It’s all a bit silly, really. Jodie Foster plays Dr Lilian Steiner, a Jewish-American psychiatrist, and she speaks in French here, sprinkled with the occasional English swearword. (Foster has been speaking French since childhood. She used the money from Taxi Driver to buy an apartment in Paris, and it has been her second home ever since).
Dr Steiner’s practice isn’t going well. A long-standing patient is angry with her for stringing out his appointments for years, after a single session with a hypnotherapist cured him of his smoking habit. Another patient, Paula, has committed suicide- so it is said- and the family blames her. She finds herself unable to stop crying, so she has an appointment with the hypnotherapist who was so successful in curing her ex-patient of nicotine addiction. Under some very rapid hypnotism, she falls into a sequence in an orchestra where she and her patient Paula are lovers, shot by Paula’s husband, and Nazi henchmen, led by her son, invade the orchestra pit. All rather strange.
Moreover, the now dry-eyed Dr Steiner begins to suspect foul play in her patient’s death. First she thinks that Paula’s daughter murdered her, and then she turns her suspicions on her patient’s philandering husband who stood to benefit from his inheritance from Paula, which had been bolstered by a legacy she had recently and conveniently received from her aunt. And so Dr Lilian goes on her hunt for evidence, dragging along her ex-husband Gabriel, and together they indulge in some amateur sleuthing which I think finally resolves the mystery of Paula’s death. Along the way she falls in love with her ex-husband again, and embarks on a better relationship with her son. (Really, she’s a pretty crap mother and grandmother).
It was okay, although it felt longer than its 103 minutes. Jodie Foster was very good, although during the movie she seemed to transmogrify steadily into Julia Gillard. It was a bit silly, though
French, with English subtitles.
My rating: 3/5
Watched because: I was interested to see Jodie Foster acting in a French film.
To be honest, when I got to the end of this novella I felt a surge of relief that I don’t have to live inside this woman’s head any more. Fireweather is a follow-up to Miranda Darling’s earlier novella Thunderhead, and it deals with the same characters, some months further down the track. By now, our main protagonist Winona Dalloway has left Him (her husband). She has found a new place to live, and is now battling over custody rights with her ex-husband who is trying to use Winona’s mental health as grounds to deny access to their sons. It’s high stakes for Winona.
This time the weather is real, rather than emotional. Bushfires and a heat wave have enclosed the city in a hot, smoky envelope, reminiscent of the 2020 summer before COVID. As with Thunderhead, all the action takes place within the one day. Winona undergoes a medical test for her seizures, then waits for her children to be dropped off by Him later that afternoon. She has rented an apartment near the school, walking around the suburbs and retrieving old neglected pot plants, like a poinsettia she finds in an abandoned house. She goes to have blood tests at the pathologist, she watches a surf rescue at the beach, she has lunch at a Sushi Train and goes to watch a movie before buying the ingredients for a picnic to have with the children when they arrive.
She is alone, but her head is noisy. She has taken to devising strings of rhyming words in an internal monologue. She talks with Bruce, a neighbourhood dog. New voices have taken up in her head: The Child, The snide Archer, The bossy Nanny and the florid Poet. They bicker amongst themselves like the Greek Gods. Meanwhile, she goes off into thought trains of her own, interesting enough but didactic and distracting for both Winona and the reader.
Is this book really necessary? I wonder. I don’t know what sense you would make of it if you hadn’t read Thunderhead. I see that it has been short-listed for the Stella Prize, and I wonder if it’s an (unsuccessful) attempt at a ‘second bite of the cherry’? I think that its sequel nature would make it difficult to win, and I think that Thunderhead was the better, and more clever book. The issue of coercive control is important, but it becomes lost and almost pathologized in the noise in Winona’s head.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from e-book borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I knew it was the followup to Thunderhead and I was looking for a short book between two longer ones.
Urgent Histories. This is a newish series of history podcasts coming out of Australian National University, featuring lecturers from the University. Being in a Nanna-ish frame of mind, I listened to the episode Grandparenting’s transformations in the twentieth century. This ARC-funded project, drawing in researchers from several Australian universities features demographer Dr Liz Allen, one of the researchers. She looks at migration, housing design, distance, longer lifespans and the rising cost of living in a range of households, including multicultural and First Peoples families, and the role of parents in child-care. I found it a bit self-evident really: I wonder if they’ll find anything new?
The Rest is ClassifiedEpisode 127 Was Epstein a Russian Spy? I wonder if I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist: I have never believed that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, and I believe that Vladimir Putin has something on Donald Trump. In this episode podcast presenter David McCloskey speaks with former CIA officer and foreign policy, intelligence, and national security expert John Sipher. They point out that the Epstein files show Epstein’s frequent contact and financial ties with Russia and Belarus, especially in relation to trafficking. They point out that in Russia, espionage is directed towards protection of the regime, and towards activation of foreign policy. In the United States, espionage ‘assets’ need to have vulnerabilities and be interesting, but they also need to be trustworthy and follow orders. They felt that neither Epstein nor Trump were trustworthy or willing to follow orders, but they could be valuable without being actual assets. In Russian espionage, the uncertainty of whether someone has Kompromat on you or not is its own form of constraint. They point out that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell had helped the KGB as a banker during the fall of the Soviet union.. But overall, they downplay the likelihood of Epstein being a Russian spy- more like a ‘useful idiot’, and they reject completely the idea of him being an Israeli spy. [But that doesn’t mean that ‘they’ didn’t get to Epstein, I reckon]
From Our Correspondent (BBC) I really am quite enjoying this program. In the May 2 episode, Sean Coghlan talks about King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington came at a fragile moment in the UK-US relationship over issues such as Ukraine, defence spending, tariffs, and the Iran War. Sarah Smith talks about King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit to Washington, the multiple readings that could be taken on the King’s speeches and on how far the visit has helped restore the ‘special relationship’. Sean Coughlan has travelled with the King on previous tours, and reveals what made this one different. Lyse Doucet (I LOVE Lyse Doucet!!) recalls a trip to Iran in 1989 where a Revolutionary Guard spoke of the ‘tingle’ that came from acting illegally. She returns to Tehran, and finds many Iranians willing the fighting to continue, but for various reasons. John Donnison reports from Ramallah, where municipal elections were held last weekend in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Hamas was officially excluded from participating, as the Palestinian Authority requires parties and candidates to recognise the state of Israel – something Hamas refuses to do. And in West Bengal a fierce state election battle is underway. Indian PM Narendra Modi’s BJP has mounted an aggressive push to unseat the Trinamool Congress party which is seeking a fourth consecutive term. Soutik Biswas reveals how FISH of all things have become a hot-button issue as culture and politics merge.
The Wargame.This five-part series from Sky News and Tortoise imagines how a Russian attack on the UK could play out. The Gathering Storm: The Grey Zone Ep.1. The Grey Zone is a murky space where it’s not clearcut that an attack has actually occurred, but with multiple, deliberate occurences, there is certainly a battle going on none the less. In this episode Sky News journalist Deborah Haynes travels to Salisbury with the widow of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko to visit the site of one of the most high profile grey zone attacks – the poisoning of another ex-Russian agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia. These poisonings were followed by a deluge of misinformation. Finally, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, describes how he and his team revealed the true identities of the Russian military intelligence officers named by the UK as prime suspects in the attempted assassination. Russia denies involvement.
A thunderhead is a dense, towering cloud that often presages a thunderstorm. The sky can be blue but the thunderhead glowers on one side, building up power and energy until it blots out the sun. That feeling of rising tension pervades this short 76 page novella as its protagonist and narrator Winona Dalloway tiptoes around her controlling husband, referred to only as ‘He’ and ‘Him’ -always capitalized- trying to practice Transcendence over her small daily challenges while trying to summon the courage to make bigger changes. Dalloway? where have you heard that name before? Ah- Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and this book makes many references to Woolf’s book, and even more, I think to Michael Cunningham’s riff on Woolf in The Hours, most particularly the character Laura Brown. As with all the women in both Woolf’s book and Cunningham’s tribute to it, there is a rupture between the interiority of the characters and the outward image that they are trying to project.
I mentioned the Laura Brown character in Cunningham’s book in particular, because both women are negotiating around an oppressive husband, trying to anticipate his needs and running to fulfil them. In Winona’s case, ‘He’ manifests for much of the book through a series of commanding SMSs and calendar entries. As with Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf’s book, there is a dinner party to be held that night, and both women are apprehensive. ‘He’ is directing her preparations through SMS, while structuring her activities during the day: peering into her appointment with a psychiatrist, ordering her to be present when the plumber comes before 2.00 p.m.
Winona, a frustrated writer, is surrounded by voices: both ‘His’ SMSs and instructions, and her own inner voices differentiated by bold text and italics. These voices cause her to second-guess herself, and we- and she- only gradually realize that He is gas-lighting her as well. Her confidence and autonomy is so fragile, and she tries to guard it by the writing of lists and the ticking off of small achievements while negotiating domestic life.
For such a short book (only 79 pages) there is a lot packed in, and the tension is almost unbearable: so much so that I was glad that it is only short. I’m bemused by the publicist’s description of it as ‘black comedy’. There’s no comedy here: there’s coercion, oppression and tension- all within 79 pages. I enjoyed the allusions to Woolf and Cunningham, but the book stands on its own without knowledge of the other two books. It’s a very accomplished piece of compact writing.
This is a fantastic movie. Nine year old Lamia has been chosen from among her classmates to bake a cake to celebrate President Saddam Hussein’s birthday. We do not know what happened to her parents, as she lives with her very old grandmother who has just lost her job working in the fields. Lamia and her grandmother are ‘Marsh Arabs’ who live on the wetlands of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. Even though Saddam was later to punish the Marsh Arabs for insurrection by draining the swamplands, the people of the river at the time of this film have great fear of the President, and Lamia knows that she and her grandmother will be punished if the cake is not made. But where are they going to pay for the ingredients? Her grandmother takes her into the city to buy the ingredients but Lamia learns that she is to be left with a woman as a shopworker and she runs away. So the film turns into a quest to find the ingredients, while at the same time keeping herself safe. I had the same feeling watching this as I did with the movie ‘Lion’ when the little boy is left in the station: such an innocent child in a world where people are so suspect. The end of the movie left me speechless: speechless in anger at the corruption and disparity in wealth between the Iraqi elite and Saddam Hussein in particular, who had not need of this cake; and speechless with sorrow at the ending which made my heart sink.
I’m not particularly fond of Coca-Cola. I will have a sugar-free Coke occasionally, but I’d much rather have a juice, or even water. Which is just as well, because after reading this book, any affection I might have felt for Coca-Cola is long gone.
I don’t know who Mark Thomas is. I gather that he’s a comedian and a social activist, and that he was involved in a documentary criticizing Coca-Cola previous to writing this book. Perhaps this is where much of my dissatisfaction with the book lay: an unknown comedian or television personality doesn’t come across as particularly funny when you have absolutely no idea who they are. This book felt like a documentary and I surmised that this was the book tie-in, but it doesn’t appear that it is. A filmed documentary can get away with making the same point through several examples, each in different settings, but in a book it just seemed repetitious. Viewing a documentary is easy: a book takes more commitment, and I felt as if it was going round in circles, eating up precious reading time.
His argument is that Coca-Cola, as a global phenomenon, has a business model that works through subsidiary companies, allowing it to promote an international and western brand (which might have cachet in third-world countries in particular) while turning a blind eye to practices at a local level. Amongst the South American subsidiaries, Coca-Cola washes its hands of anti-union coercion implemented by paramilitaries; in El Salvador children work in the sugarcane fields that provide the sugar; in both India and El Salvador it extracts water for manufacturing that leaves villages parched; and in Mexico in particular- although this would apply in many other countries too- it contributes to obesity and diabetes. In fact, in Chiapas, Coca-Cola has even been incorporated into religious ceremonies.
All of this takes place while The Coca-Cola Company, the multinational, through its shareholder meetings and policy documents claims to exercise Corporate Social Responsibility, papering over all these disreputable practices committed by their subsidiary companies. At the multi-national level, they are replacing the water taken (even though this is not the case), they are ‘monitoring’ child-labour and anti-union activities, they are reducing the amount of sugar in their products. The brand is all important, and this cloaking in ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘ethical procedures’ is camouflage for practices for which the company takes no responsibility.
All of which is interesting, but which is probably best experienced as a documentary rather than a book. Coca-Cola’s Dirty Secret on SBS gives you much the same information but in just 25 minutes- leaving you time to read something else instead.
Journey Through TimeEpisode 2 The Attack that Shook America: Black Tom Explodes. New York harbour erupts with an explosion as Black Tom island is ripped apart. A series of explosions set off a chain reaction as barges and railway carriages loaded with ordnance ready for export exploded. The shock waves ripple out around Manhattan and New Jersey, shattering windows 25 miles away and even registering on the Richter scale. However, only 7 people died and although the Statue of Liberty was damaged, it was not highly visible damage. Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to maintain America’s neutrality in the war, was facing re-election and it was passed off as a regrettable accident. In the end it was the Zimmerman telegram that prompted America to join the war. In 1920, after the war, the Mixed Claims Commission was ensuring that Germany paid reparations, but Von Pappen (i.e. ex-embassy saboteur in the US) argued against the War Guilt Clause 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, keen to deflect attention away from his own sabotage. After a 13 year trial the Mixed Claims Commission settled on a compensation payment of $50 million dollars, but Hitler refused to pay it- in fact it wasn’t settled until 1953 with the final payment made in 1979. The Black Tom Explosion hardened American attitudes towards ‘traitors within’ which played out in the brutal internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the creation of America’s counterintelligence operations.
The Rest is History Episode 646. the Fall of the Incas: Death to the Emperor (Part 3) We left Pizarro and Atahualpa in November 1532 sleeping in a room together, Atahualpa having been taken captive. Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold up to a certain mark on the wall within two months, in exchange for his freedom. He had no sense that these Spanish were just the first of many. During his period of imprisonment, there was a lot of contact between Atahualpa and the Spaniards, and he was still more concerned with the Civil War with his brother, than the Spaniards. His brother Huáscar was being brought north in a cage by Atahualpa’s troops, and ordered to be murdered. By January 1533 the gold to ransom Atahualpa was beginning to arrive slowly. Atahualpa ordered that temples be destroyed to yield up more gold, largely as a way of punishing the people who had supported his brother. When Atahualpa’s general Chalcuchímac took Spaniards to a temple which did not have sufficient gold, he was burned alive. At this stage, Pizarro’s screwed-over partner Almagro with 150 more troops and royal officials. Pizarro began melting down the gold – such beautiful workmanship reduced to ingots- and Almagro demanded half but Pizarro gave him only a token amount. Pizarro’s brother Hernando was sent back to Spain, something that upset Atahualpa because the two men had become friends. The Spanish were anxious that Atahualpa’s troops would attack from the north, and the recently-arrived Almagro and his men wanted to kill him. As the rumours of the imminent invasion of Atahualp’s troop spread (and they were just rumours- there was no invasion planned), Pizarro agreed to hold a kangaroo court and Atahualpa was sentenced to death by burning, unless he converted to Christianity. Aware that death by burning would mean that there would be no mummified body to go to the next life, he finally agreed. The Spanish grilled him anyway and buried him. Both Pizarro’s brother Hernando and the King were very critical of Pizarro’s decision to kill a King, and now Pizarro needed to find a new Incan intermediary.
Foundling. Episode 6. As the series winds up, Jess’s father Lewis finally contacts the producer Lucy Greenwell, and says that he had no idea that Jennifer had been pregnant, and is evasive over whether and how much he continued to have contact with Jennifer. Meanwhile, after Jess decided to go ahead with the podcast, Jennifer’s family who had made contact with her even though their mother had not, withdrew contact with her. Jess herself had distanced herself from them when she was excluded from her ‘new’ grandfather’s deathbed and funeral, and then they blocked contact with her on social media. Meanwhile Lucy the program producer finds another American girl who was also a foundling, and as with Jess, it turned out that her mother had also gone on to have other children that she abandoned. This woman, Janet, had met with her mother and established contact with one brother, but her curiosity satisfied, she had let the relationship lapse. Jess is nowhere near doing that: she is still too angry, and wants her mother Jennifer to be punished. And the arrival of two Cold Case detectives and the knowledge that women are being prosecuted today for abandoning their babies decades and decades ago, shows that there is punishment- but just not the sort of punishment that would satisfy Jess.
Actually, I have had less and less sympathy for Jess as this series has gone on. It’s all about her, and she is heedless to the damage she is doing in order to have her own questions answered and her insecurities assuaged. With DNA there is no secrecy any more, and it’s as if secrecy is a crime. I don’t know that it is: sometimes secrets have to be kept for life to go on.
How Did We Get Here?Episode 5: Israel and the Palestinians: From WW2 to the First Arab War The White Paper which was issued in 1939 after the crushing of the Arab Revolt was rejected by the Palestinian Mufti, then in Germany, because as far as he was concerned, it still allowed for a large Jewish population in the Palestinian homeland. The Jews were angered by the White Paper’s restriction of Jewish immigration, leading to an uprising against the British and the bombing of the King David Hotel by Jewish paramilitary groups. By 1947 Britain threw in the towel, and handed it over to the United Nations, who had their own plans for partition. The UN plan gave 55% of the land Israel in a chequerboard of seven separate entities, but no one actually took responsibility for the implementation of the plan. But why did the UN vote in favour of it? Britain abstained, and the UN at that time had a different and mainly European membership before the decolonization of the post-war period. The Palestinians rejected the UN plan, arguing that they should have received all of the land. 300,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians left straight away, for various reasons. War broke out, but the Arab armies except for Jordan (which was still under British protection) were weak. The Jewish population ended up with 4/5 of the Mandate territory, with just two Palestinian reserves left: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Features Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University and the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, author of ‘The Making of the Modern Middle East’.
Sometimes a memoir says more by what it doesn’t say. The subtitle of this book is ‘A Family Saga’, and saga it certainly is, as it tells the long, drawn-out struggle between birth parents and Christian fundamentalist fanatics Michael and Mary Shelley and the foster parents of their three of their children, Tom and Lenore Blaine. It came as a rather guilty relief when Michael and Mary finally die by the end of the book, and you can let go of the breath that you have been holding and think “well, thank God that’s over”.
This is not a straight generation-to-generation family saga. The book starts in 1983 when Michael Shelley, accompanied by a 19 year old hitchhiker Glen, burst into the house of Fran and Neil Williams, the foster parents of Michael’s three year old son Elijah. To the background theme song of Play School, Michael and Glen literally snatched Elijah in front of his foster sisters, Debbie, Linda and Cindy, and took him back to join Mary Shelley as they continued on their peripatetic life proclaiming God’s providence and sponging on everyone they met. We don’t meet this event again until about a third of the way through the book, after we have learned of the family tree, history and relationships of the four main protagonists- the brilliant, egotistical Michael Shelley; his psychotic and dependent wife Carole Newgrosh who changes her name to Mary Shelley on her husband’s instructions; rough-and-tumble, overweight and raucous Tom Blaine; and his wife the conscientious Lenore Meurant who suffers miscarriage after miscarriage and whose love for children can encompass an ever-increasing number of children as foster carer
As Blaine notes in the preface, he wasn’t around for much of the action of this story, which had hardened into deep ruts of suspicion and wariness by the time he was born as Michael and Lenore’s only biological child. . The youngest child in the family, he is more observer than participant as Michael and Mary Shelley continue to confront the Blaine family demanding the return of their children, causing multiple shifts of residence as Tom buys up one hotel after another, a successful publican who builds up failing hotels into successful concerns.
Michael and Mary have multiple court appearance for harassment and stalking, not just of the Blaines but also of Queensland politicians who they hoped would take up their case- a strange way of trying to win support. Within the strict tunnel vision of their religion, they are quick to label women lesbians and men pedophiles. When they do manage to make contact with their children separately, they soon alienate them by their bitterness against the Blaines and their messianic fundamentalism.
Class is not directly addressed in this memoir, but it pervades it throughout. Both Michael and Mary Shelley had enjoyed privileged upbringings in Sydney, beautiful Mary appearing in the women’s magazines as the wife of singer Lionel Long, before meeting Michael Shelley. Tom and his hotels, with the Rugby trophies on the walls, the alcohol and the pokies are everything that Michael Shelley abhors, seeing it not only as evil but also working-class and demeaning. Certainly, contraception seems to be completely unknown throughout, as the Blaine/Shelley children grow up into adulthood with unplanned pregnancies catapulting them into responsibilities that they treat with varying degrees of maturity and avoidance. As their adult personalities emerge, so too does mental illness and addiction, but who can tell if it’s “in the blood” or a result of the constant evasion and escape prompted by yet another arrival of the Shelleys on their doorstep.
There is no grand plot twist at the end- or even a plot at all, for that matter- and the book is more observation than analysis. The book moves chronologically, focussing on one character and then another, with a number of small sub-chapters, each with its own subheading subsumed into larger chapters, which are in turn organized into three parts. The author withholds judgement, trying to present the perspective of each of his characters, and leaving the reader to pose the questions: what is a family? whose rights are paramount? what does it mean to be a parent? how well has the child protection system worked here? are we doomed to repeat the destructive patterns of our parents? can trauma ever be shaken off? is ‘alternative’ parenting abuse or just a choice?
What comes over most strongly is love – as a form of obsession and persistence, in the case of the Shelleys, or as a glowing coal of acceptance and protection, in the case of the Blaines. Although the author has withheld judgment, he hasn’t withheld his own gratitude and love for what Tom and Lenore Blaine gave to all of their children, himself included.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Purchased from Ladyhawke Books, Ivanhoe
I read ‘The Stranger’ many, many years ago- although the version I read was called ‘The Outsider’. I couldn’t really remember all that much about the book except Meursault’s rather listless detachment with everything. The film places rather more emphasis on his relationship with Marie than I remembered, and the woman abused by his neighbour Raymond is given a name here- Djemila. The film finishes with her, rather than him.
I know that the director decided to shoot it in black and white to convey heat, but I don’t know that it worked that well for me. The water even looked choppy and cool at one stage (although it probably wasn’t). I would have liked to have seen it in a stark, dazzling white heat in colour, instead. It is subtitled, but there is relatively little dialogue and the subtitles were easy to keep up with.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 645 The Fall of the Incas: Massacre in the Andes (Part 2) What happened when the Spanish conquistadors lead by Francisco Pizarro came face to face with the ruthless emperor of the Incan Empire, Atahualpa? How did the Incas treat their strange, pale, alien visitors with their horses? And, why did a brutal, bloody fight to the death break out between the two sides after the meeting? In 1532 Pizarro read the ‘Requirement’ which legally bound the Incas to submit to vassalage and established a municipality which made their conquest legal. Pizarro then headed off with 168 men, few of whom were trained soldiers, while the Incas were checking them out from a distance. Atahualpa thought that the Spanish could be useful in the Civil War with his brother. A meeting between Pizarro’s brother, de Soto and Atahualpa agreed to meet the following day. Atahualpa knew that the Spanish were outnumbered and the horses were of great interest to him. After delays, the meeting finally took place in a square. Atahualpa dropped a book (a bible?) and this was the prompt for a massacre which saw many dead and Atahualpa taken captive. There’s shades of Mexico here, and perhaps the historiography has confused Mexican and Inca conquest.
FoundlingEpisode 4 and 5 The Fallout. SPOILERS Despite her birth-mother warning Jess to consider the effect of her investigations on the later families created by her parents, Jess then searches for her father. She had done a DNA test with Ancestry, but had no success. She then went with a different company and tracked down her father’s family. (It just goes to show how the commodification of DNA testing means that you can’t get definitive results without subscribing to several services- just like streaming. And because it can identify you through your relatives, even if you haven’t submitted your own sample, there’s no escape). Jess encounters Lewis, her father, and his wife Debbie who was completely unaware of any extra-marital relationship between her husband and Jennifer, and their children. His wife is very upset, and so too is their psychologically-fragile daughter Chloe, when she finds out that Jennifer has been her mental health nurse. In best journalistic fashion the podcasters claim that they’re not making insinuations that the discovery had such a drastic effect on Chloe, but they are really.
From Our Own Correspondent (BBC) I love Foreign Correspondent reports, and this weekly program brings BBC correspondents from all over the world. In the episode of 25 April 2026 Kate Adie introduces dispatches from Pakistan, the Turkey-Iran border, Kenya, Ukraine, and Paraguay. Why was Pakistan chosen as the host of peace talks between the US and Iran? It’s a question some in Islamabad have been asking themselves – and has fired-up a sense of national pride. Caroline Davies has watched on as the country gets ready for another round of negotiations. When the war in Iran began, there was a sense of jubilation among some Iranians, who had long-dreamed of the regime falling. Now that seems like a distant reality, and the mood is changing. BBC Persian’s Omid Montazeri has been on the Turkey-Iran border, where he has found attitudes towards the war are shifting. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, which remains the world’s worst nuclear accident. Jordan Dunbar visited the city of Slavutych in Northern Ukraine, which was purpose built to rehouse workers evacuated from the power plant city of Pripyat – and recounts his search for a DJ legend of the 1980s. In northern Kenya farmers and their families are suffering the effects of consecutive seasons of low rainfall. A new report estimates around 400,000 people are experiencing acute levels of hunger. Sammy Awami reports from Turkana, one of the worst affected areas. And the semi-arid lowlands of the Gran Chaco span an area of around 280 thousand miles across South America – more than half of that is in Argentina, a third in Paraguay and the remainder in Bolivia. It’s the region’s second-largest forest ecosystem after the Amazon – and is also home to a wide range of animal, bird and plant species – as Sara Wheeler discovered.
How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians Episode 4 The Balfour Declaration to the Arab Revolt. In the fourth of ten programmes exploring the origins and tracing the history of the Middle East conflict, presenter Jonny Dymond is joined by Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin (a female voice at last!), author and historian James Barr and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. (No Simon Sebag Montefiore this time!) At the end of 1917 the British troops took Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, just 67 words long, expressed support for a Jewish ‘national home’- but not a State. It was largely designed to attract Jewish support for Britain’s war aims. Britain was promising land that it didn’t own to a people who didn’t live there and the majority of Arabs rejected it outright. There was a series of riots during the interwar years because of the purchase of land by Zionists and the influx of Jewish migrants which was changing the demography of Palestine. The Peel Commission report of 1937, held after the Arab Revolt, and its subsequent White Paper partitioned the northern part of Palestine for a Jewish state (first time Britain had been talking about a ‘state’) and limited the amount of Jewish immigration, and the rest of Palestine was to be annexed to Transjordan, another British mandate- an early form of ‘two-state solution’. ‘Independence’ was promised to the Palestinians in ten years, but it was not really independence. The Jewish population saw the White Paper as a betrayal, but Britain saw the quelling of the Arab Revolt as a way of moving more soldiers back to Europe where they were needed in the fight against Germany.
The Book Show In Episode 4: Hamnet:Love Grief and Motherhood Dominic and Tabby discussed Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and the film. I was surprised by how much Dominic enjoyed the book, which he gave a 9/10 (although he wasn’t so impressed with the film, to which he gave 6/10). Tabitha loved it too, giving the book 10/10 and 8.5/10 to the film. I was struck again, hearing them read extracts from the book, how beautifully written it is.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 