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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/13/cassandro-review-gael-garcia-bernal-lucha-libre-exotico-saul-armendariz | Film | 2023-09-13T14:00:01.000Z | Cath Clarke | Cassandro review – Gael García Bernal lights up the ring as lucha libre’s taboo-busting wrestler | In the macho world of Mexican lucha libre wrestling, “exóticos” are male fighters who compete in drag. Mostly they are straight, but this heartfelt and sweet drama based on real events tells the story of Saúl Armendáriz, an openly gay wrestler who shot to fame as an exótico in the early 90s. It gives Gael García Bernal his best role in years: Saúl is funny, infectiously upbeat, sometimes heartbreakingly vulnerable. He radiates the kind of magnetism that made him a world cinema it-boy in the early 00s (notably in another cross-dressing role: Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education).
Bernal’s Saúl begins his wrestling career using a male alter ego, El Topo. As everyone knows, wrestling is rigged, and since Saúl is slightly built he is forever cast as the “runt” in fights, the character ordered by promoters to lose against wardrobe-sized men with names such as Gigántico (played here by a real-life wrestler scarily named Murder Clown). It’s Saúl’s trainer Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) – a female wrestler, an outsider too – who suggests he fights as an exótico. At first Saúl is not keen; for a start, exóticos always lose as well.
Director Roger Ross Williams made a documentary short about Armendáriz in 2016, The Man Without a Mask, which showed how the role of exótico traditionally existed to reinforce negative gay stereotypes. Cross-dressing wrestlers performed grotesque caricatures of feyness, which was an evil to be crushed by manly, hetero opponents. The audience whoops and jeers with homophobic slurs; order is restored. It’s grim.
When Saúl steps into the ring for the first time as Cassandro, accompanied by a Mexican version of I Will Survive, he is wearing a leopard-print leotard stitched together from a dress belonging to his mum. His character is flamboyantly gay but also proud and powerful. The crowd warms to his charisma – roaring with laughter when Cassandro sits on top of her opponent, theatrically grinding him. I wondered if the speed with which Cassandro wins over audiences in this film – local, then national – underplays the intensity of the homophobia Armendáriz faced in real life. (In interviews he has been open about his struggles with mental health.) Yet the focus is on his star quality and the qualities that made him a pioneer: sunniness, grit, passion for his sport, the unconditional love and support of his mother, and his unbreakable confidence to be himself. It’s undeniably heartwarming.
Cassandro is released on 15 September in cinemas, and on 22 September on Prime Video | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/06/losing-face-by-george-haddad-review-a-rich-complex-story-of-consent-and-coming-of-age | Books | 2022-05-05T17:30:45.000Z | Sarah Ayoub | Losing Face by George Haddad review – a rich, complex story of consent and coming of age | Joey Harb possesses no fighting spirit, despite his surname meaning “war” in Arabic. He’s aimless and apathetic: meandering through his young life in western Sydney as a produce assistant at Woolworths, while being indulged by his grandmother Elaine, dabbling in drugs with his good friend Kyri, and getting on his mother Amal’s nerves. Everyone, he thinks, “feels the need to judge his existence”, but that doesn’t propel him to do anything about it.
Nothing changes when he finds himself among a group of young men arrested for a violent sexual crime. The fact that he sees the possible two-year prison sentence as “doable” suddenly adds a layer of meaning to the novel’s opening sentence, which tells us that he likes his banh mi with extra chilli, “because it numbed his mouth and he liked numbness”.
It’s this passivity that makes the main character of George Haddad’s Losing Face so simultaneously frustrating and endearing. Within a strong and multilayered story, which follows Joey and Elaine in alternating chapters, Haddad presents us with the impact of intergenerational trauma, woven through a sharp appraisal of modern masculinity and its underlying misogyny. Addiction, bitterness, complacency and abandonment underpin the characters’ stories, but it’s the examination of consent that inspires the most thought.
The author’s depiction of rape culture is deftly handled: realistic and confronting, and not simply used as fodder for Joey’s growth as a character. Joey knows something is afoot from the moment the young woman is approached by his peers, but his silence in the face of what is unfolding in a public park is telling. It’s a subtle and profound reminder that it’s not a “yes” if there is no clear “no”; the limited focus on the young woman throughout the eventual trial reflects the broader lack of empathy and justice victims face in the public sphere.
Haddad colours the crime scene with drug use, in a clever reminder of our ability to still recognise and right wrongs even through clouded judgment. The onus is on the reader to see things for what they are: the consequences of an insistent patriarchal culture that doesn’t pause to consider the rights and needs of others in pursuit of its own want; the entitlement that can breed a take-take attitude in men, regardless of their background.
These big-picture themes are enhanced by the little details that vividly place the narrative in Sydney’s west: the top-of-the-line Range Rovers and Mercedes four wheelers in Greenacre, a suburb “trying too hard to play catch-up with other parts of Sydney”; the queue-jumping in the barbershops of Bankstown; the bubble tea craze in Canley Vale; and the Virgin Mary pendants worn as badges of identity around the necks of a particular generation of Lebanese woman.
One such woman is Elaine, Joey’s doting grandmother, who has a secret habit that threatens to undo the life she sacrificed so much for as a new bride, and new migrant, in Australia. Even after decades on Earth and many years as a widow, Elaine still cares about saving face in a community that thrives on gossip; she’s experienced too much otherness to risk more ostracisation. Her efforts to conceal her own indiscretions are compounded by her need to protect her wayward grandson. In many ways she is the novel’s heart, and the family’s moral centre. But it’s her daughter Amal, Joey’s mother, who I wish I had seen more of. As a first-generation born Australian, her story would have intricacies and contradictions worth exploring: she’s spent the last decade raising her boys as a single mother and is at last ready to live for herself, if given the chance.
Losing Face is rich in scope and substance, but it isn’t the quintessential coming of age story. There’s no sense that Joey is any wiser when you turn the final page. In this vein, Haddad has written something of a universal truth for a particular type of Sydney sub-culture, embodied in a character whose mistakes are brought on by a life lived at the intersections of identity, the lack of role models who have navigated the same struggles of in-betweenness, and the familial tensions that are complicated by traditions and debts traced back to the old country.
Haddad’s characters don’t have the luxury of finding themselves or rising above their lot in life. Instead, they’re just trying to get through the here and now. Despite this, and in a move of impeccable storytelling, Haddad offers them hope. For instance, Joey’s only kiss in the story, when “his whole universe folded up real tight for a second before it burst into absolute and unequivocal harmony”, and he’s on the cusp of discovering a whole new world.
This hope is subtle, redemptive, simple, and it makes Losing Face a stunning work: an evocative exploration of what it means to falter and to flail, to rise each day knowing your setbacks are embedded deep within you, and to turn up for the people you love even though they’re as screwed up as you are.
Losing Face by George Haddad is published by UQP ($29.99) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/28/nobel-laureates-president-erdogan-turkey-free-writers | Opinion | 2018-02-28T14:03:38.000Z | JM Coetzee | An open letter to President Erdoğan from 38 Nobel laureates | JM Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Svetlana Alexievich and others | Dear President Erdoğan,
We wish to draw your attention to the damage being done to the Republic of Turkey, to its reputation and the dignity and wellbeing of its citizens, through what leading authorities on freedom of expression deem to be the unlawful detention and wrongful conviction of writers and thinkers.
In a Memorandum on the Freedom of Expression in Turkey (2017), Nils Muižnieks, then Council of Europe commissioner for Human Rights, warned:
“The space for democratic debate in Turkey has shrunk alarmingly following increased judicial harassment of large strata of society, including journalists, members of parliament, academics and ordinary citizens, and government action which has reduced pluralism and led to self-censorship. This deterioration came about in a very difficult context, but neither the attempted coup, nor other terrorist threats faced by Turkey, can justify measures that infringe media freedom and disavow the rule of law to such an extent.
“The authorities should urgently change course by overhauling criminal legislation and practice, redevelop judicial independence and reaffirm their commitment to protect free speech.”
There is no clearer example of the commissioner’s concern that the detention in September 2016 of Ahmet Altan, a bestselling novelist and columnist; Mehmet Altan, his brother, professor of economics and essayist; and Nazlı Ilıcak, a prominent journalist – all as part of a wave of arrests following the failed July 2016 coup. These writers were charged with attempting to overthrow the constitutional order through violence or force. The prosecutors originally wanted to charge them with giving “subliminal messages” to coup supporters while appearing on a television panel show. The ensuing tide of public ridicule made them change that accusation to using rhetoric “evocative of a coup”. Indeed, Turkey’s official Anatolia News Agency called the case “The Coup Evocation Trial”.
As noted in the commissioner’s report, the evidence considered by the judge in Ahmet Altan’s case was limited to a story dating from 2010 in Taraf newspaper (of which Ahmet Altan had been the editor-in-chief until 2012), three of his op-ed columns and a TV appearance. The evidence against the other defendants was equally insubstantial. All these writers had spent their careers opposing coups and militarism of any sort, and yet were charged with aiding an armed terrorist organisation and staging a coup.
The commissioner saw the detention and prosecution of Altan brothers as part of a broader pattern of repression in Turkey against those expressing dissent or criticism of the authorities. He considered such detentions and prosecutions to have violated human rights and undermined the rule of law. David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, concurred and dubbed the legal proceedings a “show trial”.
Turkey’s own constitutional court concurred with this criticism. On 11 January this year, it ruled that Mehmet Altan and fellow journalist Şahin Alpay’s rights were being violated by pre-trial detention, and that they should be released. Yet the first-degree courts refused to implement the higher constitutional court’s decision, thus placing the judicial system in criminal violation of the constitution. Mr President, you must surely be concerned that the lower criminal court’s defiance and this non-legal decision was backed by the spokesperson of your government.
On 16 February 2018, the Altan brothers and Ilıcak were sentenced to aggravated life sentences, precluding them from any prospect of a future amnesty.
President Erdoğan, we the undersigned share the following opinion of David Kaye: “The court decision condemning journalists to aggravated life in prison for their work, without presenting substantial proof of their involvement in the coup attempt or ensuring a fair trial, critically threatens journalism and with it the remnants of freedom of expression and media freedom in Turkey”.
In April 1998, you yourself were stripped of your position as mayor of Istanbul, banned from political office, and sentenced to prison for 10 months, for reciting a poem during a public speech in December 1997 through the same article 312 of the penal code. This was unjust, unlawful and cruel. Many human rights organisations – which defended you then – are appalled at the violations now occurring in your country. Amnesty International, PEN International, Committee to Protect Journalists, Article 19, and Reporters Without Borders are among those who oppose the recent court decision.
During a ceremony in honour of Çetin Altan, on 2 February 2009, you declared publicly that “Turkey is no longer the same old Turkey who used to sentence its great writers to prison – this era is gone for ever.” Among the audience were Çetin Altan’s two sons: Ahmet and Mehmet. Nine years later, they are sentenced to life; isn’t that a fundamental contradiction?
Under these circumstances, we voice the concern of many inside Turkey itself, of its allies and of the multilateral organisations of which it is a member. We call for the abrogation of the state of emergency, a quick return to the rule of law and for full freedom of speech and expression. Such a move would result in the speedy acquittal on appeal of Ms Ilıcak and the Altan brothers, and the immediate release of others wrongfully detained. Better still, it would make Turkey again a proud member of the free world.
Full list of Nobel laureate signatories:
Svetlana Alexievich, Philip W Anderson, Aaron Ciechanover, JM Coetzee, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Elias J Corey, Gerhard Ertl, Albert Fert, Edmond H Fischer, Andrew Z Fire, Andre Geim, Sheldon Glashow, Serge Haroche, Leland H Hartwell, Oliver Hart, Richard Henderson, Dudley Herschbach, Avram Hershko, Roald Hoffmann, Robert Huber, Tim Hunt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, Eric S Maskin, Hartmut Michel, Herta Müller, VS Naipaul, William D Phillips, John C Polanyi, Richard J Roberts, Randy W Schekman, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas C Südhof, Jack W Szostak, Mario Vargas Llosa, J Robin Warren, Eric F Wieschaus | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/29/wilko-owners-dividends-losses-emergency-funding-sales | Business | 2022-11-29T13:43:41.000Z | Sarah Butler | Wilko owners took £3m in dividends despite £37m losses | The owners of Wilko took £3m in dividends this past year despite the cut price chain falling almost £37m into the red before seeking emergency funding.
The homewares-to-cosmetics retailer, whose managing director Alison Hands is to exit in January, about 18 months after taking the job, is understood to be trying to secure a £30m debt facility with alternative lenders.
One of the lenders Wilko is understood to have engaged with is Bantry Bay, a firm backed by the hedge fund Elliott Advisers which is reported to be in similar discussions with the fashion retailer Superdry, amid tough trading conditions.
However, Wilko said it had paid its owners, led by the Wilkinson family, £2.25m in the year to the end of January and a further £750,000 in February despite a near 3% fall in sales to £1.3bn and a slide to a £36.8m pre-tax loss from a £2.5m profit a year before.
The company said it had reviewed sources of funding as trading conditions “remained challenging, with consumer confidence continuing to be fragile, [with] ongoing supply chain disruption and rising cost inflation”. It said it expected underlying sales to continue to fall throughout 2022 and it had begun to make cuts as it expected further pressure on costs from rising energy bills.
The company said there was no immediate issue with liquidity but its auditors said in their report the accounts indicated that the company was a going concern but had “insufficient committed financing” to withstand a “severe but plausible downturn in trading activity”.
Jerome Saint-Marc, the Wilko chief executive, said: “Our relationship with our lending partners is solid. The recent sale and leaseback of our distribution centre to DHL earlier this week unlocked £48m which has enabled us to repay our revolving credit facility in full.
“We’re taking this opportunity, now that the deal is done, to review how we manage our ongoing financing to best trade through the current retail environment while continuing to invest in our future.”
He said the company was trying to drive growth by making its products available on the Amazon, eBay and OnBuy online marketplaces as well as enabling shoppers to pick up items ordered online in 69 stores.
In accounts for Wilkinson Hardware Stores Ltd filed at Companies House this week, the company said it had sufficient funds at its year end to meet its liabilities until the end of January 2024 if trading continued as hoped.
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That came after Wilko sold and leased back its distribution centre in Worksop for initial proceeds of £48m, £25m of which was used to repay a short-term loan called a revolving credit facility. The deal left it with £63m of cash against debts of £261m and provision for further liabilities of £39m at the year end.
The company admitted in the accounts that it might have to seek additional financing if it suffered a “severe but plausible” scenario in which it saw a significant reduction in the amount of goods it was selling. In that scenario, it said its available facilities “would be extinguished by December 2023”. It said if the economic downside was even worse that it feared, it could need financing earlier.
The Wilkinson family has been approached for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/blog/2014/oct/08/miscarriage | Life and style | 2014-10-08T15:12:04.000Z | Claire Daly | Let’s talk about miscarriage | One in five pregnancies are thought to end in a miscarriage, yet though it is commonplace, such a loss can be emotionally paralysing. Many women and men feel reluctant to talk about what is often a distressing and bewildering – but far from rare – experience.
After I wrote an article for the Guardian about a miscarriage I had in 2013 I was shocked at the scale of the response. “Everyone wants to talk about, but no one wants to be the one to bring it up,” one woman told me.
The Miscarriage Association is calling for a national conversation about baby loss in the run-up to International Baby Loss Awareness Day on 15 October. Backed by several leading charities, a week of events are planned starting from Thursday for those affected by miscarriage and stillbirth.
Ruth Bender-Atik, head of the Miscarriage Association, says such events can be “especially important for those who have no other markers of these tiny lives”.
After my article was published, many people commented online and told me their stories in person for months afterwards. Often people shared details they had never told anyone before.
“I kept it in a drawer wrapped in tissues,” one woman told me. She miscarried after 10 weeks, a pregnancy that was followed by years of IVF treatment. She had never spoken of it before, but the anniversary of this loss left her stricken, unable to leave the house for the weekend until recently, six years later.
Lisa has had five miscarriages, and is now the mother of a three-year-old boy. She feels angry at what she feels is insensitive medical language used by NHS staff at various times during treatment for her miscarriages. “I felt like a chicken laying eggs – as if I was silly to worry as another one will be along in a minute.”
Like many of the women, Lisa felt she had no right to mourn or dwell on something that had happened so early in a pregnancy.
Another woman spoke of her distress at having a first trimester miscarriage while visiting a particular town. She cannot return to certain cafes because that is where she used the toilets, and the memories horrify her.
So many stories reflect the intangible nature of grieving for an early miscarriage. The wanted child that never was, who leaves behind such an enormous void of missed plans.
In a world where it is unremarkable for men to bawl after losing a football match, a Facebook feed can mourn a deceased pet, and sobbing seems a prerequisite for a successful television show, how is it this issue is still taboo for most of us?
There are some high profile exceptions. Jay-Z dealt with Beyoncé’s miscarriage in the song Glory, while Ed Sheeran’s Small Bump deals with the aftermath of a miscarriage. Disney’s Up tackles the issue wordlessly, while artist Frida Kahlo’s pain is clear for all to see in Henry Ford hospital.
Yet George Bush shocked the US public when he recalled in his 2010 memoir how his mother miscarried and he travelled with her to the hospital afterwards, the foetus in a jar.
The Miscarriage Association says “there should be no shoulds”: if you don’t feel like dwelling on the loss of something that, in the case of early pregnancy loss, could not have survived outside your body that is of course fine. But for many, including me, the logic and the emotion did not run in parallel. I needed to find a way to make sense of it. In order to move beyond what is for some people a paralysing event, marking the grief can help.
A new quality standard from Nice aims to improve the care of women who have a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy in early pregnancy. The guidelines call for women be scanned within 24 hours when a miscarriage is suspected, while a Mumsnet campaign has pushed for a higher standard of care across all NHS trusts, after its survey found that the treatment and support women received after a miscarriage often failed to meet the official national guidelines.
The NHS website gives comprehensive advice for women going through a miscarriage, including what they are entitled to in terms of treatment, and gives support regarding any ceremony or burial.
But often those who are experiencing miscarriage for the first time are not aware of the options. With an early pregnancy loss, often there is just nothing to bury. Many women miscarry on the toilet and are in shock.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly what you do, but a piece of time in rushed lives set aside to acknowledge a life missed can be the beginning of the road to acceptance. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/06/syria-rebels-unite-break-aleppo-siege | World news | 2016-08-06T19:40:15.000Z | Emma Graham-Harrison | Syria’s rebels unite to break Assad’s siege of Aleppo | A Syrian military academy in the heart of Aleppo made for a bold, even reckless target for opposition forces trying to break a devastating siege, but the rebels gambled on a double advantage: surprise and suicide bombers.
Soon the rebels were sharing pictures of abandoned artillery and a smashed portrait of President Bashar al-Assad on Twitter, flaunted as triumphant proof that the army was routed and opposition forces were within a few hundred metres of their besieged comrades.
Hours later, the people of east Aleppo were dancing in the street, as rebels and activists confirmed that the month-long siege of the area had been broken. The fate of the opposition-held city was back in play. “Morale is very high now,” said activist and poet Mahmoud Rashwani, who had been living largely underground to avoid airstrikes, eking out his supplies of canned food.
The victory is a fragile one. The area is still a conflict zone and it may be some time before a secure corridor for food and medical supplies can be set up, and the regime has called in reinforcements.
“We expect revenge bombing by the regime, including, possibly, chemical weapons,” said Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American doctor who coordinates medical aid in the city.
Still, for the rebels, it has been a remarkable triumph against the odds. After months of retreat under pressure from government forces and Russian airstrikes, they have not only broken the siege, but overrun a key base the regime had used to enforce it and apparently taken possession of a large cache of weapons and artillery.
Days earlier, the area’s future had appeared grimly settled, its civilian population facing slow weeks of deprivation and fear, as aid groups warned of a humanitarian catastrophe.
More than a quarter of a million people were hemmed into the battered remains of streets by the guns of Assad’s conscripts, elite Iranian troops and a spectrum of Shia militias, patrolled from above by Russian planes. The rebels had fewer men, fewer weapons and, most crucially, no air force.
The opposition groups called a temporary truce to their own disputes, summoned hundreds of their most battle-hardened troops away from other fronts, and used tunnel bombs and suicide attackers to hit the military base to try to set a counter-siege of western Aleppo.
Both sides are throwing everything they can at the four-year battle for the city – a fight that has come to define the Syrian civil war, because each believes the fate of Aleppo will decide the outcome of the conflict.
“This battle’s results exceed simply opening the road for besieged people; it will overturn the balance of the struggle in the Levant,” said Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the powerful Jabhat al-Nusra faction that, until last month, was the official al- Qaida franchise in Syria.
Last month, the faction severed those ties, changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and renounced international jihad, although observers said there was little sign of a parallel shift in ideology. Instead, experts reckoned the move was probably aimed at getting it off US airstrike target lists and easing coalitions with other factions.
That rebranding put the group in a strong position to capitalise on last week’s campaign, particularly if it can consolidate a victory that casts it as a champion of Aleppo’s battered civilians.
“We urge our people in Aleppo to remain steadfast,” Jolani added in the audio recording released on Friday. “The mujahideen will not fail you.”
The contrast with western powers, which condemned the siege but said they were powerless to stop it, is unlikely to be lost on Syrians, analysts warned.
“The world abandoned Aleppo; the jihadis came to the rescue. Al-Qaida’s rebranding could hardly have asked for more,” analyst Kyle Orton, from the Henry Jackson Society, said on Twitter.
Aleppo is both strategically and symbolically important. Damascus may be the capital but, before fighting broke out, the northern city was the most populous, the economic powerhouse – a diverse, vibrant cultural hub with a history stretching back millennia.
It was late to join the uprising against Assad, producing neither large-scale protests nor the bloody violence that swept through other cities in the first year of the civil war but, since the opposition stormed it in 2012, it has been a crucial battleground.
Aleppo was divided almost immediately into government- and rebel-controlled areas, along lines that have remained mostly static ever since: a stalemate unmoved by repeated and often ruthless attempts to dislodge the other side.
The years of bloody fighting have made it a symbol of Syria’s suffering, encapsulating in one place the bravery of its civilians and the terrible complexity of a war that, even before the rise of Islamic State, has set disturbingly extreme opposition groups against an ever more brutal government.
Fighters from the former Nusra – the groups has been renamed Fateh al-Sham but experts fear their ideology won’t change. Photograph: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP/Getty Images
The eastern half of the city has held out, despite an unforgiving aerial campaign by the Assad regime, whose barrel bombs have reduced much of it to ruins. Rebels have deployed “hell cannons” – crude artillery using gas cylinders – that have also been called indiscriminate.
Aleppo is now the last major urban centre where the rebels have a foothold, and success in breaking the siege would carry great psychological weight, reversing the momentum of months of setbacks brought about by an intense Russian air campaign in support of Assad.
Moscow intervened last year at a precarious time for Assad, who had lost all of Idlib province to a concerted rebel offensive. It was the first time a large coalition of opposition fighters had come together to fight the government and analysts spoke plausibly of Aleppo’s fall to the opposition.
The Kremlin’s campaign ended such hopes, pummelling the rebels, undoing their advances and leaving Assad secure in his strongholds. He, rather than opposition fighters, focused on the push for Aleppo, which culminated at the start of July in a long-feared siege.
Less than a month after being cut off, life in Aleppo has already slowed to a near halt. Markets are empty, schools have closed, hospitals and orphanages moved underground. Residents are woken by the first airstrikes of the day.
Those who chose to stay in Aleppo have stockpiled provisions in the knowledge that the regime and its backers would try to cut them off.
The Syrian army has honed the use of siege warfare to bring cities to their knees and then take them under government control – among them Homs, the birthplace and once the capital of the revolution, which opposition fighters abandoned last year.
Sieges allow Assad to avoid sending a depleted and demoralised Syrian army into close combat with the more highly motivated opposition forces. The Syrian military is down to as little as a third of its prewar strength and reliant on ground forces from Iran’s revolutionary guards, Hezbollah and a patchwork of other regional militias.
Like the opposition, Assad and his supporters are convinced that taking Aleppo will effectively end the civil war, breaking the morale of the opposition and condemning it to a marginal existence as a rural insurgency that can no longer claim to speak for large sections of Syrian society. Bringing all the country’s major cities under his control would also remove the threat that Assad’s international critics could push, as they once did, for a new Syrian settlement that does not include him as leader.
Moderate members of Syria’s opposition in exile say they fear not just for the people of Aleppo, but for the state of their wider cause, and believe the siege aimed not just to humble the city but also to polarise further a war that Assad has always cast as a battle between himself and extremists.
Isis does not have a major presence in Aleppo. Opposition groups in 2014 lost more than 1,000 men, pushing the jihadis back to a small stretch of territory near the town of Manbij, which is now under a concerted assault by US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters. But many of the groups fighting there are conservative Islamists, and moderates are worried that for this assault they have gathered around Jolani’s group.
It has shored up finances and power base as rivals splintered, and success in Aleppo would further entrench the group. “If the regime, Russians and other supporters had not brought a siege on Aleppo, we could have avoided the coalition of Nusra and the other groups joining it to fight,” said Bassma Kodmani, a member of the main opposition High Negotiating Council team for peace talks.
“The most radical remain in the fight: that is the most alarming consequence of letting Aleppo come under siege,” she said. “The lack of some credible commitment from the international community leaves the opposition welcoming an offensive waged by Nusra because this is the only way to gain some leverage, to put some pressure on Russia and the regime. And that is really unfortunate.”
Rashwani confirmed that relief on the ground in Aleppo means there is little interest in who is doing the fighting.
“No one is now thinking about Nusra or [the hardline Islamist group] Ahrar al-Sham. We are seeing a group of rebels doing their best to break this siege,” he said. “I was one of those people who started this revolution, so I believe that one day we will get our victory, and I need to be here at that moment.”
THE FACTIONS
Assad and his allies
President Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Regime forces
The Syrian army numbered 300,000 before the war but, after five years of fighting, it is barely a third of that.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah began to support Assad covertly soon after violence broke out and, in 2013, its leader publicly declared it had joined the war. It is believed to have lost hundreds of fighters, including its top military commander.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards
Iran firmly supports Assad, whom it sees as a key ally in a regional power struggle, and is supplying arms, fuel and hundreds of soldiers. Last year, it released photos of its most celebrated commander on the ground in Syria.
Shia militias
Iranian troops are fighting alongside, and coordinating, Shia militias recruited from across the region, including from Iraq, Afghanistan and even Pakistan.
Russian air force
Last autumn’s Russian air campaign was key to turning the tide of the war in Assad’s favour. Its planes can fly in weather that grounds the Syrian air force and have more powerful and accurate weapons.
Anti-Assad forces in Aleppo
Free Syrian Army
The moderate FSA, made up of many smaller groups, was the dominant opposition force in the first two years of the war. It was initially backed by the Arab states and got cautious US support. After years of disunity and faltering advances, its influence and territory has shrunk, while Islamist groups have grown.
Jaysh al-Fateh
A broad coalition of Islamist factions that came together to fight Assad last year, when its advances forced Russia to come to his aid. Jaysh al-Fateh has been at the heart of the campaign to break the siege on Aleppo. The two most influential groups are as follows.
Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra)
The reconstituted al-Qaida affiliate renounced its ties to the global terror group last month and changed its name, but few observers believe that will herald any change in its ideology.
Ahrar al-Sham
Formed by hardliners with Muslim Brotherhood links, who aim to establish a Sunni theocracy in Syria, Ahrar al-Sham fought with Nusra when it was still part of al-Qaida, but rejects international jihad itself. It has a strong support base in Syria. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/the-guardian-view-on-the-australian-election-big-ideas-shrink-in-a-small-target-campaign | Opinion | 2016-06-30T21:33:23.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on the Australian election: big ideas shrink in a small-target campaign | The 2016 Australian election campaign began with the hope that big ideas and bold positive policies might mean voters would be able to choose the party that inspired them the most rather than the one they despised the least.
The eight long weeks have been better than the vitriolic battles of 2010 and 2013. But the election hasn’t entirely delivered on its promise. Ideas seem to have shrunk in the explaining and the campaign has too often descended into scares and misinformation and high-handed, self-serving demands that disillusioned voters should reconsider a vote for the Greens or minor parties because those democratic choices would somehow create “chaos”.
It soon became obvious that just eight months after he ousted Tony Abbott as prime minister and Liberal leader to widespread national relief and sky-high expectations, Malcolm Turnbull was planning a small-target campaign. He promised to respect the intelligence of the electorate but has been seeking the Coalition’s re-election on the calculation that voters were fed up with political upheaval and weren’t ready to write him off just yet, certainly not in favour of the Labor leader, Bill Shorten.
Turnbull’s agenda is thin. His centrepiece $48bn company tax cut, unveiled in a pre-election budget, was modelled as delivering a 0.6% boost to gross national income in a decade, but there are not convincing answers to questions about how much of the tax relief would flow offshore or the extent to which growth would fill the budget hole left by the revenue forgone. When the tax cuts for big corporations proved unpopular, he shifted to the more general claim that only a Coalition government could deliver “jobs and growth”. His budget included a progressive superannuation policy but he also talked about that less as a backlash in the Liberal heartland grew.
His agenda has been weighed down by the often regressive “zombie” spending cuts, still lingering in the budget from 2014 but never legislated, cuts to government payments to the poorest Australian families and a four-week wait before young people could receive the dole. His climate policy and marriage equality plans are deliberately opaque to disguise unresolved conflicts with the Coalition conservatives; by his own admission, Turnbull would prefer a parliamentary vote to introduce marriage equality (the policy of both Labor and the Greens) but he took the leadership with an internal agreement to keep Abbott’s unnecessary and expensive plebiscite. His childcare policy would leave many families better off, but its future is uncertain because he continues to insist it must be paid for by the family benefit cuts. And, astonishingly, he goes to the poll with no policies at all on higher education, vocational education, industrial relations or the arts.
It’s as if his re-election pitch is fuelled mostly by the sheer force of his confidence, because he hasn’t been in the job long enough, or exerted his authority over his own party sufficiently, to come up with a fully considered plan.
Bill Shorten, by contrast, began the campaign with a braver, clearer and more progressive set of ideas than we have seen from recent oppositions. Voters were far more attracted to them than the Coalition had expected. Labor had already announced ambitious policies to wind back the generosity of superannuation concessions for the wealthiest and to limit negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions – a policy that would both save money and go some way to slowing the price rises that are putting home ownership out of reach for so many Australians. The party had the courage to oppose the company tax cut and to offer slightly higher near-term budget deficits as the price of its health and education agenda and smart structural savings that would take some years to mature. It promised to fully fund the “Gonski” plan for schools, to more than reverse the Coalition’s university spending cuts, and Shorten argued the case for marriage equality with conviction. Tying the “putting people first” message together was a noticeable shift from the 1980s economic consensus, an acceptance that reducing inequality was important for ensuring economic growth as well as a fair society.
But Labor’s full policy offering hasn’t quite lived up to its vision. After spending years attacking the Coalition for cutting $57bn from public hospitals over the next 10 years, it topped up Turnbull’s additional spend in the short term but offered no more money over the decade. It quietly accepted some of the “zombies”, including some cuts for new recipients of deeply inadequate welfare payments. It sketched an ambitious climate policy and had the political courage to state clearly that it would need to involve emissions trading schemes, but it also fudged crucial details to avoid another carbon tax scare campaign. It abandoned parts of its superannuation policy mid-campaign and said it would come up with something in government that saved as much money as the Coalition’s version. Despite deep disquiet inside his party, Shorten persuaded Labor’s national conference to mirror the Coalition’s policies to turn back asylum boats and send any arrivals to offshore detention.
As the long campaign proceeded Labor seemed to balk, to be unwilling to back its departure from the political and economic orthodoxy. It lacked a coherent economic story that tied together its policies. It appeared diverted by trying to minimise the difference between its near-term deficit and the Coalition’s, as if it doubted its own ability to argue the case against the inevitable charge that Labor posed a risk to the economy.
Perhaps those fears were justified by Brexit, an international earthquake that has quickly reverberated across the world and on to the Australian hustings. The Coalition is sure it will benefit, both from incumbency and the traditional advantage the Coalition has in perceptions of economic management competency. It took Shorten days to mount the obvious alternative argument, that Australia has avoided the extremes of social division precisely because it retains a reasonable social safety net, but that even so, inequality is growing. Then he cut across his own arguments by being loose with the truth in some of his own last-minute scare campaigns.
The stampede to non-mainstream parties and candidates is not as fast in Australia as in other countries but an increasing number of voters are choosing someone other than the majors. The Coalition has effectively told those voters their choices are dangerous for the country’s political stability – which can only be assured by a Coalition majority. Given no major party has had control of both houses of parliament since 2004, that’s nonsense. Indeed, both major parties have let themselves down with scare campaigns and a ridiculous vilification of the Greens and some independents.
The Greens have released a full suite of progressive, costed policies. They are backed – according to the polls – by about 10% of Australians. And they have a track record of responsibly exercising a balance-of-power position. They are also the only significant party to represent the views of Australians who reject the offshore detention regime. The Greens would also keep up the pressure for crucial reforms to laws governing political expenditure and the disclosure of political donations, changes backed by Labor and Turnbull “in an ideal world”, but which never seem to happen, despite a steady stream of scandals and the increasingly unsustainable task of attracting sufficient donations to pay for election campaigns.
The major parties have also attacked Nick Xenophon and his candidates. The Nick Xenophon Team’s policies are not as detailed as those of the Greens, but Xenophon, powerful in South Australia, has a responsible parliamentary track record. So do Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, although many other independents have views so extreme and platforms so sketchy it should give any voter pause.
Guardian Australia readers are able to reach their own conclusions. But in our view the Coalition’s offerings are thin, Labor’s go a long way towards a progressive program, and false threats of looming “chaos” should not deter voters from choosing the Greens, or other candidates with a plausible, fair agenda. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/20/opera-actor-82-furious-with-critic-for-saying-she-looked-a-fright-on-first-night | Music | 2023-09-20T18:09:58.000Z | Amelia Hill | Opera actor, 82, furious with critic for saying she looked a fright on first night | Rose Knox-Peebles was on a high after the opening night of Das Rheingold at the Royal Opera House earlier this week.
It was the first time the 82-year-old model, who plays Erda, the weary, gnarled earth mother who has seen it all, who knows what has been, what is and will be, had performed in an opera. In quite the baptism of all sorts of fire, the director, Barrie Kosky, decided to keep her character on stage, naked, for the entire two-and-a-half-hour performance – with no interval.
The reviews were glowing: Knox-Peebles’ performance was “remarkable and gracefully brave” said one reviewer. Another said she performed a difficult part with “great skill”. Yet another said that she was “visually arresting” and her constant presence on the stage was the producer’s “finest interpretative moment”.
Das Rheingold review – uncluttered staging is a compelling start to Kosky’s Ring cycle
Read more
But when Knox-Peebles turned to her favourite newspaper – the Financial Times – she got a shock. “Not only was the review terribly short and superficial but it accused me of having been ‘made up to look quite a fright’,” she said.
Knox-Peebles wasn’t upset about being told she looked “a fright” by the critic Richard Fairman – she couldn’t give two hoots what anyone thinks about her appearance – but she was upset by what she thought of as the lazy inaccuracy of the statement.
“I was furious,” she said. “I hadn’t been ‘made up’ to look like a fright. That’s what I looked like. It was me.
“I don’t actually think I do look like a fright”, she added. “I’m perfectly happy with the way I look.”
Knox-Peebles fired off a letter to the newspaper. To her great amusement, it was published. ‘The “fright” look is all naturally mine’, she wrote, signing her letter “Erda”.
The media loved it: “‘Frightful’ make-up is just my face, octogenarian tells opera critic,” announced the Times. “Opera critic calls 81-year-old actress’s make-up ‘frightful’ … but she wasn’t wearing any,” crowed the Telegraph.
Knox-Peebles said she had better things to do than worry about a critic who confuses an opera stage with a catwalk. “My appearance was obviously totally irrelevant. I’m supposed to be 4.9bn years old, so I would hardly look like some beautiful young thing,” she said on Wednesday.
She added: “I’m having a wonderful time. I got married at 18 and had four children. I never worked until 20 years, when I started modelling, more or less by chance. Since then, I’ve been in Vogue, in music videos – bopping around like anybody else – and having the time of my life.
“To my eyes, getting old is a plus. Until this thing – whatever it was – I’ve not been treated differently at all over my age,” she added. “If anything, ageing is a bonus: I get offered seats on the Underground. What’s not to like?!”
The Financial Times has been contacted for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/jun/28/kerry-washington-scandal-interview | Culture | 2013-06-28T22:00:00.000Z | Decca Aitkenhead | Kerry Washington: notes on a Scandal | When the Scandal box set dropped on to our mat, my partner took one look and said he'd be having an early night. Seven hours later we peeled ourselves away from the screen, having watched the entire series together back-to-back – but when I report this to Kerry Washington, she doesn't look surprised, just amused. "Yeah," she smiles, "I'm finding a lot of people telling me that. They watch it with their grandmother, or their girlfriend."
Now into its third series in the US, Scandal is the hit creation of Shonda Rhimes, who made Grey's Anatomy. Washington plays Olivia Pope, an elite crisis manager in Washington DC, part lawyer, part private eye, cop and political fixer – a tiny but formidable beauty in stilettos with a gift for getting what she wants out of everyone from foreign dictators to wealthy rapists to the president, with whom she has an on-off affair. Imagine Alastair Campbell and Matthew Freud in Naomi Campbell's body, and you begin to get the picture.
Pope is at once sympathetic and terrifying, and it's a measure of Washington's performance that she has to reassure me she's nothing like Pope in real life. "She's so much cooler than I am, so much smarter, so much more powerful, so much more fearless. I'm not going to tell you about yourself or try to manipulate you." She chuckles. "I'm definitely not her. She is based on a real-life person, though – and that person is pretty badass."
Pope is loosely based on Judy Smith, an African American crisis management expert who worked as a White House press secretary for George W Bush and has since advised clients from Monica Lewinsky to Wesley Snipes. She is still a crisis manager, but also a producer on the show. "So it's like, one week she's on set with us, the next she's in an undisclosed location doing work we can't know about." Washington has a conference call with Smith before filming each episode and the show's writers "come up with the most scandalous crisis situations they can think of, then say, 'Judy, what would you do? How would you fix that?'"
This helps explain why, despite the occasional far-fetched plotline and cartoonish cliche, Scandal feels so compelling. Even so, Washington hadn't even wanted to read the script when her agent suggested it. "I thought, a network TV drama? No way, no way. I have a thriving film career."
She's not being immodest: at 36, Washington is poised to make the breakthrough from interesting cinema actor to movie megastar. Her career began in television, with appearances in NYPD Blue, Boston Legal and Law & Order, but soon graduated to cinema. Following roles in Mr & Mrs Smith and Spike Lee's She Hate Me, she played Idi Amin's wife in The Last King Of Scotland, Ray Charles' wife in the biopic Ray and Broomhilda, wife of the slave Django, in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.
With Jamie Foxx in the biopic Ray. Photograph: Rex Features
"But then I read the Scandal script and I was like, 'Oh, I'm screwed. This is so good.' Then I got really scared, because I did feel like it was written for me; you know, in some divine way, this was mine. But there were 15 other actresses who felt the same. Shonda auditioned everyone and their mother, because for African American actresses this was the glass slipper – so she let everyone try it on."
Scandal is the first network primetime drama to feature an African American female lead in close to 40 years, and possibly the first ever whose colour is entirely incidental. Pope's identity isn't defined by her skin: she just happens to be black. It is, many critics have raved, the first "post-racial" TV show. Does Washington think it could have been made pre-Obama? "Well, it could have been written pre-Obama, because Judy Smith worked in the George Bush White House. But would it have made it to air? Would people have tuned in? That I don't know."
She is adamant, however, that Scandal is not "post-racial" TV. "I don't believe in post-racial. It's like saying we should live in a post-gender world. But I love being a woman! I am interested in living in a post-sexist world and feel the same about race. I don't want to live in a post-race world because being black is really exciting. I mean" – she laughs – "it's who I am. I'm a woman, black, from New York, Aquarius – these are things that create who I am. I'm interested in living in a post-racist world, where being African American doesn't dictate limitations on what I can do – but I don't want to live post-race. Our differences are so fascinating and wonderful. We don't want to all be the same. Who wants that? Hitler did, but who else?"
She is philosophical about the influence of skin colour on her career. "There are two sides to this coin. I have had, and still do, experiences where someone will say, 'You know, we just don't really see this character as black. We don't want to go black with her.' Some of it I respect, because this is a visual medium, so I don't believe in colour-blind casting. But I think sometimes people make that decision out of fear, or laziness, or just not wanting to have to travel down roads that aren't familiar." On the other hand, she points out that, were she white, she wouldn't have landed her biggest movie roles. "It has its downsides – there have been things I've loved but I haven't been able to be a part of – but it's also had its upsides."
She can't bring herself to single out a favourite role. "God, no." She half-laughs. "Every role is like a child, so I don't like to compare them." But the part of Pope makes particular sense to her because "I've been in politics for a long time".
Washington campaigned for Obama in 2008, addressing meetings across 15 states, and spoke at last year's Democratic National Convention. "Which was the most terrifying thing I've ever done in my life. I looked out at this stadium full of tens of thousands of people and I was like, what am I doing here?" She is a member of V-Day, a global movement to raise awareness of violence against women and girls, and lobbies Congress on issues around the arts. Will she bring to the part skills or ideas learned through her political activism?
"I want to be careful about this," she says quickly, "because obviously I have a very different relationship with the White House than Olivia does, and a very different relationship with the president." She gives a playful but firm grin, before steering the conversation in another direction. "But I do think my knowledge of Washington fashion came to play in establishing her wardrobe, because I wanted to set her apart from the DC norm."
Kerry Washington in Scandal, America's favourite new drama. Photograph: ABC/Channel 4
Scandal has developed a US fan base who tune in for the outfits alone, and Washington is closely involved in choosing them. "For me the clothes are as big a part of how a character expresses herself as how she walks or speaks. When you think about the power suit of a corporate woman in the 80s, it was just dressing like a man. Olivia feels thoroughly modern – she is powerful, and at the same time she's flawed and vulnerable behind closed doors, and I love that. I live that duality and I think it's something a lot of us relate to. So Olivia does wear the pants, but her clothes are distinctly feminine: we tailor everything so that you see her waist."
Pope has a "wonderful balance", she says. "She doesn't traffic in her sexuality, doesn't manipulate people with it. But she is aware of the impact of her beauty and not afraid to be beautiful."
Washington herself was ranked among People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People earlier this year, and is a spokeswoman for L'Oréal, but has no interest in being a sex symbol. In fact, she had always thought she would be a psychotherapist or a teacher, not an actor. "I'm the daughter of a professor, so… well, I think acting's not a real job," she says, laughing. "I come from this sort of academic, working-middle-class family where you make something respectable of your life, do something that matters, and being a starving artist is not that. I always loved acting, but I think for a long time, in my brain, the desire to be an actor was equivalent to the desire to be famous. And I did not want to be famous. I did not want to be that girl. I thought that if you wanted to be an actress, you had to want to be on the front cover of magazines, otherwise you shouldn't do it."
It wasn't until halfway through her degree in sociology and anthropology at George Washington University that she "understood that I could want to be a working actor and it didn't have to include fame. That there were lots of people who made a living doing theatre and a couple of commercials a year, and I didn't have to want to be that girl."
Only now, of course, she is that girl, splashed across the covers of magazines. "That was that theory blown." She giggles, nodding. She has left behind the Bronx of her childhood and moved to Hollywood for work. "But I'm lucky. I come from a really grounded family and I have three best friends from high school who have made it their job to remain unimpressed by everything I do. If I started being superdiva Kerry, they would be like" – she wrinkles up her nose – "what is that?"
She was once engaged, to actor David Moscow, but is now single. And from what she says about shooting Scandal, I would guess her work-life balance may be as elusive as Pope's. "Doing 22 episodes is unlike anything I've ever done, like making 11 movies back to back. I actually called my doctor after because I felt like my adrenals were depleted." But she is guarded when asked, offering only, "Um, yeah, I don't get to spend as much time with friends and family as I'd like. But, you know, my primary relationships I'm very committed to and I find time for them, yeah."
Washington never reads reviews, so took a while to grasp that Scandal had relocated her to a new stratosphere of celebrity. "Looking at ratings is like stepping on the scales, and it's why I never weigh myself. If the number is a number you don't want it to be, then you're miserable, and if it's a number you want it to be, you spend the rest of the day thinking, oh, I should never eat again so the number stays where it is, right? It's just better that I don't get on the scales."
In the end it was her three best friends who let her know. "They are completely addicted to the show and I thought, oh, we have something here. OK, now that's interesting."
Scandal starts next Thursday at 9pm on More 4. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/06/corbyn-urges-support-for-labours-brexit-plan-as-house-vote-nears | Politics | 2018-12-06T20:43:26.000Z | Dan Sabbagh | Corbyn urges support for his Brexit plan as Commons vote nears | Jeremy Corbyn called on MPs of all parties to vote down Theresa May’s deal and back his alternative plan for Brexit, as campaigners for a second referendum urged him to get “off the fence” and endorse a fresh public vote.
Labour’s leader, writing in the Guardian, said that the party’s “comprehensive customs union plan” should be one of the options on the table if the party could not force a general election – in addition to a second referendum.
Corbyn argued that if May was defeated next Tuesday the government would lose “its ability to govern”. That would have meant an automatic election before the introduction of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act in 2011, which formalised the rules governing votes of confidence.
“If under the current rules we cannot get an election, all options must be on the table,” Corbyn wrote. “Those should include Labour’s alternative and, as our conference decided in September, the option of campaigning for a public vote to break the deadlock.”
Labour sources said recent polling showed that the most popular option with the British public was trying to renegotiate the Brexit deal, although the party wants to retain maximum flexibility in what is likely to be a chaotic period if May’s deal is, as is widely expected, voted down.
The careful positioning came as it emerged that a head-to-head TV debate between Corbyn and May would almost certainly not take place after ITV announced it had abandoned its plan to broadcast it because Labour and the Tories could not agree on its format. The decision followed the BBC dropping its own plans for a similar programme.
However, Labour’s decision to maintain its “constructive ambiguity” over Brexit and support a range of options came under fire from frustrated second-referendum campaigners on Thursday, one of whom abandoned her plan to submit an amendment to next week’s final vote on Thursday.
Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, a former GP, had planned to put down a cross-party “doctor’s amendment” calling for a second referendum, but said she would not do so because she had been persuaded that without Labour frontbench support at this stage it would be at risk of heavy defeat.
Wollaston said that she made her decision after discussions with the people’s vote second-referendum campaign, many of whose active members included backbench Labour MPs such as Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie. “Labour has to end the constructive ambiguity, Corbyn has to come off the fence,” Wollaston added.
She said that she would make her move after May’s deal “failed in the Commons”, although last night the Liberal Democrats took advantage of Wollaston’s decision to submit their own amendment instead.
The Lib Dem amendment instructs the government “to take all necessary steps to prepare for a people’s vote” although the party’s small number of MPs in the Commons means it will have no chance of passing it next week.
Corbyn said that as part of Labour’s “alternative plan” he wants to strike a “comprehensive customs union with the EU, with a British say in future trade deals”. He added that he wants the UK to enjoy “a new and strong relationship with the single market that gives us frictionless trade” – although with time running out before Britain is due to leave the EU in March 2019 it was unclear how the plan could be negotiated.
Corbyn also came out against the unpopular customs backstop in an effort to woo pro Brexit voters, warning that if the UK used it “workers’ rights would be allowed to fall behind” and “restrictions on state aid to industry would be locked in”.
The article came a day after it emerged that the Labour’s powerful union backer, Len McCluskey, had warned Labour MPs in a private meeting that they should have reservations about a second referendum.
One person present said that McCluskey had warned that there would be “a sense of betrayal” if the party chose that option, although the issue is divisive at senior levels of the party. Over the weekend it emerged that Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, had wanted Labour to quickly get to the point where a second referendum became an option.
In September Labour adopted a compromise position in which the party would first decide whether to oppose May’s deal, then, if it was voted down, try to force a general election, before turning to other options. But with the vote looming, Corbyn and the party’s leadership is coming under pressure to spell out what it might do next.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister and campaigner for a second referendum, returned to Westminster on Thursday to say he believed that May’s “half in and half out” deal satisfied no one in the Brexit debate and that there was no solution that commanded majority support in the House of Commons either.
Speaking at a parliamentary press gallery lunch, Blair said that MPs could be obliged to consider a second referendum. “My guess, and I may be 100% wrong, is that when all the options are voted upon, parliament will come to the view that none can truly be said to reflect the majority will of the people, and it’s back to them therefore that we must go for resolution.”
If May’s deal is defeated in the Commons on Tuesday Corbyn could call for a vote of no confidence on Wednesday. However, Labour is desperate to avoid signalling its intentions until the last minute.
Under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, if May is defeated by one vote, her government will fall, but there will be 14 days in which an alternative government could be formed.
Corbyn flies to Lisbon on Friday for the two-day congress of the Party of European Socialists. Party sources said he was expected to meet Frans Timmermans, a European commission vice-president who is the socialists parties’ candidate for the commission presidency, to press his case. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/bbc-andrew-neil-media-politics | Opinion | 2018-04-11T17:42:00.000Z | Owen Jones | If the BBC is politically neutral, how does it explain Andrew Neil? | Owen Jones | Imagine this. The BBC appoints a prominent radical leftist, a lifelong Bennite, the chairman of the publisher of a prominent leftwing publication no less, as its flagship political presenter and interviewer. This person has made speeches in homage of Karl Marx calling for the establishment of full-blooded socialism in Britain, including a massive increase in public ownership, hiking taxes on the rich to fund a huge public investment programme, and reversing anti-union laws. They appear on our “impartial” Auntie Beeb wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of a hardline leftist thinktank. Their BBC editor is a former Labour staffer who moves to become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief. They use their Twitter feed – where they have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to a platform handed to them by the BBC – to promote radical leftist causes.
Is the BBC abdicating its responsibilities over Brexit?
Henry Porter
Read more
This would never happen. It is unthinkable, in fact. If the BBC establishment somehow entered this parallel universe, the British press would be on the brink of insurrection. And yet, the strange case of Andrew Neil, the ultra-Thatcherite former Sunday Times editor who is the BBC’s flagship political presenter, is an instructive example about how our media works.
Neil is a formidable political interviewer in many ways: forensic, unrelenting, quick-witted, sardonic. But consider the background of this former Conservative party researcher. When Jeremy Corbyn had the audacity to meet with leftwing Jewish group Jewdas, Neil smeared them as “nutters”; last year, he made a speech denouncing antisemitism on the left. To be clear, leftwing antisemitism exists and must be vanquished. But Neil has no moral authority on this issue. As editor of the Sunday Times in 1992, he hired Britain’s foremost Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist David Irving, to work on the Goebbels diaries. To hire a sympathiser of Hitler and denier of the worst atrocity in history to do respectable work for a national newspaper – to offer a reputational lifeline to a man who should have been treated as a pariah – was a disgrace for which he has never apologised. As the Wiener Library, the oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, said at the time: “David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.”
Not long after becoming a high-profile BBC presenter, Neil made a speech in homage to rightwing radical Friedrich Hayek, in which he called for a “radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy” as well as a flat tax “and the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale not yet contemplated”. During last year’s general election, he presented the Daily Politics wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of the hardcore neoliberal Adam Smith Institute. His editor was Robbie Gibb, a former adviser to Michael Portillo – another longstanding colleague of Neil on This Week. Last year Gibb became Theresa May’s head of communications.
Neil’s Twitter account – which has hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to his BBC gig – is routinely used to promote rightwing causes. He uses this platform to denounce the scientific consensus on climate change, reviling what he calls “the climate mafia” and claiming that deviation from the consensus meant “the witch-finders want to burn you”. It is not the first time he has deviated from scientific consensus. When he was Sunday Times editor, his newspaper ran a series of articles arguing that HIV did not cause Aids. It was a theme picked up by the Spectator 15 years later. Let’s be clear: this contemptible myth risked people’s lives. His Twitter feed, too, reveals a relentless sympathy for Brexit and denunciation of its critics. A valid political perspective, but not coming from the BBC’s main politics presenter on the biggest issue facing Britain. Again unsurprising, given that he once called “for a reorientation of British foreign policy away from Europe towards Asia and Latin America”and “unilateral free trade, regardless of the policy in Brussels”.
His firebrand rightwing politics aside, Neil skins politicians alive across the political spectrum, comes the inevitable retort. There is no question that Neil is exceptionally bright and well-read with an acute eye for detail: it is a grave error to turn up unprepared with him in the chair, as I discovered in one of my earliest TV appearances. And yes, he did recently take down a Tory minister for the absurd smears against Corbyn over a crank ex-Czechoslovak spy: that he was applauded for doing his job here shows how low the left’s expectations are. But as a general rule, while Neil will fillet politicians on both left and right on the basis of competence, he reserves his ideological assaults for the left, ridiculing Corbyn over Russia – which one would expect on US TV networks, where impartiality rules do not apply.
As editor of the Sunday Times in 1992, he hired Britain’s foremost Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist David Irving
Last month, when Green MP Caroline Lucas tabled an Urgent Question on bullying and harassment in Parliament, Neil excoriated her for not talking about rape in Telford instead. When Lucas responded that the Telford case was “absolutely appalling” and that she backed an urgent public inquiry into the matter, but that didn’t mean MPs shouldn’t get their own House in order, Neil denounced her for making a comparison between “what some middle class women had suffered” and the Telford scandal – one he alone had made. The consequence was an online pile-on. Imagine if a prominent leftwing BBC journalist existed and launched such a baseless out-of-nowhere attack on a rightwing politician?
Why does this all matter? Critiquing any prominent journalist normally results in a defensive backlash: it is regarded as the ultimate sin within media ranks. But the issue here is about a system. The media are one of the most essential pillars of any democracy, and must be critiqued as such. The usual BBC defence is that the corporation is attacked from both sides, and therefore must be neutral. This is a logical fallacy. For one, it does not take into account which side is more assertive or dominant. Our press overwhelmingly supports the Tories and is intolerant of even mild deviations from rightwing orthodoxy. The BBC itself is dominated by social and economic liberalism, which is why it provokes ire from left and right: but that isn’t neutrality, either. Its daily news priorities are set and framed by the front pages of Conservative-supporting newspapers.
Neil himself would be the most intimidating and effective rightwing polemicist in Britain if he was freed from the BBC. But the fact that somebody as stridently leftwing as he is rightwing would never be appointed to such a position is indicative of how our media operate. Many on the left fear that any critique of Auntie will play into the hands of a right wing that would privatise and gut the BBC if it could. This deference means that BBC political output remains framed by rightwing assumptions. The Media Reform Coalition has suggested a series of proposals, such as freeing the BBC from all government interference and a BBC board elected by licence-payers and BBC staff. At the very least, as the case of Neil underlines, the left – which, after all, represents millions of Britons – must stop accepting its continued media marginalisation as just one of those things. It isn’t – and it must change. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/03/rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture | Television & radio | 2018-03-03T08:00:12.000Z | Decca Aitkenhead | RuPaul: ‘Drag is a big f-you to male-dominated culture’ | When RuPaul Charles was seven, one of his sisters comforted him with a promise. “Everyone who’s in charge of the world now,” she told him, “they’re all making it better, so that years from now everyone on the planet will have at least eight pairs of shoes.” Her prediction tells us something about the better world a young RuPaul dreamed of – and that, in the case of his own shoe collection, at least, turned out to be true. Before the boy was even born, a psychic had told his mother he would grow up to be famous, so she took great care to name him suitably. What neither his unusually prescient family – nor a single TV pundit – predicted, however, was that at the age of 57 he would be the star of what has been called “the most radical show on TV”.
RuPaul’s Drag Race was turned down by every network bar one when he first pitched the idea a decade ago. A pastiche of America’s Next Top Model, part talent contest and part reality TV, the format selects a dozen or so drag queens to compete in weekly challenges such as running up a Gone With The Wind-themed gown out of curtains. A judging panel of RuPaul and guests, who have included Lady Gaga and La Toya Jackson, scores the catwalk finales, looking for Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent (the acronym is not an accident), and the bottom two then “lip-sync for their lives” to a pop anthem, before the loser is eliminated.
The show is about to enter its 10th season, the concept has evolved a little every year, and the queens take the contest very seriously, but I’ve never met anyone who actually cares who wins. What makes Drag Race addictive are the contestants’ life stories and the group dynamics which break all the rules of reality TV by favouring camaraderie over cat fights. For all the artifice of their outfits, the queens make themselves emotionally naked for us, by turns poignant, comic, vulnerable and heroic. RuPaul performs the role of grand matriarch, and it’s his unexpected humanity which both defines and elevates the show. As one Drag Race addict wrote in Esquire, “Drag Race is an endless reminder that it’s possible to find love for others – and ourselves – despite all of the shit and the pain and the heartbreak we go through in life.”
RuPaul in drag
The contestants are all “showgirls” – professional drag queens – and part of the fun comes from watching the miracles they conjure; there is nothing these girls can’t do with wigs and corsets and enough gaffer tape. Some are plus size, others comic, and some straightforward glamour girls – all unrecognisable out of costume – but beyond the pleasing reality TV formula of transformation, Drag Race is also wildly funny. The frenzied athleticism of the lip-sync challenge, the frantic panics over frocks, the fabulous names – Adore Delano, Tempest DuJour, Eureka O’Hara – all shimmer with knowing irony. Contestants are fluent in the vernacular of drag – “throwing shade” (criticising), “hog body” (an insufficiently hourglass figure), “Judy” (good friend) – making the show feel like an invite to a private party on another planet.
Bought by Logo TV, a tiny LGBT cable network, Drag Race became an instant hit, quickly crossing over to VH1, bringing the subculture of drag into middle America’s living rooms. In the coming season, the guest judges will even include senior Democrat and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Each episode now averages well over a million viewers, the show is streamed all over the world, and last year RuPaul won his second consecutive Emmy and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.
With Lady Gaga. Photograph: Logo TV
We meet in a hotel near his West Hollywood home. All 6ft 4in of him appears in the lobby, alone, bang on time; he could not be less diva-ish. Though immaculately dressed in a navy checked suit, his manner is playfully informal, and the unwavering eye-contact accelerates the sense of instant intimacy. When we part 90 minutes later, he has wept three times, referenced astral chart movements as though the zodiac were the Dow Jones, and cited various psychics as unimpeachable authorities. He has a fondness for aphorisms – “We’re born naked, everything else is drag” – and when he talks about “culture”, he means the Kardashians. To infer from all this that he is a delightful airhead, however, would be a mistake. RuPaul is deeply serious, erudite and self-aware, and has clearly given a great deal of thought to everything he says. If the personal is political, RuPaul has been a radical from the day he was born.
“P
eople have always been threatened by me as an African-American man, because of the inherent black rage that all black people have in our culture, the underlying black rage because of what happened to us in this country. It’s always there; it’s a glaring issue that’s saying, ‘First of all, let’s talk about the black rage.’ So one of the ways that I’ve been able to dilute that perception is to dress as a character that says, ‘Look I’m fun, I can have a sense of humour about life because I’m in drag. I acknowledge black rage, but we’re going to have some fun.’ So then people are like, ‘Oh, OK, so we can laugh together, we don’t have to address the black rage.’”
He grew up the only son of four children to dirt-poor, “crazy-arse country hillbilly” parents in San Diego, who fought violently before separating when RuPaul was seven. By then he already knew he was different. “When I was a kid I thought, ‘OK, I don’t fit in, I know that, but I’m smart enough to figure out what I can do to fit in.’” He studied the gender norms and expectations around him and, “I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got it, I want nothing to do with that. In fact I’m lucky that I don’t fit in, because now I can play with all the toys and all the colours.’” Drag, laughter and cannabis were his coping mechanisms, and at 15 he moved to live with his sister and her husband in Atlanta, where he quickly hit the nightclub scene, before graduating to New York’s downtown nightlife in his 20s.
‘I hear the universe’s stage directions and take advantage.’ Photograph: Dylan Coulter/The Guardian
A club dancer who did “comedy fright drag”, he had a lot of fun, but by 28 was broke. “Nothing was clicking. It was my Saturn returns, and it was that crossroads. I wasn’t sure if the prophecy [that he would be famous] was true.” He weeps unselfconsciously at the memory of how close he came to abandoning his dreams. “But then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to glam the fuck out.’” He shaved his legs and chest, “went glamazon,” and nine months later was crowned Queen of Manhattan at a drag queen pageant, “the pinnacle of downtown success”.
But at the end of his reign, he was horrified to see the New York dance act Deee-Lite enjoy global fame with Groove Is In The Heart. “These kids in the neighbourhood were actually behind me in terms of succession to stardom. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, how’d they get up there?’ It’s because bitch you were fucking asleep in the party world, being the Queen of Manhattan. So, I said, ‘OK, no, I’ve got to fix that. I’m not having that.’” He made a demo tape, got signed to a label, and on his 32nd birthday released the dance anthem Supermodel (You Better Work) which went on to be a smash hit. “And that’s when my world changed for ever.”
The 90s were a riot for RuPaul. An international superstar, he made albums, starred in movies, had his own chat show, and was signed up by Mac as the first male face of the cosmetics brand. But in 1999 he withdrew from public life and moved to LA, to get sober and quit smoking pot.
“Listen, I’m not the greatest actor. I’m not the greatest singer. I’m not the greatest drag queen. I’m not the greatest dancer. My gift has been having the clarity to hear the universe’s stage directions and to take advantage of that. I knew it was finally time for me to approach the things I had pushed deep down inside.” He breaks down and silently weeps again.
“I realised that my putting a cloud of smoke around myself, literally and figuratively, was a way to push down those feelings. So I got into therapy, and recalibrated what my purpose was, you know. I had gotten into show business as a kid to get validation from the world, get validation from my father. And I realised that would never satisfy. It has to come from the inside. So I came back to show business, but I do what I do now with this newfound motivation.”
When his long-time producers suggested a drag reality show, RuPaul had one condition: “I don’t want to do anything mean-spirited.” The high camp of drag may appear superficially catty, he says, but in fact the essence of the art form is compassion.
In 1979. Photograph: WireImage
“For people to do drag and make it their profession in a male-dominated culture, they have to go through so much emotional tug-of-war, because society says, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’ So, the strength and humanity it takes to maintain yourself and your dreams create many different layers of consciousness. That’s where the humanity comes from.”
RuPaul likes to speak in deeply heartfelt but somewhat opaque rhetorical flourishes, so I ask if he means that Drag Race has a political message about humanity.
“Yes! It doesn’t have a political agenda in terms of policies in Washington. But it has a position on identity, which is really the most political you can get. It has politics at its core, because it deals with: how do you see yourself on this planet? That’s highly political. It’s about recognising that you are God dressing up in humanity, and you could do whatever you want. That’s what us little boys who were maligned and who were ostracised figured out. It’s a totem, a constant touchstone to say, ‘Don’t take any of this shit seriously.’ It’s a big f-you. So the idea of sticking to one identity – it’s like I don’t care, I’m a shapeshifter, I’m going to fly around and use all the colours, and not brand myself with just one colour.”
Pinning him down on precisely what all of this means can be tricky, in part I think because he doesn’t want to offend anyone by explicitly acknowledging the contradiction between his playfully elastic sensibility and the militant earnestness of the transgender movement. The two couldn’t be further apart, I suggest.
At a gay rights march in 1993. Photograph: Getty Images
“Ye-es, that’s always been the dichotomy of the trans movement versus the drag movement, you know,” he agrees carefully. “I liken it to having a currency of money, say English pounds as opposed to American dollars. I think identities are like value systems or currencies; there’s not just one. Understand the value of different currencies, and what you could do with them. That’s the place you want to be.” But to a transgender woman it’s critically important that the world recognises her fixed identity as a female. RuPaul nods uneasily. “That’s right, that’s right.”
What I can’t understand is how transgender women can enter a drag contest. Last year RuPaul’s Drag Race was widely acclaimed for featuring its first openly transgender contestant, called Peppermint – but if transgender women must be identified as female, how can they also be “men dressing up as women”?
“Well, I don’t like to call drag ‘wearing women’s clothes’. If you look around this room,” and he gestures around the hotel lobby, “she’s wearing a shirt with jeans, that one’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, right? So women don’t really dress like us. We are wearing clothes that are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity.”
In the subculture of drag you do occasionally find what are known as “bio queens” – biological women who mimic the exaggerated femininity of drag. Would RuPaul allow a biological woman to compete on the show? He hesitates. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.”
With La Toya Jackson in 1993. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
So how can a transgender woman be a drag queen? “Mmmm. It’s an interesting area. Peppermint didn’t get breast implants until after she left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really transitioned.” Would he accept a contestant who had? He hesitates again. “Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing. We’ve had some girls who’ve had some injections in the face and maybe a little bit in the butt here and there, but they haven’t transitioned.”
There’s something very touching about RuPaul’s concern to stay abreast of subcultural developments and find a way to embrace even those he finds confronting. “There are certain words,” for example, “that the kids would use, that I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, hold up now.’ But I’ve had to accept it because I understand where it comes from.” Such as? “Well, one of the things that the kids do now is they’ll say, referring to another drag queen, ‘Oh that bitch is cunt, she is pure cunt’, which means she is serving realness,” by which he means presenting herself as realistic or honest. “They say it knowing it’s shocking, knowing it’s taboo, and it’s the same way that black people use the N-word.”
RuPaul talks about “the kids” on his show in tenderly nurturing tones, but has never had children himself. He met his husband, Georges LeBar, an Australian rancher, on a New York dancefloor in 1994, and revealed last year that the pair had married, but explains quickly, “Conventional, that wasn’t my goal! Our goal was to use the system to work for us. I don’t give a fuck about marriage. What I did care about is that if anything happens to me or him, our assets are protected.”
The couple’s domestic arrangements are fairly unconventional; LeBar lives on the couple’s 60,000-acre Wyoming ranch, while RuPaul spends most of his time in LA, observing an almost comically west coast lifestyle; he rises at 4am, meditates and does yoga, and is out in the canyon with his personal trainer before dawn. RuPaul puts the success of their 24-year relationship down to the fact that it is open.
‘We’re born naked, everything else is drag.’ Photograph: Dylan Coulter/The Guardian
“He and I are very respectful of one another. He and I know that on this planet where there are millions and millions of people, the person I have found on this planet that I like the very most is him. And I know that for him the person he loves the most on this planet is me. I know that; there’s no doubt in my mind. So if he needs to do something else somewhere else, I’m fine with that. He is respectful of me. He would never turn it into something that would make me feel uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t do that to him either. To have that on this planet is crazy. It’s rare.” He becomes overcome by tears again and sobs softly, before brightening and admitting, with a mischievous grin, “The truth of the matter is that there aren’t many people that I like. I’m usually bored by people, you know. I’d rather be alone reading a book or something.”
I ask if the couple ever considered having children. “Georges loves kids, but I know what a child needs to prosper and grow, and I don’t have the time to do that. If I were going to do it, I would devote my time to that kid. But, no, I’ve never wanted to do it. I love kids, but it’s mainly because I’d have to deal with the other parents.” He chuckles. “Fucking idiots, passing on this bullshit to their kids. People are fucking insane, and it would be terrible for my kid, because I would be telling off the other parents. I’d want to expand my kid’s experience, but all these other parents would be like…” He wags a finger disapprovingly. “Oh my God that would drive me crazy – so, no.”
He pauses to think for a moment. “But who knows? It could still happen, sure. It could happen tomorrow, you know. If he wanted to do it tomorrow, I would do it.” Really? “I certainly would, yes. It’s because I’ve done my thing on this. I think my legacy is set in stone.”
It can be hard sometimes to know when RuPaul is and isn’t being serious. What he calls shapeshifting is so central to his sensibility that being fabulous feels more important than maintaining fixed positions – but that is precisely the political message of his show. In another life, had he not been in show business, he thinks he would have been a teacher, “teaching young people how to navigate life”. But it is quite impossible to imagine him being anything other than RuPaul.
With husband Georges LeBar, a rancher he met on a dancefloor in 1994. Photograph: Getty Images
He wishes he’d given himself another stage name, and thus the option of anonymity in the doctor’s waiting room, say. But when I ask what name he would have chosen for himself, he can’t imagine being anyone but RuPaul either.
“You know, that’s a good question. I’m really good at choosing names for other people. Once I get their energy and once I see the rhythm I go, ‘Oh I know what you are.’” Can he do that trick for everyone? “I think so, once I know them.” Go on then, I laugh. Give me a drag name. He considers me for a moment.
“You know what? The first thing that came to my mind with you is Sparkle.” And so Sparkle it is.
RuPaul’s Drag Race season 10 starts on 22 March on VH1. Previous seasons can be viewed on Netflix.
Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email [email protected], including your name and address (not for publication). | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/09/hargreaves-lansdown-apologises-to-clients-in-neil-woodford-fund | Business | 2019-06-09T16:58:34.000Z | Phillip Inman | Hargreaves Lansdown apologises to clients in Neil Woodford funds | The boss of stockbrokers Hargreaves Lansdown has apologised after thousands of the FTSE 100 company’s clients found their money trapped in ill-fated funds run by the renowned fund manager Neil Woodford.
Chris Hill, its chief executive, said he shared clients’ disappointment and frustration after the closure of the Woodford equity income fund which prevented investors from cashing out of the ailing investment vehicle.
Hill said he backed research through Hargreaves Lansdown’s Wealth 50 list of top buys that recommended investors pick Woodford over better-performing fund managers. Woodford, one of the UK’s best-known stockpickers, suspended all trading in the fund “until further notice” after being overwhelmed by customer withdrawals following a series of bad market bets.
Hill said: “I would like to apologise personally to all clients who have been impacted by the recent problems with the Woodford equity income fund. We all share their disappointment and frustration. Our priority right now is to support our clients and keep them informed.”
Woodford said last week the fund would reopen as soon as was “practicable after these exceptional circumstances have ceased”, and that the suspension would be reviewed “at least every 28 days”.
Hill said: “The shortcomings of one fund should not detract from the benefits of favourite fund lists like the Wealth 50.”
His firm has come under fire from investors who will not be able to access their investments until the suspension is lifted. Investors have also criticised the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, for failing to see the risks taken by Woodford.
The former City minister Lord Myners said the FCA “should have been awake” to problems at the fund, telling the BBC that the regulator had missed “clear warning signs” that things were going badly.
On Thursday, Nicky Morgan, who chairs the Treasury committee, said investors should not be charged management fees while trading in the fund was suspended.
Concerns were raised last year after a series of poor performances by companies part-owned by Woodford funds, many of them not listed on the stock market, making them difficult to sell.
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Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, defended the regulator and Woodford’s decision to suspend the fund. “The alternative would have been much more disorderly,” Bailey told Bloomberg TV in his first comments since the gates were closed on investors on Wednesday.
He offered assurances that the FCA would be watching Woodford closely as the fund manager started to sell off his stakes in privately held companies, which are more difficult to turn into cash. Bailey said it was important for funds like Woodford’s to invest in unlisted firms. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/18/australia-aukus-asia-future-us-china-richard-marles | Australia news | 2024-04-18T06:12:13.000Z | Daniel Hurst | Australia plans for a ‘less certain’ future in Asia — one where the US may not remain the dominant force | Australia’s defence overhaul has accelerated some projects and cut others and has already prompted a plea from China to abandon a “cold war mentality”.
But as the dust settles on a plan to increase overall military spending, the Albanese government has also sent some significant signals on how it sees the future of the Indo-Pacific region – and these aren’t exactly how Australia’s top security ally, the US, might see things.
The defence minister, Richard Marles, also has a new answer to a persistent question about claims from some western analysts that Beijing may seek to seize Taiwan in the next few years, and where Australia finds itself in that scenario.
Plans for new fighter jets on back burner despite Labor’s $50bn boost to defence spending
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The question goes like this: if the region is as dangerous as the government suggests, and Australia no longer can rely on a 10-year warning before major conflict breaks out, how can we wait until the 2030s and 2040s for nuclear-powered submarines? Of the government’s promise to spend an extra $50bn on defence over the next decade, why is only 10% in the first four years?
Marles’s answer is to imply the Australian defence force wouldn’t play a decisive role in a US-China war. He insists Australia will still work with the US and others to deter such conflict, but is “trying to solve a different problem”.
In his National Press Club speech and in a round of interviews afterwards, Marles takes aim at commentators who “talk about our defence force needing to acquire everything yesterday in case of the worst-case contingency that might be experienced in terms of great power contests in the next few years”.
Marles reasons that a medium power like Australia is “never going to bring to bear the kind of military capability that exists in the United States or China” and must be “really clear-eyed about the fact we are not trying to be a peer nation to the United States or China”.
In no way should his comments be seen as ruling Australia out of committing military forces in the event war erupted – there would probably be huge institutional pressure to join the US – but equally Marles is playing down the practical impact of such a contribution.
In Marles’s narrative, “the next decade and beyond” looks “precarious and less certain in every respect”. He says “the strategic problem that we are trying to meet” is to ensure that in the face of that uncertainty “we are able to resist coercion and maintain Australia’s way of life”.
Left unspoken is the fact this remains Australia’s focus regardless of the level of future US military engagement in the region – and a “less certain world” doesn’t presuppose who would emerge as victor in any great-power contest in the meantime.
According to the national defence strategy released on Wednesday, the effects of China’s military buildup are “occurring closer to Australia than previously” and Australia must project power further from its shores to discourage “a potential adversary from taking unwanted actions”.
Australia’s defence planners regard a physical invasion of Australia as unlikely because it would be an easier task to disrupt shipping or to launch cyber-attacks.
Resisting coercion means preventing a country – China – from being in a position to pressure Australia by physically blocking fuel imports from South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. China was, however, able to cause economic disruption through a series of tariffs and trade actions against key Australian export sectors at the height of the diplomatic dispute in 2020, something that did not involve any military action or counteraction.
Albanese government recommends David Johnston to head Australian defence force – video
Even though senior US officials talk about the Aukus security pact as “binding” the allies for decades to come, Marles says Australia must become “a much more capable self-reliant country”. That’s the official justification for increasing defence spending to 2.4% of economic output within 10 years (up from 2.1% now).
Marles is also explicit in calling for “a sustainable strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific – a balance where no state is militarily predominant”.
This elaborates on what the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has said about the US being “indispensable to balance in our region” but that “the nature of that indispensability has changed”.
Australia’s National Defence Strategy devotes just two paragraphs to US engagement in the Indo-Pacific, including one welcoming Washington’s efforts to deepen its ties with partners and allies because “collective approaches are crucial” to maintain the regional balance. Australia’s security “will continue to be underpinned by the strength of our partnerships with regional countries and our alliance with the US”.
The Australian government’s emphasis on no one state being militarily predominant does tend to clash with the idea of the US maintaining “primacy” in east Asia – an idea that continues to have strong ideological appeal in Washington.
While the US president, Joe Biden, has proclaimed “competition not conflict” with China, he has also played to domestic sensibilities by rebuking claims that “China is on the rise and America is falling behind”. Biden retorted in his latest State of the Union address: “America is rising.”
In the latest edition of the Foreign Affairs journal, two former US officials with possible sway over the next Republican presidential administration call for “a generational effort” to “restore US primacy in Asia” rather than aiming “for a stalemate”.
Prominent Australians urge Albanese government to adopt activist middle power role to head off war between US and China
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Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser to Donald Trump, and Mike Gallagher, the former chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist party, firmly reject the idea of trying to achieve a stable and durable balance of power, or détente, with China.
They scoff at the idea of “managing” competition with China or seeing dialogue as an end in itself. Instead, Pottinger and Gallagher demand a rapid increase in US military capabilities “to achieve unmistakable qualitative advantages over Beijing” as part of a strategy of “owning” and “winning” the new cold war.
Such calls are hard to reconcile with Australia’s stated goals: a more “stable” relationship with China, dialogue to reduce the risk of dangerous miscalculations, and a regional balance where no one power dominates. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/oct/07/bbc-says-no-decision-has-been-made-about-future-of-top-gear | Television & radio | 2023-10-07T12:56:02.000Z | Sammy Gecsoyler | BBC denies report decision has been made to axe Top Gear | The BBC has denied Top Gear has reached the end of the road amid reports the show had been axed.
The Sun reported on Friday that the broadcaster had told production staff on the long-running show to look for other work after the presenter and former cricketer Andrew Flintoff was injured during filming last December.
A BBC spokesperson told PA Media: “A decision on the timing of future Top Gear shows will be made in due course with BBC Content.”
Flintoff was taken to hospital by air ambulance last December after a high-speed crash during filming. He was taking part in a shoot at Dunsfold Park aerodrome in Surrey on Tuesday, which has featured regularly in the BBC show since 2002.
Flintoff was seen in public for the first time since the incident last month, when he attended the one-day cricket international between England and New Zealand at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. He had visible scars on his face and tape on his nose.
He spoke publicly about the incident for the first time on Wednesday in a clip released by England Cricket on social media.
In the video, in which he awarded an England cap to the spin bowler Tom Hartley, Flintoff said: “It gives me so much pleasure to share what is going to be a day Tom that you’re going to remember for the rest of your life.”
He told Hartley the England Cricket team “would share the good times with you, the successes. But as I found over the past few months, they’ll be there in the hardest times of your life, they will stand next to you”.
The BBC said in March that it would not resume filming the latest series of Top Gear and added there would be a health and safety review on the motoring show, which has been running in its current iteration for 21 years.
The incident last year was not Flintoff’s first accident while filming the show. He crashed at 125mph while travelling in a three-wheeled cycle car in 2019, but was able to walk away from the scene.
The former presenter Richard Hammond spent two weeks in a coma in 2006 after crashing at the Elvington airfield in York in a jet-powered Vampire dragster while travelling at 288mph.
Flintoff’s son Corey said at the time he was “lucky to be alive” and described it as a “pretty nasty crash”.
Flintoff began presenting Top Gear in 2019. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/09/willie-landels-obituary | Media | 2023-05-09T17:07:44.000Z | Veronica Horwell | Willie Landels obituary | Willie Landels, who has died aged 94, had been at the London office of the supreme ad agency J Walter Thompson for years, art directing smooth, cool come-ons for consumables, such as Lux soap and Campari, before he was invited into the editorial side of magazines. Later he become the editor of Harpers & Queen, from its launch in 1970 until 1985.
The invitation came from Jocelyn Stevens, who in 1957 had spent an inherited small fortune buying the Queen, a publication with a dwindling dowager readership interested mostly in each other’s dowdy doings. Stevens abbreviated the name to Queen, targeted it at the Chelsea set – young, entitled but not always titled, and, if not monied, capable of making or marrying money – and brought in Mark Boxer as art director and Beatrix Miller as editor. They restyled it as a glossy in which the editorial content looked and read as sharply as the best ads, which it began to attract, along with creative talent.
When Boxer departed to set up the Sunday Times colour magazine in 1962, Landels suceeded him, while Stevens took over from Miller in 1964. Landels had a philosophy about glossies: he believed the business of mags was glamour, visually projecting a desirable if unrealisable life.
Tom Kublin’s photograph of Willie Landels photographing a model. Photograph: Tom Kublin
He put firm layout restrictions on words, since he hated “turn to page XX” directing readers to excess text squeezed between dull, cheap ads at the back of the book. Words, he thought, should serve clever ideas appealing to the ideal audience, although he did reserve pages for Jennifer’s Diary, an ur-social-media space of snapped smiles at polo tournaments and name-dropping.
Queen was a success when he arrived, at the height of hems and the Swinging London fantasy, and Landels stayed imperturbable through the subsequent contest for readers with its rival, the American-born sophisticate upstart Harper’s Bazaar, and through Stevens’ heavy management style and loss of interest in Queen after his related investment project, the pirate pop station Radio Caroline, was outlawed in 1967. Stevens then sold Queen the following year to a passing businessman, whose fortunes foundered even as the mag conquered.
After sell-offs and take-overs, the rivals were bound together in 1970 as Harper’s & Queen, with Landels as editor, and his protege Ann Barr as features editor. H&Q dominated magazine racks until Tina Brown’s Tatler breezed in at the end of the decade. Landels recruited on merit and instinct, unworried by eccentricity or lack of direct experience, and his finds did him credit.
He spotted fresh photographers and gave them minimally briefed, free-rein commissions, while Barr’s editorial strategy was to use newcomers, such as Peter York and Craig Brown, and collective social reporting, assembling anecdotes into narratives like an upmarket Mass Observation, to substitute for the big-name writers H&Q could not afford. H&Q created a genre out of the taxonomy of the shifting British class system, or at least its upper levels, as with the Sloane Rangers. Circulation more than doubled, to around 100,000, and issues bulked up with top-end ads. Landels was unsure about such expansion, asking: “But who are all these ghastly new readers?”
Landels took the shape and feel of his magazine with quiet seriousness but was no careerist; he kept up his own private taste and non-media gifts for art and craft. He really was an outsider, born in Venice, the son of a Scot, Reynold Landels, a banker, and an Italian, Carla Manfredi, and educated at home near Lake Como, then briefly, from 16, a student at an art college in Brera, Milan.
Such stories from his youth as he shared could stun: he told his friend Charles Darwent that he met the dictator Mussolini and his mistress the day before they were shot near Milan in April 1945: “Mussolini looked terrified. Clara Petacci looked rather chic.” (Chic was a key Landels approval word.)
In art, he learned on the job, with an apprenticeship in 1947 as a scenographer at La Scala opera house in Milan: this gave him the practical nerve to cover space – huge, painted backdrops – and an understanding of how glamour is practised and projected. He also worked for the architect Gio Ponti, and had an exhibition of surrealist collages before leaving for London in 1950.
Landels still remained Italian in many ways, never losing his accent or his pleasure in cooking Italy’s most difficult simple dishes. Even when working as an editor, he continued to paint and make practically, especially furniture – in the 60s a sofa experiment with novel solid foam upholstery, in the 80s, handmade wooden desks for the H&Q office to replace deplorable plastic ones. Landels biked to work decades before it was fashionable and designed and chose his clothes with a Milanese ease with textiles.
His mischievousness, and refusal to defer to suits and stuffed shirts (he was a velvet slipper and tartan trews man), ended his H&Q reign. He had a wicked collage idea, photographs of real Bond Street bling applied to picture postcards of the royals. Nicholas Coleridge, who was to succeed him as editor, recalled that “all hell broke loose” upon publication, with royal-warranted jewellers claiming Harpers & Queen had offended her majesty.
Landels resigned eventually, from a phone box at Heathrow on his way to a summer holiday in Italy. There was one more editorship, in 1989-90, of a travel magazine, Departures, for American Express, but his definition of global glamour was wider, kinder and less obvious than his employers’ and he was soon out.
He painted and exhibited for the rest of his life, and designed for friends’ ventures, including books, and the club belonging to Robin Birley whose father Mark he had known in his ad-man days.
A first marriage in 1958, to Angela Ogden, ended in 1986; their two daughters, Lavinia and Francesca, and his second wife, Josephine Grever, whom he married in 2003, survive him.
Willie Landels, artist and magazine editor, born 14 June 1928; died 29 April 2023 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/02/lars-ulrich-metallica-mission-documentary-feature | Film | 2012-06-02T22:01:47.000Z | Kate Kellaway | One fan's mission to Lars | This is a story that almost didn't happen. And I am on a train to Devon to meet the people who were determined to see that it did. The saying "Be careful what you wish for", in the case of the Spicer family, needs adjusting to "Be careful what your brother wishes for". It is the story of three siblings: Kate, a 42-year-old London-based journalist, her youngest brother, Will, a 36-year-old film-maker, and their middle brother, 40-year-old Tom, born with fragile X syndrome, the commonest cause of inherited learning disability, affecting about one in 4,000 men and one in 6,000 women – a sort of autism, caused by a mutated gene on the X chromosome that can inhibit intellectual development. For half a lifetime, Tom had been a fan of heavy metal – Metallica his favourite band. And, by 2009, no one was in doubt about Tom's dearest wish: "I wanna meet Lars." Lars Ulrich is Metallica's drummer. Many times a day, Tom would repeat his wish. It is like this with fragile X sufferers: an idea jams – and language gets stuck with it. The technical name for this is "verbal perseveration".
Will and Kate had talked before about making a film with Tom (he would "map read", they'd concoct a random road movie). But now, the Lars fixation got them thinking. Could they make Tom's dream come true – and get him together with Lars? "We began to think we could exploit our media positions to do something genuinely cool for our brother," says Kate. Put like that, it sounds easy. But, as they were about to discover, "ease" was not to be part of the process. What they have produced is a film that will make everyone who sees it want to champion it. It is original, funny and overwhelming – and it will make you cry. It is called Mission to Lars.
One can think of several Oscar-nominated films about autism and other disabilities – Rain Man, Ryan's Daughter, I am Sam, Precious – and, more recently, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – but they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the UK – and they are feebly represented in the arts. This truthful, unglamorous film with a learning disabled, middle-aged man as its centre is not only a rarity, it is a treasure.
As the Devon landscape rushes past, I picture the Spicers setting out in the opposite direction, to LA and beyond – and of the moment when Kate and Will ask their parents for tips about Tom. They are given a lengthy list – it reads like a warning. Tom is dependent on routine but, on their transatlantic trip, uncertainty will rule supreme. There is no guarantee Tom will even meet Lars. Only one thing is sure: wherever Metallica goes, the Spicers will follow. We watch with horror as they rent a mobile home and drive this overblown beast along the bumpy concrete of interstate 15 to Las Vegas. Tempers fray. And then comes the show-stopper. Tom has cold feet. He does not want to go to a Metallica gig. But doesn't he want to meet Lars? "No." It looks as if dream and film are over. The trip has become a nightmare. Kate and Will are catatonic. Head in hands, Kate admits to her brother: "I don't think you and me are very good at looking after Tom…"
But as the audience we know that if the mission were not accomplished, there could be no film. And, against the odds, we are eventually backstage, chez Metallica, where Tom and Kate endure a heck of a wait. Kate gnaws at her nail varnish, Tom is restless. But then the door opens and a small, ordinary Danish man in a white plastic bomber jacket walks in (the truth is that when Lars first moved to LA, he was a junior tennis champion before founding Metallica). He is smiling. And by this stage, anyone watching will be crying hard – because Lars is so nice to Tom. He is not patronising. He is sensitive. On the back of this film, Lars is about to become everyone's hero. And the look on Tom's face is – but you have to see the film to witness it – happiness beyond words.
Bystock Court is a residential care home on the outskirts of Exmouth, where Tom has lived for 22 years. I travel there with Kate. She is funny, hyper-intelligent, attractive and anxiously controlling. She thinks of everyone and everything (she has engagingly instructed me to bring "pocket money" for Bystock's excellent eggs). But you can see she is making efforts not to take charge. Will drives into the car park in his Volvo – a family man with three children. He has a video production company. He is not as dissimilar from Kate as each of them likes to think. He is personable, nice, amused – the smile, usually missing from the film, is lovely to see. But he is more self-contained than Kate – on the back foot.
The house itself is double bow-fronted, red brick – Victorian or earlier – with a generous garden. It has a comfortable, battered grace. And with summer making its surprise appearance, residents are coming and going, talking to each other and, sometimes, to themselves. I sit on its elegant terrace. It is the only time in my career – and it is refreshing – that my first sighting of the person I have come to interview is his disappearing back view. Tom, instantly recognisable from the film – owlish glasses, sweet face, loping gait – hurries past with a mischievous smile. He is looking at his feet critically and says (his speech is not always easy to follow), "It is a mess", before heading in the direction of the shrubbery.
It is not clear what is a "mess". But one reflects, with amusement, that he is right – if what he is talking about is family. Kate tells me later that Tom was just winding her up. But it reminds me of the first crisis in the film when Kate and Will fail to show up on time to take him to America and Tom does a runner. And they had already been through so much to get the film off the ground. Kate fills me in on the hell of fundraising, unenthusiastic television producers ("It was a big, fat no") and their unflattering insistence that she lacked the "charisma" to be a presenter.
When a television company finally came good, the Spicers decided against it. They no longer wanted to "entrust the family dynamic" to anyone other than their long-suffering co-director, James Moore. It was John Battsek, of Passion Pictures (responsible for Man on Wire), who inspired them to go it alone. He said: "Sod the telly, make the film you want to make." They were determined to raise awareness: "There is still so much prejudice where it is not supposed to exist." And Mission to Lars now has charity status. The film's fundraising has earned Mencap £25,000. And the relationship with Mencap will continue. There are plans to reform Mencap's leisure provision to film an annual "Mencap mission" in which other learning disabled people can pursue their dreams.
But there is one score that needs settling: why was it so difficult to reach Lars? Couldn't Kate, as a journalist, hook him with a charming phone call? She explains it was not simple: Metallica are the biggest metal band on the planet (with 25m likes on Facebook) and wrapped up in red tape. "I don't know what did it in the end – whether it was the correct emails – climbing the greasy pole to the top – or when I was drunk at a party late at night and met someone who surfs with Kirk [lead guitarist Kirk Hammett]."
And besides, in the film, the axis of worry shifts. It is not about whether Lars will see Tom. The new question is: will Tom refuse to see Lars? "It was Tom who was behaving like the rock star," Kate laughs. But his reaction, typical of his syndrome, is sympathetically presented. It comes across as a larger-than-life version of what all of us feel when something we long for is suddenly in the offing: stage fright without a stage. What is amazing – and partly explains the film's power – is the Spicers' emotional honesty. Rough and unready, they don't finesse anything. Kate openly calls her family "dysfunctional".
But to talk about her parents, she says, would be "to open a can of worms, kick over a hornet's nest and uncover a viper's nest". This does not stop her or Will returning to the subject. Their father – a surgeon – and mother divorced when they were little (Will was a baby, Tom four, Kate six). They now hazard that the stress of having a child with fragile X must have been "a big factor" in the marriage breakdown.
The family split in two: Will lived with his mother, Kate and Tom with their father. But it is their stepmother, Jane, who is the most intriguing parent in the film, the only person with authority. Kate's mother, admirably, makes no secret of the fact that Jane is more effective with Tom than she is. Will says he only now realises (after having a bash at Tom maintenance) how hard it must have been bringing Tom up. Jane had three more children of her own – so was often in charge of six. He used to see her as "slightly cruel". Now he sees that what is implied to have been a dictatorial rule was expedient. His mother he sees as a "complete softie".
Will explains that one reason he wanted to make the film is that he has "struggled" to explain Uncle Tom to his children. He hopes the film might do the job in a "light-hearted and cool" way. Kate, who at present has no children of her own, feels slightly differently and is less lenient about the past. "This is so not a film about my parents. I love them to bits, but they won't be there for ever. Tom will be my responsibility. I will have to fight for his wants and desires in a world that, at best, cannot afford to fulfil them and, at worst, doesn't listen or care.'
Tom was 11 when he was diagnosed with fragile X. Kate remembers from childhood "the strain in people's voices. They'd be saying he was not normal, potty-trained, crawling. You absorbed the adult anxiety – and euphemisms." Tom's condition was not much discussed: "We don't talk much as a family." Tom would be referred to as "mentally retarded". It was "awful". Diagnosis, we agree, is a difficult subject. Kate thinks there is an over-diagnosis of autism in this country and the US. We consider the attendant risk that a person will be defined by a diagnosis. "You have to ask: at what point do we stop diagnosing and say: This is Tom." Kate then tells me about her boyfriend's joking reaction to the film – which has its serious side. He asked: "Which one of you is supposed to be normal?"
I ask Will whether he thinks that when one family member has a disability, it is, in a sense, shared by the other children? "That is true. But you don't question it. It is your life." It was not until Will's wife was expecting their first baby that they woke up to what fragile X, a hereditary condition, might mean and were horrified by their ignorance. Kate says: "It galvanised us. Until then, we had existed apart from the generation above. Fragile X was their problem."
They made it their business to learn about fragile X. "It even affects fruit flies – it goes back to the primordial soup. And now we can see," Kate adds, "there were lots of Toms in our family tree. We look at black-and-white family photos and say: 'We think she was a Tom.'" They also got themselves tested (and aren't carriers). But Kate admits: "I have often wondered if fragile X made me internally anxious about settling down and having a child."
Kate is ashamed to remember herself as a child. She was often Tom's tormentor. Once, aged 10 and driven to distraction, she ran to the kitchen and "grabbed one of Dad's carving knives from the magnetic rack and held it to my brother's neck: 'You will do what you're told or I will cut your throat'." All through his childhood, Tom had "humdinger tantrums that Mum now, knowing more, thinks were small fits: petit mal seizures". Today, she is fiercely sisterly towards Tom and would be more likely to brandish the carving knife at anyone who treated him badly (boyfriends who could not be natural with him never lasted).
"Tom can be upset if he is in a room of people and feels left out. He can be dismissive of other residents. He will tap his head and say: 'They have got issues.' He is unfathomable: he can surprise you or be obtuse. But he is not stupid. If you are calm with him, you can have good chats."
As teenagers and when they were in their 20s, there was one place where they were together and happy: in Will's old banger – commuting between their parents in Bristol and Devon in the school holidays. "We'd eat junk food and listen to AC/DC tapes." It was "magic" – old banger heaven. And that is what they were trying to recapture in the film. "I always expect things to be easy – and they never are," says Will. His starting point is: "We are brothers and sisters, we have never not got along." But he adds: "Kate can be hard work." And by the end of filming: "We were raw and ragged. It felt wrong… And we didn't want the film to be about film-making – that was a constant tension."
Kate continues: "There were so many fights. Will would make me feel like a loser. Tom, responding to our tension, would look distraught and unhappy. I felt so lonely with nowhere to run." Now she says: "We were like three little islands." How often did they think of giving up? "It was non-negotiable. We couldn't let Tom down. The film took on a life of its own. It was a monster that had to be fed."
By the end of the trip, the Spicers were not on speaking terms. When they got back to Bystock, a bottle of red wine, badly packed by Kate, had broken in Tom's case. She and Will had a "screaming fight" as a parting shot. "We were totally out of love with each other," Kate says. Even by the cutting stage, they were still asking: are we going to make this work?
Once the film had been made, there was the further problem of Lars. There was no telling how he would react. Metallica, who formed in 1981, are one of thrash metal's "big four", alongside Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. But their members have not always been model human beings (as Joe Berlinger's 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster revealed; while the 2000 lawsuit they brought against Napster helped effect the file-sharing site's demise).
And their stage image does nothing to reassure. Kate tells me about the gig she and Tom went to – part of the World Magnetic tour, in Anaheim, home of Disneyland: black helium balloons, with Metallica insignia on them, a revolving drum kit for Lars, coffins lowered onto the stage mid-act. It seemed possible that the film itself might be buried alive.
Its fate was decided last June at a small screening at Alfred's club in Mayfair. All the Spicer family assembled for the occasion. Lars arrived really late – and Kate had a second chance to strip her nails of varnish. But Lars turned out to be "really cool". Kate sees it like this: "When artists get to that level, they have either to evolve as human beings or become the biggest knob. Lars tries hard to be authentic. I think that is because he is Danish." And at the end of the film, Lars "jumped up and down and cheered".
Tom does not linger in the shrubbery – and turns out to enjoy having his picture taken. We drink tea together. You're famous, we say. "Yes, I know," Tom laughs. He is pleased with "my film" and the promotional poster and leads us to his room to find space for it. A togetherness is visible now between the Spicers – which was what they all wanted "deep down".
Will and Kate are seeing the benefits of having come through it. And so is Tom who has, since the trip, become more independent: taking bus journeys on his own, using a mobile, visiting London. Tom tells us, approvingly, the film will be loud. "But you don't like that?" Kate exclaims (hypersensitivity is one of the causes of the intense social anxiety that is part of the fragile X syndrome). "I do now," Tom says. The world's foremost expert, Prof Randi Hagerman, explains in the film: "Tom hears the world 10 times louder than anyone else," but he seems to have a love-hate relationship with noise. Today, "really loud" is his catchphrase. The key is to control the level – in the film, headphones save the day.
Tom announces that his Metallica T-shirts are "in the wash". Kate ignores this. She opens a drawer stuffed full of Metallica shirts. Tom shows me the drumsticks Lars gave him and assorted DVDs and pictures of the band. He appears to be developing a crush on James Hetfield, the lead vocalist (famous for accidentally setting fire to himself at a 90s gig). He tells me about Hetfield's superior size. (He gravitates towards strong male characters.) I ask how big Lars is? "He's tiny."
But there is no cause for serious concern: the devotion to Lars is holding. Tom thinks it is Lars's turn to visit him. His eyes shine as he imagines his friend giving a gig on the lawn. Kate thinks a reality check is needed: "Lars would never come." Yet somehow the fantasy builds. We talk about what Lars would eat: "Mum's cottage pie." And he would drink "tea and wine", Tom adds, and "more wine". "Chardonnay," says Kate. Tom, she tells me later, loves to act the sommelier. What would his message to Lars be then? "Come," Tom says. And we all dream about how Lars could do it: Mission to Tom.
Mission to Lars tours Picturehouse cinemas through June and July | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jun/12/anna-jones-summer-recipes-for-pavlova-and-vegetarian-picnic-rolls | Food | 2020-06-12T11:00:21.000Z | Anna Jones | Anna Jones' summer recipes for pavlova and vegetarian picnic rolls | Instead of zigzagging down to Portugal in our campervan this summer, we’ll be at home. Still, I intend to make it a summer to remember. I’m seeing the beauty of our parks and countryside with fresh eyes, and, thanks to the recent run of knockout weather, we have been eating most meals outside. This pavlova has been on our table a few times – it brings a lot of cheer – and the leek and mustard rolls have been packed for low-key family picnics. It’s going to be a British summer in every sense, and I am embracing it.
Brown sugar pavlova with Pimm’s-roasted strawberries
Vegans can make meringues using aquafaba (the water from a can of chickpeas). Here is a quick recipe: Whip 150g chickpea water with a pinch of salt until very stiff, add 150g of caster sugar and 1½ tsp cream of tartar, and whip on high until the sugar grains have dissolved. Use coconut yoghurt in place of dairy. You will need a stand mixer or an electric hand whisk for this.
Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr 20 min
Serves 8
For the meringue
4 eggs (see above for a vegan alternative)
100g light brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 pinch salt
For the Pimm’s fruit
500g strawberries, larger ones halved
50ml Pimm’s
Zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
1 small bunch mint
For the cream
200ml double cream
1 tbsp vanilla bean paste or 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1 tbsp honey or maple syrup
Heat the oven to 140C (130 fan)/gas 2. Separate the eggs and put the yolks to one side for another use. (You can use them for mayonnaise, custard or add them to scrambled eggs, making them extra rich).
Make sure the bowl you’re using for the egg whites is very clean, then whisk them to stiff peaks. Add the sugars and salt, a tablespoon at a time, whisking between additions. Once all the sugar is added, whisk on the highest setting for about five minutes, until all the grains of sugar have disappeared. Rub the meringue with your fingertips: if you can still feel the grains, keep going.
Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper, dotting a little of the mix on each corner of the tray to stick the paper down. Spoon the mixture into the middle of the tray: use the back of a spoon to make a circle roughly the size of a large dinner plate (about 24-26cm in diameter), then use the spoon to make it lower in the middle and a little higher around the sides. Once you have a shape you like, use the spoon to create waves and peaks in the meringue, which will look great when it is cooked. Bake for an hour, until golden on the outside and chewy on the inside.
Take the meringue out of the oven and turn up the oven to 190C/(180C fan)/gas 6. Toss the strawberries in the Pimm’s, lemon zest and mint, spread on a baking tray and roast for 20 minutes, until everything caramelises. You are looking for the strawberries to soften but hold their shape. Set aside to cool.
Whip the cream with the vanilla and a couple of tablespoons of the liquid from the roasting pan. Once everything is cool and you are ready to eat, pile the cream on to the meringue, and top as artfully as you like with the fruit.
Seeded sweet leek and mustard picnic rolls
Use whatever root veg you need to use up here; mine included carrot and squash but parsnip, celeriac and sweet potato would all work – steer clear of potatoes, though, as they are too starchy. If you are vegan, use shop-bought puff pastry (most supermarket brands are vegan), vegan cheese in place of the cheddar and a non-dairy milk instead of the egg wash.
Anna Jones’ vegetable sausage rolls.
Prep 25 min
Cook 35 min
Makes 12 medium rolls
Olive oil
2 leeks, washed, trimmed and finely sliced
1 red onion, peeled and finely sliced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely sliced
200g root veg, peeled and grated (see intro)
½ tsp fennel seeds
1 small bunch parsley, roughly chopped
Zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
1 tsp english mustard
100g cheddar, grated
Salt and black pepper
1 x 320g sheet ready-rolled all-butter puff pastry
1 medium egg, beaten
Seeds, to top (I use a mix of black and white sesame, linseeds, fennel and caraway mixed with a pinch of salt)
In a large frying pan, heat a little olive oil and add the leeks and onion. Cook for 10 minutes until soft and sweet.
Add the garlic, grated root veg and the fennel seeds, and cook for another five minutes, until the root veg has lost its rawness and the mixture has come together. Tip into a bowl to cool. Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan)/gas 7.
Once cool, add the parsley, lemon zest, mustard, cheddar and some black pepper, taste and adjust the seasoning if needed.
Unroll the puff pastry on a floured surface, then cut in half lengthways so you have two long, thin rectangles. Have the egg and a pastry brush to hand.
With the long side of the rectangle towards you, spoon half of the mixture along the middle of the rectangle and then press it into a long sausage with your hands. Egg-wash the far edge of the pastry. Pull the near side of the pastry over the vegetable mixture, then carefully pull the egg-washed edge on top to seal.
Carefully turn the whole thing over so it sits on where the pastry joins, then cut it into six equal pieces. Repeat with the other rectangle.
Put the little rolls on a baking paper-lined tray, brush with the beaten egg, then generously sprinkle with the seeds. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden and bubbling. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/01/country-diary-mysterious-birdsong-fills-the-air-with-sweetness | Environment | 2022-10-01T04:30:58.000Z | Jim Perrin | Country diary: Mysterious birdsong fills the air with sweetness | The birdsong that best counterpoints relaxed and sunny days is surely the sonorous, easy fluting that drifted up from the bottom of the garden. Where was it coming from? What bird was making it? This was not the tunefulness of my favourite blackbird – the one with white feathers on his rump, who serenades each morning I’m here. The tempo was slower, the tone richer, the impression altogether more mellow. I went indoors for a spyglass, scanned the bushes, found nothing. Still those cadences filled the air with sweetness.
Suddenly, the tops of the ash trees seemed dappled with glancing sunlight, from the midst of which a vision in black and gleaming gold swooped down to a bunch of dark grapes hanging from the pergola above my head. You cannot mistake a male golden oriole. In full view now, he gorged himself on fruit, feeding up for the long flight to equatorial Africa. Grapes and ripe figs on the terrace are an irresistible lure to birds on migration. A taste for them has been to the oriole’s disadvantage historically, rendering sweet and succulent the few grams of flesh they provided to heartless epicurean gluttons, for whose tables these exquisite birds were slaughtered in tens of thousands. WH Hudson tellingly said “if protected, [orioles] would probably become an annual visitant [to Britain]”. In our time it is classified as “rare visitor”.
Country diary: The kingfisher allows me to get astoundingly close
Read more
There’s a passage in Giraldus Cambrensis’s The Journey Through Wales of 1188 where he and Archbishop Baldwin, with whom he was recruiting for the Crusades, encountered one near Bangor: “a bird in a nearby coppice began to sing very sweetly … it was an oriole, remarkable for its gold and yellow colouring.” Its brightness and dramatic contrast between gold and black is indeed remarkable. The only other bird I’ve seen to match its visual and aural impact was a blue-crowned motmot that peered into a wooden cabin where I was staying in Tobago, and hooted in a deep and resonant quaver.
As I watched, the oriole stopped feeding and sped back into the ash foliage, where it became invisible against the shifting lemon-brightness on the leaves.
Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/sep/14/phones-4u-administration-contract-ee | Business | 2014-09-15T08:00:00.000Z | Juliette Garside | Phones 4u goes into administration – with 5,600 jobs at risk | Phones 4u went into administration on Sunday night, putting 5,596 jobs at risk after the retailer said it would not open its doors on Monday.
The closure of the retail chain that made the entrepreneur John Caudwell a multimillionaire comes after mobile network EE decided to stop selling through Phones 4u.
Disaster struck when Vodafone withdrew its business a fortnight ago. O2 had stopped selling through the retailer earlier this year and Three some time before that.
With only EE left to represent, Phones 4u's ability to offer customers choice by comparing prices across operators disappeared, and its final supplier is understood to have dealt the death blow on Friday after talks last week.
Phones 4u's private equity owner, BC Partners, said it would appoint PwC as administrators for its 720 outlets, including 550 stores, on Monday. BC acquired the chain in 2011 in a €770m (£610m) deal, but the highly leveraged business is currently saddled with debts of £635m.
Phones 4u will update its staff at meetings in store and at its headquarters on Monday, and BC insisted: "Employees will continue to be paid until further notice."
The retailer has pledged to refund customers in full for any orders that have not yet been dispatched. While there was grumbling on Twitter from customers who had ordered an iPhone 6 as recently as Friday, the company said it had ceased trading "as soon as practically possible".
Administrators will be left to decide whether the stores can reopen. Vodafone's contract with Phones 4u, which represents 20% of profits and revenues, runs until February 2015, and its deal with EE has more than a year left to run.
In January EE began a review of all the independent retailers it sells through with the intention of reducing the number of partnerships. The decision to part company with Phones 4u means EE is likely to continue selling through Dixons Carphone for the time being.
An EE spokesman said: "In line with our strategy to focus on growth in our direct channels and to move to fewer, deeper relationships in the indirect channel, and driven by developments in the marketplace that have called into question the long-term viability of the Phones 4u business, we can confirm that we have taken the decision not to extend our contract beyond September 2015."
BC executive Stefano Quadrio Curzio hit out at Vodafone, which had traditionally favoured Phones 4u over its larger rival Carphone Warehouse.
He said: "Our overriding concern is for all the dedicated hardworking employees of Phones 4u at a time of uncertainty for the company.
"Vodafone has acted in exactly the opposite way to what they had consistently indicated to the management of Phones 4u over more than six months. Their behaviour appears to have been designed to inflict the maximum damage to their partner of 15 years, giving Phones 4u no time to develop commercial alternatives.
"EE's decision on Friday is surprising in the context of a contract that has more than a year to run and leaves the board with no alternative but to seek the administrator's protection in the interests of all its stakeholders."
Carphone's decision this year to merge with electricals retailer Dixons is thought to have been prompted by growing unrest among its biggest customers – the mobile networks whose connections it sells. Three pulled its business from Carphone earlier this year.
Hammered by the financial crisis and regulated price cuts to the cost of phone calls, with Europe tackling bill shock by imposing strict limits on how much customers can be charged for using their phones on holiday, networks have been looking for savings.
An obvious place to cut was in the use of third-party resellers, who have enjoyed healthy margins in the UK compared with elsewhere in Europe. Vodafone has invested heavily in expanding its own-brand stores, making it less reliant on Phones 4u and Carphone.
David Kassler, chief executive of Phones 4u, said: "Today is a very sad day for our customers and our staff. If the mobile network operators decline to supply us, we do not have a business. A good company making profits of over £100m, employing thousands of decent people, has been forced into administration.
"The great service we have provided should have guaranteed a strong future, but unfortunately our network partners have decided otherwise. The ultimate result will be less competition, less choice and higher prices for mobile customers in UK."
Known for its controversial advertising campaigns, including a banned ad featuring a cartoon Jesus, Phones 4u was aimed squarely at the youth market, a hard-to-reach demographic for Vodafone in particular, which is regarded as the business person's network.
It is understood that EE sold around 10% of its connections through Phones 4u, but the company will now rely more heavily on its string of 570 stores across the UK, and on its remaining contract with Dixons Carphone.
Caudwell founded the business in the mid-1980s. By the time he cashed in his shares for £1.5 billion in 2006, it was selling 26 phones a minute and employed 10,000 people. It generated sales of more than £2.25 billion.
Phones 4u said it remained profitable, with turnover of more than £1bn, underlying earnings of £105m in 2013 and significant cash in the bank.
Credit rating agency Moody's, which downgraded its outlook for the company's ability to repay its debts last week, said Phones 4u had £205m in notes due by 2019, £430m due in 2018, and a £125m revolving credit facility. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/20/netflixs-the-crown-cruelly-unjust-for-leaving-off-accuracy-disclaimer-says-judi-dench | Television & radio | 2022-10-20T15:24:06.000Z | Sammy Gecsoyler | Netflix’s The Crown ‘cruelly unjust’ for leaving off accuracy disclaimer, says Judi Dench | Dame Judi Dench is calling for a disclaimer to be added to The Crown to tell viewers the show is not historically accurate.
In a letter to the Times, Dench said the Netflix hit “seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism” the closer the drama comes to the present day.
She goes on to express her concern that “a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true.
“Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalised drama’, the programme-makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode … the time has come for Netflix to reconsider.”
Dench also notes events due to be covered in the upcoming fifth series, some of which have already drawn criticism: “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series – that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence – this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, former prime minister Sir John Major said a scene which apparently portrays a plot to oust Elizabeth II was “a barrel-load of malicious nonsense”.
Major’s office released a statement that said: “Sir John has not cooperated in any way with The Crown. Nor has he ever been approached by them to factcheck any script material in this or any other series.
“As you will know, discussions between the monarch and prime minister are entirely private and – for Sir John – will always remain so. But not one of the scenes you depict are accurate in any way whatsoever. They are fiction, pure and simple.”
In response to Major’s comments, a spokesperson for The Crown said: “The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events.
“Series five is a fictional dramatisation, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family – one that has already been scrutinised and well-documented by journalists, biographers and historians.”
The Crown returns on Netflix on 9 November. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/27/republican-candidates-second-debate-polls-california-reagan-library | US news | 2023-09-27T19:53:15.000Z | Joan E Greve | Rivals accuse Trump of being ‘missing in action’ at second Republican debate | The absence of Donald Trump played a central role in the second Republican primary debate of the 2024 election season, as seven White House hopefuls tried and mostly failed to shake up a race in which the former president remains the clear frontrunner.
Two of Trump’s rivals attempted to capitalize on his absence by criticizing him for skipping the debate, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute in Simi Valley, California. DeSantis mocked Trump as “missing in action”, saying, “He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record.”
Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, suggested Trump was skipping the debates out of fear of facing voters. Addressing Trump in a straight-to-camera diatribe, Christie said, “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things.”
Trump skipped the event – as he skipped last month’s debate, and reportedly plans to skip the next – and instead held a rally in Michigan, where autoworkers have gone on strike to demand pay increases. A day earlier, Joe Biden joined some of the striking workers on the picket line, providing an odd preview of the likely matchup in the 2024 general election.
In the final question of the night, the moderators of the Fox Business and Univision debate forced the candidates to reckon with reality. Fox News host Dana Perino asked, “What is your mathematical path, Governor DeSantis, in order to try to beat President Trump, who has a commanding and enduring lead in this race?”
DeSantis replied, “Polls don’t elect presidents. Voters elect presidents. And we’re going to take the case to the people in these early [voting] states.”
But those voters do not yet appear to be swayed by any of the candidates who appeared onstage on Wednesday night. Even as Trump faces 91 felony charges across four criminal cases, Republican primary candidates have struggled to put a dent in the former president’s significant polling lead. One NBC News poll conducted this month showed Trump has the support of 59% of likely Republican primary voters, giving the former president a 43-point edge over DeSantis. Besides Trump and DeSantis, every Republican primary candidate remains mired in the single digits, the poll found.
DeSantis in particular entered the second debate looking for a breakout moment to help dispel mounting doubts over his ability to challenge Trump for the nomination. The Florida governor has seen his polling numbers tumble in recent weeks, with one New Hampshire survey showing him dropping to fifth place in the second voting state.
With their primary hopes dwindling, the debate participants shouted over each other in an attempt to be heard, allowing the discussion to devolve into incomprehensible crosstalk.
In an apparent effort to get voters’ attention, some debate participants offered eyebrow-raising suggestions on the issues of gun violence, race and immigration. The former vice-president, Mike Pence, called for the passage of “a federal, expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting so that they will meet their fate in months, not years”. It is unclear how such a policy might prevent mass shootings, especially given that the perpetrators of such crimes often die by suicide or are killed by law enforcement before they are prosecuted.
In another surprising moment, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who is Black, implied that slavery had been more bearable for Black Americans than the Great Society, President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty program that birthed social welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
“Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country,” Scott said. “What was hard to survive was Johnson’s Great Society … where they decided to take the Black father out of the household to get a check in the mail.”
Trump’s business empire could collapse ‘like falling dominoes’ after ruling
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A theme from the first primary debate played out again on Wednesday, as former UN ambassador Nikki Haley sparred with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Criticizing Ramaswamy for joining TikTok despite the app’s potential security vulnerabilities, Haley landed the most stinging insult of the night.
“Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say,” Haley told Ramaswamy.
But it remained unclear how the debate might help candidates break through in a race that has grown static, as Trump’s rivals jockey for a distant second place. With less than four months left before the Iowa caucuses, the pressure is escalating for candidates to quickly prove their mettle in the primary. One Republican candidate, the Miami mayor Francis Suarez, has already dropped out of the race, and others may soon follow suit if they cannot gain momentum in the coming weeks.
Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who participated in the first primary debate, did not appear on Wednesday because he failed to meet the heightened polling requirements set by the Republican National Committee, but he insisted he would keep fighting for the nomination. In a statement released on Monday, Hutchinson said he would move forward with events planned in early voting states even after he failed to qualify for the debate.
“I entered this race because it is critically important for a leader within the Republican party to stand up to Donald Trump and call him out on misleading his supporters and the American people,” Hutchinson said. “I intend to continue doing that.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/07/kazakhstan-president-scientists-research-ageing | World news | 2010-12-07T20:26:09.000Z | Tom Parfitt | Kazakhstan's president urges scientists to find the elixir of life | Cleopatra may have bathed in asses' milk to preserve her youth but Nursultan Nazarbayev, the autocratic president of Kazakhstan, wants nothing less than an elixir of life to keep him going.
Not satisfied with 19 years in charge of the gas-rich central Asian state, Nazarbayev urged scientists today to unlock the secret to immortality.
The 70-year-old leader stressed in a speech that a new scientific research institute in the capital Astana should study "rejuvenation of the organism," as well as "the human genome, production of human tissue and creation of gene-based medicines".
In an aside to students, Nazarbayev added: "As for the medicine of the future, people of my age are really hoping all of this will happen as soon as possible."
Two months ago an ethnic Korean delegate at Kazakhstan's people's assembly proposed that Nazarbayev should stay in power until 2020. The president answered: "Maybe, then, you'll offer me an elixir of youth and energy – maybe you have such potions in Korea … I'm willing to go on until 2020, just find me an elixir."
Today was the third time in just over a year that Nazarbayev has urged scientists to find a way to stave off death.
"Anti-ageing medicine, natural rejuvenation, immortality," he mused to a government science committee in September last year. "That's what people are studying these days." He added: "Those who do are the most successful states in the world – those who don't will get left on the sidelines."
In case anyone had missed the point, Nazarbayev repeated the challenge a month later.
"One important subject is anti-ageing, or the study of prolongation of life," he told an audience at the Kazakh national university in Almaty. "However difficult such investigations are, these questions must be resolved sooner or later. Why shouldn't our scientists take on this task? Would it not inspire our Kazakh youth who are now living through the great moments of passion?" | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/17/the-end-we-start-from-review-all-too-believable-disaster-drama-jodie-comer | Film | 2024-01-17T07:00:23.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | The End We Start From review – Jodie Comer shines in all too believable disaster drama | Here is a post-apocalyptic drama of survival, a fiercely acted and unnerving real-time demonstration of law and order breaking down. It is all the more disturbing, credible and immediate in that, unlike other examples of genre, the narrative isn’t heading for an abyss of unknowable chaos. Rather, it envisions society’s grim normalisation of disaster and loss, an evolutionary leap downwards but one in which a kind of rebirth is not ruled out.
In contrast to the American post-apocalypse of John Hillcoat’s The Road, or the European apocalypse of Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, this film is a very British world-ending – because the populace are unarmed, or mostly. First-time director Mahalia Belo and screenwriter Alice Birch (who has adapted the novel by Megan Hunter) may have taken something from the 70s BBC TV classic Survivors. The film’s vision of climate change and of those low-lying British cities, naturally positioned near the very rivers and commercial waterways which are going to drown them, couldn’t be more timely. So many people imagine the effects of climate disaster in only the most abstract terms, and don’t grasp that it means fire and flood.
Jodie Comer plays a pregnant young woman living in London: smart, tough and with a supportive partner played by Joel Fry; the movie begins with a black-comic irony, as her waters break just as the heavy rain escalates into something more catastrophic. Giving birth in a crisis-hit hospital and getting home in the riotous streets, she is calm because having a baby for the first time is just such a radical upheaval that she hardly notices.
Fry’s new-dad figure is charming and easygoing, coming up with facetious suggestions for naming a baby born into a world of water: Noah and Bob. But instead, in a spirit of weird blankness and a feeling of having reached the end of their conceptual tether, they call the baby “Zeb”. The couple head for his parents (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya) who live out in the country with a stockpile of food, but when this runs low, dangerous sorties have to be made into the terrifyingly lawless countryside to find government shelter-support stations which are overrun by violent hungry mobs; Comer faces a lonely battle to survive with her baby.
This is a road movie and quest movie, of sorts, with alpha-grade supporting performances from Katherine Waterston, Benedict Cumberbatch and Gina McKee. These keep the film’s IQ at the highest level, although I wasn’t entirely sure about the emollient later flashbacks showing the beginnings of the young woman’s relationship with her partner. Comer’s vulnerability and idealism are authentic as are her determination and a dash of real ruthlessness – for a moment, she becomes one of the scary people to be encountered on the road, and not particularly regretting it afterwards. She carries everything with unselfconscious strength and style.
The End We Start From is released on 19 January in UK cinemas, with an Australia release to be confirmed. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/08/89-review-arsenal-football-documentary | Film | 2017-11-08T13:30:45.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | 89 review – on-the-ball doc revisits Arsenal's last-minute glory | An easy-going, watchable documentary about one of the great feelgood-underdog stories in the history of British sport. After being written off as boring, boring failures, Arsenal FC triumphed against Liverpool at Anfield in the final match of the 1988-89 season.
It was a uniquely important era that included the horror of Hillsborough and preceded the great resurgence of football with Italia 90. And of course the great Arsenalaissance of ’89 was made mythic by Nick Hornby in his classic memoir Fever Pitch: the 1997 movie version starring Colin Firth actually made the Liverpool v Arsenal match its euphoric finale, in tandem with its romance plot, and there is almost a tension in this film waiting for Hornby to make his talking-head appearance, and then afterwards something anticlimactic, knowing that he has so much more to say.
As well as Arsenal fans such as Hornby and Alan Davies, the film speaks to journalists such as Amy Lawrence and of course the great warriors themselves, including Paul Merson and George Graham, and there is a great poignancy as they go back to their old Highbury ground in north London, now redeveloped into pricey flats. A pleasantly nostalgic documentary, maybe chiefly for fans. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/dec/09/rugby-union-talking-points-weekend-action-champions-cup | Sport | 2019-12-09T09:57:24.000Z | Guardian sport | Rugby union: talking points from the weekend’s Champions Cup action | 1) Larmour suits for Leinster and Ireland
Ireland look like going into the Six Nations Larmour-plated. Joe Schmidt, who stood down as the national side’s head coach after the World Cup, never seemed to trust Jordan Larmour fully, certainly at full-back, but the 22-year old showed in Leinster’s emphatic victory over Northampton at Franklin’s Gardens that he is ready to take over from Rob Kearney, who was among the province’s replacements on Saturday. Larmour was the architect of Leinster’s first two tries, showing how deadly he can be in broken play if given just a trace of time and space, and he was part of a defensive unit that prevented the Saints from turning considerable second-half pressure into points. The victory puts Leinster in charge of Pool One with Northampton’s likeliest route to the quarter-finals being one of the best runners-up. Rivalling them for second place will be Lyon, who broke their Champions Cup duck with a 28-0 victory over Treviso. Paul Rees
Pool One: Northampton 16-43 Leinster
2) Quins’ hopes hang by thread
The Harlequins head coach, Paul Gustard, insisted his side have not given up hope of qualifying out of Pool Three after their late 25-24 defeat in Belfast on Saturday even if realistically they need to win their three remaining matches. They will at least face the two pacesetting clubs, Ulster and Clermont Auvergne, at home with the former, who lead Clermont by a point in the standings, travelling to the Stoop on Friday night . Bath were dismantled by a quickfire treble of tries in the final 20 minutes at the Rec by Franck Azéma’s side in a 34-17 defeat after a promising first half was wiped out. There is a daunting return leg on Sunday with Bath having lost all three of their pool games so far, while Clermont have lost at home only once in Europe since 2008, in a quarter-final two seasons ago. Claire Tolley
Pool Three: Bath 17-34 Clermont Auvergne
Chris Robshaw and Harlequins’ hopes of a quarter-final place look bleak after a narrow defeat to Ulster. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
3) Hogg makes difference in Chiefs cameo
Exeter’s full-back Stuart Hogg was on the field in Salford for only 17 minutes but the Scottish international, who scored one try and created another in his brief outing, is already making a difference to the table-topping Chiefs. Sale’s Steve Diamond would love to have Hogg’s former Glasgow colleague Leone Nakarawa to bolster the Sharks’ resources but says the Fijian lock has declined a move to England from Racing 92 “because the weather’s too cold … it’s not the money”. He is promising, however, to put out his strongest possible side for the return game at Sandy Park, taking sardonic aim at sides who put out weakened teams in the Champions Cup. “I might just send the kids down. Other teams are doing that, aren’t they? I could send my under-19s down. We work hard to get into the competition and you have to respect it.” Many would have expected La Rochelle to be posing a more serious threat in Pool Two but they have so far lost all three matches, including two at home. The latest disappointment came courtesy of a 27-24 loss to Glasgow who were hastened to victory by another fine finish from the flying Kyle Steyn, South African-born but Scottish qualified, who has just signed a new contract to stay at Scotstoun until 2022. Robert Kitson
Pool Two: Sale 20-22 Exeter
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4) Ntamack takes centre stage for Toulouse
Toulouse took control of Pool Five after a Romain Ntamack inspired 23-9 victory over Montpellier on Sunday. The France fly-half, playing at centre for the host club, scored two tries, one each side of the interval, on a wet day in the south of France. The four-time European champions are now six points clear of second-placed Gloucester, after Johan Ackermann’s side ended a run of five straight defeats to earn a bonus-point win over Connacht. The 26-17 win at Kingsholm featured two tries from Tom Marshall and a first Champions Cup try for 18-year-old Louis Rees-Zammit after a Danny Cipriani interception. The try was the first of three scored by Gloucester in 17 second-half minutes, after going into the break three points adrift at 10-7. Afterwards Ackermann said: “We can hope it kickstarts our season. Every season’s got a [turning] point but we are not blind to know that it is far from perfect.” Claire Tolley
Champions Cup roundup: Cooney kicks Ulster to win
Romain Ntamack goes over for a Toulouse try against Montpellier. Photograph: Pascal Pavani/AFP via Getty Images
5) Saracens preoccupied with home discomforts
Saracens remain just about in the mix in Europe, albeit tenuously. It is clear they are not prioritising their defence of the Champions Cup title; they have bigger matters on their minds at home. Nevertheless, the integrity of the competition is compromised as a result and there are rules against fielding under-strength teams. Very difficult to prove, though, against the perfectly legitimate concern of squad management. Besides, Saracens probably feel tribunals can hurt them only so much after their recent experiences. Either way, the English challenge in Europe is looking as anaemic as ever, bar Exeter. This time not even Saracens can be relied on. Their team sheet this weekend for the return against Munster in Barnet will be interesting. A win with a bonus point might draw them level with Munster but Racing will almost certainly register the same at home to the Ospreys, putting them in comfortable control of Pool Four. Michael Aylwin
Pool Four: Munster 10-3 Saracens
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/03/tories-lose-over-1200-seats-in-local-elections-as-major-parties-suffer | Politics | 2019-05-03T21:00:05.000Z | Heather Stewart | Tories lose over 1,300 seats in local elections as major parties suffer | Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have vowed to press ahead with seeking a cross-party solution to the Brexit deadlock at Westminster, after voters punished both major parties in local elections.
The Conservatives’ net loss of more than 1,300 seats on their 2015 figures marked their biggest defeat since John Major was prime minister. Disillusioned voters deserted the party in droves, including in traditional Tory areas such as Chelmsford and Surrey Heath.
Labour had expected to make gains, but instead suffered a net loss, and lost control of a string of councils, including Burnley, Darlington and Wirral.
Vince Cable’s remain-supporting Liberal Democrats were the major beneficiaries, taking control of 10 councils, including Cotswold and Winchester, while the Greens and a string of independents also fared unexpectedly well.
The Greens’ co-leader Sian Berry described her party’s performance as “a spectacular 24 hours”, adding: “Voters are clearly fed up with the tired old politics of the parties of the past, who have delivered a UK in Brexit turmoil.”
Cable told celebrating Lib Dem activists that the result reflected a “story across the country”. He said: “The Lib Dems were written off at one point, but we’re coming back very, very strongly. We’re the big winners of the night throughout the country.”
Many Labour MPs suggested the results underlined the urgency for Labour to shift to a full-throated remain position.
But Corbyn insisted: “I think it means there’s a huge impetus on every MP, and they’ve all got that message, whether they themselves are leave or remain – or the people across the country – that an arrangement has to be made, a deal has to be done. Parliament has to resolve this issue – I think that is very, very clear.”
Close Corbyn allies Ian Lavery and Richard Burgon echoed his message, saying Brexit was detracting from a string of other crucial issues, while shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the message from voters was: “Brexit – sort it.”
The prime minister, who was heckled by a party activist as she began to address the Welsh Conservative conference, said the voters were giving a “simple message” to the Conservatives and Labour: “Just get on and deliver Brexit.”
She conceded that the results were “very difficult” and apologised to councillors who had lost their seats, saying they were not to blame.
The Guardian view on local elections: national lessons for Brexit
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Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, speaking at her party’s conference in Aberdeen, said: “I think the message is pretty clear. It seems to be ‘A plague on both your houses.’”
The projected national share of the vote, calculated by elections analyst John Curtice for the BBC, put both major parties neck-and-neck on 28% of the vote – both down from 35% a year ago. If that result were replicated in a general election, it would result in another hung parliament.
Curtice said the results demonstrated that Labour had been hit just as hard by the Brexit logjam over the past 12 months as the deeply divided Tory party. “The opposition is in no way demonstrating an ability to profit from the government’s misfortunes,” he said.
Labour MPs who favour a referendum said the results showed that Corbyn’s attempt to appeal to both remain and leave voters had failed, and he should throw his weight behind a people’s vote.
Sunderland MP Bridget Phillipson said: “I fear Labour’s position has been too hesitant and lacking in clarity over the past few months, depressing support among our voters at a time when they expect strength and leadership from my party rather than fudge.”
However, Corbyn appeared determined to press ahead with seeking a compromise with the Conservatives – a move that could spark a ferocious backlash from many of his MPs unless it is accompanied by the promise of a “confirmatory” referendum.
Participants on both sides of the cross-party Brexit negotiations reported a marked improvement in tone at the start of this week, and several senior Labour figures, including the shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, have played up the idea of a deal.
Both parties fear the disappointing set of council results could be dwarfed by the challenge facing them at European parliament elections in three weeks’ time, when political newcomers Change UK and the Brexit party will be standing candidates.
The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, suggested he was optimistic about the prospects of a deal, and hoped that Labour might sign up to some compromise that brought “the benefits of a customs union” but would also allow the UK to have an independent trade policy for the services sector.
Hunt suggested that the local election results, and trends in the polls, gave an incentive to both parties to compromise since both parties were being dragged down. He added: “It is actually in both parties’ interests to resolve this because we will both be punished equally hard by our core voters.”
Hunt, a former remainer who is now willing to countenance a no-deal Brexit, warned that the electorate had become angry and bored. “They want it resolved. They want to move on, so anyone thinking of delaying Brexit further needs to remember one of the core reasons why the people of Britain decided in large numbers to give a punch in the face to the British establishment – which is overwhelmingly remain – is because they thought we were not listening to them.”
“If, three years on from that vote, we still fail to deliver Brexit, then that anger will only amplify.”
This article was amended 6 May 2019 because an earlier version described Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow Brexit secretary instead of shadow business secretary. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/sep/18/kurt-sanderling-obituary | Music | 2011-09-18T16:55:42.000Z | David Nice | Kurt Sanderling obituary | Of all the London orchestras waking up to the desirability of having a Grand Old Man among its roster of conductors, the Philharmonia moved quickest and chose most wisely. Its conductor emeritus since 1996, Kurt Sanderling, who has died aged 98, proved even more popular with awestruck orchestral players than with respectful audiences for his love, depth of understanding and disciplined attention to detail of the core repertoire he conducted. While his interpretations of Beethoven and Brahms signalled the solid German training to which he returned in 1960, his authority in speaking about the meaning of the Shostakovich symphonies that were among his most distinguished interpretations came from more than two decades in the Soviet Union - perhaps the most unusual period of his career, and only recently the most often discussed.
Sanderling was born in Arys, in former East Prussia, now Orzysz, in Poland. His piano studies in Königsberg and Berlin led to a post as a repetiteur at the Berlin State Opera (now the Deutsche Oper) from 1931 until 1933, when Hitler's rise to power meant his dismissal as a "non-Aryan". After working for the Jewish Cultural Foundation, he was forced to leave Germany. A post as coach at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, fell through owing to the absence of an affidavit, so it was for Russia that he departed in 1936.
In one way his journey east, rather than west to America like so many of his colleagues, came at a bad time; Stalin's denunciation of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "chaos instead of music" spelt even more difficult times for creative and performing artists, as Prokofiev - who returned to his homeland at the same time - soon discovered. But for conductors there was plenty of work. Sanderling assisted Georges Sebastian at the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra before taking up a post in the southern city of Kharkov, now Kharkiv in Ukraine, from 1939.
There Sanderling first performed the music of Shostakovich, conducting the Sixth Symphony shortly after its premiere. He had become acquainted with Shostakovich's works right at the start of his Soviet career, playing through a four-hand piano arrangement of the First Symphony with Nikolai Anossov, but did not meet the composer until 1943, when a courteous, respectful and durable friendship was born which extended to Sanderling's son Thomas (Shostakovich entrusted the first German performances of several of his later symphonies to the younger Sanderling, who had taken up his father's profession). Kurt Sanderling was chosen to "rehabilitate" the disgraced artist in a concert a year after the trials of "formalism in music" in 1947, and always remained dedicated to explaining the hidden meaning of Shostakovich's music to orchestral players. He tended to steer clear of the more deliberate epics – especially the Seventh and Eleventh Symphonies – but the massive tragedy of the Eighth seemed to accord well with his sustained, often very slow, shaping of long paragraphs, accompanied by the most detailed shading of phrase and nuance.
His chance to explore the breadth of the Russian symphonic repertoire with the very finest of orchestras came in 1941, when he was once more appointed assistant – this time to the awesome Yevgeny Mravinsky at the Leningrad Philharmonic. The second-in-command made several recordings with the orchestra – including a powerful interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. In his in-depth study Conductor's World, David Wooldridge recalled that the German conductor's visit to Berlin with his Russian orchestra in 1957, playing Weber's Der Freischütz Overture, Scriabin's Piano Concerto with Emil Gilels as soloist and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, "boded well for the Leningrad Philharmonic's title as the world's greatest orchestra, and Sanderling's title as the world's greatest conductor".
In 1960, he was sent to East Berlin to raise the Berlin Symphony Orchestra to new heights. Although it never became the rival to Herbert von Karajan's glowing Berlin Philharmonic on the other side of the wall as the authorities had hoped, and lacked the distinctive bite of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Sanderling worked hard to improve standards and left a legacy of reliable, if safe, recorded interpretations. He also championed a host of contemporary German composers, though, according to his son Thomas he did not hold them in the highest esteem. At the same time he took charge of the Dresden Staatskapelle (1964-67), and began to tour more widely.
His first appearance with the (then New) Philharmonia came in 1972, replacing an indisposed Otto Klemperer, and grand master status arrived when he recorded a cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the Philharmonia in 1981. The verdict of players in all the British orchestras he conducted, including the BBC Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic (or BBC Northern Symphony, as it then was), remained the same: a Sanderling concert was always an event, the conductor a rare figure to be respected – and permitted to talk at length about his point of view – by otherwise unimpressible musicians.
The same was true of his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and of his appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as he approached his 90s. He retired on his own terms, slowly but wisely, first ceasing to travel to America and Japan, then taking only direct flights from Berlin and finally conducting in Berlin only. By the time he celebrated his 95th birthday, he had retired completely.
The tradition lives on in his conductor sons Michael (also a cellist), Stefan and Thomas, who followed his father's work with the Philharmonia in an outstanding recording of the four Brahms symphonies. On the recent anniversary of 9/11 in Moscow, Thomas conducted the Russian National Orchestra in Shostakovich's Thirteenth ("Babi Yar") Symphony. The composer's widow, Irina, was there, and recalled Sanderling as being among the greatest of the musicians, along with Mravinsky and the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who had been close to her husband.
Sanderling's first marriage ended in divorce, and he is survived by his second wife, Barbara. Thomas is the son of his first marriage, and Michael and Stefan are from his second.
Kurt Sanderling, conductor, born 19 September 1912; died 17 September 2011 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/mar/04/booker-club-english-patient-ondaatje | Books | 2011-03-04T11:00:46.000Z | Sam Jordison | Booker club: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje | In 1992, for only the second time in its history, the Booker Prize was divided between two books: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. The English Patient has been translated into 40 languages, has sold more than 1m copies, and turned into an Oscar-winning film. Scared Hunger has ... well ... have you read it?
All of which is not to diminish Sacred Hunger. I haven't read it either (that's for next time) and have no reason to doubt the competition was hard fought. By all accounts the judges were bitterly and passionately divided about the books: the decision was made just 30 minutes before the ceremony, and the chair, Victoria Glendinning, characterised the awarding of the prize as a "necessary nonsense".
Even so, viewed through the reverse telescope of history it seems surprising that Ondaatje's novel had to share the prize. Especially since it's so damn good.
In case you're one of the few people who've neither read the book nor seen the film, The English Patient centres around an Italian villa towards the end of the second world war, where four variously damaged characters try to come to terms with the past. The titular patient isn't, in fact, English. He's a Hungarian desert explorer called Laslo Almasy (very loosely based on a real man) who was burned black after a plane crash on the Libya-Egypt border. He spends the book on what he knows to be his deathbed, recounting the story of his doomed love affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton. This story is extracted by a former thief and spy, Caravaggio, who uses his knowledge of morphine addiction (developed after Axis torturers removed his thumbs) to make the patient garrulous. Almasy is also tended by a young nurse, Hana, who is herself a victim of war, shell-shocked and grieving for her father's death under arms. Finally, there is Kip, a Sikh bomb disposal expert who becomes Hana's lover and the patient's admirer and friend.
The character of the English patient may be sophisticated, adult and troubled, but there's plenty of Indiana Jones in his archaeological discoveries, incredible journeys, wartime intrigues, and even the accident that spills him from his plane wearing "an antlered hat of fire". Then there's Caravaggio's thieving and spying, Kip's bomb disposal and Hana the beautiful nurse ... This is a book imbued with the spirit of Boys' Own Adventure. It makes sense that it made such a good film – even if the most impressive feature of the book, Ondaatje's prose, can't be caught on celluloid.
Much has been said about the richness of Ondaatje's writing, the sensuousness of his physical descriptions and his poet's gift for using well-timed silences and ellipses to speak volumes. All that's true. But the thing that impressed me most as I read the book this time around is its hard centre. It may come wrapped in musky perfume, but Ondaatje's prose could go a few rounds with Hemingway and probably knock out Kipling, too.
The latter is a comparison the author audaciously invites. At one point Hana reads the patient an extract from Kim:
"He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zamzamah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot."
He interrupts her to say:
"Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise."
It's a fairly incidental and subdued passage in the greater scheme of things. There are far brighter pyrotechnics in the book. But it's a good example of how hard Ondaatje's writing works. It works firstly because it's spot on: try and read that quote with and without commas. It works thematically: immediately you start thinking about empire and its impact, about the Orient, about adventure, about how much Kipling himself lost in war. It works because it illuminates the polymath English patient: he's just the sort of man to have an opinion on how to read Kipling – and to be right about it. It works – craftily – as a guide to reading Ondaatje himself: The English Patient too should be taken slowly and with careful attention to rhythm. And so it is throughout the book. You get the sense that every word is straining and bursting with meaning. Every word has been made to labour as well as delight. Everything is turned up to 11. Everything, in short, works.
Or almost everything. I should also note that some of the novel has come in for criticism. Most notably, there have been objections to the way the book ends, with the detonation of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some have said that it seems rather tacked on – and it's true that the bombs do have a strange and unsettling impact at the culmination of the narrative. Personally, I felt that to be true to the brutal way the bombs cut short the war, but it isn't an easy termination.
There has also been controversy – particularly in the US – about the following remark: "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." It's certainly uncomfortable reading. Possibly because it's too true. Possibly because it's impossible to prove either way. There is one important point to make about it though – and that is that Ondaatje himself does not present it as a simple black and white statement of fact. It is not Kip – as most critics seem to think – who owns the line. Caravaggio says it as he attempts to explain why Kip has found the nuclear bomb so upsetting. Yet Kip's horror can just as much be ascribed to his role as a sapper as to his race. He's spent the whole war trying to prevent explosions. He's risked everything time and again to save maybe a few hundred Allied lives – and now the Allies have killed millions at a stroke. Actually, the line is just another example of how everything Ondaatje writes has depth and ambiguity that rewards slow reading and careful thought - just another demonstration of his meticulous talent. This is a book to be savoured, re-read and remembered. It is wonderful. I'm going to be very curious to see how Sacred Hunger measures up.
Next time: Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/13/australia-supplants-china-to-build-undersea-cable-for-solomon-islands | World news | 2018-06-13T04:09:44.000Z | Amy Remeikis | Australia supplants China to build undersea cable for Solomon Islands | The Australian government has stepped in to help build a key piece of infrastructure for the Solomon Islands, as concerns about Beijing’s attempts at “soft diplomacy” continue to grow.
Malcolm Turnbull announced that Australia would jointly fund construction of an underwater telecommunication cable network, which will link remote Solomon Islands communities to Honiara.
Huawei had been earmarked to build the cable, after the Solomons originally awarded the contract to the Chinese company – a move that prompted Australian intelligence and security chiefs to warn against the deal.
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The cable is to have an Australian link point, to allow the Solomons and Papua New Guinea to connect to Australia’s fibre optic cable infrastructure. Sydney, Townsville and the Sunshine Coast are all being considered as connection points.
Huawei has been banned from government contracts to build Australian infrastructure over concerns that its links to the ruling Chinese communist government could jeopardise Australia’s security.
Last year Nick Warner, who heads the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the agency which deals with foreign intelligence, was reported to have warned the former Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare against Huawei’s involvement.
Australia stepped in to fill the gap, with funding put aside for the 4,000km cable in the budget.
While foreign aid funding was frozen, Australia has concentrated its efforts on the Pacific, after reports about the concessional loans Beijing has been providing countries in the region have concerns that China is seeking to increase its influence in the region.
Of the $4.2bn Australia will spend on foreign aid in the next year, $1.3bn is earmarked for the Pacific.
Julie Bishop said the Solomon Islands accepting the Australian offer made sense, as it was “cheaper” and “likely to be faster results for them, and technically superior”.
“We put up an alternative, and that’s what I believe Australia should continue to do,” Bishop said. “We are the largest aid donor in the Pacific.
“We are a longstanding partner of the Solomon Islands and I want to ensure that countries in the Pacific have alternatives, that they don’t only have one option and no others, and so in this case, we are in a position to be able to offer a more attractive deal for Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea and they accepted it.”
Turnbull attempted to play down the security concerns about the cable, saying instead Australia was happy to see the Solomons and PNG grow.
Warning sounded over China's 'debtbook diplomacy'
Read more
“There have been a number of cable projects that have been contemplated, with respect to the Solomon Islands over the years,” he said.
“You’ve referred to one of them. What we are doing is providing very practical and substantial support and aid as part of our foreign aid program, to provide that telecommunications infrastructure which will ensure that the Solomons Island has access to 21st century telecommunications, which, as I was discussing with the prime minister [Rick Houenipwela] today, it is going to be vital for education, for commerce, for economic development, in every aspect of their society, just as it is in ours.”
Houenipwela will spend time in Queensland, a key trading partner with the Solomons, as well as Sydney and Canberra during his trip, which follows the official end of the Australian-led peacekeeping mission in his nation, which began in 2003 and ended last June.
with Australian Associated Press | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2013/jun/04/rentokil-balfour-beatty-office-maintenance | Business | 2013-06-04T09:20:44.000Z | Nick Fletcher | Rentokil rises on talk of £400m sale of office maintenance business | Rentokil Initial has risen nearly 3% on reports of a possible offer for its office maintenance business.
US private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice is considering buying the Rentokil division and merging it with Balfour Beatty's rival operation, according to the Financial Times.
Talks are already being held on the plan, the report said, with a valuation of a higher than expected £400m put on the Rentokil business. Justin Jordan at Jefferies said:
In our sum of the parts Rentokil valuation, we value [the division] at £226m, hence view £400m proceeds as an appealing prospect. While Rentokil has refused to comment, we view this possible disposal as strategically sensible, allowing Rentokil to focus on its two key growth divisions, Textile and Hygiene and Pest, both of which enjoy leading market positions, mid-teen operating margins and structural growth opportunities.
Hector Forsythe at Oriel Securities said:
The proposal to a sale of the two businesses to a single purchaser reduces the probability that a deal can be done. That an article appears in the public domain at this juncture perhaps is an effort to get some price tension into the deal.
Our view is that this is perhaps the most likely route for Rentokil to achieve a disposal of [the division]. It is a business that is performing well in our view. Margins are making progress as the mix changes to a higher concentration on integrated facilities management contracts. There have been notable wins this year and the pipeline is encouraging. Near-term, revenue progression is being masked by action to exit small, single service contracts. These are low margin sales. An exit would remove another non-core business from the Rentokil portfolio and lower group leverage, giving additional flexibility to maintain bolt-on growth in its core activities.
Rentokil is up 2.65p at 91.1p while Balfour Beatty, whose business is said to be worth around £200m, has dipped 1.2p to 231.3p after HSBC cut its target from 285p to 260p.
Meanwhile defence group Cobham is down 13.7p at 272.4p on talk of an institutional investor selling 3.6%, or 39.1m shares. The shares were said to be being offered by UBS to institutions at between 273.5p a share and last night's close of 286p. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/08/hornby-losses-widen-supplier-problems-china-it-upgrade | Business | 2015-12-08T08:44:56.000Z | Sean Farrell | Hornby losses widen amid supplier problems and IT upgrade | Hornby has posted a £4.5m loss for the first half of its financial year after an overhaul of the model railway maker’s operations disrupted sales. The group, whose products include Corgi Cars and Airfix kits, also struggled to get products into European stores from its Chinese supplier.
The pre-tax loss for the six months to the end of September widened from £520,000 a year earlier as sales fell to £22.3m from £24.2m. Excluding exceptional items, Hornby swung to a £3.4m loss from a £250,000 profit a year earlier.
Hornby has been upgrading its computer and stock management systems in the UK and Europe while bringing in new managers. The revamp caused UK sales to fall sharply over the summer and affected Hornby’s European business, which was also hit by problems getting products made in China on to shelves.
The group has had trouble with its Chinese suppliers for many years after moving production from the UK in the late 90s. After extricating itself from a long-running contract, it had further problems this year and issued profit warnings in September and November.
Hornby said it was looking for additional manufacturers in China and elsewhere and that it would open a new warehouse in China to give it greater control over suppliers.
In the UK, business has recovered from the summer disruption and sales are rising, Hornby said. With Christmas approaching, the company’s main products include an 80th anniversary set of silver LNER locomotives and a James Bond Spectre themed Scalextric set.
Richard Ames, Hornby’s chief executive, said: “We are at an important stage in Hornby’s transformation. Following significant disruption in the first two months, the business is performing well in the important Christmas and New Year period.
“We have pulled forward our reorganisation plan for our European operations, which has contributed to further trading disruption but which accelerates our overall plan.”
Hornby said it expected to post a £2m loss excluding items for the financial year, in line with the guidance when it published its second profit warning last month.
Hornby’s shares fell 4% to 91p. The shares are up 17% this year but have fallen from the 111p level reached in August. | Full |
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in Dataset Viewer.
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
The dataset was curated to facilitate research and development in natural language processing tasks such as text classification and information extraction from news articles.
Source Data
Initial Data Collection and Normalization
Articles and similar content were scraped from theguardian.com website.
Encoding
The primary language of the dataset is English, but it may contain content in other languages. It is recommended to handle the data in UTF-8 encoding to accommodate the full range of characters.
Dataset Structure
Data Instances
A typical data row contains:
- URL: [string] The URL of the scraped article.
- Article Category: [string] The category assigned to the article.
- Publication Date: [datetime] The date and time the article was published.
- Article Author: [string] The author of the article.
- Article Title: [string] The title of the article.
- Article Contents: [string] The full text content of the article.
- Data Quality: [string] 'Full' if all data from the article was scraped, 'Partial' if some data may be missing.
Dataset Statistics
Tokens
The dataset model includes an estimated 135,808,383 tokens.
Data Quality Distribution
- Number of rows with 'Full' data quality: 87,641
- Number of rows with 'Partial' data quality: 50,594
Who are the intended users?
Researchers, data scientists, and developers interested in text analysis of news articles.
Considerations
Content Warning
The dataset may contain explicit content or material that is not considered child-friendly. Users should exercise caution and review the content before using it in applications accessible by a younger audience.
Potential Biases
The dataset reflects the content as published on theguardian.com and may inherently contain biases present in the source material. Users should be aware of these potential biases when analyzing the dataset and consider them in their research or applications.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
Dataset Licensing
The dataset is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, which allows for a wide range of uses.
Data Privacy
The dataset contains publicly available information from articles. However, users should ensure they comply with The Guardian's terms of use and privacy policies when using this data.
Content Usage Restrictions
According to the robots.txt file of theguardian.com, the content is made available under their terms and conditions of use. The following uses are not permitted:
- For large language models (LLMs)
- For machine learning and/or artificial intelligence-related purposes
- With any of the aforementioned technologies
- For any commercial purposes
For further assistance or permissions, contact [email protected].
Who are the dataset creators?
The dataset model was created by Stefan Carter ([email protected]).
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