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Hindustan Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Hollywood icon Jane Fonda looks obsessed with Alia Bhatt in new video from Cannes. Watch
Bollywood star Alia Bhatt impressed not just her desi fans but also a Hollywood icon with her Cannes Film Festival debut this weekend. A video from a L'Oreal event in the French Riviera shows Jane Fonda look completely smitten by Alia's beauty and Gucci saree-dress. The video shows the 87-year-old actor looking adoringly at Alia as they pose for photos. Both are wearing almost matching golden-silver outfits as the brand ambassadors for L'Oreal. Jane, instead of looking at the camera, was all eyes for Alia and touched her dress to get a better look. Alia catches her looking and gives a big smile. Watch the video here: The actors were walking the red carpet ahead of the Cannes Film Festival closing ceremony on Saturday. Alia wore a stunning saree-inspired mesh dress, made specially for her by Gucci. Decked up in a Schiaparelli cream gown, the 'Highway' actor stole everyone's attention with her look. She walked the iconic red carpet in an off-shoulder outfit made in ecru Chantilly lace, with organza and enamel flowers embroidered on the bodice. The custom soft nude bodycon version, which was elevated with tulle ruffles at the hem, received a thumbs up from fashionistas. Alia was styled by Rhea Kapoor. She styled her hair in a neat bun with edges in a unique pattern. For the makeup, she kept it shiny and radiant. Jane Fonda is an American actor whose career spans over six decades. She is a two-time Academy Award winner known for powerful performances in films like Klute and Coming Home. Beyond Hollywood, Fonda has been a passionate activist, speaking out on issues from the Vietnam War to climate change.
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Action needed: social housing providers must be made accountable for the treatment of their tenants
On the tree-lined north London street where I live, scaffolders arrived seven years ago. Metal poles were erected around a housing association property next door to me, owned by the social housing provider Peabody, to allow for external refurbishment work to be carried out. But today, that scaffolding still stands – and those repair works have never been carried out. 'This is yet another example of Peabody's casual neglect of their residents. They do not respond to emails from me or senior council officers and have also ignored an enforcement notice served on them by planning officers,' the chair of Islington council's planning committee, Martin Klute, recently told the Islington Tribune. Peabody owns more than 5% of Islington's nearly 112,000 properties. And it has well below average performance on every key indicator of landlord services. Inaction on dealing with hazardous cladding, damp, rodent infestation or broken-down lifts, and failure to tackle neighbour nuisance or other forms of antisocial behaviour, are typical of the concerns that Peabody tenants raise regularly. And Peabody, while it is one of the worst offenders, is not unique. Ask any councillor or Citizens Advice worker in any of our largest cities about their housing caseload, and they will tell you the same story. Yet locally elected representatives are often powerless to act. Before 2010, the Audit Commission, of which I was chief executive, routinely inspected housing associations. But for the Regulator of Social Housing, created by the Tories, the main preoccupation was with their financial viability; tenant services were no longer their focus. Since the Grenfell Tower fire, this has begun to change. However, social housing remains the least accountable of all our public services. In England, providers are not even subject to the Freedom of Information Act. And the housing ombudsman, which made four findings of severe maladministration against Peabody last year, has also been unable to drive change. In one of last year's findings, involving dangerous cladding, the ombudsman noted that it had taken 24 emails and an intervention by the local MP before Peabody responded to the issue.. In another case, Peabody refused to look beyond the last six months at a problem that had persisted for eight years, even though it had previously admitted that its property was in 'a very dangerous state My neighbours, who have suffered from dark, damp and neglect for longer than the duration of the second world war, would no doubt empathise. Klute, the critic from Islington council clearly has a point. Asked to respond to the many criticisms, Peabody says it spends £1m a day on maintaining residents' homes with teams in each local area and that it seeks to listen to residents to improve 'the basics'. In this case, Peabody says it regrets how long the scaffolding has been up. The building is listed and it says that means any changes must involve the council, English Heritage and everyone who lives there. 'This has all taken longer than we would have liked and we're very sorry. We're aiming to do the work as soon as possible.' Residents would welcome that. But the real problem is bigger than Peabody. Housing is now the responsibility of the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. She is commendably increasing the rights of tenants in private rented property. But her renters' rights bill does not address the growing crisis in the experience of social housing tenants. And as Labour promises yet another quango cull, housing associations will lobby for even greater deregulation than has so far been suggested. For building the additional homes the country desperately needs, they may have a point. But their tenants need more protection, not less. This does not mean reintroducing inspection, which is costly and can be ineffective. Instead, Rayner's many options include giving local authorities a clear role in the accountability of the sector. For instance, she could permit councils to require attendance at public scrutiny meetings by associations felt to be neglecting their charitable roots. She could allow the housing ombudsman to consider super-complaints from councils, which would act like a class action in law. She could extend the Freedom of Information Act, as proposed by the Labour MP Andy Slaughter in 2019. She could also give existing regulation more bite, with stiffer penalties and a new duty on housing providers to be good neighbours, requiring them to keep communities informed. In my own particularcase, Peabody has never provided any information about its plans for the properties adjoining my home, despite erecting scaffolding which extends across my windows. But one change, above all others, would compel all housing associations, not just Peabody, to give their responsibilities as landlords the same focus that they now devote to development activities. The law permits councils to order the repair of some properties in very poor condition. However, the powers, provided by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, convey only trivial penalties for non-compliance. It is possible for councils to then undertake the necessary work themselves – yet they are not able to recover the cost of doing so immediately, by billing the delinquent providers. Instead, they must place a charge on the property that is recoverable only if, and when, it is sold. No cash-strapped council will take such a step lightly. To remedy this imbalance, the offenders should be compelled to pay immediately on completion of the repairs. And if they then challenge council invoices in court, the onus should be on the provider in each case to show that it had taken reasonable steps to avoid direct action by the council on behalf of vulnerable tenants. Before Margaret Thatcher, when social housing was mostly provided by local government, disaffected renters could vote against their landlord. That is often no longer the case, so it is vital that we find other ways to empower social tenants and make politics relevant to their concerns. Meanwhile, Peabody's chief executive, who has failed to respond to the letters my neighbours and I have written to him about his organisation's failings, will soon become chair of the group of London's largest housing associations. As such, he will arguably be the most influential person in the sector. When they meet, Rayner should tell him to first put his own house in order. And should he fail, that she will enable councillors to put things right. Steve Bundred is a former Audit Commission chief executive
The Independent
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Book of a lifetime: Mystery Story by David Pirie
I was attracted to Mystery Story by its title and jacket. The photographic cover, with its half-buried clues (stiletto, photo of woman, Duke of Wellington £5 note), appealed to me, and the title seemed pleasingly straightforward and self-aware. Mystery Story takes place in an alternative contemporary Britain (it was published in 1980) with its white defence leagues, coalition government and Commission on Urban Violence (Curv). The narrator, a writer and journalist, spending Christmas alone in London, hears news that police in Weston, Staffordshire, are searching for 32-year-old Johanna Parver after the discovery of her clothes by the side of the road. Since the missing woman is an ex-girlfriend of the narrator's, he's soon driving out of London. Weston is a new town, with a Curv-led programme of curfews and resulting low crime figures. After the narrator's arrival, a mutilated corpse is found. The narrator turns snooper. He slips into Johanna's former house, now with new owners, where he thinks he hears voices discussing Johanna, but it's just the television. The police, initially gruff and unforthcoming, become earnest and obliging. 'It suddenly seemed to me... that I wasn't dealing with a policeman at all, but with a rather skilled professional actor.' Johanna, it is revealed, previously posed as Bree Daniels, a name familiar to anyone who has seen Jane Fonda in Klute. No one is who they seem. Later, sporting a head wound, the narrator invents a persona for himself. 'I was a garage mechanic who had been hurt in a small accident... it gave me a role.' The atmosphere of paranoia and fear, as the narrator goes from hunter to hunted, is masterfully built up. The set pieces – car chase, deadly night-train hide-and-seek, knife fight on a rollercoaster – are remarkable. On the train, the narrator considers his options: 'The question I had to face now was what was going to happen next.' I love the possibility that this might reflect the author's modus operandi, matching my own. Mystery Story, long out of print, is Pirie's first novel. It says so on the flyleaf. I've lost count of the number of people I've lent my copy to. I had to buy another before I could write this piece. Reading it for the third time, I realise that a bit of business with a £5 note in my new novel might have been subconsciously borrowed from it. So imagine my bewilderment when in 2001 Century published David Pirie's The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes and wrote on the jacket: 'This is his first novel.'
