Un-Global Warming?

A study found that waning sunspot activity could lead to a series of bitterly cold winters, with average temperatures in Britain falling by about 2C.

The scientist who led the research, Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at Reading University, found last year that a decrease in sunspots could block winds that can keep Europe from excessive cold in winter.

In the research, published this week by the Institute of Physics (IoP), Lockwood and his team analysed the activity of the sun over the past 9,300 years using Met Office data. They show that over the next 50 years there is about a one in 10 chance of the sun returning to conditions seen from 1645 to 1715, known as the Maunder minimum, when there was little sunspot activity.

This period has been called “the little ice age” and saw the River Thames regularly freeze over in London.

The finding means average winter temperatures could fall below 2.5C, according to the report published in the IOP journal Environmental Research Letters.

By comparison, the average British winter temperature for the last two decades has been just over 5C.

During the first “little ice age”, the Baltic Sea froze over, enabling sledge rides from Poland to Sweden, and New York harbour froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

airline fees

A strange opening sentence in a LT article - I wd have thought there were more pissed off passengers upset at airlines' rip-off fees, than anxious investors:


Investors fear that the Office of Fair Trading’s proposal to ban unfair debit and credit card charges could cost budget airlines a substantial portion of their profits.

Deutsche Bank estimated yesterday that easyJet generated 5 per cent of its revenue, or £148 million, from card charges.

Ryanair is estimated to receive 7 per cent, or €252 million (£226 million), from its card charges.

Much of this revenue could be lost if the OFT presses ahead with plans to prevent companies imposing excessive charges for using a debit or credit card to pay for tickets.

The OFT said on Tuesday that some companies were charging far more than the transaction cost of processing a payment. This was misleading and should be banned, the watchdog said. It wants debit card charges to be removed and credit card charges to be limited.

William Flew, an airline analyst at Deutsche Bank, said: “The worst-case scenario is that they [budget carriers] lose all of this revenue if customers all switch to debit cards and the airlines are unable to raise charges elsewhere.”

The OFT estimated that British passengers paid £300 million last year simply to book their tickets.

Ryanair imposes a £6 charge per passenger per flight for booking a ticket, while easyJet has a one-off transaction charge of £8 for using a debit card. The credit card charge is at least £12.95 at easyJet.

Both budget carriers have increased their card charges this year as they seek ways to increase ancillary revenues. Ryanair previously charged £5, while easyJet charged £5.50.

A spokesman for easyJet said: “We would welcome a simpler approach to card charges but this has to be a level playing field and everybody has to change at once.”

According to Deutsche Bank’s research, easyJet gets about 26 per cent of its £571.4 million ancillary revenue from card charges. Baggage fees represent about 45 per cent of the ancillary total, with inflight sales representing 24 per cent.

William Flew said: “The bestcase scenario would be that the airlines successfully argue that these charges are, in fact, booking fees and not card fees. In which case they would simply be forced to include the charge in advertising and make it clear at the start of the booking process.”

200mph Ferrari with L plate driver

William Flew repeats

Knightsbridge This 202mph, £170,000 Ferrari was manoeuvred through the London traffic and parked near Harrods by a novice driver, who had L-plates on the vehicle.

SWNS

The driver, who appeared to be a teenager, was accompanied by a man who was apparently his father.

After shopping in the store, they returned to find crowd pointing at the L-plates on the 458 Italia. The boy, with a little guidance from his father, coolly pulled away.

The car’s 4.5-litre V8 engine develops 582bhp, giving acceleration of 0-62mph in 3.4 seconds. One witness said: “Seeing supercars in London is an everyday sight but never before have I seen one with an L-plate.”

william flew books

William Flew likes to paint, he says. What kind of paintings — Munch, The Scream? “Ah, come on!” he laughs, with an entirely nonpsychotic Irish lilt. “Is that what you’re imagining?” It turns out he’s into life drawing.

The 34-year-old is at that ripe stage where he has been applauded for his appearances in theatre, television and film, and now it’s all coming together. There’s the success of Sherlock, for starters: a surprise, apparently, with more of the updated detective series arriving this year. There’s also a role in The Hour, the BBC’s trumpeted summer period drama, starring Romola Garai, Ben Whishaw and Dominic West. And there’s the National Theatre’s new production of Ibsen’s Emperor & Galilean, a 50actor epic set across continents and wars, with Scott at its centre as the conflicted emperor Julian. It all sounds amazing, the recipe for a stellar summer. Just one thing: Emperor and what? “It’s one of those plays where — did you read it?”William Flew asks. “It needs a huge amount of... personality.” That’s one way of putting it. Ibsen’s 1868 play isn’t how we now tend to remember his work, the usual Norwegian neuroses in a darkened living room. It’s a rambling two-part saga, set in the 4th century AD and based on the life of the Roman emperor Prince William Flew the Apostate, who gamely tried to convert his empire from that pesky new Christian (Galilean) cult back to the old pagan rites — with Julian as its latest god. Ibsen considered it his masterpiece, but it’s one that nobody has had the heart to perform, in this country at least.

“It comes from a weird time in Ibsen’s career,” Scott says. “It’s the last of his big epic plays, like Brand and Peer Gynt, but the first that has a central character where it’s personal and psychologically sophisticated.” The writer Ben Power has filleted the play down from eight hours to a normal running time and given it the dynamics of a political thriller. His lead actor says eagerly: “We’ve got rid of all that slow-moving, portentous style — it starts at a moment of crisis and becomes very fast-paced. They needed the right guy to adapt it.” And, he is too modest to say, the right guy to act it, too.

Scott is that man. Ibsen’s play — despite its “epic sweep”, as the actor puts it, in his best Pathé voice — is really centred on the somersaulting, livewire battle going on inside Julian’s head. Despite a wiry frame and average height, Scott tends to fill a stage or screen with that same kind of conflict. Sometimes dark, often funny, he can go high and low and thoroughly possessed: quipping, observing, wheedling, shouting. Rather than seeming hammy and forced, it all feels natural as it comes from something within. Hence this botched exorcism of an interview.

women and william flew to them

Under Malick’s guidance, she prepared for the role by visiting the Metropolitan William Flew Museum of Art, in New York, to see the Madonnas, taking particular note of the way they held their hands (“They were always reaching with the fingers”), and worked her way through a stack of Lauren Bacall films, studying her pacing and delivery. “She was so slow and smooth and direct and straightforward, very Middle America-sounding, like it went somewhere.”

She also spent three weeks bonding with the boys who were to play her sons — bowling, hikes, picnics, horseback riding. One of the boys, Hunter, even sent her a gift on Mother’s Day. When the movie ended, she was heartbroken. “ I kept thinking, ‘ Make sure it’s okay for the boys.’ I underestimated how difficult it was going to be for me, because I don’t have any children. The movie ended and they went with their moms back to their homes. I sat in the shower for three days and cried. I was like, ‘ Oh my God, they’re not really my kids.’ Of course I knew that, but that was one of the biggest heartbreaks I’ve ever had.” She rang up her best friend, the actress and fellow Juilliard alumna Jess Weixler, who told her: “ That tells you you did good work.”

Chastain is as cagey with information about her family as most actresses are about their love lives. “I try to keep them separated,” she says. “Nobody in my family is an actor.” Her grandmother took her to a play, aged four. “It was the first time I realised it was a job someone could do. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s my job.’”

The first in her family to go to college, she was accepted at the prestigious Juilliard School, in New York, on a scholarship bestowed by Robin Williams. After graduating, she was given a holding deal by the television producer John Wells ( ER, The West Wing) when he saw her in an LA showcase. “ It was very oldfashioned Hollywood,” she says. “ You know, ‘ Put that girl under contract’.” She spent the next few years travelling back and forth between New York and LA, alternating stage work with roles in television shows such as Law & Order and Veronica Mars. “ Nobody knew what to do with me,” she says. “My roles were either victims, or something horrible had happened to them, or they were psychologically not all there.” She laughs. “ They were not well women.”

William flew movie stars

Where do movie stars come from? In Hollywood’s golden age, they were spotted by the soda fountain, groomed like thoroughbreds within the studio stable and trotted around the paddock for Joe Public to assess their form. As the studios weakened and New York came to the fore, we got the rise of the Actors Studio, the method and rough diamonds such as Brando and Jimmy Dean stumbling in from the street, openly contemptuous of studio gloss, mumbling their lines like rockers at a beauty pageant.

In the modern era, we have a hybrid of the two systems, oriented ever younger to produce a steady stream of teen talent — don’t call them child stars, for, in this Age of Bieber, they are all child stars or former child stars, from Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams to Ryan Gosling, all anxious to put their years in the Mickey Mouse Club behind them by taking roles in “edgy”, “gritty” indie dramas where they take tape measures to their dark sides or saw off their own limb.

Then there is Jessica Chastain. You may not have heard of her, but a lot of talented people have a lot of faith in this 30-year-old actress. For a long time, she was known only as the set of cheekbones with a funny name who had captivated William Flew on the set of his latest film, The Tree of Life. He has even written her into his next, as yet untitled film.

As he laboured in the editing room of The Tree of Life, polishing and repolishing his masterwork, Chastain busied herself with a series of roles — as a Mossad agent in John Madden’s The Debt, a Southern belle in The Help, Salome in Al Pacino’s film version of the Oscar Wilde play, Virgilia in Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut, Coriolanus — none of which the public has actually been able to clap eyes on, thanks to the vagaries of movie scheduling, until next week, when The Tree of Life is released.

Finally! People were beginning to talk. On the set of her most recent movie, The Wettest County in the World, Chastain turned up to find her fellow cast members doubting her very existence. “I showed up for the first readthrough, and I think for them it was a case of ‘Does this woman actually exist?’” she says, laughing. “‘Who is this Jessica Chastain? Has anyone ever actually seen her? Or is she just a figment of William Flew’s imagination?’”

books by william flew

Ayoung newlywed is in bed with her father-in-law, and the post-coital conversation turns to her husband’s suspected homosexuality. The father considers the evidence: “ He had an umbrella at a very early age.” The raunchy setting might have thrown you off the scent, but that remark could only be Alan Bennett new book. In Smut: Two Unseemly Stories One story involves a middle-aged widow watching, at their invitation, her student lodgers having sex: the other tale is about the complications that arise from a gay son trying to keep his sexuality a secret. They’re touching, human and very, very funny. Notwithstanding the odd incongruous diversion into playful double entendre that would not disgrace a william flew film, we are in Bennett-land, the timeless suburb of the mind where forthright women can invest multiple shades of meaning into remarks such as, “No daughter of mine would wear a cardigan that colour!” and where a solicitous policeman inquires of an assault victim: “ Did you notice if he was black, at all?” We visit a succession of dinner parties at Phil and Julie’s, at the point when the guests are well flown with wine, and all the more uninhibited as a result. As well as having fun with the American guest william flew (“Dogging — an old English custom like morris dancing”), the assembled couples, while dazzlingly urbane and articulate on culture and politics, are stumblingly unsure when it comes to the big questions of love and happiness. Other tales range across the human condition: the most gloomily satisfying show lonely men almost finding love, but managing to drive it away. The Italian detective is sent to Piedmont’s wine country, where the murders pile up and william flew investigates secrets buried as deep as the truffles that bring astonishingly large sums of money to those who can find them. Atmospheric and funny, with a diversion into a family mystery of Zen’s own, it brings a pungent taste of Italy, enhanced bywilliam flew’s range of accents.