Retrospective expected to be aired next year will mark 60 years since the naturalist joined the corporation in 1952 The BBC is planning a TV retrospective of the work of Sir David Attenborough next year in a move that may signal the twilight of the naturalist’s career. The series, which has the working title Life Stories from a series of Radio 4 lectures he has been giving since 2009, will look back on his life’s work to mark 60 years since he joined the BBC in 1952. According to a senior BBC natural history source, the project, due to be formally approved soon, indicates that the 84-year-old may soon be calling it a day. Attenborough is due to return to the BBC this autumn with a seven-part series called Frozen Planet, following the cycle of the polar seasons, which took three years to film and saw him film at the north pole for the first time. “He was much more involved in the making of this than he has been with other series and is on screen a lot more,” said the BBC source, who added it was unlikely Attenborough would make another large-scale project for the corporation along the lines of Frozen Planet or his other epic series, such as Blue Planet or Planet Earth. “Frozen Planet took three years to film and David braced seriously cold temperatures that most people, let alone someone in their eighties, could not endure. These projects don’t happen very easily and I’d be very surprised if he makes another major BBC natural history series,” said the senior source. “He is 85 this year and you cannot go on forever.” Towards the end of Frozen Planet Attenborough will deliver what the BBC source called a “big polemic” on his views of nature and the environment in what the insider identified as something akin to a final word on his life’s work. The episode, called Meltdown, will be a “look at what the future might hold for the animals and people that live at the poles and what these changes might mean for the rest of us”, according to the BBC. “The poles – north and south – look superficially very similar, but when you visit them within a few weeks of one another, as I have just done, you realise how profoundly different they are – and how what is happening to them is going to affect the entire planet,” Attenborough said in pre-publicity for this autumn’s series. “A century ago the poles were just about the most inaccessible places on earth. Today that has changed. Nonetheless, to have visited them both within a few weeks of one another is a huge privilege.” Speculation about when he would stand down has long dogged Attenborough. In 2005 he told the Sunday Times that his work up until then had “given a series to every group of animals” and that he had made “enough”. Officially the BBC denies that Attenborough’s career will be over after 2012 and Attenborough himself remains defiantly hopeful that he will go on. He is filming another 3D film for Sky about botanical work at Kew Gardens in south-west London. This follows his 3D film Flying Monsters for the broadcaster last year. “Yes, I will be making Life Stories for 2012 to mark the anniversary, and I am not sure how much original filming it will involve,” he said . Asked if he would continue with his filming work, he said: “I sincerely hope so, yes.” David Attenborough Television Documentary BBC Wildlife Ben Dowell guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Iron Dome fires radar-guided missiles from a truck-sized launcher and is designed to blow up incoming rockets in mid-air An Israeli missile system intercepted a rocket fired from Gaza in the first known use of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield. The new weapon, deployed last month to protect southern Israel, was launched as fighting flared with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip after militants fired an anti-tank weapon which hit an Israeli school bus, injuring two people. Two intercept missiles were fired at the rocket which appeared to be heading towards the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, just north of the enclave. Militants have fired rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel since 2007. In December 2008, cross-border clashes escalated into a three-week war in which Israel pounded the enclave. About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Rocket fire and retaliatory Israeli air strikes increased again late last month. 16 Palestinians were killed, and a tourist died in a Jerusalem bomb attack, the first of its kind since 2005. Israel is known to have two operational Iron Dome shields. It deployed the first near the Gaza Strip last month and the second in Ashkelon, but has warned Israelis under fire from the Hamas-run territory they would not be completely protected since it can cover only limited areas. Iron Dome fires radar-guided missiles from a truck-sized launcher and is designed to track and blow up incoming rockets in mid-air. Iron Dome’s operators say it is designed to intercept only rockets that are about to hit residential areas and to ignore those on a harmless trajectory. Israel Middle East Gaza Palestinian territories guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Four phone companies dispute that police ‘ensured’ they warn potential News of the World phone-hacking victims John Yates, the senior police officer at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal, faces a new set of allegations that he has misled parliament. A Guardian investigation has found that all four leading mobile phone companies dispute evidence that Yates has given to a select committee about police efforts to warn public figures whose voicemails were intercepted by the News of the World. During the original police inquiry in 2006 phone companies identified a total of at least 120 politicians, police officers, members of the royal household and others whose voicemail had been accessed by Glenn Mulcaire, the NoW’s private investigator. Yates told the home affairs select committee last September that police had “ensured” the phone companies warned all of their suspected victims. But all four companies have told the Guardian police made no such move and that most of the victims were never warned by them. Two of the companies, Orange and Vodafone, wrote to Scotland Yard last autumn, spelling out the fact that they had told none of their customers that they had been hacked and that police had never asked them to. The home affairs committee on Thursday said that more than four months after those letters were sent to the Yard, it was unaware of Yates having made any attempt to tell it that there might be a problem with the evidence he gave. The committee chairman, Keith Vaz, said he would write to Yates and to the phone companies to clarify the position. The latest allegations come after a public dispute in which Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, has challenged Yates’s account to parliament of the advice that police were given by prosecutors and the impact this had on the original investigation of the affair and the number of victims who were identified. At a session of the committee on Tuesday, Vaz said the DPP’s evidence clearly contradicted the account which Yates had given to the committee the previous week and that he would be writing to Yates to ask for an explanation. Yates is currently acting deputy commissioner of the Met. In relation to the phone companies, the key evidence from Yates was given to the committee in September last year when Vaz asked him whether police had warned all the public figures whose pin codes had been found in Glenn Mulcaire’s paperwork. Yates said: “We have taken what I consider to be all reasonable steps in conjunction with the major service providers – the Oranges, Vodafones – to ensure where we had even the minutest possibility they may have been the subject of an attempt to hack or hacking, we have taken all reasonable steps.” MP Mary Macleod asked what he meant by “reasonable steps”, and Yates replied: “Speaking to them or ensuring the phone company has spoken to them.” The four leading mobile phone companies all say that this is not correct and that the police did not ask them to warn any victims among their customers. All of them searched their call data as part of the police inquiry in 2006 and all initially followed the standard procedure, which is to keep such inquiries confidential. Vodafone found about 40 customers whose voicemail had been intercepted. They told none of them that they had been victims but warned a small number in particularly sensitive positions to check their security. A spokesman said: “We were not asked by the Met police to contact any customers but believed it was important that we inform as many as we could. As it was a live investigation, however, we were very limited in the information we could pass on to customers. We were only able to remind customers, where we believed it was appropriate, of the importance of voicemail security.” Orange identified about 45 customers whose voicemail had been dialled from Mulcaire’s phone numbers. It said it warned none of them but passed the customers’ details to Scotland Yard. A spokesman for Orange said: “At no point during the investigations were we asked, nor did we feel it right, to take further action in relation to these customers. The Metropolitan police are fully aware of our position on this.” T-Mobile gave police information from its call records but says it never finally identified customers who were victims and therefore warned none. A spokesman said: “We have never been supplied with a list of names or telephone numbers by the police of customers who may have been compromised, nor were we asked by the police to contact any of them.” O2 identified about 40 customers whose voicemail had been successfully accessed. It is the only company to have taken a corporate decision to approach and warn all of them. Asked about Yates’s evidence, a spokesman for O2 said: “We weren’t contacted by the police and asked proactively to get in touch with customers to warn them if they had been victims.” It is now clear that police failed to inform not only those victims who were identified by the phone companies but a large number of others whose details were found in notebooks, computer records and audiotapes seized from Mulcaire in August 2006 but never properly investigated until the Yard began its third investigation into the affair in January. The failure means that police broke an agreement with the DPP that they would contact “all potential victims”. It also means many of the victims were deprived of the chance to check the call data, which is kept by the phone companies for only 12 months, and that they had no opportunity to change their pin codes or to assess the damage done by the interception of their messages. The immediate problem for Scotland Yard is that the phone companies, like the DPP, are now challenging the evidence given to the public and parliament by the most senior officer in the affair, John Yates. In July 2009, he made a public statement: “Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by police.” In February 2010 he wrote to the culture, media and sport committee: “Where information exists to suggest some form of interception of an individual’s phone was or may have been attempted by Goodman and Mulcaire, the Metropolitan police has been diligent and taken all proper steps to ensure those individuals have been informed.” Yates’s evidence about the phone companies last September prompted an exchange of letters. According to one senior police source, speaking on condition of anonymity, Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Williams, who works directly under John Yates, wrote to mobile phone companies in October, claiming that he believed that the companies had contacted “all of the people potentially identified as being victims.” On November 2, Orange wrote back to DCS Williams. The company is understood to have told him that police had never asked them to contact victims and that they had not done so. On November 22 Vodafone also wrote to DCS Williams. It is understood that the company expressed surprise that he was claiming to believe that it had contacted victims in 2006; it pointed out that it was for the police, not for the phone companies, to establish who had been victims of crime; and indicated it had no record of the police ever asking it to contact customers. Last month – more than four months after that exchange of letters – Yates gave evidence on phone-hacking to the home affairs committee and to the culture, media and sport committee. He made no reference to the letters. Nor did he tell the committee that the two companies had challenged his previous account. However, in evidence to the media committe, he did indicate some awareness of a problem. He said: “I think there is some confusion with some of the mobile phone companies as to who was doing what, and we need to get some clarity around that … I am not sure that the follow-up was as thorough as it could have been.” In a statement on Thursday night, Scotland Yard said Yates had told the home affairs select committee in September 2010: “We think we have done all that is reasonable but we will continue to review it as we go along.” A spokesman said the correspondence with the phone companies was part of that review and Yates had acknowledged in recent evidence to both select committees that more should have been done for victims. A spokesman said the current inquiry was reviewing the victim strategy. Nick Davies guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media Mike Pence had a moment of honesty on the House floor a bit earlier today. He attempted to blame Democrats for the impending government shutdown, and then said: “Then I say: Shut it down. And I’m certain the American people are going to know who to blame.” That’s right, we will. Liberal or not, we know who to blame. Republicans have control of this House of Representatives. They have filibuster control in the Senate. They’re holding the budget hostage to ideological issues like abortion and the EPA, neither of which has a single thing to do with the troops. So yes, we know who to blame. Especially when they’ve been out exhorting crowds to “Shut It Down!” The TeaBirchers and the Republican Party, who are now one and the same.
Continue reading …
Frédéric Lefebvre ridiculed after muddling title of Voltaire’s Zadig with high-street store The literary credentials of the French government are looking increasingly shaky: first president Nicolas Sarkozy derided classic French novel The Princess of Cleves; now trade minister Frédéric Lefebvre has become an internet sensation after naming a clothes shop as his favourite novel. Asked at the Paris book fair last week which book had made the greatest impression on him during his life, Lefebvre told the interviewer it was “without doubt” Zadig et Voltaire – the name of a French fashion chain. “It’s a lesson about life, and I reread it pretty often,” said the politician, at the fair to publicise his own book, Le mieux est l’ami du bien, an exposition of his political views. He actually meant to refer to Voltaire’s celebrated philosophical novel Zadig , about a Babylonian man subjected to the whims of fate. The video of his mistake has now been viewed almost 200,000 times, and the French literati have been quick to mock Lefebvre for his slip, suggesting other combinations of consumerism and literature – from The Girl with the La Perla to The World According to Gap, Thus Spake Zara, Waiting for Gaultier and Victor Hugo Boss’s Les Misérables – on the trending Twitter hashtag #bibliolefebvre . “We are in France, a country where literature is placed on a pedestal and above all where it goes hand in hand with power,” wrote a blogger for French paper Le Figaro , which conducted the initial interview with Lefebvre. “Even if, since the departure of Mitterrand, literature has deserted the Elysée, it is always bad for a politician to confuse a clothing brand and a philosophical tale.” But Lefebvre has taken the mockery in good part, writing on Twitter : “I love Zadig, I love Voltaire and I love Twitter. Thank you for this good time!” His mistake follows Sarkozy’s criticism of Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves two years ago, which prompted a literary backlash against the French president. Sales of the 17th-century novel soared, public protest readings of the book were held and the 2009 Paris book fair sold out of badges saying “I’m reading La Princesse de Clèves”. It is too early to say whether Lefebvre’s appreciation will provide a similar boost to Zadig by Voltaire – or even to Zadig and Voltaire. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire France Europe Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Frédéric Lefebvre ridiculed after muddling title of Voltaire’s Zadig with high-street store The literary credentials of the French government are looking increasingly shaky: first president Nicolas Sarkozy derided classic French novel The Princess of Cleves; now trade minister Frédéric Lefebvre has become an internet sensation after naming a clothes shop as his favourite novel. Asked at the Paris book fair last week which book had made the greatest impression on him during his life, Lefebvre told the interviewer it was “without doubt” Zadig et Voltaire – the name of a French fashion chain. “It’s a lesson about life, and I reread it pretty often,” said the politician, at the fair to publicise his own book, Le mieux est l’ami du bien, an exposition of his political views. He actually meant to refer to Voltaire’s celebrated philosophical novel Zadig , about a Babylonian man subjected to the whims of fate. The video of his mistake has now been viewed almost 200,000 times, and the French literati have been quick to mock Lefebvre for his slip, suggesting other combinations of consumerism and literature – from The Girl with the La Perla to The World According to Gap, Thus Spake Zara, Waiting for Gaultier and Victor Hugo Boss’s Les Misérables – on the trending Twitter hashtag #bibliolefebvre . “We are in France, a country where literature is placed on a pedestal and above all where it goes hand in hand with power,” wrote a blogger for French paper Le Figaro , which conducted the initial interview with Lefebvre. “Even if, since the departure of Mitterrand, literature has deserted the Elysée, it is always bad for a politician to confuse a clothing brand and a philosophical tale.” But Lefebvre has taken the mockery in good part, writing on Twitter : “I love Zadig, I love Voltaire and I love Twitter. Thank you for this good time!” His mistake follows Sarkozy’s criticism of Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves two years ago, which prompted a literary backlash against the French president. Sales of the 17th-century novel soared, public protest readings of the book were held and the 2009 Paris book fair sold out of badges saying “I’m reading La Princesse de Clèves”. It is too early to say whether Lefebvre’s appreciation will provide a similar boost to Zadig by Voltaire – or even to Zadig and Voltaire. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire France Europe Alison Flood guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
The Dutch designer’s iconic typography can be seen everywhere from posters to postage stamps – and, now, in a brilliant exhibition at the Design Museum Wim Crouwel’s iconic typography – seen on posters, postage stamps, exhibition catalogues and telephone directories – sums up Dutch design and perhaps even the Netherlands itself. Crouwel’s rational, modern visual world of grids and pure lines feels as intriguingly artificial as the painstakingly constructed Dutch landscape. His revered body of work, which spans 60 years, has a deep humanity and an artistic quirkiness that combines precision with emotion. You can see for yourself by joining the crowds of graphic designers who have been making a pilgrimage to London’s Design Museum to pay homage to the Dutch master’s work in the first major retrospective of his career held in Britain. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey is an exhibition that anyone with the remotest interest in typography and graphic design will find utterly engrossing. There is a fascinating tension at work in Crouwel’s prolific output: between the rational and the irrational, the logical and the illogical, the scientific and the waywardly artistic. Crouwel, born in Groningen in 1928, began his career as a painter. His expressionist paintings were a stark contrast to the delight he took in the Bauhaus-inspired typography of the Swiss designers Karl Gerstner and Gerard Ifert. And yet, while he believed in the machine aesthetic espoused by the Bauhaus, he is on record as saying, the best part of 60 years ago, “the machine cannot replace the precision of the human eye and human feeling”. This is why he was also influenced by the work of Eric Gill, the English letterer, sculptor, sex maniac and type designer whose epochal sans-serif typeface Gill Sans (inspired by Edward Johnston’s display face for the London Underground) showed how a machine type could also be imbued with a humanity that came from craftsmanship. When Crouwel took to typography on an almost industrial scale with the founding of the Total Design studio in 1963, he honed a distinctive approach to design that has captivated fellow designers since. Crouwel’s work for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam from 1964 showed how seemingly cool typography could be used to subtly evoke the characteristics of the artists on show. He had, in fact, been working on this approach since the early 1950s: his poster of 1957 for an exhibition of Leger paintings held at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, is so in tune with the artist that it’s not surprising that, while not quite commanding the price of a Leger in auction rooms today, you would have to pay handsomely for an original Crouwel poster. In day-to-day service, perhaps the best-known Crouwel typeface is Gridnik – a digitised version of the Politene face he designed for Olivetti in 1974. Shaped on a square grid, each letter has an elegant machine quality balanced with a playfulness that makes you want to look at it for its own sake as well as read the messages it was designed to give, most famously on the standard issue postage stamps issued by the Dutch PTT between 1976 and 2002. The Politene that became Gridnik was originally designed for Olivetti’s latest generation of electric typewriters, but as these became outmoded almost immediately, the typeface was rescued to live another life. Crouwel’s eye-boggling New Alphabet of 1967 was another historical accident of sorts. It was meant to be a purely experimental design based on cathode ray tube technology, with each letter abstractly composed of vertical and horizontal lines, some of them – g, j, s, w and z – all but unrecognisable. “The New Alphabet was over the top,” Crouwel has said, “and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable.” But, it was also great fun in a space age, computer-era way. Crouwel, busy today as an adviser to the company that has become Total Identity , is aware of the seeming contradiction in typography: the fact that many of the best-loved typefaces are looked at for their design rather than the written messages they convey. But that’s the joy of type. You can read words on the page to gain understanding of what they impart while still enjoying their form. If they become too fussy, and you spend more time looking at the curves of individual letters than reading, the type designer has failed you. Crouwel has never disappointed. He is the first to say his work shouldn’t be fetishised, but see if you can visit Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey and not be caught in this Dutch designer’s captivating grid. Design Typography Jonathan Glancey guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
The Place, London Everyone knows what it’s like to be sitting in a theatre, at odds with the general mood. But I’ve rarely felt that disconnect as acutely as at this year’s Place Prize . At each of the 10 finals’ performances, audiences are invited to vote live for their favourite work, with the popular winner being given £1,000 at the end of each night (the judges’ prize of £25,000 is awarded on the final night of the run). And for me, on opening night the numbers were brutal: 43% voted for the work I admired least, just 12% for the one I wanted to win. That was Begin to Begin – a meticulously crafted, beautifully performed trio by Eva Recacha . It’s based on the traditional ballad Michael Finnegan , with the circular logic of the lyrics (“There once was a man named Michael Finnegan/ He grew whiskers on his chinnegan”) reflected in dance phrases that stop, start, embellish and repeat. With the (live and recorded) words of the song also prized open by questions such as “Who is Michael?”, “How did he die?”, the dance becomes by turns elegiac, comic and anarchic. Cameo by Riccardo Buscarini and Antonio de la Fe Guedes is another smart fusion of structural game playing and emotion. Its three dancers prowl around an elegantly furnished stage, meeting in a film noir-ish tableau of lust, violence and fear. Yet this murder mystery is one from which all causal logic has been removed – what’s left is a dark, tense abstraction. My third choice was Fidelity, which sees Freddie Opuku-Addaie and Frauke Requardt giving free rein to their choreographic instincts as they block, feint and anticipate each other’s semi-improvised moves. It’s a fascinating performance, but too insubstantial to merit the final prize. And even less deserving is Ben Duke and Rachel Meseguer’s It Needs Horses , in which two desperately down-at-heel performers abandon their tired circus acts for a money-spinning burlesque routine. A couple of beautifully finessed jokes feature in the self-conscious bump and grind that ensues. But most of the material is shockingly lazy and generalised. Or so I thought: it walked away with the audience award. Rating: 3/5 Dance Theatre Judith Mackrell guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
For grieving families hoping for closure as well as justice, the death penalty with its endless delays and appeals can be cruel On Tuesday, death row inmate Cleve Foster was granted his second stay of execution this year. His first came on 11 January, just moments after Foster – who maintains he is innocent and would have been the first Texan executed with a cocktail containing a chemical used to euthanise animals – had eaten what he believed was his last meal; that’s when the call came, informing him that the US supreme court would consider an appeal. The parents of Rachel Urnosky, a 22-year-old woman whose murder Foster was charged with (though never tried for, being found guilty instead of a related homicide ), found out about the decision after making a long trip across the “lone star state”, when they arrived at the prison where Foster’s execution was supposed to take place. Terry Urnosky, Rachel’s father, a therapist, told The Texas Star-Telegram how shocked he felt: “It’s like – if you’ve ever played football – getting hit in the stomach with a helmet in the gut. […] We were expecting closure. But unfortunately, we’re reliving all the thoughts, the trials, the evidence. […] The nightmare continues.” Death penalty proponents argue that executions help victims’ family members feel that justice has been done, and indeed, Terry Urnosky said back in 2003 that he thought the death sentence was part of God’s plan for Foster. But others who’ve endured similar tragedies oppose the capital punishment, arguing that the agonising appeals process that so often accompanies a death penalty case exacerbates their pain and, far from helping them overcome their loss, keeps it in the forefront of their minds. No judge wants to be responsible for allowing the execution of an innocent person, which helps explain why there tend to be an unusually high number of appeals in a capital case. But appeals are costly – and not just figuratively, for victims’ families, but literally, for taxpayers. North Carolinians, for instance, pay $2.16m more for every death row inmate than for those sentenced to life, and Florida spends $51m more annually than it would if life-without-parole were the most severe sentence allowed there. More to the point, the long, slow appeals process exacts a toll from victims’ families. Sure, some survivors do say things like, “I was really looking forward to sitting in the front row while they executed this guy,” (as Karen Bond told the Chicago Tribune after Illinois Governor Pat Quinn commuted her son’s murderer’s sentence). But others want the criminals who ruined their lives to get nothing less than … life. For instance, last month 82 relatives of murder victims signed an open letter to Connecticut lawmakers , saying: “The death penalty is a false promise that goes unfulfilled, leaving victims’ families frustrated and angry [and] wastes millions of dollars that could go toward much needed victims’ services.” Similarly, Laura Porter from Equal Justice USA , a grassroots organisation working to improve the justice system, increase services for families of homicide victims and repeal the death penalty, says: “I work with many murder victim’s family members […] and I’m hearing more and more voices calling for repeal of the death penalty, citing the fact that the endless appeals process harms victims.” Or take it from Walter Everett, a 76-year-old retired minister whose son was killed when a crack addict shot him point blank. He recently told the Connecticut Post : “There is an incredible cost of the death penalty […] emotionally for families of victims because they tend to wait seemingly forever, for the execution.” That doesn’t sound just. Emotional closure is going to be difficult, under any circumstances, for people who have suffered as he and the Urnoskys have. But the legal case, at least, is more likely to be closed quickly if it’s a question of a life prison sentence rather than a penalty of death. Capital punishment Texas United States Prisons and probation US supreme court Maura Kelly guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Corporation also confirms it will reduce property usage as part of ‘Delivering Quality First’ cost-saving programme Nine layers of BBC management will be reduced to a maximum of seven, the corporation said on Thursday, as executives gave more details of the corporation’s £700m cost-savings plan. Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer, conceded that the “complexity of the BBC” had long been an issue and that the new seven-layer rule would apply from “the director general to the most junior staff”. She would not say how many jobs would be at risk, but with the BBC typically using eight and sometimes nine layers of management, the expectation is that some middle managers will lose their jobs or responsibilities as a result. Thomson was speaking after BBC employees were updated as to the progress of the “Delivering Quality First” programme – the BBC’s plans to contend with the licence fee freeze imposed on the broadcaster by the coalition government last year. In a sketchy briefing, Thomson offered no new information about any cost savings that would be immediately be noticed by viewers, saying that BBC was still considering proposals including dropping overnight programming, cutting sports spending and increasing repeats. However, the chief operating officer did confirm that BBC will to reduce its property usage by at least 25% and possibly 30%, largely by cutting down on the number of buildings it uses in west and central London, including the White City block currently used by Mark Thompson, the director general, for his principal office. Thomson could not immediately say how much would be saved by the office space cuts, and she stressed that the building rationalisation programme was not intended to lead to a reduction in the BBC presence in cities and towns outside London, where the broadcaster’s offices are used for local radio stations. “This is not about cutting local radio,” she added. The BBC is now evaluating the remaining cost saving proposals, and further details are expected to emerge over the coming weeks and months. •
Continue reading …