World news | The Guardian

Electric Ballroom, London

The democratically elected leader faces years in jail if she is found guilty on charges that also include corruption, fraud and breaking Covid rulesOusted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi is braced to hear the verdict in her trial for incitement against the country’s military rulers, the first in a catalogue of cases that could see her jailed for the rest of her life.The Nobel laureate has been detained since the generals ousted her democratically elected government on 1 February, and she is expected to find out about her sentence on Tuesday. Continue reading...

A poor harvest season and booming demand has prompted Quebec’s syrup ‘cartel’ to release around 22,000 tonnes of the luscious liquidMaple syrup producers have been forced to raid the world’s only stockpile of the highly valued sweet treat, as surging worldwide demand combined with an unusually short harvest season in 2021.The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, sometimes referred to as the “Opec of maple syrup”, has released about 22m kilograms of syrup from its strategic reserve to cover a shortfall driven by a short and warm spring in 2021, Canada’s NPR reported. Continue reading...

Regulator to investigate Fashion for Relief after charity for young Londoners says promised sum never paidA charity whose patron is the mayor of London says the fashion charity founded by the supermodel Naomi Campbell owes it tens of thousands of pounds.The Mayor’s Fund for London, whose figurehead is the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, says it is owed £50,000 from a pop-up shop created by Campbell’s Fashion for Relief two years ago to raise money for the mayor’s causes.This article was updated on 27 November to include a statement from Fashion for Relief Continue reading...

The federal project offers women up to $5,000 to help escape violence, but workers say getting the money is too onerous and complexVulnerable women attempting to escape domestic violence are being offered “false hope” by a government program that potentially could be putting them at greater risk, frontline service workers say.The two-year $145m escaping violence payment trial was billed as a one-off payment of up to $5,000 to “help women establish a life free of violence”. It was announced as part of the government’s “landmark $1.1bn women’s safety package” in the May budget. Continue reading...

The names and stories of 10 people who died in the Channel, including a mother and her three childrenAccording to his friends, Harem Pirot was an excellent swimmer. In the summer of 2019 he and a neighbour Anas Muhammad set off from their home in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Ranya to nearby Lake Dukan, a popular picnic and boating spot.“Harem was a really good person. He could swim well in deep water,” Anas said yesterday. “Our families knew each other well. A great guy. He was 25.” Continue reading...

Masks made mandatory in shops and on buses and trains. New arrivals must take PCR tests

Spike in drug use has caused problems across Tongan society, with arrests doubling in two years and children severely affectedAfter more than four decades spent living in New Zealand, Ned Cook knew it was time to return to his home country of Tonga.His country was in the grip of a methamphetamine epidemic that was ripping families apart and overrunning the country’s hospitals and jails. Cook, a trained drug and alcohol abuse counsellor, with a history of drug abuse himself, had been preparing for years to return to Tonga to combat it. Continue reading...

In a taste of things to come, a secret Office of National Assessment report worried the ‘carbon dioxide problem’ would hurt the nation’s coal industryThe report was stamped CONFIDENTIAL twice on each page, with the customary warning it should “not be released to any other government except Britain, Canada, NZ and US”.About 40 years ago this week, the spooks at Australia’s intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), delivered the 17-page report to prime minister Malcolm Fraser. Continue reading...

Contrary to claims of failed responsibility of Indigenous parents, we in fact are calling for greater responsibility. We want to change this country for the betterAs I write this article, my children are stealing cars and robbing houses, I suppose. I am an Indigenous father – so, doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about me as a parent, and about my children’s capacity to understand right from wrong?I know you sense the sarcasm in this. Well, a great, great majority of Australians would. But there is a certain type of person I am implicating here. The type who have an ignorance so deeply ingrained, that it is a wonder they haven’t wandered off into the dark recesses of our colonial history and followed each other off the edge of a cliff. Shouldn’t they be extinct?Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. Continue reading...

Hedayat Osyun’s construction company is the kind of social enterprise he would have benefited from when he came to Australia to flee the Taliban

Among the makeshift tents near the French beaches, we ask what drives people to make the perilous journey in small boats and what could prevent more deathsThere was a time when, if you googled the phrase “Dunkirk, small boats”, reports of one of Britain’s finest hours would stack up in the results. Not last week. The beaches near Dunkirk have now become synonymous not with the embarkation point of dramatic rescue but of despairing tragedy.Details of the 27 people, among them seven women and three children, who drowned in the Channel on Wednesday have been very slow to emerge, their anonymity itself an indication of their desperation. The first to be named was a Kurdish woman from northern Iraq, Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, a newly engaged student, who was WhatsApp messaging her fiance, who lives in the UK, when the group’s dinghy started deflating. The 24-year-old had travelled through Germany and France to join Mohammed Karzan in the UK, paying people smugglers thousands of euros to get across the Channel in the absence of other possible routes. Karzan said that he had been in continuous contact with his fiancee and was tracking her GPS coordinates. “After four hours and 18 minutes from the moment she went into that boat,” he said, “then I lost her.” Continue reading...

So often in debates about asylum, statistics are used out of context to back up a politically motivated point, or as fuel in the government’s culture war against asylum seekers. Here are the key statistics about the UK’s asylum system in context13,210. The number of people the UK granted protection to via asylum or resettlement routes in the year to September 2021 This is significantly lower than before the pandemic hit in March 2020.64%. The proportion of initial asylum applications that were successful in the year ending September 2021. This rate has increased in recent years. In addition, almost half of unsuccessful applications are granted on appeal.17th. The UK’s ranking against EU countries in terms of the number of asylum applications it gets, adjusted for population. The UK’s asylum application per capita rate is almost half the EU average. Germany received 122,015 asylum applications in the year ending March 2021; France, 93,475.37,562. The number of asylum applications in the UK in the year ending September 2021. This is 18% higher than last year, which saw a dip as a result of the pandemic, and less than half the peak of 84,312 that was seen in the early 2000s.25,700. The number of people who have arrived in the UK so far this year after making the dangerous Channel crossing in small boats. This is three times the total number who arrived via this route in 2020.83,733. The number of people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum application at the end of September 2021. Delays in the asylum system have increased rapidly since 2018: this is 41% higher than a year ago.86%. The proportion of refugees worldwide who live in low-income countries neighbouring their country of origin. A very small proportion choose to travel to Europe. The UK is home to just 1% of the 26.4 million refugees who have been forcibly displaced from their home country across the world. Around half of the world’s refugees are under the age of 18.£39.63. The amount that people seeking asylum get per week to subsist on in the UK. In France, it’s £42.84, and in Germany £65.63. In Germany, they are allowed to work 3 months from making their applications, in France it’s 6 months. In the UK they’re not allowed to work at all regardless of how long it takes for their application to be processed. Continue reading...

Travellers to UK must take PCR tests and masks to be made mandatory in shops and on public transport

Chris Riddell on the drowning of refugees trying to reach Britain• You can order your own copy of this cartoon Continue reading...

Statement says Chinese player’s responses to chief of sport body were ‘clearly’ influenced by othersThe Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has said it remains “deeply concerned” about the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, weeks after she disappeared following her allegations against a high-ranking Chinese former politician.The WTA said in an email statement on Saturday that its chief executive, Steve Simon, had attempted to contact Peng through “various communication channels” including two emails. It said it was concerned about her welfare and ability to communicate freely and that her responses were “clearly” influenced by others. Continue reading...

The first cases of the new B.1.1.529 Covid variant have been identified in the UK. Two people found to be infected with the Omicron variant are self-isolating, according to the health secretary, Sajid Javid

Details from 50 newly released letters echo scenes between Winston and Julia in the dystopian novelThe feeling of longing for a lost love can be powerful, and George Orwell makes full use of it in his work. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his great dystopian novel, the hero Winston Smith’s memories of walks taken with Julia, the woman he can never have, give the story its humanity.Now a stash of largely unseen private correspondence, handed over to an academic archive on Friday by the author’s son, reveal just how large a role romantic nostalgia played in Orwell’s own life. The contents are also proof that the writer was an unlikely but enthusiastic ice-skater. Continue reading...

While working on a book about missing persons, Francisco Garcia received a message that turned his life upside down. Here he reflects on love, loss and the enduring promise of reunionDespite the cold, it had been a decent day. Late March is sometimes like that in London. More winter than spring, the grass often still frozen half solid underfoot. It’s rarely a time that speaks too loudly of renewal. This year wasn’t any different, as far as I can remember. The occasion that afternoon was a friend’s 30th birthday party, if that’s what you’d call a few faintly desultory beers in a barren Peckham Rye Park.Back at home, my partner and I had settled down to watch a florid period drama. About half an hour in, that’s when it happened: the moment my life changed. My phone lit up with an unfamiliar name on Facebook Messenger. “Hello Francisco, this might be a shock. It’s your father’s family in Spain. Twenty years may have passed, but we have always remembered you.” Continue reading...

Second walkout on London Underground in two days amid dispute over night-time drivers’ rotaPlans to restart night tube services on London Underground will be disrupted by strike action on Saturday.Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union will walk out at 8.30pm on the Victoria and Central lines, over a continuing dispute over the drivers’ rota for night services.8.30pm 27 November –4.29am 28 November Central and Victoria.8.30pm 3 December – 4.29am 4 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 4 December – 4.29am 5 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 10 December – 4.29am 11 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 11 December – 4.29am 12 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 17 December – 4.29am 18 December Central and Victoria.4.30am 18 December – 4.29am 19 December Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria. Continue reading...

The African American artist has been making powerful, political work since the late 70s. As a new exhibition in Edinburgh shows, she still has plenty to sayHowardena Pindell’s art can seem as if it were made by two separate people. There are the huge canvases where stencilled dots or tiny, hole-punched discs of paper amass like drifts of leaves, which she began making while working as MoMA’s first African American curator in 1970s New York. And then there’s the work that has challenged social injustice with a gut-punch directness since the 80s.It is clear, though, speaking with the 78-year-old ahead of her first UK solo exhibition in a public gallery, that her swirling abstract constellations are not entirely devoid of politics. As a young curator, she’d seen artists with museum day jobs give up their creative lives. Not her. She found time for painting because “the racism [at MoMA at the time] meant I was left out of certain activities. I loved being an artist and I had the stamina to work at night.” Continue reading...

From the Super Bowl to groundbreaking cinema: we jump down the rabbit hole, via a detour to Britney SpearsA new documentary, Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, has revisited the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, when Justin Timberlake exposed one of Janet Jackson’s breasts – and nipple adornment – for about a half a second, causing America to lose its collective mind in a manner that was unfathomable then and remains unfathomable now. Continue reading...

Two people have died after being hit by falling trees as Storm Arwen brought winds of almost 100mph to parts of the UK overnight. The extreme conditions led to the closure of roads and forced planes to abort landing

The state’s policy of ‘Massive Resistance’ exemplifies the incendiary combination of race and education in the USNot long after Patricia Turner and a handful of Black students desegregated Norview junior high school in Norfolk, Virginia, she realized a big difference between her new white school and her former Black school. That February of 1959, she didn’t have to wear a coat in class to stay warm, because Norview was heated.She hadn’t noticed the difference earlier because of the steady volley of racism directed at her, Turner said. A teacher put her papers in a separate box and returned them wearing rubber gloves. (He later wrote her an apology letter.) And her fellow students spat on her.A crowd gathers for an NAACP rally in May 1961 at the Prince Edward county courthouse in Farmville, Virginia, marking the seventh anniversary of the supreme court’s school desegregation ruling. Continue reading...

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