Новости за 19.08.2015

The fact that the Chilcot report is taking so long may be a sign that, when it comes, it will be worth reading.

Whatever else, Baroness Butler Sloss’s suggestion this week that Sir John Chilcot should have set a deadline on responses to the draft Iraq report, is another reminder that all is not well in inquiry land. And while it was probably not her intention, it will no doubt fuel the attempts by politicians to force the inquiry to publish its report before it feels ready. Of course it's hard to see why time limits shouldn’t be set on “Maxwellisation”, under which those facing criticism are allowed to respond ahead of a draft report’s publication. Читать дальше...

A hitherto unconsidered life goal to add to your mental list: having your pregnancy announced on the London Stock Exchange. Take that, Hallmark!

The long list of attacked or murdered journalists in Pakistan continues to grow with the latest kidnapping and assault of Karachi Bureau Chief Faheem Siddiqui of TV news channel Geo News in late July. Plain clothes armed policemen pulled over the journalist in what he believed to be a routine security check but instead, they corralled him, beat him and ditched him, hands tied, 40 km away near the Hub Dam on the outskirts of Karachi.

Perhaps there was a reason why, until 2001, nobody had coined the acronym Bric. It was then that Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, came up with the word to encapsulate the burgeoning economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. South Africa asked to be added later, to form the now commonly-used Brics.

In 1784 Lee Boo, a 19-year-old Pacific Islander, was brought to Britain by East India Company sailors. Boo was dressed in British clothing, taught to speak English, converted to Christianity, and then paraded around the English liberal intelligentsia as an example of a primitive being who was capable of being civilised.

Great news from the capital of the free world today!  The White House has just appointed its first openly transgender official.  Raffi Freedman-Gurspan is now the Outreach and Recruitment Director in the Presidential Personnel Office, and apparently that’s A Really Good Thing for transgender people everywhere. Sure, she’s achieved professional integrity in her own life – but let’s concentrate on what’s important here, guys, and that’s the signal that’s been sent to right-thinking people the world over by their overlords... Читать дальше...

Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has come a long way since he and Edward Said created it in 1999. The original idea was nothing so grand as an orchestra for peace, despite its being labelled as that: ‘it’s not a love story’, Barenboim insisted, nor even a peace story, ‘because it’s not going to bring peace, however well it plays’. It was, he said, ‘a project against ignorance.’ He wanted to create ‘a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives’.

Benedict Cumberbatch is no longer opening Hamlet with the play’s most famous lines after an uproar erupted over producers’ re-structuring.

A couple of weeks ago some of my friends were comparing the amount of student debt they have. One guy who graduated in 2004 has £12k, two others who graduated in 2008 have £15k+. Then I started ruefully boasting about my staggering £28k+ in student loans and everyone went a bit quiet. My ability to kill a conversation aside, this was slightly shocking because I graduated one year after the £15k-ers, in 2009. How on earth, their enormous eyes asked me, had I managed to get into that much debt?

Jessica Hayes, 38, belongs to a group of 3,000 in the world and just 215 in the United States.

A drug dubbed the ‘female Viagra’ has finally been approved by the US Food and Drug administration but concerns have been raised over the drug’s possible side effects.

I wrote about the hazards of prediction on Sunday, with reference to what Paddy Power, the betting company, yesterday called “the most dramatic turnaround in recent political betting history” – namely Jeremy Corbyn’s imminent victory in the Labour leadership election.

The Department of Work and Pensions has admitted that it invented fake benefits claimants in order to praise their own benefits sanctions in their publications. No wonder. Because for Conservatives, poor people just aren’t real people.

Lord Coe has been elected as the new president of the International Association of Athletics Federations.

Sebastian Coe has been elected as the new president of the International Association of Athletics Federations.

The Northern Powerhouse was great politics. It was good for the Conservative Party, which had all but ceased to exist in the great cities of the North, because it conveyed a message that a Conservative government was reaching out to parts of the country that had rejected them in the past. It was good also for its main sponsor, George Osborne, one of the few Conservative MPs to hold a northern constituency, who hopes to take over as Conservative leader when David Cameron stands down.

The problem facing Britain’s university leavers is simply stated: too many graduates, too few graduate jobs. Many are finding themselves forced into “temporary” occupations in bars, factories and offices that can turn uncomfortably permanent, and it is getting them down. Graduates must ask themselves why they bothered writing dissertations and studying for years, just so they can run up a large “debt” – in reality a liability to higher taxation, but no less onerous for that.

I've been working in Nevada's legal brothels for almost a year and a half now. In this time I've learned a lot about sexuality, psychology and relationships. My job is a mix of customer service and fantasy fulfillment, and I love it. It suits my needs and allows me financial stability I never had access to before. However, what I've noticed since starting this career is that there is a lot that the general public doesn't seem to get about sex work. Here are some of the biggest misconceptions:

I don’t shop at Amazon and I don’t actively belong to any of the websites owned by them either. When they acquired my favourite book review website, Goodreads, I abandoned my account and ran a mile. I'm a videoblogger, and on the several occasions I’ve been approached to work with Audible, Amazon’s audiobook company, I get a few words in before deleting the email. Many of my vlogs are about books, their successes, failures, and value. Over the years I have become convinced that Amazon does not value the book industry... Читать дальше...

As someone whose before and after hair transplant headshots have been in this newspaper, and as such are grafted on to cyberspace as permanently as the 2,783 hair follicles that were plucked out of the back of my head and jabbed into the front, I am qualified to speak about just how seriously you should take those pictures.

The pressure for Korean kids to succeed from pre-school onwards fuels a national epidemic of desperation among young people – and an industry in after-hours cram schools that nets about US$20bn (£12.8bn) a year.

Jenny Meadows knows more than most about the knock-on effect of doping for clean athletes. She estimates she has been denied six or seven medals by Russian drugs cheats alone during the course of her career over two laps of the track.