news – Page 4 of 11 – The Orbital

Student Union Elections: Communication, Collaboration, and Joyful Surprise!

29Mar

By Madelaine GrayNo Comments

Elections, Features, News

Student Union Elections: Communication, Collaboration, and Joyful Surprise!

On Wednesday the Sixteenth of March, Orbital Magazine attended the SU Election results night to interview some of the lucky elected officers, including NUS Delegates, School Reps, and the 2022/23 Sabbatical Officer team. NUS Delegates – Maia Jarvis, Ananya Krishna Madelaine: Well, congrats to both of you! First off, I’d like to ask what your main priority is going into the NUS conference? Maia: So, I actually submitted a proposal to the NUS National Conference, which is about making education more accessible. So, making sure there’s flexible online learning. I’ll be pushing that agenda and making sure that’s on the national stage for education, because I want to make sure Holloway student concerns are on the national stage. Madelaine: What about you, Ananya? Ananya: I t...

21Mar

By Accalia SmithNo Comments

Features, News, Opinion

One More UCU Strike…

How effective is the Strike action in creating the change it seeks? An Interview with James Smith The end of March will see the disappearance of professors from classrooms once again. Not because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but because of industrial strike action from the UCU (University and College Union). As a third-year student my university experience has been impacted by both the strikes and COVID resulting in an unexpected minimal amount of time spent on campus. In my first year there were extensive strikes which some students joined in on. Then COVID struck in March, disrupting the entirety of that year. Now, we are partly back to campus with both covid and strikes interrupting simultaneously. Professor James Smith, the UCU representative within the English department here at...

1942 Recipe: Eggless Sago Pudding – Vintage Cooking (The Student Version)

4Mar

By Leah EdwardsNo Comments

Lifestyle

1942 Recipe: Eggless Sago Pudding – Vintage Cooking (The Student Version)

Women’s magazines from the 1940s are riddled with wartime propaganda. Whilst their husbands, brothers and fathers were fighting overseas, women learnt to effectively hold down the household under wartime restrictions. This isn’t to say that women of the 1940s were exclusively homemakers; there are plenty of ads in the February 1942 issue of Woman that suggest otherwise. There’s even an old Tampax advert with the slogan “Women are winning the war of freedom”, with a picture of a woman in full uniform at work on an army tank. Some other ads shouted about the importance of friendly consumerism of household items. An advert for Parozone (a solution that sterilized clothes in cold water) has the bold slogan, “SAVE FUEL”, a subject Ruth Morgan talked about in her section, dubbed, ‘BARG...

Repeating History? | ‘Munich’ and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

27Feb

By Accalia SmithNo Comments

News, Opinion

Repeating History? | ‘Munich’ and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Netflix recently released 'Munich: The Edge of War', a film adaptation of Robert Harris's book. It centres around the Munich agreement, Chamberlain’s attempt to ensure peace in Europe via the negotiation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. With Vladimir Putin’s Russia waging war on Ukraine, reading this book felt very apt for me, and terrifying. Looking up from the pages to hearing the news at the moment felt like I hadn't left the world of the book at all. Europe is facing one of the largest attacks since World War Two, leading to many people referring to the current events as the prelude to world war three. This is not the first recent Russian threat to Ukraine, but it is it’s most unjustified, violent and daring. Missiles and helicopter attacks began on Thursday resulting in...

31Jan

By Madelaine GrayNo Comments

News, Opinion

A Litany of Insults

Why women never seem to win in the world of casual sex. Modern society has undeniably done a lot for the rights of the ‘fairer sex’. The right to vote, first and foremost. The right to own property. The right to open a bank account, to work outside the home, to enter any career we may choose. And of course, the sexual revolution went some way to reducing stigma around premarital sex, decentring the myth of virginal purity. With that came the right to choose – in the form of access to birth control, as well as freedom to terminate unwanted (or unviable) pregnancies. Despite all of this, it is clear to many that in contemporary sexual culture, the odds are still strictly not in our favour. There is a litany of insults directed at women, and the way they choose to navigate the world...

“One More Strike and He’s Out”- Boris Johnson in Trouble

30Jan

By Josh SebonNo Comments

News, Opinion

“One More Strike and He’s Out”- Boris Johnson in Trouble

On 16/12/2021, the Liberal Democrats handed the Conservatives a significant by-election defeat in North Shropshire, halving the conservative vote from 63% in 2019 to just 31% in 2021. This result is not only significant due to the extent of the swing, but because the seat was the 58th (out of 361) safest seat for the Conservatives. It has elected Tories since its conception in 1983 without fail, with an ever-increasing victory margin year on year over the past decade. The Conservative Party chairman didn’t hold back on why his Party had been dealt such a blow, deeming the by-election “a referendum on the Prime Minister’s performance” and stating, “one more strike and he’s out.” There is no secret as to why a referendum on Johnson’s performance has reflected badly on him. 2021 ...

Covid does not discriminate. Rich or poor, you are exposed to the virus.

30Jan

By Elena-Teodora ChiujdeaNo Comments

News, Opinion

Covid does not discriminate. Rich or poor, you are exposed to the virus.

The Covid pandemic started over two years ago. The highly infectious virus ingrained a fear in society that has never been seen before. Places known for their busy streets and tourism turned into ghost towns. Australia is one of the only countries where Covid could not settle its claws amongst citizens, with barely five confirmed cases since March 2020. So, Australia handled the pandemic well, right? Wrong. The praises from all over the world about their good strategies went to their heads. Once the Omicron variant came around, the government freed the Australian population — restrictions be damned. Cases rose quickly during the holidays, but the health care system was over its head. A Covid wave was alien to them. Omicron is supposedly a milder version everyone will get at some point, so...

7Dec

By Bridget OSullivanNo Comments

Features, News, Opinion

ERICA OSAKWE: ‘I CHANGED THE LAW’

Trigger Warning: the following deals with themes of domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is defined across government as any incident of coercive, threatening or controlling behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 and over who are or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of their gender or sexuality. It wasn’t until Summer 2021 that the Domestic Abuse Act was introduced, creating the first ever statutory definition of domestic abuse in Britain. The bill was rushed through in response to increasing domestic violence reports since the onset of Coronavirus. In other words, it took a pandemic for British politics to formalise its definition of domestic abuse in law. This lack of consolidation only serves to feed the tragic reality that one in ten offences ...

The legality debate on abortion; a new age of misogyny

22Nov

By Ilayda KaplankiranNo Comments

News

The legality debate on abortion; a new age of misogyny

Following on from the enforcement of the Senate Bill 8, on 1st September, women across the nation have been standing up and fighting for their reproductive freedom. A Texas statute that completely dismisses a woman’s fundamental right to decide on matters concerning her body, eliminates the option of terminating a pregnancy that is over six weeks. In many ways then, the Texas law is enacting a near-total ban on abortion, since most women don’t even know that they are pregnant during this timeframe. While it arguably bans abortions after the detection of a foetal heartbeat, medical experts have denounced this term as inaccurate; at six weeks of gestation there is neither a foetus nor a heartbeat. As a result of this widely accepted reform, there have been growing concerns and dangers r...

22Nov

By Beth McCowenNo Comments

Features, News

An Update on the Kyle Rittenhouse Case

In August 2020, Black Lives Matter protests began after Wisconsin police shot Jacob Blake, a black man, seven times in the back. On the third night of the protests Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Illinois, shot at three men using a semi-automatic rifle. Two of them were killed, and the third was left seriously injured. Clearly, this act of murder was motivated by white-supremacy and vigilantism, again highlighting the racism problem in America, which so many continue to deny the existence of. Rittenhouse claimed that his intention was to protect property. Whilst patrolling the area, he was pursued by a group of protestors and shot one of them. Following this, he is further followed and identified as ‘the shooter’. He then fires bullets at three people who approached him. During...