********** UNIVERSITY **********
return to top
‘Defeat clarifies so much’: Chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley on the power of losing
Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:00:38 GMT
The American has seen the best players brought down during his career among chess’s elite. And he does not necessarily see losing as a bad thing
As college and high school commencement speakers counsel the next generation, how about this advice? Embrace defeat.
This doesn’t mean playing to lose, but rather, if and when you lose, seek to learn from the experience in hopes of improving in the future. This approach has been adopted by NBA greats past and present, from Kobe Bryant to Giannis Antetokounmpo – as well as by American chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley, who writes about it in his new book, Move by Move: Life Lessons On and Off the Chessboard.
Continue reading...The board had proposed appending a statement that would have undermined a Palestinian scholar’s article. The students rejected it.
The post Columbia Law Review Is Back Online After Students Threatened Work Stoppage Over Palestine Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.
Researchers tested for bias in Facebook’s algorithm by purchasing ads promoting for-profit colleges and studying who saw them.
The post One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? appeared first on The Intercept.
The narrative that took hold ignored inland campuses, like in the Rust Belt and into Appalachia, where students formed their own encampments.
The post Not Just Coastal Elites: Here’s How Three Rust Belt Colleges Protested Israel’s War in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
The post Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
A clever, meat-free pasta sauce using soffritto, red wine, plus maybe a smidge of Marmite, to create a deceptively dense flavour
While today’s recipe is from Tuscany, it is also thanks to a girl who went to my school. She lived outside town, in a big house with both a swimming pool and chickens. I never actually saw the house, or jumped in the pool, but I did hear about the chickens that lived in a cage at the bottom of the garden and laid more eggs than the family could eat. There was also the story about how, one day, this girl stopped her uncle from killing one of the chickens, which meant that for Sunday lunch they had roast potatoes, fried eggs and gravy made from Marmite. I remember being thrilled by this story, the idea that she had put herself between an uncle (with a gun, knife, rope, his bare hands? I had no idea) and the hen, therefore saving its life; and that, while the family ate Marmite gravy, the chicken ran free.
Scappato means run away, escaped, scarpered. It’s a nice thought that this recipe for penne con pollo scappato, or pasta with chicken that has fled the coop, was the result of a feisty young girl and a fortunate hen somewhere in Tuscany. It is probably more likely, though, that it was the result of no chickens at all. Along with Sicilian pasta con le sarde al mare (pasta with sardines still at sea) and Neapolitan spaghetti alle vongole fujute (spaghetti with clams that have fled), penne con pollo scappato is part of a family of recipes brought about my resourceful necessity. I have a book about Tuscan food that calls such recipes cucina del’ inganno, which translates as “cooking of deception”, but I think the meaning is slightly different in Tuscan – cunning, and also protective, something you do in order to make something as good as you can with whatever you have to hand. This one is certainly a clever recipe, the well-cooked soffritto of carrot, celery, onion and wine, mixed with rosemary, tomato concentrate from a tube and a long cooking time result in a flavour so deep that it is every bit as good as meat.
Discover Rachel’s recipes and many more from your favourite cooks in the new Guardian Feast app, with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun
Continue reading...Deep-sea divers feel the pressure, Stephen King returns with some masterly tales, a mother fears her own son, and a Dorset resort isn’t as restful as it seems
A thriller plot line is barely needed in Will Dean’s The Chamber (Hodder & Stoughton); the real-life terrors of the world he describes are enough to have any even vaguely claustrophobic heart racing. Dean, the author of the excellent Tuva Moodyson thrillers as well as a handful of standalone novels, sets his latest in the world of saturation diving in the early 00s. Here, deep sea divers work at more than 100 metres below sea level, living for up to a month in a pressurised, immensely cramped environment and breathing a mix of helium and oxygen so they can continue diving at depth without needing to decompress and thus risk nitrogen narcosis (the bends). Dean’s protagonist is Ellen Brooke, one of the few female saturation divers; she and five others will live for a month in a chamber “about the size of the back section of a bus” while they take shifts diving beneath the North Sea, fixing oil pipes. But then one of them dies. And then another. Are the people providing them with food and gases to breathe harming them? “In some ways, this is similar to an academic experiment that got out of hand: the lack of control we have, and the enormous list of ways in which they could inflict harm upon us if they so desired.” Or is the danger inside the chamber? As those in charge start the days-long decompression process, Ellen and her colleagues try to survive. “One might be an accident,” she writes on a piece of paper. “Two is a crime.” Horribly, claustrophobically compulsive.
“You like it darker? Fine. So do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to a new collection of short stories, You Like It Darker (Hodder & Stoughton), which range from the deliciously creepy (Willie the Weirdo, reminiscent of one of King’s best short stories, Gramma), to novels-in-miniature. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is one of the latter. The premise is a paranormal twist: a man has one prescient dream, and discovers where a body was buried. As his efforts to let the truth be known backfire on him, and spin out of control, this becomes a gripping story of an obsessively dangerous cop. My favourite, though, is Rattlesnakes, which made me jump for joy with its links to two previous King novels (no spoilers here, because it was too much fun to discover), while also chilling me to the bone. “Dusk, you know. Real things seem thinner then, at least to me.” Some of these stories are supernatural; some are not; many feature older protagonists; all are worth a read, as King continues his self-described project to “show the real world as it is, and to tell the truth about the America I know and love”.
Continue reading...Union claims Whitbread, which also owns Premier Inn, has not consulted properly with restaurant staff
More than 1,500 workers from restaurants including Brewers Fayre, Table Table and Beefeater outlets are threatening their parent company Whitbread with legal action over alleged poor consultation on planned job cuts and closures.
The Unite union has written to Whitbread, which also owns Premier Inn hotels, saying it is considering launching employment tribunal claims for unfair dismissal. It says some of the 3,000 workers potentially affected by the company’s moves to exit more than 200 restaurants have yet to be told which sites will close despite evidence that plans have been in place since December last year.
Continue reading...Ian Sample hears from Linda Geddes about her recent trip to the Netherlands to try cultivated meat sausages, courtesy of the company Meatable. Advocates say that cultivated meat could be the future of sustainable and ethical meat production. Linda explains how they’re made, how their carbon footprint compares with traditional meat and most importantly … what they taste like!
Read more from Linda Geddes on her trip to the Netherlands
Continue reading...Katherine Ryan joins Grace this week to share her favourite comfort foods. The Canadian comedian, writer, presenter and actor is best known for her deliciously wicked comedy, delivered with a side dish of couture. Katherine shares memories from her past, including her father’s attempts to bring Indian food to Canada via Ireland, her difficult early days in London as a single parent trying to makes ends meet, and the deep fried delights on offer at her first place of work: Hooters. Now, Katherine has had two Netflix Comedy specials, and is a regular on the UK panel show circuit. But the question is – what is fuelling her funny?
New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent will be released every Tuesday
Continue reading...The spread of the avocado is a story of greed, ambition, corruption, water shortages, cartel battles and, in a number of towns and villages, a fierce fightback
Phone service was down. A fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm. Even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard at the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military uniform, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car. We tried to explain ourselves: we were journalists writing about the town’s war with the avocado, and had plans to meet with the local council. We finally managed to recall the first name of our point person on the council – Marcos – and after repeating it a number of times, we were let through.
To reach Cherán’s militarised outskirts, we had driven for hours on the two-lane highway that laces through the cool, mountainous highlands of Michoacán, in south-central Mexico. We passed through clumps of pine, rows of corn and patches of raspberry bushes. But mostly we saw avocado trees: squat and stocky, with rust-flecked leaves, sagging beneath the weight of their dark fruit and studding the hillsides right up to the edge of the road. In the small towns along the way, there, too, were avocados: painted on concrete walls and road signs, atop storefronts and on advertisements for distributors, seeds and fertilisers.
Continue reading...GMB poll receives reports of workers being stabbed, punched and threatened with syringes
One in three Asda staff have been attacked at work, according to research that included reports of workers being stabbed, punched and threatened with syringes.
The poll of almost 1,000 members of GMB, one of the UK’s biggest unions, returned stories of delivery drivers being chased by people in cars, while store workers had food thrown at them. More than half (58%) of respondents said they had suffered injury or illness on the job.
Continue reading...Blue crabs with no natural predators have been disrupting prized shellfish populations on Italy’s coast. So revenge is on the menu
In a down-to-earth suburb of Catania on Sicily’s east coast, smoke billows from street stands selling traditional grilled horse meat, and local youngsters gather around kiosks selling the region’s unique handmade drink, seltz limone e sale (seltzer with lemon and sea salt). It is here that a family of charismatic ex-fishers have opened a seafood restaurant that bravely challenges long-held regional conventions.
The Salamone family sell all the usual local specialities in their slick new business “La Fish”, such as Sicily’s famous swordfish, sardines and tuna. However, the feature of tonight’s tasting menu – attracting customers who range from local families to food connoisseurs – is a relative newcomer to these shores and to Sicilian tables: the Atlantic blue crab.
Continue reading...Repairs complete but security concerns after Israeli operation to free hostages mean food has not yet been distributed
Humanitarian assistance has begun to come ashore in Gaza from a US-made pier once more, two weeks after the short-lived sea corridor was suspended due to storm damage, but security concerns after one of the bloodiest days of the war meant the aid was not distributed.
The head of the World Food Programme (WFP), Cindy McCain, said the food distribution from the pier had been “paused” because she was “concerned about the safety of our people”. An Israeli military operation on Saturday freed four hostages but killed 274 Palestinians and left one Israeli commando dead. McCain told CBS’s Face the Nation programme that two of WFP’s warehouses in Gaza had also been rocketed and a staffer injured.
Continue reading...Andrew Bailey’s office has a losing record of fighting against exonerations recommended by local prosecutors — but it’s not giving up.
The post Missouri’s Attorney General Is Waging War to Keep the Wrongly Convicted Locked Up appeared first on The Intercept.
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now...
A weekly email from Yotam Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha, Felicity Cloake and Rachel Roddy, featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas
Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha and all our star cooks, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent and Jay Rayner.
Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.
Continue reading...Michelle Roach bought a used ice-cream van in order to bring cheap, affordable food to Liverpool's struggling communities. She wanted a vehicle with freezers built in for frozen food, and also something cheerful that was able to break down stigmas around food poverty. Using a '10 items for £5' model, Michelle sources discount food from supermarket surplus and donations.
The Guardian's Christopher Cherry follows Michelle and the van on its rounds, with the service struggling to meet overwhelming demand as the cost of living crisis deepens, and the UK's general election fast approaches.
Continue reading...South Africa's case against Israel over allegations of genocide before the international court of justice has raised a central question of international law: what is genocide and how do you prove it? It is one of three genocide cases being considered by the UN's world court, but since the genocide convention was approved in 1948, only three instances have been legally recognised as genocide. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks back on these historical cases to find out why the crime is so much harder to prove than other atrocities, and what bearing this has on South Africa's case against Israel and future cases
What is the genocide convention and how might it apply to the UK and Israel?
‘Famine is setting in’: UN court orders Israel to unblock Gaza food aid
On the last day of his Huginn mission, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen takes us on a tour of the place he called home for 6 months: the International Space Station. From the beautiful views of Cupola to the kitchen in Node 1 filled with food and friends and all the way to the science of Columbus, the Space Station is the work and living place for astronauts as they help push science forward.
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, direct to your inbox every Thursday
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday
Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you
Continue reading...Imagine a world in which you can do transactions and many other things without having to give your personal information. A world in which you don’t need to rely on banks or governments anymore. Sounds amazing, right? That’s exactly what blockchain technology allows us to do.
It’s like your computer’s hard drive. blockchain is a technology that lets you store data in digital blocks, which are connected together like links in a chain.
Blockchain technology was originally invented in 1991 by two mathematicians, Stuart Haber and W. Scot Stornetta. They first proposed the system to ensure that timestamps could not be tampered with.
A few years later, in 1998, software developer Nick Szabo proposed using a similar kind of technology to secure a digital payments system he called “Bit Gold.” However, this innovation was not adopted until Satoshi Nakamoto claimed to have invented the first Blockchain and Bitcoin.
A blockchain is a distributed database shared between the nodes of a computer network. It saves information in digital format. Many people first heard of blockchain technology when they started to look up information about bitcoin.
Blockchain is used in cryptocurrency systems to ensure secure, decentralized records of transactions.
Blockchain allowed people to guarantee the fidelity and security of a record of data without the need for a third party to ensure accuracy.
To understand how a blockchain works, Consider these basic steps:
Let’s get to know more about the blockchain.
Blockchain records digital information and distributes it across the network without changing it. The information is distributed among many users and stored in an immutable, permanent ledger that can't be changed or destroyed. That's why blockchain is also called "Distributed Ledger Technology" or DLT.
Here’s how it works:
And that’s the beauty of it! The process may seem complicated, but it’s done in minutes with modern technology. And because technology is advancing rapidly, I expect things to move even more quickly than ever.
Even though blockchain is integral to cryptocurrency, it has other applications. For example, blockchain can be used for storing reliable data about transactions. Many people confuse blockchain with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
Blockchain already being adopted by some big-name companies, such as Walmart, AIG, Siemens, Pfizer, and Unilever. For example, IBM's Food Trust uses blockchain to track food's journey before reaching its final destination.
Although some of you may consider this practice excessive, food suppliers and manufacturers adhere to the policy of tracing their products because bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella have been found in packaged foods. In addition, there have been isolated cases where dangerous allergens such as peanuts have accidentally been introduced into certain products.
Tracing and identifying the sources of an outbreak is a challenging task that can take months or years. Thanks to the Blockchain, however, companies now know exactly where their food has been—so they can trace its location and prevent future outbreaks.
Blockchain technology allows systems to react much faster in the event of a hazard. It also has many other uses in the modern world.
Blockchain technology is safe, even if it’s public. People can access the technology using an internet connection.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had all your data stored at one place and that one secure place got compromised? Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to prevent your data from leaking out even when the security of your storage systems is compromised?
Blockchain technology provides a way of avoiding this situation by using multiple computers at different locations to store information about transactions. If one computer experiences problems with a transaction, it will not affect the other nodes.
Instead, other nodes will use the correct information to cross-reference your incorrect node. This is called “Decentralization,” meaning all the information is stored in multiple places.
Blockchain guarantees your data's authenticity—not just its accuracy, but also its irreversibility. It can also be used to store data that are difficult to register, like legal contracts, state identifications, or a company's product inventory.
Blockchain has many advantages and disadvantages.
I’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about blockchain in this section.
Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency but a technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible. It's a digital ledger that records every transaction seamlessly.
Yes, blockchain can be theoretically hacked, but it is a complicated task to be achieved. A network of users constantly reviews it, which makes hacking the blockchain difficult.
Coinbase Global is currently the biggest blockchain company in the world. The company runs a commendable infrastructure, services, and technology for the digital currency economy.
Blockchain is a decentralized technology. It’s a chain of distributed ledgers connected with nodes. Each node can be any electronic device. Thus, one owns blockhain.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is powered by Blockchain technology while Blockchain is a distributed ledger of cryptocurrency
Generally a database is a collection of data which can be stored and organized using a database management system. The people who have access to the database can view or edit the information stored there. The client-server network architecture is used to implement databases. whereas a blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, stored in a distributed system. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, timestamp and transaction information. Modification of data is not allowed due to the design of the blockchain. The technology allows decentralized control and eliminates risks of data modification by other parties.
Blockchain has a wide spectrum of applications and, over the next 5-10 years, we will likely see it being integrated into all sorts of industries. From finance to healthcare, blockchain could revolutionize the way we store and share data. Although there is some hesitation to adopt blockchain systems right now, that won't be the case in 2022-2023 (and even less so in 2026). Once people become more comfortable with the technology and understand how it can work for them, owners, CEOs and entrepreneurs alike will be quick to leverage blockchain technology for their own gain. Hope you like this article if you have any question let me know in the comments section
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER
Aileen Cannon ruled ex-president would not be charged for waving classified papers as that conduct was not on trial
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents agreed on Monday to expunge from the indictment a paragraph about an episode where the former president waved around a classified document at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
The US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled she would strike the paragraph because Trump was not charged with a crime for the conduct it described and would be unfairly prejudicial if a jury later saw it at trial.
Continue reading...The federal judge hearing a human rights case disputed allegations he might be impartial but recused himself out of an “abundance of caution.”
The post Judge Who Went on Israel Junket Recuses Himself From Gaza Case appeared first on The Intercept.
Activists suing the Biden administration over Gaza policy are demanding the judge recuse himself over the sponsored trip.
The post A Federal Judge Visited Israel on a Junket Designed to Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing a Gaza Case. appeared first on The Intercept.
“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito told a person he thought was a right-wing activist.
The post Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Caught on Secret Audio appeared first on The Intercept.
Roma photojournalist Eszter Halasi follows a Romany family on their journey to the Appleby Horse Fair, an annual gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Westmorland
In May earlier this year, Romany Gypsy Wendy Smith went to the high court and successfully challenged a new law that effectively criminalised the travelling way of life. Even among the many Romany Gypsies and Travellers who are settled and no longer travel, the victory was seen as symbolic because travelling is part of their heritage.
Several families stopped in Melmerby before travelling to Appleby
Continue reading...Beverley McLachlin’s decision comes after British judge Lord Sumption quit court of final appeal, condemning ‘impossible political environment’
A former chief justice of Canada’s supreme court has announced she is stepping down from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal – the latest in a string of departures amid concerns about judicial independence from China.
Beverley McLachlin, 80, said she would be leaving the territory’s top court when her term ends next month to spend more time with her family, but that she still held “confidence in the members of the court, their independence and their determination to uphold the rule of law”.
Continue reading...Lord Sumption, who last week quit territory’s top court, speaks out on ‘paranoid atmosphere’ under Chinese rule
A British judge has described the “paranoid atmosphere” in Hong Kong as he explained his decision to step down from the territory’s top court.
Jonathan Sumption, along with another British judge, Lawrence Collins, last week resigned from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal (CFA).
Continue reading...FBI chief condemns Peltier, 79, who denies killing agents on Pine Ridge reservation in 1975, as ‘remorseless killer’
Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who has served nearly 50 years in prison for the killing of two FBI agents, was due to have his first parole hearing since 2009 on Monday, his lawyer said.
Peltier, 79, has maintained that he did not kill the FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Advocates, including figures such as the late Nelson Mandela and a former prosecutor and judge involved in his case, have long said he should be freed because of what they call legal irregularities in his trial.
Continue reading...Andrew Bailey’s office has a losing record of fighting against exonerations recommended by local prosecutors — but it’s not giving up.
The post Missouri’s Attorney General Is Waging War to Keep the Wrongly Convicted Locked Up appeared first on The Intercept.
Three US nationals on trial in Democratic Republic of Congo over events in May described as an attempted coup
More than 50 people, including three US citizens and a Belgian, have gone on trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo over what the army has described as an attempted coup.
The actions of the three Americans were “punishable by death”, Judge Freddy Ehume told the military court in the DRC capital, Kinshasa.
Continue reading...Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
Republican extremist tells crowd ‘The man that I worship is also a convicted felon’
Donald Trump has been compared to Jesus Christ by the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at a campaign rally for the former president in Las Vegas, a city more renowned for evoking images of gambling than biblical scenes.
Greene, who makes frequent references to her Christian faith, cited Trump’s supposed Christ-like qualities to challenge the Democrats’ efforts to capitalise on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s status as a convicted felon following his recent conviction in a case involving hush money paid to an adult film actor and falsified business records in a New York court.
Continue reading...ANC leader and president accepts he will need help of opposition parties to tackle serious problems facing country
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has said that his African National Congress (ANC) would seek to form a government of national unity with a broad group of opposition parties.
“The purpose of the government of national unity must be, first and foremost, to tackle the pressing issues that South Africans want to be addressed,” Ramaphosa said late on Thursday after a marathon ANC meeting.
Continue reading...Government employees are using their official badges to demonstrate against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
The post “Not the Career in Public Service I Signed Up For”: Federal Workers Protest War appeared first on The Intercept.
Researchers tested for bias in Facebook’s algorithm by purchasing ads promoting for-profit colleges and studying who saw them.
The post One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? appeared first on The Intercept.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities
Continue reading...In Gainesville, Florida, children are on the front lines of the hazards long ignored by local and state government officials.
The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.
Government prosecutors claimed they didn’t know a former detainee recanted his testimony in interviews with the government.
The post Guantánamo Prosecutors Accused of “Outrageous” Misconduct for Trying to Use Torture Testimony appeared first on The Intercept.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is in line to accompany Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham in midfield when England face Serbia in their opening game at Euro 2024 on Sunday.
Gareth Southgate, who has a number of fitness concerns before his side travel to Gelsenkirchen for their Group C opener, faces a big call over who should take the third spot in central midfield. England are light on experience after leaving Kalvin Phillips and Jordan Henderson out of their squad and whoever is chosen to start with Bellingham and Rice will have plenty to prove.
Continue reading...About one in four people stopped at border had some data copied from their devices by Australian Border Force
Australian border force officers obtained passcodes to the devices of almost 10,000 people in the past two years, new data obtained by Guardian Australia reveals, with most people who were ordered to hand over their phones willingly providing the passcode.
Data provided to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws show that since Australia’s borders reopened following easing of Covid-19 restrictions phone searches rebounded as the number of travellers increased. There were 2,087 searches in the 2021-2022 financial year, 5,065 in 2022-23, and 4,422 in the period between 1 July 2023 and 31 March 2024.
Continue reading...Trains from Britain to Spain put me a taxi ride away from Ribeira Sacra – an unspoiled region of river gorges, chestnut groves and rich history
Modes of transport always dictate the shape of the human landscape. When travel took to the rails in the 19th century, vast palaces of railway stations were built all over Europe. And now, on a train journey to Spain, I am passing through some of the best examples: in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. In the latter, I have time to leave my bags at Chamartín station, actually a modern terminal, and dash off to see the Goya frescoes at the church of St Anthony, then nip back for the Renfe service to Ourense in Galicia.
My week-long hike is in a little-known part of Galicia close to the northern border of Portugal called the Ribeira Sacra, a region cut by deep river gorges. I arrive with my sister Jo after dark in the city of Ourense and take a taxi from the station up into the mountains. Our plan is to walk back to Ourense over the next five days. The taxi winds up the mountain, the headlights strafing deep forest and few houses. “It is very wild up here,” says the driver, “I’ve seen wolves on this road at night.”
Continue reading...“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito told a person he thought was a right-wing activist.
The post Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Caught on Secret Audio appeared first on The Intercept.
Roma photojournalist Eszter Halasi follows a Romany family on their journey to the Appleby Horse Fair, an annual gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Westmorland
In May earlier this year, Romany Gypsy Wendy Smith went to the high court and successfully challenged a new law that effectively criminalised the travelling way of life. Even among the many Romany Gypsies and Travellers who are settled and no longer travel, the victory was seen as symbolic because travelling is part of their heritage.
Several families stopped in Melmerby before travelling to Appleby
Continue reading...British Museum will host treasures from Samarkand in a bid to dispel cliches of camels, spices and bazaars
A monumental six-metre-long wall painting created in the 7th century, and 8th-century ivory figures carved for one of the world’s oldest surviving chess sets, are among treasures set to be seen in Britain for the first time.
The items will travel from the ancient city of Samarkand to the UK for an exhibition opening in September, as part of the first-ever loan from museums in Uzbekistan to the British Museum.
Silk Roads will be at the British Museum from September 26 2024 to February 23 2025. Tickets go on sale on Monday.
Continue reading...From phantom villas to too-good-to-be-true offers, here’s how to make sure your booking is the real thing
Can you imagine arriving in a small Greek village after a long flight and bus transfer, only to find out that the luxury villa you and your family were expecting to spend the next two weeks in – and spent £5,000 on – simply does not exist?
Some holidaymakers are poised to find themselves in exactly that position this summer, and many more holidays will be ruined as people realise they have been defrauded before they have left for the airport.
Continue reading...Interesting story of breaking the security of the RoboForm password manager in order to recover a cryptocurrency wallet password.
Grand and Bruno spent months reverse engineering the version of the RoboForm program that they thought Michael had used in 2013 and found that the pseudo-random number generator used to generate passwords in that version—and subsequent versions until 2015—did indeed have a significant flaw that made the random number generator not so random. The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past...
Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
Ahead of the election in India, the Guardian’s video team travelled through the country to explore how fake news and censorship might shape the outcome.
Almost one billion people are registered to vote. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for more than 10 years, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is seeking a third term.
But critics of Modi and the BJP say his government has become increasingly authoritarian, fracturing the country along religious lines and threatening India’s secular democracy. At the same time, the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors. You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors.
You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
Continue reading...Groups issue call to next government amid criticism of online fashion retailer’s labour practices and accusations of copying
Workers rights campaigners have called for the UK’s next government to oppose the online fashion business Shein joining the FTSE, arguing that a London listing would be “yet another betrayal to working people everywhere and the planet”.
Alena Ivanova, campaigns lead at Labour Behind the Label, said it had heard the news of senior British politicians courting Shein’s £50bn listing “with dismay” given what she claimed was a lack of transparency about its supply chain and ethical concerns.
Continue reading...Workers for US defence contractor KBR concerned after colleagues die on island with no hospital-grade health facility
Migrant workers employed by the US defence contractor KBR on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia have expressed concerns for their safety after the recent deaths of two of their colleagues, the Observer has learned.
The most recent death on Diego Garcia, which is host to a strategic American military base in the British Indian Ocean Territory, came on 5 January. Relemay Fabula Gan, 41, from the Philippines, died after suffering a collapsed lung following several weeks of illness after a Covid diagnosis, her family said.
Continue reading...Beverley McLachlin’s decision comes after British judge Lord Sumption quit court of final appeal, condemning ‘impossible political environment’
A former chief justice of Canada’s supreme court has announced she is stepping down from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal – the latest in a string of departures amid concerns about judicial independence from China.
Beverley McLachlin, 80, said she would be leaving the territory’s top court when her term ends next month to spend more time with her family, but that she still held “confidence in the members of the court, their independence and their determination to uphold the rule of law”.
Continue reading...Lord Sumption, who last week quit territory’s top court, speaks out on ‘paranoid atmosphere’ under Chinese rule
A British judge has described the “paranoid atmosphere” in Hong Kong as he explained his decision to step down from the territory’s top court.
Jonathan Sumption, along with another British judge, Lawrence Collins, last week resigned from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal (CFA).
Continue reading...Group from Cornell College were visiting a temple in Jilin city when they were attacked by a man with a knife, Iowa state representative Adam Zabner says
Four US college instructors teaching in China have been stabbed while visiting a public park, US officials have said.
The tutors from Cornell College in Iowa were at the park in Jilin province, north-eastern China with a faculty member from Beihua University on Monday when the attack occurred, college president Jonathan Brand said in a statement. The private college in Iowa partners with the university near Jilin City.
Continue reading...Experts believe Beijing will retaliate with measures that could hit European exports from cheese to cognac
The EU is expected to notify China that it will impose tariffs on electric vehicle imports this week, firing the starting gun on a potential summer trade war with Beijing.
A formal pre-disclosure of tariffs could happen as early as Wednesday, after a lengthy investigation into China’s state subsidies for its car manufacturing, which is predicted to conclude that massive support continues to be concentrated on the EV sector.
Continue reading...Katherine Ryan joins Grace this week to share her favourite comfort foods. The Canadian comedian, writer, presenter and actor is best known for her deliciously wicked comedy, delivered with a side dish of couture. Katherine shares memories from her past, including her father’s attempts to bring Indian food to Canada via Ireland, her difficult early days in London as a single parent trying to makes ends meet, and the deep fried delights on offer at her first place of work: Hooters. Now, Katherine has had two Netflix Comedy specials, and is a regular on the UK panel show circuit. But the question is – what is fuelling her funny?
New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent will be released every Tuesday
Continue reading...FBI chief condemns Peltier, 79, who denies killing agents on Pine Ridge reservation in 1975, as ‘remorseless killer’
Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who has served nearly 50 years in prison for the killing of two FBI agents, was due to have his first parole hearing since 2009 on Monday, his lawyer said.
Peltier, 79, has maintained that he did not kill the FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Advocates, including figures such as the late Nelson Mandela and a former prosecutor and judge involved in his case, have long said he should be freed because of what they call legal irregularities in his trial.
Continue reading...Reverend, pastor and professor, who was a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr, dies in Los Angeles after short illness
The Rev James Lawson Jr, an apostle of nonviolent protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white authorities as the civil rights movement gained traction, has died, his family said on Monday. He was 95.
His family said Lawson died on Sunday after a short illness in Los Angeles, where he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor.
Continue reading...Australia meet Scotland in St Lucia on Saturday with the potential for a 1999 World Cup-style controversy in the air
They were showing India v Pakistan in the bar at Bridgetown airport on Sunday, this World Cup having been pleasingly visible in the Caribbean. But as England supporters watched that nail- biter unfold over a cold bottle of Banks before the flight to Antigua, Scotland were already in the land of sea and sun, gleefully lining up a week at the last-chance saloon for the Auld Enemy.
Coming 24 hours after England were out-thought and outplayed by Australia at Kensington Oval, and staged in parallel to Pakistan’s big flop in the Big Apple, that seven‑wicket victory against Oman at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium has put Richie Berrington’s side on the verge of swiping their boarding passes to the Super Eight phase. Knocking off a target of 151 with 41 balls to spare, supercharging their net run-rate in the process, they could scarcely have done more.
Continue reading...Modi becomes second leader in Indian history to win three consecutive terms, but opposition leaders snub ceremony
Narendra Modi has been sworn in as prime minister of India for a historic third term, ushering in a new era of coalition politics for India’s strongman leader.
The ceremony, which took place at the presidential palace on Sunday evening, marked Modi’s return to power, only the second leader in India’s history to win three consecutive terms.
Continue reading...Campaigners say election shows rejection of ‘hate politics’ after marginalised groups vote to deny BJP a majority
It was widely described as the week that India’s beleaguered democracy was pulled back from the brink. As the election results rolled in on Tuesday, all predictions and polls were defied as Narendra Modi lost his outright majority for the first time in a decade while the opposition re-emerged as a legitimate political force. On Sunday evening, Modi will be sworn in as prime minister yet many believe his power and mandate stands diminished.
For one opposition politician in particular, the humbling of the strongman prime minister was a moment to savour. Late last year, Mahua Moitra, one of the most outspoken critics of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), found herself unceremoniously expelled from parliament and kicked out of her bungalow, after what she described as a “political witch-hunt” for daring to stand up to Modi.
Continue reading...Indian high commission made claim bronze depicting Tirumankai Alvar which it believes may have been looted
Oxford University has announced it is to hand back a 500-year-old sculpture of a Hindu saint to India.
The almost 60cm-tall bronze statue, which depicts Tirumankai Alvar, had been on display at the university’s Ashmolean Museum.
Continue reading...The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet:
According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million unique IP addresses, including 613,841 IP addresses located in the United States. Wang then generated millions of dollars by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee...
Incident comes at time of heightened tensions between neighbours, as tit-for-tat actions increase after North Korea sent rubbish-filled balloons into the South
South Korea’s military has said it fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers briefly crossed the border this week, amid rising tensions after Pyongyang sent rubbish-carrying balloons into the South and Seoul retaliated with a loudspeaker propaganda campaign.
“Some North Korean soldiers working within the DMZ on the central front briefly crossed the Military Demarcation Line,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to the line of control in the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas.
Continue reading...Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
Ian Sample hears from Linda Geddes about her recent trip to the Netherlands to try cultivated meat sausages, courtesy of the company Meatable. Advocates say that cultivated meat could be the future of sustainable and ethical meat production. Linda explains how they’re made, how their carbon footprint compares with traditional meat and most importantly … what they taste like!
Read more from Linda Geddes on her trip to the Netherlands
Continue reading...The airline has said that anyone who sustained serious injuries on SQ321 last month could be entitled to a larger payment
Singapore Airlines has offered US$10,000 compensation payments to passengers who suffered minor injuries during a flight last month that hit sudden, extreme turbulence.
On Tuesday, the airline announced that it had sent compensation offers to passengers who were on board flight SQ321 from London to Singapore on 20 May, which dropped 54 metres in altitude in less than five seconds while flying over Myanmar.
Continue reading...“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito told a person he thought was a right-wing activist.
The post Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Caught on Secret Audio appeared first on The Intercept.
Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
Muhammad Yunus tells the Guardian charges against him are politically motivated, and expresses concern about personal attacks from politicians
The Nobel peace laureate and microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has said that years of fighting what he calls “dirty” politically motivated attacks on his work to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh have made life “totally miserable”.
Yunus told the Guardian he had come under 20 years of pressure from the Bangladeshi government for his work, which is credited with improving the lives of millions of poor people, particularly women.
Continue reading...Kuo Chiu, known as KC to his friends, teaches urban design at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He’s also one of many of the country's citizens who practises rifle skills in his spare time, in case of a Chinese invasion.
The population of Taiwan has long grown familiar with Beijing’s pledge to one day ‘unify’ what it claims is a breakaway province. But recently, there has been a significant increase in aggressive and intimidatory acts.
Taiwan’s 160,000 active military personnel are vastly outnumbered by China’s 2 million-member armed forces, leading many civilians to turn to voluntary medical and combat training to protect themselves.
The Guardian's video team spent time with KC to see how he is preparing
Continue reading...“It’s hard to see this wildly disproportionate response as anything other than an attempt to chill speech on this issue.”
The post Columbia Coincidentally Rewrites Disciplinary Rules Just in Time to Screw Over Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
Ahead of the election in India, the Guardian’s video team travelled through the country to explore how fake news and censorship might shape the outcome.
Almost one billion people are registered to vote. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for more than 10 years, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is seeking a third term.
But critics of Modi and the BJP say his government has become increasingly authoritarian, fracturing the country along religious lines and threatening India’s secular democracy. At the same time, the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media.
We know turbulence is a common part of flying – but are some routes more prone? And where is it the worst? Turbulence is the leading cause of in-flight injuries to crew and passengers and after the fatal Singapore Airlines incident and injuries to passengers above Turkey on a Qatar Airways flight, you might be wondering if flights are about to get bumpier. Incidents of severe turbulence are on the rise – increasing by 55% between 1979 and 2020 – and the climate crisis is thought to be a responsible factor
► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube
Continue reading...Ban Khun Samut Chin, a coastal village in Samut Prakan province, Thailand, has been slowly swallowed by the sea over the past few decades. This has led to the relocation of the school and many homes, resulting in a dwindling population. Currently, there are only four students attending the school, often leaving just one in each classroom. The village has experienced severe coastal erosion, causing 1.1-2km (0.5-1.2 miles) of shoreline to disappear since the mid-1950s
Continue reading...“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito told a person he thought was a right-wing activist.
The post Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Caught on Secret Audio appeared first on The Intercept.
Prof Nick Megoran on the horror of Hiroshima, Andrew Aikman on Russia’s need for buffer states, Norman Rimmell on fears of a nuclear accident, and Alex Hamilton on the deterrent power of the atomic bomb. Plus a letter from Ted Schrecker
It is ironic that news of Keir Starmer’s plan to restate Labour’s commitment to “a ‘triple lock’ for the UK’s nuclear deterrent” (Keir Starmer to declare Labour as ‘party of national security’, 2 June) emerged on the same day that Toshiko Tanaka, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, addressed a spellbound meeting in London – organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Quakers – about her childhood experiences in 1945.
She spoke of seeing the initial explosion that killed every one of her classmates. She recounted regaining consciousness with a mouth full of dirt, running home to a mother who could not recognise her own badly burnt daughter, and smelling the lingering stench of burning flesh as bodies were cremated. To this day, she struggles to sleep as new sores break out on her skin, and cannot see a grilled tomato without remembering the ghastly sight of skin peeling off the dying who staggered through her neighbourhood like zombies.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed.
Murray Watt says the opposition has “started the new climate wars” after Barnaby Joyce and Keith Pitt, two senior Nationals, called for Australia to pull out of the Paris agreement. You can read more on this from Karen Middleton below:
Speaking to ABC News Breakfast, Watt said:
We’re back to the same old climate wars in the Coalition. I saw overnight that [Joyce and Pitt] openly called for the Coalition to pull out of the Paris agreement. They’ve spent the last couple of days trying to paper over the cracks in the Coalition, saying that they can withdraw the target without withdrawing from the agreement. Now it’s out there in the open for everyone to see. And you can set your clock by Barnaby Joyce causing new climate wars within the Coalition. It’s seem like we’re back to the bad old days.
We’re on track to get to 42%, which is only 1% short of the 43% target.
Continue reading...Prime minister says there will be ‘regrettable’ consequences for global relationships after Liberal leader won’t commit to 2030 target
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has accused Peter Dutton of being “afraid of the future” and risking “chasing away” investment in clean energy in Australia, after the opposition leader confirmed the Coalition will not set a 2030 emissions reduction target unless it wins the next election.
Albanese called Dutton’s stance “absurd”, highlighting confused messages from the Coalition about its climate policy, and saying any backtrack on Australia’s emissions reductions commitments would be “walking away from the Paris agreement”.
Continue reading...Aileen Cannon ruled ex-president would not be charged for waving classified papers as that conduct was not on trial
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents agreed on Monday to expunge from the indictment a paragraph about an episode where the former president waved around a classified document at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
The US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled she would strike the paragraph because Trump was not charged with a crime for the conduct it described and would be unfairly prejudicial if a jury later saw it at trial.
Continue reading...New Jersey attorney general looks into whether Trump is ineligible to hold licenses at three of his golf courses in state
The ripple effects of Donald Trump’s felony conviction widened on Monday to encompass one of his most famous business assets: golf courses.
The New Jersey’s attorney general’s office is looking into whether the former president’s recent convictions make him ineligible to hold liquor licenses at his three New Jersey golf courses, according to a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office.
Continue reading...Supporters hospitalized following rallies in Las Vegas and Phoenix, where temperatures have broken records
Dozens of Donald Trump’s supporters have been requiring medical help at his rallies in the scorching US south-west but it seems lost on him that his plans to reverse climate policies and “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels will only worsen extreme weather, campaigners say.
A total of 24 people at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Sunday required medical attention due to the heat, according to the Clark county fire department, with six taken to hospital for treatment. The hospitalizations come after a further 11 people needed to be admitted to hospital for heat exhaustion as they waited for Trump to speak at a rally in Phoenix on Thursday.
Continue reading...Republican extremist tells crowd ‘The man that I worship is also a convicted felon’
Donald Trump has been compared to Jesus Christ by the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at a campaign rally for the former president in Las Vegas, a city more renowned for evoking images of gambling than biblical scenes.
Greene, who makes frequent references to her Christian faith, cited Trump’s supposed Christ-like qualities to challenge the Democrats’ efforts to capitalise on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s status as a convicted felon following his recent conviction in a case involving hush money paid to an adult film actor and falsified business records in a New York court.
Continue reading...The White House has a goal to conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030 – Trump has different plans
A week after his presidential inauguration, Joe Biden cited the climate and biodiversity crises as reasons to set a sweeping new goal – to conserve at least 30% of America’s vast lands and waters by the end of the decade.
Three years on, new protections have spurred meaningful progress towards meeting the target by 2030.
Continue reading...The federal trial of the president’s son undermines Trump’s claim of a weaponized DoJ, but the right aims to make hay regardless
The picture of criminal behavior and a dissolute lifestyle was painted in sometimes painfully frank testimony in a Delaware court room last week and would have been difficult to hear for the family of any defendant.
But Hunter Biden, the man in the dock in Wilmington, is no ordinary plaintiff; he is the son of the president of the United States.
Continue reading...The draconian restrictions on asylum-seekers owe a lot to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, but the path was paved by Democrats.
The post Joe Biden’s Cruel Border Shutdown Follows in Clinton and Obama’s Footsteps Too appeared first on The Intercept.
Recovery Conference set to address Ukraine’s reconstruction needs; Finnish defence minister taking suspected violation ‘seriously’
Kyiv controls the situation in Ivanivske near Chasiv Yar, and Ukrainian forces continue to repel Russian troops in Staromaiorske in Donetsk oblast, Lt Col Nazar Voloshyn, the spokesperson of the Khortytsia group of forces, has told the Kyiv Independent.
The Kyiv Independent has this report:
The statement comes after the Russian defence ministry claimed on 10 June that its forces had captured Staromaiorske, a frontline village in southwestern Donetsk oblast.
The crowd-sourced monitoring channel DeepState then claimed the same day that Russian forces also captured Ivanivske, a village on the eastern outskirts of the embattled Chasiv Yar, and advanced near Staromaiorske and Novopokrovske. Voloshyn dismissed the claims about the capture of the two villages.
Continue reading...Families in Taranto, Italy, watch their kids play in polluted soil in the shadow of a steelworks, knowing that many people there have lost their lives to cancer. Lisa Sorgini captures their struggle
Continue reading...Incident comes at time of heightened tensions between neighbours, as tit-for-tat actions increase after North Korea sent rubbish-filled balloons into the South
South Korea’s military has said it fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers briefly crossed the border this week, amid rising tensions after Pyongyang sent rubbish-carrying balloons into the South and Seoul retaliated with a loudspeaker propaganda campaign.
“Some North Korean soldiers working within the DMZ on the central front briefly crossed the Military Demarcation Line,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to the line of control in the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas.
Continue reading...Company performing Shakespeare classic formed of 12 members who moved to small Uzhhorod town during war
Vyacheslav Yehorov was working at a film school creating art therapy for children when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, forcing millions of Ukrainians to flee their homes.
Many took refuge in the small western town of Uzhhorod, which borders four EU countries. It was here that Yehorov – a student of directing within the performing arts – decided to realise his long-held dream of staging King Lear.
King Lear, directed by Viacheslav Yehorov, will be staged at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 14 and 15 June.
Continue reading... submitted by /u/Saltedline [link] [comments] |
The far right has made significant gains in the European parliament elections. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has responded with a high-stakes gamble
As the results of the EU elections came in, the shocks kept coming. In France, Germany and Italy the far right made serious gains. Just under a quarter of MEPs in the European parliament will be drawn from these parties. But outside the biggest countries the picture was more complicated – in some places, the centre parties held their ground, in others, the left did well.
The biggest fallout has been in France. Macron saw the surge in the far-right votes as a direct challenge to his rule and his response was to call snap elections for the French parliament. Why has he taken such a huge gamble and what could all this mean for France – and the direction of Europe?
Continue reading...Only Russia abstains in vote on plan calling for hostage and prisoner swap in six-week ceasefire leading to wider deal
The UN security council has adopted a resolution calling for Hamas to agree to a three-phase hostage-for-ceasefire proposal outlined by Joe Biden, the first time the body has endorsed a comprehensive peace deal to end the Gaza war.
A Hamas statement said the group welcomed the resolution, though it was not immediately clear if that meant the leadership in Gaza accepted the ceasefire plan.
Continue reading...European Conservatives and Reformists party includes members such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice
Reaction to Emmanuel Macron’s shock election announcement continues to roll in.
Celine Bracq, director general of the Odoxa polling agency, told the AFP news agency it was a “poker move” at a time when there is a “strong desire on the part of the French to punish the president”.
It’s something extremely risky. In all likelihood, the National Rally, in the wake of the European elections, could have a majority in the National Assembly and why not an absolute majority?”
The most likely outcome is more fragmentation, more deadlock and chaos. A complete paralysis.”
Continue reading...The French president’s decision to call a snap parliamentary election, after Marine Le Pen’s triumph in European polls, is a fateful moment
Ahead of Sunday’s European election results, attention was understandably focused on the impact of a potential far-right surge on the balance of power in Brussels institutions. In the event, the pan-European centre held, just about, with more moderate conservative parties generally enjoying a good night. But that was not even close to being the main headline of the evening.
Emmanuel Macron’s shock decision to call snap legislative elections, after a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party (RN), is a gamble of the highest order, taken from a position of weakness. Even by the standards of a president who created his own movement to demolish the traditional centre-left and centre-right, it is a surprisingly risky move. In a Sunday evening address, Mr Macron told the nation that it was a necessary one in order to “clarify” a result that saw the extreme right win a combined 40% of the vote. That clarification, when it comes on 7 July, may or may not be welcome.
Continue reading...Blue crabs with no natural predators have been disrupting prized shellfish populations on Italy’s coast. So revenge is on the menu
In a down-to-earth suburb of Catania on Sicily’s east coast, smoke billows from street stands selling traditional grilled horse meat, and local youngsters gather around kiosks selling the region’s unique handmade drink, seltz limone e sale (seltzer with lemon and sea salt). It is here that a family of charismatic ex-fishers have opened a seafood restaurant that bravely challenges long-held regional conventions.
The Salamone family sell all the usual local specialities in their slick new business “La Fish”, such as Sicily’s famous swordfish, sardines and tuna. However, the feature of tonight’s tasting menu – attracting customers who range from local families to food connoisseurs – is a relative newcomer to these shores and to Sicilian tables: the Atlantic blue crab.
Continue reading...Amelia Sanjurjo, a member of Uruguay’s Communist party who disappeared in 1977, was identified and laid to rest
A Uruguayan woman who was abducted by security forces during the country’s military dictatorship has received a proper burial, nearly 50 years after she was forcibly disappeared.
Bone fragments of Amelia Sanjurjo were exhumed exactly a year ago from a military base in a small southern town in Uruguay. She was finally identified last week after investigators took DNA samples from her maternal aunt and nephews in Uruguay, Spain and Italy in hopes of finding a match.
Continue reading...The bedroom antics of two couples 50 years apart drive the cultural critic’s debut novel, a cerebral comedy full of insights into art, womanhood and ethical quandaries
Set in pre-Covid Paris, Lauren Elkin’s first novel is a brainy sex comedy narrated by Anna, a Franco-American psychoanalyst on medical leave in the wake of a miscarriage. Her lawyer husband is away from home on a job in London, leaving her to oversee the long-planned knocking through of a wall in their Belleville apartment. It’s August – all her friends are out of town – and she’s drifting until she gets a new neighbour: Clémentine, an art history postgraduate who has just moved into a nearby building with her boyfriend, Jonathan – the name, coincidentally, of Anna’s most serious ex, the son of a famous psychoanalyst whose books turned her on to the discipline.
The first third of the novel ambles amiably in exploratory chat between the two women, despite a crackle of ambient dread in ominous signs of climate change (record temperatures in the city; wildfires in Corsica) as well as, more immediately, the mounting toll of French women murdered by men – an outrage highlighted by a guerrilla poster campaign Anna notices on her daily run. But Scaffolding’s real action comes in the bedroom: first when, a third of the way through the book, Elkin winds back the action nearly 50 years to toggle between Florence and Henry, an unfaithfully married couple who used to live in Anna’s flat, and then, in the novel’s final part, when we follow the narrator’s own bed-hopping in the present, as Clémentine widens Anna’s sexual horizons.
Elkin gives us two versions of an adultery plot, the second a self-consciously queered retread of the first. Clémentine, who says she spends her days “writing poetry and masturbating”, functions in the novel as a kind of constant question for Anna, loosening her view of monogamy, prodding her guilt as a slightly self-loathing gentrifier as well as needling her about the assumptions of psychoanalysis and its “Mommy-Daddy-Me structure, like there’s no one else in the world who affects who we become, or the binary take on gender... It’s, like, patriarchy, bottled and distilled”.
Elkin’s date-stamped sign-off tells us the novel was begun in 2007 and completed last year – there’s a list of five Paris addresses where she wrote it – and it’s interesting to think of how the landscape of modern fiction changed in that period. In putting property at the centre of a novel about womanhood and sexuality, Scaffolding joins books by Rachel Cusk (Transit) and Deborah Levy (Real Estate), and as an erudite lust quadrilateral interested in ethical quandaries, it may put you in mind of Sally Rooney (even if Clémentine didn’t at one point mention watching a television series “based on an Irish novel”, which is “kind of annoying... Like, sleep together, don’t sleep together, do your thing”). Indeed, the rapid tying up of loose ends, embracing social norms given side-eye by the rest of the novel, bears resemblance to the left-turn conclusion of Beautiful World, Where Are You. Instead of a blocked writer in the wake of a breakdown, we’ve got a blocked analyst in the wake of grief re-envisioning life from the ground up (“Something Clém said has stuck with me for weeks now and I don’t know what to do with it; something like whether psychoanalysis ought to be socially transformative to justify its existence”).
Elkin, as well as being a prolific translator, has previously published cultural criticism and experimental memoir (No 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute), and in many ways Scaffolding is a critic’s novel, full of insights that could seamlessly appear in Elkin’s nonfiction. Anna and Clémentine exchange views of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors or Chris Kraus’s novel I Love Dick; in a conversation near the end of the novel, when its emotional freight is heaviest, Anna looks up a word’s etymology on her phone. “In The Symposium, early on, Plato talks about...” or “At the beginning of Encore, Lacan’s twentieth seminar, which he gave in 1972-73, he says that...” aren’t untypical ways for Elkin to open a sentence.
submitted by /u/xSNYPSx [link] [comments] |
The U.S. has trained 15 coup leaders in recent decades — and U.S. counterterrorism policies in the region have failed.
The post After Training African Coup Leaders, Pentagon Blames Russia for African Coups appeared first on The Intercept.
Activists suing the Biden administration over Gaza policy are demanding the judge recuse himself over the sponsored trip.
The post A Federal Judge Visited Israel on a Junket Designed to Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing a Gaza Case. appeared first on The Intercept.
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.
Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying...
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities
Continue reading...About one in four people stopped at border had some data copied from their devices by Australian Border Force
Australian border force officers obtained passcodes to the devices of almost 10,000 people in the past two years, new data obtained by Guardian Australia reveals, with most people who were ordered to hand over their phones willingly providing the passcode.
Data provided to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws show that since Australia’s borders reopened following easing of Covid-19 restrictions phone searches rebounded as the number of travellers increased. There were 2,087 searches in the 2021-2022 financial year, 5,065 in 2022-23, and 4,422 in the period between 1 July 2023 and 31 March 2024.
Continue reading...Commonwealth ombudsman’s report says another five people ‘inappropriately detained’ in 2022-23, though numbers are falling
At least two people were held in Australian immigration detention centres for longer than necessary after emails for their release were missed by staff, an independent watchdog has revealed.
Another three people had been “inappropriately detained” on incorrectly issued visa cancellations, which used the wrong template or did not provide enough reasons.
Continue reading...Nicholas Sampson claims Four Corners story that led to his resignation was ‘wildly inaccurate’ and ‘biased’
The former headmaster of Sydney’s prestigious Cranbrook School has lodged a “detailed complaint” with the ABC ombudsman after the broadcast of a Four Corners program about the school earlier this year.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Nicholas Sampson said he had been “vindicated” after settling a legal dispute with the school’s council, while labelling the reporting that led to his resignation as “wildly inaccurate” and “biased”.
Continue reading...Sydney Malayalee Association confirms the identity of two women who died after being hit by wave while picnicking
The Sydney Malayalee community is “saddened” by the deaths of two women from the community, who were swept out to sea by a large wave in the city’s south.
In a post to Facebook, the Sydney Malayalee Association confirmed the identities of the two women as 35-year-old Marwa Hashim and 38-year-old Nirsha Haris.
This story was updated on 11 June. A previous version of the story incorrectly said the two women who died were Nepali.
Continue reading...The charge of an illegitimate marriage is all that’s left after a court acquitted Khan over his handling of a classified cypher.
The post Imran Khan Remains Imprisoned Over His Wife’s Menstrual Cycles. State Department Says That’s “Something For the Pakistani Courts to Decide.” appeared first on The Intercept.
Trump fans say his conviction is an overreach. But a close look at another recent fraud trial shows his case was run-of-the-mill.
The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.
Andrew Bailey’s office has a losing record of fighting against exonerations recommended by local prosecutors — but it’s not giving up.
The post Missouri’s Attorney General Is Waging War to Keep the Wrongly Convicted Locked Up appeared first on The Intercept.
Twelve jurors in New York have presented their fellow Americans with a simple question: are you willing to elect a convicted criminal to the White House?
On Thursday, Donald Trump was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The verdict makes him the first president, current or former, to be found guilty of felony crimes in the US's near 250-year history. Regardless, the conviction does not disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate or bar him from again sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump, who opted not to take the stand during the trial, has denied wrongdoing, railed against the proceedings and ahead of the verdict compared himself to a saint: “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged,” he said on Wednesday. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is expected to appeal the verdict.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine has been in court over the last several weeks covering all the developments – here are three testimonies he found most memorable.
Could Trump go to prison? Here’s what happens next after the guilty verdict
RSS Rabbit links users to publicly available RSS entries.
Vet every link before clicking! The creators accept no responsibility for the contents of these entries.
Relevant
Fresh
Convenient
Agile
We're not prepared to take user feedback yet. Check back soon!