Starstruck remains a slow-burn treat.
Star ratings out of five
The Woman in the Wall ★★★★
David Hockney: A Celebration ★★★★
The Following Events Are Based on a Pack Of Lies ★★★
Starstruck ★★★★
What else I’m watching
Screw
(Channel 4)
The return of the prison-based comedy-drama that sets out to humanise inmates and officers. Starring Nina Sosanya and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, this time Lee Ingleby plays a prisoner adjusting to incarceration. It’s a jailhouse soap, but smartly done.
Nina Sosanya and Lee Ingleby in series 2 of Screw. Photograph: Mark Mainz / STV / Channel 4
The Wheel of Time
(Amazon Prime Video)
Second series of the flashy, megabucks fantasy epic starring Rosamund Pike, which Jeff Bezos launched as the new Lord of the Rings saga. Roll up for more reliably overwrought battles between good and evil against a Middle-earth-adjacent backdrop.
Storyville: iHuman
(BBC Four)
A chance to see Tonje Hessen Schei’s bold, unsettling feature-length documentary looking into the capabilities of artificial Intelligence, and the big tech clique who control it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/kosovo-serbia-leaders-talks-diplomacy | World news | 2023-10-17T12:29:05.000Z | Lisa O'Carroll | Kosovo and Serbia leaders to meet for talks after flurry of diplomacy | Attempts to revive talks between Kosovo and Serbia have begun, with meetings of the two countries’ leaders and senior US and EU envoys scheduled for Saturday, it has been announced.
It will be the first time Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, and Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, have agreed to meet an international delegation since a shootout at a monastery in northern Kosovo last month left three assailants and one Kosovan police officer dead.
The meetings have been set up after a flurry of diplomacy involving senior officials in the US, France, Germany, Italy and the EU.
A spokesperson for the EU high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, said: “The purpose of the visit is to make concrete progress on the implementation of the agreement on the path to normalisation and on de-escalation after the latest developments.”
He said there were “clear expectations” that the parties would resume the normalisation talks “without delays or conditions”.
Talks collapsed after the attack in September, with accusations by Kosovo that the EU and US, in an effort to limit Russian influence in the Balkans, were appeasing Serbia because of its links to the Kremlin.
This month the Kosovan president, Vjosa Osmani, accused Vučić of pursuing a strategy “straight from the book of [Slobodan] Milošević” and said talks would not resume until sanctions were imposed on Serbia.
In the aftermath of the attack in the monastery, the Kosovan police discovered a huge cache of weapons – enough, they said, to arm hundreds.
Pristina claims Belgrade financed and supported the ambush by well-armed Serb paramilitaries near the village of Banjska and also ordered a buildup of troops on the border. Tensions have since been defused but hostility and distrust between the two countries prevails.
Vučić has denied involvement in the attack and this week a Serbian politician who admitted he had taken part in the deadly skirmish was arrested.
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Saturday’s meetings are expected to be attended by the EU’s special representative for the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, Miroslav Lajčák, who will be accompanied by foreign policy and security advisers for France, Germany and Italy, Emmanuel Bonne, Jens Plötner and Francesco Talo respectively.
The US’s western Balkan envoy, Gabriel Escobar, will also travel to Kosovo and Serbia for the meetings, the spokesperson for Borrell said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jan/01/michael-schumacher-condition-unchanged-skiing-injury | Sport | 2014-01-01T10:18:00.000Z | Lizzy Davies | Michael Schumacher's condition remains unchanged after skiing injury | Michael Schumacher remains in a stable but still critical condition in hospital after suffering multiple head injuries in a skiing accident in the French Alps, his manager has said.
As the retired Formula One champion began a fourth day in Grenoble's university hospital in eastern France, Sabine Kehm said there had been "no significant changes" observed by doctors since they reported a slight improvement in his condition on Tuesday.
"Michael's condition has been supervised all the night and has remained stable over the night and also now," she said, cautioning, however, that it was still premature to be optimistic about his recovery.
"For the moment this is good news," Kehm said. "However, I do not want to go into any further prospects because this is much too early, as the doctors were saying yesterday … It's good to have a stable condition but still overall the situation is still critical."
Schumacher, whose 45th birthday is on Friday, remains in a medically induced coma that is aimed at reducing swelling on the brain. The medical team treating him has said he suffered multiple lesions, haematoma and bruising to the brain when he fell on a ski slope near the resort of Méribel, apparently tripping and hitting his head on a rock.
Kehm declined to comment on the details of his condition, saying she was "not a doctor" and indicating that entering into prognostics was in any case futile.
"I don't want to go into speculation about what will happen in the next days. We have to really see from day to day. For the moment it's stable. That's good. And I don't know what will happen in one week," she told journalists.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, the director of the hospital said a "slight improvement" had been seen in Schumacher's condition following a second operation on Monday night. But her surgical colleagues warned there was "a long way to go" and that the seven-times Formula One champion was not out of danger.
With him in the hospital are understood to be his wife, Corinna, two children, Mick, 14, and Gina-Maria, 16, brother Ralf, also a former racing driver, and father, Rolf. "Mentally, the family is obviously not feeling very good," said Kehm.
On Tuesday Kehm gave the fullest indication to date of how Schumacher's accident, which occurred shortly after 11am on Sunday, happened. Rejecting speculation he had been skiing at high speed when he fell, she said he had stopped shortly before the accident to help a friend who had fallen on the slopes. As Schumacher set off again, Kehm said, he appeared to hit a rock and was "catapulted in the air", falling "apparently head down" on to another rock.
"[It] was an extremely bad and unfortunate circumstance and not because he was speeding too much," she said. "I have spoken with several people, also ski teachers, and they tell me that that can happen even at 10km/h. It was just very, very unfortunate."
The prosecutor's office in the resort town of Albertville, which is overseeing the investigation into the accident, confirmed that Schumacher's helmet had split when he fell and hit a rock. "It broke apart in two pieces," an official said.
However, the official said it was too early to infer that the helmet had broken because of the speed at which Schumacher was skiing downhill.
"It's too early to draw conclusions about excessive speed," said the official. "It will take two or three more days to know exactly what happened." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/07/russia-croatia-world-cup-quarter-final-match-report | Football | 2018-07-07T20:53:37.000Z | David Hytner | Croatia book World Cup semi-final with England after penalty shootout win | The drama was unremitting but when Ivan Rakitic strode forward to address the penalty to win it for Croatia, he located a pocket of calm. The Barcelona midfielder had been in the same position last Sunday, standing over the shootout kick to beat Denmark in the last 16, and he had risen to the challenge.
He would do likewise here and, in truth, it never looked in doubt. When Rakitic picked out the bottom corner, Croatia’s joy knew no bounds. At last, they have emulated the glory boys from France 98, who reached the semi-finals, and it is they who have advanced to face England in the last four.
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Croatia thought they had won this quarter-final before they actually did. Domagoj Vida will not rate his extra-time header as the most powerful of his career but it was surely the most precious.
When he connected with Luka Modric’s corner, the ball had a long way to travel. It got there in the end. The substitute Vedran Corluka had a nibble at it and another replacement, Russia’s Fedor Smolov, was on the scene. The upshot was that the goalkeeper, Igor Akinfeev, saw it late and it squeezed into the far corner.
It was merely the precursor to an extraordinary finale.
At this point, it is probably worth remembering what a mess Russia were in before the start of their World Cup. Winless in seven matches, they were derided as the worst team in the nation’s history. They were the lowest-ranked side here. Nobody gave them a prayer.
But the remarkable last-16 shootout win against Spain, which followed a largely positive group‑phase campaign, had ignited belief in a seemingly impossible dream. Russia were determined to meet England in the semi-final and, even when extra time was finished, they refused to give up.
Mário Fernandes’s equaliser sparked wild scenes, with all of Russia’s substitutes tearing on to the pitch and hurdling the advertising hoardings behind the goal to celebrate with him. The right-back had headed home from Alan Dzagoev’s free-kick and the momentum, at that stage, was most assuredly with his team.
On into the shootout and Russia began badly when Smolov’s attempted panenka was weak and Danijel Subasic saved. When the Croatia substitute Mateo Kovacic was denied by Akinfeev in round two, it was all square but there would be a horrible twist to Fernandes’s evening when he dragged the first kick of round three past the post.
Ivan Rakitic celebrates after scoring the winning penalty. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Croatia knew it was going to be their night when Akinfeev pushed Modric’s kick on to the inside of the post and watched it flash across the line and go in off the far post. Rakitic would see them home.
With several of their stars including Rakitic, Modric, Subasic and Mario Mandzukic the wrong side of 30, it feels as though it could be now or never for this Croatia team in terms of football’s biggest prize. They continue to believe it will be now.
It was difficult not to feel sorry for Stanislav Cherchesov and his Russia players. They gave everything, playing with no little adventure, which had been a surprise after their bolted‑door approach against Spain, and they rattled Croatia in the first half. Denis Cheryshev, one of the finds of the tournament, had scored his fourth goal of it – and what a goal it was – yet the tie turned against them when Andrej Kramaric equalised just before half-time. It was a bad time to concede.
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In the end, the shootout gods were against them but there can be no doubt that the performances of this team have energised the nation and the World Cup. Russia supporters will take away cherished memories. It was their first quarter‑final since 1970, when they competed as the Soviet Union, but there would not be a first semi‑final since 1966.
England’s scouts will pore over every detail of the Croatia performance, not least how Zlatko Dalic left out the defensive midfielder Marcelo Brozovic at the outset to play an extra attacking player in Kramaric. Dalic’s starting central midfielders were Modric and Rakitic. But he would introduce Brozovic in the second half of normal time and press Modric and Rakitic further forward either side of him in a 4-3-3 formation. Croatia came to control the midfield in the second half and Modric was particularly prominent.
0:45
Croatia fans celebrate World Cup quarter-final win as Russians are left devastated – video
Russia pressed high in the first half with Aleksandr Golovin, the No 10, playing like a second striker and Artem Dzyuba, the centre-forward, a focal point and battering ram. It was impressive to see the home nation’s slickness and directness.
Cheryshev scored after he swapped passes with Dzyuba and, from a position to the left of centre – 25 yards out – he bent a curler that began its journey outside Subasic’s right-hand post before fizzing back inside it. Subasic did not even dive. It was a beauty and the home crowd could revel in another pinch-me moment.
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Croatia might have been in front by then. Ante Rebic, the powerful winger, sent a free header high following a corner and Mandzukic fluffed a finish from Sime Vrsaljko’s cross. They found the equaliser when Mandzukic crossed and, with the Russia defence pulled out of shape, Kramaric arrived to head home. Briefly, there was the sound of silence.
Ivan Perisic hit the inside of the post for Croatia on the hour but Russia continued to flicker, with the substitute Aleksandr Erokhin heading over. It was a gripping spectacle, the atmosphere pulsating, but it would be Croatia who felt the pull of destiny. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jul/17/downs-syndrome-cells-fixed-chromosome-therapy | Science | 2013-07-17T17:00:24.000Z | Ian Sample | Down's syndrome cells 'fixed' in first step towards chromosome therapy | Scientists have corrected the genetic fault that causes Down's syndrome – albeit in isolated cells – raising the prospect of a radical therapy for the disorder.
In an elegant series of experiments, US researchers took cells from people with DS and silenced the extra chromosome that causes the condition. A treatment based on the work remains a distant hope, but scientists in the field said the feat was the first major step towards a "chromosome therapy" for Down's syndrome.
"This is a real technical breakthrough. It opens up whole new avenues of research," said Elizabeth Fisher, professor of neurogenetics at UCL, who was not involved in the study. "This is really the first sniff we've had of anything to do with gene therapy for Down's syndrome."
Around 750 babies are born with DS in Britain each year while globally between one in a 1000 and one in 1100 births are DS babies. Most experience learning difficulties.
Despite advances in medical care that allow most to live well into middle age, those who have the disorder are at risk of heart defects, bowel and blood disorders, and thyroid problems.
Though a full treatment is still many years off, the work will drive the search for therapies that improve common symptoms of DS, from immune and gastrointestinal problems, to childhood leukaemia and early-onset dementia.
"This will accelerate our understanding of the cellular defects in Down's syndrome and whether they can be treated with certain drugs," said Jeanne Lawrence, who led the team at the University of Massachusetts.
"The long-range possibility – and it's an uncertain possibility – is a chromosome therapy for Down's syndrome. But that is 10 years or more away. I don't want to get people's hopes up."
In a healthy person, almost every cell in the body carries 23 pairs of chromosomes, which hold nearly all of the genes needed for human life. But glitches in the early embryo can sometimes leave babies with too many chromosomes. Down's syndrome arises when cells have an extra copy of chromosome 21.
Lawrence's team used "genome editing", a procedure that allows DNA to be cut and pasted, to drop a gene called XIST into the extra chromosome in cells taken from people with Down's syndrome.
Once in place, the gene caused a buildup of a version of a molecule called RNA, which coated the extra chromosome and ultimately shut it down.
Previous studies found that the XIST gene is crucial for normal human development. Sex is determined by the combination of X and Y chromosomes a person inherits: men are XY, and women are XX. The XIST gene sits on the X chromosome, but is only active in women. When it switches on, it silences the second X chromosome.
Lawrence's work shows that the gene can shut down other chromosomes too, a finding that paves the way for treating a range of other "trisomy" disorders, such as Edward syndrome and Patau syndrome, caused by extra copies of chromosomes 18 and 13 respectively.
Writing in the journal Nature, the team describes how cells corrected for an extra chromosome 21 grew better, and developed more swiftly into early-stage brain cells. The work, the researchers write, "surmounts the major first step towards potential development of chromosome therapy".
The work is already helping scientists to tease apart how an extra chromosome 21 causes a raft of problems that strike people with Down's syndrome at various ages. "By the time people with Down's syndrome are in their 60s, about 60% will succumb to dementia. One question is, if we could turn off the extra chromosome in adults, would that stop or ameliorate their dementia?" said Fisher. Another approach would cut the risk of leukaemia by silencing the extra chromosome in bone marrow cells.
The US team has already begun work that aims to prevent Down's syndrome in mice, by silencing the extra chromosome 21 in early-stage embryos. "That would correct the whole mouse, but it's not really practical in humans," said Lawrence.
A chromosome therapy for humans would be fraught with practical and ethical difficulties. To prevent Down's syndrome, the genome editing would have to be performed on an embryo or foetus in the womb, and correct most, if not all, of the future child's cells. That is far beyond what is possible, or allowed, today. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/30/young-fathers-heavy-heavy-interview | Music | 2023-01-30T11:00:15.000Z | Stevie Chick | Young Fathers: ‘We’re not weird – this is the pop music we want to listen to’ | “M
istakes are good, and perfection is a sin,” says Graham “G” Hastings, explaining the creative ethos guiding Young Fathers. They have even coined a name for it: “mistakeology”. It’s the governing principle at their Edinburgh HQ, Out of the Blue Studios, an environment where, bandmate Kayus Bankole says, “You’re not afraid to make mistakes, to try”. Without it, the trio wouldn’t have happened on the chaotic, joyful brilliance of their sound, which has evolved yet again on their new album, Heavy Heavy.
This faith in mistakeology is partly atonement for the first half of Young Fathers’ career, the original sin that almost did them in. Meeting as teenagers at Lick Shot, an under-16s hip-hop night in Edinburgh, they bonded over their nascent love for the culture and were soon gathered around an old karaoke machine in Hastings’ bedroom cupboard, freestyling over beats. Drunk on MTV dreams of success and fame, at 15 they signed a “horrible, nasty production deal”. What followed was nearly a decade of sustained failure as their handlers attempted to shape them into “some strange fucking boyband”, filming videos nobody saw and recording five albums’ worth of music they hope no one will ever hear.
Our old mates, even my dad … they’re proud of us, but don’t necessarily get the music
Those years almost broke the boys who would become Young Fathers. But then their former manager put them in touch with the producer Tim London, formerly one third of Hippychick hitmakers Soho, who had since relocated to Edinburgh. London let the trio loose in his basement studio, where they shook loose the blinkers of their earlier ambitions and discovered the magic of mistakeology. “We were recording a track called Dar-Eh Da Da Du,” remembers the third Young Father, Alloysious “Ally” Massaquoi, “and Kayus made this exasperated, stuttering noise before his line, and it sounded so good we just kept it in. It broke the fourth wall, it made it real. That was the starting point. The ‘mistakes’ are part of the creativity.”
The moment marked the beginning of Young Fathers. Their blend of soul, rap, pop and noise arrived fully formed on their self-released debut EP, Tape One. This was swiftly reissued by LA-based underground hip-hop label Anticon, which then released a second EP, Tape Two. Signing to Big Dada, the hip-hop imprint of UK indie label Ninja Tune records, their debut album Dead, won the 2014 Mercury prize.
Even in this moment of triumph, there was something of the misfit about Young Fathers. “Our families didn’t really know what the Mercury prize was,” says Hastings. “Our old mates who were into bashment and dancehall … even my dad … they’re proud of us, but they don’t necessarily get the music.” The band’s brilliantly amorphous sound has often confounded a music industry preferring more pigeonhole-friendly artists. Dead’s follow-up, 2015’s White Men Are Black Men Too, came with a sticker reading “File Under Rock and Pop” because, Hastings says, “filing it under hip-hop would have miscommunicated the music inside. We’re more than that. We know the rules of hip-hop. And our music is hip-hop without the rules, just like it’s rock without the guitars.”
Dad rock … Young Fathers at London’s All Points East festival in 2018. Photograph: Burak Çıngı/Redferns
Their anarchic, emotional live shows are renowned, but they’ve spent so long playing support to the likes of Pusha T or Paul Weller, “where every gig is a battle, and we’ll either steal your fans or revel in them hating us”, that “it feels weird to play to people who actually like us”. To illustrate how their music falls between the cracks, I ask which radio stations play Young Fathers. BBC 6 Music is a supporter, they say. What of 1Xtra, the corporation’s black and urban music outlet? Does their mutant, rules-free hip-hop-adjacent music have a home there? Sardonic laughter erupts. “1Xtra don’t play us,” scowls Hastings. “At all. Ask them why. People are so scared now of alienating listeners, they make everything so frictionless.”
“People tell us, ‘It’s too rocky for us,’” says Bankole. “Or, ‘It’s too hip-hop for us.’ So everyone just pushes us away.”
“We don’t think our music is weird,” adds Massaquoi. “It’s just the context it exists within makes it seem weird. We love choruses, hooks. This is the pop music that we want to listen to.” Their third album, 2018’s Cocoa Sugar, made those pop ambitions explicit: “We’re trying to work within the frame of the three-minute pop song,” Hastings said at the time. Heavy Heavy makes good on those ambitions.
“We’ve done a Frank Ocean, waiting five or six years to put a record out,” grins Massaquoi. Heavy Heavy bears the imprint of those intervening years, not least Bankole’s extended visits to Ghana and Ethiopia, which fed into the album’s danceable, chant-along sounds. “Music is not so premeditated there, it just happens,” he says. “It’s like you’re watching a musical – people are sitting around, and then suddenly they’re singing. My mum will be singing in the kitchen, and then my auntie picks it up, and then they’re teaching me the words and suddenly we’re all singing along.”
Hastings, meanwhile, became a father during the hiatus. “Before we had the baby I was sweating my career and how we’re going to survive and all that,” he says. “And then he arrived, and the opposite happened. It’s liberated me, in a way; it’s made me want to home in more on what we want to do, and not worry about anything else.”
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“It’s because the wee man is a real thing,” smiles Massaquoi. “So you realise whatever else you do in your life, like your music, needs to be of that level of authenticity. You realise there’s no point in compromising.”
Heavy Heavy is, in places, a political record: buoyant, ecstatic opener Rice touches upon goldminers destroying natural resources in Africa, while I Saw is, Hastings says, “about Brexit, and people turning a blind eye to what’s happening and just wanting to live in their own present”. But they are more interested in emotion than polemic. While making the album, a friend of Bankole came to Out of the Blue after an argument with her husband. “We were working on a song,” remembers Bankole, “and she was humming, singing along. So we set the track looping, and she sang over it, about having gratitude, even in the midst of all this anger and pain and sorrow.”
The resulting track, Ululation, is remarkable, a dizzying rush of emotion set to an ecstatic beat. “It happened by accident, but moments like that are transcendent,” says Massaquoi. It’s just another example of mistakeology in action; of Young Fathers keeping themselves open to the unexpected, and folding it into their music. “We captured it, because we’ve set up this space for these moments to happen. And so we’re able to make this music that is steeped in humanity – all the facets, all the complexities, all the contradictions.”
Heavy Heavy is released on 3 February. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/jul/08/cary-grant-festival-bristol-hollywood-film | Film | 2016-07-08T11:41:49.000Z | Pamela Hutchinson | Cary Grant: from the Bristol docks to the Hollywood hills | Cary Grant, Hollywood’s most dry and dapper gentleman, was full of secrets. Even now, when we can easily read all about his adventures – the five wives, the gay relationships, the rows with the Academy, the chemical experimentation – it’s a surprise to learn that Hitchcock’s stiff-necked hero was more of a bad boy than a sweetheart. That’s because his smooth appearance on screen is a seductive path to an idea of old-school movie charm, the twinkly-eyed gent in a dress shirt we’d like to clink martinis with. But deep down, the real appeal of Cary Grant is that we know he’s not as conventional or as saccharine as that at all.
Over 10 days, the Cary Grant festival in Bristol celebrates the city’s most elegant son. The event is billed as “Cary comes home for the weekend”, and there will be screenings of some of his most famous films, in settings that resonate with the themes of the films or that were special to Grant. Notorious (1946), the Hitchcock thriller co-starring Ingrid Bergman, will be shown in a wine cellar, while Bringing Up Baby (1938), in which Grant plays a palaeontologist, will screen at Bristol City Museum. The festival will remember another local legend by showing the classic weepie An Affair to Remember (1957), in which Grant plays opposite fellow Bristolian Deborah Kerr.
By feting the man once known as Archie Leach in his own hometown, the festival also offers a chance to look into the background of this unusual movie star. There’s no reason why a boy from Bristol should not become the urbane and sharply dressed epitome of Hollywood glamour, but the route he took was circuitous. And where exactly does that distinctive, strangulated accent come from?
Born in Bristol on 18 January 1904, the young Archie would visit the music hall with his father. On one of those trips, in 1909, he first saw his idol Charlie Chaplin on stage with the Fred Karno troupe. Archie was enchanted, and, as he followed Chaplin’s career, the more he liked the idea of performing, of travelling to America and working in the movies. His first job in the theatre was as a teenager, operating the stage lights at the Bristol Hippodrome, which further convinced him that he wanted to tread the boards.
Like Chaplin, he started out on the variety stage, doing acrobatics and comedy acts – very far from being a leading man. He was a fine physical comedian, especially good at taking a fall, tumbling and walking on stilts. You can see that boisterous slapstick on display in his films, especially the screwball comedies of the 1930s such as the sublime The Awful Truth (1937) or Bringing Up Baby. There was one comic trick he couldn’t master, however: he could not shift his West Country burr, and put on the “toff” accent required for many skits.
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Leach’s life became more glamorous in 1920 when the troupe he was part of travelled to the US – to appear on Broadway. Leach found crossing the Atlantic exciting: he had often watched the boats in Bristol harbour as a boy, and dreamed of escape and show business. The trip became even more fun for the teenager when he realised that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were on board. Leach ended up making pals with the couple (“The first films stars I ever met”) and even did exercises with Fairbanks on deck.
The Broadway gig came to an end in 1922, and Leach, alone in New York, was on his uppers. Then followed one of the strangest periods of a strange life. He made ends meet by working as a stilt-walker in Coney Island during the day, and as an escort in the swankiest New York nightclubs and parties in the evenings. It was while carrying out his night job that Leach further practised his posh English accent on the matrons of Manhattan, resulting in the nasal, not nearly plummy enough, clipped accent now familiar from his films. But, with his new stiff-backed posture, a crisp tuxedo and a cute, distinctive British accent, he played the smoothie to perfection – an act he would repeat on the sound stage, playing debonair heroes for Hitchcock and Hawks.
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At this time he was sharing a flat in Greenwich Village with costume designer Orry-Kelly, from whom he may also have picked up some of his camp on-screen mannerisms. The two were close, but then had a massive, very public falling out. Grant doesn’t mention Orry-Kelly in his autobiography, but the designer lambasts the actor as stingy and self-centred in his own memoir. Nevertheless, it was Orry-Kelly who made the right introductions to get Leach an audition for his first Broadway musical, paving the way for him to appear as a leading man and to catch the eye of Hollywood scouts. Orry-Kelly went to LA to work as a studio designer and Leach followed, arriving in Hollywood in 1932.
Leach signed with Paramount that year, but not before changing his name to the more American-sounding Cary Grant, at the suggestion of studio executive BP Schulberg. With that, the movie career that would make his name began, as did the dual identity that troubled him. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” he said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
His first roles were in pre-code films, including She Done Him Wrong (1933), with Mae West. His star rose as he specialised in light comedies, from Topper (1937) to The Philadelphia Story (1940), which exploited his acrobatic skills and timing, as well as his buttoned-up English persona and his hint of camp. Only Angels Have Wings (1939) gave Grant the chance to play a more grizzled character, almost an action hero, and a year later in 1940, he played the first of four roles for Hitchcock, in Suspicion with Joan Fontaine.
All the time that Grant was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he was also one of the system’s biggest rebels, forever the naughty boy who was expelled from school aged 15. He didn’t play by the rules of the studio system and refused to join the Academy, damaging his chances of winning an Oscar (he was nominated twice but didn’t win until he was given an honorary award in 1970). He lived with actor Randolph Scott for 11 years, a relationship many interpreted as romantic, which lost him some influential friends and film roles. And, while rumours of bisexuality swirled around him (he also liked to drag up at costume parties), Grant married five times, having a daughter with his fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, when he was in his 60s. As well as a colourful love life, he was fond of taking LSD as part of his psychotherapy, a practice he continued to advocate until his death.
As Grant got older, his British roots reasserted themselves. When his career slowed down in the mid-50s, Hitchcock continued to have faith and cast him in To Catch a Thief (1955) and North By Northwest (1959), reinventing him as a suave, older man of mystery. In the 60s, there was even talk of Grant playing James Bond.
Archie Leach the Bristol boy had lived out his Chaplin fantasy and become Cary Grant the movie star. Or, as he put it: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”
The Cary Grant festival, Bristol, runs until 17 July. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/17/britain-universities-comprehensives-academic-selection | Opinion | 2017-08-17T17:39:05.000Z | Sonia Sodha | How to turn Britain’s universities into comprehensives | Sonia Sodha | Is it worth it? That’s the question many young people starting university this autumn have to grapple with, in a way previous generations haven’t. Young people now graduate with an average debt of more than £50,000, which three quarters of them will never pay off. So the vast majority will spend most of their working lives effectively paying an extra 9p of income tax for every pound they earn over £21,000.
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That’s a huge financial commitment that only adds to the sense that a raw deal has been doled out to today’s younger generation compared to their parents. Perhaps the only surprise is how long it has taken for the idea that tuition fees should be scrapped altogether to become politically mainstream. But if we focus on how higher education is funded to the exclusion of two more fundamental questions, we’re missing a trick. Does our university system represent value for money for taxpayers and students? And is there a way to improve how we do undergraduate education in this country?
The value for money question is critical in the light of the 28% increase in average per-student funding that universities received as a result of the fee cap tripling to £9,000 in 2012. Universities have long argued that the fact that Britain punches well above its weight among top global universities is evidence of the fantastic value for money they provide. But global rankings are overwhelmingly based on research, rather than the quality of undergraduate education.
Because it’s so difficult to unpick the value of a degree, we rarely try. Instead, it’s common to assume that the primary value stems from the opportunities for academic learning that it provides. But that’s quite an assumption. Fans of Harry Potter will be familiar with the Hogwarts Sorting Hat that assigns students to one of the school’s four houses based on their characteristics. Our universities similarly have a significant “sorting hat” function: the top universities, with the best reputations for research, get to pick the most able students with the top A-level grades. Many employers use the university that applicants attended as an important rule of thumb in their hiring decisions. And there’s another aspect of the university experience that undoubtedly adds value: the life skills young people gain from moving away from home for three or four years and experiencing the social side of university.
Academic experience, social experience, sorting hat: we don’t know how strongly each weigh in the value of a degree. And that means we haven’t a clue if the way we currently structure undergraduate education is the best way of doing things. Our lack of imagination means we just carry on doing things the way they’ve always been done. This means that more than 40% of young people now attend university based on a selective, residential model whose fundamentals have changed remarkably little since the second world war, when just 2% of the population attended only 21 universities. As Alison Wolf argued in Prospect last month, the UK is unique in the extent to which higher education almost exclusively takes place in universities. Government policy continues to contribute to the university cannibalisation of tertiary education: the 2015 decision to lift the cap on student numbers has resulted in an increase in the proportion of young people going to university, at great cost to themselves and the taxpayer.
This means we have a responsibility to ask tough questions about value for money. Instead, we kid ourselves that the “graduate premium” – the fact that, on average, graduates earn more than non-graduates – proves that the continued expansion of the university system is right. But the graduate premium is an entirely unsatisfactory proxy for value. In a world where more young people are getting degrees, they are increasingly becoming a prerequisite for jobs that don’t require graduate skills. The graduate premium doesn’t tell us what would happen if someone with three As at A-level signed up for a degree at the University of Bristol, got a full-time job instead of attending the course, then returned to pick up their degree certificate three years later. Maybe they’d end up being even more successful.
There are some important signs to suggest universities may be resting too much on their sorting-hat laurels. Our university system is highly segregated both in terms of ethnicity and social class – just 10% of Oxbridge’s intake is working class, compared to almost 60% at Bradford. Employers are pushed into relying on a university’s research reputation as a proxy for degree quality, because universities award their own degrees – the very definition of marking your own homework. This means there’s been significant degree inflation, and a first from one university is not equivalent to a first from another.
University reform should start, not end, with reducing the maximum fees universities can charge
The government knows there’s a problem. But its fix – greater transparency about what students get in terms of teaching, and even more new universities competing for more students – is based on the fallacy that higher education can function as a competitive market when it is universities that pick students more than the other way round.
University reform should start, not end, with reducing the maximum fees universities can charge, and reintroducing a cap on student numbers to limit taxpayer spending on universities. But it must go further: we should incentivise universities to behave less as sorting hats, and to focus more on improving the quality of undergraduate learning. And we should separate the social transition involved in going to university from the academic experience.
There’s a neat way of doing this: moving towards a more “comprehensive” university system as proposed by Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of Middlesex, in which far more students attend their local university. Blackman points out that academic selection is (rightly) shunned in our school system, because creaming off the most able does nothing to improve their attainment, but depresses outcomes for everyone else. Yet we remain strangely breezy about academic selection in universities. A more comprehensive system could potentially deliver academic benefits by mixing lower- and higher-ability learners: but there would also be other important perks.
If significantly more students lived at home while studying, higher education would be significantly cheaper for the taxpayer. At the moment we actively incentivise young people to move across the country by offering higher maintenance loans if they choose to do so. It should be the other way round: we should drop the fallacy that it’s worth young people moving hundreds of miles to go to a university that may be very similar to their local one.
It would also allow us to take a more equitable approach to whether the state should subsidise young people’s social transitions. There’s certainly a case for it doing so, but it’s hideously unfair if it is just for the disproportionately middle-class group of young people who go to university – this just drives inequality further. If most students lived at home, we could, for example, use the savings to subsidise all young people to do a gap year volunteering in their own communities or abroad if we thought this developed valuable skills for the workplace and life.
Making our universities more comprehensive would require radical changes. They would have to do more to standardise their degree classification, so a first from Bolton meant as much as a first from Exeter. Admissions would have to be transformed, either by putting a limit on the number of students universities can select by academic ability, or by introducing banded admissions by social class.
Capping student numbers and introducing a quota for working-class students at each university would effectively limit the number of middle-class students going to university. This holds the key to improving the status and quality of vocational pathways, which will remain intractably difficult while they are seen as the route by which young people from poorer backgrounds get shunted down. It would increase pressure for greater parity of funding between those who go to university, and those who opt for a vocational qualification.
The debate we’re currently having about universities is long overdue. But it would be a waste to spend it all talking about fees. We urgently need to explore how we can reward universities less for being sorting hats – let’s leave that to employers – and more for the quality of the academic experience they provide.
Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/oct/07/the-tin-drum-gunter-grass | Books | 2009-10-07T11:45:33.000Z | Darragh McManus | The Tin Drum summarised the 20th century in three words | Darragh McManus | Whether it's the greatest is open to debate, but one could argue that Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is the great novel of the 20th century. By that I mean it most completely defines the era in all its glories and catastrophes – the moods, atmospheres, manias, streams, currents, histories and under-histories.
First published 50 years ago this week (on 6 October 1959), it is, technically, an incredible piece of art, a melange of bildungsroman, memoir, allegory, grotesquerie and pure reverie. On a superficial level it tells the story of Oskar Matzerath: incarcerated maniac, self-created dwarf, paranoiac, possessor of supernatural gifts, vindictive genius, fallen angel, miniature tyrant, obsessive beater of the titular drum. Oskar is all of these things and none of them; the ultimate unreliable narrator.
The book charts his progress, and that of the independent port city of Danzig/Gdansk, and greater Germany, and the world as a whole. It is odd, profound, sprawling, poetic, often unnerving. But more than this, never have I read something that so exquisitely and lucidly captures the dazed, eerie strangeness of our misfortunate times.
To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola's line about Apocalypse Now, The Tin Drum is not about the 20th century; it is the 20th century. We begin, after an introductory preamble, with Oskar's grandmother Anna in a Polish potato field, working by hand. (Throughout the novel, Grass uses the leitmotif of how she smelled, not unpleasantly, of "slightly rancid butter"; a reminder, a link back, a sociological memory-trace.) We end after the second world war, when the planet is exhausted, cynical, indifferent, blood-crazed (and Oskar still remembers how his grandmother smelled).
Through the eyes and words of the anti-hero, Grass delineates and gives life to the evolution of the century: from agricultural to industrial, traditional to cosmopolitan, feudal to postmodern. Like Oskar and his family and associates, the reader accelerates toward modernity. The mechanical quickening of industrialisation. Mass production. Science awakened. Commerce invigorated. The world shrinking. The spread of democracy and virus of totalitarianism. Sleek beauty of the machine. Global conflict and conflagration. Hate made productive. Death and automation. Anxiety and modernity. And what we mistakenly believe to be the end of history.
We can take this further, reduce it to a harder point of truth. The most significant influence on the 20th century was totalitarian ideologies, and Oskar both reflects it and pushes against it. Writers from Philip Dick to George Orwell have written of how these ideologies, whether fascist or communist, wanted to step outside of history, leap from the normal current of human affairs, impose their subjective selves on the objective world. They wrote of how unnatural this was, how against life and reason.
Oskar steps "outside" time and history and nature from the moment of birth. The precocious infant decides in his cot to spend his life drumming, as a way of spiting his father's bourgeois ambitions. At the age of three he chooses to stop physically growing "in order not… to be driven… into the grocery business… I remained the precocious three-year-old, towered over by grown-ups but superior to all grown-ups, who refused to measure his shadow with theirs, who was complete both inside and outside." Like the political death-cult that shamed his country, he too is unnatural (Oskar later learns he can break or even inscribe glass by screaming at a high pitch). Yet he also rebels against the Nazi "family": at a party rally, he surreptitiously drums out his own beat, competing with the fascist marching band, confusing and disrupting, and transforms the inhuman rigour of Nazism into a joyful dance of life.
And let us reduce it further: "Chapter 27 – Inspection of Concrete, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored." A title which says, for me, all that needs to be said about the modern world. Here, Oskar and a troupe of midget acrobats and entertainers visit the German "pillbox" defence posts in northern France, late on in the war, as his country's doom looms large. They meet corporal Lankes, a former artist who now views these brutally efficient standards of war and hatred as genuine, profound artworks.
The pillboxes marked with his graffiti and carvings will last forever, he believes; and archaeologists of the future will marvel at them, describing them thus: "Magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality… In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the 20th century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely and for all time." Lankes names his "installation" piece Structural Oblique Formations, with a subtitle: Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. To which Bebra, leader of the acrobatic troupe, replies: "You have given our century its name."
Barbaric, mystical, bored: here is the last century in summation. A schizophrenic, self-mutilating era in which man flew higher than was dreamed possible and plumbed depths unimaginable; slaughter beyond measure coupled with advances beyond comprehension; collective insanity and individual rationality; atavistic passions and detached irony; terror and humour. The black pall of mechanistic wickedness and the struggling but still-lit spark of humanity: as visceral and concrete as viscera and concrete, but as surreal as can be expected from the 10-decade fever-dream we all shared.
And just as The Tin Drum symbolises and defines the 20th century, so Lankes does the same for The Tin Drum. The corporal and Grass both wrench art, beauty and hope from indescribable ugliness and horror; and like the pillboxes, this book will endure forever. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/26/spain-elections-feijoo-launches-doomed-bid-lead-country-sanchez-peoples-party-government | World news | 2023-09-26T11:25:48.000Z | Sam Jones | Spain elections: Feijóo launches doomed bid to lead country | Two months after winning July’s general election but failing to secure a parliamentary majority, the leader of Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) is launching an almost certainly doomed bid to become the country’s next prime minister.
Although the PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, finished first in the snap election, it failed to win enough votes to form a government, taking 137 seats in Spain’s 350-seat congress. Despite the arithmetical challenge, King Felipe has asked the party to try to form a government during this week’s investiture session, which begins with a day of debate on Tuesday.
Even with the support of the far-right Vox party, which won 33 seats, and one vote each from the small Navarrese People’s Union and Canaries Coalition parties, Feijóo can muster only 172 votes. To become prime minister, he needs an absolute majority (176 votes out of 350) in a first vote, which will be held on Wednesday, or a simple majority – more yes votes than no votes – in a second vote to be held on Friday.
Feijóo is unlikely to win either vote, leaving the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), led by the acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, best placed to form a government. But while Sánchez can count on votes from his own party, from its partners in the leftwing Sumar alliance and from a handful of Basque and Catalan nationalist parties, he will also need to enlist the support of Junts, the hardline Catalan separatist party led by Carles Puigdemont.
The problem for Sánchez is that Puigdemont – who fled Spain to avoid arrest over his role in the unilateral and unlawful push for independence six years ago – has insisted his support will be conditional on the granting of amnesty to him and hundreds of others involved in the attempted secession.
The PP has seized on the possibility of an amnesty to rally support and to portray the PSOE leader as craven, dependent on Catalan separatists and hellbent on remaining in office. Speaking at his party’s large, anti-amnesty protest in Madrid on Sunday, Feijóo accused Sánchez of “an utter lack of moral and political integrity” and of degrading Spanish democracy in order to hang on as prime minister.
In his investiture address to MPs on Tuesday, Feijóo was adamant that he would not countenance any amnesty or steps towards Catalan self-determination, even if doing so cost him the opportunity to take office.
“I will not forsake the equality of Spaniards – something we all share – to become prime minister,” he said. “I will not jump through any hoop that stands counter to the general interest to become prime minister. I will not betray the trust of the Spaniards who vote for me to become prime minister.”
Sánchez, who has been careful to avoid explicit mention of an amnesty, is confident that he can attract the 176 votes he needs to remain in Moncloa Palace. “[The PP] are demonstrating against a socialist government,” he told supporters in Catalonia on Sunday. “But I’m sorry – there’s going to be a socialist government.”
If, as expected, Feijóo fails in his bid to become prime minister, Sánchez will have two months to attempt to form a government. Should that fail, Spain will return to the polls in January for its sixth general election in nine years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/10/film-review-bruno | Film | 2009-07-09T23:01:00.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Film review: Bruno | On the off-chance that there still remain some American demi-celebrities and pundits as yet unpunk'd, British situationist-hoaxer Sacha Baron Cohen has returned with a new and horrifying creation. Now, this may not be every bit as funny as Borat and the latest film is - I admit it - a little further compromised by worries over fakery. Furthermore, at the very end, there is a disappointing parade of smirking A-listers treated with dismaying leniency and deference.
But this film is still howlingly funny, staggeringly rude, brutally incorrect and very often just brilliant. It has some really extraordinary, confrontational moments that live on in my traumatised mind in a continuous loop. Before this, I had thought Michael Haneke was the only figure of world cinema with the power to knot up my intestines in horror. But Baron Cohen has done something comparable. His new persona is Bruno, the gay Austrian TV fashion journalist with the impossible umlaut: flamboyant, blond, emotionally generous yet vulnerable and still only 19 years old.
Bruno is fired from his TV programme Funkyzeit Mit Bruno for disgracing himself backstage at the Milan shows where his self-created velcro outfit had stuck to the curtain and caused a fashion incident. In an angry and turbulent state, Bruno sensationally denounces the fashion world as "shallow" and flounces off to LA, base camp for his assault on the Everest of celebrityhood. To gain headlines, Bruno tries to solve the Middle East's woes by dressing as a gay Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem; with tough love on his mind, Bruno tells an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander that his hair is "sun-damaged"; he adopts an African baby and imperiously tells an astonished and largely black daytime TV audience that the correct term for his child is "African-American". He devises a TV show in which his urethra pouts the word "Bruno" and finally realises that to gain acceptance he will have to become straight like his heroes: Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey and John Travolta.
Fans of Baron Cohen's first creation, Ali G, will have found the press coverage of Bruno thus far familiar: just as Ali G received an initial accusation of racism, and then almost instantly enjoyed a colossal frontlash of praise on the grounds that he was in fact satirising the white world's appropriation of black culture, so Bruno was first criticised as homophobic, the prelude to a lavish celebration for having confronted homophobia. And Bruno's hoaxes certainly expose some breathtakingly shabby bigotry and ignorance, and he hilariously makes some prejudiced idiots look thoroughly silly. It's an unimpeachably progressive cake he's got there - but munched down with some outrageously queeny camp gags on the side.
But even this might not quite be the point. At the beginning of the movie, Bruno has a session in which he decides what's hot and what's not: what "in" and what's "aus". And what's in, he says, is "autism". Autism? Well, Baron Cohen's cousin is Simon Baron-Cohen, a world-renowned expert on autism, so as well as being a typically outrageous gag, that moment could be a tiny, almost subliminal tribute to the famous academic in his family. But perhaps Bruno's behaviour itself tells us why autism is "in". In the comic nightmare of his personal world, Bruno has an extraordinary inability to understand how he is being perceived, and how to relate to other people. Now, this newspaper takes a pretty dim view of journalists casually caricaturing "autism" as a metaphor for selfishness or moral failing - but Baron Cohen could be using it for some characteristically non-PC satire on the psychological condition of celebrity-worship.
On then, to the fakery issue. The scene in which Bruno, having got a job as a movie extra, plays a member of a jury in a courtroom drama but can't keep his mouth shut ... this is probably faked. And the leather-clad woman who whips Bruno at the end of a hetero swingers party, with cartoon whiplash-cracks pasted on to the soundtrack, is almost certainly acting, and her scene is staged. (The other swinger-couples are probably real and this leather-dominatrix was presumably the "girlfriend" with whom Bruno gained admission to the party.)
But the film's most glorious scene is absolutely real. Bruno interviews Texas congressman and would-be US presidential candidate Ron Paul in his hotel suite, and then attempts to seduce him to create a sex tape that will kickstart his celebrity career. It is sublime. Baron Cohen's nerve is incredible; Paul's outrage and horror are unmistakably the real thing, and the mistaken-identity punchline is a classic. Did Baron Cohen and his writers, Dan Mazer, Pete Baynham, Anthony Hines and Jeff Schaffer, think of the punchline first and then sucker Paul into getting involved? Or did it occur to them later? Either way, it was inspired.
Famously, Ronald Reagan ordered the tune Edelweiss to be played when the Austrian president Rudolf Kirschläger visited the White House, believing it to be the Austrian national anthem. I suggest that the organisers of the Golden Globe ceremony start work now on a new funky arrangement of Edelweiss to play when Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of modern cinema's most notorious faux-strian, sashays up to receive his award. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jan/10/radiohead-rebut-lana-del-rey-get-free-plagiarism-lawsuit-claims | Music | 2018-01-10T09:43:05.000Z | Ben Beaumont-Thomas | Radiohead rebut Lana Del Rey's plagiarism lawsuit claims | Radiohead have refuted Lana Del Rey’s claim that they have filed a lawsuit against her that demands publishing rights to her song Get Free, thanks to its similarity to their song Creep.
After rumours of the lawsuit circulated, Del Rey had tweeted: “It’s true about the lawsuit. Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing – I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless, so we will deal with it in court.”
Listen to Lana Del Rey’s Get Free
A representative for Radiohead’s publishers, Warner/Chappell, admitted they had been “in discussions since August of last year with Lana Del Rey’s representatives. It’s clear that the verses of Get Free use musical elements found in the verses of Creep and we’ve requested that this be acknowledged in favour of all writers of Creep.” But they added that no lawsuit has been filed, and Radiohead aren’t demanding 100% of the publishing, per Del Rey’s claims.
Watch Radiohead perform Creep
Del Rey alluded to the legal spat at a concert in Denver earlier this week, saying that Get Free was her “personal manifesto” and that “those sentiments that I wrote, I really am going to strive for them, even if that song is not on future physical releases of the record”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/24/khovanshchina-review-russia-tragedy-millennium-centre-cardiff-welsh-national-opera-mussorgsky | Music | 2017-09-24T13:14:07.000Z | Rian Evans | Khovanshchina review – Russia's tragedy becomes the world's in compelling revival | Welsh National Opera’s new season forms part of Russia 17, Wales’s arts-wide commemoration of the centenary of the Russian Revolution and, hot on the heels of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina at the Proms a few weeks ago, comes this revival of WNO’s 2007 production. It’s a starkly compelling reflection both on the anniversary itself and on the bloody nature of change throughout history: for what emerges is not simply a drama about Mother Russia but the tragedy that unfolds when rival factions within any nation set about each other in a way that spells fragmentation and self-destruction.
The bicentenary of the accession of Peter the Great as Tsar in 1682 was the impulse for Mussorgsky in composing the opera to his own sprawling libretto. Director David Pountney’s staging is set just after the revolution, with the strong, constructivist lines of the late Johan Engels’ design brilliantly channelling El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich, but the contemporary resonances are even more chilling today than a decade ago.
Claire Wild as Emma and Adrian Dwyer as Prince Andrei Khovansky in Khovanshchina. Photograph: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL
The biggest change is that the production is now sung in Russian with subtitles, an initial caption on the frontcloth explaining the significance of the Streltsy, the brutal and debauched militia who support the ambitions of Prince Ivan Khovansky for himself and his son Andrei. Together with the machinations of the corrupt Prince Vasily Golitsyn, former lover of the regent Sophia, and the involvement of the schismatic Orthodox sect, the Old Believers, the complexities of the plot are manifold but, thanks to the clarity of Pountney’s delineation of the different elements and Musorgsky’s artful and deeply Russian characterisations, the work’s essential intensity is always felt.
Performed in Shostakovich’s orchestration – Mussorgsky died before finishing it – the monumentality and theatricality of the concept is convincing, though the endless soul-searching of the non-historical seer, Marfa, sung by Sara Fulgoni, becomes trying, and the paradings of the similarly extraneous Persian slave, danced by Beate Vollack, also drags on. The sheer force of the WNO chorus on stage adds immeasurably to the experience, notably as the fiery Streltsy in act three and most movingly as the Old Believers, opting finally for self-immolation rather than compromise their religious principles.
Robert Hayward’s Ivan is the big vocal presence, but it is the dignified authority of Miklós Sebestyén’s performance as the believers’ leader, Dosifei, that helps carry the evening, and Simon Bailey is similarly imposing as Shaklovity. Tomáš Hanus conducts with passion.
At Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 30 September and 7 October. Box office: 029-2063 6464. Then touring until 31 October.
This review was corrected on 27 September to amend the name of the dancer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/mar/02/the-class-lesson-despair | Film | 2009-03-02T11:32:33.000Z | David Cox | David Cox: The Class teaches us a lesson in despair | Few are confident that all is well in our secondary schools. Much as we'd like to believe that our inner-city schools are fashioning enlightened, capable and responsible citizens, many fear that they aren't. Moreover, there's a creeping suspicion, voiced not only by the Daily Mail, that peculiarly British failings are to blame - that it's our soppy liberal attitudes and timid multiculturalism that have somehow led our teachers to lose the plot.
Elsewhere, things must surely be better ordered. Across the Channel, for example, a sterner and more confident, no-nonsense and no-headscarves state is firmly in command. Presumably, it's making a better fist of opening minds, imparting truths and instilling citizenship in its own multifarious progeny.
Well, we can safely set aside any such sense of national inferiority, at least if The Class is anything to go by. This compelling account of a year inside one classroom in Paris's impoverished and ethnically diverse 20th arrondissement shows us much that's all too familiar.
The film is no Blackboard Jungle. Its adolescent students are neither aggressive nor even ill-tempered. It's just that their own agendas have little to do with the syllabus, and their teacher, François, feels obliged to try and negotiate a path between these two unrelated realms.
His efforts are in vain. When he invites the class to consider the function of the imperfect subjunctive, they decline. For them, it's a tense that's had its day. It's bourgeois. Who needs it? François surrenders. Maybe the imperfect subjunctive is used mainly by snobs. Let's discuss snobs instead.
Asked by a colleague if he'll be teaching any Voltaire, François demurs. Too tough for his charges. Instead, he goes for The Diary of Anne Frank. Yet this concession isn't enough. The girl he asks to read a passage refuses. She just doesn't happen to want to. So, instead of discussing the Holocaust, they discuss the modalities of their situation. Does a teacher have the right to ask a student to read?
In the absence of both the desire to learn and the will to instil it, the class fritters away its year on such inanities. Is François a homosexual, one student wants to know. Why does he use "whitey" names in the sample sentences he chalks up on the blackboard? Let's discuss what ethnic alternatives we might prefer, send texts under our desks and swap insults with each other.
Eventually François is hoist by his own confabulatory petard. Engaging with his students on their own terms, he accuses two of them of behaving like "pétasses", a word of variable meaning that they choose to interpret as "whores". This triggers a mildly violent incident leading to a disciplinary hearing and the exclusion of a difficult but far from malign student. These events, rather than education, become the focus of both the class and the film. In the end, François finds himself embroiled in a heated playground row with his students about whether his transgression is worse than theirs.
Some will of course see all this argy-bargy as more educational than studying Candide. Endless bickering, banter and heckling may indeed heighten interpersonal skills and promote self-realisation. However, a classroom ought surely to be more than a mere extension of the playground. Towards the end of the film, one of François's students tells him sadly and gravely that during the year she's learned nothing whatsoever. He's taken aback, but audiences won't be.
What The Class seems to suggest, deliberately or not, is that the kind of education we've expected schools to deliver is incompatible with some of the attitudes that we've all come to embrace. Learning requires respect for the authority of teachers and for the value of what they teach. If this is neither existent nor even expected, the process collapses in the way this film so impressively depicts.
At one point, one of François' less determinedly upbeat colleagues, goaded beyond endurance by his own class, declares that he's had enough: "They can stay in their shit". Is this to be the fate of the self-esteeming but undirected youth of western Europe's urban wastelands?
The Class has won the enthusiastic endorsement of Nicolas Sarkozy and his education minister. Nonetheless, there have been critics. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut declared in le Monde last year that the award of the Palme d'Or to this film was the sign of "a civilisation in crisis". He demanded the reinstatement of "the great texts" in the Republic's schools.
It's a way to go. First, though, France would need to reinstate values long abandoned on both sides of the Channel. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/nov/01/pedestrians-reclaim-streets | Environment | 2012-11-01T12:26:58.000Z | Natalie Bennett | It's time for pedestrians to reclaim our streets with 20mph speed limit | Natalie Bennett | Do you live on a major road? Or a side street in a leafy suburb? Either way, in most parts of Britain, that means you still have vehicles, cars and lorries rushing past your door at 30mph. If, in a moment's inattention you should step out in front of one, it will likely kill you.
Actually, if you are an adult, and reasonably young, you're not so much at risk. Statistics show that it is the young and the old who are most in danger - and poorer people, who are more likely to be walking and more likely to live on busier roads. In Britain 24% of our road deaths are pedestrians - one of the highest percentages in Europe.
The safety argument to reduce speed limits in places where people and cars interact is clear – if you need convincing, you can listen to the emergency responders and their experiences, particularly in having to treat child victims. But the benefits of 20mph limits go far beyond that.
It is no coincidence that Britain is the most car-dependent nation in Europe, and the state with the biggest obesity problem. We need to greatly increase "active transport" - walking and cycling - for the good of our health and wellbeing, as well as to reduce carbon emissions.
We need to ensure that older people feel comfortable crossing the road, secure that cars will have time to see them, and that pedestrian lights allow them enough time to cross. That's the only way they can feel fully able to participate in their communities - with all of the benefits to health and wellbeing that brings.
Parents need to feel that they can let their children walk or cycle to school and establish good exercise habits for life, as well as enjoy all the educational advantages of freely interacting with the natural and built environment around them.
Even for drivers, there are significant advantages: reduced fuel consumption, less congestion, smoother traffic flow so less wear and tear on their vehicles.
In light of these powerful arguments, 20mph zones are increasingly being imposed, planned or proposed in places like Blackpool, Plymouth, Uckfield and Chichester.
But installing small, fragmented zones across the country does take funds for signage and road markings, for road design – and that's often a factor preventing or delaying their implementation.
Drivers may, sometimes rightly, argue confusion, while police plead lack of resources for enforcement. And each individual zone usually involves a campaign, a lot of time and energy - good for the community, but time and energy that could be used for other productive purposes.
Furthermore, many of the zones installed thus far are in residential areas, but main roads with heavy pedestrian footfall suffer higher collision rates than residential side roads, so that's where 20mph can make the biggest difference.
People living in villages bisected by main roads have to suffer the danger, noise and inconvenience of fast flowing traffic, but they're no physically tougher than the rest of us – nor do they have faster reaction speeds to skip between the speedsters.
The London borough of Islington is leading the way in showing an alternative approach: a blanket 20mph limit across all of the roads that it controls. The Labour council deserves credit for standing up to police resistance to bring in 20mph on major as well as residential roads. Now it is over to Transport for London, which controls a few remaining major routes, to do the right thing and apply the limit.
When that happens – and it surely is a "when" not an "if" – the only signage needed will be on the borough boundaries, with occasional reminders.
Islington has made a start, but surely, with 8.4 million people across Britain now covered by 20mph standard speed limits, it's time to think bigger. Local individual campaigns can and should continue - it is all part of the pressure - but it is time to say that safe, pleasant roads designed for people and communities – not cars – should be the norm everywhere people live, work and shop.
Make 20mph the default in built-up areas, and the need for extensive signage – the excuse for police to say that enforcement is too difficult, and a chance for drivers to claim they were confused by varying limits – is done away with.
We'd get streets all around the country on which the young, the old, all of us could feel much safer, streets we were more inclined to use as pedestrians and as cyclists, pavements that felt more comfortable as a place to stop to catch up with our neighbours. We'd have started to reclaim our streets. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/10/his-dark-materials-review-britannia-dublin-murders-arena-british-guide-to-end-of-the-world-fing | Television & radio | 2019-11-10T05:30:37.000Z | Euan Ferguson | The week in TV: His Dark Materials; Britannia; Dublin Murders and more | His Dark Materials (BBC One) | iPlayer
Britannia (Sky Atlantic/Now TV) | nowtv.com
Dublin Murders (BBC One) | iPlayer
A British Guide to the End of the World (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The End of the F***ing World (All4) | channel4.com
The appallingly ambitious His Dark Materials has burst fully formed on to our Sunday nights, and it is a thing of some glory. I employ the overused term “ambitious” advisedly: Philip Pullman’s epic trilogy is every bit as roundly imagined as CS Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and anyone currently thinking it’s fine and dandy enough but still, y’know, a young-adult thing for Sunday evenings, like a Potter or a Doctor Who, will soon have their eyes opened.
That anyone should get that impression is, oddly enough, one of the strengths of Jack Thorne’s labour-of-love eight-part adaptation. It can, indeed, be seen at one level as the story of plucky Lyra Belacqua, in a just-alternative world, where a sort-of-Oxford exists, but with airships and truth-telling compasses, and one’s soul striding or prowling or flying beside you in the form of an animal known as a daemon.
On another level, it’s nothing less than an intellectual treatise on atheism and the grim levels any church will go to in order to guard its secrets, to deny pure truth and the freedom of reason. It had perforce to please both mild, what’s-on-telly browsers and diehard fans of that beloved trilogy. (Wiki has an entire entry on Dust, a manifestation of consciousness, including a section on the provenance of its naming, which itself includes the passage “the Mulefa, who are able to see Dust directly, use the word ‘sraf’, accompanied by a leftward flick of the trunk [or arm for humans] to describe it”. See what I mean?)
In this straddling of both jobs it succeeds, I think, with triumph. The acting – especially young Dafne Keen as Lyra, and Ruth Wilson as the seriously glam/unspeakably sinister Mrs Coulter – is marvellous, the daemon effects subtle, clever, understated and hugely effective.
The one thing Thorne wouldn’t have been able to control – and goodness knows he’s put the work in, reportedly spending two years and around 40 treatments on the first episode alone – was the title sequence. Stylish and steampunk enough, but it seemed to be pitched somewhere between Harry Potter and Game of Thrones (the music certainly was GoT-vainglorious). Still, it’s a hard task to pitch just-so, and it takes a singular vision to manage. Thankfully we had first Pullman, and now Thorne.
Mercifully, crucially, it’s almost wholly unlike the 2007 film of The Golden Compass, which studios attempted to make in God-ridden America with, remarkably, no reference to heresy or atheism. Thus rather missing the point: think Hamlet without the indecision.
Meanwhile, expect before Christmas a clamour for the golden age of airships and a rush to name at least animals, if not actual children, after the intriguing daemons/familiars. Salcilia, Sophonax, Kaisa, maybe even Pantalaimon; certainly Stelmaria.
‘Not just slightly loopy’: Britannia. Photograph: Sky UK
The handsome, scatological, crazed – and not just slightly loopy, full finger-in-mouth wibble-hatstand noises – Britannia returned for a second series. I’m not entirely sure where they got the permission from: probably not the viewing figures, for the first series opened with 1 million Barb-certified viewers, and by run’s end this was down by an impressively disastrous 90%.
I’m highly glad it’s back, though. It makes little historical, theological, tribal or any other sense, but we get to see much fire and naked madness in Jez Butterworth’s own vision; and Druids and the gorges and mudsmoke of Kent and Cornwall, and Mackenzie Crook with teeth filed to a point. And glorious non sequiturs of dialogue, such as turncoat Queen Amena explaining who had decided to bestow on her a crown. “A Roman devil. Twenty feet tall. Spitting fire. With a big, scaly dick.” Resolutely unimpressed loyal Brit chieftain, soon to die of course, and bloodily: “You get a herring each. Then you leave.”
I wonder whether it wasn’t asking a twitch too much, of writer and adapter and all the generally rather marvellous cast in Dublin Murders, which concluded last week, to manage to cram two full, different books into this opening outing. Certainly it was atmospheric, often terrific, never dull, but I suspect many were befuddled by the leaps between two plots – the missing Katy Devlin and the Cassie/Lexie undercover saga, with only Rob, the compromised cop, to provide the go-between link.
In a way it hardly matters, but it’s a shame for those who might have stopped watching. Along with adapter Sarah Phelps, I suspect we’ll be wanting to hear much more, and very soon, from writer Tana French and the two main stars, Sarah Greene and Killian Scott, who had such a winning chemistry together.
The conclusion was nicely but not cheaply wrapped, an opening left for follow-ups. Nothing has been other than complex about this series, and so it was until the end – and an absolutely virtuoso turn from young Leah McNamara as the butter-wouldn’t-melt Devlin sister, Rosalind. Her cold conclusions, her denunciation of her parents’ “boring, loveless, empty” lives, disturbed deep to the marrow.
Ready for war? A British Guide to the End of the World. Photograph: BBC/Ewan Bauer
We smile at the pathos behind Dad’s Army, but we forgot that something very similar was going on in the three decades after that war. Until last week, with a telling, vital Arena: A British Guide to the End of the World. In the stern, kindly paternal wisp of “advice” from our establishment, about how to cower before nuclear bombs raining on these islands in the cold war, there was much of the laughable and the bizarre. The early-warning radios in country inns, which no one bothered to switch on, and which saw one poor publican, denied a siren during the exercise, frantically cycling round his village, shouting. In Italian.
The good-natured stoicism of middle Britain in the 70s, the WI packing blankets and sandwiches and a touch of lippy to keep the spirits up. The yawning giggle of a gulf between the chances we thought we stood and the chances we actually stood. Laughable, yes, but in hindsight goosebump-chilling.
The delightfully bleak, obsidian-black The End of the F***ing World deserved its return for a second series on Channel 4. But it was a poor idea, for any binge-watchers (and you’ll be tempted), to have promised full availability, after broadcast, on All 4: it’s a dreadful, mismanaged, ugly clunking beast of a “free” platform, and the ads will drive you tootsie.
But… aww, sweet, clever, murderous James and Alyssa are really back! And joined in their vulnerable teen anger by newcomer Bonnie, a great Naomi Ackie, who at midweek count had managed to bump off a mere three, admittedly appalling, souls! Teen noir with savage class. Kids will love it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/30/uber-new-ceo-dara-khosrowshahi-all-staff-meeting | Technology | 2017-08-30T18:45:55.000Z | Olivia Solon | New Uber CEO meets staff as emotional Travis Kalanick gets standing ovation | The incoming Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, former CEO of Expedia, addressed the ride-hailing company in an all-hands meeting Wednesday at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Khosrowshahi, who starts next Tuesday, replaces the ousted leader and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who resigned following a string of controversies including allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and intellectual property theft.
The 48-year-old Iranian American will need to address cultural issues within the organization and restore confidence in the $69bn startup that was once the poster child for the gig economy.
“I’m a fighter ... I will fight with every bone in my body,” said Khosrowshahi, addressing the packed room.
An emotional Travis Kalanick, who cried as staff gave him a standing ovation, described the last six months as the hardest of his life and admitted to making many mistakes before introducing Khosrowshahi to stage.
Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member who has become the public face of the company during its troubles of the last six months, quizzed Khosrowshahi in a fireside chat.
During the softball conversation, Khosrowshahi revealed that the experience of his family fleeing Iran for the US at the age of nine and “losing everything” had shaped him.
Dara Khosrowshahi: who is the man chosen as Uber’s next CEO?
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Khosrowshahi said his priorities were to meet with the leadership team and fill the many management holes. Uber currently has vacancies for several key positions including a CFO (officially), chief operating officer, chief marketing officer, general counsel and senior vice-president of engineering.
When asked about when the company would go public, which would allow employees to cash out, Khosrowshahi said that it could be anywhere between 18 and 36 months.
Khosrowshahi was picked ahead of the former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and Meg Whitman, the chief executive of HP Enterprise, following a two-month search. He joined from Expedia which, according to a statement from Uber’s board, “he built into one of the world’s leading travel and technology companies”.
Khosrowshahi reportedly impressed the Uber board and Kalanick during a pitch last week, in which he included a slide in his presentation asking them to leave him alone to get on with his job. It read simply: “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
The Uber board has been in turmoil, with one major investor in the company, Benchmark Capital, suing Kalanick and accusing him of sabotaging the search for his replacement.
“Indeed, it has appeared at times as if the search was being manipulated to deter candidates and create a power vacuum in which Travis could return,” said Benchmark in an open letter to Uber employees.
In an email to Expedia staff, Khosrowshahi said he was “scared” and had “forgotten what life is outside of this place [Expedia]”.
“But the times of greatest learning for me have been when I’ve been through big changes, or taken on new roles – you have to move out of your comfort zone and develop muscles that you didn’t know you had,” he said.
Expedia yesterday named its chief financial officer, Mark Okerstrom, to replace Khosrowshahi as chief executive. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/25/jacob-rees-mogg-quits-with-handwritten-letter-dated-st-crispins-day | Politics | 2022-10-25T17:44:01.000Z | Charlie Moloney | Jacob Rees-Mogg quits with handwritten letter dated ‘St Crispin’s Day’ | Jacob Rees-Mogg has submitted a typically old-fashioned resignation letter, in a last hurrah for the so-called honourable member for the 18th century.
The North East Somerset MP wrote his letter, resigning as business secretary, by hand and declined to share it on social media, in stark contrast with the typed resignation letters shared on Twitter by other MPs.
Rees-Mogg’s handwriting is so difficult to decipher that the Scottish newspaper the National has headlined an article: “We bet you can’t read Jacob Rees-Mogg’s handwritten resignation letter.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s resignation letter. Photograph: Crown Copyright
In his characteristically anachronistic style, Rees-Mogg, a devoted Catholic, dated the letter “St Crispin’s Day”.
St Crispin’s Day is a feast day in the Christian calendar on 25 October, which takes its name from the saints Crispin and Crispinian, who were tortured and beheaded by the Roman emperor in AD286.
Many significant battles have taken place on that day throughout history, including the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, immortalised in a St Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Rees-Mogg begins his letter by wishing the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, “every success” in his position.
“As you will rightly want your own team I would be grateful if you would convey my resignation as secretary for business, energy and industrial strategy to the King,” Rees-Mogg added.
In Britain’s parliamentary democracy, the monarch, now King Charles III, retains some prerogative powers, including appointing or dismissing ministers and the prime minister.
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Such power is usually exercised only on the advice of ministers, and in reality it is the prime minister who hires and fires their cabinet team.
However, Rees-Mogg is well known for insistently sticking to his interpretation of the finer points of the British constitution.
He famously argued in August 2019 that the decision to advise the Queen to prorogue parliament, weeks before a vote on the final Brexit agreement, was “routine”. The then prime minister Boris Johnson’s advice was later declared unlawful by a unanimous supreme court verdict. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/09/marriage-divorce-reform-justice-secretary-david-gauke | Opinion | 2019-04-09T10:10:42.000Z | Gaby Hinsliff | It won’t undermine marriage to make divorce easier. It’s simple humanity | Gaby Hinsliff | He was one husband for the first eight years of their marriage, and someone quite different for the next eight.
Or so the former Olympic rower James Cracknell, whose separation from his partner Beverley Turner was recently announced, apparently put it. Like most elite athletes he had always been formidably driven, obsessive even in pursuit of extreme sporting challenges. But a head injury sustained during one of them caused changes to his personality that were clearly hard for everyone in the family, including him, to live with. Arguing about whose fault the breakdown of their marriage was in these circumstances seems ridiculous and petty, and yet that’s what the law would currently require them to do.
Tini Owens is locked into an unhappy marriage – this is why we need ‘no fault’ divorce
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So the justice secretary, David Gauke, has done a humane and sensible thing in proposing reforms to divorce law, which would remove the requirement on divorcing couples either to provide proof of the other side’s irredeemable awfulness or else spend at least two years (and up to five years if the other spouse contests it) separated. Marriages do end without it necessarily being anyone’s particular fault. Either people simply grow apart, or both sides do things they regret in the death throes of a relationship. Pinning blame on one side or the other can only increase the toxicity of it all for any children. Hats off to anyone who manages to be good-natured, amicable and flexible co-parents who don’t blame each other in front of the kids, while very much blaming each other in front of a judge.
Removing one spouse’s power to block a divorce, meanwhile, solves unusual dilemmas like that of Tini Owens, trapped by her husband’s refusal to consent to the end of what was clearly a very dead marriage, despite taking a landmark case through the courts.
So Gauke should hold his nerve through the inevitable protests to come; the harrumphing about how this will further undermine traditional marriage, the silly complaints that it will soon be easier to get out of a marriage than a mobile phone contract. It’s not the bureaucratic hurdles that hold unhappy couples back from getting divorced but the fear of upsetting the children – reduced but not wholly eliminated by the Gauke reforms – and the pain of admitting that you’ve failed at being in love, not to mention the fear of poverty and loneliness. It shows a curious lack of confidence in the resilience and appeal of marriage to imagine that people need to be browbeaten or shamed into staying in one.
And that’s the lesson from other reforms that were supposedly going to be the death of traditional marriage, such as legalising civil partnerships or gay marriage. A happy marriage is not such a fragile flower that it will wilt at the mere thought of two men in a registry office, or of someone like Tini Owens finally breaking free. The fear that divorce will be socially contagious – that if one couple breaks up, others in their social circle who are unhappy might be encouraged to do the same – lies behind many of these objections. But for happy couples, or even those who would like to be happier, the effect of seeing the messy reality close up can easily work the other way round; you thank your lucky stars it’s not you, resolve to make a bit more effort at home.
If anything, now that fewer and fewer young couples feel the need to get married in the first place, those who have still chosen to tie the knot may be more committed to the long haul than their parents were. The pro-marriage lobby should concentrate on celebrating those who are still in love, not forcing miserable people back together.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/16/roger-federer-marin-cilic-wimbledon-final-tears-blistered-foot | Sport | 2017-07-16T18:07:34.000Z | Martha Kelner | Marin Cilic’s tears are the memorable image of one-sided Wimbledon final | Martha Kelner | Marin Cilic had voiced concern about how he might handle the pressure of his first Wimbledon final, before it unravelled spectacularly. But even his nightmares surely could not have thrown up the possibility that the most memorable shot of the final would be of him sobbing into a towel with two medics and the tournament referee crouched at his feet.
Wimbledon 2017: Roger Federer beats Marin Cilic to seal record eighth title – as it happened
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Only Cilic knows how much his tears were owing to the pain of a massive blister on his left foot and how much it was being overcome by the significance of the occasion and his inability to rise to it. But ironically, it took an outpouring of emotion to garner some support from a Centre Court crowd wildly in favour of Roger Federer.
The last time a Croatian had played in a Wimbledon final – when Goran Ivanisevic defeated Pat Rafter in 2001 – there was a carnival atmosphere on Centre Court with vast swathes of the crowd wearing the country’s red-and-white checked football shirt.
The story of the wildcard on the brink of a historic victory had the nation in raptures. But this time round the only narrative the crowd was interested in was Federer winning an eighth title here and becoming the oldest male Wimbledon champion in the Open era.
Wearing beige chinos, red jackets and carrying £8.50 plastic tumblers of Pimm’s, those fortunate or rich enough to have secured a ticket filed into a packed Centre Court.
Polite applause ensued as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge settled into their green cushioned wicker chairs in the royal box.
Roger Federer wins record eighth Wimbledon title against Marin Cilic
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The photographers in the pit beside Centre Court were briefly diverted by the presence of Chelsea manager Antonio Conte in the stand behind the baseline, with Nigel Farage two rows behind him.
But it was first sight of a white bandana-wearing Federer rounding the green barriers that sent them wild. For some of the crowd, the stakes were higher than others. One 36-year-old man from North London had bet £50,000 on Federer lifting the trophy at the start of the tournament. He will go home happy but as a sporting contest it was a non-event beyond the first few games.
The closest Cilic got to mounting a challenge was on Federer’s serve in the second game. The sense of relief was palpable as he held amid a heavy artillery onslaught from the Croatian.
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Wimbledon 2017: Roger Federer wins record eighth title – video highlights
The first moment Federer mania really hit was when the Swiss patted a backhand into the open court after Cilic slipped in the forecourt, which took him to 30-0 on the Croatian’s serve. A netted forehand to give him the break had the crowd jumping to their feet for the first time in the afternoon.
It quickly became apparent that the match was effectively over as Cilic dissolved into tears during a changeover break at a set and two games down. Doctor Ian McCurdie, trainer Alejandro Resnicoff and tournament referee Andrew Jarrett were summoned onto court to offer support.
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The Croatian held a towel to his face and dabbed at the tears. There was little obvious concern or sympathy from Federer who looked straight ahead as he rounded Cilic in his chair to change ends. You do not get to own 19 Grand Slam titles by being soft and the scent of victory was already hanging heavy in his nostrils.
Only one Wimbledon singles final, both in the men’s and the women’s, has ended in a retirement and that was back in 1911 but it seemed another might be on the cards. Somehow Cilic composed himself enough to continue and was cheered to the rafters by a crowd keen not to be short-changed as he made his way to serve.
Of all Federer’s 29 slam finals, this was arguably the most one-sided and a second set was sealed as neatly as his on court attire. The last time someone came from two sets behind to win the Wimbledon final was Henri Cochet beating Jean Borotra in 1927. But this match never felt like bestowing such a heroic comeback.
A 119mph ace from the Cilic to keep the match alive with the faintest of pulses in the third set was cheered raucously. But the title was soon Federer’s and he too produced the waterworks at the sight of his four children being brought into his box.
Leo and Lenny, wearing matching blue blazers and white trousers, and Myla and Charlene in identical floral dresses, made the master blub. Evidence that he is human, after all. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/08/un-experts-demand-crackdown-on-greenwashing-of-net-zero-pledges-cop27 | Environment | 2022-11-08T13:41:58.000Z | Adam Morton | UN experts demand crackdown on greenwashing of net zero pledges | A UN group set up to crack down on the greenwashing of net zero pledges by industry and government has called for “red lines” to stop support for new fossil fuel exploration and overuse of carbon offsets.
The “high-level expert group”, created in March by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to advise on rules to improve integrity and transparency in net zero commitments by industry, regions and cities, said climate plans must include deep cuts in greenhouse gases before 2030, and not delay action until closer to 2050.
It stressed serious commitments must prioritise deep cuts in absolute emissions by 2030, with carbon offsets – which allow companies and governments to pay for cuts elsewhere instead of reducing their own pollution – to be used only for further reductions “above and beyond” that. Rules were needed to ensure offsets were high-quality and came from a reliable and verifiable source, the group said.
The group of experts was created after widespread concern about greenwashing, including claims by major fossil fuel companies that they were aiming for net zero emissions by 2050 while backing new coal, oil and gas developments and relying heavily on offsets.
World is on ‘highway to climate hell’, UN chief warns at Cop27 summit
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A Guardian investigation this year revealed that oil and gas companies, including several with net zero pledges, were still planning vast new developments that would push the world well beyond the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris agreement. In Australia, they include Woodside, which has taken on BHP’s global petroleum assets and is planning to open new fields off the north-west coast.
Net zero plans already adopted have drawn criticism for being vague, delaying action until it is too late and relying too heavily on reductions claimed from unrelated nature-based offset projects, such as tree planting and supporting forest regrowth. While offsets have enjoyed wide support from governments and industry as a cheaper way to cut pollution, the experts said they should be used only once a business or local government had met ambitious short and medium-term targets through absolute cuts.
Releasing the report at the Cop27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, the expert group’s chair, the former Canadian climate minister Catherine McKenna, said net zero pledges must be “about cutting emissions, not corners”.
“Right now, the planet cannot afford delays, excuses, or more greenwashing,’ she said.
Panel member Bill Hare, a climate scientist and chief executive of Climate Analytics, said no one could ignore the need to “immediately and drastically cut emissions”.
“If industry, financial institutions, cities and regions mean what they say in their net zero pledges, they will adopt these recommendations,” he said. “If fossil fuel companies think that they can expand production under a net zero target, they need to think again.”
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The experts said non-state actors should have to report publicly each year, backing up their claims with verifiable information, to prevent dishonest climate accounting. They called for voluntary net zero commitments for large corporate emitters to be replaced with regulated requirements, and said industry must address “scope 3” emissions – those released through the use of their products – as well as direct pollution.
Guterres said: “A growing number of governments and [companies] are pledging to be carbon free – and that’s good news. The problem is that the criteria and benchmarks for these net zero commitments have varying levels of rigour and loopholes wide enough to drive a diesel truck through,” he said. “We must have zero tolerance for net zero greenwashing.”
The secretary general also had strong words for fossil fuel companies: “So-called ‘net zero pledges’ that exclude core products [coal, oil, gas] are poisoning our planet. Using bogus net-zero pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible. This toxic cover-up could push our world over the climate cliff.”
The report was backed by Laurence Tubiana, the chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and considered one of the architects of the Paris agreement as French environment minister. She said living up to that deal demanded drawing “a clear line on true net zero – what it really means and requires, and what is simply greenwashing”.
“We can’t afford creative accounting,” she said. “I urge all actors – including cities, regions, businesses, investors, alliances, countries, and regulators to take these recommendations seriously and embed them with urgency.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/23/caravan-migrants-mexico-guatemala-honduras-latest-trump-response | World news | 2018-10-23T19:29:51.000Z | David Agren | God will decide if we make it': Central American caravan presses northward | Still bleary-eyed after a night camped out in a rain-soaked town square, Miriam Carranza combed the knots out of her daughter’s hair and listed the many challenges of life back in Honduras: the low pay and precarious job security at the maquiladora factory; the soaring inflation; the rampant insecurity.
But the final straw came when a local gang demanded payment of a “war tax” that far exceeded the income of Carranza and her construction worker husband.
“They said they would kill one of my daughters if we didn’t pay,” Carranza said as she struggled with seven-year-old Ashley’s unruly locks.
The family fled their home, and rather than risk making the journey north alone, they threw in their lot with the caravan of migrants currently making its way through southern Mexico.
“Honduras just isn’t a country where you can live in peace,” said Carranza.
More than 7,000 people have now joined the caravan, defying threats from Donald Trump and slowly advancing some 45 miles into Mexico since crossing the border from Guatemala at the weekend.
After 10 days on the road, weary members of the caravan – which includes children and seniors as well as several people in wheelchairs – said they would rest on Tuesday in the town of Huixtla, before continuing their journey north.
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The migrants’ persistence – and the failure of Mexico and Central American governments to stop them – has enraged Trump, who has described the group as an “onslaught of illegal aliens”, and made the apparently baseless claim that they include “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners”.
But the US president has also made the caravan a central part of his strategy for the US midterms, seizing on the issue as a way to attack the Democrats.
Clean-cut, baby-faced and cradling his six-month-old son, Gerson Martínez, 22, hardly looked the part of an invader. Like many other members of the caravan, he had set out from San Pedro Sula in Honduras, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Gerson Martínez and his son Axel, in Tapachula, Mexico. Photograph: David Agren/The Guardian
Unable to find work after losing his job at a maquiladora, or export assembly plant, he was approached by a local gang that pressured him to store weapons in his apartment.
Rather than join the gang, Martínez fled. “If I had joined, my son will have to eventually have to join, too,” he said, as Axel started to cry.
Many of the Honduran migrants describe similar tales of extortion and death threats: reporting such crimes to the police is risky and in a country riddled with corruption and dominated by organised crime, moving to another city is no real solution.
“They gave me 24 hours,” said Aida Acevedo, 26, slicing her finger across her throat as she described how a gang had demanded extortion payments on pain of death. She fled the rugged Olancho region with a vague plan to reach the US and find safety.
“God is the one who will decide if we make it,” she said. “Trump doesn’t have that power.”
Trump and other rightwing US politicians have suggested that the caravan has been funded by “Democrats” or the billionaire financier George Soros. But Acevedo said she was already planning her escape from Honduras when she started seeing mentions of the caravan.
The exodus appears to have grown spontaneously, after a Honduran lawmaker, Bartolo Fuentes, announced on social media that he would be accompanying a group of 160 people who planned to start walking from San Pedro Sula on 12 October.
Fuentes was arrested in Guatemala and deported back to Honduras, where he has since become the target of an online smear campaign, but has always denied organizing the caravan.
Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, in the outskirts of Tapachula, Mexico. Photograph: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
Some support has been given by the Mexican NGO Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) which has organised previous – though much smaller – migrant caravans such as one that travelled the length of Mexico in April, and prompted a similar overreaction from Trump.
The group is providing humanitarian and logistical support, but denies having a leadership role.
“There’s not ‘an organiser’.” said Alex Mensing, a projects coordinator with Pueblo Sin Fronteras. “With the Syrian refugees, nobody looks for ‘an organiser’. This is a mass exodus.”
A second caravan from Honduras is also reportedly heading towards Mexico. On Tuesday, Casa del Migrante, a migrant shelter in Guatemala City, said more than 1,000 people had joined the second group which is moving through Guatemala towards the Mexican border.
For many in the caravan, the logic is simple: life at home is increasingly impossible, and travelling alone is too dangerous, especially in Mexico, where criminal gangs target migrants for rape, robbery and extortion.
Central America's rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
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The three countries of Central America’s “Northern Triangle” all face a combination of systematic corruption and violence fuelled by state forces, criminal gangs and the drug trade. Not coincidentally, all three are also still feeling the consequences of US intervention in the region’s 1980s civil wars.
Many Honduran travellers focused their fury not on Trump, but on their own deeply unpopular president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was re-elected in December in elections plagued with allegations of fraud.
Washington was quick to recognize Hernández’s re-election, just as it supported the government installed in the country’s 2009 military-backed coup.
Miriam Carranza and her daughter in Tapachula, Mexico. Photograph: David Agren/The Guardian
Trump’s threats to cut aid to Central America made little impact on the marchers. “The US has given money to Honduras – but politicians have spent it on themselves,” said coffee-picker David Hernández as he sipped tamarind juice from a plastic bag.
Like many others, Hernández spoke of a worsening daily grind back home, where bills and taxes have gone up as wages drop. Many companies have started charging for services in US dollars as the local currency, the lempira, plunges.
Meanwhile, the country is struggling to take in a record number of deportees from the US, thanks to Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policies: more than 35,000 have arrived in the first six months of 2018, a 55% increase from the year before.
Edin Mata, 21, was among them, having been detained in an immigration raid on his employer in Miami.
In Miami, Mata had earned $160 a day working in construction. Back in Honduras, the only work he could find was selling clothes: he barely made $4 a day, and had to give a cut to the gangs.
Removing his camouflage Duck Dynasty cap, he showed a scar on his scalp, left after a gang beating when he failed to make the payment.
“We live like slaves in Honduras,” he said. “I lived so much better in the US.”
Like many of the younger men in the group, Mata entered Mexico by swimming from Guatemala. He said that when he reached the country’s northern frontier he would again swim across the Rio Grande into Texas – a much tougher undertaking, he said, because “the currents are much stronger”.
Such determination has kept the caravan moving northwards, despite Trump’s bluster.
Ordinary Mexicans have pitched in too, passing out sandwiches and water, leaving out new shoes and clothes at the roadside, or giving them lifts a few miles down the road.
Central America's rampant violence fuels an invisible refugee crisis
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The caravan has left Mexican politicians in a bind: wary of angering Trump, but unwilling to follow his example – at least in public. Mexican immigration officials routinely detain and deport tens of thousands of Central Americans each year – even as the foreign ministry defends the rights of Mexican migrants living in the United States.
“Violent entry into the country cannot be permitted,” Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto said in a national address last week. “Mexico remains willing to help the migrants who wish to enter the country respecting our laws.”
President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on 1 December, has offered long-term solutions, proposing work visas to Central Americans. But he stopped short of repeating a campaign statement, in which he said Mexico would not “do the dirty work” of foreign governments.
But many Mexicans called on the government to allow the caravan to pass through.
“¡Chingue su madre! Donald Trump!” yelled Marisela Pérez, 27, hurling an insult at the president as she handed out clothes and shoes as the migrants marched north from Tapachula. “Let them in!” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2024/jan/05/animosity-endures-despite-diverging-fortunes-of-sunderland-and-newcastle | Football | 2024-01-05T18:31:30.000Z | Louise Taylor | Animosity endures despite diverging fortunes of Sunderland and Newcastle | Louise Taylor | The San Siro-bound Milanese metro carriage was uncomfortably overcrowded and the handful of locals on board looked distinctly uneasy as visiting Newcastle fans chanted three words at full volume.
“We hate Sunderland,” they chorused with some emphasising the point by thumping empty beer bottles against the train’s ceiling. “Why?” a thoroughly bemused Italian eventually inquired.
The answer will become apparent at the Stadium of Light on Saturday lunchtime as the first Tyne-Wear derby since 2016 starts.
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Much has changed in the intervening eight years, most notably Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian-led takeover in 2021 and Sunderland’s plunge into the third tier in 2018. The Wearsiders are now Championship residents but, whereas their current squad cost about £20m to assemble, more than £500m has been spent on Newcastle’s.
It dictates that what once ranked as a clash of near equals would normally appear an embarrassing FA Cup third-round mismatch. Yet given Eddie Howe’s visitors are scarred by a run of seven defeats in eight games and have not beaten their local rivals since 2011, a distinct nervousness permeates the Tyneside air.
Four months after that Champions League draw at Milan and a little over three weeks since the Serie A side extinguished Howe’s European hopes in the return, the rise in tension is almost palpable. Police have deemed the inter-club enmity so dangerously intense that the 6,000 travelling Newcastle fans have been barred from using the local metro.
They must avoid all conventional forms of public and private transport and traverse the 14 miles separating the cities on a convoy of free buses flanked by heavy-duty police escorts. No one will be handed a match ticket until they reach Wearside.
The idea is to avoid a repeat of the violence that, outside St James’ in 2013, led to a police horse being punched in the face by a Newcastle fan after Sunderland’s then manager, Paolo Di Canio, enraged his hosts by performing a celebratory touchline knee slide as the visitors won 3-0.
“The knee slide’s been mentioned a few times,” says Sunderland’s promotion-chasing manager, Michael Beale, as he prepares for his fifth game since replacing Tony Mowbray. “But I can’t tell you what I’d do if we won!
“The clubs are in completely different places to 2016. We’ve been down to League One and are now the youngest team in the Championship, possibly in the country. My players have big ambitions to play Premier League and Champions League football but they’ve got everything to prove against top opponents.”
The teams’ fortunes have certainly diverged since March 2016 when Rafael Benítez’s Championship-bound, Mike Ashley-owned Newcastle drew 1-1 at home with a Sunderland side managed by the soon to be England manager Sam Allardyce.
A Newcastle fan punches a horse, and Paolo Di Canio performs an infamous knee slide at the troubled Tyne-Wear derby in 2013. Photos: Paul Kingston/NNP; Shutterstock
Yet if the black and white banner draped across a bridge in northern Italy in September declaring “You’ll never see a Mackem in Milan” emphasised a growing chasm on the pitch, off it a lingering parity endures.
Regardless of the Saudi millions invested in refurbishing Newcastle’s training ground, Sunderland’s Academy of Light remains the superior facility, and the 49,000-capacity Stadium of Light ranks among England’s finest grounds. Moreover, although Kyril Louis-Dreyfus cannot remotely rival the Saudis’ wealth, Sunderland’s Swiss-French majority owner is a billionaire.
Louis-Dreyfus has struggled to win local hearts and minds, though. If fans were upset by Mowbray’s harsh sacking they are outraged by Sunderland’s initial decision – now overturned – to redecorate in black and white a club hospitality suite housing 700 Newcastle fans paying £600 a head for derby tickets.
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One of Louis-Dreyfus’s predecessors, the businessman and philanthropist Sir Bob Murray, would not have made such a naive mistake. Rather more significantly, Murray is adamant that, as Sunderland’s owner, he would have declined any attempted Saudi buyout owing to the kingdom’s “human rights violations”.
Beale steers a more diplomatic course. “There’s a time and place to comment on the ownership of football clubs and what’s right and wrong,” says the former Rangers manager. “Let’s focus on a really intriguing game. Financially, we’re building something very different here with young players. One club’s about getting to the top quickly, the other’s trying to take a development route. It’s two different visions.”
The Stadium of Light will host a Tyne-Wear derby for the first time since 2015. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian
Beale added that, money apart, there was no real difference in “size, support or status” but Howe demurs. “I’m not going to get into a war of words with any manager but I don’t think it’s wise to make those comparisons or comments,” he says. “We know who we are and what we are.”
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The former Sunderland captain turned BBC local radio co-commentator Gary Bennett is looking forward to seeing whether Beale’s much-coveted winger Jack Clarke, the midfielder Dan Neil, the forward Jobe Bellingham (Jude’s younger brother) and others can fulfil their potential on Saturday. “It’s a great stage for Sunderland’s players,” he says. “There’s nothing like a north-east derby – the noise will be something else.”
Sunderland manager Michael Beale admits his young team have ‘got everything to prove against top opponents’. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian
Happily that soundtrack has changed appreciably since 1985 when Bennett was subjected to horrendous racist abuse at Newcastle. It was the era when the National Front routinely recruited outside St James’ but, more positively, that watershed incident served as a catalyst for the establishment of the transformational education charity Show Racism the Red Card.
“Off the pitch the north-east is a much more diverse, more understanding and more educated place now,” says Bennett. “And on it, the clubs are incredibly diverse; so many nationalities will be playing in this derby.”
The similarities between Newcastle’s green away strip and Saudi Arabia’s national flag incite accusations of state annexation but Bennett points out that Howe’s team have not won anything. “They’re very, very wealthy now,” he says. “But they’ve got to keep recruiting well. Finance alone doesn’t win trophies.”
There are strict travel restrictions in place for the 6,000 Newcastle supporters making the short trip to Sunderland. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian
Sunderland’s club historian, Rob Mason, endorses the point. “The early 1950s brought Newcastle three FA Cups in five years while Sunderland won nothing, despite being the moneybags team of the era, known as ‘the Bank of England club’,” he says. “That failure during their time as the top-spending team in the country serves as a warning to those who think silverware will automatically follow money. Newcastle are massive favourites but this is the FA Cup and all Wearside is hoping it conjures up what would be one of the greatest derby victories of all.”
Jim Montgomery is optimistic Sunderland can win. The club’s former goalkeeper and hero of the 1973 FA Cup final triumph against Leeds has invited Bob Moncur, who captained Newcastle to their last major trophy, the 1969 Fairs Cup, to sit alongside him. “I’m sure we’ll have some laughs,” says Montgomery, highlighting the often humorous side of a rivalry that divides numerous families across the Tyne-Wear conurbation. “Sunderland were underdogs in 1973 so we know what can happen.”
Montgomery has recently been treated for prostate cancer at the Sir Bobby Robson Cancer Trials Research Centre within Newcastle’s Freeman hospital, funded by the late England coach’s charity foundation.
As a former Newcastle manager, Robson was proud Sunderland and Middlesbrough suspended footballing hostilities to help finance the establishment of a project which continues to save countless lives.
A mural of the 1973 FA Cup-winning goalkeeper Jim Montgomery on a pub beneath the Queen Alexandra Bridge in Sunderland. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian
Despite widespread misgivings about the Saudi Arabian regime, there is similar pan-regional consensus that Newcastle’s owners should be encouraged to assist in achieving the desperately needed economic “levelling up” programme the UK government has failed to deliver.
Visible infrastructure improvements are yet to materialise but the kingdom’s ambassador to the UK has dined with local business leaders in Durham, the Saudi companies SABIC and Alfanar are investing billions in green fuels development on Teesside and the national airline, Saudia, plans to launch direct flights to the Gulf from Newcastle airport.
For the moment, though, football is primarily responsible for putting an overlooked region back on the map. “This game’s not just about the north-east,” says Beale. “It’s the tie of the round. The whole nation’s looking forward to it.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2015/feb/11/guardian-live-to-frack-or-not-to-frack | Membership | 2015-02-11T16:45:03.000Z | Mischa Wilmers | Guardian Live: To frack or not to frack? | Despite warnings from across the political spectrum that fracking will harm efforts to tackle climate change, an obstinate David Cameron insisted last year that his government was “going all out for shale”. But this week, just days after the Scottish government declared a moratorium, came the news that fracking is set to be banned from 40% of British shale areas, dealing a heavy blow to the fledgling industry.
This set the backdrop for a lively discussion on the merits and dangers of fracking, chaired by the Guardian’s head of environment, Damian Carrington, in front of an audience at Manchester’s Friends’ Meeting House. Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party, and Tony Bosworth, national energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, debated the case for a total ban on UK fracking with Michael Bradshaw, professor of global energy at Warwick Business School and Nick Riley, director of Carboniferous.
Meeting the UK’s climate targets
It didn’t take long for global warming to become one of the central themes of the discussion. Bradshaw began by reminding the audience that both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) have advocated a limited role for natural gas as part of a transition to a low-carbon energy system, though he stopped short of saying fracking should be the method used to extract it in the UK.
Make no mistake, the right to peaceful protest in this country is under threat. It’s being restricted.
Natalie Bennett
Riley, a chartered geologist and strong advocate of fracking, stepped in, describing the CCC’s targets for decarbonising the UK’s electricity supply by 2030 as “naive” and arguing that shale gas could be a realistic option to help the UK meet its future energy needs. “If climate change is going to be a central part of this debate we need to be extremely careful and have a holistic view.”
But Bennett, who claims the Greens are the only UK-wide party opposed to fracking, was unconvinced, laying out her main objective to fracking in clear terms: “It’s a fossil fuel and we have to get away from fossil fuels.” She urged the self-titled “greenest government ever” to invest in energy conservation and renewable sources instead, adding that “once you’ve created an industry it’s very hard to use it for a little while and then shut it down”.
Several members of the audience echoed her sentiments. “Do the panel accept that we need to avoid two-degrees warming or risk runaway climate change?” asked one woman. “It’s like saying we’ll go in an aeroplane but it’s OK since we only have 50% chance of crashing.”
Is fracking safe?
Throughout the event Bosworth declared his unequivocal opposition to fracking. “It’s a risk that we don’t need to take,” he insisted, citing a recent study from the New York State Department of Health that concluded the health risks of hydraulic fracturing are “inestimable”. On the strength of this evidence New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, decided to ban hydraulic fracturing in the state.
One former resident of Balcombe – the Sussex village where British energy firm Cuadrilla abandoned its fracking plans following a public backlash last year – also raised concerns about US studies that have reportedly shown a link between fracking and birth defects in surrounding areas.
How are we going to learn more if we don’t try it within the context of our own geology in the UK?
Nick Riley
But Riley countered that scientists were unable to conduct the necessary research into the safety and viability of shale gas unless they are first allowed to frack. “Calling for a moratorium on the basis that we need to learn more is a bit daft because how are we going to learn more if we don’t try it within the context of our own geology in the UK?” he said. “Let’s get on with it and learn.”
Threat to democracy
By this point the distribution of applause suggested the majority of the audience strongly opposed fracking, leading one participant to question the threat to democracy posed by having the technology imposed on communities without their consent. “When are the people going to have a say?” she asked.
“Make no mistake, the right to peaceful protest in this country is under threat. It’s being restricted”, replied Natalie Bennett, drawing reference to the strong police presence in Balcombe last year. “People are being terrified away from exercising their right to peaceful protest.”
Bradshaw agreed there were problems with the way energy companies have been allowed to develop plans without consulting communities first. However, he also highlighted the tensions that exist in communities where opposition to fracking isn’t universal: “If you talk to some residents in Balcombe the biggest problem for them was the campaigners.”
Riley appeared less concerned. “Those who oppose fracking can vote for Natalie,” he quipped to enthusiastic cheers from sections of the audience.
For and against
Before concluding the event the four panellists were asked to briefly summarise their positions.
Riley warned that the public should not be deceived by anti-fracking “hype”. “My biggest fear is misinformation in terms of making the public fearful around health, water contamination and impact on the landscape.”
Bennett, meanwhile, recalled a meeting she recently attended at which people from a variety of political affiliations were asked whether they thought fracking should form part of Britain’s energy future: “Not a single person raised their hands,” she said.
“It’s a mistake for the government to say they want to go all out for shale,” said Bradshaw. “In a sense that’s undemocratic because it’s not giving us the choice to decide whether we want to go all out for shale or not.”
Bosworth ended the event with a quote from John Ashton, a former special representative on climate change for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office: “You can be in favour of exploiting shale gas or you can be in favour of tackling climate change but you can’t be in favour of both at the same time.”
This Guardian Live event took place at the Manchester Friends’ Meeting House on 10 February. Find out about upcoming events and how to sign up as a Guardian member. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/feb/28/fifa-and-uefa-suspend-russian-clubs-and-teams-from-world-cup-and-all-competitions | Football | 2022-02-28T17:39:18.000Z | Paul MacInnes | Russia suspended from all Fifa and Uefa competitions until further notice | Fifa and Uefa have acted in unison to suspend Russian teams from international football competition on Monday as global sport closed the door on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
The most powerful bodies in football joined the International Olympic Committee in acting after days of growing protest. The suspension means Russia will not be able to face Poland in a World Cup play-off semi-final next month, while its women’s team will also be barred from this summer’s European Championship in England and its remaining club side in European competition, Spartak Moscow, will no longer compete in the Europa League.
IOC calls for international event ban for athletes from Russia and Belarus
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In a joint statement the two organisations said: “Fifa and Uefa have today decided together that all Russian teams, whether national representative teams or club teams, shall be suspended from participation in both Fifa and Uefa competitions until further notice.
“These decisions were adopted today by the Bureau of the Fifa Council and the Executive Committee of Uefa, respectively the highest decision-making bodies of both institutions on such urgent matters. Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine. Both Presidents hope that the situation in Ukraine will improve significantly and rapidly so that football can again be a vector for unity and peace amongst people.”
Uefa also announced a second highly significant move, confirming that it had cancelled a long-standing and highly lucrative sponsorship deal with Gazprom. The Russian gas company had been a sponsor of the Champions League for a decade and the final of this year’s competition was to have been played in the Gazprom Arena in St Petersburg.
Last week Uefa moved the match to Paris, however, and has now severed the relationship entirely. “Uefa has today decided to end its partnership with Gazprom across all competitions,” a statement said. “The decision is effective immediately and covers all existing agreements including the Uefa Champions League, Uefa national team competitions and Uefa Euro 2024.”
Daniil Medvedev became men’s world No 1 on Monday. It is unclear what sporting sanctions will mean in non-team sports. Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP
On Sunday, Fifa had said that Russia could continue to compete in World Cup qualifying if they changed their name and played matches on neutral grounds. An action described by Fifa as taking “initial measures”, it was resisted fiercely by Poland, Russia’s opponents in World Cup qualification. The Polish stance was supported by a number of other European nations, too, including the football associations of England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland.
As pressure grew on Fifa on Monday a change in direction was signalled by an intervention from the IOC. Citing the mission of the “Olympic Movement” to “contribute to peace through sport and to unite the world in peaceful competition beyond all political disputes”, the IOC issued a lengthy resolution calling on all sporting organisations to act.
“In order to protect the integrity of global sports competitions and for the safety of all the participants,” the resolution read, “the IOC Executive Board recommends that International Sports Federations and sports event organisers not invite or allow the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes and officials in international competitions”.
The IOC added a condition, however, which could yet mean Russia competes in the Winter Paralympics which start in Beijing this weekend. In situations where short notice “for organisational or legal reasons” meant Russia and its ally in the invasion of Ukraine, Belarus, could not be excluded, they “should be accepted only as neutral athletes or neutral teams”, the IOC said. This would be a similar sanction to that applied to Russia at last year’s Tokyo Olympics, where “no national symbols, colours, flags or anthems should be displayed”.
The Ukrainian delegation for the Winter Paralympics is yet to arrive in Beijing due to the invasion and on Monday evening the British Olympic Association called for Russian athletes to be banned immediately from competition.
Uefa and Fifa are too late: Russia’s sportswashing has served its purpose
Barney Ronay
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“Together with the National Olympic Committee of Germany, [we demand] the immediate exclusion of Russia and Belarus from the international sports family until further notice,” the BOA said. “We call on the international sports federations to ban athletes representing Russia and Belarus from competitions for the time being and to suspend Russian and Belarusian officials from their positions.”
There are further questions now likely to be asked over the involvement of Russian athletes in non-Russian teams, and also in individual sports. One of the most prominent examples is Daniil Medvedev who took over the mantle of the men’s world No 1 tennis player from Novak Djokovic on Monday and over the weekend made a statement calling for peace.
The Ukrainian Tennis Federation board member Seva Kevlych told Reuters that Medvedev should not be allowed to compete in grand slam matches. “Let [Medvedev] play on the ATP Tour but grand slams are ITF events and if you lose the possibility to play in grand slams he could never be world No 1,” Kevlych said. “He shouldn’t play in the French Open, US Open and Wimbledon.”
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Kevlych’s words echoed a broader, sweeping agenda for action against Russia issued by Ukraine’s ministry of sport. Arguing that “Russian authorities use sport achievements for propaganda of their own ideology” and as “a tool for popularizing ideas of bullying, murder and destruction”, the ministry called not only for athletes to be excluded from competition but for Russian representatives to also be removed from governing bodies and Russian companies from being allowed to act as sponsors. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/four-legged-flyers-pets-abroad | Business | 2013-09-20T13:32:01.000Z | Rupert Neate | The four-legged flyers: owners dig deep to take pets abroad | "We'll take anything," says Angela Lacey, a pet importer working in the shadow of Heathrow's Terminal 5.
Hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, guinea pigs, tropical fish, parrots, rabbits and even the odd rat have passed through the Airpets handling and quarantine centre since its founder converted it from a pig farm 47 years ago.
"But we try to put [customers] off hamsters," says Lacey. Her colleagues break out into giggles. "They don't make it," she adds. "They don't live very long, little hamsters. The flight coming over, then the [four-month] quarantine. The average lifespan is, what, a couple of years? I wouldn't pay all that money for a hamster, no I don't think so."
And it is a lot of money. Flying in a hamster from New York plus the legally enforced four-month stay in the quarantine cages would cost at least £2,000.
The cost of sending a pet overseas depends on the animal's size, but Nick Foden-Ellis, Airpets managing director, says it is "rarely less than a business-class ticket for the same route". A recent job sending a chocolate labrador to Sydney cost more than £4,000.
Despite the economic downturn business has been booming for Airpets and the dozens of other pet importing and exporting firms. "We've had the busiest summer for 10 years," says Foden-Ellis.
The firm has recorded a recent rise in pet exports to Australia after its currency fell against the pound, he says. The pound has recovered to A$1.71 from A$1.44 in March. "The exchange rate change adds a huge amount to disposable income. People that might not have been able to afford to take their pets with them and might have left them behind with a relative now feel they can afford to take them with them."
He says exports to Australia – the most expensive destination as it requires a stopover – are up 8%-10%. Australia is Airpets' biggest export destination accounting for 40% of all pet travel. "Everyone has been watching [ITV show] Poms in Paradise," he says.
Official figures from the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency show 139,000 dogs were brought into the UK last year compared with 85,000 in 2011. Imports of cats jumped 74% to more than 14,000. Even ferrets, popularised in recent years by Paris Hilton and Jonathan Ross rose from 68 in 2011 to 93 in 2012.
The agency, part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, also reports a big rise in families importing rabbits, chinchillas, rats, guinea pigs, fish, snakes and even frogs.
It says imports of cats and dogs to the UK exploded on 1 January last year when the pet passport scheme made it much easier for people to move pets from the European Union and certain other countries to the UK.
"Overnight, it meant the end of mandatory quarantine for thousands of animals that had rabies jabs and vet certificates," says Foden-Ellis. "We opened at midnight on New Year's Day as some of our animals were eligible to leave without seeing out the rest of their sentence. Four or five people came in to collect their pets, we had some champagne."
While it is now much easier to bring in animals, it still requires planning with vaccinations for rabies and check-ups several weeks in advance.
"People don't think about how tricky it can be," says Foden-Ellis, a former paratrooper. "An awful lot of our customers are people who go on holiday to north Africa, Cyprus or Spain and fall in love with a street dog and want to bring it home with them. They'll manage to get it on a flight back from Spain or wherever, but when they arrive here they'll be asked for documentation. 'Well, I haven't got it,' they'll say. That means it will have to go into quarantine, which can cost £1,500-£2,000."
Sadly, he says, when some people find out the size of the bill they fall out of love. "We will never destroy an animal. That's why if you check out these guys' staff profiles you'll see how many pets they've got. They're predominately strays that people haven't been able to afford the quarantine bill for."
While the number of strays Airpets handles is rising, they are a tiny proportion compared with the pets which executives take when posted abroad. "There has been a huge rise in pets going out to Asia and Bric [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries," he says. "As those economies grow businesses are sending their people there, and animals are becoming more accepted as family pets in Asia."
Laura Nolan, an Airpets customer who took her cat, Gizmo, from Plymouth to Sydney, says the trip cost up to £16,000 including her own flight and visas. "We had her since she was a kitten and we both agreed that we wouldn't have been able to leave her behind and not know what happened to her." Despite the cost, Nolan adds, she will take Gizmo with her if she ever has to move again.
Foden-Ellis also boasts a string of celebrity customers, some of whom even fly out their pets with them on holiday. "We have movie stars, footballers, everyone," he says. One of the world's best-known footballers regularly books his dogs on transatlantic flights, he lets slip, before threatening to hunt me down if the Guardian names him.
Mike Sawyer, sales and development manager of rival pet transporters JCS Livestock, says his firm has also recorded an increase in business. "We have got a couple of people who take their pets on holiday with them; one customer takes his dogs to New York back and forth at least twice a year and another client sends his dogs to Australia and back," he says. "Another client shipped their dog to America for a two-week holiday. Luckily it was a small dog – you pay by the size."
Sawyer points out that the airlines make much more than the handlers. Ramón Delima, vice-president of special cargo at Air France-KLM, which claims to transport more animals than any other airline, says animal transport does not follow socioeconomic trends because pets are largely seen "as part of the family".
He refuses to say how much money KLM makes from transporting animals, but it's a much higher margin than regular cargo. "It's not as simple as transporting a box. We have an animal hotel in Schiphol [airport near Amsterdam]. We take full care of them … dogs are walked in the park, literally. We have animal attendants, just like cabin attendants for passengers. This is not just putting an animal in a box and sending it off." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/30/sally-rooney-book-transformed-her-life-all-our-yesterdays-natalia-ginzburg | Books | 2022-06-30T07:00:32.000Z | Sally Rooney | ‘This is a perfect novel’: Sally Rooney on the book that transformed her life | When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover. Far more than anything I myself had ever written or even tried to write, her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life itself. This kind of transformative encounter with a book is, for me, very rare, a moment of contact with what seems to be the essence of human existence. For this reason, I wanted to write a little about Natalia Ginzburg and her novel All Our Yesterdays. I would like to address myself in particular to other readers who are right now awaiting, whether they know it or not, their first and special meeting with her work.
Ginzburg was born Natalia Levi, the daughter of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, in Sicily in 1916. She and her four siblings grew up in Turin in northern Italy, in a secular and intellectually lively home. In 1938, at the age of 22, Natalia married the Jewish anti-fascist organiser Leone Ginzburg, and they went on to have three children together. In 1942, she published her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City). Due to the legal barriers imposed by the fascist government on publications by Jewish writers, this novel was printed under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte”. The Ginzburgs were sent into internal exile during the war, in the south of Italy, because of Leone’s political activities, but they travelled to Rome in secret to work on an anti-fascist newspaper. In 1944, Leone was imprisoned and tortured to death by the fascist regime. The war ended a year later, when Ginzburg was still in her 20s, a widowed mother of three small children. These experiences – her upbringing, her marriage, her motherhood, her husband’s death and the political and moral catastrophe of the second world war – would shape Ginzburg’s writing for the rest of her life.
All Our Yesterdays, Ginzburg’s third novel, was originally published in Italian under the title Tutti i nostri ieri in 1952. It begins in a small town in northern Italy, in the years before the war, with a family: an ageing widower, his four children and the family’s companion, Signora Maria. Across the street, in the “house opposite”, lives the owner of the town’s soap factory, with his wife, his children and “a person that you couldn’t be quite sure who he was” named Franz. Gradually, from the hectic and comical jostling of family life in the opening chapters, a protagonist begins to emerge: the widower’s youngest daughter Anna. The novel goes on to follow Anna’s relationships with her family, with the inhabitants of the “house opposite” and with an older family friend named Cenzo Rena, before and during the war.
The great emotional power of this novel springs from the depth and truth of each one of its characters
But Anna’s status as the protagonist remains a partial and contingent one. The narrator often leads us away from her without warning, relating events to which she is not a witness, describing with sudden compassion the thoughts and feelings of other, seemingly minor figures, their desires, disappointments and dreams. The great emotional power of this novel springs from the depth and truth of each one of its characters. As readers we grow to know and love Anna deeply, but we cannot help loving at the same time her cantankerous father, her sombre and beautiful brother Ippolito, the fretting Signora Maria and all the other complex and interesting people that populate the world of the book.
After the death of Anna’s father, near the beginning of the novel, Ippolito befriends Emanuele, one of the boys from the house opposite. The two of them have “great discussions” together, “but no one knew quite what they were about, because if anyone else was present they started talking in German”. They are soon joined by Danilo, a suitor of Anna’s sister Concettina, and the three young men take to shutting themselves up in the sitting room together, talking. The adolescent Anna is mystified by these developments: are Emanuele and Danilo both in love with her sister? Why do they spend so much time with Ippolito speaking German? Then her brother Giustino whispers one word to her, a word that will change the course of the novel and Anna’s life: “Politics.”
“Politics,” thought Anna. She walked about the garden, amongst Signora Maria’s rose-trees, and repeated the word to herself. She was a plump girl, pale and indolent, dressed in a pleated skirt and a faded blue pullover, and not very tall for her fourteen years. “Politics,” she repeated slowly, and now all at once she seemed to understand …
Ippolito, Emanuele and Danilo, we learn, are anti-fascist dissidents, gathering in secret to share and discuss prohibited political literature. Soon, Danilo is taken to prison, and Ippolito and Emanuele enlist Anna’s help to burn the newspapers and books they have been hiding behind the piano. As war breaks out in Europe, the moral world of the novel becomes increasingly haunted by the brutality of fascism, and by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. Ippolito sinks into a morbid depression at the German occupation of Poland, “with the Germans taking people away to die in the concentration camps … his will to live left him at the thought of those camps, where the Germans put their cigarettes out against the prisoners’ foreheads”.
In the second part of the novel, Italy too is at war. Anna is by this time married, a young mother, helping to conceal fugitives from the fascist regime in the cellar of her home. In one long tumbling sentence, from the point of view of the man who has become Anna’s husband, Ginzburg evokes the catastrophic unravelling of ordinary life:
He looked out of the window at the refugees from Naples who were now going hither and thither about the lanes of the village, carrying mattresses and babies, he looked and said how sad it was to see all these mattresses carried about here and there all over Italy, Italy was now pouring mattresses out of her ravaged houses.
Politics for Anna is no longer a daydream among the rose trees, but a question of supreme moral urgency. In times of crisis, she learns – and we learn along with her – that there can be no ethics without politics.
How do we know what is right? And how can we live by that knowledge?
Ginzburg’s work is concerned, it seems to me more than anything, with the distinction between what is right and what is wrong. All Our Yesterdays approaches this question intellectually and ideologically, with an interest in the development of moral theories and belief systems; and it also and equally approaches this question from a practical and human point of view. In other words, it poses two questions of equal significance. Firstly, how do we know what is right? And secondly, how can we live by that knowledge? Reading this novel, we get to know its characters as if they were our own friends, or even ourselves. Many of them are trying hard in various ways to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong. As the war penetrates further into their lives, some must make terrible compromises in order to survive, while some cannot survive at all. But as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. These are not people born with special moral qualities, people who find it easy to be brave and honourable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are. As Anna’s husband tells her: “No one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life.” Ginzburg shows us the possibility of this courage, she bears witness to the possibility, and reading her work we know and believe also.
This is not a novel that turns its face away from evil. Like any story of the second world war, it tells of almost unendurable grief, loss, violence and injustice. But it is also a story about the possibility of knowing what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences. As readers, we understand and love the novel’s characters in all their humanity – and for a moment or two, their courage seems to illuminate, in a flash of radiance, the meaning of human life. And yet, at the novel’s close, after the war has ended, Ginzburg is careful to show the difficult task that awaits those who survive. A character who has spent the war editing an anti-fascist publication struggles to adjust to his new working conditions:
He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was. But newspapers that had to come out every day with the rising of the sun, without any danger or fear, that was another story. You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger or fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and you knew perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn’t cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.
These are characters from whom the war has taken a great deal, almost everything. But the challenge that faces them in the end is to make sense of a world that is no longer at war, a world in which heroic acts of courage are no longer necessary or even possible, a world in which newspapers have to “come out every day with the rising of the sun”. All Our Yesterdays was published seven years after the end of the war, and it is difficult not to hear Ginzburg’s own voice in this passage, sitting and grinding away at her desk, “without either danger or fear”, trying to make sense of what remains.
To me, All Our Yesterdays is a perfect novel, which is to say, it is completely what it is attempting to be, and nothing else. It is a book that shows in simple and intelligent prose both how large and how small a novel ought to be. Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the 20th century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. As readers, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Ginzburg’s novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them. This accomplishment is made possible by Ginzburg’s extraordinary understanding of the human soul, by her brilliance as a prose stylist and above all by her incomparable moral clarity. All Our Yesterdays is among the great novels of its century, and Ginzburg among the great novelists. Speaking for myself, as a reader, as a writer and as a human being, her work has touched and transformed my life. I hope that you might give it the opportunity to do the same to yours.
All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Angus Davidson, is published by Daunt. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/11/nhs-trusts-paying-agency-doctors-up-to-5200-a-shift-labour-research-shows | Society | 2022-12-11T22:30:43.000Z | Peter Walker | NHS paying up to £5,200 a shift for agency doctors, Labour research shows | NHS trusts are paying as much as £5,200 a shift for agency doctors, figures uncovered by Labour have shown, with the party saying that low staffing levels resulted in a significant rise in the use of temporary workers last year.
In what Labour called an indication of a “desperate” staffing crisis in the health service, freedom of information requests to every English NHS trust showed they paid £3bn to agencies for staff during 2021-22, 20% more than in the previous year.
In addition, trusts spent £6bn on so-called bank staff – NHS professionals paid to carry out temporary shifts, including employees looking for extra work.
In response to a question on the most they had paid that year for a single doctor’s shift, one in three trusts said this was more than £3,000, and three-quarters paid over £2,000.
The overall most expensive shift, at the Northern Care Alliance NHS foundation trust in Greater Manchester, cost £5,234. The same trust spent the most overall on agency doctors: £21m last year.
One of Labour’s big pushes for its NHS strategy would be to recruit more permanent staff, including a doubling of medical school places to 15,000 a year.
Shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting. Photograph: Lucy North/PA
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said it was “infuriating that while taxpayers are paying over the odds on agency doctors the government has cut medical school places”.
Separately, Streeting has become engaged in a bitter war of words with the British Medical Association (BMA) after saying the doctors’ union would need to become more accepting of change if a Labour government was to provide more resources to the NHS.
The BMA criticised Streeting for what it called “disappointing” comments after he used an interview to accuse the union of being hostile towards vitally needed NHS reform efforts.
Streeting had told the Sunday Telegraph: “Given that we have committed to more staff, I cannot for the life of me understand why the BMA is so hostile to the idea that with more staff must come better standards for patients.
“Whenever I point out the appalling state of access to primary care, where currently a record 2 million people are waiting more than a month to see a GP, I am treated like some sort of heretic by the BMA – who seem to think any criticism of patient access to primary care is somehow an attack on GPs.”
In the interview, Streeting highlighted what he called a “something-for-nothing culture in the NHS” and accused the BMA of being out of touch.
A vote last month by GPs in England to cut surgeries’ core opening hours to 9am to 5pm made doctors “look like they’re living on a different planet and, worst of all, aren’t really thinking about the best interests of patients”, Streeting said.
Dr Emma Runswick, deputy chair of council at the BMA, said the comments were “incredibly disappointing”.
She said: “The anger for that crisis should be directed squarely at the government and their failure to invest, not at those who work in the NHS or the unions who represent them.
“It wasn’t so long ago that Mr Streeting and the Labour party were clapping healthcare workers for their contributions during the pandemic, so to hear them now accusing staff of a ‘something for nothing’ culture and potentially supporting further real-terms pay cuts will leave many staff extremely concerned.”
The BMA did accept “that a strong workforce goes hand in hand with patient standards and that investment in the workforce is the only way to improve our NHS”, Runswick added.
“We very much hope Mr Streeting will focus his attention on challenging this government on ensuring that they will offer strong support to the doctors, nurses and other NHS workers who are now suffering unprecedented levels of exhaustion and burnout,” she said.
Asked about the comments on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show, Streeting said: “I was just responding in that interview with the Telegraph to criticism they levelled at me.”
He went on: “I do understand the pressure that doctors are under – they do a very difficult job against a very difficult backdrop – but what I’m saying is, if we’re putting investment into the NHS, as the next Labour government will, we have got to expect better results for patients, and ultimately, it’s my job to be the patients’ champion.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/03/fertility-treatment-ivf-selling-eggs | Opinion | 2017-05-03T13:52:23.000Z | Jessica Hepburn | Behind the latest IVF furore lies untold human suffering | Jessica Hepburn | The latest furore to hit the fertility industry exposes what a murky, complicated business it is. A number of the UK’s private clinics have been accused of misleading desperate, cash-strapped fertility patients into donating their own eggs for other people’s treatment. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt said the findings were “serious and worrying” and the UK’s regulator of fertility treatment, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has launched an investigation.
One of the problems with the exposé is that the situation is far from straightforward. Egg sharing is an established and accepted practice in this country. In return for free treatment, a woman donates some of her own eggs harvested during an IVF cycle to another woman who does not have eggs of her own. It is supposed to be a primarily altruistic gesture, although undoubtedly if you can’t afford IVF there is a financial incentive (ie you don’t have to pay). However, the recent allegations suggest that some clinics are not offering just free treatment but money for eggs (which is not allowed), and that some clinics are proactively promoting the practice in order to obtain eggs to sell on at a significant profit.
Added to this is the suggestion that clinics are not counselling patients on what egg donation really means. One clinic was said to describe it as being like “donating blood”. In this country, if a person is conceived by egg or sperm donation through a licensed fertility clinic they are legally allowed to find out their genetic origins when they reach 18 years of age. I’ve not yet heard of a blood cell doing that.
It's not a perk when big employers offer egg-freezing – it's a bogus bribe
Suzanne Moore
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There’s a shortage of egg donors in the UK and growing demand, and this does undoubtedly present clinics with a possible motive for underhand practices. The picture is further complicated by the fact that the situation is very different abroad. In countries such as the US young women are being paid handsomely for donating their eggs, and can do so anonymously. We should pride ourselves on having the gold standard in regulations – most human beings want to know where they come from (just look at the popularity of TV shows such as Who Do You Think You Are and the growing numbers of genealogy junkies scraping their cheeks and sending off their DNA). But in a competitive environment with targets to meet, and with many patients turning to treatment abroad, where donor eggs are more plentiful, the temptation to mislead could be there.
The people I really fear for in all this are the patients. These women are often desperate and vulnerable. They are the hidden faces of the fertility industry because so many of them are afraid to “come out”. I know because for years I was one of them, juggling my job with going through multiple rounds of treatment in secret in my pursuit of motherhood. Infertility and assisted conception still carry a stigma that is felt acutely by those going through it, but little understood or empathised with by those who are not. It affects your relationships with your family, your friends, your partner and at work, and above all it decimates your self-esteem. And why would you feel confident about saying you have the infertility illness (and it is an illness – your reproductive system isn’t working as it should) when we’re so conflicted in this country about whether or not IVF should be provided on our glorious NHS.
Who ever admits how many rounds of IVF they went through and how much it cost?
This is the environment that people who are struggling to conceive exist in. Perhaps it doesn’t affect the cash-rich celebrities sporting their menopausal miracle babies who can only have been achieved through egg donation. But who ever admits this or discloses how many rounds of IVF they went through and how much it cost? Arguably it doesn’t even affect me. Next month I pay off the final loan instalment of my last round of IVF from three years ago; I’m the sort of person who was lucky enough to find a bank that would loan me money, and that was my choice.
What about the people who don’t have the money and whom financial institutions won’t touch? The people who are the victims of the IVF postcode lottery but want to be parents too. Are we saying that if your arm is broken, we’ll fix it, but if your womb is broken, we won’t? Does your wealth determine your right to try to have a baby? Are we encouraging people to donate their eggs out of desperation to obtain treatment they couldn’t otherwise afford? Remember that they are running the risk that another woman might end up with their genetic offspring while they don’t. And why is there still so much suffering in silence around this whole subject? It’s not just the private fertility industry and the NHS that have to answer these questions. We all do. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/nov/19/justine-roberts-maternity-leave-mumsnet | Women in Leadership | 2013-11-19T13:30:13.000Z | Justine Roberts | I left my job at five months pregnant: Mumsnet founder talks | Many moons ago, I left a job in a bank when I was five months pregnant. I'd overheard a conversation I wasn't meant to; my bosses discussing how they were going to cut my clients out of a lucrative deal because I'd be off soon and the chances are I wouldn't be back. I was stunned. I'd worked hard for years in an overwhelmingly male environment – been as good, if not better than the boys and been promoted fast. But when it came down to it, this was no place for me and I left, proving my bosses right after all.
A couple of years later I started Mumsnet, with the idea if I was in charge at least, then I could guarantee a family-friendly workplace. Too often in banking I'd seen the few women who did manage to get on pretending their family didn't exist. I wanted Mumsnet to recognise one essential truth. If you're a parent, your children come first, and work second.
That was way back in the last millennium. I think we'd all like to believe things have improved for pregnant women since then. But the evidence from Mumsnet, somewhat depressingly, suggests otherwise.
Our users still describe shocking examples of discrimination. One talked about being made to work extra hours while pregnant because she was going to be "leaving them in the lurch". Another said: "On my second week back I was sent away for a week, there was no way to get out of it. Two weeks later I was deployed over 100 miles from home. I had no choice but to stop breastfeeding."
In a Mumsnet survey a few years ago four out of five mothers said they felt their promotion prospects had been worsened by pregnancy and a similar number said they felt becoming a mother made them less employable.
Despite the legislation designed to protect women from such discrimination, many told us they felt their job was under threat when they came back after maternity leave.
Clearly, plenty of companies didn't understand the value of helping parents to balance work and family.
That's why in 2010 we launched the Mumsnet Family Friendly programme, which aims to help companies improve their policies and celebrate their innovations. We knew that mothers cared about their careers and yearned to be valued for new skills developed once they became parents, not written off or excluded because "part-time" and "flexible" are too often associated with "unambitious" or "unreliable".
In the three years that the programme has been running we've worked with companies employing millions of staff and we've seen tangible improvements. From gradual return to work schemes to seemingly less innovative but incredibly impactful core working hours policies, which ensure that being part-time doesn't mean you always miss the most important meetings.
Of course, some businesses will never get it. Like the one whose HR director told a 36-year-old Mumsnet user: "Look love, we all know that you are getting older and that you will want another one and that your priorities will change; and so will how we think about you."
But smart businesses understand that training up women only to lose them through a lack of flexibility when they become parents is bad business. Let's face it, mothers continue to do the bulk of the juggling and while that remains the case, the only surefire way to keep women in the workplace is to help them make that juggling act work. And the single biggest ask from those juggling mums is for flexibility.
Surely in a digital age where we all walk around with a device that means we can be reached almost anytime and anywhere, that ought to be more possible than ever? Women need to be able to put their children first but with a mobile phone in your hand, work can come a close second.
Justine Roberts is the CEO of Mumsnet and Gransnet. Follow her on Twitter @justine_roberts
Sign up to become a member of the Women in Leadership community here for more comment, analysis and best practice direct to your inbox. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/dec/24/susannah-clapp-10-best-theatre-shows-of-2023 | Stage | 2023-12-24T16:00:01.000Z | Susannah Clapp | Theatre: Susannah Clapp’s 10 best shows of 2023 | 1. A Streetcar Named Desire
Almeida, London; January
Rebecca Frecknall’s transporting production, with a tinderbox Paul Mescal, fascinating Anjana Vasan and marvellous Patsy Ferran, parachuted into the lead role at a few days’ notice.
2. Phaedra
Lyttelton, London; February
Simon Stone’s galvanic reimagining of a classic drama. Among a magnificent cast – including Janet McTeer and Paul Chahidi – teenager Archie Barnes highlighted one of the year’s most cheering aspects: the surge in gifted young actors. The RSC’s Hamnet featured exceptional performances from Ajani Cabey, Alex Jarrett and Harmony Rose-Bremner as Shakespeare’s children. In The Effect, Taylor Russell made a strong stage debut alongside an incandescent Paapa Essiedu.
3. Guys & Dolls
Bridge, London; March (runs until 31 August)
Guys & Dolls at the Bridge. Photograph: ©Manuel Harlan
Nicholas Hytner’s knockout production jived all over the Bridge and into the heart. It was a thin year for new musicals, but Conrad Murray and the Beatbox Academy lit up Battersea Arts Centre with their explosive hip-hop Pied Piper, while at the Gielgud, Old Friends provided Sondheim satisfactions: caustic, melancholy, rich in double-takes and teasing rhymes.
4. Infinite Life
Dorfman, London; November (runs until 13 January)
Annie Baker’s mesmeric play about illness.
5. Alter
Milton Keynes international festival; July
Catalan company Kamchàtka’s moonlit exploration of migration in the glades of a Buckinghamshire wood. The audience were told to bring stout shoes and a potato: both were put to good use.
6. Dear England
Olivier, London; June (runs at the Prince Edward theatre, London, until 13 January)
James Graham’s Dear England at the National. Photograph: Marc Brenner
James Graham scored with his football play, looking at the state of the country through the fortunes of the England team. There was not much overtly political drama in 2023 – playwrights may feel they can’t match the pantomime arguments of the House of Commons – though Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor continued their meticulous chronicle of catastrophe in Grenfell: System Failure.
7. A pair of Macbeths
Donmar Warehouse, London; December (runs until 10 February) / The Depot, Liverpool; December (tours to Edinburgh and London until 23 March)
Macbeth, also staged at the RSC, was the year’s most popular Shakespeare play. I can’t detect a widespread appetite for regicide, but the tragedy’s wildness touches a pulse, as does its interest in equivocal truth. Are the witches early bearers of fake news? David Tennant and Cush Jumbo simmered through headphones in Max Webster’s Donmar staging. Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma were the magnetic murderers in Simon Godwin’s warehouse production.
8. Boys from the Blackstuff
Liverpool’s Royal Court; September
Gissa play. Alan Bleasdale’s tales of tarmacers were stirringly adapted by (again) James Graham. The play found the perfect stage at Liverpool’s tremendous Royal Court, which specialises in reflecting the life of the city – and offers supper and new writing for £30 a seat.
9. Clyde’s
Donmar Warehouse; October
Patrick Gibson, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo, Sebastian Orozco and Giles Terera in Clyde’s at the Donmar Warehouse. Photograph: Marc Brenner
Lynn Nottage’s X-ray of impoverishment in America – which contained an inventive celebration of the sandwich – was dynamically directed by Lynette Linton. Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo firecrackered across the stage.
10. Stranger Things: The First Shadow
Phoenix theatre, London; December (runs until 30 June)
Turned the idea of technology on stage Upside Down. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/we-rush-to-condemn-fakers-such-as-dan-mallory-world-has-made-impostors-of-us-all | Opinion | 2019-02-10T09:30:32.000Z | Rachel Cooke | We rush to condemn fakers such as Dan Mallory but the world has made impostors of us all | Rachel Cooke | What’s the difference between something going viral and a storm in a teacup? Not an awful lot, it often seems to me. Last week, everyone in publishing and quite a lot of people in the media were talking – I mean online, although presumably their offices were also ablaze with the subject, indignation rising from their desks like smoke – about a profile in the New Yorker.
In the piece, it was revealed that Dan Mallory, aka AJ Finn, author of the bestselling thriller The Woman at the Window, is a fantasist who has told an awful lot of lies: a series of grandiose and frequently ghastly deceptions that, according to some, may have helped his extraordinarily successful career in the book trade. (Before he was a writer, he was a highly paid editor, most recently at William Morrow in New York.)
In case you missed the whole fantastical kerfuffle, let me briefly recap. Mallory is a Waspy, 39-year-old American with a chiselled jaw and a million-dollar deal for the movie adaptation of his novel and whose elaborate fabrications, according to the New Yorker, include his own terminal brain cancer, the death of his parents, his brother’s suicide, his two doctorates and, on one occasion, dogsitting (not even the line about the dog turned out to be true; during a telephone conversation with his bosses, Mallory apparently tried to prove its existence by hammily shouting: “No! Get down!”).
No wonder, then, that on social media his unmasking provoked plenty of exaggerated eye-rolling and, seemingly within minutes, a spoof Dan Mallory Twitter account. The whole thing was so juicy. Such bonhomie, however, didn’t last long. Pretty soon, it was replaced with something much less enjoyable – an implacable self-righteousness that put an end not only to the jokes, but also to the possibility of explanation and inquiry.
I’m not here to defend Mallory. He shouldn’t have behaved as he did and the statement he has since issued in which, in effect, he begs for a free pass for his misdeeds on account of the fact that he has bipolar disorder is risible; such a diagnosis cannot account for his behaviour. Nor am I going to come over all saintly and deny that I am as prone to schadenfreude and envy as the next writer, although it has to be said that the more I read of Ian Parker’s New Yorker profile, which is 12,000 words long, the more it seemed to me to resemble a cosmic sledgehammer and Mallory a tiny hazelnut.
Nevertheless, I find myself amazed by the response of the wider publishing world to the revelations about him. How bizarre that people see his inexorable rise, and the untruths on which it was based, only in political terms – as an indictment of the way publishing treats women and people of colour, who simply do not rise as high as white men – rather than as an example, too, of human folly and frailty. Such folly and frailty, by the way, applies to those who fell for him as much as to Mallory himself.
In her short story, Now More Than Ever, Zadie Smith wrote: ‘I instinctively sympathise with the guilty.’ Photograph: Brian Dowling/Getty Images
It is bewildering to me that people who essentially make their living from the telling of stories should be moved to such grim piety at this real-life narrative: more angry than fascinated; blank condemnation where there should be curiosity. We know very well that the virtual mob likes nothing more than to “cancel” those whom it regards as having transgressed, whether in word or deed. But to see publishers heading in this direction, when nuance and complexity, drama and strangeness should be their very lifeblood, strikes me as both disheartening and not a little chilling.
But then, my instincts tend more in the direction of the narrator of Zadie Smith’s recent story about our present moment, Now More Than Ever. I have an urge to understand those who are deemed “beyond the pale” (whatever that means: the accused, these days, rarely are). As she puts it: “I instinctively sympathise with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.”
I don’t know what, if anything, is wrong with Mallory. It may be that he is, to use an old-fashioned word, mad. Or it may be that he is simply bad. More likely, it is a combination of things. In truth, it’s difficult to separate him from the wider literary culture in which he operated: a culture in which writers, whatever their sensibility or suitability, are expected to perform like seals at every opportunity, whether online, on the radio or at festivals; a culture in which some kind of backstory is useful, not to say essential (and all the more so if you are white, male and seemingly privileged). A quiet writer is an invisible writer and therefore an unsuccessful one.
Nor is it possible to argue that Mallory, however extreme his case, isn’t on a continuum: whether we care to admit it or not, we’re all rolling along on a conveyor belt of pretence and deceit now. Some of this has to do with identity politics and the pressure it exerts in terms of how others may perceive us (and how we want them to). In my case, there came a point when I stopped being coy about aspects of my northern childhood; what I’d previously kept hidden, I began subtly to deploy, the better to make myself seem less privileged or perhaps just more “authentic”.
Some of it has to do with the internet and the way platforms such as Instagram invite us to invent (or reinvent) ourselves: to tweak and craft our images, to “curate” our every thought, to offer ourselves up for the approval of others.
Put the two together and what you get is a ruthless, deadening and, above all, unthinking artifice. It covers everything, like enamel. To pinch from Smith again: “There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem… these are out of fashion.” We are, in other words, all impostors now.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer writer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/jul/22/worst-opening-ceremonies-sport-ever | Sport | 2012-07-21T23:06:02.000Z | Michael Hogan | The worst opening ceremonies ever to grace a major sporting event | One small step
The 1991 World Student Games were held in Sheffield. Who better to open them than local lass and first British astronaut Helen Sharman, fresh from a trip to the Mir space station? Trouble was, more used to floating weightless than trotting round a track, she tripped and dropped the torch, extinguishing the ceremonial flame.
The tooth will out
The 2008 Olympics' opening bash at Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium was deemed a success, with spectacular fireworks (aided by CGI, it turned out) and flawless dance routines. Yet controversy ensued when it emerged that cute, pigtailed nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, who "sang" the national anthem, was miming to another schoolgirl's voice. Embarrassed organisers were forced to admit that the vocals actually belonged to seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who had won a national contest to perform but was deemed unsuitable due to her bad teeth.
Hubble bubble cauldron trouble
The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver opened on an awkward note, due to a massive malfunctioning cauldron. Four pillars were supposed to rise, enabling a quartet of Canadian sporting heroes to walk up them and jointly light the flame. Only three legs rose to the occasion, leaving speed-skater Catriona LeMay Doan standing sheepishly with a flaming torch but nowhere to go.
A scuff Supreme
Not one but two American showbiz queens came a cropper launching the 1994 World Cup at Soldier Field in Chicago. After performing a medley of her hits, soul diva Diana Ross had to take a penalty from a few yards out. Humiliatingly, she toe-punted the shot yards wide. The goal promptly split in half and fell apart. The ceremony's presenter Oprah Winfrey then slipped off her on-stage dais.
Tarred feathers
To get the 1988 Seoul Olympics under way, a flock of doves was released into the stadium as a symbol of peace. Sadly, that peace didn't extend to the birds, and when the cauldron was lit several doves were flame-grilled live on TV in front of billions.
He chutes, he scores
The 1988 Africa Cup of Nations kicked off in Casablanca with parachutists descending into the stadium and landing in the centre circle. Until the 10th skydiver veered off course and flew into a floodlight. He hung upside down from a pylon for 45 minutes while the ceremony continued below. Eventually a crane arrived to rescue him. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2013/jun/20/why-acceptable-daniel-radcliffe-disabled-character | Stage | 2013-06-20T15:59:00.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Why is it acceptable for an able-bodied actor to play a disabled character? | As I've written here recently, it's increasingly obvious that there's still a long way to go to increase employment opportunities for black and east Asian actors. Companies, directors, and casting directors need to be more alert to the decisions they make around recruiting actors. But what about opportunities for disabled actors?
Jenny Sealey, artistic director of the disabled-led theatre company Graeae and co-artistic director of the 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony, pointed out in an interview I did with her last year that prejudice against disabled actors remains rife. She cited the example of someone who told her that, if a play wasn't conceived by its writer to be performed by a disabled cast, and you cast an actor who was a wheelchair user, the play would become about that. "I was speechless," said Sealey. "Nobody would say that casting a black actor makes a play become about that – so why is a wheelchair user any different?"
Why indeed. But whereas it would now be unthinkable for a white actor to black up to play Othello, it seems that most of us don't even blink when able-bodied actors play disabled roles. In fact, there is perhaps no quicker way to glory at awards ceremonies, particularly in Hollywood movies. Jon Voight and Daniel Day-Lewis both won Oscars for cinematic portrayals of disabled characters.
Earlier this week, Daniel Radcliffe opened in the West End playing Billy, the lead role in Martin McDonagh's gleefully politically incorrect play The Cripple of Inishmaan. Radcliffe is clearly the box office draw; the play is very much a vehicle for him, and he's received warm reviews, with many pointing out that he is turning into a promising young actor. That's great. What interests me is that, while reviewers would quickly pounce on a white man playing Othello, almost no one has thought to comment on the fact that an able-bodied actor is playing a character who is disabled. We simply accept it as a norm, just as – in the 1980s – we accepted Jonathan Pryce playing The Engineer in Miss Saigon, something that would be totally unacceptable in the revival due in the West End next year.
Of course, the casting of Radcliffe is entirely about commercial interests. In 2009, when some protested about the casting of an actor with unimpaired sight and hearing to play the deaf and blind character Helen Keller in the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, the producers retorted that, without a star name, they would not have been able to raise the finance. Without Radcliffe, McDonagh's play would probably have not made it into Grandage's season.
But Equity counts rising numbers of disabled actors among its members, and in the wake of the Paralympics – which did so much to challenge and change perceptions – perhaps it's time to question why all minority casting is not equal. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/08/gerald-barry-alices-adventures-under-ground-royal-opera-barbican-beethoven-weekender-250 | Music | 2020-02-08T12:00:36.000Z | Fiona Maddocks | The week in classical: Alice’s Adventures Under Ground; Beethoven Weekender – review | Anyone who views opera as a rarefied pastime should gatecrash a schools matinee. On Monday lunchtime at the Royal Opera House, the roar in the auditorium, pre-curtain-up for Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, was as raucous as any playground. The collective “ooh” as the lights went down, and “aah” as the red velvet curtain came up made you wish all ROH audiences were as excitedly engaged, but on the whole they’re not year 4s (eight- and nine-year-olds). Schools, or parents, paid £7.50 per ticket, thanks to support from the Taylor Family Foundation and the Gerald and Gail Ronson Family Foundation, who surely deserve mention for their low-profile but vital philanthropy.
I was seated next to 90 children from Grays, Essex, who immediately, together with the rest of the auditorium, fell quiet at the sight of Alice (soprano Jennifer France) tumbling down, down, within a Pollock-style Victorian theatre, only to be confronted by giant-sized Drink Me bottles and Eat Me cakes. As the music raced and screeched in crazed scales and arpeggios, so Alice fought back with a mayhem of stratospherically high, ridiculous, show-off top Cs – apparently 30 of them – in the first minutes of music. Who knows what trouble Barry (b1952) got up to at his County Clare primary school.
This was the world’s first encounter with his version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in a full staging, before its opening night last Tuesday. Given a memorable concert premiere at the Barbican in 2016, it was conducted then, as now, by Thomas Adès, Barry’s friend and advocate. The composer has compressed Carroll’s best episodes, languid in comparison, into condensed matter of the most ear-popping, eye-popping variety.
The director-designer Antony McDonald, whose previous work includes the Royal Opera’s Hansel and Gretel and The Importance of Being Earnest (also by Barry and arguably even madder), might be the only person undaunted by the challenges of this nonstop, whirlwind fantasy. Mad Hatter, Mock Turtle, Red Knight, White Knight, Red Queen, White Queen, Tweedles -dum and -dee: all whistle by, each a glimpse, gone for ever. One fabulous costume is shed, another worn, with speed and finesse. The whole event lasts barely an hour.
Barry’s Alice is a true comedy, rare in opera – once you name Rossini, Donizetti, the Puccini of Gianni Schicchi, you have to stop and think – but its humour, for adults, is based on brilliant subversion of the familiar: of Carroll, of musical styles (Wagner, Verdi, Beethoven, music hall are wittily present), of language, of foolish human behaviour. Translating Jabberwocky into doggerel Russian, French and German is sillier and funnier if you know how silly and funny the original is. To say the young audience maintained a quizzical silence – except when Robert Murray as the eloquent Messenger, among his nine other roles, engaged in some high-speed bum waggling – isn’t to suggest they weren’t attentive. They were, impressively. But as Adès has said, Barry is “in the innovative line of the great Irish artists, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien” – writers who may not have made it on to the year 4 syllabus.
A scene from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer
However innocent their eye, they surely appreciated the magic and theatricality of this staging, and certainly roared approval when the end arrived. France’s Alice, Nicky Spence’s captivating White Rabbit, Alan Ewing’s melancholic Humpty Dumpty, with Allison Cook, Carole Wilson and Stephen Richardson, were nimble and heroic in the first of two casts. The Royal Opera orchestra, brass especially, entered Barry’s zany musical world with wildness and velocity. Adès kept all, including the important silences, under military control, right until the melancholy end. The following night, the other cast, led by Claudia Boyle as Alice, and pulling with equal weight, stirred plenty of chuckles from the adult audience, but this time the children present, prompted by the grownups’ example, realised they were allowed to laugh, and did.
Humpty Dumpty’s forlorn intoning of the Ode to Joy, sung to Carroll’s words “In winter when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight”, is one of Barry’s many and loving tributes to Beethoven. You only have to recall Beethoven’s own musical jokes to imagine how he would have enjoyed the later composer’s irony: try the cartoon extremes of variation 13 of the Diabelli Variations as a start. Beethoven blamed his seeming curmudgeonliness on his growing deafness, already fully in evidence by the age of 30, the time of his Symphony No 2. An example of one of his ear trumpets, a grotesque, cumbersome metal contraption – on show at the Barbican as part of a touring exhibition from the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn – must haunt any mind or imagination. Yet Symphony No 2 bursts with optimism and radiance, as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, under their music director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, demonstrated so vigorously at the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender.
Clockwise from top left: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts the CBSO in Symphonies 2 & 4; Sarah Mohr-Pietsch puts a question to violinist Tai Murray; Mark Elder conducts the Hallé in Beethoven’s Ninth; and the Carducci Quartet. Photographs: Mark Allan
This coming together of the UK’s regional orchestras – never before under one roof, as far as anyone could recall – was an inspired celebration of Beethoven in his 250th birthday year. It’s impossible to convey every aspect of a full two days that ranged from a soft play Baby Beethoven Squish Space to recorded birdsong in the Barbican Conservatory, as well as all nine symphonies. As fringe activities, repeated through the sold-out weekend (a bargain £45 all-in), Simon Callow read the composer’s letters with the excellent Carducci Quartet performing; Gerard McBurney introduced the often witty gems that are Beethoven’s piano Bagatelles, with pianist Christopher Park; and Sarah Mohr-Pietsch shared the awe-inspiring secrets of Beethoven’s own, honey-toned violin, played by Daniel Sepec, with Tai Murray performing, in contrast, on a modern violin.
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched the weekend proper, under their chief conductor Vasily Petrenko, with elegant, nuanced accounts of Symphonies 5 and 6, and some remarkable pianissimo string playing. Then the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, with Kirill Karabits, uncorked the fizzing energy of No 1 and the contrasting sobriety and wit, turbulence and anarchy of No 3 “Eroica”. On Saturday evening, to end the day, and without worrying about any numerical harness, the CBSO paired the two least familiar symphonies, Nos 2 and 4: check out their electrifying performance of these works (from Birmingham), now on BBC Sounds.
On Sunday, the smaller forces of the Royal Northern Sinfonia – an orchestra I don’t know as well as I should – made light of Beethoven’s own beloved, the Eighth, and stormed through the terrors of No 7. Their conductor, Lars Vogt, also a star pianist who has directed the concertos from the keyboard, has a way of giving modest gestures, a curve of the hand, a slight bend of the knees, yet eliciting quickfire results. No wonder this wonderful ensemble got such particular cheers after the hair-raising finale of the Seventh.
Lars Vogt conducts the Royal Northern Sinfonia at the Beethoven Weekender. Photograph: Mark Allan
Lastly came the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Mark Elder, who brought wisdom and magnificence to the Ninth, with an accomplished quartet of soloists and the Hallé Choir, without scores, singing the Ode to Joy with belting fervour. Many of us were there all weekend. The ovation was, in part, for the Ninth, for its invention and ingenuity, as well as for its wider associations and resonances. Chiefly, the long applause was for the whole event, and the limitless, humanistic genius of Beethoven.
Star ratings (out of five)
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground ★★★★★
Beethoven Weekender ★★★★★
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 9 February
All nine Beethoven symphonies will be repeated at the Sage Gateshead’s Big Beethoven Weekend 1 (with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra replacing the CBSO), 22-23 February | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/03/former-yugoslavia-war-crimes-hunt | World news | 2011-08-03T19:00:00.000Z | Julian Borger | The hunt for the former Yugoslavia's war criminals: mission accomplished | The man who walked into a forest clearing in northern Serbia did not look like a wartime leader who had spent seven years on the run. There was no face paint or camouflage – just a chubby, balding man in a sky blue T-shirt decorated with what appeared to be a modernist rendering of an ice-cream cone.
It is hard to imagine a more perfect embodiment of the banality of evil. The man in the forest was Goran Hadžíc, the leader of Croatia's Serb minority during the Balkan wars of the 90s. The former warehouse worker is charged with playing a leading role in the destruction of the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991 – the first time a major European town had been destroyed since the second world war. It was carried out with a barbarity reminiscent of the Nazi era. At least 264 Croats and other non-Serbs were taken from Vukovar hospital to a nearby pig farm and tortured before being shot and dumped in a mass grave.
Before his capture on 20 July, Hadžíc had spent seven of the past 20 years living under a false name in Russia, where he was hidden by diehard ultra-nationalist priests who still populate the Serb Orthodox church. But he started running out of money, and it was his apparent desperate attempt to flog a Modigliani portrait (it is so far unclear whether it was real or forged, or whether he even owned such a portrait) that got him noticed by the Belgrade authorities, who put a 24-hour tail on the contacts they thought he might go to for help.
On 20 July, Hadžíc broke cover to collect some cash from a friend in some heavily wooded hills in an area of the northern Vojvodina, where many of his relatives live. As the meeting began, Serbian commandos emerged from the undergrowth in black balaclavas and surrounded them. There is some dispute over whether Hadžíc was armed, but in any case he did not resist, meekly admitting his identity as he gave himself up.
The arrest was a pathetic and long-overdue finale to the age of the Balkan warlord. Of the 161 war crimes suspects indicted by the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Hadžíc's court appearance in The Hague last month, besuited and glumly responding to the South Korean judge, marked the end of a hunt that began with the tribunal's creation in 1993.
It has been a long time coming, but with every name now crossed off the list of Hague indictees, it has arguably been the most successful manhunt in history. The search for the former Yugoslavia's war criminals involved the US National Security Agency's latest spy satellites at one end of the technological scale and, at the other, a couple of SAS soldiers lying in a trench for weeks watching their quarry.
It involved subterfuge, counter-subterfuge and car chases straight out of The Italian Job. It is a story that unwound in the shadows cast by the Balkan conflict, and which has been largely untold. With the Hague hit-list now behind bars or dead, the details are only just coming to light and some of the diplomats and soldiers who have talked to the Guardian were speaking about the hunt for the first time.
The tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – and its twin for Rwanda – represents the first concerted attempt to deal with crimes against humanity since the Nuremberg trials after the second world war. Unlike the purely victor's justice at those trials, the UN tribunal sought to hold to account all parties to the Yugoslav horror. And while Nuremberg missed Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, The Hague finished the job. On top of that, the ex-Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals have paved the way for the creation of a permanent tribunal for judging mass murder, the International Criminal Court (ICC).
None of these achievements was pre-ordained or even seemed likely when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in 1993, largely as a sop to the western conscience at the height of the Bosnian war, in lieu of actual intervention. It was then promptly ignored by those who had created it.
Even after the worst atrocity in Europe since 1945, the Serb massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, there was no international effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. Those primarily responsible, President Slobodan Miloševic of Serbia and the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, all acted as if the court in The Hague did not exist. So too did the world powers whose long-awaited intervention helped bring the war to an end. The immediate focus of the world's diplomats was hammering out a peace deal in Dayton, Ohio.
Goran Hadzic (in beret) arriving at a session of the Serb republic of Krajina's parliament, April 1993. Photograph: Ranko Cukovic/Reuters
In the summer of 1996, months after the Dayton peace agreement was signed, little had changed. Karadžic was able to drive across Bosnia, through four international checkpoints, waving insouciantly at the Nato troops on guard, whose orders – dictated by a nervous Clinton administration – all but precluded them from taking action. "The rules of engagement said in effect: 'Don't pick him up, unless you actually trip over him,'" recalls Charles Crawford, who was UK ambassador to Bosnia at the time. "Anything that involved going off the road even 10 yards was regarded as 'not being in the course of your normal duties'."
In April 1996, just before being sent to Sarajevo as ambassador, Crawford attended a meeting in the magnificent map room at the Foreign Office, at which the issue was not whether to arrest Karadžic but whether to let his party run in the coming post-Dayton elections. "The Brits and other Europeans were wriggling about banning the autumn election posters of Karadžic and Mladic, saying it's all very difficult," Crawford says. "I thought it was ghastly. The Europeans were evincing a disconcerting feebleness, brooding on the supposed downsides of being tough. The Americans were saying we were dealing with a bunch of hillbillies and we had 70,000 troops. The Americans won the argument hands down."
In fact, the Americans were keener on the Europeans arresting war criminals than they were on doing it themselves. Clinton was fearful any US casualties could cost him his re-election in November 1996. It was the US president who had insisted on the restrictive rules of engagement for Sfor, the Nato "stabilisation" force in Bosnia.
But the US special envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, saw it as American humiliation. In June 1996, he wrote to the president: "The implications of Karadžic's defiance go far beyond Bosnia itself. If he succeeds, basic issues of American leadership that seemed settled in the public's eye after Dayton will re-emerge. Having reasserted American leadership in Europe, it would be a tragedy if we let it slip away again."
It was only once Clinton had secured his re-election, and appointed Madeleine Albright – a former refugee from Nazi Europe who insisted US military might should be used to prevent a repeat of such atrocities – that Washington began to focus seriously on catching war criminals.
And as the war criminals' impunity grew more and more blatant, several British officials came round to the same point of view. Towards the end of 1996, Crawford wrote a telegram from Sarajevo to the head of the Foreign Office's Balkan desk, in which he recalls arguing: "We have to arrest these people and pull out the poison, because we can't expect the Bosnians to take us seriously if they think these people are still running the show. We are shooting ourselves in the foot."
In the last months of John Major's government, steps were taken to prepare for action. War crimes suspects in British-occupied western Bosnia, who had been named in sealed indictments issued by the tribunal, began to be shadowed by the SAS. Lawyers drew up detailed procedures for handing captives over to The Hague, under which an ICTY doctor and lawyer would be on hand for each arrest. But it was left to Tony Blair's new Labour government, elected in May 1997, to give the green light to the first capture operation. "Blair, and [foreign secretary Robin] Cook in particular, were much more forward and much more willing to take risks in the name of stability and morality than their predecessors had been," recalls a senior European diplomat.
The first war-crimes arrests in former Yugoslavia were carried out on 10 July 1997 in an operation codenamed Tango. For the preceding four weeks it had involved SAS soldiers lying in a shallow trench beside a lake near the town of Prijedor, watching a man called Simo Drljaca. During the war, Drljaca had been Prijedor's police chief, and had organised the "ethnic cleansing" of the town's Muslims, who were driven into a string of horrific concentration camps at Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. Many of the inmates were beaten or starved to death.
In peacetime retirement, Drljaca had relaxed, spending a lot of time fishing at the lake, and on this particular summer morning he had brought along his son and brother-in-law, unaware that his impunity had run its course.
In the clipped account of one British official: "It was a hardcore SAS operation. The SAS came out of the undergrowth saying: 'We are here to arrest you.' Drljaca pulled out a pistol and fired at them and they shot him."
At exactly the same time, another SAS team entered Prijedor hospital, posing as Red Cross officials, and arrested its director, Milan Kovacevic, who as the town's wartime mayor had given the orders for the round-up of Muslims. Kovacevic did not resist and within a few minutes found himself on a helicopter bound for a US army base, on the first leg of a journey to The Hague.
Operation Tango triggered an outcry. The Serbs accused the British of executing Drljaca in cold blood, and the Muslim government in Sarajevo, somewhat perversely, accused Cook, on his first visit to the region, of deliberately creating a martyr as part of a "pro-Serb" plot. But, crucially, Tango did not spark the feared conflagration. "What Prijedor did was show it could be done. And the blowback was not as bad as people had thought," a senior European diplomat says. The US, German, Dutch and French contingents in Sfor started carrying out their own capture operations and the restrictive rules of engagement, ignored anyway by the SAS in Operation Tango, were relaxed, allowing the troops to go hunting for suspects.
Chastened by Drljaca's fate, the likely targets in the British zone went to ground. The next SAS operation, codenamed Ensue, did not take place until September 1998, when a team crossed into Serbia and grabbed a suspect called Stevan Todorovic – wanted for war crimes in the town of Bosanski Samac – in a log cabin hideaway in the middle of a forest. According to Todorovic's lawyer, whose account was privately confirmed by a British official, Todorovic was bound and hooded and bundled into a car, and then taken over the Drina river on a rubber Zodiac boat, into Bosnia, before being extradited to The Hague.
The ruins of Vukovar, November 1991. It was the first large European town to have been destroyed since the second world war. Photograph: Art Zamur/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding. In fact, Sfor officers remained discreetly in touch with Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, on the grounds that – in the words of one British official – he was still "honcho numero uno" in the military and could therefore deliver results.
Back in Sarajevo, Crawford, the British ambassador, offered to drive to the nearby Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale to try to talk Karadžic into giving himself up. "There was a chance that, speaking to him in Serbian, I might have got him to sit down and think about it and maybe just surrender. Maybe a slim chance, but a chance worth taking," he says. Cook thought it was a good idea, but submitted the plan to the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who overruled him.
The Americans had their own plans for Karadžic and were at that time putting together an operation to seize him. But the operation was abruptly called off when it was leaked to the Bosnian Serb leader. US officials quickly blamed the French, and in particular a dashing and aristocratic young major called Hervé Gourmelon, who was discovered to be holding secret meetings with Karadžic.
Gourmelon, who has since retired from the army, could not be reached for comment. The defence ministry in Paris said at the time he had been part of an independent French bid to persuade Karadžic to surrender quietly. Ministry officials denied he had given away the US plan but swiftly transferred him back to France because his contacts "might have appeared questionable".
The Gourmelon affair drove a deep rift between Paris and Washington, and the Americans started conducting their own operations in the French zone of control without telling their distrusted allies. On one such operation in 2002, Karadžic's wife opened her door at one o'clock in the morning to find a group of US special forces soldiers in balaclavas, led by an urbane major general in a beret asking politely if they might come in for tea. The major general was David Petraeus, later US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and now soon to start work as the head of the CIA. He was doing what his officers called his "Eddie Murphy routine" after the role Murphy played in the movie 48 Hrs as a convict who used a broad smile and easy charm to go after a ruthless murderer.
It worked in the movie, but not in real life. Ljiljana Karadžic turned out to be a match for the future spy-chief and his men. The night-time visit, and others that followed, were intended to rattle her into making contact with her husband while under constant surveillance by satellites, aircraft and ground reconnaissance teams. But she took elaborate precautions against being followed. On one occasion, a former Sfor officer recalls: "We saw her bags go out in front of her house. A black Audi drew up and she got in. We followed her but she went into a covered car-park while we waited outside. Six different black Audis, all the same, came out. She was in one of them, but we couldn't follow them all and we lost her."
The Nato hunting teams tried everything they could think of to pick up the trail. They looked out for satellite dishes on houses in remote locations and found out who was subscribing to Belgrade newspapers in out-of-the-way villages, on the grounds that war crimes suspects would have a greater appetite for news of the outside world than their country neighbours.
It was all to no avail. Sfor had picked up some of the low-hanging fruit, but those suspects with connections to the governments in Belgrade and Zagreb found havens among their friends and sponsors there. Nato, meanwhile, was drawing down its troops in the Balkans and the war crimes operations were handed over to the intelligence agencies, who could watch their quarry but had to rely on the deeply unreliable Serbian and Croatian governments to carry out arrests.
Ultimately, it took a political upheaval to bring any real progress. Miloševic was overthrown in October 2000 and handed over to The Hague the following June by the man who replaced him, Zoran Djindjic, in a dramatic, fatal, gamble that the west's gratitude would outweigh the hatred of his fellow Serbs. What is less well known is that Djindjic simultaneously offered the British the opportunity to grab Mladic.
"On the night Miloševic went to The Hague in 2001, the Serbs invited us to send out a team to get Mladic, saying they reckoned they knew where he was," says Crawford, who by that time was serving as the UK ambassador in Belgrade. " My conclusion, as the guy on the spot, was I didn't think it would be wise. We of course put the offer to London. But it would have meant SAS people getting on a plane and flying straight out; I didn't think it right to put British soldiers into a dangerous situation where they could not know for sure what was going to be happening or whom to trust." At about the same time, the Americans also believed they had a chance to seize Mladic. A US officer says: "He was in a military compound in Belgrade, and we had a fix on it. We gave real-time intelligence to Djindjic but it leaked."
The window of opportunity offered by Djindjic's pro-western leadership closed abruptly in March 2003, when the prime minister was shot dead by a sniper working for an unholy alliance of organised crime and former Serbian intelligence officers outraged by his willingness to co-operate with The Hague. With his death, power shifted to the Serbian president, Vojislav Koštunica, a democrat but also a nationalist who proved far less willing to help hunt down Mladic and Karadžic.
The Hague tribunal switched tactics, however, and started exerting intense diplomatic pressure. The court's tough, outspoken chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general, made sure the EU would not entertain Serbian or Croatian bids for membership unless she certified that their governments were fully co-operating with The Hague. In her autobiography, Madame Prosecutor, Del Ponte complains she constantly ran into what she termed the "muro di gomma" or rubber wall, in seeking western support. George Tenet, the CIA chief, even told her: "I don't give a shit what you think."
Serge Brammertz, Del Ponte's successor, kept up the pressure until he came face to face with Hadžíc in the Hague courtroom last month. "Unfortunately the truth is, without pressure, things do not really move forward," Brammertz tells the Guardian. "Linking EU enlargement to the arrest of the fugitives has been a really successful tool in the past, and has been instrumental in the arrests of the fugitives of the last years."
The pressure eventually forced the government in Zagreb to hand over intelligence that led Interpol and the Spanish police to catch the highest ranking Croatian war crimes suspect, General Ante Gotovina, holed up in a luxury hotel in the Canary Islands in December 2005. It also led to the election in 2008 of a new pro-western leader in Serbia, Boris Tadic. His appointment of a young new head of the country's intelligence service, the BIA, Saša Vukadinovic, and the subsequent purge of old ultra-nationalist officers, brought near instant results.
Two weeks after Vukadinovic took charge, Karadžic was picked up in Belgrade, where he had been posing as a new-age healer. Mladic was tracked down in May, old and destitute and demanding his pension in the outhouse at his cousin's home in northern Serbia.
Justice is finally being delivered, but it has taken 18 years since the ICTY was established. During that time, many thousands of victims were killed and 10 Hague indictees cheated justice by dying before they were caught.
"We are pleased that at the end of the day they were all arrested, but was it really necessary that it took so long, and was so painful?" says Brammertz. "Many of the survivors of the crimes in the meantime died without seeing justice being done. So I share the frustration." But he does not agree that justice delayed has been justice denied. As well as paving the way for a permanent war crimes court, the ICC, he said The Hague tribunal had struck a firm blow against a culture of impunity in the western Balkans and beyond.
"It is clear that without the tribunal, those who bear the greatest responsibility would never have been prosecuted," he says. "I don't think that, without the tribunal, there would now be a database of 7m documents which very clearly gives the history of the conflict, so that no one can deny that crimes have taken place and that genocide has been committed."
This article was amended on 5 August 2011 because the original said Nuremberg missed Martin Bormann, when it should have said Josef Mengele. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/17/fastartdrawnin60seconds | Art and design | 2008-06-17T11:00:00.000Z | David Wroe | Fast art: drawn in 60 seconds | On your marks ... Get ready ... Draw! ... Jason Atomic at work in Berlin. Photograph: Penny Bradfield
Under its broadly defined "arts" category, Guinness World Records has entries for the fastest-tied balloon dog sculpture (6.5 seconds) and for the furthest distance travelled by the "worm" rap dance move (108ft 9in). London artist Jason Atomic thought it was reasonable, then, to ask that Guinness officiate at his planned attempt to set a record this Friday evening at the National Portrait Gallery for the most portraits sketched in a given time.
To his surprise, they refused, saying they couldn't define what constituted a portrait and therefore had no way of counting how many Atomic sketched (notwithstanding the fact they'd managed in the past to define balloon dogs and worm dances).
Interestingly, the NPG, that robust pillar of Britain's artistic tradition, founded in 1856 with Disraeli one of its trustees, thought Atomic's record attempt was a terrific idea when he approached them via the improbable means of an audience feedback card at one of the gallery's documentary film nights. They saw it immediately for what it was - an entertaining sideshow that would bring in punters, create a festive live atmosphere and, hopefully, set a benchmark just for the fun of it.
Now we could start asking hoary questions about the definition of art, about how the viewer imposes meaning and the need for some realism in portraiture. But let's not.
Instead, let's nod with approval at the NPG's willingness to embrace a different kind of art. No, they're not going to be hanging Atomic's work in the gallery, but by inviting him to perform his attempt in their foyer, they give it their imprimatur.
In a session of up two hours, Atomic (his real name, changed by deed poll) plans to sketch dozens, maybe even 100 or more life-sized, full-body portraits of friends and strangers. It's as much a feat of endurance as it is a demonstration of artistic ability. When I met Atomic last week at the Tacheles gallery in Berlin, where he was exhibiting, he explained that speed sketching was the closest thing he'd ever done to sport. A balding goth who shaves his head to the skin, Atomic doesn't look cut out for feats of great endurance. But he'd been training by practising long shifts of speed-sketching and had got it down to a steady two minutes for a life-sized, full-body portrait.
An artist for more than 20 years, he discovered his gift for speed after he started sketching strangers at parties and nightclubs and, to avoid being too intrusive, got into the habit of doing it very quickly. Far from being precious about the final product, Atomic tends to give away, throw away or simply lose most of the speed portraits he sketches.
In Berlin, his work on display was of a more permanent kind - paintings with titles such as ''I am the death machine'' and a self-portrait that, ironically, took him a decade because it grew out of an old painting he'd started 10 years ago but shelved. It was, I have to say, pretty awful. Yet when he speed-sketched his vampiric muse and model, who goes by the name Manko, he was brilliant.
The art, for him, is in the performance - the very act of sketching. The product is a refreshing amalgamation of those bitterest enemies - art and sport. Sport satisfies our need to measure, assess, compete and compare. Art frees us from all those constraints and allows us to create without rules, even if it is always accompanied by the infuriating impossibility of ever saying with certainty what the damned thing means, or whether it means anything at all - precisely the fuzziness that seems to have given the killjoys at Guinness such pause.
Sport is becoming more artistic as athleticism, technique and the gracefulness of play evolve and improve. Football can be almost balletic, as we have seen several times in Euro 2008 (if not so much of late in the English side). Why shouldn't it go the other way too? Why shouldn't art have a crack at being the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, the strongest?
Jason Atomic will hopefully set the ball rolling with a record for portraiture. Sadly it must be an unofficial one.
· This article was amended on Monday June 30 2008. In the article above we had the model Manko as Mamko. This has been changed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/when-it-comes-to-climate-hypocrisy-canadas-leaders-have-reached-a-new-low | Opinion | 2020-02-05T10:30:07.000Z | Bill McKibben | When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada's leaders have reached a new low | Bill McKibben | Americans elected Donald Trump, who insisted climate change was a hoax – so it’s no surprise that since taking office he’s been all-in for the fossil fuel industry. There’s no sense despairing; the energy is better spent fighting to remove him from office.
Canada, on the other hand, elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.
The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have ever carved on the planet’s surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that the mine was nonetheless in the “public interest”.
Here’s how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada’s prime minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” That is to say, Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. Ottawa hides all this behind a series of pledges about “net-zero emissions by 2050” and so on, but they are empty promises. In the here-and-now they can’t rein themselves in. There’s oil in the ground and it must come out.
This is painfully hard to watch because it comes as the planet has supposedly reached a turning point. A series of remarkable young people (including Canadians such as Autumn Peltier) have captured the imagination of people around the world; scientists have issued ever sterner warnings; and the images of climate destruction show up in every newspaper. Canadians can see the Australian blazes on television; they should bring back memories of the devastating forest fires that forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray, in the heart of the tar sands complex, less than four years ago.
The only rational response would be to immediately stop the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. It’s true that we can’t get off oil and gas immediately; for the moment, oil wells continue to pump. But the Teck Frontier proposal is predicated on the idea that we’ll still need vast quantities of oil in 2066, when Greta Thunberg is about to hit retirement age. If an alcoholic assured you he was taking his condition very seriously, but also laying in a 40-year store of bourbon, you’d be entitled to doubt his sincerity, or at least to note his confusion. Oil has addled the Canadian ability to do basic math: more does not equal less, and 2066 is not any time soon. An emergency means you act now.
In fairness, Canada has company here. For every territory making a sincere effort to kick fossil fuels (California, Scotland) there are other capitals just as paralyzed as Ottawa. Australia’s fires creep ever closer to the seat of government in Canberra, yet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, can’t seem to imagine any future for his nation other than mining more coal. Australia and Canada are both rich nations, their people highly educated, but they seem unable to control the zombie momentum of fossil fuels.
There’s obviously something hideous about watching the Trumps and the Putins of the world gleefully shred our future. But it’s disturbing in a different way to watch leaders pretend to care – a kind of gaslighting that can reduce you to numb nihilism. Trudeau, for all his charms, doesn’t get to have it both ways: if you can’t bring yourself to stop a brand-new tar sands mine then you’re not a climate leader.
Bill McKibben is an author and Schumann distinguished scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/13/lizz-truss-book-farce-swim-england-tim-adams | Opinion | 2024-04-13T14:00:26.000Z | Tim Adams | If you’re seeking a good old British farce, look no further than Liz Truss’s memoirs | Tim Adams | British public life often tends toward sitcom, and you imagine that once the catastrophic economic fallout of her time in office has faded – in a generation or two’s time – Liz Truss’s 40-odd days in Downing Street might yet be viewed in those terms. Certainly, that seems the legacy she most craves.
The first extracts from her farcical book, Ten Years to Save the West, reveal it to be written with all those gifts for “Accidental Partridge” that she displayed in office (key quote: “For too long, the political debate has been dominated by how we distribute a limited economic pie. Instead, we need to grow the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice.”). Her memoir’s most immediately memorable scenes are ready-made for canned laughter. There’s the one in which she spent her few days in power itching because of an outbreak of fleas in the prime ministerial apartment (a parting gift, she half-implies, of the Johnsons’ dog, Dilyn); the one in which her promise to the nation of “delivery, delivery, delivery” falls at the first hurdle of a missing Ocado order; the one in which she finds the fridge full of protein shakes labelled “Raab”, from her power-hungry colleague; and the one in which she struggles to get a mobile phone signal on a call with the US secretary of state and has to hang out of an upstairs window to hear about the invasion of Ukraine. There will never be a second season.
Shallow end
About one in three children now leave school without basic swimming skills. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA
The Royal Navy, desperate for recruits, has apparently, done away with the longstanding requirement of candidates to be able to swim. In light of recent figures from Swim England, the change of policy is no doubt pragmatic. For many kids, gone are those shivery afternoons spent diving for bricks or blowing up pyjamas to make a float.
It remains a government commitment that “by the end of primary school, all children should be able to swim at least 25 metres unaided, using a range of strokes”, but largely because of decreased funding and access, and a shortage of teachers, about one in three children leave school without those skills.
You are reminded that one of the first things that the coalition government did on arrival in office in 2010 was to cancel Gordon Brown’s £130m plan for “free swimming” at public baths for all under-16s and over-60s – one of the pledges for a 2012 Olympic legacy. Not to worry, though. In future, it is suggested, rather than be thrown in at the deep end to complete a mandatory Royal Navy swimming test, hopeful applicants will be able to “self-declare” proficiency.
Fish-eye lens
A livestream camera is set up in the murky depths of the river in Utrecht city centre. Photograph: undefined/PR
Like all of us, I’m often anxious, these days, to find distracting alternatives to the news. No doubt with this in mind, my elder daughter alerted me last week to a Dutch website, “The Fish Doorbell”.
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It has a simple premise: “Every spring, fish migrate upstream in search of places to spawn. They swim through the centre of the city of Utrecht. Unfortunately, the boat lock is closed during spring. You can help the fish.”
Assistance is quite straightforward, though it requires a degree of patience. There is a camera livestreaming in the murky depths of the river, and every time a frustrated-looking fish appears in view, eyeing the camera, you press a bell on screen to alert the lock keeper in Utrecht to open a little door and allow it to follow its instincts upriver. It is the slowest of all video games. Needless to say, I am hooked.
Tim Adams is an Observer columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/16/how-one-of-melbournes-most-contaminated-sites-became-a-political-battleground-on-housing | Australia news | 2023-09-15T15:00:07.000Z | Benita Kolovos | How one of Melbourne’s most contaminated sites became a political battleground on housing | From the street, few would be able to tell a boarded-up block of land in Melbourne’s inner city has become the frontline of the latest housing battle between Labor and the Greens. In one corner, Labor say they are “pushing on” with a project to deliver 1,200 homes and community infrastructure on the former industrial site, while the Greens argue the government has “slowly wound back and watered down” its plans.
Chief among the minor party’s concerns is the promise of social housing on the site, which it says has been “paused”. The deputy premier, Jacinta Allan, however, has accused the Greens of spreading “misleading information” about the project.
“Of course, the Greens oppose this project because they are all about the fight and not the fix – their first instinct is always to block not build, even if it means communities in need of housing miss out,” Allan says.
“We’ve continued to push on with this project in the face of that opposition because this is precisely what we need to do – build more homes close to jobs, public services and transport links.”
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But the Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, points to reporting by Guardian Australia, which showed only 74 extra homes have been added to the state’s social housing stock over a four-year period.
“We’re seeing a repeat of very vague promises hoping that people will just be satisfied with that. But at the same time, these projects are being either massively delayed or not happening at all,” Ratnam says.
She says adding to the public housing stock at the Gasworks site and elsewhere will help “take the pressure off the private market”.
Greens agree to support Labor’s $10bn housing fund, breaking months-long impasse
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In March, it emerged there were 86,887 social housing dwellings across the state as at June 2022. In 2018, there were 86,813.
Over that time the social housing waitlist has grown by about 45% – from about 44,000 applications in June 2018 to 64,168 in June 2022.
The Greens’ ‘first instinct is always to block not build,’ Labor’s Jacinta Allan says. Photograph: Diego Fedele/AAP
The Victorian stoush has parallels with another between the parties in Canberra, which was resolved this week when the Greens agreed to pass Labor’s $10bn housing Australia future fund bill in return for a further $1bn for public and community housing.
But in Victoria, where the government is releasing its own housing statement in the coming days, it is just beginning.
Grand plans
Located in one of Melbourne’s most sought-after suburbs, Fitzroy North, the 3.9-hectare (9.6-acre) Gasworks site sits on the corner of Alexandra Parade and Smith Street, just 2km from the Melbourne CBD.
Since three large gasometers were pulled down in the 1970s, it has sat mostly dormant, thanks to its status as one of the city’s most contaminated sites.
In 2016, the Andrews government declared the site as surplus land and Development Victoria began investigating opportunities for its use.
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Ahead of the 2018 election Labor announced the site would be rezoned to make way for a new school and about 1,200 apartments. Under the rezoning, at least 20% of the apartments were to be affordable housing.
The Yarra independent councillor Stephen Jolly recalls welcoming the commitment.
“At the time, I was a member of the Victorian Socialists and we had been pushing for 10-15% [affordable housing]. And then [then planning minister Richard] Wynne goes and outflanks us from the left. It was bananas,” Jolly says.
Four years of remediation works were completed in mid-2022 and the land was split into four precincts by Development Victoria, with expressions of interest recently sought on two of them.
The development plan suggested a 2026 completion date, but the project’s website now says housing is not expected to be finished until late 2028 – and that’s “subject to change”.
Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam says the government is being ‘dictated to – once again – by the private property industry’. Photograph: Morgan Hancock/AAP
The senior school has already been completed in one precinct, while work is also under way on a multi-use sports centre and community facility.
The timeline for another parcel – which, according to the development plan, was to “deliver the majority of the precinct affordable housing requirement” – appears in doubt.
In June, the director of Yarra’s planning department wrote to local councillors to inform them “the social and affordable housing project at the Gas and Fuel Site [known as Parcel A] … has been paused by the government”.
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Ratnam says by prioritising development of two other precincts, the government was being “dictated to – once again – by the private property industry”. Her MPs have held community sessions on the project and started a petition to “stop Labor’s property giveaway at Fitzroy Gasworks”.
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The government denies it is walking away from social housing on the site. In information provided to Guardian Australia, the government said the 20% affordable housing target will be reached “across the three parcels – A, B and C”.
“As part of its commitment to deliver affordable housing, Development Victoria is currently exploring opportunities to deliver social housing and affordable build-to- rent options across approximately a third of the site [known as Parcel A] but also within other parcels [Parcels B and C],” it said.
Allan accuses the Greens of spreading “misleading information”.
“[It is] bewildering – this site was vacant for decades, so we’ve decontaminated it, built a new school and we’re building a new sports centre alongside hundreds of new homes,” she said.
But Ratnam maintains the government’s criticism of the Greens was a “tactic” to “distract” from the fact they are failing to deliver public housing through contracts with private developers.
Is Victoria planning to impose rent freezes and will that solve the housing crisis?
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Jago Dodson, the director of RMIT’s centre for urban research, also says the government’s ambition could be higher.
“I’m not aware of new development in Australia that has incorporated 50% social housing, but I think that’s the level of ambition we need to be aiming for if we’re going to start systematically resolving our housing challenges,” he says.
Planning for the next 50 years
Despite the government’s rhetoric, it would be difficult to ignore the Greens. Without the support of the Coalition, Labor relies on the minor party’s four MPs and two crossbenchers in the upper house to pass bills.
This will soon include the government’s housing statement, which is expected to include an Airbnb levy, as well as a suite of measures designed to tackle the growing affordability crisis and encourage the construction of an extra million homes in Melbourne’s inner suburbs by 2050.
Changes to planning laws to fast-track approvals and limit the powers of councils to object to major developments have also been flagged.
Getting ahead of the government, the Greens released its own housing statement last month, which they say form the basis of their upcoming negotiations.
It includes a rent freeze, a 2% cap on rent increases and a government-owned builder constructing 100,000 public housing units over the next decade. The party is also pushing for a minimum 50% public and affordable housing within any special development zones under state planning control.
The Coalition also released a wishlist, which includes no new property taxes, protection of residents’ voices on local planning decisions and more land supply.
Dodson urges bipartisanship on the issue, though concedes it is difficult in the current political environment.
“We’re talking about the future of our city and the mistakes we make over the next 10 to 20 years are going to be with us for the next 50 to 100 years,” he says.
“It is a real opportunity to offer an example to the community of what can be done right.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/29/mahler-where-to-start-with-his-music | Music | 2020-07-29T11:01:47.000Z | Andrew Clements | Mahler: where to start with his music | During his lifetime and in the decades after his death, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was primarily regarded as an outstanding conductor. It has only been in the last 60 years or so that his significance as a composer has been fully appreciated. Now, his symphonies are seen as perhaps the most important since Beethoven’s, linking the romanticism of the 19th century with the modernism of the 20th, and only rivalled for originality among his contemporaries by those of Sibelius.
The music you might recognise
Mahler’s symphonies and songs have regularly been plundered to accompany visual images: research in 2008 found over 120 examples of his music being used in cinema and television. The most famous example is on the soundtrack to Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice in 1971, which uses both the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony and the fourth-movement setting of Nietzsche from the Third, while an episode in the second season of the TV series Fargo (“Fear and Trembling”) features an arrangement of the opening of the Second Symphony and an excerpt from the finale of Das Lied von der Erde.
His life …
Mahler was a Bohemian, born in Kaliště, a village now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austrian empire. He was the second of 14 children; a few months after his birth, the family moved to the town of Jihlava, where his father opened a distillery and tavern. The Mahlers were Jewish and German-speaking in a region where most people spoke Czech, and Gustav thought of himself as an exile, “always an outsider, never made welcome”. But the sounds of his childhood – folk tunes, street songs and military bands – haunted his music for much of his life. By 10 he was already recognised as a musical wunderkind, and in 1875 he went to study at the Vienna Conservatory. He was primarily as a pianist, but he also took composition lessons and started to conduct.
Mahler began his conducting career in 1880, working in provincial opera houses across Austria and Germany. He reportedly discarded most of the music he composed during these years (there’s a theory that some of his early manuscripts were destroyed in the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945), but one large-scale work – the cantata Das klagende Lied, completed in 1880 – survived.
Mahler as a child, circa 1865. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images
Though orchestras apparently disliked his authoritarianism, appointments in Prague and Leipzig from 1885 to 1887 confirmed Mahler’s rising reputation as a conductor. During this period he completed his first orchestral song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), with texts modelled on poems in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, an early 19th-century collection of German folk poetry that would dominate his music for more than a decade.
In 1888, he completed his First Symphony, conceiving it as a five-movement symphonic poem under the title of Titan and incorporating melodies from his song cycle; eventually he dropped one movement, creating the work we usually hear today. That same year, he sketched a single-movement symphonic poem, Totenfeier (Funeral Rites), which became the opening movement of his Second Symphony, the Resurrection. Conceived on a massive scale, the Second followed Beethoven’s Ninth in requiring vocal soloists and a chorus, as well as a huge orchestra.
In 1894, when Mahler finished work on the Second, he was living in Hamburg, where he’d been chief conductor at the Stadttheater since 1891. Composing took second place to conducting, though he did complete more Wunderhorn songs, and conducted the premiere of his Second Symphony in Berlin in 1895. He’d already begun a Third Symphony, conceived on an even more expansive scale than its predecessor. At around 100 minutes, it’s the longest symphony ever written by a major composer. Of all his works, it’s the one that most completely confirms what he told Sibelius in 1907: “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.”
The Third Symphony was not premiered until 1902, after he had finished the Fourth Symphony, the last one linked to the Wunderhorn world. Mahler had settled in Vienna, having been appointed to the Hofoper (the Court Opera – today’s State Opera) in 1897 after converting to Catholicism, aware that a Jew would not gain such a prestigious post.
And times …
Vienna was about to become one of the centres of modernism in Europe, perhaps rivalled only by Paris as a centre of radical art in the years before the first world war. In 1897, the painter Gustav Klimt helped found the Vienna Secession, while the seeds of expressionism were sown with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams two years later, and taken up in the next decade by poets such as Georg Trakl. Mahler found himself feted by the composers of the Second Viennese School, headed by Arnold Schoenberg, who with his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern viewed Mahler’s symphonies as signposts to the direction their own music would take.
Duties at the Hofoper restricted his time for composition to summer breaks. He’d begun his Fifth Symphony in 1901 at his new lakeside villa in Carinthia, completing it there the following summer. By then, his personal life had changed utterly. The previous autumn he had met Alma Schindler, who was then a student (and lover) of the composer Alexander Zemlinsky; within four months she and Mahler were married, Alma was pregnant with their first child and the Fifth’s famous Adagietto became a declaration of love for his new wife. During their marriage, Alma surrendered her own ambitions to be a composer, whether voluntarily or at her husband’s insistence remains unclear. (Her account of their relationship in her memoirs has been questioned.)
The Fifth was the start of a trilogy of purely orchestral symphonies, which Mahler completed by 1905, along with settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert that became the orchestral song cycles Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children).
If the Seventh Symphony remains one of Mahler’s most enigmatic works, the Sixth is one of his greatest achievements, with a finale punctuated by three huge hammer blows – the third of which, according to Alma, fells the hero of the symphony “like a tree”. The superstitious composer removed the third blow from the score after the first performance in 1906, but Alma identified the blows with seismic events in Mahler’s life the following year: the death of their daughter Maria, his own diagnosis of a potentially fatal heart condition, and his forced resignation from the Hofoper, supposedly because he was spending too much time composing.
By the beginning of 1908, Mahler was conducting in New York. as director of the Metropolitan Opera. His performances there were generally successful, but he resigned the following year to take up a post with the New York Philharmonic. Summers were spent back in Austria composing, with Das Lied von der Erde beginning a final trilogy of works premiered after Mahler’s death. But the massive, choral Eighth Symphony, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand, which he’d completed in 1906, stands apart from the works on either side of it. Its premiere in Munich in 1910 was one of the biggest triumphs of Mahler’s life, and the last time he conducted the first performance of one of his works: he died eight months later in Vienna.
Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which Mahler superstitiously avoided describing as his “ninth symphony” because so many composers had died after completing nine symphonies, is a song cycle with the dimensions of a symphony, ending with a half-hour movement, Abschied, that seems a very conscious farewell to life. Yet having lived to complete it, Mahler did write a Ninth Symphony – his astonishingly moving acceptance of the inevitability of death – and began a Tenth too, a much more autobiographical work riven with fears and doubts after his discovery of Alma’s affair with the young architect Walter Gropius.
Mahler died having completed two movements of the Tenth and made extensive drafts for the other three. A number of completions of the whole work have been made from these drafts, of which that by the British musicologist Deryck Cooke has proved the most convincing and widely performed.
Why does his music still matter?
Mahler was revered by Schoenberg and his pupils, but his influence extended much further into the 20th century. Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies and Benjamin Britten’s orchestral writing both owe it a significant debt, and composers of the post-1945 avant garde admired him too. Pierre Boulez recorded all the symphonies, while in the third movement of his Sinfonia, Luciano Berio used the scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony as the framework for a virtuoso collage of musical quotations ranging from Bach to Stockhausen.
Great performers
For more than 30 years after his death, only a few conductors bothered with Mahler’s music. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg ploughed a solitary furrow promoting his cause at the Amsterdam Concergebouw – though other than a performance of the Fourth Symphony, none of Mengelberg’s Mahler seems to be available on disc. Leonard Bernstein was one of the leaders of the Mahler renaissance when it began in earnest in the 1960s, while Bernard Haitink continued the Mahler tradition at the Concertgebouw. In the digital era, the cycles by Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon) and Riccardo Chailly (Decca) have been pre-eminent. Other great conductors such as Otto Klemperer and Herbert von Karajan were more selective in the works they tackled, though some of their recordings – Klemperer’s accounts of the Second Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, and especially Karajan’s elegiac version of the Ninth – are among the finest Mahler recordings of all time.
Listen to this playlist on Spotify Spotify | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/01/russian-parents-and-teachers-urged-to-boycott-propaganda-classes | World news | 2022-09-01T04:00:44.000Z | Andrew Roth | Russian parents and teachers urged to boycott ‘propaganda classes’ | When Russian schools open on Thursday, students will have a new lesson on their schedule: “conversations about important things”, a mysterious class that critics believe will be used to deliver propaganda about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian activists are calling for parents and teachers to boycott required “patriotic” lessons in Russian schools that many fear will seek to indoctrinate students as young as six.
“Many directors out of fear of their bosses are lying to parents, telling them that these propaganda classes are mandatory,” Russia’s Teachers’ Alliance, a renegade union, said on Wednesday. “Once again we are saying you are not required to let your children into these classes.”
The likelihood is that the interpretation of the classes will fall on the tens of thousands of Russian teachers who will be expected to run the patriotic lessons starting next week, signalling an important step up in Russia’s efforts to shape education to try to justify its war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s 22-year rule.
The courses were announced in June. But only recently methodological documents have been published showing that Russian teachers are expected to discuss the “values of Russian society”.
According to the independent Russian outlet iStories, these include the need for students as young as eight to understand that loving one’s country means a readiness to “bear arms in its defence” in dangerous times.
By 10, students can be taught about Russia’s “special military operation”, the Kremlin’s favoured term for its war in Ukraine, and the importance of eastern Ukrainians’ “return to Russia”. In later classes, students should be taught that patriotism includes a willingness to enlist to fight for Russia in the military, the documents indicate.
All of this glosses over accusations of crimes of aggression and other war crimes that have been levelled against Russian troops by Ukraine.
In response, a number of Russian independent media outlets have urged parents to sound out teachers on what they will be teaching in the classes.
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“We are sure that true patriotism is not brought up in an atmosphere of hatred, fear and obligation,” wrote the Teachers’ Alliance, saying that the lessons could be adopted to teach other values.
“Patriotism can be instilled only by example: by doing charity, protecting nature, studying and preserving historical heritage. And parents should do this, and the school should help.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/aug/08/history-of-art-in-three-colours | Television & radio | 2012-08-08T21:00:04.000Z | Zoe Williams | TV review: A History of Art in Three Colours | You know you're getting old when art historians start looking young. Thank God James Fox actually is. For all his accomplishments and authority, he's only 30 (another sign that you're getting old is when 60-year-olds appear youthful).
A History of Art in Three Colours (BBC4) finishes with white. I am innately suspicious of attempts by art history programmes to find a tickling theme. I feel like I'm being sucked into the meeting at which it was decided that telling a story in any sensible way – chronologically, for instance, or by movement, or by broad historical context, or by technique – was way too obvious. Wouldn't it be more interesting to find four painters who all slept with the same person, or nine sculptors who were all missing a thumb? Then before you know it, the presenter is dressing up as a hooker or strapping down his own thumb to show you how hard it is to handle stone with only four fingers, and it's demonstrative and patronising, a little bit like watching Nina and the Neurons on CBeebies, which is at least intended for the under-fives.
But there is another way to do things, it turns out, whether with the collusion of the producers or by slipping it under the wire, I know not. Fox principally uses the colour to tell some stories that interest him. Pretty well everything interests him, and pretty well everything he says is interesting.
He makes a decent stab, at the very start, to thread his tales together, so that they coagulate into a solid notion: that white "might just be the darkest colour of them all," that it has been used over centuries to "control and conquer". But I wasn't buying it. Sure, sometimes it's dark; sometimes it isn't. There was no need to overplay this hand, but anyway, that is a minor complaint.
We start at the Elgin marbles, whose story is told with admirable pace and drama: "In 1938, the director of the British Museum was on his evening rounds. Everything seemed to be in order, but a disturbing incident had been taking place right beneath his feet." I'm afraid I cannot tell you whether the suspense came from artful pausing, or just a nice, posh, HG Wells, Radio 4, understatedly-serious, we-are-now-at-war-with-Germany accent. I simply surrendered to its message: something really exciting is just about to happen!
In fact, the disturbing incident was quite subtle. People were cleaning – for which read ruining – the marbles, having become obsessed with the idea that white was their perfect colour. (In fact, the marbles started off painted many colours.) The idea, if you are prepared to trace it back 221 years, commenced with the birth of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, son of a humble something or other who – being gay and favouring tight leather trousers – naturally yearned for the big city, where he saw a room full of sculptures, "of all shapes and sizes," Fox says, as the camera zooms in on a moustache. "There was plenty to feast his eyes on. Buttocks aplenty, ripped, muscular torsos and even the odd genital. They were the most wonderful objects Winckelmann had ever seen," Fox tells us.
Thus, the world's first Hellenist was made, and he was the one who wanted everything white. I guess the needling pop-psychological subtext – that Winckelmann elided the colour of the marbles with the colour of purity in a bid to ratify his sexual awakening – that bit you can take or leave. The trajectory itself is fascinating, however: how one version of beauty can come to dominate a huge swathe of culture, for centuries, by the sheer force of one man's will.
Fox goes on to do a great job on Whistler, who uses white to "mock Victorian taste" by the subtle measure of painting a series of women in white. The scandal and bafflement were the talk of the town. Why was this one standing on a bear? Is she married? Why does she look so unhappy? (I can't believe this would have raised too many questions). Whistler underlined this by wearing white trousers around town. If only they'd had blogs in those days, someone could have done lookatmyfuckingwhitetrousers and divided them into sailor, mental health nurse and Whistlerite (that will only make sense if you look at this website, but you won't regret it.
It was interesting, memorable, thought-provoking and lingering. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/31/eu-plan-us-china-green-subsidies-state-aid-rules | Business | 2023-01-31T11:46:14.000Z | Jennifer Rankin | Leaked EU plan reveals response to US and Chinese green subsidies | The EU executive will loosen state aid rules and propose a new “European sovereignty fund” later this year, in response to the controversial US Inflation Reduction Act and China’s “unfair” green subsidies.
A leaked European Commission plan underscores the global green subsidy race is under way, although EU member states remain divided on how to respond.
EU leaders are due to meet next week in Brussels to discuss the bloc’s response to Joe Biden’s $369bn (£300bn) Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to subsidise a vast expansion of green technology, from renewable power to electric cars. European leaders say the IRA discriminates against companies exporting to the US and fear it will lure their firms across the Atlantic, costing jobs and shuttering factories in the crucial green tech sector.
Can EU anger at Biden’s ‘protectionist’ green deal translate into effective action?
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While European anger has been most visible against the US, the EU plan is also a response to China, which the commission accuses of using “unfair” and “market distort[ing]” subsidies to advance in the race to produce clean technologies.
Chinese subsidies “have long been twice as high as those in the EU, relative to GDP” states a leaked copy of the commission’s “green deal industrial plan” seen by the Guardian. “Europe and its partners must do more to combat the effect of these unfair subsidies and prolonged market distortion.”
Earlier this month, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU was working with Washington to reduce the “negative side effects” of the IRA on Europe, but added: “Even more significantly we are facing unfair competition in the clean tech sector from China”.
The leaked document, first reported by the Financial Times, provides new details on the commission’s plans to loosen the EU’s state aid regime, strict rules that limit government subsidies for industry. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the commission has twice relaxed state aid rules to help governments struggling to protect companies from soaring energy costs and a weakening economy. The commission wants to extend these flexibilities to help the EU manage the green transition.
Simplified state aid rules that already apply to some renewable technologies will be extended to renewable hydrogen and biofuel storage. Significantly EU member states will be able to offer help to EU companies that are being offered equivalent financial aid from foreign governments. This is a direct response to fears that Washington is actively luring European firms to quit Europe and make their clean tech products in the US.
But the prospect of a relaxed state aid regime – without any other support – has alarmed southern and smaller European governments that lack the fiscal firepower of the EU’s biggest member states. These fears were compounded by recent commission figures revealing that France and Germany together accounted for 77% of all state aid given to companies during the coronavirus pandemic. Italy’s government has warned that relaxed state aid rules should “not be a free-for-all” and called for a joint EU fund to help green tech in all member states.
Meanwhile, fiscal hawks, such as Germany and the Netherlands, argue that the EU has unspent billions for the green transition in its Covid recovery plans, an €800bn (£703bn) fund funded by common borrowing. With much money unspent, they argue it is premature to talk about further joint funds.
The leaked paper reveals that the European Commission will propose a European sovereignty fund by the summer, but details remain scant. The European sovereignty fund is intended to preserve “a European edge on critical and emerging technologies”, such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and clean tech, the paper states. Yet it gives no details on budget or precisely how the fund would be paid for.
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Elsewhere, the paper notes that the EU’s existing Covid recovery plans have made €250bn available for green measures, including the decarbonisation of industry.
But it spells out the scale of the task in removing fossil fuels from the EU’s economy, noting that each year until 2030 an extra €477bn of investment in energy and transport will be required on top of the historical average spend.
In a statement the EU’s employers’ association, Business Europe, said the commission had “finally recognised” the urgency to act on Europe’s “worsening” competitiveness.
Warning against a subsidy race, the group added: “The answer needs to simultaneously address the push factors resulting from higher energy and regulatory costs as well as lengthy permitting procedures, and counter the financial pull factor created by the IRA. If the EU fails to deliver on all those aspects, we will lose even more ground on global competitiveness.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/12/ministers-silence-brexit-fears-nhs-unravelling-simon-stevens | Opinion | 2017-01-12T19:54:27.000Z | Gaby Hinsliff | Ministers can’t silence NHS concerns because people can see it unravelling | Gaby Hinsliff | Believe hard enough, and you can get what you want. Or at any rate that’s the theory behind the fashionable cult of manifestation, as championed by Oprah; focus on your heart’s desire, tell yourself you’re going to get it, and it’s amazing what positive thinking can achieve. Only now this form of secular prayer seems to be catching on in Downing Street too.
This week Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, became the latest civil servant accused of failing to believe. He is said to be regarded by some within No 10 as “unenthusiastic”, insufficiently on board perhaps with thrilling efforts to solve the NHS crisis by claiming there isn’t one. Think positive, man! Best foot forward! Like Ivan Rogers, the departing ambassador to the EU said to be too gloomy about Brexit, apparently Stevens just needs to jolly well buck his ideas up.
NHS England chief hits back at Theresa May on health service funding
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To be fair, a certain cheery confidence may well prove useful in Brexit negotiations if Theresa May’s plan is basically to play chicken with the EU – convincing other member states that Britain is hellbent on extracting itself, regardless of the cost to itself or anyone else – and hope they blink first. That would require a display of gung-ho optimism and Rogers’ true feelings were perhaps too well known in Brussels for him to fake it.
And even our economic performance post-Brexit vote is, in some ways, linked to the power of self-belief. Part of the reason the predicted post-referendum crash hasn’t materialised may simply be that leavers still cheerfully expect Brexit to be a change for the better, and so see no reason to panic and stop spending.
But putting a brave face on what are still, for now, the theoretical risks of Brexit is one thing. Wishing away cancelled operations is another. The pressure on beds is too tangible now for that, the stuff of school-run conversations and everyday life even for people too busy to follow the news.
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn clash over NHS at first PMQs of 2017 Guardian
At the funeral of an old family friend last week, I was shocked to hear how quickly he had been bundled out of hospital after a stroke, despite being unable to speak or fend for himself. Yesterday, I bumped into another friend whose elderly mother needs an operation and has been told she can have it whenever a bed comes free – but nobody could say when that might be, so it’s hard for the family to make plans to look after her when she comes out.
The idea that the NHS isn’t coping is seeping into ordinary lives now, whether or not they heard the surgeon on Thursday morning’s Today programme explaining that the crisis isn’t just affecting A&E – every day she wonders if there will be enough beds available for her to operate on even half the patients on her list. Perhaps she should try to see the sunny side too, of there being no room on the wards for people to recover.
But this is more than just a culture clash between natural Tiggers and suspicious Eeyores. The charge of pessimism is really just code for suggesting that Stevens isn’t really “one of us”; that like Rogers, he was David Cameron’s man and hasn’t adapted yet to regime change in No 10.
And here, perhaps, lies a grain of truth. Simon Stevens is unpartisan enough to have worked perfectly comfortably with everyone from Labour’s then health secretary Frank Dobson (who first hired him as a special adviser two decades ago) through the Lib Dems’ Norman Lamb to Cameron, who originally brought him back in 2014 to run NHS England.
But Stevens has arguably overstepped the mark lately, not so much by making clear that the NHS got less cash than it wanted in the last spending round – although he has been unusually bold for a bureaucrat in contradicting ministers on this – as by suggesting that reform of benefits paid even to the richest pensioners could provide a long-term source of funding for social care. He may be right, but welfare reform is technically beyond his pay grade. For him to be openly discussing it hints at some frustration.
Our NHS trust is close to a tipping point – and we are not alone
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For Stevens is not just any old bureaucrat. He has an unusually shrewd grasp not just of policy but of politics, having started life as a hospital manager before turning Labour special adviser and architect (under Alan Milburn) of New Labour’s biggest NHS reforms. He endured tortuous negotiations with the Treasury in the early 00s over the national insurance rise that unleashed billions for the NHS – the lessons of which he has not forgotten – before moving into Downing Street to advise Tony Blair and then pursuing a successful private sector career. He took some persuading to come back and run the NHS, and friends say he did it only because he thought he could make a difference on something that matters.
Might he be struggling somewhat with taking orders from a new No 10 team whose understanding of the subject is inevitably less deep than his and which, unlike Cameron, is temperamentally opposed to just giving people their heads? Judging by his resignation email, Rogers clearly felt that way. But that’s being a civil servant for you.
As the name suggests, it is the politicians who are the masters, for good or ill. The Whitehall machine works best when civil servants defer to elected politicians and their mandate from the public, while ministers defer in turn to officials’ specific expertise. It seizes up when the servants worry that their masters aren’t acting in the public interest. What happens next depends on whether the public believes that, too.
Nobody serious denies now that the NHS is being squeezed remorselessly by three separate forces: an ageing population, medical advances putting doctors under constant pressure to do more, and a threadbare social care system that stops existing patients leaving hospital and raises the risk of vulnerable people needing to come in. If nothing changes, winter crises will morph into year-round ones. That’s why Stevens has opposed cuts in social care, drily telling the health select committee this week that he had done so “enthusiastically, I might add”.
But he would be the first to concede that money alone can’t cure what ails the NHS, while no political party yet has a compelling prescription for what could. It’s disappointing that Labour has rejected a cross-party coalition to produce lasting answers. But it’s more worrying that Downing Street can’t even admit to the existence of a question. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/19/bank-of-japan-raises-interest-rates-negative-scrapped-borrowing-costs | World news | 2024-03-19T05:50:12.000Z | Justin McCurry | Japan raises interest rates for first time since 2007 | Japan’s central bank has ended eight years of negative interest rates, in an overhaul of one of the world’s most aggressive monetary easing programmes that sought to encourage bank lending and spur demand.
In its first interest rate hike in 17 years, the Bank of Japan [BOJ] said it was lifting its short-term policy rate from -0.1% to between zero and 0.1%, although analysts said a fragile economic recovery meant it would continue go slow with any further rise in borrowing costs.
The shift makes the BOJ the last central bank to exit negative rates, bringing to an end an era in which policymakers sought to prop up growth by pushing banks to lend more by charging interest on money banks deposited at Japan’s central bank.
Is the era of zero interest rates gone for good?
Jeffrey Frankel
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In a widely expected decision, the BOJ on Tuesday ditched a policy put in place in 2016, judging that its long-held goal of stable 2% inflation was “within sight”.
Seven of the bank’s nine policy board members supported the move while two opposed it, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Wage growth has added to confidence among BOJ board members about the probability of achieving 2% inflation after decades of deflation and stagnation.
Japan’s biggest employers agreed to a 5.28% wage increase in negotiations with unions this month – the biggest rise since 1991 – lifting hopes for a “virtuous cycle” of pay and price increases.
“This would be the first rate hike in 17 years, so it has a lot of symbolic significance,” Izumi Devalier, head of Japan economics at BofA Securities, said prior to the BOJ’s policy decision.
“But the actual impact on the economy is very small,” she said, noting the BOJ will probably maintain its resolve to keep monetary conditions loose. “We would not expect a substantial rise in funding costs or households mortgage rates.”
The BOJ is hoping that Asia’s second-biggest economy is emerging from a long period of deflationary pressure – a trend that had put it at odds with other central banks, which have raised rates in recent years to tackle inflation triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supply chain problems.
The BOJ had come under pressure to end its ultra-easy monetary policy, seen as a key factor in the rapid decline of the yen against the dollar. The weak yen has helped exporters but placed greater financial pressure on households.
Inflation in Japan momentarily reached its highest level in more than 40 years in 2023, forcing households to tighten their belts and creating more headaches for the country’s embattled prime minister, Fumio Kishida. However, that rate was still well below the levels of inflation that caused the cost of living to spike in many countries around the world in recent years.
The US Federal Reserve and other central banks yanked up rates to rein in galloping inflation after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
But haunted by the country’s “lost decades” of stagnation and deflation, the BoJ kept its main rate negative.
Raising the rate will make loans more expensive for consumers and businesses and increase Japan’s bill for servicing its national debt, which at about 260% of gross domestic product is among the world’s highest.
Markets are now focusing on governor Kazuo Ueda’s post-meeting news conference for clues on the pace of further rate hikes.
An end to the world’s last remaining provider of cheap funds could also jolt global financial markets as Japanese investors, who amassed overseas investments in search of yields, shift money back to their home country.
“We trust the BOJ,” the paper quoted a source close to Kishida as saying. The decision “is in their hands”.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/24/wales-australia-rugby-world-cup-match-report | Sport | 2023-09-24T21:06:23.000Z | Robert Kitson | Gareth Anscombe helps Wales sail into quarter-finals after easy Australia win | Australian rugby has had its bleak days and nights but nothing remotely as bad as this. If congratulations are clearly due to Warren Gatland’s Wales for inflicting a record all-time defeat on the Wallabies, this was Eddie Jones’s absolute worst nightmare. His squad are now staring at an embarrassingly early exit from the tournament, having never previously failed to qualify for the knockout stages at a World Cup.
When Jones was rehired in January at vast expense, having lost his job with England, it was not supposed to end like this. If defeat to Fiji was bad this was infinitely worse, with his side barely firing a shot. If the 63-year-old’s appointment was supposed to breathe fresh life into the Wallaby squad, it is increasingly having the opposite effect.
Australia mirror Eddie Jones by looking lost and heading for early exit
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This pallid performance will go down like a bag of decomposing maggots back in Australian rugby and loud boos rang around the stadium whenever Jones appeared on the big screen. If he survives as head coach beyond this World Cup it will be a major turn-up and neither he nor his outclassed team could have any complaints about this outcome. If Fiji manage a bonus-point win over Georgia in Bordeaux on Saturday, Australia will be out of the competition before their final game, against Portugal next Sunday.
Wales, though, still had to seal the deal and duly did so through tries from Gareth Davies, Nick Tompkins and Jac Morgan and the boot of Gareth Anscombe, on as an early replacement for the injured Dan Biggar. By the end Anscombe had racked up 23 points on his own and Wales were out of sight, on course for a quarter-final against, potentially, Argentina. Morgan’s late score, driven over by his pack, was the clearest possible sign of Welsh supremacy and summed up a totally one-sided contest.
Gatland, his staff and his players deserve huge credit for lifting Wales out of the deep hole they were in last winter. Jones, as he later acknowledged at a tense media conference, has had conspicuously less joy. Australia is a vast land but even in the dustiest, most remote corner of the outback it is common knowledge Jones was brought back by Rugby Australia for his big tournament expertise and motivational ability. In many ways, this was exactly the occasion they had in mind but no one envisaged this kind of scoreline.
Gareth Anscombe celebrates victory over Australia, a game in which he scored 23 points. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images
Not everything can be laid at Jones’s door but it was his decision to axe experienced campaigners such as Michael Hooper and Quade Cooper and pick a more youthful squad. It has been a transparent flop and the treatment of his young playmaker Carter Gordon, picked as the first-choice fly-half only to be summarily discarded, perfectly sums up the uncertainty that has now taken hold in the Australia dressing room. Wallaby fans, and Jones’s employers, are fully entitled to ask some serious, pointed questions.
Wales did not have to play remotely like world-beaters to defeat a team who looked resigned to their fate from an early stage.
If the quality of the game never remotely approached the stunning Ireland v South Africa game on Saturday night, the Welsh gameplan was perfect for the occasion and there was an air of composure about them from an early stage. The first lineout certainly went to plan, a slick first-phase move straight off the training ground releasing Morgan down the middle of the field and setting up the pacy scrum-half Davies for his latest high-profile World Cup score.
It was the worst possible start for the Wallabies. Their games against Wales have invariably been close and they did not want to spend a clear, still night playing catch-up. The fates were about to intervene, however, with the influential Biggar forced out of the contest after 12 minutes with a strained pectoral muscle. The red-shirted sections of the crowd fell momentarily silent as they pondered the potential implications.
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Two Ben Donaldson penalties offered the Wallabies further encouragement so it was a relief for all concerned with Wales when Anscombe, having missed a straightforward first kick, slotted a harder one on the angle to put his side 10-6 ahead at the start of the second quarter.
Australia did enjoy brief joy in the scrums but, as the pace of the game dropped, Wales continued to build scoreboard pressure. Anscombe landed a third penalty just before the half-hour mark and when Rob Valetini dived on a ball that the referee, Wayne Barnes, ruled had not fully emerged from a ruck the gap widened further. Louis Rees-Zammit nearly extended the 16-6 lead before being held up over the Australia line but Wales were still very much in the box seat at the interval.
Eddie Jones ‘committed’ to Australia after reports of Japan interview
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Any doubt about the outcome pretty much evaporated in the third quarter as the Wallabies’ confidence ebbed away completely. Anscombe clipped over another penalty and then created a 49th-minute try for the alert Tompkins with a little chip over the top. Anscombe’s fifth penalty three minutes later tightened the screw even further.
It was turning into an unmitigated disaster as more Australian ill discipline offered Anscombe yet more ammunition. No wonder Jones has apparently been talking to Japanese officials on the quiet, although he later insisted he was still committed to the Australian cause. After this, however, his days as coach must surely be numbered. England’s decision to part company with him before Christmas last year is also starting to look better by the day. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/14/osborne-resists-use-of-uk-backed-eu-fund-for-greek-emergency-loan | Business | 2015-07-14T18:07:54.000Z | Jennifer Rankin | Osborne resists use of UK-backed EU fund for Greek emergency loan | Europe is split over whether Greece could be offered an emergency loan from a central EU fund in a move that could require around £850m of financial support from the UK.
George Osborne, the chancellor, is furiously opposing the idea, saying it is a “non-starter”, but the European commission confirmed it was under consideration in spite of British objections and German scepticism about the plan.
Osborne is arguing only eurozone countries should participate in the Greek bailout, so it would be wrong to tap the central EU fund set up in 2010 to help Ireland and Portugal, which is known as the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM).
Using this source of cash as an emergency bridging loan until a longer-term bailout plan is put in place would leave the UK out of pocket if Greece failed to repay it.
Osborne’s argument was boosted when the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said it would “not be appropriate” to use the fund when some non-eurozone member states were against. The Czech Republic also registered objections.
However, the European commission likes the idea of using the EFSM, because funds can be unlocked relatively quickly with a qualified majority vote, meaning it cannot be blocked by Britain and the Czechs alone.
The proposal was not officially tabled at the meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday, but a working group looked at the issue among a number of proposals and eurozone finance ministers will discuss the options at a conference call on Wednesday.
After the Ecofin finance ministers’ meeting, Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner in charge of the euro, confirmed that a loan to Greece from the EFSM was still being considered.
He said: “All options are quite complicated, either legally or politically or financially, but we need to find a solution as soon as possible.”
A Treasury source said: “During Ecofin and in the margins, the chancellor couldn’t have been clearer. We are immovable on this. British taxpayers’ cash must be protected. We will try to be constructive but this is a eurozone bailout.”
Eurozone officials have been scrambling to come up with €12bn (£8.5bn) in emergency funds for Greece until an €86bn three-year bailout is in place.
Work to reach agreement on the long-term bailout could take four weeks, but Greece is almost bankrupt.
The Greek government has to pay debts worth €7bn in July, plus a further €5bn by mid August. If Athens fails to repay €3.5bn to the European Central Bank on Monday 20 July, the Greek financial system could collapse.
On top of that, a leaked International Monetary Fund (IMF) report seen by Reuters warned that Greece would need debt relief far beyond what has been proposed so far.
The UK government argues that use of the EFSM would break a deal made between the commission and EU member states in 2010 that funds cannot be used to shore up the financial stability of the eurozone.
But the commission thinks the UK has misunderstood that agreement: it argues there is nothing to prevent use of EFSM funds to help one member state.
The Labour MEP, Richard Corbett, said British taxpayers were very unlikely to lose money. “The risks to British taxpayers’ liability is actually very small indeed, although I understand why he [Osborne] doesn’t want to create a precedent.”
Along with other EU member states, the UK would be providing a credit guarantee, rather than a direct loan. But the Treasury could be liable for £1bn if Greece failed to repay the EFSM fund.
Corbett said the issue was not helpful to the debate over Britain’s EU membership, although it was minor compared to the real issues facing the UK.
“This is a trivial sum in terms of what is at stake in terms of our membership of the European Union, especially as it is not a sum we are ever likely to pay.”
The prime minister’s official spokeswoman said on Tuesday that Cameron did not believe that UK cash should be on the line and there was currently no proposal on the table for this to happen.
Osborne said earlier that he would block any EU move to draw on an emergency fund containing British money for the new bailout programme.
Arriving in Brussels for a meeting of European finance ministers, Osborne said: “Britain is not in the euro, so the idea that British taxpayers will be on the line for this Greek deal is a complete non-starter. The eurozone needs to foot its own bill.”
Eurozone leaders struck a deal on Monday to prevent Greece from leaving the euro in return for a pledge from Athens to enact major reforms in the coming days.
The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has vowed to secure parliamentary approval after accepting a third bailout programme that came at the end of exhaustive talks with EU leaders.
Britain, however, has been alarmed about the possibility of having to participate, leading the chancellor to hold a series of telephone conversations with his counterparts ahead of Tuesday’s meeting to emphasise his opposition. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/26/sophie-heawood-oxford-david-cameron-pig | Life and style | 2015-09-26T05:00:02.000Z | Sophie Heawood | Sophie Heawood: Drugs and pigs? Oxford has been underselling itself | What really annoys me about the whole “prime minister shagged a dead pig” scandal is that, if I’d known Oxford University was full of orgies, I’d have tried a hell of a lot harder to get in. Why oh why, when state school kids like me were told we could possibly apply to the top universities if we toiled and toiled, did nobody tell us there would be parties like these? Parties involving the abuse of substances so mind-altering that you might actually desire to become one with a recently deceased farmyard animal? For this is the allegation: that our honourable member, David Cameron, inserted his rather less honourable member into a pig. I have no evidence that this even happened, or that drugs were involved, but just think what fantastic drugs they must have been. The week before, he was overheard slagging off Yorkshire people, something that only earns him respect from Yorkists such as myself. I have never liked Cameron more, having never liked him at all.
All of this outreach work that Oxbridge does with the state sector: coming round to our schools, telling us that a world-class education isn’t just for the rich. If they’d simply come to my sixth-form college and explained that hanging out with future leaders of the realm didn’t mean we’d have to stop taking ecstasy, we’d have jumped at the chance. As it was, most of my friends applied to Manchester, so we could carry on raving, rather than spend three years somewhere we suspected we’d have to speak ancient Greek to buy a packet of crisps. Had I known that Oxford also offered something called a Piers Gaveston party where you can, it is rumoured, watch live sex shows, I’d have reworked my life plans accordingly.
As a sixth-former, I had an interview at Cambridge. When they asked me what I liked doing at weekends, I seized up and became uncharacteristically shy. Wishing to hide my secret life, standing waiting for the drugs to wear off in fields outside Leeds, I muttered that I did “a bit of babysitting”. Dull was something I truly believed might be required here: don’t let them know the real you; pretend to be purely hard-working and good.
If only I had realised that what I actually needed to say was that I tended to read a few chapters of Machiavelli’s The Prince before downing three bottles of Jameson, raising a toast to the Queen with my braying pals, and then gently lowering my genitals into the buccal cavity of a dead swine. I mean, this is the sort of information that needs to be fed through to state school kids as a matter of urgency. It could really level the playing fields.
My friend Dawn went to a comp in Wales which had never sent anyone to an elite university. She and some other local children, chosen for their brightness, were put in “a van” (as she puts it) and driven to Cambridge, where they were shown around by a posh girl called Tiggy (clearly a made-up name). A lecturer announced that he had no idea why there was nobody from Cardiff in his college, but would anyone like to hazard a guess? Dawn was already underwhelmed, and then found out that, on top of the standard £20 for a UCAS form, she’d have to pay £15 to apply to Cambridge. Given that this was the price of a wrap of speed, she decided she’d rather spend the money on amphetamines, and applied to Sussex and UEA instead.
The David Cameron #piggate storm is a sideshow from the real issues. It’s certainly effective
Suzanne Moore
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More recently, another friend had an interview for a junior teaching post at an Oxford college. On entering the ancient don’s ancient office, the two men sort of recognised each other, but couldn’t quite work out where from. It was only when the younger man got home that he realised he had seen his future employer, fully and frontally naked, when they were exchanging photos anonymously on the gay dating website Grindr. Again, this is exactly the sort of exciting information I could have done with when I was 18, back when I still feared the dreaming spires might contain only the oldest and deadest of dreams.
Still, I can see why Cameron isn’t fond of Yorkshire. It’s a respectable place where we look very, very dimly on the shagging of pigs. Where I’m from, we much prefer sheep. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/oct/17/real-lettings-housing-solution-genuine-difference | Money | 2010-10-16T23:07:29.000Z | Jill Insley | Real Lettings: a housing solution with a genuine difference | When I ask him how long he has been living in his new home, Stephen Lacey, a former coach driver, responds gleefully: "Two weeks and two days."
You get the impression that he could extend this information to hours and minutes too, he is so pleased with his one-bedroom flat in London. And no wonder: prior to this, he had been living on the streets for more than a year ("and it was cold last winter"), and then in a hostel for four months.
"The hostel wasn't bad, you had a toilet and shower in your room," he says. "But it wasn't a patch on this. It's lovely having your own place. It's fully carpeted and I've got a fridge and a cooker…"
Lacey doesn't have a job and it's apparently pretty unusual for people who have been in hostels for such a short time to get a home of their own, but the organisation Real Lettings that has let him the flat will house people straight off the street if necessary: one client had been living rough for 10 years.
Real Lettings leases properties from private landlords and then sub-lets them to homeless people. The 160 properties currently in the scheme all meet the Decent Homes Standards, and after maintenance work by the social and private housing developer United House, are handed back to the landlords at the end of a lease in tip-top condition.
Howard Sinclair, chief executive of Broadway, the charity behind Real Lettings, says: "From the landlord's point of view it can be a great deal. They get to lease their property for three to five years, get a guaranteed rent, and get their property back in the same condition they let it."
Most of the properties taken on by Real Lettings are studio or one-bedroom flats but it will rent bigger properties for families. It currently has properties in 13 London boroughs but Sinclair says he would be happy to be able to provide homes in all 32 boroughs.
Cuts to housing benefits could make property less affordable: the government has announced cuts to housing benefit and a £500 cap for the total amount of benefits a household can receive each week. Sinclair says that in some cases this will make a difference of up to £40 a week: "We will speak to the landlord and the tenant and try and come up with a way of ameliorating the effect." But he remains reasonably confident that the full service provided to landlords, and the guarantee that they will get their rent, even if it is slightly lower than they expected, will tip the balance in Real Lettings' clients' favour.
Indeed, the organisation's website quotes a landlord saying: "I can forget about the property for five years. I don't have to worry about getting the rent, or about the quality of the tenant. If there's a problem Real Lettings will deal with that. It's a weight off my shoulders."
Clients are supported through the process of moving in, applying for benefits, setting up utilities and paying bills. Then someone from the charity visits the client once every three months to make sure he or she is coping.
Broadway set up the specialist lettings agency in 2005 in response to the lack of suitable housing available for the 50,000 people who sleep in hostels each night and for those at risk of losing their homes. Real Lettings remains the only organisation that provides this valuable lettings service in London. Sinclair is now hoping to increase the numbers of both volunteers and landlords so the properties handled by Real Lettings can grow to 500.
He says: "Ninety five per cent of our clients successfully maintain their tenancies, and 88% of the landlords renew their leases – so it is working for everyone."
In addition to setting up a new website – www.reallettings.com – to provide information for landlords about the scheme, Real Lettings is also launching a volunteering scheme to provide extra support for tenants through a befriending service, helping them to keep their new properties in the longer term. The idea is for volunteers to provide one-to-one support via phone or email to Real Lettings' tenants on a weekly basis for a minimum of six months to reduce their social isolation and help them gain the confidence to become part of the local community.
Regardless of all the support provided, surely it must be a bit nerve wracking for landlords to hand over their properties for the first time to someone who was formerly struggling with alcohol or drug abuse problems?
Sinclair says: "We go through a 19-page assessment to make sure clients are ready to live independently. We don't mind what a person's past has been; it's where they are now in their life. We assess that very carefully and match them with a property. Often if you exceed people's expectations, they will live up to it."
Lacey won't go into the details of how he lost his housing association home but he does say that when he left he had just two bags of possessions. He couldn't take anything else with him because he had nowhere to store it. The flat is unfurnished, and he has a £429 social fund loan to buy everything – from the airbed he has bought just that morning to bedding, pots, pans and cutlery. He is planning a trip to a charity shop in Wandsworth, which apparently sells "really good three-piece suites for £100".
He is totally confident that he will be able to find work now he has a home. "You can't get work while you're living on the streets but I've been doing voluntary work in community transport. I take pensioners and disabled people out for the day," he says. Lacey has a licence to drive coaches, but adds: "I'm not fussy. I'll do anything me." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/nov/30/chris-eubank-jr-billy-joe-saunders | Sport | 2014-11-30T01:12:02.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | Tyson Fury beats Dereck Chisora, Billy Joe Saunders beats Chris Eubank | It was a good night for the Travelling community and not a bad night for boxing, as a loud gathering of nearly 20,000 fans willing to miss their last train home stayed in the hall into the small hours as their champions Billy Joe Saunders and Tyson Fury held off challengers to their unbeaten records and world title ambitions.
Saunders survived the late charge of Chris Eubank Jr to keep his British, European and Commonwealth titles, and looks forward to the prospect of challenging the winner of Matt Koborov and fellow Traveller, Andy Lee, who meet in Las Vegas on 13 December for a WBO version of the world title.
Fury, switching from orthodox to southpaw, virtually strolled through10 one-sided rounds before Dereck Chisora decided he had taken enough punishment - an ending that was greeted with disgruntlement as fans filtered out of the arena.
Fury won way more easily than when they met three years ago, and securing the vacant European title puts him just a few months of hard negotiating away from challenging the best heavyweight in the world, Wladimir Klitschko.
The earlier fight that mattered built slowly and ended in fierce exchanges, with the result in the balance until the final seconds, as Saunders, exhausted, dug deep to hold the challenger at bay.
Eubank might well be a world champion one day, but, cursed by genes that stilled his charge until it was too late, he was not quite good enough last night. He will come again, much better for this experience.
Had he boxed in the first half of the contest like he did in the second half, he would this morning be admiring the British, European and Commonwealth middleweight titles – but he learned that posing like his father once did can be a costly business.
One judge saw it for the challenger 116-113, while the other two officials gave it to Saunders by margins of 115-114 and 115-113. There were a slew of close rounds in a slow start. I had it a draw, Eubank winning every round from the eighth onwards and sharing the fourth and fifth, although a good argument could be made for seeing those in Saunders favour.
Saunders now is in line to fight the winner of Matt Koborov and Andy Lee, who meet in Las Vegas on 13 December, for the WBO “world” title.
From the moment he vaulted the ropes - a la his father (who might have split his fancy britches had he tried it last night), Junior wanted to play mind games. Saunders kept his cool, though, as his opponent went into full Eubank pose.
Paul Smith Jr, the Liverpool super-middleweight, and trainer Shane McGuigan observed on social media that the champion had erred by wearing Winning gloves, which are considerably more cushioned than the Reyes on the fists of Eubank. Certainly, Saunders did not land a single blow that threatened to stop his opponent, although he took quite a few himself that threatened his titles in the final few rounds.
With his father standing on the steps in his corner, clapping impatiently like a schoolmaster, Eubank swished air way too often in the first five rounds.
Eubank’s strategy appeared to be watch, wait, watch some more then lunge and dip low to avoid the counter. It was not pretty and it was bringing him little dividend. By the end of the fourth, he’d given up staring down Saunders on the bell.
The fight was like a tightly-strung bow, but neither archer was releasing the arrow. They mimicked each other’s feints with eerie synchronicity and it did not make for much of a spectacle early on.
They continued their grab-and-smash into the eighth, with more missing than landing from either side - although Eubank, swinging more freely, caught Saunders on the ropes with some heavy shots to the ribs. There was nothing in it going into the final two rounds, but Saunders needed to stop the barrage coming his way.
With his mouth open and his nose bleeding, Saunders shipped huge left hooks and uppercuts in the final round, as well as one crunching right cross, but was still there, proud and unbeaten. Not to mention relieved.
Eubank Senior’s clapping grew more insistent as the crowd began to boo, rightly so. “Come on!” Saunders said - but the only engagement was in close- quarter wrestling with the odd blow to the back of the head.
Saunders raised his hands at the end, but they looked mighty tired from ringside.
A word for two losers of astonishing fortitude on the undercard, Gary Sykes and Andrew Robinson, both of whom might have been saved from long and fruitless fights by more compassionate refereeing.
Sykes surrendered his British super-featherweight title to the Commonwealth champion Liam Walsh, but looked gone in the first round when dropped heavily then artfully battled all the way to the final bell. Walsh, who will move up to lightweight after struggling to stay at 9st 4lb, boxed beautifully to win 118-109, 119-108, 118-111 – and, although unhappy because several rounds were competitive, Sykes had no cause to complain.
Frank Buglioni raised more questions than he answered despite a 97-92, 97-93, 97-92 win over the unbeaten Andrew Robinson, who also got off the floor, rising glazed-eyed to get through the seventh and somehow surviving a shelling in the eighth of their 10-rounder.
Buglioni’s switch from Jimmy Tibbs’ stable to Steve Collins’s Dublin base, after being stopped two fights ago, does not seem to have done much for his defence, which is as bad as Liverpool’s. That said, Robinson wasn’t exactly Fort Knox.
Mitchell Smith laboured a little in beating the light-punching Hungarian Zoltan Kovacs 97-91, 97-91, 100-89 for the WBO’s European super-featherweight belt. A match between the Londoner and Sykes would be interesting.
Frankie Gavin squeaked by Bradley Skeete by scores of 116-112 and two of 116-113 to add the vacant Commonwealth welterweight title to the British championship, but there were a lot of close rounds in a contest that was enlivened only at the very end – first by a little scrap in the crowd before the start of the 12th round, then by the premature playing of the ring-walk music for the Saunders-Eubank fight. Otherwise, it was, as they say, one for the purists.
I had it a draw. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/biden-soviet-russia-status-quo-democratic-ussr | Opinion | 2020-03-06T15:44:02.000Z | Ben Judah | Is Joe Biden the American Brezhnev? | Ben Judah | Despite being frail and confused, he won the trust of an oligarchic party nomenklatura in a declining superpower by promising no structural reforms, no curbs on special interests and no changes to an interventionist, hegemonic and overextended foreign policy.
Biden becomes America's new comeback kid after triumphant Super Tuesday
Read more
That’s a pretty neat summary of how the ailing Leonid Brezhnev held power in the USSR in the 1970s, or the ploy deployed by Konstantin Chernenko, the anybody-but-Gorbachev candidate, to become general secretary in 1984 before his death in office barely a year later. But the fact that it could also be read as an outline of Joe Biden’s pitch to the Democratic party establishment should give pause for thought.
Think of this comparison, in true eastern European style, as a “serious joke”. First, excuse the silly part: there are leagues of difference between the intrigues of a totalitarian party state and the Democratic primaries. There were obviously no free and fair elections in the USSR. But there is a core similarity. The late Soviet Union was a complex system that the party establishment knew by the late 1960s was badly malfunctioning. Yet rather than rethink their role in the world or embrace what were considered radical structural reforms that would have threatened the vested interests of party chiefs and state corporations, the Soviet establishment chose an avoidance strategy – first with Brezhnev, then with Chernenko. The price they eventually paid, with the USSR’s collapse, was world-historic.
This election cycle the Democratic party has been presented with not one but two compelling campaigns for structural reform in the shape of Elizabeth Warren (who dropped out on Thursday) and Bernie Sanders. Both candidates have offered a sustained critique of the country’s economic model and argued that it is to blame for the rise of Donald Trump at home and has fuelled authoritarian kleptocracy abroad. Their campaigns consistently highlighted the unsustainable nature of the current trajectory when it comes to not just the financialisation of the US economy, but the failed approaches to healthcare, college debt, climate breakdown and defence. And, issue by issue, the progressive diagnoses and treatments for these ills have shown themselves to be highly popular.
Biden has effectively been the campaigner against structural reform: rather than articulating where he thinks the left flank’s analysis fails, he chooses to criticise their solutions as unworkable or unelectable. He was being honest when he told rich donors “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected president.
But there is more to this than merely waiving proposed wealth taxes. Unlike the Obama administration, his would be a government with no policy roadmap, no reformist agenda and likely no executive energy. Biden’s visibly frail mind would be in the driving seat and, with it, his nostalgia for days of civility and collaborative politics on Capitol Hill that have plainly failed the Democrats for decades. There would be no rethink of the US’s role in the world, despite the country having spent $5.9tn on conflicts in the Middle East and Asia that have not demonstrably made it safer.
Biden and his supporters’ desire to beat Donald Trump is laudable. He has clearly won the trust of African-American voters. But the fact that Biden has chosen to campaign for the presidency without presenting any goals beyond ejecting Trump should trouble us. By choosing to conceptualise Trump as an exception to the status quo and not as a product of the status quo, he fails to recognise that the conditions to produce another Trump still exist.
Much of what is now attracting the Washington establishment to Biden is that he offers an image that resembles the mythic form of American leadership. But it lacks substance. What concerns me is that those in the Beltway establishment most committed to the so-called “rules-based international order” that Trump has undermined are forgetting that American power is built on a foundation of widely shared domestic prosperity allowing social stability.
However when lower- and middle-class incomes have been stagnant for decades, nearly 140 million adults report “medical financial hardship” every year, life expectancy is in decline as personal, mortgage and college debt continues to rise, this foundation starts to crumble. Surveys show the national sense of wellbeing has declined. Key indicators like these were what the Soviet leadership chose to ignore when they decided they would rather retain Brezhnev in senility or choose Chernenko months away from death than confront the challenge of domestic reform.
This is where this “serious joke” gets really serious. Biden – if he survives the media- and Republican-led onslaught that will highlight every agonising mental blank as closely as Hillary Clinton’s emails – could actually win in November. Head to head polls in swing states show this electability. But those now rushing to endorse him have to be honest themselves about what kind of presidency this will be – a kind of caretaker government that will swear fealty to superpower myths, and ignore the immense structural problems hollowing out the nation’s strength from within because they are too hard.
Ben Judah is the author of This is London and Fragile Empire | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/14/will-apples-image-scan-plan-protect-children-or-just-threaten-privacy | Opinion | 2021-08-14T15:00:42.000Z | John Naughton | Is Apple’s image-scan plan a wise move or the start of a slippery slope? | John Naughton | Once upon a time, updates of computer operating systems were of interest only to geeks. No longer – at least in relation to Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. You may recall how Version 14.5 of iOS, which required users to opt in to tracking, had the online advertising racketeers in a tizzy while their stout ally, Facebook, stood up for them. Now, the forthcoming version of iOS has libertarians, privacy campaigners and “thin-end-of-the-wedge” worriers in a spin.
It also has busy mainstream journalists struggling to find headline-friendly summaries of what Apple has in store for us. “Apple is prying into iPhones to find sexual predators, but privacy activists worry governments could weaponise the feature” was how the venerable Washington Post initially reported it. This was, to put it politely, a trifle misleading and the first three paragraphs below the headline were, as John Gruber brusquely pointed out, plain wrong.
To be fair to the Post though, we should acknowledge that there is no single-sentence formulation that accurately captures the scope of what Apple has in mind. The truth is that it’s complicated; worse still, it involves cryptography, a topic guaranteed to lead anyone to check for the nearest exit. And it concerns child sexual abuse images, which are (rightly) one of the most controversial topics in the online world.
A good place to start, therefore, is with Apple’s explanation of what it’s trying to do. Basically: three things. The first is to provide tools to help parents manage their childrens’ messaging activity. (Yes, there are families rich enough to give everyone an iPhone!) The iMessage app on children’s phones will use its built-in machine-learning capability to warn of inappropriate content and alert their parents. Second, the updated operating systems will use cryptographic tools to limit the spread of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on Apple’s iCloud storage service while still preserving user privacy. (If this sounds like squaring a circle, then stay tuned.) And third, Apple is providing updates to Siri and search to help parents and children if they encounter unsafe material. This third change seems relatively straightforward. It’s the other two that have generated the most heat.
Photographs are not going to be scanned by attempting to analyse the image per se, but by checking its crypto-signature
The first change is controversial because it involves stuff happening on people’s iPhones. Well, actually, on phones used by children in a shared family account. If the machine-learning algorithm detects a dodgy message the photo will be blurred and accompanied by a message warning the user that if s/he does view it then their parents will be notified. The same applies if the child attempts to send a sexually explicit photograph.
But how does the system know if an image is sexually explicit? It seems to do it by seeing if it matches images in a database maintained by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Every image on that grim database has a unique cryptographic signature – an incomprehensible long number – in other words, the kind of thing that computers are uniquely good at reading. This is the way photographs on iCloud are going to be scanned, not by attempting to analyse the image per se, but just by checking its crypto-signature. So Apple’s innovation is to do it “client-side” (as tech jargon puts it), checking on the device as well as in the Cloud.
It’s this innovation that has rung most alarm bells among those concerned about privacy and civil rights, who see it as undermining what has hitherto been an impressive feature of iMessage – its end-to-end encryption. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, views it as a potential “back door”. “It’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for sexually explicit images sent or received by children,” it warns. “As a consequence, even a well-intentioned effort to build such a system will break key promises of the messenger’s encryption itself and open the door to broader abuses. That’s not a slippery slope – that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.”
Before getting too steamed up about it, here are a few things worth bearing in mind. You don’t have to use iCloud for photographs. And while Apple will doubtless try to claim the moral high ground – as usual – it’s worth noting that it has to date seemed relatively relaxed about what was on iCloud. The NCMEC reports, for example, that in 2020 Facebook reported 20.3m images to it, while Apple reported only 265. So could its brave new update be just about playing catch-up? Or a pre-emptive strike against forthcoming requirements for reporting by the UK and the EU? As the Bible might put it, corporations move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform.
What I’ve been reading
Stunted growth
Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind is the transcript of an interview by David Wallace-Wells recorded after the publication of Smil’s magisterial book on growth.
Fallen idol
Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk is a fabulous long read by Nathan J Robinson on the Current Affairs site.
Hang ups
Teenage Loneliness and the Smartphone is a sombre New York Times essay by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, who have spent years studying the effect of smartphones and social media on our daily lives and mental health. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/may/05/black-ops-review-met-police-comedy-race | Television & radio | 2023-05-05T21:00:32.000Z | Rachel Aroesti | Black Ops review – can you really make a hilarious comedy about police racism? Yes you can! | Between the institutional racism, the institutional misogyny and the institutional homophobia, the Metropolitan police isn’t exactly steeped in hilarity. Can a new sitcom really mine some primetime BBC One belly laughs from the beleaguered institution?
It’s a big ask, but the answer – pretty miraculously – is yes. Black Ops follows two community support officers: the clever but unambitious Dom (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and the naive, uber-religious Kay (Hammed Animashaun). Their jobs are predictable, low-risk and questionnaire-centric – until they’re convinced to infiltrate a local gang as part of an “off the books” undercover operation. From there, Black Ops merges broad comedy with bent copper crime drama to hilarious and nail-biting effect. I won’t give away any of the myriad plot twists, but suffice to say there are some malevolent forces at play in the force itself. Or as Dom economically puts it: “This is some Line of Duty shit!”
Sometimes, high-concept, plot-heavy and especially crime-themed comedy can feel like a cop-out (sorry not sorry). Judging by the ratio of irresistibly gripping police procedurals to laugh-out-loud funny comedies – I’m going to make a conservative estimate of 300:1 – it’s far easier to stage hairy escapes and soft-launch dodgy characters than to deliver gag after well-landed gag. While the cop corruption storyline makes this a very bingeable series – the setup is brilliantly intriguing – Black Ops always feels impressively like out-and-out comedy.
That’s partly because it has a joke density that distinguishes it from the raft of laughter-lite dramedies that currently dominate the streamers. Mostly, however, it’s down to the show’s two stars. Ikumelo – who wrote the show alongside Famalam creator Akemnji Ndifornyen (who plays gang member Tevin) and seasoned sitcom writing duo Lloyd Woolf and Joe Tucker (Witless, Click & Collect) – plays the chronically pissed-off Dom with a level of comic timing that makes every sentence a rewindable treat. Animashaun – who you can also see being hilarious in criminally underrated YouTube satire Pls Like – is a natural clown.
Many jokes stem from the failure of these decidedly non-“street” individuals (spoilt Dom lives at home with her paediatrician dad in a house with an aspirational kitchen, while ebulliently idiotic Kay runs a prayer group) to conduct non-farcical drug deals and play it cool in front of the gang they find themselves awkwardly embroiled in. It’s the sort of comedy that lives or dies by its delivery, and these two are pitch perfect. Some scenes – such as one where the clueless Kay pretends to know what dogging is – might sound hackneyed on paper, but his delivery is so fresh it feels like the first time anyone has made the joke.
The rest of the cast don’t let them down. Amid the starry names (Felicity Montagu, Joanna Scanlan, Rufus Jones, Zoë Wanamaker) are some standout performances. Character comedian Colin Hoult is exceptional as community support colleague Pricey, a man whose lame brand of arseholery is best encapsulated by his caff order: “Energy drink straight in the coffee. Gotta be done!” Kerry Howard appears for about three very memorable seconds as an incredibly smug police officer who thinks Dom and Kay have conned their way into their own workplace (because they are black, it is implied). Emma Sidi – also excellent in Pls Like – plays a park ranger who catches Dom and Kay doing something suspicious on Walthamstow Marshes. When she later identifies them to the police, her terrible attempts to be racially sensitive had me helpless with laughter.
As is probably now quite clear – and as its punning title suggests – Black Ops is full of jokes about race. Some play on the anxieties of white people: there’s a recurring joke that involves Dom calling Kay “a chocolate teapot” due to his uselessness. “In’t that racist?” says Pricey. “Errr, no,” replies a typically disgusted Dom. Others are at the expense of the protagonists themselves, including an exchange where Dom accuses a senior black officer of not dating black women. But the show also uses comedy to spotlight racism in a pointed way. Sometimes that’s in fairly on-the-nose style – the Met are portrayed as cartoonishly ignorant when it comes to race – but elsewhere the digs are more subtle. When Dom complains to Pricey about always being partnered with Kay because they are both black, he responds: “Woah, no comment!” A little reminder that when it comes to racism, most people just don’t want to know.
That said, there is nothing remotely self-serious about Black Ops. Its focus is on perfecting the art of the farce via the dream team of Ikumelo and Animashaun. The Met might be in a state – the country might be in a state – but if these two are the future of British comedy, we’re in very safe hands.
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Black Ops is on BBC One and iPlayer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/06/glasgow-international-gi-2014-review-bedwyr-williams-govanhill | Art and design | 2014-04-05T23:06:00.000Z | Laura Cumming | Glasgow International – more homogenised, emphatically global | Chameleons slither around an abandoned swimming pool in the Puerto Rican jungle. In Korea, super-rich ladies in Prada are becoming frightened of their mutinous servants. In America, a grown man in diapers pretends to be a baby until the cops drag him bawling from the sidewalk to the crowd's bewilderment. You know where you are with video art: it likes to take you all over the world.
The moving image is everywhere – in both respects – at the sixth edition of the Glasgow international festival of art (GI), but that's hardly unusual in the caravan of biennials forever circling the planet. Nothing travels so neatly or cheaply as a DVD. What is significant about this GI is that its focus is so emphatically global.
In the past, of course, selectors could achieve this without going outside the city at all. By general consent, Glasgow has one of the world's most fertile art scenes, enriched by the constant presence of artists from elsewhere. And you can still see something of that in the gorgeous transformation of Glasgow School of Art using little more than tinfoil, sherbet-coloured paint and a ricochet of reflections by the Glasgow-based German artist Michael Stumpf.
But this year is different. This year is not so exhilaratingly free, experimental and home-based; it feels more homogenised.
Take the magnificent McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street, in use for 150 years and recently reopened for the first time in seven years. This is Glasgow in fine style – marble walls, double staircases, vast panelled galleries for old masters – and a revelation to behold. But the building is more impressive than its contents.
Love, by Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne at Govanhill baths. Photograph: courtesy the artists and Glasgow International
Downstairs are the aggressive films of the New York artist Jordan Wolfson, currently the very squeak of chic for his animatronic lap-dancer and his super-sharp use of CGI techniques over stock footage, all scored to Mazzy Star and Beyoncé. Upstairs are the computer-generated drawings of the New York artist Avery Singer, pale and etiolated, like something that has crawled out from under a stone.
If they sound like the kind of art you find at Frieze, this is where GI's new director, Sarah McCrory, last worked.
The glorious baths of Govanhill are also being used as a gallery. This Edwardian palace, its vaulting cupola sending down a tiny echo of the gleeful sounds that must have rung out when the swimming pool was still in use, before the council shut it so outrageously in 2001 to the distress of the community, is a heart-rending vision of redundancy and loss. The vacant cubicles are still etched with the last words of the local people.
Now it's filled with inflatable cubes printed with images – 60s dollybirds, Rodin's The Kiss – that feel as fatuously inconsequential here as they did in 2012 when the artists (Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne) stuffed them in a swimming pool in Poplar, east London.
Writing on a cubicle wall at Govanhill baths. Photograph: David Levene
There's better prospecting at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) where the Slovenian artist Aleksandra Domanovic has a hanging garden of immense transparent sheets bearing half-familiar motifs – rockets, robots, strange inventions out of sci-fi movies, a hint of Sigourney Weaver, Sandra Bullock and the lone female cosmonaut. You weave your way through these giant banners, wondering where it's all leading, and the payoff is properly shocking: a rejection letter from Walt Disney to a young woman in 1938.
"Women do not do any of the creative work preparing the cartoons. That work is performed entirely by men." The only available job was tracing characters on to celluloid; Domanovic's installation becomes a huge sardonic parody.
There is an exact echo in Lucy Reynolds's sound work high in the eaves of the School of Art, where the names of those precious few women allowed to enrol as students a century ago throng the air. They were confined to a single studio. The corridor outside is still known as the hen run.
One of Aleksandra Domanovic's installations at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art. Photograph: courtesy the artist and Glasgow International
Upstairs at GoMA, Sue Tompkins has a beautifully strange show. Memories of snatched conversations, of half-forgotten lyrics and unfulfilled thoughts, stuttered out on old typewriters, are somewhere between concrete poetry and Samuel Beckett. On the walls, thoughts find form in zips that nearly make it all the way up, get stuck, or can't be toothed together at all, dangling pathetically from pieces of chiffon – flimsy things, almost caught. Some thoughts get further than others.
There is a lot of sculpture – literally – in the Briggaitt where Victorian busts, modernist nudes and terracotta warriors keep strange company in the courtyard. And the community spirit is alive at the Common Guild, where the Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri has assembled those needful emergency items – blankets, waterbottles, sleeping bags – into gentle send-ups of Carl Andre's bricks. The materials were donated, briefly used for this humanised minimalism, and will be given to charity at the end of the festival.
The high point of which is undoubtedly the Tramway, which has become a house of humour for the duration. Here you can see videos of the veteran US performance artist Michael Smith, playing his wonderfully tragicomic Mike. Hapless, badly dressed, rubber-faced, Mike is an Everyman Zelig who pops up everywhere, always out of joint with the times he so vividly sends up. The real man is making appearances at GI too.
Best of all, once again, is the inimitable Bedwyr Williams, who has turned the immense central hangar into a dark, dank forest where a coach has stalled in the middle of the night. The luggage has tumbled from its hold, which now emits a fantastical film from its innards.
‘Madcap visionary’ Bedwyr Williams. Photograph: courtesy the artist and Glasgow International
Epic, tormented, hilarious, black, it dreams up a horrible world some time after a major catastrophe in which England has gone feral and turned in on itself with medieval violence. Those with the most stuff – toys, lawnmowers, garden gnomes, forks – are top. The king simply has more hats than anyone else, his shoes so profusely laced he can no longer walk.
Planning officers are buried alive in miniature buildings, councillors are ritually humiliated for their corruption, nightclub bouncers enforce a vicious feudal system in the vacuum. And there in the middle of it all is Bedwyr himself, madcap visionary, artist-cum-poet out of whose conscious all this is streaming as he lies dreaming on the floor of the emergency sports hall surrounded by the snoring forms of hundreds of pensioners, their kindliness and wisdom a comfort in the present crisis. At one point he remarks that there is nobody left to satirise the bad, so they just get worse. But this is Williams's own role – his own great Swiftian achievement. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/09/an-inspiration-fellow-impressionists-pay-tribute-to-mike-yarwood | Television & radio | 2023-09-09T09:51:18.000Z | Harry Taylor | ‘An inspiration’: fellow impressionists pay tribute to Mike Yarwood | Mike Yarwood “kicked the door down” for others in the comedy trade, Rory Bremner has said, after the death of the impressionist and satirist.
Yarwood, who died on Friday aged 82, was a household name in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1977 Christmas special pipped Morecambe and Wise’s festive offering to break, and still hold, the record for the highest-ever single Christmas Day audience.
He was known for his impressions of politicians, celebrities and royals, including Harold Wilson, the then-Prince Charles and Brian Clough.
Tributes were paid to the comedian, including by those to whom he had been a comic forebear. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, Rory Bremner, who has gone on to become one of Britain’s best known impressionists on Bremner, Bird and Fortune, said he had been an inspiration.
He and Alistair McGowan had coincidentally been recording tributes to Yarwood for a documentary before the news broke on Friday.
Bremner said: “If it hadn’t been for him and Stanley Baxter, I don’t think I’d have become an impressionist.
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“He kicked the door down, and he turned impressions from being a kind of specialist act, a trick as it were, into top of the bill entertainment, Saturday night affair.
“He was the inspiration for so many of our generation, Alistair, John Culshaw, Phil Cool, we were inspired by him.”
McGowan said his favourite impression of Yarwood’s was Brian Clough, the then-Nottingham Forest manager. They worked together once in the mid-1990s, when McGowan was starting out and Yarwood was attempting a comeback.
“He was a wonderful man, very generous,” he told the Today programme. “He just said that ‘your lot nowadays are much more interested vocally than I was, I wasn’t that bothered about getting them exact, but I was interested in getting the essence of them’, but it was the physicality that interested him the most,” he said.
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“You look back to his Frankie Howerd, his Larry Grayson and Bruce Forsyth. He would just stick his tongue in the corner of his mouth as Frankie Howerd or Larry Grayson, or the way he walked as Bruce Forsyth, it was exemplary and it has been very hard to match that standard.”
Yarwood got 21.4 million viewers for his 1977 Christmas special, but McGowan believed he suffered from impressionists’ TV shows often not being rebroadcast, unlike other shows, because of their topical nature.
“With impressionists we get sort of forgotten a bit because our material is thought of topical and of course the people we’re doing move on all the time,” he said.
“So you don’t get repeated in the same way and Mike didn’t get repeated in the way the Two Ronnies or Morecambe and Wise have always been repeated. Their stuff is seen as timeless, but theirs is of an era, and Mike’s was of an era, but we don’t get the same recognition. Mike has been forgotten in that respect, and it’s is a shame because he brought so much joy to young and old alike.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/mar/04/the-terror-review-an-icy-chiller-with-echoes-of-our-present | Television & radio | 2021-03-04T13:30:02.000Z | Lucy Mangan | The Terror review – an icy chiller with echoes of our present | The Terror (BBC Two) was originally broadcast by AMC/BT in the Before Times – the halcyon days, did we but know it, of 2018. It’s an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ 2007 bestseller about the imagined fate of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which went missing along with 129 crew in 1845 as Sir John Franklin led them in a search for the fabled North-West Passage through the Arctic. The series could be regarded with detached interest then. Now, the tale of two ships and their men trapped for two winters in unyielding pack ice, bored, isolated and made increasingly paranoid and unstable by the uncertainty of rescue … well, it has more resonance, let’s say.
Apropos of nothing, I note that Franklin (Ciaran Hinds) is a man disastrously underqualified for his position as expedition leader. He has succeeded in life through confidence and showmanship and is better at delivering bombastic speeches than listening to reason or executing a plan of action that will save his men. He prefers to be liked than take difficult or unpopular decisions and so seems set to doom the men under his care to unnecessary suffering and death. The enabler of all his weaknesses is his cabinet – I mean, sidekick – Captain James Fitzjames (played with customary elegant malevolence by Tobias Menzies).
The only real kink in this perfect analogy to our benighted county’s lockdown situation is that the voice of reason, intelligence and tough decisions that might actually work is the vainglorious leader’s second-in-command rather than a committee of medical and scientific advisers. The ever-magnificent Jared Harris plays Francis Crozier, a dour man disappointed in love, held back in his naval career by his Irish heritage and 10 times the seaman Franklin will ever be. They are stuck in the pack ice because Franklin ignored his advice to play it safe and keep some slack in the unforgiving system.
The dynamics and characters of those in charge and of those they command are impressively dense and detailed. Franklin and Crozier’s relationship – its bonds and its strains – are gradually illuminated via flashbacks to pre-expedition times (dear God, everyone looks so warm and happy and free in their theatres and ballrooms and at their leisurely, non-socially distanced dinners).
The ordinary young lad who suddenly starts vomiting blood at the dinner table and dies by the end of the opening episode is drawn so well that his dying terrors are heartbreaking. You feel his loss as starkly as the doctor (Paul Ready) who tries in vain to comfort him. And then there’s caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis), a potent mix of social ambition and street smarts, and a man who can spot another fellow’s weaknesses at a hundred paces. An interesting person to have aboard any ship, let alone the trapped HMS Terror.
You hardly need the horror element that is soon introduced into the mix. In some ways, the tension actually dissipates with the advent of a monstrous bear-cum-angered-Inuit-spirit. Once the creature starts tearing exploratory parties to pieces, there is focus and legitimacy to the fears of the trapped men. But it is surely the sprawling and deepening nature of these fears that provides the true horror for us all. Or maybe that’s just 2021 speaking. Maybe vicious giant bears roaming the icy wastelands were more frightening, and will be again one happy day.
History, horror and much of human life is here, and it’s all done well. However, it never quite catches fire into the blazing glory you might expect from the acting talent involved and the pedigree behind the scenes. The executive producer is Ridley Scott, a man who knows his way around a trapped ship housing a monster keen to pick off its crew members one by gored and bloodied one. It’s directed by Edward Berger, who was responsible for Deutschland 83.
Nor does The Terror live up to the beauty and period detailing of the set design, as it alternates between the claustrophobic interiors of the two vessels and the bright, desolate expanse outside. Maybe it is trying to do too much, or maybe 10 episodes is simply too long to keep sufficient suspense going.
But, assuming you are one who prefers to lean in to a situation rather than escape it via reruns of, say, Scrubs or Brooklyn Nine-Nine, there is much to enjoy here, and you can tick those 10 episodes off whatever mental or actual countdown chart you are keeping during our collective incarceration. Don’t let the bears get you down. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/09/macquarie-wades-back-into-uk-with-majority-stake-in-southern-water | Business | 2021-08-09T15:55:42.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | Macquarie wades back into UK with majority stake in Southern Water | The Australian investment bank Macquarie has returned to the UK water industry – four and a half years after leaving Thames Water saddled with debt – buying a majority stake in Southern Water for more than £1bn.
The infrastructure investor promised to put the utility firm “back on a stable footing” after it was fined a record £90m last month for dumping billions of litres of raw sewage off the north Kent and Hampshire coasts.
An investigation found that Southern Water had deliberately poured the sewage into the sea to avoid financial penalties and the cost of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure.
The company is responsible for supplying water to 2.6m customers and provides wastewater services to 4.7m customers across Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
Macquarie said that by injecting more than £1bn in new equity to recapitalise the business, Southern would be able to invest in fixing the faulty pipes, pumping stations and sewers, which are causing harm to the local environment.
Ian McAulay, the chief executive of Southern Water, said Macquarie’s investment was “good news for our customers, the local environment and the regional economy”.
“It strengthens our ability to tackle the longer-term challenges posed by climate change and population growth, at the same time as being responsible custodians of Southern England’s rivers and seas,” he said.
The bank sold its stake in Britain’s biggest water supplier, Thames Water, in 2017 after a decade in which Macquarie earned billions from the company through dividends and paid next to no corporation tax.
Macquarie sold its final stake in Thames for an estimated £1.35bn, just months before the Environment Agency prosecuted the utility company for extensive pollution in the Thames and other rivers between 2012 and 2014. At the time the £20m fine was a record for such this kind of offence.
In a letter published on Monday, Ofwat, the water industry regulator, warned Macquarie that “very profound changes” would be required at Southern Water.
Jonson Cox, Ofwat’s chair, added that the water industry had made strides in recent years to bring investor returns in line with customer service and eliminate complicated corporate structures and financial arrangements. Macquarie used such mechanisms to load Thames with debt to pay hefty dividends and no tax.
“You have confirmed that you support these aims,” Cox said. “You have recognised that Southern Water’s customers deserve better service, and you have set out your ambition for Southern Water to be a well-performing business in the next regulatory period and for the company to be able to operate in line with Ofwat’s expectations for the whole sector.”
On Saturday, an incident involving a Southern water overflow prompted Canterbury council to warn the public not to swim off a section of the Kent coast near Whitstable.
Leigh Harrison, the head of Macquarie’s infrastructure division, said its long-term investment in the company would put Southern “back on a stable footing” and enable “an ambitious multi-year transformation plan” to make the company more sustainable and resilient.
In response to Ofwat’s letter, Harrison said that while Southern should make “substantial progress in addressing its issues by the end of 2025”, the full transformation “will take time”.
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The public outcry prompted by Thames’s track record under Macquarie’s ownership was one of the key drivers behind calls for the regional water company monopolies to be taken back into public ownership, which was a Labour party manifesto pledge for the 2019 election.
Pascale Robinson from We Own It, which campaigns against private ownership, said Macquarie’s previous ownership of Thames set “a worrying precedent” for its ownership of Southern Water.
“Macquarie may be promising to use their stake to stop sewage leaks but we can’t trust them to be true to their word, given that they were responsible for Thames Water’s extensive pollution of the Thames in 2014-16,” he said. “To stop the rip-off that is private companies profiting off a basic human necessity, and to hold Southern Water to account, we need to bring water back into public ownership throughout the UK.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/06/barnaby-joyce-says-charitable-status-helping-green-groups-destroy-the-economy | Australia news | 2017-09-06T08:09:17.000Z | Paul Karp | Barnaby Joyce says charitable status helping green groups destroy the economy | Barnaby Joyce has criticised the charitable status of environmental groups, questioning why they should receive tax deductible donations for “destroy[ing] the economic base of Australia”.
In a speech to the Minerals Council on Wednesday, the deputy prime minister said that Australia had to “push back” against highly organised groups lobbying against mining and take them “head on”.
A Treasury inquiry is considering changes to the rules governing tax deductibility of gifts, which conservation groups fear is the latest stage in a long-running campaign by the Coalition government and miners to limit their advocacy.
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On Friday the Minerals Council made a submission to the Treasury inquiry suggesting environmental charities should be banned from using more than 10% of their expenditure on advocacy.
Joyce said coal and iron ore miners, and farmers, were fighting “fatuous economics” that ignored “the overwhelming wealth of this nation historically and to this day” comes from primary producers.
“Now we are still fighting. Still fighting to this day. And they fight it in the most ardent forms, right in your face,” he said. “In fact many of the groups that fight you have tax deductibility. They’re charities, apparently. A charity whose job it is to completely destroy the economic base of Australia.”
Joyce said that conservation groups fought projects with “green tape” (a reference to environmental litigation), “red tape” and “black tape” – the latter expression being one he said Aboriginal groups had given to him.
“Because apparently, they [Aboriginal people] got their own land back but they can’t do anything with it,” he said.
One of the most controversial developments in the country, Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine in Queensland, recently lost majority support from traditional owners.
Tony McAvoy, one of Australia’s leading native title lawyers and a traditional owner fighting to stop the Adani mine, has rejected the suggestion Indigenous groups were being manipulated to oppose the mine.
Joyce said Australia was “having a bit of a reality check” and the “penny is starting to drop” that environmental groups were using the law as “a mechanism which works against the interests of our nation”.
Joyce also said that the government was “redesigning the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund, so it can be better used to get access and start delivering some of these infrastructure projects essential to the delivery of mining outcomes”.
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The Naif is currently considering whether to give a $900m concessional loan to pay for a rail line to the Carmichael mine and the Galilee Basin. The $5bn fund is also one possible source for funds for a new coal-fired power plant, which Malcolm Turnbull has said the government has no plans to build but has not ruled out.
With respect to the Galilee Basin, Joyce said Australia was “in the fight of our lives trying to open up a mechanism to provide wealth for this nation”.
“We will just have to take people head on,” he said. “Those people collecting the tax deductibility to fight us, take them head on, and start selling back to the Australian people the economic message ‘this is how you are actually going to survive, this is how you are going to win as a nation’.”
Joyce said that primary producers – of cattle, coal, grain or iron ore – were “in the same game” and the same battle.
“They are very coordinated, they’ve got a lot of spare time, a lot of spare time to work out how they deal with you and we’ve got to make sure that we get that push back.”
Joyce complained the environmental campaigners had contributed to Hazelwood coal power plant being shut, blaming the decision by its owners Engie for increasing power prices by 20%.
In 2015 the Abbott government introduced legislation to remove the right of most environmental organisations to challenge developments under federal laws, which never passed parliament. Last year Turnbull suggested the bill could be revived if the Senate supported it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/03/drug-use-is-a-health-problem-inside-one-of-the-worlds-oldest-legal-consumption-rooms | Society | 2023-12-03T13:00:14.000Z | Charlotte Lytton | ‘Drug use is a health problem’: inside one of the world’s oldest legal consumption rooms | In a lime-green room behind Geneva’s main train station, a man is slumped over a chair, the heroin he has just injected taking effect. Around him, a handful of others are in the process of reaching that same state of bliss: administering bands to their arms to produce a vein, unpeeling plastic-clad syringes, exhaling as the needle goes in. Some will return later today – maybe a handful of times – to get their hit at one of the oldest supervised drug consumption rooms in the world, where users can take their own illicit substances without fear of prosecution.
A state-provided supply of safe injecting equipment, along with tea, croissants and hot showers, may seem an unusual way to handle a citywide drug epidemic, but Geneva’s Quai 9 facility – which turned 20 this year – may well provide a blueprint for Britain. In September, it was announced that the UK’s first legal consumption room is to open in Glasgow, a city in a country with higher fatal overdose rates than anywhere in Europe; deaths caused by drug poisoning in Scotland are 2.7 times higher than the UK average. First proposed seven years ago, the site – five minutes from the city centre’s main drag, by a Morrison’s and a pram shop – will cost £7m to build.
Kirsten Horsburgh, chief executive of the Scottish Drugs Forum, says she is “delighted” by this “massive, massive achievement over many years” for health leaders and city officials in Glasgow, “who should be applauded for their tenacity and resilience in trying to push this forward”.
Studies of the approximately 120 facilities worldwide appear positive: Vancouver’s has been “associated with improved health outcomes” such as reducing HIV and hepatitis C transmission by providing clean needles; Sydney’s, which opened in 2001, noted a reduction in ambulance callouts. A 2011 paper found that consumption rooms reduced fatal overdose rates by a third, while a paper published by French researchers last year showed that emergency department visits and crime dropped once they had been introduced, too.
A drug consumption room at Quai 9 in Geneva. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Its proponents argue that consumption rooms not only provide better outcomes for users’ health, but for the public – and the public purse. Reduced illnesses and overdoses means fewer people needing medical care; a 2021 government review found that the societal cost of drug misuse in England and Wales is £20bn annually, yet that for every £1 spent on harm reduction and treatment, there is a fourfold return on investment via alleviated pressure on health and justice services.
“It’s really hard to find people who are against drug consumption rooms,” Horsburgh says, adding that if one were to open close to her home, she would “welcome it”.
Of course, not everyone is on side. The idea seems mind-boggling to many, even if consumption rooms have been around for close to four decades (the first opened in Bern, Switzerland, in 1986). After a five-year trial, a small group of vocal protesters expressed their fury at the recent opening of the medically supervised injecting room (MSIR) in Melbourne, sharing photos of addicts lying in the street outside in a chemically induced stupor. (Its location, next to a primary school, has been a key source of ire.)
Horsburgh appreciates that “there’s always the mystique around these types of services. If you’ve never been familiar with them before, if you’ve never visited a facility like this, it’s really difficult to understand how it operates, what it does, what outcomes can be for people.” As such, she thinks the most important next step for Glasgow – along with ensuring the facility doesn’t enter a protracted consultation period that derails it from its opening, projected to be within a matter of months – is a “really good consultation with the neighbours, because while a lot of people may be supportive of services for people who use drugs, quite often it’s then the ‘well, not in my back yard’ stuff.”
Quai 9 appeared to have cracked that. Run by Première Ligne (a nonprofit focusing on drug harm reduction), with 4m Swiss francs (about £3.6m) in funding from the Canton of Geneva over the past year, it has become a fundamental part of the city’s makeup. Its central location (considered a necessity for consumption rooms, so they are based where excessive drug use is) and lurid lime-green exterior are not intended to hide its identity, but signpost it to those in need – something that requires close cooperation between local businesses and residents, police, healthcare and housing facilities. It is seen as mutually beneficial: reducing the number of addicts who would otherwise have been consuming drugs on the street or on doorsteps, potentially in large groups, and leaving drug paraphernalia on the floor.
The proposed site on Hunter Street in Glasgow of the UK’s first safer drug consumption centre. The aim is to open the facility next year. Photograph: Iain Masterton/Alamy
The relationship between the centre and locals, and the fact that, to date, there has not been a lethal overdose at Quai 9, are “a matter of pride … It’s nice to think that good decisions were taken in Geneva”, says Ruth Dreifuss, a former Swiss president and ex-chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (which includes a handful of world leaders, Richard Branson and Nick Clegg).
Dreifuss, who was elected to the Swiss cabinet in the early 1990s – when the country was in the grip of the HIV crisis – is adamant that “drug use is a health problem”, and that the “illusion” that it is a social ill that can be dealt with by “repressive” criminal laws alone “really has to stop, and to be replaced by pragmatic answers to the needs of the people who use drugs”. She believes that penalising users of illicit substances serves only to potentially worsen their health and social footing when they are forced through the justice system for something that could be overseen safely.
Yet in recent months, Quai 9 has been hit hard by new challenges. Geneva, along with other cities in Switzerland, is facing a crack cocaine epidemic, with cheap “rocks” available for as little as £9. Its presence on the streets has become so strong that Quai 9 has introduced a smoking room in its facility, with plastic dividers to help contain the fumes. “You cannot predict what’s going to be the next step,” says Thomas Herquel, Première Ligne’s director. “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.”
We think sometimes that the only path is to have some kind of authoritarian response
Dr Nico Clark, Royal Melbourne hospital
Around the world, shifting drug use habits have unseated what appeared to be permissive drug law success stories. Portugal decriminalised consumption of all drugs for personal use in 2001; it technically remains against the law, but instead of prison, users are registered by police and referred for help (attendance is voluntary). In the early days, it appeared to be an unequivocal success: HIV transmission rates via syringes dropped, as did the number of overdoses, and prison populations were down 16.5% by 2008. But a recent national survey shows illicit drug use up from 7.8% to 12.8% between 2001 and 2022; overdose rates are at a 12-year high, having nearly doubled in Lisbon between 2019 and 2023 (this is still below the European average). In Porto, there has been a 24% jump in drug paraphernalia being collected from city streets in the year to 2022, with this year set to outpace that. Crimes such as robbery in public spaces rose 14% from 2021 to 2022, which police have in part blamed on the rise in drug use.
Drug reforms in Oregon and Canada have also failed to live up to their promises. Measure 110, introduced in the US state three years ago to limit the role of law enforcement in drug use, has resulted in rising overdoses and delays in funding for treatment; a statewide nonpartisan poll in May found that more than 60% of residents believe the policy has worsened levels of addiction, crime and homelessness. In British Columbia, decriminalisation efforts amid an opioid crisis have been called a “failed experiment” by the Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre.
A user at Quai 9 in Geneva prepares heroin using clean equipment provided by the centre. Photograph: Conor Ashleigh
Dr Nico Clark led the establishment of the MSIR in Melbourne, worked on drug treatment efforts at the World Health Organization and is now head of addiction medicine at Royal Melbourne hospital. He remains optimistic that “if you redesign [drug] services in a way that works for [drug users], then you have this combined benefit of helping people stay alive, but also helping them change their lives and improve their lives”. He points to figures showing a drop in ambulance callouts in the area around the centre once it opened, and data modelling that estimates more than 6,000 overdoses have since been successfully managed, and 63 lives saved.
Its location next to a community health centre has, he says, made it possible to give further treatment quickly, including dental services for those whose drug use had severely damaged their teeth, as “not only does it cause chronic pain, but it severely limits their opportunity to re-engage with society … We had so many examples of people who transformed their lives before our eyes.” Opposition, he adds, is based less on centres’ efficacy, more on the “huge stigma” that drug-taking retains. “It’s confronting for us as a society… we think sometimes the only path is to kind of have some kind of authoritarian response or take [drug users] away.”
For Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, it is hard to conclude whether consumption rooms – which “have become a battleground in the culture wars” – are really the answer to rising global drug use rates. Evidence to date is “methodologically weak”, Humphreys says. “Supervised drug consumption sites may make a small difference or they may not, especially when compared with better evidenced services [such as treatment with medications and counselling, or provision of naloxone, used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose] that could be supported with the same money.”
Increasingly, how well consumption rooms work comes down to what “working” looks like. Do reduced ambulance callouts and less antisocial behaviour constitute success? Or does that only come with a drop in drug use and crime rates? Is the main goal simply keeping people who would be injecting anyway off the streets?
Vincent*, who has been visiting Quai 9 for six years, is that dichotomy made flesh. “At the beginning I was only smoking heroin. After four or five months, I started injecting, and started mixing medication [taking other substances], which made things feel much stronger,” he tells me. “It makes me calm, but at the same time, it’s a false calm, because I’m very nervous, stressed and anxious.” Inside his mind is a prison, he says, from which he is unable to escape.
He is grateful for the centre, to “have a safe place to smoke and inject, we don’t have to use drugs outside people’s houses, [or] on the streets”. But he also attends five times a day, his addiction showing no signs of slowing. Vincent aspires to have “a beautiful family”, he says, smiling; “to be given a chance”. Quai 9 may be the safest place he can achieve that. But there is no guarantee.
*Name has been changed
In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/apr/04/theres-nothing-natural-about-australias-cost-of-living-crisis-its-time-we-had-systemic-change | Australia news | 2023-04-04T01:03:32.000Z | Peter Lewis | There’s nothing natural about Australia’s ‘cost-of-living crisis’. It’s time we had systemic change | Peter Lewis | The “cost-of-living crisis” has ushered in a feverish cycle of retail politics, where our elected representatives strive to prove both their empathy and utility by promising to end the hip pocket squeeze being felt by many Australians.
The Albanese government has made history winning a cost-of-living byelection; New South Wales has changed power in a contest where the hip pocket nerve was vigorously massaged; the upcoming federal budget will inevitably be framed around the issue as well.
But there is a wilful blindness at the core of this crisis that risks diminishing the challenges people face by reducing them to a crude consumer price tag.
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The “cost-of-living crisis” has the vibe of a construct cooked up in one of those libertarian language labs that have shifted “global warming” to the more benign “climate change”, “public funding” to the fiscally medicinal “tax relief” and “privatisation” to “asset recycling”.
“Cost of living” implies an inevitability to our current situation, as if this inflationary cycle is just a natural consequence of our worldly existence, part of the rhythm of our economic life that we need to accept.
But there is nothing natural about the pain that households are currently feeling. It is the direct consequence of “economically rational” decisions (another triumph of rightwing framing) made by governments over many years.
There is nothing natural about a housing system that privileges those who have accumulated capital over those who have not; nothing natural about the retail markets that dominate education, nothing natural about our unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels.
As this week’s Guardian Essential poll illustrates, these are decisions that are now undermining the economic security of many Australian households
If cost of living is the question, the answer is a resounding “ouch”. One quarter of the population are doing it tough, another 40% are starting to feel the heat, leaving just a third in the comfort of the economic banana chair.
This speaks to a second problem with the “cost-of-living” frame. It vests the challenge to find the money to pay the bills and mortgage in the individual, rather than seeing these as the inevitable consequence of turning essential services into private markets and transforming citizens into customers.
As individual consumers it’s on us to navigate the system, with the government’s role confined to improving the flow of consumer information. Remember the Rudd government’s impotent response to post-GFC rising prices with a string of price comparison websites?
Finally, thinking of the current problem as a “crisis” makes the moment seem transitory, more like an economic storm or bushfire to be weathered while absolving government of longer-term accountability for systemic failures.
But a separate question suggests most people have not read the free market memo and expect the government to intervene with more than crisis payments and emergency accommodation.
People, especially the young who are most affected by the impacts of inflation, believe government can – or more appositely could – make a difference if they chose to. It’s what politicians do with that expectation that is more revealing.
Ironically, for the conservative political parties that have always governed in the name of “free markets”, blaming the new government for living costs requires a suspension of disbelief that not even the Murdoch echo chamber can sustain.
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This was borne out in the Coalition’s abject failure in the Aston byelection over the weekend, where the federal Coalition discovered that simply shouting “cost of living” is not enough to convince people you have a plan.
Meanwhile in NSW, Labor’s successful prosecution of the “cost-of-living crisis”, a key issue in winning minority government, was more a series of Band-Aids placed on existing policy wounds than transformative change.
NSW Labor promised to lift the 2.5% public sector wages cap designed to peg pay claims to inflation but now delivering declining living standards to nurses, teachers and many other tens of thousands who work directly for the government.
It also pledged to end the Coalition’s privatisation fetish and specifically vowed to keep Sydney Water, one of the few assets that hadn’t been flogged off already, in public hands.
Most gallingly, it promised to redirect significant taxpayer dollars to offset the exorbitant tolls multinational corporations are charging people to get around a city too reliant on private roads. Cost of living, indeed.
A final table shows there is an appetite for government to take the discussion beyond the sticker and open a more honest discussion on the very architecture of our economy.
For each of the following, please indicate whether you are comfortably able to afford it, finding it a bit difficult to afford or really struggling to afford it.
These figures show the depth of public appetite for government intervention into the markets of essential services, not just at the point of sale, but at the source.
Ideas that have been off the table for the best part of four decades including centrally mandated price caps on energy prices enjoy overwhelming public support. Tax cuts are also as popular as ever, highlighting the challenges in reversing even the regressive stage-three handouts to the wealthy.
But it is support for systemic change that also stands out, starting with the shambolic childcare market that has placed unnecessary economic stress on young families while placing unfair barriers on women returning to paid employment.
Turning this failing market into a coherent, universal early learning system will ease price pressure, increase immediate productivity and invest in kids for the long term.
Sole parents like me are at the frontline of the cost-of-living crisis. Will Albanese right the wrongs of his predecessors?
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Speaking of working, the workplace minister, Tony Burke, has recognised one of the huge drivers of cost-of-living pressure is at the input end, a bargaining system designed to minimise wages for labour and maximise profits to capital.
Even before our current “crisis”, the Reserve Bank was warning of the impact of artificially low wages. Now it is these same Paye wage-earners who are facing the brunt of rising prices who are being most squeezed.
There is strong support in our Guardian Essential poll for Burke’s endorsement of a higher minimum wage; but this is not the only work on his agenda to get wages moving, with “same jobs, same pay” laws to increase pay for labour hours and contractors.
Rather than being in a “cost-of-living crisis”, maybe we are actually in an “inequality crisis” or a “markets charging us too much (while continuing to deliver massive profits) crisis”.
Or maybe we are entering a “finally taking responsibility for the way our nation functions” moment. Less “cost of living”, more “choice of how we live together”.
The “cost-of-living crisis” narrative served Labor well in opposition, allowing it to shift the abstract economic management contest to the kitchen table.
Moving beyond it in power could give it its best chance to create the momentum and urgency to deliver on its broader policy agenda and render the Coalition, which will instinctively oppose anything it does, even more irrelevant.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/08/uyghur-student-convicted-posting-protests-video-wechat-kamile-wayit | World news | 2023-06-08T14:41:15.000Z | Amy Hawkins | Uyghur student convicted after posting protests video on WeChat | A Uyghur student who was detained in Xinjiang in December after posting a video on WeChat of the “white paper” protests has been convicted of “advocating extremism”.
Kamile Wayit, 19, was detained in Atush on 12 December the day after returning home from university in Henan, a province in central China. She has not been heard from since, but last week a spokesperson from China’s ministry for foreign affairs confirmed to the Economist magazine that Wayit had been sentenced on 25 March “for the crime of advocating extremism”. The spokesperson did not confirm the length of the sentence but it can be up to five years.
Kamile Wayit. Photograph: Amnesty International
Wayit is one of dozens of people – many of them young women – who were detained after protests against China’s harsh zero-Covid regime spread across numerous cities in November and December last year. The trigger for the protests was an apartment fire on 24 November in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, which killed 10 people. Many blamed the deaths on residents being unable to leave the building because of Covid controls.
In April, four women who had participated in the protests in Beijing were released on bail after being charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all indictment used against any critics of the government. That charge also carries a sentence of up to five years. The women released in April are reportedly still being monitored by police.
Wayit, who is not thought to have attended any of the protests, has been treated more harshly.
Maya Wang, the associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Kamile Wayit’s case is unique in that she has been arrested for a particularly severe crime, simply because she is a Uyghur, and simply for sharing a video about the protests.”
Wayit’s case showed how in Xinjiang “the state can construe everything a Uyghur does – including many peaceful, lawful behaviours – as extremism and terrorism and arbitrarily detain and imprison them,” Wang said.
Wayit’s elder brother, Kewser Wayit, is an engineer living in the US who is outspoken on Uyghur rights issues. He previously told Radio Free Asia that the police had called their father after Kamile shared a post about the protests on WeChat. Kewser also noted that his living abroad may have led to increased scrutiny of Kamile, as is common for Uyghurs living in China.
Wayit had been studying preschool education at the Shangqiu Institute of Technology in Henan. Between 2017 and 2019 she lived alone in Urumqi, and had depression because their father was detained in a “re-education” camp, according to her brother. She had been due to have eye surgery in Beijing this summer, saiid a source close to Wayit.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to a request for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/13/a-e-crisis-paramedic-practitioners-patients-home | Society | 2013-11-13T07:00:04.000Z | Kate Murray | Paramedic practitioners are key to easing the crisis in A&E | Kate Murray | For the specialist paramedics in Andy Collen's team, keeping patients at home is as much a part of the job as rushing them quickly into hospital with blue lights flashing when they need it. So when an older person calls 999 after suffering a fall, the paramedic practitioners at South East Coast Ambulance service (Secamb) can stitch up their wounds and prescribe them medicine rather than taking them into a crowded accident and emergency department. "People are surprised at what we can do – they assume they will have to go to hospital and when you can offer them care in their home, they are delighted," says Collen, clinical development manager at Secamb.
With new figures showing a rise of 43% in the numbers of patients spending more than four hours in A&E and warnings that emergency care departments are facing their worst winter yet, Secamb's approach is one that health chiefs hope could be rolled out more widely to help ease the crisis. WhileAs NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh's review of urgent care services is published, NHS England says many of those who end up in A&E could avoid a hospital visit if more effective alternatives were more widely available.
At Secamb, Collen says, paramedic practitioners end up taking 40% of those who call 999 to hospital – compared with 55% of those seen by generalist paramedics. "We think we are keeping around 80,000 patients out of hospital a year – that's getting on for two A&E departments," he says. "People don't want to be going into an emergency department that's full to the brim, so we want to make sure we only send people when we need to. If we fill A&E departments inappropriately, it creates more problems for us, quite apart from the patient experience."
Secamb now has more than 220 trained or student paramedic practitioners among its 1,000-strong paramedic team. As well as going out on 999 calls, they are deployed in the control room, giving advice to colleagues and taking referrals to visit patients who have called 999 but don't necessarily need to go into hospital. They can also refer on to other health professionals for follow-up treatment.
According to the College of Emergency Medicine, which represents emergency doctors, A&E should not mean "anything and everything" and more seven-day-a-week alternatives are needed to take the strain off emergency departments. Yet, as the health regulator Monitor has highlighted, nearly a quarter of walk-in primary care clinics have closed in the past three years.
There are many reasons why patients use emergency services. NHS England says with out-of-hours alternatives not being available, or not widely known about, A&E is often a default option. As evidence for Keogh"s review put it: "Patients know what an A&E department does and that its services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is in contrast to other components of the urgent and emergency care system, which offer less consistent responses and are less well understood by patients."
Then there are the patients with long-term conditions like diabetes, asthma and chronic heart disease, who might not have to use A&E services so frequently if they were supported to manage their health more effectively.
In Bradford, Dr Shahid Ali, a GP, says engaging such patients in a more effective way is helping to cut A&E visits and hospital admissions significantly. In his practice, he began offering patients with one or more long-term conditions longer appointments to discuss all of their health and lifestyle issues, rather than just addressing one symptom. He then developed an online "self-care" system called VitruCare, allowing patients to track their medical progress, input their own readings and contact their doctor immediately with any concerns. "People with chronic diseases are often the ones in and out of A&E because that's where people are able to address their immediate concerns," says Ali. "What we've found is if you treat people in a holistic way and give them the opportunity to set their goals, it makes a huge difference. The fact that they have a plan in place means they get in touch before they deteriorate. If there's a problem, we can nip it in the bud and stop that person ending up in A&E or being admitted to hospital."
Analysis of the first 50 patients to get involved in this way found they had 71% fewer A&E attendances and 83% fewer acute admissions over a year. It's an approach which, Ali says, could make a big impact on stretched NHS resources.
"People are not bent on going to A&E regardless. But if you are not getting answers to your questions, you are going to end up there," he says. "Empowering patients to look after themselves more effectively is a major area where we are going to be able to make a big difference." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/feb/26/canoe-new-zealand-river-whanagui-maori-legend | Travel | 2019-02-26T06:30:17.000Z | Peter Carty | Mystic river: Canoeing a living entity in New Zealand | If my canoe makes a noise when I smash sideways into the rock, I don’t hear it. The rapids drown everything. For a moment the canoe is stationary, then it fills with water and tips me out. I try to swim to the bank but make no headway against the current. I remember that the Maoris say their ancestors dwell in the river and I wonder if I am about to become intimately acquainted with them.
I have spent three days on the Whanganui River in New Zealand’s North Island. The Whanganui is the country’s longest navigable river, yet it is notable for more than that – because this is a river that is also a person. In 2017, the local Maoris gained a ruling to give the river the legal status of personhood. “The river has always been a living entity to us,” Maori campaigner Gerrard Albert told me.
He believes the river’s status will protect it: “Everyone has to be conscious that the river has the right to continue to be in a healthy state.”
Canoeing on the Whanganui. Photograph: Andrew Bain/Getty Images
In 2014, the Te Urewera wilderness area on its eastern side also assumed the rights of a legal person. And last year nearby Mount Taranaki gained the same status. The Maoris believe there are no boundaries between themselves and the natural world: it is a continuum.
The river’s representatives are now waiting for the results of a study into its wellbeing. There are concerns about pollution from agriculture and damage from hydroelectric power schemes. The representatives are also deciding how to allocate a NZ$30m (£16m) fund for environmental initiatives.
The Whanganui rises near Mount Tongariro. According to Maori legend the river was created after Mount Taranaki ran away to its present position on the east coast and left a gash behind. Afterwards Mount Tongariro healed the wound with water and the Whanganui was born.
The Whanganui is New Zealand’s third largest river after the Waikato and Clutha. Photograph: Rob Arnold/Alamy
My guide, Hemi Gray, grew up in the mountains. He’s a mountain of a man himself, with a monolithic torso and shoulders. We join the river at the way station of Whakahoro, where I’ve slept in former sheep shearers’ quarters at the Blue Duck Station.
The pulsing melodies of bellbirds fill the air, and the view is of a valley packed with spiky cabbage trees, palms and giant tree ferns. Significantly, there are conifers, too. “You see conifers where there have been human settlements,” says Hemi. The area was farmed up to the 1950s before nature reclaimed it.
The Bridge to Nowhere spans the Mangapurua Gorge. It was completed in 1936 and now forms part of a cycling and walking route
As we begin canoeing I can see the forest continuing down the gorge. The high walls to either side and the saturation of greenery create an enclosed world. It’s intensely peaceful – often we go an hour or more without encountering another vessel – but there is always something to see.
A pair of mallards chug past. I also see kereru, New Zealand’s large native wood pigeons, calling to each other. A large circular lesion in the gorge wall, framed by ferns and creepers, is Tamatea’s Cave, a sacred place named for an early Maori explorer. Soon after, a couple of wild goats trot along the bank and turn to stare at us.
The final overnight stay was at the Maori site of Tieke Kainga. Photograph: Alamy
A day-and-a-half of paddling brings us to the Bridge to Nowhere, a monument to the failed hopes of settlers. The concrete bridge was finished in 1936, but within a few years most of the farms to either side had been abandoned. The bridge spans a deep cleft over a tributary of the Whanganui, and in the water far below I can see eels more than a metre long and thicker than my arm (though not Hemi’s).
Mount Taranaki: will the New Zealand peak’s ‘living person’ status bring respect?
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That evening we stop at the Maori settlement of Tieke Kainga, where we’re to sleep in the community’s marae, or meeting house. After landing we take part in a powhiri, or greeting ritual, with its kaitiaki (guardian), Woody Firmin. Part of this means us singing a song – our Frère Jacques is incongruous, but well-received. Then it’s on to the marae’s version of a hangi, or pit oven, for a meal Firmin prepared by wrapping chicken, lamb and sweet potato in leaves and letting them cook over hot stones.
A view of Taranaki volcano from the Whanganui. Both have the legal rights of a person. Photograph: James Heremaia
The final day brings the rapids. Oblivious to Hemi’s instructions, I paddle left instead of right and hit the rock. Fortunately he’s at hand to haul me, gasping, on to the bank. Notwithstanding my involuntary baptism I can see why – even though it is not actually a walk – canoeing or kayaking the Whanganui is one of New Zealand’s 10 Great Walks.
Returning to the tumult of the world is hard, but it is consoling to recall Firmin’s farewell: “You’ll always be a part of the river now. And you’ll be a part of us, too.”
The trip was provided by Tourism New Zealand (tourismnewzealand.com) and Singapore Airlines (singaporeair.com). An all-inclusive three-day trip with Unique Whanganui River Experience (uniquewhanganuiriver.co.nz) is £588pp. Canoes or kayaks may be hired for independent trips (from £90pp for three to five days), but prior experience is advisable | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/12/bread-sourdough-loaf-sandwiches-baking | Opinion | 2023-11-12T09:00:16.000Z | Rachel Cooke | Bread of heaven: sourdough may have had its day, but we’ll always love a loaf | Rachel Cooke | There is a game people like to play, and it goes like this. Potatoes or bread? Cheese or chocolate? Around the table late at night, I usually refuse to answer. Why should I have to choose? But push me, and in the end, I’ll always pick bread over potatoes, and cheese over chocolate – and for the same reason.
If food is culture, it’s also alchemy, and never is that particular magic more apparent than in the hands of the baker and the cheesemaker. Put the two together, and in a single mouthful, you may be transported to a near-heavenly realm: the apotheosis of all that is straightforwardly good and healthful in life.
In Britain, it’s bread that has the greatest hold over us: a food with an ancient history which has long been so fundamental to life that the two words (bread and food) were once equivalent (this is also why, in vernacular modern English, bread means money). Even as some of us take it for granted, its value is embedded in our island story, and therefore in our hearts and souls.
The Anglo-Saxons, after all, called their lords hlafward, or loaf guardian, and their ladies hlaefdige, or loaf kneader. Putting aside the terrible gender stereotyping of the early Middle Ages – young people, calm yourselves, perhaps with a glass of mead! – these words are a beautiful reminder that before human beings learned about such things as gluten, milling and leavening, the common man lived on gruels, pottages and wafers. Bread is hard-won and precious, a miracle by any other name – and some deep part of us knows it.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to sourdough. Big news. According to the restaurant booking site Resy, which has talked to several leading chefs, it seems that sourdough, lately so beloved of restaurants and home bakers alike, is on its way out. Next year, they insist, we will all be hacking away far less often at these tangy, chewy loaves; we will finally have grasped, as one chef puts it, that they are no good at all for a bacon sandwich. Instead, we’ll be getting into breads that deploy ye olde grains: millet and spelt, and amaranth, einkorn and teff (no, me neither).
I read about this – a story reported with utmost seriousness in my newspaper – and laughed. For one thing, bread making has relied on fermentation, aka sourdough, as a leavening agent for much of human history; it’s not exactly modern. For another, you still have to leaven bread somehow; bakers of a spelt-ish ilk are unlikely to use added yeast. More to the point, that very morning, I’d passed the milk float that’s used as a mobile market stall by the Dusty Knuckle, a hip bakery where I live; its most popular bread is sourdough, and I could see a queue of happy-looking customers.
No, my guess is that people won’t, in fact, be abandoning sourdough any time soon. Its holes may well allow butter to drip all over, and it’s often overpriced. But it also tastes good, and has a surprisingly decent shelf life.
Bread is a repository of all kinds of snobberies. We use it to send messages, to other people and ourselves
Bread is, of course, a repository for all kinds of snobberies. We use it to send messages, to other people and ourselves. Some doubtless will move on to pastures/breadbaskets more fashionable, as instructed. Their baps will be of einkorn and their loaves full-bodied with teff(I’ve looked it up, and it’s cultivated in Ethiopia). They may already have done so, in fact; Sainsbury’s stocks a flat-looking “ancient grain pave”, whose ingredients include millet. These are the kind of people who think garlic bread is only for children, and who’d rather go on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here than eat white sliced; if they ever do, it’s either ironically, or when they’re ill.
But most of us, happily, are not like this. We mix it up. If sourdough is a Saturday treat, there’s Hovis in the freezer for “emergencies” (that occur every day), or just because we like it, and it’s affordable. We love baguettes and garlic bread, focaccia and flour-dusted white rolls (known in Sheffield, where I come from, as bread cakes). Which bread to eat, and when, comes down to a mixture of taste, suitability and, above all, nostalgia.
Personally, I think the chefs may be right about sourdough and bacon; on a Sunday morning, I like the cheapest, softest rolls. But I also think it makes the best cheese toasties – though be warned: it won’t fit in your old Breville sandwich maker.
Rachel Cooke’s new book Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking and Eating is out now | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/best-love-scenes-film-leicester-football-king-lear | Opinion | 2016-02-12T17:12:13.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | We’ll always have Leicester (as Bogart nearly said to Bergman) | Peter Bradshaw | In honour of Valentine’s Day, a poll for the TV channel Drama has attempted to find the most romantic lines in film, drama or television. The winner is “My heart is, and always will be, yours,” from the 1995 screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, as uttered by Hugh Grant’s Edward Ferrars to Emma Thompson’s Elinor Dashwood. For what it’s worth, that doesn’t feature in my own personal top two romantic moments in film history.
The first is from Brief Encounter. Alec, the doctor played by Trevor Howard, is earnestly telling Laura, played by Celia Johnson, about all the opportunities for research into pneumoconiosis: “In the hospital here, there are splendid opportunities for observing cures and making notes because of the coalmines.” “You suddenly look much younger,” says Laura. “Do I?” asks Alec. “Almost like a little boy.”
The second-most romantic moment comes from Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick asks Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa what she was doing 10 years before, and she says: “I was having a brace put on my teeth. Where were you?” And after a superbly judged thoughtful pause, Bogart says: “Looking for a job.” – and in his laconic reticence it is a very real moment. She was a child and he was a young man, hardly more than a boy himself. Those two romantic moments are my favourites because they are not overtly about love, but are suffused with love, and about how love changes adults into something like children. It also occurs to me that they are both spoken by couples having an extramarital affair.
Premier Lear news
The incredible resurrection of Leicester
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The town of Leicester is having a bit of a moment, thanks to the skyrocketing success of its football club, Leicester City, favourites to win the Premier League for the first time. Pondering what other famous things Leicester has done, people come up with the fact that Gary Lineker was brought up there, and also David and Richard Attenborough; Richard III’s body was discovered under a car park there.
Well, fine. But why, oh why, does no one talk more about Leicester’s most famous resident: King Lear? Or rather King Leir, the actual, original monarch himself, inspirer of Shakespeare, who ruled Britain in the eighth century BC and founded Leicester, endowing it with his name (according to legend) before going on to attempt to divide his kingdom among his daughters, leading to catastrophe and despair. Leicester is associated with the greatest tragedy in English literature and the most famous scream of existential anguish. Why are there not signs up all around town: “You are now entering King Lear country – Howl, howl, howl, howl”? I can’t imagine. King Lear also contains Shakespeare’s oddest insult: “You base football player.”
The joy of cash
‘Cash transactions are a way of doing respectable business in privacy.’ Photograph: Gary Roebuck/Alamy
Big bucks: high denomination banknotes - in pictures
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Peter Sands, former chief executive of the Standard Chartered Bank, has demanded that the British government scrap the £50 note – that rarely seen and exotically coloured pinky-burgundy piece of paper – because it’s used by people up to no good: tax evaders and the like. But why is cash always being demonised in this way? I confess to a twinge of libertarianism here. Cash transactions are a way of doing respectable business in privacy – unlike debit card payments, which are liable to be snooped upon. And the cash customer is not responsible for the tradesperson’s tax arrangements. I think we should stick up for the exotic and richly textured 50 quid note. After all, the egregious tax avoiders, such as Google and Facebook, appear to be able to pull off schemes without the help of big-denomination banknotes. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2013/oct/25/university-guide-help-our-subject-review | Education | 2013-10-25T13:37:43.000Z | Judy Friedberg | Guardian University Guide: help us review our subject categories | The Guardian University Guide would like the help of the higher education community in reviewing our league tables.
At present, we have 46 subject tables – but some courses have grown enormously in popularity in recent years and may now warrant a table of their own.
Every year, we ask universities which of their students they want us to count in each subject area. We then use a blend of eight metrics to allocate them a score that represents their teaching performance for each subject. You can read more about the methodology here.
Now we're asking for your help in deciding whether to enlarge our list of subjects, and whether some courses should be grouped differently. While we want to make all necessary amendments, we are keen to keep the number of changes as small as possible thereby avoiding confusion which could compromise accuracy, and even distort our overall table.
Here are some of the areas we've been thinking about:
Should "art and design" be broken up? Should we separate fine art from design? What about craft? And textiles? Should we have a separate table for fashion?
Cinematics and photography (currently with drama and dance) has 17,000 students, so is easily big enough for its own category. Are drama and dance happy together?
Should we separate nursing from courses such as paramedical sciences and radiography, grouping these with physiotherapy under the Health professions heading and leaving Nursing and Midwifery together?
Business and management studies currently covers marketing, accounting and finance. Accounting and finance could be introduced as its own subject, leaving business, management and marketing together. Would this distinction be helpful, and would there be a benefit to splitting the subjects further?
Should we separate information systems from computer science? We'd really like to know more about this. And should librarianship be taken out of its unlikely home in the media studies group and be grouped with information systems? Or go somewhere else?
And what about the rest of media studies? Currently we have communications and librarianship grouped with it, as well as journalism and publishing. We think journalism should be its own thing. What about communications?
What about linguistics? It's small and it currently sits with English. But of course it is the study of language as a whole. Should it be with modern languages? Or even anthropology?
Talking of anthropology, development studies has been introduced to the classification system to describe the study of change in low and middle income parts of the world. Can we assume that this sits alongside anthropology?
Should history of art be separated from history? It is popular in its own right. But other subjects have a "history of" component – would this be opening a can of worms?
Should history include heritage studies?
Should ancient history be with classics?
Do we need a stand-alone table for food science? The numbers for nutrition are big. What else would go into that?
Should "hospitality" be added to the title of the "tourism and travel" table?
The idea of area studies has been mooted (we currently have American studies but no others). But would there be problems about where to draw the line? If area means continent, that's one thing but what about French or German studies, the sort of course that is likely to form part of many language degrees?
We know there is demand for a table dedicated to criminology, but we think it unlikely that sufficient data will be available. If it isn't, should criminology sit with sociology?
There are bound to be other areas that you are aware of. But for us to consider introducing a completely new table, we would need to be looking at 4,000+ students across the sector and at least 10 institutions providing the subject.
Please let us know what you think in the comments below. It would be useful if you could let us know what position you hold, to help us understand on what experience you are basing your opinion. If you would prefer to email your response, please send it to [email protected].
If you'd like to see the technical detail behind these ideas and proposals, please visit http://intelligentmetrix.co.uk/ProposedSubjectGroups, where you can also leave comments against each subject proposal. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/aug/23/box-set-club-the-shield | Television & radio | 2011-08-23T11:40:27.000Z | Kathy Sweeney | Box Set Club: The Shield | The Shield has never enjoyed the universal popularity of The Sopranos nor the critical reputation of The Wire, but it ran for seven seasons, merging police procedural with a doomed quest for salvation. Watching it again, you are immediately reminded of how groundbreaking the show was when it was first broadcast in 2002 on Channel 5, buried somewhere late in the schedule. When it was announced, it was difficult to get too excited over yet another series about a rogue cop bending the rules to get results - and especially one who looked like Ross Kemp. Then Vic Mackey shot good guy cop Terry Crowley in the face in the pilot. After that it was difficult to see how Vic would ever be redeemed no matter how many drug dealers he beat up or how many murderers he took off the street.
But to simply describe Vic as evil is to overlook what a fascinating, complicated and layered character he was. Vic could be a monster of snarling rapacious self-regard or an angel of vengeance meting out Old Testament justice, often in the same scene. Michael Chiklis gives an incredible performance, turning this thoroughly corrupt cop into one of the most memorable TV characters of all time. Utterly mesmerising, you can't help but root for him, most of the time.
Created by Shawn Ryan, The Shield was based on a notorious real-life case of Los Angeles police corruption known as the Rampart scandal, wherein a small coterie of cops, lead by Detective Dave Mack, solved LA's crack problem by removing the drug dealers and taking over the business themselves. Mac and his colleagues, known as the Crash team, also robbed banks, planted evidence, tortured rival dealers and worked for Death Row Records, home of the murdered rapper Tupac Shakur.
Given this inspiration, to say The Shield was morally ambiguous would be something of an understatement. This is not the sanitised, Hollywood depiction of LA. Rather, filmed on shaky hand-held cameras, with the sound of Chicano rap emanating from every dusty doorway, it's a purgatory of heat, poverty, crack vials and warring gangs. Vic and the corrupt cops he leads are just another one of those gangs, all be it better armed and with a badge to hide behind – hence the show's name. The title music reinforces this hellish atmosphere by essentially amounting to a few seconds of screams and speed metal guitar.
Vic is the exploiter and creator of this appalling netherworld but he is also its victim. In this he is helped by a truly terrific supporting cast – chiefly in the cops who worked with him in The Barn, many of whom were distrustful of him to say the least. CCH Pounder as Claudette Wyms was openly appalled by him. A fiercely moral character, she was a worthy adversary to Mackey, and her partnership with weird, cat-strangling Holland "Dutch" Wagenbach was an inspired pairing. Mackey's other antagonists included Glenn Close, who gave an intense performance as Captain Monica Rowling and Benito Martinez as David Aceveda, whose desperate desire to nail Mackey was motivated by his political career. But everyone pales in comparison to Forrest Whittaker who gave the performance of his life as Vic's nemesis, Internal Affairs Lieutenant John Kavanaugh.
Vic's allies, whom he thought of as his family, were the Strike Team, and had all become corrupt cops to varying degrees. We got to know more about these men as the series progressed, although David Rees Snell was underused as Ronnie Gardocki until the last couple of seasons. I was reminded that I used to refer him "the other one". Kenny Johnson was the most likeable member of the Strike Team as Lem, but it was Walton Goggins, as Mackey's sexist, racist best friend Shane Vendrell, who was often in danger of stealing the show.
I remembered the first season as promising but flawed, anchored in a spectacular performance by Michael Chicklis. But rewatching it, mindful of the show's future direction, I found that the first few seasons were much better than my memory of them, particularly series two. The suspense may be gone, replaced by the anticipation of some truly horrific events – two face burnings, sexual assaults (including one of the police chief by another man) and the "necklacing" which occurs at the start of the second season - but yes, it's still shocking. The second and third seasons made such a huge leap in quality that, for my money, it ranks among the best television ever made. The final two episodes of season seven were the most nerve-wracking and perfect conclusion to any series I've watched. Shane's fate is heartbreaking, but the life Vic is given is probably worse than death for him. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/feb/19/dont-feed-monster-the-people-who-have-stopped-buying-new-clothes | Fashion | 2019-02-19T06:00:01.000Z | Paula Cocozza | Don't feed the monster!' The people who have stopped buying new clothes | Lauren Cowdery is flicking through the rails of the Cancer Research charity shop in Goole, east Yorkshire. “Too bobbly!” she tuts at a ribbed top. “This skirt is big but it would be easy to take in … ” Cowdery appears to be shopping, but she is merely browsing. She is on a mission not to buy any new clothes, even ones that have recently belonged to someone else. “I think you have to pull back and ask: ‘Do I need this?’” she says.
Cowdery is one of a growing number of people who love clothes but try their hardest to resist buying them for reasons of sustainability. According to the charity Wrap, which promotes sustainable waste management, the average lifetime for a garment in the UK is just 2.2 years. An estimated £30bn of unused clothing hangs in UK wardrobes, and yet still we shop for more. “Each week we buy 38m items and 11m items go to landfill,” says Maria Chenoweth, chief executive of Traid, a charity working to stop clothes being thrown away. “We don’t have enough resources to keep feeding this monster.”
Chenoweth believes that consumers are switching to secondhand shopping, or adding a pre-owned element into their purchasing habits. She points to a 30% rise in turnover at Traid shops in 2018 compared with 2017. When she was a teenager in the 80s, her father banned her from jumble sales in case people thought the family was poor. She disobeyed him, and dragged her sacks of clothes through her bedroom window. Now, Chenoweth considers it “a huge gesture of activism to buy secondhand”, a necessary choice for those who “do not believe in damaging the environment and perpetuating this consumption and waste”.
So how hard is it to make the transition to a more sustainable way of shopping? In the UK, clothing has the fourth largest environmental impact after housing, transport and food. More than half of fast-fashion items are thrown away in less than a year, according to McKinsey’s State of Fashion report last year. But is buying secondhand really an antidote to fast fashion?
In Goole, where Cowdery works as a marketing officer for the Junction Theatre, there are ample local distractions for a lunch break: Dorothy Perkins, New Look, Peacocks. Cowdery used to buy things “because they were there”. In the evenings, she went on Asos. “I’d think: ‘Oh brilliant, a discount code! Free shipping! I’ll order stuff! Hmm … It doesn’t fit very well, but I can’t be bothered to send it back … I’ll keep it.’”
Each month, Cowdery bought two or three things. “At £20 a time, that starts to build up. There’s a wardrobe of stuff. Things with the tags still on … I took a look at myself and thought: ‘What are you doing?’”
‘It changed how I thought about clothes’: Lauren Cowdery of the Leeds Community Clothes Exchange. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Curious about a post she saw on Facebook, one weekend Cowdery dropped into the Leeds Community Clothes Exchange, a local swap shop. Four years on, she is one of its three directors, helping to oversee the 2,000 items – “designer stuff, vintage stuff, handmade things, wedding dresses” – that pass through the doors of the Woodhouse community centre each month.
Cowdery and I meet in one of those lunch hours that used to be spent shopping. Her skirt, top and cardigan are all from the Clothes Exchange; her boots are from the Autism Plus shop in Goole. “At the exchange, it’s one for one on everything,” she explains. There are no value judgments. A garment is saleable if all its buttons are present and there are no stains. Some prom dresses return again and again. “People take them, wear them, bring them back.” Regulars set aside pieces for each other. The fitting room is a place of encouragement.
As her involvement in the clothes exchange grew, Cowdery’s visits to Peacocks dwindled. Now, its shop floor struck her as “an explosion in a jumble sale”. She began to delete unopened emails from Asos and Topshop. She swore off buying new clothes for a year. “I thought I’d reach the end and think: ‘I’ve done that. I’ll move on,’” she says. Instead, “It changed how I thought about clothes.”
Cowdery still loves clothes – especially anything velvet – but she has found a safe way to consume them. The clothes exchange enables her to refresh her wardrobe without adding to it. She can be acquisitive, as long as she relinquishes in equal measure. Where she once bought three pieces a month, she now swaps 10 to 15 – mostly things she picked up at the previous exchange.
Clothes come and go at the Basingstoke home of Sarah Fewell, too. In fact, so many parcels come and go that she knows her postman by his first name (Jay). Fewell has always loved cutting up old clothes, sticking on studs, even at 14 when most of her friends were into Hollister. But now she has turned her passion for preloved clothes into a sustainable version of fast fashion.
Fewell runs a shop called Identity Party on the website Depop, which since being established in 2011 has offered its 10 million users a blend of eBay-style trading with Instagram-style posting. Her brand is “a lot of 80s, 90s, quite bohemian, grungy”. She especially loves “selling things with animals on, a good old ugly jumper and anything by St Michael.”
Two years ago, in the second year of a politics degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, Fewell was browsing the charity shops when she saw “a really nice dress that wasn’t for me”. She already had a Depop profile, having sold some unwanted clothes, so she bought the dress, listed it as “‘very Phoebe from Friends” and it promptly sold.
She bought and sold relentlessly during her third year. “When I left university, I thought, I don’t want a real job.”
Now with Identity Party, Fewell has professionalised her love of vintage.
She doesn’t totally eschew new clothes for her own wardobe; they make up about 10%. She buys gymwear new, for instance (“It would be a bit gross to wear secondhand gym clothes”). She even bought some on Black Friday: “That’s maybe contradictory of me to engage in Black Friday, but I just wanted gym clothes.”
People used to watch hauls on YouTube and be like: ‘Yeah, great.’ Now they are a lot more aware
We are sitting in a cafe in a shopping mall in Basingstoke. Fewell, who is wearing an Identity Party top and jeans and an eBay jacket, runs through her working week: Monday, she posts; Tuesday, she photographs; Wednesday she uploads. A fourth day is spent scouring the charity shops of Basingstoke, Newbury and Reading. A fifth and a sixth on further photography and posting.
Fewell’s days are long. But all the hours spent cutting out shoulder pads and removing used handkerchiefs from pockets have made her one of Depop’s top sellers. Since that first dress, she has sold more than 3,000 items, and her customer base includes her own friends, who no longer find secondhand shopping “a bit niche”.
“A lot of people are getting really sick of fast fashion,” Fewell says. “People used to watch hauls [mass trying-on sessions of newly purchased clothing] on YouTube and be like: ‘Yeah, great.’ Now if you click on a haul and read the comments, everyone’s like: ‘Oh, there’s so much stuff, it looks really bad quality.’ People are a lot more aware.”
In 2017, when she posted that first dress, Fewell “wasn’t very conscious” of the sustainability benefits of secondhand clothing. “I wasn’t really thinking: ‘I could push this message.’” After a couple of months, “it got added in there”. Now she trades her “handpicked vintage gems” as sustainable fashion. Facts about clothing waste are printed on the reverse of her business cards. When a piece of clothing doesn’t suit a customer, she urges them to sell it on, to close the loop.
But does Fewell ever look at the floor of her parents’ spare room – now her stock room – at the sea of pink plastic packages waiting to be driven to the post office, and think that buying and selling secondhand clothing may not be the height of sustainability? In some ways, Depop mirrors fast fashion: consumers buy cheaply and often. Fewell points out that the bags are made of recycled plastic; she would like to afford biodegradable ones. “The downside, environmentally, is postage and packing,” she admits. “But people are always going to want to buy clothes. Buying secondhand is probably the best way they can do it.”
The key, says Stephanie Campbell from Wrap’s Love Your Clothes campaign, is “to keep clothing out of landfill”. Each year 430,000 tonnes of clothing are disposed of and not recycled in the UK. Meanwhile, the number of new clothes sold is rising: 1.13m tonnes in 2016, an increase of 200,000 tonnes on 2012.
Zoe Edwards, who 11 years ago pledged never to buy new clothes. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
“It’s a slow, gradual mindset change,” says Zoe Edwards, a sewing teacher and blogger who 11 years ago pledged never to buy new clothes. “It’s not like a switch goes on and all of a sudden, it’s: ‘Right, this is how I shop now.’”
Edwards was working for “a very fast-fashion, low-end clothing supplier” in London. Her job was to order the trims: labels, hanging loops, buttons, zips. The quantity of delivered fabric always varied, so she had to order a surfeit of trims, a routine waste that made her uncomfortable. She had always loved sewing, selling her handmade clothes on market stalls and Etsy. Now, her two ways of living jarred.
“I didn’t want to be part of fast fashion any more,” she says. She quit her job, sewed clothes, sold the clothes, taught sewing and blogged about it. In the past 11 years, Edwards has bought only “one or two things”. Her bras are new, and she thinks she may have purchased a top from Zara in about 2010. Even her knickers are what she calls “me-made”.
So how difficult is it to stop buying clothes? Tania Arrayales, a self-described “fashion disruptor”, has founded an organisation in New York called Fashion of Tomorrow to advocate a more sustainable approach to the clothing industry. Arrayales was a founding member of Style Lend, a peer-to-peer clothing rental site, and swore off all clothing purchases for a year, inspired by the documentary True Cost. But weren’t there times when she was desperate to break her self-imposed rule?
“The challenge was feeling a little bit … I wasn’t as trendy as I used to be. I couldn’t make an impact when I went to an event,” she says. “I didn’t have anything new and shiny. But I wanted to restructure the way my brain saw shopping.”
‘I started seeing pieces in a new light’: Tania Arrayales, a founding member of the clothing rental site Style Lend. Photograph: Tania Arrayles
In her second year, she allowed herself to buy vintage clothes. The year after that, she bought the odd piece of new clothing from sustainable brands. Any time she felt her style “lack a little”, she rented what she needed from Style Lend (there are lending sites in the UK, too, but this is not yet a flourishing market). “I started seeing pieces in a new light. I discovered styling,” Arrayales says.
Cowdery has noticed a similar sense of exploration and play at the Clothes Exchange. “I’ve been more experimental, more free, with clothes. I don’t keep things for best. I wear them. And I don’t worry about the size on the label,” she says.
The fluidity around sizing is one of the pleasures of secondhand shopping. Depop sellers such as Fewell list clothes as fitting size eight to 14. Shoppers are encouraged to view their size as variable. “That’s the great thing about swapping,” Cowdery says. No one gets depressed because something their size won’t zip up. “You just look by eye, and ask yourself: ‘Will that fit?’”
Edwards has faced a similar confrontation with her personal taste. Sewing requires a lot of decision-making: the colour and weight of fabric, length of dress, shape of sleeves. She buys vintage fabric and refashions charity shop finds, but even so, she doesn’t think “sewing is necessarily the most sustainable way to dress yourself”. There is still the acquisition of fabric and materials. And a tendency to prize the making over the wearing, so that a lot of making goes on that never gets worn. “There is a big slow fashion movement within the sewing community,” Edwards says. “People are using their stash rather than buying new stuff.”
The volume of clothing of all kinds – new, secondhand and handmade – is challenging. And selling on secondhand clothes has its limits. To avoid swamping the secondhand market, or passing the problem on to others, including developing countries where many used clothes are sold in bulk, other technologies, such as fibre-to-fibre recycling, need to be encouraged.
“Clothing is a way to show who I am, what I feel, what I believe,” Edwards says. “It’s a way to communicate with the world. It’s got real social value, but it has got to be done mindfully.”
So what can a person who loves new clothes but wants to live more sustainably do? As Edwards says, if you are spending time on fashion sites, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination or will to switch your browser to eBay, Depop, thredUP, HEWI London or any of the raft of “resale disruptors”. Chenoweth says that “not keeping stuff in your wardrobe is important if you’re not wearing it”. Donating clothes puts them back into circulation.
As Cowdery says: “Clothes have a story. If you wear something once then throw it in the bin, it hasn’t had a story. You want to know there’s life in these things.”
This article was amended on 19 February 2019. An earlier version referred to Newbury as Newberry. This has been corrected. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/24/australian-authorities-once-embraced-privately-operated-prisons-but-some-governments-are-taking-back-control | Australia news | 2023-12-23T19:00:32.000Z | Nino Bucci | Australian authorities once embraced privately operated prisons. But some governments are taking back control | Tucked between a creek and a highway just outside Ipswich, in Queensland’s south-east, stands the first privately operated prison in Australia.
The Borallon correctional centre must have seemed futuristic for some inmates when it opened in 1990, given two of the state’s other prisons, in Brisbane and Townsville, were built more than a century earlier.
It was also seen as a brave new experiment in how states could manage their prisoners. But by 2018, the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) made clear what it thought of the experiment.
“This marketised approach, where prisons are operated by private, profit driven organisations, disconnects the state from direct responsibility for the delivery of privately operated prisons,” it found.
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“This model creates challenges for the state in ensuring prisoners detained in privately operated facilities are treated humanely and have appropriate access to programs and services.”
Just as Queensland was the first jurisdiction in Australia to embrace private prisons, it could be leading a national charge away from them.
In 2019, the state’s Labor government announced it would return its two private prisons to public hands. Later that year, the Western Australian government said it would do the same with Melaleuca prison, which would leave only one private prison left in that state.
NSW could see end of ‘prisons for profit’ as troubled facility returns to public hands in 2025
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This year, New South Wales announced it would not renew the private contract for Junee prison, while Victoria took the less dramatic step of taking over healthcare from private operators in women’s prisons.
Queensland’s acting minister for corrections, Mark Furner, says state and territory governments have an obligation to look after their own prisoners.
“I am of the belief that the government has an inherent responsibility to ensure the safety and security of prison operations,” he says in a statement to Guardian Australia.
“The decision to transition all Queensland prisons to public operation was based on a conviction that the government delivering these critical services was the only way to ensure all correctional centres operated at the highest standards, whilst ensuring the safety of our officers on the front line.”
Victoria, NSW, South Australia and Western Australia are the only Australian jurisdictions with private prisons. By 2026, the number of private prisons could fall to seven – the lowest number in almost 30 years.
In NSW, the decision not to renew the Junee contract was viewed as giving the state increased transparency and accountability in how the prison was managed, as well as improved collaboration with other services, such as the health and court systems, that remain publicly run.
Furner says that when Arthur Gorrie and Southern Queensland correctional centres returned to public operation in 2020 and 2021, respectively, “workers on the ground immediately saw a difference, with more workers on the floor guarding the prisoners, and immediate back up available”.
One of the highest rates of private incarceration in the world
The Queensland decision to spend $111m to regain control of its private prisons was hardly unexpected in the wake of the CCC report.
But the NSW government’s decision to take back Junee left the private operator, GEO Group, dumbfounded.
“The decision has been met by staff and management with much disappointment and surprise given 30 years of successful operations by GEO,” it said in a statement last month.
UN anti-torture watchdog urges Australia to reduce ‘extraordinary’ number of prisoners on remand
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“Even though staff are disappointed by this decision, and given the uncertainties and challenges brought about by transitioning to a new employer, GEO and its staff will work with the NSW government to ensure a smooth handover.”
The three private operators responsible for multiple prisons in Australia – GEO Group, G4S and Serco – either declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Australia has one of the highest rates of prisoners held in private facilities in the world, according to Justice Map, a research and consultation project.
The majority of private prisons are managed by companies that have had a long association with the facility, are on long-term and lucrative contracts, or both.
Victoria has the most private prisons of any Australian jurisdiction: Port Phillip, Fulham and Ravenhall.
The Port Phillip prison has been operated by G4S since it opened in 1997, and the current contract, worth $1.8bn, does not expire until 2037.
Fulham and Ravenhall have both been operated by GEO since opening, and the US company holds contracts for their continuing operation that have more than a decade left to run.
These contracts were signed before the national shift away from private prisons, and before the state’s auditor general found that “serious incidents at both Port Phillip and Fulham have, in some instances, exposed weaknesses in how G4S and GEO manage safety and security risks”.
“Neither operator is investigating serious incidents using methods that effectively identify root causes,” the Victorian auditor general’s office (Vago) found in 2018.
Guardian Australia can reveal that an analysis of court and public records shows that, in the past year, the Victorian government paid damages to at least five prisoners or former prisoners who had taken legal action against the state and either GEO or G4S.
A spokesperson for the Victorian corrections minister, Enver Erdogan, did not answer specific questions regarding the contracts with private providers or the damages payments, including why the state remained liable for claims against private operators.
‘People before profits’: Victoria to ditch private health providers in women’s prisons
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“The safety and wellbeing of our staff and people in custody is our highest priority,” they said.
“Corrections Victoria regularly reviews and updates our operational arrangement to ensure the needs of staff and people in custody are met.
“All private providers operate under strict performance and reporting guidelines to ensure that duty of care is upheld.”
The bottom line
The Victorian government is taking charge of primary health services at women’s prisons and, at the new youth detention facility Cherry Creek, provides improved oversight and tailored care to those in custody and when they’re released, particularly for Aboriginal women and children. But it has not indicated whether it believes broader change is necessary.
This could be because of a simple bottom-line equation. In the 2018 auditor general’s report that raised questions about how GEO and G4S investigated serious incidents, it was found they were good value for money.
According to Vago, the companies delivered “cost-efficient services for the state that have largely met the contracts’ service and performance requirements” and Port Phillip and Fulham cost up to 20% less to run than publicly operated prisons of the same security rating.
About 340km south of Borallon prison, shining futuristically, as it once did, is an enormous beacon to the private prisons experiment: the 1,700-bed Clarence correctional centre, near Grafton, which is the largest prison in Australia.
It was opened in 2020, and Serco has a two-decade contract which will reportedly require the government to pay them about $130m a year.
When justifying the decision to use a private operator, the-then NSW corrections minister, Anthony Roberts, said it “presents a level of competitive tension” and “Victoria and NSW certainly lead the way in ensuring that we have a very good balance between private and publicly run prisons”.
The experiment may have a little while longer to run. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/21/nicky-morgan-education-questions-commons-sketch | Politics | 2014-07-21T18:00:52.000Z | Caroline Davies | Rapidfire Nicky Morgan wastes no time at education questions | Perhaps Cameron missed a reshuffle trick judging from the sparks shooting from the Hansard stenograph as Nicky Morgan rattled off responses during her first parliamentary questions as education secretary. Transport and the HS2 brief might have been a better bet; London to Loughborough as swiftly as she could spit out AS levels, free schools and no change. Not since Prescott have stenographers faced such a challenge.
First day nerves, efficiency of time, or just eager to get on with it? She has a lot to get on with. Secretary of state, minister for women and equalities, a working parent. "As a working parent I sympathise with all working parents in relation to the availability and affordability of childcare," she rat-a-tat-tatted to a question on holiday childcare. Of course; she's a mother. One of two now in Cameron's shiny new cabinet, and lest we forget it, Maria Miller was on hand to welcome her as "a fellow working mum".
Another mother, Labour's Lucy Powell, was confused. Was Morgan now childcare minister, along with everything else? "I am all for flexi-working, but given the challenge that our country faces in the childcare system, I hope she is able to focus full time on this issue". Working mums "are excellent at multitasking", a brisk Morgan reassured. Somehow, it's difficult to imagine her predecessor, Michael Gove, having to field that one.
The Rt Hon member for Surrey Heath was not in the chamber but his spirit was evoked, warmly by some, less so by others. Kevin Brennan, shadow schools minister, urged Morgan to change the locks on the Department for Education's buildings, to make sure Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings "don't sneak back in after dark". Tristram Hunt, historian, part-time university lecturer and shadow education secretary, paid tribute to "a man full of ideas – they just happened to be the wrong ones".
"After no change on AS levels, work experience, free schools, can the secretary of state explain to the house why she is also continuing with the flawed and unpopular policy of increasing the number of unqualified teachers in our schools?" he asked.
Morgan was in rapid response mode. "It started off so well, but the theatrics are typical of somebody who took part in the Cambridge Footlights when he was there". Then – did she even draw breath? – "I am not going to take lessons from the hon ... oh, wait a minute, in fact he does give lessons as an unqualified teacher, doesn't he?". The new head teacher had done her homework, but she almost lost her line in the machine-gun delivery.
At her side were the new education team, including Nick Gibb, returning as an education minister after losing the same post in the last Cameron reshuffle. The "greatest comeback since Lazarus", observed Brennan.
Gibb looked very happy to be back. "As [Richard Benyon, Conservative MP for Newbury] said to me on Wednesday: 'It just shows you can boil cabbage twice'. It was meant kindly, I think," he mused.
Labour's Keith Vaz was keen to congratulate. "If he has been boiled twice, I wonder what happened to the other vegetables," he observed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/nov/23/b-bang-heatherwick-manchester-gormley | Art and design | 2008-11-23T00:01:00.000Z | Ally Carnwath | A tale of two sculptures | Angel of the North by Antony Gormley
1994: Gateshead council commission the sculptor Antony Gormley to create a massive work of public art overlooking the A1 in Tyneside.
April 1996: The Arts Council provokes a storm of protest, announcing the project will cost at least double the £300,000 originally quoted by the council.
February 1998: Angel of the North is unveiled to a mixed reaction. Local councillor Martin Callanan calls it a 'vast eyesore'.
January 2006: The statue is named as one of 12 official 'Icons of England' as part of a government-backed project.
November 2008: A 4ft high model of the sculpture, used to persuade councillors to commission the project, is valued at £1m on Antiques Roadshow.
B of the Bang by Thomas Heatherwick
January 2003: Manchester council grant planning permission for the 184ft steel work of art, commissioned in 2002 to mark the Commonwealth Games.
August 2004: The main part of the sculpture is installed. 'Its sheer size and scale can really begin to be appreciated,' says Tom Russell of commissioning body New East Manchester.
January 2005: A week before its unveiling by Linford Christie, whose phrase gives the sculpture its name, the tip of one of its spikes falls to the ground.
May 2006: Nine more spikes are removed from the sculpture to test its safety. The sculpture is dubbed KerPlunk after the similarly shaped children's game.
November 2008: The Thomas Heatherwick Studio agrees to pay Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement over the safety problems. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/17/rodney-graham-thats-not-me-review-baltic-gateshead | Art and design | 2017-03-17T11:39:12.000Z | Adrian Searle | Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me review – starring role in his own method-acting dramas | All comfy in his striped pyjamas, Rodney Graham sleeps across the back seat of a car, driven through the night. Dimly visible, and dreaming sweet dreams on a double dose of a narcotic sleeping draught, he is like an exhausted child being taken home after a too long day. Are we nearly there yet?
Graham always goes the long way round in his videos, films and large light-box photographs, now filling two floors of Baltic. There are movies of a whirling chandelier and an indolent pipe smoker (in the next room, the sink is overflowing with suds), there are books, the smell of cinnamon, a road trip to Kurt Cobain’s hometown and recordings from Graham’s accomplished but still undervalued music career.
Drugged, kidnapped and cast away: the funny, disturbing obsessions of Rodney Graham
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Most of all there are sumptuous, large-scale light-box images, all featuring Graham himself in a starring role: canoeist, stilt-walking plasterer, sous chef, lighthouse keeper, dupe in a wild-west bar, thinker, painter, voyeur. Graham the artist is just as much a succession of parts – musician, photographer, director, writer, conceptualist, joker and sentimentalist. The labels are insufficient for the Vancouver artist, 68, who keeps slipping in and out of view.
Now he is a US lighthouse keeper, in a lighthouse, reading a book about lighthouses, and there’s a scale model of a lighthouse on the table behind him. Come to think of it, the huge backlit image is itself a sort of light house, making the obscure visible. This is dizzying.
The Avid Reader, 1949 (2011) … Rodney Graham employs his wife, Shannon Oksanen, in the tableau. Photograph: Stefan Altenburger/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The staging, set-dressing and props that make up Graham’s images have a wonderful circularity. In one funny, visually complex image, Graham is a painter, a Gifted Amateur, the title tells us, getting down to some post-painterly 1960s abstraction in his mid-century modern house. He’s probably back from seeing a Morris Louis show, and has decided to do some pouring himself. Thick yellow paint drools from a Tupperware bowl towards a canvas leant across the furniture. Again, the artist is in his jim-jams, cigarette between his lips. The parquet floor is covered in newspaper (smoking and newspapers are recurrent motifs). The piles of art books, the reel-to-reel tape machine, the furnishings, the overflowing ashtrays, are perfect Mad Men-era details, still lifes that nearly trip you up as Graham lays down the acrylic.
Sometimes I wonder if Graham can’t tell method acting from real life. What rich and engaging images these are: Graham as a young Georges Braque, playing the accordion; Graham as a top-hatted guy in a saloon, forced to leap and dance as cowpokes shoot the floor beneath his feet; Graham as some sort of voyeur or spy on a park bench, reading a newspaper from 1878. He’s cut eyeholes in the paper so he can take furtive peaks at the passing world. His suit doesn’t seem to fit the times. Or the newspaper doesn’t. Something’s wrong at any event, in this almost innocent but unhinged image.
In one of the best works, he stands outside an old-fashioned, closed down Woolworth’s store with newspapers covering the windows. It is 1947. He’s reading the old news while a woman (Graham’s wife, artist Shannon Oksanen) walks down the street. Time is out of joint and so are we.
Laconic, wry and deeply complex, Graham’s art is compendious in its reach. He could easily fill the whole of Baltic several times over. His art is autobiographical, art-historical.
Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour 2012-13, by Rodney Graham, which plays on work by Thomas Eakins. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
One image from the Four Seasons series is a play on Thomas Eakins’s 1871 The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull). Other works are deceptively simple. In the black and white film Coruscating Cinnamon Granules, a spiral electrical hotplate heats up, the image disturbed by flares and flashes as cinnamon granules, dropped on to the element, flash and burn. A chandelier slowly rotates, then goes into a mad spin. A snowfall of sifted flour slowly clogs a 1930s German typewriter. One thinks of a writer muffled, and of the shed hair and skin that accumulates between keys in constant use, of the whiteness of a blank page (itself a kind of whiteout) that silences thought. The more you tease at it, the more there is to it, to be wondered at, to be troubled by, to be enjoyed.
At Baltic, Gateshead, 17 March-11 June. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/sep/17/press-freedom-china | Media | 2014-09-17T08:19:22.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Chinese government makes life difficult for international journalists | The Chinese communist party continues to make life difficult for foreign journalists, says the latest report by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC).
It states that international reporters are restricted in where they can travel. Their sources are vulnerable to intimidation, or worse. If they write stories that displease the Chinese government, they face retribution in various forms - threats, effective expulsion by a refusal to renew visas and reprisals against local staff.
According to an FCCC survey of China-based foreign correspondents, 80％ of those surveyed thought that their work conditions had worsened or stayed the same compared to 2013.
On the basis of its evidence, the FCCC argues that China is rapidly eroding the progress it made in "opening up" to the world prior to the 2008 Olympics.
"China's poor record on allowing open and unfettered reporting is in conflict with its desire to be seen as a modern society deserving of global respect," says the report. It continues:
"It is in great contrast with the wide access Chinese journalists have enjoyed when reporting in many foreign countries.
Yet as China embraces and leverages press freedoms abroad for its own media, it is going in the opposite direction at home."
The FCCC, which has 243 correspondent members from 31 countries, believes that foreign reporters operating in China should enjoy the same access and freedoms that Chinese reporters enjoy in most other countries.
In advocating the elimination of barriers to free reporting, it wishes to see the establishment of a level playing field and welcomes enhanced dialogue with authorities to agree on standard operating procedures for the coverage of news events.
The FCCC has identified six areas for action: restrictive reporting conditions, interference with news assistants, interference with sources, denial of access to government information, denial of foreign media access to the Chinese market, and punitive immigration policies.
China ranks 175 out of 180 in the 2014 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
Sources: FCCC/Reporters Without Borders Hat tip: CPJ | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/nov/15/accused-greek-myths | Television & radio | 2010-11-15T00:05:02.000Z | Will Dean | Tonight's TV highlights: Miranda | Accused | Greek Myths: Tales Of Travelling Heroes | Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations | How Not To Live Your Life | When Playboys Ruled The World | Miranda8.30pm, BBC2
When Miranda first appeared last year, its old-school comedy aesthetic puzzled critics, who took a few episodes to realise that just because it felt like it was from a different decade it still had some good gags to offer. Miranda Hart is back in her joke shop for a second series, with Miranda making moves to get fit and struggling with etiquette at a sushi restaurant. WD
Accused
9pm, BBC1
Taking a similar approach to The Street in offering up linked dramas that tell distinct stories, Jimmy McGovern's Accused follows half a dozen ordinary people who land up in court. First is plumber Willy, whose life implodes when he hits money problems just as he needs to pay for his daughter's lavish wedding. Playing unfaithful Willy with a barely repressed anger, Christopher Eccleston is mesmerising throughout, helped by a script that returns repeatedly to his character's inability to see his own part in his problems. "I've done nothing wrong . . ." JW
Greek Myths: Tales Of Travelling Heroes
9pm, BBC4
Historian Robin Lane Fox is off on a mission to uncover the origins of the Greek myths – stories, he argues, that "lie at the root of western culture". It's one of those documentaries that's as much a travel show as a history lesson, as we follow him from the ancient lost city of Hattusas in modern Turkey to the summit of Mount Etna to hear about "sex, giant monsters and baby eating". It's followed by a repeat of Aristotle's Lagoon, in which professor Armand Leroi heads to Lesvos, the island teeming with wildlife that inspired Aristotle's first thoughts about biology. RV
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
10pm, Good Food
After stunning the foodie world with Kitchen Confidential, his excellent narcotic-fuelled memoir of life as a chef in 2000, Tony Bourdain has spent the past decade travelling the world eating weird food. His experiences have been documented in two books and in this long-running travel-food doc which follows the chef as he continues his foodie odyssey. This time he's looking for a chivito (beef butty) in Uruguay, offbeat Egyptian food and delving into the habits of one of the strangest food nations … the UK. Continues nightly to Thursday. WD
How Not To Live Your Life
10.30pm, BBC3
The third series of Dan Clark's sitcom continues. Tonight's plotline has the reliably offensive Don partake in a double date with Jason and two "posh birds", Harriet and Felicity, and wind up at Felicity's parents' country manor, where her dad takes an instant dislike to Don. Things aren't helped by some bedroom hi jinx. Typical BBC3 fare; whether that's a good thing or not depends on your tastes. AJC
When Playboys Ruled The World
10.35pm, ITV1
"Instead," says Stirling Moss, considering the difference between the racing drivers of his age and ours, "of finishing a race and going off chasing girls, they now say thanks to Vodafone." This entertaining documentary fondly laments formula one world champion James Hunt, and motorcycling legend Barry Sheene – 1970s racetrack gods who lived like there was no tomorrow for the reason that, back then, there was every chance there wouldn't be. Comparisons between the adoration they enjoyed, and the opprobrium heaped upon Tiger Woods and
Wayne Rooney for not dissimilar behaviour, are telling. AM | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/mar/01/the-best-theatre-to-stream-this-month-peaky-blinders-prima-facie-and-more | Stage | 2024-03-01T00:01:40.000Z | Chris Wiegand | The best theatre to stream this month: Peaky Blinders, Prima Facie and more | Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby
A doff of the cap to Rambert’s artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer for teaming up with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and the late Benjamin Zephaniah to deliver this blistering prequel to the street gang’s saga. A hit in 2022, it brought dance to a huge new audience and heads back out on tour this autumn, but a version filmed at the Hippodrome, in the gang’s home turf Birmingham, is on BBC iPlayer.
Prima Facie
After sold out runs in the West End and Broadway, and a phenomenal success with NT Live, Jodie Comer reprises her Olivier and Tony award-winning role as a barrister in a new audiobook version. Suzie Miller’s study of sexual assault and a broken legal system is available from Audible on 14 March.
The Magic Finger
In 2020, the Unicorn released a disgustingly delightful theatrical reading of The Twits. Now it presents a version of one of Roald Dahl’s lesser-known stories, The Magic Finger, directed by Milli Bhatia and performed by Corinna Brown and Lucy Mangan. Available free for 12 months on the Unicorn’s YouTube channel.
‘A church of art and learning’ … Maxine Peake in They at John Rylands Library, Manchester. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
They
They, Kay Dick’s 1977 dystopian novel about artistic repression, “very delicately describes the asset-stripping of culture” director Sarah Frankcom told the Guardian before staging it at Manchester’s John Rylands Library in 2022. “It feels right to do this in a place which is a sort of church of art and a church of learning.” Performed by Maxine Peake, with movement direction by Imogen Knight, it’s released on Factory International’s online platform Factory+ on 9 March.
Complete Works: Hamlet
Who needs star casting? The Prince of Denmark is played by a long-necked bottle, Ophelia is a vase of roses, Polonius is a sad iron and Claudius is a container of flea powder in Forced Entertainment’s version of the tragedy, performed by Terry O’Connor using household objects. The company’s full collection of irreverent, insightful and addictive “tabletop Shakespeares” is now free online.
To Da Bone
“5, 6, 7, 8!” And they’re off – a crew of jumpstyle dancers in trackie tops, moving through throng, line and ring formations to an explosive finale that is all angular limbs and blistering beats. Choreographed by hip French collective (La)Horde, who are at London’s Southbank Centre this month, To Da Bone is on YouTube, with an accompanying documentary.
Star on the Rise: La Bayadère ... Reimagined!
Marius Petipa’s problematic 19th-century classic becomes the backstage drama of a Hollywood western. Phil Chan, whose initiative Final Bow for Yellowface aims to eliminate stereotypes of Asians in ballet, co-stages with dance historian and musicologist Doug Fullington. Indiana University Bloomington present three livestreams from 29-30 March.
Jon Culshaw, Matthew Kelly, Jemma Redgrave and Adrian Scarborough in Barnes’ People. Photograph: James Findlay
Barnes’ People
Peter Barnes’s monologues, written for BBC Radio in the 1980s, were first released in 2021 as part of Original Theatre’s digital offerings during the pandemic. Now they are back online, bringing together a fine cast: Jon Culshaw, Matthew Kelly, Jemma Redgrave and (in the controversial True Born Englishman) Adrian Scarborough.
A Close Approximation of You
The playwright and teacher Oliver Emanuel, who died aged 43 from brain cancer last year, left behind a richly reflective body of work for stage and radio. This hour-long audio drama, on BBC Sounds, is a fitting tribute as it explores the theory of a mirror version of our world.
Unseen
The Unseen is the name of a 2022 report by the Vision Foundation into blind and partially sighted people’s experiences of domestic abuse. Now, its findings have inspired an audio drama, directed by Ben Wilson for theatre company Extant, asking: “Where do we turn when the ones who are supposed to love and care for us are the very people we’re most afraid of?” Available from 4 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/17/portmanteau-films-wild-tales-pulp-fiction-short-cuts | Film | 2015-03-17T07:00:13.000Z | Nicholas Barber | Fragmentation games: the return of the portmanteau film | Everyone should see Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales. And, if possible, everyone should see it in a packed cinema. A record-breaking hit in its native Argentina, the Oscar-nominated film is a portmanteau of six gleefully twisted short stories, each focusing on an over-the-top revenge. Watch it with a few fellow viewers and its spiralling black humour will make you giddy. But catch it as part of a crowd and you may experience an all-too-rare phenomenon when the first segment ends: a cinema full of people cheering and applauding.
That’s what I experienced when Wild Tales was screened at Cannes last year. And it seemed to me that the audience wasn’t just delighted by Szifrón’s opening tale. We were also delighted by the knowledge that there were five more in store. In other words, we were rediscovering our love of portmanteaux, anthologies, omnibuses, whatever you want to call them – films comprising several stand-alone segments that come one after another (although there may be the occasional overlap here and there).
Not that my own love of the form needed rediscovering. Maybe it’s because I saw Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Twilight Zone: The Movie at an impressionable age (both were released in 1983). But for me, an anthology film has always been one of the medium’s most lip-smacking treats. From 1945’s Dead of Night to 2005’s Sin City, it’s a format that requires each part to be concise and enthralling. And if you don’t happen to enjoy one particular section, you know another will be along in a minute. The only trouble is that there aren’t enough portmanteaux being made.
“One problem we had,” says Szifrón, “is that we didn’t have a lot of examples of similar films that worked well, either commercially or artistically. So it’s hard to stay confident when the industry thinks stuff like this can’t find an audience.”
Cultural landmark … Pulp Fiction. Photograph: MIRAMAX/Allstar
Two decades before Wild Tales raised the rafters at Cannes, Pulp Fiction made its debut at the festival. All sorts of appreciations were published to mark its 20th anniversary last year, but one aspect that didn’t get much attention was the fact that it, too, was a portmanteau. Quentin Tarantino had assembled three stories, plus a prologue and an epilogue (four stories, actually, if you count Christopher Walken’s painfully funny PoW gold-watch-up-the-backside anecdote).
When Pulp Fiction became a cultural landmark, those of us with a fondness for portmanteaux assumed there would be plenty more where that came from. And we were briefly right. Tarantino’s next film was an anthology, 1995’s Four Rooms, on which he shared directing duties with Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Alexandre Rockwell; in the same year, Eric Rohmer released a charming triptych, Rendezvous in Paris.
After that, though, the flow slowed to a trickle. We may have been subjected to countless sadistic thrillers involving sharp-suited gangsters with verbal diarrhoea, but the one element of Pulp Fiction that wasn’t imitated by an army of Tarantino wannabes was its structure. Instead, another film was to prove far more influential. While it was undeniably spellbinding, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, released in 1993, was bad news for fans of the portmanteau. The film gathered together nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver – but, rather than sticking to an anthology arrangement, Altman wove them into one intricate tapestry, thereby introducing the term “Altmanesque” to a whole new generation.
Six years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia intertwined a dozen stories with similarly beguiling results, but Short Cuts was the gamechanger. While traditional portmanteaux still appeared, they were now the exception: in the early noughties, the default way for any film-maker to present multiple narratives was to simply chop them into small pieces and stir them into a stew. Lots of these so-called “hyperlink” films were hugely successful: Traffic, Love Actually, Intermission, Crash. But, acclaimed as they were, how many of us would choose to sit through Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel again? And in the last decade, hyperlink films have been getting worse. Love Actually triggered a production line of saccharine ensemble romcoms, all of which made you grateful Altman didn’t live to see what he sparked: Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Crash, meanwhile, persuaded a host of struggling writer-directors that if they could dream up three or four hardboiled vignettes set in the same city and coax some B and C-list actors to give up a couple of weeks each, they would end up with something that might seem, from a distance, respectable. So we got the barely remembered likes of The Air I Breathe (featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Brendan Fraser); Powder Blue (with Jessica Biel and Ray Liotta); and last year’s Reach Me (Sylvester Stallone, Tom Sizemore, Tom Berenger and Cary Elwes – together at last!). The pretentious vagueness of the titles tells you all you need to know.
Hyperlink films … Crash. Photograph: Allstar
See enough hyperlink films and you’ll soon start muttering: “Yes, yes, we get it – we’re all connected. Human life is a marvellous web of chance meetings and coincidences – the person you’ve just bumped into in an airport gift shop is a hitman on his way to murder your brother’s wife. Now, where’s the actual plot?”
It isn’t just minor writers and directors who use the structure to hoodwink audiences, either. In 2010, Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger was shoddy even by the standard of his other London-based films, but it was no feebler than Peter Morgan and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, which hyperlinked the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami, the London bombings of 2005 and, well, Derek Jacobi’s audiobook of Little Dorrit. There was further awfulness to come. The sub-Altman form finally hit rock bottom last year with Third Person, an unbearable navel-gazing exercise written and directed by Paul Haggis. It’s nearly two and a half hours long, but none of its three strands is substantial enough to qualify as an actual story.
That’s why I prefer a good honest portmanteau. It’s less tricksy than a hyperlink film. Every section has to stand or fall on its own merits, as well as complement the whole. If one segment doesn’t entertain, it risks being cut out: the other segments will survive without it. Sub-Altman hyperlink films, on the other hand, can use their constant back-and-forthing to disguise the weakness of the individual strands. You don’t get such shilly-shallying from Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, where every gruesome story packs a punch and has a twist to remember. Great title, too.
Blame Robert Altman … Love Actually. Photograph: Rex
“I wrote these stories while working on regular screenplays,” says Szifrón. “At the beginning, I didn’t know what to do with them. But by the time I had four or five, I noticed they all had the same DNA, they were linked thematically. So I said to myself, ‘These are all tracks that belong on the same album, they are like stars from the same constellation.’ And as soon as I found the name Wild Tales, I knew that was all I needed.”
Aspiring film-makers, take note. Now that Szifrón has shown the way, it could be that the traditional portmanteau will come back into fashion. A star-studded anthology of Australian short stories called The Turning is due on DVD in April. And a new wave of low-budget horror anthologies is already enabling nascent directors to get their work in front of audiences. They probably won’t have anything airy-fairy to say about the network of invisible threads that bind our fates. But, with any luck, they should get audiences cheering and applauding.
Wild Tales is out on 27 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/13/football-daily-email-big-cup-arsenal | Football | 2024-03-13T17:00:44.000Z | Daniel Harris | Football Daily | Arsenal advance amid sensory reverie and an edifying dispute | THE ROUND OF … AH
Football is the greatest thing in the world. Regular readers will be surprised to learn the Daily thinks that, but it has a confession to make nevertheless: its exhibition sniping and miserableness are nothing more than an attention-seek, a teenage boy being mean to a girl he fancies with predictable results.
There are those first enthralled by the game itself, its balletic rhythms, er0tic physicality and affirming chaos offering artistic inspiration, sensory reverie and intellectual mastication. Others were first attracted by its anarcho-communist credenda, families, friends and comrades constellating to celebrate the simple fact of their existence; the unknowable complexity of their and all existence. And yet others were ravished by the frisson of possibility; the distant yet galvanic sense that the draw for its premier club competition might, one day, be too complicated to be performed by mere humans in order to satisfy the geopolitical gambits of feudal finks and financial fancies of billionaire boors.
Amazingly, we are almost there, next season’s 36-team Big Cup perming the best in prejudicial competition with an obfuscatory system for the ages, the result a reaffirming meld of resounding integrity. However, being too complex for the simple to grasp, the Daily has no choice but to stop there to consider this season’s more easily intelligible abomination – most particularly the romantic tale that is Arsenal finally progressing beyond the Round of Arsenal by shading the third-best team in Portugal thanks to the heroics of Brentford’s goalie.
The highlight, of course, was the edifying dispute between Mikel Arteta and Sérgio Conceição. The former is renowned for his time as Arsenal captain, reportedly using players’ fines to buy a watch for millionaire chief suit, Ivan Gazidis. But he is also famous for being Arsenal manager, patrolling the touchline in intimidating trousers like all the hardest tweens, free to incite conflict he is arguably ill-equipped to resolve. As such, Arteta stands accused of cussing down Conceição and his family. Quite what was said remains unknown. But Conceição was sufficiently moved to initiate a lío of grown men proportions, the two exchanging empty threats and naughty words to the amusement of all and shame of none. Truly, football is the greatest thing in the world.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE
Join Simon Burnton from 8pm GMT for hot Big Cup minute-by-minute coverage of Borussia Dortmund 2-1 PSV (agg: 3-2), while Daniel Harris will be on deck for Atlético Madrid 1-1 Inter (agg: 1-2).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We simply didn’t want to concede in the second half. We managed that and then to get a lucky punch, through a throw-in, a free-kick, or from the halfway line. That we managed to do it is just crazy” – yes, Saarbrücken are at it again, Rüdiger Ziehl’s third-tier team dumping Gladbach out of the German Cup with an added-time winner from Kai Brünker to reach the semi-finals for the second time in four years. “I’m mega-happy,” added Brünker, as well he might be.
Saarbrücken get their celebrations on. Photograph: Uwe Anspach/AP
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
So, a computer is to be used for Big Cup draws after Uefa found ‘it would take up to four hours [to do] without digital assistance’. Isn’t that quicker than the whole shebang can take at present?” – Dr Peter Storch.
I’m not sure I’ve witnessed a more pointless spat than the media confection produced after Trent Alexander-Arnold claimed the trophies Liverpool won meant more ‘to us and our fanbase because of the situations at both clubs financially’. To put it in terms relevant to the readership of the Football Daily, we all know that someone with their last Tin will savour it far more than someone with a fridge full of Tin” – Colin Reed.
Send letters to [email protected]. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Colin Reed.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
The latest Football Weekly podcast is right here, right now on all things Big Cup, Belgrade derby and fridge auditing.
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/20/google-privacy-controls | Technology | 2010-04-20T21:29:12.000Z | Paul Harris | Watchdog calls for tighter Google privacy controls | Britain's privacy watchdog has joined senior government officials from nine other countries to push Google to adopt stricter privacy controls.
Christopher Graham, the UK's information commissioner, has joined countries including Germany, Canada and Spain in signing a letter challenging Google to protect its users more.
The letter, addressed to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, claimed the concerns of citizens across the world were "being forgotten" as Google introduces more and more products. It followed problems with Google Buzz, a social networking application that triggered a storm of protest when it was launched and automatically connected people via their email accounts. Google was forced to quickly change Google Buzz to allow users more choice in who would be in their networks.
"It is unacceptable to roll out a product that unilaterally renders personal information public, with the intention of repairing problems later as they arise," the joint letter said. It added: "We call on you ... to incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of your new services."
The letter then listed six areas where Google should strive to do better, including only collecting the minimum amount of personal information on users of its services, telling users how that information will be used and making it easy for people to delete their accounts and protect their private data. The letter reflects growing fears in some quarters about the power of Google. The search engine has a self-declared mission to make all information in the world searchable but that has run up against numerous privacy or copyright issues. Its Google Books project to put the world's books online has outraged many in the publishing industry. Its Google Street View project also caused negative headlines by capturing images of people in public as Google cars roam the streets and then put the resulting images up on the web.
In an official response a Google spokeswoman said the firm was already very sensitive to the privacy issue and vigilant over the concerns of its products' users. "We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect and how we use it," she said. The spokeswoman added that the company would not be responding to the letter. "We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today's letter," she said.
Google insiders suggested that, in fact, the company complies with the suggestions contained in the letter and that it had been an unnecessary attack. But the issue is clearly a highly sensitive one for a company whose unofficial corporate motto is "don't be evil" but is now getting increasingly bad press about privacy and its global ambitions and dominance of the internet. In the US yesterday Google released comments it had made to the Federal Trade Commission about privacy concerns. The firm said it would support self-regulatory standards and even a federal privacy law that would establish "baseline privacy protections". | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/apr/09/the-good-life-box-set | Television & radio | 2010-04-09T05:45:00.000Z | Leo Hickman | The Good Life | Your next box set | Thirty-five years after it was first broadcast on BBC1, The Good Life is as pertinent as it was when Tom Good decided to jack in his job designing plastic toys for cereal packets and lead a life of self-sufficiency with his wife Barbara in their Surbiton home. Modern audiences will still recognise those same temptations to leave the rat race and live off the land. But the harsh realities of doing so are beautifully sent up by the scripts of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey in this exquisite comedy with a cast – Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington – that most TV producers would still mulch their right arms for.
Tom and Barbara are the happy-go-lucky dreamers next door to the smug yet warm Jerry and Margo, who remain both bemused and supportive of their haphazard yet sporadically fruitful efforts. As Tom struggles to tame his growing backyard menagerie (Pinky and Perky the pigs, and a cockerel called Lenin), Jerry offers wisecracks and encouragement over the fence.
The interplay between the principals is masterful: the characters are both flirty and irritable as the two polarised worlds they represent repel and attract each other. The dialogue is rarely safe, though, even now – the first words spoken to Barbara by Tom (albeit jokingly) are: "You bitch!" And the racy double entendres, shared between the ever-frisky Tom and Barbara, are as integral as the gags about methane gas and overly potent homebrew.
Today, such a comedy would riff on carbon footprints and fair trade, but you would be wrong to assume The Good Life is all about 1970s cliches of earnest environmentalism. Tom makes it clear from the start that he is raging against "it", by which he mean mindless materialism and convention. "It's quality of life I'm after," he says.
It remains a very modern comedy. Just as Tom does on the first day of his new life, I suspect we've all had fantasies of running a rotivator across the neat lawns of our own conformist lives. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/07/sally-rugg-mp-monique-ryan-federal-court-fair-work-case | Australia news | 2023-03-07T00:18:51.000Z | Paul Karp | Sally Rugg’s bid to keep working for Monique Ryan dismissed by federal court | Sally Rugg has failed in her bid to keep her job as a staffer for independent MP Monique Ryan pending the full trial of her Fair Work case alleging she was sacked for refusing “unreasonable” additional hours.
The federal court’s Justice Debra Mortimer dismissed Rugg’s application to prevent the commonwealth giving effect to the termination of her employment, meaning she ceased being employed on Tuesday morning.
In her written reasons, Mortimer explained that although there was a serious question to be tried in the case, it was not convenient to require that Rugg remain employed because it would likely not be “tolerable” for the pair to work together for at least four months pending the trial.
Sally Rugg v Monique Ryan: court documents reveal how working relationship fell apart
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In a statement the Maurice Blackburn Lawyers principal, Josh Bornstein, said that Rugg was “disappointed” but the case was “at an early stage”.
“As Justice Mortimer observed in her judgment, ‘Ms Rugg’s arguments at trial about contraventions of the [Fair Work Act] may well succeed’,” he said.
Rugg has sued the commonwealth and Ryan for alleged adverse action after Rugg tendered her resignation, claiming that Ryan had “pushed or jostled” her out of the chief of staff role for refusing to work unreasonable additional hours.
Ryan has denied directing or requiring Rugg to work 70-hour weeks, and she and the commonwealth also deny that they engaged in “adverse action” in breach of the Fair Work Act.
Mortimer said the case could not commence until at least June, meaning the pair would have to work “closely together over a number of parliamentary sitting periods, and for a number of months”.
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“Even on the most favourable view of Ms Rugg’s submissions about how responsibly they might each try to behave, I do not consider the situation is likely to be tolerable, let alone productive and workable, for either of them,” the judge said.
“[Rugg’s] submissions to the contrary had a significant degree of unreality about them.”
That was because Rugg appeared to be suggesting she could “set her own boundaries about what work she would do and how much work she considered reasonable”, the judge said.
“She gives no detail about how she considers she could work on a day-to-day basis to manage any tensions or challenges, or how she considers her concerns about working hours could be addressed. There is nothing but an assertion.”
The judge said there was a “live debate” about whether Ryan had lost trust and confidence in Rugg, about her working hours, and whether community engagement is part of her role.
“It is not rational to contend that Dr Ryan can, or should be able to, put all this to one side and resume a constructive working relationship with Ms Rugg in what is on the evidence a pressured, extremely busy and demanding working atmosphere at the best of times.”
Mortimer also cited Rugg’s Instagram post to a private account that she was “devastated” to have missed out on the protections of the new code of conduct in parliament.
The judge accepted Ryan’s characterisation that this suggested Rugg was “subject to poor treatment” in her office.
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“I do not see how this is the conduct of a person who wishes to return to work closely and professionally with Dr Ryan.”
The judge also cited two tweets that were “antithetical to the position on Covid-19 held by Dr Ryan” and one criticising the teal independents’ position on super tax concessions.
The judge found that, given Rugg took stress leave in early December, it was likely her health would deteriorate further if she returned to work.
Given the “untenable” relationship between Rugg and Ryan, a return to work would also be “likely to have adverse effects” on others in the office, she said.
Mortimer said she was “not determining Ms Rugg’s overall claim”.
The judge said the case involved “factual disputes” about how many hours Rugg worked, the “wider contextual circumstances” of the Albanese government cutting independents’ staffing allocation and whether Rugg resigned voluntarily or was forced out.
“There are real divisions in the accounts given by Dr Ryan and Ms Rugg, such that the reliability and credibility of their evidence about what happened during the five months of the employment relationship is going to be critical to the outcome of the proceeding.”
The case will be listed for case management before 20 March, ahead of a trial in three to six months which is expected to take up two weeks.
Bornstein said the case would consider “whether 70 hour working weeks, almost twice the ordinary working week of 38 hours, is unlawful”.
“The issues to be considered at trial could have far-reaching ramifications for all Australians who work in industries where long hours are expected and normalised.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jul/31/adam-goodes-aboriginal-men-and-boys-show-support-at-arnhem-land-festival | Sport | 2015-07-31T07:04:23.000Z | Helen Davidson | Adam Goodes: Aboriginal men and boys show support at Arnhem Land festival | A group of Aboriginal men and boys have shown their support for AFL star Adam Goodes at the opening of the annual Garma festival in Arnhem Land.
The Yolngu group painted their bodies with the number 37, to represent the Sydney Swans player and performed a traditional dance.
We feud over Adam Goodes because our big questions remain unanswered
Paul Daley
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Goodes has been the target of booing and racist abuse since performing an Indigenous war dance in celebration at a game during the AFL Indigenous round.
Gabbirri Yunupingu organised the display to show support for Goodes, who he said was “having a tough time down south”.
“We just wanted to show our support from this part of Australia, Yunupingu said.
Aboriginal men and boys show their support for AFL star Adam Goodes by painting their bodies with the number 37. Photograph: Helen Davidson/The Guardian
He said there was “underlying racism” in the booing of the Sydney Swans player.
“He was never booed before what happened previously,” he said, referring to Goodes’ now famous war dance during the Indigenous round.
“It is upsetting that people have come this way. It’s 2015. But we support for him for what he’s doing for our people across the nation.”
When asked how much Goodes and other Indigenous sportspeople were role models for kids in Arnhem Land, Yunupingu replied: “They’re just gods here. You could say that in all communities across Australia. They’re very high up in Indigenous eyes.”
He said the performance of the war dance was “very, very important” and “displayed our culture, which is not really celebrated in our country. We’re very proud of him and what he’s doing”.
“What Goodesy’s doing is standing up to racism and we support him in that.”
Yunupingu said no one should be booing Goodes or other players, regardless of whether it was about racism or something else.
“Even if they don’t think it’s racism, it’s bullying, and that’s no good. They shouldn’t cop it week in and week out.”
He sent a message to Goodes: “Keep going, brother. We’re all behind you.”
Stan Grant: ‘You don’t throw off the shackles of your history that easily’ – link to video Guardian
Jerome Yunupingu, one of the dancers, said he was performing to support Goodes. “He’s a legend player,” said Jerome.
“I’m supporting him and to show everyone our culture.”
Brisbane Lions great Jonathan Brown believes the Adam Goodes saga is building up to a landmark AFL moment like Nicky Winmar’s famous jersey lift.
Winmar, who played 251 AFL games, made a stand against racism in 1993 when he lifted his jumper and pointed to his skin after being jeered by Collingwood fans at Victoria Park.
“[This] may take a landmark moment in time, like the Nicky Winmar case when he famously lifted his St Kilda jumper,” Brown told ABC Radio. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/mar/27/jeremy-corbyn-not-stand-labour-next-election-keir-starmer | Politics | 2023-03-27T18:02:35.000Z | Pippa Crerar | Jeremy Corbyn will not stand for Labour at next election, Keir Starmer to confirm | Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour MP at the next general election, Keir Starmer will confirm at Tuesday’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting after he vowed to prove the party had changed under his leadership.
The Labour leader will propose a motion that makes it clear the party’s ruling body will not endorse Corbyn as a Labour candidate for the Westminster election expected next year.
Starmer first confirmed the move last month as he marked an “important moment” for Labour after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) lifted the party out of special measures over its past failings on antisemitism.
0:27
'We're not going back': Corbyn won't stand as Labour MP in next election, says Starmer – video
The motion Starmer will propose at the NEC does not explicitly mention antisemitism. Instead, it says Labour’s electoral prospects in the seats it needs to win at the next election would be “significantly diminished” should Corbyn be a Labour candidate.
It continues that the NEC’s “primary purpose“ is to maximise the party’s prospects of winning the next election and to avoid any “detrimental impact” on its standing with the electorate. “The Labour party’s interests, and its political interests at the next general election, are not well served by Mr Corbyn running as a Labour party candidate,” it concludes.
Corbyn hit back by saying Starmer had broken his commitment to respect the rights of Labour members and denigrated the party’s democratic foundations.
Resisting calls to declare whether he will stand as an independent candidate, Corbyn said in a statement: “As the government plunges millions into poverty and demonises refugees, Keir Starmer has focused his opposition on those demanding a more progressive and humane alternative.
“Our message is clear: we are not going anywhere. Neither is our determination to stand up for a better world.”
In a clear mark of his growing confidence, Starmer had also invited anyone who disagreed with the party’s new stance on driving out antisemitism, to leave the party.
At the time, Corbyn accused his successor of a “flagrant attack on the democratic rights” of Islington North party members, saying it was for them “not party leaders” to decide who their candidate should be at the next election.
A senior Labour source said: “Keir Starmer has made clear that Jeremy Corbyn won’t be a Labour candidate at the next general election. The Labour party now is unrecognisable from the one that lost in 2019. Tuesday’s vote will confirm this and ensure we can focus on our five missions to build a better Britain.”
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Corbyn was suspended from Labour in October 2020 for suggesting complaints of antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated” for political reasons. His membership was later reinstated but Starmer refused to restore the party whip, meaning he sits as an independent MP.
He led the party for nearly five years, quitting after it suffered its worst election defeat in 80 years in 2019. He has not yet announced whether he will run as an independent at the next election.
The NEC has the power to endorse, or not endorse, a candidate selected for election. It is expected to back the move.
A spokesperson for the grassroots group Momentum said: “We utterly condemn this venal and duplicitous act from Keir Starmer, which further divides the Labour party and insults the millions of people inspired by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership
“We urge all NEC representatives to reject this anti-democratic manoeuvre tomorrow – it should be for Islington North Labour members to decide their candidate, not a neighbouring MP drunk on his own power.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/sep/25/rufus-norris-first-national-theatre-season-interview | Stage | 2015-09-25T11:00:14.000Z | Sarah Crompton | Rufus Norris: how the National Theatre needs to change | Theatres, like schools, take on the personality of the person who runs them. Which is why Rufus Norris, six months into his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre can’t be surprised that his every move is under scrutiny. How he behaves is the best indicator of what Britain’s most powerful theatrical institution will become.
When he arrived to meet the press last week, in a loose denim shirt and leaning against a precarious table to make his season announcement, it was a marked difference in style from that of his predecessor, Nicholas Hytner, more relaxed and less dynamic. The way he answers questions also breaks with the past; where Hytner was fluently politic, Norris pauses and then answers with devastating directness. “I have a growing reputation of being a bit trigger-happy on the candid front,” he says when we meet the next day. “But I would much sooner have that. I try to be as open and honest in any given environment as I can be.”
We are talking in his office at the National, where meetings are landing like planes at Heathrow. No sooner does one group take off than the next lands, with insistent demands, giving Norris barely a chance to draw breath. This, he says, is the single biggest challenge of the job. “It is a steeplechase and it never stops. Every day, there are new and unexpected hurdles. There is no preparation for it really. You just have to get in there and do it. It’s partly about stamina. You have to be able to shift your mind very quickly.”
Rufus Norris's National Theatre must celebrate the new and honour the past
Michael Billington
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An award-winning theatre director with hits such as Festen and Cabaret under his belt, one of his first tasks as National Theatre boss was to oversee the film of his production of London Road, Alecky Blythe’s reimagining of a series of murders in Ipswich as a verbatim musical. He has just returned from the Toronto film festival where it was hailed as “a revelation”.
News of his appointment was greeted enthusiastically within the building where he has been an associate director since 2011 and he is by all accounts the kind of man people want to work with. That said, doubters point out that he has had no experience of running a building and the National is a big building with which to start. He meets the sceptics head on. “I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for and I didn’t know whether or not I could do it. I still don’t. I had a lovely chat with Oskar Eustis who runs the Public Theater in New York the other day and I asked him how long it was before he felt he was in the job. He said the end of the third year. That felt about right to me.”
Norris’s aim is to make a National Theatre for everyone. “It’s not that every show will be for everyone,” he adds, quickly. “Not at all. But the National Theatre has to be a broad church, I would love it to be a broader church and I think it is very important that we reflect the city and the country we are in. We have to be national in terms of what we are debating, the subjects we are looking at, and particularly the people and stories we are representing.”
Chiwetel Ejiofor in Everyman, adapted by Carol Ann Duffy. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian
The emphasis of his programming is on increasing diversity, on gender equality and co-production, making the audience base as wide as it can possibly be. “But excellence has to be the first port of call so each project is judged on that.” In this respect, his direction of the opening production of Everyman, in a modern translation by Carol Ann Duffy and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, was his mission statement. “If I was going to put down a marker and say this is what this place is about, then that would be it.”
Norris, 50, is the first director of the National Theatre since Laurence Olivier not to have been to Cambridge, and to have worked as an actor. He is also the only one to have worked as a painter and decorator to make ends meet. That sense of difference runs deeper. His childhood was spent in Ethiopia, Malaysia and Nigeria, and “because I didn’t grow up in this country, despite having a very close family unit, I never really felt I belonged here”.
He joined a youth theatre in pursuit of a girl, but when the girl vanished, he discovered he had found another family. “To be in a situation with lots of like-minded people where you have a sense of shared endeavour was great.” Perhaps because his upbringing made him an outsider looking in, he values the ability of theatre to explain the world around him. “I believe in theatre because of its power to enable an audience to stand in the shoes of somebody else. It is as simple as that.”
He’s instinctively inclusive, and fundamentally radical. “I have a small bum and a low boredom threshold so I like theatre that is engaging and dynamic. It’s all about eyes on stalks, the things that demand you sit forward.” His own shows have brought into the National voices not often heard – the Ipswich residents caught up in the murders of prostitutes, Mumbai slum dwellersin Behind the Beautiful Forevers, or the black worshippers in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner – and striking visual effects. These are paramount in his next show wonder.land, already warmly received at the Manchester international festival, the new Damon Albarn musical that uses Lewis Carroll as a starting point for an exploration of the online world.
Thusitha Jayasundera, in pink and Meera Syal, in green, in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian
Partly inspired by what he has observed about his own children – he has sons of 18 and 15 with his wife, the playwright Tanya Ronder – it’s a bold choice as the National’s Christmas family show. Yet in many ways, the surprise of Norris’s regime is not how radical but how classical it has been. He may have brought in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**er with the Hat to shake up audiences and programme printers, but he also presented Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem. Next year will bring new plays from untested talent, but also Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and Rory Kinnear in Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. “The spine of what we do will always be classical work,” he said when we first talked two months ago. “Our heritage and how to reimagine and rework these fantastic plays is a huge part of our remit and our core audience are massively important to us.”
Ticket sales are a healthy 89% of capacity. But he admits that he has been disappointed by the reception of some of the works he has championed. “It’s tricky, isn’t it? Because you want everybody to think you are great.” He pauses and smiles, broadly. “So sometimes, when you put something on and people are a bit mealy mouthed about it … ” His voice trails away.
wonder.land review – Damon Albarn musical goes down digital rabbit hole
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The reaction to Patrick Marber’s new play The Red Lion is one of the disappointments. “It’s a beautiful play yet part of the learning curve is that plays about football, or maybe this play about football, have not caught on. I’ve been surprised by that but I have no regrets at all. Bringing Patrick back into the fold has been one of the great privileges of my working life.”
The only real ripple so far was the departure of his chief executive, former Film4 boss Tessa Ross. Yet even that seems to have been accomplished amicably. “We discovered that you can’t have two people running an organisation. We thought we could manage it because we agreed on everything. In the end, it proved complicated. But it doesn’t feel like there is any scar tissue, certainly not between Tessa and me and the organisation is healthy. From my point of view, it made me understand a lot more about the mantle of what I have taken on and made me step up to that.”
Certainly, there will be plenty on his plate. At the press conference he announced that next March, the West End production of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse is to close, after eight years in which it has earned the National more than £13m. That leaves a considerable hole in the coffers at exactly the moment when arts organisations are bracing themselves for budget cuts of between 25-40%. This is on top of a 30% cut in real terms in Arts Council funding over the last seven years.
Norris says the theatre is considering “six pages of ideas that our director of finance has come up with” of ways to get leaner, which include looking again at the question of Sunday opening, which is not always as popular as was hoped. “There’s no point in pretending we can endlessly go on growing,” he says. “The most important thing by far is that we make sure we can fulfil the initiatives and the innovations we really want to pursue.”
Damon Albarn’s wonder.land: watch an exclusive trailer Guardian
What he can’t do, he says, is pin his faith on finding another hit. “You hope, but you don’t take action on hope. Every producer in the West End is trying to grow hits; if there was a secret formula they would all be billionaires. The truth is that all the examples from this building that have done well have not been predicted. The only way to think about it in pragmatic as well as philosophical terms is to look at how you make work, and support the artist to do the best they can.”
To that end, Norris’s most significant act has been to integrate the literary department and the Studio into a unified new work department. “The Studio really is our unsung jewel,” he says. “It’s a resource no one else in the theatre world has got. It gives us the opportunity to develop all kinds of work, all kinds of artists and be a resource not just for the stages here but for the whole theatrical community nationwide. It’s a question of planting seeds.”
You hope, but you don't take action on hope. Every producer in the West End is trying to grow hits
Behind Norris’s easygoing manner, you sense the steel. He has a vision for the future and is working towards it, building on Hytner’s legacy, while shaping it in his own way. His predecessor will soon be working close by – running a new theatre at Tower Bridge. But a direct rival on the South Bank holds no terrors.
“I’m naturally competitive,” says Norris. “Every time I see something really good, it spurs me on. And I think the more good theatre there is, the more people want to see.” His only problem is finding the time to see anything. “I work five nights a week and often at weekends. The thing I am not doing enough of at the moment is going to see other shows outside the building, but that will come.”
There is no doubting his purpose, to keep the National Theatre at the centre of the nation’s culture and at the heart of its debates. “I went through a period in my 30s when I thought theatre was dying and film was the thing. Then you get a bit older and you realise that everyone has been thinking that for ever. Theatre will never die because as a culture and as a species, the value of story is immense and that live connection between the story teller and the audience is a really vivid, vital thing.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/dec/14/jeremy-corbyn-hat-buy-of-the-day | Fashion | 2015-12-14T16:37:46.000Z | Morwenna Ferrier | Jeremy Corbyn's hat – buy of the day | When Jeremy Corbyn announced his intention to attend a Stop the War coalition fundraiser he was criticised by fellow Labour MPs. It was unlikely, therefore, that his appearance at the event would have come and gone with little fanfare. So the fact that he entered Ev restaurant in Southwark at the weekend wearing his trademark hat, only to leave without it, was gold dust to the paparazzi huddled outside in the bushes.
The Daily Mail described the hat as a Leninist cap, which it is, although peaked caps are infiltrating less political environs – most recently seen on Gigi Hadid on the January cover of Vogue. At £100, this hat by Etoile Isabel Marant, is far cheaper than Corbyn’s and much more wearable.
Etoile Isabel Marant cap, £100, Net-a-porter. Photograph: net-a-porter
So what exactly happened to Corbyn’s hat? Well, he auctioned it. And who bought it? Brian Eno, of course, for the kingly sum of £250. One likes to imagine that the Labour leader silenced the room by clambering on to his chair, ripping the hat from his head and sending it spinning into the hands of the auctioneer to uproarious applause, but to be honest, we’ll never know. The more exciting question: what hat will Corbyn wear next? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/nov/30/stars-back-andrew-lloyd-webber-call-for-music-education-funding | Education | 2023-11-30T17:33:43.000Z | Nadia Khomami | Stars back Andrew Lloyd Webber call for music education funding | Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Dua Lipa are among the music industry leaders who have called for public funding for music in disadvantaged schools.
In a letter to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer on Thursday, Lord Lloyd-Webber called for funding to scale up the work of his music education charity, the Music in Secondary Schools Trust (MiSST), which has provided free musical instruments and weekly music lessons for 20,000 children in disadvantaged schools for the past 10 years.
The letter was co-signed by industry figures including Liam Gallagher, Katherine Jenkins, Nicola Benedetti, Julian Lloyd Webber, the Kanneh-Mason family and Jonathan Vaughan, the principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
The MiSST provides instruments, lessons as part of the curriculum and a developed programme for children in years 7, 8 and 9 in schools in England, including in London, Barnsley, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough and Cumbria.
According to the trust, across all subjects taught in its partner schools – not just music – children are getting half a grade more than predicted, and some are going on to study at the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. It says there is also a 10% increase in pupils’ self-confidence and resilience, and many students report that music helps to improve their happiness, and sometimes turn their life around.
The cost of the programme is initially £200 a year for each student, which drops to £132 once a school has been running the programme for three years.
Lloyd Webber’s letter said: “From improved cognitive development, communication skills and problem solving to greater confidence, self-esteem and social development, music has a profound impact on young people’s lives.
“Most pertinently, in a world that feels more divided than at any point in my lifetime, and with conflict raging around the world with incalculable consequences, music has a unique ability to unite. It is a universal language that can transcend borders, cultures and differences and bring people together.”
It continued: “For many years, music education in schools has been scaled back – at a time when we have never needed it more. Every child deserves to be empowered through music, no matter their background, race or religion.”
The letter urged the government, and all future governments, to help scale up the work of the trust, targeting the most disadvantaged schools in the most disadvantaged areas, starting with the 80 schools on the trust’s waiting list.
“Now, more than ever, we must reverse the tide on musical education and recognise the transformational impact it can have for our children, schools, communities and society at large,” it said.
Rachel Landon, MiSST chief executive, said: “If governments are serious about creating equal opportunity in education, programmes like MiSST are exactly where they should be focused.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/l-q-partner-zone/housing-associations-communities-future | Housing Network | 2013-06-19T11:53:21.000Z | Kate Murray | How housing associations are creating the communities of the future | It is billed as one of the most ambitious regeneration programmes in Europe. The development of new communities on the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, will see high-quality energy-efficient family homes built in 'traditional family neighbourhoods' alongside well-planned open spaces, schools, nurseries, health centres and shops.
It may be one of the most high-profile sites in the country, but London and Quadrant housing association (L&Q), which is developing Chobham Manor, the first of five new neighbourhoods on the park, says that its approach in east London exemplifies the way housing providers, whatever the scale of their project, are now thinking about creating the sustainable communities of the future.
"The role of housing associations now goes far beyond laying bricks and carrying out repairs. A successful 'place' is about the interplay between the built environment, individuals and local communities," says Mike Donaldson, group director of strategy and operations at L&Q.
"All successful neighbourhoods need transport links, access to jobs, schools, healthcare, entertainment facilities and usable green spaces. A successful mixed neighbourhood also needs a sense of safety, ownership and community. This has to be tailored to each area and it means involving residents right from the start, giving them a meaningful say in local matters, and then keeping them engaged."
But at a time when public grant is reducing and the hunt is on to find ever more innovative ways of funding desperately needed new homes, how are housing providers ensuring that they think quality rather than just quantity? As Alan Yates, director of regeneration at the Accord Group, stresses, housing associations may be under pressure to deliver numbers, but they need to ensure what they develop produces great places for the long term.
"To a certain extent we are driven by the numbers game by the Homes and Communities Agency," he says. "My approach is that we do need to take a step back and think carefully about the homes we are building and the communities we are building. Inevitably developers will try and squeeze as many homes on a site to make it economically viable but they are not in an area for the long term in the same way we as housing organisations are. Sometimes we are being encouraged to design things out of schemes on cost grounds when we should be designing things in."
Yates says Accord, like many housing associations, tries to involve local communities as early as possible in the decisions about the places where they live.
This might mean incorporating people's preferences into the way homes are built, even on little details such as where their plug sockets are fitted. Or it might mean designing in community features which can give a real boost to an area's prospects. One such example is a recent development in Redditch where plans were amended at the request of the future residents to take away space from their individual back gardens to free up land for communal allotments. "Successful communities are as much about people as about place," says Yates. "It's important to get the community involved – and not make assumptions about what they want."
Tony Stacey, chief executive of South Yorkshire Housing Association and chair of the PlaceShapers group of community-led housing associations, says three main issues contribute to creating places where people really want to live. Great design and good community involvement are two key elements but so too, he says, is careful consideration of the right mix of residents for each particular area. "That doesn't mean you're not housing the most difficult cases – it just means being sensible about long-term management issues. It's important not to regard each project as a one-off but as a 60-year or 100-year project."
Building new developments is, of course, only a small part of what housing associations do. Taking the same considered approach for new-build schemes that they use with existing communities is now the hallmark of many associations' work. As Tim Edwards, head of regeneration at the Aspire Group, explains, that means investing in social and economic improvements as well as in homes and community facilities and integrating new homes into the existing neighbourhoods that surround them.
"We want areas that are sustainable both economically and environmentally – places that people want to live in. We want good community relationships and neighbourhoods as well as good services and good quality housing," he says. "A good mix of housing type, good quality services and good neighbourhood support are all important but so too are the opportunities for people to do well."
Edwards says that in the current financial climate, there is pressure to deliver affordable housing, perhaps at the expense of the right mix of tenure and housing type that can make an area sustainable in the longer term. There's increasing pressure too for organisations to justify their spending on some of the social value elements that can really make a difference to whether communities thrive. But most housing providers recognise that despite the pressures, tough economic times make such investment even more vital for their communities' future.
"As social landlords investing in the long term we have got to make our places sustainable," says Edwards. "If we can deliver neighbourhood programmes which integrate physical investment but also social investment, we have a much better chance of making that happen."
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/may/21/in-the-heights-review-high-energy-movie-musical-loaded-with-sunny-d-optimism | Film | 2021-05-21T15:00:34.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | In the Heights review – Lin-Manuel Miranda musical loaded with Sunny-D optimism | There’s a sentimental kind of exuberance and more than two solid hours of dancing in the streets in this boisterous, if earnest, movie-musical version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit from 2008. (Famously, it was while taking a well-earned holiday after this stage success that Miranda chanced upon Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton – and the rest is showbiz history.)
It is a sweet-natured film with Sunny-D optimism and a no-place-like-home ethic; in a pleasant way, it felt like a feature-length version of that moment in Fame when all the kids start dancing and singing around the yellow cab outside New York’s High School of Performing Arts. You might also compare it to West Side Story, soon to be revived by Steven Spielberg. But this is a world of all jets and no sharks, or all sharks and no jets. There is no serious conflict here, and the quarrels, family rows and lovers’ tiffs disappear very quickly.
The scene is the Washington Heights district of Manhattan, a vibrant hub of Latin American communities. A hardworking, romantic young guy called Usnavi runs a bodega, a corner store, with his cheeky cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz) and dreams of one day making it home to the Dominican Republic to open a beachside bar. On stage this was Miranda’s part; now it is played with likable openness by Anthony Ramos, with Miranda taking a cameo as someone selling cold drinks from a cart. Bashful Usnavi is in love with smart, beautiful Vanessa (Melissa Barerra) who works in a nearby nail salon, but with ambitions to be a fashion designer. Meanwhile, Nina (Leslie Grace) returns to the neighbourhood from her studies at Stanford to a hero’s welcome but she’s secretly eaten up with sadness: she wants to drop out, sick of racism in the student body, and worried about her dad Kevin (Jimmy Smits) going broke to pay her tuition. Meanwhile, her ex-boyfriend Benny (Corey Hawkins) has obviously still got a thing for her.
The summer heat climbs in parallel with the emotional temperature, and the rumours are that someone has won big with a lottery ticket bought in Usnavi’s store; it all climaxes in a calamitous power cut (inspired by a notorious Washington Heights blackout in 1999) which kills all the fridges and the A/Cs but not the nonstop party atmosphere, and the community is kept grounded by a wise matriarchal figure of “Abuela” (ie “Grandma”) Claudia, played by Olga Merediz. There are loads of enjoyable setpieces, high-energy ensemble scenes and warbling Broadway showtunes with a spoonful of rap: I loved the goofy spectacular at the outdoor swimming pool (in-pool dancing is always entertaining) and Ramos has an open, pleasant, intelligent face. In a way, he’s an actor in search of a more demanding role, and almost everyone here (except Merediz and Smits) looks like players in a very talented youth theatre company.
There’s plenty of vibrancy and winning charm but a persistent and weird lack of grownup plausibility. Of course, that’s part of what a musical is, but there is no place for grit in this oyster. Nina, for example, talks about the ugly incident that soured her experience of Stanford: her roommate misplaced an expensive necklace and this young woman’s wealthy parents insisted on literally searching Nina, and when this necklace was simply found in the roommate’s bag, not only did Nina get no apology, but she found herself stammering out an apology herself – an intense humiliation. But this all happens off-camera. In the Heights themselves, bad feelings evaporate in the film’s greenhouse-controlled atmosphere of bubbling excitement. There is certainly no racial tension, unless you count the white removals guy who calls Vanessa’s colleague “ma’am” and is sharply told that this should be “señorita”.
It’s impossible to object to In the Heights with its almost childlike innocence. Ramos is very good and it is great to see Stephanie Beatriz (from TV’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Dascha Polanco (from Orange Is the New Black) round out the supporting cast. But this is a pretty quaint image of street life, whose unrealities probably worked better on stage.
In the Heights is released on 11 June in the US, 18 June in the UK and 24 June in Australia. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/apr/30/underrated-premier-league-players-part-two-from-man-city-to-wolves | Football | 2020-04-30T11:00:19.000Z | Guardian sport | Underrated Premier League players: part two, from Man City to Wolves | Manchester City: Edin Dzeko
Position Forward Time at club 2011-16 League apps/goals 130/50
Dzeko was never an automatic choice – as his status as an unused substitute in City’s 2011 FA Cup final triumph and 74 league starts in five years illustrates. Yet despite a prevailing view that he lacked technicality and was a little ponderous Dzeko could score a “heavy” goal when required. The most vital example of this is the 90th-minute equaliser against QPR that made it 2-2 before Sergio Agüero scored that winner to claim the 2011-12 Premier League title. Jamie Jackson
Manchester United: Javier Hernández
Position Forward Time at club 2010-15 League apps/goals 103/37
Signing for the club when he was 22, Hernández registered 20 goals in his opening season, won two titles and started the 2011 Champions League final before fading from the first-team picture when Sir Alex Ferguson retired in May 2013. Yet Hernández’s 147 minutes per strike ratio is the same as Alan Shearer’s and better than Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Michael Owen, placing him 11th on the Premier League list. Since Robin van Persie in 2012-13 only Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Romelu Lukaku have scored 20 times for United in a campaign. His sale always appeared to be a Louis van Gaal howler. JJ
Javier Hernández celebrates scoring against West Brom in 2011. Photograph: Ian Kington/AFP/Getty Images
Newcastle United: James Milner
Position Midfielder Time at club 2004-08 League apps/goals 94/6
Newcastle’s then-manager, Graeme Souness, appeared unaware of the rare gem in his possession, claiming his side “would never win anything with a team of James Milners”. As Liverpool’s Mr Versatility polishes his Champions League winners’ medal, Tynesiders recall how a young winger signed by Sir Bobby Robson shortly before his sacking was consistently under-appreciated at St James’ Park. Although he was often sidelined by Souness during the 2005-06 campaign, Milner never let anyone down in the course of 136 first-team appearances. Twenty eight came in Europe where his stellar reading of the game and understated skill shone through. He eventually left for Aston Villa and after a conversion to central midfield, his talent was properly appreciated. The rest is history. Louise Taylor
Underrated Premier League players: part one, from Arsenal to Liverpool
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Norwich: Alexander Tettey
Position Midfielder Time at club 2012- League apps/goals 215/7
Signed from Rennes by Chris Hughton, Tettey is the only player from that era to remain at Carrow Road. In each season since the Norwegian international has had to fight for his place. He doesn’t contribute goals (except the very odd pearler). He can make bad errors, his passing is unreliable and there’s always a sense he could be upgraded. But that calculation ignores the 34-year-old’s determination, dedication and ability to still learn. In 2019-20, having seen off his latest replacement – the loanee Ibrahim Amadou who was sent back to Sevilla – Tettey was having his best season for the club. Paul MacInnes
Alexander Tettey is Norwich’s longest-serving player. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
Sheffield United: Chris Basham
Position Defender Time at club 2014- League apps/goals 238/11
The 31-year-old right-sided element of Chris Wilder’s now famous overlapping centre-halves, Basham took a long time to win hearts and minds at Bramall Lane and remains seriously underrated in the wider football world. Born in Hebburn, he joined Newcastle’s academy but ended up working in McDonald’s for two years after being released. Low-profile stints with Bolton, Stafford Rangers, Rochdale and Blackpool followed before he proved an integral part of Sheffield United’s ascent from League One. Many Blades fans feared Basham would fail to cope with the step up to the Championship and then assumed he would be replaced when the Premier League was reached. Instead he has been sensational this season. LT
Southampton: Jack Cork
Position Midfielder Time at club 2011-2015 League apps/goals 114/2
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, the saying goes. Cork did not miss a league game en route to the Premier League in 2012 and, a steady if not spectacular performer, he quickly established himself as a regular in Mauricio Pochettino’s first season at the helm, a calming influence in the heat of the midfield battle. But Cork was deemed dispensable by Ronald Koeman, signing for then top-flight Swansea, before joining Burnley in the summer of 2017 and making his England debut later that year against Germany at Wembley. Just as Dusan Tadic and Graziano Pellè did, Cork left a void that proved difficult to fill. Ben Fisher
Jack Cork in action for Southampton in 2012. Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images
Tottenham: Benoît Assou-Ekotto
Position Left-back Time at club 2006-2015 League apps/goals 155/4
Like a lot of left-backs, Assou-Ekotto tended to fly under the radar. Perhaps it was because he had no interest in building any sort of profile as a footballer. To him, his work was his work and that was it. Yet it would be foolish to underestimate his commitment when he put on his game face. Assou-Ekotto was a fixture in one of the best Spurs teams of modern times – the one that finished fourth in 2010 under Harry Redknapp and swept to the Champions League quarter-finals the following year. He was quick, tough to beat and made 202 appearances in all competitions across seven seasons at the club, before being loaned to QPR. David Hytner
Watford: Adrian Mariappa
Position Central defender/right-back Time at club 2005-2012; 2016- League apps/goals 278/4
The last time Mariappa played a top-flight game for Watford in the month of August was in 2006. In four Septembers since his return to the club in 2016, he has made six appearances. Every summer Watford recruit and rebuild, and as the season starts the manager – often a new appointment – does not have Mariappa in his plans. Even at his own club he has been undervalued, but season after season he fights his way into the team, and now he sits 18th in the list of all-time appearance makers. There was also a phenomenal shoulder-high first touch in the home game against Burnley this season that was good enough to earn him a place on this list on its own. Simon Burnton
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West Ham: Hayden Mullins
Position Midfielder Time at club 2003-09 League apps/goals 180/4
Mullins was a player who sometimes suffered because of his versatility. When he joined West Ham it was hard to pin down his best position and he struggled when he had to fill in as a full-back, particularly when he went up against Crystal Palace’s Wayne Routledge in the 2004 Championship play-off final. After a torrid spell at right-back, Mullins found his feet after linking up with Nigel Reo-Coker in central midfield, helping West Ham regain their place in the top flight in 2005. It did not feel right when he missed the 2006 FA Cup final through suspension. Jacob Steinberg
Wolves: Romain Saïss
Position Midfielder/defender Time at club 2016- League apps/goals 110/8
Every hero needs a trusty sidekick. Saïss has served as exactly that to several players since arriving at Molineux four years ago. He did the dirty work in midfield when Rúben Neves got the acclaim for leading Wolves out of the Championship and he has continued to make his presence felt in the top-flight, both in midfield and in central defence. He is a wholehearted utility man who brings rousing spirit and deceptively tidy passing but tends not to get the attention he deserves. Except, in fairness, from referees, who nearly always spot a reason to take his name. Paul Doyle | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/10/china-doll-broadway-david-mamet-al-pacino-delayed-opening | Stage | 2015-11-10T18:58:24.000Z | Jessica Glenza | Two-week delayed opening of David Mamet's China Doll raises eyebrows | The official opening of David Mamet’s new Broadway play China Doll, starring Al Pacino, has been delayed for two weeks – a move that sometimes suggests producers are anxious about a play’s readiness to face theater critics.
China Doll – the story of a billionaire played by Pacino “ready to walk away from it all to start a new life with his beautiful young fiancee” before an unexpected phone call interrupts his plans – was scheduled to open at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York in just over a week.
Now the play’s official opening will be 4 December. It opened for previews on 21 October.
In a statement to the Associated Press, producers Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel and Steve Traxler said the delay “allows the creative team additional time to work on the play before its world premiere”.
Richards told the New York Times that “new material is going in this week and new material went in this past weekend”. A call to Jeffrey Richards Associates by the Guardian was not immediately returned.
In theater, such moves are often viewed skeptically. One of the most famous recent examples of a delayed opening was an apparent attempt to shield critics from the disastrous 2011 production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, directed by Julie Taymor with music by U2’s Bono and the Edge. The play staged 183 preview performances, angering critics, who eventually broke the media embargo and reviewed the musical (the New York Times critic called the play “grievously broken” in his review).
The New York media has circulated rumors about China Doll’s progress. The New York Post reported that Pacino has had teleprompters hidden onstage to help him remember lines, and that director Pam MacKinnon has had trouble giving the star notes.
“I’m not your fucking puppet, Pam!” the actor allegedly yelled to MacKinnon when she attempted to give him notes in Mamet’s absence.
Despite the doubts swirling around the play, it has maintained some of the best ticket sales on Broadway. Since previews began, China Doll has grossed more than $1m a week, with performances “virtually sold out”, the Associated Press has reported.
Mamet has been one of Broadway’s most formidable playwrights for decades, and his collaborations with Pacino go back almost as long. Pacino starred in the 1983 revival of Mamet’s American Buffalo, the 1992 movie-version of Mamet’s hit Glengarry Glen Ross, and the 2012 Broadway revival. This is Pacino’s 12th run on Broadway.
Nevertheless, some have questioned Mamet’s hit-making powers in recent years. In 2012, as Glengarry Glen Ross starring Pacino was staged nearby, Mamet’s The Anarchist quickly failed (it was called a “turgid two-hander” by the Guardian).
Previews for that revival of Glengarry were also extended, with producers reportedly fearing the play’s eventual tepid reviews. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/19/iron-maiden-double-album-the-book-of-souls | Music | 2015-06-19T07:17:45.000Z | Guardian music | Iron Maiden announce double album, the Book of Souls | Now that Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has been given the all-clear from cancer, Iron Maiden are set to return with their long-promised double album. The Book of Souls will arrive on 4 September and will be their first-ever double album, with a running time of 92 minutes.
The Book Of Souls - coming September 4th http://t.co/gNW90fqzdG pic.twitter.com/zQRrJKPkqv
— Iron Maiden (@IronMaiden) June 18, 2015
Split across two CDs or three vinyl LPs, the press release says “there’s a broader split on the songwriting compared to previous Maiden records.”
Dickinson said in a statement:
We’re really excited about The Book of Souls and had a fantastic time creating it. We started working on the album in late summer 2014 and recorded it at Guillaume Tell Studios in Paris, where we’d done the Brave New World album back in 2000 so the studio holds special memories for all of us. We were delighted to discover the same magical vibe is still alive and very much kicking there! So we immediately felt at home and the ideas just started flowing. By the time we’d finished we all agreed that each track was such an integral part of the whole body of work that if it needed to be a double album, then double it’s going to be!
Although only 11 tracks long, a number of the songs on the double album clock in at over 10 minutes, such as The Red and the Black, which is 13 minutes, and the 18-minute album closer Empire of the Clouds.
Despite the new album, the band will not promote their record live until 2016. “Although Bruce is naturally eager to resume Maiden activities, it will take a while before he is completely back to full strength, as we explained previously,” Rod Smallwood said back in May. “Because of this, the band will not be touring or playing any shows until next year.”
The Book of Souls track list:
CD1:
If Eternity Should Fail
Speed of Light
The Great Unknown
The Red and the Black
When the River Runs Deep
The Book of Souls
CD 2:
Death or Glory
Shadows of the Valley
Tears of a Clown
The Man of Sorrows
Empire of the Clouds | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/oct/20/comedy.television | Stage | 2007-10-20T09:49:47.000Z | Justin Quirk | Justin Quirk on The Young Ones legacy 25 years on | "Yes, we've got a video!"
"A package from the Transvaal ... how strange!"
"Bad for society ... when the kids start to get into it!"
It'll be difficult for readers under the age of 30 to believe, but if you were watching TV between 1982 and 1984, these phrases are like "Garlic bread!", "I'm Rick James, bitch!" and Andy Pipkin's "Yeah, I know" all rolled into one. They helped cement The Young Ones' reputation as the high watermark of 1980s comedy. This month marks 25 years since the airing of the first episode, Demolition, and sees the rerelease of all 12 shows on DVD. In a fittingly iconoclastic gesture, that episode ended with the entire cast being wiped out in a plane crash; but then logic and continuity were never the show's strong points. Rather, it was their disregard for convention that people found most endearing about The Young Ones, and this stemmed largely from producer Paul Jackson, who cobbled together the best new acts appearing at The Comedy Store, then London's pivotal alternative comedy venue. Bar the 1980 BBC2 showcase Boom Boom ... Out Go The Lights, the cast and crew had virtually no TV experience, which Jackson turned to his advantage.
"I told them 'don't worry about budgets or technical constraints. Just write what's in your imagination and if we can't film it I'll tell you.'"
So, it was out with jokes about mother-in-laws and black people, and in with atomic weapons, talking Glaswegian hamsters and Motorhead playing in the front room. The anarchic mixture of violence, explosions, authority-bating and alternative music proved a hit, but not with the target audience. The intended 18 to 30s were slow on the uptake, while 10 to 14 year olds instantly warmed to a show where a hippy had nails driven into his skull and a ginger punk drove "a yellow Ford Anglia with flames up the sides". The Evening Standard's TV critic Ray Connelly summed up the cultural sea change when he wrote: "There's something going on in my house. My kids are sneaking off to watch this show that I don't get but they find hilarious."
Crucially, these were the first generation of technologically-literate children with access to VCRs. By the show's second series 18 months later, obsessive taping, lending and replaying of the first six episodes had swelled their popularity. The short-term impact was seismic: with the Comic Strip films running concurrently on Channel 4, the comedians showcased in The Young Ones spread across sketch shows, films and rival channels like a rash. As well as the original cast, French & Saunders, Keith Allen, Hale & Pace, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Robinson, Fry & Laurie, Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and Smith & Jones all cropped up in the show. And the phones of an entire generation of older, less-PC comics suddenly stopped ringing.
In truth, the show hasn't aged brilliantly. The first series feels particularly unstructured, with the surreal interludes dragging on. There is also the problem for any programme of this age that the washed-out film stock and studio sets instantly date it. The lightweight cameras and lack of laughter track that gave The Office its documentary feel belong to the modern age. The Young Ones came at the tail end of the pre-digital period when technical constraints - namely, two massive fixed cameras and a live audience - made televisual comedy closer to the theatre. The declamatory speeches and pauses for laughter make even a show as energetic as this seem rather slow.
There is also the uncomfortable truth that for a programme so fondly remembered as revolutionary, it changed nothing in the long run. Most of the cast themselves became cosily ensconced in the establishment with unseemly haste. Alexei Sayle is the only member who pretty much stuck to his principles, and pinpoints the first episode of series two - when Emma Thompson and Fry & Laurie appeared as Scumbag College's University Challenge rivals - as an inkling of the future. "These people were the enemy and everyone else was like 'Stephen's looovely '," he recalls, grumpily. "I'd have been out there cutting their brake cables."
Indeed, for all its anarchy and iconoclasm, the show was still a comfortably white, middle-class proposition that dealt with the familiar baby-boomer touchstones of university life and liberal politics. With hindsight, the early series of Only Fools And Horses from the same year - with their portrayal of an otherwise unseen, hand-to-mouth Thatcherite London - now looks like the more radical proposition.
Glance around the current entertainment landscape and light entertainment is once again predicated on talent shows and ballroom dancing, just like Gary Bushell always said it should be. Jimmy Carr cracks gags about Gypsies and gets endless Channel 4 gigs. Ricky Gervais tours the country with a routine that even Kelvin MacKenzie damned as "both unfunny and offensive ... basically Jim Davidson from two decades ago." The Young Ones may have played a crucial role in the development of a generation of comedians and had plenty of flashes of genius, but ultimately it won the battle and lost the war. If you watched it first time around, remember it fondly. Just don't expect any genuine young ones to find it as funny as you.
· The Young Ones: 25th Anniversary Complete Series Box Set is out on Monday | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/22/uk-business-chief-warns-against-us-trade-deal | Politics | 2017-07-22T19:52:58.000Z | Michael Savage | British business chief warns against swift US trade deal | A headlong rush into a “politically attractive” trade deal with the US risks exposing British companies to hostile takeovers and handing American firms the upper hand, one of Britain’s leading business figures has warned.
Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said he was “distinctly uneasy” about the idea of a swift free-trade deal. Writing in the Observer, he called on the government to focus on small “quick wins” to free up trade between Britain and the US. He said the pressing need is for a deal with the EU.
His warning came as Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, prepares to travel to the US on Monday to begin talks about a possible deal. There are already concerns among trade unions on both sides of the Atlantic over the prospects of a quick deal, with calls for far more details to be released about the areas being considered for inclusion in the agreement. However, tackling some of the smaller barriers to trade is understood to be on Fox’s agenda for the trip.
Marshall said that his reservations about a US-UK free trade agreement were shared by businesses across Britain. “The US has many of the world’s toughest trade negotiators, whereas the UK has ceded policy and knowhow to the European commission for decades,” he writes. “If talks began on a US-UK deal over the coming months, I know which of the two I’d put my money on.
“There is a huge risk that UK-based firms will continue to face higher upfront costs and regulatory requirements after any agreement, leaving them at an instant disadvantage to US competitors that would suddenly have wider scope to compete in and buy up chunks of the UK market.”
He warns that a rushed deal with the US could lead to “predatory purchasing of UK firms by bigger, cash-rich US competitors”.
British unions have begun to raise concerns. Frances O’Grady, head of the TUC, said the talks were a “PR stunt for Liam Fox”. “With serious trade talks, government prepares by speaking to business and unions. But that’s not happened here,” she said. “Ministers should be focused on getting the best possible deal with the EU, rather than leaping into bed with Donald Trump.”
Len McCluskey, the Unite union boss, said: “Unite is concerned about the rush to secure a cobbled-together trade deal with Donald Trump’s administration, and to do so behind closed doors.
“Unless the government drops the secrecy and lets the public in on the terms of any trade discussions and prospective deal, then we remain deeply worried that what will emerge from Liam Fox’s discussions with the president’s team will be music to the ears of global big business but absolutely not be in the interests of ordinary people.”
A government spokesman said: “The UK-US working group is dedicated to strengthening our already strong bilateral trade and investment relationship now, and post-Brexit.
“It aims to provide certainty, continuity and increase confidence for UK and US businesses as we leave the EU, helping to inform the groundwork for any potential free trade agreement.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2018/mar/20/world-cup-2018-russia-contenders-dark-horses-international-game-crisis | Football | 2018-03-20T18:35:50.000Z | Barney Ronay | The Russia World Cup has to save international football from crisis | Barney Ronay | As the friendly international spring break descends upon the season like a dose of Sunday afternoon blues, it has become a reflex response among those watching to sigh a little, to count the days, to see this severance from the teat of club football excitement as a draught of cold water, another unwelcome interruption from the dying hand of international football.
How absurd to boycott World Cup when Russia is so bound up in our economy
Barney Ronay
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In many ways this sense of deflation is a credit to the way the Premier League is sold and packaged. If not quite a reflection of its enduring tensions. It is worth being clear on this point. When the current round of 82 mixed and varied international friendlies has been played, Manchester City will still be miles clear of the field, the Premier League season still reduced to a wrangle to avoid 19th and 18th place. Serie A will still be the only major European league with anything resembling a title race.
In the meantime international football, so often dismissed – with some justification – as a drowned world of by-rote mediocrity, is entering one of its periods of sharpened interest. Many of these games may look enjoyably obscure – Gibraltar v Latvia anyone? – or a selection of carefully staged geopolitical oddities (I bring you: Madagascar v Kosovo at the Stade Jean Rolland). But there is also something more tangible in train, the first real spark of the World Cup fuse, a kind of base camp for Russia 2018.
This will be the last round of friendlies before the club seasons end, a place where squads are trimmed and sharpened, tactical plans junked or fleshed out. And where we might get a sense of the look and feel of Russia 2018, European football’s last sensible international tournament before the inanities of the multi-nation Euros and Qatar’s winter-sun break.
History suggests there are three key on-field components to a genuinely memorable World Cup. The first is a high-functioning top tier of teams: a pedigree winner and at least one other side touched with a little greatness to chase them across the line.
This often turns on circumstance. The most vivid teams define themselves in fine tournament details. The good news for Russia 2018’s prospects is the likely winners look both impressively stocked and genuinely hard to separate.
Hence, in the current round of fixtures, some obvious moments of A-list gold. Argentina play Italy then Spain. Germany face Spain then Brazil. Chuck in France, who play Colombia, and history, and indeed most predictions of the future, suggest the winner will come from this bunch.
Toni Kroos has become the heartbeat of the world champions Germany. Photograph: TF-Images/Getty Images
Germany are deserved favourites, with a method that seems beautifully grooved and some genuine depth in the player pool. Toni Kroos has matured into the real heart of this late-Löw team, all grizzled serial winners and fearless young talent. Germany do not exactly look irresistible. But they seem like a standard to beat, a default winner, supremely well-equipped to retain the title unless someone, somewhere can come up with a reason why not.
I’ve followed England around the world, but Russia is too risky
Philip Cornwall
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Brazil are better under Tite, with less in the way of Neymar-dependence and plenty of elite club football faces. Not to mention a hard core who have played club football in Russia or Ukraine.
Spain’s blend of ageing lions and sparky young guns is the usual seductive mix. Watching a midfield containing Isco, Thiago Alcântara and Andrés Iniesta might be an absorbing game within a game in its own right. France could probably pick a last-16 team from players who will not make their squad. Argentina have the greatest club footballer of all time and a rag-bag of talent and scufflers in support. There is enough here for the gears to click, the sense of destiny to take over, for at least one of the obvious A-listers to find its best rhythms.
The second necessity for a functioning tournament is interest elsewhere, a generational moment from one or two of the nearly-theres: think Poland ’82, Holland through the 90s, Romania at USA 94, Colombia last time out. Again the next week’s fixtures could offer some hope. Portugal are behind England in the UK betting, laughably, but they have a very decent chance of winning the World Cup. The game against Egypt looks fascinating, a chance for the form horse Mohamed Salah to pit himself against the annihilating boot of Portugal’s enduring golden god.
Can Mohamed Salah take Egypt to even greater heights at Russia 2018? Photograph: Nariman El-Mofty/AP
And throughout the week there are games that look like convincingly drool-worthy World Cup last-16 knockout ties. Poland, currently joint sixth in the Fifa rankings, play Nigeria. Nigeria play Serbia. Belgium’s blend of muscular defence, attacking brilliance and Roberto Martínez has a one-off against Saudi Arabia.
In the middle of which there is a genuine seam of talent, candidates for breakout success, a run to the semis, haunting penalty shootout agony.
Similarly the final ingredient – the breakout-team, the Cameroon 1990 – also looks intriguingly poised. There will surely be hints this week. South Korea face Poland, Iceland play Peru, Denmark take on Panama. Even England, defiantly touting around their assortment of bafflement and inflated expectation, could surprise everyone by failing to collapse under Gareth Southgate’s cautiously dogged hand.
So far, so familiar. But there is an added urgency too. Whatever your views on international football – and many younger fans, drawn more to individual players, do seem nonplussed by the spectacle of energetic mediocrity wrapped in a flag – it is undoubtedly entering a point of dramatic crisis.
Fifa is desperate for a successful World Cup. The club game continues to soar away into the stratosphere, sucking up coaching talent, setting an unmatchable bar of intensity.
Meanwhile, the World Cup continues to struggle under its self-imposed yoke of corruption and tailing interest, the political difficulties of Russia, even the disaster-in-waiting of badly applied VAR. There is a genuine sense of jeopardy. International football desperately needs this to work out. And it all starts here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/26/texas-border-wall-lone-star-conflict | Film | 2024-02-26T14:59:48.000Z | Phil Hoad | ‘I recently went back to the Texas border – and urinated on the wall’: how we made Lone Star | John Sayles, writer and director
We decided to make a film about the Texas border after going there in 1978 to shoot a cameo in the Joe Dante film Piranha, which I wrote. On my day off, I visited the Alamo in San Antonio. What I knew about the battle was mostly the Walt Disney version – Davy Crockett and all that. But the day I was there, Chicano-Americans were protesting, saying: “Tell the whole story.” I got interested in its racial complexity, the fact there were Mexicans fighting for the US, too, and that the “freedom” the Texans were fighting for was the freedom to own slaves. That’s a major part that gets left out.
The kind of story Lone Star tells – about the fate of white racist sheriff Charlie Wade, played by Kris Kristofferson – isn’t that uncommon. A person has a reign with an inordinate amount of power. My script had elements of a western, but it was more of a detective story. It was one of those rare instances where I wrote it and we got the money to make it right away.
I cast Chris Cooper as the present-day sheriff investigating Wade’s murder because he had that iconic American Gary Cooper thing. One thing he can do very well is play a subtext, which was needed in interrogation scenes. In those, he is essentially asking: what kind of man was my father, the sheriff who challenged and replaced Wade? It’s not easy to get the performance right when you’re shooting out of sequence. Chris constantly had to ask himself where his character was in the mystery story and what he was feeling.
The border patrol would just say ‘No me hagas correr’ to illegal immigrants – ‘Don’t make me run’ – and deport them
I never do rehearsals – I want the shock of the new. Matthew McConaughey, who plays Chris’s father Buddy, had only done one movie before: Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. I needed a guy who didn’t have any star weight but who had the presence to play off against Kristofferson.
I didn’t want normal cuts between present and past, so I did a lot of live transitions, which were a lot of fun for the crew to figure out. In the first one – where the camera starts on a basket of tortillas as we switch from the present into Kristofferson’s timeline – Clifton James, the old character actor narrating the story, couldn’t get out of shot quickly enough. So the grips had to pick him up in his chair and get him out of the way to be replaced by Matthew in the past. Doing those seamless transitions gave the sense that these characters all carry their history around with them.
I don’t think we’ve made any progress on border issues since the movie was made. Back then, it didn’t have the same tension. The border patrol would just say no me hagas correr to illegal immigrants – don’t make me run – and deport them. I don’t think a wall is the answer: it’s like a Christo installation that has cost billions of dollars. I recently visited it with a friend and we urinated on it.
Presence … Kris Kristofferson in Lone Star. Photograph: AJ Pics/Alamy
Chris Cooper, actor
John first told me the story over dinner with his partner, the film’s producer Maggie Renzi. Only at the end did I realise he wanted me to play Sam Deeds, the present-day sheriff, which knocked me off my chair. He used this word for him: “laconic”. I said: “Why does he have to be laconic?” John eventually said: “I wrote this for you, because you’re laconic.” It took me a little while to go with it.
The script was across-the-tables, one-on-one, human-to-human, which is what I thrive on. We didn’t have that green-screen nonsense back then. John does something few other directors do: he gives you a couple of pages of character background – a great springboard for getting on the same track as him. But I was already extremely familiar with Texas. Everyone on both sides of my family is Texan going back generations.
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For Sam and his father Buddy, I drew on memories of my relationship with my father. We loved each other, but had our ups and downs. He was very conservative, and we were at opposite extremes politically. He thought acting was the silliest thing a person could do. Him being a doctor, he’d say: “You want to see drama?” And he’d take me to the emergency room.
I didn’t realise the transgressive nature of what was happening between me and Pilar, the schoolteacher played by Elizabeth Peña, until my second read-through. Maggie said to me: “Their dance scene and the love scene afterwards have to work.” Elizabeth and I fell back on to the bed, and John shot us from the chest up. The selling point for Maggie was when I reached over and played with Elizabeth’s hair and tickled her ear. It was the kind of thing I do with my wife.
John is 20 years ahead in his storytelling. Look at what we’re dealing with now. Border conflict is a nightmare. The way John did those transitions suggests history is never too far away from the present. That’s the film’s legacy: things don’t change too quickly, if ever.
Lone Star is out on Criterion Collection 4K UHD and Blu-ray and is available on streaming services | Full |
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