Japan's top court said on Wednesday that requiring transgender people to be sterilised in order to change their...

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 12, 2023--

South Korea has spent billions of dollars on policies to boost its birth rate. But when Kim Kyu-jin and her wife wanted to have a baby...

Amber Husain was cooking dinner for a friend when she suddenly realised the meat she was preparing was a corpse. She looked at the chicken in front of her and was overcome with a visceral sense of disgust. Instead of food, she saw “a carcass – plucked, beheaded, and fleshy”. Husain was 26 when she had this epiphany, and it served as a wake-up call not just for her stomach but her mind, too – as her personal tastes shifted away from meat products, her political outlook on the meat industry and food production more broadly also altered and expanded. Five years later, that moment of revulsion forms the opening of her new book, Meat Love, in which she scrutinises the idea of “ethical” meat consumption, and dares to ask how the contemporary middle classes have come to criticise “the worst violence against animals” while still happily feeding on their flesh. Why, for example, has well-heeled, middle-class London gone nuts for slurping bone marrow from the shin bones of baby cows? Why is offal on so many trendy menus? How has contemporary culture at large come to accept that factory farms are monstrous, but that if animals are cared for, cherished and loved while alive, we should feel better about killing them for our carnivorous pleasures? “For ages, I was one of those carnivores who felt mildly bad about eating meat but just turned that into this inane, self-consciously sadistic part of the pleasure of it all,” Husein tells me. “The more my diet started to revolve around stuff that wasn’t meat, the weirder meat started to feel. Interestingly, once my stomach had been radicalised, I found I had a much greater intellectual openness to thinking about the politics of meat.” Having freed herself from the conflict of eating meat but also feeling bad about it, she found she was able to go beyond those questions of morality – which she suggests can be “stifling” – and think politically. “Now that I have no desire to eat animals, there’s nothing to stop me reckoning with what it means that the meat industry [consists of] an underclass of both humans and animals who are exploited and – in the animals’ case – killed for pleasure and profit.” This is the essential crux of Husain’s argument, and it’s something often lacking in discussions around the “ethics” of meat consumption. For Husain, the question is not, “how can humans eat meat responsibly?” but “how are certain lives devalued to an extent that their suffering can be written off, in order to ‘make a killing’?” What she’s saying, in other words, is that whether the meat on the table has come from a factory farm or an organic farm, or whether you’re tucking in at Burger King or the River Cafe, the path to the plate is still paved with violence. And, while current cultural trends may claim it is better to love and respect an animal before killing and consuming it, perhaps what this cultivates is the ability to embrace exploitation “in a spirit of virtuous indulgence”. What does it really mean, for all living beings, if love is imagined as compatible with killing? “To slide your buttery hand between the flesh and skin of a thing that, if only for a moment, you have re-learnt to perceive as a corpse, is to give an invigorating massage to your sense of political possibility,” Husain writes in Meat Love. By the slim book’s end, her invigorated “sense of political possibility” has led to “a ravenous hunger – a desire for a different culture, a different society”; a new world “in which no one, neither animal, immigrant, worker, woman, or peasant, was considered a thing to be owned, controlled, killed, or left to die”. For many, the leap from a chicken breast on a plate to the exploitation of oppressed people around the globe might seem like a vast one. Yet, it certainly seems clear that there has been a marked shift in the way meat is conceived and consumed – among the middle classes, at least. Since the turn of the millennium, foodie figures like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have been promoting “seasonal, ethically produced food” as part of a broader commitment to caring for the environment. At the same time, a distinctly carnivorous spirit has taken hold – one that professes to be an “honest”, “grounded” and “down to earth” ethos. “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay,” Anthony Bourdain wrote at the start of the 1999 New Yorker article that would, eventually, catapult him into global foodie fame. I find it easy to laugh at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and people like that, but I’m not totally convinced that they’re really the bad guys Lewis Bassett Then there’s Fergus Henderson and St John – the illustrious London restaurant, born in 1994 on the premises of a former bacon smokehouse, which popularised “nose to tail” dining. This offal-centric “no waste” approach is neatly summed up in Henderson’s oft-quoted phrase: “If you’re going to kill the animal, it seems only polite to use the whole thing.” Traditionally “cheap cuts” are “elevated” from a source of sustenance for the working classes, to a source of virtue for the urban bourgeois. According to its own cookbook, St John dishes combine “high sophistication with peasant roughness” – that winning aesthetic formula that also sees middle-class urbanites flocking to farmers’ markets and chugging natural wine. In a sharp and searing piece for food and culture newsletter Vittles, writer Sheena Patel dubs this “Rich Person Peasantcore”, asking: “Why are these influencers pretending that they themselves till the land and eat like 17th-century French peasants when in fact their chopping boards cost more than most people’s rent?” In the face of swathes of small plates adorned with offal, and slices of ham served for upwards of £20, it seems like a pertinent question not just for influencers, but also for today’s trendiest restaurateurs and diners. Lewis Bassett is a chef and the host of The Full English podcast, which, over its two seasons, has dived into everything from the birth of “modern European” cuisine to high food prices, factory farms, and why Britain is in love with Greggs. “It’s interesting the way we create these fantastical worlds for us to eat within,” he says. “It is clearly a fantasy to imagine that you can have the rural experience of a peasant in France or Italy, in modern-day Britain.” Yet, he also says that this trend is far from new. The current “rustic” style – typified by “nose to tail eating” – is, he suggests, “intimately tied with what you could call a culinary and broader cultural movement that appears in the wake of countercultural movements in the Sixties, and eventually finds its way into food, especially as some of those countercultural people get a bit older and a bit more affluence”. Essentially, “it’s the same thing that manifested in places like Habitat,” he says, of the homewares and furnishings brand founded in 1964 by Terence Conran. Both design and dining were transformed, offering experiences to the middle classes that were both refined and casual at the same time. Alongside that cultural shift, and “that fashion for pared-down forms of eating out”, Bassett notes the arrival of a broader awareness of environmental and animal welfare concerns. “It’s obviously easy to ridicule these middle-class forms of culture,” he says, “but these concerns are ones I certainly share and I think should be considerations for everyone. I find it easy to laugh at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and people like that, but I’m not totally convinced that they’re really the bad guys.” So is there a danger that legitimate backlash to the “thrifty rural”, “nose to tail” trend – and bourgeois “peasantcore” more broadly – could spill over into an attack on all food industry attempts at sustainability? “I think people don’t want stuffy fine dining experiences,” Bassett says, “but at the same time, having the kind of pared-down, rustic, ‘peasant food’ – like, having ham served to you at St John costs you 20 quid – maybe people are slightly sick of that.” He quickly adds, though, that he is “not saying it can come any cheaper than 20 quid, because when you spend a lot of time and effort rearing animals properly, and paying chefs properly, and paying rents in your restaurants, that racks up”. It seems there is a tension, then, between practical and immediate ethical matters – such as paying food industry staff liveable wages or reducing food waste – and broader questions about what kind of society we wish to live in or create. Is the question of “ethical” meat consumption, as Husain suggested, “beyond morality” – a question of politics only? Or is it still, at heart, a moral dilemma, based on people’s personal sense of “right” and “wrong”? Summing up Husain’s attitude towards animals in Meat Love, Bassett suggests “she’s saying that, if you love them so much, why are you killing them? I suppose where Amber Husain and I would slightly disagree is that I’m not convinced that killing an animal is inherently wrong.” Away from the carnal appreciation and “peasantcore” of contemporary restaurant culture, meat-eating often seems to be conceived as either a “guilty pleasure” or a “grim necessity”. In all these cases, however, there appears to be an overriding sense that there is “no alternative” to a meat-eating status quo. The late cultural critic Mark Fisher famously used similar terms to define “capitalist realism”, meaning that capitalism is the only viable economic system, and thus there can be no imaginable alternative. Is it possible we’re also stuck in a kind of “carnivorous realism”? If so, it might be because the two are so interlinked. As Husain puts it, “meat is the inevitable outcome of an economic system that relies on cheap labour and cheap life. But that doesn’t mean meat is a necessity, it means a new economic order is a necessity.” Perhaps taking the leap from a vegetarian diet to full-scale social and economic revolution still seems unthinkable to many. But, in nasty, brutish and austere times, it has also perhaps never been more necessary to seriously consider who can eat, and who is made meat. “I think we need an avalanche of political will from within the food justice, land justice, climate justice and labour movements to radically transform society,” Husain says. With that as the goal, she believes it isn’t helpful “for us to be clinging to the idea of meat as a pleasure”: “If we can’t imagine something other than animal flesh to eat for dinner we might struggle to imagine an entirely different society.” ‘Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh’ by Amber Husain is out now Read More Between Brexit and Covid, London’s food scene has become a dog’s dinner – can it be saved? It’s time for booze bottles to have health warning labels Should I give up Diet Coke? With aspartame under suspicion, an addict speaks Food portion sizes on packaging are ‘unrealistic and confusing’, says Which? In Horto: Hearty, outdoorsy fare in a secret London Bridge garden Zero-fuss cooking: BBQ pork ribs and zingy Asian slaw

On July 13, the national board of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of

DURHAM, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2023--

Bernie Ecclestone – the former supremo of Formula 1 – has pleaded guilty to fraud at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday but has been spared jail. The 92-year-old failed to declare more than £400 million of overseas assets to the government, namely a trust in Singapore with a bank account of around $650 million. He was sentenced to 17 months in jail, suspended for two years. He has agreed a civil settlement of £652,634,836 in respect of sums due to HMRC over the course of 18 years. The billionaire, who has courted controversy throughout his life, was in charge of F1 for over 40 years before relinquishing his role in 2017 when current owners Liberty Media took over the running of the sport. The Independent takes a look at Ecclestone’s life and times through his tenure in motorsport and beyond: 1930 – Ecclestone born on 28 October, son of Sidney and Bertha Sophia, in St Peter, Suffolk. 1952– Marries first wife, Ivy Bamford, at 21-years-old. They have a daughter, Deborah, born in 1955. The pair divorce in the 1960s. 1958 – Entered two F1 races as a driver, at Monaco and Silverstone, after purchasing two chassis from the disbanded Connaught Formula One team. Failed to qualify for either race. 1972 – Buys Brabham F1 team for £100,000. Tastes success with Nelson Piquet’s two world titles in 1981 and 1983, though only records a best result of second in the constructors’ championship. 1974 – Forms the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA). Played crucial role in negotiating F1’s television rights. Becomes chief executive in 1978. 1984 – Slavica Radic, later his second wife, becomes pregnant and second daughter Tamara is born. Marries Radic in 1985. 1988 – Sells Brabham for more than $5 million to Swiss businessman Joachim Luhti. 1988 – Ecclestone’s third daughter, Petra, is born in London. 1997 – Embroiled in a dispute with the Labour Party over tobacco sponsorship of Formula 1, in contrary to the new government’s health position. After a meeting with prime minister Tony Blair alongside Max Mosley (a fellow Labour Party donor), the government make an exemption for F1. 2005 – Farce embroils the United States Grand Prix, with seven teams refusing to participate due to safety concerns over the Michelin tyres used. No compromise was reached, and only six cars (using Bridgestone tyres) started the race. 2008 – Radic files for divorce, which is settled in March 2009. She receives a reported settlement of $1 billion. 2009 – Crashgate. F1 descends into chaos after cheating scandal which saw Nelson Piquet Jr. deliberately crash a year earlier in Singapore to aid his team-mate, race winner Fernando Alonso. It later emerges, in 2023, that Ecclestone and then-FIA boss Mosley knew about the scandal at the time. Felipe Massa is now in the process of pursuing legal action for damages, having lost the 2008 world title to Lewis Hamilton. 2009 – Ecclestone widely condemned after remarks that were positive about Adolf Hitler. He said to The Times: “Terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was – in the way that he could command a lot of people – able to get things done”. Ecclestone later apologised for his comments. 2012 – Marries vice-president of marketing for the Brazilian Grand Prix Fabiana Flosi, 46 years his junior. 2014 – Paid a £60 million settlement to end a bribery trial in Germany without admitting guilt. Prosecutors had accused him of bribery of banker Gerhard Gribkowsky. 2017 – Removed from position as CEO of Formula One Group after its £6.4 billion takeover by Liberty Media. Retains title of Chairman Emeritus until January 2020. 2020 – Ecclestone has first son, Ace (Alexander Charles Ecclestone), at age 89. 2020 – Criticised by F1 and Lewis Hamilton after comments made in wake of the murder of George Floyd. Ecclestone says to CNN: “In a lot of cases, black people are more racist than what white people are.” 2022 – Arrested by Brazilian authorities for illegally carrying a firearm while boarding a private plane to Switzerland. Ecclestone paid bail and was freed to travel to Switzerland. 2022 – Ecclestone says on Good Morning Britain that he would “take a bullet” for Russia president Vladimir Putin because he was a “first class person,” adding that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was just a “mistake” that businessman make. He later apologised for his comments. 2023 – Pleaded guilty to £400m fraud. Sentenced to 17 months in prison, suspended for two years. Read More Lewis Hamilton gives blunt response to Felipe Massa’s legal action over 2008 F1 title F1 given new deadline by Felipe Massa’s lawyers – who label Lewis Hamilton title a ‘sham’ ‘More teams, less races’: FIA boss outlines aspirations for future of F1 F1 reveal unique Las Vegas GP schedule and ‘opening ceremony’ plans Lance Stroll ‘may have contravened FIA rules’ during furious outburst in Qatar

"Does anybody else have a friend who texts you like they're famous i.e. they don't?"

Extreme desktop processors for PC builders and highly demanding workstation users are back—or so AMD

Roark Capital snapped up Subway in a $9.55 billion deal, sources said on Thursday, after it outbid several

If you find yourself making typos sometimes when you’re trying to type a URL into

As of June 29, several Dyson vacuums are on sale at Amazon ahead of Prime