Tiny resort to welcome incoming US president Joe Biden and other world leaders for three-day summitThe tiny seaside resort of Carbis Bay in Cornwall has been chosen to be the venue of the G7 summit in June, with the village now expecting an influx of foreign visitors.The 125-acre Carbis Bay Estate – which encompasses a luxury hotel, an award-winning restaurant and a spa – will be the main location of the summit, but the seaside village will be supported by neighbouring St Ives a mile away, along with other towns across the region. Continue reading...
Eastern England, the north-east and Scotland woke to thick layer of snow on SaturdayParts of the UK experienced between 4cm-8cm (1.5in-3in) of snow to start the weekend, while forecasters warned of heavy rainfall next week.An amber weather alert for snow was in place for some areas on Saturday morning, with people told to expect travel delays, power cuts and a chance that rural communities could be “cut off”. Continue reading...
At least 49 dead after magnitude 6.2 shock on Sulawesi island, which destroyed roads, bridges and housesDamaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 49 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.Operations were focused on about eight locations in the hardest-hit city of Mamuju, where people were still believed trapped following the magnitude 6.2 quake that struck early on Friday, said Saidar Rahmanjaya, who heads the local search and rescue agency. Continue reading...
Whether it’s fish fingers or a fancy restaurant chicken salad, what we eat can help us through hard timesLockdown 3.0. My plan, before this exciting new iteration was announced, was to write about Francis Bacon’s cooking: I’ve been reading a new biography of the artist, and on every other page is a description of the wondrous meals he would produce for friends, seemingly out of nowhere (oysters, fish, cheese, grapes). But all that will have to wait. We must be practical. I’ve had a good look around the place in which we find ourselves, and I’m pretty sure that this is it: the Slough of Despond. It is, I think we can all agree, a grim spot: not quite the bog of Bunyan’s imagining, but nevertheless somewhat dark and dank – and strangely depopulated, too, when you consider how many of us now loiter here, quietly catastrophising. On the plus side, though, it comes with a small kitchen. Will this help to see us through? Perhaps. We can only try.It’s absolutely fine to eat a slice of toast for supper – we all of us have our picky bread-and-cheese nights Continue reading...
New leader of centre-right CDU will run for chancellor in September, or have a big say in who doesAngela Merkel’s continuity candidate, the centrist conservative Armin Laschet, has beaten one of her longest-standing rivals in the contest to lead Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.In a digitally-held party congress, Laschet beat the conservative hardliner Friedrich Merz by 521 to 466 votes in a run-off vote, following a strong speech that emphasised social cohesion and held up recent scenes from Washington DC as a warning example of divisive leadership. Continue reading...
The comedian, 51, on gambling with criminals, a surprise daughter, and needing to cryThere’s no greater hell than being an asshole with morals. My tendency to over-analyse makes me slow to act; I question whether I’m doing the right thing constantly.I inherited my father’s welcoming nature – he loves to tell jokes and stories; reasonableness is his default position. But I also got my mother’s violent rage. It’s rare that I lose my temper, but when I do I become every bit the devil of her. Continue reading...
Postmortem found son of Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas Lyndhurst had ‘numerous bleeds’ on the brainThe CBBC actor Archie Lyndhurst, the son of the Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas Lyndhurst, died from a brain haemorrhage, his mother has said.Lucy Smith, a former ballet dancer, said a postmortem found his death was due to natural causes. Her 19-year-old son had had “numerous bleeds” on the brain and would have died painlessly in his sleep, the doctor confirmed to her, at his home in Fulham, west London, on 22 September. Continue reading...
by Emmanuel Akinwotu West Africa correspondent on (#5CXNJ)
Opposition candidate urges citizens to reject result of ‘most fraudulent election in country’s history’Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, won a sixth term in office on Saturday, extending his 35-year-rule in one of the country’s most turbulent election campaigns while his main rival Bobi Wine alleged widespread fraud and rejected the result.Museveni won 59% of the vote, consolidating his grip on power and becoming one of the world’s longest serving leaders. Wine won 35%, according to the electoral commission’s final results from Thursday’s poll. Continue reading...
Twenty-five years after his Booker prize‑winning novel was published, Swift reflects on how his story of a dark day trip to Margate became a celebration of lifeWhen I wrote Last Orders in the early 1990s I was in my early 40s. My father had just died. The novel was my response and is dedicated to him. It was my first real recognition that “in the midst of life we are in death”, something that the pandemic now teaches us daily.I’ve always felt that my literary journey began even when I was small, that the seeds of my desire to be a writer were sown in childhood. If it was no more at the time than an infant’s naive wish, it stuck and became lifelong. There were no writers in my family and I didn’t grow up in an environment that would have led me towards writing or anything artistic. My father was a minor civil servant in a dull office in London. In those days he might have called himself a “pen pusher”. In the war he’d been a fighter pilot. When my own puzzling urge to be a pen pusher of a different kind emerged he did not stand in its way. It was all my idea. Continue reading...
David Tennant and Michael Sheen squabble as exaggerated versions of themselves, capturing the chaos of life in lockdownStaged (Tuesday, 9.45pm, BBC One) is back, which is good, because it is arguably the only noteworthy thing any single celebrity did during the first lockdown. If you missed the first series: David Tennant and Michael Sheen squabbled over Zoom as exaggerated, frustrated, hyper-thespian versions of themselves, in an actors-playing-actors miniseries with the exact same energy of a late-night Comic Relief sketch; 15-minute episodes where you got to see familiar actors with their off-duty haircuts saying words that seemed real. It was good, and it was smart, and it played perfectly with the boundaries of the format it was in. Series two comes to a close this week, and … well, I mean, it’s exactly the same as series one just with more guest stars, isn’t it? Let’s not play about.Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading...
His skills as a fixer are finely honed – but they cannot restore a pre-Trump normality. As president, Biden’s private self, shadowed by loss, must come into its ownEvery year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”. Continue reading...
Mojo tells subscribers that, while the magazine is ready, ‘the CDs which are produced in the EU are not yet in the UK’The venerable cover CD, beloved of music magazine buyers for a generation, has been challenged by Brexit after Mojo was forced to postpone distribution of its next issue because of a delay in delivery.In an email to subscribers on Friday, Mojo said that while the magazine itself was printed, “the CDs which are produced in the EU, are not yet in the UK”. It is understood that the issue was caused by hold-ups in the process caused by new trade rules. Continue reading...
The cook and campaigner barely slept last week as the row raged over inadequate food parcels for kids. She discusses austerity, cronyism and why she’ll never stop fighting
Error message greets visitors to site registered in name of Irish businessman who claims he does not know campaign groupLeave.EU has been forced to “Internexit” after the group’s EU domain name was temporarily suspended. It comes after the Irish businessman in whose name the pro-Brexit campaign group’s domain name is registered denied having any involvement with the organisation.Now visitors to the site are greeted with an error message, and the EU’s online registry marks the domain as under a server hold, meaning it is “temporarily inactive and under investigation”. Continue reading...
The comedy, whose fourth series hits Netflix this week, shows France’s TV can match its filmFast approaching 50 and fed up after two exhausting decades at Artmedia, the top talent agency in Paris, Dominique Besnehard decided, one day in 2005, that he would quite like to turn his hand to producing something of his own.“At the time,” Besnehard told Le Monde, “Desperate Housewives was all over the telly, a huge success. I just thought, with a couple of colleagues, we could maybe make a series a bit like that, but about the job we do for a living.” Continue reading...
Detectives seek to establish if former president was employed to lobby on behalf of the firmThe former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is facing a preliminary investigation for influence peddling in connection with a €3m (£2.7) contract he signed with a Russian insurance company.The rightwing politician reportedly received a first payment of €500,000 last year after being hired as a “special adviser” to the Reso-Garantia group, owned by two Russian-Armenian billionaire brothers. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Prof Lukman Thalib and son Ismail freed after being held in secret for five monthsAn Australian public health professor allegedly tortured and held in secret in a Qatari jail cell has been freed after five months detention, the Guardian can reveal.Biostatistician Prof Lukman Thalib, 58, and his son Ismail Talib, 24, were arrested at their home in Doha on 27 July and held at undisclosed locations. Continue reading...
Feigang Fei, who runs the Aunt Dai Chinese restaurant, says patrons appreciate his bracingly frank descriptions of the foodIn the cut-throat restaurant industry, most business owners boast that their dishes are the best in town.Feigang Fei, who runs Aunt Dai Chinese restaurant in Montreal, has taken a different approach, with a menu offering bracingly honest descriptions of the dishes on offer. Continue reading...
Corinna Larsen tells court ‘chilling’ warning to her and her children came on the orders of King Juan CarlosThe ex-lover of Spain’s former king Juan Carlos has told a court in Madrid of the “chilling” moment when she claimed the head of the country’s intelligence services threatened her and her children on the monarch’s orders.Corinna Larsen told the court Félix Sanz Roldán met her in London after her relationship with the king had ended to warn her that if she did not follow his instructions he could not guarantee her safety. She claimed she later returned to her home in Switzerland where she discovered a book about the death of Princess Diana and subsequently received a cryptic phone call about tunnels, which she took to be an allusion to the princess’s fatal accident in 1997. Continue reading...
Appeal court adds six years to prison term of Andy Anokye, 33, who held women against their willA man who held four women against their will and repeatedly raped them has had his sentence increased by the court of appeal.Victims of Andy Anokye, 33, who performed as a grime artist under the stage name Solo 45, told how he beat and threatened them with weapons, held a cloth with bleach over their faces and waterboarded them, recording much of the abuse on his mobile phone. Continue reading...
Laila Anita Bertheussen denied trying to get sympathy for family by blaming theatre group for incidentsThe partner of Norway’s former justice minister has been found guilty of threatening democracy and sentenced to 20 months in prison in a case involving faked attacks on her family home and the torching of her car.Laila Anita Bertheussen, 56, had pleaded not guilty to all charges and rejected the prosecution’s claim that she had sought to generate sympathy for the family by blaming an anti-racist theatre group for the incidents. Continue reading...
You’re unhappy where you are. How can you be sure you won’t be just as unhappy in a different town, asks Annalisa BarbieriFour years ago, we relocated at a time we thought least harmful to our children: the youngest was starting primary school, the eldest junior school. They are now nine and 13. They are of mixed ethnicity and we wanted to live somewhere more multicultural, in a larger house in a less urban area. Our close family live outside England, so we thought moving nearer to extended family might provide some roots. The children settled well but contact with the extended family didn’t really happen.Last year, going through the menopause, I became depressed and sought counselling. I recognised I’d been so focused on what might be best for the children that I’d disregarded what was right for me. I’ve always wanted to live by the sea and have become increasingly despondent about having missed an opportunity to move there four years ago. During lockdown my husband and I had time to reflect; he thinks our family unit will be stronger if we move again, before the children are any older. We both want our eldest settled before GCSEs. She is very empathic, knows I am unhappy and constantly asks why. Continue reading...
Opposition leader tweets ‘we are under siege’, while President Yoweri Museveni takes early lead in electionSoldiers have stormed the home of Bobi Wine, the Ugandan opposition leader has said, as votes continued to be counted in the country’s election.“We are under siege,” the pop star turned politician tweeted. “The military has jumped over the fence and has now taken control of our home.” Continue reading...
Officers were involved in 2017 arrest of Théo Luhaka, who was left permanently disabledA police disciplinary board in France is reported to have recommended that two officers involved in the violent arrest of a young black man, who was allegedly sexually assaulted with a truncheon, be let off with a reprimand.Théo Luhaka, who was 22 at the time of the attack, was left permanently disabled after suffering severe anal injuries from a police telescopic baton during a stop-and-search operation in a Paris suburb. Continue reading...
by Sarah Marsh , Jamie Grierson and Vikram Dodd on (#5CW9Y)
Fingerprint, DNA and arrest history records deleted and visa system thrown into disarrayFingerprint, DNA and arrest history records were deleted, which could allow offenders to go free because evidence from crime scenes will not be flagged on the Police National Computer (PNC).The Home Office said it was working with police to assess the impact of the error, which reportedly occurred by accident during a weekly “weeding” session to expunge data. It said no records of criminals or dangerous persons had been deleted, and that the wiped records were those of people arrested and released when no further action was taken. Continue reading...
Centred on a sex-assault case involving former French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn, this docuseries reveals worryingly outdated attitudesMost people will have only the haziest recollection of the fallout that occurred after the French presidential hopeful and then head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a room attendant in a New York hotel in 2011. That allows the Netflix documentary Room 2806: The Accusation to possess all the qualities of a slick political thriller. Who will be believed? The immigrant, hotel cleaner, a single parent living in a flat in the Bronx or the globally powerful, immensely rich politician?This tense, four-part documentary has astonishing material to work with. There is plenty of CCTV footage, filmed from the ceiling, of chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo making her way to the presidential suite, and later, visibly distressed, being shepherded by her supervisor to a subterranean network of shabby staff offices in the bowels of the building, away from the gilded foyer, where she wipes away tears and recounts how she has been assaulted by Strauss-Kahn as she cleaned his rooms. Continue reading...
Fifteen-sevenths should not be a thing, but at least I’m mobile again with my knee scooterA new week dawns and fresh madness breaks upon us. Sex and the City is to be relaunched as a 10-part limited series under the title Just Like That – without the legendary sex goddess Samantha Jones. Think The Beatles without John. Jaffa Cakes without the smashing orangey bit. A pair of Louboutins without the scarlet sole. For the scarlet soul of the show she surely was. Continue reading...
Scottish court of appeal rules Libyan was properly convicted of 1988 bombing of passenger planeThe family of the Libyan convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, are lodging an appeal to the UK supreme court after Scottish judges threw out a miscarriage of justice case.The court of appeal in Edinburgh ruled on Friday that Megrahi was properly convicted of bombing Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 passengers, crew and townspeople. Continue reading...
As the first book in his spy series, Slow Horses, is made into a TV drama, Herron talks about his slow-burn success – and the resemblance of a certain blustering villain to our PMWere it not for the packed bookshelves – everything from Len Deighton to the complete Philip Larkin – you could almost imagine the novelist Mick Herron’s flat as a safe house, plain and modest as it is, tucked away in a rather anonymous modern block in Oxford. The other immediate impression given by his home is of – how shall I put it? – antiquity. He’s still buying CDs (there’s a soaring Gavin Bryars choral work playing on the stereo) and at one point he produces his mobile, which, like the vast Toshiba laptop enthroned on a side table, seems suspiciously elderly. “It’s not a smartphone. I switch it on and it works. I don’t like having to learn new things, I’m too lazy,” he says. Before lockdown he had no wifi, either. “Obviously there are things I would need to check, and I would go out and do that.” At this point I look at him as if he’s just told me he gathers information by examining the entrails of birds. “In libraries,” he explains, gently.He is clearly not lazy, not at all, about the stuff that matters to him. Herron is the author of the hugely entertaining Jackson Lamb series, about a stunningly inept collection of secret agents. These mess-ups and headcases have been banished from the sleek MI5 headquarters in Regent’s Park, London, to the secret service’s institutional oubliette Slough House, a grotty office block near the Barbican. Which is also the title of the seventh and latest novel in the series, published next month. Continue reading...
Disparity with white women shows need for action, doctors say, despite slight improvement in mortality rateBlack women are still four times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or childbirth in the UK, and women from Asian ethnic backgrounds face twice the risk, according to a new report.The data shows a slight narrowing of the divide – last year’s report found black women were five times more likely to die – but experts say that is statistically insignificant and not a sign of progress. Continue reading...
During lockdowns, handhelds have come into their own: here’s our Top 20, from Gizmondo to NintendoOK, it’s here more for the amazing backstory than the qualities of the handheld itself, but Gizmondo did momentarily look like a contender back in 2004, offering text messaging, web browsing and video playback as well as mobile gaming. But then the founders burned through millions of investor funds on Regent Street stores and extravagant launch parties, and the whole thing collapsed in spectacular fashion, symbolised by one exec’s (non-fatal) 200mph Ferrari crash on the Pacific Coast Highway. Continue reading...
The co-director of the haunting documentary, filmed inside the city’s hospitals during the first outbreak, explains why it is so importantIn the opening scene of 76 Days, the extraordinary inside story of how Wuhan’s hospitals coped with the initial wave of Covid, a sobbing daughter in full PPE begs to see her dying mother. The staff refuse and restrain her. Soon after, she pursues her mother’s body bag on to the street, only to watch as it is driven away. The woman crumples in the road, distraught and bereft.Such harrowing partings have since been replicated hundreds of thousands of times the world over. Yet 76 Days derives incredible strength from being a chronicle of the first outbreak. It is a journey into the unknown. The intensive care unit is full of people infected with an unidentified plague. Overwhelmed nurses bolt the doors to a ward as scores of older patients shuffle in the cold on the landing, begging to be admitted. Continue reading...
Delays in publication of official list of those killed and wounded provokes anger and claims of government indifferenceMoslem Kasdallah rests on his crutches, the stump of his amputated leg on display. His voice hoarse, he yells the demands that, after years of delay, have brought him and the other wounded and bereaved of the Tunisian revolution to the steps of the government building they have been occupying since December.Some are on hunger strike, others have sewn their lips shut. Kasdallah carries a bottle of fuel and a lighter, ready to self-immolate. Continue reading...
by Richard Partington Economics correspondent on (#5CVY3)
Second national Covid lockdown in November ends six months of growth but decline not as bad as fearedThe UK economy is heading for a double-dip recession after official figures confirmed a renewed slump in November as the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic took hold.Related: UK economy shrank 2.6% during November lockdown – business live Continue reading...
From stiles to greetings cards, map-making to whittling, niche interests have become a lifeline for people struggling through successive lockdownsIt all started three years ago as an antidote to the angry, inflamed opinions on Twitter. I just thought, let’s make something nice here so I started posting photos of stiles that I’d taken on my daily fell runs in the Lake District. I chose stiles simply because I have to stop at them when I run. They make you pause and look around and I like that. Once I’d started posting the pictures, it grew into something. People started sharing their own photos, locally but also in the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and more. It’s a small, low key-thing to do, but heartening too. Continue reading...
Rediscovered song, which has a ‘cheerful energy’, was likely written by a teenage sailor or shore whaler in New Zealand in the 1830sEven from “the back of nowhere, far from any city” – not to mention the sea – John Archer caught wind of the sea shanty revival before anyone else.From his home in landlocked Ōhakune, Archer had noticed a sharp uptick in visitors to the New Zealand Folk Song website he set up in 1998. One 19th-century seafaring epic was of particular interest: Soon May The Wellerman Come. Continue reading...
After battling Covid-19 for three weeks in hospital, Faithfull went on to finish her 21st solo album – and possibly her last. She reflects on how she might never sing again, her hatred of being a 60s muse and why she still believes in miraclesMarianne Faithfull is on the phone from her home in Putney, south-west London. She sounds exactly like you would expect: as husky as her singing on every album she has made for the past 40 years and, as the daughter of a baroness, very posh. Her vocabulary is unmistakably that of someone who came of age in the 1960s: exasperation is expressed in sentences that begin: “Oh, man…”; things that vex her are “a drag”. But before we begin, she offers a pre-emptive apology. Her memory, she says, isn’t what it was. “It’s wild, the things I forget,” she says. “Short-term. I remember the distant past very well. It’s recent things I can’t remember. And that’s ghastly. Awful. You wouldn’t believe how awful it is.”The memory loss is a result of Covid-19. She was in something of a purple patch in her career when the virus struck last April, midway through recording her 21st solo album She Walks in Beauty, and with a biopic based on her 1994 autobiography in the works (“It could be really good,” she says of the latter, “but it doesn’t require my artistic input – I lived the life, that’s enough”). She doesn’t remember anything about falling ill, or being rushed to intensive care: “All I know is that I was in a very dark place – presumably, it was death.” Continue reading...
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