Category Archives: Life and style

‘Impunity reigns’: six survivors of sexual violence speak out

Posted on by

From Colombia to Zimbabwe, members of a global network of rape survivors are demanding an end to the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war

All photographs by Raegan Hodge of the Dr Denis Mukwege Foundation

Carmen was raped by armed guerrilla forces in Colombia. Ekhlas was kidnapped by Isis in Iraq and forced into sexual slavery. Grace was taken by rebels from her classroom in Uganda, “given” to a soldier and impregnated twice before finally fleeing to safety.

Today, these women are all members of the Global Network of Victims and Survivors to End Wartime Rape, known as Sema, which translates to “speak out” in Swahili. The network represents roughly 2,000 rape survivors and 90 years’ worth of conflict across 21 countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and Europe.

Continue reading...

‘White supremacy’: popular knitting website Ravelry bans support for Trump

Posted on by

Administrators take action to ensure site ‘is inclusive of all’

One of the biggest knitting websites in the world, which claims to have more than 8 million members, has announced that it will ban users from expressing support for Donald Trump, saying that to do so constitutes “white supremacy”.

On Sunday, administrators for Ravelry, a site for knitters, crocheters, designers and anyone dabbling in the fibre arts, said that they were making any expression of support for Trump and his administration in forum posts, patterns, on their personal profile pages or elsewhere permanently off limits.

Continue reading...

Glastonbury organiser says some men refuse to deal with her

Posted on by

Emily Eavis says there are male execs in music industry who insist on speaking to her father

The Glastonbury festival organiser, Emily Eavis, has said some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup.

Speaking days before the start of this year’s event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she was often the only woman in meetings with music moguls.

Continue reading...

Scamp the Tramp is champ at World’s Ugliest Dog Contest

Posted on by
  • California competition highlights plight of rescue dogs
  • Owner: ‘I think the audience saw his beautiful spirit’

Scamp the Tramp, a bug-eyed, dreadlocked pooch, took top honours on Friday at the 31st annual World’s Ugliest Dog Contest.

Owner Yvonne Morones won an appearance with Scamp on the Today show, $1,500 in cash, $1,500 to donate to an animal shelter and a trophy the size of a rottweiler.

Continue reading...

My gay son: ‘The family said we should send him to Syria for conversion therapy’

Posted on by

Could an ‘outrageously heterosexual’ father handle his eldest child coming out at 16?

Sam Khalaf and his son Riyadh used to call themselves the two musketeers. When Riyadh was growing up in Bray, south of Dublin, they were inseparable. Like twins or best friends, they say. So the Iraqi-born, Irish citizen remembers keenly the moment when he realised his eldest child had drifted from him.

“We used to go everywhere together,” 54-year-old Sam recalls. “Every weekend we’d go to a tropical fish shop and pick out which koi carp to go into our pond. The first time Riyadh didn’t come with me, he was about 15. And the lad who worked there said: ‘Where’s your mate?’ I said, ‘He’s grown up now, he’s out with his friends.’ It was a shock to the system.”

Continue reading...

Senior Islamic cleric issues fatwa against child marriage

Posted on by

Deputy grand imam of al-Azhar calls for marriage based on mutual consent with minimum age set at 18

One of the world’s most prestigious centres of Islamic learning has issued a fatwa against child marriage, saying marriage should be based on the consent of both parties and “particularly the young woman”.

The deputy grand imam of al-Azhar, considered by some Muslims to be the highest authority of Islamic jurisprudence, hammered out the document with his team and young activists at the first African summit on child marriage and female genital mutilation, which took place in Senegal this week.

Continue reading...

‘He never hit her in front of me again’ – Donna Ferrato’s domestic abuse photos

Posted on by

As two exhibitions of the photojournalist’s work open in Madrid on her 70th birthday, Ferrato recalls some of the most powerful images in Holy – a retrospective spanning nearly 40 years

For nearly four decades, the photojournalist Donna Ferrato has documented the effects of domestic violence on abused women and their families. Her book and series Living with the Enemy is one of the most important works on the subject.

She launched a campaign in 2014 called I Am Unbeatable, which features women who have left their abusers.

Continue reading...

Donatella Versace pays homage to the Prodigy’s Keith Flint in Milan

Posted on by

The designer’s SS20 collection once again proved her talent for making a splash; elsewhere, Dolce & Gabbana put the leopard into leopard print

From one 90s superstar to another … Donatella Versace dedicated her spring/summer 2020 menswear show to the Progidy’s Keith Flint in Milan at the weekend. The designer described the musician, who died in March this year, as “my friend, and a disruptor of this world”.

Homage was paid through the pounding soundtrack of the band’s monster hit, Firestarter, and models bearing his distinctive double mohawk and tinted bug-eye sunglasses. Although the revelation that Flint and Versace were friends may have come as a surprise, it’s not an incongruous pairing; Versace has been something of a disruptor herself. Picking up the mantle of the family business her brother, Gianni, established in 1978, she embraced full-blown sex appeal in her collections from day one, and has admitted in the past to not knowing how to do things quietly. Last year, she surprised the world when she announced that she sold her family company to Capri Holdings – formerly known as Michael Kors Holdings.

Continue reading...

Are crystals the new blood diamonds?

Posted on by

Gwyneth loves them, Adele can’t sing without them and Kim Kardashian uses them to deal with stress. Many of us are lured by their beauty and promise of mystical powers, but are ‘healing’ crystals connecting us to the earth – or harming it?

Crystallisation is a transition from chaos to perfection; the evolution of the crystal industry has been less simple. Millions of years ago liquid rock inside the earth cooled and hardened, and this is how crystals formed at the twinkling centre of the earth. Piece by piece they’ve been mined to become the centre, too, of an international industry that hangs on their rumoured metaphysical healing properties. But recently something else has emerged from the rocks – a darker truth. Rather than connecting with the earth, those buying crystals are damaging it, fatally.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen gifted guests black tourmaline to keep negative energies at bay

Continue reading...

Germans thirsty for alcohol-free beer as brewers boost taste

Posted on by

Rise in bars stocking 0% beers to meet demand of drinkers who wish to ditch the hangover

During last year’s sweltering summer in Europe, workers of the Störtebeker beer brewery stood at the doors of the bottle depot eagerly awaiting the empty returns so they could be washed and refilled as quickly as possible. A bottle shortage swept the country due to the rate at which beer was being consumed to quench the overheated nation’s thirst.

But it wasn’t the demand for their classic range of beers that surprised the brewery bosses most, rather the rate at which its alcohol-free varieties were being drunk.

Continue reading...

‘Without my daughter, drinking would have been a problem’: Patton Oswalt on bereavement

Posted on by

The comedian’s life was upended in 2016 when his wife died. He discusses her role in the Golden State Killer case, the ‘shadow slog’ of grief – and the reaction to his remarriage

The sad clown. The chronic depressive comedian. It is one of the greatest cliches in showbusiness. Patton Oswalt – ebullient, life-affirming, swearing as he hurtles along the Interstate 10 highway in California – does not sound like one of those. At least, not any more.

Oswalt’s wife, the true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 46. That was the second-worst day of Oswalt’s life. The worst was breaking the news to their seven-year-old daughter, Alice, the next day.

Continue reading...

Dioramas of death: cleaner recreates rooms where people died alone

Posted on by

Miyu Kojima creates miniature scenes based on Tokyo apartments her company has cleaned after solitary deaths

Warning: this article contains images some people may find distressing

It was at a trade show for the funeral industry that Miyu Kojima had what might seem at first like a macabre idea.

Kojima, 27, works for To-Do Company, a cleaning firm that specialises in the apartments of the recently deceased. Many of their jobs involve kodokushi (“solitary deaths”), where people die alone and are not found for days, a phenomenon that has recently gripped the Japanese imagination.

Continue reading...

Digging their heels in: women wage war on footwear dress codes

Posted on by
A campaign in Japan for a ban on women being forced to wear high heels at work is gaining global support

It’s hard to imagine men enduring decades of pain and long-term physical injury just to “look the part” in the workplace – after all, many bemoan the necktie as too restrictive for the daily grind.

Now consider this: millions of women around the world, at all levels of the workplace hierarchy, have consistently spent their working hours tortured by blisters, bloodied flesh, foot pain, knee pain, back pain and worse, as a result of the pressure to conform to an aesthetic code – sometimes explicitly written into contracts or policy, more often subliminally expected as a societal and cultural standard – that deems it appropriate to wear high heels.

Continue reading...

Sleep apps backfire by causing anxiety and insomnia, says expert

Posted on by

Neurologist says ‘metricising our lives’ is counterproductive when it comes to sleep

Smartphone sleep-tracking apps are making people so anxious and obsessed about their sleep that they are developing insomnia, a leading neurologist has said.

Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, Dr Guy Leschziner, a sleep disorder specialist and consultant at Guy’s hospital in London, said a growing preoccupation with getting enough sleep was backfiring.

Continue reading...

‘The models have bellies, hips and thighs that jiggle’: the rise of body-positive swimwear

Posted on by

From larger-cup bikinis to modest beachwear, fashion is finally beginning to cater for a range of women’s bodies

If there’s one thing Sasha Khan loathes, it is shopping for swimwear. Which makes it a strange coincidence that, on the day we speak, Khan has just been bikini shopping. “I buy swimwear about once every 10 years,” she says. The 23-year-old charity worker from London is flying to Ibiza tomorrow. “I always put it off. I hate it. It’s like having to go to the dentist or get your eyes tested.”

The reason Khan hates bikini shopping is because she is a size 10-12, with a 32FF bust, and few retailers design swimwear for women with relatively narrow backs and larger cup sizes. Khan isn’t alone. “I heard at least two or three other people in the changing rooms today saying: ‘Oh God, I can never find anything.’”

Continue reading...

Unwelcome guests: moped riders protest as Amsterdam drives them from bike lanes

Posted on by

Dutch capital steps its pro-cycling reputation up a gear with new regulations – and not everyone is happy

Convoys of mopeds speed down Amsterdam’s bike lanes, beeping their horns and flouting their bare heads. This isn’t some strange Dutch festival, though. These were protests from some of the thousands of furious moped riders ahead of a new city regulation which came into force this week to force them out of bike lanes, on to main roads and into helmets.

The cycling city of Amsterdam is stepping up a gear – with plans to ban petrol and diesel vehicles from the centre by 2030, the removal of 10,000 car-parking spaces, a hike in parking charges and a wide range of measures to take from the car and give to pedestrians, cyclists, green space and children.

Continue reading...

Not one single country set to achieve gender equality by 2030

Posted on by

The first global index measuring efforts to end gender inequality finds countries are not doing enough to improve women’s lives

No country in the world is on track to achieve gender equality by 2030, according to the first index to measure progress against a set of internationally agreed targets.

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the index, launched on Monday, “should serve as a wake-up call to the world”.

Continue reading...

Bluetooth your bladder: the hi-tech way to beat incontinence

Posted on by
Urinary leakage affects millions of women, who have often suffered in silence. That may change with Elvie, a new way to strengthen the pelvic floor – involving an app

There are nappies in my wardrobe, but I have no children nor a sexual fetish. Instead, I have a problem shared by millions of women (and some men): I cannot always control my bladder as well as I want to, no matter how many toilet visits I have made beforehand. I have incontinence, and I am not alone: in the UK, up to 40% of women have incontinence at some point, either because they have given birth or are menopausal, because of genetics, or simply because of age. Up to 70% of expectant and new mothers experience incontinence, and a quarter of men over 40 – though, given how shameful it is thought to be, the figures are likely to be conservative. We mask, we hide, we cope.

The pelvic floor – a sling of muscles stretching from the tailbone to the pubic bone – supports the bladder, bowel and womb. These muscles are meant to contract to stopper any flow of urine. (The muscles are also sometimes referred to as a “trampoline” – a sour joke for women who know trampolining is a sure way to wet pants.)

Continue reading...

The Trumps are coming! Expect it to go as well as a US sitcom episode set in London

Posted on by

In a plot twist no one saw coming, Trump is bringing his four adult children on his forthcoming state visit. It will be like Arrested Development Goes To The UK

The one immutable law about TV sitcoms is the show should never leave its usual setting. Sex And The City’s worst episodes were when Carrie went to Los Angeles and – ooh la la! – Paris, where les français were très rude but the croissants were fantastique. That cultural insight looked positively authentic compared with the trip to Abu Dhabi in the second film, where “the girls” were terrorised by swarthy men and befriended by alluring ladies. This is what happens when a show forgets its appeal is rooted in a particular place, and when the scriptwriters have apparently never been abroad. Suddenly its site-specific references are swapped for national cliches even the makers of National Lampoon’s European Vacation would reject as “a bit obvious”.

Which brings me to the forthcoming episode of Arrested Development Goes To The UK, AKA Trump’s state visit. In a plot twist no one saw coming, Trump is bringing not just Ivanka, the daughter he once said he would date if they weren’t related, but his less date-able adult children, too: Donnie Jr, Eric… and Tiffany! Trump’s daughter with second wife Marla Maples is not a regular character, so it’s exciting when she makes an unexpected appearance. Sort of like on The Cosby Show when Lisa Bonet would come back “from college”, AKA shooting the sex thriller Angel Heart with Mickey Rourke. I’m not insinuating Tiffany is up to something similar, but I bet she’s having more fun than her half-siblings.

Continue reading...