Новости за 03.09.2015

The Kurdish enclave of Kobani in north-east Syria, once the home of Aylan al-Kurdi and his family, is largely in ruins after a four-and-a-half month siege by Isis fighters that ended in January. It was one of the greatest victories in Kurdish history, but a Pyrrhic one that saw 300,000 Syrian Kurds flee into Turkey from Kobani, a city just south of the Turkish border, and from the 250 villages surrounding it.

By the time I was 25 years old, I was a salaried employee, I had bought and sold my first house, I had a mortgage, insured my own car, had made some flat-pack furniture (not very successfully, it has to be said) and considered myself very much part of an adult world. Since that time (which was, admittedly, a few decades ago), I may not have grown up any more, but I can say that at a relatively early age I was shouldering a fair amount of fiscal responsibility and considered myself a person in my own right, firmly independent from my parents.

Usman Keita had vivid memories of the day in February two years ago when François Hollande came to Timbuktu.

Little Aylan al-Kurdi was part of Dave’s “swarm”. A bit difficult to brush that one off for PR Dave, of course, because Aylan wasn’t black or brown or “blobbed” out by television’s techie-taste dictators, but looked – let’s face it, for this is what it is about – rather like our three-year-olds. He could have been an Alan or a John – or a David. Washed up at Hastings or Bexhill, you can just imagine the demands for a public inquiry by the good citizens of Sussex. But PR Dave had just told us that... Читать дальше...

Scroll back 10 years. Just like today. A recently re-elected, self-confident, government basking in business approval and a reputation for economic competence. High levels of consumer confidence. Robust growth. Low unemployment and low inflation. A strong pound. Then came the 2008-09 global financial crash exposing serious structural weaknesses in the economy, decades long in the making.

When opinion polls first suggested that Jeremy Corbyn had a good chance of becoming the next Labour leader, the response from the right was glee, laced with incredulity that Labour could behave so destructively. A brief period of revisionism followed, with warnings about counting chickens pre-hatch and the dangers of one-party government.

A compromise may be possible for David Cameron in the problem of dealing with refugees. He could satisfy his instincts for remaining tough on immigration, while giving way towards the more compassionate attitude demanded in recent days, by agreeing to take in more refugees – as long as we get only the dead ones. Then no one can accuse Britain of not doing its bit. Because we will take in boatloads at a time, offering them a new start by chucking them into a skip. Kindness is the Conservative way. Читать дальше...

This isn’t a migrant crisis, it is a human crisis which must not become a crisis of our humanity.

As “working mother” role models go, the example from the boss of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, is about as welcome as those tiresome celebrities who publicly prance about in skinny jeans two days after giving birth. Mayer – who, let’s not forget, is expecting twins – has announced she is going to take only two weeks’ maternity leave.

It took a picture to change a “migrant crisis” into a “refugee crisis”. And so, the publication of powerful and distressing images from a beach in Turkey has forced a shift in the climate of public opinion; made the media think again about calling them “cockroaches” and the like; and, as a direct result, pushed politicians across Europe into at least talking about the issue.

Such as having her own private cash point in her basement

Shocking though your front-page picture of the dead child was (3 September), the background to it is even worse. In Syria, every day children like this are in danger of being blown to pieces by barrel bombs dropped on their towns by their own government.

Keep canines clean and healthy with these tools and treatments

If George Osborne’s visit to Faslane earlier this week was supposed to boost support for Trident in Scotland or deal a killer blow to Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, then he’s failed on both counts.

I hold in my hand two photographs. They’re only holiday snaps; I could have just looked at them on Facebook, but for some reason I decided to print these two out.

Four weeks ago, when much of the media's focus on refugees was limited to veiled pejoratives and the Calais “jungle”, Isis’ Khayr Province Media Office, based in eastern Syria, released a propaganda video.

Yet another coup for Proms director Edward Blakeman: composed in 1928, but only now getting its first Proms airing, Henry Cowell’s Piano Concerto proved a revelation. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this American composer, who widely-imitated invention of note-clusters was only one of many ways in which he broke new ground and gathered distinguished disciples: John Cage, who was one of the latter, called him ‘the open sesame for new music in America’.

Six of Mozart’s piano concertos are being performed at the Proms this year, and despite their seeming simplicity they really do sort out the men (and women) from the boys.

Europe once stood for human rights, collective action and the reconstruction of lives shattered by war. Not anymore. Faced with a refugee crisis that leaves the lifeless body of a three year old Syrian toddler washed up on a beach, 70 dead in the back of a van on an Austrian lay-by, and thousands drowned in the Mediterranean, Europe’s leaders are behaving like rabbits caught in the headlights.

'It's better to die trying than just die back in Syria,' he said

The hardest part of starting any conversation on the treatment of women in the world of video gaming is just picking an example. We could talk about the latest Metal Gear Solid and its embarrassing attempt to wave away the fact one of its central female characters wears next to nothing while the camera constantly languishes on her body. Or we could trace our history back to the earliest days of gaming with the Atari 2600 and the infamous General Custer’s Revenge where your aim is to rape a Native American woman tied to a pole. Читать дальше...

Yuja Wang always makes a theatrical entrance, and this time in a spangled Marilyn Monroe ball-dress, but the moment she launched into the maelstrom of octave runs which begin Bartok’s Piano Concerto No 2 she was in her element.

The most famous bit of John Donne’s well-known poem is the line ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’. But today the more pertinent, and haunting, section reads: ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less’.

Mozart’s piano concertos have such a limpid simplicity that one is constantly surprised at the number of ways in which they can be got right - or very wrong. And with eight pianists playing eight of them in this year’s Proms, we’ve visited both ends of that spectrum.

Social conservatives who object to marriage licenses for gay couples claim to defend “Christian marriage,” meaning one man paired with one woman for life, which they say is prescribed by God in the Bible.