‘It’s been a barrage every day’: US election workers face threats and harassment

‘It’s been a barrage every day’: US election workers face threats and harassment:

As Trump and allies falsely claim the vote was stolen, officials who uphold the election machinery say threats are the new normal

Before he leaves his house to walk his dog these days, Rick Barron’s 12-year-old-daughter reminds him that he needs to keep an eye out because she worries her dad could be the target of an attack.

Barron, 55, is the director of voting and elections in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta and is the most populous county in Georgia. For the last year, he’s been subject to a barrage of voicemails and emails with threats, including some threatening violence and death, as Donald Trump and his allies have falsely claimed the election was stolen.

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The Tempest review – stirring all-female Shakespeare on the cusp of Cop26

The Tempest review – stirring all-female Shakespeare on the cusp of Cop26:

Tron, Glasgow
The climate-change summit inspires a production emphasising the land-grab aspects of Shakespeare’s late play in an imaginative staging

The short-term forecast is for a storm – or maybe a squally shower – of Cop26-inspired Tempests. On 7 November, BBC Radio 3 is fielding a soft-spoken Ian McDiarmid as Prospero in Shakespeare’s island reverie and here in Glasgow, as the climate delegates assemble, director Andy Arnold has put together an 11-strong, all-female Tempest, led by Nicole Cooper.

Neither production overstates the eco connections, each preferring the story does its own work. This is a play about a man-made weather event leading to a bunch of Europeans taking over a foreign territory, exploiting it, then getting out again. The latter idea is picked up by Arnold, who leaves Itxaso Moreno’s athletic Ariel and Liz Kettle’s proud Caliban forlorn and abandoned at the end of the 90-minute show. They have been used and discarded, the dream-like visions of their visitors a lingering nightmare for them.

The Tempest is at Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 13 November.

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The road to net zero: Aberdeen looks to a future without oil

The road to net zero: Aberdeen looks to a future without oil:

Can the Granite city diversify into non-fossil fuel industries in time to avoid the fate of UK coal-mining areas?

The oil companies know it. The car dealers selling top of the range Porsches get it, as do the hoteliers and the restaurateurs. Change is coming to Aberdeen: the UK centre of North Sea fossil fuel production since the 1970s is trying to avoid becoming the city of stranded assets.

The Granite city became Scotland’s boom town almost by accident. It was Dundee down the coast that was originally identified as a probable hub for offshore production when exploratory work established large reserves of oil and gas under the continental shelf.

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Coronavirus news live: Australia reopens international borders; France records jump in Covid hospitalisations

Coronavirus news live: Australia reopens international borders; France records jump in Covid hospitalisations:

Australians fly into Sydney airport to reunite with families without quarantine for the first time in 583 days; France reports the highest daily increase in Covid hospitalisations in six weeks

• Australia reopens international borders for first time in pandemic
• China dismisses recent US Covid-19 origins report
• England offers Covid booster jabs at NHS walk-in clinics
• Thailand reopens to vaccinated tourists after 18 months of Covid curbs
• First Covid case recorded in Tonga in the Pacific
• See all our coronavirus coverage

Hello and welcome back to our global Covid blog.

I’m Samantha Lock and I’ll be reporting from Sydney, Australia, to bring you all the latest developments from around the world.

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To avert climate disaster, we need resilient societies built on love, not just technology | Gaia Vince

To avert climate disaster, we need resilient societies built on love, not just technology | Gaia Vince:

Love is a human survival adaptation, and it is the scaffolding for the new social networks on which we will depend

When things look especially bleak for humankind, it’s worth reminding ourselves who we are – what makes us such a special species. Beyond our machines and our buildings, beyond our fiery conquests, beyond all of it, we’re exceptional creatures because we are capable of love. And not just one to one and within our families, but on a massive scale.

This is especially pertinent as we face the climate crisis. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of our technological transition, which dominates the climate adaptation narrative. We are the technological ape, and our technologies will be vital in solving this crisis: windmills to decarbonise our energy systems, flood defences against rising seas, and air conditioners to survive brutal heatwaves. We will need many more technological fixes, and much faster.

Gaia Vince is an author, journalist and broadcaster. Her latest book is Transcendence: How humans evolved through fire, language, beauty and time

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Cop26: Boris Johnson talks the talk but can he really deliver a climate deal?

Cop26: Boris Johnson talks the talk but can he really deliver a climate deal?:

This week’s talks in Glasgow will be a test of commitment. But there has been little hard diplomacy from Britain, the host nation, to ease the path to an agreement

Anyone who listened to Rishi Sunak’s budget speech last Wednesday could be forgiven for concluding that there is nothing particularly urgent for people to worry about – economically or existentially – on the climate front.

The chancellor was 35 minutes into his third budget address to MPs before he even alluded to matters environmental. And when a reference finally came it was a fairly brief one – to the government’s “ambitious net zero strategy” – of which he is said to be no great fan. Throughout the entire budget, Sunak did not use the phrase “climate change” once.

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The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney review – a man of his words

The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present by Paul McCartney review – a man of his words:

From All My Loving to Your Mother Should Know, the former Beatle illuminates a life spent puzzling how to get from the beginning of a song to its end

At the beginning of this two-volume book, Paul McCartney says that while he has no intention of writing his autobiography and has never kept a diary, it has been his habit throughout his adult life to turn his life experiences into the words of songs, and so here are 154 of them. With that kind of introduction you’d be forgiven for expecting them in chronological order. Had they been so, most of the hits would be in the first book and a lot of people would hardly open the second. Chronological was obviously a non-starter.

Alphabetical it is, then, with each initial letter a fresh lottery. F is particularly solid, featuring Fixing a Hole, The Fool on the Hill, For No One and From Me to You. Unsurprisingly, almost everything under I dates from the Beatles’ personal-pronoun period – I Saw Her Standing There, I Wanna Be Your Man, I Want to Hold Your Hand, I’m Down, I’ll Follow the Sun and others – while the average reader may be a bit lost in the O section once they get past Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. As much space in this book is devoted to Magneto and Titanium Man as Michelle. This last turns out to have been half-written by a schoolteacher friend, which would guarantee it winding up in court if it were to happen today.

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