Новости за 05.08.2015

The Edinburgh Fringe begins this week, with tens of thousands of performers flocking to the Scottish city. It is a place of dreams – while there are plenty of big names in attendance these days, it is still associated with fresh talent and opportunity; people arrive as unknowns and hope to leave as "breakthrough hits". Perhaps it's unsurprising, therefore, that we also often associate the fringe with youth. Edinburgh can be seen as the preserve of trendy young companies, pretentious students, even school children... Читать дальше...

At the start of 2013, a family of 12 elephants including several mothers with suckling infants  were machine-gunned to death in a Kenyan wildlife reserve and their tusks were sawn out by poachers.

On the surface, the sudden demise of Kids Company, the children’s charity that has announced it will cease trading with immediate effect, is a story of government failure. The high profile and media savvy of the charity’s founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, encouraged politicians to plough more funds into a charity that was the subject of suspicion, not only among civil servants – who allegedly raised concerns with Downing Street as early as 2007 – but also throughout the charitable sector.

The World Anti-Doping Agency has not yet received the leaked blood test data at the heart of The Sunday Times’ explosive investigation, despite promising to open an inquiry.

Money makes the world go around,” sang the master of ceremonies in Cabaret. True enough in the short term, but what makes the economic world go around is the investment of money. It’s capital investment – locking money up today in a project that will increase the productive capacity of our economy tomorrow – that generates sustainable economic growth and puts more money in our pockets. And there are worrying signs that we’re not getting enough of it.

It may be the silly season, but the feel-good, fun-for-all-the-family film that’s this summer’s box office blockbuster is anything but silly. Inside Out, an animated movie which is set in the mind of a pre-pubescent girl from the American mid-West, is so replete with psychological insights and so layered with subtle messages that, as a piece of work, it’s more thoughtful than joyful.

The Iraq Invasion of 2003 was a catastrophe of historic proportions. Not only did it destabilise the whole Gulf region at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, but as a demonstration of America's military might post-9/11, it has had precisely the reverse effect.

You’re streets ahead of your closest rival according to national polls. You have a glittering résumé, shedloads of cash and endorsements – not to mention the tide of history at your back. Isn’t it high time the US joined most of the rest of the developed world and elected a woman president?

In anticipation of the latest Tube strikes, I’ve made arrangements to work from home, and stocked up on Pot Noodles and fish fingers. As far as I’m concerned, they can strike for the rest of the year. Bring it on.

Get the whole family playing this summer with rackets, mallets, balls and water pistols

A controversial play about radicalised young people joining Isis has been cancelled without warning just two weeks before its opening night.

This week, pro-choice advocates celebrated the defeat of a Republican-led attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, after a series of videos that claimed to show staff selling foetal tissue prompted a vote in Congress.

When I first became a driver on the Tube in 2001 I knew I would be working unsociable hours, including weekends, bank holidays and nights. But I accepted this as part of my job.

As a fat positive activist my goal, first and foremost, is to advocate body love for all shapes and sizes. Instead, doing this as a fat woman, I am often subjected to accusations of ‘glorifying obesity’.

The blazers are gone and the uniform becomes that of a tracksuit, as pupils march in neat, military lines to the sports field.  A typical Chinese school day begins in sunny Hampshire, with choreographed physical movement, synchronised by the teachers.

The price of ivory has soared four-fold since 2007, as has the scale of elephant poaching, driven by high demand across Asia. At a time when smuggled rhino horn also sells for more than $60,000 a kilogram, poaching has never been so lucrative for criminal cartels.

An alternative approach to wildlife conservation in Kenya called ‘the conservancy concept’ is helping to create a sustainable future for animals, local communities, the environment and visitors alike for the very first time – and the son of British emigrants to Kenya is one of those at the forefront of the movement.

It’s 400km long, took 21 years to complete, rises seven feet above the ground, and its wire cable would stretch from Nairobi to London if unstrung.

Gill Pharaoh's recent death at a Swiss assisted suicide facility has brought the assisted dying debate back into the news. But one of the dangers of the assisted dying debate is that it detracts from the discussion about how to improve the experience of the living.

Abi Morgan has gone on to achieve renown as a screenwriter (for The Irony Lady, Shame etc) since this play was premiered in Edinburgh fifteen years ago. It's good to report that Robert Hastie's meticulous and mountingly mesmeric revival proves that it has stood the test of time. We're in the opulent state residence of some unnamed but probably East European dictatorship where four women from very different backgrounds and cultures find themselves cooped up together on the snowy eve of civil war. Читать дальше...

Recent attempts by British directors to stage Monteverdi’s Orfeo have all ended in disaster: what a relief to get a concert performance – plus delicate hints of staging – by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the direction of that veteran Monteverdian Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Seven times, the Pakistan government told Shafqat Hussain they were going to hang him. Seven times, his hanging was stopped right at the last minute. When he was saying his final goodbyes, almost as he was en route to the gallows, Shafqat was turned around and sent back to a jail cell.

How do we train people for the jobs of the future when we don’t know what those jobs will be? And how does an employer pick people when it is not clear that what they have been taught is relevant to the job in hand? The first is a general conundrum that faces all educators, for though education is about more than preparing young people for the workplace, that is nevertheless a pretty important part of it. And the second is an immediate question facing employers, and one to which the answer seems to be shifting in a fascinating way. Читать дальше...

Sebastian Coe has called the allegations levelled against the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) “a declaration of war”.

On Monday, debt-plagued Puerto Rico, the island my family calls home, did not make a $58 million bond payment, placing the US territory in default for its first time.