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[
"Jack Schofield"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:59 | null | 2016-07-21T08:42:11 |
John has upgraded one of his two laptops to Windows 10 but doesn’t want to lose Windows 7 on the other. Does he have to upgrade it before 29 July, to avoid paying?
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2Faskjack%2F2016%2Fjul%2F21%2Fshould-i-take-my-last-chance-of-a-free-upgrade-to-windows-10.json
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en
| null |
Should I take my last chance of a free upgrade to Windows 10?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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I have two laptops: one started with Windows 7 and the other with Windows 8. I’ve upgraded the second machine to Windows 10 and left the first on Windows 7. Microsoft keeps telling me to upgrade before 29 July as it “qualifies” but I don’t want to lose my Windows 7.
If/when I master Windows 10, can I use my copy of Windows 10 to upgrade my Windows 7 laptop, or can I store a copy of Windows 10 on my Windows 7 laptop until required? I don’t want to pay £100 (?) for a retail copy of Windows 10. John G
If you are ever likely to want Windows 10 on any PC, then you should upgrade it before 29 July. This is true even if you don’t intend to use Windows 10 for a few years, if ever.
The key point is that each qualified PC has to register the Windows 10 upgrade online on Microsoft’s activation server by 29 July. The activation, not the code, is what makes the Windows 10 upgrade free. If you were to use exactly the same code on exactly the same PC a few days later, the activation would not be free.
The online activation procedure means you can’t usefully save Windows 10 upgrade code, or transfer an upgrade from a different laptop. (In fact, pre-installed copies of Windows are locked to a specific device, and can’t legally be moved to a different device.)
Windows 10’s online activation procedure creates a hash code based on your PC’s hardware, mainly the motherboard and processor. Microsoft stores this code for future reference. After that, you can upgrade to Windows 10 then roll back to Windows 7 as often as you like.
Windows 7 was launched in 2009 and will be supported until 2020, so you can keep using it until then. However, if you think you might want to use Windows 10 before 2020, or you plan to keep using your current PC through 2020 and beyond, then you should take the free upgrade while it’s available. The PC manufacturers, who are Microsoft’s real customers, would much rather sell you a new PC running Windows 10 than have Microsoft upgrade your old one.
Rolling back Windows 10
When Microsoft upgrades a PC to Windows 10, it keeps a copy of the previous version – Windows.old – on your hard drive for 30 days. This makes it very easy to roll back to Windows 7 or 8.1.
To do this, go to Settings, select Update & Security, and then Recovery. This will give you the option to “Go back to Windows 7” or “Go back to Windows 8.1”.
The process is quick and easy, and I’ve done it a few times with no errors. However, you should obviously make a back-up of your whole hard drive, and any important data, before doing an operating system upgrade. There is always the risk that something will go wrong. If the worst comes to the worst, you may need to re-install Windows 7 from your back-up and do the upgrade again.
If you have created any new files in Windows 10, these will be retained after the roll-back. But, obviously, if you have installed any Windows 10 apps, they will disappear.
Preparing for the upgrade
I’ve already published an answer on this topic, so I don’t need to go through it again. Just see: How should I prepare my PC for the upgrade to Windows 10?
Briefly, it’s best to uninstall any software you no longer use or want. For best results, also uninstall any third-party anti-virus software and firewalls. Some anti-virus software publishers have new versions for Windows 10, and you can reinstall your AV software once the upgrade is complete.
As I also mentioned, you may avoid some problems if you also detach any large peripherals, such as printers, scanners and projectors. (Mice and monitors appear to be OK.) Windows 10 will spend some time trying to find drivers for peripherals, and it doesn’t always do the best job. Being smart, you can download new drivers directly from the manufacturers’ website and re-install your peripherals later.
Yes, I know, hundreds of millions of people have done Windows 10 upgrades with no preparation and no problems at all. However, even if 99% of the upgrades worked perfectly, that would still leave 3.5 million people with problems. It’s worth making a small effort to avoid becoming one of them.
Anniversary edition
Windows 10 is “software as a service” (SaaS), installed and continuously updated from the cloud, and it’s free for the life of the device. In other words, Windows 10 remains free of charge until your PC dies, or you recycle it. Of course, if you buy a new Windows PC, that will come with a new copy of Windows 10 pre-installed, for which the manufacturer will usually have paid Microsoft a fee.
SaaS means there will never be a Service Pack 1 for Windows 10, and there will never be a Windows 11. Instead, Microsoft will keep upgrading Windows 10 on a regular basis.
None the less, there will still be new versions of Windows 10, which will probably arrive twice a year. These “milestone” versions provide a clean refresh that gets most PCs onto the same code base. So far, there have been two: the launch edition, and the Windows 10 Fall Update, aka version 1511, which appeared in November.
In a better world, you would now be able to install the third version of Windows 10, aka Redstone 1, which Microsoft is calling the Anniversary Update. This is being beta tested at the moment, but unfortunately, it won’t appear until 2 August. So, if you upgrade to Windows 10 towards the end of next week, you’ll find your “new” code is out of date the following Tuesday.
The problem is that you have to do the Windows 10 upgrade while it’s free, but it may not be worth spending a lot of time on problems that may have been fixed in the Anniversary Update.
What’s new
The Anniversary Update includes lots of bug-fixes plus improvements to Windows Hello’s biometric authentication, Windows Ink for the wider use of styluses, Cortana access without unlocking your PC, extension support in the Edge browser, Linux command-line integration (a Ubuntu-based Bash shell running on a “Linux Subsystem for Windows”), and features for Android and Apple iPod users.
There will also be a free DirectX 12 game: Forza Motorsport 6: Apex. Forza is popular on Xbox games consoles, and an Xbox One controller is the recommended input for PC users. (The new Play Anywhere games bought for Xbox will be playable on Windows 10 PCs, and vice versa.)
Another useful feature is Active Hours, which you can set via the Windows Update page in Update & Security. Windows 10 will not attempt to install updates and restart during the times you set as Active Hours.
Of course, not everybody wants a more secure, more powerful, more usable operating system with a voice-controlled AI assistant and thousands of new apps, even if it’s free. But Windows 10 is improving at a rapid pace, and it’s worth keeping the option open.
Have you got a question? Email it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com
|
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2016/jul/21/should-i-take-my-last-chance-of-a-free-upgrade-to-windows-10
|
en
| 2016-07-21T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1686b18c51a30ebcb336b785cef318099e9fb45cbe5737f0ff884da1cc4136f8.json
|
|
[
"Frances Perraudin"
] | 2016-08-30T10:50:13 | null | 2016-08-30T10:30:05 |
Lawyer for four people arrested in Nottingham cites restrictive bail conditions and contrasts with treatment of EDL marchers
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fpolice-treated-uk-black-lives-matter-protesters-more-harshly-due-to-race.json
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en
| null |
Police 'treated UK Black Lives Matter protesters more harshly due to race'
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Protesters arrested during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Nottingham have claimed that police treated them disproportionately harshly because of the colour of their skin.
Yvone Francis-Parmar, 50, Eshe Graham, 20, Lisa Robinson, 48, and Malachi Glaiester Thomas, 30, appeared at Nottingham magistrates court last week charged with wilful obstruction of a highway.
On 5 August, the four protesters brought traffic to a standstill when they chained themselves together and lay across tram tracks near the Royal Centre tram stop in Nottingham city centre.
The demonstration was part of a national day of action by Black Lives Matter UK, to protest against what they describe as “a nationwide crisis of racism”. The campaign group was originally formed in the US in response to police shootings of black people.
“My clients feel that they have been targeted because of the colour of their skin,” Haroon Shah, the solicitor representing the four, told the Guardian. He argues that the bail conditions were disproportionately harsh.
Nottinghamshire police said they could not comment on the allegations due to the ongoing court proceedings.
The initial bail conditions, which prevented the four accused from contacting each other or taking part in any organised protest, were lifted following representations from Shah.
The presiding magistrate, John Lock, agreed to lift the conditions and released the four on unconditional bail until their next hearing on 6 September.
“The day after they were arrested there was an [English Defence League] march where all the tram lines were shut down and sections of the city were brought to a standstill at the cost to the taxpayer to the tune of about £200,000,” said Shah.
“Obviously [the anti-racism protesters] feel aggrieved that nothing is done in relation to those people that are marching, where there was basically a shutdown of the whole [city centre], and yet when they’re trying to make their [protest], they are then arrested for obstructing the highway.”
On 6 August, extra officers were drafted in from forces across the country – including Greater Manchester, Durham and Lancashire – to policethe protest by the far-right EDL and a counter-protest by anti-fascist groups.
Nottinghamshire’s police and crime commissioner, Paddy Tipping, estimated that the entire operation would cost the force around £200,000. Five arrests were made, with three people released without charge and another two given court dates.
Shah acknowledged that, unlike the EDL demonstrators, his clients had not obtained permission from the police to hold their protest, but said: “The objective for both parties was [to protest], but one gets charged and the other doesn’t.”
The national day of action this month was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police, sparking nationwide riots. An inquest found that Duggan, 29, had been “lawfully killed”.
Protesters blocked the roads leading to Heathrow and Birmingham airports. Police in London arrested 10 protesters, while West Midlands police arrested five.
A statement from the group, released on the day of the protests said: “This morning UKBLM have #Shutdown roads in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham to mourn those who have died in custody and to protest the ongoing racist violence of the police, border enforcement, structural inequalities and the everyday indignity of street racism.”
The group highlighted statistics showing that black people are far more likely to die in police custody. They are up to 37 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people and three times more likely to be arrested than white people.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/30/police-treated-uk-black-lives-matter-protesters-more-harshly-due-to-race
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/58aa17e1ff341e6d9da76e3a96fd20f9088959a80aa79f391ab01bc10376ada5.json
|
|
[
"Sid Lowe"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:58 | null | 2016-08-22T16:58:20 |
Mnau García, lifelong Alavés fan, popped up to score a 95th-minute equaliser against Atlético, for his hometown club on their return to La Liga after a decade of heartbreak and chaos
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2Fblog%2F2016%2Faug%2F22%2Fmanu-garcia-atletico-madrid-alaves-la-liga-blog.json
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en
| null |
Manu García realises boyhood dream at Atlético after leaping Alavés fence
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Deportivo Alavés’s resistance finally broke four minutes after midnight when the 27th shot of the match flew in, or so it seemed. Kévin Gameiro’s foot trembled and he waited a long time – two minutes passed between Atlético Madrid winning one last chance and him taking the penalty – but he smashed the ball into the net. When it bounced out again, Manu García furiously smashed it into the stands, where the colchoneros were going crazy. Up in the north corner of the Calderón, occupied by 400 Alavés supporters, the drums stopped for the first time.
Just because the goal had been coming, the siege overwhelming, did not make it hurt less. It was 1-0, 92.06 and over. Their return to primera a decade later had ended in defeat. But Alavés have been through worse than this before, and so had García. Resistance gave way to rebellion: if only for a moment, if only in anger. And it was enough. As they kicked off, time up now, the clock showing 93.21 when the board had shown 93, there was a look. Then there was a long ball that was not quite long enough, a header, a sliced clearance and another header, and then it happened.
Gareth Bale’s double gets Real Madrid off to a flyer against Real Sociedad Read more
“The things that go through your mind in barely a few seconds,” García said. “It dropped to me, I turned. I thought they’d foul me. And I thought I was closer than I was; I thought it wasn’t a bad place for a free-kick. But Correa didn’t foul me. So I faked the shot, took another step. ‘OK, pass it.’ But, no. Impossible. So I hit it.”
Oh, he hit it all right, socks halfway down his shins. Alavés’s first shot on target, only their second in total: 94.02 on the clock. From 25 yards it rocketed in. “I see it go in and the next five seconds are beautiful: you run and nothing hurts any more,” García said. It was late and it was hot but he sprinted to the corner and team-mates piled on. Silence fell, except high up at the other end. No one could believe it.
There had been no goals on Sunday night and two on Monday morning, a new day. The ball had been back in play for 46 seconds but it was enough. Now there was time for only two more touches: a kick-off, a long hoof and that was it.
They call Alavés El Glorioso and somehow, no one really knows how, they had done it: 27-2 the shot count read; what did not hit the post or fly past it Fernando Pachecho saved, two of them in a row from two yards with two minutes left. Somehow they made it to the 93rd minute and, even more improbably, beyond.
“The truth is, we didn’t deserve to draw,” said the Alavés coach, Mauricio Pellegrino.
“We were lucky that they didn’t take their chances and then the penalty was avoidable, a mistake. Then there was that anger. We thought it was over but …” García said. “You could say: ‘How badly we have played, how many chances they had!’ but it’s Atlético, runners up in the European Cup.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manu García scored with Alavés’s first shot on target in the 95th minute of the match. Photograph: Mariscal/EPA
It is the first division, too. After 10 years away, three of them spent in the Segunda B, Spain’s regionalised 80-team, four-division, theoretically amateur third tier; after suffering Dmitry Piterman, collapsing into crisis and debt; after going into administration and coming out of it again, stable now but still small, still newcomers, still set to struggle; they were back. And like this. With luck, yes, and lots of it. But also with a ludicrously good goal, a ludicrously good moment, barely believable and better for it. Right, too.
Somehow, sport finds a way. People do. “It’s a game, it’s a game,” one Atlético player repeated last night, wide-eyed. It gets harder to break from the routine and upset increasing odds and, when it happens, it may be only fleeting – Alavés know there will be trouble ahead – but there is still room for moments like Mario’s and moments like Manu’s. “A fairytale”, he calls it, and he’s right.
The man who spent the first eight years of his career in Segunda B and thought he would spend the rest of his days there too, who admits that his “objective” – “distant” and “unlikely” – was to play in the second division; a man who got around but never stayed further than 110km from where he was born, who was not given a chance in the first team at Real Sociedad, was dropped by Girona after a month, was left unregistered by Eibar and who “couldn’t even imagine” playing in the top flight, had just scored a last-minute belter at the Calderón, his team’s first primera goal in 10 years. And it is his team, too.
The first time Manu’s name appeared on the Alavés shirt was in 2001 when they embossed it with the name of every socio. His was on the front, right in the middle, near the badge. Now it is on the back. He is proud of that historic pink shirt and laments the fact that he has not got the blue and yellow one they wore in Dortmund. “A treasure,” he calls it. Laments, too, the fact that he was not there that day against Liverpool, a season-ticket holder who was forced to watch the Uefa Cup final on television having joined Real Sociedad’s youth system up the road in San Sebastián.
Born in Vitoria, García has, as he puts it, leapt the fence at the front of the general stand at Mendizorrotza, where his dad took him as a boy, and on to the pitch. “While the other kids wanted to be Romário or Laudrup, I wanted to be Manolo Serrano.” Serrano scored against Madrid in the Copa del Rey in 1997 but never in the first division for Alavés, even though he did take them there. Five years in a row Alavés made the play-offs but did not make the second division. Serrano, there from 1995 to 1998, finally pulled them out of Segunda B and then scored the goal that took them up again, to the first division in 1997, at which point Espanyol, who had loaned him, brought him back.
And if Serrano could not get there with Alavés, how would García? Crisis and a sporting director who knew him from Real Sociedad gave him the chance to play for his club. In his words: the club had dropped to his level. Together they would find another level and another and now another.
Midway through a career spent entirely in the Segunda B – after winning promotion with Real Unión he was forced to return to Eibar rather than go up with them – the team García supported signed him in 2012. Alavés were in administration and, although things would slowly stabilise under new owners who came from success in basketball, it was a long way back. A big club with a big fan base, Alavés were still down in Segunda B. Promotion came but, the year after, only a last-minute goal on the final day against Jaén rescued them from heading back down. “Agonising,” García calls it. He knows; he scored it.
Just as he scored three in the last three games last season, having got only two all season before that, including the goal that clinched a return to the first division. He was the captain, the outstanding player, once an attacker – he had been top scorer in Real Sociedad’s youth team – now a more defensive midfielder. Still, there were no guarantees that he would get there with them. Only nine of last year’s team are still there and the coach has changed too; 16 new players have arrived. Only three men remain from García’s first season in 2012.
Luis Suárez scores hat-trick in Barcelona’s 6-2 rout of Real Betis Read more
“I had always thought that Alavés would make it to the first division one day because the project was good; what I didn’t think was that I would be in the team,” he said. “And this summer, bloody hell, I was so happy when they offered me the chance to continue.”
He is happier now. “Just to make your debut in the first division is difficult; I could never have imagined it. To make your debut for your team; well, very few can say that. And to do it against Atlético at the Calderón. There will be a lot of suffering to come this season but one day, not yet, we’ll look back on this and it will be a lovely memory, a tiny little bit of history, and maybe I’ll remember the hard times too. There are lots of players who have made as much effort as me but not been as lucky as I was to be in the right place, for everything to fall for me.” The ball, in particular – with the clock showing 94.07 in Alavés’s first game back for a decade.
“Manu is a leader, he knows the history of this club very well and he worked so hard to get us here,” Pellegrino said. “Now he’s a first division Manu; that’s what I want from him. He deserves this.”
Outside the Calderón the team bus was waiting. The fans, staying at first as the stadium emptied, had pulled out by then; they had 350 kilometres ahead of them. A little after 1.15, the players did the same. There were no beers and no celebration, just a few games of cards and people trying to sleep. At five o’clock Deportivo Alavés rolled into Vitoria. They had come a long way.
Talking points
• That blond bloke looks pretty good. The one with the ginger beard. Leo Messi was superb as Barcelona hammered Real Betis 6-2 at the Camp Nou. There was another match ball for Luis Suárez and two goals for Messi. Which might not be much of a surprise. What is, but probably should not be, is that it looks as if Arda Turan might turn out nice after all. Luis Enrique called it almost perfect; Betis’s two goals came from their only two shots and Barcelona might have got more. “They’re frightening,” AS’s cover ran, “but Madrid aren’t scared.”
•Not scared of Real Sociedad, for sure. Without Ronaldo, Benzema, Modric, Pepe and Navas, they won easily at Anoeta, impressive and in control throughout, slick, fast and dangerous. Gareth Bale did a Bale for the first, thumping in a header from Dani Carvajal’s cross. That was with 74 seconds gone. He got his second with seven seconds left. Between them there was a gorgeous goal from Marco Asensio. “My head hurts when it comes to picking the team,” Zinedine Zidane admitted afterwards. The debate was James or Isco. The answer was Asensio. Marca called him a “magician.”
• Anoeta stood to applaud in the ninth minute, in honour of Dalian Atkinson.
• Good Cop, bad Cop. Duje Cop committed more fouls than anyone else this weekend but he also got the opening goal on his debut for Sporting Gijón – and it was a beauty too, volleyed in from a corner. That set Sporting up for a win against Athletic Bilbao that was surprisingly comfortable; certainly considering the way things had looked in the first half. Once they were given the chance to play on the break, Abelardo’s team looked dangerous and genuinely good. The second was a lovely goal, superbly made by Burgui and neatly taken by Victor. “We ran like lions,” Cop said. Tsk. Any five-year-old knows that cheetahs run faster than lions.
• Sporting could face a fine after the referee stopped the game for a minute in the first half when he heard monkey chants aimed at Inaki Williams. The chants stopped, or seemed to, after an announcement was made over the PA system but that should not see them avoid punishment and, with new legislation, a reasonably serious one.
• Two points down already. “It doesn’t matter how you play, what matters is how effective you are. And when you don’t win at the Calderón you go home sad,” Felipe Luís said. He is right, of course, but when it comes to the analysis, there should not be much alarm. What is wrong with Atlético? Not much, really: 27 shots, 20 corners, two sitters, two posts – they did pretty much everything except score and there was a genuine variety to the way they attacked, even without Antoine Griezmann, although there may be some doubts about the type of strikers they have and whether they need either a touch more subtlety or maybe more size.
• You come to a report to find out what happened – but the truth is, no one really knows what happened. But it was fun. It finished Sevilla 6-4 Espanyol and it could have been more, for both teams (and especially for Sevilla, who were stopped often by Roberto). AS called it “Russian roulette”. Everyone else called it “mad”. Marca’s match report ended on “thanks”. Well, quite. “I’ll be extremely offensive,” Jorge Sampaoli had said at his presentation and he was as good as his word.
• Welcome home, Michu.
Results Málaga 1–1 Osasuna, Deportivo 2–1 Eibar, Barcelona 6–2 Betis, Granada 1–1 Villarreal, Sevilla 6–4 Espanyol, Sporting 2–1 Athletic, Real Sociedad 0–3 Real Madrid, Atlético 1–1 Alavés. Tonight: Celta v Leganés, Valencia v Las Palmas.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/aug/22/manu-garcia-atletico-madrid-alaves-la-liga-blog
|
en
| 2016-08-22T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/989e329d55194444a1d753a3c456b6833518f1154391fc281c5205016a3da922.json
|
|
[
"Tom Mccarthy",
"Ben Jacobs",
"Heather Stewart",
"Dan Roberts"
] | 2016-08-26T13:20:12 | null | 2016-08-24T20:18:00 |
Former Ukip leader and leading figure of leave campaign is not expected to endorse Republican nominee but will tell Mississippi voters ‘the Brexit story’
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fnigel-farage-donald-trump-mississippi-rally-appearance.json
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en
| null |
'Mr Brexit' meets Mr Brexit: Nigel Farage to stump with Trump
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Nigel Farage, the anti-EU British politician and former Ukip leader, will appear with Donald Trump at a rally on Wednesday, a week after the US presidential candidate branded himself “Mr Brexit” and tapped one of the leading American supporters of Brexit to run his campaign.
The Trump campaign confirmed that Farage would appear with Trump at an evening rally in Jackson, Mississippi, to tell US voters “the Brexit story” of how he triumphed over the electoral odds. Farage will not endorse Trump.
Trump hopes to ride to victory a populist wave of nationalist enthusiasm comparable to the movement behind Britain’s June vote to leave the European Union. As leader at the time of Ukip, Farage was a key promoter of the Brexit.
Instead, the British politician, who was invited by Mississippi governor Phil Bryant, will draw parallels between what he sees as the inspirational story of Brexit and Trump’s campaign. Farage will describe the Republican’s campaign as a similar crusade by grassroots activists against “big banks and global political insiders” and how those who feel disaffected and disenfranchised can become involved in populist, rightwing politics. With Trump lagging in the polls, just as Brexit did prior to the vote on the referendum, Farage will also hearten supporters by insisting that they can prove pundits and oddsmakers wrong as well.
How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign | Rafael Behr Read more
This message resonates with the Trump campaign’s efforts to reach out to blue collar voters who have become disillusioned with American politics, while also adding a unique flair to Trump’s never staid campaign rallies.
The event will mark the first meeting between Farage and Trump.
Arron Banks, the businessman who backed Leave.EU, the Brexit campaign group associated with the UK Independence party (Ukip), tweeted that he would be meeting Trump over dinner and was looking forward to Farage’s speech.
The appointment last week of Stephen Bannon, former chairman of the Breitbart website, as “CEO” of Trump’s campaign has seen the example of the Brexit vote, which Breitbart enthusiastically advocated, rise to the fore in Trump’s campaign narrative.
Speaking to a local radio station before the joint rally, Farage urged Americans to “go out and fight” against Hillary Clinton.
“I am going to say to people in this country that the circumstances, the similarities, the parallels between the people who voted Brexit and the people who could beat Clinton in a few weeks time here in America are uncanny,” Farage told Super Talk Mississippi. “If they want things to change they have get up out of their chairs and go out and fight for it. It can happen. We’ve just proved it.”
“I am being careful,” he added when asked if he supported Trump. “It’s not for me as a foreign politician to say who you should vote for ... All I will say is that if you vote for Hillary Clinton, then nothing will change. She represents the very politics that we’ve just broken through the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom.”
Asked if he thought this was the biggest factor in the Brexit referendum, Farage said: “It was the key. It was the absolute key. The reason we won the referendum ... is that we believe immigration should be controlled.”
Both Farage and Trump are keen to limit immigration and protect voters against some of the impact of globalisation.
Farage was condemned during the EU referendum campaign for using anti-immigration rhetoric, including a poster showing a queue of refugees with the slogan “Breaking Point”; Trump has promised to impose “extreme vetting” on potential immigrants.
In a further parallel with Brexit politics, the Trump campaign has argued in recent days that it enjoys support not reflected in the polls, from undercover voters who are shy about admitting their support for the controversial nominee.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!
In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, Trump flew to Scotland, where he owns a golf resort, and enthusiastically welcomed the decision of the voters to leave the EU, saying it was a “great thing” that voters had “taken back their country”.
Farage has expressed “massive thanks” to Bannon and Breitbart for their favorable coverage of the Leave campaign.
“And can I just say a massive thanks to Breitbart, on both sides of the pond?” Farage told Bannon after the vote. “Because you guys have been fair with me, and given me a chance to make my arguments. I thank you guys very much indeed for that.”
Farage is taking a more prominent role in the Trump campaign even as he stepped away from British politics. Farage stepped down as Ukip leader in the wake of the vote, but has hinted that he could re-enter frontline politics if the British prime minister, Theresa May, does not rapidly press ahead with her promise to ensure “Brexit means Brexit”.
Farage has appeared at Republican events in the past, beginning with a well-received speaking gig at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Farage also popped up at the Republican national convention in Cleveland last month, where he declared himself himself “a huge fan of Barack Obama”.
“Without him we wouldn’t have won the referendum,” Farage explained. “He was very helpful.” The US president had encouraged Britain to remain part of the EU.
Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, raved at the time about Farage’s CPAC appearance to the Guardian, calling him a “very smart, very funny man and he can turn a phrase very well”.
Farage is not uniform in his support of Trump, however. Last month he told an interviewer that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric makes him “very uncomfortable”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/24/nigel-farage-donald-trump-mississippi-rally-appearance
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a6a851ab7fd3a3becd4f88161b389baadbe5c092c17d3d932761c4c64d324282.json
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[
"Associated Press In Paris"
] | 2016-08-27T22:49:34 | null | 2016-08-27T22:25:53 |
Mourad Hamyd, 20, brother-in-law of Chérif Kouachi, arrested in Bulgaria on suspicion of trying to join Isis in Syria
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Frelative-of-charlie-hebdo-attacker-held-on-terror-charge-in-france.json
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en
| null |
Relative of Charlie Hebdo attacker held on terror charge in France
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The brother-in-law of one of the Islamic extremists who attacked the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last year was indicted and jailed on Saturday on suspicion of trying to join Islamic State (Isis) in Syria.
French investigators said Mourad Hamyd, 20, faced preliminary terrorism charges. He was arrested on a French warrant in Bulgaria last month on suspicion of trying to travel to Syria to join Isis. He has denied the allegations.
Paris attacks inquiry finds multiple failings by French intelligence agencies Read more
He was handed over to France by Bulgaria on Friday after a European arrest warrant was issued over alleged “association of terrorist conspiracy to prepare acts of terrorism”.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Saturday that French citizen Hamyd had been remanded in custody. Hamyd is the brother-in-law of Chérif Kouachi, one of two brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office in January 2015, killing 12.
A high school student at the time, Hamyd was briefly detained on suspicion of having a role in the attack, but classmates said he was in school at the time.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/27/relative-of-charlie-hebdo-attacker-held-on-terror-charge-in-france
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ebb6595696526d10368971edb9c685ccb75150c2474eef75f1c8d717149a5417.json
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[
"Staff"
] | 2016-08-29T02:52:01 | null | 2016-08-29T00:55:23 |
Bernard Cazeneuve says law prohibiting the full-body swimwear would stoke tensions when the country needs ‘healing’
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fburkini-ban-would-be-unconstitutional-says-french-minister.json
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en
| null |
Burkini ban would be 'unconstitutional', says French minister
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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A law banning the full-body burkini swimsuit in France would stoke tensions between communities and would be both unconstitutional and ineffective, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.
France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, ruled on Friday against a decision by the mayor of the resort town of Villeneuve-Loubet to ban the burkini .
In Riyadh and the Riviera, women have to fight for the right to be themselves Read more
The ruling may set a precedent for the dozens of French towns that have also ordered burkini bans. After the ruling some mayors said they would refuse to lift the bans.
The issue has become politically charged at the start of party primaries ahead of next year’s presidential election in France, with several leaders on the right and far-right calling for a law prohibiting the full-body swimming costume worn by some Muslim women.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy who is staging a political comeback and is seeking the ticket of the conservative Les Republicains in primaries set for November, has called for a law allowing mayors to ban the burkini.
But Cazeneuve said in an interview with La Croix newspaper on Sunday that such a law was unlikely under the current socialist government.
“The government ... refuses to legislate on this because a law would be unconstitutional, ineffective and likely to create antagonism and irreparable tensions,” he said.
“We do not need a new law. Current laws clearly lay out France’s secularism.”
However, Cazeneuve said Muslims must “continue to engage with us over gender equality, the inviolate nature of the principles of the French Republic, and tolerance in order to live together in peace”.
He also criticised the opposition for trying to earn political points from the controversy at a time when the country has been rattled by a string of deadly attacks claimed by Islamic State militants.
“Certain opposition leaders are making a lot of noise. They think that in the current context of terror threats, we can abandon the fundamental principles of law as embodied in the Constitution,” he said, warning that such a move would be “a serious mistake”.
The debate was fuelled by footage of police trying to enforce the ban on a woman on a beach in Nice.
The controversy, coupled with several Islamist militant attacks in France since January 2015, has filtered into early campaigning for the presidential election in April 2017, making French cultural identity and security highly-charged issues in the political debates.
“France needs healing and people coming together, not divisive outbursts by those contesting in primaries,” Cazeneuve said.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/burkini-ban-would-be-unconstitutional-says-french-minister
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1ad4f39e0a0e73148de41e25293661436f6d3f179138cfe74ede98b3c6786e3d.json
|
|
[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-26T13:19:47 | null | 2016-08-25T14:53:45 |
Manchester City have completed the signing of goalkeeper Claudio Bravo from Barcelona on a four-year deal for about £17m
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fgoalkeeper-claudio-bravo-completes-move-to-manchester-city-video-report.json
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en
| null |
Claudio Bravo completes move to Manchester City - video report
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Manchester City have completed the signing of goalkeeper Claudio Bravo from Barcelona on a four-year deal for about £17m. Bravo joins Pep Guardiola at City, having spent the two seasons at the Camp Nou. His arrival will cast further doubt on the future of Joe Hart at the club with England’s number one yet to feature in the league this season
|
https://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2016/aug/25/goalkeeper-claudio-bravo-completes-move-to-manchester-city-video-report
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f24987e0e74afc00684343758e4290bb41edbe61574d3b83c20b218246200930.json
|
|
[
"Sam Jones"
] | 2016-08-26T13:20:11 | null | 2016-08-25T13:37:06 |
As political impasse continues, Spain faces real prospect of its third general election in just over a year – on 25 December
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fspain-mariano-rajoy-third-general-election-christmas-day.json
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en
| null |
Spain braces itself for unwanted gift on Christmas Day: a third election
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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With the benefit of nearly 250 days of hindsight, Mariano Rajoy’s words a few hours after Spain’s most significant election since its return to democracy appear utterly prescient – if a little on the optimistic side. “I’m going to try to form a government,” the People’s party (PP) leader told supporters early on 21 December last year. “But it won’t be easy.”
Fast-forward eight months, past June’s second inconclusive general election and through a tangle of political deals that have failed to deliver a government, and Spain’s acting prime minister has lost none of his characteristic caution. Asked this week whether he could at least guarantee that the country would have a government by the time the next Olympic Games come around, Rajoy jokingly replied that he didn’t dare speculate.
Many Spaniards share the fear, even if they’re finding it hard to laugh at the quip. The economy may be getting back on track, unemployment falling and tourist numbers hitting record levels, but the country is now facing the real and unwelcome prospect of yet another general election – on 25 December.
Rajoy has accepted the king’s invitation to try to form a government, entered into negotiations with the small, centrist Ciudadanos party, and agreed to submit himself to parliament for a confidence vote at the end of August. But the stalemate is unlikely to be broken: the PP and its new allies simply do not have the numbers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters of Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s acting prime minister, and his People’s party. Photograph: Paul White/AP
Unless the socialist PSOE, led by Pedro Sánchez, suddenly abandons its deep opposition to Rajoy and abstains from the vote to allow the PP leader to form a minority government, the impasse will stretch on.
If no agreement is reached within two months of a confidence vote, the king will issue a decree dissolving parliament and fixing an election date 54 days later. With the confidence vote scheduled to begin on 30 August, a new election would fall on Christmas Day – and the significance of this date has not gone unremarked. The PP, however, has denied trying to bully Sánchez into caving, saying the timing is simply down to the electoral calendar.
Although the PP took the most votes in the December and June elections, it was unable to win the 176 seats necessary to give it a majority in Spain’s 350-seat congress of deputies on either occasion. The PSOE – long the PP’s rival – finished second in both polls.
Dissatisfaction with the two political giants, which have occupied the Moncloa palace for the past four decades, combined with the effects of Spain’s economic crisis, gave rise to the two parties that have redefined the political landscape. The far-left Podemos came third in December’s election, winning 21% of the vote, while Ciudadanos finished fourth with 14%.
The anti-austerity party – now known as Unidos Podemos after joining forces with United Left (IU), the leftwing coalition that includes the Communist party of Spain – failed to pull off the much-predicted coup of overtaking the PSOE in June’s election. But its emergence, along with Ciudadanos, has left congress deeply fragmented and bitterly divided, and has revealed just how poorly the new politics fits into the old system.
“There’s a certain exhaustion and very little appetite for a third election, especially if it has to be on 25 December, because the impression is that the second election didn’t provide a solution to the stalemate, and it’s negative in that it just widens the gap between citizens and politicians,” says Antonio Barroso, an analyst at the political risk-advisory firm, Teneo Intelligence. “It’s perceived as, basically, ‘These people can’t get their act together.’ It’s definitely negative in the sense of the confidence of citizens in the political system.”
The frustration and weariness are understandable: while the ship of government has languished in the doldrums, its crew have given the impression of being keener to make each other walk the plank than to plot a joint course towards a viable administration. Rajoy turned down the king’s invitation to try to put together a government after December’s election, knowing he did not have the necessary support. Sánchez’s attempts to do so were thwarted in March by the PP and Podemos.
Pablo Simón, a political science professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University, argues that a fresh election and the attendant politicking could further alienate an already despondent electorate. “We’re talking about an election campaign during the Christmas period, which means that some people won’t be able to eat with their families on Christmas Day because they’ll have to be in polling stations,” he says.
“That will upset things a huge amount and could lead to record levels of abstention in Spain. I think it’s just another way for the PP to pressure Pedro Sánchez, by constructing the argument that we’re having Christmas elections because of the stalemate the other guy’s created.”
Sánchez’s options are limited: any shift towards supporting Rajoy could trigger a leadership race within the PSOE and risk ceding ground to Unidos Podemos, which is keen to establish itself as the pre-eminent voice of the Spanish left.
Emilio Sáenz-Francés, professor of history and international relations at Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University, says Spain will suffer internally and externally as long as the political paralysis endures. “It’s damaging Spain’s image around the world, but what’s more worrying is that it’s also damaging the already tarnished image that Spanish voters have of their politicians,” he says.
“We’ve been almost without a government for nearly a year, and although most people don’t notice that lack in their day-to-day lives, we’re living in volatile times where a lot of things are changing and where there’s a global terrorist threat that’s already manifested itself in neighbouring countries.
Hopes of forming Spanish government rise after party leaders' agreement Read more
“You’ve got to bear in mind that Spain’s economic recovery is far from being consolidated and there are many chances for the progress to be undone. In the face of so much danger, it’s better to have a strong government with the capacity to act – and as soon as possible.”
Amid the confusion, squabbling and shifting alliances, however, two things remain clear. Rajoy, a politician who has built his career on riding out storms and waiting for others to make the first move, still maintains the upper hand. The PP was the only party to do better in June’s election than in December’s, increasing its seat count from 123 to 137. In the wake of the Brexit vote and at a time of renewed clamour for Catalan independence – not to mention the scandals engulfing the PP – the 61-year-old Galician remains confident in his showing at the polls and happy to take his time.
Equally apparent is the magnitude of the transition ahead. “This is what happens when you have a political system suffering such a huge transformation,” says Barroso. “It just takes time. The problem is just that the numbers are what they are – and they are diabolical.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/25/spain-mariano-rajoy-third-general-election-christmas-day
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e637317f7213dd67ca8ff5c3b93440a7210d7c0dcca094798b17c7854be27531.json
|
|
[
"Australia Associated Press"
] | 2016-08-27T08:51:44 | null | 2016-08-27T06:14:17 |
A dominant offensive display from Diamonds shooters Caitlyn Bassett and Caitlyn Thwaites has led the world champions to a 68-43 win over South Africa
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fdiamonds-shine-netball-quad-series-south-africa.json
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en
| null |
Diamonds shine in Netball Quad Series win over South Africa
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
A dominant offensive display from Diamonds shooters Caitlyn Bassett and Caitlyn Thwaites has led the world champions to a 68-43 win over South Africa in their Netball Quad Series opener.
The 193cm Bassett and 188cm Thwaites, playing a half each in Auckland, repeatedly employed their height and reach advantage over Proteas defender Phumza Maweni to good use.
Netball Australia edge towards finalising collective bargaining agreement Read more
The pair scored a combined 51 points as Australia eased to victory over a valiant South Africa outfit, who bettered their 35-point thumping against the Diamonds in the World Cup.
Goal attack Natalie Medhurst nailed a further 12 points before making way for debutant Stephanie Wood, who scored five.
The world champions went on the offensive from the get-go, repeatedly hitting Bassett with passes over the top from midcourters Kim Ravaillion and the returning Madi Robinson.
Bassett netted 16 of her 17 shots in the first quarter as the Diamonds raced to a nine-point lead.
At the other end of the court, goalkeeper Sharni Layton ensured the absence of skipper Laura Geitz didn’t impact too heavily on the side, marshalling from the back with authority and restricting limiting Proteas shooter Lenize Potgieter to eight points.
The match followed a similar pattern in the second quarter, as the Diamonds put their foot down.
Ravaillion and Robinson snared a combined 17 goal assists over the two quarters to take the Diamonds into the halftime break ahead 36-20.
Coach Lisa Alexander rung in the changes at the halftime break, introducing April Brandley into the defence and young gun Liz Watson at centre.
Bassett was also given a breather for the second half, swapped out for Thwaites after her 28-goal showing.
A closer third quarter ensued, with the Proteas limiting the third-quarter tally to 14-10.
Wood and fellow defensive debutant Kristiana Manu’a were both given their Diamonds debut in the fourth quarter as the Diamonds wound down the clock.
Thwaites, 29, finished her half on the court with a perfect 23 points from 23 shots.
New Zealand are set to take on England later on Saturday, with Australia next in action on Wednesday against the English.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/27/diamonds-shine-netball-quad-series-south-africa
|
en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3280412970516cae4124fc351117920a21e9e265612a7c2585ef28e86019a9b7.json
|
|
[
"Daniel Boffey",
"Michael White",
"Sadiq Khan"
] | 2016-08-26T13:30:56 | null | 2016-08-14T11:49:10 |
Exclusive: Labour’s deputy leader heavily criticised by Corbyn for his claims of Trotskyist entryism as Labour leader sets out policy plan to win general election
|
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpolitics%2F2016%2Faug%2F13%2Fjeremy-corbyn-tom-watson-talking-nonsense.json
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en
| null |
Jeremy Corbyn: Tom Watson is talking nonsense - and he knows it
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Jeremy Corbyn has accused his elected deputy of deliberately deceiving members with claims of Trotskyist entryism – and refused to offer a vote of confidence in Labour’s general secretary, Iain McNicol.
Jeremy Corbyn's team incensed as new members denied Labour vote again Read more
In a wide-ranging interview with the Observer, in which he launches what is being billed as a totemic National Education Service policy, the Labour leader described claims of far-left infiltration of the party by Tom Watson as “nonsense” adding, “and I think he knows it’s nonsense”.
Corbyn also claimed that McNicol, Labour’s most senior employee, has questions to answer over his conduct in “recent months”. On Friday, the court of appeal ruled in favour of McNicol, whose lawyers argued that Labour’s governing body – the national executive committee (NEC) – could bar 130,000 new members from voting in the leadership election.
Corbyn said that he believed the five new members who initially took the NEC to court over its decision to prevent them from voting “will be considering whether or not to take it to the supreme court”. He added that McNicol would now have to answer to the “new NEC” on which six new members who support Corbyn have recently been elected.
Corbyn said: “People joined the Labour party in order to take part in the party and were specifically told that they were able to vote in the leadership election and it was decided by the high court that they could. The appeal court has said they can’t and I would imagine that those who brought the case will be considering whether or not to take it to the supreme court. I have no idea what their decision will be …
Jeremy Corbyn interview: ‘There are not 300,000 sectarian extremists at large’ Read more
“We will receive a report from Iain about the process that has gone on over the last few months. And the NEC will no doubt ask him questions and he will probably give answers on it. But let’s look at that when the new NEC takes over.”
Asked twice if he had full confidence in McNicol, Corbyn repeatedly stated: “I have been happy to work with Iain McNicol since I became leader.”
However, it is Watson – who claims to have sent a dossier of evidence to the Labour leader last week documenting infiltration by the extreme left – who is Corbyn’s main target. The Labour leader said: “I read about his letter to me in the media. And it appeared to be a rehash of a book Michael Crick wrote 20 years ago about alleged entryism into the Labour party at that stage.
“I just ask Tom to do the maths – 300,000 people have joined the Labour party. At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour party.
“Sorry Tom, it is nonsense – and I think he knows it’s nonsense. Let’s get on with campaigning Tom. Thanks.”
Corbyn said that while he wanted people to join the party “with good motives”, MPs and staff should be pleased that those who supported other parties were now joining Labour.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Taaffe, left, with Labour councillor Derek Hatton at the party’s conference In Bournemouth in 1985. Photograph: Associated/Rex/Shutterstock
Watson hit back on Saturday night, claiming the evidence was “incontrovertible”. He said: “The overwhelming majority of new members joined the Labour party because they want to build a fairer and more equal society. But there is clear and incontrovertible evidence that a small group of Trotskyite activists have taken leading roles in the Labour party or are seeking to do so.
“They are also explicitly targeting Young Labour and Labour student clubs with the aim of recruiting new members. That is beyond dispute. We can’t deal with this problem until we acknowledge it exists.”
Last week, Peter Taaffe, the Socialist party’s leader, and founder member of Militant, told the Guardian that he hoped to be readmitted to Labour.
Corbyn said: “I want people to join for good motives. But if they have changed their political views or developed their political views, then surely that is a good thing. We can only win a general election by winning people over from either non-voting or voting for another party. If someone has developed their politics to be members of the Labour party, even though they were once members of the Lib Dems, or Greens or something, fine. Welcome aboard.”
Asked about Taaffe’s comments, he added: “I met Peter Taaffe many, many years ago. I have no idea if he has even applied to join. I have had no conversations with Peter. I look forward to a conversation with Peter at some point but, hey, let’s be happy for what we have got, this vast number of members we have got and let’s get on with campaigning.”
In his extended interview, Corbyn:
• Announced a cradle-to-grave free National Education Service under which there will be free universal childcare, the scrapping of tuition fees, the reintroduction of maintenance grants and renewed funding for adult education.
• Offered backing for the RMT strikers on Southern Rail and Eurostar.
• Predicted a reselection process for every Labour MP when constituency boundaries are redrawn in 2017, and committed to allowing local members to make their choice unimpeded.
• Pledged an active state under his premiership willing to intervene widely in the market.
The Labour leader condemned the booing at the two leadership hustings that have taken place. But he claimed that he received “more abuse than anybody else”. He said: “Unfortunately, there has always been nastiness in politics, there has always been abuse in politics. I regret it and I deplore it. And I deplore it if it has increased. It’s wrong.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Owen Smith has pledged to remove charitable status for private schools. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex/Shutterstock
“I am not sure it has [increased in the last year]. I know I have received more abuse than I ever used to. But then maybe I’m better known these days. But I receive more abuse than anybody else. The best way of dealing with abuse is: ignore it.”
Corbyn also offered his support to Hillary Clinton in the battle to be US president. “Well I can’t be with Trump, can I?” he said. “I can’t be with Trump so obviously with Hillary.”
Meanwhile, Corbyn’s challenger for the leadership, Owen Smith, has pledged to remove charitable status for private schools. Smith writes on guardian.com/observer: “On my watch, there’ll be no cautions or caveats about whether a private school is charitable or not, this wealthfare will end. Scrapping the subsidy for privileged private schools will raise hundreds of millions of pounds.
“And, if I’m the next Labour prime minister, I’ll put every penny of that into Sure Start – one of Labour’s proudest achievements and one of the most powerful antidotes to educational injustice.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/13/jeremy-corbyn-tom-watson-talking-nonsense
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en
| 2016-08-14T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3cfe82b821d4993369c58bef471a88e0643a531fd3dc774f26ec1c8e4ec92c7a.json
|
|
[
"Associated Press In Seoul"
] | 2016-08-27T14:51:16 | null | 2016-08-27T13:37:12 |
Army accuses South Korean and American soldiers of ‘deliberate provocations’ by aiming their lights at guard posts at Panmunjom
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fnorth-korea-threatens-us-military-south-korean-troops.json
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| null |
North Korea threatens to fire at US military troops' lighting equipment
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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North Korea on Saturday threatened to aim fire at lighting equipment used by “provocative” American and South Korean troops at a truce village inside the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas.
'How could our country lie so completely?': meet the North Korean defectors Read more
The North’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) accused US and South Korean soldiers of “deliberate provocations” by aiming their lights at North Korean guard posts at Panmunjom since Friday evening.
The KPA said in a statement that the soldiers’ actions have seriously threatened the safety of North Korean troops and disrupted normal monitoring activities. It said the activities have further raised the anger of North Korean soldiers at a time when the Korean Peninsula has reached the “brink of war” due to last Monday’s start of annual joint military drills between the US and South Korea. Pyongyang says the drills are an invasion rehearsal.
“Floodlight directed at the KPA side at random is taken as an intolerable means of provocation and it will be the target of merciless pinpoint shots,” the KPA’s chief security officers at Panmunjom said in the statement, carried by the North Korean state media.
“The true aim sought by the provocateurs through their recent act is to seriously get on the nerves of the KPA soldiers, lead them to take due countermeasures and label them as provocation,” it said.
South Korea’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The statement by North Korea’s military came hours after the United Nations security council issued a statement strongly condemning four North Korean ballistic missile launches in July and August.
On Tuesday, the American-led UN command in South Korea accused North Korea of planting land mines near the truce village. Panmunjom, jointly overseen by North Korea and the UN command, is where an armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War was signed and is now a popular tourist spot for visitors from both sides.
Under the Korean War armistice, the two sides are barred from carrying out any hostile acts within or across the two-and-a-half-mile-wide DMZ. They have accused each other of deploying machine guns and other heavy weapons and combat troops inside the zone.
More than a million mines are also believed to be buried inside the DMZ. In August 2015, land mine blasts that Seoul blamed on Pyongyang maimed two South Korean soldiers and caused tensions between the two Koreas to flare.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/27/north-korea-threatens-us-military-south-korean-troops
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/5a00a656fc61e76acd0ecad70fb6d77234f4bf11cd1fa89a2f04a07b2a568b2a.json
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[
"Joanne O'Connell"
] | 2016-08-29T00:59:32 | null | 2015-06-24T00:00:00 |
Wedding costs can quickly grow, but couples need not say ‘I do’ to paying an average of £7,500 on their big day
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2015%2Fjun%2F27%2Fhow-get-married-finances-wedding-costs.json
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| null |
How to get married for less than £1,000
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The wedding season is in full swing, and while some couples are happy to throw cash around like confetti, others try to slash the cost of their big day. Those tying the knot can expect to pay an average of £7,500, according to Nationwide building society (that’s for couples of all ages, which includes the lower amounts older couples tend to spend), or more than £24,000 if you’re a reader of Brides Magazine.
But celebrating with a bit of fanfare doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tie the knot for less than a grand.
The basics
To be legally married, costs start at around £120. That covers fees for the notice of marriage (£35 for each partner) and a brief registry office service on a weekday. In Chester, for example, hiring a room in the city centre registry office that seats 50 guests costs £49, and that includes the marriage certificate (usually £3.50). The cost of this type of basic, legal service is about the same anywhere in the UK, including more expensive cities such as London.
If you want to get married in an approved venue (you cannot just do it in your local pub), you will need to pay for a registrar, which can easily run to £400 at weekends, and you will also have to fork out for the hire of a venue. If you want a religious service costs will vary again – a Church of England wedding, for example, will set you back £413.
The dress
Brides spend an average of £1,098 on their dress, according to the magazine You & Your Wedding, but there are an increasing number of cheaper options on the high street, where wedding dresses start from about £150. If you are willing to wear a secondhand frock, check out Oxfam’s online shop or one of its 11 bridal departments across the UK – grooms can have their pick of suits from just £20.
There are also specialist second-hand websites, charity shops and eBay – which is where newlywed Alex Fitton, a London-based chef, found her dress. She says: “It was a vintage dress in a shorter, informal style, and it cost £45. I bought plain shoes from Primark and made them sparkly with glue and glitter.”
It was a vintage dress and it cost £45. I bought plain shoes from Primark and made them sparkly with glue and glitter. Alex Fitton
Brides happy to wear “something borrowed” could use a friend’s dress or find an outfit for free on websites such as Freecycle or Freegle. Other ideas include making your own (see eHow.co.uk for ideas) or buying material and paying a local seamstress.
You don’t have to limit yourself to the wedding department of shops, either. This year there are plenty of white and ivory lace dresses in fashion, which may prove cheaper (fingers crossed, though, that one of your guests doesn’t turn up in the same dress).
The venue
Opting for a Sunday or off-peak winter wedding will help you avoid the high rates charged for summery Saturdays. “Even the very best venues have quieter times, so check when they are and negotiate costs if you take an off-peak date, or investigate local restaurants that have a private dining room you could use,” advises wedding planner Liz Taylor of the Taylor Lynn Corporation.
You can also cut costs by throwing a garden party if friends or family have a large enough space, having a picnic in the park or beside a river, or hiring a local pub with a garden. Last July, Jennifer Earle had her reception in a pub. “We played music on our iPods in the garden and borrowed garden games for free entertainment,” she says.
Local community centres are also a popular cost-saving option. Jo Dyer, who lives in Plymouth, had her reception in a village hall. “We booked it from Friday through to Sunday. This meant we had plenty of time to set it up and take the decorations down – and it cost £300,” she says.
Sites such as Halls for Hire, Hallshire.com and Hall Hire UK list everything from tiny local halls at £4 an hour to Grade II-listed castles. And don’t let the exterior put you off. Charlotte Ward, who is getting married in her old school grounds in Kent in August, has come up with a good solution. “I’ve arranged to have my wedding photos taken at a nearby museum with prettier grounds, in exchange for a donation,” she says.
Food and drink
Couples spend an average of £1,449 on wedding food and drink, according to research by VoucherCodes.co.uk. Ways to slice those costs include having your do later in the day (you then only have to feed your guests once rather than providing both lunch and evening food), buying food from a local restaurant rather than hiring caterers, and serving canapés as your starter and wedding cake as pudding.
If you can make a cake, or rope in a family member to make it, the ingredients can cost as little as £30 for 50 guests if you ditch the traditional fruit cake and whip up a sponge. This compares with an average of £660 for a professionally made cake. For example, the BBC’s Good Food website says its zingy lemon wedding cake costs less than a fiver to make – so if you slice it into eight, a £4.90 cake works out at 61p per guest.
For substantial savings, ask your guests to contribute food to your celebrations instead of buying gifts. Fitton says: “I suggested recipes and people made a portion big enough for about six people. There was plenty of food and guests took the leftovers home.”
There are also ways to save on wedding drinks. “We’ve bought Prosecco from Italy at £4.50 rather than £10 a bottle,” Ward says: “And we’re drinking out of jam jars instead of hiring glasses from the bar.”
Costs drop further if you make your own wine, cocktails, beer and cordials. Dyer served elderflower champagne for the toast. “It went down really well and cost only a few pounds,” she says.
Try this recipe from Andy Hamilton, author of Booze for Free.
Other costs
Forget the expensive gold-edged invitations and table decor – many couples send out emails and make their own decorations. “We printed our invites ourselves for about £34, but when people RSVPd we emailed the arrangements over,” Earle says. “Guests said this was handy as they had the details on their phone, and it was free.”
For photos, you can ask guests to upload their snaps to a dedicated website so you can take your pick and create an album online – or you can put disposable cameras on every table. Other ideas include asking a friend to act as photographer or paying a student from a local photography or art college.
There are social media sites such as Pinterest where you can find inspiration for creating homemade table decorations and stationery at a fraction of the cost of buying them ready-made.
Growing your own floral bouquet and buttonholes is also popular – seeds can be bought for a few pounds (or are even free at seed swaps) and you can grow posies in jam jars and then pick them fresh on the day.
Or you might prefer to go for dried flower arrangements. “We’ve bought lavender for the tables,” Ward says. “It works out at about £1.10 per table.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jun/27/how-get-married-finances-wedding-costs
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en
| 2015-06-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a2d5ef8bd86b6dde4884b14d118782506f76dc3fdd3b471f148490bfe613cb3f.json
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[] | 2016-08-29T06:52:06 | null | 2016-08-29T06:02:28 |
No injuries reported after car rammed through barriers and attackers detonated a device
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fbomb-brussels-institute-criminology-belgium-car.json
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Brussels bomb: explosion reported at city's Institute of Criminology
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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A bomb has exploded at the Brussels Institute of Criminology in the north of Brussels but the building was empty and no one was wounded, according to local media.
A car rammed through the barriers at about 3am local time on Monday and one or more attackers exploded a bomb near the laboratories which caught fire, broadcaster RTL said.
State broadcaster RTBF said no one was injured but that damage at the site was significant. Police have been deployed in force and sealed off the area.
The institute is in Neder-Over-Hembeek, a suburb north of Brussels. It is linked to the Belgian ministry of justice and carries out forensic investigations in criminal cases.
Belgium has been on high alert since March when attacks on the the city’s airport and subway killed 32 people.
Days before the Brussels attacks, Salah Abdeslam, one of the leaders of the terror attacks on Paris in November 2015, was arrested in the Molenbeek area of Brussels after a four-month international manhunt.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/bomb-brussels-institute-criminology-belgium-car
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1d299cb230c33b30716c0618f07a774b35be442c2ae716a9fa5eb1b8a778af2b.json
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[
"Rebecca Smithers"
] | 2016-08-26T13:29:10 | null | 2016-08-07T06:00:08 |
The wine delivery was cancelled without explanation and now the supermarket wants to charge me more to reorder
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F07%2Fasda-cancelled-wine-delivery.json
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en
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Asda left me high and dry over failed wine delivery
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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I ordered 12 bottles of my favourite wine for home delivery from Asda – on offer at a good price, which worked out at £62 (12 bottles at £5 and £2 delivery charge). It was scheduled to be delivered on a Saturday between 7pm and 9pm and I received an email reminder.
By 10pm there had been no delivery, so I phoned the helpline only to be told the order had (inexplicably) been cancelled. I was asked if I would like to reorder and take delivery on Sunday so I agreed, only to find that both the delivery charge and the wine had increased in price.
I cancelled and rang the next day having checked the terms and conditions, and asked that the original terms be honoured, but gave up after being put on hold. In the meantime I had a call from the fraud division of my credit card company to say my card had been compromised. Asda had taken the money for the wine from my card.
I eventually spoke to someone else at Asda who said the money would be in a holding bank and refunded in about a week. I explained that as my card was now blocked it would not be possible to put the money back on the card.
I was still not offered a reorder of the wine and I have heard nothing since. BC, Teignmouth, Devon
This became far more complicated than it needed to be once your card became blocked, which meant it was not possible to easily make the refund.
After our intervention, Asda’s customer service team got in touch with you to try to resolve the matter and to apologise for any inconvenience – and we gather all has now been sorted.
An Asda spokesperson said: “We’re disappointed that we didn’t meet our usual high standards. We have been in contact with BC to resolve the matter and have apologised and offered a gesture of goodwill to go some way towards making up for the inconvenience caused.”
We are glad this has been resolved to your satisfaction but we still don’t understand why your order was cancelled in the first place, or why Asda could not have reinstated the original order at the same price as a gesture of goodwill.
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/07/asda-cancelled-wine-delivery
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en
| 2016-08-07T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e0c4a18ede6e42d49f065087deb805cee986c428fd263674659dc4c57781aa12.json
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[
"Guardian Readers",
"Sarah Marsh"
] | 2016-08-26T13:23:04 | null | 2016-07-21T12:15:40 |
Labour has just signed up more than 180,000 new supporters who are keen to vote for the party’s new leader. Here, some of those who joined explain why
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Fjul%2F21%2Fmeet-the-180000-why-we-paid-25-to-vote-for-the-next-labour-leader.json
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Meet the 180,000: why we paid £25 to vote for the next Labour leader
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Between Monday and Wednesday this week, more than 180,000 people paid a £25 fee to become registered supporters of the Labour party, enabling them to vote in its leadership election in September. Here, new members explain what led them to join.
Anthony Johnson, 23, London: I joined to back Corbyn – I want to see a new Labour party
I joined to keep Jeremy Corbyn as leader, because I want a move away from new Labour and the politics that people such as Owen Smith represent. I am voting for Corbyn and a Labour party that believes in public services and wants to improve our NHS because it’s good for the economy. I want a leader who isn’t focused on just making profits.
I approach this topic as a student nurse and I can see the impact of Blair. There are lots of policies New Labour implemented that were bad for our economy in the long run, and I don’t want the same Labour party in again. If we have Smith as leader then we won’t see new politics – just the same old neoliberal line.
The MPs’ vote of no confidence in Corbyn doesn’t make me nervous because those politicians have never represented me. They have always been ineffective and Corbyn does a much better job of explaining what he believes in than them. If the parliamentary Labour party got behind Corbyn, then he would be able to provide an effective opposition. They are choosing to go against the will of their party, which they would not do if they really believed in democracy.
Megan Mason, 71, north of England: I am supporting Jeremy Corbyn – his policies and socialist views are what we need
I paid £25 to ensure that I got a vote in the leadership election. I am supporting Jeremy Corbyn, whose policies and socialist views move the party to the left, which is the right direction. Having lost 40 seats in Scotland, Labour is going to have to regain these seats to even draw level with the Conservatives. They need real leftwing policies to do this. Owen Smith is hedging his bets and going for middle-of-the-road policies. He hasn’t really given a good reason why he doesn’t support Corbyn – no one has. The definition of leadership is a wide one, and for the parliamentary Labour party to say Corbyn is not a good leader is unfair.
Roger Cowell, 65, west Yorkshire: Anything I can do to weaken or replace Jeremy Corbyn is worth a try
Why did I pay the £25 fee? My answer is simple: it is the only way I can have a direct say. I think Jeremy Corbyn is a disastrous leader of the opposition. Anything I can do to weaken his hold on the post, or even better, replace him with a more electable person, has to be worth a try.
Corbyn doesn’t seem to care if he opposes effectively or not, or if he is considered a credible leader, or if Labour is seen by the general public as a government in waiting. Whether in prime minister’s questions, or in debates, or press appearances, he seems unprepared and rarely gives a coherent, organised response to questions. He is also only content to talk to dedicated supporters, not the swing voters he needs. He has no narrative for modern British society and where Labour can influence that narrative.
I am not sure about Owen Smith – it’s too soon to know, but in the absence of any alternative in the contest, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Personally I would have preferred Angela Eagle, or any one of numerous other Labour figures. I think Smith is a very cautious and uninspired choice, but I hope he can beat Corbyn, or at least weaken his grip for another challenge in the near future.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I think Smith is a very cautious and uninspired choice, but I hope he can beat Corbyn.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
It’s likely the Momentum machine will see Corbyn hang on to the leadership, though possibly not decisively. Whether he wins or loses, Labour will continue to struggle to get a coherent story to the media and the electorate, and the prospects of an alternative to a long Tory period in government will fade further.
Will Vigar, 52, Southampton: I had to make sure my voice was heard, even if that means living off rice for a week.
When Jeremy Corbyn came along, it genuinely looked like the party I had loved was making a comeback. I registered to join for £3 and feel proud to have been one of the people who voted him in as leader.
Corbyn has promised a fairer society. Given his history of fighting for social justice and the rights of people, I believe him. So many people with low (or no) incomes or disabilities or mental illnesses have the chance of being given back their dignity. I can’t not be part of supporting that.
I experience agoraphobia. Under successive rightwing governments – including Tony Blair’s – aid for mental health issues has plummeted. After three years on the waiting list, I finally got an appointment with a psychologist who told me I would need at least a year of therapy to gets to grips with my agoraphobia, but the government cut would only allow me 12 weekly sessions.
I have had a lifetime of paying into the system through taxes and national insurance, only to discover that despite all promises I will not be looked after in my time of need. I am unable to sign on for jobseeker’s allowance or employment and support allowance (ESA) as I can’t make it into the office, although I am looking for work that I can do from home. I haven’t had money of my own for four years, so I rely on friends and family.
The behaviour of the Labour party has disgusted me. The unwillingness to embrace their history and their raison d’etre, prove that the parliamentary Labour party and the national executive committee are Tory, self-serving charlatans. They care nothing for the people, just their careers.
It was essential that I made my feelings known by paying the £25 – although this fee is a travesty of democracy. I do not want the Labour party to remain self-serving and this payment is designed to keep the poor and disenfranchised from voting away the self-serving careerists.
I had to make sure that my voice was taken into account, even though it may mean living off nothing but rice for a week.
Stephen Jones, 47, Salford: On Monday I paid my money, in September I will make my choice. It will be for Owen Smith
Why did I pay £25 to vote in the leadership contest?
On 24 June I awoke to discover that Britain had voted for Brexit. Over the following days, as I read reports of racist attacks and heard some of my colleagues’ own experiences, the initial shock gave way to fear. A fear that this country – a country that has recently legalised gay marriage and had seemed to be gradually becoming a more liberal and accepting place – was sliding to the right.
I began to believe that the remain vote had been lost partly due to Labour’s failure to speak to its traditional working-class base; its failure to clearly explain the financial consequences to those on low wages; and its failure to tackle people’s genuine and understandable concerns about immigration. I saw Jeremy Corbyn’s obvious lack of commitment to remain as the main cause of these failures.It’s because of this that I joined Labour as a full member – I felt it was time to stop criticising from the sidelines and do something from the inside.
When Labour’s national executive committee voted to exclude those who’ve been members for less than six months from voting in the leadership election] I was slightly disappointed, but understood. I was also sceptical about the £25 fee. At first I decided against registering, but then I read Thangam Debbonaire and Lilian Greenwood’s pieces on why they resigned from the shadow cabinet and saw the extent of Corbyn’s lack of leadership. I decided that I had to have my say, even if, from the very vocal support for Corbyn among potential supporters, it seemed pointless. On Monday I paid my money, in September I will make my choice. It will be for Owen Smith.
Laura Muir, 38, London: I would have paid more to improve the chances of Labour returning to power in the near future
I am a lifelong Labour supporter and believe in redistribution of wealth so that all people have access to the basics of a free society, including freedom of speech, health care and education.
To deliver this we need a united and effective opposition capable of taking government and running the country. The current Labour leadership cannot deliver this.
I don’t feel Jeremy Corbyn takes the Conservatives to task enough on key issues such as cuts to income and disability support, public sector cuts and teachers’ pay. He and his team totally misjudged Brexit, the outcome of which will hit the poorest hardest. Instead, they focused on scrapping Trident, which ironically takes on greater relevance as we forge an independent path outside the European Union.
I’m not hugely in favour of Smith and would have voted for Angela Eagle. However, I think Smith will be able to garner the support of the party and build the strongest team around him. May’s cabinet is actually quite intellectually weak and the big hitters on the left, if rehabilitated, would trounce them, reinvigorating mass public support because they could see that there was a clear choice again.
I don’t resent the £25 charge. I would have paid more to improve the chances of Labour returning to power in the near future.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/21/meet-the-180000-why-we-paid-25-to-vote-for-the-next-labour-leader
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en
| 2016-07-21T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/b5237668bb876e736c91356463637e5243fccd1240a5e054b259ded9412c6bed.json
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[
"David Robert Grimes"
] | 2016-08-30T08:59:23 | null | 2016-08-30T07:00:24 |
Giving money to a seriously ill person trying to afford treatment seems a good thing to do. But sometimes the ‘treatment’ is unproven and even dangerous
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fblog%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Ffundraising-appeals-for-the-desperately-ill-are-moving-but-evidence-is-crucial.json
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Fundraising appeals for the desperately ill are moving, but evidence is crucial
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The human urge to help others is a laudable aspect of our nature as social animals. In an era of crowd-funding platforms and electronic transfers, appeals can rapidly tap into the spirit of human generosity and sponsor any number of excellent endeavours. But this generous spirit can be quite easily abused, especially when it comes to fundraising for healthcare.
Given the prevalence of cancer, it’s not surprising that those affected are frequently the target of outlandish and costly false cures. Wallace F. Janssen, historian of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), noted that at least one dubious therapy has dominated headlines every decade since the 1940s. These “cures” can be worse than merely useless; in some instances these interventions can be actively damaging or deadly. And whether borne of benign cluelessness or outright deception, these treatments are rarely free.
We know it's effective. So why is there opposition to the HPV vaccine ? Read more
Based in Houston, Texas, Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski claims to treat cancer with a group of peptides he christened antineoplastons (ANP) way back in the 1970s, when he set up a clinic ostensibly for research. In the decades since the clinic was established, precisely no reproducible results have emerged. There are many problems with the research conducted by Burzynski’s clinic; Professor David Gorski provides an excellent overview of some of these.
Yet despite the numerous FDA warnings, scientific criticisms and myriad legal cases, Burzynski’s clinic is still a beacon of hope for many desperate people. The clinic has heavily promoted itself as capable of miraculous deeds, for which it charges a hefty fee - the American Cancer Institute warns that treatments at the clinic can cost upwards of US $7,500-10,000 a month (£5,600-£7580).
Sick people, their families and communities frequently raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment there. The story of British toddler Amelia S is just one such heart-breaking account. Amelia was three years old when diagnosed with a brain tumour. The prognosis was bleak, and, understandably, her family looked for any hope they could find. Despite pleas from concerned sceptics, Amelia’s family began fundraising for her treatment, and aided by uncritical media coverage collected over £200,000. Initially, Amelia’s family were encouraged by the apparent improvement they witnessed in their daughter’s condition, and the clinic wasted no time in promoting the toddler as a success story. Her story even featured in filmmaker Eric Mercola’s uncritical documentary Burzynski: Cancer is a Serious Business. Swayed by the coverage, several other parents of sick children raised large sums of money for ANP treatment.
Sadly, Amelia’s improvement was illusory, and her condition deteriorated steadily until she passed away in 2103. The Other Burzynski patient group records many similar instances. No-one disputes that patients do, sadly, sometimes die, but but that they should be peddled false hope whilst being heavily burdened financially strikes opponents of the clinic as unforgivable.
Autism is another condition that attracts bogus treatments and dubious elixirs. “Treatments” range from unnecessary chelation therapy to what are essentially bleach enemas. The human protein GcMaf is often marketed as a miracle cure, and can set patients back somewhere in the region of €5000 (£4270) a month. It may also come with considerable risk, especially if patients have abandoned conventional treatment: in 2014, five patients died having undergone the protocol at First Immune Switzerland. The clinic was closed pending an investigation and remains closed, although the company’s website reassures potential patients that “we have closed our clinic to replace it with a better one”.
But perhaps the most pernicious treatments are those designed as interventions for syndromes that are not medically recognised. These include Electromagnetic Hyper-sensitivity (EHS), where sufferers believe they are adversely affected by electro-magnetic radiation. While EHS is psychological rather than physiological, the profound discomfort experienced by sufferers is very real. And because such afflictions are not medically recognised, hawkers appear to offer desperate sufferers the chance to relief or cure, offering everything from juicers to ludicrously implausible electro-magnetic shields.
Of all these maladies, Chronic Lyme Disease (CLD) is one that is currently attracting attention. Lyme disease is a common infection passed from ticks to human, and is usually easy to treat with a course of antibiotics. Generally, it quickly clears up, though in rare instances symptoms can persist for a few weeks after treatment, a situation referred to post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS). CLD sufferers claim that a range of varied and often debilitating symptoms can manifest after infection. Yet the symptoms of CLD are entirely subjective, and completely inconsistent - in many instances, there is no evidence that the sufferers ever had Lyme infection in the first instance. A 2011 New England Journal of Medicine review dismissed the existence of CLD alongside other discredited “illnesses” such as chronic candida syndrome and chronic Epstein–Barr virus infection.
Understandably, this dismissal by the medical establishment is rejected by illness advocacy groups, who in their determination to have a diagnostic label for their complaints can be somewhat militant. Indeed, the co-discover of Lyme disease, Prof Allen Steere, has been stalked, threatened and abused for refusing to substantiate self-diagnosed CLD, in addition to his refusal to endorse long-term antibiotic therapy - a treatment course shown to lack efficacy.
The online tool that helps the public decode health research Read more
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the evanescent nature of a CLD diagnosis is a haven for snake-oil sellers, keen to dole out a diagnosis and supply lucrative alternative treatments. The lack of medical evidence for the very existence of the condition is, paradoxically, something of a boon for alternative practioners, who are therefore able to attribute practically any perceived malaise or symptom to CLD, and push any manner of dodgy cure.
These treatments can command a staggering price-tag; a recent campaign to raise €100,000 (£85400) for a CLD treatment was heavily covered in the Irish media, urging at least 10,000 people to donate €10 to save a life. Along with Prof David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist and fellow of University College London, I queried this particular case. We asked some questions regarding where the treatment was going top be carried out (ie. where the money was going) and discovered the clinic in question was the Sophia Health Institute in Seattle.
Further investigation revealed that this is not the first appeal to raise huge sums for CLD treatment, with many other similar appeals on numerous crowd-funding platforms. That any clinic would offer expensive treatment for an unrecognised ailment is a red flag. However, the situation becomes murkier still when one considers that the Sophia Health Institute is a naturopathic centre run under the auspices of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, a man whose medical reputation has been called into question by many sceptics and health bloggers, and whose Lyme disease treatment protocol makes for frankly worrying reading.
So why do these unproven treatments still find ready patients? Part of the problem is survivorship bias, where people are more inclined to focus on apparent success stories whilst overlooking failures. Dubious clinics exploit this effect, showcasing their apparent miracles whilst downplaying the much more informative failure statistics, creating an aura of effectiveness where there is none. But crucially, these clinics have commoditized hope. At its worst, this is naked abuse of desperate people.
Faced with this desperation, raising questions about the clinics or their methods, can trigger extreme reactions, even if compassionately meant. It is all too easy for patients and their supporters to interpret concern as contempt for the sufferer. The siege mentality has the effect of insulating clinics from criticism- precisely the environment in which exploitation thrives.
The depressing conclusion is that although the urge to help those suffering is laudable, the truth is that promises of miracle cures should be viewed with extreme scepticism. Raising money for such causes does not help sufferers one iota – it benefits only those with the audacity to push false hope at great expense.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/aug/30/fundraising-appeals-for-the-desperately-ill-are-moving-but-evidence-is-crucial
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/dd3b5bb4b186848524a1534af490da3b0a5671392ad5f9ddc8885536def3c194.json
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|
[
"Philip Oltermann"
] | 2016-08-29T06:51:55 | null | 2016-06-10T15:47:07 |
In Der Spiegel interview German finance minister rules out Britain’s chances of enjoying bloc benefits from outside EU
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http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpolitics%2F2016%2Fjun%2F10%2Fno-single-market-access-for-uk-after-brexit-wolfgang-schauble-says.json
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No single market access for UK after Brexit, Wolfgang Schäuble says
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has slammed the door on Britain retaining access to the single market if it votes to the leave the European Union.
In an interview in a Brexit-themed issue of German weekly Der Spiegel, the influential veteran politician ruled out the possibility of the UK following a Swiss or Norwegian model that would allow it to enjoy the benefits of the single market without being an EU member.
“That won’t work,” Schäuble told Der Spiegel. “It would require the country to abide by the rules of a club from which it currently wants to withdraw. If the majority in Britain opts for Brexit, that would be a decision against the single market. In is in. Out is out. One has to respect the sovereignty of the British people.”
A reverse Maastricht would be legal and politically feasible | Michael White Read more
The German conservative’s intervention seems to rule out the “reverse Maastricht” option floated privately by some British MPs and government sources, whereby pro-remain MPs in Westminster could use their parliamentary majority to retain access to the single market after a British exit from the EU.
Their first target is likely to be to try to ensure that despite a Brexit the UK could remain in the single market by joining the European economic area, of which the non-EU countries Norway, Lichtenstein and Iceland are currently members.
The single market – to which Switzerland also has access despite not being a member of either the EU or the EEA – guarantees the free movement of people, goods and services inside the bloc.
Supporters of the British leave campaign argue that it is in Germany’s economic interest to maintain barrier-free trade relations with the United Kingdom. Britain is the third-largest export market for German car manufacturers and the destination of around 7% of total German exports.
In a debate on the BBC, Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, went even further than the official leave campaign and suggested getting rid of tariffs on goods traded with all countries.
This was condemned by the remain campaign, who said it was a “reckless” plan that would “decimate our domestic industries”.
“People would be able to sell in to the UK market for free, but our exporters would face tariffs selling in to Europe,” a spokesman said.
Commentators in Germany point out that Germany has more to lose from a Brexit than a segment of its export market and that the government was able to sideline economic interest to diplomacy in its relationship with Russia.
Until recently, the assumption in Berlin’s political circles had been that Schäuble’s finance ministry was more open than others to the idea of keeping open a back door for renegotiating some form of associate membership for Britain after an out vote.
But the interview in Der Spiegel, which will be published on Saturday but has been seen by the Guardian, indicates a less flexible stance. “Europe will also work without Britain if necessary,” Schäuble said. “At some point, the British will realise they have taken the wrong decision. And then we will accept them back one day, if that’s what they want.”
The Christian Democrat, seen as the key actor behind Germany’s hardline stance towards Greece at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, said he and his counterparts in the eurozone would “do everything possible to contain these consequences …We are preparing for all possible scenarios to limit the risks,” he added.
While warning that it would be a “miracle” if there were no economic drawbacks for Britain following a withdrawal, Schäuble also admitted that a Brexit could have dramatic consequences for the rest of the European Union.
The 73-year-old said it could not be ruled out that other countries could follow Britain’s lead after the referendum on 23 June: “How, for example, would the Netherlands react, as a country that has traditionally had very close ties to Britain? It is important for the EU to send the message that it has understood the vote and is prepared to learn from it.”
Schäuble also poured cold water on suggestions that France and Germany would react to Britain’s departure from the 28-member bloc with a leap towards accelerated integration. On the contrary, he said, it was important that the EU needed to show that it could learn from the British referendum.
“In response to Brexit, we couldn’t simply call for more integration,” he is quoted as saying. “That would be crude; many would rightfully wonder whether we politicians still haven’t understood. Even in the event that only a small majority of the British voters reject a withdrawal, we would have to see it as a wake-up call and a warning not to continue with business as usual. Either way, we have to take a serious look at reducing bureaucracy in Europe.”
Leading figures in the campaign to leave the EU, including Michael Gove, the UK justice secretary, want to officially withdraw from the single market to stop freedom of movement. But Matthew Elliott, its chief executive, said in response to Schäuble: “The eurozone economies are dependent on trade with the UK. We are the fifth largest economy in the world, while many of them are in a desperate state due to the failing single currency. There is no question about it, Britain will still have access to the single market after we vote leave. It would be perverse of the eurozone to try to create artificial barriers – and would do far more damage to them than to anyone else.
“One thing that will change if we vote leave is that we will be able to forge trade deals with the economic powerhouses of the future – the emerging markets – which we are currently forbidden from doing by the EU. That’s why we will not only be stronger and more secure if we vote to leave the EU, we will also be more prosperous.”
However, George Osborne, the UK chancellor, who has played a leading role in the remain campaign, tweeted:
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) Major intervention from Germany: UK would have to accept free movement and pay in to EU to continue to access trade https://t.co/jIAPPXM6hT
Peter Mandelson, the former EU trade commissioner and ex-business secretary, said Schäuble’s comments “finally knocks on the head the leave campaign’s claim that we can leave the EU and still enjoy the benefits of the single market”.
“We cannot leave the club and continue to use its facilities,” the Labour peer said. “Being outside the single market wold be a hammer blow to the UK economy. Our future trade [would] be hit and our manufacturing sector, which relies on the single market’s free movement of goods and people, [would] be at risk. This is the cold reality of Brexit that the British people must face. If we leave we lose the economic gains of being the world’s largest free-trade zone, putting jobs and livelihoods at risk.”
Iain Duncan Smith, the former work and pensions secretary, said of Schäuble’s comments: “To quote Mandy Rice-Davis, he would say that, wouldn’t he? … What I call the realpolitik underneath the surface is that they don’t want to get into spats. Of course they don’t. We’re a friend, we cooperate in Nato, the G8 and G20. Mr Schauble’s bound to say what he said. Come on. Don’t tell me that Mr Osborne hasn’t been on that line to him almost permanently for the last few weeks …
“You’ll probably get a load of these statements. Every finance minister in Europe is going to line up. They’ve probably got them every day between now and the referendum.”
The leave campaign has said it does not want to be in the single market, because it would not want the UK to have free movement. But its leading advocates, including Boris Johnson and Gove, dismiss the idea that Germany or other EU countries would impose trade tariffs given they sell the UK more in manufactured goods than they buy.
Schäuble’s comments were made on the same day that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, repeated her hope that Britain would vote to remain in the EU. Speaking on Friday to a group representing family-owned businesses, Merkel said: “From my point of view, Great Britain remaining in the European Union is the best and most desirable thing for us all.
“We have very close cooperation on many questions with Great Britain and would of course like to continue this within the framework of the European Union.’’
Der Spiegel, which sells around 800,000 copies per issue, has upped its circulation in the UK for Saturday’s special bilingual edition and reduced the cover price from £5.20 to £2. The cover carries the headline in German and English: “Please don’t go!”
In an editorial, the magazine argues that while it is too late “to convince the British to love the EU, perhaps we should use this opportunity to mention how much the rest of Europe admires them. It’s unbelievable that they don’t seem to see how much they’ve shaped the continent, how much we value them here, how close we Germans feel to them”.
“Germany has always looked across the Channel with some degree of envy,” it adds. “On our emotional map of Europe, the Italians were responsible for love and good food, the French for beauty and elegance and the Brits for nonchalance and progress. They have an inner independence that we Germans lack, in addition to myriad anti-authoritarian, defiant tendencies. A lot of what happened in Britain spilled over to us sooner or later, reinforcing our cultural ties.”
In a homage to British cultural exports ranging from “James Bond to Twiggy’s haircut”, the magazine’s staff writers said they wanted to offer Britain a “firm handshake, coupled with an honest, straightforward appeal: remain”.
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/10/no-single-market-access-for-uk-after-brexit-wolfgang-schauble-says
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| 2016-06-10T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/a36a0312bfbf2ee19ddc1e408a24306e0a5e59cc12c17848213a28067b342faa.json
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[
"Ewan Murray"
] | 2016-08-30T22:52:52 | null | 2016-08-30T21:31:00 |
Darren Clarke believes his personal picks – Lee Westwood, Thomas Pieters and Martin Kaymer – and rookies can thrive as Europe seek a record fourth win running over USA in the Ryder Cup
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Darren Clarke backs his Ryder Cup wild cards and rookies
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If bookmakers are to be believed, the evolution of Europe’s Ryder Cup team will come at an immediate cost. With a month to go until Darren Clarke oversees the defence of the trophy at Hazeltine the USA are heavily odds-on to win.
The hosts’ price shortened further on Tuesday as confirmation of Clarke’s full team arrived. With Thomas Pieters afforded his most high-profile chance to shine, six from 12 of the European contingent will be making Ryder Cup debuts. That represents the highest rookie contingent for an away match since 1999, when the US triumphed with much leaping around and gnashing of teeth at Brookline. The home side is unlikely to feature more than two debutants and, in Brooks Koepka, may have only one.
Clarke did not adopt a woe is us approach or play on the sense of underdog when discussing his dozen. Europe’s captain was at his most bullish yet with regards to the additions of Pieters, Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer. He explained his choices with reason and assuredness. “We have six rookies, one of them [Danny Willett] is the Masters champion,” said Clarke. “The other guys have won tournaments all over the world.
“Who would you have picked for experience? Who is in form? If I’m going to add experience to it, I need to have form. I need to see guys that are playing well. Unfortunately, the two guys that would have fallen into that category, Graeme McDowell and Luke Donald, are not quite playing the way we know they can play.
“I would have loved them to be playing a little bit better to give me a bigger headache but it didn’t happen. My options of adding to the team with strength then came back to rookies again.
“I’m very, very pleased with Martin and Lee adding to the team because they bring a balance which we have always talked about. The last pick was always going to be the difficult one.
“Yes, we have six rookies. I’ve got all the trust in the world in them. They have got themselves in this position. It’s not just a straightforward case; if it was, you would go straight down off the world rankings. That’s not the European way. That’s not what we do.
“I have a massive amount of belief in the rookies that we have. To put two together, I wouldn’t want to do it but, if I did do that, then I would have confidence in them going out there and delivering a point.”
Clarke is right to point to Willett’s status, although the Yorkshireman has been routinely out of sorts since his win at Augusta National in April. Questions, too, hover over the current touch of Andy Sullivan, Matthew Fitzpatrick and Chris Wood.
“I was part of that Brookline team and the rookies that we have now play more in America,” said Clarke. “I don’t mean any disrespect to the guys that didn’t play until Sunday at Brookline, but the guys are global players nowadays. Those guys did play considerably around the world but it’s different now. The rookies that we have now are more comfortable in America because they have been playing more over there, so it’s somewhat different to what it was back then.”
Westwood was similarly upbeat. “I see them not as rookies,” said the 43-year-old. “I look at a lot of the players’ characters and I think they can take it. They can take a fight and a bit of stick.”
Indeed this wave of debutants is not necessarily a disaster for Europe. Quite obviously the core of a team that included McDowell, Donald and Ian Poulter for years would change at some point. That Westwood – who will compete in his 10th Ryder Cup and, with 21 points, is four behind Nick Faldo’s record total – Rory McIlroy, Sergio García, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson are on hand to assist with the transition is a benefit to Clarke, himself immersed in the biennial event.
The USA have players returning to familiar surroundings but the scar tissue associated with defeat upon defeat can hardly be deemed advantageous.
“It’s not like any other tournament,” said Clarke. “It’s going to be something totally different but the experienced guys will do what we do in the European way by looking after the first-time guys. Making picks is not just about stats. It’s not just about form, which is important, but it’s about the whole team dynamic, what goes on behind the scenes.
“I’ve consulted over this past couple of days with lots of previous Ryder Cup captains to try and just gain a little bit more of an insight and to see what they were thinking whenever they were making picks, in case I was doing anything that might not have fitted in, but every one of them was 100% behind me and very, very helpful.
“Their thoughts on their picks were exactly the same as mine; you’re adding to not just the playing, the playing bit is important, but you need more. Team is more important and the European team ethos is what has enabled us to be as successful as we have. With this team, that’s what I’m trying to do and take this forward.”
Clarke batted away fitness fears regarding Stenson, who withdrew after one round of The Barclays Championship in New York last week with the recurrence of a knee problem. “I’ve spoken to Henrik two or three times,” he said. “It was purely precautionary; he is OK. I think he has a slight issue but it’s not going to stop him playing.”
The overwhelming issue in Europe’s favour is pressure; namely the barrowload of it placed on the USA. A miserable recent run – they have lost six of the past seven – triggered a task force, the inclusion of Tiger Woods as a vice‑captain and the apparent acceptance of the complaints so vociferously aired by Phil Mickelson at Gleneagles two years ago. Quite where the PGA of America would turn to in event of another defeat is anybody’s guess.
For now Davis Love has to decide on four picks with some big names in Rickie Fowler, Bubba Watson, Matt Kuchar and Jim Furyk having failed to qualify automatically. Love will name three of his four on 12 September as he seeks to halt what would be an unprecedented fourth victory in a row for Europe.
“Thankfully one of my hard parts of the job is over and done with but Davis has that ahead of him,” said Clarke. “He’s been there before and I’m sure he will make very, very solid choices.
“I know he’s going to have a tough decision to make. There are some big names not on that American team and they are going to consult with everybody, with members of the task force, to see what they are going to do. They have got to try and get the right mix on the team as well.”
None of which is Clarke’s concern. On Tuesday,he exuded a level of confidence which, if transferred to Europe’s players, offers a decent antidote to betting markets.
The 12 players who will aim to retain the Ryder Cup for Europe
Rory McIlroy (Northern Ireland)
Age 27 World ranking 5 Ryder Cups 3 (2010, 12, 14) This season’s earnings $2,700,835 Majors 4
Having once dismissed the Ryder Cup as “an exhibition” McIlroy has now been on the winning team in all three of his appearances. Won three points from five at Gleneagles in 2014, crucially beating Rickie Fowler in the singles. Has won six, lost four and halved four of his Ryder Cup matches
Danny Willett (England)
Age 28 World ranking 11 Ryder Cups rookie This season’s earnings $1,928,132 Majors 1
Willett became only the second Englishman to win the Masters this year and his third-place finish in the 2015 WGC Match Play stands him in good stead for Hazeltine. One of five rookies to automatically qualify, he started the year as the world No19 but climbed to No9 after Augusta
Henrik Stenson (Sweden)
Age 40 World ranking 4 Ryder Cups 3 (2006, 08, 14) This season’s earnings $3,365,923 Majors 1
Won all three of his matches alongside Justin Rose at Gleneagles and brings plenty of experience. Claimed his first major with the Open at Troon this year and a silver medal at the Olympic Games suggests he has maintained his form. Persistent back problem could be a worry
Chris Wood (England)
Age 28 World ranking 28 Ryder Cups rookie This season’s earnings $1,782,324 Majors 0
Wood won the BMW PGA Championship in May, which helped secure his place in the team. Having been forced to withdraw from this year’s Open with a neck injury, where he announced himself by finishing fifth as an amateur in 2008, the rookie will be eager to prove his worth at Hazeltine
Sergio García (Spain)
Age 36 World ranking 12 Ryder Cups 7 (1999, 2002, 04, 06, 08, 12, 14) This season’s earnings $3,155,365 Majors 0
A highly experienced competitor, the Spaniard was a vice-captain in the only recent match he missed, at Celtic Manor in 2010, and has won important matches throughout the course of his seven appearances. Won 2.5 points from four at Gleneagles, beating Jim Furyk in the singles
Rafael Cabrera–Bello (Spain)
Age 32 World ranking 27 Ryder Cups rookie This season’s earnings $1,111,553 Majors 0
Secured his spot with a highly consistent season which included runners-up spots in Dubai and Qatar and a series of top-five finishes.. Also managed 17th at the Masters, having finished third at the WGC-Dell Match Play. His only victory on the European Tour came in 2012
Justin Rose (England)
Age 36 World ranking 10 Ryder Cups 3 (2008, 12, 14) This season’s earnings $2,000,811 Majors 1
Won gold at the Olympics in Rio when beating his Gleneagles partner Stenson down the stretch and played all five matches in his last two events, making him a key member of the team. Only his fourth Ryder Cup appearance, he has a record of nine wins, three losses and two halves
Andy Sullivan (England)
Age 30 World ranking 42 Ryder Cups rookie This season’s earnings $925,625 Majors 0
A Walker Cup winner in 2011, Sullivan’s last tour win came in 2015, when he won the Portugal Masters by nine strokes from Chris Wood. Pushed McIlroy hard in the season-ending World Tour Championship in Dubai in 2015. Also finished second in Dubai but missed cut in final two qualifying events
Matt Fitzpatrick (England)
Age 21 World ranking 48 Ryder Cups rookie This season’s earnings $290,559 Majors 0
The 2013 Open silver medal winner and US Amateur champion won the Nordea Masters in June and has spent the longest time in the automatic positions after his first Tour title in October’s British Masters. Also fourth in DP World Tour Championship, secured his place with fifth in penultimate event
Martin Kaymer (Germany)
Age 31 World ranking 50 Ryder Cups 3 (2010, 12, 14) This season’s earnings $889,932 Majors 2
The wildcard pick secured the point that enabled Europe to retain the Ryder Cup at Medinah in 2012 with victory over Steve Stricker and has the 2014 Players Championship and US Open to his name, his last victories to date. Won four, halved three and lost three in his three appearances
Lee Westwood (England)
Age 43 World ranking 46 Ryder Cups 9 (1997, 99, 2002, 04, 06, 08, 10, 12, 14) This season’s earnings $380,333 Majors 0
The most experienced European player with nine consecutive Ryder Cup appearances, having made his debut at Valderrama in 1997. A second-place finish at the Masters and 14th on the world points list gave the captain Darren Clarke licence to pick his good friend as a wildcard
Thomas Pieters (Belgium)
Age 24 World ranking 41 Ryder Cups Rookie This season’s earnings $1,185,851 Majors 0
Finished just out of the medals in fourth at the Olympics, second in his defence of the Czech Masters and won the Made in Denmark title last Sunday. Big-hitting should be an advantage and Clarke played two rounds with him at the Danish event, with the Belgian shooting 62 and 71
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/30/ryder-cup-darren-clarke-rookies-prosper
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| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/ed136b3464a8beb8ecdab9922226dd24634935f6d95847d47934cc549c97eb83.json
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[
"Dan Roberts"
] | 2016-08-29T20:52:16 | null | 2016-08-29T19:00:36 |
The private life of Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman is making headlines today – but her greatest role may be alongside a future president
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Huma Abedin's split with Weiner ends one political drama as another unfolds
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Huma Abedin has been the reluctant star of two political psychodramas in the past year.
The first – involving painfully public strains in her marriage to Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman – ended, perhaps predictably, on Monday with news that she had decided to separate from him following yet another sexting scandal.
Huma Abedin separates from Anthony Weiner after latest sexting scandal Read more
But the second – Abedin’s emerging role as a central figure in the likely return of Hillary Clinton to the White House – may be only just beginning and remains of far greater public interest.
Just how crucial this 40-year-old campaign aide is to the presidential project became clear last July when emails revealed the inner workings of Clinton’s hectic life as secretary of state.
Then serving as deputy chief of staff to the secretary, Abedin appeared frequently in the email traffic, as a gatekeeper, personal assistant and professional confidante so close that Clinton said she was “like a second daughter”.
Initially, the tranches of emails painted Clinton’s right-hand woman in a flattering, but somewhat subdued, light: advising her boss on how to operate a secure fax machine and suggesting when it was time to take a nap.
But more recent batches underlined how far Abedin has come since this George Washington University student started out as intern working for the then first lady in the East Wing of an earlier Clinton White House.
In these latest emails, it has become clear that this loyal aide has become a key broker in the Clinton’s powerful nexus of international connections: dealing with everything from requests to link U2 with the International Space Station to seeking a visa for a disgraced Wolverhampton Wanderers football player.
Both these more lurid requests for political favours were wisely squashed by Abedin, and her discretion and sound political judgment has led to a senior role in the 2016 campaign, of which she is vice-chairwoman.
But it is her constant access to the candidate, not the nominal job title, that makes this such an influential role. In the fast-moving and insular bubble of campaign travel, Abedin can be seen constantly by Clinton’s side – she is often the last person Clinton talks to before going onstage and the first to congratulate the presidential nominee on the way back in.
An idiot husband, a footballing felon: but Huma Abedin rises above it all | Peter Bradshaw Read more
The close ties to such a controversial figure have made her a lightning rod for political attacks. It is perhaps no accident that Trump’s aggressive first reaction to the news of her separation from Weiner was to question whether their relationship posed a security risk. Some of his supporters have been blunter still in claiming that Abedin’s Muslim faith and upbringing in Saudi Arabia were somehow suspect.
But the close support and loyalty of the Clinton family may also help their young protege deal with the brickbats and barbs that come the way of the powerful. Both highly successful women already share the experience of overcoming public marital infidelity.
In a fly-on-the-wall documentary of Weiner’s failed run for New York mayor – a bid destroyed by the exposure of his “sexting” relationships with other women – Abedin emerges as a stoic and sympathetic character. “This is like living a nightmare,” she says to camera at one point.
Her decision to finally cut him loose may come later than many observers of the marriage imagined, but it should finally free one of Washington’s brightest up-and-coming political stars to emerge as a public figure in her own right.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/29/huma-abedin-anthony-weiner-hillary-clinton
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| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/342e8eae7ebd4642bf57f56924b772f4e891ac0834c8cb838d883f2570f7c5e5.json
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[
"Patrick Kingsley"
] | 2016-08-26T13:22:41 | null | 2016-08-24T11:43:25 |
Jean-Claude Juncker has outraged nationalists with a throwaway jibe about borders. They may be a human invention, but as countless asylum seekers know, they’re real
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The story of Mohammad and his dog is a modern parable about borders
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On the Croatian-Serbian border last September, I met a Syrian biomedical engineer called Mohammad who was trying to get to Germany. He’d been beaten to it by his pet dog. The dog, Mohammad said, had a pet passport that allowed him to fly to Berlin. Mohammad himself had a human passport that had only let him get as far as Turkey.
I thought of Mohammad’s absurd situation when Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU’s most senior official, said this week: “Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians.” Predictably, his throwaway line – made at a conference in Austria this week – sparked fury among Europe’s nationalists. If any proud patriot still needed proof that the EU seeks to create a totalitarian super-state, this was it. “Beyond parody,” said a Ukip spokesman. “Madness,” summarised the Daily Express.
If Juncker had stopped at “borders are the worst”, perhaps he could have mitigated some of the damage. While he would still have rejected one of nationalism’s most central concepts – the boundary between two sovereign states – at least he wouldn’t have questioned the reality of the border itself. But by calling it an “invention”, Juncker went a step further. Borders in his view are not just bad. They are fictitious.
When I crossed the Croatian-Serbian border last year, there was nothing to mark where Serbia stopped and Croatia started
For this oddly timed intervention, Juncker has been presented as a renegade. But his argument is in fact an old one. Anthropologists and historians of a certain political disposition have long maintained that borders and nationhood are relatively new constructs. In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the concept of a nation developed only after the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Printed material led to a standardisation of language, Anderson writes, and encouraged readers to see themselves as part of a common national culture.
Some scholars argue that the contemporary concept of nations constrained by borders began to crystallise only in 1648. It was then that Europe’s major powers agreed to end the thirty years’ war by signing the peace of Westphalia – an agreement that saw the signatories agree to respect each others’ territorial sovereignty, a new concept that has become known as the Westphalian system.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thousands of migrants across the border between Croatia into Slovenia. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Even then, as William Maley writes in his new book, What is a Refugee?, “Borders except as formalistic markers of jurisdiction typically did not register prominently in the thinking of princes, not least because until the advent of modern systems of regulatory bureaucracy, rigorous border control was simply beyond the capacity of rulers.” According to the deal, Maley continues, Europeans could still migrate from place to place.
Tellingly, it would be centuries before the creation of many of the countries we now consider as immutable concepts. Germany and Italy only became united entities in the second half of the 19th century. Hungary, now one of Europe’s keenest proponents of border protection, was less than a century ago part of a polyglot, multinational commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian empire. Poland sits roughly 100 miles west of where it did 70 years ago. If an American says her ancestors are Polish, there’s every chance they were born in what is now Lithuania. Meanwhile, one of the creators of the Westphalian system – the Holy Roman empire – ironically no longer exists.
Britain is still failing child refugees in Europe. We must help them – and fast | Alf Dubs Read more
Even today, borders often exist only as a concept, rather than the robust entities that politicians present them as. When I crossed the Croatian-Serbian border last autumn, a few hours before Mohammad the biomedical engineer, there was nothing that marked where Serbia stopped and Croatia started. On either side, there were identical fields of stubble. It was only when I looked on my GPS map – and saw how the blue dot showing my position had moved west of a slim black line – that I realised I’d crossed into Croatia.
Many borders also exist only in certain contexts – blocking the passage of people but not things. The majority of humans – or at least those of us born in the developing world – cannot legally cross most borders. But all of us can circumvent those same barriers by sending products, money, information, insults, emails, photographs, and ideas to almost any country on the planet.
Are borders “the worst”? That’s a subjective debate. But objectively speaking, borders are definitely an invention. If they weren’t, Mohammad’s dog wouldn’t have beaten him to Germany.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/24/borders-jean-claude-juncker-nationalists-asylum-seekers
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e54d2292584f8b29816a96ab86ee90de9084b4c59c71ffb3f603661668d07b0c.json
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[
"John Vidal"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:37 | null | 2016-08-18T08:38:55 |
The Arctic’s ice is disappearing. We must reduce emissions, fast, or the human castastrophe predicted by ocean scientist Peter Wadhams will become reality
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Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral
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Ice scientists are mostly cheerful and pragmatic. Like many other researchers coolly observing the rapid warming of the world, they share a gallows humour and are cautious about entering the political fray.
Not Peter Wadhams. The former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge has spent his scientific life researching the ice world, or the cryosphere, and in just 30 years has seen unimaginable change.
When in 1970 he joined the first of what would be more than 50 polar expeditions, the Arctic sea ice covered around 8m sq km at its September minimum. Today, it hovers at around 3.4m, and is declining by 13% a decade. In 30 years Wadhams has seen the Arctic ice thin by 40%, the world change colour at its top and bottom and the ice disappear in front of his eyes.
In a new book, published just as July 2016 is confirmed by Nasa as the hottest month ever recorded, this most experienced and rational scientist states what so many other researchers privately fear but cannot publicly say – that the Arctic is approaching a death spiral which may see the entire remaining summer ice cover collapse in the near future.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Because Peter Wadhams says what other scientists will not, he has been slandered, attacked and vilified by denialists and politicians who have advised caution or non-action.’ Photograph: PR
The warming now being widely experienced worldwide is concentrated in the polar regions and Wadhams says we will shortly have ice-free Arctic Septembers, expanding to four or five months with no ice at all. The inevitable result, he predicts, will be the release of huge plumes of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, accelerating warming even further.
He and other polar experts have moved from being field researchers to being climate change pioneers in the vanguard of the most rapid and drastic change that has taken place on the planet in many thousands of years. This is not just an interesting change happening in a remote part of the world, he says, but a catastrophe for mankind.
“We are taking away the beautiful world of Arctic Ocean sea ice which once protected us from the impacts of climate extremes. We have created an ocean where there was once an ice sheet. It is man’s first major achievement in re-shaping the face of the planet,” he writes.
And, boy, are we seeing extremes. So far this year, the planet’s average temperature has been 1.3C warmer than the late 19th century, and 2016 is virtually certain be the hottest year ever recorded.
Nobody can buy the silence of a climate spinning out of control | Caroline Lucas Read more
Britain and northern Europe may have had average temperatures, but 500 million people in the Middle East and north Africa, along with most of south-east Asia, have experienced droughts and searingly hot days and nights, which are only partly to do with the natural El Niño phenomenon. Meanwhile, China, India and the US have seen some of their longest heatwaves and worst floods in decades, and nearly 100 million people will need food aid in the coming months because of disrupted rainfall patterns.
Mitribah in Kuwait has reported a world record 54C, India and Iran have both recorded their highest ever temperatures, and deadly heatwaves have struck China, the US, Indonesia and New Zealand. We are perilously close to the 1.5C limit of warming that all countries signed up to in Paris last year and on track for a 3C-4C increase which would make much of the world uninhabitable.
Because Wadhams says what other scientists will not, he has been widely slandered, attacked and vilified by denialists and politicians who have advised caution or non-action. But now he returns their fire, exhorting people to counter what he calls “the sewage flow of lies and deceit” emitted by the deniers. Above all, he says, people who study climate change should speak up and be prepared to risk the blighting of their careers and absence of honours.
But he joins other climate researchers to cross lines that the public may still find unacceptable. He wants global action to find new ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and is not afraid of nuclear power – both of which answers can be swallowed – but he also argues for a colossal, global research programme in geo- engineering.
The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us | George Monbiot Read more
This is the deliberate attempt to reduce warming by the planetary-scale manipulation of weather patterns, oceans, currents, soils and atmosphere to decrease the amount of greenhouses gases.
Spraying sun-reflecting chemicals into the atmosphere, mimicking volcanoes, blocking sunlight and fertilising the oceans with iron filings attracts people who think that technology has all the answers, but it should strike fear into most of the world, which has not been responsible for warming and which has no reason to trust politicians’ or scientists’ further meddling with planetary forces.
How to proceed safely in a warming world without disastrous unintended consequences? The need for truly urgent action is undeniable, but by the time answers have been found to the massive questions of science, engineering and governance that Wadhams agrees need to be solved before geo-engineering on a planetary scale can go ahead, it will be far too late.
Climate change has been caused by ignorance and stupidity and cannot be solved by endorsing more of the same with geo-engineering. The only answer is reducing greenhouse emissions. Fast.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/ice-scientists-arctic-ice-disappearing-reduce-emissions-peter-wadhams
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en
| 2016-08-18T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/eb81c66a9771055d9bbdf1888c3edf81bf98dc5eda7a2463501a7dbce227ff90.json
|
|
[
"James Edward Mills"
] | 2016-08-26T13:24:45 | null | 2016-08-21T06:00:09 |
As the National Park Service turns 100, a new campaign aims to make the country’s natural spaces more appealing to all Americans, regardless of race, over the next century
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftravel%2F2016%2Faug%2F21%2Fus-national-parks-survive-must-reflect-diversity-of-population.json
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| null |
If US national parks are to continue to thrive they must reflect the diversity of our population
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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In the sweltering heat of a summer day, I walked along the visitor trails of Yosemite national park. I had just made the five-hour drive from my childhood home in Los Angeles to glimpse a vision of the future. There in the valley surrounded by high towers of stone, I watched as thousands of tourists from all over the world marvelled at the sheer granite walls of El Capitan, Washington Column and Half Dome. Like ancient cathedrals of divine architecture, these magnificent features stand as monuments to the notion that the natural heritage of our nation must be preserved for all time.
Throughout my life I have enjoyed spending time in the outdoors. Despite having grown up in the urban heart of LA, I frequently ventured into the wild places of California, from the slopes of the San Gabriel mountains to the summit of Mount Whitney. Though I was blessed, thanks to sacrifices of my parents, with a lifetime learning and playing in nature, on this occasion, as with many visits to the valley, I noticed that I was among the very few people of colour there. And though I felt no less welcome to enjoy the splendour of this magnificent place, I wondered how it might be possible to encourage tourism to Yosemite – and other national parks – that reflects the diverse population of the US as a whole.
There are many reasons why African Americans and other ethnic minorities don’t make more use of the great outdoors. Racial oppression of the past gouged deep wounds which persist today, in the form of the limited disposable income and leisure time necessary to holiday in remote places. Add to that few personal mentors or family traditions of days away from the city to enjoy camping, hiking and fishing, and the result is a generation of citizens disenfranchised of a rich cultural legacy.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Edward Mills with Yosemite national park ranger Shelton Johnson.
We are seldom told of the Buffalo Soldiers, black members of the US Cavalry, who patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia national parks at the turn of the last century and became the world’s first park rangers. And few know about George Melendez Wright, an El Salvadoran-American biologist who conducted the first scientific survey of fauna for the National Park Service (NPS).
I know that if our beautiful national parks are going to survive they must be made accessible to everyone
On this latest visit to Yosemite I reconnected with my old friend Jonathan “Moose” Mutlow. As the project director of the National Environmental Science Center, Moose has dedicated much of his life to inspiring young people to spend time in the outdoors. A long-time staff member at Nature Bridge, an environmental education institute based in San Francisco, he has worked to help kids appreciate and revel in the wonders of nature. But as young black people predominantly live in urban areas, Moose says he is constantly challenged to create opportunities, such as nature walks and natural history lessons, that are culturally and socially relevant to the emerging ethnic groups.
“When the national parks were first conceived, the grand lodges were a way to sell the idea to the American people. But they were places for the elite to stay, people of power who would back the parks with their money,” Moose said. “The grand lodges of the 21st century need to be schools. The constituent group we’re building now are the users, people whose experiences in nature as kids sparks their sense of exploration and discovery and that belongs to them.”
He puts it simply: “They will own it. And if they own it, they will fight to protect it.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jonathan “Moose” Mutlow, project director of the National Environmental Science Center
Moose is currently overseeing the construction of the National Environmental Science Center building, a remarkable education facility for young people. With a budget of more than $35m, this state of the art hands-on learning centre in the heart of Yosemite national park will open this autumn and expects to receive 17,000 students a year. This beautiful campus will give young people – many of whom live in low-income urban neighbourhoods or rural farming communities – the chance to experience the wonders of nature, as well as learning practical skills in camping, hiking and climbing.
I am optimistic for the power of nature to bring us together, despite our differences, as a united people
As the NPS celebrates its 100th anniversary this week, the idea of public land for everyone to enjoy is the basis of a new vision of environmental conservation to carry us through the next 100 years. Though rival candidates in our presidential election debate the many social issues which drive us apart, too often along racial and socio-economic lines, I am optimistic for the power of nature to bring us together, despite our differences, as a united people. The Next 100 Coalition, led by national park advocate Audrey Peterman, aims to raise awareness about making our natural spaces more accessible and inviting for all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, to enjoy.
The Next 100 Coalition includes a variety of different organisations, including Outdoor Afro, a community network with leaders in 28 states, which promotes positive experiences in nature for African-American families.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buffalo below the Grand Teton Mountains, Yellowstone national park. Photograph: Matt Anderson Photography/Getty Images
Similar groups in the coalition, such as Latino Outdoors, the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, the Hispanic Access Foundation and Eco Cheyenne, are working together with agencies of the federal government including the NPS and the US Forest Service.
In the next century of national park conservation, the coalition insists that we must acknowledge the contributions of African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American explorers and adventurers. Matthew Henson (it is the 150th anniversary of his birth is this week) was a black man from Baltimore, Maryland, who, with Robert Peary, was the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909. And Walter Harper, a native Athabaskan of Alaska, was the first to reach the summit of Denali, the highest peak in North America, in 1913. We have to inspire young people from all backgrounds to pursue study that will expand their knowledge and love of the natural world and preserve it into the future.
Our national parks were created as an escape from the tribulations of the modern world. Described by the writer and naturalist Wallace Stegner as “the best idea we ever had”, the parks are meant to instil not only a passion for the outdoors but also a spirit of co-operation in the long-term preservation of humanity. As the Next 100 Coalition rallies the collective interests of under-represented members of our society, we can envision a new century in which our national parks continue to thrive.
James Edward Mills is creator of the Joy Trip Project a blog covering outdoor recreation and environmental conservation, and author of The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors, which chronicles the first all-African-American summit attempt on Denali
|
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/aug/21/us-national-parks-survive-must-reflect-diversity-of-population
|
en
| 2016-08-21T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/367144f617f2680e7ab2b5e238e3939e69d7f93bfbe7d0f43429c55b1d644283.json
|
|
[
"James Walsh",
"Photograph",
"Geedeejay Guardianwitness",
"Juliecollin Guardianwitness",
"Mark Caddye Guardianwitness",
"Jenjens Guardianwitness",
"Ladyfushia Guardianwitness",
"Maddy Shaw Guardianwitness",
"Carriehill Guardianwitness"
] | 2016-08-27T08:51:16 | null | 2016-08-27T07:00:01 |
Tired of doing Britain down, the underwhelming series invites you to enjoy these disappointing holiday photographs from around the world
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Flifeandstyle%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Fyour-underwhelming-international-holiday-photos.json
|
en
| null |
Your underwhelming international holiday photos
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
‘The photo is a picture of me stood at one of the viewing platforms at the Blue Mountains in Australia. You should be able to see something like the grams canyon with foliage. My friend and I travelled on the train from Sydney for the day hoping to see the famous views. But it was so misty and rainy that we were unable to see anything at all. We still managed a nice day in Katomba and consoled ourselves with a lovely afternoon tea at one of the posh hotels.’
Photograph: ladyfushia/GuardianWitness
|
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2016/aug/27/your-underwhelming-international-holiday-photos
|
en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3da38d63744f22be3a437461f2442d2cadcfef22e26e9f385536aa6750a57169.json
|
|
[
"Daniel Taylor"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:59 | null | 2016-08-26T10:41:58 |
In an exclusive interview, the Manchester United defender talks about the horrific injury he suffered against PSV Eindhoven a year ago and how José Mourinho has changed the whole atmosphere at the club
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fluke-shaw-manchester-united-fit-happy.json
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en
| null |
Luke Shaw: ‘I could hardly walk for six months, never mind play football’
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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It was the happiest Luke Shaw had ever been to take a whack from one of his team-mates. “A proper swipe, too,” Shaw remembers, reaching down to the part of his right leg where Ashley Young had connected in training. A bad one? “Not enough to knock me over, but you could hear the crack against the shin-pad. It was the first time anyone had really kicked me since I started training again and as soon as it happened, Youngy’s reaction was [hands up to his face]: ‘Ah, shit.’
“Nobody had wanted to be the one to do it. You could tell he felt really bad – ‘Shit, are you OK?’ – but he didn’t have to. He’d hit my leg and it was fine. ‘I’m good, I’m good.’ And I was. I was really good. It was fine, and I’d needed that kick.”
Marcus Rashford loses England place after being ousted at Manchester United Read more
It is coming up to a year now since that moment – 7.59pm, 15 September 2015 – under the floodlights of the Philips Stadion, PSV Eindhoven versus Manchester United, when Shaw’s leg was shattered like a broken cricket stump. Type the words “10 most horrific football injuries ever” into Google and you can find the video. It comes with an advisory you should be 18 or over and it certainly isn’t for the squeamish bearing in mind Shaw’s own recollections conclude with him sitting on the pitch “holding on to my thigh and looking down at the rest of my leg, and it was just kind of hanging there”.
In another era, an injury of that nature might have wrecked a footballer’s career and, for Shaw, it has certainly been a long slog to reach this point where he is back in United’s team, playing with distinction once again and possibly about to resume his England career. The man sitting here today, much like his club as a whole, seems happy for the first time in a long time. “It’s hard to describe how good it feels,” are his first words when the tape goes on.
Yet there are glimpses of hurt, too. Shaw is speaking in-depth for the first time about the double break, his rehabilitation and how the past year has affected his life, and it quickly comes across that the suffering was mental as well as physical. It is only recently that he has stopped watching the various footage but, for a while, he often found himself looking back on what happened, trying to make sense of it.
“I partly blame myself,” he says. “I’d run into their penalty area and I should have shot with my right foot but I wanted to come inside. I wanted to be on my left foot. And then, obviously, the tackle. I don’t even want to think about the tackle, to be honest. At the time I thought: ‘Give him the benefit of the doubt, it wasn’t actually a bad tackle.’ But the more I’ve seen it since, the more I think: ‘You know, that was actually a really bad challenge.’”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luke Shaw receives treatment after the challenge from PSV’s Héctor Moreno last September. ‘It really annoys me they [Uefa] gave him man-of-the-match,’ Shaw says. Photograph: Hoogte/Rex Shutterstock
The player in question is Héctor Moreno and though Shaw has no appetite to pick a fight, his views have certainly hardened over time. “To be fair to him, he did come to say sorry. He came to the hospital and I saw him face to face in my room. I was quite sympathetic at the time – ‘Aah, look, you can come in, it’s fine’ – but at the end of the day it was me lying there with a broken leg, and I went through so many bad times since then I did start thinking about it some more. It really annoys me they [Uefa] gave him man-of-the-match. Some people were saying it was a good challenge, others were saying it was a bad challenge. For me, it’s a bad challenge.”
Briefly he did wonder if he would ever make it back. “I remember I said I didn’t know if I was going to play again. I didn’t properly think that, but it did go through my head a couple of times at the start,” Shaw says.
“Now, I don’t like looking at the video any more because I’ve probably watched it enough. But I can look at the pictures. Even now, I think: ‘Oh my God.’ I’ve shown a few of the lads. They don’t like them either and I can remember, on the night, Memphis [Depay] turning his head away because he didn’t want to look.
That night, lying in hospital, I swear to God the pain was something else. Oh God, the worst you could ever imagine
“I was in shock, to be honest. The pain came later. I was just so upset because I knew I was going to be out for so long. You might have seen the picture where I had a tear coming down my face. They took me back to the dressing room and it was weird because at the start it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would have. I remember getting my phone, texting my mum and tweeting everyone. It sounds mad, I know, but my leg was broken and I didn’t know what to do. I thought: ‘I’ve got to do something.’
“Then, that night, lying in hospital, I swear to God the pain was something else. Oh God, the worst you could ever imagine. My mum was next to me and I remember saying to her: ‘They have to do something because I actually can’t keep going with this amount of pain.’ They had to open up my leg to pull out all the clotted-up blood. They put me to sleep, but it didn’t stop the pain when I woke up again.”
Shaw tries not to be bitter because it is not his nature. One day, he says, he wants to go back to St Anna Ziekenhuis hospital in Geldrop to see everyone who treated him. “I want to say thank you properly. I want to give them a present because, look, [holds up leg] it is so good now. They were the best people, everything they did for me and my family.”
He also still has the banner – “Get well soon, Luke Shaw” – that the PSV fans held up when the team played at Old Trafford and it would be a full-time job to reply to the tens of thousands of people who wrote to him. Ross Barkley, who broke his leg in three places at the age of 16, was one of the many people offering support and advice. “But I’ve had so many messages I can’t just pick out one or two people,” insists Shaw.
“There were so many people – fans, professionals, ex-players – getting in touch. I had a lot of time obviously to go through Twitter and it was really nice to get so much support. The first couple of weeks it was non-stop. But I also remember someone saying: ‘As long as you know that’s going to die down in a few weeks and, after that, it’s just going to be you, focusing on getting back.’ And that did happen, too.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luke Shaw back in action, against Leicester in the Community Shield. ‘I don’t feel I have come back any different,’ he says. Photograph: John Sibley/Action Images via Reuters
That long period of rehabilitation was a gruelling, difficult experience. “I’d heard other players talking about dark times when they were trying to get back from bad injuries. I didn’t think I would be like that but, yeah, there were parts when I was thinking: ‘I just don’t want to be here any more.’ I could hardly walk for six months, never mind play football. I was limping for so long. I was walking with crutches – as in, properly walking – after about the first month because I thought it was much better to put my body weight on and build up the strength. But people have said I was still limping even after I came off the crutches.
“I still get aches. I don’t go a day without feeling it. It’s 100% better but it’s normal, apparently, to feel it after such a bad injury. In the first three or four weeks when I started training outside it felt good, but then all of a sudden it started aching. It didn’t hurt, but it was aching and aching and even before I went out I could feel it and I was thinking: ‘Fuck … is it ever going to go away?’”
Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend Read more
In total there were four operations, leaving two three-inch scars either side of his calf. Shaw had his crutches for six months and he also saw a psychologist to help make sure he was in the right frame of mind to play again. “Most of it was about how it affected me,” he says. “But I don’t feel I have come back any different. It’s harder for my family really. My mum was really nervous anyway watching me play but it’s even worse for her now. Whenever I go into a tackle she grabs hold of whoever is next to her because she can barely watch. But I’m fine. I’ve had a couple of times when someone has come across to tackle me and for a split second I’ve thought ‘Whoa’, but in the last game it didn’t even cross my mind.”
Now, Shaw says, it is about making up for lost time, particularly as it still nags at him that he did not “show what I could properly do” in his first season after signing from Southampton two years ago. “I was only 18. I’d come in new and then all that stuff came out within pre-season,” he says, referring to Louis van Gaal’s public declaration that his new signing was not fit enough. “It was my first couple of weeks and being so young it was difficult. I picked up an injury, I didn’t get a full pre-season, then I was out for four weeks.
“Loads of things. Maybe I took it a little bit easy over my time off after the World Cup. Maybe I didn’t think it was going to be as hard and as quick as it was. The stuff that happened, the injuries – it knocked my confidence a bit. Sometimes I didn’t feel right to play.”
That, however, feels like a long time ago now. Shaw has played in both of United’s wins so far under José Mourinho. A popular member of the dressing-room, he has quickly set about re-establishing himself as an attacking left-back of high ability and though he is not taking anything for granted, no one should be surprised if he is rewarded with a place in Sam Allardyce’s first England squad, named on Sunday. Even if not, a career of brilliant promise is back on track. “I’m loving it,” he says of living in Manchester. “I live with my best friends from school, four of us. Some people might think we’re always partying but it isn’t a party house. These are my best friends – I’ve known one since we were eight – and they want the best out of me.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Luke Shaw is enjoying life in Manchester. ‘I’m loving it. I live with my best friends from school, four of us.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
They have their own chef – “it’s much better that way, much healthier as well” – and Shaw also has plans to do something that was impossible when he was operating on only one leg: take his driving test.
Mourinho, he says, has changed the entire atmosphere within the club and the admiration is mutual given this was the manager who tried, unsuccessfully, to gazump United’s £27m deal for Shaw and sign him for Chelsea instead. “We’ve had a little joke about it,” Shaw says. “He’s a cool manager. ‘Why didn’t you come?’ he wanted to know. I just felt I had more opportunity of first-team football here.
“But now I’m with him and I’m really happy he’s here. It hasn’t been the best few years but all of a sudden it feels really good, really positive. We feel we have that fear factor back where people are thinking this team is going to be hard to beat. I’m fit, I’m happy, I still feel I have a lot more to give. I just want to push on now.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/26/luke-shaw-manchester-united-fit-happy
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/258f4f74a1bcad61b0f43c8c8555381b4522c968d8ac13fc5107fd4caa725ff3.json
|
|
[
"Jamie Grierson"
] | 2016-08-26T16:48:37 | null | 2016-08-26T16:24:08 |
Maria and Will Henniker-Gotley, 51 and 55, and Marcos Burnett, 14, died in quake in central Italy on Wednesday
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fthree-britons-named-victims-amatrice-earthquake-italy.json
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en
| null |
Three Britons named among victims of Amatrice earthquake
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Three Britons including a 14-year-old boy were among 278 people killed in the earthquake in Italy, their families have said.
Maria and Will Henniker-Gotley, 51 and 55, and Marcos Burnett, 14, were killed when a 6.2-magnitude quake struck the town of Amatrice on Wednesday.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria and Will Henniker-Gotley. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
A statement issued on behalf of their families by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: “[The] families have paid tribute to the tireless work of the Italian rescue workers and hospital staff and expressed their gratitude for the love and support they have received from the Italian people. Their thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by the earthquake.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are providing support to the families of Marcos Burnett and Will and Maria Henniker-Gotley following their tragic deaths in the earthquake in Italy. Our thoughts are with them at this incredibly difficult time.
“British embassy staff will continue working with local authorities regarding any further British nationals that may require our assistance.”
Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has authorised a preliminary €50m (£43m) in emergency funding for the stricken zone, which on Friday was hit by a 4.7-magnitude aftershock while rescuers continued their search for survivors.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/26/three-britons-named-victims-amatrice-earthquake-italy
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/32c963e286645d917655269ad7bef3bd8e6e925e29dde3d86aca7e6d9f4cfd7f.json
|
|
[
"Andrew Wasley"
] | 2016-08-28T14:49:42 | null | 2016-08-28T14:29:08 |
Data released by the food watchdog reveals thousands of animals are being subjected to avoidable suffering at slaughterhouses
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Ffsa-4000-breaches-animal-welfare-laws-uk-abattoirs-two-years.json
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| null |
FSA: 4,000 breaches of animal welfare laws at UK abattoirs in two years
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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There were more than 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations over the past two years at British slaughterhouses, according to data released by the government’s food watchdog under freedom of information laws.
The reports by vets and hygiene inspectors detail instances of needless pain and distress that include chickens being boiled alive and trucks of animals suffocating or freezing to death.
The data – a log of reports submitted to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) – reveals how regular breakdowns on production lines, equipment failures and poor procedures in abattoirs result in thousands of animals being subjected to avoidable suffering each year. Many individual acts of cruelty and neglect by slaughterhouse staff, hauliers and farmers are also documented, alongside malpractice that increases the risk of food poisoning.
The FSA, which released the data to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), said “only a tiny percentage” of animals that pass through Britain’s slaughterhouses are affected, adding that “the vast majority of meat processors comply with regulations”.
Meat inspectors and campaigners argue there is an under-reporting of welfare abuses, blaming insufficient staff and the often-intimidating working conditions at abattoirs.
Vets and meat hygiene inspectors working for the FSA inside abattoirs reported a total of 9,511 animal welfare breaches between July 2014 and June 2016, with records classified into three categories according to severity. Category 2 refers to a low risk isolated incident, while category 4, the most serious, means animals were subjected to “avoidable pain, distress or suffering”.
The BIJ’s analysis reveals almost half the recorded incidents were category 4 breaches – a total of 4,455, or an average of six a day. A single breach can involve hundreds of animals. Between April 2011 and July 2014 there were 6,859 reported incidents in all categories.
Neil Parish MP, chairman of the Commons select committee for environment, food and rural affairs, described the results as shocking.
“There is no place for animal cruelty at any stage of farm production – including the slaughterhouse,” said Parish. “This country prides itself as having some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world. It’s vital the authorities crack down on any abuses and ensure there is zero tolerance to any mistreatment of animals when slaughtered.”
The welfare infractions included a cow being “violently slammed” against a wall following an argument between two workers; an abattoir worker beating three bulls with a wooden stick and electric prod; and a haulier hitting and kicking cattle during unloading, an incident that was caught on CCTV. Many involved sheep being grabbed by the wool and ears or dragged by the horns, or pigs being lifted by their ears and tails.
Failures in the slaughter process were also highlighted, with thousands of instances of animals not being stunned properly and in some cases not stunned at all. Inspectors recorded cases of chickens and pigs being immersed in tanks of scalding hot water – used to soften the skin and remove hair or feathers – while still alive.
Almost 600 instances were recorded of animals arriving at slaughterhouses already dead. In one case 574 chickens, from a load of 6,072 birds, died after being left on a lorry in very hot conditions. This counts as one welfare breach despite involving hundreds of birds.
The data also highlights practices that could facilitate the spread of the bacteria campylobacter, the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK. About four in five cases of the infection, which kills about 100 people a year, come from contaminated poultry.
However the data includes regular instances of chickens being “overstocked” in crates and incidents of birds being left in lorries for lengthy periods of time. In one case, because of a breakdown at the plant, 14 trucks were left overnight for more than 12 hours; in another, birds were left in crates at the abattoir for 20 hours.
The British Meat Processors Association, the industry trade body, declined to comment on the findings.
More than 900m farm animals are killed for food each year in Britain. There are 317 approved slaughterhouses across the UK, most run by a handful of large companies that dominate the meat processing sector.
It is unclear from the data how many of the breaches resulted in any sanctions or improvements. Most of the level 4 breaches were referred to regional Trading Standards offices, which have responsibility for monitoring farms and transportation, but there is no requirement for the vets and inspectors who make the referral to record details of what happens next.
A spokesperson for the FSA said it had “zero tolerance” for welfare breaches and used a “proportionate approach” to enforcement. Action could include suspending or withdrawing certificates of competence from slaughterers, referring cases for prosecution, stopping operations or serving welfare enforcement notices.
“There is a comprehensive animal verification procedure in place at every slaughterhouse for monitoring animal welfare,” the spokesperson said. “[Level 4 breaches] can be the result of unavoidable accidents rather than deliberate abuse.”
Between June 2014 and July 2016, the spokesperson said, all level 4 breaches resulted in enforcement action. But in 2013 and 2014 the FSA referred 14 breaches of welfare regulations to the CPS, of which four resulted in prosecutions. Three of those prosecutions were later dropped.
Of the remaining cases, four resulted in warning letters. Over the course of the two years, two slaughterers’ licences were suspended and three were revoked for failure to comply with welfare legislation.
The fact that serious welfare breaches were the exception not the norm was not the point, said Marc Cooper, head of farm animals at the RSPCA.
“Such incidences of severe pain, distress and suffering are wholly unacceptable and completely avoidable,” he said. “If they’re avoidable, that means they shouldn’t be happening at all – you shouldn’t be seeing one. You would hope that strong enforcement action would be taken.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/28/fsa-4000-breaches-animal-welfare-laws-uk-abattoirs-two-years
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en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/bbcb7d62954947e3151cad86e66d878c1dccfa8d7be305f2dec55427ffc4b0a1.json
|
|
[
"Jamie Doward"
] | 2016-08-27T14:49:14 | null | 2016-08-27T13:08:41 |
Campaigners attack broken election pledge to shut down domestic market
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Ftories-failure-halt-ivory-trade-risks-extinction-of-elephants.json
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en
| null |
Tories’ failure to halt ivory trade ‘risks extinction of elephants’
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The UK is putting elephants at risk of extinction through its broken promises on the ivory trade, according to campaigners. Before the last election, the Conservative party pledged to shut down the UK’s domestic ivory market: at the time 30,000 elephants a year were being slaughtered for their tusks. But no action has been taken.
While bans on the international trade in ivory exist, a failure to observe similar measures at a national level is being exploited by criminal gangs who smuggle ivory into the UK, where it can be passed off as antique. Now, in the run-up to a major conference, more than 1.6 million people have signed a petition on the Avaaz activist website calling for the world’s domestic ivory markets to be closed down for good.
“The government’s broken promises to ban ivory sales in Britain are being paid for in the blood of African elephants,” said Avaaz campaign director Bert Wander. “As one of the world’s most vocal advocates against the illegal wildlife trade, the UK must now practise what it preaches. Otherwise, China and other ivory hotspots will see no reason to put in place the permanent ban on ivory we need to stop elephants being wiped from the face of the Earth.”
Avaaz hopes the petition will put pressure on politicians, wildlife experts and conservation groups attending next month’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in Johannesburg, where they will consider a range of measures to protect endangered species.
“The existence of these domestic markets definitely has had a negative impact on African elephant populations,” said Susan Lieberman, vice-president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Simply put, if it were illegal to sell ivory – whether in China, Japan, the US, or the UK – there would be far less incentive for traffickers and organised criminal syndicates to traffic ivory, making it much harder for them to launder illegal ivory, and giving far less incentive to poachers.”
The Conservatives gave manifesto commitments to close down the trade in ivory in the UK in 2010 and 2015 and the government promoted a conference on the illegal wildlife trade in February 2014 which pushed for the measure.
A large number of African nations have promised to outlaw domestic ivory markets, while France, the US and, crucially, China have introduced their own bans or are in the process of doing so.
Between 2009 and 2014, 40% of all customs seizures in the UK were ivory items. Last year about 110kg of ivory was stopped at Heathrow alone. “The UK is really lagging behind,” said Jonathan Baillie, conservation director at the Zoological Society of London. “It’s difficult to understand why exactly. We were in a very strong leadership role. There are some potential barriers to introduction, but the Americans seem to have been able to deal with all the issues.”
Ivory is prized for a variety of reasons. In Japan it is used to make family seals; in the Philippines it is used for religious artefacts. Baillie said elephants would be protected only if all nations observed a domestic ban. “To take the economic value out of ivory it really requires everyone to play ball. If you have a number of countries that don’t go along with it, it really weakens the incentives for those nations to maintain their commitments.”
Lieberman said a UK ban would be symbolically important. “I personally have had Chinese government officials say to me, ‘Why should we close our markets, when we can find ivory very easily across London?’ The UK needs to show it is serious about stopping poaching of elephants and trafficking in ivory.”
Under the ban, owners of ivory could hand it on to others but not sell it. There would be exceptions – such as the sale of particular antique instruments that use ivory.
Experts say the ban is urgently needed. There are about 450,000 African elephants left. But 30,000 a year are being slaughtered. “I worked in south-west Africa in 2001,” Baillie said. “If I went back there would be less than half the number now than were there then. If we can close the international trade and the domestic markets there is going to be no reason for people to go in and kill these elephants.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the government was working on its pledge to implement a total ban on ivory sales. “The illegal wildlife trade is a global issue and will only be solved through global cooperation. That is why we continue to lead the international community to protect the world’s most iconic wild animals and to stop the organised criminal networks behind this brutal and unnecessary trade.”
Lieberman conceded that prohibition was not a magic bullet. “Certainly it won’t stop smuggling 100%, into the UK or elsewhere, but if the UK closes its market it will be far harder for illegal ivory to be laundered as legal.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/27/tories-failure-halt-ivory-trade-risks-extinction-of-elephants
|
en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f0f2a243f76b675c046290c905b8b62599120d54cb4cd61bc2c7e3af92d7a1d2.json
|
|
[
"Jill Papworth",
"Photograph",
"French Tye The Modern House"
] | 2016-08-26T13:29:57 | null | 2016-07-08T09:44:25 |
Surround yourself with lush gardens in this 19th-century glasshouse converted for contemporary living
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2Fgallery%2F2016%2Fjul%2F08%2Fin-a-glass-of-its-own-greenhouse-for-home-in-pictures.json
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en
| null |
In a glass of its own: a greenhouse for a home - in pictures
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The house, which comes with a separate studio/store room building, forms part of the old estate which is now a conservation area and an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’. It is on the market for £675,000 through agent The Modern House
|
https://www.theguardian.com/money/gallery/2016/jul/08/in-a-glass-of-its-own-greenhouse-for-home-in-pictures
|
en
| 2016-07-08T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0a8c02450612700478f447eb053606b9459628516d3a60a58d871776a582d84a.json
|
|
[
"Alex Hern"
] | 2016-08-26T13:27:12 | null | 2016-08-25T08:55:31 |
Steve Wozniak criticised company’s rumoured plan to make customers rely on Lightning cable or Bluetooth headphones
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fapple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-ditching-iphone-7-headphone-jack-would-tick-people-off.json
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en
| null |
Apple co-founder: ditching iPhone 7 headphone jack would tick people off
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Steve Wozniak may have left Apple in 1985 but that hasn’t stopped the company’s co-founder from giving his two cents about the latest releases.
Like a worried yet slightly distant father, Wozniak just wants Apple to know that even if he can’t be there for it, he cares and wants to help it avoid messing up.
So true to form, he’s waded in on Apple’s decision to drop the headphone jack _– though it’s not actually been announced yet but is strongly rumoured. Wozniak is concerned by the idea that iPhone users would have to use either Lightning cable headphones or Bluetooth ones.
“If it’s missing the 3.5mm earphone jack, that’s going to tick off a lot of people,” he told the Australian Financial Review. “I would not use Bluetooth … I don’t like wireless. I have cars where you can plug in the music, or go through Bluetooth, and Bluetooth just sounds so flat for the same music.”
“Mine have custom ear implants, they fit in so comfortably, I can sleep on them and everything. And they only come out with one kind of jack, so I’ll have to go through the adaptor,” he said.
“If there’s a Bluetooth 2 that has higher bandwidth and better quality, that sounds like real music, I would use it. But we’ll see. Apple is good at moving towards the future, and I like to follow that.”
Previously, Wozniak has laid in to Apple over the company’s Watch, writing on Reddit that “I love my Apple Watch, but - it’s taken us into a jewellery market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1,100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1,100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot.”
In April, he expressed his concern over Apple’s low tax bill. “I don’t like the idea that Apple might be unfair – not paying taxes the way I do as a person. I do a lot of work, I do a lot of travel and I pay over 50% of anything I make in taxes and I believe that’s part of life and you should do it.”
After leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak went on to develop the first programmable universal remote control, teach computer classes in an elementary school, build an early consumer GPS device, and launch a comic convention in Silicon Valley with former Marvel Comics boss Stan Lee.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-ditching-iphone-7-headphone-jack-would-tick-people-off
|
en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/17dd04441bc16b864de6d3cb097ab815d56041463e5b53b0fe395f2119118a1d.json
|
|
[
"Richard Adams"
] | 2016-08-26T13:08:26 | null | 2016-08-25T18:13:16 |
Results for 16-year-olds similar to 2015, but overall pass rate lower as full effect seen of new retakes policy in England
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Feducation%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fbiggest-drop-in-gcse-pass-rate-for-30-years-due-to-exam-changes.json
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en
| null |
Biggest drop in GCSE pass rate for 30 years due to exam changes
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The national GCSE pass rate has tumbled by the biggest margin since the exam replaced O-levels almost 30 years ago, driven downwards by conflicting government policies and a jump in older students forced to resit core topics.
In what exam boards chiefs described as “a complex national picture”, the headline pass rate fell by 2.1 percentage points to 66.9% attaining C grade or above, and falls in the proportion winning the highest A* and A grades.
In England alone, the proportion getting good grades dipped to 66.6%, led by a 2.4 percentage point drop in the pass rate for boys. Unexpected shifts in the numbers and abilities of candidates caused a dip in results for several major subjects including English and sciences.
Why are GCSE results down, and other questions Read more
But it was the effect of the government’s new policy – imposing retakes on pupils in England who failed to get at least a C in English or maths – that provoked most controversy, with leading educationalists arguing that the results showed that repeated retakes by 17- and 18-year-olds were ineffective.
The number of those aged 17 and over taking GCSEs in maths has more than doubled in just two years, from 80,000 to more than 160,000, but their success rate has stuttered, with fewer than 30% gaining the coveted C grade.
Mark Dawe, former head of an exam board and chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said: “This is evidence enough that hitting students over the head with the same form of learning and assessment is not the way forward.”
Dawe’s view was backed by Jo-Anne Baird, professor of education at Oxford University, who said that a better GCSE should be developed for older students.
“The requirement for all to gain grade C in English and maths is surely the right aspiration for the education system. But resitting an exam that you failed, maybe because it didn’t engage you in the first place, could switch people off to further learning,” she said.
Labour joined the attack, with the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, saying the government’s “relentless focus” on exams was the wrong way to develop numeracy and literacy skills.
“It is worrying that some children are losing out and not reaching their full potential in core subjects like English and maths. Resits are clearly not tackling the issue of underachievement. The government must think again,” Rayner said.
GCSE success stories: from the refugee to the piano prodigy Read more
But the schools minister, Nick Gibb, said: “For those 17-year-olds who have struggled to achieve good grades in maths, we are seeing 4,000 more successful retakes of those exams, delivering better prospects for every one of those young people.”
The results for 16-year-olds alone revealed a much better performance, although there was still a 1.3 percentage point fall in A*-Cs compared with 2015. That was attributed to an influx of less-able students shifting from alternative qualifications to take GCSEs, especially in science, as schools aimed to meet the Department for Education’s new performance measures.
But in English the effect was reversed, as schools moved more able pupils into the alternative iGCSE qualification, the last year they will be able to do so under a policy introduced by former education secretary Michael Gove. The net effect was falls in the percentage getting good grades in English as well as combined sciences.
Physics, biology and chemistry were all beneficiaries of increased entries, as schools worked to meet the requirements of the English baccalaureate (Ebacc) introduced by Gove and the new Progress 8 measure to be used as the benchmark for school performance from this year.
The increase in science entries was applauded by the Royal Society, although the Wellcome Trust said there was more to do to sustain and improve grades, as the tide of new entries gained lower results than the previous year’s.
GCSE results day 2016: UK students get their grades – as it happened Read more
History and geography saw similar patterns, as higher entries led to lower results, “suggesting that the entries now comprise a wider range of abilities,” according to the Joint Council on Qualifications.
But modern foreign languages largely failed to gain from the rush to study the Ebacc subjects. While Spanish continued its climb in popularity, rising for the fifth year in a row, German and French continued to lose entries. All three saw lower grades, with Spanish the most affected by “a more varied cohort”, according to the JCQ.
But the shifting flows of entries obscured otherwise stable performances. Maths bucked the trend, as 16-year-olds gained a higher proportion of good grades, including A*-As. Exam regulator Ofqual also noted that combining GCSE and iGCSE grades in English revealed similar results between 2015 and 2016.
London continued to outperform the rest of England, and Northern Ireland also improved overall with 79% gaining Cs or above. Wales, after a grim set of A-level results last week, remained unchanged with 66.6% getting A*-C grades – the same as England.
Secret Teacher: students need to know bad grades aren’t the end of the world Read more
Among the many schools and individuals celebrating success were the three sets of twins attending Ripon grammar school in Yorkshire. Louisa and Katharine Chatterton, Lorcan and Molly Gallagher and Harry and George Stratford combined for 58 A*s and As.
West London free school, the pioneering school established by Toby Young in 2011, saw its first GCSE results, with 76% of pupils gaining five A*-Cs. “I’m over the moon. The pupils and staff have done us all proud,” Young said.
However, those results were eclipsed by the first set of GCSEs for the Tauheedul Islam Boys free school in Blackburn, where 95% of pupils gained A*-Cs.
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https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/25/biggest-drop-in-gcse-pass-rate-for-30-years-due-to-exam-changes
|
en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/efaea7cf4898b0e32a5bde7295832036c992ff62ef73dd43fa8d801e4e1b98c1.json
|
|
[
"Mark Harris"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:37 | null | 2016-08-25T03:48:07 |
Nutonomy has begun the world’s first consumer trial of driverless cabs in Singapore - the first self-driving taxis anywhere in the world
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fself-driving-taxis-roll-out-in-singapore-beating-uber-to-it.json
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en
| null |
Self-driving taxis roll out in Singapore - beating Uber to it
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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When Uber announced on 18 August that it would let the public hail self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh before the end of the month, some autonomous vehicle experts could not believe it was happening so soon.
In fact the $60bn multinational has just been scooped by Nutonomy, a small MIT spin-out whose electric self-driving cabs have already started picking up real customers in a Singapore business park. Initially, riders will use Nutonomy’s own app to summon hail a Mitsubishi i-Miev or a Renault Zoe, ramping up to a dozen vehicles in the coming months.
Like Uber’s upcoming rides, this is a controlled experiment with a safety driver behind the wheel and a limited service area. Nevertheless, it is the first time anywhere in the world that anyone will be able to hitch a lift from a robotic vehicle on public roads. The company will not be charging for the rides.
“The pilot is going to allow us to collect technical data, but equally importantly, it’s going to allow us to find out if people enjoy riding in driverless cars,” says Karl Iagnemma, Nutonomy’s CEO. “When people get into the car, some will love it, some will be indifferent and some won’t like it. But how many won’t like it– 3% of the ridership, or 30%? We want to know that number. And Uber wants to know that number, too.”
Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas Read more
Founded in 2013 by ex-MIT engineers, Nutonomy announced a $3.6m funding round in January, followed swiftly by $16m in funding in May from venture capitalists including Ford chairman Bill Ford and the Singapore government.
Like Uber and Google, Nutonomy is convinced that the real benefits of autonomous technology will only be realised when humans never have to touch a steering wheel or brake pedal.
“Introducing a human operator in the loop brings an enormous amount of complexity and unpredictability,” says Iagnemma. “These ‘simpler’ systems [like Tesla’s Autopilot] are in fact harder to develop and harder to guarantee their safety than [fully autonomous] cars.”
The trials in the high-tech One-North business park are open-ended, says Iagnemma: “We plan to keep offering rides as long as we continue to learn new things from the data.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/self-driving-taxis-roll-out-in-singapore-beating-uber-to-it
|
en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/031527813d1f24718a4b54324c8470c6e2b7b4bfe976c1b34851b28a2287d378.json
|
|
[] | 2016-08-30T18:57:44 | null | 2016-08-30T18:50:28 |
Letters: It was disappointing that there was no reference to the strong protective effect of breastfeeding in the prevention of sudden infant death syndrome (Sids) in the commentary on Peter Fleming’s important and seminal work on this topic
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsociety%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fbreastfeeding-air-pollution-and-sudden-infant-death-syndrome.json
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en
| null |
Breastfeeding, air pollution and sudden infant death syndrome
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
It was disappointing that there was no reference to the strong protective effect of breastfeeding in the prevention of sudden infant death syndrome (Sids) in the commentary on Peter Fleming’s important and seminal work on this topic (Safety in slumbers, 27 August).
Where a baby is formula-fed there is an increased risk of Sids. Given this, and when considering the huge additional financial impact of low breastfeeding rates in the UK (if nothing else, the other hot topic of obesity), I cannot understand why the government does not invest a relatively small amount in effectively and consistently supporting breastfeeding.
Most women want to breastfeed but are thwarted by the lack of this support, compounded by the powerfully undermining effect of formula milk advertising.
Helena Stopes-Roe
Birmingham
• I’m surprised that neither Dr Peter Fleming nor the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, which started in 1971, appears to have noticed that changes in exposure of air pollution correlate with changes in rates of infant mortality.
The reduction in air pollution following the switch to cleaner North Sea gas was followed by a rapid fall in the average infant mortality rate in England and Wales, which showed that the widespread belief that high infant mortality is caused by low socioeconomic status must be false.
Nine of the 10 councils in England and Wales with the highest infant mortality rates aggregated for the six years from 2009 to 2014 either have an incinerator or are adjacent to a council with an incinerator. The 10th of the above councils adjoins one with a major cement works.
Michael Ryan
Shrewsbury
• The story of Peter Fleming’s painstaking research into the causes of Sids is remarkable. A near eightfold reduction in the occurrences of the syndrome and associated family grief between 1989 and 2016 is extraordinary, both for its magnitude and the simplicity of its cause. Peter Fleming, clearly a modest man, is likely to be embarrassed with the awarding of an honour, but if ever there was justification this is it. Arise, Sir Peter!
Neil Macehiter
Cambridge
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/30/breastfeeding-air-pollution-and-sudden-infant-death-syndrome
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3439dcf39adb59e3089123797abf8134f30d75614c20a9babcd88e5560c40b94.json
|
|
[
"Associated Press In Seoul"
] | 2016-08-31T12:53:03 | null | 2016-08-31T11:38:01 |
South Korean police are investigating claims that two male swimmers secretly filmed female members of the squad after installing a camera in their locker room
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fsouth-korea-swimming-spy-camera-locker-room.json
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en
| null |
South Korea's swimming head coach quits over spy camera scandal
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The head coach of South Korea’s national swimming team resigned on Wednesday as police investigate allegations that two male swimmers secretly filmed female members of the squad after installing a spy camera in their locker room at a training facility in 2013.
Ahn Jong-taek, who was named head coach in 2012, felt responsible for what allegedly happened under his watch, but maintained he and other coaches didn’t know what went on, said Park Seong-su, an official from the Korean Olympic Committee.
Towson diving coach given probation in secret locker-room video scandal Read more
Police in Seoul have been investigating two former national team swimmers over the allegations, and said one of them has admitted installing a camera at the national training facility in Jincheon, central South Korea, and discarding it after footage was taken. Police said the other swimmer, who according to Park represented South Korea earlier this month at the Rio Olympics, has denied involvement.
Police are currently analyzing the laptop computer of the swimmer who confessed, to see whether the footage was leaked to the internet. Police and the KOC didn’t name the swimmers.
The KOC has launched an independent investigation into the allegations. It also sent a team of experts to the Jincheon facility on Tuesday and also to the national team’s training center in Seoul on Wednesday to search for spy cameras, but didn’t find any, Park said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/31/south-korea-swimming-spy-camera-locker-room
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/be0f0e827c8c2e7ad2fcd1b3b4d36f4ac6e07606654aa9b329d9d61d248138fd.json
|
|
[
"Ian Sample",
"Seth Shostak"
] | 2016-08-29T08:59:17 | null | 2015-09-28T15:00:01 |
Researchers say discovery of stains from summertime flows down cliffs and crater walls increases chance of finding life on red planet
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2F2015%2Fsep%2F28%2Fnasa-scientists-find-evidence-flowing-water-mars.json
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en
| null |
Nasa scientists find evidence of flowing water on Mars
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life.
The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.
Images taken from the Mars orbit show cliffs, and the steep walls of valleys and craters, streaked with summertime flows that in the most active spots combine to form intricate fan-like patterns.
Scientists are unsure where the water comes from, but it may rise up from underground ice or salty aquifers, or condense out of the thin Martian atmosphere.
Mars find suggests our solar system is awash with life | Letters Read more
“There is liquid water today on the surface of Mars,” Michael Meyer, the lead scientist on Nasa’s Mars exploration programme, told the Guardian. “Because of this, we suspect that it is at least possible to have a habitable environment today.”
A visual guide to water on Mars Read more
The water flows could point Nasa and other space agencies towards the most promising sites to find life on Mars, and to landing spots for future human missions where water can be collected from a natural supply.
“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past,” said Nasa’s Jim Green. “Liquid water has been found on Mars.”
Some of the earliest missions to Mars revealed a planet with a watery past. Pictures beamed back to Earth in the 1970s showed a surface crossed by dried-up rivers and plains once submerged beneath vast ancient lakes. Earlier this year, Nasa unveiled evidence of an ocean that might have covered half of the planet’s northern hemisphere in the distant past.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dark narrow streaks called recurring slope lineae emanate out of the walls of Garni crater on Mars. Photograph: Nasa/AFP/Getty Images
But occasionally, Mars probes have found hints that the planet might still be wet. Nearly a decade ago, Nasa’s Mars Global Surveyor took pictures of what appeared to be water bursting through a gully wall and flowing around boulders and other rocky debris. In 2011, the high-resolution camera on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured what looked like little streams flowing down crater walls from late spring to early autumn. Not wanting to assume too much, mission scientists named the flows “recurring slope lineae” or RSL.
Researchers have now turned to another instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to analyse the chemistry of the mysterious RSL flows. Lujendra Ojha, of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues used a spectrometer on the MRO to look at infrared light reflected off steep rocky walls when the dark streaks had just begun to appear, and when they had grown to full length at the end of the Martian summer.
Water on the red planet: Nasa reveals major discovery – in pictures Read more
Writing in the journal Nature Geosciences, the team describes how it found infra-red signatures for hydrated salts when the dark flows were present, but none before they had grown. The hydrated salts – a mix of chlorates and perchlorates – are a smoking gun for the presence of water at all four sites inspected: the Hale, Palikir and Horowitz craters, and a large canyon called Coprates Chasma.
“These may be the best places to search for extant life near the surface of Mars,” said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and senior author on the study. “While it would be very important to find evidence of ancient life, it would be difficult to understand the biology. Current life would be much more informative.”
The flows only appear when the surface of Mars rises above -23C. The water can run in such frigid conditions because the salts lower the freezing point of water, keeping it liquid far below 0C.
“The mystery has been, what is permitting this flow? Presumably water, but until now, there has been no spectral signature,” Meyer said. “From this, we conclude that the RSL are generated by water interacting with perchlorates, forming a brine that flows downhill.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest These channels, which are between 1 metre and 10 metres wide, are on a scarp in the Hellas impact basin. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters
John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester, said the study was fascinating, but might throw up some fresh concerns for space agencies. The flows could be used to find water sources on Mars, making them prime spots to hunt for life, and to land future human missions. But agencies were required to do their utmost to avoid contaminating other planets with microbes from Earth, making wet areas the most difficult to visit. “This will give them lots to think about,” he said.
For now, researchers are focused on learning where the water comes from. Porous rocks under the Martian surface might hold frozen water that melts in the summer months and seeps up to the surface.
The Guardian view on the discovery of liquid water on Mars: cause for great celebration | Editorial Read more
Another possibility is that highly concentrated saline aquifers are dotted around beneath the surface, not as pools of water, but as saturated volumes of gritty rock. These could cause flows in some areas, but cannot easily explain water seeping down from the top of crater walls.
A third possibility, and one favoured by McEwen, is that salts on the Martian surface absorb water from the atmosphere until they have enough to run downhill. The process, known as deliquescence, is seen in the Atacama desert, where the resulting damp patches are the only known place for microbes to live.
“It’s a fascinating piece of work,” Bridges said. “Our view of Mars is changing, and we’ll be discussing this for a long time to come.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/28/nasa-scientists-find-evidence-flowing-water-mars
|
en
| 2015-09-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/2d3b4465770fb9a7dc3b94c661925b9e6deaf79193589807c406fe62a4922621.json
|
|
[] | 2016-08-26T13:29:28 | null | 2014-12-04T00:00:00 |
Cover varies between deals so it pays to shop around, read the small print and remember that the cheapest is not always the best
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2014%2Fdec%2F15%2Ffactsheet-travel-insurance.json
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en
| null |
Factsheet: Travel insurance
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Travel insurance is designed to protect you against the cost of any unforeseen events when you are on holiday, or before if they force you to cancel your break. It’s up to you if you buy a policy. Cover varies hugely between deals, so reading the small print before you buy is vital.
The benefit of cover
A good travel insurance policy will ensure that any unexpected medical bills are paid and that you can get home in an emergency. Even routine surgery such as an appendectomy costs around £7,500 in Europe, according to insurer esure, increasing to £25,000 in some parts of America.
It may also meet the cost of new baggage if your luggage is lost or stolen, and compensate you if your trip is cancelled, your travel delayed or you miss your departure.
Medical costs
Whether or not you are buying insurance you should take a European Health Insurance Card (Ehic) with you when you travel to the continent.
This provides you with access to free medical treatment in EU countries, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, but it will only fund you up to the level of free treatment given to locals. You could find this is significantly less comprehensive than the NHS, leaving you with a big bill – and it won’t cover the cost of repatriation. So it shouldn’t be relied upon exclusively in the event that you fall ill or suffer an accident abroad.
You can apply for an Ehic online from the NHS.uk website. It is entirely free to get. Don’t be fooled by unofficial, copycat websites that may charge you for an Ehic if you apply through them.
Cost of cover
It’s now cheaper than ever to get travel insurance, with some single-trip policies only costing around a fiver. But remember that cheapest is not necessarily best, as the cover might be inadequate and the service a little thin.
Start with price comparison sites, which give you a range of quotes to choose from with varying levels of cover for your situation. Make sure you check what is covered by each policy and that you are comparing like with like. A more expensive deal might have a smaller excess, the amount you need to pay towards any claim, or a higher payout if, for instance, you lose your luggage.
Buy your cover directly from the insurer rather than from a tour operator or travel agent. It will be cheaper, and if anything goes wrong you will have recourse to the Financial Ombudsman Service to claim compensation.
Choosing a policy
If you are likely to take more than two trips a year, it is probably worthwhile investing in annual multi-trip insurance rather than a single-trip policy.
Annual polices will cover you no matter how many times you go away during a year, so you won’t risk forgetting to buy insurance. Typically they cover trips up to around 31 days each, and if a trip is longer than this you can speak to your insurer and get specific cover.
If you’re planning a gap year or career break travelling the world, you may need to opt for a backpackers’ policy. This covers trips lasting a year or 18 months.
Level of cover
The level of cover you need depends on a variety of factors. For example, if you have a holiday home abroad that you visit four times a year, and travel by cheap budget airlines, you may not see the need for cancellation cover in an annual policy. In this case, you might choose a cheaper policy with just repatriation, medical and personal liability cover.
However, if you are heading off on an expensive cruise costing thousands of pounds, you may be willing to pay a higher premium for greater cover, as cancellation of the trip could see you lose a hefty sum. A cheap policy may limit cancellation cover to £500, but around £3,000 is generally recommended.
The amount of baggage cover you need depends on the value of the possessions you will be taking with you. There is often a limit of £200 per item, so make sure your home insurance covers you for any expensive items outside the house.
Declare to your insurer any valuables you are taking, such as a camera or jewellery, to establish whether special procedures are required – for example, locking them in a safe, or paying an additional premium.
The minimum medical protection recommended for Europe is £1m, and £2m for the US where hospital costs are higher. However, many quality policies automatically cover up to £5m.
The excess, which is the sum you are required to pay of any claim before the cover kicks in, varies depending on the policy. Some insurers don’t charge any, although these are few and far between. Typically it is around £50-£75.
Check for exclusions
Study the small print carefully, and make sure you’re aware of any exclusions. Alcohol is one to consider. If you are ill or have an accident after drinking, your insurer is within its rights to refuse the claim.
Insurers will not provide cover for any areas banned for travel by the Foreign Office. Some policies don’t cover terrorism and would therefore not meet any medical costs if you were caught up in an incident.
The majority of sports are accepted by default, such as standard watersports and horse riding. That said, check this carefully as some policies have strange exceptions – we recently found a policy covering cricket but not football.
If you’re going skiing, double check you’re covered for “winter sports” and what that means in practice. For example, you may not be able to make a claim if you don’t wear a helmet or if you leave your ski equipment unattended.
Other activities with an additional element of risk associated with them, such as jetskiing, hang-gliding, parachuting and bungee jumping will not be covered under a normal policy, but specialist cover is easy to find.
Making a claim
You will need to provide proof of any incident.
• Report all thefts or losses to the nearest police swiftly and ask them for a written police report. Get a receipt from the airline or baggage handler for lost or damaged luggage
• Get your paperwork in order for medical claims, and keep all receipts for all expenses
• Contact your insurer as soon as possible for a claim form. Complete it and return it with any suitable evidence, including copies of receipts, photographs and any police or medical reports you have
• If you do send any original documents, always make sure it is by recorded delivery, and you keep photocopies
• Keep all correspondence between yourself and the company. Make accurate records of every phone call, the name of the individual you spoke to and the time you spoke to them.
• If your claim is rejected, appeal against the decision. You should produce any further evidence to help the insurer decide in your favour. If this does not work, contact the Financial Ombudsman Service to see if it can help.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/15/factsheet-travel-insurance
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en
| 2014-12-04T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3ebde6b36dfc2c884fff7b720b06441bb09506f99c218b784d561cda29532ac2.json
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[
"Nicky Woolf"
] | 2016-08-26T14:54:45 | null | 2016-08-26T14:10:53 |
The latest crop of big-budget summer films have fared dismally because the big studios are betting more money on fewer films. A flop is now a very expensive flop
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Where have all the summer blockbusters gone?
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www.theguardian.com
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Is the summer blockbuster dead?
Certainly, compared with summers past, this year’s crop of big-budget, saturation-marketed summer films has been dismal.
None of this summer’s releases has enjoyed anything like the $200m opening three days of 2015’s Jurassic World. This year’s most impressive offering has been Captain America: Civil War, but it fell some $10m shy of last year’s second-biggest summer hit, Avengers: Age of Ultron, which grossed $191m in its first three days, according to Box Office Mojo, although Civil War was released in April.
Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad? Read more
At least the third Captain America film was well-received by critics. The same can’t be said for Warner Brothers’ Suicide Squad, which was so widely panned – including by this newspaper, which gave it two stars – that its fans tried to shut down the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Batman vs Superman, also by Warner Brothers, suffered a similar fate.
To be fair they did debut with reasonable opening weekends. Others, like the much-hyped sequels to Independence Day and Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland, as well as Disney’s live-action Tarzan reboot, all debuted damply and then continued to limp on at the box office.
The season ended with the catastrophic flop of the remade biblical epic Ben-Hur, starring Jack Huston and Morgan Freeman. It brought in an embarrassingly bad $11m over its first weekend and could wind up making a $100m loss, the same amount it cost to make.
Tom Nunan, a lecturer at the UCLA school of theater, film and television, and the founder of independent film and TV production company Bull’s Eye Entertainment, says that the metric to look for is “fall-off” of audiences a few days after a movie opens.
A sophisticated promotional campaign can get a film a decent opening few days, but, he says, the problem is, they don’t sustain, and the reason for that is audience rejection between opening and second weekend.
“If a movie falls off more than 55% weekend to weekend, it’s a huge problem, and that’s been the problem this summer: giant drop-offs, 60, 70% and higher. That shows complete rejection.”
Match the highest-grossing summer blockbuster to the year – quiz Read more
“Not only is performance lacklustre with these blockbuster franchises, but there’s a general feeling that the poor performance is deserved, because the quality of the films doesn’t hold up,” Nunan continues.
Studios today make far fewer films than they have in previous eras, and now focus more and more resources on a smaller number of huge-budget properties. “More and more is riding on fewer and fewer pictures – it becomes distressing,” says Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian at UCLA’s school of theater, film and television. “A lot is riding on every roll of the dice here.”
On top of that, Kuntz says, is a similar problem to the one already faced by the music industry. “The marketplace and audience is much more fragmented than it used to be.”
In the classic era, everyone saw Gone With The Wind or Casablanca, but that is no longer the case. “People are not going down every Friday to the local multiplex, so you have to do something blockbusterish to get their attention. And it costs a lot of money to market films these days,” he says.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lena Headey in Game of Thrones, one of many high-budget TV dramas blamed for falling cinema attendance. Photograph: HBO/AP
High-budget, boutique and on-demand television dramas such as Game of Thrones are also putting pressure on the marketplace; DVD sales, once as big an earner for Hollywood as box office takings, have collapsed completely.
“Each film costs so darn much; you’re risking $150-$200m. There’s so far you can fall, so many ways to fail,” Kuntz says.
Box office figures are variable and there’s a lot of noise in the signal. 2014 was also a relatively dry year for big summer blockbusters; and overall box office take is up slightly in 2016, though some of that can be attributed to a rise in ticket prices, according to Tucker Tooley, a Hollywood producer and CEO of Tooley Productions. There’s also the fact that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was still playing in theaters for the first quarter of the year.
Trouble in Hollywood: who has the formula for blockbuster success? Read more
“To me, the big question is: where are the young males,” Tooley says. “They have become harder and harder over the last few years to persuade to come out, and the tentpole movies have always relied on them to be profitable. There’s some degree of sequel-itis; [the audience has] become more selective. But the good news is, you’ve got movies like Deadpool that get that audience active again,” he says, referring to Fox’s surprise hit earlier this year. The film, about Ryan Reynolds’s motormouth assassin, took $132m in its opening weekend on its way to box office receipts of $400m – record-breaking for an R-rated movie.
His message is that movies just have to be better to bring out big audiences: “The bar has just been raised in terms of presenting something that feels fresh and unique.
“I would say that the audience can smell a unique, good proposition,” he says, “and when they can, they show up. If not, then it’s much harder to get them.” The good news is that it is becoming impossible for studios to remain unaware of this. “A totally fresh movie like Deadpool resonates.”
“[It was] well done and unique, new and fresh-feeling. I would say there’s no way that producers, writers, directors, and studios aren’t all taking note of that.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/26/where-have-all-the-summer-blockbusters-gone
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6c08a80996203b20640796b27a9a800d6e32f30104484ddd5d36d72eab42f564.json
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[
"Heather Stewart"
] | 2016-08-29T18:50:19 | null | 2016-08-29T17:53:51 |
Firmer link between contributions and receipts is on table as PM calls first cabinet meeting since summer break
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Theresa May urged to reshape welfare with 'social insurance'
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Theresa May is being urged to consider reviving the principle of social insurance to help struggling low-paid workers, as she prepares to flesh out her vision of “a country that works for everyone”.
What does Britain's next prime minister Theresa May believe? Read more
The prime minister, who will hold the first cabinet meeting since the summer break at Chequers this week, is keen to show that social reform and tackling “burning injustice” remain a priority, despite the urgent need to clarify what the new government hopes to achieve from Brexit.
May is under pressure, not least from her own back benches, to give a clearer signal as to what kind of deal her government hopes to negotiate with the other EU member-states as the government moves to implement the voters’ decision to leave the European club.
Ministers appear to have taken distinct stances on the best deal Britain can hope to strike with the chancellor, Philip Hammond, stressing the importance of retaining access to the single market, including for financial services firms, while Brexiters Liam Fox and David Davis, both of whom will have key roles in the negotiation process, are thought to prefer a go-it-alone approach.
Another knotty issue in May’s back-to-work inbox is Hinkley Point C, the nuclear reactor due to be built by state-owned French firm EDF with Chinese backing, in a complex deal signed by Osborne.
The prime minister has launched an inquiry into the project before giving it the go-ahead, amid concerns about security and value for money. But the Chinese ambassador has warned that a decision to cancel it could affect diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The new business and energy minister, Greg Clark, is also known to be keen to scrutinise the details of the deal and one potential option is to try to separate agreement on Hinkley from a second reactor, at Bradwell in Essex, that China hopes to build. A decision on Hinkley is expected in September.
May will visit China next weekend for her first major international summit – a G20 leaders’ meeting in Huangzhou, in the east of the country, where she is expected to hold her first face-to-face meetings with Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.
Her fellow leaders are likely to urge her to push ahead with the Brexit process, to minimise the risk that a prolonged period of uncertainty saps economic confidence. The International Monetary Fund recently warned that the referendum result had thrown a “spanner in the works” of the global economy.
A decision on whether to back a third runway at Heathrow – or other options for expanding airport capacity in the south-east such as increasing the size of Gatwick – is also expected in the autumn.
Meanwhile May will chair the first meeting of her social reform cabinet committee this week – a gathering of relevant ministers – in a bid to show that improving the lives of those she described in her first speech in Downing Street as “just managing” is high on her agenda.
One option thought to be under consideration is to shift the focus of welfare policy from the cost-cutting approach of George Osborne, which many Conservatives believe reached its limit when reductions to tax credits and disability payments were rejected by his own backbenchers during a public outcry, to a self-help system.
May’s new director of policy, John Godfrey, is a keen advocate of what in his last job, at financial services giant Legal and General, he called “Beveridge 2.0”: using technology to introduce new forms of social insurance.
Godfrey told a campaigning group, the Financial Inclusion Commission, last year that the systems used to deliver auto-enrolment, the scheme that ensures all low-income workers have a pension, could also be used to help the public insure themselves against unexpected events.
“There is a clear lesson from auto-enrolment that if you have a plumbing network or an infrastructure that works, that auto-enrolment infrastructure could be used for other things which would encourage financial inclusion: things like, for example, life cover, income protection and effective and very genuine personal contributory benefits for things like unemployment and sickness,” he said. “They can be delivered at good value if there is mass participation through either soft compulsion or good behavioural economics.”
As an example he suggested that a worker earning £27,000, who paid in 0.5% of their earnings, or £11 a month, could then be entitled to claim 40% of their income for 12 months if they fell sick – perhaps two to three times what they might get on the existing contributory employment support allowance.
The NHS is ailing. Is a ringfenced tax the best remedy? | Ian Birrell Read more
Such new social insurance products would not replace universal credit, the means-tested welfare system championed by Iain Duncan Smith, which is currently being rolled out across the UK – but they could supplement it.
Politically partly restoring the link between contributions and receipts in the welfare system could help tackle the perception that some get “something for nothing” and sharpen May’s appeal to the “just managing” households she has said she wants to help.
Ryan Shorthouse, director of a Conservative thinktank, Bright Blue, said: “Thanks in large part to the proposed cuts to tax credits and the personal independence payment, there is a danger that the Conservatives have developed a politically unhelpful and one-dimensional reputation on welfare reform: namely, they are simply cost-cutters. Theresa May’s government has a real opportunity to change this.
“There are a growing number of leading centre-right policymakers inside and outside of government who believe the next stage of welfare reform should be to offer more contributory benefits. The public overwhelmingly believe that it is fair that those who have worked longer – who have put more into the system – deserve more support in testing times.”
Governments have found it hard to adapt the welfare state to a labour market in which many jobs are transient and a growing proportion of the workforce are self-employed. Nest, the national savings scheme behind auto-enrolment, allows workers to continue paying in when they move jobs, or while out of work.
May is also expected to make an autumn announcement on expanding grammar schools – perhaps at Tory conference, where grassroots members are likely to be cheered by it – though she is likely to opt for something more modest than a nationwide edict to bring back selection.
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/29/theresa-may-urged-revive-social-insurance
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/13b1dc0ec67c1ae3f0fa13794020d548a65058022f39198e61656e19c8d383ca.json
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[
"Phillip Inman"
] | 2016-08-30T12:55:19 | null | 2016-08-30T12:18:13 |
Banks and building societies approved 60,912 mortgages in July, lowest monthly total since January 2015, figures show
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fuk-mortgage-approvals-fall-to-18-month-low-july-brexit-vote-housing-market.json
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Mortgage approvals fall to 18-month low after Brexit vote
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www.theguardian.com
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Mortgage approvals fell to an 18-month low in July as aftershocks from the EU referendum result rippled out into the housing market.
Figures from the Bank of England showed a drop from 64,152 approvals by banks and building societies in June to 60,912 in July, the lowest monthly total since January 2015.
It was also a continuation of a recent trend, following a spike in February to 73,000, which has prompted some analysts to predict that house prices will fall over the next 12 months.
Earlier this month, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said estate agents were gloomy about their prospects for the year ahead after buying inquiries fell dramatically in July for the fourth month running.
With reports showing that Brexit vote uncertainty had driven down new buyer inquiries in recent months, “we suspect that mortgage approvals have further to fall over the rest of the year”, said Scott Bowman, a UK economist at Capital Economics.
Howard Archer, the chief economist at IHS Global Insight, said the marked slowdown added weight to his prediction that house prices could ease back by about 3% over the latter months of 2016, and there could be a further fall of 5% next year.
“We believe housing market activity is likely to be limited over the coming months and prices will weaken, as heightened uncertainty following the UK’s vote to leave the EU weighs down on consumer confidence and a willingness to engage in major transactions,” he said.
The Bank figures also showed that the Brexit vote affected consumer borrowing in June, after net consumer credit rose by a monthly total of £1.2bn, the smallest rise since August 2015 and well below the consensus expectation of £1.7bn increase. It was the first annual decline in consumer credit growth since December 2014.
Consumer confidence bounced back in August after a slump in July, but remains appreciably lower than before the Brexit vote.
The European commission consumer confidence index for the UK climbed to -7.5 in August, from -9.2 in July, compared with -1.2 in June. It had previously trended down gradually from +4.1 in December 2014.
Archer said the Bank’s cut in interest rates from 0.5% to 0.25% earlier this month would likely dampen any fall in house prices. However, housing market activity and prices would come under pressure from stretched house-price-to-earnings ratios, and tighter checking of prospective mortgage borrowers by lenders.
“According to the Halifax, the house-price-to-earnings ratio reached 5.70 in June, which was its highest level since October 2007, before easing back to 5.63 in July. This is well above the long-term [1983-2016] average of 4.16,” he said.
“Furthermore, the more uncertain and weakened outlook for the economy could make mortgage lenders tighten their lending standards, and possibly even look to increase their margins on mortgages.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/30/uk-mortgage-approvals-fall-to-18-month-low-july-brexit-vote-housing-market
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/cf466b485fda00f887614e8ac7e962faf85bbae1424d59b40dd3e89b9bfc1064.json
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[
"Associated Press In Hilo"
] | 2016-08-28T20:51:56 | null | 2016-08-28T20:42:41 |
Six researchers leave Mauna Loa dome, seeking ocean and fresh food, after simulated mission that was second-longest to 520-day Russian project
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Mars scientists leave dome on Hawaii mountain after year in isolation
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www.theguardian.com
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Six scientists on Sunday completed a year-long simulation of a Mars mission, during which they lived in a dome in near-isolation.
Space oddity: how do astronauts prepare for life on Mars? Read more
The group lived in the dome on a Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii and were only allowed to go outside if wearing spacesuits. On Sunday, the simulation ended and the scientists emerged.
Previous simulations in the Mauna Loa dome have lasted four to eight months. Mauna Loa soil is similar to what would be found on Mars. The area’s high elevation means there is almost no plant growth.
The scientists managed limited resources while conducting research and working to avoid personal conflicts.
Kim Binsted, principal investigator for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, said the researchers were looking forward to getting in the ocean and eating fresh produce and other foods that were not available in the dome.
Nasa funded the study, which was run through the University of Hawaii. Binsted said the simulation was the second-longest of its kind, after a Russian mission that lasted 520 days.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/28/mars-scientists-nasa-dome-hawaii-mountain-isolation
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en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/7ab9eee8562a5f71eb2e478c880d40e3605c6a14f6c8cbede019ca49990abb4e.json
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[
"Sam Levin"
] | 2016-08-26T13:17:26 | null | 2016-08-24T10:00:17 |
Rapidly rising rents, exacerbated by the tech boom and short-term rentals, have made it impossible for many working-class Americans to remain in Santa Cruz
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'It’s a catastrophe': low-income workers get priced out of California beach city
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At first, Jamie Kahn tried ignoring the repeated knocks on her front door. It was September 2015, and the 52-year-old Santa Cruz woman had recently faced an unexpected 40% rent increase that she could not afford.
After missing a rent payment, her new landlords in the northern California beach city quickly moved to evict the single mother and her two children. Kahn thought that if she refused to open the door and accept a summons, she could bide some time to fight the increase from $1,400 to $2,000 a month. She was wrong.
Ordinary people can't afford a home in San Francisco. How did it come to this? Read more
Court records show that a process server repeatedly showed up, and the Kahns ultimately had no choice but to vacate their home of six years. Her 22-year-old daughter subsequently moved into a small back porch room in a neighboring city. Her 19-year-old son crashed on couches. Kahn, meanwhile, moved into her black 1995 Camry station wagon – where she has been sleeping ever since, often stationed in Walmart parking lots.
“California is a monster. If you don’t keep up, you end up on the streets, and nobody cares,” said Kahn, a college graduate who previously worked two jobs in Santa Cruz. “This is a public health issue. It’s a catastrophe.”
While housing shortages and homeless epidemics have afflicted communities up and down the west coast, a major crisis has emerged in Santa Cruz, the liberal seaside city 80 miles south of San Francisco, known internationally for its surfing and laid-back boardwalk attractions.
With a swelling presence of Airbnb short-term rentals and university students, Santa Cruz has increasingly become unaffordable and inhospitable to many longtime low-income workers and middle-class families, and experts say the tech boom and housing crunch in nearby Silicon Valley is exacerbating the displacement.
For newly evicted families such as the Kahns, there’s often nowhere to turn except the streets.
California is a monster. If you don’t keep up, you end up on the streets, and nobody cares Jamie Kahn
‘Least affordable’ housing in the US
Santa Cruz, which was originally controlled by Mexico, was incorporated as a California town in 1866. The city is constrained by mountains and the ocean but has steadily grown since the gold rush, attracting agriculture and commercial fishing along with a vibrant resort community and tourism industry.
Housing development has not kept pace with the growth of the population, which is now 62,000 in the city and 270,000 total in Santa Cruz County. The county has added roughly one housing unit for every 10 new residents in recent years, according to county housing manager Julie Conway.
At the same time, the top five occupations in the area are low-wage jobs in retail, food service and cleaning, paying between $9.06 and $11.30 an hour, according to 2015 research. As a result, 63% of renters live in unaffordable housing, meaning their rent is more than 30% of their income.
By some measures, Santa Cruz is considered the “least affordable” small metro area in the US. Santa Cruz – which is about 58% white and 33% Latino – also recently counted nearly 2,000 homeless people, which translates to one of the highest concentrations in the country, according to the federal government.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest After Jamie Kahn was evicted she moved into her black 1995 Camry station wagon where she has been sleeping ever since, often stationed in Walmart parking lots. Photograph: Courtesy of Jamie Kahn
“Such a broad spectrum of the community is being priced out,” said Sibley Verbeck Simon, president of New Way Homes, an affordable housing not-for-profit group in Santa Cruz. He said roughly 70% of the homeless were previously housed in the area, meaning the housing crunch is displacing many locals.
The lack of housing has also led to severe overcrowding, said Steve McKay, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has studied regional poverty and recently found that the median hourly wage for low-income workers is $10.
“No one can live on $10 an hour,” he said.
Santa Cruz also lacks rent control laws to preserve affordable housing rates, which means the increasingly intense competition for a limited supply of units has enabled landlords to dramatically jack up rates.
McKay said it’s not uncommon to see two renters pay $1,000 each to share a single bedroom. He said he recently learned of a landlord who put up dividers in a four-bedroom house, illegally converting it to an eight-room property and charging $8,000 a month.
People are living in all kinds of alternative housing – converted garages, cars, chicken coops, you name it Gretchen Regenhardt, of California Rural Legal Assistance
In another case, four senior citizens were sharing one studio apartment.
“People are living in all kinds of alternative housing – converted garages, cars, chicken coops, you name it,” said Gretchen Regenhardt, regional director of California Rural Legal Assistance, which aids low-income renters.
Most of the time when desperate tenants show up at the doors of Regenhardt’s office there’s little she can do. So many evictions and rent hikes are legal, she said, which means her organization can’t assist 90% of the people who seek their help.
‘We didn’t know where to go’
On a recent summer afternoon in downtown Santa Cruz, a mile away from the city’s main beach and waterfront amusement park, homeless residents filed into the public library, carrying piles of personal documents and half-completed housing applications.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Such a broad spectrum of the community is being priced out,’ said Sibley Verbeck Simon, president of New Way Homes, an affordable housing not-for-profit group in Santa Cruz. Photograph: Sam Levin for the Guardian
John Dietz, a housing specialist with the 180/2020 program, which aims to eliminate chronic homelessness by 2020, sat with clients at a small roundtable, prepping them for high-stakes meetings with prospective landlords.
“It’s gonna be a tough interview,” he told William Henry Brown Jr, a 65-year-old man who lost his Santa Cruz home last year when an owner redeveloped his building.
“I’m very patient,” said Brown, who has been sleeping on the living room floor in his father-in-law’s unit. “But I won’t give up.”
Dietz and Brown discussed how he would explain to a potential landlord why he doesn’t have credit.
Dietz and his colleagues have developed relationships with specific landlords to try to encourage them to accept homeless tenants who have vouchers for housing – but can’t find anyone to take them.
“The hardest part is knowing that there is available housing, but not being accepted,” said Joshua Waltrip, 27.
“When we go to interviews, I get so nervous,” said Rita Chavez, Waltrip’s mother.
Statistics suggest her fears are merited. A recent 88-unit affordable rental project, for example, received 1,371 applications, according to Conway.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joshua Waltrip, homeless in Santa Cruz with his mother: ‘The hardest part is knowing that there is available housing, but not being accepted.’ Photograph: Sam Levin for the Guardian
Chavez noted that she has seen the dynamics of Santa Cruz change over the years. “It used to be a lot of local people. There used to be more hippies.”
Some worry the expanding presence of short-term rentals is worsening the housing emergency in Santa Cruz county, which is home to Airbnb’s “most popular” rental. Even a local councilman was reprimanded for illegally renting out a secondary residence to make extra cash.
In addition to tourists and an increasing number of UC Santa Cruz students straining the already tight housing market, the relocation of wealthy Silicon Valley tech workers to Santa Cruz has also accelerated anxieties and fears of rising income inequality and a changing population.
Earlier this month, Kate Downing, a planning commissioner in Palo Alto – a city by the headquarters of Apple, Google and Facebook – penned a viral resignation letter outlining why she, a lawyer, and her husband, a software engineer, could no longer afford Silicon Valley.
The lack of housing in the region has made it impossible for the couple to comfortably raise a family and stay in Palo Alto, she said. Instead, Downing wrote, the couple has decided to migrate south and settle in Santa Cruz.
‘Because of Silicon Valley’
Commuting from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley across the windy, two-lane Highway 17 can be a nightmare during rush hour, but more tech workers may make the move as housing prices continue to climb.
“Unless you work over the hill at Google or Apple and are making a ton of money, you’re basically not going to be able to afford anything here,” said Dale Davis, 65, who was recently priced out of Santa Cruz with her husband. “This is because of Silicon Valley.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest William Henry Brown Jr, left, is a 65-year-old man who lost his Santa Cruz home last year when an owner redeveloped his building. Photograph: Sam Levin for the Guardian
“Santa Cruz is feeling that pressure,” added Downing, who argued in her letter that Palo Alto has fundamentally failed to fix its housing crisis by blocking new developments. “Santa Cruz is at least trying.”
Government officials and housing advocates say they are focused on increasing the pace of development and reforming local laws so that developers are incentivized to construct denser projects.
Simon, the nonprofit director, argued that if the area had 2,500 new units, median rent would drop 20% across the board. “We could absolutely significantly alter the dynamics by building supply.”
The county, however, has a target of producing roughly 1,400 new housing units by 2023, and some worry it’s not enough.
Conway, the county housing official, noted that the crisis has been building for decades and won’t be quickly solved. “We’re losing our middle class, and we’re losing our young families … Does that mean the fundamental character of our community is changing? Of course.”
For Kahn, who is still living out of her car and relocating to New Mexico this month, it seems clear Santa Cruz won’t ever be an option for her again.
She said she feels grateful that she and her children have found ways to get by. “Many people aren’t so lucky … In Santa Cruz, people end up on the streets for the rest of their lives.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/24/california-homelessness-santa-cruz-housing-affordability
|
en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/517ebf39b7d638858c3ef8b2b1eb8d5f0c6a8a59b3a3ba9d51eef3c8b7382459.json
|
|
[
"Julie Bindel"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:55 | null | 2016-08-26T07:00:12 |
Val Derbyshire is right to nail the snobbery directed at romance literature. But the truth is, a genre that revels in forced seduction does nothing to empower women
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fmills-boon-feminism-val-derbyshire-snobbery-romance-women.json
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en
| null |
Mills & Boon: zero shades of feminism
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Are Mills & Boon novels really, secretly, feminist texts? On Wednesday it was reported that the academic Val Derbyshire has written a paper – to be presented at Sheffield University’s Festival of the Mind next month – that contends they should be reread from a feminist perspective.
Mills & Boon romances are actually feminist texts, academic says Read more
Derbyshire’s argument, as described so far, includes a variety of points: that the male hero is often forced to acknowledge his sexism and change his ways as a result of falling in love with the heroine; that the series has challenged the blaming of female rape victims within the criminal justice system (using the 1985 novel Time Fuse to back up this point); and that these books are primarily by women, for women. “Why would [Mills & Boon writers] set out to insult their target audience?” asks Derbyshire.
I am sympathetic to some further points Derbyshire makes about snobbery. I read and enjoy crime novels that are badly written and formulaic, and hate being judged by those who brag that they read Ulysses with their spinach smoothie.
Derbyshire argues that women should read Mills & Boon with pride rather than guilty embarrassment, and I agree that no one should feel ashamed of reading pulp fiction. But what has this got to do with feminism? In her paper Derbyshire goes so far as to call the books “the literature of protest rather than mere escapism”.
My thoughts on this subject are on record. In 2007, to mark 100 years of the Mills & Boon novel, I wrote in the Guardian that these books are “full of patriarchal propaganda”, and derided them for perpetuating the myth that women crave to be swept away by overpowering, macho men.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in the film of Fifty Shades Of Grey: ‘I have softened towards Mills & Boon because Fifty Shades of Grey is considerably more insidious and misogynistic.’ Photograph: Allstar/Focus
I have, however, softened towards Mills & Boon a little since then. Because we now have Fifty Shades of Grey, a brand that is considerably more insidious and misogynistic. The first Fifty Shades novel was published in 2011, and the book and its sequels are a celebration and sanitisation of domestic abuse and sexual sadism.
Despite this softening, I still cannot see how anyone could make a robust argument that Mills & Boon novels are feminist, unless we follow the line trotted out by some “fun feminists” that anything can be labelled as such – up to and including Margaret Thatcher.
Like other social justice movements, feminism has a set of aims and objectives. One of them is to challenge the lie that women enjoy being forced into sex. Most of the older (and some recent) Mills & Boon novels are based on “forced seduction” because in the bad old days, nice girls could not actively choose to have rampant sex and still be considered decent. This extract from The Innocent’s Surrender, published in 2010, illustrates my point:
'If that is not rape I am not sure what is. Yet she falls for the rapist'
“Her taut muscles shocked into resistance, she wanted to cry out to him that he was hurting her, and beg him to stop. To give her unaccustomed body at least a little time to adjust to the stark reality of his penetration of her. Yet she did nothing, said nothing, determined not to grant him the satisfaction of knowing that anything he did could affect her in any way – pleasure or pain.”
If that is not rape, I am not sure what is. Yet she falls for the rapist. And, presumably, they go on to live happily ever after.
In a blog post Derbyshire writes: “I, myself, find that I tend to pick up a Mills & Boon romance to read when I’m feeling in need of cheering up. They’re quick, easy to read, and yet – no matter how ridiculous the plot – strangely satisfying.”
I perfectly understand this, and feel exactly the same way about some of the books I read. Derbyshire has every right to rail against the snobbery of her critics – but none, I would argue, to say that Mills & Boon novels are even remotely feminist.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/mills-boon-feminism-val-derbyshire-snobbery-romance-women
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0727e0e65d044bb2d24720aeba2a054da803ff1b21ef97ffbff61a2198a9f1ee.json
|
|
[
"Gavin Haynes"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:33 | null | 2016-08-24T16:45:34 |
There can be around 100,000 of them in the average face wash, but now MPs are calling for a ban and manufacturers are swapping plastics for ground-up peach-pits in products
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fshortcuts%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fban-on-microbeads-tiny-objects-massive-problem-environment-cosmetics.json
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en
| null |
Microbeads - tiny objects, massive problem?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The late Dr John Ugelstad was a hero of Norwegian science. “Why go to space when you can go to Trondheim,” Newsweek crowed on a visit to his labs in the 80s. It had come to photograph him in the company of a few of the millions of tiny particles – microbeads – he had invented. Prior to Ugelstad, it had been assumed that the only way to make tiny plastic polymers spherical was to do it in the weightlessness of space – the ones made on Earth had come out as useless droopy plastic soufflés. But Ugelstad had found a way, and the results were revolutionary.
In medicine, they allowed the separation of bodily substances to make testing much easier, especially for Aids. And in cancer, his “paramagnetic” (magnetic only in a magnetic field) microbeads allowed new treatments that would pile into bone cancer patients’ bones and “scrub out” the old cancerous cells.
In cosmetics, though, his work has recently met with mixed reviews. This week, parliament’s environmental audit committee called for a worldwide ban on cosmetic microbeads, found in everything from facewash to toothpaste to shampoo. And the scientific and political consensus has reached a tipping point. The US instituted a ban late last year, Canada did so in June, while the Dutch were on it back in 2014.
The evidence on microbeads has existed for almost a decade. A landmark study on North America’s Great Lakes in 2012 used specially designed nets to drag the surface, finding tiny polymer spheres everywhere.
There are 100,000 in the average face wash, and estimates once put the number swirling down US plugholes every day at 808tn. Most end up in the sludge pile at the waste-water plant and are packed off for fertiliser. But 1% remain in solution – 8tn beads a day. These then become snacks for microscopic plankton; soon enough the big fish eat the little ones, the beads start showing up in the stomachs of larger fish, and, in the Great Lakes study, also in fish-eating birds such as the double-crested cormorant.
Ugelstad was about to go down in history alongside the guy who invented asbestos and the bloke who put lead in petrol, but action by corporations seems to be turning the tide. In 2012, Unilever said it would stop using them, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble have set timetables, while Boots ceased with its own brands in 2014. Some have simply deleted the ingredient (look for “polyethylene” or “polypropylene” on the pack). Others have instead turned to ground-up peach-pits, oatmeal or sea salt.
Rest assured, if you want to continue to sandpaper excess dermis off your face, to ritually grind your way back through gnarled exoskeleton back to the young you you know must be hiding in there somewhere, you still can. Just so long as you also respect the rights of the double-crested cormorant.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2016/aug/24/ban-on-microbeads-tiny-objects-massive-problem-environment-cosmetics
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6a7d424f26e46d4903f66ad7125b03fa7312ecf6899bcaa6d6d9e07ee27b298f.json
|
|
[
"Rebecca Smithers"
] | 2016-08-26T13:28:35 | null | 2016-08-08T05:59:24 |
Holiday season has brought a rise in the number of unofficial sites charging unnecessary fees for Esta permits and EHIC cards
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F08%2Ffake-websites-esta-ehic-duping-travellers.json
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en
| null |
Beware copycat websites overcharging for Esta and Ehic documents
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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With the summer holidays upon us we have had a flurry of complaints from readers who have fallen for copycat websites that aim to dupe those applying for an Esta permit (the US’s online visa system) and, to a lesser extent, the Ehic health insurance card into paying unnecessary fees.
Under the terms of the Visa Waiver Program, all Britons entering the US are required to apply online at esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta, at least 72 hours prior to travel and pay a $14 (£10.60) fee. From April this year, they also need to hold a biometric passport with a built-in chip.
However, unscrupulous operators have set up copycat websites, where the sole purpose seems to be to catch out the unwary and get them to hand over an additional service or administration fee. They do so by making their website look like the official site, or by just hoping that some consumers don’t know better and will pay them for the unnecessary service.
Guardian Money has repeatedly warned about this issue, but despite moves by Google and promises of action by UK ministers, it shows no sign of going away. There is even a warning about fake sites on the official Esta site.
The free Ehic card gives access to state-provided healthcare during a temporary stay in another European Economic Area country and Switzerland. Although the service, at gov.uk/european-health-insurance-card, was temporarily unavailable online immediately after the result of the Brexit referendum due to a technical glitch, it is now up and running as normal.
Copycat websites still provide the Ehic card, but charge an unnecessary fee. We have learned of a spate of “reminder” emails being sent to consumers who have already been duped into paying fees as their cards get close to expiry. You have been warned.
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/08/fake-websites-esta-ehic-duping-travellers
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en
| 2016-08-08T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f052ed450120f3cdb7d006aa6638692bcbb558450305ed8fbee65138ec6c931b.json
|
|
[
"Associated Press"
] | 2016-08-30T20:52:48 | null | 2016-08-30T20:34:27 |
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater went down with an injury in practice, causing the team to cut short its session after 25 minutes.
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fteddy-bridgewater-injury-minnesota-vikings-nfl.json
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en
| null |
Teddy Bridgewater injury leaves team-mates distraught at Vikings training
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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Minnesota Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater went down with an injury in practice on Tuesday, causing the team to cut short its session after 25 minutes.
Bridgewater dropped back to pass during a drill, planted his foot and immediately went down. He grabbed his left knee while concerned team-mates and athletic trainers huddled around him.
Coach Mike Zimmer eventually called off practice, and the rest of the team walked off the field while Bridgewater was being attended to. Moments later, an ambulance pulled into the team’s Winter Park headquarters, stayed for about 10 minutes and then pulled away.
Jim Brown backs Colin Kaepernick as Rodney Harrison says QB 'is not black' Read more
The nature of Bridgewater’s injury was not immediately clear. The team said Zimmer would address the situation at a later time.
Players were visibly distraught as they exited the field, some hurling expletives into the air. A small group remained behind, huddled around him in prayer as team athletic trainers worked to immobilize his leg.
If Bridgewater is unable to return in a timely manner, there is little behind him on the depth chart. Shaun Hill is the primary backup, but he’s 36 years old and has played only sparingly over the last five years.
Bridgewater is entering his third season in the NFL and the Vikings were counting on him to take some major steps forward after a promising start to his career. He helped lead the Vikings to the NFC North championship last season as more of a game manager, but Zimmer and offensive coordinator Norv Turner have said that they expected him to be much more of a playmaker in 2016.
Bridgewater missed the second preseason game with a sore shoulder, but was very sharp on Sunday against San Diego. He went 12 for 16 for 161 yards and a touchdown in two quarters of work, leaving Vikings players and fans fully confident as the team starts to prepare for the season opener at Tennessee on 11 September.
The Vikings host the Los Angeles Rams in their final preseason game Thursday night, though Bridgewater and most of the starters were not expected to play.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/30/teddy-bridgewater-injury-minnesota-vikings-nfl
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6137f721651c9762490d32e90a8de46d5073769135726240e22b12911520c661.json
|
|
[
"Hannah Jane Parkinson"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:55 | null | 2016-08-12T12:06:31 |
Instagram is challenging Snapchat with Stories, but … can we spice it up a bit? Videos of lunches and office carpets are as boring as they sound
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Faug%2F12%2Finstagram-stories-boring-snapchat.json
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en
| null |
Instagram Stories: who cares about your commute or cleansing routine?
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
I don’t hate Instagram Stories, but Instagram Stories hates me.
I also don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such brilliant friends in life, but, equally, I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve their banal videos of facial cleansing routines or them making a peace sign on a busy road as a lorry roars by or a macro shot of a bug they found in the bathroom.
This is what I’ve had to witness since Instagram introduced its clone of Snapchat’s Stories - a section that lets users posts pictures and videos that are only available for 24 hours.
When I were a lass, stories had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Then I realised that wasn’t strictly true – shout out to Queen Woolf, Ford Madox Ford and my postmodernism crew etc – but they have to have, you know, something. There’s the theory (possibly Shakespeare’s, but honestly, who even knows with that guy anymore?) that there are only seven original stories in the world. Whatever: eating avocado isn’t one of those.
I left Snapchat when Stories began to take over. But I was never a big fan of Snapchat in general.
And the reason why? I have a problem with mediums and platforms that encourage ephemeral sharing: if something isn’t worth saving – or at least being able to view over and over – it isn’t worth sharing.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest What is it about our collective ego that we think everybody cares about our commute? Photograph: Amber Jamieson/Snapchat
Snapchat and Instagram Stories encourage people to share what, in modern parlance, we would call content that is dull as hell. Instagram Stories is basically the visual equivalent of someone tweeting their entire drafts folder. Sure, the ethos is “live in the moment!” But why are these moments all people just scrunching their noses up or photos of filing cabinets?
Snapchat, the popularity of which relies massively on its multiple filters, encourages zero filtering in terms of the content produced by users. You might argue the entirety of the content just becomes the filters and stickers overlaid on top. The ultimate in style (well, dog overlay) over substance. If you take away the filtering and stickers, then ask yourself, was that really worth posting? Instagram Stories is even worse because at the moment it doesn’t even carry Snapchat’s more fun features. It’s a me-too version. A good-enough version, to halt Snapchat’s market.
I can already hear the sounds of “killjoy” being typed in the comments, so let me say that I’m all for fun, I’m all for filtering, I am all for silly content. But that’s not really what a lot of ephemeral content is: it’s filler, or a dump for all the stuff you wouldn’t put on Facebook and Twitter or Instagram proper. And often, inflicted without discrimination. The formula cover letter that is addressed to someone else, the round-robin Christmas letter that no-one cares about but everyone is in receipt of. I don’t have an issue with Snapchat’s (genuinely fun) features applied to direct or group messages, but what is it about our collective ego (including mine) that we think anybody and everybody cares about our commute?
Of course, the answer for those of us irritated by the fleeting sharing of coffee queues and missed buses and the same pictures of a mug next to the same picture of a desk is just to avoid the ephemeral social apps and networks. And I do, for the most part. As I say, I stopped using Snapchat. But with Instagram, those spinning circles up-top grate, and make me wonder how much time they’ve taken to put together and for so little gain.
I have come across a few (OK, two) Stories that have made me laugh. And when that happens, the medium frustrates even more with its fleetingness. But here’s hoping the Instagram Stories on my feed improve as time goes by. The End.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/12/instagram-stories-boring-snapchat
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en
| 2016-08-12T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f4fa145beffa58c00d9ca44f16945c248cb492e8cce3a1e52163a1930ca8285c.json
|
|
[
"Jon Boone"
] | 2016-08-29T16:52:08 | null | 2016-08-29T15:29:24 |
Srinagar residents hurl stones and shout slogans demanding freedom from Indian rule before curfew is reimposed
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fbrief-lifting-of-curfew-in-kashmir-prompts-fresh-violence.json
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en
| null |
Brief lifting of curfew in Kashmir prompts fresh violence
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
A nearly two-month curfew in the troubled Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir was partially lifted on Monday only to be largely re-imposed after fresh violence erupted in several parts of the capital, Srinagar.
For many people the easing of the curfew had been the first opportunity in 52 days to move freely outside their homes. The former Himalayan kingdom has been wracked by protests in the wake of the killing of a popular young militant separatist by security forces on 8 July.
The death of Burhan Wani, a commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen group, tipped Kashmir into one of its worst crises in years. At least 68 people have been killed to date and up to 10,000 injured during the clashes.
The saga has soured relations between Pakistan and India, who have been engaged in a decades-long dispute over the region.
Authorities announced the partial lifting of the curfew after declaring an improvement in the security situation. But in many areas residents swiftly came out to hurl stones at government forces and shout slogans demanding freedom from Indian rule.
Weeks of mobile phone network blackouts and movement restrictions have hit the poorest of Kashmir the hardest, with many people struggling to get hold of basic supplies from relief committees established across Srinagar.
Raja Begum, a 62-year-old widow living in a small home in downtown Srinagar, lost her daily earnings of 150 rupees a day selling clothes on the street.
“I tried to venture out of my house several times to get medicines but each time I was stopped by paramilitary forces,” said Begum, whose health has deteriorated without the drugs she needs.
Even without the curfew, shops remained closed after a strike was called by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), an umbrella group of separatist parties, many of whose leaders have been arrested in recent weeks.
“People will not start their usual business until Delhi says it is open to full talks with the three parties – India, Pakistan and the resistance leaders,” said Hamida Nayeem, an academic at Kashmir University and an activist.
On 15 August, Islamabad extended a formal invitation to India for fresh bilateral talks on the Kashmir dispute. But the offer was rebuffed by India, with Delhi saying it would discuss cross-border terrorism, which it blames on clandestine support by Pakistan.
The lifting of the curfew allowed Nayeem to visit injured protesters recovering at Srinagar’s main hospital, many of them from serious pellet injuries to the eyes caused by shotguns used by security forces to disperse crowds.
She said she had seen more than 100 such patients on Monday, many of whom either had been blinded or had undergone multiple operations to try to salvage some of their eyesight.
“India has achieved new depths of degradation with this policy of aiming guns at people’s eyes,” she said. “They treat us as enemies rather than citizens.”
India has flooded even more security forces into a region that is already home to 500,000 soldiers. Many of the reinforcements have taken over schools for use as temporary bases.
The government of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, initially played down the crisis in Kashmir, but it has faced increasing pressure, including from army chiefs, to open a dialogue with separatist leaders.
In a radio address on Sunday, Modi expressed sadness at the loss of life in Kashmir but criticised “those trying to disturb peace in Kashmir by putting small children in the front and hiding behind them”.
India and Pakistan have fought three conflicts over the Muslim-majority region, which Pakistan believes should have been included inside its territory when the subcontinent became independent from Britain in 1947.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced over the weekend that he had appointed 22 parliamentarians as “special envoys” who would attempt to raise the issue internationally in the hope that foreign governments would exert pressure on India.
The violence in Kashmir has undermined Sharif’s dream of overseeing an improvement in relations with India.
Doubts are growing over whether Modi will attend a meeting of heads of government of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation due in the Pakistani capital on 9 November.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/brief-lifting-of-curfew-in-kashmir-prompts-fresh-violence
|
en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/2a2e23921896dcc81ebad5f6bdc4654b6a984c711a6e4447e6a1229aa28e7cd6.json
|
|
[
"Press Association"
] | 2016-08-30T18:50:15 | null | 2016-08-30T17:33:23 |
Jordanna Best receives 20-month sentence after crashing car in Manchester while inhaling nitrous oxide, injuring herself and others
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fdriver-jailed-for-crashing-car-while-inhaling-laughing-gas.json
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en
| null |
Driver jailed for crashing car while inhaling laughing gas
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
A motorist who crashed her car while inhaling a laughing gas balloon has been jailed for 20 months.
Jordanna Best, 21, lost control of her vehicle on a blind bend, drifted into the opposite carriageway and hit a van head-on in Manchester. Prosecutors said Best’s use of nitrous oxide put herself and others at risk with disastrous consequences.
One of her passengers in the Ford Ka suffered a fractured vertebra and injuries to her liver, while the other passenger received broken ribs. The van driver received cuts and bruises from the crash in Manchester Road, Carrington, on the evening of 10 March this year, Manchester Minshull Street crown court heard.
Laughing gas usage in UK highest in global survey Read more
Best, of Partington, who suffered a collapsed lung in the collision, was sentenced on Tuesday for causing serious injury to her two passengers by dangerous driving, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. She was also banned from driving for 34 months and must take an extended re-test.
A CPS spokesman said: “Jordanna Best took a series of risks that night, putting other road users as well as her passengers at serious risk of harm with disastrous consequences.
“She has accepted driving her car whilse inhaling nitrous oxide. Not only would this have affected her ability to drive safely, it meant she had to drive with only one hand on the steering wheel, whilse the balloon she inhaled from would also have obscured her view through the windscreen.
“She overtook another car before drifting again over the solid white lines into the path of oncoming traffic, whilse on a blind bend. The van driver she collided with did not stand a chance of avoiding the collision.
“As a direct result of her reckless actions, her two passengers were seriously injured, the van driver was injured, plus she also received fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. Her actions alone were responsible for this serious collision that risked the lives of those involved.”
|
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/30/driver-jailed-for-crashing-car-while-inhaling-laughing-gas
|
en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6e6cb49cfecd2285b41a41bee655399caad67ef1aa4fc48588c98a7c2b4bb8c7.json
|
|
[
"Jonathan Fisher",
"Andy Brassell",
"Ryan Baxter"
] | 2016-08-26T13:19:07 | null | 2016-08-25T12:54:13 |
The 2016-17 Bundesliga season kicks off on 26 August with defending champions Bayern Munich taking on Werder Bremen. Bayern have reinforced their squad this summer with the likes of Mats Hummels and Renato Sanches, so does anyone else have a chance this season?
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F25%2Fbundesliga-2016-17-season-preview-bayern-the-team-to-beat-video.json
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en
| null |
Bundesliga 2016-17 season preview: Bayern the team to beat - video
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The 2016-17 Bundesliga season kicks off on 26 August with defending champions Bayern Munich taking on Werder Bremen. Bayern have reinforced their squad this summer with the likes of Mats Hummels and Renato Sanches, so does anyone else have a chance this season?
|
https://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2016/aug/25/bundesliga-2016-17-season-preview-bayern-the-team-to-beat-video
|
en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/cf4de2748d64e72d0731593c3df657dec3d411887b94677f2381e3e3fcb12afb.json
|
|
[
"Press Association"
] | 2016-08-29T10:49:59 | null | 2016-08-02T07:54:36 |
Alasdair Clift, from Wirral, finished 20-hour journey at Heathrow Terminal 5, raising more than £12,000 for blood cancer charity
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F02%2Fboy-visits-all-270-london-underground-tube-stations-in-one-day-in-memory-of-brother.json
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Boy, 13, visits entire London tube in one day in memory of brother
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www.theguardian.com
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A 13-year-old boy has visited all but two of the 270 London Underground stations in one day in memory of his older brother.
Alasdair Clift, from Wirral, Merseyside, took on the “tube challenge” to raise money for charity Bloodwise after his brother Adam, 17, died from lymphoma in March, and only just ran out of time to complete the whole network.
He began his journey at Chesham station, at the end of the Metropolitan line in Buckinghamshire, at 5.15am on Monday, and finished at Heathrow Terminal 5 station in west London in the early hours of Tuesday morning, having navigated the entire underground network.
Alasdair, who is said to be “fascinated” by transport, has so far received more than £12,000 in donations on his online fundraising page, far exceeding his original target of £100.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alasdair, left, who is said to be ‘fascinated’ by transport, with Adam. He had originally aimed to raise £100 for charity Bloodwise. Photograph: PA
After spending nearly 20 hours on the tube with his father, Richard Clift, 50, Alasdair arrived at Heathrow to applause from a welcoming party of relatives, tube staff and police officers shortly before 1am.
He said he felt “tired, but proud and happy” of his achievement and the huge support he had received.
“This has been an ambition of mine for a while. In 2013, my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma and unfortunately after many rounds of treatment, he passed away in March. I’ve done this challenge to hopefully give other people a better chance,” he said.
Richard Clift said the kindness shown by fellow travellers and tube workers had been “phenomenal”.
“We have had a very warm day on the tube and in terms of feeling shown to us. We have had terrific support, with people sticking their heads into the carriages saying how wonderful we are and the Transport for London staff have been right behind us. Alasdair felt like a star,” he said.
The family had been touched by the “random gestures of complete strangers” who donated along the way, Richard Clift said.
Alasdair was allowed to ride in the front cab for the first two journeys of the day and was given a certificate recognising his achievement from Mark Wild, the managing director of London Underground, at Southwark station.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alasdair is presented with a certificate by the managing director of London Underground, Mark Wild, at Southwark station. Photograph: PA
Speaking earlier, Richard Clift said he and his wife Caroline, 51, had been “overawed” by Alasdair, who singlehandedly arranged the challenge.
“We’re very proud, and very proud of his organisation skills, because Caroline and I have had absolutely nothing to do with it,” he said.
Later on his charity page, Alastair said: “Sorry for the lack of updates on the challenge day, but we managed to do 268/270 stations (we missed Mill Hill East and Heathrow T4 as we were way behind schedule to do those) Blame the Circle line for us not doing 270! But otherwise we have had so many donations, were over 22k! Thank you all so far!”
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/02/boy-visits-all-270-london-underground-tube-stations-in-one-day-in-memory-of-brother
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en
| 2016-08-02T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4e2de9ccd6b85a4a9f323558b440b928a5fcee84a999a986938ff4a8577eea7e.json
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[
"Oliver Wainwright"
] | 2016-08-31T12:50:23 | null | 2016-08-31T10:45:58 |
Ikea’s flat-pack refugee shelter, an online sexual health test and Taipei’s scooter share among ideas to go on show at London’s new Design Museum
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fartanddesign%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fbeazley-designs-of-the-year-design-museum-london.json
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Astronaut coffee and DIY heart surgery - Designs of the Year unveiled
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David Bowie’s final album cover, a build-your-own robotic surgeon and a coffee cup that allows astronauts to drink in space are among the Designs of the Year, a 70-strong lineup of ingenious innovations that will be exhibited at the Design Museum’s new home in Kensington from 24 November.
Design Museum aims for Tate Modern effect in new home, says director Read more
Launching the museum’s west London incarnation, housed in the concrete tent of the former Commonwealth Institute on the edge of Holland Park, the exhibition will join a new permanent collection, on show for the first time in the institution’s 27-year history – some of this year’s highlights might one day join the anglepoise lamp and the Eames plywood chair in the design canon.
But the exhibition does more than scout out the next design icons. Holding up a mirror to the creative industries, Designs of the Year is an annual barometer of the design world’s preoccupations, anxieties and dreams – as well as a reminder of its conscience, with a welcome emphasis on useful problem-solving, rather than luxury sofas.
Following a period of unprecedented global migration, responses to the refugee crisis loom large on the list this year. A simple icon-based communication system designed to illustrate first aid kits and provide clear way-finding in refugee camps features alongside Ikea’s contribution to the crisis in the form of a flat-pack shelter, made from lightweight insulated panels that clip on to a simple frame. It’s a step up from the usual tents, though the design has yet to be perfected: the city of Zurich had to return 62 of the cabins it had ordered to house asylum seekers after tests showed the enclosures were “easily combustible”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pictograms from Buero Bauer’s first aid kit for use in refugee camps Photograph: Design Museum
They could have done with the expertise of Design that Saves Lives, a structural assessment methodology created by Arup engineers that will also feature in the exhibition, developed in response to the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed 1,100 workers. Now adopted across the country, the assessment process has seen around 4,000 similar factories surveyed and upgraded to prevent such disasters in the future. Like many other projects on show, it is design as strategic process, rather than the creation of a final photogenic product.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The sleeve design for David Bowie’s Blackstar. Photograph: Design Museum
Alongside humanitarian interventions, the shortlist also reflects the ongoing interest in open-source, DIY “maker” culture and crowdsourced design, as designers continue to bypass conventional routes to manufacture and consumers demand an increasing say in how their products are made.
Inspired by the publishing trends, three Royal College of Art graduates have developed an on-demand clothing company, Unmade, allowing people to order customised garments at the click of a button. Using digitally coded knitting machines and a simple online interface of adjustable graphic patterns, every item is made to order, yet sold at a similar price to mass-produced high street clothing.
Fellow RCA graduate Frank Kolkman has taken the DIY approach a few alarming steps further with a speculative project that imagines a future of robotic keyhole surgery in the home. Kolkman was inspired by the gruesome discovery that some Americans without health insurance are using YouTube to share videos in which they perform medical hacks on themselves as an alternative to professional care.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The OpenSurgery domestic surgery theatre. Photograph: Juuke Schoorl
His project, Open Surgery, follows self-care culture to its ultimate conclusion, with a series of open-source robots made from 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, combined with hacked surgical components bought online. Although still requiring a surgeon to operate it remotely, the machines could theoretically be replicated almost anywhere at a fraction of the cost of commercial surgical instruments. A heart bypass from the comfort of your armchair?
Meanwhile, a pair of south London councils, working together with the NHS, have a slightly more down to earth application for self-care in the home, in the form of SH:24, an online sexual-health testing service. Freeing up clinical capacity to deal with more complex cases, the service allows people to order free home sampling kits for chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhoea and HIV, send them back to the lab and receive results by confidential text message.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lumos bike helmet, displaying a left-turn signal. Photograph: Max Wagenblass
The transport category is also brimming with clever inventions, including a crowdfunded light-equipped bicycle helmet with a built-in accelerometer, providing automatic brake lights and turning signals, a super-light e-bike, and Gogoro, an electric scooter sharing scheme in Taipei. Structured around quick battery-swapping stations, avoiding lengthy recharging times, Gogoro has been hailed as a gamechanger, with the potential to do for scooters what Tesla did for cars.
A winner will be selected in each category – architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport – and the overalldesign of the year will be announced on 26 January 2017.
• Beazley Designs of the Year will be at Design Museum, London from 24 November to 19 February.
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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/aug/31/beazley-designs-of-the-year-design-museum-london
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| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/5367534c5407422bcfac68439e13f7906ee25b6c6654e49c0eec66a41dbeeb7c.json
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[
"Paul Karp"
] | 2016-08-28T22:51:59 | null | 2016-08-28T21:00:42 |
Ken Wyatt, Jacqui Lambie, Patrick Dodson and Linda Burney to share stories with youth representatives as part of campaign
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Faustralia-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Findigenous-mps-to-meet-youth-in-push-for-constitutional-recognition.json
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Indigenous MPs to meet youth in push for constitutional recognition
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Indigenous youth representatives will travel to Canberra on Monday to meet four Indigenous MPs as part of a campaign to raise awareness of reasons to recognise the First Australians in the constitution.
The Liberal MP Ken Wyatt, the independent senator Jacqui Lambie, and the Labor MP Linda Burney and senator Patrick Dodson will meet with the representatives and share their stories about why they support constitutional recognition.
In a statement the Recognise organisation noted the 45th parliament boasted the highest number of Indigenous representatives in parliament in Australia’s history, making this the moment to achieve constitutional recognition.
Indigenous recognition referendum likely to be delayed until 2018 Read more
A Recognise youth representative who is travelling to Canberra from Adelaide, Rebekka Rogers, said: “I know that with constitutional recognition and the removal of racial discrimination from our constitution our country will be better and I am prepared to fight for that.”
Kayameshia Kells from Alice Springs said the record numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the parliament was “a great source of hope and inspiration for young Indigenous people”.
Almost 50 years after the 1967 referendum removed two constitutional provisions discrimination against Indigenous Australians, Recognise is launching a campaign called Why I Recognise. The campaign will share 50 stories about why recognition is important, including personal messages from the Indigenous MPs.
The campaign for constitutional recognition is entering a fragile period. Although support for recognition is high many delegates to the referendum council which is designing the proposal have called for recognition to be scrapped in favour of a treaty.
The deadline for the constitutional recognition referendum has been pushed back until 2018 to allow for better consultation with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.
Labor has said it would consider a treaty with Aboriginal Australians in addition to constitutional recognition, a proposal which led the government to accuse it of putting at risk “meaningful but modest” change in the form of constitutional recognition.
A Recognise spokeswoman told Guardian Australia preparations for the Why I Recognise campaign had shown that there is strong support for recognition across the Australian community, including bipartisan support for it. “When this moves towards a referendum, multiparty support is critical,” she said.
Most voters support Indigenous treaty and constitutional recognition: survey Read more
A Recognise ambassador, Mark Yettica-Paulson, said the movement for constitutional change across the country was strong and almost 300,000 Australians had signed on to support the campaign.
“People from across Australia want to be part of fixing our constitution and to leave a legacy for future generations that we can all be proud of,” Yettica-Paulson said.
“It’s great to see parliamentarians from across the political spectrum come together to support the movement for constitutional change and maintain momentum. We can’t leave this to the next generation.
“Having tomorrow’s leaders – our youth representatives – meet and share their aspirations with politicians who are making history in this new parliament is a big step forward.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/29/indigenous-mps-to-meet-youth-in-push-for-constitutional-recognition
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en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6e56b74d858bc584a1f833b7ca421ef7c5ce0335bc022877bfe7c469883f2234.json
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[
"Guardian Readers"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:14 | null | 2016-08-23T09:51:27 |
As part of a new series on elephant conservation we’d like to hear your elephant experiences
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fshare-your-encounters-with-elephants.json
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Share your encounters with elephants
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www.theguardian.com
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Over the next year we’re going to be covering the plight of elephants around the world. The numbers of these beautiful animals – now our largest land mammal – have been in steep decline for a century and now face more serious challenges than ever, due to poaching, habitat destruction, and conflict with man.
Please help with our coverage by getting in touch and telling us your own stories, encounters and campaigns. Are you a wildlife campaigner in Asia? A grassroots activist in Africa? Whoever you are, we want to hear from you about your own encounters with elephants.
You can get in touch by filling in our form below. We’ll include some of your contributions in our ongoing reporting.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/share-your-encounters-with-elephants
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| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/cc6b6e8bc7f3862654a2d1ff0e37bd558f69adaeaceed5729c5bdac174050396.json
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[
"John Naughton"
] | 2016-08-28T08:49:36 | null | 2016-08-28T07:59:26 |
It’s hypocritical of Mark Zuckerberg to sing the praises of the web’s founder when he’s trying to monopolise the internet
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Ftim-berners-lee-open-web-mark-zuckerberg-facebook.json
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Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook
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I f there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: “Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.”
Aw, isn’t that nice? From one “pioneer” to another. What a pity, then, that it is a combination of bullshit and hypocrisy. In relation to the former, the guy who invented the web, Tim Berners-Lee, is as mystified by this “anniversary” as everyone else. “Who on earth made up 23 August?” he asked on Twitter. Good question. In fact, as the Guardian pointed out: “If Facebook had asked Berners-Lee, he’d probably have told them what he’s been telling people for years: the web’s 25th birthday already happened, two years ago.”
“In 1989, I delivered a proposal to Cern for the system that went on to become the worldwide web,” he wrote in 2014. It was that year, not this one, that he said we should celebrate as the web’s 25th birthday.
It’s not the inaccuracy that grates, however, but the hypocrisy. Zuckerberg thanks Berners-Lee for “making the world more open and connected”. So do I. What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more “connected” but less open. Facebook is what we used to call a “walled garden” and now call a silo: a controlled space in which people are allowed to do things that will amuse them while enabling Facebook to monetise their data trails. One network to rule them all. If you wanted a vision of the opposite of the open web, then Facebook is it.
Facebook's founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his approval
The thing that makes the web distinctive is also what made the internet special, namely that it was designed as an open platform. It was designed to facilitate “permissionless innovation”. If you had a good idea that could be realised using data packets, and possessed the programming skills to write the necessary software, then the internet – and the web – would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn’t need much in the way of financial resources – or to ask anyone for permission – in order to realise your dream.
An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It’s what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world. And in the process create an empire of 1.7 billion subjects with apparently limitless revenues. That’s what permissionless innovation is like.
The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But – guess what? – the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need.
Ironically, Zuckerberg’s cynical tribute to Tim Berners-Lee came a day after Nick Denton published his obituary of Gawker, the pioneering and raucous news website that he created 13 years ago. Gawker was bankrupted – and ultimately shuttered – by a privacy action that had been funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley eccentric (and Trump supporter) who had been infuriated by a Gawker article that called for Thiel to be recognised as the world’s most successful gay venture capitalist.
As that uber-blogger Dave Winer observed: “Gawker is gone because Peter Thiel financed its murder-by-lawyer. It’s legal to do this in the US, but until now as far as I know, no one has crossed this line. Now that the line has been crossed, it’s fair to assume it will become standard practice for billionaires like Thiel to finance lawsuits until the publication loses and has to sell itself to pay the judgment.”
I wasn’t ever a great admirer of Gawker, but Dave Winer is right: Thiel’s strategy demonstrates how tech money not only talks, but can now also suppress freedom of expression, even in the land of the first amendment. Interestingly, Thiel is also a member of Facebook’s board of directors. So will Zuckerberg’s commitment to an “open and connected world” extend to firing him? You only have to ask the question to know the answer. Hypocrisy rules OK.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/28/tim-berners-lee-open-web-mark-zuckerberg-facebook
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| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0a844470b41912879f2d1356a6e495aa7bc6a5954c3c81cce5f1ee1b10969ea4.json
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[
"First Dog On The Moon"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:00 | null | 2016-08-26T06:02:01 |
In Scott’s bar and grill, we serve everyone except pieces of string and poor people, or as we call them now, the “taxed-not”
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fa-piece-of-string-a-banana-and-a-cassowary-walk-into-scott-morrisons-bar.json
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A piece of string, a banana, and a cassowary walk into Scott Morrison's bar
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/a-piece-of-string-a-banana-and-a-cassowary-walk-into-scott-morrisons-bar
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/22071ab062280d5712895676ca986081cbc8ce83b4c9f4fa6ec7a2f5f89d8045.json
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[
"Associated Press"
] | 2016-08-29T22:52:37 | null | 2016-08-29T22:01:04 |
In a matchup of American tennis present and future, 31-year-old John Isner rallied from down two sets to edge 18-year-old Frances Tiafoe
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Fjohn-isner-frances-tiafoe-us-open-cici-bellis.json
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John Isner beats Frances Tiafoe in battle of US tennis's present and future
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www.theguardian.com
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In a matchup of American tennis present and future, 31-year-old John Isner rallied from down two sets to edge 18-year-old Frances Tiafoe in the first round of the US Open.
The 125th-ranked Tiafoe had a chance to serve out the match in the fifth set Monday, but Isner broke back then pulled away in the final tiebreaker to win 3-6, 4-6, 7-6 (7-5), 6-2, 7-6 (7-3) in three hours and 27 minutes.
It was just the second career comeback from two sets down for Isner. Tiafoe had never before played a five-set match.
How David Foster Wallace illuminates the US Open – even without Federer Read more
The 20th-seeded Isner has finished each of the last four years as the top-ranked US man and has now won 11 straight grand slam first-round matches. He’s 5-0 against fellow Americans at majors.
Tiafoe, who got in with a wild card, has just two career tour-level wins. He had played in two previous grand slam tournaments, losing in the first round both times.
Earlier in the day, another American teenager, CiCi Bellis, won her first round encounter. The darling of the 2014 tournament after she stunned Australian Open runner-up Dominika Cibulkova as a 15-year-old, Bellis is back in the main draw this year and beat 65th-ranked Viktorija Golubic 6-2, 6-3.
Bellis, now 17, is ranked 158th and advanced through qualifying to make the field. She next faces another American, Shelby Rogers, who upset 27th-seeded Sara Errani.
Playing with his left wrist heavily bandaged, Rafael Nadal won his first grand slam match in more than three months, easily beating Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan 6-1, 6-4, 6-2.
Nadal’s first-round victory in Arthur Ashe Stadium was straightforward. He produced 14 of his 21 winners via his forehand, which showed little sign of being troubled by a wrist he says is still not completely healed.
Nadal hadn’t played at a major since winning his second-round match at the French Open on May 26. He then withdrew from Roland Garros before the third round and sat out Wimbledon because of the problematic wrist.
Elsewhere, the French Open champion Garbine Muguruza lost the first set, called for the trainer and complained about trouble breathing. She won the second set without dropping a game, then pulled out a tough third set to move on to the second round.
The third-seeded Spaniard beat Belgian qualifier Elise Mertens 2-6, 6-0, 6-3. She had to save a break point at 3-3 in the third.
The 22-year-old Muguruza went just 3-3 in her next six matches after winning her first major title at Roland Garros, before making a semi-final run at Cincinnati.
With temperatures soaring, the heat rule went into effect before the third set, giving the players a 10-minute break.
The 137th-ranked Mertens is 20 years old and was making her Grand Slam debut. This was the first time she faced a top-20 opponent. Muguruza has never gone past the second round at the US Open.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/29/john-isner-frances-tiafoe-us-open-cici-bellis
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| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1c3e3961feaaf446b817b2e7c3b2d9201ac8d426f80f55f5065a6381910a9b6b.json
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[
"Emine Saner"
] | 2016-08-30T18:55:25 | null | 2016-08-30T16:54:52 |
Ireland may be reluctant to take a huge tax payment by the tech giant, but think about what they could do with the cash …
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2Fshortcuts%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fnine-ways-ireland-could-spend-apple-13bn-payback.json
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A tunnel to Wales or a gallery full of Gauguins: how Ireland could spend Apple’s money
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After Apple was ordered to pay €13bn (£11bn) plus interest in back taxes to Ireland, following a ruling by the European commission that the country had given the tech giant illegal tax benefits, it looked as if the Irish were in for a windfall. Except Ireland doesn’t want it. The finance minister, Michael Noonan, says the government will appeal against the ruling, which will hit Ireland’s reputation for low taxes. But here is what they could do with the money:
Create an Ireland-Wales tunnel
A rail tunnel, similar to the Channel tunnel, has been envisioned for years, linking Dublin to Holyhead in north Wales. It would run for 50 miles under the Irish sea and could take just over an hour to cross – its cost has been put at around £15bn.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Olympics … from Rio to Dublin? Photograph: Franck Robichon/EPA
Host the Dublin Olympics
London 2012 cost about £9bn, so there would be plenty of change left over to nurture medal-winning athletes. Team GB’s Rio medal haul was the payoff for £274.5m of investment.
Build a new town for post-Brexit UK exiles
Admittedly, not one that could house all 16,141,241 remain voters, and a million or so regretful leavers, but one or two new towns could be a start.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Large Hadron Collider. Photograph: Rex Features
Fund amazing science
Ireland could get its own Large Hadron Collider (about £4bn) or send a rover to Mars (Nasa’s Curiosity exploration vehicle cost £1.9bn). China spends about £4.5bn a year on its space programme, and Russia even less.
Buy incredible art
Until the matter of whether a number of masterpieces in the National Gallery in London actually belong to Ireland is solved, the country could amass quite an art collection. Ireland could follow Qatar, which has become a significant art buyer, spending £1bn annually on building a collection for the Qatar Museums Authority (including, it was rumoured, £200m for a Paul Gauguin painting last year).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hello, Cork! Photograph: John Shearer/Getty Images for MTV.com
Get Kanye to perform every night
Kanye West reportedly turned down an offer of a short Las Vegas residency that would have earned him £380,000 a show. Perhaps it wasn’t enough. Ireland could offer a bit more – say, £400,000 – and have him perform every night for the next 82 years.
Gain footballing glory
They have more than a consonant change as a point of difference, but the way tiny Iceland has become a footballing nation – thanks to a huge investment in pitches and coaching at grassroots level – is an inspirational model to any small nation, particularly those with an unexpected £11bn windfall.
Or do something sensible with it
Such as pay for Ireland’s health service for a year. Or make a small dent in the national debt.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2016/aug/30/nine-ways-ireland-could-spend-apple-13bn-payback
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e37fda64eb1c69e243c55f0a8f9fde672a2c43c6fae8c25a45cf005fd674023d.json
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[
"Paula Kahumbu"
] | 2016-08-29T08:57:27 | null | 2016-08-29T08:49:12 |
Paula Kahumbu: Elephant diplomacy is helping to get Japan on board in efforts towards a global ban on ivory trade
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fafrica-wild%2F2016%2Faug%2F29%2Four-message-to-japan-africas-elephants-need-your-support.json
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Our message to Japan: Africa's elephants need your support
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The global coalition for a total ban on the trade in ivory is taking shape. In Africa calls for the ban are led by the 29 nation African Elephant Coalition (AEC). In the consumer countries, both the US President Obama and China’s President Xi have made commitments to close the domestic markets which will have a huge impact on demand.
To be sure, progress towards building the coalition is uneven. Key African nations such as Zimbabwe and Namibia are opposed to the ban, and have even petitioned CITES for a relaxation of current restrictions. In Europe, while the French Environment Minister Ségolène Royal has signed a decree banning the trade, in the UK the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says it is still “working” on its pledge to implement a total ban on ivory sales.
Conservation organisations used the occasion of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), held in Nairobi on 27 and 28 of August to call for Japan to throw its considerable weight behind the campaign to ban the ivory trade.
Their statement, published in English and Japanese and signed by representatives of 21 African, Japanese and international conservation groups, concluded as follows:
Japan is one of Africa’s most important development partners. They have made major contributions and commitments to support conservation. Now the conservation community call for 5 actions to be agreed at TICAD: 1. Japan to permanently close legal domestic markets of ivory, and aggressively close down online trading sites that deal in ivory, all to crush demand.
2. Japan to suspend ivory registration immediately, to prevent loopholes that allow fraudulent registration and laundering of illegal ivory. 3. Japan to support the Elephant Protection Initiative. 4. Japan to strengthen cooperation on elephant conservation initiatives and combating the trafficking of ivory to Japan through joint investigations and mutual legal assistance. 5. Japan’s Prime Minister and First Lady to jointly issue statements to discourage the selling and buying of ivory in Japan and to initiate an education and outreach campaign to Japanese citizens on the importance of saving elephants by stopping poaching and ending ivory trade.
Kenya is proud to be hosting the first TICAD conference in Africa and we look forward to positive outcomes of the discussions that the conservation community.
Japan’s support is important for three reasons. Firstly, Japan is a highly respected and influential development partner in Africa. If Japan speaks up for elephants, its voice will be heard and listened to, in ivory producer and consumer countries alike.
Secondly, Japan’s willingness to take the politically difficult decision to close down the domestic ivory trade in support of calls by AEC will provide further evidence of her commitment to ‘African ownership’ of its development.
The third reason is that banning the ivory trade is essential to fulfil Japan’s long-term commitment to fostering peace and stability on the African continent. While the spotlight has been on China, the world’s largest market for ivory, Japan’s contribution to fuelling the poaching and ivory trafficking epidemic in Africa has remained in the shadows.
In fact, the situation in Japan provides one of the clearest examples of why elephants can only be saved by banning all trade in ivory, not just the ‘illegal’ trade. Sales of ivory are legal in Japan but recent evidence has highlighted how it is impossible to distinguish legal and illegal ivory.
Speaking on the Kenyan TV programme ‘NTV Wild Talk’ Airi Yamawaki, co-founder of the Japanese-Kenyan NGO ‘Tears of the African Elephant’ described how an ivory tusk can be registered as ‘legal’ in Japan simply by asking a neighbour to sign a document vouching that is has been in your family for a long time. Registered tusks are not marked, so that same registration form can be used for multiple tusks, again and again. No registration at all is required for pieces of ivory weighing less than 1 kg.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Airi Yamawaki of the NGO ‘Tears of the African Elephant’ talks about Japanese involvement in the ivory trade on the Kenyan TV series NTV Wild Talk. The interviewer is Smriti Vidyarthi.
Statistics from National Geographic show that as at 2014, Japan had registered 6,000 tusks, up from 500 in 2010. Yahoo Japan also closed sales worth $7 million in 2014, up from $2 million four years earlier. According to a recent report by Environmental Investigation Agency, there is no meaningful control of the illegal ivory trade in Japan even at the most basic level.
Airi Yamawaki described how in Japan, as in China, ignorance of consumers is the biggest problem that needs to be overcome. Ivory is used mainly to manufacture ‘Hankos’, personal seals that are required by law in order to conduct business transactions. These seals can be made of many materials, but ivory is supposed to bring luck, so people choose ivory without even thinking about it—and without any knowledge of where the ivory comes from.
Tears of the African Elephant has been working hard to change this situation by raising awareness among Japanese consumers through its project “No Ivory Generation” and reaching out to conservation organisation in Kenya. According to Airi:
It is important that the international community does not underestimate Japan’s role as an ivory consumer and the effect of legal ivory trade. With Kenya having hosted TICAD6, I hope that Kenya will use their friendship with Japan, to win their support on elephant conservation.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visitors and activists pose at a stall set up by the NGO ‘Tears of the African Elephant’ to raise awareness in Japan about the threat to elephants from the ivory trade. Photograph: Tears of the African Elephant
Now elephants have a new and influential ally in Akie Abe, wife of the Japanese Prime Minister. While the politicians (almost all of them men, of course) were talking on Sunday, the first ladies of Japan and 6 African countries braved a cold morning in Nairobi to visit the elephant orphanage run by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT), where they were received by Angela Sheldrick and the First Lady of Kenya Margaret Kenyatta.
It was an emotional visit. I have been to see the baby elephants many times, and I’ve fallen in love with and adopted four of the orphans, but this was a particularly moving experience.
The First Ladies stood and waited as the hungry babies ran towards them hungry for their milk. Each of the ladies got to bottle feed them with giant one litre bottles. The babies held their bottles in their clumsy trunks and you could see their eyes curiously tracking these new nannies. One couldn’t help feeling a pang of motherhood. Hands reached out and stroked the babies, feeling their furry heads.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The First Ladies of Kenya, Japan and six other African countries on a visit to the David Sheldrick Elephant & Rhino Orphanage, Nairobi, during the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), held in Nairobi on 27 and 28 of August, 2016. Photograph: Mureithi PSCU/Courtesy of The Star, Kenya
Akie Abe was silently focusing on one particular elephant Kauro, a rather large 2 year old bull whose tiny tusks are only just showing. Kauro had been rescued after falling down a well by rangers on the Sera Conservancy in northern Kenya (click here to read the story and see the video of his rescue ). After the first few moments of being with him, tears began to flow down her cheeks. Akie said “I don’t know why I’m crying” and Angela responded, “it’s because you have connected”. We were all teary eyed.
I described to the participants how the presence of the orphans at the sanctuary was the result of ordinary people taking action to rescue elephants in distress. I spoke about the powerful bond that Kenyans have with elephants, which are even revered as gods in some tribes. Some people believe that we came from elephants and that is why we must aspire to be like them, empathetic and fiercely protective of one another. I also explained their keystone role in the ecology of Africa.
Following her visit, Mrs Abe posted the following comment on her Facebook page:
I was invited by First Lady Mrs Kenyatta, who is also doing a lot of conservation work, to visit the Sheldrick’s animal orphanage. Baby elephants who lost their mothers to poaching… They may have been traumatised by seeing their mother killed right in front of them, yet they come and so innocently play with us. Feeding them milk, stroking them… I felt a kind of connection with these babies. And before I realized I was in tears. It almost felt like touching God… More and more elephants are slaughtered for the sake of ivory. Elephants maintain our forests and protect our environments. We Japanese, who have a taste for ivory, must not turn our back on this issue as something happening far away…
These wise words—and the experience which inspired them—prove once again what I have long known: that elephants are their own best ambassadors.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/africa-wild/2016/aug/29/our-message-to-japan-africas-elephants-need-your-support
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/d891d70ed0a1151dd50d4e805b339c76fcc368334f5921035291f3ef75d0e4ec.json
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[
"Donna Ferguson",
"Suzanne Moore"
] | 2016-08-31T02:59:57 | null | 2014-03-11T00:00:00 |
How would you like to get paid £40,000 a year for shopping? Some mystery shoppers achieve this, but it's not as easy as it sounds
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2014%2Fmar%2F11%2Fsecrets-mystery-shopper.json
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The secrets of the mystery shopper
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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The customer next to you in the queue looks innocent enough. But instead of a shopping list, you notice she's carrying handwritten notes about the appearance and cleanliness of the store. She's been timing the progression of the queue on her phone … and is that a tiny camera lens peeking out from her purse? There's no trenchcoat in sight, but odds are, you've just spotted a mystery shopper.
There are approximately 50,000 mystery shopping trips carried out every month in the UK, according to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA), and as more and more spending takes place online, the demand for mystery shoppers is growing. "Retailers are becoming increasingly aware that shoppers who are prepared to set foot in a physical store want a service and an experience they can't get online," says Simon Boydell, spokesman for Marketforce, which has more than 300,000 mystery shoppers on its books. "Our clients want to measure how well their stores are delivering on that experience."
Sainsbury's, John Lewis, the Post Office and Metro Bank all use mystery shopping company ABa to score their stores, which then helps to determine staff bonuses and identify any training issues. "We assign different store locations to each shopper and rotate them so that they never go back to the same shop within three months," says ABa spokeswoman Jill Spencer. "Each day, they typically spend up to eight hours visiting five to 10 stores, plus another hour or two filing detailed reports on every aspect of their visit." For that, the mystery shoppers can earn up to £155 a day. They are also reimbursed for their petrol and hotel stays, and compensated for their car depreciation (the shoppers can be expected to drive as many as 20,000 miles a year). Meanwhile, video mystery shoppers, who film their visits with a hidden camera planted in a buttonhole or handbag, can earn even more – around £300 a day.
Shoppers are usually repaid any money they spend in the stores, and may also be allowed to keep the products they buy. "I'm typically given between £5 and £20 to spend at each store, to assess the service I receive at the till," says Laura, a 50-year old mystery shopper from Devon, who has been paid to visit around 7,000 shops since 2001. The purchase usually has to be related to a service or a type of product that the retailer wants her to check. "I'm always given a scenario, such as buying something from a specific department or a new product range, but within that framework, I can often buy whatever I want – and keep it."
Like most full-time mystery shoppers, Laura is self-employed, taking jobs from ABa and other mystery shopping companies as and when they come up. Her income is typically £30,000 to £40,000 a year, and that doesn't include all the freebies she gets on the job. "With the perks, it's enough to live on. But I don't do it because I love shopping. In fact, I hate shopping now. When I'm not working, it pains me to have to go out and buy a pint of milk."
Is that a grocery list or notes on her shopping experience? Photograph: Paul Burns/Getty Images
She does, however, find it satisfying to return to a store she has previously mystery shopped and see standards have improved. "I know it must be because of my feedback or why would they pay me to give it? Some of the retailers I shop at win awards for customer service, and I think that is down to us mystery shoppers. I feel I'm not just doing a service for my company, I'm doing a service for all shoppers everywhere."
Sadly, regular mystery shopping assignments that pay like Laura's are few and far between. In fact, competition is so fierce, she keeps her job a closely guarded secret and even her friends and family don't know who she works for (Laura is not her real name).
It's estimated that more than 500,000 people have registered as mystery shoppers in the UK, but just 10% or fewer manage to get regular work each month and this has led to a dramatic reduction in compensation. "Where once you got a fee, reimbursement for your purchase and mileage, you now often just receive a contribution towards a purchase," say Val, a 51-year-old former mystery shopper. "I worked for 40 different mystery shopping companies for almost 20 years but I gave up entirely three years ago because I had bills to pay and very few assignments paid what I considered to be an acceptable rate."
Nowadays, mystery shopping companies mostly rely on the promise of freebies to incentivise their workers. "Marketforce shoppers typically get a couple of pounds for a visit as a token gesture for their time and effort," says Boydell. "At the most, we'll pay £15 to £25 plus reimbursement for say, a meal for two or a hotel stay. We don't directly employ any shoppers so we don't have to pay them the minimum wage."
Shoppers for Marketforce do not receive any recompense for their travel and, on average, get just £5 to £15 to spend during each visit, but Boydell argues the shoppers are deliberately chosen because they would be visiting those shops anyway or "are happy not being paid". For example, no fee is offered for all-inclusive trips to five-star hotels abroad, yet these jobs are usually snapped up "within 10 minutes or less" of being advertised online.
"I'd go on a cruise for nothing," says Laura. "But I think mystery shopping companies that pay you a nominal fee to travel to a restaurant and eat a meal are exploiting people. I won't touch those jobs anymore." There are plenty of people, however, that would. Hannah, a 41-year-old City lawyer, has conducted nearly 500 visits for the Mystery Dining Company in her spare time without receiving remuneration or travel expensesAs a prestigious "platinum diner", she is regularly hand-picked by the Mystery Dining Company to carry out their most exclusive assignments, enjoying £200 meals at Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurants, five-star hospitality at Ascot and overnight stays at boutique hotels.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch – even if you work for a mystery dining company. Hannah says she typically spends two to four hours after each visit writing detailed reports on everything from the quality of the food to specific interactions with staff, whom she always needs to be able to name or "subtly" describe. Trickiest of all, she must memorise all these details while eating her meal – unable, of course, to openly write anything down.
"There's lots to remember, and sometimes it can detract from the experience. You're expected to give feedback while it's fresh, so I've had to get up at 5am to write a report before work. It's a challenging thing to do; you need to be focused, articulate and detail-orientated."
Yet to some, mystery shopping is so attractive that "a few hundred people" every week are willing to spend up to two and a half hours filling in surveys at ukmysteryshopper.co.uk, just to be in with a chance of effectively winning a £100 mystery shop. "We make money when we sign people up via our surveys, we don't work for any brand we mystery shop," says spokeswoman Amy Mills. Within the surveys, she admits "there may be questions that if you select yes, you'll get text messages and there may be a charge for those messages". Would-be shoppers need to read the terms and conditions of each of the 15 10-minute surveys they are asked to complete, she says, adding that just five of those who have taken part will be selected "at random" each week to receive a £100 voucher. Their reports are then published online, apparently with their name or photo.
The MSPA warns that the industry is rife with highly organised scams. For example, emails or calls asking for money upfront may purport to be from legitimate mystery shopping companies whose entire websites have been copied to lure in unsuspecting victims. "Never pay a fee to register for work. A genuine mystery shopping company would never ask you to," says Adam Kaye, MD of mystery shopping company GAPbuster Worldwide. "There are unscrupulous people out there who promise significant sums of money if a shopper pays to join, but even the most prolific mystery shoppers aren't exactly millionaires. The reality is: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is."
Working as a mystery shopper
• Visit the mystery shopping forum thread on moneysavingexpert.com for word-of-mouth reccomendations about different companies and how they operate.
• If you are unsure about the authenticity of a company, check whether it is a vetted member of the MPSA at www.mspa-eu.org.
• Stay on the right side of the taxman: "It is unlikely that there will be a taxable profit if the mystery shopper is simply reimbursed for the cost of meals they are required to eat to fulfil their assignments," says a spokesperson HMRC. "Profits will arise, however, if any assignments involve a fee or if the mystery shopper is reimbursed for the cost of goods which they are allowed to keep. In which case the tax charge will be based on the value of those goods."
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/11/secrets-mystery-shopper
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en
| 2014-03-11T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e7bab4a627ad9eff39ae21c70f692045f42e25956280452ae59ae59d4bab5c31.json
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[
"Rupert Jones",
"Patrick Collinson",
"John Wilson"
] | 2016-08-29T04:59:34 | null | 2015-05-20T00:00:00 |
Want to earn good returns and help provide affordable homes? The Real Estate Annuity Plan is a community rental enterprise that offers 7% payments
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2015%2Fmay%2F23%2Fequfund-reap-social-housing-real-estate-annuity-plan-returns.json
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en
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You can Reap the rewards of social housing
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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It is the “ethical” alternative to buy-to-let that is targeting older people looking to cash in their pension funds, and boasts a tempting 7%-a-year return.
The Real Estate Annuity Plan (Reap) allows people to lend money to a social enterprise that specialises in converting derelict properties into affordable rented homes for those in need, such as families on council waiting lists. It is being offered by a Merseyside-based mutual organisation called Equfund, and is aimed at those looking for a better return than they would get from a traditional annuity.
Reap may also appeal to those who would like a slice of property market action but are put off by the high costs/perceived hassle/questionable ethics of buy-to-let. It allows them to use their money in a way that benefits local communities. But it’s not risk-free.
So what is Reap exactly? It is a scheme offered by Equfund whereby you loan the company money for five years. In return, it will pay interest at a rate of 7% a year gross, which you can take as a fixed monthly or quarterly income.
The loan is secured against a property – so you are effectively providing a mortgage to Equfund. That property will be used to provide affordable housing to private tenants, which will produce a rental income from which your interest will be paid. After five years you get the loan amount back in full, subject to 90 days’ notice, or you can choose to continue with the arrangement.
Who or what is Equfund? It is a social enterprise and affordable housing provider based in West Kirby on the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool. It is a community benefit society – a type of mutual similar to a co-operative whereby any profits are ploughed back into providing better services or facilities. Set up in 2000, it specialises in buying empty properties and refurbishing them, and says that over the past 15 years it has brought more than 1,000 properties back into habitable use. Equfund currently owns about 125 properties, about 60 of which are in the Merseyside area.
So how exactly does this work? The loans are only secured on the fully refurbished properties, after all the work has been carried out, and the maximum loan per property is 75% of its open market value, as assessed by an independent chartered surveyor.
Give me an example Let’s say Equfund buys a derelict two-bedroom house in Merseyside for £40,000. It’s “the worst house in a good street” and has been empty for years. Equfund spends £20,000 on repairs and improvements – perhaps a new kitchen, plumbing and electrics and so on. The property is then independently valued at, say, £80,000.
A Reap loan up to a maximum of £60,000 (ie, 75% of the value) would then be allocated to the property. We will assume it is one individual, John Smith, lending the whole £60,000, but it could be four people each lending £15,000. This leaves the remaining £20,000 free of any debt to act as a buffer against property value fluctuations.
Equfund finds tenants for the property, who pay it rent in line with Local Housing Allowance (LHA) levels, which in Liverpool is £455 a month for a two-bed property. So over 12 months, Equfund will receive £5,460 (£455 x 12) in rent. Of that, Smith gets £4,200 (7% of £60,000). After five years Smith will have received £21,000, plus he gets his original £60,000 back.
In this example, the outstanding £1,260 a year that the company receives goes into a pot to cover things such as “voids” – periods when the property is not rented out – or a broken boiler.
Who is this aimed at? Equfund says Reap is open to anyone with a minimum of £15,000 to lend/invest, but says it is “ideally suited” to retirees. If you were looking for a monthly income of £100 you would have to lend £17,100, while a monthly income of £300 would involve lending just over £51,000.
What are the downsides? The biggest drawback is that Reap isn’t covered by any financial services compensation scheme. So if Equfund were to go bust, you could potentially lose some or all of your money. Equfund director, Danny Mahon, says that what would happen is that the appointed “security trustee” (a solicitor) would step in, take charge of the property, sell it and return the money to the investor(s). Alternatively, it could keep the arrangement going and carry on paying the income.
Another downside is that while investors enjoy a regular fixed income, they don’t benefit from any increase in property values – although Reap isn’t dependant on house prices rising. So if, during the next five years, the value of the property on which Smith has his money loaned was to plunge 25%, he would still get back 100% of his original loan amount. But if the value of the property doubled, he would get back his original loan amount and no more.
What if the property crashes in value by more than 25%? Equfund insists Smith wouldn’t be out of pocket. A 30% fall, say, would reduce the £80,000 property’s value to £56,000. If that is what had happened after five years, Smith would be able to demand his full £60,000 back, and the society would have to make up the £4,000 difference. “We’ve borrowed money and must give that money back, otherwise we are in default,” Mahon says. However, Smith might opt instead to carry on receiving an income, during which time prices might bounce back.
Anything else? Your income is unaffected if there are void periods or the tenant gets into arrears, says the society, which also takes care of “everything from finding tenants and checking references to managing an inventory and dealing with unexpected problems”.
Are there any fees or charges? No.
Why is it an ethical option? Equfund says that as well as bringing empty homes back into use, it is offering tenants affordable decent housing, while providing investors with a fair return.
It adds that it caters for the tenants that some other landlords “choose to avoid”. The society also caps its rents by making its properties among the cheapest 30% available locally, and where possible aims to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/may/23/equfund-reap-social-housing-real-estate-annuity-plan-returns
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en
| 2015-05-20T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/3fd8b18eb731da225e17236ca2ddd99dcd47be0040e35cbadc3ae2320a544276.json
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[
"Reuters At Flushing Meadows"
] | 2016-08-31T10:52:57 | null | 2016-08-31T01:54:05 |
Top seed, who has been struggling with a shoulder injury, threw down 12 aces in 6-3 6-3 victory over Russian opponent
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Fserena-williams-ekaterina-makarova-us-open.json
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Serena Williams sweeps past Ekaterina Makarova to reach second round
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www.theguardian.com
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World No1 Serena Williams opened her US Open account with a tidy 6-3 6-3 win over Ekaterina Makarova on Tuesday, to join her sister Venus in the second round of the year’s final grand slam.
Serena Williams beats Ekaterina Makarova: US Open – as it happened Read more
Williams, whose status as world number one is under attack from several fronts, delivered a message that she will not be surrendering the top spot without a fight, needing just 63 minutes to dispatch the 29th-ranked Russian.
Germany’s Angelique Kerber and Spain’s Garbine Muguruza, who have both beaten Williams in slam finals this season, along with Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanska, will all be eyeing the number one ranking should the American’s bid for a 23rd grand slam title stall.
Williams has held the No1 spot since 18 February 2013 and will extend her streak to 186 consecutive weeks by the end of the US Open fortnight, tying the WTA record currently held by Steffi Graf.
Back on Arthur Ashe Stadium court for the first time since a shock loss to Italy’s Roberta Vinci in last year’s US Open semi-finals, Williams made quick work of Makarova to follow the lead of her sister Venus.
Sixth-seeded Venus had provided the opening act for sister Serena when she outlasted Ukraine’s Kateryna Kozlova 6-2 5-7 6-4 before turning over the Arthur Ashe Stadium court to her top-seeded sibling.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/30/serena-williams-ekaterina-makarova-us-open
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en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/11ffbc426927119a0f1bf8c2267d841c2a045d8925ff197aad467eeffe551398.json
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[
"Simon Burnton"
] | 2016-08-27T18:51:26 | null | 2016-08-27T18:10:43 |
Arsène Wenger praised the performance of Mesut Özil as the German midfielder was in outstanding form on his return to the Arsenal side in the 3-1 win at Watford
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffootball%2F2016%2Faug%2F27%2Farsene-wenger-mesut-ozil-arsenal-win-watford-return.json
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Arsène Wenger praises returning Mesut Özil in Arsenal victory over Watford
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Arsène Wenger hailed the impact made by Mesut Özil after the German belatedly kickstarted Arsenal’s season with a performance of real verve and quality in a 3-1 victory at Watford. All of his side’s goals and most of their best moments were compressed into a first half in which Özil, making his first start of the campaign, and Alexis Sánchez were outstanding.
“Özil was excellent, especially in the first half,” he said. “In the second half we dropped physically, but of course we need him. I think what we have seen from him today is what we want of him, assists but also to score goals. I’m very happy he scored today because that’s what he needed to add to his game.”
Arsenal’s Mesut Özil and Alexis Sánchez turn on style against Watford Read more
With his influence on the game fading Özil was taken off after 70 minutes as Arsenal protected what was by then a two-goal advantage. “Overall I think it was a strong performance, very fluent in the first half,” Wenger said. “In the second half we still created many chances but we missed something in the final ball, and we are not capable yet to maintain for 90 minutes exactly the same intensity physically.”
Wenger nursed Özil back to fitness having granted him an extended break after Euro 2016, in which time Arsenal were beaten at home by Liverpool and drew at Leicester, but immediately loses him once again, with Özil named in Germany’s squad to face Finland and Norway.
“I believe we paid a heavy price in our first game because we were not ready, we did not have the players back,” Wenger said. “Now Mesut is nearly ready, not quite, and he goes again. For us the break is not welcome. To reach our best level will take perhaps two more weeks – it would have been easy for us if the players stayed at home.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/27/arsene-wenger-mesut-ozil-arsenal-win-watford-return
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/91a49fd34e1102f05332e8c2c7b472787cde3d2ec9adb0b864a2f727337568eb.json
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[
"Maria Reguera"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:21 | null | 2016-08-25T06:10:03 |
The Pokémon Go craze has brought the unlikeliest of visitors to local libraries – and one London library is making the most of it
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Pokémon: gotta catch them all, even in the library
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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With the Pokémon Go app taking the world by storm, public buildings such as ours have found themselves inundated by visitors staring intently at their smartphones. Like many libraries, Redbridge central library in Ilford, north-east London, happens to be a designated PokéStop where participants can revive their Pokémon, collect more balls (used to catch Pokémon), and collect eggs that the characters hatch from.
We have acted fast to make the most of our new-found popularity to attract new clientele. We not only advertise our PokéStop status and the number of Pokémon on site, but also run a series of events for families to learn about technology, while playing the game.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest One library visitor celebrates bagging a new Gastly Pokémon. Photograph: Maria Reguera
I came up with the idea after reading about a priest in Spain who was pleased the app was bringing more people to his church. I thought if Pokémon could bring more people to a church, it could be a great way for me to bring more people to the library.
So I started tweeting that we were a PokéStop and took pictures of the Pokémon I found among the books to encourage people to visit. A lot of the young people who come to the library to play the game don’t come here normally, especially the teenagers.
We have targeted families because we know that Pokémon Go appeals to all generations. The events, held weekly, include advice on privacy issues and online security, and are a chance for me to publicise our free Wi-Fi facility, computers, e-books and e-magazines.
It’s been popular. Eight people came to the first session, but word of mouth meant that increased to 21 the following week, and we’ll continue to run them if the demand is still there once the schools go back in September.
— InIlford.com (@InIlford) Even #Pokemon love @RedbridgeLibs! It's a hot spot for catching them! #PokemonGO pic.twitter.com/xuS5vl6SmR
It has had an impact on noise levels in the library. The children call out when they discover a new Pokémon or manage to catch one, but I think anybody who uses local libraries knows they are multi-purpose now. While they are still perfect for quiet studying or reading, they are also spaces full of energy and creativity. Most people just laugh when they see what we are up to, and then continue with whatever they were doing.
It’s important for libraries to embrace new technology and media and to teach the public to do that, too. More of Redbridge council’s services are moving online, and having a good grasp of technology means that local residents will feel confident about accessing information online.
Our efforts in this area – and my role for Vision RCL (Redbridge culture and libraries), which focuses on digital services and innovation – means we are now where people can learn about technology and digital media, in a non-threatening environment.
It’s important to think beyond the walls of the library. I always keep it in the back of my mind, looking for what’s on trend, motivating people, or getting them talking. We should also be asking for feedback from our users – I always ask parents and children attending my events for ideas and suggestions. Even if it’s not feasible right now, it might be one day, so keep a folder for ideas, and hold on to even the craziest.
Maria Reguera is library development officer at Redbridge central library.
Talk to us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic and sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday.
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| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
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[
"Guardian Sport"
] | 2016-08-26T13:18:06 | null | 2016-08-26T10:41:44 |
Thierry Henry will serve as an assistant to the new Belgium coach Roberto Martínez, the Belgian federation has announced
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Thierry Henry joins Belgium coaching staff as assistant to Roberto Martínez
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Thierry Henry will serve as an assistant to the new Belgium coach Roberto Martínez, the Belgian federation has announced.
Arsène Wenger confirms Lucas Pérez and Shkodran Mustafi set for Arsenal moves Read more
Henry will be part of the backroom staff alongside Graeme Jones, who was Martínez’s assistant at Swansea, Wigan and Everton. The announcement was made as Martinez named his first senior squad since taking the Belgium job after Euro 2016.
“Thierry brings something completely different. He’s someone who has been in the situation of having to develop a mentality in a team of chasing the dream of winning something special for his country,” said Martínez. “He is very much an important figure in our staff and we hope he will pass on his experience to the players.
“I’m very pleased with the effort of the federation to put in a support staff as impressive as it is. But always remember that the star is the talent of the players.
“The attacking quality that we have in our group is very rich. Thierry Henry’s experience of being able to go through that situation that we have as a team is going to be very important. Then when you go into the basics of simple attacking drills, as player you can get a lot from him. That’s going to be a big role from Thierry’s point of view.””
It was also announced that fitness coach Richard Evans, who like Jones followed Martinez from Swansea to Everton via Wigan, would take up a similar role with the national team
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
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[
"Robin Mckie"
] | 2016-08-26T14:57:03 | null | 2016-08-21T06:00:08 |
Scientist Peter Wadhams believes the summer ice cover at the north pole is about to disappear, triggering even more rapid global warming
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‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’
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Peter Wadhams has spent his career in the Arctic, making more than 50 trips there, some in submarines under the polar ice. He is credited with being one of the first scientists to show that the thick icecap that once covered the Arctic ocean was beginning to thin and shrink. He was director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge since 2001. His book, A Farewell to Ice, tells the story of his unravelling of this alarming trend and describes what the consequences for our planet will be if Arctic ice continues to disappear at its current rate.
You have said on several occasions that summer Arctic sea ice would disappear by the middle of this decade. It hasn’t. Are you being alarmist?
No. There is a clear trend down to zero for summer cover. However, each year chance events can give a boost to ice cover or take some away. The overall trend is a very strong downward one, however. Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free. You will be able to cross over the north pole by ship. There will still be about a million square kilometres of ice in the Arctic in summer but it will be packed into various nooks and crannies along the Northwest Passage and along bits of the Canadian coastline. Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.
Why should we be concerned about an Arctic that is free of ice in summer?
People tend to think of an ice-free Arctic in summer in terms of it merely being a symbol of global change. Things happen, they say. In fact, the impact will be profound and will effect the whole planet and its population. One key effect will be albedo feedback. Sea ice reflects about 50% of the solar radiation it receives back into space. By contrast, water reflects less than 10%. So if you replace ice with water, which is darker, much more solar heat will be absorbed by the ocean and the planet will heat up even more rapidly than it is doing at present.
Sea ice also acts as an air-conditioning system. Winds coming over the sea to land masses such as Siberia and Greenland will no longer be cooled as they pass over ice and these places will be heated even further. These effects could add 50% to the impact of global warming that is produced by rising carbon emissions.
In the end, the only hope we have is to find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has got there
What will be the effects of this accelerating increase in temperatures?
The air over Greenland will get warmer and more and more of its ice will melt. It is already losing about 300 cubic kilometres of ice a year. Antarctica is adding to the melt as well. Sea-level rises will accelerate as a result. The most recent prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that seas will rise by 60 to 90 centimetres this century. I think a rise of one to two metres is far more likely. Indeed, it is probably the best we can hope for.
That may not sound a lot but it is really very serious. It will increase enormously the frequency of storm surges all over the world. We may be able to raise the Thames barrier in Britain but in Bangladesh, it just means more and more people will be drowned.
Global warming is generally associated with increased fossil-fuel burning and consequent rises in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But is that the only climate problem we face?
No it is not. We also have the issue of methane. Russian scientists who have investigated waters off their coast have detected more and more plumes of methane bubbling up from the seabed. The reason this is happening is closely connected with the warming of the planet and the shrinking of the Arctic icecaps.
Until around 2005, even in summer, you still had sea ice near the coast. Then it started to disappear, so that for three or four months a year warm water reached the shallow waters around the shores where there had been permafrost ground since the last ice age. It has started to melt with dangerous consequences. Underneath the permafrost there are sediments full of methane hydrates. When the permafrost goes, you release the pressure on top of these hydrates and the methane comes out of solution.
Can we monitor this methane just as we can monitor carbon dioxide?
Yes, we can measure methane over large areas using satellites. These have shown that methane levels that had been fairly flat for most of the last century have started to rise and are accelerating, often with little outliers on the graph. There is a scientist called Jason Box who works in Denmark for the Greenland Survey and he calls these outliers dragon’s breath. They are not some sort of measurement caused by dodgy instruments. They are real pulses of methane coming from offshore flumes.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image from the NOAA/Nasa Suomi NPP satellite taken on May 30, 2016, highlights the Arctic ice retreat off the north-west coast of Alaska. The average Arctic sea ice extent for May 2016 set a new record low since satellite observations began. Photograph: Suomi NPP/NASA/NOAA
How intense is methane as a heater of the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide?
It is 23 times more powerful. However, methane dissipates much more quickly than carbon dioxide. It gets oxidised so that it only lingers in the atmosphere for about seven or eight years. By contrast, carbon dioxide hangs around in the climate system for about 100 years before it ends up in the sea and is absorbed by creatures that die and litter the seabed. At least that is what scientists thought. Today, there are quite a number of researchers who think carbon dioxide could last 1,000 years in the atmosphere.
So in the long run carbon dioxide is still going to be worse than methane in terms of heating the planet because a single methane pulse will have a disastrous effect but if there is nothing to follow it on then it will go away. But with carbon dioxide there is a ratchet effect. All the carbon dioxide we release by burning fossil fuels just builds up in the atmosphere. We are having to live with last century’s carbon dioxide. What that says is simple: there is no such thing as a safe emission rate of carbon dioxide. That is why I am despondent about us ever being able to cut carbon emissions.
If we cannot halt the emissions of carbon dioxide, what can we do?
In the end, the only hope we have is to find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has got there. Even the IPCC has admitted that we will have to find a way to extract carbon dioxide from the air. The trouble is that they don’t just how we can do that. The most favoured scheme is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. Essentially, you plant trees and bushes over vast swaths of ground. These grow, absorbing carbon dioxide in the process. Then you burn the wood to run power plants while trapping, liquefying and storing the carbon dioxide that is released.
Hottest ever June marks 14th month of record-breaking temperatures Read more
It sounds straightforward. Will it work?
I am a bit suspicious of this technology. BECCS will need so much land to be effective. Calculations suggest it would need 40% to 50% of the arable land of the planet to make it work on the scale we will need and that would not leave enough land to grow crops to feed the world or to provide homes for a viable population of wild animals and plants. Other techniques, such as crushing and spreading olivine rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, on beaches, will simply not scale up. They won’t work, so we will have to find some other way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly.
As far as I can see, it will have to take the form of some sort of device into which you pump air at one end and you get air without carbon dioxide coming out the other end. It can be done, I am sure, but at the moment we do not have such a device. However, without something like that I cannot see how we are going to deal with the carbon dioxide that is getting into the atmosphere. We are going to have to rely on a technology that has not yet been developed. That is a measure of the troubles that lie ahead for us. I think humanity can do it, but I would feel much better if I saw governments investing in such technology.
Farewell to Ice is published by Allen Lane (£20) on 1 September. Click here to order a copy for £16.40
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-summer-next-year
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| 2016-08-21T00:00:00 |
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[
"Tom Phillips"
] | 2016-08-31T02:52:33 | null | 2016-08-31T02:09:36 |
World leaders, including Barack Obama and Theresa May, will jet into a city that is having a multi-billion dollar makeover
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'Paradise on earth': China's Hangzhou gets propaganda facelift for G20 summit
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As China prepares to host the G20 for the first time, even its mice are feeling the heat.
A red banner, hung by Communist party officials in a rundown neighbourhood near the meeting’s venue in Hangzhou, urges residents to take up arms against the troublesome quartet of flies, cockroaches, mosquitoes and rodents before the event begins.
“Contribute to the Summit by wiping out the four pests!” it says.
World leaders including Barack Obama, Chinese president Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Theresa May will jet into the capital of Zhejiang province for the annual summit which takes place from 4-5 September.
And ahead of their arrival, China’s image-obsessed leaders have ordered a multi-billion pound makeover of this sweltering eastern metropolis, planting trees, shuttering factories and building new motorways and homes to ensure visitors go home with a good impression.
“It’s a paradise on earth!” boasts one freshly painted mural flaunting Hangzhou’s delights.
The city’s transformation has been music to the ears of residents of Mantoushan, a low-income community close to the cavernous International Expo Centre where the heads of the world’s leading economies will convene.
Construction teams have invaded the area in recent months, paving roads, digging sewers, and throwing up brand-new three-story abodes for some of its 6,800 inhabitants.
“The government is taking care of us,” enthused Chen Meixian, an 84-year-old grandmother-of-six, as she sat on the porch of one such home, gifted to her as part of the G20 upgrade. “We never thought we’d see this kind of change.”
Mantoushan’s mouse and insect populations may have suffered but Chen said she was overjoyed: thanks to the G20 she now had a toilet inside her home for the first time in more than eight decades.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chen Meixian, an 84-year-old grandmother, says that thanks to the G20 in Hangzhou she now has a bathroom at home for the first time Photograph: tom phillips for the Guardian
“China is getting richer,” she said, describing the Summit as a symbol of her country’s rise. “And our lives are getting better.”
Wang Xiaohua, a neighbour, also approved the changes. With the city’s factories ordered to halt production, Hangzhou’s smog-choked skies were now unusually blue. “You can see the stars at night,” Wang marvelled as he hung washing in a newly paved alley outside his home.
Authorities have refused to reveal the exact cost of Hangzhou’s G20 revamp but claim the massive infrastructure works will forever alter this city of about six million.
“We will use this opportunity to take the development of the city to the next stage,” its Communist party chief Zhao Yide told reporters earlier this year.
China appears to have spared no expense in its bid to wow the world.
The G20’s main meetings will be held in a spectacular, 850,000 sq metre convention centre - reputedly one of the country’s largest standalone buildings - erected on the eastern bank of the Qiantang river at a reported cost of 8bn yuan (£917m).
With just days left until international delegates flock to this vast monument to China’s economic clout, a round-the-clock security operation is unfolding around it. Rifle-toting troops man road blocks on highways into town, beneath giant signs reading: “A good host, a better G20”. Police vehicles equipped with CCTV cameras and black-clad guards prowl the streets in search of unwelcome elements.
A frenzy of floristry has also gripped Hangzhou, with street corners, bridges, bus stops and intersections decked out in a yellow and pink blaze of peonies.
Around the city’s West Lake, a leafy tourist district where many of the G20’s leaders will sleep, red Chinese lanterns and Christmas lights hang from plane trees outside Ferrari and Aston Martin showrooms. Billboards extol the virtues of what one propaganda poster calls “the most beautiful and splendid city in the world”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Hangzhou Olympic and International Expo Center in the Binjiang District of Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images
Propaganda chiefs have also sought to bring some music to proceedings, commissioning a bossa nova-style G20 anthem to celebrate the host city’s charms.
“Here is our home, heaven on earth,” gush the English lyrics. “Where we all come to realise our dream and colour our lives.”
Lives have certainly been coloured by the G20 but not always for the better.
China is currently witnessing what many call its harshest political crackdown in decades and Zou Wei, a Hangzhou-based dissident, said police had forbidden local activists from speaking out lest they embarrass the Communist party in front of its G20 guests.
“Treating this leadership summit as a golden event seems very old-fashioned to me,” complained Zou, defying repeated warnings not to talk to the foreign media.
Local churches have reportedly been forced to close while migrant workers have also been excluded from the G20 boom.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A seal on the entrance to a closed building site in Hangzhou reads: “Project suspended in order to welcome the G20 Summit”. Photograph: tom phillips for the Guardian
“It’s not been good for us,” complained Wu Yuhua, a 42-year-old shopkeeper from Jiangxi province who was preparing to leave the city until the G20 roadshow had moved on.
Wu, who runs a DIY shop in northern Hangzhou, said sales had plummeted after construction projects and factories across the city were given orders to shutdown.
“All the migrant workers went home. All of our customers are outsiders,” he said, adding: “There’s no business… it’s better to close.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest West Lake Road in Hangzhou. Hangzhou has been massively upgrading the city’s infrastructure with such improvements as repaving roads, expanding its subway system and dredging waterway for the G20 summit. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images
Over the road from Wu’s store, a half-built apartment complex lay empty, its entrances padlocked and plastered over with white seals reading: “Project suspended in order to welcome the G20 Summit”.
The impact of China’s first G20 is being felt in Zhejiang province and beyond. In Ningbo, a port city 150km east of Hangzhou, one entrepreneur said helicopters had been spotted flying over factories to check they were not pumping fumes into the air G20 leaders would breathe.
“The sky is getting clearer,” said the businessman, who asked to be named only by his surname Wang. “But there is a price to pay.”
Commuters in Hangzhou, one of China’s most congested cities, were more upbeat. Authorities have ordered thousands of cars off the roads, declared a seven-day holiday and offered locals some 10bn yuan in incentives to leave town in order to rid the city of traffic jams ahead of the summit.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zhen Yuanyang, the Communist party chief of one rundown Hangzhou community, says the G20 has helped revive the area. Photograph: tom phillips for the Guardian
“I feel pretty happy,” said Yu Luhong, a taxi driver, as he glided effortlessly through the city’s usually congested roads. “The traffic was awful here before,” he added, cruising at 80kmph over a flyover he usually crawls across at 10kmph. “Now look.”
In Mantoushan it was all smiles, too, as officials prepared for the arrival of the world’s leaders.
Zhen Yuanyang, the area’s 45-year-old Communist party leader, flashed a bright red grin as she boasted how the event had accelerated the redevelopment of the once ramshackle community. “In the past it was dirty, disorganised and poor but now the whole environment has changed.”
Asked how locals felt about the G20, she replied: “It’s like you have guests coming to stay. Of course we are very happy.”
Additional reporting by Christy Yao
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| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
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[
"Amanda Petrusich"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:25 | null | 2016-08-23T05:00:06 |
The Long Read: Light pollution conceals true darkness from 80% of Europe and North America. What do we lose when we can no longer see the stars?
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Fear of the light: why we need darkness
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Every civilisation we know of has devised a system – scientific, religious, what have you – to make sense of the night sky. The mystery of what’s up there, where it came from, and what it means has been inherited and puzzled over for generations. Those questions may be the most human ones we have.
Due to pervasive light pollution – glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting – 80% of Europe and North America no longer experiences real darkness. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way seems abstract: we understand it to be a document of something true, but our understanding is purely theoretical. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky”. What those callers were seeing were stars.
I grew up in a small town in the Hudson River valley, about an hour north of New York City. Like most children, I regarded the night sky (or what I could see of it) with wonder. I understood that nobody could say for sure what was out there. Little kids are often frustrated by the smallness of their lives – as a child, you can conjure complex worlds, but in your own life, you are largely powerless to make moves. Looking up, the tininess I felt was confirmed, but it no longer felt like a liability. If the night sky offers us one thing, it is a liberating sense of ourselves in perspective, and of the many things we can neither comprehend nor control.
“I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1856. He understood those worlds as separate, but in some essential conversation with each other – to receive one without the other was to misunderstand both. But what happens when mankind divorces itself from a true experience of the cosmos, separating from the vastness above, taming it by erasing it? How can we ever come to know a heaven we can barely see?
Darkness is a complicated thing to quantify, defined, as it is, by deficiency. In 2001, the amateur astronomer John Bortle devised a scale to help. His classifications range from “inner-city sky” (class 9), in which the only “pleasing telescopic views are the moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters”, to a sky so dark “the Milky Way casts obvious diffuse shadows on the ground” (class 1). Most North Americans and Europeans live under class 6 or 7 skies, in which the Milky Way is undetectable and the sky has been smudged by “a vague, greyish-white hue”. In that kind of night, a person can wander outside, unfold a garden chair, open a newspaper, and read the headlines, if not the stories.
Under class 6 or 7 night skies, a person can wander outside, open a newspaper, and read the headlines
In addition to the Bortle scale, scientists often use photodiode light sensors to measure and compare base levels of darkness by calculating the illuminance of the night sky as perceived by the human eye. Unihedron’s Sky Quality Meter is the most popular instrument for this kind of work, in part because it is small enough to fit into your pocket and also because it connects to an online global database of user-submitted data. According to that database, Cherry Springs State Park – an 82-acre park in a remote swath of rural Pennsylvania – presently has the second darkest score listed. On the Bortle scale, Cherry Springs usually registers between 1 and 2. In 2008, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), a nonprofit organisation that establishes and supports dark-sky preserves around the world, designated it a gold-tier international dark sky park.
Earlier this year, I drove the six hours to Cherry Springs from New York to meet Chip Harrison, the park’s manager, his wife, Maxine, and a park volunteer named Pam for a 4.30pm dinner of baked fish. Afterwards, Chip had promised, we’d go and see stars.
“Most children, right now, growing up in the US, will never see the Milky Way,” Chip said while we waited for our main courses.
“Their parents never saw it either,” Maxine added.
“You come to a place like Cherry Springs, you’re gonna see four or five thousand stars, maybe more,” he continued. “I’ve seen people who are fairly serious amateur astronomers, and they can’t find their way around this night sky – there are too many stars.”
After supper, we drove to the park, arriving around sunset and unloading several bags of equipment from the trunk before setting out, together, into the blackness. White light isn’t permitted on the astronomy grounds, but red-filtered light, which won’t cause the rods of the eye to become overexposed and less efficient, is allowed, if not quite encouraged.
“If you hear crunching, you’re on the right path,” Maxine announced over her shoulder. I only presumed she said it over her shoulder. The dark around us was compact, bottomless, sonorous and I was echo-locating poorly. I blinked city eyes. We crunched along a gravel path towards the astronomy field, where Chip was assembling an Orion SkyQuest telescope. The SkyQuest is stout but sizable, about eight inches in diameter, and ideal for locating deep-sky objects such as dim star clusters, nebulae and galaxies.
At the edge of the field, a former airstrip, killdeer birds cheeped eagerly, constantly; a woodcock sounded a burp-like call. It was four days after the new moon, and the sky was so black that even the tiny slice of visible moon felt like a bare bulb screwed into the ceiling of an interrogation chamber.
On a clear night, from the proper vantage, watching constellations emerge over Cherry Springs is like watching a freshly exposed photograph sink into a bath of developer, slowly becoming known to the eye. Pam pointed the telescope towards Jupiter, which had risen over the east end of the field. The four largest moons of Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were clearly visible through the lens. Galileo discovered these moons in 1610, in the skies above Padua. They were the first celestial bodies proven to be orbiting something other than Earth. With my face still pressed into the telescope, I gasped.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The US at night, 2012. Photograph: Planet Observer/Getty Images/Universal Images Group
Pam laughed. “Usually when people look through the telescope, I point out the big ‘wow’ items, like the planets, Saturn and Jupiter, some of the clusters,” she said. “Everybody looks at them and goes, ‘Oh, my God.’ They go, ‘Is that real?’”
Cherry Springs is located less than 300 miles inland from the US eastern seaboard, in a region – the East Coast – that contains 36% of the total US population and is lit up every night like a backstage makeup mirror. When pinpointed on a satellite image, Cherry Springs is in the middle of an uncharacteristically dark patch – insulated, on all sides, by hundreds of thousands of acres of protected forest and perched atop the Allegheny Plateau, 700 metres (2,300 feet) above sea level. Most of the small towns surrounding the park are situated in valleys where outdoor light is already sparse. This unusual combination of factors explains, to a certain degree, how Cherry Springs became one of the darkest places in America.
Which isn’t to say the sanctity of the sky here is not being encroached upon. In the last decade, a handful of energy companies have begun extracting natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica Shales underneath Pennsylvania via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a much-reviled practice that involves the release of gas or petroleum via a high-pressure injection of fluid through a narrow shaft bored into the ground. In Potter County, where Cherry Springs is located, there are 40 active fracking sites. The work cycle in a gas field is nonstop: energy companies not only rig up colossal, stadium-style spotlights, they also burn off excess gas in open pits or through steel pipes, in a process known as flaring. From afar, a flare resembles a giant blowtorch; clusters of flares are visible on satellite images from space.
Chip – who is exceedingly kind and mild-mannered, possessing the sort of preternatural calm seemingly required of park rangers – has worked out an informal agreement with representatives from nearby wells, in which workers abstain from flaring at night during star parties, when amateur astronomers gather in Cherry Springs to observe and record astral phenomena, or when the park is hosting astronomy-related public programmes. But it’s chiefly a gentleman’s agreement, reliant on neighbourly goodwill. At present, there are no light-pollution restrictions placed on energy companies by the state of Pennsylvania.
Gary Honis, an electrical engineer and astrophotographer based in Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania, has been visiting Cherry Springs for 25 years, since long before it was recognised internationally for its stargazing potential. Feeling disheartened by the bright skies in their area, his local astronomy group had “pulled out an old air force map, a satellite map, that showed a dark area in Potter County. We compared that to a Pennsylvania road map, and it was Cherry Springs State Park. That’s how we found it, by looking at light-pollution maps. My first view was through a friend’s six-inch Dobsonian telescope, and it was of M51, the twin galaxies in Ursa Major,” Honis said when we spoke on the telephone. “It looked photographic. We never saw that back home.”
Chip eventually came upon Honis, tented by foil, peering up at the heavens. The park had been closed for hours, but Honis convinced Chip to let him stick around and take some pictures. Their meeting was serendipitous. With Chip’s advocacy, the park’s hours eventually changed to allow for visiting stargazers, who, with the proper permit, can now camp overnight on the astronomy field.
Since then, Honis has been outspoken about the effect fracking is having on the skies above Cherry Springs. He’s posted videos to YouTube – often accompanied by ominous music he performs himself on his Moog Theremini – linking fracking to declining sky-quality readings. The videos are convincing, showing, via time-lapse photography, how gas flares and unshielded drill-site lights are compromising the park for astronomers. “We started doing sky quality meter readings of the night sky brightness in 2006, and since then, the skies over Cherry Springs have been getting much brighter,” Honis said. “When the fracking started, sky quality readings went very bad.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The gas flares of a fracking site illuminates a country road in California. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
The nocturnal world, of course, also generates its own light, and those deviations can affect dark-sky conditions. The National Park Service lists numerous natural sources: moonlight, starlight from individual stars and planets, the Milky Way (also called galactic light, or integrated starlight), zodiacal light (sunlight reflected off dust particles in the solar system), airglow (a faint aurora caused by radiation striking air molecules in the upper atmosphere), wildfire, lightning strikes and meteors. Atmospheric moisture or dust particles can refract or reflect that light, amplifying glow (deserts, for example, are low in moisture but high in dust; forests are the inverse). Air pollution makes it all worse.
On the night we ventured out in Cherry Springs, Maxine – a former game warden, one of just a few women to hold that position in Pennsylvania – had fixed her gaze towards the sky. We were quiet. Maxine was wearing a pair of dangly moon-and-stars earrings, which glinted in the starlight. “This is where the word awesome comes from,” she whispered.
In the 17th century, under the reign of the self-described Sun King, Louis XIV, tallow candles fashioned from rendered beef or mutton fat were placed in iron-framed glass boxes and strung above the streets of Paris. Lamplighters wandered the districts of the city at dusk, unlocking the boxes and igniting the wicks. Other places followed Paris’s model, and candles eventually gave way to oil and then gas lamps.
By 1890, more than 175,000 electric streetlights had been installed in the US; there are now somewhere around 26m
By 1890, more than 175,000 electric streetlights had been installed in the US; there are now somewhere around 26m, which collectively cost American taxpayers about $6bn in annual energy costs. The idea at its inception was that street lighting would help officials of the state more effectively survey and control city streets after dark. Whether streetlights actually make anyone safer remains a contentious topic among scholars and city planners. Most studies fail to demonstrate an inarguable correlation between street lighting and decreases in traffic accidents or crime, although it feels wilfully obtuse to suggest that taking the dark way home is always just as safe.
Street lighting is undeniably pervasive, but it isn’t the only culprit of our perpetually bright skies. Light pollution is aggravated by any kind of irresponsibly aimed outdoor lighting: stadium floodlights, illuminated billboards, futuristic Exxon stations beckoning tired drivers towards off-ramps with their neat rows of glowing pumps. Proper shielding and direction can mitigate the glare of these emanations – which can be blinding – and the International Dark-Sky Association publishes guidelines for easily modifying outdoor lighting to be more dark-sky friendly. But in most places, following the association’s suggestions is optional. The right to light isn’t easily denied, nor circumvented.
In recent years, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Los Angeles have been swapping the high-pressure sodium bulbs in their streetlights – which produced puddles of gassy, orange-hued light, a grittily romantic flicker – for comparably cost-effective LED bulbs. The temperature of sodium bulbs is usually around 2,200 Kelvin, which registers to the eye as warm. LED bulbs burn closer to 4,000 Kelvin and emit an intrusive, bluish glare. If you live in a major American city, it is now virtually impossible to spend any time at all outside and in the dark.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chicago Photograph: Jim Richardson/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative
The new LED streetlights are almost universally described as unpleasant. New York is presently in the midst of its own retrofit, a colossal overhaul scheduled to be completed by the end of 2017. The bulbs last longer and will ultimately reduce energy use by up to 75%, according to the US Department of Energy. But after the new bulbs were installed in Windsor Terrace, a residential neighbourhood in Brooklyn, citizens reacted with disbelief. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, the novelist and Windsor Terrace local Lionel Shriver wrote: “Although going half-blind at 58, I can read by the beam that the new lamp blasts into our front room without tapping our own Con Ed service… These lights are ugly. They’re invasive. They’re depressing. New York deserves better.”
Susan Harder, the New York State representative of the International Dark-Sky Association and a board member of the Montauk Observatory in East Hampton, has been campaigning aggressively against the installation of LED streetlights in New York. “We still think that God lives in the heavens, in part because the sky was so dynamic to ancient cultures,” she explained when I asked her to explain how the problem goes beyond the bulbs themselves. “How could you ignore a changing, moving night sky? It struck them with awe. They attributed all sorts of things to the night sky. We’re going to lose that if towns and cities keep installing these LED streetlights.”
Harder previously had a career as an art dealer but now works full time as a dark-sky activist. She has the kind of fast-talking, no-nonsense comportment that recalls Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and is, by all accounts, a formidable opponent. In 2006, a New York Times reporter described her as “a virtual one-woman dark-sky mover and shaker”, and characterised her particular approach to advocacy as a “combination of sweet talk, cajoling and bullying.”
The single biggest challenge facing dark-sky advocates such as Harder is working out a way to change our understanding of darkness as a nefarious force, a thing that needs to be avoided or controlled, if not vanquished entirely. What may seem like a logical and instinctive aversion – our vision is impaired at night and we are therefore more vulnerable – has been socially reinforced via so many avenues that it’s exhausting to even try to tally them up. From a very young age, we are taught that nighttime is when dubious things transpire. At best, night is considered a middling expanse (“No occupation but sleepe, feed, and fart,” as the Jacobean playwright and poet Thomas Middleton put it). At worst, it is terrifying.
In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian A Roger Ekirch details the ways in which nearly every known civilisation figured darkness as a source of evil: “Everywhere one looks in the ancient world, demons filled the night air,” he writes. Even in our earliest folklore, night is a proxy for wickedness, worthy of trepidation. Christianity positioned God as a source of eternal and unblinking light, a corrective to spiritual darkness and chaos. Torches, candles, oil lamps, gas lamps, lightbulbs – these were not only facilitators of productivity and examples of the extraordinary ingenuity of man, but also sacred talismans to ward off ever-encroaching night and the malevolence it supposedly enables.
It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe
Most historical reasons to fear darkness are now moot; our unease at night is more transcendental than pragmatic. In the US, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.5% of violent crimes actually occur during the daytime, between 6am and 6pm. Still, a kind of basic discomfort with darkness persists. Changing deeply ingrained cultural ideas about darkness is a complicated task. It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe, spreading out from here to God-knows-where.
I wrote to Ekirch to see how he understood the stakes of the battle to preserve the dark. “At the least, we stand to forfeit age-old opportunities for human intimacy of the sort that darkness alone enhances – not just by affording privacy but by drawing couples closer together physically and emotionally,” he replied in an email. Then he quoted an anonymous early Italian essayist, who described darkness as its own lubricant for human communion: “Darkness made it easy to tell all.”
Ekirch also evoked the idea that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the night sky itself was “a source of inspiration [that] knew no bounds, all the more as vestiges of church and state, to name but two powerful institutions, receded in the darkness,” he wrote. “On a moonlit evening in Naples, Goethe felt ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘a feeling of infinite space.’ Exclaimed an English laborer in the 18th century as he treaded home from an alehouse: ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars.’ To which, replied his companion, ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’ Today, few modern critics of light pollution, I suspect, could put the case more passionately.”
A few weeks before I visited Cherry Springs, I went with a couple of friends to a sensory deprivation chamber in Brooklyn. Formerly a component of psychological experiments – and, on occasion, deployed as an interrogation technique – sensory deprivation is now being reconfigured as a kind of bourgeois meditation aid: For $99 (£75), you can float for an hour in 30cm or so of heavily salted mineral water (roughly 450kg of Epsom salts per tub), calibrated precisely to your body temperature, inside a sealed, soundproof, lightproof, womb-like chamber. The idea is to disappear a little. The stresses and expectations of a modern life seem to demand an antidote of, well, nothingness.
I was not a natural inhabitant of the tank. I spent the first 15 minutes karate-kicking the door open and then pulling it closed again – mostly to make sure it would, in fact, still open and close. I pressed the button that turns the lights on and off approximately 50 times. I decided to stretch one hand out – ostensibly to see if I could still see it in the dark; I could not – and accidentally dribbled warm, salty water into my open eyes.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Milky Way seen from Cherry Springs National Park, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Serge Pikhotskiy/Getty Images
Eventually, once I had tired myself out, I was able to consider the experience of pure darkness, unbroken even by starlight. I understood how people found it curative: there’s a disassembling that occurs, a loosening of certain grips. But darkness, without the galactic punctuations of the night sky – without stars and planets and moons – feels more finite than infinite. It feels claustrophobic.
On my third night in Pennsylvania, I went back to the park by myself, after midnight. I stumbled on to the astronomy field, wearing a pair of pyjamas underneath my coat. My rental was the only car in the lot. It had been raining earlier that afternoon, and thick, heavy clouds now hung low in the atmosphere, obscuring the moon and almost all of the stars. It was as dark a place as I’d ever been. There, shivering, I again felt something akin to genuine panic. When the brain is deprived of visual information – when all external stimuli are washed out – we are alone in new ways. I wondered, then, if the dark acted as a kind of Rorschach test: if our perception of it wasn’t also a manifestation of our most profound fears. Whatever you conjure there, in the blackness, speaks to your innermost terrors.
Astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know
When I got back to New York, I spoke to Matt Stanley, a colleague at the university where I teach. Stanley holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics and the history of science. He leads a seminar called Achilles’ Shield: Mapping the Ancient Cosmos, and another called Understanding the Universe.
“I’ve found that probably 95% of my students come from either an urban or suburban environment, which means they can only see a dozen stars at night, and no planets,” Stanley said. “When you say the Milky Way to them, they imagine a spiral galaxy, which is fine, but that’s not what the Milky Way looks like – it’s a big, whitish smear across the sky. I have to do a lot of work to orient them to what human beings actually saw when they looked at the sky. They don’t know that stars rise and set. Their minds explode.”
An alarmist may wonder if light pollution is threatening the future of astronomy – if the skies will eventually become so illuminated that we’ll no longer be able to identify new celestial objects, given that we can barely see the ones we already know are there. Stanley said: “The best astronomy nowadays is being done from space. When I did my astronomy degree, I never looked through a telescope. Now, you can imagine a world – almost a dystopia – where no human being has ever seen a celestial body with the naked eye, but we have fantastically sophisticated astronomy, because we do it all above the atmosphere. It’s efficient, but it breaks with those initial questions: why does the sky behave like that?”
Urban light pollution: why we're all living with permanent 'mini jetlag' Read more
That curiosity was the catalyst for centuries of intellectual and spiritual growth. “Science, as we understand it, comes from this very old tradition of trying to understand what we saw in the night sky,” Stanley said. Babylonian astronomy gave us time, later mathematics; astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know. Our instinctive preoccupation with the content of the sky seems tangled up, somehow, with all those other inborn human desires: to know and be known. To feel cowed, sublimated. To wonder and to worship.
“The experience of looking up at the sky – that’s what Kant uses to explain the sublime,” Stanley said. “In 1788, he said, ‘There are two things that fill my heart with wonder. One is the moral sense within me, and the other is the order in the heavens above me.’ That’s an extraordinary feeling, and ineffable. You can’t describe it, but once you’ve experienced it, you never forget it.”
This is a version of an essay published in the Summer 2016 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/why-we-need-darkness-light-pollution-stars
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| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f252d566161613db0d618389e2e2c6f643bd73a7e1c55c39a17f5c49eb03fc13.json
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[
"Simon Parkin"
] | 2016-08-26T13:26:05 | null | 2016-07-03T07:15:08 |
Current real-world politics remind us why so many prefer the ordered fairness of gaming
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If only Brexit had been a game
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www.theguardian.com
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During the run-up to the general election, my children and I took our new puppy for a walk around the block. A campaigner for Ukip, presumably spying a happy scene ripe for spoiling, approached. If there was, as the prime minister once suggested, racism in the Ukip pamphleteer’s closet, its whiff did not dampen the generosity of our dog’s greeting. As the man handed me a sticky leaflet, the puppy peed in excitement on his shoes, before trying to hump his leg, wetly.
The scene was a cause of great hilarity for my children, none of whom will be able to vote for another two general elections. “Barney peed on the Ukip man,” they’d tell bewildered visitors during the following days and weeks. It was a minor victory for a generation to whom so much worse has been done by this political class.
As with any divorce, Brexit will hurt the children most – and not just because it has introduced an insufferable portmanteau into their coming history lessons. Its effects will be felt by the youngest for decades, a final blow from baby boomers who have, obliviously or otherwise, systematically spoiled their descendant’s chances over the course of their lifetimes. Ours is the first generation that will be worse off than that of our parents. Many will never own a home. Many will struggle to find employment. All will have to contend with our new demented weather, a climate disease contracted by the boomers, with which the young must now attempt to deal if they’re to survive a wet, sweltering future.
Games offer a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood and conquered
In this context, it is no great mystery that video games are the preferred medium of the under-40s. They appeal for a great many reasons. It might be the team sport-like camaraderie and sense of shared accomplishment they provide. It might be plain escapism, the way they present a place of relative calm into which one can retreat and fire off a few virtual rounds into some aliens in Halo, or tug at a few virtual weeds in Animal Crossing. But often, beyond the shots of dopamine, we play video games to escape the pressures and anxieties of the world or, more precisely, to replicate them in forms that can be more easily mastered.
Games, in other words, offer a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood and conquered. They are fair and just in a way that the real world is not. The game makes its player a fair bargain: “Give me your time and energy and you will prevail in accordance with your effort.” It says: “Work hard and victory will be yours. You will be glorious.”
While most politicians believe they came to power in a meritocracy, few would dare to make such a promise of plain fairness to the proletariat today.
Games function more like the natural world than the political world: they are reassuringly underpinned by order, logic and mathematical equations. For that reason, they are comforting. Politics, by contrast, is chaotic and unpredictable. Outcomes can be swayed and interrupted by personalities, opportunists and, in this post-fact, post-truth world, the allure of disinformation.
Moreover, games provide us with unending second chances. Thanks to Mario’s stock of lives, there’s always a do-over, a chance to try out new approaches in search of the optimum strategy, a way to wind back the clock to the precise moment before a terminal mistake. On the world stage, unlike in the virtual domain, we may now have to watch as fear trumps love. As our grandparents know so well, there are no do-overs for this. No wonder video games are so appealing.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/03/games-brexit-escapism-halo-animal-crossing-mario
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en
| 2016-07-03T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/2ed22b9156ae113de9036ef7906e5c0797e672ed78fcf367bc95ba66651bb1fa.json
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[
"Sarah Marsh",
"Guardian Readers"
] | 2016-08-29T10:52:32 | null | 2016-08-29T10:20:57 |
Do you have the java gene? As a study shows that a love of coffee might be down to genetics, we asked our readers to talk about their relationship to the bean
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'I drink 12 to 18 cups a day': five people on their coffee-drinking habits
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www.theguardian.com
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Ever felt like your love of coffee runs so deep you must be genetically predisposed to enjoy it? That might not be as ridiculous as it sounds: a new study suggests there may actually be a coffee gene.
The impact coffee has on your body can be both good and bad. On the positive side, it contains a range of antioxidants and plant chemicals, and it’s been suggested moderate coffee consumption might lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
However, caffeine also causes the release of adrenaline, activating your “fight or flight mode”. This can lead to restlessness, anxiety and a quickened heartbeat. As it’s a stimulant, those who love caffeine also risk a bad night’s sleep. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority warned that drinking more than five espressos a day could put your health at risk.
We spoke to readers about their relationship with coffee – their joy on first tasting it, and their struggles to give it up.
Janik Hansen, 26, Copenhagen: ‘I drink about 12 to 18 cups a day, and desperately want to cut down’
I run a company, based about an hour from Copenhagen in Denmark, with my dad. To get me through the day I have about one coffee every hour – so about 12 to 18 a day. You might think this would inhibit my sleep, and I usually only get five to seven hours, but I never slept for very long even before I started to drink coffee.
I don’t have coffee for the first hour of the day as I’m focused on
getting my son ready, but as soon as I start working it’s the first
thing I need. I love Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica, but usually I just have either Nescafe or Starbucks.
At the beginning of August I tried to cut back, but started drinking more again about a week ago because I found not having it too hard. I had huge withdrawal symptoms, and hardly any energy. To keep my energy levels up I had to go to the gym loads and make sure I ate a lot.
I would like to cut down on my coffee intake as it affects my energy levels (leaving me lethargic without it). I’m thinking of new ways to change my caffeine habits, and would welcome suggestions.
Claire Ferguson, 53, London : ‘After being a Mormon for years, I fell in love with coffee’
Photograph: Claire
I tasted my first coffee 12 years ago, at the age of 41, and it was a heavenly experience. My best friend had taken me to a well-known coffee shop and I thought I heard angels sing while I was drinking it.
I’d spent my life before then avoiding the evils of coffee (and tea and cigarettes and alcohol … to name but a few restrictions) because of my belief in the Mormon church.
In the years since that first cappuccino, and leaving the Mormon church, I have delighted in this new-found wonder. After 41 years of almost no caffeine (I’d indulged in the occasional Diet Coke or Pepsi) the effects of coffee still feel fabulous.
I have one coffee a day – a soya latte in the morning that jolts me awake. It is often the first thing I think of when I wake up and the thought of it makes me smile.
One of the things I love about coffee is that it makes me feel better emotionally. If I’m irritable or low, coffee changes that; it makes the world seem brighter. I can definitely say coffee is one of the loves of my life.
Tom Walters, 32, Chichester: ‘The small things, such as the first sip of coffee, are what makes life beautiful’
I wouldn’t consider myself a massive coffee drinker, but I need a strong one to wake me up – otherwise I can’t shift that morning fog. However, I usually start off with a cup of tea, before moving on to two Nespresso pods (the stronger and more bitter the better) mixed with hot milk, all poured into a flask for my morning commute to Brighton.
I may have another cup if I’m feeling like a zombie (a byproduct of having a nine-month-old baby boy) but all caffeine-related activity must stop before 1pm. When I drink tea or coffee in the afternoon it seems to make me sluggish.
I drink coffee for two reasons. Firstly, I adore the smell and taste of it. For some reason, it brings back nostalgic memories of travelling the world with my then fiance: I never started a day without a strong cup of local coffee. The other reason is its energy-providing properties (as I already mentioned). I’ve had periods before when I’ve stopped drinking it, but it’s the small things – the first sip of coffee, or the smell of toast – that make life. The beautiful minutiae of existence.
Jasmin Bauer, 29, Hamburg: ‘I hate coffee and have only met a handful of people who understand my plight’
I hate coffee. I don’t even like anything with coffee flavouring. I do like the smell of roasted beans, but that’s about it. And yes, I have tried all sorts of coffee: ones with lots of sugar or no sugar, milky ones and ones that are freshly-ground and so on.
People always feel the need to convince me about how great coffee is and everyone looks startled when I say I don’t drink it, asking how I can work and stay awake. I am the type of person who just gets up when the alarm rings. If I do feel the need for caffeine I drink Coke Zero and in extreme cases, such as when I go out at night, Red Bull.
I have only met a handful of people who understand my plight. I don’t even know how to make coffee, which has created some awkward situations in the past. For example, if I am expected to offer coffee to a client I panic and frantically try to find someone who can help. Then, when I am asked to make coffee again, I have already forgotten how to do it.
Paula Rose Toohey, 31, Tasmania: ‘Coffee is the smell of my travels from Adelaide to Hobart with my brother’
Coffee is the smell of childhood at my grandma’s house, the scent of filter coffee permeating the house as she told me stories of being a migrant from Europe after the war – she always said she found not having real coffee harder than learning English. Coffee is working in a rainforest as part of John Howard’s Green Corps programme, building walking tracks and eating chocolate-coated coffee beans. Coffee is my dad and mum watching the ABC news after dinner.
It is travelling from Adelaide to Hobart with my brother in his car, camping as we were broke, and spending what money we had on a half-decent brew at the start of our trip. Coffee is me curled up in bed on a Sunday morning with my kitties reading the newspapers. And now it is me going to work and making people’s days a bit better with my job as a barista. There is a saying: first coffee you are a customer, second cup you are a friend and third cup you are family.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/29/drink-coffee-drinking-habits
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/0eb6b7b32fd0528c71d115bf265d6211ae37f2da67130946e14b76ed9dd5bde4.json
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[
"Sarah Butler"
] | 2016-08-26T13:23:53 | null | 2016-08-25T23:01:03 |
Visit England looks to build on rising number of Britons taking bank holiday break at home as exchange rates and terror attacks deter foreign travel
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UK staycations grow in strength as pound weakens
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The government is to launch a tourism action plan including cutting red tape for B&Bs and ready-made train tours as an increasing number of Brits take bank holiday breaks in the UK.
Just over 5 million Britons are planning a staycation in the UK over the weekend, 6% more than last year, according to Visit England, the tourism promotion body, after a fall in the value of the pound against the dollar and the euro in the wake of the EU referendum vote.
The expected surge comes after a record-breaking first four months of the year for domestic holiday trips in England. From January to April Britons took 11m holiday trips, 8% more than during the same period last year, according to Visit England. They spent £2.8bn, 22% up on last year, more than ever before.
That continued a strong year in 2015 for staycations when the number of trips and the amount spent both rose 7% on the previous year.
The prime minister, Theresa May, who chose to holiday in the Swiss Alps this month, said: “Tourism is vitally important to the UK and the sector goes from strength to strength. Our stunning scenery, centuries-old monuments and cultural traditions continue to draw visitors from both home and abroad.”
The government action plan will include internationally promoted rail travel deals, with five easily bookable itineraries that will help tourists get around the UK, although it’s not clear if they will be assured a seat.
There will also be changes to regulations to let B&Bs offer visitors a welcome drink without the need for an alcohol licence, or to pick up guests from a station without applying to become a taxi service.
Around £40m of previously announced funds will also be awarded on Friday to a string of projects to help boost tourism in England outside London. Among the projects, money will go towards boosting golf tourism, increasing visitor numbers to Kent’s gardens and gourmet restaurants, the south-west coastal path plus other rural areas.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The south-west coastal path is one of the projects to get extra funding. Photograph: Alamy
The investment comes after turnover for small and medium-sized hotels, B&Bs, cafes and restaurants in the UK rose 6.4% in the first half of this year, compared with last, with London experiencing the greatest increase in the number of new businesses followed by the south-east and the north-west, according to a Barclays survey.
An 11% drop in the value of the pound against the euro means that a holiday within the eurozone will cost a family of four at least £245 more now than it would have done before Britain voted to leave the EU. Terror attacks in France, Belgium and popular package holiday destinations such as Turkey have also changed behaviour.
Scotland is experiencing particularly strong growth as families flock to Skye and the Highlands to visit locations used in Stephen Spielberg’s BFG film or the Outlander TV series.
“Skye has been absolutely crazy busy this summer – all businesses are saying they have never seen a year like it,” said a Visit Scotland spokesman.
But the whole of Scotland has enjoyed a busy season with some businesses in Arran calling it their busiest summer for more than a decade.
Rob Ganley, of the Camping & Caravanning Club, said it reached its highest ever number of members this spring and has continued to grow since.
“The staycation trend has gone from strength to strength from the credit crunch to exchange rate changes and concerns about security overseas,” he said.
Nearly a fifth of Brits questioned told the Barclays survey they were planning to holiday in the UK this year because they were worried about terror attacks abroad while 22% said they would holiday in the UK to save money. More than a quarter wanted to cut down on travel time.
Brits have not been put off travelling abroad altogether. An estimated 2 million are expected to head abroad this weekend, just over 5% more than last year, according to ABTA, the travel association.
Spain, where temperatures are expected to hit the low 30s over the weekend, is one of the top choices with Malaga, Mallorca and Barcelona some of the most popular short-haul destinations.
Thomas Cook said last month that bookings from the UK were down 1% in the three months to the end of June, but it expected a strong start to the winter season in the UK, with bookings up by 19% despite Brexit worries.
Some holidaymakers may be getting their trip in now while it is more affordable. Travel operator Tui, has warned that UK holidaymakers will have to pay higher prices next summer due to the weakening pound.
However, spending on holidays is generally on the rise as people seek out experiences rather than consume things. Official data shows that households are spending less on clothes and food but more on holidays, cars, entertainment and eating out.
David McCorquodale, UK head of retail at KPMG, said retailers were now having to battle it out fiercely with holidays and other experiences for a share of people’s spare cash. “Undoubtedly people are spending more and more on experiences rather than stuff to put in the wardrobe. Just look at the rise in music festivals. People like experiences as they make you feel a bit better than you did before, rather than a new jumper,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/26/uk-staycations-grow-in-strength-as-pound-weakens
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/418facee30c495513952192fc4473b07926accae43902df6fbd125f546eee5a5.json
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[
"Miles Brignall"
] | 2016-08-26T13:29:07 | null | 2016-08-14T06:01:28 |
After 10 years of normal deliveries, the parcel firm has suddenly flagged us up for fraud
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DPD has put our address on a blacklist
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www.theguardian.com
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In the not too distant past you helped a couple who found that all the packages sent to them via the parcels firm DPD were returned after they had been put on some sort of blacklist. My partner and I are experiencing exactly the same problem and can’t resolve it.
We have lived at our current address for 10 years and have deliveries on a daily basis – my partner is even friendly with the DPD delivery man, having had regular chats with him. All of a sudden we stopped receiving all packages via DPD and, having spoken to the companies sending them, learned that our address had been flagged up for fraud.
Some 10 phone calls and just as many emails later we are getting nowhere fast. We have spoken to the local depot and to multiple customer service personnel at DPD, but no one seems to be able to give us any information as to why we have been put on this list, or how to resolve it.
We are on the cusp of contacting our lawyer as we are so frustrated with this company, and desperate due to so many items we are waiting for hanging in limbo. KF, Aylesbury
As you say, you are not the first reader to complain at being blacklisted by DPD, and failing to get it lifted. The last such incident turned out to be caused by a suspected mobile phone fraud that had unwittingly caught the complainant. The same is probably true in this case.
We asked the company about your case and it told us: “Following an investigation, we can confirm this address was placed on a stop list in January 2016 due to concerns about potentially suspicious third-party fraudulent activity.
“Any information of this nature is always taken seriously by DPD and acted upon to protect both the sender and recipient from potentially dishonest transactions caused by identity fraud. After reviewing the case, however, it is clear that on this occasion the decision was incorrect. As a result, KF’s details have now been removed from the stop list. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.”
It seems to us the company needs to give those on the receiving end a better chance to clear their name, however rarely it happens.
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/14/dpd-deliveries-blacklist-fraud
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en
| 2016-08-14T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/832fae636bf1f4e16aebc2c69d6e5892b3ef5e5e387f428edb063376e48eadae.json
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[
"Matthew Jenkin"
] | 2016-08-26T13:24:29 | null | 2016-08-23T07:34:50 |
From a rocket landing at the entrance to a shop in Ukraine, to escaping armed police raids, John Ibbotson describes working in countries scarred by upheaval
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What it's like doing business in war-torn countries
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www.theguardian.com
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When John Ibbotson began his career as a trainee manager at Littlewoods in the 1960s, the most hazardous part of his job description was probably stacking shelves and cleaning a spillage on aisle three. He didn’t expect to one day be risking his life opening stores in some of the most dangerous and corrupt regions in the world.
The Yorkshireman cut his consultancy teeth with Asda, transforming it from a discount store in the north of England into a major supermarket chain. After working with a client in Asia to open more than 200 small supermarkets across Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, he saw an opportunity to sell the UK model of consumer-focused retail to developing countries.
“British retailing is the best in the world because it has within it all its processes, systems and organisation that focus on the customer and delivers to the customer what they require,” says Ibbotson.
Ibbotson launched management consultancy Retail Vision 18 years ago to meet the growing demand for brand Britain abroad, employing a team of associates who have all held senior positions in UK retail.
While they have undertaken projects in Canada and Barbados, they have also taken on clients in countries scarred by conflict or political upheaval, such as Palestine and Iran. Doing business in these often unstable environments comes with huge risks – both personal and professional.
Working with one client in Ukraine to develop its nationwide chain of 150 mobile phone stores, they were forced to sell dozens of outlets in Crimea when it was annexed by Russia in 2014. And a rocket landed at the entrance of one of their shops in war-torn Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, where all seven of their stores closed as a result of the ongoing conflict.
During work on a separate project in the troubled eastern European country, Ibbotson recalls being forced to make a hasty escape out the back door of the store he was working in after armed police raided the building. The claim was that the company had fallen behind on their “taxes”, according to Ibbotson.
“We were working for one of Ukraine’s biggest consumer electrical retailers and had just opened a new store for them,” he explains. “The oligarch who owned the business had, for some reason, fallen out with someone in the government, so the police rolled up in two 10 tonne trucks with kalashnikovs and big boots on, stormed into the building, took all the company servers away, and then drove off.
“All the employees had the virtually impossible task of working for 10 days without computers until the right people were paid off and the business was allowed to continue. It was scary for me and everybody.”
Corruption and bribery is endemic in many of the countries which Retail Vision does business in, so Ibbotson has had to take steps to protect his interests. Firstly, building a good relationship with a client is essential to the success of a project. He claims that in many cases the person in charge of the business is only there because of family or political connections and has little retail experience. It is therefore necessary to educate them about why changes are being made and hold their hand throughout the process. Trust with the client is achieved when results are delivered.
John Ibbotson. Photograph: Pr
In some cases, however, trust is unlikely to ever be at a comfortable level for Ibbotson and the biggest risk in those situations is not getting paid. He asks for 50% up front from the client before agreeing to travel to the country and start consultancy work. Once he arrives there he insists the other half is transferred directly into his business account.
It’s a lesson he learned the hard way while working with a client in Nigeria who owned a chain of convenience stores. After being paid 50% up front, he flew to the capital Lagos where he was given no choice but to accept the rest of the fee in hard cash.
He says: “At the end of my visit I went to the airport to catch my flight home and this guy rolls up with an envelope. I opened it up and it was £10,000 in dirty £50 notes. I went through customs, they pulled out the envelope, looked at it and put it back and said I was OK.
“The biggest problem was paying it into Barclays in Huddersfield. I thought they were bound to be fakes. The bank had to count it and report it for possible money laundering. Fortunately you were allowed to put in £10,000 and under and they weren’t fakes, so it went through.”
It is important to be patient throughout the process and to persevere despite constant setbacks. Ibbotson says it is common for major projects to fall through and for months of hard work to come to nothing. For example, the company was recently hired to make seven existing stores in Palestine profitable. After they achieved that aim, Retail Vision gave them a new format for supermarkets, similar to a Tesco store of 20,000 square feet. They branded the pilot store in Nablus, which was a success, and the plan was to open a further nine supermarkets. However, the holding company got cold feet at the last minute blaming the deteriorating political climate in the country and a lack of finance.
You have to have enough irons in the fire so when a project does collapse, the business can continue to run successfully. “The company will go through peaks and troughs but you have to just put up with that. You have just got to ride with it and make sure you have other projects in the pipeline,” he adds.
In September, Retail Vision, which now has a team of 12 consultants, will return to Ukraine to continue planning, developing and redesigning 40 flagship stores for one of the country’s leading mobile phone retailers.
Ibbotson will also travel to Iran to run a feasibility study for a chain of consumer electrical and mobile phone stores similar to Dixons Carphone in the UK for a huge holding company there. He claims that with the lifting of sanctions, Iran is the new frontier for organised retail.
What drives him to keep pushing the business onwards and upwards? “It’s so much more fun working in a wild west situation,” he says. “When you have actually established a chain in a hostile place for retail, where nothing is certain, and you have managed to educate and get some decent people to do it, it’s really satisfying. The sense of achievement is incredible and it is something I would not have been able to do in the UK.”
Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox.
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https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/aug/23/what-like-doing-business-war-torn-countries
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| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/9eccf118424b7534fe068a4ed2671fa39d7dad0e7fd4f02af5b825ee7cc7deab.json
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[
"Jamie Jackson"
] | 2016-08-27T22:51:34 | null | 2016-08-27T21:30:14 |
Pep Guardiola said the only reason players ever criticise him is because they are not being chosen
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Pep Guardiola: it’s impossible to keep whole Manchester City squad happy
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Pep Guardiola has acknowledged that keeping his 30-man Manchester City squad happy will be impossible, saying the only reason players ever criticise him is because they are not being chosen.
Claudio Bravo will not make Manchester City debut against West Ham Read more
Guardiola’s team host West Ham on Sunday, looking to extend their 100% Premier League record and having also won both legs of their Champions League play-off. The results have come against a background of City’s manager deciding Joe Hart is not good enough to be the No1 and giving Yaya Touré one start. That was in Thursday’s Champions League second leg against Steaua Bucharest, with City 5-0 up from the game in Romania, and the midfielder has not been included in any other match‑day 18.
Guardiola has made tough selection calls at previous clubs, including the exclusion of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Ronaldinho at Barcelona and Xherdan Shaqiri at Bayern Munich.
Shaqiri said recently that Guardiola can be a coach who praises a player publicly yet does not select them. However, the manager said: “I spoke with Shaqiri but I cannot say every weekend why you don’t play. You don’t play because I decide to play another one, but I try to help them. In my career I help few players or enough players but [some] they criticise you a lot to the media. They go to the media because they did not play. That is the only reason. So when they speak it is [like when] Pep doesn’t play Shaqiri.
“I would like to have only 18 players. It would be a dream because everyone is happy but unfortunately there are injuries, we have to compete every three days. In Germany, they have a winter break, here not. We have all the competitions here: four; so many games and we need a bigger squad. But always we are polite with the players.
“We respect their careers but sometimes I take the decisions and the players who don’t play, they are not happy they are not playing but they are not happy for one reason, they feel: ‘The coach don’t love me.’ They don’t feel loved.
“That is the reason why. Players [don’t] understand: ‘Why the coach love this guy and don’t love me? Why?’ It is true, you deserve to play. I said many times you deserve to play. All of them, 30 players, you deserve to play. Nineteen players don’t play, so tell me how you handle that? It is impossible. Especially if you have many relationship minutes, training sessions with them to develop, to understand what you want to do.
“You have to communicate so that they believe: ‘I am going to play because I created a [good impression],’ and that is the goal.”
Guardiola has asked Sergio Agüero to start closing down opposition players and he is happy to do so. “Pep has changed the way we have been playing in previous years,” the striker said. “In my case, he’s very demanding of me. I need to be the player who starts the pressure and with my pressure the rest of the team-mates will join me and keep up the pressure. I’m happy to do that. I’m still getting used to it. I need to keep improving even more.
“His arrival is great because with his way of playing I’ll have more chances to score and hopefully we will be able to win more games. I always respect the style of play every manager has. I try to adapt myself about what the manager wants as fast as possible. Pep has brought a way of play he has always used. We need to get used to it and I’m also enjoying the new concepts he’s teaching us. We need to keep working this way.”
Despite his glittering CV and City’s flying start, Guardiola tried to downplay his role. “It is not about me,” he said. “I can’t decide the games. The referee whistles and I move my hands but it is them [the players]. I am so happy that Raz [Raheem Sterling] can play and show his talent, but when you go left-right, you go left-right, you go to receive in the middle, it is like that in dribbling: do you think my info is in there?
“Maybe I can say: ‘If you stay here, you receive the ball more often or today you move in that area and you go right to left, you have problems to defend his right side.’ I can help, we can help Raz and the other guys. Football belongs to the players. I am here to help but sometimes it is impossible.”Guardiola also confirmed Toure will not leave in the current window, saying: “I spoke with him and he said he wants to stay.
“Ok, if he wants to stay, I am happy. There are a lot of games. Everybody needs to play. I know his quality. For example in the last 20 minutes against Steaua Bucharest he played as a striker and played amazing. Of course I know him very well and his behaviour from the beginning was perfect. When his behaviour is OK, everything is going very well.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/27/pep-guardiola-manchester-city-happy-west-ham
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1c1ae5d8315460cf2f6d87d7d832f1ea893f990367d7ea0ada7e52afb72b5506.json
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[] | 2016-08-27T02:51:12 | null | 2016-08-27T02:10:54 |
Computers and mobile phones were also seized in an investigation into allegations of an illegal Olympics ticketing scam
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Rio 2016: court to return passports to three Irish Olympic officials
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www.theguardian.com
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A Rio de Janeiro court will return the passports of three members of the Olympic Council of Ireland and they will be allowed to leave Brazil, a source in the Rio state security services said on Friday.
The passports were seized by Brazilian police, along with computers, mobile phones and unused tickets as part of an investigation into allegations of an illegal Olympics ticketing scam.
Rio 2016: three more Irish officials barred from leaving Brazil amid ticket probe Read more
OCI treasurer Kevin Kilty, secretary-general Dermot Henihan and executive director Stephen Martin have collaborated with the police in the investigation and would be able to return to Ireland, said the source, who asked not to be named because he is not authorised to speak publicly on the matter.
“There is no longer the necessity to keep them here,” the source said.
Pat Hickey, the former head of Ireland’s Olympic council, is still being held in a Rio prison complex.
Police allege Hickey is implicated in a scam involving Ireland’s official Games ticket reseller, Dublin-based PRO10 Sports Management, and an international sports hospitality company, THG Sports.
They accuse PRO10 of funneling tickets to THG Sports, which sold them illegally at inflated prices. A director of THG Sports, Kevin Mallon, was also arrested this month in Brazil.
PRO10 and THG have denied wrongdoing. Hickey’s lawyer in Dublin has not responded to a request for comment.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/27/rio-2016-court-to-return-passports-to-irish-olympic-officials
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/b59b207a1961195be0be7c2932159566c26168d11e8e2923c348a246b2052fe2.json
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[
"Andrew Harrop"
] | 2016-08-31T12:50:31 | null | 2016-08-31T12:00:30 |
Labour needs a long-term plan to raise living standards for low- and middle-income families. It could learn much from our generous but sustainable pension system
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fleft-welfare-agenda-labour-living-standards-pension.json
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The left has lost its nerve on welfare. It needs a new agenda
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Labour’s opponents like to call it the party of welfare, but for years the opposition has said almost nothing new about social security. Intellectual torpor, fiscal constraint and public stigma regarding benefits have given rise to a purely defensive posture. Under both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour has opposed cuts to its own old policies, but has had no agenda for how social security should get better over time.
Life after community death: this food bank has a lesson for Labour | Aditya Chakrabortty Read more
Now that George Osborne no longer frames the debate on public spending, it is time for the left to rediscover its nerve and ambition. Over the course of this decade an already improving system for pensioners will grow stronger still and a typical state pension will soon pay over £10,000 a year. But social security for children and working-age adults is a disaster. The system will be far less generous in 2020 than it was in 2010 – and unless there is reform it will carry on getting worse in the decade that follows.
With all the cuts combined, the living standards of families without work will fall by between 10 and 20% during the 2010s. By 2020 the disposable income of a single jobseeker will be barely greater than the tax relief that the state gives to a full-time worker. This is because, while benefits have been cut, tax allowances are rising in value by 80%, revealing today’s double standards on “austerity”.
Then, in the 2020s, benefits are to be linked only to inflation, which means lower-income families will not share in whatever rising national prosperity we see over the next 15 years. Child poverty will return to levels last seen under John Major, rising rents will lead to a large increase in homelessness, and for many, incomes will rise very significantly at the state pension age.
None of this is inevitable, however, particularly in this time of political and economic flux. In place of today’s piecemeal resistance, Labour must call for a long-term plan to raise the living standards of low- and middle-income families. A process is needed that mirrors the Turner Commission on pensions of the mid-2000s, which established an enduring consensus on retirement incomes.
But to make that happen, the left must find the confidence to explain why social security is important. If the share of GDP that the nation spends on working-age benefits is constantly shrinking, as Conservative policies intend, it is arithmetically impossible for the living standards of low- and middle-income families to keep up with rising national wealth.
Benefits are not just a vital last resort, to prevent destitution for a small minority. They matter as much for low earners as for people without a job, and they are something almost every one of us relies on at some point in our lives, to insure against unpredictable risks and provide support when our living costs are high. Higher wages, full employment, childcare or housebuilding can never be a substitute for these functions, no matter how desirable they are in themselves. They are complements not alternatives to social security.
A report published today by the Fabian Society seeks to trigger the long-term debate that is needed. It asks how to make social security for non-pensioners more like our generous but sustainable pension system. There are dozens of proposals but the report’s main point is that social security can serve everyone better, while also doing more for people with the lowest incomes.
Our welfare state shouldn’t be a source of shame, but of pride – and fury | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Read more
This can be achieved without spending a higher share of GDP than today, particularly if we start to integrate benefits and tax reliefs. For example, the report shows how the percentage of national income currently devoted to tax allowances could be used to gradually introduce flat-rate credits instead. They would be paid to all adults and children, on top of existing benefits, as a partial basic income.
The plans also seek to break down the artificial divide between pension and non-pension entitlements, particularly when it comes to national insurance benefits and support for people with long-term disabilities. Benefits for unemployment, sickness and maternity, which have been earned by contribution, and payments for disabled people with little prospect of work should match the state pension.
Alongside more generous national insurance benefits, there should be a role for the private sector too, as is the case with our pension system. This would not replace taxpayer-funded support, but add another contribution-based layer. The Fabian report calls for a new scheme to help people with low and middle incomes save automatically, and it suggests there could be private insurance against losing your job, alongside better national insurance protection.
Together, these ideas would transform social security. Instead of a mainly means-tested system, we would have tiers of support, combining contributory, citizenship-based and income-related entitlements, as well as private top-ups. The reforms would both tackle poverty and restore public confidence, by offering something for us all. With enough ambition, social security for children and working-age adults can become successful and popular, just as it is for pensioners.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/31/left-welfare-agenda-labour-living-standards-pension
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| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/d95b3d6cfd02538f51f44e451e16b2395961451e4045eeaeb2b03c25eef4a079.json
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[
"Australian Associated Press"
] | 2016-08-27T16:51:20 | null | 2016-08-27T02:56:51 |
Lachlan Smart touches down on Sunshine Coast, having travelled 44,000km and stopped in 15 countries
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Teen aviator becomes youngest person to fly solo around the world in single aircraft
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Queensland teenager Lachlan Smart has become the youngest person to fly solo around the world in a single aircraft.
He touched down on the Sunshine Coast at Maroochydore on Saturday, having departed the same airstrip on July 4.
Smart, who is 18 years, seven months and 21 days, stopped in 24 locations and 15 countries on his way to taking the Guinness world record from American Matt Guthmiller, who completed his circumnavigation when he was 19 years, seven months and 15 days.
Smart started his last leg from Bundaberg, where he had completed much of his flight training since the dream of taking on the record breaking flight began two-and-a-half years ago.
“What a welcome,” Smart said on touching down. “The support I have received from family, friends, the local Sunshine Coast council and community and people around the world that I have never even met has been incredible from the first moment we spoke about this journey.”
Smart was considerably less complimentary about Indonesia’s traffic control, however, saying he would have been scraped off the side of an Indonesian mountain had he obeyed local traffic controllers.
The Sunshine Coast teenager said he ignored regional traffic controllers in Indonesia and chose his own route as he navigated the country because of misguided instructions. He said poor radio reception and a “blase’” attitude was also an issue passing through the south-east Asian country.
“There were no major failures of equipment ... but I did have trouble with air traffic control coming out of Indonesia,” he said. “They would have run me into a mountain if I had gone with their instructions.
“I stuck to my training pretty well and when I saw what they were going to try and send me through I thought, ‘They’ll be scraping me off the side of a mountain if I go that way’.”
Smart travelled more than 24,000 nautical miles (44,000km) on his epic journey, which included more than a week’s break visiting family and sightseeing in London.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/27/teen-aviator-becomes-youngest-person-to-fly-solo-around-the-world-in-single-aircraft
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/d7ecf36570daeed737ed0328ccedef70140b3d13884b937b884eb508cc568882.json
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[
"David Hulme"
] | 2016-08-26T13:21:01 | null | 2016-08-26T09:00:15 |
An extract from David Hulme’s Should Rich Nations Help the Poor? examines the mix of altruism and self-interest rich states use to justify support for foreign aid
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Looking good and making a fast buck? Why rich countries help the poor
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Why do rich nations help the poor in faraway places? There are a mix of very different reasons, ranging from the high-minded – “It’s our moral duty” – to the venal – “We can look good and make a fast buck out of this”. Commonly, the governments of rich countries use combinations of altruism and self-interest to justify support for the distant needy to their taxpayers. There are four distinct lines of argument.
The most commonly heard reason that the leaders and politicians of rich nations make for supporting the distant needy is moral duty. All human beings should be compassionate and should seek to reduce the suffering of others. The pursuit of social justice requires that the poor in any part of the world should be assisted by those individuals (and their governments) with the means to help. From this perspective such actions are not simply charity, they are a duty. How could anyone spend $5 on a cup of coffee when $5 could pay for the medicine to save a child’s life in Africa?
The second argument, moral responsibility, is based on causal analysis. It holds that rich nations and their citizens must support poor nations because they are responsible for the economic and political structures that have made countries and populations poor. In effect, this is a critique of colonialism, post-colonial developmentalism, contemporary capitalism and globalisation. It views such processes as a major cause of global poverty, global inequality and social injustice. The impacts of colonialism (resource extraction, racism, ethnic divisions, slavery and societal breakdown, illogical national boundaries, government by narrow predatory elites that hold power, etc) have created historical legacies that continue to impoverish poor nations. The classic example is the Atlantic slave trade, which depopulated and socially destabilised west Africa in ways that hamper development today. While all colonial powers have left negative legacies, the Belgians are sometimes held up as bequeathing some of the greatest problems, such as fostering an ethnic divide in Rwanda between the revenue-collecting rulers (Tutsi) and the taxpaying ruled (Hutu) that laid the basis for the genocide of 1994.
The best books on Democratic Republic of the Congo: start your reading here Read more
And so to the present: a manifestly unfair world trade regime helps keep poor people poor. African cotton farmers are impoverished while US cotton farmers receive vast public subsidies to keep them going. The average cow in the EU receives grants of $2.50 a day: more income than around one-third of humanity. Multinational corporations based in rich countries dominate business in many poorer countries and illicitly help extract $10 from poor countries for every $1 of foreign aid the rich world provides. The world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, based in Europe and the US, charge such high prices for their products that millions of poor people die unnecessarily. Rich country control over finance and technology ensures that poorer countries cannot compete economically or meet the social needs of their populations. Furthermore, the policies pursued by the IMF and World Bank are tightly monitored by the US government (and thus indirectly by US corporate interests). Such evidence has created heated debates among leading philosophers about whether poor countries have an ethical case to declare a “just war” against rich nations in order to protect the lives of their citizens!
In recent years a further strand of argument, climate change, has greatly strengthened the case that the rich nations are responsible for poverty in low-income nations. The world’s most economically advanced countries and wealthiest people have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that this is now undermining the livelihoods of poor people in poor countries.
The third argument for rich nations helping the poor – common interests – is based as much on self-interest as altruism. It posits that people whose basic needs are met should assist the poor if they want to maintain and improve their own wellbeing. The relatively better-off should assist poor people: to improve local and national social cohesion; to reduce the incentives for excluded social groups to threaten social and economic stability; to create economic opportunities; to reduce the likelihood of public health problems and pandemics; and to reduce rates of migration and population growth.
The arguments about health and migration have been highly evident in recent years. Without effective health policy support from rich nations, the likelihood of major new diseases, such as Ebola, evolving in poor countries and subsequently spreading across the world is much higher. Similarly, any serious attempt to reduce the flow of Africans crossing the Mediterranean to live in Europe entails rich nations actively promoting economic growth and job creation in Africa so that the stark inequality in economic opportunities between the two continents is dramatically reduced. Relatedly, if you want to cap global population at 9 billion, rather than 10 or 11 billion, then you need to reduce poverty rapidly in the poorest parts of the world.
The best way to bring down fertility rates is not to hand out contraceptives but to reduce poverty. Prosperity in Bangladesh has brought the total fertility rate (the average number of births in a lifetime per woman) down from 5.2 to 2.1 in just 30 years. An important argument in the west has been that if the distant needy have no prospects for improvement, then some of them might be more likely to support violent political groups and/or engage in drug trafficking and international crime. At the extreme they may become terrorists. So, helping the distant needy may not only be “the right thing to do”, it might also reduce the social and political problems rich nations face. This argument has been common in the US since 9/11, although the evidence to support it is very limited.
Will giving fat cats some of the cream help to cut poverty? | Jonathan Glennie Read more
The more pertinent argument is that in countries where poverty is the norm, governance is often poor and terrorists can establish bases and training camps there (Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen). There is also a strong liberal economic strand to the common interests argument. The more poor nations and poor people around the world increase their incomes, the greater will be the economic opportunities for wealthier nations and people.
However, behind these three publicly propounded reasons for helping poor countries a fourth and much less noble set of motives has often been uppermost in the thinking of rich nations: short-term political and commercial advantages. Geopolitical considerations were a priority throughout the cold war, with the US and its allies, and the USSR and its allies, seeking to outmanoeuvre each other through buying the support of poorer countries and their leaders with development and military aid packages. This did not simply mean giving foreign aid to a country. It meant giving foreign aid to murderous dictators, such as President Mobutu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
Alongside foreign policy considerations are commercial interests. Rich countries have commonly “tied” their aid to contracts for their home companies and NGOs; allocated aid as export credits for domestic businesses; and used aid as a form of inducement for commercial contracts to be placed with the aid-giving nation. Margaret Thatcher’s public humiliation over the Pergau Dam – when her government was successfully taken to court for providing the Malaysian government with increased aid in return for their ordering British armaments – is a classic example of aid pursuing commercial interests.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illegal migrants in a port east of the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Hulme argues that ‘any serious attempt to reduce the flow of Africans crossing the Mediterranean … entails rich nations actively promoting economic growth and job creation in Africa’. Photograph: AFP/Getty
One might expect that the arguments presented above would impact on public opinion in rich nations and, as most of these nations are democratic, on the very different levels of commitment to development described earlier. The evidence, from public opinion surveys in Europe and North America, is, however, paradoxical. While it indicates that the citizens of rich nations do not think about the distant poor very much, it also reveals that they think their governments should do something. For example, when 4,789 people in the UK were asked “What is the most important issue facing Britain today?”, only 0.21% mentioned global poverty. By contrast, in a different survey, when asked about global poverty, 25% declared themselves to be “very concerned”.
But maybe this is paying too much attention to public opinion. If, as Colin Crouch argues, many rich nations have moved into “post-democratic” politics and the mass of the population have withdrawn from active political engagement, then we need to look at business and government elites to understand public policy. From this critical perspective the global poor have proved a useful adjunct to elite interests. Under the guise of “reducing global poverty”, business elites (and the political elites they resource) have been able to promote the economic liberalisation of middle- and low-income countries so that the wealth of these elites has increased at an unprecedented rate. Alongside them official and civil society actors promoting global poverty reduction – bilateral aid agencies, the multilaterals (the UN and the World Bank), big-brand NGOs and even celebrities – have seen their budgets and/or profiles rise. By contrast, informed public understanding of and engagement with what governments are doing to support the distant needy appear to have receded – our leaders are permitted to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/26/looking-good-making-fast-buck-should-rich-nations-help-the-poor-david-hulme-book-extract
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| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/f5e9a50f43a20611289504558a250f5027cf357afbe1f4b7e8cda8ab93ba8254.json
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[
"Source"
] | 2016-08-26T13:25:04 | null | 2016-08-23T12:00:08 |
In honor of the National Park Service’s centennial this week, the Guardian has compiled breathtaking scenes from dawn till dusk around the country
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fvideo%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fus-national-parks-timelapse-centennial-video.json
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en
| null |
Sunrise to sunset: stunning timelapse video of America's national parks
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
In honor of the National Park Service’s centennial this week, the Guardian has compiled scenes from around the country. President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service 100 years ago. From coast to coast, Hawaii to Maine, the beauty, nature and scope of US national parks are breathtaking
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2016/aug/23/us-national-parks-timelapse-centennial-video
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en
| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/52f6f95d691e070ffb11783153a244c661dcfcd494c80524dfc0df8cdf30486d.json
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[
"Amy Reichelt"
] | 2016-08-26T13:28:11 | null | 2014-06-23T00:00:00 |
Amy Reichelt: A recent study suggests that women find their breasts prevent them exercising. But although this may be the case, science can help overcome this anatomical obstacle and provide many benefits
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fbrain-flapping%2F2014%2Fjun%2F23%2Fexercise-bust-breasts-physical-activity-exercise.json
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en
| null |
Exercise or bust? Breasts and physical activity
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
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As a research scientist, I endeavour to make an impact on humankind's understanding of the world, and in particular, the brain. My research aims to probe the intricacies of memory, determining how the brain controls behaviour. I have always hoped to make a difference and be remembered as “a person who really made an impact in the field of neuroscience”. So I was delighted to be asked by past postgraduate laboratory companion, Dean Burnett, to discuss what I appear to be most well remembered for in scientific circles: my boobs.
Now, boobs (I’m sorry, I can’t call them breasts as it conjures images of matronly middle-aged women, which I am not) are a topic close to my heart, physically and otherwise. When friends have complained about their lack of endowments I have often offered to donate some of mine. To put it bluntly, they are more than a handful and seem to have a mind of their own, particularly when presented with any opportunity to make themselves apparent.
As someone who has had to deal with their presence since my early teens (my first bra was not a darling Forever Friends crop top, it was a 34C sports bra from M&S), I have developed many boob-containment strategies. Safety pins, strategic use of scarves, multiway straps and avoidance of button-up blouses are all established techniques in my mission to prevent untimely escapes.
One thing I will not allow my boobs to do is hold me back when it comes to sporting activities. I am never going to be a lean, long-distance running type, and I will never attain the perfect “Plough” pose in yoga, as I would asphyxiate myself. But I love going to the gym (I feel that this is the time I have to mention Crossfit, because people who do Crossfit just have to talk about it, it’s the opposite of Fight Club), enjoy kickboxing, and can be found running around my local park on a sunny weekend. So when I read that nearly one in five women say their breasts stop them from partaking in physical activity, I found it hard to believe.
In fact, participation in sports weren’t influenced by breast size, but just their mere presence. Boobs were ranked fourth as a barrier to exercise after lack of energy, time constraints and health reasons. These I feel are pretty valid excuses, as a demanding job sometimes leaves me exhausted and trapped in the lab. Boobs were ranked above other barriers including cost, access to facilities, not having the right clothing, not having any company while exercising, and feeling embarrassed about doing sport.
I’m not going to preach in the way that Gok Wan attempts to convince women to “embrace their bangers”, but surely blaming something that all women possess should not be a barrier to exercise? Exercise is great! Research has demonstrated that exercise improves not only your health and mood, but it also enhances cognitive abilities and increases memory.
I can support the notion that vigorous exercise can be painful in more ways than just muscle pain. Inadequate support, combined with excessive movement, is the most likely cause of sore and tender breasts after exercise. Your boobs' built-in support is limited to skin and Cooper's ligaments so excessive movement puts strain on these ligaments causing irreversible damage. Stretching these ligaments leads to sagging, nothing can naturally restore them to their former position.
But – science to the rescue! Research into the physical dynamics of boobs in motion has led to sports bras that contain and control movement as opposed to compressing them down into an immovable lump. Take it from me; although I will unashamedly sprint for the bus at the end of a long day at work, you wont catch me in the gym without my trusty shock absorber sports bra. As my F cups are outside of the “normal” size range, and my adventures in exercise tend to be vigorous in nature, I tend to settle for the more extreme levels of control. These bras may set you back £35-£40. However, I would like to point out that a surgical lift (mastopexy) would cost more than 100 times this amount.
All in all, I would say that blaming your boobs for preventing you undertaking exercise is no longer a valid excuse. I’m not going to run a mile in a pair of high heels or my regular lacy underwired bra. A supportive sports bra should be deemed as essential as a pair of trainers for women undertaking exercise.
Amy Reichelt is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Her boobs are the only F’s she has ever received
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/jun/23/exercise-bust-breasts-physical-activity-exercise
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en
| 2014-06-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/500cbdb5425cf4fd6acb9d86dd4fdb5f31784b0692afe014a1b1063948013c96.json
|
|
[
"Sisonke Msimang"
] | 2016-08-26T13:20:05 | null | 2016-08-24T07:00:13 |
The irony of privileged athletes with their nutritionists, physios and sports psychologists pointing fingers at those who’ve overcome so much is laughable
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fcaster-semenya-is-the-one-at-a-disadvantage.json
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en
| null |
Caster Semenya is the one at a disadvantage
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
When athletes lined up for the 800m women’s final in Rio last week they weren’t exactly starting from a level playing field – on that we can all agree. But who was it who enjoyed the “unfair advantage” that the eventual winner Caster Semenya has been accused of holding?
Various competitors and commentators have declared that the South African runner’s gold medal was unfairly gained because her physical attributes and medical condition make it impossible for others to beat her.
Lyndsey Sharp, the British runner who came sixth, tearfully announced that she hadn’t had a chance at victory after a decision by sports authorities not to force Semenya and other athletes with hyperandrogenism to take drugs to reduce their testosterone levels.
Paula Radcliffe explained why Sharp had been so upset. “However hard she goes away and trains, however hard Jenny Meadows goes and trains, they are never going to be able to compete with that level of strength and recovery that those levels of elevated testosterone brings,” she said.
Another Brit Sebastian Coe, head of the international athletics federation, said the organisation would continue to fight for a ruling to force athletes with hyperandrogenism to take drugs or have surgery – and is confident of succeeding.
Caster Semenya wins gold but faces more scrutiny as IAAF press case | Andy Bull Read more
Another British athlete tweeted: “Happy for Lynsey Sharp for coming 3rd in women’s 800m.” The tweet, which pointed to rumours that all three medal winners in the race have this so-called unfair advantage, has since been deleted.
Nevermind the fact that all Olympic athletes have varying degrees of physical advantage over each other and the rest of us, there are more significant inequalities that aren’t being talked about here.
It is calmly accepted that athletes from large, rich countries enjoy benefits not available to those from poorer, smaller countries, and so will always dominate sporting competitions such as the Olympics.
The irony of athletes from Great Britain, which spent £275m on preparations for the Rio games, raising fundamental questions about fairness in a race against an athlete from a country that spent less than £1.9m has somehow been lost.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Semenya shares a joke with fellow medallist Cameron van der Burgh as her grandmother Mmabuthi Segale looks on as the team is mobbed by fans on arrival home. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images
Semenya has been the object of a long and terrifyingly international campaign that has included the disclosure of private medical information and ongoing hounding by the media. She has refused to talk about the condition, saying only that “God made me the way I am and I accept myself”.
This silence is emblematic of the way in which athletes from poor countries seldom complain about the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to unfair advantage; that they are disadvantaged from the start.
In developing countries all aspects of sports are under-resourced. School programmes barely exist. Even elite athletes struggle to find a track to practice on or a coach to work with – never mind the sophisticated nutritional, psychological and biomechanical performance enhancement available to those in the developed world. Forget marginal gains, these are massive ones.
The idea that testosterone levels could constitute an unfair advantage in this climate is laughable.
The ignorance aimed at Caster Semenya flies in the face of the Olympic spirit | Katrina Karkazis Read more
Just look at the final medal table in Rio: the US got 121 medals; Team GB 67 medals; China 70, Russia 56 and Germany 42. Canada spent over C$5m for every medal won; while Australia spent A$330m over the last Olympic cycle.
Perhaps Sharp should reflect on the advantages she carried into that 800m race. Can there be any doubt that Semenya’s road to Rio was so much more arduous, demanding more training, talent and tenacity than her western rivals?
Sharp is right that the Olympic system needs to be re-examined, and there are a range of practices that British athletes can tackle in their crusade for fairness.
For example, blatant sexism continues to exist in the way the international sporting community operates. Male athletes with higher-than-normal naturally occurring levels of testosterone have not been subject to testing or complicated medical treatments in the way women have. Those concerned about Semenya’s ostensible advantages ignore this obvious double standard that demeans all female competitors.
The return of Caster Semenya: Olympic favourite and ticking timebomb Read more
The British athletes’ selective outrage over Semenya’s victory ignores the unfairness of their own situation. By cherry picking one form of advantage while being unprepared to recognise the myriad ways in which they themselves are privileged, athletes such as Sharp have chosen to portray themselves as victims – despite all the benefits of birth they have enjoyed.
Those who genuinely wish to see fairness in sports have to be prepared to stop focusing on individuals and take a closer look at inequalities that are built into the system. In the meantime, athletes like Semenya will continue to keep their eyes firmly on gold.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/caster-semenya-is-the-one-at-a-disadvantage
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/108b6694a82d691e9f47e83fa8d8a9e582522ff48e4b212823b439d4fac842fa.json
|
|
[
"Kate Lyons"
] | 2016-08-28T12:49:39 | null | 2016-08-28T12:18:40 |
Vincent de Rivaz has called for £18bn nuclear project to be approved after it was delayed unexpectedly by Theresa May
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F28%2Fhinkley-point-c-edf-boss-vincent-de-rivaz-government-approve-plans-nuclear.json
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en
| null |
Hinkley Point: EDF boss calls on government to look at 'bigger picture'
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The head of the energy company behind the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactors has called on the government to authorise the project after its approval was unexpectedly delayed last month.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Vincent de Rivaz, the chief executive of EDF Energy, said critics of the planned Somerset reactors risked “losing sight of bigger picture by overlooking the positive impact and importance of this investment for Britain”.
The nuclear power plant was approved by the EDF board in late July, but in a surprise move shortly after becoming prime minister, Theresa May postponed a decision to proceed with the plant and ordered a review of the £18bn project.
The delay was a shock to investors and after it was announced De Rivaz wrote to employees to reassure them that the project was still on track, saying: “Our journey is a long one and there is a further stage. Our job now is to maintain the courage, patience and dedication that have served us so well.”
After May announced a further investigation in Hinkley Point C, the former business secretary Vince Cable claimed that, as home secretary, May had raised objections to the nuclear power deal during coalition government and had been unhappy about George Osborne’s “gung-ho” attitude to Chinese investment.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artist’s impression of Hinkley Point C. Photograph: EDF Energy/PA
On Sunday, De Rivaz addressed criticism of the involvement of the state-owned Chinese nuclear company China General Nuclear Power (CGN), the joint investor with EDF in the project, saying “we know and trust our Chinese partners”. He said there were “enormous benefits for the UK” from the project being jointly run by China, which has the largest civil nuclear programme in the world.
On the issue of cost, he said that instead of comparing the value of electricity produced by the £18bn plant with “today’s depressed wholesale prices” they should be compared with future prices, against which he said electricity generated at Hinkley Point was competitive. The Hinkley Point development has been heavily criticised over the large cost of building it and setting it up.
If wind and solar power are cheaper and quicker, do we really need Hinkley Point? Read more
De Rivaz discussed other forms of power, including renewable options such as wind and solar, which some critics have claimed are better alternatives to nuclear, saying that wind energy presented problems of space, intermittency and cost, and that solar was problematic because peak electricity demand in Britain falls in the winter “when there is almost no solar electricity generated”.
“There is no single technology which offers a panacea for our future needs. We need them all, including new nuclear,” wrote De Rivaz. “We can’t afford to cross our fingers and muddle through in the hope that a new technology will meet all our needs at the right price.”
De Rivaz also pointed to the jobs and apprenticeships likely to be created, saying that “billions of pounds will be invested into the economy of the south-west of England”.
The building of the power plant has the support of the GMB union, with Justin Bowden, its national secretary for energy, previously urging the government to stop searching for “get-out clauses”.
“The government must get on with building Hinkley Point C as the only carbon-free show in town to keep the lights on during the one in six days when there is no wind or sun,” said Bowden.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/28/hinkley-point-c-edf-boss-vincent-de-rivaz-government-approve-plans-nuclear
|
en
| 2016-08-28T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4d82c2c6b040868a27200c9e3a0c29d76a0148d1b2e294bcef001d0d17d49b7c.json
|
|
[
"Miles Brignall"
] | 2016-08-26T13:28:17 | null | 2016-08-16T05:59:26 |
I’m worried it’s a scam so have ignored the messages
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2016%2Faug%2F16%2Faqua-reward-credit-card-texts-scam.json
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en
| null |
I’m getting texts about an Aqua Reward card, but I never applied for one
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
I have received a series of unsolicited text messages on my mobile phone over recent months concerning an Aqua Reward credit card application I have not made. I’ve ignored them as a presumed scam and would appreciate your advice as to whether this is indeed the correct thing to do, or whether I should report it.
The messages initially told me not to forget to activate my card. Another warned that a £127 payment would soon be taken by direct debit. As far as I know I’ve never signed anything from this company requesting a card or other service. And I haven’t received a card or any paperwork in the post. SC, by email
We suspect that someone filling in a credit card application – or someone at the company – has mis-typed in the mobile number and as a result you are getting someone else’s texts. However, given the high rate of fraudulent credit card applications it is worth keeping a vigilant eye on your bank statements, which will be easy as the texts say when the payments were to be taken.
Equally, there is nothing to stop you calling Aqua to ask why it keeps sending you the texts. While that probably won’t be a short call, it might be prudent.
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/16/aqua-reward-credit-card-texts-scam
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en
| 2016-08-16T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/4db67be05728889415d1c275fad13cb57f5a56fde2a233a42020e1ee9a038df0.json
|
|
[
"Matthew Weaver"
] | 2016-08-31T12:50:21 | null | 2016-08-31T12:02:49 |
Six teenage boys have been arrested after Arkadiusz Jóźwik, 40, was killed on Saturday night
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fuk-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F31%2Fmp-horror-over-killing-of-polish-man-in-harlow-robert-halfon.json
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en
| null |
MP expresses horror over killing of Polish man in Harlow
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The Conservative MP Robert Halfon has expressed his horror at the killing of a 40-year-old Polish man in his constituency, and urged Harlow to welcome Poles and other migrants and celebrate their contribution to the community.
Six teenage boys have been arrested in the Essex town after Arkadiusz Jóźwik, 40, was killed on Saturday night after his brother said he was heard speaking Polish.
Essex police said that Jóźwik and a second Polish man who survived were apparently the victims of an unprovoked attack. The motive is currently unknown, but one line of inquiry was the possibility of it being a hate crime.
The killing has sparked widespread alarm after an upsurge in hate crime targeted at eastern Europeans following Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
The Polish ambassador to the UK, Arkady Rzegocki, was due to visit the scene of the crime in the Stow area of Harlow, together with Halfon. Rzegocki expressed his shock and urged witnesses to help police investigate the killing.
The Polish community in Harlow is planning a “march of silence” on Saturday to protest against the killing.
Halfon, an education minister, issued a strongly-worded statement on the killing, saying: “We must do more than be horrified.”
It said: “We must actively stand up against racism of any kind.
“We must welcome Polish and other communities just as we would welcome our best friends and we must all work together to ensure that Harlow remains a kind, decent and tolerant place to live.”
Halfon, who backed the remain campaign in the referendum, added: “We should be celebrating the hard work and positive contribution of the migrant communities that greatly benefit our society.
“I believe it is the responsibility of all those in public life, of politicians, journalists, and anyone with a voice, to stand up and speak out against racism and to promote and celebrate the massive benefits that Polish, and other migrants, give to Harlow and to our country.”
Police in Harlow have been given the power to order anyone involved in crime or harassment to leave The Stow. The dispersal order came into effect at 7pm on Tuesday and will remain in place for 48 hours.
Eric Hind, organiser of Saturday’s protest march, said that the community had remained quiet for too long: “We need to speak up about racism and discrimination we face on a regular basis.”
Speaking to Jakub Krupa of the Polish Press Agency, he added: “It’s not only about us Poles. Racism in Harlow is a real problem, and we need to unite.”
Hind said he had lived in the UK for 14 years and had a daughter who identified as British. “I’m not going to leave,” he said.
The second man survived the incident and suffered suspected fractures to his hands and bruising to his stomach. He was discharged from hospital.
Five boys aged 15 and one aged 16 were arrested on suspicion of murder, but were released on on bail until 7 October pending further inquiries.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/31/mp-horror-over-killing-of-polish-man-in-harlow-robert-halfon
|
en
| 2016-08-31T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/205a424fb7645a872beaeaf4b96e05c642b0c438ce008427283373dbe8011afe.json
|
|
[
"David Brindle"
] | 2016-08-30T00:50:13 | null | 2016-08-29T23:01:14 |
Study of 80,000 social care workers shows 57% have benefited from raise with ‘no evidence of hours cut to foot the bill’
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsociety%2F2016%2Faug%2F30%2Ffears-over-minimum-wage-increase-in-social-care-industry.json
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en
| null |
Living wage has positive impact on care industry, research shows
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
The worst fears about the impact of the national living wage on social care businesses have been confounded by research suggesting it has had a remarkably positive effect on pay rates in the traditionally low-wage sector.
When the statutory minimum of £7.20 an hour for all workers aged 25 or over was announced – an increase of 50p on the previous floor – employers in social care warned that they would struggle to pay it on profit margins that were already low.
What will the new 'national living wage' mean for independent care providers? Read more
Care England, the umbrella body for the bigger companies in the sector, which employs 1.6 million people in England alone, forecast on the eve of the new rate taking effect in April that the added cost would be the “the final straw” for some businesses teetering on the brink of viability.
But a study published on Tuesday by the Resolution Foundation thinktank indicates that the move has had a favourable effect not only on care workers directly benefiting but also – and unexpectedly – on younger workers and on wage rates across the sector. The overall pay bill has risen by more than twice that needed to meet the new minimum alone.
Laura Gardiner, senior research and policy analyst at the foundation, said: “It is great news that the national living wage has had a large, positive impact on low pay in social care, giving hundreds of thousands of frontline care workers a pay rise, with no evidence of hours being cut to foot the bill.”
The study, based on pay data for 80,000 employees of more than 2,000 care providers, suggests that 57% of frontline workers (54% of all) have benefited directly from the £7.20 minimum with an average pay rise of 9.2%. This includes 83% of those aged under 25 who are now receiving £7.20 or more, even though it is not required by law.
Noting that the overall pay bill has risen 6.9%, the study concludes that introduction of the national living wage is “undoubtedly correlated with an immediate and profound increase in pay in the sector”.
The Guardian view on social care and the NHS: can’t pay, won’t pay | Editorial Read more
The foundation admits that its analysis does not cover any job losses or non-compliance with the new minimum. It also expresses concern at workers’ potential to progress up the pay ladder, pointing out that 32% of the sample studied were now “bunched” at £7.20.
A previous survey of local councils that commission social care found that 82% of them raised fees paid to care providers from April – almost half by more than 3% – after ministers allowed councils to add a 2% social care precept to council tax bills.
|
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/30/fears-over-minimum-wage-increase-in-social-care-industry
|
en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/6cd6c95123db20d62ddc12d2a52fd84630f83c691ad7404477ca35efd7822860.json
|
|
[
"Heather Stewart",
"Damien Gayle",
"Graham Ruddick",
"Dan Milmo",
"Owen Jones"
] | 2016-08-28T12:51:38 | null | 2016-08-24T12:58:57 |
Corbyn, who faced repeated questions about ‘Traingate’ row, also condemned ‘lunatic’ remark by leadership rival Owen Smith
|
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fpolitics%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fowen-smith-cctv-shows-jeremy-corbyn-chose-to-sit-on-train-floor.json
|
en
| null |
Angry Jeremy Corbyn reminds Branson of rail nationalisation plans
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Jeremy Corbyn has reacted angrily after being repeatedly asked about his public row with Virgin Trains, and reminded the company’s boss, Sir Richard Branson, of Labour’s pledge to renationalise the railways.
Corbyn faced several questions over his account of sitting on the floor of a “ram-packed” Virgin service at an event on Wednesday to launch Labour’s health policies in London.
Behind Traingate: retracing Corbyn's trip to see reality of UK rail travel – live Read more
He repeated the explanation his allies gave on Tuesday night, saying: “I boarded a crowded train with a group of colleagues; we journeyed through the train looking for places; there wasn’t a place for all of us to sit down, and so for 40 minutes or so we remained on the floor of the train, in the vestibule.” He explained that a sympathetic train manager later found seats for him and his team, including his wife, by upgrading other passengers.
Asked again by a Sky journalist about what had been rapidly dubbed #traingate on Twitter, Corbyn initially refused to answer. “Can we have an NHS question?” he asked crossly. But he went on to say: “Yes, I did look for two empty seats together to sit with my wife, so I could talk to her.”
Corbyn added that he hoped Branson was “well aware of our policy, which is that train operating companies should become part of the public realm, not the private sector”.
Labour’s leader was drawn into a row with Virgin Trains after the rail operator disputed his account of being forced to sit on the floor of a crowded train, releasing CCTV footage of him apparently walking past free seats before the video was shot.
The Labour leader also commented on remarks by his leadership rival, Owen Smith, who appeared to suggest at a rally in Hammersmith, west London, on Tuesday night that a “lunatic” was in charge of the party. Smith said: “What you won’t have from me is some lunatic at the top of the Labour party.”
Corbyn said: “I deplore the use of that language in any context. I don’t use it myself, and I will not use it today.”
Corbyn was speaking alongside the shadow health secretary, Diane Abbott. The pair launched a series of policies, including a pledge to restore nurses’ bursaries and to attempt to buy hospitals out of costly private finance initiative contracts.
Student nurse Danielle, introducing Corbyn, said: “To take away the bursary will not only deter students, it is one of the most insulting things I have seen this government do since they came to office.”
Corbyn said: “I cannot accept that in Britain, the fifth biggest economy in the world, we do not have the resources to look after our fathers, our mothers and our grandparents.” He promised to “restore the NHS”, saying Britain was a “country of compassion”. It was unclear how the policies would be paid for – though Abbott said an increase in corporation tax could fund the restoration of nurses’ bursaries.
Smith had earlier said that despite the Traingate row, Corbyn had made an important and legitimate point, and he echoed the Labour leader’s call for the renationalisation of Britain’s railways.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about whether he believed the story given by Virgin Trains and Branson, Smith said: “Well I’m not quite sure what the Corbyn version of events is because I think it changed a couple of times yesterday, but what is clear from the footage that I have seen is that he had a seat on the train and there were seats on the train and he chose to sit on the floor for the purposes of the video.
“But I do think he was trying to make a legitimate point and trains are overcrowded and I think we should nationalise them in order to try and make sure that they serve the British people rather better.”
|
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/24/owen-smith-cctv-shows-jeremy-corbyn-chose-to-sit-on-train-floor
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en
| 2016-08-24T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/859aced21bcc5e7e14b8e50c13715abb17872d3a963b5d79c0714e50ee9d3560.json
|
|
[
"Polly Toynbee"
] | 2016-08-26T13:23:10 | null | 2016-08-18T12:26:07 |
Fat is a class issue. Most of the seriously obese are poor. Offer a diet of self-esteem, good jobs and social status, and the pounds will fall away
|
https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F18%2Ftories-obesity-inequality-fat-class-issue-self-esteem-social-status.json
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en
| null |
The Tories must tackle the real cause of obesity: inequality
| null | null |
www.theguardian.com
|
Why is anyone surprised that a Conservative government has yet again caved in cravenly to industry and produced a shaming non-policy on childhood obesity? That’s what Conservatives do in any clash between business and the environment or general wellbeing, a bias towards profit neatly disguised with a pretended objection to “the nanny state” taking over from personal responsibility.
Childhood obesity: UK's 'inexcusable' strategy is wasted opportunity, say experts Read more
Labour agonised for far too long over banning smoking in public places. Even Dublin and Glasgow had proved it could be done: that changed cultural attitudes towards smoking overnight. The Tories would never have done it.
The obesity crisis is galloping ahead, exactly as predicted a decade ago, with a third of children leaving primary school overweight. This is far harder to tackle than smoking. Forcing food manufacturers to cut sugar, fat and salt should be the very least the state should do – but it would still be only one step in the right direction. Banning the advertising of junk food during breaks in children’s programming would help, alongside simple labelling, instead of the deliberately baffling small print on kJ and kcal. More sport in school? Good idea, when so many playing fields are sold off – school sport was first to go under Michael Gove’s regime at education, and the Olympic obsession with gold medals leaves no “legacy” for vanishing community pools and sports grounds. Watching Laura Trott from the sofa doesn’t impel us to run to that Zumba class.
Attitudes towards food, our use and abuse of this essential, run deep emotionally, psychologically – and socially. Obesity is no one’s choice, as everyone wants to be thin: young children now worry about body image, and rates of anorexia – obesity’s evil twin – are rising.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Watching Laura Trott from the sofa doesn’t impel us to run to that Zumba class.’ Photograph: SWpix.com/Rex/Shutterstock
From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Harry Potter, heroes are skinny and lithe, while fat children are mean and selfish. A multibillion-pound industry trades on our wish to be thin, in magazines, slimming products, diet fads and endless advice from pseudo-nutritionists. No public health campaign could begin to compete with the message sent out every day in every way that thin is beautiful, and fat is ugly, undesirable and a sign of moral uselessness. That’s not a nudge, it’s a daily knock on the head with a cudgel. “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” said Dorothy Parker.
What no one says explicitly enough is that fat is a social class issue. Most of the seriously obese are poor. This is tiptoed around, but those with a body-mass index in the red zone, those whose children risk swelling up at a young age, in danger of losing limbs and eyesight to diabetes as they grow up, are the poorest. The hyper-rich are called “fat cats”, but privilege is usually thin and sleek, its body well-exercised by gyms and personal trainers on diets of kale and goji berries. And even then, God knows, to be middle class doesn’t guarantee thinness, as every ageing decade adds to girth. But poverty is a marker for most obesity.
Reports suggest the poor find it harder to afford fresh fruit and vegetables, home cooking, and of course swimming pool and gym fees, ballet and judo lessons for their children. All true, but that’s only part of the story. As some smug middle-class people remind us, well-educated penurious families can feed their children well on lentils, but that’s irrelevant to life at the bottom of the social heap.
Olympic legacy failure: sports centres under assault by thousand council cuts Read more
To be obese signifies being poor and out of control, because people who feel they have no control over their own lives give up. What is there to struggle for if there is no chance ever of a job that will pay beyond bare subsistence? With no prospects, drinking, smoking and eating the wrong things become small compensations in lives with very little else. Being out of control becomes a mindset ever harder to climb out of. Why defer small gratifications when there is no greater reward on offer?
Most people have social incentives not to give in to temptation – and even then we often fail – but those who have nothing are likely to give up more easily. From every social signal, poor children know from their first day at school that they are low in the pecking order and that gap between them and the rest widens with every school year, as their self-esteem falls away.
Those on the margins, excluded from life’s best things, eat themselves into an early grave. It is inequality and disrespect that make people fat. Look at the historical figures: obesity took off in the 1980s, up more than 400% in the years since inequality exploded. The link between inequality and obesity is stark around the world: among developed nations, America is the most unequal society and the fattest, with Britain and Australia next on both scores. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all.
There may be social policy reasons, as social democratic governments invest in picking up family problems earliest. But the big picture is this: where the status and income gap in a society is smallest, so are the waistbands. Turn to that great classic of inequality research, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and chapter seven documents how wider income gaps mean wider waists.
That dispiriting fact could be an invitation to nothing-can-be-done fatalism, when of course governments should do all they can to stop the food industry making us all needlessly fatter, with the NHS picking up the bill. But yet again, social dysfunctions spring from the unequal state of the whole society.
There is a nasty tendency to fat-shame the poor, a vicious cycle in which people are blamed individually for both their obesity and their poverty.
But the social facts suggest Britain would get thinner if everyone had enough of life’s opportunities to be worth staying thin for. Offer self-esteem, respect, good jobs, decent homes and some social status and the pounds would start to fall away.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/tories-obesity-inequality-fat-class-issue-self-esteem-social-status
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en
| 2016-08-18T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/24f037e14e9decc0a74a5fdc28267f17eda5391bea6aa5625820df157876baf3.json
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[
"Elliot Bentley"
] | 2016-08-28T02:59:01 | null | 2009-07-17T00:00:00 |
Ultra-sensitive cameras reveal that our bodies emit tiny amounts of light that are too weak for the human eye to detect
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fblog%2F2009%2Fjul%2F17%2Fhuman-bioluminescence.json
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Humans glow in the dark
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www.theguardian.com
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Amazing pictures of "glittering" human bodies have been released by Japanese scientists who have captured the first ever images of human "bioluminescence".
Although it has been known for many years that all living creatures produce a small amount of light as a result of chemical reactions within their cells, this is the first time light produced by humans has been captured on camera.
Writing in the online journal PLoS ONE, the researchers describe how they imaged volunteers' upper bodies using ultra-sensitive cameras over a period of several days. Their results show that the amount of light emitted follows a 24-hour cycle, at its highest in late afternoon and lowest late at night, and that the brightest light is emitted from the cheeks, forehead and neck.
Strangely, the areas that produced the brightest light did not correspond with the brightest areas on thermal images of the volunteers' bodies.
The light is a thousand times weaker than the human eye can perceive. At such a low level, it is unlikely to serve any evolutionary purpose in humans – though when emitted more strongly by animals such as fireflies, glow-worms and deep-sea fish, it can be used to attract mates and for illumination.
Bioluminescence is a side-effect of metabolic reactions within all creatures, the result of highly reactive free radicals produced through cell respiration interacting with free-floating lipids and proteins. The "excited" molecules that result can react with chemicals called fluorophores to emit photons.
Human bioluminescence has been suspected for years, but until now the cameras required to detect such dim light sources took over an hour to capture a single image and so were unable to measure the constantly fluctuating light from living creatures.
While the practical applications of the discovery are hard to imagine, one can't help wondering what further surprises the human body has in store for us.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jul/17/human-bioluminescence
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en
| 2009-07-17T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/954b196eb3572f918b211c1cc8ca548a7ff1418750a70bdbb6a6a4d4e305d095.json
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[
"Alan Smith"
] | 2016-08-29T10:52:16 | null | 2016-08-29T10:16:31 |
A year ago Quek was ready to call time on her hockey career, but thanks to plenty of perseverance, she was one of the undisputed stars of Team GB’s Olympic triumph in Rio
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Sam Quek: ‘You could see from making eye contact we were going to win gold’
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www.theguardian.com
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Last year Sam Quek was ready to put her stick to one side and call it a day. The Great Britain hockey defender, one of the undisputed stars of their unstoppable charge to gold in Rio, was struggling to recover from a rib injury. She was bereft of belief in her ability and following the heartbreak of non-selection for the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, losing faith that her opportunity would ever arrive.
The 27-year-old, enthusiastic and still riding the wave of excitement from that magnificent fortnight in Rio, is finding it difficult to stop smiling these past few days. But when it comes to discussing the bumpy ride from the Wirral to Olympic champion, her steely undercurrent and determination, fostered by an unfamiliar path in a sport concentrated in the south of England, becomes apparent.
Quek lives by the Robert H Schuller quote “tough times never last, but tough people do” and is honest when discussing the turnaround that led her from failing to make it into the reserves little more than 12 months ago to becoming the defensive bedrock of a team that won seven of their eight games in Brazil, defeating the Netherlands on penalties after drawing the final 3-3.
Her success is a result of perseverance and hard work but this is also a tale of never giving up.
“In June 2015 I seriously considered hanging up my stick and walking away,” Quek says. “I missed out on Beijing and London and watched all the games from the stands [as a fan]. I remember post-2012 saying I never wanted to experience that feeling again. Words can’t describe how painful it was to sit there.
GB women win historic hockey gold with shootout victory over Netherlands Read more
“Everything went well after that. We got a silver in the Europeans the following year and in 2014 I had the honour of captaining the squad [in the Champions Trophy]. For me that was the proudest moment in a GB shirt. Plenty can say they have played but not many can say they have captained the team. In game one of that tournament I broke two of my ribs but didn’t realise until I got home. So I didn’t play my best hockey, I did a job but it wasn’t my best.”
Things would soon get worse. Her confidence plummeted and returning to full fitness proved difficult. Approaching breaking point, some tough love from her family and partner changed everything.
“I came back in the following February but I was not as strong or as fit. I was playing for a good two months before the selection for the Rio qualifying tournament and I didn’t even make it into the friendly matches before. I was available but didn’t make it. I wasn’t even in the reserves, let alone the squad.
“Going from captain, the pinnacle of your sport, to not even being seventh-choice defender brought all of the feelings of 2012 back again. It hit me hard and there were times when I was on the phone to Tom [Mairs, her partner] for hours in the night, contemplating my future and doubting if I was able to do it. I wasn’t the player I was before and I was ready to give up. But he was like: ‘Don’t be silly, Sam, you don’t become a bad player overnight.’”
Kate Richardson-Walsh's hockey team in historic bully-off Read more
One moment stands out. On a June evening, after training at Bisham Abbey and a Skype conversation with Mairs, Quek decided to drive back north. “Tom sat me in the kitchen, it must have been midnight, and he had some firm words. He told me I was being ridiculous, it was all down to me and all the issues we talked about were in my control to sort out. That conversation was the turning point.”
It kick-started a remarkable transformation from peripheral figure to vital cog. She recalls going on holiday to Croatia after being dropped for the qualification tournament and ensuring the hotel had a gym. A fitness plan was strictly adhered to “while Tom spent his days drinking beer on the beach”.
Quek seems reluctant to take credit for her work ethic, regularly referring to her support system of family and friends, and there is a sense that she is oblivious to the talent at her disposal. Things could also have been quite different if she had stuck with playing football for Tranmere Rovers.
“I played lacrosse, netball and football but it came to a point where at about 16 I was at the same level with football and hockey and had to choose a path. I ended up playing a bit more hockey than football and I was never in the first team at Tranmere, always in the reserves, which was fair enough because there were two trainings a week but I would only go to one. I ended up playing a little more hockey and fell in love with it.”
At times, though, the love seemed unrequited. “I’m not going to sit here and say every day has been great because it hasn’t. Looking back at my journey, it’s maybe the most turbulent and roughest in terms of the team but if that hadn’t happen I don’t think I would be the character I am today. I’m quite proud now. There are times that I was embarrassed I didn’t make selection but I can sit here now and say that it taught me a valuable lesson, that I’m in control of everything I do. I learned that quite late but once I had that self-belief I cracked on.”
Cracking on is an understatement. Quek describes the training in Croatia and the regime after she returned to the national hockey complex at Bisham Abbey – where 31 centrally contracted players work on a three-weeks-on, one-week-off recovery system – as the best she has had. Her form returned and a place in England’s European Championship squad that summer was secured.
She was player of the match in their dramatic 2015 EuroHockey final against the Netherlands in London and as fate would have it, they won on penalties after coming from 2-0 down to draw.
When it came to Rio and taking on the Dutch, who were going for a third Olympic gold in a row and the overwhelming favourites, there was an assuredness among the players. The game looked up at one point but Britain’s defensive resilience, led by an indomitable Quek performance, paid off when Nicola White made it 3-3 in the final period. Maddie Hinch, the goalkeeper, proved heroic in the shootout and gold was theirs.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sam Quek celebrates after Team GB won hockey gold against the Netherlands: ‘everyone said you shouldn’t really be beating them.’ Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
“Everyone said you shouldn’t be really beating them but we came back to 2-2 and beat them on shuttles last year,” Quek continues. “I think once they knew we were going to shuttles, psychologically we had a bit of an advantage.
“We were very calm and there was an aura of confidence in the team. You could see from making eye contact that we’ve got this. We see from the amount of time and practice we put in doing the shuttles and the homework and scouting from previous shuttles, we were probably in the best possible place to win gold.”
Quek describes the reaction when Hollie Webb struck the winner as “a blur” as well as “pure joy and almost disbelief as well”, though she was in for another shock upon returning to the dressing room.
Her grandmother, Dolly, had suffered a stroke during the Games but her family decided to wait until after the final to break the news. A text message arrived and she instantly phoned home, bursting into tears after hearing the story. Dolly, who is making a full recovery, has become a minor celebrity in her own right. The video doing the rounds on Facebook of her being greeted by Quek in hospital surpassed three million views in five days. “She’s probably more of a star than me at the moment,” Quek says, that unassuming nature coming across once more. “She’s 95, a strong woman and I’m so proud I could call her my nan.
“The most special thing was giving her a hug, regardless of the medal. It was just making sure she was OK but she’s been so proud in the hospital, telling everyone: ‘My granddaughter won an Olympic gold medal.’”
Hollie Webb: Hockey World Cup ruin laid ground for gold medal Read more
While on a personal level her family influence was key, it is hard not to ignore that for Team GB the path to gold was made easier by such forensic planning. None of the teething problems in the Olympic Village experienced by Australia, for example, would get in the way of Britain’s medal rush. Great Britain sent an team to Brazil in advance to ensure the facilities were up to scratch and a local plumber was hired to work on their accommodation so as not to rely on the village’s in-house contractors.
And then there is the Lottery funding. While the price of each medal won by Team GB is understood to have been more than £4m, Quek is right to point out that the players earn just enough to survive. There is also the pressure of performing – failure in Rio would have seen the sport’s funding cut, which would not just impact the elite but trickle down to the grassroots.
“It was really important for us to reach the podium and make sure we had the same funding or maybe got a little bit more. First and foremost, that was the most important box to tick off. They basically fund each athlete to be able to train full time. It’s not enough to go out and buy fancy cars and go on nice holidays.”
London 2012: Great Britain's women win Olympic hockey bronze Read more
The aim now is to ensure hockey remains in the spotlight, but Quek’s intentions are triple-pronged, with promoting the game in the north and encouraging Asian women to be more proactive equally on her mind.
“I want to make sure the sport is accessible for everyone because naturally some fall under certain titles and there are barriers,” she adds. “It’s a case of getting it out there that hockey is for anyone of any age.
“A lot of people are under the impression it’s a southern based sport but that’s a bit of a misconception. It may be a tad more accessible but GB Hockey has been awesome over the past couple of years in promoting it for everybody. I’m obviously half Asian – my dad’s from Singapore, my mum is English – so I would like to inspire people who think they might not be suited to hockey. I want to take that back up north and for people in different backgrounds, whatever their religion, colour or gender make sure they know hockey is for them.”
Quek is candid, too, when it comes to capitalising on this success. Numerous endorsement offers have been made but she will be picky. The ideal path post-hockey would be to “become like Gabby Logan or Clare Balding” on the small screen, but before that there is some more business to take care of. “I’m trying to enjoy it and ride the wave. This has never been done before and we need to remember that. We’ve created history and now it’s about inspiring the future generation.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/29/sam-quek-hockey-team-gb-gold-rio-2016
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en
| 2016-08-29T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1d6d5329bd63277822b5973237e6c2987681144669cb02d32949ed1df9b3408f.json
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[
"Press Association"
] | 2016-08-26T20:51:35 | null | 2016-08-26T20:07:29 |
Belgium’s Jonas van Genechten won his first grand tour stage at the Vuelta a España while Chris Froome remains third overall
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsport%2F2016%2Faug%2F26%2Fvuelta-a-espana-jonas-van-genechten-wins-stage.json
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Vuelta a España: Jonas van Genechten wins first grand tour stage
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www.theguardian.com
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Belgium’s Jonas van Genechten surged to his first grand tour stage victory as Chris Froome and Alberto Contador were caught up in a late crash on stage seven of the Vuelta a España.
The Tour de France winner was unharmed but the Tinkoff team leader fell heavily on his left shoulder after touching wheels with another rider 500m from the finish line in Puebla de Sanabria.
Vuelta a España: Simon Yates claims maiden victory on stage six Read more
Contador crossed the line with a cut to his shoulder and, although he was given the same time as the field with the crash coming inside the final three kilometres, the Spaniard admitted the race was now “complicated” for him.
“Somebody hit me and that’s why I fell down,” Contador told Eurosport. “I was taken down and the left hand side of my body feels pretty bad. “We’ll see about the Vuelta but it will be complicated from now on.”
Contador remains three minutes and 19 seconds down on the race leader, Darwin Atapuma of BMC, whose advantage over Movistar’s Alejandro Valverde was cut to eight seconds. Froome remains in third place 42 seconds down on Atapuma.
The day belonged to Van Genechten, who claimed a third grand tour win in 2016 for an IAM Cycling team who will be disappearing at the end of the season.
Unaware of the pile-up behind him, Van Genechten held off Daniele Bennati (Tinkoff), Valverde, Philippe Gilbert (BMC) and Kevin Reza (FDJ) in the uphill sprint to the line.
“The chances for victory are really small on the Vuelta, so we have to fight every single stage for the possibility of a sprint,” said Van Genechten, riding his maiden grand tour at the age of 29.
“I tried the first one, the second one I was a little bit on the limit – but this was one of my goals so I went right to the finish. It’s the biggest win for me, that’s for sure. To be on the podium in a grand tour was one of my dreams and I did it.”
On a sweltering day, Victor Campenaerts of Lotto NL Jumbo and the Cofidis rider Luis Angel Mate led out an early six-man break. They were caught by the peloton 43km from the finish of the 158.5km stage between Maceda and Puebla de Sanabria in Galicia.
There was another five-man attack with 29km remaining and Astana’s Luis Leon Sanchez and Simon Clarke of Cannondale-Drapac tried to resist the peloton in the closing stages. They were hunted down in the final kilometre and Van Genechten prevailed in what had been a gruelling stage.
Team Sky’s Michal Kwiatkowski was forced to withdraw at the start of the day because of a back problem. Niccolo Bonifazio of Trek-Segafredo and Rein Taaramäe of Katusha were also casualties.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/26/vuelta-a-espana-jonas-van-genechten-wins-stage
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/1b35c6b908ce2697d00e62ed8fc4b3a6a53a6f130e274a80f2476b52c1d8aa67.json
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[
"Matthew Teague"
] | 2016-08-26T13:11:47 | null | 2016-08-25T06:18:28 |
Trump described Brexit as a bid for autonomy and drew parallels to his own campaign, declaring a Trump presidency would bring ‘American independence’
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2016%2Faug%2F24%2Fnigel-farage-donald-trump-rally-hillary-clinton.json
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Farage at Trump rally: 'I wouldn't vote for Clinton if you paid me'
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www.theguardian.com
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Donald Trump positioned himself as an underdog Wednesday night, leaning on Nigel Farage, architect of the British exit from the European Union, to boost morale in the face of sliding polls.
Midway through a speech in Mississippi Trump described “Brexit” as a bid for independence and drew parallels to his own campaign, declaring a Trump presidency would bring about “American independence”.
'Mr Brexit' meets Mr Brexit: Nigel Farage to stump with Trump Read more
He introduced Farage as the leader of Ukip who stood up to the EU “against all odds”. Farage told the crowd of thousands, “We reached those people who have never voted in their lives but believed by going out and voting for Brexit they could take back control of their country, take back control of their borders and get back their pride and self-respect.”
The crowd seemed slightly puzzled by Farage’s appearance on stage. But Trump welcomed Farage warmly, and stood by him as he spoke.
Farage, on stage alongside one of the wealthiest men in the United States, said that Brexit was “for the little people, for the real people”.
Farage’s involvement is part of Trump’s latest strategy that centers on his new campaign chair, Stephen Bannon. Bannon was the head of the Breitbart website before Trump hired him, and is an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit.
But the mashup Wednesday night of Trump, New York politician Rudy Giuliani and British affairs left the Mississippi audience bemused. Before the rally, a quick survey of the crowd at random showed that eight in 10 people had never heard of Farage or Brexit. One woman said she had learned of him in the lead-up to the rally, and the other said, “He’s from the Brits. That’s all I know.”
The rally’s audience was almost entirely white, but Trump placed a new emphasis on reaching minority voters. The opening speaker, a black pastor named Mark Burns, worked through a list of anti-Hillary Clinton points from the traditional – Benghazi, state department emails – to the new and novel, like questioning Clinton’s health. But most pointedly he accused Clinton of racism.
“Millions of babies are dying,” he said, referring to abortion, “at the hands of the race-baiting Democrats.”
Trump himself put an even finer point on it, during his speech: “Hillary Clinton is a bigot,” he said, to an audible gasp in the audience, “who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump greets Nigel Farage during a campaign rally in Mississippi. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images
Amid the unfamiliar talk of British politics, the crowd enjoyed the familiar Clinton and Obama aspects of the speeches, chanting “Lock her up” at the mention of Clinton.
“It’s hard to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the state department begins,” Trump said, referring to a recent analysis by the Associated Press that showed more than half the people Clinton met outside the government as secretary of state were donors to the Clinton family’s foundation. “Hillary Clinton does not believe in America first,” Trump said. “She believes in donors first. And special interests. And lobbyists.”
Farage stopped short of endorsing Trump outright, but added: “I will say this: if I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me!”
After the rally, Bo Smith, a nurse from Florence, Mississippi, said that he enjoyed what he had heard, from the Clinton rhetoric to Farage’s talk on Brexit.
“Yeah, I support it,” he said. “You’ve got to control the borders. They say one in 50,000 might be a terrorist. But if I give you a jar of 50,000 M&Ms and tell you one is cyanide, are you going to take a big handful?”
• This article was amended on 25 August 2016 to include information referring to a recent analysis by the Associated Press that showed more than half the people Clinton met outside the government were donors to her foundation.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/24/nigel-farage-donald-trump-rally-hillary-clinton
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en
| 2016-08-25T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/5300a7cfdacea7d839dd99299e21ffe7d59d1dcd576eb0ecafbcb5a0157802df.json
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[
"Alison Flood"
] | 2016-08-26T13:27:49 | null | 2016-08-23T13:59:12 |
Research by US social scientists found that those who read novels by the likes of Toni Morrison and Harper Lee do better on ‘theory of mind’ tests. Genre fans do not
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2016%2Faug%2F23%2Fliterary-fiction-readers-understand-others-emotions-better-study-finds.json
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Literary fiction readers understand others' emotions better, study finds
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Literary fiction by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Harper Lee and Toni Morrison helps improve readers’ understanding of other people’s emotions, according to new research – but genre writing, from authors including Danielle Steel and Clive Cussler, does not.
Academics David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, from the New School for Social Research in New York, put more than 1,000 participants through the “author recognition test”, which measured exposure to fiction by asking respondents to identify writers they recognised from a list. The list included both authors and non-authors, and ranged from writers who are identified as literary, such as Rushdie and Morrison, to those such as Cussler and Steel who are seen as genre authors. The participants then did the “reading the mind in the eyes” test, in which they were asked to select which of four emotion terms most closely matches the expression of a person in a photograph.
In a paper just published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, the academics reveal that those who had recognised more literary fiction authors in the list were better at inferring others’ feelings, a faculty known as theory of mind. Genre fiction is defined in the paper “by its focus on a particular topic and reliance on relatively formulaic plots”, while literary fiction is defined “more by its aesthetic qualities and character development than its focus on plot or a particular set of topics and themes”.
“Results indicate that exposure to literary but not genre fiction positively predicts performance on a test of theory of mind, even when accounting for demographic variables including age, gender, educational attainment, undergraduate major … and self-reported empathy,” they write in the paper, Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity With Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalising. “We propose that these findings emerge because the implied (rather than explicit) socio-cognitive complexity, or roundness of characters, in literary fiction prompts readers to make, adjust, and consider multiple interpretations of characters’ mental states.”
Castano and Kidd had previously conducted research in which they gave participants extracts from literary or genre novels to read, and then assessed how well they could recognise emotions in others, finding that those who read the literary fiction extracts scored highest. Their latest research set out to look at the emotion-recognition responses of those who choose to read either literary or genre fiction in their daily lives.
“We thought it was important to try and measure a lifetime’s exposure to fiction, and how it affects these processes,” said Castano.
“In those 2013 experiments, we focused on the question of causation – can reading fiction cause improved theory of mind, at least in the immediate context of reading? We found evidence that it can, but this effect was only observed when we assigned participants to read literary fiction. It did not appear when they were asked to read popular genre fiction,” said Kidd.
This time round, said Kidd, they did something new. “We examined patterns of author recognition in two large (each more than 850) independent samples using a technique called factor analysis, and we found evidence of two clusters of authors that could be classified as generally literary or generally popular genre writers.,” he said. “We then tested how levels of familiarity with each type of fiction related to theory of mind performance … The results across three independent samples consistently showed that familiarity with literary fiction, but not genre fiction, reliably predicts better theory of mind performance.”
Their latest evidence, said Kidd, shows that “not all fiction draws on the same psychological processes in the same way”, and that “over time, habitual reading of literary fiction is associated with differences in interpersonal perception that are not associated with regularly reading genre fiction”.
The academics are keen to stress that they are not claiming a superiority for literary fiction. “What we are saying is that there are different ways of telling a story, and they have different impacts on the way we perceive social reality. Literary fiction, we say, tends to challenge social categories – the characters are category-resistant … Popular fiction, on the other hand, uses types of characters which help us immediately understand what is going on. That’s how we learn about the social world – how we build our national and cultural identities,” said Castano.
“This is not to say that reading popular genre fiction cannot be enjoyable or beneficial for other reasons – we suspect it is,” agreed Kidd. “Nor does the present evidence point towards a clear and consistent distinction between literary and popular genre fiction. Instead, it suggests that the broad distinction between relatively complex literary and relatively formulaic genre fiction can help us better understand how engaging with fiction affects how we think.”
The academics hope that their findings will have implications for the study and teaching of literature, as well as in helping to improve theory of mind in those who lack it. “It doesn’t mean you can give Don DeLillo to an autistic child and they’ll be fine – but may help us to understand how theory of mind process[es] could be fostered in individuals with known deficits,” said Castano.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/23/literary-fiction-readers-understand-others-emotions-better-study-finds
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en
| 2016-08-23T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/e7650658a3dadd9d2f10b686424102e1a357b01ed8f1b1e06eae0162ee8f80e9.json
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[] | 2016-08-26T13:25:09 | null | 2016-08-17T18:54:38 |
Editorial: Ira Glass the radio show host says global warming may not be amusing or surprising but it is still the most important thing that’s happening
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fenvironment%2Fcommentisfree%2F2016%2Faug%2F17%2Fthe-guardian-view-on-the-heatwave-still-hope-on-climate-change.json
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The Guardian view on the heatwave: still hope on climate change
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The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.
He might have added that the news about climate change is rarely good, either. As most of the UK enjoys a brief August heatwave, Nasa has confirmed that July was the hottest month the world has experienced since records began. Even in Britain, where most of the month was wet and cool and felt not very summery at all, it was by a narrow margin the warmest month in the past 130 years of record-keeping – and it was the 10th month in a row that a new high was set. Siberian permafrost is melting, releasing lethal anthrax bacteria from thawing reindeer carcasses into the environment. There are floods in southern Louisiana which have killed 11 people and in California thousands are fleeing from forest fires. The link between short-term weather events and long-term changes in the climate may be tenuous, but it’s just what the scientists warned about.
Ever since the general election 15 months ago, too, the political climate has seemed as bleak as the weather has been warm; subsidies for renewables have been cut and incentives intended to encourage landowners to give permission for fracking expanded. Theresa May’s restructuring of Whitehall closed down the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Yet there are glimmers of optimism, too. Decc’s critics argued that it was too small and too narrowly focused to be effective in the kind of territorial battles it needed to win in government. With the right political leadership, the new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy could be capable of the kind of policies that people mean when they talk about joined-up government (although the Treasury will have views about that). The Paris climate summit commitment to cut carbon emissions far enough and fast enough to hold the rise in global temperatures below a maximum of 2C is helping to expand the market in renewables, not least by collapsing the appetite for investment in fossil fuels.
Europe has doubled its power generation from green sources; in the UK it has almost quadrupled. Last year, it accounted for more than a quarter of power. But George Osborne’s attack on “green crap”, along with the eurozone crisis, hit investment hard. China and the US are the big new forces in green energy production. So this is the challenge: we need nuclear to keep the lights on. But not from Hinkley C. Instead, redirect the £30bn of subsidies into making the UK a good place for green investment again.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2016/aug/17/the-guardian-view-on-the-heatwave-still-hope-on-climate-change
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en
| 2016-08-17T00:00:00 |
www.theguardian.com/042a3279dbff713be6e23f53c45623d7c49bf440cc062e8d83b24f517b99fc72.json
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[
"Janet Hall",
"Janet.Hall Jpress.Co.Uk"
] | 2016-08-26T16:49:02 | null | 2016-08-26T16:14:24 |
Thousands of people have packed Blyth for the first day of the Tall Ships Regatta.
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The Tall Ships Regatta in pictures
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/news/local-news/the-tall-ships-regatta-in-pictures-1-8091458
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en
| 2016-08-26T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/dfbaffd9f6b71c48508486d78a899290748aee759fb776a4c6ed27f475e827c6.json
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[] | 2016-08-30T16:51:22 | null | 2016-08-30T14:44:25 |
Seaton Delaval 5-1 Ponteland United
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Foalle nets five as United crash to defeat
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Seaton Delaval 5-1 Ponteland United
United visited early favourites for this season’s title Seaton Delaval without Paul Jones and Alex Nisbet and with manager McIvor suspended he recalled Rory Spencer and brought in the experienced Chris Rue for his first start of the season after returning from holiday.
Rue was in the action straight away having to head a free kick over his own crossbar. Ford cleared the resultant corner out to Cook and Potts for Pont to go on a quick counter attack through Zac Bewley making his first start of the season to win a corner at the other end.
The first period was quite even with United under no real pressure. Then on 20 minutes after the good work Pont shot themselves in the foot. A loose ball was played to an off balanced Ford and the ball was pounced on by Gibbons heading for goal. His shot hit the inside of the post and out to the divisions leading goal scorer Jack Foalle for a simple tap in.
Five minutes later good movement by Foalle found him collecting a ball over the top and running towards goal to score his second with a good finish.
On the half hour mark Foalle took advantage of yet another defensive misunderstanding to shoot on the volley and although Bowey-Tyler got a hand to the ball he couldn’t keep it out. It was effectively game over but certainly not for Foalle for seven minutes before half time he got another opportunity through some poor defending to score his fourth.
Pont were rarely in the game as an attacking force although Zac Bewley had a dangerous run but was brought down just outside the area. Potts’ free kick went over the wall but into the arms of Sean White. The first half had been a one man show of awareness, movement and clinical finishing by an in form striker who just loves playing against Pont. There may only have been six attempts at goal by the hosts in the first half but four of them had finished up in the back of Pont’s net.
McIvor made an immediate change at half time bringing on Johnstone to help the tireless Ethan Bewley up front and moved Potts to centre half to counter the speed of Foalle.
The second half kicked off with Pont kicking down the slope. Hibbitt played a cross towards Johnstone and although the striker got a firm head on the ball it went wide of the target from a good position.
Hibbitt who was the one Pont player to come out of the first half with any credit floated in a free kick which was headed behind for a corner. From the corner the ball was cleared to Havelock-Brown whose cross found Johnstone heading into the net but the goal was disallowed for offside. Johnston’s presence was at least causing some problems for the home side and giving Pont an outlet.
The second half was at least an improvement by Pont but Delaval by now had taken their foot off the gas.
With 20 minutes remaining Pont again caused their own problems. Potts dallied on the ball as the last defender and lost the ball to Foalle who sped for goal. He rounded Bowey-Tyler but was impeded in doing so and the keeper was booked. Foalle picked up the ball to plant his spot kick into the net for his fifth to end a miserable afternoon for Pont.
They did score a consolation goal two minutes from time when Johnstone headed over the keeper from Hibbitt’s free kick for his first league goal for the club.
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/sport/foalle-nets-five-as-united-crash-to-defeat-1-8096076
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en
| 2016-08-30T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/3628a77792a5a2a34468302a9fa3f609b59e9b0dc74b7c2f903d6b16c49598c9.json
|
[
"Andrew Coulson",
"Andrew.Coulson Jpress.Co.Uk"
] | 2016-08-27T14:49:31 | null | 2016-08-27T14:28:48 |
Two key members of the North Sea Tall Ships Regatta organising team have expressed their delight at how well it is going so far.
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Tall Ships event 'great for whole county'
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Two key members of the North Sea Tall Ships Regatta organising team have expressed their delight at how well it is going so far.
And they have set out how important the four-day event is for other parts of Northumberland following an excellent first day.
Tens of thousands of people have already visited Blyth to see the 23 majestic ships in place ahead of the start of the latest race on Monday.
They have also enjoyed a range of entertainment and activities at the port, as well as in the Market Place, Dun Cow Quay, Ridley Park and by Blyth beach.
David Hall, of one of the event sponsors Northumbrian Water, is also chairman of Northumberland Tourism and Active Northumberland.
He said: "When you look at the visitor numbers from yesterday, I think it was approaching 100,000 across the whole day and I'm confident of reaching half a million by the end of the event, which will provide a boost for the county's tourism economy of between £5million and £10million.
"Many businesses in Northumberland are benefiting form the regatta. For example, I know that bakers based in Morpeth and Alnwick are supplying products.
"Visitors have been complimentary about the breadth of activities available as well as the space provided for the ships.
"This event is good for other towns and villages that rely heavily on tourism as hotels and B&Bs further up the coast are reporting that there aren't many beds left.
"The legacy will hopefully be that people will come back to Northumberland having been impressed with what they have seen this weekend and a boost for sailing in the county, particularly for its yacht clubs."
He added that a number of tourist attractions in the county have set-up information displays and stalls in Ridley Park using donated freight containers.
Coun Val Tyler, cabinet member for arts, leisure and culture at the county council, said: "There is something for everyone at the event and the way it's laid out means it's very accessible whether you are able bodied or not.
"Everyone I've spoken to so far has nothing but praise for how it's being organised.
"It took a lot of hard work by many people to bring the event to Northumberland and the key message we're putting across is that this will benefit the whole county.
"Many people are taking the opportunity to visit some of our other towns and villages this weekend and the trainees who will be involved in the race are from all over Northumberland, with councillors support them through their members small schemes fund.
"One councillor chipped in to help fund two bus loads of young people from the Tyne Valley to come along and that's important because we want to encourage people in the west of the county to visit the south east and vice versa.
"It's great that the Port of Blyth has been so supportive and the activities have not curtailed any of its operations. Everyone is working together to make sure the event is a huge success.
The ships will start the race to Gothenburg, Sweden, on Monday. The distance is approximately 600 nautical miles.
A parade of the crews this afternoon will start at 3pm and race chairman James Stevens said they were getting excited for the week ahead at a Captain's Dinner event at Alnwick Castle last night.
He added: "It's very obvious that the town of Blyth has really got into the occasion and people I've spoken to are very enthusiastic about the Tall Ships.
"Day one was great and I'm sure it will be an excellent weekend. Hopefully, there will be a bit of wind on Monday when the race starts.
"The crews will take it very seriously and the responsibilities they will have will bring them together."
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/news/local-news/tall-ships-event-great-for-whole-county-1-8092409
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/95d2949824efa4858717bcfaa261e9a4b43a66c58635fff486c64ec1053fd1d6.json
|
[
"Andrew Coulson",
"Andrew.Coulson Jpress.Co.Uk"
] | 2016-08-27T16:49:30 | null | 2016-08-27T16:02:30 |
Families have been enjoying live music and other fun activities in the sunshine at the Blyth Tall Ships regatta this afternoon.
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http%3A%2F%2Fwww.morpethherald.co.uk%2Fnews%2Flocal-news%2Fwatch-plenty-of-entertainment-on-offer-at-tall-ships-1-8092460.json
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WATCH: Plenty of entertainment on offer at Tall Ships
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Sorry, we're having problems with our video player at the moment, but are working to fix it as soon as we can
Families have been enjoying live music and other fun activities in the sunshine at the Blyth Tall Ships regatta this afternoon.
As well as the parade that is currently taking place, entertainment is being provided at the beach, bandstand, in the Market Place and at Ridley Park.
A large crowd enjoy a circus skills show in Ridley Park.
There is also a stage at Dun Cow Quay and the video shows the Sing Morpeth community choir in action.
Funfair attractions are across the site and those coming along will likely run into a pirate or two.
Have you got something to share on the story? Were you there? What do you think? - Send your pictures, videos or story and we'll publish the best × Continue the story WATCH: Plenty of entertainment on offer at Tall Ships Loading ... Add up to 3 photos or 1 videos to the story There's been a problem uploading your files. Please try again. By uploading your file you agree to our Terms and Conditions × Continue the story Sign in to contribute sign in shape the news in your area...
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/news/local-news/watch-plenty-of-entertainment-on-offer-at-tall-ships-1-8092460
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en
| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/635697b225d492c57ea683cffe66cf883999b31d0471bb83e7e0c073c4d3cc0a.json
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[
"Andrew Mcdonnell"
] | 2016-08-26T13:11:35 | null | 2016-08-18T11:35:53 |
Liam Henderson’s second-half strike turned out to be the decider as Morpeth Town edged out 2-1 winners against Consett at Craik Park.
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McKinnon and Henderson goals see Morpeth Town beat Consett
| null | null |
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Liam Henderson’s second-half strike turned out to be the decider as Morpeth Town edged out 2-1 winners against Consett at Craik Park.
The Highwaymen went into the break with the lead after Ryan McKinnon turned Paul Robinson’s drilled cross into his own net in additional time.
Consett came out a different side and struck the post just before the hour mark through Michael Sweet.
Henderson calmly slotted under the keeper with 10 minutes to go before Sweet scored a consolation for the visitors deep into injury time at the end of Wednesday night’s game.
The Highwaymen went into the game following a disappointing result against Newcastle Benfield on Saturday, and it was a close encounter in the opening exchanges.
Keith Graydon’s free kick, which broke through the four-man wall, was the first attempt of the game, but Shaun MacDonald had it covered.
Henderson forced the keeper into making a fine save two minutes later as his shot across goal was pushed around the post.
Both sides frustrated one another as such, but Michael Chilton probably should have put the hosts ahead on 27 minutes.
A neat passage of play saw James Novak break through into the box, and the defender crossed for Chilton, but the forward glanced his header wide.
Graydon had a further chance when he curled over seven minutes before the break, but the breakthrough came into injury time at the end of the half.
Robinson drove forward and left his marker, the midfielder drilled a cross low and McKinnon slid in at the near post and put into his own net.
Consett came out after the break rejuvenated, having only had one shot on target throughout the first 45 minutes.
Luke Sullivan failed to test Karl Dryden before the Steelmen came within inches of finding an equaliser.
Sweet connected brilliantly with an in-swinging cross, and he hooked the ball onto the foot of the post, and to Morpeth’s relief, the ball was cleared.
The visitors were on top and began to turn the screw, but they continued to fail to hit the target as Sullivan missed a brilliant chance when he headed wide when unmarked.
Chris Reid glanced Sean Taylor’s cross just wide, but the Highwaymen found a much-needed second goal to settle a nervous crowd.
Substitute Steven Anderson drove forward and rolled the ball through to Henderson, who opened his body and slid the ball under the oncoming keeper.
The action wasn’t over, Craggs struck a free kick in a glorious position over the bar six minutes before the end, but Consett did get a goal deep into injury time.
Sweet, who had scored five goals in three games prior to the match, headed home a corner from close range.
However, with seconds remaining, Morpeth kicked off and no sooner had they done that, the referee blew his whistle to confirm the hosts’ first points of the new season.
Morpeth are away to North Shields in the FA Cup preliminary round on Saturday.
Morpeth: Dryden, Mullen, Novak, Fry, Swailes, Reid, Taylor, Graydon (Fondato, 73), Henderson, Chilton (Anderson, 73), Robinson (Forster, 66). Subs not used: Carr, Hall.
Attendance: 252.
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/sport/local-sport/mckinnon-and-henderson-goals-see-morpeth-town-beat-consett-1-8075977
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en
| 2016-08-18T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/7cc736a87feda69f44f8435f80fcb534ab11a5fcf51ed50fcd0e784b3e994b4e.json
|
[
"George Patterson"
] | 2016-08-26T13:11:27 | null | 2016-08-16T10:49:00 |
Morpeth Harrier Rhiannon Hedley achieved a new personal best time of 4m57.8s, when winning the U13 Girls’ 1500m at the fifth and penultimate Start Fitness North Eastern Grand Prix Meeting, held at a rain-soaked Monkton Stadium in Jarrow.
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Rhiannon comletes good weekend for Hedley siblings
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Morpeth Harrier Rhiannon Hedley achieved a new personal best time of 4m57.8s, when winning the U13 Girls’ 1500m at the fifth and penultimate Start Fitness North Eastern Grand Prix Meeting, held at a rain-soaked Monkton Stadium in Jarrow.
Just 24 hours after elder brother Kieran had achieved a new best of 4m00.66s over the same distance at a BMC Gold Standards Meeting at Stretford, there was no doubt his achievement had spurred Rhiannon into adding further success to the family tally.
Hedley has now furthered her standing as the leading athlete in her age group regionally, and overnight has seen her rise from 19th to 20th nationally.
It was a good night all round for Morpeth Harriers, who had a total of 15 athletes in action on a night that was certainly well adrift of August in terms of conditions and temperature.
Although there were constant showers, thankfully there was no hint of wind.
All 15 from the club did manage to score points in the individual Grand Prix, and including Hedley, the club’s athletes managed to pull off no less than seven age group victories, two from the track, and five coming from some excellent field eventers.
Prominent was U17 throws specialist Charlotte Pickering-Pruvot, who won both the discus and shot putt with best efforts of 30.01m and 11.40m respectively.
There were also victories for Ruaridh Lang, Andrew Knight, and Adam Willoughby.
Lang won the U17 Men’s Discus with a best throw of 39.69m, Knight the U15 Boys’ Shot Putt with a best of 13.33m, and Willoughby equalled his best clearance of 1.35m, to win the U13 Boys’ High Jump.
In the Senior Men’s Shot Putt, Morpeth’s Craig Charlton was up against North East champion Craig Sturrock of Gateshead, who managed 14.44m. Charlton made a best of 13.09m to finish second.
On the track Morpeth secured their second win when Holly Peck won by a near margin of six seconds in the U15 Girls’ 1500m, posting a finishing time of 4m59.8s, which was a little adrift of her personal best.
Another Morpeth Harrier competing in this event was Lily Heaton, who finished fifth in 5m23.3s.
When finishing fourth in the A race of the graded 1500m, Morpeth Harrier Philip Winkler posted a new personal best of 4m11.00s.
In the B race, Morpeth U17 athletes Liam Marsh, Matthew Waterfield, and Connor Marshall finished second, fourth, and sixth respectively.
Marsh set a brand new personal best of 4m31.7s, taking all of six seconds off his previous figures. Waterfield equalled his personal best of 4m34.4s, and Marshall posted a finishing time of 4m35.0s.
In the graded C race, Morpeth’s Abby Sheldon finished eighth in 5m10.1s, and was second U20 woman.
Morpeth’s Adam Gibbs competed in the graded 200m events, finishing sixth in the C race in 24.7s, and was fourth U20 man.
In the E race, Matthew Waterfield finished third in 25.3s, and was third fastest U17 man.
Morpeth’s Jacob Clayton competed in the U13 Boys’ 100m and 200m events, finishing sixth and fifth respectively, posting times of 15.5s, and 31.1s.
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http://www.morpethherald.co.uk/sport/local-sport/athletics/rhiannon-comletes-good-weekend-for-hedley-siblings-1-8071262
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en
| 2016-08-16T00:00:00 |
www.morpethherald.co.uk/f4406265e140280598d2e7dc15551620ae2c550f21b273d759cb70232f97a86d.json
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[] | 2016-08-27T14:49:28 | null | 2016-08-27T13:58:52 |
A new hairdressing experience salon and children’s clothing boutique for children has opened in Morpeth.
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Spare a Minna and take a Pikku at this
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A new hairdressing experience salon and children’s clothing boutique for children has opened in Morpeth.
Pikku is the brainchild of mum-of-two Minna Scaife, who also offers similar services at her premises in Gosforth.
Ms Scaife came up with the concept of a unique shop that combined children’s hairdressing with an exclusive retail outlet selling a selection of fashion brands not readily available on the high streets in the North East.
The second branch of Pikku opened in Morpeth’s Newgate Street following the success of the first outlet.
And the hard work of the team paid off with news earlier this month that Pikku had won a bronze medal in the national Junior Design Awards.
Ms Scaife said: “I am so proud of what we have achieved with Pikku in a relatively short period of time, and our customer loyalty is second to none, which is a testament to the level of service and attention we give to each and every customer.”
The business aims to transform what can be a stressful haircut for little ones into a fun experience, which is relaxing for both children and parents alike.
All team members at Pikku have received special training, including work with the North East Autism Society, to ensure they can also provide an enjoyable hair-cutting experience for children with autism, many of whom can struggle with having their tresses trimmed.
“We have over 150 five star reviews on Facebook alone, which is truly incredible,” said Ms Scaife.
“We are looking forward to introducing everyone in Morpeth to fun Pikku experiences.”
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
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[
"Ian Leech"
] | 2016-08-27T10:49:25 | null | 2016-08-27T11:00:11 |
The retail and commerce sectors remain the heartbeat of Morpeth town centre, just as they have been for generations.
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Awards will recognise the best of town centre business
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The retail and commerce sectors remain the heartbeat of Morpeth town centre, just as they have been for generations.
History is on their side, going back to the time in 1199 when King John granted Morpeth a Royal Charter to hold a weekly market.
Morpeth Market Picture by Jane Coltman
Since then, through the Middle Ages and beyond, Morpeth has continued to build its reputation as a trading centre in Northumberland and the North East.
It is one centred very much around the markets, which would bring cattle traders to the town from as far away as the Highlands of Scotland.
Today, Morpeth remains as proud of its role now as a modern market town as it has ever been, serving not only local residents, but as a shopping destination without rival in the region.
It’s a reputation that has been earned through the quality and variety of the Morpeth shopping experience, offering, as it does, an unrivalled mix of big high street names and niche independent businesses that together give the town its uniqueness.
Together all those in business or working in the centre of Morpeth help to make our town such an attractive and vibrant place to shop. Jacky Beesley, Morpeth and District Chamber of Trade Chairman
Add in the character, charm and heritage of the town centre; its colourful floral on-street and parks’ displays that have regularly caught the eye of Bloom judges; and the hospitable welcome Morpeth can offer through its cafes, coffee shops, restaurants and pubs and its easy to see why Morpeth attracts the large number of visitors it does each week.
It’s not surprising then, perhaps, that Morpeth will later this year recognise and celebrate the achievements of the best of local businesses trading in and around the centre of town.
The Heart of Morpeth Business awards have just been launched and applications are now open for entrants in seven different categories.
The awards are being promoted by Morpeth Town Team, with the assistance of the team’s main partners Morpeth and District Chamber of Trade and Sanderson Arcade.
The main sponsor of what promises to be a gala awards presentation evening is Cookswell Citroen of Pegswood, Northumberland’s principal Citroen dealer.
The various award categories are as follows.
Business Manager of the Year (sponsored by Inside Morpeth magazine and ThruYouDoor delivery service), Young Achiever of the Year (sponsored by WCRS), and the Emily Wilding Davison award for women in business in Morpeth (sponsored by the Northumberland Suffragette’s relative Geoffrey Davison and Emily Inspires, which organised a series of events to mark the 100th anniversary of Emily’s death in 2013).
The Customer Service Team of the Year award is being sponsored by The Flag Man, the Independent Retailer of the Year is sponsored by Global Radio, the Community Engagement Project Award is being sponsored by Beach Design, while Taylor Wimpey will sponsor the Retailer of the Year Award.
A final award will be presented on the evening to the winner of a competition to find the best shop window display for the homecoming of Morpeth Town Football Club after its victory in the FA Vase final at Wembley in May.
Businesses are eligible to enter the awards if they are trading in Newgate Street, Bridge Street, Oldgate, New Market, Sanderson Arcade, Manchester Street, Castle Square, Wellway and Dark Lane.
Entry forms are now available from either Lumley House in Sanderson Arcade or via the moreinmorpeth website.
Completed entry forms have to be submitted by Friday, September 5, with a judges’ shortlist of finalists announced by Friday, September 16.
The winners will be presented with their awards at a gala evening being held at Morpeth’s Riverside Lodge on Wednesday, October 19, starting at 7pm.
Bookings for places at the evening, which cost £20 per head including a three-course meal, are now being taken at Lumley House in Sanderson Arcade.
Jacky Beesley, who chairs Morpeth and District Chamber of Trade, says Morpeth’s claim to be the premier market town north of the Tyne, is largely due to the variety and quality of its shops and businesses in the centre of town.
“It is right and proper that we recognise and celebrate the success of those businesses, and the people who work for them, through the very first Heart of Morpeth business awards,” she said.
“Together all those in business or working in the centre of Morpeth help to make our town such an attractive and vibrant place to shop, whether you live locally or customers are simply visiting us.”
Plans are also well under way for another very special event in Morpeth in October — the fourth annual food and drink festival being held on the very first day of the month.
And organisers say it will be the biggest and best yet.
For the second year running, stalls will be set up in Bridge Street, as well as around the Market Place and in Morpeth Town Hall.
There will be plenty to see, do and taste at the festival, which has as its main sponsor BMW dealership Stratstone Tyneside.
One of the regular favourites that will be back again will be the show-cooking kitchen manned by local chefs and cooks from restaurants, take-aways, cafes and coffee shops around the town.
Watch out for more details in publicity releases as the Morpeth Food and Drink Festival date approaches.
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
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[] | 2016-08-27T12:49:27 | null | 2016-08-27T12:58:52 |
There were celebrations at Lynemouth and District Arthritis Care 25 years ago. Pictured are some of the committee members, but what had they achieved?
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Images of Yesteryear
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| 2016-08-27T00:00:00 |
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