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Can ‘confidence-whisperer’ Nate Zinsser help Jamie Waters boost his wavering self-belief?Dr Nate Zinsser, a top US army psychologist renowned for helping lieutenants and officers build their confidence, is giving me a talking-to. We’ve been discussing highly disciplined writers who sit at their desks at 9am each day, no matter the circumstances, and assertively punch out stories. “I definitely don’t do that,” I say, remarking that I envy their confidence to sit and deliver. An aggressive perfectionist streak combined with niggling impostor syndrome insecurities mean I need conditions to be just-so in order to have faith that I’ll produce anything decent. Zinsser blanches.“The statement ‘I don’t do that’ is a decision you’re making about yourself,” he says, speaking over video call from his office at the US Military Academy in upstate New York; behind him there’s a whiteboard, ornamental Japanese swords and photos of athletes he’s counselled, including the Olympic-medal-winning US men’s bobsled team. “A constructive shift in your thinking would be the idea that, ‘Whether or not I got the right amount of sleep the night before or had a good breakfast, once 9 o’clock strikes, I am at my desk, lights on, ready to go – and I’m producing good stuff,’” he says. “That’s a belief about yourself that you can de-li-be-rate-ly cultivate,” he adds, stretching out each syllable in “deliberately” so there can be no question that in this matter, as in all self-confidence-related issues, change lies with me. Continue reading...

Racist contenders are stirring Islamophobic fears in their rush to take the presidencyFrance is both beautiful and brutally bleak. It is a country studded with towns and rural vistas that take your breath away, but pockmarked with districts of soulless, desolate concrete, especially in the suburbs of its cities, the banlieues. It’s as though French planners and architects, in their embrace of modernity, lost touch with what it means to be human. It has been an important trigger for a toxic brew of Islamophobia and wider cultural despair.The political consequences, now playing themselves out, will ricochet around Europe and the west. The presidential elections this spring will be dominated by the right, overtly mouthing implacable opposition to immigration that even Nigel Farage, who shares similar sentiments, dares not use so openly in Britain. Continue reading...

NSW records 30,062 new Covid cases and 16 deaths; Victoria reports 44,155 cases and four deaths; Queensland records 18,000 cases, South Australia 4,506 cases and one death, Tasmania 1,406 cases, ACT 1,039, NT 481 and WA one. This blog is now closed

Abtin’s death was ‘aided and abetted’ by the Iran’s government, says US human rights group PEN AmericaThe dissident Iranian poet and filmmaker Baktash Abtin has died of Covid-19 in hospital after being released on a furlough from prison where he was infected.Abtin was transferred to hospital in the capital Tehran “but the treatment did not succeed and he died”, the semi-official ISNA news agency said on Saturday. Continue reading...

Government scheme to replace EU agricultural payments fuelled by ‘blind optimism’ and still lacking crucial details, say MPsThe government’s plans for a post-Brexit scheme to support British farming are based on little more than “blind optimism” and risk increasing the UK’s reliance on food imports, a parliamentary inquiry has warned.The EU’s scheme of subsidies – known as the common agricultural policy (CAP) and worth £3bn-a-year to UK farmers – was one of the long-running complaints of Eurosceptics, who saw the ability of Britain to draw up its own scheme of payments as one of the major benefits of Brexit. Ministers had said the new scheme would be used to increase the environmental benefits of agriculture. Continue reading...

The tragic events of last week, in which dozens lost their lives, have exposed hidden political tensionsFor many Kazakhs, the full story behind the unrest of the past week remains as murky as the mist that enveloped Almaty, the country’s largest city and the centre of violence, at the same time.People were unable to access accurate information, as an internet blackout froze almost all access to the outside world during a tragic few days of violence in which military vehicles rolled through the streets, government buildings burned and state television carried rolling threats that “bandits and terrorists” would be eliminated without mercy. Continue reading...

Teaming with husband Alan Bergman, she composed songs for many television shows, films and stage musicalsMarilyn Bergman, the Oscar-winning lyricist who teamed with husband Alan Bergman on The Way We Were, How Do You Keep the Music Playing? and hundreds of other songs, died at her Los Angeles home Saturday. She was 93.She died of respiratory failure not related to Covid-19, according to a representative, Jason Lee. Her husband was at her bedside when she died. Continue reading...

Group led by former Democratic party leader Sali Berisha used iron bars and hammers to break into the buildingPolice in Albania used a water cannon trick and teargas to disperse protesters who broke into the headquarters of the country’s main opposition party in an internal squabble over the party’s leadership.Scores of officers pushed back hundreds of protesters who had stormed the ground floor of the centre-right Democratic party’s headquarters. They detained 25 of the trespassers and eight party staff members as the two sides clashed, authorities said. Continue reading...

Rising tension over Anglophone zones threaten to disrupt football tournamentThe much-anticipated Africa Cup of Nations football tournament opens today, hosted by Cameroon for the first time for 50 years.

Many in the Saposa Islands are wrestling with the dilemma of starting a new life on the mainland or staying to watch their homes vanish. Deputy editor, David Munk, introduces this storyYou can read the original article here: ‘My father will go down like the captain of the Titanic’: life on the Pacific’s disappearing islands

Former BBC Breakfast presenter says she is speaking out to help other victims of harassment copeLouise Minchin has revealed it was “truly blood chilling” for her and her family to be threatened by a stalker last year.The former BBC Breakfast presenter said she was speaking out about the experience to help other victims cope. Continue reading...

The claims by Carolyn Andriano, who testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, will add pressure on the princeCarolyn Andriano, who testified in the trial of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in New York last month, has claimed that Virginia Giuffre told her in 2001 that she slept with Prince Andrew.The claims, made in an interview with the Daily Mail, will ratchet up the pressure on the prince, as it is a contemporaneous report of his alleged sexual assault of the then 17-year-old Giuffre. He has vehemently denied the claims and his lawyers have been urging a US judge to dismiss Giuffre’s civil suit against him. Continue reading...

Irish musician says Shane O’Connor, last seen on Friday morning, ‘was the very light of my life’Sinéad O’Connor’s 17-year-old son has died, two days after he was reported missing.The musician shared the news on social media, writing that he “decided to end his earthly struggle” and asked that “no one follows his example”.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. Continue reading...

Thousands affected at popular destination of Murree with eight of those killed from same familyAt least 22 people have died after heavy snow trapped them in their vehicles as tens of thousands of visitors thronged Pakistan’s hill town of Murree, officials have said.Atiq Ahmed, an Islamabad police officer, said eight of the 22 fatalities were from the family of fellow Islamabad police officer Naveed Iqbal, who also died. All 16 died of hypothermia, officials said. Continue reading...

Adm Tony Radakin says any attempt by submarines at damage would be treated as ‘act of war’The head of the UK’s armed forces has warned that Russian submarine activity is threatening underwater cables that are crucial to communication systems around the world.Adm Tony Radakin said undersea cables that transmit internet data are “the world’s real information system”, and added that any attempt to damage them could be considered an “act of war”. Continue reading...

The Booker winner discusses work, wisdom and the drive to teach, plus seven key tips on how to write wellWhile George Saunders was writing his latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he noticed something strange. The book examines seven Russian short stories, which Saunders has taught on the creative writing course at Syracuse University, New York, for 20 years. Many writers teach, and many have a difficult relationship with teaching, but Saunders long ago “decided to not let it be like that”. He sliced his weeks into three days of teaching, four of writing, a clear division of roles. But when he started the Russian book, however, his two lives merged.He adopted his “teaching stance” while he wrote, and was amazed by “how much fun” he had. “There’s a different sensibility when I walk into a classroom,” he says. The outward appearance is the same – “sloppy balding hippy” – but “I’m a slightly nicer and less egotistical person”. With this slightly nicer, less egotistical person at the keyboard, interesting things began to happen, and his fiction-writing self “got a real boost”. Continue reading...

Drones are helping in searches across tricky terrain and their role could grow as technology improvesScotland’s mountain rescue teams have begun using sophisticated drones to search for injured and missing climbers lost in often dangerous and isolated terrain across the Highlands.The drones, weighing just under a kilo, can be fitted with torches, heat-detecting cameras, loudspeakers and even radio handsets, enabling rescuers to search inaccessible gullies and remote areas more quickly and safely than before. Continue reading...

Karim Masimov was fired this week as unrest raged across the country, with dozens killed and public buildings ransackedThe former head of Kazakhstan’s domestic intelligence agency has been detained on suspicion of high treason, the agency said, after he was fired amid violent protests.The National Security Committee, or KNB, said in a statement on Saturday that its former chief Karim Masimov had been detained on Thursday after it launched an investigation into charges of high treason. Continue reading...

Legal advice says any challenge under equalities law would have reasonable chance of success

The actor knew her father had served in the merchant navy, but it wasn’t until she read about Britain’s mistreatment of Chinese seamen in the 40s that she understood just how much his experiences had shaped her family“Take the rest of the noodles and the pak choi and you can have it for your lunch tomorrow.” My dad pushed the takeaway containers and their remaining contents across the table towards me.“I’ve got loads of food at mine, why don’t you and Mum keep it?” I protested. I knew he’d insist I take the leftovers with me. This routine would always play out at the end of family dinners once I’d left home and, this time around, it felt both familiar and oddly comforting – because it had been a while since our last dinner. Continue reading...

PM relied on party factions to get into No 10, but amid Covid and climate crisis is finding them difficult to contain

Country records over 116,000 cases as Victoria surpasses NSW with 51,356 cases including rapid test results; Nick Kyrgios says Djokovic treatment ‘not really humane’; Queensland grapples with flood emergency. This blog is now closed

Emergence of ‘great exhibition’ messages seems to undermine ethics adviser’s finding, says LabourBoris Johnson’s ethics adviser has been accused of failing to investigate a potential “funds for favours” scandal after the prime minister was cleared of rule-breaking over his Downing Street flat refurbishment.Christopher Geidt shut his investigation without commenting on Johnson seeking funds for the works from a Conservative donor while promising to consider plans for a “great exhibition”. Expectations also faded that another inquiry, led by parliament’s standards commissioner Kathryn Stone, would go ahead. Continue reading...

Ellie, 27, charity worker, meets Tom, 27, auditorEllie on TomWhat were you hoping for?

Critics fear Hun Sen’s meeting with military ruler Min Aung Hlaing gives legitimacy to the ruling juntaCambodian prime minister Hun Sen has met Myanmar’s military ruler Min Aung Hlaing, amid criticism of the first visit by a head of government since the army seized power from an elected government last year.Hun Sen was greeted by an honour guard and red carpet when he arrived on Friday, just as protests by coup opponents broke out in other parts of the country over fears his trip will provide more legitimacy to the ruling junta. Continue reading...

Social workers struggled to provide effective help for Alexander Tekle, one of four friends who all killed themselves, coroner saysOverworked social workers struggled to put in place effective measures to support a vulnerable Eritrean teenager seeking asylum who went on to kill himself, an inquest has concluded.The death of Alexander Tekle, who died a few months after turning 18 and less than a year after arriving in the UK, was a tragedy, the Westminster coroner Bernard Richmond said. Tekle killed himself in December 2017 in Mitcham, south London.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. Continue reading...

Inquiry into government gatherings widened to include former aide’s allegation and photographed cheese-and-wine get-together

Rawah Arja was determined to write a YA novel for – and about – teenage boys in Western Sydney. She tells Zoya Patel about how she created a story about religion, rivalries, romance, racism and redemption in The F TeamHear more episodes of Book It In here.The F Team by Rawah Arja is published by Giramondo. Continue reading...

It was audacious. An old-school bank robbery that kept the northern rivers town of Murwillumbah guessing for decades. Has it now been solved?The bank building has been standing squarely on the corner of the main street for 133 years. Quietly doing its business as the generations strolled past. Unassuming and solid with its thick brick walls and flat roof. Its unassailable strongroom was once considered the most secure place to stash the cash of the region. But it was not, as it famously turned out, impregnable.In the sweltering summer of 1978 hippies still roamed the hills around the Tweed valley. What is now suburban sprawl around the New South Wales northern rivers town of Murwillumbah was dairy farms and wooden farm houses. There were large agricultural and farm supplies stores; it was a subtropical, rural place of cows, cane and banana plantations. No one locked their doors. Across town the plume of white steam rose from the sugar mill. In the shadow of the great mass of the extinct volcano that is Wollumbin Mount Warning, it was, says former mayor Max Boyd, “a quiet little country town”. Continue reading...

Senior lawyers question motives of attorney general, who says she could refer acquittal to court of appealSenior lawyers have accused the attorney general for England and Wales of politically-driven meddling after she announced she could refer the acquittal of the Colston Four to the court of appeal.Suella Braverman said she was contemplating the highly unusual move after an outcry from Conservative MPs following the jury’s verdict on four Black Lives Matter protesters who toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. Continue reading...

Wolf Volcano, the tallest mountain in the Pacific archipelago, began erupting shortly before midnight on WednesdayThe tallest mountain in the Galápagos islands has erupted, spewing lava down its flanks and clouds of ash over the Pacific Ocean, according to Ecuador’s Geophysical Institute.A cloud of gas and ash from Wolf Volcano rose to 3793 meters (12,444 feet) above sea level following the eruption that began shortly before midnight on Wednesday local time, the institute said. Continue reading...

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev tells security forces to ‘use lethal force without warning’The president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has promised an uncompromising crackdown on demonstrators in the country, telling security forces they should “use lethal force without warning” against protesters he called “bandits and terrorists”.On Friday, relative calm returned to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and the centre of recent tumult, and some residents ventured out for the first time in several days. They found looted shops, shattered glass and many burnt-out cars, with the grim atmosphere intensified by the thick mist enveloping the city. Continue reading...

Footballer accused of eight sexual offences against five women bailed until 24 JanuaryThe Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy, who has been accused of a series of serious sex offences against young women, has been freed on bail.The 27-year-old has been in custody for just over four months, since first being arrested and charged on 26 August last year, and was freed on Friday after a bail hearing at Chester crown court. Continue reading...

Limits on restaurant opening times imposed in Okinawa and parts of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi

It’s good for mental health, a study found, but what’s it like being an older person at the skatepark?Skateboarding in middle age can help people feel empowered and reduce the chance of mental health issues such as depression, according to a study.Dr Paul O’Connor, 46, who published the research and is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Exeter, said he wanted to look at what ageing in a subculture would be like. Continue reading...

Analysis: CSTO may be an alliance but decision to intervene was almost certainly taken in MoscowThe old joke about the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact was that it was the only military alliance to attack itself, after its tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 to crush a reform movement there.With the deployment of troops from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) to Kazakhstan on Thursday, some heard “eerie echoes” of the so-called Prague spring of 1968, and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Continue reading...

Housed in a custom space made from cast-offs, the Japanese artist’s cartoon girls blend fairytale lore with 60s-inspired protest, and have become more introspective though no less impressively wrought in cardboard and wood“Stop the bombs” reads the angry red writing in the storm cloud thought bubble above the little girl in a pale blue dress. Like all the children in the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings, she has puppydog eyes and a toddler’s outsized head, yet her posture is pure bruiser. There are tiny animal fangs at the corners of her mouth. Of the paintings, drawings and sculptures in Nara’s latest exhibition, she is the closest to the pint-sized characters with big dark feelings that he began making in the 1990s, some of contemporary art’s most recognisable creations.Those early works, where tots sweetly clutched knives or took fag breaks, blended Japanese kawaii – cuteness – with mischief and menace. Partly thanks to Nara’s alignment with the pop art titan Takashi Murakami’s Superflat movement, he reached a global art audience and a wider public. Both artists mined the Japanese weakness for baby-faced adorableness, an infantilising that Murakami linked to the trauma of Hiroshima. Yet where Murakami’s trademark smiley acid-faced flowers and phallic mushrooms channel the surface sheen of a depthless mass-produced world of cartoons and commerce, Nara’s appeal has always been universal human emotion. “My works’ roots are my childhood, not pop culture,” he explains. “Around me there were orchards, sheep and horses; I read fairytales rather than comics.” Continue reading...

Restoring and moving 750,000 volumes and ancient manuscripts expected to take five yearsIt is known as Ireland’s “front room”, where esteemed visitors including the Queen, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been taken to get a sense of the “land of saints and scholars”.Biden, vice-president at the time, was so moved by the atmospherics in the dimly lit, barrel-vaulted hall when he visited Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 2016 that he came back a year later to contemplate the history of its old library, known as the Long Room. Continue reading...

French president spoke alongside Ursula von der Leyen, who pledged an ‘architecture of European security’Emmanuel Macron has said the EU needs a “frank, exacting” dialogue with Russia to defuse tensions, as he called for new security arrangements on the continent.The French president was rebuffed by other EU states in June when he and the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made a surprise proposal for a summit with Vladimir Putin. Continue reading...

Suella Braverman says she is thinking about unusual move, after Tory outcry over protesters’ acquittalThe attorney general has said she is “carefully considering” whether to refer the Colston statue case to the court of appeal after a jury cleared four protesters of criminal damage over the toppling of the monument.Suella Braverman announced she was contemplating what would be a highly unusual move after an outcry from Conservative MPs following the jury’s verdict on Wednesday. The former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick suggested the rule of law had been undermined, while Tom Hunt, a vice-chair of the parliamentary Common Sense Group, said he was “deeply concerned by the precedent set here”, despite jury decisions not setting legal precedents. Continue reading...

Newly discharged conscripts to hand back items including socks and bras, to be washed and reusedNorwegian conscripts are to return their underwear after completing military service for the next recruits, as the army struggles with dwindling supplies due to Covid.Norway, which guards Nato’s northern borders and shares a border with Russia, calls up about 8,000 young men and women for military service every year and until recently allowed newly discharged conscripts to leave barracks with the underwear they were issued. Continue reading...

Singer’s legal team attempt to discredit anonymous accuser after she changes timeframe of allegations in 1965Lawyers for Bob Dylan have formally denied allegations of child sexual abuse made against him in a lawsuit from an anonymous woman filed in August 2021.The lawsuit claims that Dylan groomed the woman, referred to as JC, when she was 12 years old and sexually abused her. Dylan, it is claimed, aimed to “lower her inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did, coupled with the provision of drugs, alcohol and threats of physical violence, leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day”. Continue reading...

Sotheby’s to sell designs and artwork of François Catroux, decorator to the stars, and his wife, Betty, muse to Yves Saint LaurentIn 1970s Paris, Betty Catroux and her husband, François, were the glittering couple at the heart of French high society and what used to be known as the international jet set.She was the androgynous model and darling of the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, he the self-taught interior decorator who transformed the mansions, grand apartments and chateaux of the super-rich or royal, among them the Rothschilds, Diane von Furstenberg and, later, Roman Abramovich. Continue reading...

Princess Cruises’ ship was at centre of 2020 outbreak in Sydney which resulted in over 900 cases and 28 deaths

Visitors stop for selfies with 9ft representation of fertility symbol from pre-Columbian Mochica culture but phallus already damagedThe newly erected statue of a grinning man with an enormous phallus has prompted delight and rage in an archaeological hotspot in northern Peru where it has been on show since the beginning of the year.Although perhaps not anatomically correct, the crimson fibreglass structure is a faithful representation of a ceramic vessel from Peru’s pre-Columbian Mochica culture, whose people lived in the region between 150 and 700 AD. Continue reading...

Justin Trudeau calls revellers who partied onboard flight ‘idiots’ as three airlines refuse to fly them homeA group of passengers who filmed themselves partying without masks onboard a chartered flight from Montreal to Mexico face being stranded after three airlines refused to fly them home to Canada.Sunwing Airlines cancelled the return charter flight from Cancún that had been scheduled for Wednesday and Air Transat and Air Canada also both said they would refuse to carry the passengers. Continue reading...

NSW to ban dancing and singing in venues and suspend non-urgent elective surgery amid 38,625 new Covid cases; Queensland considers delaying school year start amid 10,953 new cases; Victoria records 21,728 cases, South Australia 3,707, ACT 1,246 and Tasmania 1,489; home affairs minister defends Djokovic visa decision. This blog is now closed