In November 2015, the World Anti-Doping Agency released a highly anticipated report into allegations of misconduct within Russian athletics. Finding that the Russian authorities had engaged in a widespread pattern of doping, cover-ups, and extortion, WADA recommended the banning of Russia from all international athletic endeavour. The International Association of Athletics Federations – recently rebranded as World Athletics – was also implicated in the report, but in the spirit of reform it picked up the baton, and as WADA suspended the Russian Anti-Doping Agency for non-compliance, the IAAF suspended the All-Russia Athletic Federation from all future world track and field events.
Business pretty much as usual then, as this week WADA – after once again declaring RUSADA to be non-compliant – handed Russia a four-year ban from major international sporting events. WADA provisionally lifted its ban on Russia towards the end of 2018. However the IAAF continually voted to uphold its own ban on the All-Russia Athletic Federation, while WADA immediately ran into problems as it struggled for access to RUSADA’s Moscow laboratory and found that pertinent data had been manipulated. The latest ban, decided unanimously as WADA executives met in Lausanne, follows directly from this evidence of data tampering.
WADA’s ban seeks to go further than ever before in comprehensively barring Russia from international sporting events while also banning the hosting of events within Russia. In practice however, Russian athletes with clean samples will still be able to compete at major events under a neutral flag, just like they did at the 2018 Winter Olympics. That means that while the Russian flag will not appear at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo next year, Russian athletes will still be present in Japan, at least on a case-by-case basis. Russia’s status ahead of the 2022 World Cup is murkier still, as while they would theoretically not be allowed to compete in the finals, the implication is that they are not currently banned from the regional qualification process. And Russia will retain its status as both joint host and participating nation at Euro 2020, which is deemed a regional rather than an international competition.
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The nominations for the 77th Golden Globe Awards were announced this week, and there were strong showings from HBO and Netflix. The Golden Globes honour the best in American film and television over the past year, with the boozy ceremony at the Beverly Hilton, overseen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, kicking off awards season with a message of style over sobriety. Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as a couple going through a coast-to-coast divorce, picked up a leading six film nominations. Meanwhile Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman – which like Marriage Story is distributed by Netflix – and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood managed five film nominations apiece. HBO’s Chernobyl and Netflix’s The Crown and Unbelievable each received four nominations in the television categories, with Barry and Big Little Lies (HBO), Fleabag (Amazon), Fosse/Verdon (FX), The Kominsky Method (Netflix), and The Morning Show (Apple) landing on three. The 77th Golden Globes will air live on NBC on 5 January, hosted for a record fifth time by Ricky Gervais.
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COP25 – the twenty-fifth edition of the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was taking place this year in Madrid – sought to bring the international community together for a final round of aspirational problem-solving before the Paris agreement comes to fruition in 2020. Since 2013, countries have been tasked with meeting both binding and non-binding environmental commitments agreed and implemented in two phases under the Kyoto Protocol. From next year, the Paris agreement takes hold, with its core goal of limiting the increase in the global average temperature to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, seen as a tipping point above which the world will find itself locked into a pattern of rising sea levels, frequent floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, crop failure, and depleted water resources. Recognising the risks inherent in even a 2 degree rise, the Paris agreement also pledges to ‘pursue efforts’ to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Paris agreement therefore demands bolder action than ever before when it comes to the environment and greenhouse gas emissions, even while the implementation of the agreement rests on non-binding nationally determined contributions. COP25 hoped to settle outstanding issues around the Paris agreement, while encouraging countries to be more ambitious, backing up their proposed environmental contributions with tangible measures and the funding to match. The time could hardly be more pressing: in the run-up to COP25, a United Nations Emissions Gap Report showed that greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record high in 2018, keeping the world on course for a devastating temperature rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while a bulletin released by the World Meteorological Organisation showed that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has also continued to rise.
Last Saturday – at the end of the first of two weeks of deliberations, as thousands of environmental activists gathered in Madrid – an IUCN report indicated that climate change and nutrient pollution are resulting in depleted oxygen levels at a growing number of ocean sites. And the bad news kept coming during the conference, as at the beginning of the second week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States released its annual Arctic Report Card, showing that temperatures in the Arctic remain near record highs. Warming air temperatures are causing a rapid reduction in the Greenland Ice Sheet and the extent of winter sea ice, prompting concerns over rising sea levels, warming oceans, and the impact on marine ecosystems and the indigenous communities that rely on them for food. What’s more, the permafrost sequesters carbon, and the Arctic Report Card suggests that thawing permafrost could be releasing between 300-600 million tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere, in an accelerating climate feedback loop. At least a comprehensive map of the contours of Antarctica – which uncovered the deepest point on continental earth, stretching 3.5 km below sea level under Denman Glacier – painted a mixed picture of ridges and slopes which will both halt and hasten glacial retreat.
If all of this news was meant to focus minds and bring talks at COP25 to a compelling climax, by and large the efforts were a failure. The conference stretched 36 hours beyond its scheduled conclusion, and when talks finally came to a close on Sunday, entrenched positions and a disparity between the ambitions of the Paris agreement and the realities of national politics meant that much was left unresolved. Amid continuing protests, and anger over the perceived obstruction of major economies including the United States, Australia, and Brazil, the United Nations general assembly president Tijjani Muhammad-Bande issued a midweek call to action, pleading for ‘significant results now’. Instead COP25 ended with a distinct lack of ambition and a dwindling spirit of cooperation, as countries failed to establish rules around Article 6 of the Paris agreement, which is meant to govern carbon trading, while the big emitters largely thwarted attempts to compensate poorer countries for the damage caused by climate change.
The final draft from the conference acknowledged the ‘significant gap’ between existing pledges and the goals set out in the Paris agreement. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and China were accused of blocking the use of ambitious wording while ‘looking backward’ as they sought to re-examine old pledges; the United States – scheduled to withdraw from the Paris agreement next year – was held accountable for the stymieing of loss and damage provisions under Article 8; and Australia received particular criticism for its demands around ‘carryover credits’, where it hopes to use reductions achieved under the Kyoto Protocol to minimise its efforts in the period from 2020-2030. Many of these issues then will have to wait until next year, when the twenty-sixth Conference of Parties hits Glasgow.
After making the long boat trip across the Atlantic to Madrid, the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke and participated in a march outside the conference, before stepping to one side and allowing some of the other young campaigners in attendance to take centre stage. She was forcibly engaged in a spat with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who called her a ‘pirralha’ – which translates as ‘pest’ or ‘brat’ – after she condemned illegal deforestation in the Amazon. But Greta’s week hit a high note when she was named as the Time Person of the Year for 2019, grabbing the prestigious cover as the face of a global youth-led climate movement – even if the accolade brought inevitable scorn from the American president Donald Trump.
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Every year since 1989, the Librarian of Congress in collaboration with the National Film Preservation Board has selected twenty-five films to be added to the National Film Registry, a growing collection of American films deemed ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’. This year saw a push for diversity, steered by the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and by Jacqueline Stewart, who chairs the National Film Preservation Board’s task force on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Previously of the 750 films added to the registry, just 52 were directed by women, while only 36 were directed by people of colour. As Stewart explained:
‘The board has been asking, “How many more John Ford or Albert Hitchcock films do we put on the registry?”. It seems like we’ve covered a lot of those bases – and because of the sheer number of films on the registry, we absolutely have to broaden our horizons, and engage with archives and film critics and scholars and the American public to help us bring a wider variety of films into view.’
So among the twenty-five new additions announced this week were Body and Soul, a silent picture from 1925 written, directed, and produced by Oscar Micheaux and starring Paul Robeson in his film debut; historical footage from 1937 of the famed botanist George Washington Carver; and Before Stonewall directed by Greta Schiller, which looks at life in the LGBT community prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots. An unprecedented seven motion pictures directed by women made this year’s list, including Claudia Weill’s critically acclaimed 1978 comedy-drama Girlfriends, Gunvor Nelson’s avant-garde picture My Name is Oona from 1969, more recent fare in the form of the 2002 indie flick Real Woman Have Curves starring America Ferrera, and a personal favourite from Elaine May, who in 1971 became the first woman to write, direct, and star in a major American feature with A New Leaf.
There were cult classics and familiar faces too: George Cukor’s psychological thriller Gaslight, whose star Ingrid Bergman took home her first Academy Award for Best Actress: Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which swept the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Sound, and Best Film Editing; Prince’s rock musical Purple Rain; She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s black-and-white film breakthrough; the biographical film Boys Don’t Cry starring Hilary Swank, which depicts a violent hate crime perpetrated against a transgender youth; the epic drama Amadeus; two Disney features in the guises of Sleeping Beauty and Old Yeller; and Kevin Smith’s low-budget convenience store debut Clerks.
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On 17 October, 1999, courtesy of an hour-long special, Larry David brought forth to HBO a new comedy, conceived in irritation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created antagonistic. One score and a couple of months later, Susie Greene faces ridicule for wearing a hat that reminds Larry of Abraham Lincoln. Curb Your Enthusiasm is back for its tenth season starting 19 January, and while we’ll have to say goodbye to Marty Funkhouser following the death of Bob Einstein, the new season is brimming with familiar faces and guest stars, including Fred Armisen, Laverne Cox, and Jon Hamm, all of whom feature in the latest trailer.
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UNESCO defines ‘intangible cultural heritage’ as the ‘living practices, expressions, skills and knowledge that communities cherish and recognize as their cultural heritage, which must be achieved with the active and full involvement of these communities themselves’. In this sense intangible cultural heritage stands in contrast to tangible cultural heritage, the buildings and monuments of the past, and incorporates everything from folklore, oral traditions, and language, to social practices and rituals, to craftsmanship, costumes, music, and dance. The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was drafted in 2003 after several years of consultation. It entered into force in 2006, and is currently ratified by 178 states.
The Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage now meets annually, and this week the fourteenth iteration of the couppmmittee met in Bogotá, Colombia, the first time the event has been hosted in Latin America and the Caribbean. As well as considering how best to safeguard living heritage in emergency situations, the committee added a total of 42 practices to its list. They included Seperu folkdance from Botswana, ak-kalpak craftsmanship towards the traditional men’s headwear in Kyrgyzstan, talavera pottery and ceramics in parts of Mexico, Byzantine chant across Cyprus and Greece, Gnawa sufi spiritual music from Morocco, Kwagh-Hir theatrical performance from southern Nigeria, traditional Thai massage, and the playing of the long-necked, two-stringed dotar in Iran.
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New Zealand’s greatest Olympian Peter Snell died on Thursday at the age of 80. From a short but dominant career which spanned the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Snell emerged with three Olympic gold medals: first in the 800 metres in Rome, and then four years later in Tokyo when he defended his 800 metre title while adding gold over 1500 metres. Snell remains the only man since 1920 to have won both the 800 and 1500 metres at one Olympics. In between, he also managed to double up over 880 yards and the mile at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, and he set a slew of world records, notably a time of 1:44.3 over 800 metres on the grass in Christchurch, a record which stood for six years and would have been sufficient to win Olympic gold at the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Olympics. In later life Snell gained a PhD in exercise physiology and became a member of the American College of Sports Medicine. In 2000 he was voted New Zealand’s athlete of the century, in 2009 he received a knighthood, and in 2012 he was one of the twenty-four inaugural members of the IAAF Hall of Fame.
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Once more unto the breach for the worthy patriots of the United Kingdom, who in the cosy confines of the election booth on Thursday opted to give migrants, minorities, and the young a good kicking. Way back when in 2011, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government introduced and received assent for the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which was supposed to fix the date of general elections in the United Kingdom so that they occurred but once every five years. The first general election under the terms of the act was held in 2015, with the next scheduled for 2020. Yet following a referendum on European Union membership in 2016, the UK has fallen into a right-wing nationalist stupor from which it steadfastly refuses to awake: an early general election held in 2017 resulted in a minority government and hastened the departure of Prime Minister Theresa May, so now another two years later her successor Boris Johnson was back asking the public to give him a resounding mandate.
Brexit remained the hot topic, but bubbling under the surface were some of the same cultural values around nationalism and immigration, while parties debated the longstanding impact of Conservative austerity which has seen cuts to the National Health Service and the police force, and prompted wage stagnation and rises in homelessness and the use of food banks. The Labour Party offered a bold economic package of tax increases and nationalisation projects, meant to reset the growing imbalance between rich and poor, but a surfeit of policy scarcely helped as the party was subsumed by antisemitism allegations and Brexit. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, despite a fervent following on the left, remained decidedly unpopular among the public at large. The Conservatives meanwhile under Boris Johnson led with the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’: otherwise there was a dearth of policy beyond previous claims that austerity is coming to an end.
In 2017, Theresa May’s attempt at social care reform was swiftly dubbed a ‘dementia tax’: with Brexit still a pipe dream, May struggled to scoff down fish and chips and was suitably embarrassed, but more than anything the policy failure probably cost her a majority at the election which ensued. This time around the Conservatives largely abandoned policy making, but still managed to push a few faulty claims, repeating for instance that a Conservative government would result in ‘50,000 more nurses’, despite the detail showing that 18,500 of these would not be new but simply retained. That was the least of it: Boris Johnson made xenophobic remarks about EU migrants while outlining a wealth-based immigration system, and Tory health secretary Matt Hancock was at the centre of things when a photograph of a boy on the floor of a Leeds hospital led to a torrent of right-wing fake news. One prominent study suggested that 88% of Conservative advertisements on Facebook contained misleading information, and both Facebook and Google were forced to ban Conservative ads.
Elsewhere the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party squandered their surges at the European elections earlier this year: the Liberal Democrats thanks to Jo Swinson’s strident, tone-deaf leadership and their switch to a hard-line revoke position on Brexit; while Nigel Farage took his money and ran into the arms of the Conservatives, standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory strongholds across the south. The Scottish National Party, consistent in their opposition to Brexit while touting a future referendum on Scottish independence, looked to have the north sewn up. There was growing ambivalence around the main parties in Northern Ireland after almost three years without a functioning government, while in Wales nobody really knows what’s going on, apparently least of all the Welsh. Otherwise support for the Greens waxes and wanes: the longer-term trend is for a small increase in their share of the vote, and the party’s sole MP Caroline Lucas is widely respected, but environmental issues have not quite taken off in the UK as they have in the United States and parts of northern Europe. For this election, there were some vague targets but a shortage of costings and specifics: mostly parties signalled their concern for the environment by promising to plant trees.
The upshot of all this was that Boris Johnson got his resounding mandate – to get Brexit done, and then the devil knows what as the UK likely commences a decade of prolonged trade talks and creeping deregulation. In their unenviable wisdom, the British public – overwhelmingly England with a helping hand from Wales – gave the Conservatives 43.6% of the vote for a strong majority of 365 seats in parliament. Labour suffered their worst election result since the 1930s, ending the night with just 202 seats as they were squeezed by the Brexit Party in many of their traditional northern constituencies and ultimately lost out to the Conservatives. The SNP dominated in Scotland, emerging with 48 of a possible 59 seats, putting independence back firmly on the agenda. The Liberal Democrats actually saw a swing of 4.2 percentage points in their favour, the highest of the night as they picked off antipathetic former Labour supporters and a few straggling Conservatives, but they ended up with only 11 parliamentary seats. Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson – who suffered the narrow loss of her seat in Dunbartonshire East – announced that they would step down from their leadership positions, presenting new opportunities and some familiar challenges for the left.
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On Sunday the death of the iconic Danish-French film actress Anna Karina was announced, who passed after a battle with cancer at the age of 79 years old. Karina was the face of the French New Wave, starring in a series of films by the director Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s as his innovative style – utilising jump cuts, long takes, and fragmented narratives, drawing on the nascent mannerisms of cinéma vérité filmmaking, by turns blithe and expressionist, serving to homage the cinematic past at the same time as it tangled with the political present – broke with French tradition while helping to lay the ground for modern cinema.
Born Hanne Karin Bayer and moving from Denmark to Paris at the age of 17, a chance modelling career led to a change of name and the world of film. From the beginning of the 1960s, Karina starred in The Little Soldier, A Woman Is a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and Made in the U.S.A, all with Godard, for A Woman Is a Woman winning the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1961. At the same time she starred in The Nun by Jacques Rivette, opposite Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of The Stranger, in the contentious collaboration Justine between American directors Joseph Strick and George Cukor, and in another literary adaptation by way of Tony Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark. Later standouts included her roles in Bread and Chocolate by Franco Brusati and Chinese Roulette by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In 2008, she wrote, directed, and starred in the musical road movie Victoria, filmed between Montreal and Quebec. Anna Karina also enjoyed success as a singer, achieving hits in the late 1960s courtesy of her renditions of the Serge Gainsbourg songs ‘Sous le soleil exactement’ and ‘Roller Girl’, while she wrote four novels, Vivre ensemble, Golden City, On n’achète pas le soleil, and Jasqu’au bout du hasard.
