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UK parents: share your experience on the impact of online content on children | Kate Winslet used her Bafta speech to ask the government for more protection against ‘harmful’ content on social media. Winslet who won best actress award for her role in I am Ruth , which explores the relationship between mother and child (played by daughter Mia Threapleton) dealing with mental health pressure from social media. Winslet called on “people in power” to “criminalise harmful content,” telling the ceremony: “I Am Ruth was made for parents and their children, for families who feel that they are held hostage by the perils of the online world, for parents who wish they could still communicate with their teenagers, but who no longer can.” The online safety bill , which is progressing through the House of Lords, requires social networks to protect children from harmful content, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for those services that do not comply. We would like to hear from parents on how they feel about the impact on children of online content that could be deemed offensive, disturbing or harmful. What issues have you experienced? We will contact you, if we wish to take your submission further and before we publish. Town or area is fine eg. Your age and what you do Your details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Your details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Please do not share names of other individuals Add any extra information here Contact us on WhatsApp at +447766780300. For more information, please see our guidance on contacting us via WhatsApp . For true anonymity please use our SecureDrop service instead. | BAD |
It’s time to root out toxic Tony Danker and his creepy cronies, the old boys’ network must be dis | YOU can tell a lot about a person by their reaction when they are told it’s time to go. And Tony Danker , who was dismissed as director-general of the Confederation of British Industry after allegations of misconduct , didn’t exactly cover himself in glory this week. Rather than just accept the fact that it was time to go, he embarked on a bit of a bizarre comms blitz to defend himself. Dripping with self-pity, he summoned his best cliches when he told the BBC: “I’ve been around the block, I know the way the world works. But it’s so clear — I’ve been made the fall guy.” He moaned that his reputation has been “totally destroyed” because, as a result of his sacking, his name has been wrongly associated with separate allegations, by more than a dozen women, of serious sexual misconduct at the CBI before he joined. The allegations led to a mass exodus from the CBI, with more than 50 leading businesses including John Lewis , BMW and Tesco pulling out, and the group suspending its operations until June. So, if this intolerable behaviour by senior CBI figures was rife before Tony took over, what exactly was the £376,000-a-year director-general doing to change the obviously toxic culture there? It seems he was trawling the private Instagram accounts of junior members of staff, messaging some 200 individuals to “build rapport”, inviting some to send him family pictures and generally making a number of staff queasy with his messages. According to Brian McBride, president of the CBI, Danker was being “selective” with his account of the allegations against him and was given his marching orders. Tony apparently also forgot to mention that the majority of colleagues he invited to a select Christmas karaoke party in 2021 were women under the age of 35. The bottom line is that asking multiple younger and more junior women out for drinks and karaoke, and sliding into their Insta accounts, is not boss behaviour. At 51, the father-of-two should be young enough to know the rules and boundaries of the modern office. But rather than accept that he had behaved badly, he appears to be in a froth of self-righteous indignation that he was dismissed simply for making staff feel “uncomfortable” — as if having a creepy boss should still be seen as a rite of passage for young women in the workplace. The fact that other men at the CBI might have behaved even more badly is no defence, but in some ways this case is indeed a red herring. What the whole episode has done is to lift a rock to reveal an appalling, misogynistic culture at the organisation which claims to represent 190,000 British companies and which bills itself as “The voice of business”. If more than a dozen women have said they have been victims of serious sexual misconduct in a workplace then that often means there are dozens more who haven’t felt able to speak up, which is horrific. Unfortunately, the sordid revelations about the CBI are just the latest to engulf important institutions, including the Met Police and the Fire and Rescue Service, where misogyny, sexism and racism are said to be rife. Toxic environments won’t fix themselves. Organisations like the CBI, founded on the old boys’ network, need to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up — preferably by a team of both women and men who can create a culture of equality. In the wake of Tony Danker’s departure and the raft of further damaging allegations miring the CBI, three other members of staff have been suspended and its board has promised a “root and branch” review of its culture. It is the very least its business clients should expect before the organisation can once more claim to speak for British companies. ELEVEN years after committing despicable attacks on teenage girls, rapist Fabian Henry still hasn’t been deported to Jamaica . It seems the large part of the hold-up is thanks to Sir Keir Starmer who, along with other politicians, opposed a flight to send him home. Henry was jailed for attacking a 17-year-old girl twice and for abducting and raping a 15-year-old. He was among 25 Jamaican nationals taken off a February 2020 deportation flight at the last minute, after the Labour leader signed a letter demanding the cancellation of “all further deportations”. And so he is still with us. Thanks for that, Keir! PM Rishi Sunak hit the nail on the head when he referred to him at PMQs as “ Sir Softy ”. Starmer is so soft I fear crime levels would soar under a Labour government – which really is the last thing we need. MOST of us have enormous sympathy for doctors and nurses working in the NHS . But within minutes of RCN nurses rejecting a five per cent pay offer, doctors were pushing to co-ordinate strikes. A post on an online junior doctors ’ forum read: “We can co-ordinate strikes and really disrupt, and we won’t have the, ‘Well, the nurses accepted five per cent, do you think you’re better than nurses?’ stick to be beaten with.” This is morally wrong – and would cause havoc, delays to already-long waiting lists and needless deaths. I understand the idea of a strike is to make a point, but to co-ordinate it with the sole motive of causing maximum harm to people in need is just plain nasty. I’VE got more fabric in my napkin than in the extremely itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny bikini that Demi Moore wore in recent Instagram pics. But, oh boy, doesn’t she look great? And, as they say, if you’ve got it then you might as well flaunt it. I know I would. I AM very glad to hear that Strasbourg judges’ ability to block Rwanda removals flights will be overridden by new UK laws. It’s absolutely right that Home Secretary Suella Braverman is able to disregard the European Court of Human Rights ’ attempts to obstruct deportations. The Home Office will introduce amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill to allow the Home Secretary to ignore European judges’ “pyjama injunctions” – so-called as they are granted so late. About time. HOW does this one work, then? A new report says Chinese researchers may have begun developing two Covid vaccines in November 2019, just before the official start of the outbreak. A 300-page document compiled by the US Senate suggests Chinese researchers started work on a vaccine programme long before most of the world had heard of this particular coronavirus. But the most shocking part of the report is that it concludes the pandemic most likely came from a lab leak and was the result of a “research-related incident” in Wuhan. It’s vital that we know for sure how Covid began in order to prevent similar outbreaks in the future. If it was developed in a lab then China must be held responsible. ISN’T it funny how divided the world can be over a little bit of body hair? Actress Rachel McAdams was branded “nasty”, “tasteless” and “gross” for merely posing for a photoshoot with a bit of under-arm fuzz. She responded by saying that “looking your best” is “different for everyone” – which is true. But the real point is this: her body, her choice. | BAD |
Keir Starmer has a blank piece of paper where his policies should be – it will be no surprise if Tories w | FORGET the polls and the focus groups. This is the week we’ll find out for sure if voters believe Sir Keir Starmer has what it takes to be PM. Elections are the only real test of public opinion. Thursday’s town hall skirmishes will reveal who is on track to win in 2024. After 13 years of Tory chaos, coups and convulsions, any self-respecting Labour leader with a clear plan of action should be a racing certainty. Yet Starmer is struggling to look like an outright winner, leaving Rishi Sunak with a faint hope of leading a shock fourth-term Tory government. The “Rishi bounce” — a combination of competence and stability — has persuaded voters to think twice about switching sides. But an even bigger factor is the blank sheet of paper which represents a Starmer-led Labour administration. The biggest blank of all is Starmer himself. He is rarely mentioned on the doorstep and, when he is, there are more questions than answers. What would he do on taxes and public spending? Or crime and punishment? Would he stop illegal immigration? Can he really define a woman? As for more bread-and-butter issues, whose side is he on? Is it the politically motivated wreckers who are crippling public services? Striking doctors and nurses or terrified patients? Militant teachers or innocent children robbed of a decent education? After a torrent of twists, U-turns and policy somersaults on everything from crime and punishment to Covid and lockdown, voters have no idea what Sir Keir really stands for. Asked to sum him up, focus groups range from the bland (“grey”, “wooden”) to the abusive (“insincere slimeball”). This is no surprise, remembering his erstwhile support for both ultra-left Jeremy Corbyn and the EU’s “free movement of people” — aka mass immigration. Fortunately, the nature of this week’s elections provides a glimpse of how life might be lived in a Starmer-led Britain. In Labour towns and cities, tin-pot tyrants meddle in every nook and cranny of our daily lives, from kids’ sex education to trans issues , race and diversity to policing priorities. London motorists vow revenge for Mayor Sadiq Khan’s cash cosh on White Van Man , charging a huge £27.50 a day in congestion and “clean air” fees to enter our gridlocked capital. Birmingham City Council faces a backlash for fiercely opposed road closures. Car- parking fees across the country are steepest under Labour. More than 8,000 council seats fall vacant this week. Six months ago, amid the Liz Truss ruins, Labour were more than 20 points ahead in the polls and tipped to grab 2,000 seats from the Tories. Today they would be lucky to gain half that number. Anything less will boost Tory hopes of survival. Voters still feel bruised, but any protest votes are likely to go to Lib Dems. This is bad news for Labour. Political analysts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher say Labour cannot afford to be seen as just another protest party. “Labour requires a swing larger than Tony Blair achieved in 1997 just to register the slimmest of parliamentary majorities,” they said in The Sunday Times. “Anything less than significant gains in a wide variety of English councils will suggest that ambition is out of reach. “It will not be enough for electors simply to search for the best way to punish the Tories. Labour needs to show it is winning back support on its own account.” Devoid of ideas of his own, Starmer is now pinning all Labour hopes on the cost-of- living crisis, with soaring food prices right at the top of voters’ priorities. Sir Keir believes he can win simply by asking the killer question: “Do you feel better or worse off after 13 years of Tory rule?” But voters with long memories will recall the election of 2000, when Gordon Brown was defeated after 13 years of Labour rule. His departing Chief Secretary Liam Byrne left a note on the desk of incoming Chancellor George Osborne . “I am afraid there is no money left,” he wrote. Just eight words. But as a verdict on Labour in power, they could fill Starmer’s blank sheet of paper. | BAD |
Wednesday briefing: Are standardised tests failing children? | Good morning. Almost everything about adulthood stinks, but it has one important benefit: nobody can ever make you take another exam. Who among us looks back fondly on turning over a sheaf of paper to find out which particular gaps in your knowledge are about to be ruthlessly exposed? And who doesn’t feel a shiver of sympathy for the children going through the same thing today – and gratitude that at least this time, it isn’t you? Year 6 pupils in England, who sat their key stage 2 tests (widely known as Sats , or standardised assessment tests) last week, might be justified in feeling particularly hard done by: they face far more onerous assessment than their counterparts across the rest of the UK, and can look to 10 and 11-year-olds in comparable systems from Canada to New Zealand for proof that another approach is possible. In the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis, and after the alarm was raised over a particularly brutal English test last week that was said to have left some pupils in tears , those worries look particularly salient. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s education correspondent Sally Weale, is about the long-running fight over Sats, and why so many teachers and parents are calling for an overhaul. You may now look at the headlines. You have five minutes to complete this newsletter. Do not use a calculator. Housing | Tenants and campaigners have warned Michael Gove not to create a “back door” for unfair evictions as private rented sector reforms are unveiled on Wednesday . The overhaul will ban no-fault evictions but strengthen landlords’ rights to throw tenants out for antisocial behaviour, which could mean renters being given a two-week notice period for antisocial behaviour evictions. Taiwan | Free nations must commit themselves to a free Taiwan, Liz Truss has said on a visit to Taipei , in which she called for an “economic Nato” to tackle Beijing’s growing authoritarianism. Truss, the most senior British politician to make the trip since Margaret Thatcher, drew a rebuke from China’s UK embassy, which said the visit would only harm Britain. Media | A leading Mirror journalist allegedly blackmailed the company as it attempted to cover up phone hacking , the high court has been told. Lee Harpin, who held a number of senior roles at the People and Sunday Mirror, was alleged to be a known phone hacker whose understanding of illegal behaviour at the newspaper group caused anxiety at board level. Harpin denies the claims. Asylum | Ministers are removing basic housing protections from asylum seekers under new rules designed to move tens of thousands out of hotels and into the private rented sector. The changes would exempt landlords from regulations governing everything from electrical safety to minimum room sizes. Education | The University of Oxford will cut its ties with the Sackler family , whose wealth came from addictive opioid drugs. The family’s name will be removed from two galleries in the Ashmolean Museum and a university library as well as several staff positions. Dismay about the difficulty of Sats is now as predictable a part of the academic calendar as a terrible school play – but it feels especially acute this year. Last year’s results revealed the gap between the scores obtained by disadvantaged children and others had grown since before the pandemic, when they were last taken, leaving the biggest difference between the two in a decade . And after the Department for Education responded to anger over an English test last week, reported to be so hard that some teachers struggled to understand the questions, by saying that it was “ designed to be challenging ”, schools minister Nick Gibb promised to review the paper in question. “They do have to test a range of ability to make sure we can show what proportion of children are exceeding the standards and so on,” he said. “But we don’t want these tests to be too hard for children. That’s not the purpose.” So what is the purpose? “The government would say that up until the pandemic, taking a rigorous approach has in general narrowed the gap between disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers,” Sally Weale said. “But that approach has stalled. And there is real worry that they will find it very difficult to catch up.” How are Sats supposed to work? The key stage 2 assessments are billed as a way to measure how well schools are doing, and to identify any problem areas for pupils ahead of their secondary education. In theory, they’re not meant to be a source of stress for the children who take them. “The assessments only include questions on things that children should already have been taught as part of the national curriculum,” the government’s education hub says . “Children shouldn’t be made to feel any unnecessary pressure when it comes to the KS2 assessments.” The exams are calibrated to be a reliable guide to what children have learned, with questions going through three cycles of reviews by teachers and experts before being trialled on 1,000 pupils each time. That process is supposed to avoid any disadvantage for particular groups of pupils and to make sure they produce a range of marks that accurately measures a full range of abilities – since there’s little point in a test that leaves the bottom quartile all scoring zero, or the top one all getting full marks. “They’re supposed to provide a picture of a school’s performance that helps parents know what kind of school they’re choosing, and to see how individual kids are doing,” Sally said. “The idea is that it’s just based on what they’ve been doing all year. It’s meant to be fairly pain-free.” UCL research in 2021 supported that argument: it found little difference in the well-being of children who had taken them and those who had not. Those who defend the existing system might point to news yesterday that pupils in England have risen to fourth place in the world rankings of literacy among nine- and 10-year-olds – beating the US and every other country in Europe. While that measure is taken before the Sats, Prof Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, argued : “Although there are sometimes cries of pain from parents and teachers about the Sats test, there’s no doubt that they set clear objectives for primary schools, and that is reflected in our position on the international scene.” What do critics say? The argument against Sats is not, typically, that there is no need for assessment of children’s progress: it is that high-stakes external tests that matter so much to schools are bound to create perverse “teach to the test” incentives that drive out what many parents value most about education, and consign children to an “exam factory” at too early an age. They also say that quite often, as in the recent English test, they’re simply too hard. One measure of that: when a group of MPs and peers (pictured above) took a sample test in maths and English last December, they scored lower than the average results achieved by 10-year-olds . (You may think that you’d quite like more than 44% of MPs to be up to year 6 maths, but the point still stands.) “Even if the department says that they aren’t meant to be this way, you hear many stories about kids having revision at lunchtime, or getting homework during half term, or being sick from the stress, and so on,” Sally said. “The news of this recent test will have added to that argument. It feels like a judgement to parents and pupils, and the argument is that it drives a lot of the joy out of a period in education which is supposed to be about enriching children’s lives and making them love education.” The National Education Union says that the UCL research fails to take into account how Sats have changed in recent years. Ninety-five percent of headteachers say too much time is spent preparing for the test, and 90% of teachers are unsatisfied with the system. You might see a vested interest in teachers rejecting a system that demands a lot of them. But parents tend to agree: 95% said Sats had a negative effect on their child’s well-being last year. Nor do parents typically use them to choose a school: Ofsted reports and local reputation are considered much more important, and 85% say they don’t use Sats at all. As for pupils: almost half of year 6 children said they spent most of the year doing practice papers, 60% said they were worried about the exams last year, and one in 10 said they were having trouble sleeping as a result. (You can see all these figures and others in this briefing (pdf) by the campaign group More Than a Score.) What would an alternative look like? There are plenty of suggestions from critics – but most centre on replacing Sats with something new. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour promised to abolish them altogether , though did not say what the alternative would be; the party doesn’t currently have a stated position on the issue. The EDSK thinktank argues that more frequent, shorter assessments run online that automatically give pupils questions adjusting to their performance would make the process less burdensome for schools and pupils alike and provide a fairer measure of progress. The British Educational Research Association suggests removing the tests – and league tables – and instead using a test of a sample of pupils alongside questionnaires for schools, parents and pupils for a broader measure of success. Any alternative would be more popular with teachers and parents. Nonetheless, the government does not appear likely to abandon the current system, which it sees as one of the tools it will use to get 90% of pupils to expected standards in reading, writing and maths by 2030. That looks a tall order: last year, that target was hit by just 1% of schools. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Zoe Williams has an entertaining meeting with Loreen (above), who won Eurovision for Sweden for the second time at the weekend, and finds a beaming, self-mocking balladeer with a rich life story and political convictions. “I don’t like the word ‘political’,” she says. “It’s so small – I wish there was a bigger word for it.” Archie President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador is the most popular leader in Latin America, in part because of his draconian treatment of gangs and the resulting fall in crime. Luke Taylor reports on the innocent young men being caught up in the crackdown. Archie It has been three months since a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling more than 116,000 gallons of toxic petrochemicals. Like many residents, Zsuzsa Gyenes is still displaced, unable to return home, and is calling for accountability for those responsible. Nimo Marina Hyde has every last detail of the byzantine Phil and Holly drama on This Morning . Stop lying to yourself and read it. Archie “Stealth wealth” and “quiet luxury” are the latest fashion phrases dominating social media. But in the Atlantic, (£) Amanda Mull asks whether this trend is actually taking off in the way many seem to be suggesting: “Stealth wealth seems to be more of an imagined trend than anything else – inspired by a mistaken, stylised notion of how the wealthy live their glamorous lives.” Nimo Champions League | Inter reached the final of the competition after a 74th minute goal from Lautaro Martínez (above) secured a 1-0 win against their bitter rivals Milan on the night, and a 3-0 aggregate victory. While Inter will be underdogs against either Manchester City or Real Madrid in the final, Jonathan Liew wrote : “This is a club that has always done its best work in the shadow of doubt, that is most dangerous at the moment when you dare to write it off.” Cricket | Jofra Archer will miss a third successive summer, and a second successive Ashes series, after scans revealed a recurrence of a stress fracture to his right elbow . Rob Key, the ECB’s managing director for men’s cricket, said the fast bowler was “pretty distraught” at the news. Championship | Luton fans celebrated on the pitch after a 2-0 win over Sunderland in the playoff semi-final second leg secured them a place in the final. Goals from Gabriel Osho and Tom Lockyer turned the tables on Sunderland, who had won 2-1 at home in the first leg. “We had to mix it up and be horrible and dirty and that’s how we won the game,” Lockyer said. Our Guardian print edition splashes this morning with “Alarm as ministers target housing standards to cut asylum hotels bill”. Housing issues of a different kind lead the Times’ Wednesday edition – “Starmer: I’ll allow more homes on green belt”. “PM: You must let us deport illegal migrants” – that’s t message from Rishi Sunak to European judges, says the Daily Express . “Can’t afford a sandwich? Hard cheese” – the Daily Mirror calls out “more right-wing cruelty” as, it says, former MP Ann Widdecombe declares “no one has a right to cheap food”. The Daily Telegraph has “Free speech is at risk in trans row, Oxford dons tell students”. “We’re NOT guns for hire Harry” – that’s the Sun’s headline for its story about the court case between the prince and the Met over payment for his security. “Working from home fuels UK’s sick note crisis” says the Daily Mail , while the i has “Bird flu spreads to humans in the UK”. The top story in the Financial Times is “ChatGPT chief sees AI manipulation of US elections as ‘significant’ concern”. Has Ukraine’s spring offensive begun? Ukrainian officials claim their forces have retaken land around the eastern city of Bakhmut and shot down Russian missiles targeting Kyiv. Luke Harding reports on the state of the war A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad This picture essay collects images from a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of works by female artists who have highlighted the evolving political and social landscapes of countries with large Muslim populations. One photograph (above) features the actor Iman Vellani, known for her television role as comic-book character Kamala Khan, AKA Ms Marvel, in a series that focuses on girls and women in the US and Lebanon. Another features the photographer’s daughters, inspired by their evolution from girls to adults. The two girls, Darine and Dania, gaze confidently at the camera, their personalities emerging through their body language and what they are wearing. Others highlight the plight of a transgender woman in Iran, the dispossession of Palestinian women who live in a perpetual state of occupation, and a moment of togetherness in Nigeria as girls gather around a circle of candles on their classroom floor to exchange stories while Boko Haram unleashed attacks on the country. The exhibition centres the experiences of marginalised women and celebrates the achievements of female photographers who have been able to capture their stories. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android . Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply | GOOD |
Press freedom should not be subject to the whims of MPs | The House of Commons will today hold a general debate on Ukraine, the first for several weeks. It is right that the military, diplomatic and political implications are regularly discussed in Parliament. This is the biggest geo-political crisis in Europe since 1945 and the conflict is turning into a proxy stand-off between Nato and Russia. What does this mean for our foreign policy and defence budget; should countries like Finland be brought into Nato; do we need to revisit the Strategic Review entitled Global Britain in a Competitive Age published last year? We will be living with the ramifications of the past two months for the next two decades. Such a debate will also elevate the gaze of our MPs to weightier matters than “partygate” and the latest subject to foment discord, the furore over Angela Rayner’s legs . Great offence has been taken by the Labour deputy leader and other MPs about a story in the Mail on Sunday suggesting she was distracting Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Question Time. It is extraordinary that this has been elevated into a cause celebre when so much else is going on. The anger of parliamentarians is also being directed at the messenger rather than the tawdry source of the claim. MPs are even demanding that the Commons pass of the story’s author should be removed and Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, has requested a meeting with the newspaper’s editor to “demand an explanation” . Last week, a Labour MP called for the pass of the sketch writer of The Times to be withdrawn because of the “unacceptable” content of an article. Are newspapers now expected to tailor their reportage to the whims of what MPs consider appropriate? | BAD |
Donald Perkins obituary | The particle physicist Donald Perkins, who has died aged 97, made seminal discoveries about the structure of the proton, and nuclear interactions at extreme energies, and first proposed the use of beams of pion particles in cancer therapy. His career spanned the birth of particle physics, as it emerged from studies of cosmic rays in the 1940s, through its maturation in the final decades of the last century, to the climactic discovery of the Higgs boson in the 21st. He played key roles throughout. When Perkins began research in 1948, the electron, proton and neutron were the only known fundamental particles whose role in building atoms was understood. The pion, a particle predicted to carry the strong force that binds atomic nuclei, had recently been discovered in cosmic rays by Cecil Powell of Bristol University, and it was in Powell’s group that Perkins began his research career. Powell had pioneered the use of photographic emulsions to study cosmic rays. The technique involved going to high altitudes, such as the Pic du Midi, or using specially adapted weather balloons, to get best access to the rays. Perkins’ supervisor was GP Thomson, who had been active in the second world war, and Perkins asked him to arrange for a flight from RAF Benson in Oxfordshire to take his photographic emulsion up 30,000 feet and fly it around for several hours. During the next few years Perkins obtained several significant images of pions in action. He was the first to observe the nuclear capture of the negatively charged pion and obtained evidence that the pion is unstable. With Powell and Peter Fowler, Perkins published an encyclopedia of emulsion images of the interactions of cosmic rays, The Study of Elementary Particles by the Photographic Method (1959), which was the state of the art in the field. In 1961, Perkins and Fowler first suggested the use of pion beams as a cancer therapy. Discoveries in cosmic rays inspired the birth of high-energy particle physics using terrestrial accelerators, which led to the discovery of a veritable zoo of particles. That most of these are not fundamental was suspected, but not until 1968 was there direct evidence that the proton, and by implication others, are composed of more fundamental particles. The breakthrough had come from experiments at Stanford, California, where electrons were used to probe inside the proton and neutron. That the fundamental constituents are quarks, however, was only established in 1972, thanks to an insight by Perkins. Among the avalanche of particle discoveries had been that of the neutrino, in 1956. This electrically neutral sibling of the electron fascinated him. After becoming professor of elementary particle physics at Oxford University in 1965, where he built the modern department of nuclear physics with Denys Wilkinson and Ken Allen , Perkins began to use beams of neutrinos, at the Cern laboratory in Geneva, as probes of the proton. There he was directly involved in two breakthrough discoveries that inspired the modern standard model of particles and forces. Perkins was well informed about the Stanford experiments with electrons and immediately, in 1968, convinced a newly formed collaborative team using Cern’s Gargamelle bubble chamber that beams of neutrinos could provide a complementary view of the proton’s inner structure. This idea dominated the neutrino programme at Cern, and by 1972 their data enabled the electric charges of those constituents to be measured. The result: the proton and neutron are built of quarks, bound together by gluons. By 1973 this had inspired development of the modern quantum chromodynamics theory of the strongly interacting particles, a key foundation of the standard model. The strong nuclear force was understood, but the weak force, whose most familiar role is in fuelling the sun and in causing forms of radioactivity, remained an enigma. A novel theory, uniting the weak force with the electromagnetic force, now received its first confirmation thanks to Perkins and the Gargamelle group. Neutrinos are a unique probe of the weak force. They were known to pick up electric charge when interacting with protons, but the emerging theory uniting electromagnetic and weak interactions required the existence of a previously unseen consequence of the weak force in which neutrinos bounce off protons unchanged. The Gargamelle experiment played a leading role in establishing the existence of these “neutral currents”, which paved the way for eventual confirmation of the unified theory and Nobel prizes in 1979 for its theoretical creators, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg . At the time of their award, the agents of unification, the massive W and Z bosons, were not yet discovered. The Gargamelle results, much driven by Perkins, were deemed sufficient proof by the Nobel committee. Perkins was a member of Cern’s scientific policy committee from 1981 to 1986, and latterly its chair, a period when LEP, the Large Electron-Positron Collider and precursor to the current Large Hadron Collider was being built. With the standard model established, the long march to find its fulcrum, the Higgs boson , began. Perkins’ graduate textbook, Introduction to High Energy Physics, first published in 1972, is now in its fourth edition and continues to educate and inspire new generations of particle physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider. Born in Hull, east Yorkshire, Donald was the son of Gertrude and George Perkins, teachers of, respectively, English and maths. Educated at the city’s Malet Lambert high school, he went on to Imperial College London, where he gained a BSc in physics in 1945 and his doctorate in 1948. He was a senior scholar of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 for three years, before becoming an associate in physics in 1951 at the University of Bristol. After a year at the Lawrence radiation laboratory, at Berkeley in California, he returned to Bristol in 1956 as a lecturer in physics, appointed a reader in 1960. He was at Oxford University, where he was a fellow of St Catherine’s College, from 1965 until his retirement in 1993. Having been elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1966, he won the society’s Royal Medal in 1997. He was made a CBE in 1991. Perkins married Dorothy Maloney in 1955. She died in 2021, and he is survived by their two daughters, Venetia and Michele. Donald Hill Perkins, particle physicist, born 15 October 1925; died 30 October 2022 | GOOD |
‘Paris agreement’ for nature imperative at Cop15, architects of climate deal say | The architects of the Paris agreement have urged world leaders to reach an ambitious sister deal for nature at the Cop15 biodiversity conference this December while warning that limiting global heating to 1.5C is impossible without protecting and restoring ecosystems. On biodiversity day at the Cop27 climate conference in Egypt, Christiana Figueres, Laurence Tubiana, Laurent Fabius and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who helped design the Paris agreement, said that Cop15 would be an “unprecedented” opportunity to turn the tide on nature loss. It follows scientific warnings that humans are driving the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, with 1m species in danger of extinction . The biodiversity summit takes place in Montreal, Canada just two weeks after Cop27 in Egypt, where governments will negotiate this decade’s targets on preventing biodiversity loss. Despite the ominous scientific warnings about the health of the planet and the consequences for human civilisation, no world leaders are scheduled to attend the meeting, which clashes with the football World Cup in Qatar. In a separate announcement, a group of nearly 350 scientists, Indigenous peoples, businesses and NGOs have urged presidents and prime ministers to prioritise the nature summit. “Leaders must secure a global agreement for biodiversity which is as ambitious, science-based and comprehensive as the Paris agreement is for climate change. Like the Paris agreement, it must encourage countries to pledge and also ratchet up their action commensurate with the size of the challenge,” said the joint statement by the designers of the Paris climate agreement. “There is no pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5C without action on protecting and restoring nature. Only by taking urgent action to halt and reverse the loss of nature this decade, while continuing to step up efforts to rapidly decarbonise our economies, can we hope to achieve the promise of the Paris agreement,” it reads. “It must be inclusive, rights-based and work for all. And it must deliver, through the whole of society, immediate action on the ground – our future depends on it,” it continues. Figueres, Tubiana, Fabius and Pulgar-Vidal said that humanity’s “accelerating destruction of nature is undermining its abilities to provide crucial services, including climate change mitigation and adaptation. As with climate change, it is the most vulnerable communities who bear the greatest impacts of biodiversity loss, from loss of food security and livelihoods to decreased climate resilience. The climate and nature agendas are entwined.” On Tuesday, ministers from about 30 countries met in Sharm el-Sheikh at a side event co-hosted by Canada and China to discuss the draft nature agreement, formally known as the post-2020 biodiversity framework. Sticking points in negotiations were discussed by governments, including financial backing for the agreement. At Cop15, China is overseeing a major UN agreement for the first time and holds the presidency, although its leaders have played a modest role so far, prompting fears that the biodiversity summit could be nature’s “Copenhagen moment”, a reference to the conference where climate talks fell apart in 2009 . Cop15 was moved from China to Canada after several pandemic-related delays and no world leaders have been invited by Beijing amid fears they are trying to downplay the event so as not to embarrass Xi Jinping , who is not expected to attend. Helena Gualinga, a Kichwa indigenous youth climate leader from Sarayaku, Ecuador, said Cop15 was a “once-in-a-decade opportunity to agree a global deal for nature” and leaders needed to attend and produce an ambitious final agreement. “Nature and the future of the climate is at stake, and we will not be safe until leaders are held accountable. For generations, my community has coexisted with nature, while witnessing extraction and deforestation of our territories devastate wildlife, nature and people. Our existence is our resistance, when we uphold our Indigenous rights we safeguard key ecosystems for the planet. We only have this decade to turn things around, yet governments are failing their responsibilities. Cop15 in Montreal is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to agree a global deal for nature, and we need leaders to show up and deliver,” she said. Scientist Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said nature was crucial to keeping global heating within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels. “To have a 50% chance of achieving 1.5C and thus limiting tipping point risks, global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050,” he said. “Critically, these pathways rely on the continuing capacity of nature to operate as a carbon sink and to buffer against the worst impacts of climate change – 1.5C is not a goal, it is a biophysical limit. Nature is one of the best climate solutions for remaining within that limit. An ambitious global framework for biodiversity at Cop15 that addresses root causes of decline of the global commons is urgent and necessary.” Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow the Guardian’s biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features | GOOD |
You be the judge: should my girlfriend stop taking free samples from the same shop? | Irene goes to the same place every day for free hot chocolate – it’s so embarrassing My girlfriend Irene and I have different attitudes when it comes to customer service and free samples. I think this is down to the fact that Irene is from LA. Americans aren’t really bothered about stuff like going into the same shop every day for a free sample, whereas as a Brit, I find it supremely embarrassing. Irene goes to one shop every day to get a free hot chocolate. We live in a small town where everyone knows everyone. When we’re in town, before we head home she’ll always say, “Oh shall we just pop in here and see what free samples they have?” There’s always this feeling in my gut of “no, not again,” because she does it so often. The people who work there must recognise us. Sometimes when we go into the shop, there’s a sign saying that the free hot chocolate isn’t ready yet as the machine needs to start up. It’s uncomfortable because we’ll have to linger and pretend to browse, as if we actually want to buy something. When in actual fact, we are simply waiting for the free hot chocolate samples to start. Irene goes there so often that I bought her some hot chocolate from that shop for Christmas. I thought: “Well, she must really like them, so maybe I should spend some actual money here, too.” She says that my purchase more than makes up for all the freebies she’s taken, but I’m not so sure. Fundamentally I don’t have a problem with taking freebies. If I’m in a shop and they’re giving out snacks or samples I’m happy to take one or two. The issue is if you keep going to the same place all the time, knowing that the staff probably recognise you as “that person who comes in for freebies every day”. That really makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. But Irene also asks for samples of things in pubs and ice-cream shops, even when they aren’t really on offer, so I think it’s in her nature. We’ve been together for a year and a half and I’ve seen her do that several times. I’ve bought the shop’s products as a result of going in for the samples, so what’s the problem? My first line of defence is that this was a much bigger issue last year, and now I’ve calmed down. I went for a lot of samples in the lead-up to Christmas because I knew Mike was going to be buy me some hot chocolate mixes and teas from the store as a present. I felt like because I’d asked specifically for them, it was OK. I’ve also bought more tea from the shop myself, so I feel like I’m a loyal customer, even if I help myself to lots of samples. I’m also careful to tell people there that I do buy the products. Nobody has ever recognised me in there, and I haven’t recognised any of the staff. If they said something, I would stop because that would be embarrassing, but I never see anyone twice as they have a massive rotation of staff. It certainly doesn’t hurt their sales because I bring friends there and introduce them to the samples. Everyone loves the hot chocolate, and they always go and buy more. Had I never tried those samples, I would not have started buying from the shop. One time, I remember my friend Rose, along with Mike, saying “This is embarrassing” when I went for another freebie after going a few times earlier in the week. Mike actually refused to go into the store with me. He is unfailingly polite and gets embarrassed easily, often by my Americanness. Once, in John Lewis, I asked if they could wrap a gift and everyone laughed. But I don’t always know how things work in the UK. I’m not really a big free sample person. I don’t actively sample a lot of things, so I disagree with Mike. I only started doing it with the hot chocolate because I felt like I needed a sugar boost and a tiny bit of joy during the dark English winter. Maybe me being American explains everything. Those free hot chocolates are very popular in our town, though. Last time I was in there, there was a queue to get a sample shot glass, so it’s not like I’m the only person doing it. And if the store didn’t want us to try these samples, they wouldn’t promote them like this, would they? Should Irene stop hitting the same shop for free hot chocolates? Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion I’ve worked for two companies that offered samples, and the assumption was you’d only ever convert 10% into paying customers, which would be more than enough to make it worthwhile. Plus the regulars bring their friends, so Irene is good for business. Jonathan, 41 Mike’s embarrassment is his own problem – Irene isn’t forcing him to get her freebies. Let her make her own decisions and have fun. She’s making the most of an opportunity to have something nice in her day. Maybe Mike should join her to see what all the fuss is about . Charlotte, 25 Chances are the business owner can afford to gift a few little hot chocolates without a purchase being made – they wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. So let Irene enjoy these little free treats. Kristina, 34 I have sympathy with Mike and resonate with that feeling of having to be polite. I know my girlfriend would do this without hesitation, and I’d feel like Mike. However, the samples are free, it’s a great advertisement for the company and you are actually buying their products . Euan, 27 While repeated sampling might seem against the spirit of the endeavour, at the end of the day this is a capitalist enterprise. They’re increasing footfall and advertising their product. Irene is just playing her part . Aengus, 43 In our online poll below, tell us: is it time for Irene to stop taking free samples? This poll is now closed We asked whether Barry should stop vaping so much . 91% of you said yes – Barry is guilty 9% of you said no – Barry is not guilty | GOOD |
MPs and peers do worse than 10-year-olds in maths and English Sats | MPs and peers tasked with completing a year 6 Sats exam have scored lower results on average than the country’s 10-year-olds. MPs including Commons education select committee chair Robin Walker took part in the exams, invigilated by 11-year-olds, at a Westminster event organised by More Than A Score, who campaign for the tests to be scrapped. Only 44% of the cross-party group of parliamentarians dubbed the Westminster Class of 2022 achieved the expected standard in maths and just 50% had achieved the expected standard in spelling, punctuation and grammar. Across the country, 59% of pupils aged 10 and 11 reached the expected standard in the Sats tests of maths, reading and writing this year, down from 65% in 2019, the previous time the tests were taken. Detailed figures published by the Department for Education in the summer revealed disadvantaged children had a steeper fall than their better-off peers. Walker took part in the Big SATS Sit-In Westminster alongside his Conservative colleagues Flick Drummond and Gagan Mohindra; Labour MPs Ian Byrne and Emma Lewell-Buck with the Green party’s Lady Bennett to experience the high-stakes nature of the exams. More Than A Score hope the politicians will take the high-pressured experience away with them and realise that “the exams only judge schools but do not help children’s learning” at that age. “The exams were absolutely terrifying,” Byrne said, “the mental impact such pressure would have on these young children is immense. Sats at this level must be scrapped. I’m delighted so many cross-party colleagues could experience this pressure too.” Walker, the new chair of the education select committee acknowledged a need to reform exams for 10 to 11-year-olds, but refused to back dropping the exams altogether. “There will always be a place for testing but that cannot be the be-all and end-all to accessing the most opportunity. Ultimately, it’s not just about testing but it’s how we develop their love of reading.” His comments were welcomed by Drummond who said a lot of the terminology used in the grammar exam was “unnecessary”. “We should have assessments but they shouldn’t be at such high stakes, wasting six months or more. It was quite a hard test and we need to acknowledge what will actually be useful for the future. We’re not educating young people to pass tests, we should want to give them a love of learning.” A YouGov poll commissioned for the campaign group found 8% of parents and headteachers agreed that preparing for Sats and other tests should be the bottom of their priorities in the classroom. It also found 60% of parents felt intense nature of the exams harmed children’s mental health. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Alison Ali from More Than A Score said: “This is more than a test of maths and English capabilities, it’s an opportunity for MPs to put themselves in the shoes of 10 and 11-year-olds … they will see how absurd some of the questions faced by children are, how these absurdities influence and narrow the whole curriculum and how they are only used to judge schools not to help children’s learning.” | GOOD |
Labour to restore whip to Neil Coyle after suspension over drunken abuse | Labour is to restore the party whip to Neil Coyle after the MP was suspended for drunken abuse and making racist comments to a journalist. Coyle was suspended in February last year after a complaint by Henry Dyer, a political reporter for the Insider website who now works for the Guardian, about the behaviour of the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark in London. The MP previously had a complaint of sexual harassment upheld against him over an incident at a Labour conference. The decision over Coyle’s readmission was confirmed on Wednesday by Labour’s chief whip, Alan Campbell. Campbell is understood to have told a parliamentary Labour party committee that independent investigations into Coyle’s conduct had been undertaken by Labour and an independent expert panel under the independent complaints and grievances scheme, which was set up by parliament and investigates complaints about inappropriate behaviour. In March, Coyle was suspended from the Commons for five days. The MP was found to have breached the Commons’ harassment policy with drunken behaviour in its Strangers’ bar last year. Coyle was found to have engaged in “foul-mouthed and drunken abuse” towards a junior parliamentary assistant employed by another MP. The independent expert panel said this was “shocking and intimidating for any complainant, particularly a junior member of staff”. In the second case, Coyle was found to have “used abusive language with racial overtones” towards Dyer. On Wednesday, Campbell told the PLP committee that he had been clear to Coyle that the behaviour described in the reports was completely unacceptable and had met him a number of times and sought reassurances about his future conduct. While suspended, Coyle undertook two programmes regarding managing alcohol and stopped drinking entirely, according to Labour sources, who said the chief whip had also said to the MP that drinking did not excuse his behaviour. The committee also was told the party recognised the efforts Coyle was said to have made to address his drinking and to change his behaviour. In a statement published last year by Insider, Dyer, who is from a British Chinese background, said Coyle referred to China as “Fu Manchu” and told him he looked like he was involved in giving money to the Labour MP Barry Gardiner, who received large sums from a woman who later was accused of being a Chinese agent. Dyer said he had subsequently encountered Coyle around parliament and felt a “sense of discomfort”, and decided to inform the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle. Coyle, who has spoken about quitting alcohol for a year and has pleaded for the Labour leader, Keir Starmer , to readmit him to the parliamentary party, accepted he was “drunk” on both occasions. In an apology in the Commons when news of his suspension was announced, Coyle said he was “ashamed” of his behaviour. “I wish to specifically apologise to the two complainants who were subject to my drunk and offensive behaviour and attitude,” he said. “I cannot apologise enough for the harm and upset caused, and I’m ashamed of my conduct, frankly. It should not have happened.” After news that Coyle would have the whip returned, the Labour grassroots movement Momentum said: “It is shocking and disgusting to see Labour readmit someone found to have engaged in racial and sexual harassment. The NEC must immediately move to bar Neil Coyle from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election. “This shameful act exposes a system which is not fit for purpose. When loyalists can engage in such abhorrent behaviour and be punished with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the Starmer leadership’s claims to independent and robust disciplinary processes lie in tatters. “It’s time to end this dangerous, politicised abuse of the Labour whip, and enact a truly independent process.” | GOOD |
Look at what hedge funds really do – and tell me capitalism is about ‘rewarding risk’ | Coming up with economic policy is a difficult, unforgiving task. To make the best of it, it helps to work with an accurate model of how the economy works. If you use a misleading model and act on it, you can’t reasonably expect good outcomes: in that scenario, we end up, as JM Keynes warned in the 1930s, with “madmen in authority”, acting according to the precepts of “some defunct economist”. But that’s exactly where we are. One of the most deeply held and frequently heard propositions about capitalism is that it revolves around private companies and individuals taking risks. When, earlier this year, the US government arranged a rescue package for Silicon Valley Bank, for instance, among the many objections to it was the claim that the rescue contravened capitalism’s risk norms. “The US is supposed to be a capitalist economy,” said the billionaire Ken Griffin, founder of the US investment firm Citadel, “and that’s breaking down before our eyes.” Capitalism, Griffin argued, is about taking risk. If returns are achievable without taking risk – the apparent message of the bailout – then, for Griffin at least, it is no longer capitalism. This view of the world directly informs wide swaths of economic policymaking today. When business confidence ebbs and investment declines, an increasingly common policy response is to “de-risk” business investment – usually by subsidising it or guaranteeing returns. The prime example in recent memory was the US’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the kernel of which is a package of tax credits designed to make private investment in clean energy less risky. But examine the economy, and it becomes clear: capitalism has become less and less about corporate risk-taking in recent decades. To be sure, many businesses do take significant risks. The independent small business owner who opens a new cafe in London generally faces intense competition and massive risk. But as political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued , business in general has been enormously skilled in recent times at offloading risk – principally by dumping it on those least able to bear it: ordinary households. Paradoxically, the best example of a business usually regarded as being fundamentally about risk-taking but which in fact is not, is Ken Griffin’s own: alternative asset management, an umbrella term for hedge funds, private equity and the like. (“Alternative” here means anything other than publicly listed stocks and bonds.) Asset managers are anything but marginal, exotic firms – they manage more than $100tn of clients’ money globally and control everything from Center Parcs UK to your local Morrisons. But let’s look at what asset management companies in places like Britain and the US actually do. Three considerations are paramount. First, there is the matter of whose capital is put at risk when alternative asset managers such as Citadel, Blackstone and KKR invest. In large part, it’s not theirs. The proportion of equity invested by a typical hedge or private equity fund that is the asset manager’s own is usually between 1% and 3%. The rest is that of their external investor clients (the “limited partners”), which include pension schemes. Second, consider how an asset manager’s investments are designed. For one thing, its own financial participation in, and management of, its investment funds is usually through a vehicle (the “general partnership”) that is constituted as a separate entity, precisely in order to insulate the firm and its professionals from liability risk. Furthermore, the fund and its manager is generally distanced from underlying investments by a chain of intermediary holding companies that protect it from the risk inherent in those investments. In leveraged buyouts, where money is borrowed to help finance a deal, the debt goes on to the balance sheet of the company the fund has acquired. This means if trouble arises in repaying the debt, it is not the investment fund that is on the hook, still less its manager. Third and last, fee structures also distance asset managers from risk. If a fund underperforms, they may earn no performance fee (based on fund profits), but they do have the considerable consolation – a form of risk insurance, if you like – of the guaranteed management fee, usually representing about 2% of limited partners’ committed capital, year after year. Essentially, management fees pay asset managers’ base salaries; performance fees pay bonuses. In short, then, it would be far-fetched to suggest that what hedge funds and the like do amounts substantially to risk-taking. The only meaningful risk they themselves face is that of losing custom if fund returns prove underwhelming. In reality, the business of alternative asset management is less about taking on risk than, in Hacker’s terms, moving it elsewhere. So when things go wrong, others bear the brunt. This can be the employees on the shopfloor of a retailer owned by private equity who find that they’ve shouldered the risk when they’re told they’re being laid off. It can be ordinary retirement savers, who find they have a meagre pension because the alternative funds in which their savings were invested by the asset manager have tanked. Why does this matter? Because unless elected policymakers understand how risk is produced and distributed in modern economies, they will not be in a position to act appropriately and proportionately. That is why vague talk from politicians of being “pro-business” or “entrepreneurship” mean so little; the point is to learn from economic realities as they actually are, as opposed to how economics textbooks say they could or should be. There is one very obvious policy recommendation for alternative asset management that flows from our understanding what they actually do with “risk”: taxing them more. The main performance fee earned by alternative asset managers is “carried interest” – effectively, a profit share. In the UK and US, most asset management firms pay tax on this revenue at the capital gains rate, rather than the usually higher income tax rate. This is because the asset manager has typically been understood to be “taking on the entrepreneurial risk of the [investment]” – a standard justification for taxation as capital gain. But as we have seen, this simply does not hold water. In 2017, the New York Times called the beneficial tax treatment of carried interest “a tax loophole for the rich that just won’t die”. It’s time to close it. In fact, the recent confirmation by Keir Starmer’s Labour party that it would do exactly that if it wins power was one of the few genuinely progressive and sensible economic policy moves it has made while in opposition. Brett Christophers is a professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University and author of Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World | BAD |
A Brighter Tomorrow review – Nanni Moretti’s new film is bafflingly awful | Nanni Moretti is the Italian director who will always have a place in our hearts, not least for his masterly The Son’s Room (2001), in my view the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far . And more recently his cinephile comedy Mia Madre (2015) was tremendous. But his new film in competition is bafflingly awful: muddled, mediocre and metatextual – a complete waste of time, at once strident and listless. Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama. It is effectively a film within a film, both as dull as each other. Moretti himself plays Giovanni, a high-minded film director with a failing marriage who is struggling to shoot his passion project about the Italian Communist party standing up to the Soviets over the Hungary invasion of 1956 – although a smirkingly ironic and evasive final title card indicates that A Brighter Tomorrow can’t even commit to deciding if all that was worth celebrating or not. Giovanni’s wife and longtime co-producer Paola (Margherita Buy) is paying the household bills with a side hustle producing a crass gangster flick for a crude up-and-coming film-maker, and this pains Giovanni so deeply that he actually trespasses on location when this film’s grisly mob execution is about to be filmed and stops everything to lecture them on how crass it is and why what they’re doing isn’t as good as the murder scene in Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. Is he supposed to be a shrill, self-important idiot who deserves to be booted off the set? Well no: this presumably is a comic hero whose unfashionably high standards and chaotic midlife angst are supposed to be adorable. Meanwhile, Paola is seeing a therapist and confesses she’s thinking of leaving him. Mathieu Amalric phones in a grinning, sweaty performance as Giovanni’s dodgy producer Pierre, who is wheeler-dealing behind the scenes to raise the cash. There is a lot of perfunctory sub-Fellini circus business and a lot more peevish and redundant grumbling from Giovanni about the state of the cinema business today, featuring an easy-target scene in which Giovanni is forced to take a meeting with blockheaded Netflix suits who complain that his movie doesn’t have enough WTF moments. Actually this is one long WTF moment, for the wrong reasons. There is also the now traditional scene in which an ageing cinephile attempts to show a classic movie to his teen kid who isn’t interested – although it’s incidentally pretty baffling that Giovanni goes on about his other idea, to make a movie version of John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer, without mentioning the classic Eleanor and Frank Perry version starring Burt Lancaster. Moretti tries for some unearned sentimental endorsement by featuring classic Italian songs, and on the same everything-including-the-kitchen-sink basis, gives us a wacky walk-on from architect Renzo Piano in the Woody Allen/Marshall McLuhan style, and a final parade of movie-legend cameos which only make the film look blandly self-congratulatory. I’m sure the future will be brightened by another, better Moretti film – this one is best forgotten. | BAD |
IPL 2023: the state of play, stars so far and how England players are faring | Not much, just the first 68 games. The IPL is a curious beast: the biggest tournament in cricket, the richest in any ballgame, the greatest show in Asia – and yet eminently missable . Its bosses at the Indian board still haven’t worked out how to give it meaning. It works for the players and coaches, who get massive fees and two months of further education. To most cricket lovers, though, the teams still feel like mere franchises and the story of each game is written in invisible ink. This is cricket – nobody’s ever winning till they’ve won. The best team has been Gujarat Titans, top of the table for the second year running. They were the only side to win eight of their first 12 matches, which is especially impressive as (a) they are the holders, so the hunted not the hunters, and (b) they were founded in 2021. At the bottom of the pile, two teams have had a stinker: Sunrisers Hyderabad, coached by Brian Lara, and Delhi Capitals, captained by David Warner. The other seven have been much of a muchness, all winning six or seven of their first 12 or 13 games. Looking at the table, you might deduce that Twenty20 is 50-50. As Jeff Beck sang, they’re everywhere and nowhere, baby. There are plenty of them, but they are often on the bench. It’s quite an achievement to render Ben Stokes invisible, but Chennai Super Kings have managed it. England’s Test captain has played two games, making 8 and 7 and bowling one over (none for 18); after six weeks without a start, he found the CSK coach, Stephen Fleming, calling him “batting cover”. Joe Root has been almost as hard to spot, playing three games for Rajasthan Royals, bowling two overs (none for 14), and batting just the once. He made 10 and, like a true Englishman, took part in a right Royal collapse, 59 all out in 10.3 overs. The most visible has again been Jos Buttler , England’s white-ball GOAT. Opening as usual for Royals, he has returned to earth after last year’s stratospherics, with more ducks (five) than fifties (four). England’s next superstar, Harry Brook, has also been a model of inconsistency, scoring 100 not out in one innings for Sunrisers Hyderabad and scraping 63 for eight in the rest. Jason Roy, Phil Salt and Liam Livingstone have played about half the time and been respectable, but there have been only two English regulars apart from Buttler. One is Moeen Ali, who has had a quiet time with Chennai Super Kings. The other is Sam Curran, who moved from one set of Kings in Chennai to another in Punjab. He has sparkled with the bat but struggled with the ball. Curran’s most memorable day came when Shikhar Dhawan was injured and he took over as captain. Typical. We send them our seasoned captains – Stokes, Buttler, Root – and the only one they want is somebody who has never led a professional team. Among the batters, one young blade and one veteran. This year’s meteor is Yashasvi Jaiswal, 21, Buttler’s opening partner for Royals. This year’s grand old man is Faf du Plessis, now 38 and captaining Royal Challengers Bangalore. You could think he had his hands full being Virat Kohli’s boss, but he has also found time to be the first man to 600 runs. Among the bowlers, it’s been the year of the leggie. The first three players to reach 20 wickets were Rashid Khan of Titans, Yuvendra Chahal of Royals and Piyush Chawla of Mumbai Indians. The most incisive seamer has been Mohammed Shami of Titans. In a list dominated by India’s big names, Rashid is the only overseas bowler making hay. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s action after newsletter promotion Only one has enhanced his reputation: Mark Wood, whose 11 wickets have come at the phenomenal strike rate of one every nine balls. At the other end of that scale was Jofra Archer, who needed 60 balls for each of his two wickets before succumbing to yet another stress fracture . They left India early, Archer for Belgium to see a doctor, Wood for Durham to await the birth of his second child. This year the teams are allowed to bring on a sub – a full one, allowed to bat and bowl. Some sages declared this the end of the all-rounder, as the side batting second could simply replace a tailender with a specialist batter. Which goes to show you never can tell, because all-rounders are still thriving – the great Ravi Jadeja of India and his apprentice Axar Patel and Mitch Marsh of Australia, now better at bowling than batting. On Tuesday. That’s when, after 70 league games, we get the first of the four knockouts. But you could just wait for the final on 28 May, clashing with the climax of some other Premier League. Money. The IPL media rights for 2023-27 raked in $6.2bn, which makes each game worth $15m. That’s $4m more per match than Premier League football. The franchises are so rich that they are now buying up franchises in other countries and aiming to tie the best players to 12-month contracts, thus putting another nail in the coffin of Test cricket. So it’s not just about money: power is involved, too. In this league table, sport comes a distant third. | GOOD |
Australian Olympic boxer Harry Garside charged with assault | Olympic boxing medallist Harry Garside has been charged with assault after being arrested on his return to Australia from filming reality TV series I’m a Celebrity. Garside was taken into custody at Sydney international airport on Tuesday. Police launched an investigation into reports of an alleged domestic violence-related incident in 1 March at Bellevue Hill in Sydney’s east, a New South Wales Police spokesperson said. Garside has been charged with common assault (DV) and told 7 News he would defend the charge, as he left Mascot police station. “Of course, me and my lawyer will release a statement in the coming hours,” he told a reporter late on Tuesday. He is due to appear at Downing Centre local court on 24 May. Garside won bronze for Australia at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and has won seven Australian national boxing championships. The champion men’s lightweight boxer intends to compete for Australia at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Garside recently appeared on the ninth season of I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! He was runner-up to former champion netballer Liz Ellis. The finale aired on Sunday night. | GOOD |
Fairbuds XL review: the excellent noise-cancelling headphones you can fix yourself | On first impressions, the Fairbuds XL are just another set of big, plush noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones. But their novel design allows them to be easily dismantled for simple at-home repairs, making them some of the most sustainable on the market. Produced by repairable and Fairtrade electronics pioneer Fairphone, the £219 (€249) headphones follow in the footsteps of the modular Fairphone 4 . All products from the company are aimed at being better for the planet, the workers making them and your wallet. Out of the box they look and feel like a regular set of well-made headphones with nicely padded ear cups and a cushioned vegan leather headband. But they break down into nine modular components using a standard small Philips screwdriver, all of which are available to buy from Fairphone should a fix be needed down the line. The outside caps unclip, revealing a removable battery like the good old days of Nokia dumbphones. The ear cushions twist off for easy replacement when they wear out. If that wasn’t enough, the headphones are made from more than 80% recycled plastic, 100% recycled aluminium and tin, and 100% Fairtrade gold, while Fairphone tops up the wages of the people putting the devices together to a living wage. The Fairbuds XL are comfortable to wear for extended periods with well-balanced weight and good padding. The ear cups swivel a little to adjust to the side of your head and clamp with just enough force to hold them in place. They are splash resistant in case it rains and fold down for travel, coming supplied with a recycled nylon bag to keep them safe. The right ear cup has a noise-cancelling button and an excellent control joystick. Press and hold the stick for three seconds to turn the headphones on and off, double press to hear the battery level. Press it in once for pause/play, left and right for track skip or up and down for volume. It is simple and effective. The one thing the headphones are missing compared with competitors is a sensor to detect when they are removed to pause the music. But I can live without that. Weight: 330g Dimensions: 190 x 180 x 70mm Water resistance: IP54 (splash) Drivers: 40mm Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.1 with multipoint, USB-C (charging and audio) Bluetooth codecs: SBC, AAC, aptX HD Battery life: 26 hours (ANC on) The battery lasts a good 26 hours of listening with noise cancelling active and fully recharges in about 2.5 hours via the USB-C port, which doubles as a wired audio input too. An optional USB-C to 3.5mm cable is available from Fairphone for €12.95, but there is no analogue 3.5mm socket on the headphones. The headphones have Bluetooth 5.1 with multipoint, meaning they can connect to two devices at the same time. They support the standard SBC and AAC Bluetooth audio formats, but also support Qualcomm’s high quality aptX HD, which is common on Android phones. Call quality in quiet environments is excellent. They were still pretty clear in noisier places, suppressing background sounds well, but my voice broke up slightly around really loud sounds. The Fairbuds XL have surprisingly good sound for a new entry into headphone market, helped by the company’s collaboration with pro-audio tuning firm Sonarworks . On their default “Amsterdam” profile, they produce a nicely round sound with reasonably deep bass, nicely warm mids and detailed highs. They handle complex tracks well with good separation between tones and render most music genres with aplomb. They can sound a little narrow and clinical at times, lacking a little rawness or aggression with some tracks, but overall they are nicely tuned. There are several other sound presets to choose from in the app, but not a full equaliser. The sound is slightly affected by the noise cancelling when active, sounding a bit wider with bigger bass with it turned off. The noise cancelling is decent, dulling the rumbles and noise of a commute well. Sounds coming from certain directions were handled better than others, which was noticeable when turning your head. They manage higher pitches such as typing and background chat in an office a little better than many, but can’t quite replicate the cone of silence produced by the best in the business from Bose and Sony. The ambient sound mode is reasonable, sounding quite clear if a little muted. Certainly good enough to have a conversation or listen out for an alert. The Fairbuds XL have a two-year warranty. The battery is expected to hold at least 80% of its original capacity for more than 500 full charge cycles and can be easily swapped with spares or replacements costing £17.95. Other modular components include: a £69.95 right speaker, £34.95 left speaker, £17.95 headband, £17.95 headband cover, £13.95 cable, £13.95 ear cushions and £5.95 outside covers. The headphones contain 100% recycled aluminium and tin, more than 80% recycled plastics and 100% Fairtrade gold. The firm also tops up the pay of its contract manufacturing workers to a living wage. The Fairphone Fairbuds XL cost £219 (€249.95) and come in green or black. For comparison, the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless cost £310 , the Sony WH-1000XM5 cost £349 , the Bose QC45 cost £250 and Urbanista Los Angeles cost £169 . The Fairbuds XL prove that good, wireless headphones can be made more sustainably and in a way that is easy to fix and maintain without huge compromises. They are well made, comfortable to wear for long periods, have excellent controls, the battery lasts a long time and you could carry a spare one if you wanted to. They connect to two Bluetooth devices at once, support high quality audio standards and sound great. They even have pretty good noise cancelling and are weather resistant despite being modular. The headphones lack a sensor to pause the music when removed and won’t trouble the very best from Sennheiser and Sony for sound quality and noise cancelling but they do better than rivals around the £150-£200 mark. In effect, you’re paying about £50 more to be as ethical and sustainable as possible with your headphones purchase. But given the parts that wear out are readily available for reasonable sums and are easy to replace, they could last significantly longer than other models. The big question is: why aren’t all headphones designed like this? Pros: decent sound and noise cancelling, 26-hour battery life and removable battery, comfortable, Bluetooth 5.1 with aptX HD and multipoint, USB-C charging and audio, great controls, modular design you can fix yourself with readily available parts, more ethical manufacturing. Cons: slightly more expensive than rivals for the design, no 3.5mm headphone socket, no full EQ, no pause on remove. | GOOD |
German economy in recession after high prices take toll | Germany has fallen into recession, fresh figures have revealed, after high prices took a bigger toll on the country’s economy than originally estimated. Updated data released by German’s federal statistical office on Thursday showed gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.3% in the first quarter compared with the previous three months, which also recorded a contraction. The revised numbers confirm that the German economy shrank for two straight quarters – the technical definition of a recession – after a 0.5% drop in the three months to December. Initial estimates released in April had suggested that Germany had narrowly avoided a recession, merely stagnating with 0% growth. “It took a couple of statistical revisions, but at the end of the day, the German economy actually did this winter what we had feared already since last summer: it fell into a technical recession,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at the Dutch bank ING. The statistics office said that while private sector investment and construction grew at the start of the year, this was offset in part by a drop-off in consumer spending as higher prices forced households to pinch their pennies. “The persistence of high price increases continued to be a burden on the German economy at the start of the year,” the statistics office said. Overall, household spending dropped 1.2% in the first quarter, with shoppers less willing to splash out on food, clothes, and furniture. Government spending also dipped by 4.9% compared with the previous quarter. Overall, Brzeski said the overall drop in GDP was “not the worst-case scenario of a severe recession but a drop of almost 1% from last summer. The warm winter weather, a rebound in industrial activity, helped by the Chinese reopening and an easing of supply chain frictions, were not enough to get the economy out of the recessionary danger zone,” he added. The economist warned that the drop in purchasing power, weaker industrial sector orders, rising interest rates, as well as a slowdown in foreign economic growth in countries including the US would all likely lead to weaker economic activity for Germany in the months ahead. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion “On top of these cyclical factors, the ongoing war in Ukraine, demographic change and the current energy transition will structurally weigh on the German economy in the coming years,” Brzeski added. | GOOD |
‘I can’t track him down to return his family album’: the things our exes left behind that we can’t bear to get rid of | Gwynne (left), now 38 and a producer in New York We met in 2007, when we were both living in New York. I had just moved from Kansas and Paul was a friend of a friend of my sister’s, who I was living with at the time. He was a Brit, working for a totally shady company that went door to door around all the pharmacies in New York City. He lived in an apartment that the company rented for him and three other guys, who spent their days going between pharmacies. Paul would come to New York on a travel visa, for three months at a time, then fly back to England for a bit, then return. We dated for a year. He was the most wonderful human being; everybody loved him and wanted to take him under their wing. He just had a way of winning them over; not in a scammy way – he was just really likable. But he wasn’t making much money, and sometimes his employer neglected to pay him at all. One day they stopped paying the rent on the apartment and he had nowhere to live. I had just moved into my own place and I said he could live with me for the months he was in the US. He brought this family album with him. It’s mostly pictures of him as a baby, him with his mum. It was one of the only things he had with him from home and he left it behind. The last time he left for England was the day after my 25th birthday, when we had been out all night, partying. I was so hungover that my purse was stolen, and with it my phone and his number. It soon became clear that Paul’s company had gone bust and he didn’t have a way to come back to the US unless we got married. I thought about it for a few months and decided that I didn’t want to get married right now. We’d been talking over email and Facebook, but I called him over Skype and said it wasn’t going to work out. We were both really upset, but Paul was so sad that he vowed to quit social media so he wouldn’t have to see me – and he stuck to his word. I cannot find the dude at all. I’ve tried several times over the years to track him down to return the album, but without success. I asked my sister to ask the friend who’d introduced us, but his number was no longer in service. I emailed an old email address and that didn’t work either. I’ve searched for his name, his family members’ names that I could remember – I even asked for advice on Reddit. It’s all come up empty. I feel so bad if I hurt him in such a way that he wanted nothing to do with social media for the rest of his life. I have nothing but positive things to say about Paul. Dating an Englishman set me up to meet my now-husband online in 2009, six months after Paul and I broke up. Like him, Ricky is from Essex and supports Arsenal. He has looked through the album and said: “I have that same shirt.” The album has moved with me to three apartments, and I’m determined not to take it to the next one. People have said to me, “Why don’t you just throw it away?” but these are pictures of his family – even if he doesn’t want it, his mum probably does. I’ve been carrying this with me for 15 years now, and he should have it back. This is my best shot. If this doesn’t work out, we’re throwing it away. Ron Tipan (left), now 42 and a project coordinator in Belgium I’d been living and working in Chicago for almost 10 years. I wasn’t happy, I needed a change. I decided to quit my job and travel, and hopefully get some experience working in communications. I left the US in December 2010, thinking it would be a six-month trip. Mostly I travelled around South America, working and volunteering at different NGOs. I went to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, then Peru. I found an organisation fighting poverty in Arequipa, in the south of the country, and immediately felt good working there; I ended up staying for three months. That’s when I decided to continue travelling for as long as I could. It was also when I met my ex. She joined the organisation a bit later than me. She was from Belgium and we’d talk English together. But it was not until she was about to leave that I realised she liked me in that way – I’d just thought she was being friendly. It started out as a fling. We got to know each other and travelled around Peru. There were no expectations that it would be for ever, but the feelings grew stronger towards the end. I went from thinking it was just a fling to thinking she could be the one. Even I was surprised by how it developed. I can’t remember exactly when she gave me the bracelets [recreated here by Eva Grinaway], but she told me she’d made them. I put them on my wrist and they are still there, more than 10 years later. At that time I had other bracelets, too, which I’d bought myself, but none of them lasted this long. She went back to Belgium and I continued to travel. I think the decision to break up was mutual – the distance was just too much to overcome. Plus we were just at different points in our lives. I deleted a lot of her emails, and even unfriended her on social media, but I’ve never taken the bracelets off. They have become a part of me. I did end up in Belgium, but not because of her. When I saw her last, on New Year’s Eve 2014, she had the bracelet I’d given her in her wallet, but she has a family now – I don’t expect she still has it. I thought about cutting mine off at one point, but then I thought: why? They’re not bothering me. They’re a memento of that time, but more to do with me than with her. Now I look at them and am reminded of when I was travelling and really enjoying life. The experience changed me in a lot of ways – I cannot imagine myself being the same person now without it. Tania Hall (left), now 53 and an editor in London For 30 years, I have carted around a well-loved paperback of Mediterranean Cooking – by Lady Arabella Boxer, of all people. I met its owner when we were both in our first year of university in Auckland, living in student halls. He was English, but his mother had moved to New Zealand a few years before. We became good friends, bonding over our shared love of 80s horror films – and then boyfriend and girlfriend. Our first date was to see The Fly – very romantic. After a year of dating, we got a place together and played house. He was a great cook, particularly of vegetarian food and Middle Eastern dishes, and this cookbook was a real staple. We were intensely in love, but 35 years later I can look back and see our lack of maturity: we were just crazy teenagers, with our whole lives ahead of us. I was the person who ended it. We had been going out for a reasonable amount of time, about two and a half years, but I wasn’t ready to settle down. I don’t remember consciously taking the cookbook, but it found its way into my box of things when I moved out. Then I kept intending to return it, but I just found it so useful. I don’t know whether my ex didn’t notice it was missing, or if he didn’t want to ask for it back, but it’s travelled with me to the UK and back, twice, and all over New Zealand. Now it’s falling to bits, the pages are yellowed, it’s held together with sticky tape – but it’s still useful. I don’t think I could bear to part with it now, just because it’s been with me for so much of my life, literally nourishing me. It has nothing to do with my ex: oddly, I don’t think it ever really did. So much water – and olive oil – has passed under the bridge. I’m now happily married to someone who’s benefited from this cookbook a lot. I’d be happy to buy my ex a shiny new copy. Jack Highton, now 28 and a research scientist in London I installed Tinder in 2019 to find a girlfriend. After about three months of dating I matched with Rina. She had come to Britain because she was from Goa, which used to be part of the Portuguese empire and meant she had a European passport. She said she was Portuguese-Indian, which I found interesting and wanted to find out more. We talked about her job, at a pharmaceutical company, and about her church. She was Roman Catholic and I’m Anglican. That was on my profile as well – that’s probably why we matched. We kissed at the end of the first date and very quickly became a couple. She gave me the charm a few weeks in, along with a fridge magnet. I’d gone on a work trip to Slovenia and brought her back some trinkets, so she gave me some she’d brought from Goa in return. I was living on my own in a student dorm at that point and I hung the charm on a cupboard handle. Our relationship progressed nicely: we went on a lot of dates and walks, and we were quite intimate. However, because of her faith, there were limits to how intimate we could be before marriage. I understood that and was respectful – but after a few months, I started to think very seriously about the future. Catholicism and Anglicanism have a lot in common, yes, but I think her view of religion was a little more strict than mine. I was conscious that if we kept dating, then the time would come for me to meet her family and the commitment would become serious. She’d said that they had already been very sceptical about her dating a white British boy. We both wanted the same thing: to find someone to marry relatively young. The question was: was she the right person? At the root of it, I think, there was a barrier. We talked about intellectual things like science and religion all the time, but I felt after dating her for four months that I didn’t really know her deeply. That, for me, was why we broke up. I don’t know if it came as a surprise, or if she felt the same way, because we weren’t having those in-depth, soulmate conversations. I sent the difficult message asking to meet after work: “We need to talk.” That phrase warned her what it was going to be about. It went surprisingly well, actually. We met in a park, I brought her a box of chocolates, and I explained why I wanted to end the relationship. I got more visibly upset than she did, actually. She said she was glad we’d met up to do this and that I’d respected her boundaries around intimacy. After that, we had a long hug and went our separate ways, quite literally walking into the sunset. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion I eventually returned to Tinder, refreshed my profile and started talking to Belle, who’d just moved to London from Hong Kong. We met up and there was strong chemistry straight away. We got married in July 2020 after a whirlwind romance. I lost the fridge magnet when we moved house recently, but the charm remains as a nice reminder of my four months dating the girl from Goa, and a pleasant time in my life. I think it represents the journey of finding someone to marry, trying to get to know them deeply and also developing yourself as a person: what it is you’re looking for, emotionally and intellectually. It’s the journey that led me to Belle. We hang the charm in a cupboard in the living room, on display along with other paraphernalia. Belle of course knows its story. I think she finds it quite sweet. Katie Dore, now 40 and a sailor on a boat near Montpellier, France I got married when I was in my 20s, young and naive. We were both working on a navy ship, that’s how we met. I left the navy and came ashore, and found my life sliding into a slot that I didn’t want it to. When you’re young and in love, you don’t address the big questions. I didn’t understand why anyone would want kids – still don’t – and he didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t. His idea of what he wanted out of life was definitely different from mine and we grew apart. We probably would have split up sooner if he hadn’t been absent half the time. He would go away for four to six months, come back, turn my life upside down, and then go away again. I had one life; university sailing club while he was away. When he came back, he expected me to drop all that and stay in while he played computer games in his underwear and drank lager. I eventually realised I wanted to have adventures myself. We had been together almost a decade, but it didn’t feel like it. The divorce wasn’t the worst – we didn’t have kids, which helped – but he was so disagreeable that it became a case of just signing the paperwork and walking away. I left the house with only what I could fit in a rucksack. That was liberating: off I went, to whatever I wanted. I have no idea how I ended up with the marlin’s spike. It folds into a penknife and is used to split rope into strands, so you can splice them. I never thought about giving it back at the time, because I’d left so much of my stuff behind. Since then I’ve lived in a motorhome, on a boat, gone across Europe on a motorbike – all the things I wanted to do. I joined a sailing club, where I met my now-partner. He said he wanted to go off cruising and I thought: “That’s cool.” I consider myself very lucky that we found each other. Now here we are, on a boat at the entrance to the Mediterranean, having come all the way through the French canals, planning to disappear over the horizon. It’s warm at the moment, beautiful sunshine, blue skies, clear water. I look back on that time and think how frighteningly easy it is to be pushed into a life you don’t want. It seemed to be the harder I fought against it, the tighter the noose got. I’m determined not to let that happen again. I don’t want anything to push me back. The marlin’s spike is quite useful on the boat, but I have thought about returning it when we make it to the other side of the planet, from Taiwan or somewhere. No letter, nothing – just the knife on his lanyard so that he knows it’s his. Mariusz Grocki (left), now 34 and a medical physicist in Nottinghamshire We met at secondary school back in Poland, when we were both 14. I’d been asked to attend extracurricular classes in physics before representing the school in a competition. I went to the first one and it was just me and her in the classroom. I only knew her by name: she was our school’s top student. That day we met, I didn’t manage to solve any problems the teacher gave us because my hands were shaking and I was just trying not to stare at her. It was like being hit by a train – and I was kept under that train for several years. She was only interested in me on and off. I was so madly in love with her that, when it came time to go to upper secondary school at 16, I applied for one in a different town so that our paths wouldn’t cross every day. I’d just had enough. Then one day, when we were both 18 and in our final year of high school, I bumped into her. We stopped to chat, then she asked if I’d like to meet up. We started going for walks around town. Back in school, I hadn’t understood why I felt that way around her; now I understood it was love. One day I just decided to be honest with her. On one of our walks, I gave her a single red rose and said what I felt. She was completely silent and we turned back for home. Then, while we were waiting at the pedestrian crossing, she grabbed my hand. It was bittersweet; I’d rather have known what she was thinking. It took her quite a long time to make a decision, then we were together for several months and went to each other’s proms. It wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t the best boyfriend but I respected her boundaries, and I often felt as if she was punishing me for wanting to be with her. I was so tormented, I couldn’t prepare for exams. It was a hard decision to dump her – I don’t think of myself as a heartbreaker – but it came down to a choice between our relationship and my mental health. I don’t know if the breakup hit her hard because I only saw her once afterwards, and it was very awkward. She had brought the DVD of V for Vendetta to my house, but we’d never gotten around to watching it and when we met up to exchange our things, I brought it with me. She said she didn’t want it back – that she wasn’t interested in seeing the movie and she didn’t want it reminding her of me – so I took it to university. I was about to turn 19 and due to study physics. I went to visit my future student accommodation with my brother who already had a friend living there. When she opened the door, my hands started sweating and shaking, and I couldn’t help but stare. Because of my ex, I knew what was happening and was determined not to mess it up. At 24, she was a bit older than me, but we started spending more time together, chatting about music, cooking meals in the shared kitchen. I spent most of my summer holidays learning how to cook, to prove that I didn’t need looking after. One night she wanted to watch a film. This was before Netflix: I dug out the V for Vendetta DVD, which I still hadn’t watched. V wears a mask for the whole film, and we made a bet on who the actor was. She guessed Sean Connery; I said Hugo Weaving. Whoever lost would have to sort dinner. I had seen Weaving in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings a hundred times, so I was confident. Boom: sure enough, there was his name in the credits. She said, “What do you want me to cook?” I said, “No, I want us to go out for dinner.” And so I talked myself into a date. We realised very quickly that this was it. It felt honest and open in a way that it had never felt with my ex. We got married in 2012 and our daughter is now almost seven. We always rewatch V for Vendetta in the autumn, around our anniversary, but the DVD is in storage – we don’t have a way of playing it any more. | GOOD |
Gill Dorer obituary | My mother, Gill Dorer, who has died aged 78, was, among many things, director of services at Arthritis Care, a member of the General Medical Council (GMC), a director of the charity Relate and a magistrate. She sat on the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy’s (CSP) fitness to practise panels, and on many employment tribunals. Born in Southgate, north London, Gill was the younger child of Vera (nee Powell), a secretary, and Archie Fielder, the owner of a textile business. The family moved to Finchley, and Gill went to the North London collegiate school in Hampstead Garden Suburb. On leaving school, she worked in the personnel department of Shell. Gill met Brian Dorer, an IT manager, in London in the early 1960s. They married in 1965 and, shortly after, moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire. They had two girls and in 1975 the family moved to Wheathampstead. Gill went back to work in 1981, managing the St Albans branch of Relate, the beginning of a long association with the charity. Gill and Brian divorced in 1987. In the mid-1990s Gill was promoted to become Relate’s director for the east of England. Then, around 2000, Gill took on the role of director of services at Arthritis Care, a charity that represented a condition she was very familiar with. She managed the three hotels run by the charity – she loved visiting them and getting fully accessible rooms. In the course of this role, her own experience with medications was recognised, and she developed a long and productive research relationship with Leeds and Bradford Universities. My mother ended up with four journal publications to her name – a source of huge pride as she had not gone to university. Her colleagues said that she made a difference in how researchers, policymakers and professionals regarded patients, and their views. Gill also spent may years serving as a magistrate – both in St Albans and in Littlehampton, West Sussex, to which she moved in 2006. She had a compassionate approach to social justice and always tried to come to the right judgment for all, especially when sitting in the family court. Over the last 10 or so years, her health and mobility changed greatly, and while this brought her many challenges, she was still able to hold on to things that gave her pleasure. She joined the U3A – the University of the Third Age – and, after trying a few different groups, settled on current affairs, where she made a number of new friendships. The group remembers her joy in researching topics for discussion, never shying away from more controversial ones. Gill is survived by her children, Claire and me, her older brother, Colin, and two grandsons, Bill and Henry. | GOOD |
A local’s guide to Brighton: the best galleries, museums, restaurants and pubs | Travel blogger Ellie Seymour ( ellieandco.co.uk ) has been based in Brighton for nearly 20 years. She is the author of the guidebooks Secret Brighton and Secret Sussex You can’t visit the seaside city of Brighton without having fish and chips, and where to get the best is hotly debated. One of my favourite spots is the city’s oldest: Bardsley’s of Baker Street opened in 1926, which has a tiny dining room full of music hall memorabilia. I try to support independent restaurants, and love Bincho Yakitori , a buzzy, inexpensive Japanese near the seafront serving small plates cooked over fire. The covered Open Market is a global feast – Korean, Japanese, Greek, Mexican, Indian, a French bakery, homemade hummus and falafels, plus handmade chocolates and sausage rolls. Then there’s Tilt Kitchen at Fiveways, north of the centre: this unsung veggie hero serves mouth-watering toasties, heaped salads, fragrant soups, gooey brownies and much more from a postage stamp-size open kitchen. For my blog and guidebooks , I have trained myself to see my surroundings differently, and spot urban curiosities we usually rush past. I love finding ghost signs , and there are some beautiful examples here – like one for the old Western hotel above the Paris House bar on Western Road. Brighton is a well-known artists’ enclave, and packed with galleries. Fabrica , in a former chapel, hosts three contemporary art shows a year, and Phoenix Gallery holds 12 free shows a year across two huge spaces, and has a cool coffee bar , too. In May and November Brighton holds Artists’ Open Houses , with work on display in private homes and studios. The bohemian North Laine draws big crowds but a great, quieter area for a wander is Seven Dials, a leafy neighbourhood a 10-minute walk from Brighton station. Despite its proximity to the city centre, it feels off the radar. Don’t miss diminutive cactus emporium Hi Cacti , with its cheerful yellow shopfront; Dog and Bone Gallery , the city’s smallest, inside two red phone boxes; and Anna’s Museum , a miniature natural history museum in a shop window. The best coffee in the area is at Puck. You can’t walk 10 minutes in Brighton without passing a club, bar or pub. Those in the know head to the Jolly Brewer near London Road station. It’s run by Zack and Matt, the most welcoming landlords in Brighton, and the kind of place you go to have just the one but end up making new friends and leaving at closing time. Another favourite is the Hand in Hand in Kemp Town, where you can play “toad in the hole”, where metal discs – “toads” – are thrown into a slot on a wooden box. There’s jazz on Sundays, and unusual beers from their microbrewery, Hand Brew Co. I also love the Duke of York’s cinema at Preston Circus. It’s in a beautiful Edwardian building, with a pair of stripy can-can legs protruding from the roof. It opened in 1910 and claims to be the UK’s oldest surviving purpose-built cinema. With its seafront and piers, Brighton is more about blue space: the view over rooftops down to the sea from Hollingbury Hillfort is one of the best in the city, especially at dusk. However, the city is also on the fringes of the South Downs national park, and I head for the hills when I want some nature. In next to no time, you can be on a blustery hike and exploring tiny hidden villages. I am always drawn to Streat, a 15-minute drive from the centre of Brighton, even though it’s minuscule. It is a good base for a walk up and over the hills to Ditchling, and has a hidden honesty food box, Suzy’s Streat Food , filled with homebaked treats. I love directing people to the small Artist Residence hotel (doubles from £105 room-only), where I once had a mini staycation. It overlooks the sea on Regency Square and is full of vintage charm. | GOOD |
Hollywood hypocrites fawn over ‘wife beater’ Johnny Depp but they’d never do that for female abuser, says U | NO one can deny that a seven-minute standing ovation for a man found by a judge in an English High Court case to be a domestic abuser is quite an achievement. Premiering his new film, Jeanne du Barry, at the Cannes Film Festival , Johnny Depp lapped up the warmth and applause from the audience and fans alike. This was his first red carpet appearance since his victorious US court case against his ex-wife, Amber Heard , who was found guilty of defaming him as a wife-beater . Not a bad little comeback, huh? The adulation for Depp was not entirely due to his acting performance as critics seem divided about his portrayal of Louis XV, so it has to come down to a heartfelt welcome back into the fold from a population of humanity with very short memories. As if winning his case of defamation against Heard, who gave countless examples of his atrocious conduct and made allegations of violent, coercive, denigrating and manipulative behaviour wasn’t enough, people are now — literally — rolling out the red carpet for Depp. He’s a hero. He hasn’t even had to show any signs of rehabilitation — they just love Johnny. And yet, this was the man who — among other things — talked in texts about wanting to rape his wife, burn her body and drown her to make sure she was dead. He claimed they were made in jest. Who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with a man like that? What a catch. And this is pretty much the point: Men behaving badly are not only attractive but they are so easily forgiven. Society would have us believe that bad boys are where it’s at. They are risqué, and risqué is sexy. Bad boys have edge. They are not dull like the nice men who might treat women well and with respect. No, life is about adventure, and what better adventure than being headbutted ? (He claimed it was accidental.) Granted, Heard and Depp’s relationship was a highly toxic one and while many might claim her behaviour was far from angelic, it’s important to point out that often relationships like this quickly spiral into situations which are so far removed from decency that it has no semblance of normality for those in it or even bystanders. In an abusive relationship, you have simply two choices: You cower or you fight back, and the latter is nigh-on impossible — not least because any grasp of reality has left you. But isn’t it shocking to think that only five years ago we were all rocked by the stories that came out of the #MeToo movement? Men may have been shocked but, of course, many of us women had sat quietly on stories of abuse and denigration for decades. Lifetimes, even. It really felt like the movement would bring about substantial changes, not just in attitudes, but in behaviour. Misogyny was finally in the spotlight, not just the stars of Hollywood and beyond. I remember feeling hugely relieved and comforted by the movement because it spoke many of the things I’d wanted to say or had whispered under my breath for decades. It was a true reflection of many of the experiences I’d been forced to endure during my life as a woman — and for the first time, I had real hope that change would come about. Permanent change. And yet, here we are. Only this week, actress Ruth Wilson has talked about how the City of Angels has no “moral backbone” — it remains as “fickle” as ever post #MeToo. She says it has become no more than a box-ticking exercise and change has not been substantive. Depp may have won his case in the States but not his case against this newspaper, who stated he was a “wife beater”. The judge here found 12 of the 14 alleged incidents of domestic violence had occurred. Across the pond, however, Heard became the enemy — public enemy number one, in fact. Mocked globally, across social media , where she was swiftly established as a meme and a joke. No one wanted to believe her here because . . . well, because Johnny is handsome, a bad boy, and if anything did happen, it was because he was under the influence of drink and drugs. In short, was he being excused? And people wonder why women don’t speak out. Women don’t speak out because the patriarchy is still very much alive and kicking. What’s more is that Heard was somehow seen as a bit too woke during the trial . She was a representation of a wokeness which misogyny has had enough of. #MeToo might be one thing — but for God’s sake, women, don’t push it! Of course, Johnny isn’t the only bad boy who hasn’t just made a seamless return to glory and normality but is being rewarded for it (he will remain the face of Dior Sauvage in a new £16million deal). The list of men who have succeeded in recovering their careers after claims of abuse, violence and drug-taking is nigh-on endless. Will Smith smacked a man in the mouth on live TV . Then there was Mel Gibson . What about Roman Polanski , who raped a 13-year-old? He was also patted on the back by the Cannes Film Festival not so long ago. There are more names and they don’t all have their roots in Hollywood, even though #MeToo does. No, this is bigger than the world of showbiz. This is the ongoing, relentless, soul-destroying fight women face on a daily basis in their pursuit of equal treatment. Men, put quite simply, are judged by a different set of rules to us women. And don’t I know it. In the summer of 1998, following a short, volatile relationship with footballer Stan Collymore , during a work trip to Paris , he dragged me to the floor and kicked me in the head. You know the story. But did you really believe it? I didn’t bring the story to public attention — luckily for me, there was a TV camera crew in the pub where the attack happened, otherwise I might not still be alive. I cannot say whether I would have spoken out at the time because I was in shock and I simply didn’t feel the world was ready to be supportive. I was programmed by society to believe that I might not be believed. And sadly, in many respects I was right. I heard stories, rumours that doubtless would have made their way to social media had it existed in those days. Like Amber Heard, I would have become a meme myself. Apparently, I “provoked him”. I was “asking for it”. I hadn’t “behaved appropriately”. For which read: I brought it on myself. None of it was true, of course. The feeling of doubt and shame that hung over me during that time and beyond was palpable. I found it nigh-on impossible to shake that damaging trope that women ask for it, that women who are abused are weak and stupid, that we must have done something to deserve violence against us. It loomed large in my mindset. I certainly didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over the situation, despite Collymore calling me and asking me, furiously, if I was happy for him to take full responsibility for the “incident”. And yes, I was. Yet his accountability only needed to last a few weeks, maybe a couple of months at most — until people’s memories became blurred by misogyny and prejudice against me. It wasn’t long until he was back in gainful employment. Because everyone deserves another chance, right? So while Depp is lapping up all the forgiveness, flattery, sycophancy and worship in the South of France , where is Heard? She’s living in Spain , raising her two-year-old daughter , largely away from the limelight. While she says she is excited about working and filming again at some point, she’s been left exhausted and disappointed about her mistreatment and has lost faith in the American legal system. No doubt she must have lost faith in some aspects of humanity, too. Because, fundamentally, while Johnny went touring with the late Jeff Beck, she has been ostracised, castigated and judged. This is sorry evidence that, despite how far we think we’ve come with equality and since #MeToo, very little has actually changed. Women who speak up with allegations are punished and treated as something other — the best we can hope for is to be ignored. And conviction statistics in this country reflect that. After my attack, I was offered a platform by a number of women’s charities to lend my celebrity status to raise awareness about violence and abuse. I didn’t take them up on their offers because predominantly, I didn’t feel I had been victim enough — there were women who had suffered much worse than me. Also, because 25 years ago, the prospect of speaking up and speaking out felt uncomfortable, and perhaps even pointless in the face of such misogyny and inequality. I wish I could say I feel differently today but the hero’s welcome Depp received in Cannes proves that my feelings might still be depressingly true. | BAD |
Archbishop of Canterbury to criticise small boats bill in House of Lords | The archbishop of Canterbury will make a rare intervention in the House of Lords to join dozens of peers condemning the government’s flagship asylum bill. Justin Welby will argue against measures championed by Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman that seek to criminalise people seeking refuge in the UK if they arrive on small boats. The illegal migration bill is expected to face a series of demands for significant changes. Almost 90 peers are listed to speak at its second reading on Wednesday, with the chamber sitting earlier, from 11am, to allow for the many contributions. The draft plans, which cleared the Commons last month, will change the law so that those who arrive in the UK without permission will not be able to stay to claim asylum and instead be detained and removed, either to their home country or a third country, such as Rwanda. It will be the first time that Welby, the most senior cleric in the Church of England, has publicly criticised the legislation. He has previously criticised the way the debate over refugees has been conducted. Speaking in the Lords in December , Welby urged politicians and the public to reject the “shrill narratives that all who come to us for help should be treated as liars, scroungers or less than fully human”. His comments were widely thought to be criticising Braverman, who has previously described the increasing numbers of people coming to the UK to seek asylum as “an invasion”. The home secretary has more recently claimed that many of those arriving have “heightened levels of criminality” – a claim she said was backed up by conversations with senior police officers but no data. Braverman and the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, last night called for the Lords not to block the government’s radical immigration plans. Braverman said: “The British people want us to stop the boats. That is exactly what this bill will help us do. It has been designed with the assistance of some of the country’s finest legal minds to ensure it delivers for the British public in a manner consistent with rule of law and robust to legal challenge. “We are committed to ensuring that this legislation passes through parliament as soon as possible, and urge the Lords to back the bill, so we can get on with stopping the boats.” Chalk said: “This bill gives us the robust but fair legal framework needed to remove illegal migrants swiftly and curb last-minute challenges, while ensuring proper opportunity to appeal remains. “The rule of law is undermined if immigration rules set by parliament are not upheld.” Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Peers are expected to call for the law to be altered to ensure more safe and legal routes are opened for those escaping war. Critics have pointed out that the bill will oblige the home secretary to detain tens of thousands of migrants every year. It includes provisions that would limit the ability of the European court of human rights to prevent the deportation of asylum seekers. The clampdown has been prompted by Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats” bringing people across the Channel. More than 6,000 people have been detected making the crossing so far in 2023. The government plans to use disused military camps and a barge as accommodation centres. But critics argue the flagship immigration policy breaks international law and threatens modern slavery protections. In a rare parliamentary move, the Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick, a former senior police officer, has proposed a so-called fatal motion to the bill, aimed at stopping it in its tracks at its first parliamentary hurdle. However, the attempt is destined to fail without the support of the main opposition. | GOOD |
I took my kids to the playground without bringing my phone – and it was a revelation | It is a truism of parenting that it goes so fast, but as anyone who has been forced to sit on a bench and watch their children run tireless circuits of the playground knows, sometimes it goes so slowly you feel as if you’re losing your mind. I know people who will do anything to avoid playground duty, will beg their friends to coordinate so they don’t have to do it alone, or will discreetly wear headphones throughout so that, while maintaining eyes on their children, they can listen to a podcast and be entirely mentally absent. As the weather heats up and we crawl out of our screen-dependent winters, New York playgrounds are alive with the shriek of, “Joshua, 10 minutes!” I have fought with the Joshua-10-minutes tendency for years. The urge to cut short the visit – to the playground, the park, the toy aisle at Target – came on strongest when my children were smaller and could still be a danger to themselves. Somehow the combination of mindless repetition (on the slide, on the swings) and the need for hypervigilance in case someone fell off something induced a state of almost exquisite boredom that I occasionally think has an equivalence in, for example, bag checkers at the airport: the job is monotonous in the extreme but the consequences of not doing it properly can be dire. That particular dynamic has changed over the years as the requirements for my involvement have evolved. These days, long periods will pass in which nothing is required of me at all, punctuated by the occasional request – “watch this! That wasn’t it; that wasn’t it either” – that I check in to witness someone doing a cartwheel. If I wanted to, I could disappear into back-to-back episodes of my current podcast obsessions, You’re Wrong About and This Is Actually Happening , and at the beginning of this spring, I did. The experience felt simultaneously like an amazing win and vaguely like cheating. To be present/not present when you’re cleaning the house is one thing; yet to mentally absent oneself from one’s kids – to be always projecting forwards in anticipation of this particular moment being over – has started to feel like missing the point. I should add that, in general, and when it doesn’t involve swings, I am very good at doing nothing. I could sit looking at the wood grain on a table for a long time and be more or less content. There is copious literature on the necessity of boredom for children, mostly mentioned these days in the context of warnings about overscheduling and screens. There is less about the usefulness of “boredom” for adults, and what there is tends to be found in the literature of time-maximisation, where boredom is often framed as an aid to creativity or achievement. In and of themselves, these idle periods have no apparent value. But increasingly they strike me as the solid matter of life and the moments I’ll look back on with the deepest nostalgia. I’ve been having this sense for a few years now, but it’s pathetic that what has sharpened revelation is the experience, twice in a row, of accidentally going out without my phone. After the panic subsided, I sat in the sunshine while my children rode their bikes up and down and then ditched them to play in the sand. I watched a barge make its way up the Hudson. I pointed out two sparrows enjoying a sand bath. (What even is that?) I could have been listening to the real-life story of a woman who survived a home invasion, but instead I eavesdropped on some young people playing volleyball farther up the sand. I felt very happy that I was neither young nor under any obligation to play volleyball. When the reflex urge to shout “Guys, 10 minutes!” surfaced – because, realistically, how long can I be expected to just sit here? – I did the wildest thing and resisted it. “Don’t bring your phone,” they both say now when we go out. There are limits to this lassitude, which the other day nearly caused us to miss the last ferry off Governor’s Island. And I do occasionally worry that, taken to an extreme, I will one day relax into a formless blob of inactivity that I will never fully be able to pull out of. The funny thing is that of the two experiences of boredom, fighting it was the one that delivered the greatest sense of dead time, of passively waiting for something to end. The other – phoneless, rooted in minor-league bird watching – felt as active and urgent as only the best use of one’s time can. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . | BAD |
Spanish police make arrests over ‘hate crimes’ targeting Vinícius Júnior | Spanish police have arrested three people in connection with the racist abuse suffered by Real Madrid’s Brazilian forward Vinícius Júnior during a match with Valencia on Sunday, and detained a further four suspects over an effigy of the player that was hung from a bridge in Madrid four months ago. In a brief statement on Tuesday morning, the Policía Nacional said three young men had been arrested in Valencia over the “racist behaviour” that took place during the match at the city’s Mestalla stadium. The announcement came hours after the force revealed that four people had been arrested on suspicion of hate crimes relating to the hanging of an inflatable dummy dressed in Vinícius’s strip from a bridge in the Spanish capital on 26 January. The dummy, which was accompanied by a huge banner reading “Madrid hates Real”, triggered an investigation that led to the arrests of four men who allegedly belong to the ultras faction of a Spanish club and who were already known to specialist officers. The abuse directed at Vinícius has reopened the debate over racism in Spanish football – and in wider Spanish society – with the player himself saying that Spain is now known “as a country of racists” in his homeland. “Racism is normal in La Liga ,” he wrote on Twitter. “This championship which was once that of Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Cristiano and Messi now is that of racists.” Valencia received a five-game partial stadium closure and €45,000 (£39,000) fine on Tuesday night. A Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) statement read: “The competition committee has sanctioned Valencia CF with the partial closure of the Mestalla stadium for five matches, more specifically the Mario Kempes south stand, following the events that occurred during the First Division National League Championship match between the local team and Real Madrid CF. “It is considered proven that, as reflected by the referee in his minutes, there were racist shouts at Vinícius, a Real Madrid CF player, during the aforementioned match, altering the normal course of the match and considering the infractions very serious. “In addition, an economic sanction of €45,000 is imposed on Valencia.” Luis Rubiales of the RFEF said the abuse showed “a real problem” with racism and called for zero tolerance. “We have a problem of behaviour, of education, of racism,” he said. “And as long as there is one fan or one group of fans making insults based on someone’s sexual orientation or skin colour or belief, then we have a serious problem.” Valencia said it had banned one of its fans for life and was looking to identify others. “The club has analysed all the available footage, working alongside the authorities as rapidly as possible to clarify what happened,” it said in a statement. Real Madrid said it strongly condemned the incident, which it believed to be a hate crime. “These events represent a direct attack on the social and democratic model of coexistence of our state based on the rule of law,” the club said. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, urged Fifa and La Liga to take “serious measures” after the scenes at Valencia. “We cannot allow fascism and racism to seize control of football stadiums,” Lula said. “It’s unjust that a poor kid who’s done so well in life, who may be on his way to becoming the best in the world – he’s certainly the best at Real Madrid – gets insulted at every stadium where he plays,” the Brazilian president said while on a visit to Japan for the G7 meeting. The racist behaviour was also condemned by Spanish politicians. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said there should be zero tolerance for racism in football, adding: “Sport is based on the values of tolerance and respect. Hatred and xenophobia should have no place in football nor in our society.” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, said racism and sport were “totally incompatible”. Real Madrid’s Italian manager, Carlo Ancelotti, said the racist abuse – during which Vinícius was repeatedly called a “monkey” – highlighted how “something bad is happening in this league”. The Spanish league has made nine similar formal complaints over racist abuse against Vinícius over the past two seasons, most of which have been shelved. Fans have been fined and banned from stadiums, but so far only a Mallorca supporter may end up going on trial for allegedly racially insulting the Brazilian during a game. The first trial of a fan accused of racial abuse in Spanish professional football is expected to happen at some point this year in a case involving the Athletic Bilbao forward Iñaki Williams, who was insulted by an Espanyol supporter during a match in 2020 . | GOOD |
New rail strikes targeting FA Cup final and Epsom Derby amount to a spiteful punishment beating for the | THE new rail strikes are even more spiteful than we’ve come to expect. Britain is used to walkouts orchestrated by unions both to extract more money and cause chaos for the Tories they despise. Aslef’s latest timing amounts to a punishment beating for the public . So much for working-class struggle! These stoppages, led by £151,000-a-year Mick Whelan, target ordinary people heading to the FA Cup final and the Epsom Derby . Train drivers are far from badly paid. They average £60,000 plus overtime. They have been offered two rises on top, of four per cent each. Most workers would take that. To Aslef it’s “risible”. These militants are 1970s throwbacks wedded to archaic working practices which boggle the mind in 2023. To them, railways exist not to serve customers but to create jobs for union members. Bring on driverless trains. THE Tories’ proposed betting crackdown is muddled, authoritarian and likely to do more harm than good. It is well-intentioned enough — a bid to reduce problem gambling . But, while we have every sympathy for addicts, they comprise only about 0.2 per cent of the millions who like a flutter. Now anyone losing £125 in a month or £500 in a year would face financial checks and even tougher, albeit unspecified, ones if they lose £1,000 in a day. Why? We don’t vet people when they get hooked on other legal pursuits. Where next would this intrusion spread? Meanwhile maximum stakes for online slot machines would be £2 if you’re 24, but £15 from 25. When did 25 become the age of responsibility? The Government has been panicked into this latest nanny-statism by anti-gambling crusaders. Addicts will swerve it via black market websites, probably making their plight far worse. Who would this plan really help? WE’RE not sure it’s happened before — but we agree with Lib Dem chief Ed Davey. Why does a Police and Crime Commissioner blow public money on ANY social media staff, let alone three? And since these elected penpushers have swallowed £100million in three years nationwide — and crime remains rampant — why do they still exist? WE’RE happy to hear Commons leader Penny Mordaunt praise the Sun campaign , with FairFuel, to end rip-off pump prices. The “PumpWatch” regulator we back would be a powerful tool to shame profiteering forecourts. The Treasury is said to be in favour. Enough talking, then. When will the Government launch it? | BAD |
GPs and pharmacies are the very heart of our communities. Here’s how we’ll transform them | PEOPLE sometimes talk about their GP as if they were a close friend or even a member of the family. When I was growing up, that was the reality. My dad was a GP and Mum ran the local pharmacy. They were at the heart of our community, the friendly face of the NHS and the first port of call for anyone worried about their health. That’s still the case today. Our GPs are doing a brilliant job and they are seeing more patients than ever before. But as we recover from the pandemic , services have come under real strain and people are struggling to book appointments. Sun readers know how frustrating it is to be stuck on hold to your GP practice when you or someone in the family desperately needs to see a doctor, or even if they just need a routine appointment. It’s a common scene in homes up and down the country at 7.59am every morning as people get ready to dial their GP, hoping to beat the queue. And when access to primary care is difficult it has knock-on effects across the NHS, with many who cannot get GP appointments left with no option but to turn to A&E. You deserve better than that. Our NHS deserves better than that. So we are going to change things under a new plan I’m setting out today. Backed by £1.2billion of government investment, we are going to transform GP and pharmacy services in England, delivering on my promise to cut NHS waiting lists. Under this plan, millions of patients will receive quicker, more convenient access to NHS care from their high street pharmacy, leaving GPs free to help the patients who need them most. No longer will you have to wait to see the GP for common conditions like a sore throat, ear ache, shingles or sinusitis. For the first time ever, pharmacists will be able to prescribe medicines themselves. We have 11,500 community pharmacies, run by pharmacists who are skilled, qualified healthcare professionals. So it makes perfect sense to give them a greater role in helping people with these kinds of routine conditions. It is a simple change, but I know it will make a huge difference. By providing a further 2.5million blood-pressure checks in community pharmacies, tens of thousands more people will be at lower risk of a heart attack or stroke. This could be a potential life-saver by helping to tackle the rising problem of cardiovascular disease. By enabling more pharmacies to prescribe oral contraception , we will make life easier for around half a million women who will no longer need to wait to speak to their GP or a practice nurse. That means no more jumping through hoops each time you run out of pills. And by giving people the ability to self-refer for services like physiotherapy, hearing tests, and podiatry, we will help around half a million people a year to get the support they need more quickly. These are sensible, practical steps, which will make a real difference to people’s everyday lives — and help ease the burden and make the NHS more efficient. Together, these measures will free up around 15million GP appointments over the next two years. And it doesn’t stop there. We are also providing GPs with the practical help they need to manage high demand. It’s time to say goodbye to old-fashioned analogue phone systems that keep you waiting for hours on end. They will be replaced by new user-friendly online services to book appointments, get health questions answered and access records. We will put an end to the 8am rush to book a GP appointment, and people will no longer be asked to call back another day. Instead, if your need is urgent, you will be assessed the same day and get an appointment that day if you need one. If your need isn’t urgent, you will get an appointment within two weeks. All of this is on top of our work to train up thousands more doctors, nurses and pharmacists, and our decision to increase funding for general practice to a record £11.5billion. This plan will not just help GPs and pharmacies to deliver better care, it will also have a ripple effect across the NHS. This plan is comprehensive and will help to deliver one of my five priorities to cut waiting lists so people can get the help they need more quickly. That’s what I, this government, the Conservatives will continue to do for you. We are getting on with the job at hand to deliver on your priorities. I know many Sun readers will be marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS later this year. It will be a huge celebration, an outpouring of affection for this institution that says so much about who we are as a country. But it must also be a moment to pledge our determination together to keep improving, keep modernising and keep looking for ways to serve patients even better. That’s what the plan I am announcing today is all about. | BAD |
After the earthquakes, it’s women and girls in Turkey feeling the aftershocks | In Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, one of the most ravaged cities in the recent earthquakes , 25-year-old Alev Altun, the mother of two young children, became homeless in one night, like thousands of others. Having nowhere to go, she agreed to take refuge in the house of her ex-husband, on his invitation, assuming it would be safer to stay with the father of her children than alone in a tent or in a building at risk of collapse. While she was sleeping, her ex-husband allegedly poured scalding water all over her, shouting she should be grateful that he had not killed her. She remains in intensive care at a local hospital, with severe burns to her head, face and body. Hers is one of the many harrowing stories of women and girls in crisis zones. Women suffer disproportionately in the aftermath of disasters. While tens of thousands of people have lost homes and jobs, women continue to work ceaselessly in makeshift tents and containers set up for displaced survivors – finding food or trying to cook, washing or cleaning where water is available, constantly providing for others. In traditional, patriarchal societies, the entire burden of looking after extended families is on their shoulders. According to organisations on the ground , a large number of women were found dead – and occasionally pulled out alive – in children’s rooms buried under piles of rubble. When the tremors began, they ran to save their children and babies. Unicef says the number of children who have died in the earthquake “is likely to be in the many thousands”. There are 356,000 pregnant women across the earthquake-affected areas. Of these, an estimated 39,000 are expected to deliver babies in the coming weeks. For every affected woman and girl, but especially for pregnant women, the lack of toilets and cleaning facilities is a major source of distress. Growing up in Turkey , I have been told many times to be quiet about and ashamed of the female body, and especially menstruation. Still to this day, one of the widespread definitions of the word “dirty” ( kirli ) in Turkish dictionaries is “a woman who is menstruating”. When I was younger, often when I bought a sanitary product from a market, I would watch the cashier immediately wrap it in some old newspaper, hiding it as if it was a scandal. Once, in Istanbul, I was scolded by a male grocer when I asked out loud in front of everyone where the period products were. He used a word I have never forgotten, ayip – shame. In this sexist culture, female survivors of earthquakes find it very difficult to ask for sanitary pads. There is an assumption that within the broader picture of devastation and destruction, such matters are a trivial concern. They are not. Action Aid has said that the situation for women and girls and marginalised communities “is becoming increasingly alarming”. In times of war and disaster, the rights and freedoms of women and minorities always become casualties to the “more important and urgent issues” of realpolitik. The humanitarian organisation Plan International has reported that, “Our experience shows that children, especially girls, women and the poorest families, are most at risk of exploitation in a disaster like an earthquake. Women and children in the disaster zone will be at risk of exploitation and abuse, should they find themselves once again displaced.” LGBTQ+ communities find the situation extremely hard. Sexual harassment and violence is a growing threat for many who remain vulnerable in homophobic and transphobic environments. There are reports from human rights organisations that it is harder to find a tent or access aid if you are a single woman. Hate speech is never far from the surface. Wars, disasters and earthquakes also disrupt education. In Turkey and Syria, girls are much more likely to be pulled out of school. Turkey already has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Europe. Yet instead of helping women and minorities by implementing the Istanbul convention – the treaty designed to combat violence against women – the government under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done the opposite, withdrawing from the convention and targeting both feminists and LGBTQ+ activists. Erdoğan has repeatedly said that women cannot be equal to men and gender equality is “ against nature ”. Crisis times bring out both the best and the worst in humanity. While we have seen a profoundly moving outpouring of help and support from civil society, there is a correlation between the lack of democracy, lack of accountability and high levels of corruption and nepotism in a country and the scale of suffering in natural disasters. Turkey’s AKP under Erdoğan is not only antidemocratic and authoritarian, it is also blatantly macho and misogynist. Sadly, anti-refugee rhetoric has also proliferated in Turkey after this crisis. In Mersin, Syrians staying at a dormitory were kicked out , saying they had to make way for Turkish citizens. Refugees have been put on buses and dumped on the streets. Even those who were trying to help with rescue efforts have been assaulted in some places. In times of distress, instead of questioning the incapacity and structural mistakes of a government, it is easier to turn to the next vulnerable group and take it out on them. Meanwhile, on the other side of Turkey’s border in Iran, girls are being poisoned . In at least 26 elementary and high schools, more than 1000 girls have reportedly been targeted in chemical gas attacks. Women and girls have been the leading voice in demanding social change, equality and freedom in the country. The bravery of Iranian women is remarkable: this is why they are being targeted by the regime. We often hear that the world is presently suffering from multiple crises and therefore relief and aid efforts cannot be expected to continue for too long in one place. It is, however, possible to look at it from a different angle. Whether in Turkey, Syria , Afghanistan, Iran or war-torn Ukraine … as we mark International Women’s Day, women and girls and minorities across the world are suffering and struggling disproportionately. Gender-based relief efforts are essential to rebuild better and fairer societies. Studies show that when women are given financial aid and psychological support, they use this leverage primarily for their families, their children and their communities. There never has been a more urgent time for global solidarity, and especially, global sisterhood. There never has been a more urgent time to say out loud that we can both dearly love and care for our own countries or our adopted countries and at the same time be citizens of the world, citizens of humankind. Elif Shafak is a novelist and political scientist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . | BAD |
Paralysed man walks using device that reconnects brain with muscles | A man who was paralysed in a cycling accident in 2011 has been able to stand and walk with an aid after doctors implanted a device that reads his brain waves and sends instructions to his spine to move the right muscles. Gert-Jan Oskam, 40, was told he would never walk again after breaking his neck in a traffic accident in China, but has climbed stairs and walked for more than 100 metres at a time since having the operation. “A few months ago, I was able, for the first time after 10 years, to stand up and have a beer with my friends,” said Oskam, who is from the Netherlands . “That was pretty cool. I want to use it in my daily life.” The “digital bridge” is the latest from a team of neuroscientists in Switzerland who have a longstanding programme to develop brain-machine interfaces to overcome paralysis. The project aims to use wireless signals to reconnect the brain with muscles that are rendered useless when spinal cord nerves are broken. In a previous trial, Oskam tested a system that recreated the rhythmic steps of walking by sending signals from a computer to his spinal cord. While the device helped him take several steps at once, the movement was quite robotic and had to be triggered by a button or sensor. For the latest update, Prof Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon at Lausanne University hospital, installed electrodes on Oskam’s brain that detect neural activity when he tries to move his legs. The readings are processed by an algorithm that turns them into pulses, which are sent to further electrodes in his spine. The pulses activate nerves in the spine, switching on muscles to produce the intended movement. “What we’ve been able to do is re-establish communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that controls leg movement with a digital bridge,” said Prof Grégoire Courtine at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He said the system could “capture the thoughts of Gert-Jan and translate those thoughts into stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary leg movements”. The device does not produce swift, smooth strides, but Oskam said the implant, described in Nature , allowed for more natural movements than before, because standing up and walking were initiated and controlled by thinking about the actions. The signals stimulate muscles needed to flex the hip, knee and ankle. The device also appears to boost rehabilitation. After more than 40 training sessions with the implant, Oskam, who did not sever all the nerves in his spine, regained some control over his legs, even when the device was turned off. Courtine believes that reconnecting the brain and spine helps to regenerate spinal nerves, recovering some of the patient’s lost control. While the work is at an early stage, the researchers hope that future, miniaturised devices will help stroke patients and paralysed people to walk, move their arms and hands, and control other functions, such as the bladder, which is often affected by spinal cord injuries. Arm and hand movements may be more difficult, as they are more complex than walking. With Oskam showing progress more than a decade after his accident, the team is confident that other patients with more recent injuries could fare better. With Oskam “it’s more than 10 years after the spinal cord injury”, Courtine said. “Imagine when we apply the digital bridge a few weeks after spinal cord injury. The potential for recovery is tremendous.” | GOOD |
Banned British sprinter CJ Ujah cleared of deliberately taking drugs at Olympics | The British 100m sprinter CJ Ujah has been cleared of deliberately taking banned drugs by the Athletics Integrity Unit and the World Anti-Doping Agency, and will be free to return to competition next year. Ujah led off Team GB men’s 4x100m relay team as they won silver at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 only to test positive for two prohibited substances, ostarine and S-23. It led to the British team being stripped of their medals and Ujah facing a four-year ban. However, on Monday , the AIU confirmed that Ujah would now be banned for 22 months after a thorough investigation found in his favour. He still has to serve a reduced ban as, under Wada’s strict liability rules, an athlete is responsible for everything they put in their body. Speaking exclusively to the Guardian after this newspaper broke the news, Ujah revealed that it was a contaminated beta alanine supplement – bought off Amazon for £10 during lockdown – that caused his positive test in Tokyo. “Obviously I made a mistake,” he said. “But people make mistakes. I am not a cheat.” Ujah also acknowledged that he did not check the brand he chose was approved by Informed Sport, which guarantees a product is batch-tested for prohibited drugs before going on sale, and therefore he had no defence when he tested positive. “I think complacency set in,” he said. “During the pandemic I relied a lot on Amazon, rather than using the people and resources around me. It was just convenient, with next-day delivery. And I didn’t think anything was wrong with it.” “Many athletes see supplement education as a box‑ticking exercise,” he added. “And while I’m not going to call anyone out, a lot of athletes use supplements that are not Informed Sport because they don’t think anything bad could happen to them – until it does.” In a statement the AIU confirmed that it accepted Ujah’s positive test was not caused by a deliberate attempt to cheat: “The AIU and Wada were satisfied that the sprinter’s anti-doping rule violation was not intentional as a result of his ingestion of a contaminated supplement and the applicable two-year period of ineligibility was reduced by two months on account of how promptly he admitted the violation,” it added. The decision means Ujah will be free to compete again on 5 June 2023, giving him two months to prove his fitness before potentially returning to the British team in time for the world championships in Hungary. However, the head of the AIU, Brett Clothier, warned athletes to understand the consequences that could arise from taking supplements and to pay better attention to the relevant rules and athlete education programmes. Clothier said: “In this case, after a thorough examination of the facts, we were satisfied that Mr Ujah did indeed ingest a contaminated supplement, but he was unable to demonstrate that he was entitled to any reduction in the applicable period of ineligibility based on his level of fault. “Taking supplements is risky for athletes as they can be contaminated or even adulterated with prohibited substances. Athletes owe it to their fellow competitors to be 100% certain before putting anything into their body. If there’s the slightest doubt, leave it out.” The British relay team automatically forfeited their Olympic silver medals in February when Ujah did not challenge his adverse analytical finding at a court of arbitration for sport hearing | GOOD |
UK immigration stats: headline figure will not tell the whole story | The release of official statistics is often the focus of political scrutiny, but the latest annual figures for overall net migration to the UK, due Thursday at 9.30am, are sufficiently anticipated they have prompted two separate policy announcements already. On Tuesday, Suella Braverman rushed through a plan to reduce the number of people arriving via student visas by greatly limiting the scope for them to bring along family members. A day later, Keir Starmer used every one of his prime minister’s questions allocation to lambast Rishi Sunak over the likely size of the statistics, and to present Labour ideas he argued would incentivise employers to train UK staff rather than bring workers in from overseas. Immigration has long been a highly charged debate in UK politics, but with the end of free movement after Brexit, the Conservatives’ hope was that the argument on formal migration would be largely settled, with debate focusing on people arriving via unofficial routes such as small boats. Instead, the near-46,000 arrivals who crossed the Channel this way will be only a small fraction of the total for net migration, which some have forecast could get into the high hundreds of thousands. The last available figures showed the number stood at 504,000 in the year to June 2022, compared with 173,000 in the 12 months to June 2021. Those released on Thursday will be for the calendar year 2022, and are likely to be higher still. What is going on? The short answer is this is the result of unexpected one-off factors and long-term choices. In the first column comes one obvious bulge: the arrival of refugees from Ukraine and from Hong Kong. Similarly, the impact of Covid has skewed figures, with more shorter-term arrivals such as students coming after the pandemic, given very few arrived during 2020 and 2021. But more significant is the effect of government policy, not least the fact it became easier for many non-EU nationals to come to the UK to work after Brexit, with restrictions on skills and minimum salaries lowered. In the longer term, there has been an official willingness to rely on overseas staff to fill gaps in industries facing shortages, notably health and social care, rather than tackle wage and working condition issues that might make the roles more appealing to British staff. And, at least until this week, there has been a tolerance for universities targeting new overseas markets for students, who pay high fees but, when studying for masters or doctorate qualifications, can be in their 30s with dependants. As with all migration debates, officials describe it as a generally polite battle of wills between departments eager to fight their corner over the economic boosts from migration, particularly education, agriculture and the Treasury, and a Home Office led by Braverman, who has publicly called for significant cuts in the numbers coming. Whatever Thursday’s final figure was, said Rob McNeil, deputy director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, it would be “in part because of geo-political events, things like the invasion of Ukraine, the crackdown in Hong Kong and Covid, but there are also lots of policy choices involved”. He added: “All this doesn’t mean we are necessarily at the spike of the peak yet. That’s not to say that we aren’t, it’s just that we can’t predict it. In the longer term, you might expect the figures to broadly return to the pre-Covid norms, but we can’t say that with any certainty.” | BAD |
Tory pledge to build 40 ‘new’ England hospitals likely to be delayed until after 2030 | The health secretary is set to signal a major delay to one of the headline promises in the last Conservative manifesto by suggesting the delivery of 40 new hospitals in England is likely to be pushed back until after 2030. In a move that will spark anger among MPs who wanted “spades in the ground” before the next election, government sources said Steve Barclay would make the announcement on Thursday. The pledge to build and fund “40 new hospitals over the next 10 years” was one of the major headlines of Boris Johnson’s pitch to the electorate in 2019. Sources indicated the government had been ready to make the announcement about the probable delay for some time, but it was repeatedly pushed back because of fears about a backlash from Tory MPs. Instead, Barclay is expected to commit to prioritising five hospitals where roofs and ceilings are most at risk of sudden collapse because they are made from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). The cheaper, lightweight form of concrete was used in the building of many schools and hospitals in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s but is now well past its intended 30-year lifespan. The risk is so acute that some hospitals have deployed steel stilts to stop ceilings and roofs from falling down. The Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn in Norfolk – which is widely used by constituents of the former prime minister Liz Truss – has deployed about 1,500 such supports, for example. Tory MPs in marginal seats were hoping progress on new or improved hospitals could be pointed to in the run-up to the next election, as evidence of their commitment to the “levelling up” agenda. But the news is likely to lead to fresh claims that Rishi Sunak’s government has ditched the legacy of his predecessor-but-one. When Johnson made the claim in 2019 that he would deliver “40 new hospitals”, he was accused of being misleading, as critics said the bulk of the projects involved rebuilding of existing hospitals or consolidation. The scheme came with a promised spending package of £3.7bn. However, NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, said at the time the real cost of building 40 new hospitals would be more like £20bn. Construction costs have soared since 2019, especially as a result of shortages of labour and key materials. In the aftermath of Covid, Johnson used the policy as evidence of his commitment to “build back better and deliver the biggest hospital building programme in a generation”. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion Barclay is expected to make clear in his oral statement to MPs whether those five hospitals will be given five of the eight places in the New Hospitals Programme or if they will be added to it, taking the number of promised “new” facilities to more than the long-promised 40. Those five had previously applied to NHS England for £332m of extra funding between them to tackle their RAAC problems, New Civil Engineer disclosed last October. The risk posed by RAAC which has gone past its intended lifespan was highlighted dramatically in 2018 when the flat roof of a primary school in Essex collapsed without warning. No one was injured because it happened at a weekend. But the incident focused attention in the NHS on the danger to patients and staff of the same thing occurring in a hospital. Barclay is also expected to clarify whether the £3.7bn budget for the hospital renewal programme will be expanded, especially if any or all of the five most beset by RAAC problems are added to it. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are investing £3.7bn for the first four years of the new hospital programme and remain committed to delivering all 40 new hospitals by 2030 as part of the biggest hospital building programme in a generation. Our new national approach to constructing hospitals will see them built more rapidly and give value for money. “We remain committed to eradicating reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete from the NHS estate by 2035 and protecting patient and staff safety in the interim period.” | GOOD |
The Guardian has called everything from gardening to the countryside racist – but the real problem is t | A PRETTY cast-iron rule in life is that people are what they accuse you of. Nowhere is this truer than in the modern Left’s obsession with calling everyone else a racist. If you believe in controlled borders you are a “racist”. If you believe in limiting immigration you are a “racist”. If you are proud of your country and its history then you are a “racist”. That’s at least according to the modern Left, which seems to believe everybody is guilty of racism except themselves. So how to explain the behaviour of the Left’s in-house organ, the poorly-selling but still influential Guardian ? This is the newspaper most beloved of those who work at the BBC . It is the one that, in all sorts of ways, sets the weather for our nation’s obsessions. In recent years it has denounced as “racist” everything from gardening to the British countryside. Nothing good about our nation can exist without being denounced as “racist” by The Guardian. Yet it is The Guardian’s own behaviour that can be seen as “racist”. Take, for instance, the paper’s attitude towards anyone in the Conservative Party who is from an ethnic minority. The Guardian can for ever be found denouncing these people. Why? They believe they should all be leftists, and that if they are Conservatives they are “sell-outs”. It is this sort of thinking that led the paper to demonise Priti Patel when she was Home Secretary. Just one example of this was when the paper’s cartoonist depicted her as a bull, with a great ring through her nose. The image was not just ugly and dehumanising but obviously racist. The fact no one at The Guardian noticed this is a stunning thing in itself. Or take the more recent example, when the paper’s Sunday edition, The Observer, published a letter by Diane Abbott claiming that only black people can experience racism. In Abbott’s weird world, Jews, like ginger-haired people, might experience “prejudice”, but only black people can experience racism. Apart from the bizarre desire to set up a racism competition, perhaps Diane could explain what the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were. Victims of mere “prejudice”? Of course, Abbott has had the Labour whip withdrawn for her ignorant comments . But still it is remarkable that no one at the paper thought to either go back to her and check if she meant this or had no other worries about printing the letter. Then we come to this past weekend, and the cartoon published in a paper which calls itself “the world’s leading liberal voice”. The cartoon depicted the resignation of BBC chairman Richard Sharp . Sharp is Jewish, though that is no reason why he — nor anyone else in public life — should be immune from criticism. Personally, I hate almost all attempts to censor or limit what a free Press should print, draw or say. Yet The Guardian’s cartoon on the Sharp resignation was not just criticism or lampooning. It was outright anti-Semitism. Martin Rowson, the cartoonist in question, depicted Sharp in the most ugly, stereotypically “Jewish” way imaginable. Dr Goebbels would have loved the work. Sharp is shown as dusky, with great, ugly, protruding facial features. He is seen carrying his box of possessions away from the office. You’d have thought that the box, if it said anything, would say “BBC”. But no, strangely, the box said “Goldman Sachs”, the Jewish-founded bank that is such an obsession of modern-day anti-Semites. Sharp used to work there, but that is irrelevant to his current predicament. Bizarrely, the box has a squid in it, another anti-Jewish trope where Jews are meant to have their “tentacles” around everything. There is also a head of Rishi Sunak in the box, implying that Sharp also somehow “controls” the Prime Minister. To his side is a slaughtered pig, surrounded by blood. The Guardian has since withdrawn the cartoon and the cartoonist apologised. Elsewhere there has been silence from the paper’s contributors. All these pious men and women who always berate the rest of us, preaching from such a very high pulpit, have been silent. I have not seen a single Guardian journalist distance themselves from what their paper published. So what are we to make of this? As I say — The Guardian is what it accuses everyone else of being. Modern Britain is the most tolerant country in the world. We are the country where immigrants actually have the best chance of succeeding. We are the country which actually hates racism. Which is one reason why we mind when people accuse us of it. But the people doing most of the accusing are the ones who are most guilty. I never did listen to The Guardian’s moral hectoring. After this weekend, I suspect a few more people will feel the same way. US Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has been in the UK in recent days. Though it’s his first trip he even described it as feeling like his “second home”, which is nice to hear. After all, it isn’t as if Joe Biden has made any special effort to be particularly nice about this country. For example, his administration made it plain from the outset that there would be no trade deal with the UK, something which (for all his flaws) the President before him worked on. In fact, the DeSantis trip had a bigger purpose. The Florida governor has not yet announced he is running for the Presidency. But his arrival in the UK was a big “tell”. His critics sometimes say he is not a foreign policy person, and while he has been a superb governor of Florida, he needs to start appearing on the world stage. So yes, we may have been used to help bolster DeSantis’s image at home. But I am perfectly comfortable about that. It would be good to have someone back in the Oval Office who thinks well of our country. Most importantly, it would be good to have someone who can actually push through that big, beautiful trade deal that both our countries so desperately need. IN recent years eco-zealots have kept insisting that we should all stop eating meat. Farting cows and various other excuses have been trotted out to claim that if we eat meat we are killing the planet. Other food options offered to us have ranged from fake vegan “meat” to insects. Thanks, but no thanks. Now almost 1,000 academics have signed a joint letter saying that eating meat is actually good for us, and that there are nutrients in it which we need. Who knew that the image of the sickly vegan had some truth to it? According to the letter’s signatories, livestock farming is too important to “become the victim of zealotry”. Too late, I suspect. The generation coming up has been taught that the planet is about to burn up and it’s your fault if you eat a steak. Good luck turning around that story – or reprogramming the generation which has been brought up on it. STRANGE event in Los Angeles, where a female concertgoer apparently had a “full body orgasm” during a performance by the LA Philharmonic. The orchestra was performing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No5 when, in a brief pause, the woman let out her titanic cry. Everyone heard, though the band played on. You can hear the recording. I like a Tchaikovsky symphony as much as the next man. Though perhaps not as much as the next woman. I HAVE railed here before about the people who used Covid as an excuse to work from home for the rest of their lives. While a bit of flexibility is good in some jobs, we all know there are workers who have just been taking the p**s for the past three years. The knock-on effect of them not turning up to the office is clear. Businesses that relied on office workers have been shuttering. Parts of cities that used to be heaving midweek are still strangely quiet. So I’m not sure how I feel about the latest way to woo people back into the office. These include extra time off for your birthday, so-called “duvet days” and also free doggy daycare. The last is the result of a 24 per cent rise in pet ownership during the pandemic. On the one hand, I’m for whatever is needed to get this country back to work again. On the other, I can’t help feeling that we’ve become this lazy, soggy, wet-blanket of a country. How adult do we expect to be treated? I mean “duvet days”. How old are we? Try a little bit of coaxing, sure. But some stick wouldn’t hurt in many cases How about: “Come back to the office or you’re fired”? Or would that just make people need more “duvet days” and comfort animals? | BAD |
This is no victory day for Vladimir Putin | At the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine , May 9 was seen by many analysts as the likely end of the operation. The assumption was that Moscow’s overwhelming military would soon subjugate its neighbour, forcing a surrender and the removal of the government in Kyiv to be replaced by a pro-Kremlin leadership. This was to be completed by today, when Russia commemorates the victory of Soviet forces over Nazi Germany in 1945. Not only has Vladimir Putin failed to conquer Ukraine but his army has become bogged down in a war of attrition in the east and is losing ground even there. He underestimated the resilience and courage of the Ukrainian people and the unity of the West in the face of aggression, while grossly overestimating the competence of his military. Putin was not alone in this. Nato also thought Ukraine would not last long, yet all these received wisdoms now have to be revised – with considerable geo-political ramifications. So far, despite what by any measure is a disaster for the Kremlin, the regime has managed to convince a credulous population that the “special military operation” has been going to plan and that any setbacks are the result of having to confront the might of Nato, not just Ukraine. But this line is hard to hold as the casualties mount up and Russia counts the cost of destroyed hardware. Soon, the impact of economic sanctions will start to be felt by the Russian people. Many mothers have already had to bury their sons and, as the death toll grows, it becomes harder for Putin to maintain that a military success is taking place in Ukraine. No doubt at today’s Victory Day parade, Russia will deploy large numbers of personnel to march through Red Square, but are they capable of fighting effectively? Western planners fear Putin will formally declare war on Ukraine in order to mobilise reservists to increase the deployment to the Ukrainian war substantially. But in doing so he would be admitting to his people that the stories they have been fed for weeks about a Russian triumph were false. As the atrocities continue – with the deaths of scores of people sheltering in a school the latest – the Kremlin is at a crossroads. It needs to decide whether to cut its losses or to increase both the misery of the Ukrainian people it purports to be defending and the vast cost to Russia. Whatever Putin does, this is not his victory day. | BAD |
One in five people in UK suffer from misophonia, researchers find | If the sound of someone chewing gum or slurping their tea gets on your nerves, you are not alone. Researchers say almost one in five people in the UK has strong negative reactions to such noises. Misophonia is a disorder in which people feel strong emotional responses to certain sounds, feeling angry, distressed or even unable to function in social or work settings as a result. But just how common the condition is has been a matter of debate. Now researchers say they have found 18.4% of the UK population have significant symptoms of misophonia. “This is the very first study where we have a representative sample of the UK population,” said Dr Silia Vitoratou, first author of the study at King’s College London. “Most people with misophonia think they are alone, but they are not. This is something we need to know [about] and make adjustments if we can.” Writing in the journal Plos One , the team report how they gathered responses from 768 people using metrics including the selective sound sensitivity syndrome scale. This included one questionnaire probing the sounds that individuals found triggering, such as chewing or snoring, and another exploring the impact of such sounds – including whether they affected participants’ social life and whether the participant blamed the noise-maker – as well as the type of emotional response participants felt to the sounds and the intensity of their emotions. As a result, each participant was given an overall score. The results reveal more than 80% of participants had no particular feelings towards sounds such as “normal breathing” or “yawning” but this plummeted to less than 25% when it came to sounds including “slurping”, “chewing gum” and “sniffing”. However, Vitoratou noted not all those reporting a response had misophonia. “While there are a lot of sounds that irritate many people, people with misophonia express different emotional responses,” she said, noting this could include anger and distress or panic. To dig deeper the team carried out clinical interviews with 55 of the participants, 26 of whom were self-diagnosed as having misophonia, allowing them to determine a cut-off score for participants strongly affected by triggering sounds. This score was used to glean the proportion of the whole group, and hence the UK population, similarly affected. While it is not yet possible to give a definitive diagnoses of clinical misphonia disorder, the team said 18.4% of participants experienced misophonia to an extent that it was a significant burden on them. Sign up to First Edition Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning after newsletter promotion What is more, the team found no difference by sex. “Before it was thought that maybe it’s more prevalent in females,” said Vitoratou, adding the team was now carrying out further research into misophonia, including whether there were different types. Vitoratou added only 14% of those deemed highly affected by misophonia had heard the term before. “There are lots of people out there experiencing this and they don’t even have a name for it,” she said. “That’s heart-breaking.” | GOOD |
Premier Inn owner surpasses pre-Covid profits as travellers seek deals | The owner of Premier Inn has said profits have surpassed pre-pandemic levels as the UK’s biggest budget hotel chain benefits from a surge in demand from cost-conscious holidaymakers. Whitbread, which runs almost 900 hotels in the UK and Germany as well as restaurant chains including Beefeater, Bar & Block and Brewers Fayre, said it would benefit from the scale of its business as small operators succumb to a combination of labour shortages and cost inflation. The company beat analysts’ expectations, reporting £375m in pretax profits for the year to 3 March, up from £58m in 2022 and 34% more than the year ending February 2020. Investors cheered the results, which were driven by a 544% increase in adjusted annual profits at Premier Inn UK, sending Whitbread’s share price up 5% and making the company the biggest riser in the FTSE 100. “The recovery in market demand in conjunction with a structural decline in the independent sector has provided a helpful backdrop,” said the Whitbread chief executive, Dominic Paul, who took over from Alison Brittain last month . “We believe that operational challenges created by labour shortages and cost inflation may put further pressures on the independent sector, creating structural growth opportunities for Premier Inn across the UK. The budget branded hotel sector has consistently delivered attractive rates of room growth and has also proven its resilience during economic downturns, as guests trade down to lower cost alternatives.” Whitbread, which also announced a £300m share buyback and raised its final dividend, said that demand continues to be strong; UK sales were up 17% year on year in the first seven weeks of the company’s new financial year. Premier Inn UK reported a 50% increase in total revenues to £2.5bn, fuelled by increased occupancy, an expansion of the business and a 54% increase in average revenue for each room, from £38.69 to £59.45 year on year. In January, Whitbread said it intended to raise room prices to help offset cost increases of £60m because of soaring inflation in its last financial year. Total costs rose from £1.24bn to £1.6bn year on year. The company said higher levels of occupancy helped drive a 40% year-on-year increase in food and beverage sales, but spend remains 4% below pre-pandemic levels. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion “Despite an increase in spend per head, customer volumes at our branded restaurants, that are focused at the value-end of the market, remained below pre-pandemic levels,” the company said. “The return to economic normality post pandemic with the removal of travel restrictions and the release of pent-up demand boosted demand for hotel rooms at Whitbread and provided a tailwind to its bottom line,” said Victoria Scholar, the head of investment at Interactive Investor. “The cost of living crisis and the squeeze on household budgets have also driven more customers towards its budget low price point offering.” | GOOD |
Central banks ‘risk losing trust if they cannot tame inflation’ | Central banks risk losing public trust if they fail to bring down high rates of inflation found across the developed world, according to the boss of the body that advises them. Agustín Carstens, the director of the Bank of International Settlements, said central bankers needed to maintain a tough stance against inflation or else risk a new generation of consumers who had never experienced rapidly rising prices losing faith in their independent role. Speaking in Brazil, Carstens also warned that the recent run of bank failures seen in the US and the reckless use of cryptocurrencies could undermine trust in the financial system. In an unusually hard-hitting speech, the BIS boss said he was concerned that governments would undermine political institutions by spending their way to prosperity, saying the likelihood was that an increase in government budgets would be self-defeating and contribute to inflation. “The consequences of the state abusing the privilege of issuing money can be disastrous,” he added. Central banks should continue to fight inflation with high interest rates to maintain trust in their institutions, he said. “The trust gained can be lost if society doubts the central bank’s commitment to the objective of maintaining price stability. This is one of the reasons why the recent rise in inflation in virtually every country is a cause for concern, he added. He said the knock-on effects of a loss of confidence can “result in severe financial instability, with very high costs for society in terms of economic growth, employment, inequality and wealth”. Carstens, a former boss of Mexico’s central bank, did not name individuals or countries but appeared to have a harsh word for any politicians that questioned the independence of their central bank and the primary purpose to keep inflation low and stable. Liz Truss was widely criticised for putting forward proposals when she was prime minister last autumn to curb the independence of the Bank of England . Carstens’ comments are also likely to be seen as a shot across the bows of the UK’s central bank should it consider cutting interest rates before inflation has fallen for a sustained period. The collapse of Silicon Valley bank and the merger of Credit Suisse with UBS after the former found itself in financial trouble must be avoided he said to maintain trust in the financial system, he said. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Though he warned that in many countries 50% of lending was managed by non-banks, including hedge funds and insurance companies, where regulation was weaker than the rules governing the banking system. “The need for greater supervision and regulation of the non-bank sector has become more pressing in the light of recent episodes of instability,” he added. “Instability stems from the sector’s interconnectedness with the traditional banking system and the tendency of different forms of non-bank intermediation to generate opaque and excessive leverage as well as substantial liquidity mismatches. Upsets in this sector can result in systemic financial crises.” | GOOD |
John Sentamu forced to step down from C of E after failing to act on abuse claims | The former archbishop of York has been forced to step down from duties after failing to act on allegations of sexual abuse. John Sentamu last week rejected the findings of a report that found he failed to act on disclosures that a C of E vicar repeatedly raped a teenage boy in the 1980s. He claimed the report’s author, an experienced safeguarding investigator, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the responsibilities of bishops and archbishops. In a statement on Saturday, the Diocese of Newcastle said Sentamu, an honorary assistant bishop, would be required to step down from ministry duties indefinitely. It said: “Following the publication of the independent lessons learnt review into the Church of England’s handling of allegations against the late Rev Trevor Devamanikkam, and the response of those criticised, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, having taken appropriate advice, yesterday required Lord Sentamu, honorary assistant bishop in Newcastle Diocese, to step back from active ministry until both the findings and his response can be explored further. “The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, is fully supportive of this decision. The Diocese of Newcastle remains committed to the highest standards of safeguarding which seeks always to place victims and survivors at the heart of this vital work.” The C of E commissioned the report to examine how it handled allegations by Matthew Ineson that he was repeatedly raped as a teenager in the 1980s by Devamanikkam, who later killed himself. In 2013, Sentamu acknowledged a letter from Ineson which detailed the sexual abuse with the words: “Please be assured of my prayers and best wishes during this testing time.” The C of E is not expected to impose sanctions on any individual as a result of the review’s findings. | GOOD |
Putin doesn’t care that 20,000 of his soldiers are dead, he’ll get more – unless powerful forces in Moscow | IN the struggle for freedom in Ukraine, a crater-strewn quagmire called Highway T0504 is taking on historic significance. It is the last route out of the city of Bakhmut for the country’s troops, whose fierce resistance has taken the lives of an estimated 10,000 Wagner Russian mercenaries in the past six months, according to new US intelligence. Under intense artillery fire, Ukrainian forces make perilous thunder runs up and down this strategic stretch of road from Bakhmut to the safety of nearby Kostyantynivka. It enables them to bring in supplies and take out casualties from a city that both the Russian president, Vladimir Putin , and his bloody private Wagner Group army are determined to claim. These mercenaries have so little regard for their men that they shoot them dead if they dare to turn back when faced with Ukrainian bullets and bombs. Intelligence suggests that 60 to 70 per cent of Wagner’s ground troops will die in every assault — when often the aim is just to dig a trench a bit closer to opposition lines. It is clear why Putin is engaged in such World War Two -style warfare, conducting a siege reminiscent of Stalingrad — although in this case it is the Russians who are the attackers. Putin is in desperate need of victory, however small or tactically insignificant it may be. His once-feared army has attacked Vuhledar and Avdiivka and tried to push west from Kreminna over the winter, but it has failed to make any significant advances. Figures released by the US National Security Council this week suggest that 20,000 Russian personnel have died in the past six months across the front line, with another 80,000 badly injured. With spring already here, only Bakhmut offers the hope of success. The question many observers have been puzzling over is why Ukraine continues to defend a city which, to all intents and purposes, is lost to the enemy. Ukraine’s military never gives out figures for its casualties, but there are suggestions it has been losing between 100 and 200 troops a week in Bakhmut. While that is far fewer than the Russians, those losses are painful. Many think the Ukrainians view the fight for the city as a way to deplete Putin’s forces. But I wonder if they want to deny Russian troops a morale-boosting victory ahead of a spring offensive. I am sure the Ukrainians will launch an assault on the invader’s stretched defences very soon. Last week Nato announced it had delivered 98 per cent of the weaponry it had promised to President Volodymyr Zelensky . Ukraine has been given 230 main battle tanks, which is enough for two armoured brigades if they have the armoured fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and air power to support them. Those two armoured brigades will give them the capacity to punch through a 30-mile front, but the whole line dividing the two sides is about 650 miles long. The Russians have built powerful defences in the south of eastern Ukraine, suggesting they think that is where the attack will come. Many commentators in the West are sceptical that Zelensky’s forces are capable of achieving a decisive victory. But there are no such doubts in this defiant nation. When they talk of victory, it is not just propaganda, they believe they can win. Ukrainian politicians are worried though that the West will cool on support if there is a continued stalemate. They fear that the longer this war drags on, the more likely it is that their allies will push them to the negotiating table. Anyone who thinks that withdrawing military support would end the conflict is gravely mistaken. Without Western aid they would fight a guerilla war which would continue for two generations. There is no hope either that Putin will be deterred by suffering 100,000 casualties in half a year. He can still find more men to send to the front even without another hugely unpopular national mobilisation. The Kremlin has opted for a “crypto mobilisation” where extra forces are mobilised through various means. The Russian authorities are determined to pull in anybody who avoided the draft last time and have made the latest annual 130,000 conscription virtually unavoidable. But morale among troops is poor because Russia doesn’t feed or supply them well. If Ukraine does rout Putin’s forces this year, then powerful forces within Moscow may finally turn on their defeated leader. That sounds optimistic, but it is what the government in Kyiv believes. Don’t rule it out because they have a habit of proving their doubters wrong. That’s why road T0504 could go down as the most famous road in this conflict. Deny Putin a boost today and tomorrow both he and his dispirited forces could collapse | BAD |
Carmelo Anthony’s flawed genius hit different because I saw his faults in myself | I wasn’t prepared for Carmelo Anthony’s retirement announcement . One, because I thought he would, and should, play a few more years. He was still in game shape and could bring a veteran scoring presence to any team in the NBA. The second reason is because I am in the middle of the most consequential separation of my adult life with the woman I still consider my soul mate. As with Anthony, or Melo, as he is known affectionately by his fans, there was no obvious inciting incident. Melo and the game seemed to drift apart and neither could give the other what they wanted. The same can be said for my former partner and me. The video Melo released showcasing his amazing journey from the gang-infested streets of Baltimore, to the mountaintop of Syracuse, to becoming the ninth leading scorer in NBA history broke me. I had yet to cry for the ending of my relationship, but Monday’s news brought my grief to the fore: one of our favorite rituals was watching the NBA and cheering for the Knicks together. She was not a Knicks fan before we met. Our first date was watching the 2016 NBA finals at Hooters. Watching her cheer for LeBron James and the underdog Cleveland Cavaliers in the glow of a 100 televisions over a pitcher of Miller Lite was the moment I fell in love with her. When we spoke for the first time on Monday morning, it was to discuss where I would be moving. I asked her if she would help me find an apartment, as she was so much better than me at finding a deal. As the tears welled in my eyes, I apologized and told her that I was trying to be strong but that my favorite player was retiring, pushing me past my breaking point. The first year we dated, Melo was still on the team, surrounded by players far inferior to him and under the misguided “leadership” of Phil Jackson, who disgraced Melo at every turn. Knowing how much both of them meant to me, she gifted me a loving and empathetic “I’m sorry.” My partner was there when Melo was traded from the Knicks to Oklahoma City. We watched his abrupt exit from OKC after just a season, then again, a failed fit in Houston. We cheered together for his resurgence in Portland. And then hoped he would finally win it all with his buddy LeBron in Los Angeles. There’s no hidden irony in Melo’s career ending the same day as our relationship. Like Melo, it had been fading for some time. The acknowledgment that neither Melo nor I would experience the intimacy of winning was an unspoken understanding. That Melo never won it all in the NBA was one of the reasons I defended him with such vigor. I have always loved an underdog story, and Melo’s was one of the best. I kept a signed copy of his book, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, by my bedside. For those who have escaped poverty and are learning how to be, it was my Bible. Melo’s mistakes, chasing the bag, and “love him or hate him” persona resonated with me, perhaps too deeply. Knicks fans have a mantra, “Once a Knick, always a Knick.” With Melo, it was more than that. He was the one player I would always go to war for. I saw so many of my failures in him. He was a player who never won it all and will be remembered in equal measure for his failings. In that, too, I relate. I might not have married the girl of my dreams, but I take solace in knowing I’m not the only one who has fallen short of their goals. Melo entered the NBA at the height of the one-man isolation circus. His off-the-dribble skill set fit perfectly in a league with Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson, Vince Carter, and Kobe Bryant. But as the league evolved and superteams were formed in Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles, Melo chose the road alone, choosing the bag over free agency and teaming up with his 2003 draft class buddies, James and Dwyane Wade, in Miami. As the league continued to change, it left Melo behind. No longer were teams looking for the next great gunner, but instead, those who could plug and play within a team identity. No longer could you be the first option as a scorer. You had to play defense and make your teammates better. Those were two skills Melo never prioritized. His game had been enough. And why not? He had experienced winning the NCAA championship as a freshman at Syracuse while making the playoffs all eight seasons with the Denver Nuggets , who drafted him third overall. Like Melo, I, too, suffered from main-character syndrome. Growing up without any control over your circumstances, unable to escape trauma, poverty and environmental violence, can breed that kind of egocentric mindset. As an adult, I willed my existence to serve my needs, giving me the power I never had as a child. It caused me to be selfish and bend the world around me to my needs. This type of thinking can whisk everyone around you into a chaotic frenzy. For Melo, it created four teammates standing idly by while he unleashed one of the greatest bags of offensive tricks ever seen. For me, it created two different relationships, one for each of our point-of-views. Ultimately, we went from a team to separate people, and nobody won. But Melo’s seemingly unbreakable charm, the almost angelic naivety that his way would always win, was my favorite attribute of his. It’s the one trait I made for myself. It could be called arrogance or gall. It could create heroes or brutes. These binary perceptions embody the two drastically different responses to Melo’s legacy, as they reflect the differing points of view when a relationship dissolves. As a Knicks fan who started watching in 2002, I have only known pain. So for me, Melo arrived in New York as an epiphany. An All-Star 10 times, seven of his selections, including the NBA’s scoring title in 2013, were in a Knicks jersey from 2011 through 2017, the prime of his career. As a Knick, Melo provided my only glimpse of success in two decades: he averaged 24.7 points, seven rebounds, and 2.3 assists while making the All-Star team every season. Only eight other players have walked onto an NBA floor and scored more points than Melo. Only eight. This, as well as his three Olympic gold medals with Team USA, are just two of the reasons he was voted on the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team by his peers. Another reason is he never ran from the smoke. He took on every challenge by himself, for better or worse. Melo will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer when his time comes. But that won’t make up for how current coaches and executives have chosen to keep him out of the league. No one has stuck up for him, allowing him to go all season without a call, forcing him into a retirement outside of his own terms. There was no farewell tour or magic moment at the Garden. There was just a letter to those he loved that he was done. Melo was always the same, on and off the court. He never ran from the media, carrying a team, questions about his intentions, or difficult matchups. And like most of our lives, it didn’t turn out how he wanted. When I watched Melo on the court, I watched more than a player, but a fully realized person, flaws and all. Melo isn’t my favorite player just because of how good he was. He is my favorite player because he is the most relatable. | GOOD |
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