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More training, more links to buyers of rural arts means more income for women Northern Lao PDR is home to a host of traditional craftsmanship. Think slim skirts with hand-embroidered diamond motifs, or woven textiles dyed shades of blue, or handbags of knotted jungle vine. Generally produced for use locally, these items are also sold to the country’s foreign tourists, and sometimes trickle out as exports. But having such honed skills does not necessarily translate into good income for the women who create such labour-intensive items. One project in six villages of three provinces with 120 w...

Duran Duran on their wild heyday, ageing with grace – and which Covid jab they would prefer

He remembers quite particularly when things changed: doing promotion in Australia in the late 1980s. “I remember walking out of the hotel and there being nobody there. I’m walking down the street – streets we’d never been able to walk down before; we’d have had to have minders – and I almost wanted to stop people and say, â€˜Do you know who I am?!’” He grins. “But then it was, like, hang on, I’m free to walk down this street, and it’s kind of f**king great!” It must be a strange balance for them these days, I say: a band known ...

  Melanie Brown is in her tracksuit talking to me from her Leeds home. Her mother has popped round and is chomping away on an Easter egg she has just found, despite the fact that Brown has made her some “amazing” spicy curry soup for lunch. Her oldest daughter, Phoenix, is going to extreme measures to get her attention. Meanwhile, a tiny Yorkshire terrier named Cookie has jumped into Brown’s arms, as her French bulldogs, Yoshi and Yoda, and golden doodle, Luna, wander around making mischief. It’s a picture of contented domestic chaos. But it wasn’t always like this....

This classification of Dylan as a political troubadour is borne out as recently as last year’s Murder Most Foul, his rumination on the Kennedy assassination and what he sees as its ripple effect on America up to the present day. This epic narrative may be driven by Dylan’s apocalyptic account of the JFK killing but the state of the nation almost 60 years later in the Trump era is its bubbling subtext. America, its history and sprawling geography, has been central to Dylan as poet and songmaker. In a sense he came full circle with Murder Most Foul. He had already addressed Americaâ�...