World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk

---

• Ronan Farrow: young blue eyes
• Kwame Kwei-Armah: 'I found myself constantly moaning in London'
• Farmageddon by Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott – review
• Pru Goward seeks extension of NSW public housing income management policy
• Thailand: hundreds of polling stations closed, but voting begins peacefully
• I'm lost between fact and fiction | Carole Cadwalladr
• Will the Israeli peace process talks prove to be a turning point or a crisis? | Peter Beaumont
• Penny Wong: SA premier 'strong leader' for outmanoevring ALP powerbroker
• Chris Christie hits back over allegations he knew about bridge lane closures
• Sea Shepherd accuses Japanese whalers of 'aggressive', 'ruthless' confrontation
• Indonesian volcano eruption claims lives after villagers allowed to return
• Human Rights Commission titles may be lost in upgrade of president's powers
• Looking recap: episode 3 – British people are awful
• Last-minute rush by Australians to attend 2015 Gallipoli dawn service
• Penny Wong: PM's attack on ABC based on its criticism of his government
• Liberal MP says government 'cruel' to refuse SPC Ardmona support
• Adelaide fringe stands by 'blasphemous' show Come Heckle Christ
• Popular support for a republic flags to a 20-year low, new poll shows
• Shia fighter beheaded by Syrian rebels, amateur video shows
• Actor Maximilian Schell dies aged 83
• Dylan Farrow details allegations of child sex abuse against Woody Allen
• Miniature dogs take the lead as UK splashes out on its pets
• Flooding: five lessons we have learned
• The Exorcist makes its scary radio debut
• Being a Man festival explores what it means to be male

Ronan Farrow: young blue eyes Posted: 02 Feb 2014 01:01 AM PST Activist, lawyer and now TV news host, Ronan Farrow is a force to be reckoned with. But what really caught people's attention was his quip following his mother Mia Farrow's revelation that his father might not be Woody Allen but Frank Sinatra. Jesse Lichtenstein meets him in New York Ronan Farrow had a cold. "Probably from a source," he joked. It wasn't clear who gave it to him — the big pop star in LA or the Minnesotans fighting against terrorist recruitment in their community. Farrow had been out of town reporting pieces on both, and his voice was almost shot. It was a Monday in December, and as part of the preparations to host his own daily news show on American cable channel MSNBC in January, Farrow was scheduled to do a quick "hit" on one of the network's daytime shows: a few obligatory minutes riffing on young people's attitudes towards President Obama's healthcare plan, a few more on income inequalities. He had a conference call, then make-up, then he would be on camera, then he was leaving directly for eight days of reporting in Kenya. On set in Studio 3A you could barely hear his voice across the room, but the microphones picked it up, and on camera he was scratchy but cogent. Solutions for income inequality "are incredibly difficult to stomach," he said. It means "increasing the minimum wage, which in turn may mean more expensive goods for Americans; it means reducing executive compensation". Each time the show cut away, he soothed his throat with tea. Last summer, when he got the call from MSNBC, Farrow was living in a charmingly musty room at Magdalen College, Oxford. He had left a job at the State Department for a Rhodes Scholarship, studying politics and international relations. Farrow assumed MSNBC wanted him to make appearances as a talking head on their shows. He had written articles decrying what he saw as the American government's obsession with secrecy and the partisan tenor of the Congressional hearings on Benghazi, and had been invited to talk about them on television. But Phil Griffin, the president of the network, had other ideas. He'd seen clips of Farrow giving interviews and speeches and was impressed. "I started following him on Twitter," he told me recently, "and loved the way he talked about things." When Farrow was in New York, the two sat down for a chat. "Within 20 minutes I wanted to hire him," Griffin says. "He's got it." Farrow, 26, is in many ways an obvious choice to step in front of a camera. The only biological child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, he has his mother's looks and an impressive lineage. His grandmother starred as Jane across from Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan; his grandfather was a director and an Oscar-winning screenwriter. John Lennon wrote "Dear Prudence" about his aunt. But celebrity is something he has assiduously avoided for much of his life. His trajectory has been unfailingly, precociously serious: college at 11; Yale Law School at 18; liaison to NGOs for American diplomat Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and more recently special adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton. His public persona is friendly but guarded; he prefers not to address rumours about whom he's dating. So working as a TV personality seems a strange choice; it's likely to foreground all the things he has been so keen to leave in the background – his looks, his family, his private life. "Not everything that's said is going to be kind," he says, "but over time, with the kind of show that we want to build and the emphasis on telling real stories, I think people will hate or love me based on the issues, not based on who I am." That doesn't mean the show won't be named after him. MSNBC has yet to give it a title, but on Twitter, the leading candidates are Times New Ronan, Ronan the Barbarian and The Ronan Empire. "I don't know about the last one," Farrow says. In a darkened editing room, Farrow, in well-worn shoes and jeans, sat one leg crossed over the other, a pen and notebook in hand. Together with Brian Drew, an editor, and Anthony Terrell, a producer, he watched a red-scarfed version of himself on four monitors. On screen, Farrow strolled through the Little Mogadishu neighbourhood of Minneapolis with a man whose nephew was recruited by the Somali-based terrorist organisation Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaida-affiliated group responsible for the Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi in September. (The nephew was later killed in Somalia.) "I liked the nexus of international and domestic stuff," Farrow said, turning to Drew and Terrell. "It's important to us going into this show that it's not NGO-TV, it's not just the foreign stuff that was my bread and butter before." Izzy Povich, MSNBC's vice president of talent and development, ducked into the room. "I got some really emotional interview testimony," Farrow told her. "We've got a lot of guerrilla stuff – from this last story and LA, too. We've got hand-held stuff that I did." The editor ran through "walk-and-talk" footage and shots of women on the street in traditional Somali garb. Then the monitors showed a former member of an FBI anti-terrorism task force. "Do they have an aspiration to conduct violent terrorist attacks against innocents in the United States?" he asked. "I think their rhetoric tells us: absolutely." "Boom," Terrell said. "I wanted to have a sort of gritty reporting style to it," Farrow said, "so we've got a lot of Handycam stuff." Griffin has said that he hopes the show will feel rough and spontaneous, not polished and packaged. On screen we caught glimpses of a second cameraman in the frame, of the lights that illuminated a sit-down interview. "We like showing the set-up as much as possible, giving it in the raw," Farrow said. When I first met Farrow two years ago in Amman, Jordan, he was in full diplomat mode. He was then serving under Clinton, leading a new office of Global Youth Initiatives. He had recently returned from meeting young people in Nepal and would soon be off to Latvia – but the Middle East and North Africa had a special urgency. It was roughly a year after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and, over the course of nine days, Farrow visited Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Tunisia and Algeria. I tagged along for several legs. Farrow spent much of his time in meetings with young entrepreneurs, university students and youth-oriented civic groups. In Algeria he convoked a "youth council" — one of about 70 now affiliated with US embassies around the world – made up of young Algerian leaders invited to advise the US ambassador. "It's a change of culture," Farrow said at the time, "the idea of really treating young people as serious diplomatic partners." Throughout our travels in the Middle East, Farrow remained rigorously, even wearyingly, on message. He insisted that his appointment was simply a kind of "meta-narrative" for the State Department's engagement with the young people he was meeting. There was no need to focus on his precocity, his parents – or the gossip. For a brief time in the early 1990s, Farrow's family was the most famous, or infamous, in America. Its dissolution – the bitter separation and allegations, the affair between his father, Woody Allen, and his adopted sister, Soon-Yi (Previn) – seemed ripped from the pages of Sophocles. Twenty years later, nearly every mention of him makes allusion to the scandal. Whenever anyone asks Farrow about his family, he braces himself for what he thinks is coming next. But in the Middle East, most of the teens and 20-somethings he encountered had never heard of Hannah and Her Sisters or Husbands and Wives. So when a young girl in Madaba, Jordan, asked him about his family, instead of bristling, he softened. "I grew up in a family that had young people adopted from all over the world," Farrow said. Another girl asked what his siblings did. "I have a brother who's a schoolteacher, a sister who's a graphic artist, a brother who is a lawyer," Farrow said. "I have a brother who's a carpenter." "Is it quite a large number?" someone asked. "I was one of 14," Farrow said Forty sets of eyes widened. More than a few gasps. All smiles. "I grew up in a family where you could never be the centre of attention," Farrow told me, one evening in Algiers. It was the end of the trip, and we were walking across a vast plaza beside the towering monument to the martyrs of the revolution. "I was pretty insulated from the entire Hollywood thing," he said of his childhood in a sprawling Connecticut farmhouse. "We were every minority in the town." For volume and variety, it's hard to match the Farrow household – it was a United Nations General Assembly in the dining room, but the outside world was sometimes less welcoming. Farrow remembers that his "black siblings got the N-word thrown at them all the time". His sister, Quincy, would invite the offenders home, Farrow said, and tell them: "This is where we're going to be friends. This is what it is to be friends of different colours." "She was a little peacemaker," he says. "My brother Isaiah took it much more to heart." Many of Farrow's adopted siblings arrived from harrowing situations in Vietnam, in Calcutta and even in the USA, and many had serious health challenges. One brother was severely malnourished and suffering from polio, a disease Farrow's mother also battled against as a child. He was abandoned outside an orphanage in Calcutta after being chained to a post and fed scraps for years. Depending on which side of his body you scanned, Ronan recalls, his brother appeared to be either eight or 12. The family decided to split the difference and make him 10, the same age as Farrow at the time. Farrow entered college a year later – "I was a huge nerd, and I didn't want to be bored" – but there was never any pressure on him to stand out. "My mom always supported me," he says, "but she definitely played the role of, like: 'Why? Why? Just stay in grade school! Be normal. Have a normal life.' " Normal is relative. By the time he was 10, Farrow had travelled with his mother to South Africa, where he had private conversations with Nelson Mandela about the power of non-violent protest. Between college and enrolling in law school, he served as a Unicef spokesman for youth, making multiple trips to conflict zones in Africa. On a trip to a refugee camp in the Sudan, he met a young rebel his own age, a refugee from Darfur whose family had been slaughtered. It's an archetypal story, one that Farrow has told so many times that the memory of it and its assigned meaning seem inseparable. A boy, named Yahia, holds his gun to the sky and shouts: "This is how I can have my voice heard. How can you judge me for that?" From his trips to Sudan and research on Chinese investments there, Farrow wrote an opinion piece with his mother in the Wall Street Journal that called the 2008 Beijing Games the "genocide Olympics". After Unicef, Farrow led a research project for the federal Centres for Disease Control on post-traumatic stress disorder in the Kibera slum of Nairobi following the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008. He returned frequently to Africa as special assistant to the chief counsel on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. While in Sudan, Farrow contracted a bone infection that went untreated for too long. Through multiple operations, he found himself in and out of wheelchairs and for years required crutches and braces. "It sort of gave my character some wrinkles and complexities," he said, "maybe neuroses, too, but it made me have a fundamental sense of empathy when I go into situations where people are struggling with much worse problems." It was an autumn day on the Upper East Side, and Ronan Farrow didn't yet have a cold, but he was working on it. He arrived for lunch completely soaked, having been caught in a downpour without an umbrella. We ordered our meals, talked books, movies, music (in Washington, he would occasionally busk on the sidewalk to try out the songs he has been recording for an album). At one point he pulled off a striking Katharine Hepburn impersonation. The conversation turned to his book, which he had just sold to Penguin. It explores the notion, shared with Holbrooke, his mentor, that America's habit of funding and arming "bad guys around the world" has had a powerfully negative effect on a new generation of leaders. "It's the US creating Al-Shabaab, and the mall shooting in Kenya happening over and over," he said, then added, apologetically, "I sold it in as unwonky a way as I could." Just after news of his book deal broke, on the very day that Farrow and MSNBC were set to announce their new TV show, a bit of gossip appeared. In an article in Vanity Fair, his mother let slip, somewhat coyly, that Farrow's father might not be Woody Allen, but Frank Sinatra, her first husband. (As she told Vanity Fair: "We never really split up.") "There was a very serious conversation at MSNBC about, 'Oh, crap, is this going distract from the story?'" Farrow said. "Spoiler: Yes!" He made a pitch-perfect quip on Twitter – "Listen, we're all possibly Frank Sinatra's son" – and waited a few weeks for chatter of his parentage to run its course on the internet. "Look, I get it, it's hilarious, it's wild," he said at lunch. "There are salacious aspects of the story I'm able to sit back and appreciate with everybody else. And then it's: 'OK, how do we move to the substance and redirect this conversation so we're actually talking about stuff that's useful?'" Of course, no publicity is truly bad for a TV host trying to break into the ratings. Farrow knows curiosity about who he is can draw people to the issues he cares about. "In any way that I'm a source of interest or something that's relatable, that's a cool thing," he said. But he would still like to get out of the way as quickly as possible. "When we do a story," he said, "I want to make sure you walk away with the freshman-college knowledge, the cocktail-party take on it, something that when you go to recount it to your friends, you know the basics and also you know what the future is, and, if you happen to care about the issue, what you can do with that." His models are a mix of old-school and new, a marriage of Bill Moyers and Twitter. Griffin, the president of MSNBC, told me that it was Farrow's presence on Twitter that he wanted him to emulate. "I look at his tweets and I say: 'The way you write those little 140 characters, they're great. That sensibility has got to be in everything you do.'" He was probably not thinking of the tweet that Ronan wrote the day after Thanksgiving: "The only thing better than Black Friday with your sister is Friday with your black sister." Some of his 150,000 followers must have wondered what this blond white guy was thinking. This drier side of his humour might fare poorly under daily media scrutiny; or it might be what attracts an audience. Farrow said he felt liberated by no longer being a government spokesman: "I can say whatever I want. I will be nothing but unfiltered with my audience." While unfiltered Farrow has so far played it safe – tweeting jokes such as "Breaking: Iran to stop enriching uranium as soon as we stop enriching Kardashians" – an eye for absurdity may help leaven the measured, on-the-ground accounts from Kenya. "There's an element of gallows humour to any accurate surveying of the state of affairs in this country and around the world," he said. "I think capturing that is an honest representation of the news. "The thing I'm cautious about," he added, as lunch wound down, "is talking about myself. That's a trap people fall into… I'm happy to throw down a few drinks and talk about this stuff, but the greatest security is being in a space where you're actually talking about issues you care about, not about yourself. Then you can just let totally loose." Mia Farrow Woody Allen Television Frank Sinatra theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Kwame Kwei-Armah: 'I found myself constantly moaning in London' Posted: 02 Feb 2014 12:01 AM PST When actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah left the UK to become artistic director of Baltimore's Center Stage theatre in 2011 he jumped headfirst into America's racial politics… Kwame Kwei-Armah enjoys many things about living in Baltimore, but one of the things he enjoys most is the look on people's faces when he opens his mouth. Kwei-Armah, who was brought up in Southall in London, loves to talk and he has a rich and exact British accent. His voice confuses people here. "You know Americans like to think of their society as classless, but I think class is just as strong here as in Britain," he says, "and sometimes it is conflated more easily with race. A very interesting thing happens to me here in that respect. Just occasionally one gets a sense that a certain kind of white American feels slightly inferior to an RP British accent, but feels slightly superior to the African American. So when I speak they don't know what the fuck to think. They stare at my mouth for a long time. It's funny but almost every black British actor that comes here you hear them speaking just a touch more correctly than they do at home. Not consciously at all. But it becomes a little statement: just know I am slightly different…" Kwei-Armah, the multi-talented playwright and actor and critic and political activist, came to Baltimore having been invited to become artistic director of the state theatre here, Center Stage, the kind of offer he never received in Britain. We are talking in his office at that theatre, an impressive cultural hub in the heart of Baltimore's midtown just a few blocks from some of the wilder streets familiar to fans of The Wire. He has been here for three years, and in that time he has observed that open-mouthed curiosity about black Brits become something of a phenomenon. Idris Elba had started it, with his scene-stealing portrayal of Stringer Bell, the aspirational drug dealer in The Wire, but lately, with Elba's uncanny portrayal of Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, and Steve McQueen's Oscar-tipped 12 Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, the influx is headline news. "It has got to the point," Kwei-Armah suggests, "where the African American has started to become a little defensive in terms of the black Brit. I'm not sure that until recently they really knew we existed. People here discovered quite late on in The Wire's success that Idris was British. It shocked people, his accent was so good, he was such a superstar. And then they realised there were others: David Oyelowo [star of Jack Reacher and Lincoln and The Butler] coming through and Chiwi [Ejiofor]. It was like they were being invaded." Kwei-Armah is often canvassed for his opinion on this phenomenon. He has had university cultural studies professors in here asking, "What is it about you guys, do you think you are a cut above or something?" He's heard American black actors and directors imply that the reason Brits are getting jobs is that they are "black other" and not as threatening as African Americans might be to those making decisions (they are also, pertinently, often not bound by quite the same labour laws). Before starting any new rehearsal these days he has become accustomed to cracking a joke: "Listen, don't believe what you've heard: I'm not here to take your jobs and your women." A keen student of racial comedies of manners, Kwei-Armah is amused by the fact that "all the stereotypes that used to attach to the Jewish community here, of culture and education and learning, have suddenly been attached to black Brits. We are given extra respect. It's hilarious really: we still cannot get through glass ceilings to save our lives back at home. But here we are natural Oscar contenders. You feel it when you walk down the street or into a room and start to speak. You have a currency." The newfound cultural status is something of an unexpected bonus of the move across the Atlantic that in Kwei-Armah's case was born out of a mixture of frustration and curiosity. He is perhaps most widely known in Britain for his portrayal of paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC's Casualty, but his most significant work was the groundbreaking series of plays he wrote for Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, in particular the "triptych" beginning with Elmina's Kitchen in 2003 which memorably and uniquely explored three strata of second-generation black immigrant experience: the violent streets of the first play, the political working class of the second, Fix Up, based in a black history bookshop, and the intellectual middle class of the third, Statement of Regret, set in a Blairite thinktank. Despite the critical success of this work, Olivier and Bafta nominations and the rest, Kwei-Armah felt he had come to something of a dead end in London. He had directed Elmina's Kitchen in Baltimore in 2005, returned a few times since, and when, aged 43, he was offered this job, he didn't hesitate. "To be honest," he says, "I had got to the point in London when I started to feel a little frustrated. I know moaning is part of our national character, but I hate it. And I found myself moaning a lot about theatre. Why did they decide to put that on? How come he got to direct that? And why is it that they only want plays about black people who are part of the underclass or involved in street crime? Is it because those are the only types of plays about minorities that ageing white middle-aged reviewers feel they can understand? I just found myself moaning and moaning and moaning…" He was, too, afraid with an incoming Conservative government, and a recession, that some of the progress that had been made in terms of diversity in the arts and in society would be rolled back. "I really didn't want to be arguing again why Harriet Tubman should be on the school history curriculum or whatever. I thought we had won those arguments already. I couldn't face it again." For all his relative success in Britain, Kwei-Armah felt that what he calls a cultural "gatekeeper" role, in charge of a major programme and theatre, would be hard to come by at home. So he made the move. Only a couple of months after he arrived the riots broke out back in London. "I would cry reading the news, literally," he says. "Reading about Britain's youth ripping itself apart. It was reported here extensively, and it was the conversation of every dinner party I went to for about four months. People were profoundly shocked. My eldest three kids [from his first marriage; he has another son of eight, with his second wife] are at school and college back in London. They went to different places, Wood Green, Hackney, and showed me what happened every day on Skype. I desperately wanted to be back there like those people with the brooms trying to help clear up. I felt like a traitor, not being there while the country was imploding, if that makes any sense." He had addressed many of the issues – of disaffection and disempowerment – that led to those riots in his plays, and had a strong sense that the small black middle class of which he had become a part had not fought hard enough for the younger generation. "I was really pained because I felt we had let them down." Kwei-Armah has lately been involved with a Bafta initiative to try to involve more young black talent in the most important cultural institutions in Britain. He recently flew home to be part of a round-table group organised by Ed Vaizey MP asking questions of how the kind of individuals being recognised in America could have a similar impact at home. Again he has had the sense of only tiny increments of progress and the same kinds of conversations about structural discrimination and lack of access that he was having 20 years ago. "It would be churlish of me to say I was not able to have a career in the UK," he says. "I was able to jump from theatre to TV to documentary. Lots of things that when I was growing up no 'person of colour' would be able to do. The Britain I was born into was pretty cold and it became a whole lot warmer for people like me. But all the same, apart from David Oyelowo, who was the only black male actor I knew who had a comfortable living from a television career, nearly everyone else has left, presumably because they felt they could not survive economically or flourish artistically in Britain. I'd say that brain drain is a fundamental indictment of our country. The structural inequality remains, even though personally I was treated well…" Does he think that the likely Oscar success of Steve McQueen, for example, might be a turning point in that under-representation? "It might. I mean Luther is an example of that. But then Idris had been a star a long time out here before he was able to star in that at home. Now Steve McQueen is doing a major series at the BBC I think. But will an Oscar make a fundamental difference to how we treat our minority artists in Britain? History has taught me, probably not. "One interesting thing is what happened to the few of us who broke through or received some recognition in my generation. Chris Ofili now lives in Trinidad. Zadie Smith is in Italy and America. I am here. And so on and on. Nearly everyone you can think of moved away. Of course the same thing happens with white artists but, I would argue, not to the same extent. It is possible to get to a certain point, but beyond that it is maybe not so easy." Kwei-Armah imagines he will be back some day – he was linked recently as an outside contender to be successor to his mentor Nick Hytner at the National – but for the time being he sees greater opportunities for growth in the States. He is relishing the role of artistic director, even if opening 10 shows a year and answering to everyone from the board to the audience to the production crew to the mayor of Baltimore is a new experience. He sleeps less than he used to, not least because it is down to him to front a $30m fundraising campaign to remodel the theatre, which he shows me round with proprietorial pride, as well as a community outreach programme and an initiative to create links with similar institutions in other cities – Rio, Reykjavik, Belfast and elsewhere. He is fascinated by Baltimore. He didn't watch The Wire until he came here and after immersing himself in it stopped his habit of walking everywhere, but only for three days or so, until the more violent effects wore off. The city still has a lot of challenges – 17 murders in the first 17 days of the year when I visited – but he has started to get the measure of it, even if three years on he is still coming to terms with the demands of pleasing the theatregoer of Maryland. "The difference between a London audience and a Baltimore audience is a very large one," he says. "But as someone told me when I arrived. Always remember you know nothing, but bet on yourself." Kwei-Armah, not a man to shy away from a challenge, backed himself most riskily, when last year he plunged head first into America's racial politics. When he arrived at Center Stage, Bruce Norris's play Clybourne Park was on everyone's lips. It had won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for drama, and the Tony and Olivier awards for best new play in America and Britain respectively. Written in response to Lorraine Hansbury's 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun, it looked at issues of gentrification and the failures of black and white integration in a Chicago neighbourhood over a span of 50 years. The first thing the outgoing artistic director in Baltimore said to Kwei-Armah when he arrived was: "One tip: do Clybourne Park." Subscribers to the theatre were writing in demanding it. But there was a problem. Having seen the play during its run at the Royal Court in London, Kwei-Armah was thinking: "Shit. Part of the reason I became an artistic director was never to have to put on plays like Clybourne Park." His reasons were simple: he believed the play reinforced racist stereotypes. As he says now, "I felt that the message of the play – not necessarily the thing Bruce Norris intended – was that white flight from a neighbourhood equalled black blight. That whites build and blacks destroy. There was a line in there that attacked black intelligence directly. I saw it at the Royal Court and I felt insulted by it. Enraged. And what was worse was that in all the reviews I read of the play – written almost exclusively by middle-class white men – not one of them even hinted that they had seen that message in the play. It was a huge critical success. And so here I was in my first week and there is this clamour to perform it, and the argument that there were similar issues of gentrification just up the road in Baltimore…" Kwei-Armah thought hard about what to do and his solution was to write his own play in response to Norris's drama to be performed alongside Clybourne Park and the original Raisin in the Sun. He had asked some leading African-American playwrights, who shared his view, to write the play, but they all said he should do it. And so he wrote Beneatha's Place, which told Norris's 50-year history from a very different perspective. "I was petrified," Kwei-Armah says. "And to compound it I did a stupid thing: I described Clybourne in the way that I just did to a journalist who had been part of the committee that awarded Bruce the Pulitzer. He wrote a headline in the Washington Post that read: 'A new sheriff is in town' with the implication that I wanted to tell America what to think about race. I thought fuck me, now I've set myself up for it." In the event the season enjoyed great critical success and opened a national debate on the issues raised in the plays. "In the end," Kwei-Armah says, "whatever flak I got I knew in my heart that I was doing the play for an honest reason. I mean, Clybourne opened with a white person saying, 'If you let them in, the neighbourhood will be destroyed'. And then it opens in the second act, 50 years later with the neighbourhood having been destroyed. And then a white couple are coming in to make it better again, to gentrify it. That angered my soul. I sound ridiculously self-righteous saying that, but that is what I felt. I call it my first American play, I had to write in the vernacular. I had to use Bruce's footprint, same number of actors, same format in that it was set in a house. But it served us tremendously well, and made Baltimore excited about the work, because it opened this big national conversation on an issue that is rarely addressed directly." Does he think such debates, about underlying racist assumptions, are easier to have in the US than in Britain? "Not always," he says. "Condoleezza Rice suggests race is one of America's birth defects. You just have to scratch the surface and it's always there. The reality is that America is a very tribal place. In cities, in my experience, the black community lives here, the Chinese community lives here, the Wasp community lives here, the Italian community lives here, the Hispanic community lives here. They work together much more cohesively perhaps than in Britain, but when the whistle blows at the end of the day everyone goes back to their own community. They learn about the other communities by watching TV. American civic and institutional integration is way ahead of ours. Mayors, senators, judges, police chiefs, the president, are all from a variety of backgrounds. But I'd say the social integration is closer to where Britain was in the 1970s. The social integration of major British cities among races is far higher. The debates that we had about diversity and equality 15 or 20 years ago are only just being had over here." Partly because of his status as an outsider, Kwei-Armah is beginning to relish his role as a stirrer of such conversations. As well as running his theatre, and playing a role on various boards and funding committees across the country, and directing eight shows in the last year, he is deep into a couple of screenplays – one about "the first African-American spy who J Edgar Hoover had infiltrate Marcus Garvey's organisation in Jamaica" and the other "an animated movie about the great Windrush migration" as well as a just-completed first draft of a play exploring the politics of the industrial food complex in America. When people tell him he is doing a lot, he says, he always thinks of his mother, who passed away in 2005. "She literally worked 24 hours a day on a Friday and 24 hours a day on a Sunday, as a nurse [at Hillingdon hospital] and then as a nanny and a hairdresser so she could earn enough extra to send us kids to fee-paying schools. That was her way of doing it. She was determined to improve things for us, while my father worked at the Quaker Oats factory to keep a roof over our heads. If I am ever tempted to moan about working too hard, I try to remember her example." In his mother's eyes, Kwei-Armah, who changed his name from Ian Roberts aged 19, having researched something of the family's likely slave history, would have been a lawyer. He recalls the first time she told him of that ambition. "My younger brother was in our house once in Southall, aged 12 or 13, and the police kicked down our front door and my brother flew back about 10 feet, his mouth was all cut. The police ran upstairs to my father's room – he had never been in trouble with the law in his life – and they broke open his wardrobe, scattered everything. That kind of raid happened maybe eight times in my growing up. There were never any charges, my father didn't even smoke weed, we had church on Sundays. But it was always: your cousin or whoever was arrested for so and so and we are looking at all the houses. But after this one time, when my brother got cut my mother sat me down and said: 'I need you to be a lawyer.' She felt we needed a foot in the establishment. That is why she worked 24 hours to put us through private school as kids." Unfortunately, though, Kwei-Armah wanted to be an R&B singer, an ambition he pursued until he was 26 and started to write in earnest. It wasn't until his mother saw his plays, he says, "and saw that I was advocating on behalf of black British people in perhaps a different way, that she was: OK, I get it." You imagine she would have been proud of his current direction, and wondering when he might get back home. He has no real answer to the latter question, beyond the fact that for all its frustrations, he misses Britain, though not the sense of deja vu. "In truth, my kids are there and the messages that I get back are relatively despairing in terms of prospects for young people. And when I read about politics it's this same old Tory overemphasis on benefits and immigration again. Listening to things like the Mark Duggan inquiry sounded at this distance very much like the language you used to hear about such things in the 1980s." He has noticed a change though, which he welcomes. He gets to read a lot of new plays from young playwrights starting out in their 20s. "The great thing about the writing is that these kids are enjoying being political again. Five years ago, here or in Britain, you did not hear that. Back then young people just seemed to enjoy being apolitical and making money. That's gone. I think they are about to surprise us." Kwame Kwei-Armah Race issues Theatre US politics National Theatre Tim Adams theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Farmageddon by Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott – review Posted: 02 Feb 2014 12:00 AM PST This survey of the effects of the intensification of agriculture around the world is at once committed, balanced and appalling Many of us feel uneasy about the intensification of agriculture, or as we may more pejoratively term it "factory farming". But when articulating this unease it's alarmingly easy to descend into an Alan Partridge-style rant on farming and farmers, ie "You make pigs smoke. You feed beefburgers to swans. You have big sheds but nobody's allowed in…" We need some real information. Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat is a classic polemic that provides all the ammunition you'll ever need. It comes as no surprise that this book, co-authored by Philip Lymbery, is against industrialised agriculture. Lymbery is head of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), the UK organisation dedicated to the welfare of farm animals (as opposed to pets and wild animals). CIWF was founded by Peter and Anna Roberts in 1967. Dairy farmers, the Robertses were moved to act after they discovered an early US import – broiler farming – and became convinced that postwar agriculture was moving in the wrong direction. Quite what they'd make of today's situation – around 70bn farm animals are produced worldwide every year, two-thirds now factory farmed – doesn't bear thinking about. So, CIWF is institutionally against mega-dairies and their hulking cousins that wear the same prefix, ie mega-piggeries, where more animals are placed on smaller pieces of ground, often restricting or removing access to pasture land for example. The thesis examined in Farmageddon is that not only do these systems negatively effect the welfare of farmed animals, but that industrial agriculture affects our health, our countryside and many of the world's poorest people. Nor does Lymbery make much attempt to hide his activist background. Many of the book's anecdotes (used evidentially) are from bust-ups at various conferences with vets, farmers or policy makers. Indeed Lymbery's own deep-held beliefs provide the heart of this book.There's a moving scene where he reports a welfare victory – when caged eggs are at the first stage of being outlawed – to Peter Roberts, his mentor, at this point on his death bed. He also pays homage to Rachel Carson, the great eco-warrior and author of Silent Spring (1962) – as all ecological books must – by visiting her US home; the environment is cast throughout as one of the most significant victims of the intensification of agriculture. But don't worry: Lymbery hasn't been allowed to have it all his way. He chose to co-write Farmageddon with Isabel Oakeshott, the outgoing political editor of the Sunday Times unwittingly made famous by her involvement in the Vicky Pryce affair. Although her voice is never heard in the book, her fingerprints are all over the text, and she robustly challenges Lymbery's (and other ethical campaigners') assumptions and prejudices and whips them into shape. The book is the stronger for this. The overriding effect is the wholesale destruction of the myths that are used to sell intensive agriculture to populations around the world. These range from the idea that intensification of agriculture is a brilliant space-saving idea (not when you factor in cropland expansion fuelled by industrial production of animal feed crops and all those ghost acres) to the notion that intensification provides us all with cheap food – the authors allege that it actually pushes the real price of food upwards. The pair cover a lot of geographical ground – necessarily, given that our food chain is intensely globalised and at such scale, "the 21st-century equivalent of the scramble for Africa in Queen Victoria's reign". They are in Peru to look at anchovy production, the volume of which makes your head spin; in America to look at feedlots practically visible from space; and in China to investigate the Sino-British porcine relationship. Here, things take on an absurdist tone: the British pig industry has production down to a fine art with the average UK-bred sow producing 22 piglets a year, compared with a weedy 14 piglets in China. Cue planeloads of (live) British pigs en route to Beijing for examination. And people say we're not world leaders any more. Naturally, some of the links in the food chain are as chewy as a cow masticating cud. There is a lot of information, and some quite technical language – "blanket" dry cow therapy, anybody? But to get a handle on the details of intensification and really challenge complacency, the reader has to become an expert. In fact Farmageddon also lays out enough evidence to challenge complicity. For example, are the UK's farm vets increasingly propping up industrialised farming at the cost of animal welfare? Actually, there is some evidence globally (not explored in the book) that intensification has peaked, partly because it's no longer delivering the high yields initially promised and because techniques such as the blanket prescription of antibiotics for high volumes of "housed" livestock have proved to be a nightmare, rather than because everybody has suddenly got a conscience. In terms of getting your knickers in a twist, Farmageddon has something for everybody. The thing that really upsets me (which Lymbery and Oakeshott prove carefully throughout) is that during the rise and rise of intensification we've failed to acknowledge and explore other, sustainable production systems, such as organic farming with higher animal welfare standards, by putting all our (caged) eggs in the intensification basket. Any alternative system has been cast as niche or bonkers. Ultimately the expansion of warehoused animals and nation-sponsored land grabs to produce food to feed them – what Defra and governments the world over politely refer to as "sustainable intensification" – is revealed to be a big, fat oxymoron. Science and nature Farming Food Politics Society Organics Animal welfare Ethical and green living Animals Wildlife Conservation Lucy Siegle theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Pru Goward seeks extension of NSW public housing income management policy Posted: 01 Feb 2014 11:43 PM PST Welfare advocates voice concern as minister pronounces scheme a success before trial is over Bridie Jabour

Thailand: hundreds of polling stations closed, but voting begins peacefully Posted: 01 Feb 2014 11:23 PM PST Relatively little violence in early stages of anxiously-awaited election day as PM's supporters insist on right to vote

I'm lost between fact and fiction | Carole Cadwalladr Posted: 01 Feb 2014 11:15 PM PST From Bill Roache to Amanda Knox, sometimes it's hard to tell the real from the made-up Sometimes I can't help thinking that the global news media get the wrong end of the stick. Yes, there was a compelling legal case unfolding last week, one with a dramatic courtroom flourish. But surely the woman's face who should have been plastered over the papers, who produced the most dramatic courtroom appearance and whose presence in itself provided the most arresting commentary on legal process in a hypermediated world, was not Amanda Knox. It was Deirdre Barlow. Oh come on. At the start of the court case in question, the judge reminded the jurors that they are not "judging the fictional character of Ken Barlow in court. It is a real person, William Roache, who is on trial". Yeah. But then, what to make of the fact that days later Deirdre Barlow turns up to defend him? Though apparently she's not Deirdre Barlow, she's an actress called Anne Kirkbride. Who knew? And, anyway, come on! How can you not be impressed that after everything they've been through, that she's still there, still the loyal wife. What? Oh yes, not real. Ken Barlow is not real. It's just that his physical incorporation, who has graced our television screens for the past 50 years and played the "character" Ken Barlow for longer than many of us have been alive, is real. As someone who conducts the sort of interviews that appear in newspapers making you think you know something of the personality of an actor, take it from me: you don't. Interviewing Leonardo DiCaprio in a fancy hotel room on the kind of Hollywood publicity junket that has actors transported from country to country like prize bulls is something akin to trying to have a deep and meaningful conversation with Siri, iPhone's voice recognition software. There's just an affectless voice repeating back stuff they've found on Google. DiCaprio may have a personality, who knows? But what he chooses to show is Teflon Leo, with its hard, shiny surface off that your questions effortlessly slide. You might as well do an interview with a George Foreman grill. Though there's an argument that a George Foreman grill might be more interesting. In fact, there are a number of everyday kitchen implements that, I would contend, are more interesting than Leonardo DiCaprio. A chicken brick. A toaster. A microwave. Anyway. The point I'm making is that the William Roache trial is confusing in a life-meets-art-meets-life-meets-the-Kabin-cornershop sort of a way. This tricky question of what is real life. And what is a fictional character. And who's actually being tried is luckily something that the jury has been given a direction on. It's not us who need to wrestle with the issue. It's just that we do wrestle with these issues, in every high-profile court case, every day of the week. Last month, we had "Nigella Lawson" who was a character in a trial who might be related to the "Nigella Lawson" you see on the telly in that they both have the same hair, though the one on the telly seems to be a bit jollier and happier at home. (This is apparently not the same as her home on TV. It just looks the same.) And then last week, we had multiple stories about the media personality now known as "Amanda Knox". When I looked at pictures of Knox last week, I thought: "Oh, she's had her hair cut." I did not think: "That poor sweet innocent, the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice!" Or "What a cold-hearted manipulating murderess!" Because while I've read lots about the case previously, and I've even written about it, I have no idea of knowing one way or another. Making a judgment call on whether she is innocent or guilty from the media coverage is like trying to parse the soul of Leonardo DiCaprio from the computer-regulated algorithm that is his public person. There may be a person underneath the many layers of media narrative, the expensive PR management, and in Knox's case, the 2.5m web pages that bear her name, but it's highly unlikely we'll ever know it. Having watched Simon Hattenstone's filmed interview for the Guardian, I'm slightly doubtful that even she does any more. But did you see the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Mirror on Saturday? For legal reasons, presumably, the Mirror couldn't actually use "WITCH!" in its banner headline so it settled for "THE ICE MAIDEN". The Daily Mail's was almost cute in comparison: "SHAMELESS IN SEATTLE! Foxy Knoxy's brazen TV offensive to escape extradition for murder of British student". (Though the Mirror's evidence was compelling. It had interviewed one of her former prison guards who'd revealed: "Once in prison, instead of socialising, Knox grew obsessed with books, reading Kafka and Dostoevsky late into the night.") But then, did you also see the interview on US breakfast TV, in which the interviewer, in her fearless journalistic quest for the truth, held Knox's hand? I'm not sure what we gain by emotionally investing in characters who are, to us, fictional cyphers used by the global news-industrial-entertainment complex to entertain and delight us. In deciding that we're Team Nigella. Or against Foxy Knoxy. Because these are real people. They feel pain. And joy. And despair. There are real crimes with real victims, in this case, Meredith Kercher, whose family is served by none of this. But we do not know Amanda Knox. Just as even though more than 24 million people watched Ken and Deirdre's first wedding and 12 million the second (three million more than watched Charles and Camilla's the day before), we do not know William Roache either. The truth is out there. I hope. If you believe in the criminal justice system as the best chance we have. In the meantime, you'd probably find out more by interviewing your toaster. Amanda Knox Celebrity Carole Cadwalladr theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Will the Israeli peace process talks prove to be a turning point or a crisis? | Peter Beaumont Posted: 01 Feb 2014 11:05 PM PST Binyamin Netanyahu's negotiations with John Kerry take place against a background of divided public and political opinion Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, spoke of the need to solve the "intractable" problem of brokering peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people. Intractable is a big word. It suggests the problem is insoluble, when the reality is that it is not. Support for a two-state solution – an independent Palestine alongside the state of Israel – is not a constant, as Peter Beinart illustrated in his book The Crisis of Zionism. After Oslo, the high-water mark of optimism, it steadily declined through the second intifada and the conflict with Gaza. Even now, there exists an odd tension in public opinion on both sides, with a desire for the two leaderships to negotiate a settlement set against a much weaker conviction that they are capable of doing it. None of this should be surprising. Politics, not least the politics of peace negotiations, swings constantly between optimism and pessimism. On one side is the drama of the possibility of change energised by expectation. The other is characterised by a wary stasis. The question hanging over this latest round of negotiations – as Kerry returns to the region this week to continue discussions over establishing a framework document to further the peace process – is whether sufficient enthusiasm can be rekindled on either side to make progress. In this respect, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, reflects where a substantial section of Israeli politics stands today. While Netanyahu's long-term obstruction of movement towards a two-state solution has been both narrow and ideological – the reiteration of the hard-line revisionist Zionism espoused by his historian father – he has become in turn the receptacle for a wider pessimism about the peace process. The situation would be straightforward if this were the whole picture. But it is not. Because that pessimistic Israel exists alongside another Israel that wants to be more normal, that sees the obsession with security and maintaining the occupation of the West Bank as toxic to its own rights. This is an Israel that wants to be open for business. The 100 or so Israeli business leaders who appealed to Netanyahu at Davos to reach an agreement with Palestinians or face a growing threat of sanctions are neither outliers nor representative of a marginal constituency. They recognise, as Netanyahu has too in his own way in calling a meeting of ministers to discuss the growing threat, that the movement for divestment from Israeli companies, not least those with interest in the occupation (the BDS movement), is following a familiar pattern to the sanctions movement in South Africa. A movement at first confined to academia and activist circles has gained traction in churches and now the business world. And however you choose to define the deficit of Palestinian civil rights in the occupied territories, where laws and rights are imposed or enjoyed differentially according to what ID card you hold, its continuation is becoming increasingly corrosive for Israel's reputation abroad. The decision at the beginning of this month by PGGM, the Netherlands' biggest pension fund, to cut its ties with five Israeli banks is an indication of the movement's advances. Those who have dismissed Netanyahu, including US diplomats who believed he was an obstruction, to be bypassed eventually, have underestimated his talent as a wily politician. He has formed pragmatic partnerships to block progress and has been adroit in synthesising Israel's competing anxieties into a single story with broad appeal, one that sustains him in power. In this story, criticism of Israel equals "delegitimisation"; the appeal to security equates with a distrust of Palestinian motives that need constantly to be exposed. But if it is a formula that has worked for the last six years of the Obama administration, there is some evidence that its effectiveness is weakening. Netanyahu, whose policy of keeping Barack Obama at arm's length through a policy of snubs, complaints and manoeuvring, appears to have used most of the weapons in his arsenal. With the threat of war with Iran receding quickly after the recent nuclear deal, a distraction has been removed. The declaration by Obama, who has been pushed into retreat before by Netanyahu, in the State of the Union address last week that he would veto any attempts by Congress to derail that deal is an indication that the game might be changing. That has coincided with a renewed and committed engagement from John Kerry, a secretary of state far more capable than his hyperactive predecessor, Hillary Clinton. Netanyahu finds himself increasingly exposed in Israeli politics as well. His condemnation by coalition partner and economy minister, Naftali Bennett, for hinting, at Davos, that Israeli settlements on the West Bank might remain as a minority under future Palestinian sovereignty has not only threatened his coalition but revealed that idea for what it really was – a cynical invitation to Palestinians to reject it. It is a conflict that has marked a crucial narrowing of Netanyahu's room to operate. Under increasing US pressure, his convenient alliances with settler-supporting parties and figures who have suggested annexation of large areas of the West Bank and even population transfer have become more awkward and hostile. Rivals have cleaved to the positions of their minority constituencies. Suddenly, stress points are visible. If one thing remains unchanged it is Netanyahu's popularity. According to the most recent Times of Israel poll, he retains a degree of personal popularity (although he has been losing voters from his rightwing core and picking up support from the left and centre). His approval rating of 51%, however, is matched by the number who believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, a figure that rises to 71% for voters aged 24 and under. In any snap election, Netanyahu's Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu party would win the largest number of seats. Given the exigencies of the politics surrounding the Middle East peace process, only a fool would predict an outcome, not least with some diplomats in Washington assessing only a 10% chance of agreement on a framework document even by the April deadline. However, after the long years of stalled negotiations, there is a hint that the tectonic plates might be in motion once again. Whether they will shift the stance of an Israeli prime minister who resigned from government over the Gaza settlement withdrawal and who has vowed in the past to hold on to as much of the West Bank as possible is an even more difficult question. But the lessons of apartheid in South Africa and the Troubles in Northern Ireland are that "intractable" problems eventually can be brought to a just resolution. If there should be urgency over this long-festering issue, it is because there is a pressing issue of self-interest. Occupation hurts not only those being occupied. It damages the occupier too. • Comments will be turned on in the morning Israel Binyamin Netanyahu Palestinian territories Gaza John Kerry Barack Obama Middle East and North Africa United States Peter Beaumont theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Penny Wong: SA premier 'strong leader' for outmanoevring ALP powerbroker Posted: 01 Feb 2014 10:37 PM PST SA senator backs Jay Weatherill over Don Farrell's state parliament bid despite being given his No. 1 spot on Senate ticket Bridie Jabour

Chris Christie hits back over allegations he knew about bridge lane closures Posted: 01 Feb 2014 09:55 PM PST New Jersey governor's team says former Port Authority official who made the claim 'will do and say anything' to save himself

Sea Shepherd accuses Japanese whalers of 'aggressive', 'ruthless' confrontation Posted: 01 Feb 2014 09:10 PM PST Anti-whaling group says Japanese ship rammed its vessel Bob Barker in an 'unprovoked attack'

Indonesian volcano eruption claims lives after villagers allowed to return Posted: 01 Feb 2014 08:53 PM PST At least 16 die as Mount Sinabung erupts after authorities gave the go-ahead for evacuated residents to return to their houses

Human Rights Commission titles may be lost in upgrade of president's powers Posted: 01 Feb 2014 08:34 PM PST Attorney general George Brandis has yet to decide on disability, social justice and sex discrimination commissioners' roles Bridie Jabour

Looking recap: episode 3 – British people are awful Posted: 01 Feb 2014 08:00 PM PST Spoiler alert: this post discusses episode three of Looking, which aired on Sunday on HBO in the US and on Monday on Sky Atlantic in the UK Dominic Rushe

Last-minute rush by Australians to attend 2015 Gallipoli dawn service Posted: 01 Feb 2014 07:47 PM PST Centenary service draws more than 42,000 applications for 8,000 tickets set aside for Australians

Penny Wong: PM's attack on ABC based on its criticism of his government Posted: 01 Feb 2014 07:22 PM PST Labor senator says efficiency is not the problem: 'The government doesn't like what the ABC does and says'

Liberal MP says government 'cruel' to refuse SPC Ardmona support Posted: 01 Feb 2014 07:09 PM PST Sharman Stone says employment minister's defence of helping Cadbury but not SPC is 'desperation politics' Daniel Hurst

Adelaide fringe stands by 'blasphemous' show Come Heckle Christ Posted: 01 Feb 2014 07:08 PM PST Catholic archbishop Philip Wilson and NSW Christian Democrat party leader Fred Nile object to comedian's offering

Popular support for a republic flags to a 20-year low, new poll shows Posted: 01 Feb 2014 06:00 PM PST Star power of younger royals has changed opinions of older and younger Australians, says monarchist

Shia fighter beheaded by Syrian rebels, amateur video shows Posted: 01 Feb 2014 05:32 PM PST Video shows footage of public beheading of a man believed to have been a pro-government Shia fighter Rebels in Syria with ties to al-Qaida have decapitated a man believed to have been a pro-government Shia fighter, an amateur video of the public beheading posted to the internet on Saturday showed. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group which posted the video, said the beheading was conducted by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a foreign-led group fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and establish an Islamic emirate in Syria. The footage shows armed men in black standing outdoors in a circle around a man who is lying on the grass. One of the militants leans over the victim and appears to cut off his head with a small knife, cheered on by the others. Once the head is detached, the militant holds it up and places it on the man's back before it rolls off and settles on the ground about a metre away from his body. The remainder of the three-minute video shows the crowd, which includes several children, talking, laughing and taking photographs of the scene. The Britain-based Observatory, which opposes Assad and has an extensive network of sources across Syria, said the video was taken in the central province of Homs. Its authenticity could not be independently verified. Hard-line Islamist rebels with links to al-Qaida have come to dominate the largely Sunni Muslim insurgency against Assad, who is supported by members of his minority Alawite sect – an offshoot of Shia Islam – as well as Shia fighters from Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Both sides in Syria's nearly three-year conflict have been implicated in torture, killings and other war crimes. The rise of al-Qaida in Syria has forced some in the West to temper calls for Assad's removal from power. The Syrian government cited atrocities such as the beheading at the Geneva II peace conference in Switzerland last week in an attempt to characterise all of its armed opponents as "terrorists". The first round of talks ended on Friday without any progress towards ending the civil war, which has killed more than 130,000 people, displaced nearly 6 million others and aggravated sectarian tensions across the region. Syria Middle East and North Africa Al-Qaida Human rights Bashar al-Assad theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Actor Maximilian Schell dies aged 83 Posted: 01 Feb 2014 05:27 PM PST Austrian who won best actor Oscar for role in Judgment at Nuremberg died at clinic in Innsbruck after sudden illness Austrian actor Maximilian Schell, who won an Academy award for his role as a German defence attorney in the acclaimed 1961 courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg, has died aged 83. The Vienna-born actor died overnight at a clinic in Innsbruck as the result of a "sudden and serious illness", his agent, Patricia Baumbauer, told the Austria Press Agency on Saturday. One of the best-known foreign actors in US films, Schell starred on stage and screen on both sides of the Atlantic after growing up in Switzerland, where his family settled to escape the Nazis after Germany's 1938 annexation of Austria. The brother of actress Maria Schell, he also won a Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Circle award for his role in Judgment at Nuremberg, which followed a television drama version of the play. The film, directed by Stanley Kramer, was a dramatisation of the war crimes trials in Germany that followed the second world war. It focused on an international tribunal, headed by Americans, that was handling the trials of four German judges accused of knowingly condemning innocent men to death in concert with the Nazis. For his portrayal of defence attorney Hans Rolfe, Schell earned broad international recognition. He was part of an all-star cast that also included Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Richard Widmark and Judy Garland. Schell won the Oscar for best actor, beating, among others, his co-star Tracy. Schell was nominated for two more Oscars, for best actor for The Man in the Glass Booth in 1976 and for best supporting actor in Julia in 1978. Also a prolific television actor, Schell won the 1993 Golden Globe for best actor in a supporting role in the TV movie Stalin, in which he co-starred with Robert Duvall. He made his mark as a film director as well. He directed and starred in The Pedestrian (1973), which was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign language film. He also directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Marlene (1984) about Marlene Dietrich. Schell was also a talented pianist and directed operas. Austria Europe theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dylan Farrow details allegations of child sex abuse against Woody Allen Posted: 01 Feb 2014 05:14 PM PST In an open letter to the New York Times, Allen's adopted daughter tells her side of the story in public for the first time

Miniature dogs take the lead as UK splashes out on its pets Posted: 01 Feb 2014 04:07 PM PST Devoted owners fuel a high street boom in gourmet food, grooming, even cat cafes Hard-pressed households may be struggling with the cost of living but more people are finding the cash to pamper their pets. Despite troubles on the high street, there has been a near 10% increase in the number of pet shops over the last two years, according to the Local Data Company as chains such as Pets at Home, Pets Corner, PamPurred Pets and Jollyes have all expanded. Pet owners are splashing out on better quality food, pampering, treats and even fashion. Daycare centres for dogs, walking services, pet-friendly hotels and dog bakeries are opening up while London's first cat cafe is set to open this year, where customers will be able to sip their coffee and enjoy a calming stroke of a resident cat at the same time. According to analysts at Euromonitor, the amount spent on pet foods and care products is up 4% year on year and they predict sales will continue to grow at the same pace for the next five years. Unsurprisingly, the big grocers are keen to win a share of that extra spending: internet grocer Ocado has opened a separate online pet store, Fetch, while Sainsbury's recently launched a range of gourmet pet foods. At the other end of the market, the discounter Poundstretcher has developed the Pet Hut chain, selling bargain pet care products. It is not just pet shops cashing in on our weakness for pets: the vocational education body City & Guilds says the number of people qualifying as dog groomers has gone up by 75% over the past two years, with nearly 2,000 people qualifying last year. Heidi Anderton, owner of Absolutely Animals in Lee, south London, says she now grooms two cats a day – on top of the 70 dogs a week her salon has groomed for years – and has trained 20 new cat groomers in the past 18 months. "People want to have cleaner houses, they don't want dog and cat hairs everywhere, but they don't have the time or inclination to groom the animals themselves. If they're in a better financial position, they can pay people to groom or even walk their dogs and that's jobs for us which is brilliant," says Anderton. Pets at Home, which is due to launch on the stock market this spring with a potential valuation of £1.5bn, has been opening grooming centres in its stores. Business has also been booming for Airpets and other pet importing and exporting firms that help owners take their animals on holiday or to new homes abroad despite charges which can run into thousands. "More people treat their pets as a member of the family and are willing to give them nothing but the best," says Paula Flores, head of pet care research at Euromonitor. "There is a trend towards humanising pets and wanting premium products so the market is still strong." She points out there are 9.5 million single-person households and almost 7.5 million couples without children in the UK, and reckons these groups want pets as "replacements" for a partner or children. This view of pets as furry "children" is also behind a trend towards keeping smaller animals. The number of French bulldogs registered – pet of choice for A-listers such as Hugh Jackman, Leonardo DiCaprio and the Beckham family – was up nearly 50%, while boston terriers were up 11%. chihuahuas 10% and pugs nearly 5%. Matthew Hopkinson, director of the Local Data Company, said pet stores and pet groomers were benefiting from the same economics as other service providers such as barbers, tattoo parlours and bookmakers. "There has been a fourfold increase in the number of vacant shops and so prices have come down by about 20%. Entrepreneurs have spotted that pets is not a market well served by the supermarkets and seen an opportunity to move in," he said. Pets Dogs Cats Animals Sarah Butler theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Flooding: five lessons we have learned Posted: 01 Feb 2014 04:05 PM PST What our washed-out winter has taught us Concrete is no longer a solution For centuries flood protection has meant building ever higher walls and radically straightening and clearing rivers, to rush water ever faster to the sea. But a more crowded island, rising sea levels and increasing extreme weather caused by climate change mean the hard engineering approach is hitting its limit. Dredging is a prime example: experts say it would not have prevented flooding in the Somerset Levels, nor drained the water significantly quicker. A desire for immediate action is understandable, but a massive amount of rain has fallen on the Levels, far greater than the capacity of the river channels, and large parts of the Levels are below sea level – the water has to go uphill to the coast. Instead, a "back to nature" approach is being successfully tested to return water systems to the sluggish, slow systems they once were, using fields as temporary ponds, blocking up drains and even allowing fallen trees to obstruct streams. Soft flood defences mean hard choices Good, fertile farmland has been prized since the dawn of agriculture and Britons have spent a millennium draining marshes and creating coastal land by holding back the sea in order to create new fields. But today our villages, towns and cities are prized even more. If the soft "back to nature" approach is to be expanded on the scale required, a new settlement is needed with farmers that balances food against floods. Payments will need to be channelled to landowners in key areas who allow their fields to store water during wet periods. In places like the Somerset Levels there will be hard choices for people, too. Many flood experts predict the Levels will have to be abandoned to the sea before the century's end, as the cost of keeping the water out spirals out of control. Retreat is also under way on the coast, where sea walls are being smashedby Salt marshes will reappear, but often they sap the energy of the waves and therefore offer better protection to nearby homes. Flood protection often works Despite the thousands of homes that have been flooded during this sodden and stormy winter, about a million have been protected by the defences that held out. But, with the risk rising, experts warn it is impossible to stop all floods. The focus needs to shift towards households being prepared for flooding, particularly as flash floods – which can strike anywhere – are expected to increase as rainfall intensifies in a warming world. Measures can be simple: from inflatable toilet bungs to stop sewage overflows to slot-in door protectors. Others reduce the cost of flood repairs, such as rewiring electrical circuits nearer ceiling level. On some flood plains, people are even building homes on stilts. Cutting flood defence spending is a false economy This winter's floods have already caused at least £1bn of damage to homes, businesses, roads and other infrastructure. That is almost twice the amount that will be spent on flood defences this year. In fact, in the longer term most flood defence schemes are expected to save £8 for every £1 invested. But annual government spending on flood defences will fall by 15% in real terms under the coalition, about £90m a year, and hundreds of projects across the country remain on hold. The government's official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, calculate that these cuts will result in £3bn of future damage. Furthermore, because the risk of flooding is rising, the committee calculates that between 2011-2015 the coalition is spending £500m less than would be needed to keep flood risk at the same level. Climate change appears to be hitting harder and faster than feared A government study in 2012 – coincidentally England's wettest year on record – identified increased flooding as the greatest impact of climate change on the UK. It is already being felt. The extensive floods in England back in 2000 were made twice as likely by global warming, according to scientists. Warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the air but also more energy in weather systems: the result is more frequent severe downpours On the southern coasts, the sea has already risen 6cm in two decades, bringing storm surges nearer – or over - the top of sea walls. Sea levels could rise by almost a metre this century. Planning to cope with this rising flood risk began a decade ago, expecting it to be felt in the 2030s. But experts say it is hitting now. Flooding Natural disasters and extreme weather Damian Carrington theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Exorcist makes its scary radio debut Posted: 01 Feb 2014 04:05 PM PST Radio 4 airs the classic of demonic possession – and promises a 'creeping, toxic' horror tale A new version of The Exorcist, a film often considered one of the most frightening ever made, is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this month. The audio drama will go out late in the evening on two consecutive nights and, according to producer and director Gaynor Macfarlane, will be just as scary as the film that caused widespread controversy in America and Britain when it was first released in 1973. The adaptation will be based, like director William Friedkin's film, on the book of the same name by William Peter Blatty and will deal with the possession of a young girl, Regan, by a demon. In a key scene in the film the victim's head appears to swivel on her neck as family and clerics attempt to rid her of satanic influences. MacFarlane said this weekend that her radio version will not suffer from not being able to show such horrific moments: "In the book there is some doubt about whether Regan's head turns around or not. Our version may not have these filmic tricks, but it has a gradual, creeping, perhaps more toxic horror. You feel tainted by hearing it." She added: "Robert Forrest, who adapted the story for us, was fascinated by the psychological story and he has put Father Karras, the priest figure, at the centre of the story. It takes him to the point of a possible breakdown." The row surrounding the film's first release in America centred on the fact it was not given a high enough rating in the view of some parents. Sick bags were reportedly issued for cinema patrons and, when the film was released in the UK, it was banned by several councils, and was not awarded a video certification until 1999. There was also a fuss in 2001 when the film was shown on terrestrial television in the UK for the first time on Channel 4. "It does feel like a departure for Radio 4, but it is a classic of the horror genre," said Macfarlane this weekend. "On the BBC iPlayer it will carry a warning, because we think it is frightening. In the film the demon is very foul-mouthed, but we have changed that so it is not just a ranting presence, but something really frightening, witty and knowing instead. It gets right inside Karras's head." Jeremy Howe, Radio 4's commissioning editor for drama, has justified the decision to make The Exorcist by saying that he wants to diversify the station's output. "Horror is an under-explored genre for us," he said. The film has obsessed The Observer film critic Mark Kermode for years. Attempts to make a prequel to the Friedkin film have been dogged by misadventure. Forrest explains his own fascination with the story as down to the struggle between mysterious forces in it. But the process had its worrying moments for him too. "One development I always hope for when working on a dramatisation is that I begin to hear the book's characters speak in my head; then they become my characters," he has explained. "Unfortunately, or fortunately, when I began work on The Exorcist the first voice in my head was that of the demon. I had that sneering, merciless creature whispering in my ear constantly – for months. This was frightening and exhausting; it was also exhilarating. There were times, when the demon's attack on other characters – and on humanity in general – was especially fierce, that I felt the dangerous thrill of being on its side." When Forrest finished work on the script he threw away everything related to it with relish. The Exorcist will be broadcast on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 February at 11pm. Radio 4 BBC Radio industry Horror Vanessa Thorpe theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Being a Man festival explores what it means to be male Posted: 01 Feb 2014 04:05 PM PST Billed as an 'overhaul of masculinity', the event on London's Southbank proved that real men can even multitask In other cultures and times they would have taken you off up into the hills and returned you scarred or enlightened or both. For this weekend's inaugural Being a Man festival, the only requirement was to descend to the London underground, emerge to brave a rain-lashed footbridge and pitch up on the banks of the swollen Thames. You wonder if the timing had been chosen with special care: the festival opened on that most sacred and mysterious of British male days, just before the closing of the January football transfer window, when women across the land traditionally observe the patriarchy pressing its ear to TalkSport radio, expectant of distant tribal news. Being a man, I guessed I knew exactly what to expect of this gathering. Being a man, I also exercised the right to post-rationalise when immediately surprised, and to self-congratulate when challenged or moved. The festival is – obviously – the idea of a woman, Jude Kelly, artistic director at the Southbank Centre. Her mission, she suggested, was in part age-old female wisdom: that men need reminding that it might be a good thing to share their anxieties. Or, as she put it, to provide the space "for an overhaul of masculinity" and an "opportunity for men to go naked" – prompting a proportion of her male audience to cross their legs. Despite its advertised Neanderthal acronym – BAM – this was not an Iron John experience. The tone for the emotional undressing was set by Ziauddin Yousafzai, inspirational father of Malala, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for demanding the right for girls to be educated. In Yousafzai's world, simply making breakfast for his family, as he sometimes did – a man performing woman's work in the Swat valley – was considered a traitorous and political act. He argued not only that all girls should be educated but, equally important, that all boys must be educated to believe that girls should be educated. Being a man lay not in the exercise of power, but in the equal sharing of it. His theme – the necessity for men to unlearn all that they had been raised to understand of any single dominant masculine identity – was subsequently embellished by many other life stories. By the ex-prison inmate and artist, introduced only as Gus, who described the tough work of dismantling the rules by which he had grown up – when looking another man in the eye would be a necessary challenge to violence – through trust in group therapy and writing plays. By the Ugandan-born writer Nick Makoha, who spoke typically and eloquently of his resolve to be closer to his own children than his distant father had been to him, and of how the overwhelming sensation of holding your child in your arms for the first time was the literal, frightening feeling of "your heart expanding with love". Many fathers in the world – from south London to the Swat valley – have never, it was noted, had that experience, perhaps because the dangers of such love for traditional power structures meant that holding a baby remained an unmanly taboo. According to Michael Kaufman, head of the White Ribbon Campaign, a global movement working to end violence against women, this is about to change. The natural conclusion of the feminist demand for equal rights in the workplace, has to be, he said, the male demand for a fair share of parenting. We were, he argued, already seeing that happening (he also confessed to being a utopian). That utopianism was undermined by some statistics, not least those that showed the "crisis of masculinity" at its most extreme. The fact that 95% of the prison population remains male. That 75% of suicides are men, mostly under the age of 35. The fact that male mental health was declining along with stable employment prospects, and that British boys are less likely than ever before to be brought up with a man in the house or a male teacher at primary school. Solutions were – at least by the halfway point of the weekend's debate – harder to define. And though there was a general agreement that men might benefit from doing more cooking and having less access to pornography, by spending not quantity but quality time at home, and by talking about it all, there was also an inevitable sense of preaching to the converted. Only a certain type of man has the time or inclination to give up a Friday or a weekend to come and talk about the unlearning of maleness. I didn't, for example, spot a single suit and tie. Still, it's early days; given the demand for tickets, Kelly has already committed to BAM being an annual event, perhaps even the start of a movement. All movements need a manifesto, and it took Grayson Perry in one of his Bo-Peepiest pink party dresses to provide one. Few men have done as much original thinking about what it means to be male as the transvestite potter, champion cyclist, therapy survivor, Turner prizewinner, devoted husband and father. Grayson insisted that all we believed about men could be unbelieved – men can, despite the propaganda, multitask ("I never go upstairs without carrying something") – and they can prevail in the constant battle with testosterone and keep it in their pants (frilly or otherwise), if they put their minds to it. He ended with a scribbled series of demands. "We men ask ourselves and each other for the following: the right to be vulnerable, to be uncertain, to be wrong, to be intuitive, the right not to know, to be flexible and not to be ashamed." He insisted that men sit down to achieve them. He received, deservedly, a standing ovation. Equality Parents and parenting Grayson Perry Malala Yousafzai Tim Adams theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

You are subscribed to email updates from World news and comment from the Guardian | theguardian.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610