Tag: English

Report claims surge in Indians entering UK illegally on boats across English Channel

[ad_1]
London: Indians have allegedly become the third-largest group of migrants entering UK shores illegally across the English Channel on dangerous small boats, according to a UK media report quoting Home Office sources on Friday.
‘The Times’ newspaper reports that Home Office officials believe Indian students are using a loophole in the rules that allows asylum seekers to study in the UK and pay much lower domestic, rather than international fees.
It reports that about 250 Indian migrants have made the dangerous crossing in small boats this year alone, more than 233 who crossed the Channel in the last year – making them the third largest cohort after Afghans and Syrians.
“One theory being pursued is Serbia’s visa-free travel rules for Indians, which Home Office officials believe is providing a gateway into Europe,” the report claims.
“Until the end of last year, all Indian passport holders were able to enter Serbia without a visa for up to 30 days. Home Office officials believe the arrangement, which ended on January 1 as part of Serbia’s efforts to align with EU (European Union) visa policies, led to some Indians travelling onward into the EU and subsequently to the UK in small boats,” it claims.
According to official Home Office statistics published in early November last year for these illegal Channel crossings in the first six months of 2022, over half (51 per cent) of small boat arrivals were from three nationalities – Albanian (18 per cent), Afghan (18 per cent) and Iranian (15 per cent).
Indians have not been among the nationalities referenced in official statistics of this illegal route so far.
“This is very disturbing to hear and is the first the NISAU (National Indian Students and Alumni Union) has heard of such an act,” said Sanam Arora, chair of the Indian student representative organisation in the UK.

“Indian students are law-abiding, meritorious and very hard-working and we are worried that such isolated incidents, if true, can reflect badly on the whole community. Indian students who have studied in the UK are trailblazers who are setting the future of the India-UK relationship. We’d like to understand details of who these immigrants are and what their motivations for entering the UK in this manner are…no student should ever abuse the UK’s visa system,” she said.
While the UK Home Office declined to comment specifically on the media report quoting sources, a government spokesperson told PTI that the UK’s Migration and Mobility Partnership (MMP) with India are aimed at accelerating the removals of any illegal migrants.
“Our migration deal with India aims to enhance and accelerate the removal of Indian nationals with no right to stay in the UK and secure greater cooperation around organised immigration crime,” the spokesperson said.
“The global migration crisis continues to place an unprecedented strain on our asylum system. This is why we are going to introduce legislation which will ensure that people arriving in the UK illegally are detained and removed to another country,” the spokesperson added.
Tackling the problem of illegal small boat crossings across the English Channel is among the top government priorities set by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The Home Office said its Small Boats Operational Command (SBOC) will oversee operational activity with neighbouring France to disrupt such crossings, save lives at sea and ensure the effective processing of arrivals in the UK.
[ad_2]
#Report #claims #surge #Indians #entering #illegally #boats #English #Channel
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 4, 2023
‘English flirting’: Dimoldenberg v Garfield is real magic

[ad_1]
He’s a Hollywood A-lister, recently named a man of the year and routinely included among the sexiest alive. She is an awkward art-school graduate who has his shirtless photo as the wallpaper on her phone. And they just can’t seem to stop running into each other.
The television personality Amelia Dimoldenberg and the actor Andrew Garfield have been hailed as a real-life romcom in the making for their brief but memorable – and, now, heavily hyped – encounters at awards shows.
Video of their first meeting at the GQ Man of the Year awards in London in November, at which Dimoldenberg was interviewing celebrities from the red carpet, went viral for the pair’s seemingly undeniable chemistry.
Garfield told Dimoldenberg he was a fan of her popular YouTube interview series Chicken Shop Date; she told him he looked hot without a shirt. “This is going well. I think,” said Dimoldenberg, to camera. “Are we rolling?” said Garfield.
After 90 seconds of stop-start compliments and cautious circling, the interview concluded with Dimoldenberg proposing a toast – to their “future date”. “Whenever, really: whenever,” said Garfield, accepting the tiny glass of fizz, then checked himself. “Well, not whenever. But when we can both do it.”
The clip has been watched 4m times on GQ’s official Twitter alone, sparking debate among users as to whether it was cute or excruciating. In particular it was said to be an especially English display, with both Dimoldenberg and Garfield awkward and almost aggrieved in their apparently mutual attraction.
“It’s so rare to see people have great chemistry any more,” commented a tweeter. “It’s like the golden age of Hollywood again.” Another reposted the clip for their own easy referral: “Don’t mind me, I just need to be able to find these videos again at a moment’s notice. Andrew Garfield, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Chicken Shop Date – when?”
With the world willing them to meet again, the pair’s recent reunion on the red carpet of the Golden Globes in Los Angeles carried the weight of expectation – and, judging by Garfield’s bashful approach, not just of the audience’s.

“Just stand! Be normal!” Dimoldenberg berated him – charmingly, of course. Garfield, for his part, likened her stricken expression to that of “a capybara in the wild”.
If there had been any doubt as to the authenticity of their first interaction, their second interview seemed to dispel it, with social media whipped into a frenzy by Garfield’s oh-so-subtle brush of Dimoldenberg’s hand as he reached for her microphone.
“We must stop meeting like this,” said Dimoldenberg, faux-flirtatious. “I only ever want to see you … in situations like this,” replied Garfield, reaching for her microphone – and with it, Twitter noted, her hand. “What about other situations?” responds Dimoldenberg.
She posted the clip, barely longer than the first, on Twitter with the caption “round two”; it has since been viewed 34m times.
“This is such an accurate representation of English flirting, which is hardly ever captured in film,” tweeted the writer Louis Staples. “Moments of exquisite charm punctuated by the cringiest shit you’ve ever witnessed, yep sounds right,” agreed the author Philip J Ellis.
Dimoldenberg regularly draws large audiences online with Chicken Shop Date, the interview series she started while a fashion student at Central Saint Martins in 2011. What began as a print Q&A with grime musicians in 2014, carried out at one of London’s many fried-chicken joints, moved to YouTube, where it grew a following.
Now in its fifth season (or “seasoning”), Chicken Shop Date has 1.65 million subscribers, drawn by Dimoldenberg’s deadpan interviews with guests as diverse as the musicians Burna Boy, Ed Sheeran and Phoebe Bridgers and members of the England women’s football team.
Last year, Dimoldenberg’s interview with Louis Theroux, in which she persuaded him to reprise his self-written rap from his 2000 series Wild Weekends, gave rise to a TikTok trend and then a hit song, on which they were both credited artists.
After her first interview with Garfield went viral, fans circulated an older Chicken Shop Date clip, showing her toying with actor Daniel Kaluuya. Her romantic “type” is actors, she tells him meaningfully – “good ones”, from Camden. “It’s not you,” she says with wonderful disdain.
But, setting aside Dimoldenberg’s undeniable comic timing and charisma on screen, what makes her encounters with Garfield so effervescent is the sense of her having met her match. As one Twitter user put it: “This is my Pride & Prejudice.”
When Garfield compares their astrological signs and suggests they might be too compatible, Dimoldenberg seems genuinely flustered – then claws back the upper hand. “I don’t think we should explore this … I’m not ready for it,” Garfield says gravely. “Oh, OK,” says Dimoldenberg. “Well I am.”
Her last-ditch attempt at an actual question, valiantly inquiring after Garfield’s apparent “affinity to playing religious characters”, only draws more attention to their chemistry.
“Authenticity” is highly sought after in today’s media environment, but impossible to approximate: a real, felt reaction is undeniable, and audiences can’t help but respond.
In the context of “reality” television, it is the difference between the by now perfunctory, glassy-eyed engagement with Love Island and its latest production line of Boohoo models – and the genuine emotion of (and excitement about) The Traitors, a recent surprise success for the BBC.
Dimoldenberg and Garfield’s “interviews” are the kind of serendipitous, compulsively watchable lightning strikes that typically only happen in live sports or news broadcasts, or the very best home-video recordings of children and pets.
The clips have the endlessly amusing quality of the all-time greatest memes like the kids crashing the BBC interview (now six years old) or the botched “Monkey Jesus” restoration (now 10) – and yet it seems that, in this case, lightning can strike twice.
At a time when celebrities love to hide behind their public image and no A-list pairing is above speculation that it’s all for publicity, Dimoldenberg and Garfield’s off-the-cuff, toe-for-toe interactions were a breath of fresh air – whether they actually fancy each other or not.

[ad_2]
#English #flirting #Dimoldenberg #Garfield #real #magic
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 21, 2023
‘Better than finding gold’: towers’ remains may rewrite history of English civil war

[ad_1]
When archaeologists working on the route of HS2 began excavating a stretch of pasture in Warwickshire, they were not expecting to uncover what one of them calls “the highlight of our careers”. Their excavations revealed the monumental stone bases of two towers from a late medieval fortified gatehouse, the existence of which had been completely lost to history.
While that find was remarkable in itself, the ruins were even more significant than they first appeared – and might even rewrite the history of the English civil war.
Peppering the sandstone walls were hundreds of pockmarks made by musket balls and pistol shot, showing that the building had come under heavy fire. Experts think this may be evidence that the gatehouse was shot at by parliamentarian troops heading to the nearby Battle of Curdworth Bridge in August 1642, which would make this the scene of the very first skirmish of the civil war.
The finds were “a real shock”, said Stuart Pierson of Wessex Archaeology, who led excavations on the site. “The best way to describe it is that we were just in awe of this tower.
“People always say that you want to find gold in archaeology, but I think for a lot of us finding that tower will always be better than finding gold. I think it’s the highlight of our careers finding that, and I don’t think we’re going to find anything like that again.”
Musket ball impact marks on the outside wall of Coleshill gatehouse. Photograph: HS2/PA
The team knew that a large Tudor manor house had stood somewhere near the site at Coleshill, east of Birmingham, but its location had been lost. As they started excavating, they were astonished at the state of preservation of its vast ornamental gardens – larger in scale than at Hampton Court.
Pierson had said to colleagues that he expected there might be the remains of a gatehouse, “but we figured a small box structure. We weren’t thinking anything involving towers.” He was on holiday when the first walls were uncovered. “My colleagues say their favourite memory from the site was my expression when I [returned and] saw this complete tower,” he said.
Taken together, the finds make the site “nationally significant – and a bit more”, he added.

In the lead up to the civil war, which pitched forces loyal to King Charles I against parliamentarian soldiers seeking to topple him, Coleshill Manor was in the hands of a royalist, Simon Digby. The position of his grand home, next to a key strategic crossing of the River Cole, would have put it directly in the path of parliamentarians on the march to Curdworth Bridge. While it is impossible to prove, experts think it is highly likely that it is their musket balls – dozens of which were recovered from the site – which struck the gatehouse on this journey.
While the discovery potentially rewrites the history of the start of the civil war, Pierson said, it can also tell us more about the experience of those living through it. “What it gives us is a more personal [insight] to the civil war. There are always stories about royalty and the lead parliamentarians, but there’s not so much focus given to the people themselves, even the upper classes who found themselves involved but weren’t necessarily really part of it.”
The discovery features on Digging for Britain on BBC Two at 8pm on Sunday 22 January.
[ad_2]
#finding #gold #towers #remains #rewrite #history #English #civil #war
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 21, 2023