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[
"Olivia Cuthbert"
] | 2016-08-27T08:51:13 | null | 2016-08-27T07:00:01 |
At Al Huseyniyat landfill Syrian refugees salvage recyclables illegally, but efforts to formalise their work could offer hope
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsustainable-business%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fjordan-waste-pickers-syria-refugees-recycling.json
|
en
| null |
Broken glass and needles: the waste pickers scraping a living in Jordan's landfills
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Without warning the bulldozer accelerates, cutting through mounds of waste at Al Huseyniyat landfill in northern Jordan. A lingering stench intensifies as the machine scoops up an armful of rubbish, discharging clouds of flies over a group of people rifling through bin bags nearby.
No one notices the disturbance. Their gazes are trained downwards as they sift through the morning’s waste. “We look for plastic, aluminium, metal, clothes – anything we can sell or keep, or sometimes eat,” says Mohammed Ali, an Egyptian who makes a living salvaging recyclables from the site.
Ali manages a team of 15 waste pickers – men, women and children – most Syrians from nearby Za’atari refugee camp. They earn around 10 Jordanian dinar (£10.90) a day. “It’s not a lot but I make enough to manage on,” says Nawras Sahasil, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee who supports his wife and two children on the 250 dinars a month he earns from the landfill.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Syrian refugees Majid Al Ahli (L) and Nawras Sahasil (R) at Al Huseyniyat landfill in Mafraq. Photograph: Olivia Cuthbert
Like most people here, Sahasil does not have a work permit. While the Jordanian government has gone some way towards easing restrictions on employment for Syrian refugees, the vast majority are still working illegally. Now, a number of organisations in Jordan are looking to formalise the work of waste pickers and harness their role as recyclers to address the country’s mounting rubbish crisis, while developing sustainable solutions for processing waste in the future.
For the waste pickers at Al Huseyniyat, and others working on streets around Jordan, this would mean stable employment and safer working conditions. At present, children, many of whom look younger than their stated age of 14, face the same dangers as adults in this toxic environment. A few wear cotton gloves found in the rubbish, but most go through the bags with bare hands, exposed to broken glass and needles hidden among the coloured cans, wrappers and rotting organic waste.
During the day, 80,000 tonnes of rubbish will be added to the mounds at Al Huseyniyat, which serves the surrounding Mafraq Governorate, including Za’atari. The swollen site, which has more than tripled in size since the start of the war in Syria, is a physical reminder of the challenges that confront Jordan as public services buckle under the strain of more than 655,000 registered Syrian refugees.
“Many municipalities were struggling with waste management before and then the population in some areas doubled and they didn’t have the resources to cope,” explains Olmo Forni, humanitarian waste specialist at non-profit Disaster Waste Recovery. “DWR is working with GIZ [a German company specialising in international development] and ACF [Action Contre La Faim] to formalise waste pickers into co-operatives that will allow them to have proper contracts with the municipality and become long-term service providers.”
Integrating informal waste pickers into the labour force, Forni says, will legitimise the important contribution they make, reducing the pressure on Jordan’s landfills while promoting recycling as a sustainable business model. For the scrap yards, waste brokers and manufacturers that make up Jordan’s grassroots recycling sector, professionalising the waste pickers promises “properly sorted” – and therefore better quality – materials, says Samer Almadanat, who owns a paper treatment company in the Jordanian city of Karak.
Almadanat purchases 75% of his stock from a sorting station employing local waste pickers. “They generate a lot more material this way,” he says, adding that his business has benefited from having a consistent supply.
The facility, which is managed independently by the municipality, sells plastic and paper recyclables to the private sector in bulk. It is the first of seven sorting stations being built by GIZ to generate employment in the recycling sector for vulnerable Jordanians, and soon, Syrian refugees. “This was a test run to see how well this model works in Jordan,” says GIZ project manager Patrick Poehlmann, who describes the Karak station as a “success story”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Syrian refugee Younis Haraki, 19, in camp Za’atari with family members. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
In Za’atari, the financial potential of waste separation is being harnessed in an Oxfam recycling project that the NGO hopes will eventually be rolled out across Mafraq and nationwide. Rubbish is separated by households in the camp and sold to local companies that trade in reusable material. This helps create jobs for refugees while making a dent in the amount of solid waste send to landfill from the camp, currently around 750 meters cubed each week.
Ibrahim Ali Eid, who works for a large scrap yard in Mafraq, purchases between 30 and 45 tonnes of material a month from the project. “We don’t deal with individual waste pickers because they can’t provide the quantities we need,” he explains.
Less than 10% of municipal solid waste is recycled in Jordan, which generates more than 2m tonnes a year. A framework waste law under discussion is looking at ways to incorporate pickers into a modernised “waste management cycle that engages the private sector”, says Dr Mohammed Khashashneh, director of waste management at the Ministry of Environment, acknowledging the need to raise awareness about recycling and address the litter lining Jordan’s streets.
Rio's waste pickers: 'People spat at us but now we're at the Olympics' #Rio2016 Read more
Meanwhile, local upcycling entrepreneurs, such as Alaa Ziadeh and eco-designer Hana Faouri, are finding ways to share their skills with informal rubbish workers as part of a growing grassroots movement to establish a culture of reuse and recycling in Jordan.
Faouri ran upcycling workshops in rural villages, then established a community centre in Amman so participants could sell their products to the wider market. Ziadeh, who produces professional upcycled furniture through his company, Ziadat for Recycling, has been approached by organisations including UNHCR and UNDP to teach refugees and vulnerable Jordanians how to generate an income by refashioning rubbish.
“With this approach towards recycling we can create a good level of living for a lot of people,” he says. “We’re also laying the foundations for an industry that can provide responsible and sustainable solutions to Jordan’s rubbish crisis.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/27/jordan-waste-pickers-syria-refugees-recycling
|
en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/8ed143e71bb3c05fcf9ad65e709f37e52708cb876d7c66a757416c84eeaf6a23.json
|
|
[] | 2016-08-28T02:51:41 | null | 2016-08-28T02:14:22 |
Guptas, whose businesses range from media to mining, deny accusations of influencing cabinet appointments
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Fguptagate-family-sells-south-africa-holdings-after-jacob-zuma-influence-claims.json
|
en
| null |
Guptagate: family sells South Africa holdings after Jacob Zuma influence claims
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
South Africa’s wealthy Gupta family, which has been accused of holding undue political sway over President Jacob Zuma in a scandal that became known as Guptagate, said on Saturday it planned to dispose of all stakes it holds in South African businesses before the end of the year.
The Guptas have denied accusations that they have used their friendship with Zuma to influence his decisions or advance their business interests. But South Africa’s anti-corruption watchdog said in July it would get more funds to investigate whether Zuma allowed the family to make government appointments.
'Guptagate' claims surrounding Jacob Zuma spark corruption inquiry by police Read more
In a statement, the Gupta family said “we now believe the time is right for us to exit our shareholding of the South African businesses” and it believed the move would benefit current employees.
“As such, we announce today our intention to sell all of our shareholding in South Africa by the end of the year. We are already in discussions with several international prospective buyers,” the statement said.
The prominent business family is accused of being behind Zuma’s abrupt sacking of former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene in December, a move that rattled investor confidence and triggered calls for the president’s resignation.
The scandal surrounding the Guptas took a dramatic turn earlier this year after deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas said the family had offered him his boss’s job.
Zuma has said that the Guptas are his friends but denied doing anything improper. The Guptas have also denied making job offers to anyone in government.
Jacob Zuma denies influence of wealthy Gupta family in South African cabinet Read more
The three Gupta brothers moved to South Africa from India at the end of apartheid rule in the mid-1990s and went on to build a business empire that stretches from technology to media and mining.
A family spokesman told the Gupta-owned ANN7 news channel the decision to divest from South Africa had “been on the cards” since April, when the brothers had resigned from the directorships of their companies.
He also said the family planned to stay in South Africa.
In a statement, the family said it “had been a victim of a political campaign ... A narrative has been constructed against us, which has been perpetuated by many media titles, and that flawed perception has become the truth in the eyes of some.”
“We have no interest in politics, only business.”
The Gupta family’s assets in South Africa include its holding company Oakbay Investments, which controls Johannesburg-listed Oakbay Resources. They also own the New Age newspaper.
Knives are out for Jacob Zuma as South Africa's Guptagate grows Read more
Oakbay Investments chief executive Nazeem Howa said the company would remain rooted in South Africa. “Oakbay Investments will continue in South Africa, they [the Guptas] are just selling their shareholding,” he told the eNCA news channel.
All four of South Africa’s major banks have severed links with the company. Analysts have said the banks were probably prompted by concerns about reputational risk and if the Guptas are no longer part of Oakbay, that risk may diminish.
South African markets were rattled again this week by news that current finance minister Pravin Gordhan, had been summoned by an elite police unit known as “the Hawks” over an investigation into a suspected rogue spy unit in the tax service.
Political pundits have said Gordhan is being undermined by a faction allied to Zuma. On Friday, South African police denied being part of a conspiracy targeting Gordhan, City Press newspaper reported, after the opposition described the investigation into him as a “witch-hunt”.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/28/guptagate-family-sells-south-africa-holdings-after-jacob-zuma-influence-claims
|
en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3d1804d3de6fefa0aebc4a53d4e0b086b3b3fb5fd16800385645448918d49a03.json
|
|
[
"Ian Sample"
] | 2016-08-26T13:27:21 | null | 2016-08-24T17:00:26 |
The discovery of a rocky planet in the habitable zone around our sun’s nearest star is just the beginning of decades of intense research and exploration
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fproxima-b-will-be-our-prime-laboratory-in-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life.json
|
en
| null |
Proxima b will be our prime laboratory in the search for extraterrestrial life
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Has life gained a foothold on a planet that orbits our nearest star? The question, a variation on one of the greatest mysteries humans have pondered, is now front and centre in astronomers’ minds. The short answer, of course, is nobody knows. But over the coming months, years and decades, scientists will throw every instrument and clever technique they have at Proxima b, an Earth-sized planet warmed by a small, cool star in Centaurus, to find out.
Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life Read more
The newfound world has the compelling label of lurking in the “habitable zone”. But planets in this Goldilocks region of space where the heat from their host star makes them neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water, are not necessarily habitable or inhabited. Proxima b may have no flowing water, a prerequisite for life as we know it. On Earth, life flourished with help from an atmosphere and a magnetic field, the latter of which shields us from the worst of space radiation. No one knows if Proxima b has either of these.
And so begins the effort to learn more. Ignas Snellen, a professor of astronomy at the Leiden Observatory calls Proxima b the most important planet found beyond the solar system since the first, 51 Pegasi b, was spotted by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor in 1995. “This is the discovery of the year and possibly of the decade,” Snellen says. Not only does it mean an Earth-sized planet orbits our nearest star, it implies that other such worlds are common. “It will be our prime laboratory for the search for extraterrestrial life for the decades ahead. We have no idea whether life could exist on this planet, but the circumstances are likely to be much more favourable than on Mars,” he says.
The most immediate task is to check whether Proxima b crosses the face of its star as viewed from Earth. Since Proxima Centauri is comparatively small and dim, and thus far less dazzling than sun-like stars, such a transit would allow the Hubble Space Telescope to look for the telltale dip in starlight that the planet’s atmosphere would produce. But the chances are more than 95% that Proxima b orbits in an unhelpful plane.
Without a transit, hopes of finding and studying the planet’s atmosphere fall to future instruments. Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to launch in 2018, may be the first to peer at Proxima b’s atmosphere. Next in line could be the European Extremely Large Telescope being readied for action in 2024. The goal then will be to spot telltale imbalances in the chemical composition of the atmosphere which are are the calling cards of life.
“People will use Proxima b as a test case. It’s a gift,” says Queloz. “The search for life is not a dream, it’s a serious research topic. There is nothing about magic about life. It is just chemistry and in a way it must happen. Whether it survives and develops is another question,but I really do expect it to be everywhere. Life should not be so special.”
In the language of astronomers, Proxima b is nearby. But 4.2 light years away is 40 trillion kilometres. At the speed of Voyager 1, the only human-made object in the space between the stars, a spacecraft would take 80,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. With new technology, that could potentially be halved.
Proxima Centauri planet could tell us about alien life in the universe Read more
This year, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner announced $100m for research into a 20 year journey to Earth’s nearest stars. In reality, such a mission will take billions. But Proxima b gives the project clear focus.
“The importance of this system is as an inspiration,” says Chris Lintott, presenter of The Sky at Night and a professor of astrophysics at Oxford University. “There’s much work to be done to find out what this planet is really like, but the existence of a potentially habitable world just next door should inspire us to explore beyond our solar system. There are existing plans for small, fast-moving probes that could reach Proxima in a couple of decades, and I think just having a target to aim for will inspire more. Now we know it’s there, surely we have to go?”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/24/proxima-b-will-be-our-prime-laboratory-in-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life
|
en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/925d17f2d347c688e9036877bfc14cc6cae97e46ff4e027ef6afb2c634350d8f.json
|
|
[
"Martin Lukacs"
] | 2016-08-30T00:57:34 | null | 2014-02-28T00:00:00 |
Martin Lukacs: Canadian government closely monitoring how legal rulings and aboriginal protest pose an increasing “risk” for multi-billion dollar oil, mining plans
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Ftrue-north%2F2014%2Fmar%2F04%2Faboriginal-rights-canada-resource-agenda.json
|
en
| null |
Aboriginal rights a threat to Canada's resource agenda, documents reveal
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The Canadian government is increasingly worried that the growing clout of aboriginal peoples’ rights could obstruct its aggressive resource development plans, documents reveal.
Since 2008, the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs has run a risk management program to evaluate and respond to “significant risks” to its agenda, including assertions of treaty rights, the rising expectations of aboriginal peoples, and new legal precedents at odds with the government’s policies.
Yearly government reports obtained by the Guardian predict that the failure to manage the risks could result in more “adversarial relations” with aboriginal peoples, “public outcry and negative international attention,” and “economic development projects [being] delayed.”
“There is a risk that the legal landscape can undermine the ability of the department to move forward in its policy agenda,” one Aboriginal Affairs’ report says. “There is a tension between the rights-based agenda of Aboriginal groups and the non-rights based policy approaches” of the federal government.
The Conservative government is planning in the next ten years to attract $650 billion of investment to mining, forestry, gas and oil projects, much of it on or near traditional aboriginal lands.
Critics say the government is determined to evade Supreme Court rulings that recognize aboriginal peoples’ rights to a decision-making role in, even in some cases jurisdiction over, resource development in large areas of the country.
“The Harper government is committed to a policy of extinguishing indigenous peoples’ land rights, instead of a policy of recognition and co-existence,” said Arthur Manuel, chair of the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade, which has lead an effort to have the economic implications of aboriginal rights identified as a financial risk.
“They are trying to contain the threat that our rights pose to business-as-usual and the expansion of dirty energy projects. But our legal challenges and direct actions are creating economic uncertainty and risk, raising the heat on the government to change its current policies.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs declined to answer the Guardian’s questions, but sent a response saying the risk reports are compiled from internal reviews and “targeted interviews with senior management in those areas experiencing significant change.”
“The [corporate risk profile] is designed as an analytical tool for planning and not a public document. A good deal of [its] content would only be understandable to those working for the department as it speaks to the details of the operations of specific programs.”
Last year Canada was swept by the aboriginal-led Idle No More protest movement, building on years of aboriginal struggles against resource projects, the most high-profile of which has targeted Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would carry Alberta tar sands to the western coast of British Columbia.
“Native land claims scare the hell out of investors,” an analyst with global risk consultancy firm Eurasia Group has noted, concluding that First Nations opposition and legal standing has dramatically decreased the chances the Enbridge pipeline will be built.
In British Columbia and across the country, aboriginal peoples’ new assertiveness has been backed by successive victories in the courts.
According to a report released in November by Virginia-based First Peoples Worldwide, the risk associated with not respecting aboriginal peoples’ rights over lands and resources is emerging as a new financial bubble for extractive industries.
The report anticipates that as aboriginal peoples become better connected through digital media, win broader public support, and mount campaigns that more effectively impact business profits, failures to uphold aboriginal rights will carry an even higher risk.
The Aboriginal Affairs’ documents describe how a special legal branch helps the Ministry monitor and “mitigate” the risks posed by aboriginal court cases.
The federal government has spent far more fighting aboriginal litigation than any other legal issue – including $106 million in 2013, a sum that has grown over the last several years.
A special envoy appointed in 2013 by the Harper government to address First Nations opposition to energy projects in western Canada recently recommended that the federal government move rapidly to improve consultation and dialogue.
To boost support for its agenda, the government has considered offering bonds to allow First Nations to take equity stakes in resource projects. This is part of a rising trend of provincial governments and companies signing “benefit-sharing” agreements with First Nations to gain access to their lands, while falling short of any kind of recognition of aboriginal rights or jurisdiction.
Since 2007, the government has also turned to increased spying, creating a surveillance program aimed at aboriginal communities deemed “hot spots” because of their involvement in protest and civil disobedience against unwanted extraction on their lands.
Over the last year, the Harper government has cut funding to national, regional and tribal aboriginal organizations that provide legal services and advocate politically on behalf of First Nations, raising cries that it is trying to silence growing dissent.
Follow Martin Lukacs on twitter: @Martin_Lukacs
|
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/mar/04/aboriginal-rights-canada-resource-agenda
|
en
| 2014-02-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6444e7ee77969fdb3e436be4ece7d036d69f02d51d3b711a384b312a9e4b1078.json
|
|
[
"Emma Lunn",
"Patrick Collinson"
] | 2016-08-26T13:28:47 | null | 2016-08-20T06:00:06 |
The best deal depends on how much you want to transfer and the type of provider you decide to use (which probably won’t be PayPal)
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F20%2Fsend-money-overseas-best-deal-transfer.json
|
en
| null |
Planning to send money overseas? Here’s how to do it
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The pound has plummeted to less than 1.15 against the euro and 1.3 against the dollar, the lowest for years. So finding the best foreign exchange provider is more essential than ever. But this article is not about holiday money. It’s about people who need to send small sums regularly, and those making large one-off transfers, such as buying a holiday property. It reveals that some providers are great for large sums, but pricey for smaller transfers – and it tells you to avoid PayPal, which came out particularly poorly in our price survey.
Consumers should first cut through any nonsense about “no fees” or “no commission”. Your key question should be: “After all the charges, how many euros/yen/dollars etc will I get for X pounds?” To do this, check how much you are offered against the mid-market “interbank rate”, the rate used when banks trade between one other. You can check the live interbank rate on XE.com.
Secondly, you can be reasonably certian that the deal offered by your high street bank will be pretty lousy, unless you are a “premier” type customer transferring very large sums.
James Daley of Fairer Finance says: “Almost all major banks charge a fortune for transferring money overseas, and offer a poor exchange rate to boot. The good news is that a number of alternatives offer you much better value.”
Our third golden rule is that, if transferring a sizeable sum into a foreign account, first send a small sum and check it has been received, as much to ensure you have sent it to the right account as anything else. Only then should you send the full amount.
Almost all major banks charge a fortune for transferring money overseas, and offer a poor exchange rate to boot James Daley, Fairer Finance
Finally, remember there is relatively limited protection should things go wrong. The currency brokers can be “authorised” by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) or just “registered”. Authorised firms should keep clients’ money separate from the company’s own funds. If a firm is just registered with the FCA there’s a risk all the money is in the same pot and could be lost if the company went bust.
“Even if a firm is FCA authorised, it’s important to understand that there is no protection from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in this sector,” says Daley. “So if a firm goes bust because of a fraud, there’s still a chance that you won’t get your money back. However, the risks if you’re using a big brand are fairly small.”
In 2010, Crown Currency Exchange, based in Hayle, Cornwall, went bust, leaving 3,000 people owed £20m. It used new customers’ cash to pay off existing clients, as well as fund the purchase of a luxury home. Three people involved in the scam have been jailed.
What we found
We obtained quotes for moving £200, £2,000 and £150,000 into euros and dollars. We conducted the test on 29 July when the pound was fetching €1.19 and $1.32 respectively, but sadly it has since fallen further.
Best for small sums When transferring £200 we found UKForex best for euros and TransferWise best for dollars. UKForex is FCA authorised rather than registered, and is a subsidiary of an Australian group, OFX. TransferWise is a peer-to-peer service (see below), headquartered in London and run by Estonians. Investors in the business include Richard Branson.
Worst in this bracket were MoneyGram and NatWest, which goes to show why you shouldn’t automatically use well-known names. For £200, NatWest would give us only $229.31, compared with $260.94 from TransferWise.
Best for mid-size sums When transferring £2,000, the Currency Account (for euros) and TransferWise (dollars) were best. The Currency Account is a relatively new and small company, formed in 2014, and is authorised by the FCA. It describes itself as a “hybrid” peer-to-peer plus direct market access company.
Worst for mid-size sums were PayPal (euros) and NatWest (dollars).
Best for large sums We checked rates on moving £150,000, a sum where you would be seriously upset if anything went wrong. Again, the Currency Account came top for euros, though there was very little between it and the other brokers. HiFX came top in the bracket for dollars. HiFX was established in 1998 and is one of the largest brokers, having transferred around £100bn since then.
Providers
Currency brokers There are loads of currency brokers or money transfer specialists. These include MoneyCorp, Currencies Direct, CaxtonFX, TorFX, HiFX, UKForex, FairFX, Azimo and Xendpay. They pretty much all advertise “bank beating” rates, but how do they compare against one another?
A handful of currency comparison sites are available, but they won’t necessarily find the best deal. If you’re looking for the most bang for your buck you would be better off going to individual companies, getting a quote and asking how long the transfer will take. When you see a company offering a good deal, check out its reputation by using FXCompared, TrustPilot or a general Google search.
We don’t send money overseas, so can cut out the crazy fees that banks charge consumers Taavet Hinrikus, TransferWise
Established firms are usually, but not always, the most reliable. Some smaller brokers and “disruptive” web platforms temporarily stopped trading during the EU referendum aftermath.
Peer-to-peer services TransferWise is one of a new breed of peer-to-peer operators which cut out the banks and brokers by providing an online meeting place for people wanting to buy each other’s currencies. You don’t send your money directly, rather to the currency exchange firm which then passes it on.
“Our exchanges are based on free or extremely low-cost local bank account transfers. We don’t send money overseas, so can cut out the crazy fees that banks charge consumers,” says Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise.
Another peer-to-peer platform, CurrencyFair, works in a similar way, though the exchange rates are set by its users. In the event that there are no customers providing a decent rate for your exchange, CurrencyFair will step in and match with you. The site claims customers typically pay 0.35% of the amount exchanged plus a fixed €3 transfer fee.
Other options
If you need to pay in cash or transfer money quickly, Western Union and MoneyGram both have branches on the high street – but their services are not cheap and only suitable for small amounts. And while the companies themselves are legitimate, they are often used by scammers, so be wary of strangers asking for payment this way.
PayPal might make it easy to send money overseas, but was the most expensive option in half the Guardian calculations. It whacks on a hefty conversion fee if you want to pay someone in another currency.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/20/send-money-overseas-best-deal-transfer
|
en
| 2016-08-20T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e44c790b9a795cf776b5ddbcab7525a5536a1ad18701fb8ed2171519bdc5e2be.json
|
|
[
"Rob Smyth"
] | 2016-08-31T08:52:58 | null | 2016-08-31T07:58:39 |
Marcos Alonso to Chelsea? | Jack Wilshere on loan to Crystal Palace or Bournemouth? | Moussa Sissoko or Isco to Spurs? | Islam Slimani and Adrien Silva to Leicester? | Marcos Rojo to Valencia? | Odion Ighalo to West Brom?
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Frumours-david-luiz-chelsea-return-transfer-deadline-day.json
|
en
| null |
Rumours: PSG’s David Luiz set for Chelsea return on transfer deadline day?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
On the list of Things The Mill Really Really Really Didn’t Think Would Happen On Deadline Day, Antonio Conte attempting to re-sign David Luiz is there with the apocalypse and Jim White pulling a brazen sickie so that he can stay home and watch Bake Off on loop.
Transfer deadline day news: Jack Wilshere, Shkodran Mustafi and more – live! Read more
Luiz might seem an odd choice of defender for a man who has spent most of the last five years working with Italy’s most streetwise bouncers, but the word on the street is that Chelsea will pay £32m to bring him back from Paris. Conte is also planning to buy Fiorentina full-back and Bolton legend Marcos Alonso.
“Union” Jack Wilshere will turn down Milan, Roma and Valencia so that he can join Crystal Palace or Bournemouth on loan. Across London, Daniel Levy is at serious risk spending some money on Newcastle’s Moussa Sissoko or Real Madrid’s Isco.
Claudio Ranieri likes the look of Sporting Lisbon pair Islam Slimani and Adrien Silva, and to hell with a combined fee in excess of £50m
Bastian Schweinsteiger has endeared himself to José Mourinho some more. When offered a free transfer to Sporting Lisbon, Schweinsteiger slowly plonked both feet on the nearest table and carefully enunciated the word “Nah”. In other Old Trafford news, Valencia have a vacancy for a scatterbrained Argentinian left-back who somehow got into the team of the 2014 World Cup and thus like the look of Marcos Rojo’s CV.
Tony Pulis has raised £32m by selling his entire baseball cap collection and plans to spend it on Watford’s Odion Ighalo. That will allow Saido Berahino to go to Stoke and thus end the dullest saga in transfer history.
Sunderland are keen on Lorient’s Didier Ndong, St Etienne’s Florentin Pogba, elder brother of Paul, and Mamadou Sakho.
Manchester City rejects Eliaquim Mangala and Samir Nasri are likely to join Porto and Sevilla on loan with a view to never darkening Pep Guardiola’s door again. And finally, Jim White has just woken up with a smile on his face.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/31/rumours-david-luiz-chelsea-return-transfer-deadline-day
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4c6ff9525bfba7c626d2b5ede15fdce9ac4d82b6f625f2f33c666f1ac1c310e9.json
|
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[
"Jill Papworth",
"Photograph"
] | 2016-08-26T13:29:23 | null | 2016-07-29T06:00:29 |
Located in a former mill below the ancient town walls of Amelia, Umbria, the oldest part of this property dates back to 1600
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Fjul%2F29%2Fa-restored-italian-farmhouse-steeped-in-history-in-pictures.json
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en
| null |
A restored Italian farmhouse steeped in history - in pictures
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www.theguardian.com
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With views of the ancient bridge, down the gorge and to the town walls above, the house is on the market for £290,000 through Italian property portal Gate-away.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/gallery/2016/jul/29/a-restored-italian-farmhouse-steeped-in-history-in-pictures
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en
| 2016-07-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6042f12752d2831d0fbf464c8fbb87ab010d174baf2295cc1688bfcba25c4e15.json
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[
"Sid Lowe"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:05 | null | 2016-08-25T14:14:25 |
Manchester City’s latest signing wanted to be a striker when he was young but has gone on to become one of the most complete shot stoppers in the world
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fclaudio-bravo-manchester-city-joe-hart.json
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Claudio Bravo: The reluctant goalkeeper who became Pep Guardiola’s No1 man
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www.theguardian.com
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Claudio Bravo did not want to be a goalkeeper and Pep Guardiola does not want him to be a goalkeeper either. Not “just” a goalkeeper, anyway. The Chile captain recalled how on the streets of Viluco, a village of 2,000 people surrounded by vineyards south of Santiago, the older kids would tell him to get in goal. By the time he made it to the capital, he was told to get out of it again: he had to save, sure, but he had to play too. And so he played: at Colo-Colo, Real Sociedad and then Barcelona. Now he will do the same at Manchester City having officially joined the club on Thursday.
Manchester City confirm signing of Claudio Bravo from Barcelona Read more
“Like any kid I originally wanted to be up front,” Bravo said but he was forced between the posts and it was from there that he joined Colo-Colo aged 11, travelling daily in his dad’s lorry, fruit filling the back. He was only short, skinny too, but for three years he progressed until one day he came for a cross, missed it and conceded a goal. One of the club’s directors blew his top, decided he was useless, too small to be a goalkeeper, just not good enough either, and insisted they get rid of him.
“I thought: ‘I’m only 14,’” Bravo told El Periódico. Hurt, he went home to Viluco and stayed there. His mind was made up: it was over. But back in Santiago his coach defended him. “If he goes, so do I,” Julio Rodríguez insisted.
Rodríguez saw something in Bravo, persuaded him to return and persuaded Colo-Colo to let him. He saw something in football too. He had been on a coaching course at Ajax, where he met Frans Hoek, who had joined the club under Johan Cruyff. Hoek later worked at Barcelona and Manchester United with Louis van Gaal and embraced Cruyff’s ideal: “In my teams, the goalkeeper is the first attacker.” So did Rodríguez. Bravo had to play, to pass the ball out, not just hoof it clear; it became an obsession, repeated constantly.
Bravo shot up: from that mistake at 14 to his first-team debut at 16, he grew 14cm. At 19, an injury gave him the chance to become first choice and he didn’t let it go; it was a story that would be repeated, very much his way. One day, a coach at the Basque club Real Sociedad was asked to go and watch him. His name was Xabier Mancisidor – taken there by Manuel Pellegrini, he is now the goalkeeping coach at City – and his recommendation led to Bravo being signed in 2006.
It had not always been easy – he did not play a single league game in his second season, despite the team having been relegated to the second division – but by the time Bravo joined Barcelona eight years later, he had become la Real’s captain and Chile’s too.
There is no doubting his personality, the pride; there is a serious determination about him, a confident self-awareness and a certain toughness, a sense of duty. He challenged a comedian for mocking members of the Chile team and he spoke out when he won La Liga’s best goalkeeper award in 2015 and the presentation was proceeded by a “funny” video of goalkeeping errors that he did not find funny. “Lamentable,” he called it.
There were no mistakes from him in it – there were none to choose from – but he said: “I hope to be here next year and I hope the video is different then.”
Pep Guardiola shows ruthlessness over Joe Hart but he is not a bad judge | Daniel Taylor Read more
The men behind his signing at the Camp Nou were the assistant coach Juan Carlos Unzué and Andoni Zubizarreta, the sporting director. Both had been goalkeepers there under Cruyff, team-mates of Guardiola. “He has character, a good relationship with the defence, good one on one, and excellent with his feet. And for me that is a key element,” Zubizarreta said. Excellent with his feet? Well, he had scored a free-kick for Real Sociedad, against Numancia. “I know I am going to have to participate not just as a goalkeeper but also as a centre-back,” Bravo said.
At the Etihad he will have to do the same; that is a key part of why they have turned to him. For many managers that matters: when he was with England, Fabio Capello had spoken to Joe Hart about improving with his feet. For Guardiola, more Cruyffist than Cruyff, it is absolutely non-negotiable. Last season, Bravo completed 84% of his passes; Hart completed 53%. Hart gave possession to the opposition 352 times, Bravo 142. He became a vital part of Barcelona’s mechanism, even though the truth is that, at 31, he had been signed as an experienced, competitive and reliable back-up goalkeeper for Marc-André ter Stegen, nine years younger.
Bravo did not see it like that of course, so he competed, dealing perfectly with the pressure, an open determination about him. “I have come to play everything,” he said, hinting at those who doubted him as he added: “I know what I am capable of and what I am worth.” So, in theory, did Barcelona, but it turned out that he was better than even they anticipated. An injury to Ter Stegen just before the season started left Bravo as a starter, replacing a man who he also did not get on with. It took until the ninth game for anyone to score against him.
So Bravo became first choice in the league, Ter Stegen in the Champions League and the Copa del Rey; the Camp Nou goal would be shared. It was not an entirely comfortable situation for either and unsustainable in the long term, Ter Stegen insisting late last season he did not want to be “the goalkeeper of the future” and Bravo’s departure underlining he did not want to sit on the bench. The problem was they were both too good to be left out and neither of them ever gave the manager an “excuse” to choose a clear No1.
Now, Luis Enrique has it: two years on, the decision has been made, assisted by City. It is Ter Stegen’s extraordinary ability and age that makes this a deal most supporters, both clubs and both players are satisfied with, in which everyone’s a winner except Hart.
The truth is the majority of Barcelona fans consider the German a better, more exciting goalkeeper, more likely to pull off a miracle, but there is recognition and gratitude for Bravo too. How could there not be? In two years since he joined, he has won two league titles in a row and also captained Chile to consecutive Copa América titles.
Chile win Copa América once again as Argentina title drought continues Read more
His contribution has been hugely significant, bringing sobriety and stability; bringing the ball out too. He was exactly what Barcelona were looking for and exactly what Guardiola is looking for now: personality, presence, passing, and decisive when it matters.
In theory, he came to Barcelona as a substitute but he leaves as a sought-after man, having played 75 games and carrying eight medals. Rarely has a goalkeeper been more reliable. Ter Stegen may have had more memorable moments but as Salvador Sadurní, Barcelona’s goalkeeper from 1961 to 1976, aptly puts it: “If Bravo has made any mistakes, I can’t remember them.”
The kid from Viluco turned out to be pretty good in goal; it turned out he can play a bit, too.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/25/claudio-bravo-manchester-city-joe-hart
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/cc7e116ea08c85c79f22f7e021602d8211747fcc7838203972fbcaa21470874f.json
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[] | 2016-08-26T13:24:30 | null | null | null |
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffashion%2Frss.json
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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/rss
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The Guardian
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www.theguardian.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/rss
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en
| 2016-08-01T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6fa91072fdce951cee84876f5e768360a4970176d0e0da2329bd3d1e64420d5b.json
|
[
"Patrick Collinson"
] | 2016-08-26T13:30:05 | null | 2016-07-23T05:59:32 |
The majority of reviewers on websites are men. So that ‘audience score’ you see on every film is really telling you what men like, not women
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2Fblog%2F2016%2Fjul%2F23%2Ffilm-websites-reviews-audience-score-men.json
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Don’t let film websites make a Muppet of you
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Independence Day: Resurgence was this summer’s dead-on-arrival blockbuster – Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called it “planet-smashingly boring” in his one-star review. Massively popular film review website Rotten Tomatoes (it has 22 million users) scored it at just 35%, with critics and audiences alike dismissing it as a dull, brainless sequel. Over on IMDB the user reviews were of the “Wow, I can’t believe I paid $8 for that trash” variety. I always check both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB before heading to a cinema (or for new releases on Netflix), so was thankful to see the scores – it saved me a tenner and a wasted couple of hours. A few weeks ago similar reviews stopped me wasting another tenner, this time on the Ghostbusters reboot. But was I being seriously misled? What Ghostbusters reveals is how, in the words of one movie blogger, the internet review system is broken.
In the past, films relied on good reviews plus word-of-mouth. Today RT and IMDB have digitally replaced word-of-mouth and become hugely influential consumer websites as a result. So it matters enormously that what they tell you is fair.
So what do we learn from Ghostbusters? When I first scanned Rotten Tomatoes for the film, my eye immediately dropping to the top right hand audience score, I was instantly put off. At the time it was showing something around 50% liking it, or much lower than the 73% critic score. The wisdom of the crowd was telling me Ghostbusters was a turkey, no matter what the critics thought.
But dig deeper and you find that the “crowd” is loud, often angry, men. And the maths behind the percentage ratings is interesting, to say the least.
Take these early audience reviews on RT: “Non-funny, man hating” … “Jokes about men, wasn’t exactly funny” … “garbage third wave feminism”. No surprise, all these were written and posted on the site by men. Each gave the film half or one star. “Ton of fun” … “Incredibly enjoyable” … “seeing it for third time tomorrow”. All these four and five-star reviews were written and posted by women.
So what, you might argue. Some films will always appeal more to women than men. Except that the great majority of reviewers who bother to voice their views on websites are men. So that “audience score” you see on every film is really telling you what men like, rather than women. Search on IMDB and you find the data breakdown for reviews. Ghostbusters scores an average 5.3 out of 10. But for women the average score was 8.1, compared with 4.6 for men. But men’s scores matter more, because 22,500 men wrote up reviews on IMDB, compared with 7,500 women.
Now let’s look at how the percentage is calculated on RT. I had assumed an 85% or 90% score on the site’s “Tomatometer” meant most critics were giving the film rave reviews. Get 96% and the film must be almost perfect. But you know what gets 96% on RT? The 2011 Muppets movie. That’s the same score on RT managed by Psycho, recognised by the Guardian as the number one horror film of all time, and some way ahead of Brief Encounter, which we described as the greatest romance movie of all time, but which gets just 89% on RT.
What happens on RT is that the Tomatometer is just the percentage of professional reviews that are positive. If every critic gives the Muppets a score of 60% or more, then theoretically it scores 100. Which is what nearly happened – the Muppets had 209 professional reviews, of which 200 were three stars or above. So that adds up to a 96% score on the Tomatometer.
I shall carry on using RT and IMDB. They remain fantastically useful sites to consult before spending time and money at the cinema. But I will probably go and see Ghostbusters now, despite what RT told me. And I bet it’s a lot better than the Muppets.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2016/jul/23/film-websites-reviews-audience-score-men
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en
| 2016-07-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3687b2e21b945e9f82ee39f2df574ee91d3d630bb68387f38cf59ad889b65ada.json
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|
[
"Amanda Holpuch"
] | 2016-08-29T20:52:14 | null | 2016-08-29T19:48:38 |
Appeals court rules lawsuit can proceed in Washington state because the renegade Canadian store could devalue an American-held trademark
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Ftrader-joes-pirate-joes-canada-court.json
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Trader Joe's v Pirate Joe's, again: case against knockoff will return to court
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Pirate Joe’s, a renegade Canadian grocery store, is going back to court with Trader Joe’s, an American grocery store with a cult following.
Meet Pirate Joe, the man who (legally) smuggles Trader Joe's goods into Canada Read more
In an October 2013 trademark case, Trader Joe’s said the Vancouver shop was violating trademark laws with its operation, which resells Trader Joe’s products in Canada, where there are no Trader Joe’s stores.
A US district judge dismissed the case, writing that Trader Joe’s could not prove that Pirate Joe’s affected its business in the US.
Last week, however, the ninth circuit court of appeals said the case could proceed because the Canadian store could devalue an American-held trademark.
“It’s pretty obvious to me that Pirate Joe’s is short for unaffiliated, or unauthorized, there never has and never will be an effort to trade on a name, we’re just providing a service and we think it’s benign,” Michael Hallatt, Pirate Joe’s founder, told the Guardian on Monday.
The case will return to a federal district court in Washington state, where many Trader Joe’s stores have allegedly “blacklisted” Hallatt. He hires people to shop for him in Trader Joe’s stores across the country, then meets them in a secret location to load up his van and take the groceries across the border.
“It [Pirate Joe’s] has never not been silly, and the fact that there’s this ninth circuit serious consideration of this whole thing, it’s beyond me,” Hallatt said. “It [Trader Joe’s] is a big company, with a big brand.”
Trader Joe’s, which did not respond to a request for comment, estimated in court documents that Hallatt had spent more than $350,000 on its products. In November 2014, Hallatt told the Guardian that was how much he spent annually at Trader Joe’s.
Hallatt, who marks up products like chocolate-covered almonds and gorgonzola cheese crackers by $1.50 or more, said he was hoping to make $100,000 this year so he could hire someone to run the store for him.
The shop moved to a larger space this summer, and changed its name to Super Pirate Joe’s. After news of the reopening of the court case, Hallatt said customers were stocking up on items, in case the store shuts down.
Trader Joe’s filed a lawsuit against Hallatt in 2013 for trademark infringement, unfair competition, false designation of origin and false advertising.
Hallatt told the Guardian: “We’ll sit around waiting for a decision, years, and then there will be a decision, and then someone is going to appeal it, and we’re going to bounce this thing all the way to the supreme court.
“That’s insane.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/trader-joes-pirate-joes-canada-court
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a8d2ef93f3f7d96886f1a282cc69713365bb3bd883452ecac0317c553e52c4fd.json
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[
"Giles Richards"
] | 2016-08-27T22:51:48 | null | 2016-08-27T21:00:13 |
Spa-Francorchamps gave McLaren their first F1 win 48 years ago and while they are unlikely to win the Belgian Grand Prix hopes are already high for next season
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fmclaren-triumphs-spa-francorchamps-belgian-grand-prix-f1.json
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McLaren back at scene of triumphs and preparing for repeats in future
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Few circuits stir the heart quite like Spa-Francorchamps, one of the grandest of the grand old tracks. Whether bathed in sunshine or lurking in the rain, sometimes both in the space of the same race, it winds its way through the forests of the Ardennes, a heady mixture of challenge and reward. If Formula One belongs anywhere, it is here and if one team belong here then they are McLaren, who approached this weekend with optimism, if not so much for this race as for a future to match their storied past.
Spa was one of the seven circuits in the first world championship in 1950 and is one of the four of those that are still on the calendar. Sunday’s race will be the 48th to be held at the circuit, where the sense of history is palpable. The fans feel it, staring at the impossibly steep climb through Eau Rouge; the drivers live it, clinging to the limit through Pouhon; and for the teams, winning here makes them a part of that rich past. The more so when it is a landmark victory.
Lewis Hamilton set to start from back of F1 grid at Belgian Grand Prix Read more
In 1968, Bruce McLaren brought his Cosworth V8-powered M7A to the race. It was the third year of racing in F1 for the team set up by the New Zealander and the first in a full season. Never short on ambition, McLaren had signed his compatriot Denny Hulme, the world champion, to drive alongside him on the track in its fearsome nine-mile configuration on roads winding through the countryside, where ditches and houses awaited the unwary.
They began on the second and third rows of the grid and, after John Surtees and Chris Amon retired from the lead, Hulme was fighting with Jackie Stewart for the top spot. A drive shaft failure put paid to Hulme’s bid but McLaren, now up to second, took the flag with a wave, only to be greeted by wild exultation when he promptly pulled into the pit lane. Unbeknown to the New Zealander, Stewart had been forced to go to the pits for a splash of fuel at the death. McLaren had their first race win.
It was the first of many and Spa has continued to be a happy hunting ground for them. They are, alongside Ferrari with 12 wins, the most successful constructor to race here and some of the greatest drivers have ensured the team’s name is inextricably linked with the track.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bruce McLaren (second from left) on the podium alongside Ricardo Rodriguez (left) and Jacky Ickx after the race. Photograph: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch/Getty Images
Perhaps most notably with Ayrton Senna, who was immense round Spa, winning his first race for McLaren here in 1988 and taking three more on the trot – all during the heyday of the team’s dominant partnership with Honda. A partnership with the manufacturer renewed last year has fared considerably less well – 2015’s ninth was their worst championship placing since 1980 – but at Spa there is a bullish air that the future is brighter, that for 2017 at least, winning ways will return.
The head of Honda’s engine team, Yusuke Hasegawa, who has spent 30 years with the company, was there when McLaren-Honda ruled F1. “I was sitting nearby to the engine team,” he says. “They were very motivated and very strong, I feared them very much.” He is no longer afraid but has continued their ethos. “We are very aggressive, we are very motivated,” he says. “The ratio of development speed is very high, we have a very clear target to catch the opposition.”
Back then the engine team had more resources he believes but that has not been the stumbling block to returning McLaren to the front. “We started in 2013 and Mercedes started in 2010,” he says. “We have a lot of racing engine experience but not of the current specifications of engines.”
Time, he stresses, rather than money or numbers has been the enemy. Development requires trying new options in a complex system. That only yields results as the process unfolds and it cannot be forced.
It can be frustrating for fans who do not see the steps being made behind the scenes but Hasegawa is insistent they are moving forward. They started well behind the other manufacturers, which has somewhat masked their improvements. “From the beginning of this season to now, our engine power gain has been bigger than Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull,” he says.
Lap times support his claims, as does Fernando Alonso. “If you look at the team 12 months ago we were in a very different situation,” the Spaniard says. “We were starting last here in Spa, we had been lapped twice and we have made a step of nearly minutes, not even seconds in a race total time. The progress is very optimistic, even for next year as well.”
The majority of resource is already behind next year’s engine and Hasegawa is confident innovations are promising. “We expect a greater step forward over the winter, that is what we are aiming for,” he says. “Our target is to overtake the opposition. Our final goal is wining the championship. We can’t completely understand what we need for that now, so it’s too early to predict for next year, but the area we know and we have set a target to get there.”
Jenson Button worked with Hasegawa, racing for the Honda works team in the mid 2000s, and described him as “a great leader, a great listener” and is still confident in the manufacturer. “What I love about Honda is they’ll never give up,” he says. “That’s why it’s such an exciting partner. They will definitely get there in the end in terms of outright power.”
The team will not be writing a new chapter in their history at Spa on Sunday afternoon – Button’s ninth in qualifying shows there is improvement but Alonso’s mechanical woes are a reminder how far there is still to go – but there is no shortage of belief that the success story Bruce McLaren began here in 1968 is on course to be resumed. “I can’t guarantee we will be the champions next year,” Hasegawa says, “but we have to be at the level of racing with champions. It is challenging but we can do it.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/27/mclaren-triumphs-spa-francorchamps-belgian-grand-prix-f1
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/81cff860a11fa4ddd8bf6e8b7854bb2bb0e0a7cdc2449034697332810ffe00f4.json
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|
[
"Guardian Readers",
"Sarah Marsh"
] | 2016-08-26T13:23:17 | null | 2016-07-29T12:01:26 |
New data shows that wages in Britain have fallen drastically since the recession. How has this impacted on people’s lives?
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Fjul%2F29%2Frecession-continues-affect-wages-britain-financial-crisis.json
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en
| null |
From solicitors to scientists: how the 2008 recession continues to affect wages
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www.theguardian.com
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Do you feel as if you never have enough money? New data might explain why – a report by the TUC, published on Wednesday, found that Britain has been hit by a bigger fall in real wages since the financial crisis than any other OECD country apart from Greece. This comes at a time when wages have been growing in other countries, including Poland, Germany and France.
What impact has this had on people’s lives? We asked for your stories.
Charity worker – £26,000
My lack of pay has made me feel devalued – Nick, 34, London
My salary was £25,000 five years ago, and since then it’s gone up to £26,000 – an increase, but one that doesn’t reflect the extra work I do now due to staff cuts, and the increase in my bills, let alone rising rent.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The fundraising team was made redundant a few years ago, and the rest of us have had to pick up their work.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Over the past three years, all “cost of living” or “extra experience” rises (normally 1-2%) have also been cancelled. The entire fundraising team was made redundant a few years ago, as were many of the other staff, and the rest of us have had to pick up their work. This was all part of a cost-cutting exercise to slim down the organisation.
The trials of a 2016 job: why so many of us are unhappy at work | Peter Fleming Read more
My lack of pay has made me feel devalued. Why should I put effort into improving my work and my employer’s goals if the only reward for success is being given more work? I’ve been looking for jobs elsewhere but the chances of getting anything permanent and full-time are slim. All this means that five years on I’m still repaying the £2,000 loan I took out to move to London in the first place. We don’t take holidays, and it was only after my wife ended a stay in hospital, and was able to get a job, that we could start paying off our debts.
I also worry about the impact of Brexit. The panic around it means our trustees and chief executive make decisions differently – postponing pay rises, cutting back on admin staff and stopping perks.
Solicitor – £32,000
I earn less as a qualified solicitor than I did as a paralegal – Megan, 34, Salisbury
In 2008, before I qualified as a solicitor, I was working as a legal assistant, earning £34,000 plus bonuses that averaged £8,000 a year. I started my training contract just as the financial crisis hit and on qualifying in 2010 I returned to a position effectively identical to my pre-qualification role, but salaries had dropped dramatically. Between 2010 and 2015 my salary remained static at £25,000 despite my increasing level of experience and bigger work load. My salary is now £32,000, meaning I earn less as a five-year qualified solicitor than I did pre-recession as an unqualified paralegal.
I feel undervalued and as though there has been no advantage at all in spending thousands of pounds on my education. I am currently on maternity leave. When I return to work I will be spending more money on childcare than the amount I take home. My husband and I would love a second child but we do not think we will be able to afford it.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There have been times when I have struggled to meet my bills.’ Photograph: Christine Balderas/Getty Images
My older colleagues were able to buy a house at least five years before I did and, while we were able to buy a house last year, we only managed this with significant financial assistance from my in-laws.
I am continually stressed and worried; there have been times when I have struggled to meet my bills. I have suffered from depression in the past and anxiety about my finances and job security has often left me feeling isolated and distressed.
Professional in media company – £40,000
I can’t earn enough to get a mortgage – Ken, 40, London
I haven’t had a pay rise in five years. Wages have flatlined but the costs of living have gone up. We will not be going on holiday this year and probably not next year either. I earn £40,000 a year but am married with two children. My wife has a part-time job but that brings in just under £10,000 a year, and the government says we’re rich. I rent, I cannot afford a mortgage and I wonder what the point of university was after all.
London is supposedly a great city because of its opportunities but it just feels as though the lucky few at the top are squeezing everyone else dry to maintain their wealthy lifestyles. I can’t see how I can stay in London. I can’t earn enough to get a mortgage.
When I see friends, all of us just seem to talk about the one issue that affects us all – the fact we have no chance to get on the housing ladder. It makes us depressed, to be honest.
Scientist – about £18,000
I’ve not been on holiday for three years – Antony, 42, Suffolk
Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income Read more
I was made redundant in 2011, and spent ages trying to find a job with similar pay to the £30,000 I had been earning. I failed, and set my sights lower. My current wage pays just over £18,000, and there’s little chance of that increasing. Promotions here are few and far between, but the company I work for is fun and the people great to be with. I like working here, I just wish the money was better.
My wage now covers the mortgage and bills, and little else. I have to make several decisions every month: do I buy new shoes or can I carry on with the old, worn-out ones? Can I take the bus this week or must I cycle? How much can I save so that I can buy my wife a birthday present? I no longer go out: no booze, no fags, no luxury food. My wife and I are considering selling the house and going with something much smaller. We don’t have children and that’s now unlikely to change.
I’m anxious, depressed and frustrated. I’ve not been on holiday for three years – even when I take time off I can’t even go somewhere for a change of scenery. We’d love to have a cat, but we’re scared of the vet bills and the added cost of food.
My personal experience, and that of my partner, is that the more I progress in my career, the less money I am paid.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/29/recession-continues-affect-wages-britain-financial-crisis
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en
| 2016-07-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/df49bc3aed623b2ee46c2770c81e8d90b93aca8e36788d65c9fbfb2309cc5d73.json
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[
"Deborah Orr"
] | 2016-08-27T08:49:11 | null | 2016-08-27T08:00:03 |
We celebrate exam success but ignore the plight of those unable to thrive in our pressured, rigid system
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We blight children’s lives for the sake of five good GCSEs
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As misleading cliches go, those celebratory GCSE results-day photographs have to be right up there. For a lot of children – and a lot of parents – tableaux of happy, smiling teenagers, hugging each other in delight, are the final insult. These are yearly examples of the 16-year-old gold standard, the kind of child you must aspire to bring up. If your 16-year-old doesn’t fit in that picture, or had to be dragged into it, subjugated, resentful, kicking and screaming, then you, the parent, didn’t even scrape a C, let alone an A*.
A*-C grades in dramatic decline as GCSE results are published Read more
Results day, and the attendant hoopla, is insidious propaganda. It’s the day the media decide to portray most of Britain as one big public school, where academic excellence and clean hair is all that matters. Sure, there will be some heartwarming stories from a flagship academy. Sure, the occasional celebrity – Jeremy Clarkson, Kirstie Allsopp – will drop a tweet declaring that it’s not such a big deal: we didn’t cover ourselves in glory at school, and look at us now! Good on them. It’s a comfort.
But most of us know people doing rubbish jobs that they hate, feeling trapped and frustrated, a bit bitter, a bit beaten – and also know that things started going wrong for them when they were still listlessly dragging themselves through the best days of other people’s lives. Those photos of GCSE success are like a lot of things in our culture: sweet icing on a cake baked from fear.
Our children are taught to fear failure. They’re taught to feel shame. School is serious. Childhood is serious. There is little room for rebellion or mistakes, not much in the way of different routes or second chances. Few people really know at 16 what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Still, there they all are, choosing A-levels with a view to university. The high cost of higher education should logically mean that people take more time to knock about for a bit, deciding what they want to study and why. Instead, even a gap year is increasingly seen as “falling behind”.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) If your A level results aren't great, be cheered by the fact that I got a C and two Us. And I'm currently sitting in a villa in St Tropez.
Sure, you can tell your kids that their GCSE results don’t matter, that you’re full of love and pride for them anyway. But reassurances about “bad” results sound hollow, because parents have spent years doing what contemporary parenthood demands: motivating their children, insisting that they get “five good GCSEs including English and maths”, then three A-levels, then a degree – otherwise their life choices will shrink to nothing, and it’s-a-tough-old-world-out-there-you-have-no-idea.
The worst thing is that this is basically true. You need a degree now to get a job buying crockery online for an oligarch. I know a double-honours graduate who spends his days doing exactly that.
I wish I could say that I blossomed as a home-school mother. I didn’t
The paradox is that GCSEs/A-levels/university is now the sacred blueprint. Childhood and young adulthood are much less carefree, dominated by the building of strong foundations to bear the weight of the competitive world of work, with university both an important further preparation and a coveted means of keeping scary adulthood – in which putting a roof over your head looks like an impossible dream – at bay for a few more years.
Rebellion can be lonely. Even if you get a job or apprenticeship you like while still a teenager, your friends will more than likely be off in various cities doing studenty things, then home for the holidays – enjoying the sort of unstructured free time that doesn’t have to be up and out in the morning, with four weeks off each year.
Yet how to resist? It takes courage, deciding that your child just doesn’t suit the narrow demands and conventions of a highly regimented education. Even if you take that frightening leap, you’ll find that you’re on your own. I tried state, private and public school with my older son. The day I realised none of it was going to work was the day I pleaded with him to do some overdue English exercise that he could have knocked off in half-an-hour.
“Why won’t you do it? Why won’t you just get it over with?” I asked. He said he didn’t accept that some other person had the authority over him to demand he share his private thoughts, so that those thoughts could be judged. When your 15-year-old cottons on to the idea that school violates his human rights, the game’s up.
When your 15-year-old cottons on to the idea that school violates his human rights, the game’s up
I wish I could say that I blossomed as a home-school mother. I didn’t. Still in thrall to the “five good GCSEs” commandment, I signed my boy up for IGCSE correspondence courses with the National Extension College, registered him with a private examination centre, and set about the tedious task of nagging and pleading seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Basically, if you could get it on a DVD, I got it.
Two years and one maths tutor later, my son had a motley clutch of results that just about approximated the commandment. It was lonely, for both of us, and it wasn’t cheap. But he also learned to play the guitar, worked out that he wanted to be a musician, and convinced me he’d found his passion and path. It was the right thing to do, I’m certain. (Fairly certain. Time will tell.)
Some children just aren’t suited to the prescriptive “range” of schooling available in this country. While there’s some provision for those children, there just isn’t enough. It’s cruel and psychologically damaging to make miserable children jump through hoops anyway. But people without a couple of grand to spare (even though the NEC is very good value) just have to put their children, and themselves, through it all, gritting and gnashing their teeth, the start of every school day a battle. It’s an everyday story of courage in the face of adversity, and I salute all the families who’ve been there, however GCSE results day judged them.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/27/blight-childrens-lives-five-good-gcses-exam-success
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/820040cdbab0966186612beb03428788c87824ae785632ac8999f9e246e1da12.json
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[
"Jana Kasperkevic",
"Amanda Holpuch"
] | 2016-08-27T18:54:54 | null | 2016-08-24T17:35:14 |
Heather Bresch, Mylan executive who came under public scrutiny this week for raising EpiPen prices, reportedly raised prices more than 20% on 24 products
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EpiPen CEO hiked prices on two dozen products and got a 671% pay raise
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www.theguardian.com
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The executive of the pharmaceutical company that hiked the prices of two dozen drugs, including EpiPen, received a 671% pay increase over the past nine years.
Heather Bresch, chief executive officer of Mylan, came under public scrutiny this week after reports that since acquiring rights to EpiPen in 2007, the company had implemented a series of gradual price increases inflating the price of the drug from $56.64 to $317.82, a 461% increase in cost . During that same time, Bresch went from being Mylan’s chief operating officer to president to chief executive and saw her pay rise $2,453,456 to $18,931,068, a 671% increase.
When Mylan first acquired Merck KGaA in 2007, Bresch oversaw the integration of its 400 products. Among those products was EpiPen, which is used to quickly deliver a proper dose of epinephrine to those suffering from anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis is when an allergic reaction causes one’s airways to swell and close. In a 2015 interview with Fortune, Bresch described EpiPen as “my baby”. Under her management, EpiPen went from bringing in $200m a year in sales to becoming Mylan’s first billion-dollar product.
Following the outcry over the increase in EpiPen’s prices, Bresch, who is the daughter of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, could be called on to justify Mylan’s pricing before the US Congress. Her father does not sit on the Senate judiciary committee, which would most likely hear her testimony.
Mylan has hiked prices of other products as well, according to a June report by a Wells Fargo senior analyst David Maris.
“Mylan has raised the prices more than 20% on 24 products, and more than 100% on seven products,” he wrote.
Among the products whose prices were hiked over the past six months were:
Ursodiol, a drug used to treat gallstones, saw its price increase by 542%
Dicyclomine, a drug used to treat irritable bowel syndrome, saw its price increase by 400%
Tolterodine, a drug used to treat overactive bladders, saw its price increase by 56%
The Guardian has reached out to Mylan to confirm these hikes.
In his report, Maris noted that the price hikes could draw “greater regulatory scrutiny and headline risk”.
“Mylan’s business model is not today, nor has it ever been, premised on price hikes,” Nina Devlin, Mylan’s spokeswoman, said in June. She described Maris’s analysis as “flawed” and said it focused on a small selection of the company’s 1,400-plus products.
The fact that EpiPen is a household item for those suffering from severe allergies is perhaps why this price increase is drawing so much public ire.
“One reason I think the EpiPen situation is getting so much attention compared to other cases is a lot of the high-cost drugs are used by patients who are very sick, cancer patients, multiple sclerosis. These are patients that actually don’t end up paying a lot of these costs out of pocket because they hit their out of pocket maximums and deductibles pretty quickly,” explained David H Howard, a health economist at the department of health policy and management at Emory University.
“But for EpiPen, a lot of people who are using this, or might use it, are pretty healthy. They don’t have a lot of other health conditions or health needs so this is their major expense and they end up paying for a lot of of it out their own pocket,” Howard told the Guardian.
Since the price hike was reported, a number of lawmakers have called on the company to make its products affordable.
“Due to Mylan’s virtual monopoly of the epinephrine auto-injector market and its unique life-saving attribute, it is crucial that your product remains affordable for all Americans,” Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthalwrote in a letter to Mylan. “Therefore, I demand that Mylan take immediate action to lower the price of EpiPens for all Americans that rely on this product for their health and safety.”
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton put out a statement on Wednesday calling on Mylan to reduce the price of EpiPen, saying: “It’s wrong when drug companies put profits ahead of patients.”
According to Citigroup analysts Liav Abraham and Eugene Kim, there is “little regulatory action that can be implemented to compel Mylan to lower the price of EpiPen”. However, increased scrutiny and an appearance before the Senate judiciary committee could lead to “self-regulation”, they wrote in a note to investors. They noted that over the past 12 months, EpiPen underwent two 15% price increases.
Earlier this year, another pharmaceutical executive was in the hot seat in front of the US Congress: Martin Shkreli, former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli became notorious after Turing increased prices of its HIV medicine Daraprim by 5,000%. The price of the drug went from $13.50 to $750 overnight.
In a recent interview with NBC, Shkreli said that he too considered gradual hikes in price – akin to how Mylan proceeded – but had instead decided “to come out and say: ‘This is our desired price’”.
Prior to being acquired by Mylan in 2007, the price of EpiPen went up 3%-4% on several occasions. Price increases under Mylan ranged from 5% in 2008 to 20% in 2009.
Shkreli went on to describe Mylan as “vultures” and asked: “What drives this company’s moral compass?”
Profit seems to be the answer.
According to Mylan’s second quarter earnings report, its total revenue so far this year was $2.56bn, up 8% compared to last year. Its net sales in the “specialty third party” category, which includes Mylan’s EpiPen, increased by $100.6m or 33% during the three months ending in June 2016, compared to the same period last year. Some of that increase was due to higher EpiPen sales, the company said in its earnings report.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/24/epipen-ceo-hiked-prices-heather-bresch-mylan
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/9d500d45ff2eb1838aafd174afedb1a34890e5d9da96877978d48c37851d56fa.json
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[
"Sarah Marsh",
"James Walsh",
"Guardian Readers",
"Caroline Lucas",
"Simon Jenkins",
"Christian Wolmar",
"David Boyle"
] | 2016-08-26T13:22:57 | null | 2016-08-11T12:55:32 |
Amid strikes, rising fares and delays, catch up on our debate on whether it’s time to put our rail service back into public ownership
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2Flive%2F2016%2Faug%2F11%2Fshould-our-rail-services-be-renationalised-live-debate.json
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Should our rail services be renationalised? Readers' debate
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www.theguardian.com
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06:21
It’s been a week when the state of Britain’s fragmented rail network has again been on the agenda, with strikes on Southern and a planned one on Virgin East Coast services. What’s more Eurostar workers are expected to walk out on Friday over work-life balance. Even before this passengers on southern trains have complained of weeks of delays, cancellations and a reduced timetable amid staff shortages. So, what’s going on with our rail services and how can it be improved?
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a solution: renationalisation. Corbyn said the “misery” that those travelling to London on southern rail have faced makes a “very good case” for a change of ownership.
“I want to see Southern back in public ownership. I don’t believe it’s fulfilling its obligations under the franchise it was given, “ Corbyn said.
He has also argued that rail renationalisation would bring to an end “rip-off” fares, arguing that with regional transport authorities would focus on the interests of travellers over profits.
However, others claim that private expertise allows for our rail services to be run more effectively, with improvements in customer service and ease of booking.
Some argue that the answer is longer franchises. South West Trains, operating out of Waterloo and owned by Stagecoach, has arguably benefited from being the longest-running franchise.
But with fares rising above the rate of inflation because of the cost of massive upgrades in track and stations which for years were starved of investment, there remains public appetite for major change. Still: if fares were to fall, money would have to come from somewhere, and Theresa May’s government seems unlikely to instigate such radical changes to the network.
What do you think? Join us to debate from 12pm-2pm today.
Itching to share your views already? You can contribute via the form below.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/live/2016/aug/11/should-our-rail-services-be-renationalised-live-debate
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en
| 2016-08-11T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/620dd887b392d54eb23a23eb9c096a96f0f0f226966677aa7d68a3b0b86b2081.json
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[
"Hadley Freeman"
] | 2016-08-26T13:22:11 | null | 2016-08-22T14:33:00 |
Trust the French to make exposure of female flesh an essential part of their national identity. Come on France, you’re better than these burkini bans
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffashion%2F2016%2Faug%2F22%2Fask-hadley-should-i-wear-burkini-on-beach-france-ban.json
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What should I wear to impress the French sur la plage?
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www.theguardian.com
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I’m going on a beach holiday to France this week. What style of bathing suit should I wear to impress the chic French?
Amanda, by email
Ooh la la, la plage française – c’est si chic, n’est-ce pas? What on earth to wear to a setting celebrated by everyone from Manet to Colette to Karl Lagerfeld? This year, there is only one answer: a burkini.
As you’ve all probably heard by now, the burkini – or full body swimsuit favoured by some Muslim women (and Nigella Lawson) – is the latest item in France’s eyeline of things they should ban Muslim women from wearing in order to liberate them from patriarchal rules about female appearance, or something. I don’t know, I’ve tried to read about a thousand articles on this subject and yet somehow I can never get beyond the first paragraph because my brain keeps exploding.
Following on from the ban on headscarves in schools and the outlawing of the niqab in public spaces, it’s now the turn of the burkini to be deemed incompatible with the French way of life. Trust the French to make exposure of female flesh an essential part of their national identity. So far five towns have banned the burkini and three more are in the process of doing so, all to save what Marine Le Pen calls in a totally non-dog whistle way “the soul of France”. The prime minister, Manuel Valls, added last week “the nation must defend itself”.
Unfortunately, no one can quite decide what this soul is, or why it needs defending from a Muslim woman’s bathing suit. The socialist government’s minister for women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, has insisted this is a feminist issue: “[The burkini] has the same logic as the burqa: hide women’s bodies in order to control them,” she said, apparently unaware that forcing them into bikinis could very easily be seen as another form of control. “It is not just the business of those women who wear it, because it is the symbol of a political project that is hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation,” she added. It really is something to hear a government minister allegedly in charge of women’s rights quite happily trample on individuals’ rights to wear their bathing suits – which do not contravene any form of French law – in order to make some kind of generalised theoretical point that goes against diversity, in the name of diversity. Is your brain exploding now? Because mine definitely just went again.
Do French politicians imagine these women will now come to the beach in the accepted French attire, ie, topless?
Look, there are plenty of things about Islam’s attitude towards women I don’t like. There are plenty of things I don’t like about my own religion’s attitude to women, for that matter, but let’s keep things focused here. Let’s not kid ourselves that that’s what this burkini hoo-hah is about. France has suffered more dreadful terrorism in the name of Islam than any other European country in the past few years and, at a loss of what to do about it, it is doing precisely what Rossignol criticises Islam for: it is singling out blameless women and making them feel bad about their bodies. This is what happens when French politicians exploit the country’s celebrated laïcité (secularist principle) for political gain by playing to the lowest common denominator. Moreover, when the women’s rights minister finds herself on the same side as le Front National, well, at least one of them needs to take a cold, hard look at themselves. After all, if Rossignol was so concerned about clothing that is “hostile to women’s emancipation”, perhaps she might consider banning white wedding dresses, which send out the message a woman needs to be a virginal, innocent cupcake when she marries. Or high heels, which say women have to pretend to be gazelles who love walking on their tip toes for purposes of sexiness. But are either of these being banned? No they are not. But then they are not associated with the Muslim religion. This is not about cultural relativism, it is about looking at “what the hell is going on”.
Honestly, what do these French politicians think is going to happen to these women, now banned from wearing their burkinis? Do they imagine that they’ll now come to the beach in the accepted French attire, ie, topless with their modesty only covered with a tiny pair of bikini bottoms and an occasional cigarette? No, they’ll stay home, banished inside and out of sight, unable to be on the beach with their children. Great soul defending there, France!
France, you know I love you. Half of my family is from you and my parents live in you. But really, have you learned nothing from history? Did the events from under a century ago really not teach you that chip chip chipping away at the rights of a persecuted religious minority in your country purely to make their lives worse so as to appease a scared and angry populace does not do your “soul” any good? Right now, you sound like the vaguely racist team leader of a nudist camp, telling Muslim women they have to be at least semi-naked in order to prove their worthiness. I don’t want to sound too off the ball here, but if you’re so worried about how persecuted these Muslim women must feel in their bathing suits, perhaps talk to them first about it before you start swooping in like some colonialist savior, insisting you know what’s best for them. Come on, France. You’re better than this. And for the rest of us, let’s break out the burkinis.
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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/aug/22/ask-hadley-should-i-wear-burkini-on-beach-france-ban
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en
| 2016-08-22T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7bae957c265f695ea78ba72330de293b671d07deab72ce222a070ef67b23d89d.json
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[
"Rajeev Syal"
] | 2016-08-30T04:52:01 | null | 2016-05-10T23:01:43 |
Ipsa report says £925,000 was paid between 125 people before general election, but each had a job for a different MP within 10 weeks
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MPs’ staff given redundancy payments weeks before starting new Commons jobs
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www.theguardian.com
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Dozens of MPs’ staff were given nearly £1m in redundancy payments prior to the general election just weeks before returning to another publicly funded job, the expenses watchdog has disclosed.
Analysis from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) also showed that staff members related to MPs were paid on average £5,600 more than unrelated staff members during the last parliament.
The disclosures came in a report into MPs’ winding-up costs just before the last general election.
The report shows 125 staff members received £925,000 in tax-free redundancy payments with a break of employment of less than 10 weeks.
In each case, the staff member was made redundant as a result of their employer standing down or losing their seat at the election and entered into a new employment with a different MP within two months of their prior employment ending.
This amounts to 22.2% of all redundancy payments made. In 60.3% of these cases there was no break in employment at all.
The watchdog also found that £647,700 was handed over as pay in lieu of notice (Pilon) to 289 staff members; however, between £379,800 and £435,200 could have been avoided if the MPs had issued notice earlier, Ipsa concluded.
In each case the staff member was paid for not working some or all of their notice period even though the MP had enough time to issue notice before their leaving date. This amounts to between 58.6% and 67.2% of all Pilon paid by departing MPs.
“Most [MPs] claimed significantly less than the maximum budget limit,” Ipsa said. “However, their status as the employer of their staff could have enabled them to confer financial advantage on their former employees, some of whom were connected parties, in a manner that is not reflective of conditions in the wider public sector or employment best practice. These are issues that we should seek to address.”
The body also identified a “surge” in the claims made by MPs for equipment just before election restrictions began. Rules put in place to restrict spending on equipment, such as computers, in the six-month run-up to the general election have led to an 84% drop over the period, according to the watchdog.
However, it found a significant increase in the weeks before the tighter regulations came into force. “There was a surge in spending just before the deadline,” Ipsa said. “Capital purchases in September were four times the normal rate.”
The Ipsa chairman, Sir Ian Kennedy, said: “We aim to make the scheme simpler and clearer, whilst retaining a robust approach to regulating MPs’ business costs and expenses and a commitment to supporting MPs in their parliamentary duties.
“There are places where we believe that we need to strengthen the rules to assure ourselves that public money is being spent appropriately; there are others where there is clear compliance and we can simplify overly restrictive rules.
“We also wish to examine the rules relating to claims made just before and after general elections, in the light of our experience in 2015. We have not made any commitment to change any part of the scheme. It is important for us to consult widely and openly.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/11/mps-staff-given-redundancy-payments-weeks-before-starting-new-commons-jobs
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en
| 2016-05-10T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/9efa8cabb6f629b89ed80dea9c731a6f6d314642823268d8f2692f56618f1978.json
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[
"Angelique Chrisafis",
"Alan Travis",
"Anushka Asthana"
] | 2016-08-30T14:50:15 | null | 2016-08-30T14:23:44 |
Amber Rudd and Bernard Cazeneuve say they will work together to strengthen security around ‘shared border’ in Calais
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UK and France restate commitment to border treaty after Calais talks
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www.theguardian.com
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British and French interior ministers have ordered a fresh review of security in Calais and confirmed they will continue with the treaty under which British border checks are carried out on French soil.
A joint statement issued by the home secretary, Amber Rudd, and her French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, says they will work together to strengthen security around the “shared border” in Calais and “strongly diminish” the migratory pressures that have attracted 7,000 migrants to the Channel tunnel port.
The statement from the two ministers confirms their commitment to the 2003 Le Touquet treaty but makes no reference to calls from some French politicians for an asylum “hotspot” processing centre to be set up in Calais to consider claims for asylum in Britain.
French rightwing politicians, including Nicolas Sarkozy, have called for Le Touquet to be scrapped or changed, raising the prospect of the UK border returning from Calais to Dover. But the joint statement issued by Rudd and Cazeneuve after a meeting in Tuesday clearly says they are committed to “preserve the vital economic link”.
The two ministers say they recognise the humanitarian situation in Calais and they will step up their joint efforts to improve the situation. They say that additional work, including by Britain, to protect the shared border will “reflect the outcome of the UK/France security reviews and the steps that need to be taken to continue to manage the common border effectively”.
On Monday the president of the region around Calais, Xavier Bertrand, had called for the Le Touquet agreement to end, telling the BBC: “It’s not possible to keep people here without a new agreement between the two governments.”
The issue was highlighted during the EU referendum campaign when both David Cameron and François Hollande suggested the deal could be threatened by Brexit.
Calais asylum hotspot proposal: the main questions answered Read more
Bertrand suggested allowing migrants to apply for asylum in Britain from “hotspot” application centres in France. Rudd was expected to reject the idea during her visit. Government officials have reportedly said Britain could threaten to review security cooperation with France if it tries to tear up Le Touquet and push the border from Calais into Kent.
Earlier the prime minister’s spokesman sought to play down tensions between the two governments. He said: “This meeting between the home secretary and her counterpart has been in the diary for some time. As we’ve said, these discussions will focus on security and counter-terrorism issues. Our position on Le Touquet is pretty clear and we are not changing from that. France is one of our most important allies in Europe.”
Saying he would not be drawn on reports about security cooperation, he added: “We will cooperate fully with France. It is one of our closest allies.”
The spokesman said the French government continued to support the agreement with Britain as it stands, dismissing Bertrand’s suggestions on both the treaty and the asylum centres.
Former president Sarkozy, who hopes to make a comeback next year, has also said the “Jungle” migrant camp should be shut down and moved to Britain, but the prime minister’s spokesman said he wouldn’t comment on a hypothetical situation that was a “long way off”.
“In terms of relationship with France it remains as strong as it ever has done, it remains absolutely critical. [France is our] closest neighbour, we have worked incredibly closely together and we will continue to do so,” he said.
“The French government position was made perfectly clear when the prime minister went to France last month for talks with President Hollande – and our position is clear. We are committed to protecting our shared border in Calais – it works in the interest of both countries.”
On Tuesday morning Charlie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover and Deal, urged the government to avoid any “tit-for-tat” battles with France over border security. He told BBC Radio 4: “France, clearly, has suffered some serious terrorist atrocities, and we need to stand with France. Threatening a tit-for-tat is not the right thing to do.
“What we need to do is work more closely together. Next year it’s likely there will be a change of [French] government and we need to understand what it is that they want to achieve. I think what they want to achieve is, as we in Dover want, is to see a lasting solution to a problem that has gone on too long.”
There are estimated to be nearly 10,000 people living in squalid surroundings at the Calais camp, including hundreds of unaccompanied minors, and French charities have warned of the worst sanitary conditions ever.
The French right has jumped on the issue in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. Sarkozy said in a speech at the weekend: “I’m demanding the opening of a centre in Britain to deal with asylum seekers in Britain, so that Britain can do the work that concerns them. The Jungle should not be in Calais or anywhere else, because this is a republic and those with no rights to be here should return to their country.”
Sarkozy, who is running a hardline rightwing primary campaign, in effect called for a renegotiation of Le Touquet. Yet it was Sarkozy, when he was interior minister, who signed the agreement with Britain in 2003.
Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux who is favourite to become the right’s candidate for the presidency next year, has also questioned the agreement, saying over the summer that “logic dictates” that border controls should happen on UK soil.
Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Front National, who has strong support in Calais, is also campaigning to scrap the current immigration deal.
But at a government level the issue is complex as France tries to sort out its own asylum system issues. After the UK voted for Brexit in June, the Socialist government said there would be no renegotiation of the British-French immigration deal because it would not be in French interests.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/30/uk-plays-down-calais-border-tensions-with-critical-ally-france
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/2883971d56fc24268b04ade6e74883d88d1981d38562810e18351781d591e330.json
|
|
[
"Ian Sample"
] | 2016-08-26T13:17:08 | null | 2016-08-25T13:00:12 |
Scientists have found a gene that appears to have an influence over the amount of coffee people drink, and how the body processes caffeine
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fyour-daily-coffee-habit-could-be-partly-genetic-new-study-suggests.json
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en
| null |
Your daily coffee habit could be partly genetic, new study suggests
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
A gene that appears to wield influence over the amount of coffee people drink has been found by scientists who believe the section of DNA alters how caffeine is broken down in the body.
Italians villagers who carry a specific variant of the PDSS2 gene consume about one less cup of coffee per day compared with non-carriers, according to researchers at Edinburgh University.
The gene variant appears to affect people’s coffee intake by slowing the metabolism of caffeine in the body. When caffeine is broken down more slowly, the stimulant lingers in the blood for longer and gives people a more enduring “hit” for every cup.
Why drinking coffee can give you jet lag – and help you get over it Read more
Nicola Pirastu, a geneticist who led the study, said the discovery reinforces the idea that caffeine is one of the main drivers for drinking coffee. But he added that larger studies are needed to confirm the biological mechanism that links the PDSS2 gene to coffee drinking.
Previous searches for genes linked to coffee consumption have already thrown up more than half a dozen variants that hold sway over the metabolism and rewarding effects of caffeine. In teasing out the genetics of coffee drinking, scientists hope to learn more about the unexplained effects of the drink. “Coffee is protective against some types of cancers, cardiovascular diseases and Parkinson’s,” said Pirastu. “Understanding what is driving its consumption may help us understand what the effects on these diseases are, and so open new lines of research.”
In the study, researchers analysed the genetic makeup of 370 people living Puglia in southern Italy and a further 843 from six villages in the Friuli Venezia region in the north east. All were asked to complete a survey, which included a question about how many cups of coffee they drank each day.
The researchers found that people with a specific variant of the PDSS2 gene tended to drink fewer cups of coffee than those who carried other variations of the gene. To check the result, the researchers went to 1731 people in the Netherlands and found a similar effect, though the gene’s apparent influence over coffee consumption was weaker there.
Suzi Gage: Can drinking too much coffee kill you? Read more
One explanation could be that national preferences for coffee differ in Italy and the Netherlands. While moka and espresso are popular in Italy, the Dutch favour more filter coffee. And even though the concentrations of caffeine in the drinks are much the same, the difference in cup sizes means the Dutch imbibe nearly three times as much caffeine per cup as the Italians.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study drew on researchers from Edinburgh, Trieste and the Netherlands. The Italian coffee company Illy participated in the project, but did not fund the work.
Many of the genes that have a role in the breakdown of caffeine also metabolise certain medicines. So unravelling the genes could help scientists understand why some patients respond differently to their drugs than others, and so help doctors to personalise their treatments, Pirastu said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/25/your-daily-coffee-habit-could-be-partly-genetic-new-study-suggests
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c4770954a3ceebb195c6a65d1f51ab75be8b30f7dfc504199f71f9dea877436d.json
|
|
[
"Katie Allen"
] | 2016-08-29T12:55:09 | null | 2016-08-29T12:40:51 |
UK consumer confidence report, manufacturing and construction surveys and house price data to shed further light on economic effect of the EU vote
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fbusy-week-of-economic-data-gives-further-clues-on-brexit-vote.json
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en
| null |
Busy week of economic data gives further clues on Brexit vote
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
There will be fresh clues on how the Brexit vote has affected households and businesses this week with new figures on consumer confidence, the housing market and the embattled manufacturing sector.
Economists will be poring over the releases to get a clearer picture of the referendum’s impact after indicators so far have suggested consumers shrugged off the decision to leave the EU but businesses have scaled back investment and hiring plans. The housing market has slowed in some areas but nothing has pointed to dramatic house price falls.
After many indicators since the referendum have turned out stronger than economists had expected, some are reassessing their predictions that the economy would grind to a halt in the months following the Brexit vote.
“The recent run of data can scarcely be described as stellar, but it has confounded some of the worst fears about how the economy would react to the referendum result,” said Andrew Goodwin at the consultancy Oxford Economics.
“It is still very early days in terms of gauging the impact of the referendum on the economy and much could still go wrong. But if next week’s higher profile clutch of surveys for August ... follow the pattern shown by the other recent indicators then this might encourage us to upgrade our forecast for third quarter GDP growth from the flat outturn that we currently anticipate.”
Some economists have already raised their forecasts. IHS Markit had been expecting GDP growth of 1.6% this year, slowing to just 0.2% in 2017, but has raised its forecast to 1.9% and 0.6%.
The increased optimism is largely due to the current resilience of the consumer, said Howard Archer, IHS’s chief European & UK economist. “We now believe that the economy is likely to achieve modest growth of around 0.2-0.3% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter and could well dodge contraction in the fourth quarter.”
One key focus this week will be a consumer confidence report on Wednesday from market researchers GfK. That is expected to show households remain nervous about the economic outlook but are less gloomy than in the immediate aftermath of the referendum.
The July poll had recorded the biggest slide in consumer confidence for more than 26 years, as people reported being gloomier about their own finances, the broader economy and whether now was a good time to make big purchases such as furniture and household appliances.
August’s headline consumer confidence reading is expected to come in at -8, up from July’s -12, according to a Reuters poll of economists. That compares with -1 in the June surveycarried out before the referendum.
“We suspect that consumer confidence recovered some of July’s sharp losses as consumers got over the initial shock of the Brexit vote,” said Archer.
“It is also very possible that confidence benefited in August from a feel good factor coming from the good weather and from Team GB’s strong performance in the Rio Olympics.”
Economists say house prices have long been a significant factor in consumer confidence in the UK and there will be fresh news on the housing market on Wednesday from the country’s biggest building society.
In August, economists expect Nationwide’s monthly survey to show a 0.3% dip in house prices, following July’s rise of 0.5% and a monthly gain of 0.2% in June. The annual growth rate is forecast to edge down to 4.5% from 5.2% in July, according to a Reuters poll.
Rounding off the week are a survey of manufacturers on Thursday and a survey of construction firms on Friday. These closely watched purchasing managers’ index (PMI) reports from data company Markit were particularly gloomy for July. The surveys’ compilers said they pointed to a 0.4% drop in GDP in the July-to-September quarter, a stark contrast to growth of 0.6% in the previous three months.
The manufacturing PMI index is expected to edge up to 49.0 in August from 48.2 in July, staying below the 50-mark that separates growth from contraction. The construction index is expected to rise to 46.1 from 45.9 in July. The PMI report for the much bigger services sector will not be published until Monday 5 September.
Philip Shaw, economist at Investec said Brexit related uncertainty “hit home” in the manufacturing sector in July but he expects some improvement in August, helped by stronger exports on the back of a weaker pound, which makes UK goods cheaper to overseas buyers.
“We steadfastly believe that sentiment will have subsequently settled down and that purchasing activity and therefore the PMI will recover at some stage soon, albeit modestly,” said Shaw.
For financial markets, the main focus of the week ahead will be new US jobs data on Friday. After the US central bank chief Janet Yellen left the door open to another interest rate rise before the end of the year, traders are awaiting the US non-farm payrolls report for clues as to quite when such an increase might come.
US Federal Reserve policymakers will use the report on the number of jobs added in August to gauge whether the world’s biggest economy is in strong enough shape to take a rate rise as soon as September.
Economists polled by Reuters expect the payrolls report to show a 180,000 gain in jobs after July’s surprisingly strong gain of 255,000 jobs.
Looking ahead to the jobs report, Caroline Bain and Julian Jessop at the consultancy Capital Economics said: “While the labour market has continued to tighten, we suspect that Fed officials will want to see clear signs of a renewed acceleration in GDP growth before they green light the next rate hike,” they wrote in a note to clients.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/29/busy-week-of-economic-data-gives-further-clues-on-brexit-vote
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a89d7f089f97f258a6b8fbfc1b2eb1c030c45c50350f5f2a1e0f07fdc291b5b7.json
|
|
[
"Joseph Stiglitz",
"Anne Mcelvoy",
"Anatole Kaletsky"
] | 2016-08-28T02:54:59 | null | 2016-08-22T14:01:33 |
Time for EU reform or divorce? Unless Brussels makes seven changes, its members will inevitably conclude they are trapped in an untenable marriage
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F22%2Fseven-changes-needed-to-save-the-euro-and-the-eu.json
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en
| null |
Seven changes needed to save the euro and the EU
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
To say that the eurozone has not been performing well since the 2008 crisis is an understatement. Its member countries have done more poorly than the European Union countries outside the eurozone, and much more poorly than the United States, which was the epicentre of the crisis.
The worst-performing eurozone countries are mired in depression or deep recession; their condition – think of Greece – is worse in many ways than what economies suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The best-performing eurozone members, such as Germany, look good, but only in comparison; and their growth model is partly based on beggar-thy-neighbour policies, whereby success comes at the expense of erstwhile “partners”.
Four types of explanation have been advanced to explain this state of affairs. Germany likes to blame the victim, pointing to Greece’s profligacy and the debt and deficits elsewhere. But this puts the cart before the horse: Spain and Ireland had surpluses and low debt-to-GDP ratios before the euro crisis. So the crisis caused the deficits and debts, not the other way around.
Deficit fetishism is, no doubt, part of Europe’s problems. Finland, too, has been having trouble adjusting to the multiple shocks it has confronted, with GDP in 2015 around 5.5% below its 2008 peak.
Other “blame the victim” critics cite the welfare state and excessive labour-market protections as the cause of the eurozone’s malaise. Yet some of Europe’s best-performing countries, such as Sweden and Norway, have the strongest welfare states and labour-market protections.
Many of the countries now performing poorly were doing very well – above the European average – before the euro was introduced. Their decline did not result from some sudden change in their labour laws, or from an epidemic of laziness in the crisis countries. What changed was the currency arrangement.
King Canute's lessons for Brexit Read more
The second type of explanation amounts to a wish that Europe had better leaders, men and women who understood economics better and implemented better policies. Flawed policies – not just austerity, but also misguided so-called structural reforms, which widened inequality and thus further weakened overall demand and potential growth – have undoubtedly made matters worse.
But the eurozone was a political arrangement, in which it was inevitable that Germany’s voice would be loud. Anyone who has dealt with German policymakers over the past third of a century should have known in advance the likely result. Most important, given the available tools, not even the most brilliant economic tsar could not have made the eurozone prosper.
The third set of reasons for the eurozone’s poor performance is a broader rightwing critique of the EU, centred on the eurocrats’ penchant for stifling, innovation-inhibiting regulations. This critique, too, misses the mark. The eurocrats, like labour laws or the welfare state, didn’t suddenly change in 1999, with the creation of the fixed exchange-rate system, or in 2008, with the beginning of the crisis. More fundamentally, what matters is the standard of living, the quality of life. Anyone who denies how much better off we in the west are with our stiflingly clean air and water should visit Beijing.
That leaves the fourth explanation: the euro is more to blame than the policies and structures of individual countries. The euro was flawed at birth. Even the best policymakers the world has ever seen could not have made it work. The eurozone’s structure imposed the kind of rigidity associated with the gold standard. The single currency took away its members’ most important mechanism for adjustment – the exchange rate – and the eurozone circumscribed monetary and fiscal policy.
In response to asymmetric shocks and divergences in productivity, there would have to be adjustments in the real (inflation-adjusted) exchange rate, meaning that prices in the eurozone periphery would have to fall relative to Germany and northern Europe. But, with Germany adamant about inflation – its prices have been stagnant – the adjustment could be accomplished only through wrenching deflation elsewhere. Typically, this meant painful unemployment and weakening unions; the eurozone’s poorest countries, and especially the workers within them, bore the brunt of the adjustment burden. So the plan to spur convergence among eurozone countries failed miserably, with disparities between and within countries growing.
This system cannot and will not work in the long run: democratic politics ensures its failure. Only by changing the eurozone’s rules and institutions can the euro be made to work. This will require seven changes:
• abandoning the convergence criteria, which require deficits to be less than 3% of GDP
• replacing austerity with a growth strategy, supported by a solidarity fund for stabilisation
• dismantling a crisis-prone system whereby countries must borrow in a currency not under their control, and relying instead on Eurobonds or some similar mechanism
• better burden-sharing during adjustment, with countries running current-account surpluses committing to raise wages and increase fiscal spending, thereby ensuring that their prices increase faster than those in the countries with current-account deficits;
• changing the mandate of the European Central Bank, which focuses only on inflation, unlike the US Federal Reserve, which takes into account employment, growth, and stability as well
• establishing common deposit insurance, which would prevent money from fleeing poorly performing countries, and other elements of a “banking union”
• and encouraging, rather than forbidding, industrial policies designed to ensure that the eurozone’s laggards can catch up with its leaders.
From an economic perspective, these changes are small; but today’s eurozone leadership may lack the political will to carry them out. That doesn’t change the basic fact that the current halfway house is untenable. A system intended to promote prosperity and further integration has been having just the opposite effect. An amicable divorce would be better than the current stalemate.
Of course, every divorce is costly; but muddling through would be even more costly. As we’ve already seen this summer in the United Kingdom, if European leaders can’t or won’t make the hard decisions, European voters will make the decisions for them – and the leaders may not be happy with the results.
•Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel prizewinner, the chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute, a former senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank, and was chair of the US president’s Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton.
© Project Syndicate
Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Euro (Allen Lane , £20) is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £16.40. To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/22/seven-changes-needed-to-save-the-euro-and-the-eu
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en
| 2016-08-22T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7c80aaab800059449f7b8a5a9764a29bd27fabd6afdc8546b32492d5d75aaca0.json
|
|
[
"Stuart Clark"
] | 2016-08-27T10:58:57 | null | 2015-10-16T13:45:39 |
Strange signals from a distant star are defying natural explanation. There is a remote chance that they could be from an ‘alien megastructure’
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Facross-the-universe%2F2015%2Foct%2F16%2Falien-megastructure-could-explain-mysterious-new-kepler-results.json
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| null |
‘Alien megastructure’ could explain mysterious new Kepler results
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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There’s a new mystery in the universe and it goes by the name KIC 8462852. It is a star approximately 1500 light years away from the Earth, and displays a strange pattern of dimming that has astronomers scratching their heads.
With many natural causes apparently ruled out, there is even the suggestion that the signals could be caused by a giant structure, built in space near the star, presumably by extraterrestrials.
Welcome to Earth: a travel guide for aliens | Dean Burnett Read more
The unexplained signals have been found in data collected by Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope. The mission was launched in 2009 and was designed to find planets by looking for the small dip in light caused when a planet passes in front of the star and blocks a small portion of the light.
It has been remarkably successful adding thousands of planets to the known roster. But in all the 150,000 stars that Kepler has monitored, none have ever looked like KIC 8462852. It stands out because the star dims so dramatically.
Whereas a planet will drop the light by a percent or two at most, this star dims by up to 20 percent. Also unlike a planet, which orbits the star and causes the drop to repeat, these dimmings took place at random intervals during the 1600 days that Kepler was monitoring the star.
Around the 800-day mark, the star’s light dropped by 15 percent, Then around the 1500-day mark, there was a flurry of dimming with one dropping 20 percent of the starlight. To fall that much, the object passing in front of the star must be almost half the diameter of the star. Yet Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is only one-tenth the diameter of the Sun.
To rub salt into the wound, KIC 8462852, is estimated to be about 1.5 times larger than the sun, making the necessary object vast indeed. So it cannot be a planet.
Tabetha Boyajian, Yale University, led the investigations into the mysterious signals and found that the most likely natural cause was the break-up of a comet around the star. As the icy remains expand into giant clouds they could temporarily block out the light, causing the observed signal. But this should cause dust to scatter around the star, producing an excess of infra-red radiation that should be easily detected from Earth. As yet, no such signal has been found.
According to the The Atlantic, Boyajian said that there were “other scenarios” that she was considering. And these are where the aliens come in.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, has been investigating what a huge alien construction in space might look like from Earth. He told The Atlantic: “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
It would have to be a huge space station indeed to block out that amount of light, hence the epithet “alien megastructure” that is currently setting Google alight.
This is not the first time that astronomers have speculated about aliens when confronted with an unexplained phenomenon. Famously, the discovery of rotating stellar corpses, eventually called as pulsars, were first suggested to be aliens. The researchers even cheekily labelled the reading ‘LGM-1’ for “little green men”.
When hugely powerful gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) continued to defy explanation decades after their discovery, some suggested they could be the optical equivalent of a sonic boom, taking place because alien starships were accelerating to warp speed. The GRBs were eventually discovered to be exploding stars.
A natural explanation is almost certainly the case here too.
Many of the same objections to natural causes apply to the alien megastructure hypothesis too. Namely, the structure should be in orbit around the star and so should lead to periodic dips in the light.
Also, if something is absorbing 20 percent of a star’s light, it is going to get hot and that means it is going to re-radiate that energy at infrared wavelengths but, as mentioned, no IR-excess has been detected.
The only way to clear up this mystery is to make more observations. Boyajian suggests long-term monitoring from ground-based telescopes to look for a recurrence of the dimming events, and is working with Wright to use a radio telescope to listen in for alien broadcasts leaking from the system.
My money is on comet collisions. But part of me hopes I’m wrong.
Stuart Clark’s latest book is The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus).
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2015/oct/16/alien-megastructure-could-explain-mysterious-new-kepler-results
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en
| 2015-10-16T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/04e395832595414e67a45e8f7c5ea4ca43f560bd4179424a8193bb6e8af87ac6.json
|
|
[
"Miles Brignall"
] | 2016-08-26T13:28:19 | null | 2016-08-15T05:01:15 |
I moved my website and email account to another provider, but the internet firm is threatening me with a debt collection agency
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F15%2Ffasthosts-internet-website-account-debt-collection.json
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en
| null |
Fasthosts slow to sort out its mistake
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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For the past eight years I have used a firm called Fasthosts Internet to host my website and provide an email service, paying in advance for this. But in February this year my email account suddenly stopped working, and when I called I was told that if I wished my service to continue I would need to upgrade and pay more.
Having paid in advance I considered this a breach of the agreed terms, so decided to go elsewhere. I moved my domain to another provider, and called Fasthosts to tell it of my decision. At the end of the conversation, which I recorded, I clearly asked whether I had to do anything else to end the matter, and was told no.
Fasthosts has since pursued me for the costs of renewing my account, which it claims I have not closed. I have unsuccessfully attempted to resolve the issue via three phone calls. Staff claim my hosting package is still ongoing – even though there is nothing to host – and it is now threatening me with a debt collection agency. Are you able to help? JSA, Gantham
This was all a bit of a mess and should have been sorted out without our intervention. The company blamed your problems on the fact that you had not replied to emails it had sent out – but to what turned out to be an old email address.
It also says it regrets the way that it sent you a “final” letter in the first instance, and it should have accepted you had cancelled. Happily, after we got involved, this has all been sorted out. Your account has now been closed – and the debt collectors will not be hassling you.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/15/fasthosts-internet-website-account-debt-collection
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en
| 2016-08-15T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/bab9e68fc6ca2798c35b3239fea22ce7804ec2f210b00a5e46b4f8e31d403b30.json
|
|
[
"Barrett Holmes Pitner"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:53 | null | 2016-08-25T19:45:32 |
Now that it’s clear he needs us to win, Donald Trump has focused on African Americans. But his entire platform and history works against our interests
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Ftrump-trying-to-woo-black-voters-not-buying-it.json
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| null |
Trump is trying to woo black voters. We're not buying it
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Donald Trump has embarked on a cross-country tour to proclaim – to mostly white audiences – that he alone can solve what ails the black community.
“So many in the African-American community are doing so badly, poverty and crime way up, employment and jobs way down: I will fix it, promise,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. And the day before, in Mississippi, Trump called Hillary Clinton a “bigot” because she supposedly only cares about African Americans for their votes, and he told them to “reject” her “bigotry” and vote for him instead.
What he continuously fails to recognize is that he is the bigot – and the problem that the black community intends to solve by not voting for him.
Trump has shown no desire to reach out to African Americans during this election until it became abundantly clear that he needs their votes to win the presidency. Before now, he has spent months rebuffing invitations to speak at black events while hesitating to disavow the likes of former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
All his sad, pathetic and misguided attempts at black voter outreach have occurred after he polled at 0% among black voters in both Ohio and Pennsylvania — two states he must win to assure victory.
The other day in Dimondale, Michigan, a city 90 miles from Detroit that is 93% white, he said, “To those [African American voters] I say the following: what do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
A lot. A vote for him isn’t so much a vote for something “new” as a return to a more bigoted and regressive past, an allegedly idyllic America that wrapped white Americans in a comforting blanket of privilege and left black Americans out in the cold. He never acknowledges that America has created structures that are intended to impede black advancement, and he’d probably scoff at the data supporting the seismic gap in black and white wealth inequality.
Trump rarely visits black communities, and his company has a history of legal action taken over allegations of not renting to African Americans. Trump’s political and professional business empires both perpetuate America’s racial inequalities.
And we cannot overlook how his rise to political prominence began by attempting to legitimize the discredited birther movement. Trump has spent seven years attempting to undermine the intellect and accomplishments of America’s first black president. I believe his underlying political philosophy stems from the premise that a successful black American is either not truly successful or is not actually American and has taken a job that “rightfully” belongs to a white person.
Trump has made all of these claims from a pedestal built upon a business model based around concealing large sums of debt, underpaying contractors and underplaying his inherited wealth – while presenting his brand as pristine luxury, the result of honest hard work and American ingenuity.
Black America does not need the dishonest, obtuse and false promises and generosity that Trump espouses. Instead we need to deconstruct his ignorant, oppressive argument and reveal it for what it really is: in the apt words of another journalist, nothing but a “turd tornado”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/25/trump-trying-to-woo-black-voters-not-buying-it
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/b63bf42dfd260fb54d9a3542885abf95569fe82b93490948bebb966d7302c5c4.json
|
|
[
"Frances Perraudin"
] | 2016-08-27T04:49:10 | null | 2016-04-08T14:40:25 |
Serious sexual abuse, including rape of vulnerable teenage girls, took place between 2005 and 2013
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Fapr%2F08%2Frochdale-grooming-case-10-men-sentenced-to-up-to-25-years-in-jail.json
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en
| null |
Rochdale grooming case: nine men jailed for up to 25 years each
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Nine men have each been sentenced to up to 25 years in jail for a catalogue of serious sexual offences against teenage girls in Rochdale, exposed following widespread media coverage of grooming cases in the area.
The men were found guilty last month of abusing their victims, aged 13 to 22, between 2005 and 2013. The defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges during two separate trials at Manchester Minshull Street crown court, which lasted a total of 15 weeks. A 10th man pleaded guilty and was sentenced last September.
During the sentencing, Judge John Potter said the fact that the women, now in their 20s, had given evidence was a testament to their “bravery, courage and fortitude”. Three of the victims were present in court to watch the sentencing and the public gallery erupted into applause when the sentences were read out.
The principal victim in the case, who was abused by all of the defendants, walked into a police station in 2012 claiming to know about “Rochdale grooming”, after news emerged of the convictions of a number of Asian men for grooming white girls for sex.
The victim reported that when she was aged 14 and 15 she was repeatedly sexually groomed by a large number of men from the Rochdale area. The victim – described by prosecutors as an “extremely vulnerable young woman” who had had a difficult home life and a learning disability – said her phone number had been passed around and that hundreds of men would ring her wanting to meet for sex.
The 10 men were charged as part of Operation Doublet, a police investigation into the alleged sexual exploitation of teenage girls by men in Rochdale. The operation has led to more than 100 people being arrested and questioned, the majority of whom had links to Rochdale.
Many of the offences date back 10 years and were first reported shortly after they were committed. In some cases the victims decided they no longer wanted to cooperate with police inquiries, while in other cases the police decided not to pursue the allegations. The victims were later approached by detectives to give evidence after the principal complainant came forward in 2012.
During the trial’s opening, the prosecution told the jury that even in the relatively short period of time since the offences had taken place “the whole of society has a much greater understanding of child sexual exploitation”.
Det Ch Insp Jamie Daniels, the senior investigating officer for Operation Doublet, said it had been an extremely complex case and commended the victims for their bravery. “Only with their support have we arrived at this point,” he said. “The process can be emotionally demanding and traumatic for the victims and we do not underestimate the courage this took.”
He said child sexual abuse was more than a criminal issue. “It is a social problem that we are working closely with our partners to tackle on many levels. Criminal investigations and convictions allow us to remove the offender but there is a huge amount of work behind the scenes. These are victim-led investigations and the long-term wellbeing and care of those victims is of paramount importance.”
In a statement read out to the court on Thursday, one victim said her experiences had been eating her up inside and that it was hard to describe the “brilliant relief” that came from telling someone. “After all these years something had been done. My head was clear and I could start to move on,” she said of the guilty verdict.
Afraz Ahmed, 33, of Rochdale, was found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, conspiracy to rape and sexual activity with a child. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Another defendant, 40, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted of rape and attempting to abduct a child. He was sentenced to 23 years.
Choudry Ikhalaq Hussain, of Rochdale, was convicted in his absence of rape, sexual activity with a child and conspiracy to rape. The 38-year-old, who left the country during his trial and is currently believed to be in Pakistan, was sentenced to 19 years.
Mohammed Dauood, 38, of Burnley, was convicted of rape, sexual activity with a child and sexual assault. He was sentenced to 16 years in jail. David Law, 46, of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, was convicted of conspiracy to rape and sentenced to 11 years.
Rehan Ali, 27, of Blackley, and Kutab Miah, 35, of Rochdale, were both found guilty of rape and sexual activity with a child. Ali was sentenced to seven years and Miah to nine.
Abid Khan, 38, of Liverpool, and Mohammed Zahid, 54, of Rochdale, were both found guilty of sexual activity with a child. Khan was sentenced to six and a half years and Zahid to five.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mahfuz Rahman. Photograph: Greater Manchester police/PA
The 10th man, Mahfuz Rahman, 29, is serving a five and a half year sentence at Garth prison, having pleaded guilty in September to three counts of sexual activity with a child.
A spokesperson for the NSPCC child protection charity said the victims in the case had shown “a great deal of bravery to speak out, particularly the young girl who walked into a police station after seeing coverage of other child abuse cases in the Rochdale area and told detectives her grim story. This sends out a strong message that other victims of abuse can feel confident they will not be ignored and will be taken seriously.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/08/rochdale-grooming-case-10-men-sentenced-to-up-to-25-years-in-jail
|
en
| 2016-04-08T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a7291ddb8e3398a1424e8a74de1f113a81ec89d21ff0c2ab444898f94e63c309.json
|
|
[
"Photograph",
"Charles Fisher Pennsylvania State University Photo Courtesy Of The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute",
"Sönke Johnsen",
"The Lost City Expedition Noaa",
"Norbert Probst Alamy Stock Photo",
"Dave Fleetham Getty Images",
"Norbert Probst Alamy"
] | 2016-08-30T12:57:41 | null | 2016-08-30T11:57:01 |
A report launched on 3 August by Unesco’s World Heritage Centre and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) explores the importance of marine life in the open ocean, which covers more than half the planet
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fworld-heritage-in-the-high-seas-oceanic-wonders-explored.json
|
en
| null |
World heritage in the high seas: oceanic wonders explored
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
A hydromedusa seen at a depth of just over 3,900 metres near the seafloor in Mona Canyon, Puerto Rico. Two sets of tentacles are visible along with an inner ring of short tentacles and a longer set of tentacles originating from bottom edge of its bell. Its red canals and uniquely shaped gonads suggest it is a Genus Crossota
Photograph: NOAA
|
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2016/aug/30/world-heritage-in-the-high-seas-oceanic-wonders-explored
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a6bad91960b28e0110a08307cc74521ca19b945095aad82e732c83a144cdd9c0.json
|
|
[
"Martin Belam",
"Damien Gayle",
"Zoë White",
"Graham Ruddick",
"Dan Milmo",
"Owen Jones"
] | 2016-08-26T16:50:36 | null | 2016-08-24T16:30:11 |
The Guardian took the 11am London-Newcastle train the Labour leader says lacked free seats. Follow the updates on our trip, people’s reactions – and whether we got a seat
|
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpolitics%2Flive%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fbehind-traingate-we-retrace-corbyns-trip-to-see-reality-of-uk-rail-travel-live.json
|
en
| null |
Virgin v Jeremy Corbyn: what rail passengers think of Traingate - as it happened
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
12:30
So what have we learned from today? Well, I didn’t struggle to get a seat on the 11am train from London’s King’s Cross to Newcastle, but that doesn’t disprove Jeremy Corbyn’s experience, and it doesn’t mean that the UK’s rail system does not lack capacity.
It is well known that there are sections of the network with capacity problems – it is one of the stated reasons for building HS2 – and no one regularly using Southern rail at the moment can be happy with the service they are getting.
Is #Traingate a silly season story? Absolutely.
Are Virgin Trains running a flawless system on the east coast mainline? No. And while staff implied our journey was pretty much the same as always, we did not prove that this route is not usually crowded.
Do people have questions about Corbyn’s media operation after this? Yes, they do.
Martin Belam trying out the floor as a seating option. Photograph: Martin Belam for the Guardian
And are they the same people who were already saying Corbyn was incompetent? Very probably.
But I hope this has made people think a bit more about the uses of CCTV by a private company running a train franchise on behalf of the state. And while lots of you wondered about live-blogging a train journey, I can’t think of a better place to interview the people travelling on that route.
Thank you for your comments below the line and contributions; I’m now off to catch the train home. I have not reserved a seat for the trip back, so fingers crossed.
|
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/aug/24/behind-traingate-we-retrace-corbyns-trip-to-see-reality-of-uk-rail-travel-live
|
en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/35a3816a798fc4d356fb94bb2b20169f3eaeb3de8ed245749c90612e3585269d.json
|
|
[
"Aditya Chakrabortty"
] | 2016-08-30T06:50:06 | null | 2016-08-30T05:00:21 |
Two women who restored pride to a blighted town can show Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues what a social movement could be used for
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Flife-after-community-death-food-bank-lesson-labour.json
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en
| null |
Life after community death: this food bank has a lesson for Labour
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
I never expected to leave a food bank feeling optimistic. To visit a kitchen serving hundreds of free summer-holiday meals to kids who might otherwise go hungry – and come away pondering the lessons Westminster, and especially Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, should learn. But then, until last week, I hadn’t met the two women who run the Neo cafe.
Eating v heating: this is what destitution looks like | Frances Ryan Read more
To understand what an achievement Neo is, you have to see what it’s up against. There’s the area, for a start: Birkenhead, now practically a byword for social deprivation. In parts of this town the life expectancy for baby boys is lower than in North Korea.
Since the Brexit vote there’s been a boom in hand-waving commentary on “left-behind” Britain. The columnists and studio guests should come here for a day, and see what their talking points look like as lived experience. Industrial decline? The once great shipbuilder Cammell Laird still clings on, but many of the other big employers have been wiped out. Insecure work? The usual features of an exploitative jobs market are all present, from zero-hours contracts and temp agencies to, most of all, low wages. And of course austerity, from benefit sanctions to multimillion pound cuts at Wirral council.
Impose such conditions on a family and you create misery. Push them across an entire community and you get breakdown. Widespread economic insecurity produces social instability. Relationships fail. Colin, a twentysomething on temp work, describes how his partner had to move out because “I couldn’t make my pay packet feed two”. Stop-start work makes planning budgets hard enough – it makes planning families impossible.
Neighbours move in then move out, so you never know who’s living next door – and you’d all rather leave. One grandmother, Wendy, remembers how she cried on being offered a council house in Rock Ferry, the patch of town that’s home to Neo. Then Anne and Trish chip in with other problems: druggies and no-go areas, so that a kid from this estate can’t go to that one. Here, the horizons have shrunk so far that the neighbourhood can seem like a trap.
Community feeling? It withers in this environment. Wendy remembers a welcome message when she moved in: “My neighbour knocked 11 o’clock at night, drunk. He said, ‘If you need a drill, I know a man who can get you one.’”
Now enter Ema Wilkes and Jen Doherty. Mothers in their early 30s, they moved into the local community centre this Easter – and here’s where things get really interesting.
When I turned up last week, the two had just finished breakfast club and were prepping lunch. As part of the Feeding Birkenhead project, chaired by local MP Frank Field, they’ve served 1,440 meals to local children and their parents these holidays – and handed out 36 “crisis food bags” stuffed with cereals, tins and sauces.
'As part of the Feeding Birkenhead project chaired by MP Frank Field, the pair have served 1,440 meals to children'
Neo also runs a social supermarket, offering food – that the likes of Marks & Spencer and Tesco would otherwise plaster with yellow stickers or chuck away – to residents on a “pay what you feel” basis. One father, Jamie, detailed how he had picked up around £40 of groceries for £8. Later on, he told me how he’d recently been diagnosed with a vitamin B12 deficiency, a complaint that can be traced to the sustained lack of decent food. It had left him tired, forgetful and in pain. I wondered how much worse off he’d have been without Neo’s cut-price shopping.
All vital work – but it’s the next bit I really want you to hear. Because Wilkes and Doherty are doing something harder, rarer and perhaps more valuable than dispensing charity: they’ve begun restoring a sense of pride to a community left for dead by the rest of the country.
Take the centre the pair work out of. Once used by the council, it had long fallen into disrepair. Weeds thrust knee-high out of the paving and the paint on the railings was peeling. On opening day the gates were flung open, a bouncy castle was put up in the garden and some food was served up. The women, who are from neighbouring Wallasey, didn’t know what to expect. Then by the end of the first morning, the garden began to overflow with stuff: footballs, a racket ball set, climbing kit.
Neighbours who wouldn’t even say hello to each other were bringing over their kids’ playthings. When removal men brought over the giant M&S chiller cabinets for the social supermarket but left them outside, muttering about the wrong angles, it was the locals who stood guard against any nicking – and then shifted them inside.
When I visited, the grass was cut to less than an inch high, and the railings were freshly painted: all done by locals for free. The entire place is run on a philosophy of someone-will-know-someone. When I looked around, there were tyres cut in half to serve as planters, kit donated by schools, cafe tables and chairs given by a local Tesco. In an economy in which so many institutions have withered away or been useless, Wilkes and Doherty have led residents into building their own. Now volunteers lay on ukulele and art lessons upstairs for the kids, and the adults teach each other how to cook good-value filling meals. Local businesses have been corralled into donating money or goods or time. Next month, a solicitor will begin a free advice surgery. I hope Colin and his mates get him to check whether their job contracts are being properly followed.
With paint, tools and community spirit, homeless people are renovating empty homes Read more
In a previous role Wilkes was an employment coach, cajoling people off the dole and into whatever jobs were around. Now she and Doherty are encouraging locals to see what they can do for themselves. All this is being done without money or a business plan, and on subsistence wages. Asked what their guiding principles are, Wilkes offers: “It’s about working with community, identifying their needs, not just throwing leaflets through the door and walking off.”
The community house is already being used as a hub to lobby for local housing for a resident who faces resettlement miles away. Maybe in time the locals will organise against exploitative bosses and for better services.
Next month Corbyn’s party will hold its annual conference down the road in Liverpool. He should pop by and take a look. Both Wilkes and Doherty are fans of Corbyn, and I think they have a lot to teach him about what a social movement can be used for. Not just to pass about memes and mobilise votes – but to listen to the communities they are trying to organise to see what would help them: defending private tenants against bad landlords, and casual workers from dodgy bosses – and negotiating good deals with the energy companies. Now that would be a political movement worth getting excited about. It might even be worth voting for.
• To donate to Neo, visit www.gofundme.com/smrej864
|
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/30/life-after-community-death-food-bank-lesson-labour
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/de1db6916ae7e105bb355a954473f86dad42445f6716d4dbed5caf185f44be8e.json
|
|
[
"Michael Slezak"
] | 2016-08-31T06:57:47 | null | 2016-08-31T05:08:47 |
Geodynamics makes announcement as solar researchers speak out against cuts to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fbiogas-projects-suspended-amid-uncertainty-about-renewable-energy-grants.json
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en
| null |
Uncertainty about Arena halts renewable energy projects
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Renewable energy projects in Australia are already being suspended as a result of the two major parties’ plans to effectively abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena).
In an announcement this week to the Australian Stock Exchange, Geodynamics announced it was suspending two large biogas projects in Goulburn, New South Wales, and Mindarra, Western Australia. It told investors it was doing so because of uncertainty surrounding the possibility of getting grant funding for the projects in the future.
“In light of recent announcements regarding policy changes to key federal government grant programs, the availability of grant funding is increasingly uncertain,” it said.
“Without grant funding these two projects will not meet the targeted investment returns. As a result, following consultation with our customers, work on these projects has been suspended until there is certainty on grant funding availability.”
Labor says Coalition has lied and included additional cuts in 'omnibus' savings bill Read more
Guardian Australia understands that if the cuts to Arena go through, Geodynamics will cancel the projects.
The company said it calculated that the suspension of the two projects would impose a $4.69m hit to its value.
The Coalition announced before the election it would save $1.3bn by removing the ability of Arena to make grants – essentially abolishing the organisation. Labor didn’t oppose the cuts, and included them in the savings it took to the election.
The cuts now form part of the “omnibus” bill the government will introduce to parliament, which it says contains all the budget savings agreed to before the election by both parties. But Labor has indicated it might oppose the measure, since it doesn’t include an extra $300m for renewable energy projects that Labor took to the election.
The project at Goulburn was planned to generate up to one megawatt of renewable energy from manure and other organic waste produced by a nearby sheep processing facility. It would have converted that waste into methane, which would then be burned in a power station built on the site to create electricity.
The company said the project would have been the first biogas plant that generated electricity that offset grid-supplied electricity.
The Mindarra project was similar, set to be built at a piggery, and would produce more power than was needed by the piggery, exporting the excess to the grid.
Tom Quinn, executive director of the Future Business Council, said the issue affecting Geodynamics was likely to be already impacting a lot of other businesses trying to pursue renewable energy.
Richard Di Natale urges Bill Shorten not to back $1.3bn cut to climate agency Read more
“It’s surprising how early it is, but it’s also inevitable,” he said. “If they do go ahead with the Arena cuts, this is just the beginning. We’re going to see the best and the brightest of Australia’s renewables business going overseas unless we can keep Arena and have strong bipartisan support for it.
“It’s very easy to talk about innovation but this is what innovation looks like in practice.”
On Wednesday 190 members of Australia’s solar research community signed an open letter calling on both political parties to not proceed with the cut to Arena.
“If Arena is debilitated then hundreds of people would lose their jobs within a year or two,” the researchers wrote.
“In the longer term, Australia’s leadership in solar energy would vanish. This would be completely at odds with the government’s innovation agenda and its commitment at the Paris climate conference to double clean energy R&D by 2020 under the international Mission Innovation program, and with the ALP’s climate change action plan launched in 2015 at UNSW Australia, and reinforced by opposition leader Bill Shorten at ANU also in 2015.”
Geodynamics declined to comment on the announcement.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/31/biogas-projects-suspended-amid-uncertainty-about-renewable-energy-grants
|
en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/8702dd9cc53e8adffcf607a146926a9ffd90104a532aa969538928d1d32f763a.json
|
|
[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-30T14:50:18 | null | 2016-08-30T14:12:43 |
Rosie and Ruby Formosa, who were joined at the abdomen when they were born, are preparing for their first day at school
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Flifeandstyle%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fseparated-conjoined-twins-really-excited-starting-school-video-report.json
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en
| null |
Separated conjoined twins ‘really excited’ to be starting school - video report
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Rosie and Ruby Formosa, who were joined at the abdomen when they were born, are preparing for their first day at school and say they are ‘excited, really excited’. The twins were given a 25 per cent chance of survival when they were born sharing an intestine and needing an emergency operation, but thanks to the surgeons at London’s Great Ormond Street hospital the two survived. Their mum says she never let herself think this day would come. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2016/aug/30/separated-conjoined-twins-really-excited-starting-school-video-report
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ab3cf80200d389073db402d6f645d05dcbadc0fba9fedf80a63193e516065280.json
|
|
[
"Source",
"Asha Philip"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:32 | null | 2016-08-23T10:13:20 |
Athlete Asha Philip captures the moment Team GB members sing the national anthem and celebrate returning to the UK on Tuesday
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fteam-gb-sings-national-anthem-onboard-flight-ba2016-olympics-video.json
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en
| null |
Team GB sing national anthem onboard flight BA2016 - video
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Athlete Asha Philip captures the moment Team GB members sing the national anthem and celebrate returning to the UK on Tuesday, following a highly successful Olympic Games in which the team increased its medal haul from London 2012. Team GB returned from Rio on a special British Airways gold-tipped 747. It was also called BA2016
|
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2016/aug/23/team-gb-sings-national-anthem-onboard-flight-ba2016-olympics-video
|
en
| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/504c7e94edbfb7177c859ff0b86944db8bbe28578069de7dc5a92f5a22d7ad26.json
|
|
[
"Alex Hern",
"Jorge Armanet"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:17 | null | 2016-07-13T13:46:15 |
I can’t put a billboard on your house without your permission, but I can put a Pokéstop there. As real and virtual worlds collide, that is causing problems
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Fjul%2F13%2Fpokemon-virtual-space-home.json
|
en
| null |
Pokémon Go: Who owns the virtual space around your home?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
When a virtual space overlaps a real-world space, then whose space is it, and who controls what is created as a result? The success of augmented-reality game Pokémon Go has forced this question into focus. Since its launch less than a week ago, groups worldwide have struggled with the game’s unforeseen ramifications.
Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum has asked Pokémon Go players to stay away: the museum was designated a Pokéstop, where players can pick up items like Pokéballs and revives, forcing its communications director to point out that playing a game inside a memorial to victims of Nazism is “extremely inappropriate”.
In the Sydney suburb of Rhodes, a chance confluence of Pokéstops has led to “hundreds” of players milling around a small outdoor area. “The place is in complete chaos with crowds of well over 1,000 per night. There is a massive level of noise after midnight, uncontrollable traffic, excessive rubbish, smokers, drunk people, people who are ‘camping’ in the site, and even people peddling mobile phone chargers,” a resident told Buzzfeed.
Boon Sheridan, a Massachusetts man who lives in a converted church, has found his house has been designated a Pokémon Gym, the most important category of locations in the game. For days, people have been loitering outside his house, leaving him concerned it “could easily make this place look like a dealer’s house”.
Some of these problems can be pegged to the unexpected, astronomical success of Pokémon Go. Back in June, I spoke to John Hanke, the chief executive and cofounder of the game’s developers, Niantic Labs. He was cautiously optimistic about the game’s potential, saying that the mixture of augmented reality (AR) and Pokémon “felt like a very natural combination on both sides”, but nowhere in our discussion did he suggest he was planning to ride the wave of a multinational phenomenon.
When asked about future plans, Hanke instead discussed licensing the core technology behind Pokémon Go to other brands looking to make their own AR games. That’s likely to still be on the cards, but for now, the company has their hands full dealing with the monster they’ve unleashed.
Naivety can’t be the only excuse, though. Niantic Labs has been doing this for a long time. Ingress, a science fiction-tinged game developed back when the company was still a subsidiary of Google, has been running for six and half years. In July 2015, the company faced an almost identical controversy, after the German magazine Zeit reported that concentration and death camps including Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau were all set up as in-game “portals”. Some were deleted the day after Zeit contacted Google; others remained, including a portal specifically located at the notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei” gates in Auschwitz.
Pokémon Go and Ingress share a database, built over half a decade from a mixture of public information sources and volunteer contributions. In a technical sense, it’s little different from Wikipedia: a database of geotagged entries on points of interest dotted around the world. Ingress players can even read brief summaries of why the point of interest is actually interesting, a feature which is yet to roll out to Pokémon players. (Do they think we don’t want to learn?)
Wikipedia, of course, can be edited by anyone. Niantic’s database cannot. For the first few days, the company would only accept reports about physical locations “that present immediate physical danger (for example, they are in the middle of a road or on railroad tracks)”. Now, the company has widened it out, and users can report an issue for a number of reasons, including, notably, to highlight a Pokéstop “on private property”.
The language is telling, and may give more ground – real or virtual – than Niantic intended. A Pokéstop cannot be “on private property”. A Pokéstop does not exist: it is a latitude and longitude stored on Niantic’s servers, interpreted by the Pokémon Go client which then represents it as a circle hovering over a stylised Google Map of the area surrounding the player.
In the short term, it clearly makes sense for Niantic to offer this control to landowners. It doesn’t result in great press for your megaviral casual game if players are arrested for trespassing due to the instructions the game gives them.
Niantic can also comfort itself with the fact that a number of properties are quite happy with their inclusion in the game. Churches have been reported making the most of the sudden influx of young secular players; signs have popped up outside shops reading “No purchase, no Pokémon” and “come for the Pokémon, stay for the selection of retro clothes at affordable prices”; and bars and pubs have found that even if they aren’t an official Pokéstop, dropping a lure on-site results in a short-lived flood of Pokémon. Those lures can be bought for between £0.45 and £0.79 in real money, already offering Niantic a nice way of monetising commercial interest in the game. The nature of capitalism being what it is, of course, you can bet that slicker iterations of the same idea, such as sponsored Pokéstops and Gyms, will arrive sooner or later.
But even though the interests of Niantic and landowners happen to coincide for now, there’s no guarantee that state of affairs is universal. And if – or rather, when – the edge-case arrives, it’s not entirely clear what the right response is. Who does own the virtual space around you? I can’t put a billboard on your house without asking you; but is it so obvious that I should be allowed to put a virtual billboard “on” your house without giving you any say in the matter?
Those questions are only going to get more pressing as the real and virtual merge. Already, Pokémon Go is making the leap from a smartphone app to something with a physical presence, in the form of Pokémon Go Plus, a fancy pedometer built by Nintendo to allow players to stay connected to Niantic’s virtual world even when they aren’t looking at their phones.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to look backwards, not forward, for solutions. In the early days of the 20th century, another technological revolution raised questions of control, trespass and oversight: the aeroplane.
Who owns the air above the land? For millennia, the answer had been both obvious and irrelevant. Suddenly, as airports sprang up, and noisy machines crossed first fields, then nations, then the globe, the question crystallised into something requiring an urgent and definitive answer. The pressure was increased by the (literal) rise of the skyscraper; just as airspace became useful, it also became valuable.
The specifics of that answer vary around the world, but the generalities are the same: above a certain height, the airspace is owned by the state. Landowners can’t charge pilots for the privilege of flying over their land, nor can they block it off entirely.
But there’s a quid pro quo. States enforce a responsibility to the people on the ground, ensuring that unsafe vehicles don’t fly overhead, limiting the noise emitted by low-flying planes, particularly overnight, and ideally ensuring that access to the skies isn’t held hostage for private profit.
In the virtual world, nations are already approaching the same compromise. Data protection laws, particularly in Europe, allow for the freedom to innovate while still offering individuals the choice to object. It’s not a stretch that soon you’ll be able to denote your home a sort of digital no-fly zone, requesting its exemption from databases like Niantic’s without requiring you to individually negotiate a deal with every single AR company.
Technology has typically outpaced legislation, and even with tens of millions of downloads it doesn’t look like Pokémon Go will be the tipping point that causes that trend to change. But the questions raised over the past few days aren’t going away, and while a wild west may work for some, it’s ultimately unsustainable.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/13/pokemon-virtual-space-home
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en
| 2016-07-13T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/74222cede2073c0e1bc33f372f7c2efc397fa395e1790b85d4d1ec510e379aeb.json
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|
[
"Roy Greenslade"
] | 2016-08-26T13:12:29 | null | 2016-08-26T11:51:45 |
No, it’s not because of embarrassment about falling circulations - it’s a way of saving money in these tough times for the newspaper industry
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmedia%2Fgreenslade%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fwhy-11-trinity-mirror-dailies-do-not-appear-in-the-latest-abc-audit.json
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| null |
Why 11 Trinity Mirror dailies do not appear in the latest ABC audit
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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An old friend, a long ago staffer on the Newcastle Journal, wondered why there was no sales figure for his former paper in the latest set of ABC circulation figures, which covered the first six months of this year.
I thought I had overlooked it in my round-up yesterday and, in consulting Trinity Mirror’s website, I then realised that only 16 of the company’s 27 regional dailies received an ABC certificate for the first half of 2016.
Aside from the Journal, there were no figures for the Burton Mail, Cambridge News, the [North Wales] Daily Post, Gloucestershire Echo, Gloucester Citizen, Grimsby Telegraph, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Western Daily Press, Western Mail and Western Morning News. Why?
My friend suspected that the Journal’s sale had fallen so low that Trinity Mirror executives were too embarrassed to have it audited.
Well, it certainly has dropped badly in recent years, but several of the other titles have done rather better, so that didn’t appear to be a relevant reason for all 11 omissions.
In fact, Trinity Mirror tell me there is an altogether less sinister explanation. The company decided that only papers it designated as “big city titles” should be audited every six months while the others in its portfolio should be audited on an annual basis.
In Newcastle-upon-Tyne therefore, the larger-selling Chronicle was chosen over the Journal. So we will have to wait until February 2017 to discover this year’s sales performances by the Journal and the other 10 titles relegated to “small city” status.
In fact, Trinity Mirror is not alone in this move. Other regional publishers have also shifted some of their titles to yearly audits. I recall one executive telling me it was a prudent cost-saving measure. These are, after all, tough times for the industry... and every little helps.
For the record, just in case you were wondering, here are the last audited sales figures for the missing 11 Trinity Mirror titles, covering their average daily sales during the six months from July to December 2015:
Burton Mail: 8,844; Cambridge News: 14,068; the [North Wales] Daily Post: 23,272; Gloucestershire Echo: 9,805; Gloucester Citizen: 10,944; Grimsby Telegraph: 18,113; Huddersfield Daily Examiner: 13,152; Newcastle Journal: 14,424; Western Daily Press: 17,544; Western Mail: 16,754; and Western Morning News: 22,266.
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/aug/26/why-11-trinity-mirror-dailies-do-not-appear-in-the-latest-abc-audit
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e471c464a775f0eec0f85d5b82f189707ecda38a457b1992bccf38011967edb1.json
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[
"Ian Sample"
] | 2016-08-26T16:58:47 | null | 2016-08-26T15:53:05 |
Scientists expect unprecedented images of gas giant as $1.1bn probe makes first pass using full set of instruments and cameras
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fnasas-juno-probe-to-make-closest-pass-of-jupiter-on-saturday.json
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Nasa's Juno probe to make closest pass of Jupiter
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Nasa’s Juno spacecraft will make its closest pass of Jupiter on Saturday when it soars over the swirling cloud tops of the solar system’s largest planet at more than 125,000 miles per hour.
The close encounter will be the first time the $1.1bn (£840m) probe has its full suite of cameras and scientific instruments switched on and turned towards the planet as it flies overhead at an altitude of 2,600 miles.
Mission scientists expect the spacecraft to capture the most spectacular images of the planet yet and reveal in unprecedented detail what lies beneath Jupiter’s thick blanket of cloud.
The flyby at 1.51pm BST will be the first opportunity for Juno to get so close to the gas giant since the probe arrived in orbit on 4 July. When the spacecraft reached Jupiter, all of its scientific instruments were shut down to ensure nothing interfered with the crucial braking manoeuvre needed to stop Juno from barrelling past the planet.
The spacecraft is now on a highly elliptical orbit that takes it far away from Jupiter’s dangerous radiation belts before swinging back in and passing close over the north and south poles that flicker with brilliant aurorae more than 1,000 times brighter than those on Earth.
“We are very excited, and really just anxious to see what the poles of Jupiter will look like. No other spacecraft has gotten a good look at them before,” said Candice Hansen, a co-investigator on the Juno mission at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
The spacecraft will shoot across the Jovian sky with eight scientific instruments switched on and the probe’s main camera, JunoCam, ready to take snapshots of the atmosphere and poles. The first images from the flyby are expected to be released towards the end of next week. Scientific data from the encounter will take longer to be processed and analysed.
“They will be using JunoCam to take some really high-resolution images of the atmosphere, which promise to be delectable,” said Tom Stallard, an astronomer at Leicester University, home to the UK’s only research team associated with the Juno mission. “We’re all very positive. This is a mission Nasa has planned for a very long time, so this is the fruition of a lot of work.”
The radiation belts that wrap around Jupiter are so intense that Juno’s most essential electronics are encased in a titanium vault. The probe’s sensors and instruments are harder to protect and will take a battering from the hostile rays with every pass around the planet.
“We’ll have some amazing orbits and collect some great data, and then as time goes by it will get more and more difficult, but Jupiter is difficult,” said Stallard.
The spacecraft will perform 35 more flybys during its primary mission, which is due to end in February 2018 when mission controllers command the probe to plunge into the Jovian clouds, never to be seen again.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/26/nasas-juno-probe-to-make-closest-pass-of-jupiter-on-saturday
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4646e0da97bb8893163c7cda9239881972e05c90bccd44f4ed7e9dd797d7559b.json
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[
"Paul Doyle"
] | 2016-08-28T22:51:52 | null | 2016-08-28T21:30:43 |
Daniel Sturridge must be willing to adapt his game and increase his work rate if he is to figure in Jürgen Klopp’s plans at Liverpool
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2Fblog%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Fdaniel-sturridge-jurgen-klopp-liverpool.json
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| null |
Daniel Sturridge now needs to work flexitime to fit in at Liverpool
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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If Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool have a spine it is that of a limbo dancer. Their loose structure is one of the reasons why they are both thrilling and vulnerable, as they showed again against Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday.
Tottenham and Danny Rose punish wasteful Liverpool to claim draw Read more
Players who are supple of mind and body revel for these Reds. Their midfielders and attackers, in particular, are expected to be slick and committed generalists rather than traditional specialists and if Daniel Sturridge insists on a rigid definition of a centre-forward, he will make himself largely redundant.
Sturridge is the best finisher at Liverpool but he must accept that is not enough to earn a regular start. Bungled chances, notably by Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino, prevented Liverpool from gaining three points at White Hart Lane. Klopp is no doubt aware that Sturridge would probably have converted at least one of the opportunities wasted by the Brazilians.
However, the manager left the England striker on the bench until two minutes from time because he also believes that Liverpool would not have created so many chances – nor restricted Spurs to so few – if they did not have forwards who were determined to apply what he described afterwards as “high pressure, flexible pressure”.
Attacking and defending are not as distinct as Sturridge seems to think. A forward who springs into action only when his own team have the ball is a passenger Klopp is not prepared to carry, at least not away to top opposition. The manager maintains that he has not given up on Sturridge, who has often been injured and/or seemed unhappy at Liverpool despite scoring prolifically when on the pitch.
Even though at Tottenham the manager introduced Divock Origi before Sturridge, to the latter’s visible displeasure, Klopp was adamant that Sturridge will get more action this season. “Daniel Sturridge is a wonderfully skilful player but for this game I made the decision that this kind of defending was what we needed,” Klopp said.
“In the last game against Tottenham at home [in April] he made an outstanding game so it’s possible. But I can only pick 11 players for the start, I make these decisions never against one player so I’m really happy that we have him. And he will play, he will score and all will be good.”
However, the German made it clear that to be considered suitable for as many scenarios as possible, Sturridge must reach full fitness and the same level of understanding as his team‑mates. “He did not have a perfect pre-season, that’s how it is,” he said.
“A few other players had more pre-season. They played together. They’ve trained from the first day of pre-season together so of course that’s an advantage. Then when you see when it was still 1-0, we needed someone to come on for the counter-attack, that’s Divock and unfortunately even though he was running we didn’t find him. Nobody has real rhythm [yet]. But there’s no big mountain for [Sturridge]. It’s a good team, thank God. Hopefully we can make different lineups for different games.”
Sturridge might find it useful to compare his approach and medal collection with that of James Milner. Milner scored a penalty at Tottenham but, more pertinently, again displayed a willingness and ability to adapt to his team’s needs. The 30-year-old’s performance at left-back was solid enough to raise hope that he could secure what has been a problem area for Liverpool. “I am a Liverpool player and what the manager asks me to do I will do,” Milner said, before explaining that learning the role at Liverpool is unique because of Klopp’s conception of it. “I have played a lot on the left in my career and would rather play left-back than right-back so that does not affect me, but it is learning the position, playing there in training and in pre-season and watching videos after the game. I could speak to other left-backs but the way the manager wants his full-backs to play is different to how other managers want them to play.”
Transfer window wishlists: who Premier League fans want to sign this week Read more
Another boon from the match at White Hart Lane was that Joël Matip hinted that another problem role for Liverpool could be secured while its definition is expanded. The Cameroon international impressed on his Premier League debut alongside Dejan Lovren in central defence, where his aerial strength was a welcome addition and his ability to build from the back hinted at a fresh dimension to Liverpool’s approach, one they have not had since Daniel Agger was at the club and on song.
Klopp has high expectations for Matip, who, he says, was only about 75% fit on Saturday and would not have played if Ragnar Klavan had not been injured. “He’s a brilliant footballer,” the manager said. “His buildup play is really good, really calm, and he’s quick, especially quick in the mind.”
Liverpool could still do with more mental quickness and calmness in midfield: a rudder in the vein of Dietmar Hamann, someone who can reset the team when whirlwind mode malfunctions. An inability to take stock on the fly cost Liverpool at times last season, notably in the Europa League final after Sevilla suddenly perked up, and it cost them again at White Hart Lane after Danny Rose drew Tottenham level against the run of play. “The big turning point was the goal, it should not have affected us but we ultimately suffered from it,” Milner said.
Jordan Henderson is an apt captain for this team only insofar as he is a diligent jack of all trades. He is master of none. Maybe Emre Can will conduct the team more knowingly from midfield when fit. But if the 22-year-old’s promise is not fulfilled, Liverpool this season look likely to remain both uncontainable and unstable.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/aug/28/daniel-sturridge-jurgen-klopp-liverpool
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en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7319b56fbf8a25b894f6680b88593309c7afd2b52711a858e07bcab845f019aa.json
|
|
[
"Jonathan Drennan"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:21 | null | 2016-08-25T11:03:42 |
When Father Dave Smith’s local youth centre was threatened with closure he knew he had to do something – so he took on a professional fight and earned enough money from boxing to keep the place open
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2Fbehind-the-lines%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Ffighting-father-professional-boxer-gym-sydney.json
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| null |
The fighting father: how a priest became a professional boxer to save his local gym
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Father Dave Smith’s Sunday schedule rarely wavers. He rises early to prepare the morning service at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, in the inner west of Sydney, and then he delivers his weekly sermon. In the afternoon, he continues to serve his parishioners, this time acting as their boxing trainer in the gym across the road. The young men and women under his tutelage will listen to him calling out drills and work hard. He has earned their respect for acting not only as a spiritual guide but also for his exploits as a fighter. Father Dave is Australia’s oldest professional boxer, always training for his next opponent, whoever that may be.
Dulwich Hill is now a gentrified Sydney suburb lined with quaint coffee shops and book shops. The parish that Father Dave inherited in the 1980s as a young man was filled with gang fights and drug addiction. Heroin plagued teenagers in the area, leaving the young priest needing more than his pulpit to calm the storm he was living within.
“This area has changed but I don’t think I have. The gym I run has helped turned lives around. We set it up originally as a youth centre, to give people coming off a heroin a safe place to be. The boxing has worked wonders for angry young men. The boxing changes them, it gives them a brotherly connection and a lasting calmness.”
Smith was a regular visitor at the juvenile courts and police stations of Sydney. His word was often good enough to get a troubled teenager another chance. He remembers the deputy head boy from the local high school so desperate for a hit of heroin that he injected it into his eye ball. The centre was often the only safe haven left in an area filled with broken homes and lives.
Smith ran the youth centre on a budget that was completely reliant on donations and it was frequently on the verge of closing. In 1996 he received a visit from the archdeacon. “He knew we were in trouble and how much the area needed this centre. We had a youth worker and we couldn’t get cash together to pay his wages. Then I was offered a professional fight and I told the archdeacon that was that problem solved.”
Smith was a seasoned amateur boxer but had never climbed into the ring as a professional. He believed the work he was doing in his parish with the youth centre was essential and took the fight on the condition that all proceeds would go towards its upkeep. The 34-year-old priest took on a super welterweight professional called Jimmy Pat. On a grainy video on YouTube, Smith, in white trunks, stands toe to toe with Pat in a fight that he describes now as “nasty and brutal”.
The fight was declared a draw and Smith raised over $50,000 keeping his centre open. He had largely forgotten about that fight until a phone call came decades later and he heard a familiar voice. “Father Dave, I’ve rung to say two things, sorry mate for the terrible things I said before our fight and, also, to let you know, you hit really fucking hard.” That phone call from his former opponent led to a close friendship and Christian fellowship. Smith considers boxing more than a sport, it has given him the impetus to enrich lives, none more so than his own.
Smith originally started training and fighting seriously as a young man to find some release from the turmoil of his marriage breakup. He shadow boxed late into the night, working himself into a sweat, feeling gradually better with each jab and cross thrown. Father Dave eventually connected boxing to his spirituality. The sport gave him calmness and a sense of purpose in working with the troubled young people in his parish. He would train hard in his free time for his amateur fights and he would come to know his opponents, more often than not creating lasting friendships. He thought the sport that had helped him in his darkest hours could also give solace to the people in his community who needed it.
The violence and drug addiction that surrounded his rectory as a young man has disappeared, replaced by young professionals who walk the streets in search of the perfect Sydney espresso. Yet, the door of the gym across the road from the church remains open. Father Dave’s fight club trains during the week and on Sunday. The young people often come with anger issues and want to use boxing to channel it, or they are sent by their parents as a last resort, thankfully the success rate is high.
“I find that boxing is so successful in changing people with anger management issues, that often we never see them again after a few fights. They are so calm that they can’t see the sense in continuing to fight. I suppose that’s a success in a way. I remember one boy who came in with terrible anger issues winning three fights by knock out and telling me that he didn’t think God wanted him hitting people anymore. He never came back; his life had changed for the better.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Father Dave in his clerical clothing in Syria earlier this year. Photograph: Tom Toby
In February, at 54, Smith returned to the professional ring to raise money for charities across Sydney and overseas. After years of competing in amateur tournaments, he wanted to know what it felt like to lace up the smaller gloves of the professional game once more. Twenty years after his professional debut, he fought as a super middleweight, won on a technical knockout in the third round and became Australia’s oldest professional fighter. Buoyed by the win, he is searching for an opponent, but is unable to find a willing man.
Life as an Olympic boxer: torture, money worries, darkness ... and a dream of glory Read more
“In many ways it’s a bit of a lose-lose situation to fight me. If you beat me to a pulp, well you’ve just beaten up an old priest, and if I win, then you’ve been beaten by an old man. I think the professional fight suits me better. Often in amateurs you’re just getting started and then, boom, after three rounds it’s over. I want to keep supporting my charities, so will continue that search for the opponent.”
Father Dave’s may never duck his head under the ropes of a professional ring again, but the fight to stay a relevant part of young people’s lives in a changing world is one that he has won unanimously.
• This article is from Behind the Lines
• Follow Jonathan Drennan on Twitter
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/behind-the-lines/2016/aug/25/fighting-father-professional-boxer-gym-sydney
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/775724ab700e23f4c9160a9cb6b5de9ec5cc05c3d73670fb28ccd0120cf9e7e7.json
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|
[
"Alex Hern"
] | 2016-08-30T16:59:29 | null | 2016-08-30T15:00:03 |
Google’s AI research arm is partnering with the hospital to improve the scans available for radiotherapists by using machine learning
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fgoogle-deepmind-ucl-ai-radiotherapy-treatment-.json
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| null |
Google DeepMind and UCLH collaborate on AI-based radiotherapy treatment
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Google DeepMindhas announced it is working on a project to improve treatment on head and neck cancers, its third major collaboration with the NHS.
The London-based AI research arm of the online search firm is partnering with University College London Hospital in an attempt to improve the scans available for radiotherapists by using machine learning. The project will use anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients.
Radiotherapy works by bombarding cancerous cells with radiation to kill them, while minimising damage to the healthy cells around them.
Clinicians target the treatment through a process called “segmentation”: literally drawing around different parts of the patient’s anatomy on scans, letting the radiotherapy machines know which tissue to target and which tissue to leave.
The process is particularly painstaking and slow for head and neck cancers, taking about four hours of a clinician’s time. DeepMind believes its machine-learning techniques can reduce that time to one hour.
“Our collaboration will see us carefully analyse anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients at UCLH,” the company said in a blogpost, “to determine the potential for machine learning to make radiotherapy planning more efficient.
“Clinicians will remain responsible for deciding radiotherapy treatment plans, but it is hoped that the segmentation process could be reduced from up to four hours to around an hour.”
Dr Yen-Ching Chang, clinical lead for radiotherapy at UCLH, said: “Developing machine learning which can automatically differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissue on radiotherapy scans will assist clinicians in planning radiotherapy treatment. This has the potential to free up clinicians to spend even more time on patient care, education and research, all of which would be to the benefit of our patients and the populations we serve.”
The DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who has led the company’s health efforts, added: “This real-world application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is exactly why we set up DeepMind. We’re incredibly excited to be working with the radiotherapy team at UCLH to explore how AI can help to reduce the time it takes to plan radiotherapy treatment for head and neck cancer patients. We hope this work could lead to real benefits for cancer patients across the country and for the clinicians who treat them.”
The collaboration comes after February’s announcement that DeepMind is working with the Royal Free hospital to monitor patients’ kidney functions to help catch and treat acute kidney failure in inpatients, and July’s announcement of a research project in conjunction with Moorfields Eye Hospital, to examine the possibility of using machine learning to identify eye conditions in retinal scans.
As with the other NHS collaborations, the project will raise questions over DeepMind’s data sharing agreements with the health service. DeepMind said: “As with all our work with the NHS, we will treat the patient data we are using in this project with the utmost care and respect. All scans will be anonymised in line with the UCLH Information Governance policy before they are shared with DeepMind.”
UCLH added more information in an FAQ published about the project: “UCLH will rigorously ensure that no personally identifiable data is included in the database of scans provided to DeepMind Health for this project. During the course of the project DeepMind Health must take rigorous measures to protect the security of the data, and may not disclose it to anyone other than the researchers and engineers working on the project.
“Data contributing to this study can only be used for research that explores the use of machine learning to identify and differentiate between healthy and cancerous cells in radiotherapy images.”
“DeepMind Health must securely destroy all copies of anonymised data received through the agreement,” the hospital added.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/30/google-deepmind-ucl-ai-radiotherapy-treatment-
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4c6fb1b343df810d11fe4f423ffb7c298e0127e5c5f6d69c9e144905da952032.json
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|
[
"Patrick Collinson"
] | 2016-08-29T14:59:38 | null | 2015-08-28T00:00:00 |
Welcome to Edinburgh, site of the perfect capitalist model: where the owners of assets such as hotels skim off large profits, while the people who make those profits possible walk away penniless
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The business model for the creative industries is broken
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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How much is a pint of Guinness, I asked the barman at the Gilded Balloon, one of the major venues for the Edinburgh fringe festival. “It’s £5 – but it will be £3.60 when the festival is over,” he said, with admirable candour. So-called “surge pricing” has come in for a lot of stick after online taxi firm Uber was found to be tripling fares during London’s tube strike. But if you want to really be taken for a ride, head to Edinburgh.
The city’s festival is vast, exuberant and intoxicating – and a giddy opportunity for price gouging that almost every business in town takes advantage of. It is the perfect capitalist model: the owners of assets such as hotels and restaurants skim off large profits, while the people who make those profits possible – the performers sweating in the city’s aircon-dodging venues – walk away penniless.
Take the Ibis, a budget hotel, in the city centre. It makes no bones about its “dynamic” pricing model, with a digital screen facing the street showing the latest shocking room price updates. Last week it was like the Shanghai stockmarket, just with soaring prices rather than collapsing ones. I don’t recall the exact figure, but on the Saturday it was asking above £230. This for a hotel that charges £35 a night for advance bookings at other times of the year.
Not far from the Ibis, I was lucky to get a seat for one of the triumphs of this year’s festival, a theatre production called 1972: The Future of Sex. It’s the third time Wardrobe Ensemble has played at Edinburgh, and even after great reviews and sold-out performances, it will barely cover its costs. One of the group’s actors, Ben Vardy, told me: “We broke even in our first year, and made a small loss in our second. We will turn a small profit this year because it has been very, very successful. But when I say profit, I mean under £100 each.”
The business model for the creative industries is broken. For every performer at Edinburgh working for nothing, read musician on Spotify or writer on the net. Providers of content make peanuts, while the controllers of the infrastructure, such as Google, walk away with extraordinary profits.
It was ever thus, some might argue, although the internet has allowed businesses to extract profits with a precision previously not possible. How can we transfer some of the wealth grabbed by, say, hotels in Edinburgh and hand it to the people who generated it? A city-wide tax on hotels and restaurants during the festival, the money redistributed to performers? Utopian, probably, and in any case illegal under our tax regime.
I asked colleagues for alternative ideas. As one quipped, the best financial solution for Edinburgh is to give every performer a middle-class parent. Sadly, I think he’s right.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/aug/29/edinburgh-fringe-industries-pay-piper
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en
| 2015-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e3eff12873aa1b043d4ca008ce6fd41e39c97118e5194a5b2aa694b433648268.json
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[] | 2016-08-27T02:51:13 | null | 2016-08-27T02:20:19 |
Employee aged 21 went over the edge of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone while socialising with colleagues in early hours of the morning, say officials
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fworker-dies-in-cliff-fall-at-yellowstone-national-park.json
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Worker dies in cliff fall at Yellowstone national park
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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A worker has fallen to her death in Yellowstone national park, according to officials.
The 21-year-old died early on Friday during a social gathering with colleagues, park officials said.
Estefania Liset Mosquera Alcivar, 21, a concession employee, was with a small group of co-workers at the rim of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone shortly after 3.15am when she fell, according to accounts by her companions, the park’s public affairs office said in a statement.
America’s most remote site – the undiscovered side of Yellowstone Read more
Her body was recovered about four hours later and the incident remained under investigation, the officials said. Alvicar was from Quito, Ecuador.
The incident, along with three major wildfires burning in Yellowstone, comes at the height of the summer tourist season and as officials in both parks prepare for celebrations set for Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the creation of the National Park Service.
The fires have prompted authorities to close the south entrance to the park, which last month saw an average of more than 2,400 vehicles per day.
Yellowstone, which occupies the north-western corner of Wyoming and spills over into Idaho and Montana, was the first national park established in the United States and remains one of its most popular.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/27/worker-dies-in-cliff-fall-at-yellowstone-national-park
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/436ca08c3aac56cdacb37f9871ecde7116294b7dde19a8bcb27860f46f22045f.json
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|
[
"David Teather"
] | 2016-08-26T14:54:40 | null | 2010-04-03T00:00:00 |
Vermont's finest double discuss American pie the, greenwash and giving Unilever some sticky moments
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2010%2Fapr%2F04%2Fben-jerrys-fairtrade-ethical-business.json
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| null |
Sold up but not sold out, Ben and Jerry are still the poster boys for fair trade
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www.theguardian.com
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Ben Cohen, one half of Ben & Jerry's, is recalling the time he got in trouble with the bosses at Unilever, which bought the ice-cream maker in 2000.
Coca-Cola had just taken a stake in Innocent drinks, a small British maker of smoothies with a reputation for being a socially responsible business. A British reporter called to get Cohen's opinion. He, after all, had a similar experience. Ben & Jerry's, which had been founded in the liberal US state of Vermont in the 1970s, was the prototype hippy business-with-a-conscience, promoting liberal causes on the lids of its tubs, giving a percentage of its profits to charity and having a rule that no executive would earn more than five times the lowest-paid worker. Unilever, by contrast, could be a synonym for the faceless multinational, bestriding the globe, selling detergents and cleaning products.
"So the BBC called me up and said 'you have been in a somewhat similar situation; you were a socially responsible little business, you got bought by some big giant, you know, what do you think?'" he recalls.
"I said, 'you know, it doesn't sound good to me' … I think that if you get bought by a company that doesn't really share the same values, it is hard to have your values continue and then I suggested …" he says, starting to laugh, "that it would be good for Unilever to abide by their agreements – and they didn't like that." The laughs get louder.
"You know," adds Jerry Greenfield, his co-founder in the business, "we have these annual franchise meetings every year, so it's a gathering in January, we have all the franchise shops of Ben & Jerry's around the world and the head of the franchise department always tries to sit down with Ben and me before the meeting, to find out what Ben is going to talk about. And he never tells him, because he doesn't know till like 10 minutes before anyway, but their people are always a little nervous, always a little on edge about what Ben is going to talk about."
The pair, raised on Long Island, New York, and both 59, were in London to promote the announcement that Ben & Jerry's planned to take all the ingredients in its ice cream from Fairtrade sources by 2013. Walking into the room to meet them, they bellow their names in turn "Ben", "Jerry", and offer a firm handshake, as though they long ago dispensed with the need of a surname.
Both wear their liberal views on their sleeves. But on the evidence of an hour-long meeting, Greenfield is the more emollient; Cohen, the sharper-edged, less predictable of the two, swallowing half-sneers and chuckles of disbelief as he touches on subjects ranging from the US military budget to Wal-Mart and the relationship with Unilever, which he describes as a "forced marriage".
Best friends since school, they sound like an old married couple, finishing each other's sentences, constantly referring to the other by name and making each other laugh; deep sonorous, belly laughs. The pair stood back from day-to-day running of the firm years ago. Greenfield describes their role as akin to limbo. "We are employees. We have no responsibilities at the company and no authority," he says, with some authority. But they still act as spokesmen when the company does something they approve of, such as the move to Fairtrade, with Unilever doubtless realising the maverick pair can still generate column inches.
I wonder, given his remarks about Innocent, whether Cohen would accuse Unilever of "greenwash" – using Ben & Jerry's as a socially responsible fig leaf.
Greenfield says not. "But on the other hand," says Cohen, not quite able, or apparently willing, to stop himself, "Unilever quite likes to hold up Ben & Jerry's as kind of the poster child of socially responsible business and does use that to try to give an example of 'here is how socially concerned Unilever is, you know, we have the Ben & Jerry's brand'. And you know Ben and Jerry's does happen to be very high profile but when Unilever holds up Ben & Jerry's as 'our example of how socially responsible we are', you know, we should understand that Unilever is what? – a $40bn-$50bn business and we're a little piece of that." So it is greenwash? "Yeah, yeah."
Even so, Cohen says he is more convinced than ever that business can be a force for good. "If there is any hope for our countries and society in general, it is through business. Business has risen to this level of the most powerful force in society. I mean it used to be that the most powerful forces in society were religion and then nation states and the purpose of those two entities was to support the common good, and maybe they didn't do everything exactly right, but now those two are subservient to business."
Greenfield says that trust in corporations "is pretty darn low" at the moment, but suggests that is a good thing. "Well, along with trust in the government," adds Cohen. "And you do know the entity that people most trust in the US?" The church? "The Pentagon," he says, with another big laugh.
Greenfield spends much of his time on the company's charitable foundation; Cohen on his mission to shift money out of the Pentagon (he is currently making a documentary on this). Cohen almost expresses surprise that Ben & Jerry's has managed to maintain its progressive identity. "The company took a major stand on the issue of gay marriage. It renamed its Chubby Hubby flavour to Hubby Hubby and people loved it. Sure, some people hated it. But our consumers loved it. And it is interesting that Unilever itself is very gay friendly."
"Yeah, that's been sort of an unusual thing," Greenfield adds. "We came out with this flavour American Pie [which had a pie chart showing how much taxpayers' money is spent on defence], and we weren't involved in any of those conversations, but I don't think there is a lot of pushback on that [from Unilever]."
Cohen describes the move to Fairtrade as "certainly the best thing that Ben & Jerry's has ever done since the acquisition. I think it is the harbinger that the day of first-world corporations making huge profits off the exploitation of the third world is over.
"I mean it was even our president George Bush," he says with a big laugh, "who said that poverty is the breeding ground of terrorism. I mean if you are not going to treat the world justly, you are not going to have peace."
Then he adds: "Well, it would certainly be a lot better for the world and a much stronger statement if Unilever said everything we sell, all $40bn a year, is now going to be fair trade, but Ben & Jerry's was never Unilever, and you know, I never had any illusions."
The pair say chose Britain to launch the Fairtrade initiative partly because Europe has gone further in adopting the idea. The old world, Cohen says, "is a lot more civilised, as evidenced by things like how advanced Fairtrade is here and how behind the US is. The US excels at maximising profits and exporting weapons."
The conversation drifts to politics. Cohen is disappointed with President Barack Obama. "Obama was dealt an incredibly bad hand. But the continued absurdity of thinking you can defeat terrorism by having a global war without end and bombing and killing populations continues to be misguided," Greenfield says.
"So wasn't that the most amazing thing? Not George Bush being in office, but how he got re-elected? Was that a shock? Man, how discouraging was that as an American."
I wonder what they think of Sarah Palin, and the room erupts into laughter. Greenfield yells in the din: "Weird country, isn't it?"
Cream of the crop
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield became friends because they were "the two slowest, fattest kids in the gym class", according to their official biography.
They remained close through college, Greenfield working as a lab technician and Cohen training in art therapy. But when they were 27 they decided to set up their own company. The first idea was a bagel business but the equipment needed cost $40,000, so instead they took a $5 correspondence course on how to make ice cream.
Their first shop was at a disused petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, and became so successful the pair decided to sell up, fearing they were in danger of becoming the type of capitalists they abhorred. "The idea of becoming real businesspeople had negative connotations," they say in the book. Greenfield went to Arizona and Cohen put the shop up for sale.
But Cohen then met an eccentric 80-year-old artist and restaurateur who suggested that they could create a business that was a force for progressive change.
Today, there are 58 flavours for sale in 26 countries. Known as much for an affection for bad puns as their liberal views, flavours include Jamaican Me Crazy, Cherry Garcia and Phish Food.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/apr/04/ben-jerrys-fairtrade-ethical-business
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en
| 2010-04-03T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/534a29076f15d390aba50b535fe55d514e4cb28becd97c01b6bbbc81069830c5.json
|
|
[
"Stuart James"
] | 2016-08-27T16:51:03 | null | 2016-08-27T16:17:35 |
Swansea City’s Leroy Fer scored late to set up a nervous finish for the champions Leicester City but goals from Jamie Vardy and Wes Morgan were enough to give them a 2-1 win
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| null |
Leicester survive late scare against Swansea to secure first win of season
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The thunder and lightning were relentless and so were Leicester City for the majority of the game, as the Premier League champions got their title defence up and running with a victory that was far more convincing than the scoreline suggests. Jamie Vardy registered his first goal of the season and Wes Morgan scored the second against a Swansea City side who seemed resigned to defeat until Leroy Fer’s late header gave them a flicker of hope where there should have been none.
Leicester, who controlled this game for so long, ought to have been out of sight by the time Fer powerfully headed home in the 80th minute after a rare Swansea attack. Riyad Mahrez squandered a chance to put the game to bed shortly before the hour with a poor penalty kick that Lukasz Fabianski saved and it was a moment that Leicester were almost left to regret when Fer’s goal encouraged Swansea to push for an unlikely equaliser.
Football clockwatch: Leicester 2-1 Swansea, Watford 1-3 Arsenal and more – live! Read more
It was a strange ending to a game that finished in farcical conditions, with the incessant rain causing the ball to get stuck in puddles of water on a surface that was close to unplayable in the final five minutes. Leicester, however, weathered the storm in more ways than one to hold on for Claudio Ranieri’s 100th Premier League win and an important three points.
With Leicester so dominant from the outset, the only surprise was that we had to wait until the 32nd minute for the opening goal. Playing at a high tempo and looking much more like the Leicester of last season, the home team pinned Swansea back and kept probing for the breakthrough.
Vardy’s pace had troubled Swansea several times before the goal. Only a crude foul by Federico Fernández, which earned the Swansea centre-half a yellow card, stopped Vardy from running clear early in the game. On another occasion Kyle Naughton was left for dead near the touchline.
From Leicester’s point of view the only thing missing was the finishing touch but everything came together just after the half-hour in the most familiar fashion as Danny Drinkwater, who set up five goals for Vardy last season, linked with up the England striker once again.
The move started with some neat one-touch passing deep inside the Leicester half involving Drinkwater, Daniel Amartey and Mahrez. It was Mahrez’s cushioned header that found Drinkwater and there was only one thing in the midfielder’s mind when he looked up and saw the Swansea defence playing a high line. The through ball was executed perfectly and left the Swansea defence hopelessly exposed, with Fernández appealing in vain for offside as Vardy outpaced Jordi Amat in the right channel. Vardy took a touch and hammered a right-footed shot in off the near upright.
Arsenal’s Mesut Özil and Alexis Sánchez turn on style against Watford Read more
At the other end, Swansea had barely troubled Leicester. Modou Barrow made a couple of darting runs and Gylfi Sigurdsson, who was withdrawn early in the second half, shot tamely at Kasper Schmeichel but that was the sum total of their attacking threat in the opening 45 minutes. Swansea’s biggest problem during that period was keeping the ball, never mind trying to score.
Normal service resumed seven minutes after the restart as Leicester doubled their lead. Marc Albrighton’s corner was never dealt with by Swansea as Fer and Fernández challenged Robert Huth and Morgan, who thumped home a volley from six yards after the ball fortunately rolled over his shoulder.
With Swansea in disarray, Mahrez should have made it 3-0 four minutes later when Amat, who has been tasked with replacing the departed Ashley Williams, brought down Shinji Okazaki in the area. Roger East had no option but to point to the spot but Mahrez telegraphed his intentions and saw a weak penalty saved by Fabianski low to the keeper’s right.
It was a reprieve for Swansea and one that they took advantage of later in the game when Fer, climbing above Morgan, headed beyond Ron-Robert Zieler, a second-half replacement for Schmeichel, who had seemed to injure his groin when rushing from his line to make a clearance.
Danny Simpson and Christian Fuchs both made important late inventions for Leicester in those fraught final minutes, during which Leicester could also have wrapped things up when Ahmed Musa ran clear but was denied by Fabianski.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/27/leicester-city-swansea-city-premier-league-match-report
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/76600edfdfff42db0c341fef608626e622231d940ea57d614f8acf90b7af0c38.json
|
|
[
"Nicole Puglise"
] | 2016-08-30T16:55:21 | null | 2016-08-30T16:15:58 |
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders join colleagues in signing letter to Mylan CEO Heather Bresch raising concern about reports of a 461% price increase
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fepipen-mylan-price-increase-senators-letter-warren-sanders.json
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en
| null |
'Exorbitantly expensive' EpiPen prompts letter from 20 US senators
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The pharmaceutical company Mylan is facing more political pressure to confront the price hike of EpiPen after 20 US senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, sent an open letter on Tuesday to the company criticising its “exorbitantly expensive” price hikes.
Reports emerged last week that the company had implemented a series of gradual price increases inflating the price of the drug from $56.64 to $317.82, a 461% increase in cost since Mylan acquired the rights to EpiPen in 2007. During that same time, Heather Bresch, chief executive officer of Mylan, saw her pay rise $2,453,456 to $18,931,068, a 671% increase. Last week, she sold 100,200 of her shares in the company for more than $5m.
EpiPen CEO hiked prices on two dozen products and got a 671% pay raise Read more
“The EpiPen auto-injector delivers a life-saving dose of epinephrine to patients suffering from anaphylaxis. Anaphylactic shock can lead to serious injury or death if untreated; thus, making sure the EpiPen is readily available for use is a critical part of life for millions of Americans living with severe allergies,” the Democratic senators wrote in the eight-page letter addressed to Bresch.
“The EpiPen, however, has become so exorbitantly expensive that access to this life-saving combination product is in jeopardy for many Americans.
“Mylan’s near monopoly on the epinephrine auto-injector market has allowed you to increase prices well beyond those that are justified by any increase in the costs of manufacturing the EpiPen,” the senators wrote.
The senators gave Bresch a deadline of 12 September to address seven multi-part questions about the company’s “Savings Card” for customers with insurance, patient assistance program, school programs and plans to release a cheaper generic version of the EpiPen in several weeks. They were sceptical of the company’s attempts to defuse the row, noting that the price of the planned generic “is still three times higher than the cost of the branded EpiPen in 2007”.
Democratic senators Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Joe Donnelly, Richard J Durbin, Al Franken, Heidi Heitkamp, Mazie K Hirono, Amy Klobuchar, Patrick Leahy, Edward Markey, Chris Murphy, Jack Reed, Brian Schatz, Jon Tester, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse also signed the letter.
Last week, Hillary Clinton commented on the controversy, announcing a plan to reduce drug price increases. In it, the Democratic presidential nominee wrote that manufacturers “should be required to explain significant price increases, and prove that any additional costs are linked to additional patient benefits and better value”. She called on Mylan to reduce the price “immediately”.
Other lawmakers have already written open letters to both Bresch, who is the the daughter of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, and the Food and Drug Administration. Senators Susan Collins and Claire McCaskill sent a request for information to Bresch from the Committee on Aging. Iowa senator Chuck Grassley and others asked the FDA for suggestions on “alternatives to the EpiPen”. Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal sent his own letter in addition to the letter sent on Tuesday. “My office has been contacted by dozens of concerned Connecticut residents, families, and first responders who urgently require your life-saving product but fear that its skyrocketing price has put it out of reach,” Blumenthal wrote last week.
The Guardian has reached out to Mylan for comment.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/30/epipen-mylan-price-increase-senators-letter-warren-sanders
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/fe623ae69002ea57f23ff2be51845ddc1ed8a3d9f92fa3382d62d94ba9dd8512.json
|
|
[
"Alison Flood"
] | 2016-08-31T14:50:22 | null | 2016-08-31T14:44:17 |
Despite more than 7,000 responses to a recent consultation on library cuts, county council confirms more than 20 closures, with others left unstaffed
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Flancashire-county-council-library-closures.json
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en
| null |
Lancashire council to close more than 20 libraries
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Lancashire author Andrew Michael Hurley, the Costa award-winning novelist, has warned that “once libraries are closed down that’s it, they don’t come back”, after Lancashire county council confirmed it was set to go ahead with plans to close more than 20 local libraries.
The council proposed reducing its library network from 73 to 44 branches in May, in response to government cuts to its budget. After a consultation to which it received more than 7,000 responses, it recommended in a report on Friday that while a few libraries were facing a reprieve, more than 20 others would still be closed. The report goes to the council’s cabinet on 8 September.
It will be those who have least who will be the most impoverished and disempowered when libraries are closed. Andrew Michael Hurley
“It all seemed horribly inevitable, unfortunately,” said Hurley, winner of the Costa first novel award and the British book awards book of the year prize for his debut novel The Loney. “The real tragedy is that once libraries are closed down that’s it, they don’t come back. It’s just so sad that those who hold the purse-strings cannot see how valuable they are, how a library can be a vital place in any and every community. And as with all cuts to public services, it will be those who have least who will be the most impoverished and disempowered when libraries are closed.”
Adele Bamber, a campaigner for Save Coppull Library, which is proposed to become a “satellite library” – a unstaffed service sharing space in a council building – said that locals were “devastated that Lancashire county council feel the need to close down or reduce the service from our libraries”.
“According to CILIP, less than 1% of [the council’s] budget is actually spent on these services. Turning Coppull Library into a satellite library, an Aldi with books in essence, will ensure the service isn’t used by the people who need it the most,” said Bamber. The council defines a satellite library as “an unstaffed library facility within a shared county council building”, attended by a member of staff once a week “for a limited time”.
“Vital social and life skills are taught in our library. The internet doesn’t care like a librarian does, children do not read ebooks, and a youth group masquerading as a library is not what is needed in our community,” Bamber said.
The Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1964 requires councils to provide the public with a comprehensive and efficient public library service. In its report, Lancashire county council says it is confident that while its proposals “involve the closure of a significant proportion of static libraries, the library offer overall will in fact not be diminished and will continue to exceed the minimum level of service required to provide a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ service”.
It said that the changes it has suggested, which include the development of independent community libraries, are not a “quick fix” or “short-sighted cost savings, rather they are a measured response to a pressing financial imperative”.
Library use in England fell dramatically over last decade, figures show Read more
“The financial pressures that the council faces are unprecedented and more than ever those pressures mean that cost-effective solutions must be identified to be able to finance a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service,” says the report. “There is no easy, off the shelf solution which will allow the service to continue in its current form without having to achieve savings … The library service as a whole, as described in the report, taking account of the continued use of mobile libraries, ‘satellites’, the home library service and virtual library service, with a greater emphasis on a digital offer, will ensure that a sustainable 21st century library service can continue to be delivered.”
“Our aim is to find a solution that still gives everyone in Lancashire good access to good services, despite the pressures on the council’s budget,” said county councillor David Borrow, deputy leader of Lancashire county council and portfolio holder for finance. “We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to respond to the consultation – their feedback has been invaluable in helping to shape the final proposals and the cabinet will be giving the report careful consideration.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/31/lancashire-county-council-library-closures
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/5eb4c6d620161a3345b9a635c7fc74d6c2b4e993a3b746aad660bc486a48230f.json
|
|
[
"Diane Taylor"
] | 2016-08-26T13:14:50 | null | 2016-08-25T23:01:03 |
Council leaders refuse to back proposal amid fears Ealing and Charing Cross hospitals could lose A&E and other services as focus shifts to ‘virtual’ care
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsociety%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fplan-to-transform-nhs-could-led-to-downgrade-of-major-london-hospitals.json
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en
| null |
Plan to 'transform' NHS could lead to downgrade of major London hospitals
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Council leaders have refused to sign up to a plan to “transform” NHS services amid fears two major London hospitals, Ealing and Charing Cross, are to be downgraded and will lose their A&E units and other acute services, the Guardian can reveal.
Plans being developed around England to tackle the NHS funding crisis involve increasing focus on “virtual” and outpatient care, and internal documents show there are plans in north-west London to close or downgrade its acute hospitals from nine to five.
Both west London hospitals are highly valued by local residents and have been the subject of campaigns to save them when they were threatened with closures in the past.
NHS plans radical cuts to fight growing deficit in health budget Read more
Leaders at both Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham councils say they are determined that these hospitals should remain open with their A&E and operating surgeries and so have refused to sign up to the north-west London sustainability and transformation plan (STP), which is one of 44 such plans in development around England.
Critics of the plans fear that up to 500 acute beds could be lost if these hospitals are closed or downgraded.
The majority of the 44 plans – described by NHS England as internal documents – have not been published. The Guardian has seen two of the plans.
The STP for North-West London Collaboration of Clinical Commissioning Groups advocates:
• Reducing acute hospitals from the current nine in north-west London to five and reducing acute admissions by a third. The document says “... consolidate acute services onto five sites (the consolidation of acute services to fewer sites is not supported by the London boroughs of Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham)”.
• The document also states that to replace the acute hospital closures there will be a “local hospital model” introduced. This has not yet been fully defined but is likely to be minor injuries/out of hours GP centres, rehab beds for elderly people after accidents, but no A&E, no medical or surgical beds, and no operating theatres.
• Making parts of the NHS “virtual” rather than using physical buildings for some consultations, and selling off some buildings that would become surplus to requirements as a result.
• Revolutionising the outpatient model by using technology to reduce face to face consultations by up to 40%.
• Give patients phone or face to face coaching to treat themselves.
Some of the proposals have support from experts and NHS professionals, as there are huge pressures on budgets as the UK copes with an ageing population.
However, the document says “unsurprisingly there are many risks to the achievement” of the ambitions in the plans.
Steve Cowan, leader of Hammersmith & Fulham council, told the Guardian that NHS officials were being forced to drive through the changes by the government. “We condemn the Tory government for drawing up these plans. This is about closing hospitals and getting capital receipts. It’s a cynical rehash of earlier plans and is about the breaking up and selling off of the NHS. It will lead to a loss of vital services and will put lives at risk.”
He added: “Our job is to protect the NHS and this plan is about dismantling it. This document is an affront to the sensibilities of the people of north-west London.”
Julian Bell, leader of Ealing council, said: “We refused to sign up to the STP plans because we do not support the closure of Ealing and Charing Cross acute hospitals … We have made it abundantly clear that we will campaign until our last breath to save Ealing and Charing Cross hospitals. We do support some of the proposals for more integrated health and social care but we feel we will be punished for not signing up to these plans.”
The document seen by the Guardian does not detail numbers of beds facing cuts in the two London hospitals. When asked why no numbers were specified for planned bed closures in the document, London North-West Healthcare NHS trust said: “The STP does not focus on beds because this ignores the fact that we are trying to deliver the best possible care for people, with no unnecessary delays or waits and with expanded services in the community to prevent avoidable admissions.”
The plan is regarded as one of the most detailed and comprehensive STPs produced so far and a strong indication of the government’s future plans for a radical transformation of the NHS.
NHS officials told the Guardian that any individual local council that chose not to engage with NHS partners would forgo the opportunity to join up social care and health services more effectively, but that would be their choice.
The risks highlighted in the plan include a failure to shift enough acute care out of hospitals, a possible collapse of the private care-home market and a failure to get people to take responsibility for their own health.
Council officials claim that pressure was exerted on them to sign off an executive summary of the draft plans quickly without seeing the full document. NHS officials have denied this.
The north-west London STP states that the demand for healthcare is projected to rise with an expected 53% increase in cancer cases by 2030 as well as an increase in conditions of old age such as dementia, yet the significant reduction in hospitals and acute beds is deemed the best way forward.
NHS England believes the STP process will bring many wider benefits including more joined-up care and that there is evidence to show care closer to home has advantages.
The pace of the planned changes is alarming critics. The north-west London plan states that changes need to be delivered “at scale and pace” in order to have a financially sustainable system by 2020.
John Lister, secretary of Keep the NHS Public, said: “The draft plan for north-west London really is a shocker. The assumptions they are making in this document are just enormous. No services anywhere will be safe with these plans. NHS managers are quite desperate when faced with massive and growing deficits, and are resorting to untested plans which will target the most vulnerable and the least mobile people.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/26/plan-to-transform-nhs-could-led-to-downgrade-of-major-london-hospitals
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f3e54d98c248616b374f3b117e5a1ad783aaf6035646b09170cd88bb3fede8c2.json
|
|
[
"Photograph",
"Sam Hobson Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Scott Portelli Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Lance Van De Vyver Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Iago Leonardo Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Audun Rikardsen Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Isaac Aylward Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Willem Kruger Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Alexandre Hec Wildlife Photographer Of The Year",
"Dhyey Shah Wildlife Photographer Of The Year"
] | 2016-08-31T00:57:44 | null | 2016-08-30T23:01:13 |
From a curious fox to a hungry hornbill, these stunning scenes represent some of the world’s best nature photography
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2F2016-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-finalists.json
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en
| null |
2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalists
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Splitting the catch by Audun Rikardsen (Norway)
Sometimes it’s the fishing boats that look for the killer whales and humpbacks, hoping to locate the shoals of herring that migrate to these Arctic Norwegian waters. But in recent winters, the whales have also started to follow the boats. Here a large male killer whale feeds on herring that have been squeezed out of the boat’s closing fishing net. He has learnt the sound that this type of boat makes when it retrieves its gear and homed in on it. The relationship would seem to be a win-win one, but not always
Photograph: Audun Rikardsen/2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year
|
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2016/aug/31/2016-wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-finalists
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f7440fcf833af0d5047281382c119e9d641bca5f695ad29a647ec5f3dc92a430.json
|
|
[
"Rachel Pugh"
] | 2016-08-31T08:50:32 | null | 2016-08-31T08:36:34 |
Dementia United aims to improve care of area’s 30,000 residents with the condition
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fhealthcare-network%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fhow-manchester-plans-best-place-people-dementia.json
|
en
| null |
How Manchester plans to be the best place for people with dementia
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Imagine a pub designed for people with dementia, complete with old beer adverts, games of dominoes and darts, a DJ playing a selection of music from the 50s and regular live entertainment, where people with the diagnosis can feel welcome and those who look after them can receive support.
A pop-up pub like this was set up in Salford recently by the university’s Institute for Dementia as part of Dementia United – the Greater Manchester partnership whose five-year improvement plan aims by 2020 to make Greater Manchester the “best place in the world” for its 30,000 residents with Alzheimer’s and similar conditions. It also wants to reduce dependence on health and care services.
This pub experiment is one of a number of innovations under the umbrella of Dementia United, led by the health and social care trusts enjoying their newly devolved status, and the Alzheimer’s Society. Its 41 partners, including charities, sports organisations and three universities, are working out how to tackle dementia from the perspective of those who live with it.
With 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK (1.3% of the population), according to Alzheimer’s Society figures, the eyes of the UK are focused on Dementia United.
Maxine Power, director of Dementia United, , says: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Dementia is an area with a huge amount of activity, but it is like an orchestra without a conductor. Devolution brings clarity and a focus on care for people in the places where they live, rather than on organisations. Culturally that is a massive shift for our system.”
Dementia United goes way beyond pubs. It is about rejecting a model of care that health professionals agree is neither fit for purpose nor financially viable, and the opportunity to create a new one. Greater Manchester spends £270m a year treating and caring for people with dementia. The figure has not decreased in the past five years, despite many attempts to improve dementia care, and there are 20,000 hospital admissions for the 30,000 people in the area with dementia.
This is is outrageous, says Power. She is adamant that in five years Dementia United will reduce that figure – mainly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and admissions to care homes – by 20%.
This will be guided by five pledges, to be implemented by 2021: improving the lives of dementia patients and their carers by questioning them about their individual needs; reducing variation in care quality (and a diagnosis rate difference between 63% and 90% across the city); the introduction of a key worker for each person with dementia; the redesign of services around users; and access to the best assistive technology.
Dementia United was set up in late 2015 as an “early win” under the devolution of Greater Manchester’s health and social care.
There is dementia knowledge in Manchester to back it. Its three universities formed a dementia research consortium in May 2016 and Prof Alistair Burns, the national clinical director for dementia, is based at Manchester.
Progress is being made. A measurement tool of “lived experience” has been developed, including numerical and qualitative measures of how people live their lives, which can be shared across Greater Manchester’s health systems. Work is under way on a dementia “dashboard” to allow inter-area comparisons and set standards. External evaluation methods of Dementia United are being developed jointly by the universities of Salford and Manchester.
Discussions are going on with Social Finance – a not-for-profit organisation bringing together government, the social sector and the financial community to tackle social problems – to build in additional financial support.
Assistive technology is advancing apace, with Manchester University’s dementia platform evaluating devices, such as watches with accelerometers to measure movement, to establish value for money. Everything in Dementia United must be supported by a business case.
George McNamara, head of policy for the Alzheimer’s Society, is working with Dementia United to make it a reality across Greater Manchester and is receiving inquiries from politicians worldwide, particularly the US. He says: “We are seeing the devolution of powers and funding on an unprecedented scale. What is significant is the scale and the marrying together of a number of political objectives and cultures into one vision.”
Patrick Hall, a fellow in social care policy for the King’s Fund, admires the ambition of Dementia United, but is concerned about its sustainability given the financial climate.
He says : “The locality focus in Dementia United is very welcome and anything that gives impetus to that for the care of people with dementia would be looked on by the King’s Fund very positively. However it is being set up in the context of unprecedented cuts in social care and a decline in the number of community nurses. Only time will tell whether Greater Manchester has got the model right.”
Maxine Power and George McNamara will discuss devolution and dementia at the NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo in Manchester on 8 September NHS staff can attend free of charge. Click here to register.
Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.
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https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/aug/31/how-manchester-plans-best-place-people-dementia
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0b04bf0820e8a9669d866dc29f64ddc8514e2038fa91624dc43dcd5c030e5dad.json
|
|
[
"Jim Powell",
"Greg Whitmore",
"Photograph",
"Gabrielle Lurie Afp Getty Images",
"Joe Raedle Getty Images",
"Spencer Platt Getty Images",
"Aaron P Bernstein Reuters",
"Jae C Hong Ap",
"Kai Pfaffenbach Reuters",
"Dave Hunt Epa"
] | 2016-08-26T13:24:55 | null | 2016-08-20T09:00:53 |
The Rio Olympics, wildfires in Europe, the continuing violence in Aleppo – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fartanddesign%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Faug%2F20%2Fthe-20-photographs-of-the-week.json
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en
| null |
The 20 photographs of the week
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Jamaica’s Usain Bolt looks back at Andre De Grasse of Canada as they compete in the semi-final of the men’s 100m. Bolt got off to a slow start behind rival Justin Gatlin but surged ahead in the final seconds. Although Bolt’s time didn’t break any records, his win makes him the first athlete to win three successive 100m titles. Click here to see an interactive on how Bolt made history with his third 100m gold medal victory
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/aug/20/the-20-photographs-of-the-week
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en
| 2016-08-20T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/608ba70c818c872d280703f11373c099cfb8928b08bf4313152e50b496fb1f5e.json
|
|
[
"Associated Press In Toronto"
] | 2016-08-26T20:51:03 | null | 2016-08-26T19:44:25 |
Man who was a suspect in a string of Canadian bank robberies was charged on Friday after a bloody attack that left three people dead in a middle-class suburb
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Ffake-beard-bandit-charged-toronto-crossbow-attack-canada.json
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| null |
Man called the Fake Beard Bandit charged over Toronto crossbow attack
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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A man once dubbed the Fake Beard Bandit as a suspect in a string of bank robberies and due to be married in three weeks has been charged in connection with a bloody crossbow attack that left three people dead in a middle-class Toronto suburb.
Wearing white coveralls and fumbling with his fingers, Brett Ryan, 35, of Toronto, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder during a brief court appearance. He was remanded in custody until 2 September. Details of the proceedings, including the names of the victims, cannot be reported due to a publication ban.
Police have released few details about the killings or what might have motivated them. The relationship between the accused and the three victims – two men and a woman – is not known.
Ryan lived in an upscale waterfront condo that was evacuated on Thursday after police responded to a report of a suspicious package at about the same time they were dealing with the east-end killings. The two incidents were related, police said, though they offered no details on the link.
In 2008, Ryan was arrested in the case of the Fake Beard Bandit, and charged with numerous counts of robbery, wearing a disguise and possessing dangerous weapons. The charges related to a string of bank robberies in Toronto and nearby Durham region, in which a man showed a teller a note indicating he was armed and demanded cash. In that case, Ryan was arrested after going into a bank wearing a false beard and carrying pepper spray, police said at the time. It was not immediately clear what became of the charges.
Social media profiles show the accused was engaged to a registered physiotherapist. They were to be married in Hamilton on 16 September. The couple, according to their registry page, met three years ago on a blind date in downtown Toronto.
Thursday’s crossbow killings shocked the otherwise tranquil, tree-lined neighborhood as police cordoned off the immediate area.
Vijaya Cruz, whose house backs on to the bungalow where the incident took place, said she was home with her husband on Thursday afternoon when he heard a commotion.
“My husband said he heard some screaming, someone was screaming there,” she said. “Then he said he heard ‘bang, bang, bang’ noise, and then someone was saying ‘calm down.’”
Cruz said she soon saw the flashing lights of a fire truck, which was among the emergency crews that responded to the scene. Police later knocked on her door and told her three people had died in an incident involving a crossbow.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/26/fake-beard-bandit-charged-toronto-crossbow-attack-canada
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/25e4443d664afff4daed7a7ef9acaa6b34585bffc4eb4ef343d452ca2fcaa725.json
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|
[
"Mark Jenkins"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:13 | null | 2016-08-25T15:41:26 |
The south-eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming takes a week of backpacking to hike in and out and is populated by wolves and grizzly bears
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America’s most remote site - the undiscovered side of Yellowstone
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The most remote place in the contiguous 48 states, the farthest you can go to get away from it all – the only place you can be more than 20 miles from a road – is deep in the south-eastern corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
I discovered this after spending an afternoon at the University of Wyoming’s Geographic Information Systems Science Center, where geographer and GIS specialist Shawn Lanning explained that he’d discovered it by using “a spatial analyst extension to access the Euclidean distance tool, and a Lambert conformal conic projection, with a raster 100 meters x 100 meters cell parameter”. I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. Minutes later, he printed out a topographic map with a red dot dead center. That was my destination. The question was: could I actually get there? And could I do it without having uncomfortably close encounters with the sometimes sour, hirsute locals: grizzlies.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park Photograph: Diana Robinson Photography/Getty Images
It wasn’t going to be easy – it would take a week of backpacking to hike in and out – but I’d done several long trips into Yellowstone and thoroughly looked forward to this one. I chose Dave Gaillard, a long, lean, carrot-headed scientist as my partner. An indefatigable backpacker, Gaillard was a specialist in endangered species, namely the wolf, wolverine, grizzly and lynx. These are species that only thrive where there are very few humans. All four of them had been exterminated from 95% of their natural habitat, only surviving in the most remote pockets of America’s backcountry. The lynx and wolverine were already so rare that the chances of us seeing either was small. But we had high hopes of spotting wolves and, at a distance, grizzlies.
Our plan was simple: hike through the largest roadless area in the lower US, an 80-mile jaunt exploring the most unknown part of our most well-known national park.
“Best watch yerselves! Seen 11 grizzlies in seven hours!” A tobacco-chewing wrangler
We started on the eastern edge of the Washakie Wilderness, an hour’s drive east of Cody, Wyoming. It was late October, snow had fallen and the hunting season was in full swing. We weren’t on the trail 10 minutes before a wrangler high on a black horse and trailing six mules trotted by.
“Best watch yerselves!” shouted the wrangler, pushing a plum-size wad of chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth, “Seen 11 grizzlies in seven hours!”
“How far down the trail?” asked Gaillard excitedly.
“Just a little ways back there was a sow with a cub. Reared up mad as hell and swatted at my dog.”
Dave and I expected to see bears. We wanted to see them. We’d both spent months in grizzly bear country, from the Beartooth Wilderness in Montana to Katmai National Park in Alaska. Grizzly bears have little fear of humans and often use foot trails like the one we were on.
As we hiked, we talked loudly so as not to surprise a griz on the path. We had bear spray and knew how to use it.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A grizzly bear sow and her cubs walk through the underbrush in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
Photograph: NPS Photo/Alamy
At the time of Lewis and Clark, it is estimated that there were over 50,000 grizzlies in North America. Today there are less than 2,000 in the lower 48, most of them roaming in or between Yellowstone and Glacier National Park
We came upon the tracks of a sow and cub in the snow a few miles later, but the bears were long gone. We camped that first night in a meadow, hanging our food in a tree. The night air was cold and pine-scented and it felt good to sleep on the ground.
•••
The next morning there was frost in the meadow and a skim of ice on the pond. My hands froze filling our pot but soon warmed up clamped around a scalding cup of hot chocolate. It’s cliché, but camping does simplify your life. Your biggest concerns are staying warm, staying dry, eating, moving. It is a rare opportunity to live like humans lived for thousands of years.
It is a rare opportunity to live like humans did for thousands of years
Back on the trail we discovered an enormous, steaming pile of bear scat not 100 yards from where our tent had been. We spent the whole day gamely walking through mud in the low country and snow in the high country, our feet getting soaked despite waterproof boots and gaiters.
Dave regaled me with stories of critters that inhabited the landscape. How wolverines build snow caves as far as they can get from humans and have their kits in the winter, which are born snow white. How the primary diet of the lynx is the snowshoe hare, and without it, the population dies.
“There probably aren’t more than 300 wolverines left in the Rockies,” he lamented.
The next night we camped just outside the Yellowstone boundary on a bluff that burned during the 1988 fires. Already, tall, brilliant saplings were taking over the blackened totem poles of their ancestors.
We made a little fire, just enough to warm our knees and hands, but not enough to alter the starlight pouring down through the trees. We were tired, that good tired, and didn’t speak much. By now, the madness of everyday life was as far off as the Milky Way.
Increase in Yellowstone visitors raises park's concerns over wildlife and safety Read more
•••
The next day, we arrived at Thorofare Ranger station, the most remote cabin in all national parks outside Alaska.
A park ranger came out and shook our hands and said “more than three million people visit Yellowstone every year, but probably not more than a hundred get this far back!”
He wanted to know if we’d seen any bears.
“Just scat,” Dave said with disappointment.
“Well then you must be doing everything right.”
At dusk we forded the freezing Thorofare Creek, bare assed and barefoot, and set up our tent amid enormous wolf tracks in the snow.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pack of gray timber wolves at snowy Yellowstone. Photograph: David Parsons/Getty Images
“Wolves once roamed the entire continent, from Panama to Prudhoe Bay,” Dave told me that night. But due to government bounties and predator control policies designed to help ranchers, the last original Yellowstone wolf was killed in 1926. Then, over vociferous objections of ranchers, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995.
“Today there are an estimated 1700 wolves in the Northern Rockies,” Dave said. “They are a keystone species.”
A keystone species is one that directly impacts the balance of the ecosystem. In Yellowstone, the extermination of wolves caused the elk population to explode. With no wolves to disperse them, elk chewed down the aspen saplings and willows along streams, which depleted the food source for the beavers, reducing their numbers.
Today, what visitors to Yellowstone most want to see – more than elk or buffalo or even geysers – is a wolf
Fewer beavers caused a drop in beaver dams, which reduced the amount of cool, shaded water, which reduced the fish populations. Fewer willows caused a drop in migrating neotropical songbirds.
“Everything is connected,” said Dave, poking the fire with a stick.
Today, what visitors to Yellowstone most want to see – more than elk or buffalo or even geysers – is a wolf.
That night, after days of hard hiking, I slept like a dead man. I awoke to a deep-throated howl. The roar was so close and so loud I thought Gaillard was having me on. I crawled from my tent to find him pumping the camp stove, his furred red face grinning ear to ear.
“Quite a wake-up call isn’t it!” he said. “Not 50 yards away. Biggest wolf I’ve seen in my life.”
Envious, I scanned the valley. It was twilight, the stars still vanishing into a lavender sky, straight dead pines white with frost.
I didn’t see a wolf. I saw wild, open, primeval country.
After that first howl, we assumed a portent silence. Wolves have an acute sense of hearing. I knew they were watching us right now, through the gloaming, but we couldn’t see them. Like dogs and cats, wolves have a thin, reflective film inside their retinas, called the tapetum lucidum, which gives them night vision.
Dave headed off to break a hole in the ice and fill our pot while I lowered the food bag out of the tree. A short time later we were standing over the dead coals of last night’s fire, stomping our frozen boots, digging into our bowls of hot granola and watching the sunlight gild the surrounding summits.
Then the gorgeous howl came back. This time it was much farther away and echoed across the still-shaded valley. Another howl answered it from the stony mountainside to the northwest, then another from the dark line of forest to the southeast.
The wolves had triangulated us.
Black as night, the wolves looked right at me
“This is the Delta pack,” said Dave, “could be as many as a dozen.”
We were standing in the most remote place in the lower 48, two small, pink creatures inside a prodigious sanctuary. The wolves commenced to sing. Perhaps three or four in a group, a call and refrain. Dave threw his arms back like a preacher.
“Now this is Yellowstone!”
They howled together in thundering choruses, bringing music to the morning. Individual voices could be distinguished, just like in a choir. Numerous basses, two baritones, even a tenor trying out her young pipes. They ululated for perhaps five minutes, then abruptly stopped.
I began glassing along a bank of trees to the south from whence the closest howling had come, stopping for some reason on a stand of spruce. I was studying the conifers when two huge wolves stepped out into the open. Black as night, they looked right at me, then loped off through the trees.
I had so desperately wanted to get away, to escape – and I’d done it. But now everything was inverted. Being there in the moment in the mountains with the wolves, I realized we actually hadn’t gotten away from it all, we gotten right into the middle of it. The office and the asphalt are what felt strange now. We had hiked ourselves back in time into an environment that was once common and now barely exists, a place I had imagined to be silent and austere but was in truth songful and profoundly complex.
And is this not the very point of a national park? To reveal a world in which humans are just another species in a beautifully intricate ecosystem.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/25/yellowstone-national-park-wyoming-bears-wolves-remote
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/176e29fa00f54aec2a8057bf4a007ee64517d0d6fd592e103903cd3081113375.json
|
|
[
"Lenore Taylor"
] | 2016-08-30T08:57:37 | null | 2016-08-30T07:53:34 |
Australia’s climate debate is dominated by the the clash between what is necessary and what is possible, but the new report might permit a compromise
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Faustralia-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fclimate-change-authority-split-no-surprise-emissions-trading-direct-action.json
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Climate authority split is no surprise - Australia has fought the same battle for 10 years
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The split in the Climate Change Authority is a rerun of the climate policy fight Australia has been having for the past 10 years – the clash between what is undeniably necessary and what is politically possible.
The CCA report, to be released on Wednesday, lands exactly on the spot where the major parties might, just might, be able to reach a compromise and finally end the barren years of climate policy “war”, policy reversal and time-wasting gridlock.
Climate Change Authority splits over ETS report commissioned by Coalition Read more
Guardian Australia understands the report recommends a type of emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector where generators are penalised for polluting above an emissions-intensity baseline.
It’s the policy Labor took to the last election and exactly what most observers assumed the Coalition’s Direct Action would morph into after next year’s review shows what everyone already knows, that it isn’t fit for purpose in its current form.
The CCA is also understood to recommend a strengthening of the current “safeguards mechanism” for other big polluters.
The dissenters argue the authority is supposed to make recommendations based on what is scientifically necessary and leave it up to the politicians to make the political compromises – and that the recommended policy cannot meet the increasingly ambitious greenhouse gas reductions that Australia agreed to in Paris last year.
They are probably right.
But over the past decade the undeniably necessary task of doing our part to avert global warming has become ever-bigger and the politically-possible solutions seem to have shrivelled. We’ve actually done very little.
Coalition's policies go around in circles instead of finding the sensible centre | Lenore Taylor Read more
The new energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, started out in his new job saying Direct Action needed no change at all because it was “very successful”. An authority report pushing for change – backed by board members mostly appointed by the Coalition – could help make the case that that starting point was never tenable.
The last time a politically possible policy was defeated because it wouldn’t achieve the scientifically-necessary greenhouse gas cuts was when the parliament voted down Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. And that started the long and sorry story that led us here.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/30/climate-change-authority-split-no-surprise-emissions-trading-direct-action
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/9df5a28dcfd996f365482f1a789e9ae2d27b196a6ff5f1ba8158b52ae4771eb9.json
|
|
[
"Alice Ross",
"John Crace"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:01 | null | 2016-08-23T09:25:45 |
Demonstrators focus on driving up policing costs as anti-bovine TB programme expanded across south-west England
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fbadger-cull-protesters-change-tactics-in-response-to-expansion.json
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Badger cull protesters change tactics in response to expansion
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Protesters against the badger cull in England have said they plan to change tactics by undertaking direct action to drive up policing costs, after reports of an expansion of culling to new areas.
The BBC has reported that the cull will be extended to five new areas in south-west England – south Devon, north Devon, north Cornwall, west Dorset and south Herefordshire – where badger shooting will begin in early September as part of government efforts to eradicate bovine TB.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said no decision had yet been made on where culls might take place, but confirmed that officials were considering new applications.
The shooting of badgers would continue in the areas where it was already taking place, she added. The cull is in its fourth year in Gloucestershire and Somerset and in its second year in Dorset.
Jay Tiernan of the protest group Stop the Cull said: “We have spent the last three years just in the fields ... We haven’t ever once stood outside a farm with a banner or blockaded a road or put locks on to a business’s gates to stop their business from working.”
To date, the campaign has focused on disrupting the killing of badgers by discovering where the shooting would take place and by breaking traps. Tiernan said: “We are going to change that to specifically look at policing costs ... We are going to start looking at making the culls expensive.”
The group has previously been criticised for publishing a list of farmers involved in the cull.
Almost 1,500 badgers were killed during last year’s badger cull, according to Defra. The government described the effort as a success.
The continuation of the cull under Theresa May’s government will disappoint campaigners and scientific experts who had hoped that the policy would be dropped under the new prime minister.
Within days of May entering No 10, a group of scientists, including some of those behind a £50m trial conducted in 2007 that showed culling was not effective at reducing TB in cattle, called on her to end the “failed” policy.
At the time Defra was reported to be considering up to 29 applications across nine counties including Cheshire, Cornwall and Herefordshire.
Bovine TB reportedly led to the slaughter of 36,000 infected cattle in 2015, an increase of about 10% on the year before and costing taxpayers about £100m. But the scientists say the cull has had little effect on the spread of the disease and may even have increased infections.
Professors John Bourne, Rosie Woodroffe and Ranald Munro wrote to May: “We urge you to review the considerable evidence that culling badgers is a risky, costly, and inhumane tool in the fight against bovine TB. We submit to you that expanding this unpromising programme would fly in the face of scientific evidence. We publicly call on you at this time to halt – not expand – the failed badger cull.”
The cull has received the backing of some farmers’ groups. Ross Murray, president of the CLA, which represents farmers and landowners, said: “The badger cull is one important part of a comprehensive strategy which also includes pre- and post-movement testing of cattle, the removal and slaughter of infected animals and vaccination.
“Bovine TB is a devastating disease that is causing misery for dairy and livestock farmers across the countryside. It is vital that all those involved in the cull have the support of local people and law enforcement as they carry out this important task.”
An RSPCA spokesman described the prospect of an extended cull as “alarming”. David Bowles, head of public affairs, said the charity had concerns about the humaneness of shooting badgers, adding: “We don’t believe an extension of the badger cull will solve the problem of bovine TB in cattle. It ignores all the scientific evidence that indicates a cull will not achieve this.”
A Defra spokeswoman said: “Natural England is currently considering applications for further badger control licences as part of the usual licensing process. England has the highest incidence of TB in Europe and that is why we are taking strong action to deliver our 25-year strategy to eradicate the disease and protect the future of our dairy and beef industries.
“Badger control in areas where TB is rife is one part of our long-term plan, which also includes strengthening cattle testing and movement controls and improving biosecurity on farms and when trading.”
Dominic Dyer, the chief executive of the Badger Trust, said: “After four years of badger culling, no one can now doubt that the policy has been a disastrous failure on scientific, cost and humaneness grounds.
“For the new Defra secretary of state, Andrea Leadsom, to ignore the facts and extend this policy into five new areas of the country defies belief.”
Defra has not said when its decision on new applications will be announced.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/badger-cull-protesters-change-tactics-in-response-to-expansion
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en
| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0d0d19ba37caaed86edfa50754a4059805346af0407942868dd89d358f94d3ce.json
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[
"Dr Carrie Ladd"
] | 2016-08-31T10:59:38 | null | 2016-08-31T10:00:34 |
Going online may fill a void for struggling parents, but can the internet’s instant gratification fail to address deeper perinatal problems?
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fblog%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fcan-social-media-help-maternal-mental-health.json
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Can social media help maternal mental health?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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She irritates your parents. She baffles your grandparents. The preoccupied young mum feeding, with one hand, organic sweet potato puree to her eager eight-month-old, and checking her Facebook notifications with her smartphone in the other. A stereotype which would pass for a member of the Modern Tribe and one I’m sure you already recognise. Perhaps she is closer to yourself than you would like to admit.
Postnatal depression: what the baby books don't tell you | Tania Browne Read more
To say that parents will have to adjust to a new way of life when they have a baby is perhaps the most cliched of all understatements. Social contact becomes less face-to-face due to the physical and logistical challenges a new baby brings. Leaving the house for a simple errand becomes a near military operation incorporating sleep schedules, changing supplies, feeding equipment. A spontaneous evening out to the cinema with friends? An impossibility. Text messages become almost nostalgic, phone calls time consuming and social media quickly fills the social void for the new parent, who is likely to be surviving on caffeine, chocolate and very little sleep.
Connecting with people via social media is immediate, with responses often instant. Positive replies can become an addictive gratification, bringing confirmation of the image people want to project of themselves, be it intelligence, charisma or wit. Social media offers an uninhibited space in which people can express themselves freely, bringing with it the bounty of validation of who they are, where they fit within a social circle and their place within a community. Arguably, this is the essence of good mental health and is particularly pertinent when talking about women - and men - when they have a baby.
The elephant in the nursery
Although social media presents an opportunity to make a connection with other new parents who, reassuringly, may be going through the same uncharted newborn territory, it may reveal the elephant in the nursery. The pressure to appear as the perfect parent is omnipresent online, and these platforms are particularly unhelpful when they present the Hollywood edit of parenthood. Carefully crafted sepia-toned Instagram glimpses of yoga mum or zen dad may actually disguise a multitude of imperfect truths. Research has found there are many barriers to disclosure of perinatal mental health problems including embarrassment, stigma and “failure at being perceived as not coping”. What role does social media play in facilitating this unhelpful undermining of confidence and capability of a new parents? Is social media a witness to the development of perinatal mental health problems or a sly accomplice?
My interest in the relationship between social media and maternal mental health has developed during the five years I have been working as a GP, as well the last 18 months working as a clinical fellow for the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). Despite mental health problems during the perinatal time affecting one in five women and one in 10 men, only 50% of these cases are identified, meaning many people are struggling on without receiving appropriate treatment they need. The RCGP is working to raise awareness on these issues, and social media has helped in many of these projects such as #MumTalk in conjunction with Sport Relief , open access e-learning modules in conjunction with Health Education England and most recently the Perinatal Mental Health Toolkit which was launched in July 2016 on the RCGP website.
The toolkit offers more than 300 free resources to help professionals care for those directly affected, as well as information for women who are affected. Social media has helped recruit women with lived experience to contribute in this important work, as well as sharing links across the healthcare online global community.
Shared support
Through this role, I have met many inspiring women who show courage and conviction in telling their stories on blogs, such as Laura Clark @butterflymum83 and Eve @littlemissevec. In sharing their recovery narrative so eloquently, they encourage others to come forward and seek help. There are also Twitter discussion groups, the most established of which is the brilliant #PNDHour (weekly, Wednesdays 8-9pm), which is run by Rosey @PNDandMe and recently hosted by Laura @cooksferryqueen, both of whom have had postnatal depression. This platform in particular is unusual in that health professionals are welcome to contribute – the voice of a woman with expertise through her experience is considered equal to that of a professional expert by training, and both groups can learn much from each others’ contributions. Misconceptions such as “I thought it meant I was a bad mother” and “I didn’t think I could take antidepressants if I was breastfeeding” are commonly challenged, and damaging myths debunked.
However, there is a risk that professional boundaries of the doctor/patient relationship become blurred and less visible to both parties, with unintentional consequences possible. This should not discourage GPs from contributing to these forums but the principles guiding their practice in the consultation room should be maintained on line, as discussed in the RCGP Social Media Highway Code,including respecting privacy, treating others with consideration and maintaining confidentiality. This is in addition to a general consensus within the profession that social media is inappropriate for giving personalised medical advice on an individual basis.
Two in five new dads concerned about mental health problems, survey says Read more
Peer support or trigger trouble?
Another innovative development of digital technology in mental health is online peer support groups. These are often quoted by women with lived experience as an important part of their recovery. One of the most established of these is the one run by the charity Action of Postpartum Psychosis . Importantly, these groups need moderators who have access to training and clinical supervision so they can redirect someone to seek medical help when appropriate and moderate any unhelpful or unkind behaviour from those participating. This kind of forum may carry “trigger warnings”. Triggering is a fairly new phrase for a familiar concept of bringing up negative emotions or memories from other people’s words and is also something to be considered when discussing mental health online. Trolling or cyberbullying, misinformation and misdiagnosis are all potential risks from using social media to discuss maternal mental health. But the prospect of reaching so many women who are socially isolated, facing self-stigma or just living with undetected illness and encouraging them to come forward is a persuasive argument for exploring this area further.
Social media has been a great driver for recognition of Perinatal mental health,raising professional and public awareness and influencing policymakers and commissioners - most recently future investment from NHS England has been promised. The full benefit of the public and healthcare professionals using social media in the ways described here are only just becoming apparent and are yet to be fully understood, with a quality evidence base slowly developing. So whilst social media is far from a panacea in terms of helping women facing perinatal mental health problems, there is great scope for health professionals to further exploit its full potential.
References:
Khan L. Falling through the gaps: perinatal mental health and general practice. 2015; London: Royal College of General Practitioners and Centre for Mental Health.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Clinical Guideline 192. Antenatal and postnatal mental health: clinical management and service guidance. 2014; London: NICE.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/aug/31/can-social-media-help-maternal-mental-health
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/8f551f944ec90aabd540b62bbbbeec950d135aa1ca4182716be407a47deacc86.json
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[
"Sam Levin"
] | 2016-08-30T20:52:33 | null | 2016-08-30T17:58:06 |
Statements mark first time Aaron Persky has addressed effort to unseat him over his light sentencing of Brock Turner, who was convicted of sexual assault
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Judge in Stanford sexual assault trial launches campaign to fight recall effort
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The judge in the Stanford sexual assault case has launched a campaign to fight the high-profile effort to unseat him, declaring that he has a “reputation for being fair to both sides” in his first public comments on the controversy.
Judge Aaron Persky, who received widespread backlash for his sentencing of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, is campaigning to stay in office and has launched the website RetainJudgePersky.com where he states that he is a strong advocate for “judicial independence”.
“I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not to appease politicians or ideologues. When your own rights and property are at stake, you want the judge to make a fair and lawful decision, free from political influence,” he wrote on the site.
The northern California judge’s statements mark the first time he has directly addressed the well-funded initiative to recall him from office over his light sentencing of Turner, who was convicted of multiple felony counts of sexual assault. Persky is also soliciting donations on the site.
Judge in Stanford sexual assault case faces recall effort over light sentence Read more
Persky sentenced the 20-year-old athlete to six months in county jail, which is lighter than the minimum of two years in state prison prescribed by law. Turner was caught sexually assaulting an unconscious woman by a dumpster outside an on-campus fraternity party, but throughout the trial, he argued that the encounter was consensual.
Turner, who went to jail in June, is scheduled to be released on Friday after serving only half of his sentence. In California, inmates with good behavior are often released early.
The case made headlines across the globe after the victim released a powerful impact statement detailing the trauma of the trial.
Michele Landis Dauber, a Stanford law professor and family friend of the victim, subsequently organized a formal initiative to remove Persky from office, arguing that the Santa Clara County judge failed to treat assault as a serious crime.
Prosecutors later removed Persky from a new sexual assault case, saying they lacked confidence in him. Last week, the judge took the unusual step of removing himself from all criminal cases and transferring to civil court, but Dauber said the recall campaign would continue.
The judge’s opponents have argued that he has repeatedly been too lenient towards men convicted of sex crimes and violence against women, including when he presided over a sexual assault case in civil court.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Activists hold a rally before delivering more than a million signatures to the California commission on judicial performance calling for the removal of Judge Aaron Persky from the bench. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP
But Persky’s supporters, including public defenders, former judges and law school professors, have argued that the recall is misguided and that judges should not be removed from office for a single decision. His defenders further fear that the push for harsher sentencing could lead to more severe punishments for low-income defendants and people of color disproportionately caught up in the criminal justice system.
On Monday, lawmakers approved legislation inspired by the Turner trial that seeks to make prison a mandatory punishment in cases of sexual assault involving unconscious victims.
On his website, Persky notes that he has served in public office for nearly 20 years, first as a criminal prosecutor.
“I prosecuted hate crimes and sexually violent predators,” he said. “As a judge, I have heard thousands of cases. I have a reputation for being fair to both sides.”
Persky, who has served as a judge for the past 12 years, noted that he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford and that he is married with two children.
The site also features links about judicial independence, including one letter from retired judges defending Persky, which says judges may be recalled for illegal or unethical conduct, but that “the essence of judicial independence is that judges must be able to make decisions without fear of political repercussions”.
Dauber said on Tuesday said Persky’s pattern of unjust sentencing warranted the recall.
“Judicial independence is really important … but in order to be exercised freely and appropriately, it has to be exercised without bias.”
Persky has raised $3,600 in contributions for his campaign, according to the Mercury News.
Dauber said the recall campaign has raised more than $250,000 in pledged funds and cash.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/30/stanford-sexual-assault-judge-aaron-persky-recall-campaign
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1717b8b727ce296d73063f1386c4077d3b750b841bee16945e721e4f94796df6.json
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[
"Daniel Taylor"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:17 | null | 2016-08-25T19:35:05 |
Barcelona have been City’s opponents four times in three Champions League years and won the lot – with an aggregate of 7-2
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Manchester City left to hanker for the beginners’ luck of Leicester
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www.theguardian.com
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By now it is just becoming a standard part of the calendar for Manchester City, greeted with the familiar rolling of eyes and complaints behind the scenes that they feel cursed. This is the sixth season they have appeared in the Champions League and once again they find themselves casting envious glances towards the other English teams in the competition. The déjà vu is overwhelming and, in particular, they could be forgiven for looking at Leicester City and wondering why they never had the same kind of beginners’ luck.
Champions League draw: Man City face Barcelona and Celtic, Arsenal play PSG Read more
It is not entirely misfortune, of course, when Leicester assured themselves of a more comfortable draw by winning the Premier League, thus entering the draw among the top seeds and going into Group G with Porto, Club Brugge and Copenhagen – the perfect blend of great cities for supporters to visit and opponents the Premier League champions may fancy themselves to beat.
All the same Pep Guardiola must be thinking the same as Manuel Pellegrini before him, and Roberto Mancini too, given the first side Manchester City were paired against was Barcelona and soon afterwards it was confirmed they would be playing Bundesliga opposition once again, in keeping with every season they have been involved in the tournament.
Guardiola was at the Camp Nou, watching from the stands as the manager of Bayern Munich, the last time City were there and the occasion is still memorable for the moment Lionel Messi slipped the ball through James Milner’s legs and the former Barcelona manager could be seen rocking with laughter. If the nutmeg is the ultimate indignity for a professional footballer, Milner and Fernandinho suffered greatly that night. Messi and Neymar seemed to be taking it in turns to trick their opponents.
City have played Barcelona four times in the past three seasons and lost on every occasion, with an aggregate score of 7-2. This is the first time they have met so early in the competition and they are probably entitled to feel hard done by when Group C will also involve Borussia Mönchengladbach, possibly the hardest opponent among the third pot of teams.
Leicester, in contrast, will be playing the third-placed team in last season’s Portuguese league, plus two other opponents with little reputation in the competition, and this is now a common theme for the side Guardiola has inherited. Last season they were drawn against Juventus, Mönchengladbach and Sevilla, the Europa League champions. The year before that it was Bayern Munich, Roma and CSKA Moscow.
Even in the year 2013, when the draw was slightly kinder than usual, City were still paired with Bayern, just as they were two years earlier. Or consider the opposition in 2012: Borussia Dortmund, Ajax and Real Madrid, the champions of Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.
On a more positive note Mönchengladbach finished only fourth in last season’s Bundesliga, losing 13 out of their 34 games and finishing 33 points behind Bayern, while City should not be too alarmed about the fixtures with Celtic – two games, incidentally, when Uefa’s rules stipulate there is nothing to stop the on-loan Patrick Roberts turning out against his parent club. Celtic tend to raise their game in the so-called Battle of Britain fixtures but Guardiola’s main concern will inevitably be facing Barcelona, a tie that will also have Joe Hart’s replacement, Claudio Bravo, quickly reunited with his former employer.
As for the other Premier League teams, Arsenal should be confident of maintaining their record of qualifying for the knockout stages in each of the past 16 years, even if Paris Saint-Germain will be difficult opponents in a group that also features Basel and Ludogorets Razgrad, champions of Switzerland and Bulgaria.
Champions League: How the groups shape up for 2016-17 Read more
This will be the first time since Blackburn Rovers had their solitary experience of the Champions League 21 years ago that England have no previous champions representing the country and, in the absence of Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea, who have nine European Cups between them, it is doubtful if the Premier League teams are viewed with quite so much caution by their opponents as in previous years.
Tottenham, nonetheless, must feel their chances of making it to the knockout stages have been enhanced by their own draw, having managed to miss any of the teams with realistic credentials of winning the tournament. CSKA Moscow were the team everyone wanted from the top seeds, even if it means a long midweek trip, while Mauricio Pochettino’s side will know it could have been much worse when they look at their other assignments in Group E against Bayer Leverkusen and Monaco. Manchester City, with their hard-luck stories, can testify to that, too.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/25/manchester-city-champions-league-draw-leicester-arsenal-tottenham
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c4aab4a5a84468d54ada6bf9b6f3cb285eac675a2d6a388d441004ea3552521b.json
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[
"Daisy Buchanan"
] | 2016-08-26T13:14:59 | null | 2016-08-26T08:30:14 |
More than 75% of UK adults own a smartphone, but a quarter never use it for calls: manners are transforming the way millennials communicate
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Wondering why that millennial won't take your phone call? Here's why
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www.theguardian.com
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When I was seven, I joined the Brownies. At the time, becoming part of Baden-Powell’s famous organisation felt very grown up. However, when I reflect on the experience, I realise that being a Brownie is worth doing only if you start when you’re very young. It’s full of peculiar rituals, and only now that I am 31, and no one incentivises me to do anything by offering me a special badge, do I recognise how odd some of them were
One in four UK smartphone owners does not make phone calls weekly Read more
We were given badges for applying bandages to our ungrazed knees, remembering to keep a sewing kit in the pockets of our culottes, and successfully using a payphone to make a call. I’ll always remember the day 24 Brownies were walked into the nearest village, and each given a 10pto call our mums and tell them that we were still at Brownies, everything was fine and that we would see them in 40 minutes.
From that moment, I saw telephone conversations as exciting events. They were fraught with romance, glamour and danger, and could only be approached if you were under strict supervision, unless you were a proper adult. I would have been overwhelmed if anyone had predicted that when I was an adult, I would have a portable phone for my exclusive use. I think I would have collapsed with shock if I had been told that I could use it to read books, play games, argue with strangers and identify vaguely recognisable songs that were being played in bars. If someone had said that I’d barely bother to make calls at all, I’d have told them they were a liar. But it’s true. More than three-quarters of all adults in the UK own smartphones, but 25% don’t use them to make calls.
Can we blame millennials for the demise of the phone call? Most of the twenty- and thirtysomethings I socialise with would rather suck Donald Trump’s toe than make or receive a call in order to have a chat. We’re in touch with each other constantly, but written communication allows us to participate in the conversation at the pace we choose. We don’t have to worry about misreading anyone’s tone when the words are laid out in black and white.
However, it seems that phone-call phobia definitely isn’t confined to a single generation. Jeremy Corbyn’s aides complained that they were unable to reach their boss on the telephone this week to discuss “traingate” because he was busy making jam.
Perhaps it’s not the phone calls themselves we object to, but the feeling of being ambushed by them
Many millennials struggle with mental health, and we’ve been dubbed the “anxious generation”. As an anxiety sufferer, nothing fills me with dread and terror like a phone call from a withheld number. The trouble is that the issue exacerbates itself. Because we don’t call for chats, I assume that whenever anyone does try to reach me on the telephone, it’s because of a bad, sad, serious emergency and I need to be reached urgently, possibly for a telling off. So I fling the phone from my hand, as if it’s a live snake, and then get a voicemail from someone who was just ringing for a catch-up. “But it’s not urgent, we can just do it on WhatsApp.”
Perhaps it’s not phone calls themselves we object to, but the feeling of being ambushed by them. One worker in their 20s told the Wall Street Journal: “Calling someone without emailing first can make it seem as though you’re prioritising your needs over theirs.”
That’s right. The millennial attitude towards phone calls is actually about manners. We’ve grown up with so many methods of communication available to us, and we’ve gravitated towards the least intrusive ones because we know how it feels to be digitally prodded on a range of different channels. Speaking on the telephone is an event, and we don’t want to avoid it – we just need to be sure that both parties have a chance to prepare for it. We want a chance to compose and edit our thoughts, in the way we do when we’re writing them down.
There is an element of mindfulness involved too. Thanks to our phones, we’re never doing nothing, and if we’re surprised by a phone call we might struggle to give the caller our full attention. If we know when to expect it, we can at least try to focus in a way that we’re not always capable of during other moments of our lives.
It’s fair to say that young people can still see the value of a phone call, but perhaps we understand it as something serious and significant, to be used in much more specific contexts and shared with a select group of people. We all have an inner circle who would be allowed to interrupt us for a chat when we’re in the middle of making jam. Everyone else will have to make do with a message.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/whatsapp-phone-calls-smartphone-messaging-millennials
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ddd094e207bc5359a1ee68ac9929298d82a09cc70e43573fa7050ecb6bacf8a9.json
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[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-31T10:59:35 | null | 2016-08-31T10:10:21 |
Cameras outside the International Space Station captures views from 257 miles above the Earth of three Hurricanes Lester, Madeline and Gaston
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fspace-station-captures-pacific-atlantic-hurricanes-timelapse-video.json
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Space station captures Pacific and Atlantic hurricanes - timelapse video
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Cameras outside the International Space Station capture views from 257 miles above the Earth of three powerful tropical systems churning across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans on Tuesday. Hurricanes Lester, Madeline and Gaston all had winds of 100mph or more
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2016/aug/31/space-station-captures-pacific-atlantic-hurricanes-timelapse-video
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6a17d3bb35da94a8c08f89690ae326dd315ec00ecbb969e27c842a2f570890c4.json
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[
"Virginia Wallis"
] | 2016-08-26T13:29:04 | null | 2016-08-18T06:00:25 |
Can he sell his share or force a sale of the property?
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F18%2Finherited-house-brother-wants-to-sell.json
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Four of us inherited a house from our mother - now my brother wants to sell
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Q When my mother passed away in 2012, she left her property to me and my three brothers – the deeds have been changed accordingly.
One of my brothers has lived in the property for around 25 years. We all had a verbal agreement with my mother that he could live there as long as he needed to.
We understand that one of my other brothers is now seeking to sell the house. Can he sell his share or borrow against it, and can he force the sale of the property? What rights would the brother living in there have? JW
A As one of the joint owners of the property, the brother who is living in the house has the right to occupy it, as do you and your other brothers. He can’t be made to leave the home without an exclusion order from the courts, which your other brother would have to apply for. But simply wanting to sell a property isn’t seen as a good reason for granting such an order as it is usually used to remove someone who is physically abusive to another occupant of a jointly owned home.
The brother who wants to sell, on the other hand, does not have the right to sell the whole property without everyone’s agreement. If you each own a distinct share in the property – and so are tenants in common rather than joint tenants – in theory, the brother who wants to sell could try to sell his share without your permission. But unless you and your other brothers would be happy and able to buy him out, it’s unlikely he would find a willing buyer.
He can’t force you all to sell the property, but he can ask a court to order a sale. This can happen only after he has formally written to all of you – or gets a solicitor to write – setting out his case for selling the property and giving you the chance to reply with the reasons why you don’t want to do so.
If he did go to court, it would consider a number of factors including the intention of your mother from whom you inherited and the purpose for which the property is owned. If your brother were to go to the expense of going to court, it would be wise to use a solicitor yourselves who would be able to advise on how to formalise the verbal agreement you had with your mother about her wishes for your other brother to use the property as his home after her death.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/18/inherited-house-brother-wants-to-sell
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en
| 2016-08-18T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ff61fb2f618178ce880e1fda3abece7aa642ae5ffbad7ccd06ca7a03f9aa4fe6.json
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[
"Ian Sample"
] | 2016-08-27T16:58:57 | null | 2008-05-12T00:00:00 |
Food, water and energy shortages will unleash public unrest and international conflict, Professor John Beddington will tell a conference tomorrow
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Beddington: World faces 'perfect storm' of problems by 2030
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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A "perfect storm" of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions, the UK government's chief scientist will warn tomorrow.
In a major speech to environmental groups and politicians, Professor John Beddington, who took up the position of chief scientific adviser last year, will say that the world is heading for major upheavals which are due to come to a head in 2030.
He will tell the government's Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster that the growing population and success in alleviating poverty in developing countries will trigger a surge in demand for food, water and energy over the next two decades, at a time when governments must also make major progress in combating climate change.
"We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same time frame," Beddington told the Guardian.
"If we don't address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages," he added.
Food prices for major crops such as wheat and maize have recently settled after a sharp rise last year when production failed to keep up with demand. But according to Beddington, global food reserves are so low – at 14% of annual consumption – a major drought or flood could see prices rapidly escalate again. The majority of the food reserve is grain that is in transit between shipping ports, he said.
"Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food. At the same time, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water.
"There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected," Beddington said. "You can't think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together."
Before taking over from Sir David King as chief scientist last year, Beddington was professor of applied population biology at Imperial College London. He is an expert on the sustainable use of renewable resources.
In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive. Some parts of the country are predicted to become less able to grow crops as higher temperatures become the norm. Most climate models suggest the south-east of England will be especially vulnerable to water shortages, particularly in the summer.
The speech will add to pressure on governments following last week's climate change conference in Copenhagen, where scientists warned that the impact of global warming has been substantially underestimated by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latest research suggests that sea level rises, glacier melting and the risk of forest fires are at, or beyond, what was considered the worst case scenario in 2007.
Beddington said that shifts in the climate will see northern Europe and other high-latitude regions become key centres for food production. Other more traditional farming nations will have to develop more advanced pesticides or more hardy crops to boost yields, he said. In some countries, almost half of all crops are lost to pests and disease before they are harvested. Substantial amounts of food are lost after haversting, too, because of insufficient storage facilities.
Beddington said a major technological push is needed to develop renewable energy supplies, boost crop yields and better utilise existing water supplies.
Looming water shortages in China have prompted officials to build 59 new reservoirs to catch meltwater from mountain glaciers, which will be circulated into the water supply.
Beddington will use the speech to urge Europe to involve independent scientists more directly in its policy making, using recent appointments by President Barack Obama in the US as an example of how senior scientists have been brought into the political fold. Shortly after taking office, Obama announced what many see as a "dream team" of scientists, including two Nobel laureates, to advise on science, energy and the environment.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/mar/18/perfect-storm-john-beddington-energy-food-climate
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en
| 2008-05-12T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/10d759ca06c3112b66970adaf3618b62051a5913754b0af81857cdef070f4731.json
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[
"William Poundstone"
] | 2016-08-28T06:59:02 | null | 2016-08-28T05:00:23 |
There are drawbacks to outsourcing our memory and knowledge to the internet, says William Poundstone
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Does knowledge matter in the age of Google?
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Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz recently noted that one of the most common Google searches containing “my penis” was “how long is my penis?” Luddites might say a ruler would have a better answer than Google, but that’s not how digital natives think. Why should we figure out anything for ourselves, when everything is so easy to look up?
It’s a good question, one I confront in my book Head in the Cloud. I ran surveys of public knowledge in Britain and the US, on topics ranging from pop culture to quantum physics. In many regards the public is ill-informed. More than 50% of those under 30 can’t name the largest ocean on Earth, the palace built by Louis XIV, or the first artificial satellite; don’t know who invented the telegraph, radio or phonograph or which Roman emperor was said to have fiddled while Rome burned.
The cloud is making us meta-ignorant: unaware of what we don’t know
Does knowledge matter any more? There’s a decent case that it doesn’t. In the 1950s economist Anthony Downs coined the concept of rational ignorance. In many situations, Downs observed, learning isn’t worth the bother. Most of us don’t learn car repair or medicine or accounting. Instead, we consult professionals when such expertise is needed – and that’s perfectly reasonable.
Today, we’re outsourcing memory and knowledge to the internet. This is often a good thing, but it comes with a drawback. The cloud is making us meta-ignorant: unaware of what we don’t know.
Each day we make hundreds of small decisions and judgments: what to eat, buy, or do; what to think about the latest film, trend and politician. Rarely are these assessments important enough to justify looking up facts. We make snap judgments in a state of rational ignorance, based on facts already in our heads.
I found that there are correlations between general knowledge and behaviour, political views and even socially responsible choices. One dilemma I posed was: would you throw your pet off a cliff for £1 million?
About 7% of the British public said yes. But the percentage was double that among those who scored poorly on a quiz of general knowledge. The less informed are either greedier or less kind to animals.
In the same survey, those who didn’t know which document King John signed in 1215 were far more likely to say that people should be able to smoke in pubs. Those who can’t name their MP tend to say it’s OK for a business to post fake online reviews under a false name. Those who believe that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs are more likely to refuse to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps, and rubella.
These findings challenge the easy assumption that you can always look up the facts you need. Anti-vaccine parents do look up articles on the internet. It appears they are unable to distinguish valid medical advice from pseudoscientific nonsense drawing on paranoia, urban legends and conspiracy theorising.
Hence the survey’s finding: people who can’t answer an easy question about dinosaurs have a poor grounding in science and are ill-prepared to form good opinions about medical controversies, even with the internet to assist them. Unfortunately a “general background” in science or anything else isn’t something you can look up on a lunch break. It’s acquired through lifelong learning.
Knowledge is not wisdom, but it is a prerequisite for wisdom – and that’s one thing the digital revolution hasn’t changed.
William Poundstone is the author of Head in the Cloud: The Power of Knowledge in the Age of Google, published by Oneworld (£12.99, or £10.65 from bookshop.theguardian.com)
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/28/inner-life-does-knowledge-matter-in-the-age-of-google
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| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
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[
"Mikey Stafford"
] | 2016-08-26T16:50:49 | null | 2009-12-18T00:00:00 |
Carlo Ancelotti has dismissed the Arsenal manager's prediction that Chelsea would drop league points
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Carlo Ancelotti dismisses Arsène Wenger's gloomy Chelsea prediction
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www.theguardian.com
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Carlo Ancelotti has responded to Arsène Wenger's claim that his Chelsea side would "drop points" by branding Le Professeur "a good magician".
Chelsea's lead at the top of the Premier League was cut last month as they dropped nine points in December, while at Fratton Park on Wednesday the Arsenal manager saw his side's third straight victory. This cast minds back to late November, when Wenger said: "It [the Premier League title race] is not over and I believe, on what I have seen of Chelsea, that the team can drop points."
Ancelotti today laughed off Wenger's comments and dismissed his side's patchy form last month as normal: "He is a good magician if he said that after that game. He is a good magician," he said.
"We had some problems in December and didn't win important games, drawing against Everton, Birmingham and West Ham, but it's normal to have these moments. Some teams had bad moments before, and we had that period that wasn't so good," said Ancelotti.
The facts are on the Italian's side as his team have reached the turn of the year with a two-point lead at the summit of the Premier League table, though he admits both the second and third-placed clubs will punish any further slip-ups.
"Arsenal and Manchester United will be difficult opponents. But, until now, Chelsea are in first place in the Premier League and we deserve to have stayed at the top of the list," he said. "Manchester United and Arsenal are very close to us. It's a very competitive championship and will be until the end of the season. But I think the problems are over now for Chelsea."
The Chelsea manager is unfazed by rumours that José Mourinho will return to English football, possibly at Stamford Bridge. "He'll have to wait because I'm now the manager and I am staying here," Ancelotti told Sky Sports. "As far as I'm concerned, Mourinho is coach of Internazionale so he is not my opponent."
• This article was amended on 1 January 2009. The original attributed to Arsène Wenger a remark he did not make (that Chelsea "will drop points and steadily implode over the remainder of the season and sack you in the summer. If not before …"). This has been deleted and the correct quote inserted in the story.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2009/dec/31/carlo-ancelotti-arsene-wenger-spat
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en
| 2009-12-18T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3ac50020aaa5bf8b1bda146b6d1e035409b8436e0c3cf6279d1b61dbff7f3899.json
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[
"Damien Gayle",
"Hugh Muir"
] | 2016-08-28T12:49:35 | null | 2016-08-28T11:59:53 |
Limits to festivities, which have become stricter as area has gentrified, draw criticism: ‘now everything’s regulated’
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fculture%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Fnotting-hill-carnival-revellers-complain-of-bureaucracy.json
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Notting Hill carnival revellers complain of bureaucracy
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www.theguardian.com
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Standing next to a stack of speakers on All Saints Road, DJ Alistair Roberts of Rapattack, one of 38 sound systems at the Notting Hill carnival this year, went through the paperwork he has to fill out before he can play a single tune.
Events notice, bar licence, risk assessment, a site plan, premises licence, licence to play in the street. “Back in the day, we used to string up on any street we wanted and just play,” Alistair said. “Now everything’s regulated so we have protocols with the police.
“You can’t even give out leaflets in the street within the carnival footprint. We have to get a licence to give out fliers in your spot … We can’t even sell our own CDs without a licence.”
More than a million people are expected on the streets this bank holiday for the Notting Hill carnival, Europe’s biggest street party. The event, which is celebrating its 50th year, has grown from a Caribbean street party into a triumph of British multiculturalism.
But limits to the festivities, which correlate with the gentrification of W11, have led to feelings that bureaucracy is strangling the event. “It’s not a natural flow, whereas before it was a natural flow,” said Joe 90, a veteran MC.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Houses in Notting Hill boarded up before the carnival. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
Old carnival ravers remember how the party started on Friday night and kept going until Tuesday morning. Sound systems would play until after midnight, as the parade snaked repeatedly around W11 and locals sold food and drink from their front gardens.
This Sunday, sound systems will shut down at 7pm; illegal trading – even selling whistles – can get you thrown in jail. The curbs come amid criticisms over crime at carnival – last year saw a record number of arrests – and a perceived “invasion” of revellers into one of London’s wealthiest areas. Many homes and businesses are boarded up for protection.
Lady Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington, told London Live last week: “There are many people now who just feel wouldn’t it be nice to have a carnival where [businesses] could stay open; or, alternatively, has carnival outgrown this area?”
Such complaints are not new. Businesses have boarded up their premises since 1977, a year after rioting broke out at carnival, the local shopkeeper Lee Harris said. He remembered how police had been forced to use bin lids to protect themselves from volleys of bottles and stones. But with 7,000 officers on the streets this year, a repeat is unlikely.
Some local residents told the Guardian of problems with the event. “People use the basements as a toilet, throw rubbish down, bottles,” one Westbourne Park Road homeowner said. But even doors away, neighbours took a different view. Nadja Omoregie, 31, was helping to transform the front of her family home into a bar.
“They’re speaking as if to say that’s what everyone really feels and it’s not the truth,” she said. “If you just walk around the area you can feel the euphoric feeling, and everybody’s really quite happy.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest People stock up a street stall before the carnival. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
Femi Williams, 51, of the 90s acid jazz group Young Disciples, who was watching sound systems set up, said the first airing of his seminal track Apparently Nothin’ came at carnival. The party, he said, is “just what the community is, it’s just what life has been here for more than 50 years. This is just an official recognition of that.”
Critics could just as well criticise the cost of the Queen’s birthday, he added. “We justify that by saying the queen brings a lot of people to the country. Well, so does carnival.”
Around the corner, on Lancaster Road, Anna Clayden, 52, sat with friends on the steps to the home where she has lived for the past 37 years. She said carnival was a symbol of one of the things modern Britain has got right.
“This country does well at multiculturalism, although some people here might think it’s a problem. When you look at other countries, what’s going on in Europe at the moment, what’s going on in America, why would you want to close down something like carnival that’s a success?”
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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/aug/28/notting-hill-carnival-revellers-complain-of-bureaucracy
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| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/9206e2b9165914a7f113fb332af5b45c1b7b4b4d1c6f9a35d05240f1e35c996d.json
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[
"Robin Mckie"
] | 2016-08-30T20:59:28 | null | 2016-08-06T21:01:17 |
Grim backdrop to vital global emissions talks as new analysis shows 1.5C limit on warming is close to being broken
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Scientists warn world will miss key climate target
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Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set.
The decision to try to limit warming to 1.5C, measured in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, was the headline outcome of the Paris climate negotiations last December. The talks were hailed as a major success by scientists and campaigners, who claimed that, by setting the target, desertification, heatwaves, widespread flooding and other global warming impacts could be avoided.
Environmental records shattered as climate change 'plays out before us' Read more
However, figures – based on Met Office data – prepared by meteorologist Ed Hawkins of Reading University show that average global temperatures were already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38C in February and March. Keeping within the 1.5C limit will be extremely difficult, say scientists, given these rises.
These alarming figures will form the backdrop to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Geneva this month, when scientists will start to outline ways to implement the climate goals set in Paris. Dates for abandoning all coal-burning power stations and halting the use of combustion engines across the globe – possibly within 15 years – are likely to be set.
Atmospheric heating has been partly triggered by a major El Niño event in the Pacific, with 2016 expected to be the hottest year on record. Temperatures above 50C have afflicted Iraq; India is experiencing one of the most intense monsoons on record; and drought-stricken California has been ravaged by wildfires.
Stanford University’s Professor Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, told the Observer: “From the perspective of my research I would say the 1.5C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.”
The Paris summit first agreed to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels and then decided to try to keep it below 1.5C. This latter limit was set because it offered the planet a better chance of staving off catastrophes such as the melting of polar ice, which would no longer be able to deflect solar radiation and allow even greater global warming. Similarly, coral reef destruction and extreme sea level rises might be avoided if the 1.5C limit is achieved.
“If the world puts all its resources into finding ways to generate power without burning fossil fuels, and if there were international agreements that action must happen instantly, and if carbon emissions were brought down to zero before 2050, then a rise of no more than 1.5C might just be achieved,” said Dr Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “That is a tall order, however.”
Climate models are accurately predicting ocean and global warming | John Abraham Read more
The problem was made particularly severe because moving too quickly to cut emissions could be also be harmful, added Field. “If we shut down fossil fuel plants tomorrow – before we have established renewable alternatives – we can limit emissions and global warming, but people would suffer. There would be insufficient power for the planet. There is an upper limit to the rate at which we can move to a carbon-free future.”
The Paris agreement is vague about the exact rate at which the world’s carbon emissions should be curtailed if we are to achieve its 1.5C target. It merely indicates they should reach zero by the second half of the 21st century, a goal that was accepted as being ambitious but possible – until global temperatures increased dramatically this year.
“It means that by 2025 we will have to have closed down all coal-fired power stations across the planet,” said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “And by 2030 you will have to get rid of the combustion engine entirely. That decarbonisation will not guarantee a rise of no more than 1.5C but it will give us a chance. But even that is a tremendous task.”
Many scientists now believe the most realistic strategy is to overshoot the 1.5C target by as little as possible and then, once carbon emissions have been brought to zero, carbon dioxide could be extracted from the atmosphere to start to cool the planet back down to the 1.5C target. In other words, humanity will have to move from merely curtailing emissions to actively extracting carbon dioxide from the air, a process known as negative emissions.
“Some negative emission technology will inevitably have to be part of the picture if you are going to keep 1.5C as your limit,” said Professor Jim Skea, a member of the UK government’s committee on climate change. “There will always be some human activities that put carbon into the atmosphere and they will have to be compensated for by negative emission technology.”
But what form that technology takes is unclear. Several techniques have been proposed. One includes spreading crushed silicate rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, over vast tracts of land. Another involves seeding oceans with iron to increase their uptake of carbon dioxide. Most are considered unworkable at present – with the exception of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Under this scheme, vast plantations of trees and bushes would be created, their wood burned for energy while the carbon dioxide emitted was liquefied and stored underground.
“It could do the trick,” said Cambridge University climate expert Professor Peter Wadhams. “The trouble is that you would need to cover so much land with plants for combustion you would not have enough space to grow food or provide homes for Earth’s wildlife. In the end, I think we just have to hope that some kind of extraction technology, as yet unimagined by scientists, is developed in the next couple of decades. If not, we are in real trouble.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/06/global-warming-target-miss-scientists-warn
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en
| 2016-08-06T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/66ff4f4a5e0e836ff3cad4c9e7947d99ace9ff57c3cef764182bef671fd202f0.json
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[
"Samuel Gibbs"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:02 | null | 2016-08-09T06:00:07 |
British cleaner maker’s first robot vacuum was worth waiting for, but costs a lot, can’t do the stairs and isn’t perfect despite being the best available right now
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Dyson 360 Eye vacuum review: the robot that sucks (but in a good way)
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www.theguardian.com
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Dyson’s 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner has finally been released in the UK after an extensive trial in Japan and it claims to be the best available. How does it stack up against the market leading Roomba – and is it really worth buying?
Look, size and dock
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The dock is a simple, white panel with a chrome contact-covered foot onto which the robot drives to charge itself up. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The 360 Eye is both smaller and taller than most other robot vacuums. It’s 23cm in diameter, which is 12cm less than its biggest competitor, the iRobot Roomba 900 series, but it’s also 12cm tall, which makes it 3cm taller than the Roomba.
Docked, as it spends most of its time, the 360 Eye takes up significantly less floor space than wider competitors, which makes it easier to live with, and its smaller diameter means it can also get into and out of tighter gaps. For instance, the 360 Eye can weave in and out of table and chair legs better than competitors so you don’t have to stack chairs on top of tables on scheduled-clean mornings.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The eye sits proud of the top to give it a 360-degree view of its environment, but it cannot see things that are shorter than the robot’s body. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The top of the robot has a 360-degree camera, which it uses to map out your room each time and plot the best, most efficient cleaning path. The footage captured by the robot never leaves the robot.
The dock is a simple white stand with chrome strips on to which the robot drives to charge. Two black and white checkered squares help the robot see the dock and come back to it when it needs a top up, which it will do mid-clean if its doing more than one room. Excess cable can be stored in the power adapter, keeping it from getting sucked up by the robot.
Scheduling and control
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Dyson Link app for Android and iOS allows remote control, scheduling and diagnosis of faults, in an easy-to-use manner. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The 360 Eye is one of Dyson’s first line of connected products, along with the Dyson Cool Link, while means most of its settings and controls have been offloaded to the Dyson Link app for Android and iOS devices.
You can still set the robot cleaning using the single button on the top, but to schedule cleaning times you need the app. Once installed and connected to your Wi-Fi network – it took three attempts to connect it properly to my (admittedly quite complex) multi-network set up – the app can control the robot from anywhere, not just in the home.
Scheduling is as easy as tapping every day, or picking a time and day of the week and setting it to repeat, or not. The app can then notify you ahead of a scheduled clean and once the robot has finished. It also shows you a map of where the robot has been so you can interrogate how throughly it has covered the available floor space, which is reassuring.
There’s a solid product guide built into the app that runs through the features, which bit does what, maintenance and troubleshooting. There is also an option to have Dyson come round to your house and install it for you.
Cleaning
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The brush bar covers the complete width of the robot, while caterpillar tracks give it a bit more traction than wheels. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
There’s no doubt the Dyson 360 Eye is the most thorough of vacuuming robots currently available. It’s full-width brush bar and solid suction picks up considerably more dirt and fine dust than a Roomba. Dyson claims its vision system is also much more efficient than less expensive bump-sensing models, that map a room by bumping into objects.
Its edge-cleaning performance is also better than most others that rely on spinning brushes at the side, but it won’t get everything. Like every other robot vacuum currently available, the 360 Eye is designed to do the bulk of the work, to clean every day and keep on top of the dirt build up. You will still need another vacuum to clean the stairs and the parts that the robot can’t reach.
Watching it clean can be frustrating. The 360 Eye follows a square spiral pattern in 5m squares. It cleans until it is obstructed and then proceeds to fill in the square before moving onto the next square. If the space doesn’t allow, such as the length of galley kitchen for instance, it will switch to what looks like a more logical zig-zag pattern.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Taking the bin out and emptying it is quick and easy, but it is a small bin and you might have to empty it mid-run if you have particularly dirty carpet. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The robot has caterpillar tracks, rather than wheels, which helps it get over small humps such as thick rugs and small lips to doors. The vision system prevents the 360 Eye from crashing into large things and walls, but it still strikes chair legs and other thin or small objects.
The whole top of the body shifts as a buffer for impacts, which happens more than you might expect, but unlike many other bump-style cleaners, it doesn’t turn and rub itself against a surface and so won’t mark any delicate finishes or appliances you might have.
After about 45 minutes of cleaning the robot returns to its base station to charge, which takes just under 2 and a half hours. It will then go out and finish the bits that it didn’t reach once it’s charged. It turns off the suction and brush bar when it’s driving too and from the base station, and also while it pauses and works out ways around objects.
Noise
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The robot is probably short enough to fit under an average bedstead. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The 360 Eye isn’t the quietest of vacuums and is loud enough to prevent you hearing the television if it starts cleaning near you, but it is also at a more pleasant pitch than most others. Dyson makes a big deal about how it tunes the sound of its vacuum cleaners to be more bearable and it really makes a difference. Normally you wouldn’t be in while it is doing the cleaning, however.
Maintenance
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pop-off panel on the back reveals the post-motor filter, while the pre-motor filter sits behind the bin. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
While the 360 Eye will do the vacuuming and keep itself charged, there is a little bit of maintenance required. Once a month you have to wash the pre and post-motor filters, which are easy to detach - one at the back and one near the bin - run under a tap and let dry for 24 hours.
The 0.33L bin is very easy to empty. Just press the release button on top, pull it out, lift the lid and shake into the bin. A 30 second job at most.
Clearing obstructions from the brush bar is simple. It can be unscrewed and removed from the side, but I found I never actually needed to do that, even for shoe laces it had eaten.
Observations
Facebook Twitter Pinterest One cleaning run on a supposedly clean carpet. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
If it loses connection to the internet, scheduling appears to be a bit hit and miss
It can get stuck on small lips or objects quite easily if it is forced to turn on one
The amount of dirt it pulled up from a supposedly clean carpet was quite horrifying
The 360 Eye doesn’t need to run as frequently as some others to maintain a perceivable level of clean
It’ll do 20 square metres of carpet with various bits of furniture and obstacles in under 30 minutes without needing a second charge
It needs to be able to drive out about a metre or so from the dock to be able to start cleaning, which means it has to have a free path to a decent open space
It isn’t as adorable as other robot vacuums
Price
The Dyson 360 Eye costs £800. For comparison, iRobot’s Roomba 980 with visual navigation also costs £800, while bump-navigation robot vacuums start at around £150 and up.
Verdict
The Dyson 360 Eye is the best performing robot vacuum available. It’s simply better at cleaning than all the others, but it also has its downsides. It can’t get under as many things as a Roomba, it still bumps into thin things and it still can’t clean everything, meaning it’s not the only vacuum you need to own.
Its smaller footprint makes a difference in its ability to get in and around table and chair legs, and it takes up less space when sat on its dock, which makes it a lot easier to live with in cramped flats and terraces.
Robot vacuum cleaners are designed to vacuum everyday or at least several times a week, which means that out-and-out cleaning power doesn’t matter as much. The regular cleaning never lets it get to particularly bad levels, and if you spill something you’re more likely to get out a vacuum then and there and clear it up rather than leave it for the robot.
You could therefore argue that a less capable robot could do the job just as well, but the 360 Eye also doesn’t need to run as frequently as some others to maintain a perceivable level of clean, precisely because it gets more on its first sweep. It’s also easy to transfer between floors to cover different areas on different days.
It costs a lot, it isn’t perfect and it certainly isn’t a must-buy for everyone. But it is the best robot vacuum right now.
Pros: fits in tighter gaps, cleans better on each run, makes a more pleasant noise, better edge cleaning, easy maintenance, good app, simple scheduling Cons: can’t get under as much furniture, expensive, cannot be your only vacuum, requires internet access for most features beyond push-button cleaning, can get stuck like all robot vacuums
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Dyson 360 has a smaller diameter than the Roomba 880 pictured here, but is taller. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Other reviews
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/dyson-360-eye-robot-vacuum-review
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| 2016-08-09T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0cbe37ad6812b1e9b4b9193d192ee863a81aa63e8bf4b68997222ab725752d91.json
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[
"Nick Miller"
] | 2016-08-26T13:19:43 | null | 2016-08-04T17:00:37 |
They won neither the league nor the FA Cup but Leicester took on Liverpool in the 1971 curtain-raiser after Arsenal pulled out, and went on to beat their more fancied opponents 1-0 at Filbert Street thanks to an unlikely source
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The forgotten story of … Leicester City winning the 1971 Charity Shield
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www.theguardian.com
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Three months on the concept of Leicester City being the defending Premier League champions still does not seem real. There will be reminders of it in the coming weeks, starting with the Community Shield against Manchester United on Sunday. But despite this being Leicester’s first top-flight title win and having never won the FA Cup, this will not be their first appearance in the season curtain-raiser.
In 1971 Arsenal won the Double, the second club in the 20th century to do so, but whereas that would usually confirm their place in the Charity Shield, they had other plans for early August. Rather than take part in what is the traditional season opener, Arsenal played a series of friendlies: two against Benfica (home and away), and on the day faced Feyenoord in Rotterdam.
During their march to the Double they had been forced to cancel a friendly with Benfica, under pressure from the powers that be wanting their players available for the home internationals. “That left a nasty taste in the mouth,” said Bob Wall, Arsenal’s secretary at the time, so the only way to wash it away was the palate-cleanser of two games in August and a trip to the Netherlands tacked on.
The forgotten story of … Oxford United winning the 1986 League Cup | Simon Burnton Read more
So, with the champions and FA Cup-winners indisposed, who would get the honour of playing in the Charity Shield? Liverpool were a logical choice, having lost the Cup final to Arsenal the previous May, but beyond that the options were wide and varied. Leeds (the runners-up in the league), Tottenham (the League Cup winners) and Chelsea (the Cup-Winners’ Cup holders) were considered, but in the end they plumped in favour of Leicester, the Second Division champions.
Why Leicester? Well, no one seems to have a definitive idea, beyond “they were as good as anybody else” and “they were available”. Chelsea were initially keen but were overlooked, Tottenham were on tour in Scotland, and although Leeds were upgrading their ground so hosting would have been a problem, they probably would not have been allowed to anyway.
They had spent most of that summer arguing with the Football Association over a four-game ban on staging games at Elland Road, placed on them after the previous season’s debacle at West Bromwich, when Jeff Astle scored a goal that initially seemed to be yards offside. Fans invaded the pitch, Don Revie had some harsh words to say about the referee, and Barry Davies declared the Leeds supporters, players and manager had “every right to go mad” about the goal, despite it being perfectly legitimate. Safe to say, Leeds were not in the FA’s good books.
And so to the game. Held at Filbert Street (Anfield was unavailable because of ground redevelopment), a sunny day in August saw 25,104 show up. There was plenty to look forward to: this was Leicester’s first game against top-flight opposition after winning promotion, and they had a new manager in Jimmy Bloomfield. Frank O’Farrell, who had masterminded their successful promotion, had been tempted away by Manchester United and after Don Howe declined to be interviewed, Bloomfield left Orient for the east Midlands.
It would – in hindsight – turn out to be a pretty big day for Steve Whitworth. A lifelong Leicester fan, the young right-back made his first-team debut the previous season and was established in the team by the time promotion was won. Whitworth scored the only goal of the game, capitalising on a spot of penalty area pinball to tap home from inches out.
“I made a real long, overlapping run,” says Whitworth now, “I got into their penalty area and just slid the ball across their six-yard box.” Whitworth’s cross was aimed for the centre-forward Rodney Fern, who nipped in just ahead of Tommy Smith but could not get a proper effort on goal, the ball dribbling back towards the post. The goalkeeper, Ray Clemence, initially went for the cross, then stopped and changed direction, scrambling and diving back, presumably thinking no one would be behind him. Not quite.
“The ball just sort of popped out, and for some unknown reason I’d carried on running,” Whitworth says. “I tapped it in with my left foot, and if you ever watched me play my left foot was purely for standing on, I assure you. It was amazing how it all happened.”
It would turn out to be a notable strike because it was the only goal Whitworth would score for Leicester, a club he left eight years and more than 350 games later. “I didn’t even realise that as the years went by,” he says. “It wasn’t something that ever got mentioned.”
“Already at home” read the headline in the Guardian, while Brian Moore in the Times was particularly effusive about Leicester’s showing, writing the performance “suggests more a coming season of achievement than one of mere survival”. The top-flight newcomers seemed to cope well with a Liverpool side who featured Clemence, Steve Heighway, John Toshack, Emlyn Hughes and Ian Callaghan. According to the Leicester Mercury, they “might have scored four had it not been for the fine goalkeeping of Clemence”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leicester’s Jon Sammels, bought from Arsenal that summer, was the most impressive player on the pitch in the 1971 Charity Shield. Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock
Seemingly the most impressive performer was a man who otherwise might have been in Rotterdam: the only new signing to play for Leicester that day was Jon Sammels, a midfielder purchased from Arsenal, whom the Guardian’s match report described as being “the main driving force” behind Leicester’s win.
Bloomfield was particularly delighted, largely with himself. “I saw Arsenal beat Liverpool [in the Cup final] and I thought then that if ever a team of mine played them I would know the tactics to adopt,” he sagely informed the Daily Mirror. “In the final, Liverpool were caught by the long through ball. We planned to take advantage of this – and it worked. I told the players if we could get the square Liverpool defence turning, it would be our best form of attack.”
Leicester became only the second club to win the shield who had never won league or cup, the other being Brighton in 1910, although there was not much fanfare about the achievement. The shield was presented away from the public eye, below the stands at Filbert Street, partly because of some crowd trouble at a testimonial game that year, when the Second Division trophy was due to be presented on the pitch but some fans invaded the turf.
It is worth noting that back then the Charity Shield was not quite the event it is today. In its early days the format was fluid, early incarnations featuring a game between professionals and amateurs, the winners of the Football League and the Southern League, while in 1950 an England side took part and when Tottenham did the Double in 1961, they played an FA invitational XI. It was not held at Wembley either and its shift to the grand old stadium was when people started taking it more seriously.
Premier League 2016-17 preview No8: Leicester City | Paul Doyle Read more
A little too seriously as it turned out, as the first time it was held there, in 1974, Leeds faced Liverpool and Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan marked the occasion by fighting and ripping their tops apart when they were sent off.
The move to Wembley was partly in response to increasingly lukewarm attitudes to the match: after Arsenal opted out in 1971, the following year the champions, Derby, and cup winners, Leeds, didn’t fancy it, so fourth-placed Manchester City and the Division Three winners Aston Villa played; the year after that, Liverpool and Sunderland were not keen so the ever-willing City (11th in the First Division) and Burnley (Second Division champions) stepped up.
For Whitworth, the Liverpool game would represent a snapshot of youthful exuberance. “Everything was just easy peasy,” he says. “I got in the team, had a great season, played in the Charity Shield, scored the goal – it all seemed like life was supposed to be, really. I was so bloody naive in those days. You’re just free and do what you want, and it’s only later when people start picking faults in you.
“Later on I became far more disciplined and start thinking maybe a bit too much about the team, where you should be on the pitch and so on, instead of just bombing forwards, which is how I got into the team in the first place.”
At that stage, it might have seemed like games such as this, brief moments in the spotlight where they defeated the finest teams in the land, were as good as it would get for Leicester. Their only previous major honour was the League Cup in 1964, a cup they would win again in 1997 and 2000. Should they win the shield again this year, it will be sweeter because of what came before.
As for Arsenal, they lost the friendly in Rotterdam 1-0, and the Times reported that the “60,000 crowd was left disappointed”. They might as well have stayed at home.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2016/aug/04/leicester-city-charity-shield-1971-forgotten-story
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en
| 2016-08-04T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/85f422ae3ce478370b801f224bb0f6ecbded8f1c296f250357a569d6127995f2.json
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[
"Jill Treanor"
] | 2016-08-29T20:55:12 | null | 2016-07-08T15:09:44 |
Former Portuguese PM and head of EU commission will help Wall Street firm deal with fallout of Brexit vote in non-executive advisory role
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Fjul%2F08%2Fjose-manuel-barroso-to-become-next-head-of-goldman-sachs-international.json
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José Manuel Barroso to become chairman of Goldman Sachs International
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www.theguardian.com
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José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister and one-time head of the European commission, has been hired by Goldman Sachs to help it deal with the fallout from the UK’s shock vote to leave the European Union.
Barroso, who was president of the European commission for 10 years until 2014, is becoming chairman of Goldman Sachs International – the bank’s UK and European operations – and will also be an adviser. His pay has not been disclosed.
Brexit fallout – the economic impact in six key charts Read more
He replaces Ireland’s former attorney general Peter Sutherland who left in May 2015 and whose position had been temporarily filled by the Swedish businessman Claes Dahlback, another non-executive director.
Barroso joins Goldman Sachs as the investment bank is not only tackling Brexit but is also facing questions about its involvement in BHS, the retailer that collapsed in April. It is also fighting a court case brought by the Libyan Investment Authority for losses on trades during the 2008 financial crisis.
He told the Financial Times (£) that one of the most difficult elements in the UK’s Brexit negotiations would be over passporting rights – the ability to trade from the UK across to what will now be a 27 nation bloc.
“What I know for sure is that on both sides it will be intelligent and wise to have a fair negotiation,” he told the FT. “Nobody wins from a confrontation.”
He said he would attempt to mitigate the negative effects of the referendum result. “Of course I know well the EU, I also know relatively well the UK environment,” Barroso said. “If my advice can be helpful in this circumstance I’m ready to contribute, of course.”
During his final period of tenure at the commission, Barroso was critical of David Cameron’s handling of the EU and the prime minister’s ambitions to impose a cap on immigrants from eastern Europe. While he was head of the commission, Barroso was at heart of the banking crisis and the ensuing fallout which gripped the eurozone. He has been critical of the behaviour of banks.
“As president of the EC, I was leading an overall effort of regulation and supervision, including the creation of banking union in the euro area, to bring back stability, credibility to the financial sector,” Barroso told the FT.
Before taking the EC role, Barroso was prime minister of Portugal between 2002 and 2004.
The co-heads of Goldman Sachs International, Michael Sherwood and Richard Gnodde, said that Barroso had been hired for his understanding of Europe. “We look forward to working with him as we continue to help our clients navigate the challenging and uncertain economic and market environment,” they said in a joint statement.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/08/jose-manuel-barroso-to-become-next-head-of-goldman-sachs-international
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en
| 2016-07-08T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c5fdfa061c6c9184f6ee367b03c19b1444f349a0f5e6eb12b878d63b69bcc6fe.json
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[
"Giles Richards"
] | 2016-08-26T22:51:36 | null | 2016-08-26T21:00:44 |
The former world champion Jenson Button believes he is driving as well as ever and has plenty of options for next season
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Jenson Button: ‘I’m probably driving the best I have in my career’
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While he will not be fighting for the win at Spa on Sunday, the urge to do battle, it seems, has diminished not a jot for Jenson Button. All the drivers love to come to this classic track, nestling in the Ardennes mountains, and face down what is a turbulent test and thrill-ride combined, but for Button enthusiasm for the challenge here perhaps also stirred his feelings for the sport as a whole as he reaffirmed both his commitment to Formula One and his own talent in the face of continuing questions about his future in the sport.
Strictly speaking, describing Button, who looks as youthful and fit as ever, as the grand old man of Formula One would be misleading. Kimi Raikkonen is the oldest driver on the grid, they are both 36, with the Finn three months older. But in terms of race starts the British driver is by some distance the most experienced in the field with 296 (third in the all-time list, behind Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher) in the 16 years since he first took to the track with Williams in 2000 as Britain’s youngest Formula One driver, aged 20. But rather than feeling those years, he exudes the air of a maturing fine wine in the paddock at Spa-Francorchamps.
Lewis Hamilton set to start from back of F1 grid at Belgian Grand Prix Read more
“I’m probably driving the best I have in my career,” he said. “I put more and more pressure on myself every year. I feel I’m in the best shape physically and driving the best I ever have.”
He has earned that quiet confidence 16 years on from achieving his ride at Williams, when he famously won a shootout in front of Sir Frank Williams against the Brazilian Bruno Junqueira, and has since never left Formula One. Winning the world championship with Brawn was the highpoint in 2009 after which he switched to McLaren, where it was expected he would see out his career. For the past two seasons, however, his future has been hanging in the balance as contract renewals dragged on.
It is a sequence that has continued into 2016 with September again the earliest the team have said any announcement will be made on whether he will be replaced. If so it will almost certainly be by McLaren’s reserve driver, the 24-year-old Belgian Stoffel Vandoorne.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jenson Button and his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso are former world champions but have endured tough times over the past two seasons. Photograph: Mark Thompson/Getty Images
Button faces the questions about his future at every race weekend with calm stoicism but the interest is not surprising. Williams would be a good fit, given the prospect of bookending his career with them. Button is hugely experienced, popular with fans and sponsors and most importantly still has it on track. Wrestling this season’s recalcitrant McLaren is no mean feat but he has done so with admirable determination and skill. Five points finishes have resulted, two more than his team-mate Fernando Alonso.
He insists there are “multiple” driver options for him still open within Formula One for next year and that he is happy his recent performances have been strong enough to prove his point to McLaren. They have, he believes, been drives born of his abiding enthusiasm for the sport.
“Do I enjoy my racing? Yes. My heart is definitely in racing now, 100%,” he said. “At the last race I wouldn’t have finished eighth if my heart wasn’t in it. You have to give it your all to finish that far in front of your double-world champion team-mate.”
Jenson Button wanted by Williams but they will not ‘wait around’ for decision Read more
He has only the one win at Spa for McLaren – in 2012 – but sees no reason age should prevent him from bidding for more. “As long as you’re keeping your fitness in check,” he said. “Michael Schumacher, when he was racing, was fitter than 75% of the grid I’m sure. It’s definitely if your heart is still in it.”
The corollary to these veterans clinging on to their rides – and Ferrari have already re-signed Raikkonen for 2017 – has been considerable criticism that they are denying young drivers their shot at a drive. It is an argument that is given short shrift by Button. “I don’t feel anything for young drivers or old drivers,” he said. “If a team wants me to drive there they want me to drive there. I’m not going to move over for someone else. If I feel I still want to be in the sport I won’t move over because I think someone else needs a chance.”
He has 15 wins and 50 podiums and has contributed to some of the most memorable races of recent years: his debut win in the wet from 14th place at Hungary in 2006, the masterclass at Suzuka in 2009 and the fightback from last at Montreal in 2011, but is unlikely to add to the tally here. McLaren have spent seven engine tokens on upgrades for the race and installed a new engine but will still suffer on a track where power pays dividends and the Mercedes-engined runners should dominate.
The glorious challenge of Spa, however, will remain and Button on current form will positively revel in it. “I think I’m still doing a very good job,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone who can do a better job in this car than me.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/26/jenson-button-mclaren-options-2017
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/291be96eb2858199dbb2a83722f5c966a620165fb36767daa4efcd56539f6e68.json
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[
"Katie Allen"
] | 2016-08-26T13:30:23 | null | 2016-08-23T09:32:06 |
IFS research shows average difference in pay is 18% and widens markedly after women have children
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fgender-pay-gap-average-18-per-cent-less-uk-women.json
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UK women still far adrift on salary and promotion as gender pay gap remains a gulf
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Women earn 18% less than men on average, according to new research that highlights the challenge facing Theresa May in closing Britain’s stubbornly wide gender pay gap.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also found that the gap balloons after women have children, raising the prospect that mothers are missing out on pay rises and promotions. That is echoed by a separate report on Tuesday suggesting that male managers are 40% more likely than female managers to be promoted.
May highlighted the gulf between men’s and women’s earnings in her first statement as prime minister when she vowed to create a “Britain that works for everyone”.
But underscoring the struggle her government will face in closing the gender pay gap, the IFS study hints at an entrenched penalty for those women who have children. The pay gap widens consistently for 12 years after a first child is born, by which point women receive 33% less pay an hour than men, according to the research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
More than four decades after the Equal Pay Act, there is some encouraging news in the report. The current 18% gap in hourly wages is down from 23% in 2003 and 28% in 1993, the IFS notes.
But at the same time, its research reveals there has been little improvement for graduates and women with A-levels. For the mid-level and highly educated, the gender wage gap is essentially the same as it was 20 years ago.
“The gap between the hourly pay of higher-educated men and women has not closed at all in the last 20 years,” said Robert Joyce, associate director at IFS and one of the report’s authors.
“The reduction in the overall gender wage gap has been the result of more women becoming highly educated, and a decline in the wage gap among the lowest-educated.”
The thinktank says the widening of the hourly wage gap after childbirth is associated with working fewer hours. However women do not see an immediate cut in hourly pay when they reduce their hours. Rather, women who work 20 hours or less per week lose out on subsequent pay rises, meaning that the hourly wages of colleagues in full-time work pull further and further ahead.
Sam Smethers, chief executive at the Fawcett campaign group, said the findings underlined the urgent need for more quality part-time jobs. “We are wasting women’s skills and experience because of the way we choose to structure our labour market,” she said. “Part-time workers can be the most productive, yet reduced hours working becomes a career cul-de-sac for women from which they can’t recover.”
But Mark Littlewood, director general at the free market thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said the study showed employer discrimination was not to blame for the gender pay gap. “If anything, the IFS has provided us with more evidence that the wage gap has nothing to do with gender discrimination. As the study itself notes, women who take time off work and return doing fewer hours are not getting paid less per hour.”
Former prime minister David Cameron had vowed to “end the gender pay gap in a generation” and new government rules are coming in next April that will force bigger employers to publish their pay gap. The UK has also introduced more free childcare and shared parental leave but equality campaigners are concerned too few families can afford for fathers to take it.
Responding to the IFS study a government spokeswoman said: “We want to make our country a place where there is no limit on anyone’s ambition or what they can achieve – that means making sure everyone, regardless of their gender, can succeed at work.
“The gender pay gap is the lowest on record but we know we need to make more progress and faster. That’s why we are pushing ahead with plans to force businesses to publish their gender pay and gender bonus gap.”
A separate report from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) attempts to shed some light on women’s lack of pay progression by analysing the salary data of more than 60,000 UK managers and professionals. In the past year 14% of men in management roles were promoted into higher positions compared with 10% of women.
The research, carried out with pay analysts XpertHR, cited the difference in promotion rates as one of the main causes of the gender pay gap. The CMI’s measure of the pay gap for managers was 23.1% for this year, compared with 22.8% in 2015.
CMI’s chief executive, Ann Francke, said the rules on reporting pay gaps should force employers to analyse any discrepancies in the salaries of male and female employees. “Promoting men ahead of women is keeping us all back,” she said. “Diversity delivers better financial results, better culture and better decision making.
“Transparency and targets are what we need to deal with stubborn problems like the gender pay gap.”
The researchers also found there were fewer women in executive positions than men. Women comprise 73% of the workforce in entry and junior level roles but female representation drops to 42% at senior management level and 32% at director level.
Mark Crail, content director at XpertHR, commented: “The gender pay gap is not primarily about men and women being paid differently for doing the same job. It’s much more about men being present in greater numbers than women the higher up the organisation you go.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/23/gender-pay-gap-average-18-per-cent-less-uk-women
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en
| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a2967168dc720fd50d0dea611d81b8b44b9d485cb8980b4c79caea21e6ad167f.json
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|
[
"Guardian Sport"
] | 2016-08-28T12:51:42 | null | 2016-08-28T11:06:45 |
Marouane Fellaini rushed to the aid of a supporter who has crushed against the advertising board during the celebrations of Marcus Rashford’s late winning goal against Hull City at the KCom Stadium on Saturday
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Fmarouane-fellaini-manchester-united-supporter-crushed-hull-city.json
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| null |
Marouane Fellaini rescues fan caught in crush amid Manchester United elation
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www.theguardian.com
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Marouane Fellaini rushed to the aid of a supporter who has crushed against the advertising board during the celebrations of Marcus Rashford’s late winning goal against Hull City at the KCom Stadium on Saturday.
Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford taps in last-gasp winner at Hull Read more
Rashford’s dramatic strike prompted a number of away supporters to surge towards the jubilant United players but Fellaini quickly noticed that a woman, who was clearly in distress, had been caught up in the melee and he broke off from the celebrations with his team-mates.
The Belgian midfielder, who had earlier picked up a back injury in the victory that maintains United’s 100% start to the season under Mourinho, swiftly alerted nearby stewards to the issue before reaching into the crowd to help her avoid further harm.
Footage captured by a supporter in the stadium shows the woman being pulled from the scrum of Manchester United fans before regaining her feet near the pitch while other supporters flooded the pitch – something that will no doubt be of concern for the Football Association.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/28/marouane-fellaini-manchester-united-supporter-crushed-hull-city
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en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f14a54aa5461fe24ab1dcb045b5626a52f1810109dc287a3217b31b11902ac8e.json
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[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-26T13:27:27 | null | 2016-08-24T18:59:59 |
Patrick Hardison, whose face burned off 15 years ago when a roof of a home on fire collapsed on him, is doing well after his face transplant surgery
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fface-transplant-patrick-hardison-video.json
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A year after face transplant, man says he is 'feeling great' - video
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Patrick Hardison, whose face burned off 15 years ago when a roof of a home on fire collapsed on him, is doing well after his face transplant surgery. Hardison was the subject of media attention last year when he was operated on for 26 hours at New York University’s Langone medical center. He received the face of David Rodebaugh, 26, who was pronounced brain-dead after a cycling accident
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/aug/24/face-transplant-patrick-hardison-video
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/cf4630d2a3e586d88973a22c0998f2994fe6e54346c3511ad9cd0fedb606236d.json
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[
"Miles Brignall"
] | 2016-08-30T06:55:18 | null | 2016-08-30T06:00:23 |
Her son emigrated after running up debts and she is feeling intimidated by all the bailiffs’ visits
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fprotect-elderly-aunt-from-bailiffs.json
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How can I protect my elderly aunt from the bailiffs?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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I am contacting you on behalf of my elderly aunt, whose son ran up debts through various companies then emigrated. As he had no official address at the time, he used her address. We have returned all correspondence sent to him as “not at this address”, but the bailiffs keep showing up. She does not want to give them her son’s address, but is finding the situation really intimidating and upsetting. Is there anything to be done to stop these visits? AS Wetherby, West Yorkshire
First, her own credit standing is not at risk. According to Experian, even if her son had been made bankrupt at her address it would not show up on her credit report unless there had been a joint credit activity between them that created a link, which is probably unlikely. Getting a copy of her credit report will reveal that, it says.
It advises you to write to the debt collectors, informing them he has moved on, and asking for written confirmation that they have updated their records.
We would be inclined to tell them his new address which, if it is abroad, would likely be the end of the matter. If subsequent to this bailiffs keep showing up, then make a formal complaint to each one. If that doesn’t work you can then go to the ombudsman and any relevant trade body – for collectors that should be the Credit Services Association.
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/30/protect-elderly-aunt-from-bailiffs
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f3ad1478672d77dc0761fb320b940ae9a6ae7531c8dd327b0cf2433f4e51c6c0.json
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[] | 2016-08-26T13:23:36 | null | 2016-08-24T18:08:24 |
Brief letters: New-term offers | The lovely Harry | Crossword difficulties | Wales’s Olympic triumphs | Isle of Wight
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fback-to-school-booze-offer-for-sir-and-miss.json
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Back-to-school booze offer for Sir and Miss?
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www.theguardian.com
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Re Roger Frisby’s experience in Morrisons (Letters, 23 August), at the start of September last year, the first aisle in our nearest big Tesco had a “back to school” sign above it, but the shelves were filled with special-offer booze, cut-price wine, spirits etc, which had replaced the stationery and backpacks. I drew the conclusion that it was aimed at teachers.
Shelagh Hubbard
Nottingham
• Thank you for publishing my occasional letters, the most recent one on the difficulty I now have with the cryptic crossword (23 August). I have loved the Guardian and its history since I was a student in the 60s. I am now severely deaf with very debilitating tinnitus (my hero was Jack Ashley, as indicated in a previous letter), and when the lovely young Harry rings to say a letter is under consideration, a somewhat dark day becomes considerably brighter. He has become a part of my family!
Jean Jackson
Seer Green, Buckinghamshire
• Cryptic crossword? I used to complete the quick crossword over my muesli. Now I struggle to finish it by teatime.
Dennis Ruston
Derby
• It’s not just the cryptic crossword – the Suguru has taken a step up in difficulty recently, too.
Dave Denison
Lichfield, Staffordshire
• Here is another Olympics statistic (Letters, 24 August): Wales’s tally of 10 medals was their best ever. It is almost a sixth of the UK total, yet from a population that is only a 20th of the whole UK’s. Wales has outperformed England yet again, as its team did in the football.
Dr Paul Tench
Cardiff
• As an occasional visitor to the Isle of Wight, I have never seen any evidence of inbreeding (Ofsted’s Hoare quits over Isle of Wight ‘inbreeding’ slur, 24 August) except during Cowes week.
Ted Watson
Brighton
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/24/back-to-school-booze-offer-for-sir-and-miss
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/de4f3fe8124bea73cc212ca88c92cc8e0780774d497873fcb4642f8015c0c8a8.json
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[
"Anonymous Nhs Manager"
] | 2016-08-26T13:14:20 | null | 2016-08-26T11:58:12 |
I think we have a duty to inform people about sustainability and transformation plans but NHS England is worried about negative headlines
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fhealthcare-network%2Fviews-from-the-nhs-frontline%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fnhs-plans-bring-benefits-barred-telling-public-sustainability-transformation-plans.json
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NHS plans could bring benefits but we're barred from telling the public
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I work in programme management in the NHS for a commissioning support unit: we support GPs’ clinical commissioning groups and other organisations on matters such as finance, IT, service transformation and change management. Recently I’ve been supporting our local system to develop a sustainability and transformation plan (STP) – bringing NHS bodies together with councils and community providers, and producing a five-year plan to improve care and find the very ambitious savings required of us.
The benefits of STPs could be huge. The whole system is short of money, and we have a growing and ageing population with increasingly complex needs. To have any chance of sorting this out, we must bring health and social care services together – and STPs have sparked some real collaboration. People who have been plugging away at different aspects of the same problem for years are now working together, and there’s huge enthusiasm.
NHS plans closures and radical cuts to combat growing deficit in health budget Read more
We had a difficult start, though, because NHS England made up the policy on the hoof. Late last year, work had started across England on initial plans: by April, we were to submit plans to transform and connect the IT of NHS and social care bodies within our “footprint” areas. Then at Christmas, we were suddenly asked to produce an STP by June.
There was no clarity about how STPs were to line up with the initial plans, and in some areas their footprints aren’t coterminous – which is daft. NHS England’s guidance was fragmented, emerging in bursts while we worked, often leaving us little time to respond to new requests. Still, we hit the deadline, expecting a written response in July; but as of late August, we haven’t heard back. NHS England are constantly telling us to work “at pace and at scale”. It would be helpful if they worked at the pace that they expect of us.
A second big challenge with STPs is their lack of a formal structure or leadership. Volunteer chief executives lead STPs alongside their day jobs, and the organisations involved report to their own boards – which have a legal responsibility to protect their own bottom lines. Plans that are good for the whole system can lead to individual organisations losing income, which may put boards in conflict with STP ambitions. The government should create formal structures that will enable STPs to appoint full-time leaders, make the necessary strategic decisions and, crucially, move money around the system to where it’s needed.
System-wide reforms may also involve controversial changes such as closing A&E departments. It’s an NHS England requirement that there’s strong public and patient engagement before these decisions are finalised: when we don’t get people’s buy-in, the result is protests, judicial reviews – and delays that we can’t afford.
The secret hospital manager's diary: 'There's a bed crisis and staff are off sick' Read more
We need to start consulting on our plans, having an open conversation with the public. But NHS England tells us that we can’t publish our STPs – presumably because it’s worried about negative headlines. I think we have a duty to tell the public about the plans, and NHS England says we must move “at pace”; yet we’re barred from explaining our plans. That’s a problem.
STPs are helpful in driving collaboration; in integrating health and social care; in creating a climate for change. But they need the right management structure to make system-wide decisions, along with the freedom to publish and consult as they see fit. I’d like to hear much stronger signals from NHS England that they’re committed to this model; that it won’t be swept away in yet another round of top-down reforms. Then people will recognise that this is for real, and commit themselves to the agenda – and we’ll be able to use reforms to make the savings asked of us, even as we improve services for patients.
If you would like to write a blogpost for Views from the NHS frontline, read our guidelines and get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com.
Do you work in the NHS? Please take our survey and tell us whether bullying is a problem and how it affects your work
Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
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"Damien Gayle"
] | 2016-08-30T00:50:17 | null | 2016-08-04T13:51:13 |
Met police deploys officers on streets in greater numbers to offer reassurance to residents, businesses and tourists
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Armed police patrol central London after 'random' knife attack
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Police officers patrolled central London in greater numbers than usual on Thursday, in an effort to reassure tourists and shoppers after the multiple stabbing in Bloomsbury.
Patrols included firearms officers, although few walked the streets openly; most visible officers carried batons and CS sprays in their belts.
Two armed officers posted outside the National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square during morning rush hour said there would be many armed police around central London throughout the day. Policing would focus on crowded areas where an attacker could do the most damage, one said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armed officers outside the National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square during morning rush hour. Photograph: Damien Gayle for the Guardian
They carried semi-automatic carbines over their chests; in their belts were holstered Glock pistols, Taser stun guns, CS spray and batons.
“We deal with everything from having strong words with someone to lethal force,” one said.
Around the British Museum in Bloomsbury, near the scene of Wednesday night’s attack, patrols could be seen on almost every street, as well as in the courtyard in front of the museum.
Two officers who spoke to the Guardian said it was their usual beat and they were not aware of any armed officers nearby.
Police were also stationed near most tube stations and at major rail terminals throughout the city centre, although officers remained discreet on the concourses. Four police vans, each full of officers, were parked outside Marylebone station.
One officer said: “It’s because of what happened last night. We’re not expecting anything bad to happen. These are literally just reassurance patrols.”
Asked if they were waiting to go out on patrol or whether they were just going to sit in the van, he answered: “Just waiting for now.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police vans outside Marylebone station on Thursday morning, which were filled with officers. Photograph: Damien Gayle for the Guardian
Earlier, the Met assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, urged the public to remain calm, alert and vigilant.
He said: “This attack will of course still cause concern and as a precautionary measure we have increased the number of officers out on the streets today and that will continue for as long as necessary.”
Although police said later the Russell Square incident did not appear to be linked to terrorism, Rowley paid tribute to the officers who attended at the scene: “Our firearms officers bravely rushed to that scene with very little information. They would not have known if this was an act of terrorism or the random attack we now know it to be.
“They detained an armed and dangerous man and resolved it using the minimum necessary force – no shots were fired. We should be proud of them and the British tradition of using the minimum necessary force.”
He added: “I want everyone who is out and about in London today – our residents, businesses or visitors – to know that the Met is totally committed to doing everything we can do to protect you.”
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| 2016-08-04T00:00:00 |
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"Graham Snowdon"
] | 2016-08-26T18:59:12 | null | 2009-05-28T00:00:00 |
If you are one of the rising number of people working part-time, earn some extra cash in dog walking or rampant veg growing
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50 side businesses to set up from home
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Happy days are here again – or so you might assume from a recent wave of optimistic reports about the economic outlook and rising consumer confidence. But while unemployment is down, the latest labour market figures reveal a surge in part-time jobs as employers remain anxious about long-term recovery prospects, suggesting it may not be time to hang out the bunting just yet.
With more of us working fewer hours and with a resulting earnings gap to close, there's arguably never been a better time to set up a business you can run in your spare time from home. Whether it's to help make ends meet, or to follow your passion, or maybe even both, we've asked the experts to come up with 50 practical and cheap ways to make some extra cash.
Our list may not be exhaustive, nor may it put you on the path to riches and early retirement, but hopefully it will get you thinking. And if you have any better ideas, let us know by emailing .
1 Antiques/collectibles dealing Know your stuff when it comes to certain kinds of collectibles? If so this can be a great way to make money from a hobby. Trading sites such as eBay make it easier than ever to reach your target market, according to Trent Hamm, author of US money-saving blog thesimpledollar.com. "I had some success with this myself in the past, trading cards and video games," he says.
2 Babysitting If you can spare a few evenings and know any parents desperate to get out, there are few simpler ways to make a few extra pounds.
3 Bed and breakfast Got a spare room? Live near somewhere of interest to tourists, or close to a student area? Note you'll almost certainly need planning, mortgage lender and health and safety approvals first.
4 Biscuit/sweet making Homemade biscuits and confectionery can be a great seller, says Hamm. "Bake and package them well, and try reselling through a local gift shop. People in your social network may buy batches for special occasions."
5 Cake making/decorating If you enjoy baking and have an artistic touch, making and decorating cakes can be a really satisfying way of earning extra money. "One of my mother's old friends does this and makes quite a bit on the side," says Hamm.
6 Car boot sales This is a part-time occupation that increases earnings and broadens horizons as you make sales and get to travel, says Emma Jones, author of Working 5 to 9: How to Start a Successful Business in your Spare Time, and founder of the website enterprisenation.com. "Consider selling specialist items and building a reputation for being the go-to person; offering your knowledge and expertise with the product can increase the price you're paid," she suggests.
7 Car cleaning/valeting Have a meticulous eye for detail and love to get things spotless? This could be a perfect side business for you. "Many people are quite happy to pay well for this service," points out Hamm.
8 Catering Formal qualifications are not strictly required for catering, which is more about producing and delivering good food. However, the organisational aspects may be easier after some instruction, such as a City & Guilds certificate (NVQ or other) in hospitality and catering.
9 Census distributor Every 10 years a census is held in England and Wales. The next one is in 2011, but you can register now to be considered for a range of related roles in your area, including collection and delivery. See censusjobs.co.uk.
10 Childcare There's great potential to earn extra money from looking after kids, but you'll need to adore children (not just your own), have boundless energy and patience and in many cases must satisfy Ofsted criteria.
Any adult who looks after another person's child for more than two hours on any one day in a location other than the child's home (so excluding most babysitters and nannies) needs to register with Ofsted – it's not a particularly complicated process but does include medical, criminal and domestic safety checks. Nannies can look after the children of up to two sets of parents, in one of their home environments, without being Ofsted-registered.
Failing to meet the criteria can land you in court, so check here for the full list of Ofsted restrictions.
11 Computer repairer/troubleshooter Despite the proliferation of technology in our lives, many people still find computers complicated to maintain and terrifying if they go wrong. If you have a reassuring manner and are not fazed by the inner workings of a PC, offer your services locally and let word of mouth do the rest. "I had some success doing this in the past," says Hamm.
12 Cosmetics sales This is very much a social business activity so be prepared to spend lots of time meeting and talking to people. You'll be selling mainly by networking and often through parties in other people's homes, so an outgoing manner and immaculate personal presentation skills are essential.
13 Data entry Perhaps not the most thrilling of part-time pursuits, but data entry can nevertheless offer an extremely steady (not to mention flexible) source of extra income. You generally get paid for the number of entries you make rather than by the hour, which means you can go back and forth to it when you get a spare few minutes.
14 Dinner preparation "I recently met a woman who earned quite a bit of money as a very part-time chef," says Hamm. "Once a week, she would go to someone's house and prepare a homemade meal for their family, then do all the dishes and cleaning up. This gives the family plenty of together time, while earning her some cash in hand." If you love to cook, this can be a great extra earnings opportunity, but be prepared to put some effort into finding your customers.
15 Become a DJ It goes without saying that you need a deep love of music and an extensive collection of tunes before you can even consider DJing, but as much of the work is at evenings and weekends, it could make a perfect side business. Be ready to cater for a range of crowds and musical preferences, not just your passion. Learn the ropes by concentrating first on weddings and birthday parties or by doing roadie work for an established DJ, which will gain you useful contacts.
16 Be a doula Jasmine Birtles, the founder of website moneymagpie.com, says you can make between £12 and £15 an hour or £250-£500 for a birth by being a doula – a birth partner and post-birth partner. "If you've had a baby and you want to help new mothers, do a short course with Britishdoulas.co.uk and work locally," she says. "You do what a grandmother or sister might do for a new mum, such as giving moral support, helping around the house, caring for the baby and supporting the whole family."
17 Flower arranging Imagine doing what you love and getting paid for it, which is what this idea brings to mind. "The nature of the product means you're likely to cater to a local audience, so why not impress with a business card and delivery car adorned with flower power," suggests Jones of enterprisenation.com. "It'll turn heads and attract new business as you turn corners."
18 Garage/garden sales "One person I know holds a garage sale at their house almost every weekend during summer," says Hamm. "They get a lot of regular customers who stop by almost every weekend to see what's on sale. That person then goes to neighbours and friends and offers to sell their stuff for them, splitting the proceeds. People are usually happy to do this since they can get rid of unwanted items and earn a bit of money, too."
19 Gardening services "I've had requests from others for people willing to do this, so the demand is out there," says Hamm. "To put it simply, some people are willing to pay others to get a vegetable or flower garden started so that they can have access to ultra-fresh produce without doing all the legwork."
20 Making greetings cards If you're the kind of person who loves making things, why not try your hand at cards? Ask a local shopkeeper what kind sells best and follow their advice, working to a distinctive style of your own. Then try selling to family, friends and local businesses. Be mindful of material costs and time taken though, as wastage can be expensive in such a low-value product.
21 Handyman services Know your way round a toolbox? Let people know that they can call you for little repair jobs, relatively straightforward DIY tasks such as putting up shelves or assembling flat-pack furniture. "You'd be amazed at the simple things people are willing to pay others to help them with," says Hamm.
22 Host and teach foreign students "This is a great way of renting your room without getting stuck with the flatshare from hell," says Birtles. "Foreign students don't usually stay longer than a couple of months at a time, so if they're annoying at least you know they'll go soon."
Usually the deal is B&B, but sometimes you need to give them an evening meal too. Get in touch with your nearest English language schools and let them know you have a room to rent, Birtles advises. The website idiom.co.uk has a list of schools in the UK. You can make up to £200 a week depending on where you live.
23 House cleaning "This is an idea you can start yourself, or consider being part of a house-cleaning franchise such as Molly Maid where you have the benefit of being your own boss as well as the support of a central team," says Jones.
24 Ironing/laundry services "Even in these cash-strapped times, some people hate ironing so much they're willing to pay others to do it (at least in the posh parts of town)," says Birtles of moneymagpie.com, who suggests either registering with domestic agencies such as mrshunts.co.uk or setting up your own local service.
"Check out the competition, see how much they charge, and undercut. Either work for an hourly rate, a fee per item or a fee per lb," she says. You should get between £8 and £12 per hour, between 50p and £1 per item or between 50p and £1 per lb of clothes, depending on where you work."
25 Jewellery selling Never mind Tupperware – if you have jewellery you no longer wear or want, try organising a party to sell it, says Jones. "Websites that organise these parties, such as ounces2pounds.co.uk, are going great guns in signing up ladies who want to earn extra income in their spare time," she says.
26 Knitting/alteration/sewing services A big growth area, as more people come to appreciate the value in repairing and patching up clothes. If you're handy with a sewing machine, there's serious money to be made. Once you get known locally, word-of-mouth should do the rest.
27 Leaflet distributing Delivering leaflets to people's houses could be a profitable and healthy way to spend a few spare hours a week. Call into your local shops and restaurants to see if they need help distributing flyers, menus and so on.
28 Market research Get paid for your opinions by signing up with sarosresearch.com and taking part in focus groups, suggests Birtles. "You get between £50-£100 cash, plus food and drink for saying what you think about products or services for a few hours. Or be the one asking the questions. Ipsos Mori offers flexible hours to people willing to do phone interviews or knock on doors to ask people questions. You make between £8-£10 an hour on average."
29 Musical performance If you can play a musical (especially orchestral) instrument to a high enough standard, know a few choice solo pieces and look presentable, spread the word locally – weddings and other formal functions can be a lucrative source of performance income.
30 Online surveys It's possible to make pocket money by filling in internet surveys – though moneymagpie.com's Birtles advises caution, as there are hundreds of bogus companies on the net. "Toluna, Ciao!, Lightspeed Panel, and Valued Opinions are all pukka," she says. "You make between 50p and £5 per survey. Click here for more information and a list of genuine survey companies.
31 Online trading Sites such as eBay and Amazon make it easy for people to dabble in e-commerce. "Start with a clearout of your attic," suggests Dan Wilson, author of Make Serious Money on eBay. "If you start to sell other goods, focus on things you can get hold of easily, or are passionate about. And have an eye on the Christmas market: think about what will be selling well in a few months' time."
32 Personal organiser/assistant If you are good at filing and managing tasks, and know someone who isn't, why not offer to share your expertise with them for a small consideration? Being organised is a valuable skill, and whether it's for a small company or a friend there may be more of a market for this than meets the eye. Ask around friends or look on listings websites including gumtree.com.
33 Personal shopping "This is an idea that nicely taps into our desire for personal service," says Jones. "There's also potential to niche this business, for example focusing on time-starved ladies. Making it niche brings down marketing costs and increases customer loyalty."
34 Personal tutoring If you are a part-time teacher or are perhaps taking a career break to look after young children, this can be a great way to make a little money while keeping your syllabus knowledge up to date. Try advertising locally or registering with an agency like Personal Tutors.
35 Pet grooming "Many people loathe bathing their pets and trimming their hair – I know I do," says Hamm. "Pet groomers can do this for a small fee – a perfect job for a person who loves dogs and cats."
36 Pet minding/walking "Dog-walking is a fantastic earner if you love animals and enjoy the outdoors," says Birtles. "On average you can make between £10-£15 per hour, per dog." Get good and you can be walking two or more at a time. Offer pet-minding as well and you can make a whole business out of it. "You'll need public liability insurance in case something happens to the dogs or members of the public," she warns.
37 Online referrals expert There's money to be made from your email address book: a surprising number of companies will pay you if you can persuade your friends to become their customers. Check out the website refermehappy.com, an online matching service where you can get referral bonuses from companies like Sky, Virgin Media and First Direct.
38 Rent out your stuff You can rent pretty much anything now, although space is still the most profitable "item", says Birtles. "Rent your driveway on parkatmyhouse.com if you live somewhere popular, or your possessions from a baby bath to your lawnmower on sites like rentnotbuy.co.uk and Zilok ," she advises. "Currently there are more items on offer than requests to lease things, but it's worth a try."
39 Slivers of Time OK, this isn't strictly a business idea, but sliversoftime.com matches people with a few spare hours here and there with part-time work. Register with the site, then put your spare time on the calendar. Your hours are sent to local agencies and businesses who regularly use part-time workers.
40 Selling ad space on a personal blog This is not a big money-earner to start with but could be if you work at it, reckons Birtles. "Set up your own blog (do it for free with blogger.com) and fill it with great writing, photos, videos and anything else you're passionate about," she advises. "Get ads automatically through Google Adsense and make a few pence every time someone clicks on an ad."
Do book reviews and make money selling the books through Amazon's affiliate programme.
41 Scrapbook making Many people dream of having beautiful scrapbooks, says Hamm. "They collect all the materials they want to go in them, but never follow through on the actual creation. You can step in here – take their ideas and materials and assemble a scrapbook for them."
42 Selling lost luggage Auction houses round the country routinely sell off lost luggage that the airlines have failed to match with their owners. "For example, Greasby's in south London sells off BA's lost items every week," points out Birtles. "You bid blind on bags that have had the expensive stuff removed (cameras, iPods etc) and then sell the bag and contents on eBay or at a car boot sale. Bags generally go for between £5-£50. Your profit depends on what's in them!"
43 Translating If you are fluent in a second language, translation services are in demand as UK companies look overseas for new sales. But be warned: it's a serious business and you'll need professional qualifications from an accredited body (such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting or the Chartered Institute of Linguists) and professional indemnity insurance before setting up.
For public service translating work you'll also need a diploma in public service interpreting law, a licence from the National Register of Public Service Interpreters and to be registered with an approved interpreting body.
"Once qualified, register with translation sites such as lingo24.com and language123.com and grow from there," suggests Jones.
44 "Ugly" modelling If you look, shall we say, different, you could make money in ads, photoshoots or appearances through the Ugly model agency. "People with phenomenal tattoos, piercings or just very "interesting" faces can make thousands doing commercials, videos or corporate appearances," says Birtles.
45 Vegetable growing If you have some suitable garden space and the requisite green fingers, focus on one vegetable and sell the excess to local greengrocers and at farmers' markets. "My father does this with tomatoes and earns some solid extra money in the summer," says Hamm.
46 Virtual assistant "Many ultra-busy professionals appreciate having someone who can check and answer their email, organise task lists for them, update their calendars and so on, with minimal interaction," says Hamm. "You can provide this service from home with a good internet connection."
47 Website designing An increasingly competitive field as the software needed becomes more and more mainstream. However if you have a good eye for design generally and formal training, it can be a profitable side business.
48 Wedding/social photographer You'll need a website or blog to showcase your work, but if you're confident that your photography is good enough, there's no reason why you can't do wedding/function work professionally. Do your homework though – you'll need to take charge of arranging people into groups and know all the classic poses expected of the occasion.
49 Wedding planning If you're one of those people who can't help but flip through bridal magazines and daydream about nuptial arrangements, this might be perfect for you. "A great way to get started is to develop a website on the topic, get to know people online and offer your services to the community," says Hamm.
50 Writing letters to magazines You can make between £10-£200 for a good letter or photograph to a weekly magazine such as Take a Break or Pick Me Up, suggests Birtles. "If you have a really juicy story you can make even more, and you don't even have to write it, she says. Women's magazines particularly are usually desperate for items for their letters' pages, and even quite tame stuff often gets in.
Working from home - Whose business is it?
If you're an employee/mum/student by day and are building a business after hours, Emma Jones highlights the people you need to keep in the loop.
• The boss So long as you're not doing anything in competition with your day job, it's wise to tell your employer. Providing it doesn't affect your work, most employers should see a side business as a good thing; you're gaining new skills, while the employer gains the benefits and doesn't have to pay for the training.
• The insurance/mortgage people When starting a business at home, upgrade the insurance policy to include business cover and tell your mortgage provider, even though this won't affect payments. You only have to inform the local council if the nature of the house is going to change from a home to business premises, which is unlikely.
• The taxman You have a duty to inform HMRC of activities within three months of trading. Registration is straightforward, with forms depending on whether you set up as a sole trader, partnership or limited company. Keep the tax bill as low as possible by claiming business and homeworking expenses.
• Friends and family Last but not least – so they can all (hopefully) start buying from you.
Emma Jones is founder of Enterprise Nation and author of Working 5 to 9. To order a copy for £10.49 (including UK mainland p&p), go to theguardian.com/bookshop
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"Katrina Kollegaeva In Balaklava"
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Since the Russian annexation local vineyards have been capitalising on gaps in the market triggered by western sanctions
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Crimea's champagne makers hope to recreate the Soviet glory days
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It was once the “Coca-Cola of the Soviet Union”, a homegrown luxury promoted by Josef Stalin as a promise of the supposed abundance soon to come to the USSR.
Now, more than 80 years since Stalin’s “invention” of Soviet champagne, a ban on western-imported produce triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea is prompting a revival in home-grown versions of foreign luxury goods.
Russia and Ukraine step up security amid tension over Crimea Read more
This month, as part of its efforts to revitalise otechestvennoe (local production), the Russian state supported a festival at a prominent vineyard in Balaklava, Crimea which produces one of Russia’s most popular champagne brands, Zolotaya Balka. More than 12,000 people attended to drink, eat and listen to the headline band, called Leningrad.
The festival comes as the Russian government seeks modernise the Crimean economy. On a recent state visit, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev announced that his government would invest 2.5bn roubles in “objects of cultural importance” in the peninsula, including local wine production, by 2020.
The Crimean “bureau of vine and wine”, set up before the annexation but which has seen a new lease of life under sanctions, is now working to champion local brands, including the popular Balka champagne. By 2025 they hope to have increased the production of Crimean-made wines by 20%.
The festival comes at a time when Crimea’s security situation is deteriorating. Russia and Ukraine stepped up safeguards on the de facto border between the peninsula and mainland Ukraine in early August, a day after Moscow accused Kiev of planning terror attacks on the peninsula.
The alleged incidents have raised tensions over Crimea to the highest level since Russia annexed the region from Ukraine in 2014. Russia’s FSB security service claims to have detained a Ukrainian terror cell with 20 homemade explosive devices inside Crimea, and repelled fire from across the border in a separate incident. The FSB said one of its officers and a Russian soldier died during the clashes.
But locals like Bogdan Parinov, a chef at Crimea’s first 5-star hotel, Villa Elena, are trying to make the best of a challenging political situation. Parinov says sanctions have helped spur on the local food industry. He sources most of his ingredients from the peninsula and makes his own cheeses. He’s even named one variety Black Out, “in tribute” he says to the electricity shortages that have hit the area since the annexation.
The most interesting terroir is around Sevastopol city, there’s even a faculty of winemaking there Katerina Belmas
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A vineyard in Crimea. Locals say the area is primed for a winemaking renaissance. Photograph: Katrina Kollegaeva
Rich history
As the Soviet Union developed in the early 1920s, the government asked Russian wine-makers to devise a recipe for a new “champagne for the people” that would be cheap, quick to produce for the working masses.
The winning recipe came from Anton Frolov-Bagreyev, who used a blend of Aligoté and Chardonnay grapes matured in large tanks, rather than individual bottles. The result, named “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye”, was launched after a decree in 1936 and became popular across the Soviet region.
Today most champagne makers in Crimea use a variation of Frolov-Bagreyev’s method, with tanks of grapes maturing over 1-3 months instead of the traditional 15 months required for French champagne.
Both methods can, in theory, produce good quality wine but Pavel Syutkin, the author of The Uninvented History of Russian Cuisine, says that any Crimean wine that costs less than 200 roubles (£2.50) is likely to be a “primitive mix of imported wine must, powders, spirit and colorants.”
Dining out in Moscow: from culinary wasteland to foodie heaven Read more
In contrast, a bottle of Novyj Svet or Zolotaya Balka’s finest will cost around 400-600 roubles (£5-£8), and is considered a decent quality.
While internationally only the wines made in the particular region in France are allowed to call their produce champagne, the Novyj Svet vineyard, among others, still uses the label champanskoe, which they say is permitted as long as they only use the Cyrillic alphabet.Against a backdrop of increased political tensions, locals say local food production is still a source of pride. “Shampanskoe for a Russian person automatically means a celebration. Often it’s not a holiday that leads to shampanskoe but the other way round. Up until recently, I didn’t have a great desire to drink otechestvennoe – until I’ve visited a few wineries – [now it is] Novyj Svet or Zolotaya Balka for me,” says Katerina Semenova, a tour guide in Yalta.
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| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
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"Press Association"
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‘Single lapse’ in eye examination by Honey Rose meant she failed to pick up signs that Vincent Barker, 8, had fluid on the brain, a condition that cost him his life
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Suspended sentence for optometrist Honey Rose who missed eight-year-old's fatal condition
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An optometrist who failed to spot symptoms of a life-threatening brain condition during a routine eye test of an eight-year-old who later died has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Honey Rose, 35, failed to notice that Vincent Barker had swollen optic discs when she examined him at a branch of Boots in Ipswich. The abnormality is a symptom of hydrocephalus – fluid on the brain – and Vincent died in July 2012, about five months after the eye test.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vincent Barker died in July 2012 about five months after a routine eye test in Ipswich. Photograph: Suffolk Police/PA
Rose had not looked at retinal photos taken by a colleague and failed to examine the backs of Vincent’s eyes with an ophthalmoscope, Ipswich crown court heard. She was “generally competent”.
Judge Jeremy Stuart-Smith, sentencing, said that although it was a “single lapse”, the breach of duty was so serious that it was criminal. The landmark case is thought to be the first conviction of an optometrist for gross negligence manslaughter, which generally involves multiple lapses over a period of time.
Stuart-Smith told Rose: “You simply departed from your normal practice in a way that was completely untypical for you, a one-off, for no good reason.”
He added that there was “nothing in (Vinnie’s) general presentation that should have rung particular alarm bells for you”.
Rose had tried to “cover up” her actions when she found out Vincent had died, claiming he had not co-operated and showed signs of photophobia.
Judge Stuart-Smith dismissed this account as false and praised the Barker family for showing “dignity and restraint”, noting they had called for leniency in sentencing.
He said an immediate custodial sentence was not required to bring home the importance of optometrists properly discharging their duty to patients as the case had been highly publicised and had already caused great concern to the optometry profession.
A written statement from Vincent’s mother Joanne Barker said: “The knowledge our loss should have been prevented and Vinnie should have been saved is intolerable to live with.”
Rose’s husband, Louis Kennedy, fought back tears as he took to the witness stand and said “sorry” to the Barker family, who were in court. Rose made no comment as she left court.
Ian Stern QC, mitigating, said Rose had worked “extremely hard” to qualify in India before moving to the UK and qualifying as an optometrist here.
“The loss of that vocation, which undoubtedly will happen when she comes before a fitness-to-practise panel, will affect her self-respect as someone who worked so hard to obtain those qualifications,” said Stern.
Rose has three children aged eight months, five and 10, and has not worked since March 2013.
He said the court case had “sent shockwaves round the optometric practice”.
A letter from the Association of Optometrists said there had been an increase in practitioners’ concerns about the way they were doing their job, said Jonathan Rees QC, prosecuting.
Rose, of East Ham in east London, was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter after an earlier trial at Ipswich crown court. She was also ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and given a 24-month supervision order.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/26/suspended-sentence-for-optometrist-who-missed-boys-fatal-condition
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/8dca20c582ef545d4cd27a69f9a009c494bf3d3f5c69754960119a1fa562f690.json
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[
"Dominic Fifield"
] | 2016-08-27T16:51:11 | null | 2016-08-27T16:00:40 |
Chelsea defeated Burnley 3-0, Eden Hazard and Willian scoring in the first half before Victor Moses sealed the win
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Chelsea have menacing look as Victor Moses completes defeat of Burnley
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www.theguardian.com
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The fanfare has been reserved up to now for the contenders up in Manchester, the focus fixed rather more on a mouth-watering duel between Pep Guardiola and José Mourinho to be played out over a city divide. Yet, quietly but impressively, Chelsea are a team revived under Antonio Conte.
The threat they pose in the title race this term should not be underestimated.
This was a third successive league win under the Italian, and the most impressive of the team’s displays under his stewardship to date, with Burnley dismantled from the outset and outclassed throughout. Chelsea were irrepressible, Eden Hazard tearing at will beyond the unfortunate Matthew Lowton and Willian providing some balance by exploiting Stephen Ward on the opposite side. The urgency was all local, the quality imposed from the off.
Burnley, far too passive for comfort, never stood a chance.
Conte, sporting a black armband in memory of those who lost their lives in the earthquake back in his homeland this week, never stopped bellowing instructions at any point, even when the game was clearly won. He kicked every ball, berated every mistake or pang of sloppiness, and celebrated manically each of his team’s rewards as if this was the game upon which the championship hinged.
It is easy to see why he is in need of a few days off next week. He may be able to relax easier knowing his team are retiring into the international break with their pristine record maintained.
This game was settled early with Hazard’s opening goal, so slickly taken, effectively serving to wreck the visitors’ game-plan in its infancy.
Where Sean Dyche’s side had sat back and defended so stoutly against Liverpool the previous week, their own lead having been established in the opening exchanges, here Burnley were gasping in arrears from the moment, 10 minutes in, the Belgian collected possession just inside his own half. As he sprinted forward at panicked defenders, Diego Costa and Willian dragged opponents out of position with clever, selfless runs. Ben Mee was too flustered to muster a challenge, with Hazard easily cutting inside at pace and curling a delicious shot into the far corner of Tom Heaton’s net.
It was a goal reminiscent of the forward at his best in the title-winning campaign, reward taken on the gallop with the confidence of a player utterly content with his role in the team. Last season feels like an aberration when he performs with this effervescence, and he clearly benefits from the industry of those around him.
N’Golo Kanté’s busy energy as Chelsea’s new midfield shield has given the creators a platform from which to perform – the France international has slipped seamlessly into this set-up – though Oscar was just as feverish with his tackling further up the pitch. Even Nemanja Matic, a player diminished over the last 18 months, looked more like his old self.
The hosts’ dominance was all too evident as Burnley laboured to contain them. Mee did well to scramble another Hazard shot from the goal-line, while Heaton saved smartly from John Terry’s header and instinctively from Diego Costa’s rather languid shot. That opportunity was born of Oscar’s quick feet near the by-line which had left Steven Defour grounded and helpless, yet the procession of opportunities was rarely checked while the visitors toiled in vain to clear their lines. Dyche cut an increasingly agitated figure on the touchline as he raged at the one-sidedness of it all.
Willian eventually made Burnley pay, teasing space from Ward before spitting away a shot through the full-back’s legs, across Heaton and into the net for his first goal of term. This team functions better with the Brazilian’s own blend of trickery and industry from the right flank. The excellent Heaton, again, did well to deny Hazard a second as he crunched a volley from outside the area. Terry should have buried the rebound only to sky over the bar on the stretch, though this was an occasion where profligacy was unlikely to be punished.
There would be a third to celebrate before the end, a sweeping counter-attack seeing the substitutes Pedro Rodríguez and Victor Moses combine with the Nigerian converting the Spaniard’s centre emphatically at the far post. It was a goal to add gloss to the occasion. Conte’s side will face greater tests once the campaign resumes but, on this evidence, they will be eager to confront them. This team feels menacing again.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/27/chelsea-burnley-premier-league-match-report
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c72fcae5bfd32268975c2bebf3dffd0d1a73fd70e38fad16887def6d5cbc7166.json
|
|
[
"Source",
"Noaa Office Of Ocean Exploration"
] | 2016-08-27T06:57:07 | null | 2016-05-28T14:46:50 |
Deep sea scientists exploring the remote waters between Hawaii and Midway atoll find a gigantic sea sponge “about the size of a minivan” that could be the oldest animal on earth
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Fmay%2F28%2Fscientists-discover-gigantic-sea-sponge-hawaii-video.json
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en
| null |
Scientists discover gigantic sea sponge in Hawaii - video
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Deep sea scientists exploring the remote waters between Hawaii and Midway atoll find a gigantic sea sponge “about the size of a minivan” that could be the oldest animal on earth. A remote-operated submersible found the sponge about 2,100m (7,000ft) down, while exploring the depths of the Papahānaumokuākea marine park
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2016/may/28/scientists-discover-gigantic-sea-sponge-hawaii-video
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en
| 2016-05-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/db5a7500c0eefd3a520275601b4ba0615fe5c9a734ffc6fddb684153b92ae98f.json
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|
[
"Frankie Boyle"
] | 2016-08-26T13:22:47 | null | 2016-07-12T12:30:12 |
The new Tory leader will no doubt introduce a cap for migrants. Probably an orange cone with an ‘M’ on the front that gives out an electric shock if they stray too close to a golf course
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Fjul%2F12%2Ftheresa-may-has-vowed-to-unite-britain-my-guess-is-against-the-poor.json
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en
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Theresa May has vowed to unite Britain - my guess is against the poor
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The Tory party seemed to have been blown apart by Brexit, but coalesced like the T-1000, this time taking the form of a woman. Andrea Leadsom, a sort of defrosted Theresa May, said that she was withdrawing in the national interest, but the suspicion will remain that she was ordered to stand aside by some blasphemous, tentacled demigod addressing her through a screaming mirror. You would have thought that having two women competing for the job would have gone down well with the Tory cabinet, rekindling fond childhood memories of the trial-by-combat phase of their nanny selections, but May was seen as the safer pair of hooves. She immediately vowed to unite Britain – my guess is against the poor. She will no doubt introduce a cap for migrants. Probably an orange cone with an “M” on the front that gives out an electric shock if they stray too close to a golf course.
You’ve got to say that at this crisis point the Labour party should be concentrating on doing what it’s good at, and surely that isn’t elections. Jimmy Savile armed with a cloak of invisibility let loose at Hogwarts would have more self control than the Labour party. A headline in the Guardian quoted a colleague describing Angela Eagle as “tough – in the best possible sense”, although personally when I think of tough in the best possible sense, I’m thinking maybe al dente pasta rather than voting for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. There are those on Corbyn’s side who suggest this is a struggle between the top-down and bottom-up ideas of parties as social movements. I mean, it might be; it might also just be a struggle between people who don’t really seem to know what they’re doing and people who have some really firm ideas about how to change direction that are terrible. Eagle was widely derided for not putting forward any policies at her campaign launch, but really I think everybody knows the kind of things she stands for, and she was wise not to mention any of them. Indeed, given the makeup of the electorate, the whole thrust of her campaign should be to try to stop people remembering what she represents, and ideally who she is.
It’s hard to know whether all this is taking it out of Corbyn, due to his clever tactic of starting each day looking like he slept in his car. Yes, the media is hugely, systemically biased against him, and reason in general, but his one-note response seems to be going nowhere. He has this manner with interviewers where he seems to think that he is calmly talking sense to a lunatic, when really he is talking to the machinery in an abattoir. It’s probably worth noting that the referendum will have been seen at Westminster as a huge reaffirmation of the power of Murdoch generally, the Sun and the Daily Mail. Looks like it’s going to be a long time before senior politicians start turning up to the weddings of bloggers.
The fallout from the referendum continues. Some people are finally saying they’re embarrassed to be British, admittedly because we’ve left a trading union, rather than the centuries of mass murder, but it’s a start. House prices have dropped and you won’t be able to use your phone abroad – good, my kids can buy a flat and won’t be bothered by work calls on holiday. This all sounds as tragic as a conga line through a cocktail bar so far. Yet there’s no doubt racists feel vindicated by the result. It’s like a dam has burst. Finally we’ve thrown off our politically correct shackles and can tell it like it is – “That tapas ... It ain’t a meal. It’s just snacks. It ain’t right Terry! Pizza! They’re havin’ a laugh. It’s just cheese on fuckin toast! That Polish. Where’s the vowels? It ain’t right. It’s bad enough we let the Welsh get away with it.”
But let’s remember that the referendum vote wasn’t to normalise racism; that was the one we had in May 2015. Remainers have spent so much time online calling people racist that Chinese primary school children are getting a raise for mining the lithium for their new batteries. Seriously, do you want the right to stop acting as if the Brexit vote was a mandate for racism? Stop telling them that it was a mandate for racism. A generation of liberals who voted for Blair and then Clegg are demonising the people who gut their salmon at 4am for not knowing that leave were lying to them. “We were changing the EU from within!” cry a group of people who stayed home watching Netflix while 21 Ukip members were voted in at the 2014 European elections. Meanwhile, Farage spent the referendum taking a group of undecideds and, with Nazi imagery and a pledge to let Syrians die, got their support. A trick he learned from Hillary Benn.
So where are we? Well, we have an opposition dedicated to opposing itself, and a country so heavily dependent on money laundering that we just brought out a waterproof fiver. Churchill’s on the back, presumably because he best reflects the current state of the UK economy – “Never was so much owed by so many ...” We also have a ruling class that has trained itself to look for opportunity in every crisis, no doubt wondering how it can get rid of all the best bits of EU membership and retain the most iniquitous. For now, we will just have to hold tight and watch Theresa May do her considerable worst, praying for Dorothy’s house to fall on her.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/12/theresa-may-has-vowed-to-unite-britain-my-guess-is-against-the-poor
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en
| 2016-07-12T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3e9de913a32785f484c61522c4397efcf3c255fcd83c5947ffe791eaf8a382bc.json
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|
[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-26T13:20:37 | null | 2016-08-25T22:04:10 |
Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of embracing a brand of political conservatism associated with white nationalism during a Nevada campaign stop
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fhillary-clinton-donald-trump-alt-right-video.json
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en
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'Alt-right' effectively merged with Trump's campaign, Clinton says - video
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of embracing a brand of US political conservatism associated with white nationalism and nativism during a Nevada campaign stop on Thursday. She cited Trump’s decision to bring on Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as his new campaign chief as a sign Trump is strengthening his ties to the ‘alt-right’ movement
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/aug/25/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-alt-right-video
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/82fe8af10643cdc91c831d1f23df1d4dad1da1e8fc5988d8536a6debd93cf74f.json
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[
"Paul Mason"
] | 2016-08-29T12:49:57 | null | 2016-08-29T12:30:01 |
The prime minister must kill off the delusion of a ‘giant flounce-out’ from the single market
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Feurope-brexit-britain-theresa-may-single-market.json
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Europe is out to shaft Brexit Britain. Here's how Theresa May can prevent it
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www.theguardian.com
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When Theresa May calls the cabinet to order on Wednesday morning, amid the chintz of Chequers, the roses will be past their best and the lawn covered with dew. After Britain’s mad summer, the May administration will convene in Buckinghamshire finally to face the chill autumn reality: Britain voted for Brexit without a plan and the Europeans intend to shaft us.
They may not have actually used the word “shaft” when they met on the Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi last week, but German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande and Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi know they hold all the strongest cards. French civil servants are trained at the grandes écoles, like diplomatic special forces, to spot and ruthlessly attack the weakness of negotiating partners. And May’s administration goes into this critical negotiating process with an obvious weakness. It does not know whether it wants to remain in the single market.
Chancellor Philip Hammond is said to want “partial” single market access, to keep the City’s passporting arrangements into the eurozone. If, in order to get it, Britain has to soft-pedal on immigration controls, that would be no disaster for the Treasury, whose growth projections in this year’s budget relied on the impact of a million EU migrants over the next five years.
Brexit minister David Davis and international trade secretary Liam Fox are chomping at the bit to begin the article 50 process – naturally they have drawn up rival timelines – but have so far failed to produce any kind of blueprint for their preferred outcome, which is to quit the single market and end free movement. This leaves May struggling to assert control over the process of even coming to a negotiating strategy – hence Wednesday’s away day – and in severe danger of floundering once she has to deliver her Brexit plan to the other EU heads of government.
It is a real, serious and material split in the government of a major country. And it is backed by rival forces in society. Those for whom Brexit became a religion in the spring of 2016 do not care about the niceties of the European Free Trade Association and the European Economic Area. They voted to leave all of it and to “take control” of migration. But the economic elite of Britain, which has the strongest voice both in the Conservative high echelons and in the civil service, simply does not want Brexit. Above all it wants to maintain market access for the City, and for the major global service firms headquartered in London. For them, it is logical to hope that Europe stonewalls all May’s requests for flexible market access, and that – by the end of the process, and with the economy suffering – the public will be ready to accept staying in the EU, with some minor variations on migration.
Labour, too, is racked by the same dilemma. John McDonnell’s “red lines” on Europe do not, and cannot, include keeping free movement, but do include keeping the City’s financial passport and single market “access”. For Jeremy Corbyn the additional problem is that the European left wants Britain out of the EU pronto, before it can negotiate any dilution of the social chapter.
Both main parties, then, are trapped between what is possible and what the British people voted for. Owen Smith may be wowing his rallies with talk of a second referendum, but the party leaderships are beginning to realise this will only be sorted out in parliament. It will be complex, messy and reputations will be minced. The only democratic way of doing it is to say – if necessary with May, Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon standing shoulder to shoulder somewhere symbolic – that Britain’s aim is to remain in the single market.
Until the delusion of the giant flounce-out is killed off – and until Liam Fox and David Davies are told to stop dreaming about it – those negotiating with Britain from the other side will have a massive incentive to force us into it. If they think it is our secret desire, or our plan B, for Britain to quit the single market cleanly, Europe will not take seriously any UK government demands for variations to single market rules, designed to keep us on the inside the market, though outside the EU itself.
May should seek cabinet agreement for a baseline request: to remain as part of the EEA, with a humane, time-limited restriction on free movement as Britain’s one demand, and then get on with it. She should make a statement to the commons that rules out leaving the single market. Any confusion that is allowed to fester over this will corrode her own authority as the Europeans sensibly deploy every trick in the book – a book going back to the era when Prince Metternich ran rings round Britain in post-Napoleonic Europe – to make her squirm.
There will be uproar in Ukipland – but there always is. Not only is there no clear mandate for leaving the single market, but the negotiating positions of our major partners are now clear. They have not said “go ahead, pick and mix” from the EU goodie-bag: they have said the single market plus free movement or get lost. The British negotiators’ job is to prise that position apart – not rubberstamp it, which is what Fox, Davies and other hardcore Brexiters want.
May wants to serve a full term. But both logic and principle dictate that were she to give in to the “clean break” brigade within the cabinet, she would have to schedule an election and fight for a mandate to lead Britain into this particularly stupid form of economic suicide. If so, whoever leads Labour should be salivating at the prospect. The Brexit moment caused many in the City to question the long-term direction of centre-right politics. By finessing May into power without a vote, and surrounding her with the grey men and women of provincial Toryism, the grandees of the party restored the impression that they could – just about – hold the line for the City, the big law firms, the service giants and big pharma.
But if Tories want go into an election promising to destroy 30 years of European financial integration in order to assuage the xenophobes and climate deniers of Ukip, that would be a different prospect.
For the opposition parties, if they can recover their nerve, any confusion coming out of Wednesday’s cabinet – still better any open revolt – will be a big opportunity. They should state, simply, that they will seek a vote in parliament to veto any Brexit strategy that tries to remove Britain from the single market. That principle – which needs no further elaboration since these are opposition parties, not a parallel government – could become the rock upon which Theresa May’s soaraway ratings are broken, and her majority ground down.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/29/europe-brexit-britain-theresa-may-single-market
|
en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c07d2d3f3892a80b56db00968643d1d358c707df6b5aaaadf6a34fb5dbb81235.json
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|
[] | 2016-08-29T18:52:38 | null | 2016-08-29T17:54:51 |
Editorial: Wartime anniversaries are a way of shaping the future as well as honouring heroes of the past. This week’s ceremony is no different
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fthe-guardian-view-of-arctic-convoy-commemorations-more-than-meets-the-eye.json
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The Guardian view on Arctic convoy commemorations: more than meets the eye
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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On 31 August 1941, 75 years ago, the first Arctic convoy arrived in Archangel. A handful of merchant ships carried raw materials and Hawker Hurricane fighters, the first instalment of lend-lease that was to shore up the Soviet defences against Hitler. On board one of the merchant vessels was the Polish-born artist Feliks Topolski, accompanied by several war reporters. The political and propaganda intentions, as well as the military purpose of the convoys, were easy to spot.
Over the next four years, 78 convoys sailed to deliver essential supplies to Britain’s new ally. The losses were terrible: 85 merchant ships, 16 Royal Navy vessels and as many as 3,000 sailors; the supplies were never enough to meet Soviet demands. The conditions were diabolical, not just from cold. In summer the eternal daylight left no place to hide from the constant threat of German aircraft. The convoys had to survive submarine and surface attack while fighting the turbulence of the Arctic Ocean as it meets the warmer waters of the Atlantic. The handful of men who still survive deserve the British medal that the Ministry of Defence finally conceded three years ago.
Most official commemorations of second world war battles are intended to shape the future as well as honour the fallen of the past. This week’s Arctic convoy ceremony (for which Princess Anne will travel to Murmansk) also serves a political as well as a military end: it is to amplify Russia’s significance as the conqueror of fascism.
Over the past decade the growing attention paid to the convoys has kept time with Vladimir Putin’s careful rehabilitation of Stalin and Stalinism. Only last week the Volgograd regional governor approved the idea of renaming the international airport Stalingrad, putting the city’s old name, erased in 1961 after Stalin was denounced, back on the map. Schools are soon to have a new history syllabus that will give a “balanced” view of the dictator.
And along with the well-publicised awards of the Ushakov medal to survivors, Wednesday’s commemoration is meant to remind Europe that Russia still sees itself as standard bearer in the fight against fascism, a war demanding eternal vigilance. That past deserves honour. But it does not justify the actions or the policies of Mr Putin’s regime today.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/29/the-guardian-view-of-arctic-convoy-commemorations-more-than-meets-the-eye
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7f509ef39f64b986a41b571830627212c924483ac433a45ccda16e3d9ddad733.json
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|
[
"James Walsh"
] | 2016-08-27T12:49:13 | null | 2016-08-02T12:12:49 |
From the blustery Norfolk Broads to the cloudy Cairngorms, if you’re on holiday in Britain we want to see your stoic holiday snaps
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F02%2Fon-holiday-in-the-uk-share-your-underwhelming-photos.json
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| null |
On holiday in the UK? Share your underwhelming photos
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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It’s that time of year again, when schools in the UK have broken up for the summer holidays and the weather responds accordingly. We’re certain the start of September will be just lovely, but for now, enjoy the rain, the wind, and the endless banks of cloud.
We know from past assignments that our readers are pretty stoic about bad weather hitting their holiday plans, and we’re keen to see what you’re up to even if the skies are leaden and the attractions you are visiting don’t quite match up to your expectations.
If you’re on holiday in Britain this week, we want to see your photographs - the more underwhelming the better. From soggy campsites to broken tourist attractions, all we ask is for you to take care, be safe, and send us images dripping with disappointment.
We’ll put together a gallery of the best / worst pictures, to make those of us stuck at work feel slightly better about our fate.
Looking for inspiration? Be like JKLEIN96, who managed to go to Land’s End during a heatwave in London.
Lands End AKA Dismaland Came down to Cornwall from London for a week away. Get to Lands End and can't see further than 10 metres in front of us. Strange visitor centre/amusement area, not quite sure what the aim was (plus a Shaun the Sheep experience for a small fee). Anyway, turns out it's 27 degrees in London.
How to contribute
Share your work by clicking on the blue “Contribute” button on this article. You can also use the Guardian app and search for “GuardianWitness assignments”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/02/on-holiday-in-the-uk-share-your-underwhelming-photos
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en
| 2016-08-02T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/bcef27beccc2ed24adfd64c6ab8d40c542a99b4b3c5b8ed5a48d95268bc057ca.json
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[
"Arwa Mahdawi"
] | 2016-08-30T16:52:36 | null | 2016-08-30T15:45:23 |
Women in India have been told to avoid skirts and French mayors can’t deal with the burkini ban being illegal – how can a girl keep the rules of propriety straight?
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffashion%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fdressing-while-female-burkini-france-india-skirts-rules.json
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Dressing while female: a semi-definitive guide to exercising sartorial safety
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Geopolitics is really starting to mess with my autumn/winter wardrobe. While the UN conveniently sits in silence, government officials around the world can’t seem to shut up about what women should or shouldn’t wear.
India’s tourism minister, for example, has just advised that foreign women shouldn’t wear skirts “for their own safety”. Meanwhile a number of French mayors are nobly continuing to ban the burkini even after France’s highest administrative court ruled the ban illegal. These mayors care about women’s right to bare arms and are willing to break the law for it. Ladies, you should be grateful.
Is a skort as dangerous as a skirt? Is a sarong just as wrong?
And I certainly don’t want to sound ungrateful. I think it’s great that politicians understand that women’s rights are often simply a matter of the right sort of clothing. It’s laudable that so many men are encouraging us to exercise sartorial safety. But here’s the thing: if you’re going to become the fashion police you need to take your policing a little more seriously. All of this advice is very confusing, occasionally conflicting and doesn’t seem terribly well thought out. Is a skort as dangerous as a skirt, for example? Is a sarong just as wrong? And can we have an official verdict on the burkini already before burkini season is over?
I’m sure a lot of women are as concerned about inadvertently dressing inappropriately as I am. So while we wait for the UN to get their act together and sort out some sort of official female dress code we can all abide by, I’ve put together some pointers on dressing while female. Please note, of course, that these are only guidelines and you should always double-check your outfit with a man.
Bikinis in Israel
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Muslim women wear hijabs in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea as people play on the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 22 August 2016. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters
While the French are saying non to burkinis, their sluttier sister, the bikini, appears equally out of fashion in Israel. A performance by singer Hanna Goor at a government-organized event was recently cut short because, apparently, her shorts were too short and she was wearing a bikini top. The culture ministry, shocked and saddened by what the public had endured, noted that they would work to ensure correct dress at future events.
As an editorial in Haaretz noted: “The modesty regime that the culture ministry is trying to enforce on events meant for the general public is the mirror image of France’s unconstitutional burkini law.” Started from the burkini bottoms now we here, eh?
Bikinis in any country whatsoever if you’re not beach body ready
It’s irresponsible to wear a bikini unless you’ve got a six pack and a thigh gap. This may not be official legislation in most countries – but the media and advertising industry helpfully ensure that women are cognizant of these rules all around the world.
High heels in a professional environment
In May, a London receptionist was sent home from her first day at corporate accountancy firm PwC after refusing to wear heels. Around the same time a waitress at a Canadian restaurant was told she couldn’t change out of her heels even though her feet were bleeding. I have very little sympathy for these women. Yes, heels can be incredibly painful and result in debilitating foot deformities – but have you seen Jurassic World? If Bryce Dallas Howard can dodge dinosaurs and sprint through a muddy jungle while wearing 3.5-inch pumps, you should probably just get a decent podiatrist and suck it up!
Headphones near a man
What if a man wants to talk to you but can’t because you’re rudely covering your ears? Show a little more consideration, ladies, you know you want to.
Pants on a plane
Facebook Twitter Pinterest British Airways: no longer skirting the issue. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In February, after a two-year dispute, female crew members on British Airways were finally given the right to wear trousers as well as skirts. If you work for Virgin Atlantic, however, then your right to wear trousers is considered on a case-by-case basis. And Etihad doesn’t have a trouser option for its female flight crew. Ettore Bilotta, who designed the Etihad uniform, told the press that: “Females in the inflight crew were not allowed to wear trousers, because the element of femininity had to be emphasised.” If there isn’t enough femininity in the cabin it can really mess with in-flight safety, I guess.
Flats at a film festival
The second biggest fashion faux pas in Cannes, after a burkini, is having the audacity to try and attend Cannes Film Festival in rhinestone flats. It doesn’t matter if part of your foot has been amputated, nobody wants your excuses. Please wear heels like a self-respecting woman.
Lacy lingerie in Kazakhstan
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Women protesting against the ban on lace underwear in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Photograph: Vladimir Tretyakov/Associated Press
In 2014, a trade ban prohibited the import, production or sale of synthetic lace underwear in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Not long after, 30 women were arrested for protesting against the ban by wearing lace underwear on their heads and shouting “freedom to panties!” What these women didn’t understand, of course, was the ban was for their own good; the government explained they were simply protecting women’s vaginal health. Kazakhstan has issues like the shrinking of the Aral Sea, the devaluation of its currency and radioactive contamination to deal with, but it took time out of its busy schedule to focus on panties. Sometimes women are so ungrateful.
Leggings or yoga pants in the US
Not appropriate in a number of American high schools, apparently. A Republican in Montana attempted to ban yoga pants from the state last year but was unsuccessful. So for now Montana remains a largely Lululemon safe zone.
Miniskirts in Uganda
In 2014, Uganda attempted to ban the miniskirt. A number of men tried to help the government out by forcefully undressing any women they saw wearing miniskirts in public. Eventually the Ugandan government was forced to clarify that the miniskirt wasn’t entirely banned. Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister, clarified: “Put on a miniskirt but please don’t expose your thighs, your buttocks and your genitalia. Finished.” Finally, some clear advice! India, are you listening?
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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/aug/30/dressing-while-female-burkini-france-india-skirts-rules
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| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/60a5f176faedff3bd50c649120f5948c25c8fcd69a849bca580ae380590d8429.json
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[
"Mark Sweney"
] | 2016-08-26T13:02:10 | null | 2016-08-25T15:47:18 |
Managing director of content defends scenes such as the rape of Sansa Stark on her wedding night, saying the show’s audience knows what to expect
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmedia%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fgame-of-thrones-violence-towards-women-sky-sansa-stark.json
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Sky boss: violence towards women in Game of Thrones is part of the story
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www.theguardian.com
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A top Sky executive has dismissed accusations that Game of Thrones uses violence against women as character development.
Gary Davey, managing director of content at Sky, said it was “nonsense” to make such a suggestion, arguing that male characters are subjected to just as much violence in the hit fantasy drama.
In a discussion panel at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Davey was asked specifically about the rape of the character Sansa Stark on her wedding night, a controversial storyline that has raised widespread debate and was even mentioned in the US senate.
Game of Thrones walks fine line on rape: how much more can audiences take? Read more
“I think that’s nonsense,” said Davey. “There is also a lot of violence to men. For anybody who’s watched the show it can be a very violent show. I don’t think the violence against women is particularly highlighted. It is just part of the story. The rape happens, it’s part of the story, it was in the books.”
That specific scene did not appear in George RR Martin’s books, although there was a rape of a different character.
The TV scene was almost universally decried by fans, with Vanity Fair publishing a piece headlined: “Game of Thrones absolutely did not need to go there with Sansa Stark”.
Davey admitted that the sixth and latest season was “pretty intense” but said that Sky had only received three complaints about the show’s often extreme scenes of sex and violence.
“I think it is bit silly, it is not like sex and violence on TV is a new idea,” he said.
“I feel like I’ve been defending it for most of my adult life. In fact I’m not sure it’s any worse or any better than it’s ever been. And I think part of the issue is context.
“I think Sky Atlantic in particularly is a really good example. People know what to expect there. It is challenging content whether it is the story structure, the characters or indeed the intensity of the content in sex and violence context really matters.”
Davey said that the TV show is now ahead of the books but that author Martin remains involved in the development of plotlines.
“We are now past the books so the story is evolving,” he said.
“We got ahead of the books so we had to write original content and we have done that in conjunction with original author. The [low] complaint level clarifies our audience knows what to expect from Sky Atlantic and a show like Game of Thrones.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/25/game-of-thrones-violence-towards-women-sky-sansa-stark
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1e873575fb4f7f6f831a301591050d67a9de22cbad7f5535240aa033496e3ca7.json
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[
"Maev Kennedy"
] | 2016-08-26T13:27:48 | null | 2016-08-24T14:14:27 |
Soldiers died of starvation and disease after brutal forced march when they were taken prisoner by Oliver Cromwell
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fremains-of-scottish-soldiers-who-died-400-years-ago-to-be-reburied-oliver-cromwell.json
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Remains of Scottish soldiers who died 400 years ago to be reburied
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www.theguardian.com
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The remains of Scottish soldiers who died of starvation and disease almost 400 years ago after a brutal forced march will be reburied with honour near the site where their bodies were tipped into a mass grave in the shadow of Durham Cathedral.
The discovery, after three years of research on bones found during building work within the Unesco world heritage site of Durham’s palace and cathedral, resolves a centuries-old puzzle about what happened to 6,000 prisoners taken by the English parliamentarian army under Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650.
Some of the men were so ill they were freed immediately, some were shot for trying to escape and others succeeded in getting away, while many died on the 100-mile march south to Durham. Some were then transported to America, while others were sent to work on draining the Fens, but it is believed that up to 1,700 died in wretched conditions in Durham’s abandoned religious and palace buildings where they were held. Most of the cathedral’s ornate medieval woodwork was burned by the prisoners in an attempt to keep warm.
Professor David Cowling, pro-vice-chancellor for arts and humanities at Durham University, said the decision to keep the bones in Durham had been complex, and reached after extensive discussions.
“We were acutely aware of the strength and depth of interest amongst many about the fate of these soldiers, whilst at the same time recognising our ethical, moral and legal obligations. All options were explored fully by the university and in the end it was felt that the case for reburying the remains in Durham and also commemorating them here with a plaque was strongest.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scientists found that those who could be identified were young adult males, some with worn teeth from pipe smoking. Photograph: Richard Rayner / NNP/North News & Pictures Ltd
Canon Rosalind Brown, of Durham Cathedral, said it was hoped that those interested in the story of the Scottish soldiers, including churches in Scotland, would now join in planning “a fitting and dignified reburial and commemoration”.
Archaeologists believe hundreds more bodies probably still lie under the nearby buildings, which is partly why the decision has been taken to rebury the skeletons nearby, instead of – as some had suggested – repatriating them to Scotland. Stone will be brought from Dunbar for the memorial plaque, and Scottish soil may be brought in for their new grave. An existing plaque in the cathedral will be reworded to record that their burial place is now known.
The two mass graves, described as holding “numerous skeletons laid in a disordered fashion” were found as archaeologists monitored a site being prepared for a new cafe, within a courtyard enclosed by medieval buildings that are now part of the Palace Green Library.
Skeletons had been found near the site before, including a mass grave of bodies packed together and buried without coffins found during building work in the 1940s. That find was poorly recorded, but this time the archaeologists found the jumbled remains of up to 28 individuals and have been studying them ever since.
The scientists found that all those who could be identified were young adult males, some with worn teeth from pipe smoking. There was evidence that some of the bodies had been left exposed for long enough after their death to be gnawed by animals – possibly as open mass graves were gradually filled as the death toll mounted.
Richard Annis, senior archaeologist with the Durham University archaeology unit, said when the identification of the Scottish soldiers was confirmed last year: “Their burial was a military operation: the dead bodies were tipped into two pits, possibly over a period of days. They were at the far end of what would have been the Durham castle grounds, as far as possible from the castle itself – they were out of sight, out of mind.”
The reburial will probably happen next year, when research is complete on the remains, including analysis of teeth to try to establish where the soldiers came from and details of their diet and health.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/24/remains-of-scottish-soldiers-who-died-400-years-ago-to-be-reburied-oliver-cromwell
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/154b5700f493153a8d3d1b545bd15a04ef40a0ff1ea704d302c4a202d173c257.json
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[
"Marine Gauthier"
] | 2016-08-30T12:52:31 | null | 2016-08-30T12:09:16 |
In the DRC, the Mbuti people rejected a reserve that banned them from their lands. Now, with conservationists, they are exploring ways to protect the forest together
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fglobal-development%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fclashing-conservation-saving-democratic-republic-congo-forest-pygmies-drc.json
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Clashing over conservation: saving Congo’s forest and its Pygmies
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Global development is supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Reaching the Itombwe forest and the people who live in it isn’t easy. A muddy path from Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), traverses this mountainous terrain, crossing areas controlled by a multitude of armed militias. Access is difficult for everybody: the NGOs working in the area, and the merchants and miners hoping to benefit from the coltan, gold and wood found here. In the heart of the world’s second-largest forest basin (pdf), an incomparable wealth of biodiversity has been preserved: rare trees, tropical birds and the last gorillas on the planet.
But the mountain range is changing rapidly. International demand for the DRC’s natural resources, in addition to the country’s gradual economic and rapid population growth – and consequent appetite for exploitable land – are taking their toll on the forest. Following the war in neighbouring Rwanda in the 1990s, and successive rebellions against the Congolese government, the forest of the Congo basin now hosts rebel groups that hide in the mountains and live off the illegal exploitation and trafficking of natural resources.
“The state is itself a threat to our forests: it makes a complete mess of things by handing out timber licences. It gives them to anyone willing to pay, and we see these people come and cut down our trees with impunity. They cut down our medicinal trees and, with them, the bark and fruits used for our medical treatments. They cut down our caterpillar trees, our oil trees,” says Irangi, who is a member of the Mbuti Pygmies in his 30s. He lives on the edge of the Itombwe reserve.
He has watched as trees have been chopped down for charcoal to be sent to Bukavu and Rwanda. “These people come with their weapons and take everything: the trees, the animals,” says Irangi. “They even kill species whose hunting we forbid, like the pangolin and the gorilla. Because they have weapons, they believe that they’re above our laws.
“We also know that our subsoil is rich. One company has already come to dig for gold. If we don’t protect our forest, more aggressors will come and invade our lands. This is why we have to conserve it.”
In 2006, the government created the Itombwe nature reserve, supported by WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The reserve delineated an area of 15,000 square metres within which all human activity was forbidden.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Mbuti Pygmies say they have their own methods of conservation, which they call ‘traditional technologies’, based on their deep connection to the forest. All photographs by Riccardo Pravettoni
But this area doesn’t simply contain flora and fauna. It is also home to the Mbuti indigenous people, who have lived and depended on this ecosystem for millennia.
“When we learned that the reserve was created we were angry,” recalls Marie, a woman from Kitale village in the mountains. “If you found out that the place where you gather and hunt your food, where you find your medicines, where the resting place of your ancestors is located, was to be taken … would you be happy? We were afraid that they would steal all of this from us. So we met and decided: we’re not going to let this happen.”
In the 1980s, in the neighbouring national park of Kahuzi-Biega, nearly 6,000 Pygmies were expelled from their villages, condemned to re-establish themselves outside the forest without government support. Today, these groups live in extremely precarious conditions along the major thoroughfares. Deprived of their traditional food sources, lands and identities, they work as manual labourers.
Irangi and his community know this story all too well – it took place only 200km from Itombwe. “We don’t know what will become of us, but we know it’s not a good thing for our forest to belong to the state,” he says.
In many areas of the country, the imperative to protect natural habitats has led to tension with local communities, whose traditional hunting practices are seen as conflicting with conservation. “It’s an old approach to conservation that pushes people out of protected areas in order to conserve nature,” says Lars Løvold, director of Rainforest Foundation Norway, an NGO that defends the rights of indigenous people. “This comes to us from the classic American vision of wild and pristine nature, while in reality, what one thinks to be a virgin forest has in fact been inhabited and delicately manipulated by man for millennia.”
Irangi, who is the local schoolteacher, is not afraid to speak to strangers or officials. “I was born and grew up in this forest,” he says. “I married and had children in this forest. I left for a few years to study in the city, but returned … This land belongs to us because our entire lives are here: we find our food here, our pharmacy, everything we need. We, the Bambuti [plural of Mbuti], can’t live outside of the forest; our nature is to live here.”
Though not protected as indigenous by the state – which would mean recognising their traditional rights over the land – there are at least 600,000 Mbuti Pygmies in the DRC (pdf), according to government estimates, including about 60,000 in the Itombwe forest. They live a semi-nomadic life.
“In this forest we find the wood to build our homes, the fruits and the takus [caterpillars] we eat … We gather plants, we hunt, we fish – it’s our life,” says Marie.
Physically and spiritually connected to the forest, the Mbuti Pygmies have a traditional knowledge of their land, and have their own methods of conservation, which they call their “traditional technologies”.
“We know how to protect our forest because nobody knows it the way we do. We know where the animals give birth, where they sleep and during which periods one must never kill them,” says Mapenzi, a young hunter. Like the other Pygmies, he underwent his initiation, or lutende (in Mbuti), during months of isolation in the forest. The exact location and content of this ritual remains secret.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Itombwe tropical forest holds a great biodiversity in flora and fauna. Local communities and indigenous people say it also hosts livelihoods activities which they would like to see guaranteed by the national reserve.
“I know all of the traditional methods and was trained by the guardians of our customs,” says Mapenzi. “I know the sites and the periods for hunting and fishing. During the dry season, we don’t hunt, because the animals give birth. And there are authorised animals, like the mokumbi [the Gambian pouched rat], and those which must not be killed, like the gorilla.
“We have our own traditional conservation technologies. The animals that the modern law wants to conserve are already under our customary protection. These are the laws our ancestors established. We will continue to use our technologies to manage our forest with the knowledge of our ancestors.”
The rules are numerous, and those who break them are subject to severe punishment. “The malambo are the sacred sites where the animals give birth,” says Irangi. “There, we don’t have the right to hunt. Just as we don’t set traps near the river where the animals go to drink. If you don’t obey, the guardians of custom will place the muzombo on you. It’s a punishment by death.” Whether a spiritual death sentence or more probably an excommunication, the members of the community believe in the punishment and respect the rules.
If you don't obey [the rules], the guardians of custom will place the muzombo on you – punishment by death Irangi, Mbuti Pygmy
Supported by local organisations from Bukavu, the Mbutis demanded the rejection of the reserve and blocked the entrance to the forest. The protests caught the attention of international indigenous rights organisations, and the reserve project was halted (pdf), forcing the government and conservation organisations to start negotiating with the Bambuti in 2008.
Bitomwa Onesiphore Lukangyu, who was working for WWF at that time and is now director of the reserve, says: “At first, we couldn’t even talk, we were enemies.”
He adds: “It’s difficult to believe that we can sit around the same table together today. But we took an important step by realising that we share the same goal: to protect the Itombwe forest. So we’ve started to work together. To create the reserve together.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gold and casserite are among minerals found in the mineral-rich region of South Kivu. In Itombwe, many local communities depend on artisanal mining.
Collaboration between local communities and conservationists might seem like a natural alliance, but this is a first in central Africa. However, feelings about the collaboration vary. For example, is recruiting rangers from among local communities a sufficient step to integrate them into the management of the project? “No,” says Løvold. “The majority of conservation organisations have adopted the rhetoric of working with local communities, but in practice their approach remains very instrumentalising, which indicates that they engage members of the community for certain tasks but don’t work deeply with them. It’s not enough to give indigenous peoples a little job; one must truly implicate them in every step of the management of the ecosystem.”
In June, the Bambuti’s efforts paid off when the government officially recognised new boundaries of the reserve, which were decided in consultation with local communities.
Protecting the newly defined area requires sizeable investment, and the government depends entirely on international aid for the project’s success. “The state itself cannot deliver sufficient support. WWF pays for everything here: my salary, this office, my house,” says Lukangyu.
The economic and social situation of local communities remains difficult. The Pygmies certainly want to conserve their lands and traditions, but they also want access to modern services such as health and education.
“Pygmies are going through profound change,” says Jean de Dieu Wasso, coordinator of Africapacity, a Bukavu-based organisation. “They have suffered forced displacements and violence within a general framework of discrimination as minorities … The community must be free to make its choices and to evolve. The important thing is to respect the international principle of self-determination, guaranteed by the declaration of the UN on the rights of indigenous peoples [pdf].” Wasso lives in the city now, but he has indigenous roots and has devoted the past 10 years of his life to supporting the Itombwe, maintaining the links between his people, the government and international partners.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bambuti from the village of Kitale often welcome their guests with dance and song.
Local communities are supported by the Norwegian government through Africapacity, while WWF and WCS, the two most active conservation organisations in the reserve, mobilise funds for the project from the Netherlands and the US. The Central African Forest Initiative, a coalition of central African and European countries, and Brazil, has pledged $300m (£231m) to protect forests in the Congo basin. There is a risk this new initiative will protect the forests at the expense of indigenous people. Yet there is hope that it will be guided by the Itombwe experience and approach conservation in a way that empowers indigenous people.
Wasso hopes to promote the Itombwe forest as a model nationwide. “The experiment should be recognised and replicated,” he says. “All conservation projects should now be based on negotiations with communities concerning their rights and their involvement.”
Lukangyu agrees: “We may have our army, our armed forest guards, but if we don’t cooperate closely with local communities this won’t work in the long term.”
Itombwe offers hope for indigenous people elsewhere in central Africa, placing them at the heart of a conservation project – not just as beneficiaries of international aid, but as authentic actors. “The conservation of this forest will be done with us, or it won’t be done at all,” says Irangi.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Itombwe mountain counts many peaks in its range, and accessibility is limited at the only road that connects it with Bukavu. Not many vehicles venture on to the bumpy track.
• The travel for this reporting was supported by the European Journalism Centre’s innovation in development reporting grant programme
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/30/clashing-conservation-saving-democratic-republic-congo-forest-pygmies-drc
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| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/390e58be7c3976e2dedc2091e3b6ea91ba9783b9665b905df1b19c3dd14dcccc.json
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[
"Blair Palese"
] | 2016-08-26T13:24:21 | null | 2016-08-26T02:35:09 |
Despite the government’s sudden conversion to gas as Australia’s panacea to climate change, the only real solution is 100% renewable energy
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsustainable-business%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fsorry-josh-frydenberg-gas-is-not-the-cleaner-alternative-to-coal.json
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Sorry Josh Frydenberg, gas is not the cleaner alternative to coal
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www.theguardian.com
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There has been a lot of hot air recently about the role of gas in Australia’s future energy generation. At last week’s COAG meeting, the overwhelming takeaway message from our newly minted energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, was that gas was good, not to mention vital for our future energy solution.
For Frydenberg, gas is the key plank of Australia’s solution to climate change: the low-carbon panacea that will help us meet our obligations under the Paris agreement. Indeed, he has so much faith in gas that he is applying pressure on Victoria to overturn its current moratorium on onshore drilling and give the industry a foothold in the Australian state with the highest population growth rate.
Steve Wozniak: The status quo doesn't have to exist. We can come up with solutions Read more
This action would open up some of our most productive farmlands to a ravenous and destructive industry, and lock Australia into decades of dependence on fossil fuel energy when renewable energy is cheaper and more effective than ever.
We have seen what gas has done in other parts of Australia and the US, where tap water becomes flammable, farmland is ruined and communities torn apart. As you can imagine, this is a move that is desperately unpopular with farmers, traditional owners and rural communities alike.
So where does this new fervour for gas stem from? Especially from Frydenberg, who once loved coal so much, he called it good for humanity.
As coal is seen as being increasingly toxic to the health of the planet – and communities – the gas industry sees a chance to capitalise in the new post-coal market. The role of coal in our future energy generation is facing challenges from other factors as well since the world agreed to step up on climate change in Paris in December.
The share of renewable energy is growing in Australia and worldwide. Nationally, we have a plan for about 23% of all energy to be generated by renewables by 2020. This is the baseline, while states such as Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have more ambitious goals on top of the national renewable energy target. The ACT is leading nationally with a plan for 100% renewable energy by 2020 and looks on track to achieve it.
The increase of power coming from renewable sources means the manner in which energy and the grid interact has changed fundamentally – and will continue to do so. And this is helping to contribute to the end of coal power generation. If the wind suddenly stops blowing, or the sun stops shining and back-up power is needed, coal power plants take too long to fire up and fill the void: coal and renewables are not compatible.
This is where gas feels it has an edge. Not only does it promote itself as a cleaner alternative, but it also has a much quicker response rate if power is suddenly needed. However, a recent report has suggested there may be difficulties in relying on gas. .
A recent report from the Melbourne Energy Institute suggested that the Torrens Island power plant potentially gamed the South Australian market by deliberately withholding power until the last moment it was needed, and then charging massive amounts for it. If true, it was estimated power companies made upwards of $40m from this highly dubious practice, at the expense of South Australia power consumers.
But by far the biggest argument against gas – along with the astounding damage it does to farmland and local communities in the process of extraction – is that more and more research is coming out to challenge the claim that gas is a cleaner option.
Modelling conducted by the International Energy Agency (IEA), shows that if the planet converted heavily to “clean” gas today, global temperatures would still rise by 3.5 degrees. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change today.
The Grattan Institute is wrong. We need more science students, not fewer Read more
If we raise the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees, we can say goodbye to many of our Pacific neighbours, who would become a modern day Atlantis story. Raise it by 3.5 degrees and it doesn’t bear listing here how horrific things will become. Suffice to say, the storms, droughts and extreme heatwaves we face today will pale in comparison.
The social and political fallout from a world that is 2.5 degrees hotter than today’s should be worrying to all of us. And yet that is the best case scenario if we give the gas industry a front-row seat in our energy mix.
And I say “best case” because the IEA’s modelling doesn’t factor in the gas industry’s fugitive emissions. This is the methane pollution that leaks out of wells and pipelines at every stage of the production line. These leaked emissions are 105 times worse than CO2, which is why experts agree they cancel out any climate benefit gas may have been thought to offer.
There is no accurate measurement of these emissions, so there is no way to know how much the industry is setting loose into the atmosphere – particularly in Australia where almost no independent studies have been carried out.
Add that to the astounding startup and infrastructure costs of expanding the gas industry – the new plants and pipelines, not to mention cleaning it up to hopefully stop the fugitive emissions – and it quickly becomes apparent that the gas “solution” is a furphy our elected leaders are trying to hide behind to pretend business as usual is good enough on climate change. That somehow we can just switch from coal to gas, whack up a few wind turbines, and that is the problem solved.
It just doesn’t add up. Even the industry knows this – including Australia’s largest power company and carbon emitter, AGL. The company is divesting many of its gas assets and has been calling on governments to work with the industry to come up with a coherent strategy to transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.
Sadly Australia has lagged well behind other countries on the march to renewable energy – China has just passed 200GWs of solar and wind capacity and investment in countries such as the US, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Canada and India has taken the share of the world’s energy coming from renewable sources to 20% in 2015.
The choice, quite genuinely, couldn’t be clearer. Australia must join the rest of the world and start investing in the renewable energy systems we know will be required, and building them now. We simply can’t afford to flirt with new gas infrastructure that the science says won’t be able to run for even a third of its normal life.
It’s time our politicians stop their gas-is-good propaganda and instead roll up their sleeves, engage with the industry and start the difficult but necessary work of making our power systems transition to 100% renewable energy.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/26/sorry-josh-frydenberg-gas-is-not-the-cleaner-alternative-to-coal
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ffb1c7fdd1e1cd8a5307744b58e3b72db3751f66f341ce20742aaea6509b426e.json
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[
"Jack Williams"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:07 | null | 2016-08-24T10:00:17 |
The midfielder decided to forego the English academy system and get an education in the US. Now he is thriving alongside Andrea Pirlo and David Villa
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fjack-harrison-interview-new-york-city-fc-mls.json
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Jack Harrison: from Manchester United to No1 draft pick and Yankee Stadium
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www.theguardian.com
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When Jack Harrison was a youngster, growing up in Bolton and playing for Manchester United’s youth academy, he perhaps did not imagine that football would take him to the most famous baseball stadium in the world. But football has a funny way of doing things. Which is why, on a recent summer’s afternoon in New York City, Harrison, 19, sat in one of the dugouts at Yankee Stadium, discussing the unconventional path – at least in of English football terms – that has taken him to the professional ranks here with New York City FC.
“It’s crazy,” he told the Guardian, a northern lilt still in tact and a slight grin on his face as he looked out over the field where his team had just beaten LA Galaxy 1-0. “I don’t think I understand the significance yet, as many Americans do, of being in Yankee Stadium. But it’s a great place to play. Look around – the stadium is fantastic.”
For many of the European players who had just left the pitch – Lampard, David Villa, Pirlo, Gerrard, Keane, Cole – questions about their transfers usually revolve around how they came to America to grow the sport. But for Harrison, who has generated the odd next-big-thing rumbling during this, his rookie season in MLS, the decision to leave England five years ago was more about personal development – in a footballing sense and as a way of improving his education.
Jordan Morris, Jürgen Klinsmann and surviving the US Soccer Hype Machine Read more
When Harrison was 13 and about six years into his Manchester United tenure, his mother, Debbie, decided to explore ways of continuing her son’s education, having foreseen the risks of pinning their hopes on football being Jack’s only career path.
“I wanted to find that balance for him,” she said. “I think it’s a bit of a parent trap when these young children go into academies, and then, to actually put all your focus and all your effort into football, football, football … I don’t think it’s a good thing.”
Debbie, a single mother with Jack her only child, recognized that sporting talent in America could lead to an elite education at a school with excellent academic and athletic resources. Though her son was not receptive to the idea at first, she continued to explore options in the US, walking Jack through United’s academy and pointing to pictures of the youth teams of old as a way of making her point that very few academy prospects make it into top-level teams.
“I said: ‘Do you recognize him?’... ‘Do you recognize him?’... ‘Do you recognize him?’,” Debbie explained. “And he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘What we can do is: you get the best of both worlds here [in the US], and if you do ever manage to play professionally, it’s a bonus, isn’t it?’”
Harrison agreed to study through textbooks that Debbie described as “the size of the Yellow Pages,” and after attending a three-plus-hour exam in London, her son was accepted into Berkshire school, a private, co-ed boarding school in Sheffield, Massachusetts.
With Debbie feeling like she’d “won the lottery” and Jack still apprehensive – he had friends in England and was playing for Manchester United, after all – the pair made a compromise: Jack should go and visit the school, and if he did not like what he saw, they would figure out another path for him.
“The soccer was a lot better than I expected,” said Harrison, who called his mum to express how much he liked the school, where the average class size is 12 and whose football coach accommodated him for a number of days. “At the same time, I would be surrounded by great people; the community was great; the facilities were out of this world.”
While Debbie admitted that it was tough letting her only child leave home at such a young age, she felt assured that the move was the right decision for Jack.
Harrison left for the US in 2011, aged 14, and said that he immediately found the education system in America “a real hit in the face.” In England, he joked, some of his teachers would forgive him for not completing his homework if he had attended United training late the night before. But here there were no excuses for a schedule that incorporated his soccer practices and additional study time in the evenings.
“One of his greatest attributes was that he was willing to ask questions, to advocate for himself, to be involved,” Dan Driscoll, the director of athletics at Berkshire, said. “He took advantage of every opportunity. I think the thing that separates the ones that have truly reached the highest levels are the intangibles — the drive, the grit, the leadership abilities — and Jack also showed those from the minute he walked onto the field as a little pipsqueak, as a freshman.”
At Berkshire, Harrison’s footballing talents soon became apparent, despite coaches initially being concerned about the midfielder’s small frame. He tallied 24 goals and 33 assists during his time at the school, and was named the national boys’ soccer player of the year in 2015.
It was during his time a Berkshire that Harrison also found a love for New York City. While on breaks from the school, a two-and-a-half hour drive from New York, he spent periods visiting friends there and trained with local teams – sometimes alongside players four of five years his senior.
Ray Selvadurai, the director of coaching at Manhattan Soccer Club, where Harrison played during high school, recalled a time when the player, then 15, was called as a ringer to play in an U-20 match and scored four goals. At another tournament, he added, Harrison put in man-of-the-match performances against sides from Tottenham, Brentford and Stevenage.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Villa is among the stars who have been impressed by Jack Harrison’s ability. Photograph: Nathan R Congleton/NYCFC.com
“The best part about him is his humbleness,” Selvadurai said. “I call him a yes guy. ‘Jack, can you get the cones?’ … ‘Jack, can you get the balls?’ ‘You’ve got it!’”
With the focus still on a balancing education and footballing prospects, Harrison accepted a place in Wake Forest University in North Carolina, in 2015. It was there that talk of the midfielder making the move to Major League Soccer really started to pick up speed.
“Professional scouts had been watching him for the year,” Bobby Muuss, the men’s soccer coach at the college, said. “I was hoping he wouldn’t go, selfishly. I’m a big believer in the university system – maybe not just for player development, but for human being development. And I think Jack is a tremendous young man, mature beyond his years because of his experiences.”
After picking up a string of accolades during his freshman year, Harrison decided it was time to turn pro. In January 2016, he was selected by Chicago Fire as the No1 pick in the MLS draft, but was soon traded to New York City FC, which had been tracking the midfielder for some time. (Harrison still has the option to complete his studies through online courses.)
“I would have been happy going anywhere,” Harrison said. “But I’m glad that New York reached out and went out of their way to get me. It’s nice to be back here. Also, with my friends being around as well, it’s great to have that support system around you.”
That support system, Harrison added, has been vital since he moved the United States. In New York, he said, the likes of Frank Lampard – who helped him through rehab for an injury during his early days with the club and spent time with Harrison away from soccer – have been pivotal. Patrick Vieira, the NYC FC manager, is doing his best to protect Harrison from excessive media hype also.
Such attention has come about from the performances Harrison has been putting in on the field. Deployed mainly as a right winger and confident cutting inside onto his left foot, the midfielder has played 13 times for NYC FC: he has scored three goals, creating three, been named in the MLS team of the week twice, and won player of the week once. These displays have seen publications mention both Harrison’s England prospects, and the chances of him potentially representing the United States one day. His team-mates see his potential too: “When he has the ball at his feet, you get the sensation something is going to happen,” said David Villa last month. “Few players give you that feeling and he has it. He has it at 19 years old, with not much time as a professional.”
Harrison is not getting ahead of himself when it comes to his international prospects. “I try not to think about it too much,” he said. “Obviously, it would be great to represent my country, England, but if the interest is not there, I’d be happy to represent America, and I’d be open to that. I’ve said that before: I like to focus on the moment and do what I can while I’m here.”
As the sun set on the Yankee Stadium field, Debbie Harrison waited for her son inside the vast hallway through the giant doors of the stadium’s Gate 2. On a visit to city, she was hoping to see the Statue of Liberty any day now. And for the Galaxy match, Harrison had given her tickets in the family section – an area from which she moved midway through the game, opting instead for the louder supporters’ section behind the goal. There, Debbie stood, was photographed with fans, chatted to others, and wore badges linked to the team’s supporters group, the Third Rail.
“She’s on the drums and everything,” Harrison laughed. “She loves being a part of it. You don’t really get many parents like that, but she’s in touch with them all on Facebook and stuff. I’m really happy to present her with that opportunity after everything that she’s done for me – I’ve been so grateful.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/24/jack-harrison-interview-new-york-city-fc-mls
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| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/11cb19e65fb225ac6fb3bd90249e3dccc1370c41c30ebed74ca0e41502d47234.json
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[
"Jon Henley"
] | 2016-08-30T12:50:23 | null | 2016-08-30T12:16:37 |
Pro-leavers want to get on with it while others argue there is no hurry until UK decides what it wants from negotiations
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Brexit weekly briefing: splits over timing of talks and single market membership
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www.theguardian.com
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Welcome to the Guardian’s weekly Brexit briefing, a summary of developments as Britain moves slowly – very slowly – towards the EU exit. If you’d like to receive it as a weekly email, do sign up here.
Producing the Guardian’s thoughtful, in-depth journalism is expensive – but supporting us isn’t. If you value our Brexit coverage, please become a Guardian supporter and help make our future more secure. Thank you.
The big picture
With the dust of the referendum earthquake settled, August all but over and Westminster and Brussels back from their summer breaks, the Brexit battle lines have suddenly become a lot clearer. It is going to be quite a fight.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iain Duncan Smith said the UK should not seek to stay in the single market ‘putting yourself again under the rule of European law’. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
In one camp are the get-on-with-it Brexiters like former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, who told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week that the formal leaving procedure must be launched early in 2017 to provide focus and set a clear deadline for exit talks. Key cabinet figures backed this plan, he said:
I have spoken to them and I am certain that these characters – David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson, and the prime minister by the way – are very clear that they need to get on with triggering article 50 as soon as possible ... And I believe they are all very positive about the outcome: we will be out, and we will do incredibly well.
In his view, Duncan Smith said, Britain should not necessarily seek to remain in the EU’s single market because “that would entail putting yourself yet again under the rule of European law”.
Brexit means Brexit … but the big question is when? Read more
In the opposing camp are much of the rest of the cabinet, including the chancellor, Philip Hammond, who reportedly wants to see Britain retain access to the single market, at least in specific sectors such as financial services, while also securing border controls for the UK.
Their position was ably summarised (also on Today) by Gus O’Donnell, the former civil service chief. While the government “needs to get on and implement the people’s decision”, he said, he really wouldn’t be in such a hurry.
The problem is that article 50 is “very strongly in favour of those who are staying, not the leaving party”, O’Donnell said. That means it would be madness to trigger it without having a “strategic plan to say ‘what kind of UK do we want, what’s our place in the world, what are we trying to achieve in these negotiations?’”
Whatever kind of Brexit it is, it will undoubtedly prove an “unprecedented challenge” for the government and for the civil service, he said – and particularly for the prime minister:
She’s got to corral all these different individuals, come up with precisely what version of Brexit we want, what works best for the British people, and then go about implementing it.
Theresa May promptly announced a meeting of senior cabinet members at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, on Wednesday. Amid reports of a full-blown cabinet split over the issue of single market membership (which would very probably entail accepting freedom of movement), she has demanded they come armed with ideas about how Brexit could be a success.
May has reportedly also been told by government lawyers that she is not obliged to hold a parliamentary vote on the decision to leave the EU before triggering article 50. Half a dozen different lawsuits claiming the contrary are currently before the high court where they will be heard in October, with a supreme court hearing likely some time in December.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barry Gardiner said Theresa May would be behaving ‘like a Tudor monarch’ if she triggered article 50 without a parliamentary vote. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images
Barry Gardiner, the shadow trade secretary, echoed the feelings of many MPs on hearing that news, saying parliament cannot be sidelined from the greatest constitutional change the country has debated in 40 years:
The logic of saying the PM can trigger article 50 without first setting out to parliament the terms and basis upon which her government seeks to negotiate – indeed, without even indicating the red lines she will seek to protect – would be to diminish parliament and assume the arrogant powers of a Tudor monarch.
The view from Europe
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Merkel in Tallinn with the Estonian prime minister, Taavi Roivas. Photograph: Guido Bergmann/EPA
Angela Merkel, at least, is prepared to be (relatively) patient. Mid-diplomatic marathon around assorted European capitals, the German chancellor said in Tallinn there was no point pushing Britain for progress until it had made up its mind what it wanted, and pointed out that the remaining 27 member states had plenty to sort out for themselves without the nitty-gritty of Brexit:
As long as Britain hasn’t submitted its application we can’t say what kind of a relationship we envision. [The EU-27] can allow Britain the time it takes to work out what relationship it wants with the EU. We have to think about what our priorities are, how we want to continue our work and where we want to make an effort in particular.
Her economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, however, sounded a somewhat less conciliatory note, saying Britain should under no circumstances be allowed to have its cake and eat it in the wake of the referendum:
Brexit is bad, but it won’t hurt us as much economically as some fear – it’s more a psychological problem, and a huge problem politically. If we organise Brexit in the wrong way we’ll be in deep trouble, so now we need to make sure that we don’t allow Britain to keep the nice things, so to speak, related to Europe, while taking no responsibility.
Meanwhile, back in Westminster
The home secretary, Amber Rudd, looks like she may face a fight to keep Britain’s Le Touquet agreement with France. The deal in effect places the UK border in Calais, and has led to the emergence of the so-called Jungle migrant camp.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amber Rudd with her French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, on Tuesday. Photograph: Etienne Laurent/EPA
Rudd was set to tell her opposite number, Bernard Cazeneuve, that talk of tearing up the accord is “a non-starter”. The rightwing regional president, Xavier Bertrand, and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy have both called for it to be scrapped.
One month on, what has been the impact of the Brexit vote so far? Read more
The former British ambassador to France, Sir Peter Ricketts, has warned that if a rightwing candidate wins the country’s presidential election next year, Britain “is going to have to deal with a pretty serious conversation” about the accord.
Meanwhile, in more indirect Brexit fallout, Labour’s leadership fight is getting increasingly nasty, with contender Owen Smith accusing his rival Jeremy Corbyn of lying about having voted to remain and being “happy about the result”. Smith said he would to stop May formally triggering Brexit unless she promises a referendum on the final deal, or calls a general election to approve it.
You should also know that:
Read these
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Will Hutton. Photograph: Anna Gordon/for the Guardian
The former economics editor of the Guardian, Will Hutton, responds to the current incumbent’s article last week about the absence of a Brexit armageddon, warning that unfortunately, the worst is still to come:
We have been plunged into a mess. The EU never obstructed the vital structural changes to the British investment and innovation ecosystem that had to be made, in or out. Now we have to deliver those reforms beset by the disastrous uncertainty of leaving the world’s greatest trading bloc ... Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s current economic editor, is upbeat about Brexit. I, a former one, am profoundly concerned. Readers in the years ahead will judge which of us was right.
In the Financial Times, lawyer and blogger David Allen Green argues that Brexit may of course happen, but it will not come about just because people say it will:
Brexit also needs to be capable of happening, and that requires a policy as well as resources. Instead of just asserting that Brexit “shall” happen, the government now needs to explain “how” it will happen. It seems not to have any idea.
The LSE’s professor of European political economy, Paul de Grauwe, argues that for its own sake, the EU can and must offer the UK only two options: a Norwegian-style model (accepting EU rules, allowing freedom of movement and paying into the budget), or leaving entirely and negotiating a free trade agreement à la Canada:
Clarity is essential for those who consider leaving the EU. This clarity can only be achieved by excluding a privileged trade agreement with the UK ... The century-old British strategy remains the same, ie to weaken the forces that can make Europe stronger. The UK can achieve this by insisting on a special deal whereby the UK maintains the benefits of the union while not sharing in the costs. Such a deal would signal to other member countries that by exiting, they can continue to enjoy the benefits of the union without the costs. Such a prospect would fatally weaken the European Union.
At the New Statesman, Ian Leslie has a light-hearted but actually fairly accurate sounding guide to the top 10 reasons why Brexit isn’t working – according, of course, to Brexiters (sabotage by Whitehall, remainers talking down the country, untrustworthy experts, EU bureaucrats, etc etc):
Over the next few years, it is likely that the economy will shrink, the entire government will be consumed by trade negotiations, and EU leaders will use their considerable negotiation advantages to theatrically screw us. As this unpretty story unfolds, those who argued confidently for Brexit, in parliament and in the press, will feel compelled to maintain that they were right, and that if it hadn’t been for some other impossible-to-foresee factor everything would be going splendidly.
Tweet of the week
The obvious silver lining? As the European commission rules that Ireland must recover up to €13bn in taxes from Apple:
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/30/brexit-weekly-briefing-splits-over-timing-of-talks-and-single-market-membership
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f5bffe28a88d089cb1c62d7a56c14fc69c284017c33edc364ac5ceca8b104074.json
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[
"Larry Elliott",
"Phillip Inman Economics Correspondent"
] | 2016-08-26T18:54:42 | null | 2016-08-26T16:56:09 |
Forget the markets, the US Federal Reserve chair actually hinted she is in no hurry to raise rates.
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fjanet-yellen-interest-rate-analysis.json
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Janet Yellen's message on interest rates is clear - but not as clear as you think
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The dollar went up. The dollar went down again. Share prices dropped. Share prices recovered. Yes, it was time for Wall Street to play one of its favourite games: interpreting a speech by Janet Yellen.
Truly, in terms of making her pronouncements cryptic, the most powerful central banker in the world is the daughter and heir to her predecessor but one, Alan Greenspan.
Nothing Yellen has come up with comes close yet to Greenspan’s “I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant”, but her presentation at the Jackson Hole symposium was a pretty good effort.
On the face of it, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve made a clear statement of intent. In the light of the continued fall in US unemployment, which has been dropping by an averageof 190,000 a month for the past three months, and the likelihood that growth and inflationary pressures would strengthen, the “case for an increase in the federal funds rate has increased in recent months”.
That could be taken as a hint that US interest rates could rise when the Fed next meets in September. Hence the knee-jerk selloff in shares and the jump in the dollar because dearer borrowing costs are seen as bad for corporate profits but good for attracting investors into the greenback.
Janet Yellen: the case for an interest rate hike in 2016 has 'strengthened' Read more
If only things were that simple. A closer textual analysis showed Yellen saying that the Fed continues to “anticipate that gradual increases in the federal funds rate will be appropriate over time” to hit its targets for jobs and inflation. What’s more, she stressed that decisions would depend on future economic news.
This suggests that the Fed is actually in no real hurry to raise rates, a view that is supported by the way in which the US central bank has shied away from raising borrowing costs in the first half of 2016 amid disappointing data. Figures released on Friday showed that the world’s biggest economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in the second quarter, a slight downward revision from the initial estimate of 1.2% .
So what Yellen is actually saying is that US interest rates could rise later this year, most likely in December, provided nothing nasty and unexpected happens in the meantime to make the Fed change its mind.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/26/janet-yellen-interest-rate-analysis
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/14a7fac79f7ba4e1f913eb3e5be71a1fa91da88746f7fc9482fe729a6a3f1bc3.json
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[
"Miles Brignall",
"Patrick Collinson"
] | 2016-08-27T16:59:20 | null | 2012-06-15T00:00:00 |
We always hear from readers who have been taken for a ride over holiday car hire. This guide will put you in the driving seat
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2012%2Fjun%2F15%2Fholiday-car-hire-10-ways-avoid-being-ripped-off.json
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Holiday car hire: 10 ways to avoid being ripped off
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www.theguardian.com
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1. Buy the basic package only
The secret to saving money on car hire is to buy the basic package only. Car hire firms make all their profits by selling you the add-ons, which are usually absurdly expensive. In particular, ignore pressure to buy their collision damage waiver (CDW) or "super" CDW insurance, which will cover the "excess", usually £500-£1,000, not covered by the basic insurance. Instead, arrange your own cover independently – see step three.
Use online agents such as holidayautos.co.uk, argushire.com, auto-europe.co.uk to check hire prices first, but also look on the sites of the major players, such as Hertz, Avis, Budget, Europcar and Sixt. They often have special offers making them just as cheap as the brokers, and booking direct has its benefits if there are problems later.
Keep to on-airport operators – not only are they more convenient, but "cheap" off-airport deals can be a false economy when the car turns out to be a dud. Hire deals organised by airlines such as Ryanair's link with Hertz are rarely better value than using a broker or going to the hire firm direct.
2. Bring your own satnav and child car seats
We tested the cost of hiring a satnav for a week in Italy with Hertz and were asked for €97 (£78.50) for one week. In Spain, Europcar wanted £77.
This is a waste of money. You can buy a new satnav that covers both the UK and Europe for around £50-£60.
Child seats are more tricky. Hertz wanted £78.50 while Europcar asked for £74, and £60 for a booster seat. But if you are flying with a charter airline such as Monarch, it is free to take a child seat with you. Booster seats cost as little as £8 to buy in the UK, indicating just how overpriced the car hire deals are.
If you are flying on a low-cost airline such as Ryanair, check the additional baggage cost when booking. Ryanair charges £10 each way for a child car seat, so even with this extra cost it can still make sense to bring it along.
3. Save £100 by buying excess insurance
When you rent a car, the price generally includes insurance cover for a major crash, write-off, etc, but leaves you with the bill for the first £500 to £1,000. If there are any small scratches or scrapes, adding up to, say, £500 worth of damage, it means you have to pay it in full. So the car hire firms try to persuade you into buying super CDW insurance to cover this first £500-£1,000. But they charge as much as £150 for a week, compared to the £33 cost of buying it independently.
Insurance4carhire.com is an independent insurance company that will sell you an annual excess policy for Europe for £49, or £4.75 per day for shorter rentals.
Unlike the car hire firm's own policies, its policies cover damage to windows, tyres, undercarriage and the roof, and the rest of the car up to £2,000 per single claim. If you damage the car, you pay the car hire firm the agreed excess and then reclaim.
Readers who have claimed say customer service and claims handling is quick and excellent.
icarhireinsurance.com is another firm in this area. Its annual European policy is £40 a year, but is not quite as comprehensive.
4. Ignore the sales patter at the collection desk
This is where you need to be strong. Don't be persuaded to buy insurance you have already paid for (above). When you fill out the rental agreement, the local agent will try to sell you their super CDW that reduces the excess to zero. They will tell you that your insurance isn't valid (it is) and they will try to sell you windscreen wheel, tyre, and undercarriage insurance (if you bought from the likes of Insurance4carhire, you will also have this).
Assuming you have a policy, don't fall for it. We get lots of complaints about this, and the car hire firm is under no obligation to refund you because you bought two policies – nor is the agent you hired the car from. If you paid twice, it's your mistake.
When you refuse the extra cover, the rental firm will "pre-authorise" a sum to cover the excess on your credit card – typically £600 or so in the local currency. This is normal and allows the firm to charge your card the excess if you do have a crash. They will also charge you for the fuel if appropriate.
You will need enough available credit on your card to handle both.
5. Check the fuel policy, the mileage and other extras
Before you hand over your credit card details, look up the company's fuel policy. If you are driving a long way, does your rental limit the mileage in any way? If you are under 25, is there a surcharge?
A growing number of firms (for Spanish rentals in particular) now insist on a full-to-empty fuel policy on rentals of more than three or four days. You pay for a full tank of fuel and then bring it back empty, which is fine in theory, but if you aren't using the car much you'll end up paying for three-quarters of a tank of fuel you didn't use.
Renters on the small Spanish islands report it being impossible to use a full tank of fuel. Even the big firms now adopt this policy. The only way round it in Spain for those on a week's holiday is to go for a series of short rentals. Elsewhere, such as Italy, it is less prevalent, but starting to appear.
6. Note all damage, and video or photograph the car
This is the key moment. Before you leave, go round the car and look for any damage and mark even minor scratches on the rental agreement. Don't leave anything off. Same for the interior. Check the spare wheel is there, inflated and undamaged. Check the car is full of fuel if it supposed to be, and record the mileage, if it's restricted.
Once you have marked all the damage on the sheet, get someone at the rental desk to sign it – even if it is a long walk or drive back to the desk. If you don't there is nothing to stop the firm arguing that you caused the damage at the end the rental.
Once signed for, there can be no dispute. Take a video or digital pictures of the car (especially any pre-existing damage) as extra proof.
7. Photo the car on return and keep the paperwork
Assuming you have done no damage, and have filled it up (if required), park it up and then take digital photos of each panel of the car, the wheels, the mileometer, and other shots.
Hand the keys back to the person at the desk. If late at night post them through the letter box. Be wary if approached by someone in the car park claiming to work for the car firm. One reader faced a lengthy battle after his car was stolen in this way.
Lastly, keep hold of the paperwork. Don't throw it away, thinking the rental is over – it's not.
8. Keep an eye on your credit card statement
Check your credit card statement a few days later to make sure promised fuel payments and excess charges are returned and keep an eye out in later statements that no extra payments have mysteriously materialised.
9. Fight any additional charges
If you have wisely bought excess protection, simply claim from the firm in question. If the claim is spurious, pass this on to them and let them sort it out. If you bought the car hire firm's policy (why?) and the claimed damage is not covered – it rarely is – then it is time to go into battle.
Send a copy of the photos you took, and talk to the company. Some, particularly those in Spain, will ignore you. Take it up with the agent you made the booking through. They may help. If the hire firm has a UK presence, contact the offices here.
Ask for evidence of repairs that were supposedly carried out.
If you don't get anywhere and know you are innocent, raise the dispute with your credit card provider. The card firm may again try to ignore it, but they are in the UK, and will be easier to tackle. It will then be up to the car hire firm to prove its claim is valid.
10. So which car hire company do you go with?
Shop around, of course, but one firm that we get relatively few complaints about is Holiday Autos. It has the advantage of offering a one-stop shop in that you can buy its basic rental – it also offers Insurance4carhire's excess insurance in the same booking – albeit branded as its own total damage excess waiver.
Just remember you've already paid and don't pay again at the rental desk. The downside to using Holiday Autos is that to ring it you must pay 10p a minute. It charges to add an additional driver – €23 for a week's rental in Spain – compared to Europcar's £60. Holiday Autos' baby seat charges aren't excessive either. It is part of lastminute.com, so you have a big parent company to complain to if things go wrong.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/jun/15/holiday-car-hire-10-ways-avoid-being-ripped-off
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| 2012-06-15T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/c0113569990a9ad5a978157b2b3d92197207651f77cdd5e58f9c4e52026724e3.json
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[
"Brian May"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:57 | null | 2016-08-26T08:00:13 |
The government’s chief scientific adviser admits the animals may be responsible for just 6% of bovine TB. There are better solutions than yet more killing
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The extension of the badger cull is horribly cruel - and it won’t help farmers
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www.theguardian.com
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Tuesday was a sad day for our wild animals. The BBC reported that the badger cull will be extended into five new areas, although the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) would not confirm that the selections had been made.
News that the already failed cull would be expanded is particularly disappointing to those who hoped that a new government would bring new wisdom. This tragic development is born of a distortion of the real facts, supported by false promises and propaganda heaped on to the farming community.
Badger cull failed humaneness test, independent panel finds Read more
There is mounting evidence that badgers have little to do with the spread of bovine tuberculosis. And there are no grounds whatsoever for believing that badger killing has made the slightest impact on the disease, but the government is seemingly pressing ahead, cheered on by the National Farmers Union.
People close to this machinery will tell you that it’s hard to see a clear line between the government and the NFU; and this in itself has a bad smell. No thought whatsoever is given to the suffering of the badgers, even though the government’s own independent expert panel delivered a verdict that the cull was neither humane nor effective. In fact, the shameful response from David Cameron’s government was to ensure there was no independent panel for the next rounds of culls.
Even Defra’s chief scientific adviser, Ian Boyd, has admitted the contribution of badgers to bovine TB may only be 6%. That means that at least 94% of the problem lies with the cattle herd itself. The overwhelming evidence is that the policy of skin testing and removal of individual reactive cows leaves infected and infectious animals in the herd, and so of course the problem recurs time after time.
Blaming reinfection on wildlife is a glib piece of manoeuvring by the NFU, but it’s not supported by any evidence. Quite the reverse. It’s worth mentioning also that even within the so-called hotspot areas for bovine TB, many farms have never harboured the disease. If the badgers were to blame for spreading the disease, would they be so choosy? The closer you get to the whole bovine TB scenario the more you realise that what the farmers are being put through is nonsense.
There are no grounds whatsoever for believing that badger killing has made the slightest impact on the disease
Culling badgers is a pill that is being offered as a consolation prize to farmers who are desperate for “something” to be done. It’s a placebo. What the farmers need is a proper testing regime that actually does clean up their herds.
I hope some of the farmers who are considering signing up for this continued culling farce will read this. I don’t say it lightly. I’ve been immersed in this stuff through Team Badger and the Save Me Trust for seven years now. I have no ulterior motive; I just want a solution to the problem. I believe we have now seen the beginnings of new evidence that recurrence of bovine TB on farms can be eradicated by more refined testing and, crucially, without interference with wildlife. Surprised? We’re not. But continued culling will wreck it all. With the badger cull, nobody benefits – except possibly a couple of government officials who are frightened of losing face.
It’s a sad tale. History will tell that, in clinging to this ridiculous cull, the government has:
1) wasted millions of pounds of the public’s money
2) disastrously let down cattle farmers
3) inflicted massive unnecessary suffering on thousands of mostly healthy native badger families
4) lied to the public about the effectiveness of what it is doing
5) delayed the resolution of the bTB problem by possibly 20 years
6) in the process, allowed tens of thousands of cattle to be avoidably infected, and prematurely slaughtered
In short, the casualties resulting from the decision to extend the cull are not just the badgers. The other casualties are cattle, farmers and the truth. It’s a disgrace.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/badger-cull-bovine-tuberculosis-tb
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7f1878da917db42b4f4290e68414f35bda3337812d50243dbf6f0585b6df7955.json
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[
"Joshua Robertson"
] | 2016-08-29T08:57:29 | null | 2016-08-29T08:10:01 |
Former environment minister entitled to find any assessment of resulting carbon pollution on the Great Barrier Reef was ‘speculative’, court says
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Faustralia-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fgreg-hunts-approval-of-adanis-queensland-mine-upheld-by-federal-court.json
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Greg Hunt's approval of Adani's Queensland mine upheld by federal court
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www.theguardian.com
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The federal court has upheld the commonwealth approval of Adani’s Queensland mine, ruling that former environment minister Greg Hunt was entitled to find any assessment of resulting carbon pollution on the Great Barrier Reef was “speculative”.
The court on Monday dismissed a challenge by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), which claimed Hunt failed to consider the impacts of the mine’s 4.6bn tonnes of emissions on the world heritage values of the reef.
Greg Hunt: no definite link between coal from Adani mine and climate change Read more
The ruling prompted the ACF to call for tougher national environment laws to tackle carbon pollution from coalmines, while flagging hopes that Hunt’s successor, Josh Frydenberg, would take a “fresh look” at the Carmichael mine.
The Queensland resources council accused the ACF of running a “nonsense case” that was akin to holding the Saudi Arabian government responsible for emissions from Australian cars running on their oil.
After the decision the head of the Queensland Conservation Council, Tim Seelig, said it was time for Australia to “stop exporting climate change”.
The QRC was joined by rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs in calling for the scrapping of section 487 of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which gives conservation groups the right to legally challenge commonwealth approvals.
The ACF challenge was the first known legal case exploring the effect of emissions from burning Australian coal overseas on the environment minister’s obligations under the EPBC towards the World Heritage Convention.
It was the second challenge to Hunt’s approval of the mine, with an earlier decision overturned a year ago by the federal court after Hunt ignored his own department’s advice about its impact on two vulnerable species, the yakka skink and the ornamental snake.
The ACF argued Hunt had made an “error of law” by not factoring in the impact of overseas “combustion” of the coal over the 60-year life of the mine.
Hunt had found it was “not possible to draw robust conclusions on the likely contribution of the project to a specific increase in global temperature”.
It was therefore “difficult to identify the necessary relationship between the taking of the action and any possible impacts on relevant matters of national environmental significance”.
Hunt concluded that emissions from the project would be “managed and mitigated through national and international emissions control frameworks” in Australia and countries importing the Adani coal.
Justice John Griffiths in his judgment ruled it was “plain that the minister did give consideration to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the combustion emissions and made an express finding that the proposed action would not have an unacceptable impact on the world heritage values of the reef”.
Griffiths also accepted Hunt’s submission that articles of the World Heritage Convention to which Australia was a signatory gave “considerable latitude to state parties as to the precise actions they may take to implement their ‘obligations’”.
Kelly O’Shanassy, the chief executive of ACF, said it was “absolutely incredible” the government could approve a major coalmine “without being able to determine the impact that coalmine will have on climate change or on the Great Barrier Reef”.
She called on the government to strengthen environment protection laws that are “so weak that they are not protecting the people and the places that we love, they are allowing big polluters to keep on polluting”.
“We need a next generation of environment laws that … explicitly deal with pollution from coalmining and the impacts that will have on the places we love like the Great Barrier Reef,” she said.
Geoff Cousins, the president of ACF, said the legal defeat was “disappointing” but that “many avenues” remained for opponents of the mine to exert pressure.
He said a meeting with Frydenberg last week left him “hopeful that he may take a fresh look” at the mine approval.
Cousins said it was “quite unlikely [the mine] will be funded”.
Michael Roche, the chief executive for the Queensland Resources Council, said the dismissal of the “nonsense case” brought by the ACF was “inevitable”.
“What the ACF was wanting the federal court to agree to was equivalent to saying that Saudi Arabia needs to take responsibility for the emissions from Australian motorists using their oil,” he said.
“Adani is building new power stations in India. They need coal. They would prefer the good quality coal in Queensland’s Galilee basin and if they don’t get access to that coal they will source their coal from somewhere else. So there will be no difference in that outcome for global emissions.”
Roche said it was the third defeat of a legal challenge to the Adani mine in recent weeks but three more cases remained, with the miner “locked and loaded” into a legal process that too easily enabled challenges without merit by mining opponents.
A spokesman for Adani said the ruling was welcome and reinforced “the stringency of the strict, science and evidence-based federal environmental approval process”.
Adani's Carmichael mine approval labelled 'economic stupidity' Read more
“At their core, these [legal] challenges have been about stopping investment and jobs as part of a wider activist campaign against mining,” he said.
Selina Ward, a coral reef scientist at the University of Queensland, said the mine would “diminish water quality” around a reef that suffered “35% mortality of corals in northern and central sections” after a major bleaching event in recent months.
“There is no doubt about the science that shows us that climate change is adversely affecting reefs,” she said.
“Dredging increased, coal dust going into the water and increased shipping are only going to exacerbate those [additional] problems of low water quality.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/29/greg-hunts-approval-of-adanis-queensland-mine-upheld-by-federal-court
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/89b5544e7f531afa2245e12c031eb4cc9e2e67d728737737c739a92c303ca785.json
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[
"Associated Press"
] | 2016-08-26T13:15:43 | null | 2016-08-25T13:18:10 |
Katie Ledecky, the most decorated US female athlete at Rio 2016, made an appearance before the Nationals-Orioles game
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fkatie-ledecky-first-pitch-washington-nationals-bryce-harper.json
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Katie Ledecky throws out first pitch for Nationals as Bryce Harper carries medals
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www.theguardian.com
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One by one, swimmer Katie Ledecky handed her Olympic medals to Bryce Harper. Four gold medals and one silver from the Rio Olympics sat in the hands of the reigning National League MVP.
As the Nationals star outfielder admired the medals of the Olympic champion and held her hat, Ledecky threw the ceremonial first pitch to reliever Shawn Kelley before the Baltimore Orioles beat Washington 10-8 Wednesday night.
“I’ve swum in front of 14,000 people,” Ledecky said of the pitch. “Once the ball leaves the hand, you can’t really control it.”
For the remarkable Katie Ledecky, the future appears limitless | Bryan Armen Graham Read more
Ledecky, a native of nearby Bethesda, Maryland, has thrown out the first pitch at Nationals Park before. That was in 2012 after she won the 800m freestyle at the London Olympics as a 15-year-old.
“I think I’ve gotten stronger and a lot’s happened in four years,” she said. “I’ve been to a couple world championships, more international meets, another Olympics, I’ve gone through high school, I’m heading out to college. Looking back four years ago, a lot has changed since then.”
— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) Bryce Harper held Katie Ledecky's medals for her as she threw out the first pitch: pic.twitter.com/ePqZsIzRok
Ledecky tied as the most decorated US female athlete in Rio along with gymnast Simone Biles and just short of Michael Phelps for the most among Americans. Before Ledecky’s first pitch, a tribute played on the video board, featuring a clip of her world record-shattering victory in the 800m freestyle performance in Rio when she won by more than 11 seconds.
The 19-year-old met several Nationals before the game, including Harper, whom she called one of her favorites. They didn’t give her any tips on the first pitch, which she said she had practiced, but they were curious about her five medals.
“They all wanted to see how heavy they were and things like that,” Ledecky said. “They are pretty heavy. It was kind of a different feeling for me to have them be a fan of me when I’ve been a huge fan of theirs for a couple years.”
Ledecky got a warm reception on the field 20 minutes before the start of the game but a rousing standing ovation when she was shown on the video board before the fifth inning. Fans cheered and broke out in chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Most Valuable Medal-Holder. Thanks @bharper3407 and @nationals for a great night! A photo posted by Katie Ledecky (@kledecky) on Aug 24, 2016 at 8:34pm PDT
She said her accomplishments in Rio are “slowly but surely” sinking in, only days after the closing ceremony. “I expect it’ll sink in as we move forward the next couple weeks,” Ledecky said. “Once I get back in the pool and start working toward my next goals, I know you just kind of have to put everything you’ve done behind you and start working toward the next thing.”
For now, the next thing is college. Ledecky will be a freshman at Stanford in the fall and plans to take some time off before starting school.
Before she finds out who her roommate is, Ledecky’s mind is already on the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. “It’ll probably be the longest break I’ll take in the next four years,” she said. “It’s just nice to be out of the water a little bit and get recharged for the next four years.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/25/katie-ledecky-first-pitch-washington-nationals-bryce-harper
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/b89d8dd99440e976466f77c469463b78101dabd5b5c01e5265b4c957f7cdaffc.json
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[
"Jessica Murphy"
] | 2016-08-29T10:52:07 | null | 2016-08-29T10:30:03 |
As Canada’s prime minister visits China, he must balance an effort to reset the countries’ relationship with concerns at home
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fjustin-trudeau-canada-china-relationship-visit.json
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Trudeau's challenge in China: forging closer ties while remaining wary
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Justin Trudeau will need to walk a thin line as he seeks to reset Canada’s relationship with China while balancing human rights concerns – and a domestic audience wary of the Asian power.
Canada’s prime minister leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day official visit to China, ending at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, an industrial and economic powerhouse on China’s south-eastern coast.
Trudeau’s Liberal party is billing this first official visit as an opportunity to build a closer long-term relationship with China compared with what party members call the “ad hoc” relations of the past.
The trip’s focus will be on building commercial, cultural and tourism ties with China, where Trudeau will meet with officials, business leaders and entrepreneurs such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing, and former pro basketball player Yao Ming. Canada is also seeking better cooperation on global issues such as climate change.
The visit will once again put Trudeau in the footsteps of his father, Pierre, whose government re-established diplomatic relations in 1971 with China, 20 years after they were broken during the Korean war.
At the time few western countries formally recognized the Asian nation, and Trudeau’s overture served as a breakthrough for China on the world stage.
This time, it was China that made the first approach, following the election of the younger Trudeau last October.
In an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail newspaper in June, the Chinese ambassador to Canada, Luo Zhaohui, called for the two countries to work together to usher in a “golden era” of Canada-China relations, following a visit by China’s foreign affairs minister Wang Yi - the first in seven years. China has also expressed interest in forging a free trade deal with Canada.
But while Trudeau’s family name may open doors, observers say he will need to wade clear-eyed into the diplomatic waters with a country that is now an ambitious geopolitical power.
Anastasia Lin: a Falun Gong practitioner seeking the Miss World crown – in China Read more
“The great role Canada played in our own small way bringing China in from the cold – that was appreciated by China and is still appreciated by China. So if you have a little collateral, you might as well use it,” said Hugh Stephens, with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “[But] he has to tread carefully – he’s got to be seen as not overtly pro-China, to represent broad Canadian interests.”
Former diplomat David Mulroney, who served as ambassador to China between 2009 and 2012 and is now with the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto, warned the goodwill that comes with the Trudeau name will only go so far.
“Trudeau’s lineage will be important to the Chinese,” he said. “But at the end of the day, they’re very hard-nosed and business-oriented.”
Mulroney said the prime minister would have to sell Canadians on the importance of engaging with the Chinese while reassuring a skeptical public that Canada would push back on issues such as human rights, cybersecurity, and intellectual property.
“Is that easy to do? No, it’s very challenging. And the Chinese make it as difficult and challenging as possible,” he said.
Ahead of the trip, Trudeau faced calls from activists to highlight concerns over human rights abuses, Tibet, and the treatment of Falun Gong practitioners. The son of Kevin Garratt, a Canadian detained in China on spying allegations, appealed to the prime minister to raise his father’s case.
While China is Canada’s second-largest single-country trading partner after the United States, a survey released last February by Nanos Research indicated two-thirds of Canadians held a negative or somewhat negative view of the Chinese government.
Trudeau has told reporters that although he was interested in building economic and trade links, he also intended to raise human rights concerns during his visit.
The subject of human rights remains sensitve: Wang provoked outrage in Canada after lashing out at a journalist for asking about the country’s human rights record.
Wang berated the journalist’s question as “full of prejudice against China and arrogance” and as “totally unacceptable”, to the visible discomfort of global affairs minister of Stephane Dion, who stood next to him.
Chinese minister vents anger when Canadian reporter asks about human rights Read more
In January, Reuters reported that Canada joined the United States, Germany, Japan and the European Union in expressing concern over a new counter-terrorism law in China and two draft laws, on cybersecurity and on the management of international NGOs, respectively.
But China offers too much potential for it to be ignored, said Mulrooney.
“We have to grow up and realize the world is changing. China is much more influential. It will engage us whether we decide to respond or not. And it’s in our interest to maximize the upside and minimize the downside of that inevitable relationship,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/justin-trudeau-canada-china-relationship-visit
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/001b5fc180e438808f4480410d5fa75f5b6e9efba68649c45806b5611fdddb82.json
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[
"Tom Ransley"
] | 2016-08-30T14:50:19 | null | 2016-08-30T14:02:47 |
The years of pain, training and total commitment to rowing all paid off in a perfect race. But then it was like line-dancing off a cliff – things took a turn for the surreal
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Frowing-olympic-gold-rio.json
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Winning Olympic gold was incredible. But I wasn’t prepared for what came next
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www.theguardian.com
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I have a long-held secret, but it is time to reveal it and give up on my dreams. Every set of birthday cake candles I blew out as a child, every wishbone snapped at a chicken roast dinner, I always wished for the same thing: that one day I would play in the NBA.
The closest I came to realising this wish was meeting Steve Nash, the eight-time NBA all-star. I was a gawky kid and what I remember most about the encounter is that he had spectacular, sharp sideburns that went right down to his jawline. I hoped but failed to emulate his unexpected triumphs in the greatest of basketball arenas. I did, however, manage to hold on to another dream and see it through to completion: winning a gold medal at the Olympics.
Britain’s men’s eight row to Olympic gold glory as women take silver Read more
Winning at the Olympics requires an all-consuming level of dedication. In my experience as a rower with the GB men’s eight team, the prologue of arduous and repetitive training extends for many years before the punishing routine and harsh selection battles all culminates in one single event, the pinnacle of sport, the Olympic Games. This event is likely to define an athlete’s career, and the result will be internalised by that athlete for the rest of their life.
When you head off to the Olympics the stakes are ridiculously high. The start line is a punishing and exquisite place. I love the buzz. I know everyone in the warm-up area deserves to be there. Each athlete has pushed themselves to excellence, hurting themselves over and over again in order to represent their country. That is an inspiration in itself.
There is a brilliant intensity of emotion bubbling under the surface of the focused, concentrated and hard exterior of an athlete ready to perform. It is a raw experience that taps into the primal – the fight or flight response. The strange and potent combination of fear, rage and readiness that circulated throughout my body before the start buzzer in Rio is a feeling I will never forget. It is an addictive sensation: bold and blinding, beautiful and horrible in equal measure. If I could go again tomorrow I would, but it takes at least four years and a considerable chunk of your soul to earn that spot on the start line.
The race itself flew by in a blur of perfection. I knew my crew were capable of big things but we had to do it on the day, when it really mattered. I share a common trait among the team: an obsessive eye for improvement. This unflinching commitment to ceaselessly perfect my rowing is compatible with the high-performance programme we follow. Every detail is torn apart and every performance analysed to yield the next speed gain.
This perhaps explains the strangeness I felt after the Olympic final. There was very little I would change about how we executed that race. The smallest of details that I did pick up on did not matter. We had won the big one. The one that mattered. The one that I had strived for over so many years. In an instance that machine-like process had stopped. I no longer needed to analyse or to perfect. The end product had been reached. The regimented and planned timetable of training no longer existed. I was free.
It is akin to line-dancing off a cliff. For nearly a decade coaches had mapped out every stage of my training. Every session was programmed, every day accounted for, and then abruptly the race was over, and it all stopped. It is disorienting: an alien sense of freedom, tinged with loss.
On crossing the finish line the sensation was unexpected. I was aware of what had happened but I felt somehow detached. I knew everyone was celebrating and going crazy, but by contrast I was still. I don’t understand why this was the case. It was as if my body were empty, or completely drained, and it felt as if I watched all this from outside of my body. I could hardly feel anything. On the landing stage I felt like a ghost. The effort was total, and I was exhausted. We had brought everything we had to those five minutes and 29 seconds of racing. I felt sick and disoriented. I think I was so overwhelmed by the experience I had no energy left to process what was happening. At some point someone sat me down and placed an ice pack on the back of my head/neck. The ice was bliss. It returned the world to focus. I knew this feeling, as surreal as it was, trumped the devastation of four years ago. In London 2012, we had led the Olympic final but were rowed down by two crews, and the bronze medal felt a very bitter type of bittersweet.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tom Ransley top row, second from left: ‘In some ways to be awarded the gold medal felt as surreal as if I found myself sitting beside Goldilocks eating porridge with the three bears.’ Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA
This time, standing on the podium I pondered a truly surreal experience. It had all the trappings of an Olympic prize-giving. I was being awarded the Olympic gold medal. I could hardly take it all in. At one point in the proceedings a brief and casual thought popped into my head: this is all a construct, purpose-built for effect. The Olympic prize-giving is a piece of televised theatre. Despite an absolute belief that we could win, our plans and visualisations never extended beyond the finish line. In some ways being awarded the gold medal felt as surreal as if I found myself sitting beside Goldilocks eating porridge with the three bears.
We dived headfirst into a whirlwind of parties. The city was alive with carnival-like celebrations. Unfortunately my energy levels waned with alarming speed. After a week I began to crave some normality. I ended the party-marathon the morning after the closing ceremony with several sleepless, singing Brits: there were four gold medallists across two different sports, shooting vodka from a paper cup at 7am in the Olympic food hall. This was not normal.
By the time I boarded the flight home I felt as if I were nearing the end of an endurance event or some kind of sleep deprivation experiment. I was fast approaching breaking point where the next selfie, photo-op, or glass of champagne might be terminal. Apologies to the lovely BA staff who kindly served me a glass of champagne – I just couldn’t face it. After no teammates accepted the offer I had to surreptitiously pour it down the sink at 30,000ft. For the first few hours of the flight I rapidly flitted in and out of strange dreams. I kept lurching back into consciousness, puncturing the snatched and restless sleep. In the end I opted for a Baileys. It did the trick. I was asleep in no time.
Team GB return from Rio Olympics on gold-nosed 747 Read more
The next thing I knew, I stood bleary-eyed, in front of the world’s media. I felt decidedly the worse for wear and no doubt I didn’t look particularly fresh. I would like to apologise to all the fans that crowded every section of the airport, from runway to bag carousel to car park. It was incredible to have so much support, and I am deeply sorry for my detached look. I was so desperate to get home that I might have been tempted to trade my newly acquired gold medal to be teleported to my bed.
I slept for many hours when I got home. I felt quite rough at first but am starting to feel a bit more human now. I have spent most of the last 10 years preparing for major sports events, so the time following an Olympics can feel a bit empty: I felt a similar void after London. I like to have goals and targets to work towards and if I am not being productive then I can get frustrated, so losing the focus of winning the Olympics is a giant gap to fill. However, I enjoy visiting schools and other organisations to help inspire other people and share the positive values of sport.
And from within my chaotic and surreal memories of Rio is growing a quiet satisfaction of a job well done. The pleasing knowledge that our crew executed the race in a manner we knew we were capable of, and that it was good enough to win the Olympic gold.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/30/rowing-olympic-gold-rio
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| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/d928702f0a16559ac2782e877f6eaa96f0d207f6455ca090d627541713bc0fdc.json
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[
"Gaia Vince"
] | 2016-08-26T20:58:49 | null | 2016-08-07T06:30:08 |
Research suggests we may be predisposed to speak more than one language, and that doing so brings health benefits, such as delaying the onset of dementia
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Why being bilingual works wonders for your brain
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because their conversation sounds fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don’t speak their language.
Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what language they are speaking. They both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. For example, Morris’s mother’s tongue is Sotho, his father’s is Zulu; he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours and English and Afrikaans at school. “I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds.
Was it easy to learn so many languages? “Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.
To communicate for trade, travel and so on, it would have been necessary for early humans to speak other tongues
He’s right. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60-75% – speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority and perhaps to be missing out.
Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers are finding a swath of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.
Could it be that the human brain evolved to be multilingual, that those who speak only one language are not exploiting their full potential? And in a world that is losing languages faster than ever – at the current rate of one a fortnight, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century – what will happen if the current rich diversity of languages disappears and most of us end up speaking only one?
I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. All I have to do is decide which snowflake is being described. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called Syntaflake.
It’s part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, an ebullient Greek with a passion for languages. Professor of psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at Lancaster University, he’s at the forefront of a new wave of research into the bilingual mind. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages, but no one here grew up speaking Syntaflake.
The task is profoundly strange and incredibly difficult. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues to help you decipher the meaning. The speaker might point to the snowflake as they speak, use their hands to demonstrate shapes or their fingers to count out numbers, for example. Here, I have no such clues and, it being a made-up language, I can’t even rely on picking up similarities to languages I already know. By the end of the session, I have to admit defeat.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Studies suggest bilingual people think differently according to the language they are using. Photograph: Rex
I join Athanasopoulos and glumly recount my difficulty in learning the language, despite my best efforts. But it appears that was where I went wrong: “The people who perform best on this task are the ones who don’t care at all about the task and just want to get it over as soon as possible. Students and teaching staff who try to work it out and find a pattern always do worst,” he says.
“It’s impossible in the time given to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what’s being said to you. But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. That’s why, if you don’t think about it, you’ll do OK in the test. Children do the best.”
The first words ever uttered might have been as far back as 250,000 years ago, once our ancestors stood up on two legs and freed the ribcage from weight-bearing tasks, allowing fine nerve control of breathing and pitch to develop. And when humans had one language, it wouldn’t have been long before we had many.
Language evolution can be compared to biological evolution, but whereas genetic change is driven by environmental pressures, languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups – for trade, travel and so on – it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues.
We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism might have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. “If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual,” says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. In Australia, where more than 130 indigenous languages are still spoken, he says, multilingualism is part of the landscape.
“You will be walking and talking with someone and then you might cross a small river and suddenly your companion will switch to another language. People speak the language of the Earth,” says Bak. This is true elsewhere, too. “Consider Belgium: you take a train in Liège, the announcements are in French first. Then, pass through Leuven, where the announcements will be in Dutch first, and then in Brussels it reverts to French.”
The connection with culture and geography is why Athanasopoulos invented a new language for the snowflake test. Part of his research lies in trying to tease out the language from the culture it is threaded within, he explains.
Ask me in English what my favourite food is and I will picture myself in London choosing from the options I enjoy there. But ask me in French and I transport myself to Paris, where the options I’ll choose from are different. So the same deeply personal question gets a different answer depending on the language in which you’re asking me. This idea that you gain a new personality with every language you speak is a profound one.
Athanasopoulos and his colleagues have been studying the capacity for language to change people’s world views. In one experiment, English and German speakers were shown videos of people moving. English speakers focus on the action and say: “A woman is walking” or: “A man is cycling”. German speakers, on the other hand, have a more holistic view and will include the goal of the action: they might say (in German): “A woman walks towards her car” or: “A man cycles to the supermarket”.
Part of this is due to the grammatical toolkit available. Unlike German, English has the -ing ending to describe actions that are ongoing. This makes English speakers much less likely to assign a goal to an action when describing an ambiguous scene. When he tested English-German bilinguals, however, whether they were action- or goal-focused depended on the country in which they were tested. If the bilinguals were tested in Germany, they were goal-focused; in England, they were action-focused, no matter which language was used.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thomas Bak, who believes multilingualism might once have been much more common than it is today. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
In the 1960s, one of the pioneers of psycholinguistics, Susan Ervin-Tripp, tested Japanese-English bilingual women, asking them to finish sentences in each language. She found that the women ended the sentences very differently depending on which language was used. For example, “when my wishes conflict with my family... ” was completed in Japanese as “it is a time of great unhappiness”; in English, as “I do what I want”. Another example was “real friends should… ”, which was completed as “help each other” in Japanese and “be frank” in English.
From this, Ervin-Tripp concluded that human thought takes place within language mindsets and that bilinguals have different mindsets for each language, an extraordinary idea but one that has been borne out in subsequent studies; many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language.
These different mindsets are continually in conflict, however, as bilingual brains sort out which language to use.
In a recent study of 600 stroke survivors, cognitive recovery was twice as likely for bilinguals as for monolinguals
In a revealing experiment with his English-German bilingual group, Athanasopoulos got them to recite strings of numbers out loud in either German or English. This effectively “blocked” the other language altogether, and when they were shown the videos of movement, the bilinguals’ descriptions were more action- or goal-focused, depending on which language had been blocked. So, if they recited numbers in German, their responses to the videos were more typically German and goal-focused. When the number recitation was switched to the other language midway, their video responses also switched.
So are there really two separate minds in a bilingual brain? That’s what the snowflake experiment was designed to find out. I’m a little nervous of what my fumbling performance will reveal about me, but Athanasopoulos assures me I’m similar to others who have been tested and, so far, we seem to be validating his theory.
In order to assess the effect that trying to understand the Syntaflake language had on my brain, I took another test before and after the snowflake task. In these so-called flanker tasks, patterns of arrows appeared on the screen and I had to press the left or right button according to the direction of the arrow in the centre. Sometimes, the surrounding pattern of arrows was confusing, so by the end of the first session my shoulders had been hunched somewhere near my ears and I was exhausted from concentrating. It’s not a task in which practice improves performance (most people actually do worse second time around), but when I did the same test again after completing the snowflake task, I was significantly better at it, just as Athanasopoulos had predicted.
“Learning the new language improved your performance second time around,” he explains. Relieved as I am to fit into the normal range, it’s a curious result. How can that be?
The flanker tasks were exercises in cognitive conflict resolution – if most of the arrows were pointing to the left, my immediate impulse was to push the left button, but this wasn’t the correct response if the central arrow was pointing right. I had to block out my impulse and heed the rule instead. The part of the brain that manages this supreme effort is known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), part of the “executive system”. Located on the frontal lobe, it is a toolbox of mental attention skills that enables the brain to concentrate on one task while blocking out competing information and to switch focus between different tasks without becoming confused.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Many countries have more than one official language. Photograph: Jeff Morgan/Alamy
The snowflake test primed my ACC for the second flanker task, just as speaking more than one language seems to train the executive system more generally. A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks, from verbal and non-verbal tests to how well they can “read” other people.
“Bilinguals perform these tasks much better than monolinguals – they are faster and more accurate,” says Athanasopoulos. “And that suggests their executive systems are different from monolinguals.”
Brain imaging studies show that when a bilingual person is speaking in one language, their ACC is continually suppressing the urge to use words and grammar from their other language. Not only that, but their mind is always making a judgment about when and how to use the target language. For bilinguals, with their exceptionally buff executive control, the flanker test is just a conscious version of what their brains do subconsciously all day long – it’s no wonder they are good at it.
A superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus are, of course, valuable in everyday life. But perhaps the most exciting benefit of bilingualism occurs in ageing, when executive function typically declines: bilingualism seems to protect against dementia.
Psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok made the surprising discovery at York University in Toronto while she was comparing an ageing population of monolinguals and bilinguals. “The bilinguals showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s some four to five years after monolinguals with the same disease pathology,” she says.
Bialystok thinks this is because bilingualism rewires the brain and improves the executive system, boosting people’s “cognitive reserve”. It means that as parts of the brain succumb to damage, bilinguals can compensate more easily.
Bilingualism can also offer protection after brain injury. In a recent study of 600 stroke survivors in India, Bak discovered that cognitive recovery was twice as likely for bilinguals as for monolinguals.
Such results suggest bilingualism helps keep us mentally fit. It may even be an advantage that evolution has positively selected in our brains, an idea supported by the ease with which we learn new languages and flip between them and by the pervasiveness of bilingualism throughout world history. Just as we need to do physical exercise to maintain the health of bodies that evolved for a physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle, perhaps we ought to start doing more cognitive exercises to maintain our mental health, especially if we only speak one language.
In recent years, there has been a backlash against studies showing the benefits of bilingualism. Some researchers tried and failed to replicate some of the results; others questioned the benefits of improved executive function in everyday life. Bak wrote a rejoinder to the published criticisms and says there is now overwhelming evidence from psychological experiments backed by imaging studies that bilingual and monolingual brains function differently. He says the detractors have made errors in their experimental methods.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest English and Spanish: two of the global giants of language. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Bialystok agrees, adding that it is impossible to examine whether bilingualism improves a child’s school exam results, for example, because there are so many factors. “But,” she says, “given that at the very least it makes no difference – and no study has ever shown it harms performance – considering the very many social and cultural benefits to knowing another language, bilingualism should be encouraged.”
To maintain the benefits of bilingualism you need to keep using your languages and that can be tricky, especially for older people who may not have opportunities to practise. Perhaps we need clubs where people can meet to speak other languages. Bak has done a small study with elderly people learning Gaelic in Scotland and seen significant benefits after just one week. Now he aims to carry out a much larger trial. In the meantime, it makes sense to talk, hablar, parler, sprechen, beszél, berbicara – in as many languages as possible.
Creating new languages
Every year, humanity loses 30-50 languages. Of roughly 7,000 we still have, just 10 are used by half the world’s speakers. It seems inevitable that eventually the world will use just one – Spanish, perhaps, or Mandarin or English.
While the number of natural languages has fallen, people have tried to create entirely new ones. Volapük, invented by a German priest in 1880, was one of the first attempts at an artificial universal language. Conferences were held in Volapük and periodicals and books were published in the language, which, at its peak, claimed a million speakers.
It was usurped at the end of the 19th century by Esperanto, which was made up by a Polish Jewish opthalmologist and claims 2 million speakers today. Various attempts were made to stamp out Esperanto, surely the most reliable sign of a “real” language. The most aggressive attack came from the Nazis, who hated it because it had been invented by a Jew. It was taught illicitly in concentration camps, by prisoners who told guards it was Italian. In the end, however, Esperanto’s failure to become universal came down to the same pressures that threaten the rest: the handful of languages that are truly global.
Even as tongues succumb to extinction, new pidgin dialects – word and grammar hybrids of pre-existing languages – emerge. Kiezdeutsch originated in Turkish migrant communities in Germany, but has now become a common way of speaking for young people who otherwise have perfect German, including those with no Turkish origins. Like British teens using Jafaican (or multicultural London English) – a melange of Jamaican patois, Los Angeles rap-speak and south London slang – Kiezdeutsch is strongly tied to identity and how the speakers see themselves in society.
Meanwhile, as channels such as MTV are broadcast internationally, English speakers across Europe are modifying their accents as well as their vocabulary, so even if English ends up the one global language, it won’t be the Queen’s English everyone is speaking.
• This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.
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Boorman, who has coached Biles since she took up gymnastics at eight years old, “will be there as a mentor” for five-time Olympic medalist
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Simone Biles' longtime coach Aimee Boorman accepts new job in Florida
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www.theguardian.com
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Aimee Boorman, the longtime personal coach of Olympic champion Simone Biles, is walking away from the suburban Houston gym that both called home during their rise to international renown.
Simone Biles the bandleader of a US quintet that might never be bettered | Bryan Armen Graham Read more
Boorman announced on Monday that she is leaving the World Champions Centre, the 56,000 sq ft gym commissioned by Biles’ parents as a retirement venture in 2013, to become the executive director of women’s gymnastics at Evo Athletics in Sarasota, Florida.
“My vision for what a gymnastics facility should be is reflected in Evo,” Boorman said in a statement. “Not only having world-class equipment and staff, but the dedication to exceeding the needs of all members of the Evo family, athletes, their families’ coaches and staff while providing a platform for developing young athletes to reach their great potential.”
The 43-year-old Boorman, who was the head coach of the US women’s team under national team coordinator Martha Karolyi, led the Americans to a record nine medals at the Rio Olympics.
Biles, who has studied under Boorman since taking up gymnastics at eight years old, accounted for five of those including four golds. The 19-year-old is taking a hiatus before deciding whether to return to the sport.
“We were both sad, but [Simone] understands that life moves on and she knows that if she plans to continue in gymnastics … I will always be willing to coach her,” Boorman told People magazine. “I will be there as a mentor.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/30/simone-biles-leaving-coach-aimee-boorman-new-job-florida
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| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/8d0f5a155e49a796eba5e5129e303c6907a8967a012f95fb79277feeb31ae865.json
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