Support dogs in the dock confirm what babies we've all become
Anyone else out there too scared to turn on the telly come teatime? Make yourself known, friend.
Have you swapped the Today programme for Smooth FM, because Bonnie Tyler belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart reminds you of getting a 3am cab to the airport rather than imminent armageddon? Welcome. Come, share a safe space.
And if you, too, react to the News at Ten music as though it were the terrifying opening credits of Doctor Who circa 1975, all plucked string baseline and swoopy oscillating menace, rest assured, there are a great many of us back here.
No, not there, here. Here! Look! COO-EEE! Hiding behind the cushions on this great big existential DFS (Devastating Finale Sanctuary) sofa.
So. Across the pond, the Beverly Hillbillies have rolled into Doge City and are parking their very own brand of bipolar politics on the free world's lawns. The international markets are at the volatile mercy of Trump's fiscal whims.
Barely a day goes by without some horrendous natural disaster or callous act of obscene warmongery. And what are we doing here in Great (stop with the eye-rolling, kids) Britain? I'll tell you what we are doing, we are apparently bringing so many emotional support animals into our courtrooms that our creaking justice system has called a halt to the menagerie.
Wait, what? Am I saying that even our (alleged) criminal classes are such big babies they can't make it into the dock without clutching a living plushie? Yes, yes I am.
So much so, folks, that judiciary officials have taken valuable time out from despairing about the crumbling estate, the soon-to-reach 100,000-long backlog of unheard trials in England and Wales, the justice delayed and the justice withheld, in order to deliver guidance on dealing with the issue of disruptive and incontinent animals. (Insert tasteless joke about messy jailbirds here, if you must.)
It seems a surge in defendants and witnesses seeking to bring along pets to help them cope with stress has led to 'untrained' animals jumping at or even attacking witnesses – including people who are scared of dogs or have allergies. Or, presumably, just want their day in court without being mauled by a mastiff. Is that too much to ask? Clearly it is in Spineless UK PLC. It's hard to understand where this ridiculousness comes from (the US, obviously, but more of that shortly), but thanks be to Dog, its days are numbered.
Last year, at Grimsby Crown Court, defendant Vincent Harvey brought his nine-week-old Staffordshire terrier with him when he was sentenced to eight months in prison for dangerous driving. Cute? Not when the creature both urinated and defecated on the floor of the court's foyer after Harvey was sentenced.
In 2017, Aidan Wiltshire, a transgender pensioner, was allowed to bring his pet cat to his trial at Chelmsford Crown Court to 'help calm his nerves'. Wiltshire, who had been living as a woman and calling himself 'Anne' at the time, relentlessly stalked two women; a city lawyer and a church minister.
As he imposed the 18-month supervision order, Judge David Turner QC condemned Wiltshire's oppressive behaviour towards the two women: 'It affected their lives practically and professionally. It intruded into their privacy, it left them feeling besieged, controlled, manipulated, overwhelmed, at risk, hounded and anxious.'
It strikes me that criminal justice was also being controlled and manipulated when Wiltshire refused to appear without his cat. But he was only taking advantage of the unhinged precedent set in 2016 by Judge Lynn Roberts, a family judge for Essex and Suffolk, who permitted dogs into Chelmsford County Court in what was a UK first.
Apparently, the judge said she would have 'loved' to also allow donkeys into court but stopped short because of their size. The scheme there came to an end in 2019 when a new judge ruled against it – but it's self-evidently caught on elsewhere.
As ever, ignorance rules; unlike guide and assistance dogs, emotional support animals do not share the same legal status. Taxis and shops aren't obliged to give them access. Landlords can refuse them – but medical magazine Pulse recently carried an article revealing that so many patients now ask their GPs for 'supporting letters' to justify their 'need' for such animals, family doctors have now been advised to charge a fee – or just refuse to write them.
Back in the Halls of Justice, I can grasp why a vulnerable witness might benefit from the comfort a much-loved pet would bring, but even then, it's a hard sell. Why can't they keep it in the waiting room? Tied to the railings outside? In a horse box?
Rumour has it that furry AI robots are being programmed to offer the same service, without the unpredictable bowel movements, which sounds just the ticket.
Speaking of tickets, the whole concept of emotional support animals has been imported from America. There's a chap on TikTok who credits his emotional support 'cuddly' alligator with relieving his depression. And when Demi Moore lost out on the Oscars, comfort came in the form of ' emotional support Pilaf ' which turned out to be chihuahua, not dinner.
But the tide has started to turn. As of 2020, America's Department of Transportation decreed that US airlines would no longer be required to transport emotional support animals after passengers insisted on bringing on board horses, pigs, peacocks and turkeys for psychological reasons.
Only dogs qualify as service animals, although I'm not sure how many of us would be happy with a 8st cane corso occupying the middle seat. Or watching a defendant play with his puppy as he's sent down for a criminal offence.
We are living through tough times as the Trumpian Tariff Tumult
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The Guardian
16 hours ago
- The Guardian
America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away
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Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. 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Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. 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This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.
The Herald Scotland
18 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
So why is Rod Stewart in the huff with The Donald?
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Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Disney CEO Bob Iger's dramatic move following LA protests that will be sure to infuriate Trump
Disney CEO Bob Iger is fighting Donald Trump through his women's soccer team, who have publicly protested the ICE raids on Los Angeles and the president's response to riots. Iger - along with his wife and dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Willow Bay - is the majority shareholder of Angel City FC, who represent Los Angeles in the National Women's Soccer League. Amid controversy over federal law enforcement's appearances at Dodger Stadium, Angel City have been publicly and vociferously in opposition to the president in moves that Deadline reports Iger backed and was 'thoroughly consulted on.' Ahead of their recent match against North Carolina Courage, the organization offered the first 10,000 fans - Angel City regularly leads NWSL in attendance and averaged 19,000 per match in 2024 - a t-shirt with the words 'Immigrant City FC' on the front and 'Los Angeles is for everyone' in English and Spanish. The team has also sold shirts on their website with proceeds going to Castro Immigration Services, who 'serve the immigrant community by providing quality legal counsel on immigration matters and connecting immigrant families to available resources.' Aside from Iger, the club has several liberal celebrities with minority shares, including Eva Longoria, Jessica Chastain and America Ferrara, putting several famous and powerful people at loggerheads with Trump. Angel City FC - along with MLS side LAFC, with whom they share a stadium - have issued statements of support for immigrants but otherwise the city's sports franchises have refrained from commenting. Iger and Bay have made no public statement on the protests, however it appears he not only signed off on it but was briefed on the move every step of the way. Iger - along with his wife and dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Willow Bay - is the majority shareholder of Angel City FC, who represent Los Angeles in the National Women's Soccer League, who gave out these pro-immigrant t-shirts at a recent match has reached out to the White House for comment. It comes as Iger's day job at Disney has tried to make nice with the second Trump administration on multiple big occasions. Most recently, ABC News has fired star anchor Terry Moran just days after he penned a social media post calling Donald Trump a 'world class hater' and blasting top advisor Stephen Miller as full of 'bile.' A spokesperson for the network confirmed the firing in a statement on Tuesday that specifically cited Moran's post as a 'clear violation' of ABC's policy. 'We are at the end of our agreement with Terry Moran and based on his recent post – which was a clear violation of ABC News policies – we have made the decision to not renew,' the statement read. 'At ABC News, we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism,' the rep added. Moran, 65, was a senior national correspondent at the network. He previously served as ABC's Chief Foreign Correspondent from 2013 to 2018. In May, it was reported ABC News and its parent company Disney have asked the ladies of The View to dial back their constant complaining about President Donald Trump. Ahead of their recent match against North Carolina Courage, the organization offered the first 10,000 fans - Angel City regularly leads NWSL in attendance and averaged 19,000 per match in 2024 - a t-shirt with the words 'Immigrant City FC' on the front and 'Los Angeles is for everyone' in English and Spanish ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic and Iger made the requests separately, The Daily Beast reported. The daily talk show has been filled with criticisms of the commander-in-chief and his policies, with mostly kind words for Democrats. Iger reportedly expressed his support for the show but made clear it needed to pull back on politics. Prior to that, Moran co-anchored the network's newsmagazine Nightline for eight years. He was ABC News' Chief White Correspondent from 1999 to 2005. Earlier this year, the network paid President Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his remarks about the president. Stephanopoulos erroneously claimed on-air that the president-elect was found 'liable for rape' - rather than the correct phrasing of sexual abuse - against writer E. Jean Carroll in March. Trump sued Stephanopoulos and the network for defamation soon after the segment aired, accusing the anchor of making the statements with 'malice' and a disregard for the truth. As part of the settlement, Stephanopoulos was forced to issue a public apology. Angel City FC - along with MLS side LAFC, with whom they share a stadium - have issued statements of support for immigrants but otherwise the city's sports franchises have refrained from commenting In 2023, Iger revealed the company will 'quiet the noise' around cultural issues because it has shown to be bad for business. Iger wants to make content that is entertaining, not issue-focused - after The House of Mouse faced backlash over pushing a ' woke agenda'. His comments about focusing on entertainment rather than 'issues' came after a spate of recent box office busts. Among these was the live-action version of The Little Mermaid, Guardians of the Galaxy, Strange World and Lightyear. The Little Mermaid sparked controversy over the casting of Black actress Halle Bailey as the title character, Ariel. Lightyear, released one year ago with a reported budget of $200 million, brought in a modest $226.7 million in worldwide ticket sales. The film could not be shown in 14 Middle Eastern and Asian countries because of its depiction of a same-sex relationship. Since the company has been faced with loss from the Disney+ streaming business, which is expected to become profitable only next year, they have turned to the parks business to soften the blow.
