“Look what I have done in this lifetime, with this body,” said Tina Turner, in a documentary released about her life in 2021. “I’m a girl from a cotton field, that pulled myself above what was not taught to me.”
Tina Turner‘s life was a story of trauma and triumph – she was the star known for her energetic stage performances and her incomparable soulful, husky voice, who overcame several personal and professional struggles to become the Queen of Rock ‘n Roll.
Following her death at the age of 83, tributes have been paid to a “legend”, an “icon” and a “remarkable force of nature,” from fellow music stars to the White House, with clips of her biggest hits – including Proud Mary, Nutbush City Limits, The Best, We Don’t Need Another Hero, and What’s Love Got To Do With It – flooding social media.
Throughout her career, Turner won a total of 12 Grammys and was a two-time inductee into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame, as a solo artist and as part of the duo she formed with ex-husband, Ike Turner, in the 1960s.
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Tina Turner sings The Best
She was the first woman to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and a record breaker – previously holding the Guinness World Record for the largest paying audience for a solo performer, attracting an audience of 180,000 for her show at the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1988.
And she also inspired an award-winning musical based on her incredible life – the story of the star who achieved stratospheric success, including sales of more than 100 million records worldwide, after overcoming years of abuse from both her father and ex-husband, and pushback from those who told her she could not make it as a solo star.
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Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, on 26 November 1939, to parents Zelma Priscilla and Floyd Richard Bullock. At the age of 11, she moved to live with her grandmother after her mother left her abusive relationship with her father.
Image: Tina with her abusive ex-husband and musical partner Ike Turner in 1966. Pic: AP
Aged 16, she joined her mother and sister Alline in the city of St Louis in Missouri, which is where she encountered her future husband for the first time.
She soon joined his band The Kings Of Rhythm as its first female member – and when she reimagined herself as Tina Turner in 1960, the group reformed to become the Ike And Tina Turner Revue.
That same year, Turner gave birth to their first child Ronnie and the couple wed in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962. Ronnie was her second child; her first, Craig Raymond Turner, was with the saxophonist for the Kings Of Rhythm, Raymond Hill.
Image: Turner’s famous legs were reportedly insured for millions. Pic: AP
The group produced a string of RnB hits, including A Fool In Love and It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, but it was the release of River Deep – Mountain High in 1966 that saw their popularity soar around the world. The release was followed by a UK tour with The Rolling Stones as the band’s support act.
Songs such as Come Together, Honky Tonk Woman and Proud Mary helped cement their status, with the latter winning them a Grammy in 1972.
But behind the scenes, Turner was enduring abuse at the hands of her husband.
She stayed with him until 1976, but later revealed she had attempted suicide during their relationship. “I simply couldn’t take any more,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir, of the moment she hit rock bottom.
Image: Flowers were left on her Hollywood Walk of Fame star following news of her death
During their divorce, she reportedly asked for nothing more than the right to keep the use of her stage name, and she went on to reinvent herself as a solo star.
It wasn’t easy, with a slow start for debut album Tina Turns The Country On! in 1974, followed by Acid Queen in 1975, but Turner pushed back against those who told her that, as a black woman approaching 40, she would never make the transition to rock.
Throughout the 1980s, she rebuilt her career, with a string of hits starting in 1983 with a cover of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together, and the 1984 release of her album Private Dancer. Her most recognisable song, a cover of The Best, was released in 1989. By then, her image of big hair and mini-skirts had become iconic, her famous legs becoming almost as famous as her distinctive voice.
In 1986, Turner was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. Her first induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame, for her work with Ike, came in 1991, though neither attended the ceremony. Her induction as a solo artist came some 30 years later, in 2021.
“If they’re still giving me awards at 81, I must have done something right,” she said in a recorded acceptance speech.
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Turner on recognition and achievements
She was inducted by Angela Bassett, the actress who portrayed Turner in the 1993 film What’s Love Got To Do With It. Both Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, who played Ike, were nominated for Oscars for their performances.
“Imagine, a black girl from Nutbush, Tennessee, who embodied more talent than her small town could have ever dreamed,” Bassett said at the Hall Of Fame ceremony. “Imagine that same girl breaking through every barrier to one day make history.
“People still tell me how much Tina has meant to them. I know exactly what they mean, because she has meant that much and more to me. I too am one of those people blessed by Tina’s remarkable gift to inspire.”
In the 1990s, Turner joined the list of Bond musicians, voicing the title song for Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye.
Image: Sir Mick Jagger and Turner at a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame performance in 1989
After a brief break from showbusiness, she returned to the limelight in 2008 at the Grammy Awards, where she performed Proud Mary alongside Beyonce. Other notable duets through her career included performing with David Bowie, and with The Rolling Stones during Live Aid in 1985.
In 2008, she embarked on her 50th-anniversary tour, and in 2016 she announced Tina – The Tina Turner Musical.
In 2021, she sold the rights to her back catalogue after reaching an agreement with BMG for an undisclosed sum, and the last of her 34 UK Top 40 hits was released in 2020, when she re-recorded What’s Love Got To Do With It with Norwegian DJ Kygo.
Image: Turner and her husband at the opening night of the Tina musical in April 2018
Turner’s solo works include 10 studio albums, two live albums, two soundtracks and five compilations, which together have sold more than 100 million records. As well as her music, Turner also starred in films including Tommy in 1975, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, and Last Action Hero in 1993.
In her personal life, she met music producer Erwin Bach in the 1980s and the pair married years later on the banks of Lake Zurich in Switzerland, where they lived. In 2013, Bach saved her life by donating her one of his kidneys, she revealed in her memoir in 2018.
She faced heartache that year, when her eldest son Craig died by suicide, and again in 2022 when her second son Ronnie died of cancer.
Image: Pic: AP
Known for her strength and resilience throughout her life, in an interview with the New York Times in 2019, she said: “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person. I had a terrible life. I just kept going.”
Turner always kept going.
And in what must have been one of her last interviews before she died, she told The Guardian exactly how she wanted to be remembered – as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. “A woman who showed other women that it is okay to strive for success on their own terms.”
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are preparing to launch a legal battle over COVID secrets, just hours before a deadline for handing over sensitive material to the official pandemic inquiry.
With the clock ticking towards the 4pm deadline, Baroness Hallett is demanding to see all government messages, which she claims are vital for the inquiry’s deliberations on COVID decisions.
She is said to have warned the government that failure to release material would amount to a criminal offence, a claim the government disputes and is therefore poised to launch a legal challenge.
The government argues that handing over all ministers’ messages to the inquiry – including those of Mr Johnson – would stop them communicating freely in future and that much of the material is irrelevant.
In a ruling last week, Baroness Hallett said: “The entire contents of the documents that are required to be produced are of potential relevance to the lines of investigation that I am pursuing.”
Image: Baroness Hallett
But the government’s opposition to handing over WhatsApp messages and diaries in full and the threat to launch a legal challenge was strongly backed by the former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.
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Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he accused Lady Hallett of “trying to be Agatha Christie” by turning the COVID inquiry into a “whodunnit” rather than “whatdunnit”.
Sir Iain said: “It’s completely unnecessary chasing individuals. They are on a fishing expedition and they should stop fishing. There is enough evidence out there to know what went wrong.”
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Mr Johnson has claimed publishing his diaries in full would be a breach of national security.
And the standoff now appears to be heading for the extraordinary spectacle of a legal battle between the government and the inquiry.
Mr Sunak and the former PM are expected to speak this week, for the first time since last year, about their approach to the COVID inquiry and also to discuss the former PM’s controversial resignation honours list.
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As a result, officers from the Metropolitan Police and the Thames Valley force are now considering whether meetings that took place with allies in Downing Street and at Chequers in May 2021 broke COVID rules.
The diary entries include Chequers visits by outgoing BBC chairman Richard Sharp, Mr Johnson’s cousin Sam Blyth, who loaned him £800,000, and Tory peer Lord Brownlow, who funded decorations to the Downing Street flat.
Another diary entry refers to a visit to Chequers by two friends of Carrie Johnson, though Mr Johnson’s spokesman has insisted that this event was “entirely lawful”.
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‘Leave Boris Johnson alone’
In an exclusive Sky News interview at Dulles Airport in the United States last Friday, a defiant Mr Johnson declared: “None of them constitute a breach of the rules during COVID. They weren’t during lockdown.
“They were during other periods of the restrictions. None of them constitute a breach of the rules. None of them involve socialising. It is total nonsense.”
Mr Johnson’s allies are also accusing Oliver Dowden, Cabinet Office minister, deputy prime minister and Mr Sunak’s closest ally, of sanctioning “a political stitch-up” to smear Mr Johnson and prolong the Privileges Committee inquiry.
It has been reported that Mr Johnson believes Mr Dowden “has form”, after helping to trigger his downfall last year with a dawn resignation as party chairman within hours of two disastrous by-election defeats for the Conservatives.
The former PM told Sky News: “I think it’s ridiculous that elements of my diary should be cherry-picked and handed over to the police, to the Privileges Committee, without even anybody having the basic common sense to ask me what these entries referred to.”
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‘Is Boris Johnson toast?’
Johnson allies have also demanded a leak inquiry to catch the “ratty rat” who disclosed that his diary entries had been passed to police, a reference to the so-called “chatty rat” who leaked a lockdown announcement in November 2020.
Despite the threat of a looming legal battle, a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said: “We are fully committed to our obligations to the COVID-19 inquiry.
“As such, extensive time and effort has gone into assisting the inquiry fulsomely over the last 11 months.
“We will continue to provide all relevant material to the inquiry, in line with the law, ahead of proceedings getting under way.”
The sun beats down on us. I’m sweating, and there is noise from every angle. Two marine engines thrum behind me, churning the water of the Mediterranean.
You can smell the salt, but also the plastic of our boat, warmed by the early afternoon. Cloudless skies. I can hear shouts, cries, and also words of thanks.
Ahead of us – painted in a rich blue – is a hopelessly dilapidated fishing boat that teems with people. Crowded on to the deck, peering out of every gap, perching from every vantage point.
The boat left the Libyan port of Tobruk packed with hundreds of people and has meandered its way towards Italy. A day or so ago, with the food and water running out, the captain left during the night, abandoning his passengers to an uncertain fate. None of them knew how to control the vessel, or how to navigate.
These are the passengers we are now rescuing. Mainly Egyptians, but with groups of Bangladeshis, Syrians and Pakistanis, among other nationalities. They clamber down from the fishing vessel and on to the RIB – the universally used acronym for a rigid inflatable boat.
My job is, basically, to get them to sit down and keep relatively still, so the boat doesn’t get unbalanced.
Some of these people are exultant, but most seem exhausted. A few are clearly very ill.
I help a woman who turns and simply faints in my arms. The medic on board, a Belgian nurse called Simon, gives her a quick look and assures me she’ll be fine. He’s right. She’s simply overwhelmed.
Image: A little boy is carried from the broken down fishing vessel onto the rib that will take them back to the Geo Barents
And now, almost out of nowhere, a middle-aged man in a discordantly warm jacket grabs me and kisses me on both cheeks. I can feel his stubble and hear him mumble “thank you”. I smile, and then ask him to sit down in the boat.
It’s filling up. Eventually, the leader of the boat team, an Argentinian man called Juan, will give the signal and we will back away and speed the passengers off to the looming presence of the Geo Barents, the 80m-long rescue ship run by the charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). In a few hours, it will look less like a ship and more like a floating refugee camp.
The Geo Barents was never meant to be doing things like this. It was built as an oceanographic survey vessel, which is why there are still huge reels of cable on one of the decks, along with a “seismic room”.
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But MSF wanted to hire a boat to launch rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the Geo Barents was available and fitted the bill. There is space for the two RIBs to be launched and doors that can be flung open to help the migrants clamber back in.
There is storage capacity for clothes, food, water, medical supplies, bedding and the hundred other things needed to keep people going.
And there is space, which is just as well. This is the 30th time the Geo Barents has gone to sea on behalf of MSF, and its previous record was when 440 people were rescued during mission number 25.
That record is in the process of being very comfortably broken – a total of 606 people will be taken from the fishing boat and brought over to the Geo Barents. Space, the precious commodity, will run out quickly.
The biggest area is given over to men, who make up most of the people who are rescued. Upstairs are the minors and also the relatively small number of women.
More than a hundred minors were rescued from the boat. Some are very small – I saw a tiny baby being brought on to a rescue boat, passed gingerly to its mother – and there are fearful toddlers, who cried on the boat and now sit on the Geo Barents, open-eyed and overwhelmed.
There is also a pregnant woman who was carefully helped on after her rescue. Once before, a baby has been born on the Geo Barents and there is a midwife onboard. Most of the children are here with a parent, or parents, and, as we complete one of the runs between wreck and rescue boat, a man asks me to take a photo of him and his small child. The man looks happy; the child stunned.
Food is given out once per day – a bag that contains emergency rations and meals that can be heated up by adding water and squeezing the packet.
Image: A young injured man is lifted on the Geo Barents
We meet Hamdi and Assad, Egyptians who met in Libya and have become close friends. They paint a desperate picture of what life was like on board the boat.
“I was worried about the boat within 30 minutes of getting on board. We all thought it would be bigger and safer than it was. When we left for the first time there were even more people on board – 750 perhaps – but the captain said that we would sink. So about 150 people got off, and then we left.”
He says there were problems with the engine, and then the ship – hopelessly ill-balanced due to overcrowding – was nearly knocked over by large waves. And then, amidst it all, the captain disappeared, having apparently abandoned his ship and its passengers by jumping on to another boat in the middle of the night.
Image: A member of MSF demonstrates how to prepare an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) ration
“We all thought we were going to die,” said Hamdi, and Assad nods alongside him. “We had no water, the only food we had left was rotting, people were ill because of the sun, or the cold, or the sea water, or being crammed together, and nobody knew how to steer the boat. I was sure we would die.” He smiles at me. “So now I feel I have been given another life.”
He says the passengers did not know what was going on when they were first approached by a boat. They thought it might be kidnappers or pirates. In fact, it was the Italian coastguard, who assessed the situation, saw that it was grim but salvageable, and called the nearby Geo Barents to ask it to take all the passengers off the stricken fishing boat.
Things are not always so harmonious between the boat and the authorities. The Geo Barents, along with other charity rescue boats, has been criticised by Italy’s government, which claims that it encourages migrants to try to cross the Mediterranean, knowing that there will be a boat to help them along the way.
Image: Three people demonstrate how they had to sit for days in the fishing vessel
The reality is that the Mediterranean passage is the most dangerous migrant route in the world, with around 1,000 deaths already this year. But the political debate around migration is as fierce in Italy as it is in many other European countries. In Britain, the focus of migration policy is on small boats; in Italy, ministers talk of big ships, like the Geo Barents.
Those on board shrug off the criticism, pointing out that the coastguard rescues a lot more migrants than they do. But the tension is also clear – earlier this year, the Geo Barents was confined to harbour and fined after officials noted what they said was an administrative error. MSF suspects its work is being deliberately disrupted.
Out at sea, the last migrants are off the fishing boat. The logistical challenge of caring for them is enormous – food, water, bedding, toilets, shelter, clothes, toiletries and medical treatment are all offered. Everywhere you look, there are people sleeping, talking, laughing and eating all within a few square feet. The sense of relief over their rescue does not seem to have dissipated.
And so we set off back towards Italy, to drop off these 606 people and put them into the hands of the Italian authorities. The Geo Barents will be cleaned and loaded with new supplies, and then it will head back out to sea. A beacon of humanitarian goodwill in the minds of some, a magnet of controversy in the opinion of others.
New anti-gay legislation that could mean the death penalty in some cases has been signed into law in Uganda, amid outcry by LGBT charities.
The version of the bill signed by President Yoweri Museveni doesn’t criminalise those who identify as LGBTQ, which had been a key concern for campaigners who condemned an earlier draft of the legislation as an egregious attack on human rights.
But the new law still prescribes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” which is defined as cases of sexual relations involving people infected with HIV as well as with minors and other categories of vulnerable people.
A suspect convicted of “attempted aggravated homosexuality” can be imprisoned for up to 14 years, according to the legislation.
Parliamentary Speaker Anita Among said in a statement that the president had “answered the cries of our people” in signing the bill.
“With a lot of humility, I thank my colleagues the members of parliament for withstanding all the pressure from bullies and doomsday conspiracy theorists in the interest of our country,” the statement said.
Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda and the country has some of the strictest punishments. It is one of more than 30 African countries where it is criminalised.
The US has warned of economic consequences over legislation described by Amnesty International as “draconian and overly broad”.
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The leaders of the UN AIDS program, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund in a joint statement Monday said they “are deeply concerned about the harmful impact” of the legislation on public health and the HIV response.
“Uganda’s progress on its HIV response is now in grave jeopardy,” the statement said.