‘Out in a year’: what the papers say about Tory vote on Boris Johnson

Only the most stridently supportive titles stand vocally behind prime minister after 41% of his own MPs vote for his removal

Boris Johnson has survived a no-confidence vote, but some UK papers question how long he will stay in power. Composite: Times/Mail/i /Herald/Telegraph/Guardian/Mirror/ Express

Martin Farrer

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

A haunted-looking Boris Johnson stares out from the front pages of many of the papers after a dramatic night of Conservative party bloodletting at Westminster.

The prime minister is shown being driven back from the Commons to Downing Street after he won a Tory no-confidence vote in his leadership by 211 to 148.

Although he called the victory decisive and vowed to “bash on” in government, the reaction of some Tory-supporting newspapers suggests he will not be able to draw a line under his Partygate woes any time soon.

“A wounded victor”, says the Times, alongside the picture of Johnson that seems eerily similar to the famous one of Margaret Thatcher being driven away from Downing Street after she was ousted in a Tory party coup.

The paper adds that it was a worse than expected result for Johnson and throws up another parallel with Thatcher by noting that the same proportion of MPs voted against her as against her current scandal-plagued successor. She resigned two days later.

The Daily Telegraph’s front page headline says “Hollow victory tears Tories apart” and carries a secondary headline saying Johnson’s authority has been “crushed” as rebels circle to finish him off.

 Photograph: The Daily Telegraph

The Financial Times also suggests that the prime minister is badly damaged by the vote with its lead headline saying “Johnson wounded in confidence vote as 41% of Tory MPs rebel”.The paper’s columnists line up to give a damning verdict on Johnson’s prospects for leading the party into the future with Tim Stanley declaring simply: “The PM is toast.”

The Mirror proclaims “Party’s over, Boris” and says that the prime minister has suffered a “brutal attack” by his own side “and is warned that he will be out in a year”.

The Guardian’s splash says “PM clinging to power after vote humiliation”, with columnist Martin Kettle writing: “He is irreparably damaged. Politicians don’t recover from such things.”

The i’s front page says “Wounded Johnson in peril” and inside its political editor, Paul Waugh, says Johnson is the “sick man of Downing Street, infecting all those around him”.

The Metro also thinks it’s time for Johnson to go: “The party is over Boris”.

However, the prime minister still has some defiant backing from his cheerleaders in the national papers. Reflecting the concern of some Tories that dumping Johnson is electoral suicide, the Mail has mocked up a red button marked “Lib Dems Labour SNP” and says “MPs hit the self-destruct button by opening door to smirking Starmer’s coalition of chaos”. Underneath, its main headline says “Boris vows: I’ll bash on”.

 Photograph: Mail

The Express also tries to strike an upbeat note with

 a headline which reads: 

“Defiant and unbowed … Boris: I’ll lead party to victory”.

The Sun’s splash is “Night of the blond knives”,

 saying that Johnson has been “stabbed in the back by 148 MPs”.

In Scotland the Herald says “Wounded and weakened,

 but Johnson vows to stay in office”, while the Press and Journal 

says “Boris body blow despite winning confidence vote”.

 Photograph: The Herald

The Record opts to throw Johnson’s election-winning slogan

 back at him with its front page headline: “Get Borexit done”

The Northern Echo says “Carry on Boris (for now)“, 

while the Newcastle Journal asks “Is he on his way out?”.

Bug v killer cactus: Kenyan herders fight to stop a plant destroying their way of life

A woman removes invasive cactus plants in Laikipia County, Kenya. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Imported insect offers a last hope against the invasive prickly pear cactus killing off grasslands and the animals that graze them

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Peter Muiruri in Laikipia

THEGUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022

In single file, women brightly wrapped in colourful Samburu cloth come out of a small greenhouse. They carry buckets stuffed with the only weapon left in their fight against an enemy that threatens their very way of life.

They are heading to a field that despite its attractive appearance hosts the invasive Opuntia stricta, a prickly pear cactus that is taking over large swathes of northern Kenya’s rangelands, inhibiting grass growth in a landscape with poor rainfall.

There will be no grass with opuntia. No grass means no livestock. With no livestock, we cannot feed our children

Priscilla Kilua

Here in Laikipia county, some studies indicate the cactus has taken over 50-75% of communal grazing fields. It is listed among the 100 worst invasive alien species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

To the largely pastoralist community living within Naibunga community conservancy, the thorny plant is a deadly enemy. It lacerates the mouths of livestock and causes blindness, as its fine spines, or glochids, get lodged in animals’ eyes. The indigestible seeds also clog the animals’ intestines and, unable to feed, they become emaciated and die.

“This is our only hope,” says Florence Liosoi, a mother of five from the nearby Il Pollei group ranch as she dips her hand into a bucket of cochineal (Dactylopius opuntiae), a scale insect or “true bug” bred in greenhouses here and released to suck the sap out of the cactus and kill it.

Cochineal is an hemiptera insect that which dye carmine is extracted. 

Photograph: agefotostock/Alamy

The insects only eat Opuntia stricta and do not harm other forms of vegetation. The bug was imported from South Africa where it was used to control the spread of the plant in Kruger national park. In Laikipia, the bug was quarantined and trials were held in nearby Ol Jogi wildlife conservancy before it was released to the wider areas being swallowed up by the cactus.

Liosoi is among 20 women who collect cochineal-infested plants from the greenhouse and place them next to uninfected cacti in the fields. They then return to the greenhouse with fresh cacti to be covered with cochineal. It is a delicate process that leaves the women with itchy hands and legs.

NRT regional director Jacqueline Nalenoi. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Jacqueline Nalenoi, a director with the Northern Rangelands Trust, an organisation that helps people combat the spread of the plant, says involving women in the control of the plant is crucial, since they are the ones who suffer most when fragile economies collapse due to land degradation. She says: “When livestock die, it is the women who lack the daily necessities of life such as food and proper shelter. When children get constipation as a result of eating the fruits of the cactus, it is the women who care for them. Even when there was little money to fight the invasive plant at the height of Covid-19, it was the women who volunteered to grow cochineal in the greenhouses and take it to the fields.”

Local people say the cactus was introduced here as an ornamental hedging plant by a British colonial administrator who served in nearby Dol Dol in the 1950s. Unlike indigenous plants, the cactus has no local name, so people just call it imatundai, or fruity plant in the Samburu language. “It is nutritious,” says Nalenoi. “People would eat the fruits during drought, but nobody knew how dangerous it would be to the ecosystem. It is also beautiful and made for a good potted plant. It is now threatening the existence of a whole community.”

Baboons cleverly roll cactus fruits in the dirt to brush off the thorns and fine hairs that can cause infections and digestive issues.

 Photograph: Gina Rodgers/Alamy

Ironically, the largely successful elephant conservation programme in Laikipia has contributed to the rapid spread of the invader. After feeding on the succulent plant with no observable harmful effects, elephants help spread the seeds through their dung to far-flung regions. “A single elephant can spread at least 2,000 seeds a day,” says Nalenoi. “In addition, small chunks of the cactus that break off the main plant can grow independently with very little water, hence the spread of the cactus in arid northern Kenya.”

Olive baboons and birds also help propagate the seeds after feeding on the plants’ reddish-purple fruits.

Harrison Saikong has lost over 100 sheep as a result of the animals feeding on Opuntia stricta. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Harrison Saikong is walking his sheep along the dusty road past Munishoi village, the harsh midday sun shining down on him. It is his third day away from home, and he has walked close to 50km in search of water and pasture. In arid Laikipia, both are hard to come by and his livestock want to feed on the cactus instead.

“This plant has finished my herd,” says Saikong, 32, sheltering under an acacia tree. He lifts a sheep to show its badly lacerated and smelly mouth. “I used to have 180 sheep before many of them died after consuming this thing. I have lost 20 sheep on this journey alone. Only 40 are left.”

A cow feeds on Opuntis stricta in Naibunga conservancy. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

While elephants have accelerated the spread, unsustainable grazing practices and the climate crisis have degraded large sections of the rangelands, giving space for the cactus to take hold. In an area where livestock determines social status, it is not easy to persuade herders to offload their animals during drought and restock when conditions allow.

This becomes apparent at the home of George Sintaroi, a few kilometres down the road. His emaciated herd of cows includes some too thin to stand for long. Like Saikong, Sintaroi, 68, lost at least 20 cows through eating the plant. “I am not sure how long these ones will stay alive,” he says. “Look at this field. There is not a blade of grass, but bare earth. Opuntia is all around, and even the rains might not be of much help.” Sintaroi is trying to hold on to his remaining flock, competing for the meagre resources with wild animals, including a herd of elephants foraging near his village.


‘It’s a struggle for survival’: why Kenya – and its wildlife – need tourists to return

Sammy Leseita, director of livelihood at the Northern Rangelands Trust, says continued degradation of land will lead to unstable economies and conflict over resources. While his organisation has been helping local people mitigate the effects of climate crisis by providing watering holes, Leseita says practising sustainable livestock keeping will help stem the tide.

“Overgrazing leads to poor breeds that fetch little in the market. You have a pastoralist keeping 300 cows without enough body mass that butchers prefer. It is better to keep 20 cows that will be more profitable. Large herds only contribute to land degradation, as grass never gets a chance to produce seed since it is eaten up before reproduction,” says Leseita.

A Samburu woman removes cactus plants in Naibunga Upper Conservancy. 

Photograph: Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images
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But people around Naibunga conservancy are at a crossroad. They need livestock to survive, but the animals fall victim to the cactus. They would like to earn money from tourism, but elephants, which are key attractions in Laikipia, are super-spreaders of Opuntia stricta seeds. “Sometimes it feels like we are just going round and round,” says Priscilla Kilua, one of the women in the team. “There will be no grass with opuntia. No grass means no livestock. With no livestock, we cannot feed and clothe our children.

“Opuntia must go. If not, then one day we shall tell our children that we used to rear goats.”

This article was amended on 6 June 2022. An earlier version incorrectly referred to cochineal as beetles; they are in fact true bugs, in the order Hemiptera and suborder Sternorrhyncha.

OLD THINGS ARE NEW AGAIN

Kate Bush thanks Stranger Things fans as Running Up That Hill climbs charts


Singer celebrates ‘fantastic, gripping’ show in a rare statement, after her 37-year-old song entered the UK top 10

‘It’s all really exciting!’ wrote Kate Bush after an episode of Stranger Things introduced her song Running Up That Hill to a whole new generation of listeners. 

Photograph: Peter Mazel/Sunshine/Rex


Sian Cain
THE GUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022

Kate Bush has said it is “really exciting” that her song Running Up That Hill has reentered music charts around the world, 37 years after release, due to it appearing in an episode of Stranger Things.

Issuing a rare statement to thank her legions of new fans, the musician wrote on her website on Sunday: “You might’ve heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of Stranger Things has recently been released on Netflix. It features the song, Running Up That Hill which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show – I love it too!


The strangest thing? Why Kate Bush is back at the top of the charts

“Because of this, Running Up That Hill is charting around the world and has entered the UK chart at No. 8. It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song. I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July.”

Running Up That Hill plays a key role in the latest season of Stranger Things, being the favourite song of the character Max, played by Sadie Sink, and appearing as a motif throughout. The song has become a particular hit among Gen Zers, who were not born when the song was first released in 1985, appearing in TikTok after TikTok since Friday.

After the song appeared in the Netflix show last week, Running Up That Hill reached No 8 in the UK charts, based on streams and downloads, three decades after it reached No 3 on its initial release. Running Up That Hill also re-entered the UK charts in 2012 after it was used in the closing ceremony of the London Olympics.

Running Up That Hill is also the most-streamed song on Spotify in the US and the UK, just shy of Harry Styles’ As It Was in Spotify’s global chart, and in the same No 2 position on Apple Music. The song is also expected to place highly in the US charts, which are announced on Tuesday.

Lou Reed’s earliest Velvet Underground demos unearthed for reissue

Recordings from May 1965 were sealed for nearly 50 years, and reveal folk-like renditions of songs including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin

Lou Reed performing with the Velvet Underground in 1966. 

Photograph: Adam Ritchie/Redferns

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 6 Jun 2022 

Lou Reed’s earliest versions of some of the Velvet Underground’s greatest songs, including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin, have been unearthed and will be released in August.

The US record label Light in the Attic, in partnership with Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson, will release Words & Music, May 1965 as the first album in a new archival series.

It features demos of songs that Reed recorded with future Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, and mailed to himself in a notarised package as a way of securing copyright on the recordings without filing the official paperwork. The five-inch reel-to-reel recordings remained sealed for nearly 50 years and have been heard by almost no one before.

Reed performs the songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica, with Cale adding vocal harmonies, making the performances more akin to the folk music of the time than the avant garde rock that the Velvet Underground would soon pioneer. Two months later, in July 1965, guitarist Sterling Morrison had joined the group for another round of demos, by November they were called the Velvet Underground, and by December their lineup was finalised with Maureen Tucker on drums.

Of the songs demoed in May 1965, I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin would end up on their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, while Pale Blue Eyes would be released in a substantially different version on the band’s self-titled 1969 album.

Some of the lyrics on the May 1965 demos also deviate from the later versions: the demo of Heroin opens with the line: “I know just where I’m going,” and has some distinctive Reed lines that didn’t make the finished recording: “People selling people pound by pound / And the politicians and the clowns / And the do-gooders with their frowns.”

Writing the liner notes for the release, US rock critic Greil Marcus said: “The poverty in these songs – the bathtub-in-the-kitchen you hear in their clumsiness, the fifth-floor-walkup you can hear in their defiance – lets you hear them, now, as chalk on a wall, not the markings that wash away in the next rain but inscriptions that somehow become part of the brick, even if in a year or two no one will be able to read them.”

The reissue also features Reed-penned songs that have never been recorded since, such as the doo-wop-tinged Too Late, and the R&B track Buzz Buzz Buzz. Another folk-tinged song, Men of Good Fortune, shares a title with a track from Reed’s solo album Berlin but is completely different. Included with some versions of the reissue are unheard Reed songs from home recording sessions in 1963 or 1964, plus doo-wop number Gee Whiz, recorded by Reed in 1958 when he was 16 years old.

 

Words & Music, May 1965 will also be available on single LP, CD, cassette and 8-track formats, as well as on streaming and download services. Clips of the songs can be heard now on Light in the Attic’s website.

‘The beginning of a conversation’: the Met examines a complex history of emancipation art

Installation view of Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. 

Photograph: Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met

In a new exhibition, the popularity of antislavery art is revisited with a critical eye on what is being shown and why it’s being celebrated

Walker Mimms

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

Museum exhibitions are traditionally about objects. But in a provocatively commentated show of Black portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries, the Met confronts itself.

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast centers on Why Born Enslaved!, the bust Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux modelled in 1868 and produced in popular editions thereafter. Life-size, she is bound at the chest with rope, glowering upwards in knowledge and pain – a captive with no doubts of the crime she’s been dealt.



‘It’s so joyful and full of promise’: a modernism exhibition aims for hope

The Met already owned Carpeaux’s terracotta version of the famous work. Then a rare marble (one of two from his studio) went on sale in 2018. “When the opportunity to acquire this bust came up,” Elyse Nelson, the conceiver and co-curator of the show, told me, “we acquired it with the idea that this could be the lynchpin for an exhibition.”

“Sculpture requires patronage, requires wealthy patrons, so is often associated with the state,” Nelson explained. That state, the court of Napoleon III, was very proud of the emancipation decree from back in 1846, a generation before America’s. Carpeaux’s work offered a belated congratulations to France. The emperor was among its first buyers.

But when art is tied to regimes — especially regimes as grabby as the Second Empire – it has trouble gaining our trust. There was something unclean about the Met’s acquisition: by purchasing an enslaved woman, the show’s catalog asks, “can we be other than complicit in the aestheticization of slavery?”

In this spirit, the show interrogates Carpeaux across his early sketches of the bust, his marble, his earlier versions, and his renderings of a larger public work related to her. It must be the fullest examination ever staged of his iconic sculpture.

For the catalog Wendy S Walters, a professor of non-fiction at Columbia and Nelson’s co-curator, explores the work as a record of subjection, even fetishization. “We have historically understood enslavement,” Walters explained to me, “to think that the sexual component of enslavement was separate from the work component.” They were not.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875) Why Born Enslaved!, modeled 1868, carved 1873. 

Photograph: Paul Lachenauer/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Wrightsman Fellows, and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation

Walters argues that Carpeaux revisits that sexual component a little too readily: the hyperrealism where rope meets breast, the artist’s alleged aggression toward women, his commodification of a slave’s likeness for financial gain and political favor.

Viewers will leave either outraged by such politicization of art or equipped with a more nuanced understanding of the touchy era following abolition, a time when European heads of state made grand gestures toward equality while they plotted the Scramble for Africa.

Carpeaux’s contemporaries appear and give him context. Familiar works by Charles Cordier field unsparing questions about the white gaze. Once a gem of the collection, the Black man of Jean-Leon Gérome’s Bashi Bazouk (1868-69) still adorns the cover of the Met’s official guidebook, but now it is scrutinized “through the prism of European imperialism”.

One of the show’s virtues is to reach back before Carpeaux, to the golden era of protest when his abolitionist vocabulary was first being forged. One display is devoted to Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter whose medallion from 1787 took off like wildfire among activists of the time. No bigger than a thumbprint, it shows a Black man chained and begging for our sympathy. Here he is reproduced on a glass cologne bottle, on a pearlware jug, and on a gilded seal fob modified to show a female slave.

Though Wedgwood’s intentions were good and his timing ingenious, such finery smacks of the black Instagram square, the corporate pledge to “do better”, the pint of Juneteenth ice cream.

The most illuminating guest is Jean-Antoine Houdon, Carpeaux’s forebear in marble. Locals have long admired Houdon’s Bather (1782) in the Met’s sun-drenched court of European sculpture. Braced for a splash, the bather is lovely – the arch of her outstretched foot fixed nimbly on a stone, a detail both structural and emotive.

Jean-Antoine Houdon - Head of a Woman, circa 1781.

 Photograph: Musée Municipal de Soissons / Bertrand Coutellier

It turns out she didn’t wash alone. The bather was commissioned for a fountain in the forty-five-acre pleasure garden (now the Parc Monceau) of the King’s cousin, the duc d’Orleans. Above her originally stood a Black woman carved in lead, a servant who pumped water through a ewer onto the pure white back of her stone mistress.

Though the servile half of the fountain disappeared during the Revolution, a plaster of her head appears on loan from Soissons. Far from Houdon’s famous realism (see his exquisite Ben Franklin in the American wing), this head depicts a simplified, obsequious, very unfortunate, smiling mammy.

Worse, when France freed her slaves the first time, in 1794, Houdon converted his slave’s likeness into terracotta, scrawled an abolitionist caption into her base, and mass-produced her as a souvenir of emancipation. The Met have brought out their copy of this miniature for the show.

Here is expert curation: the plaster slave, the clay freedwoman, the implied connection to the marble mistress across the wing. “I think this project changed me as an art historian,” Nelson said of such timebombs. “I think that this is just the beginning of a conversation, and that a larger conversation could follow.”

If the parable of Houdon teaches anything, it’s how greasily the feudal values of the ancien régime could masquerade as liberalism. These masqueraded in artist and patron alike: having installed Houdon’s “happy slave” fountain in his wonderland, the duc d’Orleans, one of the richest men in France, renounced his title when revolution arrived and rebranded himself “Philippe Egalité”. (The guillotine got him anyway.)

The curators believe Houdon’s cheap intentions with his smiling slave “served as precedents” for Carpeaux 90 years later. But Why Born Enslaved! is not so easily reduced – not quite.

Yes, Carpeaux’s patrons, like Houdon’s opportunist duc, were the worst kinds of virtue signalers. While Napoleon III sent troops to steal Mexico from behind the back of a war-torn America (a Union general had to shoo them out), his empress used her bronze of Why Born Enslaved! to broadcast republican sentiment back home.

And yes, Carpeaux borrowed from his own racialized fountain, his globe allegory in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris (1874). Now anonymous, the sitter for Why Born Enslaved! was visibly the same woman who modelled his “Africa” in that monumental public work. The chain around Africa’s ankle might well be construed as a degrading and irrelevant icon. “That was very common,: an emancipated figure, even decades after abolition, would still be carrying the vestiges of their captivity,” Walters explained.

Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977) After La Négresse, 1872, 

2006 Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

For context, Walters and Nelson include earlier “four continents” allegories in porcelain and on paper. For all its realism, Carpeaux’s fountain – and by extension his bust – derived from a time-worn menu of ethnic tropes that put Europa first.

But these facts cannot dim the absolute electricity of the woman’s gaze. Against her ropes she spins sharply to the left, and as you spin with her, encircling a back-to-back display of the terracotta and the later marble, you’ll detect from that early draft to the final one a faint sharpening of her brow — as if a wound that began in entreaty has hardened into reproach. Against the glib Wedgwood and the shameless Houdon, Carpeaux creates nothing less than a human.

Janet Jackson owned a reproduction, Beyoncé posed with one, and Kehinde Wiley depends on the sincerity of Carpeaux’s original for the strength of his own homage, which is wisely on display: a small bust critiquing exploitation in modern sports.

Carpeaux’s endurance, as this searching and feisty exhibition makes clear, can and should exist alongside the paternalizing traditions and the dirty money in spite of which his work took such vivid life.

“The figures themselves carry multiple valences,” Walters offered, “and if we allow them to carry multiple valences, then we’re really starting to think critically about what representation is, which to me seems to be the purview of a museum.”

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 5 March 2023

Anticyclone Scipio turns up heat in Mediterranean and north Africa

Analysis: Andalucía in Spain could exceed 40C this week, with parts of Italy and Africa also affected

Searing heat in Cádiz, an ancient port city in Andalucía, south-western Spain. Photograph: Juan Carlos Toro/Getty Images


Alice Fowler (Metdesk)Mon 6 Jun 2022

Extreme and prolonged heat engulfing parts of Spain, Italy and north Africa shows no signs of easing this week. Anticyclone Scipio has been bringing hot air from Africa to the central Mediterranean, causing weeks of scorching temperatures.

An anticyclone – an area of high pressure – is the opposite of a cyclone. Some countries name anticyclones if they are likely to bring severe weather such as searing heat. This is similar to the way most countries, including the UK, name areas of low pressure, or cyclones, if they bring severe weather in the form of heavy rain or strong winds.

Temperatures are forecast to reach the high 30s Celsius across the Mediterranean, with some parts of Spain, Italy and north Africa in the low 40s. The Andalucía region of Spain is predicted to exceed 40C most days this week – about 4-5C above the climate average.

While anticyclonic heat is not unusual in the Mediterranean, the unrelenting nature of this event has brought an early and dramatic start to the summer, with healthcare centres in the Canary Islands and Balearics on high alert.

People cool off by a fountain in Piazza del Popolo, Rome, as Anticyclone Scipio raises temperatures in Italy. 

Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA

Meanwhile, low pressure across east Asia will bring high rainfall totals to parts of south-eastern China, Taiwan and Japan. At first, the downpours – more than 60mm on Tuesday – will hit Guangdong and Fujian in China as well as northern Taiwan. But as low pressure drifts north-eastwards, torrential rain will extend from northern Taiwan and up the East China Sea before reaching the Kagoshima region of Japan before the weekend. Daily rainfall could reach 65-80mm in these areas, bringing a significant risk of flooding.

Torrential rain in south-eastern China in the past two weeks has killed 15 people in landslides and building collapses. Heavy rain has also damaged roads, bridges and telecommunications facilities in Yunnan province and Guangxi.

Further south, significant rain is expected across South Island, also known as Te Waipounamu, in New Zealand. Its northern coastline including the Southern Alps could experience more than 50mm of rain a day between Tuesday and Thursday, with further downpours expected this weekend. Cumulative rainfall totals for the northern coastline could exceed 250-300mm this week.

Of course French police and politicians lied and smeared UK football fans. That’s what they do

In France, the violence meted out at the Champions League final and the cover-up that followed were tragically familiar

Riot police keep an eye on Liverpool fans at the Champions League final at the Stade de France.

 Photograph: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images

Fabrice Arfi

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022 

There is a proverb in French: “A quelque chose malheur est bon.” It roughly equates to “Every cloud has a silver lining.” In that sense – and I mean no offence, above all, not to Liverpool supporters – I think something positive emerged from the fiasco of the Champions League final in Paris on 28 May, when the club’s fans were unfairly blamed for chaotic and terrifying scenes outside the Stade de France.

It is that the world finally knows that there exists a country where people who cause no trouble – including children who had simply come to watch their idols play football – can be teargassed and abused by police for no justifiable reason. A country where those exercising the highest political office are able to peddle absolute nonsense in an attempt to extricate themselves from the controversy, without fear of consequence. That country is mine, France.

At last, amid continuing outrage, with British and Spanish officials and politicians, and thousands of fans and families, still calling for apologies and explanations, the world can perhaps understand what we French journalists have been trying to document for several years, most notably since Emmanuel Macron arrived in office in 2017. Here are but a few examples.

On 1 December 2018 in Marseille, 80-year-old Zineb Redouane was struck in the head by a teargas grenade when she went to shutter a window in her fourth-floor flat because of a demonstration taking place in the street below. Video images pointed to the firing of that grenade by a police officer. She died the next day in hospital. The police never identified the officer who fired the grenade, and the government did nothing.

On 23 March 2019, in Nice, 73-year-old Geneviève Legay, a feminist and anti-capitalist activist, was peacefully taking part in a demonstration against Macron and his government. When a police charge caused her to fall, she suffered serious head injuries, including bleeding on the brain. “This woman had had no contact with the forces of law and order,” declared Macron two days later. With contempt, he added: “I wish her a swift recovery and, perhaps, a sort of wisdom.” He had lied – a judicial investigation established she was indeed a victim of the police action. For having revealed details of the case, a journalist with the investigative team I co-lead at Mediapart was summoned for questioning by police. Again, the government did nothing.

On 21 June 2019 in Nantes, Steve Maia Caniço, 24, joined a dance party on a quay beside the River Loire during France’s yearly music festivities, the Fête de la musique. During the night, the police violently attempted to disperse the partygoers, causing 14 of them to fall into the river. The body of Maia Caniço was discovered in the water one month later and the initial police report concluded his death was unrelated to the police charge. A judicial investigation has since found to the contrary. The government, again, did nothing.


Fury in France as Champions League final chaos tarnishes nation’s global image

I could also mention how police forced a group of school pupils protesting about education reforms to kneel on the ground with hands behind their heads like prisoners of war, or incidents of police hitting firefighters during a demonstration over working conditions, and dragging protesting nurses along the ground. Not forgetting the 30 people who lost an eye, and six others who lost a hand, during the “yellow vest” protests – and all those times when the government did and said nothing.

But when it does say something, this is what it sounds like. In March 2019, Macron, apparently inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, said: “Don’t talk about police repression and violence, such words are unacceptable in a state of law.”

In February 2020, Macron’s then interior minister, Christophe Castaner, infamous for having once falsely claimed that May Day demonstrators “attacked” a Paris hospital, declared: “I like order in this country and I defend the police … And in my words there are no ‘buts’. I defend them, and that’s all.”

And what can be said of the comment by Castaner’s successor, Gérald Darmanin, who blamed the Champions League disturbances on “industrial-scale” ticket fraud and said more than 30-40,000 Liverpool fans had fake tickets or no tickets outside the stadium.

Speaking before parliament in July 2020, Darmanin pronounced: “When I hear talk of police violence, I choke.” The remark was particularly cynical, made just two months after the death of George Floyd in the US after his neck was compressed by a police officer, and six months after the death in Paris of deliveryman Cédric Chouviat who, in a roadside police check that got out of hand, cried out “I’m suffocating” seven times to officers lying on top of him.

The message I want to send here is that behind the loud controversy that continues to surround the Champions League final, the violence and the near disaster, lies the silence of a familiar, practised French strategy. It ensures wrongdoing is never punished, and police offenders are never brought to book.

Fabrice Arfi is a French journalist with co-responsiblity for investigations at the website Mediapart

From hunger striker to MP candidate: the rise of France’s ‘humanist baker’


Between 15 hours of baking and three hours’ sleep, Stéphane Ravacley is trying to knead a little faith back into French politics

Stephane Ravacley in 2021 during his campaign to save his Guinean apprentice from deportation. Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

Angelique Chrisafis in Besançon

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

After dark in a bakery kitchen, Stéphane Ravacley was bashing blocks of butter with a giant rolling pin as he prepared his croissant pastry. “A lot of French people have lost faith in politics,” he said, shaping the first of 500 croissants. “They’re not voting, they don’t feel listened to, and it’s my battle to win them back.”

The 53-year-old baker who hails from what he calls the “bottom rung of the social ladder” has captured France’s imagination as one of the most improbable newcomers in this weekend’s first round of the parliamentary elections.


Ravacley’s outsider challenge to Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party in the Doubs near the Swiss border in eastern France is focusing attention on the newly re-elected president’s image problem as being aloof, especially concerning people’s everyday worries.

Macron is seeking a centrist parliamentary majority in order to have a free hand for his policies, such as raising the pension age and overhauling the benefits system. But turnout on 12 and 19 June is expected to be at a record low of less than 48% amid a growing mistrust of the political class. Some voters feel that the real battle will take place with street demonstrations against Macron’s policies from the autumn, so there’s “not much point” in voting, as one unemployed man said on a housing estate in the eastern town of Besançon.

Stephane Ravacley (centre) delivers a speech during a campaign meeting in Besançon on 15 May.

 Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

A historic alliance of parties on the left, led by the radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is seeking to make big parliament gains, and is predicted by pollsters to triple its seats and become the main opposition to Macron’s centrists. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is also seeking to increase its seats.

Ravacley, who does not belong to a political party, is running for parliament for the leftwing alliance, backed by the Greens. He argues that the French parliament, which is overwhelmingly middle-class with a high level of formal education, needs more working-class, manual labourers who understand the way French people think. He grew up in eastern France, in a poor family who worked the cereal fields. His mother died in a tractor accident when he was four, leaving his father with three children.

Ravacley is known as the “humanist baker of Besançon”. He became famous last year for going on hunger strike in defence of his Guinean bakery apprentice, Laye Fodé Traoré, an orphan who had arrived in France as an unaccompanied minor aged 16, but faced deportation when he turned 18. Ravacley’s protest tapped into national concern for unaccompanied minor migrants. Stars including the actors Omar Sy and Marion Cotillard signed an open letter to Macron on his behalf. Still, it took 11 days of hunger strike and Ravacley’s sudden hospitalisation for the authorities to make contact and begin processing Traoré’s paperwork, allowing him to stay.

“When I went on hunger strike, I was initially met with silence from the authorities and that changed me as a person,” Ravacley said. “I’ve become a monster now – a kind and gentle monster – I really understand that if you want to change things you have to fight for it.”

Stéphane Ravacley working with Guinean apprentice Laye Fode Traoré in January 2021 after the baker’s campaign to save him from deportation ended in victory. 

Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

The baker’s campaign schedule is gruelling. He works on his croissants until 10pm, sleeps three hours, rises at 1.30 am to bake bread for his shop until midday, briefly naps, then sets off in his old Renault Twingo full of flour-sacks as he canvasses in his eastern constituency that spreads from the housing estates of Besançon to the small villages outside.

Ravacley still supports migrants who arrived as unaccompanied minors, as well as French young people leaving the care system, which has opened him to far right attacks. Last week, one of his election posters was sprayed with the Nazi swastika and racist slurs. “I’ll never give in to hate,” he said.

In an election described by pollsters as lacklustre and dull, Ravacley has become a high-profile figure. During last month’s Cannes film festival, the Dardenne brothers directing-duo, whose latest film is about young migrants in Belgium, dedicated their film to Ravacley. They called his hunger strike a “great act of resistance in our era”.

Ravacley said: “I was rolling out my croissants, as usual at that time of night, the phone rang and someone said: ‘Put on the TV, they’re talking about you at Cannes.’ Incredible.”

The town of Besançon, run by a Green mayor since 2020, saw a high vote for the left’s Mélenchon in the presidential race – he topped the poll in the first round, beating Macron and Le Pen. Ravacley’s challenge is whether the new leftwing alliance can now persuade voters to turn out again in the parliamentary elections, particularly on housing estates where abstention is high.

On the estates of Besançon’s Clairs-Soleils neighbourhood, as Ravacley knocked on doors, people said their biggest concern was making ends meet, as well as the climate crisis, but that trust in politics was low.

Outside a primary school, Ahmed, 32, an accountant collecting his two daughters, said he recognised Ravacley from TV. “It’s important to have someone in parliament who understands people’s everyday concerns, and we’re really struggling with the cost of food and petrol,” he said. “If I vote, I’ll vote for him. But I’m not really sure if it’s worth voting any more, nothing ever changes.”

Nabia Hakkar-Boyer, a regional councillor for the Socialist party, and Ravacley’s runningmate, said: “He comes across as down to earth and different to other candidates. He looks like the voters themselves, and he understands their lives. He always has flour on his trousers and he works more than 15 hours a day.”

Since the gilets jaunes anti-government protests of Macron’s first term, there has been a demand for “ordinary citizens” to play more of a role in political decision-making. Under pressure, Macron promised this month that he would set up a vast democratic consultation with the French people, but he is yet to spell out in what form.

Ravacley is not the only citizen protester who has turned parliamentary candidate this year. Rachel Keke, a hotel housekeeper who led a two-year strike for better conditions for cleaners at a hotel on the edge of Paris, is running for the left alliance east of the capital.

Meanwhile, Ravacley has even made his flour-encrusted, worn-down work shoes a campaign argument. “I’ll go to the National Assembly in my magic shoes,” he said. “They keep my feet on the ground.”

Polio outbreak in Pakistan worsens as eighth child reported paralysed


Investigation launched as first cases in a year blamed on vaccine refusal fuelled by clerics and falsification of records by parents

A child’s finger is inked to show a polio dose has been given. Some health workers are said to be helping parents avoid vaccinations by falsely marking a child’s fingers. Photograph: K Chaudary/AP


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Haroon Janjua
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

Pakistan’s polio eradication campaign is in disarray after an alarming jump in cases last week. Eight polio cases have now been reported in children over the past month in North Waziristan district, bordering Afghanistan. They are the first cases in more than a year.

This new outbreak, officials believe, is due to parents falsely marking themselves and their children as vaccinated, and the government has launched an investigation into the outbreak.

North Waziristan is a former Taliban stronghold in north-west Pakistan, where high vaccine refusal rates are thought to be behind the new cases.

“Fake markings and refusals are two key reasons in the recent outbreak, with polio staff conspiring with parents to miss the vaccination,” said Zulfiqar Babakhel, of Pakistan’s polio eradication programme, referring to how parents suspicious of immunisation have got hold of special pens used by health workers to mark vaccinated children’s fingers.

Dr Shahzad Baig, national programme coordinator, said: “The cases are highlighting exactly where the challenges lie, and we are doing our utmost to ensure that the virus remains contained and we fight it till the end.”

Before this surge, the last case of child paralysis as a result of polio was reported in January last year.

The federal health minister, Abdul Qadir Patel, said: “Following the first two cases in April, the polio programme took immediate steps to ringfence this area and prevent the virus from spreading further, particularly in the historic reservoirs [of infection] of Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta.

“Pakistan has had tremendous success against polio over the past few years, and we are taking all steps to protect the gains made by the programme.”

It was crucial for parents to vaccinate their children every time it was due, said the minister, as every dose of polio vaccine built further immunity.

Nationwide vaccination drives have been carried out door-to-door for the past 25 years. The teams are mostly female health workers, often volunteers, who have to be escorted by security guards.

Three such campaigns have been carried out in January, March and May this year. During the March campaign in north-western Pakistan, gunmen shot and killed a female polio worker. In January, also in the north-west, assailants shot and killed a police officer providing security to the polio team.

Militant groups in Pakistan have killed more than 100 health workers and their security guards since 2012.

According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan is one of only two countries, with Afghanistan, where the wild polio virus is still endemic.


Spectre of polio returns to haunt Pakistan as baby boy is left paralysed

Anti-vaccination sentiment in Pakistan is deeply rooted. Clerics and others have spread myths that vaccines are a conspiracy by the west to sterilise Muslim children, and a husband was allowed to divorce his wife for vaccinating their children against polio.

In April 2019, more than 25,000 children were rushed to hospital during a mass panic in north-west Pakistan after the spread of unfounded rumours about polio vaccines causing fainting and vomiting.