Children near Amsterdam airport use inhalers more, study finds | Air pollution

As the public hearings for London Gatwick airport’s northern runway resume, researchers from the Netherlands have found greater inhaler use in children living near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

Stand close to a large airport and, if the wind is in the wrong direction, each cubic centimetre of air that you breathe will contain tens of thousands of ultrafine particles (UFP).

Air pollution measurement equipment was installed in three primary schools, each about a kilometre from the airport fence. The researchers took weekly measurements of the lung function of 161 children at the schools and 19 asthmatic children living near the airport. With schools to the north and south of the airport, the children experienced airport UFP at different times.

The children were also taught how to take their own lung measurements at home in the mornings and evening. It was these records that revealed the most significant finding from the study.

Prof Gerard Hoek of Utrecht University, who led the study, said: “On days with high aviation-related UFP, children experienced substantially more respiratory symptoms and used more symptom-relieving medication.” These symptoms included coughing, wheeziness and phlegm. Wind direction alone was not a good predictor of exposure to airport UFP so it is unlikely that parents or children will have known their day-to-day exposure. UFP and soot from traffic was also associated with symptoms and changes in morning lung tests.

In 2021, the Dutch Health Council and the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted the growing evidence that UFP are damaging our health. This included 75 studies, but technical differences between the studies meant that the WHO could not set a standard at that time.

In 2020, a study of four European capitals found aviation UFP in the city centres that came from airports on the outskirts. In the UK, UFP from Heathrow can be measured in central London nearly 20km away and all across the west of the city. UFP has also been measured under the flight paths of airports in the US, including Boston’s Logan international airport, but these measurements do not capture what it feels like to live close to an airport.

During 2018 and 2019, I led a team of researchers that measured UFP around Gatwick including in Horley, a town of 23,000 people next to the airport. We found that UFP 500 metres downwind of the airport was greater than that at the kerb of London’s busiest roads.

Victoria Chester, a Green party local councillor, described living close to Gatwick: “I live very close to where airport expansion will most heavily impact Horley. Living near the airport you become used to the noise and smell but on some days it’s so bad you can taste the pollution in the air and when the wind blows in your direction it really stinks.”

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A Gatwick spokesperson said: “The health impact assessment within the northern runway project environmental statement includes an appropriate assessment of UFP. London Gatwick is committed to participating in national aviation industry body studies of UFP emissions at airports, including those reviewing how monitoring could be undertaken. We have put forward a voluntary contribution to fund work should the government introduce standards.”

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Ukraine war briefing: Sanctions to strike at Putin’s oil ‘shadow fleet’ | Ukraine

  • The UK has announced dozens of new sanctions aimed at constraining Russia’s war in Ukraine, including targeting Moscow’s main stock exchange, a day after Washington announced similar measures. Washington on Wednesday unveiled a raft of sanctions, including on the Moscow exchange and several subsidiaries, that raise the stakes for foreign banks that still deal with Russia. The punishment, set to complicate billions of dollars in transactions, dramatically prompted the Moscow exchange to halt dollar and euro trades on Thursday.

  • Among the new UK sanctions are its first on vessels in Putin’s so-called shadow fleet, used by the Kremlin to circumvent western curbs on its oil exports. They also target suppliers of munitions, machine tools, microelectronics, and logistics to Russia’s military. Those suppliers include entities based in China, Israel, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey, along with ships transporting military goods from North Korea to Russia.

  • The Financial Times reports that the UK “shadow fleet” sanctions cover the large Russian insurer Ingosstrakh as well as individual tankers including one called the Canis Power. More details of the sanctions package are included in the government announcement.

  • China said it firmly opposed Britain’s decision to include five Chinese firms in the sanctions, which target China-based Hengshui Yuanchem Trading and Hong Kong-based HK Hengbangwei Electronics for allegedly being or having been involved in “destabilising Ukraine” or “undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”.

  • Leaders of the G7 western economies have meanwhile outlined an agreement handing $50bn (£39bn) of aid to Ukraine backed by frozen Russian state assets. The loan agreement, hammered out in complex legal talks over the past three months, will see a special fund operating by the end of the year. The interest on the large loan is to be funded not by Ukraine but from the profits derived from the frozen Russian state assets.

  • The US and Ukraine have also signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement, announced as Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy met at the G7 summit in Puglia, Italy. Biden said arrangements were being made to provide Ukraine with five Patriot missile defence systems, adding: “Everything we have is going to Ukraine until its needs are met.”

  • Zelenskiy described the deal as the “strongest agreement” struck since his country’s independence in 1991, noting it would last through the war and afterwards, covering intelligence cooperation and the strengthening of Ukrainian defence industries. In addition, Ukraine and Japan signed a 20-year security agreement on the sidelines of the G7, Zelenskiy said, that envisages security and defence assistance, humanitarian aid, technical and financial cooperation.

  • On the frontlines, Ukraine said on Thursday that its forces were fighting fierce battles near Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop settlement whose capture would give the Russians a powerful foothold in the eastern Donetsk region. “Two combat engagements continue near Ivanivske,” the Ukrainian military said. “The situation is tense.” Ivanivske is a small town just outside Chasiv Yar.

  • Farther south in the Donetsk region, officials said one civilian was killed near Pokrovsk, another point where Russia has concentrated its firepower. A 40-year-old man was killed by Russian fire in the Kherson region, Ukrainian officials said, while Russian-installed authorities in the region meanwhile said one civilian was killed by Ukrainian forces.

  • Allies will send Ukraine about €350m worth of 152mm artillery shells, the Dutch defence ministry said on Thursday, after a two-day “Ramstein group” meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels. “In previous ammunition deliveries, Ukraine has so far received mainly 155mm shells for howitzers donated by the west. However, the country also has many 152mm guns. With the new delivery, these weapons can also be better utilised,” said the ministry.

  • Returning to the G7, Zelenskiy, at a joint press conference with Biden, said the Chinese president, Xi Jinping had assured him during a phone conversation that “he will not sell any weapon to Russia. We’ll see if he’s [a] respectable person he will not, because he gave me [his] word.” But Biden added: “China is not supplying weapons but the ability to produce those weapons and the technology available to do it, so it is in fact helping Russia.”

  • China, skipping the coming weekend’s summit on a peace plan for Ukraine, has been lobbying governments with its alternative plan, 10 diplomats have told Reuters, with one calling Beijing’s campaign a “subtle boycott” of the global meeting in Switzerland. Reuters cited Beijing-based diplomats, one of whom said China had told developing nations the Swiss meeting would prolong the war, while two diplomats with direct knowledge of the matter said China had been telling western nations that many developing countries shared its views.

  • China’s own proposal calls for an international peace conference “held at a proper time that is recognised by both Russia and Ukraine, with equal participation of all parties as well as fair discussion of all peace plans”. Zelenskiy recently accused China of trying to undermine the Swiss conference but has also encouraged Beijing to take part in find a route to peace.

  • Countries supporting Ukraine must speed up their decision making, the outgoing Dutch PM, Mark Rutte said on Thursday. Rutte, a leading candidate to become Nato’s next secretary general, was speaking at a conference in Finland.

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    The Truth vs Alex Jones review – so viscerally wrong it will fry your mind | Television & radio

    On 14 December 2012, an armed man entered Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. He shot and killed 20 children aged between six and seven and six members of staff.

    It is impossible to imagine a worse thing, isn’t it? The massacre of children and those trying to protect them. And yet it did get worse, thanks to a rightwing bloviator with merch to sell. The Truth vs Alex Jones maps, in painful, unsensationalist detail, the additional suffering the bereaved families were caused when Jones began to call the shooting a hoax. This, he told viewers of his “alt-right” internet show Infowars, was the “false-flag operation” he had been warning them about – a fake shooting orchestrated by gun control advocates to give the left the leverage it needed to come for patriots’ weapons. Conspiracy theorists took everything he said and ran with it.

    And he said a lot. Although most of us will be aware of the bare bones of the story – and appalled by even those – it is still shocking to see him spout his viciousness. It is so viscerally wrong that you want to reach through the screen and stop his mouth by force. He builds a world in which the nervous smile of a stricken parent, Robbie Parker, before he speaks to the press about the death of his six-year-old daughter Emilie, becomes proof that the parents are all “crisis actors”. A world in which the absence of helicopters landing on the school lawns proves that there was no shooting and in which a technical glitch in an interview by the US journalist Anderson Cooper with the mother of another dead child is evidence that they did the whole thing in front of a green screen. The madness of it, and the knowledge that Jones’s rants are giving a certain rabid demographic exactly what they want, the dizzying sense of unreality and the multiplying questions as you watch – about how and why any of this can possibly be – fries your circuits even at this remove of time and space.

    What it was like for the families is described by a handful of them. They speak plainly and – unlike Jones, who must whip his audience into an unthinking frenzy – without histrionics about the death and rape threats they have endured, the years of terrible harassment and the simple horror of knowing that a large number of Americans – 24% according to one estimate – doubts that their children lived or died or that their grief is real. Six-year-old Dylan Hockley’s mother Nicole remembers being told only to touch his hands because “you won’t like what you feel” elsewhere – such is the impact of close-range bullets on a little boy’s body. Scarlett Lewis recalls holding her dead son Jesse’s hand until it got warm again and noting that he still had dirt under his fingernails.

    The final third of the film deals with the various court actions the families eventually brought against Jones that ultimately resulted in various default judgments against him, after he failed to comply with court procedures. The juries awarded the plaintiffs damages totalling $1.5bn. The suit brought in Connecticut sees Scarlett take the stand and deliver the most beautiful, compelling, heartfelt speech directly to Jones. It is astonishing. Even if the film had no other merits, it would be worth watching for this alone. It is to see every piece of humanity that is missing in him and his followers embodied in one woman.

    To date, Jones has paid nothing. And he continues to broadcast, untrammelled. Since the film was made he has been ordered to liquidate his assets to pay at least some of what he owes but, the world and the internet being what it is, even this is unlikely to put a spoke in his wheels for long.

    The trials point to money as Jones’s motivation, adducing evidence that every time he ranted about the “giant hoax” in which “no one died”, his audience numbers and revenue (from the dietary supplements and other products that Infowars shills) spiked. But it does not – and perhaps no one can, though there should be film-makers who try – fathom an answer to the question of why people are so willing, so thirsty to believe lies. All the punitive damages in the world won’t remake society into a place where Alex Jones and his ilk can’t flourish. We live in a world built on shifting sands. We live in terrifying times.

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    Rayner and Mordaunt clash again in heated seven-way TV debate | General election 2024

    Angela Rayner and Penny Mordaunt have clashed again in a second seven-way TV debate, one which also featured representatives from smaller parties turning their attacks on Labour as they seem set for government.

    Labour’s deputy leader repeatedly had her answers on subjects including public services and the economy interrupted as Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, accused Labour of wanting to raise taxes, while also saying the party had no economic plans.

    “You’ve had 14 years to come up with some ideas,” Mordaunt said at one point. Rayner, prompting laughter from the ITV audience, replied: “You’ve had 14 years in government.”

    In an identical lineup to the first seven-way debate on BBC One, the pair debated alongside: Daisy Cooper, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats; Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader; Stephen Flynn, the Westminster leader of the Scottish National party; Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Greens; and Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader.

    Much like the earlier debate, just under a week ago, the sheer number of participants often made events a bit chaotic, as the panellists talked over each other and jostled for airtime.

    But some themes emerged, including a tendency for Labour to take a degree of criticism from a range of parties, while Farage focused his aim on the Conservatives.

    An initial question on healthcare and other public services saw Flynn say £18bn of public sector cuts were “baked into a future Labour government”.

    He also attacked Labour for planning to use surplus private health provision to try to cut waiting lists, as did ap Iorwerth.

    After explaining the Greens’ plans to raise money via wealth taxes and other levies on wealthier people, Denyer asked Rayner why Labour would not do the same. “Why so timid?” she asked the Labour deputy leader.

    “I’ve never been called timid in my life,” Rayner replied, to laughter.

    In a section of the debate in which all seven participants could ask a question of one other panellist, Mordaunt, Denyer, Flynn and ap Iorwerth directed their queries at Rayner.

    Farage targeted Mordaunt, as did Cooper – whose party is targeting dozens of Tory seats – and Rayner. The Labour deputy leader asked Mordaunt if she would welcome Farage into the Conservative party, to which she gave a noncommittal answer.

    There were repeated exchanges between Mordaunt and Rayner over tax and spending plans, with the Conservative minister repeatedly citing the much-criticised claim that Labour’s spending plans would cost families about £2,000 in extra taxes.

    There was, Mordaunt insisted, a fiscal gap in the Labour plans that needed filling.

    “The only way they are going to be able to do that is to raise taxes,” she claimed. “They’ve only declared about a quarter of the taxes they are going to put up. They are going to have to put up a lot more.”

    Rayner disputed the idea and, at a couple of points when Mordaunt repeatedly tried to raise the subject of tax, some of the audience laughed.

    In another slightly awkward moment for the Tory representative, a comment that English schools were “world-class” also prompted laughter.

    In another sign of seemingly waning support for the Tories, Flynn won audible audience support by responding to Mordaunt saying people “cannot afford” a Labour government, saying: “What people can’t afford any longer, Penny, is one single day more of a Conservative government which is completely out of touch with reality.”

    Farage, for his part, began the debate by citing a new YouGov poll showing Reform UK inching above the Conservatives, saying: “We are now the opposition to Labour.”

    He repeatedly sought to bring questions about public services back to immigration, saying: “All of our public services are under pressure because the population has increased by 6 million since the Conservatives came to power. It’s impossible to keep up.”

    He also blamed what he termed “an exploding population” for increasing school class sizes. Rayner responded by noting that many school rolls are actually dropping.

    Flynn condemned what he called “the Westminster status quo” when a show of hands asked for by the host, Julie Etchingham, resulted in Rayner, Mordaunt, Cooper and Farage agreeing that they wanted migration to fall.

    He also said that rather than blaming migrants for making Britons poorer, Farage should take responsibility for damage to the economy caused by his “pet project” of Brexit.

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    Tesla shareholders approve CEO Elon Musk’s $45bn pay package | Business

    Tesla shareholders have approved a $45bn pay deal for CEO Elon Musk, following a fiercely contested referendum on his leadership.

    The result, announced on Thursday, comes as the billionaire tycoon fights to retain the largest-ever compensation package granted to an executive at a US-listed company.

    “I just want to start off by saying, hot damn, I love you guys!” a gleeful Musk said as he appeared on stage following the vote.

    The vote took place after a Delaware judge nullified Musk’s payment – then worth around $56bn – in January, on the grounds that Tesla’s board could not be considered independent from Musk’s influence and reached that dollar figure through an illegitimate process.

    The result is a victory for Musk and the Tesla board after they ardently campaigned for shareholders to approve the deal. It could serve as a rebuttal to the judge’s ruling that struck down the award – making it easier for Tesla’s board to argue that shareholders were properly informed about the payment package, and the board members’ ties to Musk, before casting their votes.

    Tesla’s board warned Musk could turn away from the company if the package wasn’t approved, while Musk claimed on Wednesday evening that he had wide support of investors.

    Prominent shareholders such as Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System announced they would vote against the payment in the lead-up to the vote, while proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services also opposed the award.

    The vote does not automatically mean that Musk will receive the money, however, and there are likely to be further disputes. There are still numerous legal arguments around whether the board can be considered independent, and whether the package can be considered fair after the judge ruled otherwise.

    It is also possible new lawsuits may arise over the vote, potentially bringing the case back in front of a judge and raising the prospect of a protracted legal battle. Shareholders also approved a measure to move Tesla’s legal home from Delaware to Texas, potentially further complicating any challenges.

    Tesla originally devised Musk’s payment package in 2017, setting conditions for the CEO to receive 12 different tranches of stock options depending on whether the company hit certain revenue and market targets. Shareholders approved that package by a wide margin in 2018, but one investor filed a suit claiming that the board had been misleading and the package was unfair.

    Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who oversees Delaware’s court of chancery, ruled that Tesla’s board conducted a “deeply flawed” process to determine Musk’s payment. McCormick found that the board was rife with personal conflicts and stacked with Musk’s close allies, such as his former divorce attorney.

    Tesla’s board, which is likely to appeal McCormick’s ruling, sought to remedy her decision with a shareholder vote. Despite McCormick’s criticism of the pay package, the board put forth the same deal that the judge rejected – albeit now worth less money due to a fall in Tesla’s share price.

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    US man dies after being electrocuted in jacuzzi in Mexico resort town | Mexico

    An American man has died after being electrocuted in a jacuzzi at a resort in Mexico, local officials have confirmed.

    The 43-year-old man, identified by police as Jorge N, died after being electrocuted in a jacuzzi he was sharing with a woman. The woman, identified by police as Lizeth N, was taken to the US for medical treatment for her life-threatening injuries.

    The incident happened at a complex of private condominiums at the resort city of Puerto Peñasco, in the Mexican state of Sonora.

    The death of the man and the injuries suffered by the woman were “due to a possible electric discharge when both were inside the jacuzzi”, according to a social media post from the general prosecutor’s office of justice for the state of Sonora on Wednesday.

    State officials said they were working to identify the cause of the shock. Video taken of the incident shows onlookers screaming in panic as they crowd around the jacuzzi, which is located near a beach. Someone is shown doing chest compressions on a person lying on the ground in the video.

    The general prosecutor’s office of justice, known as La Fiscalía General de Justicia del Estado de Sonora (FGJES) in Mexico, is actively investigating the incident.

    In a GoFundMe page set up by friends of Jorge, they wrote: “Our best friends have experienced a horrible accident. Jorge had a heart of gold and was always there for family and friends. The love they shared was one for ages. We are asking for your help to bring him home & help with medical expenses for her.”

    The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported 33 fatalities involving electrocutions in swimming pools and spas since 2002. If you think someone in the water is experiencing an electrical shock, the commission recommends immediately turning off all power and calling 911.

    The American Red Cross recommends “using a fiberglass Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook, extend your reach to the victim and then follow these steps: Brace yourself on the pool deck and extend the Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook toward the victim. If the victim cannot grasp the Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook, use the loop to encircle the victim’s body and pull the victim, face-up, to the edge. Carefully remove the victim from the water”.

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    Clean v green: ‘disgust wins out’ over eco ideals when doing laundry, study finds | Ethical and green living

    How often should you wash your clothes? Doctors don’t really know, but the decision is more cultural than medical, anyway. Worried about leaving the house in sweaty shirts or stained shorts, people often chuck clean clothes in the laundry basket after wearing them just once.

    But the urge to avoid whiffy garments carries a climate cost that has largely been ignored. New research shows that feelings of disgust and shame encourage excessive clothes washing even among those who care about their carbon footprint.

    Swedish scientists surveyed a representative sample of 2,000 people and found that when asked, in effect, to air their dirty laundry, their fear of being seen as unclean overpowered environmental identities.

    When it comes to behaviours, “disgust simply wins out”, said Erik Klint, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden, and lead author of the study. “The study shows that the higher our sensitivity to disgust, the more we wash, regardless of whether we value our environmental identity highly.”

    Klint and his colleague knew from previous research that many people do not link their laundry to the environment, despite washing machines draining energy and water. After seeing that studies to alter habits had mostly failed, the researchers decided to explore the societal dimensions that make people overwash clothes.

    They found a high sensitivity to disgust, shame or violations of cleanliness norms was associated with frequent use of washing machines. They found no such effect for environmental beliefs.

    The dilemma, the scientists concluded, is that the risk of societal pushback takes priority over abstract intentions such as reducing emissions.

    Klint said disgust was an evolutionary trait used as a proxy for potential pathogens. “In practice this means that people intuitively must weigh an evolutionarily rooted driving force against a moral standpoint.”

    Fast fashion has long been under fire from sustainably minded shoppers, but wasteful washing practices have so far escaped much attention. The average European household does four to five loads of laundry a week, and though the frequency of washing has stayed steady for 20 years, the size of the machines’ drums has grown. The share of devices that could hold 6kg rose from 2% of sales in 2004 to 64% in 2015, according to a report commissioned by the French environment agency.

    While there are no hard rules about how often clothes should be washed, clothing manufacturers and fashion blogs generally recommend doing it less frequently – even if just to make the clothes last longer.

    About 70% of clothes enter the washing machine with no visible stains, according to a survey commissioned by Unilever as part of a campaign to market a detergent suited to 15-minute wash cycles.

    The extreme end of the no-wash movement – such as wearing the same pair of underpants for a week – is unlikely to pass the sniff test for most doctors. But other garments get the go-ahead. Wool jumpers and denim jeans top the list of items that last a long time before warranting a place in the laundry basket. (“Spot cleaning” – gently pressing a slightly soapy cloth on to a stain – can help spare an otherwise clean piece of clothing an unnecessary spin cycle.)

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    In one of the only studies that managed to change people’s behaviour, said Klint, researchers gave participants “excuse strategies” that addressed their initial fear of social exclusion. But when they stopped washing their clothes so often, they realised nobody noticed. “There’s a general consensus that people, at least in western countries, tend to wash clothes that others perceive as clean,” said Klint.

    The environmental benefits of washing clothes less often are sizeable. A single laundry load of polyester clothes can discharge 700,000 microplastic fibres, according to a report from the European parliament’s research service.

    Levi’s has estimated that consumers are responsible for more than a third of the lifetime climate impact of one pair of its 501 jeans. Washing the jeans after every 10 wears, instead of just a couple as is the norm in the US and UK, cut total water use by three-quarters.

    Ian Walker, the head of the psychology school at Swansea University, who was not involved in the Swedish study, said it looked like “a solid piece of research [with] good methods” but added that self-reported data on habitual behaviours, such as washing machine use, was “notoriously problematic”.

    He said the study provided a useful insight into the conflict between the environmental desire to run washing machines less often and feelings of disgust at rewearing clothes. “At a practical level, the study might help … people find ways better to reconcile these contrary desires, perhaps through messaging about how normal it is to rewear things, or about how little dirt or germs clothes typically pick up.”

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    ‘The most promiscuous man in town’: the life, loves and legendary sex parties of Dennis Severs | Immersive theatre

    Time seems to have stood still at Dennis Severs’ House. Its four-poster bed has been left unmade, half-empty glasses of wine sit on the table and breakfast has been only partly eaten. It’s as if its 18th-century residents have only just departed. Yet, astonishingly, these interiors were created in the 1980s, by an American with a vision of history drawn largely from watching British costume dramas on TV. The house, in the Spitalfields area of London, remains one of the city’s sublime eccentric gems – and it is about to evolve once more, with a new tour that tells the story of Severs himself and of the glorious queer lives of those who lived with him.

    Severs was a blond Californian surfer boy fresh out of college when he arrived in London in 1967. It was there that he found the freedom to live openly as a gay man. With an inborn sense of theatricality and a well-tailored coachman’s outfit, Severs was a natural showman who hosted tours around London in an open carriage. After he spied the opportunity in 1979 to buy the then decrepit house for just £18,000, he moved in with little more than a bedroll, a candlestick and a chamber pot – then swiftly embarked upon a camp, do-it-yourself aesthetic, conjuring the interiors as his fantasia on historical themes.

    From the moment he acquired his house, Severs opened it for tours. It did not matter that it was of no special historical significance because he just made stories up as he went along. He shepherded groups around by candlelight for up to three and a half hours while he grew more extravagant in his flights of fancy, seeking to evoke what he called “atmospheres”.

    Roll up, roll up … Severs conducted tours saying his house was once owned by a Huguenot family of silk weavers. Photograph: Stephen Birch/Alamy

    His improvised tales centred around the heteronormative fictional tale of the Jervis family – Huguenot silk weavers who, he explained, had lived there through three generations. He had no patience with participants who were less than rapturous: they were ejected on to the pavement and their money thrown into the street after them. Severs was an innovator, breaking new ground in employing poetic means to evoke the past. He acquired a cult following among creatives, including David Hockney and Derek Jarman, and high-status celebrities including Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson.


    The reputation of Dennis Severs’ House was forged by these tours, hosted from 1979 until 1999. Yet that was only one aspect of Severs’ life. He would host his heritage tours by day, then cruise leather bars and sex clubs by night. His house, then, served another function: as a steam-punk seduction machine. Anecdotes are still recounted of his legendary sex parties, including how he once entertained the entire male chorus of a famous ballet company.

    Severs succumbed to Aids in 1999. No tours took place after that for more than 20 years. Then, when the house reopened after lockdown, I was commissioned to reimagine them and start again.

    Refuge and freedom … Pettet and friend Doug Fields at Hampstead Ponds in the 80s.
    Refuge and freedom … Pettet and friend Doug Fields at Hampstead Ponds in the 80s. Photograph: Mark Tattersall

    It was a formidable act to follow. The challenge was how to remain true to the spirit of Severs’ original tours but speak to an audience today. We live in a very different world now, and promenade or “immersive” theatre has evolved too. Drawing on some fragmentary sound recordings of Severs – and my personal experience of writing and directing plays at the Royal Court and National Theatre in the 80s and 90s – I devised a play script of 90 minutes entitled Dennis Severs’ Tour, which followed the same fictional narrative, only reinvented for our time.

    Working at first with actor Joel Saxon, and then with two others, Lisa D’Agostino and Beko Wood, we explored what theatrical performers could bring to the experience. We soon discovered that not only could they embody the spirits of each of the fictional residents of the house that Severs invented, they also brought their own skills, in particular a sophisticated linguistic dexterity which allowed the performance to become a virtuoso endeavour. Audiences are limited to seven and we perform at night by candlelight, following in the footsteps of Severs through the 10 rooms of the house and through 300 years. These performances have been running six times a week for over three years now, and I must confess we have not had occasion to throw anyone out yet.

    Emboldened by this success, we have now turned the idea on its head for Simon’s Story, which explores the lives of Severs and the small circle of men who lived with him and created the house as we know it. For them it was a place of refuge, consolation and personal freedom, at a time when HIV and Aids was inducing existential terror in a generation of gay men.

    This is a parallel story to Severs’ fiction yet it is certainly no less dramatic. In Simon’s Story we portray Severs through his relationship with Simon Pettet, as told by Patrick Handscombe who lived in the house at the time. Pettet was an 18-year-old art student when he was picked up by Severs outside the club Heaven under the Charing Cross arches in 1983 and moved in with him shortly after. “How long have you been gay?” Severs asked Pettet that night. “About five minutes, since I got in this taxi,” Pettet replied.

    Just as Severs set up the rooms and furniture in his house to illustrate the tale of the Jervis family, in our performance we are able to reveal their use in the actual domestic drama that took place here – the kitchen chairs where Severs and Pettet sat to eat, the four poster bed in the 18th-century bedroom where they slept together, and the “Poor Room” under the eaves, set up to evoke the lives of 19th-century paupers, where Pettet kept his things and where they remain to this day. In Simon’s Story, the role of Handscombe is performed by an actor leading an audience of eight through these rooms, recounting the love story and revisiting the events of that time.

    Elaborate fiction … inside Dennis Severs’ House. Photograph: Lucinda Douglas Menzies

    It was a contradictory and conflicted relationship. Severs was Pettet’s first love. He also inducted Pettet into London’s hedonistic gay scene and Pettet embraced it enthusiastically, even if he would have preferred a monogamous partnership with Severs.

    When Severs created his house to tell a story, he never expected to become part of that story himself. Yet this is precisely what has happened because the rooms take on an intimate, deeper meaning when you understand the real drama that was played out there. Severs is described by Handscombe as “the most promiscuous man in London”, yet he came to realise that his relationship with Pettet was the most significant of his life. Pettet was a talented ceramicist and, over the 10 years he was involved with Severs, he made all the delftware – fireplaces, tiles, dishes and tulipieres – that enliven the house today.

    In 1984 Pettet and Severs were both diagnosed HIV+, making them two of the earliest cases in Britain. Pettet died at the age of just 28 in 1993 and Severs at 51 in 1999. Today, their story is as much a part of the meaning of the house as the fictional tales that Severs told.

    Simon’s Story, written and directed by The Gentle Author, runs from 15 June at Dennis Severs’ House, London

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    Kelp help? How Scotland’s seaweed growers are aiming to revolutionise what we buy | Environment

    Think sun, sea, Skye – and seaweed. It’s early summer off the west coast of Scotland, and Alex Glasgow is landing a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm. It emerges on what looks like a washing line heavy with dirty rags, hoicked up from the depths. And yet, this slippery, shiny, salty substance might, just might, be going to save the planet.

    When it comes to sustainability, seaweed is about as shipshape as it gets. Minimal damage to the environment, check. No use of pesticides, check. Diversifies ocean life, check. Uses no land, check. And, in the case of Skye’s seaweed farm, spoils no one’s view, check.

    Indeed, a few minutes earlier, as we sped across the Inner Sound between Skye’s second-biggest settlement, Broadford, reputedly the birthplace of Drambuie, and the tiny island of Pabay, it was hard to work out the seaweed farm’s location. Eventually the boat slows as we near a few floats bobbing around on the water. They are the only visible sign that anything is happening here, yet below the surface is an underwater grid stretching 500 metres by 200 metres, growing about 8km worth of lines of kelp. The annual yield of seaweed, Glasgow explains, is now about seven tonnes. “It’s perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet,” he says. “At this time of year, peak growing season, it can double its size in a fortnight – so five tonnes of seaweed today will be 10 in two weeks.”

    Photographer Christian Sinibaldi and I are here as part of a trip organised by the WWF to focus attention on Scotland’s burgeoning seaweed industry – what it is now, and what it could become. This unremarkable patch of water is the starting point: Glasgow and his partners, Martin Welch and Kyla Orr, set up this seaweed farm, KelpCrofters, four years ago. Like many we’ll meet in the seaweed business, they’ve migrated here from other industries: Glasgow worked in forestry, Welch in fishing, Orr in fisheries management. Like others in this business, they say they’ve come to work in seaweed because they want to feel optimistic about the future of the environment – and with seaweed, there’s a lot to feel optimistic about.

    Most of the past four years, says Glasgow, have been spent adapting machinery and devising mechanisms to allow the seaweed not only to grow, but to be harvested and transported efficiently to shore. Glasgow is a wiry 54-year-old with an air of schoolboyish adventure about him: there’s a frontier feel to this industry. He spends his days trying to work out solutions to teething troubles no one has ever had to think about before – not in this part of the world anyway.

    Seaweed isn’t a new product in the west of Scotland: in the Hebrides it has been collected on beaches for centuries, and used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making. In the 19th century it was used for iodine, making the city of Glasgow the world centre of its production.

    But the difference then was that the seaweed had grown naturally, and harvesting was basically foraging, sometimes chest-deep in water at low tide. KelpCrofters is different: this is cultivated seaweed farming, with the potential for industrial-sized yields. The kelp-seeded lines are “planted” in the autumn, left to germinate through the winter, and harvested, as we’re seeing today, after the peak growing season in May and June. Between planting and harvesting, little input is required.

    Oceanium video of aerial footage around Skye showing the boats on the kelp farm at work and a shot of what looks like a factory or office buildings

    “Seaweed has everything it needs – no fertilisers, pesticide or land required. We just leave it to grow and while it’s growing it’s also providing a habitat for fish – and it’s cleaning the water of harmful heavy metals,” says Orr.

    But here’s the rub with seaweed: no one knows what’s going to happen next. “There’s a bottleneck – we’ve been bringing too much of it ashore,” says Orr. “We’re focusing now on what happens when we get it out of the water.”

    There are all sorts of potential uses for seaweed, from plastic substitutes to beauty products to food supplements, and many more besides. The problem is, it’s far from clear which pathway will take off big-time – and that has all sorts of implications for its development as an industry, starting with: when should the seaweed even be harvested?

    “You bring the crop in earlier if it’s for food use, later if it will be used for fertilisers or packaging,” says Glasgow.

    A few miles away inKyle of Lochalsh, Alison Baker and Jemima Cooper of Eco Cascade are standing by to receive the KelpCrofters harvest. Baker, who previously ran a plastic-free fashion label, founded Eco Cascade in 2022 to explore ways of taking seaweed to its next stage. At first, she says, the idea was to dry it.

    “But that’s very energy intensive and though it could be good for some uses – food use, for example – we’re now more interested in preserving it wet, or putting it straight into a fermenting process to preserve the nutrients in a liquid,” she says.

    Liquid or dried, what happens to it next is the focus at Oceanium in Oban, a three-hour drive down the coast, which is our next port of call. Like everyone else in this story, no one at Oceanium (company slogan: “Kelp the World”) knows exactly how seaweed is going to revolutionise the future of the planet, but they’re convinced that somehow, it will.

    • Dr Mariam Aigbe, Oceanium’s technical services manager – foods, with some of the bread she made; a sample of the products made by Oceanium, which include food supplements and face cream

    We’re fed bread made from seaweed washed down by seaweed smoothies – I’m pretty sure this isn’t the future, and am grateful to hear attempts to develop chocolate made from seaweed have been axed because it tasted too awful. However, research on seaweed-based face creams is looking good (they can reduce redness, it seems, and may have anti-ageing properties), and there’s excitement over possibilities of using seaweed to make the film that covers dishwasher pods, as well as adding nutrients to food supplements.

    The product that most piques the interest of two of my companions, Emma Talbot and Harland Miller, is ink made from seaweed: they are artists recruited by the WWF to produce work linked to the seaweed industry for a project called Art For Your Oceans. They’re each given bottles of the ink to take home, so watch this space. The big questions around seaweed continue to drift, but the art is coming soon. And eventually, the answers – from which we all stand to benefit – will be on the end of the line as well.

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    ‘Firemen are some of my favourite human beings’: evacuated hotel guest turns out to be Henry Winkler | Television

    Dublin TV viewers watching news coverage on Wednesday night of a hotel fire were surprised to find themselves tuning in to an interview with a Hollywood legend.

    RTÉ News dispatched a camera crew to the Shelbourne hotel in the city centre, only to discover that one of the guests who had been evacuated was the Happy Days star Henry Winkler.

    “When I heard the fire alarm, I thought it was the clock radio – I thought somebody had set the alarm before we got there, like another guest,” he told reporters, before putting on a comedy voice to explain how a member of staff cleared up the misunderstanding. “The woman said in a very calm voice: ‘Yes, we’re all evacuating, you must evacuate right now!’”

    Henry Winkler recounts the drama of the hotel evacuation.

    Six fire engines attended the scene after a witness saw smoke coming from one of the upper bedroom windows. The actor, known for high-profile roles in comedy series such as Arrested Development, Parks & Recreation and Barry, was captured thanking the fire brigade effusively.

    “You know what? How wonderful! Firemen are some of my favourite human beings – firemen and firewomen. They run in when other people are running out. I think they deserve to be shook [by the hand].”

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    Winkler later posted a selfie with firefighters on X (formerly Twitter), with other users replying to thank him for lifting their spirits during the evacuation.

    “It was an amazing adventure right here in Dublin. I cannot wait to see the rest of Dublin,” said Winkler, who was in the city to promote his autobiography, Being Henry.

    It isn’t the first time Winkler has stumbled into a TV news interview. In 2013, he was stopped on a street in south-west London by BBC News and asked for his thoughts on the construction of a third runway at Heathrow.

    “Hello! I was going to ask you a question … are you a voter?” asked the interviewer, before realising that he was talking to the Fonz himself. “Do you have a view on … the plan to potentially expand Heathrow?”

    “Richmond is a lovely place. I watch the planes go every day, I hear nothing,” offered Winkler, who was appearing as Captain Hook in a local pantomime.

    “Im not a resident. I’m [living here temporarily]. It’s hard to commute when you’re doing two shows a day.”

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