SEVEN DAYS:A glance at the week that was
Bob Marley’s songs are some of the most ubiquitous anthems ever written but most people aren’t all that familiar with the life of the man himself beyond the fact he died tragically young.
That should change with the release on Friday of the keenly anticipated documentary about his life, titled simply Marley.
Featuring interviews with the Jamaican legend’s family, friends and fellow Wailers, as well as never-before-seen footage and private photographs, the film took seven years to make. His son Ziggy Marley is one of the executive producers – he calls it “the most personal Bob film any one will ever see” – and this is the first documentary to get musical approval from his many children.
Alongside all that reggae is an examination of his complex life, including a difficult childhood (he didn’t really know his elderly white father), his Rastafarianism and his serial womanising – he had at least nine children to seven different mothers.
The long gestation of Marley was due to protracted legal problems. Martin Scorsese was originally slated to direct, but he dropped out and was replaced by Jonathan Demme. Both are Oscar-winning directors with a knack for musical documentaries. Another Oscar-winner, Scottish film-maker Kevin Macdonald, eventually took the reins. “It seemed very important to make this film now, while some of the people who had known Bob the best, in the early years in particular, were still around to tell the tale,” says Macdonald.
Davin O'Dwyer
The numbers
20
The percentage of 11- to 12-year-olds in Ireland who have reported hearing voices, according to the British Journal of Psychiatry
€10,000
The difference in fines Uefa levied against Manchester City (€30,000 for returning late to the pitch) and Porto (€20,000 for their fans' racist abuse of City players).
8.6
Magnitude of the earthquake that struck off the coast of Indonesia on Wednesday.
€1.9bn
The debt owed by Disneyland Paris, Europe's most popular tourist destination, which celebrated its 20th birthday on Thursday.
200m
The depth at which nine Peruvian miners were trapped for almost a week.
88
Percentage fall in US sales of Madonna’s album MDNA in its second week of release, from 379,000 copies to a mere 46,000, the largest such fall in music-business history.
The girls' world of Miss Universe
The Miss Universe competition might be a chauvinistic dinosaur of an event, but last week it made a pretty progressive change to its rules. From next year, transgender contestants will be allowed to enter the competition.
The issue arose last month when a Miss Universe Canada contestant Jenna Talackova (pictured) was disqualified because she was “not a naturally born female”, in the parlance of beauty pageants. LBGT campaigners such as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) protested Talackova’s disqualification, and after a few weeks of negotiations between the Miss Universe Organization, co-owned by Donald Trump, and GLAAD, Talackova was reinstated and the rule change was agreed. Now how long before a transgender contestant wins the thing?
We now know
The Springfieldon which the Simpsons' home town is based is in Oregon, according to the show's creator, Matt Groening (pictured).
The British government is considering building cables on the ocean floor to transmit Icelandic geothermal energy.
Drug-resistant malariais spreading across Thailand.
