Mark Lawson

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ReflexionesSocial

The doubts over the world women's 800m champion Caster Semenya's gender extends a fraught August for two of the sports most associated with amateur idealism. As rugby deals with the allegation that coaches may have deliberately cut players to justify substitutions, is one of the world's quickest women also gaining an unfair advantage?

There is a long history of innuendo in athletics: several eastern European women in the lifting and throwing events came under scrutiny, and the late comedian Bernard Manning used to do a cruel routine suggesting that two leading British female Olympians might have, as it were, less clearance over the hurdles than other women in the running.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Cultural commentators searching online bookstores yesterday for English-language translations of books by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, literature's latest Nobel laureate, were surprised to find that the most heavily flagged item offered was a DVD of Young Einstein.

The tantalising possibility that a 68-year-old French writer praised in the official citation for "new departures, poetic adventures" might, during populist interludes, have worked on Peewee Wilson movies was soon removed. Computers had been confused by an actress called Odile Le Clezio and the fact that her novelistic namesake's impact on UK publishing seems to have peaked with a couple of long-deleted Hamish Hamilton hardbacks from the 1960s.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

Religious believers, when mentioning heaven, have traditionally cast their eyes skywards, but the possibility of an afterlife may now be proved by looking down towards the ground. Doctors at Southampton University are placing pictures in resuscitation areas that can only be seen from the ceiling. These will test the stories of defibrillated patients, who claim they have looked down on the crash teams attending to their lifeless bodies.

The theory is that any of the chest-thumped who successfully play this posthumous game of Where's Wally? must have had an out-of-body experience, rather than the final flashing fantasy of a dying brain.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Sometimes the best weapon for puritans is self-censorship by others. The AQA exam board has withdrawn from its syllabus a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, in which a teenage narrator squashes an insect, kills a goldfish and then walks out on to the streets with a breadknife.

The clear fear of the question-setters is that verse about violence with a blade may encourage children to take the textbook as a handbook and check out the kitchen drawer at home. And so the banned poem re-opens the debate about the copycat risks of fiction.

That particular F-word is a good place to begin.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas. And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-tops allocate one or fewer.

Unusually, though, this week's Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations here and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia Católica

In my first job in journalism, on the Catholic weekly newspaper the Universe, it was sometimes a struggle to fill the "Priests in the News" column. But, this week, we'd have needed a supplement. Bishop Fernando Lugo became president of Paraguay, while three priests from Northern Ireland - a pair of Father O'Hagans and a Father Delargy - signed a million-pound recording contract with Sony BMG, intended to make them clerical successors to the Three Tenors. And, in a story that began as comedy but now seems to be shading into tragedy, Father Adelir Antonio di Carli from Brazil took off into the skies attached to 1,000 helium-filled balloons, in pursuit of a flight record, but has not been seen since Sunday.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalSalud Pública,

The revelation of the medical trial in which dummy pills worked as well as famous drugs for all but the most severely depressed has understandably made both pharmaceutical companies and patients miserable. But for the individuals who placed their hopes on these drugs, there is nothing to be down about.

The depressed who felt better after taking medicine may feel like the purchasers of a medieval elixir that proved to be piss. But, apart from unstoppable calamities such as cancer and cardiac arrest, there is strong evidence that a positive outlook can improve outcome. In a television documentary last year, Professor Richard Dawkins proved that homeopathic medicine is scientific idiocy and yet that it improves the condition of numerous patients.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías

It's always a poignant moment when technology once cutting-edge begins to be edged out. Dealing recently with a company that still insists on taking orders by fax machine felt like being in one of those Edwardian shops where money and receipts pinged around the eaves in cylinders on wires. And now, this week, we read the obituaries of the Polaroid.

The special smelly, sticky film that made scenes and faces appear magically in your palm - or, in lower temperatures, under your armpit - will no longer be produced because cleaner, even quicker digital has stolen the market for instant images.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesTestimonios, ,

In the week that Norman Mailer died, the most talked about movies included Into the Wild, drawn from the diaries of an American man who perished in the wilderness, and In the Shadow of the Moon, a film about the Apollo astronauts that continues the new box-office power of cinematic documentary. And, on Broadway, down the river from the author's hospital death bed, the two hot new plays - Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll and Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention - both dramatise historical events.

One of Mailer's intellectual eccentricities was a fascination with astrology, and these items in the listings suggest that, at the time of his death on Saturday, the artistic stars were in the right alignment.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocialEuropaUnión Europea, ,

This newspaper recently made a stand for professional equality by deciding that both men and women who appear on stage and screen will be termed "actors". But, in showbusiness, fairness of opportunity and income having largely been achieved, language remained the final gap. In tennis, it was the other way round: though granted a unisex job description - players - men and women have played under different rules for widely divergent prizes.

Yesterday's announcement that the 2007 women's champion at Wimbledon will receive the same cash as (let's madly dream) Andy Murray finally removes a 39-year insult that began when, in the first open Wimbledon, Billie Jean King received a cheque two-thirds smaller than that handed to Rod Laver, her partner at the champion's ball.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaEuropa, ,

If things go the way the Cameron and Obama households are hoping, then, in around 2009, a US-UK summit will take place between the first black president and the first prime minister known to have smoked pot. Of course, this may not happen. It's possible that the Washington end of the negotiations would be handled by the nation's first woman leader (Hillary Clinton), first Mormon (Mitt Romney) or first double divorcee (Rudy Giuliani).

The moral of these fantasies is that definitions of electability seem to be changing. At the start of any campaign, the team sit down and calculate the candidate's "negatives" (there's a fine West Wing episode in which Josh writes down the pros and cons on Santos).…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

The story of this December, if you believe the reports, has been the flinch that stole Christmas. The UK is allegedly too PC to celebrate JC. Three-quarters of British small businesses questioned in a survey claimed that they would not be decking the halls with holly this year from fear of offending non-Christian employees and customers. In council buildings, we're told, tinsel-detectors have more or less been installed at the doors and staff are being randomly blood-tested for evidence of abuse of plum duff or other prohibited substances.

However, guerrilla forces - the Santa-nistas or the Snowy Path perhaps - are fighting back.…  Seguir leyendo »