SwayBlog

Crime This article is more than 1 year oldGun crime rising in two-thirds of police force areas in England and WalesThis article is more than 1 year oldExclusive: analysis reveals firearms offences have increased in 29 out of 43 forces over past decade Two in three police force areas in England and Wales are experiencing rising gun crime, with one force facing levels six times higher than a decade ago, Guardian analysis of Home Office data has found.

British army This article is more than 1 year oldParatroopers banned from Nato deployment after Essex orgy – reportThis article is more than 1 year oldColchester barracks incident came after other cases and could be seen to denigrate women, says head of army Hundreds of paratroopers have reportedly been banned from an annual Nato deployment to the Balkans after videos emerged of an orgy at a military barracks. In a letter to generals and commanding officers, the new head of the army, Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, said he was not willing to “risk the mission or the reputation of the British army” by sending them overseas.

OpinionR&B This article is more than 9 months oldSome white artists, like Elvis, exploit Black culture. So celebrate Bobby Caldwell, who enriched itThis article is more than 9 months oldNels AbbeyThe debate about cultural appropriation is fractious and gets muddled. But then I think about a man who makes it all clear A Black person growing up in the west will experience moments of shock. There is the first time you knowingly experience racism, and here, for me, was another: the first time I realised that the man who sang the soul classic What You Won’t Do for Love was white.

Taylor Swift This article is more than 4 years oldTaylor Swift discloses fight with eating disorder in new documentaryThis article is more than 4 years old‘There’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting,’ she tells Miss Americana director Lana Wilson Taylor Swift has disclosed her experiences with an eating disorder in a new documentary. In Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, which received its premiere at the Sundance film festival last night, Swift says that she would starve herself to the extent that she felt as if she might pass out during live performances.

The ObserverCrimeLast October, detectives were called to investigate the death of a woman under a London tube train. But as they traced her final moments, they discovered that she was, in fact, David Burgess, one of the most brilliant immigration lawyers of his generation. Here, Burgess's family and friends tell, for the first time, the complicated story of the loving father, brilliant colleague, sensitive woman and courageous person they knewOn an autumn evening last October, a slight, pretty woman with a mass of curly hair fell underneath a tube train during rush hour at King's Cross underground station.

FictionReviewA debut novel which raises timely questions about how we regard the suffering of othersThe opening sequence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, in which a six-year-old child with a shrapnel-shredded arm is brought to an open-air operating theatre, feels horribly timely. The young man carrying the listless little boy finds a strange solace in discerning the child’s prospects: “Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh … According to the boy’s sister [that] injury came from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also.

Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, who are the subject of the new documentary Three Identical Strangers. Photograph: Neon FilmsAn extraordinary new documentary about identical triplets who were separated at birth has reignited the debate over the dominance of DNA in controlling our behaviour and the way we live our lives by Robin McKieRobert Shafran’s first inkling that his life would soon be turned on its head occurred on his first day at college in upstate New York in 1980.

Nicholas Lezard's choiceMusic booksReviewLike the music he is celebrating, Cope's informative tome is loud and irreverent with an underlying intelligenceI like to fancy I know a little bit about the more obscure corners of the rock world. Did I not, after all, spend 20 years listening to John Peel? Did I not sneer at and spurn the mainstream? I am now chastened. I know nothing. Or at least, nothing compared to Julian Cope, erstwhile frontman of the Teardrop Explodes, now writer, unofficial warden of the ancient sites of Britain, and, by his own admission, spaced-out freak.

MoviesReviewRereleased for its 30th anniversary, this is a seemingly aimless but actually brilliantly controlled movie about Texan kids in 1976 Richard Linklater’s graduating class for his breakout 1993 hit – now rereleased for its 30th anniversary – featured baby-faced high-schoolers Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, Rory Cochrane, Cole Hauser and Adam Goldberg. Then there is Matthew McConaughey, who does not look all that much different from the way he does now, playing the older guy with a dodgy pudding bowl hairstyle and a pack of cigarettes stuffed into one of his T-shirt sleeves, creepily hanging out with kids from the school he is supposed to have left some years ago.