Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.New research suggests that Marco Polo, supposedly the first western chronicler of the Far East, actually never went there. That dramatic first-person story of how he became an envoy of the Mongolian Emperor Kublai Khan, roving on dangerous missions through Burma, Cochin-China and southern India? All cobblers, according to Professor Daniele Petrella of the University of Naples, who suggests that Polo never went further than the Black Sea, in whose ports he met people who'd been out east. No doubt underthe guise of the innocent inquiry, "Been anywhere nice on your holidays, then?" he appropriated their accounts, but made mistakes. For example, Polo's description of the Mongol fleet mentions ships with five masts, but Professor Petrella's excavations in Japan show they had only three. I suppose someacademic will soon be telling us that Marco Polo never even invented Polo Mints.
* According to Selfridges, many of the record number of foreign visitors to London this summer have their minds set on Christmas – which could be why they keep stepping in front of my bike on Oxford Street. Accordingly, the store has just opened its Christmas shop, several weeks earlier than usual. (They usually wait until the more traditional "Christmassy" time of late August.) "Christmas comes earlier every year," says Geraldine James, the store'sbuying manager, but surely there is a limit to this trend. I mean if you began preparing for the one after next on 24 December this year, you might look suspiciously like someone starting late for Christmas 2011 rather than early for 2012. To confront this problem, Selfridges are thinking of offering "a capsule Christmas collection" throughout the year. Would that include cyanide capsules, I wonder, for those of us less keen on the festivities?
* Mr Gary Wetson was told he couldn't carry a four-by-four-foot abstract painting he had just bought at a village outside Stroud on to a bus. "The driver looked at it and told me it was a health and safety hazard." A spokesman for the bus operator, Stagecoach, has admitted the driver was wrong. Indeed how many people have been killed by an abstract painting? Or even slightly injured? But a painting of a broken bottle or a pair of scissors... Now that's a different matter.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments