Ryan Adams: Ashes and Fire

by Dave Simpson

Ryan Adams would like to make something very clear. "I never ever sat in a room in the dark, drooling, or whacked out alone for weeks at a time, shooting drugs," he says. "I never shot drugs intravenously. I never smoked crack. I was never on the street. I think really that stuff was very experimental for me: I was experimenting with my mind."

As Adams is painfully aware, he has a certain reputation. A decade ago, he was heralded as America's new country-rock superstar. His 2000 solo debut, Heartbreaker – which followed four albums with the alt-country band Whiskeytown – was rapturously received and the follow-up, Gold, clocked up 400,000 sales and three Grammy nominations. He was hailed as "the new Gram Parsons", had Steve Earle and Bono praising him to the skies and was called "a brilliant songwriter" by Elton John. Then something went askew. Reviews and sales of his albums got worse. He started falling out with labels and mistrusting interviewers, and got a reputation for being a boozy, druggy brat.

That picture is difficult to square with the Adams of today. Looking younger than he did in his late 20s ("I wasn't happy"), the 36-year-old is friendly and enthusiastic, happily making tea and offering a whistlestop tour of his new Los Angeles Pax-Am studio, which he has built with old analogue equipment used in famous moments of pop history. He gleefully details the provenance of the equipment: a Motown recording console, a mixing desk used by the Beatles and the Doors, Elvis's engineer's old vocal mics. "And these," he beams, "are the speaker mains used on Master of Puppets!"

This is the environment that has produced Ashes & Fire, a new album of heartbreaking, beautiful songs that pick over the embers of his wilder life in a mood of becalmed, mature contentment – qualities that can spell trouble in music, but which here have produced possibly the album of his career. "I'm hearing that and it's shocking," he smiles. "But I'm glad that is translating. I'm having a nice time, and I had a nice time making the record." According to Adams, the legendary producer Glyn Johns took control, which allowed the singer to relax. He also renewed his long-term relationship with Johns' son Ethan (producer of Heartbreaker and Gold), who sent him Laura Marling's I Speak Because I Can, which he'd been working on. Hearing Marling offered Adams the challenge he needed. "I thought: 'For fuck's sake,'" Adams smiles, his piercing blue eyes peeking from behind a flop of raven hair. "I literally threw out 80% of what I had. And it felt good, to ask: 'What am I really capable of?' I felt competitive again to write great songs."

Ashes & Fire would have been impossible had Adams not been able to change his life. Five years ago he was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a degenerative condition affecting hearing and balance. "All the stuff I was doing exacerbated the disease," he says. "You're not supposed to smoke, you're not supposed to drink alcohol, be stressed, eat salty foods." Anything else? "You're probably not supposed to do speedballs," he adds drily, referring to the cocktail of heroin and cocaine that killed John Belushi and River Phoenix, among others.

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Magic Slippers

by Ben Child

They're not in Kansas any more. And if you happen to have a spare $2-3m lying around they could soon be on your mantelpiece. Judy Garland's iconic red slippers from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz are to go under the hammer in Los Angeles later this year.

The shoes are believed to be the pair worn by Garland's Dorothy for the famous scene in which she clicks her heels together and asks to return home to Kansas. Only four pairs of similar slippers are known to have survived the 72 years since the making of The Wizard of Oz, and the other three are beyond the reach of collectors. One pair resides at the Icons of American Culture exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington DC, while another is in a private collection. A third pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 and is unlikely to be recovered.

The $2-3m figure is the guide price being suggested by auctioneers Profiles in History, who will put the slippers on sale during a three-day "Icons of Hollywood" event between 15 and 17 December. The organisation has previously sold memorabilia such as a lightsaber used by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, which went for $240,000, and a full-size T-800 endoskeleton from Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($488,750).

The slippers are said to be in close to mint condition and are marked #7 Judy Garland inside. Auction organisers say the presence of light, circular scuffs on the sole indicates they were used in the close-up shots for Garland's famous heel-tapping scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz. It's also believed they may have been the slippers seen on the protruding feet of the Wicked Witch of the East after she is squashed by Dorothy's house.

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[ed.  Probably not my size.]

Anthony Freda Studio
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Seu Jorge

A Talent for Sloth

by Philip Connors

The landscape where I work, in far southwest New Mexico, is one of the most fire-prone areas in America. I look out over a stretch of country with nearly a million acres of roadless wilderness, where an annual upsurge of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico combines with the summertime heat of the Chihuahuan Desert to create tens of thousands of lightning strikes. In an arid land with brief but intense storm activity, wildfire is no aberration.

My lookout tower is situated five miles from the nearest road, on a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Gila National Forest. I live here for several months each year, without electricity or running water. Although tens of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. During these lulls I simply watch and wait, my eyes becoming ever more intimate with an ecological transition zone encompassing dry grasslands, piñon-juniper foothills, ponderosa parkland, and spruce-fir high country. On clear days I can make out mountains 180 miles away. To the east extends the valley of the Rio Grande, cradled by the desert: austere, forbidding, dotted with creosote shrubs and home to a collection of horned and thorned species evolved to live in a land of little water. To the north and south, along the Black Range, a line of peaks rises and falls in timbered waves; to the west, the Rio Mimbres meanders out of the mountains, its lower valley verdant with riparian flora. Beyond it rise more mesas and mountains: the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons.

It is a world of extremes. Having spent each fire season for nearly a decade in my little glass-walled perch, I’ve become acquainted with the look and feel of the border highlands each week of each month, from April through August: the brutal gales of spring, when a roar off the desert gusts over seventy miles an hour and the occasional snow squall turns my peak white; the dawning of summer in late May, when the wind abates and the aphids hatch and ladybugs emerge in great clouds from their hibernation; the fires of June, when dry lightning connects with the hills, sparking smokes that fill the air with the sweet smell of burning pine; the tremendous storms of July, when the thunder makes me flinch as if from the threat of a punch; and the blessed indolence of August, when the meadows bloom with wildflowers and the creeks run again, the rains having turned my world a dozen different shades of green. I’ve seen fires burn so hot they made their own weather; I’ve watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there’s a better job anywhere on the planet, I’d like to know about it.
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Twenty paces from my cabin, sixty-five more up the steps of the tower, and just like that I’m on the job. After cleaning up the mess left by overwintering rats and mice, putting up the supplies I get packed in by mule, and splitting a good stack of firewood, I begin more or less full-time service in the sky, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., an hour off for lunch—a schedule not unlike that of any other runner on the hamster wheel of the eight-hour workday. For most people I know, my office, a seven-by-seven-foot box on stilts, would be a prison cell or a catafalque. Over the years I’ve made some modest improvements to it in an effort to make it slightly more functional. With a straight length of pine limb and a square of plywood, I’ve fashioned a writing table wedged into one corner of the tower, just big enough to hold my typewriter. It allows me to write while standing; in this way I can type and look out at the same time—the extent of my multitasking. Along the east wall of the tower I’ve rebuilt a rudimentary cot, a body-sized slab of plywood perched on legs cut from an old corral post. Made up with a sleeping pad and a Forest Service bag, it offers ample comfort on which to read and allows me to look out merely by sitting up.

In quiet moments I devote my attentions to the local bird life. I listen for the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long clear note. Dark-eyed juncos hop along the ground, searching for seeds among the grass and pine litter. With no one calling on the radio, I swim languidly in the waters of solitude, unwilling to rouse myself to anything but the most basic of labors. Brush teeth. Piss in meadow. Boil water for coffee. Observe clouds. Note greening of Gambel oak. The goal, if I can be said to have one, becomes to attain that state where I’m completely in tune with cloud and light, a being of pure sensation. The cumulus build, the light shifts, and in an hour—or two—I’m looking at country made new.

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Over the Speed Limit

by Dennis Overbye

Once upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip.

Thanks to the Internet, the whole physics world was watching on Friday when Dario Autiero, of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon in France, in front of a palpably skeptical roomful of physicists, put a whole new category of speed demons on the table, namely the shadowy subatomic particles known as neutrinos. He was describing a recent experiment in which neutrinos were clocked going faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity back in 1905.

According to Dr. Autiero’s team, neutrinos emanating from a particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva, had raced to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy — a distance of 454 miles — about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 25 parts in a million.

“We cannot explain the observed effect in terms of systematic uncertainties,” Dr. Autiero told the physicists at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research. “Therefore, the measurement indicates a neutrino velocity higher than the speed of light.”

Dr. Autiero said his group had spent six months trying to explain away the result, but could not do it. Given the stakes for physics, he said, it would not be proper to attempt any sort of theoretical interpretation of the results. “We present to you this discrepancy or anomaly today,” he said.

The purported effect sounds slight, but to be even slightly on the wrong side of the speed of light is forbidden in the world that Einstein described. Faster-than-light travel can also lead to the possibility of time travel, something that most physicists do not believe is possible.

Relativity has been tested over and over again for a century, and as Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer, liked to say: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “This is quite a shake-up,” said Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN. “The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”

And the assembled CERN physicists were only too happy to oblige, diving in, after Samuel C. C. Ting, an M.I.T. Nobelist in the audience, offered his congratulations for work “very carefully done.” They asked detailed questions about, among other things, how the scientists had measured the distance from CERN to Gran Sasso to what is claimed to be an accuracy of 20 centimeters, extending GPS measurements underground. Had they, for example taken into account the location of the Moon and tidal bulges in the Earth’s crust?

The recent history of physics and astronomy is strewn with reports of suspicious data bumps that might be new particles or new planets and — if true — could change the way we think about the world, but then disappear with more data or critical scrutiny. Most physicists think the same will happen with this finding. The prevailing attitude was perhaps illustrated best by an XKCD cartoon, in which a character explains his intention to get rich betting against the new discovery.

Neutrinos are still a cosmic mystery. They are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Not only are they virtually invisible and able to sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door, but they are shape-shifters. They come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect Dr. Autiero and his colleagues were trying to observe.

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photo: CERN, via Associated Press

Issac Green and the Skalars

[ed. Maybe a bit easy on the coffee, guys?]

Henri Matisse, La Música (boceto), 1907
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Friday Book Club - This Boy's Life

by Joel Connaroe

Tobias Wolff's first stepfather was not exactly a model parent. An alcoholic sadist who humiliated his young charge and regularly beat him up, he also stole his money and shot his dog. As if that weren't enough, he tried to strangle the boy's mother. Not a very nice fellow, and were he to show up in a novel we'd probably say that he lacked credibility, that the author had overegged the custard.

Life, though, has a habit of outdoing even extremist fiction, and while Dwight is presented to us not so much warts and all as all warts, he nevertheless achieves a certain bizarre plausibility. And yet for all his oddness he is not even the most incredible of Mr. Wolff's relatives. That honor belongs to his actual father, as we know from ''The Duke of Deception,'' a cathartic memoir published 10 years ago by the author's older brother, Geoffrey. With his fake coat of arms and nonexistent degrees from Oxford and Yale, where he was - that is, wasn't - Skull and Bones, Duke Wolff was a Gatsby-like con artist of considerable charm who somehow managed, despite his failings, to gain not only the rage but also the love of his oldest son.
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Mr. Wolff's title plays variations on Philip Roth's ''My Life as a Man'' and on Edmund White's ''A Boy's Own Story,'' but where these products of inventive imaginations are fiction that resembles autobiography, ''This Boy's Life'' is apparently straight autobiography - the facts, attired in their exotic garments. The book, however, reads very much like a collection of short stories, each with its own beginning, middle and end. Lifted from their context, the individual chapters would be at home in the fiction pages of any good magazine.

And the tale itself? In 1955, when he was 10, Tobias and Rosemary, his mother, left Florida (having departed from Connecticut and the Duke some five years earlier) to get away from a man who was violent, a trait he shared with all the men in Rosemary's life, including her father, who beat her every day on the assumption that she must have done something wrong. The mother-son duo ends up in Chinook, Wash., a tiny village about three hours north of Seattle, where they settle into a domestic nightmare with the besotted Dwight and his three children. It is here that Tobias (who now calls himself Jack) gets an informal education in humiliation, betrayal and injustice, and learns how to fight, cheat, steal, gamble and, especially, lie. (He even plagiarizes his first confession to a priest, claiming as his own an acquaintance's minor transgressions.) This streetwise training in a hardscrabble world makes up the major part of the book.

His formal education, if it can be called that, is acquired at a place with the unpromising name of Concrete High School, an institution not calculated to make anyone forget Choate (brother Geoffrey's alma mater) or the Hill School, to which ''Jack'' - forging both his academic transcript and letters of recommendation - ultimately manages to get a scholarship, thus escaping Dwight's tyranny. What goes on in the Concrete classroom?

''Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, ''What is your favorite amendment?'' We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer - ''The Right to Bear Arms'' - except for a girl who answered ''Freedom of Speech.'' For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I.''

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The Movies in our Mind

From PhysOrg:

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one's own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people's dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers. "This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery," said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study to be published online Sept. 22 in the journal Current Biology. "We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

PICTURE: This set of paired images provided by Shinji Nishimoto of the University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 shows original video images, upper row, and those images reconstructed by computer from brain scans. While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.

More here.
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Tying the Knot

Wedding Invitation Design by Christina Moralego
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Glass Igloos

[ed. This seems strangely depressing.]

The Igloo Village in Kakslauttanen, Finland is like the Rolls-Royce of ice hotels. Each igloo is equipped with glass that allows you to gaze at the northern lights and millions of stars, all while relaxing comfortably in your warm room.

The glass igloo is a a marvel of modern technology, which is based on a groundbreaking idea and years of research and development. Built from special thermal glass, the view stays clear even when the temperature outside drops to under -30°C. Every igloo is equipped with a toilet and luxury beds and, every evening, a hot sauna and a refreshing ice hole await you.

In addition to the glass igloos, the resort features snow igloos, a snow restaurant, an ice gallery with ice sculptures, and a snow chapel for those we want to tie the knot. In total there are 20 glass igloos and 60 beds in the snow igloos, and the snow restaurant provides seating for 50-150 people. Igloo Village starts its season each year between December and January, depending on the weather conditions, and stays open until the end of April.

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Weekend

by A. O. Scott

The collapse of sexual taboos has caused some trouble for love, or at least for love stories. That sex often precedes emotional intimacy — or proceeds without it — is a fact of life that movies, with their deep and longstanding investment in romance, especially have a hard time dealing with. Contemporary sexual mores tend to be explored either with grim, punitive realism (as in Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” soon to play at the New York Film Festival) or with cute and careful wishful thinking.

Comedies like “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits” strain to adapt the ethics of the modern bedroom to tidy and traditional marriage plots (though not always with benefit of clergy). What starts as zipless lust winds up in a longing for commitment. The desires of the flesh rarely spare the heart.

You can’t really fault Hollywood, an empire built on fantasies of heterosexual happiness, for simplifying such complex matters. But there is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat.

“Weekend,” Andrew Haigh’s astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film. In its matter-of-fact, tightly focused observation of two young men who find their one-night stand growing into something more serious, the movie ranges over vast, often neglected regions of 21st-century life. It is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era, and also about the enduring mystery of sexual attraction and its consequences.

Shot in a little more than two weeks and taking place over a little more than two days, “Weekend” is also, even primarily, about the leisure-time activities of ordinary British young people, who go to clubs and children’s birthday parties, settle in to marriage or seek out casual sex, and unwind after work with beer, hashish and takeout curries.

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Facebook as Tastemaker

by Somini Sengupta and Ben Sisario

Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy.

The company announced new features here on Thursday that could unleash a torrent of updates about what you and your Facebook friends are doing online: Frank is watching “The Hangover,” Jane is listening to Jay-Z, Mark is running a race wearing Nike sneakers, and so forth. That in turn, Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope, will influence what Frank and Jane and Mark’s friends consume.

Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.

“We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who introduced the new features at the company’s annual conference for developers. He called what Facebook was doing an effort to “rethink some industries.”

Facebook’s moves sharpen the battle lines between the social networking giant and Google, the search giant, because Facebook is trying to change the way people find what they want online. Searching the Web is still the way most people discover content — whether it is news, information about wedding photographers or Swiss chard recipes. Facebook is trying to change that: in effect, friends will direct other friends to content. Google has its own social network product in Google+, but it is far behind Facebook.

“This is two big rivals getting into each others’ backyards,” said Sean Corcoran, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It changes the game for what social networks have been doing. What Facebook is saying is, we are your life online, and also how you discover and share.”

Facebook is not becoming a purveyor of media products, like Apple or Amazon.com. Rather, it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.
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For Facebook, the potential payoff is huge, especially as it seeks to make itself more valuable in advance of a possible public offering. A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. And everywhere on the site, users will be able to more precisely signal what they are reading, watching, hearing or eating. This will let Facebook reap even more valuable data than it does now about its users’ habits and desires, which in turn can be used to sell more fine-tuned advertising.

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photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Joyful Todays, K-On

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Doublethink

You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.  There certianly exist societies that lay claim to their own set of facts, independent of proof and unverifiable, but they are toxic when they exist in a democracy.  This is the real danger of the ideologue.  When I hear the “debate” surrounding climate change, I can’t but think of this, from Orwell’s 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Science has the advantage of being true whether you believe in it or not.

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The Waterboys

Land Grab

[ed.  I put a post up last April, titled The Great African Land Rush.  Given the systemic nature of this process it's hard not to conclude that corporations and governments are in active collusion to sever local land ownership rights on a massive scale, driving tens of thousands of people into poverty.  And, adding insult to injury, using these lands  for carbon credits to balance out pollution abuses elsewhere.  Sad.]

by John Vidal

Francis Longoli, a small farmer from Kiboga district of central Uganda, is tearful: "I remember my land, three acres of coffee, many trees – mangoes and avocados. I had five acres of bananas, 10 beehives, two beautiful permanent houses. My land gave me everything. People used to call me 'omataka' – someone who owns land. Now that is no more. I am one of the poorest now," he says.

Longoli and his family of six lost everything last year when, with three months notice, the Ugandan government evicted him and thousands of others from the Mubende and Kiboga districts to make way for the UK-based New Forests Company to plant trees, to earn carbon credits and ultimately to sell the timber.
Today, the village school in Kiboga is a New Forests Company headquarters. More than 20,000 people have been made homeless and Longoli rents a small house in Lubaali village. He says he cannot go back for fear of being attacked.

"I no longer own any land. It's impossible to feed my children – they have suffered so much. Some days all they eat is porridge from maize flour. When people can't eat well their bodies become weak – there have been lots of cases of malaria and diarrhoea. Some days we don't eat anything at all," says Longoli.

Christine, a farmer in her mid-40s, who lived in Kiboga district before the evictions, says: "All our plantations were cut down – we lost the banana and cassava. We lost everything we had. They won't let us back in to look for the things we left behind."

Land tenure in Uganda is frequently disputed, with the government handing out parcels and then trying to take it back. In this case, the land was originally a government forest reserve and some of the people evicted claim they were given deeds by the Idi Amin government because their families fought for Britain in the second world war. Others say they had bought the land legally.

Their land claims were being considered by the Ugandan courts when, they allege, the army and police forced them out in several waves of violent evictions which took place up to last year.

NFC – which is 20% owned by HSBC bank and describes itself as a sustainable and socially responsible forestry company – has licenses to grow trees in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Rwanda. It strongly denies allegations that they had any involvement in any Ugandan evictions or violence, and told Oxfam: "There were no incidences of injury, physical violence, or destruction of property during the voluntary vacation process that have been brought to the attention of NFC."

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