PUNKT MP01
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Punkt MP01: peculiar and appealing. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observerpunkt.ch, £229
The phone that ignited this debate is something of an absurdity. Its unique selling point is that it does nothing but ring people, text people and wake you up, yet it costs a small fortune. One of the foremost attributes of a dumbphone is that it doesn’t matter much if you drop it in a puddle or render it up to a thug at knifepoint, whereas the Punkt is a design accessory. I was expecting to dislike it on these grounds, but strangely I didn’t, because despite its paucity of features it is both peculiar and appealing. The trigger-happy predictive text, for example, is efficient, while the ringtones are cheerful and accurate simulacra of birdsong. More than that, it feels wonderful in the hand, only to be imperceptible in the pocket. Just how a phone should be.
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The experience of exile radicalised his sense of political critique. He became a critic of both Washington and Havana, comprar teclado tfue where he caused further upset by making contacts among the rightwing Miami exiles in his capacity as a journalist. Officially vilified in Cuba, Encuentro has become essential reading for Cuban intellectuals both at home and abroad.
“The commission is surely not suggesting the UK authorities may be diverting this material for non-peaceful uses. We know where it is, and we have been analysing with the commission for several years how best to deal with it. But we will not be rushed into any action.”
She took the action because it would have been “unfair” that the 10 members that joined on May 1, mainly from the former Soviet bloc, would have to meet standards than differed from those applied to other EU nations.
Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the south-east of England, said: “Although inspection visits have been conducted on an annual basis for 15 years, the problem remains the same: inspectors appear to be in the dark over exactly what is in the B30 pond.
Tony Lywood, Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Copeland, said even with no job losses, the end of reprocessing was a “disaster” for the area because of the changing nature of the work. He also opposes plans to see more future jobs in the private sector supply chain.
The survivor, Scott Davis, now 49, testified that he heard the click of a gun as he walked in front of Beasley at the reputed job site. Davis, who was shot in an arm, knocked the weapon aside, fled into the woods and called the police.
The Cuban writer, filmmaker and intellectual Jésus Díaz, who has died unexpectedly in Madrid aged 60, was among his country’s most controversial figures, both before and after his exile in 1991. The author of half a dozen novels, which portray the vicissitudes of characters caught up in politically trying circumstances, he refused to stay silent when he himself was forced into exile, and set about founding the journal Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana to promote dialogue between Cubans at home and abroad.Born in Havana, Díaz belonged to a generation that was propelled into accelerated activity by the 1959 revolution, and he rapidly went from being a student militant to editing Caimán Barbudo, the literary supplement of the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, soon achieving wider prominence when his book of short stories, Los anos duros (The Hard Years), won the Casa de las Americas prize in 1965.
In May last year, Isla Rae-Smith was cycling to the English school where she works in Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. She stopped at a red light and Valente Saavedra pulled up next to her. “He had speakers on his bike,” says Isla. “I’d always wanted to listen to music on my bike, but I was too scared of wearing headphones when I was cycling on the roads. I said: ‘Good idea,’ in Spanish.”
The next night, Isla and her friends, including the one she had told about Valente, were at a bar. The friend spotted him. “I said: ‘Oh my God – it’s the boy on the bike,'” says Isla. “It was a strange coincidence. I was really excited. And I was a bit drunk as well.”
The circumstances of Díaz’s departure from Cuba had an unhappy air of intrigue about them. If ICAIC, where he was an active member of the party branch, encouraged his independent thinking, he had run into trouble with other factions over his novel Las iniciales de la tierra (The Initials Of The Earth), which the authorities censored when it finally appeared in 1987.
She approached him; Valente says he was “really surprised”. He was with a friend he had already told about meeting Isla. “I was on the dancefloor and Isla is in front of me, really excited.” He had added her on Facebook the day they met. “I sent her a sticker – of two cats on a motorbike. Isla said: ‘Why didn’t you write to me?’ I said: ‘I did – I sent a sticker.’ She said: ‘No, that’s not writing.'”
