Pictures of the week come from The Guardian (wildlife), Buzzfeed News, Roll Call, The Atlantic, and the BBC.
And 209 photos of female MPs by 209 female photographers, also from The Guardian.
But the theme this evening seems to be games of various sorts. We begin in Canada, with this from the Vancouver Sun:
The World Health Organization has officially designated video game addiction as a disorder, and one former addict warns we can no longer ‘just see them as fun, innocent games that people play for entertainment.’
Cam Adair liked to bang with the biggest of ’em.
What the 5-foot-9, 150-pound defenceman with the Okanagan Hockey Academy’s midget 3A team lacked in size, he made up for in guts.
“I was an extremely aggressive defenceman, to the point where I had three separated shoulders,” the 29-year-old Calgary native said, laughing.
From the Daily Mail:
- James Willesee was a junior tennis prodigy, playing on the international circuit
- He began gambling aged just 16 and eventually got himself $500,000 in debt
- Willesee won $1m on the 2013 Melbourne Cup but lost $600,000 in property
- The 29-year-old imported cocaine worth $1.5m to clear his gambling debts
ByStephen Gibbs
James Willesee was a promising young tennis player whose life was destroyed by gambling
A tennis prodigy whose life was destroyed by a gambling addiction that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars has been jailed for importing cocaine to pay off his huge debts.
James Willesee, whose uncle is the journalist Mike Willesee, began gambling at 16, was once $500,000 in debt and eventually lost property worth $600,000 as well as his mother's superannuation.
Downing Centre District Court heard the 29-year-old from Sydney's northern beaches also had the odd big win - taking home $1million when Fiorente saluted in the 2013 Melbourne Cup.
And from ABC news (Australia):
A series of marks in the floor of a rock shelter in Azerbaijan may look like an undecipherable ancient code, but one archaeologist says he has cracked it.
Key points:
- Game was popular in ancient Egypt but there was no evidence of it being played in the Azerbaijan region until now
- Archaeologist says find suggests Bronze-Age nomads interacted with distant neighbours
- Dr Crist says researchers still cannot be sure of the rules of the game
Walter Crist, from the American Museum of Natural History, said it was a board game, played by ancient nomads who mustered cattle in the region roughly 4,000 years ago.
"Small depressions found pecked into bedrock as well as on stone slabs found during excavation are arranged in a recurring and unique pattern," Dr Crist said.
And from Variety:
It’s the first and only union representing video game industry workers in the United Kingdom, it said. It’s an affiliate of the global Game Works Unite movement, a grassroots organization that advocates for unionization and workers’ rights within the industry. Some of its goals include ending the institutionalized practice of excessive/unpaid overtime, improving diversity, supporting abused or harassed workers, and securing a livable wage for all.
But there is other news in the world, including this about life in the UK:
Ex-chancellor’s tax credits started to erase problem – but universal credit reverses trend
Larry Elliott
Gordon Brown is on familiar territory. The former prime minister is parked on a sofa in a family centre in the heart of his old constituency and holding forth about poverty.
The venue, a family centre called the Cottage, is in the Templehall part of Kirkcaldy and easy to miss. The poverty that it is helping to alleviate is not. When it launched its first Christmas appeal eight years ago – the year Brown’s Labour government was turfed out of office – the centre assisted 80 families. Last year it was 950: this year it will be 1,200.
And another, also from The Guardian:
Unseen populations living in forests, tents and sheds on the fringes of affluent towns face hostility and indifference
Random other news (or, as Stephen Colbert terms it, Meanwhile)...
This from The Guardian:
Firefighters rule building in Hastings structurally unsafe after rockfall hits building and breaks through wallA giant boulder weighing several tons has smashed through the wall of a man’s bedroom.
Firefighters were called to the home in White Rock on the seafront in Hastings, East Sussex, at about 3pm on Thursday after reports the structure of the building was dangerous.
During a significant rockfall, the boulder hit the back of the building and broke through the wall into the occupier’s bedroom, the fire service said.
From Time Out Croatia:
By Marc Rowlands
Residents of the Balkans know exactly where Croatia is, as do thousands of holidaymakers who have previously visited its sunny shores. But the rest of the world? It would appear that many have little idea.
As previously reported in Time Out Croatia, leading search engine Google have just published their annual end of year search results. And one of the most searched for destination queries has seen thousands asking where Croatia actually is.
And one about women and feminism not being a bad thing, from The Guardian:
Yes, we’ve moved on since the really bad old days – but as a new ruling on sexist ads shows, damaging stereotypes still abound
Twentysomethings are getting fed up with what they see as an overload of political correctness, which is bad news. One young woman in my family heard a piece on Newsbeat this morning about the clampdown on advertising that’s sexist or stereotyping, and told me she thinks it’s getting out of hand, and we should all stop getting so overexcited about it.
From NBC news:
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko believes the potential outcome of Saturday's meeting represents an “opportunity that arises once in a millennium.”
By Yuliya Talmazan
One of Christianity's biggest splits in centuries is expected to be formalized this weekend as Ukraine moves to create a new church independent from Russia's influence.
It’s estimated that more than 70 percent of Ukrainians — or nearly 32 million people — identify as religious. The overwhelming majority of them are Orthodox Christian. But they don’t all pray in the same churches.
There are currently three separate branches of the Orthodox church in Ukraine, including one under the control of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
And from Inews:
They have lived off the land and their reindeer herds in the Arctic Circle for thousands of years, using milk, bone and furs to survive
Eleanor Ross
It’s five degrees below freezing in Oslo, but a group of young people wearing fur-trimmed dresses are chanting outside parliament. One of them is Maret Anne Sara, a young Sami author and artist, whose family’s culture, traditions and livelihood are at risk.
She is protesting against the Norwegian government’s decision to force Sami reindeer herders to cull a portion of their herds by New Year’s Day. If the cull goes ahead, her family’s herd could be cut from 300 to 75 reindeer. This could threaten their survival. It’s also, she says, a violation of Sami human rights: they say that their culture is under threat.
Sara’s brother, Jovsset Ante Sara, is 26 years old and one of hundreds of Sami reindeer herders instructed to reduce their herd because of “overgrazing”. He submitted an appeal to the UN Commission to postpone the cull, yet on Tuesday the Norwegian government voted to continue without waiting for its response.
And one last one from Norway, via simplemost:
Who's ready for a trip?!
Jennifer Nied
Imagine a place with no cars, no shops and barely any people. This haven is quiet and serene, and it exists right here on Earth. It’s an isolated island in the Fleinvær archipelago in Norway above the Arctic Circle. It’s also available for rent.
News of the arts, or “arts”:
We begin with one from the BBC:
In 2004 John Sayles wrote a ‘half-crazy, half brilliant’ screenplay for Jurassic Park 4 that featured armed, parachuting dinosaurs. Nicholas Barber takes a closer look.
The structure is so ancient that it feels almost prehistoric. Some people take a trip to a remote island, they see some dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs try to have them for lunch. It’s what happened in Jurassic Park in 1993, and by the time the first sequel came out in 1997, the screenplay was already poking fun at how formulaic it was. “‘Ooh, aah’, that’s how it always starts,” says Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. “Then later there’s running and screaming.” How right he was. But this self-knowledge didn’t stop the makers of Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World (2015) sticking to the formula, and it wasn’t until the second half of this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that the series found somewhere else to go.
From Forbes:
Amy Dobson
You barely register it's there when you walk in. Yet it is part of the reason you end up making an offer on a luxury condo. It's part of the reason you relax when you cross the threshold to your building. It's the lure, it's the appeal—and it's the subliminal effect—of luxury art.
"When I first started staging, nobody in the high end was staging at all for some reason," says Cheryl Eisen, founder of Interior Marketing Group, which stages many luxury and celebrity homes. "As we started doing it, I always started by putting art in the spaces. Now the highest end of real estate in New York City, which is the highest in the world, more or less, is being staged more and more. This is more of a growing thing." One of the first things Eisen does upon seeing a client's space is to photoshop in ideas of art that would both look good and highlight the home's features, such as its double-height ceilings or tall windows. Then her in-house art team, Art Loft, creates unique pieces for each of the spaces.
From Artsy.net:
Jackson Arn
Last week, an email from a fairly well-known New York gallery showed up in my inbox. The email contained a press release for an exhibition featuring four highly acclaimed artists, none of whom I had heard of (this is nothing out of the ordinary for me). I scanned the artists’ bios, hoping to learn something about them. I didn’t, really, but I was reminded of a few things about the state of art writing. A representative excerpt: “[The artist’s] interest in balancing the dynamic between positive and negative space within his compositions mirrors his interest in exploring the delicate harmony between humans and nature, and his lines serve as meditations on time and motion” and who knows what else.