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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/19/shia-labeouf-occupies-oxford-elevator-for-performance-art-project
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Film
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2016-02-19T13:58:41.000Z
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Nadia Khomami
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Shia LaBeouf occupies Oxford lift for performance art project
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The actor Shia LaBeouf is occupying a lift in Oxford with two other performance artists for 24 hours as part of his latest project.
LaBeouf and his art collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner will also address the Oxford Union on Friday evening.
The union said the trio will be occupying the elevator at EC Oxford, an English language course centre in Gloucester Green, for a 24-hour stint ending at 9am on Saturday. They will leave the elevator for their talk but will return afterwards.
A live audio and video feed will be broadcast inside the union debating chamber for the duration of the event, which is called #ELEVATE. It is also being streamed on YouTube.
Shia LaBeouf: 'Why do I do performance art? Why does a goat jump?'
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“Visitors will be able to join LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner inside the elevator during this time, and are invited to address the artists, the debating chamber, and the internet, so that their collective voices may form an extended, expansive and egalitarian Oxford Union address,” the union said.
The performance and access to the debating chamber will be free and open to the public for the 24 hours. According to the BBC, LaBeouf told students in the lift that he was invited by the union’s president when he was involved in an art piece in Liverpool last year, which involved him setting up his own call centre.
LaBeouf said: “Stuart the president said ‘Do you want to stand in the same spot as Malcolm X?’ Who [...] am I to argue with that?”
The actor said he was expecting students entering the lift to give a “performance of monologues”. Reports say he has been asked a range of questions including “what’s your favourite Saturday?” and has played a game of “snog, marry, avoid”.
LaBeouf, from Los Angeles, has worked with Rönkkö, from Finland, and Turner, from the UK, for the past two years. The trio worked on the 2015 piece #ALLMYMOVIES, during which LaBeouf livestreamed himself watching every one of his films back to back for three days.
In a 2014 artwork called #IAMSORRY, LaBeouf wore a paper bag bearing the message “I am not famous any more” over his head. He also sat in a room in a Los Angeles art gallery where members of the public could walk in and interact with him.
That project proved controversial after it was reported that a woman raped the actor during the performance. Following the claims, Rönkkö and Turner said they had intervened as soon as they became aware of the incident.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/15/five-classic-beginners-errors-to-avoid-if-you-want-to-run-well
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Life and style
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2017-08-15T05:00:05.000Z
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Jade Cuttle
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The five mistakes runners make - and how to stay injury free
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Tom Craggs is a coaching consultant to some of the UK’s biggest sports brands and charities. Unlike most performance coaches in the UK, Tom wasn’t an elite athlete and didn’t run as a junior. He took up running to raise money for charity when his dad was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2006, completing his first marathon in three hours aged twenty-five. Since then, he’s been coaching runners one-on-one at Running With Us, offering advice and training plans to a range of athletes, from beginners to champions such as Tracy Barlow and Louise Damen who ran the Commonwealth games. After ten years of experience, there are five most common mistakes he’s seen come up again and again. They can be easily prevented with the right precautions. Here’s his guide:
Too fast, too soon
“A lot of people run at an unsustainable speed for their current level of fitness. They think they can only run in one gear. But if your energy demands are too great, then your body will rely on the readily available glycogen sugars in your muscles. A slower metabolic process that converts stored fats into usable energy is better, otherwise you’ll run out of carbohydrates. Mo Farah has enough stored fat to run several marathons back to back. Runners need to embrace easy running and not feel like it’s a failure. You can use a heartrate monitor to make sure you’re not running too fast – you should run at a pace where you can talk comfortably.”
Not enough variety
“All runners have a tendency to stick with what they’re already good at because it’s a confidence boost – particularly new runners, who are on an upward curve from a very low base. But after that initial period, your body will start to plateau, and progress will slow. The mistake is doing most of your running in a narrow band of paces, sticking to a steady pace without enough variety. Slowing down and doing interval training helps the body adapt. Instead of doing everything in one block, we break it in to smaller chunks and gradually increase them. I hate the term ‘junk miles’, but if you do loads of exercise in one area, you’re not getting all the benefits in terms of energy metabolism.”
Work gets in the way
“Fitting running around working life can be hard – everyone has busy lives. If you have heavy work projects, you should adapt a training plan around them, because if your cortisol levels become chronically elevated, this can increase the risk of injury. You should spend as much time thinking about recovery as training – your body only gets stronger when your muscles heal, when your energy systems regenerate their hormones. If you don’t balance your training with rest and nutrition, this can lead to injury or losing motivation. A consistently good night’s sleep is critical to progress. You need a balanced diet with a full spread of quality proteins and fat in the right amounts. Most people want a quick route to their goals but the body needs consistency – fad diets are definitely not sustainable.”
Muscle overload
“There are three controllable variables in training: frequency, intensity, and volume. If you change them all at the same time, the body will burn out. The main injuries people suffer include achilles tendonitis, calf muscle tears, inflammation and soreness in the knee, and shin splints. Often, the results are not immediate, but seen five to 10 years later. Running is addictive, and people want to push harder, but doing too much and overloading the muscles doesn’t make you fitter – the body can only get fitter in the adaptation period. Instead of just trying to achieve a goal in one go, break it down with rest periods, gradually increasing the length of those blocks and reducing the recoveries. This gives the body a planned, method-based approach to build fitness.”
Short-term focus
“Instead of focusing on an individual event, runners should think about a long-term plan. The aim is to build a sustainable pattern of progress – ‘periodising’ – organising the year into training phases, and making sure you incorporate strength and conditioning into this plan. Elite athletes look at Olympic cycles, and general runners can think the same way, looking at a six-month to a year plan. For example, after a marathon, don’t just suddenly stop, nor immediately restart. Look at a macro cycle – building, tapering and recovering – and consider how to stress the body differently. Put your training emphasis in a different place, like running on different surfaces, such as hilly terrain. This helps keep motivation levels up and breaks through the plateaus.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/26/child-refugee-fight-caught-publics-imagination-lord-dubs
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World news
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2016-04-26T09:34:26.000Z
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Heather Stewart
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Child refugee fight has caught public's imagination, says peer
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Lord Alf Dubs, the Labour peer leading the charge to urge the government to do more to help child refugees stranded in Europe, says he is determined to continue the fight because it has “caught the public’s imagination”.
Dubs, who was brought to Britain from Czechoslovakia as part of the government-backed Kindertransport scheme before the outbreak of the second world war, tabled an amendment to the government’s immigration bill in the Lords, which would have forced the government to accept 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees.
His proposal, which emerged from Labour’s refugee taskforce, chaired by former minister Yvette Cooper, was narrowly defeated in the House of Commons on Monday night but Dubs has now tabled an alternative proposal, which will be debated in the Lords on Tuesday.
Dubs told the Guardian he had received many messages of support from well-wishers concerned about the plight of up to 95,000 children who are thought to have reached Europe without their families after fleeing Syria and other war zones in the Middle East.
“I’m now getting so many messages from people I don’t even know, saying how much they want this to succeed,” he said. “It’s really struck a chord: it’s caught the public’s imagination that as a country we can do something for these children.”
The government invoked financial privilege to prevent the proposal being bounced back to the Commons unchanged because MPs take precedence on spending matters; but the new amendment does not mention a specific number of refugees, instead saying it “shall be determined by the government in consultation with local authorities”.
The government argues that it is already helping children within the refugee camps in the Middle East who have fled the war in Syria and is concerned that by bringing unaccompanied children into Britain, it could create a “pull factor”, encouraging more to come.
On Tuesday David Cameron’s official spokeswoman did not comment on how the Government will respond to Dubs’s new amendment, but said the prime minister was concerned not to create incentives for refugees to put themselves and their children at risk.
She told a Westminster media briefing: “What we have looked at very carefully here is how do we best protect vulnerable people and how can we best help refugees, how do we not fuel a system that is incentivising people to be exploited by trafficking gangs and make perilous journeys.
“There have been UNHCR experts who have talked about the concerns that if you pursue an approach which offers resettlement for unaccompanied children in Europe, you could see families seeking to separate off from their children in order to create new ways of getting to Europe. That’s not something we want to see.
“Refugees have already been through traumatic times. We don’t want to see them putting lives further at risk. That’s why we are taking an approach focusing on resettlement from the region, led by the experts.”
James Brokenshire, a Home Office minister, said in Monday night’s debate that the government could not support a policy that would “inadvertently create a situation in which families see an advantage in sending children alone, ahead and in the hands of traffickers, putting their lives at risk by attempting treacherous sea crossings to Europe which would be the worst of all outcomes”.
But Dubs said that was a “squalid” argument. He also rejected the idea that once they have reached the shores of Europe, unaccompanied children are safe.
“Whether they’re in Greece, in Macedonia, in Italy, or in Calais and Dunkirk, these children are being left to their own devices at best and at worst they’re in trouble,” he said. He blamed David Cameron for the government’s intransigence, saying: “I think the prime minister is taking the lead on this.”
The shadow immigration minister, Keir Starmer, also promised on Tuesday morning that the fight would go on to force the UK to do more.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Starmer said: “We can’t turn our backs on these vulnerable children in Europe, and history will judge us for that.” He added: “It’s not over: the fight will go on.”
He also reacted angrily to the suggestion that by helping children who were already in mainland Europe, the government would encourage others to make the risky journey.
“What it boils down to is to say we must abandon these children to their fate, lest if we do anything, others may follow in their footsteps. I am not prepared to take that position.”
MPs voted against the proposals by 294 to 276 on Monday after the Home Office persuaded most potential Tory rebels that it was doing enough to help child refugees in Syria and neighbouring countries. The amendment was backed by Labour, the Scottish National party and the Liberal Democrats.
Only a handful of Conservative MPs voted in favour of accepting the child refugees. One of them, Tania Mathias, said accepting children at risk of harm in Europe was the “right thing to do”.
Were you a Kindertransport child?
Read more
Cooper had urged Conservative MPs to vote for the Dubs proposal. After the debate, she said: “It is deeply disappointing that the government has rejected the Dubs amendment – albeit with a reduced majority. Thousands of children are sleeping rough in Europe tonight, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and Britain should not be turning its back. Alf Dubs will keep pressing this issue in the Lords and we must do our bit to help.”
One teenage refugee from Syria, who met Cooper and Dubs for an event outside parliament, said the government was missing the point when it argued that child refugees were better helped in the region.
The minor, who cannot be named, travelled through 17 countries from Syria before reaching Calais and then the UK. Speaking through an interpreter, he said: “Most of the children in the camps do have their families and parents with them but those stranded around Europe and in Calais are very vulnerable because other people could do something to them. That is the fundamental difference between the children in Europe and those in the camps.”
At least 95,000 unaccompanied child refugees are estimated to have applied for asylum in Europe last year.
Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, estimated in January that 10,000 children had gone missing after arriving in Europe, warning that many had been taken by criminal gangs.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/21/cinemas-mistrust-fine-dining-the-menu
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Film
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2022-11-21T07:08:48.000Z
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Charles Bramesco
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Hungry for less: cinema’s longstanding mistrust of fine dining
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The elaborately prepared feast at uber-exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, the setting of the new gourmand-culture thriller The Menu, is so photogenic that snapping pictures has been expressly forbidden; food in general, however, doesn’t come off looking so good.
The Menu review – Ralph Fiennes celeb-chef horror comedy cooks up nasty surprise
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The dishes whipped up by self-serious celebrity chef Julian (Ralph Fiennes) and his militaristic fleet of obedient kitchen staff aspire to profundity rather than settling for the merely appetizing. As foodie douche Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) mansplains to his unimpressed date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), the sequencing of courses tells a story, elevating foodstuffs to the level of an artistic medium. She’s mostly just hungry, and so she’s disappointed when each plate bears a couple of bites’ worth of what she can only assume is edible material.
A couple of tables over, a catty food critic and her editor concur that one culinary creation intricately bedecked with sprigs and leaves has been “tweezed to fuck”, a handy encapsulation of the film’s take on haute cuisine as fussy and overly mannered. As the moral fissures in the evening’s collection of one-percenters open up to reveal their deplorable depths, the hoity-toity grub turns into a marker of their personality defects – deluded privilege, cooked to perfection.
Director Mark Mylod and writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy resort to some cheap shots in their takedown of gustatory pretension (it’s 2022 and we’re still making “molecular gastronomy looks weird” jokes), but they’re working from a dog-eared recipe. The movies have long cultivated a distrustful relationship to the concept of fancy food, using upscale dining as a shorthand for the sanitized savagery of the bourgeoisie. The tongue’s sense of taste stands in for the brain’s, inviting damning statements about creativity, money and consumption that often short-change the joys and virtues of a nice meal. It’s all made out to be one big con, a hustle in which poseur saps spend out the nose for small quantities of sustenance better described as “interesting” than “good”. Going solely by received cinematic wisdom, one would have no idea that people splurging for an expensive night out do sometimes get what they pay for, and that appreciating the occasional dollop of miso foam doesn’t have to be a reflection on character.
Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in Triangle of Sadness. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
Cinema’s fraught relationship to its own dietary habits starts with human civilization’s equally problematic understanding of fatness. Since the days when only nobility could afford the groceries required to pack on a few pounds, obesity has been treated as synonymous with excess and greed. An unforgettable scene – maybe not in the good way – from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life joins the rotund Mr Creosote for his customary binge of caviar, mussels and foie gras, which he then projectile vomits on to his server in a visceral metaphor for the tendency of the rich to take, take, take and leave laborers with their mess. The same broad bit was repeated in last month’s Triangle of Sadness, which also doused itself in a tidal wave of puke to make plain the grotesquerie of the mega-wealthy. (An influencer poses next to a plate of spaghetti without taking a bite; so divorced are these people from the pleasure of food that they don’t even need to actually eat it any more.)
The counterexamples, grateful and worshipful films like Tampopo or Babette’s Feast, share the crucial through-line of a focus on the making and serving over the gobbling. Part of the contempt for fine dining and its patrons comes from the estrangement between the grisly work and elegant rewards of cooking, a fitting analogy for the way capitalists do their worst in indirect ways without getting their own hands dirty. Chickens are decapitated and ducks force-fed to death by other people far out of sight, our sacred communion with the raw materials that become ingredients disrupted. There’s an inherent violence to the carcass-mangling wantonness of eating, translated into a literal fight club under the Michelin-starred restaurant industry in 2021’s superb Pig. Succession’s peek into the elite overworld included an explanation of how to eat ortolan, a fowl so rich that diners cover their faces with napkins so God can’t see their indulgence. The third season of Atlanta did something similar to more surreally satirical effect, with the plat du jour instead a panéed human hand.
A still from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Photograph: Ronald Grant
As of late, traditionally bestial cannibalism has been more often portrayed to subversive ends as a shadow to the eater’s refined sensibility. The human body is plated with prestige on TV’s Hannibal, in 2017’s wickedly hysterical indie A Feast of Man, and at the demented finale of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, in all cases to expose the barbarism underlying the false sophistication of the moneyed class. The recurring association between haute cuisine and deformity of the soul is curious if only for its lack of equivalents in other luxuries just as segregated by socioeconomics. You don’t see many movies about some upper-crust sickos really into opera, perhaps due to artists feeling less animosity toward their own field, or perhaps for the sensory immediacy of food. Art requires unpacking, but we don’t need to think for a while to figure out whether something is tasty or not. It simply is, and any attempt to intellectualize beyond that can be easily angled as ostentatious puffing up.
This past summer, Peter Strickland’s wonderfully bizarre Flux Gourmet had its critical cake and ate it too. He cut out the conceptual middleman by imagining an insular world wherein food and art can be one and the same, as experimental musical groups use produce and burbling stews to create haunting aural compositions. He shares the common resentment for the donor class required to fund creative endeavors and a skepticism to artists high on their own ego, but unlike Mylod, he also reserves a deep affection for the eccentrics crushing cabbages and bashing beets. He’s one of them, after all, that kinship the secret sauce tying his exotic screen delicacy together. It helps to love something if you’re going to make fun of it. Anything else seems like sour grapes.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/17/paul-merton-my-family-values
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Life and style
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2014-10-17T12:00:11.000Z
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Angela Wintle
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Paul Merton: My family values
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My father enjoyed telling people that he first met my mother in bed. It was perfectly true. He was a patient in Fulham hospital and she was one of the nurses. Too shy to ask her out directly, he wrote a letter to that effect instead and gave it to another nurse to pass on to her. Luckily for him – and me – she agreed to a date and they were married within the year.
Dad, Albert Martin, was born and bred in Fulham; Mum, Mary Power, was from County Waterford in Ireland. Dad had a lively sense of humour and in Mum he found an always appreciative audience. She was funny as well, but a much quieter character.
I was born in 1957 at Parsons Green nursing home next door to the White Horse pub in Fulham. Naturally, Mum adored the miracle that was me, but Dad was less convinced. Perhaps he saw me as a rival for his affection. He wasn’t a particularly natural father. He wasn’t horrid, but he never felt comfortable praising me – fearing I would get big-headed – so he never did.
When I was a kid, Dad joined London Transport as a tube driver. I longed to see him drive a District line train across a railway bridge and pestered my parents for days, but Dad was reluctant. Eventually he gave in, and my little heart was beating with anticipation as Dad and his train approached. But as he passed us, he just gave a half-hearted wave, almost as if he was a little embarrassed. The truth was, he looked on it as a rather lowly job and couldn’t understand what a thrill it was for a small child. I wanted my dad to be a hero, but he wasn’t having any of it.
I met Caroline Quentin, my first wife, while performing with the Comedy Store Players in Glasgow. I’d just come out of the Maudsley psychiatric hospital after being treated for mental illness and she gave me much needed stability because she was funny, level-headed and supportive. We married in 1991, but gradually drifted apart. Perhaps the dynamic changed when I grew in confidence. Divorces are never pleasant, but the best times with Caroline were life-enhancing and joyous.
As my marriage collapsed, I began a relationship with [producer and actress] Sarah Parkinson. In 2002, Sarah found two breast lumps and was diagnosed with cancer. Strongly opposed to conventional radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment, she decided to look into holistic remedies instead. We married in 2003 and had a wonderful day. She only started suffering in the last six weeks. Before then, you wouldn’t have guessed; she didn’t look ill.
After her death I felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness, but good friends and work I loved ultimately saved me. I found love again when I met Suki Webster, a fellow improvisational comedian, while performing with the Comedy Store Players in India. We married in 2010 and she has made me happier than I’ve ever been. I’ve never felt any burning need to have children.
I lost both my parents last year. The last time I saw Dad he was lying in a hospital bed. As I walked towards him, he changed the habit of a lifetime and said he was delighted to see me, and so proud of me. “Talk about leaving it late, Dad,” I wanted to say. But instead I told him how proud I had been, seeing him drive that train across a bridge.
Mum died just a few weeks later, which was a blessing because neither of them would have been very good without the other. After her funeral, we went back to the family home and discovered Dad had secretly filled a scrapbook with newspaper cuttings charting my entire career and recorded all my television appearances. I simply shook my head in amazement.
Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography by Paul Merton is published by Ebury Press, £20
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jan/14/still-walking-review
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Film
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2010-01-14T22:10:00.000Z
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Peter Bradshaw
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Still Walking | Film review
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Amajor retrospective for Yasujiro Ozu at London's BFI Southbank provides exactly the right context for appreciating this moving new film, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking, which I first saw at the San Sebastian film festival in 2008, and which definitely grows with a second viewing. It is a "family movie" in the classic Japanese style, and a variant – offered in an intelligent, if interestingly humble spirit of homage – to Ozu's Tokyo Story. It is as if Kore-eda is the wayward elder son making a bow to the great patriarch.
Yoshio Harada plays a retired doctor, an imperious, querulous old man, who lives by the seaside with his elderly wife: his two grownup, married children are coming for a visit. There is a daughter, who is close to the mother, and shares with her an exasperation with the cantankerous father and his ways; she's continually urging her parents to come and live with her and her hearty, amiable husband. The son is Ryo (Hiroshi Abe) who has just married a widow, Yukari (Yui Natsukawa), and become a stepfather to her young boy – the father disapproves of the marriage as being somehow second best.
There is a spectre at this feast. The oldest son, Junpei, was killed as a boy saving the life of a schoolfriend from drowning, and this boy has grown up to be a tiresome chump and a loser. From an obscure spirit of masochism, of strained politeness and also a strange need to punish this man for living while their beloved son has died, they insist on inviting him to tea, excruciatingly, every year, in the presence of their children – and of course he cannot refuse. Ryo is angry at being made to feel second best, silently seething at all the fond anecdotes about how great Junpei was, and conceals from his father the fact of his own humiliation – that he is actually out of work at the moment. The old man is of course angry and depressed, and has remained in this condition for decades. Strangely, it is Ryo's little stepson who the old man reaches out to, calling himself the boy's "grandpa".
Unlike family dramas as conceived of in British or American drama, there are no crockery-smashing rows. Resentments and anger are contained within the conventions of politeness and respect. But this, I think, reflects the truth about the quiet, undramatic real lives of all families anywhere, and this, I think, is incidentally why Ozu is so passionately loved all over the world, despite his producers' initial fears that his work would not travel because it is too Japanese. With great dramatic strength and deliberation, Kore-eda is extending and developing this tradition. Of course, the notion of the "better" son dying is becoming a bit of a cliche in Hollywood, with the much-spoofed Walk the Line, but this is a higher order of storytelling, and this gentle, lovely film is impossible to watch without a lump in the throat.
The Ozu season continues at the BFI Southbank and selected venues until 28 February
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/women-have-changed-the-mood-now-we-need-to-change-policy
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Opinion
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2018-02-21T04:46:27.000Z
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Harriet Harman
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#MeToo has changed the mood. But only improved policy can change the reality | Harriet Harman
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We’re having an extended series of “moments” about gender with Harvey Weinstein’s outing as a serial sexual assaulter, outrage at Donald Trump’s celebration of groping women and the rise of #metoo and #timesup.
Social media allows women around the world to immediately see how their sisters are battling to make progress. The women’s movement which, in decades gone by, flourished around kitchen tables and at school gates is now, courtesy of the internet, international.
An affront to women in the US engenders support in the UK, the passionate misogyny speech of Julia Gillard inspired solidarity and anger in the UK.
Australia’s PM Gillard lambasts ‘misogynist’ opponent Guardian
The sisterhood is now global. And there’s no doubt that the mood has changed. Assaults on women which were commonplace but not acknowledged are now put in the public domain and challenged. But we have to learn the rights lessons from these moments.
Trump in Twitter spat with woman who accused him of sexual harassment
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The first is that we’ve made progress. In years past Weinstein would have been regarded as frisky, “a bit of a lad”, the young women judged as “asking for it” or frigid. Now it is acknowledged as wrong and it is the men who have to account for their actions rather than the women they prey on.
Second, Weinstein is not “one bad apple”. That sort of behaviour is prevalent in the film industry and indeed in all occupations with a male hierarchy and in which women want to advance. The vast majority of men would not dream of abusing their power to force themselves on young women. But some will and hitherto they’ve had impunity.
Third, the lesson is that there’s safety in numbers. One woman on her own would just have been crushed by Weinstein’s powerful legal and PR team and driven out of the industry. But no man can do that when there are a multitude of women’s voices.
This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.
Moments of solidarity with Time's Up and Me Too at Baftas 2018 - video highlights
Fourth, we need to use the moment to challenge men acting in the same way. Women, and men, have been doing that in respect of other men in the film industry. In the UK women stood up to challenge a cabinet minister, defence secretary Michael Fallon. Jayne Merrick, a young journalist, risked her reputation and her career to speak up about Fallon groping her. But others then came forward and he was sacked.
Fifth, we need to alter the complaints system so that a man who sexually assaults women is stopped after the first occasion not only after decades. That means the complainant must be able to report anonymously. No woman wants to be known only for the fact that she’s complained against a famous man.
There must be independent adjudication of complaints. He can’t be judged by people who know and work with him but don’t know her. And there must be protection from backlash and discrimination against the victim. The complainant is doing a public service by challenging criminality. She must be protected – not vilified. In the UK, parliament is changing its rules for complaints against MPs, as is the Labour party.
Six, we need to ensure that male-dominated hierarchies are a thing of the past. Sexual assault and exploitation cannot thrive in the same way where there is a mixed team of men and women in authority.
In more rumbling in the gender jungle, we’ve had an explosion of anger and embarrassment in the UK about unequal pay triggered by the BBC. We all love “Auntie”, as our national broadcaster is known, but it is not at all loveable that the BBC pays its onscreen men massively more than its women.
Carrie Gracie, the brilliant Mandarin-speaking BBC Chinese editor, discovered that she was paid 50% less than the BBC’s US editor. (And he doesn’t have to speak Mandarin or risk arrest to do his job). She protested and resigned and BBC women and the wider women’s movement rallied to her support.
1:52
Carrie Gracie tells MPs the BBC is in real trouble over equal pay – video
But we need follow-through. In laying her career on the line she has more than “done her bit.” It’s now up to all of us to ensure that the discriminatory pay structures from the top to the bottom of the BBC are changed.
Unequal pay is not confined to the BBC but is endemic in other broadcasters and across other industries. Thanks to Labour’s Equality Act employers (whether public or private) will for the first time, in April this year, have to publish annually the average pay for their women and the average pay for men. And the gender pay gap which so many people deny exists will be well and truly laid bare.
We then need our Equality and Human Rights Commission to collate and publish this information by sector and by region so all women, and men, can see how their organisation compares. And the EHRC will need to insist on tough action plans and strict targets. Unions will need to move pay equality up the bargaining agenda to do justice for their female members. We don’t just want to see the gender pay gap, we want to change it.
So you're being sexually harassed at work. Now what?
Van Badham
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Success in the battle to get a pay gap reporting into law was swiftly followed by heated argument about how it would be measured. I held out for average hourly pay for women compared to average hourly pay for men. That way we’ll be able to see the discrimination against the army of female part-time workers. The National Office of Statistics has reported the pay gap as around 9% – a figure which I’ve never believed.
Early reports from organisations publishing ahead of the April deadline show it around 30% which I think will be nearer the mark. While in Australia, I’ll be intrigued to hear more about how your public broadcaster, ABC, has managed to have no pay gap at all. Even if your most highly paid presenter is a woman, I’m amazed that overall, taking into account the pay of top managers down to cleaners, ABC says it has no pay gap. Similar declarations here have not borne scrutiny. I’m hoping my scepticism will be replaced by admiration.
We can celebrate that we’ve changed the mood. But we need to change the reality and that means change in policy and processes. Male privilege is deeply entrenched. These “gender moments” put that in the spotlight. But they mustn’t be just movements. We must use them as the spur to change and that means relentless persistence and dogged determination. But with the support women can gain from each other around the world, we are up to the task.
Harriet Harman is the former leader of the UK’s Labour party. She will be addressing the Labor International conference, Progressive Labor Agenda: Tackling Inequality, in Sydney on 24 February 2018
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/25/dwayne-johnson-top-earning-actor-hollywood-pay-gap-forbes
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Film
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2016-08-25T11:16:46.000Z
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Henry Barnes
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Dwayne Johnson named world's top earning actor as Hollywood pay gap laid bare
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Dwayne Johnson has topped Forbes magazine’s list of the highest paid male actors, earning $64.5m (£48.8m) in the last year – nearly $20m more than his female counterpart, Jennifer Lawrence.
The former wrestler, also known as the Rock, more than doubled his earnings from the previous year thanks to lucrative roles in the Fast and Furious franchise and the disaster movie San Andreas. Second in 2014, he bumped Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr, who had topped the list for three years running, from the top spot.
Forbes’s annual best-paid actors lists, which are divided between men and women, have again highlighted the huge pay gap between genders. Lawrence’s earnings are only 72% of Johnson’s, slightly lower than the pay disparity between white men and women in the US who earn an average wage.
Eighteen male actors took home over $20m, compared with only four female stars. Among them was Jackie Chan, who came second to Johnson with a pay packet of $61m. Matt Damon, paid $55m over the last year for starring in hits such as The Martian and Jason Bourne, Tom Cruise ($53m) and Johnny Depp ($48m) rounded out the male top five.
Forbes Hollywood rich list: who are Fan Bingbing and Deepika Padukone?
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Lawrence is the world’s sixth highest paid actor. She earned $46m over the last year, putting her above male stars such as Ben Affleck ($43m) and Vin Diesel ($35m). The Hunger Games star, who wrote last year of about the injustice of being paid less than “lucky people with dicks” after the Sony hacks revealed she was paid less than her male American Hustle co-stars, is one of the few women paid anywhere near as much as the leading men. Second on the female list is Ghostbusters star Melissa McCarthy ($33m), who would place eighth on the male top 10. The lowest paid man on the male list of 20 (Harrison Ford – $15m) earned $5m more than the lowest paid woman of the female list of 10 (Indian star Deepika Padukone – $10m).
The lists also suggest older women are discriminated against when it comes to pay. Of the top male earners, 95% are over 40, compared to half of the women. Ford, at 74, is the oldest actor on both lists. The ages of the female stars are not listed on the Forbes press release, but Lawrence, 26, is the youngest.
Earlier this year Johnson, whose family struggled to pay rent when he was a teenager, reacted to the news that he was the highest paid actor on Forbes’s Celebrity 100 list by taking to Instagram, writing that his pay packet was “an anchoring reminder to continue to work even harder”. Lawrence, the daughter of a construction worker and a children’s camp manager, doesn’t have a social media presence and has not made a statement about her pay.
Forbes publishes the figures in a week when a new study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that women in the UK are on average earning 18% less than men in similar jobs. Despite dealing with some of the world’s best-paid artists, the issues they raise are relevant to everyone, said Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the women’s rights charity The Fawcett Society.
Jennifer Lawrence tops Forbes list of highest-paid female actors with $46m
Read more
“This isn’t just a story about women at the top, it’s about women in every sector, at every level,” she said. “It reminds us all that it’s a structural problem we’re dealing with. It can happen to anyone. It can certainly happen to some of the biggest stars in the business. It helps to draw attention to the issue and that will keep the pressure on.
“The thing we have to remember though is that there are millions of women who are earning average salaries or less and will think, ‘What has this got to do with me?’ It’s important that we think about how to keep the focus on those women, although we want all women to be fairly paid.”
The lists, which show the actors’ earnings pre-tax and before the deduction of management fees, were produced by Forbes using data from Nielsen, Box Office Mojo and IMDb and interviews with agents, managers and lawyers. They are published at a time when female stars are becoming less hesitant in publicly criticising the entertainment industry for unfair pay. In May, House of Cards star Robin Wright told an audience at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York that she had threatened bosses at Netflix with going public unless she was paid the same as her male co-star, Kevin Spacey. In the same month, Mad Max: Fury Road star Charlie Theron, number six on this year’s list, spoke about her experience of campaigning for the same pay as her co-star The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Chris Hemsworth.
Male stars are typically less likely to be asked about the pay disparity and comment on the issue less frequenly. Among the few is Tom Hiddleston, who in October last year told the Guardian that equal pay for women in film should be “signed, sealed, delivered”.
Top 10 world’s highest paid male actors 2016
1. Dwayne Johnson – $64.5 million
2. Jackie Chan – $61 million
3. Matt Damon – $55 million
4. Tom Cruise – $53 million
5. Johnny Depp – $48 million
6. Ben Affleck – $43 million
7. Vin Diesel – $35 million
8. Shah Rukh Khan – $33 million
8. Robert Downey Jr – $33 million
10. Akshay Kumar – $31.5 million
Top 10 world’s highest paid female actors 2016
1. Jennifer Lawrence – $46 million
2. Melissa McCarthy – $33 million
3. Scarlett Johnsson – $25 million
4. Jennifer Aniston – $21 million
5. Fan Bingbing – $17 million
6. Charlize Theron – $16.5 million
7. Amy Adams – $13.5 million
8. Julia Roberts – $12 million
9. Mila Kunis – $11 million
10. Deepika Padukone – $10 million
This article was amended on Friday 26 August 2016. We mistakenly wrote that Melissa McCarthy’s pay wouldn’t place her in the male top 10 but it would actually see her in the eighth position. This has been corrected.
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/20/the-big-picture-chris-dorley-brown-street-corner
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Art and design
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2018-05-20T08:30:52.000Z
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Kathryn Bromwich
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The big picture: Chris Dorley-Brown’s surreal street corner photography
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One man stoops to the ground to pick up his change, while a nearby pigeon pecks at the coins. Another, wearing a trilby, is slightly lost, looking for something (perhaps mirroring the film title displayed behind him). A woman in a hijab seems to float above the kerb in the distance.
Artist Chris Dorley-Brown, who has lived in east London for almost 40 years, has immortalised the area’s street corners in a new book. But rather than normal photographs, taken in one-sixtieth of a second, his are multiple exposures brought together: a simultaneous snapshot of events that happened over an hour. “I’m interested in challenging the dictum of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who defined documentary photography as being about a decisive moment,” he says. “I wanted to put several decisive moments into a photograph.”
Roughly 100 photographs for each set-up are narrowed down to a handful of people and weaved together in Photoshop. It is a sort of staged scenario, yet true to life: “I’m trying to present a new way of looking at familiar territory. It’s a bit like making a painting, even though I regard them as documentary photographs: I don’t add anything that wasn’t there or take anything away.”
Street corners are a fitting place for Dorley-Brown to capture the multicultural area’s diverse demographics and constant state of flux. The fabric shop is now an estate agent. The Rio, a Grade II‑listed art deco building, is one of Hackney’s last independent cinemas. Behind the photographer is a mosque; to the right, about a dozen Turkish restaurants and cafes.
“East London for me has always retained some kind of edge: there’s a polarity there, opposing forces which make daily life interesting. Maybe they’re represented on street corners because there’s this intersection of cultural ideas – people are reorientating themselves, never really knowing what’s around the corner.”
The Corners by Chris Dorley-Brown is published by Hoxton Mini Press (£30). To order a copy for £25 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/31/earth-health-failing-in-seven-out-of-eight-key-measures-say-scientists-earth-commission
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Environment
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2023-05-31T15:51:53.000Z
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Jonathan Watts
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Earth’s health failing in seven out of eight key measures, say scientists
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Human activity has pushed the world into the danger zone in seven out of eight newly demarcated indicators of planetary safety and justice, according to a groundbreaking analysis of the Earth’s wellbeing.
Going beyond climate disruption, the report by the Earth Commission group of scientists presents disturbing evidence that our planet faces growing crises of water availability, nutrient loading, ecosystem maintenance and aerosol pollution. These pose threats to the stability of life-support systems and worsen social equality.
The study, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, is the most ambitious attempt yet to combine vital signs of planetary health with indicators of human welfare.
Prof Johan Rockström, one of the lead authors, said: “It is an attempt to do an interdisciplinary science assessment of the entire people-planet system, which is something we must do given the risks we face.
“We have reached what I call a saturation point where we hit the ceiling of the biophysical capacity of the Earth system to remain in its stable state. We are approaching tipping points, we are seeing more and more permanent damage of life-support systems at the global scale.”
The Earth Commission, which was established by dozens of the world’s leading research institutions, wants the analysis to form the scientific backbone of the next generation of sustainability targets and practices, which extend beyond the current focus on climate to include other indices and environmental justice. It hopes that cities and businesses will adopt the targets as a way to measure the impact of their activities.
The study sets out a series of “safe and just” benchmarks for the planet that can be compared to the vital signs for the human body. Instead of pulse, temperature and blood pressure, it looks at indicators such as water flow, phosphorus use and land conversion.
The boundaries are based on a synthesis of previous studies by universities and UN science groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
The situation is grave in almost every category. Setting global benchmarks is challenging. For climate, the world has already adopted a target to keep global heating as low as possible between 1.5C to 2C above pre-industrial levels. The Earth Commission notes that this is a dangerous level because many people are already badly affected by the extreme heat, droughts and floods that come with the current level of about 1.2C. They say a safe and just climate target is 1C, which would require a massive effort to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They note it is impossible to stabilise the climate without protecting ecosystems.
To achieve this, the “safe and just” boundary is for 50to 60% of the world to be home to predominantly natural ecosystems. The reality, however, is that only 45to 50% of the planet has an intact ecosystem. In human-altered areas, such as farms, cities and industrial parks, the commission says at least 20 to 25% of the land needs to be devoted to semi-natural habitats such as parks, allotments and clusters of trees in order to maintain ecosystem services such as pollination, water quality regulation, pest and disease control, and the health and mental health benefits provided by access to nature. However, about two-thirds of altered landscapes fail to meet this goal.
Another target is for aerosol pollution, which accumulates from car exhausts, factories, and coal, oil and gas power plants. At a global level, the report has focussed on minimising the imbalance of aerosol concentrations between the northern and southern hemispheres, which can disrupt the monsoon season and other weather patterns. At a local level, for example in cities, it follows the World Health Organization in establishing a boundary of 15 micrograms per cubic metre mean annual exposure to small particulate matter, known as PM2.5, which can damage the lungs and heart. This is an issue of social justice because poorer, often predominantly black communities tend to suffer the worst results as many are found in vulnerable areas.
The benchmark for surface water is that no more than 20% of the flow of rivers and streams should be blocked in any catchment area because this leads to declining water quality and habit loss for freshwater species. This “safe boundary” has already been exceeded on a third of the world’s land by hydroelectric dams, drainage systems and construction. The story is similarly poor for groundwater systems, where the safe boundary is that aquifers are not depleted faster than they can be replenished. However, 47% of the world’s river basins are being run down at an alarming rate. This is a big problem in population centres such as Mexico City and areas of intensive agricultural such as the North China Plain.
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Nutrients are another area of concern because farmers in wealthier countries are spraying more nitrogen and phosphorus than the plants and land are able to absorb. This temporarily increases yields, but leads to runoffs into water systems that become suffocated by algae blooms and unhealthy for humans to drink. Global equity is the key here, the report says. Poorer nations need more fertilisers, while rich nations need to cut the surplus. Balanced out, the “safe and just boundary” in this case is a global surplus of 61m tonnes of nitrogen and about 6m tonnes of phosphorus.
The authors say the planetary diagnosis is grim but not yet beyond hope, though the time for a remedy is running out.
Joyeeta Gupta, the Earth Commission co-chair and professor of environment and development in the global south at the University of Amsterdam, said: “Our doctor would say the Earth is really quite sick right now in many areas. And this is affecting the people living on Earth. We must not just address symptoms, but also the causes.”
David Obura, another member of the commission and director of coastal oceans research and development in the Indian Ocean, said the policy framework was already in place to get back within safe boundaries through the goals of existing UN climate and biodiversity agreements. But he stressed that consumption choices also needed to play an important role.
“There are a number of medicines we can take, but we also need lifestyle changes – less meat, more water, and a more balanced diet,” he said. “It is possible to do it. Nature’s regenerative powers are robust … but we need a lot more commitment.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/feb/16/ryan-adams-prisoner-review
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Music
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2017-02-16T21:00:13.000Z
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Jon Dennis
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Ryan Adams: Prisoner review – intimacy and restraint amid epic bombast
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Ryan Adams discusses his Summer of '69 humiliation: 'I was so angry'
Read more
It’s hard to make American rock with the epic sweep of Springsteen or Petty and keep it free of bombast. Ryan Adams doesn’t always manage it on Prisoner, his first album since he covered Taylor Swift’s entire 1989 album a couple of years ago, and his first set of original material since 2014. But he comes close. Between the clanging power chords and the big choruses, Adams, who also produced Prisoner, leaves ample space for intimacy. And he doesn’t bellow; he sings the tunes. Such restraint is appropriate on Prisoner’s vignettes of lost love. Shiver and Shake seethes with regret and muted passion, and a reverberating guitar coils around the plaintive Outbound Train. His heart-on-sleeve lyrics are often unambiguous: “Feels like I’m headed for a breakdown,” he sings on Breakdown; “I am a prisoner,” he declares on the title track, as a guitar chord pans prettily across the stereo. Adams is not breaking new ground with Prisoner, but it seems churlish to quibble when he’s at the peak of his powers.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/11/eurovision-europe-british-people-eu
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Opinion
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2014-05-11T16:45:01.000Z
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Christina Patterson
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What can Eurovision teach us about Europe? | Christina Patterson
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Iliked the poles. I don't mean the Poles, who were pouting, and gyrating, and even churning imaginary milk and washing imaginary clothes, while singing a very chirpy song. I didn't mind the Poles, though I couldn't help thinking that this was the clean bit from a new erotic musical. But what I really liked was the Tolmachevy Sisters' poles. These weren't poles to slither round in a G-string. These were poles as bayonets. The poles said: we know you're going to boo us, and we're ready to fight back.
I liked the ponytails, too. At first, as the Russian twins sang back to back, there was just one. And then, as they sprang apart, there were two. It was like a country in a federation that had suddenly split in two. No wonder Ukraine's Maria Yaremchuk sang "Tick-tock, can you hear me go tick tock?". The Tolmachevy sisters kept smiling, but you couldn't help worrying about her heart when they sang, "maybe there's a day you'll be mine".
The Swede wasn't bad, though she wasn't half as good as the Swedes in 1974 whose victory had my Swedish mother treating us all to R White's lemonade. But this year's winner wasn't a pretty blonde. This year's winner, of a song contest watched by hundreds of millions, was someone in a dress with a beard.
When Conchita Wurst won, with a song that everyone said was like a James Bond anthem, it seemed, on Twitter at least, like an outbreak of world peace. The victory, said Wurst, was "dedicated to everybody who believes in a world of peace and freedom. We are," she added, "unstoppable." She had tears in her eyes as she spoke, and many of us watching did, too.
Whatever else you can say of a man who dresses like a woman and keeps the beard, you can't say she hasn't got courage. Wurst spoke for all the people who feel cut out of the mainstream, and who have to fight to get their voices heard.
Actually, she didn't quite speak for all of them. She didn't, for example, speak for the person from the Sunday People who sent out a tweet saying: "This 'She' nonsense … She's a bloke."
The tweet caused an outcry, and was later deleted, but it summed up what many people thought. It may well have summed up what Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage, thought. He said on a radio phone-in that he absolutely hated Eurovision, and thought Britain would never win because of European "prejudice".
'Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage, said he hated Eurovision, and thought Britain would never win because of European prejudice.' Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
For many people in this country, Eurovision is a version of Europe. It's a world where an awful lot of money gets wasted on an awful lot of frivolous things. It's a world where you can't call things what you used to call them, and where politicians claiming staffing allowances of £220,000 spend time regulating the shape of carrots.
It's the kind of world, in fact, glimpsed in a book that came out last year. The book is called Mr and Mrs MEP and their Helpers. The book shows Mr and Mrs MEP being picked up in a limo. When Mr MEP wants to send a letter, an assistant brings him an envelope. The assistant gives it to a messenger, who gives it to the postman. It takes, in other words, four people to send one letter. The book, by the way, isn't a satire. It's a colouring book for children issued by the EU.
We need to be part of Europe. Of course we need to be part of Europe. We need it for trade and business, if nothing else. But most of us don't have a clue what the EU actually does. Nine out of 10 of us can't name our MEP. We don't know if they're actually doing any work. And if they can't be bothered to tell us, how would be know?
It isn't, I'm afraid, the drag queens of the world who are "unstoppable". It's all the people who are planning to vote for the joke politicians fielded by Ukip, whose names they don't know, just because they're feeling a bit fed up. They're doing it because no one has made a good case for Europe. Someone has to make a good case for Europe. Someone, that is, other than Nick Clegg.
We can't say we weren't warned. Even Wurst sang that we "were warned". Let's just hope that warning didn't come too late.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/18/peter-morgan-hugh-hefner-biopic
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Film
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2012-07-18T11:02:54.000Z
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Ben Child
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Peter Morgan in talks to develop Hugh Hefner biopic
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His screenplays have illuminated the private lives of leaders such as Richard Nixon, Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II. Now Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated writer of The Queen and Frost/Nixon, looks set to take on the controversial figure of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
Morgan is in talks to develop a biopic of Hefner's life for Warner Bros, according to the Hollywood Reporter. No cast or director has yet been announced for the project, which has been gestating for several years. It was previously lined up at Universal, with Brett Ratner attached and Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman or Robert Downey Jr tipped to play Hefner.
The Playboy mogul, 85, tweeted on Tuesday: "I had a good meeting today with screenwriter Peter Morgan discussing a film about my life."
Morgan's appointment would hint at a warts-and-all approach to the biopic, the screenwriter having pulled few punches in his previous biographical efforts. The project is being produced by Jerry Weintraub, the man behind the Ocean's Eleven films.
Morgan's forthcoming projects include writing Ron Howard's Formula One racing film Rush, and a proposed biopic of Freddie Mercury. He has said that Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film, is based on an idea he came up with during his time developing the new 007 project, though the final screenplay for Sam Mendes' film is by series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with regular Mendes collaborator John Logan.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/17/gove-toilet-worst-first-day-work-new-job
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Opinion
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2014-07-17T16:39:54.000Z
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Hannah Jane Parkinson
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Gove got stuck in the toilet – tell us about your worst first day at work
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It's your first day in the job. You want to make a good impression. You have colleagues to win over and a window office to justify, and then you accidentally crash the IT system. Or you spill hot coffee on your new line manager. Or, if you are Michael Gove the new chief whip, you lock yourself in a toilet.
Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the Commons, told MPs on Thursday: "I'd like to welcome Mr Gove … he hasn't had the most auspicious of starts. Yesterday, he not only lost his first vote but he managed to get stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby and he nearly broke his own whip."
What's the worst thing that has ever happened to you on your first day? Please leave your stories in the thread below – telling the tale might even ease the pain.
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/mar/12/the-jungle-play-about-calais-migrant-camp-life-to-get-west-end-run
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Stage
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2018-03-12T07:00:04.000Z
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Mark Brown
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The Jungle, play about Calais migrant camp life, to get West End run
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The Jungle, the immersive play that won five-star reviews for its powerful portrayal of life in the now-bulldozed Calais migrant camp, is to get a West End transfer.
The Playhouse Theatre will be radically redesigned to accommodate Miriam Buether’s set design, which placed audiences in a recreation of the camp’s ramshackle Afghan cafe as the action unfurled around them.
It was written by two young playwrights, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, who founded the Good Chance project, which brought theatrical productions to the Calais migrant camp.
Robertson said the play, which had a short run at the Young Vic in London, was an attempt to convey the many stories of the people they encountered in the camp and was intended to provoke debate.
“We always thought it was a truthful, beautiful, small piece so we were kind of blown away by the response and the impact it was having on audiences,” Robertson said. “We felt at the end of the run that it had to be seen by more people so the fact we can now do that in one of London’s beautiful theatres … it feels right. We’re thrilled.”
The play has been praised by writers on all sides of the political spectrum, as has Good Chance itself, with the late AA Gill pouring praise on the venture and giving the Afghan cafe four stars in a Sunday Times restaurant review.
Murphy said the transfer was a chance to reach more people and “begin the discussion once again on the issues the play raises”.
The playwrights Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, who founded the Good Chance project and wrote The Jungle. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian
He added: “We want this to be a play that doesn’t try to preach or teach but does provoke debate because it is one we need to have. Many, many people are still arriving in Europe, still arriving in Britain, and the question of how do we live together is as vital now as it was when we first arrived in Calais.”
Getting a diverse audience will be important, say producers, and 40% of the tickets will be priced at £25. A proportion of tickets will be offered to refugees.
The Playhouse will be reconfigured to allow the audience to sit at cafe tables and benches, and the dress circle will be renamed “the cliffs of Dover”.
The majority of the large cast from the Young Vic are returning, including Ben Turner as the Afghan chef and Alex Lawther as a well-spoken volunteer.
The play, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, was a co-production between the Young Vic and the National Theatre and its producers include the the West End impresario Sonia Friedman.
David Lan, artistic director at the Young Vic, said he was delighted that it would be seen by more people. “It was clear from the start that The Jungle would be one of the most provocative and significant shows I’ve produced. It tells a powerful, real-life story that matters hugely to everyone.”
The Jungle will begin previews at the Playhouse Theatre in London from 16 June.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/23/a-hard-times-chancellor-with-little-to-give-away
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UK news
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2016-11-23T19:05:14.000Z
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Anne Perkins
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A hard times chancellor with little to give away | Anne Perkins
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The chancellor brings the air of an undertaker to the despatch box. His suits are dark, his expression glum and his sense of humour, although unexpectedly sharp, is deployed only sparingly. This is a chancellor for hard times, and in his unshowy way, hard times are what he predicted.
This chancellor is the antithesis of his predecessor George Osborne and so was his autumn statement. The only rabbit pulled from Philip Hammond’s topper was that the number of opportunities for rabbit pulling – what the Treasury calls fiscal events – is to be cut from two to one. This was Hammond’s first autumn statement, and it is to be his last.
Philip Hammond admits Brexit vote means £122bn extra borrowing
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Hammond is a new chancellor in a new government working in a wholly new context. Leaving the EU, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)’s newly released forecasts - which are based on Brexit happening in April 2019 - will mean sharply declining growth and falling revenues. The OBR expects rising inflation and squeezed household incomes as the value of the pound continues to decline in a less trade-intensive economy.
The slower growth and higher borrowing illustrate one of the most profound ironies of the referendum result. Many of those who voted to leave, the “just about managing” people that Theresa May first described on the steps of Downing Street, are exactly the ones who will bear the brunt of Brexit under the chancellor’s plans.
There has been a failure in expectation management this week that would never have happened in the Cameron-Osborne years when the prime minister marched in lockstep with his chancellor, who doubled as political strategist. Stories have been circulating all week that No 10 was pressing the chancellor next door for a handout to the Jams, the brand new acronym for a familiar but freshly defined demographic.
The Jams appear to owe their origin to the Resolution Foundation, a thinktank now chaired by the former Tory minister David Willetts, whose director is Torsten Bell, a former aide to Ed Miliband. Resolution published a piece of research to coincide with the Conservative party conference in October that provided the evidence to underpin May’s description of just managing families in July.
Autumn statement: brill for builders, perturbing for pensioners
Read more
Resolution estimates that there are about 6 million Jams living in households where at least one member is working, based away from metropolitan centres in smaller towns from Lancashire to Devon, probably not in professional jobs, most likely not college educated and whose life choices are restricted by low pay that has not significantly increased since the crash in 2008, while house prices have soared out of control.
In the hands of the former chancellor, trails like those of the past week of giveaways – even modest ones – would have been the cue for headline-grabbing initiatives. In Hammond’s autumn statement package the surprise was that there was no surprise.
The small concessions that were made were already in the pipeline. Tax thresholds will rise, as Osborne set out, and the national living wage will go up from £7.20 to £7.50 an hour in April next year – slightly less than the rise needed to increase it by regular increments to 60% of median earnings by 2020. Fuel duty is frozen for the seventh year in a row. Insurance premiums are meant to come down through legislation to restrict compensation for whiplash injuries, but insurance premium tax will rise. Agents’ letting fees will be banned.
There are also some large and consequential decisions that will make the next four years hard indeed. Weeks of Tory backbench pressure on Hammond to soften Osborne’s cuts to universal credit have been rebuffed. Instead the work allowance, beyond which it starts to be withdrawn, was left unchanged. Though the rate at which it tapers off as earnings increase is very slightly slowed from 65p to 63p in the pound, according to House of Commons figures, that means a working family with two children could be £800 instead of £1,100 a year worse off,. A lone parent in work with two children could be £2,300 a year instead of £2,500 worse off.
Hammond warned against Brexit and no one listened. Now it's payback
John Crace
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Childcare for three and four year-olds is being extended from 15 to 30 hours a week from next September, but Osborne’s decision to limit universal credit to two children from next April still stands. The Child Poverty Action Group predicts that working families will be worse off, and more children will grow up in poverty.
This is scant comfort for May’s Jams. Hammond has put his ambition of a “match-fit” economy ahead of their needs. The match in question is the world after Brexit. So the best hope for the Jams is in the wider and longer-term plans to try to ease the metropolitan-market town split that was revealed by the result of June’s referendum.
The chancellor promised a further attempt to rebalance the economy away from London through measures such as the allocation of £1.8bn from the Local Growth Fund to local enterprise partnerships in the English regions. There is to be an extra £1bn for local transport networks, and £2.3bn will be invested in infrastructure that new housing developments need.
But this is slow-burn stuff. Meanwhile there was nothing to divert the looming catastrophe in social care that has left a million elderly people without adequate support in their homes, and hospitals struggling with patients stuck in hospital because there is no safe place for them to go. Councils had pinned their hopes on more from the Better Care Fund, the pot of money that is supposed to be joining up hospital and social care, but they were not even given permission for a further increase in the precept they can levy to meet the cost of the paying the national living wage.
Instead the chancellor was adamant that the NHS had had the extra money it asked for, a view disputed by the Tory chair of the Commons health committee, the King’s Fund and every expert on health spending. He dismissed projections of a deficit in NHS England trusts of £680m as a mere drop in the context of a budget of more than £100bn a year. He spoke sharply about the size of the NHS’s contingency fund.
This was a continuity autumn statement. Hammond is even more concerned about borrowing and fiscal rebalancing than Osborne was. His anxieties have outweighed May’s pledges to the Jams.
This is the first guess at tailoring Conservative economic consequences to the prospect of of Brexit from a chancellor operating even more in the dark than his predecessors. The pace of leaving, the impact on trade, investment, growth and borrowing are all even more uncertain than when an earlier chancellor, Denis Healey, denounced the autumn forecast – which he introduced – as “an extrapolation from a partially known past through an unknown present to an unknowable future, according to theories about the causal relationships between certain economic variables which are hotly disputed by academic economists”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/23/sampha-yussef-dayes-daniel-pemberton-top-ivor-novello-award-nominations
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Music
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2024-04-23T18:00:17.000Z
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Ben Beaumont-Thomas
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Sampha, Yussef Dayes and Daniel Pemberton top Ivor Novello award nominations
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Neo-soul singer Sampha, jazz drummer Yussef Dayes and composer Daniel Pemberton have topped the nominations for the 2024 Ivor Novello awards, which recognise the best in British and Irish songwriting and composition for the screen.
Sampha and Dayes are individually nominated for best album, while they share a joint nomination for co-writing Sampha’s track Spirit 2.0, which is up for best song musically and lyrically.
In a review of Sampha’s nominated album Lahai, Guardian critic Alexis Petridis described Spirit 2.0 as “a perfect summation of the album’s qualities – the tune luxurious, but set to a backing that slowly builds from a nagging guitar figure and an icy synth tone into jazzy drum’n’bass”. The south London-born artist has been courted as a collaborator by a range of US A-listers including Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West and Solange, while releasing solo material – his debut album Process won the Mercury prize in 2017.
Dayes, one of the central players in the vibrant London jazz scene of recent years, continues his recent flush of success following the release of his album Black Classical Music. He gave a well-received headline show at Royal Albert Hall and became a rare jazz nominee at the Brit awards, recognised in the rock/alternative category this year. Black Classical Music is predominantly instrumental rather than song-based, but the awards also recognise composition, and according to organisers the album category “celebrates consistent and inventive creativity, as well as exceptional songwriting”.
Pemberton is nominated in two composing categories: best original film score for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and best television soundtrack for the third season of Slow Horses, the latter shared with producer-composer duo Toydrum, AKA Pablo Clements and James Griffith.
Pemberton has previously been Oscar-nominated in 2021 for his song with Celeste, Hear My Voice, included in The Trial of the Chicago Seven, and has four Golden Globe nominations for scores for films such as Steve Jobs and Motherless Brooklyn. He recently scored the Michael Mann film Ferrari.
Lankum, whose album False Lankum was named the best of 2023 by Guardian critics, join Sampha and Dayes in the album category alongside Irish singer-songwriter CMAT, and Raye, who swept the board at this year’s Brit awards, winning a record-breaking six awards in one night.
Victoria Canal, nominated for best song musically and lyrically. Photograph: Karina Barberis
Also nominated for best song musically and lyrically are Blur for The Narcissist – their second ever nomination, after a win in 1996 at the peak of Britpop when they shared the best songwriter award with arch rival Noel Gallagher. The Japanese House (for Sunshine Baby), Victoria Canal (for Black Swan) and Tom Odell (for Black Friday) round out the category.
Canal was the winner of the rising star award last year – this year’s nominees in that category are Blair Davie, Chrissi, Elmiene, Master Peace and Nino SLG.
Up for best contemporary song is another of this year’s Brit winners, London funk-pop band Jungle for their slow-burn streaming hit Back on 74, and another mainstay in London’s jazz scene, Speakers Corner Quartet for Geronimo Blues featuring Kae Tempest. The US singer Mette (for Mama’s Eyes) and South African singer Tyla (for global Afro-pop hit Water) are also recognised thanks to their British songwriting teams.
Arguably stretching the category’s celebration of “originality in songwriting” to its limit, Brian Eno and Fred Again are nominated for Enough, a track whose lyrics are made up of three sampled lines from Don’t You Dare by singer-songwriter Winnie Raeder.
Nominees for most performed work, acknowledging commercial success, are Harry Styles (As It Was, also last year’s winner), PinkPantheress and Ice Spice (Boy’s a Liar), Jazzy (Giving Me), Central Cee & Dave (Sprinter) and Kenya Grace (Strangers). The songs’ various co-writers are also nominated, though Grace wrote, produced and performed her hit alone, becoming only the second woman in history after Kate Bush to top the UK chart with a totally self-made track.
Kenya Grace performing at Coachella festival earlier this month. Photograph: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella
Film, TV and video game soundtrack composers are also recognised, for work across the likes of Poor Things, The Crown and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III.
The awards take place on Thursday 23 May at the Grosvenor in London.
Ivor Novello nominations 2024
Best album
Yussef Dayes: Black Classical Music, written by Yussef Dayes, Rocco Palladino and Charlie Stacey
CMAT: Crazymad, for Me, written by CMAT
Lankum: False Lankum, written by Daragh and Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat
Sampha: Lahai, written by Sampha
Raye: My 21st Century Blues, written by Raye and Mike Sabath
Best contemporary song
Jungle: Back on 74, written by Lydia Kitto, J Lloyd and Tom McFarland
Fred Again & Brian Eno: Enough, written by Brian Eno, Fred Gibson, Buddy Ross and Winnie Raeder
Speakers Corner Quartet: Geronimo Blues (ft Kae Tempest), written by Kwake Bass, Peter Bennie, Biscuit, Raven Bush and Kae Tempest
Mette: Mama’s Eyes, written by Todd Dulaney, Ines Dunn, Barney Lister and Mette
Tyla: Water, written by Imani “Mocha” Lewis, Corey Lindsay-Keay, Jackson Lomastro, Ari PenSmith, Rayo, Sammy Soso and Olmo Zucca
Best song musically and lyrically
Tom Odell: Black Friday, written by Laurie Blundell, Max Clilverd and Tom Odell
Victoria Canal: Black Swan, written by Victoria Canal, Jonny Lattimer and Eg White
Sampha: Spirit 2.0, written by Yussef Dayes and Sampha
The Japanese House: Sunshine Baby, written by Amber Bain
Blur: The Narcissist, written by Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree
Most performed work
Harry Styles: As It Was, written by Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson and Harry Styles
PinkPantheress & Ice Spice: Boy’s a Liar Pt 2, written by Ice Spice, Mura Masa and PinkPantheress
Jazzy: Giving Me, written by Conor Bissett, Robert Griffiths and Jazzy
Central Cee & Dave: Sprinter, written by Central Cee, Dave, Jo Caleb and Jonny Leslie
Kenya Grace: Strangers, written by Kenya Grace
Rising star award
Blair Davie
Chrissi
Elmiene
Master Peace
Nino SLG
Best original film score
Poor Things, by Jerskin Fendrix
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, by Daniel Pemberton
Typist Artist Pirate King, by Carly Paradis
Best original video game score
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, by Walter Mair
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, by Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab
Tin Hearts, by Matthew Chastney
Best television soundtrack
Boat Story, by Dominik Scherrer
Slow Horses (season three), by Daniel Pemberton and Toydrum
The Crown: The Final Season, by Martin Phipps
The Following Events Are Based On a Pack Of Lies, by Arthur Sharpe
Three Little Birds, by Benjamin Kwasi Burrell
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https://www.theguardian.com/a-university-for-the-world/2024/mar/15/the-scottish-and-malawi-universities-teaming-up-to-tackle-public-health
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A university for the world
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2024-03-15T10:04:03.000Z
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David Cox
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The Scottish and Malawi universities teaming up to tackle public health
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On the face of things, there might not seem a lot in common between the west of Scotland and Malawi, a landlocked east African country traversed by the Great Rift Valley, one of Earth’s most renowned geographical wonders.
But the two nations share a past and concerns for the future. They are linked by a place name – Blantyre. It’s Malawi’s financial hub and second largest city, and also the name of a small town just outside Glasgow, and now a joint research laboratory has taken on the moniker, the Blantyre-Blantyre Clinical Research Facility based at Malawi’s Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS).
The history between Scotland and Malawi began with David Livingstone, the 19th-century Scottish physician, missionary and explorer who is well regarded in Malawi for initiating the country’s first trade partnerships and championing the abolition of slavery. “He’s respected a lot in Malawi, as his work had an impact on ending the slave trade, and also improving the educational system,” says Mwapatsa Mipando, associate professor at KUHeS.
Now, more than 150 years after Livingstone’s death in 1873, a scientific collaboration forged between the two countries is hoping to address some of Scotland and Malawi’s most pressing public health problems. Headed by Mipando and Prof Paul Garside of the University of Glasgow, the concept of the Blantyre-Blantyre facility first began more than a decade ago, when Garside spent a mini sabbatical in Malawi.
Initially, Garside’s idea was to forge a collaboration, with the aim of using Glasgow’s research expertise to help tackle malaria, the mosquito-borne parasitic illness that is endemic in more than 95% of Malawi. But while Malawi’s public health concerns have traditionally been focused on infectious diseases, Garside began to realise that diet and lifestyle-related illnesses such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer and other inflammatory conditions, which are so prevalent in Scotland and much of the western world, are becoming pressing health problems across Africa.
Mwapatsa Mipando, associate professor at Malawi’s Kamuzu University of Health Sciences and Prof Paul Garside of the University of Glasgow. ‘There is much that we can both learn from each other,’ says Mipando
Glasgow is the cardiovascular disease capital of Scotland and “it’s a huge problem along with similar diseases of deprivation like rheumatoid arthritis and many cancers”, says Garside. “And what’s unfortunate but interesting, is that with urbanisation, those diseases are now a problem in Africa. You have this tidal wave of non-communicable diseases that are now pushing up against this existing issue of infectious disease, which makes it even more complex.”
Recent research has shown that obesity rates in Malawi are now at 18.5% while 16.7% of the population have hypertension. Mipando explains that the new facility aims to collect more detailed information over time on these chronic conditions and get an idea of why they are developing so quickly, particularly in younger populations. This could also yield valuable information on potential lifestyle alterations that can reduce the prevalence of these illnesses and the kinds of guidelines that could prove most impactful both in Malawi and Scotland.
Some of the most intriguing insights could be gained through studying the differing immune responses to respiratory pathogens in Malawi. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it was noted that while Malawi is one of the world’s poorest nations, ranking 174 out of 189 on the Human Development Index, there were far fewer excess deaths compared with nations with well-funded healthcare systems such as the UK and the US.
Garside suspects that while many Covid patients in higher-income nations died from internal organ damage, due to the excessive inflammatory reaction induced by the virus, the Malawian people were more resilient, because their immune systems are already tuned to coping with a high infectious burden.
“By understanding the molecular and genetic basis of that regulation, we could perhaps understand how we can induce that with vaccines in the northern hemisphere,” he says. But at the same time, studies have shown that responses to many common vaccines are impaired in Malawi and other African countries, which has made it difficult to control infectious diseases. As an example, one study found that while 100% of infants in the UK elicited the desired immune response to the tuberculosis vaccine within three months, just 53% of infants in Malawi responded as effectively.
The collaboration was originally envisaged as a way to use Glasgow’s research expertise to combat malaria. Photograph: Danita Delimont/Alamy
“We’re attempting to learn more about that and how we can improve this in populations in Malawi that have malaria exposure,” says Garside. “We’re also about to start a small Covid vaccine study out there in vulnerable populations. But at the same time, understanding why the immune system isn’t being switched on as well could lead to new approaches for diseases where you want to turn it down, like rheumatoid arthritis, and that could benefit both the UK and Malawi.”
The creation of the Blantyre-Blantyre facility is a particularly remarkable example of what can be achieved even in a time of resource scarcity. The facility and its research projects have been directly supported by a five-year £1m grant from the Scottish International Development fund, a sum that represents 10% of the annual budget.
While these funds are dwarfed by the UK government’s official development assistance budget – which has been estimated to be £8.3bn for 2024/25 – the Blantyre-Blantyre project represents how significant impact can still be achieved through a relatively small investment.
And in a world where the cost of new treatments continue to rise, and healthcare systems are increasingly having to figure out how to make do with less, it is hoped that the research projects themselves will yield new insights when it comes to maximising resources.
In particular, Garside says that Glasgow can learn much from the achievements of Malawi’s greatly under-resourced public health system. “Malawi is one of the countries that drove down mortality in under fives more than anywhere else in Africa over the last 10 years, which is amazing,” he says.
With the collaboration being recognised by the European Commission as an exemplar of best practices between African and European institutions, both Garside and Mipando are optimistic that it will inspire similar partnerships as a new way of addressing some of the world’s most urgent challenges.
“Glasgow has been a partner that has respected us,” says Mipando. “I think there is much that we can both learn from each other. In Malawi, you’re always having to make decisions based on limited resources, but there is a lot which can be learned from that, in terms of how to get the best out of every dollar.”
Find out more about the University of Glasgow’s partnership with Malawi and the Blantyre-Blantyre Clinical Research Facility here
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/26/defiant-sebastian-coe-london-olympics-murky-legacy-2012-alex-ferguson
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Sport
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2022-07-26T21:00:01.000Z
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Sean Ingle
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Defiant Sebastian Coe flies flag for London Olympics with a murky legacy | Sean Ingle
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On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the London Olympics, Sebastian Coe is reminiscing about the one that got away. “We got so close to giving Sir Alex Ferguson the job to coach the football team,” he says, sighing, and his mind is catapulted back to the time he asked Sir Bobby Charlton to discreetly sound out the Manchester United manager.
“I came up with the idea because we were having a bit of fragility around our Celtic cousins,” says Lord Coe, the London 2012 organising committee chairman. “It was ostensibly an English team, although there was a smattering of Welsh players. But it suddenly occurred to me that the one unifying influence would be having a not necessarily English coach. And I couldn’t imagine any club having a problem with their Under-23 players having a four, five or six-week tutelage – a masterclass – from Alex Ferguson on the training ground.
London 2012, 10 years on: wrestling with a sporting legacy built on false assumptions
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“Weeks went by. I was in a Tesco in Cobham on a Friday night, filling baskets full of food for my kids, and I got a call. It was a ‘No ID’ and I was at the butter and fats counter and he said: ‘Seb, it’s Alex here’. I threw a load of cash at one of my daughters to keep filling the trolley and I said: ‘This is the stuff for a long conversation, I’m in the supermarket’.
“I explained my theory because Bob hadn’t actually told him; he’d just asked him to give me a call. So Alex rang and said: ‘Oh, I thought you were looking for tickets’. I put him through the idea and he said: ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Then there was a gap and then he went: ‘Oh Jesus, I’m already picking the team in my head.’”
Coe says he didn’t mention it to a living soul, but when he saw Ferguson at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards, Ferguson looked at him and said “the answer’s yes”.
It wasn’t to be. To this day Coe is at a loss to explain how it got away. But then Ferguson said he didn’t have the time, while the British Olympic Association told Coe it wasn’t his job to choose a coach. “The BOA decided that Stuart Pearce probably had better credentials,” says Coe. “That was a slight disappointment.”
Sebastian Coe pictured with Alex Ferguson and the then sports minister Richard Caborn at Old Trafford in 2006. Photograph: John Peters/Manchester United/Getty Images
When the Games finally began on 27 July 2012, with the Queen apparently parachuting into the Olympic Stadium with Daniel Craig as James Bond by her side, Britain soon revelled in a 16-day sporting bender. The action was staggering, with Team GB winning 65 medals to soar to third in the medal table. Such was the mood in London it was if serotonin was being pumped into the water supply.
In the days after Super Saturday, when 12 million tuned in to watch the homemade joy of Greg Rutherford, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Mo Farah winning gold over 47 eardrum-shattering minutes, Britain felt like a different country. There was no immediate hangover, either. A poll in December 2012 found 78% of voters believed the Olympics “did a valuable job in cheering up a country in hard times”, even after being reminded of the £9bn price tag, while only 20% reckoned they were “a costly and dangerous distraction”.
Now, though, the legacy of the London Games feels murky in places, and desperately tainted in others. As we have learned, the high levels of cash pumped into the Olympic system – and the subsequent pressure for medals – have led to hideous consequences in sports including cycling, gymnastics and canoeing. For all UK Sports promises to change the culture, last month the Whyte review found that between 2008 and 2020 British Gymnastics enabled an environment where young girls were starved, body shamed, and abused in a system that ruthlessly put the pursuit of medals over safeguarding.
That alone should be enough for the Games’ biggest cheerleaders to lower their pom-poms and Britain can no longer claim its success on the sporting field was totally unvarnished either. Last year, the former British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman was struck off because of a delivery of banned testosterone to the National Cycling Centre, which a medical tribunal found was ordered for an unnamed rider. In 2017, a digital, culture, media and sport committee select committee was told how some of Britain’s Paralympic stars had intentionally misrepresented their disability to gain an advantage on the field of play and the promise the Olympics would be the cleanest in history has sounded more hollow with every positive drugs test since.
Sebastian Coe congratulates Jessica Ennis-Hill on the podium after the athlete won gold for Britain in the women’s heptathlon. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Coe argues, with some justification, that legacy is not just the job of an organising committee. It is for national and local governments as well as sporting bodies. However, he accepts the promises made to inspire more kids to do sport never materialised. “What am I disappointed about?” he asks. “That school sport became a political football. We could have done more off the back of the Games.”
Coe insists he and David Cameron were trying, until Theresa May came in after the Brexit vote and scrapped their unit in the Cabinet Office.
The evidence an Olympics can inspire a nation to become more active has always been shallow. One big study after Sydney 2000, for instance, suggested there was no evidence the euphoria of the Games turned into increased activity, despite the silky rhetoric and promises. No wonder then that when Londoners were asked in March 2022 whether the 2012 Games had made a long-term difference, the results were cloudy: 43% said they hadn’t compared to 31% who were fairly positive and 8% who were very positive.
A decade on, Sir Craig Reedie, a member of the London organising committee and the International Olympic Committee, points to the regeneration of east London and Westfield, and what he claims have been 135,000 new jobs since the Games, as some of the major benefits. “In my book, that’s a legacy,” he says. “And there’s a lot more still to come.
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“When I saw the old broken down, forlorn greyhound stadium in Hackney, on a wet day in November, I looked around and thought: ‘Bloody hell’. You needed some imagination to work out how it was going to work, but it got pulled off.”
That message is shared by Coe. “The legacy of the Olympic Park is still delivering venues that London didn’t have,” he says, pointing out a city of roughly nine million people didn’t have a 50m swimming pool until recently. “And if you look at the economics and the politics of it, the ability to have built a new city inside an old city in the space of seven years – given that under a normal economic cycle that might have taken 50 or 60 years – is significant too.”
Coe pauses and then recants a familiar message. “I’m forever grateful to the millions of people across the UK who made it the greatest Games ever. I’m not ashamed to say that. I think they were on pretty much every metric.”
Not everyone agrees. A decade on, the fight for London’s legacy is nearly as closely fought over as the medals in the stadium once were.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/04/steven-osborne-review-st-johns-smith-square-schubert-debussy-rachmaninov
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Music
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2016-02-04T15:56:22.000Z
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Erica Jeal
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Steven Osborne review – colour and texture above drama and display
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You would never compliment a pianist by saying he made all the composers on his programme sound like one another. But in this recital, Steven Osborne made Schubert, Debussy, Crumb and Rachmaninov seem as though they were different faces of the same musical entity. Pieces grew out of the context of the one before; Osborne’s playing sought colour and texture above display or drama, but not at their expense.
There was certainly drama in his two Schubert Impromptus, D935 Nos 1 and 4. The first began urgently and firmly, as if Osborne wanted to push through to the other side of the keyboard; this gave way to, and eventually intertwined with, a major-key passage that was beautifully sustained, with barely a ripple on the surface.
This sense of stillness laid the ground for the nuanced colour washes Osborne created so effectively in five pieces by Debussy, especially in the second set of three Images: here was a distant bell tower or moonlit ruined temple as painted by Turner rather than Monet. There were stronger, more defined outlines in Masques, with its strumming, guitar-like figures, and in the contrasting textures of L’Isle Joyeuse.
The discovery of the night for many will have been George Crumb’s 1983 Processional. Its framework of gently pulsing clusters of notes could have been created by Debussy; the percussive flicks at either extreme of the keyboard, the gong-like sonorities, and the way in which the pulse continued in our heads even when the pianist played something else – all these were Crumb’s own.
Finally, Rachmaninov: seven of his Études-tableaux, Op 33 and 39, then the Prelude Op 23 No 4 as an encore, a perfect fit. Osborne’s playing could be ardent and muscular, and Op 39 No 5 especially was orchestral in its scope, but at the heart of these performances was a care for colour and a sense of control that put the works across more effectively than any amount of grandstanding.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/14/mark-milley-donald-trump-bob-woodward-nuclear-war-
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Books
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2021-09-14T17:13:25.000Z
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Martin Pengelly
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Top general feared Trump would launch nuclear war, Woodward book reports
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Before and after the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January, the most senior US general took steps to prevent Donald Trump from “going rogue” and launching a nuclear war or an attack on China, according to excerpts of an eagerly awaited new book by the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
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The Watergate veteran’s third Trump book, Peril, is written with Robert Costa, another Post reporter. It is due to be published next Tuesday. A week before publication day, the Post and CNN published extracts.
Following the first two books in the series, Fear and Rage, Peril covers the end of the Trump presidency and the start of Joe Biden’s first term in the White House.
Woodward and Costa portray Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as “certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election”, which he insisted without evidence was fixed.
Milley reportedly thought the president had become “all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies”.
According to the authors, Milley worried that Trump could “go rogue” and told senior staff: “You never know what a president’s trigger point is.”
The Post said Milley made “a pair of secret phone calls” to his Chinese counterpart, Gen Li Zuocheng, to say Washington would not strike Beijing.
One call reportedly took place on 30 October 2020 – four days before the election. The other took place on 8 January, two days after Trump supporters attacked Congress, seeking to overturn that defeat.
In the first call, prompted also by tensions in the South China Sea and over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Milley reportedly told Li: “I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
Milley also reportedly told the Chinese general he would warn him if an attack was launched.
In the second call, after the Capitol riot, Milley told Li: “We are 100% steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
Trump was impeached for a second time for inciting the riot, but was acquitted in a Senate trial. More than 600 people have been charged over the attack, around which five people died. This weekend supporters of those charged will rally in Washington. Capitol police, overwhelmed on 6 January, have been preparing increased security.
As Trump retains a firm grip on the Republican base and the party in Congress, a House committee containing only two dissident Republicans continues to investigate the 6 January attack.
Milley was a central player – and apparent key source – in a slew of books on Trump’s presidency that came out this summer.
In I Alone Can Fix It, by the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Milley is described before the Capitol attack resisting Trump’s demands that the military be used against anti-racism protesters while fearing a “Reichstag moment”, a coup by supporters of a president preaching “the gospel of the Führer”.
Milley is also shown assuring the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that Trump would not be able to use nuclear weapons. Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, whose own Trump book will come out next year, reported that Milley worked to stop Trump attacking Iran.
Woodward and Costa report that Pelosi told Milley: “What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?
“You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”
‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us
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According to Woodward and Costa, Milley said: “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.”
Woodward and Costa also say the general was aware of parallels to the case of James Schlesinger, the secretary of defense who in 1974 took steps to safeguard against presidential abuse of the nuclear arsenal during the downfall of Richard Nixon – a downfall in large part caused by Woodward, in his work with Carl Bernstein investigating the Watergate scandal.
Woodward and Costa also report that concerns about Trump spread among other senior national security staff. Gina Haspel, then director of the CIA, reportedly told Milley: “We are on the way to a rightwing coup.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/18/tories-rishi-sunak-leadership-plot-penny-mordaunt-general-election
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Opinion
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2024-03-18T16:04:59.000Z
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Simon Jenkins
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Loyalty was once the glue that held the Tories together. But now they’ve come unstuck | Simon Jenkins
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There are many good reasons for Rishi Sunak to postpone a general election. All are about reducing his party’s potential loss of seats. There is also an overwhelming reason for calling one now. It is in the national interest.
British government needs an act of cleansing. It needs renewal and a fresh start under a new regime. Every month that start is delayed has a cost in decisions postponed. The presumed next government of Labour’s Keir Starmer is waiting and ready to go. Its learning curve will be steep and its climb hard. There is not the remotest national advantage in another six months of bickering and squabbling.
Affliction descends weekly on Sunak’s head. He has shown himself to be an honest and articulate prime minister during probably the toughest episode in modern British politics. But his party and his government machine have failed him. The Rwanda bill, questionable donors, bankrupt councils, tax cuts, extremism laws and defence spending tumble out of Downing Street in a chaotic shambles.
Now he must confront an alleged plot to replace him with Penny Mordaunt, the apparent favourite of Tory moderates, who several MPs claim has been “on manoeuvres” for several months. While Mordaunt herself has not commented publicly, her supporters have called the claims “bonkers” – and such a bid would indeed be destabilising, just when Sunak most needs support.
Mordaunt is currently leader of the House of Commons. She heads the central oligarchy of power in Britain, the party of government in parliament. Of all cabinet members, her duty is one of absolute loyalty to her leader. Yet she and others remain silent as Sunak trips and stumbles from one calamity to another. Parliamentary lobby journalists gaily disseminate challenges to his leadership. His enemies mostly remain anonymous and, for all we know, may not exist, while his named supporters make the most obvious remark: that a fourth leadership contest in five years would indicate a party unfit for a minute longer in government.
1:35
Sunak told to take Islamophobia seriously and 'get his own house in order' – video
Throughout Conservative history, the party’s unity has been cited as its secret weapon, manifest as loyalty to the leader of the day. There have been two occasions postwar when it has been as hard-pressed as now. One was in 1964 under Alec Douglas-Home and the other in 1997 under John Major. In both cases, the leader was challenged, respectively by Enoch Powell and by the anti-EU “bastards”. But come election time, loyalty held. The party went dignified into opposition and leadership hopefuls bided their time.
There is no dignity now. Mordaunt is a modern politician who, like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, can fill a room and please a crowd. She did not seem to merit cabinet promotion, other than briefly, over the past troublesome years, as defence secretary for 85 days. She is of the populist rather than executive stream of British politician.
This Tory long goodbye is toxic for the country – and making Labour’s job ever harder
Jonathan Freedland
Read more
This could be a strength, if she were ever to make a leadership bid, but Tory leaders including Margaret Thatcher have been careful to surround themselves with a tight cabal of ministerial talent. It was Johnson’s mass expulsion of such talent in 2019 – fearing for his position – that has left the party so denuded of leadership ability today. The deplorable state of the cabinet machine during the pandemic is the one message of the otherwise useless Covid inquiry.
As the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville declared, every political party in Britain is essentially a club. Its ability to act in unison is its greatest strength. That is why Britain has always found it impossible to devolve real power to national or local governments. But the club demands its members obey the rules. One of the great strengths of the historical Labour party was to adapt the discipline of the trade union to parliament.
The Tories have suffered factional splits in recent decades, variously into the Referendum, Brexit, UK Independence and Reform parties. The Conservative party has survived them all, admittedly with help from the first-past-the-post system. The present challenge from Reform looks superficially serious, though its former leader, Nigel Farage, is carefully biding his time. Who knows – but his future may yet be with the Tories.
The clear possibility hovers on the horizon of a Farage-Johnson-Mordaunt “red wall” coalition. It could relaunch a “New Tory” party – on the model of Tony Blair’s New Labour – amid the putative ruins of a Starmer government. What is different today is the lack of any critical mass of respectable Toryism to offer it resistance. At the prospect of such a future we can only tremble.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2001/jun/17/features.review27
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From the Observer
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2001-06-17T01:17:59.000Z
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Peter Preston
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It's enough to make you weep
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Autumn in New York (106 mins, 15) Directed by Joan Chen; starring Richard Gere, Winona Ryder
Say It Isn't So (96 mins, 15) Directed by James B. Rogers; starring Heather Graham, Chris Klein
Dracula 2001 (99 mins, 15) Directed by Patrick Lussier; starring Justine Waddell, Jonny Lee Miller
Another Life (101 mins, 15) Directed by Philip Goodhew; starring Natasha Little, Nick Moran
Like Father (95 mins, 15) Amber Films; starring Joe Armstrong, Anna Gascoigne
No Place to Go (100 mins) Directed by Oskar Röhler; starring Hannelore Elsner, Vadim Glowna
So, pouring into the cracks between blockbusters, comes the familiar detritus of cinema summers - the flops, the might-have-beens, the not-quite-straight-to-videos. Autumn in New York was actually around in America last autumn. It finally arrives here covered in the leaf mould of soggy romance.
Richard Gere is a sort of Marco Pierre Grey figure, fabulously successful at running restaurants and pulling chicks: but, at 48, as emotionally fulfilled as the average kiwi fruit. Winona Ryder is the 21-year-old daughter of one of Gere's ex-girlfriends (now mercifully dead to avoid taxing Allison Burnett's scriptwriting skills too far). They meet: she fancies him rotten: he takes rotten advantage of her until - awful secret! - she turns out to have a terminal, inoperable heart condition. At which point, Rickie finds love somewhere beneath the raspberry coulis and, after much hunting around, the US's finest cardiac surgeon - who may, or may not, be able to conquer all.
It's a weepy that blocks its own tear ducts with clichés and implausibilities. Gere and Ryder are supposed to have this terrible age gap - but, in reality, it's only 22 years (the sort of stage where your average Hollywood producer trades his last ex in for a later model). Ryder can play fey and feisty and caustic, but she can't do tremulous girly any longer. Gere, hair like a monstrous ski slope, can play only his usual self. Joan Chen - of Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl - has a nice, flowing way with direction. She'll make many better movies than this. The support, from Elaine Stritch, Anthony LaPaglia and Sherry Stringfield (last seen walking out on ER) is gallantly competent. But you don't, alas, care what happens to any of them. You just wish the Grim Reaper would get a move on.
Maybe they should have tried Autumn in New York as a gross-out comedy; or then, again, maybe not. Gross hasn't equalled box-office gross lately, and Say It Isn't So from the Farrelly Brothers factory (Peter and Bobby just produced this one; their loyal sweeper J.B. Rogers finally gets to direct) comes with coffin nails attached. Chris Klein (from Election) is a blank-faced, adopted lad who works in an animal sanctuary, Heather Graham (from Boogie Nights) is a sex-crazed hairdresser of legendary incompetence. She cuts his ear off, they tumble into bed - and then up pops her mum (Sally Field) with yet another awful secret. They're brother and sister and so they must part.
The first 20 minutes or so are reasonably promising, then it all goes to putrescent pot. You have, for all its free-wheeling appearance, to deliver this stuff precise and calculated. Making it up as you go along means disaster. Klein looks bemused, out of his depth. Graham is getting a bit long in the tooth to do ditzy juveniles. Sally Field, mugging hysterically, should put her two Oscars in storage. Amputation gags? Endless jokes about strokes? I can take funny tasteless, but unfunny tasteless is more than just gross: say, repellent.
Dracula 2001 used to be called Dracula 2000 - but then willing distributors these days are hard to find. Anyway, any year it's the same old tosh. Gerard Butler rises from the tomb and bites various New Orleans blondes. Christopher Plummer, venerable vampire hunter, goes after him with a silver shotgun and his Baron Von Crapp accent. Jonny Lee Miller, who seems to have wandered in from some East End Britflick, trades sub-Crouching Tiger stunts with the forces of evil. It chills not, neither does you grin - but it does claim, incidentally, that Judas was the original Dracula. What an Iscariot on.
There are a couple of slightly better British lights at the end of this tunnel. Another Life, its titlepiece proudly announces, is 'A Philip Goodhew Film'. Thus do actors (from Crossroads, among other things) become auteurs. This is the tale of Edie Thompson, hanged for murder in 1922, after her lover Jack Bywatters had stabbed nerdy hubby Percy in darkest Ilford. It is singularly well played. Natasha Little makes a carefree, enchantingly spirited Edie. Ioan Gruffudd (last seen squirming as a camp Welsh shopkeeper in Very Annie Mary) gets to show he can do love-ravaged Cockney killlers, too. After Lock, Stock and sundry Guy Ritchie jazz, Nick Moran is almost unrecognisable as painfully pathetic Percy. They all of them - aided and abetted by a masterful Tom Wilkinson - act out of their skins.
Why, then, does Another Life rather lack life? Back to P. Goodhew, whose only previous feature was Intimate Relations. He is, on this showing, something of a plodder. Everything is solid and square and detailed. His little excursions into fantasy - for instance, when Edie asks sailor Jack about the aurora borealis and the screen fills with ET off-cuts - verge on the lumpen. The story inches towards its predestined and thus underwhelming conclusion. If this were some BBC Masterpiece Theatre, starring the girl from Vanity Fair and the boy from Hornblower , it would seem pretty good. Thanks for small Arts Council mercies. But movies with auteurs behind the camera set themselves up to deliver something more.
Meanwhile, in the far North East, the gritty Amber collective is still turning out its slices of homespun, working class, Arts Council-funded life acted by amateurs playing versions of themselves and their own experiences. Call Like Father a kind of racing pigeon pie (with brass band dressing and greyhound sauce). The council want to build on grandpa's allotment; meanwhile fat son Joe's marriage is breaking up and his 10-year-old son, Michael, is losing his bearings. The faces and landscapes are great; the acting isn't helped by some dodgy lip sync. At the end, apart from a spasm of melodrama, all we have is another helping of sentimental com munity conservatism, the nostalgia of dereliction. To my shame, I kept wishing that Tony Blair would turn up and give them all a good shaking.
Nobody, to be fair, could call No Place To Go summer dross. It arrives, via Cannes and lesser festivals, pavilioned in praise, art house with a personal twist. Oskar Röhler, the director and writer, is the son of Gisela Elsner, a fashionable, beautiful, pharaoh-coiffed (and Marxist-Leninist) star of Sixties' literary Germany. Thirty years on, Gisela was a neurotic, pill-popping, chain-smoking wreck - finally destroyed by the collapse of East Germany and most of her theories. She jumped out of a clinic window in 1992. Guess what? The central character of this film, Hanna Flanders (played by a no-relation Hannelore Elsner) does the same. This seems to be fact with the merest patina of fiction.
It is starkly shot in black and white and eloquently desperate. But for British audiences a lack of familiarity with Gisela's glory days takes away some of the force. We're asked to take her former notoriety and intellectual weight on trust and - for all the technical brilliance of Elsner H. - that means she's just another breakdown waiting to happen.
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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/feb/07/issa-rae-fruit-fictional-podcast-explores-sexuality-hyper-masculinity
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Culture
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2016-02-07T13:00:05.000Z
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Melissa Locker
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Issa Rae’s Fruit: the podcast exploring hypermasculinity and sexuality
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“I
don’t want to tell you my name yet – or maybe ever,” begins Fruit, a brand new podcast from the mind of Issa Rae. It explores questions of race, gender, identity, and sexuality through the story of a black football star who is questioning his sexuality. It sounds like it could be ripped from the headlines, but it’s a new fictional series from Rae, who is best known as the star of the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.
Why you should listen:
Issa Rae is one of those multi-hyphenate creators who is the star, writer – and brains – behind a tiny empire of creative endeavors. In addition to The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, she’s in another web series called The Choir; meanwhile, Insecure, a comedy pilot that she made for HBO with The Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore, has been picked up. Between all of that, somehow she found time to write Fruit.
Michael Sam says he's stepping away from football citing 'mental health'
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It’s no accident that the podcast debuted while the nation’s attention is on American football and the Super Bowl. Fruit tells a fictional story, told in the first person by a man known only as X, who is a professional football player on a journey of self-discovery and sexual exploration.
In the show, under a blanket of anonymity, X discusses his rise from a third string football player to a star. When a man in a bar sparks attraction, he decides to explore his feelings, which he has repressed in the past. In the show, X discusses his relationships with his friends, family, and teammates as he tries to navigate his own emotions amid everyone else’s ideas about his role in an alpha male-dominated industry. As a larger league-wide scandal unfurls around him, X must decide how to tell his own story – not only for himself, but for others like him. It’s an honest and intimate portrayal of not just sexuality or race or how the two intersect, but of humanity – and it’s exactly the kind of storytelling that fans have come to expect of Rae.
The podcast advertising group Midroll was in the market for narrative fiction and when Rae’s business manager presented her with the opportunity, she jumped at the chance. “I’ve been listening to podcasts for several years now, especially the unscripted conversation version,” Rae said. “I really liked the idea of expanding the world of audio and telling a story or listening to a story in my car and being transported without having to sit down and watch something.”
Rae already knew what story she wanted to tell, as it had been floating around in her head for a few years. “It’s a story I’ve always wanted to tell about a young black man’s sexual exploration,” Rae said. A podcast was the perfect format for the story she envisioned. “It feels very personal, like a diary entry,” she said. “This medium that allows for a character to be talking to an audience one-on-one just felt like the appropriate medium. This character, X, is telling very personal stories of his life and to listen with headphones or [in] a room or a car, [it] feels like he is talking to you directly. It just felt like the right type of environment and tone for the journey we’re taking you on with this character.”
While the story sounds reminiscent of Michael Sam, the first openly gay NFL player, Rae swears it’s purely fiction. “I had the idea before Michael Sam came out. I’ve been sitting on this idea for two or three years now. I was just really interested in this hypermasculine sport and hearing stories about football players who couldn’t come out,” Rae said.
“All these alpha-male sports just don’t allow for masculine gay men,” she said. “And masculinity itself is just [so] fragile that I always found it interesting to explore in the sports world. Michael Sam coming out just helped me realize that it doesn’t happen all the time. It just gave more fuel to the story.”
While the opening of the podcast says that the story is based on true events, Rae admits that it’s a bit fuzzier than that.
“It’s based on what I believe to be true events that are unspoken,” she said. “It’s inspired by things that I’ve read about or heard about and chosen to make a narrative story about. In the same way that Fargo is based on true events, this is based on true events.”
Listen To This: Another Round podcast changes the world one drink at a time
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Rae is also clear that X is not per se gay, but rather just exploring his sexuality without applying the world’s labels to his actions. “I wanted to explore a character who identifies or is very open and honest about his exploration, but doesn’t want to be labeled,” said Rae, who was also interested in exploring what she sees as a double standard in the treatment of bi-curious women versus men.
“Women can openly experiment and kiss a girl or sleep with a girl and no one will bat an eye and you can still continue being straight, whereas men, if they admit to thinking a guy is attractive, automatically their sexuality and masculinity is tainted,” Rae said.
While Rae may be a newcomer to the world of audio, she’s already a big fan. “It takes way less time than visual storytelling!” she said, laughing. A cast of professional actors and a talented engineer help her re-create the story she envisions in her head. “It’s so much easier to have big budget ideas because you know that no one is seeing it. I can have a football game play out with a stadium full of fans and it doesn’t cost nearly as much as if I had to play that out visually.”
Where to start: Episode 1
Listen to Fruit on the Howl Premium subscription service, via its app or at howl.fm
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2016/dec/28/carrie-fisher-catastrophe-loved-her-rob-delaney
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Culture
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2016-12-28T16:30:39.000Z
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Rob Delaney
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Rob Delaney: ‘I revered Carrie Fisher til I met her. Then I loved her’
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Yes, I knew Carrie Fisher. She played my mom on Catastrophe, the sitcom I write and star in with Sharon Horgan. Or should I say, “plays my mom”, since we just finished shooting last week and Carrie’s scenes haven’t been seen by anyone yet. Except for me and Sharon that is, and our director, producer and editor. We’ve seen them and they’re amazing. I played some early cuts for my dad the other day and he was roaring. She’s a bigger part of series three than she was of the first two series. We couldn’t help but write more for her because she’s so brilliant.
So yes, I knew her, but like you, I was a fan first and a fan for ever. Don’t feel worse for me today than you feel for yourself. Actually feel a little bit worse for me, since I won’t get to have her act right into my face any more or goof around with her between takes.
Carrie was the only cast member Sharon and I would let improvise. (I say “let”; as if we could stop her. She let us put her in our show.) We’re a bit despotic and inflexible with our dialogue because we’re insane, but Carrie was more insane and would always, always make it funnier and better. In episode one of series two you can hear her singing an improvised song about areolae in the background of our daughter’s christening party.
And she was kind too. One day I was having a hard time because I was feeling guilty about being on set pretending to have a hard time managing a young family while my real-life wife tended to our three kids under the age of five, one of whom was a newborn. She was very sweet and understanding and the next day she brought me a tin of biscuits shaped like syringes and thermometers and other medical things and said she was “prescribing me cookies”.
Of course I loved her in Star Wars and When Harry Met Sally but the thing I watched her in the most was The Blues Brothers, where her character repeatedly tries to creatively and violently murder Jake and Elwood, played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd respectively. Jesus was she beautiful in that movie, with her long chestnut hair, her impossibly beautiful brown eyes and her irresponsibly shiny lips. The per-scene budget for her lip gloss in The Blues Brothers must have been $25! (That movie came out in 1980, so $25 works out to roughly $830 in 2016 money.)
I spent my teenage years fantasising about a shiny-lipped Carrie Fisher trying to murder me and my fugitive brother one day … So naturally I tried to seduce Carrie when we finally did work together, especially after Variety called me “the poor man’s Harrison Ford, who is also fat”. I’d like to report that I was successful, but despite my begging her on many occasions, we never had sex, even though our onscreen mother/son chemistry was off the charts. We made her and Adam Driver’s sterile scenes in The Force Awakens look like bank transactions. Adam, if you’re reading this, you might want to consider spending some of your Star Wars money on acting lessons instead of Lamborghinis.
What I’m getting at here is that I revered Carrie until I met her and then I loved her. I’m smiling thinking about her. I hope you are too.
Carrie Fisher, actor and writer, dies at 60 Guardian
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/13/john-bercow-rightly-damned-bully-liar-but-not-alone-in-commons
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Opinion
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2022-03-13T07:00:23.000Z
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Catherine Bennett
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John Bercow is rightly damned as a bully and liar. But he was not alone in the Commons | Catherine Bennett
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One of John Bercow’s unfortunate subordinates, recalling how “spectacularly” the former Commons Speaker lost his temper, compared the transformation to “Jekyll and Hyde”.
Although Bercow has objected to her account (“the suggestion that I waved my arms… with spittle coming from my mouth is disgusting, offensive and untrue”) and called the investigation “amateurish” and based on “tittle-tattle”, the comparison is probably one of the more forgiving lines in the report that the Commons’ independent expert panel has entitled, rather beautifully, The Conduct of Mr John Bercow.
For, if Bercow could behave despicably, the idea that he had a wholly delightful alter ego called Mr Speaker might suggest that his many Commons admirers weren’t simply duped by his rewarding transformation from Enoch Powell fan into a champion of diversity and inclusion. Maybe, like the inhuman Mr Hyde and decent Dr Jekyll (“one of your fellows who do what they call good”), Bercow really could be both things at the same time? Perhaps it was possible for the man David Lammy called an “intergalactic hero” to double as the “serial bully” of the new report? Not that Bercow limited himself to that: “The respondent has lied extensively to try and avoid the damning reality of the truth,” the panel found.
To toggle between the panel’s conclusions and the Commons effusions when Bercow finally left in 2019 can certainly feel like reading about two separate people. “Your humanity and personal touch will never be forgotten” was typical, along with “you are an extraordinary man”; “thank you for being such a good human being”. The person who we know to have been “offensive, malicious and insulting” to one Commons staffer, “leaving the complainant feeling undermined, humiliated and denigrated”, would himself leave Westminster, according to Thangam Debbonaire, “billowed up on a cloud of love and admiration from us all”.
Staff described Bercow mimicking them 'by way of mocking caricature'. For admirers, such turns made him all the more adorable
Elsewhere though, it’s clearly the same person, different audience. Staff described Bercow mimicking them “by way of mocking caricature”. For admirers, such turns made him all the more adorable. “You have your talent – that of mimicry, your voices and all that stuff,” said the Labour MP Barry Sheerman.
Like most workplace bullies, Bercow appears to have monstered selectively, picking moments and people, never inadvertently slipping like Jekyll into Hyde mode (“I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change”). “My own personal experience is different to the things I read in the report,” said non-victim Emily Thornberry, in 2018, as if this were a reason not to act on other people’s allegations.
If such unquestioning commitment now seems hard to credit, it could be worth considering that the trait of Machiavellianism has been strongly associated with perpetrators of workplace bullying, with dishonest Machiavellians “the biggest bullies of all”.
“It is for historians to judge,” says the newest report on Bercow’s behaviour, “whether the respondent was a successful reforming Speaker of the House of Commons. However, there was no need to act as a bully to achieve that aim.”
The Labour party, which finally suspended Bercow last week, has been slow to reach agreement. In 2018, Margaret Beckett had wanted him to stay as Speaker because Brexit “trumps bad behaviour”. Thornberry, not that she’d witnessed bullying, could nonetheless see things from the bully’s perspective: “I appreciate that there must be times when it is extremely frustrating trying to get, trying to drag the House of Commons into the 21st century.”
To be fair to Thornberry, her implied distinction between bog-standard bullying and a justifiable, virtuous kind is one widely in use. In fact, for some of our most active social justice advocates, the message of the Bercow report, that all workplace bullying is bad, regardless of the visionary claims of the perpetrators, must be distinctly unwelcome. Must progressives deny themselves even occasional name-calling and intimidation?
As for the Conservatives, a renewed enthusiasm for bullying has prevented them glorying in Labour’s Bercow difficulties
Sheerman, a former chair of the all-party parliamentary group on bullying, remains defiant. Bercow, he tweeted, was “a great reforming Speaker of the House of Commons who deserves our thanks & respect”.
As for the Conservatives, a renewed enthusiasm for bullying has, alas, prevented them glorying as fully as they might have wished in Labour’s Bercow difficulties. It’s tricky, after all, to ridicule Labour hypocrisy on workplace respect when the current home secretary is, as confirmed by an official report, the most powerful bully in the land.
Lest Priti Patel’s survival be explained as a regrettable necessity, dictated purely by the shortage of comparably affectless candidates, the party has further illustrated its commitment to dignity at work by bullying Kathryn Stone, the standards commissioner tasked with investigating bullying. Kwasi Kwarteng said she should “decide [on] her position”. Mark Spencer, the former whip accused of bullying lowlier MPs, is now leader of the house. On the backbenches, Daniel Kawczynski stands up for brutes by, having apologised for bullying, saying he didn’t mean it.
Actually, if Andrea Leadsom (who was once insulted by the Speaker) was right to demand Bercow’s exclusion from Labour membership, and others justifiably question his professorship at Royal Holloway University of London, what is Patel doing in her – in any – job?
At his public resignation from the Home Office, her permanent secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam, mentioned allegations of belittling, shouting and swearing, an “atmosphere of fear”. Boris Johnson then ignored the conclusion of Sir Alex Allan, his adviser on ministerial standards, that Patel’s conduct amounted to bullying. Allan resigned. Rutnam later received a settlement of £340,000, with £30,000 in costs.
If it has always been obvious that normalising bullying and trashing codes of conduct extract a social cost, we are still learning how much suffering and shame comes of government by bullies in a humanitarian crisis. Patel’s failures of empathy and twisted notions of acceptable behaviour now shape the national response to freezing, bombed-out Ukrainian families, as well as to refugees in dinghies. When investigated for in-person bullying, Patel said (inaccurately) that nobody told her it was wrong. What’s her excuse this time?
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/31/bloc-party-hymns-review
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Music
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2016-01-31T08:00:01.000Z
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Phil Mongredien
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Bloc Party: Hymns review – a brave and successful reinvention
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There’s a clue to Bloc Party’s radical new direction in the album title: lyrically, Hymns is a turn for the more spiritual. Out goes the angst; in come song titles such as Only He Can Heal Me and an evangelical joyousness on the likes of The Good News (although frontman Kele Okereke has denied the new material is explicitly religious). There is a parallel shift musically too. “Rock’n’roll has got so old/ Just give me neo-soul,” sings Okereke on Into the Earth, which is a fair description of the direction of travel. Where once Russell Lissack’s stinging guitar defined their sound, it now caresses, complementing his bandmates rather than fighting them. It’s a brave and successful reinvention.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/feb/18/match.coventry
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Football
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2008-02-18T00:08:53.000Z
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David Lacey
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FA Cup: Mowbray's mind firmly fixed on promotion despite seductive lure of shot at Wembley
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If there is to be a team from outside the Premier League in this season's FA Cup final it may well be West Bromwich Albion whose brisk, breezy, uncluttered style might at least make a game of it. Albion won the Cup as a Second Division side in 1931 and would set a record by repeating the feat from the Championship.
Unless what is left of the Premier League's elite fall on their own or each other's swords such an outcome is highly unlikely but at least Tony Mowbray's players will go into today's quarter-final draw knowing that, if they can avoid Manchester United or Chelsea, a place in the last four will beckon.
Certainly the ebullient way they swept past Coventry City suggested that the demands of maintaining a Cup run while continuing to press for promotion will not be beyond them. The strength of this prognosis, however, will be tested by their league form before the sixth round in just under three weeks' time. After knocking out Peterborough to reach the last 16, West Bromwich went off the boil in the Championship, taking four points from four games and slipping from first to fourth.
So Mowbray, while excited by the prospect of reaching the semi-finals, is not about to fall prey to Cup fever. "Beating Hull and Plymouth at home in our next two games has to be the priority because we can't let the possibility of getting to the semi-finals ruin our chances of promotion," he explained.
Saturday's 5-0 victory was Coventry's heaviest home defeat since leaving Highfield Road for the Ricoh Arena in 2005. Albion's winning margin was expanded by a series of unfortunate events which hit the losers like the plagues of Egypt. A harsh red card deprived Coventry of their captain, Michael Doyle, soon after half-time when they were only 1-0 down and then their goalkeeper, Andy Marshall, gifted Roman Bednar Albion's second with a miscued clearance before Arjan de Zeeuw handled, leaving the Czech to put the tie out of reach with the penalty.
Bednar has scored in each of Albion's Cup ties so far. His power and pace, allied to good vision and quick thinking, will always make him a handful for defenders at Championship level and might well give some Premier League defences pause for thought. His best piece of play on Saturday set up Albion's first goal after 12 minutes when he stole past the Coventry defence to collect Zoltan Gera's throw-in, from where it was impossible to be offside, and provided the centre from which Chris Brunt headed past Marshall.
Coventry's response was energetic but confused, as well it might be at the end of a week which had seen the club being taken over and the manager, Iain Dowie, sacked by the incoming chairman, Ray Ranson. The caretaker partnership of Frank Bunn and John Harbin, coach and fitness expert, could only look on helplessly as long, high balls played in the vague direction of a lone striker, Leon Best, were easily picked off by the West Bromwich defence.
"You would have to say the red card changed the game," said Bunn. Well you wouldn't actually; it merely changed the size of the defeat. Yet it was rough justice, Mark Halsey deciding that the lunging tackle from Doyle that inadvertently caught Gera's ankle was serious foul play. Coventry could have grounds for appeal although they could hardly argue with the result for, as Bunn admitted: "We made some basic errors." Like turning up.
Ishmael Miller, who had replaced Bednar, and Gera rubbed it in with the fourth and fifth goals plundered from the rubble of Coventry's defence. Albion had already won 4-0 at the Ricoh in the league. The mystery of Coventry's 4-2 win at The Hawthorns deepened.
Man of the match Roman Bednar (West Bromwich Albion)
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/may/22/philipfrench
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Film
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2005-05-21T23:32:25.000Z
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Philip French
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Well, Sith happens ...
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The phenomenon that is Star Wars began in 1977 with a cheerful action film derived from Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, Triumph of the Will and Japanese samurai movies. It reflected the mood of a nation emerging from the debacle of the Vietnam War and the betrayal of the Watergate scandal.
Sub-titled 'A New Hope' the movie centred on a trio of young people with the counsel of an elder restoring democracy to their shattered galaxy. Two sequels followed, neither directed by its producer and only begetter, George Lucas, each of which was supposedly deeper and darker, though many thought they merely added sententiousness and whimsy.
At that midway point a new American President, Ronald Reagan, took up the trilogy as a national propaganda weapon, drawing on Star Wars mythology to characterise the Soviet Union as 'the evil empire' and the film's title was borrowed for his proposed space missile-defence system. Now, more than three decades since Lucas conceived it, his project has been completed by the third of three prequels, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which ends by disappearing up the black hole of what is now designated Star Wars Episode IV. It emerges in the wake of 11 September and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and more or less reflects that state of permanent war imagined by George Orwell, waged by a single authoritarian superpower.
This wily government uses the threat of outside terror to maintain its power and manipulating democratic processes. 'In the Jedi Council we're making finding General Grievous our first priority,' proclaims a sonorous Samuel L Jackson, and we are invited to hear an echo of Colin Powell declaring war on Osama Bin Laden.
Over this period, Lucas has created his own empire with his Industrial Light and Magic company, and his two old friends from the carefree days of the 1970s, Francis Coppola and Steven Spielberg, have also created their own studios (though the former subsequently lost his). Lucas has been accused of selling out, of contributing to the dumbing down of audiences world-wide. He's also been claimed as one of the saviours of Hollywood and popular cinema at a time when the theatrical movie seemed on its way to art-house extinction. The charges and claims are both true.
This having been said, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith isn't much of a movie. The anagramatically inviting name of its villains readily suggests another sub-title, 'This Shit Hits'. Its whole purpose is to explain how the Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) deserted the forces of light to join 'the dark side of the force' and eventually turns into the masked, bionic warrior of what we now call Episodes IV, V and VI.
It's not much of a struggle. He is easily conned by the wicked Chancellor Palpatine into becoming a double agent. He gets miffed when he's refused promotion to Jedi Master (rejection and humiliation are frequent factors in driving political leaders to the bad); and he finally makes a Faustian bargain to save the life of a loved one. There was an element of suspense in the earlier Star Wars films. We wondered where Darth Vader came from and what was his relationship to young Luke Skywalker. That has long since gone, being wholly dispelled by the prequels.
Special effects have greatly advanced since 1978, but technology needs imagination after it has made an initial impression. Imagination is not the strong suit of Revenge of the Sith.
This new century has brought us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has a dramatic drive and an emotional sweep that some feel border on the spiritual. Peter Jackson's films overshadow Lucas's new picture and its ersatz mythology. Star Wars III aims to raise serious moral issues but never transcends the banality of evil.
Its dialogue, combining the pretentious and the flat-footed, expresses the banality of drivel. Indifferently directed, the performers can do little with the material. The exception is Ian McDiarmid as the evil Palpatine who shows Anakin how to scowl from under his cowl and become one of the boys in the hood.
All this compares rather poorly with Lucas's other series, the Indiana Jones trilogy, featuring a key figure of the earlier Star Wars pictures, Harrison Ford. In what is also a nostalgic entertainment modelled on Saturday morning serials, Jones confronts - at least in two of his outings - genuine forces of evil, Hitler and the Nazis. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indie, like Anakin Skywalker, has to make a life-and-death decision.
In order to save his father's life, he must help the evil powers obtain the Holy Grail, but unlike Anakin he knows how to play a canny game.
Although Lucas appointed others to make a TV series about the young Indiana Jones, he restricted himself in the cinema to a short prequel segment about the teenage Indie, explaining his troubled relations with his father and how he came to be the way he was.
It is a witty, sparkling 15-minute sequence tucked into the opening of The Last Crusade, not three solemn movies made over a period of five years.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/may/14/world-cup-2014-luiz-felipe-scolari-brazil-group-a
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Football
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2014-05-14T11:50:16.000Z
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Zico
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World Cup 2014: Luiz Felipe Scolari's Brazil in shape to top Group A | Zico
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From August 2013 to February this year I lived in Qatar where I coached the local side Al-Gharafa. Since my return to Brazil one thing has stood out: while previously World Cup fever would be there for all to see, the atmosphere now is much more subdued. I haven't seen the bunting and painted streets that you might expect to be part of preparations here. To me, it looks like the protests might have put some fans on the back foot, but with a month to go before the tournament starts I wish I could see a bit more joy among the people.
I don't blame them. Our preparations have not been the best and people are right to complain about spiralling costs and delayed works. The public purse is funding the World Cup and people are entitled to feel aggrieved. Having said that, I don't really think anybody is against the World Cup per se, but the problems in preparation have soured the mood. Brazil undeniably needed to revamp the stadiums and, simply for all our history in football, we deserve to host the World Cup. In 1950, when we first did, Brazil was a wholly different country and certainly not as representative as it is these days.
That has nothing do with the team, though. The Seleção has managed to enthuse fans over the last year. While their Confederations Cup title needs to be seen in context, Luiz Felipe Scolari has certainly managed to steady the ship. It is important to give credit to his predecessor, Mano Menezes, who took over in July 2010 and promoted several new players, including Neymar. The core of Scolari's team – Thiago Silva, David Luiz, Oscar, Daniel Alves and Paulinho – was already playing under Menezes.
I had the chance to see that team in action in October 2012, when I was in charge of Iraq. It was a weird situation because we were about to play Australia in the Asian qualifier for the World Cup and I asked the Iraqi football federation to find me an opponent with similar style. I suggested Wales. Instead, they brought me Brazil, by no means what I wanted and even less so after they hammered my team 6-0.
Scolari did some sifting and fine-tuning with the team and imprinted his philosophy. Brazil are organised and compact but they also go for the opposition's jugular. The fans enjoyed it, especially after the Seleção beat Spain in Rio and I think Big Phil is doing well with the players he's got at hand. As for his choice of squad, announced last week, all I can say is that everybody can make a list and disagree with one or another name. But this team has every chance of winning the tournament.
Whether they will is another story. I think the Seleção had a lucky group-stage draw. Both Croatia and Mexico arrived via the playoffs and Cameroon are not as threatening as in previous years. Croatia will play Brazil without Mario Mandzukic, for example, while Mexico were almost edged out by Panama in qualifying. So I think Brazil are in shape to top the group convincingly, which will give the players confidence ahead of the knockout stages.
One thing that does worry me is that the majority of this group haven't experienced a World Cup. While it's nothing new for the Seleção to enter a World Cup with high expectations, this time things are different because Brazil are at the home and the last time that was the case, in 1950, they came up short. Which is why I hope they won't face Uruguay, perhaps the only team Brazil have seriously struggled against in recent times. In the Confederations Cup semi-final they did not allow Brazil to impose their rhythm and put the Seleção under a lot of pressure. I said before that tournament that Uruguay could psychologically rattle Brazil and so they did.
Then there is the fact that Brazil lost the World Cup to Uruguay in 1950. If they were to play each other again people would bring up what happened 64 years ago. That cannot be helpful to anybody. So I will be honest with you: as much as I think Uruguay have some great players to watch, I hope they don't go far in the World Cup, perhaps not even past the group stages.
Having said that, Brazil cannot handpick opponents if they want to win this tournament. What I have seen from these players is that they are aware of the importance of this competition for the Brazilian people. With the crowd on their side Brazil can be daunting.
It is probably an advantage that most of the European teams with Seleção players didn't do well in the Champions League. The players should turn up for national duty in a better shape. At this point, an injury could be a problem for any team, but so far Brazil have been spared.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/29/hurricane-sandy-travel-delays-your-rights-cancelled-flights
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Money
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2012-10-29T13:45:00.000Z
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Jill Insley
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Hurricane Sandy travel delays: your rights on cancelled flights
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New York is bracing itself for the biggest storm ever to hit the east coast of America – Hurricane Sandy – which has been described as a "Frankenstorm". Public transport services started shutting down on 28 October and will remain closed until the hurricane has passed and the damage has been assessed. Where does this leave travellers from the UK?
I am due to fly out – what are my chances of getting there?
Non-existant on 29 October and mixed on 30 October. Airlines have cancelled about 7,000 flights so far.
BA has cancelled all flights to and from the east coast for 29 October, including those to New York, Washington, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia (with the exception of BA238 from Boston). Virgin Atlantic has also cancelled all flights to and from New York, Washington and Boston on 29 October.
So what are my rights?
Under European law, if you are flying to or from the EU with a EU-based airline and your flight is cancelled, the airline is obliged to offer you a choice: you can either cancel your booking and get a refund, or rebook on to a different flight.
If your flights are with a non-EU airline you may only be offered help with the flight from the UK to the US, although the trade association ABTA says non-EU airlines are rescheduling passengers on to different flights – in some cases with a fee for the fare difference – or refunding those who have had their flights cancelled for both outbound and inbound journeys.
If you are stranded and booked with a EU airline, under the EU rules you should also be entitled to refreshments and meals within reason, the cost of two phone calls and, if necessary, overnight accommodation. Keep receipts for the costs you incur.
However, you will not be entitled to compensation ranging from €250 to €600 under EU air passenger regulation 261. The Civil Aviation Authority, which enforces the rules in the UK, says that because cancellations caused by Hurricane Sandy will be treated as an extraordinary circumstance, affected passengers will not be entitled to additional compensation.
What should I do?
Bob Atkinson of TravelSupermarket.com says the first step is to check the status of your flight on your airline's website, and see what help and advice it is offering – this will vary from airline to airline, including the length of time you have to rebook your flight.
If your flight is part of an ATOL-backed holiday your tour operator will look after you, making sure you have accommodation and transport as soon as possible. However, if you have booked independently you need to make sure the other parts of your trip – hotel rooms, car, etc – are cancelled, otherwise your booking will be treated as a no-show and you will be charged the full amount. Atkinson warns you may still face cancellation charges, ranging from 0% to 100% of the full price regardless of the circumstances.
Will my travel insurance pay out if my flight is delayed or cancelled?
If you bought the policy after the hurricane was announced, you will not be covered. If you bought it before and the delay goes beyond 12 hours your insurer should offer a payout, according to Martin Rothwell of travel insurance brokers World First Travel. However, check the small print of your policy as cover varies, and some cheaper policies do not cover delays or cancellations.
I'm due to fly later in the week but want to cancel – can I get a refund?
Only if your ticket or airline allows for that. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has not warned against travelling to the US, so travel insurers will not pay out if you want to cancel your holiday or journey.
What is BA saying?
BA is offering passengers due to travel between 26 and 31 October the option of changing their travel plans. Those who booked through a travel agent or tour operator should contact them directly; those who booked through BA's website or call centre should call 0844 493 0787 (between 06:00 and 20:00 local time) in the UK, or 1 800 247 9297 (07:00-01:00 local time) in the US.
If you are booked on to a cancelled British Airways flight you can either rebook on to another BA flight at a later date at no extra charge and subject to availability, or cancel your booking and claim a refund to the original form of repayment.
What about Virgin Atlantic?
Virgin is warning passengers on flights that have been cancelled to not travel to the airport and instead contact their travel agent or provider to rebook on the next available flight. Passengers who booked direct with the airline should call its flight disruption line on + 44 (0) 844 209 8711 in the UK, or 1-800-862-8621 in the US.
Virgin is warning that because so many aircraft are out of position it may take a little while before things return to normal, but it will try to book seats with other carriers to speed the process for stranded passengers.
Passengers of cancelled flights who have not started their trip can also claim a refund from their original point of sale, rebook on a later date or rebook on a Virgin Atlantic flight to or from another destination.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/dismay-as-rishi-sunak-vows-to-max-out-uk-fossil-fuel-reserves
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Environment
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2023-07-31T21:35:42.000Z
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Severin Carrell
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Dismay as Rishi Sunak vows to ‘max out’ UK fossil fuel reserves
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Rishi Sunak has pledged to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves as he revealed a new round of intensive North Sea drilling, which experts said could be catastrophic for the climate.
Unveiling a plan to authorise more than 100 new North Sea licences on a visit to north-east Scotland, the prime minister also indicated he would approve drilling at the UK’s largest untapped reserves in the Rosebank field, which hold 500m barrels of oil.
Speaking to reporters on a visit to a Shell gas terminal north of Aberdeen, Sunak insisted the plan was compatible with net zero commitments given the anticipated part-reliance on fossil fuels for years to come, saying it was more carbon-intensive to ship oil and gas from other countries.
But experts said this ignored the fact that much of the UK’s imported gas comes by pipeline and tends to be produced more cleanly than its British equivalent. Environmental groups said Sunak’s plan would “send a wrecking ball” through climate commitments.
Tory and Labour MPs said Sunak’s “economically illiterate” announcement was “driving a coach and horses” through previous promises, and warned the prime minister he was “on the wrong side of history” and that modern voters wanted leaders who “protect, and not threaten, our environment”.
Kicking off a week of announcements intended to highlight the distance between the Tory stance and Labour’s pledge to bar any new North Sea projects, Sunak criticised the latter’s policy as “bad for energy security, bad for the British economy [and] actually bad for the environment”.
He said: “My view is we should max out the opportunities that we have here in the North Sea, because that’s good for our energy security.
“It’s good for jobs, particularly here in Scotland, but it’s also good for the climate because the alternative is shipping energy here from halfway around the world with three or four times the carbon emissions. So any which way you look at it, the right thing to do is to invest into back our North Sea, and that’s what we’re doing.”
1:53
Rishi Sunak announces new oil and gas licences despite outcry – video
While the new round of licences has been in progress for many weeks, Sunak’s visit highlight the shift towards greater scepticism over green policies since the Conservatives narrowly won the Uxbridge byelection, thanks in part to concern about London’s soon-to-be-expanded ultra-low emission zone.
The new round of licences will permit drilling closer to existing projects than previously allowed, something Sunak’s press secretary said was intended to maximise the amount that could be extracted.
While Sunak has insisted he remains committed to the UK’s target to reach net zero by 2050 and other green targets, his new approach has prompted concern among some Tory MPs, who worry the party could suffer among young voters and those tempted by the Liberal Democrats.
Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP who led a review for the government into net zero, was fiercely critical of the North Sea plans, calling it “the wrong decision at precisely the wrong time”.
He said: “It is on the wrong side of a future economy that will be founded on renewable and clean industries, and not fossil fuels.
“It is on the wrong side of modern voters who will vote with their feet at the next general election for parties that protect, and not threaten, our environment. And it is on the wrong side of history, that will not look favourably on the decision taken today.”
Green groups were even more scathing. Oxfam’s climate policy adviser, Lyndsay Walsh, said: “Extracting more fossil fuels from the North Sea will send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments at a time when we should be investing in a just transition to a low-carbon economy and our own abundant renewables.”
Mike Childs, the head of policy for Friends of the Earth, said: “Climate change is already battering the planet with unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves across the globe. Granting hundreds of new oil and gas licences will simply pour more fuel on the flames, while doing nothing for energy security as these fossil fuels will be sold on international markets and not reserved for UK use.”
Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow climate secretary, said the proposals were “economic illiteracy” which would “do nothing for our energy security and drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments”.
No 10 insists that expanded UK production of oil and gas will help keep bills lower and reduced emissions from not having to ship supplies from overseas will help with net zero targets.
Speaking at the Shell terminal, Sunak said data published on Monday showed that imported liquid natural gas “typically has carbon emissions that are three if not four times higher than the energy that we can get from here at home”.
“We’re still going to need oil and gas in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs, and therefore the question is, where would you rather get that from?” he said.
“Would you rather get it from here at home? Or would you rather ship it here from halfway around the world being reliant on dictators, or coming with three or four times the carbon emissions?”
The data published on Monday by the North Sea Transition Authority, a government advisory body, actually referred to the carbon intensity of producing, transporting and regasifying liquid natural gas from overseas compared with the production of natural gas in the UK, not to their overall carbon emissions. Critics later pointed out that production costs make up only a small portion of the climate impacts of using gas, and that the differences in emissions between domestic natural gas and imported LNG are significantly reduced once burning is included in calculations.
Tessa Khan, founder and director of the green campaign group Uplift, said it was highly questionable whether domestic production was better for the environment than imports.
“The UK is in the bottom half of the global table in terms of how clean its oil and production is,” she said. “The government often points to the most carbon-intensive form of imports, but the truth is that the main source of our gas imports is by pipeline and is much cleaner than UK-produced gas.”
This article was amended on 1 August 2023 to clarify the difference between the comparisons of imported LNG and domestically produced natural gas given by Rishi Sunak, and those provided in the research itself. A general response from critics was added. Also, an illustration of carbon capture was removed as the process was not mentioned in the article.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/nov/30/england-women-latvia-world-cup-2023-qualifier-match-report
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Football
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2021-11-30T21:24:31.000Z
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Suzanne Wrack
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Ellen White breaks record as merciless England thrash Latvia 20-0
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It was inevitable but Ellen White couldn’t quite believe it: arms outstretched, fists pumping, face etched with joy. It had taken just three minutes for her to match then surpass the England goalscoring record of 46 set by Kelly Smith.
So overcome with the emotion of the occasion the Manchester City forward, making her 101st appearance, almost forgot her trademark goggle celebration, as she skidded on to her back to be engulfed by her teammates nine minutes into their record 20-0 victory, surpassing the previous best, the 13-0 defeat of Hungary in 2005, in this World Cup qualifier in Doncaster.
England 20-0 Latvia: Women’s World Cup qualifier – as it happened
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“We don’t need to talk about it any more,” said White modestly, quick to mention the role of her teammates in getting her to the top tally. “It’s been spoken about for a long time and yeah, I feel very proud.
“I’m not finished here. Kelly Smith is a legend and I was lucky to play with her ... she’ll always be the best, for me.”
Four hat-tricks – from White, Lauren Hemp, who scored four, Alessia Russo, who scored England’s fastest ever hat-trick in the space of 11 minutes, and Beth Mead – were added to by Jordan Nobbs, Jill Scott, Georgia Stanway, Ella Toone, Jess Carter and two from Beth England as the Lionesses ensured White’s record-breaking match would be one to remember as more records tumbled, debuts were made and first senior goals were scored.
Lauren Hemp heads home England’s fifth goal to open her international account. The Manchester City winger would go on to score four. Photograph: Molly Darlington/Action Images/Reuters
It also added fuel to the calls for pre-qualifiers. “I think we have to look at it,” said manager Sarina Wiegman. “Of course you want competitive games and these are not competitive games. In every country you want to develop the women’s game but I don’t think it’s good that the scores now are so high. I know that has the attention of the federations and Uefa and Fifa, and I think that’s good because I don’t think a 20-0 is good for the development of anyone.”
The 10-0 defeat of the part-time team in Latvia meant the goalscoring record, that White had moved one goal closer to in the 1-0 win over Austria on Saturday, was there for the taking. The only thing standing between her and history was perhaps the expectation that it was coming.
Quick Guide
Scotland and Wales suffer in qualifiers
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Just three minutes in and Mead would score to give them a lead that would remind them just how easily they could carve open the misshapen Latvian defence.
Three minutes later and White had matched Smith, with an uncharacteristic 20-yard strike that dropped down over goalkeeper Laura Sinutkina.
Alexia Putellas: majestic midfielder the pick of Barça’s dominant pack
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Good things clearly come in threes and, in the ninth minute, White’s City teammate Stanway whipped the ball around the defence for the record-breaker to tap in. With history made, the downside was perhaps how few were there to see it take place as standstill traffic around the ground meant many fans filed into Keepmoat Stadium well into the first half. They needn’t have worried though – England were here to put on a show for the eventually healthy-sized and heaving crowd.
Mead grabbed a second and then her third either side of Hemp’s first and second senior international goals – of four on the night. And Toone added England’s eighth before the break.
Shortly after the restart and White had a hat-trick of her own and was level with Gary Lineker and Harry Kane on 48 England goals and five shy of Wayne Rooney’s record tally of 53.
“Thanks for mentioning that, that’s great,” she laughed sarcastically. “To be honest I’m just focusing on what I can control, playing for England, loving what I’m doing, supporting the team wherever I can to help the team win really.”
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There was no let-up from the rampant Lionesses as Wiegman handed caps to some of the fringe squad members. Stanway scored from the spot then substitute Carter, on for captain and Chelsea teammate Millie Bright, turned in from point-blank range.
England, who led the line with White from the off, finally got into the mix and substitutes Scott and Nobbs added one apiece in the second half, around Russo’s staggeringly quick hat-trick. Bruising scorelines can be painful. However, England can only play the team in front of them. We know they can score and, in February, against Canada, Spain and Germany, we’ll finally find out whether they can defend.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/05/ken-clarke-on-brexit-ive-never-seen-anything-as-mad-or-chaotic-as-this
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Politics
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2017-02-05T16:00:02.000Z
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Esther Addley
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Ken Clarke on Brexit: ‘I’ve never seen anything as mad or chaotic as this’
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Eighteen hours after betraying the will of the British people (© several newspapers) by voting against triggering article 50, Ken Clarke is sitting at his paper-stacked desk in his small parliamentary office, ploughing through the government’s white paper that supposedly lays out more details of its plans for departure.
It’s a little more than an hour since David Davis, the Brexit secretary, made a statement to the Commons and published the document online, and Clarke, having secured a paper copy, has only got as far as page 10. He wasn’t in the Commons but watched the brief statement and responses on TV. What did he make of it? “It’s quite obvious that nobody could think of what to ask because nobody has had a chance to read it,” he says.
Does he see that as intentional? “I’m afraid I do. The government are going to extraordinary lengths to try to avoid being accountable to parliament, when – because of the referendum – they have a completely inbuilt majority of people on both sides [who] regard themselves as entirely locked in by the referendum result to support them.
“It leads me to the unworthy suspicion that they don’t have a clear policy that they have agreed on, so they are trying to minimise its exposure.”
Clarke has never minced his words when it comes to Brexit – or indeed much else – and last week was no exception. In a speech to the Commons during the two-day debate on article 50, the mechanism that will start the process of leaving the EU, the man described by the Daily Telegraph as “the last parliamentary big beast” thrilled those still wedded to the remain cause by making a passionate argument for ignoring the referendum result altogether and staying firmly in.
Ken Clarke: why I’m voting against article 50 Guardian
The promises of riches after Britain departs were Alice in Wonderland fantasies, he told MPs. “Apparently you follow the rabbit down a hole and you emerge in a wonderland where suddenly countries around the world are queueing up to give us trading advantages and access to their markets that previously we have never been able to achieve as part of the EU.
“Nice men” such as Presidents Trump and Erdoğan of Turkey – both of whom were visited by the prime minister last month – were impatient to do deals with us despite their history of protectionism. “No doubt somewhere there is a hatter holding a tea party with a dormouse in the teapot.”
In stark contrast to Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, who almost visibly writhed as he was forced to explain why, despite being a passionately pro-European party, Labour was whipping its MPs to vote in favour, Clarke cheerfully declared that his conscience was clear. “When we see what unfolds after we leave the EU, I hope the consciences of other members of parliament remain equally content.”
As he sat, he was applauded and cheered from the opposition benches – the first time, he says, he has ever been clapped in 47 years as an MP (“you’re not supposed to be applauded at all”). Writing in this newspaper the following day, Polly Toynbee declared the speech “magnificent” and its author “a prophet crying in the wilderness”, “too good” for the Tories. The Daily Telegraph’s Michael Deacon joked that he was “the leader of the opposition”.
Though he scoffs “This week!” when I mention that he finds himself a hero of the remain left, Clarke is clearly chuffed with the fanmail he has been getting – most of it, he says, from Labour voters. “All political careers are a rollercoaster,” he says, but “it is nice to have a week with some fans. It’s quite obvious that some of the 16 million [who voted to remain] were much bucked by the fact that somebody was still being as obdurate as I was and refusing to see why on earth they should all be abandoned. Actually, I think the 16 million were right.”
Clarke with Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher at the Tory party conference, 1985. Photograph: Brian Harris / Rex Features
Liberals and leftwingers may warm to Clarke’s position on Europe and enjoy his tendencies to blunt speech. However, far from being a closet leftie, he is a small-government Tory, hawkish on public spending. Although he didn’t flee from parliament when his 16 years in Conservative governments were roundly trashed by the electorate in 1997, he admits that he used the next few years to double-up with a “very busy business career”, most notoriously with the tobacco giant British American Tobacco.
On trade, he says: “I basically think you cannot put new trading barriers between yourself and the giant free trade area upon which we have been dependent for the past 30 years without making yourself poorer.
“I don’t want to fall into the [trap] of wandering around, positively welcoming gloom and disaster, so as to be able to say: ‘I told you so.’ But I actually do think it will make us poorer. It could be a historic disaster.” How bad is historic? “If it turns out to be at some enormous cost and it brings an end to international investment in quite a lot of sectors of the economy, then of course it could be a disaster.”
Ken Clarke was magnificent, defying the Brexit zealots
Polly Toynbee
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In addition, there is the political cost, he says. “Every US president until the present one has found us more valuable because we are the leading bridge into the EU. We carry clout because we are one of the two or three big members of the EU. We are giving all that up as well. We are a trading nation and we have political interests in all parts of the world, where we will find our voice and our clout substantially diminished. I don’t think President Putin will bother to pick up the phone to Theresa May if he’s busy. We don’t matter so much any more.”
On the US president, he is not wildly impressed by the results of May’s visit to Washington. “Well, they [the government] have got this slogan about a global Britain, so obviously they want to illustrate this by having good photo-opportunities with leading figures around the world. So I suppose they thought it was quite a political coup to finally land this first meeting with him. But it’s a mixed blessing because we happen to have a rather unpleasant and highly unpredictable American president.”
Clarke and May have some form – he was recorded calling her a “bloody difficult woman” shortly after the referendum, and the pair clashed at the Tory conference in 2011 when May said in her speech that an immigrant had avoided deportation because he had a pet cat, which Clarke immediately and publicly declared was nonsense.
‘I don’t want to fall into the [trap] of wandering around, positively welcoming gloom and disaster’ … Clarke at his office in Portcullis House. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
In fact, he says: “I am trying to minimise giving you opportunities to attack Theresa, because there is no one else at the moment capable of being prime minister, and it’s not her fault.” But, he adds aridly: “As a PR advantage, going to see President Trump and President Erdoğan as her first two highly publicised calls showed the limitations of the new global politics.”
As for Trump, “It’s possible that for some reason he wants to have a trade deal with us while he’s busy repudiating deals with everybody else but I don’t ... think ... so.”
MPs’ offices in Portcullis House, next to the Houses of Parliament, are not grand – many look out on to a wall – but Clarke’s is blessed with surely one of the best views in London, that of buses, cyclists and pedestrians scurrying over Westminster Bridge. Today he is wearing a blue shirt, bright maroon cords, his trademark scuffed brown suede loafers and an exuberantly patterned burgundy tie that wraps itself determinedly around his belly, until his assistant pops over to straighten it for the photographs. He takes up a perch in a squashy green chair, hands flopping over the arms. Behind his right shoulder is a framed photograph of Churchill in exactly the same pose.
Clarke is 76 now, but not quite the father of the house – Labour’s Gerald Kaufman holds that distinction; they have both been MPs since 1970, Clarke missing out only because Kaufman was sworn in first. One might imagine this to be a depressing week for the lifelong, passionately devoted pro-European, watching Britain’s connection fray irrevocably and finding himself the only Conservative to vote against the bill’s second reading. The MP, however, is every bit as jolly and upbeat as his reputation.
He must have been disappointed that he was the only Tory to vote against the bill, given the fact that he insists most of them believe he is right that Brexit is bad for the country. He gives a long, uncommitted mmmmmm. “Obviously I’d prefer others to join me but frankly it didn’t make any difference to me. I realise it puts me in a rather distinct position, which doesn’t bother me.”
Clarke has served in every Conservative-led government since 1979 except the current one, and in all that time – as Thatcher’s health and education secretaries, Major’s home secretary and chancellor, and as justice secretary and minister without portfolio under Cameron – his devotion to the European project has never wavered, putting him frequently at odds with much of his party. He advocated Britain joining the euro, and has said he still believes it would have been a good idea, had countries such as Italy and Portugal not been allowed to join.
Behind that, principally, has been his commitment to free-market economics, which he insists is as strong as ever.
‘No one else is capable of being prime minister at the moment, it’s not her fault’ … Clarke with Theresa May at the Tory party conference, 2009 Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Archive/PA Images
Clarke will acknowledge that there is “unfortunately” more anti-immigration sentiment in the country than previously, but he feels the referendum result was not principally about immigration. “I think it was mounting anger about economic inequality, the unfair distribution of the rewards of economic success, the gap between different parts of the country, with London and the south-east having a booming economy, and nothing happening in some of the old industrial cities of the north and the north midlands.”
And will he accept that some of that is the fault of governments in which he served? He looks momentarily surprised. “Yes ... I think everybody who believes in liberal economic policies – which is the great bulk of politicians of the past few years – have never quite solved the problem of how to distribute the benefits better, so that the whole country can be seen to benefit.
“We’ve been trying for years” – he was, he points out, Margaret Thatcher’s inner cities minister. “It all goes back to that time, and actually I think we’re still not sure how to do it. We go through a period of rapid economic growth, and if you ask the question – How is this going to benefit Hartlepool? – I can’t pretend I know, and I don’t think I have met anybody who knows. Right and left. I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn has the foggiest notion how to spend the benefits of London’s prosperity either.”
The logical conclusion, if he is correct, that his cherished free-market economics have in part brought about the end of Britain’s European dalliance, does not appear to dent his cheer either.
Clarke announced last year that the current parliament will be his last. He must have some personal sadness that he is ending his career with Britain’s withdrawal? “I go on. I’m usually quite a bouncy, optimistic fellow, and I’ve seen some fair old crises in my time. And somehow, such is the nature of the human condition, things seem to muddle through.” Although, he adds immediately: “I’ve never seen anything as mad or chaotic as this.”
Is he confident, now, that the risk of an early election is receding, and he’ll make it to 2020? “I have no idea. Nobody does. The truth is, when I go to business audiences, they always ask me what is going to happen, and I always begin with the disclaimer: ‘If you actually encounter any person who says that he or she can predict what is going to happen in the next 12 months, then he or she is by definition an idiot.’
“Because there isn’t anybody who knows what is going to happen in the next 12 months, from Theresa May downwards. We’ve never been here before. Things are out of control ... I have never seen a situation like it.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/20/the-bay-review-broadchurch-in-morecambe-come-on-in-the-waters-lovely
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Television & radio
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2019-03-20T22:00:12.000Z
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Lucy Mangan
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The Bay review – Broadchurch in Morecambe? Come on in, the water's lovely
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The Bay (ITV) is Broadchurch in Morecambe. I would even bet half my David Tennant memorabilia collection that was the makers’ pitch in its entirety. Why not? It’s perfect. I would have bought it as a commissioner, and as a viewer I was entirely sold.
We open with mother of teens – and party girl – Lisa (Morven Christie) being collected by her mates for a grand night out that ends with a nightclub, karaoke and a quick shag with a stranger called Sean in an alley. All the best times end with sinking a chlamydia shot before bed.
But what’s this? The next day, we see her pulling up at the police station. Where she works. She is actually DS Lisa Armstrong, dedicated police detective. She had just curled her hair and fooled us all.
There won’t be time for any tonging for some weekends to come, however. Teenage twins Holly and Dylan have gone missing, the local force is out in force and Lisa is appointed their family’s liaison officer.
In keeping with statutory law, as it pertains to Television Drama (section 3b: ITV; subsection vii: post-watershed, weekday), she is lumbered with a new detective (Med, played by Taheen Modak) to train brusquely-but-fondly in the ways of detectivery. They are greeted at the door of the anxious parents’ home by a needlessly hostile older relative (in this case, the twins’ grandmother, played by Tracie Bennett, who gives the best hostility in the business). Narrative formalities out of the way (“Why are you here?” “Why aren’t you all out looking for them?” “We just want them back!”), Lisa and Med settle down with the mother, Jess (a strikingly good turn from Chanel Cresswell, who won a Bafta for her role as Kelly Jenkins in This Is England) to explain police procedures, extract details about the twins and wait for their father to come home. When he does, he turns out to be (mark your best guess below, there will not be prizes):
1. A man, just like any other man; a new character we’ll get to know and will or won’t turn out to have anything to do with anything.
2. A pie.
3. Sean.
It is Sean. And if you didn’t rub your hands, squeal: “Ooh, lovely!” and curl up a little more comfortably on the sofa the moment he stepped through the door, well, you’re a better person than me.
After that, we were away. Lisa’s teenagers were shown to be involved in some funny business that may be connected to Holly and Dylan’s disappearance? Check! CCTV outside the nightclub showing Lisa and Sean up to their funny business on the night of Holly and Dylan’s disappearance? Check! Lisa disappearing the funny-business footage and hoping this doesn’t have terrible ramifications for the case and her career? Sean unable to account for his whereabouts for an hour (less than 10 minutes of which vagina-witness Lisa could provide if she had to) on the night his children went missing? The sense that events are not unfolding organically, but that the writer is wilfully withholding information until the page number is right, as the mother mentions that Holly and Dylan are not Sean’s, grandma hints that summat’s not right in the household and is not pressed on this, and various people reckon there have been rows and social-worker involvement – and that Sean’s a wrong ’un? Check, check and check again.
As Jane Austen almost said, three or four gobbets of dysfunction in a small seaside town is the very thing to work on. The Bay is what it is and you can’t fault it. It’s a satisfying knotty, plotty hour. You believe in everyone and everything just enough to get by. A good time over the next few weeks will surely be had by all except the poor cockle pickers, who are the first to come across the not-entirely-unexpected twist in the last few scenes. And it’s got Christie and Bennett in it, the latter criminally underused in recent years and the former coming pleasingly into her own kingdom, it seems, with recent work such as The Replacement and Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence under her belt.
In short, come on into The Bay. The water’s lovely.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/david-cameron-brexit-rishi-sunak-rwanda-bill
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Opinion
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2024-04-24T07:33:17.000Z
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Henry Hill
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Rishi Sunak has staked his premiership on Rwanda – but the electorate will punish him for it | Henry Hill
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The government’s current position on the Rwanda scheme is unlikely to boost its electoral hopes – and to understand why, we should look to David Cameron and a particular pre-Brexit failure. Cast your mind back to the moment the former Tory prime minister’s renegotiated deal for our EU membership “exploded on the launchpad” ahead of the referendum. He and his team had worked very, very hard. While they hadn’t got what they had set out to gain, the deal they came back with (the “emergency break” on EU migration) felt like a significant achievement. Perhaps it was, amid the constraints imposed on him in Brussels.
But voters don’t grade politicians on effort, they judge by results. And compared with what they wanted – and indeed, what Cameron had promised – the terms he came back with were entirely inadequate. Instead of a definite end to freedom of movement, there was a time-limited and arcane mechanism that might never have been used at all. What was supposed to be the foundation of his referendum campaign turned into a self-inflicted disaster.
Rishi Sunak looks increasingly to have fallen into the same trap. The sheer difficulty of delivering the Rwanda scheme means that getting that first plane off the ground (if it ever happens) will feel like a triumph to those who have made it happen – a well-earned reward for a herculean effort.
But it isn’t going to stop the boats. It couldn’t, even if it worked perfectly. The number of deportees Rwanda has agreed to take is only a fraction of those that would be needed to create a credible deterrent. At its best, Rwanda would have been a better policy for the start of a parliament; a pilot, an opportunity to work out the kinks and refine the model before negotiating other, larger deals. As a result, Sunak is now staring down the same barrel as Cameron in 2016. The electorate is likely to take a cold, hard look at his best effort and decide it isn’t close to good enough.
Each man reached this point by the same road, too. They have both tried to find a way to do something about an issue that didn’t actually bother them personally, without challenging any of the fundamentals of the status quo. The best explanation for why Sunak has gone so hard on Channel crossings is that he knows he needs to have something to say about immigration, but doesn’t want to talk about legal immigration, which has risen dramatically over the course of the current parliament and far outstrips the crossings of those on small boats.
1:20
Rishi Sunak says first Rwanda flight will take off in 10 to 12 weeks – video
Who can blame him? It’s a problem on a much vaster scale than illegal entry; tackling it would be much more difficult (in theory), and, as a creature of the Treasury, Sunak probably doesn’t really see anything fundamentally wrong with the current setup anyway. In the absence of real, per-capita growth, immigration helps to massage the GDP figures. The impression from speaking to MPs is that he wouldn’t be talking about immigration at all, if he could help it.
We can see the same dynamic playing out in the tortured progress of the Rwanda scheme. Downing Street hoped to get the legislation through the courts without having to confront the serious conflict between its aspirations on border control and the UK’s present international commitments. Despite an initial victory in the high court, this strategy failed. Now, there’s chatter that the Conservatives might try to make an election issue of the European court of human rights (ECHR) if it continues to stymie deportations.
Even those on the right of the Conservative party who want Britain to pull out of the court’s binding treaty, the European convention on human rights, should see that this would be an absurd, self-defeating strategy. Sunak clearly has no personal interest in our relationship with the ECHR: rightwingers have seen in Brexit what happens when a major constitutional change is pushed forward by a reluctant prime minister who doesn’t believe in it. Fighting the election on the ECHR would do nothing to change the outcome – arcane constitutional policy (and I speak as someone with a deep interest in it) is seldom what animates the electorate. An election defeat would just allow defenders of the status quo to paint the result as a rejection of change.
Sunak and his cabinet think one packed Rwanda flight will save them. It won’t
Enver Solomon
Read more
There are a few things the government could do that might make the policy more effective. Most obviously, it could (at least initially) restrict the pool of people eligible to be sent to Rwanda to those who cross after the bill becomes law. This has the potential to alter the calculation for those in France weighing up whether to make the crossing.
But the chance of that transforming it into an election-winning policy are slim. Few Conservatives, at least outside the leadership’s bunker, think otherwise. Indeed, one reason I and others didn’t completely discount the idea of a May election was the reverse argument: that if the bill did get through, Sunak might prefer to go to the country before the policy’s limited impact on Channel crossings became apparent in the summer.
It’s also been suggested to me that some in Downing Street hoped, if not expected, the legislation to fail, allowing them to run an election against the blockers in the House of Lords rather than on the results of the policy itself.
Regardless, we are where we are. With the legislation in place, the next few months will reveal whether all this effort has been enough to give the government a policy that is at the very least operational. If so, we’ll then find out just how much weight the voters give to a handful of planes taking off if, as seems very likely, it doesn’t stop the boats.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/sep/19/uselections2008.usa
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Opinion
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2008-09-19T19:31:27.000Z
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Jay Stevens
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Jay Stevens: Environmentalism will revive the American west
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In this presidential election, the west is supposed to be a battleground region in presidential politics. That's not a bad assumption, given the polls: New Mexico tilts towards Obama; Colorado, Montana, and Nevada are deadlocked; and Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Arizona tilt towards McCain.
Barack Obama is taking the region seriously. In Montana, for example, his campaign has at least 16 offices, the candidate has visited the state five times and his vice presidential selection, Joe Biden visited the state shortly after the Democratic convention.
So what did candidates say in their respective conventions to woo western voters?
While access to, and rights to use, water is probably the biggest issue affecting westerners, both candidates steered clear of that particular issue. And probably wisely so – water rights in the west is a big, tangled, bureaucratic mess and a very sensitive topic. When John McCain called to renegotiate water rights among Western states, for example, all hell broke loose. "Over my cold, dead, political carcass," said Colorado candidate for Senate, Bob Schaffer. And that was the Republican candidate.
Energy is a close second to water as an issue in western states. Most of the west was founded on, and continues to support itself by, the extraction of coal, oil, gas and timber. Because much of the western lands are state owned, leasing state land brings revenue to the state, usually to its rural school systems. Add that to the fact that the base of the western Democratic party was forged in the unions working in western mines and lumber mills, and there's tremendous pressure on both parties to ease environmental restrictions and promote drilling and mining.
The Republicans, who receive much of their support from the corporate entities that run these industries, are strong advocates for drilling. In her speech at the Republican convention, Sarah Palin touted her state's plan to construct natural gas pipeline as a gain for US energy independence. She offered up her state's oil fields for drilling to aid in the cause against terrorism. When Republican presidential nominee John McCain during his nomination acceptance speech promised to "drill new wells offshore and drill them now," the Convention crowd interrupted him with a chant of, "drill, baby, drill".
The Democrats took a softer tone, but they still promoted the use of oil and coal in US energy independence. Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer was assigned the task of explaining the Democrats' energy policy, and did so in a speech that brought the Convention to its feet. He outlined a program that promoted alternative energy sources and conservation – but also promoted domestic drilling and the use of clean coal. Likewise, Barack Obama promised to "tap our natural gas reserves" and use "clean coal" as part of a plan to complete energy independence within a decade.
Still, the thrust of the Democrats' message was that alternative energy and conservation should play a central – not subservient – role in a future US energy policy. Schweitzer's speech laid out a vision of a diverse set of energy sources for America that included wind, solar, geothermal and hydrogen in addition to coal and oil. Also, conservation is key. As Schweitzer put it, "Barack Obama understands the most important barrel of oil is the one you don't use". Obama reiterated his desire to center an energy plan around alternative energy sources, along with biofuel and nuclear power and conservation in part through increased mileage standards for cars.
That doesn't play out as poorly as you'd think in western states. Because alongside the pressures in places like Montana, Wyoming and Colorado to drill and mine, a conservation ethic has emerged – to the Democrats' benefit – that seeks to protect the states' quickly vanishing wild places. As political writer David Sirota recently pointed out in the New York Times, the recent history of Republican-backed unfettered drilling has driven westerners to the Democratic party, because Democrats "have found success recasting environmentalism as a defense of threatened water supplies, fishing spots and hunting grounds". If drilling and mining brings revenue, then a Democratic party with a conservation ethic needs to propose use of state lands that both generates revenue and preserves the west's open spaces, lest the region fall back into the hands of pro-corporate conservatives who argue that environmentalism costs jobs.
And that's where alternative energy sources come in.
The high plains of the Rocky Mountains offer two resources that promise to make it the center of future of alternative energy production: wind and switchgrass. Eastern Montana, for example, is one of the windiest spots in the country. If the state can build the infrastructure of high-transmission power lines to transfer the energy produced by gigantic wind farms, the state could become a major supplier of clean energy. Likewise, Montana's climate supports the kind of grasses used in the production of cellulosic biofuels, the alternative to corn-based biofuels. Harvesting switchgrass would require neither irrigation, or force our food supply to compete for corn, and it could ease the country's switch from a fuel-burning transportation infrastructure.
The Republicans' cries of "drill, baby, drill" harkens back to the 1980s, when conservatives pointed to economically depressed mining and timber communities and successfully pinned the blame on environmentalists seeking to protect endangered habitat. Now the question is whether westerners will fall back into old habits and vote to bring back the oil rigs, or will they grasp the conservationist and long-term approach of the Democratic plan?
I'm guessing the latter. Not out of any nod towards collective human intelligence, but because today's economic climate in the west is vastly different than in the 1980s, when the Republican rhetoric was so successful. In fact, during the recent economic downturn, the job rate in the west was still relatively unaffected: in this CNN June report, the Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico all ranked in the top ten for unemployment rates. Montana was close behind at fifteen and Colorado finished in the top half.
Still, while employment is up, so is the cost of living. What's likely to be at the top of westerners' minds isn't jobs, but the rising cost of housing, healthcare and food.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/25/changes-arts-funding-divisive-culture
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Opinion
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2023-05-25T07:00:02.000Z
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Nicholas Serota
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Changes to arts funding are always divisive – we were right to focus on access for all | Nicholas Serota
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When Arts Council England set out to develop a strategy for 2020-2030, we spoke at length to people across the country and heard repeatedly their wish to experience the arts close to home. People told us of their frustration at the lack of opportunities to develop their talent in their communities; and their longing for the chance to enjoy and participate in all kinds of culture. The arts reflect life back at us: they are fundamental to how we understand ourselves. Surely it is right that we can all feel equally at home in our theatres and galleries, that we can all be participants?
Sir Nicholas Hytner warned in the Guardian that culture has been squeezed out of the school curriculum. I share his concern, and agree that placing more emphasis on culture and teaching creativity within all schools would pay dividends for future generations. Arts Council funding alone cannot make good that loss, but we can support young people, both in and outside school, and those organisations and artists that work with them. That is a mission I won’t give up on.
Nick also suggested that the Arts Council’s focus should only be on what he terms the “professional” arts. I understand the concern to invest in highly skilled workers, and unique and visionary artists – but I think it’s a mistake to suggest the skills and vision that bring us the “best possible” art and culture cannot be found in community practice or in settings across the country, such as theatres and museums, small music venues and arts centres or street festivals. All cultural institutions – large or small – have a role to play, if they respond with imagination to the needs of their communities. The interdependence of the cultural world is such that you can no longer draw clear lines between us and them. To do so is to risk creating barriers to creativity, innovation and hidden talent.
And when barriers are removed, great things happen. The Royal Opera performs on stage in Covent Garden and works with communities in the Thames estuary. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s current tour of Julius Caesar, to theatres from Blackpool to Truro, features a chorus of local volunteers sharing the stage with the professionals. In 2019, Rory Pilgrim, nominated for this year’s Turner prize, collaborated with community arts organisation Heart of Glass on a project made with and for people in St Helens, Merseyside. Everything has value: from the transcendent power of a symphony orchestra, to the transformative power of the wellbeing activity in which orchestras such as the Bournemouth Symphony are engaged.
Changes to funding are, by their nature, challenging, and divisive, as demonstrated by the outpouring of concern when we shifted funding from some established opera and classical music companies to new ones. When faced with our most oversubscribed portfolio round to date, it was the mission to do everything we could to ensure that as many people as possible in England can access the very best of art and culture that guided us in making difficult decisions, leading to more investment in broadening audiences and opening new talent pathways.
I believe, given time, we will be able to reimagine and renew parts of the sector where change has involved loss, and that we will soon start to see the immense benefits that flow from the work of the new organisations in which we are now investing. However, anxieties are heightened at a time of economic pressure and I am deeply concerned about the fragile state of parts of our cultural infrastructure. After the pandemic, audiences have been slow to return, and costs have risen dramatically. This is testing the sector’s resilience.
The government invested £1.57bn in the arts via the Culture Recovery Fund during the pandemic. More recently, it committed to higher rates of tax relief, which we estimate are worth up to £200m a year. But projecting forward, the strained finances of the sector will reach breaking point unless we see an additional significant commitment from public sources.
So why should governments decide to make such an investment? The answer lies in the transformative impact culture can have on individuals and communities. In 1339 Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted An Allegory of Good and Bad Government on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. In Good Government he showed how culture sits intimately connected to learning, health, justice and wealth in a vision of a “common good” in society. As we campaign to make the arts for everyone, I hope it will be with a similar vision that sustains ambitious art and culture of all kinds and for all communities, and not simply for one type of art against another.
Nicholas Serota is chair of Arts Council England. He was director of the Tate from 2008 to 2017 and is an art historian and curator
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/15/how-to-address-social-anxiety
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Life and style
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2021-03-15T11:30:00.000Z
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Emine Saner
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Nervous about socialising again? Here’s how to handle the end of lockdown
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If the limit of your conversational prowess this past year has been to grunt through Zoom meetings, discuss dinner plans with your flatmate, nag your children or make passive-aggressive comments to the cat, you may feel out of practice now that large gatherings look tantalisingly within reach. Perhaps you’ve quite enjoyed this period of government-mandated introversion, and dread the idea that you may be expected to socialise. Either way, if all goes according to plan, this era of social distancing may be starting to close. For those feeling a little daunted, here’s how to ease yourself back in.
Some social anxiety is normal
The social rules may also have changed – do you hug? Do you need to wear a mask? Photograph: Sarah Mason/Getty Images
It is part of being human, says Emma Warnock-Parkes, a clinical psychologist and researcher on social anxiety disorder at Oxford University. “We’ve all been socially deprived this last year, and when you haven’t done something for a while, it can feel a bit strange going back into it.” The social rules may also have changed – do you hug? Do you need to wear a mask? “Some anxiety is understandable, so we need to give ourselves a bit of a break.”
You can’t lose social skills
“We acquire most of our social skills between the ages of zero and seven,” says the clinical psychologist Linda Blair. “Sometimes they’re hard to get at and we have to dig way down, but they’re there.” It may take a reminder of what is socially acceptable – have your table manners become sloppy? – but your fundamental skills won’t have withered irreparably. Also, remember that the changes to restrictions will be gradual, she adds. “You don’t have to brace yourself for something that feels like a tsunami.”
Build confidence gradually
Start slowly and ease yourself back in. Photograph: coldsnowstorm/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Note down some small goals that you would like to achieve in the coming weeks, advises Warnock-Parkes. It could be “reaching out to people online, or arranging to meet someone for a walk, or doing an online course”. If you feel you are struggling, there are effective treatments, usually CBT, for social anxiety (in England, it can be accessed through your local Improving Access to Psychological Therapy service). “Social anxiety starts early in life – most people describe it starting in early adolescence – so if you’ve always lived with it, you often think it’s just who you are. But there are really good treatments that can really change someone’s life.”
Don’t avoid social situations
It might seem the easier option, but it won’t help long-term. “Avoidance incubates anxiety,” says Warnock-Parkes. It can also have negative consequences, such as missing job or friendship opportunities. “The world has shrunk around us and it’s comfortable, but it’s not good for us,” says Nadia Finer, a coach and the founder of the Shy and Mighty Society. “When you’re shy you have to, in order to move forward and experience life fully, practise bravery.”
But be mindful of what you can tolerate
‘Will you ever be able to go to a big party? Of course, but you don’t know when and that’s OK.’ Photograph: Dosfotos/PYMCA/Rex
As restrictions change, it’s reasonable to establish boundaries, says Blair. If you suspect your employer wants you back in the office five days a week, you could pre-empt that by coming up with a plan of why and how you could start with two. “Then you’re not on the defensive,” she says. Turning down an invitation to a large gathering once they are allowed, such as weddings or a milestone birthday, “is more than acceptable. I’ve said I’m not ready for things and nobody’s minded.” Smooth the way by meeting certain obligations, such as sending a present, but don’t offer an explanation other than saying you’re not ready. “Will you ever be able to go [to a big party]? Of course, but you don’t know when and that’s OK.”
Ease the pressure
“People who feel more socially anxious tend to do so because they put a lot of pressure on themselves, and that’s probably going to be the case as life opens up,” says Warnock-Parkes. Social interactions are not a performance, she stresses – they’re simply about being with other people. “One of the most common fears people have is that they feel they should be interesting all the time.” But many of us have had a pretty mundane existence over the past year. “Simply sharing how bored you’ve been feeling in lockdown is probably enough, because that’s other people’s shared experience, too.” Don’t assume that being anything less than a dazzling raconteur is a failure. “Having very high expectations of yourself – to always have something witty to say, or to never trip over your words – is a route to feeling socially anxious. These are totally impossible standards.”
Nobody can tell how you’re feeling
One worry for people with social anxiety is that it’s obvious. “People often assume, because their heart’s racing or they feel sweaty, that others can see that,” says Warnock-Parkes. “But we know from our research, when we look at how socially anxious people come across on video, is that this just isn’t true. What’s happening in your own body might feel magnified to you, but it’s often invisible to others.”
Focus outwards
‘If you are socialising, maybe it’s also for your kids’ benefit. That purpose helps us push past our own fears.’ Photograph: Getty Images
Whether in large gatherings or one-on-one, if your focus is too much on yourself, you end up feeling self-conscious, says Warnock-Parkes. “Try getting out of your head and getting lost in what’s going on around you. Look around and notice what others are doing and saying, rather than scrutinising yourself. You will feel much better for it and quickly realise that other people are much more lost in their own world than they are focused on you.”
Think about your greater purpose, says Finer. “It takes the emphasis off you.” If you’re daunted by giving a presentation in person, instead of thinking about your own performance, “think ‘who are you helping with this work?’ If you are socialising, maybe it’s also for your kids’ benefit. That purpose helps us push past our own fears.”
Think about other people
They’re probably feeling uneasy, too. “Even extroverts are wondering: ‘Have I lost my skills?’” says Blair. “Rather than worry about yourself, you can think: ‘How can I reassure others? How can I make myself calm enough that they will feel at ease when they talk to me?’ That is a really good way to automatically calm yourself down – your fear reaction goes down – and then you can think more clearly.”
It’s not all your responsibility
Warnock-Parkes reminds us that “social interactions are a two-way street. Other people do not go into social interactions expecting the person they are meeting to perform or entertain them. Social interactions are just about being together.” When you over-analyse yourself, it gives you the impression that the other person is also doing that, when they’re not. “The more we can get out of our head and lost in social interactions, the more we ultimately enjoy them.”
Don’t write a script
Don’t put too much pressure on the interaction ... Photograph: Lucy Lambriex/Getty Images
Although it’s tempting to prepare topics of conversation, or one-liners, it’s actually counter-productive. “It makes you more self-focused, more anxious,” says Warnock-Parkes. “It takes you out of the interaction because you’re more in your head, thinking about your list of things to talk about, rather than just going with the flow of the conversation.” It can unwittingly make you appear aloof or uninterested in the other person. “Again, it puts way too much pressure on the interaction.”
And don’t dwell on it later
When we’re feeling socially anxious, we tend to give too much headspace to things we did or said, which gives us the impression the other person is also judging us – and finding us wanting. “Actually, other people have moved on to the next thing in their day, they’re not analysing your every word or action,” says Warnock-Parkes. “You’re the only one looking at yourself under a microscope.”
Celebrate small wins
“We can be mean to ourselves, particularly when we’re shy, and I don’t think we would talk to anybody else the way we talk to ourselves,” says Finer. Congratulate yourself for the small steps you’ve taken into the outside world.
Broaden your social life
Many of us will have discovered who our true friends are during this period and our social circle might be smaller than we imagined, which can be upsetting. If you want a wider social life, start by writing some small goals, says Warnock-Parkes. “What would you like to change? What would you like to be doing differently? Start now, before life opens up, to make some steps towards that – maybe reaching out to people online that you haven’t spoken to for a while, and arranging a few things in the coming weeks to build up your socialising again.”
Or maintain a lower-key social life – if you want to
Do you want loads of friends because it would make you happier, or because you feel you should? Photograph: Tim Robberts/Getty Images
Perhaps you have enjoyed a quieter, less frenzied life, with fewer people making demands on your time, and want it to continue. This is also perfectly valid. To demanding friends, advises Blair, “you say: ‘I have actually found that I want to proceed differently now. I still really want to see you but I won’t be going to big parties’, or whatever it is you want to say.” Do you want loads of friends because it would make you happier, or because you feel you should? “We’re so used to trying to gather ‘likes’ and followers, it’s been ingrained into us, but we don’t need hundreds of people around us,” says Finer. Introverts, she says, “prefer deeper relationships with fewer people. There’s not one picture of success. Often we’re shown this extrovert ideal and we’re all supposed to aim for that, and actually, that’s not for everyone.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/10/road-movies-panah-panahi-emer-reynolds-ryusuke-hamaguchi-mike-mills
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Film
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2022-07-10T06:00:28.000Z
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Xan Brooks
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Four directors on how they are breathing new life into road movies
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Panah Panahi. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
Hit the Road director Panah Panahi: ‘Cars aren’t a thematic device or an artistic choice in Iranian cinema, it’s just how we live’
A rapturously received breakout hit at the Cannes film festival in 2021, Hit the Road, the debut film of Panah Panahi (the 38-year-old son of the Iranian director Jafar Panahi), has had quite a journey since its premiere. The film, a tender, tragicomic road trip that crams a mother, a father, a brooding older son, a hyperactive six-year-old and an ailing dog into an overstuffed people carrier travelling towards the mountain country of the north-west of Iran, has accumulated prizes and glowing reviews at festivals around the world.
But one place it has yet to show, officially at least, is Iran. Panahi, talking through an interpreter from his home in Tehran, says: “The moment we submitted it to Cannes, we also sent it to the administration here that delivers the authorisation to screen and until now, I haven’t received a clear response. Now, I know that it won’t have a [cinema] release in Iran and I have to give up on that dream. But they keep you in limbo.” Points of contention include the fact that a woman’s singing voice can be heard when the actor who plays the mother sings along to a tape of pre-revolution Iranian pop. The censors also took issue with the “cursing”. “But these are pretexts. If we made those changes, it’s not as if suddenly they would be fine with it. The problem is the very nature of the film, in that it is a film that is thought-provoking. And they hate films that make people reflect.”
‘Tender and tragi-comic’: Pantea Panahiha, Rayan Sarlak and Hassan Madjouni in Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road Photograph: SFS/Capital Pictures
The rigid framework of rules that Iranian film-makers have to abide by in order to tell their stories is one reason, Panahi explains, that cars, and by extension road movies, are so common in Iranian cinema. Panahi follows his own father, and Abbas Kiarostami among others, in his choice to set his film largely inside a vehicle.
“People often ask why cars are so present in Iranian cinema. If you knew life in Iran then you wouldn’t ask that question. It’s not a thematic device or an artistic choice, it’s just how we live. There is nowhere you can have social peace. You can’t outside and just live your life. But inside your car, they won’t bother you if you listen to music or if your scarf falls down.”
One of the censors’ diktats states that women in cinema cannot be shown with their hair uncovered, which effectively means that film-makers can’t shoot domestic scenes without immediately running into credibility issues. “If I chose an interior scene, it would be nonsense because a woman has to wear a scarf whereas no woman covers her head at home.” The city streets are also tricky as a location. “The streets of Tehran: there is so much tension, so much anger. So once you have eliminated those options, there is not much left. Taking a car, hitting the road out to the countryside is what we all do.”
The process of shooting within a car was not without its challenges, not least containing the boundless energy of the film’s six-year-old child actor, Rayan Sarlak, who bounces off the sides of the vehicle like a squash ball. “For the crew, it was just like it was for his family in the film. He was at the same time endearing and bringing a lot of joy, but he is tiring! One day, we had to drive from one location to another, it was a two-hour drive. And I took him in my car with the first AD [assistant director], just the three of us. And just in the two hours I spent with him, he talked so much, he was so super-excited, that by the end of the journey I was almost crying from exhaustion.”
Interview by Wendy Ide
Hit the Road is in cinemas on 29 July
Emer Reynolds.
Joyride director Emer Reynolds: ‘I always loved the Thelma and Louise ending. They’re not going back, they’re setting themselves free’
If road movies aren’t quite the staple of British and Irish cinema that they are in Hollywood, that’s down to geography: head out on the highways of these tiny islands and you’ll reach the end of the road in a matter of hours. In Joyride, however, director Emer Reynolds sets out to marry the genre’s escapist spirit to the particular winding landscape of Ireland, specifically County Kerry, where this dark-edged comedy was shot. In it, new mother Joy (Olivia Colman) seeks to flee maternal responsibilities by hitting the road with a troubled teenage lad (newcomer Charlie Reid) as her driver.
Reynolds describes her first fiction feature – after a long career in film editing and documentary directing – as “a classic buddy road movie: two strangers are thrown together in a car, and they don’t want to be there together, but they need each other to achieve their goal”. But it was the quirkier narrative details and regional flavour of Ailbhe Keogan’s script that drew her to the project: “There’s a young boy driving a car, a little baby, and this irrational woman, all driving over the wilds of County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland, which is kind of underrepresented in film. It’s a beautiful landscape: wild and magical, with wonderful locals and poetry in the air.”
‘A dark-edged buddy comedy’: Olivia Colman and Charlie Reid in Emer Reynolds’s Joyride Photograph: Vertigo Releasing
It’s also a landscape that Reynolds felt free to reinvent slightly for the screen. “The journey is fictional,” she says. “They’re not real towns. As they move away from what they know, we were able to mix it up and really have it happen in an almost dreamlike landscape: wild mountain roads, a ferry across an estuary…”
Wim Wenders’s melancholic Paris, Texas was a significant influence but so was the mismatched buddy farce of Midnight Run – and, of course, Thelma & Louise, the ultimate tale of feminist escape by road. “I always loved that ending, how ambiguous it is. In one version of it, these women who dare to challenge the patriarchy and choose their own lives end up going off a cliff and dying. Or is it a moment of hope? They look at each other and they won’t be cowed and they’re not going back, they’re setting themselves free.”
Reynolds likes to think of Colman’s protagonist as similarly nuanced and defiant: “She’s not in florals and pastel, you know, she’s vivid, alive, cantankerous, snarky, independent. She doesn’t want to be liked. And she has an incredibly complex journey in the film of learning to love herself, to forgive herself, to love her mother, to love her child. As a feminist, to put a woman like that on screen is a great joy – excuse the pun.”
Though Reynolds cut her directing teeth on documentaries – winning an Emmy for her acclaimed astronomy-themed feature The Farthest – fiction has always been on her agenda. Having got the hang of it, she’s now preparing an adaptation of Irish American novelist Karl Geary’s cross-generational romance Montpelier Parade. It’s a long way from what Reynolds describes as a “strange start” as a film-maker: she in fact studied theoretical physics and mathematics, before catching the cinephile bug via her university’s film society. “I remember coming home after watching 12 Angry Men and arguing with my father for like five or six hours about the nature of the world and persuasion and prejudice,” she recalls. “And then I lay in bed at night feeling that film could change the world.” Interview by Guy Lodge
Joyride is in cinemas from 29 July
Mike Mills. Photograph: Kimberly White/Getty Images
C’mon C’mon director Mike Mills: ‘I suck at plot. I’ve used the structure of a road movie to make it appear that stuff is happening’
C’mon C’mon is a fabulous, freewheeling odd-couple drama, rolling from Los Angeles to New Orleans just as Easy Rider did once before. It shows us a nation in flux and its people in motion. The title alone is a call to adventure. I think C’mon C’mon might be the finest American road movie in years. But its writer-director, Mike Mills, isn’t sure. “Maybe I’m being really literal but a road movie requires a car,” he says. “So at best it’s a plane film, an air film, a sky film.”
At heart, he feels, C’mon C’mon is a relationship film in that it’s about two mismatched souls in search of common ground. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist on assignment, who finds himself saddled with Jesse (Woody Norman), his precocious nine-year-nephew. In a more conventional picture, Jesse would either be insufferably cute or impossibly angelic, the heaven-sent child, come to cure the sick man. But Mills’s tale, to its credit, takes the less-travelled path. It implies that everyone’s lost and no one knows a damn thing. The young and the old have to muddle along side by side.
‘Go with the flow’: Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman in C’mon, C’mon.
The way Mills tells it, he’s similarly in the dark. He doesn’t trust his own voice, hates writing screenplays and prefers to piece his pictures together from a range of secondhand sources. C’mon C’mon, for example, was inspired by Wim Wenders’s 1970s road movie Alice in the Cities, about a German writer and an abandoned girl. “That provided the basic structure,” he explains. “It was like a little fire to warm myself on. Or a blues riff that I could put my own lyrics around.” The locations helped, because they drove the action. So he moved the characters from sun-splashed Los Angeles to frenetic New York before alighting in New Orleans, “a big, beautiful open wound of a place”. Each city served as a stepping stone, allowing him to carry his drama from one point to the next.
He says: “Here’s the thing: I suck at plot. I suck at causality and structure. Plots are mysteries to me. It’s like I have a learning difficulty with them. One of my favourite readers of my work always says, ‘Mike, you have such a problem with forward motion.’ And I’m like, ‘I know, I’m sorry, it’s so static.’” He brightens. “But maybe I’ve happened upon a neat trick here. In moving through space, through cities, I’ve given the false appearance of a plot. I’ve used the structure of a road movie to make it appear that stuff is happening.”
Road movies involve journeys, but the very word makes him wince. It implies that his film might have some life lessons to teach and a final destination in mind. Which is totally ridiculous; that’s not what his work is about. “We’re all living in this false dream that we’re gonna figure ourselves out or get fixed or get good enough,” he says. “And it never happens. So our job as human beings is to learn to live with that instability, that ungrounded-ness, that lack of knowing.”
There is a quote that he likes by Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun: “We are always in some kind of in-between state, always in process. We never fully arrive.” The best road movies, Mills reckons, are deliberately open-ended. They’re a ticket to ride, a licence to go with the flow. Or, as Jesse puts it towards the end of the film: “Whatever you plan on happening never happens. Stuff you would never think of happens. So you just have to c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
Interview by Xan Brooks
Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi: ‘There’s a reason why we can have these deep conversations when we’re in cars’
A pair of strangers – a widowed theatre director and his young, female driver – make cursory, slightly stilted conversation in a Saab 900 which purrs around Japan’s Honshu island for a considerable chunk of a film’s hefty three-hour running time. On paper, it’s not the most compelling proposition. But the fact that Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s meditative quasi-road movie Drive My Car became one of the breakout arthouse successes of the past few years, scoring three Oscar nominations and one win, is testament to something that Hamaguchi has long known: a kind of dramatic alchemy occurs in the interior of a car. What characterises his distinctive take on the road movie, however, is that it is more about the vehicle than the road itself. The wheels could be going pretty much anywhere as long as they are turning, as long as the scenery is changing.
Hamaguchi, a regular on the festival circuit since his breakthrough film Happy Hour in 2015, and its follow-up, Asako I & II, in 2018, first realised the dramatic potential of car journeys thanks to his own social awkwardness. He co-directed a trilogy of documentaries about the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tidal wave with Kô Sakai, a project that required a great deal of driving. After a while, he noticed that while he and his fellow director didn’t chat as a general rule, in a car together, something broke down their natural reserve and they found themselves conversing at length. “In a car, visually you’re satisfied – you’ve got information from the scenery from the windows,” he later mused. “But sonically you only get the engine revving and that’s pretty much it. So I think we tend to want to fill that void.” He lists the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and Wim Wenders as influences. Reflecting on the German director’s “transportation scenes” he has said: “A relationship changes and the fact that the surroundings change at the same time helps you understand that something is evolving.”
Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s ‘meditative’ Drive My Car. Photograph: Prod.DB/Alamy
The sense of the car as a kind of confessional is a theme that crops up in Hamaguchi’s earlier film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. This triptych of stories premiered in the same year as Drive My Car and Hamaguchi described it as a trial run for the extended car interior scenes in his celebrated follow-up. In the first chapter of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a model and her booker share confidences in a breathless rush of intimacy in a late-night Tokyo taxi. And during the conversation, one woman has the bombshell realisation that her friend’s prospective new boyfriend is her own ex.
The enforced proximity of a car, that slight discomfort that tips characters off balance, is crucial for Hamaguchi. It was to create that sense of uneasy intimacy that Hamaguchi made a notable change to the source material of Drive My Car, a short story by Haruki Murakami. In the original story, the Saab 900 is a yellow soft-top. In the film, it is red, and no longer a convertible, a decision that further insulates the characters from the world outside the vehicle and compels a degree of introspection. “I think there’s a reason why we can have these deep conversations, maybe for the first time, when we’re in cars,” Hamaguchi has said. “The passengers are also facing the same direction. They’re not looking at each other, so in a way they’re forced to look inwards as they’re talking.” WI
Drive My Car is on streaming platforms now and available on DVD from 18 Jul
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https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/aug/22/gcse-results-2013-record-fall-c-grades-higher
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Education
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2013-08-22T08:41:04.000Z
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Richard Adams
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GCSE results 2013: record fall in pupils getting C grades or higher
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This year's GCSE results have seen a record fall in the proportion of pupils getting C grades or higher, triggered by a sharp rise in the number of students aged 15 or younger taking the exam early, tougher science papers and more pupils taking subjects multiple times.
The proportion of GCSE entries achieving an A* to C grade was 68.1%, a larger than expected fall of 1.3 percentage points compared with 2012, when 69.4% of entries achieved A*-C. The percentage of pupils achieving A* to C grades rose from 1988 – the first year GCSE results were published – until last year, when they dropped by 0.4 percentage points. The number of the highest A* grades fell by 0.5%.
The results, published by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), also show girls have extended their lead over boys at grades C and above. The last time girls outperformed boys to this extent was in 2003. Some 72.3% of girls achieving A*-C, compared with 63.7% of boys, and 8.3% gained A*s compared with 5.3% of boys. This may be the last year this happens, since coursework is being dropped in favour of end-of-year exams, in which girls tend to do worse than boys.
"There were many factors underlying this year's GCSEs, including a sizeable increase in entry by 15-year-olds, new science specifications designed with greater challenge, early and multiple entry in mathematics," said Michael Turner, director of the JCQ. "All of these have had an impact on entries and results."
The size of the fall could be crucial for many schools seeking to stay above the Department for Education's floor standard of results. Falling below this triggers automatic inspection by Ofsted, and could have implications for the number of state schools vulnerable to being converted into academies on the grounds of poor performance.
A school is considered to be below the floor standard if at least 40% of its pupils do not achieve the standard of at least 5 GCSEs at C or better, including English and maths, and if pupils' overall progress is not good enough in both those two subjects.
One reason for the weaker than expected results was the higher number of younger students taking GCSE papers. The JCQ figures showed a 39% increase in the number of GCSE exams taken by those aged 15 or younger, for a total of 806,000.
This effect could be seen in English, with a 42% increase in entries from those younger than 16. While results for 16-year-olds remained stable, JCQ said the decline in top grades "can, therefore, be explained by younger students not performing as strongly as 16-year-olds".
A similar pattern was seen in mathematics, with results for 16-year-olds unchanged but a decline in marks for 15-year-olds. The national figures were especially distorted due to early entries by 15-year-olds in maths, which increased by nearly 50% to make up more than one in five maths entries in total.
While 16-year-olds performed virtually the same in maths as previous years, the 15-year-olds did far worse and dragged down the national average.
While 62.1% of 16-year-olds got A*-C grades in maths – a slight improvement on 2012 – only 51.7% of 15-year-olds got the same grades, a more than 10 percentage point margin.
The figures also revealed a rise in the number of individual pupils taking multiple examinations in the same subject over the course of the year. Some 35% of pupils took two or more exams in the same subject, and 10,000 individuals took four exams in the same subject. Two individuals took an unprecedented eight exams in one subject.
Maths was particularly affected, with a total of 1.3m exam papers being sat, although only 888,000 individuals took GCSEs in total.
Andrew Hall, head of the AQA exam board, said that repeated and multiple entries "is doing real damage to education in this country" because of the stress placed on teachers and students. Hall blamed the "perverse incentives" created by the government's targets as the cause of the rush of multiple entries.
There was a rise in students taking the "international GCSE" alternative, with the number of students sitting them doubling from 100,000 to 200,000.
Science grades fell, as expected, following the introduction of new exams with more challenging syllabuses in biology, chemistry, physics and applied science, as well as a shift away from pupils taking combined science towards individual science papers.
However, there were many bright spots around the country. Brighton College, a mixed independent school, celebrated an outstanding 95% of its GCSE entries gaining A* or A – said to be the best-ever result by a co-educational school in Britain.
There was also good news for supporters of modern languages, with a dramatic rise in the number of entries. French, German and Spanish saw a combined increase of nearly 17%.
There was poignant news for the family of Ajmol Alom, the teenager who was murdered near his home in east London earlier this month. Chris Dunne, head teacher at Langdon Park School in Poplar, said that Alom had received eight A grades, including English and maths.
"He was very able, looking forward to GCSE results at a very high level, and very capable of going on to achieve the kind of grades which would have secured him a place at any one of our best universities," Dunne told the Press Association.
The results come on the heels of a slight fall in the highest grades for A-levels for two years in a row, and last year's drop in the overall GCSE pass rate. Early indications are that exam boards adjusted their grade boundaries upwards in some English papers, meaning that it was harder to get a higher grade with the same mark as previous years.
The upward move was an echo of the much larger shift seen in English in 2012, when the grade boundaries were abruptly calibrated upwards, causing dismay in schools around the country and setting off an unsuccessful legal battle to have the grades overturned.
Last year, 63.9% of entries for English were graded A*-C, a 1.5 percentage point fall compared with 2011. English literature saw 76.3% of papers graded A*-C, down from 78.4% in 2011.
The 2013 results come after considerable uncertainty over the shape of this year's GCSE marks, with exam regulator Ofqual warning: "There are a number of changes this year that mean the overall results could look different to results in previous years, even though standards will be maintained."
"The news from Ofqual that schools are entering students for GCSEs early, or multiple times, in order to secure good grades is worrying, but not surprising," said Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.
"In the current high-stakes culture where exam grades on their own can determine the future of pupils, teachers and schools, far too much emphasis is placed on exams."
Amid concerns at the rising number of pupils taking multiple exams, the DfE said on Wednesday: "We are considering further action to discourage this practice."
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, said that while the results were the culmination of hard work by pupils and their teachers, it would be "subsumed in the political game playing in which the examination system is now embroiled".
"The reality for young people and teachers is that the coalition government's endless interference with, and denigration of, the qualifications system is causing uncertainty and anxiety, and dashing hopes, aspirations and life chances," she said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/feb/02/time-warner-fourth-quarter-earnings
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Media
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2011-02-02T17:38:34.000Z
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Dominic Rushe
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Time Warner profits lifted by Harry Potter and advertising recovery
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Harry Potter and an improvement in TV advertising helped media firm Time Warner beat analysts expectations for its fourth quarter earnings.
The parent company of Warner Brothers, HBO and CNN reported profits of $769m (£475m) for the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier. The company's board voted to raise its dividend by 11%.
Revenue at Time Warner's television unit increased 14% to $3.3bn on higher income from subscriptions, advertising and content. Revenue at the company's film unit rose 10% to $3.6bn in the quarter, mainly because of higher licensing fees.
Warner Brothers is the studio behind the hugely successful Harry Potter movies, as well as last year's blockbuster Inception. Last year Warner was the most successful Hollywood studio for the third year in a row, reporting revenue of nearly $1.9bn for 2010.
Revenue at Time Inc, the company's publishing unit, fell 2%. Advertising sales rose 3% as revenues increased for print magazine and digital publications, but subscription revenues declined.
Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's chairman and chief executive officer, said: "In 2011, we're even more confident about how we're positioned, and we'll be even more aggressive. We'll increase our investments in programming, production and marketing even more than we did last year. "
Time Warner's advertising rebound comes amid increased competition from online media services such as Netflix and Hulu. The online rivals offer TV shows and movies for less than $10 per month, compared with the average of $70 per month paid by cable subscribers.
Earlier this year Bewkes attacked Netflix. "I would say it [Netflix] is like a two-hundred-pound chimp — it's not an eight-hundred-pound gorilla."
Time Warner's results came as its former partner AOL also reported soaring profits. AOL reported a profit of $66.2m for the fourth quarter, up from $1.4m a year earlier. The profit increase was underpinned by cost-cutting. Actual revenue fell as AOL's advertising sales and dial-up subscriptions continue to decline. AOL was spun off from Time Warner in 2009 and has embarked on a turnaround strategy under chief executive Tim Armstrong.
Advertising revenue, the focus of AOL's turnaround strategy, fell 29%, but Tim Armstrong, its chief executive, said he expected online display advertising to grow in the second half of the year. Subscription revenue, once a mainstay of AOL's business, dropped 23%.
Under Armstrong AOL has focused on content and the company plans to create more original news and entertainment. The company has been buying content companies and this week acquired European Internet video network Goviral for $96.7m. Last year AOL added technology blog TechCrunch and web video-syndication company 5min Media to its stable and hired hundreds of writers.
"We've come a long way very quickly and our journey is just beginning," Armstrong said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/23/covid-19-threatens-access-to-abortions-and-contraceptives-experts-warn
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Global development
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2020-07-23T15:29:21.000Z
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Liz Ford
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Covid-19 threatens access to abortions and contraceptives, experts warn
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Rates of unplanned pregnancies have fallen around the world, according to new data published by health research organisation the Guttmacher Institute and the UN Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) on Wednesday.
Global rates of unintended pregnancies have fallen from 79 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49 in 1990 to 64 in 2019, thanks in part to a concerted effort to increase access to contraceptives, but there are concerns that decades of progress in reducing the numbers risk being undone by Covid-19, as lockdown restrictions hamper health services.
Zara Ahmed, a senior policy manager at Guttmacher, warned : “Covid-19 could reverse those declines due to challenges with the supply chain, diversion of providers to the response and lack of access to health facilities during lockdown.”
Ahmed said the pandemic was illuminating existing gaps in – and strains on – healthcare services, adding that some governments had already shifted resources away from basic sexual and reproductive services to Covid-19 responses.
In April, Guttmacher predicted that just a 10% decline in services in poorer countries as a result of coronavirus restrictions could result in 15 million more unplanned pregnancies, 168,000 more newborn deaths, 28,000 more maternal deaths, and 3 million more unsafe abortions.
Guttmacher and HRP’s latest research, published in Lancet Global Health, found that women in the poorest countries were nearly three times as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy as women in the wealthiest countries – 93 per 1,000 women in low-income countries compared with 34 in wealthy states.
Europe and North America had the lowest number of unplanned pregnancies (35 per 1,000 women), while sub-Saharan Africa had the highest (91). Women in sub-Saharan Africa are among the least likely to have access to family planning.
The research also revealed that 61% of unplanned pregnancies globally in 2015–19 resulted in an abortion, up from 51% in 1990. Despite a slight fall in abortion rates in the early 2000s, rates had increased over the past 15 years. Researchers said the trend could reflect increased access to abortion or “a stronger motivation to avoid unintended births”.
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The majority of terminations occurred in countries where abortion is banned or restricted, researchers found, which meant they were more likely to be conducted unsafely. At least 22,800 women are estimated to die from an unsafe abortion each year.
Ahmed said even where it was legal some countries had deemed abortion not to be an essential service during the pandemic and had restricted services. “These service gaps could result in some individuals not being able to access abortion care at all, while others are forced to seek unsafe abortions,” she said.
The World Health Organization estimates that 270 million women who want modern contraceptives have no access to them. Universal access to family planning is a target of the sustainable development goals.
A study published in the Lancet last week said increased access to contraception is crucial if new global population forecasts are to be realised. Researchers forecast the global population will be 2 billion below current UN predictions by 2100 if women’s lives are improved.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/mar/08/sly-and-the-family-stone-10-of-the-best
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Music
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2017-03-08T11:41:41.000Z
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Angus Batey
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Sly and the Family Stone – 10 of the best
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1. Underdog
By the time they made their debut album in 1967, Sly and the Family Stone were already way out ahead of the pack in terms of the way they approached and played music. The group benefited immeasurably from the extensive experience of their leader: Sylvester Stewart, still in his early 20s, had been making records since his teens and had pulled significant stints as band leader, songwriter, producer and radio DJ. Nevertheless, that first LP – A Whole New Thing – sold poorly. Perhaps Sly was overthinking things. The opening track and first single, Underdog, cast him and his group as outsiders who had “got to be twice as good” to “get a fair shake”, and the album seemed to take that as its starting point. It’s a record that bristles with invention, time signatures changing as complicated melody lines crash against one another. Underdog is a barnstorming beginning to a terrific LP, a record that links genres and styles into a compelling whole. That determination to prove that anyone and everyone was welcome and considered an equal in the presence of the gods of music would fuel the group’s career, but at this earliest stage, it still needed a bit more honing and refining.
2. Only One Way Out of This Mess
Almost all the songs selected for the debut LP stuck to a basic love-song template. It would soon become clear that Sly and the Family Stone – multi-ethnic, men and women, comprising either members of Stewart’s biological family or their closest friends – were at their strongest when writing with disarming clarity and simplicity about US social politics. Only One Way Out of This Mess was recorded a few weeks too late to include on the debut, and despite having been worked up extensively as part of the band’s live shows, it wouldn’t have fitted alongside the rest of the tracks. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that such a dazzling and prescient track remained unreleased until a 1995 reissue of their their third album, Life. Across a trampolining backbeat, insinuated between wobbly, drunken guitar and brass squiggles, amid exhortations from backing singers and brass, Sly lays out a manifesto for dark days: “Stop everything you’re doing and look around,” he chants. “How can one look down when one is down? … There’s only one way out of this mess / Knock the corners off the squares / We hate nothing, and love the rest.” Ringing with euphoric empowerment, it’s the kind of rare record that celebrates future victories as it seeks to inspire those fighting to achieve them.
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3. Dance to the Music
Stung by the lukewarm reception to the group’s debut, Sly took his manager’s advice and wrote something simple. It worked: Dance to the Music gave the group their first hit and turned them into major-league pop stars. Straightforward it may have been, but the song is daring, too. The track breaks down the Family Stone method into its constituent elements, allowing rivals and competitors sight of the group’s moving parts. The song effectively introduces the band members, turning them into characters that fans could begin to know and identify with. This is the moment that the band who were to exert a towering influence stand revealed for the first time: here’s where Sly and the Family Stone surely begin to speak to George Clinton, Prince and, later on, Janet Jackson, OutKast and D’Angelo. It’s the birth of a funk superhero team. Over the years their ubiquity has led, perhaps, to over-familiarity, and these days we may not realise quite how bold a move it was to lay bare the mechanics of the sound and the style. It’s as if Sly was saying: “This is easy – there’s not a lot to it. Go ahead, have at it.” Before too long he’d be writing a song called You Can Make It If You Try, and here he had written the textbook for others to study.
4. Are You Ready
The second Family Stone LP, also called Dance to the Music, tends to be overlooked these days, in part because of how closely it followed the title track’s blueprint. It can feel as though you’re listening to variations on the one theme. Yet this lends its strongest moments an additional, ferocious power – it has a sense of focus and determination rare in pop. Are You Ready distils the essence of the group and their era into 2min 48sec of strident, direct, raw musical intensity, and foreshadows the sound and style they would make their own at the close of the 1960s. Drummer Greg Errico is driving the train, his performance brilliantly combining uncompromising physicality with what ought to be an incompatible embrace of funk bounce and sophisticated jazz-tinged swing. Throughout, Cynthia Robinson’s trumpet and Jerry Martini’s sax – “wrong” notes emphasising a sense of immediacy and urgency over any pretence at studio perfection (it’s perhaps only when listening to the four versions of the song included in the 2015 box set Live at the Fillmore East that it becomes clear they’re not mistakes at all) – engage in a baroque duel with Larry Graham’s intuitive, deceptively complicated bass part. It’s impossible not to be swept along. Over and through it all, Sly’s lyric leaves no room for ambiguity. “Don’t hate the black, don’t hate the white / If you get bitten, just hate the bite.” Put together, the song absorbs, enhances and transcends even the considerable effect of its constituent parts.
5. Life
From the fairground calliope opening to its end-of-the-pier, full-stop conclusion, the title track of the third album is both ebullient delight and stylistic tour de force. The sound is still in transition, one foot in the anything-goes psychedelia of the debut and another in the funk-rock-soul-pop signature sound that would follow. But those key themes – grab hold of whatever opportunities come your way; don’t let anyone put limits on what you think you can achieve or how you’re supposed to live – are all present in the midst of a song that, while still cut from Dance to the Music’s cloth, takes all the band’s manifold influences and manages to lead each one down new and unexpected paths.
6. Stand!
Fusing Life’s exuberance, Dance to the Music’s infectious sense of pop possibility, and Are You Ready’s agit-prop, Stand! became Sly and the Family Stone’s defining statement, and remains one of the most skyscraping high points in the history of music as protest. The song saw the group and their leader reaching into their bag of tricks and pulling out a little of everything that they had learned along the way – churchy harmonies and piano blend with the tender pleading of a balladeer; chords change at what are, on first hearing, unexpected intervals, mood and tone shifting as the lyric acts to encourage revolutionary political protest while honouring those engaged in more personal, private struggles with oppression. The coda turns the track from persuasive to didactic, and was added by Sly one night, just before the song was to be delivered to the label, straight after he got a DJ friend to play a test pressing in a San Francisco club. It was a moment of decisive action of the kind the song exists to encourage: the time for indecision has long since passed, it says, and everyone has to speak up for what they believe in.
7. Everyday People
He was Sly indeed. The last track on side one of the Stand! LP, Sing a Simple Song, was anything but: Errico rated it as one of the most technically demanding tracks he played on, its key changes, back-and-forth sharing-out of sung lines, and intricately layered instrumentation all anchored in a drum track he had no choice but to play with rock-solid precision and care that became a favourite among hip-hop producers (Public Enemy used Errico’s Simple Song beats in at least five different tracks, Ice Cube four). Yet Everyday People, built around a beguiling and at first oblique concept (“I am everyday people”), took away anything complicated or challenging and left only the barest essentials, any urge toward the experimental ditched in favour of music that would connect. Graham’s bass line, throughout, is comprised of one note; Errico’s back beat echoes Motown; the backing vocals are the oohs and sha-shas of pop’s golden age. Again, Sly delivers a lyric carefully crafted to withstand any attempt at misinterpretation: “I am no better, and neither are you / We are the same, whatever we do ... We got to live together.”
8. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
After Stand! and Everyday People, and particularly after a rapturous 3:30am set at Woodstock, nothing would ever be the same. The Family Stone had reached the level of cultural importance and resonance they’d been aiming for, but the view from those heights was dizzying. Desperately uncomfortable with his profile, Sly retreated from public life: he moved to Los Angeles, surrounded himself with a retinue described in various lurid and unflattering terms by his bandmates as dangerous, drug-fuelled and destabilising, and disappeared into a fug of narcotics and paranoia. The last three parting shots before the artist (and possibly the person) he had been disappeared for good were the gorgeous single Hot Fun in the Summertime, and a double-A side pairing Everybody Is a Star with the monstrous, unprecedented, indelible Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).
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It sounded like nothing that came before it, and would affect the sound of everything that followed. Graham began plucking and pulling the strings of his bass, a technique he’d developed as a teenager to add percussion to his sound that made up for not having a drummer Slap bass went on to become part of the complete bass player’s arsenal but had never been heard on record before. Slices of Sly and brother Freddie Stone’s wah-wah guitars relocate the chicken-strut style of the Meters or James Brown’s Jimmy Nolen from the deep south to an industrialised northern tundra. Broken shards of brass fizz by, as if played on the platform and heard from on board an express train as it flashes through. The four verses also mark a point of departure. How else to read these lines but literally – especially since they come from the man who, mere weeks before, had been saying: “My own beliefs are in my song”? At the close, you can feel the clouds and the fear closing in: “Dying young is hard to take,” he almost raps, the voice strained, the message desperate, “but selling out is harder.” In the end, and in the strictly accurate sense, he did neither: but the Sly who made those first four albums hasn’t been heard from since.
9. Family Affair
Western popular culture has come to place an unusually high value on the archetype of the tortured artist, and so the disturbed, dislocated, disorienting fifth album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, is generally held up as the band’s masterpiece. It’s certainly a great record, but it’s far harder to love than what came before. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember this album is by the same artist (and, indeed, most of it was recorded by Sly on his own, with remaining band members – Errico had left and Graham would soon follow – overdubbing their parts later). Even the album’s hit single succeeds despite itself. Family Affair retains some of the old sense of hope, but it doesn’t make any attempt to dispel the doubts. A skeletal structure, two verses and choruses – more like a demo than a finished song – it contrasts the perfect blindness of a mother’s love with the convenient self-deceptions of a couple trapped in a marriage that their infidelities have rendered meaningless. All this over claustrophobic clutter of drum machine and electronic keys: of the band, only Sly’s sister, Rose Stone, appears on the song. It went on to become the biggest hit of their career, though surely few US chart-toppers can match its desperation or bleakness.
10. Skin I’m In
The band effectively ended after There’s a Riot Goin’ On, withGraham escaping through a dressing-room window after being accused of hiring a hitman to take out his increasingly paranoid bandleader. He and Errico had not only been one of the best two or three rhythm sections in funk history, they were also right up there among the greatest bass/drums pairings in any genre. The brand, though, was to survive for some years, as various incarnations of the Family Stone backed the increasingly erratic Sly through a number of albums, to inevitably diminishing returns. The last great album was Fresh. Among its highlights is this song, which ties together two threads that ran through Sly’s momentous, epochal and occasionally terrifying career. It is a pointed statement of racial-political reality, laced as always with plain speaking and common sense. It finds the man and his group ignoring the temptation to second-guess the instinctive creative decisions that made their music so special and so effective.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/tuition-free-medical-school-donation-ruth-gottesman-albert-einstein-new-york
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US news
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2024-02-26T18:04:26.000Z
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Gloria Oladipo
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$1bn donation means students at New York medical school will pay no tuition
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A New York City medical school plans to be tuition-free for students after a $1bn donation from a wealthy donor.
The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx borough received the sizable donation from Dr Ruth Gottesman, a 93-year-old former professor at the school, the New York Times first reported on Monday.
“I’m happy to share with you that starting in August this year, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine will be tuition free,” Gottesman announced to rapturous applause in a video posted to X on Monday.
While teaching at Einstein, Gottesman developed new diagnostic modalities and treatments for children with learning disabilities. She also ran an adult literacy program.
The donation is among the largest to date for an educational institution in the US, the Times reported.
Gottesman received the money from her late husband, David Gottesman, who went by Sandy, the Times reported.
The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, on Monday. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images
Sandy Gottesman made his fortune from investing in Berkshire Hathaway, the multinational conglomerate that was built by the billionaire Warren Buffett.
When Gottesman’s husband died in 2022 at the age of 96, he left her a sizable stock portfolio with instructions to “do whatever you think is right with it”, she said to the Times.
Gottesman told the Times she immediately knew what she wanted to do with the funds.
“I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they would receive free tuition,” she said.
Half of Einstein’s most recent class of students are New Yorkers, according to the medical school – 59% are women and the majority are people of color. And Einstein’s students graduate with higher amounts of debt than other medical students at New York City schools.
Gottesman told the Times that she hopes her donation will help alleviate the financial burden graduating students face. She said she also hopes that it makes medical school more accessible to those who could not previously afford it.
Dr Philip Ozuah, the president and chief executive of Montefiore Einstein, which oversees Einstein College and the Montefiore Health System, shared news of the donation in a statement.
“I am profoundly grateful to Dr Gottesman for this historic and transformational gift,” Ozuah said. “I believe we can change healthcare history when we recognize that access is the path to excellence.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/20/defence-department-stonewalled-foi-requests-on-politicians-use-of-raaf-vip-jet-fleet-says-greens
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Australia news
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2023-07-19T23:00:13.000Z
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Christopher Knaus
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Defence department ‘stonewalled’ FoI requests on politicians’ use of RAAF VIP jet fleet, says Greens
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Australia’s defence department has “stonewalled” freedom of information requests about politicians’ use of its taxpayer-funded VIP jet fleet, prompting a scathing intervention from the information commissioner.
In 2021, the former government decided to stop publishing six-monthly reports about politicians’ use of the RAAF business jet fleet, citing unspecified security concerns.
The decision, made suddenly and without proper explanation, means the public is blind to how MPs are using the exorbitantly expensive fleet to ferry themselves around the country.
It also ended a longstanding practice in place since October 1967, after the so-called “VIP Affair” nearly brought down then prime minister Harold Holt and minister for the air, Peter Howson.
Since then, the reports have helped expose the way MPs on both sides of politics have used the VIP flights for questionable purposes, including their use to attend Labor and Liberal party fundraisers, the Melbourne Cup, or between capital cities when normal commercial flights are readily available.
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The records have also been used to reveal how taxpayers are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for so-called “ghost flights”, where empty private jets are dispatched at enormous expense simply to pick up politicians and return them to Canberra in place of commercial airline travel.
The Labor government has so far declined to say whether it will resume publishing the reports on the jet fleet’s use, pointing to an ongoing security review by the defence department, Australian Federal Police, and the department of finance, which began in 2021.
The Greens senator David Shoebridge requested details about the aircraft’s use through freedom of information laws last month.
The department repeatedly asked for more time to respond to his request, blaming, among other things, the inability of its IT system to produce the information.
Shoebridge gave the department repeated extensions, until it went to the information watchdog, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, to make another request for more time.
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In a decision on 10 July, the OAIC was scathing of the department’s approach to the FoI and ordered that it meet its original statutory deadline for responding to the request, which was 2 July.
The OAIC found the FoI request was simple and there was “limited available evidence” of defence doing anything to process it.
“The FoI applicant’s request does not appear particularly complex, based on the limited range and number of documents captured by the request and the limited evidence of any technical or practical challenges involved in the processing of the request,” the OAIC’s ruling found.
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“In declining this extension, I have also considered the limited available evidence of work undertaken by The Department to process the FoI request to date and limited explanation as to the steps involved, to finalise the request.”
The department is yet to act on the OAIC’s decision, nine days later.
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Shoebridge accused the department of stonewalling. He said the case was a clear demonstration of how flaws with Australia’s FoI system were harming government transparency and questioned how defence was allowed to repeatedly breach statutory deadlines and obligations without any consequence.
“This is information that used to be routinely disclosed but has now, for an unstated reason, become a state secret,” he said. “I understand that this information about extremely costly RAAF flights for members of parliament can sometimes be politically embarrassing, but that must not be the test for failing to disclose.
“It seems pretty clear that it’s politics, not some pretend excuse about IT, that’s delaying the release. To be honest if the RAAF’s IT system can’t punch out a straightforward data report on special purpose flights then heaven help us if it needs to deal with a serious conflict.”
The defence department was approached for comment but did not respond by deadline.
Defence has also ceased providing details of the flights, thought to cost roughly $4,600 an hour, to the independent expenses watchdog, which has a role in recovering money from the travel budgets of individual MPs where flights are misused.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2016/aug/22/who-lives-no-9-downing-street-brexit
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Politics
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2016-08-22T16:15:06.000Z
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Michael White
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Who lives at No 9 Downing Street?
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No 9: That’s the boring property next to the security gates on the west side of Whitehall, the one that TV news crews never bother to film because it leads a quiet life. All this may change now that it is set to become Brexit HQ, David Davis’s centre of Leave EU planning, or possibly of panic, plots and pique. No 9 used to be the office of the judicial committee of the privy council until that moved into the old Middlesex Guildhall along with the new-fangled supreme court in 2009. In recent years, it has been the office of the chief whip, though their official address remains No 12. But Davis, an old Whitehall hand, refused to be fobbed off with a base so far from Theresa May that it was almost in Wales. He has what he wants: his officials have a power address.
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No 10: Unlike the Great Pyramid of Giza, the world’s most famous jerry-built house wasn’t meant to last. It was a speculative venture overlooking St James’s Park, erected on soft soil and shallow foundations (after a 30-year planning dispute) by spy/turncoat/property developer, Sir George Downing (“a perfidious rogue” said Samuel Pepys). Even the brickwork’s mortar was painted on and No 10 was originally No 5. It subsumed two other properties, one of them a cottage, when George II gave it a makeover in 1735 to become a tied super-cottage for Robert Walpole, Britain’s first PM. It would be 20 years before any other PM lived there, because most aristos had bigger, better London houses of their own. Much repaired and modernised, few PMs have liked the house or its sunless street, literally overshadowed by the very pompous Foreign Office building across the road. At least No 10 still feels like a proper house, homely in a posh way, you could imagine watching Corrie over a curry in the white drawing room. And the big black door, fitted in the 1770s, makes for a great, photogenic brand.
Prime minister Theresa May and Chancellor Philip Hammond have swapped residences. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
No 11: One of Downing’s original terrace of mansions, officially it has been the residence of the chancellor of the exchequer since 1806. In reality, it is part of the knocked-through rabbit warren of offices that form the PM’s (minuscule) department, though it is never called that. When Tony Blair moved into No 10 with a young and growing family, he chose to live in the larger flat above No 11, leaving bachelor Gordon Brown the No 10 flat, with its homely furnishings that Cherie B didn’t like. As PM, Brown (by now married) preferred the No 10 flat, but David Cameron opted for No 11, while chancellor George Osborne stayed at home in Notting Hill. Theresa May and Philip Hammond live in each other’s flat again. Complicated, isn’t it?
No 12: It’s the one at the end, at 90 degrees to No 11 and is also part of Sir George’s interconnected rabbit warren. Long the residence of the government whips, it is still the chief whip’s official residence. Actually, it is now the home of the No 10 press office since Alastair Campbell commandeered it in the imperial phase of the Blair premiership. So it looks like a rather grand newspaper newsroom: handsome panelling offset by blinking computer flat screens. But it has some lovely views of the park and of Oliver Letwin dropping private correspondence in the bins.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2020/mar/26/what-is-the-best-tablet-for-video-calling-grandma
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Technology
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2020-03-26T08:00:22.000Z
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Jack Schofield
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What’s the best tablet for video calling grandma?
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I want to get my grandma a tablet for easy video calling. She is elderly and needs to self-isolate, and she is already quite isolated after the recent death of her husband. I am not sure which tablet or which program to use. She isn’t very computer literate.
This new Facebook thing looks good but I am sceptical of the brand. Chris
Video calling used to be a futuristic topic. Today, it is readily available on most devices except, oddly enough, smart TVs. If anything, there’s a plethora of services, and I haven’t tried most of them. The options include Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Skype and many more. Zoom is a business service but it works well and is clearly flavour of the month, with downloads up by 1,270%. Fake backgrounds are one of its winning features.
In this case, I recommend going with whatever you know best. You’re probably going to have to do remote telephone support and the more familiar you are with a system, the easier that will be. If you can get the same equipment at both ends, even better. If you have to start from scratch, try it out with someone else and find the tricky bits before involving grandma.
I can understand the appeal of the Facebook Portal because it is designed for the job. The smart cameras and tracking are far better than you get in most home speaker-type devices. You can make video calls via WhatsApp as well as Facebook Messenger, and it has Amazon’s Alexa built in. The drawbacks are that it involves using Facebook, it is expensive, and you are bound to have privacy concerns. (I assume grandma isn’t using Facebook now as you’d probably have tried Facebook Messenger as the most obvious option.)
The version that could swing it for some people is Portal TV from Facebook (£149), which doesn’t have a screen. It plugs into your TV set and works with its own small remote as well as its “Hey Portal” voice control.
Google’s Nest Hub Max (£219) is similar to the standalone Portal. It has a good 6.5 megapixel camera, a 10in screen and a voice-controlled Google Assistant, but it also comes with privacy concerns. They all do.
Amazon’s Echo Show
Amazon’s Echo Show comes in a variety of sizes, including with a 5in screen (front right) and with a 10in screen (back centre). Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Fortunately, there is an alternative that I can recommend and use myself: Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo Show. At least with Amazon I’m a paying customer, whereas Google and Facebook make most of their money from surveillance-based advertising. I think it’s the lesser of three evils, but the final choice is up to you.
There are three Echo Show options with 5in (£79.99), 8in (£99.99) and 10in (£198.99) screens. Bigger screens are better, but the 8in version is the best value for money and, in my experience, the 5in model works well enough.
You set up an Alexa Show from a smartphone app and give it access to your contacts list. After that you will be able to make calls by saying “Alexa, call grandma”. Alexa can also call most numbers that are not in your contacts list if you spell them out (“Alexa, call 0 2 0 8…).
Alexa performs many other useful functions, too. These include weather reports, playing radio stations or individual songs (if available), doing conversions (“Alexa, what’s 37 degrees in Fahrenheit?”), answering general knowledge questions (though not nearly as well as Google Assistant), telling Dad jokes, and playing simple games. You can easily provide grandma with a list of things to say, and Amazon will email you suggestions on a regular basis.
Alexa can read books and stories, including books from an Amazon Audible account. She can also control other home devices, such as lights, if you have any that are compatible. If you have an Amazon Prime account, an Alexa Show can play Amazon Prime videos.
Finally, Alexa devices – like Portals and Nest Hubs – are always plugged into the mains, so grandma never has to think about recharging them.
Fire HD
The new Fire HD 10, released late 2019, is excellent for £149.99 but there are significantly cheaper versions available if price is an issue. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
If you decide to buy a tablet instead, an Amazon Fire HD is a good choice for your purposes, and the best value for money. There are two HD models with 8in (£79.99) and 10in (£149.99) screens, and a non-HD model with a 7in screen (£49.99). The 8in version is “easily the best tablet you can buy for £80”, but I think it’s worth paying more for the 10in model. This has a faster processor, a sharper 1920 x 1200-pixel screen, twice as much storage, better battery life (up to 12 hours) and a USB-C port. I’d also pay the extra £10 to remove the Amazon promotions.
Fire HD tablets have Alexa, so grandma would be able to use the same video calling system as with an Alexa Show. The drawbacks are that it’s not as convenient as an always-on Alexa, will need charging often, and has comparatively poor speakers.
A 5in Alexa Show works well as a bedside clock-radio alarm, and the larger versions work well as kitchen radios. With a Fire HD, you’d need to add an accessory stand and an external speaker. (Amazon’s custom case will prop it up for £39.99, but I’d rather have the old Show Mode Charging Dock, which converted a Fire HD 10 into an Echo Show. See below…)
The Fire HD also has the advantage of providing tablet apps, so grandma could do her emails, browse Facebook, play games and other things. There are plenty of casual games suitable for seniors, and it’s not too late for her to become addicted to Candy Crush or Bejeweled. You could also play Words With Friends with her.
Technically, Amazon’s Fire OS is a fork of Android, but it has more than enough apps and games. The apps include Zoom Cloud Meetings, Facebook Messenger and Skype.
FaceTime
Apple’s iPads come in a variety of sizes and prices, all of which are capable of FaceTime video calls to other iPads, Macs and iPhones. Photograph: Apple
Apple’s FaceTime is a great way to make video calls. Its major drawback is that it only runs on Apple kit. If you had an iPhone or an iPad, then I expect you’d already have decided to buy grandma an iPad. If I’m wrong and you are an Apple user, you can buy an iPad with a 10.2in screen for £349.
Unfortunately, if you have to buy new iPads for both ends, then approximately £700 is not a cheap solution compared with roughly £200 for two Echo Shows, or one Echo Show and your current smartphone.
Of course, iPads can do thousands of things besides making video calls, and grandma would find many of them useful or entertaining. If grandma didn’t want to use FaceTime for some reason, iPads support many other video calling systems, including Zoom Cloud Meetings. They also have more and better apps than Android and Amazon tablets.
Android tablets
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A10 has a 10.1in screen for under £200. Photograph: Samsung
There are a zillion Android tablets, and you can save a lot of money by buying “off brand” products. Nevertheless, I’d go for a mainstream Samsung Galaxy Tab, one of the Huawei MediaPad range, or a Lenovo SmartTab. From what I’ve seen – which isn’t all of them – they are well made and they have good quality screens at reasonable prices.
A geek could spend a long time pondering the selfie camera resolution, processor speed, storage and so on. I don’t expect any of those will matter much for grandma’s purposes. Just decide how much you want to spend and pick the best you can get.
From the Samsung range, I’d look at the 10.1in Galaxy Tab A10 with Android 9 (Pie) for around £199 or less.
From the Huawei range, I’d go for a MediaPad M5 lite rather than a T5, because these have USB-C ports instead of microUSB. I couldn’t find a 10in M5 with Android 9 instead of 8 (Oreo), though you could live with that or get an 8in model instead.
Lenovo offers a 10.1in SmartTab tablet that “transforms to an Alexa-enabled Smart Screen when docked”. The dock provides the stand and extra speakers for an all-in price of £149 (M10) or £220 (P10). That ticks both boxes at an affordable price, but I’d still go for an Echo Show.
Have you got a question? Email it to [email protected]
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/feb/22/romeo-and-julie-review-dorfman-theatre-london
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Stage
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2023-02-22T13:00:59.000Z
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Arifa Akbar
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Romeo and Julie review – a sweet spin on Shakespeare
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Writer-director team Gary Owen and Rachel O’Riordan are back after reviving their extraordinary monologue, Iphigenia in Splott, last year. Its blistering intensity and force is a hard act to follow.
This production is again set in the Cardiff community of Splott but is very different fare: a teenage love story inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, lighter and sweeter than its near namesake. The star-crossed lovers are dealing with hard-scrabble lives: Julie (Rosie Sheehy) is an aspiring astrophysicist whose working-class parents are desperate for her to get into Cambridge University. Romeo (Callum Scott Howells) is an out-of-work single father, caught between his baby and his alcoholic mother, struggling to buy nappies.
Spun as a romcom cum kitchen sink drama, there is plenty of cuteness and comic banter, along with Gavin and Stacey-style awkward encounters with each other’s parents. Hayley Grindle’s abstract set illuminates the skies that Julie seeks to study as a mobile constellation dangling above, which also references Shakespearean fate written in the stars.
Crossed stars … Callum Scott Howells (Romeo) and Rosie Sheehy (Julie) in Romeo and Julie . Photograph: Marc Brenner
The play is spotted with adoptive or surrogate mothers, with existential questions subtly asked around the nature of parenting, even if Romeo and Julie’s parents feel rather too thin as characters. Julie’s ruminations on aiming for Cambridge or sacrificing ambition to be with Romeo bring good reflections on educational aspiration as an exit from poverty and powerlessness. There are some keen scenes, such as a fierce speech by Julie’s mother on the value of underpaid care work. These bring wonderful flashes of intensity but are not quite sustained or penetrating enough to capture us completely.
What does is the chemistry between Howells, as the lovable, oafish and eminently good dad, and the always excellent Sheehy who brings great force of spirit to Julie. The few (maybe too few) scenes of distilled romance between them are charged with teen physicality and they soar.
It is immensely refreshing to see a tale of working-class love and aspiration unmediated by the presence of a middle-class “linchpin” character, as is the case with Sally Rooney’s Normal People and, before that, dramas such as Educating Rita and The Corn Is Green. Working-class lives are centred here and this play’s achievement is in making their world visible, and entirely believable.
At the National Theatre, London, until 1 April. Then at the Sherman theatre, Cardiff, 13-29 April.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/26/who-will-dare-pull-trigger-article-50-eu
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Politics
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2016-06-26T13:04:25.000Z
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Jon Henley
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Will article 50 ever be triggered?
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When David Cameron delivered his resignation speech outside No 10 on Friday, he said he would leave the task of triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty – the untested procedure governing how an EU member state leaves the bloc – to his successor.
This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.
What is article 50 and why is it so central to the Brexit debate?
Read more
By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?
One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.
This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”
Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.
They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).
EU ministers call for negotiations on Brexit to begin ‘as soon as possible’ – video Guardian
In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.
But there seems to be no immediate legal means out of the stalemate. It is entirely up to the departing member state to trigger article 50, by issuing formal notification of intention to leave: no one, in Brussels, Berlin or Paris, can force it to. But equally, there is nothing in article 50 that obliges the EU to open talks – including the informal talks the Brexit leaders want – before formal notification has been made.
Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, expects Cameron to formally announce Britain’s EU exit on Tuesday evening. Photograph: Eric Vidal/Reuters
“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”
The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.
The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.
UK faces Brexit crisis after Europe’s leaders demand: ‘Get out now’
Read more
But reports in German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others, that an increasingly frustrated EU could, if push comes to shove, decide to consider the referendum result itself as “an official wish to leave” seem unreliable. “The notification of article 50 is a formal act and has to be done by the British government to the European council,” an EU official said.
“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”
Even some EU diplomats are doubtful the article will ever be triggered, because the tight deadline for talks puts the leaver in such a weak position. “I personally believe they will never notify,” one diplomat said. “The moment you push the button you’re in a stupid negotiating position.”
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.
The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.
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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/04/archie-green-damien-ware-mental-health-cleveland-rap-hip-hop-poetry
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Cities
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2019-12-04T10:30:48.000Z
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Adrian Horton
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How to make cities better with hip-hop and poetry
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Archie Green is a rapper and a producer who uses hip-hop to de-stigmatize mental illness in black and brown communities.
It’s a cause he has championed after facing his own challenges with depression, and a message that Green’s mental health awareness initiative, Peel Dem Layers Back, works to spread in Cleveland, Ohio.
Green, who is one of the 25 inspirational people and organizations being featured in the Guardian’s City Champions series, says that before he experienced therapy around five years ago, he “didn’t really know what mental illness was … We didn’t really talk about it.”
A huge reason for that – and one of the main obstacles Green works to dismantle in his music and advocacy – is what he describes as “the longstanding misconception that black men specifically have to be strong, and can’t be vulnerable, can’t cry, can’t feel emotion. Emotion as a weakness – that’s a lie.”
Now 34, Green said he experienced bouts of undiagnosed clinical depression growing up in Chagrin Falls, an upper-middle-class neighborhood south-east of Cleveland in which he was one of the only black students. As a teen, he channeled loneliness into making music, particularly hip-hop, which captured his attention at age 13 after he saw Jay-Z’s video for Hard Knock Life.
But he didn’t start publicly sharing music grappling with depression and vulnerability until years later. After obtaining an economics degree from Morehouse College and a music business graduate degree from New York University, Green moved from the big city back home to his parents’ house outside of Cleveland. A DUI arrest suspended his drivers’ license for a year, and symptoms of serious depression began to worsen. At Thanksgiving dinner in 2014, he started having a panic attack. “At that point in my life, I was literally counting down the hours to where, if I was not alone by myself, recharging, I’m going to break down,” he recalled. “That’s when I knew something was wrong.”
A concerned friend who was also a licensed psychiatrist finally asked him: “Have you ever considered therapy?” Even the question was “huge”, Green said, “because it’s the first time anyone had ever talked to me about therapy. But secondly, and more importantly, he looked like me.”
Peel Dem Layers Back’s biggest event to date was a show called My Violin Weighs a Ton.
Crucially, he found an African American male therapist who could relate to his experience. “Especially in the black community, I always try to tell people: you don’t have to go to just the free clinic and just take whatever is available,” Green said. “You can be specific with who you ask.”
Green also turned again to music. In April 2016, a story from Vice on rappers opening up about depression featured one of his songs, Layers. With sweeping piano plinks and unvarnished lyrics such as “Let’s talk facts: my life was very dark,” and “my doctor said it gets better soon as I peel dem layers back,” the song struck a nerve and went viral, with 25,000 streams on Soundcloud within two weeks. The response made Green consider his mission differently. “I started getting this idea that maybe I should be doing more than music, maybe I should start telling my story,” he said.
Peel Dem Layers Back
He founded Peel Dem Layers Back in 2016, when he was working as an outreach coordinator for Cleveland’s Museum of Modern Art; since then, the group (Green and usually one or two volunteers at a time) has hosted quarterly and bimonthly events, some with licensed mental health professionals on hand for on-the-spot consultations. For the Root of It All, a mental health awareness festival he hosted, six hip-hop artists, Green included, performed a couple songs each and spoke of their own mental health stories. Artists talked about “how they dealt with suicidal thoughts, artists who talked about trauma that they faced as a kid, about ramped up anxiety”, said Green. “Really pouring out – that’s not something you typically get from a rap show.”
Peel Dem Layers Back’s biggest event to date was a show called My Violin Weighs a Ton, which brought hip-hop culture to Cleveland’s Severance Hall, a historic venue renowned for its symphony orchestra, for the first time. The concert, in partnership with the Lexington-Bell Community Center and inspired by such genre crossovers as Nas at the Kennedy Center or Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall, featured the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra accompanying a group of kids, all of color, who played classical guitar, performed their own rhymes, and sang Old Town Road to “the most diverse crowd they’ve ever seen – we’re talking about race, age, gender, sexual orientation, class”, Green said.
If there’s a unifying strand for Green’s work, it’s the act of sharing, whether it’s music, creativity, vulnerability or common experience. Through it all, Green has remained open, determined to convince others that it’s OK to be broken, OK to share when you’re not doing well. “I’ve been going to therapy now for almost five years,” he said, “and all I want to do is save other people and be like: you can be healthy too. Please talk about this.”
‘These streets will never love you like a neighborhood should’
Damien Ware, a poet, in the Buckeye neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Photograph: Shooting Without Bullets/The Guardian
Cleveland’s Buckeye neighborhood is well-acquainted with the words of poet Damien Ware: they are painted in bright colors on buildings and embossed in the ground at the base of a statue of a water tower, a monument to the fresh water in nearby Lake Erie that replenishes the neighborhood.
It’s a message that evokes positivity. “These streets will never love you like a neighborhood should” reads one building, a message to a neighborhood that has become better-known for its poverty and gangs than for its sense of community.
“These neighborhoods are so segregated, the city is so segregated,” said Ware, who is one of 25 inspiring people and groups being featured in the City Champions series by the Guardian and the Plain Dealer newspaper.
Ware was raised in the Buckeye neighborhood and can barely remember a time when it was not deteriorating. Abandoned buildings and gun violence are now common in the area. “When you live in a culture of poverty, you have no hope.”
Ware has been trying to bring hope to the community that raised him through poetry, not only by showing his words on buildings, but also teaching people how to tell their own stories. While Ware is busy with a day job as a social worker with the Department of Veterans Affairs, raising three young boys and finishing up his master’s in creative writing, he manages to find time to teach poetry workshops across Cleveland, particularly in areas that struggle to prioritize the literary arts.
Some neighborhoods in Cleveland have illiteracy rates of 90%.
Growing up, Ware was first introduced to the literary arts through rap music. Though rap was considered a “public enemy” at the time, he wrote poetry in the form of raps. Now, when Ware leads workshops with young students, he teaches them poetry techniques through their favorite hip-hop artists.
Ware, who served a year in Iraq, has also made it a priority to connect with fellow veterans through writing and currently leads a writing workshop for veterans called Veteran Voices where he teaches how to use their stories to connect and speak about the impacts of going to combat, like suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and dealing with stigma.
“You have to remind yourself that you are great, that you are powerful, because as a black man in America no one else will tell you that,” he said. “As a combat veteran who is dealing with these things … you have to continually say to yourself, this is who I am, and I’m going to be better, that I see myself as something else.”
In a recent series of workshops called Cleveland Stories, Ware asked residents to write about their own neighborhoods with the goal of sharing stories and building a sense of solidarity in the process. “I keep that at the foundation of my work, speaking to the human-ness in all of us, and being able to hopefully inspire people to tell their stories because we all have one.”
These photos were a collaboration between Jasmine Banks, a student photographer at Shooting Without Bullets, Amanda D King and McKinley Wiley.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/mar/26/ferrell-get-hard-why-is-hollywood-suffering-another-gay-panic-attack
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Film
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2015-03-26T15:57:13.000Z
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Benjamin Lee
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Why is Hollywood suffering another gay panic attack?
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In the new Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard, an appealing comic premise is established in a slick studio comedy manner, complete with trailer-ready sight gags and a radio-friendly pop soundtrack. Ferrell’s character, a disgraced investment banker, is heading to prison in 30 days and he enlists Hart’s struggling car-washer to help him prepare, leading to a variety of farcical situations. But reviews have been mostly toxic, with Variety calling out “some of the ugliest gay-panic humour to befoul a studio release in recent memory” and The Playlist labelling it “more offensive than just about anything we’ve seen lately.”
It’s a regrettable misfire as the stars are likable, their chemistry is strong and there’s an amusing initial attempt to challenge stereotypes (Ferrell wrongfully assumes Hart has done time because of his ignorant racial profiling) but as soon as prison prep begins, an alarming cloud arrives, throwing a dark, stifling shadow over the film. Ferrell’s pre-prison fears cover the threat of violence rather briskly while his reduced freedom is barely mentioned. But the overwhelmingly dominant phobia that takes over the film relates to his concerns over being raped on the inside.
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The film then becomes a seemingly endless slog through a series of tiresome jokes related to avoiding, or even glumly accepting, having sex with a man, or a series of them, once on the inside. The film’s unarguably wretched low point arrives when Hart’s character takes Ferrell to a gay brunch “hookup spot” where he tells him he’ll need to learn to perform oral sex to make his time in prison easier. While being eyed up by every gay man around them, Hart informs Ferrell of the relative ease of approaching a gay stranger for sex, because “that’s what they do”. After Ferrell immediately gets the attention of the depressingly used Matt Walsh, of Veep fame, he proceeds to attempt an unsuccessful bathroom-stall tryst, which disgusts him in such graphic detail that he can’t go through with it. Meanwhile, Hart is approached by a predatory older gay man who, even after finding out Hart’s heterosexuality, refuses to take no for an answer.
Now, there’s an important distinction to make here. The fear of rape is obviously legitimate and a man’s fear of being raped by another man while in prison is also understandable and by no means homophobic. It makes sense that the film would at least address this but what makes less sense is why the writers have such an obsession with the idea. It punctuates every other line of dialogue and not even in particularly inventive ways (the script is essentially multiple, exhaustive variations on “you’re going to get raped”).
The film team review Get Hard Guardian
But this fear of rape turns into something far more insidious when it extends into a general fear of gay sex and then a fear of homosexuality in general. We go past the dick jokes and find an underlying repulsion (moral of the story: gay sex is ewwww gross) that drives the film and delivers an uncomfortable brand of humour that has been largely absent, or at least tempered, in recent comedies.
The Circle: why is gay cinema so fixated on the past?
Read more
Both stars have been forced to defend the jokes during press for the film, in variously unsuccessful ways. During one particularly uncomfortable interview with Louis Virtel on HitFix, Hart simply said: “Funny is funny, regardless of what area it’s coming from”, while Ferrell has said: “We’re playing fictitious characters who are articulating some of the attitudes and misconceptions that already exist.” Justifying the reactions on screen as indicative of what these two, or many straight men, would really think only goes so far as a cover, especially when the film decides to include, and make an unholy mess of, gay characters as well.
Hart’s admirer in the gay brunch scene crops up later, as a pitiful attempt to show the film’s acceptance of gay characters, when Hart offers relationship advice over the phone. But the running joke of him desperately trying to convert a straight man remains. It’s an ugly and lazy form of stereotyping that director Etan Cohen strangely claims was his way of showing how “comfortable” the pair are together.
Bromantic comedy 22 Jump Street Photograph: PR
Get Hard arrives at a strange time for Hollywood. Humour derived from gay panic has progressed into the bromance comedy, typified by films such as I Love You, Man and Superbad, where straight male characters learn to be comfortable at expressing emotion with one another, without fear of it being misinterpreted. Last year’s 22 Jump Street went one step further with a leading duo whose intimate friendship resembled a relationship, and even included a scene where Channing Tatum chastised a bad guy for using the word “faggot” as inappropriate.
The dated homophobia in Get Hard is surprisingly old-fashioned but sadly not an isolated instance, even in contemporary films. Michael Bay’s back catalogue, up to and including last year’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is full of badly judged gay jokes (check out this hideous montage) and this year’s first Kevin Hart comedy The Wedding Ringer was also packed with uneasy moments (The AV Club’s AA Dowd called it “a 100-minute gay joke”).
This weekend, Get Hard is predicted to be a big hit with an estimated $40m gross in the US despite a collection of toxic reviews. If it is as successful as analysts suggest, it, and the relative lack of non-stereotypical gay characters in mainstream cinema, makes an interesting comparison to the treatment of homosexuality on TV. In the US, two of the season’s biggest new network shows, Empire and How to Get Away with Murder, both feature central non-clichéd gay men while a study showed that the number of LGBT characters on TV is growing. Hollywood needs to catch up or risk getting soft.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/16/australias-magna-carta-precious-document-bought-in-1952-for-12500-now-worth-35m
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Australia news
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2023-07-16T00:00:44.000Z
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Tory Shepherd
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Australia’s Magna Carta: precious document bought in 1952 for £12,500 now worth $35m
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Australia’s 1297 edition of Magna Carta, bought in 1952 for £12,500, is now worth $35m.
The precious document, the “foundation stone of constitutional and parliamentary government”, is in storage at Parliament House in Canberra while a new display case is built.
In answers to questions on notice published this week, the Department of Parliamentary Services said the Inspeximus issue of Magna Carta (meaning it has been inspected and confirmed to be valid) should be back on display by the end of next year. The department said the document had been valued at $35m.
“We’ve now contracted for the construction of a suitable display case that will surround it with appropriate inert gas to ensure it doesn’t deteriorate,” the parliamentary librarian, Dianne Heriot, said.
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It is one of only four 1297 editions in existence, and the only one in the southern hemisphere, according to parliament’s website.
“It confirmed the rule of law – the principle that nobody, not even the monarch, is above the law – and, among other freedoms, laid the basis for establishing trial by jury, outlawing arbitrary detention, and ensuring that there should be no taxation without representation,” the website states.
“Over the centuries, its principles have been incorporated into the common law of many nations, and embodied in such momentous documents as the United States Declaration of Independence and constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, of course, Australia’s own constitution.”
The first Magna Carta (which is Latin for “Great Charter”) was written in 1215 as a peace treaty between King John and his barons, who were rebelling against his authoritarian rule. It established that everyone, including the monarch, had rights and responsibilities under the law.
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'It's a huge job': a peek inside Parliament House’s private, prized art stash
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With the rebellion quelled, King John almost immediately sent the charter to Pope Innocent III to be annulled, then died of dysentery not long after. Magna Carta was amended and reissued in 1216, 1217, 1225 and 1297.
The 1297 version, then, is the definitive one. Edward I of England ordered its reissue, in which he declared that Magna Carta would from then on be a part of common law.
According to the Museum of Australian Democracy, in 1936 a schoolmaster found a 1297 Magna Carta in a desk at King’s school in Somerset. In 1951, the school decided to sell it to raise funds.
The then prime minister, Robert Menzies, decided to buy it for £12,500, describing it as “the most important [purchase] yet made by an Australian library”.
When it arrived, he described it as a “remarkable and historic document”.
“The barons at Runnymede in June 1215 did not know anything about democracy, but what they did was to lay a great deal of democracy’s true foundations,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2021/aug/17/bhp-leave-ftse-100-is-no-disaster-for-london-sydney
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Business
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2021-08-17T18:48:00.000Z
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Nils Pratley
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BHP’s decision to leave the FTSE 100 is no disaster for London
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Farewell, BHP, one of the largest companies on the London stock market at almost £130bn.
The Melbourne-based mining company has tired of its clunky dual-headed Anglo-Australian corporate structure and wants to unify as a purely Australian entity with a primary listing in Sydney. It’ll keep a listing in London but it won’t be a “premium” version, the only sort that gets you into the FTSE 100. A large hole will appear in the UK’s blue-chip index.
A humiliation for London and its capital markets? A blow for the “open for business” refrain that ministers find so addictive? Well, yes, but only up to a point. Unilever’s failed attempt to go Dutch a couple of years ago was a genuine reason to be indignant, because the consumer goods giant’s logic was flimsy. BHP has a better story, even if it’s not the one it was telling only a couple of years ago.
For starters, the company is obviously Australian by history and culture. Its on-the-ground presence in the UK amounts to an office in Victoria in London. The dual structure arose only from the 2001 merger with the London-listed Billiton, most of whose mines have subsequently been demerged or sold.
Unilever, by contrast, was at least half-British by roots and has big operations here. Its board’s desire for a single corporate home in Rotterdam looked to many like a case of a Dutch chief executive and Dutch chairman seeking sanctuary from would-be predators after their close encounter with the unlovely Kraft Heinz. London always looked a more natural place for Unilever to unify, which is what happened eventually.
There’s no parallel escape plot at BHP, which is far too big for anybody to take a tilt at. There could also be a soft bung for UK plc shareholders if the shares flutter upwards to meet the rating in Sydney, where the Australian limited shares have traditionally enjoyed a chunky premium versus the plc variety, thanks to Australia’s relative generosity on dividend taxation. At the very least, that factor should compensate for forced selling by UK tracker funds.
The aspect that might still worry BHP’s board is that, as at Unilever, the proposal needs support from 50%, plus one vote from individual shareholders in each category of share. So this is one of those rare occasions when 10 shares carry the same clout as 10m, creating the potential for a grassroots rebellion. That’s one danger in the proposal: income-hungry UK investors seem to like owning BHP shares and having them in the FTSE 100.
Another risk is that BHP will end up accounting for about one-eighth of the entire Australian stock market, which could be too much dominance for its own good. On the other hand, one can see how having a single class of share could make deal-making easier.
A shareholder lobby, in the form of activist Elliott, has been pressing for simplification for years, so one suspects the proposal will be backed, after some huffing. Yes, it’s a setback, but London is hardly underweight in large mining stocks. It can probably afford to take this one on the chin.
BT’s new boss could have a bumpy ride ahead
Chairing BT isn’t quite the prestigious gig of old, but it remains a political one given the company’s critical role in building full-fibre broadband in the UK.
Adam Crozier looks a decent pick. He’s had dealings with Ofcom, BT’s regulator, twice in his executive days – first at Royal Mail and then at ITV – and the former role gave experience at a company with a large, unionised workforce. He’s also a smooth public performer, which few people ever said about his predecessor as BT chairman, the old-school Jan du Plessis.
None of which will matter a jot if Crozier can’t get a handle on Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli telecoms billionaire who has built a 12.1% stake in BT via his Altice group.
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Drahi’s intentions remain unclear. A big reveal is tentatively expected in December, when a six-month non-bid period expires. The speculation ranges from quiet long-term support to a demand for a break-up of BT to liberate the value supposedly trapped within Openreach, the broadband operation.
Any ideas must be considered, but Crozier’s default position should be to stick to basics. BT has secured good long-term regulatory terms to fund fibre rollout, while Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has made life sweeter by granting “super deductions” on tax on infrastructure spending for two years. The customers expect BT to get on with the job, rather than play games of financial engineering.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/apr/11/donald-trump-jokes-american-comedians-aziz-ansari-david-letterman-samantha-bee
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Television & radio
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2017-04-11T08:00:00.000Z
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Gavin Haynes
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‘Donald Trump is the Chris Brown of politics’ – the best presidential gags
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Aziz Ansari
I’m sure there’s a lot of people who voted for Trump the same way a lot of people listen to the music of Chris Brown, where it’s like: “Hey man! I’m just here for the tunes, I’m just here for the tunes! I don’t know about that other stuff. I just like the dancing and the music. I don’t condone the extracurriculars.” If you think about it, Donald Trump is basically the Chris Brown of politics. And “Make America Great Again” is his “These hos ain’t loyal”.
Samantha Bee
Out there ... Samantha Bee.
[Trump’s win] isn’t good for anyone. What we did was the democratic equivalent of installing an above-ground pool. Even if we’re lucky and it doesn’t seep into our foundations, the neighbours will never look at us the same way again.
Once you dust for fingerprints, it’s pretty clear who ruined America: white people. I guess ruining Brooklyn was just a dry run.
How is CNN just now discovering that [Steve Bannon] is the milkshake that brings all the deplorables to the yard?
Laughing through the pain: comics on how to handle a Trump presidency
Read more
Lewis Black
I’ve got my tickets, and I’m going to go no matter what – because I want to be there when Trump touches the Bible and his hand catches on fire.
Andy Borowitz
At this point, the US should remove the Statue of Liberty or face lawsuits for false advertising.
Stephen Colbert
Technically, this was not a State of the Union, because I think in this timeline the Confederacy won.
Jimmy Kimmel
Oscar-worthy ... Jimmy Kimmel. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
The tone of the press conference was like if your dad found a pack of cigarettes under your mattress.
Trump spoke with a number of foreign leaders over the weekend, including the president of Mexico, the prime minister of Germany. He also spoke with Vladimir Putin for about an hour. Putin wanted to know if Trump liked the gift he got him. Donald told him, yes, he was enjoying the presidency very much.
David Letterman
Donald Trump is attacking President Obama’s background. And I said: “Wait a minute, Trump also is from a mixed background. He’s half jack and half ass.”
Bill Maher
[The White House] thinks the microwave oven is filming them, but during press conferences they don’t realise they’re being broadcast on TV.
Seth Meyers
Check him out ... Seth Meyers. Photograph: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images
What president hasn’t had to say, “I’m not ranting and raving”? Who doesn’t remember Lincoln’s tirade at Gettysburg or FDR’s fireside meltdowns? And, of course, Reagan famously saying, “Mr Gorbachev, if you don’t tear down this fucking wall, I’m gonna lose my shit?”
Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony is this Friday, which means Mike Pence’s is on Monday.
Hasan Minhaj
I’m panicking because melanin doesn’t rub off … For the past 15 years, I’ve been blamed for 9/11. White Americans are now responsible for 11/9.
Trevor Noah
Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama. And, now, Trump. One of these things is not like the others. And if you’re thinking it’s Obama because he’s black, you probably voted for Trump.
You realise almost every single person he’s picked for his cabinet wants to destroy the thing that they’ve been put in charge of. It’s almost like before Trump hires someone he Googles “opposite of” and just hires that person. Welcome to the Trump administration, where climate change is fake and wrestling is real.
Conan O’Brien
Conan the barb-arian. Photograph: Amanda Edwards/WireImage
Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted that millions of people voted illegally on election day. Then someone told Trump it’s not illegal for women to vote.
Yesterday, Donald Trump threatened to send federal troops to Chicago. The weird part is, not the city, the musical.
John Oliver
A not-insignificant percentage of this [healthcare] bill is focused on the urgent matter of what if one poor person suddenly becomes less poor. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t devote a section that covered what would happen in the event of a Freaky Friday-type situation.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/25/government-rejects-plan-for-tidal-lagoon-in-swansea
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Business
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2018-06-25T18:06:56.000Z
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Adam Vaughan
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Government rejects plan for £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea
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The government has rejected plans for a £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay, dashing industry hopes of Britain leading development of a new source of renewable energy and sparking widespread criticism.
Ministers said the project, which would have been subsidised through household energy bills for decades, was too expensive compared with alternatives such as offshore windfarms and nuclear power.
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The business secretary, Greg Clark, told parliament he had “left no stone unturned” in considering whether to support the scheme.
“The inescapable conclusion of an extensive analysis is, however novel and appealing the proposal that has been made is … the cost that would be incurred by consumers and taxpayers would be so much higher than alternative sources of low-carbon power that it would be irresponsible to enter into a contract with the provider,” he said.
Clark said backing a series of lagoons would cost the average consumer £700 more by 2050, compared with a mix of offshore wind and nuclear power. The capital cost for the lagoon, per unit of electricity generated, would be more than three times as much as the Hinkley Point C power station, he said.
The minister said the government’s analysis had concluded there was little potential for cost reductions from future lagoons and limited local economic benefits.
However, the long-awaited decision was condemned by the renewable energy industry, green groups and MPs. Mark Shorrock, the chief executive of the company behind the project, Tidal Lagoon Power, accused Clark of being misinformed.
“This is a vote of no interest in Wales, no confidence in British manufacturing and no care for the planet,” he said.
Labour said it was “remarkably ironic” that the announcement came on the same day as a vote on Heathrow airport expansion.
Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, said: “Once again the Tories have defied all logic and failed to make the right decision for our economy, the people of Wales and the future of our planet.”
Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP for Swansea East, where the lagoon would have been based, told Clark: “You will never understand the frustration and anger felt in our city today.”
Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, formally tabled a vote of no confidence in the secretary of state for Wales, Alun Cairns, at the Welsh assembly. The Plaid assembly member Simon Thomas said: “The UK government has time and time again failed to invest in Wales.
“The failed electrification of Wales’ railways, and now the rejection of the tidal lagoon prove that the secretary of state for Wales has no credibility and is not fit to represent Wales in public office. He must resign at once.”
The trade body RenewableUK said it was disappointed by the rejection, while the Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas said it was “a double blow” because jobs and green energy production would be lost.
Clark defended the government’s stance, saying it believed in renewable energy. He disclosed that he had more than 10 meetings this year alone with the Welsh government, which had offered a £200m equity stake or loan to make the project viable.
Clark’s statement comes nearly 18 months after an independent government review strongly backed the scheme.
Charles Hendry, the report’s author and a former energy minister, said the Swansea project would add the cost of only a pint of milk to annual energy bills and provide predictable, low-carbon electricity.
Hendry told the Guardian that the government had failed to recognise the longer lifetime of lagoons compared to alternatives. “The offshore wind turbines will have to have been replaced three or four times during the lifetime of a lagoon; a nuclear plant would only last half as long,” he said.
The project’s dismissal comes shortly after ministers said they were considering taking a multibillion-pound stake in a new nuclear power station at Wylfa in Wales. That reversed a decades-long policy of avoiding direct state ownership and will have made it possible to aim for a subsidy price much lower than the lagoon’s.
The Swansea scheme’s planned generating capacity is about a 10th of Wylfa but backers said it could be followed by five large-scale lagoons, providing a home-grown source of renewable energy, jobs and an export opportunity.
Gloucester-based Tidal Lagoon Power had hoped to agree a guaranteed power price with the government – known as a contract for difference – for the “pathfinder” lagoon at Swansea.
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The Swansea project envisaged a U-shaped breakwater built across the bay and the tide passing through 16 turbines, generating power for 155,000 homes. First proposed in 2011, the lagoon won backing from the then chancellor George Osborne, who used his 2015 budget to announce the government was commencing negotiations with Tidal Lagoon Power for the plan.
Clark insisted that if future tidal lagoons could demonstrate value for money, the government would consider them.
However, industry observers think Monday’s rejection is likely to kill off prospects for any future lagoons in the UK. Other technologies that harness the power of the tides are still seen as having potential.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/09/alanis-morissette-queen-alt-rock-guardian-advice-columnist
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Life and style
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2016-01-09T08:00:14.000Z
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Rory Carroll
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Alanis Morissette: from queen of alt rock to Guardian advice columnist
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Alanis Morissette remembers the moment she sensed that music – writing and performing songs, packing out stadiums, selling millions of records – might not be enough to get her point across. It was the mid-1990s and she was one of the biggest stars on the planet. Her album Jagged Little Pill was on its way to becoming a cultural touchstone, a distillation of anger and heartache that seemed to speak for a generation.
And yet, barely into her 20s, the Canadian queen of alt rock felt her message was not getting through. “I was made fun of on the cover of a magazine,” she recalls. “‘Stadium therapy rock’ or whatever it was. And a lot of people would write, ‘Oh, Alanis and her psychobabble’.” And, of course, there was criticism of Morissette’s use of the word ironic, to describe a black fly in your chardonnay and a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break.
Sitting in the conference room of her production company’s office in Brentwood, a swish part of Los Angeles, on a breezy, sunlit afternoon, Morissette can laugh about the I-word now. She recently recorded a duet with James Corden on the Late Late Show – an updated, very funny version of Ironic that went viral (“It’s like swiping left, on your future soulmate. It’s a Snapchat, that you wish you had saved”). But, for a long time, the song haunted her. “I’ve certainly had my ass kicked for a very long time over the malapropism of it all,” she smiles.
On stage in 2001. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Dressed in runners, a grey T-shirt and sweater, and a hint of lipstick, Morissette is chatty and affable, laughing easily. She has impeccable posture, thanks to regular yoga, and is still recognisably the tousle-haired brunette who rocketed to fame in 1995 with You Oughta Know, a visceral ode to the pain and jealousy of breaking up.
Two decades on, at the age of 41, Morissette is moving to a new medium. She still writes songs, but is now also making podcasts, writing a book and, beginning next week in Guardian Weekend magazine, responding to readers’ letters in a new advice column. “I was getting bored with just one form,” Morissette says. “Songs are my favourite, let’s be honest. But there’s a limitation: it’s just three or four minutes. In a podcast, or in a column, there’s an intimacy and vulnerability on my part and the questioner’s part. We’re going for it, and there’s no hiding.”
The artist once labelled “an angry young woman” is, it turns out, a born agony aunt. The daughter of teacher parents, Morissette grew up Catholic in Ottawa, Canada, with an older brother, Chad, now a businessman, and a twin brother, Wade, who is a musician and yoga instructor. “It’s been the role I’ve played my whole life – family therapist,” she explains. “Parents, brothers, even extended family members, that was the role I took on, because I suppose I had this combination of intuition and empathy. I cut my teeth, basically, listening for a living.”
As God (in silver and white) in Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma. Photograph: Alamy
Morissette has spoken in the past about growing up feeling anxious and “mired in patriarchy”, leading to periods of depression and bouts of anorexia and bulimia. Even so, a precocious musical talent, dance lessons and appearances on the children’s variety show You Can’t Do That On Television attracted her to the limelight. She landed a record deal and in 1991 released her debut album, Alanis, a dance-pop mix, aged 17. It sold well, though she remained largely unknown outside Canada.
Moving to LA and collaborating with producer and songwriter Glen Ballard prompted a change of direction. When she released the LP Jagged Little Pill in 1995, her label, Maverick Records, considered it a quirky, arty album with limited commercial appeal. It became a phenomenon, selling 33 million copies worldwide, with songs such as All I Really Want, Hand In My Pocket and Ironic vaulting Morissette to stadium status at the age of 21. (More recently, the album soundtracked Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s drives in The Trip To Italy.)
Then came the rollercoaster of the 1990s, when mega-watt success and the pressure that came with it crashed into Morissette’s life. Hysterical fans mobbed her car, yanked her hair and left creepy notes in her hotel rooms, a period she now refers to as a “hailstorm of stimulation”.
She continued mining her emotions in subsequent albums, including Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Under Rug Swept and Flavors Of Entanglement, a cathartic response to a breakup with the actor Ryan Reynolds. The albums had respectable sales and reviews, but nothing like the feverish reception of Jagged Little Pill. Morissette also acted, taking eclectic roles on stage (The Vagina Monologues), film (Kevin Smith’s Dogma, in which she plays God) and television (Sex And The City; she kisses Sarah Jessica Parker in a game of Spin The Bottle).
With husband, rapper Mario ‘Souleye’ Treadway, and son Ever. Photograph: WireImage
About 10 years ago, she says, she decided to rebalance her life, after realising “I don’t want to be that woman who, at 70, has all these awards and is dying alone. So I decided I want to cultivate some real intimacies.” In 2009, she met Mario “Souleye” Treadway, a rapper and DJ, at a meditation gathering. Unlike her previous relationships, this one, she says, felt lasting. They married a year later in LA. “Anyone who meets us often marvels at how different we are,” she says, “but where we unite is our true north. We have this shared sense of marriage being this hotbed for healing. It’s a context in which we can grow and uplift each other, and catapult each other’s missions even further. It’s a very sacred crucible.” She pauses and gives a goofy grin. “We’re both traumatised humans, just trying to get it together.”
Their five-year-old son, Ever Imre Morissette-Treadway, has been “a total life-spinner”, she says, and she has tried to avoid repeating patterns from her own childhood. “For instance, being able accurately to reflect who he is, as opposed to those aspects that serve my needs. I’ve had great perfectionist issues since I was young, so it’s really lovely – because there’s just no possible way for me to be a perfect parent.”
She is happiest, she says, on her couch with her three dogs, Mario and Ever. That said, happiness can be overrated: “I don’t think that’s something we can have all the time. I’m not sure people want to feel happy so much as resilient and equipped. People enjoy watching sad movies for a reason.”
With James Corden on the Late Late Show in 2015. Photograph: CBS
Anger and love “are the two hugest life forces”, Morissette believes. “I can tell when I’m angry. I feel it on a physiological level. I get flushed, I feel hot, my jaw clenches, my arms activate.” Anger is not necessarily bad, she adds: “That’s the anger that is out of control and irresponsible. But anger has a lot of different layers that are often overlooked. It gets a bad rap.”
These days, she soaks up books on psychology, relationships and spirituality, and has “copious” therapists. “I’m definitely a therapy girl – I think that’s quite obvious. I don’t want to say everyone should [have therapy], but do I think everyone might benefit from it? Yes. But I’m aware that a lot of people have great resistance to it: there’s an implication that if they go, there’s something inherently wrong with them, that they’re damaged or innately flawed. Which is not true.”
On stage in 2015. Photograph: Getty Images
Once a symbol of youthful ire, now an advocate for therapeutic healing – I want to ask if that’s ironic, but I know Morissette has a tangled relationship with the word. “If somebody brings it up to shame me for the 450,000th time, it’s not the most pleasant experience,” she smiles. Neither she nor co-writer Ballard anticipated the song’s popularity or subsequent scrutiny. “So we thought, let’s not be precious about it.” She laughs. “But perhaps, in retrospect, we should have been.”
Collaborations with the likes of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato – “these chronologically younger, talented creatures,” Morissette calls them – have introduced her to younger audiences. “It’s their way of honouring me, and my way of honouring the baton being passed,” she says.
Now Morissette is mining her past in a memoir-cum-self-help book, Perpetual Becoming, due out in May, which braids recollections with “hopefully, some hard-won wisdoms”. She has no shame about her own experiences, sexual or otherwise, she says, but is veiling certain details to shield others’ privacy: “It’s out of respect, not out of trying to hide.”
Might she make an exception, and finally break her silence on the breakup that inspired You Oughta Know, rumoured to have been actor-comedian Dave Coulier or even Matt LeBlanc? Those big, brown eyes widen. “No! It was my revenge fantasy. I’m all about revenge fantasy, but I’m not into the acting out of revenge. It’s really destructive.”
What’s the best advice Morissette ever received? She says it came not from a therapist but from a manager during her hurricane stardom years. “He said, ‘Just look down and imagine you’re walking on a train track, and put one foot on each piece of wood, and keep looking down and walking.’”
Morissette updates the lyrics of Ironic on The Late Late Show – video. Guardian
Do other people’s problems ever make her feel impatient? Could “therapy girl” ever dispatch someone with a brisk, “Pull yourself together”?
“A version of that, yes. When someone is dropping into victim or blame consciousness, I’ll yank on their bootstraps.” Morissette smiles. “Lovingly and firmly.”
Alanis Morissette’s new advice column begins on 16 January. Email her at [email protected]. Her podcast is available on iTunes and at alanis.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/28/brexit-brings-europe-together-as-britain-starts-packing-its-bags
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UK news
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2018-03-28T09:00:21.000Z
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Jennifer Rankin
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Brexit brings Europe together as Britain starts packing its bags
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In Brussels, Paris and Berlin, in Rome and Warsaw, the clocks will be striking midnight on 29 March 2019 and history will be made: for the first time in Europe’s post-war integration story, a country will leave the European Union.
As the EU counts down to Britain’s departure, Brexit has proven to be an unexpected unifying force.
Alexander Stubb, a former prime minister of Finland, says he has never seen the bloc so united. After the Brexit vote and the election of the US president, Donald Trump, in 2016, “a lot of European leaders realised that we can’t continue to bash the EU as we have over the last 25 years”, he tells the Guardian.
It was not only the seismic votes of 2016 that shocked the EU into togetherness: the political turmoil in the UK and the vast bureaucratic quagmire of Brexit offer their own lessons. One senior official says diplomats often end their Brexit meetings musing on how difficult it is to leave the EU. “We often end up saying, ‘It’s cold outside.’ ”
Anyone immersed in the hard slog of negotiations might forget that Brexit remains a deep blow to Europe’s geopolitical pride. “Brexit is very bad, painful and traumatic, not only for the UK, but also for the European Union,” says Luuk van Middelaar, a historian and former adviser to the previous European council president, Herman Van Rompuy. “It is going against the self-image that Europe has of being a club of basically all European states – give or take Norway or Switzerland.”
Brexit was “seen as a frontal attack” on the EU and for this reason, the historian predicts the task of keeping Europe together means a hard Brexit, because it is “by far the easiest one to negotiate”. Sweeping concessions to the UK risk eroding the value of EU membership. “The political price of a soft Brexit is higher than the economic price of a hard Brexit,” he says.
Stubb, a veteran of EU negotiating tables, makes a similar point when he argues that the UK is unlikely to succeed in splitting member states by appeals to narrow interest. “What will keep a lot of the member states at bay from having bilateral type of arrangements is the fear the UK will be better off outside the European Union.”
Brexit is the unlikely glue bonding the EU together, but there are plenty of other divisive issues.
In Brussels, at least as much attention is devoted to the next EU budget and filling the €10-€14bn gap left by the UK’s departure, at a time when more demands are being made to open Europe’s wallet.
This time, the usual tug of war between net payers and net beneficiaries will be overlaid by deeper conflicts about the nature of the union. Some countries, such as Italy, want to tie EU funds to accepting refugees; others like France favour linking them to greater tax harmonisation. Several would like EU funds frozen when a country breaches democratic values – a point with increasing resonance amid alarm about backsliding on the rule of law in Poland, Hungary and Romania.
“If there is one big issue that will cause a real crisis in the EU it is the degree to which member states will agree to forms of peer review over their democratic status,” says Rosa Balfour, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “If the EU wants to have a long-term future, this is something it must address.”
More immediately, the EU is trying to reform migration rules and overhaul the eurozone to prevent a repeat of past bailout dramas.
Italy’s recent election showed how both issues offer fuel to anti-EU parties. Voters rejected the ruling Democratic party, as many felt abandoned by the EU on migration after 455,000 people arrived over the Mediterranean sea in three years. Tensions over migration rose against a backdrop of inequality that the outgoing prime minister Paolo Gentiloni described as “intolerable”.
For Balfour, recent elections show that effective policies do not always translate into electoral success. “It is not about performance, it is about whether the government is seen as the establishment, in other words, as something to get rid of.” Across Europe, she sees the success of anti-EU populists as an expression of something “not functioning in our democracies, where people do not feel represented”.
Despite a small uptick in pro-EU sentiment, the public remains far less enthusiastic about the European project than at the end of the cold war. Only 40% of Europeans had a positive image of the EU in 2017, compared with 70% in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The public is far less likely to support the EU than people in positions of influence.
In Britain’s final year of membership, restoring confidence in the EU will be an overriding priority for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and other EU leaders – especially as European elections fall in May 2019.
“If you are Merkel or Macron and you are facing anti-European populists you want to be able to say clearly that it makes a difference whether you are in or out,” says van Middelaar. “That will also have an impact on the Brexit dynamic.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jul/31/theatre2
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Stage
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2005-07-31T00:03:40.000Z
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Liz Hoggard
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Better safe than sorry
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The day he received a rave review for his film role in Croupier from the New York Times, Nick Reding knew something was wrong. 'My LA agent was jumping up and down and yet I was thinking, "Is this what I'm going to do all my life, be a jobbing actor?"'
It was a wake-up call for Reding, who had spent 20 years in theatre and TV (he is best known as Amanda Burton's handsome sidekick in Silent Witness). But he never foresaw that he would end up running a remarkable African theatre company (the company's fans include Alan Rickman, Daniel Craig - who calls Reding 'a hero of mine' - and City of God director Fernando Meirelles) that has saved people's lives.
It all started when Reding took six months out of acting, in 2001, to help establish a paediatric HIV/Aids clinic in Mombasa, Kenya. 'You couldn't at that point get expensive anti-retroviral drugs, but you could offer psychosocial support for the mothers and food supplements, which can keep a child alive.' Reding spent six months building an African public hospital from scratch and blagging $30,000-worth of equipment from rich LA types.' My biggest shock was that, in 2001, people just knew nothing about the disease. There were really smart Kenyan women going, "Why can't I breast-feed?" and that was combined with a huge amount of shame and fear. People are terrified to acknowledge they're carriers, which of course is a big problem with mother-child transmission.'
Twenty-five million live with HIV/Aids in Africa. Many families abandon relatives who are sick. 'If you chase your sister out of the house in case she infects your family and then five years later you find out you could have kept her in the house, and she's died alone and unloved ... that kind of guilt is going to really resonate in communities.'
When he returned home to Britain, Reding couldn't settle. 'I thought, "How can we get this information into the public domain?" And I realised theatre is the most obvious route. If we worked on a big enough scale and with the very best actors, it would have a huge impact.' He flew back to Kenya and commissioned a play from Mombasa's leading company, the Kizingo Arts Troupe, based on information gleaned from workshops with doctors from the hospital. The only remit was that the hero should be HIV positive, and that the audience should love him. Huruma, which combines traditional choral speaking with Complicité-style choreography (three actors play each character), was a sensation. Reding toured it around the country at free roadshows. Soon the actors playing the hero and his sister had become Kenyan celebrities. One audience member told Nick, 'When my 21-year-old brother was dying he started to cough, and I wanted to run away. Then I remembered what you had said in the show and I held him, and I held him when he died, and I say thank you.'
Reding knew he had found his calling. 'My British agent would be ringing up and saying, "Darling, they've offered you six episodes of this ..." There'd be a silence and she'd go sternly, "I suppose that means you're not going to do it?". And I realised, actually, I'm living here now. It was very liberating. Although what I'm doing is minute, at least I'm engaged with the world. Some actors are very powerful and can impact on people's lives, but at the level I had been working at it was only entertainment.'
In 2003, Reding founded the charity Sponsored Arts For Education (SAFE), which has performed to over 100,000 people. During each show free condoms and HIV leaflets are distributed and SAFE's education videos are now being distributed by Unesco. According to Daniel Craig, one of Reding's oldest friends: 'Nick did the thing all of us maybe plan to do eventually, when we sort ourselves out. Because at the back of every actor's mind there's the thought: "Is this where I'm going to be for the next 20 years? Maybe there's an adult job out there for me, one that doesn't involve all of this shit". He's totally inspirational. And he's doing it very quietly. There's no big song and dance about it ... The tragedy is that suburban Africa has only been getting information for five years at most, and as far as rural Africa is concerned, it's non-existent. What Nick's doing is trying to get people to listen and be more accepting.'
SAFE's starry trustees include Sabrina Guinness, Alan Rickman and Ian Holm, while Jane Birkin and Anjelica Houston have offered their services. 'Nick's disgusting,' laughs Craig. 'He'll walk up to anybody and ask them for anything. He scares the shit out of me. He's become the Cameron Mackintosh of Kenya. I think he's as bewildered by it as anybody.'
What is great about SAFE is that it's Kenyan artists who write, direct and perform. 'I'm just the producer finding the talent,' says Reding.
Watching a SAFE show, what's striking is how much fun everyone is having. When SAFE go on tour, it's like a rock concert. 'The troupe arrives in a village of anywhere up to 2,000 inhabitants,' explains Rickman. 'With trumpets and drums some of them create a kind of Pied Piper line through the village. The town gathers around. Before the performance people's knowledge of Aids issues is a mixture of fear, ignorance and prejudice. An hour later they go back to their homes having been wildly entertained, and more importantly, informed. So you're watching the minds of a whole community being changed in front of you. Sometimes theatre really proves its worth. There are things that only theatre can do.'
SAFE's message of solidarity and compassion is getting through. 'When younger members of the community are growing up and saying, "We don't believe in what the old people used to think. We have to be tolerant", then things change rapidly within a generation,' says Craig.
Kenyans are passionate about theatre, but after years of underfunding, Nairobi's national theatre has virtually closed. Safe is changing all that. When Fernando Meirelles saw SAFE's video, he was so impressed he asked the company to perform a live version of Huruma, which he has used to open his new film, The Constant Gardener
Reding is quick to point out the roadshows have their roots in traditional Kenyan theatre. 'If you read the playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, he says that drama in pre-colonial Kenya was not an isolated event. It was part of the life of a people. It could be performed in a fireplace, a market, any empty space.'
Next SAFE is tackling the myths surrounding virgin rape as a supposed cure for Aids. 'We go right into the slums, we perform in Sheng (slum slang) and tell people the truth,' says one director proudly. Reding is committed to running the company for the next five years. 'It's liberated me from my impotent rage. I used to read newspapers and go, "Why? Why?". I still get impassioned about stuff, but I don't feel crushed by it.'
'It's what I fantasise about doing, if situations were different,' admits Craig. 'I'd like to think I would react in that way. But I'm not sure I would. I'm scared of that. But Nick has that personality. If he sees a problem he has to go and fix it. He just chose a fucking big problem.'
· The Royal Court, London SW1 hosts a gala performance of Talking to Terrorists for Safe tomorrow, with Max Stafford-Clark talking to Nick Reding after the show. Tickets: 0207 740 6652, or from [email protected]. For further information on SAFE, visit www.sponsoredarts.org
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/27/more-than-9-million-eligible-voters-not-correctly-registered
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Politics
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2019-09-27T10:27:11.000Z
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Mattha Busby
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More than 9 million eligible UK voters 'not correctly registered'
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More than 9 million people who are eligible to vote in the UK are not correctly registered and are at risk of not being able to have their say in a potential snap election, according to research.
The finding sparked renewed calls for Britain to follow Canada and Finland, among other countries, who automatically register voters. One other potential model would enable people to opt in when they engage with government bodies such as the DVLA, NHS and welfare agencies.
Research by the Electoral Commission analysed electoral registers and found that 17% of eligible voters in Great Britain, as many as 9.4 million people, were either missing from the electoral register or not registered at their current address, with major errors affecting up to 5.6 million people.
It highlighted stark differences in registration levels between younger people, renters, low-income and black and ethnic minority people, compared with older white people who own their homes.
The study also showed that the number of people not correctly registered had risen from 16% of eligible voters in 2015, representing as many as 8.3 million people.
“These figures should sound the alarm for anyone who cares about democracy,” said Dr Jess Garland, from the Electoral Reform Society (ERS). “That more than 9 million people are not correctly registered is a major barrier to political equality and democratic engagement. It means any snap election will almost certainly be on the basis of an incomplete franchise, with millions missing.
“You shouldn’t have to opt in to your right to vote. As the Electoral Commission note, we need to move towards automatic registration now, starting with being able to check you are registered online, and being able to register whenever you engage with government bodies or services. We know this works from other countries.”
The ERS has also called for same-day registration systems to be trialled, allowing people to sign up on election day, as well as an online service to find out if people are registered.
Georgie Laming, from the housing campaign group Generation Rent, said renters in the UK frequently moved home, often due to rising rents and lack of security, and that making registration easier would help the 11 million private renters have their voices heard.
“There are some simple ways that registering to vote can made easier for renters, by integrating registration with services lots of renters use like paying their council tax locally,” she said.
In 2014, the government introduced individual voter registration to reduce the possibility of electoral fraud. This prevented universities from registering students en bloc.
Earlier this year, voter ID was made compulsory in 10 voting districts despite voter impersonation making up just 3% of all alleged electoral offences at the previous local election.
Labour announced in April it would consider introducing automatic voter registration to increase election turnout.
Bridget Phillipson MP, who represents the Speaker’s committee on the Electoral Commission, said this month it was impossible to determine the number of people entirely missing from the registers because there was not a “consistent, unique identifier for individual electors on the registers”.
More than 100,000 people applied to register to vote in two days this month, with young people making up the bulk of the surge. However, it followed an almost 1% overall drop in those registered to vote between 2017-18.
This article was amended on 27 September 2019 to make clear that the research was conducted by the Electoral Commission, rather than the Electoral Reform Society.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/football-league-blog/2021/oct/22/mick-mccarthy-on-borrowed-time-as-cardiff-battle-to-end-slump-middlesbrough
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Football
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2021-10-22T11:18:09.000Z
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Ben Fisher
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Mick McCarthy on borrowed time as Cardiff battle to end slump | Ben Fisher
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Last week Neil Warnock borrowed Forrest Gump’s famous line, comparing the unpredictability of his Middlesbrough team to a box of chocolates. “You never know what you’re gonna get,” he said, doing his best impression of Tom Hanks. On Saturday he visits his previous club, Cardiff City, whose form is anything but irregular after seven straight league defeats for the first time since 1934, an alarming run in which they have scored a solitary goal – a Sean Morrison header from a corner when trailing 4-0 at Blackburn – and conceded 17. If Derby had not been docked points for entering administration, Cardiff would be in the Championship relegation zone.
Warnock’s return to south Wales will act as a reminder of happier times, though aside from Morrison and Joe Ralls, comfortably the team’s longest-serving player, this group is almost unrecognisable from the one that won promotion to the Premier League three years ago. They have proven easy to wound – only Peterborough have conceded more goals in the division, while Cardiff have one clean sheet – on a run of nine defeats in their past 10 matches, a streak that began with their first team being swept aside by, in effect, Brighton’s under-23s in the Carabao Cup. Goals have also been a problem. Kieffer Moore has scored once this season. “Sadly, teams have been enjoying playing against my team for the last six or seven games, so that is disappointing,” Mick McCarthy said on Fridayyesterday.
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The Cardiff manager knows he is on borrowed time. Cardiff have not been in the third tier since 2003 and his predecessor, Neil Harris, was sacked after losing six successive games, five in the league. “If football is true to its usual stuff, we know what happens,” McCarthy said after a 2-0 defeat at Fulham in midweek. “I fully understand the rules of the game. The mood in the camp is good – I don’t think we would’ve got that performance otherwise.”
The Cardiff board decided to give McCarthy this week to turn the tide despite a chastening 3-0 defeat at rivals Swansea last Sunday, their heaviest derby loss since 2014, when Ole Gunnar Solskjær was in charge. The first-half performance at Fulham was vastly improved – there appeared a greater appetite to attack rather than contain – but patience is wearing thin among supporters and some joined the home fans in singing, “You’re getting sacked in the morning” at the final whistle. McCarthy, to his credit, has handled the situation with great dignity, answering every question thrown at him, even ones that have grown monotonous in recent weeks.
Cardiff must find a way to shake that familiar sinking feeling. There were forlorn figures and hands on hips as Fulham ambled back into their own half fresh from celebrating Tom Cairney’s opener and, five minutes later, the centre-back Aden Flint, captain with Morrison dropped and Cardiff’s leading scorer on four goals, led an inquest into how they allowed Aleksandar Mitrovic to double Fulham’s lead. Even before kick-off at Swansea, questions were being asked of the Cardiff chief executive, Ken Choo, after he joked with fans on board a supporters’ coach about taking managerial applications. Choo claimed the comment was made “in jest”.
Curtis Nelson reacts after a missed Cardiff chance during the defeat at Swansea. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Cardiff contacted South Wales police over “issues of concern” after the defeat, thought to centre on what they deemed provocative Swansea celebrations. The Swansea head coach, Russell Martin, and Jamie Paterson made the “swim away” gesture. It refers to an alleged incident in 1988 when Cardiff supporters went into the sea as supporters clashed. In 2013, the then Swansea midfielder Jonjo Shelvey was “reminded of his responsibilities” by the Football Association for making the gesture.
McCarthy is not naive enough to not expect flak but it would be unfair to lay the blame solely at his door. Warnock worked miracles with a modest squad but the current squad is thinner and weaker than the one that started last season under Harris, with Harry Wilson, Sheyi Ojo, Josh Murphy, Junior Hoilett and Sol Bamba, now of Middlesbrough, among those to depart this summer. Too many recent signings – mainly free transfers – have not clicked. The striker James Collins, prolific for Luton, is yet to score in 15 appearances and the midfielder Ryan Wintle was loaned to Blackpool two months after joining from Crewe. Mark McGuinness, a 20-year-old defender who joined from Arsenal, has showed promise, and Ryan Giles, on loan from Wolves, has arguably been Cardiff’s redeeming light.
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McCarthy cleaned Warnock’s boots as an apprentice at Barnsley 44 years ago and knows his opposite number will get a warm reception. “He should get a hero’s welcome having got them promoted,” McCarthy said. “He’ll probably get a better welcome than I willl, that’s for sure. Of course, he’s got Sol Bamba coming back with him as well, another hero of the club. It’s up to us to try and pull the plug on all that excitement for them and beat them.”
Cardiff supporters are clinging to the positives. The teenagers Rubin Colwill, a wildcard for Wales at Euro 2020, and Kieron Evans, who entered as a substitute in midweek, provide a welcome thrust, and Mark Harris, who also arrived from the bench, has had his moments without finding the net. “There are some good young ‘uns, but we need some soldiers at the minute,” McCarthy said. “We need to get a result from somewhere.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/16/ofm-awards-2016-best-young-chef-dan-smith-clove-club
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Food
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2016-10-16T08:30:29.000Z
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Jay Rayner
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OFM awards 2016 best young chef: Dan Smith
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The winner of our Young Chef of the Year Award does not do doubt. Dan Smith always knew that the professional kitchen was where he needed to be, from the moment he set foot in one aged 15. “I just loved being part of a team. It was about process.” Asked what he likes most about being a chef, he says simply, “Everything.” Everything? “I love being able to take a humble vegetable and turn it in to something amazing. Food is emotional. It’s powerful.”
Today, aged just 24, he is sous chef at Isaac McHale’s multi-award-winning Clove Club, inside the former Shoreditch Town Hall. Regularly he runs service. Among the team working for him is April Lily Partridge, who won the OFM Young Chef Award in 2014, and who nominated Smith for this year’s title. “I met him on the first day of my stage here,” she says, recalling the work experience she did at the Clove Club over a year ago. “He was clearly such a talent. You could see that he could do any section in the kitchen and make it look effortless.”
The UK’s best young chef on the joy of ‘nature to plate’ cooking in central London Guardian
Indeed. Through a lunch of complex but forceful dishes he works the pass in the open kitchen, with huge economy of movement and poise. There’s a tiny crab tart under a spiced hollandaise flavoured with the brown meat and the best buttermilk fried chicken; there’s flamed mackerel, there’s roast duck, and, alongside it, a consommé of the bird with a 100-year-old Madeira in its depths. “When he’s on the pass,” Partridge says, “he’s so smooth.”
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Some cooks look flustered and wrung out after service. When Smith sits down to talk he looks relaxed and at ease. This restaurant and this level of responsibility is clearly right for him. “I’ve always felt a little older than my years,” he says. Plus, he’s already been in the business for eight years. Aged 15, he worked in a local restaurant in his home town of St Albans. At 16, he left school for the full-time course at Westminster Kingsway College, but worked nights in another local restaurant “for beer money”. He cites his mother as a massive influence. “She didn’t just do the same old dishes every night. There was something different on the table every night.” Plus his parents were able to indulge his interests. He celebrated his 17th birthday with a trip to the Fat Duck. For his 18th it was back to Bray and the Waterside Inn.
After a working trip around Australia with his chef girlfriend, whom he met at Westminster, Smith returned to London for a brief stint working with Jason Atherton. He arrived at the Clove Club three years ago, six months into its life. “I’ve pretty much grown up with this restaurant,” he says. “It’s ingredient-driven. The food is complex but the place is informal.” And it’s big on skills: they don’t just make their own bread. They cure their own meats, butcher their own animals, churn their own butter and temper their own chocolate.
For his part, McHale says that he realised his young employee was the real thing during a trip to cook in Mexico City. “He was just on it. Frankly, he could have done the whole event without me being there.” And so to the inevitable question. What’s the plan? “I want my own place,” Smith says. “A similar style of food to this but more of a pub setting. I’d like to be as close to self-sufficient as possible, growing our own ingredients.” As to employees, he’s not going to have a problem. “I’ve already told him I’ll come and work with him,” says Partridge with a grin. That’s a serious recommendation from one OFM Young Chef of the Year to another.
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/jun/19/theatre.artsfeatures
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Stage
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2003-06-19T01:24:53.000Z
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Michael Billington
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Fallout, Royal Court, London
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Few writers are better than Roy Williams at exploring the contradictions of our multicultural society. Lift Off showed how white kids imitate their black counterparts. And his latest play dazzlingly overturns expectation by showing how, in a murder investigation, it is the black rather than the white cop who indulges in disastrous racist stereotyping.
The physical space itself has also been overturned. On top of the Royal Court stalls, the designer, Ultz, has created a stage resembling a wire-meshed basketball court. This becomes the arena for a police probe into the killing of Kwame, a bookish black teenager bound for university. All the evidence points to a guy called Emile, who hangs out with a gang of local tearaways. But while Matt, the white cop, is prepared to proceed patiently, his black sidekick, Joe, cuts corners by over-identifying with the dead boy.
What Williams pins down brilliantly is the corrosive envy that pervades a culture of limited opportunities. Kwame, we deduce, has been killed because he wanted to escape from the herd mentality of bleak housing estates. And this has repercussions at police level. Having likewise lifted himself out of the rut, Joe cannot forgive the brutal ethos of the street gangs. From this Williams creates scenes of biting irony in which Joe yearns for "the old school of police" while his white colleague is imbued with a post-McPherson, liberal even-handedness.
Williams also shows how sex complicates the issue. Much of the action revolves around the fatal attractions of Shanice, played with astonishing poise by Ony Uhiara, who runs the local cafe. She is a well-intentioned girl who sympathised with the dead Kwame's desire to escape. But, as Emile's girlfriend, she shows loyalty to the gang and is even prepared to intimidate the teacher who had her kicked out of school for theft. In Williams's graphically portrayed world, nothing is ever simple.
My only cavil about a thrillingly staged show is that the opening scene is played for violence rather than clarity, so we miss some crucial information. Otherwise Ian Rickson's production does vivid justice to the play's moral contradictions and its visceral impact. And there is a string of good performances, from Lennie James as the self-destructive Joe, Daniel Ryan as his strenuously fair-minded colleague, Marcel McCalla as the deeply insecure Emile and Michael Obiora as the strutting gang leader. But what is really impressive is Williams's capacity for telling the honest truth and for exposing the divisions within what we term "the black community".
· Until July 12. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/07/travis-scott-review-fireworks-and-lasers-announce-rappers-post-astroworld-comeback
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Music
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2022-08-07T16:00:13.000Z
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Tara Joshi
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Travis Scott review – fireworks and lasers announce rapper’s post-Astroworld comeback
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Travis Scott is known for his boundless energy in live performances, and the pure chaos he invokes in his crowds – there’s a reason his fans are known as the “ragers”. This is the Houston rapper’s first big headline performance since 2021’s Astroworld festival – an event founded by Scott – where a fatal crowd crush resulted in the accidental deaths of 10 people and hundreds of injuries. It’s clear the incident affected him. During a supporting slot for Meek Mill in New York earlier this year, Scott stopped mid-show when an audience member climbed up on the lighting rig. It was a striking moment, because even a year ago, he might not have called out this kind of behaviour.
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Sometimes known as La Flame, the rapper is very excited tonight: he shouts out his daughter, Stormy, and runs around the stage, limbs flailing in zigzags, every now and again flopping his body down with his arms grazing the ground, like a tired robot (an image enhanced by his aesthetic choices: he wears a futuristic-looking pair of white goggles with tiny slits). He comes down into the crowd, and even throws his jacket into the audience; by the end of the set, he is of course shirtless.
Scott’s enthusiasm is occasionally detrimental to his vocal delivery: he sounds hoarse as he screams the increasingly unclear lines, and mumbles through his rendition of his and SZA’s glorious 2017 collaboration Love Galore. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, given the extent to which the crowd are singing it all back to him anyway.
The set list takes us back and forth through Scott’s career. He hits the stage with Hold That Heat, his recent collaboration with Future and Southside, before bringing in beautiful swirling party tracks from his 2018 album Astroworld. He even plays God’s Country, a mesmerising collaboration with Ye that didn’t make it on to West’s album Donda (and which Scott implies will be on his own forthcoming project, Utopia).
Sometimes, it all feels a bit rushed, and if the show is supposed to set us up for that forthcoming release, there is not much in the way of new material. But perhaps that’s irrelevant – the crowd go wild at the opening bars for every song, and by the time he gets to his beat-switching masterpiece, Sicko Mode, Scott keeps muttering “oh my goodness” into the mic as he surveys the audience.
1:24
Rapper Travis Scott 'devastated' after eight deaths at Astroworld – video
Evidently, the ragers have been waiting for this. Though they move up and down like waves, phones glowing in a way that adds to the futuristic stagecraft, things never seem out of control – and while Scott understandably avoids goading them into disarray like he used to, he does feel a little distant. A lit-up platform carries him into the air like a spaceship, beaming him up in a vortex of white light. There are near-constant pyrotechnics, dancing lasers and plumes of smoke, all adding to the opulent optics.
It is a stunning show aesthetically, but it’s not entirely matched by Scott’s performance tonight: alone on stage, he is almost overshadowed by the scenery. Yes, he brings that impressive energy he is known for, but this feels like a show where he is refamiliarising himself with this size of crowd, soaking up the feeling rather than delivering the flawless, abundant shows people have come to expect from him. Ahead of his second night at the O2, it’s telling when he says, “Tomorrow night, we go harder.”
At the O2 Arena, London, 7 August.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/dec/12/make-or-break-the-golden-globes-nominee-list-has-rewarded-the-showmen
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Film
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2022-12-12T16:16:18.000Z
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Peter Bradshaw
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Make or break: the Golden Globes nominee list has rewarded the showmen
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So the Golden Globes have announced their nominations for the make-or-break ceremony in January 2023, featuring much awards love for Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick and Tár. This is the one that will either ensure the Globes’ survival or consign them to untelevised irrelevance and slow death.
Golden Globes nominations 2023: The Banshees of Inisherin leads with eight
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After last year’s row over the lack of diversity and preponderance of kickbacks among the Globes’ notoriously corruptible voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, NBC refused to put the 2022 ceremony on the air. They agreed to this year’s coverage after the HFPA finally committed to more diverse voters and an oversight committee. Whether or not they wish to show it again will depend on how this year’s event goes.
The still somewhat disgraced Will Smith has received no nomination for his civil war drama Emancipation – so he’s not coming. Tom Cruise’s box office champ Top Gun: Maverick is nominated for best picture (drama), but Cruise returned his three Globes last year in protest over the racial exclusion scandal. So he might boycott the event if he considers the HFPA still haven’t reformed themselves sufficiently. And most pertinently of all, Brendan Fraser – who has received a nomination for his widely admired performance in the Darren Aronofsky drama The Whale – has already announced that he will not attend, having alleged he was assaulted by a former HFPA president, Philip Berk, who has denied it, but was later expelled after calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement”.
This is another middleweight, middling list for the Globes: and Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry might well feel themselves slighted for being shut out of the nominations for their much liked drama Causeway. And Billy Eichner, who has been famously disappointed at the box office reception for his pioneering gay romcom Bros, will not be happy at the film’s non-appearance in the best picture (musical or comedy) section.
It is a Globes that has rewarded the showmen – and show-women to some degree, although this is another all-male director list. The all-conquering box-office smash Top Gun: Maverick picks up a best film nomination and James Cameron’s mighty monolith Avatar: The Way of Water also comes in with best film in the drama section and a director nod for its creator. Baz Luhrmann detonated another sequin explosion with Elvis, his musical biopic of the king of rock’n’roll, scoring best director and best actor for the lip-curling star, Austin Butler. Steven Spielberg’s wonderful autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man, The Fabelmans, gets a nod for best picture and best director and a best actress for Michelle Williams playing the eccentric mother.
In the best director section, Martin McDonagh – who has long been a player in awards season – gets a nod for his Synge-ian black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, and Colin Farrell gets a best actor (musical or comedy) nomination for his turn as the dopey dairyman whose best friend cancels their bromance, although his co-star Brendan Gleeson must content himself with a best supporting actor nomination (although his contribution is surely equal to Farrell’s) alongside Barry Keoghan. Kerry Condon very deservedly gets a best supporting actress for the same film.
The lavishly swooned-over hipster multiverse fantasy comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once has evidently hit the spot with the HFPA electorate, snagging a best director nomination for his directors, the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert), but I can’t be sure that they will pick up silverware on the night, although this film’s much-loved Michelle Yeoh could convert her nomination for best actress.
As far as acting star turns go, my prediction is that the HFPA will cleanse themselves with an award for Brendan Fraser for The Whale, although his rival nominee, our very own Bill Nighy, may well pinch it for his wonderful performance in Living. Cate Blanchett will surely win best actress (drama) for her toweringly crazed and magnificent performance as the tormented orchestra conductor in Tár (although it’s sad not to see a best director nod for that film’s auteur, Todd Field). In the comedy field, I think the night will belong to Colin Farrell and Michelle Yeoh (although the HFPA might well like Emma Thompson’s very witty and beguiling turn in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande as the retired headteacher who pays for sex.) No real left-field or bold choices, but the Globes are hoping that the mainstream is their route back to acceptance.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/10/william-fraker-obituary
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Film
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2010-06-10T17:37:55.000Z
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Ronald Bergan
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William Fraker obituary
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The American cinematographer William Fraker, who has died of cancer aged 86, worked on dozens of mainstream films – the good, the bad, but never the ugly. Fraker could not be praised or blamed for the direction, acting or script, but the look of a film was, on the whole, his responsibility. Although he saw himself as part of a team who tried to fulfil the director's vision, Fraker began to push the boundaries of cinematography in commercial cinema by using faster and wider lenses, restricting lighting sources and employing techniques such as flashing and deliberate overexposure.
According to Fraker: "The director is the captain of the ship, the cinematographer is the executive officer. You have to really learn who you're working with and what they think. It's like a marriage. As a cinematographer, you can immediately tell a terrific director if they let you do what they hire you for."
Fraker illustrated this idea with the following anecdote: "On Looking For Mr Goodbar, Richard Brooks said, 'Billy, in this scene we're gonna have four naked people on a bed. I don't wanna see any pubic hair, I don't wanna see any breasts. I don't wanna see any nudity, but I want everybody in the audience to think they've seen it all.' Then he walked away. He left me to do what he hired me to do. We ran the picture at the academy and a woman I knew came up to me and said, 'Billy, how could you do a picture like this? All that nudity!' We achieved our goal."
Born in Los Angeles of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, Fraker, whose maternal grandmother, father and uncle had all worked as still photographers within the studio system, resolved at an early age to be a cameraman. After serving as a coastguard during the second world war, he enrolled in the cinema department of the University of Southern California, studying under Slavko Vorkapic, a master of montage. "He told us 'Every time you walk into a restaurant, look at it to see how it's lit. Study the ambience of the place'," Fraker recalled. After graduating in 1950, he did some still photography and also shot 16mm films, inserts for commercials, and grab shots (photographs capturing the moment) for features.
He then served a long apprenticeship as camera loader and camera operator on television series including The Lone Ranger and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, sometimes working under the revered cinematographer Conrad Hall. Among the films on which Fraker assisted Hall was Richard Brooks's The Professionals (1965). This got him recommended to Warren Beatty, who offered Fraker the job of director of photography on Bonnie and Clyde (1967). However, Jack Warner, boss of Warner Bros, said: "Any cameraman that has not yet shot a picture is not going to shoot his first picture on my lot."
Fraker finally got a credit as director of photography on Curtis Harrington's Games (1967), an atmospheric thriller starring Simone Signoret and James Caan. The following year, he was cinematographer on two classics: Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Peter Yates's Bullitt. The former, shot almost entirely in the Dakota apartment building in New York, subtly evoked a claustrophobic, nightmarish ambience.
Bullitt was noted for its exteriors, especially its climactic car chase in San Francisco, involving a Mustang Fastback and a Dodge Charger, with Fraker and his camera strapped into one of the cars. "I met Peter Yates and we talked about a picture he'd done called Robbery, where the opening sequence has a car chase. I thought he did a terrific job and when I asked how fast they were going, he said they couldn't go over 60 to 65mph. That night we made the decision that on Bullitt, we weren't going to speed up the camera. We were going to shoot 24 frames and speed the cars up to 124mph. We were the first to mount cameras on the cars so they wouldn't shake."
Fraker brought a historically convincing western look to Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969), and a period Hollywood sheen to Beatty and Buck Henry's Heaven Can Wait (1978), for which he received the second of his five Oscar nominations for cinematography – the others being for Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1980), John Badham's WarGames (1983) and Martin Ritt's Murphy's Romance (1985).
Fraker also directed three feature films, but the transition was not a big success. The best of them was his first, Monte Walsh (1970), starring Lee Marvin as a cowboy trying to come to terms with the end of the old west.
For the horror film A Reflection of Fear (1973), Fraker seemed to have given the renowned cinematographer László Kovács carte blanche, and it seemed little more than a series of elliptical, soft-focus camera montages. The critic Roger Ebert observed: "There is such density of atmospheric haze that half the film looks as if it had been photographed through a jellyfish." Fraker's career as a director ended with the disastrous The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), also photographed by Kovács, much of it in soft focus.
Cinematographers are ignored by most film critics but appreciated by their peers, and Fraker received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2000.
He is survived by his wife, Denise. His son, William, died in 1992.
William Fraker, cinematographer and film director, born 29 September 1923; died 31 May 2010
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/feb/09/best-goals-week-angel-di-maria-will-keane-ricardinho
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Football
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2016-02-09T12:44:30.000Z
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Paul Campbell
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The best goals of the week: Ángel Di María, Ricardinho and Will Keane
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Mechack Elia (DR CONGO v Mali)
Jonny Hayes (ABERDEEN v Celtic)
Louis Ramsay (NORWICH CITY U18s v Middlesbrough U18s)
Gary Hooper (Birmingham v SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY)
Will Keane (MANCHESTER UNITED U21s v Norwich U21s)
Craig Bryson (Fulham v DERBY COUNTY)
Vincent Janssen (AZ ALKMAAR v Vitesse)
Thiago Mendes (SÃO PAULO v Água Santa)
Kostas Stafylidis (Ingolstadt v AUGSBURG)
Cameron McGeehan (Wycombe v LUTON TOWN)
Jobi McAnuff (Portsmouth v LEYTON ORIENT)
Darren White (AUCKLAND CITY v Waitakere United)
Edwin Cardona (MONTERREY v Dorados)
Angel Di María (Marseille v PARIS SAINT-GERMAIN)
Ricardinho (PORTUGAL FUTSAL v Serbia)
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Riechedly Bazoer (AJAX v Feyenoord)
Rémy Cabella (MARSEILLE v Paris Saint-Germain)
Amin Younes (AJAX v Feyenoord)
Sérgio Oliveira (Gil Vicente v PORTO)
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2008/jul/15/explanationsarethetraitoro
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Art and design
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2008-07-15T09:00:00.000Z
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Jonathan Jones
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Explanations are the traitor of art
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Unexplainable? Jackson Pollock's painting, Number 17, 1949 ... 'The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state', he said. Photograph: Reuters
It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached. If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.
Yet, there are more and more pressures today on artists to explain themselves. Once, an artist was allowed to hide behind a vague and mysterious aura. The American abstract expressionist painters made grand pronouncements about their work that are so enigmatic they give away no hostages - nor do the kinds of epigrammatic comments made by Francis Bacon. Yet artists in Britain today are always offering explanations for what they do.
If you're looking for the root cause of anything annoying, silly or spurious in the culture of art in 21stcentury Britain the source of the problem is never hard to locate. Once again the culprit is ... public art, in which the popularization of art, the determination of institutions from parks to to local councils to be associated with it, and a lingering British Puritan visual clumsiness produce a lot of guff as artists try to promote the accessible virtues of their ideas.
As soon as you start saying what people want to hear, adapting your art to the common sense political and moral platitudes of ordinary speech, you betray subtlety and poetry. Artists presenting proposals for the Fourth Plinth, the Tate Turbine Hall and elsewhere should rebel again this. They should agree to all submit the woolliest and least explanatory pronouncements they can dream up. Something like: "The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely."
That's Jackson Pollock, writing a grant application in 1947. I don't suppose it would get him much of a grant in Britain now. He'd have to explain what his webs and loops of abstract paint are all about ... but he'd sit there chewing his pen, no more able to offer a simple explanation of them than the critic is half a century later.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/10/im-broken-hearted-customers-mourn-the-end-of-wilko
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Business
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2023-08-10T17:45:46.000Z
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Morgan Ofori
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‘I’m broken-hearted’: customers mourn the end of Wilko
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The mood in the Wilko in Lewisham Shopping Centre is sombre on Thursday afternoon as dozens of customers ponder whether this visit might be their last, now that the budget retailer has officially entered administration.
The south-east London branch is one of about 400 across the country facing the threat of closure after rescue talks failed, putting 12,000 jobs across the business at risk.
Wilko employees: how will you be affected by store closures?
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Signs are evident of the recent problems the chain has been having with its suppliers, with gaps on shelves in the pick-and-mix and stationery sections. But judging by shoppers’ reactions, there is still great affection for the brand and it will be sorely missed if it does disappear.
“I’m really broken-hearted that they’re going to go,” says Maggie Callaghan, 69. “They always do a good offer on things like washing liquid, bin bags, organic products and stationery – and they’ve got plants, too. I mean, I’m retired now, so I’m always looking for offers!”
‘They always do a good offer’: Maggie Callaghan in Wilko in Lewisham. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Winsome, 53, who gave only her first name, says: “Ever since I got my own flat, I come here very often to buy everything I need, always. It’s cheap and the things here are good quality.” She grins as she puts two chopping boards into her full basket: “Look here, I got one for my daughter and one for myself.”
Kashara and Daniel Loman, 31 and 30 respectively, live just round the corner and are similarly devoted. “You can get everything here,” Daniel says. “From cleaning products to food containers, everything you’d need for your house, you go to Wilko to get it.”
“The rewards and cashback I get from shopping here is why I come back,” Kashara adds. “I’ll miss the bargains, and there’s just something comforting about it. It reminds me of Woolworths, obviously I was young when it opened, but Wilko just reminds me of that time.”
Other shoppers note the similarities to the former high street stalwart, which went bust 14 years ago with many of its former sites subsequently taken on by Wilko.
‘It’s a difficult market’: Colin Crisford. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
“I’ve always wondered why Woolworths had failed, while Wilko thrived,” says Colin Crisford. “I guess it’s a difficult market. Maybe they expanded too fast, too big of a store, I mean you would have thought some outlets would make a profit and they would slim the business down.”
The 65-year-old is looking for rubble sacks in the gardening section. “They have a good range of stuff, well priced. I’m going to miss it, definitely.”
Those feelings were echoed by people across the country, with readers telling the Guardian of their sadness at the administration news. Lynn, 63, a lecturer in Washington, Tyne and Wear, said that after she heard the news that the chain was on the brink of collapse, “I dashed into Wilko last weekend to make sure that I got the things I needed to complete my home studio makeover in case they went down.
“The shop is conveniently placed near the railway station and bus station so it was handy if, like I did, you bought a lot of stuff. It was a good place for basic DIY stuff and household furnishings. They had good wall paints and the products were both functional and reasonably priced.”
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The pick-and-mix selection in the Lewisham store. Shoppers round the country have noticed gaps on shelves recently. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Cristina Jimenez, a 35-year-old civil servant living in London, praised the friendliness of staff and the quality and prices of the own-brand products, which she said had helped her manage the soaring cost of living.
What went wrong at Wilko?
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However, she had also noticed recent supply issues. “We have had difficulties getting hold of some items recently – white vinegar, dishwasher tabs – but because of their quality and competitive price, we go several times a week to see if they have them back in stock.”
Lesley, from Kent, said: “As an elderly person without a car, I find travelling to suburban superstores difficult. But now it seems I’ll have to, as there will be nowhere left in the town centre to buy practical, everyday and good-quality things. Another win for online shopping!”
Joe, a 34-year-old team leader from Norwich, bemoaned the loss of somewhere to make small purchases without incurring a delivery fee. “Wilko will be missed because they frequently sell lots of little things that are difficult to get in other places, or not worth ordering, but are incredibly necessary,” he said.
“For example, it makes no sense to order a radiator key [online] because you can usually only buy a set of three for a fiver, whereas Wilko will have them right there for £1. I’ll miss it a lot when it’s gone.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jan/07/culture.reviews1
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Film
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2000-01-07T01:36:29.000Z
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Peter Bradshaw
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Sleepy Hollow
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The beautiful boy Johnny Depp returns to the embrace of director Tim Burton in Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving's American gothic romance, and it is only with the faintly unwholesome, cadaverous look that Mr Burton is able to conjure up for his leading man that we can appreciate his cheekbones to the fullest. Depp is Ichabod Crane, the constable sent by the New York authorities in the late 18th century to investigate a creepy wave of decapitations in an obscure upstate village surrounded by woods called Sleepy Hollow. Here it is that Crane, a sort of prototypical FBI man, meets a range of glowering locals with creepy tales of the headless horseman who gallops around divorcing people's heads from their shoulders.
These Sleepy Hollow worthies are led by the wealthy farmer Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon) and his hot babe of a daughter Katrina (Christina Ricci). Ichabod instantly forms a tendresse for her, but as there is only room for one black goth in this picture, Christina has to be blonde, with hardly any make-up, and looks like something by Millais. Depp plays Ichabod very amusingly: fastidious, scientific, insisting on reason and rationality, but investigating the headless corpses with a bizarre range of dissection implements that look like the weird gyno-instruments in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He is panicky, anxious, and a refreshingly devout coward, often running away from danger, and doing everything short of wearing a woolly hat and apologising for everything straight into a video camera. Depp also does a very funny range of face-pulling winces at each ill omen and bad augury, in which he reminded me strongly of our own Jim Dale, in Carry On Don't Lose Your Head.
Tim Burton's direction and Ken Court's art direction give us a gloomy, hyper-real landscape, the lighting set always at a kind of Hammer-horror dusk, and we are certainly never allowed to forget that this is a film about people getting their heads chopped off. There is a cumulative yuk effect here: oh no, here's the headless horseman again, gallop, gallop, chop, spurt, yuk. Eventually it gets tiring, and if anything in this camp goth extravaganza scares you, you must be a real wuss. But it's worth it for Johnny Depp's feathery, nervy performance as Crane.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/21/stuck-on-newstart-i-dont-understand-why-more-people-arent-angry
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Australia news
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2019-04-20T21:00:34.000Z
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Royce Kurmelovs
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Stuck on Newstart: ‘I don’t understand why more people aren’t angry’
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Nijole Naujokas has been on and off Centrelink for the better part of the past decade. Even during those times when the 34-year-old had work, the hours were casual and were never enough. Newstart came to be a top-up for her low wages.
To break the cycle, Nijole applied for the Disability Support Pension (DSP), but the Department of Human Services knocked back her application and never explained why.
She hasn’t tried again since and instead has accepted having to live on a payment that leaves her, after housing costs, with $169.03 a week. The poverty line, according to the Australian Council of Social Service, was $353.29 a week after housing costs.
The figure is so low Nijole says she lives in constant fear she might be cut off “at any moment” for something as simple as an administrative error by a receptionist.
“For me personally, dealing with the Jobnetwork system and Disability Employment Service is one of the most mind-numbing, depressing, bureaucratic aspects of being on a Centrelink payment.”
The meaning of Morrison's mantra about getting a fair go is clear. It's conditional
Katharine Murphy
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Nijole is not alone.
Across Australia there are roughly 700,000 people out of work and 1.3 million who are underemployed – that is, people who have jobs but are not working enough hours.
While the national jobless rate as of February 2019 stood at 5%, breaking down this figure by geographic region sees it rise sharply among Indigenous communities and working class suburbs on the edges of major cities. In Port Adelaide – where Nijole grew up – unemployment is double the national average at 10.8%.
Meanwhile, long-term unemployment – which counts those who have been out of work for over a year – has stayed at 1.4%, a figure which may seem low but which Jim Stanford from the Centre for Future work says conceals much.
“One per cent of the labour force long-term unemployed is too many and that is real pain, and it really understates the pain because a lot of people who are unemployed for longer than a year would completely give up looking,” Stanford says.
Peter Davidson, a senior policy adviser to Acoss, says many are stuck.
“Long-term unemployment has become more entrenched since the 90s when less than 50% of Newstart recipient were long-term. Now it’s two-thirds,” Davidson said.
“They face real challenges in the labour market because they have a one-year gap in their resume, they’re more likely to be older, they’re more likely to have disabilities, they’re more likely to be caring for a child or be Indigenous. The longer they are out of paid work, the less likely it is they’ll pick up a job,” he said.
Department of Social Services data released in December 2018 shows two-in-three people on Newstart were out of work for over a year, with 17.3% having lived on the payment for over a decade. They were also more likely to be older, with the majority of all recipients aged between 55 and 64 years old.
Left behind: the Australians neither political party wants to discuss
Lenore Taylor
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Dr Kathy Moore from Queensland University of Technology once worked for Jobnetwork providers – the organisations tasked with helping unemployed people find jobs – but now studies unemployment. She says there are as many ways a person can end up out of work as there are people in that position.
“Many, many personal circumstances play a part,” Moore says. “So many Australians are living paycheque-to-paycheque and it can happen to any of us, at any time.”
Moore says someone may be dealing with an illness, an injury or may have found their qualifications are no longer valued. They might be facing other structural factors like homelessness, region-specific economic trouble like drought, or issues relating to their particular demographic. More often it involves a mix.
Among young unemployed people, for instance, 18.4% of those who didn’t have a job during 2017 were long-term unemployed. Moore says a common experience for many involves graduating from school or university to find there are no entry-level jobs where they live.
“[In that case] there just aren’t opportunities without experience, and employers are asking for loads and loads of experience,” she says. “There’s only so many jobs you can apply for before thinking, well, I’ve given up.”
For older Australians, the experience is different. A report last year from the Brotherhood of St Laurence found older Australians who fell into unemployment were less likely to become unemployed than young people, but more likely to be unemployed for longer.
Dr Dina Bowman, who worked on the study, said common stories among older workers involved the loss of a relationship due to divorce or death, or industrial closures, as with the end of the Australian car industry.
Poverty as a moral question: do we have the collective will to end it?
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“They’re people who’ve held long-term jobs, people who have been employed and then something happens,” Bowman says. “You might have someone whose had full-time work and been made redundant. And we know from other research theirs is a downward trajectory.”
Out on the job market, age-based discrimination in hiring practices and a changed world means they struggle.
“They find the world of work has changed. The world of recruitment has changed. Everything’s changed,” Bowman says.
It is the crude stereotypes and tendency to treat all unemployed people alike – among both policymakers and the general public – which bothers Nijole.
“You can’t win with a lot of people,” she says. “You either don’t look poor enough, or if I do look poor, they’re like, ‘what a lazy slob, no wonder she can’t get a job’.
“Everyone deserves a right to exist in this country with a roof over their head and food in their stomach and to not be denigrated for that.”
Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/13/talking-horses-ryan-moore-can-call-tune-on-pied-piper-at-the-cesarewitch
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Sport
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2023-10-13T20:49:23.000Z
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Greg Wood
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Talking Horses: Jesse Evans offers each-way option in Cesarewitch
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Ireland’s increasing supremacy in National Hunt racing has extended to the Cesarewitch, the Flat’s most historic stayers’ handicap, in recent seasons and runners from top Irish jumping yards dominate the betting once again before the 2023 running at Newmarket on Saturday.
Pied Piper, third in the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham in 2022 and a close second in the County Hurdle under a big weight at last season’s Festival, is the best of them over timber and the booking of Ryan Moore for Gordon Elliott’s gelding should ensure that he sets off as favourite at around 5-1.
Frankie Dettori abandons retirement plans to continue racing career in US
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Elliott has clearly been pointing Pied Piper towards Saturday’s race from a long way out. The same is true, however, of many of the 34 runners and there is little to choose between the market leader and several of his leading rivals on form, with Jesse Evans (2.40) possibly the best each-way option at around 12-1.
Noel Meade’s dual-purpose gelding has been in the form of his life this year, finishing a close second in the Galway Hurdle in July and then putting up a career-best when fourth, beaten just over a length, in the Irish Cesarewitch three weeks ago.
York 1.15 Esquire could offer some value at around 7-1 having posted a useful time for a debutant when winning with plenty in hand at Hamilton last month.
Newmarket 1.25 With two convincing wins in minor events in the book, Per Contra has as much potential as any runner in the field and may have been missed in the market at around 10-1.
Newmarket 2.00 Three months on from City Of Troy’s emphatic win in the Superlative Stakes, it remains the most impressive performance by a European juvenile this season and he should seal his status as the champion two-year-old here.
York 2.25 A typically competitive York sprint handicap, with Pendleton just one among many possible winners if he can build on his recent success.
Quick Guide
Greg Wood's tips for Monday
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York 3.05 Maidens are not the most compelling events for betting purposes but Colorada Dancer does at least have some experience on his side.
Newmarket 3.15 Possibly less to choose between Gasper De Lemos and Arabian Crown, the favourite, than the betting might suggest so Aidan O’Brien’s colt gets the nod at around 7-2.
York 3.35 A 4lb rise looks workable for La Yakel after a return to winning form last time.
Newmarket 3.50 Fast-improving Real Gain may be able to take the step up to Group Three company in his stride.
Ylang Ylang gives O’Brien another milestone
Finishing last of the nine runners at odds of 6-5 was an unfortunate way for Ylang Ylang to open her Group One career last month, but her no-show in the Moyglare Stud Stakes was soon forgotten at Newmarket on Friday as Aidan O’Brien’s filly showed steely determination to edge past Shuwari by half a length in the Fillies’ Mile, the feature event on day one of Future Champions Weekend.
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Ryan Moore’s mount overcame a slow start and a tricky moment two furlongs out, as See The Fire, who eventually finished third, drifted left across the course. The step up from seven furlongs to a mile proved crucial, however, as she stayed on strongly through the closing stages to hit the front a few strides from the line.
This was a record-equalling sixth success in the Group One contest for Ylang Ylang’s trainer, putting him alongside John Gosden and Sir Henry Cecil, and also O’Brien’s first since a hat-trick of wins with Together Forever, Minding and Rhododendron from 2014 to 20126.
Ylang Ylang, ridden by Ryan Moore (second left), wins the Bet365 Fillies’ Mile with Shuwari (right) in second. Photograph: Nigel French/PA
Minding was also the most recent Fillies’ Mile winner to take the 1,000 Guineas the following spring, and Ylang Ylang will now be aimed towards the Classics in 2024.
“She was a bit keen in the Moyglare as she made the running the first two times [she raced],” O’Brien said, “but when her chance was gone, Ryan looked after her. She then came back here for education [when third in the Rockfel Stakes] and the way the race worked out, it was hard to get into it, but Ryan was delighted with her and said to come back for this race.
Quick Guide
Greg Wood's Sunday tips
Show
“The lads [in the Coolmore syndicate] usually like to start them in the Guineas, but looking at her today, she will have no problem getting the Oaks trip.”
Ylang Ylang was cut to around 12-1 for both the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks next season, while Dance Sequence, who gave Charlie Appleby a much-needed juvenile success in the Group Three Oh So Sharp Stakes, is around 20-1 for the Newmarket Classic on 5 May.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/03/rachel-reeves-challenges-rishi-sunak-to-game-of-chess-amid-reports-of-plan-to-revive-game
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Politics
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2023-08-03T15:07:16.000Z
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Aletha Adu
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Rachel Reeves challenges PM to chess match amid plans to revive game
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Rachel Reeves has challenged Rishi Sunak to a game of chess amid reports that 100 tables will be installed in British public parks to boost the profile of the game.
The shadow chancellor, who became the British girls’ chess champion aged 14, welcomed the reported proposals, and hoped her constituency of Leeds West would benefit. But she questioned whether there would be enough sets to go round.
Reeves told BBC Radio 2 on Thursday: “I really hope we get one at a park in Leeds West … all of them would love to have one of these chess sets. It doesn’t sound like there’s many to go around, but also if Rishi Sunak fancies a game of chess, I’m happy to take him on too.”
The prime minister is expected to announce a funding boost of £500,000 for the English Chess Federation, Bloomberg reported, with an announcement to expand the game in schools expected later this month.
Rishi Sunak: it should not be socially acceptable to joke about being bad at maths – video
Funding from Sport England cannot be accessed for the game as it is not officially recognised as a sport in England.
Sunak has expressed his desire to get more British children playing chess, describing it as a “great skill” during a visit to Washington in June.
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‘If you want cartwheels, I’m not your person’: Rachel Reeves on charisma, U-turns and rescuing the economy
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He said: “You know, I’m actually doing a little bit of work now on how we can get more people in the United Kingdom to play chess, because it’s so good for you. It’s a great skill and it’s really good for helping you think and it’s a great hobby.”
The proposals may fall under the prime minister’s plans to end the UK’s inherent “anti-maths mindset” that he believes has hampered efforts to improve numeracy.
In a speech to students, teachers and others in north London planned for Monday, the prime minister is expected to argue that a failure to consider numeracy as basic a skill as reading was costing the UK economy huge sums.
“I won’t sit back and allow this cultural sense that it’s OK to be bad at maths to put our children at a disadvantage. My campaign to transform our national approach to maths is not some ‘nice to have’. It’s about changing how we value maths in this country.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/24/half-uk-public-fear-family-would-not-be-well-looked-after-in-care-homes
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Society
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2023-04-24T05:00:05.000Z
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Robert Booth
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Half of UK public fear family would not be well looked after in care homes
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Trust in care homes has slumped, leaving half of the British public lacking confidence that friends or family would be well looked after.
Nationwide polling for the Guardian revealed nine out of 10 older people believe there are not enough care staff, and half have lost confidence in the standard of care homes since the start of the pandemic.
The survey conducted by Ipsos this month follows a doubling in public dissatisfaction in the NHS and exposes deepening fears about the fitness of a social care sector that had its weaknesses exposed by Covid-19, which claimed 36,000 lives in care homes in England alone.
More than 165,000 adult social care jobs remain vacant, including more than one in 10 care worker posts. The Guardian has revealed how, last year, nearly £2bn in taxpayers’ money was spent on places in below-standard care homes in England, many of which are deemed “not safe” by the regulator, while some private operators have been collecting millions of pounds in profits.
The slump in confidence comes as Oonagh Smyth, the chief executive of the government-funded Skills for Care agency, urged ministers to create an NHS-style workforce strategy and said that for the first time since gathering data, the social care workforce shrank by 3% last year.
This month the government caused anger when it halved planned spending of £500m to boost the social care workforce, a move described by the King’s Fund thinktank as a “dim shadow of the wide-scale reform to adult social care that this government came into office promising”.
The polling also showed almost two-thirds believe care workers are underpaid – a greater level of concern than for nurses who are due to strike over the May Day bank holiday.
The Relatives and Residents Association (RRA) said the polling tallied with calls to its helpline about the “harm and anguish caused by poor care and frustration at the inconsistency in standards”.
Care home where staff were filmed abusing 88-year-old is still breaking rules
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“We must weed out the poor providers and invest in skills – care workers must become our most valued workers, not the least,” said Helen Wildbore, the RRA’s chief executive. “Tomorrow, any one of us could need them.”
Labour seized on the figures as evidence “the public have lost confidence in the government’s ability to get a grip of the social care crisis”.
“Thirteen years of broken Tory promises have left our care system on its knees with record staff vacancies, millions without the help they need and it’s the NHS and families left picking up the strain,” said Liz Kendall, the shadow care minister. Kendall said Labour would provide a new deal for care workers and focus more on caring for people in their own homes, although the party has yet to make spending pledges.
Care England, which represents the largest commercial care operators, blamed the fall in public confidence on “negative media coverage” and successive governments that “have starved our sector of resources for years”.
About 380,000 people live in care homes for older people in the UK and that number is forecast to rise sharply in the coming years, driven by a predicted rise in the number of people living with dementia from 900,000 to 1.6 million by 2040.
Close to 13% of care worker posts are vacant in England and before the latest rise in the minimum wage to £10.42 for people aged over 22, the average hourly pay for a care worker in December was £10.03 – in the bottom 10% of the worst-paying UK jobs, according to Skills for Care.
The Department for Health and Social Care said it was “committed to improving the quality of care for everyone” and said the care home regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has this month started assessing councils’ delivery of their social care duties, which will “identify where improvement and additional support is needed”.
“We are supporting social care with up to £7.5bn over the next two years. Last week we set out the next steps in our plan to reform social care, backed by £700m over the next two years to put people at the heart of care.”
A further pot of up to £600m had yet to be allocated but some could be spent on workforce improvements, it said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/03/german-artist-hito-steyerl-tops-contemporary-art-power-list
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Art and design
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2017-11-03T00:01:09.000Z
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Mark Brown
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German artist Hito Steyerl tops contemporary art power list
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Hito Steyerl, a German artist, writer and theorist known for taking a strong political stand and being unafraid to challenge the power of the art market, has been named the most influential person in contemporary art.
Steyerl is the first female artist to top the annual ArtReview Power 100 list, now in its 16th year.
Last year she was at number seven. This year a committee of 20 art insiders propelled her to number one, and she gains the top spot from the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries.
Liberation day: the artists fighting the power of the market – and the internet
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Oliver Basciano, ArtReview’s international editor, said Steyerl was a huge influence to other artists. “The way she works, not just her actual work but the way she runs her studio, is an influence and an inspiration to many younger artists. She looks to disrupt power networks that you can probably see run through the Power 100 and run though the art world.”
Steyerl makes large sculptures, installations and videos which are the product of large amounts of research. This year her work appeared in the once-a-decade Skulptur Projekte Münster and in exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Gwacheon, Helsinki, New York, São Paulo, Turin and Vienna.
On display at Tate Modern is her Monty Python-inspired video piece called ‘How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013’ in which she provides a (sort of) manual on how to be invisible to surveillance.
Steyerl is far from a household name but Basciano hopes that is changing. “The art world is quite an insular place and it takes quite a while for an artist to trickle out, to become a name my mum and dad know. But she is becoming progressively better known in the wider world.”
He said Steyerl was one of a number of artists on the 2017 list who are trying, sometimes succeeding, to have a wider political and social influence.
“We are looking at artists who have very strong practice, are in museums all over the world, doing everything you would expect of an artist, but are also doing more. After the couple of years the world has had, I think that is a very strong thing to look at.”
For that reason the French artist Pierre Huyghe, whose work focuses on environemental issues, is in second place while the Turner prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who was involved in artistic campaigns against Brexit and the German rightwing AfD party, is at 11.
There is no place for Damien Hirst, last on the list in 2012, despite his enormous show at two venues in Venice this year.
Basciano said Hirst was not often cited as an influence to younger artists, unlike similarly big name artists such as Jeff Koons, who is on the list at 54, Yayoi Kusama (55) and Marina Abramovic (89).
This year’s 2017 list suggests there is a need today for big thinking. At number 3 is Donna Haraway, the feminist cultural theorist, while at number 9 is the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour.
“The more right the world goes, the people who are activists get more powerful. They get more attention,” said Basciano.
Steyerl has been an outspoken critic of the art market but it is well represented in the 2017 list. The top dealer is German David Zwirner at number 5, followed by Iwan & Manuela Wirth (Hauser & Wirth) at 7.
Tate’s new director, Maria Balshaw, who succeeded Nicholas Serota, makes it to number 16, one above the director of MoMA in New York, Glenn Lowry.
2017 ArtReview Power List, top 10
Hito Steyerl
Pierre Huyghe
Donna Haraway
Adam Szymczyk
David Zwirner
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Iwan & Manuela Wirth
Thelma Golden
Bruno Latour
Gavin Brown
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/04/soldier-jaysley-beck-took-her-own-life-sexual-harassment-army
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UK news
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2023-10-04T12:59:36.000Z
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Geneva Abdul
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British soldier took her own life after sexual harassment from boss, says army
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A 19-year-old soldier is believed to have taken her own life after being subjected to sexual harassment from her boss, according to an internal army inquiry report.
Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck was found dead at Larkhill Camp in Wiltshire in December 2021 after experiencing “an intense period of unwelcome behaviour”, the inquiry report said.
A redacted version of the internal review, published on Wednesday, details how Beck received more than 1,000 messages and voicemails from her boss in October 2021. In November, the number of messages increased to more than 3,500. The boss is not named in the report.
“It is almost certain this was a causal factor in her death,” the report said. In the weeks before her death, she messaged her boss to say: “I can’t handle it any more. It’s weighing me down.”
Speaking to the BBC, Beck’s mother, Leighann McCready, said: “You’d think the easiest solution is block him, you can’t just block your boss.” She said her daughter was reluctant to report the behaviour because of how a previous sexual assault complaint was dealt with by the army.
McCready said: “She was always down, she was fed up of his behaviour, [and] it just started ruining a job that she really enjoyed doing.”
The report said Beck’s death came “out of the blue” to her chain of command. It also said two relationships, an “unhealthy approach to alcohol”, and family issues including a bereavement may also have contributed to Beck’s death.
Her mother rejected this, telling the BBC: “I think they are trying to put a lot on her family. They have said that we are partly to blame for the passing of our daughter.”
An inquest date to determine how the 19-year-old died has yet to be set. Beck, who joined the army at 16, had no diagnosed mental health conditions, according to the report. Britain is one of 19 countries that recruit 16-year-olds into the army.
The report found significant evidence of inappropriate sexual behaviour from male soldiers towards female soldiers at the Larkhill garrison, with one witness describing routinely receiving comments from male soldiers that were “vile” and “degrading”, according to the Centre for Military Justice (CMJ), which is representing the family.
The case raises wider questions surrounding the “culture of institutional misogyny” at army barracks that have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. In 2021, a parliamentary report said the UK military was failing to protect female recruits. It revealed nearly two-thirds of women in the armed forces had experienced bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination during their career – which later resulted in an overhaul by the MoD into how complaints were handled.
In July 2021, it was reported that Beck had been sexually assaulted by a warrant officer at a social event. After the incident, which was reported by a colleague, Beck hid in the bathroom and later spent the remainder of the evening in her car, according to the report.
The CMJ said the incident was reported but not referred to police, and there “appears to have been no meaningful investigation”. The chain of command “took the incident seriously”, but the report added: “Evidence suggests that the correct reporting process was not followed.”
In a letter of apology to Beck after the incident, the perpetrator wrote his “door will always be open”, according to the CMJ. The report acknowledged that how the incident was handled may have contributed to a loss of confidence in Beck reporting future incidents.
“This is something my daughter will have to carry, or would have had to carry, for the rest of her life,” said McCready.
Beck told her family of the sexual assault and “a sustained campaign” of controlling sexual harassment from her boss in the months before she died, said the family’s lawyer, Emma Norton.
Norton said: “It is hugely significant that the army has admitted that this sexual harassment was a causative factor in her death. If there is one silver lining in this awful situation it is the fact that the army has accepted that at this relatively early stage. I don’t think that would have happened a few years ago.”
An army spokesperson said: “Our thoughts and sympathies remain with Gunner Jaysley-Louise Beck’s family and friends at this difficult time. The circumstances surrounding Gunner Beck’s death, including the cause, are still to be determined by the coroner. It would be inappropriate to comment further until the coroner’s inquest has been completed.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/06/eloy-prison-arizona-detention-deportation-trump
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US news
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2017-06-06T10:00:20.000Z
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Rory Carroll
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One prison, two realities: detainees suffer, but locals say it keeps a poor town afloat
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The Arizona town of Eloy used to live off cotton until it sucked up so much groundwater the desert floor began to crack and collapse. The town withered and almost died. Then it found a new source of revenue: people, colour-coded in blue, green and khaki uniforms.
America’s biggest private prison operator built a complex with four prisons in Eloy and imported prisoners from across the United States. CoreCivic, previously the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), is now Eloy’s biggest employer and taxpayer, contributing about $2m to its $12m general fund budget.
'Belly of the beast': former inmates hail New York plan to close Rikers Island jail
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In addition to generating property and sales tax revenues, the approximately 6,500 prisoners boost state disbursements by swelling Eloy’s official population to more than 17,000. “It’s a positive thing for a small rural community, a great help to us,” said Harvey Krauss, the city manager.
Under Donald Trump that bounty is set to grow: he wants to funnel more immigrant detainees to private prisons.
There is, in theory, a dilemma for this dusty town tucked between Phoenix and Tucson. One of the four prisons inside CoreCivic’s complex has been dubbed America’s deadliest immigrant detention centre. There have been 15 deaths, including at least five suicides, since 2003, according to an Arizona Republic tally.
A recent joint study by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (Civic) found that detainees who are incarcerated pending deportation proceedings were needlessly suffering and dying at Eloy and other facilities because of improper medical care and misuse of solitary confinement. It cited “systemic failure”.
CoreCivic’s Eloy detention center in Arizona. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian
Jose de Jesus Deniz Sahagun, 31, from Mexico, died after a disturbing suicide. Manuel Cota-Domingo, 34, a Guatemalan with diabetes and pneumonia, died when staff dithered over calling 911.
The Department of Homeland Security’s office of civil rights and civil liberties sent a report to Congress in 2015 complaining that the 1,520-bed facility ignored and delayed implementing its recommendations, including for better suicide prevention.
“They just give you water,” Miguel Cornejo, 40, who spent nine months there in 2015, told the Guardian. “If you’ve a headache, drink water. Stomachache, drink water. Cancer, drink water. Water is their cure for everything.”
Immigrant rights activists have protested outside the prison, which is surrounded by desolate scrub. Juanes and John Legend gave a concert there last year to highlight conditions.
Such notoriety could present a challenge to the residents of Eloy. It does not.
“It’s pretty much out of sight, out of mind,” said Krauss. Residents are spread over a 100 sq miles and many never see, let alone visit, the prison complex. “People just live their daily lives, do their own thing. Prison is just an industry.”
Mark Benner, a chamber of commerce spokesman, agreed: “We are non-political. If someone comes down here and protests they’re entitled to have their point of view. We’re interested in businesses.”
Residents echoed that view. Few were aware of the immigration prison’s controversial reputation. When told, they shrugged.
People just live their daily lives, do their own thing. Prison is just an industry
Harvey Krauss, Eloy city manager
“If they’re in there, they’re there for a reason,” said Tony Pedigo, 39, a steel worker relaxing in the Tumbleweed bar. He had not heard of the suicides but saw no reason to fret. “Either they’re weak and snuffing themselves out, or it’s a way of covering up gang crime stuff.”
Rob Harness, 64, an electrician, had heard of protests but was not sympathetic. “The protestors ought to be shot. They’re just looking for trouble.” He also advocated a lethal policy for border crossers. “You come here a third time, we put you in the ground.”
Eloy is majority Latino. Many of the town’s undocumented residents fear going out lest they be nabbed and deported, said Cesar Diaz, 43, who runs a taco cafe with a Mexican flag. Lunch traffic has fallen about 60% since Trump’s inauguration, he said.
Yet there appears to be no resentment toward the guards, many Latino, who jail those who are caught. A department of corrections recruitment poster (“Hiring! An important job. A better life”) adorned the cafe wall. “Before we had the fields. Now we have the prison. It’s good pay,” said Diaz, 43.
Correctional officer recruitment poster in Eloy, Arizona. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian
Support here for the prison, a vital cog in deportation machinery, contrasts with anger at rallies across the US where activists protest Trump’s immigration crackdown.
For Eloy, earning a living comes first. Average per capita income is just $9,000. Poverty is rife. Almost nine out of 10 schoolchildren qualify for food aid.
Lack of economic opportunity “enslaves” residents, said Father Alonzo Garcia, a Catholic priest. “To get into the middle class, [working at the] prison is the best bet.”
The post office’s sole jobs flyer was for correctional officer positions: $31,885 starting salary, health and life insurance, paid holidays and sick days, bereavement leave, training programmes.
CoreCivic is active in the community, sponsoring food drives, marathons and school donations. Cheerleaders toss T-shirts with “Eloy Detention Center” logos into the crowd during football games, said Orlenda Roberts, superintendent of Santa Cruz Valley Union high school district.
“There are very few jobs so when you have a large institute in the middle of a small town it just takes on a life of its own,” said Juanita Molina, head of the Border Action Network advocacy group. “There’s a feeling of loyalty, either you’re with the company or you’re with the protestors.”
Isabel Garcia, a Tucson-based lawyer with the rights group Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, said economic hardship eroded solidarity. “When you have colonised people you have people who want to be like the coloniser.”
Detention center T-shirt donated to Eloy school. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian
CCA opened its Eloy complex in 1994, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Allegations about sub-standard medical care multiplied under Barack Obama, dubbed by some the “deporter-in-chief” for his administration’s record number of removals.
“The Democrats helped to create this massive incarceration and enforcement machinery and handed it over to Trump,” said Garcia. Border crossings have fallen but the spike in arrests in the US interior will swell detention numbers, she predicted.
Behind bars, beyond means: the crushing expense of loving someone in prison
Read more
Late in his presidency Obama decided to phase out the use of private prisons to hold federal prisoners. Hillary Clinton vowed to end the private prison system altogether. The day after Trump won CoreCivic’s stock jumped 43%. Trump subsequently signed an executive order to expand immigrant detention facilities and let private contractors build and run them.
CoreCivic referred queries for this article to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the government agency with oversight. A spokesperson said Ice officers made daily visits and inspections: “Ice officers and staff are committed to ensuring a safe environment for all those in the agency’s custody.” CoreCivic’s website says the Eloy detention centre offers education, vocational programs, drug rehabilitation and behaviour services. Photos show smiling, avuncular staff.
Cornejo, the former prisoner, who is now an activist with the rights group Puente, gave a darker view, alleging that guards were aggressive and made detainees feel like criminals. “It’s a place of sadness that should not exist.”
The Guardian was allowed to observe hearings at one of the immigration courts inside the facility: a spartan, compact room with whitewashed walls, fluorescent lighting, a calendar, a clock and a US flag. A black-robed judge, Linda Spencer-Walters, sat at a raised desk.
Eleven detainees waited their turn on wooden benches. A few spoke English and had lawyers. Most did not and relied on a translator and the judge to explain what was happening. Each hearing lasted on average eight minutes and set new dates for further hearings, evidence of a backlogged system.
Karen, a young woman from Guatemala, had requested asylum. The judge gave her a trial date: 23 April 2018, at 1pm. “That’s when I’ll hear all the details of why you can’t go back to Guatemala.”
Karen looked at the clock, then the calendar. She seemed to be calculating the days and hours. She looked numb. A guard ushered her out.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/27/sex-cinema-secretary-men-women-and-children
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Film
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2014-11-27T16:23:29.000Z
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Erin Cressida Wilson
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Sex, cinema and secrets: early exposure at the arthouse
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Growing up in 1970s San Francisco I was often dragged by my parents to explicit foreign films at small cinemas like the Clay or the Vogue, the Balboa or the Castro.
There I’d sit, underage and somehow smuggled in, on a scratchy red chair that smelled of popcorn and sticky floors, surrounded by bohemians and intellectuals watching the same thing that I was watching: sex.
Back then, the entire city felt drenched in sensuality, and so did my home. It was here on sweaty afternoons that I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, curled up with my mother, drawing constellations and stars and universes from freckle to freckle across her skin.
I was trying to find the secret - the reason that fueled her to grab my hand on Sunday afternoons, take a left turn as far away from the playground as possible, and rush me to the opening weekend of I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969 – age five), Carnal Knowledge (1971 – age seven), Last Tango in Paris (1972 – age eight), A Clockwork Orange (1972 – age eight), The Mother and the Whore (1973 – age nine), and Swept Away … by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974 – age 10).
I would sit next to my mother on these afternoons and inevitably a tendril of tension would start emanating from the screen, and from her. Suddenly, in a fierce whisper, she would instruct me to look at the floor. And so I would stare at a discarded popcorn box, a spilled drink or simply the darkness that disappeared into the seat ahead of me – listening carefully to quickening breaths – allowing the film’s soundscape to caress me. I learned to peek with my eyes to see bodies in motion, pushing like animals, doing something mysterious that I didn’t understand, but somehow enjoyed.
It was during this era that even the more explicit films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) managed to cross over into the mainstream. My mother blessedly spared me these films. A confluence of factors – among them the rise of television and a growing counterculture – led film-makers to mine previously taboo topics. The abandonment of the Production Code in 1968 opened the floodgates for sex to migrate from dirty theatres to more legit venues. But it was short-lived thanks to a 1973 Supreme Court decision that once again shunted these features to adult picturehouses. Nevertheless, it was a transformative time to be coming-of-age.
But despite this early education in sexually-explicit cinema, I never quite understood how I came to construct the power dynamics in my script for Secretary (2002 – age 38). It wasn’t until I came across my mother’s diary, a few months before her death, that I started to fully comprehend what was at work in my subconscious. This journal kept a weekly record of what turned out to be my mother’s 20+ year affair with her shrink. One afternoon in 1951, after only a few sessions, he pronounced my mother to be a sadomasochist. Not great shrinkage, but there was a lot of truth there. And reading my mother’s diaries brought me to understand that secrets that fly around a house actually do get absorbed by children in ways that are mysterious.
Ours was a house full of books. Food to eat was scarce but it was packed to the rafters with words to read. It took hours of searching the pages of highbrow literature to find anything naughty. I quickly figured out that in a cinephile’s house, some of the easiest sources of sexy images were film magazines. Curious and dressed in my school uniform, knee socks, and saddle shoes, I would sneak down to the basement and flick through my father’s stashes of magazines. Alongside the mildewed copies of Oui, Hustler and Playboy, were stacks of Film Quarterly whose pages were charged with erotica, drama, and – best of all – a lot of European men.
If the city and our house felt like extensions of all things carnal, then our derelict basement seemed to be the epicentre. Oddly, my parents’ bedroom, with its door always open, seemed to be the one place sex did not inhabit. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written much on basements and their psychological connotations. In The Poetics of Space, he posits the attic as the site of rationality and the basement as the site of irrationality – manifestations of the conscious and the unconscious respectively. While the attic provides reassurance, the basement provides mystery.
Watch the trailer for Men, Women and Children Guardian
And mysteries it held. It’s where my father hid not only his porn, but his alcohol. It’s where my mother, a lover of many men, hid her love letters – locked in a metal box buried in the dirt under the house. She would often say to me, “Don’t go under the house.” And just as her order to not look at the sexy films had spurred me on to do so, I would indeed look under the house. When I finally uncovered “the box,” I found on the very top, a note to my father: “Dear heart, if you find these letters, I loved only you.” And then underneath were handwritten and typed letters from the men, often writers. On thin onion skin paper were words of love and sex and longing. But my mother had, like a true self-censor, carefully cut out all the explicit words with scissors. If I held the paper up to the light, it was like lace.
It was also in this basement that my mother would invite the dustbin men in. They were Italian-Americans who collected our trash in large burlap sacks that they’d throw over their shoulders before going back down the 30 or so stairs to their truck. In the same way I imagined my father would linger on the sexy images of his magazines, my mother admired these men, their muscles dancing and backs straining under the weight of our detritus. She would say to me, “Look at his hands. Look at his lips. Look at his back. Listen to his voice.” She was giving me erotic instruction.
Ansel Elgort, Cressida Wilson, Reitman and Adam Sandler at the Toronto photocall for Men, Women and Children. Photograph: George Pimentel/WireImage
It felt natural that in my early adulthood I would start writing plays about sex. Though in the 1980s New York theatre scene, a woman liking men was practically against the natural order. There appeared to be a rulebook thrown at every emerging playwright. If you were gay, an obligatory coming-out play was what was called for. If you were a person of colour, you were told to cash that card in and write with that in mind. If you were a woman? It was advisable to write about how abusive men were. It was not so good to be a thinking woman who was phallus-embracing. At Smith, the all-women’s college I attended in Massachusetts, girls walked around in T-shirts that said, “A Century of Women on Top”. And I remember asking, “What if you don’t like being on top? Does that mean you aren’t a feminist?”
My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.
By the time I wrote the screenplay for Secretary, I had given up all hope of ever reaching a wider audience. No movie star would accept playing the lead in that film. After all, to portray a submissive and to be spanked onscreen would be a disastrous move for their careers. In addition, there was talk early on that the script was sexist because it ended with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character making a bed and dropping a cockroach on it - so that her husband would find it and punish her. It was repeatedly suggested to me that – instead - she should “find herself,” and become a lawyer herself. She should be powerful in a way that appeared strong through a traditional feminist lens. There was also a vibe around the film that Gyllenhaal’s character should overcome her problem. Again, I didn’t consider her to have a problem. And so I decided that this was a coming-out film for a masochist.
When the film screened at the Sundance film festival, middle-aged feminists stomped out during the spanking scene. I’d sit on the bus that shuttled us through the snow between screenings and eavesdrop on conversations. When the subject of Secretary came up, film-goers would look sideways. No comment. After all, in 2002, educated film-makers were not supposed to like this sort of thing. They were not supposed to like BDSM. And so we came away from Sundance with an honourable mention and exhaustion. We had not sold the film to a distributor. I had observed other films like Tadpole getting sold to Miramax for $5m. It was not a sexy situation. Perhaps we were the ultimate masochists, attempting to make this film in such a climate.
But Secretary was allowed to sit on the vine for a long time thanks to an eventual distribution deal from Lion’s Gate Entertainment, the advent of home video, DVDs, streaming and the glory of late night airings on the Sundance Channel. Today, it seems that what was pornographic 12 years ago is passé and maybe even clichéd. One generation’s risqué becomes the baseline for the next.
Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in Chloe (2010), which Cressida Wilson wrote. Photograph: Photograph: Allstar/Optimum Releasing
These days I watch films with both eyes open. There are no discarded popcorn boxes on the floor to stare at because I’m at home, alone. And I’m usually not watching a film, but a serialised cable television show. Sometimes I miss being uncomfortable around other movie-goers. I miss the furtive glances as we exit the dark into the bright light to fall into a café and get drunk on caffeine or alcohol, cigarette smoke streaming out of our mouths as we anxiously talk in and around the film we have just seen.
My mother used to tell me – among the many things she told me – that there was nothing sexier than a man whose breath smelled of scotch and cigarettes. I miss cinema and sticky floors and popcorn on an empty stomach. We move forward, but some of us stop sometimes to remember what it was like to fill in the blanks of a dirty letter, to hunt for the naughty film magazine, and to look up between one’s fingers to catch a glimpse.
Men, Women and Children is released in the UK on 5 December
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/01/marmolada-queen-of-dolomites-glacier-could-vanish-within-15-years
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Environment
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2020-09-01T14:17:21.000Z
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Angela Giuffrida
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Queen of the Dolomites glacier could vanish within 15 years
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The largest and most symbolic glacier in the Dolomites could vanish within 15 years because of global heating, Italian scientists have warned.
The 3,343m Marmolada, located on the border of the Trentino and Veneto regions and known as the Queen of the Dolomites, has already lost more than 80% of its volume over the last 70 years.
Satellite images show rapid growth of glacial lakes worldwide
Read more
Aldino Bondesan, a geophysics professor at the University of Padua and member of the Italian Glaciological Committee, said forecasts of the glacier’s extinction were getting closer.
“In the short-term, there is nothing we can do to save it,” Bondesan said. “Because the trend of glaciers in Italy, and of those worldwide, can only be reversed if there is a global effort and a reduction of the climate change in progress.”
Bondesan said the sharp drop in carbon emissions during the coronavirus lockdown had only a minimal influence on helping to reverse the trend for Marmolada and other glaciers. “It didn’t last long and things are getting back to normal,” he added.
Marmolada has been measured every year since 1902 and is considered a “natural thermometer” of climatic change. The glacier’s ice volume has fallen from 95m cubic metres in 1954 to 14m today.
“It’s the largest and most symbolic glacier in the Dolomites and responds better than others to climate change,” Bondesan said. “So the variations in volume and dimensions give a clear and immediate indication of climatic changes.”
The Italian Glaciological Committee monitors 200 of Italy’s 900 glaciers. The results of the latest study on Marmolada will be sent to the World Glacier Monitoring Service and published in the Journal of Glaciology.
The warning over Marmolada comes less than a month after homes were evacuated in a hamlet of Courmayeur, in the Aosta valley, following a renewed alert that a huge portion of the Mont Blanc glacier, Planpincieux, was at risk of collapse. The movement of the glacial mass was due to “anomalous temperature trends”, experts said.
Planpincieux has been closely monitored since 2013 to detect the speed at which the ice is melting. In August 2018, a heavy storm unleashed a debris flow, killing an elderly couple when their car was swept from the road, which is currently closed.
In the event of a collapse, it would take less than two minutes for the mass to reach the municipal road below.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/nov/20/sky-bt-premier-league-bids
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Football
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2014-11-20T14:58:26.000Z
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Owen Gibson
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Sky and BT playing cat and mouse ahead of Premier League bids process | Owen Gibson
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Striding into a suite at the five star Landmark Hotel in London, they couldn’t help but look like the cats that got the cream. Last time around Richard Scudamore and the small coterie of advisers who have overseen an explosion in broadcasting income engineered an auction that saw the value of domestic live rights alone rise by 70% to more than £3bn.
Since the then Tottenham Hotspur chairman, Alan Sugar, famously told Sky’s chief Sam Chisholm to blow ITV “out of the water” in a clandestine phone call ahead of the launch of the Premier League, the value of the rights has spiralled from £191m for that initial deal to £5.5bn for the current contract.
No wonder Scudamore and company were smiling. While the industry and the media were speculating on whether Qatar’s BeInSports would enter the fray, a small group of BT executives had been secretly plotting a rival bid around the kitchen table of John Petter, the head of its consumer division.
The bold arrival of BT Sport, part of a strategy by the telecoms giant to stop BSkyB and other rivals eating its lunch in the broadband market, could not have been better timed for the Premier League’s lucky generals.
BeInSports had ultimately decided against a tilt at the competitive UK market, preferring to concentrate on France and the rest of the world, while ESPN had retreated to the US with its tail between its legs.
The outcome could have been more dramatic still. BT is understood to have outbid Sky for most of the seven packages on offer in the first round of bidding. It was only when a spooked Sky vastly upped its offer that it retained 116 live games per season at a cost of £767m per year. BT ended up paying £246m per year for its 38 matches a year under a contract that runs until the end of next season. It was a familiar tale that has underpinned the Premier League boom.
Whatever challenges the wider economy or regulators have thrown at it, the Premier League’s income from broadcasting rights – which has fuelled a commensurate rise in the wage packets of players and agents – has continued to grow and grow. Even at worst, growth has merely levelled out before returning to a steep upward trajectory.
Analysts have given up predicting whether or when the Premier League boom will come to an end. “It’s possible the bubble will never burst. It will just change shape,” speculated one source close to the process.
Given the extent to which the rights to those 154 live matches are of vital strategic importance to both BT and Sky, it is unlikely to happen this time, when battle commences early in the new year around. The Osterley-based pay TV giant has seen off challenges from ITV Digital, Setanta and ESPN down the years, but BT has emerged as its biggest and best funded rival yet.
There is pressure from both broadcasters to further increase the size of the cake from the current 154 live matches. By squeezing in another package of games, the Premier League could look to keep both BT and Sky happy and ensure that both have enough live matches to sustain their respective business models.
But while there may be room for a handful of extra games, the Premier League is mindful that without eating into the Saturday 2.45pm to 5.15pm blackout period there are not many other suitable slots given pressure from fans, police and transport companies.
There has been a strong lobby from broadcasters to introduce a new package of Sunday evening matches but the Premier League is understood to feel it is impractical.
BT Sport’s £897m capture of exclusive Champions League rights from next season has further upped the ante. It has increased Sky’s need to hang onto the lion’s share of Premier League rights and left BT Sport on the horns of a strategic dilemma.
Broadcasting from new purpose built studios on London’s Olympic Park, BT’s entry into the world of sports broadcasting has been solid if unspectacular. Yet it has had the desired effect of boosting new broadband customers and increasing loyalty among existing customers by giving the channels away free. That must change from next season, because it will have to start charging for those Champions League matches to cover the cost.
The big question is whether it will launch another all out assault on Sky’s dominance or settle for being the junior partner. Petter told the Guardian this year that both options were still in play but that the Uefa deal enabled it to make the decision from a position of strength.
From their ever expanding base in west London, Sky are fond of pointing out that they still broadcast all the most watched matches of the year and have not seen BT’s intervention dent their subscription figures.
Following the shock to the system of losing the Champions League, the Sky Sports managing director, Barney Francis, has embarked on a trolley dash of other rights to shore up its position. Meanwhile, other potential bidders for live Premier League football – including Eurosport, now owned by US giant Discovery – are circling.
The Premier League is still expected to go to market early next year despite this week’s curveball of a full Ofcom investigation triggered by a complaint from Virgin Media. The cable giant, which has now bowed out of the tussle for sports rights but broadcasts both Sky Sports and BT Sport, is looking to bring prices down by claiming that more matches should be made available.
That, in turn, has led Ofcom to consider whether all 380 Premier League matches should be shown live on television. That is already the case in Germany and in some of the major US leagues. Some analysts have long argued that the Premier League should follow their lead, allowing broadcasters to sell season ticket packages that would allow fans to follow all of their team’s matches.
But Scudamore, who has seen off a string of regulatory challenges from the European Commission to Portsmouth landlady Karen Murphy, will argue that the Saturday 3pm blackout should remain sacrosanct to protect the lower leagues. And, of course, the Premier League’s sales model.
The innate instinct of the Premier League is to stick with the model that has served them so well and the looming tender is likely to be closely modelled on the last one that divided the 154 live matches into seven packages.
Somewhere down the line it will have to decide whether it might make more sense to sell its rights on a pan-European basis – a trend that News Corporation’s James Murdoch recently forecast – in light of BSkyB’s merger with Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia. But for now, it is likely to be broadly business as usual.
With no timescale on the Ofcom investigation, the Premier League is likely to press ahead with the rights tender as planned. Meanwhile, a parallel Competition Appeals Tribunal process, into the price at which Sky wholesales its sports channels to its competitors, also rumbles on.
Away from the main tussle for live domestic rights there are a host of other subplots. News UK, the media group that has now split off from Rupert Murdoch’s TV and film interests and owns newspapers including The Sun and The Times, must decide whether shelling out on the rights to goal clips in order to attract online subscribers remains a fruitful strategy.
Meanwhile ITV is likely to launch a challenge to the BBC’s rights to the £180m highlights package that forms the basis for a thriving Match of the Day.And the Premier League must decide how to best balance revenue generation and expanding its footprint in an international market that has fuelled recent growth. The US, in particular, will be fertile ground this time around in the overseas auction that will follow the domestic one. Interest in the Premier League has boomed under the current NBC deal.
Underpinning all of this is the ongoing need for the Premier League’s top executives to maintain support for the “collective selling” model that has served them so well.
The system of selling the rights centrally and then distributing the money on a sliding scale according to how many times a team is shown and where they finish - while dividing booming overseas rights income equally between the 20 - has held despite the changing of the guard among owners.
Eleven of the 20 Premier League clubs are now in the hands of overseas owners, with all of the big clubs obsessed with expanding their international income.
And with the pressures of Financial Fair Play, which requires them to boost revenues from broadcasting and commerical deals, there is bound to be pressure once more on the Premier League to let bigger clubs keep a larger share of their international TV income. The issue last came up in 2011 when Liverpool managing director Ian Ayre charged over the top only to find that none of the other big clubs were prepared to follow in publicly challenging the model.
But the only way for the Premier League to keep that debate at bay is to keep delivering ever larger cheques. The revived interest in the idea for a round of competitive fixtures to be played abroad should also be seen in that context.
The rights auction will also provide the backdrop to another familiar tussle - over how the riches are divided.
When the last deal was announced, Scudamore stressed that clubs would have to ensure that not all of their increased television income found its way into the pay packets of players.
Yet conspicuous consumption has largely continued to be the order of the day, while debate over ticket prices continues and the grassroots game remains locked in state of permanent crisis.
But most of those arguments can wait until after the next big reveal in a central London hotel suite. In the meantime, let battle commence.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/12/spare-selfie-school-feminism-women-always-give-too-much-information-suzanne-moore
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Opinion
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2014-11-12T20:00:09.000Z
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Suzanne Moore
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Spare me the selfie school of feminism: women always give up too much information | Suzanne Moore
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This is all about me, because, the thing is, I’m actually OK. Even though I’m a woman and a feminist, it’s fine. I don’t do guilt, so I can’t really confess to any. Sorry, I realise this is a poor start and that I should be ashamed of myself. Maybe just take it as given that self-hatred is part of the female experience, and that discussing it is bonding as well as financially and psychologically satisfying. Feel my pain. At a price. Or watch the reward centres in my brain light up when you follow me on Instagram. We all know Sylvia Plath would have had loads of Twitter followers. She wrote of the charge levied “for the eyeing of my scars”.
Tasteless? Sure! For the confessional depends on busting every permeable membrane. The genre is everywhere now, and it’s often done in the name of feminism. As ever, women get the double shift. You have to hate yourself, then hate yourself even more for not being a good enough feminist.
Or could you refuse to amplify your anxieties for the world? If we want this selfie school of feminism, the endless disclosure is already there. It’s all over the shop. Literally – it sells.
Some of it is brilliantly done. Obviously, I’m not the target audience. The selfie is now a way of being, a state of mind, a literary form. A teenager sat in my house the other day and took 500 pictures of herself in an hour or so. A generation caught between the selfie – yes, often ironic and gurning – and actual mirrors that make many girls extremely miserable also lives with the idea that the relaying of every interior monologue is communication.
I’m not sure it is, because acute self- consciousness is not the same as acute self-knowledge. Only one of these is powerful. Only one of these moves things forwards.
Ask yourself who discloses, to whom and why. It’s simple stuff. If you’re late for work, you explain why the bus was stuck in traffic; your boss doesn’t explain to you. Women always give away too much information. As Lena Dunham has said, oversharing is complex and gendered and society trivialises female experience. I’m not down on Dunham, whose intense interiority merely reflects her intense privilege. She does great work. What she isn’t, or has never claimed to be, is the future of feminism, because no one person is. Not even Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.
Sharing or consciousness-raising has always been an important tool for feminism, since it moves personal issues into the public arena. It means we recognise there is a structure out there that is systematically making women feel bad.
In 1969, Carol Hanisch coined the phrase “the personal is political” in an essay called Feminist Revolution. She was saying consciousness-raising is about more than therapy – it’s about connecting an individual struggle to a collective one. Fighting a system that makes each of us feel crap is what feminism does. For feminism is about doing, surely? Maybe that’s just my wishful thinking.
This is why I find the myriad questions about what feminists are allowed to do so dumb. Can you be a feminist and have a white wedding? Go right ahead, pretend virgin! Can you have botox, wear lippy and like being tied up? Can you go on a diet and care about Syria at the same time? Feminism is reduced to a series of bogus lifestyle choices. The answer to all these questions, by the way, is, obviously, think for yourself – don’t ask me.
As with the horrible “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt, we are again using the wrong verbs. I don’t care what a feminist looks like – the punchline is only ever “a man”. Pass the smelling salts, it’s 2014. I care about what people do. Politics is about doing, not simply being; activity, not passivity. All around are fantastic campaigns on FGM, abortion, equal pay.
So, enough of the guilt trip. Indeed, the last time I went to talk about abortion, loads of women were saying their main feeling after a termination was relief. The only thing they felt bad about was that they felt no guilt. But these are not the confessionals we hear. Instead, it’s constant self-flagellation. Regrets, disordered eating, feeling deeply unlovable. There may be a sisterhood, but it’s too often a fake intimacy, a self-reinforcing victimhood.
Talking about our “issues” obviously helps others. Sometimes. So does understanding your own history. The idealised nuclear family life that drove so many to depression and valium is what gave rise in the 60s to books like Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which documented female misery. Each generation creates its own self-loathing. Now it’s binging and purging and self-harm. Young women reinvent the wheels that continue to flatten them.
It’s hard. We record every moment: everything is a hall of mirrors in which the self is reflected back at all times. Does any one of us have the necessary self-esteem? No. We are all flawed, but we are good enough. Do I need all the details of your dysfunction? No. Spare me the confessions and the 500 selfies.
For out there is a world controlled by those who disclose very little about their inner lives. That’s how we live.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/07/british-group-wins-right-to-take-brexit-case-to-european-court
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Politics
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2018-02-07T15:27:42.000Z
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Lisa O'Carroll
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British group wins right to take Brexit case to European court
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British citizens seeking to retain their EU citizenship rights after Brexit have won a landmark legal ruling that will result in their case being heard in the European court of justice.
Five British nationals settled in the Netherlands had asked the court in Amsterdam to refer their case to the ECJ last month on the grounds that their existing rights could not be removed because of the UK referendum to leave the EU. The judge ruled on Wednesday that the case could be referred.
A spokesman for Brexpats – Hear Our Voice, which led the challenge, said: “We are grateful to the court and obviously delighted with the decision. However, this is just the first step in clarifying what Brexit could mean for our EU citizenship.
“This case has always been about seeking clarification, not only for the 46,000 Brits living in the Netherlands, but also for all the 1.2 million Brits living in other EU countries.
“As has been demonstrated in recent days, what Brexit means is still extremely unclear. You cannot play with the lives of 1.2 million people as if they are pieces on a chessboard.”
Q&A
Brexit phrasebook: what are citizens' rights?
Show
The lobby group, the five Britons and the Commercial Anglo Dutch Society were the named claimants in the case that was funded and supported by Jolyon Maugham, the QC behind a series of Brexit legal challenges in Britain.
The judge will issue two draft questions to be put before the ECJ within the next two weeks.
The first question asks the ECJ panel of judges to determine whether Brexit means British nationals will automatically lose their EU citizenship and all the rights that flow from that, including freedom of movement.
If the answer to that question is no, then the ECJ judges are asked to determine what, if any, conditions or limitations should apply to the maintenance of those rights once Britain leaves the EU.
Floris Bakels, a judge at Amsterdam district court, said in his ruling that the rights of minorities should not be prejudiced by a referendum under the law. “The essence of a democratic constitutional state is that the rights and interests of minorities are protected as much as possible,” he added.
Why I helped bring the Dutch case over Britons’ EU rights
Jolyon Maugham
Read more
The applicants’ lawyer, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, had argued that the Lisbon treaty gave British nationals the right to retain EU citizenship after Brexit because it stated, in article 20, that “citizenship of the union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship”.
Thijm said: “This is a great victory because the questions are very important questions about the interpretation of law around EU citizenship. The judge is a former supreme court judge, so the arguments about the Lisbon treaty were followed by the judge. We need brave judges who are confident to refer questions like this to the ECJ.”
Maugham said that the outcome of the case would be “profoundly important” for British people living in the EU. He said he was heartened by the attitude of the Dutch court. “The UK courts seem to find themselves cowed by the political dynamic,” he said. “I’m very pleased that judges elsewhere are able to separate out political and legal considerations.”
Barristers for the authorities had argued there could not be a referral to the ECJ because there had been no dispute in a lower court. They also argued that the Brexpats were not a legally definable group and that there could not be a referral to the ECJ simply because someone asked for one.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/11/london-feminist-event-security
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Opinion
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2023-11-11T15:00:37.000Z
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Rachel Cooke
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Venue to be confirmed... tight security for women’s event is a sign of the times | Rachel Cooke
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On Thursday, I attended a sold-out panel event organised by the feminist organisation, Woman’s Place UK. The subject for discussion was women and the press, and I was there to support good friends who were speaking, among them my colleague Sonia Sodha.
So far, so normal. Except, these are strange times. Those organising events around the war in Gaza complain of how hard it is to get venues; of the tight security involved. But they’re hardly the only ones. In 2023, women who want to meet to talk good-naturedly about their rights will not be informed where they will actually be doing this until mere hours before kick-off. On the door, there will be men with armbands; no one will walk through it who does not have the right email. I find this bizarre and enraging, though I have to admit it only added to the sense of solidarity inside, where hundreds of women, and a few men, of all ages were gathered.
It was (if I’m allowed to say this) cosy as well as inspiring, something good in the air as well as bad, and for me personally a kind of kismet. As we finally stood up to go, the woman next to me announced herself as a girl who’d been at school with me in Jaffa, Israel, 40 years ago. “And now we’re both here,” she told me, delightedly, no more needing to be said.
Cry ‘God for Caramac!’
‘Uniquely British’: Nestlé is ditching the Caramac bar, first made by Mackintosh in 1959. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
When I’m 64… I’ll be sent to Dignitas by a heartless Swiss multinational conglomerate. Yes, Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company, is about to end production of Caramac, a sweet first made by Mackintosh in 1959. Single bars have already been withdrawn; multipacks – three for a bargain £1.25, an addict writes – will be on sale only until the end of the year.
With so many terrible things going on in the world, perhaps my disproportionate sadness over the Caramac’s imminent demise is what the head doctors call displacement. But feelings are feelings, and I want sugar, not therapy. Why can’t our Swiss overlords allow us our uniquely British confectionery, however peculiar and lowly they may find it?
While Caramac is not chocolate (no soy), its combination of butter, condensed milk and treacle means it tastes a bit like Scottish tablet, minus the grittiness. I love its sweetness, and its slimness, which works dubiously to eliminate guilt, and would rather eat it than any posh truffles.
Would a one-woman sales spike change minds in Crawley? (Nestlé’s UK’s headquarters is near Gatwick.) It’s surely worth a try. Today, I march on my newsagent, on Sainsbury’s and on Iceland. Cry “God for Caramac, the dentist and St Joseph of Wicks!”
Turn up for the book
‘Timeless bubble’: the London Welsh Centre on Gray’s Inn Road in central London. Photograph: Robert Evans/Alamy
I’m quite an anxious party giver, but at the launch of my new book last week, nerves were kept at bay by the setting. I’d booked the London Welsh Centre, which has stood on Gray’s Inn Road since the 1930s, its mission to promote Welsh culture and language, and whose building, with its mullioned windows and cosy, old-fashioned bar, reminds me of the former Co-op ballroom in Sheffield, where my granny used sometimes to take me to Ramblers’ Association dances (we’re talking waltz and quickstep, not disco).
In this lovely, timeless bubble – I mean it as praise when I say we might not even have been in London – people from all the different parts of my life gently mingled, the sight of them doing so only occasionally making me feel dizzy.
Diolch to everyone who has helped me with this book – and to Rhiannon and her bar staff, for keeping glasses full.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected]
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/10/drag-queen-maxine-young-in-cumberland-maryland-michael-o-snyder-best-photograph
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Art and design
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2024-04-10T13:53:56.000Z
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Ella Braidwood
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A smalltown drag queen vapes at night: Michael O Snyder’s best photograph
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Maxine Young is a drag queen, in Cumberland, Maryland, a small, post-industrial city in Appalachia. I took this photo in December 2022. We’d spent all day together at a drag brunch on a nearby farm. Afterwards, I got her to spend a few hours with me shooting portraits. This image is part of a long-term project, The Queens of Queen City, which I shot over the course of a decade, exploring drag and queer identities in the Appalachian region.
I first met Maxine back in 2012, the very first night that I was introduced to the drag scene in Cumberland. I grew up just outside the city and my sister and I were visiting my parents. We were flicking through the local newspaper to find something to do when I saw an advert for a drag show that night. I was just excited and fascinated that this could be happening in my home town – it isn’t known for being particularly open-minded or tolerant towards any kind of nonconformity.
We had to go. The show that night was spectacular: the drag queens were so fabulously queer, and I just loved it. Everything was falling apart on stage, but they were pouring their heart and soul into it and it was awesome. It was the spark for The Queens of Queen City: maybe the preconceptions I had about this region didn’t hold up any more. I wanted to try to understand the courage and authenticity of this community, and also the changing nature of acceptance and tolerance in the region.
Maxine was freezing, that’s why she’s hugging herself – I think she was just about done with it!
Maxine performed to Whitney Houston. When she came out on stage, my jaw dropped, as did my sister’s: she was beautiful. I went up to her after the show and said: “Hey, I thought you were spectacular!” In the years since, we’ve become friends. I’ve got about 40 photographs of her in the final version of this project, out of roughly 400. It’s quite a big and sprawling body of work.
In this photograph, I’m exploring the idea of being seen and not seen simultaneously. A lot of the drag queens, including Maxine, talked about being on stage and being loved and celebrated. But, at the same time, they also felt hidden because maybe they couldn’t express all of who they are, or because who they are is complicated and multidimensional. That’s why we used the smoke, which is from an e-cigarette, to mask Maxine’s face. It’s a literal but also metaphorical smokescreen.
It was very cold that night. We were shooting and shooting and not quite getting the positioning right. Maxine was freezing, that’s why she’s hugging herself – I think she was just about done with it! We kind of nailed it on this last shot. Maxine is standing on the brim of Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and, as we were shooting, a freight train came by. The background showcases the town’s history: it used to be a major industrial hub. At one point, Cumberland was the second largest city in Maryland – it was the queen to Baltimore’s king. That’s why the project is called The Queens of Queen City. Since the 70s, it’s seen a pretty steady decline in population and economic output.
We wanted to juxtapose that gritty, grimy backdrop with some of the glitz and glamour of drag. I brought a light with me to give it a stage-like feeling in the outdoors. Maxine had gone through several different outfits that day, as you do at a drag performance, and this was simply what she was wearing by the end. I think her dress is wonderful: the yellow just pops off the blue of the evening light. It’s so elegant.
When I started this project, the first ever Cumberland Pride event was only just setting up. It was so small, it was just a gathering of people in the streets. During the project, I witnessed the enormous growth and transformation of the drag scene in the region. Now, Cumberland Pride is one of the largest events in the town. I do think that the general trajectory has been towards broader acceptance, tolerance, respect and love. In some ways, that’s what is driving the really hateful folks out of the woodwork. It’s like both at once: because we’re seeing more acceptance, we’re also seeing a bigger backlash.
I want anybody who sees the images in this project to experience the courage, beauty and charisma of the queens at the heart of it, and to take that next step in being who they are. On the other hand, if they don’t feel like they intersect with these identities, I want people to see them as valid identities that can be celebrated in their home town, especially in rural America, but also around the world.
Michael O Snyder’s CV
Born: Pennsylvania, 1981.
Trained: Self-taught. “I learned from my father, who is a photographer. I made a transition into this career because I was a climate scientist by training and wanted to drive more impact around my work.”
Influences: “I’m inspired by anybody who has the courage to live authentically.”
High point: “In 2018, I was on an Arctic expedition for a project. For a brief period, we were probably the northernmost people on the planet.”
Low point: “I didn’t come from much financial privilege. I had numerous low points during the first couple of years of my career, questioning the wisdom of my choices.”
Top tip: “It’s not about lenses, it’s about relationships. The lens is just the tool, but the practice and the process and the outcome are all about the relationships.”
Michael O Snyder is shortlisted in the Professional competition of the Sony World Photography awards 2024, and in the accompanying exhibition at Somerset House, London, 19 April – 6 May worldphoto.org
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/06/fay-weldon-writes-transgender-sequel-to-life-and-loves-of-a-she-devil
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Books
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2016-04-06T13:16:01.000Z
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Sian Cain
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Fay Weldon writing "transgender" sequel to feminist classic
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In 1983, English author Fay Weldon wrote her most famous work: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, a bawdy, feminist black comedy about a woman exacting revenge on her unfaithful husband. More than 30 years later, it has been announced that Weldon, now 84, is writing a sequel about a man who changes gender to regain power lost “in the fall out of the feminist revolution”.
The Death of a She-Devil, which will be published by Head of Zeus in April 2017, follows Weldon’s recent inflammatory comments about transgender people and feminism to the Sunday Times, where she said women now lived easier lives than men and that: “The only way men have of fighting back against the natural superiority of women is by becoming women themselves.”
'I'm the only feminist there is – the others are all out of step'
Read more
In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Fay Weldon’s ruthless protagonist Ruth is labelled a “she-devil” by her unfaithful husband and resolves to behave accordingly, destroying his life through a series of violent and cunning acts to achieve sexual and financial dominance.
This time, the central character is Tyler Patchett, “an ultra-confident twentysomething man... [who] won’t be satisfied with his life until he can transition into the ultimate symbol of power and status: a woman”. Publisher Head of Zeus called the sequel a “provocative fable” that “stars a new kind of ‘heroine’”.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Weldon said women today acted like victims. “Feminism was necessary in the 1970s because men were so awful. By the end of the 1980s they had realised what was going on and, to their credit, changed. But women didn’t change and went on being victims.” She also said she found it significant that transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner is “still speaking with a man’s voice” and claimed men worked harder than women: “Men invent things: if this were an all-woman society, we wouldn’t have television. We’d have lots of nice cushions.”
Publisher Laura Palmer said Weldon’s controversial comments were examples of “Fay’s usual mischievous streak … Life and Loves of a She-Devil is something I read at school, so to be coming back to that world now, to conclude the story in the modern day is great.”
“I love the way Fay works with modern life and has basically changed her own story to work with current times. She’s saying that it is women who have all the power and all the status now, and that is why men want to become women,” Palmer said. “Her main character is an alpha male, very confident – you’d think he’d have everything he wants, but he sees what women have and he wants all of that instead.”
Since releasing her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, in 1967, Weldon has written more than 20 novels, as well as short stories and television dramas. Since 2006, she has worked as professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/17/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad-oprah-book-club
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Books
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2016-08-17T17:27:07.000Z
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Michelle Dean
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Colson Whitehead: 'My agent said: Oprah. I said: Shut the front door'
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Colson Whitehead, you’d think, would be used to accolades by now. Before Oprah picked his new novel, The Underground Railroad, as her next book club selection, he’d amassed quite a few of the laurels available to American writers. A Guggenheim, a Whiting award, and one of those MacArthur “genius” fellowships. His books had been shortlisted for many prizes, including a Pulitzer. But Oprah’s touch still has its own particular kind of publicity magic, and so Whitehead finds himself answering the question: where was he when he heard the news?
“I had a reading at Duke, and my plane touched down. I’m always checking my phone as soon as I hear the landing gear go down. There’s [a call from] my agent,” he tells me over the phone. “I called her back and she said: ‘Oprah.’ I said: ‘Shut the front door,’ because I didn’t want to curse. She said: ‘Oprah book club.’ I said: ‘Motherfucker.’ People were looking at me because this was on the airplane.”
Had Whitehead been able to explain to his fellow plane passengers, they would no doubt have understood. But there is some cloak and dagger involved in being blessed by the One Who Gives Away Cars.
“They said it’s a secret and you can’t tell anybody, and if you do, we’ll destroy you,” Whitehead jokes. “So four months of lying to people. It was a huge relief two Tuesdays ago when I finally was able to tell people. Two days before, I told my wife. Two days before my daughter was at sleep-away camp, and had no access to electronics, so she had one phone call. I was like: ‘I’ll tell you Tuesday. Since you have no way of telling anybody, I’ll let it out of the bag.’”
The book appeared in American bookstores the day of the announcement, even though it had previously been scheduled for publication in the US on 13 September. (The book will be available in the UK on 6 November.) American literary Twitter began joking that Whitehead had pulled a Beyoncé, dropping a surprise book. Not unlike Lemonade, The Underground Railroad sold like hot cakes, hitting No 4 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. But for Whitehead, things obviously didn’t happen that quickly. In fact, The Underground Railroad was 16 years in the making.
The book follows Cora, a young slave in Georgia who escapes her brutal life on a plantation with the help of that fabled element of the slave era, the underground railroad. In Whitehead’s retelling – though not in real life – the railroad is an actual subterranean train. One or two cars roar through a system of tunnels, with stations buried underneath the houses of sympathetic southern whites. Cora travels through South Carolina and Tennessee before ending up in Indiana. In the New Yorker this week, Kathryn Schulz praised Whitehead’s handling of the subject: “It is a clever choice, reminding us that a metaphor never got anyone to freedom.”
Some reviewers have remarked that the Underground Railroad’s spareness is a departure for Whitehead, a novelist known for his comedic touch. He has had a varied career, moving from the slightly fantastic in his 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist, to the solid realistic account of 2009’s Sag Harbor, to the zombie-apocalypse plot of 2011’s Zone One. When I asked him about it, he said: “Growing up watching Kubrick, it seems like a normal thing. You do your dark comedy, you do your war movie, you do your science fiction movie, and it’s all accessing different parts of your personality.”
The idea that the Underground Railroad was an actual train had been the idea that inspired this latest book. “I was thinking about how when you’re a kid, when you first hear about the underground railroad, you visualize a literal subway. Just because the image is so evocative,” Whitehead told me. “I thought, what if it actually was a subway?” His imagining of the book unfolded from there, informed considerably, he said, by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. He imagined the slaves traveling from state to state, and that the story would “reboot” every once in awhile, showing some different aspect of America.
But initially Whitehead wasn’t sure he was up to executing the idea. He wasn’t sure he had become the sort of writer that could pull it off, and besides, the prospect of researching slavery, “a gruesome topic”, was not appealing. So years went by, and he wrote other novels while the idea continued to germinate. Finally he had begun to work on a book about a journalist in New York, and the voice seemed too close to the voice Whitehead had used in his nonfiction book about poker, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death. “It seemed like repeating myself, and also if I put off this slavery idea for so long, why not try to confront why I was trying to avoid it?”
The wait was apparently worth it. Over time, Whitehead tells me, he dropped his onetime plan to have this be something of a fantastical story. Originally he thought, for example, that the Underground Railroad would transport the characters to different eras; instead, in the end, the action of the book all takes place in 1850. He spent a lot of time rereading slave narratives, the famous published ones like those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as narratives collected in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, which collected oral history from then-still-living former slaves. “They gave me enough material, in terms of slang and the kind of food they ate, in order to get going,” Whitehead said. “So it was four months before I felt ready to go.”
One of the most remarkable things about the Underground Railroad is Cora’s level-headedness in the face of the suffering and tragedy she both encounters and experiences herself. Another sort of writer, one more sentimental than Whitehead, might have been tempted to ratchet up more open emotionalism. Instead, his book does not make a big show about Cora’s stoicism, and Whitehead came to believe it followed logically from the horror of slavery. “I think when all you’ve known is atrocity, how do you rank the latest atrocity with the rest?” he told me.
Whitehead had in mind several grand schematic novels while composing the book. In high school, he took a class called Fabulism, and there he read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Kafka. These books, alongside Gulliver’s Travels, informed the structure of Cora’s journey. “Any kind of adventure story where someone goes from allegorical episode to allegorical episode, and escapes at the last minute, that sort of outlandish series of events actually works for an escaped slave. You are just going from slim refuge to slim refuge trying to make it out.” He has a point, and the critics, who have all given The Underground Railroad rave reviews, seem to agree that Whitehead fastened on exactly the right metaphor. This, many people are saying, may be the novel that wins Whitehead the Pulitzer.
This all comes at a time where there has been so much talk about diversity in publishing and in pop culture. I ask what Whitehead thinks of the debate. “I think progress is slow. Year by year I think we have more and different African American writers making their debuts. I was allowed to write about race using an elevator metaphor because of Toni Morrison and David Bradley and Ralph Ellison. Hopefully me being weird allows someone who’s 16 and wanting to write inspires them to have their own weird take on the world, and they can see the different kinds of African American voices being published.
“If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it’s completely white,” he adds. “Stories written about black people or featuring black protagonists have become big or get a lot of attention, and then three years later it’s back to the same draft. Not to be negative, but I always see it as a ... You want to point to The Underground Railroad and [Yaa Gyasi’s] Homegoing as the year black people broke through, [but] three years from now, you’re not going to have that same story.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/15/fat-cat-pay-persimmon-boss-100m-help-to-buy
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Opinion
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2017-12-15T18:06:50.000Z
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Stefan Stern
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Fat cat bonuses like Persimmon’s £100m are outrageous. Axe them | Stefan Stern
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It’s not every day that a housebuilder admits something has been badly designed. Even more unusual is the sight of not one but two senior company directors resigning on the grounds of their poor judgment. But the chair of Persimmon, Nicholas Wrigley, and his senior colleague, Jonathan Davie, chair of its remuneration committee, have both quit after acknowledging that the pay deal which will deliver more than £100m to the company’s chief executive, Jeff Fairburn, was flawed.
Persimmon chair quits over failure to rein in CEO's 'obscene' £100m+ bonus
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The mechanism which led to this cash bonanza is something called a long-term incentive plan, or LTIP, which was linked to the company’s share price. In the case of Persimmon, a LTIP drawn up in 2012 is set to shower more than £200m on the top three executives at the firm, and up to £800m in total for the company’s top 150 managers.
The company’s share price was £6.57 when the LTIP was signed off but stands at over £26 today. Ker-ching.
Was it commercial genius on the part of senior management that brought about this startling spike in value? Hardly. It had everything to do with the government’s help-to-buy loan scheme, launched in 2013, which has given an enormous boost to house prices and land values.
Not many people would regard a period of six years as truly representing the “long term”; you would hope any houses Persimmon built would stay up a bit longer than that. But not many ordinary people get to decide what level executive pay is set at. Institutional shareholders are told by company remuneration committees (or RemCos) what they propose to pay their top executives, usually on the advice of consultants.
The world of fat cat pay is full of myths. Big businesses are complicated, and the crucial work is done by thousands
Most people in this closed, self-reinforcing system are themselves on very high pay. They find these big numbers unremarkable, and are desensitised to how most of us react to them. Not surprisingly, businesses are by and large opposed to the idea of having representatives from the workforce involved in RemCo discussions.
Wrigley and Davie are resigning because, the company says, they realise they should have set a cap on the eventual payout. But these LTIPS were approved by 85% of shareholders. It is true that shareholders have benefited too from the share price rise and dividend flow, yet some are now “shocked, shocked” to discover how much the boss is to be paid.
Perhaps some of the shock is genuine. In truth, some of these elaborate pay structures are so complicated that hardly anyone can understand them, including the shareholders who vote and the executives who profit from them. I know of one professor who asked his PhD students to research these pay contracts, and some of them were simply beyond their comprehension.
'Nobody needs that sort of money': reaction on Persimmon estates to CEO bonus
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The world of fat cat pay is full of myths. In reality big businesses are complicated, and the crucial work is done by tens of thousands of people. Leadership is important, but not so disproportionately important that a couple of people at the top deserve to get paid so much vastly more than everybody else.
Share prices move about for a lot of reasons, very few of which can be traced back to the individual actions of a single person, whatever their level in the organisation. Big decisions are rarely taken by a chief executive on his or her own. Yet this is the bogus premise on which executive pay packages are constructed. Adherents to this mythology refer to it as “performance-related pay”. But it is no such thing: it is mostly luck-related pay.
A 10-year study of FTSE 350 companies carried out by the Lancaster University Management School found only a “negligible” link between the mediocre performance of these companies and the explosion in pay seen at the top. Long-term incentive plans have been the snake oil product driving this machine. It is high time they were axed.
Stefan Stern is director of the High Pay Centre and co-author of Myths of Management
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/19/stewart-lee-bridget-christie-comedy-couples-standup-sarah-millican-edinburgh
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Stage
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2014-08-19T15:57:26.000Z
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Brian Logan
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Take my husband: Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie and the rise of comedy couples
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As comedy gets ever bigger, and as its age-old gender imbalance erodes, so we encounter a new(ish) phenomenon: husband-and-wife (or girlfriend-and-boyfriend) standups. The outstanding Edinburgh fringe example is Bridget Christie and Stewart Lee, but they're not alone. Sara Pascoe tells jokes about her beau, John Robins, in her show – and vice versa, apparently. Sarah Millican recently married one-liner comic Gary Delaney. I'm not forgetting comedy couples of previous generations – Ade Edmondson and Jennifer Saunders; Lenny Henry and Dawn French – but it's only now that we're seeing solo standups discussing, on stage, their intimate relationships with other solo standups.
So what's the protocol? At one extreme, there's the example set at last year's fringe by comedians Nat Luurtsema and Tom Craine, who made respective shows about their recent breakup (complicated by the fact that they're both members of the same sketch group, Jigsaw). Luurtsema even advertised Craine's show at the end of her own, inviting you to view the two performances as a heartbreak diptych. But things aren't usually that intimate. Pascoe talks about Robins's reluctance to have children, and apparently he addresses her behaviour when she's pre-menstrual.
Christie gets knowing laughs talking about her "fictional onstage husband" – specifically, how sexist and racist he is. At least half the room laughs because it knows who the husband is; in Christie and Lee's case, both parties are well enough known (in comedy circles, anyway) to allow one another's personae to be part of the joke. That's not the case with Pascoe and Robins, and so instead (in Pascoe's show) the joke draws on the idea of comedians in love, and how difficult it is to have your dirty linen ridiculed in public.
That's partly why this is becoming a rich seam to mine. Standups have always joked about their husbands and wives, their mums, dads and kids. This professional obligation to cannibalise and make light of the lives of their nearest and dearest is a vexed issue. And it's vexed because it's problematic. On the one hand, it makes us uneasy: we feel instinctively that a joke isn't quite fair game when it's about someone that can't answer back. We wonder: how does the wife/kid/dad feel about this? On the other hand, many people love this confidential standup, because it's improper bordering on illicit. At its best, it supplies the kind of politeness-busting thrill we look for in comedy.
The relationship humour of comedy couples retains the advantages and circumvents the disadvantages. In these instances, the partner can answer back. It allows the audience to enjoy other people's secrets (or fictionalised secrets) guilt-free, with the bonus that we also get to enjoy the performer's anxiety about the likely payback. There's also the gossipy frisson, too, of hearing what people we know only through comedy are "really" like in their personal lives – a prurience that Christie tickles but doesn't satisfy. I dare say we'll encounter more and more comedy couples as the industry expands. In the meantime, it's intriguing to watch the pioneers working out what makes his-and-hers comedy tick.
More from the Edinburgh festival
10 funniest jokes at the Edinburgh festival
10 questions for Tim Vine
James Kettle picks the 10 best jokes so far
Jeremy Paxman mixes gravitas and glitz in one-man show
Edinburgh festival 2014: tips for the final week
Sketchy situations: when comedy troupes split up
Edinburgh festival 2014: five must-see moments
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/jan/16/st-johnstone-rangers-scottish-premiership-championship
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Football
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2016-01-16T19:07:48.000Z
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Nial Briggs
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Scottish roundup: Gary Harkins inspires Dundee to away win at Partick
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Gary Harkins stole the show as Dundee romped to a 4-2 win over 10-man Partick Thistle in the Premiership at Firhill.
The visitors were ahead after seven minutes when Harkins was upended in the box by Liam Lindsay and Hemmings converted the penalty.
Harkins was on the scoresheet three minutes later. The Partick goalkeeper, Tomas Cerny, failed to deal with Nick Ross’s free-kick and Harkins was on hand to prod the ball into the back of the net.
It got worse for Partick when Greg Stewart cut inside from the left and let loose a fine shot beyond the grasp of Cerny.
Dundee continued to attack in numbers and only the goal frame prevented them from extending their lead further as Kane Hemmings cracked a shot off the post.
Despite the bad start to the match, Partick managed to pull a goal back after 23 minutes. Stuart Bannigan’s cross picked out David Amoo in front of goal and he nodded past Scott Bain.
But their hopes were shattered when Dundee struck again eight minutes before the interval. Harkins grabbed his second of the day in style with a curling shot from the edge of the area that left Cerny stranded.
Partick’s Liam Lindsay was sent off for a second bookable offence after 77 minutes before the home side reduced the deficit to 4-2 when Doolan scored from close-range in stoppage time.
A thunderous volley from Craig Slater gave Kilmarnock a 2-1 win against Inverness at a snow-covered Rugby Park. Greg Kiltie opened the scoring for Killie but Ross Draper levelled before the break. Slater made his mark six minutes into the second half with a wonder strike and despite Inverness huffing and puffing, the points remained in east Ayrshire.
St Johnstone and Hamilton drew a blank in their match at McDiarmid Park. Tommy Wright’s men have now gone five games without a goal, while Accies restored pride after the Scottish Cup exit to Annan – although they have now won once in 14 games following this 0-0 stalemate.
Rangers moved six points clear at the top of the Championship after a 4-1 stroll against Livingston at Ibrox.
With title rivals Falkirk and Hibernian not playing until Sunday afternoon, Gers took the opportunity to extend their lead with a crushing first-half display. Martyn Waghorn extended his goal tally for the season to 27 goals with two more and Danny Wilson and Kenny Miller also scored in the first half.
There was not the same spark from Mark Warburton’s team after the break and they allowed Liam Buchanan to restore some pride for second-bottom Livingston when he struck after 55 minutes.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/02/australia-has-technology-to-cut-emissions-now-and-coalition-should-embrace-it-scientists-say
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Environment
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2021-09-01T17:30:01.000Z
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Donna Lu
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‘Get on with it’: Australia already has low-carbon technology and Coalition should embrace it, scientists say
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Australia’s leading scientists and engineers have told the Morrison government the technologies needed to make significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions already exist – and the Coalition should immediately implement a national net zero policy.
In an explicit response to the government’s “technology, not taxes” approach to reducing emissions, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering has released a position statement calling on the government to “prioritise the immediate deployment of existing mature, low-carbon technologies which can make deep cuts to high-emitting sectors before 2030”.
The academy has also urged the government to set a more ambitious emissions target for 2030 ahead of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, following calls by diplomats, scientists, business leaders, and backbench Coalition MPs Warren Entsch and Jason Falinski.
The academy’s president, Prof Hugh Bradlow, said “the technologies we can use to actually make significant progress are here today”.
“We don’t have to take risks and their economics are proven,” he said. “It’s not a case of … waiting for some miracle to happen. It’s a case of getting on with it now.”
When the US requires a deputy sheriff Australia reports for duty – but not when it comes to climate action
Katharine Murphy
Read more
Bradlow said setting a target of net zero emissions by 2050 – as most business and industry groups, all the states and more than 100 national governments have – was an “unequivocal requirement” that countries should meet.
“Most countries are stepping up to recognise that requirement, and without that sort of commitment you don’t take the actions that you need in order to get there,” he said.
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Prof Renate Egan of the University of New South Wales, a member of the academy’s energy forum working group, said existing technologies – including solar and wind power, energy storage, electric vehicles and energy efficiency for buildings – could rapidly reduce emissions in the electricity, stationary energy and transport sectors.
Egan said electricity, which accounts for about a third of Australia’s emissions, was already on track to be 80% renewably generated by 2030. But she said while large emissions reductions could be achieved using existing technology, reaching net zero would require investment in new technologies such as “clean” hydrogen and greener processes for manufacturing aluminium and steel.
Morrison under pressure
The Morrison government has emphasised the latter, promising to support five priority areas – also including carbon capture and storage, and soil carbon – under a low-emissions technology statement released last year.
It is under rising pressure to do more to reduce emissions in the short term. An Australian Conservation Foundation survey of 15,000 people released this week found a majority of people in every federal electorate believed the Morrison government should be doing more to tackle the climate crisis.
Australian greenhouse emissions down 5% in a year of Covid, but rebound expected
Read more
Entsch and Falinski both called for the 2030 emissions target to be increased beyond the government’s six-year-old commitment of a 26-28% cut compared with 2005 levels. On Wednesday, Falinski tweeted that the government should commit to reaching net zero by 2050 and set a new “stretch target” for 2030. Entsch said he had been lobbying his senior colleagues to commit to “stronger interim emissions reduction commitments”.
But some Nationals MPs remain strongly opposed to greater climate action, and Morrison has resisted calls to join the US, European Union, UK, Japan and Canada in significantly increasing 2030 goals, and the more than 100 countries that have set a mid-century net zero target. He has promised a long-term emissions strategy before the Glasgow summit in November.
The prime minister Scott Morrison has resisted calls to set more ambitious climate goals. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, last week told Guardian Australia “progress is being made behind closed doors” within the government on climate change, but said he was “very comfortable” with the 2030 target.
Dr John Söderbaum, chair of the technology and engineering academy’s energy forum, said Australia needed a net zero policy and clear framework if the country was “to have any sort of realistic hope of reaching net zero by 2050”.
“This is not anything controversial: state and territory governments, businesses, industry associations have already adopted such targets and are calling for them,” he said. “We have lost a lot of time. We could have been much further down the path if we had had a more planned and structured approach to reducing our emissions.”
The opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, on Wednesday painted the climate crisis as one of the most significant security challenges of the 21st century, and accused the Morrison government of failing to rise to that reality.
Retired defence figures join call for action
A group of retired defence force personnel stressed this point in a report to be released on Thursday, saying government inaction on climate change meant it was failing in its duty to protect Australians.
The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, which includes retired defence figures such as Admiral Chris Barrie, Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn and Colonel Neil Greet, called on the government to change its approach to climate change “as a matter of urgency”.
Coalition’s misleading tactics will no longer cut it – the IPCC report shows our future depends on urgent climate action
Adam Morton
Read more
Its report said the politicisation of climate change had “paralysed” government departments, and called on the public service to “reestablish a ‘frank and fearless’ voice on climate policy choices”.
“The capacity of the Australian Public Service (APS) to provide advice on climate issues has been diminished,” it said.
“Former APS personnel report experiences in which initiating new work on climate change could not be overtly identified as climate focused because that may lead to the project being closed down.”
The group pointed to Australia’s catastrophic 2019-20 bushfires, when soldiers were mobilised to fire-ravaged regional areas. It called for the development of holistic policies to prepare for and prevent climate-related security risks, including protecting the country’s “precarious” global supply chains.
“In an emergency [in which] supply chains are disrupted, domestic oil and petrol supplies would last only weeks and military capacity to move and fly would be compromised,” it warned.
The latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published earlier this month, found emissions were already affecting weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe, contributing to an increase in heatwaves, heavier rainfall events and more intense droughts and tropical cyclones. In Australia, average temperatures above land have increased by about 1.4C since 1910.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/29/climate-change-making-drought-worse-says-farmers-federation-chief
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Environment
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2018-08-29T06:28:00.000Z
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Gabrielle Chan
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Climate change making drought worse, farmers' federation chief says
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The president of the National Farmers’ Federation, Fiona Simson, has declared that climate change is making drought worse in Australia and says tiptoeing around the subject does not do regional communities any good.
“It is the effect of climate change we need to be aware of that makes the impacts of a drought even worse,” she told the National Press Club.
“As a community, we want to talk about it and the more discussions we have about and the more open people are in talking about it, then the less uncomfortable it becomes.
'No real appetite': former farmers chief lashes ministers over climate link to drought
Read more
“But we absolutely have to talk about it and some of the issues that people tiptoe around because they’re worried about offending people or having a discussion about it, then it doesn’t do us any good as a community.”
Simson, a farmer on the Liverpool Plains, described agriculture as a diverse industry and she was highly critical of much of the current media drought coverage of the broken farmer dependent on handouts.
“I use those words “managing drought” deliberately because managing the drought is exactly what we are doing,” she said.
“Many farmers, including me, take offence to the betrayals of the broken-down, handout dependent farmer profile peddled by many members of the media. That simply is not us.”
She was critical of the government for allowing regional communities to cope with drought in the absence of a “comprehensive national framework to deal with drought”.
“Successive governments have had a go, but we are still without certainty that a national strategy would actually provide. In fact, agriculture in its entirety is to date without a whole-of-government national strategy for plan at all.”
In another significant shift in the NFF, Simson also described Indigenous Australians as Australia’s “first farmers” in both her opening acknowledgement of country and her address.
“May I acknowledge Australia’s first farmers, in particular the Ngunnawal people on whose land we meet today,” she said. “I pay my respects to elders past and and acknowledge their historic and continuing role in what is a great story of Australian agriculture.”
“Drought is not a new phenomenon for farmers. Since farming first started under the auspices of our First Australians, drought has been a part of the landscape and a regular part of the farm business cycle.”
Climate change has been a vexed topic for the farm lobby for the past two decades. In 2007, when then prime minister John Howard and Labor opposition leader Kevin Rudd both agreed on action, the NFF said climate change might be the “greatest threat” confronting farmers and their ability to put food on Australian table and the lobby group backed an emissions trading scheme.
3:48
Australia's climate wars: a decade of dithering – video
Fiona Simson told the National Press Club farmers were “are at the front line of climate change”.
After Malcolm Turnbull’s first leadership spill in 2009 over emissions policies which saw Tony Abbott win the Liberal leadership, bipartisanship on climate change ended and the NFF went quiet until Simson took the presidency. In 2017, she recognised that climate change posed a significant challenge for Australian farmers and called for cost-efficient emissions reductions.
As parts of Australia slide into their seventh year of drought and media coverage places increasing pressure on politicians, Simson’s address was the NFF’s most forthright message on climate change yet to government.
It comes less than two weeks after Coalition’s latest energy policy, the National Energy Guarantee, preceded the leadership coup against Malcolm Turnbull.
Simson said while every drought was different, this season was the worst on her farm since 1965 and had “taken many experienced and savvy farmers by surprise”.
“We are at the front line of climate change, increasingly erratic seasons, out-of-season rainfall or no rainfall at all and longer, hotter summers.”
But Simson also pushed back against the suggestion that reducing emissions required culling huge livestock numbers – a suggestion covered in major newspapers that she described as “totally histrionic”.
“I’m sure there are those out there reading that thinking it’s true when you have the peak red meat body (Meat and Livestock Australia) forecasting zero [emissions] by 2030 and a huge drop between 2005 and 15 on current modelling, so I think for me it is about having a conversation as a community,” she said
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/mar/02/david-cameron-rejects-lurch-right-ukip-tories
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Politics
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2013-03-02T21:52:01.000Z
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Toby Helm
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Cameron refuses to veer right as Ukip targets Tory seats in the north
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David Cameron is to convene a series of meetings with backbench Tory MPs in the coming weeks in an attempt to head off the threat of a possible leadership challenge, amid rising concern in Conservative ranks that he lacks a convincing strategy to contain Nigel Farage's rampant UK Independence party.
Conservative backbenchers were expressing fears on Saturday that Ukip – which leapfrogged the Conservatives into second place in Thursday's Eastleigh byelection – represents a serious threat to their support not just in the south of England but also in the north, where the Tories face a struggle to defend a number of key marginal seats at the 2015 general election.
Farage, who is fielding a record 2,000 candidates in May's local elections, told the Observer that his party, traditionally strongest in the south, was building support in the north by the week – at the expense of the Conservatives.
"I think the Tories are heading the same way in the north of England as they did in Scotland, where they were wiped out," he said. "I think in 2015 it will be Ukip which is the real opposition to Labour in the north."
One senior Tory said the party faces a "devastating pincer movement" from Ukip in a string of marginal seats where Conservatives won in 2010 with narrow majorities over Labour: "If more Tory votes are siphoned off to Ukip, and Lib Dems switch to Labour, we will be done for in those seats and our position in the north of England will be terrible. We need to address this urgently."
Another prominent force on the backbenches warned that Ukip was a far more dangerous threat nationally because, as it showed in Eastleigh, it was broadening its message beyond mere hostility to the EU to a range of "natural Tory issues", including immigration and the linked pressures on jobs and public services resulting from the influx of foreign workers.
Farage added that Ukip had won three recent council byelections in the north and predicted that in many parliamentary seats it would increase its percentage of the vote in 2015 from low single figures to closer to its current poll ratings, which have been as high as 15%.
Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, said it was clear that the double threat of Ukip and a move to Labour by Lib Dem supporters was a serious threat. "I think that combination is a difficult one, without a doubt," he said.
In an attempt to reassure restive MPs, Cameron, who is often accused of ignoring all but his most trusted inner circle of advisers and MP friends, is convening a series of "sandwich lunch" meetings with groups of 20 or so backbenchers in the coming weeks, to gauge opinions and convince them that the answer to Ukip will not lie in a hasty lurch to the right.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Cameron makes clear that there will be no drastic or sudden change of direction, and that he will not bow to the demands of MPs who want him to abandon the ringfence around spending on international aid or the NHS.
"We are on the side of those who want to work hard and get on in life," he writes. "But the battle for Britain's future will not be won in lurching to the right, nor by some cynical attempt to calculate the middle distance between your political opponents and then planting yourself somewhere between them.
"That is lowest common denominator politics – and it gets you nowhere. The right thing to do is to address the things people care about; to fix yourself firmly in what Keith Joseph called the 'common ground' of politics. And that's what we have done."
However Cameron's promise came as Chris Grayling, the justice secretary, indicated the Tories would repeal the Human Rights Act if they won the next general election, a pledge designed to win back voters who have defected to Ukip. The legislation was introduced under Labour and is unpopular among Tory backbenchers who complain it opens up British law to interference from Europe.
Meanwhile Cameron, addressing what he sees as Ukip's opportunism, says that consistency and an ability to take tough decisions will be key: "We are engaged in a battle for Britain's future … it is a battle we will only win if we reject the cynicism, the political calculation and the easy ways out – and stick to the course we are on."
While few Tory MPs believe Cameron is in imminent danger, many believe there could be moves to oust him this year unless this month's budget reassures people over the economy and there is a convincing campaign in May's elections.
Another crunch could come after next year's European elections, from which Ukip is confident of emerging with the highest share of the vote.
Pressure will focus increasingly in the next fortnight on the chancellor, George Osborne. There will be calls from some Tory MPs for him to cut taxes to help hard-working families – to be paid for with further spending cuts to the welfare budget.
Many MPs have also suggested he announce a further postponement of fuel duty rises, and others want measures to cut energy bills, including the abolition of green levies. Tracey Crouch, MP for Chatham and Aylesford, said: "Quite a lot of these costs are now too high for ordinary working families and we have to think about that." But with little or no money in the kitty, Osborne has little room for manoeuvre.
The Tories are taking comfort from opposition leader Ed Miliband's "One Nation Labour" message failing to resonate in Eastleigh, and stress that the party, which came fourth and failed to increase its vote significantly, also lost votes to Ukip.
Former Tory party vice-chairman Bernard Jenkin said the problem for all parties was that people had lost faith in politicians. He insisted a leadership challenge against Cameron was "for the birds" and would achieve nothing, and warned his party against thinking that there could be a quick policy fix.
He said: "This is not a crisis for a government: it is a crisis of governance. Politicians talk about fixing things like immigration, like over-regulation, like high taxation, but they seem powerless to deal with it."
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/27/million-people-uk-living-destitution-joseph-rowntree-foundation
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Society
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2016-04-26T23:01:02.000Z
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Patrick Butler
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More than a million people in UK living in destitution, study shows
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More than a million people in the UK are so poor they cannot afford to eat properly, keep clean or stay warm and dry, according to a groundbreaking attempt to measure the scale of destitution in Britain.
A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that 184,500 households experienced a level of poverty in a typical week last year that left them reliant on charities for essentials such as food, clothes, shelter and toiletries.
More than three-quarters of destitute people reported going without meals, while more than half were unable to heat their home. Destitution affected their mental health, left them socially isolated and prone to acute feelings of shame and humiliation.
Although the study could not demonstrate that destitution had increased in recent years, it said this would be a plausible conclusion because of related evidence showing austerity-era rises in severe poverty, food bank use, homelessness and benefit sanction rates.
In 2015, there were 668,000 destitute households containing 1,252,000 people, including 312,000 children. The study said this was an underestimate because the data did not capture poor households who eschewed charity handouts or used only state-funded welfare services
Julia Unwin, chief executive of JRF, said: “It is simply unacceptable to see such levels of severe poverty in our country in the 21st century. Governments of all stripes have failed to protect people at the bottom of the income scale from the effects of severe poverty, leaving many unable to feed, clothe or house themselves and their families.”
Researchers called on the government to monitor destitution levels annually to better understand how people in poverty slipped into extreme hardship and to examine what could be done to close the holes in the welfare safety net.
Destitution was defined by researchers as reliance on a weekly income so low (£70 for a single adult, £140 for a couple with children after housing costs) that basic essentials were unaffordable.
People who met at least two of six measures over the course of a month, including eating fewer than two meals a day for two or more days, inability to heat or light their home for five days or sleeping rough for one or more nights, were also deemed to be destitute.
The most common causes of destitution were unsustainable debt repayments to public authorities such as council tax arrears, together with high rents and benefit delays and sanctions. These triggered financial shocks that pushed already poor households into periods of severe poverty often lasting months.
Nearly four-fifths of people who fell into destitution in 2015 were born in the UK, with younger single men most at risk. Migrants, who face restricted access to jobs and benefits, were disproportionately likely to become destitute.
High destitution rates were found in former industrial areas in the north-west and north-east of England, Scotland, south Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as inner London. These areas typically had high unemployment and above average levels of long-term sickness and disability.
Detailed interviews with 80 destitute people found that 30% had benefits sanctioned. More than half of this group directly linked the “abrupt impact” of having their benefits stopped with being unable to afford basic living essentials.
Although paid work was seen by respondents as a way out of destitution, this was seen by some as hard to come by, while high housing costs meant that, in some cases, having a job was not enough to stave off severe hardship. One in 20 destitute households had someone in work.
State support for destitute people was patchy, the study found. A third of interviewees had drawn on local council welfare schemes for help, but their experiences were mixed, while none of those who had benefits sanctioned had received hardship funds from the jobcentre.
A government spokesman said: “The truth is that relative poverty is at the lowest level since the 1980s and the number of children in poverty has fallen by 300,000 since 2010.
“This report ignores a number of measures we’ve brought in to improve life chances, including the ‘national living wage’, the extension of free childcare to 30 hours and increases to the personal allowance. We also continue to spend £80bn on working age benefits to ensure a strong safety net for those who need it most.”
Prof Suzanne Fitzpatrick, director of the Institute for Social Policy, Housing, Environment and Real Estate at Heriot-Watt University and one of the authors of the report, said: “This report has shown that destitution is intrinsically linked to long-term poverty, with many people forced into destitution by high costs, unaffordable bills or a financial shock such as a benefit sanction or delay.
“More coordinated debt-collection practices, particularly from DWP [the Department for Work and Pensions], local councils and utility companies, could help to avoid small debts tipping people in to destitution.”
The study included analysis of more than 40 official datasets, an in-depth week-long census survey of charity service users in 10 UK locations and interviews with destitute people.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/02/gone-girl-review-david-fincher-pike-affleck
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Film
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2014-10-02T13:59:05.000Z
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Peter Bradshaw
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Gone Girl review – David Fincher thrills with portrait of love gone wrong | Peter Bradshaw
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The spirits of Highsmith and Hitchcock hover over this outrageous pulp suspense-thriller from David Fincher, episodically structured around twists and counter-twists, like an addictive boxset of a TV drama. The movie reminded me a little of Steven Bochco’s small-screen classic Murder One, or indeed House of Cards, the series Fincher produced and partly directed, which is a domestic study in media-political homicide. Gillian Flynn has adapted her bestselling page-turner for the screen, and it is stuffed with mysteries, cliffhangers and very enjoyable performances, along with some sleeping-with-the-enemy provocations and nightmares of misogyny. Rosamund Pike delivers a fascinatingly poised performance as the gone girl herself – the missing piece in a jigsaw of fear, but a character whose potency exponentially steps upward. With her sculpted beauty, Arctic blonde sexiness and wide, almost lidless stare, Pike is Tippi Hedren 2.0, expressing a desperate unhappiness beneath her flawless perfection.
Gone Girl, You and the Night, Draft Day and Life After Beth: the Guardian film show – video reviews Guardian
She is Amy Dunne, a beautiful magazine writer married to fellow journalist Nick, played by Ben Affleck. Thanks to the recession they’ve been laid off from their jobs in New York and humiliatingly moved back to Nick’s hometown in the midwest, where he is forced to make ends meet by managing a bar with his acerbic sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). When Amy goes missing, Nick gives televised press conferences pleading for information about her. But the media decide that he appears to be insufficiently upset. The movie interleaves this situation with flashbacks from Amy’s diary, showing how their marriage had been unravelling and how career failure has turned Nick into a drinker with a violent temper. So the whisper begins: did this guy murder his wife?
Fincher creates a drumbeat of disquiet around this troubled relationship, making a movie that, before and after its rupture of violence, also behaves like any indie satire of suburban discontent, with bizarre, almost farcical, incidental detail. He is adroit at summoning up the looming, teetering anxiety and a presentiment of pure evil. This is explicit enough in Fincher’s movies such as Seven and Zodiac, but I always think there is something Mephistophelean, or at any rate Fincherean, in Sean Parker’s famous offer of undreamed-of wealth to the Facebook inventors in The Social Network: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” That same whiff of sulphur is here.
Gone Girl star Ben Affleck: ‘Usually the protagonist is full of shit’ - video interview Guardian
There is a great scene, recounted in flashback from the viewpoint of Amy and her girlish, ingenuous diary, of their initial meeting. The couple get talking at a party, and Nick impulsively takes her out on a magical midnight stroll through the city, past a bakery where they get caught in a “sugar cloud”, which Nick wipes off Amy’s lips before he kisses her. That should be a wonderful memory, but it has been reconfigured by violence and the loss of innocence; Fincher demonstrates how the encounter is unbearably sinister in this new context, the sugar turned into a miasma. A little later, in the bright springtime of their relationship, the couple become humorously oppressed with the knowledge of how adorable they are: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face.” The director shows how the punch has only been temporarily withheld.
Fincher and Flynn work in subsidiary characters, whose lighter qualities are expertly judged, so the film does not become overloaded with horror, and so it can maintain its palatability and stamina over a two-and-a-half-hour running time. The investigating officer, Detective Rhonda Boney, is nicely played by Kim Dickens: a sceptical cop with a shrewd sense of when to rattle the suspect’s cage and when not to make an arrest. And Tyler Perry is very funny as Tanner Bolt, Nick’s gung-ho, media-savvy lawyer, always on the alert for how his client might manage the situation proactively, launching a faux-confessional aria on the very TV talk show that had pilloried him.
Another type of movie might take the mystery forward in just one or two more stages: Gone Girl has chicane plot reversals and switchbacks that Fincher pretty much keeps within the bounds of plausibility. Although the availability of a certain weapon finally challenges credibility, the movie never jumps the shark. Together, Affleck and Pike sell you on a very tense film. They are the 21st-century versions of Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight: tortured twin figures in a portrait of marriage and murder.
Gone Girl’s ending: discuss the movie with spoilers
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/09/george-osborne-protecting-britons-terrorism-priority-mi5-mi6
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UK news
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2015-01-09T10:47:44.000Z
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Nicholas Watt
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George Osborne: protecting Britons from terrorism is top priority
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George Osborne has pledged to give MI5 and MI6 whatever resources they need to allow them to maintain their “heroic job” in protecting the British people from terrorist threats at home and abroad.
Speaking after the director general of MI5 called for new powers in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, the chancellor endorsed Andrew Parker’s view that the fight against Islamist extremism is Britain’s main national priority.
Osborne told BBC Breakfast on Friday: “My commitment is very clear. This is the national priority. We will put the resources in. Whatever the security services need they will get because they do a heroic job on our behalf.”
Parker had warned of a dangerous imbalance between increasing numbers of terrorist plots against the UK and a fall in the capabilities of intelligence services to spy on communications. He described the Paris attack as “a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm” and said he had spoken to his French counterparts to offer help.
Osborne said the government had recently set aside an extra £100m to allow the intelligence agencies to monitor “self-starter” terrorists travelling to Iraq and Syria.
“In the last few weeks we have put extra money – over £100m – into specifically monitoring people going to conflicts in Syria and Iraq, these self-starting terrorists who get their ideas off the internet and then go and want to perpetrate horrendous crimes,” he told the BBC.
“So we are putting a huge effort in. As the director general of MI5 has said over the last 24 hours, that is the threat we face and we face a threat from more complex plots. So we have got to be vigilant, we have got to have the resources there.”
The chancellor said the agencies were “absolutely in the front line with the police at dealing with this threat. They will get the support they need and indeed in the last few weeks they have got that support.”
His remarks focused on the financial support the government will provide for Britain’s three intelligence agencies, the domestic agency, MI5, the overseas Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the UK’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre. But he also made clear his strong political support for MI5.
Speaking to an invited audience at MI5 headquarters on Thursday, Parker said the threat level to Britain had worsened and Islamist extremist groups in Syria and Iraq were directly trying to orchestrate attacks on the UK. Such an attack was highly likely and MI5 could not guarantee it would be able to stop it, he said.
“Strikingly, working with our partners, we have stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone,” he said. “Deaths would certainly have resulted otherwise. Although we and our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything.”
Since the Paris attack, Britain had increased security checks at the French border, including carrying out extra vehicle searches, to ensure the suspects did not enter the country, Downing Street said.
The UK, France and the rest of western Europe faced many of the same threats from al-Qaida, from extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, and from elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia and North Africa, Park said.
He said Islamic State was “trying to direct terrorist attacks in the UK and elsewhere from Syria, using violent extremists here as their instruments”. It was “seeking through propaganda to provoke individuals in the UK to carry out violent attacks here”.
With about 50% of MI5’s work devoted to counter-terrorism, Parker said: “My sharpest concern as director general of MI5 is the growing gap between the increasingly challenging threat and the decreasing availability of capabilities to address it.”
Almost all of MI5’s top-priority counter-terrorism investigations had used intercept capabilities in some form to identify, understand and disrupt plots, he said. “So if we lose that ability, if parts of the radar go dark and terrorists are confident that they are beyond the reach of MI5 and GCHQ, acting with proper legal warrant, then our ability to keep the country safe is also reduced.”
The intelligence agencies in the UK and the US claim that the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013 about the scale of bulk data collection have undermined their capabilities.
Parker said: “We all value our privacy – and none of us want it intruded upon improperly or unnecessarily. But I don’t want a situation where that privacy is so absolute and sacrosanct that terrorists and others who mean us harm can confidently operate from behind those walls without fear of detection.
“If we are to do our job, MI5 will continue to need to be able to penetrate their communications as we have always done. That means having the right tools, legal powers and the assistance of companies which hold relevant data. Currently, this picture is patchy.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/03/halle-berry-oscars-diversity-race-row-is-heartbreaking
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Film
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2016-02-03T09:56:35.000Z
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Ben Child
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Halle Berry: Oscars race row is 'heartbreaking'
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Why Vanity Fair's Hollywood diversity cover fails to conceal industry prejudice
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The first black woman to win the best actress Oscar, Halle Berry, has described the current storm over racial diversity in Hollywood as “heartbreaking”.
Berry, who won the top prize in 2002 for her turn as a poor southern woman who falls for Billy Bob Thornton’s troubled prison guard in Monster’s Ball, said she never imagined the door she opened would remain shut for the next 14 years.
“Honestly, that win almost 15 years ago was iconic,” Berry said, on stage at the Makers Conference in Los Angeles. “It was important to me, but I had the knowing in the moment that it was bigger than me. I believed in that moment when I said: ‘The door tonight has been opened.’ I believed with every bone in my body that this was going to incite change because this door, this barrier, had been broken.”
Oscars 2016: expect five minute diversity speech as Quincy Jones confirmed as presenter
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In her tearful acceptance speech in 2002, Berry suggested her win might open the floodgates for black actors to find success in Hollywood. “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll,” she said. “It’s for the women that stand beside me – Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
On stage in Los Angeles yesterday, she said: “To sit here almost 15 years later, and knowing that another woman of colour has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking, because I thought that moment was bigger than me. It’s heartbreaking to start to think maybe it wasn’t bigger than me. Maybe it wasn’t. And I so desperately felt like it was.”
The current row over diversity in Hollywood was sparked on 14 January after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to nominate a single actor from black or ethnic minority backgrounds for the Oscars for a second year running. Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and Tyrese Gibson are among the African American stars to have signalled that they would not be attending this year’s ceremony or to have called for a boycott.
Ava DuVernay backs 'DuVernay test' to monitor racial diversity in Hollywood
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The Academy has since announced radical rule changes aimed at doubling voting representation among female and ethnic minority demographics by 2020. But a number of high-profile African American figures, including Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg and 2012 best actress nominee Viola Davis, have indicated the issue goes beyond awards ceremonies to the heart of the Hollywood decision-making process.
Berry, for her part, accused Hollywood of failing in its basic duty to faithfully portray the American existence. “It’s really about truth-telling,” she said. “And as film-makers and as actors, we have a responsibility to tell the truth. The films, I think, coming out of Hollywood aren’t truthful. And the reason they’re not truthful, these days, is that they’re not really depicting the importance and the involvement and the participation of people of colour in our American culture.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/sep/27/sly-stone-rocks-backpages
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Music
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2011-09-27T13:09:00.000Z
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Chris Charlesworth
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Take him higher: an eye-opening interview from the vaults with Sly Stone
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He extended a hand but looked elsewhere. Who could tell where his eyes focused beneath those silver shades? He gripped and I felt pain through the middle finger on my right hand. He grinned and disappeared.
About half an hour later I found out what had caused the pain. On his two little fingers were a couple of matching rings. Spelled out in diamonds were the words "SLY" (right hand) and "STONE" (left hand).
Meeting Sly is like coming face to face with an ugly cop. He isn't social. He isn't friendly. He resents intrusions on his privacy. He doesn't like to talk. He's a star and he acts like a star ought. Moody, mean and magnificent.
How many interviews begin with a little prose about how the interviewee is just like an ordinary guy in the street? Too many. That's not for Sly Stone. He isn't like an ordinary guy in the street.
He's Super-Black, riding on a wave of hero worship among his people, rather like Miles Davis.
Sly Stone rarely gives interviews and when he does the answers are monosyllabic apologies for replies.
They pierce and challenge the writer to fumble with his next attempt until Sly is in complete control of the situation (and able to bring the exercise to a speedy conclusion).
Last Wednesday was Sly Stone day. Our appointment was scheduled for 3.30 in the afternoon but when I arrived at his manager's office at the southern end of Central Park West, it turned out that Sly had disappeared to see a doctor for a blood test required because of his forthcoming marriage.
It was re-scheduled for five o'clock and in the meantime his new album, tentatively titled Small Talk, was played.
It was only a rough mix, but again, it's a departure from previous Sly material. All but the two opening songs on the first side are recorded with a violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. But despite this there's still that pounding bass guitar that has distinguished the Stone catalogue from the early days.
It was six o'clock when the man arrived, preceded by a white personal assistant. He breezed through the office and disappeared almost immediately, allowing just a glimpse of a white leather suit with red trimmings and a bare, black chest.
Another 10 minutes and he re-appeared, taking us through to an apartment adjoining his management offices. This was where he lived, and it was tiny by rock-star standards.
I offered him a copy of Melody Maker, pointing put that it contained an article on him (the recent rock giant story by colleague Steve Lake) and he retired to his toilet to read the story. He was gone for another 10 minutes.
While waiting, I caught sight of Sly's beautiful fiancée, Kathy Silva. She's the mother of Sly Stone Jnr. and she will marry her beau on stage at Madison Square Garden during a Sly concert next month. That's the way REAL stars ought to get married.
Sly re-emerged to the sound of plumbing and sat on a couch, still reading the Melody Maker.
An opening inquiry about the heavy use of violins on his new album: "It's different. It's unusual. That's probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them."
Have you been wanting to do this for a long time ... "Probably. I don't need to think about it at all to get it together."
You seem to be forever changing ... "Time changes me, man."
Will you be introducing the strings on stage ... "I gotta violin player in the group now. His name's Sidney. He's from Sausalito and I've known him just long enough for him to get into the group."
Did you arrange the strings yourself ... "Part of them."
There's a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material... "There's a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There're 11 songs. I didn't count which were slow."
How big is your group at present ... "Nine people."
Tell me something about the bass player... "That's me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything."
Wouldn't the group ever like to be on the record with you ... "Sometimes they're on the record also, but they feel good about it. They like it this way and they're pretty honest about what they like.
"I've recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since Dance To The Music, I guess."
Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage... "Sometimes I do."
Kathy, Sly's fiancée, chipped in here. "It's in his heart. He plays it so good that he's like to play everything on stage if he only could. He's only one man but he has a million thoughts."
Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like Dance and Higher... "No. They like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it, too. I love every period of my career."
Where do you write ... "My songs come from environments. I just go about my day and as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet 'cos no one bothers me there."
Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material. Is the image mellowing these days... "I'm not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I'm still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word."
Will you actually turn up for shows... "I won't ever be predictable."
Your performance in the Woodstock film helped you enormously in England ... "Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good."
And other highlights you remember ... "Yeah, but you wouldn't know about them."
I'd be in the wrong country, huh ... "It's not the country you're in, it's the skin you're in. And it's not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn't invite you there."
The last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion. Sly's assistant showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the sofa with his fiancée.
"You know something," said the girl from his management office who'd sat in during the conversation. "He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He's done a few interviews this week and he said more this afternoon than he's said all week."
© Chris Charlesworth, 1974
This interview can also be found in the archive of Rock's Backpages, the world's leading collection of vintage music journalism.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/09/brexit-britain-economy-coronavirus-gdp-figures-economic-growth
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Opinion
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2020-04-09T16:07:14.000Z
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Gaby Hinsliff
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Brexit had already damaged Britain's economy. Now coronavirus could sink it | Gaby Hinsliff
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When this outbreak first began, all the talk was of a sharp but mercifully short economic sting in the tail. The downturn triggered by putting everyday life on hold to halt the infection should, we were told, be V-shaped: a shock, but one from which we’d soon bounce back. Like many comforting predictions in the early days of this pandemic, that is beginning to look alarmingly over-confident.
The first problem with picking up exactly where we left off is that where we left off was already in trouble. Today’s GDP figures, covering the three-month period to February when the coronavirus had started to nibble at the travel and tourism industry but we were weeks away from lockdown, show economic growth virtually flatlining at 0.1% overall and falling in the final four weeks. Far from enjoying some mythical “Boris bounce”, we may have been teetering on the verge of a recession, as business confidence dried up in the face of a potentially hard Brexit. The fear is that the economic aftermath of this crisis, like the virus itself, might be toughest on those with pre-existing conditions - including otherwise thriving western countries choosing this moment in history to shoot themselves in the foot.
The second problem is that, as the World Bank has warned, we may be heading for a global recession – yet, unlike 2008, there is little evidence of countries pulling together to find global solutions. The risk of that V-shaped recession being drawn out into a U, or even the dreaded L – a blow from which we barely recover, bumping along the bottom for years – grows if world leaders retreat into economic nationalism.
So far, growing worries about the economic consequences of the epidemic have translated mainly into calls to end the lockdown quickly. It’s true that the longer Britons are confined to their homes, the more businesses will fail, and the more those lucky enough to have savings will run out of them. The worse things get, meanwhile, the greater the tendency even for those who still feel secure in their jobs to hoard their cash for fear of what lies around the corner. This is the so-called paradox of thrift: that in a recession, people instinctively try to save their money instead of spending it, and thus inadvertently make things worse.
Yet the trouble with calls to ward off economic disaster by risking an early end to the lockdown is that, in a sense, it’s too late for that now. If the country had been shut down right at the start, when there were only a handful of cases in Britain and influential voices were still scoffing that this was just a touch of flu, there may have been public outrage at a perceived over-reaction, but we might now have had the luxury of wondering whether we could afford to ease off.
As it is, there was something almost surreal about a No 10 press conference that saw journalists asking when we might be allowed out again while the death toll was climbing towards 1,000 a day. We are nearing the moment of maximum danger, the moment hospital chiefs hold their breath and even atheists in Whitehall start praying. The blunt truth is that nobody is going anywhere, possibly not for months yet, if we want to keep this infection within hospitals’ capacity to cope. So if we can’t cure what directly ails the British economy any time soon, the only option is to try and improve its underlying condition. That’s what the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has tried to do with an unprecedented rescue package, effectively taking much of the nation on to the state payroll in an attempt to keep businesses going until something like normality returns.
And if the lockdown lasts into early summer, a similarly big ideological leap of imagination looms over Brexit. For the first time, according to a YouGov poll, a narrow majority of Britons now want to extend the transition beyond December, suggesting the last thing many voters want right now is another economic shock. For now, Boris Johnson’s administration is clinging to the pretence that a complex Brexit deal can still somehow be negotiated in the middle of a national emergency that has put the prime minister in intensive care. But reality surely dictates that the timetable can’t hold.
The crunch time for deciding whether or not to extend the timetable is June, by which time official growth and employment statistics should finally be catching up with the damage now happening under all our noses. If some ministers currently fear a public backlash by admitting Brexit might have to be delayed, by summer the idea of ploughing on regardless may be more likely to trigger a mutiny.
We can’t know yet, of course, whether this life-and-death emergency will make the country more, or less, risk-averse. But perhaps nobody in politics right now should underestimate the longing for life just to go back to normal when this is over: boring, disappointing, inadequate old normal, but which beats watching helplessly as our loved ones suffer and jobs vanish beneath our feet. The great unspoken fear is that by the time this is over, however, even normal will be out of reach.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/30/why-i-love-oprah-winfrey
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Life and style
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2016-07-30T04:59:25.000Z
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Bim Adewunmi
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Why I love… Oprah Winfrey
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For people whose entire lives are built around pop culture, some of the first truly impactful music we consume comes via TV theme tunes. For one glorious moment in the 1990s, my worlds collided when the fictional Banks family (from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air) were invited on to Oprah’s show. A delighted Carlton did his famous dance to the theme tune, and I threw similar shapes at home. Because Oprah Winfrey was (and remains) one of my all-time heroes.
My first exposure to Oprah, now 62, came early. I was fascinated by this black woman with the big hair and soothing but authoritative voice, who stalked her studio, microphone in hand. So many of us adored and respected her, and loved that she’d become a billionaire (the first black female billionaire in history, and one of the world’s greatest philanthropists) after coming from so little.
For me, though, all that dough is merely a by-product of her impact on the culture: how she popularised confessional TV and set the agenda with her “Favourite Things”; how she consistently humanised black women merely by existing and being visible.
The first time I saw her, as Sofia in the 1985 film The Color Purple, I was moved to tears. Her projects since have made room for black women’s lives. She was one of my first teachers in the valuable art of elevating others wherever possible.
And she’s still at it: as executive producer on Ava DuVernay’s new series, Queen Sugar, and starring in (and producing) Greenleaf, a new TV show set in a black southern megachurch. Our stories matter and Oprah’s life is, above all, testament to that. Long may she reign.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/29/researchers-discover-two-new-minerals-on-meteorite-grounded-in-somalia
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Science
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2022-11-29T13:22:42.000Z
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Oliver Holmes
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Researchers discover two new minerals on meteorite grounded in Somalia
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A team of researchers in Canada say they have discovered two new minerals – and potentially a third – after analysing a slice of a 15-tonne meteorite that landed in east Africa.
The meteorite, the ninth largest recorded at over 2 metres wide, was unearthed in Somalia in 2020, although local camel herders say it was well known to them for generations and named Nightfall in their songs and poems.
Western scientists, however, dubbed the extraterrestrial rock El Ali because it was found near the town of El Ali, in the Hiiraan region. A 70-gram slice of the iron-based meteorite was sent to the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection for classification.
The meteorite was found near the town of El Ali in Somalia. Photograph: Courtesy of Global Resources
Dr Chris Herd, a professor in the department of earth and atmospheric sciences and the curator of the collection, said that while he was classifying the rock he noticed “unusual” minerals. Herd asked Andrew Locock, the head of the university’s electron microprobe laboratory, to investigate.
“The very first day he did some analyses, he said, ‘You’ve got at least two new minerals in there’,” said Herd. “That was phenomenal. Most of the time it takes a lot more work than that to say there’s a new mineral.”
Similar minerals had been synthetically created in a lab in the 1980s but never recorded as appearing in nature, Herd said, adding that these new minerals could help understand how “nature’s laboratory” works and may have as yet unknown real-world uses. A third potentially new mineral is being analysed.
A sample of the meteorite. Photograph: Courtesy of University of Alberta Meteorite Collection
“I never thought I’d be involved in describing brand new minerals just by virtue of working on a meteorite,” said Herd. “That’s what makes this exciting: in this particular meteorite you have two officially described minerals that are new to science.” They have been named elaliite, after the location of the meteorite, and elkinstantonite, after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of Nasa’s upcoming Psyche mission that aims to send a spacecraft to a metal-rich asteroid.
“Lindy has done a lot of work on how the cores of planets form, how these iron nickel cores form, and the closest analogue we have are iron meteorites. So it made sense to name a mineral after her and recognise her contributions to science,” Herd said.
University of Alberta scientists would like to examine other samples from the same meteorite but Herd said there were reports that it had been removed to China. Meteorites are often bought and sold on international markets.
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