Growing up with addicts: Controversial images chart one little Russian girl’s heartbreaking life The Times Daily Newspaper
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
The Times Daily Newspaper
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
· Photographic project from 2008 shows Russian family and their chaotic, drug fueled, lifestyle · Caused outrage in Russia when pictures were put online · Viewers were outraged at the neglect of two-year-old Asfina
Tory row over cheese
Sleeping it off: Anfisa plays with cigarettes while her mother lies to the images left These are the images that surgaced online causing outrage in Russia and the world.
she wanted at a nightclub, she spotted a woman urinating in the street at 2am as she pushed her child along in a stroller. The woman was Lilya and Popova asked if she could take photograph. She ended up asking Popova is she wanted to come back to her apartment to take more pictures. There Popova discovered a single room apartment that had a communal kitchen and bathroom. She moved in for two weeks and began taking pictures. Popova witnessed the drugs and the booze and among all this, Anfisa crawling around, apparently left to her own devices. Danger: Anfisa comes perilously close to the window ledge in her parents St. Petersburg apartment - what is not totally clear is a safety net that is under the ledge.
A photographer whose stark portrayal of a little girl’s life surrounded by her poverty-stricken parents life of drug and alcohol abuse has defended her decision not to report them to authorities. Irina Popova’s photo-essay entitled ‘Another Family’ sparked national outrage when its portrayal of two St. Petersburg’s addicts seemingly oblivious to their two-yearold girl, Anfisa, was shared widely online. Parents Lilya and Pasha were captured living a raucous life of drug-fueled partying - while their daughter was allowed to wander to the ledge of an open window, play with their cigarettes and come face-to-face with her strung-out father’s genitals while he slept-off his latest binge. When the photographs were exhibited in St.
Petersburg they were nominated for awards, but when the images made it online they almost sparked an official police investigation and a campaign was started to get Anfisa away from Lilya and Pasha and put into an orphanage. Anger was mostly directed towards Popova, who was 21 when she took the photographs in 2008, for not intervening. She was labeled an opportunist for taking advantage of the drug-addicts and for not alerting anyone in a position of authority. ‘I couldn’t imagine the reactions at all,’ Popova said about the backlash against her. ‘Maybe it’s weird, but my intention was to talk about the possibilities of love on the margins of society, and I hoped to bring more understanding, to build a bridge between people and to raise awareness that
bringing up a child is not an easy task.’ Popova claimed that the negative reaction was startling to her, because she claims that what is portrayed in the photographs was not the whole truth of Anfisa’s life. She claims that the startling images are just that and do not represent the ability of Pasha and Lilya to raise their daughter. ‘The truth is that life is complex and there are many situations too complicated to be judged,’ she said. ‘I thought it was important to make people think more about the level of truth which they usually don’t want to think about.’ The project began when Popova traveled to St. Petersburg with the intention of creating a photographic essay about ‘feelings’. After a failed attempt to capture what
Lilya and Pasha even came to the unveiling of the pictures at the St.Petersburg gallery before they caused such a commotion online. Without access to the Internet, Popova felt she owed it to them to explain - especially after the police began asking her for their address. Pasha became angry at Popova because of the brush with the law and now refuses to speak to he. Lilya was relaxed - but six months after the controversy in 2012 she disappeared - leaving Anfisa with her father. She sought treatment for her addictions and is no longer with Pasha and works in a St. Petersburg clothe shop. Pasha now works part-time as an electrician while he looks after his daughter with his new partner and her son. Anfisa is attending school and is still called ‘princess’ by her father. Article by James Nye, Mail Online.
Article by Peter Dominiczak
Conservative ministers have clashed over Government policy on cheese following plans to step up a campaign designed to make people cut down the amount of saturated fats in their diet. Environment ministers attacked their Tory colleagues in the Department of Health over a campaign urging people to stop eating as much full-fat cheese and milk. Senior Tories warned that the poster campaign would have alienated farmers still reeling from the floods as well as cheese producers in key marginal constituencies. It comes amid a growing debate over whether saturated fats are actually harmful. Earlier this month researchers at Cambridge University announced that giving up fatty meat, cream or butter is unlikely to improve health. They are calling for guidelines to be changed to reflect a growing body of evidence suggesting there is no overall association between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. It is understood that senior figures at the Department for Food and Rural Affairs complained to Jane Ellison, the public health minister, over plans to intensify the “Change4Life” campaign. Change4Life calls on people to
switch to skimmed milk and instead buy reduced-fat cheese. A source said: “You could have had posters going up in farming areas that were badly flooded telling people to cut down on the amount of cheese they buy. It was unbelievably stupid.” The Government last night denied saying that cheese is “bad” and said it is supportive of the UK’s £10billion dairy industry. A Government spokesman said: “The Change4Life Smart Swaps campaign… does not suggest that dairy is bad for you. The smart swaps campaign includes five recommended smart swaps, one of which was switching to low fat cheese. “We are clear that milk and cheese can be enjoyed as part of a healthy and balanced diet which also supports the UK’s £10 billion dairy industry employing more than 5,000 people.”
“We are clear that that milk and cheese can be enjoyed as part of a healthy diet”
Flight MH370 The Times Daily Newspaper
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
The Times Daily Newspaper
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
Fears of a cover-up amid claims pictures show passengers with the same set of legs · Both men pictured boarded missing Flight 370 with stolen passports · Fears pictures were doctored as both of the men have the same legs · Trousers, shoes, and shadows all identical, but upper bodies are different · Chinese aircraft spots ‘suspicious objects’ in Indian Ocean
Spot the similarity: The legs of these two men, named as 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad (left), and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29, (right), appear identical, leading to suspicions of tampering
Families of missing have become frustrated with a lack of information about the jet, and the claims of pictures being tampered with are likely to increase tensions.
Fears of a cover-up over the fate of flight MH370 grew yesterday after claims that a photo of two passengers was tampered with. Images of two men who boarded the Malaysian Airlines jet with stolen passports appear to show them having the same set of legs. CCTV footage stills released by officials three days after the Boeing 777-200 vanished from the skies shows the pair with identical green trousers and brown shoes. Their feet and shadows are also in the same position, while their faces, T-shirts and bags are different. The photo last night fuelled conspiracy theories over the fate of the aircraft,
which disappeared with 239 passengers and crew more than a fortnight ago. One Twitter user wrote: ‘They both have the same legs, edited or coincidence? And you guys believe our gov is not hiding anything.’ Malaysian police admitted the image of one man had been placed on top of the other when they were photocopied. But a spokesman said it was not ‘done with malice or to mislead’. The men – thought to be Iranian asylumseekers – have been named as Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19, and 29year-old Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza. They travelled to Malaysia on Irani-
an passports before switching to stolen Austrian and Italian documents. It comes as a Chinese military aircraft today spotted ‘suspicious objects’ in the search zone, reporting what appeared to ‘white, square’ material floating on the surface of the Indian Ocean. The plane was guided by a satellite image released Saturday by China and reportedly sighted ‘floating white objects’ in the zone some 2,500 kilometres off the coast of Perth. Last night France became the latest country to say it has spotted debris that could be part of the missing jet - but it was revealed that sighting was 530 miles
(850km) from the primary search zone. The objects were discovered on satellite images of the southern Indian Ocean, a direction the Boeing 777 may have taken after making a U-turn on its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It’s the third time sightings of possible wreckage have been announced and Malaysia has received the latest news with caution. The French satellite image was earlier thought to have been much closer to areas of the Indian Ocean where Australia and China provided satellite photographs of objects that could be debris from MH370. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss described the search operation as ‘clutching’ at information, as flight and sea crews embarked on their fifth day of sweeps. Images ‘mistakenly’ released by China last week were later withdrawn. And search planes have so far failed to locate two objects that Australia said it had identified in the Indian Ocean. A US air-to-air refuelling tanker has been ordered to boost potential search times of aircraft in the Southern Indian Ocean, and Chinese airplanes will be flying out of Perth airport to maximise search capacity. Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told
the MailOnline a US military KC-10 extender tanker - an aerial refuelling aircraft - would be joining the search fleet, in particular to assist the US Navy P8 Poseidon aircraft, which is out on mission today. ‘The United States is going to send a KC-10 tanker, which means the Poseidon will be able to stay out there virtually forever, instead of these two hour limits for actual search time,’ he said. The two Russian made Ilyuchin IL-76 aircraft deployed by the Chinese government flew from Pearce airbase to Perth airport and off to the target area early Monday. Mr Thomas said the Ilyuchins, which were used by Australian forces in Afghanistan to deliver supplies and ordnance, needed the longer Perth international runway for take-off once they were fully loaded with fuel for maximum flight capacity. ‘The IL-76s will use Perth airport as their takeoff point for the length of this search,’ he said. The Ilyuchin planes are also designed as airborne refueling craft, and have been used by China as emergency response planes, evacuating Chinese citizens out of Libya in 2011. Meanwhile a team of Malaysian government officials faced anger during a sixhour briefing session with relatives of
the 153 Chinese passengers on the jet. Earlier today, France provided Malaysia with satellite images of objects adrift in the Indian ocean that it believes could be from the wreckage of the plane, which has been missing for more than two weeks. It is the latest of such images that officials are hoping will help solve one of the world’s great aviation mysteries. Meanwhile, it was claimed that police have seized the personal financial records of all 12 crew members of the flight MH370 - including bank statements, mortgage documents and credit card bills. And an image of solid matter floating in the southern Indian Ocean was released, as seen from a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 Orion aircraft searching for the flight. Families of the victims, who have been attending meetings on the search’s progress, have become increasingly frustrated over the lack of information. Air and sea searches since Thursday have an image of solid matter floating in the southern Indian Ocean was released, as seen from a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 Orion aircraft searching for the flight.
The Times Daily Newspaper
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
The Times Daily Newspaper
Families of the victims, who have been attending meetings on the search’s progress, have become increasingly frustrated over the lack of information. Air and sea searches since Thursday have not produced any results. There have been no sightings of any wreckage since Flight 370 dropped off air traffic control screens on March 8 over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board. Planes and a ship are still looking for a pallet and other debris to determine whether the objects were from the missing jet. The pallet was spotted by a search plane Saturday, but has not been closely examined. Wooden pallets are commonly used in shipping, but can also be used in cargo containers carried on planes. Mike Barton, chief of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s rescue coordination centre, told reporters in Canberra that the wooden pallet was spotted by a search aircraft yesterday. He added that it was surrounded by several other objects, including what appeared to be strapping belts of different colours. A New Zealand P3 Orion military plane was then sent to find it but failed, he said. Written by Dylan Jones-Smith
Day five of the search reveals numerous planned search areas for doomed flight MH370 in the southern search corridor off the coast of Perth. French authorities reported a satellite sighting of objects in the Indian Ocean
Co-op Bank seeks £400m as losses mount The Co-op Bank has revealed it will report a loss of as much as £1.3bn as the troubled lender said it would need to raise a further £400m from investors to ensure it does not breach its minimum capital requirement. The bank had raised £1.1bn from its bondholders and its mutual parent last year, but said it had discovered further misconduct claims and would need more money on top of that already handed pumped in to rescue it from collapse. Niall Booker, chief executive of the Co-op Bank, said the lender’s new management team was “unearthing a range of issues”, meaning it would need to set aside more money to pay compensation claims related to PPI, interest rate swap mis-selling, mortgages, as well as “technical breaches” of the Consumer Credit Act. “The result of providing for these items together with the cost of separation from the Co-operative Group is that the starting capital position of the bank for the four to five year recovery period is weaker than in the plan announced last year,” said Mr Booker. The Co-op Bank had said its capital raising would take its core Tier 1 capital ratio, the main measure of a lender’s financial strength, to just below 9pc, but the new provisions and losses mean it is expected to have ended 2013 at 7.2pc, close to the regulatory minimum of 7pc. Article by John Smith
Obama has backed himself into a corner over Ukraine Article by Claire Johnson
Russia is massing troops along the Ukrainian border in sufficient numbers to roll up not just eastern Ukraine, but also Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria, according to Nato’s supreme commander in Europe. Countering that build up of military muscle is the threat – led by Barack Obama and the US – of sector-wide sanctions on the Russian economy. According to administration officials, financial services, energy, metals and mining, defence and engineering are all in the crosshairs. Once again, Mr Obama is drawing red lines, promising yesterday that “if Russia escalates” – ie invades eastern Ukraine – then the US and the EU will impose “a greater cost”. We tend to dismiss sanctions as the soft option – obviously softer than a military confrontation which Nato and common sense has already ruled out – but we should be under no illusions as to what a full-on sanctioning of the Russia economy might mean. Russia is not Iran or Libya. It’s a two trillion dollar economy that supplies a third of Europe’s energy and exports 7 million barrels of oil per day. To put that in perspective, the “spare” global oil capacity is 2 million barrels per day.
So while there is talk of “Iran-style” sanctions, Russia’s energy footprint already precludes walling off the Russian economy from the rest of the world, since to do so would plunge us into a global recession over night. So, is Obama just bluffing again? Well, after his threats on Syria proved empty and led to accusations of weakness and incompetence that still sting in the White House, that seems unlikely. If Putin calls Mr Obama’s bluff there will be little choice but to impose sanctions on sectors such as financial services, defence and Mr Putin’s state-owned behemoths. Likely targets, say the experts, include the state arms exporter RosoboronExport, the aviation giant United Aircraft Corporation or the VSMPO, the world’s largest titanium manufacturer. But that will not be without significant consequences. For example, VSMPO provides about a third of the titanium used in Boeing aircraft according to one industry estimate and RosobornExport currently cooperates with French, Italian and Spanish manufacturers. One estimate from the Financial Times has sanctions costing some 300,000 German manufacturing jobs in the inevitably tit-for-tat
24th March 2014
Published in London, UK
exchanges, while Bloomberg tallies up deals between Russian companies and the West, including Britain, worth $180bn over the last two years. Similarly with banks. Hitting Bank Rossiya with $10bn in assets is but a pinprick – albeit an annoying one for the oligarchs – but begin to size up Russia’s bigger institutions like Sberbank and VTB and you are into the soft tissue of global financial architecture, even as you raise the costs of doing business in Russia by tighten the lending spigots. According to figures from Russia’s Central Bank, Russian oligarchs and big business have borrowed heavily from the West, perhaps as much as $160bn in new borrowings over the last two years. If Russia now defaults on those loans, as it might, inflicting haircuts on banks and big investors, that pain will flow downwards in ways difficult to predict. European banks have nearly $185 billion in exposure to Russia. France is the leading lender, with $50 billion, and Britain with $20 billion, according to figures from the Bank for International Settlements published by Reuters. What will mutual funds with exposure to sanctioned Russian sectors tell their clients? Will holdings, estimated at $75 billion in the US alone, be frozen and marked down on portfolios as zero-value, or will everyone be given 30 days to “get out” – sparking a disinvestment campaign? These are not insignificant details that officials are now scrambling to work out. Russia is also certain to retaliate, according to Cliff Kupchan head of the Russia desk at the Eurasia Group global risk consultancy who has met Mr Putin on no fewer than nine occasions. “It will be big,” he tells me, when asked to quantify the potential blowback from Russian sectoral sanctions. “The Russians will quickly retaliate and pivot away from Europe to Asia for their transportation, heavy equipment and high tech, which is a significant part of Russia-EU trade.” At the same time, large companies with operations in Russia would see business seriously disrupted if Moscow took retaliatory measures. Everyone has a different stake. Britain has to protect its financial services, the French have vulnerable defence contracts and Germans exports in tradable goods like vehicles and chemical products will suffer. None of the above even take into account the long-term consequences of using the US Treasury, steward of the world’s reserve currency and guardian of global financial stability, as an engine of econom-
ic war – as the White House seems to be proposing at the moment. Mr Obama is leading the charge in an attempt to force Mr Putin back from the borders of Ukraine, but as we know, that is an incredibly high-risk strategy against a nationalist gut player like the Russian president who does not always make decisions on the basis of a rational cost-benefit analysis. Like many analysts Mr Kupchan still thinks, on balance, it is unlikely that Mr Putin will be so rash – but only on balance. He estimates the chances of Mr Putin taking further provocative steps at “30 or 40 per cent”, which is hardly comforting. “This is an improbable but very possible bad dream that we’re having”, is his ominous observation. If Mr Putin does feel goaded into action, Mr Obama has put himself in the unenviable position of having to make that nightmare come true – at a time when the US economic recovering is still not being felt on down main street – or taking relatively token measures and further weakening his own credibility. Unhappy choices indeed.
Vladimir Putin (left) and Barack Obama (right) pictured during the tough talks between Ukraine.
£8m: The total raised so far by #nomakeupselfies
Cancer Research UK hails #nomakeupselfie campaign for raising over £8m in just six days, funding crucial trials that otherwise would not have been possible
The #nomakeupselfie campaign, which began last Tuesday with people posting images of themselves without make-up online and donating to charity, has now raised over £8m for cancer research in Britain. Cancer Research UK said the money raised will fund nine clinical trials and one ‘tissue sample’ – a process that can be used for cancer diagnosis and analysis – that it simply could not have begun this time last week. Dr Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: “We’ve been overwhelmed by the support people have been showing us through the #nomakeupselfie trend. “We don’t receive any government funding for our research and so it’s phenomenal to think that the generosity of the public is enabling us to fund critical research that we didn’t have the money for six days ago. Being able to fund more trials will bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.
“It’s been an exciting week, and we’d just like to thank everyone again for their support. If people would like to support our work to beat cancer sooner, they can visit www.cruk.org.” The trials will look at new treatments for sarcoma, acute myeloid leukaemia, abdominal neuroblastoma, liver, head and neck, breast, prostate, bladder and oesophageal cancers, Cancer Research said. The latest fundraising total comes after it emerged that up to £20,000 has been donated in error, as part of the campaign, to Unicef, as people have mistakenly tweeted the wrong details while offering their cash. People texting ‘donate’ rather than ‘beat’ to 70099 have accidentally sent money to Unicef, who owns the particular combination of ‘donate’ and the given number. Unicef is working with Cancer Research to transfer the funds to them. Written by Jayne Jones