John Adler, a New Jersey politician who worked his way up from town councilman to congressman, has died. He was 51. Adler, who was among the Democratic members of Congress that lost their jobs in last November’s election, had been in a local hospital since last month, when he underwent…
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The revamped Archers theme tune for Radio 4 Extra’s Ambridge Extra may annoy the show’s fans. But are there any scores where the tinkering has worked? Not much is sacred when it comes to television. You can replace actors whenever the mood calls, or continue to call your show Taggart even though the bloke who played Taggart died 17 years ago, and people won’t kick up too much of a fuss. But start mucking around with theme tunes and you risk unleashing hell. This is something that Radio 4 Extra would do well to bear in mind. This morning saw the debut of Ambridge Extra, a weird new Xtra Factor-style show created to accompany The Archers. Its theme tune is the same one that The Archers always had – Barwick Green by Arthur Wood – but this version has been arranged and recorded by contemporary folk band Bellowhead. As a result, there’s a very real chance that casual listeners will hear Ambridge Extra and assume it’s a bizarre new version of The Archers that takes place during a French-themed booze-up on Captain Pugwash’s pirate ship. But it could be worse. At least Bellowhead’s version is still identifiably the theme tune to The Archers, and it’s not like they’ve made it go dubstep or anything. Also, don’t forget that this isn’t the main Archers theme tune we’re talking about, merely a 15-minute spin-off programme that airs on one of the BBC’s lesser digital stations. But just in case any other TV or radio producers feel like following Radio 4′s lead by commissioning a replacement to a beloved theme tune, let’s just pray they follow the golden rules. Rule one: Don’t just add a few dancey drum beats This is usually the domain of BBC Sports, a department compelled to destroy all of its classic theme tunes by intermittently jazzing them up with the latest Bontempi drumbeat preset. Snooker fans will be able to remember the anguish they felt when their beloved signature tune – Drag Racer by The Doug Wood Band – was given a Fatboy Slim-style mauling and renamed 147 Lockdown almost a decade ago. Worse still is the treatment doled out to the A Question Of Sport theme tune. In the last 20 years, it’s been abused with synthy handclaps , insipid drum and bass , awful electric guitar lift muzak and faux-profound orchestralisms . Just be thankful Grandstand isn’t still on air. It’d probably sound like N-Dubz by now. Rule two: Don’t introduce a new theme tune for no reason Think Grange Hill and, regardless of how old you are, you immediately think of Chicken Man by Alan Hawkshaw. That’s because it’s a timeless, iconic piece of music; its loping gait and elastic bass manages to perfectly capture the essence of what it’s like to be at school, especially when accompanied by a cartoon of a flying sausage. What you don’t think of, however, is the theme tune that replaced Chicken Man in 1990 , because it sounds like it should be soundtracking an instructional health and safety video for a regional firm of double glazing installers. If you do think of this version of the Grange Hill theme tune, it’s safe to assume that you’re already dead to me. Rule three: Treat the original with respect The first Doctor Who theme tune was a triumph of technology and willpower. Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop managed to ingeniously wrestle it into existence by laboriously manipulating a tape recording of a test tone oscillator until she was finally able to realise Ron Gainer’s score. The theme tune has been updated several times since then, often by allowing the Radiophonic Workshop to play with gigantic analogue synthesizers until it was closed down in 1998. Murray Gold has been in charge of the show’s theme since its resurrection in 2005 and, while he hasn’t come close to replicating the otherworldy hum of the original, at least he’s managed to retain its spirit of adventure. Entertainment Drama Television The Archers Radio Stuart Heritage guardian.co.uk
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James Jones’s novel, bowdlerised for many years, set to appear for the first time as author intended The novel prompted one of the most famous heterosexual sex scenes in film history, with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr clasping each other passionately on a beach amid the foaming waves. But an uncensored text of James Jones’s 1951 novel From Here to Eternity has revealed that the author originally intended to include frank references to homosexuality considered too scandalous to be published at the time. The novel, Jones’s debut, tells of a group of soldiers stationed on a barracks in Hawaii in 1941, and was loosely based on the author’s own army experiences on the island in the run-up to the second world war. Jones served as a soldier from 1939 to 1945 and was present at both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the battle for Guadalcanal, at which he was injured, and also decorated for his service. In later books, The Thin Red Line and Soon Came Running, Jones went on to explore the experience of combat and the aftermath of war. From Here to Eternity is the story of first sergeant Milt Warden, who has an affair with Karen, the wife of his captain. But the original text of the novel included two scenes which never made it to the published edition, let alone the film. In one, private Angelo Maggio – the soldier played by Frank Sinatra in the 1953 film – confesses to having oral sex with a wealthy man for $5 or $10 that “comes in handy the middle of the month”. In the second scene a military investigation into gay activity is mooted. Jones’s editor at Scribner refused to allow the scenes to be included, and also excised various swear words originally intended to be included in the dialogue. In America at the time the US postal service would not carry material it considered obscene, making it impossible for books the organisation thought offensive to be distributed. Disapproval from the influential Book-of-the-Month Club, a mail order club, also meant the end of a novel’s chances of commercial success. Many authors, including Ernest Hemingway , were therefore forced to tone down their novels’ language and content, on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Jones’s daughter, novelist Kaylie Jones, said her father fought “bitterly” to keep the novel’s language the way he’d originally intended it , but eventually acceded to his editor’s insistence. Now, 60 years after it was first published, and more than 30 since Jones’s death in 1977, the original version will be produced as an ebook through digital publisher Open Road . Sarah Churchwell, senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, welcomed the publication as a reversal of censorship. “Jones was aspiring to realism and verisimilitude and objected to the sanitisation of his novel,” she said. “He was trying to tell the truth about war. In the 1950s the US was telling itself a mythic, grandiose, heroic story about the second world war and GI Joe saving the world. Jones was saying, ‘That wasn’t the war I saw, I want to write something more honest and realistic. Whatever the mid-America myth, one of the things men were doing was giving blow jobs for money.’” Churchill added that it was also important to acknowledge that a story celebrated for inspiring the classic Hollywood beach scene between Lancaster and Kerr was actually envisioned as a novel that acknowledged homosexuality. “It’s an important historical correction, to allow James Jones his rightful place as one of the earliest mainstream US novelists to try to treat homosexuality sympathetically, without judging or pathologising it,” she said. “People don’t think of Jones as an avant-garde writer, but in his way he was. We know about Hemingway and Allen Ginsberg , but we don’t put James Jones into that story and he deserves to be there.” Fiction Censorship Publishing Ebooks Benedicte Page guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …It’s hard to believe, but even Charlie Sheen can get rattled. He admits now that the thunderous boos really got to him when he opened his new roadshow in Detroit. “There was a moment on the bus when it was like, we can just keep going, we can drive home…
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A year after her grandson’s wedding, Queen to lead river pageant of 1,000 boats in celebration of 60 years on the throne You wait ages for one royal celebration and then two turn up in quick succession. Plans for a pageant of 1,000 boats down the Thames in June next year to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s accession have been announced at London’s City Hall. The river centrepiece of the diamond jubilee celebrations will be the largest for at least 350 years – by comparison a similar procession upstream from Greenwich during the Queen’s silver jubilee year of 1977 attracted 140 vessels. It will also result in a long weekend of public holidays for the second year running, after this month’s royal wedding and the May Day bank holiday resulted in a four-day weekend. The Thames procession will take place on Sunday 3 June 2012 and will inevitably be used as an opportunity to extend the summer’s anticipated tourist influx before the Olympic Games, which start eight weeks later. The Queen, who by then will be 86, will ride down the river from Putney to Tower Bridge in a Thames sailing barge temporarily converted to look like an ornate 18th-century royal galley of the sort that used to convey her Hanoverian ancestors. It was aptly described by Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, as a royal quinquereme, “probably rowed by oiled and manacled MPs”. In its wake will follow craft of all shapes and sizes, from rowing boats to gondolas, tugs, steamers, dhows and wherries: everything, in Johnson’s words, “with the possible exception of the Ark Royal”. The fleet, more than seven miles long and taking an hour and a half to pass, will be accompanied by bands and hooters, water jets and bells from a floating belfry and from the churches sited along the river banks. There will be fireworks and music characteristic of every decade of the Queen’s reign will add to the cacophony. There will be 30,000 people afloat and a million more are expected to line the route. “It is going,” said the mayor, “to be a joyful, successful version of – err – Dunkirk. I hope. We have liquid history flowing through our city and next year we are going to make the most of it.” The organisers have written to every lord lieutenant in the country and to Commonwealth high commissioners to summon craft of all sorts. Boat owners whose vessels are seaworthy and capable of progressing downstream on the ebbing tide that day at four knots an hour (4.6mph) will be invited to apply to take part. Adrian Evans, whose previous experience as an events organiser encompasses the Archaos chainsaw juggling circus group and – possibly less happily – the capital’s millennium celebrations, said: “We are looking for the quirky and unusual. They are all going to be decked out with union jacks and an abundance of red, white and blue … It is going to be a monumental logistical challenge.” The Conservative peer Lord Salisbury, chairman of the Thames jubilee foundation, whose Cecil family ancestors have organised royal pageants since Tudor times, tried a touch of the demotic: “Charles II’s pageant in 1662 claimed to have 10,000 boats, but I am sure that was journalistic licence. My direct ancestor at that time was Nell Gwynne, the king’s Protestant whore, so that’s who I am descended from.” He insisted that the funding of the event will be met by private sponsorship, but his coyness about the projected cost was ruthlessly subverted by the mayor, who is, after all, a former journalist. “It’s an £8m budget, that’s the capital amount, isn’t it?” said Johnson. “It is going to be quite a lot of millions, whatever the final sum turns out to be … it will be … I am sure it will bring tourists here in droves,” said a spluttering Salisbury before conceding that the mayor’s suggestion was correct. Public funding will meet security and crowd control costs. Mindful that he has a mayoral election before then, Johnson added: “It is quite possible that on 3 June I will be in a coracle … but I hope to be somewhere in the flotilla.” He obviously has no intention of missing the summer of fun. The Queen Monarchy London Boris Johnson Stephen Bates guardian.co.uk
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US withdrawal of attack planes puts pressure on European countries, especially France, to offer more strike capability Nato is running short of attack aircraft for its bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi only days after taking command of the Libyan mission from a coalition led by the US, France, and Britain. David Cameron has pledged four more British Tornado jets on top of eight already being used for the air strikes. But pressure is growing for other European countries, especially France, to offer more after the Americans withdrew their attack aircraft from the campaign on Monday. “We will need more strike capability,” a Nato official said. Since the French launched the first raids on Libya 16 days ago, the coalition and Nato have destroyed around 30% of Gaddafi’s military capacity, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, the Canadian officer leading the air campaign, told Nato ambassadors. But attempts to “degrade” the Libyan leader’s firepower further were being complicated by a shift in tactics by Gaddafi, said Brigadier-General Marc van Uhm, a senior Nato military planner. “They are using light vehicles and trucks to transport,” while hiding tanks and heavy weapons, he said. “We try to identify where those heavy assets are, because we have seen they have chosen to hide themselves into urban areas to prevent being targeted, even using human shields.” Nato officials insisted the pace of the air operations was being maintained. But it has emerged that the US and the French, who have been the two biggest military players until now, are retaining national control over substantial military forces in the Mediterranean and refusing to submit them to Nato authority. The French have the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, two escorting frigates and 16 fighter aircraft, none of which are under the Nato command and control which was announced last Thursday. Until last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy was the loudest opponent of handing over the operations to Nato control. Nonetheless, the French are not only taking part in the Nato campaign, but are the biggest non-US contributors, with 33 aircraft, double Britain’s 17. Not all of these are strike aircraft. Until Monday, the Americans had performed most of the attacks on ground targets, with the French executing around a quarter and the British around a 10th. Given the US retreat, Nato is seeking to fill the gap, but only the British have pledged more. “We’re very happy that one country decided to bring in more assets,” said Van Uhm. When Nato took over from the coalition it was stressed that it had assumed “sole command and control” of all air operations. However, countries are dipping in and out of Nato command, withdrawing “air assets” for national operations before returning them to alliance control. “It’s pretty clear that Nato is in command. Nato is in the lead,” said Van Uhm. “There are assets under national control in the area. But General Bouchard is commanding what Nato does … You could say nothing is happening without Nato knowing.” The general stressed that no air strikes on ground targets in Libya had taken place outside Nato’s command. Six countries are believed to be engaged in the bombing campaign — France, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway — with many others involved in policing an arms embargo and enforcing a no-fly zone. Gaddafi’s air force had been grounded, Van Uhm said. In London, the Ministry of Defence said RAF aircraft had struck targets in Libya on each of the past three days. Tornado GR4 ground attack planes, flying from the Italian air base of Gioia del Colle, hit a battle tank and two surface-to-air missile launchers near Sirte on Monday when they launched three anti-armour Brimstone missiles. The previous day, they fired Paveway IV bombs and Brimstone missiles to target a group of 10 armoured vehicles south of Sirte. On Saturday, they fired Paveway IV missiles at two tanks in Sirte and also hit “several small ground attack aircraft” on an airfield near Misrata, the MoD said. Two of the 10 Eurofighter/Typhoons based in Italy have returned to the UK. The Typhoons are not equipped to conduct ground attack operations. Libya Nato Arab and Middle East unrest Military France Middle East Europe Ian Traynor Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The Obama administration has lifted financial sanctions against high-profile Libyan defector Moussa Koussa. The official, formerly Moammar Gadhafi’s intelligence chief and foreign minister, is suspected of involvement in numerous terrorist acts over the last 30 years, including the 1988 bombing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, and the decision…
Continue reading …British soccer ace Wayne Rooney is facing a two-game ban for cursing heard ’round the world. The Manchester United striker swore directly at a TV camera after completing a hat-trick against West Ham over the weekend and is now expected to miss the upcoming FA Cup clash with arch-rivals Manchester…
Continue reading …Federal officials are investigating a complaint charging Yale University with failing to address a “hostile sexual environment” on campus. The complaint charges that university officials ignore or cover up reports of sex assault, and tolerate open expressions of hostility toward women. “Yale, in its failure to respond to both public…
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March’s job numbers were greeted rapturously by the business press. Scratch the surface of the data and things are not so rosy When the labour department announced that the US economy had created 216,000 jobs in March , it set off a round of celebrations throughout Washington policy circles. The word in the New York Times , the Washington Post and other major news outlets was that the economy was back on course; we were on the right path. Those who know arithmetic were a bit more sceptical. If the economy sustained March’s rate of job growth, it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment. Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounceback from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace, we won’t get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022. That’s a long time to make ordinary workers suffer because the folks who run the economy are not very good at their job. In addition to the job growth numbers, the March data also showed that the unemployment rate slipped down by another 0.1 percentage point. It now stands at 8.8%, almost a full percentage point below its year ago level of 9.7%. This, too, was treated as cause for celebration. While that may sound like progress, a more careful look at the data makes this number less impressive. The percentage of the population that is employed has actually fallen by 0.1 percentage point over the last year. In order to be counted as unemployed, you have to say that you are looking for work. The unemployment rate did not fall because the unemployed had found jobs; rather, the unemployment rate fell because people have given up looking for work. Only in Washington would this be hailed as good news. Remarkably, as the mixed basket of economic news in the March employment report was being celebrated, a major piece of unambiguously bad news was almost completely ignored. The commerce department released data on construction spending for February (pdf) . A decline of 1.4 % in spending in February, coupled with sharp downward revisions to the data for the prior two months, left nominal spending in February 6.2% below its November level. The slump in construction is virtually certain to be a major drag on growth in the first quarter. The big culprit this time is the non-residential sector – as a result of the bursting of the bubble in this sector, coupled with a fading out of stimulus spending on government projects. Other recent economic news also suggests that the economy’s momentum is more likely to slow than accelerate in the months ahead. Nominal wage growth has been virtually flat the last two months. With food and gas prices rising sharply, this means that real wages are falling, leaving workers with less money to spend. House prices are again falling rapidly, having declined at the rate of 1.0% a month for the last three months. If this pace of decline continues, by the end of the year, homeowners will have lost more than $2tn in equity compared with peak hit in the summer of 2010. This loss of housing wealth implies a reduction in annual consumption of $120bn. There was also a big jump in the trade deficit reported for January . While the celebrants of recent trade pacts were excited by the growth in exports, people who know economics recognise that the larger increase in imports will be another drag on economic growth. With most of the country’s major trading partners experiencing weak growth, there is little prospect for an improvement in the trade deficit any time soon. And, investment in equipment and software also appears to be weakening. New orders for capital goods (excluding volatile aircraft orders) in February were down 6.8% from the levels reported in December. In addition, the government cutbacks, threatened at the federal level and going into place at the state and local level, will be a further source of drag on the economy. In short, there is little basis for last Friday’s celebrations about the economy. The February jobs report would have been mediocre if the economy were already at normal rates of unemployment. In the context of a badly depressed economy, it is pathetic. We should be seeing jobs growth at two or three times this rate. But the real bad news is that it is more likely to get worse than better. Yet again, the business press is missing the story. US unemployment and employment data United States Housing market Economics Economic policy Dean Baker guardian.co.uk
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