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Prof Sir Andrew Pollard cautiously optimistic that widely vaccinated population will avoid serious disease

Despite being a child actor and having her own sitcom at 12, the star of Transparent and new film C’mon C’mon is happiest out of the spotlightThere were only a few occasions when the famed self-portraiture artist Cindy Sherman took photos of someone else and, at just five years old, Gaby Hoffmann became one of them. In the portrait, Hoffmann remembers with a knowing snort, she was dressed as the devil. Posing for one of the world’s most famous photographers was no fluke: Sherman was Hoffmann’s stepmother (she married Hoffmann’s older sister’s father), and as a child Hoffmann would regularly run riot in her studio, throwing on costumes and playing with props. “Then when I was a teenager I lived with Cindy, and when Halloween came that’s where I would go to dress up. My kids now enjoy it. It’s a family resource!”This might sound like a less than conventional way to get your hands on a costume come 31 October, but such a life was pretty normal for Hoffmann. Growing up in Manhattan’s bohemian Chelsea Hotel – also home to Patti Smith, Nico and Jackson Pollock – she was the daughter of Andy Warhol muse and actor Viva, who was on the phone to the artist when he was shot by Valerie Solanas. Family friends included Gore Vidal. That Hoffmann started appearing in television adverts at the age of four to help pay the rent is perhaps one of the least fascinating things about her early years. Continue reading...

It was the day after the London Bridge atrocity that the writer discovered she knew the man responsible. Two years later, she reflects on that time and the fallout that followedIt wasn’t until the morning after the terror attack at Fishmongers’ Hall, London, in 2019, that Preti Taneja realised she knew the perpetrator. Her partner read out his name from a news report over breakfast: Usman Khan. The 28-year-old had taken the creative writing course she led in HMP Whitemoor, a high-security category A prison, two years earlier. The report said he had been shot dead by police, after stabbing five people, two fatally.Khan had been an enthusiastic student, keen to show off his literary knowledge as well as his writing. When he was released in December 2018, he was encouraged to continue working with the prison education programme Learning Together, which brings students into prisons to learn alongside people who are incarcerated. Continue reading...

Listeners have disappeared after militants restricted music, romantic serials, phone-ins, female journalists and newsThe romantic serials have gone after the Taliban warned against racy content, the popular women’s call-in shows were axed after the militants said they didn’t want female journalists on air, and news investigations were cancelled after officials demanded oversight before anything was broadcast.So perhaps unsurprisingly, most people who used to tune into Radio Sanga, once one of the most popular stations in southern Afghanistan, have turned off. Continue reading...

Relatives await news on 10 men whose phones have gone silent and a map pin that remains stubbornly stuck halfway between Britain and FranceVery little is known about the 27 people who drowned trying to cross the Channel in an inflatable boat on Wednesday, other than that many are thought to have come from northern Iraq.In the Kurdish village of Ranya, families had been waiting for days for news from loved ones they knew were planning to attempt the perilous crossing on Wednesday, but whose phones had gone silent. Some hoped their sons, brothers, daughters and sisters had made it across the Channel and were now in detention centres in the UK. Others feared the worst. Continue reading...

An ‘extraordinary’ campaign is credited for Palazzo Adriano’s stellar uptake – even if topping 100% is a statistical quirkWhile European governments weigh up new mandates and measures to boost the uptake of Covid jabs there is on the slopes of Sicily’s Monte delle Rose a village with a vaccination rate that defies mathematics: 104%.The figure is in part a statistical quirk – vaccine rates are calculated by Italian health authorities on a town or village’s official population and can in theory rise above 100% if enough non-residents are jabbed there – but Palazzo Adriano, where the Oscar-winning movie Cinema Paradiso was filmed, is by any standards a well-vaccinated community. A good portion of the population has already taken or booked a third dose and since vaccines were first available it utilised its close-knit relations to protect its people. Continue reading...

From Line of Duty to Mare of Easttown, a new generation of performers are breaking through. Meet the actors, models and presenters leading a revolution in representationIn the middle of last winter’s lockdown, while still adjusting to the news of their newborn son’s Down’s syndrome diagnosis, Matt and Charlotte Court spotted a casting ad from BBC Drama. It called for a baby to star in a Call the Midwife episode depicting the surprising yet joyful arrival of a child with Down’s syndrome in 60s London, when institutionalisation remained horribly common. The resulting shoot would prove a deeply cathartic experience for the young family. “Before that point, I had shut off certain doors for baby Nate in my mind through a lack of knowledge,” Matt remembers. “To then have that opportunity opened my eyes. If he can act one day, which is bloody difficult, then he’s got a fighting chance. He was reborn for us on that TV programme.”It’s a fitting metaphor for the larger shift in Down’s syndrome visibility over the past few years. While Call the Midwife has featured a number of disability-focused plotlines in its nearly decade-long run – actor Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome, is a series regular – the history of the condition’s representation on screen is one largely defined by absence. Continue reading...

Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman details the shock and humiliation of the scandal that sank her marriage, and a presidential campaignHuma Abedin hadn’t been working in the White House long when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Although she would eventually become like a second daughter to Hillary and Bill Clinton – most visibly as the former’s right-hand woman during the 2016 presidential election campaign – she was then just a distant junior aide to the first lady. Perhaps that explains why, as she writes in her new memoir, she initially assumed the rumours couldn’t possibly be true. Everyone in politics was young and starry-eyed once.Unusually, however, Abedin seems to have stayed that way. Even when the president actually confesses to the affair she was sure hadn’t happened, she resolves sternly to “put my judgments and emotions aside” and focus on the bigger picture. Hadn’t she been taught as a child that “slander, gossip and exploiting people’s personal weaknesses are among the worst forms of conduct for any Muslim”? Continue reading...

Dozens of SES flood rescues as flooding forecast in Singleton and Maitland

During the final funeral service Lee Soon-ja says sorry for the pains suffered during her husband’s reignThe widow of South Korea’s last military dictator has issued a brief apology over the “pains and scars” caused by her husband’s brutal rule as dozens of relatives and former aides gathered at a Seoul hospital to pay their final respects to Chun Doo-hwan.Chun, who took power in a 1979 coup and violently crushed pro-democracy protests a year later before being jailed for treason in the 1990s, died at his Seoul home Tuesday at the age of 90. Continue reading...

The farmers, mostly women, once grew enough but must now buy imported rice as the climate crisis edges them into povertyIn the sweltering heat of the late-morning west African sun, Aminata Jamba slashes at golden rice stalks with a sickle. “The rice is lovely,” she says, music playing in the background as her son, Sampa, silently harvests the grain. But even if the quality is high, the quantity is not.While once Jamba could have expected to harvest enough rice to last the whole year, this year she reckons it will last three to four months. After that, she will have to look elsewhere for a way to feed her family and make enough money to live. Continue reading...

Travellers to tiny islands in Vanuatu claim to fulfil a local belief that a mysterious figure from afar will one day bring prosperity. What are they hoping for?In life, Claude-Philippe Berger styled himself the “traditional king of Tanna”, an island of 30,000 people in Vanuatu. Berger, who was born in 1953 in Casablanca and claimed to have once been a diplomat, first visited the islands in 2011, in hope of veneration. What he found was a South Pacific of the imagination: champagne-coloured beaches, rose sunsets, the rumble of volcanoes. Yet Vanuatu is also threatened by a rising tide, and cyclones regularly hit its scarce infrastructure and fragile agrarian economy.Later, living in Nice as a supposed king in exile, Berger adopted the studied lifestyle of an obscure European royal: swathed in a blue sash and medals, he could be found cutting ribbons at provincial art exhibitions, or hosting boozy soirees in San Remo, where he and his “royal house” would engage in energetic lobbying of Ni-Vanuatu politicians to have his island throne restored. Continue reading...

Australians attempting to return from nine African nations to be subject to hotel quarantine

Carrying it under my chin like a teenager, I’m convinced I can use it, watch TV and cook dinner all at once. I can’t …Three years ago, I bought a laptop, days before flying to America, because the old iPad I had long used for working away from home had just died.Compared with the other technology in my life, this laptop was like something from the future. I’m not an early adopter. After my phone was stolen on a train, I went in search of the least-desirable model available for purchase: reconditioned, obsolete, unrecommended. Continue reading...

Alizée, 25, advertising account manager, meets Rhys, 34, chefAlizée on RhysWhat were you hoping for?

Weekly meetings of ministers chaired by Michael Gove expected to lead to new policies on reducing inequalityMichael Gove is chairing a new weekly cabinet committee on levelling up, to bang heads together across Whitehall, as the government battles to repair the political damage of the past three weeks and show it is serious about tackling economic inequalities.After a tumultuous period that culminated in the prime minister’s fumbled speech to the CBI on Monday, the forthcoming levelling-up white paper, expected to be published in mid-December, is regarded as a key moment to demonstrate the government’s seriousness. Continue reading...

ECDC follows WHO in threat assessment of new variant; countries bar foreign nationals from several southern African nations; UK sees most new infections for a month

Analysis: Australia knows the horror of deaths at sea – and that turn-backs and offshore processing have huge human costsThe prime ministerial language is starkly reminiscent.In 2013, as asylum seeker boats appeared on Australia’s north and west horizons almost daily, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd said those who were bringing them were “the absolute scum of the earth” and should “rot in hell”. Continue reading...

The badly burnt victims were discovered in a building in Chinatown in Honiara after days of riotingThe bodies of three people have been discovered in a burnt-out building in the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara, the first reported deaths after days of rioting.The charred bodies were discovered in a store in the Chinatown district of Honiara, police said on Saturday. Continue reading...

Channel Seven reporter says his failure to listen to Adele’s album was a ‘terrible mistake’Australian TV reporter Matt Doran has made a lengthy, unreserved apology to Adele for failing to listen to her new album before an exclusive interview with the singer, calling the bungle a “terrible mistake”.Doran made international headlines this week for his interview with the singer, which was canned after he conceded he had only heard one track from her latest work, 30. Sony is refusing to release the footage. Continue reading...

Remains found inside an underground structure were tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the faceA team of experts has found a mummy estimated to be at least 800 years old on Peru’s central coast, one of the archaeologists who participated in the excavation said.The mummified remains were of a person from the culture that developed between the coast and mountains of the South American country. The mummy, whose gender was not identified, was discovered in the Lima region, said archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna on Friday. Continue reading...

The American composer and lyricist, who has died aged 91, shaped the musical artform with his wise, witty and extravagantly clever workStephen Sondheim achieved such acclaim – for deepening the content and extending the lyrical ingenuity of musical theatre – that, from the age of 50, each major birthday was celebrated with tribute concerts in London, New York or both.Watching the composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd and Follies at such events – taking a bow, with his wry smile – it was impossible not to reflect on our luck in coinciding with the life of someone who would clearly stand in the history of the genre alongside such geniuses as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein. Continue reading...

The supreme lyricist and composer has died aged 91. In a piece first published to mark his 9oth birthday, Jake Gyllenhaal, Patti LuPone, Chita Rivera, Nathan Lane and many more celebrate the man and his musicalsDuring the previews of Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway, I was struggling with the song Color and Light. Steve asked me to come to his home. He was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and said: “Sorry I didn’t dress up for you!” There had been some discussion about me painting each dot of colour with a different brush. I was confused but he was like: “I don’t care how many fucking brushes you use, just paint on rhythm. Each thought is the colour.” Continue reading...

Scoring his first big hit with West Side Story at 27, the US composer and lyricist raised the art form’s status with moving and funny masterpieces including Follies and Company‘His songs are like a fabulous steak’: an all-star toast to SondheimStephen Sondheim, the master craftsman of the American musical, has died at the age of 91. His death, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on Friday has prompted tributes throughout the entertainment industry and beyond. Andrew Lloyd Webber called him “the musical theatre giant of our times, an inspiration not just to two but to three generations [whose] contribution to theatre will never be equalled”. Cameron Mackintosh said: “The theatre has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky. But the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim will still be here as his legendary songs and shows will be performed for evermore.”Over the course of a celebrated career spanning more than 60 years, Sondheim co-created Broadway theatre classics such as West Side Story, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, all of which also became hit movies. His intricate and dazzlingly clever songs pushed the boundaries of the art form and he made moving and funny masterpieces from unlikely subject matters, including a murderous barber (Sweeney Todd), the Roman comedies of Plautus (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park With George). Continue reading...

Experts stress importance of delaying import of new Covid variant to UK to avoid Christmas mixing

The proposed law has implications for multiple areas of public life but may not overcome some constitutional issues

Experts say demand for wellness and calming products for animal companions have surged since Australia’s restrictions lifted

Responding to Labor criticism, Col Murray says his time in construction and local government prepared him for role

Scientists have carefully collected spawn bundles by moonlight in a bid to help save the reefIt’s nearing 10pm, and Dr Kate Quigley is still waiting. Using red lights to minimise disruption to the animals’ behaviour, she is inspecting corals.Quigley, who studies reef restoration at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, is looking for “little red dots all over the surface”. A pimply appearance is a hallmark sign that a coral is about to spawn, releasing sperm and eggs in bundles resembling small bubbles. Continue reading...

Company says it will know in two weeks whether current Pfizer jab is effective against Omicron variant

Shocked mourners leave flowers and cards near scene where 12-year-old was stabbed on Thursday nightThe news of 12-year-old Ava White’s death spread slowly across Liverpool on Friday morning. Christmas shoppers, unaware of her killing, came into the city centre to be greeted by police cordons closing off much of Church Street and surrounding areas where the stabbing took place on Thursday night.“She was everyone’s baby. It could have been anyone’s child,” said 51-year-old Hayley Hughes, who came to pay her respects at a small flower memorial near the crime scene. Hughes said that, while she had heard of stabbings in Liverpool before, she did not expect something like this to happen in the city centre to such a young child. “She only came in to see the lights switched on,” she said. Continue reading...

Travel, aviation and oil stocks around world badly hit as worries deepen over effect of fresh Covid wave on global economy

Latest updates: Macron slams Boris Johnson for trying to negotiate with him via Twitter as it cancels talks with UK officials over Channel crossings

Ali, 28, left his home in Iran to escape religious persecution. After being denied asylum in France, he made the decision to cross the Channel in a dinghy. He told the Guardian's Today in Focus podcast about his experience making the perilous crossing twice, in search of a better life

Footage purporting to show Abiy Ahmed on the battlefront of the country’s year-long war against Tigray forces has been broadcast, four days after he announced he would direct the army from there. Wearing military uniform, Abiy said: 'The enemy doesn't know our capabilities and our preparations ... instead of sitting in Addis, we made a change and decided to come to the front'

Volodymyr Zelenskiy says there is evidence of ‘coup d’état’ being planned for early DecemberUkraine’s president has said intelligence services uncovered a plot involving a group of Russians and Ukrainians to overthrow his government next week.Speaking at an hours-long press conference, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian intelligence had obtained audio recordings of the plotters discussing their plans, which he said involved tying to enlist the support of Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. Continue reading...

Abiy Ahmed claims in the footage that the war was ‘being conducted with a high level of success’A state-affiliated Ethiopian TV channel has broadcast footage purporting to show the country’s Nobel peace prize-winning prime minister on the battlefront of the country’s year-long war against Tigray forces, four days after he announced he would direct the army from there.Wearing military uniform, Abiy Ahmed claimed in the footage that the war was “being conducted with a high level of success” and referred to locations on the border between the country’s Amhara and Afar regions, which neighbour Tigray. Continue reading...

Investigators believe blaze at Michelin-starred pub in North Yorkshire was started deliberatelyA fire that reduced a Michelin-starred restaurant in North Yorkshire to “ashes” is being treated as arson.Investigators believe the blaze at the thatched, 14th-century Star Inn at Harome on the edge of the North York Moors was started deliberately on Wednesday evening. Continue reading...

Six southern African countries added to list and temporary flight ban in place owing to new Covid-19 variant

Artist says it is ‘astounding’ that women can show any part of their body except nipplesFrom her infamous corset bodysuit with conical bra cups to her bondage-inspired outfits at the Met Gala and MTV video music awards, Madonna has never been shy of causing a stir with her looks. But now, the international superstar has come up against an unlikely and powerful foe: Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire.On Thursday, the singer criticised Instagram for taking down photographs in which her nipple was exposed, telling her 17 million followers she is grateful she maintained her sanity “through four decades of censorship … sexism … ageism and misogyny”. Continue reading...

‘Symbolic’ protests do not halt traffic but are intended as warning shot in post-Brexit fishing licences rowFrench fishing crews mounted “symbolic” protests at the Channel tunnel and three ports in northern France in a day of action against the British government over the ongoing dispute about access of French boats in the Channel.The fishers lit red flares as they started their protest on Friday at the port of Saint-Malo before moving on to Calais and the Channel tunnel in the afternoon. Continue reading...

Young people who have made the dangerous journey tell why they have risked all to reach the UK

Fame and adoration could not protect her when she made sexual assault claims against a Chinese officialAfter Peng Shuai and Andrea Sestini Hlaváčková won the doubles final at the 2014 Beijing Open, they went to karaoke to celebrate. The fifth-seeded duo had just beaten India’s Sania Mirza and Zimbabwe’s Cara Black, who had never lost a match in the Asia-Pacific region.“She was at the beginning of her comeback and I was happy to be there to play with her,” Hlaváčková recalls, on the phone from Rome. Their victory called for a night out so they went to a big Beijing nightclub. “She was singing a lot of Chinese songs.” Continue reading...

Review finds both would be vastly expensive, fraught with complexities and take at least 30 years to openBoris Johnson’s proposal for a bridge or tunnel linking Scotland to Northern Ireland has been rejected by a feasibility study as vastly expensive and fraught with potential difficulties.Released alongside a wider so-called union connectivity review, which called for investment in road, rail and domestic aviation to better connect the four UK nations, the fixed link report found either a bridge or tunnel would be at the very edge of what could be achieved with current technology. Continue reading...

After Glasgow, there is a clamour for fashion companies to increase their commitment to sustainability and supply chain transparency – and for legislation to hold them to their promisesAt the Cop26 conference, high-profile British brands including Stella McCartney, Burberry and Mulberry presented their visions for an ethical, sustainable industry. Now, there is an increasing demand for all fashion companies to make legally binding commitments to address the impact their supply chains have on the environment. While hundreds of companies – including Gucci-owner Kering, H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara – have signed up to the UN’s Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, which sets science-based targets in line with the Paris agreement, there is no obligation to take part, nor a legal mandate to hold brands to account.Leading industry figures say that if fashion brands are to have any chance of having a meaningful impact on the climate crisis, legislation is needed. Continue reading...

Educational leaders in England reveal run-ins with parents and souring relations with staff

There’s more to good sex than complicated positions or wild lust. The authors of a groundbreaking study explain what really makes it greatFar from what films and TV shows might tell us, truly magnificent sex has very little to do with daring feats of seduction or screaming orgasms. In fact, according to the latest research, erotic intimacy is more a state of mind than a physical act.In a recent study, Magnificent Sex, psychologist and sex therapist Dr Peggy J Kleinplatz and her colleagues at Ottawa University in Canada realised that, while whole library sections were dedicated to bad sex (and how to make it better), there was almost no literature dedicated to great sex. What did it feel like? Who was having it? And what made it so great? Continue reading...

From winning dance competitions to confronting Nazis, black veterans of the 70s soul all-nighters share their stories – and counter the idea that the movement was exclusively whiteIn the run-up to Christmas in 1977, viewers of Granada TV were offered a glimpse inside a little-understood world. The documentary maker Tony Palmer had ventured inside the Wigan Casino, the centre of the northern soul scene, to shoot a 30-minute film called This England.Palmer didn’t know anything about the club, the scene or the music when he arrived in Wigan – but over the course of a couple of nights he captured famous footage of a northern soul all-nighter in full swing. There’s the crush at the front door as a lone doorman tries in vain to instil some sense of order; the gravity-defying spins and splits that lit up the dancefloor; the interviews with the fans who articulate their obsession with obscure soul records in thick Lancastrian accents. It’s all punctuated by thousand-yard stares from amphetamine-fuelled punters – you can almost smell the Brut aftershave and sweat. Continue reading...