Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’.
Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence
In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.
“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.
Continue reading...Around the world, mobile library programmes are taking books, educational support and even counselling to communities in serious and urgent need
Every week, two converted blue buses stocked with children’s books carefully navigate the streets of Kabul, avoiding areas where deadly explosions are common. These travelling libraries stop off at schools in different parts of the city, delivering a wealth of reading material directly to youngsters who have limited access to books.
“A lot of schools in our city don’t have access to something as basic as a library,” says Freshta Karim, a 27-year-old Oxford University graduate who was inspired to start Charmaghz, a non-profit, in her home city having grown up without many books herself. “We were trying to understand what we could do to promote critical thinking in our country.”
Continue reading...Geoffrey Robertson says it should ‘wash its hands of blood and return Elgin’s loot’
The British Museum has been accused of exhibiting “pilfered cultural property”, by a leading human rights lawyer who is calling for European and US institutions to return treasures taken from “subjugated peoples” by “conquerors or colonial masters”.
Geoffrey Robertson QC said: “The trustees of the British Museum have become the world’s largest receivers of stolen property, and the great majority of their loot is not even on public display.”
Continue reading...Actor’s famous black trousers and leather jacket sold at auction along with other memorabilia, raising $2.4m
Olivia Newton-John’s tight black trousers and leather jacket from the movie Grease have sold for $405,700 at a Beverly Hills auction, more than double the expected price.
The outfit that marked the transition of Newton-John’s character in the 1978 musical from demure high schooler to sexy Sandy was among 500 items for sale at Julien’s Auctions to help raise money for the performer’s cancer treatment centre in Australia.
Continue reading...The son’s book is one-eyed, loose with the facts and a crude attack on the left. In short, it’s like his dad – and it might work
In Triggered, the president’s eldest child excoriates the left for its censoriousness, but ignores his father’s repeated demands for the same. In case Don Jr forgot, Trump père is no friend of free speech or a free press.
Related: Donald Trump Jr's Triggered: a litany of trolling and insults worthy of his father
Continue reading...Musician reunited with 310-year-old instrument after it was hand back by man who took it from train
A 310-year-old antique violin worth £250,000 that was stolen from a train in London has been returned to its owner with no damage.
Professional musician Stephen Morris, who said it was “devastating” to lose the instrument made by craftsman David Tecchler in 1709, reported the violin missing on 22 October.
Continue reading...Riches to move permanently to new Grand Museum, so London show is being milked by country’s PR department
In the manner of an ageing rock star with a faltering voice but a hefty tax bill, King Tutankhamun and his entourage rolled into London this weekend for the latest stop in what his handlers insist will be absolutely, without question, his last world tour.
Related: Tutankhamun review – thrills and fun as King Tut gets the Hollywood treatment
Continue reading...People of Tamba is a project by the Italian artist Giovanni Hänninen, consisting of 200 portraits taken across the Tambacounda region in Senegal and accompanied by Senegal/Sicily, a series of documentaries created with the film-maker Alberto Amoretti, courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Le Korsa
People of Tamba, inspired by German photographer August Sander’s seminal work, People of the 20th Century, was conceived as a catalogue of the society of Tambacounda, the largest city in the most remote and rural region of Senegal, and the point of departure for the majority of Senegalese migration.
Continue reading...The delay to Brexit plus strict pre-election guidelines left few chances for trenchant jokes in David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s sketch show
In the many risk assessments of the possible consequences of Brexit happening on Halloween – lorry queues, drug shortages, street violence – scant attention was paid to a significant victim of its not happening: broadcasting specials timed to coincide with departure from the EU being forced to go out, even though the UK actually hadn’t.
The special Brexit edition of Little Britain, bringing David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s sketch show back to Radio 4, where it started in 2000, was at a double disadvantage. Having been denied its calendar reason for being, it also now found itself broadcast in the run-up to a general election, when the BBC’s already contorted attempts at political impartiality become even stricter.
Continue reading...From Little Women and Bombshell on one side and The Irishman and The Two Popes on the other, the Academy will have to tread a careful line picking this year’s nominations
British politicians are not the only people preparing for the campaign trail; Hollywood’s awards-season schmooze offensive has also begun. Gala ball dates are being added to diaries, academy voters are being targeted and a clutch of frontrunners is emerging. Trends – most of them worrying – are also appearing.
In summary, this year it is “boy films” v “girl films”. A gaping gender divide seems to have split the field. On the girls’ side, we have two well-received titles: Bombshell, dramatising the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News, and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Both are stories of female defiance at the male-dominated status quo, and are cast with an embarrassment of awards-bait: Little Women features Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Laura Dern; Bombshell has Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter is releasing his sixth album in three years – his best since 1997. Would he like to expand on how he made it, or why he chose his collaborators? He would not
There is a song on Van Morrison’s 1991 album Hymns to the Silence called Why Must I Always Explain? in which the Northern Irish singer-songwriter appears to rail against the endlessly tiresome process of giving interviews. “And I never turned out to be the person that you wanted me to be,” he sings. “And I tell you who I am, time and time and time again / Tell me why must I always explain?”
The song is in my mind when I meet Morrison on a midweek morning in Cardiff. The singer sits by the window in a fourth-floor hotel room; a pale white knuckle of a man in a blue patterned shirt, his hair a sweep of bracken red. Beyond him, the view over the bay has been obscured by heavy autumn mist.
Continue reading...She was photographed by Warhol, and Dalí wanted to paint her; the first films she made were Death in Venice and Cabaret. So why did she walk away?
Most people, says Marisa Berenson, “tend to live in my past. Which is fine.” She smiles, well aware of the fascination. “But I tend to live in the present and in the future.” A 2001 profile of the model/actor in the New York Times described her as a “Zelig of the zeitgeist … popping up in the right place at the right time”. And there is certainly something magical about her life and the people who have passed through it. As a child (she is now 72) she was taught to dance by Gene Kelly. Greta Garbo came to her parents’ parties; Salvador Dalí – a friend of her grandmother, the designer Elsa Schiaparelli – wanted to paint her. The legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland pushed her to become a model – Yves Saint Laurent would describe her as “the face of the 70s” – and she was photographed by giants such as David Bailey, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Andy Warhol photographed her wedding.
She discovered meditation in India alongside George Harrison and Ringo Starr, was at Bianca Jagger’s Studio 54 birthday party – the fabled night of the white horse – and attended Truman Capote’s famed Black and White ball. Although she continues to work in film, she hasn’t made a huge number of movies – but the biggest, early in her career, were Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Continue reading...The songwriting storyteller recorded thousands of cassettes for visitors to Cahuita, his paradise town in Costa Rica. Now the race is on to rediscover them
‘Welcome to Cahuita town, welcome one and all,” Walter Ferguson sings on the song Cahuita Is a Beautiful Place, offering an invitation to drink some rum and listen to calypso in this corner of Limón, Costa Rica. Its charming lyrical bounce and layered guitar sounds like the work of more than one man, although it is his work alone – and a song that might never have been heard if not for a project aimed at locating the thousands of one-of-a-kind cassettes that Ferguson recorded at home for friends and visitors wanting to take home a piece of this “beautiful place”.
In the run up to Ferguson’s 100th birthday in May, his son Peck (the 10th of Ferguson’s 11 children) and Swiss calypso fan Niels Werdenberg have spent two years on a labour of love: the Walter Gavitt Ferguson Tape Hunt. Their goal is to track down these lost gems, digitising songs that, in 2018, the Costa Rican government designated part of the country’s cultural heritage.
Continue reading...Queen guitarist finds last two of 19th-century set of French ‘Diableries’ after 30 years
They have names like The Infernal Cavalry, Satan the Journalist and Bicycle Race in Hell, and tell horrible stories of oppression, torture and misery.
There are also scenes that show the damned playing billiards at “Cafe Chez Satan”, a fancy dress carnival with the Prince of Darkness as an untrustworthy nurse, and a “lottery in hell” for which there is only one winner.
Continue reading...The actor, director and activist talks about his return to the Stephen King universe and his frustrations with the state of the US
There’s an unmissable sense of the now in the second season of Castle Rock, Hulu’s anthology series recombining the best-known works of Stephen King. The Maine hamlet of Jerusalem’s Lot, first dreamed up by the master of the macabre as a feral vampire stronghold, contends with a more earthbound set of problems in its newest iteration. The opioid epidemic sweeping New England has seeped into town, driving area pharmacists to install locked glass cases for select products. More pressing still is the mounting tension in town between the Somalian immigrant community and the largely Caucasian local populace, each distrustful and fearful of the other. The impending turf war reflects a widening cultural divide in American life, as xenophobic sentiments gain traction with an increasingly vocal faction of reactionaries.
Related: The best Stephen King movies … ranked!
Continue reading...In June 2018, Italian photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi joined the last ship patrolling the Mediterranean to save refugees. Then, over many months, he tracked them down to their new homes
• Life aboard the Aquarius: a photographic diary
• Photo diary part two: the Aquarius arrives in Malta
In early 2018 Italian-born photographer Nicoló Lanfranchi was living in Berlin combining reportage work with commercial projects. He travelled the world for German media, producing stark images of the slow death of Brazilian rivers and the dignity of survivors of the Haiti earthquake.
But he began watching with growing horror as a crisis unfolded closer to home. In his native Italy he could see an increasingly rightwing government cracking down on the rescue ships that patrolled the Mediterranean, particularly off the coast of Libya, threatening fines of tens of thousands of euros for bringing ashore people who were risking their lives trying to reach Europe in flimsy boats. By June, when the country’s hardline interior minister Matteo Salvini began closing Italy’s ports to the rescue ships, 45,000 migrants had already crossed the Mediterranean that year, with more than 1,000 deaths. Salvini’s crackdown worked. Ships began to vanish, until there was only one left: the Aquarius, run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée.
Continue reading...The actor Wendell Pierce reveals today he warned Meghan Markle, his former co-star on the legal drama Suits, that her world would be “forever changed” by her relationship with Prince Harry.
Pierce, 55, who played Robert Zane, a successful lawyer and father to Markle’s character, Rachel Zane, on the show, worked alongside Markle for four years after joining the series in 2013. “It was great,” he recalled. “She’s a really good actress and was always sweet, always kind.”
Continue reading...Calling yourself ‘pansexual’ or ‘genderqueer’ does not give you carte blanche to repeat damaging stereotypes
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Continue reading...Ismail Ahmed, boss of money transfer firm WorldRemit, tops list of star names and entrepreneurs
The grime artist Stormzy, the Duchess of Sussex and the footballer Raheem Sterling have been named among the most influential black people in Britain.
However, it was the founder of pioneering money transfer firm WorldRemit, Ismail Ahmed, who topped the Powerlist 2020, an annual list of the 100 most powerful people of African, African-Caribbean and African American heritage across Britain.
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