From Riders to Tackle! - how Britain loves Jilly Cooper's raunchy novels

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From Riders to Tackle! - how Britain loves Jilly Cooper's raunchy novels     Despite being a nation with a reputation for prudishness about sex, the British don't seem to have any problem reading about it, at least not if you go by the enduring popularity of one the country's most successful writers, Jilly Cooper. Known as the Queen of the "bonkbuster" (a British term for a popular novel stuffed with salacious storylines and frequent sexual encounters), she even counts the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as one of her fans. For those who came of age in the UK in the 1980s or 90s, the covers of Cooper's raunchy books alone are forever imprinted on their memory, such was their ubiquity on bookshelves and sun loungers, or in schools, where they were shared like contraband by teenage girls.More like this:- Why the British are obsessed with footballers' wives - Why 'Slut' is Swift's call to arms - The greatest reality TV show never made Continued here

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Suella Braverman's comments comparing Gaza protests with Northern Ireland are a grave misunderstanding of the facts     The aim of Suella Braverman’s controversial Times article commenting on the ongoing protests over Gaza seems obvious. As with many of her recent and provocative statements, the assumption is that she is trying to undermine and ultimately replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader by appealing to the party’s right. However, the methods used – and particularly the comparisons she made between marches in Northern Ireland and demonstrations in London – are more confusing. This confusion is understandable, as Braverman herself seems confused in what she wrote. She linked marches over the Gaza conflict to “the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”. She drew further comparisons when suggesting that some of those organising the London protests “have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas”. Continued here

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All the Light We Cannot See: how progressive congenital cataracts can lead to blindness     In the new Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See, a blind French girl called Marie-Laure LeBlanc makes illicit radio broadcasts from her uncle’s house in Nazi-occupied France. We are told that Marie-Laure has congenital cataracts in both eyes. But what is this condition?The word “cataract” comes from the Latin word for waterfall and describes a condition where the usually transparent lens of the eye is cloudy or opaque. This prevents a clear image being projected onto the back of the eye and causes poor vision. Continued here

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Japan sets new nuclear fusion record     A massive nuclear fusion experiment in Japan just hit a major milestone, potentially putting us a little closer to a future of limitless clean energy.Nuclear fusion 101: Nuclear fusion is a process in which two atoms merge into one (unlike conventional nuclear power, which relies on fission — splitting an atom into two). This releases an incredible amount of energy in the form of heat, so much heat, in fact, that it can power the Sun and other stars. Continued here

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Erdogan's stance on Israel reflects desire to mix politics with realpolitik - and still remain a relevant regional player     Visiting Scholar at the Fletcher School's Russia and Eurasia Program, Tufts University Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pulled his ambassador from Israel on Nov. 4, 2023. Less than a month earlier, he was offering diplomatic assistance to calm the situation in the Middle East. Continued here

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Starts With A Bang podcast #99 - Varying and evolving stars     You might not think about it very often, but when it comes to the question of “how old is a star that we’re observing,” there are some very simple approximations that we make: measure its mass, radius, temperature, and luminosity (and maybe metallicity, too, for an extra layer of accuracy), and we’ll tell you the age of this star, including how far along it is and how long we have to go until it meets its demise.This also operates under a simple but not-always-accurate assumption: that all stars of a given mass and composition have the same age-radius and radius-temperature-luminosity relationships. That simply isn’t true! Stars vary, both over time as they evolve and also from star-to-star dependent on their rotation and magnetism. It’s a funny situation, because just a few years ago, people had declared stellar evolution as a basically “solved” field, and now it turns out that we might have to rethink how we’ve been thinking about the most common classes of stars of all! Continued here

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What on Earth Is Nathan Fielder Up to Now?     Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets. When he pushes uncomfortable bits to their extreme, you can feel like your mind is short-circuiting, the deluge of his off-kilter, often meta humor leaving you delighted and disturbed. So the best way to watch Fielder’s work, I’ve long accepted, is to persist until the punch line reveals itself.And yet, I was still caught off guard by The Curse, the new Showtime series Fielder co-created with the filmmaker and actor Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems). I needed breaks between episodes, even pausing in the middle of scenes the deeper I went into the season, fearful of what would happen next. The show is unlike Fielder’s previous output. For one thing, it’s fully scripted—a 10-episode story packed with surreal set pieces and cinematic plot twists. For another, Fielder acts, and not just as a version of himself. Continued here

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Photos of the Week:     Chilly swimmers in China, a deadly earthquake in Nepal, figure skating in France, Israeli attacks in Gaza, Palestinians fleeing from Gaza City, a proposal at the New York City Marathon, flooding in Somalia, a shrinking reservoir in Turkey, and much more A cruise ship passes under the Golden Gate Bridge on November 7, 2023, in San Francisco, California. Scaffolding attached to the underside of the bridge supports builders working on a suicide-prevention barrier, hanging nets of stainless-steel cables. The barrier project is nearing completion after six years at a cost of more than $215 million. # Continued here

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COP28: a year on from climate change funding breakthrough, poor countries eye disappointment at Dubai summit     At the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, an agreement to establish a loss and damage fund was hailed as a major breakthrough on one of the trickiest topics in the UN climate change negotiations. In an otherwise frustrating conference, this decision in November 2022 acknowledged the help that poorer and low-emitting countries in particular need to deal with the consequences of climate change – and, tentatively, who ought to pay. This following year has seen more extreme weather records broken. Torrential rains created flooding which swept away an entire city in Libya, while wildfires razed swathes of Canada, Greece and the Hawaiian island of Maui. Continued here

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Albert Brooks Everlasting     A conversation with the legendary comedian and filmmaker about what annoys him, how you know when something is funny, and his theory about John LennonThere are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture. Continued here

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Joe Biden to meet with Xi Jinping - what a good result looks like for the US president     US president, Joe Biden, is expected to meet China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in San Francisco as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) conference on Wednesday November 15. Their meeting has great significance, as the two leaders have not met since the G20 in 2022, and because of their lack of agreement concerning current global conflicts, particularly the Ukraine war. Continued here

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Phoebe Philo's fashion frenzy: why her much-anticipated collection sold out within hours     British luxury fashion designer Phoebe Philo OBE, debuted her long-anticipated eponymous label to critical acclaim at the end of October. Despite the eye-watering price tags, the small range of clothing, accessories, jewellery and footwear – only available on the Phoebe Philo website – virtually sold out within hours. But Philo is no stranger to fashion frenzies. Her 2005 Paddington bag, created during her tenure as creative director at French designer Chloé, became an instant and enduring “It bag” that sold out before it even hit the shelves. Continued here

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Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?     The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.   Continued here

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'Loki' Season 2's Ending Just Debunked a Major Kang Theory     Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has a Kang problem. While he may have started out as a much-needed shot in the arm for a rudderless franchise, Jonathan Majors’ time-traversing baddie has since become an unfortunate distraction. The actor has been confronting accusations of domestic violence since March 2023, but Marvel’s reluctance to distance itself from Kang and his many variants puts the franchise in a difficult spot.The controversy was especially apparent as Loki returned for its second season. Its Season 1 finale introduced Kang’s omniscient variant He Who Remains, and set the stage for Kang himself to appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. A handful of insiders warned about Majors’ growing role in the MCU, particularly in Loki Season 2. A blistering tell-all from Variety implied that Episode 6 put Marvel in an impossible position: “I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him,” one dealmaker told the trade. Continued here

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Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake     Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel. Continued here

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UN's 'global stocktake' on climate is offering a sober emissions reckoning - but there are also signs of progress     When this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference begins in late November 2023, it will be a moment for course correction. Seven years ago, nearly every country worldwide signed onto the Paris climate agreement. They agreed to goals of limiting global warming – including key targets to be met by 2030, seven years from now. A primary aim of this year’s conference, known as COP28, is to evaluate countries’ progress halfway to the 2030 deadlines. Continued here

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Is some of the body that collided with Earth to form the Moon still recognisable inside our planet?     Scientists have dated the birth of the Solar System to about 4.57 billion years ago. About 60 million years later a “giant impact” collision between the infant Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia created the Moon. The new study, led by Qian Yuan of Arizona State University and Caltech, argues that the heat generated by this collision was not enough to melt the whole of the Earth’s mantle, so the innermost mantle remained solid. Continued here

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4 Unimaginable Ways AI Will Change Your Life Within the Next 5 Years, according to Bill Gates     Your AI personal assistant could become a voice in your ear. Continued here

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Egypt's Iconic Sphinx May Have Begun as Natural Carving by the Wind     Egypt’s famous Sphinx may have originated as a rock feature carved by erosion that ancient Egyptians further refined into the iconic monumentThe ancient Egyptians may have crafted the Sphinx, a 4,500-year-old monument at Giza that stands in front of the pyramid of Khafre not completely from scratch but rather on a natural feature that already looked surprisingly sphinx-like, a new study suggests. Continued here

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I'm Wearing Wool Underwear, and I've Never Been Comfier     About a decade ago, I started noticing that certain clothes made my skin itch. Like, a lot. Then my infant son was diagnosed with eczema, painful rashes that covered his arms and legs. I started buying the gentlest detergents I could find and checking fabric content labels on all our clothes. When I started paying a little more for jeans, the gnarly itching stopped.Was it psychosomatic? Do I stop itching only when swaddled in the finest of denims and cotton flannel tank tops? According to fashion and sustainability journalist Alden Wicker, who runs the website Ecocult and recently published the book To Dye For, your clothes really could be making you sick. A lot of fast fashion is made from polyester, which requires special dyes. Manufacturers then add wrinkle- or stain-resistant agents, or spray fabric for soft-touch finishes. Finally, whole shipments get dusted with fungicides or pesticides to make it all the way around the world without getting eaten by moths. Continued here

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Why the search for the Loch Ness monster (and other beasts) continues 90 years after that first blurry photograph     Hugh Gray was taking his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or three feet from him. He quickly snapped several pictures of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as “an object of considerable dimensions”. Continued here

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What We Do With Our Faces     This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In 2016, my colleague Olga Khazan saw a cultural difference playing out on the faces of those around her. “Here’s something that has always puzzled me, growing up in the U.S. as a child of Russian parents,” she wrote. “Whenever I or my friends were having our photos taken, we were told to say ‘cheese’ and smile. But if my parents also happened to be in the photo, they were stone-faced. So were my Russian relatives, in their vacation photos. My parents’ high-school graduation pictures show them frolicking about in bellbottoms with their young classmates, looking absolutely crestfallen.” Continued here

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Everyday Harbingers of Doom     Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Continued here

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7 Lessons On Creating A Service Experience That Does Your Marketing For You     Great service doesn't happen by accident. Continued here

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Wegovy Slashes the Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke in a Landmark Trial     More than half the world’s population is expected to be overweight or obese by 2035. Excess weight is often linked with cardiovascular disease: It can lead to higher blood pressure or cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Now, the makers of the popular weight-loss drug Wegovy are making a case for its use as a treatment option for diseases of the heart and blood vessels.In a landmark trial of 17,604 overweight and obese patients with heart disease, weekly injections of semaglutide—the active ingredient in Wegovy and its twin Ozempic—for an average of 33 months reduced the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from cardiovascular causes by 20 percent compared with a placebo group. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting Saturday morning. Continued here

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London's Day of Creeping Extremism     How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.” That refers to Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a convicted mortgage fraudster who is the former head of a far-right, anti-Muslim group called the English Defence League. Robinson was here, somewhere, in person—and as of last week, he was back on X (formerly Twitter), five years after being “permanently suspended.” Violence and disorder follow him around, so London’s Metropolitan Police had drafted reinforcements from around Britain to deal with the situation. Walking down the Mall, a long, open road stretching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster, I saw police vans from Durham and Northumbria, in the north of England, and some officers wore caps reading HEDDLU, the Welsh word for police. Continued here

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Scientists Have Been Freezing Corals for Decades. Now They're Learning How to Wake Them Up     Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.“It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!” Continued here

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"Terminalism" -- discrimination against the dying -- is the unseen prejudice of our times     When you are dying, you are placed in a hospice. Often, this is a real, brick-and-mortar hospice with palliative care and psychological support. At other times, though, the hospice is a metaphorical one. The terminally ill are ignored by those too awkward or scared to face them. They are told not to work or exert themselves in the slightest. The dying exist as ghosts and live in the hinge space between society and “on the way out.” When you’re told you’re going to die, you become invisible.This has led the philosopher Phillip Reed to coin the expression “terminalism.” For Reed, terminalism “is discrimination against the dying, or treating the terminally ill worse than they would expect to be treated if they were not dying.” In other words, it involves treating those in a hospice — literally or metaphorically — as second-class citizens. Continued here

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How Recognizing and Filling Gaps Can Transform Your Business     From unaddressed needs to underserved audiences, a roadmap to impactful ideas. Continued here

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How Africa's first heat officer is protecting women in Sierra Leone     At the start of Sierra Leone's dry season in November, 26-year-old Adama Sesay sells fruits and vegetables at a busy market in the centre of the country's capital, Freetown. It's hard work, and one of the greatest challenges in her day is extreme heat."We suffer from extreme heat, suffocation and noise pollution," says Sesay, sitting on a cylinder brick in the overcrowded Bombay Street market, bustling with customers, traders, motorists and travelers. Continued here

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Mummified baboons point to the direction of the fabled land of Punt     One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeology revolves around the identity of Punt, an otherworldly “land of plenty” revered by the ancient Egyptians. Punt had it all—fragrant myrrh and frankincense, precious electrum (a mixed alloy of gold and silver) and malachite, and coveted leopard skins, among other exotic luxury goods. Continued here

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Restorers uncover demon in a 1789 painting - and reveal the decline of superstition in the Age of Reason     Recent news that restorers had uncovered the image of a Gothic-looking demon in a late work by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) seems fitting for these long, dark evenings. The sinister face hovers above the head of a dying clergyman in The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, painted in 1789. Fake-or-Fortune-style reveals such as this, where Reynolds’s hollow-eyed fiend re-emerges, fanged and uncanny from the gloom of centuries of overpainting, are always popular with the public. But what are we to make of Reynolds’s devilish detail in his painting, and how does it fit into the larger story of demonic representation in the art and literature of the 18th century? Continued here

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Proposed smoking ban would improve UK public health - but tobacco industry opposition could be a major roadblock     In his speech on Tuesday, King Charles III outlined what measures the government plans to introduce to cut smoking rates and create a smoke-free generation in England.Among the measures the government hopes to introduce as part of its new tobacco and vapes bill are plans to restrict sales of e-cigarettes so they’re less accessible to children and young people, as well as exploring the possibility of a new duty on vapes. Continued here

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Specialized training programs using sensory augmentation devices could prevent astronauts from getting disoriented in space     When landing on the surface of the Moon, astronauts can become spatially disoriented, which is when they lose sense of their orientation – they might not be able to tell which way is up. This disorientation can lead to fatal accidents. Even on Earth, between 1993 and 2013, spatial disorientation led to the loss of 65 aircraft, US$2.32 billion of damages and 101 deaths in the U.S. Continued here

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Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Disruptive     For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: Market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But, as the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, it’s only one end of the innovation spectrum. On the other end is what they call nondisruptive creation, through which new industries, new jobs, and profitable growth are created without social harm. Nondisruptive creation reveals an immense potential to establish new markets where none existed before and, in doing so, to foster economic growth without a loss of jobs or damage to other industries, enabling business and society to thrive together. Continued here

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Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel on the Challenges and Opportunities of Following a Visionary Leader     In the final episode of the season, HBR editor Adi Ignatius interviews Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods. Buechel discusses the challenges of succeeding a larger-than-life executive, the role of Whole Foods as a subsidiary of Amazon, and how the company is addressing changes in the business environment, such as climate change and hybrid work. Buechel emphasizes the importance of understanding the voice of team members during a leadership transition and being authentic as a leader. He also highlights Whole Foods’ focus on growth opportunities for employees and its commitment to sustainability. Buechel believes that AI will fundamentally change the retail and grocery shopping experience in the next decade. The episode concludes with Buechel sharing his favorite products from Whole Foods. Continued here

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Ivanka Trump's Tricky Comeback Tour     Poor Ivanka! Just when she thought she was out, they pulled her back in. I am referring, of course, to her recent appearance at the civil fraud trial of her father, Donald Trump, which has been ongoing in Manhattan for six weeks. The trial stems from the New York attorney general Letitia James's contention that the former President—along with his two eldest sons, and other Trump Organization executives—fraudulently inflated his net worth, and the value of his real-estate assets on financial documents, which helped them secure favorable loans for the company.Ivanka narrowly wriggled out of being a defendant herself: she stopped working for the Trump Organization, where she had been an executive vice-president, in 2017—which, as luck would have it, places her outside the statute of limitations for the trial's purposes. She also did her best to avoid getting called as a government witness, with her lawyers claiming that she would "suffer undue hardship" if she were "required to testify at trial in New York in the middle of a school week." (Ivanka lives in Florida and has three young children.) But, despite this heartstrings-pulling nod to the spectre of motherhood, the claim was rejected by the prosecution. And so there she was on Wednesday morning, striding into the New York State Supreme Courthouse, the picture of staid elegance in a navy suit and coat, a Chanel handbag in her hand, her hair long and smooth down her back, a slight smile on her face (which, if one were to believe the Daily Mail, might have been newly if tastefully nipped and tucked for the occasion). She was, apparently, ready to like it or lump it. Continued here

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'The Beast Adjoins' Is Seriously Creepy Sci-Fi     Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUHSlide: 1 / of 1.Caption: LENA SERDITOVA/GETTY IMAGES Continued here

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How much income is needed to live well in the UK in 2023? At least      You don’t have to look very hard at the moment to find evidence of the immense financial pressure on UK households. New figures from the Trussell Trust show that 1.5 million emergency food parcels were provided to people between April and September 2023. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest report on destitution in the UK shows that around 3.8 million people in 2022 were not able to meet their basic physical needs – staying warm, dry, clean and fed – more than double the amount in 2017. Continued here

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A Paradoxical Week for Democrats     Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s announcement that he will not seek reelection in 2024 capped a paradoxical week for Democrats. Manchin’s news puts Democrats’ control of the Senate at greater risk at the same time that polling for President Joe Biden continues to decline. But there was good news for Democrats: They scored a number of victories in Tuesday’s off-year election, including swing state Ohio voting to codify the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more are David Brooks, a columnist at The New York Times and the author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent and a co-author of Politico’s Playbook; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR; and Ed O’Keefe, a senior White House and political correspondent at CBS. Continued here