Billionaire PayPal co-founder is planning a luxury home on 190-hectare property on shores of Lake WanakaBillionaire Peter Thiel is facing opposition from New Zealand environmental groups over his plans to build a luxury lodge in Wānaka, an alpine town on the South Island.A company owned by Thiel had lodged a consent application for a sprawling lodge on his property, which would include a “pod” for the owner himself, water features and meditation space. The consent describes “a series of stand-alone buildings, including a lodge for visitor accommodation for up to 24 guests, accommodation pod for the owner, together with associated lodge management buildings, infrastructure, landscape treatment, water features and meditation space”. The earthworks required to build it would cover over 73,700m² of land. Continue reading...
Footage shows newlyweds squeezed inside the pot while two men and a photographer paddle them down a flooded street in KeralaAn Indian couple have arrived for their wedding in unusual style after sailing through the flooded streets of their town in a cooking pot after heavy rains wrecked havoc in the southern state of Kerala.Footage shared across social media showed the newlyweds squeezed inside the aluminium vessel while two men and a photographer paddled the pair down a submerged street. Continue reading...
by Rebecca Ratcliffe South-east Asia correspondent on (#5QVYD)
Presidential vote is likely to be referendum on the kind of governance the public wants after almost six years of Rodrigo Duterte in powerA dictator’s son, an actor-turned-mayor, and a champion boxer: an eclectic mix of personalities declared this month that they would compete to become the Philippine’s next president.More than 60 million Filipinos will go to the polls to decide who should replace the populist leader Rodrigo Duterte, who is nearing the end of his six-year term limit. Continue reading...
Tuesday: The former US secretary of state Colin Powell has died from complications of Covid. Plus: jeans myths bustedGood morning. Tributes have been paid to the former US secretary of state Colin Powell, who has died aged 84. An inquiry has said the destruction of Juukan Gorge was shocking, but not unique. And as millions see the light at the end of the lockdown tunnel in Australia, we’ve got some myth-busting fashion advice.The former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, has died from complications from Covid, aged 84. Powell was America’s first Black secretary of state and played a pivotal role in attempting to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq while serving under George W Bush. He was fully vaccinated against Covid but had a compromised immune system having been treated for blood cancer. Tributes have poured in, including former president Bush, who called Powell “a great public servant ... He was highly respected at home and abroad”, and current president Joe Biden, who hailed him “a dear friend and patriot of unmatched honour and dignity”. Continue reading...
MPs rise to the tragic occasion in tribute to much loved backbencher that brought out many jokes and storiesThere was an empty space on the packed Conservative benches where Sir David Amess used to sit. Which was as it should have been, because he was there in spirit if not in person. Parliamentary sessions where MPs remember colleagues who have died can sometimes feel somewhat formulaic – dutiful, even, with the sense that MPs are rather going through the motions, with their speeches saying as much about themselves as the departed. The farewell to Amess was very different. It was as close to a wake as the House of Commons is likely to see, with every MP doing their best to rise to the occasion. To find the right words that summed up a life and career well lived. And much loved.Amess was one of those politicians who these days often slip beneath the media radar. Someone who throughout his 38 years in Westminster never once looked on becoming an MP as a stepping stone to higher office. If he dreamed of a ministerial career, he kept it extremely well hidden, preferring instead to become the model backbench MP, devoted both to the interests of his constituents and cross-party causes in which he believed. And it was these often undervalued qualities to which his friends and colleagues tried to give voice. Continue reading...
by Jessica Elgot Chief political correspondent on (#5QVF5)
Calls for crackdown on threats to public figures and an end to online anonymityBoris Johnson is facing calls to enact “David’s law” to crack down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity in the wake of the killing of Sir David Amess.Dozens of MPs paid tribute in the House of Commons on Monday to the veteran Conservative backbencher who was stabbed to death on Friday, shedding tears, sharing uproarious anecdotes and venting anger over his death. Continue reading...
Supporters of Morris dismiss forensic findings that police say supports his conviction for the 1999 killingsForensic evidence has been discovered that supports the conviction of a man found guilty of murdering three generations of the same family in south Wales more than 20 years ago, police have claimed.A review of the case of David “Dai” Morris, who was jailed for four murders in the Swansea valley village of Clydach, was launched after his legal team, family members and a television documentary raised doubts about the safety of the conviction. Continue reading...
Julian Reichelt departs after reports that he promoted an employee he had an affair withThe editor of Germany’s biggest tabloid has been relieved of his duties as its publisher faced allegations that it tried to cover up the full findings of an investigation into sexual misconduct and bullying within its own offices.Media giant Axel Springer SE, the largest media publishing firm in Europe, recently expanded its global portfolio by acquiring the US political news website Politico for more than $1bn, inviting closer scrutiny of its workplace culture on the other side of the Atlantic. Continue reading...
Julie Morgan draws attention to the purple plaques being erected around Wales to celebrate women who have made contributions locally, nationally and internationallyI read with interest your editorial (The Guardian view on blue plaques: time to redress the balance, 6 October). Here in Wales we have been making an effort to redress the balance, with a campaign for purple plaques to mark the achievements of remarkable women in Wales.The campaign was launched by a cross-party group of members of the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, in 2017 to commemorate our former colleague and friend, assembly member Val Feld, and is now run by a small group of volunteers. The first purple plaque was erected in 2018 and, after a hiatus during the pandemic, there are now eight purple plaques around Wales celebrating the achievements of women from all walks of life who have made contributions locally, nationally and internationally. Continue reading...
Think hotel quarantine in NSW is over? Not for those of us in the air when Dominic Perrottet made the surprise announcement to reopen to the worldIf ignorance is bliss; in-flight wifi is its antithesis, a curse.I wish I had not turned it on. But on Singapore Airlines free connectivity is a business-class perk and for those not used to the pointy end of the plane, it’s hard to resist.Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning Continue reading...
Boris Johnson led tributes in the Commons on Monday to the late Conservative MP for Southend West, announcing that the Queen had agreed to grant Southend city status. The prime minister said all MPs were in mourning with the family of Sir David Amess, adding: 'We will not allow the manner of Sir David’s death in any way to detract from his accomplishments as a politician or as a human being.' MPs cheered after Johnson announced that Southend would 'be accorded the city status it so clearly deserved'
Fans of the YA After series should find something amid the tangled mess of plot, daytime-soap acting and inanimate passion – everyone else should look awayIf you don’t identify as an Afternator or recognise the hashtag #Hessa, a short explanation is necessary. After is a clutch of bestselling YA romance novels once described as “Fifty Shades of Grey for teens”. US author Anna Todd started writing stories as fan fiction for the boyband One Direction and Harry Styles is the inspiration for broody-eyed bad-boy Hardin Scott; he’s the on-off boyfriend of bookish virginal college student Tessa Young. This film is the stupendously wooden and humourless third in the series. It’s heading straight to Amazon and should come with a warning to viewers: contains extremely boring sex.If you’re new to the franchise, don’t even bother trying. The script works on the basis that everyone watching has read the books, seen the previous movies and bought the T-shirt (sloganned versions available on Etsy: “Mentally dating Hardin Scott”). No attempt whatsoever is made to introduce us to the tedious tangle of relationships. That said, all you need to know about Tessa and Hardin is that they can’t live without each other. Continue reading...
by Jessica Elgot Chief political correspondent on (#5QV6N)
Boris Johnson confirms move three days after death of MP who had long campaigned for Essex town to get city statusSouthend will become a city in honour of Sir David Amess, Boris Johnson has confirmed, paying tribute to the Tory MP who had been a long-time committed campaigner for his area to gain the status.Amess had raised the issue almost weekly in the 38 years he served as a backbench MP before he was killed on Friday. on Monday the prime minister said the Queen had agreed Southend in Essex would be granted city status. Continue reading...
Single-market status has been a boon to firms – but stirring up a trade dispute with the EU may be worth more to Boris JohnsonHere comes the destroyer, as David Frost, the Brexit minister, stomps into talks on the Northern Ireland protocol this week with European commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič. His mission from Boris Johnson is to stir up Brexit trouble, and keep stirring: yes, even at the risk of stirring the darkest shadows of Northern Ireland’s history. Let Brexit never be done if it can keep alive the antagonisms that shot Johnson into No 10.Johnson may miscalculate the public’s appetite for new Eurostrife: “Get Brexit done” worked with many voters who never wanted to hear the word again. But he may be hoping that EU trade wars against the despots of Brussels can distract voters from his pile-up of crises: shortages of HGV drivers and butchers, port blockages, NHS and social care at tipping point, music and arts crippled for lack of EU visas, soaring energy bills. EU noise might help drown out some of the bad news from next week’s austerity budget.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Attacker was armed with bow and arrows but five people who died had in fact been stabbed, police confirmFive people killed in Norway last week were all stabbed to death and not shot with arrows as initially suspected, police have announced.Four women and one man, aged between 52 and 78, were killed on Wednesday in the attack in Kongsberg, a town about 45 miles (70km) west of the capital, Oslo. Continue reading...
With Steven Spielberg’s remake almost out, the 1961 original still feels thrillingly contemporary, a tough act to followIt’s the opening credits that do it right away. Following three eerie whistles over a black screen, West Side Story explodes into a full screen of poster-paint colour – shifting from orange to red to magenta to royal blue – as Leonard Bernstein’s four-minute overture brassily clatters into action. Over the colour, a stark design flourish: seemingly random brigades of parallel vertical black lines, only coalescing at the overture’s end into the tip of Manhattan, viewed from the air, cuing a vertiginous bird’s-eye montage of New York City in motion. That chipper yet chillingly disembodied whistle returns; by the time we finally see a human face, six coolly riveting minutes has passed.This whole title sequence – from the graphics to the aerial photography – was visualised by Saul Bass, the distinctive graphic designer then favoured by such aggressive stylists as Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. It still seems, perhaps even more than anything that follows in West Side Story, sleekly and breath-catchingly modern: a coup of expensive minimalism at the outset of a splashy Hollywood production. That was no accident: in 1961, United Artists set out for the film to be something bracing and new in the movie musical, an industry staple that was looking increasingly out of step with a youth culture turning toward rock’n’roll. Continue reading...
by Aamna Mohdin, Vikram Dodd and Dan Sabbagh on (#5QV4J)
Harbi Ali Kullane, ex-comms director for former PM of Somalia, is said to be in shock after arrest of his son, Ali Harbi AliThe father of the suspect in the inquiry into David Amess’s killing, was a committed anti-extremist who risked his own life trying to thwart hate groups, his friends and colleagues have said.Amess, 69, was stabbed to death on Friday just after midday while holding his constituency surgery in his role as MP for Southend West in an Essex church. A man aged 25 was arrested at the scene and continues to be held in custody. Continue reading...
Roberto Gualtieri has a clear lead over his rival Enrico Michetti of the far-right Brothers of ItalyExit polls in Rome’s mayoral election runoff indicate a clear advantage for the centre-left candidate over a contender from the far-right Brothers of Italy.Roberto Gualtieri, a former economy minister, was leading with between 59% and 63% of the vote shortly after polling stations closed on Monday, ahead of his rival, Enrico Michetti, who had between 37% and 41%. Continue reading...
Two men appear in court in The Hague accused of murder of crime reporter Peter R de Vries in JulyA modified firing pistol believed to have been used to kill the Dutch crime reporter Peter R de Vries was found in the alleged getaway car of the two men on trial for his murder, a court has heard.On the opening day of the suspects’ trial in The Hague, held under high security, prosecutors said witnesses, security camera footage and scientific evidence all pointed to Delano G, 21, being the shooter and Kamiel E, 35, acting as the getaway driver. Continue reading...
From being pelted with stones in Greece to receiving a papal welcome in Rome, the giant girl’s migrant trek from Syria to Manchester provoked powerful responsesIn Greece, far-right protesters threw things at her as she walked through the streets, local councillors voted to ban her from visiting a village of Orthodox monasteries, and protests in Athens meant her route had to be diverted. In France, the mayor of Calais raised objections to her presence.At times, the 8,000km journey across Europe of a 3.5m-tall puppet child refugee highlighted the hostility experienced by refugees who have been travelling along the same route from the Syrian border to the UK for years. Elsewhere, this ambitious theatrical project has triggered the scenes of welcome its artistic directors hoped to inspire when they embarked on this walk in July. Continue reading...
Arnaldo Otegi’s statement before 10th anniversary of end of campaign goes further than previous apologiesA leading leftwing Basque nationalist politician and former Eta member has said the violence the terrorist group used in its quest for independence “should never have happened” and it ought to have laid down its arms far earlier than it did.Speaking as Spain approaches the 10th anniversary of Eta’s decision to abandon the armed campaign, Arnaldo Otegi, the general coordinator of the Basque coalition party EH Bildu, said the pro-independence Basque left would never forget the victims of terrorist violence. Continue reading...
The Oscar winner is a compelling lead in an unconventional drama about an ageing prostitute in the Korean capitalYoun Yuh-jung made history earlier this year by becoming the first Korean to win an acting Oscar, for her role as the bluff, pro-wrestling-loving grandma in the Korean-American drama Minari. But following a long career break after her boundary-pushing 1960s appearances, she had already built up strong previous form playing other unconventional late-life characters back in Asia. In this 2016 drama, her long face and semaphoric blink are put to strong use playing an elderly prostitute in Seoul – she is a “Bacchus lady”, named for the energy drink the ladies pep their clients up with.Youn’s character, So-Young, is at a clinic dealing with an occupational hazard – being diagnosed with gonorrhoea – when her doctor is stabbed by his Filipino lover, who claims he is refusing to pay alimony for their child Min-ho (Choi Hyun-jun). After the woman is arrested, So-Young takes it upon herself to look after the child – communicating with the broken English she learned working as a prostitute on US military bases. After this typically Korean pileup of calamity and farce, The Bacchus Lady subsides into something more reflective and mournful. Youn insists that her vagina is “still young” – but her assignments with johns seem to consist as much of consoling them about their fading years as the sex. Continue reading...
Trial into second charge due to take place this week after death of Emiliano Sala in January 2019A man has admitted a charge relating to the flight in which the Argentinian footballer Emiliano Sala was killed when the plane he was travelling in crashed into the sea off the Channel Islands while en route to the UK from France.David Henderson, 67, was involved in the arrangement of the flight that was bringing 28-year-old Sala from Nantes to Cardiff in January 2019. Continue reading...
Police express ‘serious doubts’ after Jewish symbol absent in images of Gil Ofarim published by German mediaCCTV footage published in the German media appears not to show the Star of David pendant that a Jewish German singer alleged a Leipzig hotel had told him to “put away” before he would be allowed to check in.In an emotional Instagram video post on 5 October, Gil Ofarim claimed that an employee at the Westin hotel in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, had asked him to cover up the symbol of Jewish identity. Continue reading...
Announcement follows junta chief being barred from summit over failure to commit to de-escalationMyanmar’s military has announced plans to release more than 5,000 prisoners, days after the junta chief was blocked from attending an upcoming regional summit over his failure to commit to de-escalating the country’s crisis.A total of 5,600 people arrested or subject to arrest warrants for taking part in anti-coup protests since the military seized power in February would be released, it was announced on state TV on Monday, though it is not clear when they will be freed. Continue reading...
French historians had hoped for outright apology for police attacks on Algerians during peaceful protestFrench historians have accused the president, Emmanuel Macron, of failing to fully admit the state’s responsibility in the police killing of scores of Algerians at peaceful protests 60 years ago.Furthermore, they have called on authorities to make the historical archives fully available for researchers, to allow them to investigate mass killings that even today remain shrouded in official secrecy. Continue reading...
Police investigating suspected murder of boy found fatally hurt at Glasgow rail station arrest 16 year oldA teenager has been arrested in connection with the death of a 14-year-old boy who was found fatally injured at a railway station in Glasgow.Justin McLaughlin was found seriously hurt at High Street station at around 3.45pm on Saturday. He was taken to the city’s Queen Elizabeth University hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later. Continue reading...
You can just imagine the pitch: ‘The vagina candle woman is going to have a frenzy of orgasm chats with stunned couples in crisis. Think of the meme potential!’Have you ever actually read the first edition of Goop? It’s an astonishingly normal 200-word email in which Gwyneth Paltrow explains she doesn’t only eat brown rice and seaweed, as people think she does – she actually eats normal food, just in quite a healthy way, and anyway here’s a recipe for turkey ragu. Looking at it now, it’s like peering at an ancient relic from a civilisation that no longer exists: an amulet preserved from a past version of an internet, where a celebrity could break the shackles of only being represented via film junkets and glossy magazines to reach out and teach people how to make banana nut muffins using whole grain flour; where a gleaming, $250m lifestyle industry could be built from a single moment of honesty. Now look: it makes more financial sense for Paltrow to sell jade rollers and hair serum than be in another Iron Man movie, and we all know what “conscious uncoupling” and “I steam-clean my vagina” mean. What a heady 13 years it has been.Anyway, let’s talk about your orgasms lately. Not been very good, have they? What? Does it make you uncomfortable when I make intense eye contact with you and say “orgasm” like that? While affecting a smirk that can only be described as “defiant”? Well get used to it, buddy. Sex, Love & Goop is an absolute frenzy of them. Continue reading...
What is it like to go without a partner when you long for one – and when even a fleeting sexual connection feels impossible?When a woman named Alana coined the term “incel” in the late 90s, she couldn’t have predicted the outcome. What started as a harmless website to connect lonely, “involuntary celibate” men and women has morphed into an underground online movement associated with male violence and extreme misogyny.In 2014, Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot dead six people in California, blaming the “girls” who had spurned him and condemned him to “an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires”. There have since been numerous attacks by people who identify with incel culture, including Jack Davison, who killed five people in Plymouth this summer, before turning the gun on himself. In the darkest corners of the internet, incel groups have become a breeding ground for toxic male entitlement, putting them on hate crime watchlists across the UK. Continue reading...
An installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale shows how camp residents have transformed the raw materials of aid to preserve their heritage and cultureWhen the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp started to overflow in 2013 it was so big it had become Jordan’s fourth-largest city. The camp, Za’atari, housed a staggering 150,000 people, and the influx of new arrivals meant that another camp had to be built a few kilometres away.Za’atari had been plagued by design flaws that were linked to violence and disorder, so when Azraq opened in 2014 as a “model camp” for the region it was heralded as a chance to rectify those problems. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Continue reading...
Frank Herbert’s novel, now adapted for cinema with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, is finally getting the recognition it deserves, agree authors including Neil Gaiman and Jeff VanderMeerIf science fiction has an answer to fantasy’s The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien’s epic saga of the battle to defeat the Dark Lord, Sauron – then Frank Herbert’s Dune has to be a strong contender. Published in 1965, it is the story of the desert planet Arrakis, known as Dune; of the rare and priceless “spice” that can be found there; of the Atreides family, sent to Dune’s dangerous surface to rule; of its native Fremen people, who are capable of surviving in this inhospitable environment. Of the giant sandworms, hundreds of metres long, which hunt beneath the sands, and of Paul Atreides’ reluctant ascent to messianic status. And it is finally getting the mainstream attention it deserves, thanks to Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation, out in the UK on 21 October.I first read Dune when I was 18. It left behind deep, haunting memories: Paul Atreides chanting the Litany against Fear as his humanity is tested by the Gom Jabbar; the first appearance of a sandworm, vast and magnificent; the complexity of Paul’s rise to become the Bene Gesserit’s Kwisatz Haderach, the Fremen’s Mahdi (like much of the Fremen’s culture, the word is lifted from the vocabulary of Islam). As one character puts it: “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.” Continue reading...
Mother describes girl’s disappearance as ‘very unusual’ as police continue air, land and sea search at MacleodWestern Australian police hold grave fears for a missing four-year-old girl on the state’s northwest coast as detectives investigate the possibility she was abducted.Cleo Smith was last seen by her parents about 1.30am on Saturday at the Blowholes campsite at Macleod, north of Carnarvon. Continue reading...
by Haroon Siddique Legal affairs correspondent on (#5QTSE)
UK’s ‘detain first, ask later’ approach is hampering state’s ability to identify victims, say charitiesMore than 4,500 people have been held in immigration detention in the UK before being released into the community and only then identified as potential victims of trafficking, official figures for the past five years show.Charities claim the figures demonstrate a “detain first, ask later” attitude that runs counter to the fight against modern slavery and suggest others are probably being deported without having been referred for support. They fear the situation will be exacerbated by the nationality and borders bill, which they say makes it harder to identify victims. Continue reading...
Boxing helped prizefighter Arifonso Zvenyika overcome real hardship. Now he teaches the sport he loves to aspiring fighters in a Harare ghettoBeneath a corrugated iron roof in the crowded Harare suburb of Mbare, a group of boys darts back and forth across a smooth concrete floor, firing a series of rapid punches into the air.A wiry older man, dressed in low-slung tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops, watches their moves, encouraging them to “Jab! Jab! Jab!”. Continue reading...
by Valerie Baeriswyl / AFP / Getty Images on (#5QTR6)
Celebratory wakes, lavish funerals, fanfare bands and dramatic displays are just some of Haiti’s death rites, which, like its weddings, are often extravagant social events despite the country’s poverty Continue reading...
Commonwealth Rutherford fellow and his family face deportation from UK amid conflicting messages from departmentA scientist conducting groundbreaking research into renewable energy is facing deportation with his family to Sri Lanka, where he experienced torture, after receiving contradictory information about his case from the Home Office.Dr Nadarajah Muhunthan, 47, his wife Sharmila, 42, and their three children, aged 13, nine and five, came to the UK in 2018 after Muhunthan, who is working on thin-film photovoltaic devices used to generate solar energy, was given a prestigious Commonwealth Rutherford fellowship. The award allowed him to come to the UK for two years to research and develop the technology. His wife obtained a job caring for elderly people in a nursing home. Continue reading...
Triptych’s 21st-century variations comment on technology, consumerism, sex and the planetAdam is a busy robot poring over the codes of creation. The climate disaster has imprisoned the devil in a block of ice. And a social media sinner is lashed to a hashtag for all eternity while a Terminator stalks through a charnel house hell.The Garden of Earthly Delights is once again in full, admonitory bloom. More than five centuries after it was completed, Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece is being reimagined and reinterpreted by 15 international artists using everything from sound art and sculpture to painting, video, installation, gifs and digital animation. Continue reading...
Queensland announces reopening plan; Liberals hear climate plan; Victoria and NSW release Covid numbers; Tasmania snap lockdown to end tonight; Icac hearings begin into Gladys Berejiklian; Barnaby Joyce ‘hopes’ climate won’t split the Coalition. Question time begins in Canberra. Follow the latest updates live
He blew the doors off in the 60s as part of an upstart generation of actors. As he releases a new film and tries his hand at novel-writing, is he about to make a clean getaway from the movie business?Michael Caine is 88 and walks with a stick. He has a gammy leg and a dodgy spine and reckons the only time he leaves the house these days is when his wife has the time to take him out for a drive. The other week he was sent a screenplay that had his character running away from a bunch of crooks, and this made him laugh – the very idea he could play it. “I can’t walk, let alone run,” he says. “And I’m more or less done with movies now.”He was winding down anyway, hadn’t shot a film in a year, and then sneaked in one last movie, Best Sellers, just before the pandemic struck. He doubts he will ever make another, which is fine by him, no great loss. He’s got his knighthood and his Oscars; what does he have left to prove? He says: “I’ve done 150 movies. I think I’ve done enough.” Continue reading...
Voters invested hope in the idea of leaving the EU. But a few years of queues and chaos could further erode public trustWhat must it be like to be in the inner circles of this government, watching the economy bounce from crisis to crisis? Shortages mount, while livestock that suddenly cannot be put into the food chain is slaughtered and sent to rendering plants. Ships are diverted from UK ports because no drivers can be found to transport their cargo once it is offloaded. In response to ministers’ threats to suspend the trading arrangements for Northern Ireland – that we are now told the government never believed in to start with – there is reportedly pressure within the EU to begin preparations for a trade war.The prime minister goes off to Marbella, where he pretends to paint pictures; the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to be pinning his hopes for an easing of the current energy crisis on a “wet, windy and mild” winter. Yet the Conservative party is still ahead in the polls, apparently shored up by the weakness of the Labour party and the clear, optimistic narrative that Boris Johnson has so far managed to project on to events. And I wonder: in cabinet meetings and ministerial get-togethers, do they laugh at the apparent absurdity of it all, or anxiously exchange estimates of when the roof might finally start to fall in?John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
They blagged a fortune off their label after promising to be ‘the German Beatles’ – then went wild in the countryside making experimental krautrock. But was there more to Faust than pneumatic drills and nude donkey rides?Jean-Hervé Peron, former bassist and vocalist with Faust, would like to get something straight about his old band – specifically, the period in the early 1970s when they were living in a commune in Wümme, a rural area outside Hamburg. Faust’s time in Wümme is one of the great sagas in the history of experimental rock, which begins with their wily late manager, Uwe Nettelbeck, somehow convincing Polydor that they were signing not a recently formed collection of Hamburg musicians who would prove to be the most uncompromising band in an uncompromising era for German rock – even by the standards of fellow travellers Can, Kraftwerk and Amon Düül II, Faust’s eponymous 1971 debut album was a provocative, revolutionary, flat-out weird listen – but “the German Beatles”.Faust’s keyboard player, Hans-Joachim Irmler, thinks their manager played on the fact that Polydor had lost both the actual Beatles, who had been signed to the label for a year while still performing in Hamburg, and Jimi Hendrix “because they didn’t care enough”, concentrating their attention on the lightweight, upbeat brand of Mitteleuropean bubblegum pop known as schlager. Having extracted a reputed DM 30,000 (roughly £160,000 today) out of the company, Faust decamped to an old school in Wümme, at which point the story gets more legendary still. Vast quantities of drugs were taken and the wearing of clothes was optional. Meals were frequently taken in the nude and the band’s original drummer, Arnulf Meifert, rode a donkey naked through a nearby village. Continue reading...
Wales is asking its young people to stay and work. Many want to, but there are concerns about lack of opportunityStudents Kyle Davies and Timothy Bird were to be found working on a jet engine in the aerospace centre at the University of South Wales’ Treforest campus, just south of Pontypridd.Both agreed they loved the area – the green hills, the sense of community, the culture and history. But they may have to leave to leave to find work. Continue reading...
Jacinda Ardern says restrictions are needed to prevent a spike in cases, as experts warn any relaxation now would be ‘very dangerous’Auckland, the city at the centre of New Zealand’s Covid outbreak, will remain in level 3 lockdown for another two weeks, despite rising vaccination levels. The decision from prime minister Jacinda Ardern comes as experts remain concerned that an early move out of lockdown could be disastrous, and risk overwhelming the health system.Auckland is closing in on 90% of its population having had one shot; 89% of the region’s population has now had at least one dose, and 70% are fully vaccinated. Continue reading...
Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depressionAs coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’” Continue reading...