New StatesmanBritain's award-winning current affairs magazineOf love and hunger- August 14, 2008 Two inventive new productions showcase the best of GlyndebourneHnsel und Gretel Love and Other Demons GlyndebourneHunger and potential starvation have been perennial threats in Europe for so long and until so recently that it is no surprise that a subgenre of folk tales deals with famine and feast. Engelbert Humperdinck's 1893 opera Hnsel und Gretel dramatises the Grimm brothers' locus classicus of food-based fairy tales. Glyndebourne's new production by the French director Laurent Pelly puts a.http://www.newstatesman.com/theatre/2008/08/gretel-love-glyndebourne Bending the old rules- August 14, 2008 Observations on abortionAfter a storm of protests from abortion rights groups, the American health secretary, Michael Leavitt, has for the time being backed down from issuing a legally binding regulation that would have made contraception more difficult to obtain by redefining birth control pills, the "morning-after pill" and devices such as IUDs as forms of abortion. Health workers already have the right, guaranteed by federal law, to decline to take part in ...http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/08/abortion-rights-leavitt-health Don't forget what happened in Yugoslavia- August 14, 2008 Even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the provinceThe secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals...http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovo-war-nato-serbs How The Wire found its peers- August 14, 2008 Was the unlikely success of the HBO cop show down to illicit file-sharingHow is The Wire so popular Even those who haven't been following the gritty TV series about life in Baltimore can't have failed to have heard of it, thanks to blanket media acclaim, not least from this magazine. As the fifth series opened on these shores - broadcast on Sky's obscure FX channel - what began as quiet appreciation among those in the know has grown to the kind of ...http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2008/08/illicit-file-wire-series-hbo Labour of our fruits- August 14, 2008 If we want seasonal produce we need to support seasonal workersOn a fine August day, picking raspberries is a pleasantly tiring way to spend a summer. The fruit can be reached, albeit from thorny bushes, with less back-bending than strawberries require. You make your way along your row, under the polytunnel, towards a colleague coming in the other direction. The atmosphere is relaxed, although you are aware that this is piecework, and that you need to make efficient progress. Most ...http://www.newstatesman.com/food/2008/08/seasonal-produce-workers-fruit Youth- August 14, 2008 Moral panic about Britains juvenile delinquents is nothing new. Nor are suggestions of what should be done to deal with them. Even during the Second World War both the government and the general public were alarmed by what they saw as the growing problem of unruly youth. This New Statesman article argued that the answer must be much more training and education for the young, and that a reoriented national service scheme, even in peacetime, could also help.The New Statesman 25 July 1942 Very...http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/08/war-education-youth-training The plot against liberal America- August 14, 2008 In its pursuit of a free-market utopia, the US right tried to crush unions, the legal profession and all the pillars of the left. It will not stop there, warns Thomas FrankThe most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from...http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/08/liberal-state-government No fear of . . . death No 4040- August 14, 2008 According to the Guardian, Ed Stafford, a former army captain from Leicester, has advertised for a companion "for a 3,000-mile Amazon trek - must have own iPod". Other must-haves include "a GSOH" and "no fear of snakes or gun-toting guerrillas". We wanted adverts for companions involving activities that might need judicious wording in order to get some brave soul to sign upSet by John O'ByrneReport by Ms de Meaner Well done. 20 to each of the four winners, the best of whom (Brian D Allingham)..http://www.newstatesman.com/2008/08/competition-fear-gsoh London underground- August 14, 2008 Nearly forty years ago, an explosion of surreally subversive magazines brought sex, drugs, gay liberation and feminism into the public eye - and the courtroom. What survivedThe prosecuting counsel held the publication up disdainfully. "It deals with homosexuality," he told the jury. "It deals with lesbianism - on the front cover! It deals with sadism; it deals with perverted sexual practices; and, finally, it deals with drug taking. You will, having read the magazine through, ask yourself:...http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/08/underground-press-gay-ink-sex Bulldozing Beijing- August 14, 2008 City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China Jasper Becker Allen Lane, 384pp, 22The Last Days of Old BeijingMichael Meyer Walker & Company, 368pp, 20These are vertical times in Beijing. Starchitects, egged on by politicians and developers, are reaching for the skies. "Bigger, bolder, taller" has become the mantra not just for the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron, whose China Central Television headquarters building and "Bird's Nest" national stadium, respectively,..http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/beijing-china-meyer-becker |