Новости за 15.06.2015

Greece is on the brink of crashing out of the eurozone. So what’s new? Haven’t we been reading headlines like that for the past three years?

Two leading Nike Oregon Project athletes have leapt to the defence of their under-fire coach Alberto Salazar to back him amid the doping allegations of the past two weeks.

This is a highly unusual set of circumstances. From the very start the judge was focused on the best interests of the child. Following that path, although it’s not easy, is what enables a judge to make the right decision, by keeping the focus on the child.

The UK’s elite financial services and legal firms are reportedly operating a “poshness test” that systematically locks out talented working-class people. Hooray, another stick to batter public school kids with. There are so few areas left where we have carte blanche to despise people openly that I feel poshos do us all a great service.

Austria won a silver medal in the synchronised swimming at the European Games yesterday – just four days after three members of their team were hit by a bus.

Can I let you in on a secret? I am a transitioning Mongolian yak herder. Confusingly, I may seem to be a white, middle-aged journalist with greying hair, but appearances can be deceptive. Just ask Rachel Dolezal.

The word momentous is over-used, but we can apply it with justice to the pronouncement coming out of the Vatican on Thursday from Pope Francis about poverty, the environment and climate change.

The majority of British couples consistently go to bed at different times each week because of heavy workloads, conflicting office hours and hectic social lives, according to new research.

It’s always a special occasion when Bernard Haitink picks up his baton with the London Symphony Orchestra, and this concert was doubly so because the soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 3 was Alina Ibragimova. This Russian-born, Gnessin-trained player has blossomed superbly over the last few years on both modern and period instruments, both as soloist and chamber player. She has Anne Sophie Mutter’s precision, but infinitely more warmth in her sound.

In 1963, Martin Luther King said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. In 2015, civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal decided that the only way she could convey the true content of character to the world was to change the colour of her skin.

Is being an actor glamorous and fun? Certainly most of the glimpses we have of the profession at play, and indeed at work, seem to imply that it is. The success of the Brits, Helen Mirren et al, at the Tonys in New York this week was not lacking in glam, glitz and the feelgood factor.

The days when it was thought acceptable for a white actor to black up as Othello are well behind us. But Lucian Msamati makes theatrical history now in being the first black actor ever to play Iago at the RSC. 

1. Following the painting of the London Hospital in open countryside c1760, Sir William Davenant offers a view of “The Great General Hospital for East London” a century and a half later, c1900, with a horse-drawn omnibus in front of it.

In its short life – only since 2002 have we had an institution dedicated to bringing war criminals and genocidal despots to justice – the International Criminal Court in The Hague has had few successes. Unlike the special UN tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and some internationally inspired domestic trials, such as those of former Khmer Rouge murderers in Cambodia, the ICC has been largely ineffective, though through little fault of its own.

In his interview with The Independent, Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, Britain’s second largest union, sounds defiantly Churchillian about the Government’s proposed new Industrial Relations Bill: “We will fight it in the Commons with all our means. We will fight it in the House of Lords as well. If need be, we will seek judicial reviews, and we will take claims to Europe...” Well, if this is indeed the unions’ 1940, will Unison’s “few” also win in this field of human combat?

May I add my voice to those who are mystified at the assumption that the Labour Party can only succeed if it becomes Tory Lite, rather than offering a real alternative to the current Government?

I’m writing this before going to a christening at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street; I’ll get there by the simple technique of whistling up a car from my Uber app. Or I could leap in a Zipcar – there is one handily parked about 100 yards away from my house.