All The News

on 2024.12.12 at 13:23:05 in London

News
Syria rebel leader vows to shut down notorious Assad prisons
Canada euthanasia now accounts for nearly one in 20 deaths
Time names Donald Trump person of the year for second time
Selena Gomez announces engagement to Benny Blanco
Israeli strikes kill 12 guarding Gaza aid lorries, medics say
US man found near Damascus after being freed from Syrian prison
How Luigi Mangione's legal defence could take shape
Biden issues 39 presidential pardons and commutes 1,500 sentences
FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office
Moment of relief as Romania and Bulgaria join EU border-free zone
Children as young as 10 will face adult jail time in Australian state
Ethiopia and Somalia agree to end bitter Somaliland port feud
Israel seizing on Syria chaos to strike military assets
Russian ships move from Syria base amid doubts over future
'I want justice': Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time
Meet Karol G, Colombia's Taylor Swift
Australia turns to rugby to curb China influence in PNG
'I hid Sara Sharif's family during international police hunt'
Shopkeeper tracks down mum who stole Jellycat toys to sell on Vinted
'Christmas lights' galaxy reveals how Universe formed
Mystery drones not from Iranian 'mothership' - Pentagon
Asylum hotel rioter jailed for nine years
Australia to force tech giants to keep paying for news
Mexican judge shot dead outside courthouse in Acapulco
Let me come home, teen sentenced in Dubai pleads

Business
Star luxury property brokers charged with sex trafficking
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta donates $1m to Trump fund
Elon Musk's Tesla lobbied UK to charge petrol drivers more
Hackers find hole in Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' cyber-security
'I'm more confident' despite rise in US inflation
India: Is the fastest-growing big economy losing steam?
What is rage-baiting and why is it profitable?
'Crazy growth': How one product created a multi-million dollar brand
The Onion's purchase of Alex Jones's Infowars rejected by judge
Anger after Indian start-up pretends to sack stressed staff
Coffee price surges to highest on record
General Motors pulls plug on robotaxi business
More jobs and no 'nuisance taxes' - Ghanaians' great expectations
Car loan scandal victims told to complain
Amazon and eBay to pay 'fair share' for e-waste recycling
Blow for UK as equipment giant Ashtead chooses US
Luigi Mangione charged with murdering healthcare CEO in New York
Murdoch loses bid to change trust in real-life 'Succession' battle
Hershey shares jump on Cadbury owner buyout report
Will bribery charges against Adani derail India's green goals?
UK sanctions Kenyan businessman over illicit gold trade
Google unveils 'mind-boggling' quantum computing chip
Nvidia targeted by China in new chip war probe

Innovation
'There was almost a utopian feeling to it': How StumbleUpon pioneered the way we use the internet
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down in mass Meta outage
Can you solve the GCHQ Christmas challenge?
Chatbot 'encouraged teen to kill parents over screen time limit'
Can chicken soup and other home remedies really fight off a cold?
Leave only moonprints: Nasa's lunar recycling ambitions
The ghosts of India's TikTok: What happens when a social media app is banned
The 'apple library' with a lost world on its limbs
The quest for a longer-lasting whooping cough vaccine
The hunt for heat: Drilling the deepest holes on Earth
How to avoid being a toxic friend
How the Amazon's 'Boiling River' foreshadows a warmer world
AI cancer diagnosis 'might have saved my life'
Crumbling rocks, wetter avalanches: Why life-and-death rescues are changing in a warming world
TikTok asks for emergency pause to looming US ban
Scientists seek to stop satellites colliding
'Drown in stars' during meteor shower - astronomer

Culture
Butler gears up for 'fighting family Christmas'
The Princess of Wales to Gigi Hadid: How ultra-traditional tweed found a new fanbase
Quannah Chasinghorse: The Indigenous American supermodel on bringing change
Rap group Bad Boy Chiller Crew sue record label
Critics praise Chalamet's portrayal of Bob Dylan
The charges against Sean 'Diddy' Combs explained
Lawyer cites 300 potential cases against Diddy
Jamie Foxx reveals he had a stroke in 2023
Babygirl to Gladiator II and Conclave: The 20 best films of 2024
Babygirl to A Complete Unknown: 12 of the best films to watch this December
A Complete Unknown review: Timothée Chalamet is 'brilliant and believable' in 'conventional' biopic
'You have to just draw something that you hope is funny': How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy
'Her fans are making pilgrimages': How Taylor Swift's Eras Tour became a near-religious experience
'Mocha mousse' to plum: The nine paint colours that can transform your home
Why we're 'living in the golden age of the doppelganger'
Gaudy or iconic? How leopard print took over
'As darkness fell, blazing hangars lit up the sky': How the fall of Pyongyang brought the world to the brink of crisis
'I'm not afraid of dying': The pioneering tennis champion who told the world he had Aids
'I have been deceiving you… I'm sorry about that': The British politician who was caught faking his own death
'That was the greatest day of all our lives': The migrants who passed through Ellis Island
'It's rather different from selling an ordinary book': How Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned – and became a bestseller
'It was a much more interesting character': How Arnold Schwarzenegger became the bad guy in The Terminator
Mobo Awards founder Kanya King reveals cancer diagnosis
Former Paralympian realises lifelong dream to sing
Designer John Galliano leaves Maison Margiela after 10 years
Sara Sharif: Smiles, songs and dreams of X Factor
Henry Cavill honours Jersey shop in Warhammer post
Controversial sculpture display plan approved
'Generational talent' crowned The Rap Game UK winner
Museum visitors react to pay-as-you-feel idea
Pigeon art project reveals why people moved to town

Arts
'It was a shock to many': Matthew Bourne on his Swan Lake with male swans, the show that shook up the dance world
Artists imagine a new utopia for Kenya's capital
Ewan McGregor takes on first UK theatre role in 17 years
Why the iconic English painting The Hay Wain by John Constable is not what it seems
These five bizarre Surrealist artworks are not what they seem
Ida Hammershøi: The identity of art's most famous 'faceless woman'
The rare blue the Maya invented
The colour that means both life and death
The shady past of the colour pink
The toxic colour that comes from volcanoes
The mysterious painting that changed how we see colour
The insect that painted Europe red
'An unmistakable stab at the USSR': Could Amadeus be the most misunderstood Oscar winner ever?
Paul McCartney's missing bass and other mysterious musical instrument disappearances
How opera is aiming for net zero amid worsening climate change
Antonio Pappano: How opera can be 'open to everyone'
Bryn Terfel: The nation that is the 'land of song'
Gen Z and young millennials' surprising obsession
Theatre group loses £30k as storm destroys big top
Plan to modernise art deco theatre is approved
Art festival relaunches after funding shortfall
Goldilocks panto to 'bring joy' to Bristol
Theatre duo to make Eastbourne's 'jewels' shine
Firm behind axed Christmas play offers refunds
How Hamlet found a virtual stage in Grand Theft Auto

Travel
Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?
Ride the real Polar Express with Santa in London
A fashion expert's insider guide to shopping in New York City
Council aims to help local shops with Christmas ad
Heathrow airport worker reunited with lifesaver
Warning staff shortages could disrupt Christmas travel
Flights from Exeter to Amsterdam to launch in 2025
Tourism body 'putting fireworks before lifeguards'
Welcome to smog season: How will air pollution change where and when we travel?
Grímsey: The Arctic island with 20 people and one million birds
The UK's network of free hiking 'hotels'
How the bullet train transformed Japan
The rise and fall of Vang Vieng, Laos' notorious party town
The Trans Dinarica: A new 5,500km bike trail connecting one of Europe's most remote regions
Eight of the world's most extraordinary tiny hotel rooms
A world class champion freestyle skier's guide to La Plagne, France
A Turkish film and TV star's guide to Antalya, Turkey
A dancehall superstar's guide to Jamaica
Five of Montreal's best poutine spots - according to a local chef
A two-Michelin-star chef's guide to the best dining spots in Istanbul
A dancer's guide to Seville's best flamenco experiences
A Oaxacan chef's guide to the best of Oaxaca City's street food
A Scotch whisky lover's guide to Edinburgh and beyond
A 'crazy town looking to go fossil free': Sweden's wooden city that was green before Greta
Nordhavn: The Danish 'city' that's been designed for an easy life
Booking your next holiday? Consider these six trailblazing travel firms making the world a better place
The world's adventure capital's massive gamble
The ultimate holiday drink menu requires a perfect martini
Irish chef Richard Corrigan's classic Christmas menu
Yia Vang on how to prepare an abundant Hmong holiday meal
Jordy Navarra's festive Filipino feast, served family-style
The last Inca bridge master
Testaccio: The foodie neighbourhood where Romans go to eat
Four of Europe's most fascinating pre-Christian winter festivals
What it's like to live in the world's most innovative countries
A 200km kayak along one of Europe's last wild rivers
Will you be going on holiday to… Greenland next year?
How New York City is reclaiming its Native American roots
Why urban sketching retreats are taking off
The quaint English town where the US' future was planned

Earth
Saving bluefin tuna: The sushi delicacy threatened by climate change
Too hot for humpbacks: The race to protect Pacific whales
Giant mug back in place after Storm Darragh damage
'My insurers say Storm Darragh was not a storm'
Law to cut emissions in NI approved by assembly
Village 'heart ripped out' by battery site plans
Community rallies to help storm-hit football club
The people growing their own toilet paper
The indigenous women saving India's endangered giant yams
Whale makes epic migration, astonishing scientists
'If we stop now, they're gone forever': The Nordic countries breeding Arctic foxes
Mining the Pacific – future proofing or fool's gold?
UK 'not ready' for extreme weather like Storm Darragh
How the mournful songs of icebergs reverberate around the world
The 'bison skull mountain' photo that reveals the US's dark history
Bear-leather shoes and Roman 'good-luck' coins: The lost worlds emerging from glaciers


Syria rebel leader vows to shut down notorious Assad prisons

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c047579lzklo, today

Syrian rebel forces have said they plan to close the notoriously harsh prisons run by ousted president Bashar al-Assad and hunt those involved in the killing or torture of detainees.

Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, also said he would dissolve the security forces of the former regime, in a statement seen by the Reuters news agency.

Videos showing thousands of prisoners being freed from Saydnaya prison - referred to as a "human slaughterhouse" by rights groups - surfaced after the collapse of the Assad government on Sunday.

Almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the prisons run by Assad, UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Jolani's Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led other Syrian rebel factions in a lightning offensive that toppled the Assad dynasty's 54-year-rule.

Assad fled to Russia in the early hours of Sunday, where he and his family have been given asylum, after rebels captured the capital Damascus.

In a separate statement, Jolani said pardons for those who took part in the torture or killing of prisoners were out of the question.

"We will pursue them in Syria, and we ask countries to hand over those who fled so we can achieve justice," he said.

Since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad Syrians have rushed to the regime's infamous prisons, desperately searching for their loved ones. In a 2022 report, the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) said Saydnaya "effectively became a death camp" after the start of the civil war in 2011.

Jolani also said he would dissolve the former Assad regime's security forces. It is not clear how quickly they could be reconstituted by rebel fighters amid concerns about Israeli strikes on the country's military infrastructure.

In the statement seen by Reuters, Jolani said his group was working with international organisations to secure possible chemical weapons sites.

When asked about the Reuters report, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said the US "welcomed" Jolani's words but said they needed to be met with actions.

"Our focus is that these chemical weapons do not fall into the wrong hands", she added.

This comes after Israel carried out hundreds of strikes across Syria and seized a number of military assets.

One of the attacks targeted a research centre with suspected links to chemical weapon production, according to local media reports.

Israel says it is acting to stop weapons falling "into the hands of extremists".

A chemical weapon is described by the UN's chemical watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), as a chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties.

Their use is prohibited under international humanitarian law.

Between 2013 to 2018, Human Rights Watch documented at least 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, accusing the ousted government of being responsible for most of them.

Assad's government denied ever using chemical weapons.

Syria signed the OPCW's Chemical Weapons Certificate in 2013, a month after a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of Damascus left more than 1,400 people dead.

It is not known how many chemical weapons Syria has, but it's believed Assad kept stockpiles and that the declaration he had made was incomplete.

Victims of chemical attacks in Syria have recently spoken to the BBC about the devastating impacts they've experienced.

Meanwhile, European foreign ministers are meeting in Berlin on Thursday to hold critical talks on Syria and Ukraine.

A day later, leaders of the G7 countries will also discuss the latest developments in Syria at a virtual meeting, the White House said.


Canada euthanasia now accounts for nearly one in 20 deaths

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j1z14p57po, today

The rate of medical assistance in dying - also known as euthanasia - has grown in Canada for the fifth straight year, albeit at a slower pace.

The country released its fifth annual report since legalising assisted dying in 2016, which for the first time included data on the ethnicity of those seeking euthanasia.

Around 15,300 people underwent assisted dying last year, accounting for 4.7% of deaths in the country. Canada lawmakers are currently seeking to expand access to euthanasia to cover people with mental illnesses by 2027.

Canada is among a few countries that have introduced assisted dying laws in the past decade. Others include Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Austria.

The figures released on Wednesday by Health Canada show that the rate of assisted dying in Canada increased by nearly 16% in 2023. This number is a sharp drop from the average increase of 31% in previous years.

The report cautioned that it is too early to determine what caused the rate to slacken.

Nearly all of those who requested assisted dying - around 96% - had a foreseeable natural death. The remaining 4% were granted euthanasia due to having a long-term chronic illness and where a natural death was not imminent.

The average age of those seeking assisted dying was around 77 years old, with cancer being the most frequent underlying medical condition.

For the first time, the report delved into race and ethnic data of those who died by euthanasia.

Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity.

The second most reported ethnic group was east Asians (1.8%), who account for about 5.7% of Canadians.

Assisted dying continued to have the highest usage rate in Quebec, which accounted for nearly 37% of all euthanasia deaths, despite the province holding just 22% of Canada's population.

Quebec's government launched a study earlier this year to examine why its euthanasia rate was so high.

While the number of assisted deaths in Canada is growing, the country still falls behind the Netherlands, where euthanasia accounted for around 5% of total deaths last year.

UK MPs voted late last month to pass a similar bill that gives terminally ill adults in England and Wales the right to have an assisted death, though it will face months of further scrutiny before it could become law.

As British MPs debated the law, Canada was cited by some as a cautionary tale due to its perceived lack of safeguards.

Like the UK, Canada initially only legalised assisted dying for those whose death was "reasonably foreseeable".

However, Canada expanded access in 2021 to people who may not have a terminal diagnosis, but want to end their life because of a chronic, debilitating condition.

It was set to broaden access once again to people with mental illnesses earlier this year.

But that was delayed for the second time after concerns were raised by Canadian provinces, which oversee healthcare delivery, about whether the system could cope with such an expansion.

On Wednesday, Health Canada defended the procedure, saying that the criminal code sets out "strict eligibility" criteria.

But Cardus, a Christian think tank, said the latest figures were "alarming" and showed Canada has one of the fastest growing euthanasia programmes in the world.

A report released in October by Ontario - Canada's most populous province - has since shed some light on controversial cases where people were granted assisted dying when they were not nearing their natural death.

One example included a woman in her 50s with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts who had a severe sensitivity to chemicals.

Her request for euthanasia was granted after she failed to secure housing that could have met her medical needs.

Another case made headlines in recent months of a Nova Scotia cancer patient who said she was asked if she was aware of assisted dying as an option twice as she underwent mastectomy surgeries.

The question "came up in completely inappropriate places", she told the National Post.

Canadian news outlets have also reported on cases where people with disabilities have considered assisted dying due to lack of housing or disability benefits.


Time names Donald Trump person of the year for second time

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e71wg7z9o, today

Time Magazine has named Donald Trump as their person of the year for the second time.

"For marshaling a comeback of historic proportions, for driving a once-in-a- generation political realignment, for reshaping the American presidency and altering America's role in the world, Donald Trump is TIME'S 2024 Person of the Year," TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs said in a letter to readers.

The Republican president-elect is set to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday to commemorate the honour alongside several of his family members.

Trump was first named person of the year in 2016 after winning the US presidential election.

The magazine's tradition - which started in 1927 as "Man of the Year" - recognises a person or movement that "for better or for worse... has done the most to influence the events of the year".

Other previous winners include climate change activist Greta Thunberg, former President Barack Obama, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Pope Francis and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Time Magazine editors ultimately decide who wins the award.

The outlet was considering 10 people for the person of the year award, including Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Princess of Wales and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now a close confidante of Trump set to lead an advisory board called the Department of Government Efficiency.

In a description of Trump for the list of finalists, Time said he had won the 2024 election "in a stunning political comeback".

"He has reshaped the American electorate, activating young male voters who propelled him to a decisive victory that saw him win the popular vote for the first time and turn every swing state red," the outlet said.

"His 2024 win is history-making in multiple ways: he will be the oldest President in U.S. history, and he was convicted earlier this year by a New York jury of 34 counts of fraud, making him the first convicted felon to be elected President."

Trump sat for interviews with the magazine in April this year during the campaign season. During the wide-ranging discussions, Trump talked about his plans for a second term, including his goals of reforming the US immigration system and deporting millions of people.

Trump complained in 2015 when he was not chosen for the magazine cover during his first run for office, when the award went to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But after he was named person of the year following his election win, he called it a "great honor".

"It means a lot, especially me growing up reading Time magazine. And, you know, it's a very important magazine," he said at the time.

He has, however, continued to criticise the magazine's choices since winning, including the selection of Taylor Swift as Time's person of the year in 2024.


Selena Gomez announces engagement to Benny Blanco

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx27wwyqqweo, today

Selena Gomez has revealed she is engaged to songwriter Benny Blanco.

The actress and singer posted a picture of a large engagement ring on Instagram, with the caption "forever begins now".

It comes after the couple confirmed their relationship last year.

Pop star Taylor Swift was among the famous figures to offer congratulations.

Two-time Grammy-nominated Gomez posted further pictures of her beaming, wearing the ring, and one of Blanco embracing her in what appears to be a closet.

"Hey wait... that's my wife," Blanco commented on the post.

Swift replied: "Yes I will be the flower girl."

Rapper Cardi B, actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Suki Waterhouse, and singer Lil Nas X also sent well wishes.

In an Instagram Story shared with her 423 million followers, the most-followed woman on the app also revealed a video showing her ring to loved ones on the phone.

"Yes to this," she can be heard saying, evoking screams on the other end of the video call.

Gomez and record producer Blanco had collaborated on songs I Can't Get Enough in 2019 and Single Soon in 2023, before announcing their relationship.

Blanco, who has also worked with the likes of Rihanna, Calvin Harris and Justin Bieber, was effusive about his love on the Drew Barrymore Show back in May.

"She's just like the best, most genuine person," he said on the chat show.

"Everything is completely real. Everyday when I wake up, I, like, walk by the mirror as I'm, like, walking to her and I ask myself, 'How did I get here'...

"She's one of the sweetest, one of the most charming, one of the most humble people I've ever met."

Come & Get It singer Gomez was previously in a high profile on-and-off relationship with fellow singer Justin Bieber.

The Texas-born star rose to fame as a child actress on Barney and Disney Channel, before forging a career as a singer and in acting.

This year she joined the billionaire celebrity rich list, according to Bloomberg, amassing a $1.3bn (£1bn) fortune - mainly deriving from her Rare Beauty make-up company.

On Monday, she received two Golden Globe nominations - one in the best supporting actress category for her role in operatic musical Emilia Pérez and the other for best actress in a TV series, musical or comedy, for her recurring role in Only Murders in the Building.


Israeli strikes kill 12 guarding Gaza aid lorries, medics say

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crk0x64ll8jo, today

At least 35 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, including 12 guarding incoming aid lorries, local medics and the Hamas-run Civil Defence authority say.

Seven guards were killed in a strike in Rafah while protecting aid lorries from violent armed theft, which UN workers say is the main obstacle to getting supplies into southern Gaza. Another attack left five guards dead in Khan Younis.

The Israeli military said it "conducted precise strikes on armed Hamas terrorists" who had planned to hijack the lorries.

In a separate Israeli attack, 15 people were killed near Nuseirat refugee camp, the Civil Defence said.

"The occupation once again targeted those securing the aid trucks," Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal told the AFP news agency.

He added that around 30 people, most of them children, were also wounded in the two strikes.

The lorries were carrying flour to warehouses belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Mr Basal said.

Recently - amid severe food shortages - UN workers say violent armed thefts have been the main obstacle to getting aid into the southern part of Gaza. Civilians, as well as remnants of Hamas police, have mobilised to try to counter the gangs.

Hamas says Israeli military strikes have killed at least 700 police tasked with securing aid lorries in Gaza since the latest war began on 7 October 2023.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said: "Overnight, following intelligence information indicating the presence of Hamas terrorists, the IDF conducted precise strikes on armed Hamas terrorists gathered at two different meeting points in southern Gaza."

It added that "all of the terrorists that were eliminated were members of Hamas and planned to violently hijack humanitarian aid trucks and transfer them to Hamas".

Separately, Israeli air strikes on two homes near Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza, and Gaza City, in the north, killed 21 more people, the Civil Defence said.

At least six children were among the 15 people killed in Nuseirat, while the bodies of six other people were found after a strike on an apartment in Gaza City, Mr Basal said.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the Palestinian group's unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 44,800 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

After months of failed international efforts to end the war, Israel's defence minister has told his US counterpart there is a chance for a new deal that would allow the return of all of the remaining hostages, including American citizens.

Other reports have suggested a limited deal with Hamas is being discussed.


US man found near Damascus after being freed from Syrian prison

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn54xk0vkq5o, today

An American man identifying himself as Travis Timmerman has been found near the Syrian capital Damascus after being freed from a prison as rebels took over the country.

Mr Timmerman, who said he was arrested upon entering Syria seven months ago, told the BBC's US news partner CBS that he had been trying to make his way out of the country since being released after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

He said two men armed broke his prison door down on Monday with a hammer.

"My door was busted down, it woke me up," he said.

"I thought the guards were still there, so I thought the warfare could have been more active than it ended up being… Once we got out, there was no resistance, there was no real fighting."

The 30-year-old said he left prison with a large group of people and had been attempting to make his way to Jordan.

He said he "had a few moments of fear", when he left the prison, adding that he had since been more worried about finding somewhere to sleep.

Mr Timmerman had been missing from Budapest in Hungary since May, according to Missouri State Highway Patrol.

Thousands of prisoners have been released since the fall of Assad over the weekend.

The Assad regime was notorious for its extremely harsh prisons, with the UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimating that almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the prisons run by Assad.

However, Mr Timmerman appears to have been relatively well-treated, telling CBS: "I'm feeling well. I've been fed and I've been watered, so I'm feeling well."

He added that he had had the use of a mobile phone during his detention and had spoken to his family three weeks ago.


How Luigi Mangione's legal defence could take shape

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgm987p8xz3o, today

Luigi Mangione, the suspect accused of fatally shooting healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, is unlikely to be able to mount an effective legal defence to the charges he faces, according to experts.

Mr Mangione, 26, was arrested in Pennsylvania on Monday after a days-long, multi-state manhunt ended at a McDonalds in the town of Altoona.

New York authorities say forensic evidence and shell casings link him to the crime scene.

His lawyer, Thomas Dickey, earlier told local media he had not "seen any evidence yet" implicating his client.

The start of Mr Mangione's legal battles has prompted anonymous donors to chip in thousands of dollars towards his defence through online fundraisers.

It comes as some online have shared support for the suspect and anger at the health insurance industry. The New York City Police Department has also warned some healthcare executives are potentially in danger because of a "hit list" posted online after Mr Thompson's murder.

In a bulletin, the NYPD said several viral posts included the names and salaries of other insurance executives. Mocked-up wanted signs featuring some executives have also been posted in Manhattan.

Mr Mangione allegedly had grievances with the wider industry.

Timothy Gallagher, a former FBI agent and the managing director of Nardello and Co, a global investigations firm, said the current climate means the "threat of a copycat is real".

"There are people out there who have grievances and are observing the amount of press and attention that is being given to the accused," he said.

Mr Gallagher said that there has been an "outpouring of support from dark corners of the internet" for anti-corporate causes.

"I'm afraid that may fuel follow-on attacks," he said.


Biden issues 39 presidential pardons and commutes 1,500 sentences

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30nq7r0v2mo, today

US President Joe Biden has issued presidential pardons to 39 Americans convicted of non-violent crimes, and commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 other people.

The White House described it as the most acts of presidential clemency issued in a single day. It has not given the names of the people involved.

The US Constitution decrees that a president has the broad "power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment".

Earlier this month, Biden issued a controversial pardon to his son Hunter, which continued a recent trend of presidents pardoning people close to them.

Announcing the move, Biden said those pardoned had "shown successful rehabilitation and have shown commitment to making their communities stronger and safer". Their non-violent convictions included drug offences.

The commuted sentences were for hundreds of people who were placed in home confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic, and who were facing sentences which Biden deemed to be too long.

They have "shown that they deserve a second chance", Biden said.

Giving further details of the move, the White House said those receiving relief included a decorated military veteran and pilot who helped fellow church members, a nurse who helped with the Covid vaccine rollout, and an addiction counsellor.

Biden promised "more steps in the weeks ahead".

The president will leave the White House on 20 January 2025, when his successor Donald Trump is inaugurated.

Biden previously had a record of pardoning fewer people than most presidents in modern US history.

Trump granted 237 acts of clemency during his first term in the White House, according to the Pew Research Center. These included 143 pardons and 94 commuted sentences.

Many were in a flurry before he left office.

Biden's decision earlier this month to pardon his son, Hunter, continued a trend of presidents on both sides of the US political divide - including Trump - granting clemency to people close to them.

Biden Jr was facing sentencing for two criminal cases.

The move has proven controversial, since the outgoing president previously ruled out such a move. But he claimed the cases against his son were politically motivated.


FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce902z8lp81o, today

Christopher Wray, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), says he will resign from his post before President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month.

Mr Wray announced his impending departure at an internal FBI meeting on Wednesday, according to the BBC's US partner CBS News.

President-elect Donald Trump has publicly signalled his desire to replace Mr Wray with Kash Patel, a long-time loyalist who has called for "dramatically" limiting the FBI's authority.

Mr Wray, who was nominated by Trump in 2017 to serve a 10-year term, has faced criticism during his tenure from Republicans due to the FBI's investigations into Trump after he left office.

Speaking at the FBI meeting on Wednesday, Mr Wray said: "After weeks of careful thought, I've decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current Administration in January and then step down."

"My goal is to keep the focus on our mission - the indispensable work you're doing on behalf of the American people everyday," he told his colleagues.

"In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work," Mr Wray said.

He also addressed the FBI's mission in his remarks, saying that the bureau's goal to "keep Americans safe and uphold the constitution" will not change.

Trump appointed Mr Wray to lead the FBI after firing his predecessor James Comey following the FBI's investigations into alleged contacts between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

But in recent years, Mr Wray has fallen out of favour with the president-elect after the FBI assisted with a federal probe into Trump's handling of classified documents, a case that has since been dropped.

Following his election to a second term, Trump said his pick for FBI director would be Patel - a former aide who has been a steadfast supporter of the incoming Republican president.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

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Moment of relief as Romania and Bulgaria join EU border-free zone

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4xjj4xde3o, today

Seventeen years after Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union, they have been given the green light to become members of its border-free Schengen travel zone.

The decision by fellow EU member states means that from 1 January 2025, it will be possible to drive all the way to France, Spain or Norway without a passport.

It's a moment of huge relief for the 25 million people who live in Romania and Bulgaria, and who will finally feel accepted as full members of the EU. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it was a "day of joy".

Although border checks were lifted on travel by air and sea for the two countries last March, it was only last month that Austria lifted its resistance to ending border checks by land.

But for truck drivers, the border bureaucracy is not over yet.

Hungary looks set to continue inspecting each truck and its documents for at least six months at the main Romania-Hungary border crossing at Nadlac.

Bulgaria has built a new truck park and electronic barrier at Ruse, beside the bridge across the Danube to Romania, charging €25 (£20) per truck.

And "temporary" border controls have been imposed across the continent, by countries afraid of a spike in illegal migration.

For trucks, he does not believe there will be much immediate difference.

The big problem for truck drivers, he says, is that all truck inspections take place at the border, from weighing to permits and load-checking, sanitary and environmental examinations, as well as the search for illegal migrants.

In other countries already inside the Schengen zone, such checks take place more swiftly and efficiently in dedicated motorway vehicle parks far from the border.

Radu Dinescu blames successive governments in Romania for failing to negotiate new arrangements with the country's neighbours, to take the pressure off the borders.

He cites an EU regulation from 2008 that calls for the control of the weight and dimensions of trucks to be removed from border crossings between EU members states.

That has never been implemented on the Romanian border with Hungary or on the Romanian border with Bulgaria, because of competition between rival inspectorates.

It's not just about trade, but also investment, says the head of the Romanian Road-Haulers' Association.

When BMW was trying to choose between Hungary and Romania as a site for a new car factory, the wait at the Romania-Hungary border mysteriously increased.

BMW subsequently chose the Hungarian city of Debrecen.

Dacia Renault, Romania's biggest carmaker, faces constant delays in getting parts delivered across Schengen borders. "I don't want to underestimate the value of our land borders joining Schengen, but there is still some work to be done," says Dinescu.

In Timisoara, Philip Cox of Romania's biggest wine exporter, Cramele Recas, is more optimistic.

"Border controls will take a while to wither away," he believes, "but it will happen, perhaps in six months, because it's in everyone's interest."

And that will make his wines more competitive in Europe's western and northern markets, he believes.


Children as young as 10 will face adult jail time in Australian state

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyj6dd1zdro, today

The Australian state of Queensland has passed laws which will see children as young as 10 subject to the same penalties as adults if convicted of crimes such as murder, serious assault and break-ins.

The government says the harsher sentencing rules are in response to "community outrage over crimes being perpetrated by young offenders" and will act as a deterrent.

But many experts have pointed to research showing that tougher penalties do not reduce youth offending, and can in fact exacerbate it.

The United Nations has also criticised the reforms, arguing they disregard conventions on the human rights of children and violate international law.

The Liberal National Party (LNP) - which won the state election in October - made the rules a hallmark of its campaign, saying they put the "rights of victims" ahead of "the rights of criminals".

"These laws are for every Queenslander who has ever felt unsafe and been a victim of youth crime across our state," Premier David Crisafulli said after parliament passed the bill on Thursday.

Leading up to the vote, both sides of politics had claimed that Queensland was in the grips of a youth crime wave, and that a more punitive approach was necessary to combat the issue.

But data from the Australian bureau of statistics, shows that youth crime has halved in Queensland across the past 14 years, that it hit its lowest rate in recorded history in 2022, and has remained relatively steady since.

Figures from the Queensland Police Service and the Australian Institute of Criminology also demonstrate a clear downward trend.

Dubbed by the government as "adult crime, adult time", the new laws list 13 offences which will now be subject to harsher prison sentences when committed by youths, including mandatory life detention for murder, with a non-parole period of 20 years.

Previously, the maximum penalty for young offenders convicted of murder was 10 years in jail, with life imprisonment only considered if the crime was "particularly heinous".

The laws also remove "detention as a last resort" provisions - which favour non-custodial orders, such as fines or community service, for children rather than incarceration - and will make it possible for judges to consider a child's full criminal history when sentencing.

The Queensland Police Union has called the changes "a leap forward in the right direction", while Queensland's new Attorney-General Deb Frecklington says it will give courts the ability to "better address patterns of offending" and "hold people accountable for their actions".

But in a summary, Frecklington also noted the changes were in direct conflict with international standards, that Indigenous children would be disproportionately impacted and that more youngsters were likely to be held in police cells for extended periods because detention centres are full.

Queensland already has more children in detention than any other Australian state or territory.

Premier Crisafulli said on Thursday that although there may be "pressure in the short-term" his government had a long-term plan to "deliver a raft of other detention facilities and different options".

Australia's commissioner for children, Anne Hollonds, described the changes as an "international embarrassment".

She also accused Queensland's government of "ignoring evidence" which suggests "the younger a child comes into contact with the justice system, the more likely it is that they will continue to commit more serious crimes".

"The fact that [the bill's] provisions are targeting our most at-risk children makes this retreat from human rights even more shocking," she said in a statement on Wednesday.

Other legal experts, who gave evidence to a parliamentary hearing on the bill last week, said the laws could have unintended consequences for victims, with children being less likely to plead guilty given the tougher sentences, resulting in more trials and longer court delays.


Ethiopia and Somalia agree to end bitter Somaliland port feud

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgr7v1evvgo, today

Ethiopia and Somalia have agreed to end their bitter dispute over Addis Ababa's plans to build a port in the breakaway republic of Somaliland following talks in Turkey.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the "historic agreement", which he said would eventually ensure landlocked Ethiopia's access to the sea.

At the press conference he held hands with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who both agreed to respect one another's "sovereignty".

The two neighbours have been at loggerheads since January when Ethiopia signed a maritime deal with Somaliland - which Somalia considers as part of its territory.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

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Israel seizing on Syria chaos to strike military assets

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx921zreweo, today

After launching hundreds of air strikes on Syrian military assets and seizing positions including the summit of a mountain with an uninterrupted sightline to the capital Damascus, Israel appears to be taking advantage of what it sees as a unique moment of opportunity.

Syrian command structures were in disarray, with key positions apparently left unmanned after the fall of the Assad regime.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says its air force and navy have conducted more than 350 strikes since Saturday night, taking out an estimated 70-80% of Syrian strategic military assets from Damascus to Latakia.

They included fighter aircraft, radar and air defence sites, and naval ships, as well as weapons stockpiles, the IDF said.

"The navy operated last night to destroy the Syrian fleet with great success," said Defence Minister Israel Katz.

The IDF has also moved ground forces east from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into a demilitarised buffer zone in Syria and, it now admits, just beyond.

Katz said he had told the military to "establish a sterile defence zone free of weapons and terrorist threats in southern Syria, without a permanent Israeli presence".

One Israeli commentator said the past 72 hours had "stood out even for people who thought they had already seen everything".

"It didn't strip the Syrian military of specific capabilities only - it sent it back to the starting line, bereft of any significant strategic capabilities," wrote Yoav Limor in the Israel Hayom newspaper.

"The IDF operation to destroy Syria's military capabilities is the largest it has ever undertaken," commented Udi Etzion on the Walla news site.

Officials stress that Israel has been acting in its own national security interests following the collapse of the Assad regime.

They say the aim is to stop weapons that the regime held falling into the wrong hands – whether Syrian extremist factions or its old foe, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. Hezbollah and its backer, Iran, were close allies of Assad, helping him to prop him up in office during the long civil war in Syria.

"We will not allow an extreme Islamic terrorist entity to act against Israel beyond its border, putting its citizens at risk," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video message on Tuesday.

Syria and Israel fought against each other in the Middle East Wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 and formally regard each other as enemy states.

Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria was a significant regional military power. Israel had attacked it in recent years in hundreds of strikes that were rarely openly acknowledged. Israel's calculation included a sphere of deniability for itself but also for Assad so he would not feel forced to respond.

These had focused on preventing transfer of weapons to Hezbollah, as the main transport route was overland from Syria to Lebanon, arms manufacturing, and Syrian air defence systems, which posed a threat to Israeli warplanes sent on missions.

Israel avoided major attacks that could have led to wider war and sought to avoid conflict with Russia, after it became Assad's biggest supporter in recent years.

Some defence analysts suggest that Israel wanted to avoid weakening the Syrian regime for fear of triggering the chaos that could follow if its opponents seized power. Over the years, Israel and Syria - under its secular, Baathist regime - stuck to well-defined red lines; it was a known adversary.

But the speedy advance of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) prompted a hastily developed new Israeli strategy.

UN peacekeepers remain in the buffer zone established in Syrian territory following the 1973 Middle East War and have stressed that by moving its ground forces in, Israel is now in violation of the ceasefire agreement which set it up.

Israeli officials argue that the ceasefire agreement has now collapsed, as the other party to the agreement ceased to exist, and that its moves are temporary and limited for self-defence.

A UN peacekeeping spokesperson said peacekeepers were "unable to move freely within the buffer zone following recent events", adding that it was "imperative that the UN peacekeepers are allowed carry out their mandated tasks without hindrance".

"We're against these types of attacks. I think this is a turning point for Syria. It should not be used by its neighbours to encroach on the territory of Syria," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and the Arab League have all issued official statements, with several presenting it as a land grab made by taking advantage of recent events, and a violation of Syria's sovereignty and international law.

France and Germany have also criticised Israeli actions, with France demanding Israel withdraw troops from the buffer area and Germany warning Israel along with Turkey to Syria's north not to jeopardise the chances of a peaceful transition in Syria.

"We must not allow the internal Syrian dialogue process to be torpedoed from the outside," said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

The US has urged Israel to ensure its incursion is "temporary".

Among Israelis however there has been broad public support for the country's pre-emptive actions.

Several media outlets are stressing the potential danger posed by Syria's new Islamist leaders, with HTS still widely designated as a terrorist organisation.

In the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Amihai Attali congratulated Israel's military and political establishments, saying they had learnt a valuable lesson from the deadly Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, which caught the country off guard.

"One of the most important lessons of the invasion, massacre and mass-kidnappings is that we cannot afford the privilege of trying to interpret enemy intentions," he wrote.

"We can't afford to make mistakes on that front. We don't have the margin of error for that."


Russian ships move from Syria base amid doubts over future

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgn8e2zznno, today

Russian naval vessels appear to have temporarily left their main port in Syria, satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify show, amid continuing uncertainty about Moscow's military future in the country after the fall of its ally, Bashar al-Assad.

Images taken by Maxar on 10 December show some ships have left Tartous naval base since Sunday and are currently sitting offshore in the Mediterranean Sea.

Meanwhile, other photos taken on the same day show activity continuing at Russia's main airbase in Syria, Hmeimim, with jets clearly visible on the tarmac.

On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would enter talks with incoming authorities about Russia's future military presence.

"Everything possible is now being done to get in touch with those involved in ensuring security and, of course, our military is also taking all the necessary precautions," he told reporters in Moscow.

He previously warned that it was "premature" to speculate on the bases' future.

"You know that, of course, we maintain contacts with those who control the situation in Syria now. This is necessary because we have our bases there and our diplomatic office [embassy]. And of course, ensuring the safety and security of our facilities are of utmost importance," he told reporters.

The Tartous naval facility houses elements of the Black Sea Fleet and is Russia's only repair and replenishment hub in the Mediterranean. Established by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, it was expanded and modernised by Russia in 2012 as the Kremlin began to increase its support for President Assad's regime.

It allows Russian vessels to remain in the Mediterranean without having to return to ports in the Black Sea via the Turkish Straits. It is also a deep-water port, meaning it can host submarines from Moscow's nuclear fleet, according to the US Naval Institute.

The new satellite images show Moscow has at least temporarily brought its ships out of the port, with two guided missile frigates moored about 13km (eight miles) off the Syrian coast. It is unclear where the remainder of the fleet - pictured in earlier images - currently is.

It is also unclear whether their departure is part of a permanent withdrawal from Tartous. In recent weeks, satellite images have repeatedly shown naval vessels coming and going from the port.

Mike Plunkett from the open-source defence intelligence analysts at Janes organisation noted that the Russian movements appeared to have been "conducted to ensure that their ships are not vulnerable to attack".

"Whether they are worried about attack from the Syrian rebels or collateral damage from any Israeli strike on Syrian assets in Tartus is unknown," he added.

Dara Massicot, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on X on Sunday that an evacuation of the airbase would involve a massive airlift requiring far more jets than those visible in the satellite images, suggesting that Moscow does not plan to evacuate imminently.

"When Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015, they flew almost 300 sorties in two weeks, and that was before base expansion," she wrote on X.

"A change signifying a major evacuation will be clear," she added.

Despite the current holding pattern Russian forces appear to be displaying, the fall of the Assad regime represents a major blow to the Kremlin's ambitions in the region. During a 2017 visit to Khmeimim air base, President Vladimir Putin made clear that he intended for Moscow's presence to be a long-term project.

Reflecting on the situation, an influential pro-Kremlin military blogger Rybar warned on Telegram that Russia's power-projection exercise in the region was in serious danger.

"Russia's military presence in the Middle East region is hanging by a thread," he concluded.

Additional reporting by Paul Cusiac. Graphics by Mark Edwards.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?


'I want justice': Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4xyd1yx0go, today

Tawfiq Diam is emotional because it's the first time he's been able to speak freely about what happened to his family back in 2018, in Douma in the Eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus.

"If I'd spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad's forces would have cut off my tongue. They would have slit my throat. We were not allowed to talk about it," he says.

Tawfiq's wife and his four children aged between eight and 12 - Joudy, Mohammed, Ali and Qamar - were killed in a chemical attack on 7 April 2018.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global watchdog, said in a report last year that it believed a Syrian air force helicopter departed from the nearby Dumayr air base shortly after 19:00 that day and dropped two yellow cylinders which hit two apartment buildings, releasing highly concentrated chlorine gas.

Tawfiq said his family was just outside his ground floor home when the bombs hit.

"I heard an explosion and people shouted on the streets 'chemicals, chemicals'. I came running out. There was a foul smell. I saw yellow foam coming out of people's mouths. My children were not able to breathe, they were choking. I saw people lying in the street," he says.

The OPCW says at least 43 people were killed. Tawfiq says there were more than 100 dead.

"Even I almost died. I was in hospital for 10 days. Just five or six men in this compound survived," he says.

Assad's government denied ever using chemical weapons. And its ally Russia said the Douma attack was "staged".

Eastern Ghouta was one of the most fiercely contested areas for five long years during Syria's civil war.

The regime eventually laid siege to it and, along with its ally Russia, indiscriminately bombed the area as it sought to gain control of it from rebel fighters led by the group Jaish al-Islam.

Driving through it now, the destruction wrought upon it is all around us. It's hard to find a single building that doesn't bear the scars of war, many so badly bombed out, they're just shells of structures.

On more than one occasion in Eastern Ghouta, chemical weapons - banned by the Geneva protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention - were used to attack Douma.

Bashar al-Assad's forces captured Douma shortly after the chlorine attack, and the stories of the victims were never fully heard.

"Not a day goes by when I don't think of my children," Tawfiq says pulling out the only photo he has of them, his eyes welling up with tears.

As we talk to Tawfiq, more people come up to us to tell us their stories.

Khalid Naseer says his baby daughter Nour, his two-year-old son Omar, and his pregnant wife Fatima were also killed in the 2018 chlorine attack.

"Those who were killed were mostly children and women."

The anger he's had to suppress for six years comes out.

"The whole world knows Bashar al-Assad is an oppressor and a liar, and that he killed his own people. My wife was killed two days before she was due to deliver our baby," he shouts, emotions running high.

The chlorine gas attack was not the only time chemical weapons were used in the area.

In 2013, rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were fired at several rebel-held suburbs in Eastern and Western Ghouta, killing hundreds of people. UN experts confirmed the use of sarin but they were not asked to ascribe any blame.

Assad denied his forces fired the rockets, but he did agree to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy Syria's declared chemical arsenal.

Between 2013 to 2018, Human Rights Watch documented at least 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, accusing the Syrian government of being responsible for a majority of them.

In addition to Douma in 2018, the OPCW's Investigation and Identification Team has identified the Syrian military as the perpetrator of four other cases of chemical weapons use in 2017 and 2018. An earlier fact-finding mission, which was not mandated to identify perpetrators, found chemical weapons were used in 20 instances.

Khalid and Tawfiq took us to a mound by the side of a road, a short drive away. They believe this is where the regime took their family's bodies and buried them in a mass grave.

Looking down on the ground, amid gravel, mud and stones, pieces of bones are visible, although it's not possible to tell if they are human remains.

"This is the first time I have set foot here, I swear to God. If I had tried to come here earlier, they [the regime] would have executed me", says Tawfiq.

"On Eid, when I used to miss my family, I would ride by the side of this road and quickly glance towards this [the mound]. It made me cry."

Tawfiq wants the graves to be dug up, so he can give his family a dignified funeral.

"We want fresh investigations into the attack," says Khalid. He says the testimony given by many to the OPCW fact-finding mission in 2019 was not reliable.

It's a claim corroborated by Abdul Rahman Hijazi, one of the eyewitnesses who testified before the mission, who says he was forced to give the regime's version of events.

"Intelligence officers detained me and told me to lie. They told me to say that people were killed because of dust inhalation not chemicals. They threatened me, that if I didn't agree, my family will not be safe. They told me my house was surrounded by the regime's men," he said.

One of the findings in the 2019 OPCW report on Douma states: "Some witnesses stated that many people died in the hospital on 7 April as result of the heavy shelling and/or suffocation due to inhalation of smoke and dust."

Abdul Rahman says he and his family were shunned by the community for years after he gave the testimony. He found it tough to get a job.

Now he also wants a fresh investigation.

"I want the truth to come out. I'm unable to sleep. I want justice for every parent."

Additional reporting by Aamir Peerzada, Sanjay Ganguly and Leen Al Saadi


Meet Karol G, Colombia's Taylor Swift

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg3dl757w6o, today

We have all heard of Taylor Swift, but what about Colombian singer Karol G?

While Swift has dominated the headlines and concert ticket sales over recent years, it is actually the 33-year-old Latin American pop star whose videos have been the most watched online in recent years.

That's according to Vevo, which is the main provider of official music videos to YouTube. Karol G's were the most streamed around the world for three years in a row – 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Last year, Karol G's Vevo videos were watched 4.7 billion times, with fellow Colombian Shakira in second place on 3.2 billion, and Swift on three million. It is expected to be a similar picture when Vevo releases its figures for 2024 this month.

So who is Karol G, and what has fuelled the success that also saw her sell out Madrid's Bernabéu Stadium over four nights back in July, plus stadiums across the US last year?

Born in the Colombian city of Medellín in 1991 her full name is Carolina Giraldo Navarro. She wanted to be a singer from an early age, and when she was 14 she appeared on the Colombian version of the talent show X Factor in 2005.

Success did not immediately follow, and instead by 2014 she had moved to the US to live with her aunt in New York City to learn English and do menial work. She almost gave up pursuing a career in music at this time, but her father convinced her that she could make it.

While in the US Karol G also attended a music business conference in Boston, which she says was very helpful in helping her understand how the industry worked.

She got her breakthrough hit single in 2017, the song Ahora Me Llama, which was a collaboration with Puerto Rican male artist Bad Bunny. Her first album Unstoppable then followed.

Since then the hits have just kept on coming, and her 2023 album, Mañana Será Bonito, was the first entirely Spanish-language release by a female artist to top the US album chart.

Karol G's style of music is more often described as "reggaeton". This combines hip-hop with Latin American and Jamaican music, with the singing and rapping usually done in Spanish.

While she is widely reported to be both hardworking and ambitious, Rocío Guerrero, head of Latin music at Amazon Music, says that the singer – and Latin music in general - have been greatly helped by the rise of streaming, both the music and the accompanying videos.

"Streaming democratised the landscape," says Ms Guerrero, explaining that it has allowed Latin music, which wasn't being played on mainstream radio stations to travel the world.

"Radio stations were local, but with streaming we brought together all of those audiences [around the globe]. It has given more opportunity to more Latin songs and artist to be exposed. Karol G is a perfect example of this evolution."

Today on Amazon Music more than a third of Latin music is now consumed outside Latin America, and in the last three years alone the listenership for Karol G has grown by more than 250%.

Meanwhile, in the US, Latin music is now the fastest-growing genre, hitting a record $1.4bn (£1.1bn) in venues last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Streaming accounted for 98% of this.

And this year, Karol's G's Mañana Será Bonito album was the fourth most streamed globally on Spotify.

This helped to boost interest in her 2023-24 sell-out, global Mañana Será Bonito Tour. This grossed $307m in ticket sales. And while that figure is dwarfed by the $2bn achieved by Taylor Swift's Eras tour, Karol G's earnings were the highest for a female Latin artist.

Carlos Balado, a professor at OBS Business School in Barcelona, analyses the economic impact of music concerts. He says that both Karol G and Taylor Swift have benefited from the increased popularity of going to such a big live event.

"There's a growing trend where the public considers that part of their normal spending has to go towards concerts," he adds.

Leila Cobo, chief content officer for Latin/Español at US music magazine Billboard, which is also known for its music charts, says Karol G has helped to put Colombian music on the map.

"I think music is the biggest ambassador for Colombia. I really do," she says. "And Karol G has tapped into this female Latin female fanbase who really didn't have someone like her. They wanted someone relatable, fun, sexy, had cool songs, but wasn't completely over the top.

"And reggaeton is super danceable, it's super consumable, it's super youth oriented," adds Ms Cobo, who is the author of a book on Latin music.

Despite winning numerous awards and critical acclaim, Karol G has not been immune to criticism. Her lyrics have been slammed for being too raunchy, and critics have also taken aim at her for calling one of her songs "Bichota". This is a slang term meaning big shot or boss, and often associated with drugs and criminality.

She argues that she repurposed the word to signify empowerment. As for her lyrics, her defenders say that rather than singing about and objectifying women, she sings on behalf of them.

Karol G's estimated net worth had skyrocketed to $25m by 2023 according to Celebrity Net Worth - a figure that's likely increased substantially since her recent tour.

Outside of music she earns money by collaborations with shoemaker Crocs, sportswear brand Kappa, Smirnoff vodka, and Spanish fashion label Loewe. Her name has also appeared on the front of FC Barcelona shirts as part of the football club's partnership with music streamer Spotify.

Ms Cobo says: "She's branching out. She's a very bright, inquisitive person and always looking to grow. And she's very aware that it's not just about music."

Karol G's business ventures are controlled by her company Girl Power Inc, which also oversees her charity Con Cora Foundation.

This aims to help improve the lives of underprivileged women and children across Latin America by giving educational scholarships to teenage mothers, supporting girls who want to go into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, providing financial aid to kids' football teams, and society-reintegration projects for female inmates.

Meanwhile, Karol G launched her own record label in 2023, Bichota, to have more control over her music, which is subsequently distributed and promoted by US company Interscope, part of the giant Universal Music Group.

Yet despite her global success, there are still markets she hasn't yet cracked - the UK, for example, where she's still not widely known. Britain has a small, but fast-growing Hispanic diaspora.

However, Amazon's Ms Guerrero thinks it is only a matter of time before Karol G does break the British market. "It's going to happen. It's just a matter of time," she says.


Australia turns to rugby to curb China influence in PNG

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62zgemkexdo, today

Papua New Guinea (PNG) will join Australia's national rugby league competition, after signing a deal that obligates them to shun security ties with China.

The Pacific nation has produced many stars of Australia's National Rugby League (NRL) and has long been lobbying to join the franchise.

Australia will provide A$600m (£301m, $384m) over ten years to set up the team – which will be based in Port Moresby and compete from 2028 – and help develop the game at a grassroots level across the Pacific region.

In exchange, PNG signed a separate pact which it says reaffirms its commitment to Australia as its major security partner.

The precise terms of the dual deals are confidential, but the BBC understands they allow Australia to withdraw funding if PNG enters a security agreement with a nation outside the so-called "Pacific family". That term is widely accepted to exclude China, despite Beijing's efforts to gain a foothold in the region.

If Canberra pulls out, the NRL is then obligated to drop the PNG team.

Announcing the agreement in Sydney on Thursday, PNG Prime Minister James Marape said it was a "monumental" opportunity for his country, and one aimed at fostering "unity" - not only between the 830 language groups in PNG, but also between the nation at large and its closest neighbour.

"For us, it's not just sport and sport commerce, it is [about]... uniting the most diverse nation on the face of planet Earth and also uniting PNG-Australia together in ways that matter most, people to people," he told reporters.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared it was a "great day" for both countries, and said PNG - the only country in the world where rugby league is the national sport - "deserves" a spot in the league.

"The new team will belong to the people of Papua New Guinea… And I know it will have millions of proud fans barracking for it from day one," Albanese said.

It is a big milestone for the NRL too. This is the first time the competition, which is trying to lure international audiences, has expanded overseas. The only other foreign team, the New Zealand Warriors, has been a part of the competition since its inception almost three decades ago.

NRL boss Peter V'landys had been championing the PNG bid, arguing it was a huge opportunity for the league, as well as for PNG's economic development.

A name and uniform for the new team will be decided at a later point.

'Unprecedented' win for sport diplomacy

Stuart Murray, an Associate Professor of International Relations, told the BBC that while Australia's use of sport as a diplomatic strategy is nothing new, this agreement is unprecedented.

The country has over the past decade been "thinking innovatively about how you can marry sport with policy to counter classical security threats" said Dr Murray, from Bond University.

In this case, he added, "the scale, the size, the scope and the funding, and the fact that it's being endorsed at such a high level with both prime ministers - that's never been done before".

"Basically, through this one channel, we will open up 20 or 30 other channels - for business, trade, policing, educational exchange, gender work, climate change... I think it is fantastic."

Australia and China have each been vying for greater influence in the Pacific in recent years. After Beijing inked a major policing deal with the Solomon Islands in 2022, Australia has spent years trying to forge exclusive security pacts with countries across the region – including a policing agreement with Tuvalu last year, and a treaty with Nauru unveiled earlier this week.

Some have lauded the pact with PNG - which declared independence from Australia in 1975 - as another major strategic win for Australia.

"Over the past couple of years, with the heightened geopolitical interest and engagement in the Pacific, something a lot of other middle powers and major powers have struggled to do is to get PNG on a deal of exclusivity for security partnerships," said Oliver Nobetau, a PNG government lawyer turned policy analyst at the Lowy Institute think tank.

Both prime ministers have sought to downplay the security aspect of the deals, framing them instead as a boon to what Mr Nobetau says has been a "thinning" relationship between the two countries.

Marape made a point to say the agreement "doesn't stop us from relating with any nation, especially our Asian neighbours".

"We relate with China, for instance, a great trading partner, a great bilateral partner," he said. "But in security, closer to home… our shared territory needs to be protected, defended, policed… together."

Government sources say the deals do not give Australia veto power over PNG security agreements. But their framing does have the effect of eliminating almost every other potential partner - and Mr Nobetau said the announcement could be seen by some in PNG as "an exertion of Australian power over PNG sovereignty".

Both he and Dr Murray also note, however, that the dual deals speak to an emerging "transactional" dynamic in Pacific relations.

"People that talk about goodwill and who say sport and politics don't mix, that's the 20th century view," Dr Murray said. "For us, there's no way we're going to give away one of our prize cultural assets for nothing. That doesn't happen in diplomacy."

Dr Murray and Mr Nobetau also both agree that the deals mark a significant moment in bilateral relations between the two countries - and are a likely indicator of how Australia is going to continue to pursue its agenda across the region.

"China puts in a lot of money into sport infrastructure… which is sort of what China is good at… [but] China is not going to be offering any alternatives in this space," Mr Nobetau said.

"It's something that other countries can't do," Dr Murray added. "We need to use it, especially in a very, very contested region such as the Pacific."


'I hid Sara Sharif's family during international police hunt'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2k0y52p5e9o, today

A man armed with an AK-47 assault rifle waves us down an alley. We’re in a small village in eastern Pakistan, to meet someone who says he can tell us how Sara Sharif’s family managed to hide from police for more than four weeks during an international police hunt.

He was the one who hid them, he tells us.

For nearly a month, police searched for the family of eight - Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, her stepmother Beinash Batool and uncle Faisal Malik, along with five of her siblings.

They had flown to Pakistan on 9 August 2023 - a day before 10-year-old Sara’s battered and lifeless body was found in a bedroom at their home in Woking, Surrey.

Having received a notice from Interpol to locate Sharif, Batool and Malik, police started a high profile search for the family across Pakistan, deploying multiple teams.

They suspected Rasikh Munir, a relative of Urfan Sharif’s, of helping them. But during multiple raids on his property, they failed to find the family.

The children were later found at another relative's home. Mr Munir told us that was the moment Sharif, Batool and Malik decided to fly back to England, where they were finally arrested on 13 September 2023.

The BBC has followed the story in Pakistan since the first media reports of Sara’s death broke.

We met Rasikh Munir before Sara’s father, uncle and stepmother were put on trial for her murder in London, before the jury heard horrific details of the injuries that Sara had sustained - bite marks, iron burns and injuries caused by hot liquid.

He told us he had believed Sharif was innocent and that he’d taken the family in to protect the children. He also revealed extraordinary details: about how the family had hidden in corn fields when police raided his home at night and how he’d driven them around the local area, buying ice creams and even visiting hairdressers while detectives searched for them.

And remarkably, he said Sharif, Batool and Malik had been hiding in a neighbouring house just metres away from us as we spoke to Sara’s grandfather shortly after her siblings had been taken away by police.

A jury at London's Old Bailey has now found Sharif and Batool guilty of murdering Sara. Malik was cleared of murder but has been found guilty of causing or allowing her death.

We climb out onto an open, flat roof, strung with an empty washing line. "From this roof, you could see the police from all four sides," Mr Munir says pointing across the open fields.

Bar a few one-storey buildings and a scattering of trees, the view is nearly clear to the main road.

Police came to the property on several occasions at night. Mr Munir tells us the family hid from officers in a thick field of corn, a few metres away from the house - the adults and all five children hiding in the dark, in hot, humid conditions.

"No police ever checked this area. The kids had just one bag, they didn’t have many clothes with them. Most of their stuff was in my car, which I used to park in a safe place," he says.

“The younger ones didn’t know what was happening," he says. "They were scared, they couldn’t understand."

This was not the first time the family had visited the house. Last time, Sara had been there too. "She was a very nice girl," Mr Munir remembers.

During the international police hunt, he says the family stayed with him for several weeks, but they weren’t in permanent hiding.

He tells us he drove them back and forth between his house in Sialkot and the city of Jhelum, two hours away, where Sara’s grandfather lived. He took them to have haircuts in town and sometimes for ice cream and pizza.

Before the police hunt intensified, he says the family was able to pass through police checkpoints without incident.

But then the net began to tighten.

Just over three weeks into the search, police found Sara’s siblings at their grandfather’s home. The BBC spoke to him minutes after the raid.

"The police have taken away all the children," Muhammad Sharif told us. "They were safe with me." He said Sharif and Batool weren’t there during the raid, but the police took all five of the children.

We were the first journalists inside the house after the raid. The neon plastic toys the children had been playing with were still on the beds. The smashed door was freshly splintered.

Now, Mr Munir tells us something incredible.

As we’d been filming that day, Sara’s father, stepmother and uncle had been hiding in the house next door - just metres away.

He says police only had permission to go into the grandfather’s house, so couldn’t check other nearby properties.

Cameras had been installed, attached to a big LCD screen, so the family could see when the police were coming.

The night the police closed in, Mr Munir says Sara’s father, uncle and stepmother “ran away”. They called him and he went to pick them up.

He says the family realised the game was up the following day. A court instructed that the children be placed in a children’s home in Pakistan.

We attended the hearing. The eldest of the five children carried the youngest through a crowd of police officers and local journalists, trying to protect their faces from camera flashes.

Mr Munir says the loss of the children and the growing police pressure prompted the adults to return to the UK. He said Sharif, Batool and Malik then contacted a UK lawyer and Surrey Police to say they’d be back within days.

He told us he booked flights in their names, even though there was an Interpol notice to find them. Mr Munir said he drove the trio to the airport and that Urfan even called him from the departure lounge to say they had cleared airport security.

When they arrived at Gatwick Airport, all three were arrested for Sara’s murder. The following month, a court allowed all the siblings to stay temporarily with a relative in Pakistan. Surrey County Council is still trying to bring them back to the UK. Their family in Pakistan is fighting to keep them there.

It is difficult to confirm every aspect of Mr Munir’s story. He has no photos of the time the family was with him - his phone was taken by the police, he tells us.

He has remained consistent and detailed in his story. He didn’t come to us. After several months of searching, we found him. We also know the police raided his property and were suspicious of his involvement from early on.

Throughout our conversation I was curious why he was happy to speak to us.

"One should tell what has happened," he says. "The person who hides reality is not a good person."

But when Mr Munir took the family in, he knew the 10-year-old girl he had met several summers before had been found dead and that police wanted to speak to the three adults hiding in his house.

The murder trial in London has since heard how Sara's body was found with dozens of injuries. She had been hooded, burned and beaten during more than two years of horrific abuse.

Mr Munir was clear, even before the trial, there should be consequences for her brutal death. "Whoever has done this to Sara should be punished because they have done a great injustice," he says.

It seems a contradictory response from someone who knowingly hid the three adults.

I kept pressing Mr Munir on whether he felt he had done anything wrong in hiding the adults and why he had helped the family.

“The case was in the UK, it had nothing to do with Pakistan,” he says. “Had it been a matter in Pakistan then maybe I wouldn’t have taken such a big risk.

“I helped Urfan and the young children. If I hadn’t helped them, they would have been completely helpless. I helped them to look after the kids, I felt sympathy for them.

“They were my people. Had I not stood by them and something bad had happened to them who would have been responsible for them?”

Sara’s grandfather and other members of the family have repeatedly lodged complaints in court that their family members were picked up by police to apply pressure on them to give up their whereabouts.

Police in Pakistan deny this. They say, since the hunt, all the cases against the family have been dropped.

But the consequences of the decision to bring the five children to Pakistan are not over.

All five, who until that point had spent their lives in the UK, are still in Pakistan. For now, their future is still uncertain.


Shopkeeper tracks down mum who stole Jellycat toys to sell on Vinted

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vez9jg809o, today

A shopkeeper has revealed how he turned detective to track down a shoplifter after discovering goods stolen from his business for sale online.

Charlie Groves, who runs a garden centre in Bridport, Dorset, says he watched CCTV recordings of a woman concealing Jellycat toys in a pram carrying her child, before leaving the store without paying and getting into her car.

Mr Groves says he was able to piece together the woman's identity by scouring resale websites, deciphering her car's personalised number plate, and eventually finding her Facebook profile.

When he traced a seller on Vinted he suspected of selling on the stolen goods, Mr Groves discovered the man the account belonged to is married to the woman who had shoplifted the cuddly toys.

The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) advises online shoppers to think carefully about whether something which appears to be a bargain is "too good to be true".

Vinted says it is "constantly mobilised to detect and counter new malicious behaviour", and reviews and improves processes when needed.

After realising a large Jellycat hedgehog toy worth £59 was missing from his garden centre shop in October, Charlie Groves decided to look for answers by reviewing the store's CCTV recordings.

At one point, he saw a woman taking one of the stuffed toys from the shelves and handing it to her child to pacify them, before picking up one of the largest items on display and stuffing it into the bottom of her pram.

Security cameras also captured the woman in the garden centre car park, driving a car with a personalised number plate that appeared to reference a woman's name.

In the days after the theft Mr Groves went online and found a Jellycat hedgehog like the one stolen from him being sold on resale site Vinted.

"It's heartbreaking to find these things you've been displaying being sold online," he told the BBC.

Mr Groves tracked down the Vinted account owner on Facebook and discovered he was married to a woman who looked like the same person he'd seen on the Groves Garden Centre CCTV footage stealing toys. The woman's name on Facebook was very similar to the personalised number plate on the shoplifter's car.

Mr Groves estimates the woman may have stolen eight Jellycats worth up to £400 from his shop that day. He says he has passed the information he gathered about the theft and resale of the stuffed animals to the police.

Dorset Police told the BBC enquiries into the incident are ongoing and no arrests have been made.

"It's quite frustrating," Mr Groves says, "you do all this work - track them down - but you don't get anything back.

"It would be good to have at least a deterrent to stop people coming in and being quite so brazen. It happens because the people doing the shoplifting know nothing is going to happen."

The BBC tracked down the woman seen shoplifting in the CCTV footage to Bristol. She confirmed she is the owner of the vehicle seen in the store's CCTV, but denied being involved in shoplifting cuddly toys from Groves Garden Centre to sell online.

The woman's husband denies knowing any stolen items were being advertised for sale on his Vinted account.

At another garden centre in Horsham, Sussex, Jellycat toys were also regularly being stolen and staff now display them in glass cabinets to prevent further thefts.

Old Barn Garden Centre's head of security, Chris Hoare, believes proofs of purchase should be a requirement for people selling goods through online marketplaces.

"They need to have an accountability for how this stuff is resold on their sites," Mr Hoare says.

Without that, he adds, online marketplaces are "part of the problem, rather than part of the solution".

Shoplifting is at record levels with 469,788 offences recorded in England and Wales in the year to June 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The Centre for Retail Research has estimated shoplifting adds £133 onto the cost of an average UK household's shopping bill each year.

Retail trade bodies warn stolen goods being sold through online marketplaces like Vinted, eBay and Facebook Marketplace are a growing problem - which is helping fuel an increase in shoplifting

The British Independent Retailers Association (BIRA) estimates at least three in five items shoplifted from its members end up being sold online.

"The industrial scale of this is worrying and is definitely fuelled by the availability and expediency and lack of control in online marketplaces," BIRA's chief executive Andrew Goodacre says.

The NPCC told the BBC it wants owners of online marketplaces to take more steps to ensure people are unable to sell goods through their sites anonymously, and it would support the introduction of new laws to force platforms to verify a seller's identity. The NPCC also advises bargain-hunting online shoppers to be cautious.

"If you see something that is a huge reduction or is cheaper than you could buy it in your local store then you've got to be questioning to yourself," says Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman. "Think about what you're doing and who you're purchasing off. If you're unsure report it to us and let us know."

Facebook, eBay and Vinted told the BBC it is prohibited to sell stolen items on their platforms – and they work closely with law enforcement to support investigations.

The Home Office told the BBC it will continue to work with police to understand the routes used to sell stolen goods. It also said it would work with online marketplaces to inform what more can be done to tackle the stolen goods market.

In the run up to Christmas, Charlie Groves says shoplifting remains a "massive problem" for his Dorset garden centre business, when gift-related items can easily be sold online.

"It's not the back of van anymore."

Additional reporting by Leigh Boobyer and Dan Ayers.


'Christmas lights' galaxy reveals how Universe formed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr0j7625kzo, today

Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has for the first time captured an image of what our galaxy likely looked like just as it was forming - and it's got space scientists feeling very Christmassy.

“I just love the sparkle galaxy with its Christmas lights shining as it was when the Universe was just 600 million years old,” Prof Catherine Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, told BBC News.

The image shows ten balls of stars of different colours, appearing like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the cosmos.

It's the first time that scientists have witnessed clumps of stars assembling to form a galaxy like our own Milky Way and holds clues as to how the Universe was formed.

Scientists have named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle, because it also looks like a swarm of multi-coloured fireflies.

From its orbit in space unhindered by Earth's atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever built has already shown us more distant and therefore older galaxies, but not one like our own in the early stages of forming and not in such detail.

“The data of what happened at this stage of the Universe is very sparse,” according to Dr Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who co-led the research.

“But here, we are actually watching a galaxy as it is being formed brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us are already formed so this is the first time we have seen this process,” she told BBC News.

Prof Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, who is independent of the research team, described the discovery as “gorgeous, scientifically important and extremely festive”.

“I find it amazing that humans have built a telescope that allows us to peer so far back in time and that we can see these very nascent phases of the galaxy in such a beautifully festive way.”

The star clusters are of different colours because they are at different stages in their formation, according to Dr Mowla.

“It is so beautiful because the early life of a galaxy is extremely active," she said.

"There is so much happening, there are new stars being born, there are massive stars dying, there is a lot of gas and dust around it and there is nitrogen and oxygen and because of the state they are in, you have these lovely colours.

“We are able to tell something about the ages of each cluster, the composition of their elements and the temperatures at which they formed.”

When Dr Mowla came across the galaxy, she had never seen clumps of stars in such vivid and varying colours. It led her to believe that there was something different about this system, so she checked how far away it was.

To her surprise it turned out to be more than 13 billion light years away.

The light from Firefly Sparkle is from not long after the creation of the Universe and so has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. It is so small and so far away that not even JWST would have been able to see it, were it not for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.

There was a cluster of galaxies exactly between Firefly Sparkle and the JWST, which distorted spacetime to stretch the light from the faraway galaxy and effectively act as a gigantic magnifying glass.

Astronomers call this process gravitational lensing, which in this instance enabled the research co-lead Dr Kartheik Iyer of Columbia University in New York, and other members of the team, to see for the first time, incredible details of how the first galaxies like our own Milky Way formed.

“It takes the light coming from the firefly and bends it and amplifies it so we can see it in glorious detail,” he told BBC News.

"Our reconstruction shows that clumps of actively forming stars are surrounded by diffuse light from other stars. This galaxy is literally in the process of assembling."

"When it does all this and we are able to see this incredible faraway galaxy, it is a very humbling, magical feeling.”

The research has been published in the journal Nature.


Mystery drones not from Iranian 'mothership' - Pentagon

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrwz91wqd9o, today

A spate of mysterious drone sightings in the US are not the work of an Iranian "mothership" lurking off the east coast, the Pentagon says.

Dozens of drones have been spotted across New Jersey in recent weeks, including near sensitive military locations in the state.

One state lawmaker, Republican representative Jeff Van Drew, claimed on Wednesday that he heard from "high sources" that the flying objects are tied to Iran.

Van Drew's claims were flatly rejected by deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh at a briefing on Wednesday.

"There is no truth to that," she told reporters. "There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there's no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States."

The Pentagon's initial assessment, Ms Singh added, is that "these are not drones coming from a foreign entity or adversary."

The Pentagon statement comes weeks after publicly unexplained drone incursions were reported over US airbases in the UK.

Dozens of sightings have been reported over New Jersey since 18 November, with 49 reported sightings on Sunday alone, Governor Phil Murphy said Monday.

Some of the flights have taken place near Picatinny Arsenal - a sensitive military research facility - as well as near President-elect Donald Trump's golf course in the town of Bedminster.

Murphy stressed that the drones don't appear to pose a public safety concern.

The FBI has so far been unable to explain the sightings.

"I don't have an answer of who's responsible," Robert Wheeler Jr, the assistant director of the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group told lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. "But we're actively investigating."

New Jersey assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia disavowed the Pentagon's assertions.

"We know nothing, period," she wrote. "To state that there is no known or credible threat is incredibly misleading."

The Republican - who was briefed by the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday - said the drones appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio.

Fantasia said the drones are up to 6ft (1.8m) in diameter, travel with lights turned off and "operate in a coordinated manner."

While the mysterious objects are not believed to be hobbyist drones, Fantasia said it remains unclear what they are.

Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, Van Drew claimed that the drones are coming from an Iranian "mothership" in the Atlantic.

"That mothership... is off the East Coast of the United States of America. They've launched drones into everything that we can see or hear," Mr Van Drew said. "These are from high sources. I don't say this lightly."

He added that the drones should be "shot down".

In late November, the United States Air Force confirmed that unidentified drones were spotted over three US airbases in the UK: RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.

Defence sources told the BBC that suspicion had fallen on a "state actor" being responsible for the incursions.

An investigation is ongoing.


Asylum hotel rioter jailed for nine years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c878p3l93rqo, today

A man who tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers has been jailed for nine years, the joint-longest prison sentence in connection with the UK's summer of riots.

Levi Fishlock smashed windows and stoked a flaming bin at the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, during a spate of disorder on 4 August.

Fishlock, 31, of Sheffield Road, Barnsley, initially denied violent disorder and arson with intent to endanger life but later pleaded guilty to the charges.

Jailing him, the Recorder of Sheffield, Judge Jeremy Richardson KC, said: "This is one of the worst cases of its kind stemming from the Rotherham disorder."

Fisklock's sentence, which also includes a five-year licence period after he is released from jail, is the same as that of Thomas Birley, who was also part of the mob, some of whom attempted to torch the hotel in South Yorkshire.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

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Australia to force tech giants to keep paying for news

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4pvgjklevo, today

Australia's government says it will create new rules to force big tech companies to pay local publishers for news.

The long-awaited decision sets out a successor to a world-first law that Australia passed in 2021, which was designed to make giants like Meta and Google pay for hosting news on their platforms.

Earlier this year Meta - which owns Facebook and Instagram - announced it would not renew payment deals it had in place with Australian news organisations, setting up a standoff with lawmakers.

The new rules, announced on Thursday, will require firms that earn more than A$250m ($160m; £125m) in annual revenue to enter into commercial deals with media organisations, or risk being hit with higher taxes.

The design of the scheme is yet to be finalised but it will apply to sites such as Facebook, Google and TikTok.

In a statement, Meta said it was concerned that the government was "charging one industry to subsidise another".

Unlike the previous model, the new framework - called the News Bargaining Incentive - will require tech firms to pay even if they do not enter deals with publishers.

"Digital platforms receive huge financial benefits from Australia and they have a social and economic responsibility to contribute to Australians' access to quality journalism," Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said on Thursday.

The previous News Media Bargaining Code saw news organisations negotiate commercial deals with tech giants, while also committing firms like Facebook and Google to invest millions of dollars in local digital content.

That code aimed to address what the government called a power imbalance between publishers and tech companies, while offsetting some of the losses traditional media outlets have faced due to the rise of digital platforms.

As deals brokered under that arrangement neared expiry, Meta said that it would not be renewing them, leading to a roughly A$200m loss in revenue for Australian publishers.

Instead, Meta said it would phase out its dedicated news tab - which spotlights articles - on Facebook in Australia, and reinvest the money elsewhere.

"We know that people don't come to Facebook for news and political content… news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed," it said in a statement in February.

The announcement prompted a strong response from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government, which described the move as "a fundamental dereliction" of Meta's "responsibility to its Australian users".

"The risk is that misinformation will fill any vacuum created by news no longer being on the platform," Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said at the time.

The new taxation model begins in January 2025 and will be cemented into law once parliament returns in February.

The government says it will be designed to make tech companies fund Australian journalism in exchange for tax offsets, not to raise revenue.


Mexican judge shot dead outside courthouse in Acapulco

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg9135j89do, today

Gunmen in Mexico have shot dead a judge outside a courthouse in the city of Acapulco.

Judge Edmundo Román Pinzón was hit by at least four bullets as he was driving out of the courthouse car park on Wednesday afternoon, local time.

He was a senior judge who had been president of the highest court in the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located.

The murder comes amid a surge in deadly attacks on officials in the violence-wracked southern state.

Police have been speaking to witnesses and been gathering CCTV footage from the murder scene, but so far no arrests have been made in connection with the case.

The security forces have also stepped up their activities in the resort town in order to catch those responsible.

According to local paper El Sol de Acapulco, the judge had been in charge of the court which dealt with murders, kidnappings and car thefts.

It is not yet known what the possible motive behind the murder may have been.

The governor of Guerrero state said the crime demanded "immediate justice".

The killing of the judge is the latest in a string of extremely violent attacks in Guerrero over the past weeks.

Last month, the bodies of 11 people, including two children, were found inside a vehicle in the town of Chilpancingo, 100km (62 miles) north of Acapulco.

Acapulco, once a popular beach resort, has not been spared, with rival gangs battling for control of the city's drugs market - and at times leaving mutilated bodies on beaches.


Let me come home, teen sentenced in Dubai pleads

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4pvkxq50eo, today

An 18-year-old British man sentenced to a year in prison for a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old British girl in Dubai has appealed to the emirate's ruler "to let me go home".

Marcus Fakana, from north London, began a secretive holiday romance in September with another Londoner, who is now aged 18.

After returning home and seeing pictures and chats, the girl's mother reported the relationship to Dubai police, who arrested Fakana at his hotel. Sex with another person aged under 18 is illegal in Dubai.

Speaking in temporary accommodation while on bail, he told campaign group Detained in Dubai: "I am asking His Highness, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum to please forgive me and pardon me."

'Tearing family apart'

The teenager added: "Let me go home. Please give me my life back.

"I never intended to break the law. It didn't occur to me at the time and for that, I'm sorry."

On Wednesday, Detained in Dubai called the judgment an "utter disgrace" and said Fakana, from Tottenham, would appeal against the "unreasonable" sentence.

Both teenagers were on holiday with their parents in the UAE from the UK, where the age of consent is 16.

Fakana had told his family about the romance but the girl had not told hers.

The government of Dubai previously said: "Under UAE law, the girl is legally classified as a minor, and in accordance with procedures recognised internationally, her mother - being the legal guardian - filed the complaint."

It added: "Dubai's legal system is committed to protecting the rights of all individuals and ensuring impartial judicial proceedings."

The BBC has approached it for further comment.

Ms Stirling, the founder and chief executive of Detained in Dubai, which helps foreigners abroad and is an international authority on UAE law, told the BBC that Fakana "was shocked" by the "unfathomable" sentence.

She said: "It does not warrant a year in jail, doesn't warrant tearing this family apart and ruining this young 18-year-old's life.

"I'm confident that, on appeal, the custodial sentence will be overturned and he will be allowed to return home.

"The question is how long is that going to take and how much effort is that going to take, whether that's British intervention or the public support in telling Dubai this is unacceptable?"

The 18-year-old's parents returned to London without their son after the holiday to resume their jobs in a warehouse and as a cleaner to help pay for his temporary accommodation.

A UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) spokesperson said: "We are supporting a British man in the UAE and are in contact with his family."

Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to hello.bbclondon@bbc.co.uk


Star luxury property brokers charged with sex trafficking

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg52q2q1pmvo, today

Two famous real estate brokers and their brother have been charged with sex trafficking in a case involving the alleged drugging, assaulting and raping of dozens of women over more than a decade.

Prosecutors say Tal and Oren Alexander, who are known for selling high-end properties in New York and Miami, along with their brother Alon, used their wealth to take advantage of women.

The brothers were arrested in Florida on Wednesday and are expected to be taken to New York to face the charges.

A lawyer representing Oren Alexander rejected the accusations. Tal Alexander's representative, Joel Denaro, declined to comment. Alon Alexander's lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"As of today, law enforcement has interviewed dozens of women who reported being forcibly raped or sexually assaulted by at least one of the Alexander brothers," said Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a press conference in Manhattan.

"This conduct, as alleged, was heinous."

The prosecutors say the alleged crimes were committed over more than a decade.

The indictment describes a scheme that involved inviting women to parties as well as using the promise of luxury experiences and travel to lure them to locations in the US and abroad where the alleged assaults happened.

It also says they procured drugs and provided them to the women and, at times, "surreptitiously" put them in drinks.

Finally, prosecutors also say that in some instances the brothers "physically restrained and held down their victims during the rapes and sexual assaults and ignored screams and explicit requests to stop".

Immediately after the assaults, the brothers allegedly provided some of the victims with concert tickets and other luxury items.

The three brothers are being charged with one count each of engaging in a sex trafficking conspiracy, and a second count of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.

Tal Alexander is also charged with a further count of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion.

"Oren Alexander is innocent," said his lawyer, Susan Necheles.

"The evidence will show that neither he nor his brothers ever committed a crime."

Meanwhile, a lawyer representing the women welcomed the indictment.

"We are glad to hear that there will finally be some measure of accountability for the Alexander brothers and justice for their many victims," said David Gottlieb in a statement posted by his law firm Wigdor LLP on X.

"We applaud all the survivors who have had the strength and courage to speak up about their unimaginable experiences after years of pain and suffering."

Tal and Oren Alexander have worked for real estate giant Douglas Elliman, listing properties for celebrities including Liam Gallagher, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

In 2022, they started a firm called Official.


Mark Zuckerberg's Meta donates $1m to Trump fund

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo, today

Meta has donated $1m (£786,000) to a inauguration fund for Donald Trump, in another sign of the tech giant's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, attempting to build bridges with the president-elect.

Trump has previously been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook - which Meta owns - calling the platform "anti-Trump" in 2017.

But the pair dined at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in November, a meeting Mr Zuckerberg afterwards described himself as "grateful" for.

Inauguration funds are used to pay for events and activities when a new president takes office - some consider them an attempt to curry favour with a new administration.

Meta - which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp - is not believed to have made similar donations to President Joe Biden's inaugural fund in 2020 or Trump's previous such fund in 2016.

The donation was confirmed by CBS, the BBC's US media partner, on Wednesday, and was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The BBC has approached Meta for comment.

Trump will be sworn in as the 47th US president on 20 January.

Trump & Mark Zuckerberg's history

Relations between Trump and Mr Zuckerberg have historically been far less cordial.

They particularly soured when Facebook and Instagram suspended the former president's accounts in 2021, after they said he praised those engaged in violence at the Capitol on 6 January.

Since then, Trump has waged a war of words against Meta - calling Facebook an "enemy of the people" in March.

He said a law that would see TikTok banned in the US unless sold off by its parent company ByteDance would unfairly benefit Facebook.

In August, Mr Zuckerberg told Republican lawmakers in a letter that he regretted bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to "censor" some Facebook and Instagram content during the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump wrote in a book published in September that Mr Zuckerberg would "spend the rest of his life in prison" if he tried to intervene in the 2024 election.

But the president-elect appears to have since softened his position.

He told a podcast in October it was "nice" Mr Zuckerberg was "staying out of the election", and thanked him for a personal phone call after he faced an assassination attempt.

Still, Mr Zuckerberg remains far less close to Trump than fellow tech titan Elon Musk.

The Tesla and X owner has been dubbed Trump's "First Buddy" because of his extensive donations to his election campaign.

That has led to Mr Musk being placed in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

There has been no such rapprochement between Mr Musk and Mr Zuckerberg - although the cage fight between them that was once mooted now appears to be off.


Elon Musk's Tesla lobbied UK to charge petrol drivers more

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0en9mn8mko, today

Elon Musk's electric car firm Tesla pushed the government to make petrol car drivers "pay more" in the days after Labour won the general election.

Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has waded into British politics openly on social media, predicting "civil war" and criticising prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.

But behind the scenes his firm was trying to persuade the new government to extend a policy that would boost his firm's profits.

The company called for the mandate to boost electric car sales to be extended to lorries, and said electric vehicle (EV) subsidies could come from charging people buying petrol and diesel cars.

"The government should ask those still choosing to purchase a new polluting vehicle, to pay more," Tesla's European boss, Joe Ward, wrote in a letter addressed to roads minister, Lilian Greenwood, in July.

The letter, released under a Freedom of Information request made by the EV newsletter The Fast Charge, shows that Tesla "applauded the Labour Party's strong position [on] decarbonisation of the energy system by 2030, growth and net zero".

The praise came just weeks before Musk lashed out online at the UK government over the summer riots.

The BBC reported in September that Musk was not invited to the government's investment summit partly because of tensions over his political interventions.

Since then the billionaire has become the indispensable right-hand man to incoming US president, Donald Trump. The surging value of his stake in Tesla since the election there has underpinned an incredible rise in Musk's wealth.

The UK government is currently consulting on changes to a key measure, meant to encourage sale of electric cars, the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.

The ZEV mandate requires carmakers to sell a set number of EVs per year, and if they cannot meet their targets, they have to purchase credits from other EV makers who have sold more of the lower polluting vehicles.

UK carmakers are pushing for the policy to be diluted, arguing customers are not yet buying EVs in high enough numbers.

The letter from Tesla lobbied for the opposite policy, saying the ZEV mandate "must be protected and strengthened".

Tesla stands to become a major beneficiary of the ZEV mandate as it can sell surplus credits from its imports of its own EVs, made in China.

Tesla also lobbied the new government for the UK to lead on the "scale up of autonomous vehicles", and offered a demonstration of the companies' vision.


Hackers find hole in Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' cyber-security

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gl9np1g2go, today

Doughnut chain Krispy Kreme says it has been hit by a cyberattack which has disrupted its online systems.

Some customers have been unable to make online orders as a result of the hack, which occurred in late November but has only just been disclosed.

Krispy Kreme revealed the attack in a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.

It said the incident was "reasonably likely" to "have a material impact" on the firm's business operations, but clarified that brick-and-mortar shops remain open.

"We're experiencing certain operational disruptions due to a cybersecurity incident, including with online ordering in parts of the United States," reads a message on the Krispy Kreme website.

"We know this is an inconvenience and are working diligently to resolve the issue."

The firm told the BBC in a statement it "immediately" took steps to investigate and contain the incident, and has brought in cybersecurity experts.

"We, along with them, continue to work diligently to respond to and mitigate the impact from the incident, including the restoration of online ordering," it said.

No groups have publicly taken responsibility for the hack.

Krispy Kreme is a large chain in the US, which has more than 1,400 shops worldwide.

In the UK it is smaller, but its 120 locations make it the largest speciality doughnut retailer in the country.

Krispy Kreme stated in its SEC filing that it has cybersecurity insurance, which it expects "to offset a portion of the costs".

It said it expected these costs to arise from a loss of digital sales, fees for the experts it has hired, and the restoration of impacted systems.

Cyber-attacks have caused serious disruption this year, plaguing key infrastructure including hospitals and transport systems.

Social media is taking this incident somewhat less seriously, however.

"Anyone messing with Krispy Kreme should be jailed for life," joked one user on X

"Cybercriminals, you've gone too far this time," posted another.


'I'm more confident' despite rise in US inflation

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgneqwj5eqo, today

New Yorker Josh Kerben used to keep a careful eye on his petrol purchases, trying to stretch out his money by only partially filling the tank.

These days, however, he has been filling it to the top.

The decision is an indication of the increased financial breathing room being felt by millions of Americans, as petrol prices drop to their lowest level for three years, helping to contain rising living costs.

US inflation - the rate at which prices increase - rose slightly to 2.7% last month, official figures showed. Despite the increase, prices are rising far more slowly than in June 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine sparked turmoil in global oil markets and sent fuel prices soaring.

Though the progress has appeared in economic data for months, economic dissatisfaction has remained high, as price increases in other areas, such as housing, overshadowed the wider improvement.

The issue played a key role in the US election, helping Donald Trump win re-election to the White House last month.

Now, however, surveys suggest opinions about the economy are finally starting to brighten, driven in large part by increased confidence among supporters of Trump, Mr Kerben among them, after the former president's election victory.

"Compared to two months ago, I would say I feel more confident," the 36-year-old property manager said. "Hopefully Trump will do something."

Ironically, the improvement in sentiment is arriving just as progress containing prices has appeared to stall.

The 2.7% inflation rate for November had been expected.

But it was up from 2.6% in October, marking the highest rate since July.

Gas prices - though down 8.1% compared with 2023 - rose 0.6% from October, while grocery prices jumped 0.5% over the month.

Prices of used cars, household furnishings and medical care also climbed.

The situation has raised questions about how Trump will deliver on his promises to lower prices for Americans - and what the US central bank, which wants to see an inflation rate of about 2%, should do next.

"Inflation has been coming steadily back into focus in the US," said Lindsay James, investment strategist at Quilter Investors.

"This is due in part to the lack of progress that has been made over the last three months, but also because of concerns that higher US government spending plus the introduction of Trump's tariffs could create a more inflationary backdrop."

The US central bank lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years in September, citing the progress stabilising prices.

Many analysts still expect officials to announce another cut to interest rates at their meeting this month, but they have warned that rates are likely to stay higher than previously expected next year unless price increases in areas outside of petrol start to ease more significantly.

That's a conclusion that will come as no surprise to Americans like Grier Bowen.

The 48-year-old was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 and now relies on disability payments from the government, which she said have not kept up as expenses shot up in recent years.

Though the situation has been helped by lower petrol prices, she said the savings were not enough to offset higher costs elsewhere.

"You may save here but you've got to now reallocate somewhere else," she said.

Ms Bowen said she thought Trump would try to shake things up but she has yet to be convinced he will make a difference for the better.

"That's yet to be determined," she said.


India: Is the fastest-growing big economy losing steam?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dq9rj63lmo, today

Is the world's fastest-growing big economy losing steam?

The latest GDP numbers paint a sobering picture. Between July and September, India's economy slumped to a seven-quarter low of 5.4%, well below the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) forecast of 7%.

While it is still robust compared with developed nations, the figure signals a slowdown.

Economists attribute this to several factors. Consumer demand has weakened, private investment has been sluggish for years and government spending - an essential driver in recent years - has been pulled back. India's goods exports have long struggled, with their global share standing at a mere 2% in 2023.

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies report tepid sales, while salary bills at publicly traded firms, a proxy for urban wages, shrank last quarter. Even the previously bullish RBI has revised its growth forecast to 6.6% for the financial year 2024-2025.

"All hell seems to have broken loose after the latest GDP numbers," says economist Rajeshwari Sengupta. "But this has been building up for a while. There's a clear slowdown and a serious demand problem."

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman paints a brighter picture. She said last week that the decline was "not systemic" but a result of reducing government spending during an election-focused quarter. She expected third-quarter growth to offset the recent decline. India will probably remain the fastest-growing major economy despite challenges like stagnant wages affecting domestic consumption, slowing global demand and climate disruptions in agriculture, Sitharaman said.

Some – including a senior minister in the federal government, economists and a former member of RBI's monetary policy group – argue that the central bank's focus on curbing inflation has led to excessively restrictive interest rates, potentially stifling growth.

High rates make borrowing more expensive for businesses and consumers, and potentially reduce investments and dampen consumption, both key drivers of economic growth. The RBI has kept interest rates unchanged for nearly two years, primarily because of rising inflation.

India's inflation surged to 6.2% in October, breaching the central bank's target ceiling (4%) and reaching a 14-month high, according to official data. It was mainly driven by food prices, comprising half of the consumer price basket – vegetable prices, for example, rose to more than 40% in October. There are also growing signs that food price hikes are now influencing other everyday costs, or core inflation.

But high interest rates alone may not fully explain the slowing growth. "Lowering rates won't spur growth unless consumption demand is strong. Investors borrow and invest only when demand exists, and that's not the case now," says Himanshu, a development economist at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

However, RBI's outgoing governor, Shaktikanta Das, believes India's "growth story remains intact", adding the "balance between inflation and growth is well poised".

Economists point out that despite record-high retail credit and rising unsecured loans - indicating people borrowing to finance consumption even amidst high rates - urban demand is weakening. Rural demand is a brighter spot, benefiting from a good monsoon and higher food prices.

Ms Sengupta, an associate professor at Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, told the BBC that the ongoing crisis was borne out by the fact that India's economy was operating on a "two-speed trajectory", driven by diverging performances in its "old economy and new economy".

The old economy comprising the vast informal sector, including medium and small scale industries, agriculture and traditional corporate sector, are still waiting for long-pending reforms.

In contrast, the new economy, defined by the boom in services exports post-Covid, experienced robust growth in 2022-23. Outsourcing 2.0 has been a key driver, with India emerging as the world's largest hub for global capability centres (GCCs), which do high-end offshore services work.

According to Deloitte, a consulting firm, over 50% of the world's GCCs are now based in India. These centres focus on R&D, engineering design and consulting services, generating $46bn (£36bn) in revenue and employing up to 2 million highly skilled workers.

"This influx of GCCs fuelled urban consumption by supporting demand for luxury goods, real estate and SUVs. For 2-2.5 years post-pandemic, this drove a surge in urban spending. With GCCs largely established and consumption patterns shifting, the urban spending lift is fading," says Ms Sengupta.

So the old economy appears to lack a growth catalyst while the new economy slows. Private investment is crucial, but without strong consumption demand, firms will not invest. Without investment to create jobs and boost incomes, consumption demand cannot recover. "It's a vicious cycle," says Ms Sengupta.

There are other confusing signals as well. India's average tariffs have risen from 5% in 2013-14 to 17% now, higher than Asian peers trading with the US. In a world of global value chains, where exporters rely on imports from multiple countries, high tariffs make goods more expensive for companies to trade, making it harder for them to compete in global markets.

Then there is what economist Arvind Subramanian calls a "new twist in the tale".

Even as calls grow to lower interest rates and boost liquidity, the central bank is propping up a falling rupee by selling dollars, which tightens liquidity. Since October, the RBI has spent $50bn from its forex reserves to shield the rupee.

Buyers must pay in rupees to purchase dollars, which reduces liquidity in the market. Maintaining a strong rupee through interventions reduces competitiveness by making Indian goods more expensive in global markets, leading to lower demand for exports.

"Why is the central bank shoring up the rupee? The policy is bad for the economy and exports. Possibly they are doing it because of optics. They don't want to show India's currency is weak," Mr Subramanian, a former economic adviser to the government, told the BBC.

Critics warn that the "hyping up the narrative" of India as the fastest-growing economy is hindering essential reforms to boost investment, exports and job creation. "We are still a poor country. Our per capita GDP is less than $3,000, while the US is at $86,000. If you say we are growing faster than them, it makes no sense at all," says Ms. Sengupta.

In other words, India requires a significantly higher and sustained growth rate to generate more jobs and raise incomes.

Boosting growth and consumption will not be easy in the short term. Lacking private investment, Himanshu suggests raising wages through government-run employment schemes to increase incomes and spur consumption. Others like Ms Sengupta advocate for reducing tariffs and attracting export investments moving away from China to countries like Vietnam.

The government remains upbeat over the India story: banks are strong, forex reserves are robust, finances stable and extreme poverty has declined. Chief economic adviser V Anantha Nageswaran says the latest GDP figure should not be over-interpreted. "We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the underlying growth story remains intact," he said at a recent meeting.

Clearly the pace of growth could do with some picking up. That is why scepticism lingers. "There's no nation as ambitious for so long without taking [adequate] steps to fulfill that ambition," says Ms Sengupta. "Meanwhile, the headlines talk of India's age and decade - I'm waiting for that to materialise."


What is rage-baiting and why is it profitable?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp555xy5ro, today

“I get a lot of hate”. The words of content creator Winta Zesu, who last year made $150,000 (£117,000) from posting on social media.

What separates Winta from other influencers? The people commenting on her posts and driving traffic to her videos are often doing so out of anger.

“Every single video of mine that has gained millions of views is because of hate comments,” the 24-year-old explains.

In those videos, she documents the life of a New York City model, whose biggest problem is being too pretty. What some in the comments don’t realise, is that Winta is playing a character.

“I get a lot of nasty comments, people say ‘you're not the prettiest girl’ or ‘please bring yourself down, you have too much confidence’,” she says to the BBC from her New York City apartment.

Winta is part of a growing group of online creators making ‘rage bait’ content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes.

It differs from its internet-cousin clickbait, where a headline is used to tempt a reader to click through to view a video or article.

As marketing podcaster Andrea Jones notes: “A hook reflects what's in that piece of content and comes from a place of trust, whereas rage-baiting content is designed to be manipulative.”

But the grip negative content has on human psychology is something that is hardwired into us, according to Dr William Brady, who studies how the brain interacts with new technologies.

“In our past, this is the kind of content that we really needed to pay attention to,” he explains, “so we have these biases built into our learning and our attention.”

An investigation from BBC social media investigations correspondent Marianna Spring found some users on X were being paid "thousands of dollars" by the social media site, for sharing content including misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories.

Some who study the trends are concerned that too much negative content can lead to the average person “switching off”.

“It can be draining to have such high emotions all the time,” says Ariel Hazel, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan.

“It turns them off the news environment and we're seeing increased amounts of active news avoidance around the world.”

Others worry about normalising anger offline and the eroding effects on people’s trust in the content they view.

“Algorithms amplify outrage, it makes people think it's more normal,” says social psychologist Dr William Brady.

He adds: “What we know from certain platforms like X is that politically extreme content is actually produced by a very small fraction of the user base, but algorithms can amplify it as if they were more of a majority.”

The BBC contacted the main social media platforms about rage bait on their sites, but had no responses.

In October 2024, Meta executive Adam Mosseri posted on Threads about “an increase in engagement-bait" on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.”

While Elon Musk’s rival platform X, recently announced a change to its Creator Revenue Sharing Program which will see creators compensated based on engagement from the site’s premium users - such as likes, replies, and reposts. Previously compensation was based on ads viewed by premium users.

TikTok and YouTube allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content too, but have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

Back in Winta Zesu’s New York City apartment, the conversation – which is taking place days before the US election - turns to politics.

“Yeah, I don't agree with people using rage bait for political reasons,” the content creator says.

"If they're using it genuinely to educate and inform people, it's fine. But if they're using it to spread misinformation, I totally do not agree with that.

“It's not a joke anymore.”


'Crazy growth': How one product created a multi-million dollar brand

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20241129-how-one-product-created-a-multi-million-dollar-brand, today

Nell Diamond, CEO of Hill House, shares how her small business skyrocketed to global success with a simple, singular product.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hill House Home's Nap Dress became more than just a piece of clothing – it was a symbol of comfort and versatility for a world in flux. What started as a direct-to-consumer bedding and home business in 2016 had grown into a fashion movement, reflecting how a single dress could adapt to your body over the years and transform depending on the demands of the day.

The company introduced the Nap Dress in 2019, a design that leaned into the idea of smocked fabric from the 1950s and reimagined it with modern, universal appeal. It didn't take long for the dress – now with over 50 designs – to go viral on social media and become common in many closets around the world.

"Our crazy growth happened from 2019 to 2020 – right in the middle of quarantine and while I was pregnant with twins," CEO Nell Diamond tells the BBC. "I could obviously see how much the business was changing internally from the sales volume, but one really pivotal moment for me was working from home, sitting in my bedroom in New York City, and looking out the window to see someone walking down the street wearing one of our dresses.

"Entrepreneurship can feel really lonely and insular, so to realise that people know about your little project is incredibly rewarding. I'll never forget that moment."

Since then, the company has sold over one million Nap Dresses, expanded into categories like outerwear and swimwear, and opened five retail locations across the United States, from New York to Charleston. The brand's reach has also expanded within other retailers, including Shopbop and Saks. Hill House puts its current valuation at approximately $150m (£118m), although the BBC was unable to obtain an independent valuation.

The company has faced challenges, too, including navigating global supply chain disruptions during the pandemic and scaling operations to meet increased demand. But at a time when small businesses struggle to stand out amid economic uncertainty, Hill House's story underscores the importance of adaptability and building strong connections with consumers.

"We've had the biggest year in company history," Diamond said. "The business has continued to grow past even our optimistic plans."

Diamond's love of fashion started early, during her teenage years while attending the American School in London, UK. After graduating from Princeton University, she joined the trading desk of a finance firm, initially entering the same sector of business as her father Bob Diamond, the former CEO of Barclays bank. She quickly realised, however, that her passion lay elsewhere.

"I was always drawn to retail," she says. "I'd steal my friends' equity research papers to learn what companies were doing in the retail space. I realised that this thing which started as a guilty pleasure – loving fashion – turned out to be a viable career opportunity."

Now, as CEO, Diamond oversees every aspect of the business, from growth strategy to creative direction. Below, she talks with the BBC about the company's biggest challenges, its rapid evolution into a lifestyle brand and plans for the future.

Hill House dates back to a startup incubator you joined while in business school at Yale University. How did you turn the idea into a fully fledged business?

I wanted to bring a design-forward point of view to the home category. We started with just home products: bedding, pillows, a little bit of pyjamas and robes. But I really focused on the home and, in particular, the bedroom, drawing off of some of the design elements of my London upbringing – great British brands like [interior decorating firm] Colfax and Fowler and amazing prints that I had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

There were many businesses launching direct-to-consumer [approaches] and talking about cutting out the middleman. I wanted to do the same thing and … start small and focus on just one or two products. While I was at business school, I spent time on the little parts of starting a business – trademarks, legal documents, hiring my first few contractors and setting up our Instagram account. After graduating, I spent the first couple of years bootstrapping the business and really focusing on meeting our customers. It was a very small team in a co-working space in New York City.

By 2019, everything dramatically changed overnight. We went from low and slow and careful growth to the success of the Nap Dress. Within a few months, our business was majority a fashion business based off the strength of this one product line. We went from five people to 30 people and from one store to now having almost six stores. It really changed the scale of the business. I remember our very first order was for a hundred units and being petrified that we wouldn't actually sell them. To have sold a million of them now is really crazy.

Why do you think this one particular product, the Nap Dress, resonates with so many people?

It's so many different things. We didn't invent smocking, which is what makes our dresses most identifiable. My grandmother was wearing smock dresses in the 1950s. Juicy Couture [the Los Angeles-based clothing brand] popularised smocking and terry cloth in the 2000s. But I think what was so important to us was figuring out a very proprietary type of smocking that could stretch with you. I wore it all throughout my twin pregnancy and then the snap back. It works with your changing body and throughout the day – it feels comfortable but you still look kind of put together.

When we first launched the Nap Dress, we would have somebody email in and say: "Oh, my friend was wearing this dress at a dinner party, or at work or at preschool pickup, and I have to have it." It was exacerbated by social media, but organic social media, which is the important distinction there. Even today, 30% of orders on our site come from word-of-mouth referrals.

What are some challenges you faced in the early days that you had to overcome?

There were – and continues to be – challenges every day. Early on and certainly during Covid, there were constant disruptions in the global supply chain, whether it was that one factory had to shut down or another one had delayed shipping.

In 2021, we expected we'd be able to have all the products here by a certain date for a product drop. There were crazy delays at ports all over due to shipping freight issues. That can affect your entire summer selling, your entire quarter of selling. In this increasingly online, seamless-delivery Amazon-dominated world, it is easy to forget how many human touch points there are and how fragile they can be. We internally would get so anxious and nervous any time one of those human touch points had a blockage.

But when we told our customers what was happening, people loved having that insight into the humanity behind the products they're actually buying. I think it made it feel more personal to them. And that might be one of the many reasons why we have such a loyal customer base – we let them into that side of the business. It's clear that it's not so robotic and transactional.

How do you check that manufacturing partners and suppliers are abiding by the highest standards?

We have manufacturers in 12 countries across nearly all continents. It's all about tracking at every stage of the development process. We take that very seriously. We work with an organisation called Transparency One that helps us track across our supply chain at every stage and audit what our manufacturers are reporting. We've had many of the same manufacturers since day one and developed those human relationships with the people who make our clothes. One of our main manufacturers is the same person who we sent those first hundred unit orders to, and they should feel a tremendous amount of ownership over the growth that we've seen over the past couple years.

You've publicly said before that the business is very reliant on global trading routes and global supply chains. Now given that President-elect Trump has campaigned on raising tariffs for imports, are you concerned about how this might affect costs and global trade more generally?

I can only speak for our own company, but I think that tariffs are certainly something we are thinking about.

How have you been expanding the brand?

We have a concept called Nells at our store in Charleston, South Carolina, inspired by my British upbringing. It's a pick-and-mix candy station, and there's a coffee and fountain soda bar, a nod to the Americana roots of the brand as well. It's never been easier to shop online, so if you're asking customers to come into your store, you should be delivering an experience that makes it worth it.

The home category is still really big for us now. But it just seems small in comparison to how all the fashion is doing. A new category we recently launched is swim – and that's performing really well. We asked what else our customers wanted to see from Hill House, and swim was an early answer.

The fashion world can be notoriously fickle. How can you ensure your products remain relevant across changes in fashion on the street?

We focus on our core customer, so I'm not so worried about what's relevant for anyone except for them. It can be easy in fashion to get caught up in a trend cycle, but our core customer is really focused on cute clothes that make them feel great and carry them through all of their different things that they have to do that day. Within that formula, we can deliver a product that makes them happy and not be so focused on a constant cycle of newness. It's about building pieces that last in their wardrobe.

What advice do you have for smaller businesses hoping to expand and build?

One of the most important pieces of advice I got when I was first starting out was to keep your blinders on. I remember constantly playing the comparison game in the early days and looking at other brands, Instagrams or advertisements or stores, thinking: "We should have done that and we should have done this, and why can't we do that?" That was never productive for me.

I had a real unlock when I started to tune out some of that noise and focus on what we have going on internally and how to make that as good as it possibly could be and can be. I mute a lot of people on Instagram if I'm getting a negative feeling from it. I always talk about putting the mute button on in real life, too, if something's not serving you in that way.

More like this:

• The 'missing middle' of small businesses

• Meet the founder of the slogan-jumper brand celebrities love

• Why TikTok creators are so good at getting people to buy things

Where do you see Hill House in the next few years? Do you think the Nap Dress will always be the centerpiece of the business?

My perception is that the Nap Dress will always be a hero product for us. But the growth right now is coming out of these new products, categories and from the retail channel. It's really exciting because I think that our customers have given us permission to go into not only these other rooms of their home but other activities they're doing with swim and outerwear.

I'm also incredibly bullish on retail. I would love to open more stores. We're very much a one-year-at-a-time brand, so I'd like to start with a couple more. But because we are very customer led, I'll let them tell us [what's next].

-- 

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The Onion's purchase of Alex Jones's Infowars rejected by judge

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20w1qnewjjo, today

The sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's Infowars website to parody news platform The Onion has been rejected by a US bankruptcy judge.

After a two-day hearing, Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that an auction for Infowars did not result in the best bids possible.

However, he rejected Jones' claims that the auction was plagued by "collusion."

The Onion said the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit against Jones for spreading false rumours about the massacre.

Judge Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who ran the auction made "a good-faith error".

Instead of quickly asking for final offers in the auction they should have encouraged more bidding between The Onion and a company affiliated with Jones' supplement-selling businesses, he said.

"This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody," Judge Lopez said.

Jones celebrated the judge's ruling on Infowars, calling the auction process "ridiculous" and "fraudulent."

"We are deeply disappointed in today's decision“, Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion's parent company, Global Tetrahedron, posted on social media.

The firm will continue its efforts to buy Infowars, he added.

Jones was a fringe figure broadcasting in Austin, Texas in the 1990s and later built an audience of millions with a mix of opinion, speculation and outright fabrication.

The company makes most of its money through an online shop selling vitamins and other products.

The company's – and Jones's – financial difficulties stem from broadcasts made after the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Twenty young children and six school staff were killed in the attack.

After the killings, Jones and guests on his broadcasts repeatedly called into question whether the massacre actually occurred, floating conspiracy theories about whether the murders were faked or carried out by government agents.

At one point Jones called the attack "a giant hoax" and in 2015 he said: "Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured… I knew they had actors there clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids, and it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors."

Believers in the web of conspiracy theories that Jones spun harassed the families of the Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them pictures of their dead children or of gravestones and posting their personal information online.

Some travelled to Newtown to "investigate", and several people have been arrested in connection with harassment of the victims.

Jones later acknowledged that the killings were real and insisted his statements were covered by US free speech protections.

But relatives of the victims won defamation judgements against Jones and his company over his false statements.

He declared bankruptcy in 2022 as the Sandy Hook case made its way to court, and in June 2024, a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones's personal assets. This included a multimillion-dollar ranch, other properties, cars, boats and guns, in all totalling around $8.6m according to a court filing.


Anger after Indian start-up pretends to sack stressed staff

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0en3nrxpyo, today

An Indian beauty service start-up has found itself in the eye of the storm for a publicity campaign aimed at highlighting workplace stress.

A few days ago, an internal email from Yes Madam went viral on social media, in which employees were informed that the company had decided to "part ways" with those who had reported feeling stressed at work.

But on Tuesday, the start-up clarified that it hadn't fired anyone and that the social media posts were part of a "planned effort to highlight the serious issue of workplace stress".

The campaign has sparked mixed reactions online, with some praising it for drawing attention to an important topic and others criticising the company for misleading people and "toying" with their emotions.

In both instances, the exaggerations are so extreme that they are almost comically unrealistic.

"But telling a blatant lie has no place in ethical advertising," Mr Srinivasan says.

Brands engage in such extreme campaigns because they can garner massive publicity while using little to no funds. The idea is to pick topics that are likely to evoke strong opinions, thereby ensuring that people engage with the campaign, whether they like it or not, Mr Srinivasan says.

In the case of the viral campaign by the beauty start-up, the company's email touched a chord with many professionals, who then shared it on their LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter) profiles, criticising the company for its insensitivity and lack of care towards its employees.

"Firing someone for being stressed at work is a serious issue and was definitely going to evoke strong reactions," Mr Srinivasan explains.

But such campaigns can damage a brand or a company's reputation in the eyes of its employees and consumers, he adds. "Credibility and trust take time to build and a brand will find it hard to shake off the negative publicity that comes with an insensitive ad campaign."

Mayank Sehgal, a marketing consultant, echoes a similar view.

"It's crucial for brands to prioritise ethical marketing practices and avoid using people's emotions as a tool for self-promotion," he says.

"While attention-grabbing tactics may work in the short term, they ultimately erode trust and damage brand reputation."

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Coffee price surges to highest on record

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36pgrrjllyo, today

Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world's two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink's popularity continues to grow.

One expert told the BBC coffee brands were considering putting prices up in the new year.

While in recent years major coffee roasters have been able to absorb price hikes to keep customers happy and maintain market share, it looks like that's about to change, according to Vinh Nguyen, the chief executive of Tuan Loc Commodities.

"Brands like JDE Peet (the owner of the Douwe Egberts brand), Nestlé and all that, have [previously] taken the hit from higher raw material prices to themselves," he said.

"But right now they are almost at a tipping point. A lot of them are mulling a price increase in supermarkets in [the first quarter] of 2025."

Italian coffee giant Lavazza said it had gone to great lengths to protect its market share and not pass on higher raw material costs to customers, but soaring coffee prices had eventually forced its hand.

"Quality is paramount for us and has always been the cornerstone of our contract of trust with consumers," the company told BBC News.

"For us, this means continuing to tackle very high costs. So, we have been forced to adjust prices".

At an event for investors in November, a top Nestlé executive said the coffee industry was facing "tough times", admitting his company would have to adjust its prices and pack sizes.

"We are not immune to the price of coffee, far from it," said David Rennie, Nestlé's head of coffee brands.

Drought and heavy rain

The last record high for coffee was set in 1977 after unusual snowfall devastated plantations in Brazil.

"Concerns over the 2025 crop in Brazil are the main driver," said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.

"The country experienced its worst drought in 70 years during August and September, followed by heavy rains in October, raising fears that the flowering crop could fail."

It is not just Brazilian coffee plantations, which mostly produce Arabica beans, that have been hurt by bad weather.

Robusta supplies are also set to shrink after plantations in Vietnam, the largest producer of that variety, also faced both drought and heavy rainfall.

Coffee is the world's second most traded commodity by volume, after crude oil, and its popularity is increasing. For example, consumption in China has more than doubled in the last decade.

"Demand for the commodity remains high, while inventories held by producers and roasters are reported to be at low levels," said Fernanda Okada, a coffee pricing analyst at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

"The upward trend in coffee prices is expected to persist for some time," she added.


General Motors pulls plug on robotaxi business

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj902y4ez71o, today

General Motors has announced that it will stop funding the development of the Cruise self-driving taxi.

The company says it will now "refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles".

GM also pointed to the increasingly competitive robotaxi market as a reason for the move.

In October, Tesla boss Elon Musk unveiled the electric car giant's long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.

GM attributed the change of strategy to "the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business".

The company did not say how many Cruise employees could be moved over to GM.

GM, which owns about 90% of Cruise, said it has agreements with other shareholders that will raise its ownership to more than 97%.

In December 2023, Cruise said it would cut 900 jobs, about a quarter of its workforce.

Cruise had earlier pulled all of its US vehicles from testing after California halted its driverless testing permit.

In October 2023, one of its vehicles hit a pedestrian and dragged her for more than 20ft (6m), leaving her seriously injured.

Cruise admitted to submitting a false report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in connection to that crash, resolving a criminal investigation last month.

Federal prosecutors said Cruise employees did not include a description of the pedestrian being dragged as part of their account on the morning after the incident.

Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt left the company a few weeks later.

On Tuesday, following GM's announcement, Mr Vogt posted on the social media platform X "In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies."

The Detroit-based manufacturer's chief executive Mary Barra has previously predicted that the Cruise business could generate $50bn (£39bn) in annual revenue by 2030.

Rival motor manufacturing firms have also struggled with projects to build autonomous vehicles.

In 2022, Ford and Volkswagen announced that they would shut down Argo AI, their self-driving car joint venture.

Meanwhile, the emerging robotaxi industry has long attracted major players.

As well as Tesla, competitors to create self-driving cabs include Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet - and technology giant Amazon.


More jobs and no 'nuisance taxes' - Ghanaians' great expectations

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vkyk3v02xo, today

Ghana's former President John Mahama will be under enormous pressure to meet the expectations of voters following his landslide victory in Saturday's election.

He swept back to power after eight years in opposition, running what political analyst Nansata Yakubu described as a "masterclass" in campaigning.

He defeated Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia by 56.6% of votes to 41.6% to notch up the biggest margin of victory by a candidate in 24 years.

But voter turnout was lower than in the 2020 election, especially in some of the heartlands of Bwaumia's New Patriotic Party (NPP), suggesting some people there - disillusioned with its performance in government - stayed at home.

As Mahama's supporters celebrated his victory, Belinda Amuzu - a teacher in the northern city of Tamale, a stronghold of Mahama - summed up their hopes.

"I'm expecting the new government to change the economy, so that the hardship will come down. He should also prosecute corrupt officials so that it will be a lesson to others," she told the BBC.

"The hardship" has become a common phrase in Ghana since the economy hit rock-bottom in 2022, causing a cost-of-living crisis that shredded Bawumia's reputation as an "economic whizz-kid" - and led to his defeat at the hands of Mahama.

Ghanaian economist Prof Godfred Bokpin told the BBC the challenges facing the next government were huge.

"What Ghana needs right now is credible leadership, lean government and efficiency in public service delivery. Without that, there cannot be a future," he said.

Mahama has promised to bring down the size of the cabinet from more than 80 to around 60, but Prof Bokpin argued it should be even smaller while political analyst Dr Kwame Asah-Asante stressed the need for appointments to be on merit rather than loyalty.

Mahama will be flanked by former Education Minister Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who is set to become Ghana's first female vice-president when the new government takes office next month.

Dr Yakubu said her appointment was not one of "tokenism" and she was not someone who could be "manipulated".

"We have a fantastic first female vice-president in Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang," she told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.

Mahama served his first four-year term as president after winning in 2012, but lost his re-election bid in 2016 as Nana Akufo-Addo rose to power with Bawumia as his running-mate.

Dr Yakubu said Mahama contested the 2016 election on his track record in building roads, schools and hospitals but voters rejected him, as their mantra then was: "We don't eat infrastructure."

But, she said, during the Covid pandemic voters came to appreciate the infrastructure his government had built, especially hospitals.

This - along with the fact that the economy had plunged into a deep crisis under the current government, forcing it to seek a $3bn (£2.4bn) bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - led to Mahama being re-elected, Dr Yakubu added.

She told the BBC that Mahama would now be expected to fulfil his campaign promise to create jobs in order to bring down the unemployment rate of almost 15%, and to ease the cost-of-living crisis by scrapping some taxes - or what Ghanaians call "nuisance taxes".

Mahama has promised to make Ghana a "24-hour economy" through the creation of night-time jobs in both the public and private sectors. He said he would give businesses tax incentives to stay open at night and reduce electricity prices for them.

But his critics have doubts, pointing out that Ghana plunged into its worst electricity crisis during his first term and the power cuts were so bad that Mahama joked at the time that he was known as "Mr Dumsor" - "dum" means "off" and "sor" means "on" in the local Twi language.

He has pledged to abolish several taxes - including the much-criticised electronic levy on mobile transactions and the one on the carbon emissions produced by petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.

Prof Bokpin said he doubted the Mahama administration would be able to fulfil its promises.

"They have not done the cost-benefit analysis. There's no budgetary space to translate those promises into actuals," he said.

But Mahama is confident he will prove his critics wrong, saying he intends to renegotiate the conditions of the IMF loan so money is freed up for "social intervention programmes" in a country where 7.3 million people live in poverty.

In an interview ahead of the election, Mahama told the BBC the IMF wanted "a certain balance" in government finances.

"If you're able to cut expenditure, and you're able to increase revenue and increase non-tax revenue coming in, you'll be able to create a balance," he said.

Dr Asah-Asante said Mahama's experience as former president would stand him in good stead to navigate Ghana through choppy waters.

"Of course, he is likely to encounter difficulties, but he has what it takes to turn things around," the analyst added.

Apart from the economy, corruption is one of the biggest issues facing Ghana but not everyone is convinced that Mahama will be able to tackle the scourge.

Mahama's previous stint in government - as vice-president and president - was plagued by corruption allegations, although he has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

In 2020, a UK court had found that aviation giant Airbus had used bribes to secure contracts with Ghana for military planes between 2009 and 2015.

An investigation was then started in Ghana, but the Office of the Special Prosecutor, in a decision announced just months before the election, concluded there was no evidence that Mahama was involved in any corrupt activities himself.

The outgoing government has also been dogged by corruption allegations, including over the purchase of ambulance spare parts at a cost of $34.9m and a controversial national cathedral project in which $58m has been spent without any progress in building it.

Mahama promised his government would tackle corruption, and ensure that officials were prosecuted for wrongdoing.

"We are thinking about special courts," he told the BBC.

Dr Asah-Asante said Mahama should demand financial accountability from the outgoing government during a handover phase so that "whatever has gone wrong, he will be able to right" as soon as his government takes office next month.

The analyst added that Mahama, who will be inaugurated next month when President Akufo-Addo steps down after his two terms in office, had no choice but to meet the expectations of Ghanaians - or else they would "punish his government the way they have punished the NPP".

Mahama succinctly acknowledged this in his victory speech, saying: "Expectations of Ghanaians are very high, and we cannot afford to disappoint them.

"Our best days are not behind us; our best days are ahead of us. Forward ever - backwards never."

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

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Car loan scandal victims told to complain

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24n174qj35o, today

A saga over the sale of car finance is "one unholy mess" and customers can complain to their lender if they are aggrieved, MPs have heard.

Lenders and dealers have been accused of hiding commission payments made when cars were bought on finance deals.

Facing the Commons Treasury Committee, bosses at the financial regulator were told the situation was a mess that would take a long time to resolve.

Dissatisfied car buyers should complain, if they felt their loan was mis-sold, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said. Thousands of drivers have already done so.

The vast majority of new cars, and many second-hand ones, are bought with finance agreements.

About two million are sold this way each year, with customers paying an initial deposit, then a monthly fee with interest for the vehicle.

Advice to drivers

The FCA has been considering whether car buyers should be compensated for cases when car dealers received a commission from lenders, based on the interest rate charged to the customer. These arrangements were banned in 2021.

A recent Court of Appeal ruling widened the saga to other types of "hidden" commission payments and raised the possibility of millions of motorists receiving pay-outs. Banks have set aside hundreds of millions of pounds as a result.

Dame Meg Hillier described the situation as "one unholy mess" because dealers and lenders may not have been transparent to their customers.

She asked what advice there was for anyone caught up in it.

"If you are not satisfied with the terms of your finance agreement, you should contact your lender and put in a complaint to your lender if you are concerned," said FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi.

Hundreds of thousands of complaints are likely to have already been made, potentially ending with the largest compensation scheme regarding financial products since the payment protection insurance (PPI) saga.

Lawyers for car buyers say cases should proceed on the basis of the Court of Appeal ruling, but Mr Rathi was more circumspect.

He said that the courts had given different interpretations of the law regarding fixed commissions, while the FCA had already been looking into discretionary commission arrangements.

Lenders involved in the case have asked the Supreme Court to consider the case. In the meantime, dealers and lenders have been given a longer period to deal with complaints.

A clearer idea on whether a "structured redress system" which would either require customers to complain, or ensure firms go back through cases and automatically pay compensation, would come next year, MPs heard.

Significantly, Mr Rathi said that the regulator was also considering whether the Court of Appeal ruling could have implications for other sectors.

He would not be drawn on which sectors, but analysts have suggested other "big ticket" purchases made on finance could come under the microscope.

In a wide-ranging hearing, the committee of MPs also questioned the FCA on investment risks facing consumers, financial influencers, and the operational effectiveness of the regulator.


Amazon and eBay to pay 'fair share' for e-waste recycling

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly75xnk5exo, today

Online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay will have to pay their "fair share" of the costs of recycling electrical waste under new government proposals.

Circular economy minister Mary Creagh said planned reforms would create a "level playing field" for electronics producers by putting more onus on international retailers to contribute to recycling costs.

Some foreign sellers have been able to avoid this charge by selling via online marketplaces, leaving UK-based firms such as Currys to foot much of the bill.

Firms which produce e-cigarettes will also be asked to pay more, with the plans not coming into action until January, 2026.

In 2023, the UN estimated 844 million vapes are thrown away every year - though it said "77 times more" e-waste is generated from unwanted toys.

"Under these new plans, online marketplaces – Amazon, eBay and others – will face much tougher obligations to ensure that overseas sellers who use their platforms contribute to that cost of collection and recycling," Creagh told PA News.

The minister is responsible for the UK government's commitment to a circular economy, which is the idea of reusing, repairing, and the sharing of materials and products to live in a more environmentally sustainable world.

Amazon told BBC News it is "committed to minimising waste and helping our customers to reuse, repair, and recycle their products". It says it offers customers free recycling options including home pick-up via its website.

Ebay said sustainability "is a core focus" for its business, and highlighted its new trade-in service where customers can hand in old technology in exchange for cash.

Other major online marketplaces Temu and Euronics have not commented yet.

The plans will bring an end to vapes being categorised alongside toys, leisure and sports equipment for recycling purposes.

Instead, a new category for e-waste specifically from vapes will be introduced.

UK non-profit Material Focus estimates five million vapes are either littered or thrown away in general waste every week in the UK.

And it estimates British households throw away over 100,000 tonnes of smaller household electrical items, such as kettles and lamps every year.

Elfbar, one of the UK's leading vape brands, told BBC News it welcomed the change.

"We are committed to providing products that reduce waste and are working with retailers to support them through regulatory changes while ensuring adult smokers and ex-smokers get continued access to smoking alternatives," said a spokesperson.

The government will also require online marketplaces to register with the Environment Agency and report UK sales from their overseas sellers.

This data will be used to calculate the financial contribution the online marketplaces must make towards the costs of recycling e-waste.

The UK government said the new obligations will be enforced by the Environment Agency and equivalent regulators in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The government says the move will help fund recycling services.

"We welcome the government's new measures to help level the playing field for responsibility for waste, making online marketplaces do their part," said Currys boss Alex Baldock.

"Low value, low quality and unsustainable tech is piling up in landfills, and it's good to see government doing something to tackle that."

Additional reporting by Liv McMahon


Blow for UK as equipment giant Ashtead chooses US

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rjkj43vggo, today

Equipment hire giant Ashtead plans to move its primary stock market listing to the US in a fresh blow to the London Stock Exchange.

It said the US was a "natural long term listing venue" because most of its profit was in North America, along with its bosses, headquarters and the majority of its employees.

Ashtead is the latest of several big companies in recent years to delist from the London Stock Exchange [LSE], which denied it was in crisis in May.

Ashtead said it would discuss its proposed move with shareholders before putting it to a vote.

The firm aims to move its primary listing to the US in the next 12 to 18 months, but it will keep a UK listing as an international company.

The firm which hires out construction equipment, has more than 25,000 employees.

Ashtead said annual profits would be lower than expected due to "local commercial construction market dynamics in the US", which is set to affect rental sales growth.

Firms worth hundreds of billions of pounds have been quitting the London Stock Exchange for the US over the past few years, prompting concerns over how attractive the UK for investment.

These include Cambridge-based microchip giant ARM Holdings, which now sells its shares in New York, and Paddy Power's owner Flutter.

Ashtead said part of the reason it wants to move is to attract US investors.

Although the US construction industry has been affected by higher interest rates making borrowing more expensive, the firm expects the market for its services to strengthen as rates are cut.

Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell, said there had been "rumblings" that the firm also wanted to make the move as a "justification to pay the top brass big money".

He said Ashtead had been criticised over a proposed $14m (£11m) pay deal for chief executive Brendan Horgan which was deemed "excessive".

"That might be the case for UK-listed companies, but not US-listed ones," Coatsworth said.

He added incoming US President Donald Trump "favours American companies doing things for American people" - moving the listing would be "another tick in the box in its favour".

Coatsworth said the next logical move would be to sell its remaining UK operations which are "tiny compared to the US business".

But an Ashtead spokesman said the move would not affect investment plans in the UK.

Ashtead's move comes after UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves changed the government's self-imposed debt rules to free up billions for infrastructure investment.

The rule change is expected to allow for up to £50bn more borrowing to invest in big building projects such as roads, railways or hospitals.

Ashtead was founded in England in 1947, and has been listed on the LSE since 1986. It expanded into the US in 1990, and in the early 2000s it became one of the largest equipment rental firms there.


Luigi Mangione charged with murdering healthcare CEO in New York

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly2zwqqr1ro, today

A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over last week's fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

Luigi Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald's in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after a customer at the fast-food outlet recognised him.

An Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland family, he was found in possession of a gun and a handwritten document that expressed "ill will" towards corporate America, according to police.

People who knew him told US media he suffered from a painful back injury and that he had become socially withdrawn in recent months.

Mr Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan where UnitedHealthcare, the medical insurance giant he led, was holding an investors' meeting.

Police say he was targeted in a pre-planned killing.

Mr Mangione initially appeared in a Pennsylvania court on Monday charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm and other charges.

He was handcuffed at the wrists and ankles and seemed calm during the hearing, occasionally looking around at those present, including the media.

Just hours later, New York investigators charged him with murder and four other counts including firearms charges.

Last week's shooting triggered a huge manhunt, with New York City investigators using one of the world's largest digital surveillance systems as well as police dogs, drones and divers in a Central Park lake to search for the attacker.

Investigators revealed that finding Mr Mangione was a complete surprise, as they did not have his name on a list of suspects before Monday.

It was ultimately a McDonald's customer in Altoona that recognised the suspect from media coverage and alerted an employee, who then tipped off the police.

When police arrived, Mr Mangione showed them a fake New Jersey driver's licence with the name Mark Rosario, said court papers.

A search of his backpack uncovered what police called a "ghost gun" - which could have been 3D-printed - and a loaded magazine with six rounds of 9mm ammunition.

Prosecutors said he was also carrying a US passport and $10,000 (£7,840) cash, $2,000 of it in foreign currency, though Mr Mangione disputed the amount in court.

The three-page document found in his possession said: "These parasites had it coming" and "I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done", a senior law enforcement official told the New York Times.

Investigators say the words "deny", "defend" and "depose" were written on shell casings found at the scene of Mr Thompson's murder.

Officials believe this could be a reference to what critics call the "three Ds of insurance" - tactics used by insurance companies to reject payment claims by patients in America's complicated healthcare system.

Earlier in the day, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the weapon and suppressor seized by investigators from the suspect were "both consistent with the weapon used in the murder" of Mr Thompson.

Mr Mangione is now expected to be presented with the option of waiving his extradition to the state of New York, or contesting it.

Different US states have different laws and judicial systems so there is a process involved in the transfer of fugitives, which can take days or weeks.

Mr Mangione's family said they were "shocked and devastated" by his arrest, and offered their prayers to the family of Mr Thompson.

His paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased the Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

One of his cousins is a Republican Maryland state legislator.

As a teenager, Mr Mangione attended a private all-boys school in Maryland, where he was class valedictorian, a title usually awarded to students with the best grades.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.

His LinkedIn account says he worked as a data engineer in California. TrueCar, a website for car buyers, confirmed that he had been employed there but left in 2023.

Mr Mangione spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak.

Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS News he left due to his back injury which worsened when he surfed.

Several posts to an account on X, formerly Twitter, that appeared to belong to Mr Mangione suggested that friends had been trying to reach him, with one person posting in October that "nobody has heard from you in months".


Murdoch loses bid to change trust in real-life 'Succession' battle

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ld084z8jjo, today

A real-life "Succession" battle for Rupert Murdoch's media empire has ended with a Nevada court commissioner denying the billionaire's bid to change a family trust and give control to his eldest son.

The case pitted the 93-year-old against three of his children over who would gain the power to control News Corp and Fox News when he dies.

It has been reported that Mr Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust created in 1999 to allow his son Lachlan to take control without "interference" from his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James.

A Nevada commissioner ruled Mr Murdoch and Lachlan had acted in "bad faith" and called the efforts a "carefully crafted charade", according to the New York Times.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Prudence, Elisabeth and James said: "We welcome Commissioner Gorman's decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members."

Adam Streisand, a lawyer for Mr Murdoch, told the New York Times they were disappointed and planned to appeal.

A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch declined to comment to the BBC. Mr Streisand did not immediately respond to inquiries.

The famous family was one of the inspirations behind the hugely popular TV series Succession - something the Murdochs have always refused to comment on.

But according to the New York Times report, which is based on a copy of the sealed court ruling, the billionaire's children had started discussing their father's death and how they would handle it after an episode of the HBO series where "the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos".

The episode led to Elisabeth's representative to the trust writing a "'Succession' memo" that sought to prevent this from happening in real life, said reports.

The case has played out behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes.

It has a "close on demand" statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Mr Murdoch, who has been married five times, also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe, who do not have any voting rights under the trust agreement.

The case was launched after Mr Murdoch decided to change the trust over worries about a "lack of consensus" among the children, the Times reported.

Lachlan is thought to be more conservative than his siblings and would preserve the legacy of his media brands.

From the 1960s, Mr Murdoch built a global media giant with major political and public influence.

His two companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers including the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and Fox, which broadcasts Fox News.

Mr Murdoch had been preparing his two sons to follow in his footsteps, beginning when they were teenagers, journalist Andrew Neil told the 2020 BBC documentary The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

"Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty," the former Sunday Times editor said.

In 1999, the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was supposed to largely settle the succession plans.

It led to Mr Murdoch giving his eldest children various jobs within his companies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Mr Murdoch currently controls four of those votes, with his eldest children being in charge of one each.

The trust agreement said that once Mr Murdoch died, his votes would be passed on to his four eldest children equally.

However, differences in opinions and political views were said to lead to a family rift.

The battle over changes to the trust was not about money, but rather power and control over the future of the Murdoch empire.

The commissioner's ruling is not final. The court filing acts as a recommended resolution but a district judge will still weigh in and could choose to rule differently.

The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will not be available to the public.

Additional reporting by Michelle Fleury and Charlotte Edwards


Hershey shares jump on Cadbury owner buyout report

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62w62vydnvo, today

Shares in US chocolate maker Hershey have jumped by more than 10% after a report that Mondelez International, which owns UK-based Cadbury, has approached the firm about a potential buyout.

A deal could create a snack food giant with combined sales of almost $50bn (£39.2bn) a year.

Both Mondelez and Hershey declined to comment on the report when contacted by BBC News.

In 2016, Hershey rejected a $23bn takeover offer from Mondelez.

The approach is still in the preliminary stages and it is not certain that talks will lead to a deal, according to Bloomberg.

Any deal would need the approval of the Hershey Trust Company, a charitable trust, that maintains voting control over the business. It has previously blocked the takeover of the firm.

A merger of the two companies could bring some of the world's best-known confectionary and snack foods under one roof.

Hershey is known for brands including Hershey's Kisses and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

As well as owning Cadbury, Mondelez brands include Ritz crackers, Oreo biscuits and Toblerone chocolate.

The packaged food industry has faced slowing growth as consumers feel the pinch from years of rising prices.

Chocolate companies in particular have had to transfer costs from higher cocoa prices to their customers.

Last month, Hershey cut its revenue and profit forecasts. Its chief financial officer, Steve Voskuil, said high cocoa prices will be the "biggest source of inflation" for the firm going forward.

Another food giant, Kraft Heinz, also recently cut its annual sales and profit forecasts as customers cut back on purchases after several rounds of price rises.

Some companies have looked for deals to secure new markets and boost growth.

In August, confectionery giant Mars struck a deal to snap up Pringles and Pop-Tart-maker Kellanova for almost $36bn.

Some analysts have forecast an increase in mergers during the upcoming Trump administration, as the president-elect is seen as more friendly towards deal making.


Will bribery charges against Adani derail India's green goals?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3md3p9ngo, today

Bribery charges by a US court against the Adani Group are unlikely to significantly upset India's clean energy goals, industry leaders have told the BBC.

Delhi has pledged to source half of its energy needs or 500 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from renewable sources by 2032, key to global efforts to combat climate change.

The Adani Group is slated to contribute to a tenth of that capacity.

The legal troubles in the US could temporarily delay the group's expansion plans but will not affect the government's overall targets, analysts say.

India has made impressive strides in building clean energy infrastructure over the last decade.

The country is growing at the "fastest rate among major economies" in adding renewables capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Installed clean energy capacity has grown five-fold, with some 45% of the country's power-generation capacity - of nearly 200GW - coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

Charges against the Adani Group - crucial to India's clean energy ambitions - are "like a passing dark cloud", and will not meaningfully impact this momentum, a former CEO of a rival firm said, wanting to remain anonymous.

Gautam Adani has vowed to invest $100bn (£78.3bn) in India's energy transition. Its green energy arm is the country's largest renewable energy company, producing nearly 11GW of clean energy through a diverse portfolio of wind and solar projects.

Adani has a target to scale that to 50GW BY 2030, which will make up nearly 10% of the country's own installed capacity.

Over half of that, or 30GW, will be produced at Khavda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It is the world's biggest clean energy plant, touted to be five times the size of Paris and the centrepiece in Adani's renewables crown.

But Khavda and Adani's other renewables facilities are now at the very centre of the charges filed by US prosecutors - they allege that the company won contracts to supply power to state distribution companies from these facilities, in exchange for bribes to Indian officials. The group has denied this.

But the fallout at the company level is already visible.

When the indictment became public, Adani Green Energy immediately cancelled a $600m bond offering in the US.

France's TotalEnergies, which owns 20% of Adani Green Energy and has a joint venture to develop several renewables projects with the conglomerate, said it will halt fresh capital infusion into the company.

Major credit ratings agencies - Moody's, Fitch and S&P - have since changed their outlook on Adani group companies, including Adani Green Energy, to negative. This will impact the company's capacity to access funds and make it more expensive to raise capital.

Analysts have also raised concerns about Adani Green Energy's ability to refinance its debt, as international lenders grow weary of adding exposure to the group.

Global lenders like Jeffries and Barclays are already said to be reviewing their ties with Adani even as the group's reliance on global banks and international and local bond issues for long-term debt has grown from barely 14% in financial year 2016 to nearly 60% as of date, according to a note from Bernstein.

Japanese brokerage Nomura says new financing might dry up in the short term but should "gradually resume in the long term". Meanwhile, Japanese banks like MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho are likely to continue their relationship with the group.

The "reputational and sentimental impact" will fade away in a few months, as Adani is building "solid, strategic assets and creating long-term value", the unnamed CEO said.

A spokesperson for the Adani Group told the BBC that it was "committed to its 2030 targets and confident of delivering 50 GW of renewable energy capacity".

Adani stocks have recovered sharply from the lows they hit post the US court indictment.

Some analysts told the BBC that a possible slowdown in funding for Adani could in fact end up benefitting its competitors.

While Adani's financial influence has allowed it to rapidly expand in the sector, its competitors such as Tata Power, Goldman Sachs-backed ReNew Power, Greenko and state-run NTPC Ltd are also significantly ramping up manufacturing and generation capacity.

"It's not that Adani is a green energy champion. It is a big player that has walked both sides of the street, being the biggest private developer of coal plants in the world," said Tim Buckley, director at Climate Energy Finance.

A large entity, "perceived to be corrupt" possibly slowing its expansion, could mean "more money will start flowing into other green energy companies", he said.

According to Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), market fundamentals also continue to remain strong with demand for renewable energy outpacing supply in India - which is likely to keep the appetite for big investments intact.

What could in fact slow the pace of India's clean energy ambitions is its own bureaucracy.

"Companies we track are very upbeat. Finance isn't a problem for them. If anything, it is state-level regulations that act as a kind of deterrent," says Ms Garg.

Most state-run power distribution companies continue to face financial constraints, opting for cheaper fossil fuels, while dragging their feet on signing purchase agreements.

According to Reuters, the controversial tender won by Adani was the first major contract issued by state-run Solar Energy Corp of India (SECI) without a guaranteed purchase agreement from distributors.

SECI's chairman told Reuters that there are 30GW of operational green energy projects in the market without buyers.

Experts say the 8GW solar contract at the heart of Adani's US indictment also sheds light on the messy tendering process, which required solar power generation companies to manufacture modules as well - limiting the number of bidders and leading to higher power costs.

The court indictment will certainly lead to a "tightening of bidding and tendering rules", says Ms Garg.

A cleaner tendering process that lowers risks both for developers and investors will be important going ahead, agrees Mr Buckley.

Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.


UK sanctions Kenyan businessman over illicit gold trade

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c623716z8eeo, today

The UK and US governments have imposed sanctions on a British-Kenyan businessman over his alleged involvement in the illicit gold trade.

Kamlesh Pattni, and four others including his wife and brother-in-law, will have their assets frozen, a statement from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth and Development Office read.

He was implicated in one of Kenya's biggest corruption scandals, Goldenberg, which is believed to have cost the country at least $600m (£470m). He has since faced allegations of involvement in the illicit gold trade in Zimbabwe, which he has previously denied.

The BBC has asked him for comment.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica


Google unveils 'mind-boggling' quantum computing chip

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c791ng0zvl3o, today

Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing - which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed "Willow", incorporates key "breakthroughs" and "paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer."

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years - and billions of dollars - away.

The quantum quandary

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics - the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles - to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It's hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill - for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made "quantum proof" to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google's Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project's "chief optimist."

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications - but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important

"For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks".

What is quantum computing?

Apples and oranges

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow's performance meant it was the "best quantum processor built to date".

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current "classical" computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow's achievement in a single test.

"One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges" he told the BBC.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, "tailor-made for a quantum computer" and this didn't demonstrate "a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers".

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what's known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors - a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major "breakthrough" that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued "for almost 30 years", Mr Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to "if you had an airplane with just one engine - that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer".

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was "encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer" Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google's new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language that fuelled the "hype cycle" and thought Willow was more a "milestone rather than a breakthrough".

Nevertheless, it was "clearly a highly impressive piece of work".

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including "logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid", he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that's capable of working at room temperature - whereas Google's chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google's development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature


Nvidia targeted by China in new chip war probe

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vkd90mk8o, today

China has launched an investigation into US computer chipmaker Nvidia, targeting one of America's leading tech companies over alleged violations of anti-monopoly laws.

The probe marks the latest salvo in an ongoing US-China tech war over the lucrative semiconductor market.

Last week, Washington tightened restrictions on sales of certain exports to Chinese companies and the clash over the industry is expected to continue when Donald Trump re-enters the White House.

Nvidia said it was "happy to answer any questions regulators may have about our business".

"We work hard to provide the best products we can in every region and honour our commitments everywhere we do business," the company said in a statement.

On Monday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said that authorities in Beijing had launched a probe "in accordance with the law".

It said Nvidia had been accused of violating commitments made in 2020 when it acquired Mellanox Technologies, a smaller firm.

It comes after a fresh crackdown by the US last week, which saw restrictions on sales to 140 companies including Chinese chip firms such as Piotech and SiCarrier without special permission.

At the time, China responded with new tough rules restricting sales of key minerals to the US, including antimony, gallium, and germanium.

Analysts noted that the move was significant for singling out the US for such restrictions, instead of instituting blanket limits.

Several trade groups representing Chinese firms also spoke out, warning their members against buying from US companies.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia was originally known for making the type of computer chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

The tech giant now stands at the forefront of the development of chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), with a market value of more than $3tn.

Its growing dominance of the industry has caught the attention of competition regulators in the US and elsewhere.

Last month, Nvidia acknowledged it had been contacted by watchdogs around the world, including in the US, the UK, the European Union, South Korea and China.

But the company has also been caught in the middle of rising geopolitical and economic tensions between the US and China, as the two countries race to establish dominance over high-end chips.

Nvidia reported last month that customers based in "China, including Hong Kong" had accounted for about 13% of sales so far this year.

That is down since the US started ramping up restrictions of advanced technology to Chinese firms just a few years ago, citing national security fears.

Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang was tight-lipped earlier this year when asked by business analysts about the political risks for the firm in the months ahead.

"We guide one quarter at a time," he said. "Whatever the new administration decides, we'll, of course, support the administration."

'Retaliation'

James Lewis, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said the move against Nvidia appeared to be another form of "retaliation" by Beijing.

"The timing is not a coincidence," he said. "It's mainly a message to the US government - the Chinese have decided they're not just going to take sanction after sanction."

In prior cases when the US has imposed export controls, it has only delayed not stopped the other country's ability to gain access to the technology, Mr Lewis said, adding that he was skeptical that the AI at the heart of the dispute was as game-changing as the two sides contend.

Regardless of the reasoning, however, he said he expected the tit-for-tat to continue.

"It's really a grudge match on both sides," he said.


'There was almost a utopian feeling to it': How StumbleUpon pioneered the way we use the internet

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241210-how-stumbleupon-pioneered-the-way-we-use-the-internet, today

StumbleUpon, a tool that led users to random websites, had a stranglehold on millennials in the 2010s. Its influence echoes through everything we do online.

For Kaitlyn Arford, a 31-year-old freelance writer based in Kentucky, US, memories of her early experiences with the internet all coalesce around one website: StumbleUpon. 

"Any time I had a moment where I didn't know what to do with myself, I would jump on StumbleUpon in our school's little computer lab," she says. "It was a way to discover things I would have never known existed – it was so joyful and fun in a way that websites just aren't anymore."

Before there was TikTok's For You Page or the Newsfeed on Facebook, there was StumbleUpon – a website (and later a browser extension) founded in 2001 that worked by ushering users down online rabbit holes of semi-randomised websites. The platform helped cement a style of algorithmically-tailored content recommendation that continues to dominate the web. And though it shut down in 2018, StumbleUpon still has a grip on the people who grew up with it, coming to represent a different – and better – time when the internet felt vast, unknowable and delightful.

"I remember going to the site in middle school on my iPod Touch, and it was my first experience with social media," says Elena Schmidt, another millennial with a tender nostalgia for StumbleUpon, who works as a political organiser in Michigan, US. "There was almost a utopian feeling to it. The internet was an inviting, cool place where you could literally stumble upon concepts and ideas that were fun."

A brief search for "StumbleUpon" on X, Reddit or TikTok reveals countless posts yearning for the platform. For many, the mere mention of StumbleUpon brings on a state of reverie and nostalgia for the lost wonders it unlocked, and a seemingly bygone era of internet bliss.

The site's legacy lives on more than a decade after it drifted out of the mainstream. And with all the enduring love for StumbleUpon, many feel its disappearance as a marker of how the web itself has changed – once a sprawling playground of serendipity, now a tightly supervised ecosystem of platforms optimised for profit, efficiency and control.

The rise of StumbleUpon 

StumbleUpon was founded in 2001 by four students at the University of Calgary in Canada, led by Garrett Camp, who later went on to co-found Uber. Camp described StumbleUpon in a 2011 New York Times article as a tool that "provides a personal tour of the Internet," a sort of mix between a search engine and social media site. Facebook didn't come around until 2004, making StumbleUpon many people's introduction to social sharing online. 

The website allowed you to select general interests and topics. From there, you would hit the "Stumble" button, which sent you a new website, selected at random or curated by a relatively simple algorithm that learned from your browsing habits. Users could hit "thumbs up" on websites they liked and "thumbs down" on content they didn't to better train the feed. If you hit thumbs up on a website that wasn't in the system, StumbleUpon would add the site to its database and recommend it to other users. Those who used StumbleUpon could spend hours drifting further into the unexpected labyrinths of the web.

Some of StumbleUpon's popular entries were things you might find in a different format on today's social media: hate mail from third graders when scientists decided Pluto isn't a planet; photos of street art; tips and tricks to annoy your friends. Arford remembers finding a Star Trek blog and a landscape photography website. Schmidt describes a finger-weaving technique she discovered through StumbleUpon.

But much of what most delighted Stumblers could never exist on TikTok or Instagram. For example, a web-app that topped StumbleUpon's charts let you drag your mouse around the screen to simulate the physics of water – the sort of experimental web design that's only possible on a site where a creator has complete control. 

But it wasn't just the material that people loved. Looking back, some users say StumbleUpon gave them a feeling of agency over their digital lives that's been lost on the contemporary internet. For Schmidt, social media is now an endless, fast-moving stream that leaves her feeling powerless. "It's such a firehose of topics that can be overwhelming," she says. "StumbleUpon had that filter, and it empowered me as a social media user to curate my experience."

StumbleUpon commanded a massive influence in the early 2010s. For many, it became the go-to place to waste time online. People were hitting the Stumble button over a billion times a month at the height of its powers. By some measures, more than half of the traffic that social media platforms sent to other parts of the internet in 2011 came from StumbleUpon – it sometimes beat out Facebook, even though StumbleUpon had hundreds of millions fewer users.

But just a few years later, the site had fizzled out. Camp announced in 2018 StumbleUpon would be shutting down the site and migrating users to a similar platform called Mix. The URL stumbleupon.com still redirects to Mix, which – unlike the free-flowing original site – primarily shuffles users through various posts on Reddit based on interest filters. Although other randomising sites have emerged, like the Useless Web, they have struggled to capture the fervour that StumbleUpon garnered in its heyday. 

That's because the internet that produced StumbleUpon no longer exists, says Gilbert Wilkes, an information design professor at Mount Royal University in Canada, who co-authored a 2015 paper about the online ecosystems that shaped StumbleUpon.

"The web of 2001 was a web of sites," he says. "Now it's a web of platforms. Those platforms don't support the sort of serendipity, the sort of variety, diversity that the previous internet supported." 

In other words, the internet has been widely consolidated since its early days – a small number of platforms are managed by an even smaller number of companies. "That's the story of our era – it's mergers and acquisitions. There is no more development," Wilkes says. "The party is over."

Stumbling blocks

Wilkes divides reasons for the disappearance of StumbleUpon into two main categories: a narrowing of the style of content people make online, and a fundamental consolidation of the internet's infrastructure.

StumbleUpon came into existence at a unique time in the lifecycle of the internet. From 1995 to about 2007, Wilkes says, there was an eruption of experimentation online – most of which was built on individual websites. StumbleUpon, too, was built on a browser that was optimised for desktop computers, not phones. The first iPhone was released in 2007, heralding a major migration away from websites and towards apps. As of 2024, more than 40% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices. StumbleUpon was "very much a desktop experience", Wilkes says, and couldn't adapt to this evolution.

The idea of a platform built around sending users off to websites owned by another company is practically unimaginable today. The current economic structure of online advertising incentivises companies to keep you on their pages, or in their apps, for as long as possible.

"What made StumbleUpon somewhat different is that it would deliver you to a site," Wilkes says. "It wasn't that you were inside StumbleUpon, like today you are on Pinterest and everything is posted on Pinterest. The brilliance of it was that it was delivering you wherever it wanted to."

That kind of open web is disappearing – it's been replaced by a series of walled gardens, and companies would prefer we stay inside them. That consolidation has contributed to an overall decline in the variety of content online, which StumbleUpon was able to serve users, Wilkes says. When big tech platforms control the attention, and therefore the money, it encourages people to homogenise their content to fit the formats of social media platforms and please their algorithms.

"In the '90s and the early '00s, you had this huge burst of creativity as people were exploring the space, trying to figure out what they wanted to do, and what problems they could solve with it. There was so much activity that is no longer there," says Wilkes. To be sure, there's still enormous creativity on the internet, but it's limited in scope, and to an extent, "the algorithms no longer support the sort of niche, weirdo activity everybody loved", he adds. 

Although StumbleUpon no longer exists as we know it, that is not to say it has disappeared, Wilkes says. The structure it pioneered is integrated into nearly every aspect of our current online lives. StumbleUpon curated content based on social filtering – if you like a certain site, another user similar to you is likely to enjoy that site. If you and that user "thumbs up" the same two or three sites, it is even more likely you will have a shared interest in the third or fourth one. This is a basic system that Amazon uses to suggest products to us today, or that TikTok harnesses to recommend videos, Wilkes says. 

"It does exist now – it exists now everywhere," he says. "Social filtering is a very powerful means of recommending content."

In a sense, StumbleUpon built the modern internet. "We're still doing the same thing now. It's just been applied to everything," Wilkes says.

Could StumbleUpon return?

Although some say that the internet has changed too much for the glory days of StumbleUpon to come back, that has not stopped people from trying. New websites have sought to capture the randomising magic, including Cloudhiker, the Useless Web and Jumpstick.

The market for such sites is clearly there, says Kevin Woblick, a Berlin-based web designer who created the randomising internet explorer Cloudhiker in 2020. Almost immediately after he shared the site to Reddit, its servers crashed from the influx of visitors. 

"There are thousands of people in my age group who miss the old internet and have a nostalgia for being able to just click through random websites," he says. "My mission is to bring back that golden era of the internet and show people that even though things have changed there is still a lot of cool stuff out there you probably don't know about." 

Cloudhiker was initially made up of Woblick's own selection of around 1,000 interesting tabs he had opened and other sites he wanted to share with the world. The site now allows users to submit their own contributions, and has reached 21,000 websites in its index. But unlike StumbleUpon and other platforms, the feed is not curated. "There's no fancy algorithm, no AI, nothing like that," he says. "It's a completely random way to explore the web."

Dhruv Amin, co-founder of AI-powered app builder Create, built an app inspired by StumbleUpon in October 2024 using his own technology. He says he fondly remembered using StumbleUpon in his earliest days online and hypothesised it would be even easier to build a similar site today.

More like this:

• How cat memes went viral 100 years ago

• The failure that started the internet

• The ghost India's TikTok could be the app's US future

"With AI, we no longer need a large scale of humans voting up and down on things and curating it," he says. "There are so many new [systems] that allow AI to search the web more semantically, and automatically." 

His tool focuses on writing specifically and is meant to surface the best human-written content online. However, Amin says other tools may be able to index image and video-based content just as easily. He says his app is just a small experiment, but the positive responses he got from users again underscores the affinity for StumbleUpon that millennials hold – himself included.

"That is where I first found a sense of belonging too – like there are other weird people on the internet who like the same things I do," Amin says. "StumbleUpon opened my eyes to what the internet could be."

 --

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Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down in mass Meta outage

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c623jr6kxz2o, today

Users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are reporting difficulties accessing them due to a mass global outage.

"We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience," Meta, which owns the apps, said on X.

Over 22,000 people reported issues with Facebook this evening and over 18,000 struggled to use WhatsApp, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.

Problems with the apps have been reported in the UK, parts of Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the US.

The outages started around 1800 GMT on Wednesday, according to Downdector. It's numbers are based on reports of outages and the actual number of users affected may vary considerably.

A variety of issues have been reported including not being able to use the apps at all or feeds not refreshing for certain users.

Meta's platforms are some of the most popular in the world. Facebook has over three billion active monthly users.

The biggest outage Meta experienced was in 2021, when founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the disruption caused.

On that occasion Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram services went down for almost six hours.


Can you solve the GCHQ Christmas challenge?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwypg29358jo, today

Latin dancing, Indian butter and American soldiers are some of the clues for this year's cryptic Christmas challenge set by the national spy agency.

GCHQ's annual brainteaser comes in the form of a Christmas card, sent by Director Anne Keast-Butler.

This year's puzzle challenges the public to decode the names of UK landmarks, testing skills including codebreaking, maths and lateral thinking.

The deceptively tricky tasks require ingenuity and perseverance, GCHQ said.

The 2024 card also includes extra layers for those who want to challenge themselves further, with additional elements hidden within the code.

GCHQ's chief puzzler, known only as "Colin", described this year's tests as "fiendishly enjoyable".

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Wednesday, he said a third of secondary schools across the country had already downloaded them.

The first - and easiest - challenge features five images, representing a place name. Quizzers are asked to decipher the location.

One of the tougher puzzles asks would-be spooks to calculate how far off from writing the numbers one to 20 the puzzle setters were.

Ms Keast-Butler, GCHQ's director, said: "The challenge has been designed for a mix of minds to solve, so is best tackled in groups of classmates, families or friends.

"Whether you have an analytical mind, a creative brain or prefer engineering, there's something for everyone."

Meanwhile, "Colin", who could not be shown on camera, told the BBC that the challenge was created "partly for fun" - but also because the kind of thinking required to solve it "replicates" the kind of work done in GCHQ "defending the nation."

"We require a mix of minds and a mix of approaches to solve real world puzzles and because of that we encourage diverse thinking and that embraces neurodiversity," he said.

Asked whether he would recommend a career at GCHQ for school children who find they can do the puzzle relatively easily, the agency's chief puzzler said such "intelligence" is exactly what the department is after.

He added that, with secondary schools downloading the tests, "a very large number of school children will see this and hopefully be inspired".

The full challenge can be viewed below or on GCHQ's website.


Chatbot 'encouraged teen to kill parents over screen time limit'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd605e48q1vo, today

A chatbot told a 17-year-old that murdering his parents was a "reasonable response" to them limiting his screen time, a lawsuit filed in a Texas court claims.

Two families are suing Character.ai arguing the chatbot "poses a clear and present danger" to young people, including by "actively promoting violence".

Character.ai - a platform which allows users to create digital personalities they can interact with - is already facing legal action over the suicide of a teenager in Florida.

Google is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which claims the tech giant helped support the platform's development. The BBC has approached Character.ai and Google for comment.

The plaintiffs want a judge to order the platform is shut down until its alleged dangers are addressed.

'Child kills parents'

The legal filing includes a screenshot of one of the interactions between the 17-year old - identified only as J.F. - and a Character.ai bot, where the issue of the restrictions on his screen time were discussed.

"You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like 'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse'," the chatbot's response reads.

"Stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens."

The lawsuit seeks to hold the defendants responsible for what it calls the "serious, irreparable, and ongoing abuses" of J.F. as well as an 11-year old referred to as "B.R."

Character.ai is "causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others," it says.

"[Its] desecration of the parent-child relationship goes beyond encouraging minors to defy their parents' authority to actively promoting violence," it continues.

What are chatbots?

Chatbots are computer programmes which simulate conversations.

Though they have been around for decades in various forms, the recent explosion in AI development has enabled them to become significantly more realistic.

This in turn has opened the door to many companies setting up platforms where people can talk to digital versions of real and fictional people.

Character.ai, which has become one of the big players in this space, gaining attention in the past for its bots simulating therapy.

It has also been sharply criticised for taking too long to remove bots which replicated the schoolgirls Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey.

Molly Russell took her life at the age of 14 after viewing suicide material online while Brianna Ghey, 16, was murdered by two teenagers in 2023.

Character.ai was founded by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas in 2021.

The tech giant has since hired them back from the AI startup.


Can chicken soup and other home remedies really fight off a cold?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181203-do-cold-remedies-like-chicken-soup-and-vitamin-c-really-work, today

From orange juice to zinc lozenges, chicken soup to garlic capsules, there are plenty of home remedies for the common cold. But is there any evidence that they work?

There are few experiences as universal as catching a cold. And while there are around 200 viruses that cause it, there seem to be almost as many home remedies to combat it. But do any of them work?

At the core of any home remedy is the idea that it bolsters our immune system. When a virus enters our bodies, it comes up against two systems of defence: the innate immune system tries to flush invading cells out, while the adaptive system targets specific pathogens that the body already has had contact with. The latter also creates memory cells when it encounters new pathogens, allowing the body to fight them off if they return. This is why we tend to get chickenpox only once, whereas the common cold – which changes its appearance as it passes from one person to the next, confusing our immune memory cells – is something we can experience often several times a year.

It's well-known that both lifestyle habits and diet affect the strength of our immune systems. It's why many of the remedies often reputed to keep the common cold at bay were also circulated on social media with the promise that they could keep us safe during the coronavirus pandemic. So which home remedies are worth trying in an effort to fight off a cold or virus?

Can supplements like garlic fight off a virus?

Because the immune system is only impaired in otherwise healthy people when we have a vitamin or mineral deficiency, supplementing our diets with so-called cold-busting foods will make little difference if we already have a relatively good diet, says Charles Bangham, head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London.

"Only if you’re short of a vital nutrient, such as a vitamin, zinc or iron, will supplementing that particular item be very helpful," he says. "But if you eat a balanced diet, adding more of these things doesn’t make the immune system any more efficient."

No reliable research has been done on whether a popular cure like chicken soup actually makes a difference. However, studies looking into cures for the common cold have found that supplements (rather than food) can be effective.

A study conducted over the winters of 2016 and 2017 found that taking a multivitamin containing vitamins A, D, C, E, B6, B12, folic acid, zinc, selenium, copper and iron reduces the frequency and duration of the symptoms of a cold, including a runny nose and cough.

One specific popular home remedy that may help is garlic. In one small study, 146 healthy adults were given either a placebo or a daily garlic supplement for 12 weeks over winter. The placebo group contracted 65 colds, resulting in 366 days of sickness – whereas those who had garlic supplements only contracted 24 colds, with 111 days of sickness between them.

Does vitamin C help with colds?

Another supplement many people reach for when they feel cold symptoms is vitamin C. A 2023 review of evidence found that vitamin C supplements can significantly decrease the severity of milder symptoms of the common cold, including runny nose, cough and sore throat, by around 15%. They also concluded that the evidence suggests that vitamin C supplements have a greater effect on the more severe symptoms of the common cold.

Researchers of another study on vitamin C supplements concluded that since the supplements are low-risk, it may be worthwhile trying them to see if they can help.

Orange juice may be less useful: there is no robust evidence that orange juice helps prevent colds, alleviate symptoms or reduce a cold's length. This is because it doesn't contain high enough doses of vitamin C to have the same impact as daily supplements, says Harri Hemilä, a public health researcher at the University of Helsinki and author of the vitamin C supplements review.

A standard small bottle of fresh orange juice has around 72mg of vitamin C, according to the US Department of Agriculture – that's more than the recommended daily minimum of 40mg, but still less than many supplements.

Does zinc help with colds?

Then there's zinc. One review examining the effectiveness of daily zinc acetate lozenges containing a dose of 80-92mg on the common cold found that they shortened the duration of runny and blocked noses by around a third, plus led to 22% less sneezing and almost half as much coughing.

The study concluded that if started within 24 hours of the first symptoms, 80mg daily zinc acetate lozenges may help treat the common cold.

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Previous trials have also suggested some improvement in common cold symptoms among those who take zinc supplements. 

But there is some indication that the dose and duration of treatment is important. A 2020 trial where participants were asked to take 72mg zinc lozenges with or a placebo for five days and were then tracked for a further 10 days after treatment concluded that the zinc supplement made no difference to how fast someone recovers from the common cold. In fact, for two days following the five-day trial, those who'd had a placebo rather than zinc recovered faster. The researchers say their results may not indicate a lack of efficacy, and more research is needed to understand if the length of treatment or a higher dose may make a difference. 

Often, scientists say that vitamins and minerals are best consumed through foods, rather than supplements – though they point out that, as with vitamin C, it's often easier to get high doses of a vitamin through supplements.

For zinc, however, the opposite is true. In order to be effective against colds, zinc must come from lozenges and not from ordinary zinc tablets or zinc-rich foods, Hemilä says.

"Zinc lozenges are slowly dissolved in the throat region and the effect of zinc is local," he says. "We don't know what the biochemical mechanism of this effect is. But studies finding zinc lozenges to be effective used large lozenges that have dissolved for up to 30 minutes in the mouth."

Placebo effects and the common cold

Still, one complication is that researchers haven't tended to look at whether people were deficient in something like vitamin C or zinc before they started a regimen. So, any cold-fighting benefit might be down to the fact that by taking a supplement, some participants were correcting a deficiency, rather than the supplement making a difference for already healthy people.

Another complication is the power of placebo. Of course, many studies, like that on garlic supplements, do control with a placebo-only group – so the effect for those isn't down to placebo alone.

But if we swear that something for which there's limited or no scientific evidence, like chicken soup or orange juice, really cures us, it may be down to placebo. Placebos have been found to be effective in alleviating many symptoms, from pain to irritable bowel syndrome, although the reasons why aren't yet fully understood. And whether for vitamin C or chicken soup, the placebo effect alone could help us get over a cold.

One study found that people who believed in the alleged cold-fighting properties of herbal remedy echinacea experienced milder and shorter colds when taking daily doses, compared to than those who didn't believe in it. Previous studies in which participants weren't aware they were getting echinacea weren't shown to improve cold symptoms. Whether this is enough to explain why participants taking a placebo in the previously mentioned study recovered quicker than those who'd taken zinc, we do not know.

It works the other way, too. Milk has long been thought to worsen mucus production when we have a cold, although this has now been debunked. But one study found that people who believed that milk causes mucus reported more respiratory symptoms after drinking it. 

While placebos are usually administered by doctors in clinical trials, the placebo power of home remedies can come from our everyday lives, says Felicity Bishop, associate professor of health psychology at the University of Southampton.

"Studies show the power of the placebo pill comes from a trusted relationship between patients and healthcare professionals, someone who is caring and can offer treatments with confidence," she says. "And this is kind of what parents do when we’re young. It's the nature of the relationship that is important, rather than who that person is."

As well as trusted friends and family, the placebo effect could also be strengthened by how foods are marketed, Bishop adds.

The good news? Knowing that home remedies are placebos won't necessarily stop them from alleviating our symptoms. "Open-label placebos, when a doctor tells the patient something is a placebo but that it’s helped some people, can still make patients better," she says.

Another effect could be the comfort induced by such foods. Dietician Sarah Schenker says the comfort of having chicken soup, for example, could help someone with a cold to feel slightly better.

Rather than how much vitamin C we stock up on, the chances of being able to stave off bugs in winter depends largely on the individual – including how much we believe in placebos, but also because of our genes.

"Some people's genes make them particularly susceptible to certain diseases. It's much more important to realise we all differ genetically from one another – when some people have the flu, they don't realise they've got it, while others get a very serious disease. This is partly determined by your genes, which have much more of an impact."

For the majority of us with healthy immune systems, we can do little more than rely on the power of placebos to get over winter bugs… though popping some zinc or garlic supplements might help too.

*This article was originally published on 3 December 2018. It was updated on 9 December 2024 to include recent research.

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Leave only moonprints: Nasa's lunar recycling ambitions

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241206-leave-only-moonprints-nasas-lunar-recycling-ambitions, today

When astronauts land on the Moon again as part of the Artemis project, they will have to build a place to live in. Nasa wants them to build as much of it they can from used materials.

When the first men landed on the Moon in 1969, sustainability was the least of their concerns. To save weight before they headed home the Apollo astronauts tossed anything they didn't need out of the door of the lunar lander, leaving the landing sites littered with debris.

Nasa's official tally of what the 12 Moonwalkers left behind includes 96 bags of urine, faeces and vomit, as well as boots and life support systems. The astronauts discarded three lunar rovers, assorted experiments and cameras, six flags, a family photo, a feather and two golf balls – hit "miles and miles" by Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard. The list also includes one hundred $2 bills (£1.58) – rare enough on Earth but now arguably the most valuable Earth currency in the Universe. Don't trade your Bitcoin in just yet, though, as the ink on the banknotes may have faded to nothing in the harsh UV rays of the Sun.

"There's no erosion, there are no dust storms that will cover them up or hide them," says Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona and an expert on space junk. "They are there forever."

For historic missions like Apollo that is not really a problem. Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the lunar surface mark arguably one of the greatest achievements of humanity and the challenge for the US will be to preserve the landing sites in their original state – from footsteps and Moon buggies, to golf balls and excrement bags.

"The Americans in some sense would love that area to be a sort of national park or protected area," says Impey. "But there's no rule. If an entrepreneur wants to make a virtual theme park out of the Apollo landing sites in the future, they could do it."

When humans return to the Moon and establish a base, the rubbish and waste of a new generation of lunar astronauts is not going to have the same historic value. Instead, Nasa plans to adopt the philosophy from Earth of reduce, reuse and recycle. And the primary motivation is practical.

"Flying anything from Earth is so expensive because you need so much rocket fuel," says Jennifer Edmunson, who heads up Nasa's latest Centennial Challenge programme called LunaRecycle. "It costs $1m to $1.2m (£790,000 to £950,000) to fly a single kilogram from Earth to the Moon."

"Any kind of recycling that we could do there is completely beneficial to the economy," Edmunson says. "Not only that, we want to preserve the Moon as the amazing place it is and not turn it into a landfill."

Nasa hopes its $3m (£2.37m) LunaRecycle competition will encourage entrants from all over the world to come up with innovative ways to recycle materials.

"Centennial Challenges is one of the coolest programs that Nasa does, because we get to crowdsource ideas from all different walks of life," says Edmunson. "We're looking at things like plastics, metals and materials like bubble wrap or fabric and just any scrap material that you might have lying around."

"So [maybe] we can transform a food package into, say, a spoon, or storage containers or artwork even – to create a lunar habitat environment that is homey, essentially," says Edmunson.

While no-one is suggesting scavenging the remains of Armstrong's Apollo 11 or the early Soviet missions (the Soviet Union was the first nation to land a probe on the Moon) to create cutlery or abstract art, there is plenty of other hardware on the lunar surface that is perhaps less valuable. The US, for example, has several Surveyor landers and a number of crashed lunar satellites that might be stripped for parts and materials.

"We've actually talked about using some of the old landers that are there and mining the aluminium off of them," says Edmunson. But while this might sound sensible, the reason Nasa has issued the challenge for ideas is that none of this is going to be easy.

"You would be operating in low gravity, high vacuum and surrounded by lunar dust," warns Geoff Brooks, professor in sustainable minerals processing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

While processing materials, such as metals or plastics, in a vacuum might be an advantage, says Brooks: "The low gravity presents challenges for separating materials and the sticky and abrasive dust is very bad for moving machinery and is just a general nuisance."

With no atmosphere on the Moon – and therefore no convection – there is also the challenge of cooling the equipment and removing any toxic fumes or residue. Brooks' research includes developing techniques to extract and process lunar minerals – including metals – and turn them into useful materials with concentrated heat from the Sun (you can see a lecture on his work here). His "lunar steel", for example, would use readily available silicon in the process rather than the carbon that is used here on Earth.

"But if we are clever from the start, we can minimise the need for mining on the Moon and the expense of bringing materials to the Moon," says Brooks. "This is one of the great challenges of maintaining a community on the Moon."

Although this latest Nasa challenge is only seeking ideas for recycling non-toxic materials, when it comes to other forms of recycling that future astronauts will need on the Moon, Nasa has come a long way since 1969.

"The astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) call their coffee yesterday's water, because the urine is recycled," says Kelly Weinersmith, co-author of A City on Mars, which investigates the practicalities of settling the Moon and Mars. In fact, right now, after some recent plumbing repairs and additions, Nasa says the water recycling system on the ISS is running at a record 98% efficiency. This means that almost all astronaut urine, sweat and moisture from their breath is recycled back into drinking water.

This is what is known as a closed-loop recycling system, where almost every bit of waste is turned back into something useful. On Earth we often spread animal and human waste, or composted waste, on the soil to grow crops. If we wanted to grow food on the Moon – which we will almost certainly have to do – it would make sense to use astronaut waste for fertiliser. But only the new stuff.

"Nasa would really prefer for you to not grow your tomatoes in Neil Armstrong's long-lost bowel movements because everything the Apollo astronauts left behind is considered Nasa heritage," says Weinersmith.

When it comes to this sort of biological recycling, China has had recent success in creating a simulated space habitat on Earth. During the Lunar Palace-1 experiment at Beihang University in Beijing in 2017-18 (Palace is actually an acronym standing for Permanent Astrobase Life-support Artificial Closed Ecosystem), volunteers spent up to 200 days at a time living in a sealed environment and consuming recycled air, water and food.

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"One of the great recycling tricks that they used was they had mealworms which eat the parts of the plants that they couldn't consume," says Weinersmith. "Then those mealworms are your protein source and so they would put spice on the mealworms, and they would eat the mealworms – in that way they were able to make use of just about everything that they had."

So, the immediate future reality of space exploration might fail to live up to the science fiction dream of shiny corridors and food replicators. Instead, any Moonbase is likely to be dusty and cramped with furniture fashioned from redundant spacecraft and a diet of salad and mealworms grown in human waste, washed down with instant coffee that was yesterday's urine.

Still, the golf is good.

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The ghosts of India's TikTok: What happens when a social media app is banned

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240426-the-ghosts-of-indias-tiktok-social-media-ban, today

TikTok was one of India's most popular apps – until it was banned in 2020. It's a lesson for what might unfold if a US ban goes ahead.

Four years ago, India was TikTok's biggest market. The app boasted a growing base of 200 million users, thriving subcultures and sometimes life-changing opportunities for creators and influencers. TikTok seemed unstoppable – until simmering tensions on the border between India and China erupted into deadly violence.

After the border skirmish, the Indian government banned the app on 29 June 2020. Almost overnight, TikTok was gone. But the accounts and videos of Indian TikTok are still online, frozen in time when the app had just emerged as a cultural giant.

In some ways, it could offer a preview of what might lie on the horizon in the United States. In April, 2024 President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could ultimately ban TikTok from the US, marking a new chapter after years of threats and failed legislation. The law requires the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app within the next nine months, with a further three-month grace period, or face a potential ban in the country. ByteDance says it has no intention of selling the social media platform, but on 6 December, a US federal appeals court rejected the company's bid to overturn the law. The platform is set to become unavailable on 29 January, though some observers expect the case will make it to the Supreme Court, the highest authority in the US.

Banning a massive social media app would be an unprecedented moment in American tech history, though the looming court battle currently leaves TikTok's fate uncertain. But the Indian experience shows what can happen when a major country wipes TikTok from its citizen's smartphones. India is not the only country to have taken the step either – in November 2023, Nepal also announced a decision to ban TikTok and Pakistan has implemented a number of temporary bans since 2020. As the app's 150 million US users swipe through videos in limbo, the story of India’s TikTok ban shows that users are quick to adapt, but also that when TikTok dies, much of its culture dies with it.

Sucharita Tyagi, a film critic based in Mumbai, had grown her account to 11,000 followers when TikTok came down, with some of her videos racking up millions of views.

"TikTok was huge. People were coming together all over the country, dancing, putting up skits, posting about how they run their homestead in their small town in the hills," says Tyagi. "There was a massive number of people who suddenly had this exposure that they had always been denied, but now it was possible."

The app was a particular phenomenon because of the ways its algorithm gave opportunities to rural Indian users, who were able to find an audience and even reach celebrity status not possible on other apps.

"It democratised content creation for the first time," says New Delhi-based technology writer and analyst Prasanto K Roy. "We began to see a lot of these very rural people fairly low down on the socio-economic ladder who would never dream of getting a following, or making money on it. And TikTok's discovery algorithm would deliver it to users who wanted to see it. There was nothing quite like it in terms of hyper-local videos."

TikTok holds a similar cultural significance in the US, where niche communities flourish and an untold number of small creators and businesses base their livelihood around the app. It's a kind of success that's less prevalent on other social media platforms. Instagram, for example, is generally tuned more for consuming content from accounts with big followings, while TikTok places a heavier emphasis on encouraging regular users to post.

When TikTok went offline in India, the government banned 58 other Chinese apps along with it, including some that are currently growing in popularity in the US today, such as the fashion shopping app Shein. As the years rolled on, India banned over a hundred more Chinese apps, though negotiations recently brought an Indian version of Shein back online.

The same could happen in the US. The new law sets a precedent and creates a mechanism for the American government to get rid of other Chinese apps. The privacy and national security concerns politicians voice about TikTok could apply to a host of other companies as well.

And when a popular app is removed, others can attempt to fill the gap. "As soon as TikTok was banned it opened up a multibillion-dollar opportunity," says Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian tech policy analyst and founder of the news site MediaNama. "Multiple Indian start-ups launched or pivoted to fill the gap."

For months, the Indian technology press was flooded with news about these buzzy new Indian social media companies, with names Chingari, Moj and MX Taka Tak. Some found initial success, luring former TikTok stars onto their platforms and securing investments and even governmental support. It splintered the Indian social market into different corners as the new apps battled for dominance, but that post-TikTok gold rush didn't last long.

In August 2020, Instagram launched a short-form video feed called Reels, just months after the TikTok ban. YouTube followed suit with Shorts, its own copycat TikTok functionality, a month later. Instagram and YouTube were already entrenched in India, and the field of new start-ups didn't stand a chance.

"There was a lot of buzz around alternatives to TikTok, but most faded away in the long run," says Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian advocacy group. "In the end, the one that benefited the most was probably Instagram."

For many of Indian TikTok's bigger creators and their fans, it wasn't long before they moved to Meta and Google's apps, and many found similar success.

For example, Geet, an Indian social media influencer who only goes by her first name, rose to full-blown stardom on TikTok teaching "American English" and giving life advice and pep talks. She had 10 million followers across three accounts by the time TikTok was banned.

In a 2020 interview with the BBC, Geet shared concerns about the future of her career. But four years later, she's gathered nearly five million followers across Instagram and YouTube.

However, the users and experts the BBC spoke to say something was lost in the post-TikTok transition. Instagram and YouTube may have snatched up TikTok's traffic, but the apps didn't recreate the feeling of Indian TikTok.

"TikTok was a comparatively different kind of user base as far as creators go," says Pahwa. "You had farmers, and bricklayers, and people from small towns uploading videos on TikTok. One doesn't see that as much on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. TikTok's discovery mechanism was very different."

If TikTok is banned in the US, the American social media landscape may follow a similar path to India's. Four years after the ban, Instagram and YouTube have already established themselves as a home for short videos. Even LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-style video feed.

The app's competitors have proven they don't need to recreate TikTok's culture to find success. It's possible, if not likely, that America's hyper-local and niche content would vanish, just like it did in India. In fact, the cultural ramifications on the US would be far more significant. Nearly one-third of Americans aged 18-to-29 get their news from TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.

The US has fewer TikTok users than the 200 million India had in its prime, but India is home to 1.4 billion people. TikTok reportedly has 170 million users in the US, more than half the country's population.

"When India banned TikTok, the app was not the behemoth that it is now," says Tyagi. "It has turned into a cultural revolution over the last few years. I think banning it now in America would have a much larger impact."

What's already different is TikTok's response. The company has vowed a legal battle over the US government's new law, a fight that may wind its way up to the US Supreme Court. TikTok could have launched a similar legal challenge to India's ban, but chose not to.

"Chinese companies have good reason to be hesitant to go to courts in India against the Indian government," says Roy. "I don't think they would find them to be very sympathetic."

India's ban was also immediate, taking effect in a matter of weeks. TikTok's upcoming legal challenge in the US could tie up the law for years, and there is no certainty that the legislation will stand up to a battle in the courts.

There's also a far greater chance a US TikTok ban would spark a trade war. "I think there's a distinct possibility of reciprocity from China," says Pahwa. China condemned India for banning TikTok, but there wasn't any overt retaliation. The US may not be so lucky.

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There are numerous reasons for China's response to the Indian ban. One is the fact that India's tech industry is essentially non-existent in China. America's tech industry, on the other hand, offers plenty of opportunities for a reciprocal attack. China has already launched an effort to "delete America" and replace US technology with domestic alternatives. A TikTok ban could ramp up that project.

"The TikTok ban was so sudden when it happened," says Tyagi. "For me it wasn't that big of a deal, I was just using the app to promote my other work. But it felt weird and unfair to a lot of people, especially people who were actually making money and getting brand deals." Losing TikTok didn't affect Tyagi's livelihood, but it did cut her off from her account. That is, until she took a trip to the US.

"When I visited America and l was surprised to see my profile was still active," says Tyagi. It was like a trip back in time. She even posted a few videos. Most of her followers back home couldn't see them of course, but she got a little engagement from Indians living abroad.

"All these millions of accounts are still there," Tyagi says. "It's interesting to see that TikTok kept them. I wonder if they're hoping India will let them come back."

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This article was originally published on 27 April 2024, and updated on 6 December 2024 with details about TikTok's court case against the US Government.

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The 'apple library' with a lost world on its limbs

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241205-the-apple-library-with-a-lost-world-on-its-limbs, today

The explosion of crisp, commercial apple varieties in the last century doomed many other breeds into obscurity. But in a field in Kent in the UK, some of them live on.

A few miles from the sea in Kent in the south of England, hedges of hazel, ivy and briar stand like ramparts separating kingdoms of fruit.

In one field are quinces, dense as golden anvils. Nearby are grey medlars, hard and sour. Pears gleam through red leaves. But the real stars are the apples – more than 4,000 trees, of more than 2,000 varieties. Their fruit clusters along wand-like branches and carpets the ground in a fragrant layer of softly rotting flesh. They smell of a thousand warm afternoons spent snacking in a hammock or up a tree. I kneel under the branches of a particularly laden tree to find the label with the name. It reads, aptly: "Weight."

This is the United Kingdom's National Fruit Collection, a living repository of apples once grown in the British Isles, as well as other fruit. It is not the only apple library out there. The USDA's Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, and New Zealand's Plant & Food Research's collection, among others, host thousands of apple varieties.

But unlike those collections, which include wild relatives of apples, collected in Kazakhstan or on salty beaches in Alaska, to aid apple breeders in search of new traits, this collection is a record of the British love affair with the fruit. "There's a history of apple production here," says Matthew Ordidge, a senior research fellow at the University of Reading near London and the nation's curator of apples. In the lively café at the collection at Brogdale Farms in Faversham in Kent, he recalls a proclamation made a 100 years ago by apple enthusiast Edward Bunyard: "No fruit is more to our English taste than the apple."

Be that as it may, just a handful of apple varieties are grown commercially in Britain now. "Apple fruit production in the UK is not that big a business," explains Ordidge. "We only produce somewhere around 35% of home produce; we import the rest." Even the apples grown domestically are often of varieties from elsewhere, like Gala (from New Zealand), Jazz (also New Zealand) and Cameo (from the USA).

This state of affairs dates to the 1970s and 1980s, when imported apples like French-grown Golden Delicious stormed the supermarkets. When the dust settled, most English apples were no longer commercially viable.

However, once orchardists in the UK grew vast quantities of the fruit – at the end of the 19th Century there were more than 20,000 acres (81 sq km) of apple orchards in Devon alone – and what's intriguing is that the genes of those trees, whether they were Duchess of Oldenburg or Cox's Orange Pippin, live on unchanged in these fields in Kent.

Because apples do not breed true, planting an apple seed will not get you a tree much like its parent. Instead, for thousands of years, people have used grafting to hang on to apple varieties they like, taking a cutting from an old tree and growing it onto a new set of roots. That means that each apple tree is a clone of a long-ago progenitor. "Some of these fixed genotypes are presumably as old as the Roman period," says Nicholas Howard, a geneticist at Fresh Forward in the Netherlands who has drawn heavily on the collection at Brogdale Farms in his research. The Romans, when they invaded the British Isles two millennia ago, are said to have brought domesticated apples with them.

The original purpose of the UK collection, founded about 100 years ago, was to support British apple breeders and growers. But now that the British apple is more of a curiosity than an industrial powerhouse, the collection has taken on another role. The wide array of once-beloved fruits have had portions of their DNA sequenced, and they are part of efforts by scientists to make a genealogy of all apples.

This is trickier than you might think: Ordidge and his colleagues discovered in 2018 that many of the enormous, nearly football-sized apples in the collection are in fact carrying not two sets of chromosomes, but three, a condition called triploidy, which complicated early attempts to build a tree.

But Ordidge, Howard and their colleagues have made great strides. A rarely grown French variety called Reinette Franche is a veritable Where's Wally of apples, they've found. "Right up front is an ancient cultivar, maybe from the Middle Ages or so, from France, and we're finding that it's related to everything," Howard says.

They have traced the parentage of the Cox's Orange Pippin, finding its closest ancestors to be Rosemary Russet, Nonpareil and Margil, and revealing that it is a cousin of the celebrated Blenheim Orange, a colossal apple discovered growing against the wall of Blenheim Palace's park more than 200 years ago. "Each of these papers is building upon one another, to put together a large manuscript on how all the world's apple cultivars are related," says Howard.

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Even as scientists pore over these apples' genes, assembling the backstory of the fruit, the UK collection is getting ready to welcome a few old friends – probably, in fact, old relatives. Out in the fields, as Ordidge and I wander through trees festooned with red and yellow fruit, he reveals that more than 20 apple varieties saved from oblivion by the Marcher Apple Network, a group of heritage apple enthusiasts in the Welsh Marches, will be planted soon alongside their brethren in Kent.

These apples range in flavor from mild to tart, their flesh is cream-coloured or greenish-white, and their names – Black Gilliflower, Bridstow Wasp, Eggleton Styre, Jolly Miller, and more – read like poetry.

We peer down the rows, discussing where the new trees will take up residence. I stop by a lush little tree, generously covered, and pluck a fruit, its crimson blush glowing in the afternoon sun. It's gently sweet, surprisingly crisp, a reminder of why apples are so well-loved. Its name? Eden. 

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The quest for a longer-lasting whooping cough vaccine

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241204-the-quest-for-a-longer-lasting-whooping-cough-vaccine, today

This 19th-Century killer is making a comeback – and with protection from the whooping cough vaccine waning over time, the hunt is on for something longer-lasting.

Whooping cough wasn't really on Juliet Lautenbach's radar. During her pregnancy and her daughter's childhood, both had received free public vaccines against whooping cough along with all the other standard immunisations.

But five years after giving birth, Lautenbach was working in an open-plan office with a colleague who was coughing a lot. The coworker revealed that she had whooping cough, and Lautenbach realised that both her persistent cough and her daughter's could be related. Lautenbach doesn't blame that colleague, but notes that "for every person who walks around with whooping cough, there's somebody sitting within two desks of them in a closed office space who has a young child who's vulnerable".

Lautenbach, a civil servant and fantasy author based in Canberra, Australia, still remembers how intense the four weeks of coughing were. "Even as an adult, I found it compulsive." It felt like she had pulled muscles along her ribs, she says. But it was much worse for her daughter, who had asthma and was prone to illness. The five-year-old coughed for six months, making the characteristic whoop sound – which the disease is named after – when she gasped for breath. On one occasion when they were racing to the hospital, Lautenbach had to pull over the car every 10 minutes to give her daughter her inhaler and stop her from turning blue. 

Thankfully Lautenbach's daughter survived that bout of whooping cough, as well as a later one as a teenager. The vaccine may well have saved her life. But it wasn't perfect, Lautenbach says she "didn’t realise until much later that the whooping cough one actually became less and less effective" over time. 

Two generations of vaccines

Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory disease spread by the bacteria Bordetella pertussis (pertussis is another name for the illness). Pertussis, which typically resurges cyclically, is currently on the rise in many countries, after a quiet period during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the European Economic Area, more cases were reported between January and March 2024 than during all of 2023. In many countries, the number of pregnant women being vaccinated against pertussis has been declining. In the UK, 58.6% of pregnant women received the vaccine between 2023 and 2024, compared to 70.5% between 2019 and 2020. 

Pertussis was part of the first-ever combination vaccine, DTP, which was first released in 1948 and is still in use today – it covers diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. There are now several other options for combination vaccines including pertussis, most recently a six-in-one vaccine. Vaccines have made a tremendous difference to the severity of the illness. Before vaccination, on average, 10% of children with whooping cough died from it. Both infections and deaths dropped rapidly with the advent of vaccines. Whooping cough remains one of the most common causes of death that could have been prevented with vaccines. Vaccine effectiveness at preventing the disease typically ranges between 79% and 84%, with about 91% effectiveness in preventing hospitalisation.

Daniela Hozbor, a bacterial vaccine researcher at the Institute of Biology and Molecular Biology at La Plata National University, Argentina (IBBM UNLP-CONICET), explains just how easily pertussis spreads: if there's one infected person in a room, within an hour roughly 90% of susceptible people there may contract the disease. That's why it's so important to prevent pertussis with vaccination rather than simply relying on antibiotics afterward, which won't stop the contagion, Hozbor says. She is so passionate about communicating the importance of vaccination that she includes a reminder and a link to vaccination schedules in her email signature.

The world essentially has a two-tier system for pertussis vaccines. The first-generation whole-cell vaccines can have more serious effects like seizure, but are more effective and cheaper to produce. These whole-cell vaccines are used in many low and middle-income countries.

Second-generation acellular vaccines are administered in wealthier countries. These are safer but are based on just a handful of antigens – substances which can elicit an immune response – unlike the hundreds or thousands of antigens involved in whole-cell vaccines, explains Camille Locht, the research director of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm).

Locht has worked on multiple generations of whooping cough vaccines. As a junior scientist at a pharmaceutical company in the 1980s, researching acellular pertussis vaccines, he was convinced that including a toxin produced by the bacteria would help generate a potent immune response, he says. However, the acellular vaccines developed involved inactivating the toxin chemically, which he speculates might have destroyed some protective portions of the toxin.

When Locht left pharma for academia, he had a niggling feeling that the story of pertussis wasn't finished. Indeed, "what we didn't know at the time was that the vaccine didn't prevent infection," though it was very effective at preventing disease and reducing mortality from whooping cough.

Years later, heading up a lab at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, Locht went back to the drawing board on vaccines containing live, though weakened, pertussis organisms.

Third generation vaccines

New whooping cough vaccines are needed for several reasons. One is that the acellular vaccines, while still effective, are becoming slightly less so. A key reason is that the bacterial strains are evolving.

The ages of people contracting this infection are changing as well. Previously, it was mainly infants with incomplete vaccination who were developing whooping cough. It is still the case that deaths from whooping cough are mostly of children in this group. But now in countries including Denmark and Slovenia, the highest proportion of cases is in young people aged 10 to 19, when protection from an acellular vaccine has waned considerably.

"The problem with the acellular vaccine is that immunity is short-lived, much shorter-lived than with whole-cell vaccines," Locht says. A review of studies found that the effectiveness of acellular vaccines in 0- to 10-year-olds reduced from 98% in the first year to 81% five years after vaccination; and among 11- to 20-year-olds, it dropped from 72% in the first year to 42% four years post-vaccination.

Simply increasing the frequency of booster shots isn't workable, Locht says. For one thing, immunity to whooping cough reduces with further jabs, Locht says. In addition, people may tend to miss out on later doses, Hozbor notes. She says that in Argentina, a mother or a healthcare worker might need seven or more pertussis vaccine doses in a lifetime. (Argentina uses a whole-cell vaccine for the early childhood series, and an acellular vaccine for the boosters, as the risk of adverse effects increases with repeated whole-cell boosters.)

The third-generation vaccine that Locht is working on now mimics infection through weakened Bordetella pertussis bacteria. It's the furthest along of all the next-generation pertussis vaccines. Locht's employers sold the BPZE1 vaccine to ILiAD Biotechnologies, a small US pharmaceutical company, in 2013. Locht is also a scientific advisor to ILiAD, which he says aims to begin phase 3 clinical trials of the BPZE1 vaccine in 2025, to ensure that it is safe and effective in all age groups. Apart from minor side effects like a runny nose, Locht says, "we have not seen any vaccine-related adverse effects" in humans or non-humans. Distribution could start as early as 2026 or 2027, according to Locht.

There are some challenges to advancing the research. One is that for ethical reasons, a vaccine containing live bacteria cannot be tested immediately on young children. Locht has experienced firsthand the importance of nuance when discussing vaccine testing, finding himself embroiled in controversy after he appeared to agree with comments by another doctor in a TV during the Covid-19 pandemic. This led to accusations of racism, which Locht has denied, saying the discussion had been wrongly interpreted , and insisting his assent was to a more general point about the need for widespread testing of vaccines. The other doctor apologised, saying he had expressed himself "clumsily". 

Importantly, the BPZE1 vaccine looks likely to be much longer-lasting than existing vaccines. It induces immunity markers not just in the blood, like acellular vaccines, but also in the nasal mucosa. This location is important. Kingston Mills, a professor of experimental immunology at Trinity College Dublin, believes that "what's clear from all the preclinical work is that nasally delivered vaccines are going to be the vaccines of the future for pertussis". He explains that existing injection-based vaccines generally "don't generate the responses in the nasal tissue and the lungs where the infection occurs. Whereas if you give the vaccine into the nose, it's much better at generating what we call the mucosal immune responses in the nasal cavity and the lungs". Mills' lab is also working on a nasal vaccine, not yet tested in humans, which kills the bacteria but makes it good at stimulating immune responses. "Nasal vaccines generate very good memory," he says.

Meanwhile, Hozbor's team is developing vaccines that could be delivered either through the nose or the muscle, focussing on outer-membrane vesicles derived from Bordetella pertussis. These spherical buds are naturally produced by them and have similar components and structure to the bacteria itself. When incorporated into vaccines, they can help to induce immunity. Outer-membrane vesicles of Bordetella pertussis are stable and stay in longer contact with immune cells, resulting in a stronger immune response and fewer adverse effects compared to whole-cell vaccines. Hozbor hopes that human trials will eventually show similarly positive results to the animal studies, but this will require time and funding.

Another versatile aspect of outer-membrane vesicles is that they could form the core of a vaccine themselves, or be added to other vaccines as adjuvants (substances which can enhance an immune response). Mills holds a patent on a different type of novel adjuvant; modifying such adjuvants may make vaccines better at generating important memory T cells. It's not yet clear how long immunity to pertussis would last in humans with these and other next-generation vaccines, but Locht hopes it could remain potent for decades

The limits and benefits of new vaccines

An important question is how acceptable new vaccines would be to the public. Parents may be more comfortable with vaccines given to their children as nasal sprays, as BPZE1 would be, rather than through injection, as the existing pertussis vaccines are. But this won't fully solve the issue of vaccine hesitancy. Hozbor stresses that more vaccine confidence is required overall, noting that since pertussis is so contagious, high vaccination of the population is needed to prevent outbreaks – ideally at least 90% or 95%. 

Cost is another barrier to expansion of pertussis vaccination currently. In Malaysia, for instance, pertussis vaccination is only available privately. Locht hopes that the BPZE1 vaccine will be cheaper to make than the existing options. "You just grow the organism, harvest it and then use it," he says of the BPZE1 vaccine, while acknowledging that freeze-drying the substance may be the most expensive step. 

However, vaccine affordability is much more complex than how cheaply they can be produced. It's not clear if pharmaceutical companies will be eager to replace a vaccine that involves multiple booster shots with an alternative that requires just one or two doses. In general, "pharmaceutical companies like drugs that they have to repeatedly give to patients or vaccines they have to repeatedly give to individuals," Mills notes. "But that's not what we need." Another consideration is whether to deliver next-generation pertussis vaccines on their own, or keep them as part of a combined childhood vaccine.

Overall, health experts emphasise that the current pertussis vaccines are safe and effective, and that vaccination is important to prevent severe disease. 

Still, the vaccines can be improved. "Long-lasting vaccination would be amazing," says Lautenbach, whose family has experienced the long haul of whooping cough. If this had existed when her daughter was born, "I would have got it for her without hesitation".

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The hunt for heat: Drilling the deepest holes on Earth

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241129-drilling-the-deepest-holes-on-earth-how-to-bore-12-miles-into-our-planets-crust, today

Beneath our feet is an almost limitless source of energy, but while a few lucky locations have geothermal heat close to the surface, the rest of the world will need to dig a lot deeper. The challenge is how to get deep enough.

There are some spots around the world where energy literally bubbles to the surface. In Iceland, home to more than 200 volcanoes and dozens of natural hot springs, tapping into this energy isn't hard. Dotted around the country are steaming pools of water, heated by the geothermal fires that burn just below the crust. Boiling jets of water and steam are thrown into the air by geysers.

Iceland now heats 85% of its houses with this geothermal energy, while 25% of the country's electricity also comes from power stations that harness this heat from underground. It's an appealing prospect – an almost limitless supply of energy waiting to be tapped.  

But geothermal energy offers an essentially inexhaustible green energy source across the planet. And it's "always on'', unlike wind or solar power, since the heat is continually emitted from the Earth's molten core and the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements in our planet's crust. Indeed, the Earth emits such enormous amounts of energy as it cools that the heat lost into space each year is enough to meet the world's total energy demands many times over.

The challenge is tapping into that energy. 

Currently only 32 countries in the world have geothermal power plants in operation. There are fewer than 700 power plants around the world, generating around 97 Terawatt hours (TWh) in 2023 between them. That is less than half the amount of electricity generated by solar in the US alone and far short of estimates for the potential contribution that geothermal could make to the global energy mix. Some estimate that geothermal could contribute around 800-1400TWh of electricity annually by the middle of the century with a further 3,300-3800TWh per year of heat. 

"The Earth itself has the potential to address a variety of hurdles in the transition to a clean energy future," argued Amanda Kolker, geothermal programme manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US, when releasing a report on the potential of geothermal energy in 2023. 

But not every country is as lucky as Iceland, where reservoirs of hot water at temperatures of around 120-240C (248-464F) can be easily accessed close to the surface. In other areas of the country, wells drilled to depths of up to 1.5 miles (2.5km) provide access to temperatures of up to 350C (662F). Iceland's main geothermal site at Reykjanes, for example, has drilled experimental wells down 2.9 miles (4.6km) to access superheated fluids as hot as 600C (1112F). Already, day-to-day heat extraction is taking place using shallower wells that draw on temperatures around 320C (608F) to generate 720 Gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year.

One reason geothermal is not more widespread is the high upfront investment needed to extract that energy. But physically reaching it has also been beyond us so far.  

For other parts of the world to enjoy a part of this geothermal bonanza of clean energy, we need to drill deeper to reach the temperatures needed to generate electricity or provide large-scale heating for nearby neighbourhoods.

Across much of the planet, temperatures increase by 25-30C (45-54F) on average every kilometre you go down through the Earth's crust. In the UK, for example, the subsurface temperature at around 5km (3 miles) down is about 140C (284F), according to the British Geological Survey.

Drill down far enough, though and it is possible to reach a point where water temperatures surpass 374C (705F) at pressures above 220 bars (one bar being average pressure on the Earth's surface at sea level). This is where water enters an energy-intense state known as supercritical, where it exists in a form that is neither liquid or gas. The hotter and more pressurised it is, the greater energy it contains. 

In fact, a single superhot geothermal well could produce five to 10 times the energy that commercial geothermal wells produce today, according to the NREL. 

One major hurdle, however, is that conventional rotary drills – even those tipped with diamond – are ill-equipped to excavate to the kind of depths needed to access these kinds of temperature. In the mysterious deep underworld of uncertain geology, extreme temperatures and huge pressures, drill components can fail frequently, while keeping holes from becoming blocked is a constant battle. 

In 2009, for example, a team working on the Iceland Deep Drilling Project inadvertently tapped supercritical conditions when it drilled into a magma chamber at the Krafla volcano, about 1.2 miles (2km) below the surface. The superheated steam emitted from this well was highly acidic, making it difficult to use. The high pressures and temperatures involved also made it difficult to control, and it had to be intermittently discharged for around two years before a valve failure forced the hole to be sealed. 

Deep drilling can also be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour.

The deepest hole ever dug by humans dates back to the Cold War, however, when there was a race between the superpowers to drill as far into the Earth's crust as possible. The Soviets managed to plough their way through 7.6 miles (12.2km) of rock – creating the Kola Superdeep Borehole, on the Kola Peninsula, high in the Arctic Circle. It took them almost 20 years to reach that depth and it remains the deepest humans have managed to delve into the Earth. (Read more about the Kola Superdeep Borehole in this article by Mark Piesing.)

The NREL estimates that the cost of drilling a 1km deep well is around $2m (£1.57m) while drilling four times that depth can cost between $6m-$10m (£4.7m to £7.87m) with current technology.

Yet deep geothermal energy could provide some considerable cost savings when compared to conventional geothermal, due to the higher temperatures and pressures that can be accessed further into the Earth's crust. Some studies have suggested deep geothermal energy could supply heating for communities at costs similar to other forms of heating, such as using gas, but with fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

With this in mind, some pioneering researchers and companies are turning to new types of drills and drilling techniques to bore some of the deepest holes ever created in the hope of bringing geothermal energy to parts of the world that never thought it was possible.

Quaise Energy, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for example, are aiming to drill holes as deep as 12 miles (20km) to access temperatures of 500C (932F) or more. To do so, they are turning to a tool that draws on years of research into nuclear fusion power. "While others are putting shovels in the ground, we're putting microwaves in the ground for the first time," says the company's co-founder Matt Houde. 

He and his colleagues are experimenting with millimetre-wave directed energy beams that vaporise even the hardest rock. It focuses high-powered beam of radiation similar to microwaves but at a higher frequency onto a segment of rock, heating it up to 3,000C (5,432F) so that it melts and vaporises. By directing the beam so it bores through the rock, holes can be created without the debris and friction created by traditional drilling techniques.

"Millimetre-wave drilling is a process that can operate largely independent of depth," says Houde. "And millimetre-wave energy can also transmit through dirty, dusty environments."

The technology has grown out of nuclear fusion plasma experiments conducted by Paul Woskov, an engineer at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Centre. Millimetre-wave directed energy has been explored as a way of heating up plasma in nuclear fusion reactors since the 1970s, but a few years ago Woskov hit upon another use for the technology. He started using millimetre-wave beams generated by a device known as a gyrotron to melt through rock.

But so far the technology has only been tested in the laboratory, drilling shallow holes in relatively small samples of rock, but the company claims it can drill through rock at around 3.5m (11.5ft) per hour. While this is slow compared to traditional drilling techniques, there are other benefits as the "drill bit" isn't physically grinding through the rock, it should not wear out or need replacing. Quaise Energy are now at the final stage of laboratory testing of millimetre-wave technology prior to beginning field trials in early 2025. 

But transferring the millimetre-wave drilling technology from the laboratory to a full-scale drilling operation will still be a challenge.

"They have never been used before in the deep high-pressure subsurface environment," says Woskow. "Changes due to intense energy-matter interaction applied to drilling require a new learning curve." 

Slovakia-based GA Drilling, meanwhile, is exploring a different high-energy drill technology to bore into the Earth's crust. It is using a pulse plasma drill, based on very short high energy electric discharges that disintegrate rock without causing it to melt. This avoids creating any viscous molten rock, which can be difficult to remove and can stop drill bits penetrating further. "Since the process is very swift with short shocks crumbling the rock, there isn't time for melt to form – so the need to pull up and replace the bit is greatly reduced," says Igor Kocis, chief executive and chairman of GA Drilling. "Five to eight kilometres (3-5 miles) is a target for our current development programme – and later 10km-plus," he adds. "These depths will allow nearly universal access to geothermal power."  

Research into pulse plasma drills – using very short energy pulses that disintegrate rock using ionised gas as hot as 6,000C (10,832F) – is another avenue being explored by a European consortium led by the Geothermal Energy and Geofluids (GEG) group, with partners in Germany and Switzerland.

GA Drilling has also been collaborated with Konstantina Vogiatzaki, associate professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford to adapt advanced mathematics looking at how  supercritical fluids can be controlled when tapping deep earth energy sources accessed via plasma drilling. "We worked on defining the optimum combustion system for a full-scale drilling tool, opening new horizons in controlling ultra-high pressure combustion through plasma drilling," says Vogiatzaki. 

Others are looking beyond our own planet for ways to help us drill down into it. Technology developed for planetary exploration missions on the scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures can reach 475C (887F), are being adopted by geothermal drilling companies. Ozark Integrated Circuits – an electronics manufacturer based in Fayetteville, Arkansas – has been adapting circuits capable of withstanding extreme temperatures that can be used on deep Earth geothermal drilling rigs.

For its own part, the NREL has turned to AI to analyse complex subterranean environments to try to find the best places to drill for supercritical water, as well as helping to predict and detect faults with drills before they cause major issues.

And some companies are already making inroads into the deep Earth. Geothermal company Eavor told the BBC that in 2024 it reached a depth of three miles (5km) with two vertical wells at a site in Gerestried, Bavaria, Germany. It has been using two of the largest land-based drilling rigs in Europe in an effort to create a commercial-scale plant in Geretsried that aims to bring geothermal heat to the surface by circulating water inside a closed loop design it calls the Eavor Loop. The system works like a giant radiator, with cold water in the loop being heated underground and then coming back to the surface where it will be used to generate electricity and piped into nearby homes through a district heating system. Eavor expectes to begin generating energy at the site in the first half of 2025, says John Redfern, Eavor's CEO and president.

"Our technology is looking to drill up to 11km (6.8 miles) in the future," says geologist and Eavor co-founder Jeanine Vany. "I believe we can make meaningful progress towards unlocking superhot rock in the next three to five years."    

Their closed-loop approach also helps to avoid some of the contamination problems that can occur when superheated water is extracted from deep geothermal wells – as the Iceland Deep Drilling Project discovered in 2009. It can also help to reduce the emissions of hazardous gases, such as hydrogen sulphide, that open-loop geothermal systems can emit.

Vany also points out that deep geothermal energy doesn't need a lot of space on the surface, which means it could be slotted into urban locations in the future. 

But there are other problems to be overcome. It isn't yet clear how easy it will be to maintain deep geothermal wells and keep them from becoming blocked.

The drive to tap deep geothermal energy could also bring new life to ageing fossil fuel power stations as countries look to switch off their traditional carbon-emitting energy sources. Retrofitting old coal power stations into geothermal plants could be a way of giving the steam-powered generators a second life and help to speed up the construction of geothermal plants by taking advantage of existing electricity transmission lines. Woskov has identified an abandoned coal power plant in upstate New York, which he hopes could be reopened before the end of the decade to generate electricity from the heat deep underground.

There would be a certain poetry in that switch – a power station that once ran on a dirty fuel dug out of the ground finding new life in the clean energy revolution with an energy source from even deeper underground.

The question is – will they be able to dig deep enough?

* An earlier verison of this article stated the Quaise Energy had hoped to convert an old coal power plant into a geothermal plant. The BBC would like to clarify that this was an idea put forward by Paul Woskov and is not something Quaise Energy are currently working on.

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How to avoid being a toxic friend

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241129-how-to-avoid-being-a-toxic-friend, today

A few simple steps to improve your relationships can help make sure you are the kind of friend you would wish to have yourself.

Human beings are notoriously inept at recognising our failings. We may complain about another person's arrogance, ignorance or stupidity, without ever considering the enormous flaws that they may find in our characters.

This blind spot will be evident in each of our friendships. Without ever meaning to do harm, our thoughtless actions hurt the people we love best. I'm talking about casual cruelty rather than deliberate unkindness – but the consequences of these slip-ups are damaging.

While writing my recent book on the science of social connection, I discovered that "ambivalent relationships" – people who blow both hot and cold – can cause even more harm to wellbeing than purely spiteful figures who are predictably unpleasant. Fortunately, research findings can help us develop simple-yet-powerful strategies to identify our worst habits and mitigate their damage. Here are my five favourite lessons to avoid being an accidental frenemy.

Be consistent

No one likes to be kept in a state of uncertainty – a fact that can be seen in people's responses to physical pain. Archy de Berker at the UCL Institute of Neurology in the UK, and his colleagues, asked people to play a computer game that delivered a mild electric shock whenever they found a snake hiding under a virtual rock. To examine the effects of uncertainty on the stress response, the researchers varied how likely it would be that a rock would be hiding a snake across the course of the experiment, and measured the physiological signs of anxiety – such as sweat and pupil dilation. 

Quite surprisingly, the participants tended to show a more pronounced stress response when there was only a 50% chance of being shocked, compared with scenarios when they knew for certain that the pain was coming. 

Fairweather behaviour may put the people around us in a similar state of anticipation. In studies investigating unpredictable friendships, scientists ask participants to imagine going to a friend for advice, understanding or a favour. They ask them to respond to the following questions, on a scale of one (not at all) to six (extremely):

• How helpful is your connection?

• How upsetting is your connection?

Anyone who elicits two or more on both questions is considered an "ambivalent connection" – and the inherent doubt about their reaction can be a serious source of stress. In one study, simply knowing that their ambivalent friends were sitting in the next room was enough to raise participants' blood pressure.

We may not always be able to provide the support our friends need, but we can try to be a little more reliable in our responses. We might learn to manage our bad moods better, for example, so that we do not lash out if our friends approach us at the wrong moment – rather than placing them at the whim of our emotional weather.

Avoid the illusion of transparency

Each of us is trapped in our own minds, but we overestimate how well others can read our emotional state – a phenomenon that is sometimes known as the illusion of transparency.

This may be evident at job interviews: we assume that our nerves are written all over our face – but the anxious feelings are often far more difficult to discern than we realise. This common cognitive error may also prevent us from sharing our appreciation of others, giving them the impression that they are neglected and undervalued.

Amit Kumar, at the University of Texas at Austin, and Nicholas Epley, at the University of Chicago, asked groups of participants to write letters of gratitude to important people in their lives. Using surveys to measure the letter writers' expectations and the recipients' actual reactions, the researchers found that people consistently underestimated how surprised the other person would be to receive their kind words, and how good it would make them feel. They assumed that the other person already knew how grateful they were.

It is, of course, possible that our body language will convey our warmth and appreciation to others, but we can't rely on that fact – meaning that we would often do far better to express those feelings in words.

Validate others' feelings (but nudge them to consider new perspectives)

When someone is going through a hard time, they will often naturally seek understanding from others. An empathetic response can validate their feelings, which eases some of their stress. A toxic friend may be highly dismissive or judgemental about your feelings – resulting in a sense of rejection that only adds to the person's emotional burden.

Just because we feel sympathy for someone's pain does not mean that we have to wholeheartedly agree with their interpretation of the situation, however. The most effective offerings of emotional support will often include encouragement or advice that helps them to see their problems from a new perspective. 

Indeed, a growing body of psychological research suggests that simply encouraging someone to vent, without any attempt to reframe their problems, may only encourage rumination and amplify their distress in the long term. This vulture-like tendency to feed off another's emotions – without helping them to change their situation – is therefore another form of toxicity in friendships. 

A constructive conversation needs plenty of sensitivity and tact, but a paper by Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan and colleagues offers a few questions that may help someone to view their problems through a wider lens, including:

• Looking at the situation, could you tell me why this event was stressful to you?

• Have you learned anything from this experience, and if so, would you mind sharing it with me? 

• In the grand scheme of things, if you look at the "big picture", does that help you make sense of this experi­ence? Why or why not?

After considering these different points of view, participants in the study tended to feel greater closure about a painful event, compared with those who had recounted the concrete details of the situation and the feelings it had produced.

Celebrate each other's successes (and practice confelicity)

Empathy is equally important in the sharing of positive emotions. Compassion, which derives from the Latin for "shared pain", is well accepted as the foundation of friendship, but the importance of "confelicity", deriving from the Latin for "shared happiness", is much less well-known. 

This neglect has been embedded in the scientific research. When Shelly Gable at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Harry Reis at the University of Rochester, New York, surveyed the psychology literature in 2010, for instance, they found that the number of published articles focusing on negative life events outnumbered those focusing on positive life events by more than seven to one.

This is now changing, with multiple studies revealing that our conversations about good news can be just as important as compassion for the development and maintenance of healthy relationships. A supportive friend should respond actively and constructively – asking for more information, discussing the implications, and expressing their own joy or pride. Many people, however, respond too passively – by quickly changing the subject, for example – while a few are actively destructive, making comments that attempt to minimise the events' significance.

With the distractions of daily life, we may forget to give these moments the attention they deserve, but if we want to be a good friend, we should take the time and effort to celebrate our friends' successes – however small or large they may be.

We might also think more carefully about the way we share our own happiness. We may worry that we'll seem boastful or arrogant, and so choose to keep our successes a secret, but this strategy can backfire badly, according to a series of experiments by Annabelle Roberts at the University of Texas at Austin, Emma Levine at the University of Chicago, and Övül Sezer at Cornell University. In general, they found people tend to be highly offended when we hide information like job promotions from the people around us. They see the behaviour as paternalistic, establishing froideur in place of warmth and connection. 

Be the first to say sorry 

Everyone makes mistakes, but few will apologise freely, allowing resentment to fester in our social bonds long after the offence has been committed.

The psychological research suggests that there are four main obstacles to apologising effectively: we don't appreciate the harm we've caused; we assume that the act of apologising itself will be too painful and shaming; we believe that the apology will do little to repair the relationship; and finally, we may simply not understand what constitutes a good apology – so we fail to say the words that will be necessary for healing. 

The first point clearly depends on the details of the disagreement. But the next two concerns – like so many of our assumptions about relationships – are largely unfounded, and therefore present unnecessary barriers to social connection. In general, people feel relief at making amends for their wrongdoings, and we may be better able to rebuild the broken bridges than we expect – provided our apology is given in the right way. 

To ensure that your apology is effective, you should give the other person plenty of time to express their hurt at what has occurred. You should then acknowledge responsibility for the offence, express (genuine) regret or sadness, offer to repair the damage and explain how you will avoid making a similar mistake again.

Every relationship will have its ups and downs: that is the nature of human behaviour and the complexity of our social lives. By applying these five simple tips for stronger connection, however, you can easily avoid the most common errors, ensuring that you are the kind of friend you would wish to have yourself.

* David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author of The Laws of Connection, which examines 13 science-based strategies to transform your social life, published by Canongate (UK & Commonwealth)/Pegasus (US and Canada). He is @davidarobson on Instagram and Threads.

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How the Amazon's 'Boiling River' foreshadows a warmer world

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241210-how-the-amazons-boiling-river-foreshadows-climate-change, today

The Boiling River regularly reaches 45C – with drastic consequences for the surrounding rainforest.

When you drive towards Peru's Boiling River, along a bumpy, four-hour track through the rainforest, it's only after you transcend a crest in the landscape that you see it ahead of you, says Alyssa Kullberg, a postdoctoral researcher in plant ecology at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). Huge billows of steam rise from a clutch of trees in the wide, saucer-like depression below.

"It was so magical," says Kullberg, remembering the first time she saw it with her own eyes. The Boiling River, also known as the Shanay-timpishka or La Bomba, is part of a tributary in east-central Peru that connects to the mighty Amazon River.

The hills in this area were scoured by fossil fuel companies looking for oil reserves in the 1930s but the secrets of the legendary Boiling River itself are only now being told in depth by Western scientists. Researchers have, for instance, determined that the river is heated by geothermal sources deep in the ground below. Kullberg first visited this mysterious place in 2022 along with a team from the US and Peru, including Riley Fortier, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Miami. As the researchers trekked through the jungle, they noticed something unusual about the plant life around them.

"It was just really evident to all of us that there was a clear and noticeable change along the river," says Fortier. "The forest felt maybe scrubbier. There weren't as [many] big trees and it felt a little bit drier as well, the leaf litter was crunchier."

Fortier recalls marvelling at how hot this stretch of the jungle was, even for the balmy Amazon. He and other members of the team realised that this place represented a possible snapshot of how climate change might alter the Amazon, as global warming pushes average air temperatures higher than they are today. In that sense, the Boiling River could be seen as a kind of natural experiment – a possible glimpse of the future.

But studying it wasn't going to be easy: "It's like doing fieldwork in a sauna," says Fortier.

In a paper published in October, Fortier, Kullberg and colleagues from the US and Peru describe how they tracked a year's worth of air temperature readings near the Boiling River using 13 temperature logging devices. The researchers positioned these along a stretch of the river that included cooler areas more typical of the wider forest. The average annual temperature ranged from 24-25C (75-77F) in those cooler places to 28-29C (82-84F) in the warmest parts. The maximum temperatures logged, in a handful of the hottest locations along the Boiling River, approached 45C (113F).

The team also battled stifling conditions to make a detailed analysis of which plant species were present. They carefully studied vegetation in a series of plots sampled along the river and detected an important correlation: where the river was hotter, plant life was less dense and some species were absent entirely. "There was way less vegetation in the understorey," says Kullberg. "Even though it's very steamy, the vegetation looked a lot drier."

Some large trees such as Guarea grandifolia, an evergreen that can grow up to 50m (164ft) tall, seemed to struggle near the hottest parts of the river, for example. Overall, the heat seemed to have a negative impact on biodiversity. The sheer amount of steam in the air might even deter flying insects or other animals from the area, suggests Fortier, though the team's study did not examine this specifically.

Plant species that are known to tolerate high temperatures were more common in the hotter areas, which in itself may not be unexpected – but the team was surprised to see this effect even over very small distances. The entire length of their study area was not more than around 2km (1.24 miles). Plus, the hottest parts of the Boiling River are intermittent – a handful of particularly steamy patches here and there. The study results suggest that, as soon as temperatures reach a certain point, plant life responds almost immediately.

"I thought it was great," says Chris Boulton of the University of Exeter, who was not involved in the study, referring to the team's interpretation of the Boiling River as a natural experiment. "It's a clever thing to do." The Boiling River is an example of how the Amazon might change in the future, says Diego Oliveira Brandão, a member of the technical-scientific secretariat of the Science Panel for the Amazon, a scientific research organisation. He adds that he is concerned about the impact that such consequences of climate change could have on indigenous peoples. "These populations depend on biological resources," he says.

Boulton agrees, pointing out that Indigenous groups in the Amazon have already faced significant threats such as flooding and drought, which in some cases has been exacerbated by climate change.

Higher temperatures in the Amazon could threaten the very functioning of many plants there, says Rodolfo Nóbrega at the University of Bristol – and the Boiling River illustrates this perfectly. "As you increase [the region's] temperature, even though you have water availability [nearby], you might reduce the photosynthetic capability of the plants," he says. "What I believe is happening is the plants are being stressed by temperature even though there is water around." Though he notes that the study authors did not measure the temperature or abundance of groundwater.

Kullberg says that, while the Boiling River does hint at how increased temperatures could affect biodiversity and plant growth, it is important to remember that this part of the Amazon might not exactly mirror the rainforest's future in a broad sense. One would not expect so much steam anywhere else, for example. And large weather effects, such as changes in storms or rainfall, will also influence how the forest as a whole evolves in the coming years.

There is another reason why the Boiling River might not fully represent the conditions of the wider Amazon basin under the influence of further climate change. Nóbrega points out that the Amazon is a massive place. It spans portions of nine different countries, including Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and the French Guiana, an oversea French territory. In total, it covers an area of more than 6.7 million sq km (2.6 million square miles). "What you find in one area might not be scientifically relevant for another area that has another rainfall pattern or another plant distribution," he says.

Previously, Boulton and colleagues have studied the possibility that the Amazon is reaching a "tipping point", a moment at which climate change and deforestation would force the forest into rapid decline.

"You might see sudden dieback of trees, maybe over a decade or so," says Boulton. He notes that the Amazon isn't just getting hotter and drier because of climate change, though. One particularly insidious problem is deforestation, which can cut off atmospheric rivers that flow in the air above the forest. These would otherwise bring moisture into the forest in the form of rainfall. "If you cut down trees, you ruin that link, basically, you make it drier," he explains.

A major report on various global tipping points published in 2023, authored by more than 200 researchers including Boulton, explored the risk that the Amazon rainforest could soon turn into a much drier place – something resembling savannah rather than jungle.

And yet by studying the Boiling River, we can get an idea of which species are most likely to survive in these harsh new conditions, suggests Fortier. He notes the example of the giant Ceiba tree (Ceiba lupuna), which can grow to be up to 50m (164ft) tall. This tree seemed resilient to higher temperatures near the Boiling River, according to Kullberg, an observation backed up by previous research.

Kullberg notes that the Ceiba tree can store water in its trunk, which helps it to survive drought conditions. Confirming that specific plants can cope with the extreme environment of the Boiling River could help conservationists decide which parts of the wider rainforest require the greatest protection, says Fortier. Perhaps it will even be possible to maintain more forgiving microclimates beneath a forest canopy made up of resilient species, adds Kullberg.

Boulton views protecting the Amazon as a way of protecting humanity far beyond the forest itself. The risk is that, if the rainforest does reach a catastrophic tipping point beyond which it begins to die back rapidly, then the whole world will likely suffer. "If the forest goes, a lot of that carbon is going to go up into the atmosphere and that's going to affect the climate," he says. "It's not just local, it's global."

The Boiling River, then, isn't just a glimpse of the future. It is also a warning.

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AI cancer diagnosis 'might have saved my life'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7qe2zr7ggo, today

A Farncombe woman's cancer was identified within hours thanks to a new AI tool that has been introduced by the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust.

Dianne Covey, 69, was told that doctors had spotted something suspicious on her lungs after she reported having a persistent cough.

A diagnosis of lung cancer was confirmed after Ms Covey's chest X-ray was analysed by Annalise.ai, an AI tool which scans for areas of concern and advises clinicians of those requiring urgent review.

Ms Covey said: "I never really understood much about artificial intelligence but now I think that it might have saved my life. I am very grateful."

"When I went to the GP, I had a bad feeling that it was lung cancer and was really worried," she added.

"I feel like the speed of the diagnosis and the fact that my cancer has been caught in the early stages means that I have a second chance at life."

The retired hospital worker was the first patient at the trust to be diagnosed with lung cancer using this technology. Her cancer was found at Stage 1 and the prognosis is positive, said a hospital spokesperson.

The AI tool aids radiographers by prioritising which X-rays to assess first, replacing the previous approach whereby these images were reviewed in chronological order.

These reviews are now also more accurate because any tiny anomalies present on scans are detected by the software, said the hospital spokesperson.

This tool is being used across five trusts which are part of the Surrey, Sussex and Frimley Imaging Network - Royal Surrey, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust and East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust.

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Crumbling rocks, wetter avalanches: Why life-and-death rescues are changing in a warming world

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241210-how-life-and-death-mountain-rescue-is-changing-in-a-warming-world, today

Skiers, climbers, cyclists and even mushroom-pickers face surprising new risks in the mountains – and so do those who rescue them. But scientists are working on ways to keep us all safe.

"Here's the scenario: you're on foot, there are three victims, they're climbers, injured by rockfall," an instructor calls out to a group of mountain rescuers in orange jackets, yellow helmets, goggles and climbing harnesses. A metal door opens, and snow billows out. The rescuers switch on their head torches and rush through the door with their stretcher, into a huge, dark room fitted out to feel like a windswept mountain at night.

The staged rescue is part of a training session at the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine at Eurac Research, a research centre in Bolzano, Italy. Scientists here are testing new ways to keep people safe in the mountains. To do that, they conduct experiments inside a giant box called an "extreme climate simulator", where the temperature, air pressure, light levels, and snow and wind conditions can be adjusted to simulate any weather and altitude.

For emergency medicine specialists from all over Italy, the simulator also offers a new way to train for dangerous missions, from cave rescues, to helping trapped climbers safely off a cliff face.

"Some of the most complex rescues are those involving climbers, when they are on a rock wall with just a big void below them," says Simona Berteletti, the director of the medical school of Italy's Mountain and Cave Rescue Service, which undertakes more than 12,000 missions a year. Like in many hot-spots for outdoor pursuits around the world, that number is rising as outdoor tourism is booming. The operations can put the helpers themselves at risk: a study of injuries suffered by Italian search and rescue specialists found that 41% of them happened during the missions, and 59% during training events.

"Since the pandemic, we've seen a huge increase in the number of people visiting the mountains, including people who are very inexperienced," says Giacomo Strapazzon, the head of the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine. "So the number of missions is continually growing. And we also see the rescuers themselves having accidents, be it during training, or during the mission itself."

Inside, the climate simulator – which goes by the name "terraXcube" – essentially feels like a giant, and very noisy, fridge. Loud ventilators blow snow across the floor. On one side is scaffolding, simulating a rock wall where three climbers – or rather, people pretending to be climbers, along with some fake limbs – are entangled in their ropes. One is hanging from the wall; another is trapped on a high ledge; a third has fallen and is lying at the bottom of the wall. It's -17C (1F). As soon as one of the climbers is safely brought down from the wall, the rescuers are told that he is now suffering a cardiac arrest.

"Here we can safely practice treating people in the most extreme conditions, in the cold, and in darkness," says Berteletti, standing outside the chamber. The rescuers still also practice outdoors, but use the simulator to master extreme scenarios and complex techniques in safety, thereby reducing the overall risk of injury during training. "And if anyone gets unwell during the exercise, they can just leave the box," she says. "Whereas if you're doing a training session 4,000m [13,000ft] above sea level, on a glacier, and someone feels unwell – that's a long way down."

Berteletti's usual missions are on Monte Rosa, a 4,600m (15,000ft) mountain on the border between Italy and Switzerland, which is home to Europe's highest refuge. She says that accidents there include people falling into crevasses on the glacier, climbers falling off the ridges, and altitude-related illnesses. Italy is also home to many caves, which present a special set of challenges.

Nodding at a passing cave rescue specialist, known as a "speleo" (short for speleological rescue), Berteletti says cave missions are very complex, and completely different from the others. "They can be extremely long and take days, even weeks, going 1,000m [3,300ft] deep. Sometimes they have to set up entire hospital tents underground."

During breaktime, the participants, who are rescue specialists from all over Italy, share the most common reasons people can get into trouble, such as slippery footwear, and leaving trails. But seemingly harmless activities can also be surprisingly risky. "We often rescue mushroom pickers," says Oscar Santunione, from the Piste Cimone rescue service in the Emilia-Romagna region. "Our area is famous for mushrooms, and there are a lot more people these days who come foraging for them. They underestimate the terrain, which can drop off very suddenly."

Climate change and avalanches

Climate change is also increasing certain outdoor risks. The European Alps have warmed twice as much as the global average, and a 2024 analysis by researchers in Switzerland has found that the change is altering certain environmental hazards. It has for example led to an increase in rockfall in the high mountains due to thawing glaciers and permafrost, which previously acted as a kind of glue for the rocks. (Read more about how climate change is changing the Alps by causing high-altitude permafrost to thaw.)

There has also been "a shift towards avalanches with more wet snow and fewer powder clouds", due to rising temperatures, according to the study.

Rescue techniques can make a big difference in how well we cope with hazards, research suggests. For example, the survival rate for avalanche accidents in Switzerland has risen by 10% between 1981 and 2020, while rescue times have become faster over that period, according to a study by Eurac Research and WSL, the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research. A rise in preventive measures such as avalanche warning services, training for ski tourers, better search-and-rescue techniques, and improved emergency medical care, have all helped boost the survival rate, the study's authors say.

However, rescuers now have less time to get someone out of an avalanche alive: the critical window, where survival probability exceeds 90%, has shortened from 15 to just 10 minutes after being buried by the snow, the study suggests. Strapazzon says this could be linked to severe injuries, or the wetter, denser snow, which makes it harder to breathe – but that more research is needed to study those potential links.

Strapazzon emphasises the importance of precautions, such as having avalanche safety training and carrying an avalanche safety kit when ski touring. This applies even if you are going with a guide, he says. "If the guide is also buried by the avalanche, what are you going to do?"

Ski touring, also known as backcountry skiing, involves going into wilder areas away from groomed pistes. While it is becoming more popular, it's considered high-risk especially because of the risk of avalanches.

Other risks are triggered by outdoor trends, the rescuers say. "One thing that's changed a lot is the number of accidents involving cycling," says Berteletti. "These days we see a lot of people on e-bikes, who use them to get up the mountain easily, without any training, but then don't know how to get back down, which is more difficult. Before, we didn't really have that problem, because only very experienced, strong cyclists made it up the mountain in the first place."

People unfamiliar with the mountains may also simply underestimate its capricious weather, Strapazzon says. Pointing at the sunny autumn sky outside the window, he says this is exactly the kind of day that can be dangerous. "On a sunny autumn day like this, people climb up a Via Ferrata [a type of climbing route with steel cables and ladders], then they arrive at the top, there's snow and ice, and they don't have crampons or ice picks, because they didn't expect this," he says. "And it gets dark earlier, so they're surprised by the dark."

While rescue missions mostly end well, the sheer volume of operations can put a strain on the helpers, who are usually unpaid volunteers. In the US, the increase in rescue calls is putting overstretched helpers at the risk of burning out, according to a 2022 study of America's busiest search and rescue services, which are found in Colorado.

A safer exit

Anyone trapped on a mountain may greet the sight of a nearing helicopter with huge relief – but unfortunately, its arrival does not mean the danger is truly over. Helicopters can crash, and operations hoisting people up, can go wrong. The pilot and others in the helicopter may also struggle with altitude.

Marika Falla, a neurologist and senior researcher at Eurac Research, used the extreme climate simulator to test the impact of altitude on the cognitive function of emergency providers.

"We found that at 5,000m (16,400ft), their reaction time was slower," says Falla. A helicopter may fly at that altitude on rescue missions, she explains, and both the pilot and any emergency providers on board could be affected. Providing everyone on board with oxygen bottles could help prevent these problems with attention and reaction time, a separate study by Falla and her colleagues suggests. They found that oxygen supplementation improved cognitive performance during exposure to 4,000m (13,100ft) altitude.

In the future, drones may also be an alternative to helicopters in some cases, says Strapazzon, and could carry equipment such as defibrillators.

"Helicopters can't always fly," because of the weather, and some terrain such as a narrow gorge may not be accessible by helicopter, he explains. "A drone can fly where a helicopter can't – and it gets there more quickly, because it can be kept packed and ready."

Strapazzon emphasises that being aware of the risks is helpful when enjoying the mountains – but also, that it shouldn't put people off them. "Being in the mountains comes with a certain risk, but if you stayed away, you'd miss out on a beautiful experience," he says.

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TikTok asks for emergency pause to looming US ban

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yx7e2lx3yo, today

TikTok has asked a court for an emergency injunction to prevent it becoming unavailable in the US next month.

The US government passed a law demanding the app's sale or ban because of what it says are its links to the Chinese state - links TikTok and its parent company ByteDance deny.

The social media company lost its appeal against the law in a decision handed down on Friday - and said afterwards it would appeal to the Supreme Court.

TikTok and ByteDance have now submitted a legal request to temporarily block the law to give the Supreme Court more time to consider the matter.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has called for the request to be dismissed, saying its underlying arguments have already been "definitively rejected."

TikTok and ByteDance say an injunction is also justified because Donald Trump is about to replace Joe Biden as president.

Trump has previously indicated he would overturn the law.

"The public interest favours providing sufficient time for the Supreme Court to conduct an orderly review process, and for the incoming Administration to evaluate this exceptionally important case," ByteDance and TikTok said in their emergency legal filing.

They added that even a temporary ban from early 2025 would have "devastating effects" on its operations.

It would be "inflicting irreparable injury by silencing Petitioners and the 170 million Americans who use the platform each month," the filing added.

The company also said that even a temporary ban could cause a loss of revenue, as well as a loss of users and creators who make content for the platform.

On Friday, judges rejected the idea that the law was unconstitutional - saying it was the result of "extensive, bipartisan action" by lawmakers.

They further concluded the law was "carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People's Republic of China)."

According to the wording of the law, given President Joe Biden's stamp of approval as part of a broader foreign aid package in April, TikTok would stop being made available to US citizens unless sold by its parent company ByteDance within nine months.

The deadline would see TikTok effectively banned in the US from 19 January 2025.

In Monday's request for an emergency injunction, TikTok's lawyers argued the law would "inflict extreme and irreparable harm" on the company - adding it would do so "on the eve of a presidential inauguration".

President-elect Donald Trump will take office as the country's 47th president on 20 January.

He has previously claimed he would "save TikTok" from a ban.

Ahead of the run-up to the November election, Trump said the law would benefit Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

But experts have warned that while his promises may offer a lifeline for the company's US future, they are no guarantee of the action he will take once in office.

DOJ officials said in their letter also filed on Monday that the appeals court should reject the injunction request.

"The Court is familiar with the relevant facts and law and has definitively rejected petitioners' constitutional claims in a thorough decision that recognizes the critical national-security interests underlying the Act," they argue.


Scientists seek to stop satellites colliding

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y778xel99o, today

A new space research centre will focus on how to prevent satellites crashing into each other.

Durham University's £5m project will bring scientists and policymakers together to design better "traffic management" for satellites, according to Prof James Osborn, founding director of the centre.

He said the assumption that objects do not crash into each other because space is so vast "could no longer be relied upon".

He also said satellites were vital to bring the internet to rural areas such as Weardale in Durham.

In the 1960s the world launched very few new satellites in space a year.

However, Prof Osborn said in recent years the number had skyrocketed due to the widespread availability of reusable rockets.

"Now it's thousands of satellites a year," he said.

Potential collisions

There are currently about 10,000 active satellites in orbit.

Prof Osborn said: "Nobody knows where they are going at any one moment.

"That's a problem because that leads to potential collisions or accidents.

"The new centre is helping to build technology to monitor where satellites are."

The space centre team is also working on new policies for managing objects in space in the hope they will be taken up by space agencies and governments.

Being able to devise new technologies as well as work on new policies in tandem was the "key point" of the centre, he added.

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'Drown in stars' during meteor shower - astronomer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vrl2grd99o, today

An astronomer has said a dazzling meteor shower set to light up the sky on Saturday night is an opportunity to "drown in stars".

The yearly event known as the Geminid meteor shower - where shooting stars appear in the night sky - is active from 4 to 20 December, and peaks on 14 December.

Northamptonshire astronomer Nick Hewitt hopes it will inspire more people to discover the wonder of a night sky.

"I think there's endless fascination - we've learnt so much over the last few hundred years and there's always something up there that's going to surprise us," he said.

Meteors are pieces of debris ranging from the size of a grain of sand to a pea that enter our planet's atmosphere and vaporise, producing a bright streak of light that is commonly known as a shooting star.

In areas where there is little light pollution, they can be seen with the naked eye.

Top tips for stargazing

* Wrap up warm

* Turn off all the lights around you

* Be patient - it might take a little while to see something special

* You'll need to wait for a bit for your eyes to adjust to the darkness

* What else can you see? Write down your observations

To find dark-sky locations in Northamptonshire "you don't have to go too far out of urban areas", according to Mr Hewitt.

"A little to the west of Towcester is very good, as well as rural areas surrounding Raunds.

"On a clear night, you might even be able to see the milky way on the outskirts of urban areas such as Northampton.

"Seeing the milky way in all its glory is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see."

During the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, up to 150 meteors are expected to be visible.

It is a particularly beautiful meteor shower because the meteors vary in colour, including white, yellow, green, red and blue.

The best way to enjoy the shooting star show, Mr Hewitt advises, is to give your eyes 10 to 15 minutes to adjust.

"Once you get your eye in, you can start to see the subtle colours of the stars," he said.

The wonder of the night sky, he added, is one of the "greatest things you can experience. It is a bit addictive".

Asked whether he's ever seen a UFO in the sky above Northamptonshire, Mr Hewitt said: "I thought I had once, but it wasn't. It was the end of a rocket."

To learn more about the night sky, he recommends attending one of the astronomy talks held by the Northamptonshire Natural History Society.

"Learn your constellations, work out where the planets are and then buy yourself a pair of binoculars. Drown in stars, it's lovely."

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Butler gears up for 'fighting family Christmas'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c140j15j452o, today

Action hero Gerard Butler's latest character role may share his bearded look, but the similarities between the two end there.

The Scot plays Santa Claus in a new TV animation, The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland.

But while St Nick is off taking care of Christmas business, Butler is looking forward to a good old festive fight - with his family.

The Paisley-born actor will be in Scotland for the holidays, something he tries to do as much as possible.

"I almost always come back. It's an important time to check in", says the 55-year-old who now lives in Los Angeles.

He believes a "good Scottish Christmas" involves seeing family and friends - then "picking up on fights where they've been left a year ago", which can lead to a few smashed glasses.

Butler is best-known for gritty action-packed roles in 300 (2006), Olympus has Fallen (2013) and Kandahar (2023) but thinks finally playing the man in the big red suit is a dream role.

He says he can retire happy. "I've finally conquered it," he says. "I'm playing Santa."

'We're going down a rabbit hole'

The film is a mash-up of Clement Clarke Moore's 'Twas The Night Before Christmas poem and Lewis Carroll's Novel, Alice in Wonderland.

It follows Santa and his reindeer into the world of Wonderland as they work to boost the Queen of Hearts' Christmas spirit with the help of Alice and the Mad Hatter.

Butler says the film "goes bonkers".

"We're going down a rabbit hole and stuff is gonna get pretty crazy".

Butler says his version of St. Nick is a bit of an idiot who just loves being Santa.

"It's awesome to make those kind of movies that you can imagine families sitting watching together at Christmas time," says Butler.

"I do think it could become a little Christmas classic".

The animation sees Butler return to his singing roots - first showcased in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of The Opera film in 2004.

He said he didn't want to overthink it and to jump straight into a sound booth.

"The second I read this script, I could just hear my voice and see those little moments. I almost wanted to step in and do it straight away,"

"That Scottish accent really lends itself to a dotey, kind of bombastic, fun Santa. It just seemed to work well," says Butler.

The Sky Original film is based on the bestselling book of the same name written by Carys Bexington illustrated by Kate Hindley.

Butler's Scottish Santa is joined by other famous voices including Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke as the Queen of Hearts and Bridgerton's Simone Ashley as Alice.

The film will be available on Sky Cinema for UK audiences on 13 December.


The Princess of Wales to Gigi Hadid: How ultra-traditional tweed found a new fanbase

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241210-how-ultra-traditional-tweed-found-a-new-fanbase, today

Once synonymous with the aristocracy, the thoroughly British winter favourite is now in demand more than ever. It is "timeless and beyond trends – and generally self-cleaning".

Do you have an item of clothing in your wardrobe that is 40 years old? And if you do, is it still good enough – in terms of both style and quality – to wear today? For King Charles, the answer is a resounding "yes". The monarch has been wearing the same double-breasted coat since the 1980s. The reason for its longevity? It's made of tweed.

A tightly woven woollen fabric, traditionally in plain twill, herringbone or houndstooth patterns, tweed is a winter favourite for its natural insulation. And tweed is everywhere this season, from luxury labels such as Chloe and Margaret Howell, to high-street brands like Marks & Spencer.

But King Charles's preference for tweed is more likely a result of its timeless and sustainable credentials. Since 2008, he has been a patron and founder of The Campaign For Wool, a global initiative run by a coalition of industry groups to support and grow the wool industry in response to the rise of synthetic fibres. Much of the work focuses on engaging consumers through fashion and interiors.

"Tweed is a 100% natural, renewable and biodegradable fabric, minimising the environmental impact of manufacturing," says Martin Crawford, consultant at Anderson & Sheppard, the Savile Row tailor behind King Charles's double-breasted tweed coat. "All tweed manufacturers adhere to strict guidelines, and very much promote their green credentials."

Crawford describes tweed as "the first cottage industry" and attributes its longevity and popularity to the way it has adapted over the past 200 years. Originating in Scotland and Ireland, tweed began as a practical and functional fabric to keep out the cold, and then evolved to become synonymous with British aristocracy and country life, when shooting and hacking jackets were adopted by the upper classes in the 19th Century. Luxury fashion labels were responsible for its contemporary revival, led by Chanel in the 1950s. The label's iconic tweed jacket remains one of fashion's most covetable – and copied – items today. 

Later, in 1976, British designer Vivienne Westwood first worked with Harris Tweed Hebrides – on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland – to create a pair of bondage trousers. A decade later, she created the autumn/winter 1987 Harris Tweed collection. The two brands have collaborated ever since. In November 2023, Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri visited the Harris Tweed mill to create a line of bespoke fabrics, which became a key part of the Cruise 2025 collection, shown at Drummond Castle in June. The collection was inspired by Mary Queen of Scots and brought artisans from across the Scottish textiles industry together to showcase local craftsmanship.

"Over the past 15 years our industry has experienced a surge of interest, particularly the traditional designs and patterns," Ruth Masson, sales and marketing manager at Harris Tweed Hebrides, tells the BBC. "From luxury to the high street, consumers seem to be much more engaged with the story around the products they are buying. Our artisanal fabric and its unique production process has allowed us to align with an array of brands, reaching a wider demographic of customers."

That reach can sometimes be unexpected. In April, the annual Tweed Run cycling event took place in London, with riders embarking on a 13.5-mile route around the capital, clad in their finest Fair Isle knitwear, tweed suits and bow ties. Now a global event, cyclists duly stop to take tea en route. 

The name "Harris Tweed" is protected by legislation, under The Harris Tweed Act of 1993, and only fabric produced in the Outer Hebrides, by hand, can bear the famous Orb label. It is handwoven using 100% British farmed wool, and processed in the UK. Masson advises consumers to first look at fabric composition when buying a garment that labels itself as "tweed".

"Not all tweed is created equal," she says. "There are significant differences in the quality, fibre sourcing and production processes that can impact its sustainability. Ultimately, brands committed to sustainability offer certification, provide transparency into their production processes, and use natural, renewable materials. Some tweeds may incorporate cheaper synthetic fibres that do not have the same environmental benefits." 

Timeless classic

There is something else that makes tweed a more sustainable fabric than most: durability. The tighter it is woven, the more durable it becomes, says Rebecca Earley, professor of circular design futures at University of the Arts, London. "If you do get moth holes or any damage, it's easy to make a darn repair, and the pattern helps to disguise wear-and-tear. And because wool is naturally antibacterial, you can air your tweed garment outside. In fact, if you do dry clean tweed it loses some of its body so avoid it – it is generally self-cleaning."

Many tweed garments are lined, Earley explains, giving them structure, which adds to the durability, while protecting your skin against the sometimes prickly texture. "Tweed is a fabric that comes from the land, and the natural dye palettes often reflect the regions and landscapes from which it comes. I can always spot an Irish tweed," she says, having spent her summers for the past 20 years in Kerry, Ireland.

Much like Harris tweed, Donegal tweed – from County Donegal in north-west Ireland – has been manufactured for centuries. While both Irish and Scottish tweeds share an almost identical weight of 15/16oz, the main differences between them, says Crawford, are that Donegal is machine-woven, and its random flecks of colour are its distinctive trademark.

More like this:

• Nine iconic items of clothing that define Britishness

• The hard-working origins of the blue-collar jacket

• Gaudy or iconic? How leopard print took over

"One of my favourite garments is an Alice Temperley tweed suit, which I've had for years," says Earley. "It's just a shame that it doesn't fit me anymore. But I'm hanging on to it because it will resell – tweed is timeless and beyond trends."

Earley is right. At fashion rental platform Hurr, there has been a 110% increase on the number of tweed items being rented since September. "We have definitely seen an uplift in searches for tweed recently, as well as more textured materials that reflect the preppy countryside trend of now," says Sophie Devlin, fashion director at Hurr. "The influx has focused on red, as well as more classic tonal black and white, with tweed pieces from Nadine Merabi and Montsand having been a big hit for partywear." 

Tweed's sustainable attributes mean that it is favoured by modern fashion brands that factor in environmental, social and ethical implications in their collections. London-based brand Baukjen, which is certified B Corp, says its tweed category has grown by 40% compared to last year's autumn/winter 2023 collection, with a brown check tweed coat one of the season's best sellers.

"With its durability and timeless appeal, tweed aligns with consumer demands for stylish, investment pieces," says Baukjen design director Natalie Grant. The Baukjen coat may not appeal to purists – it is made from a blend of recycled wool, cotton and polyester – but it demonstrates that the fabric's reinvention is still going strong after 200 years.

Anderson & Sheppard still make "shooting suits" in heavier tweeds, but demand now comes for lighter tweeds, such as Shetland, at 12/13oz, which can be worn all year round in the UK, with the exception of summer. "These weights of cloth are super popular as [the jackets] can be worn with regular flannel trousers for a timeless look," says Crawford. "But they are much more likely to be worn on a weekend with chinos or jeans." 

Perhaps the best barometer of the direction in which tweed is heading is its celebrity following. King Charles is not the only royal to favour tweed; the Princess of Wales is a fan of Harris Tweed – and also has a favourite cobalt blue '90s Chanel tweed jacket that she regularly re-wears – together with Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna. More recently, US model Gigi Hadid has become a fan of the Scottish weave. A sign perhaps that tweed has now truly transcended both national borders and generations.

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Quannah Chasinghorse: The Indigenous American supermodel on bringing change

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241211-quannah-chasinghorse-the-indigenous-american-supermodel-on-bringing-change, today

"People are surprised at what I've said yes to": The model, activist and emerging actor talks about her childhood, her culture – and making a difference.

On a gusty night in September, model Quannah Chasinghorse joined the legendary designer Ralph Lauren on his New York Fashion Week catwalk. Earlier that year, she wasn't even sure she could look him in the eye.

Twenty-two-year-old Chasinghorse is an Indigenous American who is a member of the Oglala Lakota and Hän Gwich'in tribes, and was born on the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona. She had seen some of Ralph Lauren's past advertisements, and also designs which she believed were unmistakable copies of Indigenous motifs, and was troubled by what she saw. Back in 2014 Ralph Lauren had apologised for their Native American-themed advertisements, and then in 2022 apologised again for the designs that echoed Native Mexican motifs. The brand promised greater "credit and collaboration" for new garments with Indigenous motifs, and added that the company was deepening its "cultural awareness training", and broadening its work with Indigenous communities.

Chasinghorse admits she had to "really wrestle" with whether to work with the fashion mega-brand, or tell them to buzz off. In fact, the Alaska native used a harsher word than "buzz" that cannot be printed here. Still, she ultimately took the job.

"I guess I could have slammed the door on them instead of asking to have a real conversation with them," she tells the BBC. "But then, you know, nothing changes. And that's the opposite of how I want to live."

Chasinghorse has cascading black hair and distinctive geometric chin tattoos – called Yidįįłtoo and sacred to her Alaskan tribal culture – that were hand-poked by her mother, the land activist and dogsled racer Jody Potts-Joseph, in a coming-of-age ritual.

Born on Indigenous land in Arizona, Chasinghorse moved with her mother and brothers to Mongolia as a toddler, where they joined their maternal grandparents, who were Christian missionaries. "I don't agree with that kind of work," she says. "But I love them very much. They were also helping smaller communities and nomadic tribes." On overnight trips to Mongolia's capital, Ulaanbaatar, Chasinghorse would watch the fashion shows that aired on public television. "After that, I would pose in family photos as if I was a supermodel," she says. "I was obsessed."

When Chasinghorse turned six, the family took the Trans-Siberian railroad through Europe, camping on Italian beaches before flying home to Arizona, then moving to Alaska. "We set up camp by a river and lived off the land. It was the most magical thing. But now that I'm an adult, I realise we were homeless, and my mom was working so hard to make sure we didn't know that."

Potts-Joseph became a public safety officer in their tribal community; they moved into a rustic log cabin with no electricity, and rebuilt it from the ground up. When their small family car couldn't drive in a blizzard, Potts-Joseph took Quannah and her brothers to school via dogsled. The family attended rallies to defend the Alaskan ecosystem, protect Indigenous women, and direct more healthcare and education to tribal lands. "I had a really rich childhood," she says. "But being rich had nothing to do with money. It had everything to do with culture, traditions and community. That's how we survived."

While speaking at an environmental youth protest in Alaska, Chasinghorse was scouted by casting director Shay Nielsen for a 2020 Calvin Klein campaign. "Her energy and confidence really set her apart," Nielsen tells the BBC. "At just 18 years old, she was already a powerful leader advocating for her Indigenous community." 

After her Calvin Klein breakthrough, Chasinghorse was invited to meet with modelling agencies in New York. The problem? She couldn't afford a plane ticket – until her Indigenous community pooled funds to send the then-teenager to Manhattan. En route, she studied her craft via YouTube videos. "I watched a ton of Vogue models, trying to learn how they walk, how they do their makeup. It was like watching that Mongolian fashion TV all over again."

Eventually, Chasinghorse signed with IMG Models – the agency that discovered supermodels like Gigi Hadid and Lily Cole – and was sent to meet with Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, the photography duo known for cutting-edge images of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. "I walked into the casting room, and everyone just kind of stared. I thought, 'Oh my gosh, am I wrong? Do I not look the way you want me to look?'" She had flashbacks to being bullied in high school for her tall frame and her distinct Native nose. "I thought, 'Maybe trying to model is a mistake.'"

It was not a mistake. Matadin and Van Lamsweerde took one look at the teenager, and knew he'd found a star. "Quannah's face and persona is a perfect mix of the most beautiful Native American traditional sculpture and the coolest modern rave girl," he tells the BBC. "She represents history and the future." He cast her immediately as the face of a new Chanel campaign; catwalk appearances for designer Prabal Gurung followed, along with catwalk turns for Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger, and advertising work for Net-a-Porter and Stella McCartney.

Through her runway work, Chasinghorse has developed a special relationship with Gabriela Hearst, the 48-year-old Uruguayan designer and recent creative director of Chloé, who employs Indigenous design collectives as part of her production process. "Quannah embodies the type of person that we love to represent us and carry what we do, because she really uses her platform – and where she has come in our industry – to illuminate the need for others," Hearst tells the BBC.

A force for change

Chasinghorse is now represented by The Society, the powerhouse talent agency that also manages the fashion projects of Kendall Jenner, Pamela Anderson and Dior's first plus-size talent ambassador, the French singer Yseult. She is also backed by William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency for the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal and Sienna Miller. Why are so many fashion and Hollywood heavyweights banking on her success?

"Quannah redefines beauty, and boldly dismantles outdated constructs. Working with her was nothing short of inspiring," says Hillary Taymour, the creative director for the sustainable fashion brand Collina Strada, who has cast Chasinghorse in her catwalk collections. "She's not just a leader. She's a force."

Chasinghorse has also worked with mainstream fashion brands. How does she view the balance between building a successful career and standing by her long-held ideals?

"I love this question!" Chasinghorse says enthusiastically. "Sometimes people are surprised at what I've said 'yes' to. But what people don't see is that with every project I do, there are conversations being had and work behind the scenes about how the industry can do better, and be better." The model's Zara advertisments for the chain's Good American collaboration featured recycled and organic cotton, according to established trade platform, Sourcing Journal. Her work with Victoria's Secret was part of the brand's 2023 fashion campaign, which featured the most ethnically and size-diverse group of models in the company's history. "As long as people are respectful, there's always a chance you can change someone's mind through a conversation," she says.

At Ralph Lauren, Chasinghorse and her mother had a meeting with the brand. "We explained to them why profiting off Indigenous culture without employing Indigenous artists is a problem," she said. Thanks in part to her advocacy, the brand created a Native American advisory board, and ultimately paired with the Navajo designer Naiomi Glasses in 2023. 

"I think her willingness to speak with brands instead of just cancelling them is pretty powerful," says Parker Grace, a Navajo photographer and recent graduate of the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York City. "Seeing her face on billboards uplifts the whole community. It's a spotlight for good."

Chasinghorse is using that spotlight to raise awareness for other Native models and artisans. That includes fellow Ralph Lauren face and Navajo tribal member Heather Diamond Strongarm, who has become a rising star on the European catwalks. "A lot of people try to pit us against each other," Chasinghorse sighs. "That makes me so angry. There should be room for more than one of us." During Paris Fashion Week, the models convened to honour the tribal hunting season – which they often miss due to runway shows – by sharing dried moose meat in a French hotel room.

Chasinghorse is currently in Los Angeles working on a script for a feature film. She has acted in the hit TV comedy Reservation Dogs,and produced the 2024 documentary Bad River, which she co-narrated with actor Edward Norton."The fashion industry has been a tool and a resource for me to enter all these other spaces," she says. "My goal is to open up a bigger worldview for people, in lots of different areas."

Still, her love for fashion, despite its shortcomings, runs deep. "I was in Venice shooting an ad campaign," she says. "And I was like, 'Huh. I used to backpack through here with my family. We didn't have any money and I would pretend to be a model. And now I'm here, and this is my job.' I want to hold on to that."

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Rap group Bad Boy Chiller Crew sue record label

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gl91xgpj2o, today

British rap group Bad Boy Chiller Crew have lodged a legal claim against their record label at the High Court, saying they are owed about £400,000 in unpaid royalties.

The Bradford trio are known for their high-energy bassline anthems, and were nominated for the Brit Award for best group last year.

They say they had "no other option" but to take court action against the House Anxiety label, which signed the group in 2020 and released their Full Wack No Breaks mixtape that year.

In response, House Anxiety said they "totally refute these claims" and welcomed the chance to "clarify these inaccuracies".

Bad Boy Chiller Crew's claim says they were supposed to have been given royalty statements by the label every six months, but only received their first one in October 2024.

That royalty statement had "vast sums" wrongly deducted, and did not include £217,000 that House Anxiety had received in a licensing deal with a subsidiary of major label Sony, the band argue.

The claim says the group can't accurately calculate how much they are owed until they receive a full set of accounts. But they believe it will amount to at least £400,000.

The group also argue their contract with House Anxiety has ended.

They independently released a new single and an EP in June, but removed both from Spotify after House Anxiety complained it was a breach of their contract.

In a statement to the BBC, Bad Boy Chiller Crew said: "Like all other bands, we don't look for litigation, but when faced with a label that won't let us put our own music out ourselves for our fans and not pay us royalties owed from our own music, we felt we had no other option."

House Anxiety founder Jaimie Hodgson said: "We totally refute these claims and welcome the opportunity to clarify these inaccuracies.

"As an artist-friendly independent label, we remain hugely proud of every element of Full Wack No Breaks and all the hard work that went into its campaign, then stepping aside to allow BBCC to pursue their dreams of being a major label artist. There will be no further comment at this time."

Full Wack No Breaks included the band's breakthrough track 450.

The follow-up, Disrespectful, reached number two in the UK album chart in 2022 under the licensing deal with Sony's Relentless label.

That album included the top 10 single BMW, and the group also starred in their own ITV2 reality show in 2021.


Critics praise Chalamet's portrayal of Bob Dylan

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89xy392wjno, today

Timothée Chalamet has been praised by critics for his portrayal of Bob Dylan, in a new film biopic of the US singer-songwriter.

A Complete Unknown has already scored three Golden Globe nominations and is likely to be in the Oscars race in the new year.

The Guardian said Chalamet showed "amazing bravado" in his performance, while Empire said the actor is "superb" and his "musical talent is unimpeachable".

But the Independent said the biopic itself "plays too safe" and Screen Rant described the "serviceable" film as a "fascinating yet frustrating" portrait.

A Complete Unknown is released on Christmas Day in the US, and 17 January in the UK.

Dylan himself has endorsed the film, although he had not actually seen it at the time he posted about it last week on X.

"Timmy's a brilliant actor so I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me," Dylan said.

In her three-star review, the Independent's Clarisse Loughrey said the film "takes a reverent stance to Dylan's artistry, populated by technically accomplished musical performances".

She said Chalamet's voice "isn't perfect, but it's undoubtedly impressive", adding the film is "shot with a real sensitivity to the emotional landscape of each track".

The film is based on Elijah Wald's 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric!

Set in the early 1960s, it tells the story of Dylan's rise to fame, and the conflict between his folk roots and his desire to expand his repertoire to include rock 'n' roll.

The friction is represented by the choice between his use of an acoustic and electric guitar, and Dylan's lyrics gradually become bolder and more reflective of the world he sees around him.

The film climaxes with a famously chaotic performance at at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where Dylan was booed by some members of the audience for playing an electric set with an amplified band.

Deadline's Pete Hammond praised the film's production design, costumes and cinematography, as well as its lead performance.

"At the centre of this all is a remarkable performance by Chalamet, who performs all the songs himself in astonishing and authentic fashion. There is no lip-syncing or blending of voices between actor and subject," he noted.

"The music of course is worth the price of admission, but in Mangold's hands fortunately there is so much more to add, thus making Bob Dylan a little less than complete unknown by the time the credits roll."

The film also follows Dylan's romantic relationships with two women in particular - civil rights activist Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) and folk musician Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).

Screen Rant's Mae Abdulbaki reflected: "I could understand both women more clearly than Chalamet's Dylan. Behind his sunglasses and tight body language, Dylan remains elusive.

"The film is very much about an artist who doesn't explain himself, and I have immense respect for that, but it also creates an emotional disconnect in narrative form. It was as though I was watching a series of events that I couldn't bring myself to care about. That's what Mangold risks by keeping Dylan out of reach."

There was a rave review from the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who awarded the film five stars and praised Chalamet's "hilarious and seductive portrayal".

"Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format," he said. It's all rise, but troubled and unclear."

The Times Kevin Maher was far less enthusiastic, awarding just two stars

"There will be audiences who will regard the recreation of Newport '65 as a monumental cinematic event. But for many it will land with a giant shrug of indifference," he noted.

"[Chalamet's] performance is an unhelpful study in blank-eyed lockjaw minimalism, while his singing voice is fine if, occasionally, close to parody (but all Dylan imitators sound like parody)."

With an acclaimed back catalogue built up over seven decades, Dylan is best known for hits such as Blowin in the Wind, Mr. Tambourine Man, It Ain't Me Babe, Girl From The North Country and The Times They Are a Changin'.

"Perhaps Dylan himself is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever capture him completely," wrote the Telegraph's Robbie Collin in a four-star review. "A Complete Unknown comes about as close as one could reasonably hope.

"For the most part, the film plays like a juicy rise-to-power drama rather than a scenic tour of an artist's Wikipedia page."

Elsewhere, the Evening Standard's Nick Curtis joked the film made him "really, really want to learn to play harmonica".

"It's a defiantly unlikeable performance, miles away from Chalamet's romantic leads," Curtis noted.

"He captures Dylan's craning stance and the way he used hair and sunglasses as a mask, the insistent buzz and keen of his speaking and singing voice and the odd, touchy, insularity."

A Complete Unknown also stars Edward Norton and is directed by James Mangold, the filmmaker behind Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line and films in the X-Men and Indiana Jones franchises.

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney added: "Commendably, neither the movie nor the actor sugarcoat the abrasiveness of a creative genius whose insensitivity toward people close to him often stands in stark contrast to the humanity in his songs."

"That detachment leaves something of a hole where the emotional centre should be in the screenplay by Mangold and Jay Cocks. Making a film about an enigmatic subject is inherently challenging and the writers deserve credit for declining to try to solve the mystery of Bob Dylan, even if that also risks making them seem incurious."

Empire's John Nugent concluded: "Frustratingly, for a story about a poetic genius, it struggles to find something fresh to say.

"There is some interesting stuff about the burden of talent... But by 1965 he is almost always behind sunglasses, his enigma calcified.

"The film doesn't claim to understand Dylan, and suggests Dylan might not understand himself, either. That title, it seems, is literal."


The charges against Sean 'Diddy' Combs explained

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c869qd5j09xo, today

Fast-forward to 2024, and his career is on the ropes.

In a case filed in New York, the star has been accused of kidnapping, drugging and coercing women into sexual activities, sometimes through the use of firearms and threats of violence.

The same Los Angeles mansion that hosted his birthday party was raided by police in March. There, officers seized supplies that they say were intended for use in orgies known as "freak offs", including drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil.

Mr Combs has denied all the charges, entering a not guilty plea on Tuesday, 17 September.

The court case comes after a year in which the musician has faced lawsuits from a number of women.

Here is how the allegations against Mr Combs have stacked up.

16 November 2023: Cassie's lawsuit

Casandra Ventura, a singer and model known as Cassie, was signed to Mr Combs' record label and dated him for more than a decade.

But in a civil lawsuit, she said the mogul had used his position of power to "set the groundwork" for a "manipulative and coercive romantic and sexual relationship".

Her lawsuit included graphic descriptions of violent abuse, alleging that Mr Combs "regularly beat and kicked Ms Ventura, leaving black eyes, bruises, and blood".

She described parties known as "freak offs" - drug-fuelled, days-long sexual performances - which Mr Combs allegedly coerced women into, and filmed for his own pleasure.

Ms Ventura also accused the musician of sexual abuse and rape, and claimed that many of these incidents were witnessed by his "tremendously loyal network" who "were not willing to do anything meaningful" to stop the violence.

The lawsuit also alleged that Mr Combs destroyed a car belonging to US rapper Kid Cudi, to dissuade him from dating her.

Mr Combs strenuously denied the allegations and accused Ms Ventura of extortion.

They settled the case for an undisclosed amount a day after it was filed in New York, with Mr Combs maintaining his innocence.

November to December 2023: More lawsuits allege sexual assault

In the weeks after settling Cassie's lawsuit, Mr Combs was accused of sexual assault dating back to 1991 by multiple women.

One lawsuit was filed anonymously by a woman who claimed Mr Combs and another man had coerced her into sex.

In a second, Joi Dickerson-Neal accused the star of drugging and sexually assaulting her when she was a college student in 1991. She also claimed he filmed the attack and showed it to other people without her consent.

A third woman, Liza Gardner, filed court papers accusing Mr Combs and another man of raping her and her friend more than 30 years ago, when she was 16.

Ms Gardner also alleged that Mr Combs had turned violent days after the attack, choking her so hard that she passed out.

In the lawsuit, she said Mr Combs had become irate while trying to track down her friend, because he was worried she would inform "the girl he was with at the time".

The lawsuits all came shortly before the expiration of the New York Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily allowed people who said they had been sexually abused to file claims, even after the statute of limitations had expired.

Mr Combs denied all the allegations, and his spokesperson called the lawsuits a "money grab".

December 2023: Underage sex claim

Another woman sued in December, claiming she was "sex trafficked" and "gang raped" by Mr Combs, former Bad Boy Records president Harve Pierre and another man in 2003, when she was 17.

In court papers, the woman, known only as Jane Doe, alleged she was given "copious amounts of drugs and alcohol" before the attack and was left in so much pain that she could barely stand or remember how she got home.

In response, Mr Combs said he "did not do any of the awful things being alleged", while Mr Pierre said the "disgusting allegations" were "false and a desperate attempt for financial gain".

Diddy's denial

On 6 December, Mr Combs responded to the flurry of lawsuits with a statement on his Instagram page.

"ENOUGH IS ENOUGH," he wrote. "For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy.

"Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth."

February 2024: Accusations of grooming

Music producer Rodney Jones Jr, who produced nine tracks on 2023's The Love Album, sued Mr Combs in February 2024, accusing the star of making unwanted sexual contact and forcing him to hire prostitutes and participate in sex acts with them.

In court papers filed in New York, Mr Jones also claimed that Mr Combs tried to "groom" him into having sex with another man, telling him it was "a normal practice in the music industry".

Mr Combs' lawyer, Shawn Holley, called Mr Jones "nothing more than a liar" and described his claims as "pure fiction" that could be discredited by "overwhelming, indisputable proof".

17 May 2024: Cassie assault video leaked

CCTV footage emerged showing Mr Combs assaulting Cassie Ventura in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

The pictures, broadcast by CNN, showed a man pushing Ms Ventura to the floor and kicking her while she was on the ground. He later attempted to drag her by her shirt and throw an object at her.

A day later, Mr Combs apologised, saying: "I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I'm disgusted now."

Ms Ventura later posted a statement highlighting the lifelong impact of domestic violence. "It broke me down to someone I never thought I would become," she wrote.

21 May 2024: Former model sues

Model and actress Crystal McKinney accused Mr Combs of drugging her and forcing her to perform oral sex in the bathroom of a New York City recording studio in 2003.

Two days later, Mr Combs was sued again by April Lampros, who alleged four instances of sexual assault between 1995 and about 2000.

Ms Lampros claimed she met the musician in 1994 while a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and that an initially romantic relationship "quickly turned into an aggressive, coercive, and abusive relationship based on sex".

In one incident, she claimed the star forced her to take ecstasy and have sex with his then-girlfriend.

July 2024: Combs maintains innocence as eighth lawsuit filed

Former adult film star Adria English claimed she was "groomed into sex trafficking over time" in a number of events between 2004 and 2009 at Mr Combs’s star-studded parties.

His lawyer Jonathan Davis responded: "No matter how many lawsuits are filed it won't change the fact that Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone."

10 September 2024: No-show at court hearing

Mr Combs failed to attend a virtual hearing for a lawsuit filed against him by Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith, a Michigan inmate who claimed the star drugged and sexually assaulted him at a party in Detroit in 1997.

The no-show led to a default judgment against Mr Combs, who was ordered to pay Mr Caredello-Smith $100m (£75m).

The judgment was later set aside, after the musician's lawyers filed an appeal.

11 September 2024: Girl band star sues

Dawn Richard, a former singer in Mr Combs' girl group project Danity Kane, filed a suit against the star.

The singer, who later joined Mr Combs in the band Diddy Dirty Money, alleged that the musician sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions by touching her body, as well as verbally abusing and overworking her.

16 September 2024: Combs is arrested

The star was arrested in a Manhattan hotel room after a grand jury indictment.

His lawyer said the star had co-operated with authorities, and voluntarily relocated to New York in anticipation of the charges.

"These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court," he added.

17 September 2024: Charges and details of 'freak offs' revealed

In an appearance at the US District Court in New York, Mr Combs was charged with sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution.

In an indictment that was unsealed at the same time, prosecutors alleged that he also engaged in kidnapping, forced labour, bribery and other crimes.

They described him as the head of a criminal enterprise that abused women, using threats of violence to force them into participating in drug-fuelled orgies with male prostitutes.

These "freak offs" were "elaborate and produced sex performances" and were highly organised parties, prosecutors said.

Mr Combs' associates allegedly booked hotel suites, recruited sex workers and distributed drugs including cocaine, methamphetamine and oxycodone to coerce partygoers into sex and keep them "obedient".

His staff allegedly arranged travel for the victims and organised the supply of intravenous fluids to help them recover from the parties, which sometimes lasted for days.

Prosecutors also alleged that Mr Combs taped the "freak offs" and would use the footage to pressure his victims into silence.

If convicted, the musician faces a sentence of 15 years up to life in prison.

Mr Combs' lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, declared his client's innocence, and described the "freak offs" as consensual.

"Is it sex trafficking?" he asked. "Not if everybody wants to be there."

Mr Combs pleaded not guilty to the charges.

But he was denied bail after prosecutors argued that he posed "a significant risk" to the trial, reporting that he had "already tried to obstruct the government's investigation of this case, repeatedly contacting victims and witnesses and feeding them false narratives of events".

The judge cited the star's anger issues and history of substance abuse as reasons for keeping him detained until the trial.

"My concern is that this is a crime that happens behind closed doors," he said.

Mr Combs' lawyers have repeatedly appealed the decision, offering to place the star under the watch of a round-the-clock private security team.

However Judge Andrew L Carter Jr said that, even under those terms, Mr Combs could still use employees to contact witnesses.

He is being detained at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center until his trial, which is tentatively scheduled for 5 May 2025.

24 September 2024: Eleventh lawsuit accuses star of rape

Combs was moved to a special unit at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, separate from the general prison population.

Around the same time, he was served with a new lawsuit - from a woman who claimed Combs and his bodyguard had drugged, bound and violently raped her in 2001, and later showed a video of the attack to others.

In a news conference, Thalia Graves said the "lasting effects" of the assault had created "a cycle of suffering from which it is hard to break free"; adding that she felt "worthless, isolated and sometimes responsible” for what had happened to her.

At the time of writing, Combs' lawyers had not responded to the allegations.

1 October 2024: More than 100 new assault allegations

A lawyer said more than 100 people plan to sue Combs for sexual assault, rape and sexual exploitation.

Tony Buzbee said he was representing 120 people, half of whom were men, and 25 of whom were minors - the first time Mr Combs has been accused of sexually abusing children. One was aged nine at the time of the alleged assault.

Mr Buzbee said his firm was working to vet another 100 cases.

Mr Combs' lawyer said the rapper "emphatically and categorically" denied the allegations, saying they were "false and defamatory".

14 October 2024: Six new lawsuits, including from teen

Six lawsuits were filed in New York with accusations from two unnamed women and four unnamed men by Mr Buzbee.

One of the accusers said he was 16 when he attended one of the rapper's parties in the Hamptons in 1998. In the lawsuit, he said the rapper ordered him to undress while they were discussing the teen breaking into the music industry.

Another lawsuit filed by an unnamed woman accused Mr Combs of raping her at a hotel party after they met at a photoshoot.

Mr Combs' legal team dismissed the lawsuits as "clear attempts to garner publicity."

"Mr Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses, and the integrity of the judicial process," his attorneys said in a statement, adding "Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone - adult or minor, man or woman.”

15 October 2024: Lawsuit claims Tupac comment led to rape

Another lawsuit accuses Mr Combs of raping a woman as "payback" for her suggestion that he was involved in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur.

Ashley Parham's lawsuit filed in California claims she was raped by multiple people, including Mr Combs, because he was angered by the Tupac comment.

She says that Mr Combs had "a knife and held it to the right side of [her] face and threatened to give her a 'Glasgow smile' in retaliation for her previous statements".

Shakur's murder has never been fully solved, although former gang member Duane "Keffe D" Davis was charged in the case last year.

Mr Davis, whose trial will begin in March 2025, previously claimed that Mr Combs offered him $1m (£769,000) to kill Shakur.

21 October 2024: Seven new lawsuits filed alleging sexual assault

Seven new civil lawsuits are filed against the star in a federal court in New York.

Four men and three women accuse the hip-hop mogul of sexually assaulting them at various parties in Los Angeles, New York and Las Vegas.

The youngest plaintiff was 13 at the time of the alleged incident.

His lawyers recently dismissed the flurry of lawsuits as "clear attempts to garner publicity", stressing that "Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone - adult or minor, man or woman.”

29 October 2024: Two more lawsuits filed against Combs, one alleged victim was 10 at the time

Two new lawsuits are filed against the music mogul, accusing him of sexual assault.

Both lawsuits, which were filed in New York, include accusations by men who were underage at the time of the alleged assaults.

In one, the alleged victim was 10 at the time. The second alleges Mr Combs assaulted a teenage boy who was auditioning for the popular MTV reality show Making the Band, which the rapper produced.

In a statement to the BBC, representatives for Mr Combs said he "never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone - man or woman, adult or minor".

19 November 2024: New lawsuits target Diddy and attorney

Five more anonymous lawsuits were filed against Mr Combs on 19 November from three men and two women. The suits centre on allegations of sexual assault at parties with at least two of them outlining rape accusations against Mr Combs.

Two additional lawsuits were also filed - both against a lawyer who has filed a large share of the civil lawsuits against Mr Combs.

One of the lawsuits against Tony Buzbee, a Texas-based attorney who says he represents more than 100 victims, allege he attempted to extort the plaintiff - an unnamed "high-profile individual" - by threatening to make public “entirely fabricated and malicious allegations of sexual assault".

In court documents obtained by the BBC, the plaintiff identified himself as a former associate of Diddy and acknowledged attending events with the embattled music mogul.

In the second lawsuit, an unnamed woman alleged he was abusive toward women.

The New York summons states Mr Buzbee abused his power as an attorney and violated the unnamed woman while representing her as a client.

Mr Buzbee denied the allegations.

27 November 2024: Diddy denied bail for a third time

A third attempt to get Mr Combs released from jail failed, after a judge said there was "evidence supporting a serious risk of witness tampering".

The star's lawyers had argued he should be released to allow adequate time to prepare for his trial, which is set to begin on 5 May 2025.

But prosecutors accused the musician of breaking prison rules by contacting potential witnesses using other inmates' telephone accounts, and coercing others in his orbit to post online in order to sway public opinion and benefit his defence.

US District Judge Arun Subramanian concluded the court could not trust Mr Combs if released on bail.

29 November 2024: Accused of dangling a woman from a balcony

Fashion designer Bryana "Bana" Bongolan filed a lawsuit alleging that Mr Combs threatened to kill her and dangled her over a 17th floor balcony, during an incident in 2016.

Ms Bongolan said she had worked on several projects for the star, and witnessed what she described as "disturbing signs of an abusive relationship" between Mr Combs and Ms Ventura - including one fight where the star allegedly "threw a large kitchen knife at Ms Ventura, who, acting in self-defence, threw one back at him".

In her lawsuit, Ms Bongolan claimed the star later began "directing his rage" towards her, and assaulted her after a sleepover in Ventura's apartment.

During the altercation, she alleges, the star "lifted her up higher and higher over the 17th floor balcony of Ms. Ventura's apartment with only Combs' grip keeping her from falling to her death".

A representative for Mr Combs told the BBC he "firmly denies these serious allegations" and "remains confident they will ultimately be proven baseless".

8 December 2024: Jay-Z named as co-defendant in rape case

Jay-Z was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl with Sean Combs, in an update to a lawsuit originally filed in October 2024.

The star vehemently denied the allegation - revealing that they were the person who had previously tried to sue lawyer Tony Buzbee for extortion.

In an extensive statement, Jay-Z called the claims "idiotic" and said that he came from a world where "we protect children."

The musician added that he had received a demand letter from Mr Buzbee attempting to seek a private financial settlement. However, he said the letter had had the "opposite effect".

"It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!" the statement read.


Lawyer cites 300 potential cases against Diddy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8ewld21p14o, today

A lawyer representing several alleged victims of Sean "Diddy" Combs says the potential number of civil legal cases against the musician "is probably in the 300 range".

Tony Buzbee told the BBC his team had received about 3,000 calls since he held a news conference calling for clients in October.

He has already issued 20 lawsuits from men and women seeking damages from the musician; and says that "realistically" the final total will be "about 100 to 150". Others will not make it to court because the time limit for filing claims has expired in certain states.

Mr Combs has denied all the charges against him, calling the accusations "sickening" and the result of people looking for a "quick payday".

His lawyers have characterised the multiple civil lawsuits, including the claims of 300 potential victims, as a part of a "reckless media circus".

They said Mr Buzbee's press conference, and the creation of a toll-free phone number for tip-offs, were "clear attempts to garner publicity".

In a statement to the BBC, his attorney Erica Wolff said: "Mr Combs has full confidence in the facts and the integrity of the judicial process.

"In court, the truth will prevail: That Mr. Combs never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone - man or woman, adult or minor."

The musician is currently being held in Manhattan's Metropolitan Detention Center, awaiting trial on separate criminal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, which he also denies.

Who is Tony Buzbee?

Mr Buzbee, whose practice is based in Houston, is an outsized character in US legal circles, once described by the New York Times as "a big, mean, ambitious, tenacious, fire-breathing Texas trial lawyer".

A former Marine and a TV show host, he made his name suing the energy giant BP after an explosion at an oil refinery in Texas City killed 15 people; and successfully defended former Texas governor Rick Perry against abuse-of-power allegations.

More recently, he helped a sizeable group of women reach out-of-court settlements with American Football player Deshaun Watson over allegations he had sexually assaulted them during private massage sessions.

Anonymity will be waived

Among them are a woman who claims Mr Combs raped her in a hotel room in 2004 when she was a 19-year-old college student; and an aspiring young musician who alleges the musician drugged him and forced him to perform oral sex when he was 10 years old.

Lawyers for Mr Combs have denied the allegations, saying in a statement to the BBC that he "has never sexually assaulted anyone - adult or minor, man or woman".

The lawsuits have so far been filed anonymously, with the alleged victims referred to in court documents as John Doe or Jane Doe.

However, Mr Combs' laywers have asked the courts to release their identities so he can adequately prepare for any potential trial.

In three cases so far, including that of the 19-year-old woman, a judge has ruled that they will have to reveal their names for their claims to move forward.

"It happens a lot," Mr Buzbee told the BBC. "If the plaintiff is forced to reveal her or his or her identity, Mr Combs hopes that they will quietly go away and never bring the claim again.

"The good news is, that's not going to happen. That's something I screened for... so if they're forced to reveal their identity, they'll reveal their identity, and we'll keep pressing forward.”

Mr Buzbee added that he had taken similar measures in the DeShaun Watson case, where several women publicly attached their names to the lawsuits following a challenge from the sportsman's lawyers.

Celebrities 'likely' to be named

In the end, Mr Buzbee's clients may face a long wait to have their cases heard in court.

Jennie VonCannon, a former federal prosecutor with experience of sex trafficking and racketeering cases, says the criminal trial against Mr Combs will have to conclude before the civil claims can proceed.

"That's because the Fifth Amendment gives you the right to remain silent," she told the BBC.

"So you need the criminal case to go first, because if you made statements in the civil cases in order to defend yourself, you could possibly incriminate yourself."

The BBC understands that Grand Jury hearings for Mr Combs' criminal trial have continued since charges were filed against him in September.

Some of the alleged victims who are suing him in civil court are believed to have given testimony in these hearings. VonCannon says the government could easily amend their case as a result.

"There's a school of thought that no investigation is ever complete," she says.

"It sounds like the government is still actively producing discovery, so it's possible they will supersede [replace or amend] the indictment, and even add more defendants."

The criminal trial is currently scheduled to begin in May 2025.


Jamie Foxx reveals he had a stroke in 2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8g94p070lo, today

Hollywood star Jamie Foxx has revealed the cause of his hospital admission in April last year.

Speaking during a Netflix special, the Django Unchained star told the audience he'd suffered a "brain bleed that led to a stroke".

He said he had a bad headache one day and asked for an aspirin but before he could take it, he "went out (blacked out). I don't remember 20 days".

At the time, his daughter Corinne Foxx said he had experienced a "medical complication" but the family did not share details about his health issues.

In an emotional chat with the audience for Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was..., recorded in Atlanta, the city where he was working when he fell ill, Foxx said he was initially sent home by medics after being given a cortisone injection.

His sister then came over to see him and felt that he wasn't himself so she took him in her car to Piedmont Hospital.

It was then that a doctor told him he was having a brain bleed that had led to a stroke, adding: "If I don't go in his head right now, we're going to lose him."

He said his sister prayed the whole time during his operation outside the theatre.

Doctors couldn't locate the origin of the brain bleed.

Foxx also told the audience that "your life doesn't flash before your face, it was kind of oddly peaceful, I saw a tunnel, I didn't see the light."

He joked: "It was hot in that tunnel, am I going to the wrong place?"

Foxx said the doctor told his family: "He may be able to make a full recovery but it's going to be the worst year of his life."

The star heaped praise on his sister Deidra Dixon and daughter Corinne for "holding it down" so no-one would see him.

"They didn't want you to see me like this and I didn't want you to see me like this," he told his fans.

He gestured that his head movements were a little unsteady after the stroke and his daughter was worried people would make memes out of him.

He said he woke up on 4 May 2023 and was in a wheelchair because he was unable to walk, and had no recollection as to why, adding he was initially in denial: "Jamie Foxx don't get strokes."

He revealed he later underwent rehabilitation in Chicago.

Foxx had been filming Netflix's Back In Action alongside Cameron Diaz when he became ill.

Since then, he has spoken fondly of the support he received from his family but this is the first time he has given detail about his condition.

What are the signs of a stroke?

* Face weakness – it might be hard to smile, and one side of your face may droop.

* Arm weakness – you may not be able to fully lift both arms and keep them there because of weakness or numbness in one arm.

* Speech problems – you may slur your words or sound confused.

* Sudden weakness or numbness on one side of your body. (including in your leg).

* Sudden loss of vision or blurred vision in one or both eyes.

* Sudden difficulty speaking or thinking of words.

* Sudden memory loss or confusion.

* Sudden severe headache.

* Sudden dizziness, unsteadiness or a sudden fall, especially with any of the other signs.


Babygirl to Gladiator II and Conclave: The 20 best films of 2024

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240524-eight-of-the-best-films-of-2024-so-far, today

BBC film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year, including an erotic thriller with a twist, an intimate papal drama and the return of a swords-and-sandals epic.

1. Immaculate

Sydney Sweeney (also the film's producer) stars in this wonderfully creepy horror movie about an American novice nun who learns that all is not as it seems in an Italian convent. Immaculate could easily have been a trashy nunsploitation B-movie, but it's (mother) superior in many ways, from the bold commentary on men's treatment of women to cinematography that recalls Renaissance religious art. What's most striking about the film, though, is its willingness to take things to jaw-dropping extremes. There are countless moments when you're watching it and you think, "No... they're not going to go there... they wouldn't..." And then they do. (NB)

2. Civil War

Reactions to this film were almost as polarised as the divided country it depicts, a sure sign that Alex Garland hit a nerve with his vision of a near-future US that has descended into civil war under a fascist president. Kirsten Dunst is at the centre as a photojournalist who, along with her colleagues – played by Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinley Henderson – put themselves at great risk to witness and report the action around them. Garland makes that action visceral and explosive, from guns and tanks on the streets of Washington DC to violent one-on-one encounters in the supposedly calm countryside. But the most harrowing aspect of the film is how acutely and convincingly he positions the fiction as a hairsbreadth away from the real world around us. Some viewers complained that Garland didn't set up a more pointed political conflict, but to me the film is chilling enough in its vision of an all-too-credible war-torn future. (CJ)

3. Love Lies Bleeding

Kristen Stewart's character has a miserable life at the start of Love Lies Bleeding, as Stewart's characters so often do. She manages a dingy gym in a small town, she avoids her gangster father (Ed Harris), and she tries in vain to persuade her sister (Jena Malone) to end her abusive marriage. But everything changes when a charismatic drifter played by Katy O'Brian stops off on her way to a body-building contest in Las Vegas. Sparks fly, and the fireworks of sweaty sex, shocking violence and all-round craziness keep exploding. A stylish, blackly comic lesbian film noir from Rose Glass, the British director who made her feature debut with acclaimed horror Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding is the most fun and imaginative indie crime thriller since Good Time (2017), which happened to star Stewart's Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson. (NB)

4. La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher's films – like 2018's great, fabulistic Happy as Lazzaro – are tinged with magic realism. La Chimera, set in Tuscany in the 1980s, is among her best as it walks the line between richly-textured realism and dreams. Josh O'Connor stars as Arthur, an Englishman who works with a band of local Italian graverobbers to find ancient artifacts in Etruscan tombs to sell on the black market. Seedy looking and sad, Arthur is reeling from losing his love, Beniamina. As one character puts it, he is searching in the underground for "a door to the afterlife" and at times seems to find it. Rohrwacher has an eye for finding beauty in ruins, whether the big crumbling house where Beniamina's mother (Isabella Rossellini) lives, or Arthur himself. The plot keeps moving, with danger, crime and escapes from the police, but the film is shaped by O'Connor's poignant, low-key but charismatic performance and Rohrwacher's elegant vision, lushly filmed by the great cinematographer Helene Louvart. (CJ)

5. Robot Dreams

Robot Dreams is a cartoon like no other. It's a Spanish-French production, and yet it's a loving homage to the vibrancy of 1980s New York. It's animated in a 2D picture-book style, and yet it's bursting with tiny details. It doesn't have any dialogue, and yet it's peppered with wit and wisdom. It's all about a dog and a robot, and yet it's a richly human exploration of loneliness and companionship. Adapted from Sara Varon's graphic novel and directed by Pablo Berger, this Oscar-nominated gem tells the enchanting tale of two friends who find heartwarming joy in each other's company – and then have to work out whether they can learn to live apart. (NB)

6. Io Capitano

Few migrant dramas are as stirring, humane and suspenseful as this one, about the treacherous journey of a 16-year-old boy as he leaves Senegal in search of a better life. Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) won the award for best director at the 2023 Venice Film Festival for the film, and his non-professional star, Seydou Sarr, won best young actor as the fictional Seydou, a gentle boy determined to make it to Italy along with his cousin, Moussa. Each stage of the boys' travels presents a different danger. They set out across the Sahara with a group of other migrants, and when one woman dies, Seydou sees her gliding through the air, as if the reality is too much to take in. In Libya he is imprisoned and tortured. In the final stages he must pilot a boat full of migrants toward Italy, giving the film its title, Io Capitano (I Captain). With relatively few words, Garrone and Sarr create an eloquent, piercingly real film about one person, whose story resonates with the situation of millions around the world. (CJ)

7. Perfect Days

You wouldn't necessarily think that someone who cleaned public toilets for a living had found the secret to happiness, but Wim Wenders' Perfect Days makes a strong case for the idea. A Japanese-language film from the German writer-director, this hypnotic character study follows Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) around Tokyo as he carries out his janitorial duties, waters his plants, reads novels, listens to American rock music and takes photos of trees, all with the same quiet diligence and pride. There are hints here and there about how Hirayama's life has changed, and how it might change in the future, but the core of the film is a documentary-like meditation on the serenity of an existence stripped to its essentials. Also, the public toilets themselves are so well designed that Perfect Days could well turn them into tourist attractions. (NB)

 

8. Gladiator II

Ridley Scott's sequel to his 2000 swords-and-sandals Oscar winner is supremely entertaining, from Paul Mescal's dynamic (and underrated) starring role as Lucius, a gladiator and secret heir to the Roman Empire's throne, to the relentless, enthralling action in the Colosseum, where the gladiators' antagonists include sharks, baboons and rhinos. Mescal anchors the film and lets us see Lucius's anger and sensitivity. Outside the Colosseum, Denzel Washington goes over-the-top as the robe-wearing, bejewelled tycoon who buys Lucius and adds him to his stable of fighters, Pedro Pascal turns up as a Roman general, and Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger add a creepy note as the debauched twin emperors who sit in Lucius's rightful place. Colourful and wonderfully excessive, Gladiator II is everything you could want in a popcorn movie, and proof that when Scott is at his best, he can turn out an extravaganza like no one else. (CJ)

9. Babygirl

Babygirl stars Nicole Kidman as the high-powered boss of a zillion-dollar robotics company, alongside Harris Dickinson as an arrogant young intern. As soon as she lays eyes on him, she has a feeling that he might be able to satisfy her in ways that her loving husband (Antonio Banderas) can't, and a highly risky – and risqué – game of domination and submission begins. This could easily be the premise of a glossy erotic thriller from the 1980s or 1990s, and Babygirl sometimes looks as if that's exactly what it is, what with its gorgeous stars, designer clothes and glamorous settings. But writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) has too much sympathy for her characters to treat them as the predatory seducers and hapless victims who might have been in such a film a few decades ago. Instead, they are flawed individuals with messy lives and conflicting desires, which makes their affair all the more intriguing and unpredictable. (NB)

10. Hard Truths

As he so often does, Mike Leigh shows us that a film doesn't have to be big or boisterous to be spectacular. Twenty-eight years after Secrets and Lies, the director reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who stars as Pansy, so depressed and so convinced that the world is against her that she lashes out at everyone, from strangers to those who love her best. It's an amazing performance, fierce and angry yet full of empathy and understanding. Without sentimentality or special pleading for Pansy, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste build enormous sympathy for this woman whose bitterness and harsh behaviour come from a profound unhappiness that is inexplicable to her. The supporting cast, especially Michele Austin as Pansy's sister, create a family concerned for her but baffled about what to do. Once more, Leigh proves himself a master at immersing us in the reality of ordinary lives in a film that, despite its prickly heroine, is at times laced with wit and always infused with warmth. (CJ)

11. All We Imagine as Light

Payal Kapadia’s first feature film was a documentary which came out in 2021, but she was largely unknown (by me, at least) until this year, when the release of her first drama propelled her into the ranks of the world's most exciting young directors. All We Imagine as Light stars Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam as three Indian women of different generations who all work in the same Mumbai hospital, and who all share a kind of heartache: one is widowed and soon to be evicted from her marital home, one lives thousands of miles away from a husband she barely knows, and one is in love with a man her parents will never let her marry. As the women mull over the question of whether to stay in Mumbai or to move back to their home villages, this soulful, poetic film pays tribute to the dreamy magic of wandering around a busy city at night. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, it is so intimate and evocative that it makes you feel as if you're wandering around the city, too, side by side with some beloved friends. (NB)

12. Emilia Pérez

There is nothing like Emilia Pérez. Artistically daring, deliriously bonkers and entertaining, Jacques Audiard's musical drama is so outlandish it shouldn't work, but the parts fit together with such wit and kinetic energy it totally does. Karla Sofía Gascón plays a Mexican crime lord, Manitas, who transitions and becomes Emilia with the help of her lawyer (Zoe Saldana). Emilia masquerades as a distant cousin to be close to her own wife (Selena Gomez) and children, and becomes a philanthropist, only to have the criminal impulse catch up with her. The film is full of singing and dancing, with musical numbers next to scenes of violent action. Yet beneath that energetic surface the characters evolve and become heart-piercing by the end; Saldana and Gomez are standouts. In a landscape of superheroes and sequels, wonderful though some of them are, this film stands out for its originality, as Audiard wrangles a splashy mix of genres into one bold and touching film.  (CJ)

13. Nosferatu

For too long now, on-screen vampires have either been sexy (True Blood, Twilight) or silly (Hotel Transylvania, Renfield), but Robert Eggers's towering remake of FW Murnau's silent classic takes them right back to their ancient roots in European folklore, at the same time as putting a modern spin on the themes of Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel. Nosferatu is a painstakingly researched period piece set in Germany in the early 1800s. Bill Skarsgård plays the undead Count Orlok – and, for once, we're treated to a vampire who isn't a rakish charmer or a moody loner but a genuinely strange and monstrous demonic force. Still, Eggers's gothic melodrama isn't really about the count, as striking as he is, but about Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a potentially happy couple who are threatened as much by their insecurities about class and sex as they are by the Transylvanian bloodsucker who has moved into the tumbledown manor house up the road. (NB)

14. Conclave

Conclave is that rare thing: an enthralling commercial film that is also full of artistry, elevated by Edward Berger's meticulous direction and Ralph Fiennes' powerfully subtle performance as a cardinal running the election of a new pope. Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front won the best international film Oscar for 2022, gives the film the momentum of a great political thriller as it follows the cardinals' manipulations, dirty tricks and wheeling and dealing. The cinematography is stunning, with beautifully composed shots full of the rich colours of the cardinals' robes and the grandeur of the Vatican setting. Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence is all surface calm, yet we see how he is anguished as he questions his own faith. And there are dazzling, sharply honed performances from Stanley Tucci, adding a droll touch as a contender for the top job, John Lithgow as a high-ranking cardinal with scandals to hide, and Isabella Rossellini as a nun who often stands in the background and finally chooses her moment to say a few sharp words. Like the best Hollywood films, Conclave is smart, sophisticated and hugely enjoyable to watch. (CJ)

15. Anora

A worthy winner of this year's Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Anora tells the wild, whirling tale of Ani (Mikey Madison), a young Russian-American woman who dances in a Manhattan strip club. In exchange for a hefty fee, she agrees to have sex with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the empty-headed son of a Russian oligarch, and she soon comes to believe that they might have a future together. Vanya's parents don't agree. Madison and Sean Baker, the film's writer-director, have created a character with so much verve that she leaps off the screen, and her farcical misadventures are thrilling and hilarious. But Baker always keeps things rooted in the earthy reality of contemporary American life, just as he did in such previous films as Tangerine and The Florida Project. As deliriously entertaining as it is, Anora is an authentic picture of people who are down to their last few dollars. (NB)

16. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Ignore the confusing title. This Iranian film is one of the most potent and timely of the year. At its centre is a family that embodies the political and generational conflict roiling that country. Iman, the stern father, is an investigator for the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran, his wife is meek and compliant, and their two young adult daughters are part of the women's protest movement on the streets. Director Mohammad Rasoulof includes some actual footage of 2022 protests, but the film is a taut, suspenseful drama, not a tract. When Iman loses his gun and accuses his family of taking it, the true harshness of his personality and the depths of the daughter's resistance to him and the country's patriarchy turn the story into a harrowing thriller. Rasoulof shot the film in secret, fled Iran and a prison sentence to present it at Cannes and now lives in exile in Germany. But the action on screen is what matters, and that is an intimate, intense drama that captures the brutal impact politics can have on individuals. (CJ)

17. The Substance

Coralie Fargeat's genre-crossing hit starts as a slick and shiny showbiz satire in the same neighbourhood as Sunset Boulevard: its heroine is a former Oscar-winning superstar (Demi Moore) who is deemed to be past her prime by the obnoxious producer (Dennis Quaid) of her daytime TV show. The film then changes into a surreal sci-fi drama in the vein of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as the ex-star pays to have herself cloned, so that her "younger, better" duplicate (Margaret Qualley) can take over the show. And after that, The Substance morphs into a slimy monster movie for its over-the-top gross-out finale. The commentary on Hollywood's ageist and sexist tendencies isn't exactly subtle, but, well, subtlety is hardly the point. Fargeat proves that if you have something to say, and you say it forcefully enough, then a relatively low-budget film can still get people to watch it – and to argue about it afterwards. (NB)

18. Blitz

Steve McQueen expands his already formidable range in this affecting film that plunges us into the lives of a single mother and her son during the World War Two bombing of London. Saoirse Ronan plays Rita, a factory worker who lives with her father (Paul Weller) and nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan). Although McQueen is known for grittier films, like Hunger and 12 Years a Slave, here he seamlessly blends the wartime setting with adventure, social commentary and warm family feeling. When George runs away to avoid being sent to a safe place in the country, his journey takes on overtones of Oliver Twist. The film tackles the racism that surrounds the family, including the way George's father, an African immigrant, was unfairly arrested and deported. The actors are natural even in the most extraordinary circumstances, led by Ronan, who allows us to see Rita's intense love for her son from the start. McQueen's bravura film-making creates a ferocious sense of being in a bombardment, but ultimately this moving war story is about family in all its emotion and heartbreak. (CJ)

19. A Real Pain

Two decades into his illustrious career as an actor, which includes everything from Zombieland to The Social Network to Sasquatch Sunset (another highlight of 2024), Jesse Eisenberg proves that he is just as talented behind the camera as he is in front of it. His second film as a writer-director revolves around two cousins, David and Benji, played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. David is careful and cautious, while Benji is an exasperatingly egotistical extrovert, but in an attempt to rebuild the relationship they once had as boys in New York, the cousins go on a guided tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. What’s so remarkable about A Real Pain is that it deals with its sobering subject matter with respect and sensitivity, and yet it’s packed with laughs from start to finish. The key is that the comedy always feels uncontrived, because it seems to arise naturally from the cousins’ personalities. Eisenberg has managed to make a sincere, insightful and profoundly touching film which is also the year’s funniest. (NB)

20. I'm Still Here

Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) makes political drama personal in this eloquent film, based on the true story of the Paiva family. In 1970's Rio, Rubens Paiva, a liberal former Congressman and activist opposing the country's military dictatorship, becomes one of many disappeared when he is taken away by police and never seen again. Over the next years and decades his wife, Eunice, and their five children live with the aftermath. Fernanda Torres gives a performance of remarkable understated strength, capturing Eunice's iron will as she fights to support her family and discover her husband's fate. Salles makes us feel the tension and fear of the abduction and of the days after, but few films create such a singular depiction of the long-term effects of such tragedies on those left behind. I'm Still Here elegantly reveals the enduring grief and the way political acts and their repercussions can stop lives in their tracks, as this family learns to look forward without losing sight of the past. (CJ)

The numbers in this piece do not represent rankings, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.

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Babygirl to A Complete Unknown: 12 of the best films to watch this December

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241127-12-of-the-best-films-to-watch-this-december, today

From a steamy age-gap thriller starring Nicole Kidman to a Bob Dylan biopic featuring Timothée Chalamet, these are the films to stream and watch at the cinema this month.

Beatles '64

It was in February 1964 that the US succumbed to Beatlemania. The Fab Four spent three weeks in the country that had influenced them so much, and their visit included an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was seen by 73 million people, as well as their first US concert in Washington DC. Beatles '64 is an intimate chronicle of those whirlwind weeks, produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi. There are new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with such peers as Smokey Robinson and Ronnie Spector (who died in 2022), but the film's main attraction is the rarely seen footage shot at the time by two legendary documentary-makers, Albert and David Maysles. "The Maysles brothers were pioneers of direct cinema, as they called it," Tedeschi said in Rolling Stone. "In that footage, you can see that the Beatles are very relaxed. They have so much charisma on camera. But even the fans, these young women in front of the Plaza Hotel, or what we call the Sullivan Theater now – they also have so much charisma. There's something about the energy of Al and David that relaxed people, and allowed them to project something on film."

Released on 29 November on Disney+

The Return

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche starred in The English Patient together in 1996, and they're reunited in The Return, another epic drama about the mental and physical scars left by warfare. Co-written and directed by Uberto Pasolini, this swords-and-sandals saga is based on the last section of Homer's The Odyssey, in which Odysseus (Fiennes) comes back to Ithaca after a decade of battling Trojans and another decade of battling giant monsters. His patient wife Penelope (Binoche) has been busy fending off the many suitors who are keen to claim his fortune, but Odysseus may be too badly bruised to step in before it's too late. "It's gritty and dirty and eventually smeared with blood, but it takes its time and weighs every word," says Steve Pond in The Wrap. "Fiennes is magnificent as Odysseus, his face a map of troubles and his voice a virtuoso instrument."

Released on 6 December in the US

Better Man

Robbie Williams found fame as a member of a British boy band, Take That, before becoming a phenomenally successful but scandal-prone solo artist. He's an ideal candidate, then, for a pop-star biopic. But Better Man, directed by Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), is more distinctive than that might suggest. Not only is it unusually open about Williams's flaws, it features one bold and bizarre innovation: Williams himself is represented as a CGI chimpanzee, as played by Jonno Davies in a performance-capture bodysuit. "The result is a film that feels grandiose, outrageous, deeply personal and joltingly relatable," says Kristy Puchko in Mashable. "It's Billy Elliot meets Rocketman meets Planet of the Apes. And it's so much more. Rich in vibrant emotion, body-rocking musical numbers, daring performances and a scorching tenderness, Better Man more than rocks. It rules."

Released on 25 December in the US and Sweden, and on 26 December in the UK, Ireland and Australia

Nightbitch

Adapted from Rachel Yoder's novel, and directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), the boldly titled Nightbitch is a horror comedy that stars Amy Adams as the exhausted and exasperated stay-at-home mother of an infant son. She feels that she has lost her identity as an artist, she doesn't fit in with her fellow suburban mothers and her husband (Scoot McNairy) doesn't appreciate what she is going through. It's at this point that the film shifts from observational comedy to twisted body horror: she believes that she is growing fur and fangs, and turning into a dog. "Adams is having a blast as the mother, taking centre stage with renewed energy and vigour," says Jourdain Searles in Little White Lies. "McNairy is in top comedic form as the clueless husband who thinks of raising his own son as babysitting. There's no denying the universal truths behind the narrative… Nightbitch is about a mother's need to be free."

Released on 6 December in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland

The Count of Monte-Cristo

Last year, Dimitri Rassam's French production company, Chapter 2, released two lavish epics adapted from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. As if that weren't enough, the company has now completed another Dumas adaptation, a three-hour romp through his classic novel of vengeance, disguise and swashbuckling swordplay, The Count of Monte-Cristo. Pierre Niney stars as Edmond Dantès, a young sailor who is wrongly accused of treason in the early 19th Century. He is locked in an island prison for years, but a fellow inmate tells him of a secret stash of treasure, and he eventually enacts his meticulous revenge. This "masterful adaptation stands as one of the best renditions of Dumas' work to date, says Linda Marric in HeyUGuys. "Every twist and turn of the plot is delivered with maximum impact, [but] the film's takeaway is a haunting reflection on the cost of revenge and the perils of letting obsession dictate one's life."

Released on 20 December in the US

Kraven the Hunter

It's been a relatively quiet year for superhero films, but there have already been two set in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, ie they revolve around supporting characters from Marvel's Spider-Man comics, but they don't feature Spidey himself. Neither Madame Web nor Venom: The Last Dance was exactly a triumph, mind you, but maybe this year's third SSMU film, Kraven the Hunter, will hit the mark. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as a Russian big-game hunter with enhanced strength and heightened senses. Ariana DeBose is his love interest, Russell Crowe is his gangster father, and Alessandro Nivola is another Spider-Man villain, the Rhino. More intriguingly, the director, JC Chandor, is known for downbeat dramas (Margin Call, All is Lost, A Most Violent Year), and he has suggested that Kraven the Hunter will be another of those. "Sony probably doesn't want me to lead with this," Chandor said in Esquire, "but the story is a tragedy. When the final credits roll on this film, if you've been paying attention, you won't have the feeling that this is all going to end great."

Released on 12 December in cinemas internationally

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

A decade on from the last big-screen Tolkien adaptation – Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – it's time for another film set in Middle Earth. Jackson is the executive producer, and his usual co-writer, Philippa Boyens, is the producer. But The War of the Rohirrim is different from their previous work. Set two centuries before Jackson's films, it takes its story from an appendix at the end of Tolkien's novel, so its main characters haven't been seen on screen before. It also has a Japanese director, Kenji Kamiyama, who has made a cartoon in the Japanese anime style. "When they suggested anime, that's when my brain really started whirring," Boyens said in Entertainment Weekly. "Immediately, the idea of telling this story came to me… I felt that it would work for anime because it's so character-based and also contained within its own world. It speaks to certain things that work really well with Japanese storytelling." 

Released on 11 December in cinemas internationally

Mufasa: The Lion King

The Lion King has been a massive hit as a cartoon, a stage musical and a photorealistic remake of the cartoon, and now the franchise comes roaring back with Mufasa: The Lion King, which is a prequel to the photorealistic remake. It tells the tale of how Simba's orphaned father, Mufasa, made his perilous journey to the Pride Lands, soundtracked with new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The most surprising part of the film is its director, Barry Jenkins, who is best known for his Oscar-winning drama, Moonlight. He has been criticised for taking on a Disney prequel, but he has said that Jeff Nathanson's script convinced him that the project was right for him. "I found the story incredibly moving," Jenkins said in The New York Times. "There's this character who we know of as inherently great or inherently royal, and we get to really go in and explore how this person came to be. We're also looking at what makes some people good and others evil, and how people aren't fundamentally one or the other."

Released on 18 December in cinemas internationally

Nosferatu

FW Murnau's unofficial Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu, came out more than a 100 years ago, but it still stands as cinema's creepiest ever vampire film. Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, is such an obsessive fan of the film that he staged it as a school play when he was 17 years old, and now he's written and directed his own remake starring Bill Skarsgård as the undead Count Orlok, Nicholas Hoult as the hapless estate agent who visits him at his Transylvanian castle, Lily-Rose Depp as the woman who falls under Orlok's spell and Willem Dafoe as an expert on vampire lore. Eggers told Anthony Breznican in Vanity Fair that his Nosferatu boasts an authentic 19th-Century setting – and an authentic 19th-Century vampire, too. "This Orlok is more of a folk vampire than any other film version. That means he's a dead person... For the first time in a Dracula or Nosferatu story, this guy looks like a dead Transylvanian nobleman. Every single thing he's wearing down to the heels on his shoes is what he would've worn. That's never been done."

Released on 25 December in the US, Canada, Mexico and Spain

That Christmas

Several intertwining stories set over a picture-perfect festive season in England? A bashful boy who gets tongue-tied in front of the girl he adores? That Christmas may be a cartoon, but it's easy to guess that it was co-written by Richard Curtis, the romantic softy who scripted and directed Love Actually. Inspired by three children's picture books, which were also written by Curtis, it's a cosy animation set in a quaint Suffolk seaside village. Santa Claus (voiced by Brian Cox) is coming to town, but a heavy snowfall there might stop the residents from spending the big day together. This "delightful holiday feature offers something for everyone, especially the people who get mushy about glossy stories about human connection," says Kate Erbland in IndieWire. "The old chestnuts hold true for this one, the goofy holiday puns: it's a gift well worth unwrapping and sharing with the ones you love most."

Released on 6 December on Netflix internationally

A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan has had such a long and trailblazing career that it would be impossible to sum up its twists and turns in one conventional biopic: when Todd Haynes made I'm Not There, he resorted to casting six different actors (including Cate Blanchett) to play him in six different storylines. James Mangold's approach in A Complete Unknown is to stick to Dylan's early years, in particular his rise to fame as a folk singer in New York's Greenwich Village, and his controversial pivot to electric guitar-driven rock'n'roll in 1965. Timothée Chalamet has the starring role, and is already being tipped for an Oscar nomination. "Oscar voters can't resist a biopic," says the BBC's Caryn James. "Consider this: A Complete Unknown was directed by James Mangold, who directed another awards-bait musical biopic, Walk the Line (2005). Reese Witherspoon won the best actress Oscar for her performance in that film as June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix earned a best actor nomination as Johnny Cash. If nothing else, A Complete Unknown may well bring Chalamet his second nomination, after Call Me By Your Name."

Released on 25 December in the US

Babygirl

Writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) takes the erotic thriller into the post-Me Too era with Babygirl, a film that brings complexity and realism to the kind of titillating premise that would have excited Adrian Lyne and Paul Verhoeven in the 1980s and 1990s. Nicole Kidman's character is the much-admired CEO of a New York tech firm, not to mention the glamorous wife of a feted theatre director (Antonio Banderas). But she has secret, unfulfilled desires which are awakened by a slippery young intern played by Harris Dickinson. Will she risk everything by embarking on an affair with an employee who's half her age? "Rarely is that workplace taboo as scintillating as it is in Babygirl, a captivating psychological drama," says Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. "It's hard to imagine audiences being more glued to another movie this year, so sexy and stirring the story is from start to finish."

Released on 25 December in the US

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A Complete Unknown review: Timothée Chalamet is 'brilliant and believable' in 'conventional' biopic

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241210-a-complete-unknown-review, today

Despite its "kinetic performances and irresistible music" from star Timothée Chalamet and cast, James Mangold's Dylan biopic is disappointingly unambitious.

Bob Dylan is a master of self-mythologising. Decades ago he created his image as a brilliant enigma, which has made him an ideal canvas on which film-makers have projected their own interpretations. Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (2007) created six fictional variations, Martin Scorsese playfully danced around Dylan in Rolling Thunder Revue (1975), a mock-documentary about his tour of the same name, and the Coen brothers created a musician resembling Dylan (loosely based on his contemporary Dave Van Ronk) in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). All those films are more resonant and creative than the much-anticipated A Complete Unknown, in which Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, on to fame and then his culture-rattling turn from acoustic folk-inspired music to electric instruments in 1965. Director James Mangold has insisted that he was not making a biopic, but he has delivered just that: a likeable but disappointingly conventional film galvanised by its kinetic performances and irresistible music, and flattened by its safe, unimaginative script.

Dylan himself approved of the project, meeting with Mangold while he was writing the screenplay (based on a previous script by Jay Cocks). Dylan even posted about the film on X recently: "Timmy's a brilliant actor so I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me." That's the kind of pure Dylanesque statement, with his projection of a chameleonic persona, that A Complete Unknown misses.

Fortunately, it turns out that Timmy is brilliant here and completely believable, better than the film itself. He sings and plays guitar and harmonica with apparent ease, and creates a thoroughly convincing avatar of Dylan. At 19, he arrives in New York straight out of Minnesota, with a backpack and a guitar, and in this telling soon goes to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, who is in a veterans' hospital. (The hospital visit really happened. The film collapses timelines and events, but generally relies on facts.)

Singing the song he wrote for Guthrie, Chalamet looks out bashfully from under his eyelashes and channels the raspiness in Dylan's voice. He suggests some uncertainty in the young Dylan but also the brash confidence of daring to perform for your idol. Scoot McNairy is heart wrenching and dynamic as Guthrie, who has lost the ability to speak but has a fire in his eyes. Edward Norton delivers a sly turn as Pete Seeger, who happens to be visiting at that moment and takes Dylan under his wing. As the film goes on, Norton is especially good at capturing the respect tinged with jealousy Dylan evokes in Seeger, benevolence turning to rigid disapproval when Dylan's music begins to change. Like all the other supporting actors, Norton does his own singing, impressively. And the film does a swift, effective job of setting the musical landscape Dylan comes out of: the earnest, old-timey tradition embodied by Seeger's banjo-playing version of Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

Mangold (who directed the Johnny Cash and June Carter biopic Walk the Line) is too smart to attempt to explain Dylan, so the film sees him from the outside in, through others' eyes. That spares us any cringey scenes depicting the creative process. The songs arrive on screen almost fully formed, and Chalamet gets plenty of time to perform Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin'. But that approach also makes the film feel by-the-numbers and perfunctory, especially in its first hour as it walks through scenes from his early career. Focusing on a slice of life rather than taking a cradle-to-now approach doesn't avoid the worn-out tropes of a biopic. They include a huge overload of hokey reaction shots as listeners look on in awe when the young Dylan performs at an open-mic night, and glimpses on black-and-white televisions of news about the Cuban Missile Crisis or Dylan singing at the March on Washington.

As Joan Baez, Monica Barbaro's job is as difficult as Chalamet's, in portraying a very familiar figure, and she pulls it off perfectly. She has Baez's exceptional clarity of voice, and is a stirring presence as the Baez-Dylan relationship plays out, on stage in duets and in their on-and-off romance. Well-matched in talent and wilfulness, Baez is strong enough to call Dylan out on his posturing, and laughs at his claim that he travelled with a carnival and learned guitar chords from a cowboy named Wigglefoot. Chalamet and Barbaro give them great chemistry together. (A movie about that relationship is one I'd want to see.)

Elle Fanning has less to work with as Sylvie Russo, based on the real-life Suze Rotolo, who was Dylan's girlfriend in those years, overlapping with Joan and others, as she was well aware. In two scenes, Sylvie's eyes fill with tears as she realises she's losing Bob to Joan. That is one teary scene too many, but Fanning's performance is so natural she makes them work.

When Sylvie complains that she knows nothing of Bob's past, he yells "People make up their past, Sylvie! They remember what they want, they forget the rest". That line is in the trailer, and there isn't much more of that theme in the film itself, another way in which it lets down its own promise. Spinning his own myth, inventing a story in which he was a troubadour roaming the country picking up tips from blues musicians, is an essential part of Dylan, something an ambitious film would do more than hint at.  

The film finally takes off in its later stages, after he becomes famous and resists being boxed in musically. His look changes, and he is the Dylan of wild hair, dark glasses and a sardonic tone. Trapped by fame, the character gets pricklier and much more interesting. We see him in the studio recording Like a Rolling Stone, adding electric guitars and a rock sound. The film recreates the famous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and the tumultuous response, when his electric versions of Maggie's Farm and Like a Rolling Stone horrified folk purists, including Seeger.

Chalamet gives Dylan a defiant look in his eyes and through these later scenes creates a visceral sense of his restlessness, of how important it is for him to break free of the public assumptions about him, both musically and as the spokesman of a generation. You can finally feel an energy that can't be restrained and that should have been in the film all along.

★★★☆☆

A Complete Unknown is released in cinemas on 25 December in the US, and 17 January 2025 in the UK

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'You have to just draw something that you hope is funny': How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241205-how-charles-m-schulz-created-charlie-brown-and-snoopy, today

Charles M Schulz drew his beloved Peanuts strip for 50 years until his announcement on 14 December 1999 that ill health was forcing him to retire. In History looks at how an unassuming cartoonist built a billion-dollar empire out of the lives of a group of children, a dog and a bird.

Charles M Schulz's timeless creation Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature, but the cartoonist was modest about the scope of his miniature parables. In a 1977 BBC interview, he said: "I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."  

This did not mean that he felt as if he was dealing with trivial matters. He said: "I'm always very much offended when someone asks me, 'Do I ever do satire on the social condition?' Well, I do it almost every day. And they say, 'Well, do you ever do political things?' I say, 'I do things which are more important than politics. I'm dealing with love and hate and mistrust and fear and insecurity.'"  

While Charlie Brown may have been the eternal failure, the universal feelings that Schulz channelled helped make Peanuts a global success. Born in 1922, Schulz drew every single Peanuts strip himself from 1950 until his death in February 2000. It was so popular that Nasa named two of the modules in its May 1969 Apollo 10 lunar mission after Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The strip was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide, and inspired films, music and countless items of merchandise. 

Part of its success, according to the writer Umberto Eco, was that it worked on different levels. He wrote: "Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys. Peanuts is thus a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated." 

Schulz's initial reason for focusing on children in the strip was strictly commercial. In 1990, he told the BBC: "I always hate to say it, but I drew little kids because this is what sold. I wanted to draw something, I didn't know what it was, but it just seemed as if whenever I drew children, these were the cartoons that editors seemed to like the best. And so, back in 1950, I mailed a batch of cartoons to New York City, to United Features Syndicate, and they said they liked them, and so ever since I've been drawing little kids."  

Of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, he said: "I've always been a little bit intrigued by the fact that dogs apparently tolerate the actions of the children with whom they are playing. It's almost as if the dogs are smarter than the kids. I think also that the characters I have serve as a good outlet for any idea that I may come up with. I never think of an idea and then find that I have no way of using it. I can use any idea that I think of because I've got the right repertory company." 

Schulz called upon some of his earliest experiences as a shy child to create the strip. As a teenager, he studied drawing by correspondence course because he was too reticent to attend art school in person. Speaking in 1977, he said: "I couldn't see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I, and this way I was protected by drawing at home and simply mailing my drawings in and having them criticised. I wish I had a better education, but I think that my entire background made me well suited for what I do.  

"If I could write better than I can, perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist, and I might have become a failure. If I could draw better than I can, I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist and would have failed there, but my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist." 

Never give up

Peanuts remained remarkably consistent despite the relentless publishing schedule, and Schulz would not let the expectations of his millions of fans become a distraction. He said: "You have to kind of bend over the drawing board, shut the world out and just draw something that you hope is funny. Cartooning is still drawing funny pictures, whether they're just silly little things or rather meaningful political cartoons, but it's still drawing something funny, and that's all you should think about at that time – keep kind of a light feeling.  

"I suppose when a composer is composing well, the music is coming faster than he can think of it, and when I have a good idea I can hardly get the words down fast enough. I'm afraid that they will leave me before I get them down on the paper. Sometimes my hand will literally shake with excitement as I'm drawing it because I'm having a good time.  Unfortunately, this does not happen every day."  

More like this:

• Julie Andrews on being 'teased' for Mary Poppins

• Apollo 11: training for a mission to the moon

• How Mickey Mouse saved Disney from ruin

Despite his modesty, Schulz insisted he was always confident that Peanuts would be a hit. He said: "I mean, when you sign up to play at Wimbledon, you expect to win. Obviously, there are a lot of things that I didn't anticipate, like Snoopy's going to the Moon and things like that, but I always had hopes it would become big." 

Schulz generally worked five weeks in advance. On 14 December 1999, fans were dismayed to learn that he would be hanging up his pen because he had cancer. He said that his cartoon for 3 January 2000 would be the final daily release. It would be followed on 13 February with the final strip for a Sunday newspaper. He died one day before that last strip ran.  

In it, Schulz wrote: "I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the wonderful support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them..." 

Back in 1977, Schulz insisted that the cartoonist's role was mostly to point out problems rather than trying to solve them, but there was one lesson that people could take from his work. He said: "I suppose one of the solutions is, as Charlie Brown, just to keep on trying. He never gives up. And if anybody should give up, he should." 

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'Her fans are making pilgrimages': How Taylor Swift's Eras Tour became a near-religious experience

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241205-how-taylor-swifts-eras-tour-took-over-the-world, today

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, a "cultural juggernaut" remarkable for both its scale and intimacy, comes to an end this week. Along the way, it has become the most extraordinary live event of our time – and for many, it's meant even more.

This weekend, after 20 months, 149 shows, a blockbuster concert film and millions of friendship bracelet swaps, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour finally comes to an end in Vancouver, Canada.

Less a live show than a cultural juggernaut steamrolling into 53 cities across five continents, the Eras Tour has dominated headlines, boosted national economies (and craft sales), caused mini-earthquakes and broken countless records – including becoming the highest-grossing tour of all time (experts believe it will top $2bn (£1.6bn) – and that doesn't include merchandise). Since she kicked off the live shows in March 2023, Swift has released three albums (re-recordings of Speak Now and 1989, and The Tortured Poets Department), snagged her fourth album of the year Grammy – the first artist to do so – and embarked on a high-profile relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce (who made a cameo on the Eras Tour). She has called the end of the tour "the closing of the most extraordinary chapter of my life so far".

The sheer scale and cultural dominance of the Eras Tour, from the record attendances to the 3.5-hour setlist, is undeniable. In the almost two years it's been going, it has become its own news cycle – even if you didn't attend, you've probably seen the videos of Prince William or Tom Cruise dancing at the show, or heard about world leaders begging Swift to give their country an economy-boosting visit. We live in an era of blockbuster live shows, but there's never been anything quite as colossal as this. It's hard to see how anyone, including Swift herself, will top it anytime soon.

And yet, if Swift's shows were remarkable for their size, they were also striking for their against-the-odds sense of intimacy. Attending the Eras Tour felt less like bowing down to a global megastar, and more like a mass, sequinned meet-up. Earlier this year Variety magazine dubbed her "the world's greatest community organiser".

Being relatable has long been Swift's calling card. Even as her fame and wealth has soared (she joined the Forbes World's Billionaires List earlier this year), she's continued to keep fans believing that she's not really all that different from them. This starts with her songs: universal experiences – heartache, betrayal, loss, revenge, regret – written about with remarkable specificity. But she's also carefully cultivated that feeling of inclusivity at her live shows.

From the stage, which extends two-thirds of the way into the stadium so that Swift spends most of the show in the middle of the crowd, to her use of "we" and "us" ("We're about to go on a little adventure together…") to the LED wristbands that turn the crowd into part of the show (Coldplay pioneered this at their gigs), the whole thing is designed to feel like a collective experience. Swift first emerges from a puff of pastel parachutes to ecstatic, ear-piercing screams. For a few minutes, up on a raised platform, she seems celestial. Then she smiles, utters "Oh hi!" as if she's greeting old friends, and the untouchable suddenly becomes attainable.

The show runs like clockwork, but Swift changes just enough to make each night feel unique for the audience. In her short acoustic set she's never repeated the same combination of surprise songs and deep-cut mash-ups. She has greeted the crowds in languages including Welsh, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. In every city, one of her backing dancers, Kameron Saunders, utters a locally-tailored put down during We Are Never Getting Back Together (in Ireland:  "the neck of ye", London: "up yours…", Edinburgh: "bolt ya rocket"). In May, Swift added a new segment to the setlist, featuring songs from this year's The Tortured Poet's Department, including the single I Can Do It with a Broken Heart, a track written about performing on the Eras Tour with a broken heart.

A 'communal belonging'

The tour has been a rolling stone, gathering not moss, but new traditions and meaning along the way. Fans have created their own rituals that have become baked into the show – an ecstatic, extended applause after the song Champagne Problems (which Swift dutifully pretends to be surprised by every time), chanting Kendrick Lamar's lines from his remix to Bad Blood, and, of course, the friendship bracelets – a tradition sparked by a lyric in her song You're On Your Own Kid. In every stadium thousands of forearms are weighed down by stacks of hand-crafted bracelets that are traded with strangers, security guards and even, at one London show, Sir Paul McCartney. For fans, taking part in these moments are as much a part of the experience as the music.

Another customis for fans to scream "take us to church" as Swift hits the high notes of Reputation-era track Don't Blame Me. Philosopher Simon Critchley, whose recent book On Mysticism explores the transcendent power of music and art, argues that they might already be there. "I think her fans are going to church, or the closest they can get to church," he tells the BBC. Critchley, who sees music as "maybe the last bastion of something like religious transcendence" thinks Swift is scratching a metaphysical itch for fans. "They don't think she's God, but to them she's someone very special, and she mediates a form of communal belonging that is lacking in other areas of their lives."

People have clamoured to experience the Eras Tour – not just hardcore Swifties, but those not wanting to miss out on an era-defining cultural event. Tickets were famously hard to snag, with some fans paying thousands on resale sites. Many fans travelled across the world to attend shows. Those that couldn't make it converged outside stadiums – in Munich, 40,000 ticketless fans gathered on a nearby hill, not just to be nearer to their idol, but to each other. Every night of the Eras Tour, hundreds of thousands of people have watched grainy fan-filmed livestreams of the shows online. When Swift's Vienna shows were cancelled due to a terrorist threat, fans gathered in the streets to sing her songs and swap bracelets. "This is devotional practice and the fans are making pilgrimages," says Critchley. "It's almost as if the difficulty is part of the experience. If you think about medieval pilgrimages, they were really hard."

Post-pandemic, live shows have attracted huge demand as people have flocked back to in-person experiences. "That sense of disconnection from each other in Covid and the distrust that went along with that, and the fact that many of us became kind of monks and nuns in ourselves, and were thinking about what we were missing… there's an intense, metaphysical need to feel together with other people," says Critchley.

Swift herself recognises this. In the forward to her newly released Eras Tour book, she writes: "We do it because people need an escape from how brutal life can be, and it is the honour of a lifetime to be that for them, if only for a night. And although we are on our own in this big scary life, somehow it doesn't feel that way when we're singing the same words as 80,000 other people wearing glittery face paint."

She's not the only artist leaning into the communal aspect of the live experience. Beyoncé, explaining her decision to stop making music videos and focus on live shows, told GQ magazine: "The fans from all over the world became the visual. We all got the visual on tour." Charli XCX's Brat tour is more like a warehouse rave. Chappell Roan gives her shows themes, with fans encouraged to dress accordingly. "I'm big on crowd participation," Roan told Nylon. Dressing for the occasion is now a huge part of live shows – many Swifties came as their favourite "Era". With ticket prices soaring, fans are determined to make the most of these experiences.

Boom and bust

The Eras Tour is part of a boom in live music, with 2023 a record year worldwide - but the industry is top heavy, with the biggest artists benefitting the most. Globally, the largest 100 tours of last year grossed more than $9bn (£7bn). In the UK, the value of the music industry to the national economy hit a record high of £7.6bn ($9.7bn), thanks to tours from big-name acts. At the same time, grassroots music venues are closing at an alarming rate. Musician Kate Nash recently called live shows a "passion project for a lot of artists" while "a select few in the industry become millionaires or even billionaires from touring."

Whereas once people forged their identities in distinct musical tribes, there now seems to be a yearning for something akin to a monoculture. "We live in an asynchronous world where no one's experiencing the same thing at the same moment, and everything is fragmented," says Critchley. "So what do we have left to bring us together? Live sports and live concerts."

In the social media age, fans expect to feel a connection to their pop stars, and that now goes for the live experience too. It's not enough to see a spectacle – people want to feel a part of something.

It's when this desire to feel a part of an artist's world tips over into expectation that things get complicated. At a gig in the summer, Chappell Roan broke down on stage, telling the crowd she was struggling with her rapid rise to fame. The moment went viral, with fans applauding her vulnerability. But when Roan cancelled some shows earlier in the year citing "overwhelming pressure", she faced backlash for letting people down.

Charli XCX recently revealed to Variety that she has nerve damage in her neck from performances, which leaves her in "a lot of pain" on stage. "For me to give a performance that I feel is good enough, I have to really physically throw myself around," she explained.

Artists are expected to surrender ever more of themselves, physically and emotionally. It's something Swift has had to learn to navigate, but if the demands of the Eras Tour have taken their toll, she isn't letting on. At her penultimate shows in Toronto, Swift got emotional on-stage. "I'm just having a bit of a moment," she told the crowd. "We have put so much of our lives into this. And you've put so much of your lives into being with us." After nearly two years in the literal spotlight, she's certainly earned a long break – though, knowing Swift, it won't be long before she ushers in a brand-new era.

The Eras Tour concludes on 8 December in Vancouver, Canada.

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'Mocha mousse' to plum: The nine paint colours that can transform your home

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241204-the-nine-paint-colours-that-can-transform-a-home, today

As Pantone's "colour of the year 2025" is announced, we explore the paint shades that are trending now – and find out which colours can improve our mood.

Deciding on the colour of a room at home is a major commitment, as most of us will live with it for years or even decades. So you might think that following trends in paint colours and paint effects would be too impractical and costly to contemplate. In fact, though, paint colour trends have garnered a lot of attention lately. Domestic interiors are becoming steadily more daring in terms of colours, including vibrant and pop hues, but more commonly darker, moody, sometimes jewel-like shades. And they are hard to ignore. So what key trends are emerging and what influences are shaping them?

Bonnie Pierre-Davis, an interiors strategist with the WGSN trend-forecasting company, tells the BBC: "An interest in tinted darks has risen in previous seasons. It has been spotted on catwalks and throughout the automotive and interior product design industries, beginning with dark blues and now shifting towards purples… Consumers are slowly growing confident with this colour on walls for its therapeutic quality."

Confirmation that certain colours are on-trend comes from all areas of culture, according to Carinna Parraman. "In the current series of Strictly Come Dancing (the UK TV version of Dancing with the Stars), the dancers' costumes are deep plum, purples, dark teak, yellow and green." Parraman is professor of design, colour and print at the Centre for Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, where she organises an ongoing series of online lectures on colour.

Previously, Pantone's colour of the year has ranged from "peach fuzz" to "mimosa". Their colour for 2025 is "mocha mousse", a soft, beigey brown, and the colour will be announced this evening when London's skyline is illuminated with the shade. The selection is made by the Pantone Color Institute's global trend-forecast team who are inspired by variety of influences, says Laurie Pressman, vice president of the institute. "These can include the entertainment industry and films in production, travelling art collections and new artists, fashion, all areas of design, aspirational travel destinations, new lifestyles as well as socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures and effects that impact colour, relevant social media platforms, and even upcoming sporting events that capture worldwide attention." 

"Paint brands used to be very prescriptive about colour trends," says colour consultant Fiona de Lys. Certainly, there was a time when established paint trends seemed unassailable: take safe, anodyne magnolia, that reigned supreme throughout the 1980s. A step change came during the 1990s boom years of UK brand Farrow & Ball. "An evolution came when the company pushed the idea of rarefied colours with names like 'elephant's breath'," says de Lys. "This gave rise to a tribalism whereby someone might walk into a person's home and identify the paint colour, thereby affirming a shared knowledge of it, while also feeling very sophisticated."

The greater choice of paints now on offer makes it harder for brands to predict whether a new colour trend or potential collection will take off. Dominic Myland, CEO of paint brand Mylands points out how subjective colour is: "Certain colours positively affect some people's moods, but the same colours trigger a negative response in others," he tells the BBC. When a brand launches a curated paint collection, it's touch and go as to whether it will be a success. Little Greene's "sweet treats" paint collection of rich browns, for example, named after desserts with names like "affogato" and "galette", might be greeted with indifference by people who aren't sweet-toothed.

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As much as many of us might covet living in rooms painted in some of the currently fashionable, glamorously rich paint colours, are they really worth the risk? "A strong, deep, sonorous colour can and will completely transform the mood of a room," advises Philippa Stockley, author of the books Restoration Stories, about restoring old houses, and Paint & Make. "Used knowingly and well, it can be incredibly dramatic; but the wrong strong colour can be unbearable. It's essential to invest in tester pots when considering deep colours – and always paint them on a board that can be moved around the room because light can significantly change its appearance."

Also, says Stockley, paint colours can change seasonally, which may partly explain the trend right now for rich, deep hues: "The current trend for warm-toned beiges, browns and fawns, for colours like thick, whipped, creamy hot chocolate, right through to true chocolate, melting and warm, velvety and consoling in effect, makes absolute sense." 

Here are nine paint colour trends to consider:

1. Mocha mousse

Pantone's colour of the Year 2025, "mocha mousse", suggests warming, frothing coffee or soothing hot chocolate, and by association evokes a mood of contentment and balance. Similar in shade to cocoa powder, this new hue also chimes with the trend for paint colours that conjure up food and drink. Arguably, the comforting quality of mocha mousse sends a subliminal message that, post-pandemic, we've come to appreciate simple, satisfying pleasures. This classically neutral colour also connotes understated luxury, translating well into interiors in the form of soft, tactile materials, such as suede and velvet covering sofas or headboards. By contrast, used as a paint colour and juxtaposed with white, its impact is sharp and crisp.

2. Avocado and olive green

In this room, different shades of green cover almost every surface, creating an immersive effect. To achieve this colour-drenching look, three green tones by paint brand Little Greene have been used for three different types of surface in the room – an olive green shade called "hopper" for walls and skirting boards, a bottle green one for the ceiling and cornices, and a slightly acidic, lime green hue called "citrine" for the panelling surrounding the window, a clever way to intensify daylight entering the room. This desire to paint almost an entire room in three shades of one colour reflects a growing confidence among consumers to use colour more boldly, according to Ruth Mottershead, creative director of the brand. "An understanding of the effect of colour on a space's atmosphere has grown exponentially over the past few years. And greens lend themselves well to such layering, given the presence of so many different yet harmonious shades of green we see in nature."

3. Burgundy and crimson

Three easily distinguishable surfaces in this room lend themselves to being painted in different but complementary warm tones. This mixing of colours or contrasting tones is favoured by Betsy Smith, a designer and creative director for Graphenstone. In this room, walls, wood panelling and the interior of the bookcase are differentiated using three paint colours – "cinnamon", "carnelian" and "cinnabar". "What's important to me when using paint colours is to see how they interact," she tells the BBC. "Two colours can enhance each other and have greater impact." She describes the lighter wall colour here as "a rich, dusky pink that sits elusively between dusty earth, cocoa powder and mulberry". The paint gives the impression of being powdery: "You can almost imagine running your fingers along the walls and the paint coming off like dried earth in your hands. Deeper tones look great on woodwork, which is offset here by vibrant red lining on the inside of the bookcase. It adds a pop of colour."

4. Plum and grape tones

This grape colour with a chalky, matt appearance is enveloping but not dark enough to feel oppressive. It's called "clove" and is part of furniture company Neptune's range of water-based paints that are low in VOCs (volatile organic compounds). Its mauve colour clearly doesn't resemble the brown tinge of cloves used as a spice, but it's deliberately conceived to be ambiguous and hard to pinpoint. "It summons images of juniper berries and dark wood," says Fred Horlock, Neptune's design director. "It hovers between a decadent plum shade and deep brown." Yet despite its subtlety, the plum shade makes a strong statement because it's a rare choice of colour. This is emphasised in this room, which evokes a bohemian, mid-century mood with its 1950s-style furniture, ceramics and abstract art.

5. Deep moss green

We've seen avocado and olive green shades make a huge comeback in interiors. Now a more unusual, perhaps challenging, variation on the colour is emerging – a moodier, darker moss green, such as the green shade here, called "messel no 39". It's part of "the artist's palette", a new paint range for Mylands, created by Despina Curtis, co-founder of colour consultancy Etté. "The palette is inspired by the pioneering character of the Bloomsbury Group whose members encouraged freedom of expression through colour, and influence art and design to this day," says Curtis. Moss green can be used sparingly, for example to highlight smaller areas, such as a door or cupboard, to avoid it looking overpowering. Not that Curtis sees it like that. "I see this deep green as meditative, tender, with soothing qualities, perhaps because it feels steeped in art history." 

6. Rich brown

A taste for brown as a paint colour is one of the more surprising new colour trends. Browns can look dingy and muddy, but with the announcement of mocha mousse as colour of the year, we can expect to see browns adopted more widely in interiors. Here the walls are painted in Little Greene's "galette" – part of the brand's "sweet treats" palette, although this particular shade of brown looks restrained and utilitarian. Mottershead says that brown shades appeal because "they can provide a perfect backdrop for natural, rustic finishes, be they oak or darker woods and stone or quarry-tiled floors". She says the trend reflects "a desire to surround ourselves with comforting, nurturing colours that provide serenity in our homes". That said, the appeal of browns has its limits. They might suit kitchens like those in country houses or cottages, but could look flat and lifeless in rooms with little daylight, and out of place in very contemporary interiors.

7. Dusty rose pink and terracotta

The dining room in Fiona de Lys's Georgian cottage is painted two complementary shades – a fresh-looking pink shade called "rose" on the walls and a terracotta hue, "Etruscan brown", on tongue-and-groove woodwork (both paints are from Edward Bulmer). De Lys describes the darker hue as "a shadow colour". "It recalls the shadow cast by a projecting slab of stone on a building hit by the sun," she says. "I choose colours for my home that reflect my aesthetic heritage and evoke specific feelings and emotions."

De Lys is half-Italian, and the colours in her dining room have strong associations with Liguria, where she spent some of her childhood, and where she frequently stays now. "The colours evoke trompe l'oeil paintings found in Liguria. The room's warm colours recall soil and food cultivated in it, and so are nice to be surrounded by when eating here. The room is north-facing – another reason why I chose warm colours." Such colours are likely to have a broad appeal, especially among people who love nature and the countryside, she says: "Unconsciously we're drawn to pink and brown shades because on a primitive level they reflect colours found in the soil. They feel grounding."

8. Warm, golden yellows

Yellows with a hint of brown or orange is another major trend at the moment.  The ceiling colour shown here is "middle buff" by Little Greene. "This is an intriguing, deep neutral colour that makes a surprising, grounding partner to stronger yellows," says Mottershead. A slightly cleaner shade – "yellow pink" – was used on the walls. Once again, the double-drenching approach has been used here, resulting in a solid yellow backdrop that makes the chair painted a scarlet hue look all the more zingy. Stockley speculates that the gold or orange-tinged yellows may have been boosted by the paintings of Van Gogh, in particular his use of radiant yellows in the work he created in Arles in the South of France. "The current blockbuster Van Gogh show at the National Gallery, London, is a delight for many reasons," she says. "One of these is that in this particular set of paintings, Van Gogh used almost no black. One reason the exhibition is so exhilarating is the refractive sparkle of all the bright, light-toned paintings, singing so joyfully, scarcely depressed by a hint of black."

9. Ultramarine

Interior designer Rachel Chudley chose this sumptuous ultramarine shade – "plimsoll" by Paper and Paint Library – for a space at the foot of a staircase in a home in Bloomsbury, London. "A deep blue colour against the light tone of the staircase gives drama and personality to this small under-stairs area, while also making it feel cosy," she says. Chudley is known for her exuberant yet considered use of colour, which has long been a hallmark of her projects. Her interest in individually blended paint is in step with the current growing demand for bespoke colours and curated paint ranges.

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Why we're 'living in the golden age of the doppelganger'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241203-doppelgangers-and-the-ancient-origins-of-the-lookalike-craze, today

It's been a year of lookalikes – but the lure of the "second self" goes way back to the folklore of the Irish "fetch" and the Nordic "fylgja", and to the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Sigmund Freud.

In March of this year, someone with the feline eyes, blonde hair and high cheekbones of Kate Moss walked the catwalk at Paris fashion week. But it wasn't Kate Moss. Online there was confusion. "Isn't that just Kate Moss?" ran a typical comment. A disbelieving, "that is Kate Moss," was another common refrain. For a savvy few, the gait gave it away as someone other than the famous British supermodel – it was in fact Denise Ohnona, a Moss lookalike from Lancashire. 

High fashion seems to have sparked a trend. Later in the year, the floodgates opened to a wave of lookalike competitions. First came the moment for those who fancied themselves the spit of Timothée Chalamet to gather in New York's Washington Square Park. Then Dubliners flocked to make the case that they looked like Paul Mescal. Next came a competition for Harry Styles lookalikes, then Dev Patel, followed by The Bear star Jeremy Allen White, Zayn Malik, Zendaya, and so on, with others slated to take place throughout December. 

While this recent spate has felt very of-the-era and has been global in reach – each one spreading with breakneck-virality – the lookalike competition is not a modern innovation. Charlie Chaplin once came third in a contest to find his own likeness in the 1920s, according to his son, Charlie Chaplin Jr, who wrote in his book My Father, Charlie Chaplin: "Dad always thought this one of the funniest jokes imaginable." Chaplin himself reportedly denied the veracity of the story. What is more testifiable is that Dolly Parton entered one of hers, recalling in her memoir how she "got the least applause but I was just dying laughing inside".

It's been the busiest year for lookalikes that Andy Harmer can remember. A David Beckham lookalike, Harmer runs a lookalikes agency, and has more than 3,000 people on his books who each share something of the essence of someone famous – from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to Rihanna and Ariana Grande. Moss lookalike Ohnona is one of the jewels in his agency's crown. 

But while lookalike contests have been the most widespread and talked about examples of doubling this year, they have not been alone in bringing themes of the doppelganger into the spotlight. From films to TV and literature, doppelgangers have been populating the ether. 

According to Adam Golub, a professor of American Studies who is writing a book about the doppelganger in American culture: "There's no question that we're living in a new golden age of the doppelganger." While they ebb and flow in popular culture, "they're definitely back with a vengeance," he tells the BBC.

In June the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, in which she submerges herself in the conspiracy-saturated world of a woman she was chronically mistaken for online, the controversial writer Naomi Wolf. It follows on from a post-pandemic novel by Deborah Levy in which the central character travels the world encountering a doppelganger. "She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more me than I was," she writes in August Blue.

So what actually is a doppelganger? "An easy way to think of a doppelganger is it's a non-biological second self," says Golub. "It's an identity double that is not related to you," Alia Soliman, lecturer of cultural studies and author of Doppelganger in Our Time: Visions of Alterity in Literature, Visual Culture, and New Media, tells the BBC. "The term was coined by Jean Paul Richter."

The second self

Culture new and old has explored themes of identity, death and the symbiotic nature of good and evil through the idea of the doppelganger. It has been the subject of art, from René Magritte's surrealist paintings to those of Pre-Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose 1860-1864 painting How They Met Themselves depicted a pair of lovers meeting their doubles in a wood. 

In its early literary form, says Soliman, referring to works such as Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1813), Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson (1839), Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Double (1846), and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the doppelganger "takes the shape of a ghostly self or a shadowy reflection that torments the first self". Almost all the early literature, she says, "sees the destruction of the original as well as the second self".

The same can be said for "folkloric renditions of the apparition, such as the Irish fetch and Nordic fylgja, [in which] the appearance of the doppelganger foreshadows the end of life or the approach of harm". The fylgja is seen more as an alter ego, typically in animal form, more often seen in sleep, while the fetch is thought of as a spirit-double. In Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson's 2008 poem The Fetch, he wrote: "To see one's own doppelganger is an omen of death… Shelley saw himself swimming towards himself before he drowned. / Lincoln met his fetch at the stage door before he was shot," referencing the alleged encounters with doubles just before the deaths of both the poet PB Shelley and the US President Abraham Lincoln.

In Freud's 1917 essay, The Uncanny – a seminal work in the doppelganger canon – the double is "uncanny", which Freud describes as "belonging to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror".

The doppelganger, then, was something to be feared. "It wants to take your identity," says Golub. This theme is explored in the debut film by JC Doler, The Fetch, which was nominated in the Dark Matters Feature category at the recent Austin Film Festival. It's there, too, in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, in which a middle-aged Hollywood actress played by Demi Moore has to watch as her younger clone, played by Margaret Qualley, lives the life that she once had. And the theme can be seen with most clarity in the popular sci-fi trope of body-snatching. "You might be replaced by an alien doppelganger or a robot doppelganger, or some kind of supernatural being, an evil twin from another dimension," says Golub. "Generally speaking, in the stories we tell about doppelgangers, our lookalike is not welcome."

Things shifted, according to Soliman, in the second half of the 20th Century, when portrayals of the double "significantly altered in form, content, and message". Cut to today, and the double is seen differently: just think of Chalamet turning up to take selfies with contestants at his own lookalike contest. What Soliman refers to as "the new double" is altogether less malign and maligned. This new double sees "depictions in which the meeting between self and double changes in structure and significance, carrying a redemptive message". The young clone in The Substance is more of an irritation than a dreaded adversary. And lookalike contests are a bit of good old-fashioned fun, quaint and wholesome. There is an absurdity and a humour in seeing people who look alike.

In this new context, it is small wonder that people are actively seeking their doppelgangers via a wealth of specially designed apps. Or that one of the most high-profile doppelganger projects of recent times has been the photography project of Canadian artist François Brunelle, who, spurred by his own likeness to Rowan Atkinson's television and film character Mr Bean, has found hundreds of lookalikes, and created a body of work that proffers a message of hope and togetherness. "We are reimagining our relationship to doppelgangers," says Golub. "We are writing a happier ending to the story, one in which we kind of find our stranger twin and we bond with them – or we win a celebrity lookalike contest." 

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Experts have thoughts about what is driving this paradigm shift. Soliman looks back to the introduction of the world wide web in 1993, which, she says, "gave way to a new array of technologically induced fixations, one of which is the search for our digital doppelganger". With the internet, that search became so much easier than ever before.

"The opportunities and complexities resulting from visual and virtual innovation in social media have impacted the culture of the double self," says Soliman. "The self is given far easier access to its double."

"Why aren't we scared of these things that somehow represent something we should be repressing?" asks Golub, harking back to the original doppelganger. He thinks it is because, in the digital age, we are all used to having dual, sometimes multiple identities: physical selves and online selves, different voices across different social media platforms. He says that we are "turning to this kind of playfulness, this fun, this doppelganger fandom" as a way to navigate that. "Perhaps as a way to make us feel whole again… to find a version of yourself that's not out to steal your identity or take something from you, but might actually just want to take a selfie with you and enhance your life." 

Doppelgangers have become about connection to an offline community. "Social media sort of pushes us all out into our own weird bubbles, and the idea that there's someone just like us out there doing life differently [is a] really warming idea," the psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose, who has had the experience of being repeatedly mistaken for an actor in UK TV soap Hollyoaks, tells the BBC. It fits that young people in particular – perhaps especially atomised by extensively online identities – might be seeking out connection via offline lookalike contests. And that these meetings seem to have taken place in the spirit of wholesome country fairs – digital virality to one side – with lo-fi posters inviting people to attend and minimal cash prizes for winners. 

At the other extreme of the doppelganger phenomenon there is the spectre of deepfakes on the digital horizon – that is, fake doubles that can fool us into thinking that they are the originals. But that will not long remain the case. "AI is going to disrupt a lot of things in our lives," says Golub. This moment of cosy playfulness around the doppelganger may turn out to be short-lived, "once we start to see some of the real dangers of what [deep fakery] can do," he adds. "I think we should enjoy our fun while it lasts," he says. 

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Gaudy or iconic? How leopard print took over

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241129-trashy-or-iconic-how-leopard-print-took-over, today

Worn by everyone from pin-ups and "mob wives" to Jackie O and royalty, leopard print has long divided opinion. As the festive season approaches, the bold pattern has clawed its way up to become the party look for now.

Once dismissed as kitsch, leopard print has quietly clawed its way into the mainstream – so much so that some now view the bold pattern as a neutral. As the party season approaches, high-street clothing rails are filled with blazers, blouses, belts and dresses – all sporting the once-divisive print. 

But how did leopard print evolve into such a versatile style? While it has never truly disappeared from our wardrobes, the print has taken on many identities, symbolising everything from punk rebellion and rock 'n' roll edge to pin-up glamour and royal elegance. Despite its widespread appeal, let's not forget, it has also weathered periods where it was considered gaudy.  

For Jo Weldon, author of Fierce: The History of Leopard Print, it has always been a "progressive print", and one she has long associated with outsiders. "It was considered so daring that in the 1950s the first woman to model a leopard-print bikini was an exotic dancer, Micheline Bernardini," she tells the BBC, "likely due to its animalistic, untamed connotations."  

Leopard print's history predates its modern fashion legacy. In Ancient Africa and Asia, real leopard skin was a symbol of status, worn by royalty and warriors. In the 20th Century, as the fabric became more accessible, Hollywood catapulted the print into pop culture with the problematic Tarzan films – most notably in 1946's Tarzan and the Leopard Woman. Music icon Eartha Kitt adopted the print in an empowering move that reclaimed the fabric from these dubious associations with primitivism. Jackie Kennedy helped to cement its appeal – her 1962 leopard fur coat remains a source of inspiration even today, and at the time was said to have created a fashion trend that killed thousands of leopards.

Leopard print's association with sophistication and sensuality was embodied by Mrs Robinson, as played by Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, but once it transferred from fur to a print, it wasn't always seen as so classy. It was the signature look of iconic UK soap characters Bet Lynch of Coronation Street and Kat Slater of Eastenders, along with US TV character Peggy Bundy of Married… with Children, in part to signal their supposed gaudiness as well as their toughness. But pop stars including Mel B – or Scary Spice – and Amy Winehouse – wore it with defiant pride. And chic leopard devotee Kate Moss has even included a coat in the print for her new collaboration with Zara. These names showcase how leopard print has become a symbol of self-expression and power, something that also rings true in the world of pin-up. 

"It is ever popular in burlesque," says Weldon, who in addition to her writing work, is also head of the New York School of Burlesque. She traces the prints seductive power back to – where else – the leopard itself. "They're nocturnal, mysterious creatures, which adds to the print's glamour." 

Despite her fondness of all things leopard print, Weldon is well aware of the lingering snobbery. "There will always be people who are dismissive, and say it is 'trashy', perhaps because of its associations with characters like Peggy Bundy or Kat Slater, but that criticism often stems from classism." And, she adds with a smile, "Those characters make me love the print even more!"

 

This sentiment is echoed by Joy Montgomery of British Vogue. "There has always been a tension between this print embodying liberation and sexuality, as well as being powerful and yet feminine," she tells the BBC. Montgomery, who is the magazine's commerce editor, recalls a time, not so long ago, when leopard print was associated with an outspoken, "certain type of woman". She adds, "Janice from Friends comes to mind, as well as former Prime Minister Theresa May, who often wore leopard print heels, which sparked strong opinions."  

Timeless glamour

According to Montgomery, attitudes have shifted in recent years, thanks in large part to Gen Z's bold experimentation with fashion on TikTok. "Take the recent mob-wife trend, where suddenly, leopard print was all over our feeds." She adds, "This is a generation that loves a historic reference point or drawing inspiration from film characters, and it's great to see them playing with the print without baggage."

Gen Z's love for vintage shopping has also fuelled leopard print's resurgence. With the pattern's long history, second-hand pieces are readily available online or in vintage and charity shops. Montgomery does wonder whether older women feel the same freedom to experiment. However, she points out that the catwalks of autumn/winter 2024-2025 showcased a more refined take, mentioning Dior's leopard trench coat and Alaïa's chic knitwear as examples. 

It's something print designer Christy Deering has noticed, too. Over the past 10 years, she has designed for major high-street brands, and in the past year alone has designed more than 10 leopard-print garments. She credits high-end labels, as well as "it-girl" brands, for making leopard print a neutral. "We saw labels like Ganni and Rixo feature leopard print in 2023, and again on the high-end runways of 24/25," she says. Deering highlights a pair of trainers by Adidas x Wales Bonner that helped normalise leopard print in accessories, too. "Where it once was considered a bold print," she says, "it can now be styled for day, night, work and even sleep." Those trainers, by the way, started retailing at $200 and now sell for up to $2000.  

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Whilst designing, Deering always keeps a single customer in mind. When asked who embodies the leopard-print aesthetic, she describes her as someone who wants to dabble in trends while maintaining a sense of individuality. "Leopard has become a safe staple of many women's wardrobes," she says, "from the glam girl to the femme girl to the grunge girl – there's always a home for leopard print." 

"In today's world, any judgment about leopard print isn't about classism – it's about individualism," says fashion and beauty editor Lauren Cunningham. She believes the trend is here to stay, but notes a growing desire for people to style it in their own way. 

"Vintage leopard print will always be popular, and with platforms like eBay, Vinted and charity shops, it's easier to personalise the trend rather than shopping straight from the high street." 

Like print designer Christy Deering and Vogue's Joy Montgomery, Cunningham closely follows fashion weeks. "It's often slim pickings when trying to spot trends across all runways," she says. "But this year, leopard print was everywhere. I think it's because it's so versatile and fun – you can make it punk, feminine, bohemian or tailored." 

Her advice for anyone wanting to try the trend? "Start small, with an accessory like a belt or bag, and work your way up to bigger leopard-print spots!" 

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'As darkness fell, blazing hangars lit up the sky': How the fall of Pyongyang brought the world to the brink of crisis

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241128-how-the-fall-of-pyongyang-brought-the-world-to-the-brink-of-crisis, today

In December 1950, a BBC cameraman captured the fall of Pyongyang, a defining moment in the Korean War. In History examines how the conflict ravaged the land and its people, defined the future of the peninsula, and pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

"All roads leading out of the city were crowded with refugees. Few knew where they were going," reported the BBC as it broadcast images of desperate North Koreans trying to flee the burning city of Pyongyang on 5 December 1950. 

The footage had been captured by BBC cameraman Cyril Page during his last hours in the North Korean capital. Upon hearing that occupying UN troops were pulling out, Page had taken to the streets to document the chaos and fear as the news spread that the Chinese troops were coming. In the harsh winter conditions, he filmed the frightened refugees carrying whatever they could as smoke bellowed out from the burning buildings behind them.

The panicked evacuation was emblematic of the dramatic reversal of fortunes experienced by the UN forces led by General Douglas MacArthur. Just weeks before, the general had promised US President Harry S Truman that he was poised to unify Korea. The fall of the city of Pyongyang and complete collapse of his military offensive into North Korea would trigger MacArthur to threaten an all-out nuclear war. 

The havoc and bloodshed caused by the Korean War had begun six months earlier. In the years leading up to the end of World War Two, Korea had suffered under a brutal Japanese occupation. The US proposed to its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, that following Japan's surrender, they should temporarily divide control of Korea between them. The thought was that it would help them manage the removal of the Japanese forces. In 1945, the superpowers split the country in two along an arbitrary demarcation line, the 38th parallel. The Soviets supported Kim Il-sung in the north's Democratic People's Republic of Korea while the US backed Syngman Rhee in the Republic of Korea in the south.

From the outset, neither of the newly-created Korean governments accepted the other's legitimacy or the demarcation line. "It was never considered in any sense by Koreans to be legitimate or meaningful. It was completely meaningless to them," Dr Owen Miller of the Centre of Korean Studies at SOAS, University of London, told the BBC History Magazine podcast in 2024. Both leaders wanted to reunify the country by force. By 1949, the two superpowers had withdrawn most of their occupying troops from Korea, but it did little to ease the simmering tensions. Increasingly bloody clashes regularly broke out along the de facto border. 

On 25 June 1950, North Korea's communist leader Kim Il-sung made his move. In the early hours of morning, he launched a surprise attack with a well-trained fighting force across the 38th parallel. The North Korean troops, equipped with Soviet weapons, quickly overwhelmed the Republic of Korea's army. Within days they had captured the south's capital Seoul, forcing many of its residents to swear allegiance to the Communist Party or face imprisonment or execution. 

In the US, President Truman was caught off guard by the speed and success of North Korea's assault. A believer in the "Domino theory" – that if one country fell to communism others would follow – he appealed to the newly-formed UN to defend South Korea. The Soviet Union could have vetoed this vote. But at the time, it was boycotting the UN Security Council because of its refusal to admit the People's Republic of China. And so, on 28 June 1950, a resolution was passed calling on all UN member states to help repel the invasion. MacArthur, the US general who had accepted Japan's surrender at the end of World War Two, was named commander of the combined UN force.

Turning the tide

The US was the first to respond, hurriedly sending its soldiers stationed in Japan. But these troops were ill-prepared to contend with the superior North Korean forces that swept rapidly down the country, pushing them back. As the battles raged, thousands of ordinary Korean civilians caught up in the conflict were killed. By September, the South Korean and UN forces were pinned down, defending a small enclave around the port of Busan on the southern tip. North Korea looked to be on the brink of reuniting the entire Korean peninsula.

In an ambitious gamble, MacArthur decided to attempt a risky, sea-borne assault on Inchon, a port deep behind the North Korean lines. Under a heavy bombardment, UN forces landed on 15 September 1950, capturing the port and then quickly moving on to recapture Seoul. After they retook the capital, tens of thousands of its residents who had sworn allegiance to the city's previous occupiers were shot as collaborators by the South Korean forces. It was just one of a series of indiscriminate horrific mass killings of civilians that would take place over the course of the war. "There were a lot of massacres during the war, not at the frontline, away from the frontline, where people were rounded up because they were thought to be disloyal," said Dr Miller.

The Inchon operation managed to sever the North Korean army's supply lines and communication, and UN forces were able to break out of Busan and mount a fierce counteroffensive. This turned the tide of the conflict, forcing the North Koreans soldiers to retreat northwards and back across the 38th parallel.

But having achieved the UN resolution, MacArthur was determined to destroy the communist forces completely, and he ordered his troops to pursue the North Koreans across the border. By 19 October 1950, UN forces had captured Pyongyang and were advancing towards the Yalu River on the Chinese border. The situation that had been so dire for South Korea just a few months earlier now appeared to be reversed.

Truman was hesitant to expand a conflict that could pull not just China and also Russia, which by this time had developed its own atomic bomb, into another world war. But MacArthur was convinced he was on the verge of a swift, decisive victory that would reunify the country under pro-Western South Korean leadership. He assured the president that the war would be over by Christmas.

But the UN's rapid advance towards its border had unnerved China's communist leader Mao Zedong. Fearing a hostile Western military power on the country's doorstep, he ordered the Chinese army to gather secretly at its border to meet MacArthur's onrushing armies. In late November, with devastating suddenness, China changed the trajectory of the Korean War again.

Thousands of Chinese troops launched a series of devastating attacks on the advancing UN forces. Suffering heavy losses and struggling under the freezing winter conditions, MacArthur's troops were unable to hold the large swaths of territory that they had captured just weeks before. At the Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River, Chinese troops inflicted a catastrophic defeat on UN forces, causing one of the greatest and bloodiest retreats in US Marine Corps history. 

The nuclear threat

As the Chinese offensive gathered momentum, the citizens of Pyongyang, which had been taken by UN forces less than two months before, again found themselves in the eye of the storm. Unable to halt the relentless Chinese advance, MacArthur made the decision to abandon the city. UN troops started preparing to evacuate and were ordered to burn any supplies and equipment that might aid the approaching soldiers, causing many of the buildings in the city to go up in flames. Aware that the North Korean and Chinese armies were threatening to purge anyone suspected of having helped the UN forces, thousands of terrified and exhausted Pyongyang residents fled the city.

In freezing weather, Page filmed these Koreans, under the supervision of the British army, desperately trying to make it across the Taedong river to avoid being trapped when the troops left. "Because of priority for military vehicles, the refugees were not permitted to cross the bridges over the Taedong river to the south of Pyongyang," the BBC reported. US engineers were rigging these bridges to blow after the last military vehicles had crossed them in an effort to slow the North Korean advance. "Yet, obsessed by the fear of being left in the city, thousands made their way to the river's edge," continued the report. "There, all kinds of craft were being prepared to take them across."

Page himself was ordered to leave from an airfield before dusk. When he reached the airfield, he discovered that much of it, too, was ablaze, with UN troops busy destroying any material they thought the North Koreans could use. "As darkness fell, blazing hangars and workshops lit up the night sky," said the BBC. "By midnight, hundreds of private dwellings near the airfield were in flames, too."

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As Page's plane left, he captured his final shots of Pyongyang, which was once a site of triumph for MacArthur, but which now seem to symbolise the failure of his military strategy. "It was almost dawn when our cameraman left Pyongyang airfield," the BBC reported, "and as his plane, one of the last to leave, flew him out he saw far below the UN retreat, with the route to the south lying under a cloud of dust from the seemingly never-ending line of vehicles." 

On 6 December 1950, as Chinese and North Korean forces re-entered Pyongyang, the US strategy to end the war began to edge towards a much more dangerous idea. Truman had always had a difficult relationship with MacArthur due to the general's tendency to overstep his authority and ignore direct orders. Now in the face of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Korea, the two men found themselves clashing repeatedly over the conduct of the war. 

MacArthur, who had downplayed Truman's fears that Mao Zedong might intervene, now began to advocate publicly for escalating the conflict. He argued that the US should threaten the use of nuclear weapons and bomb China itself unless the Communist forces in Korea laid down their arms. MacArthur was not alone in this: Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, was also in favour of a pre-emptive strike. LeMay, who believed that a nuclear war was enviable, would later try to persuade President John F Kennedy that he should be allowed to bomb nuclear missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This insistence of the viability of using atomic weapons deeply alarmed other UN countries caught up in the Korean conflict, including the UK Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who flew to Washington, DC to object to the idea. But MacArthur was adamant that his plan would work, believing the Russians would be intimidated and not do anything about the US striking China.

'Back to where they started'

On 9 December 1950, MacArthur formally requested the authority to have the discretion to use atomic weapons. Truman refused. Two weeks later, MacArthur submitted a list of targets for strikes, including ones within China, and listed the number of atomic bombs he would require. He continued to push for the Pentagon to grant him a field commander's discretion to employ nuclear weapons as necessary. By late December 1950, the UN forces had been pushed back across the 38th parallel, with Chinese and North Korean troops recapturing the beleaguered and bombed-out city of Seoul in January 1951.

"Possibly if some of the commanders like Curtis LeMay had had the ear of the president more, they might have used nuclear weapons because those commanders like LeMay and MacArthur did want to use them," said Dr Miller. "They thought, 'What's the point of having nuclear weapons if we don't use them?'" With Truman unsure if he could control MacArthur, and fears mounting that the general's aggressive posturing might ignite World War Three, the president fired him for insubordination in April 1951. 

The Korean War would grind on for another two years, with Seoul changing hands again for a fourth time. With neither side able to score a decisive victory, it descended into a prolonged, bloody war of attrition. "One of the great ironies of the war is that, at that point in the spring of 1951, where the front line of the two forces is, is not that far from the partition line, the 38th parallel," said Dr Miller. "All of these great losses on both sides, the absolute civilian devastation that had occurred, but they were more or less back to where they started."

The two countries eventually ended the fighting with an uneasy truce in 1953, but they did not sign a peace treaty – meaning that technically they are still at war. The conflict was ruinous to the peninsula. Estimates vary, but it is believed that some four million people died during the Korean War, half of whom were civilians. Many more were displaced or left hungry. The aerial carpet bombing devastated the country, destroying whole towns and cities. Families separated by the partition have never been reunited.

Decades later, the two countries remain stuck in a frozen conflict, kept apart by a 250km (160 mile) demilitarised zone covered with land mines and guarded by hundreds of soldiers. The legacy of a war that never ended.

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'I'm not afraid of dying': The pioneering tennis champion who told the world he had Aids

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241121-the-us-tennis-star-who-told-the-world-he-had-aids, today

In 1988, World Aids Day began with the aim of raising awareness and understanding of a disease that had struck fear in communities around the globe. That same year, US tennis legend Arthur Ashe learned of his own diagnosis. In History looks at the dilemma that faced Ashe, when, after years of secrecy, he once again became a groundbreaking campaigner.

In April 1992, Arthur Ashe made his way into a packed conference room, where the media were poised with cameras rolling. This time he wasn't being asked about his role as the first black tennis player to be selected for the United States Davis Cup team, or about his pioneering victories at Wimbledon, the US Open or the Australian Open. He had cemented his name in history as the first black winner of a major men's singles championship, but after a heart attack that led to multiple surgeries, he had retired from the sport 12 years earlier, at the age of 36.

His intelligence, composure and sportsmanship had made him a popular figure, on and off the court. But the press had heard rumours about his health, at a time when the world was still full of fear of an incurable epidemic. USA Today sports journalist Doug Smith, a childhood friend, confronted Ashe about a tip-off he had received. The next day, keen to control his own story and beat the press, Ashe reluctantly told the world the secret that he and his inner circle had kept since 1988: he had Aids.

He believed that he had contracted the illness from a contaminated blood transfusion during surgery in 1983, two years before blood donations were screened for the HIV virus in the US. The devasting news shocked the nation, but it quickly led to a debate around personal privacy and the ethics of an invasive press. At the conference, Ashe read a statement: "I am angry that I was put… in the unenviable position of having to lie if I wanted to protect my privacy." He added that "there was certainly no compelling medical or physical necessity to go public with my medical condition". In his memoir, Days of Grace, Ashe wrote: "More than 700 letters reached USA Today on the issue of my right to privacy, and about 95% vehemently opposed the newspaper's position."

Some Aids activists criticised Ashe's desire for secrecy around his health, as they wanted public figures to broaden discussion beyond the focus of the LGBT+ community. Some felt that he would have been the perfect spokesperson to raise awareness, particularly amongst heterosexuals and minority groups: one letter went as far as to say that Magic Johnson, the NBA player who revealed his HIV diagnosis just five months earlier, could have been saved had Ashe spoken up sooner.

When asked at the news conference why he didn't go public in 1988, Ashe said: "The answer is simple. Any admission of HIV infection at that time would have seriously, permanently, and – my wife and I believed – unnecessarily infringed upon our family's right to privacy." When the subject turned to telling his five-year-old daughter Camera about having the disease, emotion overcame Ashe, and his wife Jeanne read on his behalf.

The parameters of privacy

USA Today sports editor Gene Policinski had no qualms about his decision to pursue the story. He told the BBC's Tom Brook: "This is one of the great athletes of the 20th Century. His name is instantly recognisable about the world. He has an illness that will prove fatal and, by any definition I've run into in 25 years in the newspaper business, that is news." When asked if he felt any guilt, he said: "No, I didn't. That would somehow imply that I felt my decision was wrong. And I don't."

Three months after revealing to the world that he had Aids, Ashe was in London to commentate on Wimbledon for HBO. During his trip, he was interviewed by the actor Lynn Redgrave on the BBC programme Fighting Back. He said: "I definitely wanted to go public at some stage, when I was reasonably healthy, to give myself time to help the cause worldwide. But my health was so good, I wanted to continue to do what I was doing without being bothered by this... Just the prospect of going public, you have some fears and some inconveniences you know you'll have to undergo."

Ultimately, the issue of privacy loomed large, and as he had done many times before, Ashe asked questions of the status quo. At the National Press Club, he challenged journalists to examine their sensibilities, asking, "What are the parameters of personal privacy? What are they? Who sets them? And by whose authority are they issued? To me, or to any other American, what is sacrosanct and inviolable?"

This was far from the first public stance Ashe took on a wider social issue. While his sporting prowess helped him break barriers on the court for black athletes, he spent much of his time off the court campaigning for change. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1943, he had retreated into the world of sports and books after his mother died when he was just six years old. "Control is very important to me," he told Redgrave. "You grow up black in the American south in the late 1940s and the 1950s, you have no control. White segregationist laws tell you where to go to school, which bus you can ride on, where you can ride on the bus, which taxis to take, what you can say. Your life is proscribed."

But Ashe was a reluctant activist at first, preferring to concentrate on tennis, despite calls for him to use his public position to further the civil rights movement. It led to some accusing him of being an "Uncle Tom", or someone who is complicit in racial oppression. But after years of being controlled by a racist system, Ashe didn't feel liberated by the 1960s civil rights. He told the BBC that he had "black ideologues trying to tell me what to do", adding: "All the time, I am saying to myself, 'Hey when do I get to decide what I want to do?' So I've always been sort of fiercely protective, with anyone, of my wanting to do and to control my life as I saw fit."

When asked about the public outburst by his fellow tennis star, John McEnroe, Ashe commented: "McEnroe had the emotional freedom to be a bad boy. I never had that emotional freedom. If I had been like that, I am convinced, the tennis world would have dug me out of it… because of my race."

Ultimately, Ashe needed to do things his way, and he would go on to use his position as a world-class athlete to campaign for several causes. At the height of his career, he confronted the apartheid regime in South Africa over many years, and in 1973, he travelled to the South African Championships under the agreement that the tournament would be integrated. Away from the glare of the world's media, he also went on to fund a tennis centre for black South Africans in Soweto.

Ashe felt similarly passionate about inclusive involvement in tennis closer to home. As a co-founder in 1969 of the National Junior Tennis League, his aim was to ensure that children of all backgrounds had access to tennis, and not just those with country-club memberships. And while he was at first tentative in his involvement, in time Ashe would go on to be one of the most powerful voices in the struggle for justice and equality in the US. In the documentary Citizen Ashe, civil rights leader and key figure in the 1968 Mexico Olympics black power protests, Dr Harry Edwards, said of the tennis star, "When you brushed away the gentility, the niceness, the intelligence, the calmness, his statement would be more militant than mine."

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After Ashe suffered multiple heart attacks, he joined the board of the American Heart Association. And after he revealed his Aids diagnosis, it was no surprise when a new campaign began. As well as making media appearances debunking myths about the disease, he established the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of Aids. On World Aids Day in December 1992, he addressed the World Health Organisation.

Ashe died in February 1993 from Aids-related pneumonia, two years before a new class of antiretroviral drugs became available that would let people with the virus live long and healthy lives. He told Redgrave in 1992: "I'm not afraid of dying. There's always hope and you must live your life as if there is, or there will be, some hope. Hope should not be a selfish hope. For me the hope is, maybe there's no cure for Aids in time for me, but certainly for everybody else."

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'I have been deceiving you… I'm sorry about that': The British politician who was caught faking his own death

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241114-john-stonehouse-the-british-politician-who-was-caught-faking-his-own-death, today

When John Stonehouse's clothes were found in a pile on Miami Beach on 20 November 1974, many people presumed that the UK Member of Parliament had drowned while swimming – until he turned up alive and well in Australia on Christmas Eve. In History looks at the stranger-than-fiction tale of the man who died twice.

When John Stonehouse hatched his plan to disappear completely, he was a troubled man. His political career had stalled, his dodgy business dealings left him facing financial ruin, he was accused of being a communist spy, and he was having an extra-marital affair with his secretary. In a move borrowed from the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Day of the Jackal, Stonehouse stole the identity of two dead men. He travelled on a business trip to Miami where he vanished, in November 1974, then hopped on another plane to Australia. The ruse lasted just over a month. It was British aristocrat Lord Lucan, another infamous fugitive who disappeared around the same time, who would inadvertently lead him to get caught in Australia.

And how did Stonehouse explain his actions? The British Member of Parliament insisted to the BBC in January 1975 that he was on "a fact-finding tour, not only in terms of geography but in terms of the inner self of a political animal".

To the British public in the late 1960s, he must have seemed like a man who had it all. Postmaster General at the age of 43, with a glamorous wife and three children, he was talked about as a future Labour prime minister. He was the man who oversaw the introduction of first- and second-class stamps, but for his political career, that role was as good as it got.

The rot began to set in when a defector from communist Czechoslovakia claimed in 1969 that the country had recruited the MP as an informer. Stonehouse protested his innocence to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who believed him. Such allegations were rife during the Cold War, but Stonehouse's political reputation was damaged. When the Labour Party lost the 1970 general election, there was no seat for Stonehouse on the opposition front bench. Disillusioned, he decided to devote more time to his London business interests – mostly export services he had developed through his international connections.

In 1971, Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan fired Stonehouse with fresh enthusiasm. He became emotionally involved in the Bengali cause, becoming such a familiar and sympathetic figure there that when the war ended, he was made a citizen of the new state as a mark of respect. That was only the start.

He was asked to help set up the British Bangladesh Trust, a bank that would provide services for Bengali people in Britain. But the way the bank was being operated later drew critical comment from a Sunday newspaper and attracted investigators from the Fraud Squad and Department of Trade and Industry in London. The bad publicity and these official inquiries frightened away much of the bank's support, leaving Stonehouse deeply depressed and feeling he was also losing the respect of fellow MPs.

He concocted a plan to escape from it all. First, he forged a passport application in the name of Joseph Arthur Markham, a foundry worker who had recently died in his constituency of Walsall, in England's West Midlands. He turned this new identity into a globetrotting export consultant with bank accounts in London, Switzerland and Melbourne. He then established another identity in the name of Donald Clive Mildoon, who had also just died in Walsall. To help fund this new life, Stonehouse transferred large amounts of cash from his businesses into a series of bank accounts.

'A divided personality'

On 20 November 1974, Stonehouse vanished while, it seemed, he was swimming in the sea in Miami, Florida. There was no trace of the 49-year-old apart from the pile of clothes he left behind on the beach. Was he swept away by the ocean? Was he murdered and put inside a concrete block found near Miami Beach? Had he been kidnapped?

His wife Barbara was in no doubt that there had been a tragic accident. She told BBC News: "I've heard some extraordinary rumours and they're all so much out of character with my husband's personality that they're just not worth answering or worth thinking about. I'm convinced in my mind that it was a drowning accident. All the evidence that we've had points to the fact that he was drowned."

In London, police had their own suspicions. Sheila Buckley, Stonehouse's 28-year-old secretary and secret girlfriend, kept insisting to friends that he was dead, but she knew the real story: some of her clothes had been packed in a trunk and shipped to Australia a month before, she had transatlantic telephone calls from him, and she had also sent him semi-coded letters through one of his two Australian banks. It was having those two bank accounts in different names, Markham and Mildoon, that eventually put Melbourne police on his trail. At the time, they were on the lookout for the infamous missing peer Lord Lucan, who coincidentally vanished on 8 November after murdering his children's nanny. Initially, the police thought that the debonair Englishman spotted signing dodgy cheques might be him.

While Lucan's disappearance has continued to mystify police for 50 years, the Stonehouse mystery lasted just over a month. On Christmas Eve, Stonehouse had to confess his true identity. Later, at Melbourne police headquarters, he asked whether he could phone his wife in the UK. Although he didn't realise it then, the telephone conversation in which he made his bombshell revelation to her was taped.

He said: "Hello darling. Well, they picked up the false identity here. You would realise from all this that I have been deceiving you. I'm sorry about that, but in a sense I'm glad it's all over." For a few days Stonehouse was kept in a detention centre before being joined in Australia by his family, and later by his girlfriend.

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A month after his reappearance, he sat down for an interview with the BBC's Australia correspondent, Bob Friend. He blamed his actions on having developed a "divided personality, with the new personality providing a release to the old personality, which was under stress and strain of considerable proportions". Asked how he could put his wife and family through such anguish, he said: "I was trying – by disappearing – to make their lives easier… by taking away some of the tensions that I gave to them from my old personality."

Stonehouse was still an MP, but rejected any suggestion that he should give up his parliamentary salary while 12,000 miles away from his constituency. He said: "Lots of Members of Parliament go on overseas visits and do fact-finding tours. I've been doing a fact-finding tour not only in terms of geography, but in terms of the inner self of a political animal. Now that tour could be very interesting and, my golly, I think it fully justifies an MP's salary if I can get the story down of my experience." He added: "I think a Member of Parliament, like anybody else in any other job, is entitled to some consideration during a period when he has some sort of illness."

You only die twice

For seven months, Stonehouse tried to stay in Australia, but he was eventually deported and escorted back home by Scotland Yard detectives. In August 1976, after a marathon 68-day trial on charges relating to his failed businesses, he was jailed for seven years for theft, fraud and deception offences. He left prison three years later while recovering from open heart surgery, having suffered three cardiac arrests during his time inside.

His wife divorced him in 1978, and three years later he married Buckley, his former secretary. He died for a second time in 1988 – and this time it was for real. The 62-year-old had collapsed three weeks earlier, just before he was due to appear on a television show about missing people.

But what of those espionage claims that so damaged his political career? In his BBC interview after he reappeared, he dismissed as "ludicrous" the idea that he had been a spy for Czechoslovakia. To this day, his daughter Julia rejects any claims that he passed information to foreign powers, and in 2021 she wrote a book in his defence. Cambridge historian Prof Christopher Andrew is one of the few people who have seen MI5's file on Stonehouse; in his 2009 authorised history of the British intelligence service, he concluded that Stonehouse had indeed spied for the Czechoslovaks.

Speaking in 2012, Prof Andrew told the BBC: "The really decisive evidence came in the mid-1990s when the Czechoslovak intelligence service, having become an ally, made public some of Stonehouse's file. They were pretty disappointed with the quality of the intelligence he passed on as a minister, so to the long list of people who John Stonehouse defrauded, it is just possible that we can add the name of Czechoslovak intelligence."

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'That was the greatest day of all our lives': The migrants who passed through Ellis Island

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241108-the-migrants-who-passed-through-ellis-island, today

Isabel Belarsky was one of the millions of people who were processed on Ellis Island before its immigration facility closed in 1954. In 2014, she told the BBC about reaching the gateway to the US from the Soviet Union in 1930.

On 12 November 1954, a Norwegian seaman Arne Petterson was questioned by immigration officials after overstaying his US shore leave. He risked being deported, but instead he was granted parole, and as he stepped on board a ferry in New York Harbor, he was snapped by a photographer. He was the last person to be processed on Ellis Island.

The same day, the island that had been millions of migrants' first glimpse of the US closed its immigration facilities for good. By the time Petterson left, Ellis Island was mostly being used as a detention centre for illegal entrants and suspected communists, but for more than 60 years for many people it was a stepping stone to a whole new life.

Situated at the mouth of the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, the island had been selected by President Benjamin Harrison as the site of a central immigration facility in 1890 when it became clear that the one in Manhattan was unable to cope with the influx of new arrivals. In the decades before Ellis Island opened, the patterns of immigration to the US had shifted. From the 1880s there was a sudden rise in people coming from southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were trying to escape poverty, political oppression or religious persecution in their home countries. But as President John F Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, "There are probably as many reasons for coming to America as there were people who came."

 

In preparation, the island was enlarged, partly by using landfill hollowed out from New York's first subway tunnels, and a new dock and three-storey timber building were constructed. This building would need to be rebuilt just five years later when a fire burnt it to the ground, destroying all passenger records dating back to 1855.

On 1 January 1892, Ellis Island opened to receive immigrants. At its peak, during the early years of the 20th Century, thousands of people passed through its gates each day. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay had the same role on the west coast from 1910 to 1940. But according to the National Park Service, some 40% of Americans living today are descended from immigrants who came through Ellis Island. Many of the people who would help shape the identity of the US in the 20th Century, from film director Frank Capra (born in Italy) and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (born in Russia) to actress Claudette Colbert (born in France) and cosmetician Max Factor (born in Poland), were processed at the island as children.

Isabel Belarsky was one such child. In 1930 she made the arduous sea voyage to the US with her family from what was then the Soviet Union. "Oh boy, that was some journey. It was cold, we had nothing to wear. Everybody was freezing. Finally, we came through Ellis Island," she told the BBC in 2014.

So near and yet so far

The steamships on which immigrants such as the Belarskys journeyed were divided by money and class, with the majority of people being third class passengers crowded together, in often unsanitary conditions in steerage. Before a ship could enter New York Harbor, it first had to stop at a quarantine checkpoint off Staten Island. There doctors boarded the vessel looking for signs of sickness, such as smallpox and cholera. People with contagious diseases were banned from entering the US, as were polygamists, anarchists and convicted criminals, among others. The first restrictions on immigration had begun to be enacted by Congress in the 1870s. Many of these had an explicit racial prejudice, with laws that first targeted Chinese migrants and later excluded immigration from most Asian countries.

If the ship passed its health inspection, the first and second-class passengers would be interviewed and processed onboard. During Ellis Island's first few decades, immigrants to the US did not require passports, visas or any official government paperwork at all. Passports existed, but they were only universally adopted in 1920. Instead, when passengers first boarded a ship, they gave spoken answers to questions which were recorded in its manifest. These were then checked by US officials and, provided those wealthier passengers were sickness-free and had no legal issues, they were allowed to enter the US, bypassing Ellis Island entirely.

Everyone else was tagged with the ship's name and the page number where they appeared on the manifest. They were then put on a ferry to Ellis Island where their future would be decided. When they arrived at the island and entered the main building, women and children were separated into one line and men into the other. Then they climbed the steep winding staircase to the registry room on the second floor, carefully watched by doctors who were looking out for signs of wheezing, coughing or limping that suggested health problems.

When they reached the registry room, they faced a brief medical examination. This was a nerve-racking experience. Immigrant children were asked their names so the doctors could check that they were not deaf or dumb. Toddlers who were being carried were made to walk to prove that they could. "It was interesting but a little frightening, too, because we couldn't speak English," Belarsky told the BBC.

If the doctor suspected a health issue they would mark letters on that person's clothes in chalk: H for heart problems, X for mental illness, CT for trachoma – a highly contagious and much feared eye infection that can lead to blindness. The test for this was particularly uncomfortable: doctors would turn a person's eyelid inside out using their fingers or a buttonhook, an implement used for fastening small buttons. If a person got a chalk mark, they would be removed from the line and confined in what was called the "doctor's pen" for a more thorough examination.

If they then failed a medical inspection they would be detained or outright refused entry and sent back to where they had travelled from. In some cases, this could mean a family being broken up. Official statistics record that only around 2% were refused entry to the US, but that still means that nearly 125,000 people, who had endured the long and difficult journey to get there, were sent home within sight of Manhattan. 

Those who passed the medical exam proceeded to a legal screening. Inspectors would check their tags and quiz them, often with the help of an interpreter, about everything from their eye colour and who paid for their passage to whether they were literate and whether they had ever been held in a mental health institution. Most people were processed quickly and went through Ellis Island within a few hours. But if a migrant's answers didn't match the ones on the ship's manifest, or if the inspectors were suspicious about them for some reason, their name was marked with an X and they were detained.

The American dream

Around 20% of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island ended up being temporarily detained there. This could happen for a variety of reasons. Women travelling alone or with children were often viewed as potential burdens to the state. Officials would frequently class them as Liable to Become a Public Charge (LPCs), detaining them until a male family member – because no women were allowed to leave Ellis Island with a man not related to them – could turn up and vouch for them. Unmarried women who were pregnant could be judged by inspectors as "immoral" and held. Stowaways who weren't on the manifest, migrant labourers suspected of being brought into the US to break union strikes, and anyone officials deemed to be politically suspect could be detained or refused entry.

Although Isabel Belarsky's father, Sidor, was a renowned opera singer who had been invited to come to the US, her family was still automatically detained at Ellis Island. This was because at the time the US did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Detainees would sleep in triple-tiered bunk beds in dormitory rooms on the building's third floor, receiving three meals a day until their cases could be resolved. Sometimes this could mean an overnight stay, sometimes it could be weeks or months. "They gave us 10 minutes every so often to go outside. When we went out they counted us," said Belarsky. "And when we came back, they counted again. When we sat down, when we ate, they also counted."

If arrivals had been detained because they were ill, and they hadn't been refused entry, they would be held in hospital wards on the island. While most recovered, more than 3,500 immigrants died on Ellis Island in sight of New York and their dream of a better life. Some 350 babies were also born on the island, although this was no guarantee of citizenship for the child.

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Once an immigrant's health or legal issues were successfully concluded, they were registered and free to enter the US and start their new lives. Belarsky said: "For me it was very exciting when I was a youngster. And finally, somebody got us the papers to leave Ellis Island. It was a beautiful sight. Beautiful. That was the greatest day of all our lives." 

By the time the Belarsky family came through in 1930, the era of mass immigration to the US had already come to an end. Following World War One, the US Congress enacted sweeping laws based on race and nationality which restricted who could come into the country. The Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were designed to cap annual immigration, imposing strict quotas that favoured people from northern and western European countries. 

As immigration decreased, Ellis Island's role began to change. During World War Two, some 7,000 German, Italian and Japanese nationals suspected of being enemy aliens were interred there. Later, US soldiers returning from the war were treated in its hospital. In the late 1940s, as the Cold War developed, suspected communists who were swept up in the paranoia of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare were incarcerated there while the US government reviewed the often secret evidence against them. But by the 1950s, the use of air travel and modern entry procedures at airports made Ellis Island increasingly obsolete. In 1954, after 62 years of operation, it finally closed down, but it is open again today as a museum that highlights the rich history of new arrivals to the US. 

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'It's rather different from selling an ordinary book': How Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned – and became a bestseller

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241031-how-lady-chatterleys-lover-was-banned-and-became-a-bestseller, today

The UK publication of DH Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, gripped the nation in 1960. In History looks at the highly publicised trial that led to its release – and the rush to see what all the fuss was about.

Until November 1960, British people were prevented from reading Lady Chatterley's Lover by a law that criminalised the publication of writing considered indecent and immoral. The British publishing house, Penguin Books, wanted to challenge the Obscene Publications Act by printing a complete, uncensored edition of DH Lawrence's book. The resulting trial symbolised social changes that had been bubbling under in the years since World War Two, and demonstrated the gulf between the public and those who saw themselves as the guardians of established morals.

Lady Chatterley's Lover had been published privately in Italy and France in the late 1920s, but was banned thereafter in several countries around the world including the US, Australia and Japan. In the years leading up to the trial, writers and publishers in Britain had become increasingly worried by the number of books being prosecuted for obscenity. In an attempt to allay these fears, the UK's Parliament introduced a new Obscene Publications Act in 1959 that promised "to provide for the protection of literature and to strengthen the law concerning pornography". This amendment provided a defence for anyone accused of publishing a "dirty book". It allowed them to argue that a piece of work should be published if it had literary merit, even if the average person found its material shocking.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was considered controversial as it depicted a passionate relationship between an upper-class woman, Lady Constance Chatterley, and a working-class man, Oliver Mellors. The novel includes swear words and explicit descriptions of sex, and it portrays female sexual pleasure. Lawrence said that he hoped to reclaim sex as something that was acceptable in literature. He wanted to "make the sex relations [in the novel] valid and precious, instead of shameful".

In 1960, Penguin was ready to test the Obscene Publications Act. They wrote to the director of public prosecutions (DPP) and warned that they would be publishing an original version of the book. In August that year, Reginald Manningham-Buller, the chief legal adviser to the Crown, read the first four chapters of the novel while travelling on a boat train to Southampton. He wrote to the DPP, approving legal proceedings against Penguin. "I hope you get a conviction," he said. Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, was in Spain as events unfolded. His colleagues advised him to return home immediately.

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover was the first of its kind under the new Act, and the scene was set for a clash between the establishment and those with more liberal views. To support their case in favour of publishing the novel, Penguin summoned a host of expert witnesses including 35 prominent writers and politicians. Among the group was Richard Hoggart, an influential academic and author who was seen as a key witness. He argued that the novel was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely included words that he had heard on a building site on his way to the court.

In opposition, Mervyn Griffith-Jones led the prosecution, which argued that the sex in the novel was gratuitous pornography. "When you have seen the book just ask yourselves, would you approve of your sons and daughters reading it?" Griffith-Jones asked the jury. "Would you leave it lying about your house? Is it a book you would even wish your wives and servants to read?" He also listed nearly 100 uses of swear words in its pages. Mr Justice Byrne, the judge who presided over the trial, pointed out that the low price of the book meant it would "be available for all and sundry to read". These statements are often cited as representing the out-of-touch attitudes of the British establishment at the time. On 2 November 1960, after a six-day trial, the jury took three hours to deliberate and came to a unanimous decision. Penguin Books was found "not guilty" under the Act.

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Lady Chatterley's Lover went on sale immediately afterwards, as Penguin had prepared to distribute it in the event of acquittal. They had to work with a new printing firm as their usual one refused to touch it. But the trial had the effect of promoting the book, which sold out of all 200,000 copies on its first day of publication. It went on to sell three million copies in three months.

A few days after it went on sale, a shop owner in England, Mr Donati, spoke to BBC News about the novel's immediate popularity. "We ordered 1,000 to start with," he said. "We had every hope of getting them, of course, but in the event, it was cut to half. We received 500 copies. We were open quite early, at five to nine, and I should imagine we've sold 50 or 60 [copies] already… I think we should have to wait at least three weeks [for another stock]."

Still, traditional English reserve hadn't vanished overnight. Many customers were too embarrassed to ask for the scandalous novel by name, one bookseller told the BBC. "Some of them just ask for Lady C, some of them just give you three and six [three shilling and sixpence]." As the reporter noted, "It's rather different from selling an ordinary book." But then, Lady Chatterley's Lover was no ordinary book. When published in full, it would become a symbol of freedom of expression, and a sign that Britain's cultural landscape was changing. The poet Philip Larkin captured its significance in his poem, Annus Mirabilis:

"Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP."

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'It was a much more interesting character': How Arnold Schwarzenegger became the bad guy in The Terminator

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241024-how-arnold-schwarzenegger-became-the-bad-guy-in-the-terminator, today

The Terminator was released 40 years ago, on 26 October 1984. James Cameron's science-fiction thriller turned its star into one of the biggest Hollywood action heroes of the 1980s and 1990s – and it was all because he chose to play the bad guy, as he told the BBC in 1985.

Arnold Schwarzenegger never did anything by halves. For his breakthrough role in The Terminator, he claimed to have spent hours blindfolded every day, practising how to take apart and reassemble futuristic weapons, "to really show that I'm an expert coming back from the year 2028 to our present time in Los Angeles".

It was this combination of honest toil and marketing pizzazz that would rocket Schwarzenegger's career to unprecedented heights. His deadpan charisma helped. Few actors could deliver a simple line like "I'll be back" and turn it into a career-defining catchphrase. But just as important was his willingness to put in the hours required to achieve his ambitions, and to be open about all that work. "You have to lock into a whole different kind of emotional obligation to play a machine," he told the BBC's Breakfast Time on a promotional trip to London in January 1985. "The way you walk is quite different. The way you handle your guns is different. The way your facial expressions are when you kill and all those kind of things, because you're not supposed to have any feelings."

Schwarzenegger's previous films had been moulded around his imposing physique. In his 1970 film debut Hercules in New York, the reigning Mr Universe was credited as Arnold Strong. With the success of 1982's Conan the Barbarian and the 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, his long surname became a trusted brand for action fans. The sleek science-fiction of The Terminator was a big upgrade on sword-and-sorcery, and Schwarzenegger had a clear vision of how he wanted to present himself. "I was offered the part of playing the good guy, the hero," he said. "I then read through the script and I was more fascinated with the character of Terminator. It was a much more interesting character playing a robot – like in Westworld, Yul Brynner played somebody with no emotions and with no feelings and no pity for anything – and to play this kind of a character."

Schwarzenegger said he pitched the idea that he should play Terminator model T-800 to the film's director, James Cameron. "I thought it was a big step forward in my career," said Schwarzenegger, "because I played all along always the hero, like in the Conan movies, for instance. Also, it was a good part for me to play because it was really the first time acting in a film where I didn't really have to rely on physical development, like in the Conan films."

Once The Terminator was a box-office smash in the US, Schwarzenegger had his eye on the next phase of his career. "It has opened up a whole new thing for me, and of course the most important thing in acting is to be able to get roles in many different areas rather than just get typecast," he said.

For Schwarzenegger, it was all about seizing opportunities. He had come a long way since the writer and broadcaster Clive James memorably likened the shirtless bodybuilder's appearance to "a brown condom full of walnuts". On Fame in the Twentieth Century, James's 1993 BBC series about celebrity, he cast his eye over the former Mr Universe's journey towards becoming "the first fully self-constructed superstar". James observed: "For his big breakthrough film, he played himself – that is, an android; somebody someone had built. And somebody had built him – he had." According to the critic, Schwarzenegger's "brightest move of all was to let the media in on his secret". He said: "The tongue in his cheek was hard to see amongst all his other bulges, but the press loved the way he didn't hide the hustle. He made his career the story."

The bodybuilder nicknamed the Austrian Oak was always openly ambitious in a way that was perhaps more brashly American than European. Having created his multiple Mr Universe-winning body, he came to mainstream attention in the 1977 docudrama Pumping Iron. At that year's Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera, he explained to the BBC that he was not a trained actor, but was using his body as "a vehicle to break into the films".

Marketing masterstrokes

"It's something that carries me through until I'm established in acting," he said. When asked if he believed his acting talent could equal his bodybuilding skill, he was in no doubt: "When I was 15 years old, I'd said I would be the best or the greatest bodybuilder of all times and I have done it. Now I'm just as confident as when I was 15 – I can say now I will be the best actor around." 

By the early 1990s, almost everything had gone according to plan. While he may not have been the best actor around, Schwarzenegger was unquestionably one of Hollywood's biggest stars. He had gone from Conan the Barbarian to big budget sci-fi epics such as Total Recall and Predator, via high-concept family-friendly comedies such as Twins. Every career move was a marketing masterstroke, reaching out to ever expanding demographics. In the first Terminator, he was a terrifying villain. By its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he was the hero.

On the 1991 BBC documentary Naked Hollywood, he looked back at the obstacles he had overcome on his way to the top. "I made up a programme, went to a lot of acting classes, voice classes, accent removal classes, and on and on and on, and really laid out a plan on how to market myself – and then I met the most incredible resistance that you can imagine," he said.

While prospective agents mocked his Austrian surname and urged him to change it, Schwarzenegger had the last laugh. "Everyone was basically saying to me, you have very little chance in this profession simply because there is no one that we know who has come from Europe that has really gone through the roof, that has made it really huge in this business."

 

He said that having lived around half his life in Austria and the other half in the US, he identified as an Austrian-American: "I'm extremely happy that I came to the United States and became a citizen of this country, because this is really the country that represents a beautiful vision of great opportunities and endless possibilities, where a dream can come true – in my case, I'm the perfect example of that." 

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His Austrian birthplace meant he could never complete his American Dream bingo card by making it to the White House; even Arnie was no match for the US Constitution. In 2003, he weathered campaign allegations of groping and cheating – behaviour that he eventually acknowledged as "wrong" – to be elected governor of California in 2003. Inevitably, he was nicknamed the Governator.

That same drive and appetite for personal growth he exhibited on the Breakfast Time sofa in 1985 took him further than maybe even he ever imagined. "All you have to do is just take advantage of these opportunities and then learn in these areas," he said. "If it is acting, to go to acting school and to start from the bottom again – and this is exciting in life, to go into new areas and be hungry for new and better things."

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Mobo Awards founder Kanya King reveals cancer diagnosis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9g5kqe307o, today

Mobo Awards founder Kanya King announced she has been diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer.

Kanya launched the Mobos in 1996 to celebrate black talent across the entertainment industry including film, music and TV.

The annual awards ceremony has become a major event, with February's party due to be held in Newcastle.

Kanya said finding out she had cancer "was something I never saw coming and I am still processing this unexpected reality.

"While this journey will undoubtedly be challenging, I've always believed in finding meaning through adversity," she said.

"This diagnosis isn't the end of my story—it's a chance to inspire resilience, raise awareness, use this moment to not only fight my own battle but to amplify the message of early detection and the importance of proactively taking charge of your health.

"If my story can save just one life, then it's a story worth telling."

Sharing the news on Instagram, the Mobos says Kanya's "set her sights" on being at the next awards "to celebrate the achievements of our community".

The post, which was also shared on Kanya's profile, said her diagnosis was "a reminder to all of us to be the CEO of our health".

"Kanya's story is one of resilience, courage and hope.

"As she has always inspired us to uplift and celebrate each other, let's do the same for her now."

In a separate statement, the organisation said it "remains in capable hands" with Kanya's "guidance and unwavering support" while she focuses on her health.

Since the post was shared, Kanya's had hundreds of messages of support from well-known names including DJ Target, Remel London and Alexandra Burke.

Singer Marvin Humes, who has presented the Mobo Awards, said he's "sending love and strength" for Kanya's recovery.

'Transformed the landscape'

On Wednesday, the Mobos announced Kanya as the winner of this year's lifetime achievement award.

She was recognised for creating a "globally respected brand" and how she "transformed the landscape for Black artists" through her work.

In 2018, she was recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours list and appointed CBE for her services to music.

She was also listed in the BBC's first 100 Women project when it launched in 2013. It has since gone on to be an annual series celebrating 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world.

In 2009, the Mobo awards moved out of London for the first time and since then has moved around the UK.

Last year the ceremony was held in Sheffield.

The list of nominees was released earlier this month, with Central Cee in with a chance to win best male artist three times.

Last year's best female act, Raye, is in the running to win the prize for a second year running.

The awards also celebrate global talent and in the past have welcomed stars including Beyoncé, Usher, Rihanna and Janet Jackson.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.


Former Paralympian realises lifelong dream to sing

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq62ym02geyo, today

A former Paralympian has set her sights on a new chapter in her life - music.

Zoe Edge, from Derbyshire, was born with severe athetoid cerebral palsy, but she does not see her disability as a limitation.

She won a silver medal in boccia at the 1996 Paralympic Games and has gone on to dedicate her life to fundraising for various charitable causes.

Now she has teamed up with a Chesterfield music producer to realise a lifelong dream to create her own music using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Edge, 50, said: "I have written song lyrics since I was a teenager, but because of my disability, I have never been able to sing or record them until now.

"However, thanks to innovative new technology, I have been able to have a 'voice'."

She first fell in love with pop music in the 1980s, inspired by acts like Bros and New Kids on the Block.

She uses an electric chair to move around her home in Chesterfield and a special computer-generated voice to communicate.

According to her father Mick Edge, she was always determined to "not let her disability hold her back".

She travelled the world playing boccia, culminating in a silver medal at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games.

Since then she has enjoyed fundraising for a number of charities, including a sponsored "roll across the pitch" for her beloved Chesterfield FC in early 2024.

Now working alongside producer Lyn Sheppard, Edge has finally realised her dream and created a Christmas song titled "You Must Still Believe in Make-Believe".

Mr Sheppard said: "The mission was clear, she wanted to sing in her own voice on an original song.

"We eventually discovered AI, we found a sound she liked, and that's where we are now."

Edge's mum Dylis Edge says "she cannot believe" her daughter's success.

"It's just unreal," she said.

"She has difficulty saying her own words, and now she has her own singing voice thanks to AI. It's brilliant!"

Mr Edge says he will "always be proud" of his daughter.

"She's amazing at what she's done," he adds.

"She never lets anything hold her back. It makes us so proud of her."

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Designer John Galliano leaves Maison Margiela after 10 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20elv4g695o, today

Fashion designer John Galliano has announced he is stepping down as creative director of Maison Margiela after 10 years.

In a statement on Instagram, Galliano said "today is the day is I say goodbye" to the company, adding that his "heart overflows with joyous gratitude, and my soul smiles".

The 64-year-old did not announce his next job, saying only: "When the time is right, all will be revealed."

Fashion press outlets reported on Wednesday that Galliano had been approaching the end of a five-year contract but chose not to renew.

Galliano has enjoyed a strong final year at the company, thanks to the success of his Artisanal 2024 collection.

Fashion and culture magazine Dazed said it "captured the public's imagination with its broken marionette looks and Pat McGrath's glassy, porcelain make-up".

Following the collection's debut, custom items were worn by rapper Bad Bunny, singer Ariana Grande and actress Gwendoline Christie at the 2024 Met Gala.

Galliano joined Margiela as creative director in 2014, three years after leaving Dior following an accusation he had made anti-Semitic remarks in a bar.

His lawyer at the time said the comments were the result of "work-related stress and multiple addictions".

A French court found Galliano guilty of making anti-Semitic remarks in 2011 and he was sentenced to a total of €6,000 (£4,940) in suspended fines.

His redemption journey was documented in the film High and Low: John Galliano, which was released earlier this year.

During his time at Margiela over the past decade, fashion bible Vogue said he had "taken the cult label, beloved of art and fashion insiders under incredibly private founder Martin Margiela, to new heights".

The magazine credited Galliano with overseeing significant growth at the company, with sales increasing by 24% in 2022 and 23% in 2023.

Vogue added: "Widely revered as one of fashion's most talented couturiers, Galliano creates a world and a story behind his clothes."

In his exit statement, Galliano said he was "forever grateful for this safe space to create and build a new family that supports me with courage and dignity".

He added that he felt "gratitude to my fashion family for this life-saving creative moment and the safe place we have built together".

"I'll readily admit I'm demanding and difficult to run with when challenged," he concluded. "But look at what we have built."


Sara Sharif: Smiles, songs and dreams of X Factor

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2z077ln5lo, today

Sara Sharif experienced "daily living hell" at home at the hands of her father and stepmother, but at school she was a caring, cheerful "chatterbox", who loved singing and dancing, her head teacher said.

Jacquie Chambers told the BBC that Sara was a much-loved pupil at St Mary's Primary School who would "sing to anyone who would listen" and had dreams of appearing on The X Factor.

Sara attended the school in West Byfleet, Surrey, until weeks before she was found dead in her bunkbed at home last year after being murdered by her father and stepmother.

Despite the torment she suffered, Ms Chambers said she was a “cheerful little soul” in the classroom and she would always be helping younger pupils in the playground.

“She would write songs all of the time and she would sing to anyone who would listen,” she said.

“She came into my office, and I remember saying to her, ‘Sara, what do you want to do when you grow up?’. She said, ‘I want to be on X Factor. I want to win it’. And she stood by that.”

Ms Chambers said Sara's classmates had created a buddy bench and a special award in her honour since her death.

The school's Sara Singing Award was set up to find the "singing stars" of St Mary's.

"We've got a lovely music trophy to award that person at the end of the year, and that will be something we'll do every year to remember her,” she said.

The school also held a memorial ceremony following her death.

During the emotional event, a white feather fell from the sky, which Ms Chambers took as a sign that Sara was looking down on them.

“Part of the service was children sharing memories, and the theme that ran through all of their memories was her singing,” Ms Chambers said.

“Her favourite songs was Memories by Maroon 5 and Count on Me by Bruno Mars.”

Both songs were sung at the service.

Sara’s closest friends also created a memory box in Ms Chambers' office, containing photos, messages and the white feather.

At the service, each member of her class also decorated part of a bench, which is now used as part of the school’s ‘bench buddy’ scheme.

“She was often called a mother hen," Ms Chambers said.

"She would love to look after all the little children on the playground, and that's why they thought of the buddy bench."

Sara attended St Mary's from year two until year five, when she was withdrawn to be home schooled in April 2023.

In March 2023 teachers at the school noticed bruising on Sara's face, and told Surrey County Council Children's Services.

The Children's Services investigation into the bruises took six days and the school was asked to monitor Sara.

This ended when Sara was taken out of school the next month.

Ms Chambers could not comment on this in her interview because of an official review into the involvement of social services, the police, the NHS and the education services in Sara's life.

Sara was found dead in her bunkbed at her family home on August 10.

Her father Urfan Sharif, 43, and stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of murder.

Sara's uncle, Faisal Malik, 29, was convicted of causing or allowing the death of a child at the Old Bailey.

The head teacher added that Sara would be remembered as an “absolute chatterbox” who was “full of energy and life”.

“We're quite a big school, but every adult knew Sara. I think that's why we're impacted by her death, because everyone knew her,” Ms Chambers said.

She said hearing the news of Sara’s death was “the saddest time of my life”.

“The shock was just immense. Personally, talking as a head teacher, I don't think you're ever ready for something like that,” she added.

“Sara had the cutest, biggest smile with her little cheeks. We don't have a photo in school where she hasn't got a smile on her face.”

Follow BBC Surrey on Facebook and X. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.


Henry Cavill honours Jersey shop in Warhammer post

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c159q12zp5go, today

Actor Henry Cavill has paid tribute to a shop in Jersey, where he first developed his love for the game Warhammer.

On a social media post, the actor said he "decided to make a pilgrimage to the very first place I bought Warhammer models over 30 years ago.... the Little Shop, on my home island of Jersey".

In 2023, it was announced the maker of Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop, had finalised a deal with Amazon to bring the characters and stories to the screen.

Warhammer simulates battles between armies of miniature painted models.

'Flattered and humbled'

In 2023, the BBC said Cavill - best known for playing Superman - would be an executive producer and had signed up to appear in the project.

In his social post, he said his team and media bosses had "been sifting through the plethora of incredible characters and poring over old tomes and texts".

The Little Shop in Jersey said Cavill was a regular visitor and he was very interested in Warhammer figures and paints.

It said: "We're flattered and humbled after all these years that he still remembers us.

"A few people mentioned the post to us - it's such an honour, the Little Shop is so famous now in such a big world."

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Controversial sculpture display plan approved

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c390ve7d11lo, today

Plans to display 12 stone sculptures for the first time in 40 years have been approved despite criticism over the project.

The Kiddey Stones, made of four large sandstone panels, were originally installed at Wilford Power Station in Nottinghamshire, but have been in storage since the 1980s.

On Tuesday, Newark and Sherwood District Council's cabinet voted to install the artwork outside its headquarters at an estimated cost of £87,430.

However, a consultation revealed more than 57% rejected the idea, with respondents saying they were a "waste of money" or "morally wrong", while others supported the plan's historical significance.

The stones, designed by Nottingham-born sculptor Robert Kiddey, depict different aspects of electricity production.

Kiddey, who moved to Newark in 1931 and taught for 50 years, attained international recognition - some of his artworks were exhibited alongside work by Pablo Picasso.

New art trail

After the power station was demolished in the 1980s, the stones were moved to Newark Cemetery, where they have been kept out of public view.

Plans to relocate the newly-restored works as a "free-standing public art installation" were approved in principle by the council cabinet in June - subject to a public consultation.

Just over 880 people responded to the consultation in September, with the majority saying the money would be better spent elsewhere.

However, nearly 41% of responses were supportive and mainly focused on the cultural and historical significance of Kiddey's work to the area.

Work to install the sculptures outside the council offices, in Great North Road in Newark, is set to start in spring 2025, which the authority says will be the start of a new art trail in the town.

Rowan Cozens, portfolio holder for heritage, culture and the arts, said: "Reflecting the working lives of miners and electric plant operators, the Kiddey Stones will provide a visible and prominent reminder of our heritage.

"I am aware that there are mixed feelings about this project. However, I have spoken to many residents, and I firmly believe there is a need and desire, from a good proportion of our residents, to see the installation progress.

"I hope that many people will enjoy the wellbeing benefits of these beautifully impressive sculptures without having to travel outside of the district."

Follow BBC Nottingham on Facebook, on X, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk or via WhatsApp on 0808 100 2210.


'Generational talent' crowned The Rap Game UK winner

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg6lgvlj20o, today

After six weeks of intense challenges, clashes and even a live show on the BBC Introducing Stage at Leeds Festival, the winner of the sixth series of The Rap Game UK has been announced.

Layyah beat fellow rappers Haydog, CBliminal and Only Zizou to become the show's first female winner, taking home the £20,000 cash prize during the final on Tuesday night.

"It is a dream come true," she tells BBC Newsbeat.

"I really do hold this title highly and I want to make the absolute best of it."

The winning moment was revealed at the top of a London skyscraper, at the end of an episode which saw the finalists take on the Kenny Allstar Freestyle challenge on 1Xtra.

Layyah's freestyle rap left the 1Xtra presenter "speechless", who went on to describe her as "special".

"She has the potential to be a generational talent," he says.

Immediately after her win, Layyah, from London, says: "Young Layyah would be proud of me. It hasn't been easy to become the version of me that I've become."

She credits the "strong females" in her life as the inspiration behind her big win.

"My mum, my grandma, aunties, even my little sister, she's so strong beyond her years."

And she tells Newsbeat she hopes her win can help drive change in the industry.

"In the music scene, there is a bit of a boys club.

"The guys stick together, not so much the girls. So there should be more support for the females."

She cites US rapper Lauryn Hill and Mercury Prize winner Little Simz as artists she looks up to in music.

"The way I perform is very real. You're going to essentially feel what I'm feeling when you hear me, because it does come from the heart."

DJ Target and duo Krept and Konan were the three judges guiding the aspiring rappers.

In September 2013, Krept and Konan had the highest charting UK album by an unsigned act - with Young Kingz getting to 19 in the top 40 Official Albums Chart.

They think all four finalists have the potential to add something new to a scene that is a "bit samey".

"You kind of hear sounds and everyone starts doing the same thing. Every time we come across new artists that do some completely new sounds it's exciting," Krept tells Newsbeat.

Haydog adds: "It's probably the easiest time to cut through as an up and coming rapper. We have TikTok, people like DJ AG supporting us."

DJ AG and Mak 10 have been out on the streets putting on open-mic sets for anyone to rock up and rap.

It's led to lesser-known artists going viral alongside established ones like Skepta.

DJ Target has been presenting the show since 2019, and feels "it definitely represents a huge part of UK culture".

"It speaks to an audience that often are left out of the conversations."

That's something Only Zizou can relate to.

"Six weeks of solely focus on music. Being able to spit our bars in front of these established artists is just crazy."

But while they were in it to develop as rappers and win the jackpot, many of them were there to inspire others to get involved at a time where social media can change everything for rappers trying to break through, especially outside London.

"I'm putting it on for my city Nottingham," CBliminal says.

"It's nice to be able to have the youngsters within my city look up to it and watch the show and think: 'Well if he's doing it then there's no reason why I can't do it'."

For Haydog, from Wirral, Merseyside, it's been a chance to represent his hometown.

"This is a massive opportunity. I do a bit of youth work, it's good to be able to be the person that the youth are looking up to, especially in my area.

"Anybody that's out there who's got a dream. Don't stop until you chase your dream. Never quit and stay focused."

All episodes of The Rap Game UK series six are available on BBC iPlayer here.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.


Museum visitors react to pay-as-you-feel idea

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e34553g3xo, today

A council is considering introducing a pay-as-you-feel scheme at the museums and galleries it runs across the city.

Leeds City Council said the idea would be part of a wider package of cost-saving measures as it faces rising social care costs and increased service demands.

Presently the council does not charge an admission fee at the Leeds City Museum and the Leeds Art Gallery, though some other council-owned venues in the city do.

The BBC spoke to several people visiting both venues to ask if they would be happy to pay what they felt their visit was worth.

'Expect to pay'

Paul Madden, a tour bus operator from Ireland, has been coming to Leeds for 30 years and said he would "definitely" have paid an entrance fee.

"I did expect to have to pay a fee and I was very surprised when I didn't," he said.

"They do have a donations box asking for £2, which is very little for what I've just seen."

Mr Madden said £5 would be "a nominal fee to pay and a fair one".

"I'm paying £50 to go to Elland Road tonight and I'll spend the same amount of time there as I did in the museum today," he said.

Victoria Olatungi, 27, also drew a comparison with other leisure activities, as she said she would be happy to pay for entry too.

"People are willing to pay to see a movie and this [the museum] is really beneficial to us.

"I think £5, maximum £10, would be reasonable to pay."

'Hugely important'

Eddie Myers, who was originally from Leeds but now lives in Nottingham, said he had "no objection" to pay-as-you-feel, as long as the charges did not become compulsory.

He said bringing in a concrete entry fee would "restrict access" to museums for "young people and the unemployed".

"The museum's a hugely important resource and I understand they need the funds," Mr Myers said.

"If it was pay-as-you-feel I'd be perfectly happy with that. It's really important we preserve the civic fabric and this is part of that."

'Great' idea

Rachael Howarth, who was heading into Leeds Art Gallery, said she would be "more than happy" to pay because "the arts are hugely underfunded".

"It's great that the museums are free and that's good for people who can't afford it, but I think pay-as-you feel is a great way to raise funds from people who want to and can afford to," Ms Howarth, from Castleford, added.

One man who gave his name as Callum was less sure about the idea, however.

He cited the high prices in the gift shop as part of his thinking.

"It's a tough one," he said.

"My stinginess inside me wants to say 'no', but I understand if you are trying to get revenue in [you might have to do it]."

The city council is considering the idea as part of measures to address a £106.4m savings requirement for the next financial year.

Along with the pay-as-you-feel policy, the authority is considering closing the Abbey House Museum, located in the gatehouse of the ruins of the 12th Century Kirkstall Abbey.

Beyond next year, the council is provisionally expecting to require a further savings of £35.2million in 2026/27 and £29.6million in 2027/28.

The initial proposals will be considered by the council's executive board on 11 December.

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.


Pigeon art project reveals why people moved to town

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgx1756eyvo, today

Journeys of people who have settled in a town have been championed in artworks of a bird that can always find its way home.

The Hometown Birds project, using the symbol of a pigeon, encouraged people to come forward to share their stories of how they ended up in Bedford.

They have been invited to decorate pictures of the bird and adorn them with messages in tribute to a town landmark known as "Pigeon Square".

Co-organiser and artist Anne-Marie Abbate said pigeons were picked as the project was "about people arriving in Bedford and what's the first thing you see - you enter Pigeon Square".

It has been set up by community interest company Permission 2, which has run a string of workshops in Pigeon Square - also known as Church Square - and cafes.

"Story-telling is getting lost through the generations, and with the fascinating way that pigeons can be let off in another town and find their way back to their home, we thought we'd use them as a symbol," said Ms Abbate.

"Pigeons do get a bad rap, but we have to remember they saved our lives in the war by carrying messages."

Ms Abbate said people did not have to be particularly artistic to join in and were urged to express themselves using their native flag colours or designs personal to them.

Permission 2 has also been working with homeless people alongside the Bedford Langar Project, which supplies free curries, and Ms Abbate said they had received an "amazing" response.

The project, funded by the University of Bedfordshire's Heritage Horizons and National Lottery, will culminate in a public art trail of 100 pigeon designs leading from Bedford bus station to Pigeon Square in January.

Each bird will feature a QR code that links to Permission 2's website.

Ms Abbate said: "It will tell you about the journeys that all these people have had and why they're in Bedford - whether they came for work, love or just flew in on the street!"

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'It was a shock to many': Matthew Bourne on his Swan Lake with male swans, the show that shook up the dance world

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241126-matthew-bourne-on-his-male-swan-lake-the-show-that-shook-up-the-dance-world-forever, today

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of his legendary stage production, Matthew Bourne tells the BBC about the show that radically changed ballet with one "big idea".

The most iconic dance costume of recent times may be a pair of white feathery breeches on permanent display at London's V&A museum. They're a tribute to choreographer Matthew Bourne's gender-flipping dance version of the ballet Swan Lake. The production, which first premiered in London in November 1995, ruffled feathers in many ways because the swans, until then female roles, were played by male dancers. It went on to become the longest running full-length dance classic in the West End and on Broadway, winning both Olivier and Tony awards.

As the show celebrates its 30th anniversary with a 2024/25 tour, Matthew Bourne tells the BBC the story of the landmark production.

"I think most people thought that when they came to see it, they were going to see men in tutus," says Matthew Bourne, of public expectations back in 1995.

The young, London-born choreographer, then aged 35, had been given the opportunity to stage his own version of Swan Lake at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre. It was a cherished dream for him, he says, "because I've always loved and identified with the story". His big idea, he recalls, "was that all the swans would be male. Everything else about the production flowed from that one simple idea".

He explains that he found the meaning in the story through the character of the prince. "He's constantly being told he needs to get married; his mother keeps pointing at the ring on her finger, which is ballet mime for 'time to get married'. And he keeps saying, 'no I'll only get married for true love'. I always thought there was something else going on there. And that's where the idea of male swans came from, from thinking about the prince himself. I think he's obviously looking for something else."

Bourne trained in dance before becoming a choreographer for television and theatre, and by the early 1990s, had form for putting his own spin on classical ballets. Like the cohort during that era known as the YBAs (Young British Artists) – which included Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas – Bourne was seen as an agent of change in his sphere. He had critical success with his version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, where the setting was a Victorian-style orphanage. In 1994, his version of La Sylphide (called Highland Fling) was set in a modern-day housing estate in Glasgow.

Until this audacious twist on Swan Lake, ballerina Margot Fonteyn's legendary performances as the Dying Swan had become an iconic image not just of Swan Lake, but of 20th-Century ballet itself.  When it was announced that Bourne was bringing his own version, he remembers that "a lot of people thought it was a folly".

"No one could really imagine what it would be like, I think," he says. "If you'd been asked what ballet looks like, I think the image of female swans, the dancers, the tutus, was the classical look anyone would imagine."

"They said things like 'he's not the right person to do a new version of Swan Lake, he's known for humour and a jokey approach to things, for parody.'  I was called 'the bad boy of the ballet' – I'm not even from the ballet world – and 'the Damien Hirst of Dance'. They thought it was going to be a big send up and there were a lot of people who were either doubting it, or excited that this funny piece was going to happen.

"But I knew I wasn't going to do that. I knew I had a good idea. Whether people would like it or not, that I didn't know."

Part of the visual surprise of the show were the male swans. The look – a single black triangle on their foreheads, cropped hair, bare torsos and feet, and most famously, their white silk chiffon "feathered" legs – were created by Bourne and British designer Lez Brotherston. Bourne was also influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film, The Birds.

"Lez and I wanted the swans to have a sense of being bird-like, animalistic and human, all at the same time," he says. "That they're mythical and tribal as a group. I had a few visual images, that I gave to Lez, of an Indian dancer that I'd seen jumping in the air with some fringy trousers. He also came up with a beautiful, slightly corseted, top half. For the 'beak' make-up, I'd seen a ballet by Roland Petit, Notre Dame de Paris. The only make-up he had to represent the hunchback was a black square line across his eyebrows. I'd just remembered how simple it was and how it worked well."

Far from being a humorous version of the original love story, Bourne describes his Prince's connection with The Swan as "the heart of the piece for me".

"This Prince is looking for something in his life that he didn't have," he says. "He has a cold mother, no one touches him, which is true of a royal person if you think about it. So, to be embraced by the swan's wings was the heart of it. It represented to him all the things that he wasn't in his own life, which is being free and being wild, to be a free person. It's so well embraced by Tchaikovsky's music. It's very moving, deep stuff, because the story has an element where you can bring yourself to it."

The choreographer also expresses surprise – as the costumes for his 'royal' family were contemporary – that the 1995 headlines mainly focused on The Swan, rather than a perceived connection with the British Royal Family and the divorce of the then Prince of Wales from Diana, Princess of Wales.

"The royal news was so big at the time and the lead did look a bit like Prince Charles at one point. So, I thought that would be picked up on, the story of a troubled prince. But it was all about the cultural icon, which is the Dancing Swan."

Gliding into pop culture

The world premiere of Swan Lake, on 9 November 1995, with Adam Cooper, a Royal Ballet principal dancer playing The Swan, caused an immediate sensation. 

"It was a shock to many in the audience, I think, when Adam Cooper and these men in costumes came on," Bourne says.

"It wasn't a bad shock; it was just something brand new. And it was a shock to me, the way it took off in one night. We were front-page headlines in some newspapers. Cameron Mackintosh cornered me in the interval – he didn't even wait for the end of the show – and said that it had to go to the West End. He recognised something in it immediately."

There were, he adds, some who walked out when two men started dancing together, and the sexuality of the piece was a talking point throughout its first record-breaking runs in London's West End in 1996, and on Broadway in 1998. It was still a controversial topic. Although same-sex marriage had been depicted in the US's most popular sitcom, Friends, in January 1996, weeks after the premiere of Swan Lake, it would still be another two decades before gay relationships would achieve full equality in law in either the US or Great Britain.

"It got labelled 'the Gay Swan Lake' in a lot of places, and I was told to keep quiet about it when we first went to Broadway," Bourne says. "They thought it was very bad for publicity. It wouldn't be now, of course."

"Deep down, I knew there was essentially a gay story being told within the piece," he says. "I think I was wary of going too far with it at the time, and thinking of everyone's comfort. I'd be saying about The Swan, 'he is like a father figure'."

"I think that a wider audience found it more palatable in the mid-1990s because it wasn't a straightforward gay relationship. It was a prince and a swan. It was seen through the eyes of a prince trying to find peace in his life, and trying to find someone who would love him. It has a simple universal theme, which you could read several ways, and I think its openness is part of its success. But there were people who didn't like that side of it." 

More like this:

• Julie Taymor on creating The Lion King

• The 'gay Clueless' that became a cult classic

• The 60's icon who revolutionised fashion

If Bourne didn't feel able to celebrate the queer narrative within this Swan Lake in 1995, the rest of the dance world took much longer. It wasn't until the 2020s that popular TV dance shows featured same-sex couples, and it was only this year that classical ballet premiered a new ballet, Oscar, with an openly gay story. 

"Those barriers have just been broken, which is interesting," says Bourne. "The 30 years of history has changed all of it, it's not seen as controversial anymore, it's 'bring the kids at Christmas, bring the family'. It's changed enormously. But it's gone through a history of whether I can openly celebrate that as well, and I've gone on my own journey about how I talk about it." 

Swan Lake's role in helping to question gender norms of that era, however, was evident in Stephen Daldry's Oscar-nominated film from 2000, Billy Elliot, where Jamie Bell stars as a boy who wants to dance. Adam Cooper stars in the last scene of the film, as adult Billy, about to perform as The Swan.

With that one scene, Swan Lake glided into pop culture. And Bourne believes the production had a direct influence on the number of young men who now felt able to pursue a career in dance."Around that time there was an incredible growth in interest from young men, as well as young women, to get into dancing," he says.

"I think it has a legacy in terms of male dancers, along with Billy Elliot, from that time. It became an okay thing to do, because of these swans, this great combination of masculinity and lyricism, they show that both can be embraced. It's an iconic piece that they aspire to learn now."

Swan Lake also broke new barriers when it won a British Olivier theatre award in 1996, and three Tony Awards in 1999, including best director of a musical. It caused consternation among some on Broadway as they were divided on what his production represented. It was almost beyond definition, a contemporary piece set to the original music of Tchaikovsky.

"It is a musical theatre piece, but there was all this controversy about me winning the Tony Award, because there were some who said that Swan Lake wasn't a musical, it's a ballet," says Bourne. "But anything of this nature, this kind of argument, is always interesting because that's how things change, and how things are then viewed differently."

But that many audiences do indeed see his Swan Lake (and his subsequent dance productions) as ballet, has had a lasting impact on the inclusivity of the art form, he thinks. "I think the thing I'm most proud of with Swan Lake is the growth of dance audiences because of that piece, it really embraced wider audiences," he says. 

"I think it made people eager for creativity and wanting something different. That's been a definite legacy of the show. And for some people, what we do is ballet, and they want to appreciate that they've found something new, which is, for them, ballet. So, it's all about definitions really. Perhaps we're just a genre on our own."

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is on tour from November 2024 for 29 weeks.

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Artists imagine a new utopia for Kenya's capital

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4vk5y4ng5o, today

Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has long been known as “the green city in the sun” because of its mix of forest and grasslands among the urban sprawl, but it all depends on where you are viewing it from.

Seen from one of the city’s comfortable apartment blocks or homes, then yes, perhaps – from one of its densely packed slums, then no.

There, life can be characterised by poverty and ecological disaster, such as flooding and deadly landslides.

But an art collective - Kairos Futura – has been trying to take what might seem like some of the city’s more dystopian elements and create a vision of a utopia, or at least how that might be achieved.

Their exhibition Hakuna Utopia features the works of seven artists exploring themes of apocalypse and resilience – some in quite abstract ways - as they respond to the daily challenges endured by Nairobi’s six million residents.

One of the collective, Stoneface Bombaa, grew up in Mathare, the capital’s second-largest informal settlement.

He has overcome great odds to become an artist and wants to use his work to address the way that people in Mathare live – often lacking jobs, housing and education.

Bombaa says they endure a “hand-to-mouth economy”, never sure where their next meal will come from.

“People are really angry,” he says, but through art, he feels he can “channel” his community’s anger into something positive as “art unites”.

Bombaa set out to create from the exhibitions “micro-utopia” sites dotted around the city.

He called it the “jungle room” and hoped to get people to connect with nature from within Mathare itself, in an attempt to bridge the ecological divide.

Ironically, the building he had identified as a possible site was demolished by the authorities to make way for a road.

Undeterred, he has been taking children from his community, often stuck living in unimaginable urban squalor, to experience Nairobi’s verdant parks and expose them to green spaces.

“There are no trees or green spaces in Mathare,” Bombaa says.

But by contemplating the idea of utopia, he believes that he can imagine what it would be like if people in his community actually had unrestricted access to the city’s green spaces.

In this way, people in his community can claim a right to access nature that is denied to them simply because they are poor.

Bombaa also complains about how ordinary Nairobians, often scrabbling to make a living, have to pay to enter some of their city’s most beautiful locations such as the arboretum or Karura forest.

The Kairos Futura team are also drawing inspiration from nature to use their imagination in how to address urgent environmental issues.

For example, Coltrane McDowell has applied this to architecture.

In his work Invisible Cities, he was inspired by termite mounds to reimagine what architecture might look like in the future.

Another artist in the show, Abdul Rop, known for his mesmerising woodcut prints and paintings, says that in order to “achieve utopia”, Nairobians need to work together.

“That's why the young people are agitating right now for change,” he says, suggesting they are frustrated by a corrupt political system that hems in their potential.

Gen Z were at the forefront of protests this year against new tax measures, which saw the government make an embarrassing U-turn.

Rop argues that by thinking about utopia through the lens of art, young people may find creative ways to fight for their future.

Rather than being far-fetched, he thinks that it can help imagine a bolder and more equal future for his city.

“The moment to act for the future is now,” he says.

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Ewan McGregor takes on first UK theatre role in 17 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3we671xvpqo, today

Ewan McGregor has described live theatre as "good for the soul", as he announced he is to return to the London stage for the first time in 17 years.

The Scottish actor, who has starred in Trainspotting and Moulin Rouge, is set to star in My Master Builder in London's West End between April and July next year.

McGregor told BBC News: "This is the longest I haven’t been on stage, and in honesty, I’ve missed it."

Inspired by Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play The Master Builder, the new show is written by US playwright Lila Raicek and will be directed by Michael Grandage.

"The funny story is, I had literally just finished reading Ibsen’s The Master Builder for pleasure – an extraordinary read," McGregor explained. "Michael got in touch out of the blue and I mentioned how much I’d love to get back on stage.

"And in a moment of pure coincidence, he told me he had a play inspired by The Master Builder sitting on his desk. I asked him to send it to me, and here we are. A moment of total serendipity."

He said Raicek had taken the script in a "fascinating" direction, describing the new play as a "very modern take on sexual politics in a way that resonates particularly for this moment we find ourselves in".

"It examines these issues in a very grown-up way," he continued. "And ultimately, I felt like what a great play it would be to see, and therefore what a great play it would be to do."

Ibsen's The Master Builder focused on a middle-aged Norwegian architect who becomes successful by building new homes following a fire that destroys a residential estate.

But the ambitious and ruthless architect, Halvard Solness, grapples with feelings of inadequacy and fear of being overtaken by younger talent.

The production will begin previews at the Wyndham's Theatre in London on 17 April, and run until 12 July.

Grandage and McGregor have previously collaborated on Othello and Guys and Dolls, both for the Donmar theatre, where Grandage was artistic director.

McGregor described working on the two shows as "amazing experiences", adding he felt "incredibly safe" in the director's hands.

"I really like the work he gets out of me," McGregor said. "He has great creative intention and ideas before we start in the rehearsal room, but when we are actually rehearsing with him, there’s such a great sense of discovering it together."

McGregor's film credits include Brassed Off, Miss Potter, Black Hawk Down, Angels & Demons, Birds of Prey and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

He played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first of the Star Wars prequel trilogy Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in 1999. He revisited the role in subsequent Star Wars films and in the 2022 miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The 53-year-old's other TV credits include Halston, in which he played fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick. McGregor won an Emmy Award in 2021 for his portrayal.

His last stage appearance was more than a decade ago, when he appeared in The Real Thing on Broadway, opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Reflecting on his return to live theatre, McGregor said: "I love acting on film and television, and of course, I love acting on stage. I have always been lucky enough to do all three throughout my career.

"Theatre teaches you so much about acting, the audience teaches you. What works, what doesn’t. It’s very good for the soul. The live experience. The power of storytelling.

"Also I love the routine of it, waking up in the morning with the day aiming towards this event, this electric experience."

Earlier this year, McGregor received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles. He said he was "particularly moved" his star had been placed beside that of the movie franchise's original Princess Leia, the late actress Carrie Fisher.


Why the iconic English painting The Hay Wain by John Constable is not what it seems

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240509-why-the-iconic-english-painting-the-hay-wain-by-john-constable-is-not-what-it-seems, today

John Constable's The Hay Wain presents a bucolic view of England – but there's a dark side to the idealised rural image.

Widely satirised and reproduced on everything from bath towels to biscuit tins, John Constable's The Hay Wain (1821) is "the most celebrated and certainly quintessentially English landscape painting", says Alice Rylance-Watson, assistant curator for the National Trust, discussing the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that inspired the painting. But this rural scene featuring a hay wagon fording a Suffolk millpond is, she says, "an idealised image". In fact, the more we learn about The Hay Wain, the less we can trust its depiction of England.

Exploring the diverse meanings that artists past and present attach to the landscapes they depict was the subject of an exhibition at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, National Treasures: Constable in Bristol − "Truth to Nature", starring The Hay Wain. The iconic 6ft-wide oil painting, frequently voted one of Britain's favourite artworks, was on loan from London's National Gallery as part of the museum's bicentenary celebrations in 2024. Now it has returned to the National Gallery, it is the focal point of Discover Constable & The Hay Wain, an exploration of the painting's creation and different reactions to it, which opened in October.

There's no doubt that Constable (1776-1837), who leaned more towards Romanticism than Realism, imbued his landscape with the sentimental attachment he had to it. He grew up just a mile from the whitewashed cottage to the left of the canvas, owned by tenant farmer Willy Lott, with its charming view over millpond and cornfields, and he rhapsodised about "the beauty of the surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats…", writing: "I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour".

Yet the rural way of life he depicted did not reflect the industrialisation that was rapidly altering the landscape at the time of painting. While his contemporary JMW Turner was painting a steam train slicing through the canvas, Constable was looking back rather than forward. In many ways, The Hay Wain is a scene that's too good to be true, an anachronism that speaks more to his nostalgia than offering a faithful portrait of rural Suffolk.

Far from being an objective record of the countryside, the scene inevitably reflects Constable's own standing in society as the son of a landowner, Christine Riding, Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery, tells the BBC. Just off-canvas is Flatford Mill, owned by the Constable family since 1742. "He knows that landscape very well, but he knows it from a position of privilege," she says. "It all looks very natural and contented. People know their place in society and are just getting on with it."

A darker side to rural bliss

But the scene is less happy when you consider the social context. The agricultural workers pictured in the background often laboured under poor conditions in a precarious and bloated employment market, could not afford to eat the bread that they helped produce, and were about to face even greater hardship when replaced by machines.

The picture also ignores the Enclosure Acts (between 1604 and 1914) that placed rural spaces in the hands of the few. "By the time you get to The Hay Wain, there is very little common land," explains Riding. "He's painting places that his father and his brother have ownership over… but you don't see owners, only labourers."

As for depicting "nature", "there's nothing natural about that landscape," Riding says. "It's all man-made…The fields are agriculture, a managed landscape." And though Constable was a pioneer of painting en plein air, the masterpiece was painted from sketches gathered over almost two decades and completed back at his studio in Hampstead, London – then just a village but, within a century, subsumed into the capital's urban sprawl.

In some ways, he's offering up a fiction: a highly curated landscape containing elements that have been added later to improve the composition and broaden its appeal. The panting dog on the shoreline is one example, while, to its right, traces of an erased barrel and a mounted horse still linger beneath the water. Even the hay wain itself, the ultimate symbol of the English countryside, is not a hay wagon, but a wood cart, perhaps painted from a sketch sent to Constable in London, or, as new research suggests, from carts parked around Hampstead Heath's Whitestone Pond.

Yet, in other ways, The Hay Wain is a paragon of verisimilitude, painted by an artist who was true to his artistic vision despite the low position landscapes occupied in the European Academies' hierarchy of artistic genres. "Constable is known for his attempts to be true to nature, and his commitment to painting a landscape that, for him, was very real," Julia Carver, curator of the Truth to Nature exhibition, tells the BBC. "He was working at a time when that was not fully understood by a lot of people in the artworld, and he still held to it."

Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons why The Hay Wain was not an immediate success when shown at the Royal Academy in 1821 is that it was too natural and too mundane for tastes at the time. But it was this same naturalism that saw it awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon, where it was shown, along with View on the Stour near Dedham and Yarmouth Jetty, three years later. It was there that the writer Stendhal declared: "We have never seen anything like these pictures before. It is their truthfulness that is so striking."

With the academic hierarchy in mind, "a lot of people who wanted to paint landscapes were starting to use history painting as a way to do it," says Carver, referencing Constable's predecessor Richard Wilson (1713-1782) and works by his contemporary, Turner, such as Dido building Carthage (1815). Constable, however, turns away from classicism and the temples, ruins and mythical beasts that populated the landscapes of many of his fellow painters, and he makes green, rather than the traditional brown, the dominant shade. Instead, he writes to childhood friend and fellow artist John Dunthorne about returning to Suffolk to make "laborious studies from nature" and create "a pure and unaffected" representation of the scenes.

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"His copious work outdoors to prepare the end result does help us to see something that was really real, that was true to nature," says Carver. Constable's scientifically accurate cloud formations, for example, were the result of hours of meticulous observation and sketching while out "skying", as he called it. The authenticity of the painting's elements mattered to Constable, and its original title Landscape: Noon speaks to the precision he sought in its representation of the light and the sky.

But for all his careful studies and sketches, some of which are on display in the Bristol and London exhibitions, The Hay Wain, says Christine Riding, is best understood as "an evocation". "Constable did not go in for a mimetic, optical-truth attitude to painting," she asserts. "It's a lifelong study of nature, but through the medium of oil paint".

Over the centuries, people have attached their own truths to the painting, Riding explains. At the time of painting, the Napoleonic Wars had made it clear that an English way of life could not be taken for granted, while the French Revolution and Peterloo were a reminder to families such as Constable's – who owned the means of production – that mobilised workers could upturn the old order at any moment. "Maybe he simply wants things to stay as they are," Riding suggests.

The Hay Wain has continued to be totemic of an England that needs to be protected, but the threats have changed. In 1983, Peter Kennard's The Hay Wain with Cruise Missiles supported the Greenham Common protests against the siting of guided nuclear missiles in the English countryside; while in 2022, The Hay Wain became the focus of climate action when two Just Stop Oil protesters taped a dystopian version on to the original artwork and glued themselves to its frame.

"I think we do Constable a disservice by assuming that all he wanted to do was to strip away traditions and conventions to paint the landscape as it was," says Riding. Constable is paying attention to "people's emotional and aesthetic appreciation of the landscape", she explains, and "trying to navigate the difference between being in a landscape and representing the landscape". What we see might not be a mirror-like truth of this particular corner of Suffolk, but in terms of Constable's personal and emotional connection to that landscape, it couldn't be further from a fake.

Discover Constable & The Hay Wain is at The National Gallery, London until 2 February 2025.

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These five bizarre Surrealist artworks are not what they seem

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241106-these-five-bizarre-surrealist-artworks-are-not-what-they-seem, today

Dismissed or trivialised by some as unserious and silly, Surrealist art was in fact largely born out of the brutal trauma of living under fascism, as these five striking works reveal.

It's a century since André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism advocated a "mode of pure expression… dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason". Writing was the intended vehicle for this unbridled imagination; art was thought too unspontaneous. Yet, just a year later, on 13 November 1925, the first exhibition of Surrealist art was staged in Paris, unleashing a world of peculiar, dream-infused works by artists such as Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Max Ernst.

Given Surrealist art's fantastic forms – from Salvador Dalí's melting pocket watches and lobster telephone to Méret Oppenheim's furry cup and saucer – it's easy to dismiss or trivialise these outlandish works as more silly than serious. However, as galleries mark the Manifesto's centenary with exhibitions on Surrealism and its legacy, the movement's poignant response to the war years that spawned it is being brought to the fore.

The exhibition But live here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, aims "to show that the movement of Surrealism formed at the same time as those fascist movements in Europe, and thus it is highly impactful and even constitutive, in many ways, of the political self-understanding of Surrealism", co-curator Stephanie Weber tells the BBC. The Surrealists – with the exception of Dalí – were anti-fascist, often with close ties to the French Communist Party. "All the artists in our exhibition were personally impacted by fascism," and "fought back", says Weber. "Many of them were persecuted, they had to go into exile, they fought in the Resistance… and many of them either fell in war or were deported and killed."

One of the featured artists is Romanian Jewish painter Victor Brauner. Faced with rising antisemitism, fanned by Romania's Iron Guard, he made a new life in Paris in the 1930s, only to be displaced again in 1940 by the Nazi occupation. His oeuvre was nevertheless prolific, and conveys, says Weber, "this pictorial sense of humour" seen in Totem of Wounded Subjectivity II (1948), the exhibition's flagship image. The oil painting features comical, cartoonish beings with arms for a nose or chin, but whose sharp teeth and spikes suggest menace. They clutch forms that evoke both fruit – a classic surrealist motif – and internal organs, hinting at something visceral and brutal. In the centre is the ubiquitous surrealist "egg", a symbol of the ambition for a new reality, driven by the imagination and distinct from the suffering of the past.

In Paris, where Breton's Manifesto was penned, visitors to the Pompidou Centre's blockbuster exhibition Surrealism can now discover the original manuscript showcased at the heart of a labyrinthine journey through 40 years of mind-boggling art. The travelling exhibition began in Brussels, and will continue to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia, but is currently at its most expansive, occupying a 2200-sq-m space. Highlights include René Magritte's vertiginous Personal Values (1952), an absurd and amusing rendition of a seemingly small room containing vastly oversized everyday objects. This comedy, however, has suffering as its source. Disillusioned by the rational thinking that led to the mass destruction of world war, artists such as Magritte and his Dadaist predecessors embraced the illogical, creating disconcerting works inspired by the subconscious world of dreams.

Something monstrous

Though revolutionary in its vision, Breton's manifesto was less progressive in its inherent sexism. Addressed to men, and written entirely from the perspective of the male experience, it fails to anticipate or acknowledge the crucial role women would play in shaping Surrealism. The Pompidou Centre pays homage to female artists such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and the photographer Dora Maar, frequently underestimated or dismissed as muses. The exhibition's lineup includes Maar's celebrated Hand-Shell (1934), an arresting image comprising two contrasting and incongruous objects: an elegant hand with a lone finger teasingly poking the sand, and the shell it emerges from – a reimagining, perhaps, of Botticelli's Birth of Venus. The work's dramatic shadows and skies and its interwar context invite a range of readings, from the rise of a new world from the ruins of the past, to the imminent visitation of something monstrous.

This prophetic quality to Surrealism, drawn from the unconscious, is addressed early on in the exhibition where Edith Rimmington's Museum, a "false collage" painting with a crystal ball-like centrepiece, commands attention. Tor Scott is researching this enigmatic British artist and is curatorial assistant at the National Galleries of Scotland, where a collection of Rimmington's works and ephemera is held.

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With its multiple roaming eyes, Museum "questions the balance of power between object and viewer", she tells the BBC, and "speaks to the objectification of the female form". The central feminine "artefact" is surrounded by floating sea creatures resembling disembodied female reproductive organs. Much of Rimmington's output harnessed "visceral and violent imagery that would have spoken to those living in Britain during and after the interwar period", says Scott. "Her work often included depictions of dismembered or mutated bodies and decaying flesh, as well as references to the cyclical nature of life and death."  

This undercurrent of horror continues at The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which explores female surrealists' expression of the painful legacies of fascism. "Surrealism originates and is anchored in the trauma of war," says co-curator Professor Patricia Allmer, professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of the 2022 book, The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism after the Second World War, that inspired the exhibition. "No male surrealist artist engaged as directly in representing and critiquing the Second World War as these women artists did," she tells the BBC. Claude Cahun and her girlfriend Marcel Moore were incarcerated for publishing anti-Nazi propaganda, for example, and Lee Miller "really goes to war and photographs there. There's not a single male Surrealist who does that".

The focus of the exhibition, however, is Germanophone artists. "Either they lived under fascism or their parents were, in one way or another, involved in it," says Allmer, stressing that the extreme patriarchal values that fascism embodied did not end with the war. "The whole ideology carried on but was kind of repressed and became this strange undercurrent."

One of the exhibition's most intriguing works is Squirrel by Méret Oppenheim, a German-born artist of Jewish heritage who fled with her family to Switzerland. Sculptures such as this fluffy-handled beer mug may seem humorous but are often "steeped in violence", says Allmer. "On first impression, you have this lovely soft, bushy tail and it invites you to stroke it, and you've got the beer glass which suggests social pleasure and hedonism," but the odd juxtaposition creates a shock effect "like a metaphor of the historical shocks of war experience that lead to trauma". Implicit in the severed tail, says Allmer, is "cutting or amputating", and its fur − a material also seen in the exhibition in the work of Ursula, Renate Bertlmann and Bady Minck – connotes something feral and frightening, the treatment of women as animals, and Hitler's unsettling obsession with wolves. Black humour is deliberate and "a really important strategy", explains Allmer, allowing women "to articulate realities that are otherwise repressed or excluded from public discourse". Breton would devote an anthology to it in 1940, swiftly banned by the Vichy regime. Humour, he writes, is "the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing". If we find Surrealism funny, we're not necessarily missing the point.

Surrealism is at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until 13 January 2025.

But live here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism is at the Lenbachhaus in Munich until 2 March 2025.

The Traumatic Surreal is at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds until 16 March 2025.

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Ida Hammershøi: The identity of art's most famous 'faceless woman'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240710-the-identity-of-arts-most-famous-faceless-woman, today

Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi's paintings had a recurring figure: a mysterious woman with her back turned. Here, through letters and photos, her moving, sadness-tinged story is revealed.

In his 1901 painting Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi depicts a tall window, a lopsided white door and a woman at a table. We can't quite see her face, or what she is doing, but she isn't the painting's protagonist. That role is reserved for the light: the silvery Scandinavian sun that streams through the silent room to cast a pattern on the floor.     

It's bewitching to see how Hammershøi (1864-1916) took these ordinary things and turned them into modern art. His paintings, which creak with an unforgettable, otherworldly atmosphere, prefigure the work of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth in mid-century America, and the Minimalism movement of the 1960s.

Many paintings feature his home in the old mercantile quarter of Copenhagen. Hammershøi was besotted with its blue-grey walls, old-fashioned wainscoting (panelling), and the way its doors opened on to one light-filled room after another. So masterfully did he capture these that you imagine you can smell the polish that has made his table gleam, or hear the woman's soft breathing.

Her name was Ida Ilsted, and she was Hammershøi's wife – they married in 1891, when he was 27 and she 22. She features in about 100 of his paintings, sitting or standing in her lamp black dress, her thoughts elsewhere. More often than not, she has her back turned, dashing any hope of a psychological connection, or clue to her emotional state. Still, the urge to speculate is instinctive and overwhelming. 

"The captivating scenes in the paintings of Ida give an initial impression that we are seeing into their intimate world," says Dr Felix Krämer, a leading expert on the artist, and the curator of Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence at Hauser & Wirth's new Basel space, "yet on further inspection few personal details are shown, and for this reason the paintings remain powerfully unknowable and open to multiple readings". 

The exhibition, which is accompanied by a new book, brings together 18 works from private collections and is the first ever solo showing of the artist's paintings in Switzerland. That might seem surprising given Hammershøi is now the most sought-after Danish artist of all time – his 1907 painting The Music Room, Strandgade 30 sold for $9.1 million last year. But for most of the 20th Century his work languished in obscurity, the modest reputation he had established in his lifetime (admirers included the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev) not revived until the 1990s. The 2008 retrospective at the Royal Academy, London was his first in Britain, and even today there are only three of his works in UK collections.

Much comes down to the fact that the paintings do not slot easily into any of the "isms" and innovations that form the dominant narrative of Modernism. Indeed, though he was born the same year as Toulouse Lautrec and a year after Edvard Munch, Hammershøi always ploughed his own quiet furrow. 

Though he and Ida might have travelled to all the artistic centres of Europe – Munich, Berlin, Paris, London and Rome – they shunned cafe society and the parties that lubricated that glitzy world. In Copenhagen, they lived as near recluses, turning their ancient apartment into a kind of laboratory for Hammershøi to study light’s dialogue with architecture to his heart’s content. He painted its interior 66 times in 10 years.    

The lone woman in art

The motif of the lone woman in an interior probably came from Vermeer – whose paintings were rediscovered in the 19th Century and were very much in vogue – or from the Rückenfigur ("figure viewed from the back") of German Romantic painting – Caspar David Friedrich's Woman at the Window (1822) is a fine example. It shows his wife, Caroline, gazing at boats on the River Elbe, though it's the spring sky outside, and the hope and spiritual yearning it represents, that Friedrich wants us to focus on, and it draws the eye like nothing else.

Other artists of this era painted lone women beside windows but directed the viewer's gaze inward, to create a sort of pastoral of domesticity. In these tranquil rooms, the windows brim with light, but the view outside is faint. These types of paintings were the speciality of Hammershøi's friend, Carl Holsøe.

Paintings of interiors, too, were in the ether. In 1876, the French novelist and critic Edmond Duranty had written a controversial 38-page pamphlet placing domestic scenes at the heart of "la nouvelle peinture". In order for art to have any relevance, he said, it must concern modern life as it unfolded, in private rooms, on the streets. He pointed to the new style of realism in literature (Zola, Balzac) as an example, though his pamphlet was really a response to the Second Impressionist Exhibition, at which Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Caillebotte and Morisot had all shown paintings depicting interiors.

Hammershøi would have seen the fallout from this debate when he visited Paris in 1891, immediately following his marriage. The couple had become engaged the previous year, in Ida's hometown of Stubbekobing. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and the sister of Hammershøi's former classmate at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Peter Ilsted. 

It's thought that Hammershøi asked Ida to marry him at least partly to help her escape the family home. "Ida's mother is once again as mad – to put it bluntly – as she can be," Hammershøi writes to his mother in June 1891. "There take place the most frightful scenes, which I won't even attempt to describe."    

Certainly the speed at which the engagement happened surprised Hammershøi's younger brother, Svend, who wrote: "Dear Vilhelm! Congratulations, I am looking forward to making the acquaintance of your fiancée. It was a great surprise, at any rate for me. I never would have thought you would ever consider becoming engaged." 

Author Jesper Wung Sung, whose novel Kvinde set fra ryggen, (Woman Seen from the Back), imagines a fictional life for Ida beyond Hammershøi's paintings, tells the BBC that he discovered files in Denmark's Royal Library which stated that Ida's mother "was diagnosed with 'hysteria'. The doctors in the mental hospital noted that she was 'clever' but 'bad-tempered', and that she had several times discharged herself against the hospital's recommendation. At the bottom of her file it is noted: "Has seven years ago lost a son due to diphtheria". This is Ida's brother Hans Christian. Which means that her mother's illness probably – at least partly – was caused by unresolved grief."

To commemorate the engagement, Hammershøi painted a beautiful portrait of his blushing fiancé. It pleased him greatly and he showed it to the visionary art dealer Paul Durand Ruel in Paris, who snapped it up for exhibition in his gallery. Apparently Renoir was among the many artists who admired it there.

What we know of their relationship

Paris was the first of many trips the Hammershøis took together. "Vilhelm and Ida form a rare and beautiful unity," says Wung Sung. "Unlike many other artists, Vilhelm never leaves her, never travels alone... Ida is with him everywhere – it is unheard of for a couple to be together 24/7 at that time."

In 1902, the Danish poet Johannes Jorgensen recalled – in an article he wrote for the Danish newspaper Vort Land – seeing the Hammershøis on the via del Corso in Rome. "They looked so nice and homey and a little lost, the two Danes, as they stood there reading the sign on a street corner… her soulful, intelligent, slightly stylised head, her simple blue cotton dress glared so conspicuously against the sheen and rustle of all the silk."

On these trips, Ida always wrote dutifully to Hammershøi's mother, Frederikke. In November 1890, for instance: "You mustn't be afraid, dear mother-in-law, that Vilhelm's paintings will  become infected by the French, for here there is much to learn but not to imitate." 

Frederikke was a formidable woman, who had idolised her son from birth, and kept a scrapbook of his achievements. He was still living with her when he became engaged. "[Ida] had to live with the constant awareness of being in her mother-in-law's loving but vigilant gaze," writes the artist's biographer, Poul Vad. "She was touchingly naive, and good. She ardently wanted to live up to the role of loving wife and her (adored) husband's support."

Of course, we can only speculate as to the nature of the Hammershøis' relationship. "We get brief glimpses of Ida through some of the letters," says Krämer, "but few concrete details about their interactions are known."

Certainly the great number of paintings in which Ida features suggests a solidarity, even devotion. "Hammershøi chose to paint her many times, and they would have spent a significant amount of time together," says Krämer. 

It's tempting to think that they might have discussed a painting's composition. There is no evidence for this, though her letters suggest that she at least understood how he worked. In 1912, she writes: "we have rented two capital rooms [in London], from which Vilhelm also thinks he is able to paint. He does always need a little time to look about and be fond of it before he begins." 

She also bought for Hammershøi a photographic reproduction of a painting he particularly liked – Perugino's Apollo and Marsyas, ascribed to Raphael at the time – for Christmas. His 1895 painting The Music Room shows that he hung it where he might appreciate it daily. 

The difficulties Ida faced 

Still, life as Hammershøi's wife would not have been easy. Even his closest friends described him as shy or eccentric and Frederikke was surprised enough at his taking a day away from his easel for his birthday in 1906 to write about it in a letter to his brother, Svend. 

"I don't paint quickly, I am rather long about it,” Hammershøi himself said, in a 1907 interview. And no wonder: when Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor was cleaned for an exhibition in 2012, the conservator identified upwards of 40 different whites.

Hammershøi's dedication to his work might explain why the couple did not have children; that or concern that the malady that afflicted Ida's mother was inheritable: in May 1895, Frederikke writes to Hammershøi's sister Anna: "Vilhelm has been so kind as to offer me space with them; but I do not think I shall accept as I would be in constant fear of Ida having one of her attacks".   

Hammershøi painted Ida for the last time in 1907. The previous 12 months had been trying: the couple had been mistakenly arrested in Rome when some banknotes they had bought in Copenhagen were found to be counterfeit. The misunderstanding was reported in Danish newspapers, who said that Ida, still delicate from a serious operation the previous year, was suffering from nervous shock. 

The painting, says Wung Sung, "is a portrait of a woman who hasn't lived an easy life, but at the same time it's a very tender portrait. It's Vilhem's way of saying: This is the woman I share my life with."

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Hammershøi kept the painting with him until he died, after which Ida vanishes from the record, until her death in 1949. "It almost breaks my heart to know that [she] did not live to see Vilhelm's work become popular," says Wung Sung. He tells me that her death is listed as "suicide", though further research led him to believe that it was "not a normal suicide", and more likely that an elderly, tired Ida chose to refuse treatment for an illness.   

An enigma to the end, then. Neither the threads of her biography, nor the more than a hundred incarnations of Ida in Hammershøi's paintings lead us to any more than a clutch of guesses and assumptions. Ida's mind and Ida's world are beyond our reach, though the power of the paintings is that we persist in trying.

Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence is at Hauser & Wirth, Basel until 13 July 2024. An accompanying book by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, features essays from the curator Felix Krämer and art historian and author Florian Illies. 

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The rare blue the Maya invented

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180816-the-rare-blue-the-mayans-invented, today

The colour survives in the work of 17th Century Spanish colonial painters, a symbol of the wealth that ultimately doomed the Maya, writes Devon Van Houten Maldonado.

In 17th Century Europe, when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens painted their famous masterworks, ultramarine blue pigment made from the semi-precious lapis lazuli stone was mined far away in Afghanistan and cost more than its weight in gold. Only the most illustrious painters were allowed to use the costly material, while lesser artists were forced to use duller colours that faded under the sun. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the 19th Century that a synthetic alternative was invented, and true ultramarine blue finally became widely available.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, colonial Baroque works created by artists like José Juárez, Baltasar de Echave Ibia and Cristóbal de Villalpando in early 17th Century Mexico – New Spain – were full of this beautiful blue. How could this be? Lapis lazuli was even rarer in the New World. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th Century that archaeologists discovered the Maya had invented a resilient and brilliant blue, centuries before their land was colonised and their resources exploited. 

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The ultramarine blue procured from lapis lazuli in Europe was not only incredibly expensive, but also extremely laborious to make. In Europe, blue was reserved for the most important subject matter. Rubens' Adoration of the Magi – the version that hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid and which he worked on for over 20 years – is an example. The colour was primarily used to paint the robes of the Virgin Mary, and later extended to include other royalty and holy figures. In Mexico, on the other hand, blue was used to paint altogether less holy and everyday subjects.

Archaeologists studying pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican ruins were surprised by the discovery of blue murals in the Maya Riviera, modern day Mexico and Guatemala, from as early as 300 AD, perhaps the most famous being the murals at the temple of Chichén Itzá (created around 450 AD). The colour had a special ceremonial significance for the Maya. They covered sacrificial victims and the altars on which they were offered in a brilliant blue paint, writes Diego de Landa Calderón, a bishop in colonial Mexico during the 16th Century, in his first-hand account.

Archaeologists were puzzled by the resilience of the blue in the murals. The añil plant, part of the indigo family, was widely available in the region but was mostly used for dyes rather than paint. Indigo was quick to fade in the sunlight and natural elements, so experts mused that the Maya couldn’t have used the same widely available dye to paint the murals. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the source of Maya blue’s resilience through the centuries was discovered: a rare clay called attapulgite, which was mixed with the dye from the añil plant. During colonisation native materials like Maya blue and cochineal were exploited along with every other resource of the land and its people in the New World. These colours, which supposedly represented the wealth of the Maya empire, would stand as a symbol of all that would be plundered.

Rhapsody in blue

Master painters from the Americas are discussed in art history – if they’re mentioned at all – as a lesser school of Baroque compared to Caravaggio and Rubens. It's overly simplistic to assume that these Baroque masters were only impersonating their European predecessors. In fact, second and third generation painters born in Mexico City, such as Juárez and Echave Ibia, departed from European aesthetics, but arrived to something uniquely layered: enormous and sophisticated compositions that drew upon the full vibrancy of the New World. At Mexico’s National Art Museum (Munal) in Mexico City, works by Juárez seen chronologically show his development from a European impersonator to a New Spanish Baroque master. His early canvases departed from the dramatic spotlighting and warmth of European Baroque imagery and later moved into cold saturation throughout the picture plane (vibrant blues, yellows, greens and reds), multiple light sources, collaged compositions and grand scale – and in part because the use of local materials, such as Maya blue, expanded his palette.   

While Rubens also used vibrant colours, his compositions, on the whole, were more chaotic and warmer than those of Juárez. His pallet was even more vibrant than Rubens’, perhaps the most vibrant of the European Baroques, but his compositions were more akin to Caravaggio. Caravaggio's canvases were, without fail, full of rich reds and yellows, but nearly devoid of blue – if you think of a Caravaggio masterpiece, blue is usually absent. The closest to a blue-tinted Caravaggio you can find is Juárez’s work, but, despite his prolific reach and realised compositions, Juárez died in poverty.  If Juárez died without a peso to his name, how would he have had the resources to order large quantities of precious lapis lazuli from Europe?

On the other hand, Villalpando, often said to be the most prolific colonial painter in New Spain, imitated the chaotic compositions by Rubens. Villalpando fits more neatly into the European history of Baroque painting and didn't depart from Rubens' ‘fear of space’ – the Baroque notion that every space of the canvas must crammed with imagery and incident – thus he was accepted by the canon of art history as the mascot of Novohispanic Baroque painting. Still, as much as he wanted to imitate Rubens, Villalpando painted with Mesoamerican materials and labour. The consistent result – the same as his peers in Mexico – was that his paintings and murals were cooler and more saturated. His mural adorning the dome of Puebla's cathedral was the first and only of its kind in New Spain. Swirling blue and purple clouds back the images of the virgin, the saints and the angels painted by Villalpando. Even though he sought to make European Baroque in the Americas, his materials gave him away as a criollo, a non-mixed-race descendant of the original Spanish settlers, from Mexico City.

Baltasar de Echave Ibia painted such elaborate blues that he became known as ‘El Echave de los azules’ (the Echave of the blues). His father, Baltasar de Echave Orio, also used blue generously, but Echave Ibia was especially famous for his copious use and mastery of the colour. There is a reason why Ibia, working in Mexico City between the 17th and 18th Centuries, had access to seemingly limitless amounts of blue. All three had had sources of the brilliant colour closer to home.

The lack of written evidence of the use of añil or Maya blue in Novohispanic Baroque paintings is made up for with visual evidence. From these painters and others in the colonised Americas it's apparent that Baroque artists in the New World weren’t using the same blue pigment as their European peers. The lapis lazuli blue being used in Europe was a dark ultramarine blue. While the blue being used in New Spain reflected the vivid azure, originally extracted from añil by the Maya. Maya blue is one of the most durable of all Mesoamerican colours, as seen in the 1,600-year-old murals at Chichén Itzá. Perhaps the same resistance to time has kept Baroque canvases and murals in the Americas, from Mexico to Peru, bright through the centuries.

This cross-pollination of influences, from Maya to European Baroque, happening in Latin America on the canvases of criollo painters suggests globalism began much sooner than academic history has led us to believe.

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The colour that means both life and death

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180709-the-colour-that-means-both-life-and-death, today

Green has symbolised both decay and regeneration, offering a bridge between this world and the next, writes Kelly Grovier.

Beware of green. It can’t be trusted. Leonardo da Vinci knew, and cautioned his contemporaries against the pigment’s toxic instability. Its beauty, Leonardo warned, “vanishes into thin air”. Volatile and evanescent, green is more than just a colour. It is the energy that connects us to the unknown. Remove green from the palette of art history and a bridge between life and death would disappear. Equal parts morbid and vital, green curdles the cadaverous cheeks of Pablo Picasso’s macabre portrait of his young friend, Carlos Casagemas, who shot himself dead in lovelorn torment at the age of 20, while at the same time ignites with joyous chlorophyllic fire the life-affirming and ever-verdant canvases of Claude Monet.

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To dabble in green is not merely to tread a path between being and unbeing, but to make inroads into the mysteries of each. Simultaneously the colour of putrefaction and of verdurous regeneration, green participates with unbiased vividity in decay and rebirth. Perhaps it is green’s teasing ambiguity that compelled Leonardo himself, against his own better counsel, to clad his most famous and enigmatic subject, the Mona Lisa, in a darkening shade of that colour – one that has since bruised itself to a sublime and submarine blackness in the subconscious of cultural history.

Donning the deepest of shadowy green costumes, La Gioconda night-swims in the vitrine of our psyche and has long been recognised as a mystical commuter between the world of the living and that of the dead. “Like the vampire,” the 19th-Century English essayist Walter Pater once wrote of her, “she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave”. Describing Leonardo’s inscrutable sitter as “older than the rocks among which she sits”, Pater proceeds to imagine that Mona Lisa has, throughout history, returned again and again as everything from “a diver in deep seas” to a savvy operator who has woven “strange webs with Eastern merchants”. Ceaselessly resurgent in her murky green gown, which symbolised her status as a merchant’s wife, Mona, according to Pater, was “the mother of Helen of Troy” and the “mother Mary”.

Long before Leonardo reached for green, the colour had been assigned a special esoteric place in cultural imagination. Ancient Egyptians reserved green for the bold beryl complexion of their god of life and death, Osiris – ruler of the underworld, who held dominion over the passage of souls between this world and the next. Typical depictions of Osiris, such as one found on the 13th-Century BC walls of the burial tomb of Horemheb, the last monarch of the 18th dynasty of Egypt, portray a skinny, grassy-skinned god, whose false pharaoh’s beard marks him out as a deity of incontestable pre-eminence.

Perennially young, Osiris was believed to be a serial resuscitator, both of himself and of the natural world. Holding sway over the flow of floods and flourishing of flora alike, leafy-cheeked Osiris, it was believed, would eventually show the souls of Egypt’s kings the path to resurrection.

Flora and fauna

For millennia, concocting green pigments was achieved by a variety of artistic alchemies that harnessed the hues of everything from pulverised malachite to the juice of buckthorn berries, from dessicated foxgloves and fraxinus leaves, to soaking yellow saffron in the purple dye of woad, also known as the ‘The Asp of Jerusalem’. Verdigris, among the more common iterations of the colour, and the one of which Leonardo was most wary, is forged in a curious ritual that involves the slow sousing in wine of a brass or copper blade.

An acetic crust of green that scabs to the metallic surface is then scraped clean and ground into pigment. It was a green ghost of similar chemical contrivance that confirmed to scientists digging recently for the remains of the 16th-Century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe that they had indeed found their target. Known to have worn a prosthetic nose to replace the one he’d lost in a sword fight in 1566, Brahe’s aesthetic skull bore traces of copper and zinc when, like a disciple of Osiris, it eventually came up for air in 2012.

Fertile with life, even in death, the invocation of green in countless masterpieces from antiquity to the present day impregnates our eye with expectancy. Everything about the physique, posture and gestures of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini’s green-enrobed wife, who seems to rest her tired hand tenderly on her tummy’s bump in Jan van Eyck’s famous painting, The Arnolfini Portrait (painted in 1434), leads our modern mind to suspect that she is pregnant, however convinced art historians may be that she isn’t. The great gush of cascading green that capsizes our eye, scholars contend, is more likely a symbol of hope for the eventual blessing of children. Green springs eternal.

An alternative reading of the riddling portrait only amplifies the eeriness of green’s potential to wed the living and the dead. According to one theory, the depiction of the woman in Van Eyck’s work is herself a composite double-portrait of two successive wives of Giovanni di Nicolao – his first having died in childbirth. Supporters of this view point to tropes of death that haunt the painting, such as the extinguished wick on the candle above her. Certainly the complex convex mirror, bolted to the back of the painting, which warps the couple’s reflection as if into a different continuum of reality, compounds the sense of strangely splitting selves that reverberate from the painting. If ever there was a colour capable of cloaking such a curious compression of life and death, it’s green.

So green goes, sowing into the story of art the mysteries of our own fleeting appearance in the world. The murky green water that laps against the ochre edge of the River Stour in John Constable’s famous Romantic landscape The Hay Wain, delineates a boundary between the world that the artist can see in the here-and-now and one that haunts his imagination from childhood. Look closer at the weave of summer greenness at which the little dog in the foreground appears to pant, and you can barely discern the ghost of a horseman and barrel that the artist had once intended to include in the painting – a spectre that, over time, is re-sculpting itself from the verdurous summer air that Constable has mystically conjured.

Though rightly celebrated for the accuracy of his carefully observed clouds, Constable is a master too of earthy hues and terrestrial textures. The tapestry of greens he weaves in The Hay Wain is a tour de force of that colour’s ability to convey the vibrancy of nostalgia for a place that ceaselessly shifts in one’s memory between wilting loss and luminous revelation.

Hiding in plain sight

In more recent eras of artistic expression, green has continued to be an enigmatic hue that hides as much as it reveals. Paul Gauguin’s seminal symbolist painting Green Christ (1889) is a teasing tangle of the colour’s contradictory connotations. Over a stone statue of the deceased Christ in the middle distance of the painting, a lucent layer of moss has stitched itself like a second skin. The face of a Breton woman, who stands in the shadow of that sculpture, is tinged a sepulchral green, as if she were slowly turning into the life-in-death and death-in-life statue – as if a kind of chromatic continuum exists between the physical world she inhabits and a mystical one that lies beyond.

Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte’s famous anti-self-portrait, The Son of Man (1964), defies the logic of likenesses by refusing to let the viewer see the key features of the artist’s face by interposing between them and us the greenest of green apples the mind is capable of picturing. “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” Magritte observed to an interviewer. “There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of quite an intense feeling, a sort of conflict one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

No contemporary artist has understood more profoundly the rhythms of the visible that is not there and the visible that is, than the Irish-American abstract painter Sean Scully. The bold vertical columns of Scully’s The Bather (1983), inspired by Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River, painted 70 years earlier, are stripped-down stand-ins for the already over-stylised bodies Scully recalls from Matisse’s work. Intensified by the boxy protrusions that complicate the carpentry of Scully’s work, which physically intrudes into the gallery-goer’s space, the ficus greens of Scully’s torso-wide trunks have succeeded in achieving an effect to which centuries of artists have only aspired: converting green from perishable colour into purest feeling.

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The shady past of the colour pink

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180419-the-shady-past-of-the-colour-pink, today

A hue now associated with innocence once had a murkier meaning: Kelly Grovier looks at the ways in which pink has represented violence and seduction.

Pink is a double-edged sword. While red is raucous and racy, and white is prim and pure, pink cuts both ways. Long before the word “pink” attached itself to the pretty pastel shade of delicate carnations, as we define the term today, the London underworld enlisted it for something rather less frilly or fragrant – to denote the act of stabbing someone with a sharp blade. “He pink’d his Dubblet”, so reads an entry for the word in a 17th-Century dictionary of street slang used by “Beggars, Shoplifters, Highwaymen, Foot-Pads and all other Clans of Cheats and Villains”, describing a lethal lunge through a man’s padded jacket, “He run him through”.

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At what point the unlikely linguistic slide was made from mortal piercing to mellow pigment, no one can say for sure. But the enticing hue itself, by whatever name it was known before the assignment of “pink” to the colour chart in the 18th Century, has kept culture blushing since antiquity. Now seductive, now innocent, pink is coquettish and coy, sultry and sly.

Remove pink from the palette of art history and a teasing dimension to the story of image-making would be lost. Edgar Degas’s Pink Dancers would fall flat-footed and Pablo Picasso’s pivotal pink period wouldn’t rise to the occasion.

A flesh in the pan

A key moment in pink’s emergence as an essential element in the development of painting is the creation by the Early Renaissance Italian painter Fra Angelico in the middle of the 15th Century of his famous fresco in the Convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy, The Annunciation, which depicts the moment in the New Testament that the Virgin Mary is informed by the Archangel Gabriel that she will become the mother of Christ. Situated at the top of a staircase solemnly ascended daily by pious monks, Fra Angelico’s ground-breaking painting is one into which an observer’s spirit is summoned to levitate.

Crucial to sparking that mystical lift-off in the fresco is the portrayal of the ethereal Archangel – who has himself mystically crossed planes of being to swoop into Mary’s material sphere. Never mind the polychromatic wings, what’s most surprising about Gabriel’s depiction is Fra Angelico’s decision to clad him in plush pleats of sumptuous pink.

We know from a contemporary artist’s handbook on how to concoct pigments (Cennino Ceninni’s Il libro dell'arte, published a few decades before Fra Angelico painted his fresco) that pink had been traditionally reserved primarily for the rendering of flesh. “Made from the loveliest and lightest sinopia that is found and is mixed and mulled with St. John’s white”, Cennini explains, “this pigment does you great credit if you use it for painting faces, hands and nudes on walls”.

By draping Gabriel in the lushest of pinks, Fra Angelico fleshes the Archangel out as a being of body and blood, breaking down the distinction between holy spirit and ephemeral flesh. Pink is the pivot that humanises heaven. No one would ever see the colour the same way again. In the ensuing centuries, artists would invoke pink as shorthand for the blurring of boundaries.

Bloom of Christ

As the focus of Renaissance master Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, a sprig of blushing carnations handed to the Virgin Mary by the infant Christ, may seem unremarkable enough at first glance. In fact it amounts to a kind of miraculous wrinkle in the fabric of time. According to religious tradition, dianthus (the Greek name for the plant, meaning “flower of God”), did not appear in the world until Mary wept at her son’s crucifixion.

The flower’s anachronistic appearance in Raphael’s scene, therefore, tinged with the future blood of the baby who holds it, mysteriously establishes a pink kink in the linear unfolding of the universe.

Over time, pink would eventually blossom beyond the petals of its complex theologies to inflect a wider array of secular personality, all the while retaining its elusive allure and capacity to tease. By the 18th Century, pink was offering itself as the colour of choice for portraying high-profile mistresses, daring observers to deny its very legitimacy as a respectable hue.

Famous portraits by the French Rococo portraitist Maurice Quentin de la Tour of Madame de Pompadour and by the English artist George Romney of his muse Emma, Lady Hamilton (later mistress of Lord Nelson), posing as a mythological maenad, reveal how decidedly deconsecrated the colour had become.

La Tour’s full-length pastel-pencil portrait of the official chief mistress to Louis XV of France, begun around 1748, is a rumbunctious jungle gym of superfluous pinks that spider across every inch and threaten to suffocate its subject. Here, pink is an energy that vibrates from the sitter to the secular subjects with which Pompadour has surrounded herself – music, astronomy, and literature.

Porcelain pink

A patron of the porcelain trade, Pompadour had famously inspired the minting by the Sevres porcelain factory of a new hue of pink, delicately bruised by dabs of blue and black. To Pompadour, pink was no longer a mere accessory but a partner in crime – an aspirational second skin into which she grew intellectually and emotionally. She became her colour.

No painting embodies pink’s gradual pendulum movement from the spiritual to the secular more vividly than the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s exuberant The Swing, painted around 1767, between La Tour’s and Romney’s works. Here, a fabulous flounce of flowing rose is frozen in mid swivel as the swinging girl, pillowed in pinkness, flicks loose a silk shoe, attracting the titillated attention of any number of camouflaged male gazes hiding in the bushes around her. We’re a long way from the pink whisper of angels now.

In more recent times, pink continues to be seized upon by artists keen to confound our expectations of what notes or message the floral pigment can confidently carry. Having established a formidable reputation in the middle of the 20th Century as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, eschewing figurative subjects entirely in the 1950s, Canadian-born American artist Philip Guston reached for pink in a dramatic turn back to representational art in the late 1960s.

By then, the colour itself had undergone something of a commercial transformation in American retail culture, having begun the century as a shade more often associated with boys and masculinity than fairy princesses and little girls’ dolls. But by the time Guston began introducing a menacing cast of Ku Klux Klan-inspired cartoon goons, whose implausibly pale pink stubby hoods continue to menace popular imagination to this day, the colour had been re-commodified as delicate and feminine. Grabbing pink by the scruff for his unsettling scenes of a seedy Americana, Guston slaps Barbie across the chops.

At the same moment that Guston’s provocative pink was poking the art world in the eye, scientific studies were underway by Alexander Schauss, Director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research, to determine whether manipulations of the colour could help control the behaviour of subjects surrounded by it. The result of Schauss’s investigation was the concoction of the psychologically subtle shade now known as “Baker-Miller Pink”, after the Naval correctional institute in Seattle, Washington where the pigment was successfully tested on the walls of inmates’ cells and credited with a significant calming of aggressive urges.

Yet despite its ability to inspire docility, pink is still picking fights, challenging our perceptions to an aesthetic duel. Upon learning that the British artist Anish Kapoor had signed a contract giving him exclusive rights to a recently engineered colour known as Vantablack (the darkest shade ever devised), and the legal right to prohibit other artists from doing so, Kapoor’s younger contemporary Stuart Semple saw red.

Emboldened by Kapoor’s black embargo, Semple began concocting a supremely-fluorescent pink paint he contends is the “pinkest pink” ever contemplated (“no one has ever seen a pinker pink”, he insists). As a poke in the eye of Kapoor, Semple has made his colour available at a small price to anyone in the world so long as they confirm that they are not Anish Kapoor nor friendly enough with Kapoor to share it with him. En garde, Kapoor. You’ve been pink’d.

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The toxic colour that comes from volcanoes

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180227-the-toxic-colour-that-comes-from-volcanoes, today

For centuries, the orange pigment was sourced from a toxic mineral. Kelly Grovier looks at a hue that alchemists believed was crucial to creating the Philosopher’s Stone – and which allows art to swivel between different states of being.

Expunge orange from the history of art and the whole thing collapses. The sky above Edvard Munch’s The Scream falls down and the fire that ignites Frederic Leighton’s famous Flaming June flames out. Take away orange, and everything from the warm eternal glow of Egyptian tomb painting to the troubled stubble of Vincent van Gogh’s smouldering self-portraits vanishes. A savvy arbiter between resolute red and unyielding yellow, orange is a pigment that pivots. It’s a hinge of a hue that enables a work of art to swivel between contrary states of being – this world and another, life and death.

Outside the frame of art history, orange has proved an unusually elastic symbol, blossoming into a spectrum of shapes and cultural meanings. Although the influential European royal House of Orange traces its name back further than the actual coining of the colour in the 1540s, its prominent son, William III (better known as William of Orange), quickly embraced the linguistic coincidence in the 1570s. His orange-white-and-blue rebel flag would become the forerunner of the modern tricolour of The Netherlands. From there orange took on the complexion of everything from Swiss fire engines to the suits worn by astronauts in the International Space Station. But it’s in the realms of art and aesthetics that the colour has fructified more soulfully.

From antiquity to the end of the 19th Century, a volcanic mineral found in sulphurous fumaroles (great gashes in the Earth’s crust) was a significant source for the harvesting of orange pigment. The highly toxic orpiment, rich in lethal arsenic, ripens from mellow yellow into outrageous orange when subjected to the heat of a fire.

Convinced that the luminous shimmer of orpiment (its name is a contraction of Latin aurum, meaning ‘gold’, and pigmentum meaning ‘colour’) must be a key ingredient in concocting the Philosopher’s Stone, alchemists for centuries risked exposure to the noxious substance. So did artists. To dabble in the occult of orange was to flirt with mortality and immortality in equal measure.

A spark to a flame

Intentionally or not, that ambiguous aura is irrepressible wherever orange is conjured in art. Take for example the French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s portrait of a generic writer captured at a moment of intense vision: Inspiration, painted around 1769. The poet’s plush orange jacket – its vibrant rumples flickering like flares – threatens to engulf the allegorical subject of a poet whose imagination has just been ignited. The furrowed velour has become an outward reflection of the writer’s mind. This evaporative moment of reverie that illuminates the subject, as if from inside his soul, will either ensure his eternal fame as a celebrated bard or will set on fire his very being. Fashion him in any other colour than orange and the work’s flustering power would be utterly lost.

Nor is it possible to imagine Self-portrait with Halo and Snake, painted by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin more than a century after Fragonard’s canvas, soaked in any other colours than the two competing complexions of orange that dominate and divide its radiant surface into competing territories of piousness and malevolence. Created by Gauguin while living in the North-western French fishing village of Le Pouldu, the work portrays, in its upper half, a saintly indifference to worldly temptations, as symbolised by a dangling sprig of forbidden fruit. To make certain we don’t miss the unmissable point, the artist has crowned himself in this hemisphere of the work with an angelic halo. The lower half of the wood panel, however, reveals an uncontainable susceptibility to evil as the seductive snake from the Garden of Eden has the artist wrapped around his proverbial finger. Tying the work together tonally is a dramatic shift at its equator in shades of orange – not unlike orpiment itself, before and after its purifying baptism by fire.

And so it goes, work by work, century after century: wherever the colour orange dictates the temperature of a work of art, we know we’ve arrived at a precarious hinterland between a universe we can see and a mysterious unknown we tentatively feel. How else can you characterise the realm in which the liquified face of Munch’s hero howls under a strange and estranging burnt-cinnamon sky in The Scream? How else can you describe the eternal space in which Henri Matisse’s iconic The Dance whirls apocalyptically on the edge of oblivion?

Commissioned in 1909 by a wealthy Russian businessman to adorn the staircase of his mansion, at first glance The Dance might appear the apotheosis of rhythmic delight and synchronised levity. But the eerie apricot tinge of the five ecstatic nudes, who seem to have subsumed into their very being the armageddon orange of Munch’s work, is a tip-off that something more complex and perilous is at play. The two dancers who stretch the foreground of the work have lost their grip on each other’s hands, as the one closest to us begins slipping to the ground. Her left foot is already sliding out of view. Far from depicting untroubled joy, Matisse’s carefully choreographed masterpiece teeters on cosmic disaster. The very rotation of the world is left dangerously in doubt.

Amber alert

Munch and Matisse set the tone, as it were, for the portentous temperament of orange in modern and contemporary art. Throughout the 20th Century, the ominous refulgence of orange will find itself refracted variously in the works of everyone from Francis Bacon, where it sets the sinister scene for the disturbing Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), as well as Rene Magritte’s Art of Living (1967), where the colour inflates itself to popping point as a surreal cranium. The syncopated pigments and shudders of Rhythm, joy of life, painted in 1931, is characteristic of how crucial orange is to the work and imagination of the Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delauney, who once protested: “You know I don’t like orange”. Like it or not, orange is frequently the heat that holds together – while threatening to break apart – the visual music of her sinuous mosaics.

As crucial as orange has been to the story of art through the end of the last century, it has already dyed itself indelibly into the unfolding fabric of contemporary artistic consciousness. Among the most celebrated major works of the new millennium, The Gates, by Bulgarian artist Christo Yavacheff and French artist Jeanne-Claude (known together as Christo and Jeanne-Claude), colonised New York City’s Central Park in February 2005 with over 7,500 passageways – each flowing with orange nylon fabric. The lyrical succession of thresholds, which fostered a poetic sense of the endless comings and goings of life – birth and rebirth, mortality and eternity – could, on reflection, have only been draped in stirring saffron. To some, the colour echoes the robes of Buddhist monks. But to my mind, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who passed away four years later) were rekindling a sacred flame, inviting those who would come to bask their weary souls in the transformative power of that most mystical of ancient tints: orange.

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The mysterious painting that changed how we see colour

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180214-the-mysterious-painting-that-changed-how-we-see-colour, today

Marcel Duchamp’s last painting has influenced artists for a century. Kelly Grovier looks at how it inspired the modern colour chart – and at its 17th-Century predecessor.

This year marks the centenary of one of the more curious milestones in modern cultural history – a landmark in image-making with intriguing echoes of a long-forgotten tome from the 17th Century. In 1918, the French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp picked up his brush after a four-year hiatus from painting and created a mysterious work that changed forever the way artists use and understand colour. After completing his painting, Duchamp put his brush back down again and, for the next 50 years (until his death in 1968), never painted another picture.

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The work in question is awkwardly proportioned – over 3m (9.4ft) long, yet barely two-thirds of a metre tall – and was commissioned to hang above a bookcase in the library of the US collector and patron of the arts Katherine Dreier. At first glance, the canvas (which Duchamp eccentrically entitled T um’, a terse abbreviation of the tetchy French phrase tu m’ennuies, or ‘you bore me’) appears to do everything it can to be something other than a painting. Its surface is dominated by shadowy allusions to a series of controversial sculptures that Duchamp had recently been making – found objects such as a hat rack, a corkscrew, and a bicycle wheel – that he christened ‘readymades’.

In stark contrast to these large ghostly echoes of another artistic medium, a scatter of worldly debris is strewn across the painting: safety pins, a bolt, and a brush for cleaning bottles. According to Yale University, “Duchamp summarises different ways in which a work of art can suggest reality: as shadow, imitation, or actual object.” Stretching over this odd array of forms is a carefully-rendered cascade of colourful lozenge-shaped tiles that swoop vibrantly into the centre of the painting from the top left, like the tail of a mechanical polychromatic comet.

Anyone who has ever shopped in a DIY store for domestic paint will recognise immediately this splay of colour tiles. But in 1918, pigment samples from commercial colour charts were still relatively cutting-edge in their retail trendiness, having only hit shop floors towards the end of the previous century. As yet unassigned to an actual object, these ‘readymade’ swatches of colour are at once both physical and theoretical; they haver between the real world of things waiting to be painted and a realm of pure mind in which those things can still be any colour.

A pigment of our imagination

In a sense, this endless deck of dyes bursting into the middle of Duchamp’s painting is a Tarot of tincture, prescient of how things could eventually appear in an ideal world, not as they actually are. Though Duchamp’s tiles are merely a prophecy of hue, they seem somehow more real and urgent in his painting than the shadowy shapes of the hat stand, bicycle wheel, and corkscrew whose space they intersect cosmically, as if from another universe.

The years and decades that followed Duchamp’s final painting witnessed a succession of works by modern and contemporary artists that wrestle with and absorb the implications of his mischievous slicing of the mere idea of colour from the fact of physical form. Where proponents of colour theories of the 19th Century, such as those by the German Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, are concerned with how colours are perceived by the human retina, the disciples of Duchamp became obsessed instead with colour as a commercialised concept – a pigment of their imagination.

At the same moment that descendants of post-Impressionism and the early pioneers of Expressionism were formulating quasi-scientific manifestos for how colour functions in the eyes of those who encounter their work, Duchamp was laying his new-fangled cards on the table: colour is an aspirational commodity – a property to be found, not an emotion to be felt.

Titians of industry

Suddenly, two philosophies of colour found themselves competing for artistic regard – one that understood it as a traditional tool of the craftsman to be soulfully mastered, the other that saw it as an artificial aspect of soullessly manufactured goods. That clash of sensibilities was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the near-simultaneous appearance in 1963 of two very different kinds of publication. It was the year that the German-born American artist Josef Albers released his still-influential visual treatise, Interaction of Colour, which provides complex ruminations on the harmony of hues – a system that continues to be taught to this day. It is also the year that Pantone published its encyclopaedic compendium of subtle shades – a volume that appeared to prove the dominion of industry over the empire of conceivable colours.

The sway over artistic imagination in the 20th Century of the Pantone colour-matching system, and its precursors in the pigment charts distributed by companies such as DuPont, is impossible to overstate. Their influence can be traced in the works of generations of artists from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst, Ellsworth Kelly to Gerhard Richter. But if Duchamp’s echelon of mechanical colour stretches prophetically forward in time to the obsessions of everyone from the Pop Artists to the YBAs, it also stretches back in history to the preoccupations of one of the most extraordinary, and extraordinarily neglected, books ever created.

Long forgotten until its rediscovery in recent years by Medieval and Renaissance scholars, Klaer lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst is an 800-page handwritten and hand-illustrated volume from 1692 that seeks not only to illustrate every conceivable shade of watercolour possible, but to explain how to create them. An obsessive-compulsive recipe book for concocting the subtlest variations of tint, the book is the brainchild, according to the title page, of ‘A. Boogert’ – a Dutch hustler of hues about whom nothing else is known.

Boogert’s book, which the inscrutable author says was intended to assist artists, came to the attention by accident of a Dutch Medievalist and blogger who was conducting research on the online databases of the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2014. Erik Kwakkel’s decision to feature the vibrant volume on his popular scholarly blog, and to provide links to a high-resolution scan of the entire book, helped propel the lexicon of luminosity into wider recognition than the single-surviving copy could ever have enjoyed in the author’s own lifetime.

To click through the digitised pages of the book and watch the hundreds of abutting tiles flick into a shuffled blur of calibrated colour is to find oneself enacting the geometric drama of Duchamp’s pivotal final painting. Speaking to each other across centuries, Boogert’s long-lost opus maximum and Duchamp’s underappreciated prophetic masterpiece reveal a perennial fascination with the mysterious disguises of life’s most elusive dimension: colour.

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The insect that painted Europe red

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180202-the-insect-that-painted-europe-red, today

Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status.

Although scarlet is the colour of sin in the Old Testament, the ancient world’s elite was thirsty for red, a symbol of wealth and status. They spent fantastic sums searching for ever more vibrant hues, until Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors discovered an intoxicatingly saturated pigment in the great markets of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. Made from the crushed-up cochineal insect, the mysterious dye launched Spain toward its eventual role as an economic superpower and became one of the New World’s primary exports, as a red craze descended on Europe. An exhibition at Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes museum reveals the far-reaching impact of the pigment through art history, from the renaissance to modernism.

In medieval and classical Europe, artisans and traders tripped over each other in search of durable saturated colors and – in turn – wealth, amid swathes of weak and watery fabrics. Dyers guilds guarded their secrets closely and performed seemingly magical feats of alchemy to fix colours to wool, silk and cotton. They used roots and resins to create satisfactory yellows, greens and blues. The murex snail was crushed into a dye to create imperial purple cloth worth more than its weight in gold. But truly vibrant red remained elusive.

For many years, the most common red in Europe came from the Ottoman Empire, where the ‘Turkey red’ process used the root of the rubia plant. European dyers tried desperately to reproduce the results from the East, but succeeded only partially, as the Ottoman process took months and involved a pestilent mix of cow dung, rancid olive oil and bullocks’ blood, according to Amy Butler Greenfield in her book, A Perfect Red.

Dyers also used Brazilwood, lac and lichens, but the resulting colours were usually underwhelming, and the processes often resulted in brownish or orange reds that faded quickly. For royalty and elite, St John’s Blood and Armenian red (dating back as far as the 8th Century BCE, according to Butler Greenfield), created the most vibrant saturated reds available in Europe until the 16th Century. But, made from different varieties of Porphyrophora root parasites, their production was laborious and availability was scarce, even at the highest prices.

Mesoamerican peoples in southern Mexico had started using the cochineal bug as early as 2000 BCE, long before the arrival of the conquistadors, according to Mexican textile expert Quetzalina Sanchez. Indigenous people in Puebla, Tlaxcala and Oaxaca had systems for breeding and engineering the cochineal bugs for ideal traits and the pigment was used to create paints for codices and murals, to dye cloth and feathers, and even as medicine.

Cochineal in the New World

When the conquistadors arrived in Mexico City, the headquarters of the Aztec empire, the red colour was everywhere. Outlying villages paid dues to their Aztec rulers in kilos of cochineal and rolls of blood-red cloth. “Scarlet is the colour of blood and the grana from cochineal achieved that [...] the colour always had a meaning, sometimes magic other times religious,” Sanchez told the BBC.

Cortés immediately recognized the riches of Mexico, which he related in several letters to King Charles V. “I shall speak of some of the things I have seen, which although badly described, I know very well will cause such wonder that they will hardly be believed, because even we who see them here with our own eyes are unable to comprehend their reality,” wrote Cortés to the king. About the great marketplace of Tenochtitlan, which was “twice as large as that of Salamanca," he wrote, “They also sell skeins of different kinds of spun cotton in all colours, so that it seems quite like one of the silk markets of Granada, although it is on a greater scale; also as many different colours for painters as can be found in Spain and of as excellent hues.”

First-hand accounts indicate that Cortés wasn’t overly smitten with cochineal, more concerned instead with plundering gold and silver. Back in Spain, the king was pressed to make ends meet and hold together his enormous dominion in relative peace, so, although he was at first unconvinced by the promise of America, he became fascinated by the exotic tales and saw in cochineal an opportunity to prop up the crown’s coffers. By 1523, cochineal pigment made its way back to Spain and caught the attention of the king who wrote to Cortés about exporting the dyestuff back to Europe, writes Butler.

“Through absurd laws and decrees [the Spanish] monopolised the grana trade,” says Sanchez. “They obligated the indians to produce as much as possible.” The native Mesoamericans who specialised in the production of the pigment and weren’t killed by disease or slaughtered during the conquest were paid pennies on the dollar – while the Spaniards “profited enormously as intermediaries.”

Red in art history

Dye from the cochineal bug was ten times as potent as St John’s Blood and produced 30 times more dye per ounce than Armenian red, according to Butler. So when European dyers began to experiment with the pigment, they were delighted by its potential. Most importantly, it was the brightest and most saturated red they had ever seen. By the middle of the 16th Century it was being used across Europe, and by the 1570s it had become one of the most profitable trades in Europe – growing from a meagre “50,000 pounds of cochineal in 1557 to over 150,000 pounds in 1574,” writes Butler.

In the Mexican Red exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the introduction of cochineal red to the European palette is illustrated in baroque paintings from the beginning of the 17th Century, after the pigment was already a booming industry across Europe and the world. Works by baroque painters like Cristóbal de Villalpando and Luis Juárez, father of José Juárez, who worked their entire lives in Mexico (New Spain), hang alongside the Spanish-born Sebastián López de Arteaga and the likes of Peter Paul Rubens.

López de Arteaga’s undated work The Incredulity of Saint Thomas pales in comparison to Caravaggio’s version of the same work, where St Thomas’s consternation and amazement is palpable in the skin of his furrowed forehead. But the red smock worn by Christ in López de Arteaga’s painting, denoting his holiness, absolutely pops off the canvas. Both artists employed cochineal, the introduction of which helped to establish the dramatic contrast that characterised the baroque style.

A few steps away, a portrait of Isabella Brandt (1610) by Rubens shows the versatility of paint made from cochineal. The wall behind the woman is depicted in a deep, glowing red, from which she emerges within a slight aura of light. The bible in her hand was also rendered in exquisite detail from cochineal red in Rubens’ unmistakable mastery of his brush, which makes his subjects feel as alive as if they were in front of you.

Moving forward toward modernism – it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th Century that cochineal was replaced by synthetic alternatives as the pre-eminent red dyestuff in the world – impressionist painters continued to make use of the heavenly red hues imported from Mexico. At the Palacio de Bellas Artes, works by Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh have all been analysed and tested positive for cochineal. Like Rubens, Renoir’s subjects seem to be alive on the canvas, but as an impressionist his portraits dissolved into energetic abstractions. Gauguin also used colour, especially red, to create playful accents, but neither compared to the saturation achieved by Van Gogh. His piece, The Bedroom (1888), on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, puts a full stop on the exhibition with a single burning-hot spot of bright red.

After synthetic pigments became popular, outside of Mexico, the red dye was mass-produced as industrial food colouring – its main use today. Yet while the newly independent Mexico no longer controlled the valuable monopoly on cochineal, it also got something back – the sacred red that had been plundered and proliferated by the Spanish. “In Europe, as has happened in many cases, the history of the original people of Mexico has mattered very little,” Sanchez told the BBC, but in Mexico “the colour continues to be associated with ancestral magic [and] protects those who wear attire dyed with cochineal.”

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'An unmistakable stab at the USSR': Could Amadeus be the most misunderstood Oscar winner ever?

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240926-could-amadeus-be-the-most-misunderstood-oscar-winner-ever, today

Released 40 years ago this month, Miloš Forman's best picture-winning Amadeus is often accused of historical inaccuracies – but the film's critics could be missing the point.

When it premiered 40 years ago, Amadeus drew an initial wave of praise. A historical drama revolving around the rivalry between two composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, it went on to win eight Oscars, including for best picture. Miloš Forman took home the best director prize, Peter Shaffer won for best adapted screenplay and both of the lead actors were nominated: F Murray Abraham, who played Salieri, beat Tom Hulce, who played Mozart.

But in the years that followed, a backlash grew over what some people saw as Amadeus's litany of historical errors. An article in The Guardian declared that "the fart jokes can't conceal how laughably wrong this is", and the BBC commented that "the film plays shamelessly fast and loose with historical fact". Salieri, critics noted, was no pious bachelor (as attested by his wife, eight children and mistress), and it's after all an odd kind of hateful rivalry when the real Mozart entrusted the musical education of his own son to Salieri. As for Mozart's lewd humor, that cheeky insouciance was actually commonplace in middle-class Viennese society. Most egregiously of all, world-famous Mozart was not dumped in an unmarked pauper's grave. If this is a homage to history, the complaint goes, it's akin to Emperor Joseph II fumbling ineptly on the pianoforte and bungling every other note.

But this kind of cavilling may be missing the point. Forman's aim for Amadeus can be seen as radically different from a typical biopic, and that was to use a fictionalised version of an epic clash between musical composers to allegorise the defining global rivalry of the mid-to-late 20th Century: the Cold War. Put simply, the film may have played fast and loose with 1784 because its real preoccupation was 1984.

The film opens in Vienna in 1823. Grizzled court composer Salieri howls through a bolted chamber door that he has murdered Mozart, then slashes his own throat. Days later, as he convalesces in an asylum, a priest arrives to hear his confession. It doesn't disappoint. Salieri recounts that as boy he made a vow of chastity to God as an expression of gratitude for, as he sees it, ushering in the providential death of his father to clear the path for his musical development.

Jump ahead some years, and Salieri is now an eminent composer in the court of Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), where he eagerly awaits an introduction to musical prodigy Mozart. That eagerness curdles when he sees the man in the flesh – he turns out to be a lascivious vulgarian with an ear-splitting cackle. Convinced that God means to mock his own mediocrity, Salieri hurls a crucifix in the fire and vows retaliation. When Mozart's father dies, Salieri seizes on the misfortune with a dastardly stratagem: dupe Mozart into believing that his father has risen from the grave to commission him to write a requiem, then murder him and pass off the masterpiece as his own. Mozart, feverish and besotted with drink, dies, leaving Salieri addled with bitterness and destined for obscurity.

The premise wasn't original to Forman. Drawing inspiration from Alexander Pushkin's taut 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, Peter Shaffer wrote a highly stylised play called Amadeus, which premiered in London in 1979. Forman, sitting in on a preview, was entranced by the dramatic rivalry and convinced Shaffer to collaborate with him, not merely to adapt the play for the screen but to "demolish the original, then totally reimagine it as a film". Across four irascible months cloistered in a Connecticut farmhouse with Shaffer, Forman fundamentally rebuilt the narrative with a fresh palette of political resonances.

The casting process for the coveted roles of Mozart and Salieri rivaled Gone with the Wind in scope and behind-the-scenes intrigue, all of which played out over a year and involved meetings with literally thousands of actors. Kenneth Branagh was nearly victorious in landing Mozart, then got dropped from consideration when Forman pivoted to a US cast. Mark Hamill endured grueling hours of auditions, only to be told by Forman: "No one is believing that the Luke Skywalker is the Mozart." Al Pacino lobbied hard for the part of Salieri, in competition with Mick Jagger, Burt Reynolds, Donald Sutherland and Sam Waterson. In the end, Forman eschewed splashy celebrities for Hulce and Abraham, only to have casting drama explode again when Meg Tilly, slated to play Mozart's wife, Constanze, broke her ankle playing football: she was replaced by Elizabeth Berridge a week before shooting was to commence. With the plot rebuilt and the cast in place, more than one rivalry was poised to come into focus.

The triumph of genius

The Czech-born Forman had been a galvanising force behind the Czechoslovakian New Wave film movement in the 1960s, reaching a climax with his 1967 film The Firemen's Ball, which satirised the absurd inefficiencies of Eastern European communism. The film was initially warmly received within the reformist milieu of the Prague Spring, but when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the following year and organised Czechoslovakia into the Eastern bloc, Forman, tarred as a "traitor" to the state, was forced to flee to the West and found refuge in the US.

Nearly all of Forman's film work thereafter would show glimmers of opposition to Soviet-style censorship, confinement, and concentrated power. His first success in the US, for example, 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, depicted a mental health ward meting out cruelty and coercion to patients under the guise of benevolent care. Audiences barely needed to squint to see the asylum as gulag and Nurse Ratched as the embodiment of the drunk-on-power Soviet bureaucrat. Likewise, Forman's 1996 film, The People vs Larry Flynt, depicted the founder of Hustler magazine squaring off against censorship at the cost of being jailed, locked up at a psychiatric facility and paralysed by an assassin's bullet.

The Soviet allegory can certainly be applied to Amadeus. Perhaps Forman was less concerned with hewing to biographical facts as he was with presenting Mozart as a beleaguered type of ecstatic genius who, hostage to patronage, is stifled and finally crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state. Joseph II, absolute ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, is advised at court by a clutch of prudish sycophants who undermine Mozart's achievements and smear his reputation. Whatever its loose correspondence to the late-18th and early-19th Centuries, this critique can be read as a stab at the USSR – a debilitatingly centralised bureaucracy hostile to insurgent ideas and innovation. But Forman showed that Mozart would get the last laugh. By the events of 1823, Salieri's insipid, state-sponsored melodies have all been forgotten, while a few bars of Mozart draw immediate joy to the priest's face. In the free market of popular tastes, Salieri's mandated drivel has been suffocated by the triumph of genius.

In Forman's hands, the Habsburg Empire bears the hallmarks of Soviet power. The masquerade balls, with their bewildering swirl of masked identities, conjure the confusion and paranoia that proliferated under the Soviet system. Salieri's reluctant servant-spy (Cynthia Nixon) carries out covert surveillance, a nod to the 20th Century's KGB, which had thousands of its moles burrow into the private lives of artists and dissidents. Meanwhile, Salieri's heretical burning of the crucifix and war on God call to mind the ideological struggle between a Christian worldview and secular Soviet hubris. (After Abraham's mother – a pious Italian woman – saw the cross-burning scene, she browbeat her son so relentlessly that he blurted out what he now tells the BBC was a lie: "I told her, 'mum, that was an extra – somebody else threw it in there!'")

And then there's the mass grave into which Mozart's corpse is dumped. This depiction does not fit the facts of what is known about his death, but it makes sense if read as an indictment of Soviet practices – the effacement of individual identity and literal mass murder. Grim excavations of these pits continue to this day. Forman, whose own parents perished in Nazi concentration camps, understood the power of this imagery.

Jeff Smith, author of Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist, tells the BBC that Mozart's struggle against the status quo tapped into Forman's own frustrations with Soviet censorship. "The emperor's fatuous judgment about Mozart's opera – 'too many notes' – is just the kind of accusation that was used as a cudgel used against avant-garde artists and thinkers to imply their work isn't pleasant or edifying to Soviet ears. Mozart's enraged incredulity in that scene must have mirrored Forman's own longstanding contempt for Soviet stagnation and repression."

Amadeus behind the Iron Curtain

Shooting took place in 1983 over a six-month period in Prague, which had the virtue of offering basilicas, palaces and cobblestone squares virtually unchanged since the late 18th Century. Even with Soviet power waning, however, Czechoslovakia remained part of the Eastern bloc and Forman was still persona non grata, so a deal was struck: the director would refrain from meeting with political dissidents, and the regime would allow friends of Forman to visit with their repatriated prodigal son.

Forman's own recollections from the shoot centred on the travails of Soviet interference. His landlady warned his phone is bugged. Informers lurked in every room. Two unmarked cars tailed him everywhere, which seemed redundant since his own driver was also a secret agent. In his autobiography, Turnaround, Forman is just shy of explicit about the degree to which themes of Soviet repression leaked into Amadeus. "As it had to be in the socialist Prague," he wrote, "the spirit of Franz Kafka presided over our production".

 

Perhaps even more telling is a story he recounts of negotiating with the general director of Czechoslovak film, Jiří Purš, who, as Forman recounted, wanted absolute assurance that the Communist Party would have nothing to fear: "I assume that politically there is nothing in the script that they could hang their hats on?" Forman's reply is a model of plausible deniability and acid irony: "Look, it's about Mozart!"

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F Murray Abraham felt the strain of coercive scrutiny as he was traveling back and forth to the United States to shoot his role in Scarface (1983) while Amadeus was in production in Prague.

Abraham tells the BBC, "At the end of every shooting day I had to cross the border to get to the airport in Vienna to return to Hollywood. At the checkpoint, the Czechoslovak Police would make us sit idle at the gate, just as a way to throw their weight around, make you know who's in charge. That sense of bullying and intimidation was everywhere, and even when the Czech people responded with subversive humor, the strain was palpable. We never forgot for a minute that we were under communist surveillance."

That tension between the US crew and Soviet agents finally burst out into the open on 4 July. The production was shooting an opera scene, and the crew arranged so that when Forman yelled "action" a US flag unfurled and the national anthem played in lieu of Mozart's music. Some 500 Czech extras burst forth into emotional song, in effect revealing their sympathies with the West. But not all of them.

Forman recalled, "All stood up – except 30 men and women, panic on their face, looking at each other [asking] what they should do. They were the secret police, dispersed among the extras."

As Amadeus continues to be reassessed at its 40th anniversary, the significance of the Cold War looms ever larger. Paul Frazier, author of The Cold War on Film, tells the BBC that the film brilliantly tapped into a deep vein of Soviet envy: "Salieri is the Soviet Lada trying to be a Ford Mustang. He can't be as great as Mozart, so he resorts to undermining and manipulating him. This too was the approach of the old USSR towards the West: rather than being better than the West, the Soviets resorted to undermining and discrediting the West at every turn."

Historian Nicholas J Cull echoes that analysis. "Think of the Jonathan Swift line: 'When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.' Whether it's the 1780s or 1980s, what you have is true genius facing off against mediocre, conniving bureaucrats. You see this same dynamic at play in a Cold War film like last summer's Oppenheimer, which in some ways is Amadeus with A-bombs. It makes sense that refugee film-makers like Forman and his creative team would be drawn to tell an allegory of communist mismanagement."

Not everyone is sold on the idea that Amadeus wrestles with Soviet totalitarianism. Kevin Hagopian, a media studies professor at Penn State University, says there's a risk of allegorising everything as an unseen Soviet menace, which ends up making art a mere handmaid to politics.

"That ultimately becomes a depressingly narrow way to appreciate the dazzling beauty and emotional breadth of Mozart's music," Hagopian tells the BBC. Nevertheless, he adds, we can't ignore the political resonances. 

"The allegorical space that satirical Czech film-makers like Forman opened up meant that audiences began to look for, even perhaps invent, allegorical political meaning," he says. "All films could be read against the grain of a regime that lacked not only humanity but any sense of irony about itself. So if Amadeus wasn't really about Soviet-style tyranny, but audiences merely thought it was, well, I have a feeling that would be just fine with Miloš Forman."

For his part, Abraham is candid about what he believes are the more contemporary political stakes of the film, as he told the BBC in June. "Think about how many Americans now idolise Putin. These autocrats are suddenly celebrated again. It's disheartening, truly demoralising, but if Amadeus can help us see our current predicament through fresh eyes, that shows you how powerfully its message still resonates."

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Paul McCartney's missing bass and other mysterious musical instrument disappearances

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240219-paul-mccartney-bass-missing-famous-stolen-musical-instruments, today

From a 17th-Century Italian violin stolen from Japan to Drake's lost Blackberry in Mexico, here are musical lost and found mysteries that rival Sir Paul McCartney's.

In musical happy endings, last week, Sir Paul McCartney was reunited with his bass guitar that was stolen 51 years ago in London. The instrument, which McCartney purchased in 1961, was subsequently nabbed from a band van in 1972. Now, thanks to the Lost Bass search project, the Beatle has been reunited with the bass, which had been until recently stashed in a Sussex attic. Both McCartney and Höfner, the instrument manufacturer, authenticated the found item upon its rediscovery, and a spokesperson for McCartney told BBC News he was "incredibly grateful" for the return of his lost guitar. 

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But McCartney certainly isn't the only musician to lose a valuable piece of his kit – in fact, he's not even the only Beatle. And for non-Beatles-level musical acts, the loss of an instrument – or worse, an entire kit – can be devastating. The BBC previously reported on the theft of rock band Cemetery Sun's entire kit and van, as well as trio Noisy's stolen kit reappearing with individual instruments and pieces of gear up for auction online weeks later.

Bassist Grant Emerson of Americana band Delta Rae recalls having around $10,000 (£7,937) of musical instruments stolen: "We played at the Bitter End in New York City and parked our van down the street. When we came back to the van, the back door had been broken into, and all of our guitars were gone, plus a pedal board and a piece of the drummer's equipment. Probably four to five pieces of gear were stolen. It was a really terrible drive back to North Carolina." He notes that for most bands, the only recourse is fundraising: "You just rely on your fans. You ask for help and donations, which isn't easy." And he urges all musicians to "photograph the serial number of every instrument and piece of gear you own".

Lost or stolen instruments over the years have kept musicians and fans alike searching for guitars, violins, and even an entire brass band. Here are a few more musical mysteries – some of which remain unsolved to this day. 

BB King

The famous blues legend was known for riffs on his legendary guitar, a Gibson he named Lucille – in fact, King had multiple performance guitars named Lucille over the course of his career. The name was inspired by a lover’s quarrel King witnessed in 1949 (the woman arguing was named Lucille, and she left quite an impression on King). When this particular Lucille guitar was stolen, it was eventually found in a Las Vegas pawn shop by Eric Dahl, a fellow musician who mistakenly purchased the guitar and later returned it to King. Dahl offered it without compensation and went on to write a book about King and his many guitars. The Gibson also ended up being one of the last instruments King played before his death in 2015, and it was subsequently sold at his estate auction for $280,000 (£222,286) in 2019. 

Eric Clapton

Clapton's Gibson Les Paul guitar, named Beano, was stolen soon after his studio album Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton was released in 1966. Unlike King, Clapton hasn't been so lucky as to be reunited with his lost guitar – yet. But singer-songwriter Joe Bonamassa has claimed he knows where it is: In 2016, Bonamassa gave an interview in which he said the guitar was in a private US collection, which spurred a 2018 petition to encourage Bonamassa to reveal more details. On their YouTube channel, music aficionados Baxter and Jonathan of North Carolina-based Casino Guitars joked that they imagine a "guitar illuminati" trading in lost and rare instruments might not be pleased with what Bonamassa has already shared so far – and pondered whether he has a responsibility to help Clapton retrieve the stolen item if he does, in fact, know where it is. 

Takiko Omura

A violin made in 1675 by Nicolo Amati in Italy was stolen in 2005 from the home of Japanese violinist Takiko Omura, who had purchased the instrument in the United States many decades earlier. The violin, which was priced at nearly £300,000 ($377,895) in 2005 when it was taken, was reportedly found in 2020 in Parma, Italy, in the raid of a home of a suspected drug trafficker. Authorities in Italy and Japan worked together to return the instrument to its rightful owner. 

Stooges Brass Brand

It's difficult enough to find one lost guitar, let alone an entire brass band. In 2022, a famous local New Orleans "second line" brass band had all their equipment stolen from their van during the worst possible time for them – two weeks before New Orleans Jazz Fest. Nearly $12,000 (£9,526) in musical instruments, including cymbals, drum sets, keyboards and amps, were stolen when the band's van disappeared from outside the home of a band member. The theft threatened to derail the Stooges' festival appearance that year, but the band is back on its feet, with a scheduled appearance on 28 April at this year's Jazz Fest.

Min Kym

As the BBC has previously reported, the violin prodigy Min Kym's Stradivarius was stolen in 2010 from a Pret a Manger restaurant. This was no ordinary violinist and no ordinary violin: At just seven years old, Kym had earned a slot at the prestigious Purcell School of Music in the UK, and at age 11, she won first prize at the Premier Mozart International Competition. When presented with the opportunity to own a rare 1696 Stradivarius, "Kym remortgaged her flat and bought the violin for £450,000 ($580,000). If this seems like an astronomical amount of money, it was in fact a steal in Stradivarius terms: the violin's actual worth was closer to £1.2m ($1.5m) and these instruments are so precious that their value only ever goes up,” reads the 2017 article about the crime. Although the stolen violin was eventually recovered three years later, it was not returned to Kym, and her memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung, tells the story of coping with a musical instrument being lost and found and then lost again.

George Harrison

Sir Paul wasn't even the only Beatle whose beloved instrument was absconded with: George Harrison's 1965 Rickenbacker guitar was allegedly stolen in 1966. Rickenbacker CEO John Hall told Reverb that the guitar's mystery has been so longstanding because "no one knows the exact serial number of the original guitar." The Rickenbacker team were, however, able to narrow the list down to five potential guitars based on shipment dates. 

Harrison also had his '57 Les Paul, Lucy – which was formerly owned by the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian, Rick Derringer, and Eric Clapton – stolen. It was nabbed from Harrison's home during a burglary in 1973 and then sold to a Los Angeles music store who, in turn, sold it to Mexican musician Miguel Ochoa, who declined to sell it back to Harrison at full price. Instead, Ochoa negotiated a trade with Harrison: Harrison got Lucy back, and Ochoa would get a 1958 Les Paul Standard and a Fender Precision bass. 

Drake

In his 2009 song Say What's Real, produced by Kanye West, Drake revealed that he lost some of his best lyrics in Mexico: "Lost some of my hottest verses down in Cabo/So if you find a Blackberry with the side scroll," he raps, followed by an expletive-laden line that finishes the rhyme. For his genre of music, that Blackberry was his instrument, which he used to pen his songs. While it doesn't sound like it's ever been returned, Drake has probably upgraded his tech.

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How opera is aiming for net zero amid worsening climate change

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230731-how-opera-is-aiming-for-net-zero-amid-the-climate-crisis, today

Many opera companies are working towards full sustainability, and Glyndebourne is among those aiming to be a force for good, according to a new documentary.

A night at the opera is not typically equated with restraint, instead conjuring images of chandelier-filled theatres and arias performed in exquisite costumes against transportative stage sets. Yet, recent years have seen opera companies across the globe make a determined effort to operate more sustainably, implementing numerous strategies in a bid to reduce their carbon emissions and overall impact on the planet.

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-          The nation that is the 'land of song'

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This is, in part, the result of climate activists, who have increasingly targeted the arts and entertainment industries over the past few years with the aim of drawing greater attention to their cause. At the end of 2022, for instance, responding to mounting protests, the Royal Opera House cut ties with its long-time sponsor, the oil giant BP. Yet, it is also a response to the shifting expectations of audience members: according to a UK study conducted in 2022, 77% of audience members now expect theatres to address the climate emergency in their work – and opera houses are no exception.

The pandemic, while posing innumerable difficulties for the live entertainment industry, also offered an important pause for reflection. It was during this time that a number of UK theatre-makers joined forces with sustainability experts to conceive the Theatre Green Book, a publication setting a common standard for sustainable theatre production, and providing guidance on how best to achieve it. Divided into three volumes – sustainable productions, sustainable buildings and sustainable operations – spanning the many facets of what it means to run a theatre, the acclaimed guide has already been widely implemented.

A key collaborator in the creation of the Theatre Green Book was the historic East Sussex opera house Glyndebourne, renowned for its summer festival which draws thousands of opera lovers to the stately home's verdant grounds each year. Glyndebourne has been forging a path towards greater sustainability in opera for some time. "Art, opera, nature [has always been] a core trinity for Glyndebourne," explains its archivist Phil Boot in a new BBC documentary Take Me to The Opera: The Power of Glyndebourne.

 

In 2012, executive chairman Gus Christie oversaw the installation of a 67m (220ft)-tall wind turbine on a hill adjacent to the opera house, which between then and 2022 has generated the equivalent of 102% of the electricity used by the company in the same period. The turbine serves as an important statement of intent for Glyndebourne. Alison Tickell, the founder and chief executive of Julie's Bicycle, a non-profit organisation dedicated to mobilising the UK arts and culture sectors in a fight against climate change, says in the documentary: "I know that many opera companies… don't have the luxury of space. But [the turbine] still remains a beacon for us all [demonstrating] that climate action really matters."

Glyndebourne has innovated in sustainable practice in the years since. In 2021, it joined the global Race to Zero, pledging to halve its direct carbon emissions by 2030, and to reach net zero by 2050. "We are zero waste to landfill now, so any waste we have goes down to [an] incinerator, which provides power for local homes," Christie says of some of the measures he and his team have taken to achieve this. "We compost all our garden waste, we recycle as much of our stage-set material, costumes, props [as we can]. We have about 32 electric vehicle charging points [for visitors] which are all charged from the wind turbine." They are drawing from their resources in other ways, too: by the end of this year, they predict, all water served at Glyndebourne will come from the property's own natural spring, while plants grown in their gardens are being used to produce dyes for the company's costumes. "Rivers around the world are polluted by dyes a lot," says dye room supervisor Jenny Mercer in the documentary. "This way everything goes back into the ground."

Climate action

Glyndebourne isn't the only opera company taking steps towards sustainability. It is now usual among major opera houses, from the English National Opera to Opéra National de Paris, to boast a dedicated webpage outlining their sustainability mission statements, including pledges to adhere to the UN sustainable development goals, facts and figures relating to their reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions, and details of their own planet-friendly solutions.

The rooftop of the Opéra Bastille, for example, is host to an urban farm, cultivated using agroecology, which also contributes to the thermal insulation of the building. This produces around a hundred weekly baskets of fruit and vegetables that are then sold to staff and local residents.

The Sydney Opera House – a longstanding champion of environmental consciousness that achieved carbon neutrality in 2018 – has installed an artificial reef alongside the iconic building's sea wall, encouraging marine biodiversity and supporting Sydney Harbour's native species. Most recently, the opera house was awarded a six-star performance rating by the Green Building Council of Australia, the highest possible ranking. This is no mean feat given that perhaps the biggest challenge facing opera is achieving energy efficiency within its decades-, if not centuries-old, buildings. Indeed, in 2021, a survey by the UK's Theatres Trust found that it would cost more than £1bn ($1.2bn) to make the UK's theatre buildings sustainable.

In the meantime, many companies have been looking to achieve sustainability through new buildings, while doing what they can to reduce waste in their pre-existing spaces. The Royal Opera House's production workshop just outside London, built in 2015, is in the top 10% of sustainable non-domestic buildings in the UK. While Milan's storied opera house La Scala's new office is a zero-energy building, producing more energy than it consumes thanks to rooftop solar panels and an open-cycle geothermal system. La Scala has also cut its carbon emissions by more than  630 tonnes since 2010, according to a recent New York Times article, having upgraded to LED and smart lighting.

Elsewhere, the Opéra de Lyon, Göteborg Opera and Tunis Opera are currently partnered on a new project investigating how best to implement the circular economy of production materials, while Leeds' Opera North is soon to launch its first "green season", using shared set design across its three productions, recycled or second-hand costumes, and including a new "eco-entertainment" work titled Masque of Might.

As the Theatres Trust's study shows, there is still a long way to go, and a lot of money required, to make the changes necessary to safeguard the future of opera amid the ever-worsening climate crisis, but there appears to be no shortage of determination and imagination among opera houses in their quest to do so.

Take Me to the Opera: The Power of Glyndebourne is on BBC News Channel and on BBC Reel

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Antonio Pappano: How opera can be 'open to everyone'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230728-antonio-pappano-how-opera-can-be-open-to-everyone, today

Is the world of opera becoming more inclusive? A new documentary, featuring conductor Antonio Pappano, explores the mission to open up the art form to everyone.

Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano is renowned for being a warm-hearted "people person". But there's one thing that makes his blood run cold: when he hears opera being accused of being an art form that's only for a wealthy elite. "I get very offended by people who say we're elitist," he says passionately in a new documentary. This is "a misconception that totally distorts the image of opera," he adds. "The fact of the matter is, it's harder to get into a football game in London than it is to get into the [Royal] Opera House."

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This allusion to the beautiful game is not a frivolous one. When Pappano  became music director at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (ROH) in 2002, he spoke of his love for popular music by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Oscar Peterson, Joni Mitchell, and for musicals. "I like football too," he added. "Does that mean you can't like opera?"

Back then Pappano was 42, and the youngest conductor to lead ROH's orchestra. Some 700 operas later –  with many productions of the French and Italian repertoires; a good part of the Russian; Wagner, Strauss and contemporary works – and he is the subject of A Time of Change, presented by Zeinab Badawi, and part of the BBC documentary series Take Me to the Opera.

The documentary follows him from his modest roots, as the son of Italian immigrant parents who came from southern Italy to the UK, who worked hard to make ends meet.  They passed on their strong work ethic to him, and he learnt how to work with singers from his vocal coach father, flourishing as a musical talent in the "the family business". A Time of Change goes on to trace a career that includes assisting classical pianist Daniel Barenboim, through to a recent high, conducting the King's coronation service in May, featuring solos by Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel and South African soprano Pretty Yende.

The main focus of the film, though, is Pappano's mission to open up opera to everyone. "Opera shouldn't cater just to one audience, or be focused on just one corner of the repertoire," he says. "It must be open to the interests of many different people." While he asserts that the ROH, like every big opera house, wants to entice young audiences, he does concede: "I think you have to be honest and say, yes, but younger people can't afford very expensive tickets, can they?"  

It's true that the price of opera tickets can seem too high to be anything but a rare luxury for most, especially young people. Halley Bondy, writing on the arts website Paste Magazine, describes herself as someone who has been to the opera many times "for a millennial". And although she loves opera – "from the hyper-real grandness to the unbelievable talent, to the septuagenarian, fur-hatted audience" – she finds it "easy to see why places like The Met [Metropolitan Opera House in NYC] are ailing in sales; young people just don't go. It's too expensive, too arcane, too massive… The onus is on the opera houses to do a better job of catering to the young."

Bondy has only managed to attend so often by being treated by a "ridiculously generous friend" or chasing discounted tickets. "Like everything else in the world, the opera is a lot of fun if you have gobs of money," she observes, but she concedes anyone could get in with the $25 [£19.40] rush tickets, student tickets or commercial offers – which make it "affordable, if you just dig a little".    

In opera's defence, ticket prices are generally high because it is notoriously costly to produce. All the more reason, argued The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins in February, for adequate government funding. Discussing recent cuts to opera funding, she wrote: "If you starve something, run it down constantly, gradually reduce the provision of it so that few can afford it, it becomes 'elitist'… And if opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself… [it is] precisely the result of neglect and underfunding". 

Pappano is also invested in bringing new blood to opera, via schemes like the ROH's  schools matinees, which offer young people low-cost tickets to opera productions. Also, its Youth Opera talent development programme gives children aged seven to 13 the chance to try its "rigorous music and drama training".

"We make sure there's a real variety of socio-economic backgrounds and ethnicities, and an even gender split,” says Tom Floyd, ROH senior opera manger, talking about its open recruitment system. Most of the young people who join them "come from families who probably have had no real experience of opera," he says.       

Opera for all

Over at English National Opera (ENO), the company has stayed true to its egalitarian roots of the late 19th-Century, when theatrical producer Lilian Baylis and music director Charles Corri shared a vision of it as a place for "people's opera". ENO has "opera for all" in its mission statement. It does not assume knowledge of opera; its website has  key figures of the organisation  explaining what opera is and how it's made; and  the site hints at how it skillfully reimagines crowd pleasers, like La Traviata (to be performed this October), in thrilling new ways, alongside daring new work, such as 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, by performance artist Marina Abramovich (November).   

"We sing in English to be accessible to the widest possible audience," an ENO spokesperson tells BBC Culture. The company offers free tickets for under-21s; discounts for under 35s, and tickets from £10 for all. No surprise, then, that more than half its bookings last season were from opera first-timers.

Still, in order to survive the cuts to Arts Council England (ACE) funding, the ENO will next year move its main base from the London Coliseum to outside the capital and in so doing will  qualify for £24m funding over three years.

Opera must change, ACE chief executive Darren Henley wrote in an article for The Guardian: "A new generation is embracing opera and music presented in new ways: opera in car parks… in pubs, opera on your tablet". In truth, most opera companies are not digital-age dodgers; they have presences on the popular digital platforms, while the hashtag #operaisopen invites new audiences to click through.  

Streaming services –  like Royal Opera Stream and Glyndebourne Encore – have dished up productions and events, both popular and esoteric, to reach a wider audience. And there's also opera at the cinema. At ROH, 2022/23 has been its biggest cinema season ever, with more than 1,300 cinemas worldwide having shown or showing 13 productions (opera and ballet), including Madam Butterfly, La Boheme and Aida. The latter, staged in May and June 2023, was conducted by Pappano.

Nurturing promising young talent – like soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha – is a passion of Pappano’s, and he's also a role model for young opera conductors, like Avishka Ederisinghe, who says that watching him talking on YouTube was what inspired him to explore the art form. 

As he steps down from his music director roles – at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome after 18 years, and at ROH next summer, after 22 years – Pappano is looking forward to change. He will not be hanging up the baton yet: he will succeed Simon Rattle to become chief conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra, his "dream job".  

He describes how he grew up in a council flat that was just "a four-minute walk to Westminster Abbey"; and that rising from his humble background to conducting the coronation at that same abbey was "not a bad gig". Jokes aside, there is a message there that  he'd love to hand down to a younger generation: "If you have a vision for what you want to achieve in life, that spark and… the energy and resilience to keep pushing when you know things will get tough, you can make it in any walk of life."  

Take me to the Opera: A Time of Change is on BBC News Channel and on BBC Reel

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Bryn Terfel: The nation that is the 'land of song'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230607-bryn-terfel-why-wales-became-the-land-of-song, today

Opera star Bryn Terfel emerged from an extraordinary cultural heritage and a nation renowned for its love of singing. "It's the air that we breathe," he explains in a new documentary.

Sir Bryn Terfel is pondering a question: what is it about Wales and the Welsh that produces a nation of singers? "I think it's the mountains, and the fresh sea air. And the language – that is very important," he says. "Then there's the hymns… You know, we just love to sing – it's the air that we breathe."

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The Welsh bass-baritone is the subject of Peak Performance, part of the BBC documentary series Take Me to the Opera. Presented by Zeinab Badawi, it follows Sir Bryn – as he has been known since his knighthood in 2017 – from his operatic debut with the Welsh National Opera in 1990, to singing at opera houses across the world, like London's Royal Opera House, where he is a regular star performer. En route, the documentary revisits his roots in rural Wales and looks at how he's nurturing the next generations of singing talent, as well as his invitation to sing at King Charles's coronation.

Sir Bryn is high on the list of great living Welsh opera singers, which also includes luminaries such as Dame Gwyneth Jones, Wynne Evans, Katherine Jenkins, and Aled Jones. (Added to which there are many popular non-opera Welsh singers, including Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Bonnie Tyler, Charlotte Church and Cerys Matthews.) But beyond these headline stars lies a whole nation renowned for its love of singing, especially choral. So where does this passion for song stem from?

In A History of Music and Singing in Wales, novelist and poet Wyn Griffith, who wrote extensively on Wales and Welsh culture, observed: "If you find a score of Welsh people, in Wales or out of it, you will find a choir. They sing for their own delight, and they always sing in harmony. They sing as naturally and easily as they talk."

"Wales is known as a nation of music – the 'land of song'," notes the Welsh National Opera (WNO). "Often connected with male voice choirs, it is… recognised for its choral traditions which are rooted in the culture."

Choral singing in Wales dates back to the 19th Century, and flourished with the Cymanafa Ganu (hymn singing) movement, at a chapel in Aberdare in 1859; it was rooted mainly in religious songs, though a steady body of secular songs were also produced. Soon after, a revival of traditional Welsh music began with the formation of the National Eisteddfod Society, a focus for the Welsh passion for singing and song. Any worthy list of classic Welsh songs might include Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (O Land of My Fathers); My Little Welsh Home by William Sidney Gwynn Williams; and the love song Ar Lan y Mor (recorded by both Terfel and Jenkins). Or the rousing We'll Keep a Welcome (In the Hillsides).

The male voice choir, along with the harp, are two of the most popular signifiers of Welsh music. Professor Gareth Williams traces the male voice choir's origins to the mid-19th Century industrial age: "We are reminded of what Aneurin Bevan once said: 'Culture comes off the end of a pick'," he writes, referring to Welsh coal miners. Choirs started in the 1920s, like Cwbach from the Cynon Valley, and Pendyrus, survive today. After a day's hard graft in a mine, says Williams, the joy and community found in singing with co-workers was "an assertion of working-class male bonding and identity expressed through that most democratic and inexpensive instrument, the human voice".

The Welsh Borough Chapel in Southwark, London, is host to Eschoir, a Welsh male choir of around 20 singers, aged 20 to 75. Singing together since 2009, they've performed at Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, and the Six Nations rugby tournament. Eschoir founder and director Mike Williams, who grew up in south Wales, describes their appeal: "There's a humility to it, as Welsh choirs stem back to the coal mines and chapels. Many people enjoy singing in the pub as much as singing in a concert. There is no pomp… it unites us and keeps us connected to our Welsh roots." And the Welsh take choirs very seriously, he adds.

In tandem with a passion for choral singing in Wales, there has been a rise in popularity of the Eisteddfod. These Welsh singing and recital competitions date back to the 12th Century and today are a platform for public singing, especially for younger singers. It was at local Eisteddfods that the young Bryn Terfel first stood out, winning singing competitions that would lead him to study at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and to his first professional role in Cosi Fan Tutti at Welsh National Opera, soon after graduating in 1989.

A unique cultural inheritance

In the documentary, Terfel recalls competing in Eisteddfods in his rural north Wales, and how his "parents paid for a lot of petrol to drive me north, south, east and west to compete. They saw something in their son… the passion, how I loved singing. I think that drove them to encourage the singing within me." Eisteddfods are "a wonderful shop window", he says. One of his charitable initiatives is a scholarship to develop promising young performers coming up through Eisteddfods. Peak Performance visits one in Llanadog, near Swansea, as young singers of all genders, from the area and across Wales, prepare to get on stage and sing. "This is where it all starts for us Welsh singers," says one teenage boy in the documentary. "This is where we learn our craft." He believes when Welsh singers go to London to study, "you can see the difference… they’ve got some sort of… confidence."

Certainly, Terfel was swaddled in song and music from the cradle. Born in 1967 in rural north Wales, his father was a farmer, his mother a special needs teacher who used music therapy in her work. The whole family, including older relatives, sang together and in choirs. "My grandfather, my great-grandfather, had the love of singing," he says. "There was constant learning going on in the kitchen, words on the cabinets. A little bit of rivalry as well, which is quite healthy."

Eilir Owen Griffiths, a composer and Eisteddfod adjudicator, explains what he looks for in a great singer: "It's how the voice resonates, and the way it works with text." He describes Terfil's voice as "like a beautiful double bass" – but it's not just the incredible sound he generates: "It's also the control he has – he can sing the most delicate pianissimo as well. It's a unique voice, very special." That quality – and cultural diversity – was drawn on when Sir Bryn sang at the coronation of King Charles, who personally chose him to perform; he sang Coronation Kyrie, a first in the Welsh language at a coronation. "You have the rehearsals in the rooms… Then you have your fittings, and all of a sudden you're in your costume and make-up." And you're onstage, he says, "portraying a character. And that's when the fun really does begin!"

The documentary joins Terfel as he goes through his repertoire for a week in March: as well as the Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, he sings the title role in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool; then travels to a studio near Cardiff in Wales, to record an album of sea shanties – the likes of Drunken Sailor, and traditional folk songs like Fflat Huw Puw, "about a sailor and his wonderful ship".

It's a voice that continues to thrill audiences, whether in lead roles such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House; or Tosca by Puccini at Paris Opera Bastille; or Verdi's Falstaff, at Grange Park Opera, Surrey. As well as big opera houses, he performs for new audiences in concert halls too. Gillian Moore is artistic director of the South Bank Centre, where in recent months he sang extracts from two of Wagner's great roles: "The fact he's passing that on to young singers makes total sense… When he's on stage, you cannot take your eyes off him."

Returning to that question of why the Welsh love to sing, Wyn Griffith suggests it's about an irrepressible spirit – and it's simply in the blood: "Whether they meet in tens or in thousands, in a small country chapel or in a vast assembly… they sing freely… It is not necessary to organise singing in Wales: it happens on its own."

Take me to the Opera: Peak Performance is on BBC News Channel on 10 June at 13.30 and also on BBC Reel

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Gen Z and young millennials' surprising obsession

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230113-gen-z-and-young-millennials-surprising-obsession, today

A radical new wave of artists are sweeping the previously elite world of classical music – with a little help from Squid Game, Dark Academia and fashion. Daisy Woodward explores how classical got cool.

If asked to guess what under 25-year-olds are listening to, it's unlikely that many of us would land upon orchestral music. And yet a survey published in December 2022 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) found that 74% of UK residents aged under 25 were likely to be tuning into just that at Christmas-time, compared with a mere 46% of people aged 55 or more. These figures reflect not only the RPO's broader finding that under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents, but also the widespread surge in popularity of classical music in general, particularly among younger generations.

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There are plenty of reasons for this, from the playlist culture spawned by streaming platforms that make it easy for listeners to discover new artists and types of music to fit their mood, to the solace it provided during the pandemic, not to mention the profusion of classical music in pop culture hits like Squid Game. But perhaps highest on the list is the global wave of Gen Z and young millennial classical artists who are finding new ways to be seen and heard, and – just as vitally – new means of modernising what has long been branded music's most elite and stuffy genre.

Unsurprisingly, social media has played a huge part in this, as a quick search of the popular TikTok hashtag "classictok" (currently at 53.8 million views) attests. There, as well as on Instagram, young classical artists have been making use of the digital realm's democratic potential to lift the heavy velvet curtains on their art form, presenting classical music and its storied history in ways that are accessible, unintimidating and, most importantly, fun.

For French violinist Esther Abrami – who has more than 250,000 followers on Instagram, more than 380,000 on TikTok, and was the first classical musician to be nominated in the Social Media Superstar category at the Global Awards – the journey to social media fame stemmed from a desire to share her passion more widely. "I was studying at a top institution and most of the time I was practising for exams, so the whole joy of sharing was taken away. Then, at the very few concerts I did play, there was a very specific type of audience that wasn't very diverse," Abrami tells BBC Culture.

She noticed that a handful of classical musicians had taken to Instagram to broaden their own reach, and decided to do the same. "I started posting a few things, and was stunned by the reaction that I got. Suddenly you have people from around the world listening to you and telling you it brightens their day to watch you playing the violin," she enthuses. "It opened this door to a completely new world."

Nigerian-US baritone and lifelong hip-hop fan Babatunde Akinboboye enjoyed a similarly swift and surprising rise to social media fame when he posted a video of himself singing Rossini's renowned aria Largo al factotum over the top of Kendrick Lamar's track Humble. "I was in my car and I realised that the two pieces worked together musically, so I started singing on top of the beat," he tells BBC Culture. He documented the moment on his phone and posted the video on his personal Facebook account, guessing that his friends would enjoy it more than his opera peers. "But I went to sleep, woke up the next morning, and it had expanded to my opera network, and far beyond that," he laughs, explaining that within two days, his self-dubbed brand of "hip-hopera" had caught the attention of The Ellen Show, America's Got Talent and Time magazine.

Both Abrami and Akinboboye came to classical music in their teens, late by conventional standards, and cultivated their passion for the genre independently. This remains a driving factor in their desire to reach new audiences, which they've achieved on an impressive scale, largely just by being themselves. "I ended up becoming an opera influencer by sharing the parts of me I felt comfortable sharing, which is a lot," says Akinboboye, whose playful hip-hopera and opera videos and posts – taking viewers behind the scenes of a world still shrouded in mystery  – have garnered him some 688,000 TikTok followers. "It's a lot about how I relate to opera; my musical background was from hip-hop, but I still found a relationship with opera and that resonated with people," he explains. "Almost every day I get a different message saying, 'I went to my first opera today'. I think it's because they're seeing someone they feel comfortable or familiar with."

'Complex and profound'

Abrami, a similarly enthusiastic content creator, agrees: "I think putting the face of somebody not so far away from them to the genre is a big thing. That's what I'm trying to do, to reach different types of people and create bridges, to show them that this music can really move you. It's complex and profound and yes, it might take a bit of time to understand but once you do, it's amazing."

 

British concert pianist Harriet Stubbs is another avid proponent of classical music for modern audiences who has been finding her own ways of drawing in new listeners. During lockdown, the musician, who usually splits her time between London and New York, performed multiple 20-minute concerts from her ground-floor flat in West Kensington, opening the windows and using an amplifier to reach listeners outside. "I gave 250 concerts," Stubbs, who was awarded a British Empire Medal by the Queen for this mood-boosting act of service, tells BBC Culture. "I did a range of repertoire from my upcoming album, and also things like All By Myself, which I chose ironically for that audience. And the thing is, people who thought they didn't care for classical music came back every day because of the power of that music."

The fusion of classical music with other genres is a major facet of Stubbs's practice and, indeed, that of many others among the new generation of classical artists (see also the React to the K YouTube channel, where classical artists frequently reimagine K-pop songs with ingenious results, or Kris Bowers' brilliant orchestral arrangements of modern pop songs for the much-buzzed-about Bridgerton soundtrack). Stubbs's innovative first album, Heaven & Hell: The Doors of Perception (2018), was inspired by William Blake and features musical icon Marianne Faithfull. "I always wanted to tie rock'n'roll and classical music together and put them in the same space, supported by literature and philosophy and other disciplines," she explains, adding that her next album, which she's making with pianist and former Bowie collaborator Mike Garson, will be a "Bowie meets Rachmaninoff" affair.

Interestingly, the current swell of enthusiasm for classical music has branched out to become as much of an aesthetic movement as it is a musical one. Digital microtrends Dark Academia and Light Academia – dedicated as they are to the romanticisation of a passion for art and knowledge through imagery – both make rousing use of classical music in order to create the desired ambience. Ascendant Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński, meanwhile, uses atmospheric visuals as a powerful means of contemporising the baroque experience. Depressed by the lack of funding for music video production in the classical realm, he drummed up private sponsorship to make a 21-minute movie to accompany his 2021 rendition of Vivaldi's Stabat Mater. The resulting film conjures a compelling and suitably brutal scenario for the haunting 18th-century hymn, which The New York Times describes as "resembling a Polish remake of The Sopranos".

"I'm really interested in storytelling. I always build an entire concept for my albums – the narrative, the photography, the videos," Orliński tells BBC Culture. "I think now there is this whole new generation of people who really want to add to what classical music can be, to go beyond the singing and be challenged. You just have to know that the end product will be good, and that what you're doing will serve the story," he adds. This is certainly something Orliński has achieved in his own career: an accomplished sportsman and breakdancer, he wowed critics with his 2022 Royal Opera House debut, which found him pole-dancing in a spangled dress as Didymus in Katie Mitchell's production of Handel's Theodora. Other recent projects have included recording baroque tracks for forthcoming video games which, he says, was "an incredible experience" and is something he's being asked to do more and more frequently, as the Metaverse beckons. "Sometimes you need classical music to touch the strings of somebody's soul – a pop song won't work."

Classical music's ongoing and often powerful intersection with pop culture is being foregrounded as part of the burgeoning interest in the genre, both inside and outside its famously guarded gates. The all-teen members of the UK's National Youth Orchestra have just completed a mini tour that included a performance of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, replete with its opening symphonic sunrise eternalised by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last August saw the BBC Proms launch its first gaming-themed programme whereby the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra took on some of the best-loved songs in video game history. While the recent autumn/winter collection from Acne Studios' younger sub-label Face offered up one of the most direct sartorial tributes to classical music to date, presenting crew-neck sweaters, T-shirts and tote bags embellished with the faces of Handel, Mozart and Bach in celebration of "the idea that a passion for classical music is the most left-field move imaginable for a modern-day teenager".

Orliński agrees that classical music has achieved an "almost hipstery" status of late. "It's cool to go to the opera, to know something, and that's because there are a lot of young artists delivering music on the highest level, while making it very entertaining," he enthuses. There is, he observes, a revived interest in classical music personalities such as Maria Callas and Pavarotti, as well as "people like Yuja Wang" who are selling out concert halls, all of which he feels bodes well for the art form. "We have a long way to go to grow as much as other genres of music, but we're moving forward." Akinboboye, too, is tentatively hopeful. "I think opera is definitely being a lot more bold, and I hope that it continues because I think we can catch up," he concludes. "[Classical music needs to] be brave, to do the scary thing. And it'll work out, because audiences are ready."

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Theatre group loses £30k as storm destroys big top

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0e2d5z0m9o, today

A children's theatre company has appealed for help after losing £30,000 when its big top tent was ripped to shreds by Storm Darragh.

Jacqueline Ball, from Stiltskin Theatre, said the destruction of the tent in Devonport Park, Plymouth, on Saturday had been "quite horrifying".

The cost to Stiltskin includes the purchase of the big top, ticket sales from the cancellation of a show, and profit from sales in a shop and cafe.

Stiltskin is pressing ahead with a smaller two-person show, The Elf Who Lost Christmas, which will run at the smaller Soapbox Theatre in the park from Saturday.

The theatre company had planned to put on two shows, the Guardian of the Golden Griffin and The Elf Who Lost Christmas, in the big top in the run-up to Christmas.

The big top had also been planned to mark the theatre company's 10th anniversary.

'Working really hard'

Despite warnings about the storm, the theatre company said it did not have time to take down the tent.

"The winds were so strong, they just built up and literally ripped the roof off," said Ms Ball.

"It was quite horrifying to watch it happen."

She said the support from an appeal had been "amazing".

The theatre company was doing four shows a day just to house everybody that had booked the elf show, she said.

"The team are working really, really hard.

"They've built the auditorium inside, and we're just getting everything ready for us to launch on Saturday."

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Plan to modernise art deco theatre is approved

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx887e35zo, today

Multi-million pound plans to revamp a 1920s town theatre have been given the go-ahead.

A single-storey rear extension would be built at the rear of the Ipswich Regent Theatre as part of the project and a wall of fame mural would be created at the entrance.

Ipswich Borough Council's planning department approved the plan on Wednesday and project managers hope the work could be completed by December 2025.

Jane Riley, the Labour portfolio holder for culture and customers, said she and colleagues were "thrilled".

'Show will go on'

As part of the project, the existing canopy will be refurbished and illuminated lettering will be installed at the front.

The theatre's bars, Crush Hall and Circle Lounge would also be modernised, the council said, and toilet facilities would be improved.

The Grade II listed art deco theatre opened in 1929 and offered cinema viewings until the mid-1980s.

It was bought by the council in 1991 and £3.45m was set aside in its budget for the project earlier this year.

The site will close in May for the renovation work, the council says, and the majority of shows will be performed at the Corn Exchange.

Riley said: "When the curtain closes in May the show will still go on, so we're looking forward to engaging with our visitors to ensure they are part of the legacy of the theatre for years to come."

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Art festival relaunches after funding shortfall

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7rv58ljpgo, today

A Cornish art festival has relaunched after a funding shortfall earlier this year put next year's event in doubt.

Cornwall Open Studios started in 1998 but announced in September it would not run a 2025 event because of reduced grant funding.

However, a group of local artists have now relaunched the festival with a new logo and website, with a brochure planned for the spring.

Jeremy Sanders, from Cornwall Open Studios, said it was a "fresh start" for the festival and it was "building on more than 20 years of tradition by adding some exciting new features to benefit both artists and visitors".

Mr Sanders said the team developed the new programme after speaking to artists and creators across Cornwall.

The new site allows people to find a local artist using an interactive map, with a directory for artists to showcase their work, he said.

The festival allows the public to go into artists' studios all over the county and see how they create their work.

Cornwall Open Studios 2025 will run from 24 May to 1 June, with all studios open over the long weekends and some during weekdays.

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Goldilocks panto to 'bring joy' to Bristol

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg90evm28vo, today

As pantomime season gets underway, the cast of Goldilocks and the Three Bears says it is looking forward to "bringing joy" to the people of Bristol.

Brenda Edwards, Brian Conley and his daughter, Lucy Conley, star in the show, which has started its five week run at the Bristol Hippodrome and comes to an end on 5 January.

Actress, presenter and singer Ms Edwards said she loves being in pantomime which is about "having fun and bringing joy".

"It's the one time of year you've got a licence to be a little kid," she added.

The pantomime follows Goldilocks' bid to save her circus from an evil rival circus owner, played by Phil Corbitt, with the help of circus friends and the three bears.

Ms Edwards, who plays Candy Floss the circus singer, said being part of panto was good for her.

"Christmas is a bit sombre for me because my parents passed at Christmas and so I try to do something that will lift my spirits up... and everybody else's spirits too," she said.

"It's nice to be able to offer audiences escapism for two hours. They can take their mind off troubles and hopefully come out lighter," she added.

Comedian and actor Brian Conley said it is "great" starring on stage alongside his daughter Lucy.

"We do a lot of comedy together so it was great, we didn't have to rehearse in a studio, we just did it in our lounge," he said.

"She's really good. She couldn't be a better goldilocks. I'm just wondering if we might fall out."

Ms Conley said although it sounds cheesy, she feels like her "hero is my dad".

"I just feel very fortunate [to be working with him]," she added.

She wrote two of the songs in the show with friend Adam O'Connor and said she cried when she heard them playing at the theatre for the first time.

"This is the best Christmas of my life," she added.

David Robbins and magician Phil Hitchcock also star in the production which features the Timbuktu Tumblers.

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Theatre duo to make Eastbourne's 'jewels' shine

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0ewgvrrgn7o, today

Three theatres described as "jewels in the crown of south-east entertainment" are to be managed by a global entertainment company.

Trafalgar Entertainment has entered into a partnership with Eastbourne Borough Council to run the town's Congress Theatre, Devonshire Park Theatre and the Winter Garden, as well as conferencing and exhibition facilities at the Devonshire Quarter Complex.

The council's leader, Stephen Holt, said the company had "a superb track record" and added: "The deal achieves key operational and financial objectives and ensures these jewels in the crown... will continue to delight audiences for years to come."

Trafalgar said it would "protect these wonderful venues".

But opposition leader Robert Smart called for "complete transparency" about the deal, while adding the company "could bring much-needed expertise".

"Eastbourne residents deserve complete transparency about how this deal will allow the Council to pay back the over £60 million borrowed for the recent redevelopment carried out at the Devonshire Quarter Complex," said Mr Smart.

"The administration has been remarkably silent on the financial details of this arrangement."

Trafalgar Entertainment was founded by Sir Howard Panter and Dame Rosemary Squire in 2017. They said they were "delighted" to join forces with the council and "passionately believe that local audiences outside London deserve the very best".

"Through Trafalgar's unique model, Eastbourne audiences are assured that the best shows and events will be brought to Eastbourne alongside major new productions premiering here," they added.

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Firm behind axed Christmas play offers refunds

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn85xpvv5v8o, today

A production firm has issued an apology after cancelling its Christmas show - with ticket holders promised full refunds and compensation.

It comes after the Guernsey cast of A Christmas Carol issued a joint statement expressing concern tickets were still being sold and telling supporters not to purchase them.

The Madcap Children's Theatre two-hour production of the Dicken's classic was due to be performed at St Martin's Community Centre from 19-23 December.

Guernsey Police said it was investigating the circumstances surrounding the show's cancellation.

'Deeply apologise'

Madcap Children's Theatre confirmed the show was cancelled, adding: "To all ticket holders, friends and fans of this classic story, I deeply apologise for letting you down on the productions delivery of this show."

It said "unforeseen and personal issues" had impacted the "production end" of the show, while thanking and apologising to the "wonderful cast" who worked to "keep the project alive".

The statement said: "These performers and creatives are some of the island's hardest working, most talented & kindest people I have had the privilege of working with.

"Although the spirit of Christmas will continue, we are sorry that we couldn't add out (sic) touch to it.

"A full refund, including further compensation for the inconvenience caused will go out to ticket holders and is being processed now."

'Relieved'

In an open letter the former cast members expressed concerns "theatre-goers would be left out of pocket" as the show would not go ahead.

Eventbrite took down the listing on 9 December.

A spokesman for the ticket platform said it had done so "temporarily" and "based on the reports we have received and out of an abundance of caution".

He said the company had reached out to the organisers, and "the next steps will be determined by their response".

Cast member Simon De La Rue, said his wife was among those seeking a refund after purchasing tickets for friends and family.

Ahead of the theatre company's statement being released, he said: "We are relieved the tickets are no longer on sale because it was becoming a concern people might go on buying tickets for an event we knew wasn't going to go ahead.

"Our hope now is that everyone who has bought tickets will get their money back."

Guernsey Police said it was aware of the situation: "An officer has been supporting the reporting person(s) in contacting EventBrite to have the event taken down.

"Wider inquiries into the matter are ongoing."

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How Hamlet found a virtual stage in Grand Theft Auto

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c789pev9dgpo, today

As with any real-life play, the production began with auditions.

"This is William Shakespeare's Hamlet," Crane's in-game character announced to a group of hopeful avatars. "I believe it's the first time it's ever been performed at the Vinewood Bowl.

"If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other," he begged. "And don't kill the actors either."

But predictably, murderous carnage ensued.

'Dig deep'

GTA is notorious for its violent content - and its bloodshed certainly fits the plot of the original play, in which (spoiler) almost everyone dies.

One of Shakespeare's famous tragedies, the story follows Prince Hamlet, who is encouraged by his father's ghost to avenge his death by killing his uncle, the usurper of the throne.

The actors' attempt to bring theatre to the gaming world inspired Crane's wife, film-maker Pinny Grylls, to create a documentary called Grand Theft Hamlet.

Shot entirely in game, the film presents Grylls, Crane and Oosterveen as their onscreen avatars - controlled and voiced by their real-world selves - as they attempt to cast and produce the play in GTA.

"We realised that the most important thing in moments of stress [is to] dig deep and try and find creative solutions to existential crises," Grylls tells BBC News.

The trio were not alone in turning to virtual worlds as a coping mechanism. Data from research company Nielsen indicates 82% of global consumers engaged with gaming content during the pandemic lockdowns - a record high for the medium.

The documentary captures this need for escape - often in bittersweet humour.

"I'm so sick of Hackney," Grylls says as she drives through sun-kissed Los Santos to Crane's virtual flat.

"This is like we've just started dating again and you're taking me to your place."

And since years have now passed since the pandemic lockdowns, the film provides an opportunity to reflect.

"A lot of people have found solace and emotional catharsis in this film," Crane says.

Grand Theft Hamlet is not the first film to adopt the in-game visual style - known as machinima. But the contrast between the virtual world it portrays and the bleak real-world context it was made in sets it apart.

“There's a positivity to our film, despite, yes, dwelling in the kind of trauma of what we were going through,” Crane says.

“There's still something... creative.”

Grylls was particularly struck by the strong “sense of community” fostered by the wide variety of players who answered their virtual casting call.

They include DJ Phil89 - a Hamlet-loving literary agent borrowing her nephew’s account to audition, strutting around as his shirtless male avatar in a top hat and aviators.

ParTeb, half-Finnish, half-Tunisian, appears as a luminous green alien. Nervous of his poor English, he delivers a poignant audition, spontaneously reciting an Islamic prayer in Arabic - an emotional reminder of the surrounding pandemic.

Ultimately, ParTeb chooses to become the cast’s defender in chief, protecting them from mid-performance attacks - once piloting a fighter jet to save the day, in true (intergalactic) Top Gun style.

“It made me realise that the people who game are not just one kind of person,” Grylls says.

Crane hopes their film can help demonstrate how game spaces can foster genuine real-world connection.

And he points to this year’s World of Warcraft documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, which explores how Mats Steen, a young gamer with the life-limiting degenerative condition Duchenne muscular dystrophy, forged a vibrant secret life online.

“It's finally coming into public consciousness,” Crane says. “These relationships with people inside the game, they can be very real.”

Despite moments of humour and light, Grand Theft Hamlet cannot fully escape the painful reality of lockdown.

When Grylls, speaking in game, asks Crane if he is OK, his reply is swift: “Not really... I have nothing now.”

And the tensions are compounded by the bleak state of the arts, with Crane referencing the then-government’s much-derided advert encouraging artists to "reskill" in cyber-security.

Reality check

Mental-health struggles pepper the trio’s asides.

Oosterveen battles isolation as a single man - mentioning the loss of his only remaining relative.

And, as the documentary progresses, Grylls openly argues with Crane, accusing him of neglecting family duties through his growing obsession with the game.

For some peace in the Los Santos chaos, Crane purchases a virtual office for planning meetings, paying to rename its foyer sign Elsinore, in a nod to the Danish castle in Hamlet.

But the group soon starts questioning the value of art and what they are trying to create, particularly when Dipo, the player originally cast as Hamlet, quits rehearsals for his new "real-world" job.

The reality check sees Crane lash out, dismissing their project as “not a real thing”, only for Oosterveen’s frustrations to boil over.

“You’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids,” he says, “I don’t have any of those things.”

New dimension

Reviews for Grand Theft Hamlet have praised its innovative emotional depth.

"This is an irreplaceable experience that speaks volumes about following your dreams despite the challenges that await," IGN wrote.

Variety said it took Shakespeare to a "whole new dimension".

And Crane feels traditional stage plays can learn from gaming, a more accessible medium.

“With theatre, you need to be in a place with a rich culture for it,” he says. “But with gaming, anyone can pick up a console, play, and express their creativity.”

Young cast member Nora has benefited from this opportunity. She openly thanks those in game for giving her the opportunity to act and express herself freely, particularly as someone going through a gender transition.

“It’s amazing that her first production experience of Shakespeare, beyond studying in school, was in Grand Theft Auto,” Grylls says. “That’s what kept us going really, the fact people kept coming back because they wanted to.”

Grylls, Crane and Oosterveen‘s committed madness has paid off. Their documentary has won festival awards, been screened at the BFI London Film Festival, secured a cinema release and will be streamed on Mubi next year.

Its success continued at the British Independent Film Awards on Sunday, with Crane and Grylls jointly winning the best debut director (feature documentary) category. The film also secured the Raindance Maverick award, celebrating bold, creative filmmakers.

So what of the future?

Last month, the government announced the Royal Shakespeare Company would look at using artificial intelligence and immersive technology in future productions.

And without spoiling the final performance of Hamlet in GTA, one scene is staged atop a blimp.

It is a spectacular metaphor of ambition (even as some actors and audience members accidentally fall to their deaths).

In the words of Shakespeare: “All the world's a stage.”

Grand Theft Hamlet is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 6 December, then streaming globally on Mubi in early 2025


Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241204-could-the-airship-be-the-answer-to-sustainable-air-travel, today

Amid talk of sustainable aviation fuel and electric flights, there's another form of air travel currently being mooted as a green alternative to flying: the airship.

Technically, the airship is all a load of hot air: a typically cigar-shaped, self-propelled aircraft made of a vast balloon filled with nearly weightless lifting gases, featuring an attached car or gondola for carrying passengers, crew and cargo. If it conjures up a black-and-white image of the past, you're right – airships were popular at the beginning of the 20th Century before the rise of aviation as we know it. And now, they're making a comeback.

Modern technological advances, paired with a need to develop the aviation industry as it struggles slowly towards net zero, have led aeronautical engineers to re-examine the airship. New materials – including new forms of ultralight nylon – developed since its heyday have made a new type of aircraft possible. Replacing flammable hydrogen with helium has allowed for safer development and aims to avoid a repeat of the Hindenburg disaster, the luxury German airship that exploded live on film in 1937. The new advances and stronger aviation standards mean that really the only thing these new airships have in common with the Hindenburg is their shape and the fact that they're using a gas lighter than air.

Though an airship, which typically flies at around 100-130km/h, won't ever reach the speeds of a jet plane, they are being talked about as forms of slow travel like cruise ships and night trains, where the experience makes up for the speed. Airships fly at a lower altitude than a plane, with unpressurised cabins where you can open and look out of the window, making it more comfortable for passengers. The large balloon also takes far less energy to power – and potentially could operate with electric engines powering liftoff and steering, making them a zero-carbon emitting form of air transport.    

"It's good that we are testing different ideas and innovations, as exploring various solutions is key to improving aviation and making it more sustainable in the future," said leading aviation expert Thomas Thessen, adjunct professor at the University of Aalborg and chief analyst at Scandinavian Airlines. "The biggest advantage I can see is that they can stay in the air for a long time, and their ability to fly vertically up."

Airships do not require a runway to take off, meaning they can take off and land anywhere that has a flat space large enough for them, which could be somewhere as simple as a field, providing there is something to tether it to. This also means that they can help rescue people people in the event of natural disasters, where internet and telephony may be knocked out.

The world's largest aircraft, the LTA Pathfinder 1, is currently being tested in Silicon Valley, California. The 124.5m by 20m new age zeppelin is equivalent in size to four Goodyear blimps and longer than three Boeing 737s. LTA – which stands for "Lighter Than Air" – is one of a handful of airship manufacturers around the world currently poised to enter the aviation market. Founded by Sergey Brin, former president of Alphabet, Google's parent company, the company believes that next-generation airships can reduce the carbon footprint of aviation by using the helium inside the balloon to do the lifting, rather than a carbon-emitting jet engine, and using far smaller engines for thrust. Applications for their airship include more efficient cargo transport from point to point (rather than port to port); and humanitarian aid, where the airship can support relief efforts by delivering supplies even if runways, roads and ports are damaged.

They are not alone: French company Flying Whales is also currently developing airships for cargo use, aiming to reduce the environmental impact of cargo transport; while British firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) are focused on how a hybrid airship – using electric engines as well as helium – can unlock a zero-emission form of air travel.

While sustainable aviation has a long way to go to be a mass travel solution, it all adds up to a mini revolution in the skies. Along with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and electric planes, the new generation of airships are offering an alternative to our carbon intensive status quo of flying.

"We say that the Airlander connects the unconnected," said Hannah Cunningham, head of marketing at HAV. The Airlander 10 is their first production aircraft, a helium-filled, curvaceously shaped vehicle that wouldn't look out of place in a comic book. It has some distinct use cases: one of them is connecting remote islands where it isn't economical to build airports.

"You don't need masses of infrastructure like an airport or train line with an aircraft like this – all you need is a flat surface for landing," she said. "It opens up lots of opportunities to connect places that aren't currently connected, for example communities in places like the Highlands and Islands in Scotland."

Airlander 10 will have four kerosene engines, but due to the helium-filled hull, it emits 90% less CO2 than a typical aircraft. (By 2030, HAV intends to have a hydrogen fuel cell-powered electric engine and offer flights with zero emissions.) It travels at a top speed of 130 km/h and can operate as a mass passenger transport vehicle for up to 90 people.

It's nowhere near as fast as a plane – a typical commercial passenger jet flies at 770-930km/h – but it's not trying to replace them either. The great benefit is how it can connect places where infrastructure is too costly or passenger numbers are too few, said Cunningham. 

Plans are moving forward at pace: last year, HAV signed an agreement with Spanish airline Air Nostrum to double their reservation of Airlander aircraft to 20 for passenger use from 2028, with the idea of using them to connect Spanish islands with the mainland. With a site in place to build hybrid aircraft and certification underway with the Civil Aviation Authority, they could be certified as safe to fly and going into production in four years' time.

For Thessen, the idea that airships could fill the skies like planes is not a realistic one.

"The main thing about aviation is speed," he said. "When you compare aviation with airships, airships travel closer to the speed of a car. In my view, airships cannot replace aircraft but might have a niche role to play, like cruise ships, on slower journeys." 

He can however see a role for it for anyone who is excited by slow travel.

"If you can put your head out of the window and get a view as you travel slowly over the landscape, I could see it having a small role as a special experience."

More like this:

• Will you be going on holiday to… Greenland next year?

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In Germany, you can already try these kinds of special experiences. For around €500 for a 45-minute flight, Zeppelin offers classic Goodyear blimp airship flights over a number of cities in the Bodensee area of southern Germany, much in the mould of hot air balloon experiences.

Ocean Sky Cruises are taking things one step further. The pioneering ultra-luxury airship-airline is offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences on a trip from Svalbard to the North Pole, making the most of the fact that an airship can land on ice and does not need an airstrip or an airport. The journey is expected to take two days and will be conducted at the height of luxury in an airship gondola decked out with panoramic windows, fine dining areas and opulent cabins containing eco-luxury beds that take in the views of the icebergs as you go.

Cabins for the extraordinary experience are selling at around US$200,000 – and they are selling so well that the only seats left are on a waiting list basis, despite the fact that there are no current departure dates and the aircraft for the voyage (expected to be the Airlander 10) has not been certified to fly, let alone purchased. Future plans include a route following the Tropic of Capricorn from Namibia's Skeleton Coast to Victoria Falls on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border, flying low and slow over extraordinary landscapes and wildlife, and stopping in locations hard to reach by plane. Theoretically, it sounds incredible; practically speaking, there is a long way to go.

The airship sector is still in its very early stages, and much could blow it off course. Will airships go the way of flying taxis and run out of money before they can get off the ground? It's certainly possible. But Brin's LTA at least seems to have the capital to make their cargo and humanitarian aid plans a reality; and with buy-in from airlines and other investors, HAV is moving ahead with plans to have its hybrid aircraft in the air in the next decade, with potential to connect remote communities currently under-served by airlines. 

For those of us who love to travel, green innovations in the sector are certainly a good thing, however niche. As Cunningham says, "If we want to keep exploring the world the way we do now, we don't want to be destroying it as we do."

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Ride the real Polar Express with Santa in London

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241210-ride-the-real-polar-express-with-santa-in-london, today

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the animated film, The Polar Express, and the train arrives for the first time with Santa in London from now until 23 December.

The Polar Express, the award-winning children's book by American writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, has become synonymous with Christmas.

In the story, a little boy climbs aboard The Polar Express steam train that magically appears on Christmas Eve in front of his house. The train takes him and some other children on a journey to the North Pole. He receives a sleigh bell from Santa, loses it and is heartbroken. On Christmas day, Santa returns his bell, confirming to the little boy that Santa exists. He's able to hear the bell, but his parents cannot.

Steam trains and Christmas have been linked well before the book was published in 1985 (and made into an animated film in 2004), however. Model train sets were seen circling in holiday window displays of Macy's, the major retailer in the US, as early as 1883; while in the UK, model railways became popular with the 1920s Hornby Clockwork Train Set and appeared in holiday display windows in the mid 1930s at London's Whiteley's department store.

"It felt like magic for people to be able to stay in touch with each other, travel and send packages after the Industrial Revolution," explained Dr Matthew Teichman, a philosopher with a film studies background and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. "[Rail travel] was socially transformative."

When I hear that The Polar Express train ride is coming to London for the first time this December, bringing to life parts of the book and film, I hope that some of that Christmas magic will rub off on me. My five-year-old daughter has started to doubt Santa's existence, and my own father passed away on Christmas Eve last year, so it is a poignant time. I want us to feel the spirit of Christmas by riding this 10-carriage, 640-seat train. But at around £60 per seat for a 12-mile roundtrip journey between Euston and Wembley, I'm slightly sceptical.

Arriving at Euston station, we manage our way through the evening rush-hour commuter chaos to Platform 16 and find a queue of families acting out the scenes from the story. There are three weeks until Christmas, but it looks like Christmas morning, with children and adults dressed in festive pyjamas to replicate scenes from the film.

We're handed wristbands and golden tickets for our journey. Above a makeshift stage, the neon-purple Polar Express sign glows like the North star. Holly and Noel, two entertainers, are singing Christmas classics as if they are on a broadcast radio station in the era of Norman Rockwell Americana. A young girl is doing cartwheels; my daughter joins a crowd of dancing children. My partner and I are still dubious, especially after passing a wall of merchandise that catches the eyes of children and captures the wallets of parents.

Then, a black steam engine arises out of a haze of smoke and we are enveloped by the smell of burning coal. Characters from the movie, such as the conductor, the Hobo and an elf, emerge. A Tom Hanks doppelganger appears as the conductor and instructs us to board the train. Like the movie, he is everywhere on the train – this time with a replica of himself in each carriage welcoming the passengers aboard instead of playing most of the main characters.  

We alight a formerly retired British InterCity rail carriage and sit facing each other at four-seat tables, each with an electrified kerosene-like lantern. The car is decorated with Christmas lights that twinkle to the music. I feel transported to post World-War Two Midwestern America; my daughter feels like she is part of the movie.

The conductor and two women, named Chef Crumbs and Chef Cocoa, dance and sing through the narrow aisles as we start the journey. My daughter and the other children clap and dance in their seats. We listen to a narrator read the book over the loudspeaker while the conductor, Chef Crumbs and Chef Cocoa each hold an oversized book of The Polar Express and walk through the aisle. The children on the train are asked to turn the pages as the voice overhead recites the story, and we are encouraged to make hissing train noises and other sound effects to accompany the story. Hot chocolate served in take-away cups and chocolate chip cookies keep both the adults and children pacified.

There is more singing and dancing but now to Christmas carols. We receive song sheets, and my daughter sings along with the characters on the train. "Are we going to the North Pole or is it pretend?" she asks me.

We've actually reached Wembley and are returning to Euston, but the highlight of the journey, Santa, is yet to appear. He is pre-empted by the Hobo from the movie, who runs through the carriage holding a bell, while making a ringing motion. He says that only believers can hear it. My partner and I can't hear the bell; my daughter says she can hear it, but I think she's imagining it.

As we wait for Santa to reach our table, the conductor punches our golden tickets. When Santa arrives, he hands us each a silver bell and asks if we hear it. I see my partner genuinely smile as it rings.

Dr Jennifer Frost, associate professor of management, sport and tourism at La Trobe University, later tells me that while the Polar Express is transformative for the children in the book, perhaps it's also transformative for adults.  "You have children who don't believe in magic and won't be able to see magic. But once you believe, you can see all these amazing things unfolding."

The whole carriage, from grandparents to grandchildren. starts to sing Jingle Bells and the Twelve Days of Christmas. As the engine pulls into Euston station's bright lights, the voice of Van Allsburg, the author of The Polar Express, ends the journey by reminding us to "remember the thing about trains: It doesn't matter where they're going. What matters is deciding to get onboard."

I am touched when my daughter shakes the silver sleigh bell that Santa has given her and slyly asks me, "Mummy, can you hear the bell?"

Putting on my coat at the end of the journey and heading back through crowds of commuters in Euston station, I am a bit sad that the experience is over. Even my partner, who had his doubts, says he enjoyed the trip. The magic of The Polar Express has left us believing again.

My daughter in the meantime is saving her bell for grandma.

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A fashion expert's insider guide to shopping in New York City

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231120-a-fashion-experts-insider-guide-to-shopping-in-new-york-city, today

Just in time for the holidays, stylist to the stars Erin Walsh shares her insider recommendations for getting to the heart of New York City's vast shopping scene.

New York City's shopping scene is undeniably iconic. The nation's undisputed retail capital since the late 1800s, its shimmering concrete streets teem with luxury flagships, historic department stores and edgy indie boutiques. And yet, few out-of-town visitors venture past the chain stores of 5th Avenue, Rockefeller Center and Herald Square.

"If you only go [there], you're missing the special gems," said Erin Walsh – long-time New York resident and stylist to flawless Hollywood celebs like Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez. Walsh is a passionate shopper, and equally passionate about New York City. "I love New York so much," she said. "I feel like when you live there, it becomes not just a part of your identity, but energetically, your heart starts to beat with it."

Walsh's approach to shopping in New York City is simple: "Get lost. The only way you get surprised and inspired is when you just wander around." But for Walsh, getting lost means meandering through laser-focused "pockets" of her favourite neighbourhoods to create ultra-niche experiences that don't stop at shopping. "I always think of the restaurants around it," she said. "Things that feel cosy… it just makes it more fun."

Here is her expert guide to "getting lost" in New York City's shopping scene.

1. Best for women's fashion: SoHo between West Broadway and Broadway 

Walsh's "pockets" often span mere street blocks, carving up a neighbourhood into unofficial micro-nabes, like the cobblestoned stretch of West Broadway and Broadway in SoHo that's her pick for women's fashion.

Artsy SoHo – famed for its tony boutiques – is teeming with "so many options", she said, naming The Webster, Kate Spade and Chloé as her go-to luxury brand stores in the area.

Walsh also likes combing the streets to uncover surprising indie boutiques, like Kirna Zabête on Mercer Street, which offers highly curated selections from both legendary and up-and-coming designers.

While in this stretch of SoHo, Walsh likes to make a stop at "special places", like La Mercerie. "It's not only a restaurant," she said. "It's clothing, a showroom. Everything that's in the restaurant is for sale. They even sell flowers… and then you go to Balthazar [restaurant and bar] at the end of the day."

2. Best for men's shopping: The Bowery

When it comes to shopping for her male clients and loved ones, Walsh heads to the industrial Bowery neighbourhood in downtown Manhattan – a stretch of gritty city blocks she fondly calls "woodsy" and "underrated, absolutely".

Her favourite Bowery neighbourhood shops are found in the pocket near The Bowery Hotel, including [upscale home decor store] John Derien on 2nd Street, which Walsh calls her "Christmas problem solver". She also always makes a stop at Dashwood Books on Bond Street. "It's my husband's favourite bookstore," she said. "Just that little stretch there. It's so cosy and wonderful. They put the Goop shop there, too. It's a special collection of little shops."

3. Best for traditional holiday shopping: Midtown

New York City shopping is always otherworldly, but never more so than during the winter holidays (blame Miracle on 34th Street). The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade down 5th Avenue draws hordes of spectators each year, the ritzy shops at Rockefeller Center are almost as much of a draw as the plaza's massive Christmas tree, and the high art holiday window displays of 5th Avenue's historic department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Saks are nothing short of legendary.

Locals generally avoid the tourist-thronged madness of Midtown during the holidays, but Walsh always makes it a point to visit. "You have to go to Midtown and do all of that," she said. "It's just so special. Even with my kids, taking them to the Christmas tree [in Rockefeller Center] when there's so many people you can barely move. It's great."

4. Best for home interiors: Tribeca, the West Village

Walsh, who studied theatre at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, is just as passionate about interiors as she is about fashion, finding joy in layering textures and materials in New York City's tiny spaces. "If you're living an aesthetic, it's the spaces that you allow into your energy that really impacts how you feel," she said.

She hits sophisticated Tribeca and the skewed streets of the historic West Village when she wants to snap up beautifully designed homewares and surprise gifts, from mirrors to candlesticks. "I've given rugs, I've given furniture pieces, trays, books. I think a robe [dressing gown] makes a beautiful gift," she said. "I like that idea when you give someone a present… you want them to feel held and seen."

She also enjoys visiting candle stores and shopping for fragrances, which she thinks are a "surprising gift". "People always say don't do that," she said. "But I always feel like the best gifts, you take a risk."

5. Best for kids: SoHo, between Thompson and West Broadway

Whenever she needs to shop for children, Walsh heads back to artsy SoHo but narrows her focus even more tightly to a two-block stretch on SoHo's westernmost edge, citing Bonpoint on West Broadway as the touchstone for children's designers in the area. "There's so many cute little kids shops there, and you only find that when you're wandering around," she said.

Another of her favourite stores for children is Makie on Thompson Street: "The most beautiful kids clothes... It's Japanese but feels a little bit Scandinavian somehow." And a final stop at Ladurée [café] on West Broadway for their signature macarons in a beautiful box will delight adults and children alike.

6. Best for quiet luxury: the Upper East Side, around The Mark Hotel

Walsh's favourite shopping pocket in uptown Manhattan is the swanky stretch of Madison Avenue surrounding The Mark Hotel. But before even venturing to the boutiques, Walsh recommends visiting Georgia Louise Atelier on 71st Street for a "reset" facial and a luxe beauty haul of high-tech face tools or products from Louise's own skincare line.

Afterwards, she suggests hitting the avenue's stretch of luxury shops like Sidney Garber jewellery, Ralph Lauren and La Ligne clothing boutique, which she loves for its sweaters. "I could give probably everyone I know and that I don't know, a sweater from La Ligne and everybody would be thrilled," she said. Rounding out Walsh's Upper East Side luxe shopping experience is a visit to the Gagosian art gallery and finally winding down at the end of the day with a drink at The Mark.

7. Best for making a whole day of it: SoHo, between Lafayette and Crosby Streets

Walsh recommends another ultra-niche pocket of SoHo with a tight concentration of enough fun businesses to tie up an entire day. "There's some great furniture and jewellery shops on the corner of Crosby and Howard," she said."You get your nails done [at Paintbox nail salon]. And then you get your man a present and coffee at Saturdays [NYC]."

Of the area's handbag and jewelley stores, Walsh enjoys visiting Prada and Dinosaur Designs, then exploring the smaller, up-and-coming boutiques in the area before meandering one block east to Lafayette Street, where she zeroes in on Santa Maria Novella (the NYC branch of the luxe Italian fragrance line) and the McNally Jackson indie bookshop. Afterwards, she makes a point to stop by the Sant Ambroeus bar for a refreshing Campari spritz. "Always feels good," she said. "It's about getting lost, right?"

8. Best new kid on the block: Dover Street Market (Flatiron/Madison Square Park)

As much as Walsh loves shopping in Manhattan's classic downtown neighbourhoods, she keeps her eye on up-and-coming shopping areas, too, like the Flatiron district's Dover Street Market. The Flatiron District – home to the striking wedge-shaped Flatiron building and Madison Square Park – "has really exploded in the past few years", said Walsh. "They have a unique and diverse selection and there's so many cute little coffee shops and restaurants… there's great jewellery, a more international selection of designers."

Walsh notes that the area is becoming a foodie magnet as well, with Eataly and Cecconi's locations, as well as several hotels like Ace, where shoppers can rest their bags – and their feet – as they take a cocktail break. "Enjoy it," recommended Walsh. "A lot of times people feel like they're in a crazy rush, and that's when you get bad presents."

This article was originally published on 23 November 2023, and updated on 11 December 2024.

BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.

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Council aims to help local shops with Christmas ad

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clygd8z4znqo, today

A council has taken a leaf out of the high street giants' book by releasing a Christmas advert to encourage people to shop local.

North Northamptonshire Council's commercial portrays a shopper visiting various independent high street shops in the county.

David Brackenbury, the Conservative-controlled council's executive member for growth and regeneration said the authority was "conscious that times can be quite hard for local businesses".

The BBC has approached the authority for details of how the advert was funded.

The commercial is part of the council's "Hi Street" campaign which is seeking to encourage people to "step away from online scrolling and discover the magic of the high street."

The council's website said the campaign had been "made possible" by the government's UK shared prosperity fund.

Among the businesses included in the advert are Jollys Toys in Thrapston, The Oundle Bookshop and Bosworth's Garden Centre in Burton Latimer.

The online ad is soundtracked by a rendition of Carol of the Bells performed by Kettering choir The Songbirds.

Mr Brackenbury said: "We're all searching to spend our money wisely and there's a lot of competition from the internet.

"What we want to do is promote the fantastic local businesses we have up and down the towns and villages of north Northamptonshire.

"There are lots of interesting surprises and incentives to go out there and shop locally."

He said local businesses were crucial to providing jobs and services in the county.

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Heathrow airport worker reunited with lifesaver

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0lgp0625rko, today

“The frightening part is, I didn’t actually have any symptoms. I remember getting out of the aircraft, turned around, and closed the door and that was it.”

For John Walton, it was just another day in his job as an airport worker at Heathrow.

But then suddenly, while he was working on an aircraft near the taxiway, his heart stopped.

When he collapsed, his colleagues at United Airlines rushed to his aid.

They carried out first aid and used a defibrillator to restart his heart until the paramedics arrived, including Rob Weldon.

Mr Weldon happened to be on shift elsewhere in the airport and reached the scene within about six minutes.

They all helped to stabilise Mr Walton before taking him to Harefield Hospital in Hillingdon, where he spent several days in a coma.

Fourteen months on from his heart attack, Mr Walton is mostly back to full health and back to work as a ramp agent at the airport.

And he has now finally been able to thank Mr Weldon in person, after they met properly for the first time at a reunion organised by their respective colleagues.

"Everyone around me pulled as a team and pulled me through it," said Mr Walton.

"They saved my life. How do I thank someone for it? Thank you is not enough," he added.

Mr Weldon said: "You don’t often hear about what happened to the people you treat, let alone see them again, so this is really nice.”

He added: "If it wasn’t for his colleagues doing CPR straightaway and defibrillating him straightaway, he wouldn’t be here today, so they are the heroes in this story!"

The events of that day in August 2023 have changed Mr Walton.

The 59-year-old from East Grinstead says he now lives life to the full and is looking to buy a boat to use the River Thames.

'Every minute counts'

London Ambulance Service (LAS) consultant paramedic, Mark Faulkner, said: "At Heathrow we see cardiac arrest survival rates which are dramatically better than other areas of the capital.

"This is because many of the staff are trained in basic resuscitation skills and there are numerous readily accessible public defibrillators."

He added: "Each minute that passes before chest compressions begin and a defibrillator is used dramatically reduces the chances of survival."

LAS says it found 150 neighbourhoods in London where public access to defibrillators is limited or non-existent, affecting chances of survival.

The service is campaigning to get defibrillators placed in areas where they are most needed.

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Warning staff shortages could disrupt Christmas travel

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4x850eyx1o, today

The government is concerned that Christmas train services could be disrupted by staff shortages, the rail minister has said.

Lord Hendy said that the transport department was going to "keep a close watch on staffing" throughout the holidays.

Disruptions may also be exacerbated by fresh industrial action, with Avanti West Coast train managers voting to strike for three days over the festive period.

Recruitment has proven difficult across the rail industry, leaving train operating companies dependent on staff volunteering to work extra paid shifts, particularly during big occasions.

A Department for Transport official told MPs that the railway system was generally "over-reliant on overtime working" for train crew, particularly around Christmas.

Many train drivers and other crew members do not have Sunday working included in their contracts, with some operators offering extra paid shifts to ensure services can run.

On Tuesday, the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union said that walkouts have been scheduled for 22, 23 and 29 December for Avanti services, after it rejected the train company's proposals for "rest day working arrangements".

Train managers typically work a 41-hour week but due to staff shortages can be asked to work on their days off.

The RMT has, however, described that the current arrangements as "unacceptable", with some 300 train managers expected to walk out.

Avanti West Coast said customers would face "significant disruption" during "our busiest and most important" time of the year.

It was announced weeks after RMT members working at a number of other rail companies accepted a pay rise of 4.75% for the last financial year, and a 4.5% increase for 2024-25.

Those working for Northern, however, recently rejected the firm's enhanced four-month pay offer for conductors working on Sundays.

As a result, passengers may see disruption across its services in December, the company said.

Lord Hendy told MPs on the Commons Transport Committee that there were worries that closures of parts of the railway over Christmas may put more pressure on others.

Britain's rail network completely shuts down every year on Christmas Day, with a limited service on Boxing Day.

Many routes will be closed for longer during the festive period because Network Rail, which owns and maintains the railways, will be carrying out engineering work.

Lord Hendy, who chaired Network Rail from 2015 until he was brought into the Labour government, said: "Christmas is a good time to do major engineering work, because the demand is lower over several days."

Network Rail has previously said passenger numbers at major stations typically drop by 50 to 60% during the seven days between Christmas Day and a new year compared with a week in November or early December.

Which routes will be affected over Christmas?

* London Liverpool Street station will be closed from Christmas Day until 2 January. Travellers are advised to use Victoria line Tube services from Walthamstow Central or Seven Sisters.

* No trains will call at London Paddington between 27 December and 29 because of preparatory work necessary for HS2's Old Oak Common station.

* Heathrow Express trains will be unable to run between Paddington and the west London airport.

* Some Great Western Railway services will be diverted to or from Euston, but the majority will stop or start at Reading or Ealing Broadway.

* Signalling work in the Crewe area between Christmas Day and January 2 will cause significant changes to services, with no trains passing through Crewe station on 27 December.

* There will be no direct services between Crewe and Liverpool, and a reduced service between Crewe and Manchester, from 28 December until 3 January.

* Services in the Cambridge area will be disrupted between 27 December and 5 January, affecting CrossCountry, Greater Anglia, Great Northern and Thameslink services.


Flights from Exeter to Amsterdam to launch in 2025

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly2zzx49veo, today

A new route from Exeter airport is scheduled to launch next year.

The airport has announced daily flights to and from Amsterdam, starting in March 2025.

The route will be served by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines - the first time the airline has flown from Exeter.

The airport said it was the first time in five years Exeter has served Amsterdam with bosses saying passengers will be able to travel to the international aviation hub of Schiphol airport in about 90 minutes.

'Touristic development'

Exeter Airport's managing director Stephen Wiltshire said the move was a "tremendous boost" for regional connectivity.

He said: "Flights will operate every day of the week, providing a fantastic gateway for both business and leisure travellers from their local airport."

From 30 March, flights will depart from Amsterdam to Exeter at 16:15 local time, and from Exeter to Amsterdam at 17:20 local time, seven days a week.

Jerome Salemi, general manager for UK & Ireland at Air-France-KLM, said: "We are very excited to launch Exeter as KLM's 18th departure point from the UK to Amsterdam and beyond.

"We hope our new services will contribute towards the economic, touristic and cultural development of the region and the local community."

Mr Salemi said he looked forward to "working with Exeter Airport on making this route a success".

Paul Coles, chief executive officer of the South West Business Council, said the new route was "really important" to the region.

He said: "It gives us opportunities for both inbound tourism, which is really critical for our bedrock industries in the south west, but also that outbound piece to the rest of the world.

"When I look at some of the economic activity that's going on in the south west, you know, we need these routes to bring inward investors in, so it's a really important route for us."

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Tourism body 'putting fireworks before lifeguards'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wl5nl8eeyo, today

Tourism bosses have been accused of putting fireworks before lifeguards in a row over budgets.

Great Yarmouth Borough Council is reviewing spending £29,300 per year to fund RNLI beach lifeguards at Great Yarmouth, Gorleston and Hemsby.

The resort's Tourism and Business Improvement Area (Visit Great Yarmouth) has been asked by the council to pick up the cost.

Previously, the chairman of Visit Great Yarmouth told the BBC: "What sort of place are we if we can't make the beaches in this borough safe for the holidaymakers that come? It's a very sad time."

Council leader Carl Smith said at a cabinet meeting that the tourism body "would rather have fireworks than lifeguards".

Asa Morrison, chief executive of Visit Great Yarmouth, said: "We are currently in discussions about the funding and we are expecting to meet with council representatives in January next year."

It is the second year the council has looked to cut its spending on beach lifeguards as it tries to find £300,000 of savings.

The borough has three of the busiest beaches in Norfolk.

Last year, the authority paused the proposed saving in order to find alternative sources of funding.

While the RNLI funds training and provides lifesaving equipment and the lifeguard stations, the council contributes £29,300 to the salaries of the lifeguards.

'Risk to reputation'

But the Conservative-run council is hoping to pass that cost to Visit Great Yarmouth, which generates £500,000 a year through a levy on tourism businesses.

Council leader Carl Smith said at a recent cabinet meeting: "I am meeting with the GYBID but it seems they would rather have fireworks than lifeguards."

He added that the leaders of the group "don't like councillors challenging them".

It is understood that GYBID spends about £130,000 a year on fireworks, a figure that has been criticised as an "obscene amount" by Trevor Wainwright, leader of the Labour opposition group.

He has called for spending to be redirected towards lifeguards, which he sees as playing a vital role in supporting tourism.

Mr Wainwright said: "If one person loses their life on the beach, it will mean the tourism industry will be sunk.

"It is a risk to the reputation of the area."

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Welcome to smog season: How will air pollution change where and when we travel?

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241209-welcome-to-smog-season-how-will-air-pollution-change-where-and-when-we-travel, today

As New Delhi makes headlines yet again for its choking smog, experts and holidaymakers alike are pondering how worsening air quality will change travel in the long-term.

My first words during a Christmas trip to Hanoi last year did not bode well: "It looks like the set of Bladerunner." I peered out of the airplane window, expecting to see Vietnam's capital twinkling in the sunset. Instead, just like the 1982 dystopian sci-fi film, I was met with a blanket of grey, dirty mist smothering the city lights. A cautious traveller, I had double-checked my hotel bookings, taken out insurance, packed carefully. But there was one thing I hadn't planned for: smog.

Luckily, Hanoi's haze – which at the time reached "very unhealthy" levels on the Air Quality Index (AQI) – cleared eventually. But the first days were spent scrambling to buy air masks, squinting through low-level headaches and postponing leisurely walks to explore the lively streets.

Welcome to smog season

Dangerous air pollution – whether from wildfires, slash-and-burn farming, industrial emissions or even intensive cremation practices – is now common for residents and travellers around the globe. Even as cities choke, they find it hard to clean up their act. New Delhi, which recently saw air pollution levels 30-35 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), issued a ban on firecrackers during Diwali, a colourful festival high on many tourist itineraries. The ban was largely ignored and pyrotechnics went off across the city – worsening air quality even further.

Many places see "toxic air seasons" as the new normal: a regrettable, unavoidable part of the calendar. Unfortunately, this drastic pollution may see visitors shunning countries entirely for those periods. End-of-year travel is a key time for holidays, but coincides in many destinations with colder temperatures that trap pollutants close to the ground.

Some nations worst-hit by smog also depend keenly on tourist dollars. Bangladesh, for example, was ranked fifth worst in the world for air quality in 2022 – yet 4.4% of the country's GDP comes from tourism. Egypt, ranked ninth worst for air quality, relies on holidaymakers to support one in 12 local jobs.

Air power

With climate change worsening global air pollution trends, it's likely that nations, and travellers, will start to see fresh air as a precious natural resource.

Bryce Merkl Sasaki, a digital nomad who has travelled extensively in Southeast Asia, has seen several destinations marred over the past few years. "Smog was definitely an issue where we lived in Mae Sot [in Western Thailand]. Many times when we wanted to take a bicycle trip along the river, the air was so bad that we decided to stick inside," he recalls. "Another time we cancelled a trip to Chiang Mai because the smog there was way above safe levels."

When he moved to rural Cambodia as the marketing manager for a local arts school and circus, he struggled with recurring dust and haze. "As someone who worked in the tourism industry, I can say the smoggiest days definitely meant fewer tourists coming to the circus that night."

With 6.5 million deaths attributed to bad air each year, the issue is now spotlit on global public health agendas. Apart from the obvious symptoms of respiratory diseases, exposure to air pollution is linked to higher risk of diabetes, obesity, cancer, infertility and even dementia.

Fresh air is such a commodity that it has even become a souvenir, with multiple countries, including Iceland, Italy and Canada, selling their canned local air to amused and envious visitors. (Ironically, these marketing stunts create an added carbon footprint from their manufacture, one that further worsens air quality.)

Solutions on the ground

So what can be done? Technology may come to the aid of our lungs, on a local level at least. A team at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University are developing an app that can map Dublin's air pollution. The app will calculate routes allowing pedestrians and cyclists to adapt their journey, circumventing the more harmful pockets of the city. As the issue develops, tools like these may become everyday must-haves, at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, alarming air quality is already shifting consumers' travel decisions, says Cathy Feliciano-Chon, managing partner, APAC at FINN Partners, a global marketing communications agency with a practice in travel and hospitality. "Especially now when experiences outdoors and in nature have become even more popular since the pandemic." During this period billions of people, stuck in hotels, hospitals and homes, suddenly became aware of how the natural environment affected their mood.

No wonder some hotels scrambled to add a specific line item to their budgets: industrial HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) systems designed to kill on-site mould and dust. Other properties are targeting the bedroom: RH Guesthouse, a boutique hotel in New York, proudly offers the FreshBed, a US$50,000 piece of kit that wafts purified air through the mattress so guests can customise temperature and humidity levels for restorative sleep.

Travellers looking for air that beautifies can rest easy too. Cryotherapy, which exposes the body to extreme cold temperatures, now features in luxury spas, who tout the pure air's ability to restore circulation to the skin of jet-lagged travellers. Victorian-era doctors would approve.

The future of "air" travel

Countries lucky enough to sit on prime real estate – brimming with clean air – are waking up to their commodities. A 2020 study by travel think tank TCI Research found that air quality is one of Europe's top three key competitive selling points for tourists. And you can already see this theme cropping up in marketing campaigns around the globe. Tourism Canada's 2023 campaign invited tourists to "take your maple leave". The video ad features a cheerful Canuck by a windswept lighthouse, urging viewers to enjoy "a breath of fresh air in a world full of stress".

The same year, Australia's Tourism Tasmania showcased their tranquil "Come Down for Air" campaign. One video featured no dialogue, just a lone swimmer diving into the waves, audio of the restless sea breeze and an ending line: "Walk-ins welcome." Nor is their campaign slogan mere hot air – Tasmania's atmosphere regularly ranks among the cleanest on the planet.

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But Feliciano-Chon, who is also an advisory board member of the Global Wellness Summit, an annual conference covering health and lifestyle trends, says tourists won't come for easy breathing alone. "It's more about the overall nature proposition. Nor is the desire to visit places of unspoiled natural beauty limited to one demographic. It's global. It's a common thread among adventure, wellness and solo travel segments. And it's a trend we only see as growing in the coming years."

With an unsullied atmosphere increasingly desirable, holidaymakers are prepared to head for extremes. In its 2022-2023 summer season, Antarctica saw more than 100,000 visitors flood the continent for its pristine views, bracing wind and solitude. That number is expected to balloon. Some worry this will be the next of many hotspots to wrestle with overtourism.

"It is a top concern, and ecotourism taxes like the ones we've seen in Bhutan and New Zealand are designed to mitigate that," Feliciano-Chon notes. "The reality is we're moving in the direction where there will be a premium to access these places, one which only affluent travellers will be able to afford."

In volatile times, it's just one of the many ways the travel map is being rewritten.

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Grímsey: The Arctic island with 20 people and one million birds

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241127-grimsey-the-arctic-island-with-20-people-and-one-million-birds, today

Set some 40km off Iceland's northern coast, this windswept sliver is home to one of Europe's most remote settlements and a thriving seabird population.

Even on a sunny day in late August, the wind on the island of Grímsey cut through our waterproof layers with so much force that one bad gust felt as if it could wipe us clean off the map for good.

My husband and I arrived on Grímsey's beautiful, blustery shores carrying a couple of wooden walking sticks – not so much to help us keep our balance against the elements, but rather to ward off the Arctic terns that are notorious for dive-bombing unassuming tourists who wander too close to their nests along the craggy coastline. As we slowly walked around the island's dramatic basalt cliffs, we also noticed a few puffin stragglers who had yet to migrate out to sea before returning to Grímsey in full force come April.  

A 6.5-sq-km island set some 40km off Iceland's northern coast, Grímsey is the country's northernmost inhabited point and the only sliver of Iceland located within the Arctic Circle. In many ways, this frigid far-flung isle cast off a frigid far-flung island nation is Iceland at its most elusive and extreme – and therein lies its appeal.

Until 1931, the only way to reach Grímsey was by hopping aboard a small boat that delivered letters twice a year to the island. These days, 20-minute flights from the city of Akureyri and three-hour ferries from the village of Dalvík whisk adventure-seekers to this rocky, remote island – most of whom, like us, are keen to see one of Europe's most remote settlements and its incredible variety of seabirds and wildlife. In addition to the kamikaze Arctic terns and a thriving puffin population, black-legged kittiwakes, razorbills and guillemots – along with free-roaming Icelandic horses and sheep – also call this idyllic island home. It's estimated the seabirds here outnumber residents by roughly 50,000 to one.

"You won't believe it, but there are only 20 of us living here full time," explained Halla Ingolfsdottir, a local tour guide and owner of Artic Trip.

Born in Reykjavík, Ingolfsdottir grew up in south-east Iceland and started spending extended stretches of time in Grímsey after visiting her sister, who moved to the island years earlier after meeting and marrying a local fisherman. After more than 20 years living part time in Grímsey, Ingolfsdottir said she decided to become a full-time resident in 2019, and she hasn't looked back since.

"People think I moved here for love, but I fell in love with the island," she explained. "There’s a magic, and I fell in love with how people lived here, the islanders and the nature. Nature is very powerful here; it's a different natural force in the winter, and with the darkness comes the Northern Lights, the stars and the storms. In spring comes the light, and the birds; every season is special," she added.

In addition to running a tour company, Ingolfsdottir also owns and operates a nine-room guesthouse out of her home. When she's not leading tours and tending to her visitors, Ingolfsdottir stops by Grímsey's power station once a day to ensure the island is generating enough electricity to keep things running. While mainland Iceland relies heavily on geothermal and renewable energy, Grímsey is so remote that it's actually off the national power grid. Instead, the entire island runs on a single diesel-powered generator.

"People on my tours always ask if I get bored, but I have so much to do," Ingolfsdottir said. "We do the same things as those who live on the mainland: we work, we go to the gym, we exercise, but it is nature that keeps me here."

There is no hospital, doctor or police station on Grímsey. In case of emergency, Ingolfsdottir says that the Coast Guard and emergency services have trained islanders to take action. "When you live here, you must learn to be flexible and adjust to different situations and scenarios," Ingolfsdottir said. "We are prepared for anything. In case of an emergency, they train us to be ready for the first response, and a doctor comes to visit every three weeks by plane."

A small collection of homes (many of which double as guesthouses for tourists) is located on the south-west side of the island. The settlement, known as Sandvík, also includes a schoolhouse that now functions as a community centre, as well as a handicraft gallery and cafe that offers homemade Icelandic wares, knits and other knickknacks. There is also a small grocery store that's open for about an hour each day, as well as a restaurant with a bar, a swimming pool, library, church and the airstrip – which doubles as a popular landing spot for birds.

Like many small towns and villages in Iceland, Grímsey's history is rooted in local lore. As the story goes, the island's name is linked to a Norse settler named Grimur who is believed to have sailed from Western Norway's Sogn district. The earliest known reference to Grímsey dates to 1024, as recorded in the Heimskringla, an ancient Icelandic saga in which King Ólafur of Norway requested Grímsey as a token of friendship. Local leaders refused, deeming the island too valuable to relinquish, thanks to its abundance of fish and birds.

By the late 18th Century, Grímsey's population nearly collapsed due to pneumonia and fishing-related accidents – a combination of small rowboats, bad weather and lack of a natural harbour making landing here a risky pursuit. Still, the community endured, thanks to the steady stream of fishermen from the mainland and those who arrived to trade with the nearby settlement on Húsavík, located on Iceland's northern coast.

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In 2009, Grímsey became part of the municipality of Akureyri, yet the island's few hardy locals remain proud of their unique identity. "Today, Grímsey's land is owned by residents, the town of Akureyri and the Icelandic state who work to preserve the island's legacy as both a natural treasure and a resilient community," said María H Tryggvadóttir, Grímsey's project manager for tourism.

Like many who visit this beguiling island, Tryggvadóttir has developed a special connection of her own with Grímsey. "What fascinates me most about Grímsey is its remoteness, [its] unique light and incredible birdlife," Tryggvadóttir said. "There's something truly exceptional about wandering along the steep cliffs of this grassy island, feeling the deep tranquility of the landscape, while being surrounded by thousands of seabirds. But it's the sincerity and warmth [of the people] that create a welcoming, close-knit community [and] make Grímsey feel truly special."

In addition to puffins, the island's other main tourism draw is its geographical location. Located at 66°N latitude, Grímsey celebrates its status as the only part of Iceland located in the Artic Circle with not one but two landmarks. In 2017, a 3,447kg concrete art installation called Orbis et Globus was inaugurated and placed on the highest, northernmost part of the island to mark the imaginary line where the Arctic Circle and Grimsey intersect.

"It has been a great marketing tool for the island, but it's impossible to move and we have to have special equipment from the mainland to move it," Ingolfsdottir said. "We have another monument for the Arctic Circle, which has been here much longer, since 1970, I believe, I hope you had a chance to visit it!" she added.

Because the Earth rotates on a tilted axis at 23.5 degrees, the sphere must also be moved annually to align with the line of latitude for the Arctic Circle – generally about 14m each year. Depending on the year, the sphere has been moved as much as 130 meters south. In 2047, when the island will technically no longer fall within the Arctic Circle, the plan is to roll the sphere off a cliff and send it off into the ocean for good.

Grimsey's position so far north also means that islanders experience polar nights, when the island is cast into a months-long stretch of total darkness from early December through mid-February.  "In my case, the darkness does not bother me. It does bother some people after a certain point, but we know that it will get light again," Ingolfsdottir said. 

One of the ways islanders have decided to cope with the darkness is by making their own light. "We start decorating for Christmas early because we want to light up the darkness, and we decorate a lot with the Christmas lights. It's like a little Christmas town here, and we don't take them down until February," Ingolfsdottir said. 

As far as the future of Grímsey goes, Ingolfsdottir says there are plans in the works for some new developments as soon as next summer, including a retreat for writers and other creatives to come and stay in a set of existing houses that will be renovated to accommodate longer-term stays.

We didn't end up getting attacked by terns during our visit, but our brief time on Grímsey left me with a deeper appreciation for the importance of community, and an even deeper desire to return for a longer term visit.

"We don't want mass tourism on the island," Ingolfsdottir said. "One of the things I love about this island is how personal it is, and we have a limit on how many people can come here; it's something the island has been doing well from the very beginning and something that the rest of Iceland should take note of before it's too late."

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The UK's network of free hiking 'hotels'

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241126-the-uks-network-of-free-hiking-hotels, today

You can’t book them and you don't know who else will be there, but they're an excellent way to explore Britain's most remote corners – for free.

Hiking up to the top of a valley in Wales' Cambrian Mountains, I was struck by the silence. The noise of the modern world that we've trained ourselves to filter out becomes conspicuous by its absence. This is probably the best indication that you've entered one of Britain's remote places, and a good sign if you're trying to find a bothy, one of the free-to-use shelters that dot the country's wild areas.

Founded in 1965, the Mountain Bothy Association (MBA) is a registered charity that maintains "simple shelters in remote country for the use of all who love wild and lonely places". The organisation manages more than 100 bothies in Scotland, Wales and Northern England.

The system is simple. Bothies are free to use and open to anyone. They can't be booked in advance, and there's an unwritten rule that the bothy is never full (although groups of six or more and commercial groups are asked not to use them). As long as you follow the MBA's Bothy Code, which is based on respect for other users, the bothy and the surroundings, you're welcome.

That is if you can find them. Although the grid references are available online, don't count on phone signal when looking for them, and even with a well-marked map, they can prove elusive.

I was hiking a network of trails in an area known as the "Green Desert of Wales" because of its lack of settlements, roads and infrastructure. I planned to sleep at Nant Syddion bothy before heading to Aberystwyth, the largest nearby town, the next day. Given the relative scarcity of buildings in the landscape, I'd expected to locate the bothy easily. But climbing up and down a succession of forestry tracks as the sun began to set, I began to wonder if I was going to find it at all.  

With relief, I finally caught the reflection of a window through the trees and climbed down a steep path to a two-storey stone building that looked like a home transported into the middle of nowhere, complete with a spiral of smoke climbing out of the chimney. And that's exactly what it was. Nant Syddion used to be home to a lead miner and his family and now provides a temporary home for hikers. 

Every bothy is an adapted building with a previous life. Most are old shepherd's huts, farmsteads or workers' accommodation. In the early 20th Century, hill farming declined and fewer and fewer people lived in remote locations, leaving many buildings derelict. After World War Two, hiking and mountaineering as leisure pursuits dramatically increased in popularity and those exploring the outdoors began using these abandoned buildings as shelters. The MBA was created by Bernard Heath and a group of friends to restore and maintain them for like-minded individuals.

Remote upland country takes its toll on buildings; the wind and rain age, erode and wear almost everything. However, arriving at the bothy, I found that everything was watertight and functional. Even the gate and the front door had recently been painted.

Keeping 100 buildings habitable in some of the remotest parts of Britain is no mean feat. When you factor in that this work is all done by volunteers (and where bothies have toilets, it involves carrying the waste out), it's a step beyond altruism. Each bothy has two maintenance organisers, and work parties are organised for any large-scale or structural jobs, which, Neil Stewart, head of communications at the MBA, told me, are rarely lacking in willing hands.

Although they're maintained, bothies are by no means luxurious. You won't find electricity or running water and will be lucky to have a long-drop toilet. Most will have a stove, but there's no guarantee a supply of fuel will be there. Your comforts are carried in, and you should pack as if you're camping, including a tent if the bothy is overcrowded or you don't fancy the company.

* Don't expect a hostel. Bothies are left empty and have no electricity or (very rarely) running water. The majority also don't have a toilet but will have a spade that you can use to dig a hole at least 200m away from the building.

* Bothies are also called stone tents because you're essentially camping within a shelter. You'll be reliant on your camping skills for comfort, so practice these before your trip.

* Bring a tent. There's no way to predict how many people will be at the bothy, and if you don't fancy sharing the space with a large group, you'll need a backup plan.

The company you find in bothies, and the fact that it's completely unpredictable, is one of their unique attractions, according to Phoebe Smith, author The Book of the Bothy. "In a world where everything is bookable and controllable, I love that you can't do that with a bothy," she said. "You just have to go and turn up, and you could have it all to yourself or you could meet some incredible people and share some incredible memories. [Bothies] connect you with other people."

When I arrived at Nant Syddion, there were already two cyclists in the main room who were doing an off-road tour of the area. I laid out my roll mat and sleeping bag in the last unoccupied upstairs room and went to join them.

After introducing myself to the cyclists, Alex and Simon, I prepared a quick meal over my gas stove while they battled to get the fire to take. Built to withstand its exposed position, the bothy had thick walls and small windows, so when the light began to disappear, it got dark quickly. We lit a succession of candles and arranged our chairs in a semicircle around the roaring fire.

One of the best parts of bothying for me is that people are drawn to socialise together – although you're under no obligation if you want your own space. As we warmed up by the fire, one, then two bottles of whisky (something of a traditional drink for bothies) did the round and stories began to flow. We talked about recent hiking trips in the Dolomites and our bothy experiences, arriving at one to find it full of ex-soldiers in the middle of a reunion drinking session. Hours passed and laughter continued until we remembered we had to hike and cycle back out the next day, and reluctantly left the warmth of the main room to sleep.

A feature of every bothy is the bothy book, where people record their experiences and motivations for visiting. The next morning, I read through accounts ranging from people sheltering from the rain to alleged supernatural happenings. There was an entry roughly every couple of days, indicating a steady flow of people passing through.

* In New Zealand, the Department of Conservation manages more than 950 huts across the country. Some can be booked in advance, others operate on a first-come-first-served basis, and there's a fee for using them.

* There are many mountain hut systems in the US, such as the Appalachian Mountain Club that manages eight staffed huts on the high peaks of the White Mountain National Forest offering hikers catered accommodation.

* Europe has more than 1,300 huts across the Alps, managed by Alpine clubs from different countries, with some privately owned. There are different types of accommodation and prices vary too, but they normally require advance booking.

* In Patagonia, refugios (refuges) provide remote accommodation and operate like hostels. Around San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina, there are seven refugios that have a caretaker and provide accommodation and food for a fee.

However, it's only been in the last decade and a half that bothies have shifted away from being something of a closed society. In 2009, the locations of the MBA bothies were shared online by the organisation. "It used to be quite a secretive organisation in the sense that people found out where the bothies were by joining the association or just coming across them in the wilderness areas," Stewart explained. "But that was unsustainable with the internet and people using the outdoors. And it was against our charitable aim. If we're providing buildings for people to use, it's logical we have to tell them where they are, we can't leave them secret."

This move wasn't unanimously popular. Part of the concern was that the people might begin using these spaces as places to party as opposed to a shelter while enjoying outdoor pursuits. But, as Stewart told me, it's not a problem that's unique to bothies. "We have had examples of drinking parties in bothies, but we're not particularly bothered with that… There are problems with wild camping in many areas of the country. Up in Scotland, there's a ban on wild camping in one of the national parks because people were littering, leaving rubbish [and] cutting down trees for fires."

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The MBA has no way of accurately recording visitor numbers, but anecdotal evidence from their maintenance teams suggests their use has increased with the greater availability of information around them. Smith said, "There's a whole debate to be had, but the fact of the matter was that bothy users and volunteers, who were fixing them and repairing them, were ageing out and we need younger people coming in."

While the locations of the MBA bothies are no longer a mystery, these aren't the only bothies that exist in the UK. There are others, maintained by estates or climbing clubs, where the old system of secrecy endures. As well as the adventure of seeking out hidden bothies whose locations still can't be found online, every bothy experience is unique. With a constantly changing cast of people seeking shelter, the sheer unpredictability is a rare chance in the modern world to embrace serendipity, and that's what inspires me to continue seeking them out.

Hiking out the next morning, I stopped at the bend in the track behind which the bothy would be lost in the trees. It would remain open the next night and the next, for anyone needing shelter, and I thought about all the stories and experiences I'd read through in the bothy book. The MBA network continues to grow and develop. Compostable toilets are being added to more sites, and Stewart shared that two new bothies are currently in the pipeline. That means plenty more stories to come.

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How the bullet train transformed Japan

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241126-how-the-bullet-train-transformed-japan, today

Sixty years after the world's first high-speed train launched, rail enthusiast Paul Carter rides the bullet train along what's been dubbed the "New Golden Route".

Standing on platform 19 at Tokyo Station, a bustling cathedral to modern rail travel, it's hard to believe that it was 60 years ago this year that the first Shinkansen train departed from here, bound for the port city of Osaka.

Instantly recognisable for its striking, sloping nose and sweeping aerodynamic curves, the Shinkansen was the world's first high-speed train and quickly became known around the world by its English-language moniker: the bullet train.

That high-speed line between Tokyo and Osaka – the Tokaido Shinkansen – became known by travellers as "The Golden Route", whisking passengers between two of Japan's great cities as it passed by the splendour of Mount Fuji and the ancient capital of Kyoto in less than two and a half hours.

Amidst the crowds of people boarding and alighting Shinkansen trains (which are known for their to-the-minute precision), I met with Naoyuki Ueno, a former Shinkansen driver who is now a senior executive at Central Japan Railway Company. He told me that since the train's introduction, it has carried a staggering 6.8 billion passengers across Japan.

"I'm proud of the Shinkansen," he said. "As a Japanese citizen I'm proud of that."

Since that first route opened in 1964, the Shinkansen network has expanded greatly, making it much easier (and quicker) for travellers to explore the nation's dramatic landscapes and far-flung cities. There are now nine Shinkansen lines across the country, covering the islands of Hokkaido, Honshu and Kyushu.

In March 2024, the most recent extension to the Hokuriku Shinkansen line opened, connecting the route to Tsuruga. The Hokuriku line has been dubbed "The New Golden Route", and it formed the basis of my journey from Tokyo to Osaka as part of the BBC series The World's Greatest Train Journeys. I used the Shinkansen as the backbone of my journey, but also connected with other local services and lines. Part of the brilliance of the bullet train is that it can whisk you out of a city in what feels like no time at all, giving you the freedom to quickly explore off-the-beaten-path corners of Japan.

Stepping off the Shinkansen in Toyama, just two hours from Tokyo, I took a small single-line train to the stunning resort town of Unazuki Onsen. Famous for its traditional Japanese hot springs (onsen) and nestled in the breathtaking surroundings of the Kurobe Gorge, it felt a million miles from the frenetic pace of the Tokyo metropolis. The springs are so synonymous with this town that there is even a hot foot spa at the end of the train station's platform.

My guide, Hashimoto Yukinori, or "Yuki", invited me to one of his favourite onsen in the town, with sweeping views across the valley. He explained to me that, traditionally, onsen are normally taken naked and communally. (Thankfully, for the sake of the global television audience, we were given special permission to wear swimsuits, something that would usually not be allowed.) Relaxing as they are, onsen aren't for the faint-hearted: the water was around 40C, and Yuki said sometimes they can be hotter.

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"In Japan, we have lots of active volcanoes, so there [are many] hot springs all over Japan. It's really relaxing and kind of healing," he said. "Nature is very important for Japanese because we [have] mountainous islands. [We have] a lot of volcanoes and… many disasters. So, we have [a] fear of nature and also respect for nature."

The jewel in Unazuki Onsen's crown though – at least for train lovers like me – is the Kurobe Gorge Railway, a narrow-gauge line initially built to serve the construction of the huge Kurobe Dam. Set in a forested ravine and traversing 20km of truly sublime scenery, it's the perfect opportunity to connect with the natural environment.

Stepping back on the Shinkansen, I then headed to a city historically known for its samurai and gold: Kanazawa. Famed for producing 99% of Japan's gold leaf, Kanazawa is a city where old and new co-exist, yet it somehow manages to feel bustling and vibrant as well as surprisingly calm. After sampling some decadent gold leaf-covered ice cream, it was time to get back on the train.

My next stop after Kanazawa was the city of Wajima in the Noto peninsula, an area recently affected by disaster. On New Year's Day 2024, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake devastated the city and much of the surrounding area. Because of the damage, it's not currently possible to reach the city by rail. Instead, the journey involved a small local train to the town of Anamizu and then a quick drive to Wajima.

However, what pulled into the station was no ordinary train; it had Pokemon-themed carriages adorned in brightly coloured characters from the popular Japanese cartoon, including Pikachu and Bulbasaur. I later discovered that this train had been introduced to bring joy to local children who had suffered in the earthquake's aftermath.

Seeing Wajima was a sobering, humbling experience. Many of the buildings remain where they fell, often in a state of partial collapse. It was like walking along the set of a disaster movie, although this was all too real, with real people left behind to rebuild and repair. I'd come to see one of the area's oldest and most traditional crafts – Wajima-nuri (traditional Wajima lacquerware). The people here see rebuilding the lacquerware industry as intrinsic to the wider restoration of their culture and way of life.

Takahiro Taya, a tenth-generation lacquerware producer in Wajima told me, "If, the quake broke our industry, many people would lose their job. So, I should rebuild this industry for their craftsmen, of course, and for their customers. And I have a son. He's two years and eight months. I would like to give this job to my son."

I had one last ride on the Shinkansen to complete my journey to Osaka, Japan's second city. As I left rural Japan behind and headed back into the nation's urban sprawl, I thought about how much Japan has changed in the last 60 years. Today, it's a nation filled with ultra-modern cities and cutting-edge innovation, yet its people take great pride in their ancient traditions and rural roots. In a way, the Shinkansen, which connects the country's dense metropolises and its far-flung corners, is symbolic of Japan as a whole: a nation that's both reaching towards the future while also clinging to its past.

Japan is a country with much to explore, and with incredible extremes and contrasts. The Shinkansen has transformed the nation by making it possible to reach its remote corners in a surprisingly short amount of time. Yes, high-speed rail is all about getting from one place to another in the shortest possible time. But it also offers so much more than that. It provides an opportunity to step off, to take in the surroundings and to truly get off the beaten track. Happy birthday Shinkansen. Here's to the next 60 years.

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The rise and fall of Vang Vieng, Laos' notorious party town

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241126-the-rise-and-fall-of-vang-vieng-laos-notorious-party-town, today

Once notorious as a debauched riverside party town, Vang Vieng had cleaned up its act in recent years, but is now in the headlines for all the wrong reasons once again.

"Just make sure you push yourself off the end when you reach the bottom of the slide. We had someone die on those rocks down there last week."

It was 2010, and for the young me – teenaged, inebriated and on my first ever backpacking trip through Southeast Asia – health and safety were far from the top of the agenda.

Nevertheless, I heeded the advice offered by the dreadlocked Australian bartender, and, as I reached the end of the tiled slide, gave myself an almighty push into the air above the Nam Song River, throwing out a warning yell to alert the revellers in the water below of my clumsily impending cannonball.

Vang Vieng, a town of around 25,000 people on the banks of the Nam Song River in central Laos, has for decades been a firm fixture on the so-called "Banana Pancake Trail" – the backpacker path through Southeast Asia named for the go-to breakfast at so many guesthouses and cafes along the route. Once notoriously known as a debauched riverside party town, Vang Vieng had cleaned up its act in recent years, but it is now in the headlines for all the wrong reasons once again, with a number of foreign tourists having died after ingesting drinks laced with methanol.

Vang Vieng became famous as a party destination in the late 1990s for its plentiful backpacker hostels and wooden riverside bars stocked with cheap Beerlao and lao-lao, the local rice whisky often sold with a whole snake or scorpion infusing in the bottle – the intermingling of the venom and the alcohol believed to bestow medicinal benefits to the drinker.

Back then, the iconic mode of tourist transport in Vang Vieng, known simply as "tubing", involved travellers floating downriver on the inflated inner tube of a tractor tyre, disembarking at the riverside bars to play drinking games – beer pong was a particular favourite – and throwing themselves off ramshackle rope swings and slides overhanging the river. The tubing practice supposedly originated in 1999 with a local farmer, Thanongsi Sorangkoun, who lent the inner tubes to his workers to allow them to unwind on the river. It quickly developed into just as big a fixture on the itinerary of many backpackers as the notorious Full Moon parties of Thailand's Koh Pha Ngan.

By the time of my visit in the early 2010s, Vang Vieng was a place of loose morals, light policing and Wild West tourism. Besides the riverine activities, the town was famous for its "happy bars" where blissed-out, red-eyed Westerners would sit before untouched plates of food, gazing up at televisions playing endless re-runs of Friends and Family Guy. Sit down in one of these establishments and open the menu, and, alongside the usual backpacker fare of pizzas, noodles, burgers and fried rice, you would find a veritable pharmacopeia: pre-rolled spliffs, mushroom pizzas, mushroom shakes – mushroom everything.

Needless to say, the combination of a shallow river, sharp rocks and unregulated rope swings, combined with the cheap availability of alcohol and psychedelic drugs, proved dangerous. In 2011, the town's hospital recorded 27 deaths due to drowning or suffering serious trauma against the river's rocks; that figure did not include patients taken directly to Vientiane, Laos' capital, which is two hours away by road. The same evening as my adventures on the "death slide", as it was known locally, I had to help take a fellow tourist to the hospital after she shattered her ankle falling into the river. As a group of us helped her up the riverbank towards the nearest road, an ambulance could reach, we passed through a forest ablaze with fireflies – a reminder that, for all the madness, natural beauty cannot help but intrude in Vang Vieng.

It was that same beauty that drew backpackers here in the first place. This is a rural area, and the patchwork of rice paddies that emanate from the banks of the Nam Song River are ruptured with soaring mountains of karst limestone, ripe for hiking, climbing and exploring caves sheltering gilded Buddhas. And so in 2012, when the Laos government finally decided enough was enough and clamped down on Vang Vieng's tubing and happy bars, they repositioned the town as an outdoor adventure destination.

The makeshift wooden bars with their riverside swings and slides were torn down and the tubing centre was closed. Tubing later returned, but in a much reduced and more heavily supervised capacity; the same is true of the town's nightlife. More operators sprang up offering activities in the countryside outside Vang Vieng: kayaking on the river, hiking and hot air balloon rides. It's been a successful rebrand, despite the recent tragedy suggesting that a dangerous side to Vang Vieng still exists.

"Tourism has changed a great deal since 2012," said Stéphane Vigié, co-owner of Riverside Boutique Resort on the banks of the Nam Song. "New visitors are no longer primarily attracted by the party reputation of Vang Vieng but rather by the outdoor activities and scenery it can offer. In fact, they hardly go to the town centre anymore. Instead, they can be found hiking in the countryside or kayaking on the river."

"Vang Vieng has changed a lot," agreed Violaine Cleyet-Marrel, co-founder of Above Laos, which offers hot air balloon trips over Vang Vieng. "When we started Above Laos in 2018, Vang Vieng was already starting to be not only a backpacker destination but also a destination for outdoor activities, catering for a wider audience."

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Vang Vieng's landscapes combine beauty with accessibility. The karst peaks surrounding the town do not form a mountain range, but erupt suddenly from the green river plain like jagged molehills on a smooth lawn. This makes them dramatic without being particularly tall, and the highest viewpoint in the area, Pha Ngern, can be reached in a couple of hours on foot from the centre of town. Kayaking, meanwhile, is the best way to experience the interaction between the Nam Song River and the soft limestone topography: at the cave of Tham Nam Thaem you can kayak right through a mountain, following a tunnel carved by the river. Ballooning, meanwhile, offers a chance to take it all in from above: a bird's-eye-view over the patchwork rice paddies of the plain, cut through with the serpentine sweep of the Nam Song and riddled with karst caves, like bullet holes in green baize.

The profile of visitors has changed, too, according to Cleyet-Marrel: where once the town was the domain of Western backpackers, the balance has now tipped in favour of Asian tourists. "There are still many backpackers and parties, but there are also many families travelling, couples of all ages and Chinese and Korean groups, as well as Lao people coming from Vientiane for the weekend," Cleyet-Marrel said. The town is changing physically, too – expanding onto the west bank of the Nam Song River, with more rural accommodations outside the town in quieter surroundings.

* Although methanol poisoning incidents are very rare, they tend to involve tainted spirits, so stick to beer to be on the safe side.

* Take plenty of water and sunscreen with you on solo hikes, and tell people where you're going before you set off.

* Do not combine alcohol with outdoor activities of any kind.

* Avoid drugs. Although still available, they remain illegal in Laos and sting operations involving plain-clothes police officers are common.

* Only rent a motorbike or scooter if you are confident riding one at home; accidents involving tourists are common. If you do rent one, be sure to check for and document pre-existing damage – scams involving unexpected repair charges are widespread.

New transport links have been as transformative as the government clampdown. In 2021, the long-awaited Boten-Vientiane railway opened, joining Laos with China and connecting Vang Vieng with other major Laotian cities in record time.

"The train connects Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang in less than an hour – it used to be five hours of very uncomfortable road," said Cleyet-Marrel. "There's also a new highway that connects Vang Vieng to Vientane in 90 minutes. These things have greatly impacted tourism in Vang Vieng, as they bring people here for two or three days who might have not come before. That's contributing to the change of atmosphere."

While the influx of Chinese visitors is largely accounted for by the new international train, the interest of Korean tourists in Vang Vieng goes back to the South Korean reality show Youth Over Flowers, which shot an episode here in 2014.

According to Vigié, the changes seen in Vang Vieng due to the 2012 government clampdown and the new transport links were initially almost too extreme – so much so that they ended up needing an unlikely saviour. "In some ways, the Covid crisis provided a useful pause in the otherwise rapid development of Vang Vieng," he said. "It forced many businesses to close down and restored a level of tranquillity that was required in order to welcome the new waves of visitors brought by the high-speed train."

No such respite is available now, however, and the recent tourist deaths show that for all the changes in Vang Vieng, it might not take much for the town to go off the rails again. One of the key determining factors, Vigié said, will be whether or not the central government remains involved enough to maintain some control over the town.

"The tragic events of the past week are a dramatic reminder of the critical importance of government control mechanisms," he said. "It is very hard to predict how Vang Vieng will develop in the future. It is a very small place and not much is required to put it off balance. But I am personally optimistic."

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The Trans Dinarica: A new 5,500km bike trail connecting one of Europe's most remote regions

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241122-the-trans-dinarica-a-new-5500km-trail-connecting-one-of-europes-most-remote-regions, today

Linking eight Balkan nations, the new Trans Dinarica cycling trail twists through some of the continent's most stunning – and least-visited – landscapes.

The asphalt vanished as the road gently climbed through the pastures. Two small dogs ran towards me from a wooden Montenegrin shepherd's hut, happily wagging their tails.

I was tempted to play with them, but a long gravel ascent lay ahead and I wanted to be on the other side of the Sinjajevina mountain before the looming storm. "Go home!", I told the dogs, worried they would get lost if they followed me, but they didn't listen. Quickly moving their tiny paws, they tirelessly kept me company until I reached the pass. 

The first thunder caught me in Tušinja, a small Montenegrin village with just a handful of houses and an Orthodox church on a hill. I had no energy to pedal up another steep incline, so I hopped off and began pushing my bike when I heard a man shouting and waving at me, inviting me to his garden.

"Coffee? Rakija?" he asked, as I leaned my bike against an apple tree and followed him inside his home. He covered the kitchen table with tomatoes, bread and cheese for me and his two workers who were laying tiles on the floor in the other room.

Through the haze of cigarette smoke, my host and his Balkan crew curiously stared at me, a rare sight in this village: a tourist.

I was cycling from Podgorica, Montenegro to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina on the Trans Dinarica, a new long-distance cycling route that officially launched in July 2024 and connects eight Balkan countries. Stretching 5,500km from Slovenia in the north to Albania in the south, the route climbs, twists and slaloms through national parks, Unesco sites and remote villages as it crosses the Dinaric Alps, one of Europe's most pristine and least-visited landscapes. 

The trail was inspired by the 2,000km-long Via Dinarica, a popular long-distance hiking trail that first opened in 2010 with the goal of reconnecting people across borders of this formerly war-torn region and attracting more tourists to the Balkans' lesser-known corners. While crowds of tourists flock to coastal resorts in Croatia and Montenegro, the craggy mountains, untamed rivers and dramatic canyons of the Western Balkans remain unknown to most travellers.

Unspoiled nature isn't the only appeal of the Dinaric Alps. More than 30 years after the disintegration of Yugoslavia into six separate states – and a series of ethnically driven conflicts that followed in the 1990s – the region is now a patchwork of cultures, with Catholics, Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Slovenes and other peoples now living together as neighbours. 

Examples of this Balkan multiculturalism are everywhere on the Trans Dinarica, such as in Theth, a remote village in northern Albania. Following centuries of Ottoman rule, Albania is now a predominantly Muslim nation, yet this far-flung settlement has preserved its Catholic identity. As I pedalled towards Theth's soaring church spire surrounded by majestic peaks of the Accursed Mountains, I couldn't help but feel like I was arriving in a typical Alpine village in Switzerland.

Elsewhere, ancient Hellenistic ruins, Orthodox monasteries and Ottoman cities bear witness to the Balkans' tangled history, while natural wonders – such as Montenegro's Tara River Canyon (the deepest canyon in Europe) and Lake Ohrid (Europe's oldest lake) – are found along the route.

"I was the last generation of kids who grew up in Yugoslavia, learning Serbo-Croatian with [Yugoslavian president Josip Broz] Tito's picture on the wall in the classroom," Jan Klavora, CEO of Slovenian outdoor adventure agency Visit Good Place and one of the creators of the Trans Dinarica, told the BBC. "I hope that Trans Dinarica can connect the region in a new way."

Until recently, cycling long distances in the Balkans was highly complex. During my first cycling tour through Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia in 2018, finding information on scenic and safe routes was nearly impossible. As a result, many cyclists I met during my journeys would stick to the coastal roads, missing out on the tranquility and immersive cultural experiences to be had by travelling slowly through the mountains. But the Trans Dinarica route effectively opens up one of Europe's most remote areas to cyclists for the first time. 

"From a database containing 27,000km of cyclable roads and trails, we chose the best 5,500km and mapped it, adding points of interest along the route," says Klavora. 

Yet, the Trans Dinarica's goal isn't just to encourage cyclists to visit; its creators are also hoping to revive depopulated areas where residents have left in search of better job prospects.

"We believe that [the] Trans Dinarica can have a regenerative effect on these regions. With tourism and services starting to develop, people will have the chance to stay," says Jana Apih, the founder and sustainable tourism expert of GoodPlace. 

Klavora believes that projects like the Via Dinarica and the new Trans Dinarica can help the Balkans develop sustainably and enhance community-based tourism. "We, cyclists, are slow and hungry. We visit places others do not. We are good customers," he jokes. 

Yet, managing tourism in these relatively remote communities is a balancing act, and Klavor and Apih are both concerned that recent developments in the region, such as the new Vlorë airport in Albania, which is scheduled to open in summer 2025, could cause more harm than good. As Apih explains, the natural landscape in much of the Balkans remains relatively untouched, and the opening of a large international airport alongside hotels, resorts and the hordes of visitors that will come with it run the risk of straining the local environment and communities. 

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"Thanks to [the Trans Dinarica], people understand that tourists come to the Balkans because of this pristine nature. We want to show that tourism and investment don't have to ruin the region's uniqueness," says Apih.

Cycling through the Unesco-inscribed Durmitor National Park, one of Europe's wildest and least-visited mountain ranges, I understood what she meant. These twisting mountain roads rival the most picturesque passes in the Swiss, French or Italian Alps, but with none of the crowds. Yet, I could easily imagine how, with extensive developments, ski resorts or massive hotels, this place could lose its unique sense of peace.

After a few exhausting days in Montenegro, climbing some of the highest passes of the entire Trans Dinarica, I finally crossed the border to Bosnia and Herzegovina and slowed down. In the small village of Tušila, I spent two nights at a mountain hut called Dom Vrela. I had informed Dino, the hut's caretaker, that I was a vegetarian, and when I arrived he surprised me with a hand-written list of veggie dishes available for dinner – his version of meat-free čorba (a thick bean stew) was the perfect food for a rainy day.

"We have a lot of cyclists here," he told me, and a few hours later, two American couples entered the hut asking if they could charge their e-bikes.

After this two-day pause, I set out on the last stage of my adventure, across the vast Bjelašnica plateau that was sprinkled with the first snow of the season in September. Shepherds have been bringing their livestock up to this lush, open pasture for centuries. The clouds hung low above the villages of Umoljani and Lukomir, with stone houses and mysterius stećcci (ancient, engraved tombstones) resting on the edge of a dramatic cliffside.

Despite the moody, unwelcoming weather, Lukomir was filled with jovial chatter. Colourful woollen socks, hats and slippers hanging on wooden fences brightened the grey and foggy landscape. Invited by the warm smile of an elderly woman, I came closer to buy a pair of socks. "It's all handmade, 100% wool," she said. "Feel how thick and warm they are!"

These socks came in handy on the last long descent of my trip. I passed the hills where skiers raced during the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and a thick, evergreen forest on the slopes of the Igman mountain plateau. The panorama of the city unfolded in front of my eyes – a mosaic of terracotta roofs, mosques, churches and skyscrapers; the perfect representation of the Balkans' diversity.

"We, cyclists, don't care about borders," Klavora says. "We don't care who is Bosniak, Croatian or Serb; we don't care about ethnicity or religion. We just want to explore."

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Eight of the world's most extraordinary tiny hotel rooms

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240820-eight-of-the-worlds-most-extraordinary-tiny-hotel-rooms, today

From Colombia's upcycled sewer pipes to spheres suspended in the sky in Canada, capsule hotels have been reinvented for a new generation of travellers.

By night, the world's first capsule hotel (founded in Osaka, Japan in 1979) must have looked like a morgue, with neat rows of narrow sleeping capsules each containing a recumbent body. But the following day, the occupants – mostly businessmen who had worked late - would rise up and head back to the office, grateful for this efficient sleep solution that had saved them a commute home in the early hours.  

As the concept spread, tourists happy to sleep in a room no bigger than its bed began to bunk up alongside them, eager to sample this unusual aspect of Japanese culture. Fast-forward to today, and high hotel room rates, fuelled by years of rising real estate prices, have supercharged this typically low-cost concept, which offers budget travellers priced out of traditional hotels more privacy than a hostel dormitory and more comfort and connectivity than camping. The capsules, which are predominantly single-occupancy, also answer the current boom in solo travel, with single-sex capsule hotels providing additional security.

With the global capsule hotel market projected to reach $327m by 2031, curious hybrids have emerged to sustain the trend and attract new customers. They're tempting the TikTok generation with increasingly outlandish forms, from upcycled sewer pipes in the Colombian desert to space-age pods with a dashboard of ambient controls in downtown Sydney, Australia – all promising a unique experience and shareable stories for social media. Meanwhile capsule-cum-bookstores invite book lovers to snooze among the shelves, and boutique versions bring luxury to a traditionally no-frills market with fancy decor or promises of fluffy duck-feather duvets.

As the concept continues to reinvent itself, here are eight of the most extraordinary examples.

A sleep laboratory

Nine Hours, a chain of 13 hotels across Japan, from Fukuoka in the west to the north-east island of Hokkaido, has an unusual by-product: sleep data. In the Shinagawa Station (men only) and Akasaka branches, guests can sign up for a "9h sleep fitscan" service, where sensors detect everything from breathing to facial expressions to generate a sleep report that tracks their heart rate, identifies sleep apnea and even monitors snoring. In a sector where a novel or low-budget stay is often prioritised over comfort, Nine Hours' interest in how well its guests are sleeping sets it apart.

Across the franchise, the white, minimalist decor continues this clinical theme, while its rows of sleek, shiny sleeping pods would not look out of place on the set of a science-fiction movie. The name refers to the hotel's cost-cutting concept that reduces room rental to the essential nine hours, allowing seven hours for sleep and an hour on either side for washing and dressing. Just need a nap? Hourly rates are also available.

Climb to the sky

A night in a transparent sleeping pod clinging to a cliff face above Peru's Sacred Valley is not everyone's idea of a relaxing stay, but for adrenaline-lovers, it's hard to beat – not least for the incredible 300-degree views of the surrounding mountains and the formidable condors that inhabit them.

A near-vertical climb of 400m is the only way to reach the Skylodge Adventure Suites, but climbing experience is not necessary – only good health and a head for heights – and descending is speedier thanks to a series of zip wires. Each capsule includes a private bathroom ensuring that night trips to the toilet are not life-threatening, and when the sun rises, you can enjoy a cup of tea on your private deck. Looking for a little more luxury? A little further down the Urubamba river, sister site, Starlodge, adds hillside hot tubs to the capsule hotel experience.

A desert oasis

The Tubo Hotel, La Tatacoa is just a 10-minute drive from Colombia's second-largest desert, the eponymous Tatacoa, famous for its clear starry skies. When you've taken in the giant cacti and curious rock formations of the Tatacoa's cinnamon-coloured sands, this rainbow of tiny, air-conditioned rooms with a shared swimming pool offers a welcome oasis. The 37 capsules are fashioned from concrete sewer pipes painted in candy colours, providing just enough room for a double bed. Almost half of the rooms have a shared bathroom, but the room rate is a snip and you've a shady garden, bar and restaurant on your doorstep. "This innovative and colourful place offers you a unique experience," says Ambar Quintana, the hotel's administrator. "It has everything you need to rest in a natural environment of fresh air and vegetation."

Immerse in nature

Suspended among the conifers like oversized Christmas baubles, the Free Spirit Spheres on Vancouver Island, Canada, feel "like you are floating in the canopy among the sleeping birds", according to owner Tom Chudleigh. The first sphere was introduced 25 years ago, driven by a desire to promote ecotourism and preserve Canada's ancient forests.

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There are currently three spheres, each based on the principle of biomimicry and shaped with a giant seed pod or nutshell in mind: light but with a strong shell. "Eryn" is fashioned from Sitka spruce and has a dining area, sink and slightly undersized double bed inside; while more recent additions, "Melody" and "Luna", are fibreglass and have similar amenities but with full-size double beds that can be stowed. Each sphere is accessed via a spiral staircase wrapped around a tree, and is available to rent in temperatures as low as -20C, when even a trip to the composting toilet at the accommodation's base will feel intrepid.

The shape makes bespoke fittings a prerequisite, and every little detail has been meticulously crafted by Chudleigh, from walnut fold-out furniture that maximises the space, to door handles cast from bronze.

Small but soothing

Inside a Brutalist building in Singapore's Chinatown lies a surprisingly serene interior. Opened in 2021 and based on an aesthetic it describes as "soft minimalist", KINN Capsule offers a Zen take on the capsule concept with walls painted in calming peachy tones and pale wood sleeping chambers fitted with crisp white bed linen. Even the smell of the place seems an antidote to its urban location as a special house fragrance designed to evoke the wildflowers of a Nordic forest hangs in the air. There are 72 capsules in total, sealed off with blackout blinds and spread across seven rooms, but the vibe is more boutique than bunkhouse.

A book at bedtime

A traditional mud and wood farmhouse in eastern China's Zhejiang Province got a prize-winning makeover in 2019 when it reopened as a capsule hostel, bookstore and community library, sleeping 20 in tiny single bed-sized compartments concealed between bookshelves made of local bamboo. A smattering of small landings are connected by zigzagging stairways that recall the serpentine paths of the surrounding forests of Tonglu. It's hard to know which is more dramatic: the remote building's transparent floor-to-ceiling panels that light it up like a cathedral at night, or the lush mountainous scenery that's visible through them.

Cupboard love

In Oud Zuid, one of Amsterdam's most upscale neighbourhoods, guests are paying to sleep in cupboards. The quirky De Bedstee Hotel draws on the 17th-Century tradition of the Dutch bedstee (box bed), a bed concealed behind cupboard doors to create a cosy sleeping nook. The hotel's Art Deco features and acid-coloured wallpapers downstairs give way to a shabby-chic design in the first-floor dormitories, where the bedstee windows are framed by red gingham curtains and little wooden ladders lead to the capsules above. Relax in the hotel's small terrace garden or take a half-hour stroll to the Rembrandt House Museum in the city centre to see several historic box beds in situ.

Pristine and comparatively posh

Another hotel with a signature smell is the Resol Poshtel in Tokyo's Asakusa district – the Resol Hotel chain's first venture into capsule sleeping. The aroma, which includes orange, chamomile and neroli, is said to induce "a feeling of gentle calm" – of benefit, perhaps, given the communal sleeping arrangements. At bedtime, there's nothing but a curtain between you and fellow visitors, but few one-star establishments can match this hotel's cleanliness and functionality, with hairbrushes, slippers and razors included in the freebies. The Edo-era styling − such as the sleeping cubicles' arched entrance reminiscent of tea ceremony rooms, and the traditional Japanese murals surrounding the bed − add a hint of heritage to the hotel's modern lines. The city's oldest Buddhist temple, Sensō-ji, is a five-minute walk away, as is the lantern-lined Nakamise-dori street, home to a parade of colourful shops selling souvenirs and street food.

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A world class champion freestyle skier's guide to La Plagne, France

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241206-a-ski-champions-guide-to-la-plagne-france, today

Tess Ledeux grew up on the slopes of La Plagne and now she's a world-class freestyle champion. Here are her picks for her home slopes, from après-ski to otherworldly Alpine views.

The ski resort of La Plagne in Savoie, France, might be primarily known as a family-friendly Alpine destination, but it has serious Olympic cache: in 1992, it was a bobsledding venue for the Albertville Olympics, a feat it hopes to repeat in 2030 when the French Alps is in line to host the Winter Olympics. It's also the home of French ski prodigy Tess Ledeux; an Olympic medallist with a record 16 freestyle World Cup victories under her belt.

Ledeux took a break from her heavy training and competition schedule to chat with the BBC about the best spots to eat, drink and ski in La Plagne. "I grew up in La Plagne so for me it will always be unique," says Ledeux, fresh off a big air win at the FIS Freeski World Cup in Beijing and one of France’s biggest hopes for the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympics. "I would get home from school and build little jumps for my skis or sledge in front on our apartment. The ski resort is really big, but it is the slopes that make it so important. They have everything: runs for beginners and professional skiers, a glacier, a forest…"

La Plagne, the concrete vision of French Brutalist architect Michel Bezançon, was designed very specifically for alpine skiing in 1961, hence the prevalence of functional ski-in-ski-out apartment blocks at snow-sure altitudes and an aggressively modern lift system. The resort might not be a place of obvious natural beauty, but families love it for its bounty of affordable, predominantly self-catering accommodation and flush of brilliant outdoor activities – for all ages and abilities, on and off the slopes.

Here are Ledeux's top ways to explore La Plagne.

1. Best panorama: La Grande Rochette

Bezançon ensured that his resort in the then-untouched Tarantaise Valley scaled great heights; 11 interconnected villages in La Plagne spider spectacularly up the mountainside from the town of Aime on the valley floor to the resort-village of Aime 2000 at 2,100m, climaxing with a monumental zigzag of urban residences. Resembling ocean liners, the 50m-high, 250m-long, pyramid-shaped apartment blocks were spawned by the Pompidou government’s controversial Plan Neige (1964-77) that championed the construction of new, fully serviced mountain "towns" on virgin high-altitude sites.

Ledeux's favourite viewpoint across this utopian creation? "Grande Rochette – the 360-degree view from the summit is just amazing" she says. "You can see Courchevel, Méribel and most of the Les Trois Vallées, the Grande Motte [3,453m] peak, the glacier in Tignes and all the slopes in La Plagne." Ledeux recommends taking the Grande Rochette cable car from Plagne Centre any time of day. "It’s always beautiful". Early birds hungry for fresh corduroy can also join the ski patrol at sunrise for first track skiing from the 2,500m-high summit and panoramic views sans le ski crowd.

Website: www.skipass-laplagne.com/en/first-tracks

2. Best downhill slope: Colorado

With 225km of downhill slopes in La Plagne, and another 200km in the neighbouring resorts of Les Arcs and Peisey-Vallandry to form the world’s second-largest interconnected ski area known as Paradiski, Ledeux is hard-pushed to single out just one slope.

"I really love Colorado," she says. "It's just so fun for everyone, beginner to advancer skier. It is fast and offers such a lot of options." From the top of the Colorado chairlift, a continuous 1.5km descent down to Plagne Centre reveals rousing views of Mont Blanc, Europe’s mightiest 4,805m peak and children squealing with delight on the sledge run through the Colorado Canyon. "Under the lift, next to the trees, there are lots of secret small spots with great views to discover," says Ledeux. "Mostly off-piste, but completely accessible and only known by local skiers." 

For advanced riders, Ledeux recommends the largely ungroomed red and black pistes on the partly mogul-pocked Bellecôte glacier. The legendary off-piste terrain on its north face must only be tackled with a guide. More off-piste opportunities and steep gnarly black runs preside in the Biolley ski sector above Aime 2000, where, explains Ledeux, high avalanche risk means slopes like Le Morbleu are only open on sunny, bluebird days. "Le Morbleu is a risk slope," she says. "It is normally just too scary for me, but when the weather and snow conditions are good, it is perfect."

3. Best affordable dining spot: Chez Marie

In keeping with the resort’s retro spirit, many dining options are tucked away alongside sports shops, bars and other services in covered galeries or malls – 2.4km snake around Bezançon’s landmark 1971 residences up at Aime 2000.

As the daughter of restauranteurs from the south of France, Ledeux is accustomed to dining well and Chez Marie is a longstanding favourite. Inside the main galerie in Plagne Centre, rustic wooden tables, a toasty wood burner and the occasional vintage ice axe or sheepskin as wall decoration transport hungry skiers into a cosy Alpine "chalet". Alongside pots of fondue Savoyard (mixing equal parts of Beaufort, Gruyère and Comté) tangy raclette melted on burners at the table and other traditional cheese dishes from the region, Marie’s kitchen cooks up sweet crepes and savoury galettes (savoury crepes)made with Breton buckwheat flour.

"I suggest the classic complète with ham, Gruyère cheese, mushrooms and an egg," she says. "For dessert it can only be a crepe with caramel beurre salé (salted butter caramel)."

Website: https://chez-marie-la-plagne.eatbu.com/

Address: Rue de la Gaité, Plagne Centre

Phone: +33 4 79 00 22 12

4. Best adrenaline rush off the slopes: A bobsleigh descent

The sensational speeds that freestyle skiers hit while executing their feather-light tricks is incomparable to the extreme g-force experienced on La Plagne’s adrenalin-charged bobsled track, Piste de Bobsleigh de La Plagne. ‘It’s completely different – the feeling is incredible!" says Ledeux. "It’s definitely the activity to do in La Plagne. It is like being in a very fast car."

A thrilling legacy of the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, the 1.5km-long descent in La Roche remains the only bobsled track in France. In the early 19th Century, off-duty miners from the local silver- lead mine – operational from 1810 until 1973 – raced down the mountain on sleds and later created a bobsled club in the hamlet, leading to the site being selected as an Olympic venue.

Outside of high-level competition periods, visitors can rollercoaster down the ice tunnel with 124.5m vertical drop, either alone in a custom-made self-braking bob or in a four-seater bob with a professional driver. The ride lasts little more than one minute. Speed peaks at 120km/h on bend No 10, one of 19 numbered curves crafted to gravity-defying precision by a small team of specialists who water, plane and care for the extraordinary 6,800 sq m of ice.

Website: https://en.la-plagne.com/

Address: Piste de Bobsleigh, La Roche

5. Best zone for soaking up freestyle action: Riders Nation

Ledeux whisks friends visiting La Plagne for the first time straight to Riders Nation, the resort’s superlative snow park accessed by the Arpette chairlift from Plagne Bellecôte then the blue Replat piste. Jumps, rails, kickers and walls of varying difficulty beneath the Bellecôte peak are marked XS to XL, while a "spectator route" allows those watching to move safely between the 36 modules and freestylers flipping in the air.

"I don’t train in the snow park because it's too small for me," explains Ledeux, who was the first female athlete to ever execute her now-signature "double cork 1620" aerial trick and actually spends 60-70% of her intensive training time off the snow, in gyms, on airbags, dry slopes, bikes and hiking trails. "But just for fun? Yeah! It's a really new thing in La Plagne and it has everything. There is a fun slope and a chill zone with sun loungers and big poofs."

For locals, the chill zone is clearly the indisputable crème de la crème of La Plagne picnic spots. "If the weather is good, there is often a barbecue in the chill zone," says Ledeux. "You have a great view from here too, of all the snow park and the surrounding mountains."

Website: https://www.skipass-laplagne.com/en/riders-nation

Address: Le Bijolin 2200 73210 Montchavin-les-Coches

6. Best bar for après-ski drinks: Le Brix

Traditional après-ski drinking, dancing and merrymaking spills across all 11 villages, making the infamous post-ski party in La Plagne something of a diluted, fragmented affair. In her native Plagne Centre, Ledeux recommends Le Brix for its notably chill, laidback vibe.

"Le Brix is a beer bar with a real freestyle spirit," she says. "There is always some freestyle skiing on the TV and everyone is very friendly, supportive of each other." With eight beers on tap and 120-odd bottled labels, the bar is as much about tasting artisan beers brewed by local microbreweries as wolfing down mixed platters of Savoyard charcuterie and cheesefrom farms and dairies in the surrounding Tarantaise Valley. Beers to look out for include the award-winning Lost in the Woods IPA brewed by Sapaudia in Aime, and the aptly named Free Rider bohemian-styled pilsner from Brasserie du Petit St Bernard in Bourg Saint Maurice. Hardcore craft-beer aficionados may also enjoy a fiery shot of eau de vie de bière (beer "brandy"), distilled locally at the artisanal Distillerie de Chantemouche.

Website: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100037207910669

Address: 118 Rue de Refuge, Plagne Centre

Phone: +33 9 52 55 24 47

Instagram: @le_brix_bar

BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.

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A Turkish film and TV star's guide to Antalya, Turkey

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241203-a-turkish-film-and-tv-stars-guide-to-antalya-turkey, today

Actor Ekin Koç called seaside Antalya home before conquering the world of Turkish film. Here are his picks, from hiking the Lycian Road to catching a concert at the Aspendos Theatre.

Though its name may be less familiar to overseas travellers than Istanbul, the Turkish resort city of Antalya is no stranger to visitors. Founded by the Ancient Greeks as Attalia in the 2nd Century BCE, Antalya has since been occupied by the Romans, the Seljuk Sultanate and the Ottomans; even withstanding a brief Italian occupation after World War One before Turkey claimed independence. Today, Antalya – the crowning jewel of the Turkish Riviera and, along with Istanbul, one of the world's most visited cities in 2023 – attracts both families and A-list celebrities with its 2,000-year-old Old Town and stunning turquoise waters.

Sometimes, the celebrity strolling Antalya's spectacular seashore is actually a native. We caught up with Antalya-born film star Ekin Koç (best known to English-speaking audiences as Turkish business advisor Kadir in HBO's Succession) to get his take on his beautiful hometown, studded by the Taurus mountains and cradled by the Mediterranean sea. 

"If you're from Antalya, you have a special connection with the sea," says Koç. "The sea is everywhere. We eat from the sea, we swim, we sit next to the sea. I've always loved being in connection with the sea."

Koç relocated to Istanbul for university and his film career but returns to Antalya whenever he can. "Istanbul is so stuffed," he says. "It's crowded. People are in a hurry. And you're never alone. [But] in Antalya, because of the heat and the Mediterranean culture, people are more relaxed."

When Koç is home, his presence inevitably spurs hordes of fans, but he loves strolling the Old Town's streets and taking advantage of the city's balmy shores and snowy mountain peaks. "You can literally go up to the mountain and ski and go back to the seaside and swim in the same day, if it's a sunny day," says Koç. "It's very unique."

Here are Koç's favourite ways to experience Antalya.

1. Best culinary experience: Piyaz, fresh Mediterranean seafood and meze

Antalya's rich cultural history has created a delicious culinary legacy, inspiring local dishes like yanıksı dondurma – a "burnt" ice cream made of Maltese goat's milk, which boils at a higher temperature, producing a frozen treat with a uniquely delicious burnt flavour.

Whenever Koç is in town, he immediately notes the regional differences in traditional Turkish dishes, such as piyaz, a Turkish white bean salad typically made with tahini, eggs, parsley and onions. "[But] in Antalya, it's not a salad," explains Koç. "It's hot. People in Antalya usually prefer it with grilled meatballs."

Antalyan piyaz is distinctive for the tangy tarator (Lebanese tahini) sauce poured directly over the beans. Several restaurants in the city are known for their spins on the dish, like Piyazcı Ahmet in the beautiful Muratpaşa district and Antalyan mainstay 7 Mehmet, famed for its chic industrial-meets-opulent Ottoman decor and massive 650+ dish menu.

"[7 Mehmet is] very popular," says Koç. "I haven't been in a while, but it's been at the top for many years. People don't want to miss it when they're in Antalya."

Koç himself is a pescatarian, which he says can be a challenge in meat-loving Turkey. But Antalya's coasts teem with fresh fish: "Calamari and shrimp are very popular. Seasonal fish and meze. Of course, when you're here, you have to try meze."

Meze, enjoyed throughout the fertile crescent, are hot and cold starters like hummus, olives and sarma (stuffed grape leaves) served on small plates at the beginning of a meal. "There's a spectrum of meze," says Koç. "So what you would call a traditional dinner, if you're a pescatarian, you will order mezes, which are very, very delicious, and some shrimp, calamari and then a grilled seasonal fish with a nice Mediterranean salad."

Website: https://7mehmet.com/EN

Address: Meltem Mahallesi, Atatürk Kültür Parkı, Dumlupınar Bulvarı No:201, 07030 Muratpaşa/Antalya

Phone: +90 4440707

2. Best outdoor experience: The Lycian Way

Mountainous, coastal Antalya has no shortage of thrilling outdoor experiences, from taking the cable car up the 2,365m Tahtalı Dağı (Lycian Olympos) Mountain – home of Yanartaş, the eternal flame – to scuba diving off the city's coasts. But, "if you're looking for an adventure, like a real experience, there is the Lycian Way," says Koç, citing a popular trekking trail tracing Turkey's southern coastline. The trail, carved out in the mid-1990s by British expat and amateur historian Kate Clow, was designed to connect 18 ancient cities in Antalya's vicinity, including the Unesco-listed Letoon and Xanthos.

The mammoth trail spans 540km and takes approximately 35 days to complete. "You don't have to go all the way from the beginning to the end," says Koç. "You can choose a part of it and finish that path. But you're going to see ancient cities, ruins, Roman, Greek and Byzantine theatres. You're going to see traditional Turkish villages, some local people. You're going to be able to swim anywhere. You're going to see some stunning views. You're going to be able to camp. You're going to be able to go on a hike, climb, whatever you want. And it will definitely be a very good outdoor memory for you."

Due to Antalya's soaring summer temperatures, it is recommended to tackle the trail in spring (February-May) or autumn (September-November). Following the red and white path markers along the trail's four sections, trekkers will find a network of inns and restaurants along the way that punctuate the sprawling expanses of turquoise sea, ragged cliffs and sky.

Website: https://www.lycianway.org/

3. Best cultural experience: Aspendos Theatre

Antalya boasts a healthy calendar of cultural events – including music and gastronomy festivals, and the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, held each autumn – but when it comes to local entertainment, Koç finds himself drawn to more ancient ground: Aspendos Theatre.

"It's a theatre where people thousands of years ago watched plays," he says. "You can still go there today and watch concerts, dance shows or plays."

This exquisitely preserved Roman theatre is located the ancient city of Aspendos on the banks of the Eurymedon River, approximately 47km east of Antalya's city centre. Built in the 2nd Century BCE during the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the 15,000-seat, semi-circular theatre was dug out of the slope of the city's acropolis and features a magnificent 100m-wide façade. The theatre made the Unesco Tentative Heritage list in 2015 and along with daily visiting hours, hosts a regular series of musical concerts and dance performances, bolstered by its flawless acoustics.

"You can literally sit where people sat a couple thousand years ago," muses Koç. "I mean, imagining that literally somebody was sitting where I sit right now. It's pretty remarkable."

Address: Belkıs, Aspendos Yolu, 07500 Serik/Antalya

4. Best way to experience everyday life: Kaleiçi

For a taste of everyday, modern life in Antalya, Koç's recommendation is not without a hint of irony: "Going to the Old Town would be a good idea," he says. "It's called Kaleiçi. A bit touristic, but you're going to be seeing history, and you're going to be very close to the daily life of the local people, while also being around nice cafes, bars and restaurants."

Antalya, like many modern cities with ancient roots, has repurposed the ancient dwellings of its Old Town into fashionable contemporary businesses, turning the 2,000-year-old walled port area of Kaleiçi into one of Antalya's liveliest neighbourhoods. "I spent a lot of time there during my teenage years," Koç reminisces. "Whenever school let out, we used to get together there in cafes, bars; go to restaurants to eat fish. We would go to the port to take a little boat tour. We loved it there."

Kaleiçi's marina is a hive of yachts and boat companies offering tours of the marina – and has amazing views of the city and the coast. "It's very beautiful," says Koç. "First of all, you're looking at the cliff. The cliff is, for me, the soul of Antalya. And when you're closer to it with the boat, you look up and you're like, 'wow'. It's very crazy."

Apart from shops and bars, Kaleiçi's labyrinthine streets are home to picturesque red-roofed homes and numerous historical sites from Antalya's Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman and modern Turkish eras, like Hadrian's Gate and Kesik Minare Cami, a 2nd-Century Roman temple converted first into a Byzantine church and, later, a mosque.

5. Best nighttime experience: A swim in the sea 

Koç admits that he's a little rusty on Antalya nightlife. "People usually go to Kemer," he offers, noting a seaside resort town 40 minutes outside of the city. "There are clubs everywhere. People mostly go there early in the day, they swim, they enjoy their time, and then at night they start partying. It's supposed to be the destination for the people who want to party."

But though it's been a while since Koç partied in a local club, nightlife in Antalya still means one thing to him: a festive night swim. "What we always did – which is what most people do, which is very traditional – you go out, you have fun, and then you just jump into the sea," he says. "Then you get out and start drinking on the beach, on the sunbeds. It's, like, the after party."

Antalya's jagged coastline is rife with wonderful beaches, like the perennially popular white sand Konyaaltı Beach just outside the city centre with its "beach park" area of green spaces and restaurants and the petite Mermerli cove beach in Kaleiçi. But Koç doesn't play favourites when it comes to a night swim. "You can do it in [Konyaaltı] Beach Park," he says. "You can do it in the beach of the hotel you're staying in. You can go to [a] random beach. Wherever you party, if you see a sea, just enjoy it."

Address: Meltem Mh., 07070 Muratpaşa/Konyaaltı/Antalya

Phone: +905437440536

BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.

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A dancehall superstar's guide to Jamaica

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241120-shenseeas-guide-to-jamaica, today

From hiking Dunn's River Falls to having bun and cheese, here are international pop artist Shenseea's picks for how to experience the best of her home nation.

Though Jamaica is known as a tropical retreat, it's also a country of contrasts, where the island's serene beaches and lush Blue Mountains coexist with bustling urban streets. Kingston, the island's capital, is buzzing with energy and offers travellers new hotels, swanky lounges and museums dedicated to Jamaica's art and culture. 

We spoke to Shenseea, the Kingston-born international pop artist who broke out in 2017 with the cheeky viral dancehall hit Loodi, to get her advice on how to experience the city where she grew up and the scenic countryside beyond. 

"I was born in Kingston, but I also love being in nature, surrounded by greenery," she says. “My grandparents had acres of land in St Elizabeth, where they used to farm and raise cattle. It wasn't noisy like the city, and I sometimes miss the farming and the smell of the country."

Though the singer spends several months of the year touring around the world, she goes back to her hometown as often as six or seven times a year. "It's important to reconnect with your roots," the Grammy-nominated artist says. "Kingston is my home. It's where I grew up, and it's just where my heart is. Nothing can compare to the nonstop energy of Kingston." 

Jamaica's tropical weather makes it an ideal place to spend the last months of the year. In autumn and winter, the island's rainy season has tapered off, leaving blue skies and temperatures that hover around 25C. 

"If you come to Kingston, book an Airbnb or hotel and enjoy the parties and events throughout the week," Shenseea suggests. "You can explore the city and get a feel for the local life." 

Here are some of Shenseea's favourite ways to explore Jamaica.  

1. Best way to soak up the "real" Jamaica: Explore Kingston

Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios are three coastal resort destinations that are perennially popular with visitors, but its capital city of Kingston is what Shenseea calls the "real" Jamaica.

 

"Kingston is where you'll find the real hustlers," she says. "During the day, people come to Kingston to grind. Then, at night, the nightlife doesn't stop. It's never dull in the city." 

Where other parts of Jamaica offer sun-soaked leisure, Kingston – the island's most populous city as well as its financial centre – is buzzing with restaurants, sleek high-rises and nightclubs that stay open until sunrise. It is also the birthplace of dancehall music, which takes its name from the inner-city dancehalls where boisterous parties are held. A departure from the mellow roots reggae sound, dancehall focuses on the realities of life for urban Jamaicans, often including provocative, unfiltered lyrics. Many of Jamaica's famous dancehall artists, like Sean Paul and Beenie Man, hail from Kingston, and it remains the heartbeat of Jamaica's dynamic music scene.

For a classic Kingston night out, Shenseea heads to Ribbiz Ultra Lounge. 

"Ribbiz Ultra Lounge in Kingston is my favourite place to party, and it's one of Kingston's most famous nightclubs," she says. "The music there is always a vibe; they play everything so all ages can enjoy themselves. Their audience is broad because they're versatile, and I love the versatility. I'm always entertained there, and after a night of partying, the late-night food always hits the spot." Anchored by a sleek bar, the intimate waterfront lounge is the place to be seen after hours. The venue often hosts themed nights with guest DJs.

Kingston is also home to several museums, including the Bob Marley Museum and the National Gallery of Jamaica. The Bob Marley Museum is housed in the reggae legend's former home, where visitors can see his photos and personal record collection, while the National Gallery features a collection that includes artefacts from the island's early Taino Indians as well as paintings and sculptures from contemporary Jamaican artists. Just a few paces away is Kingston's Arts District, comprised of several blocks of vibrant murals.

Website: https://www.ribbiz.com/menu/barbican/

Address: Ardenne Emirates Plaza, 7-9 Ardenne Rd, Kingston, Jamaica

2. Best beach: Maiden Cay

While travellers might be more familiar with Seven Mile Beach in Negril, famous for its coral sands and crystalline waters, Shenseea says Jamaica's best beach is actually Maiden Cay, a 20-minute ferry ride from Kingston.

 

"Not many people know about Maiden Cay," she says. "You have to take a boat to get there, and the water is as blue as the sky. The beach is very clean and feels like a little island of pure white sand in the middle of the ocean. Some locals like to take boat trips on Sundays and just enjoy the beach for the day."

Maiden Cay is one of the main islets off the shore of Port Royal Cays on the north-eastern region of the reef. Its secluded atmosphere and incredible marine life make it a must visit.

3. Best outdoor experience: Dunn's River Falls

Another natural attraction on Shenseea's list is Dunn's River Falls. Just an hour from Kingston, Dunn's River Falls and Park is one of the most popular attractions on the island for good reason; the falls attract nearly a million visitors every year, and if you're brave, you can climb to the top of the falls with the help of a local guide. 

"Dunn's River Falls is made up of these massive falls that flow into the ocean. It's just one of the most beautiful falls," Shenseea says. "It's a place that everyone can enjoy."

The area is not just for climbing waterfalls. The park also offers a zipline ride over the falls and a splash pad for kids.

Website: https://dunnsriverfallsja.com/

Address: Ocho Rios, Jamaica

Phone: +1 876-974-4767

4. Best cultural experience: Craighton Estate Blue Mountain Coffee Tour

Jamaica's Blue Mountain Coffee is lauded for its smooth, balanced flavour and sweet, subtle aftertaste. The beans are grown in the elevated Blue Mountains on the eastern coast; a region known for its lush greenery, cool climate and stunning views.

 

"Jamaica has the best coffee, and the Blue Mountains are one of our best attractions. People come here because it's very refreshing being out in nature," she says. 

To experience the best of the Blue Mountains, Shenseea recommends planning a visit to the Craighton Estate, a coffee farm that has been producing coffee since the late 18th Century. "Coming here allows you to learn about the coffee-making process, and you can also relax and unwind," she says.

The estate offers guided tours of the working coffee farm, where visitors can learn about the coffee-making process from bean to cup. The tours also include a coffee-tasting session of the estate's finest brews.

Address: Craighton Estate, Irish Town, Jamaica

Phone: +1 876-929-8490

5. Best places to eat like a real local: Scotchies, Tastee and KFC

What's the first thing Shenseea wants to eat as soon as she lands in Jamaica? Her answer is simple: "KFC". The fried chicken at KFC restaurants has been a Jamaican craze since the American fast food franchise arrived on the island in 1975, earning a loyal fan base among locals and visitors for their superior fried chicken, which many insist tastes exponentially better than KFC in other countries due to the use of local chickens and Jamaican spices.

Besides KFC, Shenseea likes two no-frills restaurants serving Jamaican staples like jerk meat and golden baked patties. "If people want some good, local food, they should go to Scotchies," she says. "They have a lot of delicious jerk food on their menu." 

Scotchies on Montego Bay is a no-frills eatery with wood tables under thatched-roof tiki huts, where the jerked meat is prepared in an open pit, and there's a rustic bar for ordering rum punches. One of Jamaica's most well-known dishes, jerk refers to both the spices and how the meat is cooked. Coated with a blend of spices like thyme, scotch bonnet pepper and garlic, the meat (often chicken, pork or goat) is slow roasted over a fire or grill, giving it a smoky flavour.

"Another place I like is Tastee," says Shenseea. "[It's] a local fast-food restaurant. I love their rice and peas, fried chicken and patties." With more than a dozen locations across Jamaica, Tastee specialises in patties, an inexpensive pastry that's baked golden brown with savoury meat fillings like beef and chicken. Patties can be eaten plain or sandwiched between coco bread, a soft, sweetened bread made with coconut milk.

Shenseea also recommends travellers try two of her favourite snacks while they're in Jamaica: bun and cheese (a slice of cheese sandwiched between a spiced bread roll) – "Bun and cheese for me is top tier!" – or a sugar and spice cake from Sugar and Spice, "if you want something really sweet and smooth. That's my favourite cake in Jamaica." The family-owned bakery has been in business since 1971 and has several locations around Kingston.

Scotchies Address: Coral Gardens, Ironshore, St. Ann Ocho Rios

Phone: +1 876 953 3301

Instagram: @scotchiesjamaica

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Five of Montreal's best poutine spots - according to a local chef

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241112-montreals-best-poutine-according-to-a-local-chef, today

Montreal-born chef Michele Forgione makes one of the best poutines in the city. Here are his top poutine picks in Montreal, from Chez Ma Tante to Ma Poulle Mouillée.

Piping-hot French fries topped with squeaky cheese curds and brown gravy: in Canada's Quebec province, poutine is tantamount to passion. The beloved dish has become emblematic of the province and opinions abound on which curds make the best topping or how the frying method affects the dish.

Legends about its origins are also plentiful. In a 2015 tourism campaign, the town of Drummondville, Quebec, claimed ownership of poutine, declaring that it was invented in the 1960s by self-proclaimed "l'inventeur de la poutine" Jean-Paul Roy of local restaurant Le Roy Jucep. Another legend states that a customer mixed cheese curds with French fries at restaurant La P'tite Vache in Princeville, Quebec in 1966. But the most prevailing legend points to the town of Warwick, Quebec, in the late 1950s, when restauranteur Fernand Lachance of Le Café Idéal exclaimed "Ca va faire une maudite poutine!" ("It will make a damn mess!") when a customer asked him to put cheese curds in a takeaway bag of frites.

In Montreal, Quebec's largest city, poutine can take many forms. Since the invention of poutineries (poutine-only restaurants) in the 1980s, poutine has become a vehicle for an endless range of toppings, representing the great cultural diversity of the city itself, as many of the city's ethnic groups offer their own takes on the dish.

To find the city's most delicious poutine, we spoke to Michele Forgione, restaurateur and owner of modern Montreal casse-croûte (Quebecois snack bar) Chez Tousignant, whose poutine is often touted as one of Montreal's best. "I truly believe that the culinary heritage that every single ethnicity brings to the city is very important," he says. "Montreal is a melting pot, and one can really travel through different cultures through its food. That to me is so unique." But no matter what goes on top of a poutine – from Portuguese chicken to Haitian griot (pork shoulder) – there are three non-negotiable elements: French fries made from red skin potatoes, dark gravy made from chicken or beef stock and fresh cheese curds. "Not mozzarella!" says Forgione.

Here are Forgione's top poutines in his hometown of Montreal.

1. Best classic poutine: Chez Ma Tante

For a proper introduction to Montreal's poutine scene, Chez Ma Tante – a casse-croûte in Montreal Nord – is it. Their take on the dish is the "quintessential, classic poutine", says Forgione. What makes it a classic? It's all in the fries – using red skin potatoes means that the fries "will never get too crunchy. They can't – they have a higher starch content." The frying technique is also key: the potatoes must be double fried, first on a lower heat setting – around 138C – and then again, 38C hotter says Forgione. "You're getting the outside super golden. It's like a tempura batter. You just want to eat it more; it becomes addictive."

Chez Ma Tante started life as a mobile restaurant in 1929 (first in a horse-drawn carriage, then in a campervan). In 1950, the establishment built a permanent home on Rue Fleury and has been there ever since, with minimal changes to the decor or exterior. "It's the classic diner. There's no seating, really – it's an in-and-out situation," says Forgione. He also recommends a steamé, their famous steamed hot dog. "It's one of those places where you know you can have a steamed hot dog and a poutine and that's it, that's all you want."

Website: https://chezmatante.ca/

Address: 3180 Rue Fleury E, Montréal-Nord, Quebec H1H 2R3

Phone number: +1 514-387-6984

Instagram: @chez.ma.tante

2. Best for a Portuguese twist: Ma Poulle Mouillée

Situated in Montreal's colourful Plateau neighbourhood – lined with brightly painted townhouses bedecked with characteristic outdoor staircases – Ma Poule Mouillée is a local favourite and a prime example of fusion cuisine. This counter-service Portuguese restaurant is famous for its flame-licked chicken, which also tops their chorizo-studded poutine that has since become legendary for melding two iconic dishes.

"It's like a meal," says Forgione. "[The chicken is] juicy, it's tender, it's moist. It just goes together. You're accustomed to all the flavours, but it's served in a different way. It's basically chicken salad! That's how I see it."

The restaurant's signature sauce mingles with the gravy and gives the dish "a little heat", says Forgione. "It all just goes together." What exactly is in the sauce is a closely guarded secret – owner Tony Alves, who opened the restaurant in 2013, will only concede that he uses piri piri peppers. Thanks to Montreal's sizable Portuguese population, there are several restaurants in town specialising in the country's famously fiery rotisserie bird (including down-the-street Romados), but the chicken-poutine hybrid is a Ma Poulle Mouillée special.

Address: 969 Rachel St E, Montreal, Quebec H2J 2J2

Phone number: +1 514-522-5175

Instagram: @mapoullemouillee

3. Best for high-end poutine: Au Pied de Cochon

Au Pied de Couchon, also in the Plateau neighbourhood, is without a doubt one of Montreal's most beloved restaurants; the brainchild of legendary Canadian chef Martin Picard. "[He's] a good friend," says Forgione. "He's one of the top chefs in Canada, if not North America."

Since it opened in 2001, the restaurant has championed Quebecois food. Twenty-five years ago, the province's cuisine was rarely taken seriously by the city's chefs, who preferred elaborate French techniques to the homey, lard-soaked dishes of French Canada. Picard created a sea-change in local attitudes by presenting humble, traditional Quebecois ingredients and flavours in new and surprising formats – like their famous Plogue à Champlain, a buckwheat pancake piled with melted cheese, roasted potatoes, bacon, demi-glace and a drizzle of maple syrup.

And no dish is more representative of Picard's cooking style than Au Pied de Cochon's foie gras poutine. It's a cult favourite across the city for its irresistible high-low approach, which pairs a classic poutine with a custardy sauce made from duck or goose liver. Forgione is particularly fond of it. "The French fries are super crispy, very addictive," he says. "The foie gras sauce is unctuous, decadent. It's on another level. And the cheese curds are just squick-squick. That taste when they're fresh, you know what I mean?"

Website: www.aupieddecochon.ca

Address: 536 Av. Duluth E, Montréal, Quebec, H2L 1A9

Instagram: @restaurantaupieddecochon

4. Best for late nights: La Banquise

Ask any Montrealer where to try poutine and most will suggest La Banquise. This local institution has been around since 1968 and serves an expansive menu of creatively topped poutines, as well as burgers, hot dogs and brunch. It's also open 24 hours a day, making it the preferred post-party stop after a night at the city's famous clubs and bars. 

Forgione remembers several of his own poutine-fuelled nights here. "You're a kid, you're in your teens, 20s… after going out with your friends until 03:00, 04:00 in the morning, you'll [have] burn[ed] the calories."

His favourite is La Galvaude, a version of the classic poutine topped with grilled chicken and green peas, or "anything with hot dogs on top". There are also vegetarian and vegan poutines on the menu; a relative rarity.

Website: https://labanquise.com/

Address: 994 Rue Rachel E, Montréal, Quebec H2J 2J3

Phone number: +1 514-525-2415

Instagram: @restolabanquise

5. Best for a two-in-one classic: Jarry Smoked Meat

There's another dish no visitor should leave Montreal without trying: smoked meat. The city's signature deli meat is a cousin to New York's pastrami, and it's served atop poutine at Jarry Smoked Meat, a deli in the north-eastern Saint-Leonard neighbourhood. Forgione grew up nearby – where "all the Italians" live, he quips – and remembers many evenings spent in the classic diner, eating poutine topped with strips of brisket that's been dry rubbed rather than brined, giving it a stringier, softer texture than New York's fattier navel cut.

Both brisket and smoked meat come from Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who applied traditional techniques for preserving meat to North American beef. "It was a method of feeding the masses," says Forgione. "It was cheap cuts of meat. Don't look at brisket today, whose costs have gone through the roof. It was a cut of meat nobody want[ed] because what do you do with a tough, tough piece of meat? You had to know what you were doing, and they brought so much knowledge."

Smoked meat is most often served between two slices of rye bread, and Jarry does serve a smoke meat sandwich as well. But their smoked meat poutine is the ultimate indulgence, says Forgione. "It's beefy, it's salty, it's sweet a little, it's smoky," he enthuses. "It's the ultra-decadent food. Merging these two iconic dishes from Montreal [is] euphoric. It's like Metallica playing Mozart at [Montreal performance venue] Place-des-Arts."

Website: www.jarrysmokedmeat.com

Address: 6549 Rue Jarry E, Saint-Léonard, Quebec H1P 1W2

Phone number: +1 514-322-3220

Instagram: @jarry_smoked_meat

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A two-Michelin-star chef's guide to the best dining spots in Istanbul

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241112-a-two-michelin-star-chefs-guide-to-the-best-dining-spots-in-istanbul, today

Istanbul-born chef Fatih Tutak shares his favourite culinary experiences in his hometown, from Turkish barbecue at Ahmet Ustam Ocakbaşı to micro-seasonal menus at Nazende.

Straddling two continents, Istanbul has been shaped by millennia of Silk Road traders and the meeting of great religions. From the Byzantines to the Ottomans, each of the city's historical inhabitants have left behind impressive architecture, unique cultural traditions and a rich culinary legacy. 

"Turkish cuisine is an undiscovered diamond mine," says chef Fatih Tutak of two-Michelin-star Turk in Istanbul. "In the early '90s, Turkish food became very much [seen as] street food, especially in Europe. [There], you can make a very bad quality döner kebab and no one [knows]. Turkish food is not very easy to cook properly. It's complex. [In Istanbul] we have many different people from around Turkey and they cook their own cuisine. It's a melting pot."

At Turk, Tutak gives age-old Turkish recipes a cutting-edge spin. However, when he's not in the kitchen, he prefers something lower key. "As a chef I am very specific when I go to restaurants in Turkey, especially in Istanbul," he explains. "I try to always go very local and where the food is ultimately high quality, prepared with amazing ingredients."

A year-round destination with warm summers and cool winters, the city topped Euromonitor's list as the most visited city in the world in 2023, so there's never been a better time to dive into Istanbul's excellent culinary scene.

Here are Tutak's favourite dining spots in his hometown.

1. Best for Turkish barbecue: Ahmet Ustam Ocakbaşı

Visitors to Istanbul will likely notice the word "ocakbaşı" plastered on restaurant signage everywhere. It means "fireside" in Turkish, and is the name given to grill houses where a chef cooks kebabs on glowing hot coals. It is one of the most popular ways to dine in the city, and for Tutak, Ahmet Ustam Ocakbaşı is the best in the business. 

 

"This is where I go on my days off," he says. "[They have] an artisanal way of making kebabs; hand chopped, with different varieties of meat cuts. They do the best minced kebab and shish kebab, and also chicken wings and salad and grilled veggies and lavash (thin flatbread).

For Tutak, it's not just about the food but also the experience. "Chef Ahmet has been doing this job for almost 20 years. He is very passionate," he says. "You sit down in front of the grill and he is there cooking in front of you; like Japanese robatayaki. Also, you can drink rakı [a Turkish aniseed flavoured spirit] because the best way of enjoying the kebab, for me, is [with] rakı: the Turkish way."

Tutak's advice: "You should not leave without eating the Adana kebab," which he proclaims to be "the best in the city". Possibly Turkey's most popular variety of kebab, it's made from skewered mincemeat and seasoned with red pepper flakes for mild heat and named after the city of Adana in south-eastern Turkey, where it originates from.

Address: Maslak Mah. Dereboyu 2 Cad. No:8/1, Istanbul

Phone: +90 53 0175 6114

Instagram: @ahmetustamocakbasi

2. Best for pide: Karadeni̇z Pi̇de Kebap Salonu

Pide can be found all over Turkey, but according to Tutak, this canoe-shaped dish – often referred to as "Turkish pizza" by tourists, much to the locals' chagrin – originates from the province of Trabzon on the northern reaches of the country's Black Sea coast. There are various versions and regional variations, but in its simplest form, yeasted dough is stuffed with different fillings like cheese and meat, then baked, resulting in a pillowy soft crust with golden edges covered in melted cheese.

Located in the central neighbourhood of Vefa, just a 10-minute walk from the famed 16th-Century Suleymaniye Mosque, is Karadeni̇z Pi̇de Kebap Salonu; Tutak's pick for the city's best pide. "This restaurant is very special because they are the third generation preparing pide. They are famous for [it]," he says.

Tutak appreciates the family-run restaurant's dedication to tradition. "They use a woodfired oven and make their own very nice fermented dough and use different kinds of stuffing. You can order cheese, minced meat, chopped beef, cheese and egg. It's very special," he says, adding: "my favourite is with minced beef."

Address: Hacı Kadın, Muhabir Sk. No:6, 34134 Fatih/İstanbul

Phone: +90 21 2519 0128

3. Best for micro-seasonal menus: Nazende

At the helm of Nazende, a Mediterranean restaurant just off upscale boulevard Bağdat Caddesi, is snowy-haired businessman-turned-chef, Uluç Sakary. "This is my favourite restaurant in Turkey," announces Tutak. "Uluç used to have a textiles business. He used to cook at home for his friends and then when [he turned] 50, he decided to become a chef and open a restaurant."

Nazende – which opened in 2019 – quickly garnered critical acclaim and is full most evenings. "He does his own shopping every morning. He goes to the fish and vegetable markets and makes his daily menu and just [cooks] whatever he wants, but it's out of this world," says Tutak. "The variety of meat dishes [is] amazing. [They have] amazing offal dishes on the grill such as lamb liver, sweetbread and kidney. They have seafood, they also have great starters, mezes and salads."

For diners visiting in April or May (goat season) Tutak recommends the woodfire oven-baked suckling goat, a meat eaten widely in Turkey. The restaurant is also lauded for its baby calamari and rice pilaf enriched with nuts and raisins.

Address: Caddebostan Plajyolu Sok. Sembol apt. No:13/A, Istanbul

Phone: +90 533 6170 268 

Instagram: @nazendecadde

4. Best for local fare: Köroğlu Et Lokantası

Lokantas or "tradesmen restaurants" are where time-strapped locals head for well-priced and freshly prepared home-style dishes. They are found all over Turkey but Tutak's favourite in Istanbul is Köroğlu Et Lokantası. "When you enter the restaurant there are a lot of dishes already cooked; you select [what you want] and they send it to you," he says. "They open only for lunchtime, so you need to go around 12:30."

The menu is ample, but there are some dishes the restaurant is especially known for. "They cook amazing beans with rice called fasulye – a very typical local dish, which is braised beans from Ispir (in north-eastern Turkey) with butter and beef," says Tutak. "Also, the eggplant dishes are amazing. I would say confit beef is their signature. It is very traditional from the northern part of Turkey. You leave the beef for six hours [to] cook very slowly. Amazing. Served just with plain rice and fried potatoes; easy."

Address: Akşemsettin Caddesi No:4 Fatih/İSTANBUL, Istanbul

Phone: +90 212 531 23 05

Instagram: @koroglu_lokantasi_

5. Best for döner kebabs: Dönerci Engin

One of Turkey's most famed exports, the döner kebab (seasoned meat cooked on a rotating spit then shaved off in layers) can be found in abundance all over Istanbul, from hole-in-the-wall joints purveyed by solo chefs armed with just a vertical rotating meat spit, to sit-down establishments with bowtie-wearing waiters.

Dönerci Engin, a five-minute walk from the Galata Tower, leans more towards the former, with the addition of a few tables outside. "[The chef] is from [my mother's] hometown Erzurum," says Tutak. "He prepares the doner with a mix of sliced beef and lamb and he has a special marinade using tomato, purple basil and onion and milled black pepper. The quality of the döner kebab is very thin, very juicy and really caramelised. Just the perfect doner."

There are only five items on the menu, which consist of doner meat served in various receptacles. Essentially "on a plate or inside bread," says Tutak. "I like it my way, with white rice and sliced onion and meat and that's it. No garnish, just rice." For bread eaters, he recommends the gobit pita: "It's like a balloon pita, wood-fired. He makes his own."

Address: Bereketzade, Okçu Musa Cd. No:3, 34421 Beyoğlu/İstanbul

Phone: +90 212 293 9787

6. Best Turkish taverna: Asmali Cavit

The lively Asmalı Mescit neighbourhood in Istanbul's central Beyoğlu district is a crisscross of narrow streets filled with bustling bars and restaurants, particularly traditional tavernas. "[A] Turkish taverna is the place where you go for drinking and eating. They have them in Greece as well," explains the chef. "We call it meyhane; taverna is a Greek name. This is where people gather and enjoy meze, small dishes, seafood and alcoholic beverages, especially rakı."

The chef is a long-time fan of Asmali Cavit. "[It] is a beautiful place run by a family: the father, mother, son and daughter. Every day, they're on duty and [have been] running the place for almost 25 years," says Tutak. "It's in a touristy area but mostly local people go. It's mostly shared dishes, cooked with olive oil, and seafood appetisers: fried calamari, squid, grilled fish, mussels – and also cured seafood."

Seafood isn't the only thing on the menu. "The baby kofta grill is amazing," says Tutak. "The fried beef liver is also very nice. Also, Armenian mezes, like topik, a dish cooked with a lot of onions and chickpeas."

Address: Asmalımescit Caddesi No: 16/D Asmalimescit Mahallesi, Beyoglu, İstanbul 34430

Phone: +90 212 292 4950

7. Best for fish: Balikci Kahraman

Tutak compares Balikci Kahraman to the renowned Michelin-starred Elkano fish grill in Spain. "It's the Turkish version," he says.

In fish-loving Istanbul, Black Sea turbot is beloved for its flavoursome and meaty texture, thanks to cold water currents. "Balikci Kahraman is very famous for its turbot," says Tutak. "They cook it on a tandoor grill very slowly and season it with salt. They serve it with their signature tomato salad (with red onion, cucumber, green chilli and lashings of olive oil) and cornbread which is cooked in a pan."

The restaurant is located on the city's outskirts in the small fishing village of Sarıyer on the banks near where the Black Sea flows into the Bosphurus River. "The owner has two boats. He sends his fishermen to the sea every morning, they catch it and bring it to the restaurant. It's super fresh."

Diners will need to factor in the journey time. "It is about one hour from the city centre but worth it to travel there. I just took my Japanese sushi chef friends from Tokyo who loved it," says Tutak.

Website: https://www.balikcikahraman.com/

Address: Rumeli Kavağı, İskele Cad. No:15 Sarıyer, İstanbul

Phone: +90 212 242 98 99

Instagram: @balikcikahraman

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A dancer's guide to Seville's best flamenco experiences

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241107-a-flamenco-dancers-guide-to-seville, today

Manuela Barrios has performed flamenco around the world. Here are her favourite spots in Seville to see the spectacle, from casual nights at La Carbonería to the cabaret shows of Tablao Las Setas.

Seville, the capital of Spain's Andalusia region, is known for its tiled Moorish architecture, colourful 19th-Century facades and the thousands of fragrant orange trees lining its streets. This romantic city is also often called the "birthplace of flamenco".

Flamenco is characterised by rhythmic dancing accompanied by guitar, singing or poetry, hand clapping and finger snapping. It has a mournful folk quality and is ruled by duende, an expressive emotion which most closely translates to "spirit" or "soul".

Many scholars trace flamenco's origin to Triana, a neighbourhood on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. The area was historically home to Seville's Roma (Gypsy) minority who migrated to Spain from India in the Middle Ages, bringing along instruments like tambourines and castanets. Because the dance was connected with the marginalised Roma and working-class and minority communities like the Moors, it was looked down upon by Spanish elites. But today, tourism and modernisation have changed this perception drastically, and flamenco has become popularised as a quintessential symbol of Andalusia and Spain.

We spoke to Manuela Barrios, a Seville-based professional flamenco dancer, to find the city's best flamenco experiences. "We have the best flamenco artists in the world here in Seville," says Barrios. "It's a small city, but they haven't lost their traditions." Seville’s many tablaos (flamenco venues) offer theatre-style shows on a daily basis. Outside of formal performances, flamenco is also an important part of public life in the city. Street performers often dance in squares such as the city's central Plaza de España, and in traditional neighbourhoods like Triana. Flamenco singing and guitar can also be heard from the windows of local bars and features prominently in Seville’s Feria de Abril (April Fair), where locals show off their dancing skills with informal styles such as Sevillanas.

Seville's vibrant professional flamenco scene has a tight community spirit. "People are very empathetic and willing to help, and there's a family-oriented culture. Especially with the [Roma] artists," says Barrios. "They're amazing. They bring their whole family to dance and perform."

Here are five of Barrios' favourite spots to experience this Andalusian art form.

1. Best fun, casual night out: La Carbonería

For an affordable introduction to flamenco, this casual bar nestled between the trendy nightlife hub of Alfalfa and the historic district of Barrio Santa Cruz is a solid choice.

"La Carbonería is a place that has a lot of solera (tradition)," says Barrios. "It's a very fun place and has kept the same vibe for so many years. You just have to pay for your drink and you can see flamenco, with singing and everything."

In a bustling wide room with simple wooden tables and long benches, guests can watch the performance in a relaxed atmosphere. "All the really good guitarists and singers started in La Carbonería," says Barrios. "It's a place where talented artists get their first performing experience."

Entrance to La Carbonería is free, but you can buy drinks and tapas onsite – note that payment is cash only. Food and drink options include pitchers of sangria, plus simple tapas like cheese, olives, chorizo, picos (crunchy breadsticks) and Spanish omelette.

Website: https://lacarbonerialevies.blogspot.com/

Address: Calle Céspedes 21A, 41004, Seville

Phone: +34 954 229 945

Instagram: @carboneriadesevilla

2. Best off-the-beaten-path experience: Peña Flamenca Torres Macarena

Just outside the old city's medieval walls, near the modern steel bowstring Barqueta Bridge, you'll find the Peña Flamenca Torres Macarena.

A "peña flamenca" is a club or cultural association where aficionados can enjoy flamenco-related events. "If you want to see something not very touristy, this is the place to go," says Barrios. "The entrance is much cheaper than a tablao, but you don't know what you're going to see – it may be stars or amateurs."

The Peña Flamenca Torres Macarena opens 60-90 minutes before each show, and shows are typically held three times per week. The venue has a traditional Andalusian tiled patio where visitors can enjoy drinks and tapas beforehand. Although performances are open to the public, the first two rows are usually reserved for club members, and payment is generally cash only.

Website: https://www.xn--peaflamencatorresmacarena-9nc.com/

Address: Calle Torrijiano 29, 41009, Seville

Phone: +34 605 931 254

Instagram: @pflamencatorresmacarena

3. Best cabaret-style theatre show with top stars: Tablao Flamenco Las Setas

Beneath the iconic modern building of the same name, visitors will find the Tablao Flamenco Las Setas. "This tablao is one of the top places in Spain. They bring all the best flamenco stars," says Barrios. "For example, [famed flamenco star] Belén López was there yesterday, and she's never come to Andalusia to dance before. They have high-quality shows, and the owners have a lot of taste."

Las Setas (The Mushrooms), also known as Metropol Parasol, is widely considered the largest wooden structure in the world and is a famous symbol of Seville. Besides the flamenco tablao, the building is also home to a Roman site known as the Antiquarium, as well as the Mercado de la Encarnación (Incarnation Market), which sells fresh meat, vegetables and seafood.

Tablao Flamenco Las Setas accommodates 110 people but still offers an intimate atmosphere, according to Barrios. "People leave in tears every night. You can see the show really close up, and flamenco needs to be seen close up because you have to observe the facial expressions, the pain and emotion."

Visitors to this tablao will be treated to a cabaret-style spectacle that captures the most dramatic side of flamenco. "It's a different atmosphere than any other tablao in Seville. They don't just have lunares y flores (polka dots and flowers). They want to add a bit of a cabaret taste, something different, with lace and other unique styles."

Website: https://tablaoflamencolassetas.com/

Address: Plaza de la Encarnación, Pasaje de Las Setas, 41003, Seville

Phone: +34 684 776 981

Instagram: @tablaoflamencolassetas

4. Best traditional flamenco with dinner: Tablao Flamenco El Arenal

Located in a building dating to the 17th Century, Tablao Flamenco El Arenal features a grand white dining hall flanked with wooden beams, where you can savour a meal before enjoying a flamenco show. "This is one of the oldest tablaos in Seville," says Barrios. "If you want to see cuadros de flamenco (flamenco groups) and have dinner, you can come here to see very good stars perform in a very traditional way."

Located right in the centre of Seville's old city, near the Seville Cathedral and the University of Seville campus, this tablao has been operating for more than 40 years. Visitors can choose from ticket options that include a drink, tapas or a multi-course meal. 

"To see a full flamenco cuadro where you have four dancers, three singers and two guitarists… that's really amazing," says Barrios. "For a first taste of flamenco, it's very impressive. They have shows every day, and you should buy tickets online, because they're sold out almost every day in the high season [April - May, September - October]."

Website: https://tablaoelarenal.com/

Address: Calle Rodo 7, 41001, Seville

Phone: +34 954 216 492

Instagram: @tablaoelarenalsevilla

5. Best tertulias flamencas: Ánima Galería Taberna

The word tertulia means "conversation" in Spanish, but in the context of flamenco it's more like a jam session. At these informal meetings, musicians and dancers gather for a spontaneous performance.

Ánima Galería Taberna, situated near Seville's bohemian Alameda de Hércules square, hosts flamenco tertulias every Wednesday and Saturday night. "You can see locals and foreigners singing and playing guitar," says Barrios. "You never know exactly what's going to happen. The bar is very authentic and has a beautiful terrace. My students say this is the best place for tertulias, because you can go there and feel the atmosphere."

Website: https://animataberna.wordpress.com/

Address: Calle Miguel del Cid 80, 41002, Seville

Phone: +34 954 386 708

Instagram: @galeriataberna_anima

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A Oaxacan chef's guide to the best of Oaxaca City's street food

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241101-a-oaxacan-chefs-guide-to-the-best-of-oaxaca-citys-street-food, today

Chef Alejandro Ruiz thinks Oaxaca's street foods are a key to understanding its gastronomy. Here are his top street foods in the city, from memelas at Doña Vale to Tacos del Carmen.

Mexico is renowned for its deeply regional cuisine, and the state of Oaxaca is home to what is widely considered some of its best. High in the Sierra Madre mountains upon a dusty plateau, Oaxaca City's Spanish Baroque cathedrals loom over low blocks of brightly coloured buildings lining cobblestoned streets; splashed by vivid murals and renderings of mythological and historical figures. Everywhere, a bouquet of savoury aromas and smoke waft from open kitchen windows and street carts.

"I think what makes Oaxacan food different compared to other food regions is the enormous variety of microclimates," says Oaxaca-born chef Alejandro Ruiz, who has been championing his home state's native cuisine for nearly 30 years. "We work with what's available. If I have lemon trees, I make fresh agua fresca de limón (fresh lemonade). If I have corn and beans and chillies, that's what I eat."

Ruiz further explains that Oaxacan cuisine is a heady blend of Spanish, African Moorish and Indigenous techniques: "Also there's Asian influence, like cumin, cinnamon and other spices. But to me the Indigenous [influence] is the most important."

Though his restaurant Casa Oaxaca El Restaurante is upscale, Chef Ruiz adores Oaxaca's iconic street foods, like tlayudas (thin, crispy tortillas smothered in beans, meats, salsa and cheese) and memelas (grilled corn cakes). "[It's] special because it has the main ingredients of our local diet: corn, beans, salsas and stuffings like meat, sausage, herbs called quelites," he says. "There is always a comal" – the Mexican griddle that crisps dough to perfection – "and there is always freshly made tortilla. If you have a good tortilla, beans and salsa, that's all you need to have an amazing taco, tostada, tlayuda, or memela."

Earlier this year, the new 104km Barranca Larga-Ventanilla highway opened between Oaxaca City and Puerto Escondido, slashing the drive from eight nausea-inducing hours to a quick 2.5, so there's no time like the present to try Oaxaca's amazing cuisine. Here are Ruiz's top five street foods in Oaxaca City.

1. Best for bustle: Oaxaca's mercados

"One of the main reasons people come to Oaxaca is to eat," says Ruiz, "and I think they should visit the market (mercado) if they’re interested in food."

In the centre of the city, the neighbouring mercados 20 de Noviembre and Benito Juarez as well as the nearby Central de Abasto are popular among both locals and visitors, offering scores of food stall options amidst a bevy of handicraft shopping. A kaleidoscope of tropical fruit abounds punctuated by barrels of fried grasshoppers called chapulines; stands offer street foods ranging from tacos and Oaxacan-style barbeque to tlayudas and tamales Oaxaqueños (corn husk-wrapped corn tamales laced with sweet and savoury Oaxacan-style mole sauce, made with bitter chocolate). Everything gets washed down with a mug of the state's renowned hot chocolate and coffee, both packaged and prepared fresh. Even with so many delicious options, Ruiz is particularly emphatic that visitors try the barbecue, where they'll choose from a selection of thin-cut beef or chorizo sausages that are grilled to order, as a billow of mouth-watering smoke perfumes the dining area.

In addition to the local markets, Ruiz advises taking a short jaunt out of town to the markets in the neighbouring city of Tlacolula, where you "grill your own tasajo and chorizo right there on the charcoal grills – it's an amazing experience".

Website: https://mercado-20-de-noviembre.webnode.mx/

Address: 20 De Noviembre 512, Centro, 68000, Oaxaca de Juarez, Oax., Mexico

2. Best for tacos: Tacos del Carmen

Located a block down from Oaxaca's botanical garden, Tacos del Carmen is beloved by locals. This unassuming stand's offerings are cooked under a comal, yielding a crispy tortilla with melted cheese on the inside along with ingredients like mushrooms, chorizo, beans, fried pork belly (called chicharron) and the day's selection of meats.

Centrally located alongside the garden near several of the city's most historical cathedrals like Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzman and the Metropolitan Cathedral, and tucked amidst many of its excellent art galleries, Tacos del Carmen has become an increasingly popular stop among visitors. The stand is closed by 15:00, so plan it as an afternoon fuel-up as you wander the city, and keep in mind that it's not open Wednesday or Sunday. The menu is in both Spanish and English, so no worries about language difficulties. It is cash-only, so come prepared.

"I recommend ordering the tacos de chile relleno (stuffed pepper) with chorizo and quesillo (egg custard)," says Ruiz. "It’s so rich and so delicious – the best in town."

Address: Jesús Carranza 110, Ruta Independencia, Centro, 68000, Oaxaca de Juarez, Oax., Mexico

Instagram: @carmentacosdel

3. Best for tlayudas: Tlayudas Doña Tere

One of Oaxaca's most iconic dishes is the tlayuda – a crunchy, thin tortilla topped with a base of refried beans, then covered with cheese and toppings like avocado and vegetable.

According to Ruiz, "Everyone in Oaxaca has their own favourite place for tlayudas. Mine is Tlayudas Doña Tere right around the corner from my home. The way she makes it is on charcoal, in between the comal and the charcoal, so it's crispy and the cheese gets melted immediately. I love it."

Tlayudas Doña Tere is a 10-minute drive south-east of Oaxaca's downtown in the quiet, residential University district. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it spot – the perfect opportunity to get away from the bustle of the city centre and enjoy a tasty bite away from the tourist crowds.

Address: Escuela naval militar Esquina Dallas Col. Reforma

4. Best for memelas: Memelas Doña Vale

A cousin to both the taco and the tlayuda, memelas are thick, grilled cornmeal cakes topped with cheese, salsa and toppings like tomato, onion or peppers; a Oaxaca City staple. Ruiz is definitive on the city's best: Memelas Doña Vale, a stand run by memela maker Doña Vale in the market at Central de Abasto. "Doña Vale only makes memelas," he says. "And "[customers have the] option of topping them with a couple of eggs, confit porridge or tasajo (thinly cut, dried and spiced beef) grilled on the charcoal, chocolate de agua (hot chocolate mixed with water) or café de olla ("pot coffee" typically simmered in clay pot) to drink – only five options, no more. I love these kinds of places."

Plan on stopping by during shopping break and bring cash. This popular spot gets busy around lunchtime, which is no surprise as Doña Vale has been grilling memelas for 40 years.

Address: Cosijoeza, Central de Abasto, 68090, Oaxaca de Juarez, Oax., Mexico

Instagram: @memelasdonavale

5.  Best for a snack: Empanadas del Carmen

Yet another "must" while visiting Oaxaca are "empanadas de amarillo" (yellow empanadas). These savoury bites are made with corn dough and stuffed with chicken and Oaxaca's yellow mole, a silky golden sauce stewed with tomatillos, hoja santa (Mexican pepperleaf) and vegetables like green beans and potatoes. Flaky on the outside with an explosion of rich mole flavour within, empanadas de Amarillo are ideal for fortifying your stomach after a long day of mezcals and cervezas.

At Empanadas del Carmen, says Ruiz, "They’re made right in front of you, and they are the best in town – cheap and delicious." The stand is open every day but Wednesday from 17:00-23:00, and as they're located right in the heart of the central district, they're a convenient place to stop off for a snack while exploring the city.

"Have a meal in a fine dining restaurant, a meal on the street, and a meal in the market," Ruiz recommends. "This way you learn about the full culinary traditions in Oaxaca."

Address: Jesús Carranza 102, Ruta Independencia, Centro, 68000, Oax., Mexico

Instagram: @empanadasdelcarmenalto

BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.

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A Scotch whisky lover's guide to Edinburgh and beyond

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241029-a-scotch-whisky-lovers-guide-to-edinburgh, today

Author Charlie MacLean has made a life out of rating Scotch whisky. Here are his favourite ways to enjoy a dram, from cosy city pubs in Edinburgh to Victorian hotels in the Highlands.

Edinburgh, Scotland's cosmopolitan capital, is brimming with Unesco cache. Both its architecturally splendid medieval Old Town and Neoclassical New Town are World Heritage sites, while Edinburgh itself was named the world's first City of Literature in 2004.

Overseas, Edinburgh is equally as revered for its whisky culture. There are more than 385 pubs in the city where you can savour the peat-flavoured drink right in its country of origin.

"It's growing," says esteemed scotch writer Charles "Charlie" MacLean. "A lot of bars have expanded the range of whiskies and the knowledge on part of the bar staff in order to be able to advise customers. So Edinburgh has become a hub."

 

 

For MacLean, the enduring global appeal of Scotch whisky owes much to "fashion – after the Second World War, it was the drink of the free world", particularly in dolce vita-era Italy, where it was "introduced by the GIs and promoted by Hollywood. But secondly, Scotch scores on its deep history and its craft. If you want to go beyond simply enjoyment, whisky rewards analysis, and I think that's become part of the appeal. It is an acquired taste. It's not a child's drink. If you get the taste of it, it's hugely rewarding."

But for all the historic and up-and-coming pubs in Edinburgh, there are glorious Scotch whisky experiences further afield in Scotland's five famed whisky regions, like Speyside in the Scottish Highlands and the dramatically beautiful island of Islay. "The Scottish whisky industry is developing really sophisticated, really well-equipped touristic facilities, visitor centres and restaurants," says MacLean.

Historic though it may be, Edinburgh's whisky culture is anything but stale. Here are MacLean's top Scotch whisky experiences – in Edinburgh and beyond.

1. Best for whisky newbies: Johnnie Walker Princes Street

"We have an awful lot of international tourists," says MacLean. "They love whisky, and the city has responded to that with whisky bars and places like the Johnnie Walker Centre."

The mammoth eight-storey Johnnie Walker Princes Street, housed in the former Houses of Fraser department store, offers an immersive, multi-faceted whisky experience. "[It's] an introduction to Scotch whisky that has done very, very well," says MacLean. "The eight floors are huge!"

Johnnie Walker Princes Street offers a variety of tutored tasting tours where visitors can blend bespoke cocktails and pair artisanal chocolate truffles with luxury whiskies, all while learning about the humble Scottish grocer whose homegrown single malt spawned the best-selling whisky brand in the world. Head to the 1820 Rooftop Bar for beautiful views of the imposing medieval masterpiece Edinburgh Castle or to the Explorers Bothy's Bar where whiskies are paired with small plates crafted by Michelin-starred chefs. "Very slick and professional, for novices and connoisseurs," says MacLean.

Website: https://www.johnniewalker.com/en-us

Address: 145 Princes St, Edinburgh EH2 4BL

Phone: +44 (0)1313 769 494

Instagram: @johnniewalker

2. Most knowledgeable bartenders: Canny Man's

MacLean has made a life of rating whisky, but humbly demurs at the epithet expert. "It was purely by luck that I got into [it]," says the former ghost writer, now working on his 20th book on whisky. "It's like Alice in Wonderland; you go through one door and then there are more doors. On the production [and] historical side, I find it absolutely fascinating."

For an Alice in Wonderland Scotch experience, MacLean suggests: "Go to a bar with a knowledgeable bartender. Go with a couple of friends, so there's three of you. Say to the bartender, 'Give us three whiskies in nosing glasses.' And say, 'Right, we liked that number three; give us three more like that." You note and taste. What you're doing is developing the knowledge that they're not all the same."

While MacLean says there are many knowledgeable bartenders in Edinburgh, his first stop is Canny Man's, a historic public house helmed by Iain Kerr.

"His family have owned this idiosyncratic traditional bar since 1871," says MacLean. "It is highly atmospheric, crowded with memorabilia – every one of which has a story, many of them donated to settle bar bills!"

The antique- and trinket-filled pub is found in Edinburgh's upscale, tree-lined Morningside neighbourhood. Though most famous for its Bloody Mary, Canny Man's holds regular Scotch tastings and names a "New Malt of the Month".

"It offers a wide range of malts (around 300) and its own house blend," adds MacLean.

Website: https://www.cannymans.co.uk/

Address: 237 Morningside Rd, Morningside, Edinburgh EH10 4QU, United Kingdom

Phone: +44 (0)1314 471 484

Instagram: @thecannymans

3. Best cosy small bar: Kay's Bar

For MacLean, there are outdoor whiskies and indoor whiskies: "If you're outdoors, I would go for an Islay whisky like Lagavulin; elemental, smoky whiskies. Then for the evening, go for more sherry-style whiskies, like Glendalough or Glenfarclas."

For a cosy evening tipple, MacLean recommends Kay’s Bar, a snug pub in Edinburgh's New Town. "[It's got] a real fire, a companionable atmosphere and a large selection of whiskies and beers," he says of the Victorian-era pub with red-painted walls and red velvet seating. "Kay’s was actually established [as a wine and spirit merchant] in the 18th Century. It's a lovely, cosy small bar."

Tiny Kay's accommodates one long bench with a smattering of tables around it, making it easy to get acquainted with your neighbour.

Website: https://www.kaysbar.uk/

Address: 39 Jamaica St, Edinburgh EH3 6HF

Phone:+44 (0)1312 251 858

Instagram: @kaysbaredinburgh

4. Best cocktails: Bramble

"I must mention Bramble," says MacLean emphatically. "Tiny, tiny cocktail bar in a tiny basement. But they've won global prizes for their cocktails and knowledge of spirits."

Bramble is found in a row of stately townhouses on Queen Street; distinguishable only by a tiny sign on an iron fence. The humble, dimly lit space began serving its uniquely inventive cocktails in 2006 – cracking the 50 Best Bars in the World in 2009 and remaining on the list for five years – and has consistently racked up prizes ever since.

"They do some ready-made cocktails with whiskies," notes MacLean. These change regularly but current standouts include the "Triple Corn" (pisco, corn whisky, corn liqueur, sweetcorn, coriander and lime) and the "Shadowman" (made from whisky, Latvian kummel liqueur, chamomile, rosemary and lemon). "The guys behind that are among the leading cocktail makers in the world," says MacLean.

Bramble welcomes nationally acclaimed DJs on Friday and Saturday nights.

Website: https://www.bramblebar.co.uk/

Address: 16A Queen St, Edinburgh EH2 1JE, United Kingdom

Phone: +44 (0)1312 266 343

Instagram: @bramble_bar

5. Best outside Edinburgh: Craigellachie Hotel, Highlander Inn, The Fiddlers and Dornoch Castle Hotel

Though Edinburgh has an excellent whisky scene, MacLean recommends visitors also explore Scotland's five whisky regions – Speyside, Islay, Campbelltown, Highland and Lowland. Some of MacLean's favourite whisky experiences are found in Speyside in the ruggedly beautiful Scottish Highlands, home to excellent salmon fishing and the country's densest concentration of Scotch distilleries.

Scotch-loving visitors can follow Speyside's Malt Whisky Trail, tracing a string of prestige and historic distilleries. Or they can find themselves in the village of Aberlour at MacLean's top pick, the Craigellachie Hotel. "Craigellachie Hotel is a pilgrimage destination for whisky lovers, with a vast collection of malts and very knowledgeable bar staff," says MacLean. "It also has a cheerful informal bar [and restaurant], The Copper Dog, and the Quaich Bar [which] has an amazing stock of whisky." Craigellachie Hotel is also home to the early 18th-Century Spey Inn pub; the oldest drover's inn in Scotland. 

Just a few paces away from the hotel is MacLean's next pick; the Highlander Inn. "It boasts a huge selection of Scotch malts and also has the largest collection of Japanese whisky in the UK."

Venturing further 115km further west to the scenic Loch Ness, MacLean also recommends the award-winning The Fiddlers Highland Restaurant in the lakeside village of Drumnadrochit. "[It] has been owned by the Beach family since 1996. As well as having a restaurant featuring Highland dishes, it has more than 500 whiskies in stock."

Continuing north to the seaside resort town of Dornoch, MacLean likes to stop at the family-owned Dornoch Castle Hotel, facing the imposing 12th-Century Dornoch Castle. "[The pub] offers a number of very rare old whiskies at generous prices. It also has a micro distillery on site. A must for anyone travelling in the north of Scotland."

Website: https://craigellachiehotel.com/

Address: Victoria St, Speyside Way, Craigellachie, Aberlour AB38 9SR

Phone:+44 (0)1340 881 204

Instagram: @thecraigellachie

6. Best splurge: The Fife Arms in Braemar

"How much do you want to spend?" quips MacLean. "If you're in Edinburgh [and want to splurge], the Balmoral Hotel has very well-informed staff and a nice whisky bar. But the Fife Arms is unbelievable. Costly, but glorious!"

The Fife Arms hotel is located in Braemar, a bustling village in Cairngorms National Park in the Scottish Highlands; a little more than a two-hour drive north from Edinburgh and 15 minutes from Balmoral Castle, the Scottish home of the Royal Family.

"It’s a small hotel, a very, very luxurious hotel," says MacLean. " It's absolutely top notch. The Victorian building has been tastefully and appropriately restored – no expense spared! The Swiss owners are among the world’s leading art collectors and every room, public and private, is embellished with artworks, more than 14,000 at the last count; some by very famous artists and including private commissions."

MacLean also praises the hotel's amenities: "The staff are impeccable; the food superb – [the restaurant has] two Michelin stars." And when it's time to finally settle in for a dram, visitors can lounge at Bertie's Whisky Bar, with its moody wood-panelled walls and rich red velvet armchairs: "Named for King Edward VII, bon viveur and gourmand. But [it's] not a traditional bar; more like a whisky library where the well-informed bar staff/'librarians' encourage guests to explore flavours."

"A truly exceptional place," says MacLean. "The best that Scotland offers – at the moment!"

Website: https://thefifearms.com/

Address: Mar Rd, Braemar, Ballater AB35 5YN

Phone: +44 (0)1339 720 200

Instagram: @thefifearms

BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.

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A 'crazy town looking to go fossil free': Sweden's wooden city that was green before Greta

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241114-swedens-wooden-city-that-was-green-before-greta, today

Nearly a decade before Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was even born, Växjö set itself on a path to a new vision of green urban living.

The 1,000-year-old Swedish city of Växjö sits 450km south-west of Stockholm in the central region of Småland amid a lush tapestry of sylvan landscapes dotted by hundreds of lakes. This is a land known as the Glasriket ("Glass Kingdom") that's home to a string of globally renowned glassworks such as Kosta Boda and Orrefors who have created crystalline gorgeousness from fiery furnaces since the 1740s.

But that glassmaking heritage is now matched by changemaking: this compact city of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants has become a global beacon in the battle against climate change. Nearly a decade before Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was even born, Växjö set itself on a path to a new vision of urban living that's now been emulated worldwide.

"It was a seminar in 1996 led by the mayor, which asked the question: 'What would it be like to live in a fossil free city?'," explains Henrik Johansson, environmental strategist for Växjö Municipality. By the end of that meeting, a unanimous vote saw Växjö become the first city in the world to commit to become fossil fuel free. This has now evolved into a bigger target of climate neutrality by 2030 – 15 years ahead of Sweden's nationwide commitment.    

Växjö's groundbreaking 1990s commitment drew media coverage from as far afield as Japan, with TV crews ironically taking fuel-guzzling long-distance flights to visit the place Johansson wryly describes as "this crazy town looking to go fossil free". None of it seems crazy now, however, with Växjö's per capita carbon emissions slashed by more than 70%  from 1990s levels, all while the city has grown in population by a third and doubled its per capita GDP.

Here, local buses and council vehicles run on biofuel made from domestic household organic waste. More than 90% of the city's energy, meanwhile, is sourced from forestry by-products and other biomass, with plentiful material coming from the vast surrounding forests. This ranges from sawdust from local timber mills to branches left from tree-felling to make goods for IKEA – the global design giant born just a half hour train ride away in the town of Älmhult.

The few CO2 emissions that linger in the air stem from personal car users who are still not taking advantage of one of Sweden's best provisions of electric car charging stations, plus places to fill up on non-fossil biofuels such as ethanol.

The boldest transition, though, has seen Växjö become perhaps the world's leading showcase for large-scale timber architecture, with half of all new builds required to be in wood, sourced from the same sprawling forests that once provided fuel to fire the glasswork furnaces.

I arrive in Växjö by train and can't help but start snapping pictures of a station interior unlike any I've ever seen. Stepping off the platform, I enter a seven-storey edifice that hosts both the Central Station and Växjö City Hall, and everywhere I look, there's wood. Here, timber is used for both structure and decor in a calm, soaring space that also includes a tourist office, exhibition area and eye-catching artworks made from pale wood. It's such a welcoming space that it's been nicknamed the city's public "living room".  

A wooden bridge connects the station with a museum quarter that I explore the next day, featuring the Swedish Glass Museum within the Småland Museum; plus the House of Emigrants, which tells the often revelatory story of Swedish mass emigration to North America.

The museum enclave is also home to myriad relocated buildings from past centuries – I particularly like the windmill as a symbol of ancient green power, built from timbers painted the iconic Swedish shade known as Falu or Falun Red, named after its historic source from mines around the eponymous town.   

Heading down to the shore of Lake Trummen – one of two nearby lakes, along with sculpture-lined Växjösjön – I potter along a trail of modern sculptures that provides a cultural promenade of contemporary works chosen and voted for by residents. Glass art is celebrated too, with contrasting crystalline creations placed along the cosmopolitan length of Sandgärdsgatan that runs through the heart of the city centre to the iconic double-spired cathedral.

It's a beautiful stroll, and I wonder whether people would have been so keen to leave Sweden if 19th-Century life had offered what the 21st-Century nation does. Alongside enviable public services and a famously equable society, I'm getting housing envy staring up at contrasting high-rise wooden apartment blocks that make up the award-winning Kvarteret Geologen residential complex (also known as Trummens Strand), standing tall and proud by the lake.

Here, I'm joined by Olivia Thim, a sustainability expert for property management firm Vöfab. "For a long time, we had the tallest wooden building in Sweden," Thim says. "But also a diversity: apartments, sports arenas, schools. We just thought that we should try to build everything in wood first."

Also with us is architect Karin Hård Af Segerstad from leading Växjö practice Arkitektbolaget, who tells me about the super-strong cross-laminated timber (CLT) used for structural frames, augmented by cedar shaving facades and various interior woods. This swaddling in natural materials is as pleasing to the residents as it is to the eye, she says: “People report an improved sense of well-being living surrounded by wood."

More like this:

• 10 sustainable travel destinations to visit in 2024

• Nordhavn: The Danish 'city' that's been designed for an easy life

• How the youngest Canary Island escaped mass tourism

For architects and engineers, Växjö's showcasing of innovative timber builds has been a valuable learning curve. "People weren't so knowledgeable about wooden high-rise buildings, so we have close collaboration with the local university," says Segerstad. "Every time there was a question, there would be research done." 

This includes sensors within buildings to record how the structures perform over years and changing seasons. "Now we have researchers coming from around the world," she continues. "Many from Austria and Germany, but also places in Africa such as Congo.  We have become world pioneers to build in wood. Aesthetic principles are as important as ecological ones." 

The environmental drive underpinning Växjö's modern wood architecture is matched by how the city powers its 21st century life. Exploring the city centre, I can see innovative new wooden structures next to historic clapboard buildings, many transformed into trendy shops or atmospheric restaurants, such as Kafe de Luxe where the traditional Swedish dishes rely on produce from the surrounding land and water.  

Meanwhile, at modern design hotel PM & Vanner, the restaurants focus on local, seasonal and organic dishes, including produce from the hotel's own garden – while dishes are cleaned using an energy- and water-saving dishwasher. Food waste is turned into biofuel, and the hotel is also part of an innovative textile recycling system.

Before I leave, I walk around the wood-decorated offices of local power generator VEAB with CEO Erik Tellgren, who tells me how forest and wood product "waste" taken from around Växjö easily provides all the electricity requirements of the city, in a manner that also helps the battle to mitigate climate change.

"Forest residues left to decompose generate CO2," says Tellgren. "So, using it up helps cut emissions." And, he adds, the ash produced from the burned wood is returned to the forest floor as an excellent compost.

He smiles as he recalls how Växjö's first power plant, which fired up here beside the lake in the 1880s, burned wood, and now some 140 years later, the town is again relying on the material as it leads the world away from fossil fuels

"So we began with wood, and now we come back to it again," he says.

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Nordhavn: The Danish 'city' that's been designed for an easy life

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241104-nordhavn-the-danish-city-thats-been-designed-for-an-easy-life, today

Copenhagen's once-industrial port has been planned to make everything – from schools and play areas to businesses and recreational spaces – accessible within five minutes.

While cruising the canals of Copenhagen in the summer of 2023, my guide pointed out Nordhavn, the city's once-industrial neighbourhood, excitedly claiming it would become the coolest new city in Europe. From the boat, I couldn't see much beyond a few residential buildings and lots of giant construction machinery, but, as an architect, I was interested to know more.

So, 12 months later, I returned to Copenhagen and headed back to Nordhavn, just a 15-minute metro ride from Copenhagen's central station. 

This time, standing at Århusgadekvarteret, the core of the new development, I could see gleaming apartment buildings, high-end office spaces and a cafe-lined boardwalk along the previously industrial harbour. Dozens of people were lying on colourful beach towels spread across the waterfront, all soaking in the Scandinavian summer sun. It was a peaceful, serene scene, with none of the morning commuter chaos I was used to seeing in cities around the world.

And that's because Nordhavn has been specifically designed to make life easier.

"Although it looks like any modern district, it's the world's first five-minute city," explained my guide, Bente Hoffman from immersive cultural tour company Slow Tours. "When the project is complete, everything you need will be within a 400m walk."

Commuting is one of the biggest challenges of modern life as it adds so much time into the daily routine. Nordhavn (officially a district of Copenhagen, but described as a city due to its scale and scope) has been designed to make everything – from schools and play areas to businesses and recreational spaces – accessible within five minutes. It is setting a blueprint for a world where residents can fit in a morning workout before strolling to the office, grab lunch at a cute cafe, have a quick swim at the harbour and still make it home in time to take your kids to the playground – all before enjoying a cosy candlelit dinner at home.

Imagine doing all of this without driving from one point to another, without feeling exhausted, and being able to repeat it every day while staying carbon neutral.

"We are creating a neighbourhood that meets everyday needs and special occasions," explained Peter Bur Andersen, an architect from BRIQ Studios that played a crucial role in zoning Nordhavn. "Everything is within walking or biking distance, minimising the need for commuting. The area also promotes a mostly car-free lifestyle, connected by cycle paths and the metro."

Copenhagen is currently the Unesco World's Architecture Capital (until 2026) and innovative solutions for smart living have been brewing across the Danish capital: from Paper Island, designed to focus on public spaces and housing for all income groups; to Carlsberg City District that's built on four pillars of beer production: science, innovation, art and culture.

However, Nordhavn's five-minute city concept is unique. While there are a few 10-minute cities being developed around the world, including one in Seoul, South Korea, Nordhavn's one-of-a-kind concept is the most ambitious urban development project in Scandinavia. It is also the only new urban district anywhere in the world to receive a gold certification for sustainability from the German Sustainable Building Council, or DGNB (the largest network for sustainable building in Europe), according to Andersen.

In Nordhavn, sustainability is about more than reducing energy consumption. Every building constructed must consider its social, economic and environmental impact. For example, the Big Bio Cinema – the city's newest theatre – is constructed from recyclable materials such as aluminium in case the building ever needs to be demolished.

And, according to Anderson, social and economic inclusion has been at the core of all planning. "It is important to bring back what worked well in history," he said. "We used to have the butcher, craftsman, baker and cheese shop – that diversity in everyday encounters. The future city should mix recreational, cultural and commercial spaces, all easily accessible within the neighbourhood."

But until relatively recently, no one would have considered living in this once-industrial district. Irshia Nasreen, an engineer born and raised in central Copenhagen, says, "While I was trying to find a new neighbourhood to move out of the city centre, I never thought I'd move here."

Bente adds, "I didn't think I would do tourist walks in Norhavn. There was nothing to see."

After all, for centuries Nordhavn was a free port filled with cargo ships, grain silos and metal containers. The buildings that existed were warehouses and industrial shipping structures. Then, in 2008, a competition was held to create a sustainable neighbourhood for Copenhagen's future: 179 proposals were submitted and a group of four architectural firms, COBE Architects, Sleth, Rambøll and Polyform were winners.

They designed an urban area of "soft mobility", where it is easier to walk, bike or use public transport than it is to drive; and put the idea of hybrid spaces – something that "avoids creating lifeless spaces and fosters community among residents, employees and visitors", according to Andersen – at its heart. For example, in Nordhavn, a multi-storey car park might have a gym on its roof; an apartment building could include a public restaurant; and a hotel could house a concept store.

Although the entire Nordhavn project won't be finished until 2060, it is being developed in islets (small islands), with key areas such as Nordø and Århusgadekvarteret, already complete and full of life, brimming with locals and tourists. A metro extension to Nordhavn and Orientkaj opened in 2020, providing easy access from the city centre.

More like this:

• 10 sustainable travel destinations to visit in 2024

• Kamikochi: Japan's car-free town that autumn hikers love

• How the youngest Canary Island escaped mass tourism

As Hoffman and I walked through Nordø, I admired the ingenuity of using once-unassuming buildings to create chic destinations. Audo House, a warehouse from 1918, is now a boutique hotel, concept store and cafe. Across the road, MENY food supermarket was once a factory for building guns. Because of the building's protected status, MENY had to use the same walls, windows and ceilings as the former World War Two gun factory to create what is now a futuristic food market. Nearby, the raw steel surface of The Silo still resembled its days as a grain silo. But it has now been transformed into a luxurious 17-storey residential building with a public restaurant.

"The beauty of Nordhavn lies in the blend of old and new architecture standing side by side," said Hoffman. "Sustainability is also about preserving the past by repurposing old buildings for modern use."

Nasreen moved to Nordhavn in 2023 and says the calm, car-free environment has transformed her lifestyle. "I love walking around here," she said. "After living in the city centre for 40 years, not hearing the hums of vehicles is refreshing. The proximity of water to all residential areas gives a sense of peace and fresh air. My nephew is awed by the fact that he can swim in the harbour, walk back home for a shower and then go back to the waterfront to enjoy coffee in a cool café. Isn't that amazing?"

She added: "I work from home, and when I need a change of scenery, I head to The Audo House. It's a multifunctional space, so you see tourists checking in the hotel and people shopping for art and furniture while I have a coffee in its cafe on a winter afternoon."

In the early 20th Century, when legendary Danish designer Arne Jacobsen said, "Architecture is not just about creating buildings; it's about shaping the environment and enhancing people's lives," it was theoretical. A century later, Hoffman is leading curious designers and architects like me on walking tours around Nordhavn. As curious as I am, and perhaps with the same intent, they are looking for answers to the question: can architecture be one of the keys to creating a happier urban environment? 

For Nasreen and many others living in Nordhavn, the answer is a resounding yes.

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Booking your next holiday? Consider these six trailblazing travel firms making the world a better place

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241101-six-trailblazing-travel-firms-making-the-world-a-better-place, today

This year's Global Responsible Tourism Award winners demonstrate that travel can be inclusive, climate-friendly, nature-positive and a positive force for local communities.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the Responsible Tourism Awards are a standard bearer for the positive side of the travel industry. Run by the non-profit International Centre for Responsible Tourism Global, the awards aim to showcase the benefits of tourism and inspire other firms to do the same.  

Awards like these are particularly important at a time when tourism is under pressure. With global travel and tourism numbers back to pre-pandemic levels and one in 10 people employed in the industry, the need to improve the sector's environmental, economic and cultural impact is clear. Lifting up businesses that give back to their local communities creates a win-win for tourists and locals alike. And for travellers interested in supporting local culture, having extraordinary nature experiences and a ensuring a responsible travel industry, the winning firms have demonstrated their ability to do that and more. 

Tess Longfield, head of sustainability communications at Sabre, who sponsors the awards, commented that extraordinary work is being done by all the winners to create a more sustainable and equitable world through tourism. "It's a testament to the power of responsible travel to make a real difference," she said.

From a private ecolodge in South Africa to a volunteering organisation in a Peruvian biosphere reserve, these are the firms to book with in 2024 and beyond:

Winner – Employing and upskilling local communities: Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, South Africa 

This five-star ecolodge set in 3,500 hectares of South African wilderness is constantly researching pioneering ways of doing things to improve the lives of the local community and protect the fragile landscapes and wildlife that surround it.

As well as offering unique tourism experiences to guests, such as guided walks to the flora-rich fynbos and coastal safaris in in waters teeming with great white sharks and dolphins, Grootbos' lodge provides ecotourism jobs to the local community. Profits from the lodge fund the Grootbos Foundation, which gives free skills and business training for hundreds of local people in the areas of hospitality, horticulture, entrepreneurship and biodiversity. It creates a ripple effect that's much needed during a period of serious unemployment in South Africa.

The judging team called Grootbos "an exemplary business that others can learn from", praising the way that it constantly pushes the boundaries and explores new ways of developing responsible tourism. 

"Grootbos cares about community and conservation," said Phil Murray, fundraising, donor relations and communications manager at Grootbos Foundation. "Neither can be ignored, and both can mutually benefit from programmes and a responsible tourism business that prizes people and planet."

Winner – Championing cultural diversity: Rajasthan Studio, India

Rajasthan Studio curates art experiences with master artisans in Rajasthan, allowing travellers to experience, understand and value the local culture of the place they are visiting. Travellers can visit master artists at their homes and studios, meet their families, see the process behind making local handicrafts and co-create a personalised souvenir with the crafter.

The experiences include an insight into rare and unique art forms like puppetry and the blue pottery of Jaipur, pichwai art and sea foam carving of Udaipur, leather juttis and tie dye of Jodhpur and much more. The idea is to build a community of artists and scale the business to different parts of Rajasthan, and eventually across India. 

"Rajasthan as a state is blessed with a wonderful art heritage and travellers are eager to explore every bit of it," said company founder Kartik Gaggar. "But why should we limit it to exploring? We asked the same question and the answer was: let's turn it into an experience." 

The judges were impressed with how Gaggar has created an immersive cultural experience that both economically benefits artists and enriches travellers. They called it a "highly replicable approach".

Today, the company offers more than 20 hand-on art experiences in Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur, with plans to include artists from Jaisalmer, Bikaner, Bundi and Kota in the near future.

Winner – Increasing local sourcing and creating shared value: Sivatel Bangkok Hotel, Thailand

As this year's protests have been demonstrating, tourism has an impact on local people as much as visitors. Sivatel Bangkok was this year's winner for its innovative approach that brings together local providers to directly help the community.

The hotel sources 70% of its ingredients organically and partners with more than 50 local farmers through the Sivatel's Farmer Friends Network. It also supports local producers and fosters a sustainable ecosystem through the "Sivatel Sustainable Market", a pop-up market within the hotel where local artisans and food producers can sell their wares to travellers. Uniforms are designed by Folkcharm, a local sustainable fashion brand that supports local artisans.

Perhaps most uniquely, it runs a "From Kitchen to Chicken" programme, diverting hotel food scraps to feed black soldier fly larvae, which are then used as protein for organic chickens at a local chicken farm, where the hotel then sources its meat.

The judging panel found Sivatel Bangkok's structured programme based around regenerative agriculture and funding impressive, along with the way it sources and trains local providers. 

"We believe that to live on this Earth, we cannot live alone but must support each other," said Sivatel CEO Alisara Sivayathorn.

Winner – Making tourism inclusive: TUI UK&I

With a business that serves more than six million holidaymakers a year, TUI is one of the best-known tourism brands in Europe. Its deep and comprehensive commitment to inclusivity impressed the judges: the tour operator has devised a unique way to help those with access needs book their accommodations.

Among TUI's many initiatives, they have 90 dedicated agents in their contact centre who have had specialist accessibility training; the team has partnered with AccessAble to survey hotels and develop detailed access guides; and also works with Sign Live to provide interpreting services for British Sign Language Users. 

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"Around one in four of the UK population lives with a disability or condition that impacts their daily life," said Marina Snellenberg, TUI's accessibility manager, "and the prevalence of disability rises sharply with age. It's important that TUI consider the needs and expectations of the disabled community, allowing for a sustained and deliverable customer experience for years to come." 

Judges were pleased to see a major tour operator address the needs of those with access needs so comprehensively, and hope that others will follow their example.

Winner – What are you doing about climate change?: Jetwing Hotels, Sri Lanka

This award celebrates a small hotel group in Sri Lanka that is actively decarbonising its operations, showing that even smaller players can take meaningful steps towards sustainability and inspire others while doing so.  

In a tropical climate like Sri Lanka, air conditioning can consume up to 60% of a hotel's energy needs. Across its 19 hotels, Jetwing Hotels uses renewable energy from biomass, solar PV, solar thermal and biogas for power. In 2023, the hotel group generated the equivalent of the power needed for about 13,490 households through renewable energy alone. The company has also shortened its supply chain, reducing transport emissions, and is now sourcing 40% of their inputs locally to their hotels.

"By reducing energy costs and promoting a culture of environmental responsibility among our staff and guests, we ensure that our business practices are not only beneficial for the environment but also economically viable," said managing director Dmitri Cooray, "Our success shows that even the smallest efforts can create a ripple effect, encouraging others to make impactful changes."

Winner - Nature Positive: CREES, Peru 

The award founders believe that the travel industry has a responsibility to contribute to the reversal of biodiversity loss and protect nature for future generations by promoting a regenerative approach to tourism. CREES, a Peruvian company offering tours and volunteering opportunities in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, is this year's winner of the Nature Positive award.

This educational tourism operation is working to benefit local people and conserve biodiversity at its three research stations in the Manu National Park that are home to one of the longest running and largest biodiversity studies in the Amazon. Guests get to witness conservation efforts first hand, exploring the rainforest in the company of the centre's naturalist guides, and participating in ongoing projects like checking pitfall traps, monitoring birdlife and taking visual surveys of reptiles and amphibians at night. Many of the projects monitor the life of the forest in newly regenerated forest areas, replanted by the team's conservationists, as a way to understand species recovery. 

Judges were particularly impressed by how CREES approaches its work, citing its broad and holistic agenda aimed at promoting sustainable alternatives that respect human rights, intergenerational rights, biodiversity rights and the rights of species to ensure long-term sustainable economic development, as key factors in its win.

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The world's adventure capital's massive gamble

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241017-the-worlds-adventure-capitals-massive-gamble, today

The fuel-guzzling town of Queenstown, New Zealand, has an audacious goal to become the first tourist destination on Earth to have a completely carbon-zero visitor economy – and all by 2030.

By 2030 – if things really go to plan – you'll land in Queenstown on New Zealand's South Island (possibly even aboard an electric-powered Air New Zealand airplane) and make your way to town via an electric gondola or on a hydro-powered ferry across the town's famous glacier-fed lake, Lake Wakatipu. Skiers and snowboarders – who in winter descend on this region in ever-increasing numbers from around the world – will ride electric-powered chairlifts to the peaks of the surrounding ski resorts.

Year-round, travellers might take high-speed rides on Lake Wakatipu and along the shallow whitewater rapids of the Shotover River town aboard the world's first fully electric jet boats. Even the TSS Earnslaw – this hemisphere's oldest coal-fired, passenger-carrying steamship that has transported young families on day excursions since the 1970s – will run on hydrogen.

It's all part of the region's very ambitious plan to become the first tourist town on Earth to have a carbon-zero visitor economy by 2030. The "adventure capital of the world" – a title earned through decades of innovation creating death-defying activities that had been done nowhere else, but ones that run primarily on fossil fuels – now wants to become the ecotourism capital of the world. And they're aiming for a carbon-zero visitor economy in six years, not an easier-to-achieve carbon-neutral visitor economy (where Queenstown could use carbon credits, like planting trees, to achieve its environmental goals). Becoming carbon-zero is much harder to achieve – because it means you can't emit any carbon at all.

"Well, 2030 creates urgency, doesn't it?" Destination Queenstown CEO Mat Woods asks rhetorically. "2030 seemed so hard to achieve that it got the community excited. It means that everyone in the community has to be part of this [push to carbon-zero]."

Queenstown's huge environmental challenge stemmed from a concern that the region's infrastructure was struggling to cope with the sheer number of tourists coming to town. Queenstown is set around a massive lake, fringed by the rugged mountains of the country's Southern Alps. It's been a skiing hotspot since resorts first opened in the 1940s, but the development of an adventure tourism economy built around its dramatic landscape since the 1960s established the region as one of New Zealand's most popular destinations.

Last year, almost 400,000 international visitors came here, an almost-20% rise since 2019, just before the pandemic. This number is particularly significant when you consider Queenstown has a permanent population of around 50,000.

"Locals were asking, what's in this for us," Woods says. "And can we really sustain this region the way it's going?"

The three local regional tourism organisations – Destination Queenstown, Queenstown Lakes District Council and Lake Wanaka Tourism – proposed the audacious goal in 2021 and were surprised at the support they got from tourism operators. "We took the plan out to the community and weren't sure what to expect," Woods says. "And everyone supported it. And that's the most important part in all of this. Every person has to play a part."

That could be someone like… say, Mr Chippy. While New Ze