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- Ukraine’s fate hangs in balance as ‘critical’ week of talks begins
- Australian government fails in bid to delay Novak Djokovic visa court hearing by two days
- Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on western diet
- Chinese city of Tianjin to test 14 million people after Covid outbreak
- England avoid Ashes whitewash after surviving in fourth Test with Australia
- Exclusive: many resettled Guantánamo detainees in legal limbo, analysis shows
- PM must commit to low taxes or risk losing next election, says David Frost
- Rising anger with Turkey drives calls for reunification in crisis-hit northern Cyprus
- Lack of English speakers embarrasses Czech coalition
- Art historian discovers that £65 painting on his wall is work of Flemish master
- Covid live news: official cases in Africa pass 10m; London hospital chief says 10% of staff unvaccinated
- Nadhim Zahawi wants UK to be leader in move from ‘pandemic to endemic’ Covid
- Coronavirus: should the UK make vaccination mandatory?
- Omicron drives Covid surge but New York a long way from pandemic’s early days
- Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I have the right to write about whatever I want’
- How to learn the trick of confidence
- ‘It’s a huge political albatross’: Guantánamo Bay, 20 years on
- Helen Mirren: is the Israeli icon Golda Meir a role too far for the dame who does it all?
- Is the US really heading for a second civil war?
- Mystery of the second world war ‘trophy’ and the Royal Court founder
- Do smart supermarkets herald the end of shopping as we know it?
- PEN prize-winning Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija illegally detained and tortured
- ‘It’s been a lot’: Joyce Carol Oates, SA Cosby, Richard Ford and Margo Jefferson on Biden’s first year
| Ukraine’s fate hangs in balance as ‘critical’ week of talks begins Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:17 AM PST Experts say prospects of deal are 'very, very dicey' as top US and Russian diplomats meet in Geneva A momentous week of diplomacy is about to get under way in Europe, with the fate of Ukraine, hemmed in by 100,000 Russian troops, hanging in the balance. Senior diplomats from the US and Russia will meet in Geneva on Sunday and Monday to discuss Moscow's demands, set out last month in two draft treaties, one with the US and one with Nato. Much of their content is unacceptable to Washington and the alliance, most importantly a pledge that Ukraine will never be a Nato member. Continue reading... |
| Australian government fails in bid to delay Novak Djokovic visa court hearing by two days Posted: 08 Jan 2022 10:43 PM PST World No 1 challenging visa cancellation but legal experts split on whether court process can be resolved in time for Australian Open draw A bid by the Morrison government to delay Novak Djokovic's visa hearing by two days has been rejected by the federal circuit court. In an order, published on Sunday, judge Anthony Kelly rejected the move which would have delayed the hearing until Wednesday – after Tennis Australia's stated deadline to include the world number one in the Australian Open draw. Continue reading...This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on western diet Posted: 09 Jan 2022 12:45 AM PST New DNA research by London-based scientists hopes to find cure for rapidly spreading conditions More and more people around the world are suffering because their immune systems can no longer tell the difference between healthy cells and invading micro-organisms. Disease defences that once protected them are instead attacking their tissue and organs. Major international research efforts are being made to fight this trend – including an initiative at London's Francis Crick Institute, where two world experts, James Lee and Carola Vinuesa, have set up separate research groups to help pinpoint the precise causes of autoimmune disease, as these conditions are known. Continue reading... |
| Chinese city of Tianjin to test 14 million people after Covid outbreak Posted: 08 Jan 2022 11:48 PM PST The port near Beijing began mass testing after 20 children and adults tested positive, including at least two with Omicron Tianjin, a major Chinese port city near the capital Beijing, has begun mass-testing its 14 million residents after a cluster of 20 children and adults tested positive for Covid-19, including at least two with the Omicron variant. Those infected include 15 students aged between eight and 13, a staff member at an after-school centre and four parents. The citywide testing, begun on Sunday, is to be completed over two days. Continue reading... |
| England avoid Ashes whitewash after surviving in fourth Test with Australia Posted: 08 Jan 2022 11:51 PM PST
Dead rubber? What dead rubber? As Steve Smith stood at the top of his mark in the gloaming and readied himself to bowl the last ball of a captivating final day to Jimmy Anderson – the kind of job swap only Test cricket and its light rules can throw up – the Sydney Cricket Ground felt gripped with all the tension of an Ashes thriller. Australia were one wicket away going 4-0 up in a series they have dominated, England were one safely negotiated part-time leg-break away from shutting down the whitewash before the fifth Test in Hobart. Ben Stokes hid his face in the old pavilion, knowing his earlier three-hour 60 could easily amount to very little, while Pat Cummins, whose two-wicket burst with the second new ball had blown the session wide open, was suddenly a fast-bowling captain under a helmet among the wake of close-catching vultures. Continue reading... |
| Exclusive: many resettled Guantánamo detainees in legal limbo, analysis shows Posted: 09 Jan 2022 02:05 AM PST One-third of former prisoners sent to third countries are lacking legal status – unable to work or travel and at risk of human rights abuses About 30% of former Guantánamo detainees who were resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status, according to new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian, leaving them vulnerable to deportation and restricting their ability to rebuild their lives. Of the hundreds of men released from Guantánamo since the prison first opened 20 years ago, about 150 were sent to third countries in bilateral agreements brokered by the US, because their home countries were considered dangerous to return to. Continue reading... |
| PM must commit to low taxes or risk losing next election, says David Frost Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:29 AM PST Former Brexit minister also calls for shake-up of Boris Johnson's advisory team in first major interview since resigning from cabinet Boris Johnson's former Brexit minister who quit last month has warned him to commit to low taxes and the free market or risk losing the next election, as the prime minister comes under continuing pressure from the Conservative right. David Frost, a former lobbyist whom Johnson made his chief Brexit negotiator and later gave a peerage, said in his first major interview since quitting as a cabinet minister that the Tories needed to "focus on rebuilding the nation and be proud of our history". Continue reading... |
| Rising anger with Turkey drives calls for reunification in crisis-hit northern Cyprus Posted: 09 Jan 2022 02:00 AM PST With the economy in freefall and allegations of political interference, people have taken to the streets to advocate for federal future In his sun-filled office in north Nicosia, Şener Elcil is plotting his next protest. Anger, he says, is in the air in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. The economy is in freefall, thanks to the self-declared republic's financial and political dependence on Turkey. Thousands have taken to the streets, spurred by inflation rates that have left many struggling to make ends meet; ahead of parliamentary polls later this month, calls for a boycott are mounting, while a blacklist of Turkish Cypriot dissidents, reportedly drawn up at the behest of Ankara, has spawned consternation and fear. Continue reading... |
| Lack of English speakers embarrasses Czech coalition Posted: 09 Jan 2022 01:15 AM PST The new government risks being isolated, particularly in the EU where English remains the working language, warn critics When a new five-party coalition took office in the Czech Republic a week before Christmas, it was expected to herald a reaffirmation of the country's Europhile and western credentials after years of ambivalence and hedging under an outgoing populist government. Instead, the new administration – headed by Petr Fiala, a former political science professor who replaced the former oligarch Andrej Babiš as prime minister – has found its carefully crafted outward-looking image tarnished by embarrassing revelations about its members' poor English-speaking skills. Continue reading... |
| Art historian discovers that £65 painting on his wall is work of Flemish master Posted: 09 Jan 2022 12:00 AM PST Picture of Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, is likely to be by Sir Anthony van Dyck, finds Courtauld's report As a leading art historian, Christopher Wright has uncovered several old master paintings in public and private collections over five decades. Now he has discovered that a copy of a painting by Sir Anthony van Dyck, which he bought for himself for £65 in 1970, may actually be an original by the 17th-century Flemish court painter to King Charles I. "I bought it from a jobbing dealer in west London," he said. "I was buying it as a copy, as an art historian. I took no notice of it, in a strange way. The syndrome is the cobbler's children are the worst shod. So the art historian's collection is the least looked at." Wright estimated the painting might be worth around £40,000, although some Van Dycks have fetched seven-figure sums. Continue reading... |
| Posted: 09 Jan 2022 05:25 AM PST South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Libya among countries hardest hit; frontline staff in England required to have first jab by February
More on the Philippines, after the country set a record for new 28,707 Covid infections for a second consecutive day. A senior government official confirmed an increase in hospital beds and medical resources in and around the capital Manila have been ordered, Reuters reports. Continue reading... |
| Nadhim Zahawi wants UK to be leader in move from ‘pandemic to endemic’ Covid Posted: 09 Jan 2022 02:08 AM PST Minister says it would be helpful to cut isolation to five days, but dismisses report that free tests are about to stop A senior cabinet minister has called for the UK to show the rest of the world how to move from "pandemic to endemic" Covid, as he suggested it would be helpful to cut the isolation period to five days to ease workforce shortages. The education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, played down suggestions that the government was imminently about to start charging for free rapid Covid tests, known as lateral flows, which would lead to fewer infections in the community being caught. Continue reading... |
| Coronavirus: should the UK make vaccination mandatory? Posted: 09 Jan 2022 01:00 AM PST With more countries ready to oblige citizens to receive the Covid jab, what are the key questions in the debate? In Italy, it is now obligatory for people aged 50 or over to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Greece is pondering a similar move. In France, which has seen record numbers of positive cases, President Emmanuel Macron has also announced that he wants to "piss off" the unvaccinated, while Austria is contemplating a law to make the vaccine mandatory for all its citizens. By contrast, in the UK, Boris Johnson has confined himself to accusing anti-vaxxers of talking "mumbo-jumbo". But is that enough? Should the UK take a harder line on those who refuse to be vaccinated? After all, this is a virus that threatens to overwhelm the NHS. As doctors continue to point out, hospital beds are now filling up with more and more seriously ill Covid patients, many of whom are unvaccinated. So, should vaccines against Covid be made mandatory, not just in certain workplace settings but for all individuals? Continue reading... |
| Omicron drives Covid surge but New York a long way from pandemic’s early days Posted: 09 Jan 2022 12:00 AM PST America's biggest city is seeing another winter spike, but with good vaccines and a new message many residents say this wave feels different In the spring of 2020, Hart Island, a mile from City Island in the Bronx, was a focal point of grief in New York. It was here, at the city's public cemetery or potter's field, the final resting place of more than a million people, that officials ordered trenches dug to accommodate those the coronavirus was expected to kill. The trenches were never filled. Many bodies were returned to funeral parlors or stored in mobile freezers on Randall's Island, better known for music festivals and the Frieze art fair than cold storage of corpses. Continue reading... |
| Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I have the right to write about whatever I want’ Posted: 09 Jan 2022 12:00 AM PST To Paradise, the new novel from the writer of A Little Life, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. But where did she get the unflinching eye she turns on America's idea of itself? Hanya Yanagihara's debut novel taught her not to give up her day job as a travel writer and editor. The People in the Trees was the story of a scientist jailed for sexually abusing children he adopted during his Nobel-winning research on a Pacific island. It impressed reviewers with its exhaustive inventiveness and its refusal to offer redemption or solace, but sold only a few thousand copies when it was published in 2013. Two years later, the Manhattan-based writer released a novel that was twice as long and even less forgiving. It was about the fallout, among four college friends, from the appalling childhood sexual abuse of one of their group, and it hit the jackpot, becoming one of those vanishingly rare literary break-outs. Victoria Beckham and Dua Lipa declared themselves fans, while an equally passionate group of readers condemned it as gratuitous, even "evil". A Little Life sold a quarter of a million print copies in the UK alone, where it was shortlisted for the Booker and the Women's prize for fiction. But far from giving up her day job, Yanagihara took on a bigger one, as editor-in-chief of T, the New York Times style magazine. Continue reading... |
| How to learn the trick of confidence Posted: 09 Jan 2022 01:00 AM PST Can 'confidence-whisperer' Nate Zinsser help Jamie Waters boost his wavering self-belief? Dr Nate Zinsser, a top US army psychologist renowned for helping lieutenants and officers build their confidence, is giving me a talking-to. We've been discussing highly disciplined writers who sit at their desks at 9am each day, no matter the circumstances, and assertively punch out stories. "I definitely don't do that," I say, remarking that I envy their confidence to sit and deliver. An aggressive perfectionist streak combined with niggling impostor syndrome insecurities mean I need conditions to be just-so in order to have faith that I'll produce anything decent. Zinsser blanches. "The statement 'I don't do that' is a decision you're making about yourself," he says, speaking over video call from his office at the US Military Academy in upstate New York; behind him there's a whiteboard, ornamental Japanese swords and photos of athletes he's counselled, including the Olympic-medal-winning US men's bobsled team. "A constructive shift in your thinking would be the idea that, 'Whether or not I got the right amount of sleep the night before or had a good breakfast, once 9 o'clock strikes, I am at my desk, lights on, ready to go – and I'm producing good stuff,'" he says. "That's a belief about yourself that you can de-li-be-rate-ly cultivate," he adds, stretching out each syllable in "deliberately" so there can be no question that in this matter, as in all self-confidence-related issues, change lies with me. Continue reading... |
| ‘It’s a huge political albatross’: Guantánamo Bay, 20 years on Posted: 09 Jan 2022 02:00 AM PST The US-run enclave has proved hard to dismantle over two decades, a legal anomaly and lead weight wrapped around America's global reputation On 4 January 2002, Brig Gen Michael Lehnert received an urgent deployment order. He would take a small force of marines and sailors and build a prison camp in the US-run military enclave on Cuba's south coast, Guantánamo Bay. Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane-load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was named Camp X-Ray. Continue reading... |
| Helen Mirren: is the Israeli icon Golda Meir a role too far for the dame who does it all? Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:00 AM PST She has played the Queen and a gangster's moll but her latest casting has sparked controversy Nobody is quite what they seem. And actors? Well, for actors that's the job. Dame Helen Mirren, as well as being herself for 76 years, has by now notably been Lady Macbeth, a London gangster's moll, a thief's wife, an alcoholic cop, an action hero, Prospero and also a British monarch at least four times. Now she takes on Golda Meir, the late prime minister of Israel, in a new biopic, and the casting has caused controversy. The choice of a non-Jewish actor to star as a woman with such a prominent place in the history of Israel has prompted irritation on both sides of the argument. Another illustrious dame, Maureen Lipman, was first to raise the issue – or "blast" Mirren, according to some reports last week – and then Dame Esther Rantzen defended the director's choice. It is the latest instance of a 'Jewface' row, a backlash to the assignment of a major Jewish role to someone not from that minority background. Continue reading... |
| Is the US really heading for a second civil war? Posted: 08 Jan 2022 11:00 PM PST With the country polarised and Republicans embracing authoritarianism, some experts fear a Northern Ireland-style insurgency but others say armed conflict remains improbable Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy. "At this moment, we must decide," Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. "What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?" Continue reading... |
| Mystery of the second world war ‘trophy’ and the Royal Court founder Posted: 09 Jan 2022 03:15 AM PST When George Devine's family discovered a Japanese battle flag among his belongings, it led to a three-year quest for answers "I am not a man for soldiering, although I do tolerably well at it in a very minor role. But there is nothing about it that pleases me, and much that offends … It is a corrupter of morals in the widest sense and a gross waste of man's time and effort." These words were written by George Devine, the actor and founding artistic director of the Royal Court theatre, in a letter to his wife from Burma, where he served in the second world war. The views he expressed reflected what his family – and many in the arts world – regarded as his essential humanity and compassion. Continue reading... |
| Do smart supermarkets herald the end of shopping as we know it? Posted: 08 Jan 2022 11:00 PM PST A new breed of supermarkets means the days of queues, checkouts and shoplifting are numbered. But what else will we lose when no-transaction shopping becomes the norm? Welcome to the supermarkets of the future. They may look and feel like the supermarkets we are all used to – and stock the same bread, butter and bananas – but these shops are now fitted out with more than £1m of the latest technology that their bosses promise will put an end to our biggest frustration (queueing) and our most persistent crime (shoplifting). Jill French, a legal secretary in her 30s, wearing a sharp navy suit and matching beret, has just left a Tesco Express on London's Holborn Viaduct empty-handed. It's coming up to 6.30pm on a Thursday and, like dozens of others, French has popped in for a few essentials on her way home. "I just went in to grab pasta, milk and some broccoli," she says. "But there was such a queue I got frustrated and walked out." Continue reading... |
| PEN prize-winning Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija illegally detained and tortured Posted: 09 Jan 2022 12:30 AM PST The author is being held after tweets criticising President Yoweri Museveni and his son Ugandan satirical novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, who was named International Writer of Courage by PEN last year, has been illegally detained and tortured for criticising the president and his son, his lawyer said. Gunmen came to the writer's house on 28 December after a series of tweets about the country's president, Yoweri Museveni, including one calling him a thief and his son and presumed successor "an incompetent pig-headed curmudgeon". Continue reading... |
| Posted: 09 Jan 2022 04:00 AM PST Four leading American authors assess the Covid-battered first year of Joe Biden's presidency Richard Ford is a novelist and short story writer best known for his quartet of novels featuring the protagonist Frank Bascombe, a failed sportswriter turned novelist, which includes The Sportswriter, Independence Day and the Pulitzer prize-winning The Lay of the Land. Ford's acclaimed memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, was published in 2017 and the following year his 1990 novel, Wildlife, was made into a widely praised film starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. His most recent short story collection is Sorry for Your Trouble Continue reading... |
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