The Critical Commentator

  MPs have accepted almost £300,000 of tickets to sports matches, concerts, red carpet film awards and theatre trips in the last year, prompting questions about how such freebies could influence their decision making. Included in the gifts handed to politicians were Glastonbury tickets from Google, FA Cup final hospitality from the Football Association (FA), and a gift hamper from a Middle Eastern dictatorship. Politicians attended concerts by artists including Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender. There is no limit, beyond public criticism, of the value of gifts that MPs can claim from individuals and companies from the UK as long as they are declared on the members register of interests. Charing Cross Bridge Claude Monet (1840-1926) Photo Credit: Museum Wales [Public Domain]  Some gifts on the register, such as attendance at industry dinners or tickets to local festivals, could be reasonably argued to be part of MPs' community work. Others are harder to justify, such as the £...

  Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner prize for her colourful drawings and sculptures made from fabric and VHS tape . Here's an art critic describing her work. Nnena Kalu's forms come at you with their almost alien presence. ( What?) They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. ( Really?) The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snagging details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body's beginnings and its endings. ( I am beginning to wonder but not about boundaries, beginnings and endings, yet.) The closer you get to Kalu's endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. ( Am I on an operating table?)  Their containment is precarious.(  I think I must be and  things don't look too good.) So full of life and energy, you think they might burst. ( Sweet Lord, I haven't mad...

  The White House spokeperson Karoline Leavitt today furiously attacked the failing news media for editing together two clips of Donald Trump in order to try and make him look like a misogynist bully. The clip, which appeared on live television, shows the President of the United States snapping at a female reporter "Quiet, Piggy!" Gloucester Old Spot Pig Page (active  19th C) Photo Credit  Museum of English Rural Life [CC BY-NC-SA] Said Miss Leavitt, "This was two separate sections of the President's reply spliced together into a disgraceful and defamatory soundbite. He firstly said, 'Quiet please, everyone, I'm trying to listen to this excellent female reporter's very good question about the Epstein files'. He later made a key policy statement in which he said, 'Fozzy Bear is okay, Kermit not a nice frog, but the only Muppet character I have any time for is Miss Piggy'." Miss Leavitt continued, "Quiet Piggy is the worst piece of mal...

  Social media platforms such as TikTok are hosting AI-generated deepfake videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation. The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions of doctors and influencers directing viewers to a US-based supplements firm. The Charlatan Franz van Mieris the elder (1635-1681) Photo Credit:  City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]  All the deepfakes involve real footage of a healthcare expert taken from the internet. However, the pictures have been reworked using AI so that the speakers are encouraging women going through menopause to buy products such as probiotics and Himalayan shilajit... "This is certainly a sinister and worrying new tactic," said Leo Benedictus, the Full Fact factchecker who undertook its investigation, which it published yesterday. Prof David Taylor-Robinson, an expert in health inequalities at Liverpool Un...

  Prof Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub is a retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery who established the heart transplantation centre at Harefield hospital. He performed the first combined heart and lung transplant in the UK, and set up the Chain of Hope charity, which helps to provide heart operations for children. He was born in Egypt in 1935 but moved to the UK in 1961. Portrait of a Doctor Francis Picabia (1879-1953) Photo Credit:: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] "I'm totally committed to the NHS because I practised in other countries, including the US, and I am totally convinced that it is the best system. Why? Because it maintains the sacred relationship between the patient and the doctor. Obviously there are problems, and issues with funding, but  it remains the best system in the world. Ask a British person if they want to have the very best treatment  for themselves and their family, they will say yes. And then you ask them if they want to have the same for their neighbour, it's st...

 L ike triple-distilled whiskey, Irish pubs appear to have timeless appeal. They are staple settings in films, books and plays, draw tourists to Ireland, replicate themselves around the world and induce social media quests for the perfect snug and the perfect pint... Irish pubs are in trouble. They are vanishing from rural Ireland and many are struggling to survive in the capital... Since 2005, Ireland has lost a quarter of its pubs, more than 2,100, averaging 112 closures a year. Reasons cited include high taxes on alcohol, drink-driving laws, rising property prices and a fall in alcohol consumption... Boors Carousing Dutch School Photo Credit York Art Gallery [Public Domain]  Just over half of the population live within 300 metres of Ireland's 7,000 pubs and Share [Perry Share, a co-editor of The Irish Pub] said, pubs remained central to expressions of Irish culture. "Even if declining, the pub is still part of the fabric of everyday life," he added. "If it does di...