The high-risk nature of the sport creates enjoyment for the competitors regardless of the hunt for medals and this positive feeling helps attract spectators
As the Winter Olympics approaches, we get to watch sports many of us have never tried. How can we connect to these sports? What should we look out for? What can we enjoy and learn? Research by three-times Olympian Lesley McKenna into what makes snowboarding meaningful offers us some great ideas.
As a British athlete, coach and team manager, McKenna experienced first-hand the pressures of managing athlete performance, wellbeing and the pursuit of medals. She saw the push and pull between the inherent creativity in pipe and park snowsport events and the drive for standardisation to make it easier to compare athletes.
Ministers’ proposals to tackle ‘forever chemicals’ fail to match tougher stance taken in Europe, say experts
Environmental campaigners have criticised a “crushingly disappointing” UK government plan to tackle “forever chemicals”, which they warn risks locking in decades of avoidable harm to people and the environment.
The government said its Pfas action plan set out a “clear framework” of “coordinated action … to understand where these chemicals are coming from, how they spread and how to reduce public and environmental exposure”.
Chuck Negron died at his Studio City, Ca, home on Monday and was surrounded by his family. He had been battling heart disease in the final months before his death.
Based on a real-life case of a teacher charged with abusing a child, Japan’s master of the extreme doesn’t sit on the fence in this two-sided retelling
Takashi Miike, Japan’s maestro of the extreme, now takes on a relatively sedate and mainstream genre: the courtroom drama. But he can’t help bringing to it his signature shocks and unsubtle tropes. Sham is based on a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion. In the city of Fukuoka in south-west Japan, primary school teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil and driving him close to suicide on the grounds of the child supposedly having an American grandfather, his pure Japanese blood tainted by foreigners. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser? The film is based on Fabrication: The Truth About the “Murder Teacher” in Fukuoka, investigative journalist Masumi Fukuda’s 2007 book about the case.
Mirroring the prosecution and defence cases in court, Miike gives us both sides of the story in quasi-Rashomon style: first, that of the boy’s mother Mrs Himuro (Kô Shibasaki) and in this version, the behaviour of the teacher (Gô Ayano) is truly sinister. Afterwards – the “prosecution” version having taken up very little of the film – we get the teacher’s own account, and it soon dawns on us that this is in fact the objective reality. He is a gentle, reasonable man, loved by his pupils; he wouldn’t hurt a fly and his remarks on the boy’s family background are entirely innocent. The trouble stemmed from having been persuaded by the school’s terrified headteacher to apologise to the parents in a doomed attempt to make the case go away and to confess to corporal punishment on the grounds of one misjudged chastisement after a bullying incident, intended to show him how awful violence is.
Is equality at the heart of our social problems? A whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive policy
If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued that inequality was the ultimate cause of almost all our social problems, from obesity and teenage pregnancy to violent crime; more equal societies, they claimed, had better outcomes across the board. While criticised – as most “big idea” books are – for overstating the case and cherrypicking evidence, they struck a chord, and some aspects of their thesis are now mainstream.
However, when it comes to the UK, there is an awkward problem, both for Pickett and for economists like me who, while not entirely convinced by The Spirit Level, would still like to see a more equal society. In the first chapter of Pickett’s new book, inequality is once again the root of all (social) evils: “if you know a country’s level of inequality, you can do a pretty good job of predicting its infant mortality rate, or prevalence of mental illness, or levels of homicide or imprisonment”. By contrast, she argues that GDP or GDP growth are very poor measures of overall welfare. Pickett then goes on to list the ways in which the UK has become a worse place to live since 2010 – higher child poverty, flattening life expectancy and child mortality, more people in prison.
By travelling during the day on scenic routes, travellers can soak up spectacular landscapes before taking in Turin’s cultural heritage
Is there a better sensation for a traveller than when a train speeds out of a tunnel? The sudden flood of light, that howling rush of air. Clearly, it’s not just me who thinks trains are the new (old) planes, with 2025 having seen a 7% rise in UK train travel, and more Europeans than ever looking to hit the rails.
It’s late December, and I’m heading out on a slow-train journey across the historic railways of the Swiss Alps and the Italian lakes. It’s a trip of roughly 1,800 miles (2,900km), crossing five countries, almost entirely by scenic daytime trains.
Modelling suggests 5.4m children under five among those who could die if budgets of donor countries such as UK and US continue to be slashed
Aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date.
In the past two decades there have been dramatic falls in the number of young children dying from infectious diseases, driven by aid directed to the developing world, researchers wrote in the Lancet Global Health. But that progress was at risk of reversal because of abrupt budget cuts by donor countries, including the US and the UK.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire spent seven years sniffing around discarded boxes and junk shops in order to paint this peculiar portrait of their home
"It’s not what it looks like, to be honest. I’m actually a good person…this story has made the media, right?” alleged carjacker Dominic Kanin said as he exited the courtroom.
A fairly technical-sounding change to student loans tucked away in last November’s budget has become the catalyst for an increasingly bad-tempered row pitting the UK consumer champion Martin Lewis against the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
In one interview, Lewis – the founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, who boasts a vast following – said he did not think the planned change to repayment terms “was a moral thing”.
‘We had 11 players available – unbelievable but true’
Cristian Romero has said it is “disgraceful” that Tottenham are operating with such a threadbare squad in an apparent dig at the club’s January recruitment strategy.
The club captain is no stranger to outspoken social media posts and he dropped another one on Monday evening shortly after the closure of the mid-season transfer window.
The Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation after a California Catholic school suffered an estimated $100,000 in damages from a vandalism incident.
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