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A man was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance after a 30-minute closure. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2Aqvqsn

Dr Roberts was chief scientist in charge of designing and building the tech that became the internet. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EVSmDX

Fox News Breaking News Alert Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., announces she’s forming an exploratory committee in step toward 2020 presidential run 12/31/18 5:39 AM

The NYPD will use camera-equipped drones to watch over New Year's Eve celebrations. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2CHUA7m

As 2018 ends, the author reveals the books he has finally got round to reading this year – hardy survivors, he explains, of years of house moves and bookshelf clear-outs What do the following books, from my list of books read in 2018, have in common? The House in Paris ( Elizabeth Bowen ), I Will Bear Witness (Victor Klemperer), The All of It (Jeannette Haien), Storm of Steel (Ernst Jünger), Son of the Morning Star ( Evan S Connell ), The Death of the Heart (Bowen), Alamein to Zem Zem ( Keith Douglas ), Burger’s Daughter ( Nadine Gordimer ), What Mais ie Knew ( Henry James ). Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2VexFrH

Author Aminatta Forna recommends a canine history by Konrad Lorenz, and Karen Joy Fowler’s novel about a family that raises a chimp, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves A pack of wolves follows a sled, picking off the sled dogs and then the occupants one by one, to the last man. So begins Jack London’s White Fang , published in 1906. The wolf pack is led by a wolfdog, Kiche. The ensuing story is told from the viewpoint of Kiche’s wolf pup, White Fang, through whose gaze we view the violence of the parallel worlds of animals and humans. White Fang is the narrative mirror of London’s earlier The Call of the Wild , in which a pet dog, kidnapped and used as a sled dog, runs away to join the wolves. Wildness is the true nature of animals, though the challenges of survival in the wilderness can also turn man into a beast, London seems to say. White Fang ends up enjoying domesticity with his new master, many miles away from the Yukon. Humans have triumphed over nature, but nature is stil...

A dark and mind-bending debut collection of short stories set in a twisted America Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black made the New York Times bestseller list recently, an astonishing feat for a debut collection of short stories. It’s not surprising because his dark and strange tales are so inventive and stirring that they read as the male counterpart to Leone Ross’s recent first collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway , with its amazing realist and magic realist concoctions around black women’s lives. Adjei-Brenyah ’s stories are equally ingenious, but through a male lens and, like Ross, they’re so daring and mind-bending that you haven’t a clue where he’s going to take you. The opening story, The Finkelstein 5, is one of the most topical and devastating. A young man called Emmanuel talks about dialling his blackness up or down according to the situation. Speaking to a possible future employer on the phone, he code-switches his voice to “1.5 on a 10-point scale” of blackness, whic...

The malware, which affected papers owned by Tribune Publishing, is believed to be from outside the US. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2Q8aWd2

Zadie Smith shares why she loves this almost ‘anti-Italian’ story from Giuseppe Pontiggia, then reads the story, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists ‘I was assigned the story by the American literary magazine McSweeney’s to translate from Italian. I’d never read Pontiggia before. As I translated it I really admired its economy and humour, and its somewhat anti-Italian spirit. There’s nothing beautiful in it, and no reverie. It’s all hard edges, like a piece by Moravia – but funnier. I think it’s interesting to see a writer working against the grain of his culture.’ Other episodes to curl up with this holiday period: Penelope Lively on MR James; Neil Gaiman on Rudyard Kipling; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading Ama Ata Aidoo and Sebastian Barry returning to James Joyce’s short story Eveline, forty years after he first read it. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SsxXJJ

We look ahead to rich offerings in next year’s genre-challenging nonfiction list and thrilling new fiction writing for all tastes The beginning of 2019 promises a genuine thrill in terms of genre-defying nonfiction, when Julia Blackburn publishes Time Song: Searching for Doggerland (Cape, February), in which she tells the story of the huge, fertile plain that once connected the east of England with mainland Europe using a singular combination of memoir, verse and story. Like lots of people, I adored Blackburn’s last book, Threads , a biography of a fisherman-turned-embroiderer called John Craske, and I expect this one to be every bit as charming and strange. It will also be timely, for by then – just maybe – we’ll once again be about to break away from Europe, albeit in a somewhat different manner than occurred in 5,000 BC. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GMypRI

Worshipped as a saint in Vietnam, beloved by the sex workers of Paris, with a party trick involving an orange – as Les Misérables comes to the BBC, let’s celebrate Hugo’s individualist spirit Victor Hugo is rightly remembered for his amazing literary output, and for his philanthropic work as a member of France’s National Assembly, campaigning for an end to poverty, free education for all children and the abolition of the death penalty. But he was also incredibly eccentric and libidinous, with a penchant for writing while starkers, and armed with a party trick – swallowing oranges whole. The BBC remake of Les Misérables seeks to upturn what we think we know about the story, looking beyond the musical to the pages of the novel it came from. But what if we take a step further, looking beyond the pages to the man behind them? The stripped back (in more ways than one) Hugo is far more interesting than he’s given credit for. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2A...

A monumental work draws striking parallels between 30s Germany and a race-torn 60s United States Born under the Third Reich, Uwe Johnson began this dense, bustling and surprisingly playful magnum opus in 1966, having left East Germany with his family for the United States; it wasn’t completed until 1983, a year before his death, by which time his marriage had broken down and he was living alone in the island town of Sheerness, in Kent. Juxtaposing the tumult of 60s America with everyday life in Nazi Germany, Anniversaries chronicles 20th-century turmoil through the eyes of Gesine Cresspahl, who leaves postwar Mönchengladbach to raise her young daughter, Marie, on New York’s Upper West Side. In the original German, the book appeared in four parts over 13 years; an abridged English text came out in 1987, but only now can anglophone readers taste it uncut, in Damion Searls’ two-volume translation. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RpEKXd

Peter Shinkle has written a superb and harrowing history of a dual life in a dark era of official oppression This is a remarkable a book about an extraordinary man who was Dwight Eisenhower’s “right hand” for foreign policy. Related: Presidents of War review: Michael Beschloss and the Vietnam scoop that wasn't Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Ap0ZTp

Fox News Breaking News Alert Alabama knocks off Oklahoma in Orange Bowl, sets up National Championship showdown with Clemson 12/29/18 9:08 PM

From fake porn to Facebook scandals, security alerts to Google protests - 2018 was a busy year. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2GJvUQ1

My mission: quit social media and spend the time reading the year’s top titles. The results were refreshing – and surprising On a Sunday in mid-December, I drove towards Nevada City, a former Gold Rush mining camp in the foothills of the Sierras in northern California. I had rented a secluded internet-free cabin – a “tiny house” to be precise – outside town. Related: 'I watch old westerns while the spuds are in the oven': creative people on how they relax Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SsUpm2

The writer David Grossman pays tribute to his friend, the Israeli novelist and outspoken peace campaigner The world has been “narrowed down” by the death of the Israeli literary giant Amos Oz , according to his close friend and fellow author David Grossman . “There will not be another Amos Oz, there was only one like him. You can say this about every human being, of course, but there was something unique about Amos,” Grossman told the Observer . Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2AiQ0Li

The Irish journalist talks about his new book, which skewers the myths of English nationalism, and finding comfort in Beckett Fintan O’Toole is one of the most respected columnists and literary journalists working in the English language. He writes for the Irish Times and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books . His latest book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain , is an excoriating cultural analysis of the political ideas behind Brexit. You argue that English nationalism is the ghost in the Brexit machine. Why do you think that is? From the turn of the century onwards, you have this extraordinary rise of the idea of England as a political community [ie, a popular desire for England-only legislation voted on by English-only politicians]. All the public opinion surveys show this. It’s very odd and I can’t think of any other parallels where it happens without a political party, without newspapers, without a national theatre. There’s no WB Yeats of Englis...

Some suggestions for a former postman about to begin a new life after almost four decades in the same job Q: What can I read to help me make a fresh start in life in the new year? I have just taken redundancy after working for the same company for 37 years. Michael Prime, 53, former postman A: Johanna Thomas-Corr , journalist and book critic: “To make an end is to make a beginning,” wrote TS Eliot in the last of his Four Quartets , a lyrical meditation on the passing of time and the sadness of lives not fully lived. That might sound like the last thing you want to read as you unbox your fresh start, but it’s also rich with possibility. “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2ESA7is

The author on her childhood move from leafy Surrey to the West Midlands Until I was nine, we lived in Englefield Green, a sprawling commuter village next to Windsor Great Park in Surrey. We had a big garden, my best friend lived in the next road and I went to the village school where we sat at desks according to our rank in class. I don’t need to tell you which articulate little know-all was ultra-keen to cling on to desk No 1. I was bossy and self-confident, and utterly secure in my status as both baby of the family and Queen of the Playground. Then we moved to the West Midlands. I don’t know exactly how I introduced myself on my first day at Chadsmead junior school in Lichfield, but I’m guessing I used several of the following phrases: “Hello, my name’s Felicity; my father’s a scientist; my favourite television programme is Tales from Europe , especially the Polish one set in medieval Kraków; Last year I had a letter published in ‘Melody Maker’; Have you ever read the ‘Uncle’ books ...

From Dickens’s charnel-house London, to Henry James’s elegant New York to Pooh Corner ... essays by 45 writers I spoke once to a distinguished dramatist who was hesitating about writing his first novel. “I hate novels,” he said. “All those descriptions.” He went on to write a very good novel that, in the tradition of, say, Ivy Compton-Burnett, consisted largely of dialogue. Clearly Literary Landscapes will not be for him. It is for the rest of us, who cherish “the descriptions” that create and embody the world of the novel, that it is addressed. The present volume is the terrestrial counterpart of Laura Miller’s Literary Wonderlands , which celebrates the fantastical; offering short essays on more than 70 novels, the book sets out, its editor John Sutherland tells us, to explore “thereness” and the accompanying “fluidities and meltingness that places are subject to”. The selection follows three criteria: each book must conjure a land that exists or has existed; the books must be roo...

New agents and imprints, Northern Ireland’s first Man Booker winner … this year, the books world turned towards inclusivity and a broadening of perspectives Read John Dugdale’s analysis of the 100 bestselling books of 2018 “You brought it on yourself, longest friend. I informed you and informed you. I mean for the longest time ever since primary school I’ve been warning you to kill out that habit you insist on and that I now suspect you’re addicted to – that reading in public as you’re walking about.” Such behaviour, the speaker continues, is unnerving, disturbing, deviant, much to the bemusement of the errant flâneuse, who wonders why it’s acceptable for a terrorist to promenade with Semtex, but beyond the pale for her to do the same with Jane Eyre . The characters are from Milkman , the novel by Anna Burns that scooped this year’s Man Booker prize and lobbed a rock into the literary millpond: a winner who included the local food bank in her book’s acknowledgements, who went on t...

While Gail Honeyman is completely fine, where have all the female writers gone? John Dugdale takes a look at 2018’s biggest books and the year’s trends Read Alex Clark’s look at 2018: the year the books world opened up There are two contrasting strategies for achieving a mega-seller, as illustrated by the uppermost books in 2018’s chart. You can publish it in mid-winter, or alternatively April, and then watch it accumulate stonking sales: that worked in the past for newcomers such as Paula Hawkins, Joe Wicks and EL James, and it has propelled Adam Kay , Yuval Noah Harari , Heather Morris and Tom Kerridge (beating Jamie Oliver, last year’s No 1 for the first time) into the list’s elite. Most spectacularly, it was the recipe for the success of Gail Honeyman’s debut, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine , published in paperback on 25 January and 11 months later more than 300,000 sales ahead of its nearest rival. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RlR2Qd ...

Mealtime wars, a puppy without a bark and crazy science … fun and facts for all ages in this month’s selection The final children’s books roundup for 2018 reflects a brilliant year. From the subtle to the over-the-top, the tear-jerking to the comic, it’s been a bumper crop – and 2019 shows early signs of being just as good. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GI9BtN

First published in 1939, this eerily prophetic study of race hatred and mass hysteria in a small French town is vintage Simenon We all think we know Georges Simenon , even those of us who haven’t read his books. However, the more of those books we do read, the stranger a writer he becomes. There is Maigret, of course, like a kind-hearted but slightly grumpy uncle, with his pipe and his hat – originally a bowler – his mid-morning petit blanc and his evening marc , and his inexhaustible fund of sympathy for wrongdoers, who he knows are probably people to whom worse wrong was done in the first place. But even Maigret has his uncanny side, which no doubt Madame Maigret could explain to us, if she cared to. The feeling that pervades Simenon’s work is Freud’s unheimlich , simply the commonplace made strange by being brought to our attention in unfamiliar form. Simenon’s world is extraordinary through being uncannily ordinary. And then there are the romans durs , as Simenon called them, th...

Written on the brink of a tumultuous year, this short story by 20-year-old Plath captures a journey towards oblivion A young woman is hustled on to a train by her parents bound for a destination known only as the Ninth Kingdom. An ominous pall of smoke hangs over a landscape dotted with abandoned settlements where the train no longer stops. “It’s the forest fires,” a fellow passenger tells her. “The smoke always blows down from the north this time of year.” Full of little nods towards the uncanny, it could almost be the opening of a Stephen King novel, but “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” is a short story by Sylvia Plath, which was rejected by a magazine when she was a 20-year-old student and has remained largely unseen until now. The story will be published next week by Faber, as part of a series of standalone short fiction titles marking the publisher’s 90th anniversary. At the time of writing, Plath was a scholarship student at Smith College, Massachusetts, where – far from “s...

The Ministry of Health (MoH), WHO and partners continue to respond to the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Published on December 28, 2018 at 07:00AM

Google and Facebook's ad networks placed promotions for major brands before apps were banned. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EUSFyC

Fox News Breaking News Alert Illegal immigrant accused of killing California cop arrested, Fox News confirms 12/28/18 10:31 AM

To critics at home, Oz was a bleeding-heart liberal – but to audiences around the world he was a literary giant, steadfast in his belief for a two-state solution On Friday afternoon, a text arrived from Israel letting me know of the death of Amos Oz , hailed for decades as that country’s greatest novelist. “The last, best voice of an Israel that is all but gone,” it read. Oz himself would doubtless have found a way to wave aside such talk, dismissing it as melodramatic. But there’s truth in it. For he was indeed the embodiment of a particular Israel, one that dominated in the first years of the state’s life but which has steadily receded to the margins. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2An1Gwv

Tesla beefs up its board with executives from Oracle and Walgreens to reassure investors. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EUxQTR

An age has passed ... A collection of the controversial critic’s lectures showcases his distinctive style and astonishing range This is a book of 10 lectures by a literary critic generally considered to be one of the greatest of his age. That age has now passed: Eric Griffiths died in September, having been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than 30 years. Griffiths was an old-school don who would certainly fare ill in an age of student feedback forms and an academic culture of publish or perish. He published just one complete book, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), which consists of a series of detailed readings of the work of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and others, and attends to the challenges faced by both writers and readers in interpreting the concept of “voice” in its various meanings and implications. His own tone and intent could be difficult to interpret. Ferocious and exacting, he could be fabulously rude: 20 years ago he became momentarily famous...

Shortlisted for the Costa debut novel award, this is a memorable, cohesive story of a fractured life Most of us show different versions of ourselves to lovers, colleagues, friends. Emma, in Hart’s Costa-shortlisted debut novel, is more fragmented than most. She is a Brit living in America, thanks to her US soldier husband, whom she met in a military compound in Iraq. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2CDpON8

The author of books including Black Box, A Tale of Love and Darkness and In the Land of Israel, has died after fighting cancer The esteemed Israeli novelist Amos Oz has died at the age of 79, from cancer. The author of 18 books in Hebrew and hundreds of articles for newspapers around the world, Oz was best known for novels including Black Box, In the Land of Israel and A Tale of Love and Darkness, his bestselling autobiographical novel. Much of his work, both fiction and non-fiction, explored kibbutz life and picked apart his characters’ often complex relationships with Israel and modern politics. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QSugQG

Viewers can decide the characters' fates in Bandersnatch, the latest instalment of the Netflix drama. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2SmlreA

Louis Theroux, Eamonn Holmes and others' accounts were targeted to highlight a Twitter vulnerability. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2RgprA8

From 31 October through 30 November 2018, the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) National Focal Point of Saudi Arabia reported eight additional cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection, including two deaths. Details of these cases can be found in a separate document (see link below). From 2012 through 30 November 2018, the total number of laboratory-confirmed MERS-CoV cases reported globally to WHO under IHR (2005) is 2274 with 806 associated deaths. The total number of deaths includes the deaths that WHO is aware of to date through follow-up with affected member states. Published on December 28, 2018 at 07:07AM

Beijing was responding to claims it might use Huawei's 5G kit to act "in a malign way". from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2CEijp3

Becoming is laden with inspirational symbolism and patriotic platitudes – but this reflects the wider pressure to use language approved by others, writes Yiyun Li Two years ago I drove my son and a friend of his to an event. They were 15, and discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest at her school. She had read the previous winners’ poems, she said. They were composed of words such as injustice, inequality, empowerment, action and descriptions of police brutality, of which, the girl pointed out, none of the poets would have direct knowledge. (She was right: she goes to one of the most preppy high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.) “What I don’t understand is –” the girl said, “why can’t we write about flowers any more.” Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2rYgUDN

The exile of an Argentinian family and an adopted brother’s origin story drive this intense autofiction about the search for roots Between 1976 and 1983, the military dictatorship in Argentina instituted state terror. According to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo , who bravely began demonstrating in the midst of the “dirty war”, 30,000 of their children were disappeared. Along with the Mothers came the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo , whose specific aim was to locate the babies taken from so-called “subversive” mothers and given up for adoption, many to the military. Some babies were snatched from mothers by midwives just before the inevitable arrest and handed on to parents desperate for a child. The narrator of Julián Fuks ’s intense and hypnotic autofiction has an adopted brother who may have come into the family in this dramatic way. The stories their parents tell, despite the fact that both of them are psychoanalytic psychiatrists, never quite seem to satisfy the younger broth...

The majority of shoppers are wary of social media influencers, a survey for the BBC indicates. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2rW71q3

A personal computer at a resettlement centre in South Korea was found to have been infected. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EONgIK

From waste baskets rifled for coded messages to early uses of waterboarding … what can spies learn from the past? Every Friday during term-time, the convenors of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar meet for tea in an old college’s combination room, beneath the gaze of a portrait of Christopher Marlowe . One of Elizabethan England’s greatest writers, Marlowe makes good company for those interested in the history of spies and spying: as a student at Cambridge in the 1580s, he slipped away from his scholarly duties and did the state some (secret) service abroad. Among the assembled scholars at the seminar, you will find Christopher Andrew, the historian behind the authorised history of MI5, who in The Secret World presents a history of intelligence from the earliest times to the present day – from ancient Greeks to WikiLeaks. This panoptic history starts broad, sketching the place of spying and deceit in Greece, Rome and the Holy Land. In China, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War informed its re...

Putin hasn’t deviated from Yeltsin, the Soviet past was a great help to the new Russia, and other original arguments The title of this excellent book is a bit of a come-on. It seems to echo the slogan that was chanted in Moscow in 2012 by crowds calling for regime change. In reality, it is a challenge to them and their western supporters for being so fixated on Putin and his personality that they fail to understand that he bestrides a system that is deeply entrenched and will easily survive him. In the first piece of myth-debunking promised in his subtitle Tony Wood argues that Putin’s system is not a deviation from the Yeltsin years when the Russian elite enthusiastically embraced capitalism; it is a direct continuation of it. There may have been a minor shift under Putin towards the restoration of partial or full control by the state over some of the big resource-extracting companies in the raw material sector. But the intertwining of government and big business, the creation of an...

The video and image sharing site apologises after a test was accidentally rolled out to millions of users. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2AjVo0K

Pakistan Health Authorities have reported an ongoing outbreak of extensively drug resistant (XDR) typhoid fever that began in the Hyderabad district of Sindh province in November 2016. An increasing trend of typhoid fever cases caused by antimicrobial resistant (AMR) strains of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (or S. Typhi) poses a notable public health concern. In May 2018, the case definitions for non-resistant, multi-drug resistant (MDR) and XDR typhoid fever were formally agreed by the Regional Disease Surveillance and Response Unit (RDSRU) in Karachi, following a review by an expert group of epidemiologists, clinicians and microbiologists from Pakistan. All typhoid fever cases reported from 2016 to 2018 were reviewed and classified according to these case definitions (see Table 1). From 1 November 2016 through 9 December 2018, 5 274 cases of XDR typhoid out of 8 188 typhoid fever cases were reported by the Provincial Disease Surveillance and Response Unit (PDSRU) in Sindh pro...

Mr Musk's insults to Thai cave rescuer were a "schoolyard spat" and not to be taken seriously, say lawyers. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2Ah2ByE

First published in 1962, this masterpiece of American literature was compared to Faulkner The first officially recorded use of “woke” as a political term was in 1962, in an article by young African-American writer and teacher William Melvin Kelley. In the same year, he published his debut, A Different Drummer . It won him comparisons with Faulkner, then slipped into obscurity until this year, when a New Yorker article brought it back into the public eye, and sparked a bidding war. It begins with Tucker Caliban, who shoots his livestock, sets fire to his house and leaves the fictional deep south state he calls home without a backward glance. Soon every other black man and woman in the state has gone, filing on to buses and into cars with carefully blank faces. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RjZi3p

The writer whose radical honesty has won fans across the globe talks about writing as a cry for help, using books to fight racism and why she rejects ‘identity politics’ There is a story in Roxane Gay’s second collection of short fiction, Difficult Women , in which a big, strong man who works in a quarry goes for a walk on the beach and, seeing an extra glint in the sand, discovers a woman made of glass. He falls in love, marries her, they have a glass child. At meals, he marvels, watching the food travel through their bodies. When he holds her he does so gently, and not just because he must. A quirk of nature – that lightning striking sand can make glass – becomes an inspired vehicle for preoccupations that recur throughout Gay’s work: that love means not being seen through, but seen, and heard for yourself; that bodies are both breakable and a possible source of redemption. Gay’s stories often take the form of fable although, on her first visit to London, she is quick to reject ...

A series of stories arranged around plane journeys creates a close-up portrait of our common humanity David Szalay’s characters travel relentlessly, but are never at home. They felt this lack particularly keenly in his 2016 Man Booker-shortlisted novel-in-short-stories, All That Man Is , which moved through the stages of nine different men’s lives, the gulf between their alpha-male aspirations and daily reality experienced variously as outrage, sorrow and cosmic alienation. As European men, they were told the world belonged to them: instead they found themselves knocked off course by shyness, by loss of status, by the humiliating grind of hard graft or old age. From a teenage InterRailer to his fading grandfather, across Europe via hotels and motorways, budget airlines and cruise ships, Szalay patiently built up a brilliantly unsparing portrait of masculinity and its dark shadow, misogyny. This new 12-story cycle, Turbulence , stretches its horizons to encompass the entire globe, as...

Project to bring recognition to women between 1500 and 1780 who wrote popular texts dismissed as minor A Spanish academic has embarked on a five-year quest to rescue the works of female writers from the margins of European thought and give them the recognition they have been denied for centuries. Carme Font, a lecturer in English literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has been awarded a €1.5m (£1.35m) grant by the European Research Council to scour libraries, archives and private collections in search of letters, poems and reflections written by women from 1500 to 1780. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2LALOuP

Employees are exploited and humiliated in the new precarious world of work. How to make a change? A few years ago, Dan Lyons , a former technology journalist with Newsweek, endured an unhappy stint with a software startup called HubSpot. Initially dazzled by the company’s youthful vibe – all ping-pong tables and beanbags – he quickly became disillusioned. “Beneath their bubbly exteriors,” he recalls, “many people were anxious, frightened, unhappy, and massively stressed out.” He wrote a bestselling book about that experience, Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Start-Up Bubble (2016). In Lab Rats, Lyons warns that the oppressive working culture he witnessed in the tech industry is being rolled out to other businesses, including some in the public sector, thanks to the efforts of a coterie of high-end management consultants. These are a truly strange breed, combining ludicrous pomposity with an almost psychopathic earnestness. Lyons frequently refers to them as “mad” or “nutty”. Many...

EU's competition commissioner says tech firms must become more transparent about their use of data. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2CA624O

Chinese state sometimes acts in a "malign way", Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is reported as saying. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2V851Zj

Fox News Breaking News Alert President Trump in Iraq for surprise visit with troops 12/26/18 11:23 AM

The American writer’s reputation continues to grow with the publication of a further short-story collection, and an intriguing memoir Rooms are invariably rundown in Lucia Berlin’s stories. You are led into them briskly, without any caveat, and so you expect a degree of familiarity. But things are never as they seem. In the collection A Manual for Cleaning Women , a dentist has only one chaise longue in his waiting room: patients usually sit on window sills or radiators – “On the ceiling was a sign, WHAT THE HELL YOU LOOKING UP HERE FOR?” A laundry floor is flooded. Water from a toilet upstairs drips through the chandelier in a New York apartment. A lonely man in Montana pastes old newspapers on his cabin walls, so that in the winter he can “read his walls, page by page”. It isn’t just the rooms; the people in them, too, seem out of sorts. A girl decides to do nothing as her pampered younger sister is molested by their grandfather. An addict in rehab kills a pack of stray dogs. A hosp...

Henry Jeffreys raises a glass to the best writing about alcohol, including the James Bond novel that inspired a cocktail and Roger Scruton’s guide to wine This isn’t a collection of books about drunkenness or alcoholism, though both feature. Rather, it is a celebration of those who write well about alcoholic drinks. I write about alcohol for a living. My latest book, The Home Bar , is a guide to setting up your domestic refreshments but it is also about booze history and culture. With drink, and especially wine, it’s easy to write in a technical way and leave out what makes alcohol interesting for most people: its intoxicating properties. Most drink-soaked fiction – by Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and others – ignores the nerdy stuff. It is the intersection between connoisseurship and drunkenness that interests me. I return to the following books again and again for inspiration and amusement. I am sure readers will vehemently disagree with some of my omissions. Continue reading...

Menace permeates an unpredictable story about an 11-year-old girl sent to her grandparents for the summer, from a Scottish author on the rise “It’s all about the voice,” aspiring novelists are told. Every so often, you come across a voice so distinctive that the writer’s words seem to have been whispered in your ear, with no page or screen coming between you. Daniel Shand is one of those writers. Born in Kirkcaldy and now living in Glasgow, he won the Betty Trask award in 2017 for his debut novel, Fallow . Although it gained praise from such Scottish luminaries as Allan Massie and Alan Warner , it struggled to get noticed further from home. That was a shame, because Fallow is a terrific achievement. Taut and tense, it follows two brothers on the run through rural Scotland. With each chapter their path twists and narrows, as it accrues the queasily compelling air of a fable about rats in a trap. Shand is brilliant at conveying the shifting balances of power between his characters thr...

Ranging from Penelope to Virginia Woolf, this study makes a case for restlessness and insomnia as acts of female rebellion If you think you sleep badly it will soon become clear, on witnessing Marina Benjamin wrestle with the problem, her mind “on fire … messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain”, that you really don’t. Never again will I refer to the kind of sleeplessness that can be tamed with Ovaltine and a few pages of Knausgaard as “insomnia”. Benjamin’s impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential. For, as she suggests, insomnia is more than “just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.” In fact she pursues sleep so hard that an entire book is the result. Fittingly for a meditation on a disrupted process, her method is...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares why she admires the ‘old-fashioned social realism’ of the Ghanaian writer’s No Sweetness Here, then reads the story, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists ‘The stories in No Sweetness Here, of post-independence Ghana in the 1960s, are written beautifully and wisely and with great subtlety. The characters lie uneasily between old and new, live in rural and urban areas and struggle to deal with the unpleasant surprises of independence. There is a keen but understated longing for the past in these stories. Aidoo is too good a writer to paint with overly broad brush strokes. She does not at all suggest that the past was perfect; there is no romanticising of culture. “No Sweetness Here”, the title story, is the kind of beautiful, old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction. It does what I think all good literature should: it has something to say and it entertains you. But girding that entertain...

Smartphone owners have a growing sense of unease about the amount of time spent staring at that screen. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2SfWNMQ

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This exhilarating Costa-shortlisted novel about a son in thrall to his painter father skewers the hyperbole and hypocrisies of the art world In 2001, Marina Picasso published a memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather . “His brilliant oeuvre demanded human sacrifices,” she asserted bitterly, adding that “no one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius. He needed blood to sign each of his paintings … the blood of those who loved him – people who thought they loved a human being, whereas they really loved Picasso.” The damage is well documented: Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline, his longtime muse and lover Marie-Thérèse Walter and his grandson Pablito all took their own lives. His son Paulo, Marina’s father, struggled with depression and died in 1975 from alcohol-related illness. Does great art justify monstrous selfishness? Must the lovers and children crushed by the careless cruelties of genius accept their suffering as inevitable, even irrelevant? Can they eve...

Neil Gaiman introduces Rudyard Kipling’s The Gardener, a melancholy tale from 1925, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists. Afterwards, the story is read by actor Marion Bailey Neil Gaiman introduces Rudyard Kipling’s The Gardener, a melancholy tale from 1925, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists. Then, the story is read for you by an actor who is familiar from the films and theatre of Mike Leigh - Marion Bailey. Other episodes to curl up with this holiday period: Penelope Lively on MR James; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading Ama Ata Aidoo; Zadie Smith introduces us to a story from Giuseppe Pontiggia and Sebastian Barry returning to James Joyce’s short story Eveline, forty years after he first read it. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Sf1Mxb

Security minister Ben Wallace says those who use drones illegally can expect severe punishments. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2GEkblO

Jacuzzi-maker promises a fix after claims it was "irresponsible" for failing to lock out strangers. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2CxT8Ew

Fox News Breaking News Alert North Korea must pay $501 million to Otto Warmbier's parents, judge rules 12/24/18 11:07 AM

Google and Amazon now under pressure to ban app of organisation that calls homosexuality "sinful". from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2BD5OZ3

The president has endorsed at least a dozen books this year – despite claiming he ‘doesn’t have the time’ to read – and they all have one thing in common When it comes to reading books, Donald Trump has protested: “I don’t have the time.” Nonetheless, the president has made at least a dozen personal recommendations on Twitter this year for a shelf full of books written by his supporters and polemicists of the right and far right that he has found to be “excellent”, “fantastic” or even “great”. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2T9eJZh

You’ll never sleep in a twin bedroom again after hearing this classic Edwardian ghost story, selected by Penelope Lively and read by Simon Callow as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists You’ll never sleep in a twin bedroom again after hearing this classic Edwardian ghost story, selected by Penelope Lively and read by Simon Callow as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists. Other episodes to curl up with this holiday period: Neil Gaiman on Rudyard Kipling; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading Ama Ata Aidoo; Zadie Smith introduces us to a story from Giuseppe Pontiggia and Sebastian Barry returning to James Joyce’s short story Eveline, forty years after he first read it. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QRWYB9

The monitoring equipment will be installed at hotspots and restricted areas such as airports. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2CwifYt

BT confirms that Huawei's gear will not be at the heart of the UK's Emergency Services Network. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2ShnG2J

The enigma of the stranger in front of you on the bus takes on a droll grandeur in this look at everyday infinity The Back of Your Head Stranger, I’m looking at the back of your head; at the heart of the crown where the whorl starts; at the touch of skin like the stars clustered at the core of a spiral galaxy, curls whirling out in points of light on dark to infinity and beyond … Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Rf0GUS

A report on the incident is recommending the RAF uses a system to warn it of drone flights. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2rSPcs4

A Chinese drama is the most-searched show, despite Google being largely blocked in China. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2T9nhj8

A government source said ministers are to discuss the disruption which grounded hundreds of flights. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EMPGIn

James Hamilton-Paterson’s survey of the decline of industry, from motorbikes to aerospace, combines nostalgia with rage Why can’t Britain make things any more? It’s almost a rhetorical question now, but keeps getting asked as one great manufacturing industry after another seemingly sinks into decline. George Osborne once promised a manufacturing revival that would supposedly see Britain “carried aloft by a march of the makers” yet we have slipped below France in the league tables for manufacturing output. Household names from Cadbury chocolate to Boots the chemist have been snapped up by foreign owners. The loss felt so keenly in former steel, shipbuilding or fishing communities isn’t just of jobs but of pride and prestige, a feeling the Leave campaign shrewdly tapped into with its promise to make Britannia once again rule the waves. And at first glance What We Have Lost looks, with its red white and blue cover, like just another jingoistic addition to the nostalgic Brexiter canon...

From Charles Dickens to Susan Cooper, the How to Train Your Dragon author chooses books to terrify and cheer – and even inspire a little kindness The festive season has always been full of defiance against the crowding in of the dark. When the year is at its bleakest, we surround ourselves with friends and loved ones to drive that darkness away with fires and joyful noise. Because this is also the time of year to remind ourselves of all the good humanity can do, and to believe in the impossible. There are so many stories that convey the magic of the festive season. When we return to Clement Clarke Moore ’s A Visit from St Nicholas , or Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales or Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising and read them aloud, we find a kind of magic, cast a spell. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EN042R

Fox News Breaking News Alert Seahawks top Chiefs, returning Seattle to NFL postseason 12/23/18 9:26 PM

Mining-technology.com will be taking a short break over the holiday season. Our full daily news service will return on 2 January. Thank you for your support in 2018, and we wish you a happy and prosperous 2019. Best Regards The Editorial team The post Season’s Greetings appeared first on Mining Technology | Mining News and Views Updated Daily . from Mining Technology | Mining News and Views Updated Daily http://bit.ly/2rR3mcT

A local man and woman are released without charge, as police say they have found a damaged drone. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EGYv5Q

The music streaming service has settled a lawsuit brought by Wixen Music Publishing. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2QHo8KZ

Fox News Breaking News Alert Defense Secretary James Mattis to leave on January 1; Trump taps Patrick Shanahan as replacement 12/23/18 8:55 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Mick Mulvaney told 'Fox News Sunday' it is 'very possible' the partial government shutdown will extend into 2019 12/23/18 6:52 AM

Amy Bloom is the award-winning author of four novels, two of which have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, four collections of short stories, a children’s book and an essay collection My mother was crying on the floor, naked, except for her black velvet slippers and my daughter’s navy blazer left behind the last time Rebecca visited. The aide put a beige thermal blanket over her, the kind my mother refused to have in her house. It’s like being smothered by tissue, she said. It feels like bark, she said. “Don’t worry,” the aide said. “We’ll have your mother fixed up in no time.” Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QJjLPw

A timely critique and reimagining of Madame Bovary by a writer who finds Flaubert ‘filled with hatred’ The archaism “cuckold” has returned to the contemporary lexicon thanks to the combined efforts of niche pornographers and “alt‑right” trolls. Anyone who has come into contact with online misogynists, or glanced at their repartee on social media, will have noticed that the contraction “cuck” is one of their go-to insults. Epitomising male anxieties about inadequacy and impotence, it’s the kind of epithet that says an awful lot about the person using it. The term’s reappearance makes the first English-language edition of Charles Bovary, Country Doctor , by the Austrian essayist Jean Améry (1912–1978), a timely publication. It takes as its subject the most famous literary “cuck” of all, the hapless husband of the eponymous adulterer in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Améry’s book is structured as a “novel-essay”, with chapters alternating between novelistic fan fiction and li...

Riveting new detail is added to the story of the men and women who lost their lives trying to stop the Führer, in the final book by Ashdown, who died on Saturday In the old German defence ministry in the Bendlerstrasse, Berlin, a whole floor has been restored to the way it was at the time of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. It was there that Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators managed their doomed enterprise: he and three others were shot in the courtyard below at the end of that dramatic day. Another floor is devoted to the trade unions, political parties and churches who did what they could to stop the man who was bringing shame and disaster to their country. It is a moving place. Related: Paddy Ashdown obituary Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QO0mNk

Fox News Breaking News Alert Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy in fight against ISIS, resigns 12/22/18 8:59 AM

From salmon fishing to textavism, naked tennis to Trump’s thirst for Diet Coke ... pit your wits against authors like Will Self and Anne Enright in our bumper quiz ANNE ENRIGHT: In Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, Andrew from Belfast survives a bomb in another city. Which city? Paris London Beirut Boston In A Pagan Place by Edna O’Brien, Emma agrees to send home a postcard when her secret baby is born. “All well with Volkswagen” will mean it is a boy. What car is code for a girl? Triumph Herald Robin Reliant Hillman Minx Morris Minor In Sally Rooney’s Normal People, how many more points does Connell get in his Leaving Certificate than his friend Marianne? 25 just 10 they get the same none, she has honours maths JONATHAN COE: Which of these novels concerns a forger called Wyatt Gwyon and an art dealer called Recktall Brown? The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan The Recognitions by William Gaddis The Allegations by Mark Lawson The Fabrications by Baret Magarian ...