In Pakistan, same-sex relationships are outlawed. But a lesbian journalist is using the most modern of dating techniques to circumvent the authorities: the dating app Tinder.
Matthew Lillard has been recognised every day since arriving in Scotland earlier this month by fans of his star turn in the horror film Scream and others who recognise him from the movie Scooby-Doo.
The chief executive of the London Marathon has launched a withering attack on the failure of world athletics to address doping in the sport after leaked data suggested his race could have been won seven times in 12 years by drug cheats.
For many years, Japanese nationalists have been trying to revise the country’s pacifist constitution, which limits its “Self-Defence Forces” to their eponymous function. They have made little progress.
The rest of the population can be forgiven a certain bemusement, but the debate ignited by Jeremy Corbyn in The Independent on Sunday cuts to the heart of the fateful struggle currently under way for the soul of the Labour Party. However painful the feelings this aroused, however perilous the reopening of old wounds and whatever the efforts by Mr Corbyn’s backers to deny that he meant anything important by his clear and concise comments, this is the argument the party could not avoid having. Better to get on with it. Читать дальше...
According to my teenage daughters, I am wrong about many things in life – ranging from my music taste to my fashion sense. I defend my choices vehemently because actually most things don’t really matter: the joy lies in the debate.
The po’ lost children of Kids Company. What will happen to them? They watched as tanks were sent in by vicious media operators and government. Camila Batmanghelidjh, once adulated as the fairy godmother of the deprived, feral and hopeless, suddenly became the wicked witch running a coven.
One of the many bizarre proposals in the Government’s Immigration Bill states that public-sector workers in “customer-facing” jobs will need to be fluent in English. Because apparently, of all the things wrong with our austerity-slashed, near-crippled public services, the most worrying one is that staff might not be speaking the most loquacious form of English.
Halima was from Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus besieged by both Syrian government and Islamic State forces. She was travelling with her daughter and teenage grandson, whose parents had gone missing in the war eight months earlier. I tried to talk with the boy, but he seemed shell-shocked by the shattering events that had engulfed his life. Nearby was Laura, a 25-year-old from Cameroon, pregnant after being raped in north Africa, and a young mother sold into slavery in Libya by a priest who promised to protect her after she became a Christian.
Imagine spending months rehearsing arguably the most iconic of all theatre roles, only to begin your 'To be or not to be' soliloquy and be put off by a load of flashing red lights in the front row.
PR Dave is my favourite British prime minister – because you can never be sure of his next blunder in the Middle East. Last year, you may recall, he demanded a report on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by our former ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, in the happy expectation that it would condemn the group as a bunch of terrorists. It was important, he said then, “that we understand... what its beliefs are in terms of the path of extremism and violent extremism...”
So Andy Burnham has called for a review of the current gay blood ban. That’s nice of him, I suppose, but I hope he doesn’t mind if I don’t get too excited about his acceptance of the queers just yet.
I’ve never been a fan of Chris Brown. I was vaguely aware of his early work (in the way I’m vaguely aware of anything that plays loudly in clubs I’m hoping to leave as soon as possible) but that was it. So the first time I really paid attention to him was when he brutally beat Rihanna in February 2009. I saw those photos and I felt crippled with the horror of it, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that I was, at that very moment, in a relationship with a violent man. So it was easy for me to channel my hatred into Chris Brown... Читать дальше...
Benedict Cumberbatch has called upon his army of fans to help put an end to the filming of theatre plays on camera phones.
I interviewed Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News, about his new book, Postcapitalism, for The Independent on Sunday last weekend. There was more in the interview than we had space for in the magazine, and it was all interesting, so here is more of it.
A prominent sportsman is granted an injunction to prevent media coverage of an affair he has had with a celebrity. Yet in Westminster, there is no mechanism to stop unfounded gossip, black propaganda and smear.
Few people outside politics had heard of Jeremy Corbyn before May, though for a strange reason, I had. Two years ago I moved to a cottage in Wiltshire previously owned by his family. I deduced the last occupants must have been left wing from the ragged copies of the New Statesman piled up in the recycling, and the yellowing pages of The Guardian stuffed between beams to act as draught excluders – a novel use for that newspaper – which continue to do a good job.
Have you met Ms Liekens? She’s the former Miss Belgium turned charismatic sexologist and UN Goodwill Ambassador who caused blushes this week when she appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Sex in Class, advocating for a more explicit style of sex-and-relationships education in schools. And boy, do we need it.
Like many politicians before him, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s new president, is finding that promises made during a campaign are easy to announce, but more difficult to keep. A former army major-general who briefly seized power in Africa’s most populous state in the 1980s, Mr Buhari swept to power in April promising not only to tackle Boko Haram, the Islamist group that has wreaked havoc and bloodshed in Nigeria, but to defeat it.
Two hours trying to rock a screaming baby to sleep in a rainstorm had left me feeling a bit fragile. So I staggered to a café to meet some friends, sat down, and burst into tears. Not subtle, droplets-meandering-down-cheeks tears. Not even a cinematic slide-down-a door moan. Nope. These tears were big, ugly, and accompanied by the kind of howls you'd normally associate with labour. Even the baby momentarily stopped screeching to watch.
When Asked by friends and relatives how she is, Melanie invariably replies, "Very busy," "Up to my neck in it" or, with a mock-exasperated shrug of her shoulders, "Whizzing about all over the shop." Pressed for details about the unusually rapid pace at which life seems to move here on the outer reaches of Godalming, Surrey, she will happily itemise the catalogue of pressing demands on her time: the urgent request from Cassandra to ferry home her belongings from uni; the 11 people expected for... Читать дальше...
The fourth wall is the imaginary structure that runs across the front of a stage, allowing actors to inhabit their own world and ignore the audience – as if there is a wall between them. It's also the name of photographer Klaus Frahm's series of shots of theatres across his native Germany. Only in his work, the fourth wall is very visible: it is the auditorium itself.
London’s West End is often criticised for its soaring ticket prices, but north of the border one show is proudly boasting the “most expensive seat” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
