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‘We’re trying to make it more inclusive’: the rise of Britain’s new wine bars
Sat, 20 Apr 2024 14:00:29 GMT
In the new wine bars springing up in cities, towns and even at the seaside, natural wines and small plates are in, sommeliers and snobbery are out
Friday night and it’s crowded. A communal table runs through the room, a couple of seats face windows thick with condensation. Scribbled on a blackboard menu are a few wines, plus a selection of dishes a lone chef in a minuscule kitchen somehow whips up. There’s paté en croute on your plate and Afrobeats hums at just the right volume. A shelf displays bottles with takeaway prices written in white marker. You’re at … well, you could be in any one of the new generation of wine bars that have emerged all over the country in the past few years.
Not just a bar but not quite a restaurant, natural wines and inventive small plates are their calling. Since 2020, London has seen a swathe of openings, from Cadet on Newington Green to Hector’s in De Beauvoir and Oranj in Shoreditch. Every neighbourhood in the capital, from Camberwell to Clerkenwell, now has one. Even Mayfair, where ArtFarm, owned by Hauser & Wirth gallery founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth, recently set up a wine bar below their Farm Shop.
Continue reading...Organic float at annual flower parade a sign of changing times amid concerns over chemicals’ link to neurological disorders
Flower farmer John Huiberts stands next to a flamingo made of thousands of organic pink hyacinths. At the annual BloemenCorso, or flower parade, where decorated floats travel through 26 miles of fields in full bloom, his electric vehicle is a sign of changing times in the Netherlands.
“It makes you proud,” said the co-owner of Huiberts Biologische Bloembollen, who went organic 11 years ago. “They say the chemicals are safe but I don’t know. It took me a few years to have good and healthy bulbs, but it is reassuring not to use them any more.”
Continue reading...As tensions with China rise, scientists at America’s leading universities complain of stalled research after crackdown at airports
Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered.
Many western scholars are nervous about travelling to China in the current political climate. But lately it is Chinese researchers working at US universities who are increasingly reporting interrogations – and in several cases deportations – at US airports, despite holding valid work or study visas for scientific research.
Continue reading...It’s three decades since the government’s attempt to ban raves radicalised an oddball coalition of dance fans, squatters and ‘new age’ travellers. What became of the protesters who tried to kill the bill?
When Harry Harrison first saw the white paper for the criminal justice and public order bill at the end of 1993, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. Harrison was the 27-year-old co-founder of Nottingham’s DiY sound system, so-called house music anarchists, who were known for throwing joyful free parties in fields and forests, quarries and squats. Now those gatherings could be criminalised and, for the first time, the music he played was being legally codified as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” he says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.”
The 179-page bill was a hotchpotch of measures, from updating obscenity law and lowering the age of consent for gay men to restricting the right to silence when arrested and enabling the collection of DNA samples. Andrew Puddephatt, then director of the civil rights group Liberty, calls it “a Christmas tree bill. You bung a lot of different issues into one big bill as a way of securing parliamentary time.” At the time, Puddephatt described it as “the most wide-ranging attack on human rights in the UK in recent years”.
Continue reading...Offering exquisite scenery, rare wildlife and spectacular trails, these under-the-radar national parks are worth tracking down
There is a wild and wonderful water world in the north-eastern corner of Spain. The Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici national park, in the central Pyrenees north of Lleida, is characterised by more than 200 lakes fed by melting snow and ice, plus rivers and streams, gorges, waterfalls and marshes. (Aigüestortes means “winding waters” in Catalan, and Sant Maurici is the biggest lake.)
Continue reading...The state says EMTALA, a law barring discrimination in emergency medical care, interferes with its abortion ban.
The post Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.
Video shared across social media shows alleged IDF strikes and sniper fire targeting groups of people attempting to travel to the north of Gaza, which Israel says is an active 'war zone'. The northern half of the coastal enclave has been sealed off by the Israeli military, but rumours spread over the weekend of civilians passing through, triggering a wave of people trying to return to their homes
Continue reading...From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to the Tuileries Garden in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself
Dodging between throngs of tourists and workers on their lunch breaks in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, we stop in front of the nearly 3-tonne statue depicting King Carlos III on a horse. Playfully nicknamed Madrid’s best mayor, Carlos III is credited with modernising the city’s lighting, sewage systems and rubbish removal.
Kwame Ondo, the tour guide behind AfroIbérica Tours, offers up another, albeit lesser-known tidbit about the monarch. “He was one of the biggest slave owners of his time,” says Ondo, citing the 1,500 enslaved people he kept on the Iberian peninsula and the 18,500 others held in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. As aristocratic families sought to keep up with the monarch, the proportion of enslaved people in Madrid swelled to an estimated 4% of the population in the 1780s.
Continue reading...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...Panel finds PC Martin Briggs breached professional standards over removal of items before job-related fitness test
A police trainer who used cutting equipment to remove earrings from three student officers before fitness and safety exercises has been found guilty of gross misconduct.
The three female officers believed PC Martin Briggs had used bolt croppers on them, but during the misconduct hearing it was established that while he did fetch the large tool, he had used smaller “snips”.
Continue reading...The stadiums have been built and 8m tickets sold. Can the notoriously pessimistic French public’s enthusiasm for the Games catch up?
In a live television interview under the steel and glass roof of Paris’s Grand Palais – the centrepiece of this summer’s Olympic Games – Emmanuel Macron set out his ambitions for the country’s athletes in much the same way he might outline a political manifesto.
They had one goal: to take enough medals to be among the Games’ top five Olympic and top eight Paralympic nations. He was putting pressure on them, he said last week – previously described as “healthy pressure” – but the goal was “absolutely attainable”.
Continue reading...Twenty-three Chinese swimmers tested positive for the banned drug TMZ months before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, it has emerged. However, they were cleared to compete at the Games after the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) accepted an explanation from the Chinese authorities that the kitchen at their hotel was contaminated.
The story, which has come to light after a joint investigation by the German TV channel ARD and the New York Times, has led to widespread criticism of Wada from senior figures in anti-doping, with one calling the case “shocking” and another a “devastating stab in the back to clean athletes”.
Continue reading...Billed as a rival to the Olympic Games, the Enhanced Games, set to take place in 2025, is a sporting event with a difference; athletes will be allowed to dope. Ian Sample talks to chief sports writer Barney Ronay about where the idea came from and how it’s being sold as an anti-establishment underdog, and to Dr Peter Angell about what these usually banned substances are, and what they could do to athletes’ bodies
Clips: Talk TV, News Nation, Inside with Brett Hawke, ESPN
Read Barney Ronay’s opinion piece on the Enhanced Games
Continue reading...
Take your nacho game to the next level by topping them with a layer each of refried beans, vegan creme fraiche, guacamole, pico de gallo, cheese, olives and jalapeños
There are several great women on my street, but two of them, Anna and Marina, make seriously good nachos. Or, more accurately, Marina makes great vegetarian nachos with all the fixings and Anna makes a glorious seven-layer dip, which is a Tex-Mex party classic that involves a very specific layering of ingredients, always starting with refried beans followed by soured cream, guacamole, pico de gallo, cheese, olives, herbs or jalapeños, and always eaten with tortilla chips for dipping. In a show of affection for both women and their cooking, I’ve merged the two to create these seven-layer nachos.
Discover this recipe and over 1,000 more from your favourite cooks on the new Guardian Feast app, with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun
Continue reading...The Royal Academy is examining the part it has played in Britain’s history of slavery and empire – and the usual carping suspects will not be pleased
Very recent visitors from Mars may not know of the regular attacks on the National Trust for being “woke”, but the rest of us have heard plenty. The trust’s latest onslaught on British values has something to do with the lack of butter in the scones. Never mind that they have been made like this for years; Tory MPs and other critics perceive the keen threat to British values posed by margarine.
Such stories never stop coming. This week, Kemi Badenoch, the trade secretary, opined that the UK did not grow rich through “colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever”, but owed its success to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This is the kind of half-digested, badly regurgitated history that leads to a forlorn Tony Hancock asking if Magna Carta died in vain.
Continue reading...Jerry Hall’s next husband could manage almost the whole menu without putting in teeth
Le Caprice will to my mind always be Princess Di’s lunchtime gal pal hotspot. I grew up about 250 miles from St James’s in central London, where handmade shoe boutiques nestle beside bespoke fedora specialists, and where the local corner shop is Fortnum & Mason’s food hall. However, via the tabloids, the goings on at Le Caprice often played out in my living room in Carlisle. Behold, HRH Diana, sleek and coquettish, striding into Le Caprice for her bang bang chicken, perhaps dining alongside megastars Mick Jagger, Liz Taylor and Nina Myskow. I guzzled that sophisticated-sounding bang bang chicken vicariously, then headed off to the local Brewers Fayre for my breaded scampi.
Now, on the old Le Caprice site, after closures and some management swapsies, Arlington is here. Some might say not a lot has changed: the decor, menu, clientele, Mayfair money, yacht tans, facelifts and the general sense that many of the diners here are merely passing through London this week, after Gstaad and before Cannes, and checking in on their Mayfair townhouses. Who is going to cook for themselves when you’re on a schedule like that? At Arlington, people table-hop, air-kiss and still eat bang bang chicken, which is just a runnier version of chicken satay, as I learned to my puzzlement on reaching London in the 1990s. It’s satisfying, sweet, crunchy, chickeny stodge, although Arlington’s version has a delectable undertone of barbecue sauce.
Continue reading...In the new wine bars springing up in cities, towns and even at the seaside, natural wines and small plates are in, sommeliers and snobbery are out
Friday night and it’s crowded. A communal table runs through the room, a couple of seats face windows thick with condensation. Scribbled on a blackboard menu are a few wines, plus a selection of dishes a lone chef in a minuscule kitchen somehow whips up. There’s paté en croute on your plate and Afrobeats hums at just the right volume. A shelf displays bottles with takeaway prices written in white marker. You’re at … well, you could be in any one of the new generation of wine bars that have emerged all over the country in the past few years.
Not just a bar but not quite a restaurant, natural wines and inventive small plates are their calling. Since 2020, London has seen a swathe of openings, from Cadet on Newington Green to Hector’s in De Beauvoir and Oranj in Shoreditch. Every neighbourhood in the capital, from Camberwell to Clerkenwell, now has one. Even Mayfair, where ArtFarm, owned by Hauser & Wirth gallery founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth, recently set up a wine bar below their Farm Shop.
Continue reading...The Irish musician on her favourite traditional pub, converting to the cult of baseball, and gigs in a western movie set
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, who performs as CMAT, was born in Dublin in 1996 and grew up in nearby Dunboyne. She formed a band at 18 but quit after three years and later reinvented herself as a solo artist blending country music with pop and other influences. Her 2022 debut, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, won the RTÉ Choice music prize for Irish album of the year. The Observer described her follow-up Crazymad, for Me as “one of the finest” albums of last year – “about as much fun as a record about a toxic power imbalance can be”. CMAT plays the O2 Forum Kentish Town on 16 May and Sheffield’s Kelham Island Museum on 18 May.
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A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to underestimate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which the Guardian has seen.
Continue reading...The state says EMTALA, a law barring discrimination in emergency medical care, interferes with its abortion ban.
The post Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.
U.S. military service members interviewed for a congressional inquiry said intelligence reports about how bad the situation is were being suppressed.
The post U.S. Troops in Niger Say They’re “Stranded” and Can’t Get Mail, Medicine appeared first on The Intercept.
Columbia, Vanderbilt, and Pomona College all seriously disciplined students protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza this month.
The post Ahead of Congressional Testimony, Columbia President Cracks Down on Student Advocacy for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.
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.
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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
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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
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