SPACEX STARSHIP EXPLODES DURING TEST IN DRAMATIC FAILURE


YouTube/Nasa Spaceflight

Footage shows intense explosion – and its aftermath

Andrew Griffin

SpaceX's huge Starship spacecraft has exploded during a test.

The explosion was documented in dramatic footage taken from the ground at SpaceX's development facility Boca Chica, Texas, where the test took place.

The cryogenic pressure test that led to the explosion was part of the development of the Starship, which Elon Musk's SpaceX hopes will one day carry humans to Mars.

Video taken from the site by NasaSpaceFlight appears to show the prototype known as "SN1" exploding and falling to the ground.

It follows a similar failure of another prototype known as "Mk1", late last year.


Further footage taken the following day showed the wreckage of the crashed spacecraft. It also showed another of the company's prototypes, which is still being worked on.



SpaceX did not respond to a request to comment from The Independent.



But Elon Musk tweeted out the footage with the words "So … how was your night?", alongside a series of jokes about being able to put the prototype back together with tape.

The shooting of John Lennon: Will Mark David Chapman ever be released?


In December it will be 40 years since the murder of The Beatles’ founder and before then a parole board will consider for the 11th time whether his killer should walk free. James McMahon looks back at the events of that fateful day in 1980, and at the man who ended the life of a legend

United by a murder: Fans in mourning in 1980, the late John Lennon and his killer Mark David Chapman ( Rex )


Two summers ago, in August, Mark David Chapman took off his prison uniform, put on his smartest clothes and – under the watchful eyes of the Wende Correctional Facility guards – made his way to the New York Parole Board building complex. This was the 10th time Prisoner 81A2860 had made such a journey, all of which had taken place within the past 20 years, having made his first appeal two decades after his initial conviction for the murder of John Lennon. Ten journeys there. Ten journeys back. And 10 rejections, despite this time Chapman seeming more contrite than he’d ever been in his many appearances in the now familiar setting. “Thirty years ago, I couldn’t say I felt shame and I know what shame is now,” he told the parole board. “It’s where you cover your face, you don’t want to, you know, ask for anything...”

The man who violently ended the life of Lennon – and any hope that The Beatles may reunite 11 years after their messy split in 1969 – is now 64. He is losing his hair and resembles little the doughy, socially inept young man who announced himself to the world 40 years ago. Five shots. Four bullet-holes in the back of Lennon, who was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital, New York, a little after 11pm on the evening of 8 December 1980.

He told us to imagine no possessions and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music

Chapman was arrested metres from where the murder took place, outside the Manhattan Dakota apartment that Lennon and wife Yoko Ono shared with their five-year-old son Sean. There was the killer, leaning silently against the wall of the Dakota, reading the JD Salinger novel The Catcher in the Rye. The book, he would tell police upon their arrival, doubled as his “manifesto”. “I acted alone,” he said as handcuffs were applied.

Lennon was 40 at the time of his death. He had only just returned from a self-imposed five-year musical absence in which he had “baked bread” and “looked after the baby”. Then that October he released his first new music in years, with the release of the single “(Just Like) Starting Over”. His album with Ono, Double Fantasy, followed the next month, featuring songs he had written or finessed during a sailing trip in the summer of 1980. The trip was to be ill-fated; journeying from Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda, Lennon’s yacht entered a prolonged storm. With most of the crew suffering from seasickness, the musician was forced to take control of the wheel alone. What followed was much meditation on the fragility of life. “I was so centred after the experience at sea,” he said, “that I was tuned into the cosmos – and all these songs came…”

Lennon and Chapman shared little in common, but both were searching for something. Just a few years prior, Chapman had made his own journey. He travelled to Tokyo. To Seoul. Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Delhi and Beirut, then London, Paris and Dublin. Through his adventuring, Chapman met his wife, a Japanese American woman several years his senior called Gloria Abe. She’d been his travel agent. They married on 2 June 1979 (and remain wed to this day). They settled in Hawaii. He took a job as a night security guard and started drinking heavily. In September 1980 he wrote a letter to a friend. “I’m going nuts,” it read. It was signed “The Catcher In The Rye”. Salinger’s meditation on alienation has a dark legacy; the book was found in John Hinkley Jr’s hotel room after his attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981. Robert John Bardo was carrying the book when he murdered the model and actor Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989.

The Beatles’ studio albums ranked in order of greatness
Show all 12





It’s long been believed that Chapman’s plan to kill his idol was formulated in the midst of his heavy drinking. In recent years Chapman has claimed that his hit list extended beyond Lennon. In 2010, he claimed he’d chosen Lennon “out of convenience”. It could have been Paul McCartney, Elizabeth Taylor, talk-show host Johnny Carson, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, actor George C Scott (famous for turning down the Best Actor award at the 1970 Oscars), even the aforementioned Ronald Reagan. Hawaii governor George Ariyoshi rounded out the list. It’s been said the musician Todd Rundgren was a target (Chapman was wearing a promotional T-shirt for Rundgren’s album Hermit of Mink Hollow when he was arrested). David Bowie once claimed he was “second on the list”.

So at that point, I had abandoned all of the plans and was going to throw the gun in the river and that type of thing and come back and everything was going to be OK. Of course, that didn’t happen

The question as to why Chapman killed John Lennon has never truly been answered. He’s given conflicting versions of his rationale for decades – citing his spiritual beliefs, his own desire to become famous, even that killing Lennon would help promote his beloved Catcher in the Rye – almost as if he’s still trying to make sense of the event himself. He had no criminal convictions prior to the murder. He’d loved The Beatles almost all his life. Lennon was his hero. As a teenager, the British band’s vivid, colourful pop provided him with a place to escape to when the fists of his violent US Air Force sergeant father reigned down upon him. By 14, he was experimenting with LSD and missing classes at Columbia High School, Decatur, Georgia. “The Beatles then were into long hair, beards, meditation, and drugs,” he said. “The Beatles were into things that fit my life perfectly.”

Unquestionably, the teenage Chapman was also already showing signs of mental instability. Most nights he would lay in his bedroom, imagining he was the “king” of a tiny race of people who lived in the walls. Generally, the appeal of his sovereignty over the “Little People” was their adoration (“I was their hero and was in the paper every day and I was on TV every day!”) but, he would later tell the journalist Jack Jones, “sometimes when I’d get mad I’d blow some of them up. I’d have this push-button thing, part of the [sofa], and I’d like, get mad and blow out part of the wall and a lot of them would die. But the people would still forgive me for that, and, you know, everything got back to normal. That’s a fantasy I had for many years.” Prior to killing Lennon, Chapman would say that the little people in the walls had come back.

A recent mugshot of Mark David Chapman (Shutterstock)

And around this time he also discovered religion, attending a retreat held by the Chapel Woods Presbyterian Church when he was aged 15. He found the experience deeply affecting. He stopped taking drugs. Put away his hippie clothes. Started wearing a suit and carrying a bible at all times. He even began to leave religious tracts in the school lockers. “At some point I lifted my hands and I said, ‘Jesus come to me. Help me,’” he recalled. “And that was my time of true spiritual rebirth. That night I came to a door. When I opened the door and let God come physically into my heart, I felt cleansed. I felt totally forgiven and totally renewed.” Crucially, he also began to sour on Beatle John.

When Lennon had told the Evening Standard in March 1966, as part of the paper’s regular franchise “How does a Beatle live?”, of his belief that the Beatles were now more “popular than Jesus”; that perhaps rock music would outlive Christianity, it drew little controversy. When the quote made it to the United States a few months later, via a reprint in the teen magazine Dateline, it induced apoplexy. Across the bible belt, Beatles records were set alight on huge bonfires. Radio stations stopped playing their songs. The Ku Klux Klan picketed performances in Washington, DC and Memphis, Tennessee. At the latter, someone threw a firecracker on stage. Briefly the band thought it was gunfire. The Beatles had headed to America to promote their seventh studio album, Revolver. They talked little about the record. They, and John – right until the very end – would never tour again.

Chapman was smarting. His dislike would only intensify with each passing year. Lennon, he decided, was a hypocrite. The release of “Imagine” in 1971 – a song Chapman considered communist – was perhaps the final straw. “He told us to imagine no possessions,” he would say, “and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music.” The cod theological pondering of “God” on 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album – “I don’t believe in Jesus, I just believe in me” – probably didn’t help.

Mourning: a fan holds a sign remembering the murdered Lennon at a New York memorial in December 1980 (Shutterstock)

Chapman had made a trip to New York in October with the intention of doing the deed then. While there, he watched the film Ordinary People, notable for being the directorial debut of Robert Redford. Something about the movie spoke to him. “I came out of the theatre and called my wife and for the first time, I told her,” he said. “I told her what I was going to do, and I was crying. And I said I thought about life and thought about my grandmother, and I told her, I said: ‘Your love has saved me. I’m coming home.’ And she said, ‘Just come home. Please, come home.’ So at that point, I had abandoned all of the plans and was going to throw the gun in the river and that type of thing and come back and everything was going to be OK. Of course, that didn’t happen.” After returning home and making an appointment with a clinical psychologist he wouldn’t keep, he returned to New York on 8 December.

Chapman spent most of that day at the Dakota. No-one thought anything of it; as well as Lennon and his family, an assortment of celebrities including Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall called the complex their home. Fans would lurk outside the building all the time. Chapman had left his £64 ($83) a night room at the Sheraton Centre downtown early, but had missed Lennon when he stepped out of a cab and entered the Dakota that morning after becoming distracted. He was much more focused a few hours later when he spotted Lennon’s housekeeper, returning from a walk with then five-year-old Sean. “You’re a beautiful boy,” said Chapman, referencing the song John had written about his younger son, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”, and shaking the little boy’s hand.
Read more

The Beatles’ White Album at 50: The story behind the controversial LP

At 5pm, Lennon and wife Yoko Ono left the building. They had an appointment at the Record Plant Studios on West 44th Street. As the pair walked towards their limousine, Chapman approached John and asked if he’d sign his copy of Double Fantasy. Lennon did, writing “John Lennon 1980” on the sleeve. During his wait at the Dakota, Chapman had befriended an amateur photographer called Paul Goresh. He captured the act of Lennon signing the album for Chapman on camera. When Lennon had gone, Chapman panted excitedly: “John Lennon signed my album! Nobody in Hawaii is going to believe me!” He tried to talk Goresh into waiting around with him for Lennon to return later. He could get his album signed too. “You never know if you’ll see him again!” Chapman told his new friend. Six hours later, John Winston Ono Lennon was dead. Lennon and Ono had returned a little after 10.50pm. As their limousine pulled up to the Dakota’s archway entrance and Lennon stepped out onto the pavement, Chapman dropped to one knee, firing five hollow-point bullets from his .38 special revolver into Lennon’s back and shoulder. His lung was punctured, his left subclavian artery torn. Two hours after that, Chapman would get on his knees and pray to God, pleading for the ability to rewind time.

This August, four months before the world unites to pay tribute to four decades without John Lennon – one half of the most consistently brilliant songwriting team pop has ever seen – on the planet, Mark David Chapman will take off his prison uniform, put on his smartest clothes and make his way to the New York Parole Board building complex once more. There the three-member board will be in possession of a letter from Yoko Ono – still a resident of the Dakota, incidentally – in which she pleads for Chapman to remain incarcerated, as she’s written and sent to every previous appeal for the past 20 years. It is unthinkable that the judgment, in this year of all years, will be any different to the 10 that have preceded it. It’s most likely that Chapman will return to his cell, strip and put on his prison uniform once more. Just him and his Little People. Just him and his regret.

What do Trump, Farage and Hitler have in common? 

A reliance on fiery, antagonistic rhetoric

Hitler at the Nuremberg rally in 1938: his fascist language was 

recycled in the Brexit ‘debate’ ( Getty )

Victor Klemperer’s moving diaries about the Second World War are of huge historic importance. But the volume he valued most is a short and devastating treatise on the linguistics of the Nazi regime, a lingua franca the far right continues to recycle to this day, 

says Robert Fisk 

Victor Klemperer was perhaps the most eloquent and academically brilliant survivor of the Holocaust. He was never sent to Auschwitz – although he was only hours away from that fate in February 1945 when the Allied bombing of Dresden allowed him to dispose of his Jewish Star – but as a philosopher, French scholar, professor, linguist and humanist, he wrote by far the most moving diaries of the Second World War.

Scarcely days pass when I do not think of Klemperer. His three volumes of diaries are a testimony to viciousness, cruelty and courage from the heart of darkness, trying (and just succeeding) to survive as a German Jew in Hitler’s Reich. But only now have I been able to obtain a translation of the one volume this fine Jewish intellectual valued most: his own short, devastating treatise on the linguistics of the Nazi regime.

He called it LTI – short for his Latin title, Lingua Tertii Imperii, The Language of the Third Reich – and it hangs like a cloak over us today, in the shadow of the new right, of east European nationalism, of racism and I suppose, of Trumpism too. And of the crisis of dictatorship in the Middle East. It shows how language can be used as a prison rather than a means to liberty, how it can wrap us in chains when we always thought it offered a path to freedom. “Nazism,” he wrote, “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”

BEHIND PAYWALL 

AMERICANS KEEP TELLING US THAT THE ONLY REASON THEY CANNOT QUARANTINE SCHOOLS, OR WORK OR MALLS FROMTHE CORONAVIRUS
 IS THEY ARE A DEMOCRACY SO ITS CHAOS OF LAZY FAIRE 

WHILE CHINA CAN DO IT BECAUSE THEY ARE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME 

WAIT A MINUTE  JAPAN JUST SHUT DOWN ALL ITS SCHOOLS FOR A MONTH, AND THEY ARE A DEMOCRACY

SILVER LINING
Coronavirus: Space images reveal drastic fall in pollution over China as factories closed
‘This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,’ says Nasa scientist

Jane Dalton @JournoJane

Satellite images show a dramatic drop in pollution over China after the coronavirus outbreak shut down swathes of the country’s industry and travel.

US space agency Nasa said the change was at least partly related to the economic slowdown caused by efforts to contain the virus.

Nasa maps show how levels of nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas from vehicles, power plants and factories, plummeted after the mass quarantine, compared with before.

Scientists have previously found the coronavirus wiped out at least a quarter of China’s emissions of damaging greenhouse gases in just two weeks in mid-February.

Closing industrial plants and asking people to stop at home has led to sharp drops in the burning of fossil fuels — a key cause of the climate crisis — in the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer. 

Pollution levels in January contrast with those in February (Nasa)

China, where the outbreak began, has nearly 80,000 cases of coronavirus, by far the largest number of any country, with nearly 2,900 deaths.


Nasa’s maps compare pollution levels between the first three weeks of the year and 10-25 February.

Coronavirus: Life in a Wuhan suburb besieged by China’s outbreak

The space agency’s scientists said the fall in pollution was first apparent near Wuhan, the source of the outbreak, but eventually spread across the country.

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.

She said she had seen a decline in nitrogen dioxide levels during the economic recession of 2008 but said that decrease was more gradual.
This year, pollution levels did not rise again after Chinese new year, unlike last year (Nasa)

The map of the world according to who every country thinks is most dangerous

Posted Monday 20 February 2017 

Picture: Reddit/Loulan

Feeling apocalyptic right now? You’re probably not the only one.

But of course, who you think the bad guys are depends a lot on where you live. Which is what makes this map really interesting.

It uses data from a 2013 poll, which asked people from 65 different nations who they thought the biggest threat to world peace was.

The map was put together by Redditor Loulan.

It turns out the USA is the country most were concerned about. And while there were plenty of nations that you’d expect to put them top of the list -like Russia and China – there were also several that you’d consider Western allies of the US, like Spain, Germany and Australia.

Pakistan was second on the list, followed by China.

Iran was the most dangerous country according to the US, Canada and Britain.

It’s important to remember that this data is a couple of years old – and therefore doesn’t take into account Donald Trump….

AND THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT IN 2013 WAS STILL HARPER AND THE CONSERVATIVES WHO HAD DECLARED THEMSELVES THE LAPDOGS OF ISRAEL
SO THEY CLOSED OUR EMBASSY IN IRAN AND CUT OFF ALL RELATIONS.
SOMETHING ABOUT CUTTING ONE'S NOSE TO SPITE ONE'S FACE COMES TO MIND

Pete Buttigieg has surprised everyone by dropping out 
— but was it because of a back-room deal?


Theories range from the vaguely conspiratorial — the Bernie-hating DNC want to back a moderate, so told Klobuchar, Biden and Buttigieg that one of them had to drop out — to the slightly more likely

Holly Baxter New York @h0llyb4xter

Many were surprised by Mayor Pete’s announcement today that he was suspending his campaign. Less than a month ago, amid a chaotic caucus in Iowa, he proclaimed to his supporters that they had “made history” and "shocked the nation". For a brief moment, when he and Bernie were neck-and-neck in Iowa and New Hampshire, many of us believed a President Buttigieg was a serious possibility.

But South Carolina was the first real test of whether the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana had managed to connect with the African American voters he’d been accused of failing. At the ballot box, their judgment was unequivocal. He had not done enough. Exit polls showed younger black voters were slightly more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, but almost no middle-aged black voters came out for him at all. They didn’t know who he was, he hadn’t put decades of work in with their communities, and he had blundered when faced with racial controversies in South Bend.

Despite a less than encouraging performance in South Carolina, however, most of us were expecting Mayor Pete to stay on for Super Tuesday in two days’ time. Just yesterday, on Saturday morning, his campaign manager was talking about their Super Tuesday strategy to a reporter at the New York Times. It’s no exaggeration to say that something must have changed overnight.

Multiple theories are afoot, ranging from the vaguely conspiratorial — the Bernie-hating DNC want to back a moderate, so told Klobuchar, Biden and Buttigieg that one of them had to drop out — to the slightly more likely — a back-room deal made with a candidate still in the race. Has Pete agreed to run as VP on a joint ticket with Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Elizabeth Warren in an effort to prevent Bernie Sanders from rising easily to the top? It’s possible. If it’s true, then my bet would be on Warren as his running-mate: she has been publicly distancing herself from Sanders in the past few weeks, while at the same time quietly winding back a lot of her most left-leaning proposals, including Medicare for All. Warren has been struggling in caucuses and primaries, but has promised to stay in until the Democratic convention in July; so she’s either bluffing or she’s been concocting a strategy to inject new energy into her campaign with someone else behind the scenes. If it’s not a case of a VP deal, however, it could be a much more straightforward and less risky case of throwing his weight behind Biden and guaranteeing himself a prestigious cabinet position in the event of a future Biden administration.

Equally, Pete may genuinely have no plans for this presidential race. At 38 years old, he was only just old enough to qualify to run for president in the first place (the highest office in the land is reserved for over-35s only.) In debates, Buttigieg made the most of his youthful status, somewhat mischievously interrupting both Biden and Bernie at least once to say, “When I’m as old as you, I hope to look back and think…” Unfortunately, leaning so heavily on his age may have backfired. It underlined his lack of experience; being responsible for a city of 100,000 people is very different to being responsible for a country of 327 million, and few Democrats are in the mood for a gamble after Donald Trump.

Buttigieg is young enough to hold back and wait until he’s accrued a bit more of that vital political experience now that he’s made a national name for himself. No one can deny that he is a fantastic orator and a solid debater. This first presidential run may well be just the beginning of his outreach, and we may see a President Buttigieg in the White House yet. If he is planning a future run, then he may have decided that quitting while he was ahead rather than facing further damaging losses in Super Tuesday would be reputationally smarter, providing him with a springboard from which to launch a similar campaign in 2024 or 2028.

Why go this far, take all those donations, attend all those rallies and print out all that merchandise if the plan was to drop out all along then, you may wonder? I doubt this was the plan all along, but in the past few weeks, Buttigieg and his advisers may have sat down and talked about the fact that Bernie Sanders has an excellent shot at being the Democratic nominee this year. Being the moderate who blocked Bernie in 2016 did nothing for Hillary Clinton. It would be risky for Pete as well. And if Bernie did end up losing badly to Trump in November — if a “reds under the bed” socialist scare campaign does serious damage to the Senator from Vermont and the entire party with him — then Buttigieg may well want to dissociate himself with the Democrats of 2020, in the same way that many British Labour politicians sought to distance themselves from the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Walking away now means he protects himself either way: he avoids the ire of the Bernie Bros and he avoids being painted with the socialist brush during his long political career ahead.

In a moving speech in Indiana tonight opened by his husband Chasten, Buttigieg declared that he felt he had a political "responsibility" to step away, and spoke of supporting a candidate with a "broad base" (so, not Sanders) who offered a "new kind of politics" (which didn't exactly sound like Biden either.) He spoke humorously and energetically. His supporters chanted, "2024, 2024!" while he put on a bashful smile.

For more clues about why he made his decision tonight, we’ll have to keep an eye out for who he endorses after Super Tuesday.

South Korean cult church leader claiming to be Messiah could face coronavirus ‘murder’ charge

Lee Man-hee, whose followers believe he is immortal, accused of knowingly providing flawed information to officials

Andy Gregory

Army soldiers wearing protective suits spray disinfectant in front of a branch of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu ( Newsis/AP )

A cult church leader claiming to be the Messiah could face “murder” charges in connection with the worst coronavirus outbreak outside of mainland China.

The majority of cases in South Korea — where the virus has killed at least 18 people and infected more than 3,700 — are thought to be members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus.

Officials have accused the church of exacerbating the outbreak by deliberately failing to provide an accurate list of its more than 200,000 worshippers and thus interfering with government attempts to curb the virus’ spread.

Amid growing public outrage, Seoul city government has filed a criminal complaint to prosecutors against the church’s leader Lee Man-hee — who himself is awaiting the result of a coronavirus test — and 11 other senior members.

Seoul’s mayor Park Won-soon alleged the church’s actions amounted to “murder through to willful negligence” in a widely shared Facebook post on Sunday, translated by the Korea Herald.

The response to Coronavirus in Daegu South Korea
Show all 11

The legal complaint accuses the church leaders of homicide, causing harm and violating the Infectious Disease and Control Act, according to the BBC.

South Korean law follows the principle of dolus eventualis, meaning a person can be convicted of murder if they foresaw the possibility of their actions resulting in the death of someone but continued regardless.

The church —​ which teaches that only Mr Lee can interpret the Bible’s true meaning — strenuously denies all accusations and insists it is the victim of a “witch hunt”.

While followers believe Mr Lee is immortal and will take 144,000 people to heaven with him on Judgement Day, some former members have now turned on him.

This week, a group of former worshippers visited district prosecutors and alleged that “by submitting fake documents, he has impeded the government in its epidemiological efforts against the new coronavirus”, the Korea Times reported.

The doomsday cult at the centre of South Korea’s coronavirus outbreak

The church is also accused of lying about its missionary work in Wuhan, regarded as the outbreak’s epicentre.

South Korea’s justice ministry said on Saturday that 42 members of the church had entered the country from China since July, with some visiting Wuhan in January. The church had repeatedly denied making new converts in the Hubei city until last week.

The virus was first discovered to have infected a 61-year-old woman dubbed “Patient 31” who had attended services at the church’s Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony branch in the country’s fourth largest city, Daegu.

The city of 2.5 million people was swiflty put on lockdown, and was likened to a “zombie apocalypse” by one resident. While cases have been identified around the country, it remains the most affected city.

A second outbreak was then discovered at a hospital in Cheongdo county. It soon emerged that several of the church’s followers visited the hospital to attend a funeral for Mr Lee’s brother.

Shortly afterwards, the church said it had closed all of its 74 sanctuaries in South Korea and told followers to instead watch its services on YouTube.
“We are deeply sorry that because of one of our members, who thought of her condition as a cold because she had not travelled abroad, led to many in our church being infected and thereby caused concern to the local community,” it said in a statement.

At Shincheonji, attending church-related gatherings “isn’t an option, but a requirement,” Ji-il Tark, a professor of religion at Busan Presbyterian University in South Korea, previously told the Associated Press.

Mr Tark said Shincheonji followers are more vulnerable to virus infections as they often sit very closely together on the floor during services.

While all of the church’s members have now been interviewed by officials, according to the BBC, roughly 9,000 of them are displaying symptoms.

While the church now acknowledges the virus, a recording emerged of one leader having previously said: “No Shincheonji member in Wuhan has contracted the virus thanks to their faith.”

As public anger over the outbreak grows, some members have said they fear being outed as Shincheonji followers.

“We’re being treated like criminals. We had a bad image before and now I think I’d be lynched if passers-by knew I belonged to Shincheonji,” 26-year-old Ji-yeon Park told The Guardian.

“Our church didn’t invent the virus. This is just an excuse to shift blame. Throughout history, minority groups have always been blamed for bad things happening in society. The same is happening to us.”

---30---

WTF 

Woman faces jail in UAE for using ‘strong language’ towards man who sent her unwanted sexual images, campaigners say

PATRIARCHY 

US national Melissa McBurnie could face up to two years in prison, according to criminal justice group

Zoe Tidman

Melissa McBurnie has been arrested on suspicion of slander

 in the UAE ( Detained in Dubai )

An American woman has been arrested in United Arab Emirates after sending a strongly-worded email to a man who was harassing her with sexual images, a campaign group says.

Melissa McBurnie was detained in Abu Dhabi after being accused of slander, a US embassy spokesperson told The Independent.

The woman, from California, messaged a man to tell him to stop sending pornographic images of himself and sexually explicit texts to her, according to campaign group Detained in Dubai.

She “lashed out” in the message to the Egyptian national, who has also shared sexual images of Ms McBurnie with others in the past, the organisation said.

Ms McBurnie was detained after the man reported her email to authorities, they added.

Radha Stirling, CEO of Detained In Dubai​, said: “Melissa has been going through one of the worst nightmares a person can suffer in the age of the internet for the past four years; she has been inundated with abusive messages of an extremely sexual nature.

“Yet, somehow she is the one facing prosecution in the UAE for cybercrime violations, simply because she used strong language against her abuser.”

Ms Stirling added the American woman could face up to two years in prison if convicted.

The US embassy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) told The Independent Ms McBurnie had been arrested for slander and later released on bail.

Ms McBurnie claims the man involved has slandered her and is using a series of explicit messages against her, according to an embassy spokesperson.

She had been in the country since November on a tourist visa and the Egyptian national had lived in the UAE for over 20 years, officials told The Independent.

Ms McBurnie and the married man had been romantically involved, according to Detained in Dubai.

Their relationship turned sour when Ms McBurnie put an end to their affair, the criminal justice organisation claimed.

The group said they expect the woman to held in Dubai until her case is heard in May.

The US State Department has been approached for comment.

INTERVIEW
Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma: ‘Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze’

The film-maker talks to Alexandra Pollard about growing up gay at a time before the internet, male privilege in cinema, and why Wonder Woman changed her life

Céline Sciamma and Adèle Haenel on the set of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' ( Claire Mathon )

Céline Sciamma always knew she was gay. She just didn’t know what to do about it. “Without the internet, lesbianism didn’t exist,” explains the French director, who came of age in the Nineties. “I mean, it did exist, but we were our own island, and we had to learn everything by ourselves. Imagine being 14 years old and going to the public library looking for lesbian romance, and just not knowing where to start. It’s like, ‘A, B, C, D…’” Is that how she learnt? “Yeah,” she says, with a laugh. “And cinema. And you have to make your own.”

So she did. For over a decade, the 41-year-old’s films have explored the kinds of identities and desires that those public libraries were missing. Her coming-of-age debut Water Lilies (2007) – filmed in the middle-class suburb just north of Paris in which she grew up, and written when she was still at film school – focused on a teenage girl’s infatuation with her synchronised swimming teammate.

The swimming, she said when it premiered at Cannes, was a metaphor for “the job of being a girl” – beauty and serenity above the surface, struggle and sacrifice below it. Tomboy (2011), released when society had an even more rudimentary understanding of gender fluidity than it does now, centred around a 10-year-old who adopts a masculine moniker on summer holiday. Girlhood (2014) followed a group of black schoolgirls in a poor suburb of Paris.

Through her work, Sciamma has earned a reputation not only as a harbinger of social progress but as a gifted auteur – one whose work is known for its sparse dialogue and tender, empathetic gaze. But her latest – the ravishing, slow-burning Portrait of a Lady on Fire – has ramped things up a notch. Since competing for the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes, the film has been gaining momentum around the world, and Sciamma has found herself much in demand. Having visited 20 French cities, 20 more across Europe and attended 14 premieres, she’s now sitting upstairs in a London members club, strong of spirit and of accent.


Dressed in a bomber jacket, her blue eyes making unwavering contact, Sciamma has a gentle kind of intensity about her. She speaks swiftly, her English imperfect but poetic. “I decided to look at this love, and all its possibility, rather than doing the impossible love story narrative,” she says of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “Which is a way to give back their presence and their present and their desire to these women, because you can’t run like you want to. I really wanted to show how a love story that is fulfilling is a love story that emancipates you.”

Set in 18th-century Brittany, the film stars Adèle Haenel – who worked with Sciamma on Water Lilies, and with whom the director was in a relationship for a number of years – as Héloïse. Mysterious and obstinate, she is soon to be married off to a Milanese nobleman, a prospect she dreads. Noémie Merlant is Marianne, a young artist hired to paint Héloïse for said nobleman ahead of the wedding. The bride-to-be refused to sit for the other (male) painters, so Marianne must attempt to do the portrait under the guise of being her chaperone, snatching glances as they walk along the clifftops.

They’re awkward at first, Héloïse stiff with suspicion, Marianne struggling to keep up the ruse. But gradually, that stiffness gives way to intrigue, then attraction. As the film progresses – at its own, teasing pace – their interactions become so heavy with desire that it’s almost unbearable. When they finally act on it, the consummation is as fiery as it is respectful. “Consent,” says Sciamma, “is sexy.”
Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (Curzon Artificial Eye)

The first time the two women sleep together, Héloïse asks, “Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” It’s a knock-out line. “A relationship is about inventing your own language,” says Sciamma. “You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”

We know from the first scene that the two women don’t end up together. Was that to avoid giving the audience false hope? “Yes, and also because I wanted to question what a happy ending is,” says Sciamma. “We have the romantic-comedy philosophy – a frozen image of two people being together – and we also have the tragic ending. And I wanted neither. Why do we believe that eternal possession of somebody means a happy ending? Love educates us about art. Art consoles us from lost love. Our great loves are a condition of our future love. The film is the memory of a love story; it’s sad but also full of hope.”

By design, there are almost no men in the film – though the impending heterosexual nuptials loom like a cloud over every passionate embrace. “I wanted to use the tools of cinema so you would feel patriarchy without actually having to embody it with an antagonist,” says Sciamma. Free from the gaze of men, Marianne, Héloïse, and the servant Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) are in a sort of utopia. There, the women and their love can briefly flourish. “When a man comes back in the frame,” smiles Sciamma, “it’s a jump scare.”


The job of being a girl: Sciamma’s ‘Water Lillies’ (2007) (Balthazar Productions)

Earlier this month, Natalie Portman walked the Oscars red carpet with “Sciamma” sewn in gold stitching on the trim of her Dior cape. There, too, were the names of several other female directors snubbed by the Academy. Sciamma is a founding member of Le Collectif, a French movement aiming to correct the gender imbalance in international film-making. The fact that men are almost always front and centre of cinema, she says, leaves them “unaware of their privilege. Ninety per cent of what we look at is the male gaze. They don’t see themselves anymore.”

She recalls recording the DVD commentary for Portrait with a male recording engineer, who watched the film alongside her. When – two hours in – a man’s hand appeared in the frame, the engineer looked down at his own. “He said, ‘I looked at my hand, because that’s the hand of a man.’ That’s what I wanted to do – there’s no man in the film, not as some kind of punishment, but as a way for them to go through someone else’s journey. You’ve been looking only at women and suddenly it feels different, weird.” She laughs. “And that’s cinema, you know?”

It’s not just arthouse cinema that can do this. Sciamma says that Wonder Woman, the 2017 superhero blockbuster directed by Patty Jenkins, changed her life. “It’s about feeling seen as a viewer,” she says. “Wonder Woman is thinking about me. It’s thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women’s representation. It gives us joy but also rage. Like, ‘Why do I not get this more often?’ Now, we get it more and more, because there’s new writing for women, but it’s an addictive feeling. Once you know it, you want it.” 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire review: Gorgeous and romantic period drama

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the first of Sciamma’s films to centre women in adulthood. The rest of them have been, in one way or another, coming-of-age stories. I bring up something she said once – that for women, losing the androgyny of childhood is a “tragedy, because you lose your freedom”. Did that happen to her? “Wow,” she says. There’s a 10-second pause. “I was such a gay child. I played by these rules, of course, but knowing that it was a performance. And I suffered from the fact that it was a performance. You have to be patient. You have to just wait for your life to start.”

That’s one of the reasons she makes films. So that young people don’t have to wait quite as long as she did. “We’re losing time, wasting time, because our culture is not being transmitted,” she says. “But we keep reinventing it. Discovering it. And that’s also the beauty of it.”