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https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/mar/06/corporate-social-responsibility-in-he | Education | 2012-03-06T16:51:00.000Z | Eliza Anyangwe | Corporate social responsibility in HE: could universities be doing more? | The Department for Trade and Industry says corporate social responsibility (CSR) "is about the integrity with which a company governs itself, fulfils its mission, lives by its values, engages with its stakeholders and measures its impacts and publicly reports on its activities."
But does the same apply in higher education?
In a research paper Mehran Nejati et al, question to what extent universities behave like large corporations and demonstrate responsibility for stakeholders and society as a whole. The authors identify seven strands that make up CSR (including organisational governance, student issues, community involvement and the environment) and conclude that developing strategies around all of these can help universities create an understanding of their role in their communities and help them manage potential conflict.
While CSR is in part about building positive relationships, business consultant Richard Goossen also suggests that CSR can help an institution develop a competitive advantage and stand out from its competitors. He says: "Universities realise that it is a competitive market in terms of creating an ongoing stream of satisfied alumni, attracting new students and addressing the concerns of business supporters, a strategy which incorporates CSR is a start."
So how should universities be satisfying they diverse stakeholders? And how do you measure the success of your CSR initiatives? Join us on Friday 9 March to share best practice in CSR. You can also follow the discussion on Twitter under the #HElivechat hashtag
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up for free to become a member of the Higher Education Network.
Panel
Naomi Drinkwater, policy researcher, Universities UK
Naomi joined Universities UK in 2007 and currently works as policy researcher supporting a broad range of policy areas such as student finance, quality enhancement and widening participation. Prior to this role Naomi worked in the communications team assisting with the launch of campaigns such as 'Universities Week', which specifically aimed to increase public awareness of some of the unsung things that universities provide. @NaomiDrink
Professor David Wheeler, dean of business, Plymouth University
David, who is also also is pro vice-chancellor (Sustainability), is an internationally experienced academic and business person with more than two decades of senior executive level involvement in change management and sustainable business practice, research and teaching. In 2010 the University of Plymouth was assessed as #1 Green University in the UK and in 2011 the University won the Green Gown award in the category of Institutional Change. @drdavidwheeler1
Harriet Gliddon, national coordinator, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM UK)
Harriet is a postgraduate researcher at Imperial College London. She is also the UK coordinator of the grassroots student movement UAEM. For the last ten years, UAEM has been changing the way universities commercialise their intellectual property, arguing that any publicly-funded research should be made available to those members of society most in need of it, whether it be a vaccine, therapeutic or any other technology. UAEM also campaigns for more accountability and transparency in HEIs and open access publishing. @uaemuk
Jimmy Brannigan, director, ESD Consulting Ltd
Working on sustainability issues with further and higher education Jimmy has delivered numerous projects on sustainability leadership, CSR and promoting positive behaviour. Jimmy has most recently been the lead developer of the LiFE index, an international social responsibility management and reporting tool for FE and HE, which was launched in Australia in the last 2 weeks. @NetPositiveUK
Hanna Plant, education & learning coordinator, Change Agents UK
Change Agents UK, is an education and sustainability charity where Hanna leads on all training opportunities and coordinates the Colleges & Universities Sustainability Placements scheme (CUSP). Hanna holds a degree in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews and later went on to work with the university's environment team on aspects such as engagement and outreach, sustainable food procurement and ethical investment. @hannaplant
Christopher Durkin, associate director, University of Northampton
Chris run a research and consultancy centre at the University of Northampton which focuses on the built environment, in particular community development and sustainable communities. In recent years he have becoming increasingly interested in social enterprises and social innovation. Chris is a member of the University's social enterprise strategy team and has co-edited a book on the subject entitled Social entrepreneurship - a skills based approach.
Harriet Waters, sustainability manager, Oxford Brookes University
Harriet is the sustainability manager at Oxford Brookes University where she has led the development of an innovative approach to corporate responsibility at the institution working towards a vision of proving the University has a 'net positive impact'. She has a background in corporate responsibility, previously working on research for ethical investors. @sustainableobu
James Adeleke, president, BPP Food & Clothes Drive (BPP FCD)
BPP FCD is a student run society at BPP University College, London. BPP FCD connects students, universities and businesses to help the local community. Students and Staff donate food and clothes at different collection boxes in BPP Waterloo. James was previously student ethics and environment officer at Bucks New University. @PresidentFCD
Paul Blagburn, widening participation and recruitment strategy manager, London Metropolitan University
Paul joined London Met in 2007 and has responsibility for managing and delivering the university's widening participation and access agenda. London Met works with local schools, colleges and community groups to support people from under-represented groups to go into higher education. Initiatives range from flagship Saturday programmes for young people designed to raise attainment, to targeted work with adults looking to re-engage with education. Paul has written a number of papers on widening participation with a focus on student rentention and transformation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/herman-van-rompuy-brexit-negotiations-cannot-begin-until-late-2017 | World news | 2016-09-15T12:53:20.000Z | Philip Oltermann | Key Brexit talks unlikely to begin until late 2017, says Van Rompuy | Britain and the EU are unlikely to get started in earnest on the “political amputation” of Brexit until the end of next year, after federal elections in Germany, Herman Van Rompuy, a former president of the European council has said.
Van Rompuy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, while initial negotiations on the broad outline of a deal could begin as soon as the British government triggered article 50, the more difficult negotiation phase would have to wait until late 2017.
“Before the German elections and before there is a new German government no serious negotiations will take place,” said Van Rompuy, who was Belgium’s prime minister from 2008-09. “You can always start with more technical matters, but the hardcore, the difficult topics, will be tackled after the constitution of the new German government. That will be October-November.”
France is to vote for a new president in April 2017, while the German elections are expected to take place in September the same year. In Germany’s case, the process for forming a coalition government could add another few months to the timetable. In 2013, the German government was not sworn in for three months after the election.
Van Rompuy, who described the Brexit vote as a “political amputation of the first degree,” said the UK had “not many friends” among the other 27 member states and the negotiation would be difficult.
“There is not a feeling that we have to punish, but, on the other hand, most leaders don’t want to encourage other exits,” he said. “Britain has not many friends any more. I saw this clearly when I was in office, when we had to vote on candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker for the presidency of the [European] commission. Britain was isolated.”
Maintaining free movement of labour would remain a “red line” if Britain wanted to remain part of the single market, Van Rompuy said. “Of course, we want an agreement that represents some sort of mutual benefit. There are huge economic interests, but there are also red lines. It is very well known that freedom of movement is one of those red lines,” he said. “It is very difficult for the EU to do something else vis-a-vis Britain, compared to what we agreed upon with Norway and Switzerland.”
In the immediate aftermath of the vote to leave the EU, officials in Brussels and leading politicians across Europe called on the British government to avoid turning the formal process of leaving the union into a waiting game.
But since Theresa May replaced David Cameron as prime minister and internal rifts over the UK’s negotiating positions within her cabinet have become apparent, the deadline has continued to slip and politicians on the continent have begrudgingly accepted that they will have to wait for Britain to declare its position.
Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, told the Guardian that it was “up to the UK’s government and parliament alone” to decide when article 50 would be triggered, but there would be no negotiations up until that point.
“Time pressure would have negative consequences for the quality of the negotiation result,” Hardt said, adding that many politicians shared his personal wish for Britain to indefinitely postpone triggering article 50.
Some British government insiders expect the UK to declare its timetable at a European council summit in December. If Britain were to trigger article 50 in January or February 2017, it would allow up to nine months to create a basic outline for an agreement before the German elections, with the bulk of negotiations starting in 2018 and potentially concluding by the end of that year.
However, several unknowable factors, such as Merkel failing to declare her candidacy for the 2017 elections, could encourage the UK government to further delay the start of negotiations. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/07/its-mission-impossible-why-britbox-will-never-rival-netflix | Television & radio | 2019-11-07T10:35:29.000Z | Mark Lawson | It's mission impossible! Why BritBox will never rival Netflix | One of the best offerings on BritBox – the new archive streaming site officially launched by ITV and the BBC today – is arguably the greatest single-series British TV drama ever made: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s espionage novel.
But the opening of another digital bank of programming will confront even the most assiduous viewer with a new parody of the children’s counting song – Netflix, Amazon, Apple, BritBox, Disney, Why?
Until sleep and work are abolished, finding time to watch all this stuff is one issue; another the financial outlay of around six pounds a month for each service.
When it was announced, after years of delay, BritBox immediately faced two possibly ruinous obstacles. It was coming late to a market that felt owned by Netflix, and, having decided to exclude the multiple original dramas that are Netflix’s prime asset, faced difficulties even in securing rights to old BBC and ITV work, already snapped up by Netflix or Amazon, or available on in-house sites, BBC iPlayer and ITV Hub.
BritBox: 'inappropriate' classic UK TV shows to be kept off service
Read more
A third common objection – that BBC licence-payers have already paid once for this stuff, so should see it for free – is preposterous. We cannot expect a single annual payment to confer viewing rights in perpetuity on all platforms, any more than buying a hardback book makes you eligible for a free paperback.
Timing feels problematic too. It seems symbolic of the jostling in the sector that Apple TV+ managed to sneak in a week before BritBox. Still, at least the UK players beat Disney.
Looking at the initial offering, ITV seems to have brought more to the table than the BBC, with one of the best dramas of 2019 (A Confession, starring Martin Freeman) and one of the most compelling of the past (Broadchurch) advertised as “BritBox Exclusive.”
Is it really a BritBox Exclusive? ... Broadchurch. Photograph: Kudos/ITV/REX/Shutterstock
The few BBC exclusives include the comedy Him & Her and the Hilary Mantel adaptation, Wolf Hall. But for the Corporation’s strongest recent work – Line of Duty, Bodyguard, Call the Midwife, Peaky Blinders – you still need Netflix.
This reflects a disparity in how the UK’s two oldest broadcasters make their shows. While almost all TV fiction is now created by independent producers, ITV owns most of its suppliers, under the ITV Studios umbrella, while the BBC effectively buys limited screening rights from indies who can deal with whichever streamers they want.
For this reason, subscribers should look very carefully at the labelling. “New to BritBox” – not hard, as it’s only just launched – means the shows (Absolutely Fabulous, The Trip) can usually be found somewhere else.
And on launch day, there were signs of how hard streamlining streaming rights may be. A Confession can be watched on BritBox, ITV Hub and Amazon Prime. All episodes neatly became unavailable on ITV’s own site at 23.59 last night, and were advertised on the newcomer as “BritBox Exclusive.” However, it is still available for purchase on Amazon, although admittedly at a much higher cost.
The closest thing to new material is Lambs of God, a 2019 drama from Australia about Catholic nuns. How Brit is that? There will also be a chance to view two episodes of Midsomer Murders before they air on ITV. But as I wouldn’t watch them for free even if ITV paid me, it does not seem much of a lure.
Because of the vast past achievements of BBC and ITV, the old material on BritBox already feels better value than the new shows on Apple TV+. As well as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, two more dramatic landmarks – The Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited – are also here, as well as every Doctor Who ever. BritBox will get more interesting, though, when Channel 4 joins next year.
But, if the aim was to challenge Netflix, that mission feels impossible – until and unless British broadcasters can secure exclusive streaming licences for their own shows.
As it stands, I’ll happily continue on the 30-day free trial, but have set a reminder to cancel before the £71.88 annual contract kicks in. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/18/easyjet-joins-calls-uk-government-help-fund-hydrogen-powered-flight | Business | 2024-03-18T15:17:56.000Z | Gwyn Topham | EasyJet joins calls for UK government to help fund hydrogen-powered flight | EasyJet has joined aerospace manufacturers in urging the government to help fund hydrogen-powered flight, as the carrier launched an operation out of Birmingham airport – its first new UK base since 2012.
The airline, along with companies including Airbus, Rolls-Royce and GKN, said hydrogen planes could be a reality by the end of the next decade, setting out a detailed roadmap to change the sector.
Its chief executive, Johan Lundgren, said there had been “astonishing” progress and that the UK could be a leader in pioneering the technology, but said: “What needs to happen is not to just fly an aircraft, but how you industrialise it.”
Hydrogen has been touted by some as the only truly zero-emission long-term solution for decarbonising aviation, although big logistical challenges remain.
A report from the companies, under the banner of the Hydrogen in Aviation Alliance, called for public funding to support the transition, as part of a number of steps needed including ensuring regulation was in place, preparing airport infrastructure, developing the supply of hydrogen and the necessary skilled workforce.
Is hydrogen really a clean enough fuel to tackle the climate crisis?
Read more
Lundgren said the sums needed for research and development were “staggering” but had to be seen as a long-term investment.
He said: “[The report is] the first time we’ve had everyone across the board saying what’s needed, from experts across the field, setting out actions by timeline before we can see hydrogen aircraft in the sky at a large scale.
“The breakthroughs in hydrogen-powered technology happening across the UK are truly astonishing but these advances will be inconsequential if we fail to complement them with the appropriate skills, infrastructure, investment and regulation needed.”
Alan Newby, the director of research and technology at Rolls-Royce, said the industry was “making great progress on technology” but there were significant infrastructure challenges, including the transportation of hydrogen and refuelling planes. There was also little availability of hydrogen created from renewable electricity, he said. “Green hydrogen is just not around. That needs to go up the food chain.”
Russ Dunn, the chief technology officer of GKN Aerospace, said hydrogen was “a unique opportunity for truly zero-emission flight”, adding: “I truly believe in the next decade we will see hydrogen in flight – but only if airports and infrastructure are there. That means the right government policy and regulations to be ready to transfer aviation into a sustainable future.”
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Airbus has said it is “firmly focused” on getting a 100-seat hydrogen-powered aircraft in the air by 2035.
EasyJet said it hoped to have such planes in service by 2040. Lundgren said there were still unanswered questions before mass hydrogen flight became viable, but added: “We wouldn’t be on this journey if we didn’t think there was a very good prospect of them being resolved.”
The easyJet boss was speaking as the airline launched a new base at Birmingham airport, where it will site three planes and expand its network with 16 new routes, creating 140 jobs. The routes include business capitals and summer holiday destinations around the Mediterranean.
The airline will also fly domestically to Glasgow from Birmingham, theoretically less than four hours away on a direct train on Avanti West Coast. Asked how flying domestic routes sat with talk of sustainability, Lundgren said it was good if consumers were “mindful about that”, but added: “We do know that if a train alternative is starting to [take] more than two and a half hours, then people gravitate towards flying – that’s just the way it is.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson | Technology | 2015-02-21T07:00:00.000Z | Jon Ronson | Overnight, everything I loved was gone': the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone | In early January 2012, I noticed that another Jon Ronson had started posting on Twitter. His photograph was a photograph of my face. His Twitter name was @jon_ronson. His most recent tweet read: “Going home. Gotta get the recipe for a huge plate of guarana and mussel in a bap with mayonnaise :D #yummy.”
“Who are you?” I tweeted him.
“Watching #Seinfeld. I would love a big plate of celeriac, grouper and sour cream kebab with lemongrass #foodie,” he tweeted. I didn’t know what to do.
The next morning, I checked @jon_ronson’s timeline before I checked my own. In the night he had tweeted, “I’m dreaming something about #time and #cock.” He had 20 followers.
I did some digging. A young academic from Warwick University called Luke Robert Mason had a few weeks earlier posted a comment on the Guardian site. It was in response to a short video I had made about spambots. “We’ve built Jon his very own infomorph,” he wrote. “You can follow him on Twitter here: @jon_ronson.”
I tweeted him: “Hi!! Will you take down your spambot please?”
Ten minutes passed. Then he replied, “We prefer the term infomorph.”
Someone called @jon_ronson was tweeting 20 times a day about his whirlwind of social engagements, soirées and friends
“But it’s taken my identity,” I wrote.
“The infomorph isn’t taking your identity,” he wrote back. “It is repurposing social media data into an infomorphic aesthetic.”
I felt a tightness in my chest.
“#woohoo damn, I’m in the mood for a tidy plate of onion grill with crusty bread. #foodie,” @jon_ronson tweeted.
I was at war with a robot version of myself.
A month passed. @jon_ronson was tweeting 20 times a day about its whirlwind of social engagements, its “soirées” and wide circle of friends. The spambot left me feeling powerless and sullied.
I tweeted Luke Robert Mason. If he was adamant that he wouldn’t take down his spambot, perhaps we could at least meet? I could film the encounter and put it on YouTube. He agreed.
I rented a room in central London. He arrived with two other men – the team behind the spambot. All three were academics. Luke was the youngest, handsome, in his 20s, a “researcher in technology and cyberculture and director of the Virtual Futures conference”. David Bausola was a “creative technologist” and the CEO of the digital agency Philter Phactory. Dan O’Hara had a shaved head and a clenched jaw. He was in his late 30s, a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Cologne.
I spelled out my grievances. “Academics,” I began, “don’t swoop into a person’s life uninvited and use him for some kind of academic exercise, and when I ask you to take it down you’re, ‘Oh, it’s not a spambot, it’s an infomorph.’”
Dan nodded. He leaned forward. “There must be lots of Jon Ronsons out there?” he began. “People with your name? Yes?”
I looked suspiciously at him. “I’m sure there are people with my name,” I replied, carefully.
“I’ve got the same problem,” Dan said with a smile. “There’s another academic out there with my name.”
“You don’t have exactly the same problem as me,” I said, “because my exact problem is that three strangers have stolen my identity and have created a robot version of me and are refusing to take it down.”
Jon Ronson confronts the people behind the Twitter account @jon_ronson Guardian
Dan let out a long-suffering sigh. “You’re saying, ‘There is only one Jon Ronson’,” he said. “You’re proposing yourself as the real McCoy, as it were, and you want to maintain that integrity and authenticity. Yes?”
I stared at him.
“We’re not quite persuaded by that,” he continued. “We think there’s already a layer of artifice and it’s your online personality – the brand Jon Ronson – you’re trying to protect. Yeah?”
“No, it’s just me tweeting,” I yelled.
“The internet is not the real world,” said Dan.
“I write my tweets,” I replied. “And I press send. So it’s me on Twitter.” We glared at each other. “That’s not academic,” I said. “That’s not postmodern. That’s the fact of it. It’s a misrepresentation of me.”
“You’d like it to be more like you?” Dan said.
“I’d like it to not exist,” I said.
“I find that quite aggressive,” he said. “You’d like to kill these algorithms? You must feel threatened in some way.” He gave me a concerned look. “We don’t go around generally trying to kill things we find annoying.”
“You’re a troll!” I yelled.
I dreaded uploading the footage to YouTube, because I’d been so screechy. I steeled myself for mocking comments and posted it. I left it 10 minutes. Then, with apprehension, I had a look.
“This is identity theft,” read the first comment I saw. “They should respect Jon’s personal liberty.”
“Wow,” I thought, cautiously.
“Somebody should make alternate Twitter accounts of all of those ass clowns and constantly post about their strong desire for child porn,” read the next comment. I grinned. “Utter hateful arseholes,” read the next comment. “These fucked-up academics deserve to die painfully. The cunt in the middle is a fucking psychopath.”
I frowned slightly. “I hope nobody’s going to actually hurt them,” I thought.
Within days, the academics took down @jon_ronson. They had been shamed into acquiescence. Their public shaming had been like the button that restores factory settings. It felt wonderful. The wonderful feeling overwhelmed me like a sedative. Strangers all over the world had united to tell me I was right. It was the perfect ending.
I
n October 2012 a group of adults with learning difficulties took an organised trip to Washington DC. They visited the National Mall, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, Arlington National Cemetery, the US Mint. At night they sang karaoke in the hotel bar. Their caregivers, Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie, did a duet of Total Eclipse Of The Heart. “They had the greatest time on that trip,” Lindsey told me. “They thought we were fun and cool.”
Lindsey was telling me the story 18 months later. We were sitting at her kitchen table, in a seaside town on the US east coast. “I like to dance and I like to do karaoke,” Lindsey said, “but for a long time after that trip, I didn’t leave the house. During the day I’d just sit here. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody.”
“How long did that last?” I asked.
“Almost a year.”
Lindsey and Jamie had been with Life (Living Independently Forever) for a year and a half before that trip. Life was a residence for “pretty high-functioning people with learning difficulties”, Lindsey said. “Jamie had started a jewellery club, which was a hit with the girls. We’d take them to the movies. We’d take them bowling. We heard a lot from parents that we were the best thing that ever happened to that campus.”
Off-duty, she and Jamie had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, “smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington [the national cemetery] we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.”
Lindsey posed in front of it, pretending she was shouting and swearing – flipping the bird, and with her hand to her open mouth. “So,” Lindsey said, “thinking we were funny, Jamie posted it on Facebook and tagged me on it with my consent, because I thought it was hilarious.”
Lindsey Stone at Arlington Cemetery. Photograph: © Jamie Schuh
Nothing much happened after that. A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. “One had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, ‘This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s tasteless.’ Another said, ‘I agree’, and another said, ‘I agree’. Then I said, ‘Whoa! It’s just us being douchebags! Forget about it!’”
After that, Jamie said to Lindsey, “Do you think we should take it down?”
“No!” Lindsey replied, “What’s the big deal? No one’s ever going to think of it again.”
Their Facebook settings were a mystery to them. Most of the privacy boxes were ticked. Some weren’t. Sometimes they’d half-notice that boxes they’d thought they’d ticked weren’t ticked.
Lindsey has been thinking about that “a lot” these past 18 months. “Facebook works best when everyone is sharing and liking. It brings their ad revenues up.”
Was there some Facebook shenanigan where things just “happen” to untick themselves? Some loophole? “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if Jamie’s mobile uploads had ever been private.”
Whatever: Jamie’s mobile uploads weren’t private. And four weeks after returning from Washington DC, they were in a restaurant, celebrating their birthdays – “We’re a week apart” – when they became aware that their phones were vibrating repeatedly. So they went online.
“Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars”, “You should rot in hell”, “Just pure Evil”, “Spoke with an employee from Life who has told me there are veterans on the board and that she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice”, “After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help”, “Send the dumb feminist to prison”. There were death and rape threats.
“I wanted to scream: ‘It was just about a sign,’” Lindsey said.
By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. “I really became obsessed with reading everything about myself.”
The next day, camera crews had gathered outside her front door. Her father tried talking to them. He had a cigarette in his hand. The family dog had followed him out. As he tried to explain that Lindsey wasn’t a terrible person, he noticed the cameras move from his face down to the cigarette and the dog, as if they were a family of hillbillies.
Life was inundated with emails demanding their jobs, so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. “Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,” Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.
That year, Lindsey scanned Craigslist for carer work, but nobody replied to her applications. She was eventually offered a job caring for children with autism. “But I’m terrified,” she said.
“That your bosses will find out?’
“Yeah.”
This was a likely scenario. The photograph was everywhere. It had become so iconic among swaths of rightwingers that one man had even turned it into patriotic wallpaper, superimposing on to the wall behind Lindsey’s shrieking face and upturned finger a picture of a military funeral, complete with a coffin draped in the American flag. Lindsey had wanted the job so much she’d been “nervous about even applying. I was conflicted on whether to say to them, ‘Just so you know, I am this Lindsey Stone.’ Because I knew it was just a mouse click away.” She left it until the moment of the interview. And then the interview was over and she found that she hadn’t mentioned it.
Now she’d been in the job four months, and she still hadn’t told them. “And obviously, you can’t ask them, ‘Have you noticed it and decided it’s not a problem?’” I said.
“Right,” Lindsey said.
“So you feel trapped in a paranoid silence?” I said.
“I love this job so much,” Lindsey said. “I love these kids. One of the parents paid me a really high compliment the other day. I’ve only been working with her son for a month and she was like, ‘The moment I met you, seeing the way you are with my son, and the way you treat people, you were meant to work in this field.’ But what if she found out? Would she feel the same way?”
Lindsey could never just be happy and relaxed. The terror was always there. “It really impacts the way you view the world. Since it happened, I haven’t tried to date anybody. How much do you let a new person into your life? Do they already know?”
T
he Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside, you realise it’s filled with tech billionaires. I had recently discovered the world of digital reputation management – companies that “game” Google to hide negative stories stored online. One of these companies is reputation.com, launched by my dining companion, Michael Fertik. I told Michael that he was the only person from that world who had returned my email.
“That’s because this is a really easy sector in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,” he said.
“Scurrilous in what way?”
“There’s a guy who has some traction in our space, who runs a company – he’s a convicted rapist,” Michael said. “He started a company to basically obscure that fact about himself, I think.”
Michael’s competitors were disreputable, he said, and he needed to be vigilant with potential clients. “Very early on, within two weeks of launching our website in 2006, I remember being by myself and getting a couple of sign-ups from guys. So I Googled them. They were paedophiles.”
“Do you remember their names?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Michael said. “Why do you ask that shit?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Curiosity.”
Michael looked different from our fellow diners. I didn’t recognise any of them, but everyone seemed insanely rich: preppy, with faces like luxury yachts, like Martha’s Vineyard in the summer, Waspy and at peace with the world, practically floating through the restaurant, whereas Michael was a big, angry, coiled-spring Jewish bear of a man. He was born in New York, attained a degree from Harvard Law School, and invented the concept of online reputation management while working as a clerk for the US Court of Appeals in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the mid-2000s. Stories about cyberbullying and revenge porn were just starting to filter though, and that’s how Michael got the idea.
After he turned down the paedophiles, Michael told me, he noticed he was getting sign-ups from neo-Nazis, albeit repentant former ones. One said: “When I was 17, I was a Nazi. I was an asshole kid. Now I’m in my 40s, I’m trying to move on, but the internet still thinks I am a Nazi.”
They were more sympathetic than the paedophiles, but Michael still didn’t want them as clients. So he drew up a code of conduct: he wouldn’t accept anyone who was under investigation or had been convicted of a felony violent crime, or a felony fraud crime, or any sexually violent crime, or anyone accused – even informally – of a sexual crime against children. And, he said, there was another moral difference between him and his competitors: he wouldn’t invent fake accolades; he’d only put the truth up there. Although, “I don’t think it’s incumbent on anyone to do massive fact-checking.”
“I have no idea what you actually do,” I had told Michael on the telephone before we met. “Maybe I could follow someone though the process?”
And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client.
“Are there any hobbies you’re particularly passionate about right now? Marathons? Photography?”
Farukh Rashid was in San Francisco, talking down a conference line to Lindsey Stone. I was listening in from my sofa in New York. I’d met Farukh a few months earlier, when Michael’s publicist, Leslie, gave me a tour of the reputation.com offices: two open-plan floors with soundproofed booths for the sensitive calls to celebrity clients. She introduced me to Farukh and explained that he usually works on Michael’s VIP customers – the CEOs and celebrities.
“It’s nice that you’re giving Lindsey the bespoke service,” I said.
“She needs it,” Leslie replied.
She really did. Michael’s strategists had been researching Lindsey’s online life and had discovered nothing about her besides that Silence And Respect incident.
Michael got sign-ups from people saying, ‘At 17 I was a Nazi. The internet still thinks I’m a Nazi’
“That five seconds of her life is her entire internet presence?” I said.
Farukh nodded. “And it’s not just this Lindsey Stone. Anyone who has that name has the same problem. There are 60 Lindsey Stones in the US and they’re all being defined by that one photograph.”
“I’m sorry to have given you such a tricky one,” I said, feeling a little proud of myself.
“Oh, no, we’re excited,” Farukh replied. “We’re going to introduce the internet to the real Lindsey Stone.”
“Are cats important to you?” Farukh asked Lindsey, now down the conference line.
“Absolutely,” said Lindsey.
I heard Farukh type. He was young and energetic, and just as upbeat and buoyant and lacking in cynicism and malevolent irony as he was hoping to make Lindsey seem. His Twitter profile says he enjoys “biking, hiking and family time”. His plan was to create Lindsey Stone Tumblrs and LinkedIn pages and WordPress blogs and Instagram accounts and YouTube accounts to overwhelm that terrible photograph, wash it away in a tidal wave of positivity, away to a place on Google where normal people don’t look – a place like page two of the search results. According to Google’s own research, 53% of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89% of us don’t look past the first page.
“I’m passionate about music,” Lindsey told Farukh.
“That’s really good,” Farukh said. “Let’s work with that. Do you play an instrument?”
“I used to,” Lindsey said. “I was kind of self-taught. It’s just something I mess around with. It’s not anything I…” Suddenly, she trailed off. she seemed self-conscious, as if the endeavour was giving her troubling existential thoughts: questions such as “Who am I?” and “What are we doing?”
“I’m having a hard time with this,” she said. “As a normal person I don’t really know how to brand myself online.”
“Piano? Guitar? Drums?” said Farukh. “Or travel? Where do you go?”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “I go to the beach. I get ice-cream.”
At Farukh’s request, Lindsey had been emailing him photographs that didn’t involve her flipping off at military cemeteries. She’d been providing biographical details, too. Her favourite TV show was Parks And Recreation. Her employment history included five years at Walmart, “which was kind of soul-suckingly awful”.
“Are you sure you want to say that Walmart was soul-sucking?” Farukh said.
“Oh… What? Really?” Lindsey laughed, as if to say, “Come on! Everyone knows that about Walmart!” But then she hesitated. The conference call was proving an unexpectedly melancholic experience. It was nothing to do with Farukh. He really felt for Lindsey and wanted to do a good job for her. The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities – to cats and ice-cream and top 40 chart music. We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.
There was a time when Michael Fertik wouldn’t have needed to be so calculating. Back in the mid-90s, search engines were interested only in how many times a particular keyword appeared within a page. To be the number-one Jon Ronson search term on AltaVista or HotBot, you just had to write Jon Ronson over and over again. Which, for me, would be the most fantastic website to chance upon, but for everyone else, less so.
But then two students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had an idea: why not build a search engine that ranked websites by popularity instead? If someone is linking to your page, that’s one vote. If the page linking to your page has a lot of links into it, then that page counts for more votes. And that was it. They called their invention PageRank, after Larry Page.
This was why Farukh needed to create LinkedIn and Tumblr and Twitter pages for Lindsey. They come with a built-in high PageRank. The Google algorithm prejudges them as well-liked. But, for Michael, the problem with Google is that it is forever adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret. “Google is a tricky beast and a moving target,” he told me, “so we try to decipher it, to reverse-engineer it.”
Lindsey incurred the internet’s wrath because she was outspoken. Now she was reducing herself to cats and chart music
Knowing what he did about PageRank’s algorithm, Michael predicted that Lindsey’s love of cats (or whatever) would achieve “initial strong impact”, followed by “fluctuation”, and, after fluctuation, “reversion”.
Michael’s clients dread reversion. There’s nothing more dispiriting than seeing the nice new judgments disappear and the horrific old judgments bubble back up. But reversion is actually their friend, as Michael’s strategist, Jered Higgins, told me. “Reversion shows that the algorithm is uncertain,” he said. And during this uncertainty, Jered said, “We go in and blast it.”
The blasting – the bombardment of the algorithm with Tumblr pages about Lindsey’s trips to the beach, the shock and awe of these pleasant banalities – has to be choreographed just right. Google knows if it’s being manipulated (alarm bells go off) “so we have a strategic schedule for content creation and publication,” Jered said. “We create a natural-looking activity online. That’s a lot of accumulated intelligence.”
“I am a nobody,” Hank said. “Just a guy with a family and a job – a middle-America-type guy.”
Hank wasn’t his real name. He’d managed to keep that aspect of himself a secret. He was talking to me via a Google Hangout from his kitchen in a suburban house in an American town. He looked frail, fidgety.
On 17 March 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, California, when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend, Alex.
“What was the joke?” I asked.
“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
A few moments earlier, Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project, and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’” (In tech jargon, to “fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository”. Just in case you wanted to know.)
Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half-noticed the woman sitting in front of them stand up, turn around and take a photograph. Ten minutes later, a conference organiser came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?” They were taken into an office and told there’d been a complaint about sexual comments.
“I immediately apologised,” Hank said. “I knew exactly what they were talking about. I told them what we’d said, and that we didn’t mean for it to come across as a sexual comment, and that we were sorry if someone overheard and was offended. They were like, ‘OK. I see what happened.’”
And that was that. The incident passed. Hank and Alex were shaken up – “We’re nerdy guys, and confrontation isn’t something we handle well” – so they decided to leave the conference early. They were on their way to the airport when they started to wonder exactly how someone had conveyed the complaint to the conference organisers. The nightmarish possibility was that it had been communicated in the form of a public tweet. And so, with apprehension, they had a look.
They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.
Anxious, Hank quickly scanned her replies, but there was nothing much – just the odd congratulation from a few of her 9,209 followers for the way she’d “educated” the men behind her. He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier Adria Richards had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he should put socks down his pants to bewilder security agents at the airport. Hank relaxed a little.
A day later, Hank was called into his boss’s office and fired.
“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” Hank said, “then I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears but…” Hank paused. “When I got in the car with my wife, I just… I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”
Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles. Right behind me #pycon pic.twitter.com/Hv1bkeOsYP
— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013
That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”
T
en months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.
“You felt fear?” I asked.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
'He’s a white male,' Adria said. 'I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me'
I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.
“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
On the evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started to receive messages of support, and then insults, from men’s rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. At the same time, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/. “A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.” “Kill her.” “Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.”
Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed on to the bodies of porn actors. Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.
‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’
The death threats and rape threats and racist insults continued even after she was fired.
“Things got very bad for her,” Hank told me. “She had to disappear for six months. Her entire life was being evaluated by the internet. It was not a good situation for her at all.”
“Have you met her since?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied.
Ten months had passed since the day Adria took that photograph, so I asked what he thought of her now. “I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied.
“Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained... Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”
I was so taken aback by this suggestion that at the time I didn’t say anything in defence of Hank. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I emailed Adria. I told her what he had told me – how he’d refused to engage with any of the bloggers or trolls who sent him messages of support. I added that I felt Hank was within his rights to post the message on Hacker News, revealing he’d been fired.
Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support, I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh, but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does, but with countless fewer opportunities.”
I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”
“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace [Hank was offered another job right away] and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?’
“Well,” Hank said, “we don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”
“You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.
“No,” she said.
Later, I saw another photograph Adria happened to take that day at the conference. It was an audience shot. A sea of men – practically only men – stretching to the horizon.
I
n October 2014, I took a final drive to visit Lindsey Stone. Four months had passed since I’d last spoken to her or Farukh – and given that they’d only taken her on for my benefit, I’d half-wondered if maybe it had all been quietly wound down in my absence.
“Oh God, no,” said Lindsey. We sat at her kitchen table. “They call me every week, week after week.” She took out her phone and scrolled through her innumerable emails from Farukh. She read out loud some blogs his team had written in her voice, about how it’s important when travelling to use the hotel safe – “Stay alert, travellers!” – and how, if you’re in Spain, you should try the tapas.
Lindsey got to pre-approve everything, and she’d only told them no twice, she said – to a blog about how much she’s looking forward to Lady Gaga’s upcoming jazz album (“I like Lady Gaga, but I’m not really excited about her jazz album”) and to her tribute to Disneyland on the occasion of its 50th birthday: “Happy Birthday Disneyland! The Happiest Place on Earth!” “Happy Birthday Disneyland!” Lindsey blushed. “I would never… I mean, I had a great time at Disneyland. But still…” She trailed off. “One of my friends from high school said, ‘I hope it’s still you. I want people to know how funny you are.’ But it’s scary. After all that’s happened, what’s funny to me… I don’t want to go anywhere near the line, let alone cross it. So I’m constantly saying, ‘I don’t know, Farukh, what do you think?’”
“This journey started with my identity being hijacked by a spambot,” I said. “Your personality has been taken by strangers twice now. But at least this second time around it’s nice.”
Lindsey hadn’t Googled herself for 11 months. Ex-army people were wondering where she was – ‘not in a good way’
Lindsey hadn’t typed her name into Google for 11 months. The last time had been a shock: it was Veterans’ Day, and she found some ex-army people “wondering where I was, and not in a good way”.
“They were thinking about tracking you down so they could re-destroy you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. She hadn’t looked since. And now she swallowed and began to type: L… I… N…
Lindsey shook her head, stunned. “This is monumental,” she said.
Two years ago, the photograph stretched to Google Images horizon – uninterrupted, mass-production shaming, “pages and pages and pages”, Lindsey said, “repeating endlessly. It felt so huge. So oppressive.” And now: nearly gone. There was still a scattering, and there would inevitably be some reversion, but for now there were lots of photographs of Lindsey doing nothing bad. Just smiling.
Even better, there were lots of photographs of other Lindsey Stones – people who weren’t her at all. There was a Lindsey Stone volleyball player, a Lindsay Stone competitive swimmer. The swimmer had been captured mid-stroke, moments from winning the New York State 500-yard freestyle championship. It was captioned, “Lindsay Stone had the right plan in place and everything was going exactly to plan.”
Here was a whole other person, doing something everyone could agree was lovely and commendable. There was no better result than that.
This is an edited extract from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson, published next month by Picador at £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
This article was amended on 21 February 2015 to move the Arlington picture further down the article. It was further amended on 22 February 2015 to remove a sentence that suggested Hank was fired after Adria Richards wrote a blogpost. This was incorrect; a production error meant the sentence was not removed earlier in the editing process. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2005/sep/23/cricket.sport1 | Sport | 2005-09-23T01:02:10.000Z | Paul Weaver | Cricket: Mushtaq kept waiting for first century as Kent falter | For three summers now Mushtaq Ahmed has been the leading wicket-taker in the country, with 103 in Sussex's championship year of 2003, 84 last season and 77, so far, this time. In all cricket he has wheeled down 2,608 overs in that period.
But like all fine bowlers he yearns to be taken seriously as a batsman. He has never scored a century. His best effort was the 90 he made for Somerset against Sussex in 1993. But none of his current Sussex team-mates were playing then so they needed to be reminded.
Gleefully, he thumped his way to a half-century. He jumped down the pitch and drove James Tredwell for a straight six; his other six, over square-leg off Min Patel, lost the ball.
He moved through the seventies and eighties and scurried a single to equal his treasured highest score of 90. Then, to his horror, he saw the last man James Kirtley - a useful No11 - fall lbw to Robbie Joseph. He looked down the pitch for some moments, too horrified to move, and Kent must have thought about calling a tow-truck to get him off. At least the last two wickets had put on 156 to give Sussex a first innings lead of 91. Mushtaq also hit eight fours in his 105-ball innings.
The ball that did for Kirtley pitched on middle and off and, seaming into the batsman, may have missed leg. Certainly the umpires Alan Whitehead and Mervyn Kitchen, who are officiating in their last first-class match, have not got everything right here. Earlier, Robin Martin-Jenkins was given out stumped, though replays confirmed that his back foot never left the ground.
Sussex had resumed on 47 for two. Michael Yardy and Tim Ambrose took their third-wicket stand to 101 before the former, slogging, was bowled by Patel. Ambrose soon followed, lbw to the medium pace of Neil Dexter.
Matt Prior, called into the England squad this week, was fifth out at 154, slog-sweeping to deep midwicket, and Chris Adams followed, bowled off his pads by Patel at 184. When Martin-Jenkins and Rana Naved ul-Hasan both went at 192 Kent fancied a first-innings lead. But Mushtaq, first with Luke Wright and then with Kirtley, defied them.
The imperious form of Rob Key when Kent batted again amid the long shadows suggested Sussex needed every run of their lead. Driving with immense power, both straight and through the covers, he reached his fifty, his eighth of the season, from 60 balls, with seven fours and in the process reached 1,500 runs for the season.
But his opening partner, the captain David Fulton, had failed again and shuffled from the field towards an uncertain future. He was not the only disappointed Kent batsman. Matthew Walker was caught at bat-pad for 33, seven runs short of his 1,000 for the season, and in the last over of the day Key was caught at slip for 84 to give Sussex the edge. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/07/ndis-review-costs-national-disability-insurance-scheme-bill-shorten | Australia news | 2023-12-07T05:29:55.000Z | Sarah Basford Canales | NDIS review urges dozens of changes as Bill Shorten under pressure over surging costs | A landmark review of the NDIS has found the critical lifeboat supporting more than 600,000 Australians with disabilities needs urgent fixes to ensure its sustainability for decades to come.
The federal government has been under pressure to develop a plan to rein in the multibillion-dollar scheme’s exponential costs after national cabinet earlier this year agreed to cap its growth rate at 8% from 2026.
The review’s primary findings centre around returning the scheme to its original intended purposes – focusing “first and foremost” on providing support to those with complex needs and “functional impairment rather than medical diagnosis”.
Albanese strikes $10.5bn deal with states to split cost of non-NDIS disability services in return for GST funding
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The NDIS should be seen as one part of a greater connected system of disability support services, the report found, urging governments over the next five years to build up mainstream disability services, and foundational supports, outside the NDIS for those who cannot access the scheme.
“Our view is that you can’t fix the NDIS without fixing everything around it,” the report’s authors said.
“We want to create a new system of support, including accessible and inclusive mainstream services, a new system of foundational supports as well as the NDIS.”
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The findings have so far been welcomed by disability advocacy groups, who say they are heartened to see the community’s requests put at the centre of the proposals.
The much-anticipated report, released Thursday morning, recommended 26 changes, paired with 139 detailed actions, to fix the NDIS and to fix how Australians with disabilities access support more broadly.
Among the changes proposed is a rethink of how the disability support system looks, including a five-year transition for some people from the NDIS scheme to foundational supports.
The NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, has told those in the disability community that the changes won’t happen overnight and any reforms adopted by the Albanese government, expected to happen next year, will be developed in conjunction with them.
The report’s authors, Prof Bruce Bonyhady, one of the scheme’s key architects, and former bureaucrat, Lisa Paul, propose a three-layered system with the targeted individual support for those most in need of support delivered through the NDIS.
The middle layer would be foundational supports provided outside the scheme and would cover Australians with disabilities needing less intensive support, such as cooking and financial assistance.
Early intervention and support systems for children with developmental would also be targeted through this layer.
The third layer is mainstream services and community supports delivered through existing services, such as schools.
Bonyhady, one of the scheme’s original architects, and Paul, said the NDIS had shifted to a focus on diagnosis, rather than how to address functional impairment.
“There is no consistent approach to identifying developmental concerns early, or helping families find evidence-based supports that work for them,” the report said.
A system of automatically granting access to those with conditions on a pre-approved list would also be stamped out as part of the proposed overhaul.
The report found the automatic access list, which was introduced at the scheme’s inception to encourage more people on to it, led to inequity and favoured those who could get a diagnosis.
A more comprehensive assessment process has also been put forward, which the report’s authors say will better determine a participant’s needs and the most appropriate budget for them to meet them.
It is expected the assessments will be completed by a highly qualified person who will spend enough time with participants to ensure they feel heard and can “account holistically the participant’s life circumstances”.
Those who will no longer be assessed as part of the proposed system’s top layer would be gradually phased out of the NDIS and directed toward foundational supports.
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“We recognise that change for participants can be very difficult. We have recommended a guide to transition to ensure participants are given time to understand and have a say in changes before they are affected by them,” the report said.
“Changes to access and budget setting processes for children and young people should only be implemented once widespread foundational supports are in place.”
Elsewhere, the report recommended a new role of navigator be introduced in a gradual phase out of existing case managers.
Victoria in the dark on proposed NDIS changes on eve of national cabinet meeting, minister says
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There would be two primary types of navigators – general navigators providing information on the available support services and specialists who help participants with complex needs.
A central online platform has also been envisioned as a one-stop shop for essential, accessible, timely and reliable information to inform users of the types of providers and services in their area.
Shorten welcomed the review’s public release on Thursday, saying it was the “most comprehensive and accessible” review of the scheme in history.
During a National Press Club speech, Shorten said he was determined to deliver “mark two” of the scheme, just as other major political reforms, such as Medicare, needed improvements after being launched.
“No one wants to go back to the days of the misery Olympics when Australians were at the mercy of a broken system,” he said.
“The National Disability Insurance Scheme is here to stay. It is not going away but we need to get it back on track.”
The report’s release follows an agreement between the commonwealth and the states and territories on Wednesday to jointly fund extra disability and mainstream support services on a 50-50 basis.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the NDIS’s growth trajectory was “unsustainable” without changes to the existing arrangements.
The NDIS’s growth is expected to exceed $50bn in next year’s federal budget with projections showing it could push past $90bn a year within a decade.
In contrast to Shorten’s optimism, the shadow disability minister, Michael Sukkar, said the review “left many questions unanswered and stones unturned”.
“There is still very little detail on how the scheme’s 8% growth cap will be met. Although, it seems clear that the government will seek to deny access to the NDIS for children with autism and developmental delay,” he said after the review’s release on Thursday.
“Participants also remain in the dark on what the new ‘foundational supports’ will look like, whether these will ever be comparable to the NDIS, and when these supports will commence.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/21/netflix-beasts-of-no-nation-uk-cinemas-subscribers-idris-elba-cary-fukunaga | Film | 2015-09-21T12:49:18.000Z | Ben Child | UK cinemas to get Oscar-tipped Netflix drama Beasts of No Nation first | The Oscar-tipped Netflix drama Beasts of No Nation will be released in UK cinemas a week before it is screened by the streaming service.
Cary Fukunaga’s film, which stars Idris Elba as a warlord from an unnamed west African nation who forces a teenage boy into life as a child soldier, will debut across the country in Curzon cinemas on 9 October, a day after its in-competition screening at the London film festival. The drama is due to arrive on Netflix worldwide and in selected US cinemas on 16 October.
Netflix’s decision to partner with Curzon for an early release suggests the streaming site may have a more sophisticated approach to debuting its first original film content than once thought. After the company announced its $12m (£7.8m) purchase of Beasts of No Nation in February, America’s four largest cinema chains – AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike – all said they would boycott the film in protest at its infringement of the standard 90-day window that usually separates cinema releases and home video premieres in the US.
Netflix has since secured a same-day limited release for the film in North America through the independent distributor Bleecker Street, without which the drama would not be eligible for the 2016 Oscars. But the early UK release suggests the site may be intrigued by the possibility of using cinema screenings to boost its product’s profile.
Based on the novel by the Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation was hailed by critics following its world premiere at the Venice film festival earlier this month. Abraham Attah, the film’s young Ghanaian star, won the Marcello Mastroianni award for his role as the child soldier Agu.
“Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie about child soldiers and a civil war in an imaginary west African country,” wrote the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in his review of the film. “It is a tale of fear, degradation and abusive dysfunction – a violent and disorientating nightmare with a shiver of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Idris Elba gives an outstanding performance as a charismatic and sinister warlord who finds that military power, however intoxicating, is subject to the fickle imperatives of politics, and the suit-wearing opportunists in the cities far from the country badlands he has come to rule.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/17/rich-think-wealth-tax-labour-party | Opinion | 2024-01-17T12:11:17.000Z | Caroline Knowles | What do the rich really think about a wealth tax? Not what you would imagine | Caroline Knowles | The British public are overwhelmingly in favour of levying wealth taxes on the rich. But how do the rich feel about the prospect? That is harder to discern. Our best guess is perhaps via the “experts” who manage wealth and luxury consumption – bankers, tax advisers, lawyers, estate agents, art advisers, yacht brokers and so on. These professions often speak for the rich, presenting them as rational economic actors who protect their money by moving to low-tax countries if pushed, regardless of the social consequences.
But what do the wealthy think? It has become hard to glean what they directly think or feel about anything. Between the spreads in celebrity magazines and the ventriloquising from the wealth management industry, the rich have become caricatures; urban legends rather than real, living people.
I sat down with 60 millionaires, billionaires, aristocrats and their serving class to try to put that right. When researching my book Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, I learned that while there are few routes to riches – be it selling a company, finance, real estate speculation or inheritance – the rich themselves are very diverse. The London rich, in particular, come from all over the world, drawn to the city’s attractively unaffordable housing, cultural scene, schools, available financial expertise, rule of law and borders readily open for them.
The rich undoubtedly travel more than the rest of us and by different means. But frequent holidays, multiple homes and elite forms of travel are not the same as hypermobility for the sake of swerving tax. The rich I encountered like the London lifestyle. Tax increases are unlikely to move them to Dubai or Texas. They have lives and children and dogs, and they can afford to live in London and pay more tax. A recent study from the Institute of Labor Economics backed this up, concluding that the mobility of the wealthy in response to tax rises is “lower than is traditionally believed”.
There are some well publicised examples of billionaires moving or threatening to move to avoid paying tax. The founder of Phones4u, John Caudwell, said he would flee to Monaco or the south of France if the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was elected as prime minister in 2019. We’ll never know if he actually would have. Tax havens such as Monaco have a certain draw. The petrochemical billionaire and new part-owner of Manchester United, Jim Ratcliffe, moved to his Monaco home in 2020 to save £4bn in tax. Philip Green lives there too, while Richard Branson is a tax exile in the the British Virgin Islands.
But my conversations with the rich suggest that Caudwell, Ratcliffe, Green and Branson are outliers. Many of those I spoke to admit to having more money than they can spend in their lifetime. Some give money away and were happy to discuss with me the difficulties of “giving it away well” – by which they mean where it can have the biggest impact. Of course, they tend to favour their pet causes. That philanthropy is often a means to extend their social networks while distracting us from thinking about their wealth. King Charles is the leading exponent of this.
But there are signs of shifting attitudes. Whether driven by guilt at the extent of their wealth or concern for the plight of the poor, the rich are decidedly uncomfortable about stepping over homeless people on their way to the opera. Grotesque inequality and the stark nature of the climate crisis are making more of them reflect on their high consumption lifestyles. Resource Justice is an organisation dedicated to giving the wealthy guidance on how to spend their money to support “grassroots social movements”; while Patriotic Millionaires campaigns against wealth inequality. The latter organisation commissioned an opinion poll of the super-rich to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos that showed that 74% supported higher taxes on wealth. Effective altruism – a philosophy that supports using excess income to combat hunger and poverty rather than spending it on luxuries – is spreading through high finance and among Silicon Valley billionaires.
Why then, when even some of the rich are warming to taxes on wealth, is the Labour party reluctant to propose them? This is especially odd considering support is becoming mainstream. A recent YouGov poll showed that 73% of the British public support a tax of 2% on wealth over £5m. Gus O’Donnell, a cabinet secretary under Labour and Conservative governments, has even suggested there is “a clear burning platform for tax reform targeting wealth”.
Wealth taxes could be annual levies or one-offs, such as the windfall tax Tony Blair imposed on privatised utilities in 1997. An LSE and Warwick University study suggests a one-off tax of 5% on total wealth above £500,000 would raise a quarter of a trillion pounds over the next five years – about the annual NHS and education budgets combined.
If Keir Starmer can tune out the loud voices of those who speak for the rich – and the truculent billionaires prepared to move countries to short-change the public finances – he will hear that the British public and even many of the rich themselves support wealth taxes. In 2022 1 million children in the UK experienced destitution: we have never needed the money a wealth tax would raise more than we do now.
Caroline Knowles is global professorial fellow at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/17/moodys-downgrades-wpp-martin-sorrell-departure-ratings-agency-negative | Business | 2018-04-17T17:48:30.000Z | Mark Sweney | WPP hires recruitment firm to help find Martin Sorrell successor | WPP has hired a New York-based recruitment firm as it begins the global search to replace founder and chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell.
Russell Reynolds, a top five global executive search firm, is understood to be working with Frances Illingworth, WPP’s global head of recruitment.
The move to bring in an external executive search firm is extremely rare for WPP, which traditionally handles most of its executive recruitment in-house.
Sorrell’s departure from WPP has prompted the leading ratings agency Moody’s to downgrade its outlook for the group, citing concerns including a breakup, the loss of clients and its poor performance compared with rivals.
The downgrade, from “stable” to “negative”, comes as WPP’s 11-strong board was set to meet on Tuesday with the task of finding Sorrell’s successor high on the agenda.
“In Moody’s view, the high-profile departure of Sir Martin Sorrell raises concerns over the future strategy and shape of the group, increases client-retention risk and could hence hinder WPP’s ability to meet its 2018 guidance,” said Christian Azz, Moody’s assistant vice-president.
WPP issued a number of warnings about growth last year on its way to reporting its worst financial year since the 2009 recession. It has also seen its market value slashed by a third. It lost almost 7% on Monday alone as jittery investors worried about its future without its founder as ad clients cut back their budgets and reconsider their spending strategies.
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“Sir Martin Sorrell’s resignation comes at a time when the company is already facing a number of operational challenges and introduces uncertainty over the strategy and ultimately the structure of the group going forward,” said Azzi.
Moody’s said that WPP was already weakly positioned before Sorrell’s departure, performing significantly below its peers such as the US groups Omincom and IPG and the French firm Publicis.
WPP’s board meeting, the first not to include its founder and chief executive in years, was expected to include Mark Read and Andrew Scott, the senior executives promoted to run the company day-to-day during the search for a new chief executive. They are also considered the two leading internal candidates.
The board member Sol Trujillo, a former chief of companies including the French telecoms firm Orange and Australia’s Telstra, is understood to have been one of the most vocal about the issue of succession at WPP.
A number of names have emerged as potential runners and riders to succeed Sorrell, including the chief executive of the publishing and exhibitions group Informa, Stephen Carter, who has worked at Ofcom, the cable firm NTL and WPP’s ad agency JWT; Adam Crozier, whose pedigree includes running ITV, the Royal Mail, the Football Association and Saatchi & Saatchi; the Sky chief executive, Jeremy Darroch, and Andrew Robertson, the chief executive of Omnicom’s global BBDO ad network.
Sorrell has said he was available to assist with the transition.
Martin Sorrell's exit leaves too many unanswered questions
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The 73-year old has “unreservedly denied” misconduct allegations and WPP’s board has said it would not be publishing the outcome of the investigations into them by an independent law firm.
The influential shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis said it would prefer WPP to publish the report but that it accepted this was unlikely to happen.
“In the interests of transparency, we would prefer if the report was made available to shareholders, though we view that outcome as unlikely,” said Martin Mortell, Glass Lewis UK & Europe’s director of research. “Some investors may be willing to forego transparency in lieu of achieving overdue change at the top and the opportunity of a new strategic vision.”
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Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, has said there was a “real lack of transparency” and “any investigations done by the company should be made public”.
The company said it had concluded the investigation and had no further comment to make.
WPP’s share price moved up almost 2% in trading on Tuesday as market sentiment about the prospects of the advertising giant steadied. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/31/freedom-to-think-by-susie-alegre-review-the-big-tech-threat-to-free-thought | Books | 2022-03-31T06:30:40.000Z | Steven Poole | Freedom to Think by Susie Alegre review – the big tech threat to free thought | It is often said that people are entitled to their opinions. But are they really? Do you have a God-given right to believe that torture is good, or that the moon landings were faked? To the extent that opinions are not merely secret possessions but dispositions to act a certain way in society, they are everyone’s business. So, no, you don’t have an inalienable right to your dumb opinion.
Unfortunately, that was also the position of the Spanish Inquisition and witch-hunters, who dreamed up vicious ways of attempting to uncover inner impiety. So these days we generally separate opinions (or beliefs) from the expression of them. Expression can be regulated, in the case of incitement to hatred, for example, but opinion is sacrosanct. It’s a fundamental freedom, but one that is everywhere under attack.
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So begins human rights lawyer Susie Alegre’s fascinating book, which sketches a brief history of legal freedoms from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi onwards, and explains the conceptual struggles behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights announced in 1948. That text defends rights to freedom of both “thought” and “opinion”: some delegates understood “thought” to mean religious belief, while others considered it superfluous as an addition to “opinion”; it was the Soviets who insisted it remain, “out of respect for the heroes and martyrs of science”.
But if “opinion” was merely a private, internal affair, why did its freedom need protecting at all? This was, Alegre explains, at the behest of the British, who “insisted that ‘in totalitarian countries, opinions were definitely controlled by careful restriction of the sources of information’, stressing that interference could happen even before an opinion was formed”. The Brits, having had a Propaganda Bureau and then a Ministry of Information, as well as birthing a certain George Orwell, knew what they were talking about.
If propaganda undermines the right to freedom of opinion, however, then we are all in trouble. And this is one of the main arguments that Alegre pursues. The modern online environment, polluted as it is by fake news, violates our freedom to form reliable thoughts. On this view, the people who stormed the US Capitol in January 2021, in the apparently sincere belief that the presidential election had been stolen by Joe Biden, were victims; and so are the millions of ordinary Russians who believe what the state-controlled media is telling them about the so-called special operation in Ukraine.
When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa, I told her it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them
Susie Alegre
The online world, Alegre argues, harms our freedoms in many other ways, and is of a piece with the cruel history she sketches of phrenology, lobotomies and CIA mind-control experiments. It was recently reported that Nadine Dorries, the UK minister for culture wars, stormed into a meeting with Microsoft and demanded to know when they were going to get rid of “algorithms”: not really possible for a software company, since all computer programs are made of algorithms, but the story does reflect an increasing public suspicion of the ways machines are being used to manipulate us.
Researchers in facial-recognition AI systems, for example, claim to be able to read political affiliation from a photograph; social-media companies analyse posts for indicators of personality traits; fitness trackers are attempting to move into mood-tracking; and fancy new brain-scanning “lie detectors” have been used by prosecutors in Indian courts, arguably infringing the right to avoid self-incrimination. Even if the claims for such technologies are so far overblown, they all represent novel attempts to intrude into what used to be a private mental space.
Here Alegre adroitly cites Nineteen Eighty-Four and its discussion of the lesser-discussed sibling of thoughtcrime, which Orwell called “facecrime”: “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in a public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.”
From facecrime to Facebook, and Orwell’s “prolefeed” (“the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses”) to the Twitter feed, is a worryingly short distance. It’s amusing that liking a Facebook page called “Being Confused After Waking Up From Naps” is a strong predictor of male heterosexuality, but it’s grimmer to learn that a leaked Facebook document boasted it was able to target “moments when young people need a confidence boost” on behalf of advertisers. Any and all information we feed into the social-media maw, Alegre notes, “will be analysed to reveal psychological traits or fleeting states of mind that will, in turn, be used to manipulate our behaviour or to tell others how they should treat us”. This is particularly egregious in the realm of behaviour-tracking targeted at children.
Whenever you hear tech companies paying lip-service to “ethics”, Alegre warns, you should be suspicious. “You don’t need to be much of a cynic to see why ethical guidelines may be more palatable to big tech than actual regulation. Ethics are optional.” Legal remedies, then, are required. The headline remedy she suggests is quite thrillingly radical: an outright ban on “surveillance advertising” – the kind dependent on trackers and cookies, that beams out your personal data to hundreds of companies whenever you load a webpage. We never asked for it, and we don’t like it. Just make it illegal, along with other key parts of the digital panopticon, such as “emotion analysis” tech in public places, or Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa devices. “When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa like her friends,” Alegre relates heroically, “I told her that it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them.”
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We have all sleepwalked into this gloomy fairytale, and it’s time to wake up. There remain questions, though, about how far regulation can or should go, since it seems impossible to police all the manifold threats to our cognitive autonomy that Alegre identifies. Some, indeed, are hardly peculiar to the digital age at all. “If inferences can be drawn about your inner world based on your appearance,” she writes, “it does not matter what you actually think or feel. Your freedom to be who you are is curtailed by society’s judgment of you.” Maybe so, but this is lamentably inevitable if you want to live in society at all.
If it should be impermissible, meanwhile, for “governments, companies or people” to seek to “manipulate our opinions”, on the grounds that this violates our right to freedom of thought, one wonders what kind of persuasive speech would still be allowed in such a brave new world. Aren’t arguments of all kinds – political, scientific, artistic – attempts to manipulate the opinions of others? How do we sort the good kind of manipulation from the bad? A benevolent philosopher-king would no doubt figure this out for us, but in the regrettable absence of one it doesn’t seem likely that many people would want to leave it up to a legal authority, whether or not it’s called a Ministry of Truth.
Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds by Susie Alegre is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/14/leyla-mccalla-sun-without-the-heat-review-a-freewheeling-joyous-listen | Music | 2024-04-14T14:00:54.000Z | Ammar Kalia | Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat review – a freewheeling, joyous listen | Multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla was exploring the Black legacies of country music and Americana long before Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made the idea mainstream. As a member of the group Our Native Daughters, she has highlighted the presence of Black female banjo players, while her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops explored the Black songbook for strings.
In her solo output, McCalla expands her purview to take in music from the African diaspora. On this, her fifth album, she provides 10 gorgeously crafted songs that veer from Afrobeat to Brazilian tropicalismo, as well as folk and country. Glittering, highlife-inspired guitars are a buoyant touch on celebratory tracks such as Open the Road and Take Me Away, while the plaintive plucking of Tree and the sweeping cello of I Want to Believe showcase McCalla’s storytelling songwriting, presenting hopeful tales of self-exploration.
While the heavier, distorted guitars of Tower and Love We Had feel somewhat jarring in the ebullient context of the album, Sun Without the Heat is a freewheeling and joyous listen, with McCalla employing her knowledge of musical traditions to produce fresh combinations.
Watch the video for Tree by Leyla McCalla. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/17/oscars2008.oscars | Film | 2008-02-17T00:09:47.000Z | Amy Raphael | Roger Deakins: Why I won't win an Oscar | According to the Los Angeles Times, Roger Deakins is 'a native of a small fishing town in England called Torquay'. The 58-year-old is also one of the world's most respected cinematographers. He made a name for himself with 1984 and has spent almost two decades working in America, during which time he has shot several films for the Coen brothers, including No Country For Old Men, for which he won a Bafta last week. Oscar-nominated five times, this may be the year Deakins takes a gold statuette back to Devon - he has been nominated twice for No Country and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He also shot the acclaimed thriller In the Valley of Elah last year.
How was it working with Richard Burton on 1984, his final film?
Everyone was nervous, but he was such a charming guy. At the end of the first day, we were summoned to meet him outside his trailer. We all thought we were in for it. He came out and said he just wanted to thank us for one of the nicest days he'd ever had on set; as soon as he'd seen how fresh-faced we all were, he'd been nervous, too. I was amazed.
Over the years, you must have become quite blasé about movie stars?
I'm certainly not in awe any more.
Yet... I was impressed by Brad Pitt on Jesse James. He turned up in character and make-up for a pre-shoot in a cornfield and he was Jesse James. He was fantastic.
Are you good at adapting to directors?
You have to be. It's quite wonderful working with the Coen brothers because we're good friends now and so the starting point is further on. They storyboard everything in advance and a specific number of shots have to be done each day. Paul Haggis is very into how a film looks - he wanted In the Valley of Elah to look very real, down and dirty - and we'd work out the shots with the actors right there on the day.
Joel Coen once said you are 'one of the world's best DOPs in terms of how he lights'. How did you learn your craft?
I wanted to be a painter when I was younger, so I went to Bath School of Art and Design and then got into the National Film School on the second attempt. I spent the 1970s and early 1980s shooting documentaries and rock videos. When I started making films, I realised I wanted to explore people, particularly the human face. I try to make images simple. I don't like gloss. I always operate my own camera and my strength, I suppose, is composition and the way I move the camera. Lighting is just something I have to do.
Do you think you'll get lucky at the Oscars next Sunday?
No, I know who's going to win best cinematography, but I'm not telling you! I'm not sure how much awards really matter; does anyone remember who wins? Although it would be daft to say that I wouldn't be pleased ... I'm happy where I am: a kid from Torquay working on amazing films. I'm quite simple. I either want to be shooting films or be in Devon getting away from it all.
· The Oscars are next Sunday. The other cinematography nominees are The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Atonement and There Will Be Blood. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/05/capitalism-dead-reform-force-for-good-society-barbara-stocking | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2015-11-05T12:39:37.000Z | Barbara Stocking | Capitalism isn’t dead; it can become a force for good in society | The capitalist model is under attack on all sides. Yet while there is appetite for change, not even the Occupy movement has come up with a coherent, alternative model. So can capitalism be reformed to operate in the service of society?
At Oxfam, where I was chief executive for 12 years, we believed that the private sector has the ability to help people out of poverty, for example through the creation of jobs or by purchasing products from farmers at a fair price.
However, I also saw more than my fair share of unethical behaviour from the private sector in developing countries. Sometimes this was partly due to lack of regulation. Indeed, sometimes governments were prepared to condone or even encourage poor standards to keep a company in the country. Nevertheless, it was shocking to experience the lack of concern about actions that would have been seen as inappropriate in the companies’ home markets.
A couple of examples stand out in my memory: in 2006 a trademark dispute emerged between Starbucks and Ethiopia over the company’s attempt to use the names of certain Ethiopian villages on their coffee packaging without paying the communities or government; in 2001 the pharmaceutical industry took the South African government to court when it wanted to import affordable generic versions of drugs for HIV/Aids.
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Such exploitative practices continue today. The most egregious examples have been in so-called land grabs, where companies have taken land in parts of Africa as well as countries such as Cambodia, Guatemala without consent from the communities concerned and without providing compensation. In a number of cases, governments have been complicit or even encouraged this, arguing that the people have no legal tenure, though they may have had longstanding traditional land rights.
This is not solely about the private sector in developing countries. Many blame the financial sector for causing the 2008 financial crisis and provoking the subsequent austerity regimes. There continue to be demonstrations in many countries with a strong feeling that it is the poor and “squeezed” middle class having to cope while the underlying capitalist system does not change. The rich get richer, the extremes of inequality grow across the globe.
The anger grows with stories of tax avoidance, the salaries of chief executives and incidents like the recent VW emissions debacle. It is hardly surprising that each year Edelman’s Trust Barometer shows extremely low trust in the private sector across the world.
You would think this situation would become untenable, after all, the private sector is given a licence to operate by society. In the short term, though, the problems seem huge and ordinary people can feel powerless to influence the system.
But public pressure on companies or governments has the potential to bring about significant change. In the Starbucks and Ethiopian villages case, for example, consumers in the US and Europe boycotted the multinational, which ultimately negotiated with the Ethiopian government.
There is also the issue of morality. Some company leaders undoubtedly want to do the right thing. No doubt that’s what many of their employees and potential new recruits want too. As head of a Cambridge college I hear from many students that they are uneasy about working in the private sector because of low ethical standards. One student reported to me that at the recruitment drive of a major global company the recruiter had said “we don’t do anything illegal; you may think what we do is immoral, but we make a lot of money”. That was enough to stop her applying. Companies can be pressured into change by what employees and potential employees think of them.
To get the widespread reform we need, we have to take a holistic view. It is all very well asking companies to behave better but they are in a system which they believe, rightly or wrongly, constrains them.
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Investors are enormously influential, demanding short-term profits which encourage chief executives to take their eyes off the sustainability – and therefore profitability – of the company for the long term. Some companies have challenged this. Unilever, for example, does not issue quarterly results. Likewise there are examples where investors have acted to influence companies positively. In the HIV/Aids-pharmaceutical example it was investors who put pressure on companies to change as they did not want to be seen siding with companies allowing millions to die when drugs were available.
There is still, however, a long way to go before investors systematically back the reforms needed, such as adhering to the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment.
One of the biggest issues globally in our capitalist system is the role of labour. With so many jobs going because of automation, how can we provide employment and meaningful work to the growing population? Currently half of the world is under 25 and 1.8 billion people are between 16 and 25. This could easily lead to a race to the bottom in wages and large numbers of disenfranchised young people.
Alongside climate change, I believe this is the biggest challenge we face globally. But just think of the imagination, innovation and commitment to change all these young people can bring.
I am left with the conviction that capitalism must be reformed to be the force for good in society. It requires companies to have a focus on positive purpose and ethical behaviour. It needs a long term approach by investors, ethically demanding consumers and public pressure on governments. We all have power in our different roles and perhaps above all we need to make sure our young people are prepared to get in there and make a difference in the way the private sector works, for the sake of their own futures.
Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, recently launched Capitalism on the Edge, a two-year series of lectures exploring capitalism from different perspectives | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/nov/13/girona-and-their-boy-from-the-barrio-hit-new-heights-on-top-of-la-liga | Football | 2023-11-13T18:07:56.000Z | Sid Lowe | Girona and their boy from the barrio hit new heights on top of La Liga | Sid Lowe | María’s grandson was back in town this weekend, and everyone came to say hello. They waited for his bus to arrive and stood waving when it left again. They sang his name and held signs welcoming him home. They held cameras and things to sign; most of all, they held him and close. Girona’s coach now, he had come to defeat them, they knew, but Miguel Ángel Sánchez Muñoz could never hurt them, even if he won. Especially if he won. They call him Míchel I of Vallecas, son of Benjamin, Candela and the streets of this self-declared Independent People’s Republic east of Madrid, and these streets don’t forget. They always knew he was the best; now, they’re proud to say, everyone else does too.
That’s their boy, the kid from down here way up there. The boy who turned down Barcelona and Madrid because all he wanted was to play for Rayo Vallecano – which he did for 16 years – stands above them both and everyone else as well. That’s his Girona side moving clear at the top of La Liga by coming from behind to win 2-1 against Rayo, their Rayo and his too. Sure, they wanted to win but some defeats are easier to take and his was a success they could share. This, like his team, had been special, from the moment he walked on to the pitch and the Bukaneros, Rayo’s fans, held up cards declaring “María’s grandson, welcome back to the barrio [neighbourhood]”, to the moment he walked away again.
Rayo Vallecano fans display a banner in tribute to Míchel before the game. Photograph: Alberto Gardin/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Born in the working class barrio of Vallecas, Míchel I – and, yes, there is a Míchel II – grew up in a tiny two-floor house in what was known as the Madrid shanty town. One of four kids, he lived downstairs with his parents and grandparents while his uncles and aunts lived upstairs, before the shacks were bulldozed for social housing. Given a council flat on the fifth floor of a block, the family moved to Palomeras, still in Vallecas, a traditional point of arrival for immigrants and a place with a marked social conscience and left-wing identity. His parents, from Murcia, had an allotment and worked long hours in a fruit shop 500m from Rayo’s ground – they fed the neighbourhood, as Míchel put it – and his grandmother took responsibility.
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When he was seven or eight he would be first in line for the free Rayo tickets handed out at school; if he didn’t get lucky, he would sneak into the blocks of flats that overlook the ground at the end where all there is is a wall and watch from there. He joined the youth team, where his own sons would later play, at 14 and made his debut against Barcelona in November 1993, still a teenager. Left-footed, a player of rare talent, by then he had said no to Madrid and Barcelona. This was his team and he spent 10 years there (with a loan season at Almería in the middle). Sold to Murcia by the club’s owners, against his wishes, he later came back, via Málaga, and played six more seasons.
Possibly the best footballer that ever played for Rayo and certainly the most symbolic, only one player made more appearances and he is the embodiment of everything Vallecas is supposed to be, everything that Rayo are supposed to be too, not just from the barrio but of the barrio: humility and solidarity, proud of his roots. Immensely likable, a man who would play for the teachers’ team against pupils at his old school, 48 but who doesn’t look a day over 14, he was Rayo’s captain, their everything and later their coach. Having first coached at the local Mar Abierto football school as a community service instead of military service, aged 24, he coached Rayo’s kids, took over the B team in 2016 and the first team the year after.
He wasn’t sure it was for him, a little timid at first, but it was. Four times Míchel took Rayo up as a player, once as a manager – celebrated at the same fountain where he kicked a ball about as a boy. When he took over at Rayo they were one point from relegation to the Segunda B, Spain’s regionalised, 80-team third tier. The following year, he had returned them to primera. That was the first of three promotions to the top flight: first Rayo, then Huesca, then Girona. Twelve games into his time at Girona, they were 19th, in the relegation zone in the second division; two years on, given the patience that fans at Vallecas felt he was denied, they are top of the first. And so when he returned to Vallecas this time he did so as league leader, a vallecano rising above the entire country.
Míchel takes a moment before the game with Rayo. Photograph: Alberto Gardin/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
It is not chance, which is not to say anyone expected this, that it’s anything other than extraordinary; 44.3%-owned by Manchester City, providing stability, resources, and know-how, it may puncture the romance too, but Girona’s success is not explained that easily. Only two of their first team squad belong to City Group – Yan Couto and Savinho – although Yangel Herrera did, and they have the 12th biggest budget in the first division. One member of the coaching staff told AS that 70% of their players wouldn’t have been wanted by the rest of the first division in the summer.
They would now. Artem Dovbyk is their record signing – at €7.5m. He and fellow Ukrainian Viktor Tysgankov had never played in Europe’s five top leagues. Paulo Gazzaniga wasn’t a regular starter at second division Fulham. Eric García was at Barcelona, via City, and Daly Blind at Bayern via Ajax, but neither club were keen on keeping them. Miguel Gutiérrez is a Real Madrid player, but an academy product on loan. Owned by Troyes, who are owned by City, Savinho was demoted to the PSV B team by unconvinced coaches. Iván Martín had gone down with Alavés. Aleix García had been in Belgium, Bucharest and Eibar, where he was relegated. He’s just become the first Girona player ever to get a Spain call-up.
Together, under Míchel’s guidance, they are top. It is not just the league table that says Girona are the best team in Spain; it is the way they play, and that is his way. On Saturday they came from behind to win for the third time in four weeks – not least because Rayo were excellent – but it’s not epic, it is logic. This is no fluke and the inevitable fall still hasn’t come into view. A third of the way through the season, they lead Madrid by two points, Barcelona by four and Atlético by six, but they are not top because top is cheap. They have 34 of 39 points. No team has ever had more after 13 games. And so that word gets used: Leicester.
Savio (right) celebrates scoring his team’s decisive second goal. Photograph: Óscar del Pozo/AFP/Getty Images
Girona have scored more than anyone else, and almost all feel like the product of a process, like the kick that ends each move is not so much a shot as the final pass into the net. They have scored more from crosses than anyone else, except that crosses isn’t really the word; these are not balls swung in, they are passes pulled back, many men there to receive them. The technical quality and combinations in tight spaces would be striking enough if it wasn’t so often done inside the opposition’s area. Míchel talks about a clear collective idea, construction, the nerve to play under pressure. “It’s been a long time since I have seen team like it,” admitted the Rayo coach Francisco on Saturday.
Asked if he had seen a team that would win the league, Francisco said: “At times, yes.” That night, having beaten Valencia 5-1, Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti noted that they have no European football, are playing “better than the rest”, and insisted: “They’re a team who can fight for the league, without doubt.” They still have to face Athletic, Barcelona, Atlético and Betis before halfway, but the original target has been torn up, survival just two wins away already, Míchel talking now about fighting for Europe and maybe more. “What the players are doing is incredible,” he said, sitting under the stand at Vallecas. “Other people’s expectations can create fear; the dream has to be ours. Let’s see what our ceiling is.”
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As he spoke, outside they were waiting for him; hundreds of them still there long after the game had finished. They could not be more proud of the man who, as the chant runs, rescued them from the “tomb” of Segunda B. They would not abandon in the worst of times; they certainly weren’t going to do so in the best of them, even if he had beaten them. Instead, they would embrace him. This was the game Míchel said he never wanted to play – he claimed he would have invented an injury if he had to – but he could not avoid it as coach. By the time he said goodbye again, nor would he have wanted to. If there was one thing even better than being top of the table, it was being top here, back in the barrio. “That was, pfff, incredible. My grandmother meant a lot to me,” Míchel said. “This will stay with me, it’s been the most special day.”
At the end of a glorious game, two great, fun teams, going at each other, he embraced Óscar Trejo. As he did so, the ground stood to hand him an ovation, applause accompanying him all the way to the tunnel, where they serenaded him.
👏 L'homenatge de Vallecas al nostre míster 🎩
❤️ Tots t'estimem molt, @Michel8Sanchez 🙌#RayoGirona pic.twitter.com/q5U7iF867V
— Girona FC (@GironaFC) November 11, 2023
He clapped, blew a kiss, bowed before them and headed inside. Down the stairs, in a cramped corner under the stand, through the next door along from the chess club and the boxing gym with its metal bars and graffitied walls, was another familiar face, yet another old friend waiting to embrace Míchel I of Vallecas. “Welcome, Mister Leader,” he said, saying it all.
How, La Liga’s best coach, leader of its best team, was asked, do you feel? “Happy,” he said. “And proud of Vallecas.”
Pos Team P GD Pts
1 Girona 13 15 34
2 Real Madrid 13 19 32
3 Barcelona 13 13 30
4 Atletico Madrid 12 17 28
5 Athletic Bilbao 13 8 24
6 Real Sociedad 13 7 22
7 Real Betis 13 1 21
8 Las Palmas 13 -1 18
9 Valencia 13 -2 18
10 Rayo Vallecano 13 -2 18
11 Getafe 13 -2 16
12 Osasuna 13 -6 14
13 Sevilla 12 1 12
14 Villarreal 13 -6 12
15 Alaves 13 -7 12
16 Cadiz 12 -7 10
17 Mallorca 12 -6 9
18 Celta Vigo 13 -10 7
19 Granada 13 -12 7
20 Almeria 13 -20 3 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/04/liam-williams-edinburgh-festival-2014 | Stage | 2014-08-04T17:29:00.000Z | Brian Logan | Liam Williams: 'I've had nervous breakdowns on stage' | Liam Williams says he was "delighted" to be nominated best newcomer at the Edinburgh comedy awards last year. But no one who saw his show – a lyrical, philosophical monologue full of existential despair – could easily imagine what a delighted Williams might look like.
At the time, I wrote that this Yorkshireman, along with fellow early-twentysomething standups Bo Burnham and Alfie Brown, represented the stirrings of angry young Generation Y comedy. This is the age group who've been bequeathed austerity, corporate kleptocracy and the commodification of everything – including dissent. Small wonder they're giving us the comedy of embittered impotence. Williams's debut show was dazzlingly clever: numb to romance, jaded about selfhood and weary of the inane exertions of pop culture.
"I was excited," says the 26-year-old, "by thinking: how vulnerable can you go? How negative and how soft-souled?" He'd seen vulnerable standups before, but they stopped short, didn't make it real enough. What's distinctive about ex-Footlights man Williams is that he did much more than just send up the misery and self-indulgence. "For the six months when I was writing the show," he explains, "everything felt empty and bleak. I didn't think, 'I'll contrive an anomie-stricken persona.' I was genuinely self-pitying and depressed." By playing it for real, he was obliged to find less cliched and more novel ways to make it all funny.
The result was the most remarkable debut of last year's fringe, and Williams – hitherto best known as one-third of the sketch troupe Sheeps, with whom he still works – found himself hailed as "the Philip Larkin of British comedy". Having adapted the show into several successful "blaps", or short films, for Channel 4, he was recently commissioned to develop a series. So how does he feel about the "voice of a generation" tag? It's hard to agree, he says, "without sounding hideously grandiose".
Now Williams is back, but this time on the free fringe – partly because "you get ripped off if you do standup at the big venues"; partly (I suspect) to manage expectations; and partly because the show is called Capitalism, so it's significant to give it away for free. Even more so than last year, Williams is grappling with what it means to be young and British in 2014: "That cognitive dissonance, that contradiction in the knowledge that you are extremely privileged and yet you still think 'things are shit'. How do you balance the existential ledger?"
Specifically, he says, the show "is about wanting to write a state-of-the-nation, generation-defining piece of art and quickly accepting that I'm not capable of it, partly because I don't have any incisive notion of what capitalism is. If I wanted to do the research and read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century then I should do that. But I sort of know I don't have the discipline. So the starting point is that visceral, instinctive anger and distrust of capitalism coming up against more rational self-analysis. 'What do you actually know? What would you actually change?' Once you accept that your heartfelt ambitions are stupid and pseudy, what are you left with?"
But isn't that a cop-out? Wouldn't we rather watch a standup who's read Piketty than someone joking about his failure to do so? "In comedy," says Williams, "there's a perennial escape route from having to say anything insightful, which is that when you hit a wall in terms of your understanding, you just go, 'Look at me, I'm an idiot.'" So is Williams taking the escape route because he wants to – or because standup convention obliges him to? "That's a good question," he says. "I oscillate between feeling that I am acquiring mastery of this art form, and worrying that, just because I've found myself earning money and can't easily leap towards any other art form, I'm stuck doing standup, much as I enjoy it."
But even that enjoyment comes and goes. My chat with Williams – enjoyable, thoughtful, frank – ends with the striking admission that he considers himself "not cut out for standup", and recently suffered "nervous breakdowns" on stage while previewing his show. "It was like being possessed," he says. "It was just being on stage without solid enough material, without reliable jokes, and reacting in the most ugly way. It was almost a tantrum."
With characteristic gloom, he concludes: "I think I'd feel happier sitting at a desk all day." This would be better, he says, than suffering "the constant need to convert material into performance. I'd like, in 30 years, to be considered a successful writer more than a successful standup. Perhaps after Edinburgh, I'll get my futile midlife crisis novel out of the way really young, then concentrate on more useful things."
Liam Williams is at Laughing Horse @ The Cellar Monkey, Edinburgh, until 25 August. Details: freefestival.co.uk
More from the Edinburgh festival
Où est le punchline? The art of standup in a second language
Review: Unfaithful – love and longing in a taut four-hander
Review: The Trial of Jane Fonda – as inventive as a school play
Standups on their entrance music: 'I play it loud to drown out the screaming in my head'
Jim Davidson: provocative, predictable and oh so popular
All Edinburgh festival coverage | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/30/the-guardian-view-on-englands-metro-mayors-local-elections-that-produce-national-figures | Opinion | 2024-04-30T18:03:14.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on England’s metro mayors: local elections that produce national figures | Editorial | This Thursday, around 20 million voters in 10 regions in England go to the polls to elect metro mayors, which largely did not exist before 2017. Today these local politicians are national figures. With Labour riding high in the polls, the party could even see a remarkable clean sweep in the 10 contests, potentially winning the first-ever elected mayoralty of York and North Yorkshire in Rishi Sunak’s back yard. Such is their importance that the loss of the Conservative Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen, and his West Midlands counterpart, Andy Street, could hasten the end of Mr Sunak’s premiership.
Devolution is working. There have been signature policies such as Steve Rotheram’s high-speed broadband plan for Liverpool. Andy Burnham in Manchester has rolled out bus franchising to address the damage done by decades of deregulation. Mr Rotheram, Mr Burnham and West Yorkshire’s Tracy Brabin collectively are a powerful northern voice to counterbalance the south. Research from the More in Common thinktank suggests mayoral races are not a proxy for national politics. The race between the independent candidate Jamie Driscoll and Labour’s Kim McGuinness to be north-east mayor is too close to call. Mr Driscoll, who resigned from Labour after being blocked from standing as its candidate, clearly benefits from his outsider status.
Labour’s Sadiq Khan will make history if he is re-elected for a third term as London’s mayor. There’s one particular reason to hope for his unprecedented victory. It would stop his Tory opponent, Susan Hall, from winning. Ms Hall has traded in disinformation, liked racist social media posts and been forced to delete fake video footage. Her deplorable campaign renders her unfit to lead a great city like London. The contest, however, is likely to be narrower than the polls suggest. Mr Khan has been in office for eight years. The Tories have also disgracefully undermined democratic competition with a skewed playing field. They will benefit from replacing the supplementary vote electoral system, which can consolidate a progressive vote, with first past the post. Ms Hall will also probably gain from the introduction of voter ID requirements that seem to exclude many of Labour’s core voters.
Ms Hall has pursued two main lines of attack: crime and the extension of London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez). The former is exacerbated in tough economic times. The latter is a brave policy to implement when drivers are feeling the pinch. In extending the scheme to outer London, Mr Khan hit Conservative supporters the hardest. While Ulez has been seen as Mr Khan’s Achilles heel, its potential electoral effect may be outweighed by his popular free school meals policy – which is backed by 70% of Londoners. The veteran London watcher Dave Hill pointed out that the politics played well for Mr Khan, as Ulez was now the main concern of only 6% of voters compared to the 41% who picked the cost of living.
Sir Keir Starmer has clashed with both Mr Khan and Mr Burnham. Metro mayors should be the start of a bigger conversation about power and democracy, not the end. They have won the right to work with central government to redesign local services, but need more say over how they are funded. There’s too often a tendency for Westminster to crush alternative power centres, because doing so leaves a larger gap for national politics to fill. For the sake of a better governed country, that urge must be resisted.
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/politics/2019/oct/29/how-do-i-register-to-vote-in-the-12-december-2019-general-election | Politics | 2019-11-27T10:28:58.000Z | Martin Belam | How do I register to vote in 12 December 2019 general election? | If you want to vote in the general election on 12 December but haven’t yet registered – bad news. It is too late.
However, you can still register online so you don’t miss out next time. And let’s face it, if the election results ends up being close, we could be having another one sooner than you think. Here’s how to get yourself registered for next time.
Who is eligible to vote in a general election?
To vote in a UK general election you must:
Be 18 or over on the day of the election.
Be a British, Irish or qualifying Commonwealth citizen.
Be resident in the UK (or a British citizen living abroad who has been registered to vote in the UK in the last 15 years).
Not be legally excluded from voting.
You also need to be on the electoral register. You only have to register once, but will need to re-register if you have changed your address, name or nationality since you first registered.
The forms can be completed online. You may need details of your national insurance number and your passport if you’re a British citizen living abroad, and want to vote in England, Scotland or Wales.
If you need help, you should contact your local Electoral Registration Office. You can use this service to find the address if you live in England, Scotland or Wales. If you live in Northern Ireland you need to contact the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (EONI).
You don’t need a fixed address to vote. You can still register to vote if you are homeless or have no fixed address, are a person who has been remanded in custody but have not yet been convicted of any offence, or are a patient in a mental health hospital. There are additional forms to fill in – you can find the instructions here.
You can register to vote at a younger age in Scotland to participate in Scottish parliamentary and local elections at the age of 16, but you will not be able to vote in a general election.
I’m a student. Where do I register to vote?
If you are a student you can register to vote at both your home and term-time addresses, but remember that in a general election it is illegal to vote more than once. For tactical reasons, you might decide it is better to vote in one location or the other – for example, you might usually live in a marginal seat, and your university address might be in a safe seat, or vice-versa.
What do I do if I can’t vote in person in England, Scotland or Wales?
There are two ways to vote if you can’t be there to vote in person on the day of an election – with either a postal vote or a proxy vote. To apply for a postal or proxy vote you must already be registered to vote and on the electoral roll.
Voting by proxy
A proxy vote means someone can vote on your behalf. Anyone can act as your proxy provided they’re registered to vote and allowed to vote in the same type of election.
Usually, you need to apply for a proxy vote at least six working days before election day if you want to vote in England, Scotland or Wales. There are different forms to fill in depending on the reason you want the proxy vote, which can be:
You’ll be away.
You’ll be at work.
You’ll be attending a course.
You’re disabled.
You’re living overseas.
You’re serving overseas as a member of the armed forces.
You’re a British Council employee or Crown servant (for example diplomatic or overseas civil service).
Voting by post
Anyone registered to vote in an election can apply for a postal vote. You don’t need to give a reason. If you live in England, Scotland or Wales you need to fill in this form and then send it to your local Electoral Registration Office.
Voting by proxy or post in Northern Ireland
If you want to vote by post or by proxy in Northern Ireland, follow the instructions from the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.
How can I be sure if I am registered to vote?
If you have any doubts that you are registered to vote, you should contact your local Electoral Registration Office. You can use this service to find the address if you live in England, Scotland or Wales. If you live in Northern Ireland you need to contact the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (EONI). | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/aug/28/is-the-edinburgh-festival-really-a-level-playing-field | Stage | 2015-08-28T17:57:44.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Is Edinburgh festival really a level playing field? | Edinburgh is the biggest open access arts festival in the world, but is it really a level playing field and if not, what can be done to change the points of access? It was one of the issues raised in the latest in the A Nation’s Theatre debates which are hosted around the country by Battersea Arts Centre and the Guardian. This one was set up by Northern Stage, who have a strong presence here on the fringe, to consider the place that Edinburgh has in the wider arts ecology, for better or worse.
Do theatre companies put too much faith in the Edinburgh effect?
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In fact it was quite clear from the wide-ranging discussion that Edinburgh remains a magnet for theatre-makers and producers and programmers for very good reasons despite the economics of the fringe. While there may be some truth in the perception that Edinburgh has simply become some kind of vast cultural supermarket around which producers and programmers dash looking to fill their shopping trolleys with shows for next year’s seasons, independent producer Jo Crowley, who also runs the Total Theatre awards, made the point that beneath the surface there is a vast amount of activity and peer to peer discussion and debate around the work that feeds the cultural landscape for the rest of the year and even decades to come.
For this year’s Total Theatre awards alone 522 productions have been seen by 35 assessors from all over the world which so far has led to 37 hours of formal rigorous discussion around the work and that’s not counting the less formal on-going discussions that have taken place. A lot of the best of Edinburgh happens below the radar in the connections and networks forged and dialogues started. Those aren’t about buying stuff but about making stuff and talking about stuff. Many young theatre-makers will see a wider range of work in Edinburgh than they will at any other time of the year.
Of course Edinburgh is not without its problems. Every artist has the right to fail, but Edinburgh is a very cruel and exposing place to do so, which means that artists have to think carefully about the work they present here. Lorne Campbell of Northern Stage pointed to the significant boost that the Edinburgh festivals bring to the local economy (estimated to be over £260 million each year) but also the ongoing under-investment by the city council which raises issues around investment in cultural infrastructure and the economic impact of the arts. After all if Edinburgh, with one of the biggest cash cows on its doorstep, still can’t understand the economic argument for the arts, what hopeis there for that argument about economic impact in the wider world with arts cuts looming? Charlie Wood, one of the co-founders of Underbelly, suggested a voluntary tourist levy should be instigated, but made it quite clear that if this was to happen the proceeds should not go to Edinburgh City Council but an independent trust that would then distribute the monies raised.
How can we keep theatre wages fair?
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But the really significant question was whether we are really happy that the fringe is often being most significantly subsidised by those who can least afford it – the artists – and that despite an open access policy the fringe is out of reach for many for both social and economic reasons? Venues do try and help: out of 141 productions at Underbelly this year they are underwriting the entire risk of 12 shows to a tune of £584,000. But the hard truth is that this is a festival where the young and often poor play to the older and more affluent, and for many the benefits that Crowley detailed are way out of reach. The fringe remains largely white, middle class, confident and, despite some advances this year, non-disabled.
One member of the audience, a young director, spoke eloquently of the opportunities and confidence that being part of the Northern stage setup and Campbell pointed to the artistic benefits and professional development that has accrued as a result of regularly bringing 20 young technical volunteers to the festival who get accommodation and a podium and the opportunity to work on shows and see artists at the top of their game performing and meet and talk with them. “The base level at which they enter the profession and start making work is so much higher,” he said pointing to the fact that this kind of cultural capital cannot be measured statistically but is none the less very real. Underbelly has run something similar at the Circus Hub this year given a week of supported work to 16 year olds who have dropped out of full time education.
Why radical kindness is the key to artistic development
Lyn Gardner
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So what to do? BAC’s David Jubb suggested that maybe theatres need to get together to pay and support one young person or more each with whom they already have contact through creative learning projects to come to Edinburgh on properly paid placements each year. Such an initiative would potentially see an influx of 100s of young people from more disadvantaged or different backgrounds flooding into the fringe each year, getting the opportunities and incredible learning experience that it offers and which introduce a crucial layer of diversity in the fringe.
Everyone knows that the fringe is a significant feeder into the wider arts industry so such an initiative would potentially have a knock on effect on a sector that currently lacks diversity but which knows that it must diversify and do it quickly if it is to stay creative and relevant in the 21st century. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/03/ban-ki-moon-burma-visit | World news | 2009-07-03T18:24:59.000Z | Julian Borger | UN's Ban Ki-moon under fire for praising Burma leaders | The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, faced a barrage of criticism tonight for apparently praising the Burmese junta without winning any concessions over human rights or a move towards democracy.
Ban was under pressure to produce concrete results from his two-day mission to Burma, which was criticised as providing an endorsement to the Burmese leadership just as it is staging a trial of the opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The high-stakes visit to Burma comes at a critical time for Ban, whose low-key approach to his job has been criticised as ineffectual. He came under further fire on arrival in Naypyidaw, the regime's headquarters, when he told the head of the junta, General Than Shwe: "I appreciate your commitment to moving your country forward."
"That is absolute nonsense," said Brad Adams, a Burma specialist at Human Rights Watch. "It's just what we implored him not to say, to make these diplomatic gaffes. Than Shwe has steadily moved his country backwards."
British officials were also furious at the remarks. They had urged Ban not to visit Burma, and risk handing the junta a propaganda prize with his visit, without first ensuring he would gain concessions in the form of the release of political prisoners and steps towards genuine democracy.
"Only agreement to release all political prisoners [and] start a genuine dialogue with the opposition and ethnic groups will give any credibility to the elections in 2010," Gordon Brown said in an article in the US online magazine The Huffington Post. According to No 10, Brown calls Ban at least twice a week to discuss Burma.
"I hope that Ban Ki-moon can convince the generals to take the first steps," Brown said. "A serious offer is on the table: the international community will work with Burma if the generals are prepared to embark on a genuine transition to democracy. But if the Burmese regime refuses to engage, the international community must be prepared to respond robustly."
However, Than Shwe said little at his meeting with Ban, and did not grant the secretary general's request to meet Suu Kyi in prison. Ban expressed hope that a meeting could still be permitted.
"I am leaving tomorrow, so logically speaking I am waiting for a reply before my departure," he said. The secretary general added that he had called for the release of all political prisoners before the elections, but got no response. He said Than Shwe had assured him, however, that the vote had been "fair, free and transparent".
However, Adams said: "The benchmark for success can't be what it was in the past. A meeting with Than Shwe is not a success. Even a meeting with Suu Kyi shouldn't be counted as a success, if all it means is she goes from being in jail back to being under house arrest.
"We have cautioned against this trip because it seems to be a trip for its own sake without any prospect of success."
Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate, is on trial because an American supporter entered her compound, breaking the terms of her house arrest. Suu Kyi's lawyers said the man swam to the compound without her permission and had been urged to leave. The trial was adjourned yesterday until 10 July. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/aug/01/eight-month-babies-salt-research | Society | 2011-08-01T13:36:00.000Z | Steven Morris | Most eight-month-old babies consume too much salt, report says | Almost three quarters of eight-month-old babies consume too much salt because they are fed too much processed food, cow's milk and bread, according to a report.
Tinned pasta and salty flavourings such as gravies and yeast extract are among the foodstuffs blamed by the University of Bristol researchers.
The nutritionists who carried out the study warned that high levels of salt consumed while very young can harm developing kidneys, give children a taste for salty foods and lead to poor habits that can persist into adult life.
High blood pressure established in childhood can track through to adulthood, the report says.
It adds that it is "extremely important" that parents receive clear and precise information over "appropriate foods" when they are weaning children.
Many parents are unaware of the amount of salt in manufactured foods and those of "low socioeconomic status" tend to be less well informed about "suitable" foods.
The research is part of a long-term ongoing study of parents and youngsters called Children of the 90s.
Though the raw research was done in the early 1990s, the authors say it remains relevant and they would expect the results to be similar if it was carried out now.
According to the research, most infants were first introduced to solids when between three and four months old.
The government's scientific advisory committee on nutrition advises that infants aged between seven and 12 months receive no more than 1g of salt a day.
The Bristol study found that 70% were receiving more than the recommended amount and some were consuming double the advised level.
Those consuming most salt tended to be taking cow's milk as a main drink – which is not recommended for children under a year – and to be eating bread.
Salty flavourings, canned pasta, yeast extract and baked beans also caused the researchers concern.
Pauline Emmett and Vicky Cribb, the nutritionists who conducted the research, said: "These findings show salt intakes need to be substantially reduced in children of this age group.
"Infants need foods specifically prepared for them without added salt, so it is important to adapt the family diet.
"This research suggests that clear advice is needed for parents about what foods are suitable for infants.
"This should be given to all parents and carers, and should include the important advice not to use cow's milk as a main drink before 12 months of age."
The researchers said progress had been made since the data was collected, with more manufacturers reducing the salt content of foods. But they said more needed to be done.
"Given that three quarters of salt in the diet comes from processed adult foods, successful salt-reduction strategies can only be achieved with the co-operation of the food industry.
"Manufacturers have a responsibility to reduce the salt content of food products. This process has already started in the UK but much more needs to be done.
"If this study were repeated today it is likely that there would be some improvement but not enough to safeguard the health of all babies."
The findings are being published by the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/18/meera-sodha-vegan-recipe-tofu-katsu-sado-celeriac-apple-slaw | Food | 2020-01-18T10:30:25.000Z | Meera Sodha | Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for tofu katsu sando with celeriac and apple slaw | The new vegan | My life can be carved into two parts: a time before katsu sando and the enlightened after period.
It’s hard for a sandwich, the lunchtime stalwart, to break ranks and become exciting and even famous, but it’s easy to see how this Japanese take on it has done just that.
Here, a tofu cutlet is coated with panko breadcrumbs, fried until crisp, then slathered with curried ‘mayo’. Then it’s covered in an eye-opening celeriac and apple slaw before being sandwiched between the softest bread available. It’s carb-on-carb action, and a satisfying sandwich of contrasts.
Tofu katsu sando with celeriac and apple slaw
In January, when UK-grown veg is not very abundant, tofu is a brilliant store-cupboard ingredient to have at your disposal, though cooked, breaded and fried pumpkin/squash or aubergine would also make great fillings. If you have one, use a food processor with the right slicer blade to matchstick the apple and celeriac, or a julienne peeler.
Prep 25 min
Cook 30 min
Serves 4
¼ large celeriac (250g) peeled and cut into matchsticks
2 medium apples (about 200g), core removed and cut into matchsticks
2 tbsp rice-wine vinegar
1½ tsp fine sea salt
2 tbsp coriander leaves, roughly chopped
8 tbsp vegan mayonnaise (I like Leon’s)
2 tbsp tomato ketchup
4 tsp medium curry powder
2 x 280g packs extra-firm tofu
50g panko breadcrumbs
Sunflower or rapeseed oil, for frying
8 slices white bread
In a medium bowl, toss the celeriac and apple with the vinegar, a teaspoon of salt and the coriander, then leave to soften. In a small bowl, whisk half the mayo with the ketchup, two teaspoons of curry powder and a quarter-teaspoon of salt.
Drain the tofu, squeezing out any moisture with your hands, then pat dry with kitchen paper. Cut each block horizontally into four “steaks”, to give eight in all. Put the rest of the mayo, curry powder and a quarter-teaspoon of salt into a shallow bowl, add a tablespoon of warm water and stir to loosen. Put the panko on a lipped plate.
Meera Sodha: exclusive vegan and vegetarian recipes from her new book
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One by one, cover both sides of the tofu steaks in the curried mayo, shake off any excess, then press into the panko to coat, and lay on an oven tray. Pour ½cm oil into a high-sided, nonstick frying pan and put on medium heat until simmering. Fry half the panko-coated tofu steaks for a minute and a half on each side, until crisp and golden, then transfer to a plate lined with kitchen paper to drain. Repeat with the rest of the tofu.
Spread half the curried mayo on four slices of bread. Lay two tofu steaks on top of each slice and top with slaw. Spread the rest of the mayo on the other slices of bread and place on top, mayo side down. Using a bread knife, cut away the crusts, so the bread is the same size as the tofu, then cut each sandwich into four and serve with extra slaw on the side. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/02/bath-johann-van-graan-rfu-rugby-union | Sport | 2024-04-02T18:12:34.000Z | Robert Kitson | Bath’s Van Graan calls on authorities to ‘simplify’ rugby after sin-bin error | Bath’s director of rugby, Johann van Graan, has called for the game’s authorities to simplify and protect the sport following the controversial officiating error which saw the Harlequins’ lock Irné Herbst return from the sin-bin three minutes early at a crucial stage of last weekend’s Premiership game at the Twickenham Stoop.
Despite clear evidence of a significant mistake having been made at a key moment in his side’s 40-36 defeat, Van Graan says Bath now wish to draw a line under the “unique” episode, following an apology from the RFU’s Professional Game Match Officials team and formal confirmation the result will stand.
Tales of the unexpected: why club rugby is seeing rollercoaster results
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“I’ve been involved in professional rugby for 23 years and it’s the first time I’ve come across it,” he said. “There was human error involved and the RFU made a statement. There is an outcome to it and we have got to move on.”
The former Springbok forwards coach, however, wants rugby to stop overcomplicating and undermining its core product and to refocus on its strengths for the sake of players, coaches and fans alike.
“I do believe we’ve got to simplify the game,” said Van Graan. “I believe we should not keep chopping and changing it, we should look after this game of ours. This game is incredibly unique. It’s one of the last gladiator sports remaining. That’s why people love it and why there’s so much emotion involved.”
Van Graan was not referring specifically to the Herbst episode but, following Exeter’s Rob Baxter’s recent remarks about constant law changes, leading coaches are clearly after greater clarity across the board at a time when games are being settled by increasingly tiny margins. “I didn’t see Rob’s article so I can’t comment on that,” said Van Graan, whose side visit the Chiefs in the last 16 of the Champions Cup this Saturday.
“What I would say is that we have to keep speaking to each other. Scrum, maul, lineout, counterattack, kicking … there is beauty in all of it. We are guided by World Rugby who is the ultimate decision-maker. [But] let’s respect what’s in the law book. I’ll give a simple example. If the offside line is behind the hindmost foot, let’s just stick to that.
“If there’s a definition of a maul, a ruck or a scrum, let’s stick to the law. That’s sometimes what we miss, the [existing] law. Yes, we’ve got to be adaptable. That’s why I respect match officials because it’s an incredibly difficult sport to referee. I don’t doubt anybody’s intentions at this stage because we all want to look after the game.”
The All Blacks captain, Ardie Savea, meanwhile, believes New Zealand may soon have to review its policy of not selecting players based overseas. Savea, the World Rugby player of the year, is playing in Japan’s League One for the Kobe Steelers and will return home to play England this summer but believes more flexibility is required.
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“There’s a country that has proven that it works and helps them and that’s South Africa,” said Savea. “The majority of their team plays in Japan and they come together and win the World Cup. I know it won’t change overnight but it needs to change.”
This article was amended on 3 April 2024. Irné Herbst is a lock, not a prop as the subheading and text of an earlier version said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/paris-attacks-bataclan-concert-hall | World news | 2015-11-14T01:32:41.000Z | Kim Willsher | Attack at Paris's Bataclan: 'two or three men began shooting blindly at crowd' | Like most Friday nights, especially those with a “special event”, the Bataclan nightclub and concert hall near Paris’s Place de la République was heaving.
More than 1,000 fans had gathered at this popular venue for a concert by California group Eagles of Death Metal. The band had been on the stage for an hour and the music was loud. Heavy metal loud. Not loud enough, however, to mask the sound of gunfire.
Just before 10pm the newsflashes began reporting a “series of gunfire outbursts” in the French capital. The reports were brief and conveyed nothing of the unprecedented bloodbath unfolding in the French capital.
In what appeared to be coordinated and almost simultaneous terrorist attacks, dozens of people were killed and dozens more injured. At midnight, police said “several hundred” concertgoers inside the Bataclan were being held hostage by an unknown number of gunmen.
Paris attacks: how events unfolded Guardian
Outside there were bodies in the street. Paris had become a war zone.
Just after midnight, French special forces launched an assault on the Bataclan in an attempt to free the hostages. There were bursts of gunfire and several explosions. At 1am, police announced the operation was over and three gunmen had been killed. French media reported that as many as 70 people had been killed inside the club.
Earlier, a visibly shocked François Hollande had declared a state of emergency and announced France was closing its borders. “C’est une horreur,” the French president said. The words needed no translation or embellishment. It was a horror.
He said French security forces were, as he spoke, carrying out “an assault” in an unspecified place, which was believed to be the Bataclan.
As the police, emergency services, and military mobilised armoured vehicles, ambulances and helicopters, the heart of Paris was sealed off.
Julien Pierce, a journalist from Europe 1 radio, was inside the club in the 11th arrondissement when the shooting started.
Police officers secure the area around the Bataclan theatre Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images
“I found myself inside the concert hall when several armed individuals burst in, in the middle of the concert,” he reported.
“Two or three men, without masks, came in with Kalashnikov-type automatic weapons and began shooting blindly at the crowd ... it lasted 10, 15 minutes. It was extremely violent and there was a wave of panic.
“Everyone was running in all directions towards the stage. It was a stampede and even I was trampled. I saw a lot of people hit by bullets. The gunmen had loads of time to reload at least three times. They weren’t masked, they knew what they were doing, they were very young.”
Pierce said the attackers had “not said a word”, but other witnesses spoke of hearing the gunmen shout: “This is for Syria.”
Shortly before the attack on the Bataclan, a few hundred metres away, in the neighbouring 11th arrondisssement, at least two gunmen had marched down a popular street where the bars and cafes were packed with weekend revellers and opened fire on a busy bar and a Cambodian restaurant.
“We heard gunfire, 30 seconds of fire, it was interminable, we thought it was fireworks,” said Pierre Montfort, who lives near rue Bichat, where the restaurant is located.
“Everyone was on the floor, no one moved,” said another eyewitness who had been at the Petit Cambodge restaurant. “A girl was carried by a young man in his arms. She appeared to be dead.”
Explosion heard during France v Germany football match in Paris – video Guardian
Emilio Macchio, from Ravenna, Italy, was at the Carillon bar near the restaurant that was targeted, having a beer on the sidewalk, when the shooting started. He said he didn’t see any gunmen or victims, but hid behind a corner, then ran away. “It sounded like fireworks,” he said.
Television cameraman Charles Pitt said he was outside a cafe in the city’s 11th arrondissement where people were shot at about 9.10pm. He told BBC News: “I had just walked past the front of the cafe. It’s a popular, typical French cafe. People were sitting outside. I had literally gone about 30 metres when, I thought it was a firecracker to start with, and then it went on and it got louder.
“It went on for a minute. Everybody dived for cover thinking it was gunfire. Then there was a pause for about 15 seconds and then it all started up again.
“Then it calmed down a bit and I walked back to the front of the cafe and there was a whole pile of bodies, probably about seven on the left-hand side and four that had been sitting on the tables outside on the right-hand side, and a lot of injured. I saw a woman who had obviously been shot in the leg.
“Then the police turned up. Now we’re about 75 metres away. A lot of fire brigade, a lot of police, a lot of army patrolling the streets.”
Paris attacks: shootings and explosions across French capital – in pictures
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In the north of Paris, a series of explosions was reported at the Stade de France, where Hollande was watching a friendly football match with Germany. Later, police said a suicide bomber had blown himself up killing several people.
In unconfirmed reports, spectators said there had been at least three explosions beforehand and grenades were thrown into the crowd.
As confusion and panic erupted in the French capital, the death toll rose: first 16, then 25, 42 ... possibly 60, 100 ... maybe more. In truth, in the chaos of the immediate aftermath, it was impossible for anyone to know exactly how many had been gunned down. Outside the Bataclan, bodies lay in the street covered by sheets thrown from flats above. Inside, at least 20 concertgoers were believed to be being held hostage by the gunmen.
Pierce managed to escape the building and reported seeing “a dozen bodies on the ground in pools of blood, including a young girl who had been hit by two bullets. I carried her 50 metres to the emergency services.”
“At the time I’m speaking, terrorist attacks on an unprecedented scale are taking place in Paris. There are dozens of deaths. It’s a horror, “ said a visibly shaken Hollande in a national address from the Elysée palace.
French Red Cross rescue workers evacuate an injured person near the Bataclan concert hall. Photograph: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images
France has been on high alert since joining the American-led campaign of air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but nobody imagined such a bloodbath in the city. Witnesses spoke of scenes “straight out of a horror film”.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day that something so terrible, so indescribable would happen in Paris,” Franck, a customer in a bar near the Bataclan told BFMTV.
The French authorities announced that they had launched the unprecedented security alert Alpha Rouge, signalling that Paris was under “multiple attack”.
City Hall advised Parisians to stay at home and five Métro lines that pass through the 10th and 11th arrondissements were halted. As the emergency services struggled to evacuate the dead and wounded, there were reports of further attacks in the capital, including Les Halles, the large central shopping area. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/30/windrush-scandal-how-changed-uk-immigration-system | UK news | 2018-05-30T12:16:54.000Z | Jamie Grierson | Windrush scandal: how has it changed the immigration system? | The Windrush scandal exposed by the Guardian has led to significant changes in the immigration system.
Members of the Windrush generation, who arrived in the UK from 1948 onwards, as well as their children, have been wrongly targeted by the government’s “hostile environment” policies designed to deter illegal immigrants.
Some of those caught up have been forced out of work as a result, in some cases for years, and left unable to claim welfare support, while others have been wrongfully detained or even deported.
Here we take a look at some of the key changes and support that have been offered.
Citizenship
Britain’s wealth was built on black backs. Windrush is a scandal of forgetting
Andrea Stuart
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The Windrush taskforce was set up on 18 April after the Guardian’s initial reporting. As of Thursday, a helpline had received more than 13,000 calls with more than 5,000 identified as potential Windrush cases.
More than 850 people have received crucial documentation following appointments with the team. This will help them confirm their right to be in the UK.
Compensation
The government committed to launching a compensation scheme for the potentially thousands of people caught up in the scandal. Lawyers have begun preparing group compensation claims on behalf of members of the Windrush generation.
The process is expected to take considerable time after the government called for Windrush citizens and their families to come forward with their personal stories while it draws up details of the scheme.
Martin Forde QC, a lawyer specialising in health cases and himself the son of Windrush parents, had been appointed to oversee the design of the scheme.
NHS data sharing
This month, ministers suspended arrangements under which the NHS shared patients’ details with the Home Office so it could trace people breaking immigration rules.
It was the first U-turn on a key element of the “hostile environment” approach to immigration and came after MPs, doctors’ groups and health charities warned that the practice was causing some patients to avoid seeking NHS care for medical problems.
Profile
How the Guardian broke the Windrush story
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The government suspended “with immediate effect” a memorandum of understanding under which NHS Digital, the health service’s statistical arm, shared 3,000 NHS patients’ details with the Home Office last year so t people’s immigration status could be checked.
In future, Home Office immigration staff will only be able to use the data-sharing mechanism to trace people who are being considered for deportation from Britain because they have committed a serious crime.
Bank checks
The Home Office revealed it was to suspend controversial immigration checks on thousands of bank accounts which were another plank of the government’s hostile environment policy.
The department said it was in the process of contacting banks and building societies to instruct them to reduce the scope of the checks.
Banks had been required since January to conduct quarterly checks on 70m UK current accounts. If an account was suspected to belong to an illegal immigrant, the Home Office would review it before instructing the bank to take action, such as shutting it down.
Highly skilled migrants
This week, it emerged the government was to stop trying to expel people through use of a complex immigration rule designed to tackle terrorism, pending a review.
A review of paragraph 322(5) of the immigration rules was announced by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, in a letter to the home affairs select committee.
At least 1,000 highly skilled migrants seeking indefinite leave to remain in the UK are facing expulsion under the legislation.
High-tax paying applicants, including teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers and IT professionals, have been refused indefinite leave to remain after being accused of lying in their applications because they made minor – and legal – amendments to their tax records.
This article was amended on 5 June 2018. An earlier version referred to paragraph 322(5) of the immigration rules as “section 322(5) of the Immigration Act”, and also said the British government was using this provision to deport people. Deportation has not been among the measures used in these cases. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/no-extending-abortion-act-to-northern-ireland-first-female-premier-arlene-foster-court-ruling-rape | World news | 2016-01-06T12:54:20.000Z | Henry McDonald | No extending abortion act to Northern Ireland, first female leader says | Northern Ireland’s first female leader vowed to prevent the Abortion Act 1967 being extended to the region, setting up a legal clash between politicians and pro-choice campaigners in the courts.
Arlene Foster, who will take over from Peter Robinson as first minister on Monday, told the Guardian she intends to maintain the Democratic Unionist party’s opposition to any reform of the province’s notoriously strict abortion laws.
After being elected DUP leader unopposed, Foster told the Guardian: “I would not want abortion to be as freely available here as it is in England and don’t support the extension of the 1967 act.”
But she conceded the Northern Ireland executive, which she will co-lead with Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, will have to carefully consider a landmark judgment in which the high court ruled that denying abortions to women who had become pregnant through rape was a breach of British and European human rights laws.
Abortion in Northern Ireland: ‘Why don’t we trust women to make the right choice?’ Guardian
Her remarks are published a day after the Guardian reported that doctors, nurses and midwives said they are operating in a “climate of fear”, worried about the threat of imprisonment if they offer advice to women seeking an abortion. Abortions in Northern Ireland are only available to women and girls where their life or health is in grave danger; only 23 were carried out in 2013-14.
Northern Ireland medics fear prison over abortion advice
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Several women told the Guardian of their experiences in trying to seek an abortion. Women and girls seeking abortions have to travel to England and pay to obtain them on the NHS. Or they can procure pills online illegally that induce a termination if they are less than nine weeks pregnant.
Despite her statement in defence of the existing law, Foster’s acknowledgement of the November court ruling suggests politicians in Northern Ireland are also preparing for judicial decisions that would force the Stormont assembly’s hand and potentially introduce some liberalisation.
The judge in the November case, Mr Justice Horner, balked at imposing changes that could have led to limited terminations taking place in the region’s hospitals following his ruling. His decision has put the onus on the Northern Ireland assembly to take on board his judgment. At present, there is no legal compunction on Stormont’s politicians to change the law.
Commenting on the ruling, Foster said: “It is impossible not to be moved by some couples’ heartbreaking experiences. Many of the cases are extremely complex, and increasingly so as medical practice advances. Along with executive colleagues I will be taking time to consider carefully Mr Justice Horner’s judgment.”
An alliance of evangelical Protestants, the Catholic church and a majority of the assembly’s politicians has ensured that Northern Ireland remains excluded from the legislation.
Illegal pills and trauma: how Northern Ireland's abortion ban affects women
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Foster declined to answer specific questions on whether she would accept limited exceptions to the near-total ban on abortion. She would not say whether she would support – as some have campaigned for – exceptions to be introduced for women who became pregnant through rape or incest, and those whose baby had fatal foetal abnormalities.
Foster pointed out that terminations did take place in certain circumstances and expressed sympathy for women with crisis pregnancies.
“I recognise this is a deeply personal issue for people, which deserves to be treated with the utmost sensitivity and compassion. The legal position in Northern Ireland is often misunderstood, and many don’t appreciate it can permit abortion when the woman’s physical or mental health is affected,” the DUP leader added.
From Nagpur to Northern Ireland: pill pipeline helping women get round abortion laws
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The Stormont assembly has the lowest level of female representatives out of the devolved parliaments, and only a fifth of members supports a relaxation of the near-total ban on abortions.
Last year one of Foster’s DUP colleagues, Alastair Ross, presented an amendment on behalf of the assembly’s justice committee that would have further tightened the ban. It would have banned private clinics such as Marie Stopes from offering non-medical terminations for women pregnant up to nine weeks. The combined votes of Sinn Féin, the Alliance party, the Greens and liberal unionist party N21 vetoed the proposal.
Earlier in 2015 Sinn Féin changed its policy to support abortions in both parts of Ireland in cases of fatal foetal abnormality. Its nationalist rival, the SDLP, is linked to the Labour party in the Republic through the Socialist International but has a long record of opposing abortion reform in Northern Ireland.
Even if more abortions were allowed in its hospitals – following legal action that could go all the way up to the European court of human rights at Strasbourg – veteran feminists and pro-choice campaigners warn this could lead to a new legal minefield.
Eileen Calder, co-founder of the Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Centre in Belfast, said that if abortion were permitted on the grounds of rape it could lead to situations where innocent men faced false rape allegations.
“I think it is totally wrong to say that perhaps we should allow for terminations on the grounds of rape only,” she said. “Many women in unwanted and crisis pregnancies might go to their GP or local hospital and say they were raped and demand an abortion in those circumstances.
“In these cases the onus would be on medics to then report a crime to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which in turn could lead to innocent men who get women pregnant after consensual sex being arrested, questioned and possibly charged over a crime they did not commit.”
Accusing the Northern Ireland assembly of “political cowardice”, Calder added that “only the extension of the 1967 act and full equal rights for women like they enjoy in the rest of the UK” was the way forward.
This article was amended on 18 January 2016. An earlier version stated that Alastair Ross tabled a motion to further tighten the abortion ban. Ross was required to present the amendment on behalf of the Northern Ireland assembly’s justice committee, of which he is chairman. This has been clarified. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/23/low-productivity-an-enduring-and-growing-drag-on-the-uk-economy | Business | 2016-11-23T18:56:17.000Z | Graham Ruddick | Low productivity, an enduring and growing drag on the UK economy | “The first challenge is to increase our productivity. Britain today is some 20% less productive than our main competitors and has been for years.”
Not the words of Philip Hammond in his autumn statement but those of Gordon Brown in his pre-Budget report 19 years ago.
“The productivity gap is well known, but shocking nonetheless,” Hammond said on Wednesday. “It takes a German worker four days to produce what we make in five, which means, in turn, that too many British workers work longer hours for lower pay than their counterparts.”
His comments, and their symmetry with Brown’s despite two decades between them, show the problem of productivity is an enduring one.
Philip Hammond admits Brexit vote means £122bn extra borrowing
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Productivity is the rate of output per unit of input, or in other words the value of products made or sold by a worker in an hour of work. As Brown’s comment shows, lacklustre productivity has hung over the UK for years. It has become more pronounced since the financial crisis, however, with an expansion of the workforce and a fall in unemployment not met with a proportionate growth in GDP.
The government’s autumn statement document states that improving productivity is the “central long-term economic challenge” for the UK and pivotal to increasing wages and living standards.
Hammond has identified better infrastructure, technology and skills as the foundations for doing so, which is why he unveiled a new £23bn national productivity investment fund in his autumn statement.
Economists, however, said the government needed to do more than fund new infrastructure projects. Yael Selfin, the head of macroeconomics at KPMG, said: “It is a pity that there was not more focus on education.
“If the government intends to make the UK less reliant on non-UK workers post-Brexit, the readiness of the local labour force will need to improve.”
Poor management costs the UK economy £84bn a year, said Ann Francke , the chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute.
“Our businesses are operating in a period of great uncertainty. This makes it difficult to plan ahead and affects how we resource and develop our employees,” she said.
“It’s tough to attract and retain skilled managers, and we need 2 million more by 2024. So we know that building management capability is critical for growth in the UK and we hope that the welcome focus on productivity will include the need to improve our management structures.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/09/alvaro-mutis | Books | 2013-10-09T17:06:28.000Z | Jason Wilson | Álvaro Mutis obituary | Álvaro Mutis, who has died aged 90, was one of Latin America's most original writers. He began by writing poems, and by the time his second collection, Los Elementos del Desastre (The Elements of Disaster), was published in 1953, had found his style. His best work has the tropics as its central feature and includes Maqroll el Gaviero, the character who first appeared in a poem in that book. Maqroll, a ship's lookout who surveys the tropics, stands on the gavia (mast), amid gaviotas (seagulls), a wanderer in Joseph Conrad's footsteps and surrounded by rotting, pestilential nature. We have to piece together the appearance and character of the nomadic Maqroll from his random asides, actions, sensations and nostalgic reminiscences.
Maqroll allowed Mutis a quirky freedom to alternate between poetry and prose, as if genre did not matter. Through Maqroll, he could recreate Colombia's tropics, a world of cheap hotels, rundown hospitals, rusting ships, rain on corrugated roofs, screaming birds, banana leaves and the stink of decomposing marshes. His Maqroll-based poems were collected as Summa de Maqroll el Gaviero (1973) and the Maqroll novellas he began to produce in the 80s were translated in the US as The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (2002).
In 1973 he started writing short stories, with La Mansión de Araucaíma (translated as The Mansion, 2004). The title piece focuses on a run-down mansion in the backwater tropics occupied by a former prostitute, a tough black servant, an obese old gay man, a pilot and a priest. A young woman arrives and becomes lover to each one. They dream and live promiscuously outside society's norms; nothing inhibits them. The story ends with the girl's suicide.
Tropical decadence and the failure of love set the tone for the rest of Mutis's fiction. He began to win literary awards: Colombia's Premio Nacional de Letras in 1974, and in Spain the Príncipe de Asturias prize in 1997 and the Cervantes prize in 2001. In 1989 his novel La Nieve del Almirante (The Snow of the Admiral) won the Prix Médicis for best foreign book in France.
Born in Bogotá, Mutis was the son of Santiago Mutis, a diplomat, and his wife, Carolina. When he was two, the family moved to Brussels, where Mutis went to a Jesuit school. After his father's death in 1934, they returned to Colombia, where Mutis first experienced the tropics while staying at his grandmother's coffee estate in Coello. "All that I have written," he said later, "is a celebration and recording of that corner of tropical land in Tolima from which derived the substance of my dreams, my nostalgias and my joys."
He continued his education in Bogotá and was lucky enough to have as one of his teachers the poet Eduardo Carranza. This did not stop him from dropping out, for by then he had discovered the work of Conrad and Herman Melville and poets such as Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro. He directed and performed in radio programmes and joined a group of young poets around the magazine Mito. He then started a long career in public relations, first with Standard Oil in 1948 and then with Esso from 1954.
In 1956 he was accused of fraud and fled to Mexico City, where he was imprisoned there in Lecumberri prison (nicknamed "The Black Palace") for 15 months before being released without charge. In Diario de Lecumberri (1959) he wrote: "And there is one thing you learn in prison, and I passed it on to Maqroll, and that is you don't judge." In Mexico, Mutis's friendship with Octavio Paz was crucial in establishing his reputation as a poet in a loose surrealist group. He got a job promoting films for Hollywood and travelled the Americas and Europe.
He was now famous as an inspiring friend, and an omnivorous reader and billiard player. Gabriel García Márquez became so close to him that Mutis was the first to read his manuscripts. Márquez got him reading the work of Juan Rulfo, until he knew Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo by heart. More prose and poetry followed, on sometimes unexpected topics, for instance a book of poems dedicated to Philip II of Spain. Mutis was a monarchist and never voted.
A lifetime spent listening to classical music conditioned his serene sentences, and his writing was also indebted to Proust. Mutis never experimented with syntax, whether in prose or poetry. Everything is seen through the senses, as in cinema. His legacy is a fresh look at his country's coastal tropics as a sordid place in the mind where nostalgia, eroticism and bookishness meet.
Mutis was immensely popular with women, a good-looking, charismatic man for whom friendship was almost a calling. He is survived by his third wife, Carmen Miracle, whom he married in 1966, and a stepdaughter Francine; by his daughter, María Cristina, and two sons, Santiago and Jorge Manuel, of his first marriage, to Mireya Durán Solano; and a daughter, María Teresa, from his second marriage, to María Luz Montané.
Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo, writer and poet, born 25 August 1923; died 22 September 2013 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/i-call-it-botanarchy-the-hackney-guerrilla-gardener-bringing-power-to-the-people | Environment | 2023-09-28T11:00:27.000Z | Damien Gayle | ‘I call it botanarchy’: The Hackney guerrilla gardener bringing power to the people | Anarchism gets a bad rep. In the popular imagination, anarchists dress in black, they smash windows and hurl firebombs at police. Or else, they are young social misfits with green hair and too many piercings. Often they are both.
But what if anarchy could be beautiful, what if it could bring local communities together planting flowers in the streets? For Ellen Miles, the new doyenne of guerrilla gardening, it is. “I call it botanarchy,” she says.
With trowel in one hand and watering can in the other, Miles is inspiring young people to take up rakes and hoes, not to wave them at the gates of Downing Street, but to till the soil in the neglected flower beds and green patches of their streets and estates.
Give Britons the right to plant to green up public spaces, Gove adviser says
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And in so doing, she says, they are not just brightening up the concrete vistas of urban cityscapes, but beginning the essential adaptations industrialised societies need to make to preserve biodiversity and become more resilient to global heating – and all the while challenging the liberal capitalist state.
“Guerrilla gardening is the practice of planting in public spaces in your neighbourhood” she says on a humid summer afternoon, walking between outlaw flower beds in Hackney, east London.
“And that’s how I define it … because, for me, it’s all about community ownership and belonging, and I think we have a right to cultivate these spaces in the areas we call home – and a responsibility to, as well.
“So-called public spaces have been really privatised, and communities actually don’t get a chance to interact with them often. So I think we do have a right to do that in the places we put down our roots, where we live.”
Ellen Miles: ‘For me guerrilla gardening is the Trojan horse into anarchist ideals.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
But in order to enjoy that natural right, guerrilla gardeners upturn another right, one which has become foundational to western society: the right to property. “Some people don’t [realise], they are not really aware; but for me guerrilla gardening is the Trojan horse into anarchist ideals.
“It’s wholesome, but that’s the thing: it’s not all about violence and hate, it can be wholesome. And it’s fundamentally about bringing people together to shape the places we live. We shouldn’t be prevented from improving our neighbourhoods by powers that don’t really live here or care.”
Miles doesn’t like the terms TikToker, influencer or content creator, but it is through social media that, over the past two years, she has reached a mass audience. Her how-to videos based on her own guerrilla gardening exploits have been viewed millions of times. Now that project has matured into a book, Get Guerrilla Gardening, that was published in June by Dorling Kindersley, and Miles is showing the Guardian around her patch to explain how it has all came together.
For anyone interested in doing it themselves, the story of how Miles became involved in guerrilla gardening is instructive. It began at the start of lockdown, she says. “I saw it as a mutual aid thing, a way to get people out and connected to nature when the parks were closed, where people didn’t have gardens, people were isolated.”
Angered by the injustice, she began a campaign calling for access to green nature to be enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nature Is A Human Right became the subject of Miles’s first book, an anthology of essays. But her attempts to persuade the council to give spaces to the community so that they could interact with nature proved fruitless.
Ellen Miles planting near Homerton hospital in London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
She realised that, in the short term at least, change would have to come from the people themselves. Introduced by a friend to the idea of “tactical urbanism”, a movement of people taking ownership of their shared urban spaces, she fell in love with its green arm: guerrilla gardening. By her own account clueless about where to begin with gardening, Miles turned to the community, posting on the local Covid mutual aid WhatsApp group, the Facebook page for Hackney’s chapter of Extinction Rebellion, and even on Nextdoor.
She found allies straight away. “Basically, guerrilla gardeners are everywhere,” she says, it’s just that most people, mindful that what they are doing is not technically legal, don’t advertise it. The people she connected with were not only willing to join her in outlaw horticulture, but also able to provide plants, compost and tools.
As we wander through Homerton, Miles points to the guerrilla gardens hiding in plain sight. A patch of chard here, a resplendent display of flowers outside someone’s home there. “I didn’t invent guerrilla gardening,” she says. “I’m not the only person doing it; they’re everywhere. And one of the things I say in the book is, often when I started talking to people about it, they were like: ‘Oh, I’ve done that. I did that on the towpath because I have a canal boat, or I did that with my friend outside of whatever.’ It’s just about showing people that you can do it.”
And, in the face of urbanisation and environmental crisis, the need to do it – to do something – is becoming ever more urgent. For Miles, guerrilla gardening and nature as a human right are two prongs of the same social change pincer movement. “Guerrilla gardening is like the ground up, grassroots way to make neighbourhoods greener and connect people to nature, and the nature is a human right campaign is the long-term, top-down way to do it,” she says.
“I see it all as fighting for the same kind of thing really: a world where human habitats are more filled with nature than they are deprived of it, and where there’s equitable access to nature.”
The benefits are not purely social. Greening our cities is crucial as more of us are packed into them, as temperatures rise, and as what wildlife remains on Earth becomes increasingly squeezed out by settlements, industry and agriculture. Plants can help to reduce air pollution, Miles points out; they can mitigate the urban heat island effect, which is contributing to lethal heatwaves; and they provide habitats and food for the insects, birds and animals that we are realising form crucial links in the web of life.
Most of all, Miles points out, guerrilla gardening is a way that people can take back not only their present, but also their future – even as it seems under dire threat from an economic and social system apparently hellbent on human self-eradication.
“I do think there is an issue in society at the moment with the lack of agency and autonomy for people,” she says. “Guerrilla gardening, even if it is just sowing something in a tree bed, it might not change the world – you might help some bees, you might bring joy to someone walking down the street – but you’re also reminding people, or awakening something that is like ‘Maybe this is how it should be.’
“We know now that we can’t trust the government to do this stuff. We have to take it into our own hands.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/aug/19/marley-outside-bet-battleship-lockout | Film | 2012-08-18T23:05:23.000Z | Mark Kermode | Mark Kermode's DVD round-up | Considering the extraordinary levels of access that he's been granted both to interviewees and archive recordings, it would have been easy for Kevin Macdonald's vibrantly exhaustive documentary Marley (2012, Universal, 15) to become little more than a hagiography. Although the tone is indeed broadly celebratory (Ziggy Marley gets an executive producer credit, and family members feature heavily on screen), Macdonald still manages to delve beneath the public adulation, painting a credible and engrossing picture of a troubled youth who grew into a cultural giant, often at the cost of his family life.
Describing his approach as "more traditional" than such previous works as Touching the Void, Macdonald intertwines interviews, stills and concert footage with some spectacularly scenic views of Jamaica as he traces Marley's mixed-race roots (his father was a uniformed white man who looked at home on a horse) to find a search for identity at the heart of his passion for music. Along the way we hear of backstage troubles from Peter Tosh, witness the strange wizardry of Lee "Scratch" Perry, learn about the (up)beat change from ska to reggae that happened as a result of an accident with an echo loop, and marvel at the extraordinary power of a popular musician to flirt with politics in a manner that leads to both a teargassed gig for Robert Mugabe and an epochal onstage handshake in Jamaica.
Perhaps most moving are the memories of Marley's daughter Cedella, who talks eloquently of her father's home-life shortcomings (at one point he is seen ungallantly denying his marriage on television) while still remaining fiercely loyal to his legacy. Having picked up the baton from Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, both of whom were at one time attached to this project, Macdonald does an impressive job of placing his own stamp on Marley while always allowing the story to speak for itself.
Despite a long and ignominious tradition of fine homemade films struggling to find an audience in the UK, I remain genuinely baffled as to why Outside Bet (2012, Universal, 12) did not fare better in cinemas. With its roots in Mark Baxter and Paolo Hewitt's book The Mumper, this unexpectedly charming coming-of-age yarn about long-term friendship, 80s industrial unrest and unlikely horse-racing capers deserves to find a more welcoming home on DVD.
At the centre of its appeal are a couple of reliably top-notch performances from Bob Hoskins and Phil Davis as the old guard of the print industry (portrayed more convincingly here than is traditional on screen) into which Calum MacNab is inducted. Tipping its hat toward the traditions of Ealing and the style nostalgia of Quadrophenia, this warm-hearted shaggy-dog story is drenched in well-chosen period music – Dexys, Style Council et al – and played with a sense of both fun and conviction by all involved. One speech, about a father who "never let a friend down, never crossed a picket line, and told his wife he loved her every day" had me wiping away a tear.
The only vaguely fun thing about the otherwise ear-bashingly awful Battleship (2012, Universal, 12) is a splendidly stupid sequence in which missiles are randomly fired at allocated grid references, thereby briefly reminding you that this is actually based on the super-dull Hasbro board game of yore. Other than that it's basically Transformers with boats but without Megan Fox's butt. Taylor Kitsch continues the charisma-free career trajectory that helped sink John Carter, while Liam Neeson looks for all the world like a man who'd like to be given the cheque so he can be somewhere else, thank you very much. At least on DVD you can turn it down. Or off.
Far better (although even farther from perfect) is Lockout (2012, Entertainment, 15), a spectacularly derivative sci-fi actioner that's described on the sleeve as "Die Hard in Space!" but could equally be labelled, "Assault on Precinct Apollo 13". Shamelessly recycling riffs ripped from Outland to Alien 3 via The Rock (the credits ironically cite "an original idea by Luc Besson" – ha!), this sends Guy Pearce into orbit to regain control of an extraterrestrial prison on which the president's daughter has become inconveniently incarcerated. With its solidly un-special special effects and forgettable conspiracy backstory involving some nonsense with a lost briefcase (no, really), this stands or falls on the quality of the hard-boiled quippage between its chalk-and-cheese stars, which, to be fair, is a lot more entertaining than you might expect – think The Last Boy Scout with less swearing. And in space. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jan/08/hell-or-high-water-julieta-chi-raq-dvd-review-pedro-almodovar-spike-lee | Film | 2017-01-08T08:00:12.000Z | Guy Lodge | Hell or High Water; Julieta; Chi-Raq; Black Orpheus; Miss Sharon Jones! – review | There are many reasons to recommend Hell or High Water (StudioCanal, 15) at this or any time of year, but in the dank, shivery no-man’s-land of early January, the sheer, sticky heat of David Mackenzie’s western-infused heist thriller makes it a positive shot in the arm. The still, steaming mugginess of a west Texas afternoon veritably wafts off the screen; cars skid and characters lope across the burnt landscape at a kind of urgent half-speed, which does nothing to diminish the copper-wire tension and conductivity of Taylor Sheridan’s nifty script.
Scotsman Mackenzie, having truly found form with his rough-and-tumble prison drama Starred Up, now taps into a vein of terse, elemental, morally mousetrapped American storytelling practised by everyone from Steinbeck to the Coen brothers. There’s nothing twisty or unfamiliar in this curt, classical tale of two brothers – one bad, one a shade better – systematically raiding banks across the state to save the family farm, however effectively it rattles along on its own sense of danger.But execution is all here, from the hungry, rumbling performances of Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster and a never better Chris Pine to the literate regional sting of Sheridan’s dialogue and the gliding, no-nonsense shooting of that cornbread locale. Sometimes it’s good to know exactly what you’re getting.
Emma Suárez in the ‘gloriously scored melodrama’ of Julieta.
And then, of course, it more often isn’t, which brings us to Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta (Pathé, 15), an entirely lovely surprise in disguise. It has all the outward trappings, the poster-paint colouring and the open, fragrant feminine sympathies that we eagerly expect from Spain’s most singular modern auteur. But unpeel its exquisite tissue-paper wrapping and this split-level character study is an Almodóvar film that moves and feels like no other.
Yes, there’s something of the gutsy, deep-seated melancholy of 2002’s Talk to Her here, and it’s certainly his greatest work since that career high. But there’s a pensive reserve inherited from the quiet, finely muscled short stories of Alice Munro, the director’s unexpected selection of literary source. Yet Munro and Almodóvar share a mutual, athletic flexibility with narrative space and time. The director’s most ingenious conceit is to stage its nonlinear portrait of a life unravelled by guilt as a kind of thespian duet.
Pedro Almodóvar: ‘Nobody sings. There’s no humour. I just wanted restraint’
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Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suárez’s respectively spiky and sorrowful performances as younger and older incarnations of the eponymous Julieta are placed in loving, alternating dialogue with each other, each Julieta, somehow, a corrective and a cautionary tale to the other. Almodóvar’s chosen key can only go so low, however: this is still lush, sangria-shaded, gloriously scored melodrama. It’s the fine, fluttering pauses and reversals that catch you off guard.
Also back on song, albeit not wholly in tune, is Spike Lee, who finally feels intellectually and stylistically replenished in Chi-Raq (Signature, 15), a grinding, bristling, unwieldy locomotive of a film that has a torrent of things to say, sing and even shout about. Resourcefully relocating Aristophanes’s Lysistrata to the ragged ganglands of Chicago, the film could feel academic in its articulation of modern American racial friction and urban class warfare through its classical prism. Yet it expresses itself entirely, even exhaustingly, from the gut throughout. If it all palls a bit toward the close, it’s not because the film runs out of steam. If anything, its steam runs out of script.
Marpessa Dawn, centre, as Eurydice in the ‘throbbing, glittering’ Black Orpheus. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Lopert Pictures
Chi-Raq has an ideal, and ideally timed, double-bill partner in the week’s best rerelease: the Criterion Collection’s gorgeous clean-up of Marcel Camus’s 1959 Palme d’Or winner Black Orpheus (Criterion, 12), a throbbing, glittering reworking of Orpheus and Eurydice set to the bossa nova beat of then-contemporary Rio de Janeiro in carnival heat. Unlike Chi-Raq, the film’s cultural conflicts and resonances work without rhetoric, reliant entirely on sensual excess to transport the viewer’s sensibilities. Its immersive, spinning-top swirl has barely dated a day.
Belgian realist Joachim Lafosse’s sternly compassionate view of the human condition is at its most clear-eyed in After Love (Curzon Artificial Eye, 12), a scenes-from-a-marriage breakdown in which well-worn relationship crisis points regain a bracing, shocking snap from the simple, practical frankness of the writing and performances. Bérénice Bejo, in particular, redeems a patchy run of recent work with her piercing, tacitly raging turn as a woman battling her husband on every conceivable point of contention. I wish Equity (Sony, 15) seethed a little more. Meera Menon’s conscientious financial-crisis thriller boasts a killer hook – placing women in the big boardroom chairs for a pointed feminist riposte to a spate of boorish Wall Street dramas – and a flinty lead in Anna Gunn, but there’s a glazed, tentative hollowness to its depiction of an already glib environment.
‘An indelible final impression’: Miss Sharon Jones!
Finally, extending Netflix’s notable January run of new additions, veteran documentarian Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! is a lovely, nick-of-time screen valentine to the vibrant, brass-lunged and newly late soul dynamo, one of the saddest and most premature losses from 2016’s grim plundering of the musical firmament. As Kopple directly addresses Jones’s long-term illness, there’s a rain cloud of regret already hanging over this intimate tribute, but those vital, jumping performance sequences blast it away. Backed by her brilliant band, the Dap-Kings, she rocks the microphone like one who knows she has a limited time to make an indelible final impression. All of last year’s major casualties deserved a farewell such as this. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/21/quentin-tarantino-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-hits-cannes-to-cheers-and-boos | Film | 2019-05-21T18:07:13.000Z | Gwilym Mumford | Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hits Cannes to red-carpet circus | Twenty five years to the day that Pulp Fiction debuted at the Cannes film festival, Quentin Tarantino returned to the French Riviera with for his much-anticipated film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
A 60s-set drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a floundering western star and Brad Pitt as his long-suffering stuntman, the film premiered to applause, boos and the attention of the film world on Tuesday evening.
Tarantino’s 10th and reportedly final film before retirement is unquestionably the hot ticket at this year’s festival. Ahead of its early evening premiere, the Croisette was filled with people hoping for a last-minute ticket, many of whom had scraps of card scrawled with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood s’il vous plait”.
Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song
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Details about the film, meanwhile, have been kept tightly under wraps, with its trailer light on salient information, and Tarantino sharing a notice on social media imploring critics not to reveal too much about it before its release. The same message was relayed by a Cannes representative before a press screening, prompting boos from the audience, although there was applause and some cheers in response to the film itself. The response was more enthusiastic at the red carpet premiere, where Tarantino revived a seven minute standing ovation, according to Deadline.
The circus around Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is perhaps understandable. Its cast list alone guarantees it column inches, with DiCaprio and Pitt – both of whom were on the red carpet for the film’s premiere – starring alongside each other in a movie for the first time.
Then there is its premise, with its signature Tarantino mix of prestige and pulp. Described by producers Sony Pictures as “a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood’s golden age”, it attracted criticism for its focus on Sharon Tate (played in the film by Margot Robbie), the actor and wife of Roman Polanski, who was killed by followers of Charles Manson in 1969.
Finally, there is the presence of Tarantino himself, back at the festival that has done more than any other to burnish his reputation as one of film-making’s most recognisable, not to mention controversial figures.
On his debut at Cannes, with Pulp Fiction in 1994, the director immediately claimed the spotlight, receiving the coveted Palme d’Or from a jury led by Clint Eastwood, but in the process receiving boos from audience members, who felt that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red was the more deserving prize. He returned to Cannes a decade later as jury president, and then in 2009 with his second world war black Comedy Inglourious Basterds, a film that received a long standing ovation at its premiere, but a markedly less enthusiastic reception from reviewers.
Tarantino’s latest effort nearly didn’t make it to the festival at all. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did not appear in the Cannes official selection announcement, with Cannes director Thierry Frémaux declaring that it wasn’t yet ready. However, after some last-minute editing by its director, the film was added to the lineup several days later.
The arrival of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be cheering to Cannes organisers, who have lost out on big-name titles in recent years to the Toronto and Venice film festivals. However, Tarantino’s presence has not been universally well-received at a time when Cannes is attempting to present itself as more welcoming to women.
Comments the film-maker made in 2003 about the sexual abuse allegations around Roman Polanski have resurfaced in the wake of the #MeToo movement, while he was also forced to apologise for his mistreatment of Uma Thurman on the set of Kill Bill. Actors including Busy Phillips and Jessica Chastain have also criticised the sexual violence found in many of Tarantino’s films.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is that it maintains many of the director’s longstanding preoccupations: stylised violence, genre elements, rat-a-tat dialogue and a period soundtrack.
Early critical response to the film seems to be cautiously positive. In a five star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said that it was “outrageous, disorientating, irresponsible, and also brilliant”. The Irish Times’ critic Donald Clark described the film as “absurdly baggy”, but nevertheless thought that the film was “a significant improvement on [Tarantino’s previous film] the Hateful Eight”.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is released in US cinemas on 26 July, with a UK release following on 14 August. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/06/the-harder-they-fall-review-idris-elba-rides-into-trouble-in-garishly-violent-western | Film | 2021-10-06T20:32:33.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Harder They Fall review – Idris Elba rides into trouble in garishly violent western | The London film festival saddles up for a gonzo revenge western which aims to reclaim the often erased African American side of this genre and history. It stars Regina King, Idris Elba and LaKeith Stanfield, and is created by the impressive hyphenate Jeymes Samuel, also known as singer-songwriter and film-maker The Bullitts, who also co-produces along with Tarantino veteran Lawrence Bender.
Samuel has brought out short movies alongside his music releases in the past and now makes this headbangingly, face-splatteringly violent feature debut, featuring the gun-toting gangsters of the old west wearing old-timey hats of all shapes and sizes. This is a really cine-literate piece of work, with echoes of Sergio Leone, John Sturges and perhaps also Mario Van Peebles’s Posse. There are some terrific moments, although the pace and the drumbeat of violence, confrontation and standoff is maybe a bit uniform, and I would have liked a bit more witty or tender dialogue to go into the mix. But if it’s more style than substance, well it really is tremendous style, and the four-note punch that hammers out the title on the screen at the beginning – THE-HARDER-THEY-FALL – is inspired.
It’s about two gangs of people almost entirely inured to violence and fear: one is led by Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), who bears a cross cut into his forehead by the villain who killed his mum and dad in front of him when he was just a kid – and he’s out for revenge. Those under his command include sharpshooter Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi), Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler), trigger-happy Jim Beckworth (RJ Cyler); this even includes the local marshal, Bass Reeves, played by Delroy Lindo, whose unofficial alliance with the Nat Love gang signals that they are kind of the good guys, just about. But the most important member of the gang could well be Stagecoach Mary, played by Zazie Beetz, with whom poor Nat is hopelessly in love.
Ranged against them are the Rufus Buck gang. Rufus himself is played by an impassive Elba, whose character is in fact absent from the screen for quite a bit; riding with him are the formidably tough Trudy Smith (King) and the inexpressibly cool Cherokee Bill, played by Stanfield. They have a crooked gold-toothed sheriff under their whip: Wiley Escoe, played by Deon Cole. Rufus’s gang begin by rescuing their leader from a prison train and reveal (a bit bewilderingly) that they have a federal pardon for confronting the military unit guarding Buck because of the army’s own brutality.
The Nat Love gang are effectively reunited when they ambush the Buck gang and steal their ill-gotten gains from a bank job; this brings them into a confrontation that was always going to happen, given Nat’s need for payback and Buck’s guilt. The matter is complicated when Mary, with imperious chutzpah, actually rides into Buck territory on a recon mission and is kidnapped, and Love and his followers are forced to rob a bank in a white town (with houses and furnishings in an eerie, facetious shade of white) to ransom Mary and pay what Rufus still figures they owe him from the original larceny. But Nat has plans to turn this against his old enemy.
Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory. But Samuel is a gunslinger with style.
The Harder They Fall screens at the London film festival on 6 October, and is released on 22 October in UK cinemas. It will be available on 2 November on Netflix. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jun/02/killology-scottish-ballet-best-uk-theatre-dance | Stage | 2017-06-02T09:30:21.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Killology and Scottish Ballet: this week’s best UK theatre and dance | Theatre1 Killology
Sometimes a playwright-and-director partnership can pay real dividends. Currently, there is none stronger than that between Gary Owen and Rachel O’Riordan, whose award-winning Iphigenia in Splott was terrific, and who will work together again on The Cherry Orchard at the Sherman in Cardiff (13-28 October). For the moment, you can savour this darkly disturbing examination of morality via a murderous online game.
Jerwood Theatres at the Royal Court, SE1, to 24 June
2 Jane Eyre
Recent page-to-stage adaptations have crushed the idea that original plays always trump those based on novels or movies. Nobody has done more to help the cause than Sally Cookson, whose Fellini-inspired La Strada has just settled in at The Other Palace (SW1, to 8 July) and whose wonderfully textured reinvention of Charlotte Brontë’s novel takes up residence in Glasgow this week. It may be a 19th-century novel, but Cookson applies 21st-century theatre techniques.
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 5-10 June; touring to 23 September
3 Fiddler on the Roof
Liverpool Everyman has reinvented the rep company for our times, and this week sees all five shows seen individually over the last few months finally come together. Gemma Bodinetz’s defiantly unsugary reinvention of Joseph Stein and Jerry Brock’s musical shows the ensemble at their finest. The cast work with generosity and spirit to create an evening in which the travails of milkman Tevye and family are, with the lightest of touches, set in parallel with the experiences of present-day refugees.
Liverpool Everyman, 9 June to 1 July
4 Hamlet
With just a couple of dissenters in the critical pack, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet at the Almeida received rave reviews, fuelling a sold-out run. Tickets for Robert Icke’s revival should be somewhat easier to come by for this West End transfer, although the production will lose its intimacy. However, Scott remains a sweet and mesmerising prince in this contemporary parable.
The Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1, 9 June to 2 September
5 Tristan & Yseult
Emma Rice’s version of the ancient Cornish myth is a real heartbreaker, and there can be no better place to enjoy it than at the Minack, an outdoor theatre carved out of the cliffs at Porthcurno. It should be a memorable setting for this glorious retelling of a story – best known from Wagner’s opera – here given a giddy slant as it tells of love’s winners and losers, and how it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.
Minack Theatre, nr Penzance, 5-9 June; touring to 22 July
Dance
Epic ... Emergence by Crystal Pite. Photograph: Andy Ross
1 MC 14/22 (Ceci Est Mon Corps) & Emergence
A long-awaited London showing for this superb Scottish Ballet double bill, pairing Angelin Preljocaj’s poetic hymn to masculinity, MC 14/22, with the epic creativity of Crystal Pite’s Emergence.
Sadler’s Wells, EC1, 7-10 June
2 Ballet Central
As always, there is a creative mix of repertory from this graduate company, including act two of Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling and a new work by Christopher Bruce.
Crawley, 6 June; Winchester, 8 June; Chipping Norton, 9 June; touring to 15 July
3 S/He & Toys
Choreographers Hannah Buckley and Léa Tirabasso are showcased in this double bill on gender fluidity and the wildness of youth.
The Place: Robin Howard Dance Theatre, WC1, 3 June | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/mar/16/labour-promises-reverse-jeremy-hunt-pensions-giveaway-richest-chancellor-budget | UK news | 2023-03-16T10:59:34.000Z | Alexandra Topping | Jeremy Hunt defends pensions giveaway as Labour vows to scrap it | The Labour party has vowed to reverse the chancellor’s £1bn budget pensions tax “gilded giveaway” for the wealthiest 1% if it wins the next general election, as Jeremy Hunt defended his decision to scrap the lifetime pensions allowance.
The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said Labour would seek to force a Commons vote next week on the decision, which critics argue will allow the wealthiest people to put a limitless amount into their pension pots, which can then be passed on to their heirs without paying inheritance tax.
In his budget on Wednesday, Hunt said the measure would prevent medical consultants retiring early from the NHS because the current pension rules meant it was not worth them carrying on working.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that – combined with an increase in the pensions annual tax-free allowance, from £40,000 to £60,000 – it will increase employment by 15,000 workers.
But Reeves said a Labour government would reinstate the lifetime allowance and create a targeted scheme for doctors rather than allowing a “free-for-all for the wealthy few”.
UK economy will take more than a year to recover to pre-Covid level, says OBR
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She added: “At a time when families across the country face rising bills, higher costs and frozen wages, this gilded giveaway is the wrong priority at the wrong time for the wrong people.
“That’s why a Labour government will reverse this move. We urge the chancellor and the Conservative government to think again.”
Responding to the criticism on Thursday, Hunt accused Labour of shifting their position “overnight”. He argued that the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, had called for the cap on pensions to be lifted last September.
“He seems to have changed his mind overnight on that one. He said it was crazy and it would save lives to get rid of that cap,” said Hunt. “Well, he was right in September when he said that.”
Streeting countered on Twitter that Labour had called “for action on DOCTORS’ pensions”, not “a massive bung to the richest costing £835 MILLION A YEAR”.
Asked on Sky News whether the NHS needed more nurses rather than consultants earning more than £100,000, Hunt said: “We need more nurses and we are recruiting many more nurses into the NHS. But yes, I think if you talk to anyone in the NHS, they will say doctors leaving the workforce because of pension rules is a big problem.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hunt was asked if it displayed the wrong values to give a large tax break to the very rich. He responded: “There are many doctors who are worried about hitting their pension cap who are deterred from taking on extra hours. So it’s not just the numbers who actually do hit the pension cap, but I don’t think it is the wrong values to support our NHS.”
Dr Vishal Sharma, a cardiologist and British Medical Association pensions committee chair, said the tax break would make a difference to the number of staff leaving the NHS.
Sharma told BBC Breakfast the number of hospital consultants who had taken early retirement had tripled, while the number of GPs had quadrupled in the past decade.
“We are heading towards a sort of precipice where huge numbers were going to go unless things changed. So it’s welcome that the chancellor’s listened to our concerns and has actually taken some decisive action,” he said.
3:28
2023 budget: Jeremy Hunt overhauls childcare, pensions and disability benefits – video highlights
However, Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, said the chancellor had “basically ignored” public services, leaving them facing “implausibly tight spending plans” while giving handouts to the richest. “The more you think about this policy, the worse it is,” he said.
Hunt argued that the budget did more for parents of young children than older voters, pointing to changes to childcare that will give 30 hours free to working parents of under-5s from September 2025. “This is the biggest transformation in childcare in my lifetime,” the chancellor told Sky News.
Hunt was asked on the Today programme whether the plans amounted to “jam for the day after tomorrow”, as they would not begin in full for all under-5s until September 2025, while an “ambition” to provide more wraparound care for children in schools would be implemented in 2026.
Hunt said it was a “huge investment” of about £5bn a year and “the biggest expansion of childcare in my lifetime”.
“That’s going to mean that we’re going to need a lot of extra childminders, a lot of extra nursery places. A lot of extra support in schools for the wraparound offer,” he said. “We recognise that if you’re making as ambitious a change as this, that it’s going to take time and that’s why we need to bring it in in stages.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/may/14/scorsese-michael-powell-red-shoes | Film | 2009-05-13T23:01:00.000Z | Steve Rose | Scorsese: my friendship with Michael Powell | "M
ovie directors are desperate people. You're totally desperate every second of the day when you're involved in a film, through pre-production, production, post-production, and certainly when you're dealing with the press." Martin Scorsese isn't talking about his own career, but that of one of his heroes, the British director Michael Powell. And in particular, Scorsese is referring to the all-consuming creative passion Powell and Emeric Pressburger captured in their 1948 classic The Red Shoes. That swooning Technicolor tragedy was ostensibly set in the world of ballet, with Moira Shearer fatally torn between her personal and professional loyalties; equally, it is a portrait of artistic sacrifice and compromise in the film-makers' own industry. "Over the years, what's really stayed in my mind and my heart is the dedication those characters had, the nature of that power and the obsession to create," Scorsese says, before finding the right analogy in another Powell and Pressburger title: "It made it a matter of life and death, really."
Had he not been so entranced by The Red Shoes as a boy, Scorsese might never have become a movie director. Watching the film for the first time - aged nine, at the cinema with his father - was the start of a lifelong relationship with Powell's movies, one that ultimately led to a friendship with the man himself; now, nearly 20 years after Powell's death, it extends to a stewardship of his legacy. Tomorrow, Scorsese will take the stage in Cannes to introduce a new restored print of The Red Shoes - a culmination, of sorts, to Scorsese's ongoing mission to rehabilitate his hero. Scorsese was instrumental not just in initiating the physical restoration of Powell and Pressburger's deteriorating back catalogue, but in restoring Powell's career and reputation when they were at their lowest ebb. He even, inadvertently, found him a wife.
Scorsese considers Powell and Pressburger's run of films through the 1930s and 40s to be "the longest period of subversive film-making in a major studio, ever". But when Scorsese first met Powell, in 1975, that run had come to an abrupt halt. Peeping Tom, Powell's first effort as a solo director, had been released in 1960, and its combination of violence, voyeurism, nudity and general implication of the audience (not to mention the film industry, again) was too strong for the British censors and critics. He hadn't worked since. So he must have been somewhat taken aback to discover that an eager young American director was trying to track him down, and that other young American film-makers were going back to his work.
"We'd been asking for years about Powell and Pressburger," says Scorsese. "There was hardly anything written about their films at that time. We wondered how the same man who made A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp could also have made Peeping Tom. We actually thought for a while Michael Powell was a pseudonym being used by other film-makers."
Scorsese came to Britain for the Edinburgh film festival with Taxi Driver, and a mutual contact arranged a meeting at a London restaurant. "He was very quiet and didn't quite know what to make of me," Scorsese recalls. "I had to explain to him that his work was a great source of inspiration for a whole new generation of film-makers - myself, Spielberg, Paul Schrader, Coppola, De Palma. We would talk about his films in Los Angeles often. They were a lifeblood to us, at a time when the films were not necessarily immediately available. He had no idea this was all happening."
It's easy to forget how obscure most movies were in the days before DVD, video on demand, or even VHS. Studio boss J Arthur Rank lost faith in the commercial potential of The Red Shoes on first seeing it, and sent only a single print to the US. So for two years it played continuously at a single movie theatre in New York, before eventually breaking out to become a huge success, picking up Oscars in 1949 for best art direction and music. Scorsese saw it that first time in colour; after that, the only way to see such movies was on television. "Even with commercial breaks, in black and white, and cut to about an hour and a half, it still had a powerful magic," he says. "The vibrancy of the movie and the sense of colour in the storytelling actually came through. Then, eventually, the prize was to track down a 16mm Technicolor print. I was able to do that a few times." The rest of the Powell/Pressburger back catalogue Scorsese would track down one film at a time. "We were in a process of discovery."
After Scorsese found him, Powell was taken to the US by Francis Ford Coppola and feted by his new Hollywood fans. They saw him as a kindred spirit: a fiercely independent film-maker who had fought for, and justified, the need for complete creative freedom. Coppola installed him as senior director-in-residence at his Zoetrope studios; he took teaching posts; retrospectives were held of his work; and the great and good of Hollywood queued up to meet him. Scorsese even had a cossack shirt made in the same style as that of Anton Walbrook's character in The Red Shoes, which he wore to the opening of Powell and Pressburger's 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To that event, Scorsese brought along his editor on Raging Bull, Thelma Schoonmaker. "Marty told me I had to go and see Colonel Blimp on the big screen," Schoonmaker later tells me. She introduced herself to Powell, they hit it off, and four years later they married.
Schoonmaker, who still edits all Scorsese's films, experienced first-hand both Scorsese's worship of Powell and his subsequent friendship with him. "One of the first things Marty said to me was, 'I've just discovered a new Powell and Pressburger masterpiece!' We were working at night on Raging Bull and he said, 'You have to come into the living room and look at this right now.' He had a videocassette of I Know Where I'm Going. For him to have taken an hour and a half out of our editing time is typical of the way he proselytises. Anyone he meets, or the actors he works with, he immediately starts bombarding with Powell and Pressburger movies."
Powell's influence is all over Scorsese's work. His trademark use of the colour red is a direct homage to Powell, for example - though Powell told him he overused the colour in Mean Streets. And Powell was practically a consultant on Raging Bull, giving Scorsese script advice and even guiding him towards releasing the film in black and white. (Again, Powell observed that Robert de Niro's boxing gloves were too red.) Meanwhile, Powell's Tales of Hoffman informed the movements of Raging Bull's fight scenes. "Marty was always asking Michael, 'How did you do that shot?' or 'Where did you get that idea?'" Schoonmaker says. "They shared a tremendous passion for the history of film - but he didn't always go along with Marty's taste in modern film-makers. For example, Michael didn't quite get Sam Fuller. Marty showed him Forty Guns, or started to show it to him, and Michael walked out halfway through. Marty was heartbroken."
The restoration of The Red Shoes came about when Schoonmaker tried to buy Scorsese a print of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp for his 60th birthday. She was alarmed to discover the printing negative was worn out, and that there wasn't enough money to restore it. Much of the Powell and Pressburger legacy was, and still is, in a similar condition. So she and Scorsese set about raising the cash to fund the restoration. "It's been over two years now of checking test prints and determining how the picture should be restored," says Scorsese. "In restoration circles, very often three-strip Technicolor film can only reach a certain technical level. The colours start to become yellow and you get fringing - where the strips don't quite line up. But the techniques we used here are top of the line. So it looks better than new. It's exactly like what the film-makers wanted at the time, but they couldn't achieve it back then."
Other Powell/Pressburger movies are now in line for restoration, but Scorsese and Schoonmaker's rehabilitation mission does not stop there. For some years, between movie projects (they are currently completing Scorsese's latest, Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio), they have been working on a documentary about British cinema, in the vein of Scorsese's 1999 personal appreciation of Italian cinema, My Voyage in Italy. Powell and Pressburger will be in there of course; but also Hitchcock, Korda, Anthony Asquith and possibly others we've forgotten about ourselves. British cinema is sorely misunderstood, Scorsese feels, and it needs this documentary even more than Italian cinema did.
Perhaps that's something for next year's Cannes? "Well, I'm still working on my speech [for Friday]," says Scorsese. "I never know what to say. I'm trying to hone it down to my key emotional connection to the film. My favourite scene is the one near the beginning at the cocktail party. Where Lermontov [Anton Walbrook] asks Vicky [Moira Shearer], 'Why do you want to dance?' and she replies, 'Why do you want to live?' Despite all the other beautiful sequences in the film, that's the one that stays in my mind."
The restored version of The Red Shoes premieres at the Cannes film festival tomorrow, and then at the Edinburgh film festival on 18 June. A Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray is released on 29 June.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 17 August 2009
In the article below about the friendship between directors Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell (he of The Red Shoes, among many other films with co-director Emeric Pressburger), we said that Powell had not worked since his controversial first effort as a solo director, Peeping Tom, released in 1960. In fact, he did direct some films in the ensuing years, ending with Age of Consent, in 1969, and The Boy Who Turned Yellow, in 1972. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/03/is-your-fridge-a-vegetable-graveyard-how-to-revive-dead-produce-into-crisper-soup | Life and style | 2023-05-03T02:59:26.000Z | Alice Zaslavsky | Is your fridge a vegetable graveyard? How to revive dead produce into crisper soup | Your fridge’s crisper drawer is the first kitchen skill worth cracking. Even if you’ve grown to refer to yours as “the rotter” where that hopeful haul of herbage snapped up at the shops in a spontaneous “health kick” goes to die. Especially so!
Rather than letting your vegetables gloop and congeal, extend their lives. And if they start to look a little lank, there’s a tasty way to transform them into a midweek marvel.
The first thing to note is that fruit and vegetables are like families – some members get along better than others. Soft herbs, leaves and brassicas are tetchy. Leave them near ethylene-emitting produce (ie most fruits) and they’ll turn yellow and shrivel and curl in on themselves. As a rule of thumb, cold-weather veg get priority in the crisper, because the crisper is closest to their natural habitat.
Brassicas: wrap them up
Top brassica: Alice Zaslavsky’s recipes for broccolini, cavolo nero and cauliflower
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Brassicas – such as kale, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and brussels sprouts – prefer to breathe, so anything airtight will do more harm than good. Wrap them in damp kitchen towel, then bag loosely.
Larger cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage and wombok have their own natural wrapping in the form of their outer leaves. If you’re not using it all at once, remember to rewrap in damp towel or the cut side will discolour and dry out.
Don’t throw out your radish and turnip tops – they’re delicious and can be used like rocket leaves. Photograph: Rochelle Eagle/The Guardian
If you’ve scored rootier brassica such as radishes, turnips and daikon with their tops still attached, it’s best to divide and conquer. Cut off the leafy tops as they have a propensity to suck the life out of the main bulb of the vegetable. The bulb goes in the crisper, but don’t throw out the tops – they’re delicious. Place in a bag, store on the fridge shelf and treat them like rocket. Just make sure you give them an extremely judicious wash, as they tend to be gritty.
Root vegetables: keep the tops
Hardier root vegetables such as carrots and beetroot also fare best in the crisper, though if you’re running out of room, you can bag them and place them in the shelf above. Photograph: Rochelle Eagle/The Guardian
Hardier root vegetables such as carrots and beetroot do best in the crisper too. If you’re running low on space, bag and pop on the shelf above though. As for the tops, leafy carrot tops are akin to a peppery parsley, and beetroot tops are quite like silverbeet.
Nightshades: keep out
No dud spuds: how to make the most of Australian potatoes
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Nightshades such as tomatoes, capsicums and eggplants are warmer-weather veg and fare best away from the crisper. Potatoes are particularly fridge-phobic, as this exposes them to too much light, dries them out and changes their starch structure (a good thing only if you’re making gnocchi). Keep them in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight – unless you live in a hot climate, in which case paper-bagging and refrigerating is the lesser of two evils.
Onions: keep them away from potatoes
While we’re on spuds, remember those feuding family members I mentioned? It’s a terrible idea to store onions and potatoes in the same place – they will tear each other down. If your potatoes are in the pantry, paper-bag your onions and place in the crisper; if your spuds are in the fridge, store onions in the pantry.
Herbs and leaves: keep them in a box
Rather than letting them gloop and congeal, extend the life of your soft herbs by wrapping them in damp paper towel and storing in an airtight container. Photograph: Rochelle Eagle/The Guardian
To store soft herbs and lettuce leaves, wash and spin-dry, then wrap in damp paper towel, pop in an airtight container or calico bag and place on the shelf above the crisper.
Fruits: keep them out of the cold
It’s best to store fruit (except perhaps berries) outside of the fridge entirely. Not only is it better for ripening, but fruit tastes better at room temperature and there’s less risk of fridge odours or dehydration ruining softer fruits. There may be circumstances when refrigeration is necessary, like if you live in the tropics or the fruit is on the turn. In this case, try storing fruit on the shelf above the crisper, or place in reusable bags to keep the “fruit farts” on lock.
A final tip
Ultimately, the best way to prevent your crisper from becoming a vegetable graveyard is to keep things moving. Whenever you bring home a haul from the shops or markets, remove your older produce from the crisper. Wipe the bottom with a little white vinegar, pop in the new vegetables first, then put older produce on top. This will encourage you to use up everything you’ve got, no matter how wilty – because it all comes out in the wash (or simmer!) in “crisper soup” recipes like shchi.
Shchi – recipe
Shchi (pronounced “she”) is essentially a cabbage soup whose etymology stems from the old Slavic siitii, the plural form of satiety or satisfaction. It’s quite literally the soup of mass satisfaction. Growing up, a big pot of this or borsch was Mum’s standing Sunday simmer – it was cost- and time-effective, and a bowl of either soup was her guarantee we’d be nourished.
Think of shchi as white borsch, where the beetroot has been substituted for swede or turnip. Photograph: Rochelle Eagle/The Guardian
Think of shchi as white borsch, where the beetroot has been subbed out for earthy sweet vegetables such as swede or turnip, and the acid amped up with apple cider vinegar. If you have some brine from dill pickles or kraut, feel free to use this instead of the vinegar. Kimchi brine would also be a welcome addition if you want a little heat.
I’ve kept this recipe fully plant-based but if you’d prefer more richness, foam in a knub of butter with the oil when sweating the veg, and use chicken stock. If you’re using a commercial stock, taste the soup before adding any extra seasoning as some stocks can be quite salty. And don’t forget to collect all of the vegetable trim and peels (except the cabbage) and pop into a bag in the freezer, ready to make more stock for your next shchi.
The flavour of the shchi gets better overnight and will happily last in the fridge for five to seven days – just in time for your next crisper clearout.
Shchi is delicious eaten on the day it’s made, but its flavour only improves overnight. Photograph: Rochelle Eagle/The Guardian
Makes 8-10 serves
¼ cup olive oil
1 brown onion, halved and finely sliced
1 small fennel, bulb halved and thinly sliced all the way up to the stalks, fronds reserved
1 large carrot, roughly chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
½ bunch dill, stalks and fronds chopped, finer fronds reserved for garnish
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
1 large turnip or swede (or 2-3 smaller ones), roughly chopped
2 waxy potatoes, such as nicola or desiree, roughly chopped into 2cm cubes (300g)
2 bay leaves, fresh or dried
500ml vegetable stock
1.5 litres water (preferably filtered)
¼ small white cabbage, finely sliced
Sour cream and extra-virgin olive oil, to serve
Heat a heavy-based Dutch oven or large pot on medium heat. Add the olive oil, onion, sliced fennel bulb and carrot, wait for it to sizzle, then lower the heat to medium-low and cover with the lid for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Once the fennel and carrot have softened and the onion is translucent, add the garlic and dill stalks, stir and cook until fragrant (about two minutes).
Deglaze the pan with the apple cider vinegar, then add the turnip (or swede, if using), potatoes and bay leaves. Pour in the stock and water, bring to the boil, then lower to a simmer and cook for about 25 to 30 minutes until the potatoes are fork-tender.
Add the cabbage and most of the dill and fennel fronds (keeping some of the finer fronds for garnish). Stir to combine, then turn off the heat, cover and let the cabbage cook in the residual heat for 10 to 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
To serve, ladle into soup bowls and add a dollop of sour cream, garnishing with reserved dill and fennel fronds. Finish with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and freshly cracked pepper. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/31/criminalised-sami-artists-arctic-venice-biennale-loggers-miners-global-heating-culling-protest | Art and design | 2022-03-31T05:00:39.000Z | Charlotte Higgins | ‘Our traditions have been criminalised’ – the Arctic artists bringing protest to the Venice Biennale | The tundra of northern Norway is a long way from the Venice Biennale. Indeed, it is a long way from anywhere, at least viewed through western eyes. To reach the gentle herd of reindeer who are now feeding under the long pale glow of an Arctic sunset, I have ridden for three and a half hours across the snowy wastes, partly in a sled and partly on the back of a snowmobile, pausing halfway at a herders’ hut (no electricity, no water, but nevertheless a cosy refuge). We are somewhere off the road that links the villages of Karasjok and Kautokeino. To the north of us is Hammerfest. North of that, the Barents Sea.
Artist Máret Ánne Sara is with her husband, brother and 18-month-old, the child cheerfully bundled up and goggled against the chill and the snow’s bright glare. She is telling me about the yearly passage of these, her brother’s reindeer, from the tundra up to the northern coastal summer lands, 250km away: how the biggest cow will start to move when she’s heavily pregnant, and the whole herd will inexorably, mysteriously make its way north. “It’s the animals who control everything,” she says. “We just follow them and try to keep them safe.”
Her brother Jovsset Ante Sara is scattering feed as the soft-haired animals prance and jitter across the snow. That’s not a good sign: reindeer have always been able to eat lichen and moss through the Arctic winters, but the unstable climate is increasingly bringing snow that’s too deep for them to find it, as it has this year. Or, as in 2019, periods of warmth that melt the snow, so that when temperatures drop again, impenetrable layers of ice form, keeping the animals from reaching food.
The tundra is changing in other ways, too: as winters get warmer, birchwoods are spreading north by as much as 50 metres a year. “When we have birch forests, the ground changes and the lichen gets pushed out,” says Sara. “If the landscape keeps changing, they won’t have any winter food.” She looks around at the short but sturdy birches. “If you look up historical photos, there are no trees here.”
Courthouse protest … a sculpture made of 200 bloodied reindeer heads by Máret Ánne Sara. Photograph: Iris Egilsdatter
Reindeer herding is one of the traditional livelihoods for Sámi families such as the Saras. The Sámi are an Indigenous people scattered thinly through a vast tract of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula. Their presence long predates the Nordic settlers of these boreal lands, who now outnumber them. Their homeland is called Sápmi in the Sámi languages, nine of which survive, some clinging on to life with just a few hundred speakers.
For this year’s Venice Biennale, the Nordic Pavilion will be renamed the Sámi Pavilion, and a long colonised people, divided by borders and living at the sharp end of climate crisis, will take their place as a nation for the first time at the art world’s most prominent global gathering – a gathering that, because of its exhibitions presented in national pavilions, can feel like a kind of art Olympics, always entangled in the geopolitics of the moment.
What do reindeer on the tundra have to do with Máret Anne Sara’s art for the Venice Biennale? Everything. For her, reindeer are both the subject and the material of her work; indeed, they are central to life itself. For reindeer-herding families, the animals are not mere livestock. “There’s a different way of thinking and being between an Indigenous perspective and a typical western orientation,” she says. “For us, the reindeer is actually a very close relative. Humans, nature and animals are interdependent and equal. So destroying any part of this is like suicide from our perspective. What’s happening to the reindeer is our story as well.” The director of the Sámi Museum at Karasjok, Jelena Porsanger, had earlier told me how this proximity is even embedded in the northern Sámi language. “To live” – eallit – has the same derivation as the noun “herd” – eallu.
It is not a sentimental relationship, though. While I’m on the tundra, a couple of reindeer are quietly and efficiently slaughtered, “for domestic use”, says Sara; and at the herders’ hut, her brother Jovsset slices chunks of dried reindeer meat as a snack. Ande Somby, a Sámi activist, lawyer and artist whom I meet in the city of Alta a few days later, tells me that between the herder and the reindeer there is a kind of contract, “that the reindeer will be given a death of dignity and everything shall be used” – bones, hide, meat, antlers.
Somby is in his 60s, of the generation of Norwegian Sámi sent away to boarding school and chastised for speaking his mother tongue. Things are different now, with Sámi parliaments in the Nordic nations giving people a say in cultural, linguistic and educational matters. Somby is a yoiker: practitioner of a haunting, uncanny vocal technique in which the singer embodies, almost becomes, the subject of the yoik, which could be a person, a landscape, a wolf, or indeed a reindeer.
Some of Sara’s most powerful art has been made as a means of protest. For years, Jovsset Ante Sara was locked in a legal battle over the government’s policy of culling herds because – it was argued – of overgrazing. Sara denies that overgrazing is an issue, and anyway, she says, “it is very difficult for us to accept that argument, because the government is at the same time inviting big industries into the same area”.
A long history of mineral exploitation in Sápmi now also extends to building windfarms on traditional reindeer-herding lands, which spooks the reindeer and affects their traditional migratory patterns. It is complicated: clearly, now more than ever, wind energy is needed to help replace fossil fuels. But the Sámi, as so often, find themselves paying a high price for the high-carbon lifestyles of others.
Ironic twist … Sara and the curtain of 400 skulls that has now been acquired by the National Museum of Oslo. Photograph: Máret Ánne Sara
As Jovsset’s case against the forcible slaughter of reindeer rose through the courts, Sara’s confrontational art accompanied it. She erected a pile of 200 bloodied, frozen reindeer heads with the Norwegian flag atop it near the courthouse in Tana. In front of the Norwegian parliament building in Oslo, she made a huge sculpture, a kind of “curtain” of 400 reindeer skulls, each with a bullet hole – a work that formed part of a greater project of documents, talks and debates she called Pile O’Sapmi.
Jovsset won every case until, at the last, he was defeated in the Supreme Court in 2017. “It showed how fragile we are, and how our rights are owned, totally, by the state,” says Sara. It was what happens, she says, “when an outside worldview criminalises your traditions and capitalises nature”. It is an irony, perhaps, that the new National Museum of Oslo has acquired that “curtain” of skulls and, when it opens its doors in June, this howl of protest against internal colonialism will be the first thing visitors see.
Sara tells me how, some time after the legal defeat when she was at a loss to find a way forward, she was talking to another herder, describing her disappointment and exhaustion. “All of a sudden he said, ‘But now the red calf is coming. And at the first sight of the red calf, everything is forgotten.’” It was a transformational moment. What he meant was that when the new reindeer are born – “the red calves” – they bring joy and a fresh beginning. Sara’s new work takes its cue from this sense of renewal but, like everything in her art, it is shot through with darkness. The losses of calves to legally protected predators such as wolverines and eagles are huge, and her work, which often teeters on the edge of the macabre, will use their mutilated bodies as material.
Pauliina Feodoroff is another artist representing Sápmi at the Venice Biennale who has a strong need to find hope in the dark. She is one of the 1,000 or so-strong Skolt Sámi community from close to the Finnish-Russian border, of whom around 300 speak the Skolt Sámi language. Feodoroff learned it in adulthood, “taking back” the tongue, like a number of her generation in their 30s and 40s. Many Skolt Sámi ancestral lands were long ago lost to the hellish, polluting nickel mines of Murmansk. But, says Feodoroff – whose background is in performance and choreography as well as politics and land guardianship – “for myself I want to focus on what is healthy and our need to be kind and gentle to ourselves and others”.
‘The trees are our cathedrals, our libraries, our museums’ … artist Pauliina Feodoroff. Photograph: Michael Miller / OCA
Feodoroff is speaking on the edge of the river Näätämö – or Njâuddam in Skolt Sami – north of Finland’s Lake Inari. She offers a greeting to the “grandmother” river and suggests that I introduce myself to the landscape by lying near the riverbank in the snow for a moment – which I do, staring into the heavy white sky and listening to the intense silence, broken only by the caw of a crow and the fussing of a couple of willow tits in the birches. The animistic, nature-based spirituality of the Sámi did not entirely die with the aggressive Christianising process of the 17th century, when Sámi noaidis, or shamans, were tried for witchcraft.
Later that day we cross the frozen lake Inari on sleds and enter the pristine, ancient pine forests that circle it – deep woods where the trees stand at a dignified, discreet distance from each other to take in as much of the precious Arctic light as possible. “This is our cultural monument,” says Feodoroff of the forest. “It is our cathedrals, our libraries, our museums.”
She has been fighting to preserve these forests, which are threatened by logging for the pulp industry, despite their antiquity, their biodiversity and their dark green, spreading beauty. Part of her work for Venice will be a conceptual project in which she will auction the right to see views of wilderness like this, and use the proceeds to buy and protect the land in a case of art and practical activism combining. When institutional or legal processes have ground to a halt, she says, “art is a space that can cause some kind of freedom of movement”.
In the forest we sit round a campfire and listen to Feodoroff’s friend, Anna Morottaja, one of the Inari Sámi, talking about her people’s traditional singing style the livđe, an art that had virtually disappeared from her community’s culture until she researched ethnomusicological collections in Berlin and elsewhere to find recordings of long-lost family members performing for the benefit of curious anthropologists. Like the yoik, the livđe can involve creating a kind of portrait of a person. Hearing an archive recording of her great-aunt’s livđe for the first time was, then, like a personal encounter. She sings it now, in the dusk and the snow, before the campfire, and it’s an unearthly thing with a rocking rhythm like a spell, but tinged with wit, telling of an energetic woman with “fire in her hemline”.
A song sung in the forest seems an enchanting and simple thing, but none of this really is simple. The Sámi were long victims of racism and prejudice. Northern Sámi activist and film-maker Siljá Somby later tells me that it’s still very much there. You can see plenty of hate speech directed at the Sámi on social media. The situation varies from country to country. Sweden has not signed the UN convention on Indigenous peoples, meaning the Swedish Sámi have fewer rights than those in Norway and Finland. For Venice, the Swedish side of Sápmi will be represented by painter Anders Sunna, another member of a reindeer-herding family that has been locked in legal battles for years with the state.
We never resist, we always bend. When it comes to nature, that’s the right thing to do
Even in Norway and Finland, points out Siljá Somby, the parliaments stop short of giving them what she calls “hard rights” over land or water, only “soft rights” over culture and education. And there are plenty of divisions within the Sámi community itself. Some have little time for the sharpening, over the last 50 years or so, of Sámi political consciousness, and those elected to the Norwegian Sámi parliament have included members of the Progress party, who would see the institution itself abolished. Nor has resistance come naturally to the Sámi, who for centuries adapted themselves to circumstances.
Inari Sámi reindeer herder Osmo Seurujärvi, has, like Morottaja, immersed himself in a language and way of life that his own parents were becoming estranged from, realising that if he did not, the chain would end and his children would lose the culture for ever. “We never resist, we always bend,” he says. “When it comes to nature, that’s the right thing to do. But when it comes to social structures, it’s not always the right thing. It’s always expected that Sámi will give up and not resist. We are not a warrior nation. But we do need to have a say.”
Everything is connected: this is what the Sámi tell us. The landscape, nature, the climate, politics, culture, society, the law, art – they are all entangled. Like Indigenous peoples from other parts of the world, the Sámi are at the front line of climate crisis but also the holders of knowledge; of alternative perspectives that could usefully challenge the consumerist, capitalist structures that have proved so destructive. And, as Feodoroff points out, we all rely on the Sámi and their breathtaking, expansive landscapes in more ways than we might at first think. “The forests here are storing carbon for you guys, too,” she says. “If they cease to exist, the consequences will come to your back door.”
The Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opens on 23 April.
This article was amended to correct the spelling of Morottaja. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/12/andy-murray-wimbledon-quarter-final-sam-querrey-match-report | Sport | 2017-07-12T19:22:00.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | Andy Murray hobbles out of Wimbledon to Sam Querrey in last eight | The end when it came for Andy Murray was drawn out, painful and not entirely unexpected. His quest for a third Wimbledon title evaporated on Centre Court when his aching hip finally gave up on him and Sam Querrey took full advantage of his injury to win their quarter-final 3-6, 6-4, 6-7 (4), 6-1, 6-1.
The affable beanpole is the first American in the men’s semi-finals here since Andy Roddick eight years ago, but his chances of getting past a fully fit Marin Cilic in the semi-finals are probably slimmer than were his prospects against a limping Murray.
Andy Murray exit leaves Johanna Konta to satisfy Wimbledon’s lust for glory
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The defending champion moved like Hercules – Harold Steptoe’s horse, not the mythical strongman – in the two hours and 42 minutes it lasted. In the closing two sets, which lasted a combined 49 minutes, he was powerless to change the direction or mood of the contest, so hobbled was he by his hip. At times he used his racket as a crutch, although not once did he consider surrendering.
Murray was bidding to join Johanna Konta in the semi-finals, where they would have become the first British players to go this deep in the men’s and women’s draws at the same Wimbledon tournament. Now Konta shoulders the nation’s hopes alone. If there was a crumb of comfort for Murray, it was Novak Djokovic’s withdrawal with a long-standing elbow injury in the second set against Tomas Berdych. That keeps the Scot at No1 in the world, but it is desperately close at the top. His reign, which began when he toppled Djokovic from the top of the mountain last November, is under siege.
As it stands, Murray is No1, followed by Rafael Nadal, Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka, all within 1,500 ranking points. Roger Federer will jump back up to No3 if he wins the tournament.
More worrying for Murray is the idea that a statistical tussle at the top of a notional tree is the extended trend of his minor decline: this was his fourth defeat from two sets to one up since last September; before that, he had won 39 on the spin from that position. He has health problems to fix first, but will be just as concerned about the restricted movement that has made him less competitive in big matches.
Murray said after beating Benoît Paire in the fourth round: “If I’m struggling and not moving well, it affects my performance maybe more than other guys who don’t rely on their movement as much.” That prognosis told the story of this quarter-final. Murray was rooted to the turf going sideways, hitting a lot of shots off one leg and serving way below his best. He fought all the way to the end, as he always does, but there could be no denying that his hip was the problem as much as his tennis.
Murray struggles during the fourth set. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
On a dull afternoon, it had all started so brightly. Within three minutes Murray was two games up and Querrey had won just a single point, with the first of his 27 aces, which took him to the top of the tournament table on 126. After seven minutes Murray had raced to 3-0, but may have suspected he would need the protection of that flying start if Querrey ever got his long right arm working – and he did.
The American had taken nearly 10 hours, 17 sets and four tie-breaks to get to the quarter-finals, while Murray had taken eight hours and 20 minutes for the loss of a single set – but the numbers and running score disguised a disturbing truth.
Serving at 4-2 up, Murray refused to chase down a routine lob that landed within his reach. While he might have been husbanding his resources for bigger battles to come, it looked more like he was guarding that mysterious hip injury.
He looked laboured with ball in hand and his second serve often dipped below 90mph; Querrey was so far off the pace he could not cash in and Murray took the first set in 28 minutes.
The arena had finally filled, but there was a growing sense of concern in the crowd. Murray did not look at his best. Hope might have been stronger than expectation that Querrey would fall in a heap for him. But the world No28 – who put Novak Djokovic out in the fourth round last year, and this season beat David Goffin, Dominic Thiem, Nick Kyrgios and Rafael Nadal in one magical week in Acapulco – was inclined to hang around.
Andy Murray: ‘I knew I wasn’t going to do any major damage to hip by playing’
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In the second set, Querrey held to love in the ninth game with his ninth ace and broke Murray at the third attempt to level at one set apiece. Then, as he has done so many times before, Murray sprang back to life in adversity, breaking and holding with some of his old magic. By the time he had returned in the third set to the 4-3 lead he held in the second, his game had transformed – but again he threw it away. Querrey broke for 5-5 with a blistering cross-court backhand – but lost the plot in the tie-break.
However, he wrote the script for the rest of the match. Querrey broke three times to wrap up the fourth set in 22 bewildering minutes and the anxiety levels rose appreciably in Murray’s box. Ivan Lendl and his team needed no reminding that the Scot had lost his last three five-set matches. His task, on one working leg, was now Herculean, but the weight was too much.
Querrey, who once was emotionally bruised when rejected on a celebrity TV dating programme, also has a bit of steel about him. Now he produced it: a finishing 118mph ace beyond Murray’s right arm, which hung motionless by his side. “I didn’t start my best, just kept swinging away,” Querrey said later. “I’m going to enjoy this one a little bit longer, rest tomorrow and do my best to get ready for the semis.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/30/over-1100-children-trafficked-into-uk-drug-trade-figures-show | Society | 2020-07-30T14:58:04.000Z | Henry McDonald | Over 1,100 children trafficked into UK drug trade, data shows | More than 1,100 children have been trafficked into the UK’s drug trade, new Home Office figures reveal.
The data obtained by the drug reform charity Transform shows that 1,173 children were enslaved by drug dealers in 2019.
Figures from January to December 2019 show that the majority of the 1,853 people estimated by the Home Office to have been trafficked into the illicit drugs business were children.
Transform obtained the Home Office statistics through a freedom of information request and released them on Thursday to mark the UN’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons.
The charity said the number of children trafficked into drug dealing in Britain had dramatically increased from 2018 and was an increasing problem. It blamed the rise on the growing national focus on “county lines” drug operations across the UK.
In 2018 the Home Office figures recorded 721 people as victims of trafficking into the “county lines” trade. Last year that figure rose to 1,139, including 1,001 children.
The data came from the Serious and Organised Crime Group (SOCG) unit of the Home Office. Their figures also show a rise in children or minors being forced to illegally work in cannabis cultivation from 146 in 2018 to 156 last year.
Harvey Slade, a research and policy officer at Transform Drug Policy Foundation, said: “The illegal drug trade provides an unparalleled source of revenue for organised crime groups.
“The current approach is to send police in to make arrests and seize the drugs, but we know, after 50 years of trying, that this doesn’t work. These new statistics show that organised crime groups are exploiting young and vulnerable people to avoid detection by law enforcement, and maximise profits.”
Slade said the increasing number of people, especially children, being trafficked as “drug slaves” in Britain underlined the need for an alternative approach to drug prohibition.
“In order to combat this horrific level of exploitation, we need to take back control and legally regulate the drug market. We need to respond to this issue as we do with legal supply chains: by providing reporting and monitoring procedures, and by keeping vulnerable children out of the trade,” he said.
Transform has argued that the “war on drugs” that has been waged for more than half a century has been counterproductive and has only enriched organised crime across the world. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/15/benton-harbor-michigan-lead-drinking-water | US news | 2021-10-15T09:00:25.000Z | Eric Lutz | After fighting for clean drinking water since 2018, a Michigan city will finally get lead-free lines | Residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, a predominantly Black city that has dealt with elevated lead levels in its water for at least three years, have welcomed an announcement by the governor that all lead lines in the city would be replaced over the next 18 months.
The governor, Gretchen Whitmer, promised an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to addressing the water crisis that has been plaguing this impoverished city since at least 2018.
A Black town’s water is more poisoned than Flint’s. In a white town nearby, it’s clean
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Whitmer had previously proposed removing the service lines within five years – a timetable residents and environmental groups said was unacceptable. On Thursday, amid growing uproar from those who say Benton Harbor residents had lived with poor water quality from far too long, Whitmer issued a directive to speed up the removal process and to launch an “all-of-government” to ensure the south-west Michigan city has access to safe water.
“Every Michigander deserves safe drinking water, and every community deserves lead-free pipes,” Whitmer said in a statement on Thursday. “We will not rest until the job is done and every parent feels confident to give their kid a glass of water knowing that it is safe.”
Activists, who have consistently called for the immediate replacement of the city’s 6,000 lead pipes, took a moment to celebrate the development.
“I’m excited,” said the Rev Edward Pinkney, chair of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, on Thursday. “I think that is huge.”
The announcement comes just a week after the state advised residents of Benton Harbor, where people have complained about declining water quality for years, not to drink or cook with tap water “out of an abundance of caution”.
As the Guardian reported last month, many have long suspected there was something wrong with the city’s water. In 2018, testing revealed a lead content of 22 parts per billion – higher than that of nearby Flint at the height of the crisis that made that city a symbol of US environmental injustice.
Volunteers load cases of water into resident’s cars at the clean water giveaway event on 10 September in Benton Harbor. Photograph: Jim Vondruska/The Guardian
Although for three years Benton Harbor’s water tested well above the federal lead action level of 15 parts per billion, state and local authorities did not take sufficient action to address the crisis, according to a Natural Resources Defense Council petition filed last month to the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of Pinkney’s group.
When officials were slow to act, locals stepped in; Pinkney and others have organized bottled water drives, educated community members about the risks of lead.
The acceleration of the timeline to replace the city’s lead service lines is a welcome development for those who say the state has overlooked the needs and health of the community.
“I applaud the Benton Harbor Community Water Council,” Pinkney said of his team of volunteers. “Their consistent [activism] led to this.”
In September, the state announced it would distribute water filters to every home in the city and provide free bottled water. And earlier this month, the state promised to expand those efforts, when it advised not to drink the water.
Whitmer said her executive directive on Thursday builds on those efforts. In addition to expediting service line replacement, Whitmer said her administration would continue to provide free bottled water “until further notice”, offer “free or low-cost lead-related services” such as water testing, and “collaborate closely” with various agencies and community groups.
Federal, state, and local resources would be marshaled to address the crisis, Whitmer said in the statement, adding that she also expects to be able to fund the removal of Benton Harbor’s lead lines with money from Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans, which are stuck in legislative limbo on Capitol Hill.
Biden has vowed to replace every lead pipe in the United States, which experts say is necessary to protect not only those in Benton Harbor and other cities already in the throes of crisis, but in communities in all 50 states that are vulnerable to contamination.
“We shouldn’t wait until there’s a crisis to remove the lead pipes,” said Elin Warn Betanzo, a Michigan drinking water expert who was one of the first to identify the Flint crisis. “The best time to remove lead service lines is before things go wrong.”
The Rev Edward Pinkney helped organize bottled water drives in Benton Harbor. Photograph: Jim Vondruska/The Guardian
In Michigan, activists and experts applauded the announcement Thursday as a long overdue step in the right direction.
“When it comes to protecting the health and safety of our children, the only way forward is an all-hands-on-deck approach,” said Dr Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is nationally recognized as the pediatrician who exposed Flint’s water crisis. She expressed hope that Benton Harbor would “be our nation’s last lead-in-water crisis”.
“I am grateful to Governor Whitmer and her administration for respecting the science of lead’s neurotoxicity and ensuring the people of Benton Harbor have safe water to drink,” Hanna-Attisha said.
“The governor has come a long way in terms of responding to the Benton Harbor water crisis,” added Cyndi Roper, the NRDC’s senior policy advocate for Michigan. “The response is absolutely heading in the direction the community has been asking for. We are optimistic.”
But Pinkney said there was still more work to be done, including ensuring that all in Benton Harbor were fully aware of the scope of the crisis – something he says will require more forceful language from state officials.
“We’ve got 18 months before the pipes are gonna be completed,” Pinkney said, urging officials to formally declare the water dangerous instead of telling residents they are acting “out of an abundance of caution”.
“It is crucial that [Whitmer] makes clear that the water is unsafe to use in that time.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/oct/13/ellie-white-windsors-star-comic | Stage | 2017-10-13T13:00:33.000Z | Harriet Gibsone | Ellie White: ‘Can you be jealous of a book? I am’ | The funniest item of clothing I’ve ever owned
My mum gave me a red bonnet for Christmas one year. It had three woollen phalluses bouncing off the back. She was really offended when I didn’t wear it on Boxing Day.
The funniest standup I’ve ever seen
John Early. He’s an American comic who can literally say anything and I’m in tears. Of laughter.
The funniest sketch I’ve ever seen
A sketch that Sheeps did in their first show called Splay, where Alastair Roberts played a man whose organs are on the outside of his body. Extraordinary.
The funniest book I’ve ever read
Cold Comfort Farm is genius. I’m jealous of that book. Can you be jealous of a book? I am.
The funniest TV show I’ve ever seen
Totally Scott-Lee. It was an MTV reality show in the early noughties about Lisa Scott-Lee of Steps fame trying to relaunch her solo career.
The funniest film I’ve ever seen
Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Really pushing the boundaries of realism.
The funniest person I know
My friend Al Green. In a very dark and sinister way. Will he end up killing me? Maybe.
The funniest meal I’ve ever eaten
Big plate of grey rice.
The funniest hairstyle I’ve ever had
I was desperate to be trendy when I started university, so I tried to shave an undercut. But I was a coward and shaved too small a patch, so I just looked like I’d been lobotomised.
The funniest dream I’ve ever had
I dreamed I had to identify my brother’s body after a shooting. When I got there, however, the bodies were just fillets of salmon wrapped in blue puffer jackets. Dreams, eh?! Absolutely wild.
The funniest joke I’ve ever heard
Q: What do you want for Christmas?
A: A new bum, cos mine’s got a crack in it.
Ellie White performs at the Moth Club, E9, 19 October | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/jun/17/decky-does-a-bronco-review | Stage | 2010-06-17T21:30:46.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Decky Does a Bronco | Theatre review | Grid Iron's Ben Harrison has just returned from directing a hugely successful production of Peter Pan in the US, so perhaps it's no surprise to find him reviving Douglas Maxwell's beautiful miniature about childhood trashed and innocence lost. A massive hit for Grid Iron back in 2000, and way ahead of its time in creating location theatre, Decky isn't performed in theatres but on and around the swings in park playgrounds nationwide.
Like JM Barrie's terrible masterpiece, Decky is about the lost child inside every grown-up. Set on a Scottish council estate in the early 1980s, the playground adventures of a group of mucky kids is recalled by the grown-up David (played by Martin McCormick) as he attempts to exorcise the ghosts of that long-ago summer, when it was every nine-year-old's rite of passage to do a bronco on the swings: a feat that involves jumping off when the right momentum is achieved, so that the swing wraps itself around the top bar.
David can do it – so can his cousin Barry, neighbour Chrissy and the enigmatic O'Neill. But the under-sized Decky can't do a bronco, and the others won't let him forget it, with tragic consequences.
On the very first night of a long tour in a windswept park, I clearly wasn't seeing this revival to best advantage, but even so its emotional directness, puppyish playfulness and sense of how we are all haunted by our childhoods long after we reach maturity is beautifully handled. With the boys' watchful older selves constantly circling their younger ones, this little show is a funny, wise and sad evocation of childhood that knows what poor Peter Pan fails to understand: that the only alternative to not growing up is dying young. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/21/eu-leaders-at-odds-over-filling-brexit-shortfall | World news | 2020-02-21T19:31:10.000Z | Daniel Boffey | EU summit collapses as leaders struggle to fill €75bn Brexit hole | A summit of EU leaders seeking to fill a €75bn hole in the bloc’s budget left by Brexit dramatically collapsed after Angela Merkel led major contributors in rejecting a proposal that would have left them paying billions more.
The meeting in Brussels was brought to an abrupt end on Friday evening with the leaders deeply divided, leaving the European council president, Charles Michel, to admit: “We need more time.”
The UK’s departure has left EU states struggling to fund plans over the next seven years to tackle the climate emergency, aid poorer regions and continue to subsidise farmers through the common agricultural policy.
The 27 heads of state and government must agree on a budget for the next seven years, and the European parliament must give its endorsement, before the end of 2020, to avoid the EU’s spending programmes grinding to a halt. “We are super, super late,” admitted one EU official.
Michel, a former prime minister of Belgium, came under fire during the summit, which started on Thursday afternoon, for aiming “far too high” with a proposed budget of 1.074% of the bloc’s gross national income (€1.094tn).
Four member states, known as the “frugals” – the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Sweden – have insisted that the EU budget amounts to no more than 1% of the bloc’s gross national income.
They received the support of Merkel, the German chancellor, in opposing proposals that would slash the rebates they receive on their contributions, designed to ensure that the biggest contributors do not overpay.
EU leaders express concern over filling €75bn Brexit shortfall – video
One EU diplomat said of Michel: “He wanted enough cash to buy a Range Rover; we only have the money for a Volkswagen – and worst of all he asked Mutti [Merkel] to pay for the Range Rover.”
Responding to claims from reporters that the summit had been a failure, Michel insisted that the issue had to be debated at the “highest political level” and that he now better understood the member states’ positions. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘In order to succeed we have to at least try,’” Michel said.
A late suggestion on Friday tabled by the European commission proposed to reduce the size of the additional burden on the the biggest payers, including Germany, through significant cuts in the EU’s science and research programmes. The compromise proposal would trim €10bn off a budget put forward by Michel.
Under the new plan, the four “frugal” member states and Germany would retain their rebates. France would also see increased cash for its farmers through the common agricultural policy.
The proposal failed to secure the unanimous support of the leaders, however. “That is democracy,” the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a press conference at the end of the summit. “It is a good tradition in democracy to debate on the different views, the different emphases … We are not there yet, but we are in a good way.”
Merkel told reporters: “The differences were simply too big.”
Diplomats from the self-styled “friends of cohesion” grouping, consisting of the net recipients of EU cash, put the failure down to a lack of solidarity among the richest member states.
The rightwing nationalist prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who has built much of his success on attacking Brussels, told reporters: “Our ambition isn’t only to be very strong friends of the cohesion policy, but to also be very strong friends that work together for a strong EU, and for a strong EU budget for the next period.”
During the last round of budget negotiations, it took the European council two summits to reach an agreement on the EU’s long-term spending, known as the multi-financial framework. A second summit is expected in March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/07/hannibal-johnson-safe-tory-party-vote-no-confidence | Opinion | 2022-06-07T11:37:29.000Z | Marina Hyde | With Hannibal Johnson safe in his job for now, the Tory party can carry on devouring itself | Marina Hyde | Ironically, the Conservative party seems to have been unable to engineer a leaving do for Boris Johnson. Last night’s unsuccessful leaderplasty leaves the government hideously disfigured but staggering on; and the prime minister the subject of headlines like “let me get on with the job”. Which, considering the circumstances that brought us here, is a little like Fred West pleading to be allowed to get on with finishing someone’s loft extension. The not-getting-on-with-the-job has been a significant part of the problem. (Please don’t think that’s today’s only serial killer reference: we shall be dealing later in the column with the one made in the prime minister’s defence by Tory MP Adam Holloway, during a particularly eye-catching Newsnight appearance.)
For now, a recap. Scores on the doors were 148 Conservative MPs voting no-confidence, with 211 opting to clean up after Big Dog yet again. For them, this is not rock bottom. Johnson’s supporters have dived down to the bottom of their equivalent of Trainspotting’s worst toilet in Scotland, and fished out the suppository. Or to put it a different way that still underscores the dependency, 211 of them chose last night to order another gram of Boris Johnson, rather than begin the painful yet ultimately unavoidable process of coming down from what can surely no longer be described as a high.
This morning, Johnson apparently told his cabinet “this is a government that delivers on what people in this country care about most”, which feels bold, considering that a poll yesterday indicated 60% of the country wanted him to sod off to a long, long Sartrean afterlife on the Hannibal lecture circuit. Johnson’s mission-aborting government is arguably the UK’s worst delivery service, making even Yodel and Hermes look as if they go the extra mile to serve. “We tried to deliver even one half-arsed policy but you were out.”
Today’s other official angle is that last night’s horror show allows the government to “draw a line” under leadership speculation, and to stop the Tory infighting. A reminder: things we’ve done fairly recently to stop Tory infighting include: having a referendum, having two general elections, and having no-confidence votes in both the past two leaders. How’s it working out for us, would you say? A significant number of the exhausted British public will feel they’ve worked harder on this relationship than their own marriages.
What the Tories now offer Britain – a lame duck leader and a party that has lost the plot
Gaby Hinsliff
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Still, Boris can change! He can make it work again with the voters! Settle an argument: who’s more likely to rekindle their relationship: Boris Johnson and the electorate, or Johnny Depp and Amber Heard? You’d think the latter would have a better shot at renewing their vows. Hard to look at last night’s numbers and not conclude the prime minister has been ambushed by consequences. The thing most likely to be rekindled is the dry brushwood beneath his stake.
But look, Johnson’s big new ideas are reportedly in the post, so do clamber back on to the old tenterhooks. Another new chief of staff? Return to the gold standard? Revival of shillings and farthings? His biggest big idea continues to be the threat of triggering article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol. Or, if you prefer, to get Brexit undone. It remains remarkable that some years into the experiment, we are no closer to discovering what, politically, Boris Johnson actually likes, other than being liked. A lifetime of hollowing himself out with narcissism and personal ambition seems to have meant that when he finally became prime minister, he had no idea what to do with the position, and even less interest in finding out. The course of a redemption arc for that type of character feels particularly unclear.
For us, the audience, the scene feels familiar. Here we go again: back to Tory Elsinore. It’s a place we’ve come to know only too well, where frequent five-act bloodlettings have yielded a steady parade of inadequate Fortinbrases. Who’s next? Hard to say at this point. Yesterday, the cabinet rat king remained intact, with no secretary of state finding the will or skill to detach itself from the fused mass of tails. Nothing is as hard fought as the competition to be the maddest liability defending Johnson. There was Jacob Rees-Mogg, obviously, who had his rose-tinted monocle firmly wedged in his eye socket when he suggested a majority of one would be enough for Johnson to declare his authority undimmed. There was Nadine Dorries, the missing link between the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, whose botched attack on Jeremy Hunt contrived to describe her own party’s earlier pandemic preparation as “wanting and inadequate”. There were the unnamed sources explaining “the PM’s weakness is he’s too nice to people”. There were the very unnamed sources who kept saying that Johnson was toying with calling a general election. Truly, the David Koresh move.
And last but not least there was Gravesham MP Adam Holloway, who was beamed on to Newsnight to declare of his boss: “This programme, that I’m on now, was showing pictures of him looking like Hannibal Lecter.” Challenged by presenter Mark Urban, Holloway produced an iPad with a screenshot. “I can show you right here,” he claimed. “You’ve got razor blades … Does that guy look like somebody who’s been given a birthday cake, or somebody who’s just been locked up for something at the Old Bailey?” Oh dear. Like the rest of the rational world, I couldn’t see the razor blades to which Mr Holloway was referring, but then, perhaps we will simply have to accept that comic beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The same programme was once accused of Photoshopping Jeremy Corbyn’s hat to make it look more Russian, so perhaps the sanest conclusion is that there is something very rotten in the state of Newsnight’s graphics department.
In any case, even an outraged comparison of Johnson with Lecter increasingly feels very unfair to the unconventional forensic psychiatrist. Lecter, of course, was rather more skilled at drawing things out than the prime minister, who – as of last night – has been bumped into the role played by the late Ray Liotta in Hannibal. You may recall the scene in which this useless and corrupt government official has been so skilfully drugged that Lecter is able to feed him mouthfuls of his own brain while he retains a form of consciousness. This will be Boris Johnson’s summer. We are all Clarice Starling now – tied to the chair at the other end of the table and forced to watch.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/oct/04/michael-palin-travels-of-a-lifetime-review-memories-of-pre-pandemic-journeys-past | Television & radio | 2020-10-04T20:00:00.000Z | Stuart Jeffries | Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime review – memories of pre-pandemic journeys past | Travelling by dhow from Dubai to Mumbai, Michael Palin gently placed some headphones over a sailor’s ears. It was 1988 and the former Monty Python star was reprising Phileas Fogg’s journey in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. In those scarcely believable times, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, Dubai’s skyscrapers were unbuilt, Hong Kong was British, the cold war was not quite over, TV adventurers accessorised long socks with shorts, and there was this little thing called a Walkman, into which you put tapes.
Palin pushed the play button and, unheard by us, Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Shuffle kicked into the man’s brain with surprising results. Can you do a Middle Eastern hand jive to the Boss while rising and falling on a tiny craft in the Persian Gulf? Me neither, but this guy could.
Palin’s remembrance of journeys past for the BBC was a sweet affair, but also a niggling reminder of all the stories that never got told. What did that sailor really think of Springsteen? What did the blind barber in Mumbai who gave Palin the best shave of his life think about his subject? We may never know.
Then there was the film crew. What did they feel as they shot Palin collapsing on to yet another hotel room bed while their working day was not yet done? We saw them only once, the erased of TV history, as Palin abandoned them on the roadside in Saudi Arabia. He hadmanaged to wangle just one visa to get across the desert from Jeddah to Dubai. They would have to hitch. “You’ll get a lift. Pretty boys like you,” he said, before driving off. We never did find out how they managed to continue their journey. Camels don’t care for carrying TV cameras.
Abroad thoughts from home are all very well, but I would have preferred to see him tracking down the man he met in Hong Kong who took his caged bird for a walk, or revisiting Shanghai, where, as in Dubai, in 1988 the skyscrapers were unbuilt. We also did not see the Palin Effect, namely how the places he has visited for TV (the Sahara, the Himalayas, Brazil, both poles, North Korea, among them) experienced tourist booms in his wake.
Instead, what we saw was a charmingly diffident, if bowel-clenching, Englishman getting constipation. Which is understandable given that, during his six-day dhow voyage, the toilet was essentially a hole and his bottom was washed by the ocean. An obliging gent on board got Palin to lie on his tummy while he walked on his thighs to soothe the pain. The cure was not just of physiological interest: the uptight Englishman was loosening up as he travelled east. Whether this was Orientalist fantasy in the manner condemned by Edward Said, whether Palin’s TV revolution was effectively British colonialism replaced by anglophone cultural imperialism are matters for greater minds than mine.
On the train from Bombay (Mumbai) to Madras (Chennai), Palin told an Indian lady he had been brushing up on his Hindi. That, she said gently, was folly: few speak Hindi so far south. For the most part, Palin adhered to the advice given him by an earlier era’s icon of the TV travelogue, Alan Whicker, namely never to attempt to speak the local language. When someone is jabbing a rifle in your ribs, Whicker counselled, tell them you are from the BBC and they should step aside.
In China, he came across official censorship. On the train from Shanghai, a DJ broadcasted to passengers over the PA. She declined to play Palin’s tapes of Springsteen or Billy Joel, but agreed to put on another. We never discovered if his fellow travellers would have preferred Uptown Girl to Mozart, though the former is a trenchant critique of class politics.
It was back in London, though, that Palin ran into the worst censorship. He tried to get into the Reform Club for the film’s final shot, reprising the moment Fogg arrived home to collect his wager, but the authorities wouldn’t let him in. “British clubs were not about letting people in but keeping them out,” he realised. Home was transfigured by his travels, and not in a good way. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/12/rene-redzepi-danish-chef | Food | 2009-08-11T23:05:15.000Z | Sybil Kapoor | Rene Redzepi: the chefs' top chef | Imagine sitting at a restaurant table, gazing out on to a channel of icy grey-blue water. A chef has just placed a large, smooth pebble in front of you. A single, seared langoustine lies on the hot grey stone. He advises you to dip the sweet-tasting langoustine into the powdery magenta scattering of ground Icelandic dulse (seaweed) and pretty blobs of oyster emulsion. It's like eating a rock pool. The next dish tastes of northern forests and summer. Gorgeous plump spears of white asparagus, sprigs of woodruff, romaine roots, hop and pine shoots tumble around a poached egg yolk and mix themselves into delicious verdant flavours as you munch.
This is Noma in Copenhagen and you are tasting the food of chef Rene Redzepi. Eating his food is a revelation. Suddenly, it becomes clear how the current trends towards seasonality, sustainability and regionality can be fused into a new and utterly delicious cuisine.
Redzepi won international acclaim earlier this year when Noma was voted third-best restaurant in the World in the S.Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurants, with only the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain, ahead of him. Even more significantly, the other 49 top chefs voted Noma as their favourite restaurant. Add to that two Michelin stars and it is clear that that there is something very special about his food.
Although he is not yet widely known over here, Redzepi came to our TV screens ealier this year when Masterchef winner Mat Follas cooked at Noma in the final.
Redzepi describes his cooking as modern Nordic, yet his background lies in a rigorous following of French cuisine, leavened with work at El Bulli and The French Laundry in California. His creation of this new cooking style only developed when gastronomic entrepreneur Claus Meyer offered him the chance to open his own restaurant in Denmark. The site was a derelict 1747 warehouse that had been used to store goods from the North Atlantic, such as salt, spelt and whale blubber. "I knew that this was the place, it had such a warmth about it with its wooden beams. I was sick of luxurious, palatial restaurants."
His manifesto was to use the best produce in the region to create an updated and modern Nordic cuisine. After spending two months travelling the region, a new world of possibilities began to open up as Redzepi began to source ingredients such as musk ox from Greenland, sea urchins from Norway and birch sap from Denmark. He distilled his philosophy into two fundamental questions. "The essence of dining should be about a sense of time and place," he says. "If you shut your eyes and just ate the food, would you know where you were in the world and what time of year it was?"
The resulting food has a satisfying balance of cooked and raw, so that the diner feels intimately in touch with wilderness, landscape and seasonality. For instance, a plump, sweet North Sea shrimp is wrapped in bright green sea lettuce and bathed in raw sweet-sour rhubarb juice with little chunks of raw rhubarb and wild coastal herbs. It has a pared-back Scandinavian beauty and exquisite pure flavours, yet if I close my eyes, I can also taste something of the British coast in early summer. It all depends on your points of reference and raises the question, how might one interpret modern British cooking in such a way?
Heston Blumenthal has watched Redzepi's cooking with interest. "It would be fascinating to take what Rene is doing in Denmark and see how far you could go here with just using seasonal British produce," he says.
Redzepi, for example, uses his Scandinavian skills in pickling to ensure that he can serve such delicacies as wild sea roses (heavenly when pickled in vinegar) throughout winter. Over the last year, Blumenthal has increasingly used wild foods and local produce at the Fat Duck, which has subtly changed the feel of the food. "Many ingredients, such as red gooseberries, have a surprisingly short season, so it requires greater flexibility when you design a new dish," he says.
Miles Irving, a professional British forager who supplies many of Britain's top chefs including Mark Hix and Richard Corrigan, believes that we are ready to change our restaurant cooking by using foods that reflect our land and climate. "Many [British] chefs are starting to experiment with wild foods," he says. "It's a very exciting time as chefs are rediscovering forgotten ingredients like woodruff, as well a new ones such as hogweed seeds that we appear not to have cooked with, despite them being delicious."
Looking at the finer details of Redzepi's cooking, he uses minimal butter and cream and only local oils such as pumpkin seed. Rye, horseradish and dill are delicately added to many dishes to add a characteristic Scandinavian note. He doesn't shy away from using modern kitchen equipment, whether it's designed to produce instant soft ice-cream or slow-poached pork, but the preparation of each dish is surprisingly simple. A gorgeous pudding of walnut powder and ice-cream, for example, contains a beautiful heap of what tastes like essence of blackberry powder. It's frozen berries that have been whizzed to a powder just before they're plated.
His cooking is already acting as a catalyst for change. In March this year, Professor Arne Astrup, head of human nutrition at Life, the faculty of life sciences at Copenhagen University, announced the development of a new Nordic diet to help reduce obesity and encourage healthy living, inspired by Redzepi's food. Life's aim is to create a healthy diet that is accessible and natural to a northern climate; delicious yet seasonal and sustainable. It is an infectious idea.
The impact of Redzepi's cooking, meanwhile, is rapidly transforming how many of his colleagues cook in Denmark. Claus Henriksen, an ex-Noma sous chef, for example, is creating his own unique and delicious food at Dragsholm Castle in North Zealand following the same principles. Given that the Noma kitchen has a liberal sprinkling of British chefs, it is only a matter of time before they return home and start to reinterpret their native food.
What the chefs say
"Rene Redzepi has managed to root his cooking in his region to create something really powerful." Heston Blumenthal, the Fat Duck
"It's fantastic that somebody who has worked at el Bulli has achieved such success. His recognition shows that the future of haute cuisine will be decided at international level." Ferran Adrià, El Bulli
"He has captured a sense of Copenhagen and put it into his kitchen. He's sourced superb local produce to create very fresh, crisp unfussy food that is well thought out." Marcus Wareing, Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley
"He's a phenomenal chef. His cooking is incredibly modern: delicate and pristine yet feral and delicious." Philip Howard, The Square
"I love what Rene is doing. From the beginning he's created absolutely amazing dishes." Claude Bosi, Hibiscus | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/mar/21/the-guardians-guide-to-playing-netball-part-seven-goal-defence | Sport | 2017-03-20T19:00:44.000Z | Erin Delahunty | The Guardian’s guide to playing netball – part seven: goal defence | Goal defenders are netball’s great chameleons, required to be fast-moving, canny and adaptable to change. They may have to fly for every contest with an aerial specialist or execute a quiet, grinding game in the shadow of more a dazzling defensive partner, who picks off loose balls generated by their tireless work.
Whatever variety and versatility a contest demands, goal defenders must deliver. To do that, they need an aerobic engine to match a centre, a high tactical IQ, fantastic footwork and second-to-none (with the possible exception of the goal keeper) communication skills.
Kimberlee Green injury sours Giants' Super Netball win over Thunderbirds
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Recently-retired Diamonds captain and three-time ANZ Championship title-winner Clare McMeniman says GDs have “got to love hard work, be dogged and determined” and have “just a little bit of pizazz”.
While their role is to shut down the goal attack – often a team’s No1 play-maker and most accurate long-range shot – goal defenders must also instantaneously morph into the attackers they hunt, as they form a vital link from defence into attack, post-turnover.
Queenslander McMeniman – who quit netball in 2011 before making a triumphant return in 2014, playing for Australia for the first time aged 29 and going on to play 15 Tests, most at GD and as captain – says many miscalculate the work rate and influence of a goal defence.
“I think people underestimate just how much work a goal attack, then by extension, a goal defence does,” she says. “Even though you’re not running that extra third that the centres do, you can often go just as far in a game. You need a good set of legs to run out a whole game. And it’s all at a high intensity, with many repeat efforts. We’re the workhorses.”
The role
Superficially-speaking, goal defenders – allowed in the centre third and their side’s defensive third, including the goal circle – simply have to stifle the goal attack, one of two players per side allowed to shoot. But in reality, it’s infinitely more than chasing one player around and teaming up with the goal keeper in the circle to pressure shots.
Unlike other positions, where players can on occasion switch on and off, the unyielding one-on-one defence required begins with the first whistle and barely relents.
The Guardian’s guide to playing netball – part six: goal keeper
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When they’re not marking their direct opponent, defending the shot, rebounding or creating and taking intercepts, they’re driving the ball into attack after it has been turned it over.
Like wing defenders, GDs also have to back up their attack line on the transverse line. Then get back to their own line for the next centre pass, whether to be a back-up attacking option for their centre or prevent their opposite number from getting a centre pass receive or laying the groundwork for a set play. Then there’s circle work, requiring defence on the shot, rebounding and a close alliance with the keeper.
Key attributes
One of the game’s most promising goal defenders, 23-year-old Jo Weston, who is starring for the Melbourne Vixens in the Super Netball league, says the position is one of the most-hardworking, physically, on the court.
Weston, who became a Diamond in late 2015 but has played just three Tests, says the stop-start nature of traditional Australian-style one-on-one defence, coupled with the increasing number of repeat efforts required, means aerobic fitness is key. So too strength.
“The game is evolving and changing,” she says. “It’s getting physically tougher and tougher and more and more athletic. You need fitness and determination to work those repeated efforts, but also power and strength.
“You need good elevation, as goalers seem to be getting taller all the time, but also speed to chase down the ball. Timing is also so important. I think that’s partially instinct, but also something you can develop.”
The Guardian’s guide to playing netball – part three: centre
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McMeniman, who loves watching Weston play because “she’s still so raw and has such beautiful hands over the shot and an amazing lean”, agrees fitness is key.
“Fitness-wise, you need to be able to match every repeat effort, at equal intensity, that your player makes, all game. You also have to be strong, especially through the core and upper body and work on your vertical jump. Footwork is another big one, of course. It’s the foundation we defenders build everything else on.”
Be the change
While they’re often perceived as “quiet worker bees”, McMeniman says a good goal defence can identify when something needs to change tactically on the court – and lead the way.
“Being tactically strong is important,” she says. “You need to be able to see when a defensive structure isn’t working or if the rate you’re bringing the ball through the midcourt into attack is working or not and then change as required.”
While goal keepers like Collingwood star Sharni Layton have reputations for being loud, providing direction and encouragement from the back, GDs are also an important mouth piece, communicating messages “through the court”, McMeniman says.
“What the GD says might not be heard by the crowd, but it’s certainly part of the role to talk a lot and provide direction and hopefully it’s meaningful. We’re normally absolutely exhausted from working so hard … we’re too puffed to be shouting!”
Weston agrees. “I’m definitely no Sharni when it comes to being vocal on the court, but talking is really important.”
Partners in crime
The chemistry between circle defenders can be game-defining, Weston says. “The communication you have with your keeper is first and foremost when you’re playing together. You need to understand how they like to play, what they prefer, even what words to use.”
The Guardian's guide to playing netball – part one: wing attack
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Weston, who is building a formidable partnership with 22-year-old Emily Mannix at the Vixens this Super Netball season, says time off the court is just as important as time on it. “You need trust and honesty in netball and I think getting to know someone off the court can really translate to on the court.”
For more than decade, McMeniman played with the very best in the business – ex-Firebirds and Diamonds captain Laura Geitz is also a close friend.
“We just clicked right from the start, but we also worked really hard on building our combination. You have to understand the other person, who is going to go where, when. For me, achieving success from that tight partnership was so rewarding. You don’t get an intercept, the combination does.”
Assess and adjust
McMeniman and Weston share a philosophy about defence on the shot – to assess and adjust.
McMeniman says it’s a “game-by-game, play-by-play” proposition. “One week, a shooter might miss under a certain defensive style, then the next week nail goals regardless, so you have to be constantly thinking and be flexible enough to have a multitude of options you can go to. It’s like anything else happening on the court, you need to identity it and implement change.”
Weston advises defenders to “constantly reassess what’s working”. “If something’s working, stick with it. If not, change it up.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/labour-challenger-angela-eagle-john-mdonnell-jeremy-corbyn | Opinion | 2016-07-01T12:55:48.000Z | Polly Toynbee | A Labour challenger needs a rhino hide – luckily Angela Eagle is battle hardened | Polly Toynbee | The wonder of John McDonnell’s speech this morning was not so much anything he said, but the fact that anyone in Labour is still standing and saying anything at all. Standing Up Not Standing By was the apt slogan on his podium.
At a time of such crisis, a coup against Corbyn is the last thing we need
Rachel Shabi
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Never mind the content, business as usual was McDonnell’s message. Quite who the advertised “business” people were assembled at the Royal Festival Hall isn’t plain, since most probably eye him as likely to hang them from the nearest lamppost, despite his reassurances that the financial industry needs protecting for everyone’s sake, not just the fat cats. To judge by the cheers he received, most were Corbyn/McDonnell activists.
Doing his very good imitation of a bank manager, McDonnell said, “We will get through this period of uncertainty”. It was a perfectly plausible speech, but with the same cake-and-eat-it problem that everyone is struggling with – yes we’ll stay in the single market; no we won’t accept free movement. If Corbyn hadn’t so forcefully emphasised his belief in free movement on the eve of the poll, he might not have lost the 27% of core working class Labour voters who now say they won’t be voting Labour again. It’s that cataclysm facing Labour, in what might be an imminent election, that precipitated the great rebellion against their leader.
Expecting a leadership challenge, the membership wars are on, as both sides dash to recruit. An astounding 60,000 have joined in a week, bringing the total above 440,000, beyond its 1997 peak – extraordinary for a party on the verge of utter disintegration. Under the insane rules, £3 membership, suspended in normal times, starts again with a leadership contest. But ordinary membership is cheap as chips at £3.92 a month, and can be cancelled any time.
Who are these new members? The party says they split 50/50 on whether to support Corbyn or to find a new leader, according to comments people leave as they join up, with the new Saving Labour site recruiting people to urge Corbyn to step down. How party members feel will determine the fate and survival of Labour, if it comes to a contest. If he’s re-elected, no one knows what splits will follow.
A YouGov poll of Labour members in the Times today, taken in the last week, compares the mood with a poll in May, pre-referendum. Corbyn only just still has the edge, but support is tumbling from an approval rating of +45, to just +3.
If Jeremy Corbyn goes with dignity, that leaves Labour free to hold a genuine leadership contest
Angela Eagle was ready to challenge yesterday and trigger a leadership contest, but she has held fire on the advice of Tom Watson and others, who still hope Corbyn might step down gracefully. After a savage week, where he has been battered and insulted by just about his entire party, with 80% of MPs, and most MEPs and former leaders telling him to go, how much more can a man take? He draws deep ideological strength from those grassroots rallies – because in his revolutionary Bennite ideas, extra-parliamentary action counts for more than elected MPs.
He has the weekend to consider the meaning of life. Might his family protect him from what can only be worse to come? Some say he’s a prisoner to consiglieri who won’t leave him alone to ponder the joys of his allotment. Seumas Milne, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and others will screw his courage to the sticking point, because if he steps down, the far left’s astonishing capture of the party will be over. All those wilderness decades of disobeying party leaders, espousing issues obscure to most Labour voters will have been wasted. If he goes, McDonnell could stand – but few think he could raise the 51 nominations from MPs. So they will nail the politically dead Corbyn to his chair, like El Cid.
There are two views as to whether Corbyn really is a nice man – but only the heartless wouldn’t feel pity for these humiliations. The disastrous launch of Shami Chakrabarti’s antisemitism report shows what happens to leaders without support: accident-prone, everything they say is a gaffe. She tried to rescue him from accusations of an apparent comparison of Israel to Islamic State, but a Jewish MP leaving in tears after being bellowed at by a Corbynite is all anyone will remember of Labour and Jewishness.
These could be the end days of Labour. Expect a challenge to Corbyn shortly, but there are wrangles as to who should do it: splitting the anti-Corbyn vote would be suicidal. Eagle has most support – soft-left, close to the unions, level headed, an experienced safe pair of hands. Owen Smith takes a slightly further left stance, but some say it can’t be someone Welsh, and he’s unknown. Watson is the key player, a wise bargainer and as deputy leader the one with a direct mandate elected by the party membership: he still hopes that Corbyn can be talked down off his miserable throne of thorns before Monday.
If he goes with dignity, that leaves Labour free to hold a genuine leadership contest between different views of the future. If he has to be challenged, debate is limited as just one contender comes forward – a loss at a time like this.
As Gaby Hinsliff wrote today, the volume and vitriol of abuse from Corbyn supporters against MPs and all opponents is phenomenal. Look no further than the comments below her column – or no doubt those following this. After one tweet yesterday about Saving Labour, I had “Blairite scum” and “neoliberal fascist” abuse by the bucketload. The Labour challenger will need the hide of a rhinoceros – and Angela Eagle is battle-hardened. This is the endgame, the battle to the last. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/29/how-labours-plan-for-fair-pay-deals-looks-to-solve-uk-social-care-crisis | Society | 2023-11-29T13:46:39.000Z | Heather Stewart | How Labour’s plan for ‘fair pay’ deals looks to solve UK social care crisis | “M
y sister is a care worker. She was a care worker during the pandemic. Fourteen-hour shifts, often overnight. Unimaginable pressure. And the reward? A struggle every week – and I mean every week – just to make ends meet.”
So spoke Keir Starmer last month, drawing on experience close to home in his party conference speech to underline his determination to overhaul the cash-strapped social care sector.
At the heart of Labour’s plans to do so, is a radical proposal for state-backed collective bargaining that will mark a departure from decades of declining trade union power in the UK.
When Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street in 1979, more than 70% of the workforce was covered by collective agreements, negotiated by trade unions. By 2019, that had fallen to little more than a quarter.
Starmer is not pledging to bring back “beer and sandwiches” summits with unions if elected next year to No 10, but Labour does have a clear commitment to increase their role in public life – staunchly upheld by his deputy, Angela Rayner, a former union organiser herself. The party’s “new deal for working people”, details of which were negotiated with unions, includes a long list of policies aimed at boosting employee power.
Exploitation and low pay causing poverty among care workers, TUC finds
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The UK’s underfunded, overstretched social care sector will be the testing ground for a key element of the package: the use of “fair pay agreements,” to boost pay and conditions for workers who have little bargaining power.
The government has already promised a series of reforms to the social care workforce, including a new career structure; but as a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) pointed out this month, these have been delayed by the political turmoil at the top of the Conservative party.
Statistics on the sector tell a stark story of staff shortages and poverty pay: a recent report by Skills for Care pointed to 152,000 vacant posts, and an average hourly wage of just £10.34 in privately run care. Staff turnover in the last year was 28%.
“It’s not that people don’t want to do the work: they love it, but pay and terms and conditions are so poor that people feel undervalued and are forced out,” says Natalie Grayson, the GMB’s national organiser for the care sector.
Meanwhile, ministers have increasingly sought to plug staffing gaps with overseas workers. The Home Office issued 78,000 visas for care workers in the year to June 2023 – accounting for more than one-third of all long-term work visas. There have been repeated warnings that many of these staff face exploitation – and their arrival has been a key driver of record net migration into the UK.
Part of Labour’s planned solution is a new state-brokered agreement on social care pay, terms and conditions, which it hopes will attract more UK-based staff, and help stem the exodus from the sector.
Much is riding on the policy. The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, sees it as central to tackling the parlous state of social care – which in turn has significant knock-on effects for the NHS. One Labour source described fixing social care as “mission critical”.
For the Labour-supporting trade unions, this first fair pay agreement would be a “proof of concept” that they hope could be replicated in other low-paid sectors.
Yet despite the policy’s significance, few details have been ironed out: which unions and employer groups would sit round the table, or precisely which issues would be covered, for example. Instead, Labour says it will consult intensively if it gets into power.
The broad approach is that government would bring together unions and employers to thrash out minimum wage rates, as well as policies such as pay progression.
Once a deal is struck, the government would give it statutory backing – so that it applied right across what is a highly fragmented workforce, with many thousands of individual employers. That would give the unions significant power, in a sector in which it is hard to recruit and organise members.
Labour sources acknowledge there would be a direct impact on the public purse, via an increase in the cost of providing taxpayer-funded care – but the party is not expected to cost such an increase in its manifesto.
Ben Zaranko, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggests a rough estimate might be £1bn-£1.5bn a year for every £1-an-hour increase in social care wages – though the disparate nature of the workforce means it is difficult to calculate.
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Social care employers pose a key question: is Labour prepared to fund the cost of any uplift, given that approximately 50% of social care is state-funded? Some providers have warned that the 10% rise in the statutory living wage announced by Jeremy Hunt in last week’s autumn statement will already strain their finances.
Chiara Benassi, of King’s College London, an expert on employment relations, says fair pay agreements look like a fairly mild policy by European standards. “The UK has the lowest standard of workers’ rights in western Europe. Fair pay agreements are the most moderate proposal that the Labour party could make.”
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development recommended collective bargaining in a recent report “to help promote a broad sharing of productivity gains, including with those at the bottom of the job ladder, provide voice to workers and endow employers and employees with a tool for addressing common challenges”.
On the tricky question of who will sit on the employers’ side of the table, Benassi says fair pay agreements should give providers in the sector an incentive to find a collective voice.
Since the decline of collective bargaining in the UK, she says, employers’ associations have retreated into the role of lobbying. “This is really an opportunity for them to raise their profile.”
Even once the participants have been identified, however, the negotiation process is unlikely to be straightforward. Labour has not made clear the precise role it would expect to play – whether ministers would expect to be inside or outside the room, for example.
The fraught process of talks over this year’s NHS pay settlement – by far the biggest collective agreement in England, covering hundreds of thousands of staff – showed that unions can differ among themselves about the right way forward.
A similar policy, also called fair pay agreements, was introduced by the Labour government of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, and intended to apply across a large swath of the economy. But the relevant legislation was only finally passed a year ago, and the new National party-led government has promised to repeal it.
Since the law was passed, Richard Wagstaff, the president of the CTU union in New Zealand, explains, half-a-dozen sectors have begun working towards fair pay agreements, but “only one has got to the bargaining table: bus drivers. I’m the lead advocate for it, and we’ve only just begun bargaining.”
He adds: “We’re continuing until the law changes; but it’s not looking very positive.”
One lesson for the UK’s Labour party, Wagstaff suggests, is to press ahead with implementing its own version of the policy early on. “The key is to move reasonably quickly, so that it can become established and embedded before the next general election.”
However, with many key practical questions still unanswered, it is unclear how realistic that may be. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/oct/21/football-world-pays-tribute-to-sir-bobby-charlton | Football | 2023-10-21T18:36:01.000Z | Observer Sport | ‘Truly a national hero’: football world pays tribute to Sir Bobby Charlton | Sir Bobby Charlton was last night celebrated as having achieved “footballing immortality”, with figures from the worlds of sport and politics paying tribute after his death at the age of 86.
Charlton’s death means Sir Geoff Hurst is the only England player who started the 1966 World Cup against West Germany who is still alive. The former West Ham striker, the hat-trick hero of the 4-2 victory 57 years ago, wrote on social media: “We will never forget him and nor will all of football. A great colleague and friend, he will be sorely missed by all of the country, beyond sport alone.”
Sir Bobby Charlton obituary
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Charlton, who graduated from Manchester United’s academy and went on to play 758 games in 17 years for the club, was described by United as “a hero to millions, not just in Manchester, or the United Kingdom, but wherever football is played around the world”.
Fans gathered at Old Trafford to lay flowers around the “United Trinity” statue featuring Charlton, George Best and Denis Law, while the team wore black armbands for their fixture at Sheffield United, where the away end sang his name.
Among United figures to pay tribute following the announcement was the former defender Rio Ferdinand, who wrote on X, previously Twitter: “What a true gentleman of not many words, but when he spoke you stood still, stopped what you were doing and listened. A lot of the history was living and breathing through him and he was a constant at the club while I was there, travelling with us all over the world. Win, lose or draw he would be in the changing room wishing us well.
“The words he shared with me at the bottom of those stairs in Moscow, before I went up to lift the Champions League trophy, will stay with me forever.
“What it meant to lift that trophy for United, what it meant for the fans, what it meant for us as a team and what it now meant for myself doing it as captain. It was a privilege for me to even get that moment with him at that specific time.”
2:57
Sir Bobby Charlton: remembering the England and Manchester United legend – video obituary
Others echoed that praise. David Beckham, who came through the ranks at United having attended Sir Bobby Charlton’s Soccer School, and whose middle name, Robert, was chosen by his parents as a tribute, said: “It all began with Sir Bobby. Sir Bobby was the reason I had the opportunity to play for Manchester United … I will forever be grateful to a man I was named after, someone I looked up to and was a hero to many around the world.
“A true gentleman, family man and truly a national hero … Today is not just a sad day for Manchester United and England, it’s a sad day for football and everything that Sir Bobby represented.”
Gary Neville said Charlton was “the greatest English player and Manchester United’s greatest ambassador. A champion on and off the pitch and a Busby Babe who paved the way for all to come at United.” Eric Cantona dubbed him simply: “One of the best of all time.”
Speaking after United’s 2-1 win at Sheffield United, Erik ten Hag said: “He was outstanding on the pitch and off it. This is a legend, a giant passing away. His achievements are immense and huge, not only in England, globally. I never had the honour to meet him, but I know he was so humble and a big personality. An example for all of us, not only as a footballer. I think some players got inspiration from it today, and they wanted a win to mark it.”
Harry Maguire added: “Sir Bobby came into the dressing room a lot and he lit the place up. He’s an absolute legend of the club. We are delighted to win the game today but this is more than football and our thoughts are with his family. We will miss him, the world will miss him.”
The England manager, Gareth Southgate, led praise from outside the club, calling Charlton “an undisputed legend … The privilege of meeting him on several occasions allowed me to understand his personal pride and emotion in having represented England and simply confirmed in my mind his standing as one of the gentlemen of the game.”
The former England striker Gary Lineker said Charlton had achieved “footballing immortality”, calling him “a truly wonderful footballer and genuinely lovely man. A World Cup winner, United great and, for me, England’s greatest ever player.”
From Hampden to Wembley: Six of Bobby Charlton’s greatest games
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Pep Guardiola said his Manchester City side would play a full part in the tributes when the clubs meet at Old Trafford in the Premier League next Sunday. “This sort of football personality represents English football like no one else can do,” he said.
“I love this country for many things, but one thing is how they take care of legends. Sir Bobby Charlton represents Man United and English football like no one else.”
Clubs around the world also reacted online. AC Milan called him an icon who “will live on forever” while Barcelona hailed a “world football legend”. Gianni Infantino, president of Fifa, world football’s governing body, said Charlton’s impact “spanned generations … Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who was close to him.”
The Prince of Wales described Charlton as “a true great who will be remembered forever”. William, who is president of the FA, wrote on X: “Sir Bobby Charlton. First Division Champion. European Champion. World Champion. Gentleman. Legend. A true great who will be remembered forever. Thank you Sir Bobby. W.”
Among political figures paying tribute was the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who said Charlton was “one of the game’s greatest players and was hugely loved”, while the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, said: “Sir Bobby effortlessly combined his legendary skill on the pitch with being a tireless ambassador for the game off it. A genius and a gentleman, Sir Bobby made history as part of the 1966 World Cup team, building a trophy cabinet unrivalled by any Englishman.
“Rest in peace, and thanks for all the memories.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/mussolini-photo-to-be-removed-from-italian-ministry-wall | World news | 2022-10-18T16:11:43.000Z | Angela Giuffrida | Mussolini photo to be removed from Italian ministry wall | A photo of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini hanging on a wall in the Italian ministry for economic development will be removed to “avoid controversy”, the outgoing minister has said.
The newly elected senate speaker, Ignazio La Russa, a Brothers of Italy co-founder who collects fascist memorabilia, criticised the move as an example of “cancel culture”.
The “disturbing fact” of the photo’s presence was revealed by the trade union, Cgil, following confirmation from public administration workers.
The portrait of Mussolini (top centre) in the Italian economy ministry. Photograph: Chigi Palace Press Office Handout/EPA
Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots, is to become prime minister after leading a coalition that includes Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to a decisive victory in elections on 25 September.
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Giancarlo Giorgetti, the outgoing minister of economic development and deputy leader of the League, said the photo was part of an exhibition, called Italia Geniale (Brilliant Italy), marking this year’s 90th anniversary of the opening of Palazzo Piacentini, the ministry’s headquarters in Rome, and included photos of all the department’s past ministers. Mussolini was minister of corporations in 1932.
Giorgetti said a photo of Mussolini also hangs in the “gallery of prime ministers” at Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of the Italian prime minister.
“Nobody realised this,” he said of the Palazzo Chigi photo.
He said the photo in the economy ministry would be taken down. “If there’s a problem, we’ll remove it, to avoid controversy and exploitation.”
Speakers of both houses of parliament were elected last week as part of the first formal steps towards the formation of Meloni’s government.
Amid condemnation from Cgil and leftwing politicians over the photos, La Russa revealed that another one of Mussolini was displayed at the defence ministry. “I mean, must we do ‘cancel culture’ as well?” he said.
Meloni is expected to receive a mandate from President Sergio Mattarella to form a government by the end of this week. As long as there is support for the coalition’s cabinet list, the government will be sworn in early next week.
Relations between Meloni and the three-time former prime minister Berlusconi, 86, hit a rocky patch last week after she vetoed his demands over the cabinet, but the pair called a truce during a meeting on Monday.
Berlusconi said on Tuesday that Meloni had asked him to be her “adviser”, a role he accepted while reminding people that he was the one who founded the rightwing coalition. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/jan/11/like-many-great-leaders-bill-belichick-was-brought-down-by-a-failure-to-evolve | Sport | 2024-01-11T17:02:54.000Z | Oliver Connolly | Like many great leaders, Bill Belichick was brought down by a failure to evolve | Oliver Connolly | No need for double takes. Yes, it has really, finally happened. Bill Belichick is leaving the New England Patriots after an unprecedented 24-season run as their head coach.
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He will leave the Patriots as the greatest to ever do it. Six Lombardi trophies, nine Super Bowl appearances, countless division titles and AFC championship games appearances. In an era with the salary cap, free agency, the draft and legislated parity, Belichick, in partnership with Tom Brady, lorded it up over the rest of the league for two decades.
In the end, Belichick the executive knee-capped Belichick the coach. He also acted as New England’s de facto general manager, and, in the post-Brady era, he failed to find a successor at quarterback. Worse: he failed to put together a coherent offense, vacillating between quarterbacks and ill-fitting schemes with a raft of coaches too often in over their heads and a group of offensive linemen and playmakers who were built for the league in 2005 rather than 2023.
Over the coming days, months and years, we will return to the inevitable (nauseating) question of who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the Patriots dynasty. Was Belichick a fraud all along? Did he luck into Brady’s talent? How come, if he’s the best to ever do it, things were so miserable in New England once Brady left? How come Brady was able to win a title in Tampa, while Belichick trudged through the sludge in Foxborough?
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'I'll always be a Patriot': Belichick leaves New England after 24 seasons – video
Such thinking is, of course, nonsense. Brady and Belichick were the ultimate partnership. We like to apportion credit to a sole individual. We want to find a Michael Jordan. The reality of the team’s success over their 20-year run was that it was a partnership of equals.
There has never been a partnership like Belichick and Brady; we will never see one again. Here we had the finest defensive strategist of his – or any – era game paired with the most obsessive, relentless quarterback to ever play the position.
Belichick did not luck into Brady – or not quite. Did he snag the best quarterback of the modern game in the sixth round of the 2000 draft? Sure. If he knew he would be Tom Bleeping Brady would he have moved up in the draft to take him first overall? You bet. But Belichick also carried Brady through their early years together. He kept Brady as the fourth quarterback on his roster during Brady’s rookie season, at a time when keeping three quarterbacks on a roster felt like a luxury. He navigated the murky early years when Belichick’s defense carried the team to victory, with Brady’s cold-blooded qualities shining in close games in the fourth quarter.
As the relationship developed, Brady shouldered more of the burden. It tilted from a Belichick-dominant relationship into a Brady-dominant one. As the league’s rules evolved, emphasizing offense, so the dynamic flowed with it. Brady’s arm, mind and mastery of the offense become more pivotal to success than Belichick’s schematic wizardry or even his team-building chops.
At times, Belichick and his defense carried Brady – including in the duo’s last Super Bowl win together in February 2019. At other times, Brady bailed out Belichick’s funky roster construction or below-par defenses. That’s how partnerships go.
Belichick’s mistake was in not realizing at end of their run that Brady had become the more valuable partner. He squeezed Brady out of New England before the quarterback was done, and that meant Brady walked away to the Buccaneers while he was still near his best. Belichick had stopped adapting the team’s offense and refused to bring in new voices. Brady wanted to force change on his own, to ditch medium-term thinking and chase short-term results to squeeze out a final ring or two. In Tampa, he showed it worked. Belichick’s view was that he could keep the thing rolling for another 10 years by sticking to the same principles as he had throughout the latter part of the franchise’s dynastic streak. It fell apart within four years, culminating in a 4-13 record this season, the worst of Belichick’s career in New England and the team’s worst in more than 30 years.
Belichick’s final years in New England were defined by his inability to find another partner. He became too powerful, too all-knowing. He whiffed on successive draft picks, splurged free-agent money on below-average players and crucial backroom staffers who’d been with the coach throughout his career retired. Nobody was capable of pushing back to curb Belichick’s own worst instincts – until owner Robert Kraft eventually decided it would be best if he left altogether.
Belichick has yet to confirm whether he will continue coaching elsewhere. But he will leave New England 15 wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s NFL record of 347 wins as a head coach. That alone should be enough for him to test the waters elsewhere. And there’s the not-so-insignificant fact that he still has juice as a defensive coach.
Over the past couple of years, he’s wrestled back and forth with ceding control over his preferred unit. Whenever the Patriots struggled defensively, Belichick reasserted his authority, and lo-and-behold they’d find themselves back atop the defensive standings.
Even as this past season devolved into misery, Belichick found a way to squeeze as much out of his defense as possible. Over the final 10 weeks of the season, the Patriots defense ranked fifth in EPA/play, a measure of down-to-down success. And they did so without any single A-plus star.
Belichick is unlikely to ride off into the sunset when he continues to coach one side of the ball at such a high level and he’s within touching distance of Shula’s record.
It’s worth reflecting on what has happened over the past 24 hours. Belichick follows two other veteran head coaches, Nick Saban and Pete Carroll, in leaving their posts. Carroll was shifted into an advisory role with the Seattle Seahawks. Saban, arguably the finest college football coach in the history of the game, decided to retire.
Belichick, Saban and Carroll are the architects of all that is right and good about modern defense. Working together in Cleveland, the Saban-Belichick axis formed a signature defensive style that lives on in every playbook at the pro and college level to this day.
Carroll built the Legion of Boom, the preeminent defense in recent modern NFL history, contorting the foundations that Belichick and Saban had laid in Cleveland, New England and Alabama. If you’re making a Mt Rushmore of the most impactful and influential football coaches this century, those are the first three faces that should be chiseled into the rock, with a spot free for Andy Reid or Mike Tomlin.
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All three exiting within 24 hours of each other is a sign of the shifting sands of the sport. Their legacies – as one-man forces and defensive architects – will live on, but their styles and success will be tough for anyone to replicate. All were obsessive visionaries. All put up an uncommon level of success: Belichick the highest number of Super Bowls; Saban the highest number of national championships; Carroll one of only three coaches to win a college football national championship and a Super Bowl.
And while all three are on their way out, they all could still do it at the highest level. Saban isn’t going out at the very top, but he’s pretty damn close. Carroll, for his flaws in building a staff over the past couple of years, was still churning out playoff-caliber teams in his 70s. If he wanted to uproot and move elsewhere in this coaching cycle, he’d be at the top of plenty of lists.
Bill Belichick will always be linked to his partnership with Tom Brady. Photograph: David J Phillip/AP
Then there’s Belichick. He will immediately be the most sought-after coach on the market, and ESPN reports that the Patriots will let Belichick, who still has a year left on his contract, join a team without seeking anything in return. Atlanta looms as the obvious destination. Falcons owner Arthur Blank and Kraft are close, so Blank will know what he’s in for if he makes a move for Belichick.
For Belichick’s sake, he needs to find an owner who’s brave enough to make it clear he will not have total control over his new team in the way he did at the Patriots. The concern would be he lands with an organization that buys into the Belichick aura, one that wants to win the press conference rather than build a successful team. The Washington Commanders and Carolina Panthers slot neatly into the new/tempestuous owner vortex. Both are likely to chase big names to reboot their flagging franchises, although it’s unclear if ownership would be willing to tell Belichick he needs to change. If the Los Angeles Chargers or Las Vegas Raiders miss out on Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, then those linger as potential destinations, too. A Justin Herbert-controlled offense paired with a Belichick defense in LA? Can we book the parade route now?
Then there are the teams still in the playoffs. Every coach in the postseason will get fidgety if they go one-and-done knowing that Belichick is sat out there.
Belichick finished with a 22-29 record over his final three seasons in New England. This last season was painful, but there are still signs, buried beneath the rubble, that he can be a top-tier coach elsewhere.
Saban and Carroll should offer some perspective. Carroll spent the final years in Seattle desperately seeking out new approaches – he just failed to fully realize them. But it’s Saban, his former understudy, that Belichick can learn from most of all.
When Saban’s dynasty started to falter, he pivoted his style. For years and years, he had turned to his old buddy Belichick for inspiration. Belichick, for a long time, was at the forefront of every kind of innovation. On defense, he consistently reshaped his principles. When you see any of the new-fangled trends on defense these days, it’s worth remembering Belichick and Saban had crafted them back in Cleveland.
On offense, Belichick had a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback capable of altering his game to whatever the coach required. The Patriots were the first to embrace the spread offense in the NFL. They were the first to crank up the tempo. They were the first to use multiple, hybrid tight ends to mess with defensive matchups. They included backs in the passing game at a time when teams were still steamrolling their runners into the line of scrimmage. They jumped on to the RPO train before such a thing had filtered into the broader footballing lexicon. When defenses eventually adapted, he returned to the good ol’ days, building a bruising attack to take advantage of lighter defensive fronts.
For 23 years, Belichick was always ahead of the curve. He had the finest quarterback paired with the sharpest schemes.
When Brady retired, things splintered. It’s not so easy to shapeshift when you’re working with mere mortals. And as Belichick struggled to keep up, he continued to look backward rather than press ahead to the future. He brought in his old defensive coordinator to run the offense and his old special teams coach to serve as a quarterback guru. When that blew up his face, he turned to Bill O’Brien, another retread of the Patriot Way, to try to get things back on track. But Belichick retained overall control. The group never moved into 2023, despite O’Brien’s credentials, with Belichick instead demanding his offensive coordinator run an offense more in keeping with a 2012 version of the Patriots offense than anything you see on Sundays these days.
Maintaining success is never as inspiring as building it. But Belichick’s brilliance as the commander-in-chief of the Patriots was that he delighted in its maintenance while also chasing the new. Over the past three years, that rush to find fresh ideas evaporated. He closed ranks, relying on those he worked with before – or shared his surname – rather than dragging in help from outside.
In the end, he was done by undone by his own mismanagement. As Alabama started to wobble, Saban ditched the approach he had preached for 15 years and swiveled, in one offseason, in a fresh direction that reignited his program. He brought in Lane Kiffin, architect of offensive fireworks and off-the-field scandals, to bring his program into the 21st century. He put up with Kiffin’s antics, for as long as he could, for the championship payoff at the end.
That decision gave Saban’s Alabama a second wind. Kiffin was swiftly booted, but his ideas stayed, and national titles came rolling in with them. Belichick stayed wedded to what he knew, keeping things increasingly in-house once Brady headed to Florida. The answer to almost all problems: More Belichick.
There was a theory circulating in the 48 hours after the end of the season that Belichick could still reboot from within. That he could find outside voices to run the offense and the team could bring in a general manager to take over personnel control. But maniacal competitors like Belichick don’t often hand power back once they’ve received it. He wanted to go out on his terms, doing things his way – and he did.
If there’s to be a final act beyond the Patriots, Belichick the coach needs to break up with Belichick the executive. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/22/fca-appoints-london-stock-exchange-boss-nikhil-rathi-as-ceo | Business | 2020-06-22T11:39:22.000Z | Kalyeena Makortoff | FCA appoints London Stock Exchange executive Nikhil Rathi as CEO | The UK head of the London Stock Exchange, Nikhil Rathi, has been appointed chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, making him the first BAME leader of the UK’s City regulator.
The Treasury announced Rathi’s appointment on Monday, formally replacing Andrew Bailey, who led the watchdog for almost four years years before becoming the governor of the Bank of England in March. Christopher Woolard, the FCA’s executive in charge of competition, has been serving as the interim boss since January.
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Rathi is the first BAME individual to lead Britain’s financial regulator, including the Financial Services Authority, which was launched by the then Chancellor Gordon Brown in 1997 and replaced by the FCA in 2013. The lack of BAME leadership has come under increased scrutiny in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, sparked by the killing of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police last month.
A survey published on Monday by Business in the Community, a network dedicated to responsible business, found that BAME professionals made up only 10.3% of the 3.7m leadership roles across the public and private sector last year. However, people of black and minority ethnic backgrounds make up about 14% of the UK population.
Commenting on Nikhil’s appointment, Business in the Community’s race equality director, Sandra Kerr, said: “Diverse appointments to key roles in the financial sector help to shift the dial for representation at all levels. This is a crucial time for decision-makers in boardrooms across the country and a diverse and inclusive workforce will strengthen businesses’ capacity for making the right decisions as we enter the recovery phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Rathi, who is of British-Asian background, has been the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange’s UK division since 2015 and was well known to officials in the Treasury, where he served as a director of its financial services division for five years from 2009.
Commenting on his appointment, the 40-year-old said: “In the years ahead, we will create together an even more diverse organisation, supporting the recovery with a special focus on vulnerable consumers, embracing new technology, playing our part in tackling climate change, enforcing high standards and ensuring the UK is a thought leader in international regulatory discussions.”
The former FCA board member Mick McAteer said that Rathi’s appointment was a “very big statement” on the regulator’s priorities post Brexit, given his background in international financial services. Between 2009 and 2014, Rathi led the Treasury’s work on the UK’s EU and international financial services interests and served as the London Stock Exchange Group’s international development executive.
McAteer said: “It sends a powerful signal that the FCA is likely to become more internationally focused in the post-Brexit world. The regulator is likely to play a bigger role in protecting the City as a pre-eminent international financial centre, given the potential loss of business post Brexit.”
However, the former regulator said it was important that consumer protection remained a top priority. “For years, prior to the FCA being created, consumer protection played second fiddle to financial stability and market regulation. Campaigners will need to be on their guard to make sure that this does not happen again.”
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Rathi will now prepare for a grilling by MPs from the Treasury select committee, as part of a pre-commencement hearing to be scheduled before he takes up the role in the autumn.
He will be paid an annual salary of £455,000 at the FCA, plus a pension worth about 12% of his basic pay. That is higher than his predecessor, Bailey, who was on a salary of £449,000, plus pension pay worth about 9%. However, Bailey also received bonuses and other benefits that bumped his total package up to £589,000 for the year to March 2019. Rathi will not be entitled to a bonus or paid any other benefits.
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said: “We have conducted a thorough, worldwide search for this crucial appointment and, through his wide-ranging experiences across financial services, I am confident that Nikhil will bring the ambitious vision and leadership this organisation demands.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jun/08/the-quarry-review-review-playstation-xbox-pc-supermassive-games | Games | 2022-06-08T14:46:31.000Z | Malindy Hetfeld | The Quarry review – engrossing buffet of horror staples | In a scene familiar to anyone who has ever watched a horror film, two young people are driving down a road at night, affectionately bickering about being lost. “We’re the L word,” Laura (Siobhan Williams) tells her boyfriend Max (Skyler Gisondo). “What, lesbians?” he says, but the banter comes to an abrupt end when Max runs into a large animal on the road. Or … was it? In the prologue alone, The Quarry offers up a buffet of horror staples, from eerie rustling in the woods to the sudden appearance of a shifty-looking policeman played by Ted Raimi.
The main story begins two months after Max and Laura’s accident: the counsellors at Hackett’s Quarry summer camp are just packing up the last of their belongings when an accident forces them to stay another night. Camp owner Chris Hackett (David Arquette) tells them not to leave the safety of the lodge under any circumstances, so of course the group immediately begins to plan a party. These preparations are our leisurely introduction to The Quarry’s cast, a familiar yet entertaining range of archetypes from jock to social-media-obsessed barbie doll to wallflower, as well as to the rhythm of play: exploration and dialogue choices interspersed with frantic button-pressing in moments of tension. We’re given several hours to really get to know them before the game unleashes its horrors.
By developer Supermassive Games’s own admission, The Quarry is a game designed for people who don’t usually play video games. The action is simple and can be adjusted to suit the player’s individual accessibility needs, and gameplay never involves more than one button at a time. You can even pick what you want characters to do and just watch the whole game as one long movie. It is refreshingly unprecious of Supermassive to create a game that doesn’t have to be played like a game, but it does come at the expense of engagement. A lot of the tension in games such as this comes from accidentally flubbing a button press, and that is hardly possible here. Only rifle shooting offers room for error, thrilling sequences where the whole camera shakes with your character’s adrenaline while your target rapidly closes in.
The dialogue choices, too, feel inconsequential – you choose between sympathetic and rude responses, and though you’re shown how your conversation partner feels about your choice of words, it doesn’t seem to lead to any in-game consequences. But the relative lack of gameplay doesn’t mean that The Quarry lacks variety. There are no less than 186 different endings, and while most players won’t see more than a handful, it’s nice that no two people’s experience will be quite the same. There’s a little bit of everything, including chases, running and hiding, and splatter horror that’s as gruesome as it is unexpected.
Once it gets going, The Quarry is consistently engaging despite its lack of gameplay complexity, presenting itself not as a jump-scare-laden mystery, but as an exploration of its characters’ reactions to fear and danger. While horror influences abound, it still makes time to let teens be teens – in one scene Dylan (Miles Robbins) and Kaitlyn (Brenda Song) are making their way through a dark forest, always fearing a sudden attack, but still find the opportunity to talk about the stuff that really matters, namely Dylan’s camp crush. The dialogue in these moments is particularly strong, not only because the teenagers sound like actual teens, but because the characters are by turns quippy and bracingly honest.
You will probably leave with several favourite characters, having glimpsed their lives beyond that one night of supernatural threats. You’re never left in doubt about what the threat actually is, and that only serves to prove that classic monster and ghost stories still work despite all their tropes, or indeed precisely because of them. The Quarry’s charming writing and cinematic presentation make it an engrossing horror caper – even if this is, paradoxically, a game that’s often at its best when you’re not actively playing it.
The Quarry is out 10 June; £59.99. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jun/12/david-haye-retires-from-boxing-tony-bellew-defeat | Sport | 2018-06-12T16:32:00.000Z | Kevin Mitchell | David Haye bows to the inevitable after injuries and Bellew loss take toll | Kevin Mitchell | Nearly eight years after he vowed to retire on his 31st birthday, David Haye was adamant on Tuesday that he is walking away from boxing for good. Revealing for the first time details of long and painful back surgery that curtailed the latter part of his career, he said: “I have given my heart and soul to boxing for 27 years.”
And no sooner had the transatlantic shouting match between Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder descended into another strident and pointless exchange than Haye stole everyone’s thunder – although it was hardly a surprise, given the way Tony Bellew battered him to defeat in the fifth round of their rematch at the O2 Arena in London last month. It was a brave, doomed farewell for the former world cruiserweight and heavyweight champion who, at his best, was among the most exciting fighters in the world.
He strongly suspected before the fight that the future belonged to Joshua, Bellew, Wilder and a hunting pack of young and not-so-young contenders – such as Tyson Fury – who are too strong and fresh for him, but he was determined to find out for himself the only way he knows how: in the ring.
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Joshua and Wilder are now locked in a ping-pong match of offer and counter-offer, although the odds are their unification fight will take place in the UK this year, probably after the British multi-belt champion makes a mandatory defence against Alexander Povetkin.
Shelly Finkel, the American’s co-manager, told ESPN: “Deontay has accepted his terms to fight in the UK. Deontay sent an email to Joshua [Sunday] night, and I sent one [Monday] to Barry Hearn and Eddie telling them that we officially accept the offer to fight under the terms they gave us and to send us the contract.”
Eddie Hearn responded by saying: “It’s great that he’s come back to us. We made this offer about four weeks ago and I don’t know if he’s come back because he’s heard we’re close to closing the Povetkin fight or whether he wants the fight. But, either way, he’s going to be getting a contract from us asap.”
It is the sort of exchange Haye was adept at throughout a 32-fight career that began in 2002 and which delivered some great nights – winning the cruiserweight title from Jean-Marc Mormeck in Paris in 2007 – and less memorable evenings, such as his 12-round survival exercise against Wladimir Klitschko in 2011, after which he attracted universal ridicule for blaming his poor performance on a sore toe.
The latter part of his career will be remembered for serial cancellations because of injury, particularly ahead of aborted bouts with Fury. But he lit up British boxing like few other big men, an uncompromising knockout artist who stopped 26 of his opponents, while failing to get to the final bell three times himself.
David Haye after his memorable win over Jean-Marc Mormeck in 2007. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters
In a long and detailed statement, Haye said: “Thanks to boxing, I have been able to live my unencumbered childhood dream, a dream my dad, Deron, facilitated the moment he took me to Fitzroy Lodge amateur boxing club as a nervous 10-year-old.”
He added: “In the first eight years [of his professional career], everything ran smoothly. I had 25 fights and became the first British boxer to unify the cruiserweight division. I then achieved my childhood dream when I beat the WBA champion Nikolai Valuev, the seven-foot-two, 150-kilogram ‘Beast from the East’.”
He also revealed for the first time the full extent of his physical struggle in recent years. “If I had it my way, I would have fought as many as 16 times in the last eight years. But, unfortunately, my faulty body only allowed me to step through the ropes on seven occasions for four wins, three losses. Often it was a fight just getting to the ring in one piece.
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“In the past five years I have snapped both biceps, my rotator cuff and my achilles tendon. All four injuries were potentially career‑ending and each of them required operations with months of intense rehabilitation.
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“The biggest physical challenge I had to face, however, was spinal surgery in March 2015. I herniated a disc in my lower back 10 years ago and years of intense training wore this disc away. This caused fragments of disc to push into my spinal nerve passage, resulting in chronic pain and loss of function in both legs. An operation was required to put a two-centimetre metal cage between two vertebrae and implant two metal rods with screws and bone grafts to fuse it all together.
“This was one battle I had to fight in private, and it’s only because the process was recorded for a documentary that people will one day be able to grasp the severity of the situation.”
With The Hayemaker, there is always a deal around the corner. He is a promoter now and will no doubt bring his special brand of hype to the business – and, given the details of his injury problems, will not be tempted for one last big night in the ring, whatever the money. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/25/ministers-may-toughen-response-to-indecent-exposure-after-wayne-couzens-inquiry | UK news | 2024-03-25T15:00:53.000Z | Robert Booth | Ministers may toughen response to indecent exposure after Wayne Couzens inquiry | The Home Office and police chiefs are to consider toughening their response to indecent exposure after a public inquiry into how Wayne Couzens was able to rape and murder Sarah Everard in 2021.
The home secretary, James Cleverly, said on Monday that he accepted the recommendations of a public inquiry into the case of Couzens, which last month called for “a fundamental review of the way masturbatory indecent exposure is treated within the criminal justice system” amid fears it is a precursor to physical assaults.
Cleverly said: “Huge strides have already been taken to root out officers not fit to wear the badge and bolster safeguards to prevent the wrong people joining the force. Now we will work with policing partners to understand the link between indecent exposure and an escalation in behaviour to ensure the right measures are in place to catch more criminals, earlier.”
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The government also accepted the recommendation by the inquiry’s chair, Lady Elish Angiolini, to commission research on the link between masturbatory indecent exposure and subsequent “contact offending”. There will be a public campaign to boost reporting of indecent exposure and the sending of unsolicited photographs of genitals, both of which are criminal offences.
Couzens, who pleaded guilty last year to three offences of indecent exposure, with other charges left on file, was allowed to work for several police forces before he raped and murdered Sarah Everard, after picking her up on a London street in March 2021.
Last month Angiolini published a 361-page report damning police culture and finding Couzens had been allowed to continue working despite being the subject of reports to police for indecent exposure and that officers showed “apathy and disinterest and found reasons not to pursue the cases”.
She found that he was allowed to serve despite a woman’s claim he raped her in 2006 while he was a special constable with Kent police, and another allegation he raped a woman in October 2019 while he was an officer with the Met. He is also alleged to have tried to sexually assault a man dressed in drag in a Kent bar in summer 2019, during which he used his status as a police officer to silence the man’s complaints. She found Couzens was also alleged to have had indecent images of children and was also alleged to have attacked a child.
Some of the allegations were not reported to police before Couzens killed Everard, but eight allegations were passed to officers, with next to nothing done.
Last month, the government set out changes to the police disciplinary system to automatically suspend any officer charged with an indictable offence. It also set out legislation that it said will make it easier to sack officers who fail to hold basic vetting approvals when rechecked, as well as anyone found guilty of gross misconduct.
Couzens was not a “bad apple”, Angiolini found, citing the imprisonment of a second police officer from the same unit as Couzens – the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command – for multiple rapes and serious sexual offences against 11 women.
Her report found he should never have been hired as a police officer in the first instance. He was employed by the civil nuclear constabulary despite being in debt, which the vetting rules in 2011 said should be a bar to being hired. When he was hired by the Met in 2018, Scotland Yard missed material on the police national database linking his car to an allegation of indecent exposure in Kent in 2015. The same forced bungled a vetting check in 2019 by missing his potential sexual offending, and gave him a gun.
The case “damaged the social contract on which British policing is based, namely policing by consent”, she said.
Laura Farris, minister for victims and safeguarding, said: “Sarah Everard’s murder shocked the nation, devastated her loved ones and has profound implications for the future of policing. The Angiolini inquiry comprehensively reviewed the facts and circumstances that contributed to Wayne Couzens’ offending and we are grateful to her for her work.
“We have already made a series of significant changes to police vetting, disciplinary and dismissal procedures. But we accept her further recommendations on non-contact offences and the escalatory risk that they may pose. We are determined to leave no stone unturned in preventing an offence of this kind from ever happening again.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/oct/05/global-heating-weather-temperatures-climate-impact | Environment | 2023-10-04T21:09:35.000Z | Adam Morton | Global heat is now ‘gobsmackingly bananas’, but there’s hope humanity can limit the climate damage | Adam Morton | “Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” is not standard scientific language, but these are not standard times, scientifically.
New data shows average global temperatures in September were not just the hottest ever recorded, but 0.5C above the previous record for the month. They were about 1.8C above temperatures in pre-industrial times, before humans started pumping vast amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The scientist and writer Zeke Hausfather is not prone to hyperbole but was quick to put this into context on social media, saying it was – in his “professional opinion as a climate scientist” – bananas. “It’s hard to overstate just how exceptionally high global temperatures are at the moment,” he said on Bluesky.
‘Gobsmackingly bananas’: scientists stunned by planet’s record September heat
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We’re seeing this in Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology reports that mean temperatures across day and night were even warmer when compared to what we’re used to: 2.43C above the long-term average Australians experienced between 1961 and 1990.
Maximum temperatures – the ones we really need to worry about as we head into summer, when we know heatwaves kill more people than bushfires or other extreme weather events – were 3.38C higher than the long-term average.
The hottest times of the day were particularly ridiculous in southern parts of the continent. In New South Wales, maximum temperatures across September were 5.07C warmer than what we would have expected late last century. Other states were not far behind.
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While some set new records, it was not the hottest September ever across the continent – that prize is still held by 2013. But with forest undergrowth lush after three drenched La Niña years, there is plenty to worry about as temperatures rise in the weeks and months ahead.
Bushfires are already burning in three states, including more than 70 in NSW. One of those has destroyed homes on the NSW south coast. We’re not even halfway through spring.
The why of this has been well covered. The simple version is we’re in an El Niño event, which generally makes things hotter. It exacerbates the clear underlying trend of global heating caused by rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
I suspect many people may be less across the reasons that we should be optimistic – however cautiously – that humans can get their act together and at least limit the damage from the climate crisis.
The push for nuclear energy in Australia is driven by delay and denial, not evidence
Adam Morton
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A report last week by the International Energy Agency – a Paris-based body that was once known for underplaying the rise of renewable energy – makes a case that a change is happening, at least for some technology.
It’s worth a closer look, not least because fossil fuel backers often claim the IEA says the world needs more of what they’re selling. This report – an updated roadmap for how we could keep the global goal of limiting heating to 1.5C within reach – clearly does not say this.
As Carbon Brief has pointed out, it makes three main points. The first is that some important clean energy tech – solar energy, electric cars and battery production – is now being rolled out at a record pace, in line with what is needed to reach global net zero emissions by 2050. Under the IEA’s pathway to zero, solar and EVs could provide one-third of the global emissions cuts needed by 2030.
This tells us that rapid change is possible. In the case of solar, it suggests that it can leapfrog fossil fuels as a primary energy source in the developing world, if influential countries tailor their support in that direction.
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Climate crisis: UN secretary general warns ‘humanity has opened the gates of hell’ – video
The second point is that, more than ever, we have the technology. Two years ago the IEA estimated that the clean technology needed to provide nearly half the emissions reductions across the planet by 2050 was not yet available. That gap has now dropped to 35% as new technology – batteries and electrolysers, for example – has come on. It is likely to continue to fall.
It means the main goal now must be rapid acceleration before 2030. That’s easier said than done, but it’s possible using proven and in most cases affordable strategies. The agency says global renewable energy capacity needs to triple, the pace of energy efficiency improvements needs to double, EVs and heat pump sales need to rise sharply, and methane emissions from fossil fuels – including leaks from coal and gas mines – need to be cut by 75% in that timeframe.
For the clean tech to have the impact that’s required, the approval and development of new fossil fuels needs to stop. This is the third point. It’s consistent with what IEA chief, Fatih Birol, said when the first roadmap was released two years ago.
‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief
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The IEA now says a concerted expansion of renewable energy could cut global demand for fossil fuels by 25% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. As a result, the world does not need new or extended coalmines, or coal plants that do not capture and store their emissions (and no power stations are meaningfully doing this).
Crucially, in an Australian context, it also says there is no justification for approving new oil and gas developments. It argues that continued investment in some oil and gas projects that either already exist or have been approved is not inconsistent with the global net zero goal, but that the transition to clean energy must be carefully sequenced to ensure there is enough energy to avoid price spikes, but not so much that there is a glut of supply.
If properly handled, the IEA expects this would translate to a significant decline in the global gas supply – a 20% drop by 2030 and a nearly 50% cut by 2035.
The implications of this are pretty clear, if not politically popular.
New fossil fuel developments should not be approved without factoring in global climate goals. And governments will need to take a more interventionist role and make science-based calls about which energy projects should go ahead.
Given the evidence, anything less might be described as bananas.
Adam Morton is Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/28/tippett-symphonies-nos-3-4-symphony-in-b-flat-review-crisp-sinewy-revival | Music | 2019-02-28T15:00:37.000Z | Andrew Clements | Tippett: Symphonies Nos 3 & 4; Symphony in B flat review | Andrew Clements's classical CD of the week | First performed in 1972, Michael Tippett’s Third Symphony was written during what was perhaps the most successful period of the composer’s career. The premiere of his third opera, The Knot Garden, at Covent Garden in 1969, had been a huge success. He had also tapped into a totally new audience in the US, which he first visited in 1965, and where he returned regularly for the rest of his life. The Third Symphony reflects his new enthusiasm for American culture, with its vocal finale in which a soprano soloist, partnered by a flugelhorn, sings a series of blues. It’s intended to offer a 20th-century response to the expressions of universal brotherhood proclaimed by the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, which Tippett quotes in his own last movement.
Tippett: Symphonies Nos 3, 4 & B flat … album artwork. Photograph: Hyperion Records
So much of Tippett’s output has become unfashionable in the 20 years since his death, it’s reassuring to discover how well the Third Symphony still stands up, both musically and idealistically, in a far more cynical age. Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, completing a cycle of Tippett symphonies they began last year with the First and Second, propel it with an almost confrontational sinewy intensity, with every texture crisply defined. Rachel Nicholls is the feisty soprano soloist in the finale, which is almost a dramatic scena, looking back to the world of The Knot Garden, and especially to its character of “freedom fighter” Denise.
As this recording shows, though, the symphony is a far more robust, less modish achievement than the opera, and one much more likely to persist in the repertoire. But Brabbins and the orchestra cannot make such a convincing case for the birth-to-death span of the Fourth Symphony, premiered in 1977. It seems to lack the substance of its predecessors, being more an orchestral display piece (it was composed for Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony) than a tough-minded symphonic argument.
Brabbins’ two discs now line up against the only previous cycles on disc, by Richard Hickox for Chandos, and a Decca set that’s shared between performances under Colin Davis (for the first three symphonies) and Solti (for the Fourth). All three have their different merits, but Hyperion offers a bonus with the first ever recording of Tippett’s Symphony in B flat, premiered in 1934 but withdrawn after a handful of performances, and not heard again until Brabbins revived it last year.
Fundamentally neo-Romantic, indebted to Sibelius and with few hints of the direction Tippett’s music might take over the next decade, it’s now a historical curiosity more than anything else, but rounds out the survey nicely. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/21/the-guardian-view-on-tory-plans-for-send-cuts-the-wrong-move | Opinion | 2022-07-21T17:46:39.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on Tory plans for Send cuts: the wrong move | Editorial | What becomes of the government’s plans to reform special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision in English schools will depend on who the next prime minister and education secretary are. But the proposals that have been out for consultation are concerning in several ways. For those directly affected, they are a source of justified anger and anxiety.
The government wants to solve problems that have emerged since it redesigned the system in 2014, and replaced statements of special educational needs with education, health and care plans (EHCPs). Since then, demand for plans that set out an individual young person’s entitlement to support has climbed sharply. So have appeals against refusals to grant them. Currently there are 473,255 children in England with an EHCP, compared with 232,190 with statements in 2014.
As demand has risen, so has the cost to the councils that fund them. In March, the government estimated additional spending at £1bn a year, and said that investment “cannot continue to rise at the current rate”. If its proposals are adopted, compulsory mediation and an intermediate assessment stage will be introduced along with price bands, in an effort to cut costs and reduce the number of cases taken to tribunals, where 96% of claims are upheld at least in part.
But while the Conservative leadership contenders put on a great show of straight talking, none of the party’s leading figures seem likely to admit what is staring them in the face. Tory schools policies are responsible for the rising cost of specialist help: directly, because they extended the entitlement to age 25, but did not fund this (and have changed accounting rules so that councils will soon be blocked from running deficits on their schools budgets); and indirectly, because they have made schools into less inclusive places.
Real-terms funding cuts and the failure to address recruitment and retention problems are probably the largest causes. These have left schools less able to manage the full spectrum of children. Another issue is the fashion, actively promoted by ministers, for extremely tight discipline, such as penalties for pupils who touch each other or avoid eye contact. While such measures may support learning in some contexts, there is little doubt that children with complex needs find them challenging. A third point is the reorientation of the whole system around timed exams, and the extent to which schools are held accountable on the basis of results.
There have recently been some tentative steps towards a more holistic emphasis – for instance, Ofsted’s promise to crack down on “off-rolling” (informal exclusion). But ministers should not be surprised that their regime has led many parents to conclude that their Send children can no longer be catered for in the mainstream.
It may be that, over time, the bandwidth can be widened to make schools more accommodating to children with diverse needs – thus reducing the need for individual support. There is nothing wrong with making this an aim. But the thrust of government policy has been in the opposite direction, with academic achievement emphasised at the expense of everything else. To criticise the adversarial nature of the tribunal system, while making clear the intention to spend less on EHCPs, is contradictory and provocative. To reduce entitlements now, when schools and families are already struggling as a result of the pandemic and because the government has refused to invest in an adequate education recovery package, would be deeply irresponsible. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/13/britain-tv-news-right-gb-bbc | Opinion | 2021-01-13T15:28:19.000Z | Jane Martinson | Is Britain's TV news at risk of being dominated by those who shout loudest? | Older, Brexit-supporting men who live outside London are really unhappy with the BBC. A survey commissioned by the Times first said so, followed earlier this week by Lord Botham, writing in the Telegraph on behalf of “country people” fed up with the “woke” BBC. “There is another unaccountable institution that Britain got fed up with,” he warned. “The European Union and its officials in Brussels made the mistake of thinking that we would always grin and bear it.”
There has long been an alignment of interests between those who despise the EU and those who despise the BBC for its publicly funded journalism. This confluence has also been demonstrated by British newspaper owners and their editors; now two new television ventures are providing a fresh outlet.
In the coming weeks, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, owner of the Times and other papers, will reveal plans for a livestreamed “alternative” to existing TV news. Last week GB News, led by the former BBC presenter and Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, announced funding for its new 24-hour channel to serve the “vast number of British people who feel underserved and unheard” by existing television news channels.
Much ink has been spilled over what this potential Foxification of the airwaves will do without much thought for the fact that the culture war over Britain and its place in the world has already been led by the UK’s rightwing press, most of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and other Brexit-backing billionaires. The differences with the US are many, from the expectation of impartiality on TV, governed by regulation, to a print media that is far more opinionated than its US counterparts.
What both countries share, however, is the tendency for the biggest billionaires to claim they speak on behalf of so-called ordinary people. Indeed, one of the ironies of this battle for the hearts and minds of the British television viewer is that many of the BBC’s bitterest critics live so far outside the south-east of England that their main residence isn’t even in the UK.
The threats to tear down the BBC have not gone away. Watch this space
Alan Rusbridger
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The Australian-born American citizen Murdoch is at least now living in Oxfordshire with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall. The chairman and a founding partner of Legatum, the investment firm that stumped up some £20m to become co-lead investor in GB News, is the New Zealand-born, Dubai-based Christopher Chandler. The US media group Discovery Inc is the other co-lead investor. Its significant shareholder is John Malone, the libertarian and erstwhile Murdoch cable rival.
Neil intends GB News to be “proudly independent and fearless in tackling the issues people care about, especially in communities outside London”. It is true that the BBC does have a satisfaction problem (relatively speaking) among those licence-fee payers who live outside the wealthier, more diverse parts of the UK. The BBC’s internal research and that of the media regulator, Ofcom, suggests that people from poorer, less-diverse communities get less satisfied the farther they live from the south-east, with this process culminating in some resentment in Scotland.
Despite this, more than 90% of the population still use BBC news. What’s more, 78% believe it is high quality, while 71% say it is trustworthy. Those are far higher figures than for any newspaper and particularly the tabloids such as the Express and Mail, which have long been the BBC’s sharpest critics.
Decent, accurate journalism costs money, and GB News’s £60m war chest will allow chairman Neil to hire 140 staff members, most of them journalists. The buzz that comes with a new venture has much currency and Neil, a canny and hugely experienced journalist himself, will hope for access despite his own criticism of the prime minister for not turning up to his BBC show.
It is not yet clear how closely the new players will abide by the spirit of Ofcom’s impartiality rules, which allow for fines and indeed outright bans for real transgressions. But if timing is all, the timing of this is dreadful, coming as it does after rightwing US broadcast media have been partly blamed for stoking the fires of populist dissent to such an extent that last week a Donald Trump-supporting mob carved “Murder the Media” into a door in the US Capitol.
Neil has indicated that he will not be looking to ape Fox News. The smart money is on the sort of combative “newstainment” often heard on LBC radio with a roster of presenters from all political stripes. Piers Morgan is said to have been courted by News UK, given the way his Marmite presentations have led to increased figures for ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
The older, male critics the BBC needs to be most worried about, of course, are those in government who have taken to calling it “the Brexit-Bashing Corporation”.
The danger is not that the UK may grow to enjoy opinionated news presenters, but that a still-powerful press culture and shouty television news will leave too little room for an organisation that depends on universality to survive. The BBC may well become so cowed by attacks loud and silent that it is no longer able to grin and bear it.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
This article was corrected on 14 January 2021. Christopher Chandler is not the owner of Legatum as stated in an earlier version. The ITV programme presented by Piers Morgan is Good Morning Britain, not GMTV. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/may/29/sexist-robots-can-be-stopped-by-women-who-work-in-ai | Guardian Careers | 2017-05-29T06:00:18.000Z | Jessica Bateman | Sexist robots can be stopped by women who work in AI | When Microsoft debuted its AI chatbot “Tay” last year, she greeted Twitter users excitedly, gushing that she was “stoked” to be on the social network and that “humans are super cool”.
Within 24 hours Tay, which was designed to emulate a teenage girl, was telling followers to “f*** her”, calling them “Daddy” and declaring “I f***ing hate feminists”. Microsoft subsequently abandoned the project and deleted her from the internet.
Of course, Tay’s offensive outbursts were partly due to internet users’ determination to interfere with a corporate PR stunt. But they also highlighted a major problem faced by the AI industry: if robots learn from humans, there’s a good chance they’ll also adopt the biases – gender, racial and socio-economic – that exist in society. Personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa have already drawn criticism for being given subservient female personas, and the more we come to rely on AI, the more we’ll be affected by this bias.
Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of AI directory and community CognitionX, is particularly alarmed by AI’s potential for gender bias and, in an effort to address this, is spearheading a campaign to get more women working in the field. “When you look at what’s going on in AI with a feminist cap on, it becomes very apparent that the biases that already exist in society will be exacerbated or reinforced,” she explains. “As soon as I realised this, my antennae pricked up and I thought, ‘Someone needs to be keeping an eye on this’.”
Soon robots could be taking your job interview
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Goldstaub says the main areas in which AI gender bias will negatively impact people’s lives are healthcare; smart cities and automated cars. She adds that “if we’re just designing for male bodies” then insurance and finance, automated HR processes and education will also be affected. There may be issues around who’s awarded loans or policies; women may miss out on job opportunities; and as learning tools may end up being designed for boys.
“AI is such a new field that these issues really aren’t being discussed enough yet,” she says. “There are all these ethics questions flying around, but if we get more women into the industry and make them brave enough to ask these questions, people will start listening.”
The issue of healthcare is being focused on by Maxine Mackintosh, a data scientist and founder of One Health Tech, a network that promotes women in the field. “I come from a health background, which has a large number of women working in it,” she explains. “When I moved over to the health tech sphere, I was surprised how few women there were. The contrast is stark.”
Mackintosh explains that, if a bias is detected in an AI’s algorithms, then it’s easy to rectify simply by re-programming it. It’s getting people to be aware of the bias in the first place that’s the hard part. “The environment in which AI is tested has a dearth of women in it,” she says. “We do events, mentorship and conferences. We try to bring women over from healthcare to the health tech sphere, as that’s really where the future is.
“We also try to repackage and redefine tech roles to make them more attractive. Lots of people are tech people, they just don’t see themselves that way.”
This touches on a point affecting all areas of the Stem world: deeply ingrained cultural attitudes have, of course, held huge sway over who is encouraged and promoted in the field. Only 16% of computer science graduates are women, and the gender division intensifies further up the company food chain you go.
Traditional ‘female’ skills are so important to AI, whether it’s nurturing, caring, problem-solving or critical thinking
Tabitha Goldstaub
Silvia Chiappa is a senior research scientist at DeepMind, a Google-owned AI company, where she sits on its diversity steering group. “Since my PhD, with few exceptions, I’ve been working in places with much fewer women than men,” she explains. “I also noticed that the number of women decreased in proportion to seniority.”
As well as working on diversity initiatives within the company, Chiappa has been involved with several outreach projects to promote the field of AI to those who may not otherwise consider it a career option, such as visits to schools in low-income areas of London and a South Africa-based summer school.
“Our aim is to encourage young women to aspire to careers in Stem and give them a platform to voice their ideas,” she says. At the South African summer school, which will take place in September this year, African researchers and practitioners will have the chance to learn from world-leading experts and better understand the diversity of careers in the area.
Other initiatives aimed at improving the diversity of those entering the field include Founders4Schools, where tech leaders teach pupils about different career options available to them, and Acorn Aspiration’s AI Hackathon, which introduces young people to AI skills. “As the field is relatively young, the skills haven’t been promoted in schools in the same way, say, coding has,” explains Goldstaub.
Chiappa believes the education system needs to go one step further, though. “We should establish a specific degree in machine learning, and actively encourage women to apply,” she says. “I also believe the work-life balance issue is important to address. Women often drop out of employment to look after children.”
Why tech needs to stop treating women as tokens
Harriet Minter
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All the women agree that one of the biggest hurdles is making people understand what AI jobs involve, and removing the image of them as being for only super techy people. “In order to address this issue, we can’t just have tech people in the field,” says Mackintosh. “We need people from areas such as anthropology, economics and politics too.”
Goldstaub says she’s an example of someone in tech with an atypical background, having studied an arts degree and suffering from severe dyslexia – “I literally can’t do maths,” she laughs. “Traditional ‘female’ skills are so important to AI, whether it’s nurturing, mothering, caring, problem-solving, diplomacy, or critical thinking skills. I’m just so excited about all the potential there is for women in this field.”
And – hopefully – just what we need to stop the robot workforce of the future succumbing to the same fate as Tay.
Looking for a job? Browse Guardian Jobs or sign up to Guardian Careers for the latest job vacancies and career advice | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/24/joe-biden-armenian-genocide-recognition | US news | 2021-04-24T18:10:27.000Z | Julian Borger | Biden becomes first US president to recognise Armenian genocide | Joe Biden has become the first US president to declare formal recognition of the Armenian genocide, more than a century after the mass killings by Ottoman troops and opening a rift between the new US administration and Ankara.
Biden vows US will work with Russia on climate
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“The American people honour all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday.
“Beginning on 24 April 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”
Biden called the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Friday, to inform him that the US would make the designation on the 106th anniversary of the genocide. The conversation was reported to be tense and the issue was not mentioned in official accounts of the exchange.
Biden’s statement was immediately denounced by Ankara.
“Words cannot change or rewrite history,” the foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said on Twitter. “We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice. We entirely reject this statement based solely on populism.”
A statement from the foreign ministry said: “It is clear that the said statement does not have a scholarly and legal basis, nor is it supported by any evidence. This statement … will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual trust and friendship. We call on the US president to correct this grave mistake”
The American people honour all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today
Joe Biden
A senior US administration official said Biden would have made the declaration no matter what the state of bilateral relations with Turkey.
“This is something that’s been a deeply held conviction of President Biden for a very long time going back to when he was in the Senate and it was a position that he made very clear during the campaign,” the official said.
The official also made a connection to the upsurge of issues of identity around the Black Lives Matter movement and attacks on Asian Americans.
“I would say we’re also at a moment, including here in the United States, where people are grappling with their histories, and the impact of of those those histories and so I think even just historically it is the right moment to do this.”
Turkey’s status as a Nato member and longtime regional ally has prevented US presidents from making a formal designation. But relations between Washington and Ankara have soured dramatically in recent years.
The declaration marked the culmination of decades of lobbying by Armenian American organisations.
“This is a critically important moment in the defence of human rights,” said Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America. “It’s been a long journey. President Biden is standing firm against a century of denial, and is charting a course for human rights everywhere.”
Words cannot change or rewrite history. We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu
The killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians was carried out as the Ottoman empire was collapsing and the modern state of Turkey was being born. Many victims died in death marches into the Syrian desert. The slaughter is widely viewed as a crime on a monumental scale – and a grim precursor to the Nazi Holocaust.
Ronald Reagan referred the Armenian genocide in passing in a statement on the Holocaust in 1981, but it was not followed by a formal recognition. Barack Obama promised Armenian Americans he would take that step but reneged once in office, unwilling to upset an ally. In 2019, both chambers of Congress declared their own recognition, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to stop them.
Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish political scientist, said the Biden declaration would be a seminal moment in relations between Ankara and Washington, but said economic considerations may force Erdoğan to downplay the impact of an issue he previously considered an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the modern state.
“It’s not the first time that a US president comes to office pledging to recommend the Armenian genocide,” said Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research program at the Washington Institute.
A gathering in remembrance of the 1915 genocide at the Armenian Martyrs Monument in Montebello, California, on Saturday. Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters
“What happened in the past was as soon as these presidents took office, departments of government would brief them. That’s not happening now and this is linked to changing US views inside Washington. Now Turkey is one of the most disliked countries, especially at the Pentagon.”
He said the Turkish decision to purchase the Russian S-400 air defence system was the main reason for the change in attitude. Policy disputes over the Kurds and Islamic State have also played a role.
Biden to visit UK in June for first overseas trip as president
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Administration officials noted that Biden had sought to soften the impact on relations with Ankara, emphasising that the genocide was carried out before modern Turkey was born and that the focus was not on blame but remembrance.
“The statement makes very clear that the point of this was was not to place blame,” the senior official said. “It talks about the Ottoman-era atrocities. And I think this this really was done in a very principled way to focus on the legacy of these atrocities and is very much forward looking as well, in the hope that we are able to prevent such atrocities from happening again in the future.”
Samantha Power, a former US envoy to the United Nations and now Biden’s nominee to run the US Agency for International Development, tried and failed at the last hurdle to persuade Obama to recognise the genocide.
She said on Twitter it was “sad to think of all those who worked so hard for recognition but didn’t see it happen. First and foremost, the community of survivors – nearly all of whom have passed away. Genocide denial caused them and their families immense pain.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/12/malala-yousafzai-calls-free-education | World news | 2013-07-12T15:30:00.000Z | Amanda Holpuch | Malala Yousafzai calls on governments to provide free education for all | Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban, delivered a powerful address to the United Nations in New York on Friday, calling on governments around the world to provide every child with free education and denouncing the terrorists who attacked her.
Malala, who was ambushed on a bus in Pakistan's Swat valley after promoting girls' access to education, said that she would not be silenced and instead stepped up her campaign to eradicate illiteracy and poverty.
Speaking to a delegation of more than 500 young people, Malala said: "On the night of 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought the bullet would silence us, but they failed."
She criticised the Taliban for their interpretation of Islam in their attack on girls' education. "They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits," she said.
Malala called for women around the world to be "brave" in their struggle to fight back. "Let us arm ourselves with the weapon of knowledge and let us shield ourselves with unity and togetherness," Malala said.
In November, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon declared 12 July, her birthday, Malala Day. While introducing her on Friday at the UN headquarters in New York, Ban said that by targeting Malala, "extremists showed what they fear most: a girl with a book."
In her speech, Malala dedicated the day to women around the world. "Malala Day is not my day: today is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights," Malala said.
She delivered her remarks from a raised platform and said she was wearing a shawl belonging to the late Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.
"Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions injured, I am just one of them," Malala said. "So here I stand, here I stand, just one girl among many."
She said she was at the UN to speak for the education of every child and that she believes peace is necessary for education. "This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone," she said.
"So today, we call upon the world leaders to change their strategic policies in favor of peace and prosperity," Malala said. She then called on all governments to offer free education, to fight against terrorism and protect children from violence. "We are really tired of these wars," she said.
Malala called on women to take up the fight, and not expect men to do it for them. "I am focusing on women's rights and education because they are suffering the most. There was a time when women asked men to stand up for their rights, but this time we will do it for ourselves."
She said this was not a call for men to step away from women's rights but that she wanted to focus on encouraging women to empower themselves. "We can not all succeed when half of us are held back," she said.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who escorted her to the UN meeting, described Malala as "the most courageous girl in the world".
Malala was sent to a British hospital for rehabilitation after the assassination attempt and now attends Edgbaston high school for girls in Birmingham. She also set up the Malala Fund to direct money to education efforts for young women in Pakistan and around the world.
A Unesco and Save the Children study (pdf) released to coincide with the speech shows that 57m children around the world are out of school.
The study shows that the amount of primary school age children who are not attending school has fallen from 60m in 2008, but the number of children in conflict-affected countries who are not in school rose from 42% to 50%.
A Unesco report released last month warned that efforts to reduce the number of children out of school has hit a "virtual standstill."
The data also shows a 6% drop in international aid for basic education between 2010 and 2011 and an 11% drop in aid for secondary education. Six of the top 10 world donors – Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the US – have cut spending. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/nov/25/post-2015-goals-citizen-participation | Global Development Professionals Network | 2014-11-25T16:08:44.000Z | Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah | Citizen voice in post-2015 goals: is anyone listening? | One of the biggest complaints levelled at the millennium development goals (MDGs) is that they were a technocratic creation, aimed at increasing and focusing aid flows, and produced without public consultation or ownership.
By contrast, the United Nations insists that when it comes to agreeing what will follow the MDGs, there should be an “open and inclusive consultation process, led by member states and engaging all stakeholders” (pdf). While the process so far has certainly been more open than almost any other intergovernmental process of this nature, it is still unclear whether civil society inputs will make a lasting difference or indeed whether the goals will truly reflect what citizens want.
The UN’s open working group (OWG) has been the primary vehicle for identifying what the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) should look like. The group recommended 17 goals and 169 targets which will form the basis of the formal government negotiations expected to kick off in January 2015, culminating in a new global framework for development at the Post-2015 summit in September 2015.
Since the process began civil society organisations have been able to join thematic clusters, working to ensure all issues on the table have a strong citizen voice. Representatives were also invited to brief the Kenyan and Hungarian working group co-chairs, and ‘major groups’ – representing the key sectors of society – have also had their opportunity to contribute, some of which is included in the final report.
But the working group process has not been the only mechanism for participation. The My World survey asked people all around the world to rank a set of priority issues. A more nuanced attempt was made by the Participate Initiative that collected views from the most marginalised groups, including through their innovative ‘ground level panels’, a response to the UN’s high level panels.
As with any initiative led by organisations in the global north, a real barrier to inclusion has been the frequency and location of meetings. This has resulted in a process dictated by government missions based in New York, often with varied positions from their respective capital cities, resulting in a disconnect between global priorities and local realities. With high air fares, expensive accommodation and monthly meetings set over a 14-month period, it is almost impossible for most citizens or community organisations to bring their cause or complaint to the UN.
So as we head into the next stage of negotiations, there is a strong chance that diplomatic horse-trading and interventions by capitals will start to dominate and the voice of citizens will be completely silenced. But is civil society foolish to expect otherwise?
Our intergovernmental institutions have been built on the assumption of the primacy of member states and, while there are now more opportunities than ever to participate, the process is still owned by governments. Until we redesign our global governance institutions to be more accountable to the peoples of the world we will never get intergovernmental agreements that are reflective of what those citizens want.
The other danger here is that civil society will spend too much of its time trying to get a phrase inserted here or a word changed there in the final document, rather than invest in ways to hold governments to account for the commitments they make. New technologies make it easier than ever to monitor development progress, from citizen-reporting on public service delivery to tracking aid expenditure. The post-2015 goals could offer a powerful global framework for promoting national-level or even local-level accountability.
Very few people around the world are likely to care about the finer details of the post-2015 agreement, but many more would seek this information if they knew what their governments were up to and how that activity impacted upon their daily lives. Those of us in civil society should do our best not just to ensure an ambitious set of goals, but also to connect the dots back to the people we say we represent. We must ask of ourselves this difficult question: if in September next year the goals we set out to monitor are not the same as the things people most care about, will we also have failed?
Civicus is incubating www.thedatashift.org, an initiative to build civil society capacity to generate, use and curate data for monitoring development progress.
Read more stories like this:
All that glitters...why growth and development aren’t the same thing
The new development agenda: six priorities from Amina J Mohammed
MDGs: facing up to the limitations of global goal setting
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/24/getup-to-launch-marriage-equality-campaign-tool-after-electoral-rolls-close | Australia news | 2017-08-23T18:00:06.000Z | Paul Karp | GetUp to launch marriage equality campaign tool after electoral rolls close | Progressive group, GetUp, has developed a website to coordinate groups campaigning for marriage equality after the rolls close for Australians wanting to participate in the same-sex marriage postal survey.
The new campaigning tool, built in conjunction with the Equality Campaign, will be launched as early as Friday, after the Australian Electoral Commission cutoff for the last enrolment applications at midnight on Thursday.
The website will be a hub for community organisations and individuals who want to campaign, to register their support, list events and access campaign resources for the yes campaign.
Resources will include tools to help supporters of marriage equality convince others and to encourage them to vote in the voluntary postal ballot, which will begin with the mail out of survey forms on 12 September, if it survives a high court challenge.
Australian marriage equality vote explainer – the answer's in the post
Read more
The executive director of the Equality Campaign, Tiernan Brady, has previously told Guardian Australia the campaign will rely on a network of 1,300 community organisations, faith groups, unions and corporations who have committed to help.
The Equality Campaign has a database of 200,000 who have signed up to help the campaign and is connected to an additional 250,000 people through social media. But the tool will help the Equality Campaign and GetUp reach a wider number of organisations and supporters.
Brady said that until midnight on Thursday the campaign’s “biggest focus” was to ensure people enrolled or updated their details.
“We’re mobilising tens of thousands of people at train stations, student campuses, and through the media.
“Our message is: if you want to have your say, you need to get on the roll.”
On Wednesday an analysis of the updates to the electoral roll since the postal survey was called showed that new enrolments were dwarfed by people updating their details, suggesting that there has not been a surge of youth enrolments.
Labor leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, said new enrolments were “lower than I would like”.
“What I would say to people is if you’re not on the roll, you can’t vote for marriage equality, and we risk handing too much of an advantage to those on the other side who will stop at nothing to deny equality to same-sex couples in this country,” she told the ABC on Wednesday.
Labor LGBTI spokeswoman, Terri Butler, said Labor MPs and volunteers were “very supportive” of the Equality Campaign’s enrolment push and were working “on social media, street stalls, standing at ferry stops to get people on the roll, you name it”.
Updated figures from the Australian Electoral Commission showed that between 8 and 22 August 54,545 people enrolled for the first time, with a further 523,334 enrolment updates for a total 577,879 enrolment transactions.
Brady was upbeat about the fact more than half a million people had signed up or changed details. He argued that people tended not to update their details between elections so the fact they had done so outside the normal cycle showed they were engaged with the campaign.
“They know if they’re details aren’t right they won’t get their ballot – they can’t walk up to a polling place … and it’s especially important for people abroad, who can usually vote at the embassy, to register to get a ballot.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2023/jun/18/ashes-england-australia-edgbaston-rain-cricketing-dads-bazball | Sport | 2023-06-18T19:08:59.000Z | Jonathan Liew | What we talk about when we talk about cricketing dads isn’t as simple as Bazball | Jonathan Liew | The rain came to Edgbaston early on the third afternoon, with the Australians still batting and a nasty swirling wind that whipped you in the face like a wet towel.
Edgbaston, it has to be said, is not the most auspicious place to be when it rains. Most of the seats are entirely open to the elements, and so when the weather hits the only places to take shelter are the poky little gangways at the bottom of each stand. And so here we cowered and shivered, pressed up against roughly 2,000 other punters all jostling for this same tiny parcel of dry land, patiently waiting for Damien Martyn and Adam Gilchrist to resume their innings. Dad sipped a cold pint. I drank tea out of a flask. We didn’t talk much. We never talked much.
When we talk about cricketing fathers, we’re usually thinking about lineages and dynasties. Mickey and Alec Stewart. Chris and Stuart Broad. Ian and Anya Shrubsole. But most of the time the influence is more subtle than that. It’s the strange ambient noise of the television in the next room or the radio in the garden. It’s long sun-blanched afternoons sitting on the grass watching Dad doing silly things in a white costume. It’s boring Sunday morning car journeys to colts games or All Stars sessions. In my case, it was the annual pilgrimage to watch England lose at cricket.
Dad was not, by even the most generous definition, a cricket fan. I think he got vaguely absorbed in the game when he moved to London in the late 1970s and had a flatmate who watched it. But he probably couldn’t have named more than a few England players or picked Brian Lara’s face out of a lineup. What really swung the dial was the discovery, in the Ashes summer of 1993, that he could plonk his only son in front of the BBC’s Test match coverage and thus obtain seven hours of free, public-service childcare.
But without realising it, he had created a monster, one that demanded constant feeding. A bat and ball. Pads and gloves. Membership of the local junior club. Car rides to places such as Gunnersbury and Southgate. Books; so many books. And eventually, after years of slowly ratcheting pressure, a day at the Test. It became our little ritual: the Oval in 1998, the World Cup in 1999, West Indies in 2000. Always the side-on or restricted view seats; always day four or five if possible. I discovered cricket via a route that is no longer open for most people today: terrestrial television, cheap and plentiful newspapers, tickets that were still – just about – within reach for a struggling west London family.
England’s Mark Butcher celebrates the wicket of Brett Lee during the third day of the Ashes first Test at Edgbaston in 2001. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images
Dad would pack lunch and a flask of tea, and on finding our seats would invariably be asleep within a few overs. When he awoke he would quickly tire at the glacial pace of play. “Just whack it,” he would grumble as the batter left yet another harmless delivery outside off-stump. At which point I would patiently and earnestly explain how it just wasn’t as simple as all that, how you had to consider the variables of swing and spin and uneven bounce and the game situation. Now, watching Bazball in full flow, I realise that it really was that simple. Dad was right. And I was wrong.
I suppose the point of telling you this is that all of us who love this game owe somebody for it. Of course when we’re young we like to imagine our choices are entirely our choices, our passions self-selecting. But hardly anyone finds cricket on their own. More often it’s something given as a gift, taught and explained, passed on and bequeathed by a well-meaning loved one. Sometimes that person is a mother, or a friend, or an older sibling. But a lot of the time, it’s a father. And sometimes it’s a father who doesn’t even really like cricket very much, and is already plotting his exit from his family home.
As the clouds again unloaded on Edgbaston early on the third afternoon, perhaps it was the sight of those very same gangways – populated, quite possibly, by the very same people as they were in 2001 – that brought the old memories flooding back. Perhaps it was the fact that Sunday was Father’s Day, which doesn’t mean a great deal to me any more, because Dad and I haven’t been in touch for many years, and I don’t know where he is now, but every so often something reminds me of him, and these days it’s often cricket.
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The scorecard from that Test tells me that I saw Martyn hit a century, Gilchrist smash 152 at better than a run a ball, Mark Butcher take the only four-wicket haul of his international career and Michael Atherton getting out to Glenn McGrath (which admittedly doesn’t narrow it down a huge amount). Of all this I have only the haziest recollection. But I do remember being huddled in the concourse, the taste of tea from a hot flask, the silence between us, the sense of lives that were drifting apart but still just about entwined. Maybe cricket was our way of saying the things we could never say aloud. It was the last Test match we attended together. As parting gifts go, it was a pretty good one. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/02/students-poverty-trap-means-testing | Opinion | 2012-05-02T11:44:10.000Z | John Hills | Why next year's students could be facing a poverty trap | John Hills and Ben Richards | This autumn, many English students will get some form of means-tested support through bursaries or fee reduction depending on their parents' incomes. Each university has designed its own system to soften the rise in fees, which is up to £9,000 in most cases.
Almost all these bursaries or fee reductions involve significant "cliff edges" in support, often with a drop of several thousand pounds if parental income two years earlier had been just above particular thresholds, such as £16,000 or £25,000.
Last year we saw strong reactions to steep cliff edges like this with the government's original proposal to withdraw child benefit if a parent tripped into higher rate income tax. That involved a potential sudden drop in annual income of £1,058 for a one-child family or £2,415 for a three-child family. Many of the student support systems we have examined involve much bigger drops – often of £3,000, but sometimes much more.
Our survey, from the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, looks at the offers that 52 larger universities made to English applicants in January. It shows that students from low-income families will generally receive greater financial support at the more prestigious Russell group universities than they would at others.
In the new system prospective students are supposed to compare what is on offer. But these offers differ in so many ways – such as whether you went to a state school, whether you were on free school meals, where you live, whether the university was your first choice, and whether you are a first-year student – that it is difficult to make any comparisons. Small differences in parents' incomes – which applicants may not even know about – can make thousands of pounds' difference in which offer is best.
A typical scheme from one of the Russell group universities, combined with government grants, gives fee reductions or bursaries totalling about £6,000 for students from families with incomes up to £25,000, falling to about £4,500 just above it and then tapering off to be withdrawn by the time family income reaches £43,000. Just by itself this implies an effective tax rate of 33% of additional income over the range – with much higher ones at particular earnings levels – but all of this comes on top of income tax, national insurance and reductions in tax credits.
In the most extreme case, Oxford University offers first-year students fee reductions and bursaries worth £13,050 (with government grants) if their parents earned up to £17,000 in 2010-11, but nothing if they had earned £44,000. But after allowing for differences in tax, tax credits and benefits, the family on £44,000 would only have been £13,250 better off in the first place. The £13,050 difference in student support cuts the gain from £27,000 of extra earnings to only £200. In effect they faced a 99% tax rate.
Of course, means-testing is meant to focus support on those with lower incomes, but there are limits to what makes sense. Effective tax rates anywhere near, let alone above, 100% are what create the "poverty trap", seen as damaging to work incentives, and unacceptable to those just above the cut-off for help. Here the system is extending a poverty trap to those with middle incomes.
In this case, people are unlikely to understand the rules of the system well enough to change their behaviour in advance, such as by cutting hours or turning down overtime. But after the event they may well be aggrieved if they discover that their family is little or no better off – or even worse off – as a result of having had higher earnings.
A main plank of the coalition government's social security policy has been to try to unify means tests through the new universal credit, scheduled to come in 2013, which is designed to simplify the system and avoid the worst aspects of the poverty trap. But other parts of government such as those responsible for universities and local government are developing systems that run in precisely the opposite direction.
More generally, the problems show just how hard it can be to protect the poorest when any substantial universal benefits or services are withdrawn and the limits to what can be done through means-testing without painful side-effects.
If you work in higher education and would like to share your knowledge and insight by contributing to the debate on key issues, visit the Guardian's network for higher education professionals. Join the network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/sep/10/tom-freer-obituary | From the Guardian | 2010-09-10T15:13:39.000Z | John Amis | Tom Freer | My friend Tom Freer, who has died aged 88, was a Gloucestershire man. He was a handsome fellow, could be good company, despite a retiring nature, and was always keen to learn. Anything he knew about, he knew a lot about.
Tom was born in Little Compton. After attending Scaitcliffe school (now Bishopsgate school) in Surrey, he went to Eton and gained an exhibition to Cambridge in 1939, which he turned down in favour of the army. He was rejected as being too young, so he then applied to the RAF, expressing the wish to be a navigator. At the interview he was persuaded to be a pilot.
He trained on Tiger Moths in South Africa and on Bristol Blenheims, Avro Ansons and Bristol Beaufighters in the UK. He went by ship to Ghana and was soon delivering Beaufighters to Egypt. Later he was based with 227 Squadron in Malta. He shot down a Heinkel bomber and a Junkers Ju 88. He was personal pilot to Sir Keith Park, head of Fighter Command at the time of the Battle of Britain.
Tom was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was shot down and interned in Turkey, but escaped to Cyprus and then Egypt, where he became an instructor. He was active in the Sicily landings and the invasion of the Dodecanese islands. In September 1944 he was posted to 272 Squadron in Foggia, Italy. He was shot down attacking the Italian battleship Conte di Cavour, ending up at the PoW camp Stalag Luft III.
On returning home after liberation in May 1945, he decided to walk the last four miles to Little Compton. News of his release had not reached his home and his parents did not immediately recognise the son they had last seen six years previously. But the dogs did – they yelped with joy in a scene that reminded Tom of the return of Ulysses.
He briefly returned to the RAF at Filton, Bristol, and then had a varied career in civil flying – including transporting the Hallé Orchestra. He worked for Croydon Airport Charter Company, Scottish Airlines and British European Airways, becoming a test pilot and even having a go at the Comet 4. He was an expert skier into old age. Seaplanes, maps, the mouthpieces of horns, badgers and otters were some of his other special interests.
For 40 years he loved and looked after Miranda Mackintosh. They finally signed marriage certificates in 2002. She survives him. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/jul/21/readers-favourite-uk-coastlines-british-seaside | Travel | 2023-07-21T10:00:40.000Z | Guardian readers | ‘The coast is vast and the skies overwhelming’: readers’ choose their favourite UK coastlines | Solitude and sky, Northumberland
For low-tide loveliness, the coastline between Alnmouth and Cresswell in Northumberland takes some beating. With the tide out the beaches and skies are overwhelming, especially on a sunny day. The coast is vast, so if you like solitude you’ll find it here. You have the bonus of a wander into the beautiful village of Warkworth and the small town of Amble. Access to public transport in this area is pretty good too, considering its remoteness.
Barry Peaden
Wind and waves, Lancashire
‘Lonely Georgian houses’ at Sunderland Point. Photograph: Tony Wright/Alamy
The 13-mile long Fylde coastal plain between Rivers Wyre and Ribble has subtle charms – wide horizons, incandescent sunsets, mudflats, marshes, racing tides, redshanks, curlews and lapwings. The handful of lonely Georgian houses at Sunderland Point, nakedly exposed to wind and waves, are cut off twice daily as the causeway is submerged at high tide, so plan your visit with care. Heading south, Glasson Dock grew through the cotton trade to be the main port in the north-west – a history that is hard to reconcile with its languorous present. You can cycle to Lancaster in half an hour on the old branch line, visit the smokehouse where there’s “nothing added except smoke, salt and time”, and watch the boats on the Lancaster canal.
Martin Charlesworth
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Lovely Llŷn peninsula, Gwynedd
Llandbedrog beach in the distance, with Snowdonia in the background. Photograph: Sophie Ware/Alamy
Llanbedrog beach on the Llŷn peninsula in north Wales is a lovely beach owned and run by the National Trust. It is picture-postcard perfect, with a row of colourful beach huts along the edge for hire. To get there you need to follow the road down towards the sea from the village. On the right you will pass some handy public toilets, then further along, just before you get to the beach, is a popular cafe that serves breakfast and lunch. The beach is sandy, protected and shallow, so ideal for families. It’s also quieter than other beaches nearby. If you get good weather I couldn’t think of a better place to spend the day than on this beach.
Julie Casey
Hold the fort, Arran
Coastline near King’s Cave, Arran. Photograph: Lisa Morgan
Easy to get to yet delightfully wild, the Isle of Arran offers an accessible way to reconnect with the natural world. Walk the spectacular stretch from the King’s Cave car park, near Machrie, to Blackwaterfoot and spot sea otters hunting for crabs, seals basking on the rocks and gannets nose-diving into the clear blue waters. Then there’s spooky King’s Cave with its legends and ancient carvings, and dinosaur “pawprints” fossilised into the rock. But the showpiece is the prehistoric Doon Fort. Jump from boulder to boulder as you round the headland beneath towering vertical cliffs before crossing the sands to Blackwaterfoot, with its quaint honesty-box bakery full of flaky pastries.
Lisa Morgan
Traditional family fun, Essex
Frinton-on-Sea. Photograph: Chris Pancewicz/Alamy
A walk north from Frinton-on-Sea is a few miles of perfect family Essex beachland. On your left, you’ll pass double rows of candy-coloured, cheerfully named beach huts; on your right you have huge flat stretches of ochre sand, broken only by the regular black lines of groynes. Shallow and sloping, it’s perfect for letting dogs and children run wild, collecting sea glass and shells. Crossing round The Naze – which means headland in Old English, but as a child I was convinced it referred to its nose-like shape – will bring you to Walton-on-the-Naze. Round off the day there on the pier, with an ice-cream and some traditional penny arcades.
Sophie
Dunes and Downs, West Sussex
West Beach, Littlehampton. Photograph: Simon Turner/Alamy
West Beach, Littlehampton nestles in the Climping Gap, the only undeveloped coastline between Bognor Regis and Brighton. It’s a walk along the river from Littlehampton station and is a protected nature reserve backed by sand dunes, fields and views of the South Downs. All of the benefits of the sunny south coast climate without the crowds. The further west you go, the quieter it is. Undeveloped also means no shops, so bring your own provisions, but there is the excellent West Beach Cafe at the entrance to the beach. Top it off with fresh dressed crab and a pint at the Arun View pub on the quayside before catching a train home.
Leigh
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Great escape, Cumbria
Silloth. Photograph: Chris Lewis/Alamy
For me, the best areas of coast have that effect of drawing you out of yourself as you look out to sea. There’s no better place to do that than from Silloth in Cumbria, with its expansive, endless sea views. Locals will proudly tell you that Turner painted here, but my interest is even more romantic. During the second world war my (southern) grandfather was based here and met my grandmother, marrying months later. Made up of wide, flat, open spaces, it’s a town you can imagine teenagers wanting to escape from, but the captivating coastline will keep drawing visitors back.
Sarah
Sea life in Shetland
Orcas in Mousa Sound, Shetland. Photograph: Hugh Harrop/Alamy
Take the short ferry trip in season from Sandwick in Shetland to the island of Mousa for a bracing walk around the island. The highlight is a well-preserved iron age “tower block”. In actual fact, Mousa broch is a 2,000-year-old round house which, for a short period each summer, accommodates nesting storm petrels. Other birds are easy to observe too – the island is an RSPB reserve. If you are lucky you can also see harbour porpoises on the boat over and seals on the beach.
Emma
England’s best, Cornwall
Heading for Zennor from St Ives. Photograph: Alec Scaresbrook/Alamy
The coast path from St Ives to Zennor is the best path in England. It’s physically challenging and gloriously varied as you skirt coves, descend to the coast then rise to the cliffs, watching seals and seabirds among wildflowers, rills and granite boulders. The Tinners Arms pub in Zennor is a satisfying end point for a pint of cider and the topless bus back to St Ives.
Stephanie
Winning tip: Eerie Anglesey
Ynys Llanddwyn. Photograph: Jane Bainbridge
Anglesey (or Ynys Môn) has some amazing coastline, with the bonus of feeling remarkably undiscovered, so you often get the walks to yourself. In the south-west corner lies Newborough Forest. This is classic pine forest stretching down through dunes to wide sandy beaches, full of birdlife – and if you’re lucky you’ll see red squirrels, too. Full of paths and tracks, best of all is when the tide is out – you can walk to Ynys Llanddwyn, with its ruined ancient church, standing crosses and old lighthouse. Take a picnic and soak up the atmosphere of this eerie, beautiful spot.
Jane Bainbridge
This article was amended on 31 July 2023. An earlier version referred to the Fylde coastal plain being between Rivers Lune and Wyre, when it is between Rivers Ribble and Wyre.
Use the comments to tell us about a stretch of UK coastline you particularly enjoy | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/30/portuguese-police-apologise-to-madeleine-mccann-parents | UK news | 2023-10-30T09:18:33.000Z | Geneva Abdul | Portuguese police apologise to Madeleine McCann’s parents | Portuguese police have apologised to the family of Madeleine McCann for the handling of the unsolved case, more than 16 years after the three-year-old’s mystery disappearance in 2007.
Earlier this year, a delegation of police officers travelled from Lisbon to London to apologise for the handling of the investigation and how the family was treated, according to BBC Panorama.
In 2007, Madeleine disappeared from her parents’ holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve, triggering a huge missing person investigation. During questioning, Gerry and Kate McCann were named as formal suspects or “arguidos”.
The McCanns have not commented on the Portuguese police apology.
In 2020, German police said they believed Madeleine to be dead. In 2022, Portuguese officials named Christian Brückner, a convicted German sex offender, as a formal suspect – the first identified in the case since Madeleine’s parents were declared as such.
Brückner is serving a seven-year term in Oldenburg prison in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in the same area of the Algarve where Madeleine went missing.
According to the BBC, Kate was offered a deal to admit covering up her daughter’s death in exchange for a shorter sentence. The arguido status was eventually lifted in 2008 when police submitted their final report.
After the case was shelved, the McCanns were later implicated in their daughter’s disappearance by a former detective. The family lost a European court of human rights challenge after their libel case against the former detective was thrown out by Portugal’s supreme court.
“It is hard to describe how utterly despairing it was to be named arguidos and subsequently portrayed in the media as suspects in our own daughter’s abduction,” Kate McCann said previously. She added it had been “equally devastating to witness the detrimental effect” it had on the search for her daughter.
One of the German prosecutors on the case, Hans Christian Wolters, told the BBC the apology was a “good sign”. “It shows that, in Portugal, there’s development in the McCann case,” he said.
Last year, Brückner was charged by German prosecutors with three offences of aggravated rape of women and two offences of sexual abuse of children – none of them linked to Madeleine’s disappearance. The case is due to go to trial in February 2024, according to Wolters.
Friedrich Fülscher, said his client, who has not been charged, was exercising his right to silence. “We know the contents of the files and I think the charges are all based on very, very shaky foundations,” Fülscher told the BBC.
Earlier this year, German investigators searched a large section of the Barragem do Arade reservoir, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz. German prosecutors at the time said the items discovered in the three-day operation might be linked to her disappearance but have not yet been confirmed as evidence.
The original police investigation resulted in an Anglo-Portuguese man, Robert Murat, being declared as a formal suspect. In 2008, he was cleared of suspicion and won more than £500,000 in libel damages over defamatory articles connecting him with the child’s disappearance. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/21/extinction-rebellion-london-protesters-offer-pause-climate-action | Environment | 2019-04-21T19:35:27.000Z | Vikram Dodd | Humanity is at a crossroads, Greta Thunberg tells Extinction Rebellion | Governments will no longer be able ignore the impending climate and ecological crisis, Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, has told Extinction Rebellion protesters gathered at Marble Arch in London.
In a speech on Sunday night where she took aim at politicians who have for too long been able to satisfy demands for action with “beautiful words and promises”, the Swedish 16-year-old said humanity was sitting at a crossroads, but that those gathered had chosen which path they wish to take.
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“I come from Sweden and back there its almost the same problem as here, as everywhere, that nothing is being done to stop an ecological crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises,” she told the crowd.
“We are now facing an existential crisis, the climate crisis and ecological crisis which have never been treated as crises before, they have been ignored for decades.
Swedish schoolgirl climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to the Extinction Rebellion protestors. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
“And for way too long the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything. We will make sure that politician’s will not get away with it for any longer.”
Her speech came amid police efforts to forcibly clear Extinction Rebellion protesters from Waterloo Bridge as the group debated whether to continue its campaign of mass civil disobedience. Police said on Sunday night they had cleared all the protesters from Parliament Square.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the disruption was “counter-productive” to the cause of climate change and was stretching resources so much it could damage police’s ability to fight violent crime.
Extinction Rebellion had earlier said it expected its supporters would be cleared out of the two sites occupied without permission as police prepared to evict them if they declined to leave voluntarily.
Last week, the group gained global coverage for the disruption its tactics of civil disobedience caused in central London. On Sunday, the organisers said they intended to change tack and would offer to vacate some sites in exchange for the mayor acting on some of their demands.
The Metropolitan police said they had made 963 arrests and charged 42 people. The force’s leader, Cressida Dick, said the group’s tactics, centred on peaceful direct action, had caused too much disruption.
On Saturday, Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus were returned to normal use, after complaints from businesses about the blocking of some of the capital’s key arteries.
Police dismantle the skate ramp erected by Extinction Rebellion demonstrators on Waterloo Bridge in London. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA
On Sunday, activists rushed to Parliament Square, when police turned up in force to try to clear five roadblocks. Activists were using lock-on devices to hold the space, as well as gluing themselves to the ground and each other in order to slow down the police.
Activists said there were three people locked on trees in the square with more ready to go up. They promised attempts to evict them would be “spectacular” and could take police all night. However, by Sunday evening the police said the square had been cleared.
The stage-truck on Waterloo Bridge was finally removed by 5am on Sunday after police spent most of Saturday and well into the night removing protesters glued and locked on to it. Police spent hours using angle grinders to cut free the two protesters who had locked themselves down on the top of truck, before winching them down and carrying them into the back of waiting police vans.
By Sunday night they were moving the activists to one side of the carriageway, and arresting those who are refusing to move.
The Met has needed support from about 200 officers from other forces to deal with the protests, which have been peaceful.
Khan said 9,000 officers had been involved in policing the protest so far. He said: “I share the passion about tackling climate change of those protesting, and support the democratic right to peaceful and lawful protest, but this is now taking a real toll on our city – our communities, businesses and police. This is counter-productive to the cause and our city.”
The mayor added: “I remain in close contact with the Met commissioner, and agree that Londoners have suffered too much disruption and that the policing operation has been extremely challenging for our over-stretched and under-resourced police.
“I’m extremely concerned about the impact the protests are having on our ability to tackle issues like violent crime if they continue any longer. It simply isn’t right to put Londoners’ safety at risk like this.”
Young protesters hold placards on Waterloo Bridge on Sunday. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty
The protest group said a phalanx of police vans were gathered around Waterloo Bridge on Sunday amid mounting expectation protesters would be forced out.
Ronan McNern, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, said: “We think they want everything cleared by the end of the week. People are willing to be arrested. There is a deep sense we do not want to be attached to any single site. What this disruption is doing, we are the news now. It is making people talk in pubs and buses about Extinction Rebellion. It makes them think about their existence which is under threat.”
Extinction Rebellion is discussing withdrawing from some sites in return for being allowed to remain in others and having its demands met.
Slow burn? The long road to a zero-emissions UK
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One manifesto from Farhana Yamin, an international environmental lawyer, advocated a “pause” in disruption next week to better project their demands and press for negotiations with government.
She wrote: “Today marks a transition from week one, which focused on actions that were vision-holding but also caused mass ‘disruption’ across many dimensions (economic, cultural, emotional, social). Week two marks a new phase of rebellion focused on ‘negotiations’ where the focus will shift to our actual political demands.”
She continued: “We want to show that XR [Extinction Rebellion] is a cohesive long-term, global force, not some flash in the pan.”
The Extinction Rebels have got their tactics badly wrong. Here’s why
André Spicer
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Others in the group’s leadership were planning further disruption and a meeting this week will attempt to decide on the group’s strategy. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/17/spain-to-cull-nearly-100000-mink-in-coronavirus-outbreak | World news | 2020-07-17T10:09:32.000Z | Sophie Kevany | A million mink culled in Netherlands and Spain amid Covid-19 fur farming havoc | Spain has ordered the culling of nearly 100,000 mink on a farm and an estimated one million mink have already been culled on Dutch fur farms, as coronavirus wreaks havoc in the European fur farming industry.
Joaquin Olona, agriculture minister for the north-eastern Aragon region, said the cull would involve the slaughter of 92,700 mink which are prized for their pelts.
Officials suspect the virus first reached the farm through a worker who passed it on to the animals. But Olona said it was not completely clear if “transmission was possible from animals to humans and vice versa”.
Covid-19 infections are now reported to have spread to 24 Dutch fur farms, a fur industry source confirmed. A further outbreak reported on Friday, bringing the number to 25, appears related to a planned movement of mink pups to another location. Scientists believe the initial Covid-19 infections passed from two farm workers to the mink in April. Culling began shortly afterwards.
The Netherlands is the world’s fourth biggest fur farmer after China, Denmark and Poland. Spain is the seventh largest European producer.
In Denmark, Covid-19 has been confirmed on three mink farms.
Workers in the Netherlands carry out a mink cull in Ospel earlier this month. Photograph: Robin Utrecht/Rex/Shutterstock
The Spanish mink farm – in Puebla de Valverde, about 100km (60 miles) north-west of the coastal resort of Valencia – has been carefully monitored since 22 May after seven workers tested positive for Covid-19, Olona said.
Since then no animals have left the property, which is the only mink farm in Aragon.
Officials had carried out a string of tests which on 13 July showed that 87% of the mink were infected, prompting the decision to carry out a cull “to avoid the risk of human transmission”, Olona said.
‘There's a direct relationship’: Brazil meat plants linked to spread of Covid-19
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Dutch mink farming is due to be phased out by 2024 but there are calls for closures to speed up. The Dutch parliament adopted a motion last month from the Dutch Party for the Animals calling for faster shutdowns.
On Thursday, Humane Society International (HSI), the animal welfare NGO that collected the Dutch cull data, said Covid-19 infection risks, and the conditions in which mink are bred, meant more immediate action to end fur farming was needed.
Fur farms can potentially act as “reservoirs for coronaviruses, incubating pathogens transmissible to humans” and are “inherently cruel”, HSI Europe’s public affairs director, Joanna Swabe, said.
Mink are culled in the same way they are killed for fur, using carbon monoxide and dioxide gas. Culled fur does not enter the retail chain.
Swabe said gassing is a particularly cruel way to kill mink because they are semi-aquatic animals able to hold their breath for long periods. Recent Dutch video footage appears to show a mink that survived gassing being fished out of a container to be gassed again, she said.
Prior to the pandemic, HSI said its data showed fur farming was in decline globally, mainly due to falling demand and bans on the practice.
Data from leading Finnish fur auctioneer, Saga Furs, shows that at this year’s latest auction, which started on 29 June and ended last week, 4.9 million mink pelts were offered along with 900,000 long hair pelts from foxes and finnraccoons, but only about a fifth sold. Magnus Ljung, Saga Furs CEO, estimates the auction raised about £33m, and would have been worth £200m if all the skins had sold.
Ljung told the Guardian on Friday, however, that sales were picking up again as international borders reopen, particularly to China, and orders for next week now stand at about £5m.
A press release this month from Saga Furs said “changes in consumer demand caused by the global coronavirus pandemic had [had] a significant impact on the company’s business during the current period”. Ljung stated that auctioneers “firmly believe” in future demand for responsibly produced fur and that “organisational changes” being made now “will help us to operate more efficiently … [and] take us beyond this crisis phase.”
A number of countries have already banned fur farming including the UK (in 2000), Austria and Croatia. Slovakia, Norway and Belgium are phasing it out, like the Netherlands, and bans are under consideration in Ireland, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Ukraine and Estonia.
Ban burning and burying of animals in US Covid-19 farm culls, NGOs urge
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Major fashion brands, meanwhile, are going fur free. The most recent announcement came from the Prada Group in 2019. Jean Paul Gaultier went fur free in 2018, but said more recently that he might return if traceability improved. Other fur-free fashion houses include Michael Kors, Gucci, Armani and Hugo Boss.
Mette Lykke Nielsen, CEO of Fur Europe, hopes the issues can be resolved. “We know that it was people infected with Covid-19 that brought the virus into the farms in the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain [so] we believe that good biosecurity is the answer to prevent virus from entering farms again.”
Nielsen hopes that because fur is long-lasting and fully biodegradable, unlike many fast fashion items that risk ending up in landfill, the pandemic might boost fur demand. She pointed out that 100,000 people across Europe work in the fur sector, which supports farmers, dressing and dyeing companies, furriers and retail outlets.
Laura Moreno Ruiz, a WWF biodiversity officer, said Spain now has only 38 fur farms in the country, mostly in the northern region of Galicia, down from more than 300 in the 1980s. “The species is listed as an invasive alien species since 2011,” she said.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2022/sep/29/knowing-england-luck-win-depressing-incarnation-world-cup-qatar-gareth-southgate | Football | 2022-09-29T11:00:35.000Z | Max Rushden | Knowing England’s luck we’ll win this depressing incarnation of the World Cup | Max Rushden | Nine years ago the then new chairman of the Football Association, Greg Dyke, spoke of his aims for England’s men’s football team. “I want to set the whole of English football two targets,” he said. “The first is for the England team to at least reach the semi-finals of the Euro Championship in 2020 and the second is for us to win the World Cup in 2022.”
So far better than expected, then – but one big step to come: win the blood-soaked, tainted World Cup in Qatar. It always seemed a ridiculous target on which to base any long-term success of the FA – get a dodgy decision in the semi-final and decades-old plans turn to dust.
Workers at Qatar’s World Cup stadiums toil in debt and squalor
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It’s a quote that’s followed Dyke around for years, and to be fair to him it was part of a plan to focus the minds of everyone in the game about the paucity of English talent playing in the top flight. Of course, trying to win the World Cup seems like a really good idea. In practice, history tells us that it’s slightly trickier. There are other countries in the world where football is quite popular, who also would like to win the World Cup, with teams who have excellent players – who, again, would also like to win the World Cup.
But however glaringly obvious that is, there are still those, perhaps blinded by the quality of the Premier League (without noticing the nationalities of most of the best players), who expect so much of England each time around.
It’s this kind of madness that prompts people to write in capital letters when you try to point out that Gareth Southgate is the second-most successful manager in the side’s history. YOU CALL LOSING A FINAL SUCCESS? THAT IS THIS COUNTRY’S PROBLEM ALL OVER.
As with previous England managers, it feels as if there is no middle ground – you either back him 100% or think he should be sacked immediately and replaced with Thomas Tuchel. If Tuchel isn’t interested, force him to do it against his will, with no games and just a week of training before we play Iran in November.
The hashtag #SouthgateOut trended on Twitter after Kieran Trippier was picked at left-back against Croatia at Euro 2020 – but England won the game at Wembley 1-0. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Uefa/Getty Images
Of course this nuance-less world extends to every part of England selection. Play more attackers – even if they’re out of position. What are they doing out of position? Pick a squad of right-backs. Drop all the right-backs. Build the team around Jude Bellingham. HE’S ONLY 19 STOP PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE LAD. The hashtag #SouthgateOut was trending on Twitter before England’s first game in Euro 2020 because he picked Kieran Trippier at left-back against Croatia.
The Toney-Tomori debate also elicited so much fury. How can you possibly know if they can cut it if they don’t get 25 minutes against Germany? But similarly, how can 25 minutes in one game really be an indication of whether any player is international quality? Moreover what does “international quality” really mean when elite club football is better?
It is possible to believe simultaneously that Southgate is the man to take England to Qatar but hold reservations about his tactics, or disagree with some of his selections. Given the swathes of criticism of his defensive outlook against the bigger teams, it feels counterintuitively brave to stick to those principles. England are unlikely to win the World Cup. Go down in flames and no one will complain (spoiler: they will); lose with the handbrake on and you’ve left the door wide open – and probably lost your job.
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A pragmatic manager doubted by fans? They often win the World Cup
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A lot of this comes back to how we consume football. How many of us are really invested in internationals until a major tournament begins? It’s on so we watch – but a boring game feels even more boring because you weren’t that bothered in the first place. It’s classic confirmation bias – you knew you hated the international break, it’s disrupted your weekend routine, and so it’s proved. (Granted, last Friday’s Italy game was boring by any metric.) Even the thrilling bits, those 15 minutes in the second half against Germany, are more of a passing bit of fun than something to remember. But since it’s the only game happening, it receives so much coverage despite the fact that none of us are really that interested.
What would have happened had England not staged that comeback on Monday night? I heard someone on the radio saying there would be “so much noise” around Southgate and the players for the next two months. However much I’d like to think the England manager switches TalkSport on or downloads the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast straight after a match, you’d hope for his sanity that he opts straight for his mellow acoustic Spotify playlist.
If there was a radio station called TalkTalkSport, that gave instant reaction to my shows after I came off air, hosted by current managers and players we’d just criticised, I’d probably give it a wide berth.
England supporters during a minute’s silence for the Queen before the match against Germany – the crush of football may mean the noise around the World Cup does not intensify until the days before its first game. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
And realistically how much noise is there going to be about the World Cup until the week before it starts? For the next six weeks, football is relentless: Premier League, Champions League, EFL, WSL, La Liga, etc. There is barely any time to think about it.
As for Greg Dyke’s 2013 dreams, the one reassuring thing about losing the final of Euro 2020 was that the despair didn’t last that long. Usually with every tournament exit you get another moving BBC montage and the chance to actually enjoy the rest of the football.
Knowing our luck, however, if the men’s team are going to win one major trophy in my lifetime, it’ll be this depressing incarnation – in an unsuitable country, built on the lives of migrant workers. If there is any noise before this tournament, that is what it should be about. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/30/the-boarded-up-windows-of-vital-leisure-centres-reveal-the-consequences-of-austerity-gateshead | Opinion | 2023-07-30T08:02:02.000Z | David Olusoga | When I was growing up, our leisure centre was a lifeline. Now it’s been boarded up | David Olusoga | Last Friday was a day of loss for Gateshead, my former home town, opposite Newcastle on the southern banks of the Tyne. On the very last day of the school year, right at the beginning of the long summer holidays and therefore at the very moment it is most needed by low-income families, the local leisure centre was closed.
On our family WhatsApp group, a photograph showing the familiar building, with its windows now covered by screens of plywood, began to circulate, sparking a week of childhood memories and family discussions. While this might sound like a local news story, behind it is a bigger conversation about real-world consequences and short-term thinking and profound unfairness.
I was 11 years old in the early 1980s when Gateshead leisure centre opened its doors. One of my younger siblings was at the opening ceremony, performed by the late Queen. For my family to suddenly have access to council-subsidised sports classes and recreation facilities was transformative and life-enriching. More than school, the leisure centre was the focal point of my life growing up. As it was for my siblings and the generations who came after us – right up until last Friday.
It was within its walls that I learned judo and karate, the sports that cured me of my childhood asthma and helped me overcome my crippling lack of confidence. It was at the leisure centre that my siblings and I had birthday parties with our friends.
After 13 years of cuts, the impact of profound cuts can no longer be papered over
The Britain of 2023 is a far richer nation than that of my childhood and yet the local council – its annual spending power cut by £179m since 2010 – can no longer afford to keep the leisure centre open. Its loss will have devastating consequences.
Gateshead is ranked 47th out of the 317 local authorities in England on the index of multiple deprivation. One of those consequences of that deprivation is ill health and poor levels of fitness. Just three months ago, the scale of that problem was highlighted by a health report that revealed Gateshead has levels of obesity and childhood obesity significantly higher than the national average. The same report noted that 7.9% of Gateshead residents suffer from some form of diabetes. These statistics also reflect the fact that Gateshead is ageing. The haemorrhaging of its young people, drawn south in search of work, has blighted the town and the north-east for generations.
In response to the health report, the council committed to exploring ways to encourage higher levels of physical exercise. Yet three months later, that same council closed the central piece of health infrastructure that would have been key to delivering the increase in physical exercise the report recommends. The long-term consequences of this are painfully obvious. The only hope of avoiding them comes from two campaigns led by local people who are fighting to keep the issue in the news and ultimately to take over the leisure centre and run it as a community asset.
The once ‘transformative and life-enriching’ Gateshead leisure centre. Photograph: Craig Connor/ncjMedia Ltd
Back in 2010, when the word austerity was placed at the centre of political debate, it quickly became shorthand for a set of policies that have changed and diminished the country. The term was borrowed from the age of penury in which Britain found itself immediately after the Second World War and, with its tones of wartime togetherness, austerity – in its new usage – helped not only to justify but also to camouflage the long-term results of the decisions being made.
I predict 2023 will be remembered as the year of consequences. The year when half a century of disinformation by climate change-denying politicians and journalists crashed headlong into empirical reality – the age of global boiling has begun. Here in Britain, 2023 may well be recognised as the year in which the social costs of austerity became impossible to ignore. After 13 years, the impact of such profound cuts can no longer be papered over and nothing says decline like a boarded-up building. The empty leisure centre in the middle of Gateshead is in-your-face proof of what the impoverishment of local government means. It is visible in a way that NHS waiting lists and exhausted nurses are not.
Just like the mountains of rubbish that accumulated in the streets during the winter of discontent (1978-79), once-loved facilities across the country, now either boarded up or sold to developers, are the symbol of another age of political failure. And, like the black bin bags of the late 70s, they may well also become the portents of the end of a political era.
Do the politicians who have taken us down this track really understand what we have lost? Are they truly in a position to comprehend what subsidised sports and health facilities mean for low-income families? If they have acquired such insights, they can only have done so by overcoming their own privilege.
In the same years that Gateshead has been struggling to fund its leisure centre, at Winchester college, where the prime minister spent his teenage years, a new sports centre has been under construction. The place will include a swimming pool, squash courts and a rifle range. It is beyond what even many local authorities at the top of the deprivation indices could afford. Other private schools have comparable facilities and 65% of the current cabinet attended such schools, more than nine times the number among the general population.
Even as the consequences become clear, can politicians with no skin in the game, who have never and will never have to rely on council-run and council-subsidised facilities, really understand – at a fundamental level – what their decisions mean for communities like the one in which I grew up?
David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/19/the-dark-knight-rises-review | Film | 2012-07-19T14:29:00.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Dark Knight Rises – review | The spectacular, monolithic final movie in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is like a huge piece of industrial machinery: massive, grimly and brutally metallic, capable of lifting great weights and swinging the mightiest wrecking balls, but taking its time about it.
The Batman (even after nearly a decade, no one in Gotham forgoes the definite article) has now been absent from the city for many years, and the city is happy with the specious explanation that the authorities have provided: namely, that the city's late District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) heroically gave his life fighting crime, and the Dark Knight, the arch-criminal, has slunk away. Billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne has gone into reclusive retirement: both are of course played with intelligence and no little charm by Christian Bale. But now two new subversive figures have burst on to the scene.
A slinky, sexy cat burglar, played by Anne Hathaway, shows up in disguise at a charity fundraiser at Wayne Manor with lawbreaking on her mind. But more scary still, a sinister super-villain, aptly called Bane, is planning to lead an insurrection of underground warriors to destroy the city and take on the Dark Knight. He is a muscular slab of a man with an evil hold on his many followers, and with a hideous facial disfigurement, concealed by a creepy leather respiration mask. As played by Tom Hardy, Bane has presence and force, no question about it. But Heath Ledger's Joker had more charisma, more style, a limber and nimble-footed wickedness. And the Joker had one particular demonic superpower that Bane does not have. You could make out what he was saying.
The film's release confirms what early test screenings of sample footage reportedly hinted at. Bane's animal snarl is often frankly indistinct. His voice sounds like Darth Vader shouting, while playing a bass accordion through a Harley Davidson exhaust pipe. There were times when I wanted Miriam Margoyles to come on, give Bane a brisk clip round the ear and say: "Come on, darling, en – un – ci – ay – tuh!" Well, there is arguably something bestially menacing in that very unintelligibility; actually, the voice clarifies later in the movie, though for me the problem with Bane is in any case not with his voice, more with his conflict with the Dark Knight, of which more in a moment.
This movie is operatic, crepuscular, portentous, a vision of apocalyptic catastrophe – and there are some great things in it. Christian Bale himself brings an interesting kind of wounded maturity to the double role, and Nolan elicits from Bale a performance which gives both Bruce Wayne and Batman a new life, as separate entities, by investigating their vulnerabilities and paranoia. When the Dark Knight returns, astride his extraordinary fat-wheeled motorbike, it's really exciting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a terrific performance as the young, idealistic police officer, Detective Blake, and Michael Caine is a calm, shrewd, heartfelt Alfred. Hathaway has a lovely line when some boorish male presumes to sneer at her fantastic high heels. "Do they make it difficult to walk?" She slices through his leg with one and replies pertly: "I don't know – do they?"
But the film is clotted and extended with tiring and sometimes baffling subplots concerning the frankly uninteresting shenanigans of the Wayne Enterprises Board: there is some manoeuvring and personal petitioning from one Miranda Tate, played by Marion Cotillard, who shows herself in later sequences to be not a natural action performer.
And I have to say I found Bane disappointing: his character promised much, but didn't quite deliver. The Joker's conflict with Batman was at least partly a cerebral affair, a matter of outsmarting and counter-outsmarting, and Bale raised his game in confrontation with Heath Ledger, who gave us a genuinely evil movie villain. Christian Bale is good in this film, too, of course – arguably more interesting in some ways. But there is simply no satisfying duel with Bane, and it seems to be ultimately more physical, a shuddering, juddering sumo-contest amid a panoply of CGI detonations.
The Dark Knight Rises certainly confirms the weapons that Christopher Nolan can wield as a director: this is a big, brash, plausible movie on a self-consciously epic scale, a deafening superhero Bayreuth, taking place in a gloomy, almost physical smog of testosterone. It will certainly be a commercial smash, and you have to admire the confidence with which Christopher Nolan insists on the seriousness of the Batman mythology; he has thoroughly reinvented it, reauthored it and thought it through, in a way no other director has done with any other summer franchise. But I wish there was more yin and yang in the movie, rather than yin and more yin. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/28/james-bond-ticket-to-joy | Books | 2012-09-28T21:55:09.000Z | Jonathan Freedland | James Bond – a ticket to distant joys | Some staples of our common culture are so established, so embedded in the collective consciousness, we think we know them even if we don't. Everyone knows Shakespeare, Dickens or the Beatles, even if they haven't seen one of the plays, read the books or played the music in years, if ever. They somehow linger in the air, ready to be imbibed as if by osmosis.
So it is with James Bond, perhaps the single best-known literary character of the 20th century. Everyone thinks they know James Bond. The terms – M, 007, licence to kill – have not just entered the English language, they are part of a global common currency, readily understood across the planet. When Danny Boyle sought to project Britain to the global television audience watching the Olympic opening ceremony this summer, he needed only to cast two individuals, each as mythic as the other, in a single scene: Queen Elizabeth II and James Bond.
More substantially, Ian Fleming's novels have become a template handily available to those who seek to explain aspects of our world. Any news story that touches, however obliquely, on intelligence will sooner or later feature the phrase "real-life James Bond", even if only to explain that this or that spy was, in fact, nothing like James Bond. Beyond espionage, any public figure who combines grandiose ambition, perceived malign purpose and memorable idiosyncrasy will eventually be likened to a "Bond villain".
Such an allusion requires no explanation. One need only to have come into contact with one of Bond's countless imitators – or parodies – to get the idea. There might well be a cohort of younger readers who think that, because they have seen the Austin Powers movies or The Incredibles (the 2004 animated feature that paid repeated homage to 007), they have no need to acquaint themselves with the real thing. In an equivalent impulse, there will be many more who think they have seen the films and so need not pick up the books.
Both groups would be making a mistake, on a par with thinking that because you once saw a Beatles tribute band you can skip Sgt Pepper. Readers of every stripe have good reason to return to the source from which this extraordinary cultural phenomenon sprang: the books of Ian Fleming.
For one thing, they yield an unexpectedly rich insight into an era now long gone. One drawback of the timelessness of Bond – maintained by a movie franchise that keeps 007 in a permanent present – is how easy it is to forget that Fleming was writing in, and therefore about, a very specific period. Postwar Britain, to be sure, but also a Britain caught between the dusk of empire and the dawn of decline. Bond sits intriguingly on that cusp.
So, yes, he is an imperial archetype: adventurer, explorer and, as he puts it, "a sort of policeman", ready to meddle in faraway places to lethal effect. But Fleming also knows that the muscles of empire are atrophying by the time Bond gets to work. The tell comes early, in the debut novel Casino Royale, published in 1953. Our hero duels the wicked communist Le Chiffre across the baccarat table. But, for all his skill, the former commander in the Royal Navy loses and is bankrupted – saved only by an emergency bailout from the CIA, in the form of a cash-filled envelope "as thick as a dictionary", handed to 007 at the critical moment and bearing the unambiguous message: "Marshall Aid. Thirty two million francs. With the compliments of the USA." No doubt who's top dog now.
Fleming tacitly concedes the new international hierarchy in the plotting of the sixth novel, Dr No: what gives the villain's evil scheme punch is that its target is the missile programme of the mighty United States. The author knows that in 1958, two years after Suez had confirmed London's diminished global standing, a conspiracy against Britain alone would not be enough: the plot has to involve the US, ideally drawing in the Soviet Union and the cold war.
This geopolitical landscape should draw in the historically minded reader, for it is a world that has passed now, just as the empire of John Buchan's novels was crumbling when Fleming took to his typewriter. Students of the changing relationship between men and women, and the advances won by a half-century of feminism, will also find much to seize on in the books' parade of gorgeous, eager women, usually positioned to catch Bond's eye. Naivete is a common trait, a crucial one in the case of Tatiana Romanova, deployed as bait in From Russia with Love. Honeychile Rider is even more unworldly, depicted in Dr No as part intuitive animal, part innocent child. She is, as we would expect from a Bond girl, a fantasy figure – curvaceous, unspoiled and, as her name promises, sexually eager. "You've got to wash me," she implores Bond once they are alone in the "mink-lined prison" No has set aside for them. "I don't know what to do. You've got to show me." (She is also the object of that recurring Fleming interest in what might be nudgingly referred to as discipline. "Honey, get into that bath before I spank you," Bond warns.)
There is guilty pleasure in all this, the same guilty thrill so profitably exploited by the creators of the TV series Mad Men. For Bond offers the opportunity to glimpse, even to revel in, how things used to be before progress and equality spoiled all the fun. Few contemporary thriller writers would risk a hero who treats women the way Bond does, but that was then: different rules apply.
Similarly, 21st-century audiences are often told they want their stories dark and brooding, their heroes filled with angst. But Bond appeals partly because he, and therefore we, dwell so rarely on his inner life (though the seventh novel, Goldfinger, introduces a more introspective 007). He is no cipher: we know there are "phantoms" that haunt him. But mention of them is usually fleeting, just enough to keep us intrigued. He is instead a man of action, capable of doing extraordinary things very well. And people will always long to see that.
In this age of confession, where almost every public figure feels the need to make himself more real by admitting to vulnerability, weakness and self-doubt, Bond's certainty is compelling. "His cause was just," the author tells us, when describing 007's sense of elation as he embarks on a mission. Fleming feels no great obligation to explain that confidence, just as Bond rarely feels the need to question the rights and wrongs of the task M has handed him. It is enough that he is serving his country and his Queen.
Few of us can imagine such iron certainty now. Fleming was writing before Vietnam and Watergate, before scepticism towards our governmental masters congealed into outright cynicism, before thrillers became laced with paranoia and deep, dark ambivalence. The Bond novels return us to a world of courage, ingenuity and moral clarity – and do it with consummate élan.
Fleming never forgets that a thriller has to thrill; that, whatever else it does, it must entertain. Central to such fiction's magic is the promise of escape. When Casino Royale appeared, rationing still had a year to run in Britain. To a readership still trudging through a drab, grey country exhausted by war and austerity, Fleming offered the prospect of azure skies, powder-white beaches, stunning women and handsome men. When jet travel was still a novelty and foreign tourism still off limits to all but the wealthiest, how exotically enticing must have sounded Jamaica's north coast, Miami or Istanbul. To the Brits back home, heads down against the rain, "their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes", a Bond novel was a ticket to distant joys.
And here we are again, in the early 21st century, in our very own age of austerity. That successive generations keep trying to follow where Bond led, imitating and copying him, only proves that our need for 007 endures. As every villain should know by now, James Bond is a man who can appear to die a thousand deaths – but cannot be killed.
The entire series of James Bond books is being reissued as Vintage Classics. Jonathan Freedland's novel Pantheon, under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, is published by Harper. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/14/carrie-fisher-star-wars-princess-leia-history-profile | Film | 2015-12-14T15:15:57.000Z | Ryan Gilbey | Carrie Fisher: Star Wars' resident Dorothy Parker remains riotously off-message | The actor and writer Carrie Fisher has many talents but soothsaying appears not to be among them. “I don’t think there is an inexhaustible public appetite for Star Wars,” she said while promoting The Empire Strikes Back, the second in the blockbuster series in 1980. If only she could have foreseen the levels of excitement and anticipation surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh instalment, in which she will return alongside co-stars from the original trilogy including Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.
Fisher accepted long ago that she would always be associated with her character from the series – Princess Leia, a plucky intergalactic warrior first seen in 1977 with a hairdo like two bagels clamped to either side of her head. Fisher referred to them as her “hairy earphones” and said: “I’ll go to my grave as Princess Leia. In the street, they call out, ‘Hey, Princess!’, which makes me feel like a poodle.” The great surprise is that it has not eclipsed or defined her. No matter how big the Star Wars franchise got, Princess Leia never overshadowed the woman who plays her.
‘Hairy earphones’ Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope Photograph: Allstar/Lucasfilm/Sportsphoto Ltd
The actor and director Selina Cadell, an old friend of Fisher’s from their days at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the mid-1970s, says this is easily explained. “It’s because of her eccentricity,” she tells me. “You can always feel that in everything she does and I think it’s what makes her a real star in that sense. It’s just a shame that Hollywood never understood her. She was always more unusual and gifted than most of the girls they trot out.”
Fisher can certainly produce sharper dialogue in real life than anything the Star Wars creator George Lucas ever gave her, rattling off zingers and one-liners with an aplomb that has earned her comparisons with Dorothy Parker. She has a swagger rarely permitted to Princess Leia. (“A lot of it was just running down corridors,” she said of the first movie.) And her own background is more fascinating than anything involving Wookiees and droids. As the pill-popping, coke-snorting, rehab-attending daughter of a celebrity couple, Fisher sounds like the ultimate Hollywood cliche. The miracle has been her ability to transform the events of her life from car-crash to glistening black comedy without sacrificing any of the authenticity.
Her parents, the actor Debbie Reynolds and the crooner Eddie Fisher, divorced when she was 18 months old: her father ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, her mother turned to booze. In interviews during the Star Wars years, Fisher affected nonchalance about that break-up. “All I was aware of was that daddy met a pretty lady and left mommy, and that a short while after that, the pretty lady met someone else and left daddy, who met another pretty lady, ad infinitum. So what?”
Coming out the other side of an addiction to cocaine, LSD and the depressant Percodan, and with many decades of therapy behind her (she said that therapy has been “my only serious relationship”), she was better placed to confront the effect on her of that messy public separation. She admitted to a fear, in the wake of her father’s abandonment of her mother, that her own partners would always leave her—“so I leave first because I can’t face that.” And amid her frankness about her own drug habit, she revealed the extent to which she had inherited it from her father, with whom she admitted having taken cocaine. “He shot crystal meth for 13 years, which is probably why he spent the last three years of his life in bed,” she said.
‘Who cares if we spill champagne on the carpet?’ … Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library
From her first moments of life, she was in the public eye – a photograph taken of her when she was only two hours old appeared in Life. She was performing at the bar mitzvahs of school friends by the time she was 13; this attracted the attention of her mother, who incorporated her in the nightclub act she was touring at the time. At 18, she had a small but eye-catching part in the 1975 satire Shampoo, where she was called upon to proposition Warren Beatty with the words: “Wanna fuck?”
It was around this time that Cadell came across her at Central one day. “She was a year or two below me,” she recalls. “I found her in tears in the cloakroom. There had been some kind of party the night before where everyone had misbehaved. People tended to exploit her because she was so wealthy. In the student world, not many people could afford to throw those sorts of parties and so people would get very drunk and the attitude would be, ‘well, who cares if we spill champagne on the carpet or push the grand piano out of the window.’ I sympathised with her and I think she found that unusual. I didn’t know about her background when I was smoothing her ruffled feathers. She never played a grand game or pulled rank. She was just a lovely person with this amazing sense of humour. And she was immensely generous. She paid for me to come out to stay with her in the US when I had absolutely no money. We think of sharp, witty people as being very resilient but she had a striking softness and vulnerability.”
Carrie Fisher admits taking cocaine on set of The Empire Strikes Back
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Even a life growing up with celebrity parents couldn’t quite prepare Fisher for the media storm surrounding Star Wars. Soon after that, she fell in with the Saturday Night Live crowd of livewire comics – she dated Dan Aykroyd, became fast friends with John Belushi, who died of a drugs overdose in 1982, and starred with both of them in The Blues Brothers. Having met the singer Paul Simon when she was 21, she married him five years later; two years after that, they were divorced. She was married again in 1991, to the Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for another man after three-and-a-half years and one daughter.
Fisher with Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/DISNEY/LUCASFILM
She had turned to drugs in her early 20s not to make life more exciting but to moderate it. Drugs, she said in 1993, “managed something in me that I was too lazy to manage on my own, this thundering emotion and verbal excitement that would roar out of me. It still can: I can still take a dinner party hostage but I try not to.” She has told many stories about how drug-taking spilled onto the Star Wars movies. “We did cocaine on the set of Empire, on the ice planet,” she said, while taking care to point out that “Luke Skywalker was drunk too.” If all addicts have to hit bottom, then Fisher’s was her overdose in 1985. “Leading up to the overdose I’d been taking drugs for three solid months.” She found herself in rehab in the aftermath. A fellow patient told her: “I was in San Quentin.” Fisher replied: “And I was in Star Wars.”
Anyone expecting a hard-luck story from Postcards from the Edge, the extraordinary first novel that came out of this experience a few years later, would have been pleasantly surprised. This was no “fuck-ups of the rich and famous”, to use Fisher’s expression, but a sharply witty and illuminating inventory of a life gone astray. It charts the recovery of a drug-addicted actor named Suzanne Vale, who shares Fisher’s lightning wit and megawatt personality, though the author claimed she was based “only 50 percent” on herself.
The actor Simon Callow was in Mike Nichols’s 1991 film version, scripted by Fisher. “I met her at the first table-reading of the screenplay,” he says. “She was this very chic, petite, mad, amusingly off-the-wall figure. Very nervous, of course, because this group of wonderful actors – Meryl Streep, Shirley Maclaine, Gene Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss – was reading aloud her first screenplay. But it worked, wonderfully well. Then when we shot the film a month later, she was on set every day as far as I know, hanging out with Meryl, who was basically playing her. It was hard when you looked over at them to know which one was more like Carrie.”
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Fisher settled into being a writer. She published other novels, including Surrender the Pink, inspired by her relationship with Simon. She also became an uncredited “script doctor”, polishing and rewriting screenplays (among them The River Wild, The Wedding Singer and Sister Act) for small fortunes, though she insisted jokingly on being referred to as “a script nurse. And I want the outfit too.” There have been other screen roles since the Star Wars series: Hannah and Her Sisters, When Harry Met Sally, the abrasive Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe and David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, in which she played herself. But the acting slowed to a trickle long ago. “She’s an incredibly gifted as writer and raconteur,” says Cadel, “but I would like to have seen her do more acting. Then again, it was probably quite hard to cast her. She wasn’t some dumb brunette. She was always more unusual and brilliant than that.”
It’s comforting to think that however many box-office records The Force Awakens breaks, it won’t temper Fisher’s insouciance one jot. And the responsibility of promoting the blockbuster of the decade hasn’t taught her to be any more on-message than usual, thank goodness. She revealed recently the studio’s stipulation that she lose 35lbs before returning to play Leia. “I’m in an industry where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up.” And her recent TV chat show appearances, many featuring her French bulldog Gary (who has his own Instagram account) panting alongside her, have been as batty as ever. Disney executives must hold their breath whenever she goes on live TV.
But no matter how cool it might seem to be part of the Star Wars franchise, it has nothing on the job of being Carrie Fisher. Though she will never have another part as memorable or popular as Princess Leia, she will always be infinitely more complex and compelling off-screen than anything a scriptwriter could conceive.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – your interactive cheat sheet
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Carrie Fisher: fact file
Born 21 October 1956, Beverly Hills, California.
Career After singing onstage with her mother, the actor Debbie Reynolds, Fisher got her first film role seducing Warren Beatty in Shampoo, followed several years later by one of the leads in the science-fiction swashbuckler Star Wars and its sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. She could be heard mourning the lot of her character: “She lost her parents and her planet in the first film. In the second film, a very close friend loses his hand and her first boyfriend becomes frozen. By now Leia must be exhausted. She’s probably ready to say, ‘Hey guys, I can’t handle this any more. I’m going to get my hair done.’” Nevertheless, she’s back in the seventh and latest chapter, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
High point Writing her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Postcards From the Edge, and adapting it for the film version starring Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale, a star fresh out of rehab. Asked why she didn’t play the part herself, Fisher responded: “I’ve already played Suzanne.”
Low point Having her stomach pumped after a drugs overdose in 1985.
They say: “She is crazy brilliant. It’s an amazing thing, her sort of free-associative mind, her ability to find humour in anything – she’s like a divining rod for wordplay. She’s incredible.” JJ Abrams, director Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
She says: “I’m Joan of Narc, patron saint of addicts.”
Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens 17 December. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/nov/05/monster-in-the-hall-review | Stage | 2010-11-05T22:00:01.000Z | Mark Fisher | The Monster in the Hall – review | David Greig's The Monster in the Hall takes its cue from shimmering 60s girl-group pop. In its story about a 16-year-old whose mother died in a motorbike accident, it nods to the melodramatic roar of Leader of the Pack, except, where the Shangri-Las gave us baroque teen tragedy, Greig gives us social-work leaflets, internet roleplay games and a hard-rocking Norwegian anarchist. Every time the four actors drop into Phil Spector harmonies, it's a fair bet the story will take a decidedly unromantic – if funny – turn.
The monster in the hall, as a meta-theatrical voiceover helpfully explains, is both a metaphor for the young girl's fear of the unknown and a reference to her dad's vintage motorbike, which he cares for rather better than his mouse-infested kitchen. The bike is an excuse for generation-gap comedy as well as being a rev-driven smokescreen for a fragile portrait of a young carer coping uncomplainingly with her father's worsening multiple sclerosis.
Where many a writer would have tackled this theme sanctimoniously, Greig treats it with heady irreverence, acknowledging the truth of the dilemma while recognising a teenage girl has other matters to deal with – not least the effeminate boy who wants a simulated blow-job outside the chip shop. Life was never so complicated for the Shirelles.
All this, in Guy Hollands' TAG theatre production, is brilliantly realised in bare-bones narrative style by Gemma McElhinney, David Carlyle, Beth Marshall and Keith Macpherson, working at high velocity and accompanying each other with amplified sound effects. They are a tightly drilled ensemble, passionate, playful and yet serious, gripping us one minute, cracking us up the next, before melting our hearts with a happy ending of pure girl-group dreaminess. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/21/peter-tork-obituary | Music | 2019-02-21T18:41:59.000Z | Bob Stanley | Peter Tork obituary | The Monkees – Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork – were the first video-based pop act, the first manufactured boy band and one of the most enduring and successful pop groups of the 60s. Tork, who has died aged 77, was their keyboard player and bassist, who described his on-screen role as being the kind-hearted “dummy”.
The brainchild of the producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, The Monkees TV show, featuring the band the pair had created, was picked up by NBC in 1966 and became an instant success. The fictional band were loosely modelled on the Beatles, and the show’s timing was perfect, first airing shortly after the release of Revolver and Eleanor Rigby had indicated that the lovable moptops were growing away from their younger fans. A spin-off single from the series, Last Train to Clarksville, went to No 1 in the US later that year. The Monkees’ first, self-titled album did the same, and suddenly Rafelson and Schneider’s “prefab four” became serious rivals to the Beatles, at least in terms of record sales.
In 1967 the Monkees outsold everyone, including the Beatles. They had several international hits including I’m a Believer, Pleasant Valley Sunday and Daydream Believer, and three more million-selling albums. Yet in 1968 the TV series was pulled after its second season saw declining viewing figures. An adventurous, satirical film, Head, was savaged by critics and flopped at the box office. Tork left the group at the end of the year.
Born in Washington, Peter was the son of John Thorkelson, an economics professor, and his wife, Virginia (nee Straus). While at high school in Wisconsin, he was given a ukulele by the folk musician Tom Glazer. At Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, he managed to secure work as the college DJ as well as playing the guitar and ukulele in various folk ensembles. Having flunked out of college, he shortened his name to Tork and decided to move to Greenwich Village in 1962, where he would spend the next three years immersed in its folk scene.
In New York, Tork initially sang humorous songs written by his brother Nick, and played for donations at venues such as the Playhouse Cafe, the Cyclops and the Dragon’s Den. Progress was slow, but by February 1964 he was at Carnegie Hall as part of the New York City folk festival, sharing a stage with Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs and Mississippi John Hurt. He married his girlfriend, Jody Babb, that summer, but they had separated by the end of the year. Among various brief musical unions, he teamed up with Stephen Stills in 1964.
After hitchhiking to Los Angeles in 1965, he answered a Raybert Productions advert in the Hollywood Reporter looking for “Folk & roll musicians-singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21.” Four hundred hopefuls applied, including Stills, who turned it down but recommended his friend Tork to the producers, Rafelson and Schneider. At this point, Tork was washing dishes but, along with Jones, Nesmith and Dolenz, he passed the screen test for the Monkees in November 1965. The four became fast friends, and the penniless Tork stayed on the couch of the newly married Nesmith’s compact apartment.
‘Running parts for 4 insane boys’: Peter Tork, second from right, on the set of The Monkees TV show in the late 60s, with, from left, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
Initially, the Monkees contributed little more than vocals to their records; the music was played by the cream of LA’s session musicians. Tork played the guitar on Papa Gene’s Blues, but none of his songs made it on to the first two Monkees albums and his voice was considered too folky for the target, pre-teen audience. All he was given was the “Ringo” slot, a novelty song called Your Auntie Grizelda. He contented himself with occasional guest spots at local venues, appearing on stage with Buffalo Springfield and singing the Monkees’ Take a Giant Step at a Dino Valenti show.
The Monkees’ instant fame gave them leverage, though, and when they strongly aired their musical frustrations in early 1967, their record label, Colgems, allowed them to make an album on their own. Headquarters featured Tork’s vocal on Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s fragile Shades of Gray, while his composition For Pete’s Sake was one of the album’s highlights and would be used over the end credits on the show’s second season. When it became clear that Headquarters was a one-off and further recordings would once again be with session players, Tork became disillusioned.
In February 1968 he played solo in front of 7,000 people at an anti-war rally at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, alongside Nina Simone, Steppenwolf and Blue Cheer. He recorded further songs for the Monkees, now accompanied by Buffalo Springfield’s drummer, Dewey Martin, and occasionally by their guitarist, Stills. Tork was by now famous in LA for throwing lavish, endless parties populated by naked starlets as well as musicians including David Crosby, Mama Cass and Jim Morrison.
In December that year, tired of the pressure and the workload, Tork bought himself out of his Monkees contract for a reported $160,000, which left him penniless again. He sold his house to Stills and moved into a $25-a-month basement room in Crosby’s house with his pregnant girlfriend, Reine Stewart, to whom he was later briefly married. Tork set up a new band, Release, but it did not take off, in spite of his well-known friends, and the group split up, having failed to get a record deal.
Peter Tork, left, and Davy Jones performing in Vienna during a 2011 Monkees tour. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Broke and drifting across America, Tork was sentenced to four months in El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma in 1972 for drug possession. After release, he moved back to California and began teaching social studies and English at Pacific Hills school, Santa Monica; he married another teacher, Barbara Iannoli, and they had a son, divorcing in 1987. Tork was once again content to play with short-lived groups including the New Monks and Cotton Mouth – the former got as far as releasing a single in 1982, a cover of the Monkees’ (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.
The Monkees TV series continued to be repeated throughout the 1970s and 80s, creating further generations of fans and leading to demand for a reunion. Jones and Dolenz were keenest for this to happen, Tork was eventually convinced in 1986, and the three toured the US to mark the group’s 20th anniversary. A year later, Rhino reissued the band’s entire catalogue and, in 1988, a new album called Pool It!
In 1994, Tork released his only solo album, Stranger Things Have Happened, which featured brief appearances by Dolenz and Nesmith; a Monkees album, Justus – with all four original members – was released in 1996. Jones died in 2012, just after the group’s 45th anniversary tour, and later in the year Nesmith was finally convinced to reunite with Tork and Dolenz for an American tour celebrating the 45th anniversary of Headquarters. A further album, Good Times!, and tour, marked their 50th anniversary, followed by a festive album, Christmas Party, in 2018.
Tork would eventually become reconciled with his past. “I did think for a long time that it was a mistake to be involved and I didn’t want anything to do with [The Monkees]. Hey, it really was my life and I really did learn a lot. Any mistakes I made was because I didn’t know better.”
Tork is survived by his fourth wife, Pam (nee Grapes), whom he married in 2013, a daughter, Hallie, from his second marriage, a son, Ivan, from his third, and a daughter, Erica, from another relationship.
Peter Tork (Peter Halsten Thorkelson), actor, singer and songwriter, born 13 February 1942; died 21 February 2019
This article was amended on 22 February 2019. Reine Stewart was not the daughter of the actor James Stewart, as the original stated. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/22/justine-damond-shooting-minneapolis-police-chief-resigns-at-mayors-request | US news | 2017-07-22T09:34:45.000Z | Jared Goyette | Minneapolis protests as police chief quits over Justine Damond shooting | The chief of police in Minneapolis has resigned at the request of the city’s mayor, Betsy Hodges, after Hodges said she had “lost the confidence of the people”.
'Never been about race': black activists on how Minneapolis reacted to Damond shooting
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Janeé Harteau has faced criticism for her handling of the shooting of unarmed Australian woman Justine Damond, as well as previous killings going back to 2013.
“I’ve lost confidence in the chief’s ability to lead us further,” said Hodges in a media statement. “And from the many conversations I’ve had with people around our city, it is clear that she has lost the confidence of the people of Minneapolis as well. For us to continue to transform policing ... we need new leadership at [Minneapolis Police Department].
Hodges’ own media conference later on Friday evening quickly descended into chaos as protesters angrily called for the mayor to resign as well, saying they “had been terrorized enough”. The crowd – a coalition of community groups pushing for police reform – drowned out her comments with chants of “Bye bye Betsy.”
Echoing the catchcry used in calls for justice after the 2016 shooting death of Philando Castile, they shouted: “If Justine don’t get it, shut it down.” The initial round of protests were led by Jonathan Thompson, a friend and coworker of Castile.
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After the room was cleared and the conference restarted, Hodges said it had been a “heartbreaking and challenging and awful week for the people of our city”.
“I share people’s frustration about the pace of change in our policing and building community trust. Transformational change is difficult, it is uncomfortable and it takes time,” she said.
Hodges nominated assistant chief Medaria Arradondo to be the next chief. Nicknamed “Rondo”, he served as the department’s public face after Damond’s shooting while Harteau was on personal leave. Arradondo, who is African-American, has been with the department since 1989.
Reached after the protest, Thompson said it was important that he had confronted the mayor in front of an assembled crowd of reporters that included many Australian journalists.
The fight for Justine is not over. It’s just begun. We got a lot of allies.
Jonathan Thompson, protester
“Betsy Hodges was trying to appease the international press, trying to say, ‘I did something about it. I did something really good. I asked the chief to step down,’ and thinking that’s going to end what’s happening, but it’s not going to end nothing,” he said.
Thompson, who now runs an organization called New North, added that he hoped Australians would find ways to get involved. “The fight for Justine is not over. It’s just begun. We got a lot of allies. We need Australia right here with us ... and we won’t stop fighting for Justine and victims like Justine.”
Mel Reeves, a long time community activist in Minneapolis, was part of the group that stormed the media conference. He said that initially they had just planned a street protest, but went to city hall when they heard about the meeting, and after a few failed attempts, managed to get inside.
“What you witnessed there was frustration. The frustration in this city is building over. The international community needs to understand that the Minneapolis Police Department has been a very abusive one. The killings are just the tip of the iceberg. People get brutalized on a regular basis,” he said.
Justine Damond 'didn't have to die', says Minneapolis police chief
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Harteau on Thursday attempted to distance the police department from the actions of officer Mohamed Noor, who shot the unarmed woman after she made an emergency call to police. She said the killing “shouldn’t have happened”.
The death of Damond, 40, who was fired at multiple times through the open window of a police patrol car, has outraged her relatives and the public in both Australia and the US. The Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, called it “shocking” and “inexplicable”.
In her resignation statement, Harteau said: “Over the 30-plus years that I’ve served as a police officer in the City of Minneapolis, moving up through the ranks to police chief, I have woken up every day knowing that this job is not about me. It is about the members of the communities that we serve and the police officers who protect our residents. I am proud of the great work the MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] has accomplished...
“However, last Saturday’s tragedy, as well as some other incidents, have caused me to engage in deep reflection. The recent incidents do not reflect the training and procedures we’ve developed as a department. Despite the MPD’s many accomplishments under my leadership over these years and my love for the city, I have to put the communities we serve first. I’ve decided I am willing to step aside to let a fresh set of leadership eyes see what more can be done for the MPD to be the very best it can be. The city of Minneapolis deserves the very best.”
Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges tries to talk to the media as she is shouted at by protesters during her press conference at City Hall on Friday. Photograph: Aaron Lavinsky/AP
Noor has refused to speak to investigators, which Harteau earlier described as his “constitutional right”.
On Monday, Justine Damond’s partner, Don Damond, said her death was a loss to everyone who knew her. “Our hearts are broken and we are utterly devastated by the loss of Justine,” he said. “It is difficult to fathom how to go forward without her in my life.”
Her stepson, Zac Damond, said she was “passionate” and his “best friend”.
The family said they planed to bring their daughter back to Australia for a hometown farewell.
“All we want to do is bring Justine home to Australia to farewell her in her hometown among family and friends,” a statement said on Thursday.
Justine Damond, of Sydney, Australia, who was fatally shot by police in Minneapolis on Saturday 15 July. Photograph: Stephen Govel/AP
Damond is believed to have been living in the US for at least the past three years. Her personal website says she trained as a veterinarian and practised yoga and meditation for 17 years.
Linea Palmisano, who represents the ward where Damond died, called for a change in leadership on Friday and told her fellow council members that she was “done with image control and crisis management” and that it was “time for action.”
After Harteau’s resignation, Palmisano thanked the mayor and her colleagues. She also thanked Harteau for her years of service, but said she looked forward to the start of changes that she felt the department needed to make.
Harteau has spent her career with the department, starting as a beat cop in 1987 when she was just 22. She worked her way up the ranks and in 2012 was appointed chief, becoming the city’s first female, first openly gay and first Native American police chief. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/19/life-in-a-post-coronavirus-world-will-it-feel-so-very-different | Life and style | 2020-06-19T14:00:20.000Z | Oliver Burkeman | Life in a post-coronavirus world: will it feel so very different? | Oliver Burkeman | Has there ever been an easier time to be a futurist? I’m distrustful of the profession at the best of times, since it involves making pronouncements about a time that hasn’t arrived – and not being held to account for your errors when it does arrive, because then it’s no longer the future, and thus no concern of the futurists. But these days, as the world staggers uncertainly out of lockdown, it’s even easier. All you need to say is that in life in general, or in whatever field you’re supposedly expert, everything’s going to change. Education, the economy, travel, work, dating, sport, the advertising industry, the world of aluminium can manufacturing: recent stories have promised massive transformation in them all. Or as a great sage (on the groundbreaking satire The Day Today) put it a quarter of a century ago: “If you’ve got a history book at home, take it out, throw it in the bin – it’s worthless.”
My objection isn’t that any of this is necessarily false. (Although taken literally, it is, because history never unfolds in absolutes: for example, it’s always jarring to be reminded that most people spent the Great Depression in work, not unemployed.) Rather, it’s the implication that life, in years to come, is going to feel very different indeed. And one of the few things we can be pretty sure of is that it won’t. For most of us, most of the time, it’ll feel normal.
Part of the reason is “hedonic adaptation”, our tendency to swiftly adapt emotionally to positive or negative changes in our circumstances, drifting back towards our baseline levels of curmudgeonliness or cheer. Another is the “focusing illusion”, whereby we overestimate the impact that any given change will have on our lives. The cumulative result is that any future change in your situation – like never shaking hands again, wearing a mask in public, or even something huge, like losing your job – is likely to make less of a difference than you think. After the attacks of September 11, we were told the world would never be the same again, and it wasn’t. But for all except those most directly affected – bereaved by war, imprisoned in Guantánamo – it soon felt normal. And so it goes, through history: each time a huge event disrupts a civilisation’s ordinary way of life, the “ordinary way of life” it’s disrupting is what people formerly thought of as the terrible climate ushered in by the last huge event.
The miracle cure for life's problems? More of what you're already doing
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None of this means things will be fine. They may well be worse: a world with less human contact, or more joblessness, is surely objectively worse, however normal it feels. But it does mean that if you found life generally meaningful in the post-9/11 world, or the post-financial-crisis world, the chances are you’ll do so in the post-coronavirus world as well.
In any case, as the political scientist Mark Lilla pointed out in a recent essay, even to ask a question such as “How different will the future be?” is to assume an oddly passive stance towards it. The future doesn’t exist – so “we should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment”. We’re never really waiting to see how the future unfolds. We’re creating it as we go.
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Being certain about the future would drain your life of meaning, Susan Jeffers argues in her self-help book Embracing Uncertainty. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global/blog/2011/mar/27/david-james-loan-players | Football | 2011-03-27T00:08:00.000Z | David James | Loan stars offer a cheap fix but they can be a pain | David James | These days the Championship seems to be littered with Premier League loan stars – outnumbering loanees from other divisions by two to one by my reckoning. With Premier League squad sizes capped to 25 it stands to reason that there are a lot of surplus players floating about and the obvious thing to do with them all is recoup a bit of cash. With a trend towards transfer loan fees opening up, I wonder what the future is for borrowed players in our national game.
They were once a cheap option for clubs – a quick fix for a new manager, or an old manager in dire straits – but we are now faced with a new and potentially lucrative market for loan players. At present the money involved is small compared to buying a player, but we're certainly not talking pennies – I know our own gaffer at Bristol City gave up on one potential signing in the January transfer window after the loan club asked for a transfer fee he described as "ridiculous".
Cardiff and Leeds have invested in a lot of Premier League loanees this season and their results show this is paying off, but could we potentially end up with "Rent-a-team United", a Championship side largely made up of Premier League players on loan, as clubs attempt to gain promotion? And what happens if one of these teams actually gain promotion and then have to give the players back?
Players on loan from the Premier League can seem a golden ticket for clubs further down the divisions, but in my experience they are something of a mixed bag. Often a player who has just been bombed by his own club brings a lot of unhappy baggage with him. If the current squad cap remains in place we could be dealing with dozens upon dozens of Premier League players angrily twiddling their thumbs as their parent club decide what to do with them over the next couple years.
Certainly being sent out on loan can have a major psychological effect. It could be a young player on the brink of breaking into the first team; he gets a call from the manager to say he is suddenly being sent out on loan. It can feel like rejection, and I've seen youngsters suffer because of it. Or perhaps it is an older player; they get sent out on loan and feel they are on their way down, a career nosedive. They lose all motivation and can no longer be bothered to work on their game.
Of course there are exceptions. Steven Caulker is on loan at our place from Tottenham and he is having a terrific season. Only 19 years old, without a doubt he's one of our best players and I can't imagine Harry Redknapp won't want him back come the end of the season. Then again, just how amazing is he going to have to be to force his way back into a squad whose size is already limited?
Caulks is quality, though, a world away from what I call the perennial loanee – that journeyman player who's been around the block and hasn't been able to find a home. Short-term loanees are the worst – they do everyone's heads in. When that kind of loanee turns up at a club everyone knows what to expect – generally not much. Personally I tend to find the ones repeatedly going out on loan are also the ones who spend the least amount of time on the training field.
That may sound harsh, but I do sympathise with their situation to some extent. I can only imagine that they have been neglected as players, not nurtured and developed, hence the apathy. Psychologically, it's got to be very difficult to be a loanee in your late 20s in particular; as an older player I can empathise with that nagging feeling that time is running out.
I imagine that for those from the Premier League who joined Championship sides this season it was a bit of a shock, which doesn't help your adjustment. The game is so different, even the ball is different – it can be challenging. But if your attitude is good and you're there to play football then everything else is just garnish. It's what you do on the field that matters, not whether your showers work – and, for the record, only three out of six at our gaff work which provides plenty of entertainment after training.
People might jest about footballers needing counselling, but if you've spent your formative years at one club – an environment often likened to a second home or family — then suddenly being unwanted and thrown out of the nest can be a traumatic experience.
Like most people in the entertainment industry, footballers need their egos massaged, an arm round their shoulders – that's what Harry was always so good at. And from what I've seen loanees are more damaged than most, low on confidence and low on aspiration.
Sports psychologists are still largely absent at football clubs, but if the migration of players is going to be bigger than ever in the next few years, it might just make sense to start investing in some.
David James has donated his fee for this column to charity | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/04/leicester-doctor-convicted-over-death-of-six-year-old-boy | UK news | 2015-11-04T12:30:53.000Z | Mark Tran | Leicester doctor convicted over death of six-year-old boy | A jury has found a doctor guilty of the manslaughter by gross negligence of a six-year-old boy.
Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, 38, of Leicester, was accused of medical failings in the death of Jack Adcock after he was admitted to Leicester Royal Infirmary on the morning of 18 February 2011 with severe vomiting, diarrhoea and breathing difficulties. She was found guilty on Wednesday by a 10-2 majority verdict after the jury deliberated for nearly 25 hours.
Nicola Adcock: I wish I had never taken Jack to hospital Guardian
Sister Theresa Taylor, 55, of Leicester, was found not guilty of the same charge
During the trial, the jury heard how Bawa-Garba, an experienced paediatrician, had mistaken Jack for another patient she had treated that day marked “do not resuscitate” (DNR) and stopped life-saving treatment on the boy. It was only restarted when a junior doctor pointed out her mistake.
Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba. Photograph: Alexander Britton/PA
Jack’s parents Nicola and Victor Adcock cheered as Bawa-Garba was found guilty. In an emotional tribute to her son on the steps of Nottingham crown court, Nicola Adcock said: “Our son Jack was a lively and energetic little boy. The room lit up when he walked in with his cheeky smile and his cheeky ways. He drew people to him like a magnet.
“Our life now is empty, painful and will never be the same again. To say that we miss him does not do justice to our strength of feeling - Jack was an amazing son and one in a million.
“We have always believed that someone needed to be held accountable for what happened to our son. The guilty verdicts will bring us some closure but the void that has been left in our lives will remain.”
Isabel Amaro, an agency nurse, was found guilty of gross negligence on Monday. Amaro, 47, of Manchester, who had worked with children for 20 years, accepted that she breached her duty of care but denied that any of her failings significantly contributed to the youngster’s death. Bawa-Garba and Amaro will be sentenced at a later date.
The boy, who had Down’s syndrome, died 11 hours after being admitted to hospital following a heart attack brought on by “septic shock” due to a virulent form of pneumonia.
The jury heard three weeks of evidence about the staff members who prosecutors alleged breached their legal duty of care to the boy from Glen Parva, Leicester, in a series of gross failures in his treatment.
Nicola and Victor Adcock, the mother and father of Jack Adcock. Photograph: Alex Britton/PA
At the start of the trial, Andrew Thomas QC, prosecuting, said: “Under their care, Jack’s condition needlessly declined to a point where, before he had been transferred to the next ward, he was effectively beyond the point of no return. If the defendants had recognised the severity of Jack’s illness and the fact he was in shock, if they had re-assessed him and acted on the findings, the risk of death would have been very greatly reduced.”
During the trial Thomas said that Bawa-Garba’s mistaking of Jack for another patient who was marked “do not resuscitate” was a remarkable error, adding that while Jack was “beyond the point of no return” and that resuscitation was futile, it suggested Bawa-Garba had not given the youngster sufficient care. Bawa-Garba said working without a break could have led to her mistakenly believing Jack was under a DNR order when he was not.
In the DNR incident, Jack had collapsed at 7.45pm, when prosecutors said his lips had started to turn blue and a paediatric arrest team was summoned.
Thomas said: “During this critical period an event occurred which you may think is powerful evidence of Dr Bawa-Garba’s performance that day. When she came into the bay, almost immediately she called the resuscitation off. She told the other doctors Jack had been marked down as do not resuscitate earlier in the day.”
A first-year doctor then re-read the notes and said she could not see a DNR entry.
In a key exchange, Thomas asked Bawa-Garba: “Did you ask anyone what is the name of the patient you were treating?” She replied: “No.”
Thomas then asked: “When you arrived, you could see the face of the little boy being resuscitated?” The doctor said: “I cannot recall whether I saw the face or not. I could see a small room, an oxygen mask, it’s an emotionally charged environment.”
Thomas said: “Is it symptomatic of your behaviour that day that you rushed to a decision without checking?” She said: “It’s not that. It’s a reflection of how long I had been working without a break.”
Blood test results on Jack showed abnormally high levels of urea and creatinine, which would have suggested problems with the youngster’s kidneys and cast doubts on an initial diagnosis of gastroenteritis and moderate dehydration.
Asked if she accepted that she missed the results, Bawa-Garba said: “I have thought and reflected on this and yes, I did miss those results.”
The prosecution had said the failings of each of the defendants contributed significantly to the boy’s death. Thomas said Bawa-Garba also failed to offer clear direction to her team, or call on the assistance of a senior consultant.
He said Taylor, who was the first to see Jack, should have “realised that he was seriously ill and required treatment as a medical emergency”, while Amaro, who trained in Portugal and was registered as an adult nurse, “wrongly indicated that his case was ‘low-level concern’, despite the fact Jack needed high levels oxygen”.
Andrew Furlong, interim medical director and children’s orthopaedic surgeon at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, said improvements had been made since Jack died.
He added: “We cannot bring Jack back and under the circumstances saying sorry does not seem enough. Nevertheless, we are deeply sorry and would like to again send our condolences to the Adcock family.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jun/26/the-10-best-stage-fright-sufferers | Culture | 2015-06-26T11:00:07.000Z | Susannah Clapp | The 10 best… stage fright sufferers | AdeleAdele at the Oscars in 2013. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
“I’m scared of audiences,” Adele says. “I get shitty scared.” In Amsterdam, she was once so frightened that she escaped out of the fire exit. In Brussels, she projectile-vomited over somebody. She copes by telling jokes. “I chat a lot of fucking shit.” She also fortifies herself with her alter ego Sasha Carter, a combination of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce and June Carter. “My nerves don’t really settle until I’m off stage.” What really upsets her is the idea that someone who has shelled out money to see her might decide: “Oh I prefer the record.”
Eileen Atkins
Eileen Atkins as Mother Sawyer in The Witch of Edmonton, 2014. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Observer
Eileen Atkins finds first nights “complete and utter miseries”. The actor Michael Bryant told her this was conceit. “He said that if you had a Buddhist-like sense of your own non-importance, you wouldn’t get scared. But it’s extremely hard not to feel quite important. Mostly because the main reason for fright is letting the others down.” Atkins hates knowing exactly who is watching her. “I scream and put fingers in my ears if someone says who’s in. I have to think of the audience as one lump of humanity. If you suddenly hear someone you know laugh, it knocks your concentration.”
Peter Eyre
Peter Eyre in Minetti at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 2014. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer
When Peter Eyre played Jacques in As You Like It, Anjelica Huston asked him: “Don’t you get embarrassed doing the Ages of Man?” The speech is often a stumbling block for actors. When Eyre was next about to deliver the soliloquy, he heard Huston’s voice in his head and completely seized up. Cast in the role some years later, he suggested that, as his character had to read in the forest, he should carry a book bag. “In the bag was a copy of As You Like It – just in case I had a similar lapse.” He never did.
Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry and Rik Mayall in a Richmond theatre production of Cell Mates, 1995. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis
In 1995, Stephen Fry fled from the West End production of Simon Gray’s Cell Mates. He said that from the beginning he had a “heavy feeling” every time he was on stage. He took to heart a Financial Times review describing him as “a lumpen superior ‘act’”. He blamed a scene in which he appeared in underwear: “I was clearly a middle-aged man with a big gut.” The day after the weekend reviews, he considered suicide but instead fled to Bruges. The play closed three weeks later, with a loss of £300,000. Fry, subsequently diagnosed as bipolar, has since returned to the stage.
Ian Holm
Ian Holmes at the Edinburgh film festival in 1999. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer
Playing Hickey in The Iceman Cometh in 1976 – decades before he became Bilbo Baggins – Ian Holm felt something was going wrong. Sure enough, “the moment arrived when I knew I would not be able to continue”. He addressed the audience: “Here I am, supposed to be talking to you… there are you, expecting me to talk…” He got off the stage, past the other actors, “frozen in a kind of tableau”. He arrived in the dressing room, unable even to walk. “The black curtain which slowly cowled my brain had become a complete hood.” He did not act on stage for nearly 15 years.
Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor at Sundance, 2015. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images
“Contrary to what the tabloids say, I do not have stage fright,” declared Ewan McGregor in 2005. He was apprehensive at returning to the stage, but “that’s partly why I’m doing it. I love that feeling of walking on a knife edge.” Yet he was pursued by horror stories: “All your actor friends will tell you nightmare stories about people’s pants falling off.” Playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, he found himself “making shit up” when he forgot a song. He took preventive action before starring on Broadway last year, tweeting about his use of an app called Conquering Anxiety.
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier in Othello (1965). Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock
Laurence Olivier suffered five years of agonising dread following a press night in 1964, when he found his voice diminishing and the audience “beginning to go giddily round”. He developed strategies. When delivering his Othello soliloquies, he asked his Iago to stay in sight, fearing “I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself”. He asked actors not to look him in the eye: “For some reason this made me feel that there was not quite so much loaded against me.” The venerable Sybil Thorndike gave him trenchant counsel: “Take drugs, darling, we do.”
Steven Osborne
Pianist Steven Osborne at his home in Linlithgow near Edinburgh. Photograph: Mark Pinder for the Observer
The pianist first became frightened when playing Mozart. “I didn’t actually forget anything, but it felt like the water was rising and lapping just under my nose.” Some years later, while playing Rachmaninov, he did have slips of memory. “This was like an earthquake.” He thought his career might be over. Realising that colleges did not help students with the condition, he prepared his own talks, advocating mindfulness rather than guzzling alcohol, pill-popping or CBT. Chiefly, he urges a sense of proportion: “Ask yourself: when I’m on my deathbed, will I still care about the fluffed note in bar 14?”
Carly Simon
‘Ingenious ways of dealing with performance panic’: Carly Simon.
Carly Simon has devised ingenious ways of dealing with performance panic. Suffering from palpitations in Pittsburgh, she invited spectators to join her on stage. Fifty people came up and massaged her arms and legs. Discovering that physical pain helps overpower fear, she wore tight boots or stabbed her hands with pins. Anxious at following Smokey Robinson at a celebration for Bill Clinton, she appealed to the horn section of the orchestra. “They all took turns spanking me. During the last spank the curtain went up. The audience saw the aftermath, the sting on my face. I bet Olivier didn’t do that.”
Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1888.
Ellen Terry, one of the most adored actresses of her era, was gripped by stage fright in 1861, when struggling to learn five parts simultaneously. She left a visceral description. “You feel as if a centipede, all of whose feet have been carefully iced, has begun to run about in the roots of your hair.” Then it seems as if somebody “has cut the muscles at the back of your knees”. As your mouth slowly opens, no sound comes out. “It was,” she said, “torture. Like nothing else in the world.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/may/22/black-eyed-peas-interview | Music | 2009-05-21T23:01:00.000Z | Angus Batey | Angus Batey meets Black Eyed Peas reinvented | Idon't think we're revolting against ..." Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson laughs as she begins to realise that her explanation of her band's reinvention is turning into a headline writer's dream. She's been trying to say that the changes the Black Eyed Peas are setting in motion are a natural progression rather than a reaction to anything or anyone, but the double meaning has snuck up on her unawares.
"I don't think we're revolting," she grins, giving in to the inevitable. "That's an I Love Lucy joke. It's quite old. But I don't think we're revolting against something, I think we are evolving: there's a visual aspect of that evolution, there's a sonic aspect of that evolution, and there's just a kind of worldwide movement around the way that we get our music."
There is much nodding in agreement from the three men to Fergie's left, on a sofa in a private club in their native Los Angeles. These are tumultuous times for the record business, and the Black Eyed Peas are throwing themselves into the thick of the battle. Whether through evolution or revolution, the Peas are certainly agitating for systemic, seismic change. Their new, fifth LP, The E.N.D - an acronym for "Energy Never Dies" - not only marks a decisive break with the pop-rap that has made them international stars, but is designed to shake up half a century of preconceptions about what an album is, and how it reaches its audience.
Everyone else's LP represents an end point - the full stop after a phase of creativity, the distillation of months or maybe even years of efforts towards making a finished piece of art. But when The E.N.D arrives in shops and at online retailers early next month, its release will instead mark the beginning of an onslaught of remixes, fan participation and constant revision and addition from its makers. If the band's bold move succeeds, The E.N.D will herald the end of the album era.
"The album? Whatever. I don't listen to albums," says William "will.i.am" Adams, the group's driving force, dismissively but not unhappily. "People don't hear music like that now. When they stopped puttin' CD players in cars, that was when I knew it was over. The tradition of gettin' 15 songs and expectin' people to hear 'em how you made 'em? That's not it any more."
What Will and his bandmates propose instead is to place "the album" at the heart of an ongoing blurt of ceaseless creative production. The E.N.D has been preceded by a single - Boom Boom Pow is their first US No 1 hit, and is the current chart-topper in Britain following its download-only release 12 days ago. Remixes for it will be made available over coming weeks, but Will claims that at least three mixes exist for every album track, and that all will be released, some free of charge via his music-based social networking site, Dipdive.com. Fans will be encouraged to turn in their own remixes, the best of which will be added to the site. Videos, live versions, other non-musical items related to the record's themes - all will form part of the sprawling whole. And new songs, as yet unwritten, may also be added to the core set, to become part of the same "album" months or even years after the CD goes on sale.
The concept requires a leap of faith on the part of fans, but is challenging to the Peas' record label, the Universal imprint Interscope, too. Think of it like a software release, suggests Will - where the product you buy becomes the base upon which subsequent upgrades can be installed. Many of these ideas were supposed to have been adopted for his solo album, 2007's Songs About Girls, but, in his estimation, he "didn't do my politics right" and the label nixed his more ambitious plans. This time, though, he's carried the day in all the necessary meetings, and his concepts and theories are more fully formed. There is a sense of urgency about his and his band's mission.
"I don't want us to be one of those groups that makes songs that end up on the internet graveyard, and we're in a bubble not knowing that this activity's goin' on," will explains. "We don't wanna be used, we wanna use it. That sentence is a very important description of the kind of record we made, and what we're gonna do with this year's programme of the Black Eyed Peas Experience, or the E.N.D Experience, for however long it lasts. We wanna use the blogging, the uploading, the sharing, the interaction, the refreshing, the updating, the remixing - that's the album. What we used to know as the album now is just the brochure for the commercial of the experience."
The concepts may take some grasping, but the Black Eyed Peas are used to being misunderstood. The group began life as Atban Klann, and were signed to the independent label Ruthless, run by the NWA leader Eazy-E. After Eazy's death, Will and apl.de.ap (Allan Lindo) recruited rapper Jaime "Taboo" Gomez and renamed themselves Black Eyed Peas. They bucked prevailing stereotypes, adopting a style redolent of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the Roots that was diametrically opposed to the gangs-and-drugs raps most groups of their south-central Los Angeles background were making.
After two modestly successful albums, they recruited Fergie and had a huge global hit with Where Is the Love?, which featured Justin Timberlake. Although it was the biggest-selling single of 2003 in the UK, comparatively few listeners caught its strident anti-war message, or noticed the lyrics which labelled the CIA as terrorists and equated them with street gangs: the band were derided for "selling out". The Peas found themselves shunned by the (small) core audience who'd made them US college circuit staples, but gained a (huge) new crowd who didn't care about their provenance and just enjoyed their unpretentiously exuberant music.
Their new musical direction - Boom Boom Pow's autotuned vocals and skittish beats move them ever closer to European dancefloors than even their single, My Humps, did in 2005 - has been informed by club music heard on a tour of Australia, but its backstory of change and renewal is rooted in America's momentous recent history. Depressed over the commercial failure of his solo album, and laid up at home with a broken leg - sustained during an early hours mission painting graffiti on a Los Angeles freeway - the workaholic Will was forced to spend the early part of 2008 in front of the TV. He wouldn't otherwise have caught Barack Obama's speech during the New Hampshire primary, and wouldn't have had the idea to write a song based around it, or make a video, or put it up on his new website.
The song, Yes We Can, used parts of the New Hampshire speech as lyrics. Jesse Dylan, Bob's son, directed a video featuring Obama-supporting celebrities. It was viewed online more than 20m times. On Dipdive's "about" page, Yes We Can is described as "a significant factor in changing the direction of the 2008 US presidential election", which seems rather bold, until you realise the claim was made by Al Gore.
The Peas are now firmly part of the new American pop culture/political nexus: Adams followed Yes We Can with performances at the Democratic convention and Obama's inauguration, and Fergie met the First Family and sang the national anthem on the White House lawn at Easter. It would have been a different story had Will agreed to the first approach from Obama's campaign, and agreed to rework a solo single, changing the chorus from "I got it from my mama" to "I'm voting for Obama". He refused - his instincts then were spot on - and the conclusions he's drawn from what's happened since only strengthen his determination to reassess the way he and his band do business.
"It made me realise everything has changed," he explains. "That if you utilise the tools, how impactful it can be. When it comes to online, all the traditional media networks have been reset back to zero. Outside of capital and marketing, we all have the same tools to connect. That video [Yes We Can] rings true to that fact. Here's a campaign, spending millions of dollars traditionally: and a couple of passionate people did a video that cost peanuts, it was the most successful piece of content from the campaign, was seen by tens of millions of people and broke internet records. And the only muscle that was used was to put it on the web. That shows how powerful we all are if we utilise these tools, and put thought behind it."
That's if they have the time: Taboo has "fallen in love with acting - that's my calling, I think"; Fergie acted before joining the group, and Will starred in the recent X-Men: Origins film. He and apl.de.ap have burgeoning careers as club DJs, while Will's songwriting and production credits include as-yet unreleased material by Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston as well as work with Estelle, Nas and U2.
"There's time to do everything now," he vows. "And I think our responsibility is to stay connected. If we weren't connected, I'd never have had the opportunity to get people to listen to Yes We Can and inspire them to go out and vote. Because I'm online all the time and I interact with 'em, I'm one of 'em: I'm no different. They were inspired because I was inspired. Now's the time to go out and connect with that vibration."
The E.N.D is released on Polydor, 8 June | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/07/the-romcom-effect-will-a-new-movie-gentrify-peckham-as-richard-curtis-gentrified-notting-hill | Film | 2023-03-07T06:00:30.000Z | Steve Rose | The romcom effect: will a new movie gentrify Peckham as Richard Curtis gentrified Notting Hill? | It’s always fun to see an area you know in a movie, so as a Peckham local, the new romcom Rye Lane is literally up my street. It is named after the bustling main thoroughfare of our south London neighbourhood, which is in the early stages of gentrification. African groceries and pound shops jostle up against new cocktail bars and art galleries. Go back 20 years and all Peckham was known for was working-class wheeler-dealing – largely thanks to Only Fools and Horses – and violent crime. Even our MP, Harriet Harman, wore a stab vest when she visited in 2008. Today, Peckham is a hip, popular destination, described by the New York Times as “the beating heart of London’s most dynamic art scene”. And now we’ve got our own romcom, too.
Rye Lane the movie is a very likable variation on a very familiar formula, making Rye Lane the place look somehow better and brighter on screen than in real life. Everything pops with colour as if it’s had a new coat of paint. There’s an absence of homeless people, drunk people, noisy schoolkids, traffic jams. Instead, there are quirky characters, like a grey-haired rhinestone cowboy who body-pops surreally across Rye Lane market as our lovestruck couple (David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah) stroll through it. When I walked through the same market the other day, the local colour took the form of a shouting match between rival stallholders.
Is the romcom a cause for celebration, though, or more of a warning sign? Director Raine Allen-Miller describes her film as “a love letter to south London”, but a love letter can also be a marketing brochure. From London to Paris to New York, edgy, up-and-coming neighbourhoods form the perfect setting for movies about young people falling in love, but by drawing attention to these areas, these films risk accelerating the commercialisation that so often ends up destroying them.
Blooming marvellous … Hugh Grant in a beautified Notting Hill. Photograph: Clive Coote/Polygram
A cautionary precedent is Notting Hill, released in 1999, and the gentrification romcom of its day. The west London neighbourhood, historically populated by immigrants, mainly from the Caribbean, has long been at the heart of black British identity. But by the time of the film, it had become a fashionable, pricey destination, popular with post-Cool Britannia types such as Madonna, Damon Albarn and David Cameron (and the screenwriter of the film, Richard Curtis). The kind of place where a foppish independent bookstore-owner (played by Hugh Grant, let’s say) might conceivably bump into an American film star (like Julia Roberts) and spill his juice over her.
The film was shot on location in Notting Hill, but observers noticed how its streets were suspiciously free of black people, and instead “wholly populated with mindless, twittering, wittering, lily-white rich”, as writer China Miéville put it. Miéville, who was an extra in the movie (and is white), described it as “a dystopian image of contemporary London after the triumphant rise of some unseen fascist authority”.
This is how gentrification operates: a relatively cheap area attracts immigrants and artists who bring it to life, which in turn attracts wealthier people looking to live in a lively area. This serves to raise rents and property values, pricing out the very people who made the area so lively in the first place. Before you know it, the artists’ studios are being converted into flats, the nail salon has become a craft sake brewery, and film crews are scouting locations for a movie that attracts even more people, making the area even less affordable.
It has happened before in London: Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones lived in Borough – once a covered food market and little else; now a gastronomic hotspot and home to the Shard’s multimillion-pound apartments. It happened in Berlin, where Keinohrhasen (Rabbit Without Ears) became a huge domestic hit in 2007, just as the city was throwing off its post-Wall edginess and property prices were starting to rocket.
A spruced-up Montmartre … Audrey Tautou in Amélie. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Alamy
And it happened in Montmartre – formerly a rundown but proudly bohemian area of Paris favoured by artists and jazz musicians. In 2001, along came Amélie, with Audrey Tautou flitting delightfully through a vie en rose-tinted version of the neighbourhood, backed by accordion music. Again, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet tarted the place up somewhat, removing graffiti and parked cars, and wringing as much retro colour out of his images as film stocks would permit. And again, the film was criticised for the lack of ethnic diversity seen around the area.
“It was already changing, but the success of this movie accelerated it,” says Albain, a writer who has lived in Montmartre since the 90s. “I wouldn’t say it was a shitty area before, but it wasn’t all clean and tidy like it is now. In the 70s and 80s, it was so cheap, even the broke artists could buy places here. But the prices have multiplied by 10 times since then, so those people either sold up or couldn’t afford to live here. A new generation has brought new kinds of shops – clothes boutiques and food shops.” Plus expat foreigners seeking to live out the Amélie fantasy and hordes of tourists, who can now take Amélie-themed walking tours.
The place where gentrification and the romcom really hit it off was New York City in the 1980s. After the urban decay and white flight of the 1970s, the city was back on the up, a new demographic moving in. As always, it seems, it started with the artists. Cheap rents on the Lower East Side attracted the Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat generation, plus a coterie of new wave musicians, punks, students, queer people, bohemians.
‘A town that existed in black and white’ … Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Manhattan. Photograph: Ronald Grant
That drew the curiosity of outsiders, and movie studios. For most of the 1980s, New York seemed to be the only place in America where anyone fell in love, judging by the likes of Splash, Working Girl, Moonstruck, Something Wild, Desperately Seeking Susan (an intriguing semi-queer variation), and When Harry Met Sally. Not to mention Woody Allen, whose 1979 movie Manhattan begins with a self-aware voiceover: “He adored New York City … he romanticised it out of all proportion, a town that existed in black and white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”
In step with gentrification, these movies often processed edgy urban culture into mainstream commodity. Academic Johan Andersson calls it “gentrification by genre”. In his essay of the same name, he notes how the romantic comedy “can bring the frequently downplayed libidinous aspect of gentrification to the fore”. No longer a place of fear and anxiety, downtown New York became a place of youth, sex and alternative culture, of potential adventure, upward mobility, social intermixing, random encounters – romance.
It goes without saying that in almost all these films, the central characters are all white. And as with Notting Hill or Amélie, people of colour are generally reduced to the status of background set dressing. Only a few film-makers addressed gentrification from the opposite end of the telescope, including John Singleton (Laurence Fishburne gives a forceful lecture on the gentrification of Los Angeles in Boyz N the Hood) and Spike Lee, whose films of the late 80s and early 90s effectively chronicle the gentrification of his beloved Brooklyn. It’s there in Do the Right Thing: “Who told you to buy a brownstone on my block, in my neighbourhood, on my side of the street?” Giancarlo Esposito demands of the white proto-hipster who has just run over his brand new Air Jordans. “What do you want to live in a black neighbourhood for anyway? Motherfuck gentrification!” (The white hipster turns out to have been born in Brooklyn.) Ironically, despite its grim conclusion, Do the Right Thing still made Brooklyn look like an attractive place to live. Other young, white hipsters would follow.
Rye Lane shares something with Lee’s work, in that it is centred on two people of colour who have grown up in the area (which, according to 2017 data, is 71% black, Asian and minority ethnic). There are few white characters in the film at all and, for a change, it’s their turn to be the window-dressing, like the body-popping cowboy in Rye Lane market. There is also a double take-inducing cameo by a certain romcom A-lister (no spoilers).
Ground zero of gentrification … Peckham Levels. Photograph: Simon Turner/Alamy
And once again in Rye Lane, it’s the artists who are in the vanguard. The obligatory “meet cute” takes place at an exhibition opening at Peckham Levels, a former multi-storey car park that now houses a gallery. It could be seen as the ground zero of the district’s gentrification. The car park was built in the 1980s to serve the Sainsbury’s supermarket next door, which later closed (it is now the beloved Peckham Plex cinema). It was about to be knocked down, but in 2007 a non-profit group named Bold Tendencies campaigned to turn the top floors of the disused structure into an art space, plus a rooftop bar – Frank’s – with a spectacular view over London. The lower floors are now studios, workspaces, bars and a food court. Combined with the neighbouring Bussey Building, a converted 19th-century factory housing a similar mix, it has become an appropriately gritty cultural and leisure hub.
“When we first started working in Peckham, everybody who came talked about Only Fools and Horses,” says Sven Mündner, regeneration expert and lecturer in spatial practices at Central Saint Martins school of art, who co-founded Bold Tendencies. “There wasn’t a single journalist that didn’t make the reference.” Peckham’s renaissance didn’t quite come out of nowhere, he says. “The car park changed something, absolutely, but it also coincided with the opening of the overground [a new rail line connecting south and central London, which opened in 2012]. And there was an underlying artistic community anyway. Peckham was never not a place where things happened.” Situated between two major art schools, Camberwell and Goldsmiths, the area has always been home to students and artists, including Antony Gormley, who designed the distinctive bollards (local people call them the butt plugs).
It has changed for the better. I don’t want to move out of the area but I can’t afford to buy a house
What do Peckham residents think of all this? When I asked around on the streets, most were delighted to see their area celebrated on film, and were happy that it had changed for the better.
“In the 80s, it wasn’t like this,” says Denise, a market stallholder in her 60s, originally from Guyana. “You used to get a lot of killing and stabbing. At certain times you never used to want to be on the street. Now you can walk free.”
Obi, an education worker in his 30s who grew up there, agrees: “We had friends from other areas whose parents wouldn’t allow them to come to Peckham. It has changed for the better. Some people would call it gentrification, but gentrification is everywhere now. It would be nice to get some property or something, though. I don’t want to move out of the area but I can’t afford to buy a house.” Property prices have been rising precipitously. In 2019, Peckham had the fastest house price growth in the UK, having risen more than 1,000% since 1995 – and more than doubled in the previous 10 years. Long-term residents, and artists, are already selling up or being priced out.
It is possible to have regeneration without gentrification, says Mündner, who points out that local groups have successfully organised to preserve historic structures, fight off intrusive developments (although there are still plans for 27-storey apartment towers at one end of Rye Lane) and retain civic spaces such as Peckham Levels. “What makes places different is the level of emotional investment; how people invest themselves in the place other than by money,” he says. “Do they engage or do they just consume? I know lots of people who live here who really have their heart in Peckham.”
It is difficult to imagine Peckham turning into the new Notting Hill any time soon, but if it does, how much could we blame a movie like Rye Lane? Is it possible to celebrate a place on film without selling it at the same time? “There’s a responsibility in the film-makers’ court to be careful and to be aware of what they’re doing,” says Mündner. “But if they are really showing their love for a place, I think it’s one of the best things a film can do.”
In a perfect world, the people who brought the area through the bad times would benefit, the sterilising effects of gentrification would be mitigated and everyone would live happily ever after in sensibly priced homes – but life doesn’t always turn out like the movies.
Rye Lane is in cinemas from 17 March. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jan/13/ground-rent-young-homebuyers-charges | Money | 2018-01-13T07:00:52.000Z | Patrick Collinson | Ground rent: ‘We feel like prisoners in our own home’ | Thousands of young homebuyers remain trapped in virtually brand-new homes made unsaleable by spiralling ground rents and abandoned by developers such as Taylor Wimpey, despite a ban on the charges promised by the government.
Guardian Money can also reveal that the £5bn John Lewis pension fund is behind the soaring rents that have made the lives of some homeowners a misery.
Nathan Stewart, 27, contacted us after the sale of his home in Soham, Cambridgeshire, fell through last month. His buyers had agreed to pay £175,000 for the detached coach house, built by Taylor Wimpey in 2011, but the deal collapsed when their lenders refused to grant a mortgage against the property. The reason? Taylor Wimpey sold the house as leasehold, but with a clause whereby the ground rent doubles every 10 years for 50 years, at which point the fee is capped at £4,800 a year. It’s currently £300 a year (a fee for which no service is provided) but halfway through the 109 year lease, this will have increased to £4,800.
Many banks now flatly refuse to lend against properties with these doubling leases, making them effectively unsaleable. “We feel like we’re now prisoners in our own home. We’re also about £2,500 out of pocket after the sale fell through,” says Stewart.
Money has previously highlighted the offshore vehicles, tycoons and aristocrats that have snapped up freeholds across Britain to extract high ground rents. But what will surprise many people is the role of John Lewis’s pension fund. The freeholds on the estate where the Stewarts live were sold by Taylor Wimpey to a group called Fairthatch GR Ltd, but documents at Companies House name the John Lewis Partnership Pension Trust as entitled to receive all the ground rents paid by homebuyers.
The documents reveal that John Lewis’s pension fund is, through Fairthatch alone, picking up ground rents from 62 housing developments across England and Wales, comprising nearly 3,000 homes, with the assets valued at more than £17m. Many ground rent practices were condemned last month by communities secretary Sajid Javid as “feudal” as he announced a ban on leaseholds on new-build houses.
Javid added that he would force developers to cut ground rents to zero on all future apartments and houses – but for those who bought before the ban, the agony continues. Stewart has pleaded for a “deed of variation” that would cut the burden of the spiralling ground rent, but was told by Fairthatch’s administrators, Estates & Management, that no variation would be allowed. It also refused to sell him the freehold.
But it is Taylor Wimpey’s behaviour that most angers the Stewarts. The developer has set aside £130m to help homebuyers affected by a leasehold scandal, but the money is only going to those people who bought directly from the developer. If the house was sold on a year or two later, Taylor Wimpey says it has no legal responsibility.
In a statement the company says: “The Taylor Wimpey assistance scheme is available to customers who purchased their home directly from Taylor Wimpey. Secondary customers are excluded as Taylor Wimpey have had no legal relationship with them, were not party to their property transaction and, as such, have no visibility of the information provided between the parties. For customers who did not buy from us, we are advising them to contact their freeholder directly to discuss what options may be available to them with regards to their lease.”
Taylor Wimpey’s response has infuriated Stewart. He says: “The company’s oppressive and unethical leasehold terms, sale of freeholds and reluctance to support innocent homeowners has left myself and thousands of homeowners imprisoned with properties that are near-impossible to sell.”
Guardian Money approached Fairthatch through Estates & Management, and put a series of questions to the company. It says: “Please be advised that our client have declined an invitation to provide a comment.”
The most immediate hope for “imprisoned” buyers is if John Lewis’s pension fund relents and puts pressure on Fairthatch to offer better terms. An alternative route, being pursued by some buyers, is to sue their conveyancing solicitors for failing to point out onerous ground rent clauses.
In a statement, John Lewis says: “We are aware of concerns about the terms of some of the leases ... For leases that are not covered by the Taylor Wimpey scheme, the trustee is not currently able to agree to a variation of the leases. However, the trustee is exploring whether it may possible to vary these leases in the future. These discussions are ongoing and are commercially confidential.”
Like many pension funds, John Lewis’s pension scheme was attracted to what on paper appear to be a lucrative and guaranteed income from ground rents: a doubling lease is equivalent to a guaranteed income of 7% a year at a time when few other investments yield more than 1%-2%. These streams of income were sold to pension funds by the companies that have snapped up ground rents around England – and while the likes of John Lewis owns the stream of income, they don’t necessarily own the underlying freehold.
One of the big ground rent companies, Longharbour, is understood to be voluntarily offering deeds of variation to “second-hand” buyers locked into doubling ground rents. Unfortunately for the Stewarts, their freehold at Fairthatch is not with Longharbour but is ultimately controlled by the Consensus Business Group, which boasts that it has “amassed a portfolio of over 300,000 residential freeholds worth over £4bn”.
Consensus is itself ultimately controlled from the British Virgin Islands through the Tchenguiz Family Trust. Multimillionaire Vincent Tchenguiz is reported to have homes in Mayfair, St Tropez and Cape Town, plus a 130ft yacht on the French riviera.
But back in their rather more modest home in Soham, the Stewarts are hoping the “confidential” discussions John Lewis’s pension fund is having may soon produce results. He says: “Action to support homeowners like ourselves needs to be faster and fairer. Thousands of hardworking, innocent people are being exploited due to greed with, at present, no solution or end in sight.”
In December, the government promised it will “make it cheaper and easier for existing leaseholders to buy out their freehold and there will be better information available about redress for those consumers who face the most onerous terms.” For the Stewarts, that reform can’t come soon enough.
Caught in the leasehold trap? A Facebook group, the National Leasehold Campaign, helps and supports victims, while the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership - at leaseholdknowledge.com - is a vast resource of news and advice.
This article was amended on 24 January 2018. An earlier version said the ground rent would double every 10 years to £307,200 by the end of remaining 109 year lease. Taylor Wimpey have contacted the Guardian to say the fee is capped at £4,800 per year after 50 years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/jul/14/worldcinema.comedy | Film | 2006-07-14T12:56:07.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Death of Mr Lazarescu | Jonathan Miller has an anecdote about how he came to appreciate how fine the line is between life and death. As a young medical student, he was shown into the dissection room for the first time, and was confronted with a row of recently deceased cadavers, of various ages. His first thought was: "These people - they don't look at all well."
One person who really doesn't look well is Mr Lazarescu, the 63-year-old widower who is the hero of this magnificent new film from Romanian director Cristi Puiu. It is about the endgame of old age - a blacker-than-black, deader-than-deadpan comedy with something of the documentary style of Frederick Wiseman and something also of Samuel Beckett. Poor Mr Lazarescu's illnesses, aches and pains are snowballing into a critical mass of mortality, and over the movie's running time we realise that, at some stage, he has crossed the invisible line that awaits all of us: the line between being unwell and being a dead man walking.
Or in Mr Lazarescu's case: a dead man lying down moaning or being carried into an ambulance incessantly complaining. Lazarescu (played by Ion Fiscuteanu) is a grumpy, lonely man in state housing in Bucharest, where he has lived all his life. His earliest memory, to which he is vividly returned by the imminence of death, is of being two years old, in 1944, when the Americans bombed the capital city.
On this fateful day, we see Mr Lazarescu dazed and in discomfort, and it is not clear if today is worse than any other day. He has a pain in his stomach, and in his head - pains that he obsessively attributes to an ulcer operation he had eight years ago. But he is not just an old geezer: Lazarescu was once a formidable professional man. His genial neighbour calls him "the intellectual" and "Mr Engineer". Like everyone else, he thinks this new complaint is down to Lazarescu's heavy drinking. The only person who cares about him is the paramedic Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu) who takes him to the hospital and to what is laughingly known as the "ER". Business there is conducted at a Soviet tempo of bureaucratic resentment and depression. It is only owing to Mioara's persistence that the uncaring doctors finally take Lazarescu's situation seriously. His first name is Dante, an ironic allusion to the successive circles of clinical hell and of course that surname promises the opposite of resurrection.
It seems extraordinary to claim that this film is funny but it is, because Lazarescu's decline into catatonia and stillness - mumbling, wheezing and whimpering against the dying of the light - is in superb counterpoint to the loquacious performances from incidental characters, forever jabbering and squabbling with each other about trivial matters while Lazarescu goes into his twilight moments. He is trembling on eternity's threshold and one grumpy doctor laments only that no one will lend him a Nokia charger. There is some great one-side-of-the-telephone-conversation comedy, and a running gag about everyone asking the patient how much he has been drinking.
Finally, the white-coated vultures decide he has a colon tumour and a haematoma from a fall, and I laughed out loud at the brutal realism of one doctor who, in a boisterous parody of caringness, shouts down the corridor as Lazarescu is rolled away into the operating theatre. "Operate on that head wound, so he can die at home - from cancer!"
Part of the film's brilliance is its stunning and unforgiving transmission of the great truth that for most of us, death is not a single, flatline moment, but a gradual, insidious process of deterioration. When does it begin: in one's 70s? Or 60s? 50s? 40s? Is the second half of our life a matter of swimming harder and harder and harder against the receding tide? Perhaps. But the process is heroic, and Mr Lazarescu, even though he has so little to say, has the mute rhetoric of a hero. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2017/aug/10/disabled-people-back-pay-sleep-in-carers-mencap | Social Care Network | 2017-08-10T06:15:29.000Z | David Brindle | Disabled people may be liable for back pay of sleep-in care workers | Disabled people who employ their own care workers have begun to receive claims for back pay as the crisis over wages for sleep-in shifts forces intervention by the prime minister’s right-hand man.
Damian Green, first secretary of state, has stepped into the wages row and ordered an urgent assessment by government officials of the costs of meeting up to six years’ back pay for care workers who sleep at the homes of the people they support, in case they need help during the night.
Why sleep-in carers like me deserve a fair night’s pay
Read more
Publicity generated by the row is triggering claims by workers employed directly as personal assistants (PAs) by some of the 65,000 disabled people in England who have personal budgets in the form of direct payments.
In one case, a disabled man has been warned he could be liable for as much as £45,000 back pay. His family has asked for help from the local council, which funds his care, but say they have had no response despite making “a variety different approaches” over “a number of months”.
The case illustrates the complexity of the sleep-in pay issue, which stems from a change last year in official guidance to HMRC wages inspectors on payment of the full hourly minimum wage – now the “national living wage” – to care workers whether they are awake or asleep.
Traditional practice in the care sector has been payment of a flat sum for each sleep-in shift, perhaps £25 or £30, plus the hourly minimum for any time they spend delivering support. But HMRC is now enforcing the full £7.50 hourly minimum wage for workers aged 25 or over and is asking employers to calculate back pay for up to six years.
The chief executive of one care charity, which puts its liability for back pay at £6m and says it might have to sell 30 of its homes for learning disabled people to foot such a bill, says: “It’s been like reducing the speed limit from 30 to 20 and then issuing speeding tickets to everyone who has gone over 20 for the past six years.”
Ministers acted at the end of July to waive any fines for not paying the full hourly rate in the past and to suspend HMRC’s enforcement of back pay until the start of October. But the threat of back-pay bills, estimated by care employers to total between £400m and £600m, still hangs over the sector.
Employers can't foot £400m care worker back pay bill. Government must act - fast
Read more
Separately, employers are still trying to persuade some councils that they need to increase what they pay for care costs to cover the hourly rate in future. This could soak up £800m over the next three years, or 40% of the emergency £2bn extra promised for social care as a whole in March.
Green is understood to have ordered civil servants to work over the summer on definitive costings to take to the Treasury, to avoid reliance on care employers’ figures and to include the liabilities of disabled people who employ PAs.
Learning disability charity Mencap, which describes the crisis as the worst it has faced in its 70-year history and says it could even be forced to close, is highlighting the case of the disabled man – named only as Lloyd – who faces a potential £45,000 back-pay bill for care workers who support him to live independently in his own home.
His mother Shirley, who does not wish to be fully identified, says: “Lloyd’s staff have informed me that they have taken legal advice. As Lloyd is classed as the employer he will be expected to pay this back-pay bill and his personal budget does not cover these costs. I am most concerned.
“The government and the local authority need to sort this out. I and Lloyd should not have been placed in this position.”
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If you’re looking for a social care job or need to recruit staff, visit Guardian Jobs. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/1988/sep/21/emu.theeuro | Business | 1988-09-21T13:14:42.000Z | John Palmer | September 21 1988: Thatcher sets face against united Europe | The Prime Minister yesterday served notice on the rest of the European Community that her government would oppose tooth and nail any attempt to turn it into an economic and political union in which Britain might have to cede power to EEC institutions.
Mrs Thatcher chose the magnificent setting of the medieval Hall of Bruges to unfold the banner of a British 'Gaullism' in the face of those who want ultimately to see a united states of Europe.
The first reaction of commissioners and other senior EEC officials to Mrs Thatcher's speech was critical. "Frankly I am shocked. It was much more
negative than I had expected," one commissioner said.
Mrs Thatcher consciously followed in the footsteps of the late French President in asserting that the best way to build the European Community was "willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states" - a
new version of De Gaulle's "Europe des Patries".
Dismissing the idea that the United States might be a model for the future of Europe - as some of the EEC's founding fathers believed - Mrs Thatcher launched a frontal assault on those within the community who want to take some steps towards that goal.
The Prime Minister launched a thinly disguised attack on the president of the EEC Commission, Mr Jacques Delors, who earlier this year said that, over the next few years, the European Community would become responsible for some
80 per cent of all legislation in the Twelve, during which time an "embryo" European government might emerge.
"It is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which
have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success
depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, some in the
community seem to want to move in the opposite direction," she declared.
"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels."
Dismissing as irrelevent proposals for a European central bank, Mrs Thatcher
said the EEC should remain committed to a free market economy.
"The basic
framework is there: the Treaty of Rome itself was intended as a charter for
economic liberty," she said. "But that is not how it has always been read,
still less applied."
Although the British Government supported the goal of freer trade and movement within the EEC as part of the 1992 internal market, Mrs Thatcher said there was no question of totally abolishing frontier controls, although this was one of the objectives of the Single European Act agreed last year.
Directly contradicting those who argue that internal border controls are bureaucratic irrelevances in the fight against crime and terorism, Mrs Thatcher said they would still be necessary "to protect our citizens and
stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists, of illegal immigrants".
The British Government did want to see Europe develop "a greater sense of common purpose" but, Mrs Thatcher insisted, "it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one's own country, for these have been the source of
Europe's vitality throughout the centuries."
The Prime Minister hinted at a growing worry that the United States might be tempted to run down its commitment to maintain vast military forces in Western Europe and underlined her personal commitment to maintaining and
modernising nuclear weapons as well as more effective conventional forces.
She said: " .. it is a question of political will and political courage, of convincing people in all our countries that we cannot rely for ever on others for our defence, but that each member of the (Nato) Alliance must
shoulder a share of the burden."
Although the commission and supporters of progress towards European union were braced for Mrs Thatcher's onslaught, the bitterness of her language came as something of a shock. There was also resentment at her suggestion that supporters of a federal Europe necessarily backed a centralised
authority in Brussels.
"We want to see more power passed down to ordinary people, in the regions and the communities of the EEC," one senior commission official said yesterday. "But would Mrs Thatcher support giving, say Scotland or Wales,
the right to negotiate directly with the community on economic and social
aid, for instance?"
Opinions differ as to whether Mrs Thatcher's language could be taken entirely at face value. "If she means everything she says, for instance, about keeping frontier controls, then we will have another crisis with Britain on our hands before long," one European diplomat said.
"But, in practice, as the recent compromise over the community's budget and farm policy problems showed, Mrs Thatcher accepts the inevitability of community's budget and farm policy problems showed, Mrs Thatcher accepts the inevitability of compromise.
"Maybe all her speech at Bruges was intended to keep her nationalist-minded rightwingers happy while the serious business in
Europe is done more discreetly." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jul/01/pressandpublishing.sun | Media | 2005-07-01T06:13:24.000Z | Jane Martinson | Mackenzie ready for a new dawn at the Sun | Kelvin Mackenzie, the best-known tabloid editor of his generation, is to return to his alma mater as a star columnist in The Sun.
At 58 and with an estimated £7m fortune from last month's sale of his radio business, Mackenzie is likely to replace his protege, Richard Littlejohn, as Fleet Street's highest-paid columnist. Rebekah Wade, the current editor of Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, is understood to have approached Mackenzie following the purchase of the stock market listed Wireless group by Ulster TV.
Looking for a belligerent voice, she turned to the man behind headlines such as Gotcha! and Freddie Starr ate my hamster. Mr Littlejohn, who earned about £800,000 for his twice-weekly opinionated columns on subjects such as illegal immigrants, the monarchy and the Guardian, defected to the Daily Mail, his "spiritual home".
The description could more aptly apply to Mackenzie and the Sun, a fact which has not escaped the attention of Wapping-based executives.
Mr Mackenzie refused to confirm the appointment last night but said: "I am out of work and there have been a lot of opportunities offered to me. Obviously, the Sun is my alma mater."
Since leaving the Wireless group, a company he bought for £25m in 1998, there have been rumours that he could return to a management role.
He has made it clear that, while he has no intentions of retiring to his Cote d'Azur villa, he is no longer interesting in a senior editorial role. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2016/jun/28/over-populated-or-under-developed-real-story-population-growth | Global development | 2016-06-28T10:22:13.000Z | Carla Kweifio-Okai | Over-populated or under-developed? The real story of population growth | Global population hit 7.3 billion midway through 2015, an increase of 2 billion since 1990. It will continue to climb steadily, according to forecasters, reaching 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100.
But there is more to the population story than unprecedented numbers. The rate of growth is continuing to slow – the overall growth rate has been falling since the 1970s – and demographics are shifting.
Here is what the data shows beyond top line projections.
Globally, women are having fewer children than ever before
“The number of births has peaked, or has levelled off globally,” says John Wilmoth, director of the population division in the UN’s department of economic and social affairs. “Some countries still have increasing numbers of births but for the world as a whole, we’re not adding people to the population through births. We’re mostly adding to the population because people are living longer.”
Almost all countries have experienced reductions in family size, with 46% of the world’s population (pdf) now living in countries with low levels of fertility, where women have fewer than 2.1 children on average. This includes all countries in Europe and Northern America and significant parts of Asia and Latin America.
Eight percent of the world’s population live in high-fertility countries that have experienced limited reductions in fertility and where the average woman has five or more children in her lifetime. As the graphic below shows, low-income countries have the highest fertility rates as a general rule, with Niger the highest at an average of 7.6 children per woman.
In contrast to those countries facing consistently high fertility rates, more than 40 countries are expected to decrease their population between 2015 and 2050. The UN says fertility in all European countries is now below the level required for “full replacement of the population in the long run”.
Birth rates are dropping, but death rates are dropping faster
Even if global fertility rates were to drastically reduce to replacement levels, populations would continue to grow for some time due to what experts refer to as the population momentum – the increasing number of people surviving to reproductive age and beyond.
Since 1960, the birth rate has dropped considerably in countries of all income groups, but this has not translated into a decline in the global population because the death rate has dropped even faster, especially in low-income countries, as the graphic below shows.
In 2015 global life expectancy rose to 71.4 years, a five-year increase since 2000. Africa experienced the highest increase in that time, partly due to improvements in child health and increased access to HIV treatments.
While rising life expectancy presents a new set of challenges, Wilmoth said it was important not to lose sight of the good news. “The narrative around these issues is often negative, but when you think about the increase in life expectancy and the overall improvement in health conditions that has made population growth happen, this is an enormous reduction of human misery that has led to longer life,” he says.
Wilmoth says it is the world’s poorest countries, where the bulk of the population growth is taking place, that have the biggest challenges ahead. “It’s the countries that are growing very rapidly, 3% or 4% per year, and therefore they are doubling in size over 25 years – that is a pace of increase which is difficult to sustain,” he says.
“It’s just very challenging when a country is trying to improve the level of healthcare and education, and at the same time they’re having to constantly chase after population growth and increase the size of everything at a rather significant pace. The challenge is scaling up.”
Africa has the most rapid population growth
More than half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to take place in Africa. The UN estimates that 33 countries in Africa have a high probability of tripling their populations, this includes Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mali, Niger and Uganda. The most notable growth is expected in Nigeria, where the population is estimated to surpass that of the US by 2050, making it the third largest nation on earth.
But within this diverse region there are African countries and cities bucking the trend – Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, has a fertility rate of 1.7. Some experts tout the possibility for Africa to follow trends in many parts of Asia, where lowered fertility rates and a slowdown in population growth rates took place from the 1960s, including in Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. As the graphic below shows, fertility is projected to decline in Africa too, but the pace with which this happens will have important implications for development.
Education and family planning can influence fertility rates
There are a number of factors that can play a role in a country’s fertility rates, including its investment in education, the availability of family planning services, the status of women’s rights and the prevalence of early and forced marriage.
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) argues that addressing these key issues is fundamental to slowing population growth. “Population dynamics are not destiny,” the UNFPA’s population matters report says. “Change is possible through a set of policies which respect human rights and freedoms and contribute to a reduction in fertility, notably access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, education beyond the primary level, and the empowerment of women.”
While more women are using contraceptives than ever before, globally there are still 225 million women who would like to avoid or delay pregnancy but are unable to access a modern form of contraception. Campaigners say an important step in slowing population growth is addressing this gap and recognising women’s rights to choose if and when they have children.
Research has also shown the impact of education on lowering fertility rates – educated girls are more likely to marry later and have fewer children. The UN estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa, women with no education have an average of 6.7 births, women with primary education have an average of 5.9 births, and women with secondary education have an average of 3.9 births.
Also important is the provision of maternal and child health services. Many researchers and campaigners support the theory that increased child survival rates can lead to lower fertility rates, as parents choose to have fewer children when they know there is a higher likelihood the ones they have will survive into adulthood (pdf).
Hans Rosling, statistician and co-founder of data foundation Gapminder, echoes this sentiment in his work, arguing that ending population growth starts by saving the poorest children.
Wilmoth agrees, saying that while the link between improved maternal health and reduced fertility can be difficult to demonstrate empirically, historical studies show that parents have family size goals in mind. “They’re less likely to have an additional birth because the current children are less likely to die.”
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Reframing the debate
The challenges of population growth are clear, not least the threats to biodiversity from increased pollution, deforestation, intensive agriculture and urbanisation. Because the stakes are high, there is a heated debate over how to tackle the issue. There are growing calls for less of a focus on overpopulation and more on overconsumption, including those outlined in Stephen Emmott’s book Ten Billion, which calls for drastic behavioural change to curb an unprecedented environmental crisis.
Wilmoth argues the key to meeting some of these challenges lies in reframing the conversation, putting human rights at the fore. “The use of the term overpopulation portrays a certain bias, that you’re focusing on the number of people rather than the level of development,” he said. “Is a country overpopulated or is it under-developed? I think sometimes the discussion is exaggerated, and there’s not enough conversation about the possibility for development to keep pace with population growth.
“There is a real opportunity here. But that opportunity can only be grasped if the growing number of young people today are empowered with education and employment, and have access to contraception, so that the generation that follows them won’t be bigger still.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/jan/04/comics.robertcrumb | Books | 2004-01-04T00:24:53.000Z | Philip French | Film of the week: Time for a reality check | American Splendor
(100 mins, 15)
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini; starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis
In a distant, more innocent time, there was a clear distinction between cinematic fact and fiction. Documentaries were considered serious and truthful, conduits for poetry and useful information. Feature films were commercial activities, purveyors of falsehood and fantasy. This we now know to be nonsense. Documentaries were never objective and, because of private or public sponsorship, rarely disinterested.
Fiction movies, on the other hand, even the most extreme melodramas and escapist tales, can contain enduring truths. During the Second World War and its aftermath, feature directors such as Ford, Capra and Wyler made documentaries, while documentarists such as Cavalcanti, Harry Watt and Louis de Rochemont (of March of Time fame) turned to feature movies.
Some later directors - Louis Malle and Michael Apted are notable examples - consciously switched between commercial features and what became known as cinéma vérité or cinéma direct, usually commissioned by TV.
Terms like 'semi-documentary', 'docudrama' and 'documentary reconstruction' deliberately blurred distinctions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, however, continues to offer separate Oscars for features and documentaries. This situation renders problematic any recognition of the mountaineering epic, Touching the Void.
American Splendor, a biopic of Harvey Pekar, a celebrated writer for comic books of the underground variety, is written and directed by documentarists Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who operate like confident guerrillas in some no-man's-land between fact and fiction. Now in his sixties, Pekar has spent his life in the rundown Midwest industrial town of Cleveland, Ohio, working until his recent retirement as a clerk at a Federal Department of Veteran Affairs hospital. He's a nondescript character from a Jewish working-class background, unprepossessing in appearance and dress, an obsessive collector of records and comic books, well read and articulate in a bar-room, corner-diner sort of way.
By a happy chance - and underpinned by his admiration of the naturalistic fiction of Theodore Dreiser's school - he started in the 1970s to write autobiographical comic strips that were drawn by Robert Crumb and other artists. His motto might well have been Thoreau's observation that 'the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation'.
His wry humour and unsentimental observation of his own humdrum life and that of those around him led to Pekar gaining a reputation as a 'blue-collar Mark Twain'. He became a cult figure through the rough-hewn comic with the ironic title American Splendor, and he appeared on nationally broad cast chat shows holding his own against a patronising David Letterman. But he didn't give up his day job or leave his small disorderly apartment in Cleveland.
The bizarre life of his friend Crumb became the subject of a 1994 documentary by Terry Zwigoff. But Berman and Pulcini have gone beyond this to make a multi-layered picture involving fictional recreation, newly shot documentary footage and animation, producing a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist as a troubled man.
For much of the time, the querulous Pekar is played by that excellent character actor Paul Giamatti, a specialist in losers, subservient sidekicks and sad sacks. And his third wife, Joyce Grabner, herself something of an oddball, is impersonated by Hope Davis. But commenting on the movie is the real Harvey Pekar, whom we also meet along with the real Joyce Grabner and a number of the fellow workers Pekar brings into his strip, most notably a strange Catholic fellow clerk called Toby Radloff.
Toby, who talks as if he's reading from the bottom line on an optician's chart, is so convinced of his position as a despised nonentity that he's prepared to drive 260 miles to see his favourite movie, Revenge of the Nerds. The real Harvey, Joyce and Radloff are sometimes seen in the same frame as the actors who play them, appearing on stylised, skeletal versions of the real sets or locations on which the fictionalised side of the film takes place. In addition, the directors draw on the different comic-strip representations of Harvey.
To make matters even more complicated, Joyce and Harvey fly out to Los Angeles to watch a pair of stage actors impersonate them in a play based on Harvey's comic strip. It's a curious hall-of-mirrors effect that gets almost hallucinatory when we see Giamatti as Harvey leave a network studio's green-room to appear live on the David Letterman show, while Hope Davis as Joyce watches the real Harvey on TV clips from the archives.
In this context, who is the real Harvey Pekar? Who could be more real than Paul Giamatti with his shrewd comic timing and professional body language? Could the 'real' Joyce and Harvey have played themselves with comparable conviction in the scenes where Harvey is diagnosed with cancer and helped by Joyce to confront his treatment by turning it into a comic book called Our Cancer Year? Just as we were beginning to get over Spike Jonze's Adaptation, which started our minds reeling early in 2003, American Splendor comes along to keep us puzzled about the nature of reality during the new year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/jan/13/bond-23-keep-real-007 | Film | 2011-01-13T14:34:17.000Z | Stuart Heritage | Your cheapest vodka, shaken or stirred: should Bond 23 keep it real? | By the time the next James Bond film is released in November 2012, four years will have passed since Quantum of Solace. And while four years isn't exactly an unprecedented gap between 007 outings, it's nevertheless quite ominous.
In all of Bond history, there have only been two gaps of this length before – the six-year hiatus between 1989's Licence to Kill and 1995's GoldenEye, and the four-year period between 2002's Die Another Day and 2006's Casino Royale. Both of these saw the franchise overhauled completely – allowing the grittiness of Timothy Dalton's reign to make way for the blowdried smarminess of Pierce Brosnan, and the goonishly gadget-driven Brosnan era to give way to the monosyllabic Bourneisms of Daniel Craig. Four years is a long time, so it's not unreasonable to expect James Bond to change once again in Bond 23, to reflect everything that's happened in the world since his last appearance.
However, any changes made this time around will obviously have to be slight. As awful as Quantum of Solace was, 007's downtime has been dictated more by financial problems than creative malaise. And, although by 2012 Daniel Craig will have been James Bond for just one year less than Pierce Brosnan, he's unconditionally locked into the next film. Similarly, the producers of Bond 23 will still be Barbara Broccoli, Anthony Waye and Michael G Wilson, and it'll be written by series stalwarts Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, so nobody should expect too many drastic alterations this time around.
But the key to James Bond's longevity has been his willingness to adapt to the times. So, after a four-year absence, how can Bond reinvent himself for the teenies, or whatever this decade is supposed to be called? Luckily, I've had some ideas on the matter.
Budget Bond
Between MGM's financial worries and the government's expenditure cuts, it would make sense if Bond found himself unable to live his usual life of luxury. Forget globetrotting, bespoke tailoring and luxurious stays in five-star presidential suites – if Bond really wants to reflect the times, he should spend most of the film shacked up in a Wolverhampton Travelodge, with nothing more than a spare £50 machine-washable Matalan suit that he keeps in a binbag. If he goes anywhere, it must either be by National Express coach or easyJet. And his drink of choice? Tesco Value vodka and Stripes Cola. Out of a mug.
Anna Chapman Bond
The biggest news in espionage since 2008 has probably been the tale of the deported Russian spies, like Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko, who turned out to spend most of their time living extraordinarily mundane lives in America. Perhaps Bond 23 could reflect this cultural shift by basing 007 in a dreary suburban St Petersburg semi with a pretend wife, where the highlight of each day was his brief drive around the block with a dictaphone poking out of the passenger window. I'd certainly watch that.
Fun Bond
By 2012, five years will have passed since the last Jason Bourne film, so filling a James Bond film with gadget-free fistfights and endless interminable parkour scenes will look a bit old-hat. Wouldn't it be nice if Bond could become, well, more identifiably Bondish again? The sort of chap who sleeps around without consequence, mows down thousands of boilersuited foreigners inside hollowed-out mountains without putting so much as a hair out of place, has a never-ending series of tasteless wisecracks up his sleeve and just generally lords it about like the charming sociopath we've all come to love so much. That would be better than just letting Daniel Craig grunt a lot and skulk around in his pants. Wouldn't it?
These are just three suggestions, of course. Leave your ideas on how James Bond should keep up with the times below. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/sep/08/the-player-naomi-alderman | Games | 2010-09-08T21:00:38.000Z | Naomi Alderman | The player: why games merit academic study | It's easy to mock academic videogame studies. A recent Digital Games Research Association conference included papers on "the fan-fictional worlds of Tetris" and "text analysis of quests in an MMORPG".
But consider this: games are the largest entertainment industry in the world. Studies have shown that children value their computers and computer games far more highly than TV programmes or books. Games are a huge part of our culture: surely precisely what academics should study. I asked Dr Ewan Kirkland, senior lecturer in media and culture at Brighton University, exactly what games academics look at. "One important area is what games do that is different from other artistic media. How do they produce an emotional effect?" The game Silent Hill 2 convinced Kirkland that games were worth studying. "It's deeply psychological. At the end of the game, you have to commit a crime which reproduces the deed your character has been trying to forget throughout the game. It's about love, loss and guilt, with a disturbing sense of complicity. That fascinated me."
Are all games worth studying? Kirkland says yes: "All games come from our culture. They reflect issues from gender politics to human relationships with technology, and they also inform culture. In Bioshock, human mutation is the extreme consequence of unbridled capitalism and scientific experimentation. Grand Theft Auto, like many gangster films, is a critical reflection on the American Dream."
Games academia is now where film academia was 30 or 40 years ago: not something "serious" departments indulge in. But as games continue to grow, that's certain to change. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/dec/24/harry-cobden-faces-king-george-vi-chase-agony-over-paul-nicholls-stable-clash-horse-racing | Sport | 2020-12-24T18:00:24.000Z | Greg Wood | Harry Cobden faces King George agony over Nicholls stable clash | Jockeys who become trainers always say that there is more pressure in their second career than in their first, so perhaps this year’s King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day is an exception to prove a rule. Paul Nicholls has four of the nine runners including the first two in the betting, he has already saddled a record 11 winners of the Christmas highlight and is around a 4-11 chance to make it a round dozen. For Harry Cobden, his stable jockey, the situation is a little more complicated.
Cobden is enjoying the best season of his career in terms of winners, and is within touching distance of Brian Hughes, the current champion jockey, in the race for the title. He is also as imperturbable as any rider in the weighing room when faced with the ever-changing fortunes of a jump jockey’s life.
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But Cobden will not need reminding that while the day-to-day winners keep arriving at a rate of knots, his last Grade One win, on Nicholls’s Topothegame, was as long ago as March 2019.
In the 21 months since, Nicholls has landed four more Grade Ones, so if Cyrname, Cobden’s ride in the King George, does not win and another of Nicholls’s runners does, it will be fifth time unlucky for the stable jockey. And if that winner is Clan Des Obeaux, who is going for a third consecutive success, the winning rider will be Sam Twiston-Davies, the man Cobden replaced as No 1 at the yard in May 2018.
That, in turn, would be a re-run of last year’s race, when Cobden and Cyrname were in front turning for home only for Clan Des Obeaux – Cobden’s winning ride in 2018 – to ease alongside pulling double three out on the way to a 21-length success.
“It’s a great job being the stable jockey,” Nicholls said at Ascot last week, “but it’s not always easy to make the right decision.
“Harry knows he got it wrong with Dynamite Dollars and Politologue [in the Queen Mother Champion Chase] in the spring. It was his decision [to ride Dynamite Dollars] and the reason was that it was Politologue’s fifth Cheltenham, and he’d always run well but hadn’t won, while Dynamite Dollars had come back from a long time off to finish third behind Altior. He was a progressive young horse and Harry felt there was a bit more to come.
“Harry Skelton kept the ride [on Politologue] in the Tingle Creek [in December] while Harry [Cobden] stuck with Greaneteen, so looking back he’d probably wish he’d gone with Politologue [at Cheltenham] as he might have won a Tingle Creek too, but it’s all ifs and buts in racing.”
Cobden’s choice this year was effectively made for him when Cyrname returned to form in hugely impressive style in the Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby in November. Had there been a decision to be made, however, Nicholls would have struggled to offer much assistance.
“I would never say ‘you’ve got to ride this’,” he said, “you try to make it a team thing, it’s always about Team Ditcheat. And I couldn’t say to Harry, this is my decision, ride this or that, because I’m in the same boat. Cyrname could not have had a better preparation this year, whereas he definitely wasn’t right when he ran there last year. The advantage Clan has is that he’s won two King Georges and he’s brilliant around Kempton.”
The team-based approach to the riding duties at Ditcheat is a point that Nicholls emphasises several times. In addition to Clan Des Obeaux and Cyrname, he will also run Real Steel, with Daryl Jacob, another former No 1 at the stable, in the saddle, while Bryony Frost will, as ever, be aboard her old ally Frodon.
Clan Des Obeaux and Sam Twiston-Davies after winning the 2019 King George VI Chase at Kempton. Photograph: Steven Paston/PA
Keeping everyone happy in such a competitive environment is never easy, as Sir Alex Ferguson, a part-owner of Clan Des Obeaux, would confirm. Nor is it always possible, as Nicholls knows only too well.
“Harry was with me from when he was 12 years old, and then two years ago, he was getting better and better and Colin [Tizzard] was trying to pinch him and so I had to make a decision, whether I let Sam go or Harry go,” he says.
“It was a really tough one, like having two brilliant strikers, who do you let go? So I canvassed all the owners and then followed my gut feeling. I didn’t want to put all that work in with Harry and then let Colin have him, even on, say, a two-year loan, he would have gone and that would have been it.
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“I knew that Sam would be OK, he’d still have a great job for his dad [Nigel], he’d be riding loads of winners as a freelance and still be riding a lot for us, and it’s always great to give him good winners when you can. It worked out for everyone.
“At the time I got plenty of stick, that’s just how it is, but sometimes you’ve got to make a tough decision and I’d have been stupid to let Harry go. And it’s great that I’m still mates with Sam and we can use him when we can, which works well for everybody.”
And perhaps on Saturday, at the fifth time of asking, it will finally work best of all for Harry Cobden. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/02/governments-65m-early-years-plan-for-england-a-drop-in-the-ocean | Education | 2024-02-02T10:19:17.000Z | Jamie Grierson | Government’s £6.5m early years plan for England a ‘drop in the ocean’ | A £6.5m recruitment campaign to encourage people to work in the early years sector as the first phase of the government’s flagship childcare expansion plan has been criticised as “too late” and a “drop in the ocean” by sector leaders.
A trial, which will take place in 20 local authorities in England from April, will also give new recruits and returners to the early years workforce a £1,000 cash payment shortly after they take up their post.
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced in March last year that eligible families of children as young as nine months in England would be able to claim 30 hours of free childcare a week.
Under the plans, working parents of two-year-olds will be able to access 15 hours of free childcare from April. This will be extended to working parents of all children older than nine months from September.
From September 2025, working parents of children under five will be entitled to 30 hours’ free childcare each week.
The children and families minister, David Johnston, said: “One of the things that people in the sector say to me is that too often people feel that they’re seen as babysitters rather than what they actually are, which is early educators who are playing a vital role in a child’s first five years.
“So what we’re trying to do both with the financial incentives – but more with the big national campaign – is get people to understand just how important these roles are and the difference you can make in shaping young lives at the earliest stage.”
He added that the government wanted to test out the £1,000 “golden handshake” in some areas to see if it did encourage people who had worked in the sector to return, as well as increase new starters.
The recruitment campaign by the Department for Education will look to increase recruitment across the sector by highlighting different childcare career routes and progression opportunities.
Purnima Tanuku, the chief executive of National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA), said: “It’s important to stress that this campaign comes too late to support nurseries with the first phase of the childcare expansion, which begins in two months. Campaigns like this take time to have a positive impact and the sector needs qualified and experienced staff now.”
She added: “The sector needs thousands more staff so we hope that the tax-free incentive will form part of a comprehensive workforce plan if the pilot is successful.”
Joeli Brearley, the founder of charity Pregnant Then Screwed, said: “These plans are undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but they’re a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. The sector needs tens of thousands more early years professionals if it is to meet the demand for places.
“A one-off payment doesn’t deal with the fundamental issue that early years professionals leave the sector because the pay is dreadful and the work can be hugely stressful. The only way to sustainably solve the staffing crisis is to increase wages.”
The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said: “This is a startling reminder that the Conservatives have offered a childcare pledge without a plan.
“Childcare staff are leaving in their droves, leading to nursery closures right across the country. Cheap bungs to new staff when existing workers are turning their back on this key industry will not magic up new places for parents.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/16/emmys-2024-elton-john-egot-win-grammy-oscar-tony | Music | 2024-01-16T04:58:17.000Z | Sian Cain | Elton John becomes an Egot after winning an Emmy award | Elton John has become an Egot – an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award winner – after winning his first ever Emmy, becoming just the 19th person to do so.
Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium won best variety special live at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Monday night, but the 76-year-old British singer-songwriter could not pick up the honour due to having a knee operation.
The producer Ben Winston, who took to the stage with John’s husband, David Furnish, to collect the award, said: “I am not Elton John, sadly he had a knee op. He’s absolutely fine but wanted to send his love and thanks to the Television Academy for this incredible award.
“We knew this show would be historic, because it was going to be Elton’s last ever show in North America on tour. We knew it would be historic because it was Disney’s first live global stream.
“We didn’t know it would be historic because it was going to win a man, who has created the soundtrack to our lives, he’s done so much great for society, who is all of our hero. We didn’t know it would win him an Egot.”
Becoming an Egot has been referred to as the “grand slam” of show business. John is the 19th person to do so, joining the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Before John, Viola Davis was the most recent individual to become an Egot, after winning a Grammy last year.
The Emmy award is added to John’s five Grammy wins, two Academy Award wins for Can You Feel the Love Tonight from The Lion King and (I’m Gonna) Love Me Again from Rocketman, alongside his Tony award for best original score for musical Aida.
Press Association contributed to this report. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrification-richard-florida-interview-creative-class-new-urban-crisis | Cities | 2017-10-26T06:15:00.000Z | Oliver Wainwright | ‘Everything is gentrification now’: but Richard Florida isn't sorry | He’s the prophet of placemaking, the king of the downtown revival, the patron saint of avocado toast. More than any other figure in urban thinking, the US academic Richard Florida has been held up as the ultimate champion of gentrification, at once celebrated by mayors for reviving their struggling cities and vilified by critics for fuelling urban inequality.
His 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class hit on what now seems blindingly obvious: that the “clustering force” of young creatives and tech workers in metropolitan areas was leading to greater economic prosperity. Don’t waste money on stadiums and concert halls, or luring big companies with tax breaks, he told the world’s mayors. Instead make your town a place where hipsters want to be, with a vibrant arts and music scene and a lively cafe culture. Embrace the “three T’s” of technology, talent and tolerance and the “creative class” will come flocking.
Florida was essentially holding up a mirror to an urban revival that was already well under way. But he packaged his findings in a such a digestible, marketable form – complete with snappy rankings such as the “Bohemian Index”, encouraging cities to compete for a place on his lists – that the message was irresistible to policymakers across the globe. Soon, no town was without its own arts and creativity strategy, innovation hub or pop-up poetry corner.
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Fifteen years on, it hasn’t quite turned out as he planned. Florida’s formula has proven to benefit the already rich, mostly white middle class; fuel rampant property speculation; displace the bohemians he so fetishised; and see the problems that once plagued the inner cities simply move out to the suburbs. Does he now regret promoting any of the principles that he has championed for so long?
“I’m not sorry,” he barks, sitting in a hotel lobby in Mayfair, wearing a leather jacket and black T-shirt. “I will not apologise. I do not regret anything.”
His defensiveness comes in response to the reaction to his latest book, The New Urban Crisis, which has been widely interpreted as a mea culpa for opening up the great can of gentrifying worms. After years of proselytising loft-living and shabby-chic cafes, Florida’s eyes have been opened to the downsides of the back-to-the-city movement, sorely felt from London to San Francisco and beyond (although not much beyond, in his western-centric study).
The annual Bushwick Open Studios event in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
He says it was the election of populist rightwing mayor Rob Ford in 2010, in his adoptive hometown of Toronto, that finally triggered his awakening. If even this liberal creative capital could swing so violently to the right, the backlash had well and truly arrived.
“It forced me to confront this divisiveness,” he says. “I realised that we need to develop a new narrative, which isn’t just about creative and innovative growth and clusters, but about inclusion being a part of prosperity. It was the service class – the class I had forgotten – that was taking it on the chin.”
It was something of an epiphany. As he writes in the introduction to his new book: “I entered a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation … I found myself confronting the dark side of our urban revival that I had once championed and celebrated.”
I’m certainly not the architect of gentrification. I wish I had that much power
Richard Florida
Florida’s Creative Class Group, a lucrative consultancy, had turned his book into an entire movement, giving him a celebrity status that saw his speaking fee balloon to $35,000. He became the rockstar of regeneration, extolling his message to packed-out venues with the rousing conviction of an evangelical preacher. His client list includes everyone from Austin, Texas, to Barcelona, Brisbane, Dublin, Pamplona and the United Nations.
With fame and commercial success came a backlash. He was accused of being a salesman, an opportunist, peddling the same “creative city” toolkit to every no-hope rustbelt town going. He even spawned his own dedicated opposition group, the Creative Class Struggle, who were keen to highlight his (publicly funded) salary as director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, which now stands at over $360,000. His slick soundbites are parodied on Twitter in the form of @Dick_Florida (“Problem: Cops are the shock troops of structural power. Solution: What if they had a booth at this farmers market?”).
Criticism has come from both ends of the political spectrum. “In the States, 99% of my critics were socially conservative, rightwing people, who said I had a gay agenda, or that cities couldn’t be built by yuppies, sophistos, trendoids and gays,” Florida has said. But, for a man who professes to be a social democrat, it was the attacks from the left that really stung.
The sickness at the heart of modern cities is clear. But what's the cure?
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Some labelled his theories elitist, while others picked holes in his indexes correlating hipster culture with economic success. As the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote: “There are many good reasons to be tolerant without spinning an unfounded story about how bohemianism helps urban development.” It was “skilled people” rather than creatives, Glaeser concluded, who “are the key to urban success”.
“My leftwing critics created a straw man,” Florida tells me, with the air of someone bruised by attacks. “I’m certainly not the architect of gentrification. I wish I had that much power. The truth is, I underestimated the virulence and ferocity of the move back to the city. I missed it by an order of magnitude.”
Following the Rob Ford shockwave, it was the surprise election of Donald Trump that really made him take notice of the divisions between the cities and the regions, and the great mass of people beyond his creative urban centres.
“It’s the working class – and I’m sorry, but I’m a member of the working class, I come from the working class – that has voted for this nationalistic agenda,” he says. “If Marx came back to life, he would say, ‘This doesn’t surprise me. I told you the peasantry was a backward-looking class.’ They weren’t part of the forward-looking momentum of capitalism.”
Swing to the right … Toronto mayor Rob Ford defends himself from allegations in 2013. Photograph: Nathan Denette/AP
He is fond of quoting Karl Marx, and he describes his own theoretical position as “a fusion of Marx, [economist Joseph] Schumpeter and Jane Jacobs”, whose sentiments he regularly summons.
“After the attack on the twin towers, I asked Jane what we should do. She said, ‘Richard, you’re a nice guy, but you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not what we should do; it’s about them, the people who live and work in those neighbourhoods.’ That’s what my work has tried to be about ever since.”
The New Urban Crisis paints a gloomy picture of what Florida calls “winner-take-all urbanism”, charting the rise of “superstar cities” such as New York, London and Tokyo. Today, the 50 largest metropolitan areas are home to just 7% of the world’s population, yet generate 40% of its economic growth.
Supported by an arsenal of statistics and rankings from his research team, he shows how the most creative cities are also the most unequal; how urban segregation exists in “patchwork” form, not just inner-city v periphery; how the next big crisis is the suburbs. There are winners and losers, good guys and bad guys, urban optimists and urban pessimists, superstar cities and everywhere else.
Gentrification is a global problem. It's time we found a better solution
Oliver Wainwright
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The book reads as if assembled from different articles over the years. He notes that inequality is an obstacle to growth, while also stating that unequal places such as San Francisco and New York are booming. He rails against Nimbys (or “New Urban Luddites”, as he calls them) and argues that planning regulations “have a substantial negative effect on the economy” – yet says deregulation is not the answer. He says public transport is key, while he himself takes taxis from the airport to London, as the preface to the book reveals.
When I suggest that perhaps his creative class v service class definition isn’t particularly helpful, given that many artists also wait tables, he pauses in his usually fluent spiel. “Maybe,” he says. “But the real issue is the immiseration of the service class.
“Yes, there are many artists and musicians who struggle, but the creative workers have colonised the best spaces in cities, pushing the service workers out to the periphery.”
At the mention of gentrification, he launches an impassioned tirade against the corrosive effects of what he sees as the guilt-laden left in urban academia, which in many ways rings true.
A sign in Cheshire Street, east London. Photograph: Sara Kelly
“Everything is gentrification now!” he cries. “Kids come to my office in tears. They say: ‘I took this class in urban geography and I want to make my city better, but they say everything I want to do is gentrification. A better school is gentrification, empowering artists is gentrification, working to improve the condition of parks is gentrification. What can I do? Just let it go all to shit?’ I think this academic urbanism is so dangerous, because it disempowers people. It is so removed from the reality of everyday life.”
Both in private and on stage, Florida speaks at such a fast pace and in a tone so declarative and self-assured that it’s sometimes hard to decode when he’s not saying much at all.He treated a packed auditorium at the London School of Economics to such a show two weeks ago, recounting his humble origins as the son of a factory worker from Newark, New Jersey, and charting his successive academic epiphanies. Mid-lecture, he stopped dramatically, and started reciting Jane Jacobs quotes like mantras. “Density in the absence of pedestrian scale can be a very dangerous thing … she was a genius.”
He is frank about how he has changed his mind since Trump and the EU referendum: “If you read the galleys of my book, you’ll see I was proclaiming that President Hillary Clinton will establish a new council of cities, that we’ll finally see national investment in transport and housing.
‘She was a genius’ … Jane Jacobs outside her home in Toronto in 1968. Photograph: Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty Images
“But I’ve come to realise that the nation state is the problem,” he says. “We have to move power back to the local level. If I can live in my little hamlet, where they’re not going to impose Brexit on me or take away women’s reproductive rights, and it’s the kind of place I want to live, then that’s great. We vote with our feet and choose the places we want to live.”
So what are his solutions? The book concludes with a series of principles (the “seven pillars”) for how we might build a new inclusive “urbanism for all”. He wants better jobs, more affordable housing, improved public transport and “a global effort to build stronger, more prosperous cities in rapidly urbanising parts of the emerging world”.
It’s mostly inarguable, though there is scant detail on how these things might actually happen. When I ask him about the benefits of a land value tax, mentioned briefly in the book, he says: “It’s time for new thinking. Many of the solutions may not work, but we need to try things and talk about new solutions. We need incentives for greater development, not only of housing in general, but of affordable housing.
“I don’t have all the answers,” he adds, in response to my confused frown. “I always say: ‘Here’s a menu of things that seem interesting, but you guys are gonna have to figure out what works best for you.’”
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