by Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent on (#5FWVE)
Martin Hewitt says he wants to change ‘generations of history’ between police and black communitiesThe leader of Britain’s police chiefs has said forces’ legitimacy in black communities is so low it is damaging the effectiveness of law enforcement, as he vowed to change generations of strained trust and confidence.In his first interview about race since the Black Lives Matter protests of last year, Martin Hewitt said it was not a matter of “political correctness” or “wokeness” but an operational necessity to boost racial justice in policing. Everyday crime-fighting was being damaged, he said, with the issue of race being the continual fault line of British policing. Continue reading...
by Reported by Ben Doherty and presented by Laura Mur on (#5FWVG)
Australia has ramped up the practice of deporting people who commit crimes while living here on visas – a policy that’s seen deportations to New Zealand skyrocket.Reporter Ben Doherty explains the history of this policy, and how a series of recent controversies over deportations have pushed tensions between the two countries to an all-time high
Schools that fail safeguarding rules risk closure after sexual abuse allegations posted on Everyone’s InvitedSchools that fail to meet safeguarding standards for pupils could be forced to shut amid concerns over a “rape culture” in educational establishments.More than 100 schools have been named in harrowing anonymous testimonies on the everyonesinvited.uk website, which was set up to expose misogyny, harassment and assault and has also drawn attention to a lack of redress and support for many victims. Continue reading...
by Josh Halliday North of England correspondent on (#5FWT2)
Blackburne House’s former chief executive says she ‘could have wept’ over soil pipes and uneven floorFor almost 40 years, Blackburne House has given a lifeline to thousands of Liverpool’s most vulnerable women. But its former chief executive has described how the charity fell victim to a “catastrophic” property deal that is embroiled in corruption allegations engulfing Liverpool city council.Claire Dove, who has been awarded a CBE, MBE, OBE and Queen’s lifetime achievement award for her work, had proposed to build an education centre but it went “very wrong” when the council brought in a developer to build the facility along with 132 apartments. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Michael Barton, who led Durham force, says government should show common sense after pandemicA former police chief has warned that new protest laws move Britain dangerously towards “paramilitary policing” and that UK ministers are “flexing their muscles via their police forces” like repressive regimes around the world.The warning from Michael Barton, the former chief constable of Durham comes as policing braces itself for a report expected within the next 48 hours after Metropolitan police officers were accused of heavy-handed tactics at a vigil on Clapham Common for Sarah Everard. Continue reading...
Dutch Green Business, which plants trees for carbon capture, says ex-Ukip leader will ‘facilitate introductions’He has criticised Greta Thunberg for “alarmism” and wind power as “economic insanity” – but Nigel Farage appears to have made a U-turn on climate change, after signing up as a lobbyist for a Dutch green finance firm, in his first commercial role outside frontline politics.Dutch Green Business Group, which is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange, said it had appointed Farage to its new advisory board. The eurosceptic and former Ukip leader will “facilitate introductions to politicians and business leaders in the UK and around the world” while also acting as a spokesman for the company, it said in a press release. Continue reading...
Exclusive: analysis finds nation has spent big on high-profile global sporting events in a bid to bolster its reputationSaudi Arabia has spent at least $1.5bn on high-profile international sporting events in a bid to bolster its reputation, a new report reveals.The oil-rich nation has invested millions across the sporting world, the report by the human rights organisation Grant Liberty says, from chess championships to golf, tennis and $60m alone on the Saudi Cup, the world’s richest horse-racing event with prize money of $20m. Continue reading...
Many middle-aged American women are selling up and shipping out, taking to the roads alone in their mobile homesSarah Gabriel found her life’s meaning in a small town in Kansas on a cold autumn morning in 2020. It was the hour before dawn in a Walmart car park and the 63-year-old rolled back the strip of floor underlay that serves as makeshift curtains on the windows of her 2008 Honda minivan to the awesome sight of a full moon looming above the spectral white of Walmart’s security lights.“Here I was in Kansas, you know, like Dorothy, and the moon was doing her thing like I was doing my thing,” she recalls. “‘Hey Sarah,’ she seemed to say, ‘you’re in your seventh decade and now it’s time for your big adventure.’” Continue reading...
With a slew of books to mark the songwriter’s birthday due, we look at the industry that has grown up around the man who forced academia to take pop seriously
At least 114 people reported killed by security forces on Saturday during protests, according to reportsMyanmar security forces opened fire on mourners gathered for the funeral of one of the 114 people killed the previous day, the bloodiest day of protests since the military coup on 1 February, according to witnesses.There were no immediate reports of casualties at the funeral in the town of Bago, near the commercial capital, Yangon, according to three people who spoke to Reuters. Continue reading...
Haringey council admits neglecting the West Indian centre in north London but is locked in a dispute over who should improve itA row has broken out over the future of an important Caribbean community centre in north London which has fallen into serious disrepair after years of neglect by its landlord, the local council.Stewart Wellington, whose parents arrived in the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, has drawn up multimillion-pound plans to demolish it and start again, giving it a bigger home within an ambitious scheme that will not cost the taxpayer a penny, while instilling pride in local people. Continue reading...
Where kings and abbots walked, tourists now follow. Are these increasingly popular trips just another holiday or are we getting more religious?The numbers are striking and puzzling in our secular, sceptical age when organised religion in the west is in steep decline. In the early 1980s, the annual tally of those walking the Camino, the thousand-year-old Christian pilgrim route from France to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain, had dropped to a few thousand at best. By 2019, before Covid got in the way, it was almost 350,000.And this countercultural, modern-day resurrection of pilgrimage is not just limited to the Camino. As we dare this Easter to start making holiday plans again, plenty of pilgrim paths and destinations offer a chance to step back and get a perspective on the trauma we have lived through these past 12 months. Continue reading...
Archaeologists have discovered foundations of the previously unknown structure in the city’s Letná parkThe colossal monument to Joseph Stalin that towered over Prague at the height of the cold war stood as a frightening reminder of the Soviet dictator’s tyranny and communism’s seemingly unshakeable grip on the former Czechoslovakia.Nearly 60 years after its demolition, the brooding 15.5-metre (51ft) shrine retains a hold on the popular imagination, with locals referring to the now popular meeting point where it once stood as “Stalin’s”. Continue reading...
The city’s leader says that a huge financial shortfall and the levy hike will not stop redevelopment plans going aheadThe home of Robin Hood is ready to welcome back international visitors following a £30m refit of the castle that, during the middle ages, played host to its notoriously villainous sheriff. But the East Midlands city will become more infamous over the next fortnight – for levying the highest rate of council tax in England, sending band D bills up £107, to £2,226.The city’s Labour council leader David Mellen says the rise is needed after a decade of austerity and the government’s failure to bridge a spending shortfall that forced all councils to increase bills by a collective £2bn before the economy is back on its feet. Continue reading...
They’ve got the time, the curiosity, the resources – and a thirst for true crime. Meet the amateur sleuths solving cases onlineIt was the phone call from a police detective that told Tricia Griffith she had been right all along. In 2008, and in her late-40s, she had given up a 25-year career in radio to work full-time on websleuths.com, an online forum whose members band together from all over the world to investigate unsolved crimes.The call she took from the detective was about Abraham Shakespeare, a casual labourer who’d won $30m on the Florida lottery in 2006, before going missing in 2009. Not long after his disappearance, Websleuth members began discussing the case, and many became suspicious of Shakespeare’s business partner, Dorice “Dee Dee” Moore, who had come into possession of Shakespeare’s wealth and assets. Continue reading...
From the troubled marriages to the breakthroughs that led to Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral… a beautifully written book by Roth’s chosen biographerIn response to that staple biographer’s question, “when were you happiest?”, Philip Roth tended to think of his first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, when he was free to pursue his persistent “Byronic dream” of “bibliography by day, women by night”. In the six decades that followed, as Blake Bailey’s compulsively readable life of the novelist reveals, this idealised schedule was generally compromised one way or another, to Roth’s frequent frustration and sometime derangement. In Chicago and subsequently during his two-year national service beginning at Fort Dix, he had regular visits from his first obsessive lover, Maxine Groffsky, and he reminisced fondly to Bailey how on meeting, they would always tear each other’s clothes off at the door. “I haven’t done that in a while,” Roth mused, aged 79. “I take them off nicely, I hang them up, I get into bed and I read. And I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed tearing the clothes off.” That late-life liberation from desire is 900 pages in the making.The two great and lasting traumas of Roth’s life were his marriages. He came to believe he had been trapped into both of them. First by Margaret Martinson, a waitress five years his senior, whom he had initially seduced as a “test” to see if he could charm a “shiksa blonde” and who Bailey later describes, through Roth’s eyes, as “a bitter, impoverished, sexually undesirable divorcee”. Martinson tricked him into a terrible union with false claims that she was pregnant, backed up with a sample of urine bought for $3 from an expectant mother in a homeless shelter, and threats of suicide if Roth should ever leave her. The second perceived “entrapment” was with the actor Claire Bloom, with whom Roth spent nearly 20 years from 1975, years that she documented in her brutally critical memoir of his role in their drama, Leaving a Doll’s House. Continue reading...
US secretary of state says Washington ‘horrified’ after bloodiest day since February coupThe killing by Myanmar’s military of more than 100 pro-democracy protesters in the single deadliest day since February’s coup has drawn outrage from across the world, and calls for a stronger global response.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, strongly condemned the junta, saying Washington was “horrified” by the deaths on Saturday, and that the violence shows “that the junta will sacrifice the lives of the people to serve the few”. Continue reading...
New manifesto of writers’ association PEN accused by its US arm of backing ‘cultural appropriation’It’s a venerable global cultural institution, dedicated to freedom of expression and set to celebrate its centenary this year. Yet the writers’ association PEN is being drawn into dispute over a declaration claiming the right of authors to imagination, allowing them to describe the world from the point of view of characters from other cultural backgrounds.At issue is a charter manifesto, The Democracy of the Imagination, passed unanimously by delegates of PEN International at the 85th world congress in Manila in 2019. A year on , through the social upheavals of 2020, PEN’s US arm, PEN America, has not endorsed the manifesto, which includes the principle: “PEN believes the imagination allows writers and readers to transcend their own place in the world to include the ideas of others.” Continue reading...
by Nadeem Badshah (now) and Clea Skopeliti and Mattha on (#5FVMC)
Small groups allowed to perform in places of worship in England; Brazil daily deaths near 4,000 amid surge; Facebook says Nicolas Maduro has violated its misinformation policies
Demonstrations against the police bill follow a long tradition of radicalism. Protesters say that, after last week’s violence, their side of the story has not been toldFor the third time in less than a week thousands of protesters gathered in the centre of Bristol last Friday to oppose the police and crime bill, which many fear will criminalise the social movements and vibrant, alternative cultures that have made the West Country city such a hub of resistance to the government.As the grey rain clouds over Bristol’s crumbling, graffiti-scrawled Georgian streets and tower blocks gave away to cool spring sunshine, a diverse crowd of mainly young people assembled on muddy College Green, starting point for so many of the city’s demonstrations over the years, including the Black Lives Matter march that toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston last June. Continue reading...
Children as young as five among those shot in democracy protestsSaturday was Armed Forces Day in Myanmar, and the ruling generals marked it with the slaughter of over 100 people, including a five-year-old and other children, at pro-democracy protests across the nation.It was the worst bloodshed since a coup that began on 1 February. State media had issued a warning on Friday evening, saying that the largely peaceful protesters risked being shot “in the head and back”. Continue reading...
by Ben Doherty, Daniel Hurst and Kate Lyons on (#5FW4P)
Beijing has donated millions of vaccines to developing countries but its largesse often comes with conditions attachedIn May 2020, China’s president, Xi Jinping, told the World Health Assembly its Covid-19 vaccines were “a global public good”, and their distribution would be part of Xi’s vision of a “shared future for the people of the world to work as one”.But in the months since, China’s alleged “vaccine diplomacy” has been consistently criticised internationally for being rolled out with conditions attached, with allegations of expatriate Chinese nationals being prioritised, and the distribution of vaccines seen as a coercive tool with which to wield geopolitical influence. Continue reading...
Suez Canal Authority warns that removing containers from grounded ship will delay operationAn intense effort to free a container ship blocking the Suez canal is struggling with strong tides and winds, according to the Egyptian head of the effort, who said he still hoped to free the vessel within days.The longer the skyscraper-sized Ever Given remains in place, the greater the possibility its load will need to be lightened using cranes, the Suez Canal Authority chief, Osama Rabie, told a press conference on Saturday, a strategy that experts have said would probably extend the salvage effort by weeks. Continue reading...
Priti Patel’s ministry has quietly relaunched a covert programme exposed in 2019 by the ObserverThe Home Office has quietly relaunched a controversial programme that uses councils and homelessness charities to obtain personal data that could lead to the deportation of non-UK rough sleepers.Two charities and six councils have signed up to the scheme since it was relaunched six months ago, according to documents obtained by Liberty Investigates, a journalism unit of the human rights organisation Liberty. Continue reading...
Join the slow lane in these relaxed looks that will see you through spring, summer and beyondGoodbye fast fashion, hello slow fashion. The age of the flash-in-the-pan trend is over; the lifespan of the trends that matter is now counted in years, not months.
The Women’s prize winner reflects on the life‑threatening virus that shaped her writing, the superstitions that held her back, and why her prize-winning novel Hamnet speaks to our timesMaggie O’Farrell found the prospect of writing the central scenes of her prize-winning novel Hamnet, in which a mother sits helplessly by the bedside of her dying son, so traumatic that she couldn’t write them in the house. Instead, she had to escape to the shed, and “not a smart writing shed like Philip Pullman’s”, she says, “but a really disgusting, spidery, manky potting shed, which has since blown down in a gale”. And she could only do it in short bursts of 15 or 20 minutes before she would have to take a walk around the garden, and then go back in again.The novel, a fictionalised account of the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the bubonic plague (his twin sister Judith survived) and an at times almost unbearably tender portrayal of grief, was first published a year ago. An interlude halfway through, which follows the journey of the plague in 1595 from a flea on a monkey in Alexandria to a cabin boy back to London and eventually to Stratford, was referred to by an American journalist as “the contact tracing chapter”. “It certainly wasn’t conceived as that when I wrote it,” the author says of the extraordinary coincidence of her novel, set more than 400 years ago, landing in the middle of the pandemic, not least because she delayed writing it for decades. Continue reading...
Governments urged to prioritise doctors and staff as access and booking issues affect health workersPrivate practice specialist doctors are being left out of the vaccine rollout, with limited supply and difficulties with the booking system making it “impossible” for doctors and their staff to access their own vaccinations, the peak body for doctors has said, blaming ongoing issues in supply from the federal government.The president of the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), Dr Danielle McMullen, said private healthcare workers such as specialist physicians in phase 1b of the rollout should have access to NSW Health Covid-19 vaccine hubs. Continue reading...
The Australian Defence Force says a soldier, 20, died after collapsing during physical training at Robertson BarracksA soldier has died after collapsing during a training exercise in Darwin earlier this week, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has confirmed.The 20-year-old man was taken to hospital after collapsing during physical training at Robertson Barracks. Continue reading...
Laming said on Facebook that he had apologised but ‘didn’t even know what for’The Liberal backbencher Andrew Laming has been ordered into empathy training by the Australian prime minister after downplaying his apology for allegedly bullying two Brisbane constituents.Scott Morrison told Laming to do a private course to help him understand and be aware of his actions on Saturday morning. Continue reading...
Annastacia Palaszczuk says case is a close contact of Brisbane man previously confirmed with Covid-19The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has announced a new case of community transmission of Covid-19, after a 26-year-old man tested positive to the virus on Friday, prompting her to call on the federal government to half international arrival numbers to the state.The new case was a close contact of the 26-year-old who lived in a separate household, she said, adding that the weekend would prove “critical” to controlling spread. Meanwhile 18 close contacts of the new case had been identified, with four so far returning a negative test result. Continue reading...
Military tries to airlift people to safety from strategic port town of Palma, near Total gas projectMore than 180 people, including expatriate workers, have been trapped inside a hotel in a northern Mozambique town under attack by insurgents for three days.The military was trying on Friday to airlift the workers to safety from Palma town which is situated near the multibillion-dollar gas site on the Afungi peninsula in Cabo Delgado province, according to the trapped workers. Continue reading...
Law Enforcement Conduct Commission finds police officers were instructed to target solicitor by a supervising officerTwo New South Wales police officers in the strike force targeting outlaw motorcycle gangs harassed and intimidated a solicitor representing a man involved in a motorcycle gang after being instructed to do so by a third officer, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission has found.The LECC reported on Friday the solicitor had represented a man involved in the Gladiators motorcycle gang in court in May 2019 who had received five charges of animal cruelty from Strike Force Raptor. Continue reading...
At least 45 homes evacuated at Stuarts Point and another 32 at Grassy HeadResidents of at least two towns on the New South Wales mid north coast have been forced to evacuate because of overflowing sewage.The evacuations in Grassy Head and Stuarts Point, near Nambucca Heads, are the latest triggered by the floods of the past week. Continue reading...
A crowd of people gathered in Bristol on Friday evening for a third ‘kill the bill’ demonstration within a week.Protesters met at two parks, Castle Park and College Green, and marched through the city centre and along Park Street towards Bristol University’s buildings
Nick Welch claimed nearly £50,000 even though his wife spent most of her time at the family home nearbyA senior army officer has been jailed for 21 months for falsely claiming almost £50,000 in allowances to pay for his children’s boarding school fees.Maj Gen Nick Welch, who is believed to be the most senior officer to face a court martial since 1815, was convicted of a single charge of fraud after a four-week trial at Bulford military court in Wiltshire. Continue reading...
Aberdeen says it will repatriate a bust while Cambridge museum has ‘expectation’ its collection could be returnedRegional UK museums could lead a wave of repatriations of disputed Benin bronzes – most of them looted by British forces in 1897 – in defiance of the British government’s stance that institutions should “retain and explain” contested artefacts.On Thursday, the University of Aberdeen confirmed it would repatriate a bust of an Oba, or king of Benin, which it has had since the 1950s, “within weeks”, a landmark move for a British institution. Continue reading...
by Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in on (#5FTYX)
Tensions between Muslims and Hindus high as Modi’s BJP shows it could win state for first timeIn the sleepy, swampy surroundings of Nandigram, West Bengal, where mango and coconut trees grow in abundance, bicycles meander down dusty lanes and ponds fester with green algae, a vicious political showdown has been brewing.West Bengal, one of India’s most populous states, will begin voting in its elections on Saturday to elect its state government. The significance of the poll, however, spreads far beyond the state’s borders. “The soul of not just Bengal but India is at stake,” said Malay Tewari, a Bengali social activist. Continue reading...
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