By Michael McNulty It’s Forgotten Film Friday, here’s this week’s instalment. Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant won both the Best Director and Palme d’Or awards at Cannes. It’s a piercingly quiet, stunningly effective, nightmarish film based on the Littleton, Colorado Columbine school shooting of 1999 which left 12 students and 1 teacher dead. Unlike the media storm that surrounded the Columbine shooting, desperate to explain and assign blame, Elephant is unafraid to leave questions unanswered. It doesn’t try to...

A chilly vineyard has become Britain's most Northerly commercial WINE producer for the first time in history. The British wine boom has rarely seen vineyards pop up as far north as Watford as the French try to snap up land for the same desire across the South of England. But no other grape-grower has managed to achieve the longitude co-ordinates of breezy Malton in North Yorkshire. The effects of climate warming and hardier strains of vine have blown away the...

Britain is experiencing a beetroot boom, with supermarket sales of the root vegetable increasing by as much as a third year-on-year on the back of the ‘purple trend’ – people eating purple to consume more antioxidants and nutrients in a bid to stay healthy. Leading researchers Kantar cite the total market spend over the past 12 months on fresh beetroot - beetroot which is ready for eating, pickled in vinegar or infused with various flavours - was more than £34 million,...

It may be a man’s world - but modern mums are twice as likely to want daughters over sons, a new study shows. Two in five mothers said they wished for a girl while pregnant, compared to just 18 per cent who hoped for a son. But for fathers the reverse is true, with men a whopping three times more likely to want boys. A huge 31 per cent of men expressed the preference to have sons, while only one...

Three quarters (76%) of NHS Trusts and Health Boards say there is not enough specialist nursing care for people with incurable secondary breast cancer, reveals charity Breast Cancer Care. Worryingly, close to half (42%) of organisations surveyed do not provide specialist nursing care for people with incurable breast cancer, in stark comparison to the majority (95%) of people with primary breast cancer having a named clinical nurse specialist for support. This is despite half (49%) of NHS Trusts and Health...

It was my first day on the job but that wasn't unusual as it was everybody's first day on the job at MAYOUT, an organisation so new that we hadn't even worked out just what the letters in MAYOUT stood for as an acronym. Jenkins, who had come to us from football after his great success with the Sven Out, Moyes Out, Pardew Out and Wenger Out campaigns (granted that last one is TBA) suggested 'Meeting All Yobs Outside Underwood's...

GMB Scotland has accused the UK Government of ‘a gross betrayal’ of drinks manufacturing workers after Diageo announced plans to cut more than 100 jobs across its Scottish operations due to Brexit concerns. Workers and trade unions were informed this afternoon that seventy redundancies will be made at Diageo’s Leven plant in Fife and a further thirty-five redundancies at its Shieldhall site, near Glasgow. The drinks giant confirmed the cuts are part of a review process which will see selected white...

TIME magazine today revealed its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, with notable entries such as Ivanka Trump, John Legend and 17 year-old LGBT activist Gavin Grimm included on the list. The list features U.S. President Donald Trump, and other U.S. political figures including Stephen Bannon, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Bob Ferguson, John Lewis, James Mattis, Rebekah Mercer, Tom Perez, Reince Priebus, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and more. Other writers include Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift, Stephen Colbert, John...

By Linda Marric There are films which will make you fall in love with them almost instantly, they may not look as polished or roll as smoothly as you might have hoped, but you somehow develop a deep love and admiration for what the director and his cast have tried to achieve. Rules Don’t Apply can firmly be placed in that category; from the opening tittles you are completely gripped by what is to come, and you can’t even bring...