Chelsea manager responds to French interest in pair
'If there is FFP, they don't have money to buy them'
To mark gay marriage in England and Wales finally being legalised, Sandi Toksvig is renewing her vows with her civil partner. But along the way she has faced objections, prejudice even death threats
The US and UK condemn him for Crimea but supported him over the war in Chechnya. Why? Because now he refuses to play ball
Once again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying "Fuck the EU" suggests, came from Washington.
Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith Lectures, informed his audience: "There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue."
From Stephen Lawrence to today's Taser revelations, Britain's forces of law and order have defiled the idea of the public sphere
"The police are the public and the public are the police," said the force's modern founder, Robert Peel, in the early 19th century. Never has a fundamental principle come to sound so hollow. Everything from the treatment of domestic violence victims and the appalling treatment of the Lawrence family to the Hillsborough campaign smears, undercover spying on protestersand today's revelations about Taser use even the stitch-up of a high-level government minister reveals quite the opposite: that the police regard the public as a dangerous, entirely separate thing, to be surveilled, imprisoned and physically restrained wherever possible.
The police force manifestly does not understand itself to be part of this "other" public, but rather a separate agent dealing with an always potentially dangerous mob, some of whom can be pre-emptively singled out on the basis of poverty, ethnicity or opposition to state policy (or a combination of these) and reminded of their place: big brother is watching you, and if you catch him in the act he'll harass, smear and stomp on you until you get back in line. The police are the public, we could say, but not the public of the people, where the term originates, but the public of "public order".
To put an end to horror stories such as that of asylum seeker Josephine, the government must support all pregnant woman
When I was 32 weeks pregnant with my first child, I was excited and hopeful for the future. My partner and I were busy preparing our home for the new arrival, eagerly attending our medical appointments and going on frequent shopping trips to make sure we had all the kit necessary for a new-born.
For Josephine, the experience of being a first-time mum to be was entirely different. She only discovered she was pregnant by chance, after an illness forced her to visit a doctor, who gave her the news. She was already 28 weeks gone when she first saw a midwife.
The prime minister is panicking as corruption claims spill out across social media, and the country is poised to go to the polls
Turks greeted the news that YouTube has been blocked in the country with the grimly raised eyebrows Brits reserve for an unusually bad weather forecast. "So it's come to this", they say, but no one is overly shocked. Internet bans are becoming a weekly occurrence. A week ago Twitter was banned at the personal behest of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, and remains so days after a court order annulled the block.
With only days left until the municipal elections, campaigning is getting more frantic, voters more nervous and political rhetoric more extreme. At the centre of all this is Erdoan, bombastically fighting off corruption claims and trying to stem the flow of phone recordings spreading across social media which allegedly show him and his associates engaging in large-scale corruption, media manipulation and most recently plotting war against Syria. The last bombshell prompted the YouTube ban; it was a desperate attempt at damage limitation.
However inconvenient it may be for adults, we need to protect children from hurtful representations of sex and sexuality
Today the Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod) published research telling us children as young as six are accessing hardcore pornography. If we were to apply their study of 45,000 households nationally, that is 44,000 primary school children and 200,000 under-16s accessing adult sexual material; 112,000 boys aged 12-17 had visited one site alone, Pornhub. These figures aren't even a realistic assessment as mobiles and tablets do not feature in the research. We should be shocked by the scale of the problem before us and galvanised into action. This is not about banning pornography, but protecting children from harmful and often degrading representations of sex and desire.
Atvod suggest forcing porn sites to complete age checks failure to do so would result in an inability to process payments from UK consumers. So critical is the situation before us that Atvod has stressed the urgency of enacting legislation "during this parliament". A spokeperson for the company said: "The material that appears on the free services is placed there by the paid services to attract customers to sign up to subscriptions. As long as the paid service placed content on a free service without age verification it would be in breach of its licensing conditions and so would not be able to access funds from the UK."
NUS data shows ethnic minority students continue to face academic, social, and financial barriers along with overt racism
New figures show that white university students receive significantly higher degree grades than those from minority ethnic backgrounds with the same A-level qualifications. This suggests that higher education institutions are somehow failing black students, which should be a national embarrassment.
Three years ago the National Union of Students (NUS) conducted a study on the experiences of black students. The findings showed that they face a range of barriers in all levels of education, which affect satisfaction and attainment. The figures made for uncomfortable reading. It emerged that one in six black students had experienced racism in their institution, a third felt their educational environment left them unable to bring their minority perspective to lectures and tutorials, and 7% openly labelled their learning environment as "racist".
If Israel really is serious about peace, it will release Bargouti the one man uniquely placed to negotiate an agreement
The death of Nelson Mandela reminds us that often the first step towards the resolution of a conflict is the release from prison of a national leader who has the authority to unite, negotiate and resolve.
Marwan Barghouti has been in jail since 15 April 2002 when Israeli security agents, posing as ambulance workers, seized him in broad daylight and took him to Israel. In 2004 he was convicted by an Israeli court of involvement in five murders, which he denies.
Let's stop pussy-footing around and get rid of these monsters before they've had their wicked way with us
So what we have long suspected has finally come true; cats are trying to kill humans. Those furry evil geniuses who have been plotting from the comfort of your very own lap have revealed themselves as carriers of tuberculosis trying their best to infect their owners.
For years we've been wondering why they've been staring at us like that, why they are so withholding with their affection, why white cats only ever sit on your black clothes. It is all becoming terrifyingly clear now. First, they came for the sparrows and I said nothing.
Its rhetoric may be softer than the Tories', but the party still puts profit before people. Left Unity offers a new voice
Every day the Guardian publishes accounts of desperate poverty and attacks on welfare provision. We know of the food banks, the plight of disabled people and the housing crisis that affects so many. We know of the propaganda to make the poorest people scapegoats for economic failure. We recognise the hypocrisy of Cameron's "moral mission".
We know that housing support goes to rich landlords, that benefits for the working poor subsidise employers who pay poverty wages. We read that benefit fraud is a tiny fraction of the overall welfare budget, far less than unclaimed benefits, and is nothing compared to the amount lost through tax dodging. But as we rail against the injustice and hypocrisy, we fail to ask one big question. Where is our political fightback? It should be led by the Labour party but therein lies the problem.
I don't think the increasingly strained Iain Duncan Smith intends to cause suffering, but that's exactly what his bedroom tax does
In his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry S Truman said the world had arrived at a better place. "More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery," he said. "For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people." To accelerate that, he said, was a job for those who had the power to do so. What would he have made of Iain Duncan Smith?
There is no evidence that the welfare secretary actively seeks to create a modern form of misery, for he seems a decent sort. But his screechy performance on the Today programme earlier this week did create the impression of a tortured soul who knows his plans are unravelling. Fixing the welfare system, which costs too much, but upon which many vulnerable lives depend, is a task requiring dexterity, subtlety, and the sort of insight that distinguishes the possible from the desirable. One cannot see that Duncan Smith has that skillset. He is like a surgeon working in front of a braying mob, using broken glass.
It's a win-win trend for restaurateurs while diners pay the price, says Emma John
There are few more dispiriting experiences than the supermarket queue: the frustrating wait in an unfathomably slow-moving line, while the promise of a delicious meal hangs in the air, unfulfilled. No one, as far as I know, thinks of queueing as a desirable part of their weekly shop. Its not a sign that you really, really rate the own-brand sausages, nor does it make you cooler than your peers (unless, perhaps, youre waiting next to the frozen food aisle).
This is something I ponder when I walk past the shivering, damp lines of punters grimly holding out for a table at a London restaurant an increasingly frequent sight, especially in the narrow streets of the West End, where a no-reservations policy is now de rigeur for new openings. Booking a table and turning up at the appointed time for your meal is irritatingly passé; were all New Yorkers now, waiting in line for the next available seat. Its a win-win for restaurants, who can increase table turnover while enjoying the cachet of the queue itself free advertising for the desirability of their food. The only losers are the diners.
There's a one in eight chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer in the average woman's lifetime. There's a one in 10 chance of developing depression. Yet we're far more likely to openly talk about one than the other. In a guest post, Tania Browne complains bitterly about her lack of complimentary baked goods
I once had a friend who was almost suffocated by cheesecake. She was a nice woman let's call her Penny. I met her in a hospital, as you do. Penny was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and let's just say she was a little bit pissed off with it. Not the breast cancer, but the way she had become "Poor Penny with Breast Cancer How Tragic She's Only 38, You Know". Penny felt that everything interesting about her had been stolen. She was no longer a clever woman who knew a lot about how ants form orderly societies by leaving chemical trails for each other, or how to get the best deal on a new washing machine. Cancer became a definition of who Penny was.
It had become quite literally the first thing people would ask her about. Not her opinion of Desperate Housewives, not the life cycle of caterpillars or any number of other interesting things she knew about. Just cancer. How her treatment was going, whether she looked "well on it" or "not so great" and because they could offer her nothing else constructive, they gave her food to show they cared. It started with a few casseroles for the slow cooker when she had chemo days, and escalated to cheesecakes and homemade choux pastry at an alarming rate. Weight loss was never an issue for Penny through her chemotherapy she had raspberry pavlova to raise her spirits. I bet she still has cheesecake in her freezer from that time. And not just that, people she barely knew suddenly laid claim to her. A bloke with halitosis she got off with at the office Christmas party in 2004 ran a marathon with her face on his T-shirt.
I had reason to remember Penny and her profiterole problem over Christmas, when I myself was ill. At the beginning of December I went to my GP, he agreed with me that something was horribly wrong and I was prescribed both chemical and non-chemical treatments. I was honest, I told friends and family that I was battling against something nasty. I confess that I was partly hoping for a shower of cake, but unlike Penny's friends mine aren't terribly good cooks.
But there was something else, too. Although aware of it, very few people asked me how my treatment was going. Even fewer told me if I looked better, or still much like I was auditioning for a new version of Worzel Gummidge. People went quiet, distant. They left me alone even when I opined about how isolated I felt. I had very few people I could talk to about my condition, and only fellow sufferers seemed to care. Why?
I didn't have breast cancer. I was depressed.
There's no easy way to slide depression into a conversation. When people ask after you when you bump into them in the supermarket, it's OK to say you have a nasty cold or some irritating health issue (especially if they've caught you in the haemorrhoid cream aisle), but not OK to mention that it's the first time you've left the house since December and you're feeling pretty pleased with yourself for venturing out to buy toilet paper. Depression is invisible. You can't see it (though you might be able to smell it: at my worst I would go without showers for days at a time), it has no obvious physical symptoms, and people don't like to talk about it.
Why not? Let's examine this in more detail. If you ask about my depression, am I likely to:
a) Shout "You know? At last, I'm free!!" And run around ripping my clothes off in the detergent section of Morrisons.
b) Corner you with a monologue about how my therapist made me realise remember that goth boy who looked a bit like Nick Cave who dumped me when I was 15? chances are we wouldn't still be together if dyeing my hair black had changed his mind, after all.
c) Scream "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ME!!" And make a break for the nearest slammable door, bedroom or otherwise.
Yes, people are often scared they'll say the wrong thing and show their ignorance of depression. Even though it's an issue for many, most of us know very little about it.
Britain is a step closer to leaving Europe this week. It is high time all who fear an exit from the union spoke out against the liars
Britain inched a step closer to a European exit this week. Simply by giving the UK Independence party a mighty national platform raises the credibility of the "outs". Nick Clegg, dead in the polls, had everything to gain from his strong stand on "in" virtually his last unsullied point of principle. Yet in the process he gifted Nigel Farage, and the act of voting Ukip, an aura of respectability.
But the Ukip ship had already sailed and was well afloat with the political wind behind it, say the Clegg team. The field was being ceded to aggressive sceptics, so it was high time to tackle the European argument head-on. They are right: with backs to the wall there is nothing left to do but fight, Labour and the Liberal Democrats against the rest. For both parties the political decision against a referendum was, as ever, a blend of high principle and low tactics; Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander's unequivocal stance as "We are the party of In" was absolutely essential.
Footage of Joanne Milne is a powerful reminder of the life-changing nature of technology, writes Nicola Davis
The moment when 40-year old Joanne Milne, who has been deaf since birth, first hears sound is heart-wrenching scene. Amateur footage showing her emotional reaction has taken social media by storm and touched viewers across the world, reinforcing the technological triumph of cochlear implants.
Its a story I have touched on before. Earlier this month I wrote about how cochlear implants changed the lives of the Campbells whose children Alice and Oliver were born with the condition auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD). Implants, together with auditory verbal therapy, have allowed them to embrace the hearing world. It was incredibly moving to glimpse the long and difficult journey this family had experienced, and the joy that hearing - a sense so many of us take for granted - can bring.
Orwell was a truth-teller whose courage and sense of social justice made him a secular saint
I admire Orwell for how he lived as well as for how he wrote. He would have sneered at the notion that he was a saint he once described the Christian heaven as "choir practice in a jeweller's shop". All the same, for me he was a secular saint. His road-toDamascus moment came when he resigned from the Indian Imperial police in 1927. He was aware, he said, of an "immense weight of guilt" he had to expiate, so he joined the beggars and outcasts, as described in Down and Out in Paris and London and "How the Poor Die".
He was a truth-teller, admitting to feelings others would hide. In Burma he had found the taunts and insults of the radicalised Buddhist priests hard to bear. Part of him thought of the British Raj as a tyranny, but another part thought "the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts".
As a teenager, Alek Wek shook up the fashion world and inspired, among others, a young Lupita Nyong'o. The Sudanese supermodel tells Sali Hughes why quirky is good
Alek Wek was 19 when she was approached by a model scout from a top London agency at a fair in Crystal Palace park. Her mother, she remembers, was horrified, thinking her daughter was about to become a Page 3 girl. She laughs loudly: "I had to point out that I wasn't really built for that." Wek, one of the most successful models of the past two decades, has inherited her father's height and extraordinarily long limbs, her mother's cheekbones and her "little booty and big smile", but she's not exactly glamour-girl material. But the agent persisted, finally convincing Wek's mother that theirs was a reputable agency, and her daughter's career began.
She went to New York and had been there barely a week when Ralph Lauren booked her to open and close his catwalk show (the spot normally reserved for the big model of the moment, not a newbie). Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi, Todd Oldham and Anna Sui followed suit. Wek was booked to star in Tina Turner's GoldenEye video, named Model of the Year by i-D magazine and, in 1997 (less than a year after starting out), became the first African model to appear on the cover of Elle magazine.
Action star has appeared in state-owned Russian media to back his personal friend the president and blast the west's anti-Putin stance on Ukraine
Vladimir Putin's decision to annexe the Crimean peninsula may be opposed by the combined political might of Europe and the USA, but one man stands ready to defend the Russian president. Action hero Steven Seagal, who considers Putin a personal friend, has labelled the former KGB lieutenant colonel "one of the greatest world leaders" and declared his actions in the Russian-majority Ukrainian province "very reasonable".
Students on the pro licence course from the much-decorated Gary Neville to Graham Kavanagh at struggling Carlisle outline the benefits they are gaining from it
Stuart James: a revamped lesson in leadership
The FA's Uefa pro licence course who, what and when
England coach
The Doc Martin and Men Behaving Badly star on throwing himself into plays to avoid being hit at school, having an uncle famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, and his love of animals
My earliest memory is a picnic in the park near our house, which was next to Wimbledon Common. Why on earth we went to a park when we lived so near the common is a mystery, but it had formal gardens and lawns perhaps it was that very difference that took my parents there. As a child, I remember being parked outside pubs with a bottle of pop and a packet of crisps and left to wait for the grownups. Later on, Wimbledon Common was my stamping ground riding my bike, climbing trees all sorts of hearty boy stuff. My sister is older than me I was a typically infuriating little brother who nicked her toys and was probably a right pain.
Singer says she is 'completely overwhelmed' by the response to her first shows in 35 years
Kate Bush's only tour: pop concert or disappearing act?
Tickets for Kate Bush's forthcoming tour have sold out in less than 15 minutes.
The singer, who added a further seven shows to her residency at the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith this week, will now be playing 22 gigs in all.
The label that dropped the Man in Black in 1986 is now polishing up recordings from the same era, with the blessing of his estate and Rick Rubin, the producer who resurrected his career
"One person can't save another person, but almost," Rosanne Cash once said about her father meeting the super-producer Rick Rubin. The union between the veteran country singer and the famed producer began in 1993 and resulted in a series of six albums (and a box set of outtakes) that revitalised Cash, both critically and commercially. He had spent the best part of 20 years in the wilderness, but the recordings re-established Johnny Cash as a great American artist doubtless helped by their mythic banner name of "American" and slowly restored him to public favour, too. Their first album, 1994's American Recordings, only made No 23 on the US country music chart and 110 on the Billboard 200 (though they were his highest placings on those charts since 1978 and 1971, respectively), and its follow-up, Unchained, fared worse. However, by 2002's American IV: The Man Comes Around, the man truly had come around. Propelled by the video for a cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, the album went platinum in the US and cracked the top 40 here; then, after his death in 2003, Cash had his first No 1 album since 1969's At San Quentin with 2006's American V: A Hundred Highways.
American V was just the first in a slew of posthumous releases that includes 2010's American VI: Ain't No Grave, compilations of unreleased material (a four-volume bootleg series), expanded editions of classic albums and numerous greatest-hits packages. In total, press cuttings list 37 compilations on a variety of labels since his death, plus one collaboration album, one gospel album, two live albums and three studio albums. The best of these releases were bought in large numbers (American VI, the last album proper, has sold 250,000 copies in the US and 62,000 in the UK) and it's into this fertile environment that Cash's estate, which is privately owned by his family, is now releasing a "lost" record from the early 1980s, Out Among the Stars.
Mourners from across the political divide come together to honour the man who dared to stand alone
The scene outside St Margaret's church in Westminster at Tony Benn's funeral was, rather appropriately, like an impromptu demonstration: trade union, Labour party and peace banners fluttered in the breeze.
In the crowd was 30-year-old activist Ian Chamberlain, holding a banner belonging to the Stop the War Coalition, a cause Benn championed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "Tony Benn was president of the coalition, and he was an inspirational leader of the anti-war movement, always on the streets with us whether it be over war in Iraq or Afghanistan. We want to make sure his political legacy continues long after his death," he said, reflecting the mood among those gathered.
As his 1980s play A Small Family Business is revived at the National Theatre, Alan Ayckbourn tells Nicholas Wroe why its mood of moral resignation is even more apposite now, and why Scarborough is vital to his creative outlook
In 1977 Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce was the first of his plays to be staged at the National Theatre. He was widely regarded at the time as a provider of middle brow, bitter-sweet comedies of middle-class lives and marriages such as How the Other Half Loves, The Norman Conquests and Absurd Person Singular, and had recently broken the record for having the most productions running simultaneously in the West End and on Broadway. "I was very pleased to be invited," he recalls, "but I do remember a lot of people saying to Peter Hall: 'What the hell is Mr Shaftesbury Avenue doing in the National?'"
Ten years later, at the high-water mark of radical Thatcherism, Hall asked Ayckbourn back to the National as both a writer and a director. The play he produced, A Small Family Business, which will be revived there next month, was not only a commercial success, but went on to be hailed by Mark Ravenhill as "one of the most intensely political plays of the period", and ranked by Michael Billington among the 10 best British plays of the 20th century for its "devastating assault" on the "entrepreneurial values we were taught to admire in the 80s".