Ask Janice: 

Drunk tarot reader put a spell on me and now bad things are happening

BUNKO ARTIST

Janice Bell
Sun, 7 April 2024

Image taken from Pixabay (Image: Image taken from Pixabay)

Drunk tarot reader put a spell on me and now bad things are happening...

Dear Janice, I was coerced into a tarot card reading at a party, and was told that some doom and gloom would happen, which was unexpected because my life was great.

At the end of the reading, this drunk woman said she didn’t like my aura and that she’d put a spell on me.

We laughed it off, but since then I’ve lost my bank card, smashed my mobile and I’ve sprained my ankle. Surely all these things can’t be a coincidence?

I want to pay this woman a visit and ask her to take the spell off me, but my friend said I should wait and hope my luck changes.

What do you think?

 Charlene.


Dear Charlene, whether you believed the reading or not, it has certainly got to you, so you could say her spell worked!

At the end of the party everyone was drunk, and alcohol changes perspectives and mindsets, so take her dislike of you and her spell with a pinch of salt.

If you focus on negative things, negative things happen, but I bet if you look back there will have been good things too.

Ignore this intoxicated tarot reading stranger, who no doubt had a laugh at your expense and a kick out of playing the power card for the night.

Stay well clear and don’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she has upset you.

Instead, make your own spells (positive affirmations), and get on with your happy life.

UK Foreign Office ‘elitist and rooted in the past’, says new report

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

THE GUARDIAN
Sun, 7 April 2024 

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Whitehall, London. The report suggests modernising the premises.
Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

A powerful new international department would help Britain adapt to being a middle-rank power and shed a Foreign Office identity that is “somewhat elitist and rooted in the past”, says a damning report by some of the UK’s leading diplomats.

The report, clearly directed at an incoming mission-based Labour government, has been written by the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill, the former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher and the former director general at the Foreign Office Moazzam Malik, among others.

It urges that 1% of gross national income is devoted to international engagement, including aid, to complement the commitment to 2% of GDP on defence spending.

The report, entitled The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s approach to International Affairs, says the Foreign Office was “struggling to deliver a clear mandate, prioritisation and resource allocation”, adding: “The Foreign Office all too often operates like a giant private office for the foreign secretary of the day, responding to the minister’s immediate concerns and ever-changing in-tray.

“The merger of Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, to create the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), was presented as an opportunity to leverage the strengths of both departments: short-term diplomacy and a long term strategic focus on real world challenges. But it has struggled to deliver. A more effective approach requires a sustained focus on the international challenges that will shape the UK’s prosperity and security.”

The report continues: “The physical surroundings [of the Foreign Office headquarters] also hint at the Foreign Office’s identity: somewhat elitist and rooted in the past. Modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial-era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future.”

It suggests a model similar to Canada and Australia, where a revamped international department has a strategic oversight over not just aid and diplomacy, but the climate emergency and trade.

The report says: “We cannot simply brush aside concerns around the UK’s historical legacy and questions of nationhood. The exit from the EU has opened many questions, including in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

“Former colonies are making increasingly vocal demands around the need for reparations from colonialism and compensation for the loss and damage arising from historical industrial emissions.”

The paper goes on to state that discrepancies “between our domestic and international conduct on issues such as climate change and human rights not only exposes us to accusations of hypocrisy on the world stage but also weakens the institutions and values essential to the UK’s interests”.

It suggests: “The UK has often sought to project an image of ‘greatness’ to the world that today seems anachronistic. We will be envied for what we are good at, not what we say that we are good at. This means the state working hand-in-hand with our universities, our creative sector, our sports bodies, news and civil society organisations, so they can serve as effective ambassadors for the UK and maximise the country’s considerable ‘soft power’.”

Calling for greater realism as a middle-rank off-shore nation, the paper says the UK “should not always see ourselves as the leader in efforts to tackle global challenges. UK convening power has achieved significant results. But effective solutions to global problems in a multi-polar world need a wider array of leaders. We should give space, be more of a ‘team player’, showing humility and respect, ready to follow and support wherever appropriate.”

In his foreword to the report, Sedwill says: “For the past decade, we have been wrestling with our national identity, to the bewilderment of our allies and the glee of our adversaries.”

He says the task is to harness the country’s strengths – including possessing the world’s sixth-largest economy, some of the best universities, world-class diplomatic, intelligence and security services, a formidable military and a leading international development network.

The report says: “As we move towards 2040 and beyond, the UK will not be able to rely on just its traditional alliances with the US and Europe to defend interests in the same way. Globally, economic and geopolitical power will be more diffuse as regionally strong countries – ‘middle powers’ – exert greater influence over international affairs.

“This does not mean that the UK will retreat from existing alliances, but we will need to build new issue-based alliances with states whose interests and values may be less closely aligned. We have historically under-invested in our relationships with Asia and are at risk of doing the same with Africa now.”

Medieval monks’ night staircase rebuilt at Furness Abbey


Mark Brown North of England correspondent

THE GUARDIAN
Sun, 7 April 2024 

Furness Abbey, on the outskirts of Barrow, was founded in the first half of the 12th century.Photograph: Stuart Walker/English Heritage

A staircase used by weary medieval monks when they had to file down from bed to their church services in the middle of the night has been rebuilt in some of the most atmospheric monastic ruins in England.

Exactly 900 years since it was first built and almost 500 years since it was destroyed, the night staircase has been reconstructed at Furness Abbey in Cumbria.

The project will give visitors extra insight into the daily lives of medieval monks, said Michael Carter, English Heritage’s senior properties historian.


Visitors can climb to what was the first-floor level of the monks’ dormitory and enjoy previously unseen views of ruins that have long captivated people, with JMW Turner and William Wordsworth having been two notable fans.

“Furness has some of the finest monastic ruins in England,” Carter said. Reinstating the night staircase recreates “an experience that was central in the lives of the medieval monks” as well as “giving visitors the unique opportunity to look back in time and see these remarkable ruins through the eyes of the monks themselves”, he said.

Furness Abbey, on the outskirts of Barrow, was founded in the first half of the 12th century by monks who had moved there from Preston, and it prospered, becoming the largest and wealthiest monastery in north-west England.

The night staircase was only ever used by the monks, to get from their cold, communal dormitory to the church for the daily matins service, which was usually between 1 and 2am.

They would have passed a statue of St Christopher strategically located to be the first thing they saw each day. “Seeing it provided them with protection from a bad death,” Carter said – as in one with an unconfessed mortal sin that would lead them to hell. It was also protection “against the tiredness brought about by daily toil”, Carter said. “The church would have been a very cold, dark space, so very easy to succumb to tiredness I think.”

The early morning service was one of eight that punctuated the monks’ day. After matins there was lauds at first light and prime at sunrise, all the way through to compline before bedtime, usually around 7pm.

A new timber structure has been put on the site of the original stairs, which were probably destroyed during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. The structure meets the original stone steps, allowing visitors to get previously unseen views of the ruins.

And it is the views that have drawn so many people over the years, notably Turner who loved scrambling over and drawing northern monastic ruins.

Wordsworth adored the abbey and did much to popularise it as a tourist destination in his Guide to the Lakes.

Other visitors have included Queen Victoria in 1848 – “so beautiful it was, and so extensive”, her lady in waiting recorded – and a young Teddy Roosevelt, the future US president, in 1869.

Carter said there was something special about Furness Abbey. “I remember the first time I ever went there, being blown away by the scale of the place and that beautiful red sandstone … it really is a dramatic site.”

He said so many monastic ruins in northern England were located in places where people had hard lives. They spoke to people in different and wonderful ways, he said. “OK, there have been the Turners and the Wordsworths at Furness loving the place, but equally it has been the docker, the shipbuilder, the miner, the factory worker on a day excursion … it has been somewhere which provides space to live.”

UK
Decriminalising abortion opposed by more than half the public, poll finds


Charles Hymas

THE (TORY) TELEGRAPH
Sun, 7 April 2024 

Diana Johnson's amendment means women would not be prosecuted if they end a pregnancy beyond 24-week legal limit 

- ER PRODUCTIONS LTD/GETTY IMAGES

More than half of the public oppose MPs’ plans to decriminalise abortion ahead of a major vote that could liberalise the law for the first time in a generation.

Exclusive polling shows 55 per cent of adults agree that it should remain illegal for a woman to abort a healthy baby after the current 24-week time limit. Only 16 per cent, fewer than one in six, agreed with the plans while 29 per cent said they preferred not to say or did not know.

More women than men believed it should remain a criminal offence, by a ratio of 57 per cent to 54 per cent. Seven in 10 adults (71 per cent) also agreed a year-long jail sentence for a woman last year who aborted her baby at between 32 and 34 weeks was “about right or too short”. Only 20 per cent thought it too long.

The ata, based on polling of 2011 adults, marks the start of what is expected to be a passionate debate over what could be the first major changes to abortion law in more than 30 years.

Two amendments – one liberalising the abortion law and one tightening it – have been tabled to the Criminal Justice Bill which is due to return to the Commons after the Easter recess. If they are allowed to proceed by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, all parties have said their MPs will be allowed a free vote as an issue of conscience.

One amendment, laid by Diana Johnson, Labour chair of the home affairs committee, would mean women would no longer be prosecuted if they ended their pregnancies beyond the 24-week legal time limit. It has so far gathered cross-party support from 35 MPs.

Women can be jailed under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act if they have an abortion outside set circumstances. As well as the mother of three jailed last year for an illegal abortion, about 100 women have faced police investigations since 2019.

Under the amendment, the 1861 law would no longer apply to women ending their pregnancies, although they would still have to abide by the requirements of the 1967 Abortion Act and the 24-week limit would remain intact. Doctors and nurses would still face prosecution if they assisted an abortion after 24 weeks.

It would bring England and Wales into line with Northern Ireland, where abortions were decriminalised in 2019. It is backed by the Royal Colleges of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, of GPs and of Midwives and the British Medical Association.

An amendment by Diana Johnson, Labour chair of the home affairs committee, has gathered cross-party support from 35 MPs - PA IMAGES/ALAMY

A YouGov poll showed 55 per cent of MPs also supported the change although the new polling by Whitestone Insight suggests MPs may be out of step with public opinion. It shows that more people are against than for decriminalisation across all age and social class groups.

The second amendment, put forward by Caroline Ansell, the Tory MP, and backed by 36 MPs, would cut the time limit from 24 to 22 weeks, on the basis that the survival rate for extremely premature babies born at 23 weeks has doubled from two in 10 to four in 10.

Twenty two weeks is now recognised by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine as the point of viability outside the womb. A poll by ComRes (now Savanta) found that 60 per cent of the public and 70 per cent of women support a reduction in the time limit to 20 weeks or below.

Critics of the decriminalisation proposal claim it would fuel late-term DIY procedures.

Catherine Robinson, a spokeswoman for Right to Life UK, said: “It would likely lead to a tragic increase in the number of babies’ lives being ended through late-term abortions performed at home, as well as the lives of many more women being endangered.

“This extreme and radical abortion law has no place in the UK. This polling clearly shows that the public do not support this change to the law. We are calling on MPs to reject Johnson’s amendment”.

Miriam Cates, co-chair of the New Conservatives group of MPs, who has backed a reduction to 22 weeks, said decriminalisation would “remove any consequence” for a pregnant woman who decided to terminate their baby after the current 24-week limit.

“Of course women who face unwanted late-term pregnancies should be offered help and support, but in a civilised and compassionate society we must not change the law to remove all rights and value from an unborn baby just a few weeks or days before birth,” said Ms Cates.

Ms Johnson has disputed the criticism, saying there is no evidence of a rise in late-term abortions since decriminalisation in countries including Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Australia or Canada.

“This amendment is only taking women out of the criminal justice system. If you look at somewhere like Texas which has very restrictive laws, they don’t criminalise women. They go after the abortion providers. We are out of step even with those countries that have stricter abortion laws,” she said.

Ms Johnson suggested that women who took abortion pills to have late miscarriages were women in the most vulnerable and difficult circumstances.

“It may be domestic abuse, coercive control. They may have been trafficked. The question is: do you believe they should be brought before the criminal law or should they be offered help and support,” she said.

UK

Sexual harassment survey reveals ‘appalling abuse’ of NHS staff


Michael Searles

THE TELEGRAPH
Mon, 8 April 2024 

Harassment of NHS staff

One in 10 NHS staff have been shown porn, offered money for sex or assaulted at work, a survey into sexual harassment has found.

The Unison union said 10 per cent of more than 12,200 health workers it surveyed had reported an unwanted incident, including being inappropriately touched or kissed, demanded sex in return for favours or received derogatory remarks.

A third of those who had suffered some form of harrassment reported it as sexual assault, while half said they were leered at or targeted with suggestive gestures.


One in four said they had suffered unwelcome sexual advances, propositions or demands for sexual favours.

Crude “banter” or “jokes” were the most common issue, reported by three in five workers who had experienced some form of harassment, according to the research.

More than half of the sexual harassment incidents experienced by NHS staff were at the hands of colleagues, while two in five were by patients, the survey found.

Despite the serious and even criminal nature of some of the incidents, half the staff had not reported sexual harassment to their employer, mainly through fear of being considered “over-sensitive” or a feeling that their employer would not act on their complaint.

Christina McAnea, the general secretary of Unison, says: 'No-one should ever have to endure such despicable behaviour, and certainly not in their place of work' - Geoff Pugh for The Telegraph

Incidents included a 111 adviser, herself a survivor of sexual abuse, who described being regularly harassed on the phone by anonymous callers. The only response from her managers was to be told it is just part of the job, said Unison.

A pathology technician in Yorkshire and Humberside said they had “witnessed complete blurred boundaries, observed kissing, men grabbing colleagues from behind and pushing themselves into them”.

She added: “I’ve experienced someone inappropriately stroking my arm, someone sneaking up behind me and jabbing their fingers into my ribs, and someone slapping my bum. I even had someone pushing a lock of hair behind my ear when I was alone with them.”

A nurse from the West Midlands said they had received comments “about my hair, how I look and how they would love to have sex with me, which reminded me of when I was raped at a young age by a male patient”.

A separate 111 call handler from Wales said members of the public call the emergency number and try to use it as “a sex line”.

“We have a ‘three warnings’ policy before we hang up. Sometimes I have to go through an entire call and assessment with a patient about a personal issue whilst they are making sexual comments and crude jokes the entire time,” they said.
‘More must be done to protect staff’

Christina McAnea, the union’s general secretary, said: “No-one should ever have to endure such despicable behaviour, and certainly not in their place of work.

“But NHS staff often put up with this appalling abuse, not reporting it because they don’t believe they’ll be taken seriously.

“More must be done to protect nurses, healthcare assistants, cleaners and other NHS staff from sexual harassment, reassure them their complaints will be fully investigated, and action taken against the perpetrators.

“Employers must take swift action when workers flag up incidents, regardless of whether the sexual harassment has come from a patient or a colleague. Otherwise, this completely unacceptable behaviour will simply continue.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “Sexual violence or misconduct of any kind is unacceptable and NHS organisations have a responsibility to protect both staff and patients.

“We have a zero tolerance approach and will continue to work with the NHS to ensure that they are taking measures to stop sexual assaults from happening, and to ensure staff feel comfortable raising concerns.

“We encourage any member of staff who have faced these issues to report it within the NHS, and to the police.”

Black women in England suffer more serious birth complications, analysis finds


Tobi Thomas Health and Inequalities Correspondent
Sun, 7 April 2024 

Pre-eclampsia is a serious pregnancy complication that causes high blood pressure

.Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy

Black women are up to six times more likely to experience some of the most serious birth complications during hospital delivery across England than their white counterparts, with the figures being described as “stark” and disheartening”, according to analysis.

Black women made up 26% of women who experienced the birth complication pre-eclampsia superimposed on chronic hypertension during delivery, despite making up just 5% of all deliveries across England, according to a Guardian analysis of NHS figures for 2022-23.

They were six times more likely to experience this pregnancy complication than their white counterparts, who made up 47.2% of these cases despite making up 70% of all deliveries.

Pre-eclampsia is a serious pregnancy complication that causes high blood pressure and protein in the urine, affecting between 1% and 5% of pregnant women across the UK. The condition can lead to serious complications for the mother and baby. Superimposed pre-eclampsia is when preeclampsia complicates another existing condition such as high blood pressure.

Black women were 1.5 times more likely to develop preeclampsia more generally than their white counterparts, and were also overrepresented in birth complications regarding high blood pressure, making up 16% of these cases.

Worldwide, pre-eclampsia affects up to 6% of all pregnancies and causes approximately 500,000 foetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths each year.

Experts said that in order to address the disparities in birth complications, the existing health inequalities such as why some ethnicities have higher rates of pre-existing conditions such as high blood pressure would need to be addressed.

Black women in the UK are almost four times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts, while black babies are twice as likely to be stillborn.

Prof Asma Khalil, the vice president for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said structural racism and the unconscious bias of healthcare professionals could be a factor contributing to the disparity.

“The figures are striking and demonstrate inequality, but unfortunately I’m not really surprised,” Khalil said. “We know that women from a black background have a higher risk of pre-eclampsia and hypertension.

“Why this is the case is multifactorial, and I strongly believe that in order to find the solution, you need that also multidisciplinary approach. Healthcare professionals and doctors cannot fix the problem on their own, we need to work with public health doctors, policymakers, and the government need to prioritise and invest on the issue.”

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP and chair of black maternal health all party parliamentary group, said: “These stark figures highlight the continuing inequalities facing Black women at every stage of the birthing journey.

“With Black mothers 3.7 times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth, the government must urgently set a binding target to end this maternal mortality disparity and improve health outcomes for Black women across maternity care.”

Dr Anita Banerjee, an obstetric physician with expertise in high risk pregnancies, said the figures were “disheartening”, and that healthcare professionals building trust with marginalised communities was essential for reducing health inequalities.

Banerjee said: “We say that the NHS is free at the point of contact and that everybody should get the same, by why is it that if you’re from a black background you’re risk of complications seem to be higher, particularly in regards to maternity for pre-eclampsia.”

“What we saw during the pandemic is the importance of our cultural competency and understanding of the women that we serve, and also secondly them trusting us. We can’t stop everybody getting preeclampsia but there are certain people which have a prior propensity.

“It’s hard if you’re serving a population that isn’t used to getting that much information or understanding because they don’t feel that they’ve got our trust, it can be quite hard.”

An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS is fully committed to ensuring all women receive high-quality care before, during and after their pregnancy – all local maternity and neonatal systems now have action plans in place to help ensure care is equitable for all mothers, babies and families, with staff having access to inclusive clinical training aids to support care for women and babies with Black or dark skin.

“As these figures demonstrate, further progress is needed, which is why the NHS is investing £10m this year to enable targeted action against inequalities, including providing more holistic support for women living in the 10% most deprived areas of England, who we know are more likely to experience adverse outcomes during pregnancy and birth.”

EU nears final vote on landmark asylum reform

Anne-Laure MONDESERT
Sun, 7 April 2024 

Migrant charities fear the reform will lead to systematic border detentions (Sakis MITROLIDIS)

The EU will vote Wednesday on a vast overhaul of its immigration policies that would notably harden entry procedures for asylum-seekers and require all the bloc's countries to share responsibility.

The European Parliament will decide a series of laws forming the bloc's migration and asylum pact, based on a European Commission proposal first made in September 2020.

The overhaul was reached only after overcoming years of tensions and divisions among EU member countries. Once fully adopted, it would come into effect from 2026.


Alongside its passage, the European Union has been striking agreements with several outside countries to try to reduce the number of migrants leaving their territories with the goal of reaching Europe.

The backdrop of the two-pronged approach is a rise in asylum applications in the 27-nation EU, which last year reached 1.14 million, the highest level since 2016.

Irregular migrant entries into the bloc are also increasing, to 380,000 last year according to the EU's border and coast guard agency Frontex.

The migration and asylum pact has been opposed, for very different reasons, by the far right, the far left and some socialist lawmakers.

"After years of impasse, the new migration rules allow us to regain control over our external borders and reduce pressure on the EU. State authorities, not smugglers, have to decide who enters the European Union," said Manfred Weber, head of the biggest political group in the European Parliament, the centre-right European People's Party.

NGOs and migrant charities have come out against the reform, especially its provision creating border facilities to accommodate asylum-seekers and quickly send back those deemed ineligible, which they fear will lead to systematic detentions.

The reform largely retains the basic rule in force under which the first EU country in which an asylum-seeker arrives is responsible for their case.

But it adds a "solidarity mechanism" that requires all EU countries to help front-line states such as Italy and Greece when they come under pressure by either taking in some of the asylum-seekers or providing an equivalent financial contribution.

- 'Inflammatory topic' -

A French centrist lawmaker in the European Parliament, Fabienne Keller, who shepherded one of the texts, called the pact "very balanced" and "a big improvement over the current situation".

"There are better checks on flows of irregular migration through the border procedures and more solidarity," she said.

But she acknowledged it was "a hugely inflammatory topic" and criticised far-right lawmakers for "trying to panic everybody" over the changes.

The parliament's vote will not be the last step for the pact, as the technical application of its procedures still need to be defined, Keller said. They include how to organise the border centres and supply them with sufficient resources, translators and police officers.

Another controversial point is a provision to send asylum-seekers to "safe" third countries.

A left-wing lawmaker, Raphael Glucksmann of France, said "that would allow asylum-seekers likely to obtain asylum in an EU country to be sent to transit countries".

He criticised a compromise under which some EU nations would be able to offset their financial obligations under the solidarity mechanism if they helped pay for tougher border security in another EU country.

"That upholds the idea of a 'safe third country' which would apply to some countries that are 'safe' only by that label," he said. "It's another step towards the outsourcing of our borders."

On the far right, lawmaker Jean-Paul Garraud of France said "the outer borders of the EU are like sieves and nothing has been done to change that".

One of the few changes the far right favoured was a system to take the biometric data of each arriving asylum-seeker and put it into an EU database called Eurodac, he said, though he argued it would do little to stop mass irregular immigration.

"These mechanisms are just smokescreens," he said. "They will be ineffective and won't be able to be applied given the scale of the migration flows."

alm/rmb/ec/db

Artists’ AI dilemma: can artificial intelligence make intelligent art?

Amelia Tait

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, 8 April 2024 

The masks in Huyghe’s Liminal sense and respond to the environment around them.Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, and TARO NASU © Pierre Huyghe, by SIAE 2023

Two people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they are grimacing, there would be no way to know – their features are obscured by oversized, smooth gold masks, as though they have buried their faces in half an Easter egg.

Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting, really – because they aren’t actually human, at least not totally. They’re human-machine hybrids, “Idioms”, created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his largest ever exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.

Idioms are wandering the exhibition for its run between March and November. Sensors in their masks monitor the rooms they sit in and visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually convert this information into a brand new language. Slowly, for example, the Idioms’ masks will come up with the words for “door” or “humans” or “writing” – building a dictionary until they will even be able to communicate with one another. Every day, their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they might be able to say in 20 years’ time.


On a crisp March day, shortly before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a darkened room opposite a large black box suspended from the ceiling – this is a “self-generating instrument” (also loaded with environmental sensors), producing ambient music and crisscrossing beams of light. In response to the artwork in front of them, the Idioms appear to have only generated a few syllables, repeated intermittently over and over again as the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold. Their words are a hissing whisper. It sounds a lot like, “What’s this?”

It’s a fair question to ask. The dilemma facing any artist who tries to tackle a subject as paradigm-changing and era-defining as artificial intelligence is that the real magic is often happening on some hard drives behind the scenes. While there is a blinking server on show at Liminal, Huyghe himself conceded at a press conference three days before opening that it might be hard for a casual visitor to understand that the language coming from the Idioms’ masks is AI-generated; he worried that visitors would assume that the people wearing the masks are the ones whispering.

For contemporary artists, there is a clear pressure to tackle and engage with the buzzy technology that has rapidly disrupted everything from homework to journalism since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022.

Like Huyghe, creatives from German film-maker Hito Steyerl to British conceptualist Gillian Wearing have used AI to make or enhance their art. Shortly after Liminal’s first run closes, an ostensibly “fully AI-driven” multimedia exhibition of French artist Philippe Parreno’s historical works will open at Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Whether artists are using the technology in an interesting and challenging way or simply hoping to hop on the hype bandwagon is not always easy to discern. From a preliminary press release of the Munich show, it’s unclear exactly which elements of Parreno’s exhibition will be artificially intelligent, and it’s easy to see how AI could cynically be slapped on to an exhibition like an Instagram filter, a shiny veneer that makes old work seem new.

AI is already all around us, autocompleting our emails, suggesting a new show to watch on Netflix, and reading the weather forecast in the voice of Amazon’s Alexa. In recent years, chatbots have revolutionised writing – responding to prompts to write cover letters, code, plays, poems, and essays – while text-to-image models such as DALL.E and Midjourney allow anyone to create “art” by typing in a few words.

But as the technology becomes more prominent in our everyday lives, artists’ use of AI risks feeling trite. Crowds have allegedly been “transfixed for an hour or more” by Turkish artist Refik Anadol’s “live paintings” currently being displayed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. AI was fed imagery of rainforests and coral reefs to generate Anadol’s exhibition, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, which features immersive “artificial realities” that visitors can wander through. While crowds may be transfixed, critics have said that Anadol’s previous AI-generated work is over-hyped.

“The whole thing looks like a massive techno lava lamp,” New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz wrote of Anadol’s Unsupervised, a 24ft screen that used AI to continuously generate images at the Museum of Modern Art between 2022 and 2023. Saltz found the work to be pointless and mediocre – good at entertaining you briefly but ultimately “not disturbing anything inside you”. In short, he felt the work had nothing to say.

Saltz argued that “if AI is to create meaningful art, it will have to provide its own vision and vocabulary”. On a literal level, this is exactly what Huyghe’s Idioms are doing. Watching them is oddly mesmerising – as a viewer, it is interesting to be confronted not with a finite state of “artificial intelligence”, but an ongoing process of “artificial learning”.

Here, Huyghe’s use of AI takes the art out of the artist’s control, which is exciting – not least because of the possibility that things could go wrong. The Idioms could fail to produce a language or produce one that is discordant and offensive to our ears. They could be unduly influenced by rowdy exhibition-goers or rebel in some way, repeating the same words over and over again.

It would undoubtedly be fascinating to return day after day and see how the Idioms have responded to the art around them. As Huyghe intended, these strange masked beings provoke questions about the relationship between the human and the non-human (even if my first thought was, “I bet their knees hurt from all that kneeling”).

Less thought-provoking is the use of AI in his work Camata. Robotic limbs surround a skeleton in one of the world’s driest deserts, performing a mysterious ritual. Though the footage is not live, the film is edited in real time, with artificially intelligent “editors” gathering data from a large brass telephone-pole-like sensor near the opening of the exhibition. This sensor monitors everything from the number of guests in the gallery to the weather outside, and the Camata footage is edited accordingly.

Yet curator Anne Stenne clarifies that this isn’t a simple case of “x” leading to “y” – for example, if only one person was in the exhibition, it wouldn’t be the case that the AI editors would automatically, say, choose footage shot at night. This means that while the endless editing process is fascinating – you could, after all, sit there for the exhibition’s entire run and never see the same sequence twice – it’s hard to understand as a layperson why AI was a necessary element. Would the work be any different if the editing was randomly generated? As a casual viewer, it’s very hard to know.

Indeed, those who attend these exhibitions simply have to trust that something fantastical is occurring behind the scenes. While Huyghe’s sensors are visible throughout the exhibition, the artist is unwilling to share the details of the program that processes this information and exactly how it runs. A representative says, “Pierre doesn’t want to focus on the technical parameters of his works. He wants to concentrate on the visitor’s experience.” Audiences may find this troubling in a world where companies have been found to be using “pseudo-AI” that is actually run by hidden humans behind the scenes.

AI art works best when it does something that the artist alone could not, as is the case with Huyghe’s self-generating language. Anything else risks feeling at best gimmicky and at worst pointless. Regardless, the AI trend will continue to sweep galleries, and soon enough the tool will be commonplace enough that questioning it will be like questioning a pen or a pencil.

In the 1960s, “computer art” swept the globe, with exhibits from London to Stuttgart to Zagreb to Las Vegas. One contemporary writer said “perhaps a computer will never produce a painting all by itself”, and noted with caution that “at least one expert thinks such art represents a genuine new art form”. One day, undoubtedly, discussions of AI’s place in art will sound this archaic.

• Liminal by Pierre Huyghe is at Punda della Dogana, Venice, until 24 November

The Body Shop owed more than £276m to creditors at time of collapse


Sarah Butler
Fri, 5 April 2024 

The UK arm of The Body Shop went into administration in February, putting more than 2,200 jobs at risk.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Body Shop’s UK arm owed more than £276m to creditors including landlords, suppliers, tax authorities and its international divisions when the ethical beauty retailer collapse in February, it has emerged as it appealed to landlords to cut rent as part of a rescue deal.

Avon, the cosmetics group owned by The Body Shop’s former parent company Natura, is the biggest trade creditor – owed just over £13m for products it manufactured, according to a report by the administrators FRP who were appointed to the UK arm of the ethical beauty retailer in February.

Total debts at the failed group add up to more than £276m, of which £6.3m is tax owed, £44m is money owed to trade creditors, £63m is from lease liabilities and other borrowing, and £143m relates to “related suppliers” understood to be other parts of the business.


The report does not reveal the extent of further debts owed to the group’s largest secured creditor, Aurelius, the German restructuring specialist that bought the retailer last year.

The private equity company put the UK arm of The Body Shop into administration in February less than three months after taking control, putting more than 2,200 jobs at risk.

In a report published on Friday, administrators said they believed they would be able to raise enough cash to ensure The Body Shop’s UK tax bill was paid and that staff would receive holiday pay, pension payments and other arrears, but they could not outline how much suppliers, landlords and other unsecured creditors might receive.

Related: ‘A scented awakening’: how The Body Shop influenced generations

One major asset up for sale will be the brand rights to the Body Shop name – worth £7.9m, according to FRP – which had been thought to be controlled by Aurelius. However, the administrator has now established that the transfer of the brand was not completed before The Body Shop’s collapse.

The availability of the brand rights could clear the way for an auction of The Body Shop, which was previously seen as unlikely because of Aurelius’s ownership of the brand. Interested parties are thought to include Next.

The report says The Body Shop collapsed after a $76m (£60m) credit facility was repaid to its former owner, the Brazilian group Natura, shortly before the change of ownership and leaving the company with greater demand for investment than its new owners had foreseen.

Administrators are planning to launch an insolvency process called a company voluntary arrangement (CVA), which is intended to cut rents at the group’s remaining stores. No further store closures are expected in the UK at this stage.

If the CVA is successful, Aurelius has agreed not to seek repayment of secured loans it made to the business shortly before its collapse.

Since The Body Shop called in administrators, about 82 of the 197 UK stores have closed, with the loss of more than 425 jobs, while a further 329 jobs have gone at head office.

Operations in the US, Germany and Belgium are being shut down after those businesses were either sold off or deprived of cash by the administration of the UK parent.

The group’s Canadian division closed 30 of its 105 stores, and its Australian and New Zealand operation is struggling to find enough cash to continue. On Thursday, a court in France put the Body Shop’s 66 stores there into administration with the aim of trying to find a buyer for the business.

UK Civil servants vote to strike over two days a week in the office

Lucy Burton
Fri, 5 April 2024

empty office

Civil servants at Britain’s official statistics body have voted to go on strike after being asked to work in the office for two days a week.

A total of 73pc of voting employees backed industrial action at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) because they want to keep the option of working from home full time.

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which is spearheading the push for action, has called for urgent talks with ONS officials to resolve the dispute.

It previously argued that many workers only accepted a job at the ONS because of home working, saying that the plan to force workers to spend at least 40pc of their time in the office has “caused considerable disruption, especially for staff with childcare and other caring arrangements”.

Fran Heathcote, general secretary of PCS, said that ONS bosses had “seriously undermined the trust and goodwill of their staff by seeking to drive this policy through in such a heavy-handed way”. She called for the policy to be paused immediately.

It is the latest pushback from staff who want to continue working from home as bosses increasingly demand an end to remote practices.

Ministers have been trying to pressure Whitehall staff back into the office at least 60pc of the time, or three days a week for full-time staff, over fears that working from home has reduced productivity and increased waiting times for services.

Around 1,200 employees balloted for a strike but only half of that number voted, a turnaround which only just hit the legal threshold for a ballot.

An ONS spokesman said that the organisation has had a hybrid working model for several years, in line with the wider civil service.

He added: “Face-to-face interaction supports collaboration and fosters learning and innovation, while some tasks can be done as effectively or even more effectively at home.

“We are applying this flexibly to help balance business and personal needs, and have offered all colleagues extensive support.”