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rk has been suspended on the installation until the hearing, leaving the fifth shark stranded on dry land.

"The work on the installation of the sharks was ongoing last night when a court injunction requested by Hackney Council was issued, which is disputing the change of use on the site," Architecture Foundation director Ellis Woodman told Dezeen.

The injunction alleges that the installation amounts to a "material change of use" of the canal and accuses the organisers of "the display of art installations without the benefit of planning permission". […]

Gray believes the council acted after reading an article about the project by Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright.

"It was provoked by some daft article in The Guardian by a guy who presented himself as interested in writing a serious story and then actually wrote a load of childish nonsense that was man-eaters released into the canal," said Gray.

"What a f*cking asshole."

Well yes: he writes for the Guardian. Here's the offending piece, where the sharks are presented as an anti-establishment gesture inspired by the famous Headington shark.

ing gay alarm at the claims made by trans activists about what they term “trans children”. As the LGB Alliance and others are now trying to highlight, there exist not just old-fashioned gender stereotypes but something deeply anti-gay about present trans claims. For example, why should a slightly effeminate boy be thought to be a girl trapped in a boy’s body? Or a boyish girl be “diagnosed” as trans? At least four-fifths of children diagnosed as having “gender dysphoria” will grow up to be healthily gay. Is it any wonder that an increasing number of gay men and lesbians are becoming concerned about the claims made by advocates of gender dysphoria?

Despite all this, in the face of the revolt the trans activists keep digging in. And the absurdities mount. The Lib Dem leadership candidate Layla Moran recently tried to get around the impasse by claiming that she sees someone’s true gender “in their soul”. Yet most people — albeit privately — recognise that to be anti-scientific nonsense.

Still, as the sackings continue, the activists seem to imagine that if they just clear all opponents from their path, they can win by insistence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biological reality can be ignored, but not for long. Our society is struggling for a way to understand the question of trans. It is a noble aim. But if you are going to address a complex question it is unwise to discard the best analytical tools any society has developed.

The Isley Brothers with their first hit, on the Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show, 1959, introduced by Dick Clark:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOjpNHf54U&w=550&h=309]

It's a strange performance. Lip-synched, obviously, and just fading out a couple of minutes into a four minute song. And they don't seem to have done much preparation, just jerking around like puppets instead of the usual smooth choreography we expect from black groups of that time. Maybe they were just trying to put together some kind of spontaneous party atmosphere.

Some history:

In performances around 1958, the Isley Brothers would typically end their shows with a cover version of Jackie Wilson's hit "Lonely Teardrops". At one performance at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, lead singer Ronald Isley could see the audience standing and yelling their approval, so he extended the song by improvising a call-and-response around the words "You know you make me wanna…" "Shout!". The group developed the song further in later performances and rehearsals, using a drawn out "We-eee-ll" copied from Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman". On returning to New York City at the end of their engagement, they suggested to record producers Hugo & Luigi that they record the "Shout!" climax of the performance as a separate song. The producers agreed and suggested that the band invite friends to the recording studio to generate a party atmosphere.

The recording took place on July 29, 1959, with Hugo and Luigi choosing the studio musicians and the Isley Brothers inviting organist Herman Stephens. Released in August 1959, with the song split over both sides of the record, the single reached number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the group's first chart hit, and later the brothers' first gold single on the basis of its longevity. Ronald Isley later said that church groups wrote to radio stations asking them to stop playing the record, because of its use of a traditional black gospel sound.

The Isley Brothers are famous by now for their longevity, having lasted over seven decades through soul, disco, funk, R&B: one of the "longest, most influential, and most diverse careers in the pantheon of popular music".

ot;making the most of things", building sandcastles, paddling in the sea, and doing what Brits do best – getting on with life, even in the face of a global pandemic. 

"Shifty weather"? Is that the polite version of the more obvious and appropriate "shitty weather"?

[Photos © Alex Micu]

hrough money."

The report noted that later textbooks had removed references to the Protocols, however, the mentality behind the antisemitic trope was still in evidence in 2019, in texts that claimed the Balfour Declaration was designed to benefit the Jews at the expense of other nations such as Russia and Germany. "Jew-hate remains a central element of Qatari education. Textbooks teach Jews control and manipulate world powers and markets, are treacherous and killers of prophets," Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se said. […]

"There is much to be concerned about in the Qatari curriculum. For years, leaders have allowed their children to be exposed to one of the most radical Jihadi curriculums in the world," Sheff said. "Qataris are proud of their education system, which is heavily influenced by western educators. But the hate renders it unfit for the modern world. The Qataris have pumped over $1 billion into elite US universities since 2011. They might want to put some of that money into deradicalizing their own curriculum."

Turkey's Erdogan, remember, is trying to set up a coalition with Qatar, Hamas, and the Government of National Accord in Tripoli, as a response to the recent Israel – UAE accord. The remnants of the Sunni Jew-haters, you might say, after the obvious threat from Iran has made the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE reconsider their attitudes towards the Jewish state.

e players could face from opponents who have gone through male puberty. We've seen the physical gulf between females and trans athletes in track cycling, where the 6ft tall and 14 stone Rachel McKinnon set world records in winning consecutive World Championship titles in 2018 and 2019. The woman who took the bronze in the 2018 race, American Jennifer Wagner, said subsequently the race was 'not fair'.

It wasn't, but at least Wagner's only bruise was to her ego. Rugby is a dangerous sport; in France in 2018 four players – all 23 or under – died as a result of violent collisions on the field of play.

Women's rugby is a wonderful sport and it must be allowed to continue to grow in a safe environment free from identity politics and from opponents who could do them some serious physical damage.

ng Un could probably see the potential for sanctions to undermine his economy, and in early 2018, he suddenly broke years of self-imposed isolation and held summits with the leaders of South Korea, China, and finally, the US. Of course, it was a ploy. But both the U.S. and South Korean presidents were too arrogant about their own powers of persuasion to recognize this, and so both of their policies have failed.

In May 2018, just before the Singapore summit, President Trump froze nearly all new sanctions enforcement by the US Treasury Department. Yet the new US sanctions laws still allowed prosecutors in New York and Washington to freeze and confiscate Pyongyang’s money as its front companies tried to launder it through our banks. So, with the Treasury Department sitting on its hands and the Justice Department being fairly aggressive, the result was something like “medium” (not maximum) pressure. In some ways, that’s the worst of everything—honest banks are scared enough of being penalized or prosecuted that they’re still avoiding North Korean business, while the dishonest ones that aren’t afraid to turn a blind eye to proliferation financing (mostly in China) continue to do so.

This is painful for Pyongyang, but not so painful that it can’t cope by passing most of that pain down to the poor—effectively, waging class warfare. The irony is that stronger sanctions might have forced Pyongyang to open its doors to aid, disarmament, and the necessary conditions for a lasting peace.

Sanctions will continue to fail to have the desired effect 100 percent of the time we don’t enforce them. And what is the desired effect? In my view, it’s either to force Kim Jong Un to recognize that Pyongyang’s financial vulnerability is a political vulnerability, and to negotiate toward disarmament and peace, or to bring those vulnerabilities to their logical conclusion, undermine the confidence of the elites, and cause the end of his rule from within. Trump could have done either. He blew it—all for a few cheap photo ops.  […]

I don’t think there can be any doubt that President Trump personally owns this failure. He personally halted sanctions enforcement. He literally declared his love for Kim Jong Un. By some accounts, he believes he’s a Svengali or (according to Jared Kushner) a father figure to Kim. Of course, he’s fooling himself. And yes, China, Russia, and increasingly, South Korea are doing their best to undermine sanctions—as they have, more often than not—but those countries don’t issue the world’s reserve currency or hold stewardship over the global financial system. Trump failed, he made the decisions that caused him to fail, and so he owns that.

Surfing's not all Californian blondes. From a new book, Afrosurf, by Selema Masekela and African surf brand Mami Wata, that celebrates surfing and related street culture in Africa.

The book aims to explore the unique surfing lives and experiences of Morocco, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique, Sao Tome, South Africa, Liberia, Somalia, Nigeria, Cote DíIvoire, Cabo Verde, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and more. As Selema Masekela puts it: "This is a book that I believe will redefine and expand how the world looks at surf culture."

I'm not sure what that last photo has to do with surfing. In Africa perhaps they've taken the sport to a whole new level…

rage over the rights and wrongs of the Swedish approach to Covid-19 – whether the refusal to lock down helped stave off economic disaster, or whether it led to thousands of needless deaths; whether it helped Swedes gain a degree of herd immunity to Covid-19, or whether the country remains as exposed to a second wave of the disease as any other nation. The analysis in Östergötland covers a small sample of people but provides some enlightenment on the nature of the deaths recorded by Sweden during the epidemic. It confirms what has been evident elsewhere: many of those recorded as dying of the virus already had short life expectancies due to underlying health conditions, and a small percentage of those deaths had nothing to do with Covid at all – the death would have occurred anyway from another illness, whether the deceased had contracted the virus or not.

As I said at the start of all this, back in March: this isn't exactly the return of the Black Death. Though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Meanwhile, despite it being abundantly clear that we're going to have to live with the coronavirus, vaccine or no, we hear from Devi Sridhar, the American public health professor currently Chair of Global Public health at Edinburgh, adviser to Nicola Sturgeon, and a leading figurehead of the “ZeroCovid” movement, that we should aim for the impossible: to eliminate the virus. How? More lockdown, more test and trace, more of the same….but stricter.

Opponents will say that the ZeroCovid goal ends up being fanatical, potentially consigning us to years of life-altering restrictions in pursuit of a goal we will never achieve, in response to a threat that doesn’t warrant it in the first place. Yesterday’s announcement by New Zealand that Covid-19 sufferers will be removed to a quarantine facility and Scotland’s drive to require masks in schools will only add to their concerns.

Well yes.

src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/mt_imported_image_1758339169.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Nippon-2″ />
Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park, by Shigeru Ban

Ebisu Park, by Masamichi Katayama/Wonderwall

Ebisu Park, by Masamichi Katayama/Wonderwall

Higashi Sanchome, by Nao Tamura

Ebisu East Park, by Fumihiko Mak
[Photos by Satoshi Nagare]