McGowan tweets that she ‘lost sight of the bigger picture’ after calling fellow actor a ‘fraud’
Rose McGowan has expressed regret for her attack on Natalie Portman over the latter’s Oscar dress “protest”, which took aim at the exclusion of women from the best director Academy Award nominations.
Related: Rose McGowan: Natalie Portman's Oscars dress protest 'deeply offensive'
Continue reading...From naked dating to dirty Scrabble, singles nights and speed dating have been reinvented. Can these increasingly quirky events lead to lasting love?
‘I used to torture frogs when I was young,” the man was telling me, with a stare that would make the most experienced serial killer uneasy. I wasn’t at a Halloween party. It was Friday night in London and I was attending my first singles event. When my friend suggested it, I had expected the evening to be awkward. I hadn’t expected to be nursing a glass of a wine while a stranger described the many brutal ways he had culled the north London amphibian population. After two hours of painful conversation with other guests, we eventually escaped, although not before our new friend leaned in for a bum grope.
I was unlucky at this mixer. But even when attendees don’t turn out to be on an RSPCA watch list, singles events can feel more forced than a 90s school disco. I am not alone in my phobia of organised mixers; a recent survey by the Inner Circle revealed that 41% of daters in the UK would refuse to attend one, citing embarrassment and awkwardness as the main reasons.
Continue reading...The Cuban dancer talks about food rationing, what he ate at ballet school and his father’s terrible cooking
I always lived with rationing in Cuba – I was born in 1973. We used the term “the three musketeers” to mean rice, chicharos [split peas] and eggs, although at one point eggs disappeared completely.
I had two rabbits as pets and I arrived home from school one day and there was that smell I’d almost forgotten, of meat. Then I realised that Mamá had roasted my pets and I cried a lot. My mother pressed us to eat them and we all did. The rabbits tasted very good, obviously – I was a kid and I sort of got distracted. I was very sad, but I ate.
Continue reading...McGowan posts Facebook attack on Portman, who wore a gown embroidered with names of female directors snubbed at awards
Activist and actor Rose McGowan has labelled Natalie Portman a “fraud” for wearing a dress to the Oscars embroidered with the names of female film-makers including Greta Gerwig and Lulu Wang who were passed over for best director nominations.
In a post on Facebook, McGowan said Portman had made “the kind of protest that gets rave reviews from the mainstream media” but was “more like an actress acting the part of someone who cares. As so many of them do.”
Continue reading...In 2014, Rob left the grey skies of the UK to travel around Canada and the US. “I started volunteering on an avocado and olive farm close to San Diego, where they offered food and accommodation in exchange for work,” he explains. After a short trip to Death Valley, he returned to find a new worker at the farm. “I was telling everyone about my travels and she seemed totally unimpressed,” he remembers. “I thought she was a bit spiky at first, but I later discovered she is just direct and honest.”
Mareike insists she found Rob’s stories “very funny” but wanted to know more. “I asked him lots of questions about his trip. He seemed interesting and I wanted to get to know him.”
Continue reading...Follow all the action from Hollywood as we find out who’s wearing what, who’s winning what and whose acceptance speech is dropping jaws
• Oscars tonight: predictions, timetable and all you need to know
• ‘Brad Pitt tells us he’s single’: play Oscars bingo!
Now for best animated feature. Beanie Feldstein just introduced Mindy Kaling. Is that how this is going to work without a host? A person announces a person who announces a winner? That seems like at least one step too many.
We already have a news story about Brad Pitt winning. Not that anyone was expecting it or anything.
Continue reading...As the first weddings take place, the partner of murdered journalist Lyra McKee and others describe the fight for their rights
Sara Canning, nurse and partner of journalist Lyra McKee, Derry
Continue reading...From the Gambia to Kenya, FGM has been fought most successfully at grassroots level. The world must pay heed
I underwent female genital mutilation at the age of seven, while on holiday in Djibouti. When I returned to school in the UK my teacher told me that this happened to “girls like me”.
Thankfully, this type of reaction is no longer common, and this country is much better equipped to protect girls at risk. FGM is now seen as a global issue, which we know has affected more than 200 million women and girls around the world.
Continue reading...Child had been taken by her family to have the procedure, still prevalent in the country despite new laws to combat it
A doctor has been arrested after the death of a 12-year-old girl he had performed female genital mutilation (FGM) on.
Nada Hassan Abdel-Maqsoud bled to death at a private clinic in Manfalout, close to the city of Assiut, after her parents, uncle and aunt took her for the procedure.
Continue reading...The MSNBC host’s show has become a safety blanket for many US progressives. She discusses her demonisation by the right, tackling the president’s lies – and coming out at 17
Rachel Maddow, the US TV host, has a message for her critics: “Bring it. Your hatred makes me stronger. Come on. Give me more. Give me more. I love it!”
That is just as well, given the way she has polarised viewers in the past few years. Maddow, 46, has presented her primetime show on MSNBC, a 24-hour cable news channel, on weeknights since 2008. If most cable news and social media is fast food, she tries to rustle up a three-course meal: sensible, sober, sometimes painfully detailed and replete with oblique references to half-forgotten politicians of yesteryear. Since Donald Trump’s rise in 2016, however, The Rachel Maddow Show has become a nightly safety blanket for many progressives who identify with the “resistance”.
Continue reading...A study is looking into the coercive practice in Uganda, amid calls for the government to address the issue
Jane’s* husband likes breast milk. “He says he likes the taste of it, and that it helps him in terms of his health. He feels good afterwards,” said the 20-year-old from Uganda, who has a six-month-old baby.
Jane said her husband started asking for her milk the night she came home from the hospital after giving birth. “He said it was to help me with the milk flow. I felt it was OK.”
Continue reading...The plethora of dating apps has bolstered society’s obsession with sex, but many people find that a period of abstinence makes them happier and healthier
In a world where you can get a sexual partner faster than a pizza delivery, it has never been easier to play the field. Yet, despite all that swiping right, a surprising number of people are not having sex at all – not for religious reasons, or because they can’t get a date, but because they find that celibacy makes them happier.
Some have never had much interest in sex, while others are taking a break to address personal problems, recover from bad dating experiences or change the way they approach relationships.
Continue reading...In one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, a very special school gives new hope to orphaned or disadvantaged girls
In Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso in west Africa, a school and training programme is combating entrenched attitudes and gender stereotypes that confine women to low-paid unskilled labour, or worse. At the CFIAM, girls and young women, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, can train to be car mechanics, a trade that offers them the skills necessary to enable them to pursue independent lives and achieve a measure of socio-economic progress. Such is the success of CFIAM and its students that it has been the subject of an award-winning documentary Ouaga Girls
Continue reading...Whether it is local ‘cat-seducers’, out-and-out thievery or marauding toms, our feline friends are prompting furious rows and rivalries between neighbours
Forget teenagers with asbos or improperly demarcated boundary fences. Cats are the great neighbourhood menace of our age, as likely to rip apart once-harmonious communities as Japanese knotweed. They pad between homes, destroying civic feeling, pitting us against each other in our search for their devotion. Think politics creates division? Cats are worse.
Last week, it was reported that a Hammersmith couple, John and Jackie Hall, had waged a legal battle to prevent a nearby resident, Nicola Lesbirel, from stealing their maine coon, Ozzy. The Halls accused Lesbirel of repeatedly feeding Ozzy, taking him into her house and replacing Ozzy’s collar with one that had Lesbirel’s phone number and the words “My home” on it.
Continue reading...Rapidly growing sector could prove lucrative as Britain seeks post-Brexit trade opportunities
UK investors could seize a $24bn investment opportunity by helping to connect millions of people without access to electricity to off-grid home solar power systems.
The market for pay-as-you-go home solar packages is expected to boom in Africa, where millions of homes are using mobile technology to rent low-cost solar panels.
Continue reading...1,758-carat Sewelô snapped up by luxury brand is world’s second-largest rough diamond
Louis Vuitton has made a splash as it showed off its latest purchase: the world’s second-largest rough diamond.
The LVMH-owned brand, which announced last week that it was the new owner of the 1,758-carat Sewelô, displayed the glinting, blackened stone at its Place Vendôme store in Paris.
Continue reading...Startling scale of inequality laid bare as Oxfam report highlights chronically undervalued nature of care work
The world’s 22 richest men have more combined wealth than all 325 million women in Africa, according to a study.
Women and girls across the globe contribute an estimated £8.28tn ($10.8tn) to the global economy with a total of 12.5bn hours a day of unpaid care work, a figure more than three times the worth of the global tech industry, claims an Oxfam report published on Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Continue reading...Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK talking to young women about the issues important to them in 2020: public safety, body image, social media and feminism. Their research found that girls are fed up and frustrated with the lack of real progress on gender equality.
Continue reading...We asked you to tell us how happy you were at 47 after a study found that people were, on average, most unhappy at the age of 47.2
I have always been extremely happy. When I was 45 my husband left me quite suddenly after 25 years of what I thought was a very happy life. I was miserable but I could cope. After six days I met my current husband and apart from being unhappy I was also in love. But then I turned 47 and two or three months later I felt so miserable. Just out of nowhere I felt really really sad. I had no money, I missed my children, and my work wasn’t going well. It feels like I had to cross some sort of swamp to get to the other side. Now, at the age of 54, I am happy and have been for quite a while. Manon Sikkel, 54, writer, Amsterdam
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