Alison McGovern speaks to media about BBC crisis as culture secretary due to address MPs in attempt to contain fallout
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has called for Robbie Gibb to be removed from the BBC board. Gibb, a rightwing Conservative who worked as Theresa May’s director of communications after a career as a BBC journalist, has been described as the lead critic at board level over the way that the BBC newsroom is run. Gibb argues that he is defending BBC impartiality, but his many critics in the organisation view his version of impartiality as overtly partisan and rightwing.
In his GB News interview, Nigel Huddleston, the shadow culture seceretary, defended Gibb. He said:
The fact that they’re now trying to hound out Robbie Gibb, the one person who’s openly Conservative, speaks volumes about their inability to understand the strength of the problem here.
The BBC tries to pursue diversity in every single area other than diversity of thought, and now they’re going after Robbie Gibb. I mean, did these people have the same arguments when James Purnell, the former Labour DCMS Secretary of State was made director of strategy at the BBC? No, of course they didn’t.
Well, with a big apology and grovel because they were wrong, and Donald Trump has a perfectly legitimate concern here. It wasn’t ‘could be perceived’ to be misleading, it transparently was.
If you look at the number of people who were interviewed, it was 10 to one the people who opposed Donald Trump to those who supported him, and there wasn’t a compensatory programme for Kamala Harris. So I think the president has some legitimate concerns …
What they did was mislead the public and give the impression that Donald Trump said something that he transparently did not.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Belgium, France and Poland among countries commemorating first world war as conflict rumbles on
Ukraine’s military said about 300 Russian soldiers were inside the embattled town of Pokrovsk, and that Moscow had intensified efforts to get more troops in over the past few days, using dense fog for cover, Reuters reported.
“Their goal remains unchanged – to reach the northern borders of Pokrovsk and then attempt to encircle the agglomeration,” Ukraine’s 7th paratrooper corps said on Facebook.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA
© Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA
© Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA
Alan, 87, has devoted his life to trying to defy death, and has promised his wife, Sylvia, that they will be cryogenically preserved upon death to be reunited in the future. However, when Sylvia dies all too soon, Alan unexpectedly falls in love with another woman and is forced to reconsider his future plans. An extraordinary love story, told with humour and tenderness about how we deal with loss, our own mortality and the prospect of eternal life.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Murray Ballard
© Photograph: Murray Ballard
© Photograph: Murray Ballard
Sport’s famous rivalry began in 1877 and since then 853 men have featured in Australia v England Tests. But who are the best? Our four-day countdown starts here with Nos 100-71
Read about the 51 judges and our methodology here
© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
The iconic museum, which was founded in 1968, has been rehoused in 82,000-sq-ft building providing a new destination for Black art in New York City
Call it the second Harlem renaissance. On Manhattan’s 125th Street, where a statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr strides onwards and upwards, and a sign marks the spot where a freed Nelson Mandela dropped by, there is bustle and buzz.
The celebrated Apollo Theater is in the midst of a major renovation. The National Black Theatre is preparing to move into a $80m arts complex spanning a city block. In September the National Urban League opened a $250m building containing its headquarters, affordable housing and retail space with New York’s first civil rights museum to come.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Albert Vecerka / Esto
© Photograph: Albert Vecerka / Esto
© Photograph: Albert Vecerka / Esto
Electric humidifiers aren’t essential for hardy species, but they deliver a steady mist and consistent results – at a price
The problem
Winter is brutal for tropical houseplants. Central heating turns living rooms into deserts, leaving once lush calatheas with brown, crispy edges. Misting can increase humidity, but the effects are short-lived.
The hack
An electric humidifier delivers a steady mist to boost humidity around your plants. You simply fill the tank with water and let it run for a few hours a day, so humidity levels feel more like the tropics than Trafford.
© Photograph: Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images
© Photograph: Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images
© Photograph: Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images
In 1865, the first ever protein-based product consisted of ‘melted-down beef hides and carcasses’. Now, there are countless shakes on the market – including one by a Michelin-starred chef. Why is everyone drinking them?
I always thought my first foray into Michelin-starred culinary territory would involve sitting in a fancy restaurant feasting on some perfectly seared scallops or a magnificent rack of lamb doused in a rich jus. Instead, I’m in a fitness studio – with Doja Cat blaring through the speakers – watching my “Michelin-starred” shake come together in a blender. Inside is a scoop of vanilla protein powder, the flesh of a guanabana (a tropical fruit with a spiky exterior that tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana) and some almond milk. Saffron foam is sprayed into a plastic cup and sprinkled with some blue spirulina before the pale protein mixture is poured on top.
The resulting shake, which was developed by the Michelin-starred chef Miller Prada for Hermosa, a luxury protein powder brand sold in Barry’s, a chain of fitness studios, is like a drinkable lava lamp, with white, blue and yellow swirling softly in the cup. According to Erika Tamayo, the founder of Hermosa, it has only one comparison. “Everyone says that it looks like Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night,” she says. Before I’m allowed to taste it, she spritzes a coffee-scented liquid on the lid and then tells me how to drink it to get the “full Michelin experience”. Place the straw about midway in the cup and suck (it should taste like an ice-cream), before shoving it down full-throttle to get a hit of the “mood-enhancing” saffron.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
New funding for researchers and streamlined regulation part of roadmap for phasing out use of animals in science
Animal testing in science would be phased out faster under a new plan to increase the use of artificial intelligence and 3D bioprinted human tissues, a UK minister has said.
The roadmap unveiled by the science minister, Patrick Vallance, backs replacing certain animal tests that are still used where necessary to determine the safety of products such as life-saving vaccines and the impact pesticides have on living beings and the environment.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: STOCK4B GmbH/Alamy
© Photograph: STOCK4B GmbH/Alamy
© Photograph: STOCK4B GmbH/Alamy
Anti-tobacco researchers have produced an index looking at the industry which they say shows how companies are succeeding in influencing governments to ensure taxes remain flat or stubbornly low
Amid international aid cuts and a murky global economic outlook, health ministries and civil society groups around the world are worried about funding basic healthcare and prevention programmes. Public health is in a fragile state: it needs money.
Countries are being advised to increase domestic revenues to bridge shortfalls, and taxing unhealthy products such as tobacco is a win-win. Higher taxes reduce demand and therefore the burden of related disease, while filling government coffers.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Juni Kriswanto/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Juni Kriswanto/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Juni Kriswanto/AFP/Getty Images
Nova Poshta connects frontline cities to the capital, and to millions of refugees across Europe, delivering everything from home comforts to house moving boxes, even under fire
In a post office 10 miles (15km) from Ukraine’s frontline, in a suburb of the eastern city of Kharkiv, business is brisk on a chilly autumn morning – despite the ballistic missiles that had shaken the city at midnight, lighting up the sky with a false dawn of flames.
The customer area is fitted out with phone-charging stations “and a small co-working space, which people can use during blackouts, since we have generators”, says the branch manager, 30-year-old Yaroslav Dobronos. There is also a changing room, in which a young woman is trying on, with a critical gaze, a new pair of jeans, before repacking them and sending them straight back.
Nova Poshta logistics hub in Kyiv, where packages are moved through a complex set of scanners and chutes before being loaded on to lorries for the journey to their destinations
Continue reading...
© Illustration: Julia Kochetova/Guardian pictures
© Illustration: Julia Kochetova/Guardian pictures
© Illustration: Julia Kochetova/Guardian pictures
The businessman shaped Dallas into an NBA force after years in the wilderness. But problems with the team only worsened when he sold up
The year 2000 cracked open like a glow stick, flooding Dallas with new money – and a new Mavericks owner, who had made his money selling his streaming site just before the dot-com crash. Like the 1990s Mavs, Mark Cuban wasn’t polished – and he sure as hell wasn’t subtle. He was brash and argumentative, clashed with refs, and clapped too hard whenever Dirk Nowitzki buried a three. The internet age, in the form of Cuban, crashed courtside when he bought the team for $285m. Gone was the era of distant owners watching occasional games from the executive boxes: the fan was in control of the team now. Cuban had hacked reality.
Cuban’s thesis was simple: never play by their rules. The Mavs were his start-up. He improved nutrition, upgraded hotels for road games, bought a team plane, filled lockers with PlayStations, and fought the NBA’s lawyers with the defiance of a rapper clapping off hundos in a strip club. This went against the NBA’s old boys’ club. For all his dot-com cache, Cuban was punk in practice.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Mark Hampton wrote, directed and stars in this drama, but his easy onscreen charisma can’t overcome a shaky, soap opera-style plot
Financial traders in the movies are usually hubris personified, while boxers are a sure-fire vehicle for an underdog story. Writing, and playing, the role of reformed city fraudster turned pugilist Danny Goode, as well as directing the low-budget British drama that results, Mark Hampton sets up a potentially fertile collision of these two opposed elements. But cornering himself into an ultra-earnest tale of redemption, he lets his film absorb a few too many cheap cliche shots.
Danny is released after a three-year stretch for cooking the books; and, as a former high-rolling member of a late-night/early-morning gambling crew called the Breakfast Club, he now must accept diminished circumstances. This means a poky rental flat and, after his licence to trade is revoked, a restaurant job washing dishes arranged by an old friend, Jon (Mark Tunstall). His ex-wife, Chloe (Sarah Diamond), has the divorce papers ready to go, but Danny is keen to build bridges with his son, Ben (Artie Wong). He promises the kid a swanky holiday, so one more high-risk play is his only means of coming good: entering a £10,000 prize fight organised by local hardman Billy (Gary Davidson Jnr), who trains at Jon’s gym.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
The dirt-cheap clothing company has opened its first permanent store in Paris – and politicians and workers have united against it
Paris is the fashion capital of the world – a paradise of couture and craftsmanship stretching back centuries. The city’s very name connotes luxury and glamour. But last Wednesday, 5 November, a sprawling Shein outlet opened on the sixth floor of the BHV Marais, the historic department store directly across from Paris’s city hall. It’s the Singapore-based ultra-fast-fashion store’s first permanent bricks and mortar retail space, and the first of several permanent outposts Shein plans to open in France in the near future. Many Parisians aren’t happy about it.
Shein – launched as SheInside in 2011 in Nanjing, China – is the reprehensible paragon of the ultra-fast-fashion industry. The company sells clothing (and home goods, toys, stationery, cookware, blankets, pet supplies and more) at an unfathomable scale: today’s “new in” page alone lists more than 1,300 items, from shiny gold shirts in its “Manfinity Mode” category, to plunging, plus-size swimsuits under the sub-brand “Slaysola”. Nearly everything on the site is made of plastic, designed for single-use disposability, and it’s all shockingly, disturbingly cheap.
Nicole Lipman is a writer and assistant editor at n+1
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Olivier Juszczak/SIPA/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Olivier Juszczak/SIPA/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Olivier Juszczak/SIPA/Shutterstock
One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits
In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.
As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book – a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights – Shahrazad’s feat of creativity “refuses the present emergency – the contrived drama of a powerful man”. The echo of life in the Trump era is deliberate; for Winterson, the means by which Shahrazad changes her predicament holds out hope for a progressive politics currently losing ground to “radical-rightwing thuggery”. “A better story starts with a better story,” she writes. “Reason will not win the day. Without imagination nothing changes.”
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Kate Peters
© Photograph: Kate Peters
© Photograph: Kate Peters
Connexion