Новости за 31.07.2015

The BMA and NHS have been negotiating the new consultant and junior doctor contracts for two years.

Rupert Murdoch’s support was critical to the rise of David Cameron. But it is simplistic to see George Osborne as just the next-in-line: the Chancellor has been in the Murdoch crosshairs for just as long as the Prime Minister.

While Israeli politicians have roundly condemned the deadly arson attack on a West Bank Palestinian home, no conciliatory words are to be expected from the extremist rabbis who have spent years inciting such violence.

As teachers and researchers in media and journalism, we are surprised and concerned that the terms of the consultation based on the government’s Green Paper on BBC charter review are so skewed; they are so preoccupied with an assumed negative impact of the BBC on the commercial media market that they ignore the considerable evidence of the BBC’s enormous contribution to the UK’s creative industries and to society more generally.

As the migrant crisis in Calais worsens, David Cameron has said he will send more dogs and fencing to deal with the problem. In doing so, is it possible he’s trying to kill two birds with the same stone, or perhaps I should say, rip apart two foxes with the same pack of slathering hounds?

Britons spend £76m a day on going out for breakfast – or its lazier, more aspirational counterpart, brunch. That’s an awful lot of granola, sourdough toast, eggs Florentine and artisan porridge.

Politicians are on holiday but, for the rest of us, getting away is proving a nightmare. Calais has become a war zone, a combination of striking ferry workers and increasingly bold migrants seeking entry to the UK by any means. Even if the ferry dispute is settled, the number of migrants heading to the town from southern Europe is unstoppable.

We are not health religionists in this column. We don’t warn against excessive consumption of all the good things in life – such as Giuseppe Rinaldi 2010 Brunate Nebbiolo, or Ribena – because we know that life itself, to be pleasurable, must be excessively consumed.

You will probably know the scene from a throng of Victorian novels, corny melodramas, family sagas and murder mysteries. In the hushed parlour, the family solicitor gravely reads a will. One after another, the time-bombs laid by the wealthy but mischievous deceased explode. The vain wastrel heir – cut off without a penny! The loyal retainer – set up in a cosy cottage with a handsome annuity! The penniless great-niece – left enough for her to marry her humble swain, but not so much to tempt them from a life of honest toil. Читать дальше...

Lloyds Bank has been forced to earmark a further £1.4bn for meeting PPI compensation claims. It will bring the total the bank expects to have to hand back top customers to a staggering £13.4bn. However it warned that if claims continue at their current level, it may be forced to set aside another £1bn.

“But what about Greece?”  The question is posed by many Labour members when they are canvassed on the  phone by supporters of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

African elephants are crossing borders between countries in the continent to escape poachers who are trying to kill them to make money on the ivory market. Many of these elephants are seeking refuge in Gabon, a country with lower poaching levels than its neighbours.

Recent high profile cases of child sex abuse - whether by fallen celebrities, in care homes or by criminal gangs - have unanimously been met with cries of shock and outrage. Yet today’s news that hundreds of child victims of crimes have had compensation payments reduced or stopped is unlikely to cause much upset. The reason? These children have gone on to commit crimes themselves.

If there’s one thing that people are more secretive about than their salaries, it’s the small print of their contracts. Few people show their contracts around. So hats off to the hat-wearing Mark Rylance. The star of Wolf Hall on TV, and numerous successes on stage, insists when he takes on a theatre role, that the contract states there will be a sizeable percentage of affordable seats. The contract for his role next month in the West End, Farinelli and the King, a play by his wife Claire van Kampen, states precisely that. Читать дальше...

Sir David Scholey looks rather pleased to be him. He’s got the polished look of a plutocrat, and the slightly crooked smile that speaks of a practised smugness. As a banker by trade, he’s hardly likely to win a public popularity contest, and he’s also described as a “Tory donor”, although the extent of his generosity towards the Conservative Party, as far as we know, is a donation of £5,000 to Ken Clarke’s leadership campaign in 2005. So we can’t really hold that against him.

Vaughan Williams was fonder of his Sancta civitas than of any of his other choral works, perhaps – as Malcolm Hayes suggests in a felicitous programme-note – because of its problematic unveiling, and the rarity of its performances.

"No Fracking Here, No Fracking Anywhere!"

Last month, a sex toy manufacturer launched a worldwide competition labelled "utterly creepy and sexist" to find the world's 'most beautiful vagina' - the idea being that the most voted-for submission would be used as the blueprint for a range of oral sex simulators.

National Orgasm Day is like Christmas to a sex toy brand (or, arguably something a marketing department made up, like Christmas), but to celebrate, LELO have compiled some reasons why orgasms are good for us. 

After the MH370 crash occurred, the media interest was intense – and as an expert in oceanography in Australia, I was regularly contacted. People were fascinated about the reasons behind the crash and tantalised by the idea that the plane seemed to have quite literally disappeared off the edge of the planet. My role in locating the plane began with speculating where debris might wash up, according to where the search area should be. Once it was clear that the South China Sea didn’t hold the answer... Читать дальше...

Of the 5,550 parents from 16 countries and territories across the globe – who were surveyed by HSBC into the value of education – more than 70 per cent said they believe university is unaffordable for most people.

While some continue to wring their hands over the challenge of attracting a younger, more diverse audience to classical music, others are exploring ways of doing so - and creating exciting concerts for all in the process.

The Almeida's Greeks season kicked off with Robert Icke's bold reinvention of the Oresteia that ditched most of the conventions of ancient Attic drama. 

The President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has now become a founding member of the Giants Club, an initiative launched by Kenyan charity Space for Giants to tackle the current elephant poaching crisis in Africa.

Elephants across Africa are disappearing in their thousands, but Uganda seems to be disrupting this trend.