Served with a sauce full of sweetness and acidity – and a splash of sherry – this is a simple but deeply Spanish dish
Duck is one of those ingredients that feels rather special, but is actually very simple to cook. It’s something I always enjoy taking my time with, so it’s tender and full of flavour, and for me what really makes this particular dish are the cherries, even more so when they’re picotas from Extremadura, where I’m from. They’re small, sweet and full of sun, and a crop we wait impatiently for every year. When you cook with them, they bring a beautiful balance of sweetness and acidity to the rich duck, while the addition of a touch of amontillado transforms this simple dish into something that’s deeply Spanish. And remember, it’s always worth using a good sherry and enjoying the rest with the meal.
Continue reading...One plan would see young workers offered early access to a slice of future pensions. It’s not perfect, but we need bold ideas
While we wait with nail-biting anxiety for the voters of Makerfield to decide the fate of the country, the prospect of renewal at the top provides a fertile time for breeding ideas and confronting great problems. Alan Milburn’s searing analysis of the first generation ever to do worse financially than their parents did at their age opens the door to people with solutions to this crisis. Now is the time to bring them out.
Among the thinktanks, voluntary sector and business organisations coming forward with ideas, this week the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is offering an inventive plan to help ease the growing inequality between those young people gifted some wealth and the majority who have none. We are now in the time of the “great wealth transfer”, with an estimated £5.5tn to be passed down by the baby boomer generation in the UK over the next three decades. My lucky generation had everything for free. Ordinary salaries bought homes easily and property values rocketed to make homeowners wealthy beyond all expectations, even as the UK has gotten relatively poorer compared to other European and North American countries.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...In a wide-ranging interview, an upbeat Ukrainian president also discusses Donald Trump, King Charles, and how Kyiv is prepared to share its experience of drone warfare with the west
Sitting down with the Guardian in London, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems cheerful. More than four years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, he believes Europe’s biggest war since 1945 appears to be slowly turning in Ukraine’s favour. The military situation is the most promising it has been for Kyiv for two and a half years, Zelenskyy says. “We can’t say Russia is losing this war. But we can say they are losing the initiative each day, day by day,” he insists.
Over the past week the Kremlin has suffered a series of setbacks. Long-range Ukrainian drones have hit Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, setting fire to oil terminals and sending smoke billowing above the skyline. Similar attacks have crippled occupied Crimea. A key supply road is littered with burning lorries and tankers and the peninsula seized by Russia in 2014 is experiencing severe fuel shortages.
Continue reading...Datacentre off Shanghai coast uses less power and water than land-based equivalent
The world’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country’s artificial intelligence boom.
The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company.
Continue reading...Measures being considered to crack down on practice that has grown as a result of Britain’s housing crisis
London councils could be banned from “dumping” homeless families hundreds of miles across England under measures being considered by ministers, the Guardian has learned.
MPs said vulnerable people, including women fleeing abuse, were being “coerced” into choosing between rough sleeping or moving to cheap, sparsely furnished properties in some of the poorest parts of the country.
Continue reading...I am one of Jacinta Allan’s most vocal critics. But calling a woman a witch is not political criticism, and must be called out
Like most households, mine has a morning routine.
As we wait for our baby to wake, my partner makes me a coffee and I open an app designed to shield me from the worst of the internet. It has become as routine as checking my emails.
Continue reading...Brigg, Lincolnshire: With harvest approaching, we’re putting the glorious long evenings to good use, and both humans and insects are working hard to protect the crops
There’s something magical about the long evenings in June, the warmth and the way the setting sun casts long shadows across the fields. The extra hours are much-needed though as there is plenty to do.
We’re in the run-up to harvest in July, so if the weather is dry we walk up and down the seed crop tramlines, pulling out (rouging) unwanted wild oats, brome and blackgrass. They drop seeds that could contaminate not only our ground, but potentially someone else’s. Strict numbers govern how many of such plants are allowed per hectare in a seed crop, and independent inspectors check the results. Government officials in the Animal and Plant Health Agency will even walk the higher quality seed crops.
Continue reading...David Ronald Mobbs, who had motor neurone disease, had said he didn’t want to live if his illness became intolerable, court hears
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A woman who gave a lethal cocktail of medication to her husband who was dying from motor neurone disease has been granted bail after being charged with murder.
Kylie Ellina Truswell‑Mobbs was granted bail on Tuesday after being charged with murdering her 56-year-old husband, who was dying from motor neurone disease.
Continue reading...Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support
When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.”
The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’”
Continue reading...The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses
On 8 March 2018, at 1.20am, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 veered off its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An hour later, military radar spotted the plane heading west over the Andaman Sea. Six or seven hours later, it is presumed to have crashed somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, one of the least studied bodies of water in the world.
Just how little we knew about this part of the ocean became clear during the subsequent search for the missing aircraft. Before a proper underwater search could even begin, a vast stretch of seafloor had to be mapped. Over the next three years, a team of ships from Australia, China and Malaysia scanned the bottom with a combination of submersible robots and ship-borne sonar. Together, they charted a swath of ocean roughly 1,500 miles long and 150 miles wide, encompassing an area the size of France. The maps produced from these scans revealed a lost world, full of undersea canyons, crevasses, volcanic plateaux and a single, enormous cliff taller than the Swiss Alps. Even the abyssal plains, thought to be some of the flattest areas on the planet, were home to previously uncharted hills.
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Een van de bekendste honden van China is ontvoerd, geslacht en als gerecht opgediend in een restaurant. Border collie Chutou (8), die samen met zijn baasje meer dan 1,2 miljoen volgers verzamelde op sociale media, werd eind mei van een boerderij in de provincie Henan gestolen terwijl zijn eigenaar Guo, een bekende reisblogger, alleen door Georgië trok. Bewakingsbeelden tonen hoe twee mannen op een elektrische scooter de dutende hond uit een veld grijpen en wegrijden, zo meldt de South China Morning Post.
Toen Guo het nieuws hoorde, vloog hij meteen terug en wist hij een van de verdachten op te sporen. Die beweerde dat hij Chutou voor een zwerfhond had aangezien — ondanks de halsband mét gps-tracker. De dieven hadden de hond inmiddels voor 180 yuan, omgerekend zo'n 23 tot 27 euro, doorverkocht aan een restaurant gespecialiseerd in hondenvlees. Daar was Chutou diezelfde dag nog geslacht en aan gasten opgediend. Zelfs zijn vacht kreeg Guo niet terug: de slager had die "allang in de vuilnisbak gegooid", aldus Bild. Guo is een rechtszaak begonnen, maar stuit op een hardnekkig probleem: China kent geen algemene dierenwelzijnswet die huisdieren beschermt tegen diefstal en slacht voor consumptie.
Vanochtend ziet het weer er niet verkeerd uit. De zon laat zich geregeld zien en op de meeste plaatsen in het Rijnmondgebied blijft het droog. Vanmiddag verandert dat beeld. Verspreid over de regio trekken dan enkele buien over, waardoor het weer van plaats tot plaats sterk kan verschillen. Tijdens deze buien bestaat ook kans op onweer en lokaal op hagel en windstoten. De temperatuur komt niet hoger uit dan 17 of 18 graden. De zuidwestenwind neemt toe naar matig en wordt langs de kust vrij krachtig tot krachtig.
