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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/asic-faces-questions-over-failure-to-warn-consumers-about-hyperverse-crypto-scheme | Technology | 2024-01-04T14:00:06.000Z | Sarah Martin | Asic faces questions over failure to warn consumers about HyperVerse crypto scheme | The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, has questioned why Australia’s consumer watchdog did not issue a consumer warning against the HyperVerse crypto investment scheme in line with a number of overseas regulators.
A Guardian Australia investigation has revealed widespread losses to the HyperVerse scheme, which escaped regulator attention in Australia despite one overseas authority warning it was a possible “scam” and another describing it as a “suspected pyramid scheme”.
The HyperVerse scheme was run by an organisation called HyperTech. Australian blockchain entrepreneur Sam Lee was chairman of the HyperTech group, while his business partner Zijing “Ryan” Xu was listed as the group’s “founder”. The pair were also directors of the Australian bitcoin company Blockchain Global, which collapsed in 2021 owing creditors $58m.
A report from US-based blockchain analysts Chainalysis estimates consumer losses to HyperVerse in 2022 amounted to US$1.3bn. HyperVerse was previously known as HyperFund and appears to have undergone various rebrandings as it sought to attract more members.
Jones said he would be asking the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) why there was no consumer warning issued in Australia about the HyperTech schemes as occurred in the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and Hungary, among others, as early as 2021.
Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund HyperVerse does not appear to exist
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Jones told Guardian Australia the schemes appeared to be selling “worthless investment products” and “tragically, a bunch of Australians got caught up in it”.
“This type of scheme works by convincing innocent people to invest their money into a product that might not exist, with the only source of income being money from new investors,” Jones alleged.
“I simply don’t know why a warning wasn’t issued.
“It seemed pretty clear that there should have been concerns raised about … this operation.”
HyperFund and HyperVerse were described in promotional material online as “membership schemes” in which people were asked to pay in cryptocurrency for subscription packages, with rewards accumulating in “hyper units” at a daily rate of 0.5%.
Members were also incentivised to recruit new members. Investors were trained to build their “trees” and build a “community”, with people moving up a ranking system based on the number of people they brought into the scheme.
While initial investors were able to cash out their hyper units, convert to other cryptocurrencies or withdraw funds, many later investors say they have lost their money.
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In August 2022, the Hungarian central bank released a public statement comparing the system underpinning HyperVerse and HyperFund to a “suspected pyramid scheme”, “behind which there is no real economic activity, the only income of the system is the payments of new entrants”.
A September 2021 public warning from New Zealand’s Financial Market Authority stated: “The FMA are concerned HyperFund may be operating a scam.” It later included HyperVerse in that warning.
In HyperVerse and HyperFund, early investors were able to make withdrawals, but many later investors have said they lost their deposits. This has led people in online forums who invested in the schemes to accuse the company of using new membership funds to pay out returns for early investors, with no actual enterprise taking place.
A separate investment platform promoted by Lee – called We Are All Satoshi – was the subject of a “desist and refrain order” from California’s Commissioner of Financial Protection and Innovation in September 2023. It alleged that We Are All Satoshi was a “fraudulent pyramid and Ponzi scheme”, and “does not sell or purport to sell any actual product and has no apparent source of revenue other than funds received from investors”.
It named Lee as the “founder, CEO and chairman” of We Are All Satoshi and alleged he was targeting investors in the state, breaching multiple provisions of the state’s corporations code and ordering him to stop “until the qualification requirements” under California law were met.
Xu is not named in the order and there is no suggestion he was involved in We Are All Satoshi. The Guardian has been unable to contact him for comment.
Lee and Xu have not responded to questions from Guardian Australia about the schemes but Lee has previously denied allegations by investors that HyperVerse was a scam.
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“No, because if it was a scam, the website would be offline and I wouldn’t be even wasting my time trying to get the information from the community in order to hold corporate accountable,” he said in a February 2023 Zoom meeting with investors.
Lee did not respond to questions from the Guardian about his involvement in the establishment and operation of HyperFund and HyperVerse before the publication of a previous Guardian Australia article.
Investors lose millions as crypto schemes operate unchecked in Australia
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In a WhatsApp message after the article was published he alleged it included “misstatements” about his role in running the Hyper schemes, but did not respond when asked what they were. He also claimed that “people on the internet continues [sic] to make things up”.
Separately to the HyperTech group of investment schemes, Lee and Xu were also behind the collapsed crypto exchange platform Blockchain Global, which owes creditors $58m.
In October the liquidator for Blockchain Global said in a publicly available report that last year he had referred Lee and Xu to Asic, alleging that they “may have contravened” the Corporations Act, and listing a range of potential breaches.
The liquidator’s report makes a number of allegations about the running of the business by former directors and key personnel and states that he has been unable to progress his own examination of Lee and Xu as they now live overseas and he “was unable to effect service of the summonses on them”. Asic said it did not intend to take any further action at this time.
Jones said he expected the regulator to use all available powers to investigate the schemes and investor losses and, if wrongdoing was found, hold those responsible to account.
“I think it sends a powerful message if the regulators are going after them using every tool that is available to them to ensure that they are brought to account,” he said.
Speaking generally, Jones indicated the government intended to do more to crack down on the distribution methods for unlicensed investment schemes, with consultation under way on a new code of conduct for social media companies, telecommunication companies and banks.
“It’s about removing the distribution channels or locking down the distribution channels and putting obligations on the social media platforms … to pull down scam and fake investment promotions – that is all key,” Jones said.
“This is about what the obligation should be upon all of those bodies to lift the bar and put in place more protective standards and there will be penalties and a liability if they haven’t met those standards.
“We’re picking on those because they’re the key parts of the ecosystem.”
He said Asic had taken down 3,000 websites in the past four months – about half of which were fake investment opportunities – comparing government efforts to tackle the proliferation of such schemes to a “game of whack-a-mole”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/19/the-guardian-view-on-internet-security-complexity-is-vulnerable | Opinion | 2017-10-19T18:39:37.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on internet security: complexity is vulnerable | Editorial | This week’s security scandal is the discovery that every household with wifi in this country has a network that isn’t really private. For 13 years a weakness has lurked in the supposedly secure way in which wireless networks carry our information. Although the WPA2 security scheme was supposed to be mathematically proven to be uncrackable, it turns out that the mechanism by which it can compensate for weak signals can be compromised, and when that happens it might as well be unencrypted. Practically every router, every laptop and every mobile phone in the world is now potentially exposed. As the Belgian researcher who discovered the vulnerability points out, this could be abused to steal information such as credit card numbers, emails and photos.
It is not a catastrophic flaw: the attacker has to be within range of the wifi they are attacking. Most email and chat guarded by end-to-end encryption is still protected from eavesdroppers. But the flaw affects a huge number of devices, many of which will never be updated to address it. Since both ends of a wifi connection need to be brought up to date to be fixed, it is no longer safe to assume that any wifi connection is entirely private.
The story is a reminder of just how much we all now rely on the hidden machineries of software engineering in our everyday lives, and just how complex these complexities are. The fact that it took 13 years for this weakness to be found and publicised shows that no one entirely understands the systems that we all now take for granted. Also this week, a flaw was discovered in one of the widely used chips that are supposed to produce the gigantic and completely random numbers which are needed to make strong encryption truly unbreakable. Even the anti-virus systems that many users hope will protect them can be turned inside out. First the Israeli and then the Russian intelligence agencies appear to have penetrated the Russian-made Kaspersky Anti-Virus, a program of the sort which must have access to all the most sensitive information on a computer to perform its functions.
And then there are the known unknowns: the devices which most users do not even notice are connected to the net. It is estimated that there will be 21bn things connected to the internet by 2020, from baby monitors and door locks to cars and fridges. Billions of these are unprotected and will remain that way.
But this kind of technological failure should not blind us to the real dangers of the digital world, which are social and political. The information about ourselves that we freely give away on social media, or on dating sites, is far more comprehensive, and far more potentially damaging, than anything which could be picked up by a lurking wifi hacker. The leak of millions of user accounts from Equifax, the credit reference agency, is only the most recent example of the plundering of personal information by criminals.
Such hacks might be regarded as the outcome of technical wizardry, but are dependent on human shortcomings in recognising and fixing security flaws. Others would be impossible without tricking real users out of their passwords first. In criminal hands, social engineering beats software engineering every time, and the problems of the internet cannot entirely be solved by technical means. Until we design for human nature, no perfection of machinery can save us. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/apr/18/imf-ratchets-up-uk-economic-growth-forecast-to-2 | Business | 2017-04-18T13:00:29.000Z | Larry Elliott | IMF ratchets up UK economic growth forecast to 2% | The International Monetary Fund has revised up its UK growth forecast for the second time in three months after admitting that the performance of the economy since the Brexit vote last year had been stronger than expected.
In its half-yearly World Economic Outlook, the IMF said it now envisaged the British economy expanding by 2% in 2017 – making it the second fastest-growing advanced economy after the US..
It noted that growth had “remained solid in the United Kingdom, where spending proved resilient in the aftermath of the June 2016 referendum in favour of leaving the European Union [Brexit]”.
The IMF said it was becoming more optimistic about the prospects for the global economy – expected to expand by 3.5% in 2017 and 3.6% in 2018 – but issued a renewed attack on the protectionist policies championed by Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
“The global economy seems to be gaining momentum – we could be at a turning point,” said Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF’s economic counsellor. “But even as things look up, the post–world war two system of international economic relations is under severe strain despite the aggregate benefits it has delivered – and precisely because growth and the resulting economic adjustments have too often entailed unequal rewards and costs within countries.”
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The IMF penciled in 2017 growth of 1.1% for the UK in its previous outlook in October 2016 but subsequently revised up that forecast to 1.5% in January this year. Growth is expected to slow to 1.5% in 2018 – slightly weaker than the IMF’s previous prediction.
“The 0.9 percentage point upward revision to the 2017 forecast and the 0.2 percentage point downward revision to the 2018 forecast reflect the stronger-than-expected performance of the UK economy since the June Brexit vote, which points to a more gradual materialisation than previously anticipated of the negative effects of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union,” the IMF said.
The IMF was also more cautious about the longer-term impact on the economy from Brexit than it was in the run-up to last June’s referendum.
“Though highly uncertain, medium-term growth prospects have also diminished in the aftermath of the Brexit vote because of the expected increase in barriers to trade and migration, as well as a potential downsizing of the financial services sector amid possible barriers to cross-border financial activity.”
The IMF added that the challenge for the UK was to “successfully navigate the exit from the European Union and negotiate the new arrangements for economic relations with the European Union and other trading partners”. The adverse medium-term impact on growth would be lower if the two years of negotiations avoided putting up new economic barriers.
The IMF said record low interest rates of 0.25% were appropriate given that growth was expected to slow and inflation was likely to peak at 2.5% this year. It signaled, however, that the end of the Bank of England’s ultra-low monetary policy was coming to an end, predicting a “less gradual normalisation” of interest rates than six months ago.
Trump, trade, interest and aid make for a challenging IMF summit
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Responding to the UK’s upgraded forecast, chancellor Philip Hammond said: “The fundamentals of our economy are strong and we continue to invest in the skills needed for a stronger and fairer Britain ... In Washington this week I will be talking to our international partners about how we can carry on increasing global economic growth, with Britain again playing an active and engaged role in the global economy.”
The IMF’s Obstfeld tempered his more upbeat assessment for the global economy with a warning that the recent improvement might not last.
“Consistently good economic news since summer 2016 is starting to add up to a brightening global outlook,” he said.
“At the same time, however, the upgrade to our 2017 forecast is modest, and longer-term potential growth rates remain subdued across the globe compared with past decades, especially in advanced economies. Moreover, while there is a chance growth will exceed expectations in the near term, significant downside risks continue to cloud the medium-term outlook, and indeed may have intensified since our last forecast.”
The Fund listed six downside risks including: protectionism; faster than expected interest rate increases in the UK leading to financial market disruption; an aggressive rolling-back of financial regulation leading to excessive risk taking; and the vulnerability of China’s financial system after a period of rapid credit growth.
Obstfeld said: “One salient threat is a turn toward protectionism, leading to trade warfare. Mainly in advanced economies, several factors – lower growth since the 2010–11 recovery from the global financial crisis, even slower growth of median incomes, and structural labour-market disruptions – have generated political support for zero-sum policy approaches that could undermine international trading relationships, along with multi-lateral cooperation more generally.”
Avoiding a new trade war will be a central theme of this week’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Both organisations have been alarmed at the growth in protectionist pressures in the past few years.
“Capitulating to those pressures would result in a self-inflicted wound, leading to higher prices for consumers and businesses, lower productivity, and therefore, lower overall real income for households,” Obstfeld said.
Speaking at a press conference following the publication of the report, Obstfeld said the snap general election could create short-term uncertainty but the outlook could stabilise after polling day. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/25/jenny-sealey-disabled-actors-graeae-threepenny-opera | Stage | 2014-02-25T09:30:00.000Z | Alfred Hickling | Graeae's Threepenny Opera: 'it dissipates the fear of disability' | An empty television studio in Nottingham, currently the rehearsal space for the disability-led theatre company Graeae, contains a selection of items you could only find in a Graeae production. A row of saxophones sits next to a prosthetic limb. A length of rope replaces the usual floor-tape, for the benefit of cast members who are blind. In one corner, the props department is busy transforming an electric wheelchair into a polystyrene horse.
"The remarkable thing about this room is that absolutely nothing here is taboo," says Graeae's artistic director, Jenny Sealey. "We were practising some of the prosthetic arm gags in the pub last night. It gave some of the city types in there quite a turn."
This is Sealey all over – funny, irreverent, yet deadly serious in her mission to bring mainstream acceptance to disabled performers. Sealey, who lost her hearing in a classroom accident at the age of seven, was awarded an MBE in 2009 and gained national prominence as co-director of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Paralympic Games. Her current project – a production of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera – is Graeae's most ambitious to date: a shared initiative between the New Wolsey theatre in Ipswich, Nottingham Playhouse, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Birmingham Rep.
Graeae already has a close relationship with the New Wolsey, having collaborated on productions of Richard Cameron's Flower Girls and the Ian Dury musical Reasons to be Cheerful. The theatre's artistic chief, Peter Rowe, is co-directing the work and explains how the collaboration came about. "We were looking for a piece that would take exposure for disabled actors to another level," Rowe says. "The Threepenny Opera is a satire of the gross inequalities in society, and our inspiration came from the Occupy movement. Our beggars are a group of contemporary activists who take over the theatre and put on a version of The Threepenny Opera that reflects their own diversity."
In Brecht's opera the beggar-master, Peachum, issues his workforce with artificial limbs in order to elicit extra sympathy. Yet Graeae's version contains a further twist. "In this production, the character who complains that he has been given a defective stump is played by a non-disabled actor," Sealey says, "though Peachum himself is in a wheelchair. And Mrs Peachum is played by a blind opera singer, though she is the one character in the piece who sees everything."
Just don't call it the alienation effect. "People frequently tell me that I have a Brechtian directing style, but I don't pretend to know what that means," Sealey says. "I'm no great Brecht expert – I just follow my instincts. But whenever you put a group of talented and empowered disabled actors on stage it demands that an audience think twice about what they are seeing. Some people cannot cope and disconnect. Yet the overall effect isn't alienating – quite the opposite in fact. It dissipates the fear of disability and difference."
Even so, The Threepenny Opera was written to be provocative, and Graeae's version contains elements that are bound to prove controversial. The setting has been updated from Victorian London to a point in the near future in which the homeless foment plans to disrupt the coronation of Charles III. Jeremy Sams has revised his lyrics, originally written for the 1994 Donmar Warehouse production, to include references to sex-pest priests and paedophiles within the BBC.
"Jeremy has come up with quite an ingenious new rhyme for 'fix it'," Rowe says.
"Which becomes even more graphic when you see it in British Sign Language," Sealey adds.
The participation of four major regional theatres marks what Sealey perceives as "an attitudinal shift" towards disabled performers. The National Theatres of Scotland and Wales have employed disabled actors and creative teams; and in January this year the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre held the first joint round of open auditions for disabled actors. Yet there's a long way to go before the playing field becomes level. "It's still regarded as perfectly acceptable to see non-disabled actors 'crippling up'," Sealey says. "I know a performer who was recently told by a drama school to come back when she was cured. As if anyone would dare to say 'come back when you're white'."
Then, of course, there's the Paralympic effect. Sealey recalls the day of the opening ceremony as the proudest of her life. "It was pure euphoria," she says. "It was a massive statement: 'We're here, we did it, and we're not going away.' And yet, when it was over, there was a horrible, horrible silence. We went back to being benefit scroungers and undesirables. I had to be assessed for how many hours I could have an interpreter."
Sealey is particularly proud that several cast members of The Threepenny Opera took part in the Paralympic ceremony. "I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build up a company of world-class deaf and disabled artists in the biggest circus-training initiative ever. Yet there were times over the past year when I truly felt it could all go to waste. So thank God for The Threepenny Opera. It's restored my faith." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/25/thispopidolfordesignersis | Art and design | 2008-06-25T14:30:03.000Z | Mark Hooper | This Pop Idol for designers is 20 years too late | Phillipe Starck with his design for a Kronenbourg beer bottle, 2004. Photograph: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty
The news that Philippe Starck is to front his own Design Idol-style reality show seems so inevitable that it's a wonder no one came up with the idea 20 years ago when zany Frenchmen were all the rage on British TV.
Come to think of it, doesn't the whole thing sound 20 years too late? Starck's reputation as the enfant terrible of design has given way to a sort of grudging respectability, while these days there's no arguing with his considerable body of design classics or his charismatic appeal.
And maybe that's enough to carve himself a role as the Simon Cowell of design (actually I see him more as an enigmatic version of Louis Walsh). I'm sure he'll make for entertaining television, and if the British public can take Raymond Blanc's mangled vowels to their hearts, they should have no problem with his often inscrutable delivery.
But it all feels a little safe, a little too late, a little bit pantomime. Have BBC2 missed a trick in choosing a grand dame of the past over the next generation's spring-heeled jack (to mix a few metaphors)? What do you think? An inspired choice or a missed opportunity? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/21/book-clinic-where-next-for-elizabeth-strout-fan | Books | 2018-01-21T11:00:19.000Z | Alex Clark | Book clinic: where next for an Elizabeth Strout fan? | Q: Having loved Elizabeth Strout’s novels My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, I devoured all her books. Who can I read next in the same vein? Jane Flood, London
A: Alex Clark, artistic director for words and literature, the Bath festival
I’m not surprised you fell in love with Elizabeth Strout – she’s a truly exceptional and humane writer, with a particular way of portraying “ordinary” people that fully understands their individuality and idiosyncrasy. She’s also terrific on place.
So, where next? I would first suggest two other American writers who don’t generate quite the noise that their male colleagues do, Jane Smiley (start with A Thousand Acres, a contemporary retelling of King Lear, and then move on to Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy), and Meg Wolitzer (The Wife, The Interestings and the forthcoming The Female Persuasion).
I can’t help but throw in anything by Marilynne Robinson as well – a different kind of writer, but with a family resemblance in terms of recognising grace in the everyday.
Strout also writes a great deal about the tension between “home”, family and community, the restrictions of class, and the yearning to get away. For wonderful books that explore that very subject, I’d kick off with Zadie Smith’s NW, Margaret Drabble’s Jerusalem the Golden and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
And if you did just happen to want something set in Maine, like Strout’s chronicle of small-town life, Olive Kitteridge, head for Richard Russo’s Empire Falls or the works of Stephen King or John Irving.
Looking for the next Philip Roth? Or maybe you loved Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and want to discover more nature memoirs. If you’ve got a question for Book Clinic, submit it below or email us at [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/22/poland-turning-back-tide-of-the-right-should-be-an-object-lesson-in-democracy-for-uk | Opinion | 2023-10-22T07:32:09.000Z | Will Hutton | Thank you, Poland, for showing faith in EU values under threat from the authoritarian right | Will Hutton | Ayear before Boris Johnson’s Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a little-known rightwing populist party won power again in Poland – using all the tricks that would become so familiar. It accused its political opponents of being enemies of the people; it would make Poland great again by restoring traditional virtues; it would resist the EU even though it was a member; and it would be unremittingly hostile to migrants and gays. At the time, it seemed a one-shot idiosyncrasy, but the Law and Justice party soon emerged as one of the leaders in Europe’s apparently irresistible drive to the right.
It won a second election in 2019 and began to menace Poland’s hard-won post-communist freedoms. A stooge was already president, but now more stooges took over public television, ran the central bank but, most important of all, followed up the 2017 purge of the supreme court to take even more control of the judiciary. The party was using presidential decree, backed by puppet judges, to run Poland, not only hugely restricting abortion rights – sidestepping parliament – but trying to blacklist political opponents from public office.
Street protests in Warsaw this June, followed by the EU launching infringement proceedings for violating its treaty commitments, forced it to back off the blacklisting proposal that was aimed squarely at Donald Tusk, leader of the opposition Civic Coalition. But in last Sunday’s Polish general election, its aim in a third term was to bring the proposal back. It would consolidate its authoritarian power and turn Poland into a de facto one-party state run on traditional Catholic lines. The standoff with the EU, which had withheld €36bn of Covid recovery funding as part of its proceedings, would deepen. Law and Justice had no intention of complying with any EU founding principle it disliked.
But amazingly, despite unremitting propaganda from the state-run TV outdoing anything George Orwell could imagine, Poland’s people – especially its young and its women – roused themselves to say no. Law and Justice lost control of both houses of the Polish parliament.
It is a stirring moment for Poland and for Europe. The increasingly settled view of the new British right is that its route to power is a British-style version of Law and Justice. Thus, Britain should withdraw from the European court of human rights, continue its hostility to the EU, be poisonous to migrants, wage war on “lefty lawyers” and “woke” preoccupations with trans and LGBTQ+ rights, character-assassinate political opponents and offer tax cuts as bribes.
It is Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson who speak for the people, just as Law and Justice did in Poland. But actually they don’t. People understand that demonising political opponents is no way to run a democracy. They do care about being told the truth, and value their public service broadcaster that tries to do that. They don’t damn all lawyers as lefty but see them as essential to the rule of law. Independent judges are never the enemy of the people.
They may want to resist mass immigration, but equally they understand migrants are human beings. They also understand that standing by human rights and liberties entrenched by a liberal constitution are better than any alternative, especially one-party rule. A minority will always buy the Braverman line that wants to trash those principles, but the majority do not. What was stirring about last Sunday was that Poland, a nation that had lived under communist oppression, was not going to surrender to a rightwing version of the same.
A lot of Polish voters backed the pro-EU opposition, influenced by their desire not to repeat the disaster of Brexit
Poles rallied to the opposition parties. In London, there were at least 40 polling stations, with more in all of Britain’s big cities: one Polish friend told me people waited up to two hours to vote. In Warsaw, some queues stretched for more than six hours, extending well beyond the closing time. The overall turnout was more than 74%, even higher than the turnout in the June 1989 general election that broke with communism. And while in London, despite Law and Justice decreeing that all votes cast outside Poland would be directed to constituencies in liberal Warsaw, where the votes for the opposition would pile up uselessly, it was still worthwhile voting. In Warsaw, citizens registered to vote outside the capital in rightwing towns and villages in the east, secure that the overseas vote would compensate for their lost Warsaw vote. The majority was spontaneously speaking as one. It was inspiring.
Trouble lies ahead. The stooges still control the power centres outside parliament. Law and Justice is trying to detach MPs from the opposition bloc to support it, so that Poland’s tame president can reasonably ask it – still the largest minority party – to try to form a government. Even if Tusk does become prime minister, the president, Andrzej Duda, can veto his laws. Trying to unravel the Law and Justice state and win the release of that crucial €36bn from the EU will be contested at every turn.
Yet a Rubicon has been crossed. Poland’s big cities and its prosperous west want to protect its democracy, are strongly pro-Ukraine and pro-EU as a guarantor of both liberty and prosperity. Importantly, a lot of Polish voters backed the pro-EU opposition, influenced by their desire not to repeat the disaster of Brexit, which has become an awesome warning across Europe. At least Brexit has served one good purpose. The Catholic church, which at first backed Law and Justice, is worried: attendance is collapsing. It is the pro-democracy Dominican churches, always more rooted with the people, that are building congregations even in the rural traditional Polish east. This is not unnoticed in the Vatican. Catholicism always loses when it becomes coterminous with reaction.
It is in Poland’s and Europe’s interest that Poland, one of Europe’s big six states, establishes itself as a bulwark of liberal democracy. It would be good not only in its own right, but as an example to other east European states of what they can be. The EU took flak from the brigade of Eurosceptics for the stand it struck on Poland, but it was right – now backed by the Polish majority.
It was one more reminder that the EU is a force for good on our continent and those who oppose it a force for bad. But more importantly, it showed that people value their democracy and all that buttresses it. Thank you, Poland.
Will Hutton is an Observer columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/11/flux-gourmet-review-poet-of-the-weird-peter-strickland-moves-farther-from-reality | Film | 2022-02-11T21:00:35.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Flux Gourmet review – poet of the weird Peter Strickland moves farther from reality | Peter Strickland is cinema’s elegant poet of fetish and rapture and oddity, creating movies that are like double-gatefold electro-pop concept albums full of deadpan not-exactly-comedy and strange mitteleuropaïsch pastiche. After his relatively conventional debut in 2009, the psychological drama Katalin Varga, Strickland moved into horror and eroticism – or, at any rate, into a world stylistically adjacent to scary or sexy, with his quasi-giallo homages: Berberian Sound Studio in 2012, with Toby Jones as the tormented sound engineer; The Duke of Burgundy in 2014, about BDSM; and In Fabric in 2018, about a haunted red dress. Now he has gone even further out on his slender limb with this pedantically bizarre creation – in which Peter Greenaway’s influence is making itself felt – occupying a precarious position in its own created world. Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.
The setting is an English country house, which is a centre for research into “sonic cooking”. It hosts a regular prestigious residency for an up-and-coming auditory-cuisine collective: that is, a group of creative people who are into cooking as an experimental live event, combined with live Radiophonic Workshop-type sound creations, with – as it were – microphones shoved into butter and theremins set up near the consommé. Over a few days, the group is invited to workshop its food-sound ideas, discussing things with the centre’s various advisers, climaxing in a big showpiece event on the final night.
The centre’s director is Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who wears a peculiar flouncy Abigail’s Party gown of the sort we saw in Strickland’s In Fabric. The Greek actor Makis Papadimitrou plays Stones, whose job is to interview the residents for what appears to be an in-house journal. Stones suffers terribly from flatulence, which requires visits to the supercilious resident physician Dr Glock (Richard Bremmer), who keeps boasting about his classical learning. And Stones’s complaint is even more embarrassing as he has to share a kind of mixed-dorm with the resident sonic-cooking group: Elle (Fatma Mohamed), Lamina (Ariane Labed) and Billy (Asa Butterfield), whose confession about his egg fetish leads to an emotional bonding with Jan. Meanwhile, an embittered collective called the Mangrove Snacks, furious at not being allowed a residency of their own, are preparing a violent revenge assault.
It is strange and silly, unearthly and self-indulgent all at once. There are some real laughs when Jan questions the group’s use of a “flanger” – the word’s innate comedy is savoured. But as to how hand-on-heart funny this film actually is– that is another question: I suspect Flux Gourmet is going to have claims to comedy made on its behalf that are beside the point. It is certainly deeply and uncompromisingly weird, and it always has the courage of its own weird convictions. There are no ironic winks to the audience about how absurd everything is.
But what is startling about the “sonic cooking” contrivance is that it is so unreal, so confected, that the ostensible content of the movie collapses and we are left with just style: the creepy surfaces, the hairstyles, the gothic interiors, the closeups, the title cards with their chemical compounds along the bottom. Flux Gourmet may yet have a claim to cult-favourite status, but Strickland has given us a stronger, realer taste in the past.
Flux Gourmet screened at the Berlin film festival; it is released on 30 September in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/05/justin-timberlake-filthy-review | Culture | 2018-01-05T10:14:18.000Z | Ben Beaumont-Thomas | Justin Timberlake: Filthy review – comeback single channels Prince for grown-up funk masterpiece | Justin Timberlake’s single Filthy is his first new release since his ambitious, occasionally riveting but ultimately bloated 2013 double album The 20/20 Experience. Well, if you exclude his schmaltzy score for The Book of Love, and Can’t Stop the Feeling!, a single released in tandem with the animated Trolls movie – a fluffy, kid-friendly pop song that ended up being his biggest hit to date.
One wonders what Filthy might sound like in a live set alongside tracks from his new album Man of the Woods, which could well be a darker, gnarlier affair. The artwork features a photo ripped in two, one half showing him in jeans in a field, the other him in a suit in a snowy forest – big clanging signifiers for an artist trying to reconcile R&B and Americana, slickness and rootsiness, coldness and warmth.
Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods album cover.
The guest stars play out the split too: Alicia Keys and Timberlake’s old sparring partners the Neptunes on one hand, country star Chris Stapleton on the other. Trolls are unlikely to feature. So can Timberlake have it all – get serious again, last the R&B course and also, as The Outline neatly put it, “rebrand as a white man”?
On the basis of Filthy, he absolutely can. Beginning with some bombastic guitar rock, it transmogrifies into a beautifully dark, undulating funk track underpinned by a whiplash bass womp. This kind of wobbling bassline was made ludicrous by the American take on dubstep earlier in the decade, but here co-producers Timberlake, Timbaland and the latter’s protege Danja conspire to make it dangerous again. Alongside the blockbuster elements there are gorgeously subtle flourishes, like the fluttering intake of breath sitting low in the mix.
Vocally, Timberlake heavily channels Prince, particularly the exacting, scornful tone of When Doves Cry, while his “whatchu gonna do with all that meat?” is like an X-rated version of Bruno Mars’s “whatchu tryna do?” from 24k Magic. If this is Timberlake’s white rebranding, he’s not doing a great job of it. But it’s not a mere parroting of others, either – the chorus, which modulates into a sweeter, smoother key, is signature Timberlake.
The video meanwhile, with shades of Ex Machina’s cyborg dance scene, stars Timberlake as a Steve Jobs figure controlling a robot with his own moves backstage – a smart way of announcing his maturity, not putting himself front and centre, while still getting to essay his magnificent flair for dance.
The maximalist ending of the track might not be to everyone’s tastes – it boils a little of the taste out of the funk – but is still handled with brio, and the song sounds like nothing else in the pop landscape right now. With its relatively experimental bent, Filthy may only get a 10th of the 737m streams Can’t Stop the Feeling! has got on Spotify – but it’s riveting evidence that Timberlake can still be the R&B futurist he was at the outset of his solo career. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/mar/18/train-wi-fi-mobile-access-osborne-budget | Politics | 2013-03-18T18:59:06.000Z | Juliette Garside | Train Wi-Fi and mobile access expected to be in Osborne's budget giveaway | Funding for widespread Wi-Fi and mobile access on trains is expected to be among George Osborne's budget giveaways this week.
Passengers who prefer quiet carriages will have to grit their teeth – in a boost for national productivity, trains will be transformed into mobile offices for commuters who want to catch up on work.
Of the 25 rail franchise operators, 12 still do not have Wi-Fi on board, according to the Association of Train Operating Companies website. The Heathrow Express offers it free to all passengers, while the Gatwick Express has no service.
The cash will be used to install special equipment on trains, according to industry sources.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport declined to comment.
Mobile phone signals are more likely to bounce off trains than into them, but connections can be improved by fixing antennae to carriage roofs which replicate signals through repeaters in the train.
Virgin Trains installed repeaters on its Voyager services in north Wales and on cross country routes through a contract with Orange, and teamed up with Vodafone in 2008 to bring the technology to its high-speed Pendolino trains between London and Glasgow.
A handful of franchises offer free Wi-Fi to all passengers, but most charge those travelling second class while giving the service free to first-class passengers.
While many people resent having to listen to loud phone calls, internet connections are less disruptive and popular with passengers. National Express registered a threefold increase in passengers along the east coast line after offering free Wi-Fi.
The line was previously operated by Great North Eastern Railway, which charged £4.95 an hour for the service. When National Express removed the charge in January 2008, passenger rates rose from 30,000 to 100,000 for the month, with regulators saying part of the increase was due to free Wi-Fi.
Virgin Media said it wants half of the government's £150m Urban Broadband fund, designed to improve internet infrastructure in cities, to be diverted to skills and training.
BT and Virgin Media are concerned public money could be used to build networks which compete with their own. They have launched legal action against a European commission decision to let Birmingham city council spend £10m from the Urban Broadband fund on installing fibre-optic cables in areas where they already serve customers.
Neil Berkett, chief executive of Virgin Media, has written to the chancellor, George Osborne, suggesting half of the fund be spent improving digital skills for small and medium sized businesses – only two-thirds have a website and just a third sell goods and services online. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/aug/19/re-forming-the-membranes | Music | 2009-08-19T14:10:45.000Z | John Robb | Re-forming a band is the stupidest thing a musician can do. That's why I'm doing it | Re-forming a band is one of the most stupid things a musician can do. That's why, when My Bloody Valentine asked me to re-form my first band, the Membranes, for All Tomorrow's Parties in December, I accepted.
We had connections with My Bloody Valentine – they'd supported us a couple of times in the 80s when they were on their way up. At the time, we were a cult institution having made some wild and deafening music as part of a sprawling UK noisenik scene.
I'm covering this scene in a forthcoming book called Death to Trad Rock (out September), and while writing it I remembered the spirit of the time. I fell back in love with the artful noise and intensity of what we were doing back then – the no-rules, decibel-heavy, DIY-punk psychedelia that we created. It made me want to do it again.
The Membranes were never a band – they were a way of life. We were chemically imbalanced, powered by freaky ideas and anti-rock'n'roll rhetoric. In that context, the idea of re-forming is so ridiculous that it makes perfect sense.
There have been offers to re-form before but touring the world in one cult band, Goldblade, is enough. However, All Tomorrow's Parties is a great gig and the bill looked fantastic.
The motivation was not really about the money, it was more about whether I could locate that fever-pitch intensity again. Would the songs lose their edge or would I be able to twist them into something fresh using the wisdom of age? That was the challenge.
So far, it's going well. I dug out the old amps and the metal percussion and let my mind head off into that weird place. It felt right and that can be the only criteria.
Re-forming the Membranes is not a career choice, we may never play again or we may play a totally different set at another location. We never wanted to be a rock'n'roll band in the first place. We were an art project that played really loud guitars and went wild onstage – there is no career trajectory in that kind of world.
We may wait another 19 years or we may play our next gig on Easter Island. We may create a bass orchestra or write a soundtrack to a film. We may dance our way through the dying days of the music industry or we may never play another gig again. There's only one way to find out. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/02/sir-neville-marriner-obituary | Music | 2016-10-02T14:53:20.000Z | Tully Potter | Sir Neville Marriner obituary | On the strength of what he had achieved by his early 30s, Sir Neville Marriner, who has died aged 92, would have been remembered as a decent orchestral and chamber music violinist. But at 34 he made a brilliant career move that led to his becoming one of the world’s best-known conductors. His chamber orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, not only inaugurated a fashion for long-winded ensemble titles, but shot straight to the top of its class, beating the Germans and Italians at their own game. To achieve this feat in Britain, a land not noted for its string playing, was extraordinary.
Recordings were vital to the success of the Academy of St Martin’s, which initially played only baroque music. When Marriner was invited by four colleagues to form the crack string band in 1958, he led it from the first desk as Adolf Busch had done in the 1930s and 40s with his Chamber Players, and Felix Ayo was doing with I Musici. The original 12 musicians wanted the chance to make music democratically, as they suffered enough in their “day jobs” from the tyrannies of conductors.
The group, which drew on Marriner’s experience of playing in such chamber orchestras as the Jacques (founded by Reginald Jacques) and the Boyd Neel, met initially in his flat. But their keyboard player, John Churchill, who was director of music at the classical 18th-century church in Trafalgar Square, suggested they should give five concerts at St Martin’s in the 1958-59 season. The viola player Michael Bowie came up with the title Academy. The initial series went well, the BBC took note and a more ambitious series began on 13 November 1959, now considered the Academy’s real starting point.
Neville Marriner, left, playing the violin in the mid-1960s. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images
Louise Dyer, an Australian sheep farmer and entrepreneur who ran the characterful record label L’Oiseau Lyre, was impressed by the first concert and offered a contract for six records. On 25 and 26 March 1961 the Academy assembled in Conway Hall to record works by Corelli, Torelli, Locatelli, Albicastro and Handel. Marriner had to buy gut E-strings because the violins sounded too shrill in the hall’s acoustic. Each player received £5, with no promise of royalties. Issued in 1962, the LP was well received, and that July a second programme was set down in Walthamstow Assembly Hall, east London. When Dyer died in 1962, Harley Usill’s enterprising Argo label took over the Academy.
The group’s LPs did so well that Marriner, with encouragement and coaching from the LSO’s conductor Pierre Monteux, began to exchange his bow for the baton. The Academy soon expanded to a full chamber orchestra and, with major studio contracts from Decca and later EMI, Philips and Sony, eventually became the most recorded orchestra of all, covering a vast repertoire from the Baroque to the moderns.
Sir Neville Marriner conducting
By 1969 Marriner could give up playing in other orchestras and work full time with the Academy. The ultimate professional, he was able to attract the best players because they were aware that he knew what he was doing. Academy recordings were musicologically sound and technically polished. Thurston Dart played the harpsichord on some of them, even during his final illness, and soloists such as Alan Loveday and Iona Brown – who in 1978 became Marriner’s successor in directing from the violin – lent further lustre to the lineup.
The Academy also toured worldwide and appeared at the large festivals, making a big impact at Salzburg under Marriner in 1982. In 1990 alone, the orchestra gave 114 concerts outside the UK with Marriner, and in 1993 it won a Queen’s award for export achievement. Meanwhile, in 1969 Marriner had taken over the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which took him to California twice a year until 1987.
Born in Lincoln to Herbert, a carpenter, and Ethel (nee Roberts), Marriner was taught the violin and piano by his father before opting for the violin and studying with Frederick Mountney. He was educated at Lincoln school and entered the Royal College of Music in London on a scholarship in 1939. His studies with Edward Elgar’s friend Billy Reed were disrupted by second world war service in Army reconnaissance (1941-43), but on being invalided out, after five months in hospital, he went back to the RCM. He then spent a year at the Paris Conservatoire, studying with the virtuoso violinist René Benedetti. After a year teaching music at Eton, he joined the Martin Quartet in 1949 as second fiddle to the Canadian violinist David Martin.
An even more powerful influence was Dart, in whose Jacobean Ensemble he played from 1951; with Dart and such enterprises as the American Vanguard record label, he was in at the beginning of the modern “early music” movement. He also founded the Virtuoso String Trio. But he earned much of his living playing in London orchestras: he was in the Philharmonia when Arturo Toscanini came to conduct in 1952 and he joined the LSO in 1954 as principal second violin, a post he held until 1969. In 1971 he made his debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra. He worked with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon and the Israel Chamber Orchestra in Tel Aviv, and in 1973 conducted the inaugural concerts of the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney.
Sir Neville Marriner conducting
In 1977 he made his New York Philharmonic debut with a Mozart programme; and he conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra a good deal. He also worked in Britain with the Northern Sinfonia from 1971, and from 1979 to 1987 was in charge of the Minnesota Orchestra. At the same time he conducted regularly in Germany, notably with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (1986-89).
From the late 70s he occasionally tackled opera, in both theatre and studio, and he mastered the central choral repertory: from 1975 the Academy had an associated chorus, founded by Laszlo Heltay. More recently Marriner freelanced, but in all the phases of his career he kept in touch with the Academy, only handing the music director’s baton to fellow violinist Joshua Bell in 2011, when he became the Academy’s life president. In 2014 Decca issued a 28-disc box of recordings that he made from 1961 to 1982 for L’Oiseau-Lyre, Argo and ASV.
Marriner was not a “deep” conductor, but he was a very good one. His style mirrored his outward appearance, which was neat and dapper, and his manner, which was self-deprecating in an English way. If he lacked the ability of the greatest orchestral directors to see and convey a work as one massive entity, he was able to give each movement of a symphony or concerto a convincing shape.
His Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn and Mozart were buoyant and graceful; he brought expertise and intuitive understanding to 20th-century British string music; and some of his recordings of large works, such as Haydn’s Creation or Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, have a sheen and glow that will keep them selling for years to come. It would be hard to beat his accompaniment to Viktoria Mullova in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
For most of the 50s he taught the violin at the RCM, and he later helped many fledgling conductors. He was appointed CBE in 1979, knighted in 1985 and made Companion of Honour in 2015.
His first marriage to the cellist Diana Carbutt, by whom he had two children, Andrew, a clarinettist, who often worked with his father, and Susie, a writer, ended in divorce. In 1957 he married Elizabeth Mary Sims, known as Molly, whose hard work in the struggling early years of the Academy played a major role in its success.
Marriner is survived by Molly, Andrew, Susie, three grandsons, Douglas, Matthew and Milo, and a great-grandson, Frederick.
Tully Potter
John Amis writes: Not exactly the Algonquin, but a pleasant, cheap and not nasty eating place next door to the old Mercury theatre in Notting Hill Gate, west London, was where a handful of musos met most days for lunch in the 40s and 50s. Neville was there with his first wife, Diana, the broadcaster Antony Hopkins and the soprano Alison Purves, the violinists Alan Loveday (soloist and leader of the Academy), Olive Zorian (the quartet leader, the leader of Benjamin Britten’s orchestra, and my wife), and sometimes Neville’s teacher and guru, the great Albert Sammons. Talk at lunch was funny and gossipy. Neville was sharp-edged, a good driver, a handyman, nifty at tennis, always lucky and good at cards. With the horn player Barry Tuckwell and clarinettist Gervase de Peyer, Neville (as principal second violin) was one of the new generation of players in the London Symphony Orchestra. They were too brilliant and reliable to get the sack, but they must have got near dismissal at times because they dared to challenge conductors.
During the war the Martin String Quartet, led by David Martin with Neville as its second violinist, had gigged for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, playing in some places that had never had concerts.
It was a great moment for the quartet to be invited to play in the Aldeburgh Festival. Britten requested them to play a favourite quartet of his, the Verdi. This quartet has a finale that begins with a fugue, led by the second violin. Just before going on stage David said: “Now Neville, for God’s sake, don’t start off the fugue too fast.” Neville responded by beginning the fugue too slowly by half. Britten was not best pleased.
On marrying Diana, who became a bookseller specialising in incunabula, Neville found himself living in the G&T belt, sometimes finding that he was the only one not wearing an old school tie.
Sir Neville Marriner at his home in London in 2008. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
Then came the request from his friend John Churchill to give a recital at St Martin in the Fields. He found that several of his string-playing friends had received a similar request. They all had to refuse because, straight our of college, they had not enough repertoire. Then Neville had the bright idea of them combining to make a tiny orchestra, where they would concentrate on not-too-demanding music of the 18th century – ice-cream composers, Neville called them: Corelli, Torelli, Albicastro, Vivaldi. Thus the Academy was born.
Fast forward to the new century. Neville’s hair had at last gone white, still playing a good game of tennis in his 80s in the garden court of the cottage on the Dorset-Devon border where he lived with his second wife, Molly. A good cook, a quick packer and a voracious reader, she shaped his career, managed his life and was good at social affairs. Neville no longer directed the Academy but had dates as a conductor, sometimes in three continents in as many weeks.
It was a life of music-making of the highest quality that gave pleasure to many. And if he excelled in the lighter classics on the whole, he could on occasion dig deep: he recorded a thrilling Eroica symphony, his Metamorphosen challenges Klemperer and Karajan in its emotional depth; and his set of the Handel Concerto Grossos is still the most satisfying in the catalogue.
Neville Marriner, conductor and violinist, born 15 April 1924; died 2 October 2016
John Amis died in 2013
This article was amended on 4 October 2016. It originally said that the 28-disc box released by Decca in 2014 included all the recordings that Marriner made from 1961 to 1982 for L’Oiseau-Lyre, Argo and ASV. There were other such recordings that it did not include. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/26/speed-kings-review-andy-bull-biography-billy-fiske-clifford-gray-eddie-eagan-jay-obrien | Books | 2015-07-26T08:00:03.000Z | Alexander Larman | Speed Kings review – a gripping yarn told at a lively pace | Andy Bull’s enjoyable first work describes itself as a “nonfiction novel”, which is an apt description for a book that, while closely adhering to historical fact, nevertheless allows itself plenty of authorial leeway in presenting those facts.
Following the fortunes of four of the contestants in the 1932 Winter Olympics – the first such event to be held outside Europe – including the dashing Billy Fiske, playboy Clifford Gray, intellectual Eddie Eagan and roguish Jay O’Brien, Bull, an Observer writer, narrates the next decade or so in their lives in unpretentious prose that is unafraid of colourful elaboration.
Speed Kings is a fast-paced read that manages to make some insightful points about professional and amateur sport in the 1930s, and becomes genuinely thrilling when describing Fiske’s subsequent career as a fighter pilot in the RAF. The immediacy and easy colloquialism of the prose style might put off some readers, but a general audience will warm to this unpretentious and gripping yarn.
Speed Kings is published by Bantam Press (£17.99). Click here to order it for £14.39 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2022/jan/31/crosswords-for-beginners-latin-inspector-morse-classical-abbreviations-cryptic-crosswords | Crosswords | 2022-01-31T11:53:15.000Z | Alan Connor | Crosswords for beginners: from Inspector Morse to Barbara Windsor, it’s all Latin to me | In the example clues below, I explain the two parts of each: there is a definition of the answer and there is some wordplay – a recipe for assembling its letters. In a genuine puzzle environment, of course, you also have the crossing letters, which hugely alleviate your solving load. Hence “crossword”. Also, the setters’ names tend to link to profiles of the individuals behind the pseudonyms.
The first words Inspector Morse says to DS Lewis are about a crossword clue. “Have a look at 14 down.” Fourteen down, Lewis sees, is:
Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter in the Guardian Bookshop
Take in bachelor? It could do (3)
Morse has written BRA. Lewis isn’t sure what to say, so Morse airily dissects the clue:
‘“Bachelor” – that’s BA and “take” is the letter “r”, recipe in Latin. Did you never do any Latin?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you think I’m wasting your time, Lewis?’
Lewis was nobody’s fool and was a man of some honesty and integrity. ‘Yes, sir.’
This is when they know the partnership will work. The writer Colin Dexter devised a clue that demonstrates well the quirks a beginner needs to get his or her head round as the fun starts.
“Bachelor” for BA is fair enough, if a little tweedy – but Lewis is not expected to know that “recipe” is the second singular present imperative for “take”, nor that doctors have long written the charming symbol ℞ (an R with a cross through it to indicate that it’s an abbreviation) to mean “take” in a prescription. At least the answer is a normal word.
Here are some other Latin abbreviations that setters find handy and solvers quickly regard as second nature.
‘King’ = R
GR = King George. Photograph: Timothy Smith/Alamy
As we see on letterboxes, ER II and GR VI indicate monarchs Elizabeth and George via regina and rex. Hence the pillow that we are told belonged to Minder fan Prince Philip with the motto “ER II INDOORS”.
So when Vlad mentions this hapless monarch …
26a Anger that king has broken a bone (7)
[ definition: a bone ]
[ wordplay: synonym for “anger” (as a verb), “broken into by” abbrev for “king” ]
[ STIR UP containing R ]
… we turn him into an R before getting the bone in the ear we call a STIRRUP.
‘See’ = V
From Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa. Illustration: Google Books
Once upon a time, a writer might refer you to another text by telling you in Latin to go “see” it: vide (as in video) or more curtly, “V”. In crosswords, we pretend this is still the case. So it is with this clue from late setter (and former National Union of Teachers president) Rover …
9a See Ingrid worried about using the car (7)
[ definition: using the car ]
[ wordplay: anagram (“worried”) of abbrev for “see” & INGRID ]
[ anagram of VINGRID ]
… for DRIVING.
‘That is’ = IE
To be or not to be, ie the question. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
A more familiar one, now, although one that gov.uk is phasing out with the advice “Try (re)writing sentences to avoid the need to use it”. So, when Boatman says “that is”, he wants you to change it via id est to IE …
17d Wait around – that is an intimately touching thing (8)
[ definition: an intimately touching thing ]
[ wordplay: synonym for “wait around” + abbrev for “that is” ]
[ LINGER + IE ]
… to obtain some LINGERIE.
‘Penny’ = D
An unflattering depiction of Mark Antony on a Roman coin. Photograph: Derek Hawes/AP
When Lionel Bart’s furious producer Joan Littlewood yelled about the damage done to him by LSD, onlooker Barbara Windsor remarked: “That’s not fair. We’re all in it for the money, aren’t we?”
Windsor knew that the “D” in the old abbreviation for “pounds, shillings and pence” was for a penny – from the Latin denarius. And so “coin”, “penny” or “pence” may be asking you to look for a D, as with this clue from the recently departed Chifonie …
6d Flirting gets Penny a relationship (9)
[ definition: flirting ]
[ wordplay: abbrev for “penny” + synonym for “a relationship” ]
[ D + ALLIANCE ]
… for DALLIANCE. Of course, it could be a P, but not in this case as I don’t think PALLIANCE is a word.
‘Now’ = AD
Judge Dredd, as seen in 2000 AD. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features
In 2011, the BBC’s religion and ethics microsite explained why it used “BCE” in place of “BC” in its discussion of various faiths. Boris Johnson wrote a 1,000-word response as if the letters “BC” without the “E” had been banned across radio and television, notable for the aside: “I am afraid my faith is like a very wonky aerial, and I sometimes find the signal pretty scratchy”.
In crosswords, BCE would only really be useful for the answer JOBCENTRE; it’s AD that we encounter more often, though it takes a few examples before you intuitively try a leap from “now” or “these days” to the abbreviation for anno domini. Here’s Vulcan …
21d Very surprised these days to go round part of Hampton Court gardens (6)
[ definition: very surprised ]
[ wordplay: abbrev for “these days” outside (“to go round”) something seen at Hampton Court ]
[ AD outside MAZE ]
… leaving you AMAZED.
Beginners: any questions? Seasoned solvers and setters: which Latin abbreviations do you encounter more in crosswords than in “real life”?
Stay safe.
More guidance
Cryptic devices: hidden answers; double definitions; cryptic definitions; soundalikes; initial letters; spoonerisms; containers; reversals; alternate letters; cycling; stuttering; taking most of a word; naked words; first and last letters
Bits and bobs: Roman numerals; Nato alphabet; Greek letters; chemistry; abbreviations for countries; points of the compass; playing cards; capital letters; apostrophes; cricket; alcohol; the church; royals; newspapers; doctors; drugs; music; animals; cars; cities; rivers; boats; when the setter’s name appears; when the solver appears; ‘cheating’
Individual letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be obtained from the Guardian Bookshop. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/19/derry-woman-killed-in-terrorist-act-say-northern-ireland-police | UK news | 2019-04-19T06:53:34.000Z | Kevin Rawlinson | Journalist killed in Derry 'terrorist incident', say Northern Ireland police | A 29-year-old woman has died after shots were fired in Derry, with police in Northern Ireland treating it as a “terrorist incident”. The victim was named as journalist and author Lyra McKee, who was covering the unrest taking place in the Creggan area of the city.
The assistant chief constable, Mark Hamilton, from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said a murder inquiry had been launched after the death on Thursday evening. Petrol bombs were thrown and images from the scene show vehicles alight and others burnt out.
2:18
Petrol bombs thrown at police in Derry as journalist killed - video
“Unfortunately, at 11pm last night, a gunman appeared and fired a number of shots towards police and a young woman, Lyra McKee, 29 years old, was wounded,” he said.
“She was taken away in a police Land Rover to Altnagelvin hospital but unfortunately she has died there. We have now launched a murder inquiry here in the city.
“We believe this to be a terrorist act, we believe it has been carried out by violent dissident republicans, our assessment at this time is that the New IRA are most likely to be the ones behind this and that forms our primary line of inquiry.”
A hijacked car explodes after being set on fire in Creggan, Londonderry. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
A local journalist at the scene, Leona O’Neill, wrote on Twitter that after the woman was hit and fell beside a police Land Rover, officers rushed her to hospital, where the woman died. She said the rioting was in response to a house search that a large number of officers conducted in the area.
The unrest comes ahead of the Easter weekend where republicans mark the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising and a time when dissidents are traditionally active.
Q&A
What is the New IRA?
Show
The Sinn Féin deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, said the killing in Derry was a “senseless loss of life”. She said: “I am shocked and saddened at the tragic news that a young woman has been shot dead by so-called dissidents in the Creggan estate tonight.
“The murder of this young woman is a human tragedy for her family, but it is also an attack on all the people of this community, an attack on our peace process and an attack on the Good Friday Agreement. I unreservedly condemn those responsible for killing this young woman.
“We will remain resolute in our opposition to the pointless actions of these people who care nothing for the people of Derry. We remain united in our determination to building a better and peaceful future for all.”
Michelle O’Neill added: “Those responsible should listen to the people, they should disband immediately and end their pointless actions against the community which tonight has tragically claimed the life of a young woman.
“I am appealing for calm and I urge anyone with any information about this killing to bring it forward immediately to the police and assist their inquiries.”
Mark H Durkan, the SDLP MLA for Foyle, said: “Just leaving Creggan, heartbroken and angry at the senseless loss of a young life. Violence only creates victims, that’s all it ever has done. The thoughts and prayers of our city are with the young woman’s family and friends, may she rest in peace.”
The Democratic Unionist party leader, Arlene Foster, tweeted: “Heartbreaking news. A senseless act. A family has been torn apart. Those who brought guns onto our streets in the 70s, 80s and 90s were wrong. It is equally wrong in 2019. No one wants to go back. My thoughts are also with the brave officers who stood in defence of their community.”
The Northern Ireland Policing Board said the killing was “utterly shocking” and appealed for witnesses or anyone with information to contact the police or Crimestoppers.
The US House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, led a congressional delegation to the city earlier on Thursday, as part of a trip to show support for the peace agreement politicians in Washington helped to broker.
Reuters contributed to this report | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/13/global-defence-spending-rises-9-per-cent-to-record-22tn-dollars | World news | 2024-02-13T16:04:50.000Z | Dan Sabbagh | Global defence spending rises 9% to record $2.2tn | Global defence spending increased by 9% to a record $2.2tn during 2023 driven by heightened geopolitical tensions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to an annual assessment by a military thinktank.
The International Institute of Strategic Studies added that it expected budgets to increase further in 2024 as the war continued into a third year and international uncertainty spread across the Middle East in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war.
Bastian Giegerich, the thinktank’s director general, described the near-double-digit uplift as reflecting “a deteriorating security landscape”. Russian and Ukrainian military spending soared, as well as western aid to Kyiv.
Ukraine’s defence budget increased nearly nine times to $31.1bn during 2023, a figure that excludes foreign donations, while Russia lifted its military expenditure in 2023 to $108.5bn and has further increases in the pipeline.
Moscow’s official defence budget was up by more than 60% in 2024 Giegerich said, meaning that Russian “total military spending now represents one third of its national budget and will now reach 7.5% of GDP, signalling the focus on its war effort”.
Russia had sustained heavy losses on the battlefield during 2023, he added, losing an estimated 1120 main battle tanks and about 2,000 other armoured fighting vehicles.
“To put that into perspective Russia’s battlefield tank losses are greater than the number it had when it launched in 2022,” Giegerich added, but said Moscow had been able to replenish numbers at a rate of 100 tanks a month, although their quality was lower, partly because many were taken out of storage.
Overall, Giegerich estimated that Russia would be able, at current rates, to sustain its tank force “for about two to three more years”..
Ukraine had also sustained heavy losses in tanks and other military equipment but these had so far been made good by western gifts. But with Republicans blocking the passage of a $61bn military aid package passed by the Senate through the House, Giegerich said the west needed to decide what its aims were in supporting Kyiv.
“Western governments find themselves once again in a position where they must decide whether to furnish Kyiv with enough weapons to deliver a decisive blow rather than enough merely not to lose,” he added.
Israel’s four-month-long assault of Hamas in Gaza in response to the 7 October attack had generated significant civilian casualties that have “raised questions about the execution of the operation and feasibility of its overall objective”, Giegerich said.
The director general estimated that Hamas casualties amounted to “between 20% and 30% of the total number of fighters” and the return of fighting squads to areas of northern Gaza attacked early in the war demonstrated “the difficultly of Israel of meeting its maximalist objective of destroying Hamas”.
It was also unclear if three rounds of bombing by the US and UK on Houthi targets in Yemen had significantly degraded the rebel group’s ability to strike at shipping in the Red Sea, partly because drone and missile launchers were easily hidden.
The bombing campaign “hasn’t yet fully delivered”, said Nick Childs, an IISS maritime security analyst. He added that there were “question marks over whether there’s a more sporadic threat” or whether the Houthis were trying to stockpile arms. Confidence among merchant shipping companies had not returned either, he added.
Overall, the US remains easily the largest global military spender, with a budget of $905.5bn in 2023, in dollar terms more than the next 15 countries combined, including second-placed China on $219.5bn and Russia, which is third.
Britain is ranked fifth globally, despite recent concerns about the ability of its army to fight a major war, ahead of Germany in seventh and France eighth. All Nato members in Europe have spent 32% more on defence since 2014, although only 10 of them spend more than 2% of GDP, according to alliance data. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/11/student-loan-interest-rate-to-be-capped-at-7-3-percent-in-autumn-says-dfe | Education | 2022-06-11T08:15:10.000Z | Richard Adams | Student loan interest rate to be capped at 7.3% in autumn, says DfE | Ministers have intervened to reduce a sharp rise in interest rates charged on student loans, after the recent increase in inflation which meant rates would treble for many graduates by the autumn.
The Department for Education said the maximum rate from September is to be fixed at 7.3% rather than the 12% it would have reached by September, based on earlier inflation figures plus 3%.
The DfE said the change meant the accumulated interest of a borrower in England and Wales with a student loan balance of £45,000 would fall by about £180 a month compared with 12% interest rates.
Capping the maximum rate will mainly benefit the wealthiest graduates, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), because they are more likely to repay their entire loan off within 30 years of graduation. Other graduates have any outstanding balance wiped after 30 years.
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The maximum interest rate is currently charged on loans to graduates making more than £49,000 a year, but the DfE’s change means all graduates will be charged the same 7.3% – which is a sharp rise from the current 1.5% charged on the loans of those earning £27,000 or less.
Michelle Donelan, the universities minister for England, said: “I want to provide reassurance that this does not change the monthly repayment amount for borrowers, and we have brought forward this announcement to provide greater clarity and peace of mind for graduates.”
Monthly student loan repayments are calculated by income rather than interest rates or amount borrowed. Graduates pay 9% of their income above a repayment threshold of £27,295 a year.
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Ben Waltmann of the IFS said: “We said in April that current policy on student loan interest rates was deeply flawed and would lead to an interest rate rollercoaster for graduates. It is great to see that as we suggested, the government has decided to take action to avoid the rollercoaster.
“However, for most graduates this announcement will have little or no effect on their repayments. Most of those with undergraduate loans will likely never pay off their loans in full, so the interest rate never affects their repayments.”
But Larissa Kennedy, the National Union of Students UK president, said that the new rates would still be “cruelly high” for many graduates.
“Ministers should be prioritising providing urgent cost of living support here and now. We’re hearing from students who can’t even afford to continue getting the bus,” she said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/27/labour-would-double-dementia-research-spending-jonathan-ashworth | Politics | 2021-09-27T21:30:47.000Z | Denis Campbell | Labour would double dementia research spending, shadow health secretary to say | Labour will double spending on dementia research if it wins power to help British scientists’ efforts to find a cure, the shadow health secretary will pledge.
Jonathan Ashworth will commit Labour to increasing investment in research into the condition from £80m to £160m a year if the party is elected.
His promise comes amid concern among dementia charities that Boris Johnson has not delivered on an almost identical promise two years after making it during the 2019 general election campaign.
Ashworth will accuse the Conservatives of breaking the pledge they made in their manifesto to put “an additional £83m a year” into research on potential treatments for dementia as part of a plan to invest £1.6bn over 10 years.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) admitted last month that, despite the government declaring dementia to be a priority, funding for research had fallen by £7.2m from £82.9m in 2018-19 to £75.7m in 2019-20 – the year Johnson committed to the much larger sum. No figures for spending in 2020-21 have yet been published.
In his keynote conference speech in Brighton, Ashworth will say: “The economic cost [of dementia] is billions; the human cost unquantifiable. Throughout the history of the NHS, the genius of medical science has developed cures and therapies once thought beyond our horizons. What seem like medical miracles today will be routine tomorrow.
“I want us to raise our sights and glimpse at the possibilities of the future. But in recent years dementia research funding has fallen under the Tories. Instead, a Labour government will double funding for dementia research to play our part in finally finding a cure for this cruellest of diseases.”
The money would come from the 3% of GDP that Labour plans to ringfence for science and research.
Ashworth will add that at the present rate, it will take the government 19 years to deliver the promised £1.6bn, whereas Labour’s commitment means it would happen within a decade.
One in three people born today are expected to develop dementia in their lifetimes.
“Dementia research is making progress, but funding still lags behind other serious conditions, so it’s encouraging to see the Labour party prioritising research for this devastating condition,” said David Thomas, head of policy at Alzheimer’s Research UK.
“Doubling dementia research funding to £160m a year will be crucial in speeding up progress towards the life-changing treatments that people with dementia so desperately need. The government’s 2019 election manifesto promised to double dementia research funding, but nearly two years on, that promise has yet to be honoured.”
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The Alzheimer’s Society has also said that hitting the £1.6bn target will involve spending an extra £800m.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease kill more than 66,000 people a year in England and Wales, according to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics. That represents 12% of all deaths.
Britain is a world leader in research into improving the diagnosis and treatment of dementia.
Thomas said: “The strength of UK scientists and investment over the last decade has led to some real progress in dementia – in translating breakthrough in research into potential new treatments and in innovations around using big data to help with early diagnosis.”
A DHSC spokesperson said: “We are already funding a huge range of projects designed to make breakthroughs for people living with dementia and UK researchers are at the forefront of global efforts to find a cure or disease-modifying treatment by 2025.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/22/yousuf-raza-gilani-chief-justice-pakistan | Opinion | 2012-06-22T18:00:01.000Z | Mohammed Hanif | Yousuf Raza Gilani's sacking is bad news for Pakistan | Mohammed Hanif | In the past, Pakistan's supreme court has hanged an elected prime minister on trumped-up charges, sentenced another to life imprisonment and forced several career politicians into exile. So the disqualification of the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, on contempt-of-court charges should be seen as a step forward. Nobody died, right? The Pakistan Peoples' party and its coalition partners now have another prime minister in the shape of Raja Pervez Ashraf. Pakistan's supreme court will thump its chest and say we have proved that the law is the same for a commoner and a king. Pakistan's all-powerful army will say: look, no hands. So why are Pakistan's human rights activists calling it a judicial coup and warning us that the whole democratic facade is about to be pulled down?
Political decisions used to be made in the Pakistani army's HQ. But the action has shifted to court one of the supreme court, in full view of the public, with judgments framed and delivered like soundbites for the primetime news.
Since being restored to his job after being sacked by President Musharraf in 2009, the chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has been betraying an evangelical streak in his pronouncements. Maybe he feels that, with a country full of self-righteous zealots, he needs to adapt their tone. Or perhaps he is one. He doesn't wait for the petitioners to come to the court, he watches TV and acts on his own cognizance. Even the half of Pakistan that can't read or write will tell you what a suo motu is. We have already been quoted Khalil Jibran and the Persian poet Hafiz, and, it seems, a verse from the Qur'an or a hadith is only ever a suo motu notice away. When the chief justice took suo motu notice of allegations of his own son's corruption he turned up in court waving a copy of the Qur'an and insinuating comparisons with himself and the second caliph, Umar. Last year the chief justice took suo motu notice against the country's most famous television actress for possessing a bottle of wine. Elsewhere, one of his sidekicks wondered aloud that if one day Pakistan's parliament were to legalise gay marriages, would the supreme court sit quietly and watch?
This court is not as much in love with the rule of law as with the sound of its own sermonising voice. It has also mastered the art of selective justice. The same supreme court that has been sitting on an ISI corruption case for 15 years, the same judiciary that can't look a retired general in the eye or force a serving colonel to appear in court, feels it perfectly constitutional to send a unanimously elected prime minister home.
There are not many tears being shed over Gilani. Looking at his record, many would say that he should have stayed home in the first place. But what is the point of clamouring for democracy if we can't elect imperfect people – slightly less competent and way more corrupt than our average traffic cop – to lead us?
There are many ways of getting rid of a prime minister (though the old-fashioned way of voting them out has never been tried in Pakistan) but no simple way of telling the country's highest judge, restored to his job as a result of a popular movement, that he has begun to sound like that dictator who sent him home.
In Pakistan, generals often confuse access to private golf courses with the country's security. Senior bureaucrats consider it their right to name roads and villages after their grandfathers. Mullahs always fall back on God to justify their greed. Political leaders believe that democracy makes it mandatory to groom sons and daughters to take over their political parties. It's not surprising that senior judges have started to believe that respect for them is the same thing as respect for the rule of law.
Pakistanis are being forced to choose between Gilani's right to rule without doing a thing for his people, and a supreme court judge's right to send him home. And people are refusing to choose. For a few days the country lacked a prime minister and a cabinet. And nobody really missed them.
The alarm being raised by pro-democracy people in Pakistan is that the whole system is about to be derailed. The supreme court's reckless pursuit of government politicians could pave the way for a caretaker setup that will suit the military establishment.
The military, indeed, sulking after a series of humiliations at home and abroad, is watching from the sidelines. Some would say it's even gloating at the prospect of civilian institutions cutting each other down to size, traditionally its job.
There was a time in Pakistan when people joked: why hire a lawyer when you can buy a judge? Now you can't buy them because they are too busy shopping for a place in history.
Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/oct/20/cardiff-city-fulham-premier-league-match-report | Football | 2018-10-20T18:17:00.000Z | Stuart James | Kadeem Harris seals first win for Cardiff against a Fulham in freefall | In the end it felt so predictable. Twenty four hours after Neil Warnock admitted he would not put any money on Cardiff staying up, his players responded by picking up their first victory of the season to climb out of the bottom three at the expense of a Fulham side in freefall.
There was a mixture of jubilation and relief in the loud cheers that greeted the final whistle as the home supporters celebrated their first top-flight win since April 2014, ending a run of five successive defeats and breathing fresh life into their season. “You look at the dressing room and it’s like we won the league last year,” Warnock said.
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Fulham’s players, in contrast, looked shell-shocked. Slavisa Jokanovic’s side have won one of their nine league matches and, most alarmingly of all, conceded 25 goals in the process. Twelve have been shipped in the past three games and Jokanovic has his work cut out to find a solution.
“The negative things kill us, we are not strong or solid enough in our box, we are conceding so easily,” the Fulham manager said. “It’s now mistakes from the beginning of the season.”
The sight of André Schürrle opening the scoring with a wonderful 30-yard strike that arrowed into the top-left corner should have given the visitors some confidence, yet they were an accident waiting to happen at the back and it was no real surprise when Cardiff struck twice in the space of five minutes to turn the game around. Calum Chambers, looking desperately uncomfortable at right-back, was at fault for the first of those two goals and withdrawn at half-time.
Cardiff, in fairness, deserve credit for exposing Fulham’s frailties. Josh Murphy, who scored their opener, was a constant threat on the left and Bobby Decordova-Reid, who registered his first goal for the club since joining from Bristol City for £10m in the summer, worked tirelessly as part of a three-prong attack.
Callum Paterson was the focal point of that forward line and the makeshift striker – he joined Cardiff as a right-back – used his physical presence to unsettle Fulham throughout. His crucial goal midway through the second half was a case in point.
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A goal feast had been on the cards from the start given the defensive records of the sides. Schürrle’s was the pick of the six, although that will be no consolation to Fulham, who will rue the way they allowed Cardiff to hit back immediately.
Chambers was caught out of position after carelessly giving the ball way and Murphy, running into the space that opened up on the Cardiff left, curled a right-foot shot into the far corner. In the blink of an eye Cardiff were in front when Decordova-Reid coolly converted after Schürrle lost possession deep inside his own half.
Although Ryan Sessegnon neatly dispatched Aleksandar Mitrovic’s clever first-time pass to bring parity with 34 minutes gone – he has scored in all five of his appearances against Cardiff – that was never likely to be the end of the scoring in a helter-skelter game.
So it proved as Paterson screwed a 12-yard shot inside the far post after several Fulham players had failed to clear Bruno Ecuele Manga’s cross from the right.
Fulham still carried a threat and would have been level but for a superb save from Neil Etheridge to keep out Alfie Mawson’s downward header. Any Cardiff nerves in the closing stages were then assuaged by the sight of Kadeem Harris, who had been brought on for Murphy, turning in Victor Camarasa’s low centre in the 87th minute. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/11/netanyahu-sets-up-emergency-israeli-unity-government-and-war-cabinet | World news | 2023-10-11T23:03:03.000Z | Ruth Michaelson | Netanyahu sets up emergency Israeli unity government and war cabinet | The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has announced an emergency wartime government, as pressure mounts for the establishment of corridors to allow aid and medicine into the Gaza Strip and to allow civilians to leave.
Benny Gantz, a senior opposition figure and former defence minister, joined the government for the duration of the conflict.
Netanyahu, Gantz and Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, are forming a “war cabinet” as Israeli troops continued to build in the south of the country in preparation for an expected ground invasion.
In a televised address late on Wednesday, Netanyahu described atrocities that took place during the weekend attack by Hamas militants, who he said shot children in the head, burned people alive, raped women and beheaded soldiers. “Every Hamas member is a dead man,” he said. “We will crush and destroy it.”
Gantz told Israeli citizens that the newly formed government was “united” and ready to “wipe this thing called Hamas off the face of the Earth”.
Netanyahu’s extreme rightwing coalition partners will continue to serve in the government. The country’s chief opposition leader, Yair Lapid, was invited to join the new cabinet but did not immediately respond to the offer.
'The whole house shook': rocket fire from Gaza continues to hit Israeli coastal towns – video
Inside Gaza, the enclave’s sole power station ran out of fuel, adding to the looming catastrophe particularly for hospitals. “Soon all services vital for the survival of the population, including hospitals, will no longer function,” said the Mezan centre for human rights in Gaza.
Mahmoud Matar, a surgeon in Gaza, said hospitals were “completely overwhelmed with the number of injuries and the number of dead”.
He told the BBC: “The smell of death is all around now in Gaza. There is no water, there will be no electricity, and we have very bad network connection. I am currently looking for water to drink.”
Joe Biden described the assault on Israel by Hamas as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust during a round table of Jewish leaders in Washington on Wednesday evning.
The US president said Saturday’s attack was “sheer evil” and a “campaign of pure cruelty against the Jewish people”.
“Silence is complicity,” Biden said. “I refuse to be silent”. He said he had spoken again today with Netanyahu and that the US is “surging” additional military assistance to the Israel Defense Forces.
“This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty, not just hate, but pure cruelty, against the Jewish people,” Biden said, adding: “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
A White House spokesperson later confirmed to the Washington Post that neither US officials nor Biden had seen photographs or confirmed such reports independently and that Biden had “based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman”.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA described a “mass displacement” in the Gaza Strip, with more than 263,000 people fleeing their homes. It said that number was expected to rise further.
The death toll that began in Saturday’s carnage, carried out by Hamas militants and airstrikes on Gaza by Israeli forces, rose again.
Palestinians inspect the destruction following Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday 11 October. Photograph: Ismael Mohamad/UPI/Shutterstock
Israel said 1,200 people had been killed and more than 2,700 injured as bodies were still being recovered from towns and communities near the Gaza border. Israel believes Hamas is holding about 150 Israeli hostages inside Gaza.
The Gaza health ministry said about 1,100 Palestinians had been killed and 5,339 wounded in airstrikes on the crowded enclave in the past five days.
1:34
'Don't be scared': buildings reduced to rubble across Gaza after deadly airstrikes – video
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was due to fly to Israel on Wednesday to show solidarity with its ally and to discuss military support.
The US has been involved in discussions about a safe passage to allow civilians in Gaza to leave to blockaded territory, now under intense bombardment. The border crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been closed since the conflict began.
In comments that are potentially extremely damaging for Netanyahu, a senior Republican said a warning of potential violence came three days before the attack.
“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” Michael McCaul, the chair of the powerful US House foreign affairs committee, told reporters after a closed-door intelligence briefing for lawmakers on the crisis.
“I don’t want to get too much into classified but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level,” he said.
Israeli soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier near the border with Lebanon on Wednesday 11 October. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP
The attack may have been planned as long as a year ago, McCaul said. “We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it.”
Sirens sounded across the south and the north of Israel on Wednesday. The Israeli military said hostile aircraft had entered the country from Lebanon, and urged citizens to take shelter. Some reports suggested drones or hang-gliders had been deployed by Hezbollah militants.
Earlier, Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles at an Israeli military position, claiming to have killed and wounded troops. The Israeli military confirmed the attack but did not comment on possible casualties. The Israeli army shelled the area in southern Lebanon where the attack was launched.
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said a spillover of the conflict in Israel must be avoided and that he was concerned about reported attacks from southern Lebanon.
“I appeal to all parties, and those who have an influence over those parties, to avoid any further escalation and spillover,” he said.
Meanwhile, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic became the latest carriers to announce they were suspending all flights to and from Tel Aviv, citing security concerns.
The BA announcement came after the captain of a flight approaching the airport turned back to Heathrow. A spokesperson for Israel’s airports authority said rockets were flying around Tel Aviv at the time but were not an immediate threat to the flight or to the airport.
The UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly, visits the house of David and Rachel Edri who survived a 20-hour hostage situation during the Hamas attack in southern Israel. Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
James Cleverly, the UK foreign secretary, was forced to take shelter while visiting Ofakim, a community in southern Israel. Cleverly flew to Israel to demonstrate the UK’s “unwavering solidarity”.
Lt Col Jonathan Conricus, a spokesperson for the Israel Defence Forces, said on Wednesday morning that 300,000 reservists had been sent south, close to Gaza, and were getting ready “to execute the mission we have been given by the Israeli government … to make sure that Hamas, at the end of this war, won’t have any military capabilities by which they can threaten or kill Israeli civilians”.
0:56
James Cleverly scrambles for cover as sirens sound on visit to southern Israel – video
Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel on Saturday morning, firing thousands of rockets and breaching the hi-tech security fence around Gaza to allow hundreds of militants to cross into Israel.
Israelis, including the very old, the very young and at least 260 people at a music festival in the area, were killed in scenes of horror that have shocked the world.
On Wednesday it was confirmed that the dead included Jake Marlowe, a 26-year-old British man who had been working on the festival’s security team. His parents said they were heartbroken.
With Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/14/debut-novel-by-millie-bobby-brown-reignites-debate-over-ghostwritten-celebrity-books | Books | 2023-09-14T10:56:45.000Z | Ella Creamer | Debut novel by Millie Bobby Brown reignites debate over ghostwritten celebrity books | The publication of Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown’s debut novel has reignited a debate over ghostwritten celebrity books.
Brown’s Nineteen Steps, inspired by her grandmother’s experience of the 1943 Bethnal Green tube disaster, was ghostwritten by author Kathleen McGurl and published on Tuesday. The cover of the book features only Brown’s name.
In response to a now-deleted tweet by Waterstones promoting the book, many Twitter users criticised Brown. “You should be ashamed,” wrote one. “Ghostwritten celebrity novels have ruined children’s literature and now they’re doing the same thing to adult fiction.”
The cover of Nineteen Steps by Millie Bobby Brown. Photograph: AP
On Tuesday, Brown posted an image on Instagram of herself holding the book standing next to McGurl, with the caption: “I couldn’t have done this without you!” Below the post, many comments were critical of Brown, claiming that the actor was “taking the credit” and that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.
However, others came to Brown’s defence. “People love to attack people who trigger them and Millie is young, beautiful, famous and rich,” Catherine Yardley, author of Ember, told the Guardian. She said that a lot of the criticism came down to “jealousy”, “ageism” and “sexism” – “I can’t think of one man who has had this level of criticism,” she added.
Brown is not the first celebrity to be criticised for using a ghostwriter. “We’ve seen it in relation to many young, female stars,” said Dr Hannah Yelin, author of Celebrity Memoir: From Ghostwriting to Gender Politics. “Zoella’s [media personality Zoë Sugg] first memoir comes to mind as an example which saw her lambasted in the media for breaking some kind of implicit social contract.”
Katie Price and Naomi Campbell are among the celebrities who have also used ghostwriters for their fiction books. “Collaborative authorship is nothing new and exists in many celebrated forms,” added Yelin. “From political speechwriters to editors like Maxwell Perkins who helped F Scott Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby”. Shannon Kyle, a ghostwriter who started the Ghostwriters Agency, agreed that ghostwriting “has been around for a long, long time – since the days of Shakespeare”.
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‘Does it really matter who wrote it?’: the rise of ghostwritten celebrity fiction
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Kyle said that it was “part of the celeb culture” to front products such as perfumes, clothing ranges, beauty lines and food products that celebrities might not have been involved in the technical side of creating. Brown’s transparency about her use of a ghostwriter was “refreshing”, added Kyle, and “it doesn’t diminish her involvement, because ultimately it is her family story, and it wouldn’t be happening without her”. Yardley added that “the public might feel cheated”, but that Brown was “being open about it”.
In a blog post in March, McGurl explained that she was sent “a lot of research that had already been pulled together by Millie and her family, and plenty of ideas”. Brown and McGurl then had a “couple” of Zoom calls before McGurl wrote the first draft. Brown continued to send the writer ideas via WhatsApp, and the book went through several drafts as the pair “refined the story”.
Kyle said that the “public perception” of ghostwriters was shifting, which was a “good thing” because there were “some parts of the industry where ghostwriters can be subject to being a bit exploited”.
She believes that celebrities speaking about their ghostwriters will happen “more and more”, because the more celebrities talk about it, “the more acceptable it becomes”.
Yardley believes that publishers could be more “open” about books that are ghostwritten. Kyle added that a publisher had to “think of the commercial angle of this because they’re a business and they need to work out what sells”.
Other notable ghostwritten celebrity titles include Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, which was written by JR Moehringer. Harry “talked very openly about his ghostwriter and their relationship, and it didn’t diminish book sales there,” said Kyle. “The general public wants to be entertained by a book, they want to read a good story, and ultimately, whoever puts it together, I don’t think they really mind.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/17/laura-kenny-i-wish-female-issues-werent-taboo | Life and style | 2018-06-17T05:00:06.000Z | Juliana Piskorz | Laura Kenny: ‘I wish female issues weren’t taboo’ | Ididn’t really enjoy cycling when I started, but my dad used to work so hard that we only spent time together on the weekends and he’d want us to go cycling as a family. So I think that’s why I grew to love it, because it meant spending a couple of hours with Dad.
When I was born I had a collapsed lung, which gave me asthma. It was pretty severe when I was a kid. When I was diagnosed I cried my eyes out. But I’ve pretty much grown out of it. Now I only get it on really dusty days. At the Rio Olympics we warmed up in the velodrome and I remember thinking: ‘I feel it coming back on.’
I thought I’d be prepared for pregnancy, but you never are. At first I was sleeping for 11 or 12 hours a night and then I couldn’t sleep for longer than two hours. I do get used to training on no sleep, but it’s really tough. Fortunately my husband, Jason [Kenny], and I work really well as a team, especially when it comes to our son, Albie.
I breastfed Albie for six months and there wasn’t much Jason could really help with in the night, but he would change the nappies. A passenger on a train recently rolled their eyes at me when I was breastfeeding, it’s hard enough breastfeeding without someone making you feel judged.
When Jason and I were writing our book, The Inside Track, I made a point of bringing up periods and being on the pill to control them because it’s so important to me. I want young girls to feel they can talk about these things if there’s an issue, especially as an athlete because it is hard to train when you’re on your period. I wish female issues weren’t taboo. There is nothing I won’t share with my coach because it’s important for me to get it off my chest.
As well as being back on the bike, I’ve also launched a project with Soreen to inspire other families to cycle together this summer. This initiative is very close to my heart, not just because I love cycling, but also because I’ve been brought up to lead a healthy and active lifestyle, thanks to my mum, who has always been my inspiration. She completely changed her lifestyle when I was younger and helped shape the way I thought about food and exercise. It goes to show that everyone can do it.
Soreen is giving away £250 of Halfords vouchers, to be spent on cycling equipment, every day over the summer. For more information, go to soreencycleproject.com
Part of the Soreen Cycle Project initiative is also to raise awareness of the more than 300 miles of Lost Cycleways, which are buried across the UK. They were built in the 1930s and have since fallen into disrepair, but through their revival could be made available again to cyclists, which will provide far greater accessibility. By raising awareness, Soreen hopes to encourage the general public to get involved and sign the petition for their rescue to be debated in parliament | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/firm-that-gave-43000-false-covid-results-still-processing-pcr-tests | World news | 2021-10-26T05:00:07.000Z | Rowena Mason | Firm that gave 43,000 false Covid results still processing PCR tests | The company at the heart of a fiasco that saw up to 43,000 people wrongly given negative Covid results is still processing PCR tests for travel and one of its senior member of staff has been seconded to work within the UK Health Security Agency, the Guardian has learned.
Immensa, whose privately run Wolverhampton laboratory was suspended by the government over the scandal this month, is continuing to process results for international travellers who buy tests through its sister company, Dante Labs.
The government also confirmed that an “employee from Immensa/Dante Labs is supporting NHS Test and Trace [part of the UKHSA] in a technical role”, though it denied any conflict of interest.
A UKHSA spokesperson said the staff member had “no involvement whatsoever in any PCR testing commercial matters” and added: “The secondee completed a conflict of interest form when appointed and they were judged suitable for the role.”
Covid-19: how 43,000 false negative tests were uncovered as wrong – podcast
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Downing Street has dismissed claims that the estimated 43,000 false Covid test results from the Wolverhampton lab were to blame for a sharp rise in cases in south-west England, saying the region might be catching up with the rest of the country.
South-west England, which was served by the Wolverhampton lab, now has the highest case rate of any region, with 760 cases per 100,000 people, according to Public Health England. The south-east had the second highest rate, at 526 cases per 100,000.
When the false tests scandal emerged on 15 October, NHS Test and Trace suspended operations at the lab. Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth has previously raised questions about “how this private firm – which didn’t exist pre-May 2020 – was awarded a lucrative £120m contract to run the lab”.
A Whitehall source insisted that Immensa had assured the UKHSA that the Wolverhampton lab was no longer being used for PCR travel results and that any tests posted to that location would be sent to another of the company’s labs for processing.
The source said the investigation to date suggests travel tests are not affected by the same problems as they were processed using different equipment, giving the first hint that a technical failure might have been to blame for the testing scandal.
Asked whether Immensa was processing PCR travel test results, a company spokesperson said: “All PCR testing, including private testing for travel, has been suspended at the Wolverhampton lab. All samples received in Wolverhampton are being rerouted to other labs. We have been cooperating fully with the UKHSA on this matter and will continue to do so.”
On Monday Downing Street said the slew of false test results had not caused a surge in the south-west. “In terms of the causes behind the increase in the south-west, we have seen there was this lab error; I don’t believe that accounts for the increases we have seen,” Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson said. “We know the south-west was an area that did not previously have as high rates as other parts of the country, which may be a factor as well.”
Dr Kit Yates, a senior lecturer in the department of mathematical sciences at the University of Bath, said it was “inconceivable that telling 43,000 people they were negative when in fact they were positive, making them believe they could safely go into schools and workplaces where they may have infected others, did not have an impact on the prevalence of Covid in the south-west … In part we may be seeing the impact of people who were given the false negatives being asked to retest and finally appearing in the figures.
“However, the vast majority of people given the false negatives will no longer be testing positive, so this is unlikely to be a big driver of the case rates. These figures will be independent of the testing scandal, indicating that the fast rises we are seeing are genuine and not a result of retesting.”
He also said it was “very odd to see No 10 trying to cover for this private company’s mistakes instead of demanding an urgent investigation and being upfront with the general public about what has happened”.
In response to the high rates of Covid, directors of public health in the south-west have advised schools to take measures such as cancelling assemblies, wearing masks in corridors and returning to bubbles. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/24/what-happened-spain-snap-general-election | World news | 2023-07-24T10:22:50.000Z | Sam Jones | What happened in Spain’s snap general election? | What happened in Spain’s snap general election on Sunday?
Pretty much the opposite of everything the pollsters and pundits had predicted would happen. The election, called by the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, after his Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) did badly in May’s regional and municipal elections, had been expected to usher in a coalition government between the conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party. Although the PP finished first and picked up 47 more seats than in the November 2019 election, its victory over a resurgent PSOE was far narrower than had been forecast and the party failed to secure the absolute majority it had hoped for.
What about Vox?
Sunday was indisputably a bad night for the far-right party. It lost 19 seats, saw its share of the vote cut and had its chances of playing kingmaker slashed. The PP won 136 seats and Vox 33, giving them a combined total of 169 – seven seats short of the 176-seat absolute majority needed in Spain’s 350-seat congress.
How did the Spanish left do?
The PSOE picked up 122 seats – two more than it won last time – while its allies in the new leftwing Sumar coalition won 31, giving the two main parties of the Spanish left 153 seats. While the PSOE and Sumar have fewer seats than the PP and Vox, they have more options when it comes to doing deals to win the support of smaller parties as they endeavour to form a new government.
What happens next?
Both the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and Sánchez are going to try to put together new governments over the coming weeks. Congress will convene on 17 August and King Felipe VI will then meet party leaders to determine which candidate could win MPs’ backing to become the next prime minister. That candidate would then take part in an investiture debate followed by a vote that requires an absolute majority in Spain’s lower house (the aforementioned 176 seats). If the candidate falls short of that number, a second vote will be held 48 hours later in which a simple majority – more votes for than against – will suffice. Should that fail to happen, MPs have two months to appoint a prime minister. When those two months are up, parliament will be dissolved and new elections called for the end of the year.
So who is most likely to be able to pull together a government?
Sánchez and his allies. Feijóo’s decision to enter into more regional and municipal coalitions with the far right following May’s elections has not endeared the PP to more moderate parties, which simply won’t entertain supporting an alliance that includes Vox, an anti-feminist, anti-immigrant party that denies the existence of gender-based violence and human-made climate change. And any attempt by Feijóo to try to forge a minority government would be sunk by the PSOE’s refusal to back it or to abstain to allow it into office.
Pedro Sánchez (second right) in Madrid on election night. Photograph: Juan Carlos Rojas/LaPresse/Shutterstock
What are Sánchez’s options?
By enlisting the support of smaller regional parties, including the separatist Catalan Republican Left party and the pro-independence Basque party EH Bildu, the PSOE leader could potentially secure the backing of 172 MPs – enough to get him over the line in a second investiture debate. But Sánchez would also need to negotiate a deal to ensure the abstention of Junts, the hardline, centre-right pro-independence party of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. In another of the election’s many twists of fate, Puigdemont’s party – which spearheaded the unsuccessful push to secede from the rest of Spain almost six years ago – could find itself playing kingmaker. “We won’t make Pedro Sánchez PM in exchange for nothing,” its leader, Míriam Nogueras, warned on Sunday night.
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While the PSOE may have a numerical advantage over the PP, deals with Catalan and Basque independence parties would play neatly into the hands of Sánchez’s rivals, who accuse him of being far too reliant on them. The campaign for May’s elections was dominated by the legacy of the defunct Basque terrorist group Eta after it emerged that EH Bildu – whose support the Sánchez government has enlisted in congress – was fielding 44 convicted Eta members, including seven people found guilty of violent crimes, as candidates.
Sánchez criticised Bildu’s decision – describing it as legal but “obviously indecent” – but it was swiftly seized on by his opponents, who have also attacked his government over its botched sexual offences reforms, which have led to more than 100 convicted sex offenders being granted early release.
“You’re the great electoral hope for rapists and pederasts, for mutineers, squatters, corrupt people, and now for those who used to go about in balaclavas with pistols,” Feijóo told Sánchez. “And I will never be that.”
What’s the most likely outcome?
As the PP has once again learned to its cost, it never pays to bet against Sánchez. That said, the coming weeks and months are unlikely to be easy for the socialists and their allies as they try to put together a new government. Spanish politics continues to be fragmented and another general election remains a distinct possibility. It’s also worth bearing in mind that Sunday’s vote means that the last five Spanish general elections have resulted in hung parliaments. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/30/kill-boksoon-review-intense-korean-assassin-thriller-with-satisfying-complexity | Film | 2023-03-30T06:00:55.000Z | Leslie Felperin | Kill Boksoon review – intense Korean assassin thriller with satisfying complexity | Like a lot of topline Korean films, this prestige action thriller is a little too long at 137 minutes, but it’s consistently entertaining throughout, and quite well-suited given the length to being viewed on a streaming platform. Viewing in chunks works quite well, especially since the dialogue zips by so quickly that if you don’t speak Korean you may need to rewind to read the subtitles – and they’re actually worth reading here, which is not something you can always say about a film with this much martial arts and fisticuffs.
Jeon Do-yeon (South Korea’s version of Meryl Streep, best known in the west for Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid and Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine) stars as Gil Bok-soon, a middle-aged single mother to teen daughter Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a). Jae-yeong and the yummy mummies at the private school Jae-yeong attends think Bok-soon is some kind of executive for an events company, which fits with the crisp haircut and boxy Chanel boucle jacket. In a way it’s true, because her employer, MK Ent, calls the contract killings it’s hired to do “shows”; Bok-soon is their star assassin, revered by her colleagues and rivals alike. Here special skill is her ability to game out in her head the next steps in a tricky situation – the film will sometimes show her doing this and then rewind back to an earlier point, which is a little confusing. Wait until you get towards the end, when an ultimate boss fight becomes a panorama of multiple, CGI-replicated Bok-soons and her adversary, as they slug, stab and shoot it out all at once.
Writer-director Byun Sung-hyun, an up-and-coming director, handles the action sequences with real flair, but does an even better job limning the complex, sometimes fraught relationships – especially the mother-daughter one between Bok-soon and Jae-yeong. It turns out that Jae-yeong is attracted to girls and has been secretly dating her best friend for some time, which leaves her exposed to blackmail. Meanwhile, like any career woman, Bok-soon has to deal with office politics, staying in the good graces of both her main boss Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), who’s always been sweet on her, and his mercurial younger sister Cha Min-hee (Esom) whose ruthless streak makes Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s little sister, seem like Minnie Mouse. All the threads come together in an extremely satisfying way for the finale, and leave plenty of room for a sequel.
This article was amended on 30 March 2023. An earlier version incorrectly called writer-director Byun Sung-hyun female.
Kill Boksoon is released on 31 March on Netflix. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/26/spiral-recap-season-seven-episodes-five-and-six-plus-ca-change- | Television & radio | 2019-10-26T21:55:07.000Z | James Donaghy | Spiral recap: season seven, episodes five and six – plus ça change ... | Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Spiral on the BBC. Do not read on unless you have watched season seven, episodes five and six.
Chain reaction
This week reveals added layers of complexity on the money-laundering scheme. Soizic from the fraud squad explains how drug dealers needing to launder cash hook up with white-collar guys – like building contractor Pierre Solignac – to dodge tax or pay an illegal workforce. Supply meets demand. Gears within gears.
Team Gilou don’t care about any of that, of course. They police primarily on instinct, and hastily drawn crime infographics from fraud squad wonks simply won’t cut it. They want summary justice for Herville, and frustration with the investigation’s glacial pace leads them – as so often before – off–the–books and off–the–rails. In an unauthorised operation, JP and Tom run interference on Fouad so Laure can identify the client waiting for his cash delivery as Aline Lecomte MP. Further digging connects Lecomte to assets manager David Cann, currently represented by his old school buddy Edelman.
That intel comes at a heavy cost, though. Fouad is discovered shot through the head with the same gun that killed Wang and Herville. An exasperated Beckriche takes Laure and Gilou off the case before an apoplectic Roban trumps him, pulling both CID and the fraud squad and calling in homicide. Will this crew ever respect the chain of command?
Not much cop ... Beckriche takes Laure and Gilou off the case before being trumped by Roban. Photograph: Caroline Dubois/BBC/Son et Lumière/Canal+
Gilou
Emotionally, it’s a bumpy ride for Commander Escoffier this week. Things heat up with Laure, as they have a fake makeout session to avoid being spotted by Fouad. Going rogue, commandeering a moped and chasing down a bad guy only intensify the mood. Adrenaline, close physical proximity and a fraught shared history are a heady cocktail.
That all changes though when Gilou hears that Laure has given custody of Romy over to the Brémonts. It brings back being dumped in the hospital car park all too keenly. “I’m getting out,” he tells her, “I’ve had enough of you”. He may even mean it, but who will ever understand him better than Laure?
Laure
Quite apart from all the Gilou drama, Laure takes a battering this week. On medication for her depression and still reeling from losing custody of Romy, being taken off the Herville case is the last thing she needs. We know she doesn’t do well without work. It could just be for the best when that other renegade fallen on hard times, Joséphine, shows up on her doorstep, looking for a place to stay. Laure could do with the company, and it could be a long night when these two start comparing war stories. Speaking of Joséphine…
Joséphine
A law unto herself ... Joséphine is out, and fighting for Lola. Photograph: Caroline Dubois/BBC/Son et Lumière/Canal+
He’s tried leaning on the president of the Law Society, witness tampering and a crooked reconstruction, but in the end it’s just a few words whispered by Edelman in Vern’s ear that gain Joséphine’s freedom. We may never know what he said, but it has Vern backpedalling away from his original testimony like it’s radioactive waste. Edelman even offers her a job with him while she waits to get her license back.
It’s enough to make a girl’s heart melt, but all Joséphine can think of is Lola. She insists that Edelman’s firm take on her case, moved by the plight of a woman whose only crimes were blackmail, extortion and driving a young teacher to suicide. The press called Lola and her co-conspirator She Devils and Joséphine absolutely likes the sound of that. A hint of gendered demonisation, a fight against the odds and a still-at-large accomplice to pursue? Ms Karlsson is all about that life.
Roban
They say that hospitals are some of the most dangerous places in the world and we’re seeing plenty of evidence of that this year. We’ve already had Mr Vouters’ untimely death in the operating theatre, and now François suffers a brutal head trauma when he walks into a sliding door, leaving him with a bloodied snozz and some tarnished pride. Still, he manages to score a dinner date with Dr Micaleff while he’s recovering, having exonerated her from sole culpability in Vouters’ death. It ends with a kiss, and the hope that Roban can waltz into retirement with a good woman on his arm.
Thoughts and observations
“No, hang on, you can’t go behind Beckriche’s back.” Ali, showing some touching naivety. Gilou gives him a pep talk about the importance of being a team player and he reluctantly goes along, his objections noted for the record. He truly is the new Tintin.
Law enforcement want to identify an intermediary the network will need between the cash rich and the cash poor – someone who can easily navigate high and low society. Sounds a bit like Edelman?
Pity poor Rayan – his brother murdered, his mother barely acknowledging him and a prison stretch surrounded by predators awaiting him. The kid’s dumb as a box of rocks and isn’t tough enough to make up for it.
There’s the hint of something romantic brewing between Gilou and the fraud squad’s Soizic as she helps him decode the text messages. If he’s looking for a way out from the folie à deux he shares with Laure, this might be it.
How much does Edelman know? Can Laure bounce back? Is Gilou really getting out? Let us know what you’re thinking below … | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/19/rubber-and-plastic-bullets-too-dangerous-for-crowd-control-says-study | Science | 2017-12-19T10:20:34.000Z | Nicola Davis | Rubber and plastic bullets too dangerous for crowd control, says study | Rubber and plastic bullets should not be used for crowd control, researchers have said, pointing out that such weapons are often inaccurate and can cause death, disabilities or severe injuries.
Bullets made of plastic, rubber, or other materials such as metal shot in a fabric bag, are used as a “less lethal” means of crowd control the world over, from the US to India. While they can leave a gun with velocities similar to live ammunition, they are designed to lose speed rapidly, reducing the force of impact. Generally, users are supposed to aim the weapons at individuals’ lower limbs.
Spanish police used rubber bullets in Barcelona during recent protests around the Catalan elections, although the projectiles have been banned for use by Catalan police since 2014.
“Our findings indicate that these weapons have the potential to cause severe injuries and death,” the authors write.
It is not the first time that the use of such bullets has been criticised, but the latest report reiterates that the projectiles can cause severe injuries, particularly at close range, while at longer distances they are inaccurate and can injure bystanders. So-called “safe shooting distances”, they add, vary greatly between weapons and manufacturers.
“If you are super close to someone you can aim it, but then the speed is the same as a live ammunition bullet and then it is dangerous,” said Rohini Haar, co-author of the study from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctor with the group Physicians for Human Rights. “If [you shoot] from far away, you can’t aim it so even if you are trying to hit people’s feet and just scare them aware, these things ricochet, they bounce, they spiral in the air.”
Rubber and plastic bullets used by the security forces in riots, from the Linenhall Library Political Collection, Belfast. Photograph: Stephen Davison/Pacemaker Press/Commissioned for The Guardian
Published in the journal BMJ Open by a team of academics in the US, the research involved a review of 26 studies conducted worldwide since 1990, looking at the impact of such weapons in situations ranging from civilian protests to criminal arrests.
The team note that a wide hunt for studies was necessary, since neither police and military records on deaths and injuries from “non-lethal” bullets may not be complete, or accessible, while “manufacturers are not required to keep records on injuries from their products in development, field trials or actual use.”
In total, the studies encompasses 1,984 people who had been hurt by projectiles, including rubber or plastic bullets, polyurethane bullets with a hollow nose known as AEPs, as well as bullets made of both metal and rubber, cloth or plastic. In total, 15% of those injured were left permanently disabled, most commonly through loss of sight, while 51 individuals (3%) died. The majority of injuries in those that survived were classified as severe.
However, the authors note that the majority of injuries and almost 80% of the permanent disabilities were the result of bullets that included metal, while access to medical care also contributed to the outcomes for the injured.
What’s more, they add, the research had limitations, including that certain reports might be more likely to be published, that certain people might be more likely to seek medical help, and that some of the studies included were of low quality.
But Haar said the analysis was the best that could be done, pointing out that it was not possible to find figures for how often people get hurt for a given use. “It is more a question of what is the range of injuries that present, what are the risk factors that we can identify from the literature.”
Rubber bullets were replaced by plastic bullets in the UK in the 1970s, and these have since been replaced with AEPs.
A Home Office spokesperson said AEP rounds are not designed to be used for crowd control, but are instead intended to be fired to tackle a violent or potentially violent person.
“It’s vitally important that police have the powers and tools they need to keep the public safe from serious threats of violence,” the spokesperson said. “Any use of force by the police must be necessary, proportionate and reasonable in the circumstances.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/aug/13/olympicstennis.olympics2008 | Sport | 2008-08-13T13:57:19.000Z | Nicky Bandini | Olympics: Andy and Jamie Murray knocked out of men's doubles | Andy and Jamie Murray have been knocked out of the men's doubles at the Olympic Games in the second round by France's Arnaud Clement and Michael Llodra.
Much had been expected from the Murray brothers, with Andy ranked No6 in the world after his Cincinnati Masters win last month and Jamie No29 in the ATP's doubles rankings. But Andy had looked tired and out of sorts during his singles defeat to Chinese Taipei's Yen-Hsun Lu on Monday and the pair never got going during a 6-1, 6-3 defeat to the French duo. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/jul/25/theatre.artsfeatures | Stage | 2003-07-25T10:49:00.000Z | Maddy Costa | After Mrs Rochester, Duke of York's, London | It is no surprise to learn that Polly Teale was inspired to write After Mrs Rochester while adapting Jane Eyre for the stage. The two plays, both also directed by Teale, have a lot in common: not least their use of Bertha Mason, the incarcerated Creole wife in Charlotte Brontë's novel, as an expression of the heroine's sexuality and hidden self.
In this play, the heroine is Jean Rhys, the Dominican novelist who felt such a kinship with Brontë's character that she transformed events from her own life into an entire biography for Bertha: the novel Wide Sargasso Sea.
Like Bertha, Rhys left her home for drab, depressing England; like Bertha, she found herself trapped by men into a spiral of self-destruction. As Bertha, Sarah Ball is constantly on stage, writhing, screeching and unleashing all the rage Jean initially keeps locked inside.
Occasionally her presence is illuminating, not least when Jean struggles to shut her up; more often it is an encumbrance, hammering home themes that yearn for a subtler treatment. We simply don't need to see Bertha behaving like a dog when Jean meets Ford Madox Ford: Jean's helplessness is expressive enough.
Jean herself is further divided, so that we see the young woman whose disastrous relationship with her mother destroys her sense of self-worth, and the older novelist, who in turn rejects her own daughter, and says that if she could have chosen between writing and happiness, she would have taken happiness.
There is a wonderful dismayed fondness about Diana Quick's elder Jean as she watches her youthful self, vibrantly played by Madeleine Potter; in one exquisite moment, yet another man tells Potter that she has beautiful eyes, and Quick responds by rolling hers.
But Teale doesn't leave much room for such detail, preferring to repeatedly layer scenes from Jane Eyre, flashbacks to Rhys's days in Dominica and appearances from Jean's scolding mother until the stage is cluttered. Rhys's life is fascinating, but the trouble with Teale's presentation of it is that the style takes over.
Bearing in mind that Teale took the same approach to Jane Eyre's story (and to that of Maggie in her 2001 co-production of The Mill on the Floss), that style no longer has novelty to recommend it.
More problematically, Bertha's raging and squirming seems to equate women's sexual desire with hysterical savagery. This may not be Teale's intention, but you wish the door to such an interpretation wasn't left ajar.
· Until September 20. Box office: 020-7369 1791. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2015/may/13/devon-nottingham-health-services-waiting-times-physiotherapy-cut | Healthcare Professionals Network | 2015-05-13T10:51:32.000Z | Linda Jackson | Devon and Nottingham health services see waiting times for physiotherapy cut | Imagine waking up in agony with a flare-up of an old knee injury and needing physiotherapy? You book an appointment with your GP, get referred and then face a 10-week wait – or go private.
Now imagine picking up the telephone and arranging to see a NHS physiotherapist in the same week. That is what’s happening in Devon and Nottingham, where the profession has developed two different, but successful services giving patients rapid access to treatment.
The schemes provide evidence of the benefits of physiotherapy self-referral at a time when GPs are still traditionally gatekeepers to the service.
The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy reveals that just 30% of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England offer physiotherapy self-referral, compared with two-thirds of CCGs in Wales. In Scotland, self-referral is almost countrywide.
Pockets of innovation do exist, however. In Torbay and south Devon, patients with musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries can see a physiotherapist within 72 hours, instead of waiting up to 10 weeks.
Based in 10 teams across the region’s community hospitals, physiotherapists offer a 45-minute first appointment where an assessment, diagnosis and treatment plan is agreed. Giving rapid access to treatment has meant that patients are less likely to turn up to A&E departments or need specialist orthopaedic care. It has also triggered a 70% reduction in the number of missed appointments.
In Nottingham, physiotherapists in 25 practices are the first point of call for patients who can make an appointment when they ring the surgery. This has cut waiting times from four weeks to a 72-hour service. Rob Goodwin, clinical lead physiotherapist, believes the scheme could be rolled-out nationally: “In the past, patients would see a GP twice about a MSK problem before getting referred. Now they can see a physio straightaway. The amount of time freed up is staggering.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/nov/18/england-euro-2024-contenders-gareth-southgate-critics | Football | 2023-11-18T20:00:29.000Z | Jonathan Wilson | England are real Euro 2024 contenders, a fact Southgate’s carping critics ignore | Jonathan Wilson | There’s nothing like failure to make you appreciate success. As England slunk out of the Cricket World Cup there was something almost comforting about the return to the not so very distant days when they seemed to be playing a different, tamer sport to the rest of the world, when the only hope of success was to happen upon, as Adam Hollioake’s side did in Sharjah in 1997, some previously unanticipated formula that was perfect for that time in that place.
Then suddenly something clicked, England started posting scores of 350+ as standard and began beating the best sides in the world. Just as the thought began to crystallise that in a World Cup on home soil they might not actually just be genuine contenders but perhaps even favourites, an astonishing generational talent became available to them in Jofra Archer.
England’s weak left flank is the flaw that threatens to derail their Euros
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The recent story of international football is similar. After years of befuddlement in the foothills, praying that everything might almost accidentally fall into place at a tournament, England suddenly have reserves of elite players and have started hammering lesser teams and competing with and beating top sides more often than ever used to be the case. And into an improving team growing in confidence has stepped a young player who, on form, is arguably the best in the world at the moment: Jude Bellingham.
There are, of course, a number of caveats here. Football is not cricket; there are more elite sides and surprise results happen more often. There will be those who dispute whether England really have started beating decent sides semi-regularly: the claim that they lose to the first good team they face has become a truism.
Like most truisms, it’s not without truth, but it ignores the fact that England beat Croatia, Germany and Denmark at the last Euros, comfortably overcame Senegal, the African champions, at the World Cup, and have twice beaten Italy in these Euro 2024 qualifiers. The logic becomes self-fulfilling: if England beat them, they can’t be good – and so England are destined always to lose to the first good side they play. Injuries and form can change but England stand just behind France as the second-best side in Europe and then there’s a gap to Portugal, Spain and the rest.
Which does not mean France or England will necessarily win the Euros. That’s not how football works. Of the 10 Euros and World Cups played over the past 20 years, only three – Spain in 2010 and 2012, France in 2018 – have been won by a team that was obviously the best there. One – Greece in 2004 – was won by a real outsider. The other six can probably be split into two groups: the fancied teams who found a new level during the tournament – Spain in 2008, Germany in 2014, Argentina in 2022 – and the decent sides that had a little luck and performed above themselves to outlast more favoured teams – Italy in 2006 and 2021, Portugal in 2016.
Yet even the very best of those sides had anxious moments. In 2010 Spain lost to Switzerland and were fortunate against Paraguay. In 2012 they were uninspired in the group and needed penalties to beat Portugal in the semi-final. Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia and required penalties against both the Netherlands and France.
At the 2019 Cricket World Cup, England lost to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia in the group and then won the final against New Zealand only in a super over after the most fraught of chases. No side ever wins a major tournament without at least some good fortune and a couple of moments when great players have to produce something extraordinary under pressure. There are no simple formulas.
It was perhaps slightly different a couple of decades ago, with the regular and justified calls for root-and-branch reform of youth development. The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) and the England DNA programme have answered that. England is producing far greater quantities of technically gifted young players than it ever did.
Now England’s main problem seems to be a tightening up in the closing stages, the pressure of not having won a tournament for so long inhibiting them when a trophy comes within reach. Against Croatia in 2018 and Italy in 2021, England let advantageous situations slip, while Harry Kane’s penalty miss extinguished a great opportunity against France.
The panaceas proposed after defeats these days always seem jejune. If only Player X had played or Player Y had not. If only England had been unleashed. But elite modern teams are never unleashed. Each of those 10 previous champions’ triumphs was based fundamentally on defensive solidity, whether that was achieved through sitting deep with screening midfielders or the maintenance of possession.
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Which is what makes so much of the criticism of Gareth Southgate so mystifying. Of course, there are things he might have done differently. He has, at times, perhaps been slow to react to make in-game changes. Defeat to Italy at the last Euros, in particular, feels like an opportunity missed. Perhaps at times he feels over-loyal to certain players but equally it may be that is a consequence of the attempt to generate a club spirit, a core that will be changed not on a whim or a blip in form but only when there is a genuine belief the replacement will be a long-term upgrade.
Gareth Southgate has attempted to generate a club spirit with England, and is responsible for 36% of all the knockout games they have ever won in major tournaments. Photograph: Kieran McManus/Shutterstock
But much of the carping feels driven by either utopianism or boredom. The fact is that Southgate has, by far, the best tournament record of any England manager other than Sir Alf Ramsey and that he is responsible for 36% of all the knockout games they have ever won in major tournaments. The draw in Ukraine in September prompted a great wringing of hands, but England qualified for the Euros with two games to spare. If we look at the Netherlands’ and Italy’s predicaments, England’s achievement should not be taken for granted.
England may or may not triumph next summer. Form, injury, luck and momentum will all play their parts. There will be moments when the prospect of failure looms. But England will head to Germany as one of the two favourites and, given where they were when Southgate took the job, that represents remarkable progress. They look not like participants who might get lucky, but like potential champions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/01/elder-son-resents-brothers-special-needs-how-to-help-him-understand | Life and style | 2022-04-01T13:00:22.000Z | Annalisa Barbieri | My elder son resents his brother’s special needs – how can I help him understand? | Ask Annalisa Barbieri | I have two wonderful sons aged seven and three. My issue is that my older son does not understand that his brother has additional needs and resents the extra attention he gets. My youngest is being assessed for autism, and has significant traits. He needs constant supervision and has routines that must be followed or he gets distressed. Our eldest finds this frustrating and blames his brother for ruining everything.
My eldest is very bright and engaging. He demands attention and has always been melodramatic, even at a young age. He gets frustrated his brother won’t play with him and says he’s weird.
When the youngest does his routines with chairs, toys, cups etc, the eldest will call him weird and seek to disrupt things. The youngest will react if what he is doing is messed up, but he ignores his older brother – and all other children – most of the time. I want them to have the best sibling relationship possible but it would help if my little one gave his brother something back.
We have told our older son that his brother needs more help with some things. I think he just thinks he’s being difficult or we’re pandering to him. A diagnosis is some way off – but I don’t want to label him prematurely. How can we make my eldest son understand more and be a bit more empathetic to his little brother? Any help much appreciated.
What a lot you all have on your plate. As a parent, you have all the usual hurdles with making things fair between siblings, and on top of that a younger child with additional needs. But as you say, your eldest is very young to understand it all. There’s a tendency to see older siblings as much bigger than they are when a younger sibling comes along.
I went to Sibs, which helps siblings of disabled children and adults, and spoke to Linda Owen, the information officer for young siblings. We thought you might be expecting your eldest son to understand a lot – too much. All you can really do at this age is acknowledge his feelings, not tell him what he should or shouldn’t be feeling.
You don’t want your older son to feel he has to be good, to not cause any trouble
Linda Owen
“What’s most helpful,” Owen says, “is to say something like: ‘I know it’s annoying that we have to follow all these routines. That must make you really sad/frustrated.’” Even a simple “This is hard for you, isn’t it?” can be empowering. Try to acknowledge things from his point of view, instead of asking him to be OK with the situation, and to look at things from his brother’s.
Also remember: children blame themselves, so he may feel some of this is his fault.
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“The danger here is that you don’t want your older son to feel he has to be good, to not cause any trouble,” says Owen. It must also be frustrating for your eldest if he feels he might never come first again, that his needs will never supersede his brother’s.
How much time do you spend just with your eldest? Owen recommends carving out regular, ringfenced time every day. “Better five minutes a day, every day, than an hour a week [that you may need to renege on].” Owen also recommends involving his school, if possible, and telling them what is going on for him.
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Young Sibs provides a service where your son can write in and get a personal response, and there is lots on its website that you and he can go through together. The links are below. But please remember to make time that’s also for him, and about him, and has nothing to do with his brother.
Useful links
Ask a Sibling advisor – for young (aged seven to 17) relatives of disabled children or adults to email and receive a personalised response
Autism – age-appropriate information for young siblings
Sibs website – for parents, professionals and adult siblings.
Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a family-related problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa on a family matter, please send your problem to [email protected]. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
Conversations With Annalisa Barbieri, series 2, is available here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/04/nhs-smart-technology-apps-artificial-wombs-healthcare | Science | 2018-07-04T08:00:23.000Z | Ian Sample | From apps to artificial wombs: the smart tech transforming NHS care | Look beyond the huge technological shifts that are revolutionising how the NHS operates, and there are a multitude of less heralded breakthroughs and gadgets that could ease the workload on staff, and help prevent illnesses.
Some are already being used in the health service, while others are in clinical trials, or are hopeful ideas waiting to break out of research labs.
The speed of advancement in computing, genetics and other fields, coupled with the powerful insights that come from huge medical datasets, mean that progress is happening faster than ever. The challenge for the NHS is to keep up.
Apps
Smartphones have the power to transform our wellbeing by making healthcare personal. Apps to help people quit smoking, drink less alcohol, eat better, and exercise more all stand to improve the nation’s physical health.
Apps have also arrived on the market to boost mental health. The Ginger.io app pairs subscribers to personal coaches who will draw up a consultation plan and provide daily emotional support. Other apps help people deal with panic attacks, the feelings that lead to self-harm, and with stress and anxiety. There is even an app, Brush DJ, that plays music for two minutes to ensure people clean their teeth for the right amount of time.
At Alder Hey children’s hospital near Liverpool, staff are developing an app that draws on IBM’s question-answering computer system, Watson, to help put patients at ease before they arrive for their appointment. The app allows children to build an avatar that can answer questions on the procedure, who they will see and what happens afterwards.
It also gives directions to the right department, overcoming one of the main causes of stress patients face on the day. With so many apps around, one of the biggest problems people may face is finding the right ones. To help out, the NHS has set up an online library of apps.
Smart pills
In the era of smart everything, even pills have been given a technological makeover. Last year, the first smart pill was approved by US regulators. On contact with stomach fluids, a tiny sensor sends a message to a wearable patch that relays the information to the patient’s smartphone. This could help patients keep track of their medication and avoid overdoses.
Work is under way on other gadget-filled pills that monitor vital signs such as heart and breathing rates as they pass through the body. Similar technology is miniaturising cameras so they can be swallowed and tracked through the digestive tract to look for disease and other abnormalities.
Artificial wombs
About 60,000 babies – one in nine – are born prematurely in NHS hospitals each year. The limit of viability for premature babies has been pushed back steadily during the past two decades to about 23 weeks.
Babies born this early weigh about 1lb (0.45kg); their eyelids are sealed shut and their skin is so thin that their blood shows through. These babies can survive, but a high proportion will experience serious and long-lasting medical problems.
The abrupt transition could be bridged using an artificial womb. The potential of the technology was demonstrated in a pre-clinical study last year in which lambs born at the equivalent of 23 weeks were successfully incubated in a “biobag” for four weeks.
Linked to the womb-like vessel by their umbilical cord, they received nutrition and oxygen and transformed from bald foetuses into fleecy newborns who performed normally on a variety of health tests. The doctors who developed the technology believe it could be ready for human clinical trials in the next five years.
Regenerative medicine
When human embryonic stem cells were first cultured in 1998, the prospect was raised of limitless supplies of lab-grown cells that could ultimately be used to grow spare organs and body parts. Turning this into a reality has been a long, difficult and at times controversial path. But recent advances show the field of regenerative medicine is now poised to make an impact.
The NHS already offers stem cell therapies for certain conditions, such as torn tendons, and for disorders such as leukaemia and lymphoma through bone marrow transplants. But work is ongoing to see whether stem cells can regenerate cartilage, restore sight to blind people, and even treat neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.
For one ambitious project, doctors at University College London, Great Ormond Street hospital and the Royal Free hospital have grown replacement food pipes for babies who are born with part of the organ missing. The tissue is made from stem cells taken from amniotic fluid and grown on a “scaffold” that moulds the cells to the right shape. When transplanted, the lab-grown tissue should allow affected babies to swallow naturally as they grow. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/21/sundance-boyhood-review-richard-linklater | Film | 2014-01-21T09:21:00.000Z | Xan Brooks | Boyhood: Sundance 2014 – first look review | At the start of Richard Linklater's extraordinary, deeply moving Boyhood, seven-year-old Mason (Ellar Coltrane) ups-sticks for Houston. He dismantles his bedroom and helps tidy the house, daubing white paint over the pencil marks on the doorframe which have measured the growth of him and his sister (Lorelei Linklater) from infancy until now. The door-frame, we come to realise, is of no further use. From here on in, the film will make the measurements itself.
What an astonishing achievement; what a beautiful movie. Linklater shot Boyhood in sequence, at regular intervals, over a 12-year period, painstakingly toiling away in solitude to produce a kind of cinematic Book of Kells. To leaf through its illuminated pages is to watch the child grow to manhood. Mason shoots up and goes gangly. His voice cracks and his heart is broken. And all around Mason, the other characters grow too. His harried mum (Patricia Arquette) weathers a brace of bad marriages but finds fulfilment teaching psychology at the local college. His deadbeat dad (Ethan Hawke) straightens out and stumbles arse-backwards into quiet contentment and a new family of his own. Somewhere along the road he even sells his death-trap GTO and buys a minivan instead.
Pull back still further and we see that the world is changing too. The seasons go round, the painted ponies go up and down, and those chunky perspex Macs are overtaken by the iPhone. No one smokes in restaurants anymore and the swing states turn from red to blue. History is constantly crawling around the corners of Linklater's canvas.
At the end of high-school, Mason decides he wants to be a photographer. "Any dip-shit can take pictures," his tutor tells him. "It's hard to make art." But sometimes the very business of taking pictures – of putting in the time and effort, of sticking with it through the long haul – can achieve profundity and touch upon the sublime. Sometimes, it turns out, the process and the art are indivisible. They shape each other, define one another, and where one leads the other will follow.
Boyhood, as might now be apparent, is far and away the best film I've seen at Sundance. It's lovingly assembled and acted with such grace and ease that it scarcely looks like acting at all. Midway through the film, I found myself wondering whether I'd ever seen anything remotely resembling it before. Except that of course I have; we all have. Simply look at your own family; it's happening all over. People screw up and make good. They grow bum-fluff beards and fall in love and there's never any resolution, just more full-speed forward motion.
"What's the point? I sure as shit don't know," says Mason's dad. "We're all just winging it." Boyhood shows the bird in flight and makes us look at it afresh.
Full coverage of Sundance 2014 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/22/bjork-vulnicura-review-breakup-album | Music | 2015-01-22T15:50:22.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Björk: Vulnicura review – a sucker punch of a breakup album | Seven tracks into Vulnicura comes a song called Atom Dance. It is the moment when the mood of Björk’s ninth solo album finally shifts a little, from black despair to something close to battered optimism. It’s a kind of avant-garde I Will Survive. The lyrics aren’t the best on Vulnicura – after almost 40 minutes of starkly drawn emotional turmoil, there’s something jarring about her breaking out the kooky physics metaphors and inspirational poster-type slogans about dancing through the pain and learning by love to open up. But it does contain what may be the album’s most telling line: “I am fine-tuning my soul,” sings Björk, “to the universal wavelength.”
That could be a description of Vulnicura itself. The album details her separation from artist Matthew Barney so unflinchingly that the first six songs are subtitled with a sort of date-stamp: Five Months Before, Two Months After. Considering Björk’s recent career, there is something remarkably prosaic about her releasing a breakup album in the grand pop tradition of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, even one with a title that sounds like a cream you put on verrucas and a cover photo featuring the singer with what looks like a cross between a gaping wound and a vagina in the middle of her chest. It is, after all, the follow-up to Biophilia, an album in the grand pop tradition of songs about plate tectonics and human biorhythms. If you wanted evidence that Björk’s work had become even more rarefied since her mid-90s commercial heyday, then there it was, in the form of a series of iPad apps narrated by David Attenborough. A breakup album might seem straightforward by comparison, but it requires certain special skills. You must not only bare your soul, you also have to make your most personal experiences speak to the wider world, or risk self-indulgence. You need, as Atom Dance puts it, to be on the universal wavelength – not a place Björk’s recent work has spent much time.
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As it turns out, only one moment feels too abstruse to touch the listener. With no discernible tune, and atonal strings alternately scraping and swarming around her voice, Family is so lost in its own personal misery that it is tough to connect with – although perhaps that’s the point: it represents that album’s emotional nadir, after which things start to look up a little. (Perhaps it says something about the tone of Vulnicura that the light relief comes in the form of a guest appearance from pop’s King of the Carefree ROFLs, Antony Hegarty.) Besides, the rest of the album doesn’t so much connect with you as rain one emotional sucker punch after another. There’s a horrible familiarity about History of Touches’ depiction of a final attempt at sex in the dying days of a relationship and Lionsong’s agonising depiction of icy passive-aggressive silence. “Should I throw oil on one of his moods? / But which one?” ponders the latter. “Make the joy peak/ Humour peak/ Frustration peak/ Anything peak for clarity.” They make you feel the queasy tang of recognition.
Vulnicura’s other great strength is that Björk clearly doesn’t see the need for emotional directness as a reason to abandon her more adventurous musical ideas. The presence of FKA twigs producer and death-obsessed experimental electronic auteur the Haxan Cloak might alert you to the fact that she hasn’t reached for her acoustic guitar in search of sincerity. Instead, the album sets out its musical stall on opener Stonemilker: high-drama string arrangements over the boom and crack of electronic beats. The chorus is a kind of gorgeous sigh, with beautiful melodies frequently sitting alongside moments of real audacity. Black Lake stretches more than 10 minutes, partly because it keeps flatlining into a single, dead-eyed note. At certain moments the note lasts for 30 seconds. That doesn’t seem long on paper, but it feels like an eternity coming out of the speakers. In fact, the most striking thing about the music on Vulnicura is how well it supports the lyrics. Björk’s recent albums have occasionally been marred by a surfeit of ideas that overwhelmed the actual songs: the wilful clutter on parts of Volta; the sense that the accompanying essays and apps were distracting from, rather than bolstering, the music on Biophilia. By contrast, the sound of Vulnicura feels perfectly entwined with the songs. On History of Touches, a nostalgic litany of old intimacies is backed by a series of weirdly muted electronic explosions; Mouth Mantra, a song about escaping the numbness of a relationship’s end and finding your voice again sounds like a sudden gushing of pent-up sounds, exploding from a waltz into sonic chaos.
The album ends with Quicksand, a song on which a relatively positive, life-must-go-on sentiment – “Hackle this darkness/ Up to the light … When we’re broken we are whole” – feels undermined by its nervous rhythm. It sounds like a breakbeat with some essential workings missing: it moves forward, but refuses to swing in the way it should. This is a fitting conclusion to an album that begins, on Stonemilker, with Björk’s frank admission: “I better document this.” You could say there’s something gimlet-eyed about a woman who realises her relationship is collapsing and automatically thinks: still, great material. But it’s nothing if not honest. And besides, on the evidence of Vulnicura, she has a point. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/06/jeremy-corbyn-buses-labour | Opinion | 2018-07-06T07:52:58.000Z | Owen Jones | Don’t sneer at Jeremy Corbyn: for millions, buses really do matter | Owen Jones | Asneer can often reveal far more about the sneerer than the object of their derision. This week, the leader of the opposition used the platform of prime minister’s questions to highlight the long-standing crisis of Britain’s bus services. What with there being 4.65bn bus journeys a year – two and half times more than train journeys – you might think this would be considered quite important. Instead, Tory MPs howled with contempt, bellowing “Taxi!” The commentariat followed in quick step. “A question about buses. That will win it!” spluttered the Sun. “Corbyn on buses. Jesus wept,” eyerolled the Times’s sketch writer. “Is it PMQs or transport questions?” cackled ITV’s political correspondent. “No 10 will not be able to believe their luck,” mocked the Spectator’s political editor.
These responses are as unsurprising as they are revealing. If you live in London, where politicians and media commentators spend most of their time, you are spoilt for transport choices – trains, an extensive underground network and a regular bus service. That’s because London resisted Thatcher’s deregulation of buses in 1986. Outside the capital, buses are often a rip-off, unreliable and are being slashed away – the number of trips has halved.
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According to the Campaign for Better Transport, there has been a £182m cut – that’s 45% – in local authority supported bus services in the last eight years, while 3,347 routes have been altered, reduced or cancelled altogether. In the past year alone, 77 bus routes have been reduced or cancelled in the north-west, along with 44 in Yorkshire and Humber and 45 in the east of England. Bus fares, as Jeremy Corbyn noted, have risen three times faster than wages.
If you’ve never lived outside London, and if you’ve always had a car, it’s difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.
Rail privatisation is widely, and rightly, commented on as a striking example of the utter bankruptcy of market fundamentalism. But the rip-off train fares and poor service are disproportionately endured by the more affluent: in 2015, the highest earners took four times as many rail trips as the lowest earners (though cheaper fares would help to change that). While 61% of Londoners used rail that year, just 40% of Welsh people did. When it comes to buses, those earning less than £25,000 a year make up two-thirds of journeys. If you live in Cornwall, you are not only in the second-poorest region in northern Europe, you also have to shell out £12 for a bus day pass.
Buses may be a joke in the Westminster bubble, but for those outside the capital on modest or low incomes this is a basic bread-and-butter issue that is not being addressed or discussed. We are constantly told that Corbynism is a London metropolitan phenomenon – normally, bizarrely, by metropolitan Londoners in the media – and yet when he raises an issue affecting millions outside the capital, it’s treated as an obscure diversion. Apparently we are supposed to allow Brexit to suck the oxygen out of everything, that everything else must fester by the roadside until it’s all sorted (presumably sometime in the mid-24th century).
‘For those outside the capital on modest or low incomes this is a basic bread-and-butter issue that is not being addressed or discussed.’ Photograph: Alamy
A more self-aware media response would be: hang on, why do we fail to report this national crisis?
Is it maybe, just maybe, that we are nowhere near as representative of the wider population as we should be? According to the Sutton Trustin 2016, over half of Britain’s top journalists are privately educated, compared with 7% of the population. Another government study found that journalism was second only to doctors when it came to hailing from a managerial or professional background. It is one of the most socially exclusive professions in Britain.
It is an obvious point that a profession so dominated by the privileged is going to struggle to understand issues that do not resonate with their lived experiences. Like bus travel outside London. And when such issues are raised, rather than doing their job, they pour scorn at something they do not deem relevant. Until that changes – until we have a national media that is representative of region, class, gender, sexuality, race and religion – then this critical institution will remain out of touch on issues that concern millions of people. The media thought buses were indicative of Corbyn’s own failures. Instead, they merely exposed their own.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/23/child-cyberbullying-at-concerning-levels-australias-esafety-commissioner-says | Australia news | 2023-01-22T14:00:38.000Z | Josh Butler | Child cyberbullying at ‘concerning levels’, Australia’s eSafety commissioner says | Online bullying among children is reaching “concerning levels”, according to Australia’s eSafety commissioner. The agency is investigating nearly 1,700 cyberbullying complaints and has asked social media companies to remove offensive content more than 500 times in a year.
The eSafety commission also revealed that it has, for the first time, used its strengthened powers to issue end user notices that can compel bullies to stop their actions or apologise to victims.
The agency says it also has its eye on the “metaverse” and artificial intelligence services like ChatGPT, as those technologies develop, and plans to take further action against global social media companies to encourage them to further crack down on child sexual exploitation.
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Monday marks one year since the Online Safety Act handed the eSafety commission new powers to address cyberbullying of children. The act reduced by half the amount of time online platforms are given to respond to eSafety removal notices, down to 24 hours, as well as giving the commission new powers to require individual users to take certain actions.
The eSafety commission’s website says it can use an end-user notice to require the person posting cyberbullying material to remove it within a specific timeframe, to stop further bullying, or apologise to their victim. Failing to comply with an end-user notice can lead to court injunctions or civil penalties.
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Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety commissioner, said that in the 12 months since the Online Safety Act changes, investigators in her agency had probed more than 1,680 cyberbullying complaints, and made more than 500 informal requests for online platforms to remove content.
“We are seeing the tenor and tone of this youth-driven cyberbullying content escalating to concerning levels,” she said.
Inman Grant said bullying complaints had continued a “post-pandemic surge” in the past 12 months, increasing by 69% compared to the previous year.
Child safety and education experts theorise that the effects of the pandemic, including children studying remotely via electronic devices, meant young people were using social media more often to keep in touch with peers, in turn leading to higher incidences of cyberbullying.
The eSafety commission would not say specifically which platforms had been used for bullying content, or how many investigations related to each platform, but it’s understood complaints related to all major social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
Most complaints related to children bullying other children, but a small number were adults bullying children.
Inman Grant also said the eSafety commission had issued its first end-user notices, requiring individuals to take action. Citing privacy concerns, the commission wouldn’t say exactly how many had been issued or for what reasons, but it’s understood there was only a small number and all were resolved before further action was required.
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End-user notices may be served to a child through their school or their parents.
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Inman Grant said the commission would issue further legal notices to big tech companies under the act’s basic online safety expectations, asking them to take more action on child sexual exploitation. She said she was also considering additional industry codes to regulate how platforms responded to illegal and harmful content.
eSafety is also turning attention to “anticipating technology trends” and emerging technologies, planning to encourage newer companies to develop safety features. Inman Grant said those included recommender engines and algorithms used by social media companies to populate news feeds, as well as new services growing in popularity.
“We have an opportunity to positively shape the technology landscape to reduce the potential for harms related to the metaverse, generative AI and quantum environments, all of which are looming in our near future,” she said.
“This will help eSafety be a nimble, anticipatory regulator when these technologies reach full maturity and saturation.”
Generative AI – like the ChatGPT text bot and art generators like DALL-E – is a growing category of technology. Artists, writers and teachers have raised concerns over its potential to denigrate art, devalue creativity and facilitate cheating at school. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/26/why-oppenheimer-should-win-the-best-picture-oscar | Film | 2024-02-26T08:00:20.000Z | Paul MacInnes | Why Oppenheimer should win the best picture Oscar | Oscars 2024: best picture nominees – reviews, awards and where to watch
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‘OK, so here’s how we win the Oscar for a biopic about a theoretical physicist. [Sounds of manic scribbling on a blackboard. A large circle is drawn and tapped with a piece of chalk.] In here, we put as many thespian-coded Hollywood stars as we can. Dozens, hundreds. We might not give them much to do, heck Josh Hartnett will just be patting people on the shoulder, but everything they do do will be poignant. Meanwhile [a shuffle of feet, another, bigger circle drawn] in here we have all the aspects of contemporary cinema production that work exceptionally well on those big screens you have to pay £10 extra to get into. We take all these aspects, sight, sound, scale – spectacle! – and we use them lavishly to recreate the first successful test of a nuclear weapon and hint at its terrifying consequences. [A big swoosh of white chalk under the word “Trinity”. A pause for effect.] I can also confirm today that we will definitely, at some point, have Albert Einstein standing by a pond [a thunder of feet pounding wooden benches]. And the rest? The rest we pad out with extended scenes of cross examination from a hodgepodge of tribunals. People? Let’s get to it.”
This may not be a faithful account of the process by which Christopher Nolan’s new movie came into existence. But the feeling of Oppenheimer being a precision-tooled construction that blends the fascinations of Hollywood’s last commercially successful auteur with the interests of the Academy remains. Serious themes, serious people, an unflinching dedication to both the craft and the medium of cinema, Oppenheimer ticks the boxes. Bookmakers are duly offering odds as short as 1/25 on for it to take home best picture.
Serious people by a pond … Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
The case for why Oppenheimer will win the best picture Oscar is easy to make, the argument for why it should is more complicated. There are obviously some straightforward points in its favour: Cillian Murphy’s performance being one. Never quite simply the harrowed Cassandra of the marketing materials, Murphy’s Oppenheimer is an impish man with a sharp sense of humour and a physical presence despite his wiry frame. A combination of these strengths and weaknesses help him to survive his trials.
The Trinity set piece is another clear plus. It’s a moment of cinematic grandeur that serves both a dramatic and historic function, attempting a snapshot of a civilisation about to take an irrevocable turn. With the countdown running, the camera pieces together the processes and makes us understand the stakes. We watch as Oppenheimer and Matt Damon’s General Leslie Groves, at the last ditch, collectively grasp the “non-zero” risk of what they are doing. Meanwhile, around them, handsome young Americans take zero precautions as they prepare to expose themselves to radioactive material. It’s as unsettling as it is exhilarating.
Obviously, there’s a long story about how Nolan meticulously constructed the Trinity test, eschewing CGI for a real (small, non-nuclear) bomb and magnifying the intensity of its explosion through the use of forced perspective, a cinematic trick as old as Charlie Chaplin. It seems likely this combination of old-school techniques delivered on a modern day scale will further endear Oppenheimer to Academy voters, but it is twinned with a more expressionistic exploration of the consequences of the bomb some half an hour later.
Master of craft … Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Oppenheimer the film has attracted critical scrutiny due to Nolan’s decision not to show the consequences of the Manhattan Project, of the atom bomb being dropped first on Hiroshima then Nagasaki. Nolan argues he made this choice because of the subjective nature of the story. So his alternative is to offer a moment inside Oppenheimer’s head. It comes as a tub-thumping address following the destruction of Hiroshima (“I bet the Japanese didn’t like it!”) whites out into something approximating a panic attack. The hubbub of the lecture room diminishes, replaced by a single scream. We see the audience, a crowd that was delirious with joy, transform into a writhing, screaming horde, with one woman’s skin apparently flayed from her face. As Oppenheimer watches, we watch him, his face bleached by white light, his surroundings bleeding in and out of focus. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is a roar that makes you feel like you might (might want to?) black out.
This scene, for me, is the strongest part of the movie and central to any persuasive case for Oppenheimer winning the big one at the Dolby theatre. It is, after all, doing many of the same things that Jonathan Glazer achieves in The Zone of Interest, using light and sound detached from their context to unsettle the viewer, to instil horror. Glazer sustains this for two hours, Nolan reduces it to a minute, but both are effective in getting under your skin. These are techniques that also feel innovative and contemporary, something you’d think the Academy might like to encourage.
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Confronting the shortcomings … Emily Blunt with Cillian Murphy. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/AP
I’m not going to pretend there isn’t a fair amount in this film I just couldn’t get on with. Beneath the performances, pockets of innovation and bucket-loads of craft is a fairly simple film. Most of the extensive cast are reduced to archetypes and poor Emily Blunt is shrunk to something even smaller. The structure is typically convoluted and can quite easily leave you (OK, me) confused, while the actual moral quandary at the heart of the film is only really poked at, in the way you might engage with a mouse left on the kitchen floor by a cat. It’s also addicted to dramatic irony. Addicted, I tell you. Whatever did happen to that Kennedy boy who blocked the confirmation of Lewis Strauss? I’m going to go home and Google him!
But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Oppenheimer (unlike Tenet). I even felt it was worth the £17 I paid to watch it in a sensory overload screen at Shepherd’s Bush Vue. A conservative technocrat he may be, but Nolan uses the workings of his imagination to make big movies for big audiences. With his latest work he also inadvertently occasioned an alliance that saved the movie-going habit in 2023. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Academy will not only choose to give Oppenheimer the Oscar forbest picture, but that they should. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2010/dec/02/experts-view-circle-s-nhs-hospital-contract-win | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2010-12-02T14:08:19.000Z | Anita Pati | Experts' view: Circle's NHS hospital contract win | Karen Webb, regional director, Royal College of Nursing eastern region
"We do welcome working with [Circle] but it would not be true to say the RCN welcomed the transfer to social enterprise of an NHS acute trust. Hinchingbrooke hospital at the time it's being transferred to Circle is well-run, has been maintaining a financial balance, unlike many NHS organisations in the region, and we would have preferred Hinchingbrooke to remain within the NHS with the capable board that was running it. It was working, it wasn't broken. On the surface, [the transfer] will make little difference to start with because they are being transferred as NHS employees. However, we've not yet agreed with Circle that they're prepared to recognise the RCN for the purposes of bargaining and representation. And nobody knows what the future holds for any NHS organisation…in the face of the financial cuts."
Peter Holbrook, chief executive, Social Enterprise Coalition
"The fact that Circle health is going to reinvest the majority of its profits back into the local community and has a strong ethos around employee ownership means that society will benefit. It shows other social enterprises that we can compete in the market with some of the largest multi-million pound corporate organisations that exist and that we should feel bold about the opportunities that are ahead for us.
"[Circle's win] means that we're not just nice businesses but that we're really good at business. I think that in some areas, people haven't always taken social enterprise seriously."
Karen Jennings, head of health, Unison
"Basically, this is an organisation that is backed by a merchant bank and although they have set up independent sector treatment centres, there's no indication from those centres that staff had ownership of it in the true sense of a mutual or social enterprise. Staff are employees of the NHS so they can't be owners or part-owners. They're not a John Lewis partnership, which is what Ali [Parsa, Circle managing partner] is saying. My concerns are that this has been awarded to people who have never managed a district general hospital [with] emergency services, intensive care and maternity. If you're bringing managers in, they need to demonstrate competence in these areas and not experiment with important community services. What competence have they got with dealing with a winter flu pandemic? [Our staff members] are very nervous. The climate at the moment is that there's going to be cuts. They're nervous that's somebody's coming in who doesn't understand the NHS and that this is a gamble."
Alastair Wilson, chief executive, School for Social Entrepreneurs
"It's encouraging that organisations demonstrating staff ownership can get competitive advantage when bidding for large contracts. The challenge for Circle is how do they take the best of what social enterprise is about while trying to reach scale? They will have to be pretty clear about how they retain this competitive advantage when they become a bigger provider. One of the criticisms of the status quo is that it has big, cumbersome organisations that are wasteful and bureaucratic. Social enterprises are more nimble and let everyone get involved. If Circle wants to operate a huge number of hospitals, there are issues of scale and bureaucracy. The ownership structure doesn't guarantee better quality."
Dr Robert Harwood, chair, British Medical Association eastern region consultant committee
"The jury's out. The BMA's had concerns on a number of levels centred around why we really need to bring a third party operating franchise in to run an NHS hospital. What could [Circle] do that couldn't have been done within the system? If you're bringing somebody else in to manage somebody, they're not doing it because they're lovely people, they're doing it because they want to make an operating profit for a company. Those investors are going to want to see a return on their money – they're not doing it as a charity. The problem with private sector participation in UK healthcare is that there aren't many good examples of where it has cost less. I don't have a doctrinal objection – if they can do it better and cheaper, then the NHS has to say, 'OK, you've got a better idea than we do'. I don't think we know enough to know if this [will be] successful."
What are your thoughts on Circle's contract win? Share them with us below.
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up to the social enterprise network. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/dec/18/bullying-scandal-university-blames-clerical-error-for-changes-to-hr-policy | Education | 2020-12-18T20:33:48.000Z | Ben Quinn | Bullying scandal university blames ‘clerical error’ for changes to HR policy | Imperial College London has blamed a “clerical error” after it emerged that its longstanding policy on bullying was altered days before staff were told of a completed investigation into bullying allegations against the world-leading university’s president.
Alice Gast and the chief financial officer, Muir Sanderson, this week admitted to bullying colleagues after allegations against them were investigated during the summer by a QC who was commissioned to carry out an inquiry. They have remained in post at the London university despite mounting pressure to step down.
The Guardian has now learned that changes were made without customary oversight earlier this month to a policy, which had the effect of watering down how severely bullying was regarded. The previous version said that bullying was “gross misconduct”. After the changes, the policy said that “all incidents will be taken seriously”.
Hours after it was contacted by the Guardian about the changes, the university said that the policy had been “mistakenly edited and published without approval from the director of HR or due process”. It said the original policy would continue to apply.
Clarifications have now also been published on the university’s website stating that the changes were due to a “clerical error” and the provost has launched a formal investigation to find out what occurred.
The Office for Students (OfS), which has a role in regulating universities, is now looking into the controversy amid mounting disquiet among staff, students and others who are concerned that Gast and Sanderson are still in post. Anger has been exacerbated by the fact that at least two of the people who were bullied have left the university.
Before the changes, Imperial’s policy on harassment and bullying stated: “Harassment, bullying and victimisation are viewed as gross misconduct, and disciplinary action, including dismissal, may be taken if any complaint of harassment, bullying or victimisation is upheld.” It was this wording, which had been in place for at least three years, that informed the investigation into the bullying allegations.
However, shortly before staff were told of the inquiry, the wording of the policy was changed to read: “Zero-tolerance means any complaints must not be ignored and will be investigated. All incidents will be taken seriously and could provide grounds for disciplinary action that may lead to dismissal from the College.”
Days after the new wording was put in place, an email to staff on 4 December first mentioned the investigation into the conduct of the president.
In its clarification, the university said it was a mistake in the updated policy that meant that the passage referring to “gross misconduct” was left out.
It is alleged that the revised policy, published after questions from an MP in parliament first made public mention of the bullying inquiry, was relied upon to provided a post-hoc justification for Gast and Sanderson’s conduct.
A spokesperson for Imperial said: “We reject these allegations.”
Imperial said on Friday that the policy, which was in place from earlier this year, continues to apply and the passage flagged by the Guardian should not have been removed. The definition of zero tolerance, which had also been inserted, had not yet been consulted on, according to the clarification.
The Imperial branch of the University and College Union called this week for the resignation of Gast and Sanderson for gross misconduct, with the union citing the college’s own statutes.
It is unclear who approved the revised policy or who was responsible for setting in motion moves to make the changes. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/19/w1a-review-bbc-send-up | Television & radio | 2017-09-19T05:00:08.000Z | Sam Wollaston | W1A review – the Way Ahead is behind, and it’s brilliant, hurrah, joyous | ‘I
t’s Monday morning and a new week at the BBC’s new Broadcasting House headquarters somewhere in central London, as head of values Ian Fletcher arrives in order to begin it.” So says narrator David Tennant, in a new series of the BBC’s self-parody W1A (BBC2), in order to begin it.
It is not just Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) arriving, but also director of strategic governance Simon Harwood (Jason Watkins) and dim intern Will (Hugh Skinner), all on their foldy bicycles – a trident of mediocrity, a three-pronged, six-wheeled attack on the week ahead. By 9am, Ian, as someone whose job it is to steer the corporation confidently towards whatever it is that is going to happen next, is chairing a meeting of The Way Ahead Group. The focus is on the More of Less Initiative (“The fact is this is about identifying what we do best and finding more ways of doing less of it better,” explains Sarah Parish’s head of output Anna Rampton, helpfully). And with the royal charter up for renewal, the group is to be renamed The Renewal Group. The Way Ahead is behind. Brilliant, hurrah, joyous, yes, exactly, say the assembled members, watched over by a giant, smiling photograph of Mary Berry.
There is also change over at PR consultancy Perfect Curve, which is now called Fun, having been taken over by Dutch media giant Fun Media. Fun – which is, fun – comes complete with comedy bearded Dutch chairman and silent disco enthusiast Jens Smit. He is fun to his bone marrow. Happily, Siobhan Sharpe has been retained as joint CEO – happily, because she (Jessica Hynes) is still the best thing about W1A, stealing every scene she crashes into.
Back at the beeb, the newly renamed Renewal group is tackling discrimination head on. After discussing the case of a former footballer, who claims he is being overlooked as a Match of the Day pundit because he is a cross-dresser, they turn their attention to the gender pay gap within the corporation itself, and the attention it has been getting.
Producer Lucy Freeman (Nina Sosanya) suggests that it might be fun (yay!) if they all write their own salaries on Post-it notes and stick them to their foreheads. Ian Fletcher starts to say that that might not necessarily be the best way to approach the issue, going forward, but before he has bumbled it out everyone else has said brilliant, yes exactly, hallelujah. And next thing you know, Ian’s sheepishly sporting a Post-it note with – in quite small writing but readable when the camera zooms in – £245,000 written on it. Meanwhile, senior communications officer Tracey Pritchard (Monica Dolan) has written “minimum wage, zero hours contract”. And she has also done all the O’s with a cross underneath, so they have become female signs.
At which point, BBC director general, Tony Hall, finally making a W1A cameo, bursts into the room to announce that he has launched at least three different enquiries into how this sorry state of affairs has come about. And that, in the meantime, everyone – male, female, the gender fluid, Ryan the cross-dressing former footballer, even Will the intern – will have their salaries bumped up to the figure he’s wearing on his own forehead: £450,000. And that, as a result, for budgetary reasons, the creation of all original content will be immediately cancelled. Going forward, the corporation will be solely an online platform for UGC (user-generated content), called BBCme, not wholly unlike YouTube …
You’ll know, if you actually saw it, that most of the previous three paragraphs are – to borrow a word from the “current controller of news and current affairs” – bollocks. I am making a point about W1A, though, in a really fun way, yay! [Puts on headphones, has little shuffle]
I’m saying it might be pitch perfect in its depiction of levels of nodding nonsense and corporate guff. And beautifully performed (Rufus Jones’s entertainment format producer David Wilkes needs a shoutout). It is very funny at times; and lovely that Auntie can do this, look in the mirror and have a little chuckle at herself. But it is just that – a chuckle, a playful slap on the arse (possible tribunal had it not been self-administered) rather than a proper kicking in the genitals, where anyone else making a mockumentary send-up of the BBC would go straight for.
Yes I know this was all done before the pay storm hit, so it couldn’t be in there. And of course they’re not going to give themselves a proper kicking. So it does all come over as a teeny bit smug and self-serving. The fact that BBC grandees and stars – Lineker and Shearer (both quite well paid I believe) – are queuing up to take part doesn’t help.
Obviously the next episode will mainly be about the gender pay gap scandal. And I will look like an idiot. So that’s all good then. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/08/egypt-clean-chemical-industry-eight-lessons | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2014-10-08T14:19:48.000Z | Wayne Visser | 8 lessons from Egypt in building a cleaner chemicals industry | In previous blogs, I have looked at the impacts of the chemicals sector and innovations like green chemistry. But how do we share the technologies that are making the chemicals sector more sustainable, especially in rapidly emerging countries?
To answer this question, I’m going to shine the spotlight on Egypt – where factories are discharging 2.5m cubic metres of untreated effluent into the rivers every day, much of it laced with toxic chemicals. The country also faces a water and energy crisis. But three Egyptian companies are tackling these environmental issues through technology adoption and transfer.
The first is Arab Steel Fabrication Company (El Sewedy), which has applied a technological solution to recover hydrochloric acid from its galvanisation process. Besides the obvious environmental benefits, the company is saving 345,000 Egyptian pounds (£30,000) a year. The second company, Mac Carpet, has used technology to create an automatic system for recycling of thickener agents, which saves it about EGP5m per year.
The third case is El Obour for Paints and Chemical Industries (Pachin), which manufactures paints, inks and resins. As with many chemical companies, the manufacturing process is very energy intensive. As part of a government programme to promote renewable energy in Egypt (part-funded by the EU), a technology company in Germany has installed solar collectors at the Pachin facility. These heat the water to 65C, then by using a heat exchanger, recover the heat and use it to keep the fatty acid store at an optimal temperature, saving the company EGP100,000 a year.
In all three cases, there are lessons to be learned.
1. Economic drivers
When asked about the top three benefits from implementing sustainable technology, El Sewedy and Mac Carpet Company both mentioned resource productivity and economic development. Environmental improvement was also a key factor (in the top three for both), but would have been insufficient on its own to motivate the technology change.
2. Skills development
Significant barriers to technology adoption for both companies were the lack of local qualified workers and institutional capacity. To overcome this, the technology provider and the Egyptian National Cleaner Production Centre (ENCPC) had to do training. Ali Abo Sena, an ENCPC representative, said that education was needed not only on the specific technologies, but also more broadly on the seriousness of the water crisis in Egypt.
3. Business continuity
For Pachin, energy consumption is not just an environmental issue, but one that is business critical. In 2013, the Egyptian government announced plans to ration subsidies for petrol and diesel fuel, and hiked fuel prices for heavy industry by 33% at the beginning of the year. Power outages have become more commonplace, resulting in significant disruption to business continuity and loss of economic value.
4. Market potential
The German solar company was prepared to part-fund, install and support the technology transfer to Pachin in Egypt because it enabled them to show a working demonstration of a project in a market that has massive potential for the business. The marketing benefits of sustainable technology in developing countries should not be underestimated.
5. Macro conditions
It is unlikely that the Pachin project would have been embraced so enthusiastically had Egypt not experienced an energy crisis – and accompanying rises in energy costs – in recent years. Although these macro conditions are beyond the control of sustainable technology providers, being sensitive to the opportunities that they can provide can help ensure that the correct markets are chosen for deployment.
6. Financial support
Although long-term economic development is an important benefit of the adoption of sustainable technologies, the high initial cost of the these projects and the relatively long payback period can be a significant barrier. In the case of Pachin, this was overcome by getting financial support for the project (from the EU and the technology provider).
7. Plan for scaling
A lack of qualified workers to install, operate and maintain Pachin’s solar technology was overcome by providing the relevant skills training. However, in order to ensure future scaling, a plan was also devised for moving towards local manufacturing (possibly through a joint-venture).
8. Local adaptation
The ENCPC – working as an intermediary – determined that the German solar technology was over-engineered for the local conditions. In particular, since the technology was made in Germany and had to comply with EU specifications and perform in a region with ambient sunlight, it was found that the insulation materials could be replaced with less expensive substitutes, which performed adequately under local conditions.
Major reductions in the environmental impacts of the chemicals industry – as well as economic benefits – can be achieved by adopting and transferring existing best practice sustainable technologies. The problem, therefore, is not our lack of sustainable technologies, but our ability to finance, incentivise and build capacity for their deployment where they are most needed in the world.
Read more stories like this:
Will green chemistry save us from toxification?
How to use technology to make our planet more sustainable, not less
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Wayne Visser is director of Kaleidoscope Futures and a senior associate at the University of Cambridge. He tweets @WayneVisser
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/14/jeremy-corbyn-will-never-stand-for-labour-again-say-senior-figures | Politics | 2022-11-14T06:00:34.000Z | Aletha Adu | Jeremy Corbyn will never stand for Labour again, say senior figures | Jeremy Corbyn will never be permitted to stand as a Labour MP at an election again, senior Labour figures have said.
The former Labour leader was told last year he had to apologise for his claims that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated”.
Keir Starmer has refused to restore the whip to his predecessor, effectively suspending him from the parliamentary party, unless he does so.
However, the Guardian understands that even if Corbyn does apologise “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation” the leadership would be reluctant to let him return.
One senior Labour figure said: “Jeremy Corbyn is never getting back in. He would be toxic to our chances of winning back some of the seats we need to win back.”
It means that if Corbyn wants to remain an MP, he will have to stand as an independent in his Islington North seat.
Allies of the former Labour leader have signalled he will run for the seat regardless of whether he gets the whip restored. One said locals in his north London seat respected him for his constituency work.
Another ally said Corbyn seemed to be the only one not to have “fully realised” that he would not get the whip restored.
Reflecting on Starmer’s recent purge of leftwing candidates from selection battles, an insider said Corbyn had no chance as Starmer was using the whip as “his personal plaything”.
Corbyn won the seat with 63.4% of the vote in 2019, a thumping majority of 26,188. Sources close to Corbyn’s camp believe he has a strong support base.
Labour party chiefs are said to be looking for a strong candidate in the constituency, which Corbyn has held since 1983. “The local party is likely to be difficult and the campaign will be very tough if Jeremy stands as an independent,” one source said.
“But we think we’d win. We’d have plenty of volunteers and there would be no shortage of money for a campaign.”
Should Corbyn decide to run at the next election as an independent, it would pose a potentially existential dilemma for Momentum, the grassroots leftwing group that emerged out of Corbyn’s leadership campaign, which has become a pressure group for the Labour left and the loudest critic of Starmer’s leadership.
Senior Labour sources have made it clear that should Momentum campaign for Corbyn, it would be proscribed as an organisation by Labour – similar to the way Militant or other leftwing groups that challenged Labour MPs have been treated.
Neal Lawson, the director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass, has written to Labour’s general secretary, David Evans, criticising Labour’s “heavy-handed approach” to selections.
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“Dramatically narrowing the range of candidates eligible for selection on increasingly spurious grounds will not help Labour win office or transform the country,” he said.
In the latest string of controversial election battles, Labour dissolved Kensington’s selection committee because of alleged leaks and because the regional party had to launch a “serious investigation” into antisemitism.
The party selected three candidates: Mete Coban, Joe Powell and Afsana Lachaux, a former aide to Gordon Brown. The leftwing candidate Kasim Ali was blocked from the shortlist.
A source criticised the move as “another blatant stitch-up” with the central party “disenfranchising the democratically constituted local body” to block leftwingers.
The constituency’s former MP Emma Dent Coad was blocked from its long list. She claimed it was “plain as day” that the party was being “factionally abused” and was no longer “fit for purpose”.
Lawson added: “In one case a former Tory MP who defected to Labour [Christian Wakeford] has been waved through the whole trigger process with no local democratic decision-making at all. The motive for this is … one side wants to gain all power and influence and stifle dissent.”
Blasting the battle between factions of the Labour party, he said: “The zero-sum game between the right and left … is now reaching dangerous levels and a price will be paid by the country.”
One insider stood by Labour’s decision to select Wakeford to run in Bury South claiming theMP had made a bold decision to cross the floor. Another said Wakeford would have wanted the opportunity to face local members. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/25/death-of-england-face-to-face-review-state-of-the-nation-drama-is-a-fast-furious-triumph | Television & radio | 2021-11-25T23:25:12.000Z | Lucy Mangan | Death of England: Face to Face review – state of the nation drama is a fast, furious triumph | Death of England began life in 2014 as a short drama commissioned by London’s Royal Court theatre and the Guardian as part of a series of microplays. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, it then became two National Theatre productions. The first was an expansion of the original monologue performed, to rave reviews, again by Rafe Spall as white, working-class Michael, formed in the crucible of a family led by a father who wants “to take our country back from the blacks”. The second was a monologue from Delroy (played by Michael Balogun, who also received rave reviews despite being the understudy), Michael’s best friend – unheard during Michael’s outpouring of grievances, doubts and the beginning of wrestling with a legacy he knows, somewhere, is not all that it should have been.
Delroy’s story takes in his childhood as a black British boy, life as a bailiff and (recently arrested) man, and his relationship with a white woman (Michael’s sister), with whom he is expecting a child. It examines and unpicks issues of identity, belonging, privilege and existence in a country that rejects, excludes and brings negative connotations to bear on you at every turn. Death of England: Delroy opened and closed on the same night in November 2020 – a victim of lockdown measures – although it was streamed to wider audiences thereafter.
Now the two are combined, cleverly and magnificently so, in a feature-length production, Death of England: Face to Face (Sky Arts). Filmed for television in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton space, this time around Neil Maskell plays Michael and Giles Terera (who was originally meant to be in the stage production) is Delroy. Set during the lockdown in January this year, we see Delroy doubly confined by an electronic tag. Ostensibly to give his sister a break, Michael takes the baby to visit her dad for the first time.
What unfolds over the next 90 minutes in Delroy’s East End flat is a fast, furious flaying and anatomisation of the state we’re in, laid out in alternate narratives from each man and, thanks to the hyper-eloquence of the characters and the the actors’ extraordinary mastery of it, covering enormous amounts of ground. Maskell and Terera slip in and out of different characters’ voices to send us back and forth in time and space without ever losing sense or focus. If there are moments when it feels as if it may be slipping towards didacticism, the recovery is rapid and the rewards more than compensatory.
Toxic masculinity – and in particular the way it renders anger as the only acceptable and available expression of male emotion – is one of the central concerns, as it was in the previous instalments. “What use is it in me, in me, in humans, in us? Why can anger rise so fully formed and indignant?” asks Delroy, desperately, as he recounts confronting the upstairs neighbour, who keeps banging on his floor when the baby cries, and how the moment between talk and violence is bridged. “I lost words. I was bankrupt, just didn’t have the language. A fit of anger that missed my self, missed me, went past me, who I want to be.” It was a line that, for me at least, shifted the dial of understanding.
Race and racism has, of course, been the most pressing concern throughout the trilogy. Here, Michael is slightly further along in his unpicking of his father’s legacy, claiming to Delroy that the pandemic and his little niece have changed him and that he wants to become a better person (“You only care if you literally have skin in the game” is Delroy’s assessment not just of Michael but of the world at large). “Make me understand!” Michael begs – a request that can be seen either as a sign of hope and progress, or as yet another manifestation of privilege. When Michael tries to make physical amends by beating up the neighbour, Delroy remarks too on his white saviourism.
Back and forth they go, in tiny bursts and towering speeches, shifting endlessly and seamlessly between jokes and meltdowns, enduring friendship and fragile bonds, tension and tenderness. All of these are given greater life and power by crisp, clever editing that knows just when to open up the claustrophobic flat with a raised blind on to a tableau beyond, or to shut it downso we might feel the pressure rise yet further. It is a profoundly impressive, deeply moving achievement and makes you think that England might be saved – might even be worth saving – yet. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/23/englands-ultimate-wingman-rides-to-the-rescue-by-ditching-bazball-ethos | Sport | 2024-02-23T15:30:07.000Z | Barney Ronay | England’s ultimate wingman rides to the rescue by binning Bazball ethos | Barney Ronay | For England this was the best kind of disruption. Orthodox disruption. Soothing disruption. The quietly rhythmical paradigm shift. In Ranchi Joe Root pushed the envelope, but did it gently, batting through the opening day with the air of a man reaching down into a deep, familiar place and feeling once again the depth and richness of his own prodigious talent.
Root was in the middle for five hours and 12 minutes, from a skittish morning with India’s seamers finding leap and jag, right through to Yashasvi Jaiswal rolling out some sundowner leg-breaks in the evening light. He batted 226 balls for his 106 not out, scored 48 singles and explored the full range of minutely controlled bat-face glances against the spinners.
‘The best player we’ve ever had’: Crawley’s praise for centurion Joe Root
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It was a genuinely high-class Test hundred, for reasons that go far beyond the skill and concentration involved; beyond even, believe it or not, the end-of-day chat about Mature Bazball, the Bazball now oozing and seeping and gaining complexity, riper and richer in its own bacteria.
There is a theory that Root is the real hero of the Bazball era because despite being an all-time great and former captain he has completely put aside his own ego, bought into the new stuff without question, even when that new stuff is so often riffing on how bad things were under him by comparison.
There is undeniably a certain amount of – how to put this? – bullshit that goes along with the essential Bazball vibe, stuff Root is too steeped in cricket not to occasionally wince at. He has never once blinked or let his levels drop, even when England have lost, and even when his own interpretation of the style has become the wider story.
On one hand playing on post-captaincy hasn’t always offered close to a million quid for every year you can make it work which, as a great man once said, ought to take the sting out of being occupied. But forget the captaincy. Root has been a sensational senior pro these last two years, one of the all-time great wingmen.
For now it was just a wonderful moment to score an unbeaten hundred: batting first on what looked to be a pre-lunch rubbish tip, already 2-1 down in the series and starting to wobble, on the back of a poor three-month run.
It was also beautiful to watch, in a way that brings out the deeper shades and shadows in this format, the kind of innings that lures you into a comfortable submission with its nudges and rundowns. Root rocked back or pressed forward so quickly the length of each delivery seemed to have been arranged by mutual consent in advance. He played straight because the pitch demanded it, doing it so easily and naturally the bat just seems to be an extension of his arms, the movements entirely his own.
The best part, for Root, will be the fact his innings has given England a chance in this game although only a Bazball ingenue would make any prediction to that end. This team is mercurial – which is another way of saying not really that good – but so committed to its methods it will still win days and sessions and hours whatever the final result.
It is of course now necessary to talk a little about Bazball, because even when there is no Bazball, what remains must be defined by the absence of Bazball, the Bazball-shaped hole, and what that hole tells us about the real subject, which is Bazball.
There is a glimpse here of how deeply annoying England must be to play against, because the story must always be us. Watch us publicly reject the idea of practice then lose by 400 runs. But it’s fine because you cannot, just cannot take the good bits of Bazball and then not like the bad bits too! Why?!! Don’t know! That’s just what people say!
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And win or lose we will fill this space, will basically try to recolonise Test cricket by making the most noise, like gap year schoolboys on a Kerala beach talking in a really, really loud voice about how great the locals (who hate you) are, and how much they just love listening to you play the guitar all night.
Ben Stokes is trapped by Ravindra Jadeja just before lunch. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
Never go back. It was that kind of pitch. WG Grace was once cheered wildly at Lord’s for blocking three successive shooters (these were simpler times; there was no streaming TV). Here Ben Stokes was hit on the ankle right in front just before lunch. Either side of which Root successfully disarmed what felt like a tick-tocking, ready-to-blow England collapse.
No Jasprit Bumrah helped, as did putting away the scoop-hoick because it seemed the right thing to do on this pitch; but also, surely, because it’s something he just doesn’t need that often, extreme match tactics aside.
Root just knows how to play these situations, which is basically to be Root, to remember that he was already playing aggressive, winning cricket when he was captain, it was just that the rest of the team couldn’t keep up with him. Perhaps Rohit Sharma could have applied more pressure early on after lunch to Root and Ben Foakes, before a late, vigorous unbroken partnership with Ollie Robinson, who batted with disarming ease. The pitch either got flat, or looked flat because Root damped it down. But this was entirely his day. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/28/fresh-israel-hamas-talks-expected-on-freeing-hostages-in-exchange-for-ceasefire | World news | 2024-01-28T18:58:44.000Z | Ruth Michaelson | Talks on Israel-Hamas hostage deal ‘constructive’ but meaningful gaps remain | Talks on Sunday initiated by Qatar, the US and Egypt aimed at brokering a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas were “constructive” but meaningful gaps remain, a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office has said.
The statement said the parties would continue to hold discussions this week. “There are still significant gaps in which the parties will continue to discuss this week in additional mutual meetings,” the statement added.
Before the talks in Paris, the Associated Press reported that US negotiators including the CIA director, William Burns, had provided a framework for negotiations focused on a two-month pause in fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas.
US officials have reportedly proposed an initial 30-day temporary ceasefire to allow for the remaining female, elderly and wounded Israeli hostages to be freed. This would be followed by a second 30-day pause where Israeli soldiers and male hostages would be released, in tandem with an increase in the trickle of aid permitted into Gaza.
The halt in fighting could, they hope, provide a further opportunity to negotiate a more durable, long-term ceasefire.
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During talks in Doha in recent weeks, Hamas has repeatedly declined to accept any deal that does not include a permanent ceasefire, according to reports. Israel recently offered a two-month pause to the fighting in exchange for hostages, but without guaranteeing a permanent end to the war.
A source with knowledge of the discussions said the current proposal was to use a system of phased ceasefires and hostage releases to build confidence. If each stage was successful, they said, this could produce a clear and permanent end to the fighting.
The location of the latest meeting means that Hamas negotiators cannot be present at the talks. Any advancements made in Paris would require the group’s political wing in Doha to convince leaders of its military wing, plus its top political official in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, to agree to the deal.
Officials from Hamas have repeatedly demanded a full ceasefire and the exchange of Israeli hostages for all of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Cairo previously proposed an ambitious deal for a 10-day halt in fighting in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the release of hostages, and Hamas leaders’ exit from Gaza. The proposal appeared to fall flat, supplanted by small-scale talks to allow vital medications for the hostages into the enclave in exchange for a small increase in aid for Palestinian civilians.
Egypt’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Ahmed Abu Zeid, said last week that Egypt is pushing for a ceasefire but Israel has imposed “unreasonable conditions” that have prevented this.
Burns is expected to meet the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea, the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, and the Egyptian intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, to discuss efforts to free the 136 remaining hostages held by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.
The group met in Poland in late December in an attempt to restart negotiations to free the remaining hostages that had stalled after the release of 50 Israeli hostages in exchange for 180 Palestinian prisoners and a pause in fighting. In a separate deal 23 Thai hostages were freed after Palestinian militant groups took 250 people hostage when the group staged an unprecedented raid on Israeli territory on 7 October, killing 1,200 people.
Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip in the past three months have killed more than 26,422 people, according to the latest estimates from the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
The US president, Joe Biden, dispatched Brett McGurk, his envoy to the Middle East, to Cairo and Doha this week in an attempt to spur further progress on hostage negotiations. Biden also spoke with the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, on Friday night to boost efforts towards a new deal.
Biden and Sisi agreed that “all efforts must now be made to conclude a deal that would result in the release of all hostages together with a prolonged humanitarian pause in the fighting”, the White House said in a statement.
In Biden’s call with Thani, the two leaders “underscored the urgency of the situation and welcomed the close cooperation among their teams to advance recent discussions”, it added.
Other White House officials preached caution. “We’re hopeful about progress, but … we should not expect any imminent developments,” said the national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, at a press conference.
The meeting in France comes amid rising tensions across the Middle East, increasing the pressure on the White House and other negotiators to rapidly find a way to end the war in Gaza that they fear has sparked a widening conflict.
Grant Shapps, the UK defence secretary, said on Sunday that British naval forces were “undaunted”, after HMS Diamond in the Red Sea shot down a Houthi drone, a day after an oil tanker managed by a company based in Britain was set alight while sailing in the Gulf of Aden.
Talks in France also follow mounting pressure on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to do more to free those held captive in Gaza, after 20 relatives of the hostages stormed Israel’s parliament this week to demand action to free their loved ones.
Israelis have increasingly rallied to demand the prime minister’s resignation. Netanyahu has also faced criticism after leaked audio emerged in which he called Qatar’s role in mediation efforts “problematic”.
Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry, said Doha was “appalled by the alleged remarks attributed to the Israeli prime minister in various media reports about Qatar’s mediation role”.
“These remarks if validated, are irresponsible and destructive to the efforts to save innocent lives, but are not surprising.”
If the remarks as reported were true, he added, Netanyahu “would only be obstructing and undermining the mediation process, for reasons that appear to serve his political career instead of prioritising saving innocent lives, including Israeli hostages”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/21/nsw-police-removed-mention-of-taser-and-knife-from-first-statement-about-clare-nowlands-death | Australia news | 2023-06-21T07:57:33.000Z | Tamsin Rose | NSW police commissioner rejects allegation of ‘cover-up’ over Tasering of 95-year-old Clare Nowland | Suggestions of a “cover-up” over the tasering of a 95-year-old grandmother have been rejected by the New South Wales police commissioner, Karen Webb, after the premier was forced to defend his minister’s handling of the situation.
Documents have revealed that mentions of paramedics, a knife and a Taser were removed in the police’s first statement about the incident, in which Clare Nowland was Tasered during a confrontation with police while walking with a frame and holding a steak knife at the Yallambee Lodge in Cooma on 17 May.
The police minister, Yasmin Catley, told parliament that she did not know about the documents until she was asked about them on Wednesday, prompting the opposition leader, Mark Speakman, to call for the premier, Chris Minns, to consider her position.
Nowland, a mother of eight who had dementia, died in hospital a week after the incident.
A 71-word press release, approved by the police commissioner, Karen Webb, was issued 12 hours after Nowland was injured but provided little detail about her “interaction with police”.
“No further details are available at this time,” it said.
But documents released under freedom of information laws reveal the statement was published after police slashed a much-longer draft that included several key details, including the use of the Taser.
The 171-word draft prepared by the NSW police media unit outlined how police responded at 4.15am to reports that an aged care home resident had a knife and found a woman “still armed … in a small room”.
“Police and paramedics attempted to speak to the woman; however, all instructions were ignored,” it said.
“When she stood up and moved towards officers, a Taser was deployed by a constable.”
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The officer’s job being placed under review was also removed.
Police did not publicly comment on the incident again until more than 36 hours after the Tasering.
In a press conference on 19 May, the assistant commissioner Peter Cotter said Nowland had a serrated steak knife in a small treatment room when she moved slowly towards officers and was Tasered.
“She had a walking frame but she had a knife,” he said.
Webb has repeatedly defended the decision to omit mention of the Taser in the first press release, of which she had oversight.
On Wednesday, the commissioner insisted all proper processes had been followed. Webb said the initial redaction was made to ensure the family heard details first from police and that there was no contamination of evidence.
“There is no cover-up and we followed the process to inform that family, conduct the investigation impartially, thoroughly and not taint evidence, [and] get witness accounts before [family members] hear things on the media,” she told Sydney radio station 2GB.
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“It’s important to get clear, concise, evidence early and then we can make statements.”
Speaking in NSW parliament on Wednesday, the shadow attorney general, Alister Henskens, alleged there had been a “cover-up”.
Catley told parliament that a question from the opposition on Wednesday was the “first I’d heard of an earlier, more detailed draft”.
She said the commissioner had been “very upfront” about the process.
Speakman said the premier “needs to give consideration to removing the police minister”.
“She’s clearly not up to the job. There’s a lack of transparency in her approach.”
Minns said Catley had his confidence and refuted claims of a cover-up.
Catley also defended her position and said she had gone to police to understand why the changes were made.
“My office has sought and received that information,” she said.
The incident sparked calls for more independent police oversight and the release of the police body camera footage.
The officer who fired the stun weapon has since been suspended with pay and charged with three offences, including recklessly causing grievous bodily harm. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/24/fossil-gen-5-review-googles-wear-os-smartwatch-at-its-best | Technology | 2020-01-24T07:00:19.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Fossil Gen 5 review: Google’s Wear OS smartwatch at its best | The Fossil Gen 5 is easily the best Wear OS smartwatch you can buy at the moment, and as long as you don’t expect it to be an Apple Watch-beater, it gets the job done and looks the part.
Smartwatches that run Google’s Wear OS software have come in many different designs from various different manufacturers, and work with both Android and the iPhone. But they have long been plagued by sluggishness, poor battery life and a software experience that is behind the competition.
Fossil Group, which includes the signature Fossil brand and many others such as Michael Kors, Diesel, Misfit and Skagen, has been making the best of Wear OS, but often that simply hasn’t been good enough.
Fossil’s fifth-generation smartwatch, the Gen 5, is important for the whole of Wear OS, as its internal workings will also form the basis of all of Fossil Group’s various smartwatches this year.
A watch made by a watchmaker
The Gen 5 hides its 12mm thickness well, and here in the Julianna HR variant looks good on relatively slim wrists. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Gen 5 is a good-looking watch in its own right, with various different colours, finishes and straps available. It doesn’t immediately scream that it’s a piece of technology, which is a good thing.
At 12mm thick and 44mm wide the watch isn’t small, but it looks fairly slim, easily fits under a shirt cuff and doesn’t look out of place on relatively small wrists.
The 1.28in AMOLED screen is crisp, clear and bright enough to see in direct sunlight with automatic adjustment. It’s on all the time by default so you can see the time and notifications at a glance.
Fossil provides loads of highly customisable watch faces, most of which look really good, plus there are hundreds more on the Play Store. There’s a speaker hole in one side of the watch with two buttons that launch your choice of apps and one rotating crown on the other.
As a watch, then, it ticks most boxes.
The 44mm case size is a nice balance between big and small watches, but some may prefer something narrower. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Specifications
Screen: 1.28in AMOLED (328ppi)
Case size: 44mm
Case thickness: 12mm
Band size: standard 22mm
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 8GB
Operating system: Wear OS
Water resistance: 30 metres (3ATM)
Sensors: altimeter, ambient light, gyroscope, heart rate, microphone, speaker NFC, GPS
Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.2, wifi
Performance and battery life
The magnetic charging puck uses pogo pins, instead of wireless charging as used by other popular smartwatches, and charges the watch relatively fast as a result. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Gen 5 manages to banish the issues of poor performance and battery life of Wear OS to the past. Performance is good, if not quite on par with the Apple Watch Series 5, with no noticeable lag or dip in speed in general usage, helped by the 1GB of RAM and newer Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor.
Battery life is also improved, lasting at least a day with the “Daily” mode activated, which turns on all the functions. Put on my wrist at 7am with background heart rate monitoring, the Gen 5 ends the day at 11pm with at least 25% battery left – a marked improvement over most Wear OS watches that struggle to make it through a full day.
The “Extended” battery mode, which turns off some of the features including the always-on screen, lasts more than two days between charges, while time-only mode lasts much longer still.
Charging takes just over an hour via the small white magnetic USB puck that attaches to a ring to the back.
It’s worth noting that while the watch comes with a two-year warranty, Fossil said the battery cannot be replaced, meaning the watch is ultimately disposable.
Wear OS
Swipe over to the various Tiles for widgets such as timers and health tracking. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Wear OS has improved over the last year, but simply isn’t as feature-complete or as slick as Apple’s watchOS or Samsung’s Tizen on their respective watches.
You navigate via swipes on the screen. Left to right for Google Assistant. Right to left for various widgets for things such as timers, Google Fit and others called Tiles. Swipe up from the bottom for notifications and other bits. Swipe down from the top for quick settings, such as airplane mode, volume, battery modes and Google Pay. Long-press on the watch face to change it.
Press the crown in to access a list of apps or go back to the watch face. Swipe from left to right typically works as the back button on Android. It’s fairly simple and easy to get the hang of.
The list of apps is easy to zip through to find the one you want, but you can also pin favourites to the top for quick access or set them to launch when you press one of the buttons. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Notification handling is where Wear OS shines. Notifications pop up from the bottom and can be dismissed, expanded to read the text of emails or WhatsApps, or actioned with the same options as available via the notification shade on your phone such as archiving with Gmail or similar.
You can reply to messages using smart canned responses, your voice to transcribe, or with the surprisingly good keyboard which, while fiddly, gets the job done for quick things even if you’re a bit fat-fingered.
Media controls are also great. Start playing something on your phone and they pop up on the watch to skip track or change the volume using the crown. There’s a dedicated Spotify app too, but it won’t allow you to store music offline – for that you have to resort to Google’s Play Music app.
Popular third-party apps such as Strava and Citymapper are available through the store, while Google’s services are well catered for with Maps, Translate, Fit and others available.
Google Assistant works well on the watch, as long as you have a good connection to your phone for internet access. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Long-press on the crown or a swipe from left to right on the watch face to get to Google Assistant, which will set timers, alarms, reminders and answer questions via voice straight from the watch using the built-in speaker and information on the screen. It works well, as long as you have a connection to your phone.
Wear OS on the Gen 5 is the best it ever has been. But it’s certainly not a perfect experience. The setup process failed once on one of the watches, requiring a reset and starting again. Occasionally the watch disconnects from the phone and the only way to get it working again is to reboot it.
The rotating crown scrolls in apps and settings, except when it doesn’t. Some apps such as Spotify refuse input from the crown, others such as face editing settings or Google Fit only work sometimes. It’s unpredictable enough that you just resort to swiping on the screen instead by default. The list of little niggles goes on. They’re not deal breakers, but each is annoying.
It’s also worth noting that Fossil also will not commit to a set length of software support for the Gen 5.
Health
The heart rate monitor in the back works well, but Google Fit lacks more advanced health data and analysis. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The biggest area of weakness in Wear OS is its built-in health tracking related functionality or lack thereof. Google Fit is the main app here. It can count your steps, movement minutes and “heart points” just fine, it monitors your heart rate in the background occasionally, and will guide you through breathing to destress.
But the Fit app doesn’t do much beyond the basics, not even sleep monitoring. It can track a lot of workouts, but the screens it displays for things such as running aren’t customisable. Using it for tracking workouts also affects battery life, particularly if you’re playing music to Bluetooth headphones while running.
Third-party fitness apps such as Strava, which is simple but effective, may fill the gap for specific functions. Nike Run Club and Cardiogram also come pre-installed.
Overall, Google is miles behind both Apple and Samsung, let alone the likes of Fitbit or Garmin, in features and polish on health tracking and analysis, and Wear OS suffers as a result.
Observations
Swapping the strap is a 10-second operation. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The bands are standard quick-release pin 22mm straps so you can easily swap them, although the black silicone is of high quality.
The pink leather strap feels nice but picks up dirt and grime almost immediately, becoming discoloured.
Google Pay works great on the watch and supports most UK and US banks.
You can take calls on your watch.
The Gen 5 works with iOS with most of the same functionality except a lack of Siri and iMessage support.
Price
The Fossil Gen 5 comes in two versions: Carlyle HR and Julianna HR, both costing £279.
The Carlyle HR comes in black with a silicone or leather strap for £279, a stainless steel with metal strap for £279 or a black stainless steel with metal, leather and silicone straps for £339.
The Julianna HR comes in rose gold with blush leather strap or metal strap for £279 or a smoke stainless steel with milanese loop for £279.
For comparison, the Apple Watch Series 5 starts at £399 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 costs £259.
Verdict
The Julianna HR in rose gold looks better in person than in photos: eye-catching without being gaudy. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Fossil Gen 5 is easily the best Wear OS watch available and bodes well for the rest of the brands within Fossil Group’s roster.
It relegates problems with performance and sub-day battery life to the past, and looks good doing it. If you want your smartwatch to look like a more traditional timepiece the Fossil is great.
But Wear OS just isn’t as polished or feature-packed as rivals from Apple and Samsung. Use the Gen 5 as a basic smartwatch with excellent notification handling and music controls and you’ll be happy. Try to get comprehensive health tracking and advanced features and you might struggle.
Will it beat an Apple Watch Series 5? Not a chance. But one of the Gen 5’s biggest strengths is that it isn’t an Apple Watch so you’re not going to see every person in the room wearing the same watch as you. It’s also at least £120 cheaper.
If you want a good-looking smartwatch that doesn’t follow the crowd and ticks enough boxes to be a replacement for a traditional digital or analogue timepiece, then the Fossil Gen 5 in its various guises is worth considering. Particularly on a deal.
Pros: looks like a watch, not as common as an Apple Watch, works with both Android and iOS, good notification and music controls, Google Pay, speaker, 30-metre water resistance, at least one day’s battery, third-party app support, standard 22mm straps.
Cons: health tracking not as comprehensive as competitors, battery life not as good as competitors, software niggles persist, iMessage support lacking on iOS.
Fossil provides loads of watchfaces with most customisable in elements and colours, but there are hundreds more available in the Play Store. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Other reviews
Apple Watch Series 5 review: the king of smartwatches | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/16/trainwreck-review-juicy-romcom | Film | 2015-08-16T07:00:05.000Z | Jonathan Romney | Trainwreck review – juicy romcom from Judd Apatow | Judd Apatow’s latest comedy stars and is written by Amy Schumer, currently feted as the most raunchily outspoken woman in American entertainment. She plays Amy, a journalist and bacchanalian free spirit with a deep distrust of monogamy who begins to rethink her life after falling for Aaron (Bill Hader), a somewhat buttoned-up sports doctor.
Trainwreck contains some bracingly risque moments – not least Amy’s sex scene with a musclebound lunk (played with cheerful brio by wrestler-actor John Cena) who can’t help outing himself as gay with every grunted utterance. Juicily written as it is, Trainwreck doesn’t live up to the promise either of its poster (a riotous Schumer swigging from a paper-bagged bottle) or its title, however ironic it’s meant to be. Amy isn’t that much of a mess – she’s a bit cynical, gets drunk occasionally, sleeps with a varied range of guys, but all in all she’s hardly more extreme than Seinfeld’s Elaine in her heyday.
Schumer is good company here, but doesn’t play to the strengths of her standup routines, where the mixture of outrage, sang-froid delivery and mischievously cherubic looks add up to something much sharper. Hader is fun, with his cartoonishly angular face, as a gawky straitlaced type in the Jack Lemmon mould. And Tilda Swinton is very funny in yet another “As you’ve never seen her before!” transformation, playing a bottle-tanned, cockney-accented magazine editor – imagine a lightly sauteed Janet Street-Porter.
The film slightly suffers from Apatow’s characteristic taste for improv and loose structure, never quite adding up to a coherent whole. The already controversial romcom redemption of Amy’s inner “nice girl” is a big minus. But just as troubling is the way that Amy, who staunchly declares herself indifferent to sport – the ultimate American heresy – is finally made to join in and cheer with everyone else. Enjoyable enough, and certainly not a trainwreck – it just doesn’t quite clear the platform. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/07/the-20-best-films-about-doomed-love-ranked | Film | 2023-09-07T12:00:25.000Z | Anne Billson | The 20 best films about doomed love – ranked! | 20. Atonement (2007)
A bungled billet-doux, unjust accusations and the second world war drive a wedge between Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy). To be honest, it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but Cecilia’s kid sister (Saoirse Ronan) tries to make amends for having naively destroyed their romance in this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s tricksy novel.
Epic romance … Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient. Photograph: Phil Bray/Tiger Moth/Miramax/Kobal/Rex/ Shutterstock
19. The English Patient (1996)
Swathed in bandages, a badly burned Ralph Fiennes recalls in fractured flashback his wartime affair with Kristin Scott Thomas, and their tragic date with destiny in the Sahara during the second world war. Put your cynicism on hold for Anthony Minghella’s epic romance, skilfully adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel.
18. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)
Henry (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel McAdams) fall in love, marry and have a child – although not necessarily in that order, since he keeps bobbing helplessly around in time, popping in and out of their relationship at random moments. Adapted from Audrey Niffenegger’s bestseller, it is the ultimate metaphor for human connection thwarted by tragic happenstance.
Star-cross’d lovers … Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
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17. Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Feuding families, fast-acting poison, unreliable messenger service: the odds are stacked against everyone’s favourite star-cross’d lovers. Franco Zeffirelli broke with tradition by casting teenagers instead of the usual mature thespians in a very 1960s vision of olde Verona, a vivid riot of mad hormones, mod hairdos and romantic tragedy.
16. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Clint Eastwood channels his hitherto unsuspected feminine side as director and co-star of this deft adaptation of a bestselling romance. While photographing bridges for National Geographic magazine, he meets a housewife (Meryl Streep), left alone on her Iowa farm while her husband and children are away. Their passionate affair presents her with a painful dilemma.
15. An Affair to Remember (1957)
Hurrying towards a rendezvous with Nickie (Cary Grant) at the top of the Empire State Building, Terry (Deborah Kerr) forgets to look both ways in Leo McCarey’s remake of his own Love Affair (1939). And then spends the rest of the film avoiding him because she is now in a wheelchair.
Frowned on …Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander in A Royal Affair. Photograph: Metrodome Distribution/Sportsphoto/Allstar
14. A Royal Affair (2012)
A British princess (Alicia Vikander) is married off to the mentally unstable king of Denmark, but is drawn – who would not be? – to a progressive German doctor played by Mads Mikkelsen. Alas, the puritanical court frowns on their affair and the doc’s enlightened influence.
13. Random Harvest (1942)
Paula (Greer Garson) marries an amnesiac (Ronald Colman) and they live happily in a cottage in Devon. But, oh no! He regains his memory and forgets all about her. So she gets a job as his secretary, hoping he will remember their life together. Preposterous tosh that never fails to make me blub. “Oh, Smithy!”
Mystical romance … Najwa Nimri and Fele Martínez in Lovers of the Arctic Circle. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy
12. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998)
Childhood sweethearts Ana and Otto (palindrome alert!) crisscross throughout their lives in an accumulation of coincidences and agonising near-misses. The Spanish director, Julio Medem, serves up a mystical romance that will have you yelling in frustration as karma comes up with excruciating new ways to keep the lovers apart.
A crushed crush … Joan Fontaine and Louis Jordan in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Photograph: Ronald Grant
11. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
In secession-era Vienna, a dying woman writes a letter to the pianist on whom she has always had a crush. They had a one-night stand, and the cad doesn’t even remember. Unrequited love doesn’t get any more poignant than Max Ophüls’ elegant tear-jerker, with Joan Fontaine doing what she does best: suffering beautifully.
10. Somewhere in Time (1980)
Christopher Reeve plays a present-day playwright who wills himself back to 1912 so he can woo the famous actor (Jane Seymour) whose old-timey photo he is obsessed with. But fate has a cruel trick up its sleeve in this adaptation of Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, derided by critics but lovingly embraced by anyone who enjoys a good wallow and a lovely John Barry score.
9. A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Audrey Tautou is convinced that reports of her fiance’s death on the western front have been greatly exaggerated and scours France in search of her soulmate. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sometimes whimsical but always unflinching portrait of the first world war’s effects on French society is a long way from Amélie. Let’s just say the journey and its outcome are both bittersweet.
A 1950s dilemma … Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex Shutterstock
8. Carol (2015)
An aspiring photographer (Rooney Mara) falls under the spell of Cate Blanchett as a glamorous but unhappily married woman in Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Price of Salt. But Blanchett’s spoilsport husband, child custody laws and repressive 1950s society put the kibosh on a liaison steeped in meticulous period style. Or do they …?
A quest for identity … Jharrel Jerome as Kevin and Ashton Sanders as Chiron in Moonlight. Photograph: David Bornfriend/Plan B Entertainment/Allstar
7. Moonlight (2016)
Will Chiron ever reconnect with Kevin, the schoolmate with whom he shared a sexual awakening on the beach before their intimacy backfired in heartbreaking fashion? Barry Jenkins’ lyrical three-act drama questions the definition of masculinity as it depicts the obstacles facing a queer African American youth in his quest for identity and human connection.
Dangerous liaison … Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence. Photograph: Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar
6. The Age of Innocence (1993)
Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), engaged to the demure May Welland (Winona Ryder), is excited by the prospect of a dangerous liaison with worldly Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) in Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel. But the high society of 1870s Manhattan will simply not tolerate such shenanigans. Meanwhile, both women are so much more interesting than the dull hero that you rather wish they could run off together.
5. Casablanca (1942)
Inside Rick’s ( Humphrey Bogart) hard, cynical shell is a romantic softy, still hurt at having been stood up in Paris by Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). Can they rekindle their romance after she walks into his bar? Or will he sacrifice their hill of beans for the allied cause? Luckily for Rick, Claude Rains is on hand to offer compensatory companionship as a congenially corrupt French cop. Here’s looking at you, Claude!
4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
One paints, the other poses, they fall in love. Alas, this is 18th-century Brittany, and Marianne’s portrait is destined for the Italian nobleman to whom her sitter, Héloïse, has been promised in an arranged marriage. And so it all ends in unbridled Vivaldi, heaving bosoms and a final extended closeup that will almost certainly break your heart.
Adultery and betrayal … Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love. Photograph: Album/Alamy
3. In the Mood for Love (2000)
The betrayed partners of an adulterous couple develop feelings for each other, but fate finds ways of keeping them apart in Wong Kar-Wai’s achey, breaky romance set in 1960s Hong Kong. Maggie Cheung sashays around in tight-fitting cheongsams and Tony Leung turns smoking a cigarette into an erotic artform in a series of dreamy vignettes, propelled by a melancholy score.
Cowboys in love … Jake Gyllenhaal (left) and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Photograph: Focus Features/Cinetext/Allstar
2. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Hired to herd sheep in isolated pastures, Wyoming ranchers Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) bond in a big, big way. They spend the rest of Ang Lee’s sublime “gay cowboy movie” trying to deny their feelings for each other while leading outwardly hetero-macho lives, leading to iconic shirt symbolism and a gut-wrenching ending. If you have tears, prepare to shed them.
Great British love story … Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock
1. Brief Encounter (1945)
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard meet cute at the railway station in David Lean’s great British love story, but end up rejecting continental-style hanky-panky in favour of boring but honourable married fidelity, all of this set in the long-gone days when the middle-classes spoke with clipped RP accents and the trains ran on time. Seldom has English reticence been more affecting. Like Johnson, you, too, will get something in your eye. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2014/jun/03/volunteering-roles-charity-weird-top-five | Voluntary Sector Network | 2014-06-03T06:00:00.000Z | Charlotte Seager | Wanted: musical sea eagle. The five weirdest volunteer roles | Mascot surgeon
Fancy hanging out with Goofy and a menagerie of furry friends? Every year, the UK healthcare charity Sue Ryder hosts the world's largest mascot race at Wetherby racecourse. For this unique fundraising event, a volunteer "mascot surgeon" is needed to patch up any mascots looking a bit worse for wear pre- or post-race so they're in shape for their next public appearance. With more than 80 furry characters competing for the gold cup, this volunteering role is both hands-on and essential to ensure the best mascot wins!
Hands-on … Sue Ryder needs a volunteer to patch up mascots at its annual race. Flickr/PrincessAshley
Chicken knitter
At Wheatfields Hospice in Leeds, one charity offers a rather unusual volunteering role: a chicken knitter. Have you ever wondered who makes those adorable model Easter chicks? Well, at the Wheatfields hospice this is a long-term position for someone to spend all year knitting little yellow chickens. The volunteer then places a Cadbury's Creme Egg inside each small chick to sell at Easter and raise funds for the charity.
The Wheatfields hospice in Leeds seeks someone to knit chicks
Pudding Chaser
If you fancy keeping fit during the festive season, you may consider volunteering for the British Heart Foundation's annual Chase the Pudding event. This rather eccentric fundraiser asks for volunteers to chase a giant pudding across Weymouth beach. If this doesn't sound zany enough, volunteers are also required to dress as an elf, fairy or Santa while they chase the 6ft-tall pudding.
Chieftain o the puddin'-race … the British Heart Foundation asks volunteers to chase a giant pudding across Weymouth beach. Photograph: Rob Melnychuk/Getty
Fiddle playing bird
Do you have a good musical ear? Do you also have a love of birds? You might be right for this next volunteering role then. It involves playing the fiddle while, er, dressed as a sea eagle. Bizarre and inventive it is. The RSPB enlists one fiddle-playing bird volunteer to fill this role as part of their education events.
First position … the RSPB needs a sea eagle who plays the violin
Astronaut twins
How far would you go for your twin? London, Paris – Australia perhaps? Well, how about space? This is where one Nasa volunteer is planning to travel to for an entire year – while his twin brother stays behind to be monitored on earth. This study is the first of its kind, and will allow researchers to chart the effects of prolonged weightlessness by comparing the genetically identical space twin with the ground twin. Out of this world adventures are not for everyone, but if you're feeling adventurous this week, volunteering on a voyage to space may not seem as far-fetched as it sounds.
Full-time … a Nasa volunteer will spend a year in space while his twin is monitored on Earth
Do you know of any weird charity volunteering roles that we haven't mentioned? Or do you have any volunteering roles in general that you enjoy? Let us know your most bizarre voluntary charity jobs by sharing your story in the comments section below.
The volunteering hub is funded by Zurich. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled as an advertising feature. Find out more here.
For more news, opinions and ideas about the voluntary sector, join our community. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/the-lord-of-the-rings-italy-giorgia-meloni-tolkien | Opinion | 2023-11-03T07:00:04.000Z | Jamie Mackay | How did The Lord of the Rings become a secret weapon in Italy’s culture wars? | Jamie Mackay | As a longtime fan of JRR Tolkien, I’ve long felt put out by Giorgia Meloni’s bizarre obsession with The Lord of the Rings. Over the years, Italy’s ultra-conservative prime minister has quoted passages in interviews, shared photos of herself reading the novel and even posed with a statue of the wizard Gandalf as part of a campaign. In her autobiography-slash-manifesto, she dedicates several pages to her “favourite book”, which she refers to at one point as being a “sacred” text. When I read the news this week that Italy’s culture ministry is spending €250,000 to organise a Tolkien show at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and that Meloni will attend the opening, I couldn’t help wondering: why? What is this government trying to achieve by stamping its mark so aggressively on one of the world’s most loved fantasy sagas?
My Italian friends don’t get the fuss. This is everyday politics, they say, a simple branding exercise to soften Meloni’s image. Perhaps. But there’s a deeper, and frankly stranger, side to this story. When The Lord of the Rings first hit Italian shelves in the 1970s, the academic Elémire Zolla wrote a short introduction in which he interpreted the book as an allegory about “pure” ethnic groups defending themselves against contamination from foreign invaders. Fascist sympathisers in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) quickly jumped on the provocation. Inspired by Zolla’s words, they saw in Tolkien’s world a space where they could explore their ideology in socially acceptable terms, free from the taboos of the past. Meloni, an MSI youth wing member, developed her political consciousness in that environment. As a teenager she even attended a “Hobbit Camp”, a summer retreat organised by the MSI in which participants dressed up in cosplay outfits, sang along to folk ballads and discussed how Tolkienian mythologies could help the post-fascist right find credibility in a new era.
Obviously, we’re talking about a fringe movement here. But it’s worth recognising that, with a little imagination, the sagas of Middle-earth do fit pretty neatly into the logic of contemporary rightwing populism. The Lord of the Rings follows the logic of a zero-sum game, rooted in Catholic metaphysics. There are “good” hobbits and elves who fight off “evil” orcs. There’s little space for nuance. While most of us probably read the “good” characters in apolitical terms, it doesn’t take much effort to bend that definition to nationalist purposes. In her book, Meloni does just that. One moment she tells us her favourite character is the peace-loving everyman Samwise Gamgee, “just a hobbit”. A few pages later she’s implicitly likening Italy to the lost kingdom of Númenor and citing the character Faramir’s call to arms in The Two Towers. Ultimately, she seems to view Tolkien’s work as a didactic anti-globalisation fable, a hyper-conservative epic that advocates a full-blown war against the modern world in the name of traditional values.
Meloni’s interest in fantasy, symbols and grand narratives sets her apart from previous leaders. All governments in Italy, left and right, use culture to aid their political messaging. Even so, the current administration seems atypically obsessed with asserting control over the public imagination. One of the first things Meloni did when coming to power was to appoint Giampaolo Rossi, a journalist known for defending Vladimir Putin, director general of the public service broadcaster Rai. The organisation’s remit is now being rewritten to include an obligation to promote “the richness of giving birth and parenthood”. Next, she appointed Alessandro Giuli, a conservative critic and outspoken Eurosceptic, president of Rome’s most important contemporary art museum, Maxxi. Last week, the government nominated Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a public intellectual and former central committee member of the post-fascist youth organisation Fronte della Gioventù, as the next president of the Venice Biennale. In the run-up to the decision, Buttafuoco declared “This season the fences will come down. A home will be given to those who have not had one until now.”
It’s tempting to disregard culture wars as superficial, campaign tactics: polarising arguments that politicians use to galvanise passions in the run-up to elections, and nothing more. Meloni’s actions remind us there’s a serious side too. Over the summer, in a move right out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook, the Italian government took the dramatic step of awarding itself direct power to appoint the management of Rome’s Experimental Cinematography Centre, one of Italy’s most important film schools. MP Igor Iezzi justified the decision on the basis of a need to “modernise” the institution, adding that the left must make an effort to “remove its claws from culture”. Interestingly, the government seems to have no such qualms with the apparently growing number of far-right publishers that are reprinting books by fascist authors such as Giovanni Gentile and Julius Evola for a new generation of readers (many of these publishers, by the way, are using The Lord of the Rings to draw in new audiences).
The question of where this is all heading remains unclear. Meloni’s cultural project is still in its embryonic stages and there is no sign yet of a cohesive state policy. Still, the early signs are worrying. Over the past year, many have bought into the idea that Meloni is a “moderate”. They’ve fallen for her smiles, her sheepish body language, her newly moderated language. Beneath the surface, however, is a deeply troubling cultural agenda.
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Jamie Mackay is the author of The Invention of Sicily. He lives in Florence, Italy
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/20/your-pictures-share-your-photos-on-the-theme-of-flow | Art and design | 2018-05-20T08:00:52.000Z | Tom Stevens | Your pictures: share your photos on the theme of 'flow' | The next theme for our weekly photography assignment in the Observer New Review is ‘flow.’ Share your photos of what different means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box.
The closing date is Wednesday 23 May at 10am. We’ll publish our favourites in The New Review on Sunday 27 May.
You can share your ‘flow’ pictures by clicking on the ‘Contribute’ button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for ‘GuardianWitness assignments’ – and if you add it to the homepage – you can keep up with all our assignments.
GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/19/sex-lies-and-videotape-at-30-how-steven-soderbergh-changed-independent-cinema | Film | 2019-08-19T14:52:39.000Z | Guy Lodge | sex, lies and videotape at 30: how Steven Soderbergh changed independent cinema | “I
’m still making movies about two people in a room,” Steven Soderbergh told Filmmaker magazine last year, suggesting his cinema hadn’t drifted all that far from the sparse setup of his 1989 debut feature, sex, lies and videotape. (So small and sparse, in fact, that the title dispensed with capital letters.) “It seems totally in line with most of the things I’ve done,” he continued.
The Abyss at 30: why James Cameron's sci-fi epic is really about love
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True from one angle, this is wildly off the mark from another. Thirty years have passed since sex, lies and videotape landed in cinemas – a cool, scuzzy alien object relative to much of what was filling American arthouses at the time – and trying to put a label on “most of the things” Soderbergh has done since is a fool’s errand. You have to squint pretty hard, for example, to see the line connecting this sharp, nasty, sensual comedy of bad suburban manners with, say, the neon popcorn swagger of the director’s Ocean’s Eleven films, or his sprawling, brawny two-part Che Guevara biopic. Perhaps more of its minimalist DNA is evident in his glassy sci-fi remake Solaris, his loosey-goosey stripper study Magic Mike or his Oscar-winning drug trade cat’s-cradle Traffic, but you have to overlook a lot of switching in genre and scale to identify sex, lies and videotape (or indeed any individual Soderbergh film) as typical. Two people in a room, maybe, but the size, decor and acoustics of that room have proven as variable as can be.
If Soderbergh has spent a rich and unpredictable career avoiding a replica of the film that made his name, that’s entirely understandable: in three decades, sex, lies and videotape has been so extensively cited and imitated – both in terms of its own aesthetics and outlook, and as an industry business model – by other film-makers that it hardly needs a signal boost from its own creator. It is often all too easy for casual film historians to credit single films as seismic Hollywood game-changers, but it’s hard to overestimate the extent to which Soderbergh’s debut changed the course, or even the definition, of American independent cinema.
Just 25 when he shot sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh had no intention of making something revolutionary. The film, a modestly formed but piercingly observed study of an unhappily married couple who relationship is further ruptured by the intervention of an unnerving, sexually dysfunctional drifter, wears its own influences, from Rohmer to Roeg, on its sleeve. It’s acutely written and beautifully acted, but the kind of talky, rarefied miniature that could easily have gone nowhere beyond the film festival circuit. Soderbergh’s initial plan was to shoot it in black-and-white, until less esoteric instincts prevailed.
Nothing in the $1.2m film, in other words, was especially calculated to meet with the immediately excited reception it got: indeed, Soderbergh expected it might be a straight-to-video affair. But at the sixth Sundance film festival, then a far small institution than the heavy indie market it is today, it won the audience award; months later, selected for competition at Cannes only after another film dropped out, it landed the Palme d’Or from a jury headed by Wim Wenders, beating such titles as Do the Right Thing and Cinema Paradiso in the process. (Not bad for a film that had to be promoted from the lower-profile directors’ fortnight sidebar; today, Cannes doesn’t permit other festival premieres in its competition lineup.)
The prizes were all well and good, though no guarantee of sleeper box-office success; it was when they were bought by Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s then 10-year-old Miramax Films that its fortunes rose. (Other names in the hunt were, improbably enough, action-movie merchants Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson: such was the volume of buzz around this tiny talkfest.) The Weinsteins were already adept in the aggressive marketing expertise for which they eventually became a byword; releasing the film in summer with sexy marketing materials and breathlessly quote-laden ads, they hyped it all the way to $25m at the US box office – a tenth of what Tim Burton’s Batman scared up that year, but a remarkable sum for a film that never expanded beyond 534 screens across the country.
For Miramax, it was the release that finally put them on the map, raking in three times the gross of the company’s previous best performer, the Profumo biopic Scandal, and announcing them as the hippest name in independent cinema. It similarly elevated the standing of Sundance, which had until then been chugging along with low-key indies that rarely broke out in a big way; Soderbergh’s film was the first to inspire heated bidding among distributors in Park City, now annually reported as the true measure of the festival’s success.
James Spader and Andie MacDowell in sex, lies and videotape. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/REX
As “independent film” became a more mainstream concept in the 1990s, these two institutions were the chief architects of that change – yet sex, lies and videotape, the film that made them, wasn’t quite the blueprint they stuck to. Sundance would gradually acquire a reputation for more wholesome, socially conscious or cutely quirky fare, while Miramax, too, pursued the more polite form of prestige cinema that would eventually make them an awards magnet. It was telling that, despite the popularity of Soderbergh’s film with critics and audiences, Weinstein’s campaigning only netted it a single Oscar nomination for its screenplay, while they had far more success the same year with a tour-de-force disability biopic, My Left Foot. Soderbergh’s film was a trailblazer, yet a little too clever, a little too chilly, for that kind of Hollywood embrace. Even Andie MacDowell, the film’s breakout star, was swiftly channelled into lighter, brighter romantic comedies.
Today, it’s easy to point out the American film-makers whose careers were enabled by Soderbergh’s early success, by the film’s low-budget fluidity of form, dark sensuality and unashamed, European-style chattiness: to imagine American cinema without it is also to imagine the industry without Todd Solondz, Noah Baumbach, Lisa Cholodenko or the entire mumblecore movement in its wake. Yet you rarely see any American films quite like sex, lies and videotape being made today, particularly as even indies have grown more sex-shy in the 21st century, and it’s all but impossible to imagine one rustling up $25m at the box office.
Thirty years is longer than a generation, after all. With the Weinsteins now a past-tense force, and A24 holding the prestige Miramax once had, independent cinema is now a different landscape, complete with new leaders, new challenges and new films as yardsticks of success. Meanwhile, the looming shadow of Netflix – a platform that almost certainly would bid for sex, lies and videotape were it unveiled to similar acclaim today – is forcing an industry-wide reappraisal of what an independent film is and where it can thrive.
Earlier this year, Soderbergh released High Flying Bird, a tart, snappy sports-business satire that often boils down to two people in a room, exclusively on Netflix; in a few weeks, his Meryl Streep-starring political drama The Laundromat will play the festival circuit under the streaming giant’s banner. Soderbergh has long proven adaptable in these matters. His brief “retirement” from filmmaking was announced after he made his lavishly cinematic Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra for HBO, while in 2005, one year after Ocean’s Twelve stormed global multiplexes, he released the microbudget experiment Bubble simultaneously in cinemas and on a cable network. It was a then innovative multiplatform strategy that is now standard for any small-scale indie entering the market. Some of the industry changes sex, lies and videotape ushered in are still with us; others are facing new, uncertain revisions in form and function. Soderbergh, somehow, is again in that vanguard. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/22/i-moved-to-the-city-and-became-an-unbearable-food-snob-but-theres-no-taste-like-home | Opinion | 2022-12-22T04:23:57.000Z | James Colley | I moved to the city and became an unbearable food snob. But there’s no taste like home – or a Chiko roll | James Colley | There was a time where I would eat the same meal every evening. I was fresh out of home, working two jobs, trying to start up a comedy career and occasionally selling my blood to medical experiments to make ends meet. I am not making that up but I’m also not explaining it. At this time, dinner was a simple meal I called Bachelor Chow. It consisted of the cheapest canned tuna available, half a packet of microwave rice from the case of rice I’d stolen from the university promo people, and if I’d landed a paid gig that week perhaps something a little exotic like a sauce or a bit of spinach. That was living. Nothing ignites the senses like microwave tuna. Bourdain would be proud.
Now, I catch myself searching for tarragon, blanching my vegetables and asking friends for the ingredients in a dressing or saying, “You’ve got to send me the recipe.”
I have become unbearable. I let out a performative “oooh” when food is dropped in front of me, even when I am at a cafe and have specifically ordered that food and am in no way surprised by its arrival.
Where has this food snob come from? I certainly wasn’t brought up like this. Leaving home, I had a sheltered palate. You see? I use words like palate now – university O-Week marked the first time I’d ever tried Thai food. The idea that Newtown Thai could be a life-changing experience is itself mildly depressing but it might have been my first direct meeting with flavour as a concept.
We were very much a family that had a standard repertoire of four or five meals, each uniquely bad, and would only go out for dinner for birthdays. There was one standard restaurant we visited – a Chinese food place overlooking a glamorous petrol station. When, for my 18th birthday, I begged my family to please go somewhere, anywhere else, they finally yielded and booked a table at the other Chinese food place overlooking a secondhand car yard.
It's just my local Chinese, but it's my favourite food in the world
Joel Burrows
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But there was a beautiful simplicity to this life, one that I do truly miss. When I had finally moved to the city I found myself surprisingly overwhelmed with feelings of homesickness. I’d fought so hard to escape home, it was bizarre to me that I could possibly miss it. But somewhere deep inside my animal brain, I knew that this yearning for home could only be cured by one thing: a bad burger.
My housemates at the time – modern, cosmopolitan university students who seemed to have been born in Newtown High School of the Performing Arts – could not understand what I meant by this or why anyone would ever do such a thing. Who would want a slightly wet bun served in a polystyrene container with lettuce that was already at least a third brown? But that’s what home tasted like. It wasn’t an inner-city burger, particularly with the trend at the time to stack a bunch of weird bullshit on top of the bun and possibly position the whole thing balancing precariously on a milkshake. I did not need aioli. I had not heard of such a thing. I wanted an honest burger made by honest people and perhaps a Chiko roll that had been sitting in a bain-marie for so long there were entirely new species of bacteria living inside it.
Now, it’s the same things that bring me back home. Devon and sauce on a white bread roll. Instant coffee that tastes like a cup of the Murray Darling. There’s something nice about this. Nostalgia should cost less than $5. We should find pleasure in simple things. It’s a nice reminder that becoming a snob doesn’t make you a better person, it makes you a fool more willing to pay $30 for a sandwich. Just because you’ve grown doesn’t mean you’ve improved.
James Colley is a comedian and head writer for Gruen and Question Everything | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/11/boris-johnson-climate-action-net-zero-conservative-party | Environment | 2022-01-11T18:08:04.000Z | Fiona Harvey | Johnson’s political weakness leaves climate agenda at risk, say campaigners | The government’s climate agenda is under threat as Boris Johnson’s popularity slumps, according to green campaigners who work closely with the Conservative party.
As the prime minister faces further lockdown party allegations, and angry Conservative MPs seek answers over energy price rises and the cost of living crisis, analysts fear the government’s commitment to net zero is facing its most severe test yet.
Tom Burke, a co-founder of the E3G green thinktank and a veteran government adviser, said: “Johnson has been the standard bearer for net zero, and lots of people were happy about that. There is now a sustained assault from the right on net zero. They see the prime minister’s political weakness, and they see net zero as a flank on which to attack him.”
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, is meeting backbench Tory MPs this week to calm fears that the squeeze on incomes caused by rising inflation and soaring gas prices will turn away voters, particularly in “red wall” seats in the north of England. He is under pressure from vocal quarters to abandon green measures such as carbon levies, which play a small role in energy bills.
Although experts have criticised the government’s net zero plans as falling woefully short on ambition and funding, Johnson is still seen as more engaged with the climate crisis than any of his Tory rivals and has made net zero a personal crusade, with a 10-point plan to “build back greener”, published after the first Covid lockdown.
He is influenced by close advisers and allies including his wife, Carrie Johnson, who works for a conservation charity, and his father, Stanley, a prominent “green Tory”, as well as friends such as Zac Goldsmith, the former owner of the Ecologist magazine, whom Johnson appointed as a minister in the Lords.
Chris Venables, the head of politics at the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “There is definite jeopardy in Boris Johnson’s weakness, as he has been the champion. But the forces of good are now rallying behind the green agenda. It does help that the facts are on our side.”
Johnson’s main rivals in the cabinet – Sunak and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who are both seen as leadership contenders – have been particularly notable in distancing themselves from net zero efforts. Megan Randles, a political campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “This year there have been more missed opportunities than bold measures by Sunak and Truss. Sunak didn’t mention the climate once in his party conference speech; his spending review failed to kickstart a green recovery, and he is reported to have curbed Johnson’s climate ambitions and hindered Cop26. Truss actively undermined climate action in the Australia trade deal.”
On the Tory backbenches, a small but vocal group – the “net zero scrutiny group” – of about 20 MPs has been courting media attention by blaming gas prices on green measures that they say should be scrapped. Analysts and experts have pointed out that the UK’s overreliance on fossil fuels carries most of the blame, and that insulating homes and investing in green energy at home would alleviate the problem.
Bob Ward, the policy director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics, warned of attempts to undermine public support for climate action. “The growing crisis around energy prices threatens to delay implementation of the policies necessary to make the net zero target credible,” he said. “There is a small but noisy group of Conservative MPs, whose voices are being amplified by the usual suspects in parts of the media, who are attempting to mislead the public about the roots of the current crisis, blaming green energy policies rather than the true cause: wholesale prices of natural gas.”
Alok Sharma, the cabinet minister who oversaw Cop26, also aimed a coded warning at his party in an interview with the Guardian late last year. He said delivering on the UK’s net zero target must be a “focus across the whole of the UK government” or the achievements of the Cop26 climate summit would be “just a bunch of meaningless promises”.
Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister, is also rallying Tory backbenchers to support net zero under the banner of the “net zero support group”.
Shaun Spiers, the executive director of Green Alliance, noted: “Fortunately, a few eccentrics aside, the Conservative party is committed to climate action. Business-friendly Tories are pushing for more ambition, while MPs across the country are demanding and celebrating green investment in their constituencies. Net zero and nature are increasingly at the heart of the party, and Boris Johnson can take some credit for that.”
Any change of direction to reduce emphasis on tackling the climate crisis could also play badly with voters, who back climate action, argue campaigners.
Dave Timms, the head of political affairs at Friends of the Earth, said: “Deep concern about the climate crisis now reaches every part of British society, so the public mandate for the radical action to slash UK emissions is there. The words on every minister’s lips should be delivery, delivery, delivery.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/07/joe-biden-state-union | Opinion | 2024-03-07T11:06:52.000Z | Robert Reich | Here’s what Joe Biden should say in his State of The Union | Robert Reich | Joe Biden is addressing the country on Thursday in his State of the Union address. Here’s some free advice about what he should say about the economy – which is the issue most voters care most about.
Instead of telling Americans the economy is great – which many will not believe – the president must tell them the truth: that most of the economic gains haven’t been felt by average working people because the gains have been going to the top.
Biden should denounce the greed and political corruption that have caused this.
Joe Biden has steadied the nation – why don’t his polling numbers reflect this?
Robert Reich
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He should explain that the biggest change in America over the last four decades – lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of many working people – has nothing to do with “woke-ism”, immigration, critical race theory, transgender kids, the “deep state”, or any other Republican bogeymen.
It’s been a huge upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth.
The nation’s economy has seen massive gains, but the income and wealth of the bottom 80% of America have barely budged while the income and wealth of the richest Americans have exploded.
This change didn’t happen because of the so-called “invisible hand” of the free market.
It happened because of policy decisions pushed by the monied interests – decisions that deregulated Wall Street, allowed corporations to bash unions and monopolize their industries, opened the American economy to Chinese imports, let pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitant prices, cut taxes on the rich and bailed out the biggest banks while saddling working people with student debt and medical debt.
In Biden’s first term he reversed much of this. He negotiated lower drug prices, funded infrastructure that will create good jobs, forgave some student debt, attacked monopolies and protected workers’ rights to organize. He even walked a picket line.
But in his second term Biden needs to tell Americans he’ll go even further.
Mr President, tell us you will:
Stop CEOs from raking in record-breaking 350 times the pay of average workers.
Support legislation linking the rate of taxes a corporation pays to the ratio of its CEO pay to average worker pay.
Enforce the antitrust laws against grocery chains and food processors that have kept food prices high.
Make it illegal for hedge fund and private equity managers to buy up houses to drive up rents when average Americans can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads.
Stop big banks and credit card companies from adding junk fees and charging usurious interest payments approaching 30%.
Prevent monopolies like Amazon from hurting small businesses and firing their workers for unionizing.
Raise taxes on the rich and lower them on average working Americans.
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End corporate welfare – the special tax loopholes, bank bailouts, unconditional subsidies, loan guarantees and no-bid contracts that have lined the pockets of the wealthy.
Stop big corporations from pouring money into politics to keep the corporate welfare flowing. You’ll get big money out of politics with legislation that prevents federal contractors (20% of big companies) from making political contributions.
Appoint supreme court justices who know the difference between money and speech, between corporations and people.
Let Republicans criticize corporate “wokeness”. You’re taking on corporate greed.
Let Republicans obsess about critical race theory and abortion. You’ll protect the freedom of speech of Americans, and their freedom to decide when and whether to have children.
Let Republicans rail against transgender kids. You’re focusing on how obscenely unfair and unequal America has become.
Let Republicans try to divide Americans into warring factions so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone. You’ll pull us together to get that wealth and power back for the people.
You wouldn’t be the first Democratic president to do something like this. On the eve of his 1936 re-election, President Franklin D Roosevelt told the American people that in his first term of office:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.
FDR won by a landslide.
Give ’em hell, Joe.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jul/12/skriker-review-extaordinarily-prescient-caryl-churchill-maxine-peake | Stage | 2015-07-12T07:00:03.000Z | Susannah Clapp | The Skriker review – extraordinarily prescient | She would not be welcome as a member of the Garrick Club. She has no penis, no establishment position and is not big on banter. Nevertheless, the Skriker is one of the primary figures of modern theatre.
As Caryl Churchill’s shape-shifting, doom-wreaking fairy, Maxine Peake rams home this importance. She slams and slides and swarms. She comes on as a crop-haired, grey-clad prophetess, growling accusations. She reappears, whining, as a shaggy creature tethered to plastic bags. She becomes a sleek woman from a southern state, with shades and a cocktail glass, and a clingy, wheedling girl in an anorak. She is a tattered, winking Gloriana, a sleek, androgynous seducer in a tie, and a winsome elf with a teeny voice and gauzy wings.
Churchill’s play is almost entirely female. The voice of its ancient Cassandra is dominant. Its most sympathetic characters are two young women, strongly rendered by Laura Elsworthy and Juma Sharkah. One has killed her baby; the other is pregnant. The Skriker haunts them, tormenting and enticing. The few males in Sarah Frankcom’s explosive production are part of a disordered landscape in which animation means mutation: one who writhes in ecstatic dance may be partly a horse; another has a giant ear sprouting from the top of his head like a satellite dish.
Yet The Skriker reclaims what have been thought as “women’s issues” for humanity. Motherhood may, after all, also affect men. Churchill uses a female voice to express a skewed world. And what better time to stage this? We are in an era of theatrical dystopias. Of dark fragmentary dramas, which dip in and out of underworlds. A few months ago, Simon Stephens’s Carmen Disruption smouldered at the Almeida. Alistair McDowall’s tale of lost souls, Pomona, will shortly be seen at the National and in Manchester, on whose geography it draws. Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath, which also starred Peake, made a claim on the same territory at the Royal Court. The Skriker, first staged in 1994, now looks like the fairy godmother of them all.
It is powerful in picturing disorder. It is bewildering, sometimes maddening in its fecund confusion. It is also extraordinarily prescient. Using fairytale to project hard truths is now common feminist currency; it was rarer 20 years ago. As was certainty about climate catastrophe, an environmental tragedy that here looks like moral rupture, psychic disaster writ large. Weird things are happening with the weather. “It was always possible to think whatever your personal problem, there’s always nature... Nobody loves me but at least it’s a sunny day.” That consolation has now gone.
Everything is disintegrating, including speech. The Skriker’s language freewheels from sense to delirium. It is as if the speaker had a tempest in her mouth that blows the boundaries between one word and another: “Pin prick cockadoodle do you feel it?” It is not an invented language; rather a repunctuation. Her opening speech, delivered in a sustained rush, is almost the length of a short Beckett play and has some of the same force. Peake can’t make its sentences clear, but she makes it evident that, however hermetic her outpouring, it is not all bunkum. It swims in and out of sense: “The baby has no name better nick a name, better Old Nick than no name.” She pulls you into the echoes of nursery rhyme and fairytale. Specially commissioned music by Nico Muhly and Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), sometimes harsh, sometimes gently marimba, also penetrates these speeches.
Maxine Peake’s fairy Skriker with Juma Sharkah as Lily. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Lizzie Clachan, one of the theatre’s boldest design talents, makes a bedlam cabaret out of the Royal Exchange. Audience members sit at rough wooden tables amid the duskily lit action. In a terrific banquet scene, in which huge platters are laden with goodies, one guest delivers a running commentary on what it is to see her own limbs and parts spread out to be devoured. Around the stage, alcoves contain glimpses of ordinary life, diminished to miniature size: rows of sunflowers, bright little houses.
It is extraordinary how rapidly Manchester international festival has established itself. Manchester and Dublin are now the cities for guaranteed festival excitement, not least because the programme is not all one-off fizzing. It looks to the future. The Skriker shows in action one of the most interesting of theatrical partnerships. Frankcom, who runs the Royal Exchange, directed Peake as Hamlet and – incandescently – in her recitation of The Masque of Anarchy. This latest collaboration proves that her theatre will go on provoking. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/feb/11/taboo-recap-season-one-episode-six-tom-hardys-horror-show-gets-ever-wilder | Television & radio | 2017-02-11T22:15:27.000Z | Sarah Hughes | Taboo recap: season one, episode six – Tom Hardy's horror show gets ever wilder | With two episodes until the finale, the wheels began to fall off James Delaney’s impeccable plan leaving death, despair and misery in their wake. This was not an episode for the faint-hearted – indeed Taboo is beginning to rival Game of Thrones for its ability to dispatch characters with minimum effort and maximum gruesomeness. This week’s horrors included a tongue torn from the mouth of its owner, a heart ripped from the chest of a traitor, a drunken husband doomed by a hatpin and the untimely death of poor, curious Winter who only wanted to see the world but who should have heeded all the warnings about poking the monster in his den.
“Go home to your mother. Helga loves you. You’re safe there. Go to sleep – all will be well”
Winter’s tragic death leaves us with the week’s biggest question: who murdered her? James, who woke face down in the mud after drowning his fast multiplying sorrows, clearly believes he committed the deed in a drunken rage. Helga is likely to agree – and I wouldn’t want to be in Delaney’s mud-crusted shoes when she finds out her only child is dead. In truth, why wouldn’t she and everyone else believe that James is the killer? Much of the episode demonstrated both his ability to commit acts of brutality (ripping out tongues, tearing out hearts) and his increasingly tenuous grip on his mind. By the episode’s end he seemed utterly unmoored – devastated by his near-strangulation of Zilpha, without a ship, and surrounded by enemies.
That said, I think the obvious answer is the wrong one. Somebody certainly wants Delaney to think he killed Winter and they made sure everyone else will think so too. But it’s more likely that he passed out drunk, she kept watch over him and the killer chose that moment to strike. So the question remains: who was it? The most probable answer is someone in the employ of the East India Company, who had after all declared war on Delaney, with outside bets on the Crown and the Americans as always. I’m also tempted to go out on a limb and suggest that kindly Brace may not be so kindly. Certainly he had the best access and viewpoint, being in the house, and he’s definitely hiding a whole host of secrets about Delaney Sr.
“I killed him, just like you said”
Bruised and black-clad … Zilpha has finally had enough. Photograph: Scott Free Prods/Olly Robinson
James wasn’t the only Delaney with blood on his hands, as a bruised and black-clad Zilpha finally decided she’d had enough of the drunken Thorne and niftily dispatched him with her hatpin. The body was swiftly disposed of thanks to James and Dumbarton’s cunning fake cholera epidemic, but there was no happily-ever-after for the Delaney siblings. James, haunted by Brace’s revelation that his mother tried to drown him as a child, initially seemed rather less enamoured of his one true love now she was free of her husband. It could be argued that he was only ensuring she stayed safe, but it was also clear that Zilpha had issues of her own – not least her belief that James told her to kill Thorne, a statement that was clearly news to him despite his tendency to converse with her through fireplaces. The Delaneys did eventually give in to their long suppressed passion, but it could hardly be called a success given that James, plagued by visions of his dead mother, nearly strangled Zilpha to death. She’d be far better off in her beautifully decorated room alone.
“Chichester is their bishop, the King is safe, Delaney is a horse and Prinny is their Queen. I think it’s time we started moving some pieces”
Much of the past six weeks has involved Stuart Strange looking infuriated yet achieving remarkably little. Finally, though, our man with a fine line in fury stepped into action. Nor was he messing around – within seconds of the declaration, Delaney’s ship had been blown up and presumably next week will see him arrested for Winter’s murder. Strange’s attempts to hush up the royal inquiry proved less successful as the unflappable George Chichester confirmed what we all suspected: the ship was originally called the Cornwallis, it was renamed the Influence, it carried slaves illegally on board because the EIC had sworn not to trade in them and it sunk because there was only a skeleton crew. The ever-helpful Chichester had two further pieces of information – the cargo hold was nailed down thus drowning all the slaves (a fact which is definitely the source of James Delaney’s slave-related nightmares) and Stuart Strange’s brother just happens to own a sugar plantation in Antigua.
Additional notes
Tom Hollander is clearly having a ball as Cholmondeley, deployer of excellent metaphors. Photograph: Scott Free Prods/Olly Robinson
The story about James’s mother and the attempted drowning made me think of Thetis and Achilles. I’m willing to bet she wasn’t trying to kill him but was performing some ritual to preserve his life instead.
The scene on the boat with the gunpowder looked very much as though they were sailing into the underworld.
I’m rather fond of George Chichester and his sardonic ability to make everyone uncomfortable by talking about slavery.
Not as fond as I am of Cholmondeley, however. Tom Hollander is having a ball with this part.
Nice to know that James’s son has a name, Robert, and the ability to act on his feet.
Poor Godfrey – I can’t see him making it to the end of this series.
Lorna’s confrontation with Thorne cemented her place in my heart. I wish her nothing but wealth, happiness and a stage big enough for her to truly shine.
Most magnificently brooding Tom Hardy moment
It’s a close contest between the fantastically growled “take that fucking dress off now” and the immediate aftermath of James’s failed tryst with Zilpha which saw him sitting alone and half dressed while flicking a lighter in despair. James, we’ve all been there mate, admittedly not with our blood relations, but still…
Most fantastically baroque threat of the week
‘Louder, wilder and more insane’ … the gunpowder team give it some elbow grease. Photograph: Scott Free Prods/Olly Robinson
“Think of it as like adding a baby to a marriage. All was ordered and calm and now there is this thing that demands attention, stops you sleeping, belches, farts, screams and she’s going to make this whole process louder, wilder, more insane, more impractical.” Cholmondeley, deployer of excellent metaphors, explains why his gunpowder team have to stir and stir then stir some more.
What did you think? Can James defeat his growing number of enemies? Will Zilpha forge a new life of her own? And who do you think murdered poor Winter? As ever, all speculation and no spoilers welcome below… | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/19/brian-cox-churchill-wasnt-like-the-chancers-weve-got-now | UK news | 2017-02-19T00:04:15.000Z | Dalya Alberge | ‘Churchill was full of flaws and lived with his mistakes’ – Brian Cox’s latest film challenge | He has played Hermann Goering and Joseph Stalin. Now, after those monsters of the 20th century, comes a portrayal of one of its heroes. Brian Cox is taking on the role of Winston Churchill in a new film, for which he put on 10 kilos, shaved his head and practised Churchill’s distinctive jutting lower lip.
But beyond making “certain physical concessions”, Cox says he was determined not to do the obvious thing and caricature the cigar-smoking statesman by adopting the stereotypical “Churchillian voice”. Cox, a Royal Shakespeare Company associate artist, is the latest in a long line of actors who have played Britain’s most celebrated leader, including Richard Burton, Robert Hardy and Albert Finney.
Churchill essay on the possibility of alien life discovered in US college
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He likened Churchill to great Shakespearean characters such as King Lear, a role he played to acclaim at the National Theatre. “The problem with Churchill is that you always fall into this trap of ‘the Churchillian voice’,” he said.
After listening to rare private recordings, Cox realised that Churchill’s natural voice was quite different from that of the rousing speeches with which he rallied the British people during the second world war.
He said: “I kind of discovered that the Churchillian voice was very much part of his oratory style – something he created. So there’s a bit where I do ‘my Churchill’ … but for most of the film, I really don’t talk like that because he was very quick and much more mercurial in his language.”
As an orator, Churchill would, for example, place a drawn-out emphasis on the “a” in a word like “France”. It was Cox said, “a clever technique”.
The film, Churchill, shot in Scotland, focuses on the run-up to D-day in summer 1944, portraying the prime minister as a man fearful of history repeating itself. Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel assault, brought back memories of his disastrous Dardanelles campaign in 1915, when thousands of young men were killed and wounded. Cox said: “The vision of the beaches is the vision of the destruction in Gallipoli.”
The film will also bring out the role played by his wife Clementine in saving him from physical and mental collapse and inspiring him to greatness. “Clemmie” is played by Miranda Richardson, whose previous films include Tom & Viv, about the poet TS Eliot.
Cox said Churchill, exhausted by the war and illness, was plagued by depression: “Clemmie was his rock. She keeps him on the straight and narrow, but is also quite exhausted by him and by his mood swings. I think he’s full of flaws and someone who lives with his mistakes, and that was a great source of his depression.”
He added: “There was an element of loneliness. He was alone for so much of the time because he was always against the flow. When Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich with his little piece of paper – peace in our time – Churchill didn’t buy it for a minute. People didn’t like him because he stated what he believed. That’s what made it very hard for him. Eventually that amount of rejection has to get to you. But he was proved right on so many elements of the second world war.”
As an actor, portraying both strength and frailty is hard, Cox said. “It’s frailty of spirit as much as physical frailty.” Playing Churchill was humbling and inspiring: “How lucky I am to give persona to this amazing man.”
He is now having difficulty losing the weight, but prosthetics and padding would not have worked: “You have to have the weight. He was not a tall man, but he was big. You can’t be walking around in padding. His walk is very easy: there’s a sort of shuffle about him.”
Other recent portrayals include those of Michael Gambon in Churchill’s Secret and John Lithgow in The Crown, both for TV. Later this year, Gary Oldman will be seen in the role in Darkest Hour, by Joe Wright, director of Pride and Prejudice.
Does Britain need a Churchill more than ever today? Definitely, Cox believes. Referring to Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary and author of a Churchill biography, he said: “[Churchill] wasn’t like the bunch of chancers we’ve got now, who are not a patch on him. Boris Johnson can bleat all he likes, but he ain’t no Winston Churchill.”
Churchill always put the country before himself, he added: “He had a vision, a great heart and a great sense of caring.”
Churchill will be released in June to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of D-Day
PAST LIVES
Richard Burton
The Gathering Storm (1974)
Writing in The New York Times before the drama was aired in the US, Burton said that while preparing to play Churchill, “I realised afresh that I hate Churchill and all his kind.” The BBC banned him from future productions.
Robert Hardy
The Wilderness Years (1981)
Robert Hardy, who has played Churchill nine times, first took on the role for this ITV mini-series. He later described the role as the greatest challenge of his acting career. He spent nine months “listening – morning, afternoon and evening – to 24 double-sided LPs of all the speeches he’d made.”
Albert Finney
The Gathering Storm (2002)
Finney, who stars with Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine, won both a Bafta for best actor and an Emmy for outstanding lead actor. The BBC-HBO film also featured a young Tom Hiddleston as Randolph Churchill. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/10/jack-white-fear-of-the-dawn-review | Music | 2022-04-10T08:00:16.000Z | Kitty Empire | Jack White: Fear of the Dawn review – crackles with energy | The first of two new Jack White offerings this year, Fear of the Dawn was written in the aftermath of intermittent fasting and bouts of staring directly at the sun of a morning. The result crackles with a wired energy that doubles down on his core creative tenets, while still sounding like no other White record released previously.
The colourful, Nashville-based impresario has always favoured discrete sounds as penetrating as dental drills. Here, blue-flaring guitars trade off with squealing Theremins and chorusing keyboards to provide consistent electro-convulsive jolts as arresting as any in his previous discography. Every single released so far, from Taking Me Back to the Cab Calloway-sampling Hi-De-Ho, featuring Q-Tip, is a bop.
At the same time, a half-light suffuses this album in which anything goes, dodging the logic of the day. Songs called Into the Twilight (whistles, burbles, funk, piano) and Morning, Noon and Night (in which White begs for “a little more time” with a lover) underline the liminal theme, while Eosophobia (Greek for fear of the dawn) uses dub techniques, echo, stereo pans and analogue squealing to ward off the inevitability of morning. “No you don’t!” chants White, as though trying to command the sun.
Watch the video for Fear of the Dawn by Jack White. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/21/sustainability-business-revenue-goals-products-services-b-green-bloomberg | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2014-08-21T11:45:01.000Z | Christoph Lueneburger | Show me the money: Curtis Ravenel on meshing sustainability with revenue at Bloomberg | Curtis Ravenel dates his enthusiasm for purpose-driven business to his first job as a program associate with the National Recycling Coalition. “I got very interested in the idea that being an environmentalist need not hurt your economic opportunities,” he recalls.
But it would be some time before the notion defined Ravenel’s career.
Ravenel joined Bloomberg LP in 2002 as a financial analyst for internal operations. He eventually rose to a management position in the firm’s capital planning group. Still, his interest in reconciling environmental issues with business was dormant rather than defeated.
Recognized as a smart manager on the rise, in 2006 Ravenel was invited to participate in a global manager-training program. “One night they said to us, ‘We want you to come up with an idea for Bloomberg, and we want you to flesh it out a little bit. You have exactly 18 hours’”, he recalls.
“I shot out of bed at four o’clock the next morning,” Ravenel says. “It sounds corny, but I saw all of it.” By “it” he means what is today called BGreen – Bloomberg’s internal sustainability plan.
The culture at Bloomberg is unambiguously commercial. It is a business of selling data to make financial markets more efficient – an entity serving money-makers of all stripes. So Ravenel, who is today Bloomberg’s sustainability manager, envisioned an internal effort to reduce resource use that would focus just as heavily on financial savings as environmental benefits, with the cost-cutting accrued directly to the operating groups.
Once BGreen was selected for piloting, Ravenel summoned the guts to nominate himself as its leader. He soon saw that what he’d originally envisioned as an 18-month project had to become much more. “You have to have a full-time, permanent group that constantly pushes the envelope,” he says, because a temporary effort creates only temporary buy-in from business units. “If you’re not a permanent part of the work flow, once you walk away they go back to their old ways.”
To take the sustainability initiative company-wide, he hand-picked team members from key departments in the company, then set the bar high by telling them: “We have to be more professional, more business-minded, and have our shit more together than any other group, because there’s so much inherent skepticism about what we do.”
This emphasis on cutting costs earned Ravenel and his team instant internal credibility and helped build the capacity to take on even bigger game. “Bloomberg is about helping customers make better decisions with quantitative information,” says Ravenel. “Book value only tells a small part of the market cap story. So much is based on intangibles. Sustainability is one example of that.”
So the team set out to “make sustainability performance more quantitative, consumable and actionable.”
As Ravenel made the rounds internally, he brandished his pinstripe suit, his banker’s haircut, and his focus on the bottom line. Over time this “looking the part” helped him move Bloomberg’s sustainability activity beyond reducing the firm’s own footprint to expanding its product line. “Risk bores people,” Ravenel says. “Creating revenue opportunities –that’s exciting.”
Curtis Ravenel, sustainability director at Bloomberg LP Photograph: Bloomberg LP
On Ravenel’s watch, savings from Bloomberg’s internal sustainability successes were channeled from internal risk management to enhancing customer services. Today the company integrates “ESG” data – environmental, social and governance – on sustainability risks and opportunities into its analytical tools for investors, right alongside more established financial benchmarks. The company offers a clean energy sector market intelligence service and a website that serves as a one-stop shop for executives and policy decision makers seeking information and insights on the business of sustainability. The firm’s editorial arm provides sustainability news.
Together these offerings generate millions of dollars in new revenues for Bloomberg, proving that commercial success is not at odds with sustainability. Indeed, commercial success is the primary metric of business sustainability – and nowhere more than in a culture of purpose.
Commercial drive is the oxygen of business. The Curtis Ravenel story clearly demonstrates that commercial drive can move sustainability beyond internal “greening” to becoming a major engine for revenue-generating products and services.
The four leaders profiled in this series – Bob Kidder of Chrysler, Kees Kruythoff of Unilever, Alberto Weisser of Bunge, and Curtis Ravenel of Bloomberg – show not only what leaders can do to build cultures of purpose, but also that the seeds of such cultures can be found in any organization that thinks aspirationally about business sustainability.
Now for an open invitation to other business leaders: what more might you be doing to build a culture of purpose marked by energy, resilience and openness? What opportunities lie at the intersection of commercial drive and sustainability?
Christoph Lueneburger, author of A Culture of Purpose: How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You, founded the sustainability practice and currently leads the private equity practice at Egon Zehnder, the world’s largest privately-held executive search and talent strategy firm.
The values-led business hub is funded by SC Johnson. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/dec/13/everton-arsenal-premier-league-match-report | Football | 2016-12-13T21:50:16.000Z | Andy Hunter | Williams atones for error as Everton come from behind to sink Arsenal | The Premier League summit beckoned for Arsenal but they blinked in the face of Everton aggression and an impassioned Goodison Park. Not for the first time, the inner resolve that has been absent from recent title challenges but Arsene Wenger has detected this season was found wanting. His post-match criticism of the referee, Mark Clattenburg, could not detract from a restorative night for Ronald Koeman.
Ashley Williams’s textbook header in the 86th minute sealed a spirited comeback by an Everton side who had won only once in 11 matches. They were devoid of confidence, adventure and accuracy for the opening half-hour and Arsenal were on course for a comfortable win that would see them replace Chelsea at the top of the table. But then Everton and Goodison roused. Ross Barkley, James McCarthy and Aaron Lennon of all people snapped into a series of challenges and the mood transformed.
Arsenal faded, and Mesut Özil’s woeful defending for Everton’s winner – backing away as Barkley’s corner arrived at the penalty spot – was an alarming sight for a manager with designs on the title.
Marc Pugh’s half-volley drives Bournemouth past Leicester City
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Wenger erred in his complaint over a corner in the build-up to Everton’s winner but was correct to inject a sense of perspective after the game. This was Arsenal’s first away defeat in the Premier League since 28 February after all, their first loss since the opening game of the season and they are in the midst of a gruelling schedule. But the return of a familiar flaw – “You go face to face,” Koeman said after his latest managerial win against Arsenal – will be a cause for disquiet at the Emirates Stadium.
There was still time for a remarkable finale after Williams’s header. Phil Jagielka picked up a second yellow card for pulling back substitute Lucas Pérez and as a consequence the Everton captain will miss the Merseyside derby next week. From the resulting free-kick, with Petr Cech challenging his counterpart Maarten Stekelenburg, there was mayhem as Séamus Coleman blocked from Nacho Monreal, Leighton Baines did likewise from Alex Iwobi on the goal-line, Alexis Sánchez appealed for a penalty against Barkley, and Everton broke but were somehow unable to release a shot on a goal missing its goalkeeper.
There was no time to rue the miss and Koeman, having called for more aggression before kick-off, was rewarded not only with three valuable points but vastly improved contributions from Barkley, McCarthy and Enner Valencia, making his first league start for the club. The Everton manager had claimed his squad were unbalanced and lacking both physically and mentally on the eve of Arsenal’s visit and his concerns were borne out during a poor opening.
Arsenal, with Sánchez’s movement spreading anxiety throughout the home defence, could have been ahead from their first attack when Özil swept over from Monreal’s inviting pull-back. The contrast between the teams’ attacking styles was increasingly apparent before the visitors took the lead. Arsenal played with the composure and imagination of a settled, confident side while Everton again resorted to hit-and-hope long balls to an isolated Romelu Lukaku. They appeared bereft of any other ploy but needed one after falling behind in slapstick fashion.
Özil opened the Everton defence with an exquisite ball down the left and that was the only touch of quality before the ball nestled in the back of the Gwladys Street net. Having dealt with the danger, Valencia overran the ball on the edge of his area. It fell to Barkley, who was sluggish and dispossessed by Francis Coquelin, then to Ashley Williams, who completely missed the ball and took out Idrissa Gueye instead, leaving Jagielka to collect his first booking with a foul on Coquelin on the edge of the area. Sánchez applied the coup de mess. His low free-kick deflected off Williams’s calf to leave Stekelenburg floundering as he got a hand to the ball but could not prevent it sailing in.
Everton bare their teeth at last as Arsenal feel full force of Goodison Park
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Arsenal were comfortable, Everton lacked the basics but with Koeman despairing at Stekelenburg’s long clearances and the crowd restless, the contest was transformed by nothing more than a show of aggression and commitment from the home side. Lukaku drove over, Lennon sliced a decent chance wide and, with Everton on top, Coleman equalised moments before the break. The goal will have realised Arsenal’s worries about losing Shkodran Mustafi from the heart of their defence through injury. Baines swept a dangerous cross into the area with his right foot where his fellow full-back rose unmarked between Laurent Koscielny and Gabriel to convert a glancing header.
Coleman’s celebration – cupping his ear to the crowd – perhaps revealed his annoyance with recent criticism and there was a minor melee on half-time involving McCarthy, Özil, Williams and Granit Xhaka. Koeman could not complain: anger suited Everton and Arsenal, after those early flashes, were relatively subdued in reply. Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade‑Chamberlain were anonymous and it was no surprise when Wenger withdrew both.
Arsenal had their moments in the second half, Özil missing another cut-back from the left, but they were susceptible to Lukaku’s strength on the counter-attack and the awareness of Barkley. Goodison implored its men forward in the dying stages. Williams answered the call. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/12/youthquake-rumbles-to-a-stop-support-for-the-left-falls-among-new-zealands-young-voters | World news | 2023-08-11T20:00:58.000Z | Tess McClure | Youthquake rumbles to a stop? Support for the left falls among New Zealand’s young voters | When New Zealand’s Labour party was elected in 2017, commentators heralded the “youthquake”. Jacinda Ardern had brought a dose of progressive energy and charisma to New Zealand politics – as well as a youthful face for Labour, and promises of transformative change. When the results rolled in, voter turnout was up across the board – but the biggest increases were among younger voters: turnout rose by 6.5% for 18- to 24-year-olds, and 5.5% among people aged 25-29.
Now, New Zealand could be seeing evidence of a move in the opposite direction, with indications that leftwing support among young people could be sinking – a result which, if it holds, would buck international trends. Polling released this week in the inaugural Guardian Essential poll found that among New Zealand’s 18- to 34-year-olds, just 20% were voting for Labour, the major centre-left party, compared with almost 40% supporting the centre-right National party. Support was not being distributed further left – the Labour-Greens coalition accounted for 34% of millennial votes, compared with a National-Act coalition sitting at close to 50%.
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Back in 2017, polling indicated the Ardern-led Labour party had a huge edge with young people. Polling by SSI commissioned by Newsroom ahead of the election found those aged 18 to 24 favoured Labour by 65% compared with 14% for National.
Poll numbers should always be treated with caveats – individual polls only capture a snapshot of sentiment, and the more a sample is broken down into subgroups, such as age, gender and location, the smaller it gets, so the degree of uncertainty grows. Younger age demographics are also more volatile in their voting patterns overall, says Peter Stahel, the managing director of Essential.
“Younger voters tend to bounce around more than older age groups … not just on voting intention, on responses to other questions as well, there’s more volatility,” he says.
Young women retreat from left
Data suggesting young voters were swinging right generated surprise among some New Zealand commentators, and denial from the Labour party. A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office declined to discuss Labour’s policy agenda for or relationship with younger voters, saying the result “doesn’t align with other polls and we have no further comment”.
The Essential findings, however, echo similar trends picked up by Roy Morgan research in June. While the margin was slimmer, Labour was again struggling among younger voters, particularly young women. According to Roy Morgan data, the party’s support among young women was 26% – 20 percentage points below the 50-plus age band – and 5 percentage points behind under-50 women’s support for National. Among young men, support for Labour and National was about even. The same results held when comparing the traditional left and right coalition blocs: support for the left was 10 percentage points behind the right for young women, and about even for young men. Stahel says Essential researchers also conducted an additional, unpublished poll a month earlier, to catch outlier numbers – and found the overall trends among young voters held.
It’s possible a large part of turning tides in the youth vote may be driven by a post-Ardern flip in the voting intentions of young women. In 2021, Roy Morgan found that “Ardern’s strength lies with the massive edge in support that the Labour Party received from women”. At that point, nearly half of women supported Labour (49%) compared with only 28.5% of men.
Young women appear to be supporting Labour in lower numbers since Chris Hipkins replaced Jacinda Ardern in the top job. Photograph: Hannah Peters/Fifa/Getty Images
If the results of the latest polls hold, they would see New Zealand bucking a widespread political trend seen in Europe and the US as young people veer unusually progressive. Analysis by the Financial Times in late 2022 found that millennials in the UK and US were not following the typical trajectory of growing more politically conservative as they aged. Historically, a 35-year-old would be around five percentage points less conservative than the national average and growing more conservative over time, the FT said. But its analysis found young people today were about 15 points less conservative, and holding their course, making them “by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history”.
The progressive shift in the UK comes after two terms of rightwing government, accompanied by economic turmoil and the pandemic aftermath. In the US, while Democrats currently govern, political analysts have speculated that the “Trump effect” is continuing to push young people leftward. In New Zealand, however, the Labour party has governed since 2017 – and held a parliamentary majority since its landslide victory in 2020.
Failure to deliver
The youth vote’s swing away from the centre left could partly be an incumbency effect, says the Green party’s Chlöe Swarbrick – parliament’s youngest sitting MP at 29. It may also reflect disillusionment with the initial promise and perceived lack of follow-through on radical change during the Ardern years, she says. “Reflecting on the last five, six years, a lot of people were initially really excited by the rhetoric of transformation, but it feels like what has largely been delivered is tinkering,” Swarbrick says. While the Labour government made strong commitments to take action on climate change, housing and child poverty, progress on those central issues – particularly housing and emissions reduction – has been achingly slow.
“If you take the poll at its face value, it is that Labour’s move to the centre is being reflected in the loss of their [youth] base,” says Lamia Imam, a political commentator and former Labour party staffer.
The post-Ardern rebrand of Labour has seen the party running on “a much more centrist position”, Imam says. The new leader, Chris Hipkins, began his tenure by dramatically paring back the policy agenda, doing away with or delaying reforms on hate speech, lowering the voting age, and climate policies focused on lowering transport emissions. He promised a laser-focus on “bread and butter issues” and the economy. His tenure – and the battle against his opponent, Christopher Luxon – has also marked a shift away from the political “stardust” and personality-driven politics of the Ardern years.
For young people, particularly those for whom the climate crisis is a central concern, “I do feel like there is a level of deep demoralisation, a bit of despair at seeing that this is not at the forefront of the major political parties,” Imam says. “It makes me wonder if their support is going to National because they truly support National – or is that support indicative that they are trying to punish Labour?”
That overall sense of disillusionment from young voters is coming through in other political-sentiment polling, says Stahel, as 54% of 18- to 34-year-olds respond that “none of the current options for PM appeal to me”.
“That’s a plague on both your houses kind of number,” he says.
Swarbrick says these numbers come as many are weighed down by an “overwhelming sense of exhaustion” in the wake of Covid and economic pressures.
“Perhaps people [are] distancing themselves from politics because that seems to be a really frustrating kind of place,” she says. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/30/malcolm-turnbull-expects-marriage-equality-plebiscite-by-years-end | Australia news | 2016-05-30T04:01:56.000Z | Paul Karp | Malcolm Turnbull expects marriage equality plebiscite by year's end | Malcolm Turnbull has said the marriage equality plebiscite will occur “as soon as possible after the election”, and he expects it to be held by the end of the year.
The comments appear to back attorney general George Brandis’s position that the plebiscite would be held this year, despite Turnbull previously only committing to hold it as soon as possible.
Asked about the plebiscite at a doorstop in western Sydney on Monday, Turnbull said: “Given that the election is on 2 July, we do have ample time between then and the end of the year. So I would expect it to be held this calendar year.
I counsel LGBTI people and know the personal harm a marriage equality plebiscite will cause
Paul Martin
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“But it will be held as soon as practical, as obviously legislation has got to pass through the parliament so all I can do is give you my commitment to hold a plebiscite as soon as we can.”
Turnbull said the plebiscite question “will be very straightforward ... we will be asking the Australian people whether they support the definition of marriage being extended to include couples of the same sex”.
At Senate estimates in May, Brandis said planning for the plebiscite was “well advanced”.
He said the government would not suspend anti-discrimination law for the duration of the same-sex marriage plebiscite campaign, but had not yet decided whether to give public funds to the yes and no camps.
Australian Marriage Equality national spokeswoman Shirleene Robinson told Guardian Australia: “Regardless of who wins the election, the quickest way to achieve marriage equality is through a parliamentary free vote and that should be held as soon as possible.
“Should the Coalition win, we will again urge them to let the parliament achieve the reform, rather than a plebiscite,” she said.
“If they continue with a plebiscite the government should expect that Australians from all walks of life will want us to embrace a fair go and equality for everyone as soon as possible.
“Marriage equality is about members of our families, friends, neighbours and workmates. Backers of marriage equality want to ensure every Australian has the same chances and opportunities in life.”
Why Knot? A spirited discussion about marriage equality, in full – audio
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Labor has committed to hold a free vote on same-sex marriage within 100 days if elected.
At a Guardian Australia marriage equality event in March Bill Shorten said “there are enough progressive Liberals, Greens and Labor MPs that we could have marriage equality before the election if it were put to a free vote”.
The Greens have also committed to have a parliamentary vote rather than a plebiscite to achieve marriage equality.
Greens LGBTI spokesman, Robert Simms, has said “it’s absurd that after harping on for years about a so-called budget emergency the Liberals are progressing with a $160m plebiscite on marriage equality”.
“Australians want marriage equality and they want to see this matter dealt with by the parliament.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/31/the-guardian-view-on-metoo-what-comes-next | Opinion | 2017-12-31T18:56:09.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on #MeToo: what comes next? | Editorial | How many more? Actors, tech executives, politicians, TV stars: the names, allegations and apologies mount. The exposure of the predatory behaviour of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo campaign it triggered, has had an impact even his accusers surely never anticipated. It has forced at least some powerful individuals to at last face consequences for their behaviour. But it has proved even more important and instructive in two other regards.
First, the sheer volume of testimony that has emerged refutes the idea that the odd “bad apple” needs to be removed but everything is otherwise fine. It has demonstrated that this is a widespread and structural issue. Second, the torrent has emboldened women to challenge behaviour that they silently endured.
Women are, at last, being heard. But which women? The questions that #MeToo has forced people to confront – who is heard, who is believed, who wins redress – are skewed by race and class as much as by gender. The very phrase “me too” bears examination: many ascribed it to the actor Alyssa Milano, who started the social media avalanche. But it was a black woman, Tarana Burke, who first used the words to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of abuse – just as the battles of black workers, mostly forgotten, shaped US sexual harassment law.
#MeToo: how a hashtag became a rallying cry against sexual harassment
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The nature of celebrity and the news cycle, the role of social media, and the privileges of race, have cast the spotlight in one direction, and left many of those who bear the heaviest burden in the shadows. A report published by the TUC last year found that more than half of women experienced sexual harassment at work; four-fifths did not report it. (Very few of those who did saw a positive outcome.) But the public discussion has encompassed relatively few of these experiences.
What does #MeToo mean for women who face additional discrimination and abuse as people of colour? For women on factory floors, in care homes, or delivering parcels? For women on short-term contracts and without union representation, or in the gig economy, where bosses can easily deny them work and where abusers may be clients of the business paying them? No woman should suffer socially, economically or professionally for challenging her abuser. But how much harder it is to speak out when the cost may be not only your career, but the ability to pay the rent or feed your children. And how much more likely you are to be targeted when predatory men know that. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights notes: “Women with irregular or precarious employment contracts ... are also more susceptible to sexual harassment.”
The neglect of these issues is not a problem peculiar to feminism, as some imply. It reflects the fact that feminism is not immune from broader social forces. But feminism can be part of the solution. Women become more powerful when they support one another – as Ms Burke and Ms Milano have stood together in demanding better for women everywhere, urging that #MeToo becomes #HerToo. It is what Latina farmworkers demonstrated in writing a joint letter to the Hollywood figures who have come forward, describing their “common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to ... threaten our economic, physical and emotional security”.
This solidarity is especially critical as the backlash begins. Plenty of people want to move on; some because they don’t understand the movement’s importance, and others precisely because they understand its implications. Even now, women are paying a price for speaking out. Much discussion has skipped past the primary question – how women should be treated in the workplace – to fixate on how perpetrators should be treated, without pausing to acknowledge the penalties that victims have already paid.
The #MeToo campaign has proved powerful. But it cannot solve all the problems it raises; it will solve even fewer for some women; and some aspects of it bring problems of their own. It was only ever a beginning. The work of effecting real, widespread and lasting change will be long, slow, unglamorous and exhausting. It will be not just about raising awareness but about improving law and policy, and bolstering women’s economic status. It will depend on measures such as a new international standard on violence and harassment in the world of work, currently under discussion by the UN’s International Labour Organization. Its best hope of success rests on its ability to address the needs of all women. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/26/concern-as-more-councils-in-england-and-wales-plan-to-turn-off-street-lights | Society | 2024-02-26T06:00:19.000Z | Robyn Vinter | Concern as more councils in England and Wales plan to turn off street lights | The county of Norfolk contains some of the best stargazing spots in the UK and was one of the few places where it was possible to see the spectacle of the aurora borealis this winter, thanks to its dark skies unsullied by light pollution.
But the council’s attempts to plunge Norfolk roads into further darkness are being contested by groups worried about personal safety, particularly for women out alone.
The majority of councils across England and Wales have introduced measures to dim or cut street lights altogether over the past 15 years, some saving millions of pounds a year.
Now cash-strapped local authorities have increased the cuts in an effort to plug gaping holes in budgets, with Croydon, Cornwall, Havering and Hampshire the latest to declare plans to switch off lights.
Norfolk council said the cost of running its 54,000 street lights had more than doubled in the last couple of years to about £4m a year.
It has made savings of £15m since 2008 by introducing more energy efficient LED lighting, dimming some lights and switching off nearly 20,000 others between midnight and 5am. It now intends to extend this to more streets and longer hours of darkness after consultations with police and local people.
In November, however, more than 200 students from the University of East Anglia signed a petition to stop further cuts, after 94% of students surveyed said they would feel safer if street lights were left on later.
It is a message echoed by campaign groups nationally worried about the effects that darker neighbourhoods may have on public safety.
The organisation Our Streets Now and the anti-stalking charity the Suzy Lamplugh Trust this week raised concerns about councils’ moves to cut street lights, the former describing women’s safety as an “afterthought”.
There is conflicting research about the effects of darker streets on crime. A study on Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 2022 led by University College London found car break-ins halved when street lights were cut during the middle of the night.
An in-depth review for the College of Policing covering 13 studies, however, found that violent and property crime were reduced by an average of 21% when street lighting is improved.
There is an absence of research specifically on women’s safety when lights are dimmed or turned off, but it is clear there is still a tangible effect.
“Perceptions really matter,” said Dr Anna Barker, an associate professor in criminal justice and criminology at Leeds University who led research last year into improving the design of parks that involved interviewing more than 100 women and girls. “When people feel unsafe … data shows they change their behaviour. And often that results in women avoiding spaces that they feel are unsafe, or at times when they feel unsafe, or not using them on their own.”
She also said street lights were not a panacea and were only part of the solution to making public spaces feel accessible. “Lighting is one intervention. It’s not the only intervention that is needed to make a difference to women’s safety in public spaces.”
Dr Elettra Bordonaro, an architect and lighting designer who co-founded Light Follows Behaviour, which works on outdoor spaces, said there was also a class component that needed to be recognised. Some more well-heeled areas “can afford darkness”, but it would not be sensible to apply the same rule to more dangerous places, she said, particularly in poorer areas. Her work on social housing estates advises more lighting rather than less.
“Sometimes you need more points [of light] to get the right uniformity instead of flood lighting everything like a prison yard,” she said.
Alongside the financial benefits, however, there may be other upsides to reducing street lighting.
Increase in LED lighting ‘risks harming human and animal health’
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Dr Richard Fox, the head of science at Butterfly Conservation, said research on moths found street lights had a “really significant impact”, reducing moth caterpillar populations by more than half in some places.
Moths are vital to the food chain and a key component of the diet of mammals, such as bats and hedgehogs, amphibians and birds. “There are a whole bunch of familiar garden birds like blue tits and great tits, which feed basically only on moth caterpillars,” he said.
“And so if you have a reduction of 50% in your moth caterpillar population, which is what we found under the LED streetlights, then that’s half of the food for these birds gone.”
He stressed that specific research on the effect on wildlife of dimming lights and switching them off for periods of the night had not been carried out, but it seemed that “turning off street lights or any outdoor lights at night times when they’re not really needed by humans would be a good idea”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/08/treasure-trove-picasso-private-photos | Art and design | 2014-11-09T00:05:00.000Z | Dalya Alberge | Picasso’s grandson shares hundreds of intimate family photos with the world | Hundreds of previously unpublished photographs and some home movies of family and friends are to give a new insight into the life and loves of Pablo Picasso. The extraordinary personal archive has been released for the first time by Picasso’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, to Sir John Richardson, the British art historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on the artist and his work.
Richardson, 90, who was a friend of the artist, told the Observer: “It is a mass of hundreds and hundreds of photographs which have never been seen. They’re a revelation. They are of all periods – fascinating when you compare them to certain paintings or events in his life. It opens up his life. It makes it 3D. Absolutely astonishing.”
The archive includes a personal photograph album and images from which the artist derived ideas. Through photography, he was recording aspects of sculptures in development, trying out ideas and documenting their creation.
Picasso with one of his dogs in 1932. Photograph: © Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA). Courtesy Archives Olga Ruiz-Picasso and Gagosian Gallery
Apart from images such as Picasso playing with his dogs, there are countless portraits of the women in his life, including his first wife, Olga, and his celebrated mistress, Dora Maar. “He constantly took photos of them,” Richardson said. “Sometimes there’s a direct resemblance. Sometimes you can see that he’s looking around for the way he wants to paint her.”
The home movies include footage of Olga plucking a daisy’s petals, mouthing the words, “he loves me, he loves me not …”
“That’s absolutely unseen,” Richardson said. “That belongs to the family. I was rather determined to get that. You can feel from the portraits most of all whether he was passionately in love or whether he was completely turned off by them.”
Picasso’s first wife, Olga, in his studio in 1917. Photograph: © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
There are numerous stories of Olga, whose life story Richardson describes as “sad”. “Picasso fell madly in love with her when she was a Diaghilev dancer. She turned out to be rather neurotic. It ended badly. She didn’t exactly go crazy, but she became a very wounded woman.”
Some of the most romantic images include pictures of Picasso’s courtship of Olga in Spain and Italy – “he was very proud of her, she was very beautiful”, Richardson said. They contrast dramatically with later photographs. In one she appears in the foreground dressed impeccably. In the background, not by chance, the studio door is open, revealing a bust of Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. “Poor Olga is looking tired but elegant,” said Richardson.
Richardson is the author of an acclaimed three-volume biography, A Life of Picasso, and is now working on the fourth. Appointed Slade professor of art at Oxford in 1995 and knighted in 2012, he was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.
He describes the photographs as “a revelation”. They show the relationship “between the subject and the artist, between the model and the image on the canvas,” he said.
Richardson has selected some of the photographs – alongside paintings, drawings and sculptures from public and private collections – for a major exhibition, Picasso and the Camera, showing at the Gagosian Gallery in New York until 3 January. The exhibition explores how Picasso used photography not only as a source of inspiration, but as an integral part of his studio practice.
Asked why the photographs have not been released until almost 40 years after Picasso’s death, Richardson said: “I am very close to Bernard, the one legitimate grandson. Bernard’s passionate about photography. It was really as a result of conversations with him. He told me he had literally hundreds of unpublished photographs and that he would make them available.”
Olga, who was a Diaghilev dancer, taken in the summer of 1925. Photograph: © Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA). Courtesy Archives Olga Ruiz-Picasso and Gagosian Gallery | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/apr/23/terence-frisby-obituary | Stage | 2020-04-23T17:19:09.000Z | Michael Coveney | Terence Frisby obituary | The actor and playwright Terence Frisby, who has died aged 87, wrote There’s a Girl in My Soup, the longest running comedy in the history of the West End until it was overtaken by Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife; it opened at the Globe in 1966 starring Donald Sinden as a middle-aged celebrity chef embroiled in a swinging 60s tug-of-love triangle with the young girlfriend (played memorably by Barbara Ferris) of a middle-class hippy, and closed at the Comedy more than six years later.
The social significance of the piece was entirely traduced in the 1970 movie version starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, but Frisby had written a “play for today” that its producer, Michael Codron, champion of Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn and Simon Gray, defined as a “bridge play” between the old world of theatre and the new (this was the play that made his whole West End operation commercially viable). Sinden took the play’s famous “chat up” catchphrase, “My God, but you’re lovely”, and improvised, repeating it as his own epitaph, alone with his looking glass, as the curtain fell.
Frisby had learned how to write and construct plays as an actor in rep and had been influenced by the whirlwind impact of John Osborne and Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in 1956. He gave a modern twist to the Strindbergian obsession with matters of the heart, and sex, that ran through all his writing, though he never repeated the success of Soup.
Jon Pertwee, left, Donald Sinden and Barbara Ferris in rehearsals for There’s a Girl in My Soup in 1966. Photograph: Beverley Goodway/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
His towering achievement was his book Outrageous Fortune (1998), a bitterly enthralling account of his 15-year legal battle following his divorce in 1971 from Christine Vecchione, a photographic model; it was addressed to their son, Dominic, who grew up to be a writer and comedian, and whose custody he had contested along with the financial terms of the separation.
The only winners in the case were the lawyers, and Frisby reserved his highest scorn for them as the wrong sort of people to be involved in marital crises. He had not helped his own case by returning to Britain after several years in a French tax haven – the consequence of Soup’s success – and the admission on both sides that this was an “open” marriage. Frisby really did land in the soup of a different and smothering consistency. What a play all this would have made as a West End farce, or tragedy.
Terence Frisby outside court during his divorce and child custody battle, 1971, which he chronicled in the book Outrageous Fortune. Photograph: Express/Getty Images
He did not so much mishandle his sudden wealth as mismanage it, but there was something honest and endearing about his collapse, and he never stopped working, and in many interesting directions. He acted in Osborne’s A Sense of Detachment at the Royal Court in 1972, and in Barry Reckord’s sexually explicit X – just him and a nude female actor – in 1974; he wrote a television comedy series for David Jason, Lucky Feller, in 1976, and a second West End play (though not a successful one), Rough Justice, in 1994 in which Martin Shaw as a liberal-minded journalist on trial at the Old Bailey for allegedly murdering his disabled child was given the third degree by Diana Quick’s prosecuting counsel.
Born in New Cross, south-east London, Terence was the second son of William Frisby, a railwayman, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Casely), a musician. On the outbreak of the second world war, Terence and his brother, Jack, were evacuated to Dobwalls, near Liskeard, in Cornwall. He memorialised the experience in an award-winning radio play and the 2009 book based on his own 2004 musical, Kisses on a Postcard, which was revived to some critical acclaim – but no West End “takers” – at the Queen’s theatre, Barnstaple, in 2011.
Returning to London, he studied at Dartford grammar school and left, aged 16, to take up an apprenticeship in tailoring. He stuck at that trade for six years before deciding to be an actor, and paid his way through the Central School of Speech and Drama as a factory hand, omelette chef, chauffeur and Hammersmith Palais bouncer.
From 1957 to 1966 he worked as an actor and director in rep under the name Terence Holland, writing his first play, The Subtopians, an Osborne-ian study of domestic tensions in suburbia, for the Bromley rep in 1962; Codron facilitated its London presentation at the Arts theatre in 1964, with a cast led by Bill Fraser, but it was only a moderate success, and Frisby lost his investment (his own money). Codron, however, told him to send him his next play, which he promised to produce. And he did. It was There’s a Girl in My Soup.
Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn in the film version of There’s a Girl in My Soup, 1970. Photograph: Columbia/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
By now Frisby was writing and acting in television, and his next stage play, The Bandwagon (1969), at the Mermaid theatre, starring Peggy Mount as the matriarch of a family where every woman was pregnant, came about because the BBC, who had commissioned it for television, would not countenance the line – which Frisby refused to cut – “My friend Sylve told me it was safe standing up.” The play never reached the West End.
Nor did It’s All Right If I Do It (1977), also at the Mermaid, though, reworked, it was the source of another ITV sitcom, That’s Love (1988-92), starring Jimmy Mulville and Diana Hardcastle in a middle-class wedlock chat between a tax lawyer and a liberated interior designer extended over four series.
Frisby was someone who used every aspect of his private life in his writing, and he was a dedicated recycler of his own material. He retained a capacity to surprise, appearing with the outrageous Ken Campbell Road Show in the early 70s; playing the lead in a West End revival of Ben Travers’ great farce Rookery Nook at Her Majesty’s in 1979; and producing in the early 80s a UK tour of Mary O’Malley’s coruscating Once a Catholic and a West End season of Woza Albert, from the Market theatre, Johannesburg, in which Christ returns to earth in an apartheid-riven South Africa.
He is survived by Dominic.
Terence Frisby, actor and playwright, born 28 November 1932; died 22 April 2020 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/09/twilight-saga-breaking-dawn-dvd-kermode | Film | 2013-03-09T18:00:01.000Z | Mark Kermode | Mark Kermode's DVD round-up | With author Stephenie Meyer's bodysnatching romp The Host due in cinemas shortly, and the underrated Beautiful Creatures sadly failing to fill the Twi-hard gap, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012, EntertainmentOne, 12) ships up on disc alongside the boxed set The Twilight Saga – The Complete Collection. The last time I defended Bella, Edward and Jacob in these pages, it provoked a barrage of Guardianista messageboard abuse, so let me say that if you're not already on board, there's nothing here for you – just move along. For everyone else, the second part of this final instalment finds safe pair of hands Bill Condon (who provides a commentary track) having more campy fun than he did in Part 1, with Kristen Stewart's long-suffering heroine finally growing a set of vampire teeth and taking command of centre stage.
Having wrestled straight-facedly with the all but insurmountable narrative conundrums of Meyer's source (the bonkers fourth book is a narrative nightmare, frankly), Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg solve the anticlimax issue with an audacious, Dallas-style device that will have fans gasping, laughing, groaning and generally WTF?-ing all at the same time. Managing to have its bloody cake and eat it, the film plays the novel's talky resolution off against scenes of battlefield dismemberment, blending spectacle and speculation to pleasingly ripe and intentionally outrageous effect. Admittedly there's nothing here to rival the visual style and narrative cohesion of David Slade's Eclipse, which remains the most satisfying episode of the saga. But it's all worth it for the sight (and sound) of Michael Sheen's maniacal cackle, which remains a spine-tinglingly peculiar treat.
The Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos's Oscar-nominated 2009 oddity Dogtooth was a bitingly satirical tale about a controlling father who raises his children to believe that beyond their garden fence lies a dark and terrifying abyss. Balancing astute social commentary with pointedly absurd tragicomedy, this twisted gem was endlessly intriguing and weirdly engaging. The same cannot be said of Alps (2011, Artificial Eye, 15), which is altogether more arch and alienating – although presumably that's the intention.
The action (or rather the series of disconnected set pieces) centres on an insular group who target the recently bereaved with the offer of "stand-ins" – substitutes who studiously, yet clumsily, replay the role of the deceased to ease and normalise the sudden absence of loss. It's a promisingly cracked idea, with a complex rehearsal and audition process providing opportunities for Lanthimos's precisely choreographed and tortuously mannered physical/visual tableaux mourants. But unlike its predecessor, the mortuary-cold air serves ultimately to distance us from the drama, undercutting any potential emotional clout, rendering this less engrossing than impenetrable.
After the brilliant but neglected The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, director Andrew Dominik reconvenes with leading man Brad Pitt for Killing Them Softly (2012, Entertainment, 18), a stripped-to-the-bone hitman thriller adapted from George V Higgins's novel Cogan's Trade. Pitt is lethal as Jackie, a hired gun who despises the whimpering of his victims, and who is enlisted to clean up after someone knocks over a mob card game, thereby destabilising the underworld marketplace.
More obsessed with the collapse of the American economy and the political squirming it produces (television news coverage burbles incessantly in the background, cost-cutting inflects even the murderer's trade) than any underworld glamorisation, this presents its protagonists as bottom-rung flotsam – dumb, obnoxious and poisonously dispossessed. It's astonishingly bleak and cynical fare, the scabrous dialogue genuinely shocking (particularly in its depiction of impotent male rage and misogyny) but presented with enough grim wit to allow the knife to slip in gently.
Although still most celebrated for 1999's Beau Travail, the outstanding title from The Claire Denis Collection (Artificial Eye, 2013, 15) is arguably 2009's White Material, boasting a typically barnstorming performance from Isabelle Huppert as a French plantation owner caught in the changing tide of African history. Other titles include Nenette and Boni and the career-making Chocolat. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/dec/05/bill-murray-five-best-moments-st-vincent | Film | 2014-12-05T15:13:40.000Z | Tshepo Mokoena | Bill Murray: five best moments | As an actor, Bill Murray seems to exist on a separate plane, somewhere beyond Hollywood’s usual ego-stroking circle jerk. Notoriously hard to pin down for interviews, and partial to pulling the odd prank on fans before scurrying away, he’s built a phenomenal career since cutting his comedic teeth on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. He’s starring in St Vincent, out in UK cinemas this week, so we’re burdening ourselves with the task of picking his five best performances to date. Join in below the line with the roles you’d have chosen.
Rushmore
It would be easy to fill this list solely with Murray’s appearances in Wes Anderson films. For the sake of fairness, we’ll stick to his turn as world-weary business owner Herman Blume, who strikes up an unlikely bond with prodigal student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). The film marked the launch of Murray’s “second career” in indie film, earned him several American critics’ awards, and featured a healthy number of British invasion-themed music montages.
Groundhog Day
Grumpy and slightly dead-eyed Murray sometimes feels like the best Murray – and his role as eternally unimpressed meteorologist Phil Connors is testament to that. He brought a dark humour to the Harold Ramis film, straddling both fantasy and comedy. He can take some credit for the film’s 2006 addition to America’s National Film Registry, filed in the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Caddyshack
In what was meant to be a bit-part in this outrageously silly sports comedy, Murray’s role as gopher-hunting golf course groundskeeper Carl Spackler grew into a sub-plot centrepiece. Murray improvised the bulk of his lines, fresh off his Saturday Night Live job in New York, and brought an unlikely character – a gopher hand puppet – into a more significant role in the story.
Lost in Translation
Murray’s turn as listless, greying celebrity Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 critically acclaimed hit introduced him to a whole new audience of indie-romance fans. He served up melancholy, introspection and wonderfully executed realism alongside Scarlett Johansson – and no, we have no further intel on what Murray whispered into Johansson’s ear at the end of the film. Sorry.
Ed Wood
Murray didn’t play the lead in Tim Burton’s black-and-white 1990 biopic, but he stole the show. As Bunny Breckinridge, it only took one stoic sing-song to Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be) and a brief monologue on narrowly escaping a dodgy sex reassignment surgery in Mexico for him to make his mark. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/08/artists-urged-shrug-off-brexit-blues-cross-channel-project | Politics | 2021-02-08T16:42:00.000Z | Kim Willsher | Artists urged to shrug off Brexit blues in cross-Channel project | Artists on both sides of the Channel are being encouraged to beat the Brexit blues in a project exploring the new relationship between the UK and France.
I Love You, Moi Non Plus aims to highlight how the arts across all disciplines from painting, illustration, photography, music and writing can break down the borders thrown up by Britain’s departure from the EU.
A number of celebrities including Brian Eno, Ai Weiwei, Stella McCartney, Jean Paul Gaultier, Tamara Rojo of the English National Ballet and the British contemporary artist Bob and Roberta Smith have already agreed to contribute their interpretations of what the British-French relationship means to them.
However, the organisers are keen for the well known to serve as inspiration for everyone else to express themselves.
A piece by the French artist Anne-Lise Coste. Photograph: Anne-Lise Coste
“In response to Brexit and the new borders now in place, the project seeks to highlight how art and creativity can maintain connections between communities across the Channel, unifying voices from across Britain and the EU,” said a spokesperson for the Somerset House arts centre, one of the project’s partners along with the fashion chain Dover Street Market.
I Love You, Moi Non Plus – inspired by Serge Gainsbourg’s 1969 hit with Jane Birkin – echoes last year’s lockdown competition inspired by David Hockney called Hope in Spring, dreamed up by Ruth Mackenzie, the chair of the London Arts Council.
Mackenzie is also involved in this latest project, which she said aimed to remind people that Brexit was more than “an economic catastrophe”.
“Art provides links between us that we really need right now,” she said. “But artists have had no voice in these [Brexit] discussions. As in any divorce you have to pay attention not just to the economics, but the emotional bedrock.”
Brian Eno’s image merges the union flag and the French tricolour. Photograph: Brian Eno
Among the early entries is a 2012 film by the Chinese artist Ai called Learning to Sing the Grass Mud Horse Song, which highlights how censorship and lack of freedom resonates with European and British artists who can no longer move freely between the UK and the continent.
The music producer and artist Eno has created an image merging the union flag and the tricolour, while the French director Mohamed El Khatib’s offering follows the red, white and blue theme with school lines reading Je ne dois pas dire du mal de Boris Johnson (I must not say bad things about Boris Johnson).
Théo Recoules of the Sabir agency, which is coordinating the project, said it was hoped the famous artists would inspire contributions from “ordinary citizens”.
“We want to hear from anyone, anywhere who have something to say about the unique relationship between France and Britain,” Recoules said. “It’s open to all and we hope the entries will be as different as possible. Since 2016, the subject of Brexit has been treated exclusively by politicians in London and Brussels, while we citizens had very little voice to express ourselves.”
Work can be submitted by sharing it on social media under the hashtags #ILoveYouMoiNonPlus, #ILYMNP and #LifeAfterBrexit, or on the Dover Street Market website before the 25 February deadline.
All submissions will be published online and the best will be chosen for an exhibition to be held in Paris and London when coronavirus restrictions are lifted.
“I believe there is an artist in everyone, and like the David Hockney project it’s about finding that artist,” Mackenzie said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/may/21/14-best-hidden-gems-on-xbox-game-pass | Games | 2021-05-21T13:00:32.000Z | Keza MacDonald | 14 of the best hidden gems on Xbox Game Pass | Call of the Sea
A 1930s mystery set on a sun-saturated yet eerie island full of mysteries and puzzles. This is a relatively short game that pulls you effortlessly through its story, about a curse-afflicted woman who follows her explorer husband on an expedition from which nobody has returned. It’s slower-paced, beautiful to look at and unexpectedly introspective. Read a full review.
Beautiful to look at … Call of the Sea. Photograph: Raw Fury
Celeste
Guide an endearing pink-haired woman up a forbidding mountain and through an encroaching mental health crisis in this acclaimed indie platformer. It’s tough as nails but makes you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you get through it, a game-design achievement that fits very nicely with the game’s themes of getting to know yourself and overcoming self-doubt.
Control
No one makes big, ambitious genre adventures like Remedy Entertainment, creator of Max Payne and Alan Wake and effectively the Christopher Nolan of video games. Control is the team’s latest, a quasi-supernatural thriller in which government agents battle an astral entity know as The Hiss. The storytelling, combat mechanics and visual imagination are as strong as ever. Read a full review.
Dead by Daylight
Nightmarish … Dead by Daylight. Photograph: Behaviour Interactive
It’s been around for almost five years, but this co-operative online horror game is still a blast with a bunch of friends. Four participants are the survivors trapped in a series of nightmarish domains, working together to open the exit doors and escape, while a fifth player takes on the role of a sadistic murderer hunting them down. Tense, thrilling and fun. Read a full review.
Dead Cells
Testing … Dead Cells. Photograph: Motion Twin
If Bafta award winner Hades has ignited your interest in the roguelike genre, it’s definitely worth getting stuck into Dead Cells, a 2D scrolling hack-’em-up set in an endlessly regenerating castle. Excellent controls, searing visuals and a difficulty level that’ll test you to the limits and quite possibly beyond. Read a full review.
Evil Within
Recent Resident Evil games have revived interest in video game horror, so now is the time to discover this gruesomely effective chiller from Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil 1 and 4. Its a classic third-person jump-scare fest, following Sergeant Sebastian Castellanos as he sets out to investigate a mass murder at the Beacon mental hospital, but then descends into a monster-filled Freudian hellscape. Read a full review.
The Gardens Between
Cosy … The Gardens Between. Photograph: Voxel Agents
Two childhood friends explore gorgeous dioramas comprised of their memories and experiences together in this puzzle game, where you scrub backwards and forwards in time to get them safely through. Whether you’re rewinding giant tapes, playing games on old giant TVs or clambering across a giant sofa, it feels both cosy and interesting. Read a full review.
Hollow Knight
If you want to enjoy some of the finest animation and most exquisite 2D game design of recent years, Hollow Knight is where to go. A slowly unfolding, mysterious and inexplicably alluring adventure that takes you to the subterranean depths of a decaying bug-world. It’s spooky, but not scary; challenging, but not off-putting.
Knights and Bikes
Nostalgic exploration in Cornwall … Knights and Bikes. Photograph: Foam Sword
A gorgeous, hand-painted action adventure set on a mysterious island off the coast of Cornwall in the 1980s. Channelling Stranger Things, The Goonies and classic Japanese role-playing games, Knights and Bikes provides a weekend of nostalgic exploration and puzzle-solving for one or two players. Read a full review.
Morkredd
A two-player puzzle adventure where you play as a pair of shades trying to escape a monochrome Lovecraftian nightmare realm. You roll around a big ball full of light, and, if you get too far away from it or wander into the shadow that it casts, you disappear. This means you must be careful not to accidentally evaporate whoever you’re playing with right in the middle of a complex puzzle – it can be fiddly, but is quite unlike anything else you’ll play this year.
NieR: Automata
Stylish twists … NieR: Automata. Photograph: Square Enix
Set on a devastated planet amid a cosmically destructive proxy war, NieR: Automata is a transgressive action role-playing game that twists and subverts genre tropes, requiring players to finish multiple times to get the whole story. A superbly stylish and clever title from cult developer Platinum Games. Read more.
Observation
Cool twist in space … Observation. Photograph: Epic Games
You’re stuck on a space station, floating in the void, and things are getting very weird. But you’re not the astronaut in this creepy sci-fi game – you’re the AI that runs the space station itself, looking through cameras, opening doors and trying to fix circuits to keep things together. A cool twist on extraplanetary horror, influenced by some of the most innovative sci-fi films of the last decade. Read a full review.
Streets of Rage 4
Mega Drive fans have no excuse not to download this modern addition to Sega’s famed series of backstreet brawlers. Up to four players stomp through the side-scrolling alleyways, picking up weapons and bashing gangsters. It’s a brash, frenetic ode to the glory years of 16bit console gameplay. Read more.
Wilmot’s Warehouse
Inventory fun … Wilmot’s Warehouse. Photograph: Finji
A puzzle game about running an efficient stock management system does not immediately sound enticing, but this is a beautifully designed game, and working out how to store and quickly retrieve goods as orders come rushing in is curiously fulfilling. No, seriously. Give it a try, you’ll see what we mean. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/16/secret-life-of-walter-mitty-review | Film | 2013-10-16T06:34:00.000Z | Tom Shone | The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: New York film festival - first look review | Watch the trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 20th Century Fox
Ben Stiller's new film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which he both directed and stars in, is handsome to look at, sometimes funny, and just a little weird. The funny bits all come early, courtesy of James Thurber's original short story, whose comic conceit still chugs along as reliably as a Mini Coupe after all these years. Thurber takes only two-and-a-half pages for Mitty to imagine himself out-flying a storm, performing life-saving surgery, and bombing German ammunition dumps, all the while making it only as far as his local supermarket to buy puppy biscuits — an image of a dreamer softly defeated. The story has always represented something of a false Grail for Hollywood, where they love the sound of all that dreaming, but are less enamoured by the prospect of its defeat. And so it proves here.
In Stiller's version, Mitty is a photographic archivist for Time magazine who dreams of a life beyond his cubicle — saving children from burning buildings, or bursting through ice-flows, blue eyes boring into his co-worker crush Cheryl (Kristin Wiig).
As a comedian Stiller comes most zingingly alive at the prospect of male vanity, which may be why Zoolander remains one of the sacred texts of modern American cinema, not least for Terrence Malick, who rewatches it with the same religious zeal the rest of us rewatch Tree of Life, Days of Heaven and Badlands. 'Tis a strange world. Similarly inspired is the casting of Sean Penn as the magazine's star photo-journalist, Sean O' Connell, bullishly muscling his way through warzones like the voice of Mitty's self-reproach made manifest. The pairing of the two stars has a delicious perpendicularity. If Ben Stiller is intent on beating himself up for not being somebody — then that somebody, you figure, is surely going to be Sean Penn.
Working with Jane Campion's cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, Stiller films himself small in the frame, frequently viewed from above, more mouse than man, scurrying through the vast modernist spaces of the Time-Life building like the long lost cousin of Jacques Tati in Playtime, whose sleek, slate-grey production design this movie meticulously evokes — a haunting talisman. Playtime was Tati's last film, a ruinously expensive bid for respectability that gave off the empty rattle of perfectionism — pratfalls echoing tinnily through lavish, empty sets. Stiller's film is certainly a looker — there are dissolves that would make Orson Welles blush — but how good-looking does comedy need to be exactly? As with his last film, Tropic Thunder, the production values sometimes appear to be the joke. There's a battle on the streets of Manhattan involving man-hole covers and Stretch Armstrong — don't ask — whose special effects would be the envy of Michael Bay, but does the money make the sequence funnier? It doesn't make it unfunnier, I suppose. It's just expensive.
The weird stuff starts at the halfway mark, after Mitty loses one of O Connell's negatives on the eve of a corporate takeover, and jets off to Iceland for a high seas adventure battling sharks and volcanoes — so sudden is the pivot, in fact, that you were to take a toilet break at this point you would spend the rest of the film in a state of unending, head-scratching perplexity. There are two problems with this besides precipitousness. Firstly: with Mitty's real life now as zoomily adventurous as his fantasy life, the laughs begin to dry up. In their place we get the usual rom-comish exhortations to break out of your shell, reach out, connect and whatnot, all of which would be more convincing were it not that what we get in the second hour is basically a series of solo adventures, with Mitty skateboarding through Greenland's mountain ranges to the sound of Jose Gonzales, alone, like someone rocking out to their Walkman, or hiking up the Himalayas, and confiding in his diary, "I'm alone." It's very odd. This has to be one of the loneliest odes to togetherness ever made.
Wiig checks in with him by phone every now and again — she's also the star of an imaginary sequence, lip-synching David Bowie's Major Tom — but couldn't Mitty's real-life adventures have included her at some point? There's also an eHarmony technician played by Patton Oswalt, whose relationship with him is another long-distance phoner. "Wow, you're not how I pictured you," says Oswalt upon finally meeting Mitty, his chin now brushed with stubble, Fairisle sweater bringing out the blue of his eyes. "Its like Indiana Jones became the lead singer of the Strokes." At such points the daydreams of Walter Mitty seem to shimmer and crackle like a bad radio signal, interrupted by the far more urgent daydreams of Ben Stiller, Gen X star staring down middle age, keen to show a generation weaned on Wes Anderson flicks that he still has the skateboard moves, camera angles and musical tastes to cut it. I kept on expecting cut-aways from those mountain ranges, not to Mitty dreaming in his office, but Stiller half-asleep at the press junket for Meet the Parents 5, dreaming of better things. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty both is that better thing, and isn't — it's too airless, too perfect, a dream of connection with humanity that flees contact with actual people. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/10/brexit-resistance-getting-bigger-pro-europe-eu-referendum-organising-groups | Politics | 2017-01-10T15:33:05.000Z | John Harris | The Brexit resistance: ‘It’s getting bigger all the time’ | “I
’m still hoping. I can’t really believe it’s going to happen, but in the back of my mind it’s always there. I love this country; I want to live here. I always dreamed of coming, because it was such an open-minded, lovely place where foreigners were greeted. I think that’s part of why I was so shellshocked on 24 June: because this country I thought I knew suddenly turned up a very ugly face.”
Chris Hoffman is a 44-year-old freelance translator who lives in south Birmingham. She is originally from Stuttgart and first came to the UK thanks to the European Union’s Erasmus student exchange programme. Later on, her husband started academic research in Birmingham, which then turned into a full-time job – and a little more than a decade ago, they settled in the city. They have an eight-year-old son. “He might not have a British passport,” she tells me, “but he was born here, and he feels British.”
Now, the prospect of Britain leaving the EU seems to have infected her life with anxiety. Does she think she might have to go back to Germany? “We’ll have to, if they chuck us out,” she says. “We haven’t got EU residency cards; we haven’t gone for naturalisation.”
Why not do that? “If the government starts throwing out EU citizens, I don’t want to live in this country any more,” she says.
On the first working day after the Christmas break, Hoffman has arranged to meet me in a cafe in the Kings Heath area of the city, along with two people who are campaigning alongside her against Brexit: 55-year-old Margaret Murray, who came to Birmingham 30 years ago from Ireland; and George Turvey, a native of south Wales who was, until recently, employed at Birmingham City University, but is now devoting his working time – on an unpaid basis – to trying to keep Britain in the EU.
The three of them are among the 15 people behind EU in Brum, an amazingly active set-up that was founded in the days after last year’s referendum. None of them did any formal campaigning prior to the vote; they fully expected the leave campaign to amount to nothing more threatening than a sizeable protest vote, and for remain to convincingly win. Late last year, EU in Brum was also the host for a “national grassroots remain strategy meeting”, organised by the new national pressure group Britain for Europe, and intended to coordinate the work of a whole host of campaigns.
Chris Hoffman during a pro-EU rally in Birmingham in October 2016. Photograph: Jane Campbell/EU IN BRUM
“There were about 40 organisations there,” says Turvey. “More dialled in on Skype. We had somebody from Gibraltar. There are a lot of expat organisations – people who travel from France and Germany to the meetings. It’s about collaboration, how we can work together, and grow the movement. We’re all linked now, and there’s work going on all the time.”
And what is their main objective?
“Remaining in the EU,” he says. “Of course.”
Some former remain campaigners, I remind him, are now seemingly resigned to Britain leaving the EU, and set on pushing for what political cliche calls a soft Brexit. How does he feel about that?
“We’re unequivocal; 100%,” he says. “We’re not going to compromise.”
The Conservatives are combining a rush towards the European exit door with the sense that they have no real negotiation plan. As of Tuesday, when great howls of dismay went up from left-leaning remainers, Labour’s position combines Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that “the UK can be better off out of the EU” with a possible watering-down of the leadership’s support for the principle of free movement, suffused with the increasingly familiar sense of a party that is all at sea. So, while the SNP remains staunchly pro-European, it’s not surprising that, in England and Wales, people who passionately want Britain to stay in the EU feel they are not represented (apart from by the Lib Dems and Greens, perhaps – but with 10 MPs between them, that might amount to rather cold comfort).
In response to this growing political gap, initiatives aimed at fighting Brexit and somehow overturning the referendum result have been springing up in huge numbers. Besides EU In Brum, there are plenty of groups rooted in specific places: Aberdeen for Europe, Hants4EU, The Berkshire 48%, Glostays, Wessex for Europe, and many more. Online, you can choose from such national networks as Britain for Europe, Sixteen Million Rising, Vote for Europe and Want2Stay.
National tensions exposed within Brexit Britain | Letters
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A somewhat secretive set-up called EU Flag Mafia – whose people do not answer my enquiries on Twitter – has been founded with the aim of making sure the EU stars are seen as often as possible: back in September, they distributed around 2,500 EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. March for Europe organised two anti-Brexit demonstrations in London last year, and another one, overseen by a network called I’m Still In, is planned for 25 March. On 20 February, people will be involved in One Day Without Us, an attempt to highlight the contribution immigrants make to Britain via special events – or by simply not turning up for work – that will have a big anti-Brexit dimension.
As much as anything, this burgeoning resistance highlights what an insanely divided country the UK has become. Post-referendum conversations with convinced leave voters usually include unshakable views that have now hardened into cliche – chiefly, the idea that even now, we are only a few establishment manoeuvrings away from some great stitch-up that will overturn the result. And guess what? In the eyes of people who want out of Europe as soon as possible, that might be exactly what the anti-Brexit activists are aiming at.
The latter, of course, say that a minority of the overall electorate voted to leave and that there is hardly the thumping mandate for leaving Europe some politicians talk about – and that, besides all that, Brexit will be such an economic and social disaster that it has to be avoided.
Whatever, were you to put both camps together, there would be precious little common ground – which is perhaps why a lot of people talk about what George Turvey says is now very common – “the breaking-up of friendships, even rifts within families.”
Corbyn on Brexit: UK can be better off out of the EU
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For the people involved in the anti-Brexit movement, it is currently pretty much impossible keeping up with who is doing what, but what is happening is a prime example of how 21st-century politics increasingly works. The lumbering structures of parties and traditional top-down pressure groups are ill-suited to such a spontaneous upsurge. In any case, the fact that mainstream politics is barely representing anti-Brexit views has encouraged people to simply do something themselves, only to find that thousands of others feel the same way.
The day before my trip to Birmingham, I take a train to Manchester to find out more about one of the most vocal national anti-Brexit organisations – 48 And Beyond, which is a hyperactive force on Facebook, and is set on encouraging the formation of yet more local anti-Brexit groups. Its founder is 32-year-old Eoin Ward, originally from Omagh in Northern Ireland, who is studying for a masters while also teaching English as a foreign language to, among other people, students from EU countries whom he says are now facing a very uncertain future.
We meet in a city-centre Pret a Manger, where he explains both his own staunch belief in the EU (partly down to where he’s from: “People in Northern Ireland see the EU in action every day,” he says), and the six-month story of what he started the day after the referendum.
At that point, he says, he had done “a bit of leafleting” with the official remain campaign, and was expecting a narrow win for his side – but when the unthinkable happened, he very quickly resolved to take action. On 24 June, he recalls, a group of English friends of Irish descent paid him a visit: “They had just been to the Irish Centre in Manchester to get their Irish passport forms; they were getting in there early. We sat and sympathised for a while, and then we said: ‘We really need to do something.’ So I started a Facebook group called The 48%. I invited about 30 Facebook friends to join. That was on the Friday afternoon. By Sunday evening, we had 20,000 people.”
The group is now closed (in the sense that permission has to be given for people to join), and has more than 50,000 members; its Facebook community page has 30,000. There’s a steering committee of four people which does a video conference every Tuesday and meets up “every now and again” – but Ward says the group’s priority now is to manifest itself in the offline world. “We’re trying to get people off Facebook and out into their local area,” he says. “That’s a big push. Reading for Europe was the first; he says that Manchester for Europe is now close to hitting 200 members. So how many local offshoots does he think 48 And Beyond have spawned? “At least 50,” he says.
Eoin Ward (right) at a 48 And Beyond rally in September 2016. Photograph: Eoin Ward
Campaigning, of course, comes with risks. In August, Ward was involved in organising a pro-EU demonstration in central Manchester. “At least 20 quite scary-looking people turned up with bandanas over their faces, holding up St George’s flags and filming everything. I don’t know what group they were from but, to me, they looked a bit kind of neo-Nazi, white supremacist – that sort of ilk. They were giving us a lot of grief, telling us we didn’t respect democracy.” What about online? “We sometimes get leave voters infiltrating the group, writing quite provocative things. But it’s water off a duck’s back. It’s much scarier in real life.”
What is his basic aim? “What we want, first of all, is for Theresa May to acknowledge that there are 16 million people who voted remain, and represent those people to some degree. So far, she has ignored almost half the country. At the moment, we don’t feel represented, and I think that’s why there are so many groups.”
Is he trying to overturn Brexit?
“Initially, I did say: ‘We will try to stop Brexit.’ I personally think we’ve gone too far down the line now. I’m not saying that’s the view of all the people in my group, but it seems like we’re on that path, with the deadline for article 50. And I’ve always been for the best possible deal for the people who voted remain. That means no change to employment protection, environmental protection, or free movement – all of those things we like about the EU. We don’t want those to change. Being a member of the single market? No question.”
And can he and the group make a difference? “Definitely. What’s the alternative? Just sitting back and accepting everything? We’ve got to at least try.”
EU in Brum had its first meeting about two weeks after the referendum, in the upstairs room of a cafe, where around 40 people showed up. At first, their conversation was more a kind of collective therapy than political action. “People were traumatised,” says Margaret Murray. “I think they wanted that space to meet other people who felt damaged, whereas within their own families or at work or wherever, they couldn’t express those things. Some of them felt like, ‘I don’t know the people around me any more.’”
Now, though, EU in Brum is all about being visible, and loudly making the case for Europe. It holds fortnightly public meetings, does regular street stalls, and makes a point of showing up at any number of local events, from last summer’s Labour leadership hustings, to gatherings of local businesspeople. In September, it held its first march in the city centre, which attracted around 500 people, who were guided around a route taking in buildings that would have been inconceivable without EU funding. Not long after that, the group arranged another rally outside last year’s Conservative party conference, at the city’s Symphony Hall – ironically enough, the centrepiece of a development that was assisted by £50m funding from Brussels.
Three months on, the group still think that Brexit can somehow be overturned. “I think we still have every chance of achieving that,” says Hoffman. “It’s probably not going to be easy, but I don’t think it’s set in stone that we have to leave.”
“Theresa May could just turn it around,” says Turvey, who emphasises the constitutional fact – perhaps offset by the politics of Brexit – that the vote was advisory. “There’s no reason why she has to pursue this headlong crusade to ruin the UK.”
“There are many ways it could happen,” says Hoffman. “If you have a second referendum, or a general election … More and more, remainers are in the news, and people realise that this is still an ongoing topic. People are saying: ‘Maybe I voted leave, but I’ve had a rethink.’ I have met several leavers who now regret voting that way.”
The message is simple: a protester at the March for Europe. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
What about the idea that a lot of people and places that voted leave did so after years of feeling completely marginalised – and that, if they were ignored again, their resentment would turn nuclear?
“That is one of the major issues: this sense of alienation and isolation in society,” says Turvey. “If people wanted to take advice from this advisory referendum, there’s a key piece of information. But the government is doing nothing to address it. That’s what they should be doing.”
There is one last devil’s advocate point. When leavers talk about the EU’s democratic shortcomings, or its embrace of the economics of austerity, they have a point, don’t they? Is it really an institution worth defending with this much passion?
“We pay less than 0.5% of our GDP to the EU,” says Turvey. “Think of all the incredible benefits: some research came out saying that we maybe get 5 or 6% of our GDP back, from the fact that we’re a member. If you weigh that against the fact that there needs to be reform, and we could make it better … the UK was a leader in the EU, and it should still be at the heart of it, making sure it is strong and fit for purpose and the best it can be. And the other thing is, what’s the alternative? It’s just a no-brainer.”
Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting question of all. Can the resistance movement not merely sustain itself, but actually grow?
“It’s getting bigger all the time,” says Hoffman.
“It is,” agrees Turvey. “And, really, it’s only a matter of time. There’s never been a good-news story for Brexit, has there? It’s all negative. If you look at the prospects for the UK, it’s disastrous.” He has been remarkably upbeat for the past hour and a half, but suddenly he almost seems to light up. “Surely, soon enough, people will have to realise that.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/may/28/george-osborne-u-turns-pasties-caravans | Politics | 2012-05-28T20:20:01.000Z | Patrick Wintour | George Osborne forced into pasty tax U-turn | The government's reputation has suffered a series of fresh blows as the chancellor, George Osborne, was forced to make two climbdowns over his budget, including scrapping the "pasty tax", and ministers prepared to make a series of new concessions over secrecy.
Osborne is to reverse plans to charge VAT on food that is designed to cool down, such as sausage rolls and pasties, and will also reduce the new VAT charge on static caravans from the standard 20% rate to 5%. The climbdowns follow weeks of protest, including by Tory MPs, and will together cost the cash-strapped Treasury as much as £70m annually.
The budget concessions, announced by the chancellor in a letter to the Treasury select committee, were deferred until the Commons was no longer sitting.
Following intense lobbying by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, is to drop plans to include closed inquests with evidence heard in private in his secret courts bill due to be published on Tuesday.
Clarke admitted he was making "substantial changes" to his original green paper, while senior Liberal Democrats claimed the balance between liberty and security had been transformed.
Ministers will doubtless claim the latest rash of U-turns are an occupational hazard of coalition government, or the sign of a government willing to listen, but they will add to the sense of incompetence that appears to have gripped the government ever since the ill-starred budget, an event that has led to a precipitous decline in David Cameron's personal poll ratings.
The two taxes were also seen as symptomatic of a government out of touch with ordinary working people. Cameron had defended the move, designed to put 20% VAT on all food sold "above ambient temperature", insisting he loved a pasty.
George Eustice, a Tory MP from Cornwall who campaigned against the tax, said: "This welcome announcement means all pasties will be exempt from VAT, and shows this has been a genuine consultation."
Under the changes, the government will charge VAT on food designed to be eaten warm, for example on rotisserie chickens sold hot by supermarkets.
The VAT, due to be enforced from October, would have added 50p to a £2.50 savoury food item. The Treasury had been planning to raise £110m from the measure, but will now only raise £70m.
Critics said the proposals were incredibly complex since it would be hard to define ambient temperature.
In the other change, VAT will be set at 5% for static caravans used for holiday purposes. That means an expected income of £40m falls to £10m-15m.
Labour said it showed the government was a shambles. The shadow Treasury minister, Chris Leslie, said: "I think they were forced to listen to the total bewilderment of the public who were completely astonished at these rather odd decisions. The other reason they have made this decision is the Commons is in recess, so there is no ability to challenge them in parliament.
"On the Wednesday when the Commons returns, there is scheduled to be a vote that we have put down on the caravan tax - it was a narrow majority of only 25 last time, so they were facing defeat.
"They are not U-turning out of the kindness of their hearts; it is because they are being forced to do so.
"What a chaotic way to run a country. How on earth can you have a budget process that unravels in a day when you've got this kind of shambolic business?"
On Twitter, the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, said: "After tonight's budget U-turns, we need rethink on biggest budget blunders – tax cut for millionaires and lack of jobs and growth plan."
A Treasury spokesman said: "At the budget, we announced proposals to address anomalies that have built up in the VAT system and have led to similar products being taxed differently.
"We have now finished the consultation on these proposals and are taking on board the points made, while still making sure we meet the objective of a clearer and more consistent system that we set out at the time."
In arguably a deeper philosophical U-turn, Liberal Democrats are claiming credit for ensuring inquests will not be subjected to so-called "closed material procedures" meaning information held by the security and intelligence agencies could be heard only in secret.
A senior Lib Dem official pointed out that Clegg, in a letter to the national security council last month, had said he was unhappy with the wide scope of the green paper.
The source claimed: "As a result of the deputy prime minister's intervention, these proceedings are restricted to exceptional cases of national security; a judge, not ministers, decides; and, crucially, these measures will never apply to inquests. Clegg made clear that he would not let security concerns erode the principle of open justice."
But the main purpose of the bill will remain: evidence and claims made by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ would be presented to the court, but would not be disclosed to individuals seeking damages or making complaints. As a result, they would not be able directly to challenge the agencies. Instead, their interests will be presented by vetted "special advocates".
Judges will decide whether to agree to a minister's request that evidence should be heard only in secret on grounds of national security.
The model for extending secret hearings into the civil courts will be based on the process already in use in the special immigration appeals commission, the body which has been hearing Abu Qatada's bail application this week.
Opponents of closed material procedures say that evidence that cannot be tested properly in court – if the claimant cannot hear accusations being made – is not reliable. Many of the special advocates themselves objected to the draft legislation. The bill will also allow ministers to claim secrecy is needed on national security grounds for swathes of information, not only material in the hands of the security and intelligence agencies.
The bill will forbid evidence being heard from witnesses, for example, from a foreign intelligence agency with relevant knowledge of the case but who are not parties to it. Whitehall officials said the phrase "public interest" used in the green paper has been removed and replaced in the bill by "national security". Officials say this is a much narrower test.
Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, told Liberty's annual general meeting on Saturday that the bill filled him with a "considerable amount of distaste" but that it would apply only to a "very small number of cases".Clarke has said the powers are needed to reassure other countries, particularly the US, that they can continue to share intelligence without fear of it being exposed in British courts. Evidence of MI5 and MI6 knowledge of CIA abuse of detainees emerged during a high-court hearing brought by lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, the UK resident held in Guantánamo Bay for more than four years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/10/neil-peart-dead-rush-drummer-appreciation | Music | 2020-01-11T06:00:01.000Z | Michael Hann | Rush's Neil Peart: unassuming, thunderous drummer who became a music legend | “H
e was one of the goofiest-looking guys I’d ever seen,” Geddy Lee told me in November 2018. Rush’s singer and bass player was talking about his first encounter with Neil Peart, his bandmate from 29 July 1974 until their final gig in 2015, almost exactly 41 years later.
“He was very tall, lanky,” said Lee. “And he had short hair. All of us had major hair. He had spent two years living in England before that. We didn’t know this. But he had just moved back home and given up his dream of playing in a rock band. And he was working for his dad’s farm equipment store. He drove up in this little sports car, drums were hanging out from every corner. He comes in, this big goofy guy with a small drum kit with 18-inch bass drums. Alex [Lifeson] and I were chuckling – we thought he was a hick from the country. And then he sat down behind this kit and pummelled the drums, and us. I’d never heard a drummer like that, someone with that power and dexterity. As far as I was concerned, he was hired from the minute he started playing.”
But Neil Peart was rather more than a drummer (and Rush’s lyricist). He was extremely reticent and not prone to shouting his mouth off in interviews. He was not one for the life of the rock star: rather than reclining in tour buses, he would travel between Rush shows on his bicycle, then later his motorbike, stopping unrecognised at roadside diners for his lunch.
Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee pose in the press room at the 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles. Photograph: Jason Merritt#TERM/Getty Images
He was a family man who lost his daughter in a road traffic accident and his wife to cancer within 10 months of each other, in 1997 and 1998, and whose response to those tragedies was to teach himself to cook, first to care for his wife, then for himself (touchingly, in his memoir Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, he offered “thanks to the food hall in the Marks and Spencer in Oxford Street, which offered cooking instructions with every item, even fresh fish and vegetables”.)
More than a drummer, Neil Peart was loved.
He was loved by Lee and Lifeson, which was evident in the delightful documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. And he was loved by pretty much everyone who ever took the slightest interest in Rush, because he was so clearly not a rock star, but a bookish, shy chap, who happened to possess extraordinary dexterity on drums.
Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart dies at 67
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You could get a sense of this from his lyrics, which, for all the focus on his young love of Ayn Rand, often had an air of loneliness and separation, never more clearly than on Subdivisions, the song the Smiths might have written had they been a Canadian prog power trio: “In the high school halls / In the shopping malls / Conform or be cast out / Subdivisions / In the basement bars / In the backs of cars / Be cool or be cast out.”
His lyrics, whether or not you liked them, were written with a plain-spoken and full-hearted honesty that meant they were sometimes extraordinarily on the nose, but could equally hit home with force. Rush’s biggest UK hit single, The Spirit of Radio (No 13, 1980), managed to be simultaneously a hymn to the old-fashioned notion of hearing a song on the radio that might transport you (“Emotional feedback / On a timeless wavelength / Bearing a gift beyond price”), a defence of musical technology against the Luddites who insist on the old way of doing things (“All this machinery / Making modern music / Can still be open-hearted”) and a tirade against those who would corrupt art with money (“For the words of the prophets / Were written on the studio wall / Concert hall / And echoes with the sounds of salesmen”). The key thing, Peart insisted in the song, was that “it’s really just a question of your honesty”.
Like a lot of other people, I fell hard for Rush in my early teens, when what I thought was significant about them was that they had songs based on Coleridge poems, or that they had tracks that occupied entire sides of albums and had overtures. Only later did I realise that what really mattered was that three men could navigate all the vicissitudes of a career in the music industry and remain true to what they wanted to do, entirely uncompromised, and still be friends.
But back then, in the early 80s, I used to sit with my friend Ian Watts in his bedroom in Windsor listening to Rush albums – A Farewell to Kings, 2112, Hemispheres, All the World’s a Stage – and marvelling, above all, at Peart’s drumming. At the way he seemed to make his way from one side of his enormous kit to the other in micro-seconds, touching every bit of it – toms, tubular bells, gongs, cowbells, wind chimes, cymbals of every kind. At the way he sounded like thunder. His kits themselves looked less like musical instruments than pieces of an industrial plant (of course there is a website that details each kit from every stage of his career).
Neil Peart onstage in Birmingham, England, in February 1978. Photograph: Fin Costello/Redferns
There has, in fact, probably never been a band that so embodied the mindset of a particular kind of teenage boy (I know women liked them, too, but early Rush were a boy’s band. Really) as Rush did with their run of albums of the late 1970s. But they grew up, and Peart did, too.
That was apparent throughout the 1980s, and especially on Vapor Trails, from 2002, the first album Rush recorded after the death of Peart’s daughter and wife. His tragedy and his recovery from it haunts the album. In Ghost Rider, he is “Just an escape artist / Racing against the night”; in Vapor Trail he sings of “Memory written on the wind / Washed away like footprints in the rain”. But it wasn’t lachrymose. The album’s opening track, One Little Victory, was about the fact that he had been able to return to music and to his friends after years away, spent riding alone around North America confronting his grief: “Celebrate the moment / As it turns into one more / Another chance at victory / Another chance to score”. Victory was getting from one day to the next, until it was no longer a struggle.
The last thing I asked Geddy Lee when I met him just over a year ago was whether he and Lifeson and Peart were still friends, now they no longer had Rush to hold them together. “Absolutely,” he said. “Alex and I just flew down to see Neil two weeks ago and hung out for three days. Had some very good meals. We’re pals, and that will never change.”
It makes my eyes well, truly, to think that he’s lost his pal. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/04/bank-teller-work-inspired-kanye-jay-z-sister-nancy-bam-bam | Music | 2017-08-04T12:30:43.000Z | Sam Wolfson | The story of a sample: how a bank teller's work inspired Kanye and Jay-Z | Stylo G feat Sister Nancy – Badd: New music
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The Interview, that schlocky Seth Rogen film about Kim Jong-un, already had one unintended consequence: it led to a hacking attack on the film’s studio Sony by a group with alleged ties to the North Korean government. But the film had another, equally surprising ramification, one that has arguably influenced some of the world’s biggest artists. When the film was released in 2014, Ophlin Russell was working at a bank in New Jersey. In another life she had been Sister Nancy, the first female Jamaican dancehall DJ, a trailblazing performer who had played with the biggest soundsystems in the country. Back in 1981, she had written nine tracks that could have been an album. Told that albums usually needed 10 tracks, she wrote Bam Bam, a semi-freestyle sung over Ansel Collins’s 70s dub-reggae staple Stalag riddim.
The album was successful in Jamaica, but it was only when she moved to New Jersey in 1996 that she realised Bam Bam had been sampled dozens of times and included on the soundtrack of Hype Williams’s film Belly. But, owing to the vagaries of Jamaican record contracts, Russell had never seen a penny from it. So she took the job at the bank.
Listen to Bam Bam.
Jay-Z: 4:44 review – a bracingly honest but conservative confessional
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Then came The Interview, and a typically Rogen-esque scene in which Kim Jong-un strides around naked, soundtracked by Bam Bam. The song shot back to the top of the reggae charts and was featured in a Reebok ad. Russell had had enough. She sought a lawyer, who secured her 10 years’ worth of backdated royalties and 50% of future publishing on Bam Bam, enough for her to give up accounting.
With the song back in the public consciousness, Kanye West used it on his controversial track Famous, the song’s sour lyrics about Taylor Swift suddenly segueing into the open heavens of Sister Nancy’s redemption. Russell still wasn’t happy. “I don’t understand why they would want to sample,” she told the Fader, keen instead to re-record the vocal “with someone who’s worthy of it”. Step forward Jay-Z. His new track Bam features the original sample, but in the video he travels to Jamaica to record with Damian Marley and Russell, who re-records her vocal: it’s a rawer, pained performance. Afterwards, the three artists talk about what it feels like to create something timeless. “Good music it will last,” she tells them. “Even when I go where I’m supposed to go, my daughter’s gonna say: ‘That’s mummy’s Bam Bam.’” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/12/donald-trump-is-undermining-the-fight-against-corruption | US news | 2017-02-12T15:25:57.000Z | Larry Elliott | Donald Trump is undermining the fight against corruption | Corruption is a curse. It stunts development, breeds conflict in fragile states, makes taxpayers in rich countries dubious about providing aid to poor countries, and gives crooked firms an advantage over those that play by the rules.
Governments have become less tolerant of dirty business dealings over time, as Rolls-Royce has found to its cost. The aerospace company – one of the UK’s genuinely world class manufacturing firms – will this week announce one of Britain’s biggest ever corporate losses, in part the result of the £671m cost of settling bribery actions.
The cases were brought by the authorities in Britain, Brazil and the US and involve allegations that Rolls bribed middlemen around the world between 1989 and 2013 to win contracts. Warren East, the company’s chief executive, has called the behaviour “completely unacceptable”.
America has been at the forefront of the international fight against corruption ever since the passing of 1978 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which sought to prevent multi-national corporations from bribing crooked officials in order to win contracts.
There was an element of self-interest in this. The US was confident that in a fair fight its companies would win overseas contracts more often than not. Corruption simply allowed less well-managed firms to deprive US corporations of deals they would otherwise get.
There has also been a recognition that the US will always be out-gunned when it comes to corruption. Despite Eisenhower’s famous warning about the influence of the military-industrial complex, the US system of governance has checks and balances that limit criminal activities. It has suited the US to present itself as the sheriff riding into town to sort out the bad hats.
Up until now. Four weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have put at risk four decades of progress in the fight against corruption and gladdened the heart of every kleptocrat around the world.
What’s happened is this. Both houses of Congress have voted to gut a law that would have forced US oil, gas and mining companies to disclose their royalty, licensing and other payments to foreign governments. The law was a bipartisan initiative between Democratic Senator Ben Cardin and former Republican Senator Richard Lugar, and formed an amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the law designed to clean up Wall Street after the financial crisis.
The Cardin-Lugar law compelled America’s financial watchdog – the Securities and Exchange Commission – to draw up tough transparency rules for energy and mining companies.
Unsurprisingly, the big oil companies were strongly opposed to revealing what they were up to at such a granular level. The American Petroleum Institute, one of the biggest and best resourced lobbying groups on the planet, has opposed Cardin-Lugar from the start, but decided to play a long game.
By dragging matters through the courts, the API succeeded in delaying implementation of Cardin-Lugar and as a result the new transparency rules – which would oblige companies to report annually on a project by project basis – were only due to come into force in 2019.
To argue that easing up on the fight against corruption is good for business is to turn truth on its head
The API’s strategy was to delay and hope that something would turn up. Now it has with Trump’s election. The new president has insisted that America has been harming itself with borders that are too porous, trade rules that are too lax, taxes that are too high, and red tape that is too onerous. He can expect the full support of his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the former boss of ExxonMobil, a prominent member of the API.
The oil and gas lobby group has successfully portrayed Cardin-Lugar as another bit of excessive bureaucracy that will put American companies at a competitive disadvantage. Other countries will not insist on gold-plating anti-corruption rules in such a way, it has insisted. The SEC has now been told to go away and draw up new regulations because Congress says the original plan would have led to rising business costs that would have been bad for growth and jobs.
This is nonsense. For a start, companies have all the information readily available and could easily adhere to the Cardin-Lugar law. The red tape argument is a red herring.
But there’s a bigger point: to argue that easing up on the fight against corruption is good for business is to turn truth on its head.
Corruption is actually very bad for businesses, which is why bodies such as the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have been so active in trying to tackle it. The cost of corruption is thought to equal more than 5% of global GDP each year – about $2.6tn (£2tn) – and is estimated to raise the cost of doing business by 10% a year. The $1tn paid out in bribes is a tax that is put to no good purpose whatsoever. It builds no schools or hospitals.
Corruption is particularly high in the extractives sector. The cost of private sector corruption in developing countries was above $500 bn in 2012 – representing 3.7 times the amount of global official development assistance (ODA) disbursed.
Bribery and Brexit propel Rolls-Royce towards historic losses
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Jamie Drummond, director of the campaign group, One, described the decision by Congress as a “really worrying development” that needed to be fought. “It is pro-business and pro-private sector to fight corruption,” he added.
All the recent evidence is that what the US does acts as an international benchmark. In 1998, other developed countries, prodded by Washington, signed an international anti-bribery convention that mirrored the US law.
What’s more, the SEC and the Department of Justice have not pussy-footed around. They have enforced the law vigorously, imposing massive fines on wrong-doers. This enforcement action has encouraged the authorities in Europe to become more vigilant.
The Cardin-Lugar law is a case in point. Europe saw what the Americans were doing and brought in energy transparency and forestry legislation of its own. Following the US lead, the European parliament approved legislation similar to the energy transparency law and included forestry companies to the other natural resources firms that must comply.
A number of major extractive companies have publicly supported the SEC’s rule or the very similar laws in the EU and Canada. More than 120 companies have disclosed payments worth more than $150bn in more than 100 countries under the EU’s rules to date.
Now the US has signalled that it intends to be less transparent and less rigorous in fighting corruption, companies in other developed countries will get the message. European-based companies are likely to start lobbying their governments for a similar regime to that which operates in the US.
Let’s be clear. Cardin-Lugar would not have ended corruption, but it did ratchet up the pressure on those giving bribes and on those receiving them. Trump has been what Lenin called a useful idiot, the unwitting channel for a move that will be bad for development, bad for global security and bad for America. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy/2017/mar/28/five-a-side-futsal-star-sixes-football-tournament | Football | 2017-03-28T12:49:06.000Z | Richard Foster | From five-a-side to futsal and Star Sixes: how football's small forms went big | If the chance of watching Jay-Jay Okocha and Robert Pires weaving through tightly packed defences up close is a tantalising prospect, then you should make your way to the O2 Arena in London this summer for the Star Sixes tournament. Okocha and Pires will be joined by a galaxy of big stars, including Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand, Roberto Carlos, Carles Puyol and Michael Ballack, for the four-day, six-a-side competition in July.
The organisers are at pains to point out that this event will be more competitive than previous tournaments featuring former professionals, such as Sky’s Masters Football series, which ran from 2000 to 2011. England goalkeeper David James says he is relishing the opportunity of representing his country again. “Having had around 26 years as a pro, I still kind of wake up each morning and think, ‘Can I still do this, can I still do that?’ I was asked if I would be interested in getting involved and my immediate answer was: yes.”
A dozen international teams – England, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Italy, France, Portugal, Denmark, Scotland, Nigeria and China – will compete in the inaugural event, which is scheduled to take place every two years in the odd years between World Cups and European Championships. Maybe this could be the tournament in which England’s “golden generation” finally deliver on their promise.
This will be the first time football has been played at the venue, which has hosted ATP World Tour tennis for eight years and NBA’s Global Game since 2011. Like these sporting occasions, there will be plenty of additional entertainment between games. This glitzy environment will be a world away from grassroots football, which remains hampered by inadequate facilities and a lack of investment. Adrian Bevington, an adviser to the Star Sixes tournament, knows about the key issues facing English football more than most, having spent almost 20 years at the FA. He says small-sided football suits today’s time-pressurised environment. “It is being recognised and needs to be further recognised that people are increasingly not able to dedicate all Sunday morning or afternoon to playing a game.”
While participation in 11-a-side football has been on the slide for a few years, small-sided football is in rude health, with a steady increase in people taking part. James Brown’s recent book Above Head Height is a well-timed, warm and affectionate tribute to the many joys of playing five-a-side throughout one’s life, from impromptu games in the street as children to the regular get-togethers for the middle-aged. “It provides regular moments of humour and acts as an outlet for anger and frustration,” writes Brown. “It generates the opportunity to experience satisfaction, exhilaration and delight.”
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The rise in popularity of small-sided football was confirmed by a Sport England participation survey in 2015, which estimated that just over 1m adults play every week, a figure that rises to close to 1.5m for the UK. The FA People’s Cup, a nationwide five-a-side competition that is supported and covered by the BBC, has grown and grown over the last few years, with 6,000 teams and more than 40,000 players involved this year.
As well as playing five-a-side football, more people in the UK are now experimenting with futsal, a version of the game that originated in Uruguay in 1930, the year they hosted and won the first World Cup. Futsal is considered part of a footballer’s education in countries such as Brazil, Spain and Argentina, and it is now gaining momentum in England, where there are around 6,000 level-1 qualified coaches, an annual futsal youth festival and an FA-accredited futsal league. The England futsal team has yet to qualify for either the World Cup or European Championship but they made it to the last qualifying stage of the 2016 Futsal World Cup, which was their best result since the team formed in 2003.
Argentina play Egypt in the quarter-finals of the 2016 Futsal World Cup in Colombia. Photograph: Jan Kruger/Fifa/Getty Images
Five-a-side games have always been used in training sessions and they are now reinvigorating the grassroots game, so it is somewhat surprising that there is no regular competition for professionals. A concoction of tournaments have come and gone over the years – such as the Atari Soccer Sixes, which flickered into life in the early 1980s before turning into the Guinness Sixes for a while until it petered out in 1991 alongside the Scottish equivalent, the Tennent’s Soccer Sixes, which lasted from 1983 to 1994.
The most enduring of these tournaments was the Evening Standard Fives, which began in 1954 and ran until 1995, when Wycombe Wanderers were rather incongruously crowned champions of London. Originally held in one of the cavernous halls of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, it moved to the even more unlikely surrounds of the Harringay Arena and then on to Wembley Arena. The Standard Fives attracted high-profile media coverage, with ITV broadcasting highlights that were presented by John Salako, with Peter Brackley commentating.
I remember with some fondness watching Vinnie Jones’ simmering aggression and the goalscoring prowess of Clive Allen and Teddy Sheringham on the squeakiest of indoors pitches. With top referees of the time such as Mike Riley officiating, this felt like proper football, but with a top prize of only £10,000 it was clearly more about the glory than the money – and it was never likely to survive in the era of the Premier League and Champions League. One can only imagine what sort of teams managers would pick these days, when players are routinely rested for FA Cup ties.
The publicity generated by Star Sixes should provide further encouragement for youngsters up and down the country. Perhaps the much-needed regeneration of grassroots football will not be born on grass pitches, which are in sorry decline, but on synthetic surfaces of the hard courts of futsal. We may even see a new golden generation.
This article is from the author of The Agony and the Ecstasy
Follow Richard Foster on Twitter | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/18/republican-candidates-reince-priebus | US news | 2016-09-18T20:30:57.000Z | Alan Yuhas | Ex-candidates who fail to back Trump could face consequences, Priebus warns | As high-profile Republicans continue to resist Donald Trump, the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) suggested on Sunday the party may take punitive action against failed presidential candidates who have reneged on pledges to support the nominee.
Trump allies scramble to defend false 'birther' claim as candidate shifts views
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“It’s not a threat, but that’s just the question that we have a process in place,” Reince Priebus told CBS’s Face the Nation. “If a private entity puts forward a process and has agreement with the participants in that process, and those participants don’t follow through with the promises that they made in that process … what should a private party do about that if those same people come around in four or eight years?”
Priebus has tried for months to persuade rebellious factions of the party into line behind Trump, who among others has alienated the 2012 nominee, two former presidents and a handful of outspoken senators. Three of Trump’s primary rivals have rejected him, explicitly or implicitly, despite signing pledges to support the nominee.
Trump himself loudly withdrew and recommitted to the pledge before he secured the nomination.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush declared in May that he would not vote for Trump, who he said “has not displayed a respect for the constitution” and “has not demonstrated that temperament or strength of character” needed for the presidency.
Texas senator Ted Cruz pointedly refused to endorse Trump at the Republican national convention in July, an event meant to unify the party and crown the businessman as its leader. The non-endorsement from Trump’s most significant primary rival reportedly enraged party leaders. Cruz has since quietly returned to pushing far-right policies in the Senate.
While Cruz drew boos in Cleveland, Ohio governor John Kasich refused to attend the convention altogether, even though it was held in his state. Like Cruz, Kasich has not explicitly condemned Trump, but in an interview with NBC this weekend he said it was “very, very likely I will not” vote for the Republican nominee.
Kasich has also bucked party calls to march behind Trump’s proposals of mass deportation of undocumented migrants and isolationist trade deals. Last week he met Democrats in Washington to argue for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which is supported by Barack Obama. He has also called for Trump to apologize to Obama for years of spreading the lie that the president was not born in the US.
Neither Cruz nor Kasich have discounted new campaigns for the White House in 2020, and Priebus warned that they may face consequences for their current intransigence, hinting that should they fail to support Trump, the RNC may withhold its trove of voter data, which campaigns rely on to compete in primaries, or restrict ballot access in some states.
“I think that people who gave us their word, used information from the RNC, should be on board,” Priebus said. “I mean, there’s a ballot access issue in South Carolina. In order to be on the ballot in South Carolina, you actually have to pledge your support to the nominee, no matter who that person is. So what’s the penalty for that?
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“We’re a private party. We’re not a public entity. Those people need to get on board. And if they’re thinking they’re going to run again someday, I think that we’re going to evaluate … the nomination process and I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for them.”
The chairman of Ohio’s Republican party resisted Priebus suggestion on Sunday, writing on Twitter: “No. This is not what we are all about as a party. Besides, let’s stay focused on 2016 for the next 50 days.”
Disaffected Republicans have been courted by the Libertarian party, which is led by two former Republican governors, Gary Johnson and running mate Bill Weld. On Sunday, Johnson was asked about reports of pressure on the third-party candidates to drop out, for fear that the Libertarians could allow a Trump presidency by siphoning votes away from Hillary Clinton.
Johnson refused to concede, and wished active ill on his old party.
“This is a party that needs to be ruined,” he told CNN’s Reliable Sources. “They have done this to themselves. They have become so polarized. Their only agenda is to kill each other.”
He said a “third scenario in lieu of Trump and Clinton” would be “the best opportunity” for the country, though his low poll numbers have already excluded him from the first presidential debate.
Johnson currently polls at about 8.3% in three-party poll averages of the general election, below the 15% threshold for the debates. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/02/boxing-chris-eubank-enjoys-sweet-revenge-after-stopping-liam-smith-in-10th-round | Sport | 2023-09-02T22:59:49.000Z | Donald McRae | Chris Eubank Jr enjoys sweet revenge after stopping Liam Smith in 10th round | Chris Eubank Jr overwhelmed Liam Smith, knocking down his bitter rival twice before the fight was waved over mercifully in the tenth round in Manchester on Saturday night, as he avenged the humiliating defeat he had suffered early this year.
Smith had dropped and stopped him in four rounds in January and posed serious questions about Eubank Jr’s boxing future. Another loss would have been calamitous for the 33-year-old middleweight from Brighton but this brutally authoritative victory offered Eubank Jr the sweet taste of redemption.
Chris Eubank Jr faces painful leap into abyss if Liam Smith wins rematch
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Smith cut an abject figure as, with blood seeping from an eye, he reeled under the onslaught and the referee rescued him from a sustained and painful beating. He had lost every round until then and the fight could not have been more different to their first encounter.
The two middleweights had shed most of the rancour that shadowed their previous contest but there was still a fraught atmosphere when the opening bell rang – with the crowd at a crammed AO Arena roaring support for Smith and disdain for Eubank Jr. The pantomime villain of British boxing was understandably cautious at the outset and both fighters were urged by the referee, Kevin Harper, to refrain from excessive grappling in a messy first round.
Eubank Jr looked more settled in the second as he used an effective jab to pepper Smith, who slipped just before the bell. There was no suggestion of a knockdown but the round had belonged clearly to Eubank Jr.
He retained the initiative when they came out for the third, looking more assured and busier than a strangely lethargic Smith. Eubank Jr forced his rival to cover up behind his high guard as he threw a series of blurring combinations. He again landed at the close of the round and his new American trainer, Brian McIntyre, who is usually in the corner of Terence Crawford, the best boxer in the world right now, crooned “beautiful … beautiful”.
With confidence surging through him Eubank punished Smith and then dropped him early in round four as he followed a left cross with a bludgeoning right uppercut. Smith spat out his mouth guard as he rose from the canvas and bought himself a few precious seconds to recover. But Eubank was in the ascendancy and he backed up Smith repeatedly, working off the jab and hurting the man who had humiliated him just over seven months earlier.
Chris Eubank Jr, who was dominant throughout the bout, celebrates his victory against Liam Smith. Photograph: Matt McNulty/Getty Images
Eubank Jr was so dominant in the fifth round that it looked as if he could soon close the show. Smith was under such fire that he hardly threw any punches – but he did gain some respite as Eubank Jr had expended so much energy his aggression began to wane. Smith still looked groggy on his stool and he again did little when the fight resumed. Eubank Jr’s jab retained its slickness and Smith had to back away repeatedly.
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As the second half of the bout began Eubank maintained the same calm intent as he was again supreme between rounds seven and nine. Smith struggled with his footing, his ankle almost giving way on more than one occasion. The end was as predictable as it was bloody and decisive.
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Eubank Jr, who turns 34 later this month, looked serene and quietly jubilant in victory as he resurrected his fading career. On Thursday he had promised an “exquisite, supernatural” performance. He did not scale such heights but he dug deep within himself to dredge up a commanding performance which also benefited from the input of McIntyre. The beefy trainer is used to Crawford laying claim to his genuinely “exquisite, supernatural” talent. Eubank is a far more prosaic operator but McIntyre brought him clarity and conviction.
Eubank Jr knows that a lucrative bout with the disgraced Conor Benn will be peddled in the coming weeks. Benn and Eubank Jr have both traded off the names of their more famous fathers, who were fierce rivals in the 1990s, and they were meant to meet in a contrived catchweight contest last October. The fight was only cancelled after a public furore engulfed the news that Benn had failed the first of two positive drug tests.
Benn and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, will almost certainly try to lure Eubank Jr back into the ring. Eubank Jr seems ready to buckle because, in a post-fight interview, he said: “I’m coming for you, Conor,” before also adding the name of the currently retired Kell Brook. It would be a depressing scenario for those of us who actually care about this tawdry business if Eubank and Benn do face each other in the ring. Eubank Jr should seek a better and far more deserving opponent whose name is not tarnished in the manner of Benn’s.
Smith, at the age of 35, will be devastated to have suffered his fourth loss in 38 bouts. His hopes of a world title challenge at middleweight are now over after this bleak and painful night. He might call for a third fight with Eubank Jr but, in the wake of such a conclusive defeat, there seems little point in a rubber match. Time is also closing in on Eubank Jr but, after this imposing victory, he will have fresh reason to dream that a few more nights of glory may yet be possible. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jan/11/how-to-make-the-perfect-vegan-ragu-recipe-felicity-cloake | Food | 2023-01-11T12:00:17.000Z | Felicity Cloake | How to make the perfect vegan ragu – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to make the perfect... | There are many great plant-based Italian recipes – pasta alla norma, mushroom risotto, pasta e fagioli (sometimes) – but none, it must be said, packs quite the savoury punch of a classic ragù alla bolognese. If you believe vegans deserve as much pleasure in this brief and brutish life as everyone else, then attempting to reverse engineer this one for them (and for everyone else who is trying to cut down on their meat consumption) feels very much like a mission worth annoying a few purists for.
The challenge, it turned out, was less in recreating the experience without using animal products – there are plenty of umami-packed ingredients out there that fit the bill – than working out what to call it. “Vegan ragu” feels oxymoronic, given the word literally means “meat sauce”, yet “bolognese”, implying as it does the use of dairy products, is equally open to nitpicking. But let the pedants argue amongst themselves – we’ve got pasta to eat.
The “meat”
Beans and lentils: Sue Quinn’s vegan ragu (all thumbnails by Felicity Cloake).
Or, rather, the meat substitute. Traditionally, such ragus are made from minced beef, not too lean, and often in combination with cured and/or minced pork and sweet, earthy chicken livers – a combination that doesn’t immediately suggest plant-based alternatives. Ideally, whatever is used should have similar fatty, earthy, umami-rich qualities, and a similarly chewy, yet juicy texture. (Note that I have not delved into the world of vegan mince here; if you’re a fan, though, you may wish to use it here instead.)
Mushrooms, which, according to Serious Eat’s Daniel Gritzer, “are an obvious choice, thanks to their deeply savory flavor” are popular, with Gritzer and Alexa Weibel for the New York Times using chestnut, Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage shiitake in their book Flavour, and Gizzi Erskine chestnut, shiitake and portobello. Erskine and Ottolenghi/Belfrage also add dried mushrooms, the former rehydrated and finely chopped, the latter blitzed to a powder and deployed as an astonishingly umami-rich seasoning that I’m definitely stealing. With so many flavours going on in this sauce, I find the fresh mushrooms useful chiefly for their juicy bulk, so I’ll be using the ordinary chestnut variety, though my testers and I decide they’re too insubstantial to do the job alone; a second, more robust element is required.
Gritzer recommends seitan, or wheat gluten: “a wet, chewy and spongy substance with a mild and oddly bread-like flavour.” This delicious-sounding item is, it turns out, hard to find in plain form in the UK; I finally locate a tin labelled as “mock duck” in a local healthfood shop, but I’m not overly taken with its consistency, which is too similar to the mushrooms. Jessie Ware, Sue Quinn and Ottolenghi and Belfrage include lentils, with Ware pureeing half of them at the end for “a perfect texture”, a tip she credits in Table Manners: The Cookbook to Anna Jones. Quinn’s recipe in Easy Vegan also uses beans, Ottolenghi/Belfrage pearl barley and Ware aubergine, while Erskine goes for soy mince and smoked tofu, as well as five sorts of mushrooms, writing in her book Slow that “it’s imperative to use all three as they each add something different”.
Though all of the above are enjoyable in their own way (and the idea of pureeing the lentils to thicken the sauce is a particularly clever one), I find that firm tofu offers the most satisfyingly beefy texture – it may taste of very little, but the flavour of the mushrooms and the umami-rich seasonings will make up for this. Weibel’s finely chopped walnuts are a clever way to add further body to the sauce, but I decide to blitz them, like the dried porcini, so they blend in, enriching it without contributing any obvious crunch.
Another useful tip from Gritzer: tearing the mushrooms (and, in my case, the tofu) gives them a more convincingly meaty texture than merely chopping them. You can get busy with a knife if you’re short of time (I don’t find the food processor method recommended by Ottolenghi and Belfrage saves any, because things always get trapped on the blades, and the onion ends up as a mush while the carrots are still hunks – but you, like them, may have a better machine).
The aromatics
Daniel Gritzer’s vegan ragu uses red wine, not white, for added oomph.
The base, by contrast, is the easy bit: onions, carrots and celery, just as in a classic ragu alla bolognese, though with some red onion to make up for the sweetness missing from with the offal. I don’t tend to add garlic to my beef-based version, but I am going to here, for the same reason that Gritzer pours red, rather than the traditional white wine into his: “In this vegan sauce, I need my smokescreens, and red wine has a more robust flavour that flirts with your taste buds more – and the more flirting your taste buds get from the red wine, the less they’ll notice that you’re not eating meat.”
Similarly, I’ll be adding bay and rosemary – two herbs which make me think of slow-cooked meat (Gritzer goes for sage as well, and Erskine for thyme, both of which work the same way), as well as nutmeg, in a nod to my original ragu alla bolognese. Though I’ve kept things fairly simple, fennel seeds, oregano, chilli flakes, chipotle, star anise, allspice, coriander and cumin all get an airing in my recipe testing, should you be looking to spice things up a bit.
The sauce
As well as the aforementioned wine (which will indeed be red), I’ll be loosening my sauce with chopped tomatoes and tomato puree. Initially, I tried to keep these to a minimum to cleave more faithfully to the idea of a meat sauce rather than a tomato-based one. But then I realise that tomato is another useful smokescreen – especially in combination with mushrooms, where the flavours meld to produce something that’s neither emphatically mushroomy or tomatoey, but simply richly savoury. (Though many recipes do include stock, I always find vegetable stock tastes far more strident – all celery and dried herbs – than meat-based ones, so I’ve stuck with water.)
Gritzer stirs a vegan bechamel, made with almond milk, and a scoop of flavourless coconut oil into the finished dish, while Ottolenghi and Belfrage add coconut cream. Not, I think, because any of them are yearning for tropical accents in their northern Italian-style sauce, but, as Gritzer puts it, “to add the silkiness and richness of emulsified beef fat in a classic bolognese sauce. Without it, the sauce is too lean, a dead giveaway that it’s a vegan impostor.” He’s right, but I think you can get a similar result with a generous glug of olive oil; don’t be put off by the amount in the recipe below, though – remember that, unlike meat, mushrooms and tofu are very low in fat, so you’re just making up a deficit.
The seasonings
Missing something? Ottolenghi and Belfrage add coconut cream and soy to their vegan ragu.
This is where things get really interesting. Mix all the above, and you’d have a pretty decent sauce. To take it the extra mile, however, you can sneak in some very untraditional ingredients – after all, you’ve already got tofu in there. Gritzer, and Ottolenghi and Belfrage, both use soy sauce and miso, which, Gritzer explains, “add complexity and deep savouriness that normally come from the meat itself”. Ottolenghi and Belfrage also use rose harissa, which supplies a further smoky depth of flavour, but my favourite option is Weibel’s Marmite, which “brings salty, bitter notes that taste like those of browned meat. Like mushrooms, walnuts, soy sauce and tomato paste – and, yes, beef – it has a high concentration of glutamic acid, which imparts a strong, umami taste best described as meaty.” I think it has the beefiest flavour of all of the above, but if you don’t keep it in the house, then soy sauce or miso are the best alternatives.
Having added salty Marmite, I decide my sauce needs a dash of sweetness for balance; Ware adds a finely chopped date for this reason, but I’m going to fall back on the thing I often sneak into a tomato sauce that needs a bit of help: a spoonful of balsamic vinegar, which brings both sugar and yet more umami. Yes, this sauce is intense.
The cooking method
I feel fairly confident that traditionalists will have given up in disgust at the first mention of tofu, so they won’t be still around to disapprove of the fact that I’m going to suggest baking the ragu, rather than simmering it on the stove. This may sound odd, but having tried this technique in the “ultimate traybake ragu” recipe in Ottolenghi and Belfrage’s book, it dehydrates and caramelises the ingredients more efficiently, which is useful in this instance, when the aim is to concentrate the flavours. As a bonus, it needs far less monitoring on the part of the cook.
If you’re loth to put the oven on, however, you can easily make it on the hob instead, gently sauteeing the onion, celery and carrot with the herbs until soft, stirring in the garlic for a couple of minutes, frying the fresh mushrooms until they give up most of their liquid, before adding the tofu, tomato puree and porcini powder, and stirring regularly until fairly dry and starting to brown. At that point, you can add the remaining ingredients, cover and simmer gently for half an hour, before uncovering for a final 15 minutes, if necessary. It’ll still be wonderful, though you’ll just need to babysit it a little more. Whichever way you do it, I promise it will be worth it.
Perfect vegan ragu
Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr 40 min
Serves 4-6
75g shelled walnuts
250g chestnut mushrooms
250g firm tofu
½ red onion, peeled and cut into small dice
½ yellow onion, peeled and cut into small dice
1 large carrot, cut into small dice
2 sticks celery, cut into small dice
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
30g dried porcini, whizzed to a powder
Salt
90ml olive oil, plus extra to serve
2 tbsp tomato puree
1-2 tbsp Marmite, to taste (depending on your fondness for Marmite)
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
200ml red wine
1 bay leaf
1 sprig fresh rosemary
Nutmeg, to taste
Heat the oven to 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 (see above for hob cooking), and put a large, high-sided baking tray/roasting tin in there to warm up.
Toast the walnuts in a dry pan for about eight minutes, shaking them once to ensure they don’t burn, then take out and set aside.
Meanwhile, chop the mushroom stems into mince-sized pieces and tear/chop the caps and the tofu similarly.
Put the diced onions, carrot and celery in the hot roasting tin, then add the garlic, mushrooms, tofu and powdered porcini, season and toss to mix.
Mix the oil and the tomato puree, then add to the tin and mix again so all the vegetables and tofu are well coated.
Bake for 20 minutes, then stir, making sure to dislodge any bits from the corners, then bake for another 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, whizz the toasted walnuts to a powder and dissolve the Marmite in 100ml warm water.
Take the tin out of the oven and reduce the heat to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4. Stir in the walnuts, chopped tomatoes, Marmite water, balsamic vinegar and wine, then add the bay and rosemary and a good grating of nutmeg, cover with foil and bake for another 30 minutes.
Remove the foil and bake for a final 15 minutes, by which time the mix should be saucy, but not soupy.
Taste for seasoning and adjust if necessary, then stir in another good glug of olive oil before serving with your pasta of choice.
Do you have a favourite plant-based ragu recipe – whether vegan or vegetarian – and what are your top tips for beefing up flavour without actual meat?
This article was edited on 16 January 2022, to clarify that the amount of Marmite required is dependent on your fondness (or otherwise) for it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/watchdog-proposes-capping-gas-and-electricity-prices-for-4m-homes-on-pre-paid-meters | Business | 2016-03-10T13:20:40.000Z | Terry Macalister | UK watchdog accused of bowing to pressure from 'big six' energy suppliers | The competition watchdog has been accused of bowing to pressure from the “big six” energy suppliers after proposing a watered-down series of remedies aimed at stopping UK consumers from being overcharged.
Opposition MPs, independent power companies and fuel poverty groups all warned the Competition and Markets Authority review would do little to stop householders paying £1.7bn a year too much for their energy.
Ovo Energy, one of the new breed of suppliers, said the last 18 months of investigation by the CMA had been “a complete waste of time and taxpayers’ money”.
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The competition watchdog has called for a price cap on tariffs covering the 4m households on prepaid meters and wants a customer database to be set up to make switching supplier more easy.
However, the CMA has not widened that safeguard cap to include those stuck on high-cost standard variable tariffs and wants to scrap a four-tariff limit established only recently by energy regulator Ofgem to make price comparisons easier.
Earlier speculation that the big six would be broken up to separate their supply from their power generation arms was shelved by the CMA as a proposal last summer amid endless lobbying by the companies.
Lisa Nandy, Labour’s energy and climate change spokeswoman, said the latest remedies represented a missed opportunity: “This investigation has confirmed that millions of families and businesses have been overcharged for their energy bills to the tune of billions of pounds yet energy companies are still being let off the hook.
“This was a critical chance to shake up a broken energy market and make sure savings from falling wholesale prices are passed on to customers. Only more transparency and competition can deliver this.”
Steve Thomas, a professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, also believed the remedies would not prevent UK consumers being unnecessarily subjected to some of the highest energy bills in the European Union.
“The CMA report has failed to tackle what really concerns consumers: the UK is supplied by a cosy group of six companies who know very well without the need to collude that the last thing they need is the price war that real competition would lead to. The CMA measures will do little to change this.”
Laura Hill, for campaign group Fuel Poverty Action, said: “Today’s announcement is a testimony to the stranglehold of the big six over this investigation. Extensive lobbying has resulted in these pathetic watered-down recommendations which will have little impact on the majority of hard-pressed households who have spent the winter shivering in their home.”
But Roger Witcomb, head of the CMA investigation, said the “coherent and comprehensive package of reforms” would transform the energy sector.
He admitted the six largest suppliers had been taking existing domestic customers – some 70% of whom are on “default” standard variable tariffs – “for granted, not just over prices, but with their service and quality”.
But he added: “In those parts of the retail markets where competition is working, customers are benefiting to the tune of hundreds of pounds a year by switching. We’re proposing a wide range of bold, innovative measures to enable competition to grow further across the market so that millions more households will benefit.”
The CMA inquiry, launched in June 2014, was intended to clear up once and for all whether SSE, Iberdrola’s Scottish Power, British Gas-owner Centrica, RWE npower, E.ON and EDF Energy were abusing their dominance of the market.
However, the regulator has retreated from more radical proposals amid ferocious lobbying from the energy sector.
Centrica shares rose slightly as the City realised the changes would not affect the supplier very much.
Iain Conn, the chief executive of Centrica, made clear he was happy: “We believe that, provided they [the CMA remedies] are implemented thoughtfully, the majority will benefit our customers. We will work through the full report once we have it and submit a formal response in line with the required timetable.”
Plans for wide-ranging cap on energy bills expected to be scrapped
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E.ON described the report as a “major milestone” of the CMA’s investigation and said it would review the material before making a detailed response. “We have been open and fully supportive of the investigative work undertaken by the CMA and we will continue to provide all necessary and relevant information as we move towards the final report in June.”
The big six have always argued the market is highly competitive and the profits commensurate with the risks they take.
The secretary for state for energy and climate change, Amber Rudd, said: “This is a wakeup call to the big six. Energy customers should get a fair deal from a market that works for them. That’s why we called for the biggest ever investigation into the energy market and won’t hesitate to take forward its recommendations.
“This report goes hand in glove with everything this government is doing to deliver a fair, competitive energy market that puts the families and businesses paying the bills first and the power back in their hands.”
Key CMA proposals
New Ofgem-controlled database allowing rival suppliers to contact domestic and microbusiness customers stuck on default SVT tariff for three years or more to offer better deals
A transitional price control for the 4m households on prepayment meters
Give price comparison websites such as comparethemarket.com access to customer data such as meter numbers and allow them to negotiate exclusive deals with suppliers
Remove the four tariff rule which limits competition and innovation
Remove restrictions hindering new suppliers competing for prepayment customers and reduce barriers to switching such as debt issues
Allow the 700,000 households on non-Economy 7 restricted meters to switch to cheaper single-rate tariffs without requiring a meter replacement
Prioritise Ofgem’s programme to help provide domestic customers with clearer information
Strengthen Ofgem’s independence and reporting powers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/12/donald-trump-nato-summit-chaos-germany-attack-defence-spending | World news | 2018-07-12T17:16:49.000Z | Ewen MacAskill | Trump claims victory as Nato summit descends into mayhem | Nato’s European leaders were left reeling after one of the most divisive summits in the organisation’s 69-year history, at which Donald Trump set a January deadline for them to increase defence spending and hinted that the US might quit the alliance if they failed to meet it.
While other Nato members treated his warnings as a bluff, they left the Brussels summit stunned at the end of two days of mayhem, almost all of it orchestrated by Trump.
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In the final hours he again reduced the 29-member organisation, the most powerful military coalition in the world, to chaos. He turned up late for a meeting, ignored the issues on the table, demanded fresh talks and secured an emergency discussion on spending.
Afterwards, at a hastily convened press conference, Trump claimed he had emerged victorious, saying European leaders had caved in to his demands – something both the French and Germans later denied.
He said they had agreed to reach the Nato target of spending 2% of GDP on defence faster than previously planned, and he claimed financial commitments would increase beyond that in the future.
“I can you tell you that Nato now is a really a fine-tuned machine. People are paying money that they never paid before. They’re happy to do it. And the United States is being treated much more fairly,” he said.
But other European leaders, in particular the French president, Emmanuel Macron, flatly contradicted this, saying no extra rises had been agreed beyond those set out in a Nato communique published on Wednesday, which contained only a vague timetable of promises, basically the same as those that existed before the summit started.
“There is a communique that was published yesterday. It’s very detailed,” Macron said. “It confirms the goal of 2% by 2024. That’s all.”
Trump made ambiguous remarks hinting that the US could leave Nato unless other countries increased defence spending and apparently setting a deadline of January, which most of them would regard as totally impractical.
“He said they must raise spending by January 2019 or the United States would go it alone,” a source told Reuters.
But Macron denied that Trump’s words about the US going its own way should be interpreted as a threat to quit. “President Trump never at any moment, either in public or in private, threatened to withdraw from Nato,” Macron said.
Trump did not elaborate at the press conference about what his words meant but declined several opportunities to deny the interpretation that it was an ultimatum. He even added fuel to the fire when he said, in response to a question about whether he could withdraw the US from Nato without the approval of Congress, required under the US constitution: “I think I probably can, but that’s unnecessary.”
Nato membership is agreed by a treaty that would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate to overthrow. The US military regards Nato as indispensable.
Summing up, Trump claimed the summit had ended happily. “I let them know that I was extremely unhappy,” he said. “It all came together at the end. It was a little tough for a little while.”
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The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, described the summit as “very intense”. Trump repeatedly singled out Germany over the two days. The US spends 3.5% of GDP on defence, compared with Germany’s 1.2%.
Asked whether Trump had threatened to quit, Merkel said: “The US president demanded what has been discussed for months: that the burden-sharing should change.” She echoed Macron, saying there had been no change as a result of the emergency meeting.
The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, abandoned a session discussing moves towards Nato membership for Georgia, diplomatically sensitive because it sits on Russia’s flank, and beefing up Nato’s role in Afghanistan.
He cleared the room of all non-Nato leaders, from countries such as Georgia and Afghanistan, and held a closed session with Trump and the other 28 Nato leaders.
Stoltenberg said: “We had a very frank and open discussion … That discussion has made Nato stronger. It has created a new sense of urgency. A clear message from President Trump is having an impact.”
After Trump’s visit to the UK – he flew from Brussels straight to London – he will meet Vladimir Putin in Helsinki next week. The Russian leader can take satisfaction from the disarray inside Nato. One of the fears among Nato leaders is that Trump might make concessions to Putin just as he did when he met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore last month.
Asked at his press conference about whether he might make concessions to Putin such as cutting military exercises in eastern Europe or recognising the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 , Trump was vague. He said the annexation had taken place on the watch of Barack Obama. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/apr/30/elliot-page-happiness-top-surgery-oprah-winfrey-interview | Film | 2021-05-04T14:33:30.000Z | Joanna Walters | ‘It is life-saving’: Elliot Page reveals happiness at having had top surgery | Actor Elliot Page has revealed how much happier he feels after having top surgery, and described transitioning as “life-saving”.
“I want people to know that not only has it been life-changing for me, I do believe it is life-saving and it’s the case for so many people,” the actor told Oprah Winfrey on her new show for Apple TV+.
During the interview, Page teared up when Winfrey asked him what has brought him the most joy.
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The Oscar-nominated star of Juno, Inception and The Umbrella Academy said it was the little things – like wearing a T-shirt, having a towel around his waist after a shower or touching his chest – that made him “feel comfortable in my body for probably the first time”, looking in the mirror and thinking “Oh, there I am.”
Page said the surgery – reconstructive surgery that includes the removal of breast tissue – has given him newfound energy “because it is such a freeing, freeing experience”, adding: “This is incredibly new. I feel like I haven’t gotten to be myself since I was 10 years old.”
He said he has written his first screenplay and is enjoying an “explosion of creativity” after so many years of anxiety, mental health pain and avoiding exploring his identity.
Page described the anguish at being obliged to parade in gowns and a feminine appearance when Juno became a huge hit.
Coming out as gay in 2014 “did relieve some stuff for me, I was extremely closeted all through my 20s … but the discomfort with my body didn’t go away,” he said, explaining that sexual orientation and gender identity are “completely different things”.
He and Oprah discussed how many transgender people do not have surgery to change their bodies, or take hormones, or even want to talk about their transition.
But Page was the first transgender man to be the sole cover figure of Time magazine, and talked about his surgery, and now was doing his first television interview, pointing out that: “My ability to be sitting here now is because of so many trans women of color who put their lives on the line” over the decades.
The full interview from The Oprah Conversation was released on Friday.
Page urged officials to support healthcare for transgender people and allow them access to sports. Republican lawmakers across the US are seeking to curtail gender-affirming care and punish doctors who deliver it, as well as banning trans youth from playing in the sports teams or events matching their gender identity.
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“Children will die,” Page said. “And it really is that simple.”
This week, state legislators in Florida rushed through a bill that would ban trans women and girls from participating in school sports they classed as “designated for females, women or girls”. Critics described the move as “cruel and horrific”.
Winfrey pointed out that there are a record 82 pieces of anti-trans legislation being considered in more than two dozen US states.
Page said he thought such moves by conservative Republicans are part of a backlash against the growing visibility of transgender people, using them as political pawns while opposing the Equality Act to provide federal protections for LGBTQ people.
“Some people want to erase trans people,” he said.
Page came out as trans in December, an announcement that was widely greeted as a watershed moment for the trans community in Hollywood. He told Winfrey the decision was “imperative” in light of the violence against trans youth.
“It felt important and selfish for myself and my own wellbeing and my mental health,” he said. “And also with this platform I have, the privilege that I have, and knowing the pain and the difficulties and the struggles I’ve faced in my life, let alone what so many other people are facing, it absolutely felt crucial and important for me to share that.”
This article was amended on 4 May 2021. Transgender women and girls will be banned from participating in school sports “designated for females, women or girls” in Florida, rather than from all school sports as an earlier version implied. It was further amended on 14 May 2021 to include a general description of top surgery.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2013/sep/24/forests | Life and style | 2013-09-24T11:17:00.000Z | Andy Byfield | It's time to stand up for our trees | There can be few more glorious places than the New Forest in autumn. With the dawn roar of stags along woodland margins, the yellow and russet tints of moorgrass and bracken among fading purple heather, and ponies feasting on a final flush of grass across chamomile-spangled greens before winter sets in, this is Old England at its best. So picture-perfect, in fact, that it could be some Olympian stage-set from the imaginings of Danny Boyle, rather than a real entity.
Trees of course feature hugely in the forest, with beech and oak vying with one another to be the forest's – and indeed the nation's - favourite. Who can fail to be impressed with the grand stands of soaring beech, with their patina-ed, gunmetal-grey bark, and vast columnar crowns. Then again, picture the spreading botryoidal crowns of mature field-grown oaks, giving shelter to a welter of wildlife on trunk and in crown alike, maybe an acorn-rootling pig at its feet.
If logos are anything to go by, the oak is the outright winner. Whether it is the acorn and leaf combinations of the National Trust, the Woodland Trust or the South-west Coast Path, or the spreading silhouette of a mature tree in its prime (the Forestry Commission, among many), most of us instinctively and instantly recognise this imagery. Of course, David Cameron's Conservative Party chose a green tree – an oak to my botanical eye – as its new logo a few years back (remember the "greenest government ever"?) though this has evolved into a more chest-thumping red, white and blue manifestation in recent times.
Over the coming weeks, the coalition has an opportunity to prove its green credentials, through the decisions that it makes over the long-term future of the Public Forest Estate (PFE) in England, currently managed by Forest Enterprise (in practice, the land-managing arm of the Forestry Commission). It's worth remembering that the public forest in England alone covers roughly an area the size of Derbyshire or Oxfordshire, and includes 500 square miles of ancient woodland, land that has in some cases sported trees continuously since the end of the last ice age. It is home to more than 200 species of rare, scarce and threatened flowering plants (and much else), and this exceptional wildlife value is recognised through designation of roughly a quarter of the estate as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. While representing only 18% of England's woodland cover, this estate provides 40% of open access woodland available for all to enjoy.
It's also worth remembering that a few years back this government tried to lot up our forests with an eye to selling much to the highest bidder. The public were having none of this, collected roughly half a million signatures, and forced the then-Secretary of State for the Environment, Caroline Spelman, to apologise, admitting that "we got this one wrong". "If there is one clear message from this experience", Spelman conceded, "it is that people cherish their forests and woodlands and the benefits they bring". The public had spoken with one voice, demanding that our forests remain in public hands for the wildlife that they support and the countryside access that they bring to all.
The role of working out a different vision for the future for the estate fell to an independent panel of forestry, amenity and conservation experts chaired by the Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool. The panel came down heavily in favour of a public forest "in public ownership and defined in statue as land held in the trust for the nation". A new management organisation should be established, with the delivery of public benefit as its prime function. An overriding purpose of the estate, they intimated, is "to sustain and maximise the public value of the estate, in terms of wildlife, access, recreation, education and cultural heritage". Above all, the panel believed that estate should be an "exemplar" of sustainable woodland management, delivering the conservation of wildlife, woodlands and associated habitats, along with large-scale open habitat and ancient woodland restoration. All in all, somewhere rather special and inspirational, and altogether different from the private plantations and woodlands run on purely commercial or sporting lines.
An oak tree. Photograph: Asist RF Arkiv/Alamy
The government has produced "governance premises" for the new public Forest Management Organisation, and this is out for consultation until tomorrow (September 25). Where the panel's report was nuanced and aspirational, and showed that the panel had fully listened to what the public truly want, there is a distinct lack of clarity in the government's three-page summary and supporting documentation. Rather than putting access and nature as overriding priorities (with income generation merely a means to "invest even more in the public benefits they deliver"), the report seeks to maximise economic opportunities. Gone is any mention of specific large-scale open habitat and ancient woodland restoration, and there is no mention of the economic values that forests provide in the form of ecosystem services that they supply. "Significant" acquisitions and disposals of land are back on the table, and in terms of guidance and governance, the panel's all-important guardians (trustees) have been relegated to the role of mere advisors. Perhaps most worryingly, as the government seemingly wants to wash their hands of the estate and ultimately withdraw funding, the big worry is that the need to balance the books will mean that economic necessities always trump inspirational landscape management. Yet, as the panel noted, for a frankly trifling £20m in costs, the estate delivers some £400m in public benefits. Not a bad return on investment.
As we approach the centenary of the birth of our public forests in their current form, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to guide the way our forest estate looks over the coming century. Inspirational landscapes teeming with wildlife – like the New Forest – should guide the estate through its second century in existence, for this is what the public clamours for. And yet for want of £20m from central government, and blinkered by 20th century forestry thinking, it is entirely possible that this opportunity will slip through our grasp. Do make your views known through the public consultation: details here.
Andy Byfield is one of the founders of the wild plant charity Plantlife.
The standfirst of this piece was edited on September 24 2013 to reflect the fact that the consultation refers to England's public forests, not Britain's. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/23/iran-says-response-to-terrorist-attack-on-military-parade-will-be-crushing-ahvaz | World news | 2018-09-23T14:49:35.000Z | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Iran says response to terrorist attack on military parade will be 'crushing' | Iran has vowed a crushing response to Saturday’s terrorist attack on a military parade that killed at least 29 people, including conscripts and children, as it accused its US-backed regional rivals of incubating insurgent separatist groups.
In the deadliest terrorist attack Iran has seen in years, four assailants disguised in military uniforms opened fire when military personnel were marching in front of a viewing platform in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.
The attack took the lives of soldiers, many of whom were on their two-year obligatory military service, as well as civilians, including children and a veteran of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war who was killed in his wheelchair. There are conflicting reports about the death of one journalist.
Iranian soldiers jump over a hedge at a street as they run for cover during the terrorist attack. Photograph: Morteza Jaberian/EPA
One image from the aftermath of the attack that went viral online showed a soldier carrying a wounded young boy away from the scene. The four-year-old, identified as Mohammad-Taha Eghdami, later died in hospital – his dead body was shown on state TV on Sunday.
“It is perfectly clear to us who were behind the attack and what their affiliation is,” Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said on Sunday before travelling to New York for the UN general assembly. “The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the smallest threat will be crushing.”
Rouhani did not single out a specific country, but other officials have pointed their finger at Saudi Arabia, Iran’s arch-enemy, which Tehran accuses of hosting and aiding separatist and sectarian groups. Ahvaz, the capital of Shia-majority Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, is home to the country’s Arab minority.
“Those who keep repeating their bogus stance on advocating human rights must be held accountable; all those small mercenary countries in the region which the US backs and provokes,” added Rouhani.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Saturday that “this crime is a continuation of the plots of the regional states that are puppets of the United States, and their goal is to create insecurity in our dear country,” according to a statement posted on his official website.
The attack was immediately claimed by an Arab nationalist separatist group called the Patriotic Arab Democratic Movement in Ahvaz. Its spokesperson told the London-based exiled TV network Iran International that the attack was aimed at “the Revolutionary Guards and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic”. Iran’s state news agency said the group was “Saudi-affiliated”. Later on Saturday, Islamic State (Isis), also claimed responsibility.
Soldiers and families run from Saturday’s attack in Ahvaz. Photograph: Fatemeh Rahimavian/AP
On Saturday night, Iran summoned the UK envoy over the conduct of Iran International, which is run by a company owned by a Saudi national, because it gave airtime to the spokesperson of the group behind Saturday’s terrorist attack. Iran’s ambassador to the UK announced he would lodge a complaint with the regulator, Ofcom.
Tehran’s foreign ministry summoned UK, Dutch and Danish envoys over “Iran’s strong protests over their respective countries’ hosting of some members of the terrorist group”, officials said. Iran urged Denmark and the Netherlands to extradite the terrorist attack’s “perpetrators and their accomplices” to stand trial, the state news agency said. The spokesperson of the separatist group that took responsibility for the terrorist attack gave TV interviews from Denmark.
Iran’s objection to the Netherlands appears to stem from the fact that a number of Arab secessionists live there. Last November, Iranian Arab secessionist Ahmad Mola Nissi was shot dead in The Hague in a suspected political killing.
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a postdoctoral research fellow in modern Iranian history at University of Oxford, said Iranians had been furious on social media over a perceived double standard in western media coverage of “what Iranians overwhelmingly see as a terrorist attack, with the sole aim of sowing fear and ethnic divisions”.
“It comes after decades of vilification in which Iranians are often depicted as the agents of terrorism, or are expected to ‘prove’ themselves as ‘good’ Middle Easterners deserving of international sympathy and empathy,” he said.
“The fact that Iranians are under severe economic pressure at home, and regularly demonised by the Trump administration in concert with a longer-standing history of grievances in which the west can be seen as turning a blind eye, are surely key to understanding a lot of the popular anger we’re seeing on social media about alleged double standards.”
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A number of Arab media close to Saudi Arabia portrayed it as merely a legitimate attack targeting military officials, including members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards. Al Wesal TV, a Saudi-based Sunni Islamic educational channel encouraging Shia Muslims to convert to Sunni Islam, wrongly referred to the Iranian city as “occupied Ahvaz”.
The state-run Press TV published an article headlined “Reactions to attack: How West sees it differently”, protesting that some western media were giving scant coverage, dropping the term “terrorist attack” despite civilian casualties, or portraying it as a merely an attack on military personnel.
Western diplomats in Tehran, including the British, German and Austrian ambassadors, condemned what they said was a terrorist attack. The US state department said “the United States condemns all acts of terrorism and the loss of any innocent lives”.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Iranian leaders should look closer to home. Asked about Rouhani’s comments, Haley told CNN: “He needs to look at his own base to figure out where that’s coming from. He can blame us all he wants. The thing he’s got to do is look at the mirror.”
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, echoed this. “When you have a security incident at home, blaming others is an enormous mistake,” he told Fox News. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/sep/11/sarah-burton-to-leave-alexander-mcqueen-fashion-house-after-two-decades | Fashion | 2023-09-11T19:18:13.000Z | Chloe Mac Donnell | Sarah Burton to leave fashion house Alexander McQueen after two decades | Sarah Burton, the creative director of Alexander McQueen who designed the Princess of Wales’s wedding dress, is leaving the fashion house after more than two decades.
In a statement released on Monday, Kering, the brand’s parent company, announced that its show on the 30 September during Paris fashion week will be Burton’s last.
“We would like to express our immense gratitude to Sarah for writing such an important chapter in the history of the Alexander McQueen House. Sarah’s contribution over the past 26 years will leave an indelible mark,” said Gianfilippo Testa, Alexander McQueen’s chief executive.
Kering said Burton’s successor would be announced “in due course”.
The Macclesfield-born designer first joined the brand in 1996 on a placement year while studying at Central Saint Martins in London. She returned after her graduation and just two years later, in 2000, was named head of womenswear design.
After the death of the brand’s founder, Lee Alexander McQueen, in 2010 she was named as his successor and charged with continuing his legacy.
A year later, Burton shot to international fame when it was revealed that she was the designer behind the Princess of Wales’s wedding dress.
Burton was charged with creating the wedding dress for the Princess of Wales, then Kate Middleton. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
At the time, Clarence House said that she had chosen the British brand “for the beauty of its craftsmanship”. Burton described the process of creating the lace gown complete with 8ft train as “the experience of a lifetime”.
She has remained the princess’s designer of choice for events, including the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2018 and the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.
In 2012 Burton was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to the British fashion industry.
Her departure was announced amid a broader restructuring at Kering, which also owns Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta.
McQueen, who founded the label in 1992, sold a majority stake to the Gucci Group – now merged into Kering – in 2001.
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The French conglomerate, founded by François-Henri Pinault, is attempting a major transformation in order to revive sales at its star label Gucci and give a new direction to the luxury group that in recent years has lagged behind LVMH, its biggest rival, which owns Louis Vuitton, Dior and Givenchy, among others.
In November 2022, it was announced Alessandro Michele was relinquishing his role as the creative director of Gucci. Sabato De Sarno, his successor, will make his debut for the brand next week during Milan fashion week.
There has also been a reshuffle at a management level. This month Marco Bizzarri will step down as chief executive of Gucci, while the group has appointed Maureen Chiquet, former chief executive of Chanel, to its board of directors and named Francesca Bellettini, the chief executive of Saint Laurent, as head of the group’s portfolio of brands.
Last week, it was revealed Pinault will take a controlling stake in Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood talent agency which represents A-listers including Brad Pitt and Salma Hayek, Pinault’s wife.
Pinault acquired CAA (reportedly at a valuation of $7bn) through the Pinault family’s investment company, Artémis, which owns a 42% stake in Kering. The venture marks a new direction for Pinaut, who has spent most of the past decade building a $40bn portfolio focused on luxury. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/10/nhs-england-boosts-beds-mental-health-young-distance | Society | 2014-07-10T18:23:46.000Z | James Meikle | NHS to boost beds for mental health care for young people | The NHS is increasing the number of beds available for children and young people needing specialist mental health services, to try to prevent patients having to be treated long distances from home.
Families in south-west England, Yorkshire and Humberside, are among those encountering the most from these bed shortages. Extra problems are being caused by the lack of sufficiently experienced staff and of appropriate social care in the community for patients after they leave units.
NHS England is to open 50 new beds for children's mental health care. A report by the organisation suggests that broader engagement with children and young people, their families and their carers, is one the problems that should be addressed.
The report, of an NHS review, says that some parts of the UK could be losing beds as services shift to areas where the problems are worse. Patients are also sometimes inappropriatedly admitted to care, the field encompassing treatment for those who are deaf, have autistic spectrum disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, or gender dysphoria.
The report says: "There are geographical inequities in provision of services with some areas very poorly served … There needs to be a balance struck between need for a concentration of clinical expertise and a specific therapeutic environment, and the detrimental effect of long distance admissions."
The number of beds for children needing specialist care rose from 844 in 1999 to 1,264 in January this year. A 100 "snapshot" case histories provided for the report, showed that one in six patients travelled more than 100 miles for care.
Shortages of skilled staff have led to some units temporarily not admitting new patients, but recruitment is a problem across the entire country, says the report. An increase in the number of beds would add to such pressures, it admits.
Norman Lamb, minister for care and support, said: "I want to build a fairer society where children get the mental health care they need, but the current system is too fragmented and pressurised. To address this we are taking immediate action by making more beds available and appointing a taskforce to improve commissioning and create more joined-up services for children and young people. I am absolutely determined to get this right so that children everywhere get high-quality care."
Sarah Brennan, chief executive of the charity YoungMinds, said the report "lifted the lid" on big failings. "This has to be a pivotal moment where we seize the initiative and bring about a sea change in how we support children and young people's mental health."
The shadow public health minister, Luciana Berger, said the problems amounted to an "appalling picture" and national scandal. The announcement came "nowhere near addressing the scale of the challenge we are facing", she said.
Martin McShane, NHS England's director for patients with long-term conditions, said: "We are committed to both addressing the more immediate problems, by increasing capacity, and to improving these services longer term, together with our national partners." | Full |
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/jul/02/the-10-best-films-of-2014-so-far | Film | 2014-07-02T16:03:09.000Z | Adam Boult | The 10 best films of 2014 (so far) | We recently asked readers to vote for their favourite films of the year-so-far. We've totted up all the nominations and here are the top 10 – along with quotes about the films from some of the readers who voted, and links to the Guardian's reviews of each of the 10 titles.
What do you think of the results? Disappointed by the absence of A Million Ways to Die In The West? Outraged that Nymphomanic didn't make the cut? Let us know which film gets your vote for best-of-the-year in the comment thread below.
We're working off UK release dates here – when a movie hasn't yet been
10. Starred Up
"Raw, real, intelligent, knowing, humane, and brutal. It's also beautifully made, brilliantly played, and thoughtfully scripted." haruvister
'Shame, depression and fear are all pungently present' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 21 March; premiered in the US at Tribeca in April
9. The Fault In Our Stars
"It's beautiful, bitter sweet, heart-breaking, perfectly executed … and the first film in my 28 years that has made me cry." Gemma Corder
'Manipulative and crass…' Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 19 June and US on 6 June
8. The Double
"Riffing on Anderson, Lynch and Gilliam, Ayoade puts his own spin on the dystopian genre with a film that is cerebral, confrontational and surreal." Josh Senior
'A brilliantly realised nightmare universe' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 4 April and US 9 May
7. Edge of Tomorrow
"Pure entertainment from beginning to end. Hugely underrated, and should have been a lot more successful than it was!" Saxondale
'Tom Cruise in a sci-fi Groundhog Day, without the jokes … or the thrills' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 30 May and US on 6 June
6. Blue Ruin
"Pure, visceral cinema. A gripping edge-of-the-seat ride that came from nowhere without any help from the usual Hollywood hype machine." nickc909
'A dignified revenger's tragedy' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 2 May and US on 25 April
Macon Blair as Dwight in Blue Ruin. Photograph: Allstar/PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINME/Sportsphoto Ltd. Photograph: Allstar/PICTUREHOUSE ENTERTAINME/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
5. X-Men: Days of Future Past
"This is the Goldfinger of X-Men movies, where the production team crystallises the essence of the concept, within a great narrative." AngusBell
"A sublimely confident piece of film-making with terrific visuals and solid pacing." Chris McSweeney
'Chaotic but fun' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 22 May and the US on 23 May
4. Calvary
"Brendan Gleeson is the perfect imperfect priest, whose final week we follow as he examines the transgressors around him. His charismatic performance enables us to believe that he has the power to assuage the sins of others, yet that he is also still very much a fragile, fallible human. A quiet, funny, scabrous, profound film" Chris7572
Agony in the confessional – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 11 April, set for release in the US on 1 August
3. Under The Skin
"Audacious, captivating and iconic, it felt fresh and like nothing I have seen before. Destined for cult status" Rachael Loughlan
"Unlike anything else I've seen this century. The soundtrack is brilliant, Scarlett Johansson is excellent, and it made me look at other human beings very differently on emerging from cinema!" Reesiepie
"Visually stunning and deeply disturbing" – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK on 14 March and the US on 4 April
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
"For the Ralph Fiennes performance alone this is a must see. The film presents something new with each repeat viewing, offering a depth and complexity to every character, every scene; in actual fact every frame is awash with painstaking beauty." ID430293
"Probably Anderson's best film: hilarious, visually astonishing and packed full of his regulars, who all dazzle in their well-drawn characters." Tom Lillywhite
"After the well-made but emotionally distant Moonrise Kingdom, I went to see this with hopes for a mild improvement. I certainly didn't expect that I'd be grinning and laughing from beginning to end. Superb." orangew
'A deeply pleasurable immersion' – Read the Guardian's review
Released in the UK and US on 7 March
Grand Budapest Hotel Photograph: Martin Scali Photograph: Martin Scali/PR
1. The Lego Movie
"Brilliant, complex, multilayered, funny, subversive … and Lego."Andc
"The could have easily been like any other branding-fixated cash-grab, yet it can stand up on its own without relying on toy-collecting fans thanks to its inventive animation and surprisingly rich emotional themes. Everything is awesome about this film." Charlie Willis
"Visually stunning, endlessly imaginative, and with a third act that comes out of nowhere to hit you right in the childhood. It's a film about the innocence of childhood, the power of imagination, and above all else, a little plastic brick that changed the world." Newbarbarian
"Operates on another astral plane" - Read the Guardian's review
Mark Kermode's review
"A toy story every adult needs to see"
The Lego Movie isn't a great film, it's a brilliant commercial
Cinemas are dreadful. Especially when you're a lone adult at The Lego Movie
Released in the UK on 14 February and US on 7 February | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/20/abstract-expressionism-review-royal-academy-pollock-rothko | Art and design | 2016-09-20T14:56:06.000Z | Adrian Searle | Abstract Expressionism review – crammed in a room with the big men of US art | There are beautiful, marvellous and terrifying things in the Royal Academy’s much-trumpeted survey of Abstract Expressionism. What more could one ask in a show including the explosive and tender Jackson Pollock; De Kooning swerving and jumbling and dismembering his frightening figures of women; Rothko’s tangy brightness and trembling, tremulous darkness; Barnett Newman’s zips and planes and intervals; Guston’s dirty abstract impressionism in which figures wait to be unleashed. Franz Kline’s angled black and white incidents; Arshile Gorky’s quietly writhing accretions: they are all here. I wanted to be blown away, and to reconnect with a kind of painting that once had me in its thrall, and whose traces and impulses continue to be felt into the 21st century. I wanted to see it in some new and instructive way, but I didn’t.
From Gorky’s querulous biomorphs to one of Rothko’s very late grey and black images of emptiness and closure, I struggled. Overloaded, frequently puzzling and erratic, this is an exhibition whose pleasures – and there are many – come at a price. For all its key works, and also because of them, it often flattens out signal achievements, with deadening juxtapositions and clunky sightlines. While the biggest names get rooms to themselves, others fight it out in thematic displays that deaden individual works and achievements.
One of two pieces by Joan Mitchell in the Abstract Expressionism show. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
There isn’t enough work by the very few women artists – principally Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell – and Helen Frankenthaler was never really an abstract expressionist. “Abstract expressionism,” wrote poet and curator Frank O’Hara, “is the art of serious men.” Men is the key word. He also said, in 1954, that without its adventurous spirit, “we would have been given over to a cult of mechanics, of know-how … which cannot be confused with creation”. This now has largely happened.
The parsimonous representations of Jack Tworkov, Mark Tobey and William Baziotes don’t upset any of the hierarchies set up by critics and dealers in the 1950s. This may be right historically, but the exclusion of Hedda Sterne, the only woman to appear in the photograph of “the irascibles”, a group portrait shot for Time-Life in 1951, and whose works were a wonderful surprise in the opening show of the new Whitney Museum last year, feels perverse. “Unfortunately,” writes the show’s curator, American art historian David Anfam, “although Sterne was a fine artist, she was not of the foremost calibre. Prejudice and other deleterious factors must be opposed when shaping any canon, yet not (pace some contemporary theory) at the expense of connoisseurship and quality: tokens are not fully fledged currency, nor are quotas. As with gender, so with race.” This tells us a lot about the shaping of this exhibition, which makes no advances on our understanding of what abstract expressionism was.
Star Cage, 1950, a sculpture by David Smith. Photograph: Estate of David Smith/DACS, London/VAGA, New York
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There are nods to activities on the US west coast, and space given to Sam Francis, an overly precious artist whose paintings are a sort of décor writ large, and a small section devoted to photography, which feels like an appendage, and comes without enough contextualisation.
Anfam does include a single, squirming abstraction by Janet Sobel, who may have influenced Pollock, and includes Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, whose career was long overshadowed by his. Joan Mitchell is represented by two large works from 1960 and 1979, and it would have been instructive had she had a larger presence here.
Abstract expressionism came with a lot of critical as well as artistic bullshit, much of which Ad Reinhardt gleefully lampooned in his coruscating cartoons and statements. Reinhardt, whose paintings were close-toned and emphatically mute and inexpressive, was a sort of antidote to much of Ab Ex’s tub-thumping. He should have had a room of his own. One constant throughout the exhibition is the presence of sculptor David Smith, as if his sculptures give it spine and continuity. Smith is everywhere. Many of his smaller sculptures are essentially pictorial, and need silhouetting. Their curves and angles snag on the paintings beyond.
By the mid-1950s, abstract expressionism was over, whatever painters like Guston, Newman and Rothko went on to do, or what ideals and styles they clung to or renegotiated in the light of both their own maturity and the art that came after them: colour-field painting, formalist abstraction, minimalism, pop or whatever. They were not immune to the changing times. Guston in particular shifted focus in ways that only retrospectively make total sense.
Coup … the exhibition has a room of works by the rarely loaned Clyfford Still. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
What united the artists was ambition, turned into the method-actor romanticism of cold lofts, bad coffee and fights
With passing acknowledgements to Hans Hoffman (two works), a tally of the show gives us 15 Rothkos, 18 De Koonings, 13 works by David Smith and 12 paintings by Clyfford Still, who also gets a room to himself. Pollock said of Still that he “makes the rest of us look academic”. Still certainly made everyone else look like pygmies, with his oversized, riven scarps of claggy, craggy paint, with their fiddly, jagged interlocking fissures. We have probably never seen so many together as here, as the Clyfford Still Museum rarely lends works from its fastness in Denver, Colorado, where Anfam is senior consulting curator. Having so many Still paintings together may be a coup, but they cancel one another out.
There will never be a consensus as to what defines Ab Ex except a time and place “and a body of names”, Anfam tells us. What united the artists was the coincidence of individual artistic ambition, turned into the method-actor romanticism of cold-water lofts, bad coffee in Sixth Avenue cafeterias, fights at the Cedar Tavern, and frontlines being drawn between the downtown drinkers and brawlers and the uptown, suit-wearing aesthetes who hung about with the influx of European surrealists escaping the war. But this moment was short, and the legacy of abstract expressionism, and what happened through the subsequent decades, could have been better served.
Abstract Expressionism is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 24 September to 2 January | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/russian-millions-laundered-via-uk-firms-leaked-report-says | World news | 2018-02-26T18:00:22.000Z | Luke Harding | Russian millions laundered via UK firms, leaked report says | A Danish bank accused of money laundering shut down Russian accounts after concluding that they were being used to funnel cash through British companies by members of Vladimir Putin’s family and the FSB spy agency, according to leaked reports.
Danske, Denmark’s biggest bank, closed 20 Russian customer accounts in 2013 following a whistleblower report alleging that its Estonian branch was involved in suspicious and possibly illegal activity.
Last September it emerged that the same branch was at the centre of a secret lobbying operation in which some $2.9bn (£2.2bn) of mostly Azerbaijani money was channelled through opaque British companies.
The latest revelations concern a different group of firms, most registered in London. In summer 2013 Danske bank employees discovered that one of these UK entities, Lantana Trade LLP, had filed “false accounts” to Companies House.
According to the whistleblower report, Lantana told Companies House that it was “dormant”, with only a very limited financial turnover. In fact, Lantana held large deposits and made daily transactions of millions of euros. Lantana’s Danske account – opened in late 2012 – functioned for 11 months.
The ultimate owners of Lantana, and related limited partnerships, were Russians. But their identities were hidden behind a series of offshore management firms based in the Marshall Islands and the Seychelles.
The whistleblower report was obtained by the Danish newspaper Berlingske, and shared with the Guardian and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCRRP). It said the bank had failed to establish who was behind Lantana, adding that “apparently it was discovered that they included the Putin family and the FSB”.
Details were sent to Estonia’s financial intelligence unit and passed to Danske’s top management. Danske only began a full inquiry in 2017. It did not inform either the UK or Companies House.
Danske said on Monday: “We have launched a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of the events at that time in our Estonian branch.” It refused to comment on “specific customers” but said it had “closed down” the “entire portfolio in question” featuring “non-resident” Russians.
The revelations again highlight the use of the lightly regulated British corporate landscape to move large sums of money around, beyond the purview of regulators and tax authorities. In this case the beneficiaries appear to have been figures with Kremlin connections.
Baltic countries are a major entry point into the western financial system for Russian cash. Last week the US Treasury accused Latvia’s third biggest bank of “institutionalised money laundering”. Days later the country’s central bank chief, Ilmārs Rimšēvičs , was arrested following allegations he took a €100,000-plus bribe (paywall).
Rimšēvičs has denied all allegations and has denounced them as a smear campaign.
Danske’s Estonian managers grew concerned following a tip-off from inside Russia. They found that Lantana was closely linked to Promsberbank, a little-known bank in Podolsk, outside Moscow. Promsberbank’s senior managers represented Lantana.
One member of Promsberbank’s board was Igor Putin, the cousin of Russia’s president. A major shareholder was Alexander Grigoriev, a banker who, according to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), has FSB ties. Another was Alexei Kulikov, who was arrested in 2016 and charged with “large-scale fraud”. Promsberbank collapsed in 2016 when it emerged that 3bn roubles (about £38m) had disappeared.
One former Danske employee said the bank’s internal investigation revealed “high-ranking employees” from Promsberbank were behind Lantana. The employee told Berlingske newspaper: “The company and cash flows were controlled by the bank. It wasn’t just rumours. This is valid information.”
Alexei Kulikov was arrested in 2016 and charged with ‘large-scale fraud’. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The trio were closely connected with another scandal featuring Germany’s Deutsche Bank. Deutsche has admitted that between 2011 and 2015 its Moscow division ran a $10bn (£7bn) “mirror trades” scheme. The scheme allowed VIP Russian clients to transform roubles into dollars, via related corporate entities that “bought” and “sold” identical volumes of stock.
Kulikov had a Danske account. Several of the entities closed down by Danske in 2013 were involved in Deutsche Bank mirror trading, including Chadborg Trade LLP, based in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, Cherryfield Management and Financial Bridge. Deutsche Bank – the main lender to Donald Trump – paid $630m in US-UK fines for laundering Russian cash.
Danske’s decision to investigative went down badly in Moscow, where Lantana had a city centre office. A Danske account manager flew to the Russian capital to obtain documents revealing Lantana’s real owners. He left a meeting shaken, reporting that his Russian clients were “furious”, bank sources say.
A few weeks later a meeting was held at Danske’s office in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. Two Russians refused to identify themselves and allegedly told bank staff: “Do you really feel you can walk home safely at night?” They added: “The bank will sink after this.” These threats were reported internally.
L Burke Files, an international financial investigator, said the fact that the same entities were used in different schemes “does not surprise me one bit”. Professional criminals “design or craft” a package to get round compliance checks and then “use it at every bank”, he said.
He described the Lantana case as “very serious”, adding: “The activity in the account was in every way indicative of money laundering. There were many large transactions and all of them done in one or two days. The money didn’t linger. Here is a small branch of a very big bank that has an account moving tens of millions every day.”
The scale of the fraud is unknown. According to Files it could have been between $2.2bn and $3.3bn in total, based on a pattern of $10m-plus being laundered every day.
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He added: “This is such an excellent way to move large sums of money that I am sure is still occurring. It is a very difficult trail to follow.”
Grigoriev allegedly masterminded another big league money-laundering scheme dubbed the Global Laundromat. Between 2010 and 2015 at least $20bn was moved out of Moscow into western banks. The money went via Moldova and Latvia. Igor Putin sat on the board of a bank involved in the fraud, the Russian Land Bank or RZB.
Putin declined to comment. In a letter written in 2014, he said: “My personal experience, gained in recent years, proves the truth of the thesis that the Russian banking system should be radically rehabilitated and cleaned of troubled banks headed by people with doubtful reputations.”
Grigoriev and Kulikov are currently in jail. Grigoriev was arrested in 2015, a year after RZB was shut for money-laundering offences. Kulikov was imprisoned in a different matter. In April 2015 Russia’s central bank revoked Promsberbank’s licence. So far Kulikov has not replied to a letter sent to him in prison inviting comment.
The British companies involved in the scam were wound up. Lantana was dissolved in December 2015.
The damning whistleblower report said that Danske had suffered a “near total process failure”. It did not identify Lantana’s true owners or take action over “suspicious payments made just under compliance control limits”. The bank “breached numerous regulatory requirements”, “behaved unethically” and “may have committed a criminal offence”, it said.
Robert Endersby, Danske’s British chief risk officer at the time, who saw the report, declined to comment. Danske said it now had a “very different and stronger control set up in Estonia”. It admitted it should have acted “faster”.
Madis Reimand, the head of Estonia’s financial intelligence unit, would not comment directly on the Lantana group of companies.
He said: “Generally speaking the purpose of such money-laundering schemes is to move funds out of Russia, to get the money into the western financial system, and to do it in a non-transparent and secretive manner.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/17/sibelius-the-seven-symphonies-cd-review-jarvi-cant-quite-convince | Music | 2019-01-17T15:00:19.000Z | Andrew Clements | Sibelius: The Seven Symphonies CD review – Järvi can't quite convince | Andrew Clements' classical album of the week | New recordings of Sibelius’s symphonies, both single discs and complete cycles, are not exactly uncommon, but few of those that have appeared in recent years have threatened to rival the best already available. Simon Rattle’s studied performances with the Berlin Philharmonic seemed disappointing after the freshness of his 1980s Birmingham set, for instance, and even Osmo Vänskä’s second cycle, recorded with the Minnesota Orchestra, rarely matched his earlier pioneering work with the Lahti Symphony for BIS Records. That version, and John Barbirolli’s 1960s Hallé cycle on Warner Classics, arguably remain the best all-round recommendations.
Paavo Järvi comes to these symphonies with pedigree. Not only has he strong family connections with them – his father, Neeme, has recorded two complete cycles – but he has established his own credentials with a fine series of recordings that included versions of the early symphonic suite Kullervo, rarely heard cantatas and Sibelius’s only completed opera, The Maiden in the Tower. The symphonies, though, present an interpretative challenge on a different level altogether, especially when working with the Orchestre de Paris (where Järvi was music director from 2010-16), an ensemble with relatively little experience of playing them. He took the project slowly, too. The recordings – from concerts in two Paris venues, the Salle Pleyel and the Philharmonie – were stretched over five years.
The cover of Paavo Järvi’s recording of Sibelius’s Symphonies 1-7
Not that there’s any tentativeness or uncertainty about the playing, which seems thoroughly idiomatic. But if nothing is contrived or forced, not all the performances are convincing. There is a freshness and urgency about Järvi’s account of the Third, for instance, that make it totally engaging, whereas his performance of the Fifth lacks the same excitement. It becomes matter-of-fact, and its pivotal moments – the first movement’s transformation into a scherzo, the emergence of the great “swan theme” in the finale – don’t quite generate the thrills they should.
As the final two symphonies show, that’s sometimes a matter of scale. Where the Sixth is unfolded with great clarity, and with a perfect balance between its moments of quiet intimacy and occasional shows of enormous strength, the Seventh seems unexpectedly diminished. One of the most original formal schemes in symphonic history is made to sound almost commonplace, even though its epic climaxes never lack authority or tonal richness. It’s a performance that could represent the whole cycle, for despite Järvi’s deep knowledge and obvious affinity with all this music, something about the result isn’t convincing. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/15/sse-to-increase-clean-energy-investment-after-profits-rise | Business | 2023-11-15T18:19:37.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | SSE boss calls on ministers to support renewable energy industry as inflation bites | The boss of SSE has called on the government to take bold action to support the renewable energy industry as rising inflation across the global supply chains threaten to slow the rollout of new clean energy projects.
The SSE chief executive, Alistair Phillips-Davies, told investors that the FTSE 100 utility would increase its spending by 14% to £20.5bn for its current budget in part because of a sharp rise in the costs of building windfarms and electricity grids.
He urged the government to take bold action to support offshore wind developers by offering higher subsidies for new offshore windfarms to reflect the higher costs of building them.
Phillips-Davies made the call for greater government support as officials prepare to unveil a new starting price for its next subsidy auction. The auction ceiling is expected to be well above the previous starting price which was too low to attract any new offshore windfarms.
The auction was described as “an energy security disaster” by the Labour party, which said that the UK could miss out on billions in investment and face higher energy bills if it derails the UK’s plan to triple Britain’s offshore wind power capacity by 2030.
The details of the next auction, which are expected to be set out on Thursday morning, follow weeks of crisis talks between the offshore wind industry and Whitehall officials over the sector’s rising costs.
Phillips-Davies told journalists it was “difficult to split out” the impact of rising costs on its multibillion-pound spending plan increase, but that the recent supply chain inflation had been “significant”.
He said that in addition to higher auction prices the government should allow more offshore windfarms to take part and award longer contracts of up to 20 years to help lower the winning bids, and the impact on home energy bills.
Rising costs have triggered concerns for the global offshore wind industry. Earlier this month, the Danish wind company Ørsted cancelled two big projects off the New Jersey coast in the US. Sweden’s Vattenfall has also scrapped plans for a huge offshore windfarm off the UK’s Norfolk coast because rising costs meant it was no longer profitable.
The government started its failed auction at a price of £44 a megawatt hour after the previous round of bidding led to record low contract prices of just over £37 a MWh. Officials are preparing to announce a new starting price that could be between £70 and £75 a MWh to reflect the industry’s higher costs, according to a report by Bloomberg.
SSE set out plans earlier this year to invest £40bn in clean energy over the next 10 years after almost doubling its full-year annual profits compared with the year before. It reported pre-tax profits of £565.2m for the first half of this year, up by 1% from the same months last year.
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Phillips-Davies said the company’s earnings were likely to keep growing because of the “enduring broad political consensus behind the need to build the electricity infrastructure required for net zero”.
He added: “There remains strong underlying political consensus on the big drivers of energy security and decarbonisation – accelerating renewables, network investment and flexible power generation – and these are the growth engines powering SSE.”
SSE’s renewable energy portfolio earned adjusted profits of almost £87m for the first half of the year, up from £15m in the same months last year, even as milder weather led to lower output from its windfarms.
The company’s fleet of gas-fired power plants, which are used to cover peaks in demand for electricity, reported adjusted profits of just over £226m for the first six months of the year, down slightly from £248.2m in the first half of last year.
SSE earned adjusted operating profit of £215.6m from running its high-voltage transmission cables in the first half of the year, up 3% from the year before. Its local power grids business, which has regulated earnings, reported a 31% drop in adjusted profits to £120.1m for the first half after rising costs in its supply chain. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/09/jj-abrams-star-trek-into-darkness-interview | Film | 2013-05-10T07:45:00.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Star Trek's JJ Abrams: 'I've come to love it by working on it' | Peter Bradshaw, Andrew Pulver and Xan Brooks review Star Trek: Into Darkness guardian.co.uk
When JJ Abrams was handed the task of revitalising the Star Trek franchise in 2006, the portents were not good. His first directing job, Mission: Impossible III, had not been finished, he had a string of script commissions behind him of variable quality – including Michael Bay's infamous asteroid-masher Armageddon. He had small-screen chops for sure, earned via successful series Alias and Lost, but many a TV guy has stumbled when attempting to deliver proper cinema. Now, seven years later, Abrams is king of the Hollywood heap: sitting on billions of dollars in box office, a second Star Trek film poised for release, and a deal up his sleeve to produce and direct the next set of Star Wars films. This is serious; how on earth did it happen?
Abrams, 46, ensconced in palatial splendour in the penthouse suite of a fancy central London hotel, turns out to be a likably fresh-faced individual, and professes himself only slightly baffled as to how well things have gone. "You know," he says, "there was no strategy about my career; no idea to create a resume of work that said anything in particular. All I went on, really, was my gut feeling about projects. Would it be a challenge, would it be fun, would it be an entertainment that I could believe I could do justice to?"
An offer to produce, not direct, the Star Trek reboot, he says, came during the madness of MI3's postproduction – "my reaction was, that's a cool challenge" – and when the opportunity came along to direct it as well, he grabbed it. "A space adventure? With crazy spectacle? When the hell was I going to get that chance again!" A not dissimilar rationale appeared to be at work when the Star Wars offer came in earlier this year: "I was so busy working on Into Darkness it was easy to say it was not possible. But the reality of it began to sink in, and when I met with Kathy Kennedy [the Lucasfilm president and Star Wars executive producer], my gut said this is not something to reject. I can't say it was a rational thing: it will turn out to be an incredibly smart or an incredibly foolish decision."
JJ Abrams answers readers' questions guardian.co.uk
In fact, the more Abrams talks, the more you realise his entire career – in its movie-making aspects at least – has been an extraordinary exercise in wish-fulfilment, dating back to his childhood. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s he really did make Super 8 movies with his friends, like a junior Steven Spielberg; 30 years later, he got to make Super 8, a film about a kid making Super 8 movies with his friends, produced by Steven Spielberg. (The Spielberg connection is even stranger; when the youthful Abrams was profiled in the LA Times in 1982 after a festival showing of his work, Spielberg's office called and asked him to edit down the director's own childhood Super 8 films. Who made the call? Spielberg's then assistant, Kathy Kennedy.) The first Star Wars movie knocked his socks off when he saw it in 1977. He was 11. "I just got sucked in; it was inspiring and mind-blowing; it spoke to me in a way that was undeniable" – and now he's in charge of its future direction ("in a million years, I never thought I would get the chance to work on a Star Wars movie"). When Tom Cruise gave him his first shot at directing, on MI3, he says he was "blindsided": "Not only was I being given the chance to direct a movie, it was a movie that included so many of the things I loved: espionage and action and comedy and scope and scale." One of the swarm of projects he's got in development is a new Planet of the Apes movie, to be directed by his chum Matt Reeves – "When I was a kid, Planet of the Apes was an obsession, it was all I would ever draw at lunch in school."
Though Abrams grew up around the periphery of the entertainment industry – and sold his first treatment, for the Jim Belushi comedy Taking Care of Business, while still in college – he says he learned to inject a personal element to his work while spending a decade as a screenwriting hack in the 90s. "I was part of that machine of screenwriters that goes from project to project, but over the years had found myself doing things that weren't so meaningful." He credits his wife, PR executive Katie McGrath, for "reminding me to work on things I actually care about; sounds obvious, but sometimes you need someone to pull you round". TV gave Abrams his outlet: well before Lost, the 1998 college-based series Felicity was, the way he tells it, "the beginning of working on things that made me feel something again." The 2011 feature Super 8, though, surely remains his Truffaut moment; movingly, Abrams mentions his mother was diagnosed with cancer during the film's production – "it was a very weird thing to be working on something about a boy dealing with the loss of his mother while that was going on for real".
In fact, the one out-of-step item in this cavalcade of whimsy and wish-fulfilment is Star Trek itself. Abrams, rather infamously, came out as a non-Trekkie before the 2009 film was released, and earned himself plenty of nasty looks and outright suspicion from the notoriously committed Star Trek fan base. (Sample any chatroom or comment thread and you'll see what I mean.) You sense that, on some level, he's been frantically back-pedalling ever since, though the stream of critical hosannas and $386m worldwide box office for what was the 11th Star Trek feature film deflected a large chunk of the scorn.
The otherwise incredibly affable Abrams comes close to a touch of asperity when mulling over the experience. "Here's the thing: it definitely put some fans off, and annoyed them. I think they think it's me saying, 'I'm better than you.' But I'm not saying that at all. I am saying that I do not think I was as smart and sophisticated as my friends who loved the show. So I didn't get it, it doesn't mean I'm judging anyone. I have come to love it working on it, but it would be disingenuous of me to say I was a Trek fan. I would rather be honest, and hopefully those fans who see what we've done will say: 'I'm glad the movies have been made and, if anyone cares at all, he's come to love the thing I loved for so long. Better late than never.'
"There are fans though who, whatever I do, it won't work for them, because it's not exactly what they know and love. I get it – I wish that they would love the movie, but we can't make it for everyone. So for anyone who didn't like the first one – well, they don't have to see this one." Golly; so riled is Abrams that he has committed a Hollywood solecism – you never tell anyone not to come. But the Hollywood operator quickly kicks back in. "But of course I hope they like it; thousands of people have worked on the movie, a lot of people hours are invested in entertaining you, and they have done an extraordinary job."
It's to Abrams' credit, however, that he managed to thoroughly spring-clean Star Trek – "we definitely tried to give Trek a little more skip in its step" – and even gave a series not renowned for its stylistic flair an ultra-contemporary polish. Extended chase sequences, epic space battles, and into-the-camera lighting all played a part in shining it up. Star Wars itself is a not too hidden influence; perhaps a consolation for the Trekkies' oft-expressed outrage at Abrams' "change of sides".
Abrams, though, doesn't seem the kind to dwell on strife. Though he's often played the nerd card in the past, he's not one from the, shall we say, Kevin Smith end of things, the intellectualised, adult version; his is all about re-excavating his childhood passions. In that regard he really is much more a Spielbergian figure than, say, a Nolan-esque one – raiding his own playground obsessions rather than constructing epic superhero-inspired mythologies.
It can't hurt, either, that he's kept the faith with a group of friends who, in some cases, go back to his Super 8 days: Cloverfield director Reeves, cinematographer Larry Fong, production partner Bryan Burk. Another key figure, writer/producer Damon Lindelof, got involved when he met Abrams in 2004, pitching for a job on Alias. This cadre has become an increasingly influential one – a new "Lost" generation, if you will – all having used the springboard of the TV series to move in to bigger and better movie-industry gigs. In retrospect, it is becoming apparent that Lost – with its multilayered narratives and high-end surrealism – is actually a bit of an aberration in the Abrams oeuvre. He is a film-maker headed unswervingly for primetime, and one who has – so far – been able to reshape the mainstream in his own image. "There are moments," says Abrams, "of utter disbelief that I get to do any of this." If nothing else, he is a natural. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/brexit-sunak-brexitism-agreement-protocol | Opinion | 2023-03-01T06:00:27.000Z | Rafael Behr | Brexit will endure after Sunak’s deal, but Brexitism is dying and Johnsonism may be dead | Rafael Behr | Brexit is done and also it will never be done. Rishi Sunak’s deal to fix the Northern Ireland protocol ends a process that is only beginning. If that sounds paradoxical it is because British politics uses the B-word to describe many things, or rather it confuses different things by pretending they are one.
Brexit was an insurrection against the status quo and a promise to upend the established ways of Westminster government. But Brexit is also a technical project and a diplomatic minefield that can’t be navigated without those old skills of establishment statecraft.
Sunak voted leave in 2016, but he was not a devotee of the vandal cult that can only see a glowing future for Britain when bridges to Europe are burning. He was a hobbyist Eurosceptic backbencher who got mugged by economic reality when he became chancellor. It is impossible to sit in the Treasury without coming to a rational understanding that the national interest demands harmonious relations with Brussels.
Selling his deal yesterday, Sunak even boasted that Northern Ireland enjoyed a “very special position” in the EU single market, and that this privilege made it a magnet for investment. By celebrating the residual benefit of membership for one nation of the United Kingdom, he concedes the cost incurred by exclusion of the other three.
This is the bitter contradiction and the absurdity that has defined British politics since the referendum. The only way to handle Brexit without economic arson and diplomatic isolation is to think like a remainer.
It was a point made unsubtly by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, when she attributed the breakthrough in talks to “honesty” and “goodwill” made possible by “a constructive attitude from the very beginning”. The beginning, that is, of the Sunakian era, in contrast to the age of Johnson (and the brief tribulation of Truss).
Von der Leyen’s praise for “dear Rishi” would once have been poison in Conservative ears – proof that the prime minister had been captured. Brexit, in its most ideological conception, is a zero-sum game in which the European Commission is only happy if Britain has been diddled out of sovereignty.
That attitude still prevails among many Tory MPs but it competes with fatigue and an instinct for electoral self-preservation. There is no appetite among voters for the re-enactment of Brexit wars, especially when the terrain of battle is so small – a scrap of European court jurisdiction under a mound of procedural safeguards in Northern Ireland.
Some Tories have committed themselves so completely to the sovereignty crusade that they find it hard to imagine life without the struggle. Others are hooked on the media limelight that falls on self-appointed arbiters of Brexit virtue. In what other field could David Frost or Jacob Rees-Mogg have risen to be men of consequence?
But even the fundamentalists have been disoriented by the quality of concession that Sunak won for his “Windsor framework”. The “Stormont brake” allows for a unilateral UK halt to the application of European regulation in Northern Ireland. It is a complex trigger, carefully designed to resist pulling by itchy Eurosceptic fingers, but it is still a departure from previous EU positions. It rewards the expectation of proportionality and good faith in future relations that Sunak brought to the table. It is the trust dividend, and a repudiation of the Johnson school of negotiation, according to which Europeans only yield to swagger and threat.
In making the case for engagement and compromise, Sunak finds himself in closer alignment with Keir Starmer than with his two Tory predecessors. Both leaders have an interest in Brexit drifting to the margins of political debate, as a matter of boring consensus. Any discussion of Europe brings the Tories out in a rash of division and disloyalty. There is no Brexit position that can satisfy Labour’s liberal remainer base without repelling the leave voters on whom a majority depends. So Starmer and Sunak collude in the fiction that, this time, Brexit really is done.
In reality, the benefit of the new framework consists in resetting relations for rolling talks to tie up loose ends on all kinds of issues – energy, fish, financial services, electric cars, chemicals. The whole edifice of trade cooperation is up for review in 2025.
Brexit as management of a relationship is, by definition, never done. But Brexitism as the doctrine of national renaissance through conflict with Brussels is dying.
That is a victory for Sunak, but it’s not bad for Starmer either if it helps to establish the superiority of managerial pragmatism over pyrotechnic charisma as the mark of a good prime minister.
This is something else the Labour leader and his Tory counterpart have in common. They are both planning election pitches that dial down ideology and sideline the cranks who, until recently, set their respective parties’ agendas.
It is easier for Starmer with a double-digit lead in opinion polls. Sight of victory breeds message discipline, even among Labour MPs who couldn’t say for sure what the message is, while expectation of defeat has the opposite effect on Tories.
The weaker the party’s prospects, the less inclined it feels to put in the hard yards of grown-up government, which is its only chance of rehabilitation. Sunak has shown how it works in negotiations with Brussels. But of all the conceivable treatments that is the bitterest pill for Conservatives to swallow. If trust and diplomacy are the ingredients of a good deal, if the national economic interest is served by closer relations with Europe, the road to getting Brexit done starts to look more like the long, arduous process of undoing Brexit.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/30/the-wonder-emma-donoghue-the-room-ingredients-remixed | Books | 2016-08-30T06:00:23.000Z | Julie Myerson | The Wonder by Emma Donoghue review – Room’s ingredients remixed | Emma Donoghue’s superbly original Room won prizes and was turned into an award-winning feature film, catapulting her to a whole new level of attention. Which can have its downsides: “Since publishing Room,” she quips on her website, “I’m mostly known as the locked-up children writer.” It is unlikely that this new novel will do anything to still that reputation.
Lib, a young English nurse fresh from Florence Nightingale’s bloody Crimea, takes up a mysterious new post in the dark and peaty Irish countryside. Her “patient” turns out to be 11-year-old Anna, but Lib is told that surveillance rather than nursing is what’s required. For Anna, allegedly, has refused to eat anything for the past four months, yet appears to be in perfect health.
As priests, villagers and even (or, indeed, especially) her parents clamour to claim her as some kind of lucrative, crowd-pulling miracle, an urgent “committee” is established to ferret out the truth. Is this a hoax or a true visitation from God? Is the child secretly being fed or is she really, as she claims, living on “manna from heaven”?
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For two weeks, Lib and a local nun will take it in turns to keep a round-the-clock watch, before a verdict is pronounced. So there it all is: a room, a child and an adult thrown into claustrophobic proximity, not to mention an escalating sense of manipulation, jeopardy and possibly abuse. All the ingredients of Room are here, just shaken up and spilled out differently.
And the first half is indeed a deliciously creepy gothic cocktail, enticingly set up and chillingly, suspensefully dragged out. In a country where the potato famine is all too recent history and folk insist on sprinkling salt on their porridge to keep the “little people” away, Lib is at first torn between concern, bewilderment and medically trained scepticism. But as the days pass and her charge’s condition deteriorates, it seems increasingly possible that she may somehow be complicit in whatever damage is being done. Even so, it takes a plain-speaking young journalist (befriending her in the hope of a scoop) to point out that something truly sinister may be afoot.
Which, I’m afraid, is when the problems start. It doesn’t matter at all that Lib is a not a totally reliable narrator – it’s clear, for instance, that her past has not been entirely revealed to us – but she is nevertheless drawn as an intelligent young woman, refreshingly (in this oppressed and superstitious community) atheist, questioning and curious. So why, again and again, does she fail to ask the glaringly obvious questions that might get her somewhere? What, for instance, has happened to Anna’s missing older brother? What is the significance of the prayers that the child obsessively mutters? And when the journalist asks her if she’s “ever put to Anna, fair and square, that she must eat?”, you realise that a part of you has been wanting to ask the exact same question for a few too many pages.
Meanwhile, Lib seems relentlessly blind to well-strewn clues and so prone to jump to wrong conclusions that at times the narrative takes on a “he’s behind you!” quality that only undermines its otherwise very promising creepiness. Too many conversations are blatantly expositional, with people either revealing things for no particular reason or else reminding each other what needs to happen next. By the time we get to: “You and I must dig out the truth… not just because we’ve been charged with that task, but because the child’s life depends on it”, what began as a tightly wrought thriller is threatening to descend into parody.
Which is perplexing, because there is so much to enjoy here. Donoghue weaves crunchily convincing period detail through a pacy narrative with relish and aplomb. Explicit medical business, clinically – often unnervingly – precise descriptions of the child’s symptoms, small insights into the theory of nursing: all of it is vivid and well judged. You never for one second doubt that Lib trained under Nightingale and the Crimean elements, far from being mere backdrop, provide a whiff of something properly violent and agonising that permeates the whole novel.
Only once the “room” itself is finally exited, the tension lifted, are you left feeling a touch deflated, which is a problem I also recall having with Room. Maybe it’s that Donoghue’s settings, like her plots, are so suffocatingly precise, so tightly wound that, in a way, they leave you nowhere to go. Or perhaps it’s just that she is such an undisputed master of the small and the slow, of the uneasy fragmenting of time that happens when human beings are contained within four walls, that all you want is for her to go on doing what she does so well. And as reputations go, that’s not a bad one to have to live down.
The Wonder is published by Picador (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/04/the-revenant-review-gut-churningly-brutal-beautiful-storytelling | Film | 2015-12-04T21:00:26.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Revenant review – gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytelling | It’s man versus bear. And bear wins. Or does it? Early reports of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s intestine-straighteningly brutal and beautiful new western thriller The Revenant have understandably focused on one quite extraordinary scene. Nineteenth-century fur trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, encounters some bear cubs in an eerily quiet forest and then hears the snuffly-wet sound of their parent behind him, a grownup grizzly who has gained a broadly correct impression of Glass’s overall intentions. The ensuing scene is one of horrifyingly primal violence, a brilliantly conceived CGI-reality cluster, during which I clenched into a whimperingly foetal ball so tight that afterwards I practically had to be rolled out of the cinema auditorium.
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The immersion and immediacy of that confrontation reminded me of the moment in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when moviegoers go to the sensory-enhanced “feelies” and watch a sex scene on a bearskin rug. They feel every bear hair. So could I, and I also felt every droplet of bear spittle, every serration of tooth, and I understood what it feels like when parts of your ribcage are exposed to fresh air and light rain.
Some have described it as a rape scene. It isn’t. But it’s about power, fear and rage, and this moment, quite as much as the human duplicity that follows, is the driving force for this film’s theme, commoner in the movies than real life: revenge, revenge against men and maybe a kind of revenge against nature. Screenwriter Mark L Smith has worked partly from the 2002 novel by Michael Punke, and partly from the real-life story that itself inspired the book: the adventures of Hugh Glass, a Wyoming mountain man who survived a bear-mauling and went on an incredible odyssey to track down the two men who abandoned him to die. This story fictionalises and intensifies his personal circumstances and payback motivation.
Glass has joined other civilian privateers engaged in a US military expedition led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) along the Missouri river to establish a lucrative fur-trapping base. Glass and the others are set upon by tribesmen-warriors in an electrifying and terrifying sequence, in which warning cries are silenced by the sibilant arrival of an arrow in the throat. Glass, an experienced tracker, guides the terrified survivors’ retreat across country, where he is mauled by the bear, and two men are detailed and promised extra pay to look after him: young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy with pop-eyed, truculent malevolence. Once left alone with their charge, they leave Glass to die in agony and figure on returning to base to pick up their extra pay with a fine tale about giving him a Christian burial. But they reckon without Glass’s fanatical will to survive.
Pop-eyed malevolence … Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald in The Revenant. Photograph: AP/20th Century Fox
Generally, immersive movies enclose, they put you inside, they dunk you down into what it is supposed to feel like. Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki do the opposite: they expose you to the elements. You are out in a piercingly painful cold, under an endless, pitiless sky. This is not an immersion that feels like a sensual surrender; it’s closer to having your skin peeled. The images that the movie conjures are ones of staggering, crystalline beauty: gasp-inducing landscapes and beautifully wrought closeups, such as the leaves in bulbous freezing mounds, and a tiny crescent moon, all unsentimentally rendered. But there is also something hallucinatory and unwholesome about these images, as if hunger and pain has brought Glass to the secularised state of a medieval saint tormented with visions. Poignantly, he mimes shooting distant moose with a tree branch instead of a rifle, and when he suddenly comes across a vast plain full of bison, it’s unclear for a second if he is imagining things. A ruined church looks like a miraculous example of cave painting.
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The Revenant recalls Ford’s The Searchers and modifies its themes of tribal and sexual transgression and its cruel invocation of scalping; the warriors who attack at first are enraged at the kidnap of a Native American woman, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). At other times, Iñárritu appears to be inspired by Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, with the visions of imperial greed and the vast river in full flood – or maybe his documentary Grizzly Man, in which the grim-faced Herzog famously listened on his headphones to the sound of someone being mauled to death. There is arguably something of Altman in the wintry frontier terrain and certainly a Malickian weightlessness in some of Glass’s dreams of his wife. But what is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.
The Revenant is released in the US on 25 December, in Australia on 7 January and in the UK on 15 January | Full |
Subsets and Splits