Circus supporters worry that the Animal Welfare Bill going through Parliament may end acts featuring elephants. It’s hard to know what the animals think, of course. But we certainly can’t ask two, probably incoherent, pachyderms owned by the Moscow State Circus. They’re each getting three litres of vodka a day to keep warm during the circus’s run in Outer Mongolia.
Cinema audiences in Germany are flocking to a three-hour documentary on a silent order of Carthusian monks. Jay Weissberg, a critic for Hollywood’s trade paper, Variety, writes that Into Great Silence passed faster for him than King Kong, despite just two minutes of dialogue. It’s a huge hit for the film’s maker, Philip Gröning, who spent 17 years negotiating permission to record the isolated community, promising even not to add music to his record of their life in the French Alps. “These,” he says, “are some of the most cheerful, happy and healthy people I’ve ever seen.”
Liz Cameron, the civic leader of Glasgow, is under pressure to explain how she, as Lord Provost, and an entourage clocked up a £60,000 travel bill on seven overseas trips in nine months. They included £12,000 to see how aid money was being spent in Sri Lanka. Here’s a mad idea: ask an aid agency to report, and send a donation instead.
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Emma Thompson says that they’re “great big, gold shiny things” and she cannot imagine them anywhere except in the loo of her home in Scotland. No, she’s not recruited chavs to help with the housework. It’s those Oscars. She has two. The 46-year-old star of Nanny McPhee says that they look “too outré” (grossly unconventional, apparently) anywhere else and are “tarnishing quietly”.
Sources: Newsweek, Daily Record, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, Newsday, AP, Time