‘Nowhere for them to hide any more’: Zelda Perkins’ fight against NDAs after Harvey Weinstein

After eight-year campaign by Perkins, a former PA for Weinstein, UK ministers have announced plans to stop bosses using NDAs to silence abused workers

Zelda Perkins was 24 when – exhausted, broken and surrounded by lawyers – she finally agreed to sign the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that would legally gag her from talking about Harvey Weinstein’s sexually predatory and abusive behaviour. The suffocating power of that document haunted her for decades, casting a long shadow over her life and making her ill.

“If I go back to that room, I did not ever imagine that it would be possible to reach any form of justice,” she says. Now, eight years since she first broke her NDA and inadvertently became the world’s leading campaigner against them, Perkins feels justice may finally be within her grasp. On Monday, in a move that surprised even the most committed campaigners, the UK government announced sweeping measures that will prohibit bosses from using NDAs to silence abused employees.

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ICC issues warrant for Taliban’s supreme leader for persecution of women

Rights activists hail move to arrest Haibatullah Akhundzada and Afghan chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani for crimes against humanity

The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls.

In a statement, the ICC said on Tuesday there were “reasonable grounds to believe” the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered policies that deprived women and girls of “education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion”.

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Sorry, Baby is a smart film about sexual assault and it’s here at just the right time | Adrian Horton

Eva Victor’s intelligent and subtle debut film tells the story of the aftermath of an assault and as the backlash to #MeToo increases, it serves an important purpose

About 25 minutes into Sorry, Baby, writer-director Eva Victor’s debut feature out this summer, a bad thing happens to Agnes, Victor’s twentysomething academic in a small New England town. The film is forthright and economical with the details; Agnes, an English PhD student, goes to meet her thesis adviser (Louis Cancelmi), with whom she shares a light flirtation and a mutual passion for Virginia Woolf. He shifts the meeting to his house, citing logistics and lavishing praise. Agnes enters at dusk; we linger outside as the shot cuts to dark, signaling hours past. She emerges in silence and hustles to her car, expressionless as she drives away for what feels like an eternity.

Back at home, Agnes sits in the bath and tells her best friend Lydie (an excellent Naomi Ackie) what happened in clipped, detached details. He was insistent. She tried to wriggle free and diffuse tension, he kept pushing. Eventually she froze – “my spine got cold,” she recalls – and she can’t remember the rest. Neither say the word sexual assault or rape, though it’s not for lack of vocabulary or understanding. “Yeah, that’s the thing,” Lydie eventually acknowledges. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

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Continue ReadingSorry, Baby is a smart film about sexual assault and it’s here at just the right time | Adrian Horton

Resident doctors’ strikes risk derailing Labour’s NHS recovery plan

With waiting lists high and pay talks deadlocked, fresh round of industrial action could undermine Starmer’s health pledges

Patients left in pain and discomfort. Thousands of appointments and operations cancelled. Much of the reaction to the decision of resident (formerly junior) doctors in England to stage their third six-month series of strikes over pay in just 16 months has focused on the disruption to NHS services.

But their stoppages also threaten to pose serious problems – political, economic and reputational – for the government. For Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and inescapably Rachel Reeves, too, this is a situation replete with risk but without an obvious solution.

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AI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators

UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans

An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.

“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

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Continue ReadingAI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators