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https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/feb/28/bok-bok-melbas-call-kelela | Music | 2014-02-28T13:52:15.000Z | Michael Cragg | Bok Bok – Melba's Call feat Kelela: New music | Reading on mobile? Click here to listen
One of 2013's most innovative releases came in the shape of Kelela's Cut 4 Me, an oddly undulating slab of futuristic R&B featuring production from a host of acts affiliated with sister labels Fade to Mind and Night Slugs. The free mixtape – represented the first time any of the producers had featured vocals on their club anthems, and it's clearly inspired Night Slugs' head honcho Bok Bok, aka Alex Sushon, whose forthcoming EP is his first full vocal collaboration. Having produced two songs on Cut 4 Me – the Little Dragon-esque Guns & Synths and the plaintive A Lie – Kelela returns the favour on the as-yet-untitled EP's excellent first single, Melba's Call. Over a head-spinning stop-start rush of Prince-like funk and cascading drums, Kelela's delicious drip of a voice sits perfectly in amongst the blasts of low-end bass, as she coyly coos, "Why you acting so...". | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/13/anz-posts-record-74bn-profit-despite-surge-in-mortgage-holders-falling-behind | Australia news | 2023-11-13T00:18:56.000Z | Jonathan Barrett | ANZ posts record $7.4bn profit despite surge in mortgage holders falling behind | ANZ has taken full advantage of a period of fast-rising interest rates to post a record annual cash profit of $7.4bn marked by a surge in the number of mortgage holders falling behind.
The result, up by 14% in the 12 months to the end of September, adds to the string of strong results reported by Australia’s major banks, which have benefited from the difference between the rates they charge loan customers and pay savers.
ANZ lifted its full-year dividend, while also reporting a 36% increase in the value of loans that are past due, primarily consisting of mortgages in Australia and New Zealand.
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At the end of September, there were $13bn in late loans, whereby the holder was behind on repayments anywhere from one day to more than 90.
The chief executive, Shayne Elliott, said in a briefing note accompanying the results that actual hardship figures remained modest, while acknowledging that it was difficult for those in financial stress.
Westpac’s profit jump is no surprise when the RBA favours banks over households
John Quiggin
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“They’re actually muddling through pretty well,” Elliott said. “That again speaks to the strength of the economy, the fact that people have been able to work through.”
While the number of actual mortgage defaults remains low, the increase in late loans shows that financial stress is building in many households.
ANZ has increased the amount of money set aside for loan losses by $245m, in an acknowledgment of the impact of higher interest rates on customers.
The official cash rate now sits at 4.35% after the Reserve Bank hiked again last week, in the central bank’s 13th rate rise since May last year.
ANZ’s chief gauge of profitability, net interest margins, increased to 1.7%, from 1.63% a year earlier, although much of the gain was recorded in the first six months of the annual result.
Banks were criticised at the time for increasing lending rates at a faster pace than savings rates, leading to a bump in profits.
“However, profit growth in 2024 is likely to be more challenging, signalled by falling net interest margins in the second half of 2023, higher credit provision charges and a likely slowdown in lending,” credit agency Moody’s said on Monday.
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ANZ declared a final dividend of 94c per share, up from 74c a year ago, although its profit result was slightly lower than analyst expectations.
The bank has been aggressively chasing market share in the mortgage sector by offering competitive rates and cashback offers for new customers even after rivals pulled back on their own incentives.
UBS noted on Monday that ANZ may have engaged in “irrational pricing” in its attempt to entice new mortgage customers.
Shares in ANZ dropped by more than 3% in early trading on Monday as investors reacted to the results.
Elliott said he was confident the bank could progress plans to buy the banking arm of second-tier lender Suncorp through an appeals process after the proposal was rejected on competition grounds.
“We’re really optimistic about that. We strongly believe our case is a good one, that this really is in the best interests of consumers,” he said.
The competition regulator turned down the plans in August, citing concerns that the acquisition would “further entrench an oligopoly” in a sector already dominated by the four major banks. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/31/pena-nieto-mexico-visit-trump-approval-ratings-backfire | Opinion | 2016-08-31T17:00:37.000Z | Daniel Peña | Peña Nieto's making a dangerous gamble with Trump's Mexico visit | Daniel Peña | Outside of their respective hairstyles, questionable real estate dealings and plagiarism scandals, President Enrique Peña Nieto and Donald Trump don’t seem to have much in common. So why then would Peña Nieto – seemingly out of the blue – invite Trump to Los Pinos? At first glance, the timing of it might seem strange. Except it’s not at all.
Donald Trump promises 'no amnesty' in aggressive immigration speech – as it happened
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Trump memorably launched his campaign in 2015 by comparing Mexicans to rapists and criminals. He later promised to erect a border wall (which Peña Nieto has publicly refused to build) while also pledging to deport 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Peña Nieto, on the other hand, has gone so far as to liken Trump to Hitler and Mussolini for that kind of rhetoric.
And yet, those spats aren’t getting in the way of a meeting. It’s reported that neither the US embassy in Mexico nor the Mexican government were given advance warning about the visit. And though Peña Nieto did extend invitations to both Hillary Clinton and Trump to meet with him in Mexico City, it’s easy to see that both Peña Nieto and Trump have something to gain from this particularly timely visit.
Trump stands to bolster his ever-loosening grip on his campaign’s trademark issue, immigration, ahead of his big speech in Arizona on Wednesday. Peña Nieto, meanwhile, stands to salvage his waning poll numbers – now hovering around 23% according to one recent survey – by looking like he is standing up to Trump. The visit is also a timely distraction from embarrassing reports, which have dominated recent headlines, that he plagiarized his law degree thesis.
This week’s bad press, which includes the sacking of Mexico’s police commissioner following allegations of cartel executions, follows months of looming scandals plaguing his own administration. These include large teacher strikes, allegations of the use of torture on ordinary citizens and most recently reports that the Mexican first lady’s home is owned by a potential government contractor. All of the above have sent Mexican confidence in its president plunging.
The embarrassing thing is that we can actually see Peña Nieto’s logic at work in real time as this disaster unfolds. The president thinks that he will see the bad man, appear stern to the bad man, tell everyone that he was indeed stern to the bad man and then his poll numbers will rise. Easy. There’s only one problem with this plan. Trump may well hijack that narrative, frame the meeting to his advantage and then straight-up lie about the details in Arizona with a straight face.
Peña Nieto, with his credibility already weakened internationally, would be easy prey. His name is almost synonymous with the brand of poor Mexican governance that Trump rails against in his anti-immigrant tirades all over the country. And even if Peña Nieto does a good job in standing tall to Trump’s xenophobic, anti-Nafta, pro-wall rhetoric, the president risks everything should the Republican candidate choose to exploit his numerous political weaknesses. That would not just be damaging to him, but to Mexico’s international reputation at large.
That’s why many fear this gamble can only go well for Trump. And if this meeting teaches us anything it’s that Peña Nieto is willing to risk Mexican ire and possible geopolitical consequences if only to save his own political career. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jul/07/chisholm-obama-director-amma-asante-mrs-america-handmaids-tale | Television & radio | 2020-07-07T15:21:50.000Z | Ellen E Jones | Chisholm made Obama possible': director Amma Asante on Mrs America's real star | It’s difficult for Amma Asante to assess how far she’s come, because she just doesn’t have the relevant role models. “I haven’t had the example,” says the director, “of someone who is both black, British and female to look to, in terms of the career I’d like to have. It’s thwarted my sense of expectation.”
Still, in the decade between making her first film, 2004’s Bafta-winning A Way of Life, and her second, the 18th-century-set drama Belle, Asante became increasingly aware of male counterparts getting more chances, being more likely to be award-nominated, and consequently getting even more opportunities and even bigger budgets.
“All of that has an impact on how your career develops,” she says, “but I made a promise to myself to try to catch up – and made three films in five years. Which was exhausting.” This was the period of A United Kingdom, starring David Oyelowo as the real-life first president of Botswana, and second world war teen romance Where Hands Touch. More recently, she made the move into US television, directing episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. And then there’s Mrs America, the miniseries about to launch on BBC Two.
‘On the face of it, Chisholm failed’ ... Asante. Photograph: Joseph Sinclair
Mrs America stars Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly, the avowed anti-feminist who led a campaign in the 1970s to block the Equal Rights Amendment. But what might have been a straightforward biopic of Schlafly has been expanded into a wider and richer story about other women from the era, representing a broad spectrum of views and experiences.
Take Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to Congress, and a candidate for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. “Her courage and vision were unparalleled,” says Asante, who seized at the chance to fully credit this lesser known figure, signing up for the episode focused on Chisholm, who is played by Uzo Aduba. “On the face of it, Chisholm failed. But without her, I don’t think there could have been an Obama. I don’t think Hillary Clinton could have thought about running.”
Early episodes have a fixed camerawork style for Schlafly’s scenes, which contrast with the hand-held style used for the likes of Gloria Steinem, played by Rose Byrne. Politically, Chisholm would fit in the Steinem camp, but Asante chose not to take the looser approach. “She was at once very traditional – the way she dressed was like Thatcher – while at the same time she was pushing us to evolve. I wanted a combination of styles for her. It’s really important that, as people of colour, we can be many things at once, like any other person.”
Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowo in Asante’s 2016 film A United Kingdom. Photograph: Allstar/BBC Films
Chisholm is finally being honoured with a monument, due to be installed in Brooklyn by the end of the year. She’s just one of a huge cast of equally nuanced characters: Asante also directs the episode focusing on Betty Friedan, the mother of second wave feminism, played by Tracey Ullman. The show not only has the scope of The Wire, the period detail of Mad Men, and the power-brokering of The West Wing, it also manages to feel very relevant to the Black Lives Matter movement and progressive politics in general. Asante didn’t balk at the challenge, though, perhaps because her films – mostly period dramas exploring race, class and gender – have been such a strong preparation.
Her next, The Billion Dollar Spy, tells the true story of Soviet-born CIA informant Adolf Tolkachev. This might seem a departure, she says, “in the sense that it’s two white men – not that I haven’t directed white men before”. But, actually, it’s a continuation of underlying themes: “A United Kingdom is about what happens when you love your country but you don’t love the people running it, in that case the empire. And this is about what happens when you love your country but not the people running it, and they come from the same place.”
The interplay of factors that lead people to believe what they believe and do what they do is what interests Asante. It’s also what keeps drawing her to the past: “History for me is the parent of society. We don’t necessarily have to think everything they did was right, but we find ways to move forward from who they were.”
‘History is the parent of society’ … Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Asante’s 2013 film Belle. Photograph: Allstar/Fox/Sportsphoto
One move forward would be more diversity in film and TV. Asante agrees “absolutely” with recent comments by Killing Eve star Sandra Oh, suggesting Britain is behind the US in this respect. “That’s why I say being British is a massive element in all of this.” But despite her views, certain labels don’t sit easily. “I [often] say I’m not an activist, I’m just a storyteller.”
She mentions the star of Belle: “Gugu Mbatha-Raw said to me the other day, ‘Really? You really don’t think you’re an activist?’ One thing I will say is I’m grateful for the work feminists have done and I’m really, really grateful for Shirley Chisholm. I’ve no doubt I’m able to stand on an American set today because she existed.”
Mrs America starts on BBC Two on Wednesday at 9pm. Amma Asante’s episodes air as a double bill on 15 July. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/key-workers-denied-coronavirus-tests-as-hancock-scheme-falters-on-first-day | World news | 2020-04-24T11:35:20.000Z | Matthew Weaver | Government apologises as problems hit new coronavirus tests scheme | The government has apologised after Matt Hancock’s attempt to test essential workers for coronavirus ran into problems within hours of its launch.
The health secretary had promised that from 6am on Friday morning up to 10 million essential workers and their families would be able to apply for a drive-in test or home-testing kit.
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But within three hours of the site launching, anyone accessing the self-referral test site was told that applications had closed.
A message said: “You can’t currently register for a Covid-19 test. Please check back here later.”
The Department for Health and Social Care blamed the problems on “significant demand”. In a tweet it apologised for the inconvenience and promised more tests would be available on Saturday.
There has been significant demand for booking tests today.
We apologise for any inconvenience.
We are continuing to rapidly increase availability. More tests will be available tomorrow.
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) April 24, 2020
The Labour MP Toby Perkins, the shadow minister for apprenticeships, was among many who received the message about closed applications.
When I click on the link, it says Coronavirus test- applications closed. Is there a link that works that I can share @grantshapps ?
— Toby Perkins (@tobyperkinsmp) April 24, 2020
And those who did get through earlier were told that Friday’s allocation of home test kits had already been issued.
Message on the government’s website about the availability of home test kits. Photograph: Screengrab
The problems took the gloss off Hancock’s launch of the self-referral system, which he said was “critical” to ramping up testing.
Speaking on BBC Radio’s Today programme before the problems emerged he said: “If you have symptoms or somebody else in your household has symptoms, then you can go online to Gov.uk and self-refer for a test – that’s a new system up and running this morning.”
Tell us: do you work in the UK test and trace service?
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He said until now there had not been enough people coming forward for tests despite the increase in capacity. He said: “It’s a good problem to have, because it means that we can then expand the amount of those who are eligible and critically we’ve been able to bring in this new online booking system that opened, six o’clock this morning, so that if you’re an essential worker, you can just book yourself instead of going through what was a quite a complicated route through your employer.”
He added: “It was always part of the plan to bring in this new booking system. We only finished writing the code yesterday. So it’s been an unbelievable effort by the technical people to build this new system … The reason that the increase was pretty slow at the start of the month was because we’ve been building these systems to automate the testing, automate the labs and the IT systems that are needed. So we’re ahead of the plan, but you know, many a slip between cup and lip.”
Asked whether he thought the government would meet the target of 100,000 tests a day by next Thursday, Hancock said: “I do, yes, but nothing’s guaranteed in life.”
5:58
Coronavirus tests: how they work and what they show | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/26/italy-ostia-mafia-raids | World news | 2013-07-26T15:11:01.000Z | Lizzy Davies | Italy arrests 51 in Ostia anti-mafia raids | As temperatures soar to around 40C this weekend, thousands of Romans will flock to nearby beaches to roast in the sun, play on the slot machines and dance in sticky seaside nightclubs. They will not be the only ones feeling the heat.
On Friday in an operation that prosecutors said revealed the extent of organised crime in the coastal suburb of Ostia near the Italian capital, 51 people were arrested on suspicion of mafia-related activity.
The crackdown, which involved about 500 police officers as well as dog support units, patrol boats and a helicopter, was described as one of the biggest anti-mafia sweeps ever carried out in the Rome area.
Its aim was to hit at the heart of gangs that prosecutors say have been carving up the coastal territory and sharing its considerable spoils for the past 20 years.
Located about 15 miles south-west of the capital near Leonardo da Vinci airport, Ostia's sandy beaches prove a popular weekend destination for city-dwellers seeking to escape Rome's stifling heat.
Particularly targeted in the operation on Friday were members of three clans – the Fasciani, Triassi, and D'Agati – whom investigators suspect of carrying out criminal activities including drug trafficking and extortion.
The Triassi are believed to have close ties to the Sicilian mafia. The website of Il Fatto Quotidiano, a daily newspaper, headlined the raids: "Welcome to Cosa Nostra beach".
The alleged infiltration by criminal networks in Ostia's political administration emerged this month when police raided the town hall's permit office and placed an employee and local contractors under investigation on suspicion of rigging bids for beach contracts in favour of another mafia clan, the Spada.
The move prompted Rome's new mayor, Ignazio Marino, to announce that permits to manage Ostia's coastline would henceforth be handled directly from the capital. He said his administration would fight to curb "the underworld infiltration" of Ostia.
"In recent years, the Roman coastline has become fertile ground for criminal activities, the scene of bloody clashes between clans and criminal gangs who seek to control significant parts of the city's economy," he said.
One of the most startling incidents in the increasingly bloody turfwar in Ostia came in November 2011 when two criminals, Giovanni Galleoni and Francesco Antonini, were shot dead in the town centre in broad daylight.
In a separate but equally dramatic anti-mafia operation on Friday morning, police in the southern region of Calabria made dozens of arrests in the city of Lamezia Terme, about 40 miles south of Cosenza, some of which concerned a suspected car-crash scam in which payouts were allegedly used to provide criminals with drugs and arms.
Police said the raids had targeted a panoply of local people suspected of involvement in the scheme, ranging from insurers and lawyers to car repairers. There were also arrests of suspected hitmen on suspicion of several killings between 2005 and 2011, police said.
A Calabria senator in the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Freedom People (PdL) party was being investigated for suspected vote-buying but had not been arrested, they added.
Guido Marino, police chief in nearby Catanzaro, said the raids revealed a flourishing criminal system in the city that had drawn in not only fully paid-up members of criminal gangs but "professionals above suspicion".
"This was a mafia system which not only bloodied Lamezia Terme with murders but which also bled dry a part of [the city's] already fragile economy," he was quoted as telling the Ansa news agency.
Calabria, one of Italy's poorest regions, is the home to the 'Ndrangheta, now Italy's most formidable organised crime syndicate, which has grown far beyond its southern origins into a hugely powerful force thought to control much of the cocaine trade in Europe. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/james-foley-daily-horrors-internet-think-clicking-beheading | Opinion | 2014-08-20T13:46:58.000Z | James Ball | James Foley and the daily horrors of the internet: think hard before clicking | James Ball | With depressing frequency in this summer of diverse horrors, we hear tales of desperate human misery, suffering and depravity – and because we live now in an era where virtually every phone is a globally connected camera, we are confronted with graphic evidence of tragedy.
The footage of the apparent beheading (to refer to the atrocity as an execution serves only to lend a veneer of dignity to barbarism) of the US photojournalist James Foley at the hands of a British Isis extremist has raised particularly strong feelings.
Social networks are banning users who share the footage. Newspapers are facing opprobrium for the choices they make in showing stills or parts of the video. Others, of course, will seek out the video after seeing the row, or else post it around the internet in a juvenile form of the free speech argument.
Before considering the rights and wrongs of the position, there is one fact we should face: we are presented with images of grotesque violence on a daily basis. Last month the New York Times ran on its front page the dead and broken body of a Palestinian child.
Like Foley, that child was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, and in a connected world there is just as much chance his family saw the photo and its spread as Foley’s will see the latest awful images of their loved one.
That photo raised little controversy in comparison to the use of images of Foley. Photos of groups of civilian men massacred by Isis across Iraq and Syria – widely shared on social media and used by publications across the world – caused no outcry whatsoever.
It’s hard to look at that and not see a double standard: like many other courageous and talented people, Foley had chosen to travel to the region, and knew the risks that entailed. Others were killed simply fleeing their homes. In a strange and bitter irony, one of the duties of photographers such as Foley is documenting bloodshed in order to show the world.
To see an outcry for Foley’s video and not for others is to wonder whether we are disproportionately concerned over showing graphic deaths of white westerners – maybe even white journalists – and not others.
That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for outlets to think hard when selecting what, if anything, from the footage they should show. Foley’s apparent beheading was released not at the editorial decision of a photojournalist, but as a propaganda tool by thugs. Outlets should consider whether they are furthering or challenging such aims when they use such images.
There is also simple human decency, and the difficult trade-off of not insulating comfortable western audiences from the world’s horrors, while not needlessly causing a dead person’s loved ones additional suffering by showing gratuitously violent imagery.
The Guardian’s stance on Foley is a demonstration of the fine balance of those decisions: at present, one image of Foley from the video is used, but not as a lead picture. None of his forced speech is portrayed, and the short audio elements from the video – some of his murderer’s speech – have been used against a still image.
But more relevant by far is the choice each of us makes about whether to view the many horrifying real-life murder videos that circulate the internet. Before clicking, serious self-examination is required: why do you want to see this? Do you need to see it to understand something important? Still deeper self-examination should certainly be engaged before even contemplating sharing such material.
It’s that self-examination, or self-censorship, that best serves ourselves. As individuals, we’re making very different decisions to publishers and news outlets, but we should trust our own judgment rather than rush to ask social media companies to become the arbiters of our free expression on a knee-jerk basis.
There is a coda to this tale, another aspect of James Foley’s life that is also being shared far and wide across the world. It is the short statement by his mother, released on his Facebook page.
“We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people,” her statement began.
It has already been shared more than 2,500 times. This is how we win: not by suppressing the worst of us, but by sharing and saluting the best – people such as Foley and his family. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/urgent-call-to-head-off-new-debt-crisis-in-developing-world | World news | 2020-03-22T15:59:49.000Z | Larry Elliott | Urgent call to head off new debt crisis in developing world | Rapid action is needed to head off the risk of a new debt crisis in the world’s poorest countries amid evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic is raising borrowing costs and hitting commodity exports, according to a leading campaign group.
A Jubilee Debt Campaign report said some of the world’s most vulnerable nations were being hit by a double whammy of increasing debt interest bills and the tumbling price of oil and other raw materials.
While central banks in the developed world have been slashing interest rates to soften the economic blow of the coronavirus, the campaign said that borrowing costs were rising sharply for poor countries.
Why debt relief should be the answer to this coronavirus crash
Katharina Pistor
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It said interest rates had spiked on average by 3.5 percentage points for low- and middle-income countries since the mid-February and that costs for new borrowing stood at 10%.
At the same time, commodity prices have plunged, with the price of copper down by 21% since the start of 2020, oil 61% lower, and coffee falling by 15%. The Bloomberg commodity price index – which measures a basket of oil, metals and food prices – has dropped 27% since the start of the year and is now at its lowest level since 1986.
Countries were also being hurt by a falling number of overseas visitors, with small island states being particularly badly hit because of their size and economic reliance on tourism.
Tim Jones, policy head at Jubilee Debt Campaign said: “Urgent action is needed to support poorer countries being hit by the economic impacts of coronavirus, including a complete moratorium on debt payments for those most affected.
“Where economic shocks have pushed countries into debt crisis, the IMF needs to help restructure debt with previous lenders. Otherwise, its loans will just be used to pay off reckless lenders and maintain the debt crises. And the IMF itself needs to cancel debts owed to it by countries suffering the impact of the pandemic.”
The IMF had been flagging up how debt problems were affecting a greater number of low-income countries well before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.
In his budget earlier this month, Rishi Sunak said the UK would contributing £150m to the IMF’s fund for cancelling debt payments for poor countries in response to pandemics. The IMF has not yet announced that any country will qualify for debt cancellation, but the JDC said there were examples of countries – such as copper-rich Zambia and oil-exporting Chad – facing severe problems.
The leading ratings agencies have started to flag up the problems that Covid-19 will pose to Africa.
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Standard & Poor said around half the 54 countries in the world’s poorest continent had confirmed cases of the coronavirus and warned that Africa could find itself among the regions hardest hit.
An S&P report said African economies and the banking sector were particularly vulnerable to the spread of Covid-19 because of the region’s weak public health systems and reliance on commodity exports, tourism, and remittances sent home from abroad. It also highlighted high levels of foreign debt and the low creditworthiness of most African countries.
“The pronounced deterioration of financing conditions could hurt African countries with a high current account deficit and dependence on external capital flows for financing,” said S&P global ratings credit analyst Mohamed Damak. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/apr/09/walking-welsh-marches-with-victorian-clergyman-kilverts-diary | Travel | 2016-04-09T09:00:12.000Z | Oliver Balch | Walking the Welsh Marches with a Victorian clergyman | Ten minutes in and my walking companion is already recommending a rest. But I’m eager to get on. The sun is out, the skylarks are in song, and the hills of Radnorshire are calling. Yet I heed his suggestion.
As I sit on the grassy hillside, fiddling with my map, my impatience dissipates. Below, a spring breeze rustles through the treetops of Pen-y-Lan. Lower still, at the base of the steep dingle path I’ve just clambered up, the picturesque village of Clyro lies languid in the sunshine.
The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), whose steps I am following, knew the value of a contemplative rest. Reading his diary entry for February 1870, I imagine him gazing at this very view: “Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley ... dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.”
As his book, Kilvert’s Diary, attests, Clyro (or ‘Cleirwy’ in Welsh) is a fine starting point. Stroll a mile south and you hit the beautiful Wye river, William Wordsworth’s “wanderer through the woods”, whose gentle banks lead upstream along the Wye valley walk. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches.
Curate of this parish from 1865 to 1872, Kilvert was an inveterate rambler. “About 12.20, I started to walk over the hills,” a typical entry in his diary reads. “Got out my old Swiss haversack, crammed night necessities into it ... and strapping all together started [out] after luncheon.”
I had selected one of his favourites: a six-mile hike over to the once fortified settlement of Painscastle. The first third of the walk involves a gentle climb through sheep fields of billiard-baize grass to a hilltop moorland called the Begwyns. Hardy ewes scurry away at my tread, their new-born charges gambolling along in hot pursuit.
Oliver Balch in the Begwyns
A mile or so out of Clyro, I reach Lower Lloyney farm, a solid square-jawed place with a muddy yard. The workhorse building reminds me that this is hill farming country, as short on luxury as it is rich in weather. Neighbouring Herefordshire, with its rich fertile plains, is awash with grand farmhouses. Not so here. People build as they live: simply, without frills.
Kilvert knew every farm in his rustic, hilly parish. “Villaging all day,” he frequently writes, a reference to his regular pastoral visits. A short while later I pass Lower Cwmgwannon farm, where Kilvert had paid one such visit to Mrs Watkins. “A mad skeleton with such a wild scared animal’s face.” The dotty old lady was wont to dance naked around the house and smash all the windows. For her own modesty and safety, her family kept her locked in an empty attic room.
This custom of dropping in unannounced provides some of the diary’s most colourful passages. Old Hannah Whitney, with her “thin grey-bearded nutcracker face”; Etty Brown, her cheeks “the dusky bloom and flush of ripe pomegranate”; Edward Evans, close to death in his shabby hovel, his “gaunt ghastly” cat just waiting to pounce. So vivid are these pen portraits, I half expect them to greet us.
Yet I see no one until I crest the hill and reach the edge of the Begwyns. Stretching over 1,200 acres, this glorious upland moor is a favourite with local dog walkers and horse riders. Several cars are parked at the cattle-grid entrance; their owners dot the cloudless skyline.
The terrain is undulating and delightfully springy underfoot. The heather, so ablaze with purple and pinks in late summer, is now cropped low. There are paths zigzagging off in all directions. I pick one that looks straightish and head westward along it to the Roundabout, the highest point in the Begwyns.
And at the summit
After a couple of miles and a final short ascent, I reach the summit, which is crested with evergreens and encircled by a dry-stone wall. To one side stands a lone trigonometry point, a red dragon painted on the plinth. Over the wall is a wide semicircular stone bench, ideal for picnicking or late-night stargazing.
Sensing Kilvert’s presence, I stop for another breather, my back against the stone. A fork-tailed red kite rides the thermals above, its feathered limbs spread wide as it prowls for rodent morsels below. Down the hillside, several dozen sheep graze.
In the distance, surging upwards from the seabed flats of the Wye valley sweep the majestic Black Mountains, dressed in cerulean blue. At their feet, nestled against the far river bank, sits the market town of Hay-on-Wye, famous for its second-hand bookshops and annual literary festival.
My gaze follows the mountains’ plateaued path as it heads southward, dipping and weaving from peak to peak. It passes on its baton of rock and scree to the mighty Brecon Beacons. The highest mountain range in southern Britain, they leap graciously away towards the horizon.
Kilvert was a frequent visitor to the Begwyns, recalling the lapwings “wheeling about the hill in their scores”, the gorse flaming a “fiery gold”. Whether silver-ribbed with winter snow or, as now, joyous with springtime birdsong, the mountains always lifted his spirits. For him, they provided a taste of the divine, a clarion call from his creator.
Lambs in the fields near Painscastle
From the Roundabout, I head north downhill, leaving the Begwyns behind in favour of lusher ground below. At Pentre farm, I cut across two hedge-lined fields to Bachawy brook. I find no evidence of the ford marked on the map, so make do with a hop, skip and jump.
In 1198, this same watercourse had run red with blood after King John’s forces trounced their Welsh adversaries here. The thought puts my now-wet socks into perspective.
A green lane takes us up to the remains of Painscastle’s motte-and-bailey castle, an enduring testament to this border region’s embattled past. Just beyond it, in the heart of the village, is the welcome sight of the Roast Ox. Kilvert once arrived at the porch of this same hostelry.
The pub, which dates from medieval times, recently underwent major renovation after a serious fire. Now it offers flagstone floors, friendly locals, Butty Bach on tap, a well-worn dart board, and great cod and chips. Kilvert never made it across the threshold, though. After finding Painscastle’s mayor at the porch, he asked him for a guided tour of a nearby quarry instead.
After a century and a half, there is still no better guide to this stunning corner of the Welsh Marches than Clyro’s erstwhile curate. Just this once, however, I ignore his lead in favour of a refreshing pint.
In Clyro, Baskerville Hall Hotel (01497 820033, baskervillehall.co.uk) has doubles from £100 a night B&B
Oliver Balch’s book Under The Tump: Sketches of Real Life in the Welsh Marches will be published by Faber & Faber, £14.99, on 19 May. To order a copy for £11.99 including UK p&p visit the guardian bookshop or call on 0330 333 6846 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/16/pulse-nightclub-shooting-orlando-omar-mateen-wife-arrested | US news | 2017-01-16T21:55:59.000Z | Amber Jamieson | Wife of Orlando Pulse nightclub gunman Omar Mateen arrested | The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub shooting was arrested on Monday near the Bay Area, an FBI official said.
Life after the Orlando massacre: ‘I have to brace myself every day’
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Noor Salman is the widow of Omar Mateen, who died in a shootout with police after the 12 June 2016 terror attack at an LGBT night club in Orlando, Florida, in which 53 people were wounded.
“I can confirm she was arrested this morning in the Bay Area,” a local FBI official told the Guardian.
The official was unable to confirm the exact charges against Salman, explaining that Florida’s middle district FBI office, which covers Orlando, was handling the case and therefore made the charges.
Messages left for the middle district office were not immediately returned. Linda Moreno, Salman’s lawyer, whose website describes her as an expert in the criminal defense of “national security and terrorism cases”, confirmed Salman had been charged with obstruction.
In a statement, Moreno said: “Noor Salman had no foreknowledge nor could she predict what Omar Mateen intended to do that tragic night.
“Noor has told her story of abuse at his hands. We believe it is misguided and wrong to prosecute her and that it dishonors the memories of the victims to punish an innocent person.”
A Twitter post from the US attorney’s office in Orlando said Salman would make her initial appearance on Tuesday morning in Oakland, California on federal charges filed in Florida.
Salman was interviewed by FBI officials immediately after the attack and has said she was “unaware” of her husband’s plans to embark on a mass shooting.
She described her husband, who she met on a dating website in 2011, as abusive, often choking her or pulling her hair. It was the second marriage for both of them.
The shooting took place in the early hours of a summer Sunday, during Latin night at the popular gay nightclub. Many of those killed were young, gay people of color.
Mateen described himself as an “Islamic soldier” in 911 calls recorded during the Pulse attack. The CIA said it found no direct link between Mateen and the terror organization.
Reports at the time indicated that Mateen may have been motivated by struggles with his own sexuality and that Pulse regulars said they had seen him before.
The 29-year-old was a security guard living in Fort Pierce, Florida, with his wife and son, about two hours’ drive from Orlando. He was born in New York City but his family moved to Florida when he was a child.
After the Orlando attack, the Senate tried and failed to pass laws regarding background checks and gun control restrictions.
The scene of the deadliest mass shooting in US history has been purchased by the City of Orlando and will become a permanent monument to those killed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/photography-blog/2014/jun/26/were-luis-suarezs-bite-marks-photoshopped | Football | 2014-06-26T16:56:26.000Z | Jonny Weeks | Were Luis Suárez's bite marks Photoshopped? | It was the back page image across countless newspapers around the world: an outraged Giorgio Chiellini pulling down his Italy jersey to reveal a series of apparent indentations on his left shoulder. The photograph, snapped by Tony Gentile of Reuters, showed no blood. But it was evidence, it seemed, that Luis Suárez had indeed bitten Chiellini during the World Cup match between Uruguay and Italy.
I'll be honest, we all published it with a degree of relish. Not because we especially wanted Suárez to get his comeuppance – and boy has he just got it – but because we knew it was a photo that everyone would talk about.
The response on Twitter was predictably splenetic. Suárez's supporters claimed the images were manipulated, their argument promoted by a rather well-done diptych which did the rounds. The left-hand image – which had been photoshopped to remove the marks – purported to be the "real" unaltered version, while the right hand side – Gentile's original image – was labelled the fake. Trying to argue against it on social media was a futile game. Believe me, I tried. It didn't seem to matter that I could cite several other images by other photographers that corroborated the mark.
Real or Photoshop? The image that went viral on Twitter (the real version is actually on the right hand side). Photograph: Twitter Photograph: Twitter
But what I and my colleagues on the picture desk found altogether more shocking was the suggestion that the Uruguayan FA might jump on the bandwagon. According to newspaper reports in Uruguay and Spain, when submitting its evidence in defence of Suárez, who has now been banned by Fifa from football for four months and nine international matches for his actions, the Uruguayan FA planned to argue that digital manipulation of images has been rife and that they cannot be trusted. Bizarre, right? Not exactly.
A quick trawl through recently published images of the incident is disturbing: for some papers, the pictures simply weren't good enough. The Mirror, for example, clearly felt it necessary to "colour correct" their close-up image so as to ensure the mark was visible. In fact, by the time the Mirror had finished with it, it was more than just visible, it was a joke. Chiellini's shoulder was a shade of red that suggested he'd been given a hickie, not a bite.
The Mirror's back page (above), which included the photo of Chiellini by Tony Gentile of Reuters and a close-up photo by Julian Finney of Getty Images. Photograph: Mirror
The close-up photo. Photograph: Mirror Photograph: Mirror
The original Chiellini photo by Julian Finney. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
The thing with colour correction is that it is a perfectly acceptable form of manipulation when done to ensure correct white balance or to ensure suitable reproduction of digital colour quality in print. But the Mirror, either through intention or incompetence, went several steps too far – and removed traces of the original marks. A simple soft or hard proof would have revealed as much, but one suspects they knew this already. Let's not forget that the Mirror were one of two British tabloids to conveniently edit out Chris Ramsey, the Spurs coach, from a back page photo of Tim Sherwood and Emmanuel Adebayor in April.
The Mirror weren't the only ones to edit a Chiellini image. The Daily News in America also heightened the contrast of the existing marks in their photo to draw readers' attention to the area. That, perhaps, is more understandable, although I think they overdid it. Subtle alterations to photographs can be acceptable but they should be done in ways that do not impinge on the veracity of the image – a slight dodge or burn, perhaps, to correct exposure, or a minor canvas extension when creating a feature page. The critical thing when picture editing is to maintain the truth. How else do you expect your readers to trust you?
If the Uruguayan FA goes ahead with its appeal on the basis of Photoshop fakery, they'll have little joy. Whatever caused the mark on Chiellini's shoulder, there's absolutely no denying it was there. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/29/english-national-opera-strike-suspended-interim-settlement | Music | 2024-01-29T13:00:24.000Z | Nadia Khomami | English National Opera strike suspended as interim settlement agreed | A planned strike by musicians and performers in the English National Opera over planned cuts to its workforce has been suspended.
On Monday, the performing arts union Equity announced an interim settlement with the ENO and said it expected a full resolution soon.
“We are pleased to announce that Equity has reached an interim settlement with the English National Opera for the chorus,” a statement said. “Although this does not mark the absolute end of negotiations, we are confident that constructive talks can lead to a full resolution in the coming weeks.”
It added: “Consequently, industrial action on The Handmaid’s Tale on the 1st February is suspended. This suspension also allows time for the ENO to complete its negotiations with the Musicians’ Union, who are also suspending their action, and to confirm the final details of both offers.”
The union added its mandate for strikes remained live “until such time a full settlement is reached”.
The ballots were conducted after ENO management announced plans to make all of the chorus, orchestra and music staff redundant and re-employ them for six months of the year. It was proposed that some musicians in the orchestra would be offered ad hoc freelance work only.
The unions said the plans would threaten musicians’ livelihoods, and were a sign of extremely difficult times for the orchestral sector and opera and ballet in particular.
Speaking to the Guardian earlier this month, members who had voted to strike said they were being used as “pawns” in a political game by ENO management.
Glen Sheldon, the second violin of the orchestra and steward of the Musicians’ Union at the ENO, said many ENO musicians were considering whether or not they would have to leave the industry entirely.
Ronald Nairne, an ENO chorus member, said: “We went out and campaigned with management, we wrote letters to MPs, we appealed to the Arts Council, cross-parliamentary groups and the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport]. We took it as far as it could go. And now they’ve decided on this business model.”
The ENO’s music director, Martyn Brabbins, resigned last October after the announcement of the cuts.
The ELO was removed from Arts Council England’s (ACE) national portfolio last year, losing its £12.8m annual grant, and told it must move outside London to qualify for future grants. ACE’s decision was condemned as “cultural vandalism”.
ACE later announced extra money and more time for the ENO to transition to a new home. It also said a new business model would allow the company to deliver a substantial opera season every year in London. Last month, the ENO announced it had chosen Greater Manchester as its future home.
Earlier this month, the company’s management maintained the dispute over cuts “could be best resolved around the negotiation table”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/28/australia-risks-failing-on-renewable-energy-but-two-steps-could-help-fix-that | Environment | 2023-06-28T15:00:30.000Z | Adam Morton | Australia risks failing on renewable energy – but two steps could help fix that | Adam Morton | Labor’s claim that Australia’s national electricity grid would be running on 82% renewable energy by 2030 started as a projection, but at some point it effectively became a target. The Albanese government is as responsible for this as anyone, having implied it’s where the country is inevitably headed.
Depending on what happens at the next couple of elections, the government will be seen to have failed if the country doesn’t get there. Among other things, it is a necessary step for Australia to reach its minimum 2030 emissions reduction goal and make deeper cuts in line with scientific advice.
But things have changed since the pseudo-target was announced in late 2021. Unless there is a significant change in direction, the view from regulators and the energy industry is that the grid won’t get to 82% green power by the end of the decade.
Australia needs to reduce emissions to net zero by 2038 to do ‘fair share’ to contain global heating, analysis shows
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Renewable energy has surged in recent years to now provide about 36% of generation, but estimates suggest the pace of construction still needs to at least double. There is no shortage of development proposals, but the head of the Australian energy market operator (Aemo), Daniel Westerman, used a major speech last week to warn investment was “just not happening fast enough”.
What’s changed?
For one, the lost decade on the climate crisis under the federal Coalition had a greater toll than some realised. It took steps to slow the rise of renewable energy and pressured companies to keep ageing coal plants running. Its attitude was encapsulated in the moment the then treasurer, Scott Morrison, brandished a lump of coal in parliament and taunted “it won’t hurt you”. The country was left way behind.
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The current federal and state governments have discovered that constructing the huge amounts of transmission infrastructure needed to connect what is basically a new, clean electricity grid is a laborious and complex task. It’s not helped by an investment test before major new connection lines can be built that many consider not fit-for-purpose. Labor has promised $20bn to “rewire the nation”, but each transmission connection is a multibillion-dollar project, and it takes seven years on average to get one approved and built.
In part, this is because proponents need a social licence for connections that are proposed across farms and public land – a challenging issue in some places.
Most of these issues were foreseeable. Others were a bit less easy to predict.
Cost is a major one. For some projects, the price for getting a development in the ground has blown out by 30-40% due to inflation and supply chain constraints.
Global competition for equipment and parts is escalating. The change agent was the $A557bn support for clean energy projects in last year’s US Inflation Reduction Act. Some other countries are responding with their own climate-focused packages. Many energy companies are global players. If it is more attractive to build solar and windfarms elsewhere, that’s what some will do.
The challenge this poses for Australia is greater than just whether the government can reach 82% renewable energy by 2030. The real target is much greater. In its blueprint for a future grid, Aemo suggested Australia would need nine times today’s level of large-scale renewable energy capacity to meet future demand.
So how do we get there?
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The short answer is the country needs a national policy that drives investment in renewable energy. The current approach – relying on solar and wind being so cheap that it will be financially attractive enough for companies to spend up big as coal plants die – won’t be enough. Neither will the underwriting schemes introduced in some of the large states.
Two steps could help address the problem. The first is to expand and extend the national renewable energy target. The target was filled in 2019 and will stop offering support for existing solar and windfarms by 2030. Solar and wind can compete and will continue to be built without it, just not fast enough. It would be relatively uncomplicated to reset it to give the system the big push that it needs.
The second is to announce closure dates for coal plants to give investors a clear picture of what the future looks like. The Queensland government, for example, has implied closure dates for its coal plants by announcing ramped up renewable energy targets, but hasn’t taken the next step of telling Aemo when all its fossil fuel generators will stop running.
The second half of this year is an opportunity for major change. The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has promised a federal underwriting program to ensure there is enough “firm” renewable energy and storage capacity that can be called on at any time to fill gaps around variable generation. On Thursday, he announced the commonwealth would underwrite 550MW of new firmed generation in NSW – the first commitment from a new capacity investment scheme.
Perhaps just as importantly, the government has allocated $5.6m to develop a plan to “catalyse clean energy industries, ensure Australian manufacturing competitiveness and attract capital investment”. In other words, to respond to the massive influx of clean investment elsewhere, building on $2bn for green hydrogen in last month’s budget.
Whatever form that response takes, it will need to be substantial. If there’s a message from recent renewable energy investment trends, it’s that Australia’s natural advantage in sun and wind energy won’t be enough on its own.
Adam Morton is Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/16/chrissy-teigen-michael-costello-leona-lewis-texting | Life and style | 2021-06-16T20:05:51.000Z | Harron Walker | Could Chrissy Teigen just try sending a text next time? | Harron Walker | In 2018, the New Republic deputy editor Katie McDonough wrote a piece for Jezebel that I spiritually consult to this day. (Full disclosure: I was a Jezebel contributor at the time.)
“Why tweet when you can text?” she asked, and … well, that’s basically it. Sometimes, you can just text the thing you want to tweet.
I gather that celebrities have never considered this idea – at least, not if the latest developments in the never-ending Chrissy Teigen bullying news cycle are anything to go by.
To quickly recap: in early May, the Daily Beast published an interview with Courtney Stodden, a model and longtime 2010s tabloid mainstay who accused Teigen of bullying them online. The alleged harassment ranged from public tweets telling Stodden to take “a dirt nap” to direct messages telling them “I can’t wait for you to die”.
In response, people dug up old tweets of Teigen’s – including a since-deleted post from 2011 joking “Lindsay [Lohan] adds a few more slits to her wrists when she sees Emma Stone,” about the actor’s history of self-harm, and another which has previously been aired in public, in which she ridiculed Oscar-nominated actor Quvenzhané Wallis, who was only nine years old at the time, for being “cocky” and unlikable. Then came a full-scale reckoning with Teigen’s public image as the relatable, approachable celebrity next door.
“There is simply no excuse for my past horrible tweets,” Teigen wrote in a lengthy apology that she posted to Medium on Monday. “My targets didn’t deserve them. No one does.”
Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but posting all this through her super-public Twitter account, which currently has more than 13 million followers, was probably a bad idea
The same could be said about what transpired after she published that Medium post.
Within hours of Teigen posting her apology on Monday, Michael Costello, a fashion designer and Project Runway contestant, made an Instagram post accusing Teigen of bullying and professionally blacklisting him, per BuzzFeed. According to Costello, Teigen saw a “Photoshopped comment” in his name made by “a former disgruntled employee” in which he appears to have typed out an anti-Black slur. “Racist people like you deserve to suffer and die,” she allegedly texted him as he argued that the comment was fake. “You might as well be dead. Your career is over, just watch.” He claims the alleged exchange in 2014 left him “traumatized and depressed” with suicidal thoughts that continue to this day.
Then out of left field came Leona Lewis, who in some Instagram Story posts on Tuesday accused Costello of being a hypocrite and a bully himself, according to People, accusing the designer of treating her so carelessly and inconsiderately at a 2014 fitting that she developed bodily insecurities she still grapples with.
Costello has responded with his own Instagram stories, and I just … what is even going on here? What does this have to do with Chrissy Teigen? I don’t want to diminish or invalidate anyone’s feelings , but I can think of a pretty old-fashioned way they might want to hash this one out: both Lewis and Costello say they still love each other. If that’s really true, maybe pause the next callout post and instead, just try texting? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/25/xabi-alonso-manager-liverpool-bayern-barcelona-real-madrid | Football | 2024-03-25T14:24:33.000Z | Jonathan Wilson | Should Xabi Alonso pick Liverpool, Bayern or Barcelona? | Jonathan Wilson | If you were Xabi Alonso, would you pick Bayern Münich, Liverpool or Barcelona – or wait for the Real Madrid job to come open? Natalie
Reports in Germany at the end of last week suggested that Munich is now Alonso’s preferred destination, which feels a little disappointing. He’s almost certainly going to lift the Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen this season and I’m not entirely clear why, having won the league on hard mode, he would now try to do it again on an easier setting. Yes, the way the Uefa coefficient works means that there’s likely to be a relatively straightforward passage into the quarter-finals of the Champions League, and experience in that competition is the one thing still missing from his CV, but it still seems an unambitious step. Leaving Leverkusen makes sense given his stock cannot really climb any higher there and repeating this season’s feat is so unlikely, especially with players probably going to be sold this summer. Barcelona seems an improbable destination given his Madrid connections and his assumed desire at some point to become Madrid manager. While there’s probably a little trepidation at being Jürgen Klopp’s successor. Liverpool looks ideal – and, unlike Bayern or even Madrid, it’s not necessarily a job that’s going to be available every couple of seasons.
This USMNT team should be entering its prime. Now they need to prove it
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Why is Gareth Southgate being linked to the Manchester United job? Would his style with England translate to club football? He has been out of the club management for 15 years. Damien
The why is easy: he’s a successful English manager with strong name recognition even among execs with little specialist knowledge. This summer feels like it’s going to be one of great turbulence, with a lot of major clubs looking for new managers and the sense that a lot of the experienced names are out of the running. There’s a real chance for one of the upcoming generation of coaches to accelerate their careers but, amid the uncertainty, Southgate is a solid, reliable name.
Would he work at club level? Maybe – but, as you hint, there’s very little evidence. His record at Middlesbrough was fine without being exceptional and included relegation in 2008. He seems ideally suited to the demands of international football, particularly the diplomacy and big-picture developmental work, but that’s very different from club management. Half the battle at international level is making the players feel they want to play for their country, creating a calm and welcoming environment, while the lack of time available on the training pitch means that tactics are necessarily less complex than in the club game. Perhaps Southgate could make the adjustment; the problem is that we just don’t know.
MLS power rankings: Phil Neville is finding his groove with Portland
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What’s next for Xavi? It seems he was made for the Barcelona job. Could you see him coaching in the Premier League? Bradley
To be honest, I was surprised Barcelona won the league last season. I have some sympathy with Xavi in that the club at the moment is clearly in a mess with mounting debt and the various restrictions on spending, but I’ve never been convinced by him as a coach: he spouts the Pep Guardiola doctrine but with little evidence he is able to implement it or develop it according to circumstance. The defeats to Bayern in the Champions League last season were predictable, but I thought Xavi fared pretty poorly against Inter and then, in the Europa League, Manchester United.
His regular bleating about opponents who didn’t play the game the way he wanted them to just sounded petulant, as though he couldn’t quite accept that the opposition were allowed to try to win, rather than existing to permit Barcelona to put on an exhibition of Guardiolismo. I really don’t know where he goes next: his name means he will probably remain in demand for at least one or two more jobs, but I’d be very surprised if he ends up in the Premier League.
Are you happy with a penalty shootout as the way to settle a cup competition or a tournament? I’m not, and I would like to see things decided by actual soccer. My proposal: if a final (or other knockout game in a tournament) ends level then extra time should be played without the offside law. Steve
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Shootouts should stay. They’re dramatic, easily understood and rely on a footballing skill; if replays are impossible – and given the modern calendar they are – they’re the least bad option available; an almost elemental test of what the sport is.
You say you want things decided by “actual soccer”, but if you remove offside what is left is not soccer. There’s a reason why offside was one of the initial 12 laws of the game when they were first drawn up in 1863. It’s fundamental. Without offside, forwards could stand in the opposition’s six-yard box, waiting to try to get a touch from long balls belted into the area. It may be that seeing teams keep a couple of 6ft 8in lumps on the bench then bringing them on in extra-time to whack the ball at would produce something exciting, but it would not be football.
Equally, without offside, teams pressing would have no protection, so what you’d probably end up with would be a ludicrously stretched game with half the players in one box and half in the other. I wrote about this in 2010. Without offside, football has no structure, no need for passing combinations, no need for dribbling, no need for any of the things that make it great.
This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/apr/07/rugbyunion.heinekencup3 | Sport | 2008-04-07T11:18:47.000Z | Paul Rees | Rugby union: Gloucester have grand designs but lack foundation | Dean Ryan, the Gloucester head coach, said after a disappointingly one-sided quarter-final that his young side would not be deflected from its lofty ambition. The Premiership leaders now have the league to focus on but in the 10 months since they were outmuscled by Leicester in the play-off final the Cherry and Whites, for all their attacking intent and movement, retain an air of fallibility.
Much was made of the two penalties missed by Chris Paterson in the opening nine minutes but tries are Gloucester's currency. The wing had kicked 33 successive goals for Scotland from the start of the World Cup to the end of the Six Nations and he found himself lining up a kick in front of the posts in the first minute on Saturday after Lifeimi Mafi had taken out Olly Morgan off the ball. But Paterson pulled the kick wide, an error he repeated eight minutes later.
He missed three penalties in all but, as Ryan said before the game, he wants his side to be able to win a European quarter-final by scoring tries, rather than converting a late penalty. It was the opposite of what England were about in the World Cup and the outcome was also contrasting. While Paterson's squandered nine points may have made a difference, it would have been only to the scoreline, not to the result. Gloucester never came to terms with Munster's defence: the centres Mafi and Rua Tipoki defended the gainline with the resolve of bouncers standing on a nightclub's threshold and the wing Ian Dowling quickly rushed into the line to ensure that, if Gloucester thwarted the blitz with a long pass, he was in a position to intercept.
Only once did Gloucester threaten to cut through. Their centre James Simpson-Daniel broke down the left and for an instant it looked as if he had only to pass to Lesley Vainikolo outside him for his side's opening try but no sooner had the danger presented itself than Doug Howlett got in front of the England wing and the moment went.
Munster were one step ahead throughout. Just as Gloucester never came to terms with Munster's defence, they failed to overcome problems at the breakdown. The visitors' two tries had their origins in defence. First Alan Quinlan, not for the first or last time, spooked Rory Lawson at a breakdown and Howlett sparked a counter-attack from his own 22 which ended when, after Vainikolo had failed to gather a bouncing ball, Howlett sent in Dowling at the right-hand corner.
The try gave Munster an 8-0 interval lead and they sealed the game 16 minutes from the end when Will James lost the ball in midfield and Howlett fed the full-back Denis Hurley, whose kick to the line fell perfectly for the New Zealand wing. "I am not going to deviate from what I believe is right," said Ryan. "I want a game based on movement and pace and we have young players who are growing together. It will come: we are not a million miles away."
The fly-half Ryan Lamb echoed his coach when he said: "We believe in the rugby we are playing and we have put sides away in the last couple of seasons. We have some young backs but we cannot go on saying we have to learn from experiences like this. Sooner, rather than later, we have to perform."
Gloucester have lost eight of their 12 matches in all competitions in 2008, having gone into the new year on a run of eight successive victories. They meet Saracens, Heineken Cup semi-finalists, in the league on Saturday and their prospects of returning to Twickenham would appear to hinge on securing a home draw in the play-off semi-final. Munster return to Coventry for the semi-final, where they lost to Wasps in the opening round of the pool stage, and it will take more than resolute defence by Saracens to stop them.
Gloucester Morgan; Paterson (Walker, 57), Simpson-Daniel, Allen (Tindall, 40), Vainikolo; Lamb, Lawson (Cooper, 68); Wood (Dickinson, 68), Titterrell (Paul, 80), Nieto, Bortolami (capt; James, 55), Brown, Buxton (Delve, 50), Hazell, Narraway.
Pen Lamb.
Sin-bin Nieto, 14.
Munster Hurley; Howlett, Tipoki, Mafi, Dowling; O'Gara, O'Leary; Buckley (Pucciarello, 33; Buckley, 70), Flannery, Hayes, O'Callaghan, O'Connell (capt), Quinlan, Wallace (O'Driscoll, 80), Leamy (Foley, 76).
Tries Dowling, Howlett. Pens O'Gara 2.
Referee N Owens (Wales). Attendance 16,500. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/02/garmin-instinct-2-solar-review-smartwatch-promising-unlimited-battery-life | Technology | 2022-05-02T06:00:46.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Garmin Instinct 2 Solar review: smartwatch promising unlimited battery life | Garmin’s latest rugged solar-powered smartwatch, the Instinct 2, promises unlimited battery life. You just have to stay in the sun.
Looking more like a rugged digital watch such as Casio’s legendary G-Shock than an Apple or Samsung smartwatch, the Garmin feels made to take a beating with its monochrome screen, physical buttons and sturdy body.
It costs from £299.99 ($349.99/A$549) and comes in various versions such as one for surfing and even one for professional truck drivers. But it is the solar charging models, costing £389.99, that promise never to need to be plugged in for power.
The Instinct 2 comes in various two or three-tone colours, all with a similar rugged or standout aesthetic, here shown in mist grey. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Underneath the rugged exterior is Garmin’s smartwatch tech, featuring market-leading sport, health and location-tracking. It has smartphone connectivity for notifications, alerts and syncing your data via the Connect app on an Android or iPhone.
It is very similar to many other Garmin sport watches, but what sets the Instinct 2 apart is its promise of incredible battery life even without the power of the sun.
The standard 45mm model without solar will last up to 28 days used as a general smartwatch, which is 10 days longer than the already impressive Fenix 7 and about 14 times longer than an Apple Watch.
The solar version, which charges using a transparent “power glass” covering the screen and panels around the edge of the display, promises to keep the battery topped up for essentially unlimited battery life as long as you spend at least three hours in direct sunlight (50,000 lux of light).
There are plenty of high-contrast watchface designs to choose from with more available in the Connect IQ store, each of which can display data such steps, calories or battery life, too. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
How realistic that is depends on your day-to-day activities. On a sunny winter’s day in London the watch received 40,000 lux of direct sunlight through a window, so if you spend your days outside rather than locked in an office it seems more than feasible.
For mainly indoor usage during winter without much in the way of solar charging, the watch lasted about 15 days between charges, including five hours of workout-tracking. I wore it 24 hours a day with message alerts, heart rate, stress, calories, general activity and health monitoring, plus sleep and blood oxygen (SpO2) tracking overnight. Turning off the Sp02 sensor added days to the life as did limiting workouts. The solar charging would add at least 24 hours battery for each sunny spring day spent outside, too.
Specifications
Screen: monochrome transflective MIP LCD
Case size: 40 or 45mm
Case thickness: 13.3 to 14.5mm
Band size: standard 20 or 22mm quick fit
Weight: 42 to 53g
Water resistance: 100 metres (10ATM)
Sensors: GNSS (GPS, Glonass, Galileo), compass, thermometer, heart rate, pulse Ox
Connectivity: Bluetooth, ANT+
When it eventually comes to charging or syncing the watch to a computer, the USB cable plugs into the port on the back below the heart rate sensor. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Of course its battery prowess comes at the cost of features on fancier-looking Garmin watches such as the Fenix 7 or rivals like the Apple Watch. The Instinct 2 lacks a touchscreen, though the button-based interface is fast and logical. It lacks the new high-accuracy multi-band GPS tracking technology, but still has an altimeter, barometer and compass.
The biggest missing features are offline music playback, such as Spotify without having to use your phone, and offline maps. It can plot breadcrumb trails of where you have been on an activity to help you get back to the start, guide you in the direction of points of interest and even measure the area of a space by walking its perimeter, but it has no maps available.
The watch tracks a vast number of activities including various forms of running, walking, cycling, swimming, strength, cardio, Hiit and more exotic ones such as paddle boarding, hunting, fishing, backcountry skiing and bouldering.
General smartwatch features include stopwatches, timers and alarms, the weather, calendars, smartphone notifications, music control and various quick settings menus. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Some activities are restricted to special versions of the watch, such as the jumpmaster mode for skydiving being only available on the “tactical edition”, surfing and tide information on the “surf edition” and the truck-driver tools on the “dēzl edition” to plan breaks and workouts. Only the solar models have Garmin Pay for contactless payments too, which supports few UK banks but is useful in emergencies when out on excursions without a credit card or phone.
On the health front, it has Garmin’s excellent body battery, which makes it easy to understand the impact of sleep, activity and rest on your day, plus stress tracking, abnormal heart rate alerts, daily workout suggestions, Vo2 Max fitness measurement and recovery estimation after exercise and many other features.
All the activity and health information the watch collects is sent via Bluetooth to the excellent Garmin Connect app on your phone, within which you can pore over mountains of data, graphs and insights. Plus you can connect it straight to social networks such as Strava.
For running, walking, cycling and swimming, the Instinct 2 provides much of the same data as the top Fenix 7 with similarly easy-to-read data screens available. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Price
The Garmin Instinct 2 comes in two sizes and various models, starting at £299.99 ($349.99/A$549) for the standard version or £389.99 ($449.99/A$699) with solar charging.
For comparison, the Garmin Forerunner 55 costs £149.99, Venu 2 costs from £349.99, Fenix 7 costs from £599.99, Epix costs from £799.99, the Coros Apex costs £299.99 and the Polar Grit X costs £369.
Verdict
The Instinct 2 Solar is the closest model so far to what is the holy grail of smartwatch makers – a watch which you never have to plug into the charger.
It looks and feels more like a traditional digital watch, but is backed by Garmin’s comprehensive activity and general health tracking, and simple smartphone notifications. It lacks a few bells and whistles you get with less rugged smartwatch rivals, such as voice assistants, maps, offline music or ECG (heart rhythm) measurement, but its features will probably be more than enough for those not looking for an Apple Watch or similar.
If you spend long enough each day in the sun or bright environments you may never need to charge it. For those of us more often confined to the indoors, it’ll still last close to a month or longer with some less necessary features disabled.
The Instinct 2 is expensive and certainly not for everyone, but if you’re an outdoors person or looking for a smarter health-tracking version of a digital watch, the Garmin is great.
Pros: potentially unlimited battery life with solar charging, tracks lots of activities and health metrics, cross-platform phone notifications, 100m water resistance, durable design, choice of colours and versions.
Cons: expensive, no offline music or maps, limited smartwatch features compared with Apple or Samsung, no voice control, screen basic compared to OLED or other Garmins.
Other reviews
Garmin Fenix 7 review: next-gen boss of adventure smartwatches
Garmin Forerunner 245 Music review: a runner’s best friend
Venu 2 review: can Garmin make a good smartwatch?
Garmin Epix review: the ultimate adventure smartwatch?
Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 review: Google smartwatch raises bar
Apple Watch Series 7 review: bigger screen, faster charging, still the best | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/dec/11/business-views-on-the-news | Business | 2009-12-11T11:53:56.000Z | Teena Lyons | Views on the News: What you thought of Alistair Darling's pre-budget report | Cynical electioneering? Damage control? Or sound financial planning? The pre-budget report got everyone talking and most bloggers could not help but have one eye on a certain upcoming national event.
"Anyone might think there was an election looming," said JonnyThinkTank. "Oh. Hold on. Apparently there is."
Yes, said tatanulabour: "I hope Labour surprise us all and win the next election, Darling must be dreading doing the next budget."
Alistair Darling's comments that things might just be a teensy bit more problematic than first thought got kakihara thinking: "Whenever I hear Darling's predictions on the economy as each one is a little bit worse than the previous, I'm reminded more than anything of a teenager admitting to his dad he's written off the car – Y'know, bit-by-bit:
'Dad, I've had an accident in the car'
'Oh God, what happened?'
'Well, I knocked off the wing mirror'
'Oh, OK, so that's it?'
'Well, I also knocked the bumper off'
'Ah! Anything else?'
'Well, there's the driver's door – ripped off, Er, and the passenger doors, all 3 of them ...' etc, etc.
"All the way through to 'The wheels came off and it's a complete write-off'."
Perhaps inevitably the lion's share of the comments were reserved for bonuses and bankers.
dutchcapital kicked off with a question: "I'm not a banker, so obviously I'm not very good at maths. Does this mean that anyone who earns, as a bonus, more than my actual salary, will still get to keep half of it, whilst I will have to take a pay cut next year to help towards it? $%£$ me!"
"What possible good can it do to tax the banks for the bonuses they pay?" asked OneManisAnIsland, echoing the views of many. "The man is a fool. All that will happen is that the banks will end up paying twice as much in bonuses and end up paying less corporation tax on profits. D'oh.
"This tax is a perfect example of short-sighted bureaucracy. Like the VAT cut. Remember that? What happened? Shops just pocketed the difference, or turned it into a marketing exercise."
"I don't understand this talk of taxing the banks, or bankers' bonuses," wrote Elajac. "If the banks have so much money sloshing around that they can afford to pay egregious bonuses, why doesn't the gov't just ask for our money back? If the banks still can't manage without our money, they can't afford bonuses."
As for the scenario that our brightest financial whizzes may leave for better bonuses elsewhere, practitioner imagined the scene: "I'm an employer. A former RBS director applies to me for a senior position. I ask him in what circumstances he left his previous job. He tells me that he flounced out in the middle of a number of significant projects because he didn't get his bonus. Am I likely to say to him, 'When can you start?' "
A few brave bloggers did stick to the line that it may be damaging in the long run to disincentivise bankers.
Swapp3r urged naysayers to consider what would happen if they did go somewhere else: "Where will the growth come from then? The mines? The steel industry? The car industry? The NHS? The only competitive advantages for the UK on the world stage are the city, public schools and the fact we speak English."
brunobignose retorted: "Competitive advantage, what competitive advantage? Without the billions in bailouts and guarantees, they would have gone the way of British Leyland, and dragged the rest of us down totally in the process."
Then, ever helpful, a number of people offered a few alternatives for any bankers who might feel aggrieved at missing out.
Gigolo wrote: "I'd suggest tar and feathers."
"Personally I favour hanging them up by their ankles and catching whatever falls out of their pockets," added ieclark.
The overall mood though seemed to be more depressed and despondent than angry.
"Let's face it, Brown is gunning for thee, me and every poor sod who is on PAYE," wrote mugclass. "We are going to be the fall guys for every wasted penny, every quango that did bugger all, every pointless initiative that this pathetic government have inflicted on us since 1997."
"I am wondering if Darling gets his advice for running the country's finances from a similar source Blair got his advice for going to war – a foreign taxi driver," posted ponyman.
Although Communicationalist decided some grudging credit was due to Gordon Brown following the news that France was joining the UK in taxing bank bonuses: "I'll say this for Brown, he understands, and is good at coordinating action in the international context. Shame that this has very little bearing on his chances of being re-elected."
But any warm feelings did not last long. News that the government may be thinking of selling off BBC Worldwide were met with howls of indignation.
yorkie54 stormed: "What next Gordon? You've sold all our gold, and now you're planning to sell a profitable, reputable company, that reflects what is best about great Britain. Why not get the Queen a cleaning job whilst you're about it, that should bring in another few pennies to plug your trillion pound debt. Leave the BBC alone, and put your own house in order first!"
"Please stop asset stripping our country; to us it's a lot more than a resource stream to finance the banking crises," added Shov.
There is only one thing for it, says pwgold, bringing us back to the PBR and imagining an interesting addition to the report: "Darling unveils Government-scrappage scheme: Under the scheme, due to begin in June, households may trade in their rusty, inefficient Governments that are over 10 years old, and receive a big tax break for doing so. In order to qualify, consumers must replace it with a nice, low-cost, shiny new Government. A spokesman for the National Consumer Council criticised the proposals on the grounds that there are not enough new Governments on the market that meet reasonable efficiency targets."
Form an orderly queue now. Keep them coming... | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/26/nba-christmas-scores-lakers-clippers-lebron-injury | Sport | 2019-12-26T14:36:15.000Z | Guardian sport | Lakers' LeBron James aggravates groin injury in Christmas loss to LA Clippers | Kawhi Leonard scored 11 of his 35 points in the fourth quarter and had 12 rebounds to help the Los Angeles Clippers beat the Los Angeles Lakers 111-106 on Wednesday night in the NBA’s marquee Christmas game.
LeBron James, who finished with 23 points, 10 assists and nine rebounds, aggravated a nagging groin injury after a first-quarter collision with Patrick Beverley and could miss game time moving forward.
According to ESPN, several members of the Lakers organization have already approached James about the urgency to sit out and rehab his groin injury until he feels fully recovered.
NBA pitches 78-game schedule, playoff reseeding and in-season tournament
Read more
“I felt healthy going into the game,” James told the network. “I got kneed in the groin taking a charge from Pat Bev, and it kind of set me right back to where I was five days ago.”
Montrezl Harrell had 18 points off the bench, Paul George added 17 and the Clippers improved to 2-0 against the Lakers this season.
Kyle Kuzma led the Lakers with 25 points while Anthony Davis had 24. The Lakers have lost a season-worst four straight games.
Los Angeles had a chance to tie in the final seconds, but video review showed James touched the ball last after Beverly knocked it away as James went up for a three.
George hit two free throws for the final margin.
James, who turns 35 this week, suffered a torn left groin against the Golden State Warriors last Christmas that derailed the Lakers’ season.
Milwaukee Bucks 109-121 Philadelphia 76ers
Joel Embiid outplayed Giannis Antetokounmpo in Philadelphia’s first home Christmas game in 31 years, finishing with 31 points and 11 rebounds to help the three-point happy 76ers beat Milwaukee.
Tobias Harris sank five threes, Josh Richardson and Furkan Korkmaz each had four and even Embiid hit three as part of Philly’s season-high 21 threes (on 44 attempts) against a Bucks team that had the best record in the NBA.
Harris and Al Horford hit threes over the final 90 seconds to push back a late Bucks run, and the Sixers improved to 16-2 at home.
Khris Middleton scored 31 points for Milwaukee, and Antetokounmpo had 18 points and 14 rebounds. Antetokounmpo got flustered over a perceived missed call and was whistled for a technical in the fourth.
New Orleans Pelicans 112-100 Denver Nuggets
Brandon Ingram scored 31 points, Derrick Favors grabbed 13 rebounds and the Pelicans surprised Denver to halt the Nuggets’ seven-game winning streak.
The 9-23 Pelicans are now 2-0 against the Nuggets this season. They spoiled the festive mood at the Pepsi Center as the Nuggets played at home on Christmas for the first time in 25 years.
New Orleans sprang the upset despite committing 19 turnovers. The Pelicans pulled away late courtesy of the long-range shooting of Lonzo Ball and Ingram. They also out-rebounded the Nuggets, including 14 offensive boards.
New Orleans finished a four-game trip with a 3-1 mark, which includes consecutive wins for the first time in a month.
Jrue Holiday had 20 points in the last of five Christmas games where the home teams went 2-3.
Boston Celtics 118-102 Toronto Raptors
Jaylen Brown scored 30 points, Kemba Walker had 22 and Boston beat Toronto in the first Christmas Day NBA game played in Canada.
Enes Kanter had 12 points and 11 rebounds as the Celtics snapped an eight-game losing streak north of the border and became the first Atlantic Division opponent to win in Toronto in more than four years.
Boston’s Gordon Hayward returned to the starting lineup after missing the past three games because of a sore left foot. He scored 14 points in 26 minutes.
Fred VanVleet scored 27 points in the Raptors’ second straight loss, and Chris Boucher had a career-high 24.
Toronto had gone an NBA-record 34 games between home losses to division foes. The Raptors’ last home loss to an Atlantic team was a 111-109 defeat to the New York Knicks on Nov. 10, 2015.
Houston Rockets 104-116 Golden State Warriors
Draymond Green scored 16 of his 20 points in the second half, Damion Lee had 22 points and a career-high 15 rebounds and Golden State beat Houston.
D’Angelo Russell added 20 points, and Glenn Robinson III had 18 to help the Warriors win their third straight and end the Rockets’ four-game winning streak. Injury-ravaged Golden State improved to 7-24.
Russell Westbrook had 30 points and 12 rebounds for Houston. James Harden had 24 points and 11 assists, and Danuel House Jr. had 18 points. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/09/squishmallows-go-from-tiktok-sensation-to-top-christmas-toy | Business | 2022-12-09T12:59:55.000Z | Zoe Wood | Squishmallows go from TikTok sensation to top Christmas toy | Times are tough and budgets are squeezed, so it is perhaps no surprise that the runaway success story in Toyland this Christmas is Squishmallows, the squidgy, huggable pillows-with-a-face that became a viral sensation on TikTok.
The £8 toys are flying off retailers’ shelves with UK sales up 300% this year and stores on track to sell 4m. This pattern is being repeated around the world as total Squishmallows sales doubled in less than a year to surpass 200m this summer – a success story that Frédérique Tutt, toy expert at market researchers NPD, said reflected the staggering “power of social media”.
For the uninitiated, Squishmallows are a line of whimsical, stuffed creatures. They can be fruit, vegetable or animal or, in keeping with this quirky world, a hybrid – think pug dressed as watermelon or penguin in a pineapple costume.
Squishmallows at a DreamToys event in Spitalfields, London. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian
They rose to prominence on social media as fans – the toys are particularly popular with teenage girls – shared their collections online, resulting in more than 9bn video views on TikTok alone. This was aided by famous devotees such as Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and the US social media star Charli D’Amelio posting about the toys to their huge numbers of followers.
Tutt said Squishmallows united several big consumer trends including wellness and collecting. “It is a bit of ‘cuddles’,” she said of the sensory appeal of the supersoft, cushionlike toys. “People are also collecting more than ever, we see that in our data with things like Pokémon and Panini stickers. Pull those things together and add the power of social media, and Squishmallows became a viral sensation.”
Launched in 2017, there are now 3,000 Squishmallow designs, each with a unique name and biography, a facet that stokes their appeal for collectors who seek out characters they relate to. For example Cam the Cat, one the US brand’s first characters, likes skateboarding, the beach and cat naps.
Gerhard Runken, the senior vice-president of brand and marketing at Jazwares, which owns Squishmallows, said the low-priced toys struck a chord during the Covid era when people were spending more time at home and needed a “little hug or something soft to play with”. The toys are popular with children and adults who relate to them in different ways, he said.
“Squishmallows are fun to have around the house, you can collect them, they’re fun to sleep with, lay on, and share,” said Runken of the toys, which range in size from 18cm to 50cm, with the largest ones selling for £50 to £60. “While we don’t say in our brand statement that we are a mental health pillow, we embrace how they help people.”
A child squeezes the must-have Christmas toy. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian
One of the most appealing things about the toys is how they feel, he said. They are covered in a special stretchy fabric while the filling, which utilises recycled plastic bottles, feels like a marshmallow. “We process it more than other people’s fillings and it really gives us that cloud-type feel,” explained Runken.
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Even the legendary investor Warren Buffett is a collector, in a sense. His Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate recently bought the investment company that owns Jazwares. The Squishmallows brand has big plans for the future as it moves beyond toys into new product areas such as clothing, bedding and stationery.
The Entertainer toy chain said it would sell 1m of the toys this year. “Squishmallows has been phenomenal,” said its founder, Gary Grant. “You see people touching, pulling and stretching them. It is not just any soft toy, it is very cuddly and tactile.
“The other thing that we’ve noticed is the age group appeal is much wider than children. Where we’ve got shops in university towns and cities, we’ve had university students buying them. It’s bonkers but that’s what is happening.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/09/martinkettle1 | World news | 2000-08-09T00:45:29.000Z | Martin Kettle | Nixon 'wrecked early peace in Vietnam' | On the eve of his election in 1968, Richard Nixon secretly conspired with the South Vietnamese government to wreck all-party Vietnam peace talks as part of a deliberate effort to prolong a conflict in which more than 20,000 Americans were still to die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians.
The devastating new charge against Nixon, which mirrors long-held suspicions among members of President Lyndon Johnson's administration about the Republican leader's actions in the autumn of 1968, is made by the authors of a new study of Nixon's secret world in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
"The greatest honour history can bestow," reads the inscription on Nixon's black granite tombstone in California, "is the title of peacemaker." But if the charges by authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan are correct, Nixon better deserves to be called a peacewrecker than peacemaker.
At the heart of the new account was Nixon's fear that Vietnam peace efforts by President Johnson in the run-up to the November 1968 US presidential election could wreck Nixon's bid to oust Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, and capture the White House.
Nixon's response to Johnson's efforts was to use a go-between, Anna Chennault, to urge the South Vietnam's president, Nguyen van Thieu, to resist efforts to force them to the peace table.
Nixon's efforts paid off spectacularly. On October 31, Johnson ordered a total halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, the precondition for getting the North and their Vietcong allies to join the talks. Two days later, under intense secret urgings from Nixon and his lieutenants, Thieu announced his government would not take part. Less than a week later, Nixon was elected president with less than a one-point margin in the popular vote over Humphrey.
Playing with US lives
The Vanity Fair article charges that Johnson knew what was going on. Intelligence reports to the president told him that Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, were playing politics with the lives of US soldiers. "Had it been made public at the time, it would surely have destroyed Nixon's presidential hopes at one stroke, and forever," the authors write.
Johnson offered Humphrey the chance to go public about Nixon, but Humphrey was afraid that the charges would be seen as election dirty tricks. Once Nixon had won, Johnson again contemplated revealing what he knew, but decided the national interest precluded it.
In the weeks running up to the election, Nixon's public stance was that, if elected, he would bring the war to an end more effectively than Humphrey. He promised not to interfere with pre-election peace efforts, pledging that neither he nor Agnew "will destroy the chance of peace".
In reality, however, Nixon used his campaign manager, John Mitchell, later his disgraced attorney general, to use go-betweens to encourage Thieu to believe he would get a better deal under a Nixon administration and to boycott the putative talks. Nixon constantly denied that he was conspiring with Thieu against the US government, but the release of previously classified FBI files used by the authors show this was exactly what he was doing.
Chennault, Nixon's main go-between with the South Vietnamese, was a right-wing Republican society hostess who was Chinese born and lived in a newly constructed Washington apartment complex - named the Watergate. She was vice-chairman of the Republican election finance committee and an inveterate lobbyist on behalf of right-wing and pro-American Asian interests.
Chennault regularly passed messages to Mitchell and Nixon during 1968 and they urged her to put pressure on the South Vietnamese leader to create delays and to refuse to take part in the peace talks.
US embassy spy operations, including wiretaps of Thieu's offices, revealed the Thieu-Nixon connection in October and Johnson was briefed about them. One message from Thieu's ambassador in Washington, Bui Diem, told Thieu: "Johnson and Humphrey will be replaced and then Nixon could change the US position."
When Thieu pulled out of the talks, Johnson exploded. He told his advisers that he would go public on a development that could "rock the world". That development, he said, was Nixon's "conniving" with the Thieu regime. An adviser had told Johnson that Nixon was "trying to frustrate the president by inciting Saigon to step up its demands". "It all adds up," Johnson told his advisers.
On October 31, with the bombing halt announced, Mitchell rang Chennault and told her: "Anna, I'm speaking on behalf of Mr Nixon. It's very important our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them. Do you think they have decided not to go to Paris?"
Chennault made contact with Thieu once again. An FBI report said that she "contacted [the] Vietnamese ambassador and advised him that she had received a message from her boss (not further identified) which her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to 'Hold on, we are gonna win' and that her boss also said 'Hold on, he understands all of it'."
On November 2, three days before the election, Thieu announced that South Vietnam would not attend the talks.
Johnson's bad relations with J Edgar Hoover at the FBI meant that Hoover, a Nixon ally, did not tell the president everything that his agents had unearthed. Even so, Johnson had learned enough to speak to Nixon by phone the weekend before the election. Nixon denied Chennault was working for him. When the phone was put down, it was later reported, "Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter".
Johnson was certain Nixon was lying, and told Humphrey what was going on. Humphrey learned about the Nixon-Thieu contacts while he was travelling by plane to a campaign. "By God, when we land I'm going to denounce Thieu. I'll denounce Nixon. I'll tell about the whole thing," he shouted to aides. But he never did.
In the five weeks leading up to the election of 1968, 960 Americans were killed in Vietnam. In the years to come, under Nixon, 20,763 more US soldiers would die.
"What the Nixon people did," the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then attached to the advance US guard to the Paris talks, tells Vanity Fair, "was perhaps even a violation of the law.
"They massively, directly and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation, probably one of the most important negotiations in American diplomatic history."
1957 Beginning of communist insurgency in South Vietnam
1959 Weapons and men from North Vietnam begin infiltrating the South
1960 US aid to the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, increased
1962 President John F Kennedy provides US military advisers to South Vietnam (12,000 by end of year)
1963 Viet Cong, the communist guerrillas operating in South Vietnam, defeat units of ARVN, the South Vietnamese army. President Diem overthrown
1964 North Vietnamese patrol boats fire on the US destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, triggering start of US bombing raids on North Vietnam
1965 US troops in Vietnam number 23,000 at start of year
1966 400,000 US troops in Vietnam, rising to 500,000 in 1967
1968 Tet Offensive - a combined assault by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army on US positions - begins. More than 500 civilians die in My Lai massacre
March 31 1968 President Lyndon Johnson (below right) announces on television that bombing north of the 20th parallel will stop and that he will not seek re-election in the fall. Hanoi responds by de-escalating its insurgency efforts, and in October Johnson orders total halt to bombing. US and Hanoi agree to preliminary peace talks in Paris
1969 President Nixon draws back US ground troops from Vietnam
1970 Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and Le Duc Tho of the Vietnamese politburo start talks in Paris
1973 Ceasefire agreement. Withdrawal of US troops completed by March
1975 North Vietnamese troops invade South Vietnam and take control of the whole country after South Vietnam surrenders
April 1975 Last members of US embassy staff evacuated by helicopter from roof of embassy
Human toll 3m military and civilian Vietnamese. 58,000 Americans
Research: Jason Rodrigues | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable-fashion-blog/2015/feb/19/clothes-and-the-memories-they-hold-share-your-photos-and-stories | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2015-02-19T16:26:03.000Z | Hannah Gould | Clothes and the memories they hold: share your photos and stories | There’s a reason why wedding dresses and old school uniforms fill suitcases under our beds. They’re completely impractical, but they are also reminders of experiences - sometimes good, sometimes bad.
We’d love to see photos of clothing that has an emotional value to you. And hear about the memories and experiences attached to them, be it your first school tie, your lucky in love jumper, or your ex’s t-shirt that you’ve taken some scissors to.
Finders keepers: my favourite piece of clothing
Read more
Please share your stories and pictures here and we’ll put an online gallery together of our favourites.
To get us started are some examples from Textales, which collects and sells clothes in small pop-up shops bearing labels that tell their story. The initiative, created by Amy Inman Villanueva, aims to reduce textile waste and raise money for charity.
Photograph: Textales
Photograph: Textales
Photograph: Textales
Photograph: Textales
Photograph: Textales
Photograph: Textales
The sustainable fashion hub is funded by H&M. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled ‘brought to you by’. Find out more here.
Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/aug/14/ivo-van-hove-uks-theatres-can-teach-its-politicians-a-lesson-about-life-after-brexit | Stage | 2022-08-14T14:00:12.000Z | Miranda Bryant | Ivo van Hove: ‘UK’s theatres can teach its politicians a lesson about life after Brexit’ | Ivo van Hove, one of Europe’s most in-demand directors, says Britain’s politicians should learn from its theatres how to behave post-Brexit, claiming they are setting a “very good example”.
The Amsterdam-based Belgian director, who regularly works with British theatres and next weekend is taking his production of A Little Life to Edinburgh international festival, said he believes Brexit was “historically a mistake”.
Yet theatres and cultural institutions were refusing to be stopped by any added technicalities, he said. Instead, they were continuing and even intensifying collaborations with other European countries.
“Theatres and other cultural institutions gave a good example by keeping collaborations going on with European artists when there was Brexit. They didn’t stop it,” Van Hove, 63, told the Observer.
“Nobody stopped a collaboration. On the contrary, they intensified a lot of collaborations. The theatre and the arts worlds are a very good example to the politicians [of how] to keep it open.”
Van Hove has been leading the way. So far this year he has directed The Human Voice starring Ruth Wilson at the Harold Pinter theatre, brought his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam production Age of Rage to the Barbican, and next weekend will mark the UK premiere of his stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel, A Little Life.
While he said “it’s clear that Brexit was wrong”, and suggested jokingly that it should be reversed, he felt that Europe was acting in “a very drastic way … it’s really a shame”.
Hanya Yanagihara said she would be honoured if Van Hove brought her novel A Little Life to the stage. Photograph: Jenny Westerhoff/PA
“Brexit is historically a mistake. But that’s my opinion,” he said, adding the caveat that he was a Belgian living in Amsterdam and working in London. But he believes that many artists in the capital feel the same way.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, his collaborations with British theatres continued through Brexit. While “it’s a little bit more difficult to get to London” than it was, the problems were not insurmountable.
British theatre producers such as Sonia Friedman, the “super producer” behind the worldwide hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and To Kill a Mockingbird, which transferred from Broadway to the West End in March, have continued to “behave the same way they did before”, he said. “Nothing changed for me there.”
As he prepares to reprise his production of A Little Life, which will be performed in Dutch with English subtitles, he admitted he was originally reluctant to read the lengthy 2015 novel which follows the lives of university friends Jude, Malcolm, Willem and JB, and tackles subjects including trauma, abuse and suicide.
Although he had seen its famous cover, which features the black-and-white Peter Hujar photograph Orgasmic Man, in bookshops around New York, where he was working at the time, he thought it was “just another gay coming-of-age story”. But after it was recommended to him separately by two of his best friends, he felt compelled to read it. Soon after, he was sucked into its “dark abyss” and couldn’t look away.
In another turn of fate, just as he started looking into the logistics of bringing the novel to stage a month later, he received a third copy of the book – this time from Yanagihara – with a “beautiful” note telling him she would be “honoured” if he adapted it.
“I was shocked by it, I was devastated by it, I loved it at the same time,” he said. “Just that she cared, that Hanya cared, to tell a story so cruel but that you can’t get away from. That’s the strange thing about the novel – you can’t get away from it. Even when you want to stop, you just can’t stop reading it. A miracle.”
What attracted him to the story was the description of abuse – “I never saw a description so haunting, so precise, so detailed” – and its story of friendship.
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“I think it tells us that love doesn’t conquer all. That love is not the ultimate solution to things so deep, so hurtful as a traumatic sexual experience.”
For a long time, he has been unable to take the production to the UK or other English-speaking countries due to a rights issue. As reported by the Observer in February, the novel was going to be made into a television series.
Now he is finally able to take it to the Edinburgh festival, which he describes as “one of the greatest festivals in the world”, before taking it “home” to Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in October.
Despite being a time of crisis – from the cost of living to pandemics, the climate and war in Ukraine – he said the story remained timeless and universal.
‘How many litres of blood do we need?’: Ivo van Hove’s ITA on 20 years of shocking theatregoers
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“Of course we live in times of war, depression, financial crisis, a crisis in nature, things like that, but people still go to the theatre to connect deeply to other human beings,” he said. “To go to a ritual. And this is really ritualistic … It cleanses you a little bit.”
He is unafraid to tackle dark subject matter. “I only do things that seem to me urgent to tell on stage,” he said, adding that the urgency must be both personal and societal.
Giving the example of Picasso’s painting Guernica, which thousands of people visit every year, he said: “Why do people go specifically to Madrid to see specifically that painting? I think that’s what art does to people. You look into the face of what you are yourself deep down, because we all have something of an animal in us, nobody is a real saint, there is nobody only a real villain, there is always something more delicate about it, but we need to see the extremes in art.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/sep/30/kirsty-maccoll-birthday-album-reissue | Music | 2012-09-29T23:05:11.000Z | Michael Hann | Kirsty MacColl: the great British songwriter who never got her due | Next Sunday in Soho Square, central London, a group of people will gather around a park bench. On that bench is a metal plaque with the words: Kirsty MacColl 1959-2000 "One Day I'll be Waiting There/ No Empty Bench in Soho Square". Assembled will be MacColl's family, friends and fans, come – as they do every year – to celebrate her birthday on the nearest Sunday.
MacColl would have been 53 on 10 October, and who knows what she would have been doing now ("You could see her writing a musical," says the actor and comedian Tracey Ullman, "or a play at the Royal Court with music.") had she not been killed in December 2000, run over by a speeding motorboat while diving with her sons in Mexico.
"She was a great writer, with warmth and humour and a keen ear and eye for humans and their foibles," says Jem Finer of the Pogues, who wrote the music for the timeless Fairytale of New York, on which MacColl duetted with Shane MacGowan. "No bullshit or pretensions or posturing. A great singer and a genius with harmony."
"You know what I think she is?" says Billy Bragg, whose song A New England she took to No 7 in 1984. "I think she's the missing link between Sandie Shaw and Lily Allen. A couple of Christmases ago someone bought me one of those encyclopedias of rock. It was a real doorstep of a book. Kirsty wasn't in there, and I was really shocked by that. She was a huge talent who made brilliant records and wrote brilliant songs and deserves to be cherished among British songwriters."
The reasons to cherish MacColl lie in the music she recorded, from her first single They Don't Know – a beautiful three-minute confection of 60s girl group and folk rock, as if the Byrds had been writing for the Shangri-Las in 1979 – to her final album, 2000's Tropical Brainstorm, on which she vigorously celebrated Latin American music.
The common thread throughout was a withering and regretful eye for men and their defects, from the bad boy of the first single to the serial liar committing seduction against the background of a 1998 World Cup match on England 2 Colombia 0 from Tropical Brainstorm.
Mark Nevin, who wrote and performed with MacColl in the late 80s and early 90s says: "If you took most songwriters, put all their lyrics into a computer and pressed 'equals' you'd get two lines that sum up everything [they'd written] in a nutshell. Kirsty's would be: 'All blokes are gonna lie, cheat and let you down'."
So why, despite those glorious songs, is she not in Bragg's encyclopedia? MacColl's was the model of a stop-start career. She suffered from stage fright, which discouraged her from touring for much of her career. "I said to her: 'If you get so worried, Kirsty, why don't you go and do something else?'" remembers her mother, the dancer and choreographer Jean Newlove. "Her eyes filled with tears and she said, 'But I love this. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.'"
She also insisted on making her own decisions – something she determined to do from an early age, her mother says – consistently refusing to have her career directed by the men of the record industry. So she switched between labels, never building up the momentum to lift her unassailably into the public consciousness. "She didn't suffer fools," says her ex-husband Steve Lillywhite, who produced two of her albums, "and to be honest, to make it in the business – especially if you're a woman – you have to suffer fools."
And so we're left with a smattering of singles and only five albums, recorded between 1981 and 2000. The first four – Desperate Character, Kite, Electric Landlady and Titanic Days – are being reissued the day after the birthday celebration, and listening to them afresh, one after the other, provides a vivid reminder of MacColl's talent. She could capture the world in songs that seamlessly interweave heartbreak and humour ("There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis/ Just like you swore to me that you'd be true," she sang on her breakthrough hit) set against a constantly evolving musical background.
MacColl immersed herself in music as a child. Not the music of her father, the folk singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl, but pop. Though he had left Newlove for Peggy Seeger, his will was known to his daughter. "I was very aware of the fact that he disapproved completely of anything he regarded as commercial," she later said. "Her dad was very scornful of pop music," Bragg says. "He really didn't like it at all. Not just her doing it, but anyone doing it."
Nevin believes her father exerted an influence in one way, though, through his having left: "She didn't talk about her dad much, but it was an underlying thing that coloured the way she saw the world – men would let you down and mess you about."
Since her dad was absent, MacColl could sing along to her brother Hamish's singles, apparently teaching herself the vocal harmony parts to the Beach Boys's Good Vibrations when she was seven. Newlove remembers her daughter waiting for the musical interludes in Andy Williams' TV show: "Kirsty would take her violin out of the case and accompany him. I would have a quiet laugh to myself, but she took it very seriously. Then she'd put the violin away until Andy Williams came out for another song, and out would come the violin." Newlove thinks MacColl started writing songs after she passed her English O-level early, at 14, leaving her with free periods to while away in the teacher's office. She'd been a prodigious writer since early childhood – a piece she wrote when she was seven for a competition run by the Observer was published in a Penguin book edited by the educationalist Edward Blishen, The School That I'd Like – but now her thoughts turned to writing pop. In her late teens she joined a punk band called the Drug Addix.
"This was a far cry from what I expected," Newlove says. "'What's your daughter doing?' 'Oh, she's one of the Drug Addix!' I went to pick her up when she did her first gig. I stood downstairs waiting and a man said to me: 'Cor, listen to those kids. I can't stand it, can you?' I didn't want to say, 'No, it's dreadful,' so I just weakly smiled."
Still, the Drug Addix were enough to get MacColl signed in her own right to Stiff, and so came They Don't Know. It had "hit" stamped all over it: great song, great arrangement, great musicians. It was all over the radio – the second most played song in the UK one week. But a strike at Stiff's distributors meant the single didn't reach the shops, and it didn't even enter the singles chart.
One of the many joys contained in They Don't Know is MacColl's voice. The time spent practising the vocal parts in Good Vibrations was echoed down her career. She adored Brian Wilson, and used to layer her own voice to create distinctive velvet harmonies like the Beach Boys had done, which became a trademark. "She would sing like a keyboard," Lillywhite remembers. "She sang without vibrato and when you don't have vibrato you have this wonderful glassy sound, which is how you can get that Beach Boys thing."
"She knew how to use her voice," Bragg says. "She'd tell the engineer where to put the mics, and she'd tell the producer what she was going to do next. She did this amazing thing where she'd do a take, then go round into a different position and do another take to layer up this amazing sound, then: 'That's all. Let's go to the pub." Though eight years elapsed between MacColl's first album in 1981 and its follow-up, Kite – arguably her best – MacColl wasn't idle. She brought up the two sons she and Lillywhite had after getting married in 1984; sang on plenty of sessions, notably Fairytale of New York; and two other artists got significant boosts thanks to her.
One was Tracey Ullman, then an up-and-coming comedian on the TV shows A Kick Up the Eighties and Three of a Kind. "I got obsessed with They Don't Know," she says. "I used to play it and play it and play it." When Ullman started recording for Stiff in 1983 she had a big hit with the song – accompanied by a video starring Paul McCartney – and recorded several other MacColl numbers. Ullman has been in America for 30 years now, winning Emmys along the way, "but my entry to America was getting into the Billboard top 10 with Kirsty's song – they got me over to be one of the first MTV veejays".
Billy Bragg, meanwhile, says he owes her for the push that made him a crossover pop star of sorts. "I was indie No 1 – the Smiths' first album pushed me off No 1 – that's where I was," he says of his position in the early 80s before MacColl had a hit with A New England in December 1984. "Life's a Riot [his debut album, featuring his original of the song] had already gone silver; within two weeks of her getting in the charts it went gold." These days, when he plays A New England live, he always adds the extra verse from her version. "I shout, 'Let's the sing the last verse for Kirsty!', and everyone cheers. There's still a great deal of love for her."
By the time Kite was released in 1989, MacColl's writing had changed – it was still personal, witty and engaged but now it was in her own voice. "I know the reason why," Mark Nevin says of the change in tone. "It was Morrissey. She said: 'I heard the Smiths and realised, I get it – I can write about anything.' She didn't have to write songs that sounded like they'd been written by songwriters. That was the thing that transformed her writing." Where before there had been what Bragg calls "Play for Today songs", now the eye for a bitter truth was combined with a weightless touch for the right phrase: "What else is there to do/ But turn and wet the baby's head/ And pray he will be happier than you and me?" she sings, devastatingly, on Tread Lightly.
"She always said, and I believed her, that the songs were pretty much not about one specific person," says Lillywhite, who produced Kite and its successor, Electric Landlady. "But later on, after we'd made our amends, she said they were probably more about me than she had realised at the time."
Titanic Days, released in 1993, was not a happy time. First, MacColl's marriage was ending. Then there was another new label. Then the album was all but ignored by the world. MacColl resolved not to make another record until she was happy – and so it was seven years before Tropical Brainstorm was released in 2000, to a delighted reception, before her return was ended abruptly by the tragedy in Mexico.
Like most re-releases, the four MacColl albums will probably slip by, barely noticed. Dedicated fans might update their copies, scouting for previously unissued bonus tracks. If any DJs pick up the albums, some new listeners might hear a singer they don't know on the radio. Maybe one or two people will read a review or an article like this, investigate further and discover one of English music's most vivid songwriting personalities. Fame will be as distant as it was when she was still making records.
"Being a pop star is a bit daft," Bragg says. "If you go for that you have to give up your personality. Jessie J would be a good example – what's she like offstage? Who knows? Or Cheryl Cole? What's she like when she's kicked back in front of the telly, having a fag and a beer? I don't think Kirsty could ever have been that kind of pop star."
Kirsty MacColl's first four albums will be reissued on Salvo on 8 October | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/feb/17/eating-out-is-an-indulgence-so-is-putting-calorie-counts-on-menus-doomed-to-fail | Food | 2022-02-17T12:00:35.000Z | Jay Rayner | Eating out is an indulgence – so is putting calorie counts on menus doomed to fail? | Everything I am, I owe to calories, as Sophia Loren never quite said. I have built myself, one edible unit of energy at a time. In truth I have more than built myself. I am over-engineered, in the way Mussolini’s Milan railway station is over-engineered, or Jason Momoa is over-engineered. See how deftly I compare myself to Momoa? We are exactly the same, him and me. Save that every calorie he consumes turns into a plank of rippling muscle, while mine turn into the greatest muffin top this side of the Greggs cake counter. But it’s all flesh, right?
Ah, calories. Mostly I try to ignore them; to regard them as I do the isobars on a meteorologist’s map which in no way describe the experience of standing outside in a howling gale. I know that not all calories are equal; that calories from carbs impact the body differently to those obtained from protein, for example. I also know that we all process foods differently. I have a metabolism that suggests I may at some point have been gene-spliced with a sloth, and hence spend hours in the gym brutalising myself. I also like my dinner very much. I regard the diet book industry as a massive scam. If a single diet book worked there would be no need to publish another one ever again. But still they come.
All of this means I should regard the introduction in April of mandatory calorie counts on the menus offered by all hospitality businesses with 250 employees or more as worthy of nothing more than a theatrical shrug. I don’t think of it that way. I find the prospect extremely dispiriting. Eating out is meant to be an indulgence, even when it isn’t a splendid parade of chips, gravy and custard-drenched puddings. It’s meant to be a pleasure. And it is very hard to indulge yourself in pleasure when the metrics arising from your behaviour are being thrown in your face all the time. It’s a bit like going to an orgy only to find it’s being patrolled by an army of nurses armed with swabs and petri dishes. I imagine.
Which, of course, is the whole point of the new legislation. Obesity costs the UK £6.1bn a year, rising to £9.7bn by 2050. We clearly need to do something about it. The question is whether this new legislation will help. The evidence that calorie counts on menus change behaviour is scant. One recent US study found that calorie consumption falls initially, before gently rising back to previous levels.
It does, however, have other impacts. In 2012 major high street brands including KFC, Costa Coffee and Pizza Hut, representing 9,500 outlets, signed up to a voluntary initiative led by Public Health England to introduce calorie counts. That led in turn to major activity behind the scenes. The companies that supply cakes to the big high street coffee shops are now constantly being told to reduce the calorie counts on new products and to revise existing ones. The great likelihood is that all the restaurants newly landed on planet calorie count will be doing something similar.
Alternatively, they’ll take advantage of one exclusion in the legislation: “specials”, those dishes on the menu for 30 days or less, do not need to be calorie counted. So expect to see a huge expansion in temporary items or small adjustments to existing dishes every 29 days to make them suddenly new and – whaddya know? – exempt. And expect to read about me ordering loads of them. It will be an act of self-delusion, but I am more than capable of that.
[email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/28/cannes-2017-ruben-ostlund-wins-palme-dor-for-the-square | Film | 2017-05-28T18:43:15.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Cannes 2017: Ruben Östlund wins Palme d'Or for The Square | The art-world satire The Square has won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes film festival. Directed by Ruben Östlund, The Square is about a museum director (played by Claes Bang) who is desperate to make a success of his gallery, and stages a new installation called “The Square” to promote it.
Cannes 2017: full list of winners
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The Square was well received after its debut on 19 May, earning a string of glowing reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it four stars, saying it created “some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness”.
Swedish director Östlund is best known for his previous film, Force Majeure, which also addressed the toxic nature of middle-class guilt. The film also starred Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss and The Wire’s Dominic West, as well as an already-celebrated appearance from animal-movement expert Terry Notary, as a performance artist who impersonates an ape.
The Square’s victory somewhat upset the formbook, as much attention appeared to be focussing on Andrei Zvyagintsev’s eerie fable Loveless, an apocalyptic study of a failed marriage and the subsequent disappearance of a child, and Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats per Minute, about the French arm of the Aids-activist Act-Up movement. In the end they were awarded the jury prize and grand prix, respectively, the festival’s notional third and second prizes.
Joaquin Phoenix with his best actor award for You Were Never Really Here. Photograph: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
The jury, presided over by Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar, gave two awards to Lynne Ramsay’s sex-traffic thriller You Were Never Really Here: a joint best screenplay award and best actor to Joaquin Phoenix; the latter appeared shellshocked to win, and took to the stage wearing Converse sneakers.
The best actress award went to Diane Kruger, who played a woman seeking revenge for her husband’s death in a terrorist bombing in In the Fade, directed by Fatih Akin; although the film itself received largely negative reaction – including a two-star review from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw – Kruger’s first performance in her native German was well-liked. Kruger dedicated her win to everyone who “has survived an act of terrorism and who is trying to pick up the pieces and go on living after having lost everything”.
Cannes 2017 awards: visceral power overlooked in favour of bourgeois vanity
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Sofia Coppola became only the second woman to win Cannes’ best director award (the first being Yuliya Solntseva in 1961 for the Russian film The Story of the Flaming Years). Coppola’s adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s The Beguiled won many plaudits, and in a statement read out by jury member Maren Ade Coppola thanked Jane Campion, the only female Palme d’Or winner to date, for being a “role model”.
The Camera d’Or for best first film went to Jeune Femme, from French director Léonor Serraille, while the maker of the best short film, Qiu Yang, declared the award “fucking amazing”.
As suggested earlier in the festival by Almodovar, neither of the Netflix-backed selections in the competition – the ensemble comedy The Meyerowitz Stories and giant-pig eco-fable Okja – received any award recognition.
This article was corrected on 29 May 2017. We had confused the plot of Loveless with that of A Gentle Creature, a film set in Russia that was also in the competition. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/nov/25/ralf-rangnick-will-bring-innovative-identity-to-manchester-united | Football | 2021-11-25T22:00:10.000Z | Ben Lyttleton | Ralf Rangnick will bring innovative identity to Manchester United | The Premier League just got more interesting. Ralf Rangnick, set to be appointed as Manchester United’s interim manager and then as a club consultant after the departure of Ole Gunnar Solskjær, has already had a successful impact on English football: his belief in fast-paced transitions has influenced Jürgen Klopp and he was mentor to Thomas Tuchel and gave him his first coaching job (as Stuttgart’s youth coach).
Now, after a long flirtation with the English game – Rangnick was close to the England job in 2016 and to roles at Everton in 2019 and Chelsea last season - comes the opportunity to put his stamp on a team. And there will be a stamp because, with Rangnick, it always comes back to identity. He has a clear style of play that he demands from his teams. He has said that all of Europe’s top coaches “know what their football looks like”. For the first time in several years, United may finally be able to say the same.
How to fix Manchester United? It depends which direction they want to go in …
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The Rangnick style kicked off in 1983 when he was player-manager of sixth-division Viktoria Backnang. His team lost a pre-season friendly to Dynamo Kyiv. Rangnick could not get over the Dynamo pressing game and was convinced they were fielding three extra players. That formed the basis of his philosophy, later honed at Hoffenheim, whom he took from Germany’s third division to the Bundesliga top seven.
Its focus, helped by an early adoption of analytics, was on aggressive pressing, direct and vertical passing, numerical superiority in key areas, and more sprints to win back the ball. His playing principles, he told the International Football Arena conference, include: “You need to dictate the game with and without the ball, not through individuals … use transitions, switch quickly … to think and find the right solutions quickly … and shoot within 10 seconds of winning the ball back.”
This identity suited RB Leipzig, and its Red Bull-ownership brand, even better. As coach and then director of football, he reduced the team’s average age from 29 to 24 and took them from Germany’s second division into the Champions League, where they reached the semi-final in 2020. Rangnick ended up as head of sport and development across Red Bull’s four football teams. One of his hallmarks there included a succession planning policy so every coach who leaves (usually for better things) is replaced seamlessly, and without a change in playing style. It sounds so obvious but is still rare. Rangnick has become a byword for tactical influence and talent development in Germany and has even taken credit for the national team’s 2014 World Cup success.
Ralf Rangnick (right) had a strong influence on Jürgen Klopp’s gegenpressing style. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The 63-year-old is passionate about improving his players, and not just by helping them run faster or kick the ball harder. “The biggest untapped potential lies in the footballer’s brain,” Rangnick told me when I interviewed him for my book Edge: Leadership Secrets from Football’s Top Thinkers.
Rangnick was one of the first coaches to hire video analysts and sports psychologists to help his teams gain an advantage. “Mentality relates to the effort you put in,” he continued. “Are you hungry? Are you willing to submit everything to get better? Do you want to improve yourself every day? Do you live in a professional way? Are you resistant to things like nightclubs or drinking? Do you need a big car or other things for your ego? If you don’t have the right mentality, you can forget about the inherited talent that’s in your DNA, and what you have learned from others. It’s no use. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t matter how talented a player is, if the mentality is shit, forget about it.
“We compare our players’ development [at Red Bull] to a 1,000-piece jigsaw. We try to offer all of those 1,000 pieces to every player, and it’s up to them to use them in whatever dimension they want. We try to have all the relevant aspects of football development in our portfolio. We want the best possible support staff to develop the players.”
Rangnick compared his role as a coach to a salesperson trying to convince a sceptical customer. “That’s what coaches are!” he laughed. “They have to give the players a reason to get up for training every morning, and to do that they tap into what drives them as individuals.”
He may be a tough taskmaster but has a genuine warmth. “Modern-day leadership is about being persuasive and creating a motivational basis so every day the players will want to come in and get better. This is about trust and empathy and human relationships.”
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Words such as philosophy and identity may seem like corporate buzzwords, but when it comes to United they hit a nerve. In the past Rangnick has warned against coaching changes that require a totally new approach to playing style, man-management and recruitment. This has been the United way since Sir Alex Ferguson left in 2013.
Rangnick knows it takes time to change a club’s setup. He understands why clubs who haven’t experienced a different model are hesitant. His United agreement incorporates a consultancy deal of at least two years to prevent the club repeating past mistakes. The irony is that, three years after United started looking for a director of football, they have landed on one of the best in the game, and appointed him as manager. His most important work for United may come once this season is over. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/07/artie-lange-cari-champion-sexual-harassment-not-funny | Opinion | 2014-11-07T13:52:23.000Z | Roxane Gay | Nobody cares about your erection, Artie Lange. And women don’t think it's funny | Roxane Gay | The cycle is predictable: a public figure says something inappropriate (usually racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic) – often, they claim, as a ploy for laughs. A significant number of people react negatively. Said public figure responds defensively to the negative reaction. And the public figure’s fans respond to the negative reaction by issuing threats (usually of rape and murder) to anyone who dared disagree with their idol. The public figure then blathers on, at length and incoherently, about freedom of speech, the ills of censorship and the scourge of political correctness.
But rarely in this familiar cycle does the public figure take a moment to examine the original behavior and consider how he or she erred. Often, they are never even asked to.
Take, for example, white comedian – and I use the term loosely – Artie Lange, who decided to harass a woman in a very public fashion. Lange, it seems, found ESPN correspondent Cari Champion very attractive during her appearance on the network’s show First Take – so attractive, he claimed, that he found himself physically aroused watching her do her job. And because Lange didn’t want to keep his desire or boner (read: entitlement) to himself, he shared the specific nature of that attraction via a series of tweets to his 275,000 followers this week.
Trying to maintain erection and jerkoff to chick on First Take but they keep cutting back to Stephen A Smith and the white guy. Frustrating!
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
I want the Chick on First Take to laugh at my white dick!
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
Here's the scenario I'm using to jerkoff to chick on First Take I'm T. Jefferson & she's my slave. She beats the shit out of me & runs free
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
Then I cum and she's free! The Happiest ending ever!
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
Hey @CariChampion lets me and you get busy!
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
I attempt to whip @CariChampion cuz she disrespected the Jefferson Plantation but she grabs whip & beats me I cum like a fat founding father
— Artie Lange (@artiequitter) November 4, 2014
It wasn’t enough to merely compliment Champion’s looks or engage in some casual objectification – that would have been too pedestrian. Lange is a comedian; he likes to be “edgy”. Champion is a black woman, so Lange was just obligated to share a strange, repulsive fantasy involving slavery, rape, Thomas Jefferson and some flagellation while calling our attention to his “white” dick. But Lange’s impoverished brand of humor and the flatness of his jokes were nearly as offensive to comedy as their troubling content was to women. That is what’s so often even more frustrating about these situations: it’s not merely that comedians are telling rape jokes or using racism or misogyny in their acts, it’s that they seem utterly incapable of doing so well.
As people tend to do when they are called out for their inappropriateness, Lange reacted defensively and conjured up the dark specter of “political correctness” – this vague idea certain people love to revisit when they can’t behave exactly as offensively as they please without social consequence. Lange later tweeted about “PC groups” and the “PC army” after he began to reap what he had sowed: he was asked not to attend a scheduled appearance on Comedy Central’s @Midnight. His fans then leapt to his defense, and the cycle of outrageousness, outrage, defensiveness and outrageousness (which even Lange acknowledged was over the line) continued at a frenzied pace.
Champion has had a great deal of success in her field but, when Lange shared his lewd comments with her and a countless number of others, he reminded her (and all women) that, no matter what she achieves, she is still a woman– and, not only a woman but a black woman. She exists for Lange and others not as a professional journalist, but as a boner-provoker, and Lange made sure she knew it – even adding her Twitter handle to his fantasies so she would be sure to see. It wasn’t enough that he made his desire public. He had to place it directly in view of the object of his temporary affection.
But challenge men like Lange and their entitlement to have women give a damn about his sad erections, and he and others will sing their sad songs about their constitutional rights to not be assaulted by your displeasure because they are utterly incapable of understanding the first amendment. They obstinately ignore reality – that they do not exist in an anarchic vacuum where their antics go unnoticed.
You don’t have to be a paid “comedian” to think the slightest bit of turgidity in your manhood is important news about which other people – mostly women – should be informed. This misapprehension is rather universal among men. In a viral video on street harassment – released by Hollaback and seen by more than 34m people to date – Shoshana Roberts walked through New York City for 10 hours as a hidden camera documented a disturbing number of instances in which various men could not help but make their desires for Roberts known.
Since its release, cultural critics and others have weighed in on the video’s merits and demerits – in the latter case, the cultural narrowness of the video (which focused on only one kind of woman), and the implication that the majority of the men committing street harassment are men of color. And though the producer, Rob Bliss, admitted in the wake of criticism that most of the white men who’d harassed Roberts were edited out, far too many people nonetheless tried to pathologize this kind of drive-by sexual harassment as unique to “low class” people, and primarily unique to black and Latino men. But there’s little cause to exonerate such a wide swath of men from bad behavior, nor to blithely ignore the reality that street and other acts of sexual harassment are committed by all manner of men regardless of class, creed, race or ethnicity.
You know, like Artie Lange.
Oddly enough – or not – Lange’s harassment of Champion hasn’t yet captured the broad public imagination in the same way the street harassment video did. In the day since the Lange incident, few major media outlets published or broadcast anything significant about his actions, though Champion’s employer, ESPN, roundly denounced Lange’s behavior and banned him from the network. There may be other consequences – but it’s not hard to imagine that he will still continue feeling entitled to use his desire as the basis for his “jokes”, or that he will continue to feel free to objectify women and use race, our nation’s fraught racial history and the ever-present threat of sexual violence to provoke and even titillate a few people.
Just like the men who catcall and otherwise harass women on the street, Lange felt he had every right to objectify Champion in the basest, most absurd way on the internet. He remains largely unapologetic and defiant – but we’re still hearing exactly how Artie Lange feels. That, it seems, is what’s supposed to be most important to us: his boners, his career, his “silencing”, his feelings.
Women are, apparently, just there to listen and behold his sad spectacle. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/03/its-a-wonderful-life-jake-heggie-english-national-opera-eno-aletta-collins-review-coliseum-tippett-a-child-of-our-time-london-philharmonic-orchestra-lpo-gardner-connolly-benjamin-williams-tarver-ims-prussia-cove-wigmore-hall | Music | 2022-12-03T12:30:44.000Z | Stephen Pritchard | The week in classical: It’s a Wonderful Life; A Child of Our Time; IMS Prussia Cove – review | Awhip-round produces a basket overflowing with banknotes towards the close of English National Opera’s new production of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s just one of the many ironies about the timing of this piece, staged as the company faces the devastating loss of its £12.8m Arts Council funding. “No matter how your story ends, no one is a failure who has friends,” sing the chorus at the curtain, and, goodness knows, ENO needs friends right now, because life is very far from wonderful.
Whatever your feelings about this sugary confection, based entirely on Frank Capra’s 1946 film, no one could describe ENO’s production (first seen in Houston in 2016) as a failure. Is it an opera? Is it a musical? Does that really matter when it is sung with such verve and staged with such panache? Probably not, and if it brings in a new audience that’s surely a good thing.
However, in a recent interview, its composer, Jake Heggie, said he writes “musicals for opera singers and opera houses”. Well, up to a point. Musicals usually feature at least a couple of big numbers you can whistle on your way home. You won’t find any in this show. Instead, Heggie is a master of pastiche: we hear the influence of Bernstein, Korngold, vaudeville and barbershop, even Schoenberg. The orchestration is often pure Hollywood, lush and creamy as a chocolate eclair, but the vocal writing can be angular, sometimes atonal, particularly for Clara, the guardian angel.
Yes, Clara. Clarence, the angel who appears near the end of the film, is replaced here with a soprano who takes centre stage from the beginning, observing the life of poor thwarted George Bailey at first hand, a change to the story that also sees welcome diverse casting (a real ENO strength) reframing the focus of the whole piece. Danielle de Niese as Clara sings, appropriately, like an angel, bringing vital energy to the role, and exciting tenor Frederick Ballentine makes a charming George, although he has a tough job playing opposite star soprano Jennifer France, who dazzles as his wife, Mary. Tenor Ronald Samm does a lovely job as bumbling Uncle Billy.
Verve and panache… the cast of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Coliseum. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Giles Cadle’s attractive set is peppered with stars, moons and snowflakes that sparkle under Andreas Fuchs’s lighting design. Costume designer Gabrielle Dalton has a ball dressing the big company in outfits that track fashion from the 1920s to the late 1940s, while director and choreographer Aletta Collins and conductor Nicole Paiement keep the whole thing moving at a slick pace (unlike the film). Librettist Gene Scheer stays remarkably close to the original dialogue, which articulates radical ideas on the cost of living, mortgages, housing, rents and profiteering – potent topics today. There’s even a proto Trump in the panto villain of the piece, the unscrupulous financier Henry F Potter, splendidly sung by baritone Michael Mayes.
When suicidal George wails that he wishes he had never been born, the music stops. Clara shows him just what a harsh, unharmonious world it would be if he hadn’t lived, with the music returning only when he finds he way back to real life. If nothing else, this warm-hearted, deeply sentimental production shows us just how much poorer our world would be if ENO’s music were to stop and we were left without it.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra, under its principal conductor Edward Gardner, is currently exploring ideas of exile and belonging in a highly pertinent season entitled A place to call home. One of the 20th century’s most powerful protests against displacement and injustice is Michael Tippett’s too-rarely performed oratorio A Child of Our Time (1944), which focuses on Kristallnacht, the night Nazi hatred of the Jewish people spilled over into stark, cruel reality. It draws on African American spirituals, the music of another oppressed people, to convey a universal message of grief, protest and boundless compassion.
‘Like a blazing comet’: soprano Nadine Benjamin (standing), flanked by Sarah Connolly, conductor Edward Gardner, Kenneth Tarver and Roderick Williams in A Child of Our Time. LPO
The London Philharmonic Choir, with the London Adventist Chorale, sang Tippett’s deeply moving score with precision and authority, particularly in his wondrous reworking of Steal Away, Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Go Down, Moses and Deep River. Special mention here for the sopranos, who despatched the most hazardous vocal line, “We are lost, we are as seed before the wind”, with consummate ease. Tippett fashions the piece in the 18th-century manner, with soloists laying out the narrative and commenting on the action. Here, Nadine Benjamin excelled, her bright, clean soprano soaring over the spirituals like a blazing comet. Mezzo Sarah Connolly and baritone Roderick Williams, turning to watch in admiration, were committed, eloquent companions, although tenor Kenneth Tarver seemed more detached.
Jonian Ilias Kadesha (violin), Thomas Adès (piano) and Matthew Hunt (clarinet) race along with Bartók at Wigmore Hall’s IMS Prussia Cove weekend. Photograph: Clive Barda
Nature and music have been meeting in harmony at Prussia Cove on the rugged Cornwall coast for 50 years. Cue for a celebration of the International Musicians Seminar, founded there in 1972 to maintain the highest standards of European music-making, with a list of maestri and alumni that reads like a Who’s Who of the classical world. Artistic director Steven Isserlis assembled a galaxy of exceptional talent at London’s Wigmore Hall last weekend to mark the milestone. Violinist Sini Simonen shone in the closing concert, coaxing her colleagues through an ecstatic reading of Dvořák’s String Quintet in G; Thomas Adès drove Bartók’s strident, frenetic Contrasts from the keyboard, with clarinettist Matthew Hunt and violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha racing along beside him. But perhaps the most memorable moment came in the opening allegro of Brahms’s Clarinet Trio in A minor, where Hunt, pianist Dénes Várjon and cellist Alice Neary raced up and down pianissimo scales like soft-pawed kittens playing in the snow.
Star ratings (out of five)
It’s a Wonderful Life ★★★★
A Child of our Time ★★★★
ISM Prussia Cove ★★★★★
It’s a Wonderful Life is at the Coliseum, London, until 10 December
Watch a trailer for It’s a Wonderful Life. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/17/facing-chaos-and-needing-a-scapegoat-the-tories-seek-endless-fight-with-europe | Opinion | 2021-10-17T06:30:19.000Z | Fintan O’Toole | Facing chaos and needing a scapegoat, the Tories seek an endless fight with Europe | Fintan O’Toole | Last week, Boris Johnson, with his paintbrush and easel at his holiday villa in Marbella, touched up his self-portrait as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, another bodysnatcher, Johnson’s Brexit tsar, David Frost, was also in sunny Iberia. In Lisbon on Tuesday evening, he channelled the intellectual father of modern conservatism, the 18th-century Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke.
Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”. His speech was entitled, in imitation of a famous Burke pamphlet, “Observations on the present state of the nation”.
In case his audience somehow failed to make the connection between the former chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association and one of the greatest political thinkers these islands has produced, Frost reminded them – how could they have forgotten? – that he had previously given a speech entitled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe”. Geddit?
For those who did indeed get it, the first response was surely to sigh, like the ghost in Shakespeare’s tragedy, “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there”. The second was the dizzying feeling that the “present state of the nation” is that of a skydiver, free-falling downwards from Burkean conservatism into pure Tory anarchism.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote that “good order is the foundation of all good things”. Somehow, when his soul was transmigrating to be born again in Brexit Britain, that bit got lost in translation.
Disorder is now the royal road to all the good things that will come to those who keep the Brexit faith. Tearing up international treaties is, like the mass culling of pigs and fruit rotting in the fields, merely a manifestation of the creative chaos from which the new universe of “Global Britain” will emerge.
It is rather unfortunate that the ground on which this big bang is set to explode, Northern Ireland, is a place that knows all about big bangs and the misery of chaos. And even more so that it is a place held together by one of those documents that Johnson and his government now hold in such contempt: an international treaty, the Belfast agreement of 1998.
Before Frost gave his speech on Tuesday, he knew full well that the EU was about to put forward a generous, sensible and very helpful set of proposals to deal with the difficulties in the practical implementation of the protocol. These proposals, unveiled on Wednesday, give civic and business leaders in Northern Ireland pretty much everything they have asked for to make the new arrangements work smoothly.
This is exactly the condition Edmund Burke warned against: an idea of ‘freedom’ unmoored from any commitment to order
Anticipating this EU move to calm everything down, however, Frost and Johnson chose to pre-empt the solutions by creating a new problem, one they know to be insoluble. They have hyped up an issue that no one in business or trade in Northern Ireland gives a damn about: the role of the European court of justice (ECJ) in any potential disputes about the interpretation of EU law. Deprived of the movement of sausages as a casus belli, they grasped another dubious foodstuff – the red herring.
The role of the ECJ in relation to the protocol is so vital that Frost and Johnson apparently forgot about it for 21 months. Johnson agreed to – and hailed as a triumph – the withdrawal agreement in October 2019. The alleged concern about the ECJ emerged suddenly in the “command paper” published by Frost on 21 July this year. On Thursday, the Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, confirmed that Johnson had never once raised it in their discussions about the protocol. Yet we’re supposed to believe that this is a red line, a matter – unlike, say, keeping your word – of the highest principle. The UK government has developed a variant on Groucho Marx: these are our principles and if you don’t agree to fight us on them, we have others that we can provoke you with.
The only reason for dragging the ECJ into the arena now is that it is one issue on which the EU cannot ultimately yield. There are many layers of dispute resolution mechanisms already available within the withdrawal agreement and they can all be used intelligently if there is a will to do so. But the EU is held together by its laws – and the ECJ is the institution that underpins them. That cannot change.
Frost is well aware of the futility of his demands – indeed, it is the whole point of his Lisbon performance. Instead of declaring victory, accepting the EU’s munificent offers and turning down the heat in Northern Ireland, he and Johnson prefer to make an impossible demand so that they can blame the EU for rejecting it.
They are, as the South Belfast MP, Claire Hanna, has put it, “mining for grievance”. Northern Ireland has a rich seam of this precious political ore. Frost and Johnson know that they can use it to mint the hard currency of complaint and self-pity. However badly it scars the social and political landscape of Northern Ireland, they are determined to keep digging.
The only consolation for Ireland and the rest of the EU is that they are not being singled out for high-handed contempt. When Johnson’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, tweeted on Wednesday that the intention was always to dishonour the protocol because “cheating foreigners is a core part of the job”, he was being uncharacteristically modest. Cheating Brits has been a core competency as well.
The whole ECJ issue is being whipped up as a matter of sovereignty. But who, for the Brexiters, is really sovereign? It is clearly not parliament, which voted overwhelmingly to ratify the withdrawal agreement they now want to tear up. It is not the people, who voted to give Johnson a whopping majority on the basis of this fabulous oven-ready deal. It is, rather, whatever it suits Johnson, or Frost, or Cummings when he was in power, to do or say at any given time.
This is exactly the political condition that Burke warned against: an idea of “freedom” that is unmoored from any countervailing commitment to order. Without an ordered structure of governance, he argued, freedom dissolves into anarchy and arbitrariness.
If there are any conservatives left in the Conservative party, they should reflect that this is indeed where the Brexit project has led them. In the name of “freedom” from the EU, it has undermined adherence to both national and international law and licensed a unilateral declaration of open mendacity.
It is all too obvious that Northern Ireland doesn’t count, except as a pressure point to be squeezed whenever Johnson feels like it. It is being used to try to solve the great political dilemma of Brexit: who do you blame when you’ve killed the scapegoat? The need for the scapegoat is becoming steadily more urgent, hence the political necromancy of revived conflict with the EU.
But if Northern Ireland doesn’t matter, what about Britain? Do conservatives now have such a low opinion of their own country that they are happy for it to be governed arbitrarily, by people who dishonour not just international treaties but their own parliament and electorate? And if you really are content to be governed by quirks and caprices rather than by laws, would you really want those whims to be Boris Johnson’s?
Fintan O’Toole’s new book is We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/25/hollywood-strike-tentative-deal-update | Culture | 2023-09-25T17:13:06.000Z | Erum Salam | ‘Exceptional’: Hollywood writers hail tentative deal to end strike | The tentative deal reached between Hollywood and studio executives has been received well by those on strike and others within the industry.
Members from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who took on the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) with demands that included better pay and residuals, and safeguards on the use of artificial intelligence, shared their collective relief.
Hollywood writers’ strike: WGA reaches ‘tentative’ deal to end 146-day strike
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In a statement issued on Sunday, the WGA said: “We have reached a tentative agreement on a new 2023 MBA, which is to say an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language.
“What we have won in this contract – most particularly, everything we have gained since 2 May – is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal.”
The organization called the deal “exceptional”.
On Monday, Joe Biden issued a statement on the strike’s imminent end and praised the power of collective bargaining.
“I applaud the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for reaching a tentative agreement that will allow writers to return to the important work of telling the stories of our nation, our world – and of all of us,” he said.
“This agreement, including assurances related to artificial intelligence, did not come easily. But its formation is a testament to the power of collective bargaining.
“There simply is no substitute for employers and employees coming together to negotiate in good faith toward an agreement that makes a business stronger and secures the pay, benefits, and dignity that workers deserve. I urge all employers to remember that all workers – including writers, actors, and auto workers – deserve a fair share of the value their labor helped create.”
Also on Monday, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called the writers a vital part of the state’s economy.
In a statement, he said: “California’s entertainment industry would not be what it is today without our world-class writers. For over 100 days, 11,000 writers went on strike over existential threats to their careers and livelihoods – expressing real concerns over the stress and anxiety workers are feeling.
“I am grateful that the two sides have come together to reach an agreement that benefits all parties involved, and can put a major piece of California’s economy back to work.”
In a show of solidarity, fellow union the Teamsters congratulated the WGA on their win.
“Teamsters congratulate WGA East and WGA West writers on their militancy and unwavering solidarity, winning a tentative agreement after almost five months on strike! The WGA strike has inspired workers everywhere to stand up against corporate greed and anti-worker technology. #1u,” the group wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.
The actor Mark Ruffalo also wrote on X: “Bravo! WGA proves when we fight we win. #Unionize. Congratulations.”
Bravo! WGA proves when we fight we win. #Unionize. Congratulations @WGAWest @WGAEast. #WGAStrike https://t.co/faBlQrPDeZ
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) September 25, 2023
Mindy Kaling, an actor, and writer and producer of several projects including The Office and The Mindy Project, also joined the picket line. Upon the announcement of the tentative deal, she posted on Instagram: “TENTATIVE AGREEMENT B******! CAN’T WAIT TO GO BACK TO WORK AND SEE MY PEOPLE!!!”
Referencing her old show, she quoted Michael Scott, who said: “I love my employees even though I hit one of you with my car.”
Talkshows were suspended during the strike, including Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Together, hosts from these shows collaborated on a limited series podcast called Strike Force Five, with all proceeds benefiting their out-of-work staff. Now that an agreement has been reached, the shows are expected to resume as early as October.
Plans for The Drew Barrymore Show to resume in the midst of the strike drew ire from the WGA and its supporters, but now that the strike is over, the show is also likely to resume production soon.
Representatives from the show did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Fellow strikers from Sag-Aftra, the largest labor union representing performers and broadcasters, congratulated their colleagues on their win, but expressed hope for their own deal with the AMPTP soon.
In a statement on X, Sag-Aftra said: “To our fellow union siblings who serve on the WGA negotiating committee, we extend our heartfelt congratulations on securing a tentative agreement with the AMPTP. We applaud your dedication, diligence and unwavering solidarity over the last five months and are proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with you as creative partners in the entertainment industry.
“We look forward to reviewing the terms of the WGA and AMPTP’s tentative agreement. And we remain ready to resume our own negotiations with the AMPTP as soon as they are prepared to engage on our proposals in a meaningful way.
“Until then, we continue to stand strong and unified. In solidarity, the Sag-Aftra TV/theatrical/streaming negotiating committee #SagAftraStrong.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/jun/12/filmweeklymeetsaudreytatou | Film | 2008-06-12T10:30:00.000Z | Jason Solomons | Film Weekly meets Audrey Tautou and the Midnight Kissers | It's a romantic week for us here at Film Weekly. Having embodied the wide-eyed, fairytale French fantasy in Amelie, actress Audrey Tautou has embarked on several roles trying to shed that wholesome image.
Her latest film is Priceless, in which she plays a gold-digging, high-class tart with a dubious heart, looking to snare herself a sugar daddy in the shallow world of Cote d'Azur millionaires.
We talk about slipping into haute couture, the economics of modern romance and the high stakes of being an international actress.
While Audrey's looking for love and money in Cannes, Monte Carlo and Nice, there's a similar, though less money-grabbing, spirit in that most unromantic and most money-mad of cities, Los Angeles. In Search of a Midnight Kiss is one of the most likeable US indies in ages, a smart-talking, vulgar yet tender love story shot in ravishing monochrome and set in that oft-overlooked world of downtown LA, where crumbling vaudeville theatres and old banks have been populated by pigeons and the homeless for way too long.
Alex Holdridge's film recalls Manhattan, Annie Hall and the long lost days of early Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and even Kevin Smith's Clerks. Alex and his leading lady Sarah Simmonds join me to discuss filming on a shoestring and it's heartening to hear of their troubled journey to the big screen and that, despite rumours of its death, the indie scene is still ticking along in Austin, Texas. What were the best indies of all time? Let me know on the blog.
Also this week, I'm joined by Guardian style guru Hannah Pool to discuss the hit of season so far: Sex and the City. Yes, I know it's been out for a couple of weeks already, but it's been a sensation at the box office, out-doing even Indiana Jones, and what with the secret screening policy and our David Lean special last week, we hadn't got round to reviewing it yet. Find out if it appealed to Hannah and me, and hear my thoughts on The Incredible Hulk and M Night Shyamalan's latest, The Happening, by listening to Film Weekly.
Listen to this week's edition of Film Weekly. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/08/edinburgh-film-festival-to-return-this-summer-after-shock-closure | Film | 2023-03-08T13:33:10.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Edinburgh film festival to return this summer after shock closure | The Edinburgh international film festival is to return later this year in a scaled-down form after the shock announcement of its closure in October 2022 when Centre for the Moving Image, operator of both the festival and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema chain, went into administration.
The festival announced that it had joined with the Edinburgh international festival, the large-scale summer event renowned for its theatre, comedy and musical performances, to present a “compact selection of films” in “a hand-picked programme” designed to “celebrate the work of exceptional local and global film-makers”.
The festival will benefit from a £400,000 grant from Screen Scotland, and has installed a new programme director, Kate Taylor, who previously acted as senior programmer at the London film festival. Screen Scotland is also looking to solidify the festival’s future, saying it will work with a group of industry experts to create a standalone yearly event from 2024 onwards.
The announcement came at the same time as the British Film Institute said it had appointed Kristy Matheson, Edinburgh’s creative director for its 2022 edition, to the post of festivals director, which includes overseeing the high profile London film festival.
Taylor is due to announce details of Edinburgh’s programme in June 2023, while the event has returned to its traditional August slot to run alongside the rest of the city’s summer festival events, having moved to June in 2008.
Meanwhile, the future of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema remains unclear, after it was revealed in December that bids from cinema operators to buy the venue were rejected. Gregory Lynn, owner of the Prince Charles cinema in London, said his offer was beaten by one that “blew everyone else out of the water”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/mar/25/should-i-give-isa-caller-the-cold-shoulder | Money | 2013-03-25T07:00:00.000Z | Tony Levene | Should I give Isa caller the cold shoulder? | I have been called by someone called Andrew White, working for De Vere Group. He said this was part of the hotel chain and also "Europe's largest financial research house". He wanted me to take out a cash Isa for my full £5,640 allowance. He said his firm "scoured the market for the best rate" and it would be one I could not match on the high street. On his first call he recommended an Isa from Barclays Bank, but on the second – a week later – it was from HSBC.
Eventually, he proposed a one-year fixed rate Isa at 4.85%. But when the Isa paperwork was emailed to me the bank had changed to JP Morgan Chase. Am I right to be suspicious? PD, Birmingham
White has nothing to do with either De Vere Hotels or a second De Vere, which specialises in financial advice for expatriates.
The rate offered is ludicrous. The best we can find on Moneyfacts is 2.25% at MetroBank, or 2.05% at Nationwide. HSBC, in common with other banks, does not use intermediaries to sell cash Isas.
You were told that the rate is high because there is a "£40m allocation and it's bulk buying". That's also nonsense.
The form he forwarded is made up. JP Morgan Chase is a US bank with little UK involvement. JP Morgan only sells stocks and shares Isas, not cash Isas. All genuine Isa applications demand a national insurance number – missing on this form. The legal conditions are a meaningless collection of phrases cut and pasted from legitimate sites.
You were given what claimed to be a Co-op bank sort code to send your money – but the code does not belong to the Co-op. And the account name Investeco looks like an clumsy amalgam of UK investment house Invesco and South African controlled bank and investment group Investec.
If you had sent your £5,640, you would never have seen it again. We confronted White, but he told us not to waste his time before putting down the phone.
What's going on here is something called "cloning" — using details from legitimate companies, in this case name, address and website, to lever cash out of unsuspecting investors. The FSA had nearly 150 complaints of this practice in the second half of 2012 alone. It warns investors against responding to any cold calls.
This week's column is guest-written by Tony Levene.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at [email protected] or write to Bachelor & Brignall, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/apr/15/wing-half-full-back-trent-alexander-arnold-liverpool | Football | 2023-04-15T19:00:49.000Z | Jonathan Wilson | Maybe it’s time to welcome back the old fashioned wing-half – in modern guise | Jonathan Wilson | One of the easiest and most misleading pieces of footballing received wisdom is that everything is cyclical. Wait long enough, the great drum of history will revolve again and the same ideas will come back round, be that sharp side-partings, the back three, Howard Webb apologising to Brighton or Roy Hodgson managing Crystal Palace. Except time is not a flat circle. Each iteration is different because it comes with knowledge of what went before.
Watch Manchester City in possession. They have a centre-forward and two wide men. They have Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva or Ilkay Gündogan as “free 8s”, essentially old-fashioned inside-forwards. They like to have five outfielders behind the ball, who will usually form a trapezoid shape: a line of three defenders and two deep-lying midfielders. Show that to Herbert Chapman and, while he may think City could be a little more direct, he would understand what he was seeing. This is essentially a W-M.
But this is not Pep Guardiola simply appropriating a formation from almost a century ago. A lot has happened since, not least the coming of zonal marking, so the game is no longer the series of individual battles it was in Chapman’s day. Indeed, it’s entirely likely Guardiola is yet to form strong opinions on Arsenal’s title-winners of 1930-31 (although you suspect that in the key dispute of the age he would go against Chapman and favour the ball-playing qualities of Jack Butler at centre-half over the gangling stopper Herbie Roberts). Rather it’s that the trapezoid shape has proved over time extremely effective at preventing counterattacks.
Is De Zerbi shifting football’s tactics with possession tightrope at Brighton?
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That’s why the 3-4-2-1 had its brief vogue, most notably as Chelsea won the league under Antonio Conte in 2016-17. But the problem with that shape, as has subsequently been seen at Chelsea and Tottenham, is that while it may be solid, it is very dependent on the wing-backs to provide width and on the individual inspiration of the two creators playing off the striker. It can become predictable.
If you want to be flexible, then, how can you create that three-two anti-counter trapezium? Often teams playing a back four would allow both full-backs to advance, with a holding midfielder dropping in between the centre-backs to create the line of three. Or one full-back would go forward with the other tucking in alongside the two central defenders.
That was how it worked for Guardiola at Barcelona, when Dani Alves would habitually charge forward supporting David Villa on the outside, with Sergio Busquets slipping between the central defenders or Eric Abidal shuffling across. At Bayern, though, blessed with a player as tactically accomplished as Philipp Lahm, Guardiola began experimenting with having one of the full-backs advancing into a deep-lying midfield role, rather than providing attacking width.
At Bayern Munich, full-back Philipp Lahm was so technically accomplished that Pep Guardiola was able to experiment by sending him into a deep-lying midfield role, rather than providing attacking width. Photograph: Kerstin Joensson/AP
At City, Guardiola has sometimes had two attacking full-backs who would overlap – Bacary Sagna or Jesús Navas and Gaël Clichy or Aleksandar Kolarov in his first season, for instance – but he has also tried the Lahm protocol, occasionally with Fabian Delph, most successfully with João Cancelo, most implausibly with Bernardo Silva, and most recently with John Stones – even if, in Tuesday’s win against Bayern Munich, Stones was stepping up from a central position, with Manuel Akanji and Nathan Aké almost as old-school, orthodox defensive full-backs; it may be that the solidity of Aké is one of the factors in Jack Grealish’s run of form, that he no longer has Cancelo inside him, impinging on the space he would naturally like to attack.
For three decades full-backs have been at the forefront of tactical development. As they have become increasingly attacking, so wingers have increasingly cut infield, which in turn made possible the rise of the false 9. Guardiola, so far, is unusual in his use of the full-back as an auxiliary wing-half, but it may be that this is the logical next step in the general development of the full-back.
There is, perhaps, a gradual turn against the modish idea that full-back is an essentially attacking position. For full-backs to operate as high as, say, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson have for Liverpool, demands the press be all but perfect. If it is not, as in 2020-21 and again this season, opponents can exploit the space behind the full-back. When Mauricio Pochettino was at Tottenham, he in effect had four wing-backs on rotation because of the physical demands on them covering the length of the pitch; having them shuffle into midfield at least part of the time may be a way of mitigating the strain.
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There has long been an argument that Alexander-Arnold would be better deployed as a midfielder rather than as a right-back, initially on the slightly spurious grounds that it would involve him in the game more (a line of thought that seems to underestimate just how important the full-back position is in modern football), and more recently because, as Liverpool’s press has faltered, Alexander-Arnold’s defensive shortcomings have been exposed.
How plausible the idea of Alexander-Arnold as a hybrid full-back/wing-half is remains debatable. Appealing as the prospect of him dictating the play from deep may be, it would if anything place more demands on the defensive side of his game, while reducing his crossing opportunities and limiting his interactions with Mohamed Salah, which were such a key part of Liverpool’s play last season, his overlaps encouraging Salah’s darts infield.
But then if Liverpool’s press improves again, those defensive issues may recede and it’s just about possible to imagine a future in which Alexander-Arnold can be both an overlapping full-back and a full-back/wing-half. Given that Jordan Henderson will be 33 in June, it may be too late, but the Liverpool captain, a very good crosser of the ball, would seem to have the ideal game to interlock with an Alexander-Arnold who sometimes bombs on and sometimes tucks in.
The issue, though, goes beyond specifics. For 60 years full-backs have been become increasingly attacking, to the point that almost every full-back is in effect a wing-back. The question was always what came next: how would full-backs evolve when there was no more attacking to be done. This, perhaps, is the answer: by helping to recreate a shape in possession that is itself almost a century old. The spiral of history revolves again. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/06/will-we-ever-talk-machines-artificial-intelligence-natural-language-stephen-wolfram | Opinion | 2016-03-06T09:00:30.000Z | John Naughton | Will we ever really talk with the machines? | Like many people nowadays, I do not talk on my iPhone as much as talk to it. That’s because it runs a program called Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) that works as an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator. It’s useful, in a way. If I ask it for “weather in London today”, it’ll present an hour-by-hour weather forecast. Tell it to “phone home” and it’ll make a decent effort to find the relevant number. Ask it to “text James” and it will come back with: “What do you want to say to James?” Not exactly Socratic dialogue, but it has its uses.
Ask Siri: “What’s the meaning of life?”, however, and it loses its nerve. “Life,” it replies, “is a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings. I guess that includes me.” Ten points for that last sentence. But the question: “What should I do with my life?” really stumps it. “Interesting question” is all it can do, which suggests that we haven’t really moved much beyond Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza program, which was created in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory between 1964 and 1966. Eliza in fact operated by using a script called Doctor, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Thus, if asked: “What should I do with my life?”, it might respond: “Have you asked such questions before?” And so on ad infinitum.
Often what really matters to us humans is stuff that we have difficulty articulating
Eliza, of course, had no intelligence, artificial or otherwise. That didn’t prevent some people from allegedly becoming addicted to her, but it meant that she posed no existential threat to humanity. The same cannot be said for contemporary manifestations of AI, as represented by the combination of massive processing power, big data, machine learning, advanced robotics and neural networks. Some latterday luminaries – Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, to name just three – have taken to worrying about the prospect of superintelligent machines that might, so to speak, have minds of their own – and could therefore regard humans as disposable life forms.
Given global warming, the planet may well have reached the same conclusion about humans some time before superintelligent machines walk the Earth and so existential worries may turn out to be moot. But let’s suppose that we survive long enough to develop such machines. How will we communicate with them?
Easy, peasy, say the AI evangelists: we’ll just use natural language, ie we’ll talk to them just like we talk to one another. At this point, a whirring noise can be heard: it’s Ludwig Wittgenstein rotating at 5,000rpm in his grave. “What can be said at all can be said clearly,” he wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” And therein lies the problem. Because often what really matters to us humans is stuff that we have difficulty articulating.
Illustration by Matt Murphy.
What’s brought this to mind is an extraordinary interview with Stephen Wolfram that’s just appeared on John Brockman’s Edge.org site. The term “genius” is often overused, but I think it’s merited in Wolfram’s case. Those of us who bear the scars from school and university years spent wrestling with advanced maths are forever in his debt, because he invented Mathematica, a computer program that takes much of the pain out of solving equations, graphing complex functions and other arcane tasks. But he’s also worked in computer science and mathematical physics and is the founder of the WolframAlpha “computational knowledge engine”, which is one of the wonders of the online world.
As befits someone who has built such powerful tools for augmenting human capabilities, Wolfram doesn’t seem too concerned about the threat of superintelligent machines. They may be able to do all kinds of things that humans cannot, he thinks, but there is one area where we are unquestionably unique – we have notions of purposes and goals. What machines do is to help us achieve those goals and “that’s what we can increasingly automate. We’ve been automating it for thousands of years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals. I’ve spent some significant part of my life building technology to essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets done in the world.”
So as machines become more intelligent, and our requirements of them become more demanding, how will we communicate our desires to them? Wolfram’s conclusion is that “it’s a mixture. Human natural language is good up to a point and has evolved to describe what we typically encounter in the world. Things that exist from nature, things that we’ve chosen to build in the world – these are things which human natural language has evolved to describe. But there’s a lot that exists out there in the world for which human natural language doesn’t have descriptions yet.” He’s right. Come back Ludwig, all is forgiven. How is it that you can never find a philosopher when you need one? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/laurie-anderson-brighton-festival-50th | Music | 2016-01-07T00:01:03.000Z | Mark Brown | Laurie Anderson to direct 2016 Brighton festival | Laurie Anderson is to be guest director in what will be the 50th year of Brighton festival.
The pioneering and eclectic American artist, who became known to audiences outside the art world in 1981 with her hit single O Superman, will show new works for the festival which will this year have a theme of “home”.
Anderson appeared at the festival in 2011 with Delusion and last year with a performance called All the Animals. Known for many works spanning art, theatre and performance, she last year made her first feature-length film Heart of a Dog which reflected on the deaths of those close to her including her husband, Lou Reed.
Laurie Anderson interview: ‘I shared a cinema with 500 rats who lived behind the screen’
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On Monday she staged a late-night concert for dogs in New York’s freezing Times Square.
In a statement Anderson said: “I’m so happy to be serving as guest director of Brighton festival in its historic 50th year. Our theme of home and place is especially relevant with so many people in the world on the move now looking, like all of us, for a place we can belong. I’ve been part of the festival several times and it was exciting to watch the city become the heart of so much art. I’m looking forward to being part of it this year.”
Andrew Comben, the festival’s chief executive, said he was thrilled and honoured to announce Anderson. He said: “In our 50th year, it feels right to reflect on the original intentions of the festival which from the start were about celebrating international culture, the new and the avant garde. Laurie Anderson has been experimenting, creating and challenging audiences all over the world for almost as long as Brighton festival has existed – indeed, she’s been a part of the festival’s journey in past years with some very special commissions and appearances in the city.
“She continues to break new ground in her own work and through collaborations with some of the most promising artists of the future, and we are looking forward to celebrating all this in what we hope will be a very special 50th Brighton festival in May.”
Anderson is the eighth guest director of the festival, a practice which started with Anish Kapoor in 2009 up to novelist Ali Smith last year.
The full festival programme will be announced on 17 February but other details have also been revealed, including a partnership with Guardian Live in the books and debates series of events.
Among the programmed performances will be a new full-length production from choreographer Akram Khan entitled Until the Lions; the 74 onstage deaths in the works of Shakespeare performed by Spymonkey and directed by Tim Crouch; a new work about the Falklands conflict by Argentinian artist Lola Arias; and a work by Neil Bartlett called Stella, inspired by the life of a Victorian cross-dresser called Ernest Boulton.
Brighton festival runs 7-29 May. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/03/hbos-stress-tests-inadequate | Business | 2012-12-03T18:13:00.000Z | Jill Treanor | Former HBOS chief says sorry for his role in near collapse | Sir James Crosby, the former chief executive of HBOS, was forced to admit the bank's lending in the runup to the financial crisis was "incompetent", as a top Bank of England official warned that the fallout from that crisis was as bad for the economy as a world war.
Crosby also apologised for his role at HBOS, acknowledging the damage to his reputation and admitting he did not expect to be allowed ever to run a bank again, as he gave evidence to the parliamentary banking standards committee.
He was addressing MPs and peers as Andy Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, said of the banking crisis: "In terms of the loss of incomes and outputs, this is as bad as a world war."
Haldane told the BBC: "If we are fortunate the cost of the crisis will be paid for by our children. More likely it will still be paid for by our grandchildren."
Crosby said he had not handed back any of his £572,000 a year pension as he had lost money after the bank's collapse even though he sold two thirds of his shares before the bank nearly collapsed.
Crosby said he was "horrified and deeply upset by what happened" in 2008, when Lloyds was forced to rescue HBOS and the enlarged bank had to be bailed out with £20bn of taxpayers' cash.
Crosby, who handed the helm to Andy Hornby in June 2006, said: "I am very sorry for what happened at the bank. I am apologising. I played a major part in building a business that subsequently failed."
Under repeated questioning by Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, Crosby conceded that lending by the corporate arm of HBOS – which led to losses of £26bn – had been "incompetent" and caused the bank's near collapse. In often heated exchanges with MPs and peers, Crosby was asked if he had considered giving back his knighthood, awarded when he left the bank. Fred Goodwin, the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, was stripped of his title this year.
Crosby said he was "completely realistic" about the effect on his reputation. "I am in no doubt my reputation and achievements will never again be seen in the same light."
Asked if he expected to be approved by the Financial Services Authority to run a bank again, Crosby said: "I don't expect that if I applied I would be approved, no, given my history."
Asking questions for the committee, Rory Phillips QC told Crosby he was being questioned because "the seeds for what went wrong" were the result of plans and strategy he devised before his departure.
Crosby insisted he had not sacked Paul Moore, the whistleblower who warned about risks being taken by the bank. He said Moore had not been made redundant because of any challenges he had made to the bank's practices and had only raised the concerns once he had been made redundant.
Crosby could not recall going "ballistic" when told by Hornby, then running the retail bank, about concerns being raised by the FSA about the bank's lending.
Hornby, who was chief executive until Lloyds completed its rescue takeover in early 2009, said: "I bitterly regret that we did not foresee the possibility of wholesale markets closing for a whole year."
Peter Cummings, the HBOS corporate banker whose division lent billions of pounds to property developers – and whose activities Crosby admitted yesterday were "incompetent" – was given a lifetime ban and fined £500,000 by the watchdog for his role in the banking crisis. He is the only former HBOS banker to be penalised by the FSA as a result of the bank's near collapse.
Hornby admitted to his own lack of experience in corporate banking and said he had put experienced bankers at the helm of corporate and banking divisions of HBOS, which was formed in 2001 by the merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/mar/11/well-be-back-stay-tuned-kermode-and-mayos-bbc-radio-5-live-film-show-to-end-after-21-years | Television & radio | 2022-03-11T16:17:17.000Z | Laura Snapes | ‘We’ll be back … stay tuned’: Kermode and Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 Live film show to end after 21 years | Regular listeners to the BBC Radio 5 Live film show must bid tinkety tonk old fruits to presenters Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, who have announced that the show will come to an end after 21 years on air.
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The church of Wittertainment will hold its final service – before setting off into the sunset on one of its fabled cruises – on 1 April.
Mayo announced the news at the beginning of Friday’s live show. “Twenty-one years is a long time to be clogging up the schedules and we have decided – and to be clear, no one else has decided – to … step away, to withdraw, to spread our wings, to exit pursued by a bear. We are way too expensive and there are much better things for the BBC to be spending their money on.”
Mayo stated that the 1 April edition would be “our last show on 5 Live”, and Kermode tweeted a photo of Spinal Tap captioned, “But like Tap, we’ll be back … stay tuned”, hinting at the possibility that the pair’s cinematic double act might find a new home elsewhere.
The news marks Mayo’s conclusive departure from the BBC after he left the Radio 2 Drivetime show in October 2018 – following a controversial pairing with Jo Whiley – first moving to Scala Radio and later Greatest Hits Radio. Kermode hosts the weekly television Film Review on the BBC News channel and will continue to present Screenshot alongside Ellen E Jones on BBC Radio 4. They are the latest high-profile talent to depart the BBC for the commercial sector: Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel have joined Global for a new show, and footballer Peter Crouch is taking his podcast to Acast.
Station controller Heidi Dawson said: “Mark and Simon’s unique partnership has been an important part of BBC Radio 5 Live for 21 years. Their decision to end the programme is a sad moment; they will be much missed by our listeners and everyone at the station.”
Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review began life as a segment on Mayo’s 5 Live radio show in 2001 and later a podcast in 2005. It became a fully fledged two-hour show in 2010. In 2014, it was the BBC’s second most-downloaded podcast, although it did not appear in the broadcaster’s top 10 programmes last year – now facing much stiffer competition from the broadcaster’s renewed focus on podcasts and BBC Sounds – or Baby Sea Clowns, as a withering Mayo would put it.
The format of the show includes a digressive countdown of the UK’s Top 10 films – often starting with a low-charting outlier that previously received praise from Kermode – an interview with a film star or director, usually conducted by Mayo, in-depth reviews of the week’s new films, and much interaction with listeners.
The oft-bickering duo also consider the TV movie of the week, as well the “so bad it’s bad” TV movie of the week, and assess new DVD releases – a feature that had ostensibly been limping to its end as physical media dies out.
A Wittertainment classic: Mark Kermode reviews Sex and the City 2 – video
Over its duration, the show has established a vast amount of in-jokes and lore with its listeners – rather, members of the church – who may identify as STLs (short-term listeners), MTLs (medium-term) or LTLs (long-term), depending on the length of their relationship with the show.
They might write in to say hello to actor Jason Isaacs, a friend of the show; to confess to the tiny cinematic hill they wish to die on; or to report violations of the show’s Code of Conduct for cinemas, which includes “no eating anything harder than a soft roll” and “no irresponsible parenting” – and certainly no eating a full Mexican meal, as once witnessed by a scarred Mayo.
The show has also kept track of listeners’ births, deaths and marriages, testament to the personal relationship that many have cultivated with it. That bond was strengthened during the UK’s lockdowns. Despite cinemas being closed, the show continued on a weekly basis with Kermode and Mayo broadcasting from their respective homes – the former usually doing battle with a noisy boiler – and reviewing digital releases and coining new forms of merriment to make up for the lack of new material to cover.
Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode: the best double act in the movies?
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While film-makers such as Michael Bay and those behind the movie adaptations of Entourage and Sex and the City may breathe a sigh of relief at the acerbic pair’s departure from the BBC, online, the tributes were manifest – and unredacted by the show’s producer, usually merciless with scrubbing praise from the end of listeners’ emails.
Live on Friday’s show, Kermode followed Mayo’s announcement with the invocation of a line familiar to Wittertainees (and Tom Hanks): “Just to add, as we’ve always said, it’ll all be alright in the end – and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/15/awaab-ishak-death-rochdale-housing-chair-to-quit-after-damning-report | Society | 2022-12-15T14:14:16.000Z | Robert Booth | Awaab Ishak death: Rochdale housing chair to quit after damning report | The chair of a social housing landlord is to quit after an investigation found it left hundreds of tenants exposed to harmful damp for nearly two years following the death of an infant from respiratory failure in one of its mould-infested homes.
Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) waited nearly two years after Awaab Ishak died to check other homes on the estate, the regulator of social housing concluded on Thursday. When it did, it found hundreds of tenants living with damp and mould.
Minutes after the announcement of the “unacceptable” conduct came news that the chair of the landlord, Alison Tumilty, will quit and be replaced next year. The move follows increasing pressure from Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, and comes three weeks after Awaab’s parents called for the board to go, describing them as a “danger” to residents.
RBH’s chief executive, Gareth Swarbrick, was initially backed by the board but was sacked following a public outcry when the landlord blamed the mould on “lifestyle issues”.
New figures show 3.4m homes in England failed to meet the “decent homes standard” in 2021 and 4% of social rented dwellings – about 164,000 – were affected by damp. The problem is worse in private rented homes, where more than 10% have damp – 473,000 homes, according to the government’s English Housing Survey 2021-22 – and 23% failed to meet the decent homes standard.
When RBH did eventually check the estate after Awaab’s death, it found hundreds of tenants were living with damp and mould causing “harm”. Almost 80% of tenants in the complex where Awaab lived who had had their properties surveyed since this summer had signs of damp and mould of which RBH was not previously aware.
A coroner concluded last month that Awaab died as a result of prolonged exposure to mould in his family’s flat in Rochdale.
Fiona MacGregor, the chief executive of the Regulator of Social Housing, said its investigation revealed “significant failures in the way RBH manages damp and mould in its homes, resulting in harm to tenants”.
“The tragic death of Awaab Ishak should have led to action to establish wider risks, but RBH failed to respond quickly or effectively,” she said. “This is unacceptable. RBH needs to address the issues we have found and we will take further action if it fails to do so.
“Our judgment sends a clear message to social landlords that they must deal with damp and mould as the serious hazards that they are, treat tenants with respect, and take their concerns seriously.”
Gove said he would continue to withhold £1m in government funding from RBH and said he was planning to legislate “to deliver urgent action when people complain about damp and mould”.
“This isn’t just an issue in Rochdale,” he said. “It is clear from today’s English Housing Survey there are very serious issues with the quality of homes in this country.”
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He said to landlords: “Get a grip of your homes and make improvements now.”
“We must honour Awaab’s memory, so I am looking at new measures – including legislation – that will go further to deliver urgent action when people complain about damp and mould, and make sure the rights of tenants are respected. There is consensus across the country that landlords must do better. Let RBH be a warning: I will use every power at my disposal to make sure people have good quality homes and are treated with dignity and respect.”
RBH repeated its apology for failing “Awaab, his family and the community we serve” and said it accepted the regulator’s judgment. A spokesperson said its new “damp and mould taskforce” had accelerated remedial work and a £1.2m programme was under way to improve ventilation on the estate where Awaab lived.
They said: “There are hard lessons to learn: process must never get in the way of people; tenant voice must always be valued; maintenance and property renewal should be prioritised; tenant safety must always be the first and foremost consideration.”
This article was amended on 15 December 2022. Due to incorrect information provided by Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, an earlier version stated in the text and headline that all RBH board members were to step down, not just its chair. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/dec/07/payday-lenders-loans-cost | Money | 2011-12-07T14:37:43.000Z | Jill Insley | Payday lenders charge up to 60 times more than true cost of loan | The true cost of lending to short-term borrowers is less than 2% of the amount charged by Wonga, the most expensive and highest profile payday lender.
My Home Finance, a not-for-profit organisation set up by the government and the National Housing Federation in 2010, charges a representative APR of 69.9%, just 1.66% of the 4,214% APR charged by online lender Wonga.
Figures provided by the firms' own websites show that it would be cheaper to borrow £300 from My Home Finance for a whole year, than from Wonga for a month.
The contrast in charges is all the more shocking following the revelation by insolvency trade body R3 that up to 3.5 million people are considering taking out a payday loan over the next six months.
Payday loans – the lenders generally prefer to refer to them as short-term or microloans – are designed to tide borrowers over until their next pay cheque. The money is usually provided very quickly – Wonga boasts that it can pay cash into your account within 15 minutes of a loan being approved – and paid back within a month or two.
Ferratum, which describes itself as Europe's biggest online payday loan lender and charges a representative APR of 3,113%, claims that more than 2 million people have already applied for payday loans in Britain, and that they will be in greater demand than ever this Christmas to pay for last-minute gifts and food.
Ian Porter, the company's UK sales and marketing manager, said: "We are already seeing a significant increase in applications for our microloans and we still have three weeks to go until Christmas Day."
However, payday lenders have been widely criticised for the size of their charges and in some cases, for making irresponsible lending decisions and using dubious techniques to market their products. Debt counselling charities have advised many payday loan customers who find themselves trapped in a cycle of rolling over loans from one month to the next, with enormous interest charges being added on every time .
The R3 research also showed that of the people questioned who had taken out a payday loan in the past, 60% regretted the decision and 48% believed the loan had made their financial situation worse. Only 13% thought the loan had improved their finances.
The government is conducting research into what controls should be exerted over short-term lenders, which is expected to run far into next year. This follows a review of high-cost lending by the Office of Fair Trading, which cast doubt over the idea of introducing price controls, for fear they reduce supply of credit to those who are most desperate.
Bristol University's Personal Finance Research Centre (PFRC) has been appointed to carry out research into the impact of introducing a variable cap on the total cost of high-cost credit.
The government has also started negotiations with the short term lending industry to introduce improved consumer protection in codes of practice for payday lenders and other instant credit providers. In addition, the government is working to improve access to credit unions which can provide a real alternative to high cost credit.
Sara Brooks, director of financial services at Consumer Focus, said: "'These are hard times and in the run up to Christmas, many will be tempted by a payday loan despite APRs of over 1,000%. Considering this is now a billion pound industry, regulation in this area is not strong enough and much more needs to be done to prevent consumers getting caught in spiralling debt.
"[The R3] survey highlights large numbers of consumers who only ever pay off interest without touching the capital borrowed – this is a very alarming situation.
"This industry has been given plenty of opportunity to reform but has not has not made the changes needed to protect consumers from debt traps. We are also concerned about the marketing, sales and debt collection practices of some payday loan companies. There is evidence of a number of lenders flouting the rules and our worry would be for vulnerable consumers who suffer as a result.
"We would like to see sensible safeguards put in place to stop payday loan users from getting caught in debt traps. Key to this is limiting the number of loans, or roll-overs, that borrowers can take out in a year to five. We are also calling on banks to do more to provide short-term loans to cash-strapped consumers and be much more transparent about their overdraft fees and charges."
The government-backed My Home Finance was introduced to provide an affordable and fair alternative for borrowers who would normally be forced to borrow from doorstep and payday lenders. The scheme is still at the pilot stage, with just 10 branches in the Midlands, but the organisation hopes to extend to the north-east and north-west by the end of 2012.
Its lending practices are exactly those that consumer bodies would like to see commercial payday lenders adopt: it operates through accessible branches, lends to people on benefits and interviews all potential customers – either by phone or face-to-face – to make sure they can afford repayment on the loans they are asking for.
Repayment of loans, the average size of which is £360, is spread over a year, which Tess Pendle, head of the organisation, says is more manageable and affordable for borrowers. "If they take out a loan for just one month, as with payday lenders, they find that the repayment coming out of their bank account at the end of the month leaves them with very little to live on," she says. "They then have to borrow again, and that is what leads to the cycle of rolling over loans from one month to the next, resulting in huge interest charges."
My Home Finance loans are not subsidised, and a borrower would pay £7.09 a week for 52 weeks to repay £300, producing a total repayment of £383.68 over the year including interest of £68.68 and an administration charge of £15. The same borrower taking out £300 from Wonga for just 31 days would repay a total of £398.91.
Pendle adds: "Wonga has the advantage of being able to do internet-based and automated lending, which should be a cheaper method of lending, and therefore a far cheaper way of accessing credit for clients."
John Moorwood, communications director for Wonga, defends the higher charges, saying the products are targeted at different audiences and provided in very different ways. Wonga loans are granted or refused within seconds and the money paid into accounts within 15 minutes if the loan is approved. The company targets people who are employed with a regular income, although it admits that some people on benefits do slip through the net.
Moorwood says the real problems for most people struggling with debt have been caused by authorised and unauthorised overdrafts and credit card debts, which can add up to more than £30,000 for the typical person seeking help from Citizens Advice.
The Consumer Finance Association, a trade body for the payday lending industry, has calculated that an unauthorised overdraft of £200 with the Halifax, incurring daily charges of £5, would cost a total of £350 to pay off after 30 days, resulting in an APR of 90,888.9%
However, Citizens Advice said this is all the more reason for better regulation of the payday loan industry. Gillian Guy, chief executive at Citizens Advice, said: "As the payday loan industry grows, we have seen a four-fold increase in the number of people with payday loans coming to us for debt advice in the first quarter of this year, compared with the same period two years ago.
"We are concerned that some of the people we are seeing seem to be using payday loans to deal with existing financial difficulties. 40% of people we see with payday loan debt have another high-cost credit loan and on average, CAB clients with payday loan debts had eight debts, while those without payday loans had five. Our evidence therefore suggests a pattern of people in long-term financial difficulty with other debts, who are much more likely to take out a payday loan to try and deal with these problems.
"And yet, the payday industry remains inadequately regulated. We have seen financially vulnerable consumers unprotected from a variety of unfair practices carried out by payday lenders. Some have been able to take out unaffordable and unsuitable loans, see their debts balloon, and are offered multiple rollovers. When they are unable to pay, many are then subject to aggressive collection practices." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2017/mar/14/jamie-vardy-doggedness-drives-leicester-past-sevilla | Football | 2017-03-14T23:28:52.000Z | Barney Ronay | Nasty Jamie Vardy and meaty Wes Morgan feed Sevilla to the dogs | Barney Ronay | Towards the end of a relentless, slightly hysterical night at the King Power Stadium Jamie Vardy could be seen punching himself repeatedly in the face. It seemed in the moment absolutely fine; all things considered entirely the right thing to do. He had just scampered 40 yards in pursuit of Riyad Mahrez before whumping his cutback miles over the bar with the goal gaping.
Leicester were leading 2-0 at the time. A cool finish would have killed the tie. This was instead a crazed, dementedly adrenal finish. But still the only kind of finish Vardy was ever likely to produce on a night when his manic energy was the driving force behind the most significant stand-alone victory in Leicester City’s history.
Leicester stun Sevilla to reach last eight after Kasper Schmeichel save
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Here’s a good stat. Vardy completed seven passes against Sevilla. It is a wonderful example of how a player’s impact can slip through the gaps between the numbers. In reality Vardy was a smothering, driving influence, harrying and snapping right across the Sevilla defensive line and at times in the first half dragging his team-mates forward from a standing start.
He was also awful. And nasty. And clever. Vardy didn’t score. He hardly found a team-mate, formed any coherent patterns, or did much that looked like what many people consider to be football. But Sevilla will have hated him by the end.
Samir Nasri had played with aristocratic assurance in the opening hour. He looked a likely candidate to finally break the Leicester defence with a pass or a jink as for a while after half-time the visitors pushed Leicester back almost to their own goalline.
At which point, enter Vardy again. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t nice. It was, though, very funny in its own way, a moment where Vardy baited the hook, felt a tug on his line and then simply reeled his man in like a startled salmon.
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Leicester City aiming for more Champions League surprises, says Craig Shakespeare – video
Nasri had already been booked when he found himself drawn expertly into a forehead rutting exchange on the edge of the Leicester box. Nasri shoved just a little too hard, Vardy feigned shock and tumbled backwards. Both men were rightly booked, Nasri with an extra red. He looked not so much distraught as embarrassed as he was dragged from the pitch, soon to be followed by Jorge Sampaoli, the Copa América champ, a Barcelona target, disciple of the great Marcelo Bielsa, who here came off second best in perhaps the most mismatched managerial duel in the history of this competition.
Not that Craig Shakespeare really had to do much at the King Power. Before kick-off this open, untiered agreeably boisterous stadium was already crackling with the familiar unbound excitement of these midweek adventures. “Let slip the dogs of war,” was the message on a genuinely unnerving Leicester banner unfurled across one end, the words framing a huge cartoon figure of Shakespeare restraining a vicious attack dog.
It seemed unduly vicious but then in his brief time in charge Shakespeare has tended to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous ham antiquation, with baffled hacks across the globe reaching for their Shakespeare Wiki-quote page to find some ill-fitting “Shakespeherian rag” from a play they’ve never read to encapsulate better his fascinating rise.
Talking of which … For the opening half-hour, just when his team needed it, Vardy was a rabidly hungry forward-hound – not perhaps one of your romping bouffant Crufts types, but a scrabbling little scoundrel of a mutt, pressing at full speed, dragging his team along behind him and drawing gusts of warm rumbling approval from the home fans.
That banner. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA
Vardy it was who won the foul that led to Leicester’s opening goal, a veering run capped with what is now a trademark move: the slightly heavy touch, the spring to the ball, the half-pike tumble, face already contorted with injustice. The Italian referee saw enough of a genuine foul to give a free-kick. Mahrez whipped in one of his better set pieces and there was Wes Morgan at the back post to bundle the ball in off his thigh and open the scoring, nudging Leicester ahead on away goals.
Finishing purists might point out Morgan actually missed with his original choice of thigh, the ball smacking his standing thigh, and deflecting past Sergio Rico. But the goal was reward for one enduring Morgan virtue. He really does have massive, unmissable thighs, thighs that have fully bought into their role in life, which is carrying around the rest of Morgan.
Still those moments of Leicester-ism kept coming: Marc Albrighton’s precise low shot for the second goal, the tenacity of an unrelenting backline. And really Morgan was the other side of Leicester’s victory here. Almost exactly 10 years ago he was playing at Scunthorpe for Nottingham Forest in League One. Here he started scratchily, but by the end seemed to have become weirdly ubiquitous, a gristly substance spread across the whole of that Leicester backline. If Vardy provided the madness needed to drag this tie Leicester’s way from the front, Morgan was once again the heart of this team of makeovers and late-bloomers and upcycled parts who will now enter the Champions League quarter-final draw with nothing to fear and nothing to lose. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/oct/29/contemporary-music-guide-hans-werner-henze | Music | 2012-10-29T16:23:35.000Z | Tom Service | A guide to Hans Werner Henze's music | There is a story that Hans Werner Henze reports in his fascinating and brave autobiography Bohemian Fifths that symbolises his central place in the cultural and political conflicts of postwar music. It's about Henze's opera, Der Prinz von Homburg, a piece that had premiered in Hamburg in 1960. Henze relates that at a dinner party (at which he wasn't present), the Italian composer Luigi Nono threw some Meissen porcelain to the floor in disgust at the mere mention of Henze's opera. The reason for the offence? Well, as the philosopher Theodor Adorno also said to Henze about the piece, "your music is not chaotic enough." As Henze put it, when I met him in 2009 at his home near Rome: "What a thing to say! There you are every day, trying to put something reasonable and clear on paper, and somebody comes and says it is not sufficiently chaotic."
Now whether Nono really did throw the pottery, Henze was (it's shocking to have to write that past participle following news of his death, even in his last years, the twinkle of his blue eyes and his Puckish energy seemed inextinguishable) certainly an outsider in the terms and frames of the postwar avant garde – especially to one of the most single-minded modernists of them all like Nono. That's what Adorno meant by the lack of chaos: Henze's music simply wasn't deemed abrasive or critical enough in the 50s and 60s by his ultra-critical colleagues. He wrote operas, and avowedly lyrical, large-scale operas at that (the sequence starts with Boulevard Solitude, the by turns limpid and dramatic retelling of the Manon Lescaut story in 1952, and ends with the luminous myth of Phaedra in 2007, with another work for an entire community of musical and theatrical performers called Gisela! that he completed in 2010: be entranced by Henze's shimmering music theatre here). By 1970 he had even written six symphonies, a genre that no self-respecting avant gardiste would consider using without a shrug of ironic distance.
Yet Henze's creative exile from the ideologies propagated by the generation of young musical Turks such as Nono or Stockhausen meant that he connected with more listeners, with more institutions, and that his music achieved its arguably more radical aims more completely than many of his contemporaries.
From the start, Henze really was an outsider. Born in 1926 in Westphalia, he had no choice from his surroundings or his Nazi-sympathising father but to enlist in the Hitler Jugend and serve in the war. Those experiences marked his entire life; even his last pieces are concerned with confronting and coming to terms with the darkest periods of Germany's history, and his own. He moved to the remote Italian island of Ischia in the early 1950s, and based himself in Italy for the rest of his life. His home in the hills outside Rome was as lavish, abundant, and sensual as his music, yet his political sympathies were those of a lifelong communist. And Henze did more than most to make his music part of the enlightening of international social consciousness, premiering his Sixth Symphony in Cuba and living there in 1969 and 70. But Henze was never an ideologue, and he supported artists who spoke out against the Cuban regime. Just as in his music, it was human and the individual that mattered more to him than the aesthetic position or orthodoxy.
And unlike so many of his contemporaries, writing music for Henze was an unavoidable, irresistible compulsion. It flowed from him in a nearly continuous stream. Even after the mysterious illness that struck him in 2005, when he returned to the world from weeks of near unconsciousness, the same unquenchable thirst to compose was there, as he completed the second act of Phaedra – music that dramatises Hippolytus's return to life – and composed large orchestral and vocal pieces.
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You can hear that fluency at its best in Ondine, the masterful ballet he wrote for Frederick Ashton and the Royal Ballet in 1958. The idiom is quintessential Henze, a fusion of Stravinskian neo-classicism and rhythmic drive with a voluptuous expressive language, bringing the tragic water-nymph of the story vividly to life – Oliver Knussen's recording with the London Sinfonietta is one of the classics of the gramophone, as they used to say, and one of the pieces to hear to convince anyone who thinks that postwar music cannot be sumptuously beautiful.
For Henze, his music was the sound of his inner life. There was only a gossamer-thin separation between the man and his music, and his fundamental artistic credo was that music ought to have something to say about human emotion and ought to contribute to contemporary society. That way of thinking also meant that he was out of step with the formalist side of postwar music. Music, for Henze, was the living, breathing sound of resistance to any kind of system, a means of creating political and cultural freedom.
And Henze was unafraid to give an explicitly political message to his music. His piece Voices is a collection songs for the oppressed, a piece that gives voices to those who otherwise would not be heard; El Cimarron tells the story of the Cuban slave Esteban Montejo; We Come to the River was an overtly anti-war music-theatre experience, a set of "Actions for Music" devised by Henze and Edward Bond for Covent Garden in 1976.
As well as those pieces of Henze's that make their politics obvious, his renewal of the idea of symphony, concerto, and opera in the late 20th century is a much more radical project than it might seem at first. Henze's operatic subjects take in the tragic, the comic, the mythic and the exotic. Among the best, I think, are The Bassarids (and there's a fantastic suite of orchestral music from this 1966 work, with its libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman), and from the other end of his career, L'Upupa, is a magical Middle-Eastern fairytale from 2003.
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Henze's symphonies are just as diverse; listen to the magnificently angry expressionism of his Sixth Symphony and compare it to the frankly gorgeous pleasures of the Eighth, inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream (including the most opulently orchestrated Bottom, if you see what I mean, in its second movement; a fantastical orchestral scherzo that's a great place to start if you're a Henze newcomer), or the choral Ninth. Henze knew exactly what he was doing composing a choral symphony as his ninth essay in the genre: unlike the Beethoven, the choir are present throughout, and Henze's piece is a personal and public attempt to reflect and reconcile the nightmare of Germany's early 20th-century history, setting a version of Anna Seghers's 1942 novel about prisoners attempting to escape from a concentration camp, dedicated "to the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism" – and it's a gigantic, fearlessly coruscating work to experience.
You'll sometimes hear a mealy-mouthed criticism of Henze's work that he wrote too much, that he couldn't stop himself overloading his orchestral textures with too much detail, with too great a density of line and activity. But listening now to works that I thought in the past were over-written or overwrought, I hear now instead a riot of colour and imagination. There is always a line to follow in Henze's music, a golden thread of lyricism and narrative that leads you through all of his pieces no matter how densely packed they might seem on the surface. Listen to the Seventh Symphony to hear what I mean – music of abundant effulgence, no doubt, but also real clarity, with its finale that starts as a gentle song and ends with an emotionally charged peroration.
For all its public grandeur, the reason that Henze's music matters and will continue to matter is that it's a distillation of his essential, generous humanity. The piece he wrote after the death of his partner of more than 40 years, Fausto Moroni, Elogium Musicum, is one of the most moving pieces he ever wrote, and that second act of Phaedra has a visionary luminescence, music that realises a character's return from the dead just as its composition symbolised the composer's recovery.
By the end of his life, Henze was disillusioned with the loss of his health, his bereavement, and his sense of his own death. But he knew that he had outlived an era of ideologies, whether political or musical, and he must have known too, that his music voiced an expressive freedom that inspired generations of German composers from Wolfgang Rihm to Jörg Widmann and Detlev Glanert. That essential freedom of the spirit is something that Henze's music yearns for and realises as completely as the work any other 20th or 21st century composer. Henze's life may be over, but we're only just beginning to understand the real importance of his music.
Five key links
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Reqiuem
Ondine
Seventh Symphony
Phaedra
Voices | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/19/pay-price-adopted-daughters-misdemeanours-stealing | Society | 2014-08-19T13:00:00.000Z | Jane Green | Who will pay the price for my daughter's misdemeanours? | Jane Green | When something bad happens, it takes me a few days to recover. And always at the back of my mind is the knowledge that there are certain things that I will never recover from.
I will never recover if I lose contact with either of my daughters and I will never recover if something terrible happens to either of them. And that is most likely with my younger daughter.
I knew things were going wrong when Georgia reappeared in her life and on her Facebook timeline. Whenever Kelly goes through a bad patch, and feels she cannot cope, or feels inadequate, Georgia pops up – and the course of action she advocates for Kelly is entirely detrimental.
The weekend before last, Kelly stayed at the house of a girl called Beth. This I can cope with. Just. Beth is a known troublemaker but seems to have reformed – or at least I am holding on to the hope that she has reformed.
The weekend goes OK, but Kelly catches a bad cold. There are jokes about who gave the cold to who on Facebook. All normal teenage girl stuff.
But as the week progresses things deteriorate. There are reports of Kelly wandering round town with £600. On Wednesday, when she should be at the much-hated functional skills lesson (basically maths and English classes) at college, she lies to me and does not go.
The rumours of the £600 are, Kelly assures me, a mistake. Her sister Jess, from whom the reports emanated, was given this information by Georgia. Georgia later tells me that her friend, referred to as "Pieface", told her that Kelly had £600 and she thought she meant my Kelly, but it was another Kelly. I feel a familiar sense of dread.
And Kelly has turned up with new clothes. A white pair of Nike trainers. The last time Georgia appeared in our lives, she stole from us. Among the things she pilfered were a pair of white trainers belonging to Kelly. Kelly says Georgia has simply returned them. Why am I not convinced? And why am I not convinced that the new jeans and top and hairdo and nails and tattoo are all gifts. I brace myself for a visit from the police.
I am normally very good at hiding my wallet from Kelly, and my husband is getting better at hiding his. We have given Jess a key and her room is permanently locked.
So I was shocked to discover that Kelly had stolen my bank card, obtained my pin and taken out £110.
But she did not take this money out until the Friday. How did she get the pin? Was she paying someone back? Is the matter now over?
I challenge Kelly and her behaviour reverts back to the sort of debilitating anger of a couple of years ago. She quickly becomes unstable. And I mean unstable.
I know if I go to the police, one of two things will happen. She faces a custodial sentence and most likely will not come out, or not come out in a functional state. Or she will be fined. And as she has no money that will mean me paying it off.
She used to have some savings – but we took them all to pay previous court fines. Just one of the many lessons in consequences that are singularly pointless if a disturbed child is not being supported in a more positive way to deal with their trauma.
And support is not something our local authority does, not unless it's the youth offending team with the most wonderful people trying to turn around lives with insufficient resources.
My husband has a plan for dealing with the latest issue. As ever, it involves sanctions and boundaries that will impact on Kelly but not damage her. She is furious but knuckling under. We are exhausted. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/14/juvenile-great-apes-love-to-tease-and-annoy-their-elders-study-finds | Science | 2024-02-14T05:00:28.000Z | Ian Sample | Juvenile great apes love to tease and annoy their elders, study finds | Footage of great apes has revealed that humans are not the only ones to endure seemingly endless bouts of teasing dished out by their smaller and weaker young who appear intent on pushing their luck.
Recordings of chimps, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas found the animals to be masters of the dubious art, embarking on an impressive range of playful and occasionally somewhat aggressive acts ranging from the cheeky and plain silly to the fabulously irritating.
From 75 hours of footage taken at San Diego and Leipzig zoos, scientists documented 142 clear instances of great apes teasing their compadres, with most instigated by juveniles aged three to five years old.
Juvenile orangutan pulling mother's hair. Photograph: BOS Foundation BPI
The apes poked, prodded and ran away, offered objects and then pulled them back, body-slammed one other, stuck their faces in others’ faces, pulled on wisps of hair – a move particularly common in orangutans whose hair is amply long enough – tugged on body parts, tickled, and dangled things in front of each other.
And that was only for starters. In all, the researchers in Germany and the US counted 18 different varieties of teasing in the footage. More than a fifth employed an element of surprise, with an ape approaching its target from behind or while it was looking the other way.
“We cannot really say why they are doing it, but we can observe that they are doing it,” said Dr Isabelle Laumer at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. “This playful teasing is provocative, intentional, and typically one-sided. It comes very much from the teaser and it often remains that way throughout the interaction.”
As with all the best teasing, a failure to respond to an unexpected poke, or an ape’s face suddenly looming into view, was met with more of the same, with apes repeating their chosen move in 84% of cases or escalating the situation with more elaborate acts of annoyance.
The study of nine bonobos, four orangutans, four gorillas and 17 chimps was too small to find major differences between the species, but adults and juveniles had different strategies. Poking was the most common form of teasing for both adults and juveniles, but while juveniles engaged in hitting and waving body parts at others, adults were gentler and favoured tickling and stealing.
“What’s interesting is we found similarities with human infant teasing,” said Laumer. “When human infants tease their mother, they tend to look to their mother’s face for a reaction. We see that in these great apes too.”
Human infants engage in playful teasing as early as eight months and before they can produce words. Scientists believe the behaviour may help test social boundaries and strengthen relationships.
Although most juvenile apes targeted adults, they often spared their own parents, according to the study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. There were exceptions, however: Denny the gorilla teased his parents repeatedly, probably because there were few other gorillas around; and Aisha the orangutan became proficient at swinging a rope into her father’s face while he was minding his own business.
It will take more observation to understand why the animals might tease one another. But with the behaviour evident in our closest primate cousins, teasing and the cognitive skills that underpin it may trace back 13m years to the last common ancestor humans share with modern apes, Laumer said.
“Teasing has been discussed in relation to humour, but it can also contribute to understanding social partners,” said Dr Marina Davila-Ross, who studies the evolution of communication at the University of Portsmouth. “If, for instance, a young ape teases another and the second one does not respond, it tells the first individual how far one can go with the second individual, providing vital information about growing up within a social group and establishing hierarchies.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/who-scored-blog/2024/feb/22/in-praise-pascal-player-brighton-roberto-de-zerbi | Football | 2024-02-22T14:12:31.000Z | Ben McAleer | In praise of Pascal Gross, the player who does it all for Brighton | Ben McAleer | Brighton have a raft of young, exciting attackers on their books. João Pedro, the club’s 22-year-old top scorer this season with 19 goals, missed the trip to Sheffield United on Sunday with a hamstring injury, so Roberto De Zerbi called upon Simon Adingra, Facundo Buonanotte, Evan Ferguson and Ansu Fati – who are all below the age of 23. They left Bramall Lane with a 5-0 victory.
Buonanotte opened the scoring in the first half before Adingra – back from setting up Ivory Coast’s winning goal in the Afcon final – added two more. Fati and Ferguson both came on as second-half subs and, with each passing week, De Zerbi seems to pull another vibrant forward from up his sleeve. However, there has been one constant in Brighton’s season: Pascal Gross.
Little is being made of his terrific campaign but the 32-year-old has been Brighton’s shining light. Plucked from FC Ingolstadt for just £3m in 2017, Gross has been a regular ever since with Chris Hughton, Graham Potter and now De Zerbi relying on the Germany player to operate in a number of different roles and carry out various duties across the pitch.
This is what makes Gross so effective for De Zerbi. This season alone he has played left-back, right-back, central midfield and attacking midfield. No matter the position, Gross puts in a solid shift for the team – as shown by his impressive WhoScored rating of 7.35, the best among the club’s regulars this season.
Gross’s ability to dictate the tempo and pry apart opposition defences was evident on Sunday and has been the case all season. The victory at Bramall Lane was an excellent example of his ability on the ball. Gross created eight chances for teammates while completing more than 100 passes with an accuracy of over 90%. To say he controlled proceedings would be a huge understatement.
Only Bruno Fernandes (72) has made more key passes than Gross (67) in the Premier League this season. The Brighton star also ranks third for assists (nine) in the league, behind Kieran Trippier and Ollie Watkins (both 10).
Not only does he know when to play a defence-splitting pass, but he also helps Brighton dominate the ball. Their possession average of 62.4% is second only to Manchester City (65.7%), so it’s clear De Zerbi craves control. He has the players to do it. Gross ranks fifth for passes per game (80.4) in the league this season – below teammates Lewis Dunk (105.1) and Jan Paul van Hecke (88.9) in second and third place respectively. Rodri, with an average of 105.9 per game, is the only midfielder in the league who makes more passes than Gross.
Brighton’s plan is clear. The centre-backs routinely look to Gross to both receive the ball and help stretch the play – only Dunk (4.9) is delivering more accurate long balls per game than Gross (2.9) of Brighton players this season. It’s no coincidence that Brighton are attacking through the middle of the pitch more frequently (31%) than any other Premier League team. What’s German for “conductor”?
Pascal Gross in action during the rout of Sheffield United. Photograph: Simon Davies/ProSports/Rex/Shutterstock
What also stands out about Gross is the desire to get stuck in. He ranks top for tackles (44) of all Seagulls players, and has made more than the likes of Boubacar Kamara (43), Cristian Romero (42) and Enzo Fernandez (41), players you would expect to rank higher in this metric.
Brighton have struggled recently with the juggling act of European and domestic football. They started the campaign brightly but have wavered with the hectic schedule that comes with competing in the Europa League. The extra workload has taken its toll; they have not won back-to-back league games since September and are currently seventh in the table on 38 points, 11 behind fourth-placed Aston Villa. If they do manage to secure another European finish, Gross’s performances will be key.
As one of the elder statesmen of this exciting Brighton side, Gross takes it upon himself to lead by example on the pitch. He deserves all the praise he gets. “Pascal’s exceptional abilities and positive mentality have been instrumental in our success this season,” said De Zerbi of the midfielder recently. In a historic campaign for Brighton, Gross is ensuring the Seagulls continue to soar.
This is an article by WhoScored
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/07/majority-of-australians-struggling-financially-essential-poll-finds | Australia news | 2023-11-06T14:00:41.000Z | Paul Karp | Majority of Australians struggling financially, Essential poll finds | More than half of Australians say they are now struggling financially, with 12 interest rate rises having a negative impact on household budgets, according to new polling.
In the latest Essential poll of 1,049 voters, 22% said interest rate rises were having a “very negative” impact on them, up three points since February, with a further 31% saying the personal impact was “somewhat negative”.
The Reserve Bank has raised the cash rate 12 times since the latest contractionary cycle began in May 2022, with interest rates lifted from emergency levels during the Covid economic downturn to combat soaring inflation.
The poll results, released on Tuesday, come as the Reserve Bank board is meeting in Sydney to decide whether to raise the cash rate in response to inflation falling at a slower than expected pace.
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About a third of respondents (32%) said the rises had no impact on them, while a small proportion said they were “very positive” (3%) or “somewhat positive” (12%).
More than half of respondents (56%) think rates will continue to rise and are yet to reach their peak, down seven points from June. Some 36% think rates have “reached the peak but they won’t go back down for a while”. Just 8% think they have reached their peak and “will start to fall soon”.
Cost of living explorer 2024: track the impact of Australia’s quarterly CPI on prices
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Households’ personal finances are under strain, with 41% saying they are “struggling a bit”, watching their budget to pay bills; and 13% reporting they are “in serious difficulty”, meaning “being able to pay all the bills is a regular concern”.
In total 53% report they are financially struggling or in serious difficulty, up seven points.
A minority (47%) now report being “secure” because they are “able to pay bills and usually have money spare for savings or buying luxuries” (35%) or are “comfortable” because they “don’t have to worry about paying bills … have savings and enough to buy luxuries” (12%).
On Monday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, defended his trip to China while Australians are struggling with the cost of living and face another potential rate rise.
Albanese said the delegation included meeting with 250 Australian businesses, which is “about Australian jobs and has an impact on our economy” and on inflation.
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“It has an impact on how successful we are,” he told Australian reporters in China. “We’re a trading nation, this is very much in Australia’s national interest for us to be engaged.”
The Essential poll found the Coalition, with a primary vote of 34%, has overtaken Labor, on 32%, while the Greens primary vote has crashed to 10%.
On the two-party-preferred plus measure, Labor leads the Coalition 48% to 46%, with a further 6% undecided.
Albanese has a positive approval rating, with 46% approving of his performance and 43% disapproving.
A further 48% of respondents described Australia as being on the “wrong track”, 34% said it is on the right track, and 18% were unsure. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/jun/25/tips-from-the-texas-rangers-to-tackle-uk-child-sexual-exploitation | Social Care Network | 2015-06-25T07:30:12.000Z | Dominic Smith | Tips from the Texas Rangers to tackle UK child sexual exploitation | “W
e’ve got to go out proactively, without being alarmist and without creating a witch hunt. We’ve got to start turning over the stones to see what we find,” says chief superintendent Ivan Wood, head of Durham constabulary’s safeguarding command.
Young victims of sexual abuse should get help in their local area, not far away
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Following damning reports by Alexis Jay and Louise Casey into the Rotherham scandal, in March the coalition government published a letter to the heads of frontline agencies across the country reminding them of their duty to share information to help protect children. And with tackling child sexual explotation an ever-increasing issue in the UK, Durham has turned to an initiative first developed in the US by the Texas Rangers to help vulnerable children.
The Intervene to Protect a Child (IPC) programme has led to more than 50 convictions for child sex offences and the recovery of 160 at-risk children in the US since 2009.
The programme has been developed in part by Joe Sullivan, an internationally renowned expert on child sex abuse, who has worked on the Madeleine McCann disappearance and the murder of April Jones. It is a single four-hour session that aims to “sensitise frontline professionals to potential child exploitation by applying the principles of forensic behavioural analysis” in their day-to-day duties and routine visits to identify possible child abusers. This can include picking up on changes in behaviour, as well as certain tattoos, photographs or literature that could imply a sexual interest in children.
If I hadn’t had that training, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to pursue my hunch
Adam Grundy
“If you stop a vehicle and there’s foil or a syringe, we consider the possibility they are using drugs,” explains one detective constable from the public protection unit at Durham HQ. “If people turn up at work and they’ve got bruises, we ask them to explain, and if they don’t explain them very well, we start to consider the possibility they are a victim of domestic violence. It’s the same concept.
“It’s about educating people about some of the things they could be aware of, that might indicate that person is a victim of sexual abuse or a perpetrator.”
Durham constabulary has so far trained 400 officers in the IPC programme, and the scheme has already proved to be a success. Just two weeks after receiving the training, police community support officer Adam Grundy took action to prevent a previously convicted child sex offender from having access to a girl aged under five. It followed a routine visit to the elderly man’s home, where Grundy noticed he was “evasive and standoffish”, repeatedly questioning why the officer was there. He was also dressed in a formal shirt ready to go out, which was unusual for him.
“I happened to glance at the kitchen bench and there was a condom and a Viagra tablet,” says Grundy. “I didn’t let on I’d seen that but I just quizzed where he was going because something wasn’t right. Relating back to the training, one of the signs was if someone’s evasive it sparks off questions in your mind about why that person is being that way. So I felt as though I had to dig a bit deeper.”
It was established that the man had begun a relationship with a woman with a young daughter, so police worked with social services to ensure the child was safe.
Grundy is candid about the influence of the new scheme on his actions. “If I hadn’t had that training, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to pursue my hunch,” he says. “Having the IPC training gave me that extra boost to think ‘something’s not right here’.”
The IPC training is being delivered to partner agencies, from education, welfare and the fire service to individual heads and teachers. Carole Payne, head of children’s services at Durham county council, says: “We are keen to develop expertise and awareness across the children’s services workforce and this training will develop shared understanding and knowledge in a critically important area, helping to improve practice and partnership working between agencies.”
Ivan Wood says partnership arrangements in the county are already good, but the IPC programme will help improve the skills of all frontline professionals.
'Risk map' highlights challenge of where to put children's homes
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“I would hate to think, and what we want to try and avoid, is that we miss opportunities to identify [child sexual exploitation], that we miss opportunities to intervene where children are vulnerable,” he says.
Evidence suggests police forces are looking at the programme as a way to strengthen local approaches to tackling child sexual exploitation, with Wood revealing that a number of other forces in England and Wales have been in touch about adopting the scheme.
Wood points out that although Durham has not had the issues with child sexual exploitation that have plagued forces such as South Yorkshire, it cannot be complacent: “These issues are happening within communities and we’ve got to be better at identifying them.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/22/new-karate-kid-movie-ralph-macchio-jackie-chan-cobra-kai | Film | 2023-11-22T12:19:17.000Z | Andrew Pulver | New Karate Kid movie with Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan in the works | Following the success of the TV series Cobra Kai, a new Karate Kid movie featuring Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan has been announced, along with a global casting call to find a teenage star for the film.
Macchio, who starred in the first three Karate Kid movies between 1984 and 1989 before returning to anchor Cobra Kai which first aired in 2018, and Chan, who appeared in the 2010 reboot starring Jaden Smith, appeared together in a short video to make the announcement. The casting notice suggested the film will also feature a new character called Li Fong, who is “Chinese or mixed-race Chinese [aged] between 15-17 years old [and] speaks fluent English”. The website added: “Conversational Mandarin is a strong plus. He’s smart, scrappy and a skilled martial artist.”
The presence of both Macchio and Chan appears to indicate that separate strands of the Karate Kid series will both be present in the new film. The so-called “Miyagi-verse”, revolving around the Japanese-American coach-mentor figure played by the late Pat Morita, operated in the first three films with Macchio, as well as the 1994 follow-up The Next Karate Kid, featuring Hilary Swank opposite Morita. Cobra Kai, which is named after the dojo of Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), who Macchio’s character Daniel LaRusso defeated at the climax of the first film, also operates in the “Miyagi-verse”, with Morita (who died in 2005) appearing in flashbacks.
However, the 2010 film relocated the action to China, replaced the principal martial art of karate with kung fu, and cast Chan in the Miyagi-style mentor/coach role of Mr Han.
Variety reports the film will be directed by Jonathan Entwistle (creator of hit TV series The End of the F***ing World), and is due to be released in December 2024. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/17/transitioning-from-elite-sport-to-the-real-world-can-take-its-toll-on-mental-health | Sport | 2017-08-16T18:00:09.000Z | Simon Orchard | Transitioning from elite sport to the 'real world' can take its toll on mental health | Simon Orchard | It was the fictional fashionista, Derek Zoolander, who asked himself, “Who am I?” as he peered poignantly into a puddle that bore his own reflection in the 2001 cult classic Zoolander, only moments after losing the male model of the year award to his arch rival, Hansel.
In defeat, he lost his identity. If he wasn’t the best model on the planet anymore, then who the hell was he? The movie jests, but I have seriously asked myself the same question several times in the last 12 months during the “transition”.
The “transition” I speak of revolves around the well-travelled journey of elite sports people from a fast-moving lifestyle that encompasses plenty of new and exciting, twists, turns and challenges, to a life of … well… not those things.
Long after the bright lights fade, and the “oohs” and “aahs” of the feverish crowds extinguish, and the body finally relents to the years of wear and tear, the mind still flickers. “Who am I now?” it asks.
And it’s in the quieter moments, usually after retiring or being dropped from something you have worked your whole life to obtain, that the pressures and struggles of establishing your new identity gain momentum.
All of a sudden, a huge chunk of your identity, purpose and sense of belonging has been removed. A life that took not moments, not days, not weeks, but years of effort and devotion is gone, with nothing but a set of “guidelines” and a good luck email left to help you overcome the slippery slopes of the “transition”.
Normal, everyday questions for sports people become obsolete. How much rest time do we have today? Where is today’s recovery session? I wonder if the game debrief will involve me? Why did I let that ball go? Who is talking about my performance, and on what social media platform?
And the questions posed above usually, and stupidly, arise before we even get started on the intricacies and important issues of family life, work dilemmas, study clashes, health problems and everything else life can muster.
'Athletes die two times': Australian stars reveal post-retirement struggles
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Lauren Jackson revealed earlier this year the impact retirement had on her mental health on SBS’s Insight and the ABC’s Four Corners. She admitted the sudden change in people’s attitudes towards her while moving from being an elite athlete one day to a retired sports star the next took a toll on her. She said it felt like she had been “put out to pasture”. I echo her sentiment and wonder what Basketball Australia is doing now that the cameras are turned off and Jackson has retreated back to her new life.
It is essentially a year since I last played hockey for Australia, yet I still deal with both mental and physical issues that arose during my time with the program.
I played at the top level with severe and chronic achilles tendonitis in the latter stages of my career. I was administered cortisone injection after cortisone injection in order to play and represent Australia where needed, but away from the televised events, I limped around the training ground for 18 months struggling from contest to contest.
Cortisone injections worked for a few weeks at a time, until the pain finally returned. It wasn’t a happy place to exist. I was also diagnosed with a generalised anxiety around the same time I was dealing with the achilles issue, something that can’t be attributed to my injury, but is well and truly related now.
I still wake up every morning and walk down my hallway in pain; I struggle to chase my six-month old puppy around; I haven’t been able to play basketball, a love of my life, for over a year; and couldn’t wear Havaianas, Nikes or boots for the entire year of Olympic preparation.
These might seem like trivial things to some, but one day it’s not unforeseeable that I could replace “dog” with kids; “basketball” with walking; and “entire Olympic preparation” with entire life. I was receiving treatment and guidance for my ailment, but largely from a very helpful friend and ex-team physio.
Now that I’ve joined the “real” world I expect those mates rates favours will eventually run out. Services that were supplemented before now cost money, and the reality is I have to earn a living somehow.
At the moment, I work casually doing brand development work for my hockey equipment sponsor Voodoo. I teach hockey to kids at Guildford Grammar School. I am at university two days a week (I graduate at the end of 2017), I recently finished an internship at the Western Force and I freelance write a bit.
I returned to competitive sport in June of this year, playing first grade club hockey for Fremantle in the Perth Hockey Competition. Nothing can replace or replicate the joy that sport (and in particular, hockey with Freo) brings to my life. A sense of belonging, a family environment, a brotherhood of mates, a physical and mental challenge each and every week, and a home away from home.
Simon Orchard played for the Hockeyroos at the Rio Olympic Games in Rio. Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images
Unfortunately, some won’t transition. The worst part of it is navigating the initial few years post-retirement where you attempt to carve out a new life. And not a mediocre life either, one that hopefully resembles the remarkable and extraordinary sporting life you lived only years earlier.
The life that teaches you to reach for the stars; to push the boundaries of what you deem possible; to fight and grind your way through numerous ailments and setbacks; to endure the heartache of defeat; appreciate the fruits of victory; and be thankful, not bitter, about the sacrifices you made to get create those moments. So who am I? At the very least, I’m the guy that speaks openly and candidly, not only about my own struggles, but the struggles of others, in the hope a more balanced and well-rounded support program can be developed and introduced by the nation’s sporting bodies.
I’m the guy trying to educate, inform and engage people on the serious issues and challenges being posed to an industry that not only brings us some of the most inspiring and uplifting stories of our time, but some of the darkest and most disturbing as well.
By writing this I’m hoping others transitioning from being centre stage to a face in the crowd will realise they’re not alone. Don’t lose your sense of worth.
So although I may not have found my true identity yet, I am hell bent on ensuring the next generation of sportspeople know where to look for theirs.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Sunday Times and on the website PerthNow.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Hotlines in other countries can be found here | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/27/kenneth-branagh-i-want-you-to-smell-the-steam-of-the-orient-express | Film | 2017-10-27T10:00:26.000Z | Sarah Crompton | Kenneth Branagh: ‘I want you to smell the steam of the Orient Express’ | “Women in wild places and mental instability run right through things, don’t they?” says Kenneth Branagh, leaning forward, earnestly. “She’s very, very sensitive, and I see the ghost of her as a heroine in what she writes, in terms of keeping body and soul together, and of being an adventurer.”
He’s talking about Agatha Christie, and giving a reading of the detective novelist’s fiction that is a long way from the more traditional view of her as a comfy West Country matriarch who churned out mysteries to support her family. “I think people have been pretty tough on her,” he adds. “They’re suspicious of the volume of her output. She herself admitted that sometimes she wasn’t proud of a book when she had finished it.
“Personally I admire the prolific nature of what she does … her ability to grab the audience’s attention is really striking. The surface of what she writes has led people to dismiss her as a second-rater. But I think she is far more than that.”
Branagh is talking about Christie as he gets ready to unveil his big-screen version of her classic Murder on the Orient Express (the first cinematic interpretation since 1974), her story of a group of passengers and a dead body trapped in a luxurious train in a snow storm. He stars as the legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
“I think people often feel this about Shakespeare – they’re annoyed by his bourgeois credentials,” he says.
“He retires at the normal age, goes back to Stratford, buys houses, gets involved in disputes about rent. It feels as though there’s a sort of middle manager quality in there; he was a businessman, a shareholder, yet he wrote all these plays. That makes people suspicious.
Prolific … Agatha Christie. Photograph: Underwood Archives/Getty Images
“With Christie, people essentially have her down as a sort of Miss Marple – a sexless, removed, bookish, woolly, very English sort of individual. And they are not aware of the intrepid, pioneering, passionate woman that she was.”
The lineaments of her life back this view. Christie had such a desire to travel – and to keep her first husband, the dashing Archie Christie, happy – that she set off on a year of travel with him in 1924, leaving her daughter Rosalind at home with her mother. She left Rosalind again when she famously vanished for 11 days after discovering Archie was having an affair; she underwent psychiatric treatment in the wake of the incident. After their divorce, she travelled alone on the Orient Express, to Istanbul and then on to Damascus and Baghdad. Her family worried about her on the trip but for her it was a way of discovering new worlds – and, coincidentally, a new companion in life since she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, on a dig in Ur. Despite her writing commitments, she worked alongside him, often in difficult conditions and exotic locations.
Branagh and I talk at Twickenham Studios. He is tired because of an exhausting schedule which is whisking him around the world, but he’s here to put the finishing touches to his film, which boasts an all-star cast: Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, Olivia Colman, Penélope Cruz, Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Sergei Polunin …
Watch the official trailer for Murder on the Orient Express
The way the trailer is framed, with captions that reveal the type of character each star is playing, takes both the film and its director back to his youth in the 1970s and early 80s, when the posters for movies such as The Towering Inferno and indeed Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Poirot, were plastered across the streets of Branagh’s home town of Reading. To the boy who had moved there at the age of nine from his native Belfast, they represented a sense of possibility. “My first encounter was with their sense of glamour,” he says. “I was pretty intrigued by all the names on those posters.”
This liking for good performers coming together to make popular entertainment is perhaps what links the two contrasting sides of Branagh’s current career. There is the actor and director who is regarded as one of the best of his age; an eminent Shakespearean, the first man to film Henry V since Olivier, a talent who can gather a top-flight company of actors to perform a season in the West End which included heavy-weight productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Entertainer. Then there is the Hollywood film director, best known for the comic-book movie, Thor. And Cinderella. He grins when I point out the strange collision between Hollywood and serious stage productions.
“No one, quite frankly, is more surprised than me that I have been allowed to get away with it,” he says. “I had not anticipated or planned for suddenly finding myself in this studio groove. It is unusual, I must say. But it’s fun.”
Shot on 70mm film, his version of Murder on the Orient Express gleams as the camera dwells on the crisp table linen, the polished wood and the glistening glasses. “I wanted you to feel the snow and smell the steam – I wanted to have all the advantages of classic material and none of the disadvantages of over-familiarity,” he says.
Judi Dench as Princess Dragomiroff and Olivia Colman as Hildegarde Schmidt. Photograph: Alamy
For Christie fans, there are some changes – to characters, to locations, to motivation – that may surprise. But all the essential ingredients are faithfully reproduced, and Branagh has added considerable depth to his portrayal of Poirot, making him more active, more passionate and more lonely. “The screenplay caught a hurt and a more tangible isolation in Poirot,” Branagh explains. “There is a kind of vulnerability about this man who appears in The Mysterious Affair at Styles with a touching gratitude to England for looking after Belgian refugees. There’s the sense of someone who has already felt the bruises of the world.”
Did he not feel any trepidation about taking on a character who has already been portrayed by 20 actors, including Orson Welles, Peter Ustinov and, on TV, David Suchet? “It’s a lot isn’t it?” says Branagh with that disarming smile. “I guess that’s where my thickish skin comes into it. You do understand that the reason so many people have played him is because he’s a fantastic character.”
There is a kind of vulnerability about Poirot, the sense of someone who has already felt the bruises of the world
Kenneth Branagh
He stopped watching other incarnations when he knew he was about to deliver his own (“I wouldn’t want to get caught copying the other boys”), but recognises the various ways that the detective has burrowed into the collective consciousness. “With the amount of source material in the novels every actor is going to bring something unique and unusual, in the same way as would happen with a famous classical part. David Suchet is a fantastic Poirot, so is Finney and John Moffatt on the radio is excellent.”
Discussion about his own characterisation will, I suspect, be dominated by conversations about his moustache – grey and flourishing and twinned with a natty beard. “We probably spent about nine months on it. We started with something thinner than Charlie Chaplin’s, then something that went up, that went down. We looked at famous moustaches in movies and paintings. The luxury as an actor – and I had this before when I was playing Wallander – is that you can go back to the books and trawl for details.
“I loved Christie’s phrasing – ‘the most magnificent moustaches in England’ – and I enjoyed the fact that the risk you were taking was that you would potentially produce the impact that the moustache has on characters in the novels, who often dismiss or ridicule Poirot, or are embarrassed by him.”
Penélope Cruz as Pilar Estravados. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox
That mention of Wallander – whom Branagh portrayed in the British television adaptation of Henning Mankell’s detective books, feels significant. Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in 1933, on an archaeological dig at Arpachiyah in Iraq. Published the following year, it was rapturously received, though the audacity of its plot caused Raymond Chandler to remark that it was “guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a half-wit could guess it.”
His damning view of the British golden age detective novel – “futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window” – and his preference for psychologically based novels where a “perfunctory mystery element [is] dropped in like the olive in a martini” underlines the division in the thriller market that has existed ever since.
But the dichotomy between the advocates of clever plotting and the lovers of a story that reveals a deeper truth about society or character is misleading when applied to Christie. She may write in simple sentences, but it is the way she imagines character that has ensured the longevity of her books.
Branagh, a fan of both schools of thriller, points out that there is not so much difference between them. “I enjoyed the meditative qualities of what the Wallander novels were doing. But there’s quite a moral brood in Murder on the Orient Express as well.
There is a passionate depth to Christie, even though she sometimes said her writing is merely entertainment
Kenneth Branagh
“There are not only the questions of who did it, how did they do it, and why, but also the question of what now represents justice. And that issue of what justice is – when concerning crimes born out of revenge – goes quite deep in analysing whether an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ultimately is a way to order civilised behaviour.”
He worked on the film at the same time as he was directing Hamlet, starring Tom Hiddleston, as a fund-raiser for Rada. “Curiously, both stories seem to me to contain the poison of deep grief, and that idea of loss and the death of innocence. I think there is a passionate depth to Christie, even though she sometimes said her writing is merely entertainment.”
Sensing that darkness beneath the surface sheen means that he has been anxious to avoid what he calls “heritage movie-making”. “I wanted to remove excessive theatricality – a sense of the sort of fluting, shrill shriek, of so called ‘larger than life’ characters. I wanted to feel that people were talking not much louder than we are now.”
Assembling his cast – consisting of old friends and colleagues and young talent – was a moment to remember.
“When they all met for the first time, they were very shy and excitable. And one of the things I was determined to do was to try to capture that energy as soon as possible. I wanted a quiver of real guilt and uncertainty when they are interviewed by Poirot, to feel as if they were people for whom the prospect of him getting it wrong and accusing them was a matter of life and death.”
Murder on the Orient Express is in cinemas from 3 November. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/13/afp-officer-tells-senate-he-would-repeat-undercover-operation-on-autistic-teenager | Australia news | 2024-02-13T15:13:08.000Z | Nino Bucci | AFP officer tells Senate he would repeat undercover operation on autistic teenager | The Australian federal police officer who authorised an undercover operation that resulted in an autistic boy being charged with terror offences has told a Senate estimates hearing that he would do so again under the same circumstances.
Guardian Australia revealed earlier this month that a Victorian children’s court had granted a permanent stay in the case of the boy, given the pseudonym Thomas Carrick, with magistrate Lesley Fleming making a raft of serious findings against police, including that they had fed his fixation with Islamic State.
The AFP deputy commissioner Ian McCartney said attempts to deradicalise the boy after his parents approached Victoria police in April 2021 had failed, and he was thought to be becoming a greater threat when McCartney authorised the major operation.
4:26
Why Australian police are being accused of further radicalising an autistic 13-year-old boy – video
That operation involved Thomas being targeted by an undercover officer online.
McCartney, whose conduct was not directly criticised in the magistrate’s decision, told the Senate late on Tuesday that “if I had the same set of circumstances, I would sign that [authorisation] again”.
“He’d expressed a desire to carry out a violent act. He had expressed a desire to carry out a school shooting. He was researching material on how to build a bomb. He was engaging with likeminded individuals.
“There was a concerted three and half month focus on the CVE [countering violent extremism] strategy, however – a really important point – by late July the decision had been made this … was not working.
“The decision made by that [Victoria police] team was that it wasn’t being effective. He was becoming more and more radicalised.”
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McCartney said this was when the case was referred to the joint counter-terror team, which includes AFP, Victoria police and Asio members, eventually leading to the decision to authorise an undercover operation.
He said that after Fleming made her findings in October last year the AFP initiated a review into its handling of the case, which will be overseen by deputy commissioner Lesa Gale, and he said would include a review of the conduct of the officers involved.
It will focus on the online undercover strategy and how Thomas was engaged with, the challenges the AFP face in these matters and how to handle similar cases in future, and the “flow of information” as part of that online strategy through the JCTT, including the information provided to McCartney before he authorised the operation.
How Australian undercover police ‘fed’ an autistic 13-year-old’s fixation with Islamic State
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But the Greens senator David Shoebridge said McCartney’s statement that he would authorise the operation showed why it was so “deeply troubling” there was not an independent investigation into the case, adding that the current review could not result in any officer being sanctioned.
Shoebridge referred McCartney to a specific passage of Fleming’s decision, in which she said the undercover operative’s evidence should not be admitted.
“The [operative’s] evidence in its entirety revealed an orchestrated litany of communications between the seasoned covert operator and the child over an extended period of time in frequency and regularity which was so highly improper to count significantly against the admission of the evidence,” Fleming found.
Shoebridge said the passage showed “a clear, unambiguous, extraordinary criticism of the behaviour of one of your undercover operatives … and that undercover operative, like you, is facing no possibility of sanctions”.
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2:39
AFP grilled over undercover operation involving autistic 13-year-old boy – video
McCartney agreed that neither he nor the undercover operative was subject to a professional standards investigation.
Gale did not respond to questions from Shoebridge about whether she was able to sanction officers involved in the investigation, saying only that she expected to make a range of recommendations after a “transparent” review.
The AFP commissioner, Reece Kershaw, told the hearing that professional standards could “act at any time” to investigate officers involved in the case, should it see fit.
Earlier in estimates on Tuesday, the acting commonwealth director of public prosecutions, Scott Bruckard, said it was in the public interest to charge Thomas.
He also said the courts had previously acknowledged there was a “fine line” between acceptable and improper conduct when it came to the work of undercover operatives.
Bruckard said the CDPP was not currently reviewing the case.
He did not directly respond when asked by Shoebridge if he had ever seen “such a complete savaging” of a case as Fleming delivered, but said a permanent stay was “an unusual outcome” for a prosecution.
“We’re mindful of that. It was an unusual, difficult case,” he said.
“We’re conscious of the criticism that’s been leveled at some of the activities of the police in the course of the investigation.
”I point out in the course of the ruling delivered by the magistrate, she also said that there was sufficient evidence of criminal conduct in the ... possession of investigators for the young person to be charged.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/mar/10/australia-in-colour-recolourised-film-ushers-into-existence-a-new-kind-of-fiction | Television & radio | 2021-03-09T16:30:01.000Z | Luke Buckmaster | Australia in Colour: recolourised film ushers into existence a new kind of fiction | Paolo Cherchi Usai – the Italian curator and former head of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) – once put forward an elegant definition of moving image preservation, calling it “the science of gradual loss and the art of coming to terms with its consequences”. Those melancholic words present the dispossession of our celluloid and digital pasts as inevitable, and efforts to maintain them a will-o’-the-wisp exercise: impossible to achieve, like reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow.
But loss is far from the first thing that comes to mind after watching the second season of SBS’s four-part documentary series Australia in Colour. Separated into different themes, the first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the stolen generations and the arrival of contraceptive pills; the second, about sport, investigates national heroes and drinking culture.
The first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the Stolen Generation and the arrival of contraceptive pills.
It is a project of restoration as well as preservation. These practices are linked but, in the words of Australian Centre for the Moving Image digital preservation technician Ben Abbott, “discreetly different concepts”. Like the first season, which arrived in 2019, the film-makers use cutting edge technology to colourise dusty black and white footage supplied by the NFSA, adding fresh modern vitality to motion pictures previously bound by the technology of the time.
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This is the central novelty of the series, narrator Hugo Weaving semi-regularly reminding us that these old monochrome visions are now “in colour for the first time”. Australia in Colour belongs to a growing trend of recent historical documentaries that apply colourisation processes including TV productions America in Colour (three seasons, from 2017 to 2020), Auschwitz Untold: In Colour (2020) and Peter Jackson’s 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old, which restored and embellished first world war footage supplied by London’s Imperial War Museum.
Australia in Colour pledges a dimension of colour that is symbolic as well as literal, matching its newfangled images with the promise of a more culturally diverse and detailed portrait of the past. This includes addressing gaps created by various historical omissions – including a focus on neglected demographics such as the Indigenous population. The passage of time has been politically appropriated, but not in a bad way; rather as an attempt to right previous wrongs.
Australia in Colour pledges a dimension of colour that is symbolic as well as literal – including a focus on neglected demographics such as Indigenous people. Photograph: SBS
In They Shall Not Grow Old, on the other hand, Jackson keeps his focus where it has always been: on men serving on the frontline, rather than groups whose efforts have often been consigned to the historical dustbin, such as women serving in hospitals. Jackson told Guardian Australia in 2018 that this was due to limitations in scope (“you need to do something focused and intensely and do it justice”) but it’s perhaps also because his primary interest lay elsewhere: not in correcting injustices but using technology to pursue visually authentic representations of the past.
The director expressed utter faith in his processes, insisting that “we’re not adding anything that wasn’t there on the day it was shot” but rather “bringing it back to what it was 100 years ago”. But that’s simply not true. As the NFSA website explains, choosing colours and shades to apply to these kinds of productions involves making decisions informed by various sources, from weather records to letters, newspaper reports and interviews with historians. The idea that we are watching the exact colours once observed in real-life is absurd.
So we have an interesting paradox: through the pursuit of historical accuracy the film-makers have ushered into existence a new kind of fiction. Some believe this sort of fiction – born in the era of sophisticated digital manipulation – has altered the very nature of cinema.
Choosing colours and shades for recolourisation projects involves making decisions informed by various sources, from weather records to letters, newspaper reports and interviews with historians. Photograph: SBS
In his influential book The Language of New Media, academic Lev Manovich argues that constructing and manipulating images digitally “represents a return to 19th century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated”. This means that cinema “can no longer be distinguished from animation” because it is now not a technology but rather “a sub-genre of painting”.
It’s hard to disagree when we watch any of the aforementioned colourisation projects (or, for that matter, CGI-slathered blockbusters, with their screensaver-like vistas, stuffed with visual stimuli). While the restored footage is impressive, it has an element of the unreal; the colours look feathery and faded, almost pastel.
Sometimes, as is the case in Auschwitz Untold: In Colour, the colourisation creates unintended psychological effects. This production captures many horrific settings, such as Nazi-run ghettoes and concentration camps, which would be shocking in any format. However, the added colour has given them a softness, a texture that appears gentle and autumnal. Nothing like the harsh, inhumane properties of black and white, which are more emotionally suited to the content. Steven Spielberg once addressed why Schindler’s List was in monochrome, saying: “The Holocaust was life without light. For me, the symbol of life is colour. That’s why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black and white”.
There is also the fact that what looks and sounds convincing to contemporary viewers inevitably changes as technologies evolve. Accounts of 19th century audiences running in fear of their lives during a legendary screening of the Lumière brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat may have been overblown, but viewers of the time would have undoubtedly considered it thrillingly realistic and immersive. As they probably will with the technical achievements of Australia in Colour – which brings, as producer Jo-anne McGowan says, old pictures “into the present in a very vivid and emotional way”.
Cinema “can no longer be distinguished from animation” because it is now not a technology but rather “a sub-genre of painting”.
We have entered a new era of immersive experiences now, during these nascent years of virtual and augmented realities. VR for instance is being sold with the promise of allowing users to “go anywhere” – including across the space/time continuum. There are already many historical VR experiences, including tours of Anne Frank’s Secret Annex and journeys through concentration camps. And use of AR is increasing rapidly in various sectors, including education, with some classrooms using AR to augment (in more ways than one) history lessons.
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In the future, real-world historical sites will use augmented reality overlays to bring to life vivid spatial representations of the past (in fact this process has already begun). In the words of VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña, “the audience will not only be in the middle of the story but they’ll be able to move around within it”. Freed from the tyranny of two-dimensional screens, we will experience volumetric scenes with a dimensional power traditional film and television can never achieve. By that point, the idea of a production spruiking the novelty of turning black-and-white pictures into colour will feel rather quaint.
The makers of these next-gen spatial experiences will need to do their research to make informed decisions about how to accurately render these spaces – not dissimilar to the way colourists consult weather records and history books. Who will keep track of these new kinds of content? How will they be captured, preserved, restored? As artists continue the dialogue between past and future, finding new ways to look forward while looking back, it’s likely the current era of moving image preservation – with all its challenges and consequences, its sense of gradual loss – will feel like the good old days in comparison.
Australia in Colour season two starts on SBS and will be available On Demand on Wednesday, 10 March at 8.30pm | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/sep/12/london-fashion-week-2014-glamour | Fashion | 2014-09-12T18:51:57.000Z | Jess Cartner-Morley | London fashion week 2014 sees reboot for wellies, glamour and digital flair | Oscar gowns, ethical fashion and Wellington boots. Welcome to London fashion week, where there is a trend to suit every taste.
The hot-ticket show of the 82 designers on the catwalk schedule is the homecoming show for Marchesa, the label that has ruled the red carpet over the past decade. Sandra Bullock picked up her Oscar in Marchesa in 2010; Michelle Obama chose a Marchesa dress for the White House correspondents' dinner earlier this year.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, the brand's British designers, Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig, are temporarily relocating from New York fashion week to London for a celebrity-packed Saturday night show.
But this is London, where humour – and rainwear – are held in as high esteem as glamour, and there is also a buzz around the second show by Wellington boot label Hunter Original. Last season, Hunter burst on to the scene with a show in which the magician Dynamo appeared to make models disappear from the catwalk. This season, the invitation is a swimming cap and the venue a historic London pool, fuelling rumours of another spectacular.
Stella McCartney, whose husband, Alasdhair Willis, is the creative director of Hunter, joins him on the London schedule on Sunday night, when she presents a collection of ethically-made "green carpet" eveningwear, at an evening co-hosted by Anna Wintour and Livia Firth.
Among the less well-known names on the schedule, the Thomas Tait label will be under scrutiny. This will be the first collection since Tait won the highly competitive LVMH Young Fashion Designer prize, and the industry is curious to discover what difference €300,000 prize money, and the support of LVMH business mentors, can make to a talented young designer.
The UK fashion sector is in a boomtime, worth £26bn this year compared with £21bn in 2009. On the opening day of London fashion week the cobbles of Somerset House were crowded, the mood upbeat, the organisation slick. First on to the catwalk was Korean-born Jackie JS Lee, a Central Saint Martins graduate and previous winner of the prestigious Harrods award, whose small label is based in east London. Her aesthetic is sleek minimalism, with a soft edge. The show opened with a navy silk jumpsuit worn under a matching blazer, with the subtlest flash of orange at the back vent. There was a nice balance of soft femininity and crispness in how the fluid silk tailoring was finished. The modern feel of the collection was carried through into the diverse casting of the models.
With the likes of Cara Delevingne still en route from the New York shows, the star turn on the first day was Peter Fitzgerald, Google's UK sales director and digital guru of the British Fashion Council. London fashion week's welcome speech, customarily given at Somerset House by Samantha Cameron or Boris Johnson, was instead beamed live from Fitzgerald's Mountain View office. Fitzgerald revealed that his team had held pre-fashion week "digital bootcamps" with London's designers, at which "they were each challenged to do one thing digitally, this fashion week, that they had never done before".
The biggest names on the London fashion week are all bringing their digital A-game this season, as the contest to stage London's most forward-thinking fashion show hots up.
Topshop is looking to harness the cool of Instragram. During the last London fashion week, in February, over 100,000 photos were posted with the LFW hashtag. The livestream of the Topshop Unique show on Sunday will combine catwalk footage with photos from five influential Instagram users who will each document the event in their own style, offering online viewers varying perspectives on the collection.
Burberry has secured a powerful tech ally in Twitter, which will debut its "Buy" button when the Burberry collection hits the catwalk on Monday. Burberry's 3.12 million Twitter followers will be able to buy the nail polish used on the catwalk models direct from a tweet. Burberry has invested enormous amounts of money and time in building social-media relationships, through such innovations as the "Tweetwalk", introduced three years ago, whereby each model's look was tweeted to Burberry's followers from backstage before it appeared on the catwalk. The Buy button is a step towards converting those relationships into sales.
At the other end of the scale, social media could be a game-changer for the lesser-known designers running small-scale businesses who make up the bulk of names on the London fashion week schedule.
Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council (BFC), said: "For those designers, it is social media that really opens opportunities, because it's free."
When the BFC launched its digital campaign within the industry a year ago, 33% of designers had e-commerce websites. That figure has grown to 43%. BFC chairman Natalie Massenet said: "Our target is 100%. And I believe we will get there."
Massenet herself has over a decade of experience in how a partnership between fashion and the digital world can be mutually advantageous. In 2010, she sold the Net-a-Porter online fashion retailer she founded for an estimated £50m. She retains the role of executive chairman at the company. She arrived at Friday's shows direct not from New York fashion week, but from Cupertino, having prioritised attending the unveiling of the Apple Watch over the Manhattan catwalk shows – further proof, as if it were needed, that Silicon Valley is becoming as important a fashion hub as London, New York, Milan or Paris. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/20/remember-when-chatting-about-the-weather-wasnt-sinister-and-weird | Opinion | 2023-09-20T06:15:01.000Z | First Dog on the Moon | Remember when chatting about the weather wasn’t sinister and weird? | First Dog on the Moon | null | Partial |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/12/ariel-sharon-legacy-of-division | Opinion | 2014-01-12T22:25:43.000Z | Editorial | Ariel Sharon: legacy of division | For Palestinians living in the West Bank, Ariel Sharon's legacy is clear. They can see it from their windows: the monument of grey, graffitoed slabs topped with barbed wire and dotted with watchtowers that make up parts of the West Bank separation barrier. This aggressive line of control, which when complete will extend 700km, is the prime physical reminder of the life of a divisive leader whose affiliations and policies shifted dramatically but who could claim to have influenced the shape of Israel more than anyone except David Ben-Gurion.
Mr Sharon's biography is rich in symbolism: for his fifth birthday, his father gave him a dagger. (He gave him a violin the following year, but by all accounts young Ariel did not much take to it.) The weapon was prescient for the boy who became the embodiment of the Israeli soldier-hero and called his autobiography Warrior. In 1948, aged just 20, he fought alongside his godfather, Ben-Gurion, in the war for independence; in 1967 he won a tactically complex victory during the six-day war; and in 1973 he brought about what many regard as the turning point in the Yom Kippur war by leading his unit across the Suez canal.
Mr Sharon was adored by his troops, but a reputation for brutality was never far behind. In 1982, serving as defence minister, he allowed Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred more than 700 men, women and children. An Israeli government inquiry concluded that Mr Sharon bore personal responsibility for the incident. But it was Mr Sharon's promotion of settlements that would produce the most vitriolic reaction against him in the wider world. He was an early enthusiast for building Jewish homes in occupied territory and, for almost three decades, from the mid-1970s, he used a number of cabinet roles to push more than 100 developments into the West Bank and Gaza.
There is a twist in the tail of Mr Sharon's political career, which came during his final period as prime minister. Like much in his life, the circumstances of his election in 2001 are controversial: in September 2000 he made a deeply provocative visit to the holy Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif with 1,000 police officers, sparking a riot that coincided with the start of the second intifada. In the climate of spiralling violence that followed, Israelis turned to the strongman of Suez, who was elected prime minister the following February. It was during this term that Mr Sharon took the substantial leap of moving to a strategy of "disengagement", unilaterally withdrawing troops from the Gaza strip and bulldozing Israeli settlements there. The Israeli right, including members of the Likud party he had helped found, were furious. Soon after, Mr Sharon left the party and set up the more centrist Kadima.
The stroke that felled him in January 2006 left his newfound policy to crumble, and created one of the enduring mysteries of recent Middle Eastern politics. At the end of his life, was the great war leader determined to secure peace by withdrawing from the West Bank? In the optimist's view, the point of Mr Sharon creating Kadima was to make the second, much more difficult, withdrawal. Pessimists say the Gaza pullout was a ruse to hold on to the West Bank, or that it traumatised Israeli politics so deeply that even he would not have had the capital to bulldoze Jewish homes there. All we know for sure is that in the subsequent eight years in which Mr Sharon lay in a coma, the settlements only grew.
It is tantalising to speculate that the illness of a man who had spent so much of his life at war may have robbed the region of its greatest chance for peace, but in the end Mr Sharon must be judged on what he did, rather than what he did not do. There may be nostalgia for his decisiveness and strength, and we may applaud the withdrawal from Gaza, but we cannot cheer his role in creating the settlements, or his long-held belief that the fight against "terror" can be waged only with bullets and bombs. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/21/don-giovanni-review-glyndebourne-mariame-clement-obsession-distress-and-danger-in-uneven-new-staging | Music | 2023-05-21T14:14:28.000Z | Tim Ashley | Don Giovanni review – obsession, distress and danger in uneven new production | Each age sees its concerns reflected in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, more acutely, perhaps, than in any other opera. “Once a figure of rebellion against conventions,” director Mariame Clément writes in a recent Guardian article, “he has come to embody what many rebel against today. In today’s world,” she adds, “many people would consider Giovanni himself a patriarchal figure whose statue they would gladly topple.” And indeed the first thing we see in her new Glyndebourne production is video footage of his statue being hauled to the ground as Leporello looks on.
What follows, however, is altogether more uncertain. Clément acknowledges that this most complex of operas admits a multiplicity of interpretations, and she is often far from simplistic in her approach to its ironies and ambiguities. But what she offers can also be anodyne and fussy, at odds on occasion with the sensuality and demonic fire we find in the score, despite the belching flames that here accompany Giovanni’s eventual descent to hell.
The setting is a hotel where all the characters are guests, and where Zerlina (Victoria Randem) and Masetto (Michael Mofidian), are having their hen and stag parties – though the fact that they are not yet married in some ways dilutes the threat, moral as well as sexual, posed to their relationship by Andrey Zhilikovsky’s charismatic if predatory Don. Clément dispenses with the fashionable trope that Anna (Venera Gimadieva) really desires Giovanni, though, in a twist to the narrative, she is now sleeping with Oleksiy Palchykov’s Ottavio, to the Commendatore’s (Jerzy Butrin) evident concern.
Charismatic and predatory… Andrey Zhilikovsky as Don Giovanni with Victoria Randem as Zerlina. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith
Mikhail Timoshenko’s sympathetic if conflicted Leporello, meanwhile, seething with resentment, is genuinely distressed at the thought of his own wife being subject to Giovanni’s attentions, but is also uneasily fascinated by the multiple photos of breasts – a horribly objectified visual list of his master’s conquests – that appear on the walls during the Catalogue Aria. There are too many extras wandering round when they’re not really needed, however, while Ruzan Mantashyan’s Elvira, portrayed as conventionally obsessive here, makes her first appearance way too early, searching for Giovanni among the hotel guests during the Anna/Ottavio duet.
Zhilikovsky sounds as attractive as he looks, which makes him very dangerous, and Timoshenko is terrific with his irony and wounded pride. Mofidian and Randem are similarly outstanding: he’s sweet, affectionate and touching despite the bluster; her Vedrai Carino is meltingly lovely. Gimadieva, however, seemed oddly cautious throughout. Mantashyan is impressive, if steely in Mi Tradì, while Palchykov makes a strikingly assertive Ottavio albeit vocally somewhat constricted. Conductor Evan Rogister hurtles through the score, often favouring breakneck speed over dramatic weight. Despite occasional slips in stage-pit coordination, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment played for him with sinewy leanness of tone and admirable clarity.
In rep until 15 July. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/aug/22/gcse-results-school-deprivation-achievement | Education | 2013-08-22T12:24:21.000Z | Helen Pidd | GCSE results: the school where deprivation is no bar to achievement | When Winterhill came into being nine years ago, it faced serious challenges. It was the product of an unhappy merger between two schools in the Kimberworth area of Rotherham – one of which was in special measures – and little was expected of its 1,240 pupils, many of whom hailed from some of the most deprived areas of the country.
No wonder Roger Burman, Winterhill's barrel-chested headteacher, was beaming on Thursday morning as he welcomed a line of nervous teenagers into the school hall, some of whom confessed they had been awake since 5am ("and I usually get up at 1pm", giggled Amy Jones as she loitered outside).
Dressed in flip-flops and jeans, muscles bursting out of his light blue shirt, Burman was celebrating the fifth consecutive year of improving results, with 90% of students achieving five A*s to C – 62% including English and Maths. When Burman took over seven years ago, that figure was "in the 40s". As we talked, one boy interrupted to give the head a hug: "I got an A in core science, sir!"
"Not one of our pupils this year will leave year 11 with nothing," said Joanne Cater-Whitham, one of the deputy heads.
"Even one lad who came to us with almost no English, a month before exams, has come away with one D. It's a difficult catchment area, but the staff are 100% determined that they all achieve their potential.
"For a lot of our students, getting five Cs is a massive achievement, but it's what they need to get into college. The distance many need to travel to get there is enormous."
For almost a quarter of Winterhill's students, English is a second language, while 58% of pupils are poor enough to qualify for free school meals. In recent years the school has taken in 100 eastern European children, many Slovakian and Romanian Roma, who bring with them extra challenges.
"Some can't afford their own uniforms or pencil tins and we have to teach them the most basic things, like how to queue up for dinner," said Cater-Whitham.
Kamol Meesri, a slight 16-year-old with spiky black hair, looked over the moon."I got a C in English, I can't believe it," he said. Kamol moved to Rotherham seven years ago from Thailand when his mum married a local man, and could barely speak a word of English on arrival. "English was always a difficult subject for me, but I knew I needed to get a C to go to college."
Nearby, English teacher Stephanie Noonan hovered by Bradley Nelson as he opened his envelope. "Thank god," he said, seeing he'd managed Cs in both English and maths. "I'm buzzing, Miss," he said, adding that he didn't want to go to college, but planned to get a job in engineering.
"Yours were the first results I looked for, Bradley," Noonan told him, confiding later that he was somewhat "hit or miss" in the classroom.
"He was always more bothered about his image than his grades, but he knew he needed those Cs and he was predicted a D in English so has done really well."
Michael Buchanan, 16, was delighted to do better than he expected, and particularly to get As in his sciences. "I'm really happy," he said. "This I what I needed to make the next step to college."
Winterhill does not just aim to get pupils over the five Cs threshold, but tries hard to get the best out of their most able students too. This year's star performer was Bethany Harcourt, a cheery girl with long red curls, who had bagged seven A*s to go with the A* in maths she got last year when she took the exam early. She hopes to one day be either a paediatric oncologist or a surgeon - "I'm not sure yet." But on Thursday, her only plan was to celebrate. "My parents have promised to take me to Nando's," she said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/17/the-holdovers-review-brilliant-paul-giamatti-hits-the-happysad-sweet-spot | Film | 2024-01-17T09:00:26.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The Holdovers review – brilliant Paul Giamatti hits the happy/sad sweet spot | The year’s best Christmas movie arrives in the UK a bit late for Christmas: it is a genial, gentle, redemptive dramedy from Alexander Payne which hits the happy/sad sweet spot with Payne’s sure aim. It is taken from TV writer David Hemingson’s impeccably crafted screenplay, a masterclass in incremental, indirect character revelations and plot transitions. The Holdovers is set in 1970, consciously (or maybe self-consciously) crafted to look like a film which its characters could have gone to see at the time, with the funny, rueful dialogue and melancholy sense of place that you might find in something by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, and a madeleine soundtrack from Cat Stevens, Labi Siffre and more.
But of course it also looks like an Alexander Payne movie, with the spiky intergenerational negotiation, the road movie sadness, the odd-couple energy and the not-so-private life of a humiliated schoolteacher. Paul Giamatti plays Mr Hunham, a cantankerous classics master at a New England boys’ boarding school where he himself was once a pupil; he is a stickler for discipline and academic standards, nicknamed “Wall-Eye” due to his lazy eye. He is unmarried and lives at the school himself. With exquisite melancholy and cruelty, the film shows how he is in the same state of arrested-development bachelorhood as his pupils, but with squalor and disillusionment in his case considerably well advanced. Like Giamatti’s character in Payne’s film Sideways, Hunham is a drinker, though without any pretensions to connoisseurship. Like Matthew Broderick’s teacher in Payne’s Election, or indeed Reese Witherspoon’s character in Payne’s upcoming Election sequel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Hunham has learned to absorb disappointment and frustration as part of the teacher’s working life.
He is loathed by almost everyone, especially the principal Dr Woodrup (Andrew Garman), who is furious at Hunham for flunking one of the richest boys and having the bad taste to insist on real grades for real academic work – thus ruining this stupid and entitled brat’s chance at an Ivy League school and ending any chance at more donations from his wealthy father. To punish him, Dr Woodrup contrives to make Hunham look after the “holdovers”, the pupils who can’t get home for the Christmas holidays, including an angry, self-laceratingly unhappy boy called Angus, played by a remarkably talented newcomer Dominic Sessa.
More importantly still, the eerily empty school is dominated by Miss Lamb, the school’s cook and a woman of colour resoundingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph (like Giamatti, a Golden Globe winner for her performance). Like the menfolk she is marooned there over Christmas, and is suppressing her grief and agony for her son, a former pupil on a scholarship connected to her employment who has just been killed serving in Vietnam – precisely the military service that the white boys are getting prestigious college places to avoid.
Race and class and toxic masculinity are thus at stake here and it’s another salient reminder of what was important during the Vietnam war: unlike the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures of a later generation, the US had the draft and education was the centre of the unfair ways in which the draft could be circumvented. It was literally a matter of life and death.
Of course, audiences will be waiting for grumpy Mr Hunham and angry Angus, both lonely and family-deprived and images of each other at different life-stages, to achieve their intimacy breakthrough; perhaps it is no great surprise that they do, but this is managed with wit, style, forthright and ingenious narrative invention. Arguably Miss Lamb’s story takes second place to this central dynamic, but her performance is excellent and Payne and Hemingson create space for her character to breathe, particularly in the sequence in which she is reunited with her sister.
Has Payne punched harder than this in the past? Maybe. But the sympathy, richness and gentleness of this picture are still a marvel: a grownup drama for grownup people. There is scope, however, for wondering why a story like this has to be placed in the past. Could it be updated to a school in 2024? I wonder, just as I wondered while watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, if the 70s setting gets the film-maker out of being bogged down in the 21st-century world of identity politics and the more clamorous demands of contemporary issues, while allowing everything to happen in a world paradoxically innocent of political and social guilt.
But what a unique talent Giamatti is; it’s a pleasure to see him play a movie lead, his first for a while, and his prominence in this really good film is a signal that the cinema could be moving back to a more approachable world of authentic drama and analogue talent.
The Holdovers is released on 19 January in UK and Irish cinemas, and is screening in Australian cinemas now. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/20/greatest-sexual-taboo-polyamorous-transgender | Life and style | 2013-04-20T06:59:01.000Z | Patrick Barkham | Why three in a bed isn't a crowd' - the polyamorous trio | Like many students, the shy boy who studied computer science got drunk in the college bar with a girl from the year below. They snogged and – sharing a love of photography, computers and cups of tea – fell in love. Six years later, they married. A few years on, however, and this everyday story turned in an unexpected direction when the young man's hair began to thin.
"That was the point I was no longer able to be in denial – time was catching up, testosterone was catching up. I had visions of myself as an old man sitting in a nursing home waiting to die, crying all the time and nobody understanding why. I thought, this is intolerable, it cannot go on – I've got to do something."
The young man became Sarah, now a chatty, self-assured city councillor who lives in Cambridge. A stereotypical way of describing trans women in childhood is to say they feel like "a girl trapped in a boy's body," says Sarah, but she believes few people think at that level. "As a kid, I assumed that everybody wanted to be a girl and some people were lucky enough to be born that way. Then it very rapidly became clear that this was something that we did not talk about and it got buried very, very deep inside."
As a teenager, when she walked past window displays of women's clothes, she would avert her eyes "in case someone saw me looking and would know. That's the level of paranoia and it took a long time to get over it."
Only a small minority of marriages survive one partner changing sex and Sarah is no longer married to Sylvia, the woman she fell in love with when they were students. But this is only because the law forbids two women to be married. When Sarah completed her transition with gender-reassignment surgery in January 2007, she and Sylvia were compelled to divorce, despite the fact that they were very much together. So they are now civil partners instead, with a wedding album and a divorce certificate stowed away in a drawer in their house.
Sylvia, who works in computing in Cambridge, is remarkably phlegmatic about her partner's change of sex, and describes herself as "heterosexual by default" before Sarah's transition. "I never really considered dating women before, but when I look back, the relationship Sarah and I had when she was presenting male was a bit lesbian," she says. "The dynamics were a lot more like two women living together when compared with other opposite-sex relationships. I had no objections when Sarah wanted to transition. I knew it would be difficult and I worried about whether both of us would experience discrimination and whether it would be scary, but I didn't see a problem adapting to the fact that someone I loved was going to have differently arranged genitals. No biggie."
Sylvia even had some laser and electrolysis treatment to remove her armpit hair so she could empathise with some of the physical pain that Sarah was experiencing.
After Sarah's surgery, it was not simply a case of Sylvia loving the person she had always loved. Like any big life change, transition affected Sarah's personality. "Before she transitioned to female, she was really quiet and nerdy and I was doing the talking for two," says Sylvia.
As a woman, Sarah is now forthright and confident. "It's amazing how people blossom and evolve when their relationships change," says Sylvia of Sarah. "There was something really nice that was brought out when she transitioned."
For Sylvia, the toughest part of Sarah's transition was being forced to replace their marriage with a civil partnership. "I thought it wouldn't make a difference," says Sylvia. "I'm a scientist, I'm rational. It's just a bit of paper, but it made us cry." In contrast to the poetry of the wedding vows, they found the language of the civil partnership ceremony like a business arrangement.
Sylvia and Sarah hope to remarry when the marriage (same-sex couples) bill becomes law, but their original marriage can never be restored in the eyes of the law. "When the registrar pronounced us civil partners it felt like the state was kicking us in the teeth," adds Sarah.
The transformation of their relationship did not end there, however. When Sarah was transitioning, she struck up conversation online with Zoe O'Connell, a computer network manager who is also in the Territorial Army. Zoe was seeking a good place for laser hair removal in East Anglia and Sarah was able to recommend one, so they met for a cup of tea. Bonding over their shared experience of transition, they became good friends.
While Sarah's path to gender reassignment surgery had been gradual, Zoe had a lightbulb moment. Like Sarah, she had entered into a heterosexual marriage; unlike Sarah, Zoe had three children with her wife. And it was not until the marriage broke down eight years ago that she began to question her gender.
"Splitting up, I tried to prove that I was a bloke and failed spectacularly. I had my hair cut short and joined the army," Zoe remembers. When she saw a photograph of herself with a shaven head she realised: "That's so not me."
She began to explore trans issues. "I was chatting to someone who I knew was trans online and it was a sudden dawning – 'Oh right, this isn't normal, I'm a girl. Shit.'"
When Sarah had surgery at a hospital in Brighton, Zoe accompanied Sylvia and they fretted in a pub. Zoe spent a period "part-time" before going "full-time" four months after Sarah. "It got ridiculous," remembers Zoe. "At one point I ended up flip-flopping between boy-mode and girl-mode seven times in a day." Zoe was treated at the same hospital as Sarah.
Some months later, Sarah and Zoe went to Brighton again to support a mutual friend's surgery and this time shared a twin-bedded hotel room. "There was sexual tension in the room," remembers Sarah, laughing. Sarah and Zoe were falling in love.
Feeling increasingly stressed about their feelings, Sarah, Zoe and Sylvia sat down to talk and, together, they "renegotiated the bounds of the existing relationship," as Sarah puts it.
Soon afterwards, Zoe moved into Sarah and Sylvia's house. At first, they tried sleeping together in a big bed but the person in the middle was always very uncomfortable. Now Zoe has her own room and often sleeps there, although the three all move between bedrooms.
Many people might assume that Sylvia would struggle to cope with her husband becoming her same-sex partner. For her to then accept the transformation of a monogamous relationship into a polyamorous one must be an enormous strain. But the striking thing when I meet Sylvia, Sarah and Zoe at their home is the absence of strain: their unconventional domestic arrangements – they also have five snakes – soon seem completely normal, perhaps because they are all so at ease with each other.
"A lot of people looking at this from the outside would probably see you as the long-suffering wife," says Sarah to Sylvia.
"None of the gender or poly stuff has ever been a problem," replies Sylvia. "Irritating personal habits are far worse."
Sylvia admits she felt "a little bit excluded" when Sarah and Zoe were going through transition – "I could never quite know what it was like" – but this period also helped her bond with Zoe: they both worried about Sarah's operation.
What about polyamory, though? "We had a lot to gain and nothing to lose really," says Sylvia. "Transition made my relationship with Sarah that much stronger because we'd been through so much together, so it was like, well, we can do anything after this."
Sarah, Sylvia and Zoe are not "poly-evangelists" but simply say it works for them. "Some people are quite jealous or need that level of commitment from one person that you can't get in a poly relationship so it doesn't suit everyone," says Zoe.
Isn't three fundamentally an awkward number? "It can be really handy," says Sylvia. "If two of us are massively disagreeing about whether to do something around the house, we can have someone to break the deadlock. As long as you're careful enough so it doesn't end up with two people picking on one."
"We're all adult enough not to do that," adds Sarah.
Their relationship is a "triangle" (a "V-shaped" polyamorous relationship in which not all three members of the relationship are connected would be more tricky, they say), and they share many passions. Zoe and Sylvia go geocaching together; Sarah and Zoe go horseriding. All three women have Lib Dem politics (Zoe hopes to become the first openly trans person to stand for parliament for a major political party) and computing in common. They also enjoy climbing, mountaineering and canyoning together. With Zoe already having three children, they are not planning any more. "I'm not into children," says Sylvia decisively.
"I've got three already," adds Zoe. And Sarah? "Governed by the other two really," she laughs.
Zoe maintains a good relationship with her ex-wife and sees their two daughters and son every weekend; she, Sarah and Sylvia usually stay with them at Zoe's parents house. As children tend to be, hers are very accepting (they don't call her Mum or Dad – simply Zoe) although Zoe admits to feeling bad if "they get some stick" at school. "They were too young to understand gender when I transitioned and when the three of us got together they just mentally shrugged," she says. "It is normal to them."
Zoe has had no problems in the Territorial Army either, but it has been harder to gain acceptance from older family members. While Zoe has an excellent relationship with her parents and her brother, Sarah has been estranged from her father since her transition, although her relationship with her mother is "better than it's ever been". Sylvia's mother is "accepting", but her grandparents struggled to adapt to her husband becoming her female civil partner, although Sylvia and Sarah were reconciled with them before they died.
Living in Cambridge, they rarely experience discrimination or abuse. Sarah is not the city's first openly trans councillor, and when they pop down to their local real-ale pub: "No one bats an eyelid. We're probably some of the less 'out there' people," says Zoe.
They do not hide their living arrangements but Zoe says they invariably develop a language of "partners" and other careful phrasing to avoid having to constantly explain themselves. "If your living arrangements or social situation is abnormal, you don't just come out once, you come out all the time," she says. But occasionally it can be fun to observe people's reactions. "I come out as trans first and then bisexual," says Zoe. "Just when people are getting really confused you hit them with 'poly' and their mind just explodes."
All three women feel liberated by their different experiences of transition and they know quite a few trans people now living polyamorous lives. "Gender transition is one of the most sexually taboo things you can do, and you do it and you realise the world doesn't end. Then you start thinking, what other things have I always taken for granted that are just wrong?" says Sarah. "In some ways I resent being born trans because it's been a lot of pain, a lot of hassle, and it has dominated my life. But at other times I almost feel grateful because it has given me an attitude that almost nothing is sacred and I don't have to be a prisoner to this very English 'mustn't make a fuss, mustn't challenge things' life of quiet desperation." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/aug/02/sex-and-the-city-series-one | Television & radio | 2011-08-02T13:44:00.000Z | Julia Raeside | Box Set Club: Sex and the City | Watching the first series of Sex and the City again after 10 years was an exercise in rosy nostalgia and painful wincing. When I first met Carrie Bradshaw and her friends in 1998, I fell pretty hard for them. The show quickly became the one I could not miss. Social arrangements had to fit around my weekly date with four fabulously-dressed fictional women having their pretend brunches. Yes, I was pretty cool.
I had graduated, moved to London and was thrilled by the possibilities of living in a city. Sex and the City coincided perfectly with my tentative first steps into urban adult life and I clung to it like a life raft. And I really felt that the women on screen were like me, albeit more expensively dressed, with better jobs and nicer flats. Looking back now, they were about as similar to me as the Empire State Building is to my shoe. They talk openly about masturbation, penis size and intimate sexual practise while entirely sober. I'd have to be blootered to get that graphic. And they never spend more than a couple of weeks being single. And they're thin.
The first season opens with what was obviously the pilot episode, tacked on to a series that was filmed much later. The writers try to jam the entire feminist manifesto (plus shopping) into the first half hour and Carrie sports a vast ginger hairdo like the one she had when she played Annie. The mass of agitated blonde worms make its appearance in episode two.
I'd forgotten how much Carrie talks to the camera in these early episodes. And the narrative is peppered with self-conscious vox pops from anonymous extras like quotes in a naive GCSE essay on sexual politics. But the pontificating about the differences between men and women was new to my 23-year-old ears back then. Now it sounds trite and hackneyed but I suppose that's the trouble with fashion, it dates quickly. I had to fast-forward past the bit where Carrie compares the divide between men and women to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In those early episodes, some of the plotting and exposition is as clunky as Carrie's incredibly noisy laptop keyboard. Seriously, she wants to get that examined at the Genius Bar. It's deafening.
But it doesn't take long for this series to slowly morph into the show I remember with such affection. Carrie is a maddening fruitcake of a woman but her comic timing gives her the necessary spark of appeal. And despite the often irritating displays of self-doubt, Carrie's insecurity is what spoke so loudly to me and millions of other women trying to find happiness back then.
In episode one she sleeps with a repeat offender called Curt who always loves her and leaves her, under the pretext of turning the tables on him. But men holding huge "Do not feed the ego" signs are like iron filings to Carrie's skinny little magnet. She's lovable for about five minutes – I used to properly adore her – then you want to slam that sash window on her stupid fingers and tell her to get a grip. Then she crumples into a heap and you like her again. Big enters the picture in the first episode and is the catalyst that turns Carrie from a happy-go-lucky single gal into an obsessive, insecure nightmare.
Miranda, the independent lawyer, has her defences set to stun in this first season. She snaps and snarls with such ferocity it's a wonder her friends don't march her straight into therapy. Her love interest in the first series is a sweet, nerdy Skipper who is clearly the blueprint for Steve, the adorable and much sexier dweeb she finally marries.
She treats Skipper so badly that you kind of loath him for not telling her to get lost. Then later in the series, she kisses a lesbian she's using to advance her career, just to make sure she's not gay as "life would be so much easier". I had perhaps the fondest memories of Miranda but proto-Miranda really isn't a very sympathetic character at all. She gets better, and more layered, in later series.
Charlotte surprised me the most as I remembered her being pretty one-dimensional and a total prude from the outset. But just in this series she has a threesome with her boyfriend and poses nude for an artist who likes to paint massive close-ups of vaginas. Quite the goer.
And Samantha, the sexually voracious one goes through cycles of incessant bonking, followed by a relationship that's always against her better judgment. In this series, she falls for a man so whole-heartedly that she waits before sleeping with him. Restraint is not a word in her vocabulary. Only when she finally "unwraps the goods" does she discover he has a tiny penis and the relationship droops thereafter. It's actually a relief when she reverts to type. Her sole function in the first series is to demonstrate sexual confidence at all times, throwing the other three into sharp relief while they're having self-conscious sex in their bras.
Needless to say, I have every episode of Sex and the City on DVD but series one is not the most-viewed in my collection. It has been good going back to the beginning at a time when the films have done such a demolition job on the brand I loved so much. I enjoyed reminding myself what a panacea this show was to me when I was lurking in the self-imposed gloom of my own single life. And though we went our separate ways for a while, I shall always love it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/jul/26/housingmarket.interestrates | Business | 2007-07-26T12:57:22.000Z | Larry Elliott | House price inflation slips below 10% | House price inflation in the UK slipped below 10% this month as higher interest rates took their toll on the property market, the Nationwide building society said today.
Reporting the smallest increase in house prices for more than a year, the Nationwide said the annual rise in the cost of a home had fallen from 11.1% in June to 9.9%.
The building society - one of Britain's biggest mortgage providers - said prices in July were up 0.1% on June - the smallest increase since April 2006. It said the average price of a home was now £184,270.
This month saw the latest of the five increases in borrowing costs announced by the Bank of England since August last year and the Nationwide's chief economist, Fionnuala Earley, said the market now appeared to be cooling.
"The sharp slowdown in July's house price numbers could show that potential homebuyers are thinking twice about overstretching themselves in a higher interest rate environment," Ms Earley said.
Many City economists believe the Bank will raise interest rates at least once more over the coming months - to 6% - but today's figures are likely to douse speculation that Threadneedle Street will announce back-to-back increases when its monetary policy committee meets next week. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/aug/31/socceroos-world-cup-hopes-lie-in-balance-after-japan-qualify-with-win | Football | 2017-08-31T12:28:02.000Z | Paul Connolly | Socceroos' World Cup hopes hang in balance after Japan qualify with win | Re-emphasising the bold vision he has espoused since succeeding Holger Osieck in 2013, Ange Postecoglou said this week that his team have bigger goals than simply qualifying for the World Cup. On Thursday night, however, that goal looks big enough as the Socceroos’ chances of automatically qualifying for Russia 2018 were put in jeopardy after they were defeated 2-0 by Japan in Saitama.
A first ever win on Japanese soil would have ensured Australia’s qualification but, instead, it is Japan – who scored a goal in each half, the sealer coming in the 82nd minute – who have guaranteed their passage to Russia.
Japan 2-0 Australia: World Cup 2018 qualifying – as it happened
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Australia, meanwhile, level on points with Saudi Arabia, and keen to avoid a third-place play-off scenario, must now beat Group B cellar-dwellers Thailand on Tuesday night in Melbourne in the final round of qualifying.
Moreover, they may also need to win handsomely in order to edge out Saudi Arabia on goal difference in the event the gulf state team defeats Japan on Wednesday morning in Jeddah. How crucial now those four draws in qualifying; draws that always had the feel of potential ghosts waiting to haunt the Socceroos, especially that howling, chain-clinking 2-2 draw against Thailand in Bangkok last November.
Of a more pressing concern for Postecoglou, however, is lifting his team that lacked sharpness, polish and, tonight at least, an ill Aaron Mooy.
Australia’s night got off to a sombre start with the news breaking just before kick-off that the veteran Fairfax and Fox Sports football journalist Michael Cockerill had died, aged 56. Commentator Robbie Slater all but broke down on air as he paid tribute to Cockerill, a tireless advocate for the game over decades.
There was no lift in spirits once the game began. For a team leading the group heading into the match, Japan chewed its collective nails in the build-up, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way the Blue Samurai started. With big names Keisuke Honda, Shinji Kagawa and Shinji Okasaki on the bench, Japan began brightly, the blade of their attack catching the stadium lighting just so.
Buoyed by a boisterous crowd of 60,000, they pressed Australia high up the pitch, winning a couple of early corners for their efforts. Central defenders Trent Sainsbury and Matt Spiranovic were given plenty of work to do early on but both looked composed and made some telling interceptions.
It wasn’t until the seventh minute that the Socceroos made a threatening incursion into Japanese territory, one that ended up with Tom Rogic taking a weak side-foot volley from the edge of the area after Japan failed to clear a James Troisi corner.
Though Australia dominated first-half possession (58%-42%) most of it was in their own half. When they did enjoy possession higher up the pitch they struggled to find the right ball from midfield and Robbie Kruse, who started as a lone frontman, seemed to lack support, though Brad Smith was active on the left flank – even if at times he looked rustier than a bike left out in the rain, his touch and pass heavy. It was hardly surprising given his lack of minutes for his Premier League side Bournemouth so far this season.
Australia’s best moment came late in the first half. In the 32nd minute Troisi slipped past Takashi Inui on the right touchline as if the latter were wearing lead boots. He then pushed a curling through-ball into the path of Kruse but there was a tad too much weight on it and keeper Eiji Kawashimi was able to collect it.
Six minutes later Massimo Luongo brought down a Troisi pass on his chest and beat two defenders with a sudden u-turn before finding Matthew Leckie on his inside. Leckie came within a paint job of putting the Socceroos ahead when his low shot deflected off the legs of Maya Yoshida before striking the far post with Kawashimi beaten.
Those efforts aside, the half belonged largely to Japan who showed more enterprise and more willingness to press forward in numbers. While they lacked finesse in the final third at times they fashioned a number of opportunities, first when Takuma Asano sent a header into the side netting following a cross from the left wing. Asano got another similar chance later in the half after Yuto Nagatomo crossed after some lovely tight passing in midfield.
The break-through came in the 41st minute when Nagatomo cut inside Leckie on the left wing and sent a low trajectory cross to the six-yard box. The excellent Asano, who threatened throughout the half, had ghosted away from his marker, Smith, to side foot home. Smith looked forlornly to the linesman for a flag that wasn’t forthcoming.
In the end Australia were fortunate to go the break just one down. A minute after the goal Asano linked with Gōtoku Sakai on the right wing and his inch-perfect cross found Yuya Osako who, under pressure, volleyed just wide.
The second half was dominated by Japan who had a chance in the 77th minute to put the game to bed. Inside his own half Ideguchi started a move that saw substitute Genki Haraguchi careen into space down the left channel. His cross evaded five gold shirts as it travelled through the Australian penalty box to where Idegucki was waiting to meet it with time to triangulate his options. After taking a touch he drove his shot towards the far post where it would have rippled the net but for Sainsbury putting his body on the line.
Shortly after Japan coach Vahid Halilhodžić stormed onto the field to protest a strong challenge by Mark Milligan, Japan scored the goal that ensured victory.
After Haraguchi pilfered the ball from the feet of Luongo he shuttled the ball out to Ideguchi, still with plenty to do, and with Jackson Irvine in his face. The 21-year-old ghosted to the side of Irvine and set off running along the edge of the area before smashing a right foot shot into the top right corner to clear the Japanese bench and send Australia to their knees. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/20/the-guardian-view-on-an-energy-price-shock-a-crisis-in-the-making | Opinion | 2021-09-20T17:56:03.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on an energy price shock: a crisis in the making | There is a level of government complacency about energy price shocks. Ministers think the best course of action is to just accept them. Wholesale gas prices are now more than five times their level two years ago, raising the prospect that household bills will rise by 12% next month. Shoppers could also face empty supermarket shelves as it becomes unprofitable to produce the dry ice and carbon dioxide needed to store meat products. If the energy crunch continues, industry warns, a 1970s-style three-day week might have to be introduced.
The government response has been familiar: deny the problem, deflect responsibility for failure and delay taking action. This strategy is a reminder of the importance of perceptions in a crisis. If something feels like a crisis, it is effectively a crisis. That is why perhaps Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, says there is “no question of the lights going out, of people being unable to heat their homes”. But what if people cannot afford the energy costs to heat and light their homes? About 85% of the UK’s domestic heating comes from natural gas. Fuel poverty is a real issue, especially when millions of workers are facing cuts to universal credit and a hike in national insurance. Price caps help poorer people afford necessities of life such as gas – but there’s no sign that ministers think the hardship merits more generous help.
Mr Kwarteng also made it clear he did not favour the emergence of a state-backed energy company. Yet this may be the inevitable consequence of a “supplier of last resort” that the government is setting up to pick up customers left stranded by the collapse of energy suppliers. The rightwing Tory business secretary is loath to admit that his shadow, Ed Miliband, was right when he promoted “common ownership” of key utilities. Mr Miliband also scored a direct hit from across the dispatch box by reminding MPs that when the privatised giant Centrica closed Britain’s largest gas storage site in 2017 it left the country more dependent on imports and exposed to price shocks. The Tory government at the time defended its actions saying the market knew best. Now, unlike its European neighbours, Britain has limited buffer stocks to stabilise volatile prices. Mr Miliband was making a valid point: gas privatisation had led to a lack of regulatory oversight and strategic vulnerabilities.
There is a logic behind ministers’ reluctance to elevate the present difficulties: if there’s no crisis, there can be no crisis management. The Conservative party has been in power for a decade, and it shows no sign of engineering, via industrial policy, a green transformation of the economy. Every move, rather, is in the opposite direction. Ministers are, in effect, saying that the climate emergency will be solved by the market and its institutions. There’s no sign of that happening.
To protect the security of Britain’s energy supply ministers need to accelerate the provision of domestic zero-carbon power. Instead they appear to be slowing it down. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the delay to produce a heat and buildings strategy to deal with the 10m-plus draughty homes that run on gas boilers. Greenhouse gas emissions from homes are higher today than in 2015. But the installation of electrically powered heat pumps and loft insulation are running at rates less than 10% of what’s needed by 2025, says the UK’s climate change committee. This while the government botched its £1.5bn green homes scheme, which prioritised economic stimulus over reducing carbon dioxide. The UK’s net zero pledge is simply public relations without a coherent plan to reduce emissions. A climate emergency is no place for the rigid application of free-market principles. A pity no one has told ministers. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/12/fractious-australia-has-much-to-learn-from-the-kindness-and-purpose-of-new-zealand-politics | Opinion | 2021-12-11T19:00:19.000Z | Eleanor de Jong | Fractious Australia has much to learn from the kindness and purpose of New Zealand politics | Eleanor de Jong | Pre-Covid, when international travel was still common, many Kiwi travellers received a similar question wherever they happened to be around the globe: Jacinda Ardern, is she the real deal?
The New Zealand prime minister’s devotion to a new breed of politics, one rooted in “kindness”, “compassion” and “cooperation” often seemed too saccharine to be true, especially at a time when a series of notorious bullies were voted into positions of power around the globe.
I usually answered this question brusquely, with a combination of facts and personal anecdotes from my interviews with the PM. I was interested, but not that interested, more enthralled by the dramatic twists and turns of foreign lands, where politics seemed Shakespearean compared with the warm, cosy bath of New Zealand’s Labour coalition government, now in its second term and astoundingly popular.
A record number of babies in the house, cradled by the speaker as their mothers and fathers delivered important speeches? Cute, nice, a sweet Friday news story. Freezes on politicians’ pay during Covid? Feel-good, sure. An indication of a truly new breed of politician, and a truly new way of governing? I wasn’t convinced.
Australia’s voters hold government and the news media in contempt – and the contagion is spreading
Peter Lewis
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Earlier this year, I shifted back to my native land of Australia, and settled in the Kimberley, still the country of cowboys and red rocks I remembered from my childhood.
Immediately, the absolute dysfunction of the state-federal relationship struck me, as did the absurdity of mini prime ministers individually vying for votes and cash and sway. I asked around and read around, but could find no one who could explain to me why the state system worked or should continue as a mode of governance.
Instead of the national unity so desperately needed in the midst of a global pandemic, personal fiefdoms ruled. Even a national speed limit couldn’t be agreed upon.
As the year wore on, punctuated by a bungled vaccine rollout and a prime minister who was tone-deaf to the mounting cries of millions of fed-up Australian women, the drama of Australian politics began to seem far less entertaining and far more concerning than when I had observed it from afar.
While sledging is a national disgrace when it happens on the cricket pitch, in Canberra it’s par for the course, so bad now that even growling like a dog at your “opponent” can occur.
And “opponent” is mostly how Australian politicians seem to view each other – shrill, power-hungry egos vying for domination, while transformative legislative change languishes, such as the recent climate change embarrassment at Cop26.
Leaving the temperate bath that is New Zealand politics made me realise how conducive that bath was to getting things done.
There is a genuine level of cooperation and – don’t be shocked here – politeness that courses through government house in Wellington and extends to how the governing party and the opposition treat each other.
Sure, there is some sledging, but it is more of the quick-barb style, rather than the truly, disturbingly nasty.
“I’ve never particularly done things differently depending on who the person is and that’s probably a good thing, given there’s been five,” said a cheeky Ardern last week, poking fun at the opposition’s five leaders during her time as prime minister.
In Australia power often seems a goal in and of itself. It is a goal that then stymies genuine legislative reform or collaboration
One, Todd Muller, experienced a mental breakdown during his tenure. Politicians on every side of the house expressed genuine empathy and concern for his welfare, and his painful experience became an opportunity, eventually, for further mental health awareness and discussion, rather than cannon fodder or public shaming.
New Zealand is much too small for true divisiveness among its leaders, much as people in small towns are to some degree forced to get along, decade after decade, despite their often myriad differences.
Much of the credit goes to Ardern, who has created a working environment that rewards focus and dedication. Indeed, despite her robust sense of humour, Ardern is a deeply serious politician, one who joined the Labour party aged 17, motivated by a desire to “end child poverty”.
The politicians Ardern chooses to promote are so thoroughly earnest and scandal-free (think Grant Robertson and Nanaia Mahuta) that the culture has become one of genuine public service. She even makes her ministers carpool in a minivan to events, scrapping the isolation and pomp of ministerial cars. This is a small gesture but it communicates volumes about her values and style of governing.
Politics is far from perfect in New Zealand, and like in Australia, there have been internal sex scandals, disappointing housing reforms and complaints from the media about fair access.
Is an acceptance that politics is a game feeding a weary cynicism about the whole exercise of democracy?
Ellen Fanning
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But the general atmosphere is one of a sincere interest in improving the lives of New Zealanders. This makes sense, because politicians in New Zealand remain, well, New Zealanders. Most aren’t personally wealthy or drawn from the corporate ranks (the new leader of the opposition National party, Christopher Luxon, is an exception) and most remain strongly embedded within their communities and family life. There is a Wellington bubble, but it’s far more humble and down to earth than its Canberra equivalent. Last week, a Green party MP cycled herself to the hospital to give birth – for the second time. Last month the prime minister was interrupted doing a Facebook live event by her daughter Neve, sneaking out of bed while her mother was trying to address the nation.
These glimpses of humanity aren’t orchestrated set pieces, they happen spontaneously and on a regular basis in the course of New Zealand’s politicians living ordinary human lives. I can’t be sure but I’d put some money on Ardern’s daughter being sent to her local state primary school when it’s time. Anything else would grate against her mum’s entrenched value system, and display a schism between personal and political beliefs that in four years of leadership has so far failed to emerge.
In this climate, world-leading legislation has been enacted in New Zealand, including a new law to protect pill testing, legalised assisted dying, a record increase in funding to women’s refuge and domestic violence services, moves to tackle climate change and a world-leading tobacco reform (aiming to make the country smoke-free by 2025).
In Australia power often seems a goal in and of itself. It is a goal that then stymies genuine legislative reform or collaboration, much to the detriment of all Australians, who can only be feeling confused and disappointed by the year that’s been, so marked by animosity and empty showmanship.
In the New Zealand model there is something to learn. Sure, the beehive lacks the fireworks of Canberra and sometimes a bit of sparkle. The finance minister is mostly interested in surpluses (and rugby) and the foreign minister’s style of diplomacy is disarmingly gentle. The climate change minister is a greenie from way back. But in the hands of these – to quote the words of Ardern – “nerds” a backbone and steadiness to political life has developed, allowing nascent transformative change to begin. And oh so needed in the current global environment, a deep and reassuring sense of calm. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/08/essential-reading-experts-inspiration-film-law-philosophy-economics-history-psychology-music-nature | Books | 2017-01-08T10:00:15.000Z | Alain de Botton | Essential reading: nine experts on the books that inspired them | Philosophy: Alain de Botton
‘Seneca should be the author of the hour’
Author Alain de Botton is known for applying philosophical concepts to everyday life; his books include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006). In 2008 he co-founded The School of Life, an innovative school with a focus on emotional intelligence.
Alain de Botton: ‘I discovered a Frenchman.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
1. Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1957)
I wouldn’t have become the writer I am if I hadn’t discovered Barthes. At university I felt a confused longing to write, but couldn’t imagine what sort of writer to be – then I discovered a Frenchman who showed me a new way of writing nonfiction. Mythologies is about the most ordinary things: washing powder, the Eiffel Tower, falling in love, short and long-hemmed skirts, photographs of his mother. And yet he brought a classical education and a philosophical mind to bear on these subjects. He knew how to connect Racine and beach holidays, Freud and the anticipation of a lover’s phone call. His work rejected the division between the high and the low; he could see the deeper themes running through supposedly banal things.
For Proust the meaning of life turns out to be located not so much in love or worldly success as in aesthetic experience
2. The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly (1951)
This is usually out of print and is often compared unfavourably with Connolly’s far-better-known Enemies of Promise (1938). The accusation most often levelled at it is that it’s a work of self-indulgence, which fails to distinguish between talking a lot about yourself and being self-centred; Connolly did a lot of the former, but was not the latter. It’s a seductive mixture of diary, commonplace book, essay, travelogue and memoir, arranged in loose paragraphs in which Connolly gives us his views on women, religion, death, seduction, infatuation and literature. The thoughts are wise and beautifully modelled, with the balance of the best French aphorisms: for example: “There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.”
3. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca (AD65)
Given the times we live in, Seneca should be the author of the hour. In a time of continuous political upheaval (Nero was on the imperial throne), Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of perpetual danger. He tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in AD62 – that natural and manmade disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness – neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic – of fatal possibilities.
4. Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)
Schopenhauer is another great pessimist who makes you feel happier: he pointed out that all humans find it easy to imagine perfection, but that it’s a problem to suppose such perfection can ever occur. The modern bourgeois philosophy pins its hopes firmly on those two great presumed ingredients of happiness – love and work. But there is vast unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within this magnanimous assurance that everyone will discover satisfaction here, which almost never happens. So our individual misfortunes – our fractious marriages, our unexploited ambitions – instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses.
5. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
What I appreciate here is that this isn’t a novel so much as a philosophy book with novelistic details. It’s one person’s search for how to stop wasting, and start appreciating, that most precious commodity: time. The meaning of life turns out to be located not so much in love or worldly success (two alternatives amply explored by Proust) as in aesthetic experience: the heightened, clarified, sympathetic version of reality we find in the best art.
Film: Mark Kermode
‘I remain in awe of Kim Newman’s work on horror’
Mark Kermode is chief film critic for the Observer. He is the author of several books on cinema, including The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex: What’s Wrong with Modern Movies? (2011) And Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics (2013).
Mark Kermode: ‘Nightmare Movies is matchless stuff.’ Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer
1. Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J Clover (1992)
Clover was a specialist in old Norse-Icelandic literature who began to notice feminist undercurrents in the disreputable slasher movies that had traditionally been dismissed as sadistic trash. Exploring the complex ways in which horror audiences identify not with the tormentors but with the tormented, Clover identified the “final girl” as the touchstone character of these narratives, brilliantly refiguring theories of gender identity in exploitation cinema. Astute, insightful, and terrifically entertaining, Men, Women, and Chainsaws crystallised ideas many horror fans had previously struggled to express, and did so with an irresistible enthusiasm.
With eye-opening candour, Roenblum explains how films can be lost, found and reshaped in post-production
2. The Dilys Powell Film Reader by Edited by Christopher Cook (1991)
Over the years several friends and relatives have bought me film readers from the publisher Carcanet, including works by CA Lejeune, Graham Greene and (of course) Philip French, all of which now occupy a special section of my bookshelf. The first, however, was this collection by “the doyenne of British film critics”, Dilys Powell, which my mentor, Arnold Hinchliffe, bought me as a reminder of what “proper” film criticism should look like. Reading the work of critics like these has always been important to me, not least because it serves to remind me how elegant the medium can be.
3. When the Shooting Stops… the Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum & Robert Karen (1979)
It’s often claimed (with some justification) that film critics don’t understand how movies are made, but when it comes to editing even those who make films can be baffled by this most “invisible” process. Editor Ralph Rosenblum worked on movies as diverse as The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Annie Hall, and his first-hand account of the practicalities and politics of the cutting room is as fascinating as it is accessible. With eye-opening candour, he explains how films can be lost, found and reshaped in post-production, blending technical knowledge with vast personal experience.
4. Black American Cinema by Edited by Manthia Diawara (1993)
Having studied English literature rather than film at Manchester University, I remain unqualified to talk about cinema other than as a lifelong enthusiast – something that only gets you so far. In attempting to plug the vast academic gaps in my knowledge, this seminal collection of essays from the AFI [American Film Institute] readers series proved invaluable. In the preface Diawara talks about addressing both “a black film aesthetic by focusing on the black artist” and “the thorny issue of film spectatorship”. This authoritative volume covers film-makers from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee, and is as relevant now as it was when first published.
5. Nightmare Movies by Kim Newman (1985)
Along with the horror/fantasy film critics Nigel Floyd and Alan Jones, Kim Newman was a guiding light when I started out in film journalism, and I remain in awe of his work. First published in the 1980s, since when it has been massively expanded and updated, Nightmare Movies is matchless stuff – a textbook which turns Newman’s encyclopaedic knowledge into a readable romp through the hidden byways of horror cinema. Like Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film, it’s as book that never ceases to amaze and delight me.
Illustration: James Melaugh
Economics: Noreena Hertz
‘Great economic thinking must straddle politics, ethics and history’
Noreena Hertz has been economics editor of ITV News since May last year; she is a distinguished fellow at Cambridge, visiting professor at Utrecht and honorary professor at UCL. Her books The Silent Takeover (2001), IOU: The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It (2004) and Eyes Wide Open (2013) have been published in 22 countries.
Noreena Hertz: ‘Sometimes people think about economics as a much narrower, less rich subject than it really is.’
1. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)
I read this when I was studying economics for A-level aged 15 and it opened my eyes to the fact that it was a much richer discipline than the graphs and numbers in the dry textbooks I’d been exposed to. Here was a thinker who was making clear that economics was inextricably linked with politics and that economists not only could, but should, take views on big social and political issues, should challenge prevailing beliefs and norms. That was very influential reading at such an early age. It’s also beautifully written and showed me you could do yourself a real service as an economist if you could write well.
Amartya Sen’s work really resonated with the realities I experienced in Africa and the Middle East
2. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O Hirschman (1970)
This is a really slim book but with a good idea: essentially that our power doesn’t only lie in our ability to walk away but also in our ability to stay put and complain. The economic orthodoxy up until then was that the market was the regulating force, so what regulated company behaviours was that customers could walk away if they didn’t like their product and what regulated governments was that an election would come up. But what Hirschman said was that it can be even more powerful to stay and exercise your ability to complain. I found it a powerful idea when I read it at university and it was definitely influential in my thinking behind The Silent Takeover.
3. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance by Douglass North (1990)
This is probably the hardest read from my list, but the ideas are some of the most influential I’ve come across – this was when I was studying for my PhD. His big idea was that when you’re trying to understand why some countries become rich while others remain poor, you have to look at the complex interplay of the country’s history, culture, societal norms, laws and belief systems, not just the markets. We ignore history and culture at our peril. I was looking at Russia in the early 90s and realised you couldn’t just impose a market economy on to it and expect something to emerge that looked like the US or the UK, but that a very particular Russian form of capitalism would emerge.
4. If Women Counted by Marilyn Waring (1988)
I read this at university and it was the first feminist economics book I read – I wasn’t even aware the branch existed. Waring talks about how much of women’s work at home isn’t included in GDP calculations, and how women are ignored in traditional economics. She argues that the production of well-cared-for children is just as important as that of cars or crops. It triggered my interest in where gender and economics intersect and I went on to do work around who we value in society. I think there has been progress, but the whole caring economy still remains significantly undervalued.
5. Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen (1999)
This essentially argues that economic development isn’t just about raising income, but also about political rights – health, opportunity, safety, security – ideas that were very influential in the creation of the UN’s human development goals. I spent a few years working in Africa and the Middle East and Sen’s work really resonated with the realities on the ground, how a person’s life was not necessarily enhanced in an uptick in that country’s GDP, how you had to look at how the money was being distributed and who got access to it. What all my authors have in common is that they straddle politics, ethics and history. Sometimes when people think about economics they’re thinking of it as a much narrower, less rich subject than it really is.
Law: Helena Kennedy
‘We have to keep remembering we are capable of terrible things’
Helena Kennedy QC is a Labour peer and an expert on human rights, civil liberties and the constitution. Her books include Eve Was Framed (1993) and Just Law (2004). She is chair of the Helena Kennedy Foundation, which promotes social inclusion in higher education.
Helena Kennedy: ‘I often use poetry when speaking to the jury.’ Photograph: Getty Images
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
This little booklet stays in my handbag and I constantly refer to it. My work is increasingly about human rights and this foundational document shows their development and reminds us why they matter. For example, it addresses the right to equal access to education. I’m the president of a bursary programme that helps the very disadvantaged begin education again: girls who get pregnant at school, young men in trouble. We’ve discovered that people fleeing persecution and given sanctuary are charged as if they were foreign students and article 26 argues this is unfair. I believe human rights should be integrated into our daily lives by recognising that everyone has a right to life, liberty and security.
On every page beautiful black-and-white photographs display the inhumanity of war, lynching in America, Belsen, poverty…
2. Archbold Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice (Published annually)
Archbold is the criminal lawyer’s bible: a great, fat legal tome, which I spend my life carting around. Now I have one shoulder that slopes down further than the other. The book sets out the law and is regularly brought up to date. It’s useful for addressing the law on homicide, for example, which has been modernised, and analysing issues such as diminished responsibility, which has evolved due to advances in psychiatry. It explains the changing position on the killing of newborn infants and the law on joint enterprise. The fine print is incredibly important to the way in which you make legal argument, a journey of research that culminates in the use of relevant cases in court.
3. The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham (2010)
Bingham was the president of our supreme court, or the appellate division of the House of Lords, as it was then known. He was a wonderful judge and an inspirational man and he wrote this very small book in which he sets down the meaning of the rule of law. It emphasises the importance of knowing the rules of society and the social contract and encourages equality before and open access to the law, something I’m worried about now because of the legal aid cuts. He discusses the sovereignty of parliament and I’m sure the judges had it in their mind during the recent decision regarding parliament’s role in any major constitutional matter (triggering article 50).
4. Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope, 1899-1999 by Bruce Bernard and Terence McNamee (2002)
I have this fantastic book on a stand in my study. It’s an incredible commentary on the 20th century, in many ways a century of horror, but which gave us the reasons why human rights matter. On every page beautiful black-and-white photographs display the inhumanity of war, lynching in America, Belsen, poverty, events throughout the world. I learned human rights by sitting in cells, in immigrant detention centres, in refugee camps. But you also learn from understanding our history and there’s nothing more powerful than an image to remind us. In the field of law, we’ve got to keep remembering we’re capable of terrible things unless we speak to our better angels.
5. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times Edited by Neil Astley (2002)
I often use poetry when speaking to the jury, and I share the same taste as Neil Astley, who edited this anthology. It’s wonderful to find words that speak about human experience. This includes many poets I love, such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Mary Oliver. She wrote a poem called Wild Geese, which is about how we are all connected, and you want to remind jurors of that connection, particularly on difficult cases. Poetry reaches parts that you otherwise cannot. You can quote Martin Luther King on “the arc of history”, or use Seamus Heaney to describe a moment to be seized, and say that as human beings we must rise to the occasion.
Life writing: Olivia Laing
‘Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives is my book of a lifetime’
Olivia Laing is the author of To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2014) and The Lonely City (2016). In 2014, she was Eccles writer in residence at the British Library. She’s currently working on Everybody, about freedom and the human body.
Olivia Laing: ‘Derek Jarman is a magically acute observer, celebrating wildness in all its forms.’ Photograph: Mike Sim
1. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Five volumes, 1915-1941)
Everything starts for me with Woolf. I read Orlando first, but my abiding love is for the five pastel-jacketed volumes of her diaries. She began on 1 January 1915, writing after tea and using the notebooks as a laboratory for ideas, a place to catch stray thoughts and observations: weather reports from the teeming days. It’s this rough quality that appeals to me, the sense of someone thinking at full pelt, worrying their way into new concepts, new forms of language. As for that last, steadfast entry: “L. is doing the rhododendrons…”
My aesthetics, my politics, my model of how to be an artist, even my style as a gardener, were founded in Modern Nature
2. Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara (1995)
My battered copy bristles with pink and yellow Post-its. A queer poet and curator who was killed by a dune buggy on Fire Island in 1966 at the age of 40, O’Hara is one of the most purely talented and nimble writers who ever lived. His poems are a scourge to pomposity: casual, intimate and expansive, spreeing between registers, cramming in high art and oranges, taxi cabs and exclamation marks. I keep trying to put him in a book, but he wriggles away. All the same, he has my heart.
3. The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989)
I’m not sure I’ve ever written a piece without consulting the formidable index of Andy Warhol’s diaries. He knew everyone, went everywhere, possessed a gimlet eye for the absurd and was never shy about dishing the dirt on friends and enemies alike. Originally begun as a way of logging his expenditure for the IRS, Warhol dictated the diary down the phone each morning to his secretary, Pat Hackett, which accounts for the wickedly giggly tone. Forget self-reflection: Andy was the consummate mirror for his times, making this the best imaginable history of the glittering, vacuous 1980s.
4. Modern Nature by Derek Jarman (1991)
It always strikes me as funny that the nature writing currently in vogue never involves any sex. I much prefer Derek Jarman’s sublime and criminally underrated Modern Nature, a memoir-cum-plantsman’s diary, written as a kind of spell against the devastations of Aids. Jarman is a magically acute observer, celebrating wildness in all its forms, from the poppies and sea kale of Dungeness beach to the midnight boys out cruising on Hampstead Heath. Reading it now, I’m amazed to see how pervasively it shaped me. My aesthetics, my politics, my model of how to be an artist, even my style as a gardener, were founded here.
5. Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz (1991)
This, by the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, is my book of a lifetime, my book for these dark times, an antidote to stupidity, cruelty and oppression of all kinds. Knives is about Wojnarowicz’s life – his boyhood as a homeless hustler in New York, his diagnosis with Aids, the death of his best friend – but it is also about art and power, sex, freedom and resistance. It’s long been out of print in the UK. Happily, next March it will be brought back into circulation by Canongate. Get those pre-orders in now.
Nature writing: Richard Mabey
‘Lewis Thomas changed the way I thought, wrote and laughed’
Richard Mabey is a journalist and broadcaster whose writing examines the relationship between nature and culture. Mabey’s published works span more than 40 years and include Food for Free (1972), Flora Britannica (1996) and Nature Cure (2005). His most recent book is The Cabaret of Plants (2016).
Richard Mabey: ‘To see how “nature” prose should be done I turn repeatedly to Kathleen Jamie’s essays.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
1. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas (1974)
I’m on my second copy of The Lives of a Cell and its wine stains and frayed pages give it the air of one of the ancient and sociable organisms that swarm in the text. I first read it in the 1970s after it had, uniquely, won two US National Book awards, in both science and arts categories, and it changed the way I thought, wrote and laughed. Thomas was a polymathic, witty, literate biologist and this collection of short essays covers subjects as seemingly disconnected as moth pheromones, language as an evolving ecosystem and the meaning of mythological animals. But his genius was to find and explore their connections, in a coherent story of reverberating wisdom and sublime prose.
Oliver Rackham almost singlehandedly turned historical ecology into a national enthusiasm… we are all in his debt
2. The Poet as Botanist by MM Mahood (2008)
Professor Molly Mahood is an eminent English literature scholar and her description of this book as exploring “the relationship between biological thought and the poetic process” does not do credit to its darting intelligence and mischievous humour. She trawls the works of writers such as Crabbe, Wordsworth, DH Lawrence, Ruskin and especially John Clare to examine how their botanical knowledge informs their poetry and vice versa. Poetry emerges as a kind of science, truth alloyed out of acute observation and imaginative insight.
3. Insectivorous Plants by Charles Darwin (1875)
When I was younger, I held a fashionably Romantic disdain for Darwin as a cold mechanist. Then I began to read him properly and found that he was passionate, uncertain, a magnificent writer and full of Keats’s “negative capability”. I once declaimed the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species, with its famous rhapsody to “endless forms most beautiful”, as a secular grace at a wedding breakfast and hankies appeared. Insectivorous Plants is a classic expression of both his scientific method and prose style and, as he experimentally feeds sundews with the contents of his larder, you feel you are in on a fizzing country house murder mystery.
4. Ancient Woodland by Oliver Rackham (1980)
Oliver Rackham, who died in 2015, almost singlehandedly turned historical ecology into a national enthusiasm. Ancient Woodland is his masterpiece, an overarching survey of East Anglia’s woodland heritage that embraces as evidence Anglo-Saxon charters, carpenters’ receipts and the habits of mildews. He excoriated generalisations and what he called “factoids” in elegant English that had its roots in the precision of Gilbert White and the robustness of William Cobbett. He had little truck with the self-centredness of modern nature writing but we are all in his debt.
5. Findings, Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie (2005, 2012)
Alan Bennett’s journals are my regular secular collects, but to see how “nature” prose should be done I turn repeatedly to Kathleen Jamie’s essays. Writing of the moon and the night sky, or the skeletons of embryos in a medical museum, she has a clarity, an attentiveness that rinses your mind. She is quite without ego and has no need of extravagant metaphorical frameworks. “The outer world flew open like a door,” she writes, “and I wondered, what is it that we’re just not seeing?”
Thought and language: Steven Pinker
‘Dawkins inspired me to write for a broad audience’
Steven Pinker is professor of psychology at Harvard and writes about language, the mind and human nature. His books include The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), which argued that violence in the developed world is declining, and The Sense of Style (2014).
Steven Pinker: ‘So many profound ideas were first explained in Thomas Schelling’s witty masterpiece.’ Photograph: Rex Features
1. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1986)
This was one of the books that inspired me to try my hand at scientific writing for a broad audience. It’s a model of how to explain complicated ideas without dumbing them down or boring one’s readers and Dawkins’s description of how he refuted a creationist’s claim that bombardier beetles could not have evolved sent me into a fit of giggles. I’ve gone to it both for explanations of evolutionary phenomena and for examples of lucid prose, including the masterful use of analogy, which I reproduced in my book The Stuff of Thought.
David Deutsch never passes along the conventional wisdom: everything is thought through and patiently explained
2. The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling (1960)
So many profound ideas were first explained in this witty masterpiece: the bizarre logic of nuclear deterrence; the paradoxical value of being helplessly incommunicado or irrationally hotheaded; why negotiators split the difference or settle on a round number; why bribes and threats are so often veiled; the best way to rendezvous with someone if you made no plans and your mobile phones go dead.
3. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum (2002)
I go to this massive reference work to understand the logic of English. Unlike the primary linguistics literature, where you’ll find a mess of contradictory theories and a blizzard of jargon, this book analyses every grammatical construction in English in a consistent framework, with depth and insight that are nothing short of astonishing. I go to it for my research on language, my tinkering with definitions and usage notes for The American Heritage Dictionary (for which I’m chair of the usage panel) and for guidance in my own writing. Most of all, when I had to commit to a set of analyses and technical terms in my writing guide The Sense of Style, I adapted them from the Cambridge Grammar.
4. Retreat from Doomsday by John Mueller (1989)
It seemed foolhardy in 1989 to publish a book with the subtitle “The obsolescence of major war”, but in this punchy and wit-filled book Mueller correctly predicted the end of the cold war and the decline of interstate conflict. He also gave superb analyses of the periods of war and peace over the past two centuries and fascinating reflections on the nature of moral progress, such as the abolition of slavery. This book was a major inspiration for my own The Better Angels of Our Nature.
5. The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (2011)
This 21st-century statement of the ideals of the Enlightenment offers fresh insight on a vast number of topics, including the workings of human cognition, the ways of science and the drivers of progress. Deutsch doesn’t labour to be provocative for its own sake and he never passes along the conventional wisdom: everything is thought through and patiently explained.
Music: Paul Morley
‘As a rock critic you’re writing about much more than music’
Paul Morley is a music journalist and television talking head. He wrote for the NME from 1977 to 1983 and has chronicled the era of British post-punk culture in several books on Joy Division. His part-memoir, part-biography, The Age of Bowie,
was published last year.
Paul Morley: ‘Richard Meltzer made rock criticism an obsessive, dramatic and ultimately futile search for meaning.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
1. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nik Cohn (1970)
Cohn wrote this book aged 22 in seven committed weeks to the loud sound of Beethoven’s string quartet No 15 in A Minor, rather than the Little Richard, Dylan, James Brown, Beatles, Who and Stones he was vividly mythologising. Cohn helped me understand how exciting writing about pop could be. The old saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture is wrong because, as Cohn made brilliantly clear, as a rock critic you are writing about much more than music – personality, appearance, illusion, myth, emotion, desire – and ultimately about yourself. Your response should be illuminating, exaggerated, inspired, serious, mischievous and put the reader somewhere new and special, like the music.
2. The Aesthetics of Rock by Richard Meltzer (1970)
This was another book ambitiously inventing a new form of writing, a new way of talking about art that fixed a fan’s intensity to a self-styled specialist knowledge. Briefly a philosophy student at Yale, Meltzer wasn’t afraid to consider that rock music was the world itself, a battle between purpose and purposelessness, and take it from there. It made rock criticism an obsessive, dramatic and ultimately futile search for meaning, an epic contemplation of possibilities. Meltzer advocated writing as a performance that mixed enthusiasm, insight, mystery and a weirdly focused sense of absurdity. The idea of writing as a projection of your own personality, became, for better or worse, a major factor in my own writing.
Arts in Society's pioneering essays on style, pop and art were a big influence on me as a 20-year-old writer at the NME
3. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (1961)
A timeless book about ideas that is itself full of ideas, a series of conceptual invitations. In the early 70s, when it was hard to actually hear any Cage music, I thought of him as being as much a writer as a musician, and not just about music, but about the mind, performance, pleasure, the future. After the influence of Meltzer and Cohn, and their indirect connection with the new journalism of Wolfe, Mailer, Didion and Sontag, my search for an innovative form of nonfiction writing led to the poetic, provocative Cage. It was never just about what he said but how he said it, his experiments with form as well as content.
4. Stockhausen: Conversations With the Composer by Jonathan Cott (1973)
I choose this as much for its influence as a book about the nature of the interview as for the ego, spirit and cosmic timing of musical illusionist Karlheinz Stockhausen, and for its enigmatic blue cover and minimal Picador elegance, which as a 16-year-old were irresistible. The way Cott, a writer for Rolling Stone, slipped through the looking glass into star man Stockhausen’s slightly menacing other world, burned the idea of the interview into my mind and it became something I wanted to do as much as being the personality rock critic – spend time with favourite musicians, having their glamour rub off on me, but also get some clues about life, living and other mysteries.
5. Arts in Society Edited by Paul Barker (1977)
This wonderful book compiles the stimulating, idealistic writings of weekly magazine New Society, first published in 1962, which expanded the radical approaches to popular culture and mass media initiated by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Richard Hoggart. It included pioneering essays on style, pop, art, TV and architecture by Angela Carter, George Melly and John Berger, all of them performers and entertainers in their own way. These were a strong influence on me as a new 20-year-old writer at the NME, serious about the role of critic and trying to bring speculative urgency into writing about rock. It’s original thinking and writing about art that was often itself art and remains invigorating today.
History: David Olusoga
‘Malcolm X’s book is one of the great indictments of US racism’
British Nigerian historian David Olusoga is co-author of The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2011), and author of The World’s War (2014). He produces radio and television programmes for the BBC that investigate ideas of colonialism, slavery and racism in military history and in contemporary anglophone culture.
David Olusoga: ‘Malcolm’s X’s autobiography is one of the great literary indictments of racism.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
As for many people who write about race, this book was life-changing for me. It’s really two books in one, and strictly speaking neither of them is an autobiography. The introduction and epilogue, by Alex Haley (of Roots fame), could easily stand alone as a poignant snapshot of Malcolm X in his final years. The main body of the book is the fruit of more than 50 face-to-face interviews and plots how the young Malcolm Little is transformed, first into the Harlem criminal Detroit Red and then, via the US prison system, into the black Muslim Malcolm X. Over the months of interviews Malcolm bared his soul to Haley but often his accounts of others are the most telling: he describes the heyday and decline of his gangland boss “West Indian Archie”, the character of his closest friend, “Shorty”, and the suffering of his own parents; his father was murdered by the KKK. Alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this is one of the great literary indictments of American racism.
You can't get a rounded sense of the age of empire – the audacity and the horror – without reading Conrad
2. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)
Arendt is better known today for her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But, to me, her greatest work is this 1951 classic. Much of my historical work focuses on the idea of linkage; that what happens in colonies and on distant battlefields seeps back into Europe. More than any thinker it was Hannah Arendt who identified how those movements of ideas, racial theories, people and methods takes place, showing how they fused with other forces – most notably European antisemitism – to shape and ultimately disfigure the 20th century.
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
You can read this in a day but you can then spend years reading the many books written about it – few novels in history have generated so much speculation and debate. That’s because as well as being one of the most compelling and shocking novels, it is also a brilliant exercise in ambiguity. Whose voice do we hear, the unnamed narrator or the witness to events, Marlow? Where is the book set? Conrad never mentions Africa or the Congo but talks of a great river in a great continent. The biggest mystery of all is who – if anyone – was the central character, Kurtz, based upon? A whole array of possible contenders, men whom Conrad may have met during his time in the Congo, have been assembled by historians. To me it is impossible to get a rounded sense of the age of empire – the audacity and the horror – without reading Conrad.
4. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray (2007)
Since Darwin, millions of people have come to terms with the idea that humans are little different from other animals. In Straw Dogs John Gray forces us to examine the difficult corollaries of that easy statement. It’s a book that’s become infamous for its pessimism yet I’ve always found it enormously liberating, as it challenges so many of my own unexamined assumptions. Gray dissects humanity’s seemingly innate need for the consolation of religion, our addiction to the myth of progress and our Darwin-proof belief that we “belong to a species which can be master of its own destiny”. This, the so-called “philosopher of pessimism” warns us, is “faith not science”.
5. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vols 1-5
Orwell is a victim of his own versatility. Because he transitioned from journalist to novelist his posthumous fame centres on the novels 1984 and Animal Farm. Yet for most of his life Orwell was a working journalist and eloquent witness to the political ructions of the 1930s and 1940s. These volumes of his collected journalism are not merely a masterclass in journalistic prose, they’re history written in real time. No one skewered the hypocrisies of his age with greater precision and no one was more willing to own up to his own mistakes and misplaced loyalties. In my view, if you’re a journalist and Orwell isn’t one of your heroes then something’s gone wrong. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2013/jul/01/ftse-100-rise-royal-bank-scotland | Business | 2013-07-01T16:01:16.000Z | Nick Fletcher | FTSE 100 records best daily gain for five weeks as Royal Bank of Scotland recovers from recent falls | As leading shares recorded their biggest daily increase for nearly five weeks, even Royal Bank of Scotland was on the rise.
Shares in the state-controlled bank have been under pressure since the surprise resignation of chief executive Stephen Hester and comments from chancellor George Osborne suggesting it could be split into a good and bad bank.
But it recovered 8.4p to 281.9p after Investec moved its recommendation from hold to buy. Analyst Ian Gordon said:
Many existing RBS shareholders are beside themselves with rage at what they perceive to be the unnecessary, wanton destruction of shareholder value of recent weeks. "Treasury involvement" was confirmed in the decision to remove Stephen Hester, but in our view, there is a ready replacement close at hand [in UK retail boss Ross McEwan]. As for the chancellor's alarming Mansion House comments, we believe that lasting damage may yet be avoided. Following the share price collapse, he (and others) are right to defer a share sale. It is the time to buy!
Other banks were also better with Lloyds Banking Group adding 0.87p to 64.03p. Barclays rebounded from earlier falls and ended 6.05p higher at 284.50p, as RBC cut its price target from 375p to 360p.
Overall, after a poor June and second quarter, the new month got off to a reasonable start. The FTSE 100 finished 92.31 points higher at 6307.78, its best performance in points terms since 28 May, with investors deciding to look on the bright side despite mixed economic indicators.
Chinese manufacturing data showed continued signs of a slowdown, but the UK purchasing managers index beat expectations and the eurozone figures were broadly positive, although unemployment continued to rise.
It was the same story in the US with the manufacturing index better than expected but a weaker jobs component. Ahead of the US non-farm payrolls on Friday, the market decided that the disappointment would mean an early end to the US Federal Reserve's bond buying programme was less likely. So we were back to the situation of bad data being taken as good news, since it means central bankers would keep the money taps flowing.
Tullow Oil jumped nearly 5% to £10.49 ahead of a trading update on Wednesday, following an upgrade from reduce to neutral by Nomura. Analyst Theepan Jothilingam said:
With the shares down 40% (in US dollar terms) since last February's high and a number of 'trigger well' results expected in the next few months, we close our short. Wednesday's trading update should be a positive catalyst particularly versus generally lacklustre outlooks for the large-cap majors in Europe. The long-term risk-reward appears more balanced on relative valuation, hence the upgrade to neutral.
Miners also regained some ground after recent falls, with Antofagasta adding 37.5p to 832.5p and Vedanta Resources rising 47p to £10.67.
BAE Systems ended 14.4p better at 397.4p as it announced it had terminated its agreement to acquire privately owned US group Marine Hydraulics International. A deal was unveiled in November, but BAE said the conditions to finalise the purchase had not been satisfied.
Software specialist Sage climbed 11.3p to 351.5p following a positive note from Espirito Santo. Analyst Vijay Anand said:
Sage's focus on accelerating growth with a target of becoming a 6% revenue growth company by 2015 implies that the stock has the potential to deliver 15%-20% annual returns, in our view. While the majority of investors remain unconvinced by Sage's cloud strategy, the investor day on 3 July should provide a good opportunity for reassessment, as we believe Sage is making good progress. We re-iterate our buy stance and increase our fair value to 400p (from 355p).
Among the mid-caps bwin.party digital jumped 11.7p to 124.5p after Peel Hunt pointed up the prospects for the gaming company in New Jersey, a market which could be worth $468m in 2017 once it is fully opened up and regulated. Analyst Nick Batram said:
888 and bwin.party have secured important partnerships which should enable them to enter the market on opening. Proportionately, the opportunity for 888 looks greater but some of the US opportunity is already reflected in the price, whereas, we don't believe this is the case for bwin.party. Ultimately, the US could represent 40%-50% of EBITDA for the two groups if online gaming expands to additional states.
Our work on the New Jersey opportunity has enabled us to firm up our opinion on the value of the US opportunity for bwin.party. This has been offset by a more cautious stance on the outlook for the existing business and we have brought back our forecasts to account for this. However, this is reflected in the rating and as we move through the second half we expect the opportunity for positive newsflow to improve. A weak first half pre-close statement is expected and this could represent the nadir. Following recent weakness in the share price we upgrade to buy from hold [with a target price raised from 152p to 157p].
Meanwhile Panmure Gordon added the company to its list of top picks for the third quarter.
Intu, the property group formerly known as Capital Shopping Centres, added 3.4p to 316p as analysts made positive noises following a visit on Friday to its Braehead site in Glasgow. Sue Munden at Cantor Fitzgerald said:
The visit was encouraging as the management is clearly putting strategies in place to embrace the rapid change in retail delivery to online while maintaining the relevance of attractive shopping centres. A higher proportion of leisure offerings, from food and beverage to skiing and curling (as at Braehead), increases dwell times and average spend meaningfully and offers customers a day out. There remains some execution risk. We are changing our recommendation to hold from reduce and maintaining our target price of 327p, following the recent sell off in share price.
Elsewhere oil services group Hunting added 66p to 798p after an upbeat trading statement showing it was benefiting from increasing business in the Gulf of Mexico and from the US oil shale industry.
But Balfour Beatty missed out. The infrastructure group, which issued a shock profit warning in April, sold its 50% stake in the Salford hospital PFI project of £22m, for a book gain of £11.5m. The completion of the deal means Balfour has sold £80.5m worth of PFI assets for a total gain of £44.9m, including last week's sale of Exeter airport.
But its shares dropped 3.5% or 8.4p to 230p after Liberum Capital moved from hold to sell. Analyst Joe Brent said:
Value investors are tempted. However, we expect only £10m of group pretax profits in the first half, despite £45m of disposal gains. We cut full year earnings per share by 10% for 2013 and 2014 to 18.9p and 20.9p Revised estimates are still 88% weighted to the second half.
Brent said the risk to his sell recommendation was the prospect of a bid for the company, something which was doing the rounds again recently.
Gold producer Centamin fell 0.69p to 30.9p on continuing unrest in Egypt. The company is involved in a dispute over its licence for the Sukari mine in the country, and the current political uncertainty is unlikely to help matters.
Finally Monitise jumped 5% after the mobile payment specialist announced it had formed a partnership with Telefonica Digital to develop new services for the telecoms group's customers. Monitise said the five year agreement would involve substantial minimum revenues for the company with the City suggesting it could be worth some $12m a year. It closed 1.75p higher at 36.25p | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2024/feb/14/relationship-income-difference-gap-advice-partner-earns-more | Global | 2024-02-13T23:00:20.000Z | Guardian community team | Tell us: how do you handle an income gap in your relationship? | Australia still has a gender pay gap of 13% which means many couples are likely to experience different-sized pay cheques. But what happens when that gap looks more like a chasm?
Have differences in career, health or family obligations lead you and your partner down diverging financial paths? From how you split the household budget to practical and emotional tips on keeping resentment at bay, we want to hear how you and your partner handle a significant income gap.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/18/christine-salem-womad-maloya | Culture | 2013-07-18T16:51:00.000Z | Robin Denselow | Christine Salem: bringing the devil's music to Womad | It's a hot night at the Sakifo festival, in a beachside park on the island of La Réunion the French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. The Spanish/French star Manu Chao was an earlier headliner, and now it's the turn of a remarkable and controversial local singer. Christine Salem comes on shaking a kayamb, a tray-like percussion instrument constructed from cane stalks. Backed only by two other percussionists, one of them sitting astride a large roulé drum, she delivers an extraordinary and compelling set that switches from the deep and soulful, with echoes of Nina Simone, through to furious, hypnotic chanting and throaty growls.
Only a generation ago, the police would have smashed her instruments, and Salem would have been arrested for singing in this way, because she was daring to sing maloya, the banned, African-influenced music of the Creole descendants of the slaves who worked the island's sugar plantations. With its mixture of thunderous percussion and improvised call-and-response vocals, it's the Indian Ocean answer to the blues. The Catholic church disapproved of it because it was used in the servis kabaré ceremonies, in which the drumming and chanting cause participants to enter a trance-like state in which they say they come face-to-face with their ancestors. The authorities disliked it because of its links to slave culture, and were concerned that it was also being used in a secular form by a political party campaigning for greater autonomy or independence from France.
The ban on maloya was lifted in 1981, but when Salem sings today it's easy to see why the Catholic church disapproved. "They thought the trance music was the devil's song ... but it's great music," she says.
Salem draws her inspiration from maloya's religious forms. One of her strongest songs, Djinn, is a haunting, powerful piece that comes out of her own experience at trance ceremonies. Performing it live, she breaks away from the slinky rhythms of earlier numbers for a section of frenzied percussion and howling vocals that develop into a furious bluesy chant in which the Creole lyrics tell of meetings with her ancestors. Her remarkable performance is a reminder of the divisions on the island. Réunion is popular with tourists from France and elsewhere, but behind the beach hotels and restaurants, there still exists a Creole culture that links back to the slavery days.
Salem was born 41 years ago in a poor district of Saint-Denis, the island's administrative capital, where her mother worked as a cleaner and cook. She never met her father, "but I heard he played accordion", nor did she study music at school, but she remembers as a child hearing the maloya band Ziskakan playing in Saint-Denis. "They were very different from the way they are now," she says. "Far more traditional. They made a big impression on me, although I didn't come from a musical family." She wrote her first song, "a blues, in English, about love" aged 12, and later joined different groups playing sega, the Indian Ocean dance style, in the tourist hotels, "just for the experience, and because I loved singing".
She was in her early 20s when she attended – just as an observer – her first servis kabaré ceremony, and she was soon drawn into the trance ceremonies and their music and began to study the special songs used for each different stage of the process.
Although maloya was predominantly sung by men, she started singing it with her own group in the late 90s. "It wasn't forbidden for women to sing it, but even now people find it strange to hear a lady singing it. When people first heard me they thought a man was singing because I have such a deep voice. They were surprised when they saw me," she says with a smile.
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view the video
Salem believes passionately that maloya deserves a wider audience, and she has travelled to Madagascar, the Comoros and Zanzibar, researching the roots of the form, and experimenting in modernising it, not least by working with the American-French folk-blues band Moriarty, who added bass and guitar to some of her songs. But she mostly performs with the traditional percussive lineup that is still used in the trance ceremonies. "But I don't use quite the same music on stage, in respect for the ancestors, and because if we did that, my audience might go into a trance!"
She believes that her experiences at the ceremonies when she was younger brought her in contact with her own ancestors. "When you go into a trance for the first time, you ask the ancestor where he is from, and after that you recognise who is there." So you know where your ancestors come from? "Yes, I know exactly. They are mostly from Africa, from Mozambique and around there. So that's where I am going to do my research next."
But at the same time she continues to promote her singing career; she has already performed in Australia this year and she is tipped to be one of the highlights at Womad next weekend.Salem may be bringing maloya to a new global audience, but her modernising approach has caused unease to some traditionalists, not least the island's greatest veteran exponent of the style, Firmin Viry. On the Sunday morning of the Sakifo festival there's a free concert down by the fishing port of Terre Saint, a showcase for the male heroes of maloya, headlined by Viry. Now in his late 70s, he sings enthusiastically for the most of the morning, spurred on by up to 10 percussionists and support from Danyel Waro, who himself made a memorable appearance at WOMAD two years ago.
Afterwards, Viry sat by the sea and talked of the days back in the 70s when he had to sing secretly, in defiance of the French authorities. He was, he says, "very lucky" not to have been discovered and sent to jail like other musicians. A supporter of the Communist party, for him, maloya was protest music, and he wrote about "love, life and employment". So how does he regard Salem and her very different approach? "She is invoking the spirits of the dead, and the way I was brought up, what you do in the house you don't do outside," he says. "The religious side should be kept at home and not performed on stage, and her songs are about the ancestors, not politics. It's a very dangerous approach because we are a mixed people in Réunion, and some words can disturb the spirits."
There is certainly a sense of urgency and danger in Christine Salem's performance, and that's part of her appeal. She deserves to become maloya's first international female celebrity – as is her intention. "It's important for me, because it used to be forbidden. It's a challenge."
Christine Salem plays at Womad, Charlton Park, Malmesbury on 28 July | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/12/trump-criticises-puerto-rico-hurricane-aid-cannot-go-on-forever | US news | 2017-10-12T15:02:49.000Z | Oliver Milman | Trump hints at ending aid as Puerto Ricans forced to drink polluted water | Donald Trump has seemingly threatened to pull federal emergency support from Puerto Rico a day after his administration reported that desperate people in the US territory have been drinking from contaminated wells due to a lack of water.
In a series of tweets sent on Thursday morning, Trump said: “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. Forever!”
The president preceded this with tweets that stated “Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes” in Puerto Rico and quoted a TV host who said of the territory that “a financial crisis looms largely of their own making”.
There are currently more than 1,400 Fema personnel in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands responding to the humanitarian crisis that has erupted following hurricanes Maria and Irma.
On Thursday, Fema said it had expanded its leadership team in Puerto Rico following the “unprecedented destruction” from the hurricanes.
Sufficient aid has yet to reach many people in Puerto Rico, three weeks after much of the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria. More than 80% of the island is without electricity and nearly half of all people are still cut off from communication.
'We pray for dawn': Trump's words ring hollow in Puerto Rico's devastated interior
Read more
The water situation has become particularly dire, with the state department estimating that about a third of Puerto Ricans are without potable water. This has led to some people attempting to access wells that have been sealed due to toxic pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
On Wednesday, the EPA said it has “reports of residents obtaining, or trying to obtain, drinking water from wells at hazardous waste superfund sites in Puerto Rico”. Superfund sites are heavily polluted areas that have been designated for federal cleanup.
The environmental regulator said it was working with Fema to get drinking wells functioning and urged people to not tamper with locked wells or drink their contents. The EPA added that Puerto Ricans should not use water from rivers or streams for drinking or bathing without boiling it first because “raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored.”
The death toll from Hurricane Maria jumped to 45 people this week, and 113 people remain unaccounted for. The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, a local investigative journalism project has estimated that the real total is likely to be much higher.
Trump’s comments prompted a furious reaction from Puerto Rican leaders.
New York congresswoman Nydia Velásquez said on Twitter that the president’s comments were “outrageous, indefensible and irresponsible. We will not allow our gov’t to abandon our fellow citizens.”
“America does not abandon fellow citizens during crises!!” she wrote.
.@realDonaldTrump certainly made no mention of withdrawing federal resources from TX or FL following #Harvey and #Irma. Shameful! pic.twitter.com/rmRC9Tu4F8
— Rep. Nydia Velazquez (@NydiaVelazquez) October 12, 2017
Governor Ricardo Rossello followed suit, saying that the US territory, home to 3.4 million US citizens, was “requesting the support that any of our fellow citizens would receive across our Nation”.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan – an outspoken critic of Trump’s response to the disaster – said in a statement addressed to the president that Trump’s tweets and comments about Puerto Rico “underscore the inadequacy of your government’s response to this humanitarian crisis.”
“It is not that you do not get it, it is that you are incapable of empathy and frankly simply cannot get the job done,” she wrote.
“Puerto Ricans have suffered greatly in the past month. Two hurricanes devastated our homes and our electrical infrastructure leaving us without the essentials to survive: drinkable water, food and medicine.
“But perhaps more frustrating has been the devastating actions, time after time, by a president whose tweets, comments and actions seem to be taken out of a book on ‘how to add insult to injury’ rather than a book on ‘how to help during a humanitarian crisis’.”
Amid the furore, Trump had an ally in the House speaker, Paul Ryan, who acknowledged that Puerto Rico was facing a “humanitarian crisis”, but went on to echo Trump’s emphatic declaration that the island would not always have access to federal resources.
“Yes, we need to make sure that Puerto Rico can begin to stand on its own two feet,” Ryan told reporters Thursday. “They’ve already had tough fiscal problems to begin with ... We’ve got to do more to help Puerto Rico rebuild its own economy so that it can be self-sufficient.”
This article was amended on 13 October 2017 because Puerto Rico is a US territory, not a state as an earlier version said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/26/queensland-election-coalition-downplays-federal-implications-as-it-absorbs-poor-lnp-result | Australia news | 2017-11-26T02:35:14.000Z | Paul Karp | Queensland election: George Christensen blames Turnbull after poor LNP result | The Queensland state election was fought “overwhelmingly on state issues”, Malcolm Turnbull has said, as the federal Coalition sought to downplay the Liberal National party’s poor showing.
The Nationals MP George Christensen has broken ranks, sheeting “a lot” of the blame home to the Turnbull government, but senior government members including Matt Canavan siad there was “was no real discussion of federal issues in this campaign” and the story would be different at the next federal election.
Federal Labor has trumpeted the Queensland result as a vindication of premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s decision to rule out governing with One Nation and warned that the Turnbull government and Coalition MPs should be nervous that they will lose seats in Queensland at the next election.
Queensland election offers Turnbull no respite as right-leaning voters show their anger
Katharine Murphy
Read more
The Palaszczuk Labor government is on track to win at least 44 seats, just a few short of a majority (47) and leads in other key tossups, making it the only party in a position to reach a majority.
On Sunday afternoon the ABC’s election analyst, Anthony Green, called the election for Labor, predicting it would form majority government with 48 seats.
The LNP suffered a 7% swing and while One Nation increased its vote it failed to translate support into seats, losing its leader Steve Dickson and failing to elect former senator Malcolm Roberts.
Christensen, who has promised to cross the floor to vote for a banking commission of inquiry and previously threatened to quit the Coalition, issued a public apology to One Nation voters for the LNP failing to “stand up more for conservative values”.
“A lot of that rests with the Turnbull government, its leadership and policy direction,” he said.
To Qlders who voted One Nation, I'm sorry we in the LNP let you down. We need to listen more, work harder, stand up more for conservative values & regional Qld & do better to win your trust & vote. A lot of that rests with the Turnbull govt, it's leadership & policy direction. pic.twitter.com/0vCREdd7mn
— George Christensen (@GChristensenMP) November 25, 2017
At a press conference in Bennelong, Turnbull said the LNP “ran a good campaign” in a “tough environment” but declined to comment further, citing the fact counting is continuing.
“Neither side has a majority, so I will leave the analysis until after all the facts are in,” the prime minister said.
Asked if he had harmed the LNP’s chances, Turnbull said the campaign was “overwhelmingly” fought on state issues and voters could distinguish state and federal elections.
Queensland election result shows Australia is done with two-party contests
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The federal Labor leader, Bill Shorten, congratulated Palaszczuk on a “fantastic campaign”, noting although the final result is unknown “it’s clear that Labor is close to forming government”.
“Queenslanders have put their trust in Annastacia Palaszczuk as a strong and courageous leader who refused to horse-trade her values with One Nation,” he said.
“The Liberals and Nationals are suffering from one end of Australia to the other as a result of the Turnbull government.”
On Sunday Canavan told ABC’s Insiders the result showed there is “a very challenging political environment, particularly in regional Queensland, where the swing against [the LNP] or the swing for the One Nation party was strong”.
The resources and northern Australia minister said he would not “sugarcoat” the poor result for the LNP but blamed the conservative vote splitting between the LNP and One Nation.
Canavan suggested the result will be “different at a federal election”, citing the fact the Nationals campaign separately and some LNP members sit in the Nationals party room to argue they will be able to win support in the regions.
The resources minister said if Labor continued to oppose a proposed $1bn concessional loan to the Adani mine it would be “hung around their necks [like] a mill stone” and cost it support in regional Queensland.
Canavan conceded the Queensland government can veto the loan to the mine, saying “they are within their rights to do that”.
“I suppose the Labor party wouldn’t break another promise and backflip again,” he said, before suggesting that if the independent Rockhampton mayor, Margaret Strelow, wins the as-yet undecided seat of Rockhampton she could force Labor to rethink its opposition to the loan.
The federal minister for cities and Liberal MP Angus Taylor also downplayed federal implications, noting the Coalition had a worse primary vote in Queensland elections in 1998 and 2001 but went on to win subsequent federal elections.
Taylor said the Queensland election showed that if people voted “for smaller conservative parties, the unintended consequence of doing that may well be putting Labor in power or keeping Labor in power”.
“The second [message] is we do have to keep this balance between urban Liberals and regional Liberals, between conservative and smaller-l classical liberals, that balance is crucial to the success of the Liberal party.”
Queensland election: Labor still short of a majority despite lead over LNP
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Speaking to Sky News the Labor senator and former Queensland state secretary, Anthony Chisholm, said the election was a “strong rejection of One Nation” and said the LNP campaign was “dogged” by Tim Nicholl’s refusal to rule out governing with One Nation support.
Chisholm said Nicholls had run the same “hollow” lines as Malcolm Turnbull and suggested federal Coalition MPs in Flynn, Capricornia and Leichhardt should be “pretty nervous” about the state result.
While the Greens failed to unseat the deputy premier, Jackie Trad, they remain in contention to win the inner Brisbane LNP seat of Maiwar.
Chisholm criticised the Greens for targeting Trad while “neglecting” Maiwar. He said federally the Greens vote is not as concentrated in Brisbane as in Melbourne and predicted they would fail to pick up seats from the ALP.
The federal Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, told ABC24 the result was “outstanding” for the Greens, citing double-digit swings in inner Brisbane electorates.
He said the result showed voters were “sick and tired of the old parties” and did not want the Adani Carmichael coalmine to be built.
Di Natale said Queenslanders and Australians “want power-sharing governments”. He suggested if the Greens win Maiwar then Palaszczuk will need to negotiate with the Greens to form government despite promises not to govern with other parties, because she could not afford to send Queenslanders back to the polls. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/dec/27/christmas-leftovers-recipes-fearnley-whittingstall | Life and style | 2013-12-27T21:00:01.000Z | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall | The remains of the day: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Christmas leftovers recipes | How often have you heard someone say, "No turkey curry for us this year – we ran out of food on Christmas Day!" It's not a familiar Boxing Day refrain, is it? We all tend to stock up to the rafters for the festive feast, and there's nothing wrong with that. I hate waste, but I love leftovers.
In fact, the inevitable appearance of tasty odds and ends is, for me, one of the pleasures of the Christmas kitchen. The things you can cook up with them are often more stimulating than the well-loved but predictable meals that engendered them in the first place. Half a tray of cold roast roots, a boat of cold gravy and a carton of cream? Ferret out a few spices and there's a glorious soup to be had. Or a very outré ice-cream.
Maybe not, but letting your leftovers cooking stray into uncharted territory is definitely part of the fun. Bubble and squeak, for instance, needn't be made with the classic potato and greens alone. Fry some sliced apple or grated parsnip along with the onion to start it off. Add a few scraps of salty ham or smoky fish. Fling in a spoonful of curry powder or paste.
Brussels sprouts are a very under-appreciated vegetable (I know people who say they love them, yet eat them only at Christmas). They have a note of bitterness, yes, but so do much-admired leaves such as chicory and radicchio. One trick with sprouts is to dismantle them slightly. I like a whole boiled sprout, provided it's not overdone (six minutes tops), but they reveal new sides to themselves when sliced, shredded, chopped or puréed. You'll find one of my favourite raw sprout salads below; another tosses them, shredded, with apple, cheddar, hazelnuts and a lemony dressing – exactly the sort of thing you need after some heavy, meaty indulgence.
When it comes to the remains of the big roast – be it turkey, pork, beef or lamb – use them with a light touch. Go for dishes that switch the standard proportions, making them veg-heavy with a little meat on the side, or on top, or folded through the middle. Richer, fattier meats such as pork and lamb are irresistible when torn into small pieces and fried until crisp and well-coloured. Caramelised, intense and super-savoury, these shards are fantastic on top of soups, in hearty salads or with purées of veg such as parsnips or peas.
Leaner, rarer-cooked meat (beef, say) is delicious cut into strips and tossed with lentils, winter leaves and a mustardy vinaigrette. And as for that turkey, tear it into strips, sizzle in olive oil with onions, garlic and a pinch of mixed spice, and use to top a big pile of couscous spiked with dried fruit (apricots, dates, raisins), lemon zest (or a chopped preserved lemon) and toasted nuts.
Trust your instincts and take a few risks, and using up leftovers becomes an art in itself, every bit as satisfying as the yuletide feast. Afterwards, you can sit down with that leftover box of chocolates and a glass of what you fancy, safe in the knowledge that all that Christmas fare has been honourably dealt with, and your kitchen stands ready for the new year.
Brussels sprout, clementine and chestnut salad
It's not just already-cooked leftovers that are a fertile base for delicious meals. This wonderfully crisp starter uses the sort of raw ingredients you're likely to have knocking about after Christmas. Serves two.
160g chestnuts in shells (or 125g cooked, vac-packed chestnuts)
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to trickle
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 bay leaves, torn (optional)
150g small, firm brussels sprouts
2 clementines or tangerines
Juice of ½ lemon
If you're using fresh chestnuts, heat the oven to 220C/425F/gas mark 7. Cut a slit down the flat side of each chestnut, put them in an ovenproof dish and roast for eight to 10 minutes, until lightly charred. When they are cool enough to handle, peel away the shells and the thin inner husk. Crumble the cooked (or vac-packed) nuts into pieces.
Put a small pan on a medium heat, add a tablespoon of olive oil, the chestnut pieces, a generous pinch of salt, some freshly ground black pepper and the bay leaves, if using. Toss the nuts in the hot pan for a few minutes, coating them in the seasoned oil. Turn off the heat and leave the nuts in the pan while you make the rest of the salad.
Trim the sprouts, remove any tough or dirty outer leaves, then slice thinly from top to base. Arrange over two plates.
Peel the clementines and separate the segments, removing as much of the stringy white pith as you have the patience for. Cut each segment in half by slicing from the inner edge to the wide, outer edge without going quite all the way through, then opening up the segment like a butterfly.
Arrange the clementine butterflies over the sprouts and scatter the chestnuts on top. Generously season with lots of lemon juice, extra-virgin olive oil and plenty of salt and black pepper, and serve.
Ham and parsnip cakes
A delicious brunch or light lunch, these tasty cakes take care of leftover ham, parsnip (and potato) and bread. Makes four cakes.
1 tbsp olive, rapeseed or sunflower oil, plus more for frying
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
About 250g cold, cooked parsnip (or a mix of parsnip and cooked potato)
About 50g chopped, cooked ham
1 tsp thyme leaves
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large egg, lightly beaten
About 75g fine, slightly stale breadcrumbs
Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium-low heat, add the onion and cook for 10 minutes, until soft.
Meanwhile, put the parsnip (and potato, if you're using a mix of the two) in a large bowl and mash with a fork – don't worry if the mash is a bit coarse and chunky (this will probably be the case if you're using roasted parsnips). Stir in the ham, thyme, fried onions and some salt and pepper, then mix in the egg.
Put the breadcrumbs in a bowl. Pour 1-2mm of oil into a nonstick frying pan and put over a medium heat. Take one quarter of the parsnip mix and form into a ball, then squash it into a shallow cake. Coat this in breadcrumbs, pressing them on lightly. Repeat with the remaining parsnip mix.
Fry the cakes in the oil for about 10 minutes, turning them once or twice, until the breadcrumbs are golden brown and crisp and the cakes piping hot right through. Serve at once, with a poached or fried egg.
Christmas pudding parfait
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Christmas pudding parfait: 'An elegant way to end its days.' Photograph: Colin Campbell for the Guardian
A very elegant way for a Christmas pudding to end its days, the fruity, spicy chunks embedded in a fluffy, snow-white parfait. Serves eight.
125g caster sugar
5 large egg yolks
Seeds scraped from ½ a vanilla pod
250ml double cream
250g leftover Christmas pudding, crumbled into small nuggets
Line a 1kg loaf tin (about 10cm x 20cm base measurement) with clingfilm. Put the sugar in a small saucepan, add 100ml water and heat gently, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Increase the heat until the syrup is boiling, put a sugar thermometer in the pan and boil the syrup until it reaches 120C. This will take at least 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, put the egg yolks and vanilla seeds in a large bowl and beat lightly with an electric whisk.
As soon as the sugar syrup has reached the right temperature, take the pan off the heat. With the whisk running constantly, trickle the hot syrup in a very thin thread into the egg yolks. Keep moving the whisk around so the syrup is incorporated immediately and doesn't get a chance to pool on the base of the bowl, where it will set. The idea is to "cook" the egg yolks with the hot syrup. Keep whisking until all the sugar syrup has been incorporated, then whisk for several minutes more, until the mixture is very pale – almost white – and thick enough to hold a trail when the beaters are lifted.
Leave this egg mousse to cool to room temperature (this should only take a few minutes), then lightly whip the double cream and fold it in carefully, using a light touch so you don't knock out too much air. Add the crumbled Christmas pudding and fold in lightly. Tip the mixture into the loaf tin, flip the overhanging clingfilm over the surface of the parfait and freeze for at least eight hours, and preferably overnight, until firm. Next day, when you're ready to dish up, peel back the clingfilm from the top, invert the parfait on to a plate and peel off the clingfilm. Cut into thick slices and serve.
Go to rivercottage.net for the latest news from River Cottage HQ. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/06/chuka-umunna-to-leave-streatham-for-lib-dem-election-fight | Politics | 2019-09-06T16:59:02.000Z | Peter Walker | Chuka Umunna to leave Streatham for Lib Dem election fight | Chuka Umunna is to vacate his existing south London seat to fight the Cities of London and Westminster constituency for the Liberal Democrats, as the party risks angering local activists by shuffling candidates to accommodate high-profile arrivals.
The announcement of Umunna’s move from Streatham comes as party sources said another ex-Labour MP, Luciana Berger, could be parachuted into a north London seat, Finchley and Golders Green.
The proposed move for Berger, who currently represents Liverpool Wavertree, has upset some local Lib Dems, with the existing candidate saying on Friday she still expected to fight it.
One Lib Dem activist said: “People are fed up with celebrity MP entryism. Hardworking candidates are being yanked out of their seats or pressured not to stand.”
The Lib Dems have gained five new MPs in recent weeks, one via a byelection but the rest refugees from Labour – Umunna and Berger – and the Conservatives, in Sarah Wollaston and Phillip Lee.
Umunna, who quit Labour in February and joined the Lib Dems three months later, will move from his current Streatham seat to take on Mark Field, the former Foreign Office minister who escaped punishment after being filmed grabbing a climate protester by the neck.
In the 2017 election Field secured a 3,000-plus majority over Labour, with the Lib Dems a distant third. But the party believes a better indicator is May’s European elections, where in both parts of the constituency the Lib Dems won more votes than the Conservatives and Labour combined.
The constituency, which includes parliament, the West End and the financial centre of the City, was heavily pro-remain in the 2016 referendum. He told the Guardian: “It’s absolutely clear that if you want to stop Brexit with no fudge or ambiguity, residents in this area are already picking the Liberal Democrats.”
Umunna is officially moving because the Lib Dems already have a well-established candidate in Streatham. It has, however, been a safe Labour seat for over 20 years, with the party winning almost 70% of the vote in 2017, making it hugely difficult for Umunna to win as a Lib Dem.
“It’s a sad and difficult decision, but I know that the constituency will be in very good hands,” he said of the decision. “Of course we’ve got to take seats from the Labour party, but also, we’ve vitally got to take seats from Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave government.”
The mooted move to shift Berger to Finchley and Golders Green remains to be confirmed. While narrowly held by the Conservatives over Labour, it is a strongly Jewish area and there are indications some Jewish voters could abandon Labour over its handling of antisemitism in the party.
Berger, who was announced as a Lib Dem on Thursday, quit Labour in February over the issue.
The existing Lib Dem candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, Clareine Enderby, said she was “delighted” Berger had joined, but said she was still the candidate: “I look forward to making sure that Finchley and Golders Green is Liberal Democrat at the next election.”
A party spokeswoman said: “Luciana Berger only joined a day ago, and no decisions will have been made, so this is all speculation.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/sep/23/derbys-wayne-rooney-hits-out-at-disrespectful-former-owner-mel-morris | Football | 2021-09-23T16:05:19.000Z | Ben Fisher | Derby’s Wayne Rooney hits out at ‘disrespectful’ owner Mel Morris | Wayne Rooney has laid bare the chaos at crisis-hit Derby County by revealing he has not spoken with Mel Morris for more than six weeks and said the owner’s address in the wake of entering administration was insincere.
Morris met playing and coaching staff on Tuesday, 24 hours before the insolvency specialists Quantuma were placed in control of the Championship club. The administrators have conceded there will be several redundancies but said they are confident Derby would not be liquidated and that a buyer would be found, with six parties expressing their interest.
Derby fall to last place with 12-point deduction for entering administration
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Last week Rooney said he and his players discovered Derby were heading for administration after watching TV and revealed at one point he resorted to ringing Morris from the phone of the club doctor in an attempt to get answers amid the silence. “I actually phoned him once off the [club] doctor’s phone,” Rooney said. “He [Morris] answered the phone, so obviously he could answer calls from the club doctor but not the manager. It was not ideal.”
The administrators confirmed Derby has debt “in the tens of millions”. It is thought they owe HM Revenue and Customs about £26m, as well as several football creditors, but Quantuma are confident of meeting the payroll of circa £1.2m next week. Rooney, who sat in on the administrators’ meeting with the Derby County supporters’ trust on Thursday, has put his hand into his own pocket to pay for things such as equipment to film training sessions. “I take this job very seriously and I want the best preparation I can get,” Rooney said.
Rooney said the lack of communication from Morris was “disrespectful” and left him “hurt”. “I haven’t spoken to Mel since 9 August,” he said. “Mel addressed the players and the staff as a group on Tuesday, which obviously I was in on that meeting, but in a one-on-one conversation I still haven’t had anything – no phone call, no message.” Of that meeting, Rooney said: “In my opinion, it wasn’t sincere, it was not heartfelt enough and it was not done with enough honesty. He has obviously moved on and we have to move on and put Mel Morris to the back of our minds and look forward.”
Andrew Hosking, the Quantuma managing director, said he was optimistic about Derby’s future and rejected suggestions the club could follow Bury in being liquidated, predicting that the club has a “95%” chance of survival. “I do not consider, at all, that this could be a liquidation scenario like Bury,” he said. He also confirmed they are undertaking “operational efficiencies” to determine the scale of redundancies required. The Quantuma chief executive, Carl Jackson, said: “We are just about OK for the next seven to 10 days but we will need some funding coming in early October.”
Wayne Rooney found out on TV that Derby were set for administration
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The automatic 12-point deduction for entering administration resulted in Derby plunging to the bottom of the Championship, on to minus points, and the club is set for a further nine-point deduction for a breach of the English Football League’s profit and sustainability rules. The administrators said they have opened “very positive dialogue with the EFL” and hope to sort out that issue before any prospective takeover. “The pain needs to be dealt with and dealt with in one fell swoop,” Hosking said. “That’s where we’re at with the EFL.”
The EFL’s chief executive, Trevor Birch, said it was inevitable that more clubs would end up in administration like Derby unless there were structural changes to the financial model of English football. While Birch said there were only a “small handful” of clubs currently under scrutiny by the EFL, he insisted that a benefactor-funded model of ownership, of the likes practised by Morris, will eventually turn sour.
“The benefactor-funded model always works until it doesn’t,” Birch said. “There is an inevitability that once the benefactor turns off that tap [insolvency] is what happens. They have created an unsustainable trading model which, once that funding is stopped, the club can’t sustain. Inevitably there will be another club along the line – how many and when you can never tell.”
The EFL’s preferred solution is to scrap parachute payments, but Birch said they were also arguing for financial redistribution similar to that promised in the aborted Project Big Picture, with a pooling of TV revenues between the EFL and Premier League, and 25% then going to the three lower divisions. Birch said he had had extensive conversations with Tracey Crouch over implementing such a change in her upcoming “fan-led” review of football governance.
“Fixing the financial cliff edge has to be the key,” Birch said. “We believe that can be done by cancelling parachute payments and increasing the level of funding that is available to the EFL and the figure we put on that is a pooling of resources and receiving 25% of that. Alongside that [the EFL will set] appropriate cost controls attempting to limit wages to a percentage of turnover.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/05/levels-of-distress-and-illness-among-students-in-uk-alarmingly-high | Education | 2019-03-05T00:01:36.000Z | Sally Weale | Levels of distress and illness among students in UK 'alarmingly high' | A poll of almost 38,000 UK students suggests rates of psychological distress and illness are on the rise in universities, with “alarmingly high” levels of anxiety, loneliness, substance misuse and thoughts of self-harm.
Researchers say the report, seen exclusively by the Guardian, is the largest mental health survey ever conducted among UK university students, and its findings constitute “an urgent call to action”.
The findings were based on responses from a self-selecting sample of students who took part in an online survey. Among the key findings likely to prompt concern among parents and those responsible for student welfare were those on self-harm. Half of the students (50.3%) who took part reported thoughts of self-harm – almost twice as high as reported rates in 2017 – while just under one in 10 (9.4%) thought of self-harm often or always.
More than four out of 10 (44.7%) admitted using alcohol or drugs to cope with their problems, while one in 10 (9.5%) said they did this often or always. One in three (33.9%) had experienced a serious psychological issue for which they felt they needed professional help – an increase of just under 1% in a year.
The survey also flagged up the vulnerability of students in their second and third years who are said to be at “significantly higher risk” than freshers.
While the findings echo previous research, the scale of the study, which polled 37,500 students at 140 universities across England, Wales and Scotland, make it hard for policymakers to ignore.
Students reported high levels of anxiety, with 42.8% often or always worried. Almost nine in 10 (87.7%) said they struggled with feelings of anxiety – an increase of 18.7 percentage points on 2017 figures – and a third (33%) reported suffering from loneliness often or all the time.
More than one in five (21.5%) said they had a current mental health diagnosis, most commonly depression (10.2%) and anxiety disorders (8.4%). The stigma surrounding mental illness persists however, with more than three-quarters (75.6%) concealing their symptoms from friends.
One of the most striking findings is that while student mental health concerns and efforts previously focused on first-years who have moved away from home for the first time, students later in their university careers are struggling too.
According to the survey findings, students moving into their second and third year report the highest rates of anxiety, loneliness and substance misuse. Persistent thoughts of self-harm are highest among second-years – 12.1% of those in the sample had thoughts of self-harm often or all the time, compared with 9.2% of first-years and 11.1% of third-years.
“Perhaps the fact that support initiatives trail off after the first year, or that academic pressure intensifies, or a combination of these and other factors, are the basis for second- and third-years finding life more difficult,” the report states.
The research was conducted by the Insight Network, a team of therapists and psychiatrists, in collaboration with Dig-In which provides a welcome box to 400,000 students at more than 140 universities.
Dr Stephen Pereira of the Insight Network said: “Counter to popular belief, it isn’t the initial transition from school to university that seems to be most associated with psychological difficulties. The research has shown that students who are navigating the transition into their second and third year report the highest rates of anxiety, loneliness, substance misuse, and thoughts of self-harm.
“More research is needed to understand the specific risk and protection factors at play during different years of university, in order for support services to effectively meet these year-specific demands.”
Many universities have already increased investment in counselling and support services for students. John de Pury, mental health policy lead at Universities UK which represents the UK higher education sector, said: “Universities cannot address these challenges alone and we are working closely with the NHS locally and nationally to make sure that students get the care they need.”
The universities minister, Chris Skidmore, added: “Student mental health is a top priority for me and from my regular visits to our universities across the country, I know this is an issue that they are taking seriously too.
“We know that university-wide approaches are vital in tackling this important issue, which is why the government is backing the university mental health charter led by Student Minds, which will encourage universities to improve the pastoral care they provide and will set a high standard for mental health support.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/02/exxonmobil-blocks-activists-attempt-to-seek-climate-strategy-vote | Business | 2024-02-02T12:20:14.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | ExxonMobil blocks green activists’ attempt to seek strategy vote | ExxonMobil has quashed an attempt by a group of climate activists to seek a vote on the US oil company’s climate strategy at its annual shareholder meeting later this year.
A Dutch green activist investor group, Follow This, has dropped its petition for Exxon shareholders to vote on whether the company should set emissions reduction targets after Exxon took legal action against the plans.
In a surprise move, the company filed a complaint at a US district court in Texas last month, which sought to prevent the activists from putting new climate targets to a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting in May.
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It was the first time Exxon had sought a legal route to block shareholder activists, and the move was understood to have been closely watched by US corporations and shareholders.
Mark van Baal, the founder of Follow This, said: “Given Exxon’s preference to fight a battle in court rather than allow shareholders the freedom of a vote at its annual meeting, we decided to withdraw the climate proposal. Now that we have withdrawn, the company has no reason to continue the lawsuit.”
Exxon argued that the Follow This proposal, which it put forward alongside Arjuna Capital, violated the SEC’s investor petition rules, which are designed to prevent shareholders being able to “micromanage” businesses’ decisions through proposals.
The company said that Follow This and Arjuna were “driven by an extreme agenda” and that their proposals were “calculated to diminish the company’s existing business”.
Exxon reported one of its largest annual profits of the last decade of $36bn (about £28.4bn) for 2023, which was the second-highest profit only to its $55.7bn profit for the year before. The 35% slump in profit was due to falling oil and gas market prices which peaked in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The global oil price averaged about $81 a barrel last year compared with $100 a barrel the year before.
Exxon has come under fire for producing more oil and gas despite warnings from experts around the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis. It has set a goal to reduce emissions from its own operations to net zero by 2050. But unlike other western oil companies, it has stopped short of setting reduction targets for the emissions created by burning its oil and gas, known as scope 3 emissions.
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The company said: “We are simply asking the court to apply the SEC’s proxy rules as written to stop this abuse and eliminate the significant resources required to address them.”
The SEC has come under pressure from some companies for allowing environmental groups to register what they believe to be too many motions at annual shareholder meetings, after it revoked policies adopted by the Trump administration. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-encryption-online-safety-bill | Technology | 2023-03-09T14:07:17.000Z | Alex Hern | WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief | WhatsApp would refuse to comply with requirements in the online safety bill that attempted to outlaw end-to-end encryption, the chat app’s boss has said, casting the future of the service in the UK in doubt.
Speaking during a UK visit in which he will meet legislators to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, described the bill as the most concerning piece of legislation currently being discussed in the western world.
He said: “It’s a remarkable thing to think about. There isn’t a way to change it in just one part of the world. Some countries have chosen to block it: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”
“End-to-end” encryption is used in messaging services to prevent anyone but the recipients of a communication from being able to decrypt it. WhatsApp cannot read messages sent over its own service, and so cannot comply with law enforcement requests to hand over messages, or pleas to actively monitor communications for child protection or antiterror purposes.
The UK government already has the power to demand the removal of encryption thanks to the 2016 investigatory powers act, but WhatsApp has never received a legal demand to do so, Cathcart said. The online safety bill is a concerning expansion of that power, because of the “grey area” in the legislation.
Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to comply with without removing end-to-end encryption. If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.
Similar legislation in other jurisdictions, such as the EU’s digital markets act, explicitly defends end-to-end encryption for messaging services, Cathcart said, and he called for similar language to be inserted into the UK bill before it passed. “It could make clear that privacy and security should be considered in the framework. It could explicitly say that end-to-end encryption should not be taken away. There can be more procedural safeguards so that this can’t just happen independently as a decision.”
Although WhatsApp is best known as a messaging app, the company also offers social networking-style features through its “communities” offering, which allows group chats of more than a 1,000 users to be grouped together to mimic services such as Slack and Discord. Those, too, are end-to-end encrypted, but Cathcart argued that the chances of a large community causing trouble was slim. “When you get into a group of that size, the ease of one person reporting it is very high, to the extent that if there’s actually something serious going on it is very easy for one person to report it, or easy if someone is investigating it for them to get access.”
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The company also officially requires UK users to be older than 16, but Cathcart declined to advise parents whose children have an account on the service to delete it, saying “it’s important that parents make thoughtful choices”.
The online safety bill is expected to return to parliament this summer. If passed, it will give Ofcom significant new powers as the internet regulator, and enable it to require effective content moderation under the penalty of large fines. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/07/chlorine-attacks-and-daily-harassment-why-mexicos-female-delivery-drivers-are-organising | Global development | 2023-12-07T14:00:23.000Z | Mattha Busby | Chlorine attacks and daily harassment: why Mexico’s female delivery drivers are organising | It was 10am in Mexico City on 24 February this year, and the heat from the morning sun was beginning to impose itself on the sprawling capital.
Berline Augustin, a food delivery driver originally from Haiti, had driven for more than an hour from her home in the outskirts of the capital to the fashionable barrio of Roma Norte, where there is plenty of food to be delivered to the affluent. She was waiting to get an order, when a fellow repartidor pulled up alongside and threw chlorine at her.
“I felt it burning against my clothes,” Augustin says. It narrowly missed touching her skin directly. Augustin, 23, has no doubts why this violent attack happened – it was another example of the misogynistic aggression that female delivery drivers, especially non-Mexicans, face every day from colleagues, customers and the restaurant staff from whom they collect the food.
The man is part of a group of fellow drivers who often heckle her and other women with the claims that they get more work, and tips, than them. “Its not true. I wake up early: that’s why I get a lot of orders. They tell us we should be at home with our children, but I don’t have children!”
Augustin says she is regularly subjected to racist remarks from the male repartidors, while some ask how much sex would cost. She rarely responds and did not consider reporting her attacker because she believed nothing would be done. She is also cognisant of her foreign national status. “This is not my country,” she says.
The National Union of App Workers (Unta) gender secretary, Shaira Garduño, and union member Yurexhi Valdivieso Rojas, both delivery drivers, outside the punto naranja safe space in Mexico City. Photograph: Bex Griffin/The Guardian
On another occasion, a man wearing only boxer shorts opened the door to her to collect his sushi with his penis visibly erect. But Augustin says that despite reporting the incident she received little support from the company. “They’re not going to lose a customer because of a delivery driver,” she says.
To find more avenues for support, this year she joined the National Union of App Workers (Unta), which represents workers for four major food delivery firms, and other companies, in Mexico. The union campaigns to regularise the status of its members as workers, which would see them obtain basic employment rights, and to defend female workers.
A report this year by Fairwork, an academic project scrutinising the gig economy, says that many female app workers in Mexico face “constant sexual harassment from staff of affiliated establishments, during their working hours on public roads, and by service users”.
Kruskaya Hidalgo, co-author of the Fairwork report and a union organiser at the Solidarity Center, which supports the delivery app workers’ union Unta. Photograph: Bex Griffin/The Guardian
Women told the researchers that they had been “confronted with requests for sexual acts when making home deliveries”. Some men open the door entirely naked to collect their deliveries, according to Shaira Garduño, the gender secretary at Unta, which was founded in 2020 and now says it has more than 700 members nationwide. Garduño says she knows of men masturbating in taxis driven by female drivers, and a delivery driver who was taken hostage for several days and sexually abused.
Other drivers are known to have been asked for sexual favours by the police to resolve alleged traffic infractions. So it is no wonder so few are prepared to make official complaints to the authorities. “There is no culture of reporting to the police here in Mexico, because we know that the justice system doesn’t work,” says Sergio Guerrero, Unta’s general secretary.
Last year, reform proposals backed by Unta that would have classified app workers as employees hit a brick wall, which condemned half a million workers, a tenth of them women, to continued insecurity – with no support if they get hurt in an accident or become pregnant. “If you don’t have a contract, then federal labour laws do not protect you,” says Guerrero.
Like other delivery and taxi drivers in the gig economy across the world, such workers in Mexico are considered business partners, or socios. But the situation in Mexico is worse than in some other countries because non-contracted workers do not get basic social security benefits. On average, app drivers earn about $500 (£396) a month from long working weeks, leaving many families in poverty in the increasingly expensive Mexican capital.
Garduño points to a sticker on her bike that says ‘Por un movimiento sindical con equidad de genero’ (for a union movement with gender equality). Photograph: Bex Griffin/The Guardian
The anger over these injustices is being channelled into the growing union movement – emboldened by the 2019 rewriting of the North American Free Trade Agreement – to make it far easier for independent unions to operate. In Mexico City, in October, representatives of unions from seven Latin American countries demanded greater action from the app companies against gendered violence, as well as algorithmic transparency. “We are discriminated workers fighting against two monsters: politicians and platforms,” Angélica Salgado, national adviser at the Workers’ United Center of Chile, told local media.
“The app companies do little to protect women, even when they make complaints,” says Garduño. “Our female members are regularly intimidated and insulted in the street in the course of their work.”
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Recently she had a brainwave, leading to the opening, in October, of the union’s first punto naranja – a place where female delivery drivers can rest and replenish during shifts, charge their devices, use the toilet and meet other drivers. Crucially, it is also a place where workers can seek help from the union in the event of harassment, or worse.
Drivers, organisers, union members and friends meet to chat, organise and eat at the punto naranja, housed inside a Venezeualan restaurant. Photograph: Bex Griffin/The Guardian
Unta opened another this November and is planning four more in other cities before the end of the year, modelled on safe spaces for women at risk elsewhere in the country. “Now colleagues have a place to go in case of harassment, or simply to use the bathroom,” Garduño says.
The union is calling on the delivery app companies to follow its lead and set up monitored hubs across the city where female drivers can wait for orders free from harassment.
“In the absence of truly pro-women initiatives from the government and the platforms, the punto naranja sends the message that positive actions can easily be taken,” says Kruskaya Hidalgo, co-author of the Fairwork report and a union organiser at the Solidarity Center, which supports Unta.
In the absence of corporate support, workers strive to protect each other. In Merida, dozens of female drivers track each other’s locations while they work, in case of danger. “In the face of the discrimination and violence faced by women platform workers, a support and companionship network becomes fundamental,” Hidalgo and her co-authors wrote of the group, who call themselves Círculo Violeta – the Violet Circle.
An Unta flyer calls on people to defend their rights and join the union, outlining that it provides emergency vehicle support, legal assistance and other services. Photograph: Bex Griffin/The Guardian
Back at the punto naranja in Mexico City, Augustin – who arrived in Mexico five years ago and ran deliveries on a bicycle, then a moped, before being able to buy a motorbike – is telling her colleagues about her plans to become a nurse. One day a week, she studies at a local college – funding herself with the little she has spare from her delivery earnings. “It’s been my dream to be a nurse since I was little: I love helping people, and I love children. But I still have a long way to go. There’s a lot of work to do.”
Additional reporting by Philippa Kelly | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/tvandradioblog/2017/apr/24/the-big-little-lies-soundtrack-hbo-tv-vallee | Music | 2017-04-24T14:01:00.000Z | Dorian Lynskey | All killer: why the Big Little Lies soundtrack is its secret weapon | This evening British viewers get to see the finale of Big Little Lies, the hit HBO miniseries about the secret lives of four women in the beautiful town of Privilege-on-Sea, AKA Monterey, California. I’ve been diligently avoiding spoilers since it aired in the US so I have no idea how the central murder mystery will be resolved, but I can guarantee that the choice of music will be crucial.
It’s unusual for a TV series to spawn a soundtrack album or move songs up the charts (Girls being an impressive exception) but then Jean-Marc Vallée is an unusual director. Instead of commissioning a score, he uses existing songs to create mood, drive narrative and reveal character. Veteran music supervisor Sue Jacobs, who previously worked with Vallée on his movies Wild and Demolition, recently told Vulture: “It’s very unnerving for people. Some executives are like, ‘you gotta get a composer’. But he likes working this way and I love working this way, too.” Before he starts shooting, Vallée decides which characters will inform the music and shares playlists with his team. At the end of the shoot, he burns CDs of all the songs he’s used and gives them to the cast and crew. At the Big Little Lies wrap party, the four lead actresses serenaded him with Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams. “I guess I’m a frustrated DJ who’s making films,” Vallée told Variety.
Music in movies or TV shows falls into two categories. Diegetic music exists in the world of the characters and can be heard by them. Non-diegetic music is an authorial choice imposed on the action from above. So, for example, the hapless mobsters in Goodfellas aren’t actually listening to Layla as they get simultaneously whacked (non-diegetic) but Mr Blond in Reservoir Dogs is really dancing to Stuck in the Middle With You while he tortures a police officer (diegetic).
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At its best, diegetic music is viscerally powerful because it illustrates the role of music in the characters’ lives. The standout sequence in the movie Girlhood shows the teenage protagonists partying to Rihanna’s Diamonds, turning a rather generic pop song into a thrilling vehicle for bonding and liberation. Music-loving directors are prone to forcing their own tastes on to their characters – people in Tarantino or Wes Anderson movies rarely diverge from the directors’ record collections – but Vallée gives each character their own distinct relationship with music. Celeste (Nicole Kidman) dons her earbuds to wallow in the luxuriant pain of Irma Thomas’s Straight from the Heart. Jane (Shailene Woodley) uses Death in Vegas and the Flaming Lips to purge traumatic memories while driving or running along the beach. Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) is cheerfully clueless. When she hears Sade at a tense family lunch, she asks if it’s Adele (Of course, the zen, bohemian Bonnie, played by Zoë Kravitz, is a Sade fan). The characters dance, sing, discuss and escape into music – it’s woven into the fabric of their lives – so the viewer hears every song filtered through their reactions. Nothing is merely background noise.
In a show in which first-graders are more well-adjusted than any of the adults, the real tastemakers are Madeline’s daughter Chloe (Darby Camp) and Jane’s son Ziggy (Iain Armitage). Some viewers have found their tastes suspiciously advanced. I could argue that Ziggy – named after Ziggy Stardust – is bonding with his musically clued-up mum and that Chloe may have got some tips from her thwarted hipster dad Ed (Adam Scott), but that requires some suspension of disbelief. Music here is the unspoken language of emotional truth – we only realise how damaged Jane is when she plays Martha Wainwright’s Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole at the end of episode one – so the most emotionally fluent characters have the best taste. “We need music in our lives to love, to make up, and Chloe knows that,” Vallée explained to Entertainment Weekly. “She makes playlists for people. And she’s committed and she contaminates everyone around her.”
Chloe’s the kind of kid who picks PJ Harvey’s trip-hop deep cut The Wind on the school run. Mostly she digs modern soul singers like Leon Bridges and Alabama Shakes, whose retro aesthetic chimes with the show’s magnificent theme tune, Michael Kiwanuka’s Cold Little Heart. Like the glorious cinematography, this strand of the soundtrack underlines the theme of the show: beautiful surfaces with turbulent undercurrents. Chloe has a child’s faith in the power of a song to unite and heal; Bridges’ River, which shot up the R&B charts thanks to Big Little Lies, is her gift to her repressed mother. “I think that’s why people relate to it,” Jacobs told Decider. “I think it’s actually because people are feeling that [song] as Reese.”
Ziggy, meanwhile, finds his music online, which explains some of his more arresting choices. His enjoyment of Grace Slick’s isolated vocal track from Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is credible because that track recently circulated on social media. Obscure offcuts aren’t just for crate diggers anymore.
When Vallée and Jacobs’ choices are more obvious, they have the ring of truth. It makes perfect sense that the musically basic Madeline would choose Dreams for a Californian road trip (you imagine that Rumours is one of about six CDs she owns), and that Celeste’s brutally controlling husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) would pick Neil Young’s Harvest Moon when he’s being performatively romantic. Some songs operate on two levels, illustrating the characters’ inner and outer lives at the same time. For Ziggy, Papa Was a Rolling Stone is a fun song he comes to love while learning a Temptations dance routine from YouTube. For Jane, it’s a coded message: “Mama, I’m depending on you to tell me the truth.” For the viewer, it becomes the ominous heartbeat of the penultimate episode. As a purely directorial choice it would be far too on-the-nose but it’s embedded in Ziggy’s reality. The song has both a diegetic and non-diegetic life.
What impresses me most about Vallée is that he’s clearly a music buff but he’s not obsessed with showing the viewer how cool he is. He and Jacobs did similarly smart work on Wild, in which the songs Reese Witherspoon’s character listens to her on her long, cathartic walk are believable choices even as they reveal more than she realises. For Vallée and Jacobs a song has to do the work of a score while staying true to the characters’ lives. It’s a complicated high-wire act – Jacobs has called the unorthodox scoring process “super hard, really challenging, unbelievably detailed and difficult” – but the pair make it look easy. They capture the way that music fans score their lives with songs whose meanings mutate and proliferate as the context changes. We may be entering a golden age of TV music, from the 80s synthscapes of Stranger Things to the eerie player-piano cover versions on Westworld, but only Big Little Lies reminds us that we’re all the DJs and music supervisors of our own lives. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/06/wagamama-struggling-to-find-chefs-at-a-fifth-of-its-uk-sites | Business | 2021-09-05T23:01:04.000Z | Jasper Jolly | Wagamama struggling to find chefs at a fifth of its UK sites | The boss of Wagamama has said the restaurant chain is struggling to hire chefs at a fifth of its sites, as companies across the economy warn of recruitment difficulties.
The end of most coronavirus pandemic restrictions in the UK has led to a bounce back in demand for the hospitality industry, which was among the hardest-hit sectors. However, many restaurants, bars and hotels are struggling to find enough workers to fill roles.
Wagamama, which serves pan-Asian food, has been hit by shortages of staff from Europe following Brexit immigration restrictions, its chief executive, Thomas Heier, told the Press Association, with difficulties at 30 of its 147 sites.
Worker shortage will lead to UK food price rises, industry warns
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“We’ve seen a reduction in our EU workforce in particular,” Heier said, “but the other thing we’re seeing is increased competition from logistics and delivery firms who are struggling with an increased number of vacancies.”
UKHospitality, an industry lobby group, has described the shortage of staff as “critical”. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed that there was a 10% vacancy rate in the hospitality sector, equivalent to 210,000 roles.
Wagamama owner burns through £5.5m a month in Covid-19 lockdown
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Ratings agency Fitch last week said the movement of workers out of the UK back to the EU had been “intensified by Brexit”. It added that European employers were facing similar challenges, although freedom of movement between EU countries coupled with higher unemployment meant the problems were less acute.
Wagamama, which is part of The Restaurant Group, the owner of Garfunkel’s and Chiquito among other brands, also reported unseasonally high demand. While UK domestic restrictions on movement and socialising have been lifted, travel abroad to many popular destinations is still restricted, meaning that spending has been directed elsewhere.
“It’s a perfect storm of higher than normal demand, with supply chain challenges in the mix and a shortage of staff on the logistics side,” said Heier.
Food prices could also rise, Heier said. “I don’t think we or anyone else are out of the water yet.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/02/daniel-radcliffe-cripple-of-inishmaan-interview | Film | 2013-06-02T18:00:01.000Z | Tim Lewis | Daniel Radcliffe: 'I'm not a one-trick pony' | Your latest role is in Martin McDonagh's play The Cripple of Inishmaan. What made you want to play Billy, the "cripple" of the title?
Michael Grandage, the director, presented me with three or four plays, and as soon as I read Cripple there was no contest. I'm very much the tragic relief of this play: Billy has a few funny lines but a lot of the comedy comes out of people being incredibly cruel to my character. Which I'm very, very happy with. I've learned that I really enjoy stage violence. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of my lunchtimes as a child choreographing fight scenes on Potter. So I'm quite good at it: the stunt department always said that I bounce.
Billy dreams of escaping Inishmaan for the neighbouring island of Inishmore, where they are making a film – the real-life, 1934 Man of Aran. Did you feel any personal connection to the role?
Billy's ambition to get away from the island is definitely one of the things I find really attractive. Somebody who's been so beaten down all his life can still say: "No, you're all wrong. I believe I can make something of myself." I absolutely don't relate to being beaten down my whole life – I had amazing opportunities at a young age – but there is still in many, many people's minds the notion that I'll never be able to escape Harry Potter. So my drive is to prove to people that I'm not a one-trick pony, basically. Drive is not something I'm lacking in.
You're a fan of the band British Sea Power and in 2009 they did a soundtrack for Man of Aran. Did you see that version?
Yeah, that's the only thing I knew about it: I'd watched maybe the first 10 minutes along with the album. I mentioned it to Michael in the hope that I might get to meet British Sea Power, bring them in to soundtrack it.
Is it true that you want to have a tattoo of a British Sea Power lyric?
Yes: "Bravery Already Exists". I want to get a tattoo on my forearm, something on my chest and maybe something on my back. There's various quotes I love. It sounds pretentious but there's something about the Beckett quote: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
But you don't have any tattoos yet?
No, I've got to get a sustained series of jobs where I don't have to get naked. But I haven't hit one of them yet, for some reason. There was that first few years of my career when I was just doing Potter where there wasn't a huge amount of nudity. But since then it's been almost every job. Recently I had my gay sex scene in Kill Your Darlings, a skinny-dipping scene in The F Word and a straight sex scene in Horns. It's just been a year of it.
From Equus onwards, you've picked some intrepid jobs. Do you need to be scared by a new project?
In a way it's just bad luck. Everything that's really interesting to me happens to involve some massive, scary thing, like getting my dick out or learning to dance [How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway]. Perhaps it's having spent 10 years in what could be described as a comfort zone. Not to just throw these slightly cliched phrases at you, but there's a Henry Ford quote: "If you always do what you've always done, you will get what you've always got."
What is it you like about the Beckett quote on failure? The Harry Potter films made billions and both the Woman in Black film and TV drama A Young Doctor's Notebook were hits…
I know it wouldn't seem like I've had a lot of failure in my career but there are things that I regard as failures, when I look at certain performances and go, "That's not good enough."
Are you going to say what those are?
The sixth Harry Potter film – I don't like my performance in that film at all. There's stuff in The Woman in Black: I'm really glad it did well but I look at that film and there were probably six weeks between finishing Potter and starting that, so I hear the same voice and I see a very similar style of acting.
Many people are surprised that you, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have turned out OK. Why is that?
It does seem to amaze everyone: "Why aren't you fucked up?" It's great when you come in at that place of very low expectations because you'll always be a pleasant surprise. But it's so hard to pin down why we all turned out all right. You know, with my mum be a casting director and my dad a literary agent, I've heard a lot of round-the-dinner-table complaining about certain actors and their behaviour. So when you come to a film set with that in your head, you go, "Oh God, I don't want anyone to ever talk about me that way."
You once said you watched a lot of parliament on TV. Do you still?
Parliament less so nowadays but I watch tons of quiz shows and I'm a little bit of a Come Dine With Me obsessive. I'm always amazed because I'm a very unadventurous eater but why would you go on that show and seemingly eat nothing? They just go round to people's houses for a week going, "Ooh, I can't eat that."
In what ways are you an unadventurous eater?
This is one of the things I could never admit to while I was on Harry Potter but I'm very bad at fruit and vegetables. I basically have the diet of a 19th-century Irish navvy, apart from the litre of stout a day. It's meat and potatoes and bread and cheese: those are my four food groups. But at the moment I'm doing enough exercise, so it's fine.
In your next film to be released, Kill Your Darlings, you're playing Allen Ginsberg. Where was that on the scale of terrifying?
That was pretty fucking terrifying, I've got to say.
Because of the gay sex scenes?
No, no, no, just because of playing Ginsberg in a film about the Beats. Allen Ginsberg: American, Jewish, working class. Daniel Radcliffe: English, Jewish by the way but not really, upper class, and definitely looks a million miles away from Allen Ginsberg. When you start from that you think: "I can't just be good in this film. I have to be better than good for people to even actually give me the chance." But I think a lot of people are going to see it and see me in a very different way afterwards. Which is a good thing.
The Cripple of Inishmaan runs at the Noël Coward theatre, London from 8 Jun to 31 Aug | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/07/new-train-services-london-scotland-grand-union | Business | 2024-03-07T14:07:56.000Z | Jack Simpson | New train services between London and Scotland get go-ahead | The rail regulator has given the green light for a new operator to provide services on the west coast mainline from London to Scotland, as the government aims to ramp up competition on the train network.
Grand Union has been given the go-ahead by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) to start running services from London Euston to Stirling from June 2025, in a move the regulator said would increase competition and choice for passengers.
Four return services to Stirling will run daily from Euston, and stop at Milton Keynes, Preston and Carlisle, directly competing with Avanti, the current franchise operator for the line.
In Scotland it will stop at Whifflet, Greenfaulds, Larbert and Stirling, which do not currently have a direct service to and from London.
Grand Union will run the service as an open access operator, a provider that can apply for access to lines, without requiring government subsidy and taking on full commercial risk. It is the first open access operator to use the west coast mainline.
In February 2023, when setting out the government’s plan for rail, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, said it would provide support for more open access operators, saying they would play an important part in the future of the railway.
There are three open access operators on the east coast mainline, including Lumo, owned by FirstGroup, which runs services between London and Edinburgh, and Grand Central, which runs from London to Sunderland and Bradford.
These numbers are expected to grow in the future, with Grand Union securing permission to run services on the Great Western mainline between London Paddington and Carmarthen in south Wales from 2025.
FirstGroup last week announced it was in discussion with regulators about extending some of its London-Edinburgh Lumo services to and from Glasgow.
Grand Union was set up by the former British Rail executive Ian Yeowart, who also created other open access operator Grand Central Trains in 1999, before it was sold to Arriva in 2011.
According to the company, the services from London to Stirling will include free wifi for all passengers and provide more legroom when compared with other services. The company, which will be based in Scotland, will also create 100 full-time roles.
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Stephanie Tobyn, the ORR’s director of strategy, policy and and reform, said: “Our decision helps increase services for passengers and boost competition on Britain’s railway network.
“By providing more trains serving new destinations, open access operators offer passengers more choice in the origin and price of their journey leading to better outcomes for rail users.”
Grand Union was approached for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/23/mark-lanegan-defied-darkness-to-become-one-of-his-generations-most-soulful-singers | Music | 2022-02-23T10:23:05.000Z | Stevie Chick | Mark Lanegan defied darkness to become one of his generation’s most soulful singers | Mark Lanegan, who died on Tuesday morning at the age of 57, was perhaps the greatest singer of his generation. His remarkable gift was apparent from his earliest work with Screaming Trees: a worn, soulful burr betraying heavy emotional and physical mileage, but possessed of considerable dignity, vulnerability and heroism.
It only deepened as he pursued a lauded solo career, served as floating vocalist-in-residence with Queens of the Stone Age and engaged in collaborations with artists including Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli, Martina Topley-Bird and Manic Street Preachers. A drug user and alcoholic for many years, Lanegan wove his agonising struggle with addiction into a grim, gripping memoir, 2020’s remarkably frank Sing Backwards and Weep, at the insistence of his late friend Anthony Bourdain. His 2021 bout of Covid-19 – which left him hospitalised for weeks – yielded a further tome, Devil in a Coma, published in December.
The widespread acclaim Lanegan enjoyed through the latter half of his career seemed unimaginable during the years he toiled with Screaming Trees. Lanegan first met the group’s founders, brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner, in the early 80s while working for their parents, repossessing televisions from trailer park residents in his home town of Ellensburg, Washington. Signed to legendary underground label SST Records, and releasing several overlooked, undersold albums throughout the decade, Screaming Trees was fractious from the out, Lanegan resenting guitarist Gary Lee’s creative control of their output and penchant for acid-rock written in a register higher than Lanegan could comfortably sing.
Screaming Trees, with Mark Lanegan left, in London in 1989. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images
Lanegan wrested control for Sweet Oblivion, the Trees’ second album for Epic Records, penning the lyrics and singing them in the forbidding baritone that he’d begun developing on tracks such as Grey Diamond Desert from 1988’s Invisible Lantern, and that became his trademark. Sweet Oblivion arrived in 1992, just as the underground scene of the Pacific north-west suddenly went overground, thanks to the success of groups including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. These groups were Lanegan’s friends – “Kurt [Cobain] was like a little brother, [Alice in Chains frontman] Layne Staley was like a twin,” Lanegan told Spin last year – and Screaming Trees were tipped for similar stardom.
But while Sweet Oblivion and its 1996 follow-up Dust were majestic records, matching the intensity of Lanegan’s vocals to high-impact heavy rock (grunge never burned with such eloquent, self-lacerating regret as on No One Knows) Screaming Trees seemed doomed by both their in-fighting and Lanegan’s snowballing taste for self-destruction. A fractious 1996 stint supporting Oasis on a high-profile US tour saw Lanegan tangle backstage with Liam Gallagher, an encounter recounted with scathing hilarity in Sing Backwards and Weep. Another Trees tour the following year was sidelined after Lanegan was arrested for possession of crack cocaine, a crack-pipe and a hypodermic needle. Dust was the final album the group would release in its lifetime.
Screaming Trees: No One Knows – video
Lanegan had been boozing since he was 12 years old, and a doctor had told him at the age of 20 that he wouldn’t live to see another decade if he didn’t quit drinking; he initially turned to heroin “to save me from becoming an alcoholic”. His memoir offers harrowing accounts of the depths to which his addictions pushed him, ruining friendships and debasing himself physically and mentally in pursuit of a fix. His substance abuse accelerated following Cobain’s death, as Lanegan struggled with his guilt over scoring heroin for the Nirvana frontman and ignoring his phone calls in the days before his suicide.
The intervention of Cobain’s widow Courtney Love – who once described Lanegan as “Seattle’s Nick Cave” and paid for him to enter rehab – helped save his life. “It was the end of a nightmare that had lasted for years and years,” he told me in 2004. “Nobody likes to believe they need anybody’s help in anything, and the smarter you are – and I’m not smart – or the tougher you are – and I thought I was pretty tough – the more trouble you have. The smartest guys I ever met are not around any more because they thought they could think their way out of an unthinkable situation, and the tough guys have to just be beaten up repeatedly. And some guys just never do make it out.”
While living in a post-rehab halfway house, Lanegan recorded Scraps at Midnight, the third in a series of dark, mature solo albums he’d begun with 1990’s The Winding Sheet (on which he’d been backed by Nirvana for a chilling cover of Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night, years before Cobain’s own MTV Unplugged version). On these early solo records, Lanegan channelled his love for folk, country and blues, drawing inspiration from Van Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, and showcasing a complexity that had been overshadowed by the Conner brothers’ guitar heroics.
He was at the halfway house when Josh Homme, who’d played second guitar on the final Screaming Trees tours, approached him to join his new band, Queens of the Stone Age. He had to turn the offer down, but later stepped aboard Homme’s unruly alt-rock pirate ship for their 2000 breakthrough Rated R, his weighty growl grounding the album’s abundant debauchery on comedown blues Into the Fade, and delivering highlights of 2002 follow-up Songs for the Deaf like the doomy thrash of Song for the Dead. While he subsequently exited the core group, he remained a member-at-large, guesting on later albums.
Lanegan with Isobel Campbell. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
‘This thing was trying to dismantle me’: Mark Lanegan on nearly dying of Covid
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With his solo work showcasing his skills as a singer and songwriter, and QOTSA scoring commercial success he’d never previously tasted, Lanegan cut loose over the last two decades of his life. He was prolific like never before, and shared his gifts with a list of collaborators both inspired and unexpected. With Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell, he cut three albums that brilliantly inverted the paradigm set by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra decades earlier (“I write the songs and he’s the eye-candy,” Campbell told me. “Sometimes, we’ll be on stage, and he’s singing The Circus Is Leaving Town, and it sounds so sad, so true, I want to cry”). With longtime friend and kindred spirit Greg Dulli, he recorded a sublime album of soulful regret as the Gutter Twins. He worked alongside PJ Harvey and Slash, and undertook projects with lesser-known talents including Duke Garwood, Soulsavers and Joe Cardamone. His energy was fearsome, his approach fearless; his later albums embraced electronic music (2012’s Blues Funeral) and icy post-punk (2019’s Somebody’s Knocking), his final album, 2020’s Straight Songs of Sorrow, inspired by the experience of writing his memoir.
Fifty-seven is no age to die, especially for a man with a voice that promised only to grow richer and more variegated with age, a voice that had earned a place alongside greats such as his beloved Johnny Cash. He’d outlived so many of his friends – Cobain, Staley, Bourdain – which is a curse all its own. But in those years his doctor had said he’d never get to taste, he created some of the greatest music of his career, found love with his second wife, Shelley Brien, located a unique voice as a prose writer, and lived long enough for his gifts to be recognised. “I feel that the fellas and myself didn’t get our due,” he told me in 2004, the ignominy suffered by Screaming Trees clearly still painful. Eighteen years later, Lanegan was finally accruing those dues, and it’s a tragedy his story ends so soon. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/30/digital-age-nostalgia-online-generation | Opinion | 2013-10-30T17:38:05.000Z | Holly Baxter | How the digital age turbocharged nostalgia | Holly Baxter | Nostalgia is a funny thing in the digital age. Take Throwback Thursday, beloved of the generation known as millennials (people who were children in the year 2000). Throwback Thursday is a Twitter and Instagram phenomenon in which 25-year-olds post pictures of themselves at 20 and loudly philosophise about how and why everything has changed since those halcyon days. To which you'd be perfectly within your rights to reply: hey sunshine, this is not visual proof of your patriotic contributions during the great war, this is Warwick University's freshers' week in 2008.
And yet if you did say that, you'd be missing a trick. Because nostalgia is a completely different beast to generations who have grown up documenting their lives online. It is no longer an internal emotion or a quiet yearning for what has passed. Instead, it is a deafening roar of collective online voices about how far we've come, how we can present that progress, and how our teenage identities on MySpace can be reconciled with our twentysomething personas on Facebook.
Such behaviour shouldn't be too surprising in a cohort of people who actually buy assorted "vintage" hand-me-downs for more than new clothes. But things really do move lightning-fast in the digi-world, so why shouldn't we become nostalgic in a timeframe that might otherwise seem ridiculously premature? Remember the man who bought $27 worth of bitcoins in 2009, forgot about them for a while, and recently found out that they're now worth $886k? (OK, the story only broke yesterday, but bear with me while I reminisce). His windfall is testament to how digi-time is monumentally different to real time.
If you need further illustration of this, then look no further than the widespread excitement about the just announced 2014 Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican in London, which is due to showcase Gameboy, Tetris and MacPaint devices (no word yet on whether side ponytails and Jumanji T-shirts are compulsory for entry). The show promises young adults, hyped up on Sega Sonic, earnestly discussing how you couldn't use the phone while you were on the internet in the good old days. Like Digital Archaeology, a similar exhibition that was developed as part of Internet Week Europe 2010 (yes, really) and showcased "a selection of the most significant sites of our time", it draws attention to how far we've come in a short space of time. The internet is still very young, yet we can already fill galleries with its many different incarnations.
There are more reasons to be nostalgic about the digi-world beyond fond conversations about nights spent on MSN Messenger. For instance, the surge of technological creativity that accompanied the opening of the App Store and a supposed new age of internet democracy is worth being nostalgic about. In the last couple of years (decades in Apple-speak), the platform has instead been awash with refinements of existing APIs, put together with very little innovation. By remembering our initial enthusiasm for such new forms, perhaps we can reignite those fires of inspiration.
Willard Foxton argued recently in the Telegraph, that there was no point in teaching children how to code because it's an "extra difficult, boring subject" with few applications. Foxton is wrong, of course; the point of teaching coding is not just to develop a useful amount of future computer programmers, but to give children the tools to be creative in the digital world. Creative coding is as nuanced an outlet as any other form of expression and has the potential to entirely reshape the cyberworld as we know it, once again.
So long as nostalgia drives us forward as well as making us glance back, then it can be a powerful force. And if we don't teach our kids about that, then we won't have anything to feel nostalgic about in three years' time. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jan/27/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-of-all-time-what-should-make-the-list | Books | 2016-01-27T15:00:08.000Z | Marta Bausells | The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: what should make the list? | Robert McCrum loves a good list: after the author and Observer writer spent over two years compiling and reviewing his 100 best novels written in English, he’s now back to craft a “definitive” list of essential works of nonfiction.
What are the 100 best nonfiction books of all time?
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This second top 100 is a continuation of McCrum’s investigation into “the classic titles that form the core of Anglo-American literary culture: the 100 key texts that have had a decisive influence on the shaping of the ‘Anglo-American imagination’, economically, socially, culturally and politically,” wrote McCrum. “The King James Bible of 1611, for instance, is every bit as influential as the greatest novelists of the past 300 years, from Austen to Waugh.”
When McCrum concluded the best novel list last year, debate ensued: the perceived lack of diversity prompted this response from Rachel Cooke and the creation of this alternative list, courtesy of our readers.
This time, we’re giving readers a head start by putting the question to you first. McCrum has disclosed that he will unveil the list chronologically, starting on Sunday, with titles exploring the distant past up to the present day – beginning with The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Which are the titles that you think should make the list? Leave up to three nominations in the comments, and please explain your choices.
Update: you’ve already shared enough brilliant recommendations for a lifetime of reading – keep them coming! Here are some of your suggestions so far:
As is traditional in such situations, I'm going to say it out that the books I like are better than the books you like so there.
I don't presume to know what the "best nonfiction books of all time*" (*in English) are but if I had to compile a list of the nonfiction books I've read that really made me feel like I was a better informed person for having read them, I'd say these would feature:
1) Friday Night Lights, HG Bissinger: A book that, for me, exploded my preconceptions about the state of race relations, education and sport in America from an English naivete to something more aware. A book I read not knowing anything about the sport it talked of, but which was more than merely a book about sport. Genuinely tragic and shocking at times, a book I never hesitate to recommend to others. I began reading it thinking that school sport, while something I hated, was something vital and important and that the fierce competition criticised by some leftist thinkers was good (a viewpoint I suppose is Nietzschean) - I finished reading it realising that what people like Chomsky say about the dangers of tribal sporting culture perhaps has more validity than I gave it credit for.
2) Ways of Seeing, John Berger: The book that, when I read it at university, made me realise that if you think studying popular or new media is a silly, worthless pursuit - or in some way a soft subject - you are quite simply wrong. A look at art that teaches the reader how to be visually literate, and encourages them to apply this to everything rather than just the "classics". In a time when there's a constant call for mass media and "geek" pursuits to be "taken seriously" it is by reading Berger and Barthes that people will be able to talk seriously about comics, games and television.
3) Practical Criticism, IA Richards: What Berger did for visual art for me, Richards did for literature. Not so much teaching me how to spot themes and techniques in the hoary old canon, but how to read in a way that makes every book more rewarding. There's something of a belief that "analysing" a book is antithetical to "enjoying" it. Reading about the elements of literary and cultural analysis made me realise, I think, that not only does being able to analyse make one able to enjoy things more deeply without consciously needing to sit down and write an essay about everything, knowing the theories of criticism let you articulate what you like about things all the more eloquently.
It's rather annoying that the books have to be in English, otherwise I would have suggested Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book as something I found immensely interesting.
R042
27 January 2016 3:43pm
I think that the work that Rebecca Solnit has done over the past decade is significant. There are a number of her books that could be recommended. Perhaps the one that inspires the most knee-jerk anger is MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME.
Terry Tempest-Williams wrote a brilliant book called REFUGE. In it, she documented three things that turned out to have connections: her entire matrilineal line, going back three generations, of reproductive cancers. The flooding of the Great Salt Lake Basin. And, U.S. atomic bomb testing in the Nevada desert in the 1950s.
For those of us living in the west of the U.S. (from being a kid until I moved away at age 30), living out west sometimes feels the equivalent of living in the north of England (I'm originally from Manchester). The gov't treated us like guinea pigs.
I have others to suggest, but I know your list will soon get full.
fingerlakeswanderer
27 January 2016 4:23pm
What If by Randall Monroe. The author uses sound scientific principles to answer questions such as (and I probably paraphrase) 'What if I could throw a baseball at the speed of light?', in a very entertaining way.
The Empty Space by Peter Brook. A wonderful, virtually talismanic discourse on the power of theatre, that proves sometimes the best things come in small packages.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. A dissection of global politics that devastatingly reveals the world as it really works.
EvilEdd
27 January 2016 4:44pm
Touching The Void, Joe Simpson's account of being left to die on the side of a remote Peruvian mountain with a shattered knee. After being stuck down a crevasse for days, he somehow found the drive to find a way out and crawl across glacier and moraine until, on the verge of death, he made it to the camp which his friends were about to vacate. It can be read as a straight mountaineering adventure story, and indeed it's one of the best I've ever read, but what makes it special is what it can say about the "indomitable human spirit" or whatever the phrase is. Gripping, reflective, and unforgettable.
EsIstGeschlossen
27 January 2016 6:24pm
May be a little low brow for some on here judging by the comments but I immensley enjoyed Bill Bryson's 'A History of Nearly Everything'.
Just the level of depth and gentle humour necessary to provide a great introduction to a whole range of subjects that you could then pursue further if they peak your interest.
Anyone wishing they knew a bit more about stuff generally (from gravity to alchemy to the origins of life), then I'd highly recommend it. Closest I've ever come to emailing an author to express my gratitude and admiration!
saltedpeanut
27 January 2016 6:02pm
Undoubtedly Marc Bloch's Feudal Society. I have read many, many history books, and this one makes everything else look small and clumsy.
He describes medieval society piece by piece, with every new chapter revealing something new, fascinating and unexpected. It is incredibly erudite but entirely accessible to any interested reader. It definitely deserves its reputation.
Westmorlandia
27 January 2016 6:18pm
That's pretty easy.
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, it not only shaped modern science, but also led to an entire new conception about what is to be a human.
A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume, one of the most relevant philosophical works of all times, that put most Western thinkers on guard to defend the knowledge against skepticism.
On Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau. It set the principles for many non-aggressive civil movements, ranging from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
Henry Bugalho
27 January 2016 7:02pm
1. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R Hofstadter
2. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Richard Feynman
3. Mythologies - Roland Barthes
1. An extraordinarily wide-ranging book which is at once mind-expanding yet accessible. Hofstadter attempts to explain one of the great theorems of modern mathematics in layman's terms, whilst finding many parallels between mathematics, music and art, and exploring such diverse topics as artificial intelligence, viruses, DNA and much more besides.
2. Quantum physics is never easy to grasp, but Feynman's little book is remarkably clear, and should be accessible to anyone with a reasonable grasp of high-school maths.
3. Barthes was wonderfully insightful on mid-20th century culture, media and advertising. He wrote these essays before he'd had much contact with the structuralists/post-structuralists, so (the last few chapters aside, which he wrote after Levi-Strauss suggested he read de Saussure) this book is refreshingly accessible and jargon-free. It is an original and brilliant mind at work, exploring areas that had hitherto been neglected, but play such an important role in how people think and act in our media-saturated world.
MikeAlx
28 January 2016 3:11pm
.@PublishersWkly Number one is The Education of Henry Adams. I don't know what number two is, but it's a long way back.
— Andrew Case (@AClaudeCase) January 27, 2016
@tonyriches @GuardianBooks I don't know about all time, but Krakatoa by Simon Winchester is very good. In Cold Blood is a favorite, too.
— Patrycja Karolina (@pk_adams) January 27, 2016
@guardian @martabausells "On Writing" by #StephenKing. Best #book about writing out there.
— DCDaddy (@dcdaddysWT) January 27, 2016 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/aug/31/conversation-with-carmel-review | Stage | 2011-08-31T17:30:01.000Z | Judith Mackrell | A Conversation with Carmel – review | It's Carmel's 80th birthday – but as she finds herself being feted by a surprise party, her immediate reaction is panic and dismay. Only after a pause can she adjust her expression to a joyful embrace of her guests. This is family life as portrayed though Natasha Gilmore's charming, sad and wise production – the most loving, but also the most lonely place in the world.
A core cast of five make up the family: granny Carmel (danced by 82-year-old Diana Payne-Myers), mother, father, daughter and boyfriend. The dynamics between them are principally evoked through dance – an awkwardly joshing duet between father and boyfriend that tips into a sharp struggle for dominance; a joyously hormone-charged duet for the teen lovers, danced as the mother mildly hangs out the laundry. Such is the quality of both choreography and performance that each vignette speaks volumes. Matthew Hawkins is particularly fine as the watchful, bemusedly affectionate dad.
Dovetailed into the dance are short films of real-life elderly people, whose reminiscences on the pains and pleasures of their own families embellish the action on stage. Some of their stories are heart-rending, such as the woman who waits every Christmas for her once-beloved son to visit. But they are also set against ebullient scenes where a mob of extras (including Gilmore's 14-month-old baby) crowd the stage as party guests. Through their natural-looking revelry – much of it cleverly orchestrated around the laughing baby – a genuine sense of cross-generational community is created. It is only Carmel and Dad who hover on the edges. One searing image in this beautifully judged production is of Hawkins, balanced on a table, with party balloons floating from his shoulders. He might be trying to fly, but weighing him down is the box of family photos in his hands – his burden, his life, his loves. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/feb/03/right-here-right-now-review-fatboy-slims-beach-concert-will-make-you-flinch-with-anxiety | Television & radio | 2023-02-03T23:50:15.000Z | Jack Seale | Right Here, Right Now review – Fatboy Slim’s beach concert will make you flinch with anxiety | Lingering snobbery towards dance music means the Big Beach Boutique II, a DJ set by Norman Cook – AKA Fatboy Slim – on Brighton beach on 13 July 2002, tends not to be mentioned alongside era-defining gigs like the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in 1969, the Stone Roses at Spike Island in 1990 or Oasis at Knebworth in 1996. Right Here, Right Now (Sky Documentaries) might rectify that, but it isn’t just a thrilling document of the event itself. The combination of what happened, and what might have happened but didn’t, turns Jak Hutchcraft’s film into a surprisingly intense experience, a rush powered by the euphoria of irresponsible adventure and the sweet sadness of distant youth.
This is good going, considering that the first half is a relatively tedious summary of Norman Cook’s earlier career. We shuffle through his stint as the bass player in 80s band the Housemartins, whose tinkling guitars contrasted with the deep knowledge of funk and dance records Cook was acquiring in his spare time. By the time the Housemartins had run their course, he was a DJ, ready to embrace the new era of club culture. In 1996, he released his debut album under the moniker Fatboy Slim, layering ingeniously chosen samples over dance rhythms to create what became known as big beat. When Channel 4 held an open-air screening of an England cricket match at the Brighton seaside in 2001, it asked Fatboy Slim – who by then had scored top-five hits with Praise You and The Rockefeller Skank – to DJ afterwards. Thousands of people turned up. Fatboy Slim decided to stage a sequel the following year, planning a free set for as many people as the beach could take.
When Right Here, Right Now reaches the summer of 2002, it becomes an entirely different film. Suddenly local councillors and senior police officers are being interviewed, and describe their preparations: the phrase “multi-agency meeting”, not often heard in rockumentaries, is uttered several times as those involved recall their growing concern that too many people would attend the event. Meanwhile, the documentary hears from some of those who did: ravers old and young, famous (John Simm, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost) and not, remembering how they borrowed cars, piled on to trains and did whatever was necessary to get to Brighton.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost among the crowd at Big Beach Boutique II. Photograph: BMG/Fatboy Slim/PA
Too many people did indeed arrive – far too many. The council had estimated 60,000, but it was more like 250,000. The A23 was backed up past Gatwick about 25 miles away. Abandoned cars were strewn along the coast road to nearby Hove. Several hours before the gig was to start, the beach was a vast mass of people, high on beer, ecstasy and the Sussex sun. In a live TV interview on his seafront balcony at the Grand hotel, Fatboy Slim said: “I’m quite scared.” He wasn’t joking.
The details make you flinch with anxiety. The security staff tasked with telling punters standing at the water’s edge that they couldn’t stay there, because they would be underwater when the tide came in, quit en masse because the job was impossible. Riot police manning the beach’s groynes – stone barriers counteracting longshore drift, with slippery seaweed on top and a sheer drop on one side – were withdrawn for their own safety. At an afternoon meeting with police, Fatboy Slim was told the gig should go ahead, not because it was deemed safe, but because it would have been even more dangerous to cancel.
On to the stage he went, opening with It Just Won’t Do by Tim Deluxe and closing with his own new remix of Pure Shores by All Saints. The music was perfect, the crowd went into raptures and the catastrophe the authorities had feared … never materialised. Only six arrests were made, and the two fatalities – a heart attack, and a fall from the esplanade railings above the beach – were tragic anomalies. The crushes, violence and drownings that could so easily have claimed scores of lives didn’t happen, for one simple reason: this was a loved-up dance crowd, not a fired-up rock crowd. As one of the security staff succinctly puts it: “If that had been an Oasis gig, we would have been fucked.”
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Big Beach Boutique II has become a case study for students of event management, a textbook example of how not to do it. No similar free concert has been permitted in Britain since. But in the film’s fantastic array of still photos of the day, we see people exhilarated and free. Speaking now, the ravers who met their life partners, underwent epiphanies, or just had the time of their life on that beach all gleam at the memory of a moment – a wild night out with a quarter of a million mates – that is all the more glorious because it must never be repeated. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/01/vodafone-blinkbox-tesco-video-tv | Media | 2014-12-01T12:42:07.000Z | Mark Sweney | Vodafone in talks to buy Blinkbox | Vodafone has held talks with Tesco about buying its loss-making video streaming service Blinkbox, as the telecoms company seeks to bolster its TV and content operation ahead of a launch into home broadband next year.
Tesco acquired Blinkbox, which was set up by former Channel 4 and Vodafone executives, three years ago to try to create a UK competitor to Amazon’s LoveFilm – now rebranded Amazon Prime Video – and Netflix.
In October, Dave Lewis, Tesco’s new chief executive, decided the eight-year-old video business will be sold, or shut, as the retailer refocuses on its core, ailing grocery business.
Vodafone is understood to have held talks about taking over Blinkbox, which made a loss of almost £20m in its last financial year, and one source cautioned that there is no guarantee a deal will be reached.
By buying the company, Vodafone could pave the way for an entrance into pay-TV and home broadband market next year.
Blinkbox offers more than 10,000 films and TV shows on devices including PCs, Macs and tablets, and has content licensing deals with partners including BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and film studios such as Fox and Universal.
Last September, Vodafone hired Cindy Rose, the former executive director of digital entertainment at Virgin Media, as UK consumer director.
Rose, an ex-Disney senior executive, was responsible for launching Virgin Media’s TiVo TV service in the UK.
Vodafone’s interest in the TV and content market follows rival EE, the UK’s biggest mobile operator, launching a set-top box to expand into offering customers a TV service.
The mobile phone company’s move comes as telecoms rival BT holds talks with EE and O2 about a potential takeover.
Reports emerged last week that Vodafone may also be interested in John Malone’s Liberty Global, which owns Virgin Media in the UK.
To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.
To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/27/immigration-plans-might-not-be-published-before-brexit-vote-javid | UK news | 2018-11-27T18:52:50.000Z | Peter Walker | Immigration plans might not be published before Brexit vote, says Javid | MPs might have to vote on the Brexit deal without knowing details of the future immigration policy, Sajid Javid has said, as he also indicated the planned scheme might abandon the target of keeping net annual migration to the tens of thousands.
In a sometimes testy appearance before the home affairs select committee, the home secretary said only that the long-awaited white paper on post-Brexit immigration should arrive before the end of the year.
“The government hasn’t set a final publication date for the white paper, but very shortly,” Javid told the cross-party panel when asked when it would arrive. “I’d certainly say in December.”
Asked whether it would come before MPs vote on the Brexit deal on 11 December, Javid said: “I hope it will come before that, but I’m not in a position to be too specific on the date right now.”
Some committee members expressed disquiet that the Commons might have to decide on the Brexit deal without knowing a key policy element. Javid was then reminded by the committee chair, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, that he had earlier promised the document by the end of July.
“When I first came into the department I was hoping that things were more ready than they actually were,” Javid said.
Home Office faces high court challenge over 'profiteering' fees
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Quizzed later in the session by the former Labour MP John Woodcock on whether the white paper would stick to the Conservatives’ long-broken pledge to reduce annual net migration below 100,000, Javid declined a series of opportunities to do so.
“The white paper is not complete. So you will have to wait for its publication,” Javid told Woodcock, who quit the Labour party in July amid a disputed disciplinary case.
Javid said: “What you call the target, the ambition, that was set out in the Conservative party manifesto, is for this parliament. In terms of what might be the future immigration policy vis-a-vis targets and numbers and aspirations, you’ll have to wait and see.”
He added: “What you’ll see in the white paper, speaking broadly, is a future immigration system that is really fit for the future for the long term. That means it has got to be flexible enough to meet our needs in how they change over time.”
Pressed by Cooper on how realistic the target would be when non-EU net migration alone is currently 230,000 a year, Javid called the figure “an aspiration”. He said: “It is our policy to bring down net migration to more sustainable levels, and our aspiration is the tens of thousands.”
Asked whether that tens of thousands target formed part of the post-Brexit EU immigration policy, Javid would only respond: “I have answered your question. I am trying to bring down net migration overall.”
A final area of confusion centred on JJavid’s statement that freedom of movement for EU nationals would end immediately if the UK left the EU in March without a deal.
Committee members questioned how this would work, when the government has already said that in this case, border checks would not immediately change, and employers would not be obliged to check the position of EU nationals seeking work until a post-Brexit “settled status” scheme was completed.
“The two are perfectly compatible. It’s perfectly possible to end freedom of movement in law, and not put an extra burden on employers after that date,” Javid said.
Asked for more details, he said: “We will be actually setting this out in due course, because it is important we set out more detail on how that might work.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/09/london-road-serial-killer-film-musical-rufus-norris-interview | Film | 2015-06-09T15:27:44.000Z | Tom Seymour | London Road: unlike any serial killer film you've seen before | “T
hey were a complete pain in the neck,” sings Olivia Colman’s Julie. “Y’know, they, they’re better off 10 feet under … That’s a horrible thing to say, isn’t it? But I’d love to shake his hand and say: ‘Thank you very much for getting rid of them.’”
Musicals we love: London Road
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Julie, who was interviewed by Alecky Blythe in Ipswich, late 2006, is referring to five women, aged 19 to 29, who were strangled to death and dumped, or arranged, naked in the woods. The hand she wants to shake is that of Steve Wright, the serial killer, and her neighbour.
The film team review London Road Guardian
The victims had used Julie’s street, London Road, as a place to attract punters, and then to feed their drug habits. A quiet residential road full of cheerful, flawed, decent people became the centre of Ipswich’s red-light district, and then the hunting ground for one of Britain’s most brutal serial killers, who lived at number 79.
Before and during Wright’s trial, Blythe, a former actor turned experimental playwright, ingratiated herself with the residents of London Road who, for those few weeks in late 2006, were caught in the salacious, judgmental way in which Britain, as a nation, responds to such acts of depravity.
“We got a lot of bad press ... when it was all goin’ on,” sings Julie, “sayin’... ‘London Road was a prostitute area’ and so forth like that, and we jus’ got absolutely cheesed off with it as a community ... It’s not nice bein’ labelled.”
Watch a trailer for London Road Guardian
We’re backstage at the National Theatre, sitting in the office of Rufus Norris, its newly appointed artistic director. Norris directed the original stage play of London Road, and the new film. Late from a meeting and due in another soon, he listens to his writer intently while chewing on a sandwich.
“They had a load of journalists looking for their scoop on Steve Wright,” Blythe says. “‘What was he like? Was he strange? Did they ever suspect him? Did they know the victims?’
I wanted to know what it was like living doors away from a serial killer. They said: 'Yes, we'll tell you … a nightmare'
Alecky Blythe
“I wanted to know what it was like to live a few doors up from a serial killer. They were like: ‘Yes, we’ll tell you about that, because it’s been a fuckin’ nightmare.’”
Blythe returned to London with more than 100 hours of recordings, and was paired with Norris by his predecessor at the National, Sir Nicholas Hytner. The relationship, they admit, was at first wary. “I was worried he wouldn’t see the beauty in the detail of the dialogue – the ‘ums’ and ‘errs’,” Blythe says, glancing at him briefly. “I think he sensed I was worried about losing the authenticity of the delivery, but we worked through it.”
The resulting play debuted to rave reviews at the National’s Cottesloe theatre in April 2011, before transferring to the larger Lyttelton. The BBC got in touch, and a film was made for £3m.
London Road on stage at the National Theatre, London, in 2011. Photograph: Mark Douet
London Road depicts a community of people who – via fish and chip nights, tea and biscuits, and gardening competitions – gradually find a way of emerging from the shadow of such violence.
But this is no normal documentary portrait. Instead, London Road is a “verbatim” musical, matching – word for word, respecting every pause, every stutter, every colloquialism – the cadence of throwaway comments and small observations to the camp melodies of a West End jolly.
“We had to try and find a way that honoured the people of London Road, that little Britain in there,” Norris says. “It’s a very political piece, with a small ‘p’. It’s about communities all over Britain, in a landscape where government or local government are reluctant to deal with the complexities of issues like prostitution or drug addiction.
“They can’t be properly dealt with by government, so they’re left alone. They’re not looked after, because doing so would be too unpopular. There are plenty of models throughout the world where people are doing innovative things with problems like this. But no one would do it here because the press would turn against them.”
Anita Dobson in the film version of London Road
A surprising but largely welcome choice for the role of artistic director, Norris, a 50-year-old father of two, who made his film debut in 2012 with the little-seen Broken, succeeded Hytner in April on the promise of bringing more female and non-white voices into the National.
How is he finding the new gig? “I don’t think you can know whether you’re suited to it until you do it,” he says. “I think it will be hard for me to say, ‘Yeah, I’m in the right place,’ or to know whether the place is happy with someone like me, until we’ve got the first year out of the way. I’m enjoying parts of it, and I think I’m managing to stay on my feet.”
The pressure of the role, he admits, is on his mind. “I’m now not allowed to be a beginner, or a promising newcomer, or the outsider, or the pirate ship, or any of those things,” he says. “This is the National Theatre, and everything has to be at a standard.”
He expects to work 80 to 90 hours a week, and not to have a life beyond work. Some “difficult decisions”, he admits, will have to be made. “I have the stamina,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll be any good at it. I didn’t expect the job to find my exposed nerves like it has.”
London Road – review
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Which nerves have been exposed ? “What’s sharp is when you really, properly start doubting yourself. It’s about recognising your insecurity and weakness” he says with a quick smile. “I sometimes feel that if I throw more hours at this, then it’ll all be fine. And then suddenly I’m getting nowhere near enough sleep. Or, on a more personal level, the voice inside my head saying ‘you can’t do it’ gets a bit too loud.”
Despite the self-deprecation, four plays have already opened under Norris’s watch, and each has been a success. Moira Buffini and Damon Albarn are currently writing a musical inspired by Alice in Wonderland, which Norris will direct, and then there’s the daringness, and sheer performative skill, of London Road. Tom Hardy, “an old mate”, has a seven-minute singing cameo in the film, as a taxi driver with a little too much insight into what the killer might be like, while Olivia Colman and Anita Dobson, in their effortlessly sympathetic ways, lead the film. But they’re easily matched by the original ensemble stage cast.
“We had six weeks of rehearsals, and four weeks of that were sat around a tape recorder or piano,” Norris says. “There were very strict rules. You have to say it how they said it, exactly. If you miss an ‘err’, or add one in, we start again. Embellishment is out of the question.”
“I’m sure all the performers cried in the toilets,” says Blythe. “But they are all fantastic musicians. They were analysing the lilt in someone’s voice and saying: ‘I think they’ve gone from an F to a D flat there.’”
The end product is a strange, unsettling and often deeply moving work of verisimilitude that, in its journalistic foundations and dramatic execution, holds some dark truths about British life.
If any of us lived on that street, I don't think we would have the same liberal views about prostitution
Rufus Norris
Did either of them struggle with some of the views expressed by the residents towards the murdered girls?
“If any of us lived on that street, I don’t think we would have the same liberal views about prostitution,” Norris says. “If there is a failing in the film, it’s that I didn’t work hard enough to show what it was like for people living there, particularly those with teenage daughters, when they had prostitution happening on their doorstep. I discovered after the event that it was far more extreme than I thought.
“But at the same time, you have to balance it by acknowledging the fact that these young women are drug addicts, and are not being looked after by society either.”
Kate Fleetwood in the new film version of London Road. Photograph: Nicola Dove
The remaining prostitutes, the ones who escaped Steve Wright, exert a ghostly presence in the film, often wandering, unseen and unheard, through scenes of community endeavour. But their experiences and their own personal trauma increasingly become the beating heart of the drama.
Was that a directorial choice, I ask – and if so, one that could be seen to undermine the verbatim message of the film, and a community’s opportunity to speak for itself on its own terms?
“I don’t think it’s a paradox to incorporate both perspectives,” Norris says, “because they sit cheek by jowl in real life. Saying ‘the girls are right’ or ‘the residents are right’ is a bullshit response.
“And the fact is,” Norris continues, “there’s no question of whether this character would say this line like this or not. They did, verifiably, exactly like that. As an audience, you’re relieved of that judgment. I think people are instinctively compassionate towards the truth, and if they feel they’re getting the absolute truth – a guarantee that this is exactly what the person said – then you sort of can’t argue with that.”
London Road: The Live Film Premiere will be screened in cinemas across the UK as part of NT Live on Tuesday 9 June. London Road is in cinemas from Friday 12 June. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/06/north-east-councils-vote-against-devolution-sunderland-durham-south-tyneside-gateshead | Politics | 2016-09-06T18:57:52.000Z | Josh Halliday | Four out of seven north-east councils vote against devolution | The future of devolution in the north-east of England has been thrown into doubt after council leaders voted against the multimillion-pound plans.
Four out of seven councils in the region voted against the proposals that include the contentious issue of electing a mayor for the region. Newcastle, Northumberland and North Tyneside all voted to move forward with the plans, but Sunderland, Durham, South Tyneside and Gateshead voted against.
The move is a fresh blow to the government’s plans to devolve more powers to regions across England, a cornerstone of ex-chancellor George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” vision.
Why devolution must survive the Brexit vote and move power out of London
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Sajid Javid, the secretary of state for communities and local government, said he was disappointed with the decision but indicated devolution was not dead in the north-east. A spokeswoman for his department said: “It is disappointing that some north-east councils have been unwilling to support this deal, which would certainly have benefited local people. If councils in the region wish to discuss devolution proposals further, our door remains open.”
While devolution plans have progressed in Manchester, Sheffield and Teesside, the proposals have been fraught with difficulty in the north-east. In May, Gateshead voted against supporting the devolution deal because of concerns about funding and its future.
Leaders from the seven north-east councils have also repeatedly sought assurances from Theresa May’s government about hundreds of millions of pounds of EU funding pledged before the Brexit vote on 23 June.
The current devolution deal would guarantee £30m a year for the region to spend, in addition to being given control of a £3.4bn pool of investment cash. It would also devolve powers over areas such as transport, skills and housing with the proviso that the north-east has a directly elected mayor by May 2017.
Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, was last month voted Labour’s candidate for the mayor of Greater Manchester. Labour MP Steve Rotheram was voted the party’s candidate for mayor of the Liverpool city region.
Paul Watson, chair of the North East Combined Authority (Neca) of the seven councils, described the vote as disappointing. He said: “Each of the seven councils which make up the Neca has always made clear that they support the principle of devolution for the north-east. Following the outcome of the EU referendum and the subsequent changes within government, council leaders have been equally clear that to move forward, the new government must provide assurances regarding the terms of the region’s devolution deal.
“Extensive discussions and negotiations have taken place with government and within the region over recent months but unfortunately, despite our best efforts, it has not been possible to reach an agreement which all of the seven local authorities feel able to support. Although this is disappointing we will continue to work together with government to achieve our ambition of a stronger regional economy with improved opportunities for residents and businesses.”
Alexandra Jones, chief executive of thinktank Centre for Cities, said: “It is deeply regrettable that local leaders in the north-east have been unable to agree upon taking forward the proposed devolution deal for the area, which could have boosted the region’s long-term economic prospects. But this should not signal the end of devolution in the north-east. Now may be the time to think instead about devolving power on a different basis within the region: for example to a ‘Newcastle city region’, which would more closely reflect the geography over which people in that area live, work and access public services. National and local leaders must continue to work together to explore these options, and to ensure that devolution in the north-east does not come to a standstill.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/13/its-all-i-talk-about-crunch-time-for-sixth-formers-to-decide-on-university-places | Education | 2020-06-13T07:00:11.000Z | Rachel Hall | It's all I talk about': crunch time for sixth-formers to decide on university places | The final year of school is always stressful but at least it follows a familiar template: revision, exams, results, and – hopefully – celebrations. For this year’s A-level students, however, everything they hoped for has been turned on its head by the coronavirus pandemic.
Sixth-formers now have to make important decisions based on uncertain information: will their teacher-assessed grades be lower? Will they still get their place at university? Will they need to take exams in the autumn? When will they even know? They need to decide on their first choice of university by 18 June, although some universities will still consider applications after that to defer for a year.
‘Will my teachers give me the grades?’
Emily Emiru, St Olave’s grammar school, south-east London
Thousands of A-level students could lose their unconditional university offers
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“I was in hospital at the start of the year for eight days, and I was off school for more than a month. If there’s been any disruption to your education they usually give you extra marks in your A-levels but now I have no idea what to expect.
I am worried I won’t get my grades through teacher marks, so I was thinking I would take the option of sitting exams in the autumn term. But the government hasn’t said when. If it’s in September, maybe people would be able to do the exams and still go to university, but if it’s November then term will already have started. I was hoping to go to Nottingham University in September to do economics.
You look forward to university, and to suddenly not have a clue whether or not you’re going and the next steps for what you want to do is frustrating. And it’s hard to prepare for exams when you don’t even know when they are or how they’re going to work. I’d rather take a year out to get the grades I need rather than just settle for less.
If I do get my grades, I will still go to university – but I’m worried now whether it will be what I’d hoped for. Part of it is making friends, trying new activities, getting the first experience of living away from home, kind of like a taste of adulthood. If you’re doing university online that’s not the same.”
‘What stresses me is all the uncertainty’
Delilah Pearson, Colyton grammar school, Colyton, Devon
“I was planning to study Arabic and business at Edinburgh University starting this year. But the coronavirus situation has given me time to think about whether the decision is right for me.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to do a gap year now. I don’t want to start university with online teaching. I think for learning a new language from scratch, having face-to-face teaching is important. Another big factor is the social side, because Scotland is the opposite end of the country from where I am now. If you’re unable to go out and mix that causes isolation and you just feel a bit lonely, which isn’t how you want to feel when you’re embarking on a new adventure.
So do I reject my offer? Or do I defer? What most stresses me is all the uncertainty. I don’t even know whether that’s still the course I want to do – I’m thinking of studying international relations now.
I’m trying to find a job, which is tricky because so is the rest of the world. If I worked and built up some money I’d like to visit the Middle East in my gap year, but I don’t know how travel restrictions will pan out.
My parents have been very understanding. It’s all I ever seem to talk about: school and uni and how everything’s going to pan out. It’s always at the forefront of my mind. I’m just trying to get everything off my chest and trying to understand more clearly what I want to do.”
‘If I have to wear a mask, I’ll wear a mask’
Harry Jaconelli, Scarborough sixth-form college, Scarborough
“The course I’ve applied for, applied chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of Strathclyde, is the only one in the country. I wouldn’t change my decision because the course is exactly right for me, and I think if that’s the case you’ll be able to get through whatever adversities are put in your way. Yes, people are saying social distancing could go on for years, but it’s pointless worrying about two to three years into the future. The course is fantastic and if I have to wear a mask, I have to wear a mask.
I would feel quite disappointed if it was entirely online. In the first year there’s a great deal of social interaction outside the course. It’s also difficult to teach practical subjects like chemistry online – you can’t expect people to set up labs in their bedrooms or there’d be a lot of university students missing eyebrows.
What we have to remember is: everyone’s in the same boat. Everyone won’t have had a freshers week, won’t have met new people. But it’ll just be delayed. Where that starts to change is if the entire first year is online. Then you’ll be more likely to make friends on your course rather than people who you live with, so you won’t have as diverse a friendship circle.
Teachers say if you get the grades just go to the university, don’t worry about taking the exams, which is sound advice. Some teachers say you might want to keep your hand in, in terms of revision for autumn exams in case you don’t get what you want. I slightly disagree, because if you try to revise all that time you’re going to burn out.”
‘I’ve discovered I like history’
Emily Jenkins, Newport Girls’ High School, Shropshire
“To pass the time in lockdown I started looking into different history subjects, which has made me question whether in applying for computer science, I applied for the right degree. I studied the Golden Age of Spain for my coursework, but my A-level curriculum skipped multiple events and characters, such as Queen Juana “the Mad” of Castile, who I found really interesting. I really enjoyed delving into a more detailed version of the past and that’s led me to reconsider my degree. I enjoy the discussion side of history and that there’s no right answer, whereas computer science can be very black and white.
The university I applied to was in Scotland, and I’m now looking at other universities, including Oxbridge, to study history. I’m scared of losing the place I already have, though, as I know the competition will be tougher next year. I’m waiting to get my grades to make a final choice – whether to defer or go through clearing. If I defer, I’ll spend a year continuing to look into history and who I want to be, now I don’t have to worry about exams. It has been sad that all the final events I was going to have with my friends have been taken away, but as the world has been going more online we’ve found new ways of reaching out to each other. So although it has taken some of the expectations of leaving school I had, it’s given me a sense of community I didn’t have before.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/feb/27/john-galliano-profile-1986 | Fashion | 2018-02-27T05:00:12.000Z | Sarah Mower | John Galliano: 'a young man of special talent' - archive, 27 February 1986 | John Galliano provokes. As a designer he is a volatile mix of the best and some of the worst tendencies in British fashion. His shows are confrontational fantasies on historical themes, deliberately freakish, self-consciously theatrical. Audience reaction to being showered with talcum powder or dead fish is sharply divided into wild enthusiasm on the one hand and deep exasperation on the other.
How John Galliano changed the face of fashion
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Galliano may try the grown ups’ patience with his high jinks and the crazed nonsense verse of his programme notes, but even his sternest critics do not deny that he is a young man of some special talent. At St Martin’s he was a star student, impressing his tutors with his natural ability and obsessive researching of details. One of his ex-teachers, not a man given to overstatement or notably fond of trendy excess, believes Galliano has it in him to become one of the fashion greats and could one day revolutionise the way women will want to dress.
High praise indeed. But he and other serious observers are anxious for the fate of Galliano and the vein of British fashion he inhabits. Some even warned I should stay away from writing about him, saying that, at 25, he has already had too much publicity and is suffering from it. That school of thought avers Galliano should be left alone to mature quietly, out of the way of head-turning dangers of designer celebrity, with the freedom to make beginners’ mistakes in reasonable privacy.
Galliano’s problem is mixed up in broader issues that begin with British art school education and end with the place that British fashion occupies internationally. He is the product of an art school system second to none in the world, a liberal education that teaches students to question, innovate and pursue ideas in an individualistic, purist manner. That, by and large, is where the London fashion explosion of the last few years originated - producing a flock of young designers whose bright, outrageous (often unwearable) clothes grabbed world attention for their sheer verve and audacity.
Fashion designer John Galliano and Kate Moss (L) during Paris Fashion Week’s Ready-to-Wear Spring/Summer 1994 fashion show. Photograph: John van Hasselt - Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images
Like pop stars young designers attract hype. Galliano was hailed as super-genius for his 1984 degree show, his work displayed instantly in the windows of Browns, London’s most prestigious fashion showcase. As it happened, the exposure brought Galliano a wealthy backer, but the situation was dodgy in other respects. Would he, like others, end up as a one-hit wonder?
Fledgling talent stands in danger of being over-praised and then dropped. A recent graduate may come out with a brilliant creative idea in one particular collection, but it is unrealistic to expect an unformed designer to keep up the flow season after season. When raw talent is being given the same publicity emphasis as the truly professional operations of Paris or Milan, it is bound, eventually, to suffer by comparison.
John Galliano is smart enough to sense these things. It makes him defensive when chided about his outlandish presentation and often confounding garments. ‘One has to make a fuss to make the right people take notice. It’s important to create atmosphere,’ he says. ‘The catwalk is an invitation to try something different.’
Hence his collaboration with the stylist Amanda Grieve, who interprets the spirit of his collections with the addition of conceptual accessories-plastered hair wrapped in string, head-dresses made from dried undergrowth and broken clocks, pipes and the notorious flying seafood. Galliano is adamant that the approach worked. ‘A good buyer will see through the madness to the point of the clothes beneath. People are always saying I’ll blow it, but they keep coming back.’
John Galliano speaks at Jewish event: 'I am an alcoholic. I am an addict'
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The clothes photographed on this page illustrate the dilemma. For me, the pannelled construction of the wrapped skirt in the one picture is an inspired piece of design that has been seriously worked out, proof enough of Galliano’s great potential. In it he shows off his best: the ability to rework a standard garment into something recognisably wearable yet impressively new. The other photograph captures his worst. We spent half an hour trying to work out how to fit the model into the garment’s octopoid limbs and mysterious pouches, without much success. Who will spend good money on such whimsey?
Galliano justifies the caprice by expounding an idea of naivety, a child-like approach to dressing where all rules are broken and the garment is bent to the will and imagination of the wearer. He is, he says, a designer of clothes, not fashion. It smacks, I am afraid, of that arty, Dada-ist stage of postgraduate development best explored behind closed doors rather than trumpeted abroad as a major, mould-breaking insight. It will pass, and Galliano will find out that if he is not a fashion designer, he is nothing.
The fact is that international fashion is moving away from the experimental and whacky, back to quality and classic forms. Art school nonsense no longer looks so amusing and the fear is that boredom may strike the powerful buyers, with disastrous consequences for British fashion. After much discussion, Galliano concedes the need for a change of tactic. ‘My next show, in March, will be like an old Paris collection, I’m hoping people will understand that. We’ll get rid of the unecessary extras. There’ll be a grown up approach. If I’d waited another season I might have blown it.’
I hope he pulls it off. Galliano has the humility to admit he is still learning what works in design terms and spends hours watching and minutely criticising the video of his shows. He has the dedication to succeed, and was so keen to work that he was even at his studio on Christmas Day. He has experience in textiles and can capitalise on his knowledge of the way fabric behaves. He has worked at Tommy Nutter, learning the all-important part of tailoring.
If he can harness all those skills into disciplining his wild imagination, he will be a winner and so much the better for the future of British fashion. It is up to him and his young designer peers to prove that the hyped-up London fashion explosion of the early Eighties was no mere flash in the pan.
The Guardian, 27 September 1986. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/katine/2010/oct/28/katine-verdicts-four | Katine | 2010-10-29T14:24:09.000Z | Richard M Kavuma | Verdicts on Katine: elder, midwife, councillor and well chairman | For Charles Eyagu, chair of the water source committee at the Aminit borehole, Ojom parish, the Katine community development project in north-eastern Uganda has achieved much but also left much work undone.
For him the project has had an impact on clean water supply but less on sanitation, health and livelihoods. "We are very grateful with what [the project] has done for us ─ especially in terms of providing us with water. We used to suffer a great deal, now we do not. We drink clean and safe water unlike before when we could take dirty water that caused most of us to fall sick. Now we even don't boil water."
Eyagu said the time spent and distance walked by residents looking for water has been reduced. At one time they might have had to walk up to 5km and then line up at a borehole for half a day. Women and girls walking long distances to open wells were sometimes attacked. But "this was no more," Eyagu said, with plenty of smiles, and listing off other project milestones such as the new lab at Ojom health centre, renovated schools leading to increased enrolment, the farmers' produce store and the village savings and loans associations.
But he did feel there were crucial needs that the project has not met. For instance, there is no road to Ojom health centre, not all families have latrines and there is no valley dam where animals can be watered. The project has failed to give local residents bulls as requested to ease farming activities in the community and, above all, it has failed to build teachers' houses, let alone renovate Obyarai and Olwelai primary schools as promised.
On the other hand, he said that although the project has not been able to meet local people's high expectations created earlier on, there is now at least something to build on. He praised the Guardian's involvement in the project, which has thown a spotlight on many activities implemented by the African Medical Research Foundation (Amref) that might not otherwise have been open to public scrutiny. "In fact, [the] Guardian did well to follow its funds otherwise I do not know what could have happened," he said.
Eyagu's hope now is that more boreholes will be built by either Amref or another development partner to meet a high demand - and that a maternity ward will be built at Ojom to lessen the burden faced by women who currently have to travel to Tiriri health centre or Soroti regional referral hospital to give birth.
Naphtali Okello Elepu, retired prisons officer
Naphtali Okello Elepu
Retired prisons officer Naphtali Okello Elepu, famed for modern farming methods, speaks with the unhurried authority that comes from being a respected, wealthy African elder. His youngest daughter graduated from Makerere University earlier this year; and when we met, he was due to travel 250km southward to Jinja, to meet a lawyer overseeing his rental properties there.
Elepu, 73, has been critical of his neighbours, especially men, for having enough money to drink alcohol for hours but "no money" to support their children's education or communal facilities like safe water sources. In fact, because of poor attitudes, Elepu doubted that the Katrine community partnership project would have a big impact. Now, however, reckons the old recipient mentality is starting to change.
"The change I have seen is that our people are becoming happy to be shown what to do and to participate in changing their conditions, so that Amref and the community are in partnership. And if they continue that way for some time, this place will change completely."
Elepu also sees people being more positive towards the maintenance of water sources built by Amref; in years gone by, NGOs had little success in setting up water source committees, he says. And from what he has heard, the village savings and loan associations are proving impressive.
"I hear talk about VSLA all the time," he said. "It has even awakened women who had never showed interest in businesses; they now save and borrow money from there and start small businesses and they make some money. I think this has been one of the best."
Elepu felt life has improved in Katine but feared further progress will be slow because of poor education standards.
"Many parents do not care very much about education," he said. Even though there is free universal primary education, he said "when a child has no exercise book or pen, many parents [still] just say, 'Ah, you go to school'."
For him, the success of the Amref project is partly due to the consistent presence of the Guardian: "But again, because of lack of sufficient levels of education, most people in Katine are not able to read what has been written about them in the media."
Jorem Eboku, Katine sub-county chairman
Jorem Eboku
As Katine's sub-county chairman, Jorem Eboku has played a significant role in the Katine project. He sits on the sub-county project management committee that oversees its implementation and has watched it notch up successes, particularly in community empowerment.
"At least people know their rights now," he said. "For instance, the local people can take [us] leaders to task to explain certain things that they are [not] clear about and also demand accountability [regarding] how their resources have been spent.
"Water coverage was very low before the project came [but] now coverage has reached 65% and we hope it would go to 85 percent as promised by the project. This means our people can afford to take safe clean water and avoid water-related diseases."
Also on his success list were new and renovated school buildings, raising school enrolment in both community and government aided schools and improving literacy rates with the wide distribution of textbooks.
Eboku praised the new produce store which would play a big part in improving farmers' livelihoods and the impact of the village savings and loans associations (VSLAs). "They are really working very well. We believe within the next few years most families in VSLAs would be able to sustain themselves."
Despite successes, however, the sub-county chairman picked out education as an area where Amref's input had failed to improve academic results."Take an example of the recent mock exam results where no one passed in grade one," he said. "The issue is on the quality of work done. A school like Amorikot was built but we are not sure whether it will last for many years."
On water provision, he said while residents now had more clean water sources, shoddy work was affecting more of them. "For example, the water jars were poorly constructed and this to me is a failure on the side of the project."
The other main issue was consultation. "The project tried but I feel they did not do much [about] consulting with the leadership and community members during the implementation process. Accessing [the] budget sometimes has been a real problem." He said this all translated into lack of transparency. The project had failed to meet the needs of the community after raising hopes when, for instance, Amref promised to renovate Olwelai and Obyarai primary schools.
Nevertheless, much was achieved by the significant role the Guardian played in both funding the project and following up to see where the money was going. "Without their support, the sub-county would have taken several years to reach the level it is at now - especially with our limited budget of UShs 33m [£9428] per year."
"We hope our people are really going to change in terms of development, given the so many trainings they received through the five components of livelihood, empowerment, education, health and water and sanitation," said Eboku. "We hope our children [will] now study because they have been motivated by the project and our planning process [will] actually change to meet the community's demands."
Teddy Akello, midwife
Teddy Akello
One of the most calming sights at Tiriri health centre IV – a place that conjures up memories of dying children and women, and long queues of patients without a doctor, essential medicines and sometimes even running water – is the enduring smile of midwife Teddy Akello.
Akello, 37, and her colleagues have to remain strong, explaining to attendants and women in labour that they do not have basics like gloves, razors or cotton wool and, sometimes, even painkillers. But Akello is a cheerful character. "Have you finally brought a contractor to repair our theatre?" she asked with a smile, as I arrived at her home where she was playing with her third child, five-month-old Nathan Amuku.
She hopes the operating theatre will be repaired soon as promised by Amref, but otherwise "as a health worker" she is "impressed" by the Amref project. It has trained health workers in HIV counselling, promotion of family planning and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission and has also trained traditional birth attendants and community vaccinators.
She is also happy with donations of mosquito nets to mothers and bed sheets to the maternity ward and supports Amref's community health campaign. "If sanitation and hygiene in the homes are poor, more people will fall sick and they will end up flooding us here in the health centre; so Amref has been doing preventive care for us."
Akello has worked Tiriri since April 2008 and hopes, if she has enough finance, to start studying for a nursing diploma or degree next year.
She believes the constant presence of Guardian journalists is one lesson the development world can take from Katine: "People [Amref] know that they must do things well, otherwise they will be reported on negatively and the whole world will know about it."
Two things, Akello says, are critical to Katine's future: "We have been sensitising the people about family planning and, if they take this seriously and they become committed to educating their children, things will really become better – but maybe in 10 years." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/mar/11/you-were-never-really-here-review-lynne-ramsay-joaquin-phoenix | Film | 2018-03-11T09:00:26.000Z | Mark Kermode | You Were Never Really Here review – a hitman with a conscience? | In 2011, I named Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay’s third feature, a brilliant adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, as my favourite film of the year. Since then, Ramsay has talked enticingly of making “Moby-Dick in space” and walked away from the female-led western Jane Got a Gun. In the process, she’s apparently earned a reputation for being “difficult”, a term first whispered during her battles to bring Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones to the screen, an ambition eventually realised by Peter Jackson, with dismal results.
Now, with her fourth film (from a novella by Jonathan Ames), Ramsay offers a riposte to anyone who ever doubted her talent or her working methods. Combining the visual poetry of Ratcatcher with the dizzying first-person fugues of Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here is a head-spinningly accomplished work that reconfirms Ramsay as one of the most thrillingly distinctive and daring film-makers of her generation.
Joaquin Phoenix is a lumpy symphony of pain as Joe, a bedraggled hired gun who specialises in retrieving lost kids. He has a reputation for brutality, a useful asset when searching for a senator’s missing daughter, Nina, eerily played by rising star Ekaterina Samsonov.
Armed with a ball-peen hammer (a weapon that chimes with his traumatic childhood memories), Joe sets out to return the child to her father. But beyond the handsome price tag, his motives are personal and his deadly endeavours will bring the chaos of his work back home.
Along with a Cannes best actor award for Phoenix, this Palme d’Or contender also earned a best screenplay trophy for Ramsay, a particularly sharp choice considering how sparse the dialogue remains throughout. Reimagining Ames’s page-turning source, Ramsay strips out explicit exposition, conjuring an elliptical world through which the audience must find its own way. The focus is on Joe’s inner turmoil, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of his fractured psyche, interspersed with flashbacks that offer clues to his shattered emotional state.
Director Lynne Ramsay: ‘I've got a reputation for being difficult – it's bullshit’
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We meet our antihero with his head in a plastic bag, his face contorted in a silent scream. Later, he dangles a dagger into his open mouth; a combat-shocked veteran, hungry for death. In some ways, he’s already dead, a wraith-like figure who, as the title suggests, leaves no physical trace in the world. Everywhere, he sees ghosts of the past: a child killed in a war zone; a container full of dead bodies. Most significantly, he’s haunted by the spectre of an abusive father whose violent rages the young Joe was powerless to oppose.
Now Joe spends time between jobs caring for his elderly mother (a heartbreaking Judith Roberts), tending to her needs, worrying about her wellbeing. Psycho may be playing on the TV in the family home (one of several horror-movie nods), but this mother’s boy is no mere Norman Bates. A scene in which Joe and his mum polish the cutlery together while gently singing “A” You’re Adorable is full of tenderness and affection, reminiscent of the beautifully understated scenes between Jason Miller and Vasiliki Maliaros that are nestled amid the growing mayhem of The Exorcist.
Watch a trailer for You Were Never Really Here.
The Shawshank Redemption pops up on TV too, as we hear Tim Robbins opining that the Pacific “has no memory”, signposting this film’s own baptismal journey of death and rebirth. Like Taxi Driver’s depiction of “God’s lonely man”, there’s something of the cracked messiah about Phoenix’s Joe, from his unkempt hair to his scarred and tortured body, as bruised and battered as his mind.
Thomas Townend’s granular cinematography places us right inside Joe’s crepuscular world, a collage of close-up physical details – hands, fingers, eyes. Passages of lyrical beauty are interspersed with grotesque eruptions of violence, although even these have a surreal quality, whether filtered through the black-and-white gaze of surveillance cameras or reflected in the shattered glass of an overhead mirror.
Brilliantly chosen pop songs provide ghoulish counterpoint to the grim action (neither Angel Baby nor I’ve Never Been to Me will ever sound the same) while Jonny Greenwood’s pulsing, throbbing, clanging score heightens the sensory overload as it meshes with Paul Davies’s immersive sound design.
It all adds up to an overwhelming experience, a slice of pure cinema from a director who refuses to dance to the beat of anyone’s drum but her own. From the disorienting opening to the enigmatic finale, Lynne Ramsay is always really here, her commanding vision shining through every frame. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/14/sbt-joan-of-all-review-heartfelt-but-fizzling-indie-rock | Music | 2023-05-14T14:00:56.000Z | Damien Morris | SBT: Joan of All review – heartfelt but fizzling indie rock | American singer-songwriter Sarabeth Tucek has been away. She first appeared 20 years ago on Smog’s Supper but hasn’t made an album of her own since 2011’s Get Well Soon – so long ago that the title track was boosted by its appearance in season one of Girls. Now Tucek’s back with a change from real name to nickname and a double album of new material. Just as in her previous incarnation, she makes slightly scuzzy, heartfelt indie rock, although much emotional impact is squandered as overlong songs stay up way past their bedtimes, all wearing very similar pyjamas.
Joan of All is more exciting when SBT leans into weirdness. 13th Street #1 recalls her best work, spiky narrative cadence sparking against taut, Lou Reed rock, made explicit by lyrics about listening to his Coney Island Baby. Shame it isn’t joined by alternate version 13th Street #2, as the album would be stronger with more of Reed’s gimlet-eyed relentlessness. Too many songs start engagingly, become slightly less interesting then peter out. And as ever, Tucek’s lyrics fall between pleasingly quotidian and blandly banal, derailing promising tracks such as The Tunnel.
Watch the video for The Gift by SBT. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/20/liberation-day-by-george-saunders-review-a-hell-of-a-ride | Books | 2022-10-20T10:00:52.000Z | Anne Enright | Liberation Day by George Saunders review – a hell of a ride | “T
he land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke.” George Saunders was writing about the unforgiving nature of the short form, but he might as well have been referring to the worlds in which his characters are trapped. Why is such a nice man so mean to the nice people he invents?
In interviews, Saunders comes across as a benignly thoughtful regular guy, a practising Buddhist who constantly tries for kindness. Some part of his writing day, however, is spent imagining complex and original ways to punish the people he has created. They are trapped by their own foolishness, or by the dreams of hyper-capitalism. They are also sometimes locked up underground, or suspended in intriguing configurations. “Suspended” here does not just mean “existing between one state and another” – though they are also that. It means hung up and left dangling, like abandoned puppets.
The 2012 story The Semplica Girl Diaries was a kind of signature piece for Saunders in his more speculative mode. In it, a man buys an “SG” lawn decoration which, we slowly discover, is made by stringing up immigrant women, as though on a washing line, by means of a micro-fibre inserted through their brains.
In this new collection, the eponymous story Liberation Day explores a similar conceit from the inside. In this case, the narrator himself is pinioned on a non-specific “wall” waiting to become an orchestrated voice in an evening concert conducted by his owner. As with the washing line, the reader is not invited to believe the hokum science; the explanation is kept loose. We do, however, keenly understand the sense of suspension, of a waking sleep or living death that this amnesiac chorus represents.
Saunders’ characters are happy in their difficulty, at least at first. In Ghoul, they are performers in a huge theme park that seems to have no limits, and they love their stupid jobs. These happy prisoners endure cheery degradations while holding outlandish props and, as in other stories, they are plucky, hopeful and hugely anxious to please. Their creator subjects these lovely, fretful people to pratfall and disaster, all of it brilliantly escalated, in order to show us lives made antic by denial. The result is both tragic and lighthearted. Even pinned to a wall and with their memories wiped, they are so darn proud and self-improving and willing to be good, you might say they are the best of America.
Saunders invents these joke prisons in order to remind the reader of the various prisons – economic, psychological and spiritual – which we build for ourselves. The first and last is the prison of the self: “You are trapped in you,” a voice says to the protagonist of The Mom of Bold Action, after an ordinary woman’s moral outrage goes awry. Even in this naturalistic piece, however, the voice enters her car as an imagined “beam of forgiveness” that is “green” and which lands “near the glove compartment”. When you are in the habit of making the allegorical physical, it is a simple step to hanging the poor and indebted on washing lines and walls.
Saunders characteristically begins a story with someone mid-thought, their diction fragmented, like jottings or notes made before their purpose becomes clear.
Why was she holding a can opener?
Hmm.
That could be something.
It’s as if the characters are making their lives up as they go along. Many are talking to themselves, their cadences running close to internal chatter, that repetitive self‑talking monologue that can be hard to shake out of your head. This sense of enclosure slows the reveal, both to the character and (at a wilful stretch) to the reader, of the conditions they must escape. On the way, there are vaudevillian bursts of delight, reverses, surprises and romance. These stories are not afraid of plot. Much of the pleasure of reading them comes from watching Saunders take an outrageous premise and resolve it by the rules of old-fashioned fiction in a bravura, high-wire act.
A pleasing thing about the characters in Liberation Day is how many of them are, in one way or another, artists and creators. They write emails or provoking essays; their fictions and opinions have an effect in the world. Some exist in the space between performance and creation and they love their work because it makes new meanings, and is sometimes beautiful. Liberation Day involves a runaway choral interpretation of Custer’s last stand, which remakes the myth of the lonely hero on the hill.
A nostalgia for American optimism runs through these pages, and this includes a nostalgia for half-decent capitalism, one in which the rich held their economic fodder in something like affection. Saunders is never less than political; he seems to say it is no longer possible to be otherwise. Love Letter, the simplest and most chilling story here, is dated 202-, and it shows the slide into an authoritarian society, as seen from a suburban front porch. No one seems to notice; they just feel a mild discomfort, like the slowly boiled frog.
In these punitive worlds in which people fail further, by choice and by misadventure, it seems impossible that they will find a way forward, but they do. By the end of a Saunders story, the characters know what is going on; they see their condition, and this awareness is a gift and the possible beginning of change. The resolutions are sometimes tiny. “What she had to do now,” thinks the mom of bold action, “was reach over, pick up the bag, open the car door, drop one foot into the grey slush.” That much she can do.
These characters are not redeemed or saved, they do not transcend: the hint is in the title – these stories are about liberation. In Mother’s Day a character dies right there on the page, and she finds wisdom and relief in the idea that she can now, finally, stop being who she is.
Saunders is the all-American Buddhist whose novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, described something that had never been written before: the release of the dead from the strictures of self. The same fusion of spirituality and patriotism makes Liberation Day a unique read. Saunders is funny and kind as ever, and his narrative virtuosity puts him up there with the best. I just hope he doesn’t feel too trapped by the perils and pleasures of the desk.
Liberation Day by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/mar/06/melissa-yeo-frozen-river-interview | Film | 2009-03-06T00:01:00.000Z | John Patterson | John Patterson meets Melissa Yeo, star of Frozen River | Melissa Leo was the dark-horse contender you've never heard of at this year's Oscar ceremony. Nominated for best actress for her lead in the low-budget indie thriller Frozen River against a very heavy field - Winslet and Streep, just for starters, gulp - she has emerged now from a two-decade career as an actor's actor and come into an altogether new kind of focus.
Things change, but they also remain the same. Speaking by phone, a week after the dizzying razzle-dazzle of the Oscars, from the makeup chair on a microbudget set somewhere in frigid northern Michigan, in the middle of the worst storm of the winter, she spells out the most noticeable change.
"The biggest thing for me is that I am now going to have to choose between work - this script or that script. Until now, my roles have chosen me; my career has been shaped essentially by never saying no. But now I will have to say no. I just hope l'll be wise in my choosing."
So the cliche about Oscar nominations prompting a sudden influx of scripts is true?
"I'm very pleased to say ... yes! After many years of starting and stalling, and then great success, and then nothing, my career has for the last three years been building and growing. I'm working with more and more interesting people. I'm working with them, alongside them and not just for them, and it only got even more amped up since the nomination."
But the rollercoaster hasn't quite reached the top yet.
"I'm here in Michigan today and tomorrow. But I'm not quite sure what I'm doing Thursday." The indie-movie life in two sentences. That will soon change.
Frozen River, written and directed by first-timer Courtney Hunt, is one of those small, well-honed independent movies - tautly written, well made, and performed with utter conviction - that would gain notice in any season. Serendipity attended its release date, however, giving Frozen River an extra boost when it appeared precisely as the American economy tanked late last year. As with Kelly Reichert's Wendy and Lucy, you can sense the reverberations from the economic collapse in the deep distance as its characters' lives go profoundly awry in the foreground. Leo plays Ray Eddy, a struggling single mother of two boys in upstate New York near the Canadian border. She's been abandoned by her gambler husband, who absconded a few weeks before Christmas with the money she had saved for a new double-wide trailer. Dogged by repo-men and the threat of foreclosure, she falls in with Lila Littlewolf, a young Mohawk native American woman who tries stealing the car her husband ditched at the bus station. Almost without thinking, such is her desperation, she joins Lila making quick and dangerous money smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada across a narrow, frozen stretch of the St Lawrence river within the Mohawk reservation, where only tribal law applies. The moment you see the iced-in stretch of water they must drive across, with their human cargo locked in the trunk, you know things will end badly.
I had expected a modest and low-key, possibly earnest working-class drama - Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in the ice and snow, perhaps - but in fact Frozen River is agonisingly suspenseful and exciting for long stretches, in addition to framing Leo's remarkable, vanity-free performance. Think of an Alice-like post-feminist drama, laid on a zippy chassis built by Don Siegel or, better yet, Ida Lupino in her noir-era directorial guise.
Even hardened thrill-hound Quentin Tarantino was impressed. As head of the Sundance jury in January 2008, he said - to the surprise of Courtney Hunt, who assumed he'd loathe it - "It put my heart in a vice and proceeded to twist that vice until the last frame." Frozen River took home the Grand Jury prize, the first of many awards it has picked up, including Leo's best actress win at the Independent Spirit Awards the day before the Oscars, and Hunt's for best screenplay.
I want to know how Leo got to grips with this tough-cookie working-class mother who's a bear for her kids and packs a handgun in her glove-compartment, but who sometimes has to lock her bedroom door and sob awhile.
"She was in fact quite easily attained. During the run-up to the Oscars I realised that one of us girls was going to walk off with the statue for best acting, but that I was the lucky one who had the very best role. I wish I could say it took all of my many years of experience to play her, but there it was on the page. And the screenplay nomination for Courtney probably recognises that too. It was phenomenal. What you see on the screen was right there on the page. My way into Ray Eddy was entirely through the screenplay."
She's a vivid figure when seen outlined against the gathering economic clouds.
"That's one of the miracles of art right there - art as the predictor of the future. Courtney, laying out the script three or four years ago, could have had no idea quite how timely it would be in the end. It wasn't until the movie had been released that we realised that many families are doing what Lila and Ray Eddy are forced to do - build extended families, new networks of support. We're on the verge of a whole new way of life here in America, and this sort of feels like a premonition."
I tell her that just looking at that ice scares me to death. How the hell did she pluck up the courage to drive across it? "We actually shot on Lake Champlain [in Vermont, near the Canadian border], substituting for the St Lawrence River. Courtney had told me - and, hey, I believed her, because trust with your director is all - that there was a good 26 inches of ice, and one requires only about 21 inches of ice to be safe driving on it. I've spent a lot of time in northern climes myself - I know people who go out ice-fishing - so actually I was far less daunted about driving on the ice than Ray was."
That's the kind of actor Leo has always been: never confuses herself with her roles, keeps a firm grip on the differences between them and herself, and just allows herself to be absorbed by them. She's in a tradition of intelligent female practitioners of the Method (often associated with enormously irritating and inauthentic masculine acting), and stands in a line reaching back to Method's greatest actress, Geraldine Page. (In fact, Leo won the Geraldine Page award at last year's 10th annual Method Fest). There is a vague connection with Ida Lupino's tougher roles, and a stronger one with performances such as Patricia Neal's in Martin Ritt's Hud and much of Ellen Burstyn's work. It has helped her distinguish such movies as 21 Grams, in which she played Benicio Del Toro's wife, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Righteous Kill, as well as her role as one of the detectives in the groundbreaking TV series Homicide: Life on the Street.
Her parents had an indelible influence on her, giving her a liberal, free-form 1960s childhood. Her father was an editor at Grove Press, which famously fought obscenity charges against American editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and The Naked Lunch. After it went under, he became a commercial fisherman off Long Island, which is certainly, as they say, changing it up some.
"I often say that the hippy in me is easy to spot, but that it's not by choice, it's by birth," Leo says. "Some of my upbringing was in a commune in Vermont - we're still members. I just got a notice on the email that some trees need to be taken care of there, so the group will decide what to do about them. It's a modern-day miracle that it's still going. Each according to his need or ability. You have to allow it to work in the way it in fact works, keep the idea of it alive, but be realistic, let things happen, respond to circumstances, not force it too much.
"It's really a lot like independent film-making."
Frozen River is being shown at the ICA Cinema, London, tomorrow at 9pm, as part of the Birds Eye View film festival | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/31/matthew-potts-promises-more-big-hitting-bazball-title-ambition-from-all-action-durham-county-cricket | Sport | 2024-03-31T07:00:34.000Z | Tanya Aldred | Potts promises more Bazball and title ambition from all-action Durham | Tanya Aldred | When Matthew Potts announced in March last year that Durham were going to Bazball their way through the County Championship, it raised a few amused eyebrows. A draw, he said, was worse than a loss. “You’d rather lose every game this year and know you’re doing it with the right intent.” Yes, very nice dear.
But, it turned out, he was right on the money. Durham galloped to the Division Two title in 2023, thrashing second-placed Worcestershire by 66 points, while collecting more batting points than had been achieved before in the bottom tier, at a rollicking rate, and pinning seven wins to their chests. It was Bazball’s human face – phenomenally successful and with a grin more of grace.
Jason Holder to join Worcestershire in bid for West Indies Test comeback
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So you would be daft not to listen to what Potts says a year on. “What’s the point in getting promoted if you’re not going to try to win the big one?” he says with a straight face. “So we’re going to try to win it.
“That’s the difference between good teams and great teams: you see it with the Test side. If they have a bad game, they’re going to approach the next Test the exact same way. That’s what great teams do. They don’t falter or change their tactics just because of one loss or one setback. Yes, the season might be a bit more turbulent than last year because everything did go very well for us, but if it doesn’t go the same, we’re going to try to grab the bull by the horns.”
If Durham do collect the pennant in September, they will have done what only two other teams – Nottinghamshire in 2005 and Essex in 2017 – have managed since the dawn of the two-division championship, win straight after being promoted. First, though, they will have to beat Surrey, out to collect their third championship on the trot, and with the added motivation of Alec Stewart’s departure from his hit-the-gym-at-6am-head-of-cricket role at the end of the season.
There should be stiff competition from Essex, who have lost Alastair Cook but gained Dean Elgar; Lancashire, who have secured the services of Nathan Lyon for at least the first part of the season; and Hampshire, if their trio of fast bowlers can keep up those astonishing level of service into their late thirties.
But Potts is not a rogue optimistic outlier. It is a chilly morning up at Chester-le-Street but nothing, even posing for the team photo in short-sleeved shirts, will dampen Durham spirits.
For Ryan Campbell, the coach from Western Australia who came to the north-east via the Netherlands and Hong Kong, cricket should be about joy. “I make very clear to our players that when someone walks away from a game at Durham they should be going: ‘Gee, I’m glad I went today, I saw great cricket, I saw smiles on faces, I saw the best of what English cricket can do.’
“It’s a bit hard for me to say that being an Aussie but I’ve invested, my family live here, my kids go to school here, they’ve got English accents, which drives me nuts. If we play the brand of cricket I know we can, we can do wonderful things this year.”
Like Brendon McCullum with England, Campbell’s effect was almost instantaneous after he took over in January last year. Not that he was without doubts. “When you’re a new coach, you hope that the players don’t think you’re just full of crap. You can say certain things but they have to believe in what you’re doing.
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“I knew I had them when we played our second game against Worcestershire. We lost our first game but the fourth morning they came to me and said we’re going to declare aren’t we? It was like, oooh are we?” He went home and told his wife Durham were going to win Division Two. “What are you on about?” she replied.
But after last year’s success, no one in Division One will underestimate Durham, whose squad – including the England hopefuls Potts, Brydon Carse and the wicketkeeper Ollie Robinson, and the run-scorers supreme Alex Lees and David Bedingham – has been boosted by England’s Melbourne nemesis Scott Boland, and Leicestershire’s Colin Ackermann and Callum Parkinson. And that’s before you throw Mark Wood or Ben Stokes into the equation.
And if the chief executive, Tim Bostock, offended county members by calling them “Luddites” for resisting private equity, others have been impressed with the efforts Durham have thrown into tendering to run one of the eight tier-one professional women’s sides the England and Wales Cricket Board has announced.
Durham want to be the best, in the women’s game, in white-ball, in the championship, a shining light for the whole north-east. Their first red-ball game starts on Friday at Chester-le-Street, when Hampshire visit. Don’t look away. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/27/astronomers-create-largest-map-universe-dark-matter-einstein | Science | 2021-05-27T15:30:30.000Z | Linda Geddes | Astronomers create largest map of the universe’s dark matter | We can’t see it, barely understand it, but know that it exists because of the powerful influence it exerts on space.
Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, and its gravitational force is enough to mesh entire galaxies together in a structure known as the cosmic web. Now, scientists have created the largest ever map of this mysterious substance – and it could imply that there’s something wrong with Einstein’s theory of relativity.
They have also mapped the location of vast cosmic voids where the conventional laws of physics may not apply.
Astronomers are able to map the existence of dark matter by looking at light travelling to Earth from distant galaxies; if the light has been distorted, this means there is matter in the foreground, bending the light as it comes towards us. Using artificial intelligence methods to analyse images of 100m galaxies, members of the international Dark Energy Survey (DES) team – a collaborative effort to reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is driving the expansion of our universe – have created a map that covers a quarter of the sky of the southern hemisphere (an eighth of the total night sky visible from Earth).
Visualised as a pink, purple and black-mottled patch, clustered inside a pale ring (a superimposed image of the Milky Way), the brightest areas of the map show the densest areas of dark matter, corresponding to superclusters of galaxies, while the black patches are cosmic voids (see main image).
Dr Niall Jeffrey, of University College London and École Normale Supérieure, Paris, who co-led the project, said: “It shows us new parts of the universe that we’ve never seen before. We can really see this cosmic web structure, including these enormous structures called cosmic voids, which are very low-density regions of the universe where there are very few galaxies and less matter.”
Scientists are interested in these structures because they suspect that gravity may behave very differently inside them. By identifying their shapes and locations, the map could therefore provide a starting point for further study.
The map, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, also brings us closer to understanding what the universe is made of and how it has evolved.
According to the standard model of cosmology, the universe started with the big bang, and then it expanded and matter evolved according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity. These gravitational forces are what created the clumps and voids of matter, which constitute the cosmic web.
Although calculations by the DES team suggest that the distribution of this matter is broadly consistent with predictions in the standard model, it is not a perfect fit. “If you look out into the universe, the matter isn’t as clumpy as expected – there are hints that it is smoother,” said Jeffrey.
“It may seem a relatively small thing, but if these hints are true then it may mean there’s something wrong with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, one of the great pillars of physics.”
One possibility is that some of the measurements used to calculate how the universe should look are not quite right, said co-author Prof Ofer Lahav, also at UCL and chair of the DES UK consortium said. Alternatively, it may be a problem with the underlying model. “Some people would even push it to say maybe Einstein was wrong,” he said.
Lahav isn’t prepared to go that far himself, yet: “What I say is: ‘Look, don’t be too relaxed. There’s something there which might indicate a disparity. Work hard, try to understand it by conventional means, but keep your eyes open that it could lead to a revolution in physics.’ ” | Full |
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