Berlin's plan to return Benin bronzes piles pressure on UK museums

British Museum and Pitt Rivers under pressure to hand back sculptures looted from Nigeria

BM REFUSES SAY'S THEY ARE A TOURIST ATTRACTION 

The British Museum in London holds the single largest collection of Benin bronzes. Photograph: Adam Eastland/Alamy

Philip Oltermann in Berlin
@philipoltermann
Tue 23 Mar 2021

Berlin is negotiating to fully restitute hundreds of the Benin bronzes in a shift of policy that has been welcomed in Nigeria but will put pressure on museums in London and Oxford to also return artefacts looted from Britain’s former west African empire in 1897.

More than 500 historical objects including 440 bronzes from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, are held at the Ethnological Museum in the German capital. Half of the collection was due to go on display this autumn at the Humboldt Forum, a newly opened museum of non-European art in the city centre.

However, Hartmut Dorgerloh, the director of the Humboldt Forum, told German media on Monday that the complex could instead exhibit only replicas of the bronzes or leave symbolic empty spaces, and that the sculptures and reliefs could be returned to Nigeria as soon as the autumn


The exhibition, due to open at the end of the year, would “critically engage” with the history of the west African kingdom and its capture by British troops, a spokesperson for the Prussian Heritage Foundation told the Guardian.

“Especially in view of the current debate, we consider it essential to address this issue,” they said. “As a matter of principle this does not exclude the restitution of the exhibited works.”

Andreas Görgen, the head of the German foreign ministry’s culture department, visited Benin City last week for discussions with the Nigerian government, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Under the terms of the agreement as reported by the Art Newspaper, Germany would take part in archaeological excavations in the region, provide training for Nigerian museum employees, participate in the construction of a new museum in Benin, and restitute the looted Benin bronzes held in Berlin to the Restoration Legacy Trust, an NGO set up in 2019.

The bronzes were looted by British soldiers and sailors on a punitive expedition to Benin City in 1897 and subsequently scattered across museums in Europe and North America. The single largest collection of Benin bronzes is held by the British Museum, and a further 300 objects are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

The museums have formed a Benin dialogue group to support the new museum, plans for which have been drawn up by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, but until recently they had agreed only to provide looted works on a rotating loan basis.


New museum in Nigeria raises hopes of resolution to Benin bronzes dispute

“This would be a hugely significant shift”, said Victor Ehikhamenor, a Nigerian artist and trustee of the Legacy Restoration Trust, which would receive the restituted artefacts. “If Germany follows through with these plans, then any European country that holds on to Benin bronzes no longer has a moral ground to stand on.

“The time has come for the British Museum to finally join in this debate. The current situation is a bit like a thief has stolen your watch and sold it to a pawn shop, but the pawn shop is refusing to hand it over to the police. It makes no sense.”

Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian who resigned from the Humboldt Forum’s advisory board in 2017, criticised plans to exhibit the Benin bronzes in Germany in a recent interview, telling Der Spiegel that “with every month, with every day, it becomes less likely that you can show the bronzes without embarrassing yourself”.

A spokesperson for the British Museum, which is working with the Legacy Restoration Trust on an archeology project linked to the new museum, said in a statement: “The devastation and plunder wreaked upon Benin City during the British military expedition in 1897 is fully acknowledged by the museum and the circumstances around the acquisition of Benin objects explained in gallery panels and on the museum’s website.

“We believe the strength of the British Museum collection resides in its breadth and depth, allowing millions of visitors an understanding of the cultures of the world and how they interconnect over time – whether through trade, migration, conquest, or peaceful exchange.”

Liquid gold: beekeepers defying Yemen war to produce the best honey


Beekeepers collect honey comb from hives just outside Ataq, Shabwah governorate, Yemen. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre


Despite the dangers, more Yemenis are turning to the sector as an alternative means of income

by Bethan McKernan in Ataq
Tue 23 Mar 2021


According to the Qur’an a lone sidr tree, or jujube, marks the highest boundary of heaven. On earth, amid the harshness of the Yemeni desert, the sweetness of sidr honey is cherished as a symbol of perseverance.

Yemen has long been renowned for producing some of the best honey in the world, often compared to Mānuka honey from New Zealand. Some of the highest quality, and purest, comes from bees fed exclusively on the flowers of the sidr, producing a pale coloured honey with a fiery, almost bitter aftertaste.

While the war has made travel difficult, closing off many roads, for traditional beekeepers life is much the same: they are some of the only people in Yemen who can traverse frontlines with ease, moving around every few months in search of flowers for their bees.

Honey sellers allow workers to sample their wares in a jewellery shop in Ataq, Shabwah governorate. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre/Publication

“It doesn’t matter who is commanding a checkpoint. They see the beehives in the back of the truck and we don’t have to stop long. Even the Houthis [Yemen’s rebels] are afraid of bees,” said Said al-Aulaqi, 40, as he took a break from looking after 80 of his hives near the village of Khamer in Shabwa.

An estimated 100,000 small-scale beekeepers like Aulaqi in Yemen produce just 1,580 tonnes of honey a year, of which 840 tonnes is exported, according to a 2020 UN report.

Sidr honey can sell for up to $500 (£370) a kilogram in neighbouring Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While honey connoisseurs maintain that the Yemeni product deserves a global market, decades of political instability have meant turbulent growth and limited outside reach.

Keen to improve food stability and bring money into the country, the government has identified honey as a key sector for expansion: beekeepers, wholesalers and exporters the Guardian met in and around Shabwa’s capital, Ataq, say they are keen to share their liquid gold with the rest of the world.

A beekeeper sells tins of honeycomb in the market area of Ataq, in Shabwah governorate. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre

Aulaqi and his three young employees enthusiastically show off their wooden rectangular hives, opening the doors to display the rows of combs inside. Smoke from burning strips of hemp cloth keeps the bees drowsy and stops them stinging, although all four say they are immune after being attacked so many times.

The 40-year-old has been keeping bees for 10 years, after learning the trade from his uncle. He lost his entire livelihood in 2015, after the Houthis moved into Shabwa and blocked the road to neighbouring Abyan, where his bees died after running out of water.

It took two years to restart with another 300 boxes purchased at a cost of 2m Yemeni riyal (£1,850). Now his hives are scattered around Shabwa’s mountains, desert and coastal plain, depending on the season.

Honeycomb that has just been taken from hives, outside Ataq. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre

The prized Sidr honey can only be harvested once every 12 months, but lower-grade acacia and desert flowers provide work year-round.

A generation ago, beehives were still cultivated in empty tree trunks and transported on the backs of camels; now, imported machine-made hives and pickup trucks make the work easier, even if beekeepers, like so many others in Yemen, are plagued by fuel shortages.

While there is money to be made in honey, there are also many challenges for beekeepers to overcome. If roadblocks or fighting make it impossible to move hives to more bountiful areas, the bees will die, and the insects are also at risk from unregulated pesticide use by farmers.

Adel Saleh Saber, 28, collects honeycomb from hives just outside Ataq. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre

The war means beekeeping has become a hazardous occupation for humans too. Unmarked landmines are planted all over the country. And while keepers prefer to move bees at night, when the insects are sleepy, nocturnal movement is often viewed as suspicious by Yemen’s warring parties, and tracked closely from the air by Saudi and US drones.

Mohammed bin Lashar, a wholesaler in Ataq, said one of his suppliers was targeted by an airstrike in Maʼrib governorate. “He was lucky to survive. They probably thought he was al-Qaida,” he said.

Despite the dangers, and as inflation soars and steady work dries up, in Shabwa at least it appears more and more people are turning to beekeeping as an alternative means of income.

While more experienced keepers are happy to share what they know about the trade with newcomers, they are also worried that too many insects in the same area will make it difficult to find adequate food and water for the growing bee population, driving down standards and prices.

The honey market of Ataq in Shabwah, Yemen. Photograph: Sam Tarling/Sana'a Centre

In Ataq’s main square, dozens of beekeepers hawked their wares to individual shoppers and wholesalers, but few people were buying.

“This is my first season as a beekeeper,” said Saleh Al-Hansi, 25. “I like it, I enjoy the work. Other beekeepers encouraged me to start so I’ll have to see how it goes.”

There could be enough work for everyone if the authorities or local charities step in to help by planting more sidr trees, a move local beekeepers are lobbying for. Other necessary steps for expanding the sector include creating a standards agency and food safety certification system to allow Yemeni beekeepers to export their organic product throughout the world.

Aulaqi, proud of his work, would not give up his bees for anything. “It can be lonely sometimes; I only get to see my family once a month. But I used to do construction work in Saudi Arabia and it’s much better than that.

“Bees and honey are a blessing from God,” he said. “There is a lot to be thankful for.”

Suez Canal blocked after massive container ship Ever Given gets stuck sideways

By Dannielle Maguire
3/23/2021


YOUTUBE Footage from another ship shows dozens of other vessels waiting to enter the canal.

A 400-metre-long container ship is holding up traffic in the Suez Canal after becoming wedged sideways as it passed through the major shipping route.

The Ever Given attempted to pass through the canal while en route to Rotterdam, Netherlands but ran aground at about 6:00am Tuesday, local time, according to a report from maritime website Fleet Mon.

"As of 1440 UTC March 23, the giant ship was still aground with tugs attempting to refloat her," the website reported.

'That ship is super stuck'

An image posted to Instagram by Julianne Cona from a nearby ship shows the Ever Given almost completely sideways in the narrow canal.

"From the looks of it that ship is super stuck," she said in a comment.

"They had a bunch of tugs trying to pull and push it earlier but it was going nowhere. There is a little excavator trying to dig out the bow."

Data from public shipping tracker website Vessel Finder showed several tug boats still attempting to manoeuvre the vessel, owned by Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen, some eight hours after the photo was posted to Instagram.

The incident attracted attention on social media, with some comparing the situation to a scene from one of the Austin Powers films.


Austin Powers GIF(GIPHY)

It's unclear what caused the ship to run aground.

The Ever Given is 400 metres long and 59 metres wide.

The lane's water surface width is 313 metres, but the Suez Canal Authority says the navigation channel is between 200 and 210 metres wide.

It usually takes between 12 and 16 hours for a ships to transit through the canal.
A major traffic jam

The Suez Canal is a major shipping lane as it's the fastest route between Europe and Asia.

A snapshot from Vessel Finder show dozens of other vessels waiting to travel through the canal.

Vessel Finder data shows ships waiting either side of the canal. (Vessel Finder)

Tanker Trackers, yet another maritime tracking site, tweeted an animation of the flow of traffic leading up to the blockage:

"[It] has now blocked off a lot of fully-laden tankers from traversing in either direction," the tracking company tweeted.

"Tankers carrying Saudi, Russian, Omani and US oil are waiting on both ends."

Banksy's NHS tribute sells for record $30 million as UK marks coronavirus lockdown anniversary
3/23/2021

Banksy's 'Game Changer' painting sells for record $30 million at auction

VIDEO 

Duration: 1 minute 24 seconds

  Banksy's NHS tribute sells for record $30 million as UK marks coronavirus lockdown anniversary - ABC News

A Banksy painting showing a young boy playing with a toy nurse as a superhero has sold for more than $30 million, setting an auction record for the elusive British street artist.

Key points:

'Game Changer' pays tribute to frontline health workers during the pandemic

It fetched a record price on the one-year anniversary of the UK going into coronavirus lockdown

Banksy has released a series of COVID-themed artwork over the past year

'Game Changer', which was unveiled last May at University Hospital Southampton, paid tribute to the frontline workers of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The black-and-white artwork shows a young boy lifting a nurse, her arm stretched and wearing a cape, while traditional superheroes Batman and Spiderman lie in a bin behind him.

In a Christie's auction streamed live, the painting sold for a hammer price of 14.4 million pounds ($26 million).

Added fees gave it a final price of 16.758 million pounds ($30 million), a world auction record for Banksy, according to Christie's.

The painting had carried an estimated value of around $4-6 million going into the auction.

Christie's said proceeds would go towards "supporting the wellbeing of University Hospital Southampton staff and patients".

The sale took place on Tuesday as Britons marked one year since Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the nation into its first lockdown.

A minute's silence was observed to remember the more than 126,000 people in the UK who have lost their lives to the virus.

Banksy has been busy during the pandemic, releasing several pieces that have caused amusement and sparked topical debate.

Last April, he created a new artwork in his bathroom that showed his trademark stencilled rats running amok around the sink and toilet.

The craze over toilet paper inspired Banksy in the early stages of the pandemic.

(Instagram: Banksy)

He posted photos of the work on his Instagram account as he abided by stay-at-home orders, along with the comment: "My wife hates it when I work from home."

In October, his Show Me the Money work, a twist on the impressionist's painting, sold for $13.9 million at auction.

And then in December, a mural of a sneezing woman by Banksy appeared on a house at the end of one of the steepest streets in Bristol, his birthplace.

'Aachoo!!' was unveiled in Banksy's hometown of Bristol last December.(Reuters: Rebecca Naden)

Banksy posted pictures of the work on his official Instagram account, along with the comment "Aachoo!!"

The mural showed the woman's false teeth propelled through the air and her handbag and walking stick sent flying by the violent sneeze.

London Transport ordered cleaners to remove Banksy's trademark rats last July.

(Instagram: Banksy)

But his work isn't universally beloved — his undercover graffiti on the London Underground last July — was scrubbed clean by Transport for London.

Banksy, whose true identity is a closely guarded secret, has been an active artist since 1990.

ABC/Reuters

Documentary films

That Cloud Never Left review – experimental ruminations on cinema and labour

Mundane life meets magical daydreams in a West Bengal village where discarded film footage is turned into toys

Otherworldly ... That Cloud Never Left

Phuong Le
Mon 22 Mar 2021

VIDEO 

That Cloud Never Left review – experimental ruminations on cinema and labour | Documentary films | The Guardian

An artful hybrid of documentary and fiction, That Cloud Never Left zooms in on quotidian life in Daspara, a small West Bengal village where toys are made from reels of discarded film footage. The iconography is clear: these pieces of film are filled with nostalgia and longing, and now bear witness to the beauty and toil of manual labour.

On the surface, That Cloud Never Left appears structurally fragmented, even opaque. There is an opening title that states that this is a work of fiction rather than a documentary; it is actually quite cheeky, considering that narrative is not a priority here, nor are any professional actors used. Instead, the film ditches linearity, and sees the villagers in fragments: a marital dispute over finances, a mother who waits for the monsoon, a boy searching for rubies in the forest. This mix of mundane life and magical daydreams lends an otherworldliness to this little village, as if the content of the cut-up film strips has seeped into everyday life.

In visual terms, That Cloud Never Left is just as eclectic and experimental, alternating between straightforward scenes of toy-assembly with scans of the discarded strips where the images are scratched and intelligible. The sound mix contributes, too: the landscape murmurs, a static-heavy score disrupts, and the news on TV speaks of war and unrest, as well as an imminent eclipse. Out of the blue, dialogue and songs from old Hindi films sneak in.

The symphony of these elements is exhilarating enough, but there’s more to be mined. The scrap film footage travels from wealthier Indian cities to be dumped on poor villages such as Daspara for recycling, meaning That Cloud Never Left becomes something more than a stylistic exercise in experimentation and nostalgia; there’s a hard economic reality here.

That Cloud Never Left is released on 26 March on True Story.

'No more shame': the French women breaking the law to highlight femicide

 An activist who is part of Les Colleuses movement stands in front of a poster which reads: ‘I believe you’, in Paris, France, in October last year. 

Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Alarming rates of violence have inspired a poster campaign that has spread beyond France to more than 15 countries

by Kim Willsher
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 23 Mar 2021

On a weekday evening, in between coronavirus lockdowns and curfews, Camille, Natacha and Cindy are out with a bright yellow plastic bucket of glue, two large brushes and a wad of A4 paper, each sheet covered with a single letter.

The women, all in their 20s, stop on the main road of this Paris suburb by the wall of what looks like a former bank.

“This is good,” says Camille. It is the signal for a well-practised piece of choreography: Natacha glues; Camille slaps up each lettered sheet; Cindy pastes over it.

They stand back. The message, in black letters on white paper, is clear: “Stop au harcelement de rue” (stop street harassment).

Another wall, another message. Outside the municipal swimming pool it’s paste, slap, paste: “Le consentement n’est pas une option” (consent isn’t optional). On a kiosk under the awnings of the local market, paste, slap, paste: “Stop féminicide”.

Then it is up and out of there to avoid a €68 fine if caught by the police. Another successful, albeit illegal, hit-and-run poster pasting.

For the past two years, similar messages have been appearing on walls all over Paris, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Poitiers, Lyons and other French cities. They are the work of Les Colleuses – the gluers – feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard.

Camille Lextray became a colleuse afterthe particularly brutal murder of a young woman in September 2019 . Her partner denies her murder.

“Her name was Salomé and she was only 21 when she was beaten to death. The police had been called but they treated it as a domestic and did nothing. Later, they found her body under a pile of rubbish. We put up a collage on the anniversary of her death at the request of her mother,” Lextray said.

The idea for street posters to highlight cases of femicide was dreamed up by Marguerite Stern, a former member of the feminist activist group FEMEN. Stern, then living in Marseille, was deeply shocked by the 2019 killing of Julie Douib, 34, a mother of two children, shot dead at her home by an abusive ex-partner who goes on trial in June and denies her murder.

Douib had reported the man to the police five times before her death, but no action was taken. Stern began putting up posters denouncing violence against women in Marseille, later moving to Paris where she set up a collage collective. 

Activists known as Les Colleuses paste anti-femicide posters on a wall in Paris in October last year. Photograph: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

In the early days they were called “Collages Contre les Féminicides” (collages against femicide), with groups pasting up the names of women killed by their current or former partner. The street action caught the imagination of women everywhere and spread even beyond France.

“Suddenly we had people all over the place contacting us.” says Camille. “At the last count more than 200 cities, towns and villages in France had collage groups others in London and in more than 15 countries around the world.”

“Anyone can get involved. It takes 10 minutes to write a slogan on a piece of paper, it doesn’t take a lot of money or resources. It’s extremely important for women. It’s about daring to occupy the public space, about women leaving their mark in public.

“One mother had suffered conjugal violence and painted the messages with her young son, went out and stuck them up. It’s taking back control in our lives and it is liberating. No more secrets, no more shame, no more silence. We have constructed our own media platform. This is our loudspeaker.”

France has one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe. In 2019, 146 women were killed in France by a partner or ex-partner. More than 40% of the victims had already suffered violence at the hands of their partner and nearly half of those had reported it to the police.

It’s about daring to occupy the public space, about women leaving their mark in public.

Camille

The term femicide is sometimes defined as the murder of women by men but in France it generally refers to the murder of a woman by a partner, ex-partner or family member.

In 2020, the number of femicides in France fell to 90 for the year – the lowest since such statistics began to be collated 15 years ago. But Caroline De Haas, who started the feminist collective NousToutes in 2018, said that even if the numbers dropped, “nearly 100 deaths is no reason to celebrate”.

About 200,000 women in France are estimated to suffer domestic violence every year, but fewer than one in five go to the police and the problem has worsened during Covid-19 lockdowns, Natacha said.

A hotline for female victims of violence set up by the government received 45,000 calls during the first three-month lockdown last year.

End femicide: 278 dead – the hidden scandal of older women killed by men

“Nobody was prepared for the lockdowns,” Natacha said. “We are sticking up [posters] for ourselves and for the victims and to raise the issue to a wider audience. In doing so we hope we are educating people on the subject of violence done to women and minorities and creating an atmosphere for change.”

The group is fiercely critical of what it sees as the lip service paid by the Macron government on the issue. “We were full of hope: they said they would fight against sexism, and make it a big cause. But it was words and inaction and nothing has changed,” Natacha said. “We have lost confidence in the politicians. We are disillusioned. We have to change the psychology of the patriarchy.”

Camille, Natacha and Cindy glueing up posters 

in Paris demanding an end to femicides. 

Photograph: Kim Willsher/The Guardian

The government responded to the outcry at the alarming levels of femicide in 2019 with new legislation including 40 emergency measures such as electronic bracelets to keep violent abusers from approaching their victims.

Critics say the rules, which took effect last July, are being implemented too slowly.

Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister at the interior ministry, was formerly the country’s equalities minister. She told the Guardian combatting violence against women was a government priority.

“Of course there is progress to be made in France in terms of the rights of women. The subject remains a priority for the government. We must always do more as long as violence exists,” Schiappa said.

Data collected by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, for 2017 suggested that Romania and Northern Irelandhad the highest number of women killed by partners as a percentage of the population. But in terms of overall femicides, Eurostat found that Germany and France had the worst records. According to the UK femicide census, a woman is killed by a man who is or was her intimate partner every four days and the rate of fatal violence against women in Britain has shown no signs of decline since the organisation started monitoring in 2009.

If we really want to tackle femicide, we need to track violent men

There’s no way to monitor the stalkers and domestic abusers whose behaviour can escalate to murder. It’s time for a register

A woman passenger holding a Reclaim these Streets placard 

in London on 14 March. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Sirin Kale
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

In the immediate wake of the tragic killing of Sarah Everard, parties across the political spectrum called for tougher action on male violence against women. The government had the political capital to do something. Instead, it promised us more street lights, some undercover police officers and proposals to record misogyny as a hate crime – symbolic policies that do little to reduce violence against women. After half a decade reporting on the issue, it should not be surprising to me that the government views female lives with such contempt. And yet somehow it is.

There is a policy that would save lives: a stalkers register. Proposed by the anti-stalking charity Paladin, a stalkers register would be a national database of men convicted of stalking and domestic violence. The government would not need to build a new database from scratch – we already have the system in place to track these often serial offenders. It would simply be a matter of adding such men to the violent and sex offender register (ViSOR), which is already used to keep track of sex offenders.

Crucially, these men would be monitored by police and be legally required to notify them if they were entering a new relationship. Police would then be responsible for notifying prospective partners about their offending history. (Under Clare’s law, women can ask police if their partners are convicted domestic abusers; however, the request has to be made by the woman – there is no onus on police to notify women proactively.) This is critical, because – as the criminologist Prof Jane Monckton-Smith has identified – such abusers tend to “love-bomb” their partners in the early stages of relationships, showering them with affection and romance. Early intervention is key if we are to empower women to make informed choices about whether they truly want to date violent and abusive men.

Studies have found that 83% of domestic abuse perpetrators are repeat offenders. They start off with the smaller offences, testing the waters, seeing how the police respond, and when nothing happens – in the majority of cases nothing ever happens – they are emboldened. Their offending escalates to sometimes fatal ends. The anti-stalking campaigner Zoe Dronfield was beaten and left for dead by her ex-partner after she ended their relationship. Afterwards, she found out that he’d stalked 13 other women before her. The only thing worse than being the first partner of a serial abuser is being their last. The final partner seldom survives.

It is inconceivable to me that there is no existing framework to monitor serial stalkers and domestic abusers. We track paedophiles, rightly, because such people cannot be allowed to work in our nurseries and schools. Why not also protect women and girls from abusive men? Our elected representatives agree: in 2018, the home affairs select committee backed the introduction of a stalkers register, as did the London assembly and the mayor of London in 2019. A petition to introduce a stalkers register has more than 235,000 signatures. An amendment to the domestic abuse bill, proposing the introduction of a stalkers register, is currently before the House of Lords. The amendment has just been passed, meaning that MPs could soon have the ability to vote on the proposals.

In 2018 I ran a year-long campaign at the media publication Vice, calling on the government to introduce a stalkers register to protect women and girls from serial abusers. I launched the Unfollow Me campaign because I was horrified by the case of Molly McLaren, 23, who was murdered by her stalker ex-boyfriend Joshua Stimpson in 2017. McLaren reported Stimpson, who had a history of aggressive behaviour towards women, to police before he killed her. Had police been able to check a stalkers register, they’d have seen they had a repeat offender on their hands. Instead they did almost nothing, and McLaren died in a Chatham car park.

It is obvious to me that these dangerous men need to be monitored and tracked. But, all too often, police seem apathetic about investigating reports of stalking and domestic abuse, dismissing serious crimes as the romantic overtures of a rejected suitor. Take the case of 19-year-old Shana Grice. She reported her ex-boyfriend Michael Lane to the police five times for stalking before he murdered her in 2016. Instead of investigating Lane, who had a history of abusing women, Sussex Police fined Grice £90 for wasting police time.

I have looked the families of murdered women in the eyes and seen their pain. People such as Sue and Clive Ruggles. Their daughter, Alice Ruggles, was murdered in 2016 by her stalker ex-boyfriend, Trimaan Dhillon. She was 24 years old. After Alice ended the relationship, Dhillon stalked her relentlessly. Alice called the police repeatedly about his harassment but they did almost nothing. Dhillon broke into her flat in October 2016 and slit her throat. After she died, Sue and Clive found out that a former girlfriend had taken out a restraining order against Dhillon. Had Alice known whom she was really dating, she might never have had a relationship with him. Since her death, Sue and Clive have made it their life’s work to introduce a stalkers register, to protect other women from men like Dhillon.

There are so many women like Alice, Molly, and Shana. Two women a week are killed by current or former partners in the UK. Covid has intensified many women’s experience of abuse: during lockdown, there was a 61% surge in calls and contacts to domestic abuse helplines. Last week, the Guardian reported on the case of Amy-Leanne Stringfellow, who was killed by her partner, Terence Papworth, in June 2020. Previous girlfriends had accused Papworth of extreme domestic violence. Papworth had abused a string of women, and Stringfellow was unfortunate enough to be his last. Men such as Papworth are all the same. They do not change. The only thing that changes is the women whose lives they ruin, and, ultimately, end.

The government has the ability and infrastructure to stop these men in their tracks, and yet it does not. Why won’t anyone join up the dots, and protect women and girls from these violent men?


Sirin Kale is a London-based journalist specialising in women’s rights, politics, music, lifestyle and culture

A.E. VAN VOGHT  ON THE VIOLENT MAN

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Stephen Harper "The Right Man" (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

Rio Tinto pledges to protect cultural heritage after Juukan Gorge disaster 

(DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION)


Chief executive Jakob Stausholm says he will make heritage protection be ‘felt in the hearts and minds’ of his employees

 

The Juukan Gorge site before the 2020 blast. Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm says the company’s new executive team ‘feel very accountable’ for ensuring an event like its destruction never happens again. Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation


Calla Wahlquist
@callapilla
Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Rio Tinto chief executive Jakob Stausholm has pledged to make protecting cultural heritage an issue which is “felt in the hearts and minds” of his employees in an effort to avoid another Juukan Gorge-style disaster.

The mining company on Tuesday announced it would publicly report to investors on its progress on improving cultural heritage systems and renewing trust with traditional owners, as it attempts to rebuild its shattered social capital.

It will also publicly report on its progress in implementing the recommendations from a parliamentary review into the destruction of the 46,000-year-old rock shelter at Juukan Gorge, and recommendations from its own internal review.

Stausholm said the new executive team “feel very accountable” for ensuring an event like the destruction of Juukan Gorge never happens again. The incident led to the resignation of the three senior executives, including the former CEO, and prompted the chairman to step down.


'Rio is still on notice': native title groups say mining company's reshuffle is mainly PR

But Stausholm said achieving that goal required changes in the company which went “way beyond procedural”.

“It’s has to be felt in the hearts and the minds, the same way as we have built safety culture over decades,” he said in an investor briefing on Tuesday morning.

“The one big thing is to make sure that we consistently get this as a value.”
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Despite the negative publicity and heads rolling in senior management, the company reported a 20% rise in profits in 2020 and a record shareholder dividend of $9bn.

Investors have welcomed the commitment to greater transparency, which was brokered in negotiations with stakeholders including the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI), AustralianSuper, and HESTA.

HESTA CEO Debby Blakey said investors put forward “very clear requests” around disclosure and governance arrangements and said it was “pleasing that we’ve had constructive discussions with Rio Tinto that can support progress towards managing this clear financial risk for investors”.

“The steps the company has agreed to will support broader improvements in practices, disclosure and oversight urgently needed across the mining sector,” she said. “Rio is at the start of a very long process of rebuilding trust. It will require long-term commitment to deep-seated cultural change and strong frameworks and processes in place to support genuine, open and ongoing partnership with Indigenous communities, no matter who is in management or board roles.”

ACSI CEO Louise Davidson said it was “positive” to see Rio Tinto commit to work more closely with traditional owners.

“Investors will continue to engage with Rio Tinto, and other companies with cultural heritage exposures, to understand how they are managing these risks and measuring against commitments,” Davidson said.

Rio committed to establishing an Indigenous advisory group, which will work with managers and may report to board level; modernising its approach to negotiating agreements with traditionally owners to remove confidentiality clauses; and spending $50m on attracting and retaining Indigenous people to work within the business.

The company’s chief adviser of Indigenous affairs, Brad Welsh, said the number of Indigenous leaders in the organisation had doubled last year, though only from seven to 15.

Rio also committed to measuring and reporting on social impact metrics, and to disclosing and explaining to traditional owners the likely heritage impact of projects, “as part of earning back trust” .

Megan Clark, a non-executive director and chair of Rio’s sustainability committee, said changes to cultural management practices to make it an iterative process would “fundamentally change the way we do mining”.

Clark said 1,000 cultural heritage sites in the Pilbara had been reviewed in the past 10 months, with a number of sites reclassified from being cleared for mining to protected.

She said relationships between traditional owners and Rio managers and executives needed to develop beyond a business relationship into friendships, “where the communication channels are just open, and those relationships are deep and trusting so that something like this could never happen again”.

“The one thing that still sticks in my mind as I look at what happened [at Juukan Gorge] and why it happened was: where was a quick phone call, where were all of those linkages that could have stopped it at any time?” she said. “And it’s a question that still sits there … those relationships with the traditional owners, they are as important as relationships with the prime minister of the countries in which we operate or the president in those countries. And I ask myself the question do we invest the same time in those relationships?”

The National Native Title Council chief executive, Jamie Lowe, said investing in those relationships with traditional owners – “I don’t think friendships is the right word” – was essential to rebuilding trust.


'Every day it's happening': Juukan Gorge inquiry told Aboriginal heritage is commonly destroyed

“You can have an advisory body that may sit at a high level but the relationships with the traditional owners are vital because that’s literally where the work happens,” he said. “And you have seen from the Juukan Gorge inquiry that those relationships either weren’t there or weren’t respected.

“So they will be talking some flash language and having deadly plans about what it will look like, but what it will look like will depend on the personnel. The personnel that you have is crucial, that’s how you build the relationships.”

Lowe said the Indigenous advisory group would only be effective if it was given the necessary power and responsibilities.

“If it’s just a peripheral body that meets four times a year, it’s not going to cut it,” he said.

Open season in Sudan as trophy hunters 

KILLERS flock to shoot rare ibex

Conservationists fear for endangered Nubian ibex in Sudan as westerners sold permits to hunt

Two male Nubian ibexes fight in a national park in the Negev desert, Israel. The sub-species is extremely rare in Sudan and numbers are declining. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

Global development is supported by

Kaamil Ahmed

Tue 23 Mar 2021 

Sudanese conservationists have accused trophy hunters of exploiting the country’s political transition to hunt the country’s unprotected rare animals.

Photographs posted online of westerners posing with the body of a rare Nubian ibex angered Sudanese wildlife campaigners this week. They called for Facebook to remove the pages of tour groups promoting such hunts.

While wildlife hunters have long come from the Gulf, Abubakr Mohammad, a biodiversity researcher, has seen a recent trend for western trophy hunters to come too, which he said could be a result of the country being more open to outsiders since the removal of Omar al-Bashir, the former president. Permits for hunting are being given out without sufficient scrutiny, says campaigners.

The Nubian ibex is considered extremely rare in Sudan and its population is classified as vulnerable and in decline, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


Donald Trump Jr killed rare endangered sheep in Mongolia with special permit

“Before this, they were not able to do it because of the government’s approach to European visitors, especially to these areas – they were considered spies.

“With this new government, the whole world comes to Sudan,” said Mohammad, who runs a popular Facebook page on biodiversity in Sudan. “They’re all taking advantage..”

Hunt Geo, which is based in Austria and promotes hunting trips around the world, released a YouTube video in December of what it said was the first hunt in Sudan in 10 years, since the secession of South Sudan. Hunt Geo posted photographs online of its customers posing with the Nubian ibex.

The photos were also shared by Kush Armaments, a Sudanese company that attracted Mohammad’s attention because he noticed it shared his posts about wildlife spots in Sudan. He feared it was then hunting in those areas.
This will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militiasMohamed al-Tayeb, singer and campaigner

Responding to anger in Sudan, Kush Armaments has deleted posts of the hunts, but they remain on Hunt Geo’s Facebook page. Neither Hunt Geo nor Kush Armaments responded to requests for comment.

Mohamed al-Tayeb, a Sudanese singer and wildlife campaigner, said Sudanese law needed to be changed to outlaw such hunts, but that there was still a problem of the companies being backed by powerful figures in the country.
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“I think it’s really difficult to change this – they are the power in Sudan, they are the people who have money and weapons. Maybe they will close one company if there is media pressure about it, but this will not end as long as Sudan is ruled by militias,” said Tayeb.

Mohammad said that permits were given without enough attention to which animals were being hunted and whether rules were followed. He called for all hunting to be halted, especially as there is no clear idea about how many Nubian ibex remain in Sudan.

The IUCN said last year that the number of Nubian ibex in Sudan and neighbouring Eritrea was unknown. Mohammad said Sudan needed to update its laws to protect wildlife and write into the constitution a requirement for a body that would tasked with conservation.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli review – the mysteries of quantum mechanics

Having altered how we think about time, the physicist sets his sights on perhaps the most maddeningly difficult theory of all

A view of Helgoland, where Werner Heisenberg began 

to develop quantum mechanics in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

Ian Thomson
Tue 23 Mar 2021

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, sold more than 1m copies in English translation in 2015 and remains the world’s fastest-selling science book. In The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli illuminated the disquieting uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other tentative physics. Nobody said that post-Newtonian physics was easy, but Rovelli’s gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. Only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive again.

Rovelli’s new book, Helgoland, attempts to explain the maddeningly difficult theory of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland. It was there that the 23-year-old, stricken by hay fever, conceived of the “strangely beautiful interior” of an atom’s mathematical structure and, at a stroke, overturned the certainties of classical physics. Gone was the old idea that atoms consisted of tiny electrons that moved mechanically round heavier protons – as planets orbit the sun. Heisenberg’s intuition was that electrons moved in diffuse, cloudlike waves.

Excited, he devised mathematical tables (“matrices”) to predict the electrons’ wave mechanics. His work was soon refined by other forward-looking physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac. Quantum theory was sired out of Heisenberg’s observations and Einstein’s earlier relativity theory. Until Einstein, scientists believed in a predictable, deterministic universe – one driven by clockwork. Newton’s idea of absolute “true time” ticking relentlessly across the universe was countered by the Einstein theory that there is no single “now” but rather a multitude of “nows”. Heisenberg and his followers, more radical even than Einstein, held that we cannot know the present state of the world in full detail, but only by models of uncertainty and probability. The riddle of quantum theory may ultimately be beyond our tentative, Earth-bound comprehension, says Rovelli; but Newtonian mechanics, though far from obsolete, can no longer account for every aspect of the world we live in.

‘A deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit’: Carlo Rovelli. 

Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images

Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors and MRI scanners.

Fortified with reflections on Vedanta Hinduism (the author has a hippyish past), Buddhism, Dante, Empedocles and Democritus, Rovelli applies quantum theory to various philosophies. Humans exist by virtue of their continuous interactions with one another; so, too, do atoms and electrons. As a happy integration of science, literature and philosophy, Helgoland owes something to the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi, whose literary-scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, reached the UK bestseller list in 1985 alongside Dick Francis. Rovelli’s book displays a very Levi-like enthusiasm for abstruse facts of all kinds. (The German director FW Murnau, we learn, had filmed parts of Nosferatu on Helgoland in 1922 a couple of years before Heisenberg arrived.)


Carlo Rovelli: ‘Time travel is just what we do every day…’

Undeniably, the book is hard going at times. (“I hope I have not lost my reader,” Rovelli says at one point.) The American physicist Richard Feynman presumably meant it when he said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics”. In his trademark lucid prose, Rovelli does his best to explain why this might be so. Known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander, Rovelli is a deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit who sees no incompatibility between physics and philosophy – only mutual attraction.

Science, in Rovelli’s estimation, is not about certainty; it is informed by a radical distrust of certainty. What is real? What exists? Helgoland, beautifully translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is the beginning of wisdom in these things.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is published by Allen Lane (£20).

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli review 

– a curious paean to science

The theoretical physicist untangles seven topics in a short book that works best when it doesn’t delve too deep

Carlo Rovelli: 'his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks'.

 Photograph: Tony Reed/Splash News/Corbis

Nicola Davis
@NicolaKSDavis
Sun 11 Oct 2015

When I was a kid, my mother would sneak brussels sprouts on to my plate. I hated those revolting little orbs of bitterness – but Mother was wily. “It’s only a small one,” she’d say, as though diminutive size suddenly rendered the unpalatable acceptable.

I suspect Carlo Rovelli would get on well with my mother. He too is attempting to woo a tough crowd with a portion of something they find hard to swallow: physics. And he’s opting for a similar approach, issuing what JD Salinger would no doubt term a “pretty skimpy-looking book”, just 78 pages long, no doubt hoping his delicate touch will stir up a taste for the subject.

Born of a series of articles in an Italian newspaper and covering just seven topics, Rovelli’s book conveys a simple truth: physics is beautiful and awe-inspiring, its mysteries there for us all to muse upon. And his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks. Elementary particles, he writes, “combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties and of the night sky studded with stars”.

Despite its austere title, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is no primer for the budding student, rather a curious paean to science. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the cosmos are covered, but other bastions of the lecture hall, from optics to condensed matter, get the boot in favour of loop quantum gravity and consciousness. For each, Rovelli unpicks the basics before revealing the loose ends scientists have yet to tidy up.

And there is plenty of food for thought. “The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat,” explains Rovelli, deftly leading to the sort of existential ponderings more commonly fuelled by late nights and a bottle of red. “What is the ‘present’?” he asks, pointing out “in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now’”. The flow of time, he implies, is simply a matter of statistics.


Seven brief lessons on physics - podcast

Rovelli has a rare knack for conveying the top line of scientific theories in clear and compelling terms without succumbing to the lure of elaborate footnotes. “Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves,” he writes, neatly summarising the ramifications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.His attempts at closing the distance between himself (a leading theoretical physicist) and his readers (who, he admits, are likely to “know little or nothing about modern science”) are perhaps less successful, describing his student digs as a “refuge from the tedium of university classes in Bologna” in the manner of a politician angling to be judged “of the people” by hanging out at a local pub. And Rovelli occasionally comes a cropper in his explanations, complacently slipping in references and terminology unlikely to ring bells with his readers. Einstein’s “box of light” thought experiment is bandied about to underline the great man’s scepticism of the later developments of quantum theory, 

but with no explanation of its thrust, the passage merely frustrates.

On the whole his spartan offering is a breath of fresh air. However, it remains to be seen if his pared-back approach could be married with a more in-depth take on physics. Capturing the imagination of a reader is one challenge, but delving deeper while retaining an accessible air is quite another: Richard Feynman, Rovelli is not. Still, perhaps his shorter form is for the best – in exploring the link between physics and the “self”, Rovelli’s occasionally florid tone is given full flight. “Amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes,” he writes, throwing measured enthusiasm out the window.

Rovelli’s approach might be refreshing, but it is still an acquired taste.