Exploding phones and Snapchat clones: the biggest tech letdowns of 2016

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This article titled “Exploding phones and Snapchat clones: the biggest tech letdowns of 2016” was written by Samuel Gibbs, for theguardian.com on Friday 30th December 2016 07.00 UTC

While there were some good things in technology released this year, there were also quite a few let downs. From detonating devices to damp squibs, these are the biggest let downs of 2016.

LG G5 and modular smartphones

Modular smartphones such as the LG G5 held so much promise and didn’t deliver. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

The LG G5 promised so much, but delivered little. As a smartphone, it is a decent if not spectacular entry, with dual cameras on the back and solid specifications. But it was the slot in the bottom of the smartphone that got the hype cycle churning.

It was the first modular smartphone from a big-name brand. The G5’s chin and battery could be swapped for fresh cells, a set of speakers, a camera control and extended battery grip and a few other so-called Friends.

The trouble was the “friends” were few and far between and those that actually arrived weren’t that great. On paper it was great, in practice it didn’t work. But the G5 wasn’t the only modular smartphone to fail last year, Google also pulled the plug on its Project Ara modular phone while Lenovo’s Motorola released the Moto Z with add-ons that slightly more elegantly magnetically attached to the back. Whether anyone bought the add-ons though remains to be seen.

Apple MacBook Pro

The 13in MacBook Pro with its new Touch Bar at the top. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

After four years of waiting for anything more meaningful than a specification bump, the new 2016 13in MacBook Pro arrived. It was thinner, lighter, had a better screen and was slightly more powerful than the last one released in 2015. It had a new-fangled “Touch Bar” instead of traditional F and control keys. It even had Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner, a headphones port and a starting £1,749 price tag.

What it didn’t have were any data ports other than USB-C – no traditional USB, no ethernet, no Mini DisplayPort, no HDMI or even a MagSafe power connector. There were four USB-C ports ready to accept a plethora of dongles. Any of them could also be used for power, which is a good thing as the battery life was pretty poor.

It’s certainly beautiful, but after four years in the making, style without substance didn’t cut it for even some die-hard Apple Mac fans.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

The Galaxy Note 7 started well but ended up a hot potato. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

Life for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 started so promisingly. It was a cutting-edge device, worked brilliantly, garnered praise from all sides and even had an iris scanner – one of the first smartphones to do so. It was predicted to sell in the millions, to propel Samsung to even higher heights and cement the South Korean brand’s lead in big-screened smartphones.

That was until one exploded. Then another and another. A halt to sales was called for safety concerns around the battery. It was pulled from shelves and the UK launch was cancelled.

A fix was applied and the offending batteries taken out before being relaunched. The problem was that the replacement Note 7s started catching fire too. The numbers were small, but the risk was great. Eventually Samsung pulled the plug and terminated the Note 7. Even still some users refused to give up the phone. Samsung was forced to hobble it before rendering it inoperative with a software update.

There the sad tale of the Note 7 ended. Pushing boundaries in design and technology can win you plaudits and sales, but Samsung pushed too far this time.

PlayStation VR

PSVR costs about £350 and works using a PS4, not a £1,000+ PC. Photograph: Chesnot/Getty Images

It was heralded as the best VR for normal people. PlayStation VR promised to bring great virtual reality experiences only possible on a desktop-class system but without the need for a £1,000 PC to run it.

The trouble was that it lacked the best-in-class controllers that really made VR in 2016. It was cheap and provided a cheap experience. And a cheap VR experience just didn’t cut it. Whether that will be enough to see it go mainstream in 2017 remains to be seen, but it certainly wasn’t the rip-roaring success many hoped it would be.

Apple iPhone 7

The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus dropped the headphone socket, but with it, battery life and design innovation too. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

The highly anticipated 2016 edition of Apple’s flagship smartphone, the iPhone 7, was meant to set the world alight. It was waterproof, had a much better camera and its Plus edition even had two cameras on the back. The physical home button was gone, instead using force touch and so was the headphone socket. But what the iPhone 7 will be remembered for will be its terrible battery life. Less is certainly not more when it comes to how long it lasts in a day, and constantly having to hunt for a charger gets old really quickly. Especially when you can’t even listen to a wired set of headphones and charge it at the same time.

Facebook Snapchat clones

This is what Facebook wants so badly. Photograph: Alex Hern for the Guardian

Snapchat. It’s an app. You share pictures with it, draw stupid things and can even discover news on it. It’s biggest asset is a younger audience than most other services, the untapped market so many are after, including Facebook, which keeps trying to clone it after failing in its attempt to buy it.

Facebook has tried to clone Snapchat, copying features and launching apps not once, not twice, not even three times. 2016 saw Facebook try to clone Snapchat for the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth time.

It’s getting old. Maybe Facebook should direct some of that engineering talent to working on more pressing matters.

Dyson Supersonic

The Dyson Supersonic didn’t blow enough hot air. Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian

The Dyson Supersonic took the humble hairdryer and infused it with the vacuum-firms technology. A high speed fan in the handle for weight distribution, it’s trademark air multiplier head to blast air in your face, magnetically attaching nozzles and a round of digital buttons for controlling temperature and air speed. It looked like the hairdryer finally dragged kicking and screaming into the gadget age.

Sadly in group tests up against hairdryers half the Supersonic’s price it was found to be a lot of hot air. Attach a nozzle and all that fancy airflow dropped to a level “akin to blowing through a drinking straw”.

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Airline passenger details easy prey for hackers, say researchers

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This article titled “Airline passenger details easy prey for hackers, say researchers” was written by Alex Hern in Hamburg, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 28th December 2016 12.47 UTC

The worldwide system used to coordinate travel bookings between airlines, travel agents, and price comparison websites is hopelessly insecure, according to researchers.

The lack of modern security features, both in the design of the system itself and of the many sites and services that control access to it, makes it easy for an attacker to harvest personal information from bookings, steal flights by altering ticketing details, or earn millions of air miles by attaching new frequent-flyer numbers to pre-booked flights, according to German security firm SR Labs.

Known as Global Distribution Systems (GDS), the technology dates back to the 1960s, when one of the first companies in the field, Sabre, was founded. To most travellers, the technology is most obviously associated with the six-character Passenger Name Record (PNR) frequently used to enable online check-in and ticket retrieval.

The PNR system was also the route for many of the weaknesses demonstrated by Karsten Nohl and Nemanja Nikodijevic, the researchers who revealed the flaws at this year’s Chaos Communication Congress hacker convention in Hamburg. While it was presented at a hacker convention, “much less hacking was actually needed to exploit” the booking system, Nohl said.

Related: Eight things you need to do right now to protect yourself online

At the core of many of the weaknesses was the standard use of just two pieces of information to authenticate a booking: the six-character PNR, combined with the user’s last name.

“If the PNR is supposed to be a secure password, then it should be treated like one,” Nohl said. “But they don’t keep it secret: it is printed on every piece of luggage. It used to be printed on boarding passes, until it disappeared and they replaced it with a barcode.”

However, the barcode is also easy to read using a number of apps, meaning many of the 80,000 travellers who have posted pictures on the #boardingpass tag on Instagram are at risk of information theft, as Nikodijevic demonstrated.

“This is supposed to be the only way of authenticating users,” Nohl said, “and it’s printed on pieces of paper you just throw away at the end of the journey.”

A bigger problem for most users, though, is that the six-character code is easy to guess. Each GDS provider (there are several, but the biggest two are Sabre, founded in 1960, and Amadeus, founded in 1987) uses a different system for generating them, but all have multiple problems that make them weaker than a simple six-character password.

For instance, some providers iterate the first two characters sequentially, meaning all the PNRs generated in one day will have the same opening characters. Others reserve some codes for specific airlines, again narrowing the range of guesses an attacker has to make.

Many of the portals into the GDS system also have minimal security features – or at least had minimal security features until Kohl and Nikodijevic notified them.

Some websites that have access to the system and allow you to use your PNR and last name to check the status of your flight offer no defences at all against an attacker guessing thousands of combinations a minute. The researchers were able to access multiple records. Looking for bookings under the name “Smith”, for example, and using a thousand randomly generated booking codes, five came back with active bookings.

Attackers could use that access to cancel a flight in exchange for airline credit and then use that to book new tickets. Or they could add your frequent flyer number to hundreds of flights and chalk up the air miles.

Even more damage could be done with the information contained in the booking. There is enough personal and flight data in them to craft convincing phishing emails purporting to report problems with the flights or bookings.

The PNR weaknesses are just scratching the surface of the problems with the GDS in general, the researchers said: there appears to be no good logging for who has accessed data and why, and access controls in general are almost non-existent, allowing anyone from any company involved in your booking to see the whole thing.

One saving grace, they said, was that the whole system might end up being rewritten anyway. As the “Smith” example shows, the namespace for booking codes is slowly filling up. Simply running out of characters for new bookings could force a rewrite of the system long before security fears do.

If not, Nohl suggested that a rise in cybercrime could do the same job. “Airlines sometimes notice this, but only when it becomes excessive,” he said. “I just hope it becomes so excessive that it can’t be ignored so that it gets fixed, because then the privacy issues get fixed as well. Privacy is never enough on its own.”

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The most exciting thrillers and horror movies of 2017

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This article titled “The most exciting thrillers and horror movies of 2017” was written by Catherine Shoard, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 28th December 2016 08.00 UTC

Baby Driver

Edgar Wright’s latest is a departure in many ways: his first film to shoot in the US, his first non-com – and we don’t see Simon Pegg or Nick Frost listed anywhere in the credits. Instead, Ansel Elgort plays a near-mute, tinnitus-suffering getaway driver who uses his headphones to drown out the ringing, and jobs for a mob boss to pay for petrol. Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm co-star.

The Coldest City

Charlize Theron, James McAvoy and inevitably, Toby Jones, are spies in Berlin around the time of the fall of the wall in this chilly-looking adaptation of the Antony Johnston nailbiter. Eddie Marsan and John Goodman pop up as support.

The Commuter

AKA Taken on a Train. This Liam Neeson vehicle is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who was onboard for Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), and Run All Night (2015) – and also for possibly the best work of Neeson’s co-star Vera Farmiga, genius horror Orphan (2009). Neeson plays an insurance salesman who must suddenly employ a very special set of skills to uncover the identity of a mysterious stranger on his train before the final stop – lest everyone onboard dies. Sam Neill, Elizabeth McGovern, Patrick Wilson and Florence Pugh are among the possible red herrings.

A Cure for Wellness

Dane DeHaan takes an enforced break at Celia Imrie’s creepy spa (head doctor: Jason Isaacs). The trailer for Gore Verbinski’s latest promises a smorgasbord of shocks.

Flatliners

Mr Robot director Niels Arden Oplev takes the reins on this remake of the 1990 medical student classic, this time round starring Ellen Page and Diego Luna – plus original lead Kiefer Sutherland, this time as a sinister doc.

It

For six years Cary Fukunaga worked on this adaptation of the Stephen King child-killing clown horror; he’s still on board but Andrés Muschietti, the Argentine film-maker behind genuinely spooky Mama is directing. Bill (son of Stellan) Skarsgård is Pennywise, Jaeden Lieberher (the kid from St Vincent and Midnight Special) Bill Denbrough.

The Mummy

The Mummy trailer: watch Tom Cruise die in monster reboot – video

The sound-effects-free trailer for this Tom Cruise adventure has already given it a shot of publicity even the official trailer couldn’t manage. The first in Universal’s new monsters universe movies, this stars Cruise as an explorer who comes back to life after a plane crash, plus Russell Crowe as friendly physician Dr Henry Jekyll.

Red Sparrow

Jennifer Lawrence teams up with Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence once more for this story of “a sexy Russian spy who falls for a CIA officer and considers becoming a double agent”. We’re guessing Lawrence is the erotic Ruskie and Joel Egerton the Yank. But we’d almost prefer it if it were co-stars Jeremy Irons or Matthias Schoenaerts.

The Siege

Following the wobble of Assassin’s Creed, Justin Kurzel returns with the real-life story of a team of the Pakistani militants Lashkar-e-Taiba who killed 31 people in a terrorist attack at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai in 2008. The involvement of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard (who have starred in his last two films) has not yet been confirmed.

Suburbicon

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote this mystery soon after the release of Blood Simple. Why it’s taken 31 years to hit the big screen, and with George Clooney directing rather than them, we’re not sure. But still, this looks very promising – a 50s-set suburban crime thriller about a picture-perfect family who employ brutal revenge after a burglary turns fatal. Coen regulars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Josh Brolin and Oscar Isaac star.

War for the Planet of the Apes

The most brutal-looking monkey movie ever promo’d, Matt Reeves’s follow-up to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes sees the return of Andy Serkis’s Caesar, this time facing off in an epic battle against a vicious colonel, played by Woody Harrelson.

Under the Silver Lake

David Robert Mitchell follows acclaimed horror It Follows with a contemporary LA noir about the kidnapping of a billionaire’s daughter. Andrew Garfield stars, with Jimmi Simpson (House of Cards), Riley Keough (American Honey), Topher Grace and Girls’ Zosia Mamet on back-up.

Wind River

Shortly to premiere at Sundance, Taylor Sheridan (who wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water) directs the story of an FBI agent who teams up with a local game tracker to investigate a killing at a Native American reservation. Avengers co-stars Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner star; support includes Jon Bernthal.

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Will 2017 be the year virtual reality gets real?

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This article titled “Will 2017 be the year virtual reality gets real?” was written by Alex Hern, for theguardian.com on Tuesday 27th December 2016 07.00 UTC

Virtual Reality is … well, real. The last year has seen the launch of every major VR platform, from high-quality tethered systems like HTC’s Vive and Facebook’s Oculus Rift, through to cheap-and-cheerful smartphone-based platforms like Google’s Daydream and Samsung’s Gear VR.

The early adopters have bought in, the launch games have been launched, and now that the initial flurry of excitement has died down, the more pressing questions are left: how will the platforms evolve? What will you actually be able to do with them? And is VR just a stepping stone anyway, to the even more science-fiction future of augmented reality tech?

At its inception, VR is unquestionably a gaming technology first and foremost. The most expensive and technologically advanced systems have an almost total focus on serving the hardcore gamer market. Even the simpler systems, which lack the pixel-pushing power necessary to satisfy modern players, still end up with a preponderance of games and game-like projects, because that’s what’s easiest to build with the tools available.

So the number one priority for the titans of VR is to carry on winning round game developers and players to prevent the juggernaut from stalling. But if the experiences of the first wave of early adopters is anything to go by, that could prove trickier than it seems.

Right now, the pressures of AAA games seem inimical to those of VR. Games for the hardcore niche of the market are often designed and sold around having durations in the hundreds of hours, with an individual gaming session often lasting three to four hours. In VR, as the devices work today, such heavy use becomes physically punishing: painful for the eyes, face, head and neck, as well as emphatically warned against by the manufacturers.

So instead, many of the highest profile games at launch are designed for quick, powerful experiences. CCP’s Eve Valkyrie and Guerrilla’s RIGS both pack intense multiplayer battles into matches lasting at most five minutes, Rebellion’s Battlezone does the same with single-player tank battles, and even more story focused games like Gunfire’s Chronos and Insomniac’s Edge of Nowhere make it fairly easy to jump in and out of the game.

In the absence of the life-consuming behemoths which constitute gaming for a large number of fans, VR development has instead been colonised by quirkier games, often made by smaller studios with lower budgets who can survive by selling games at a cut price to the comparatively small install base of VR devices.

Google unveils its Daydream VR headset Photograph: Ramin Talaie/Getty Images

Even those studios are betting on VR growing, though. Dean Hall, the chief executive of indie studio RocketWerkz, wrote that his company’s game, Out of Ammo, “has exceeded our sales predictions and achieved our internal objectives”.

“However, it has been very unprofitable. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be profitable. We are comfortable with this, and approached it as such. We expected to lose money and we had the funding internally to handle this. Consider then that Out of Ammo has sold unusually well compared to many other VR games.”

Currently, platform owners are subsidising much of the development for VR, in exchange for making those games platform exclusives. But those owners will also need to make money at some point; they’re just capable of playing a longer game than an independent developer.

In that long term, VR needs to be more than an accessory for better games. Back in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg targeted an install base of 50m to 100m Oculus headsets in the device’s first decade. At the top end, that’s equal to the total sales of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One combined, for a device which currently needs a PC to run it that costs more than a PS4 and Xbox One combined.

Of course, Zuckerberg isn’t interested in owning a gaming company, even a successful one. He bought Oculus with the stated intention of offering far more than just better video games. “Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting on goggles in your home,” he wrote in the post announcing the company’s acquisition.

Perhaps tellingly, in the years since, Zuckerberg has spent far more time focusing on Oculus’ smaller, more accessible product, the Gear VR, than on the weighty, tethered Rift headset. At the Mobile World Congress conference in February, attendees were handed one to try, causing them to miss the smiling executive strolling past them on his way to the stage.

Last week, Facebook announced it would split Oculus into two divisions, one focusing on PC-based VR, and the other on mobile. It’s clear on which Zuckerberg is staking the future of computing, and it’s not the tethered division which current Oculus CEO Brendan Irbe will be heading up.

If VR is going to become the next major computing platform, pushing mobile phones aside the way they left desktop PCs lagging in their wake, 2017 will be the crunch point: platforms like Google’s Daydream, and whatever Oculus offers as the follow-up to Gear VR, need to arrive with the same pop that tethered VR entered in the past year. More, they need a compelling reason for those who don’t care about gaming to buy in, be that experiences like 360-degree video, or social platforms like those Facebook wants to build.

If they don’t, they could find themselves obsolete before they even hit the mainstream, thanks to the new technologies peeking over the horizon. If VR doesn’t charm, could AR succeed where it failed?

AR devices, like Microsoft’s Hololens and vaporware start-up Magic Leap’s prototypes, allows virtual images to be imprinted over the real world. It’s not cheap – the developer preview of the Hololens retails for almost £3,000 – but it fixes a number of issues which hold VR back when it comes to everyday practicality. Hololens users can still interact with the real world, with their colleagues and companions, rather than locking themselves away in a virtual space. That interaction makes it much more appealing to imagine using Hololens as a general-purpose computing system, fitting in alongside your current life.

Or maybe neither will actually take off in the foreseeable future. For the first time in well over a decade, technology companies worldwide are looking at the end of one hyperbolic growth curve – that of smartphones – with nothing obvious to pick up where it died off. They may have a lot of interest in convincing their shareholders that something is the next big thing, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe them. After all, we live in reality.

• If the future of video games is VR, it needs to stop making us feel sick

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Facebook safety check helped spread false reports of Thailand explosion

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This article titled “Facebook safety check helped spread false reports of Thailand explosion” was written by Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 28th December 2016 00.49 UTC

A Facebook safety check for Bangkok, which the company claimed was prompted by a one-man protest near the prime minister’s office, helped spread a fake news report of an explosion in the city.

The incident is the latest example of the social media platform’s algorithms failing to distinguish between reliable and faulty news sources.

Related: Fake news: an insidious trend that’s fast becoming a global problem

Facebook’s safety check tool, which allows users to mark themselves safe in the event of a disaster or crisis, was activated in Bangkok on 26 December, citing “media sources” as confirmation of an explosion.

A Facebook spokesperson subsequently shared local media reports of a man protesting on a roof, throwing “ping pong bombs” or “giant firecrackers” in the direction of Government House, where the prime minister works. No one was injured, according to the Bangkok Post.

Facebook’s activation of the feature sowed confusion, however, because the platform also promoted a link to a false news report of a major “explosion”.

A screenshot of the feature shared by local journalist Saksith Saiyasombut shows that Facebook promoted a 26 December article by BangkokInformer.com in conjunction with the safety check.

That article consisted of a link to 17 August 2015 BBC video about the bombing of the Erawan Shrine, according to a copy of the article preserved by the Internet Archive.

The “source” of the @Facebook Safety Check for Bangkok: A fake news site that scrapped stuff from elsewhere…! pic.twitter.com/i6Q2k8XBxP

— Saksith Saiyasombut (@SaksithCNA) December 27, 2016

“No, there was not a massive explosion Bangkok on Tuesday night,” wrote local English-language newspaper Khaosod English in an article attempting to clarify the situation.

BangkokInformer.com is part of a network of local “news” websites that appear to simply repost articles from other sources. The company did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Facebook defended its activation of the safety check feature.

“As with all safety check activations, Facebook relies on a trusted third party to first confirm the incident and then on the community to use the tool and share with friends and family,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

When the safety check tool was launched in October 2014, it was only used for natural disasters. It was first used for a terrorist attack during the November 2015 Paris attacks. The company faced criticism, however, for its decision to activate the feature in some cases and not in others.

In November, the company announced that it would no longer directly control the feature, instead relying on alerts of incidents from a “third-party source”. The company’s explanation of the changes suggest that the feature is now controlled by algorithms detecting whether “people in the area are talking about the incident”.

Related: 2016: the year Facebook became the bad guy

The company declined to name its third-party source for incident reports.

Facebook has faced considerable criticism over its role in the dissemination of false information, especially following the US presidential election, in which news hoaxes and partisan propaganda ran rampant on the site.

On 15 December, the company announced that it would begin working with third-party fact checkers to flag viral fake news stories. Five fact-checking organizations are participating in a pilot program to combat fake news on the platform, but the pilot is limited by the staff capability of the independent organizations.

The pilot also requires the fact-checkers to address each false story individually – a challenge given that fake news stories can rapidly multiply across numerous websites.

The BangkokInformer.com article, for example, was subsequently copied onto msn.com, creating another misleading headline featured on the safety check tool.

Facebook spokeswoman Anna White pushed back against the idea that the tool was connected to the company’s fake news problem.

“Safety check the product is in no way connected with any news articles – real or fake,” White told the Guardian by email. “People seeing that [the BangkokInformer.com article] at the end of the product flow may have gotten odd information but that information did not trigger the activation in the first place like some outlets are reporting.”

The false BangkokInformer.com article remains the top search result for Facebook users searching for “Thailand explosion”. It has not been flagged as a fake news story by the independent fact checkers.

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Queen uses Christmas message to urge Britons to 'take a deep breath'

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This article titled “Queen uses Christmas message to urge Britons to ‘take a deep breath'” was written by Matthew Weaver, for theguardian.com on Sunday 25th December 2016 15.04 UTC

The Queen has suggested that Britain needs to “take a deep breath” to face the “world’s big problems” after a tumultuous political year.

In her annual Christmas message, the monarch made no mention of Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union, focusing instead on the “inspiration” of Britain’s successful Olympics team.

In what could be seen as a coded message to the nation in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, she said: “When people face a challenge they sometimes talk about taking a deep breath to find courage or strength. In fact, the word ‘inspire’ literally means ‘to breathe in’.”

The Queen’s Christmas address was recorded before she fell ill, forcing her to miss the annual church service at Sandringham for the first time in almost 30 years. She had also delayed travelling to the royal estate for the annual Christmas break earlier this week.

Related: The Queen’s speech in full: ‘We can do small things with great love’

In the address, she added: “Even with the inspiration of others, it’s understandable that we sometimes think the world’s problems are so big that we can do little to help.”

She partially echoed a Thought for the Day message given by the Prince of Wales earlier this week, in which he had called for more tolerance towards refugees by urging people to remember that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were forced to flee violent persecution.

The Queen did not go that far, but in an address which traditionally has a strong religious theme, she pointed out that Jesus was “maligned and rejected by many, though he had done no wrong”.

The Queen has done a Christmas broadcast every year of her 64-year reign except for 1969, when there was an overload of royal coverage due to her son’s investiture as Prince of Wales.

Unlike the annual Queen’s speech to parliament, the Christmas address is written without the help of government advisers.

The theme of this year’s broadcast was “inspiration”. She used the word “inspire” or its derivates 10 times as she spoke about the achievements of the UK’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and those from the Commonwealth.

She added: “To be inspirational you don’t have to save lives or win medals. I often draw strength from meeting ordinary people doing extraordinary things: volunteers, carers, community organisers and good neighbours; unsung heroes whose quiet dedication makes them special.”

This year’s message reflected the increasingly devout nature of the monarch’s Christmas addresses of the past few years. She repeatedly stressed the importance of “small acts of goodness” and she cited Mother, now Saint, Teresa of Calcutta, as saying: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

Using her own words, the Queen added: “Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love, whoever does them and whatever they themselves believe.”

She continued the theme in paying tribute to the 600 charities of which she is patron. “Many of these organisation are modest in size but inspire me with the work they do.”

Last week it was announced that the Queen would be stepping down as patron from 25 national organisations at the end of her 90th birthday year, with the patronages passing to other members of the royal family.

The Queen recorded her Christmas message in Buckingham Palace’s Regency Room while seated at a desk featuring a photograph of her with the Prince of Wales, released earlier this month to mark the end of her 90th birthday year.

Wordle of the Queen’s Christmas message Photograph: Wordle.net

Illness forced her to miss the Christmas Day service at Sandringham’s St Mary Magdalene church for the first time since 1988.

More than a thousand people had gathered outside the Norfolk church for a glimpse of the monarch, including some who had arrived before dawn.

In a brief statement issued before the service, Buckingham Palace said: “The Queen continues to recover from a heavy cold and will stay indoors to assist with her recovery.”

It added: “Her Majesty will participate in the royal family Christmas celebrations during the day.”

The 90-year-old Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, 95, were forced to fly to their Sandringham estate in Norfolk by helicopter on Thursday after their initial Christmas plans to travel by train were cancelled because of ill health.

The duke was well enough to attend the service. He was accompanied by other senior royals, including the Prince of Wales and his wife the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Harry, and Princes Andrew Edward and their families.

The royals showed no sign of concern about the health of the Queen. Prince Harry was seen chatting and joking with some of the crowd.

Ada Nesbitt, 93, decorated her wheelchair for the occasion, and also wore tinsel and Santa earmuffs. Her daughter Jane Nesbitt, 56, from Norfolk, said: “Harry said you expect to get noticed, dressed like that. It’s a pity to miss the Queen but if she’s not well, she’s not well.”

The Duke of Cambridge broke with tradition by spending Christmas at his wife’s family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended a service in nearby Englefield church with their children George and Charlotte.

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Video: The World's Tallest Christmas Tree - Sri Lanka

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Colombo, Sri Lanka exhibited the world’s tallest Christmas tree today. According to the tree building project led by chief organizer Mangala Gunasekara, the 73 -meter tall tree breaks the record previously held by a Chinese firm which put up a 55 -meter tall Christmas tree-like tower in the city of Guangzhou last year.

Made with steel and wire frame, the tree is decorated with more than one million colorful pine cones, 600,000 LED bulbs and topped by a six-meter tall shining star. The total cost of the tree is $US80,000.

However, the claim of world’s tallest Christmas tree is yet to be confirmed by Guinness World Records. An application for the new record has already been sent by the organizers in Sri Lanka and evidence is being collected for the same.

Video: The World’s Tallest Christmas Tree – Sri Lanka

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Video Credit: Pulse.lk & YouTube

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Video: Billionaires Top Security Systems

http://img.youtube.com/vi/y1VT3ZSoT6g/mqdefault.jpg

The Creative Home Engineering company has developed an amazing technology that incorporates these secret passageways in book cases. The secret doors and entrances can be hidden in walls, bookcases, fireplaces, and wardrobes. More than that, even staircases are installed and with a press of a button they reveal secret passageways.

The technique and technology has been around for 30 years, and it’s been proven that is a very safe way of security. The system works concurrently with infrared cameras which read the thermal heat from anything that is in a radius of 15km.

Video: Billionaires Top Security Systems

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The best films of 2016 ... that you probably didn't see

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This article titled “The best films of 2016 … that you probably didn’t see” was written by Andrew Pulver, Benjamin Lee, Alan Evans, Catherine Shoard, Lanre Bakare and Jordan Hoffman, for theguardian.com on Sunday 25th December 2016 10.00 UTC

How to Be Single

The post-Sex and the City surge in films and TV shows based around the dating habits of singletons was largely a conveyor belt of deceptively packaged romantic comedies still based around the idea that marriage should remain a woman’s ultimate ambition. Attempting to cover up a repetitive conservative agenda with cocktails and frank sex chat was a temporary solution to actual progress. But even, as noted in How to Be Single, the independence of Carrie Bradshaw and her pals was something of a fallacy as they spent the majority of their time talking about men.

That casual aside hints at a refreshing agenda for a film that, yes, still falls into formula mode at times (prime real estate for characters on average salaries – tick!), but makes a somewhat groundbreaking statement for a film of its ilk: it’s OK, and often preferable, to be single. Dakota Johnson’s incredibly nuanced performance anchors an often rambling ensemble piece that offers up a glossy yet surprisingly sharp view of relationships. Like a more multiplex-friendly take on 2014’s underrated drama Wild, we have a film that praises the importance of being alone and not falling into a vortex of co-dependency. It’s also a warm and funny comedy with a pitched-just-right comic performance from Rebel Wilson and a damn fine genre-defying ending that comes as a breath of fresh air after years of stuffy rom-coms. BL

Kubo and the Two Strings

For sheer movie theater spectacle you just can’t beat Kubo and the Two Strings, an unspeakably beautiful stop-motion animated yarn about a one-eyed boy named Kubo (Art Parkinson) who must find his father’s armor with the help of a silent knight made out of origami paper, a samurai-beetle with amnesia (Matthew McConaughey), and an irascible monkey (Charlize Theron).

The movie vanished without a trace after its opening but it is well worth remembering. Its various set pieces stand alongside the most inventive in contemporary filmmaking: There’s a battle with a huge red skeleton monster – the skeleton itself being the largest stop-motion puppet ever assembled – and there’s the duel with Kubo’s evil aunts on a ship made out of leaves, as well as a stunning climactic sequence in which the evil Moon King is destroyed in the most unexpected, touching way.

Kubo and the Two Strings stuffs its 102 minutes with action and humor, but the film’s deep well of sadness makes it memorable beyond the sheer adrenaline of its flamboyant visuals. As Kubo wanders through the movie’s notionally medieval-Japanese setting, director Travis Knight and the Laika staff offer up image upon image of ruin, the little boy stark against empty buildings and abandoned temples.

The screenplay’s beats stay refreshingly unpredictable all the way to the movie’s end, and its open-hearted hero has more to offer the children of the film’s intended audience than the unbearable “believe in yourself” or “growing up is hard” of its kid-movie competitors. The film-makers carefully build a desolated world with the care of the best stop-motion craftspeople, and within it, they still make hope plausible.

Swiss Army Man

Seeing a film that most people referred to as the “farting corpse film” on the final day of a festival after watching more than 30 films at altitude wasn’t ever that appealing of a prospect. Ten minutes into Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “gay necrophilia movie”, there was an almost irresistible urge to walk out – just after the scene where Daniel Radcliffe’s corpse had ridden over the waves, propelled by that most eco-friendly of fuels: flatulence.

You can’t really get around the fact that this is a feature about a farting corpse, but the directors know that and reveled in it: “What if we took that really stupid idea and poured our hearts into it?” was the question they asked themselves when making it. Swiss Army Man is the result of that questionable approach. After the initial 10 minutes of head shaking, eye rolling and prudish giggles – the plot begins to emerge and what Kwan and Scheinert manage, incredibly, is to create a film that is strangely uplifting as it is ridiculous.

Paul Dano’s hopeless, deluded loner is brilliantly wrought and perhaps a comment on the kind of characters he usually gets cast as. While Radcliffe does as well as anyone could expect of an actor whose main motivation is post-death bowel movement. It might have been the altitude, it might have been the farts, but by the end the film had gone from perhaps the worst thing I’d ever experienced to something that I couldn’t stop telling people about.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Sam Neill on Hunt for the Wilderpeople co-star: ‘I’m grumpy, he’s annoying’

Taika Waititi isn’t exactly the film world’s biggest secret: he was tapped up by Marvel to direct Thor: Ragnarok some time ago, having impressed everyone with the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows (which itself was an extension of his work on Flight of the Conchords).

However, before embarking on Thor, Waititi managed to get this long-nurtured film off the ground, an adaptation of Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump, long a legend in Waititi’s native New Zealand. And what he produced is a terrifically charming film, a fish-out-of-water comedy that manages to be both a family-type tale about a miserable teenager and a sly tribute to New Zealand’s rugged outdoors.

Julian Dennison plays said miserable teenager Ricky who worships Tupac, but is a blight on the local family services department: he is eventually fostered on a rough-hewn middle-aged couple called Bella and Hec (played by Rima Te Wiata and Sam Neill). For a variety of reasons too complicated to go into here, Ricky and Hec end up stranded out in the bush, with the cops convinced the oldster has kidnapped the kid with dark intentions. But actually the two are developing a father and son bond, a novel experience for both of them.

What marks Hunt for the Wilderpeople out is primarily its dry-as-dust sense of humour; tonally very closely related, not surprisingly, to Conchords and Shadows. Waititi also seems to have learned a thing or two from Tim Burton as to how to set up a nicely framed and calibrated sequence – or perhaps that comes naturally after making a vampire movie. Whatever’s behind it, he gets a great performance, both funny and natural, out of Dennison; and basically doesn’t get in the way of Neill, who has been one cinema’s most reliably likable performers for almost three decades. It’s a little baffling why this didn’t do better at the US box office: it’s just so easy to like. But it’s ideal if you want something to watch over the holidays, so look it up. AP

The Valley of Love

There is one true queen of cinema this year. One woman whose poise and froideur have all bowing before her. The whole of Elle – Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant rape revenge comedy – is basically a homage to Isabelle Huppert. Every moment ripe for a gif; the whole construction reliant on its leading lady’s epic, aspirational oddness.

It’s easy to love Elle; likewise it’s easy to admire Huppert’s other hit this year: Things to Come, by Mia Hansen-Løve, in which she stars as a philosophy professor abruptly left by her husband. Here we saw cracks in Huppert’s composure; the scene in which she weeps on the bus is extraordinary, ditto the one in which she begs a cat to return. What a year, crow her fans. What range! What exquisite agonies!

But they have forgotten something. For the goddess Huppert has in fact delivered us a holy trinity of hits; it’s just that one got oddly ignored. The Valley of Love, which premiered at Cannes in 2015 and which enjoyed a muted release this summer, ought not, even on paper, to be a movie that met with shrugs. It reunites Huppert with Gerard Depardieu, 26 years on from making their only other film together, Loulou. Here, they go by their own names; they are both film stars – the movie imagines they were once married and had a son together, who has recently killed himself. In a letter written before his death, he instructs them to reunite in Death Valley, on the promise they will see him again.

There is complete joy to be had in simply watching these two back at work together. She so tiny; otherworldly beneath goggle sunglasses and unlikely sunhats. He so vulnerable and enormous; for much of the run time stumbling about in his underwear, disbelieving the heat. Their relationship is funny and compassionate and complicated in a way alien to anyone who isn’t French. The film itself is half social-realist divorcee-romance, half supernatural sci-fi, set against this strange bleached landscape, beautiful and remorseless.

There is a twist, late on, for which the audience must patiently wait. Yet ultimately it remains as unresolved as life itself: a film full of truth and strangeness and uncertainty. Not perhaps what everyone wants from the movies, but well worth seeking out. CS

Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier’s horror film came and went in the space of a few weeks in May, taking just £160,000 in the UK and $3.2m in the US. A month after its release, it became a footnote to a sad story when its star, Anton Yelchin, was killed in a bizarre car accident. Yelchin, best known for his role as Pavel Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek films, plays Pat, the bassist of DC-area punk band the Ain’t Rights. When the final show of their tour falls through, the promoter sets them up with a show in backwoods Oregon at what turns out to be a neo-Nazi skinhead bar.

The Ain’t Rights need the money and take the gig, where they antagonise the crowd by playing a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Nazi Punks Fuck Off. Later, Pat accidentally witnesses the aftermath of a murder. As the killers try to cover up their crime, the band members become trapped in the green room of the venue.

Saulnier showed his mastery of suspense in his previous film, Blue Ruin, and the tension in Green Room reaches new heights. In his hands, the siege story is inventive and fresh and the exposition is never didactic – never has a shot of a pair of red shoelaces been so terrifying. It’s unremittingly gory, but the violence is never sadistic or gratuitous; it’s necessary – the inevitable, inescapable result of the two sides’ conflicting goals. I realized at the end of the film that I’d been gripping the seatrests for an hour. It’s the scariest film I’ve seen this year, but it also manages to be tremendous fun. If one tiny positive comes out of the untimely death of a talented young actor, it might be that this thriller ends up being seen by a wider audience. AE

Gods of Egypt

More than forgotten foreign imports (like Romania’s Aferim!) or minuscule arthouse documentaries (like A Space Program) the most unfairly dismissed movie of 2016 was Alex Proyas’ Gods of Egypt. A box-office stinker in the US (it did better overseas, but not good enough) Proyas, an Australian with Egyptiotic roots, rightly caught hell for this picture’s whitewashed casting. It is hard to argue against that, but if you take the movie for what it is – a modernized version of mid-century musclemen silliness – the exercise makes a little more sense.

Gods of Egypt’s storyline is impossible to predict, zooming from ancient times to outer space to the afterlife and back again. Our immortal heroes bleed gold, transform into enormous winged beasts and have regular-sized humans massage their enormous aching ligaments in gigantic indoor swimming pools. Plus two scrappy twentysomethings (Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton) prance around in very little clothing. (What? It’s hot in Egypt!)

So many of our big-budget fantasy and sci-fi projects feel a little safe. Even Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is more about snapping like a jigsaw piece into a preexisting mythos than being its own thing. Gods of Egypt and its whacked-out (OK, borderline-incoherent) storyline is bursting with creativity and risk. If you can watch a bald Geoffrey Rush shoot fireballs from a sword on his crystal spaceship at a giant worm of chaos and not be moved, you may as well stop going to movies. JH

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News: Pope calls for peace in world's conflict areas in Christmas Day message

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This article titled “Pope calls for peace in world’s conflict areas in Christmas Day message” was written by Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent, for theguardian.com on Sunday 25th December 2016 12.16 UTC

 

The world must harness the power of love rather than might and wealth to bring peace to areas of the world blighted by conflict, Pope Francis has said in his Christmas Day message. In the UK, Christian leaders focused on uncertainty, anxiety and fear at the end of a tumultuous year on the global stage.

In his Christmas Day homily, delivered in front of thousands of people from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics appealed for the message of peace to go out “to the ends of the Earth to reach all peoples, especially those scarred by war and harsh conflicts that seem stronger than the yearning for peace”.

At the close of a year which has seen repeated acts of terrorism – and amid tight security around the Vatican – Francis wished peace “to those who have lost a person dear to them as a result of brutal acts of terrorism, and to those who have sown fear and death into the hearts of so many countries and cities”.

Syria topped the pope’s long checklist of countries which have been plagued by war and suffering over the past year. “Far too much blood has been spilled,” he said.

The pontiff added: “Above all in the city of Aleppo, site of the most awful battles in recent weeks, it is most urgent that assistance and support be guaranteed to the exhausted civil populace, with respect for humanitarian law. It is time for weapons to be stilled forever, and the international community to actively seek a negotiated solution, so that civil coexistence can be restored in the country.”

Related: ‘I couldn’t take anything except dignity’: stories of the leaving of Aleppo

He called on the Israelis and Palestinians to “have the courage and the determination to write a new page of history, where hate and revenge give way to the will to build together a future of mutual understanding and harmony.”

The pope called for peace, unity and dialogue in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There was an “urgent need to put into practice commitments” made in eastern Ukraine, he added.

He urged harmony in Colombia, “which seeks to embark on a new and courageous path of dialogue and reconciliation” and courage for Venezuela “to undertake the necessary steps to put an end to current tensions”.

In Asia, he spoke of the need for protection and humanitarian assistance in Myanmar, and the need for “a renewed spirit of cooperation” to overcome tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The pope also sent a message of peace to “our abandoned and excluded brothers and sisters, to those that suffer hunger and to all the victims of violence. Peace to exiles, migrants and refugees, to all those who in our day are subject to human trafficking.

Related: Pope Francis: Christmas has been ‘taken hostage’ by materialism

“Peace to the people who suffer because of the economic ambitions of the few, because of the sheer greed and the idolatry of money, which leads to slavery. Peace to those affected by social and economic unrest, and to those who endure the consequences of earthquakes or other natural catastrophes.”

Children got a special mention, “above all those deprived of the joys of childhood because of hunger, wars or the selfishness of adults”.

Earlier, in his Christmas Eve homily, Francis said that Christmas has been “taken hostage” by a dazzling materialism that blinded many to the needs of the hungry, the migrants and the war-weary.

A world often obsessed with gifts, feasting and self-centredness needed more humility. “If we want to celebrate Christmas authentically, we need to contemplate this sign: the fragile simplicity of a small newborn, the meekness of where he lies, the tender affection of the swaddling clothes. God is there,” the pontiff said.

Many in the wealthy world had to be reminded that the message of Christmas was humility, simplicity and mystery.

“Jesus was born rejected by some and regarded by many others with indifference,” he said. “Today also the same indifference can exist, when Christmas becomes a feast where the protagonists are ourselves, rather than Jesus; when the lights of commerce cast the light of God into the shadows; when we are concerned for gifts, but cold toward those who are marginalised.”

He then added in unscripted remarks: “This worldliness has taken Christmas hostage. It needs to be freed.”

At Canterbury Cathedral, Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England, spoke of uncertainty, anxiety and fear in the world, and warned against putting trust in the wrong things and values in the wrong place.

“The end of 2016 finds us all in a different kind of world, one less predictable and certain, which feels more awash with fear and division,” said the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion.

He told worshippers: “Uncertainty in the midst of so much, but far from universal, prosperity is a sign of our trust being in the wrong things. It tells us that our values are in the wrong place …

“Economic progress, technological progress, communication progress hasn’t resulted in economic justice. It hasn’t delivered glory for us.”

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales, also addressed the challenges of the past year in his midnight mass homily at Westminster Cathedral.

He quoted WB Yeats’s 1919 poem, The Second Coming: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

These words, Nichols told the congregation, “reflect the deep and widening sense of uncertainty many feel today. This is not the time or place to reflect on reasons or causes, but it is right to recognise these anxieties and fears.”

Referring to the lowly shepherds who found a place by Jesus’s crib in Bethlehem, the cardinal said: “In our thoughts, prayers and actions there has to be room for the poor of our time so that they too may know this respect and concern. The list of those seeking our welcome is long: the homeless, the refugee, the victim of violence and human trafficking. Their voices call out for our compassion.”

Nichols also highlighted the needs and uncertainties facing those caring for elderly parents and relatives. “They are so frightened that resources to meet the basic needs of their loved ones are being withdrawn as care services are reviewed and reduced. For many elderly and needy people not only are these basic needs sometimes left unmet, but human contact disappears and the darkness of loneliness closes in.

“Meeting this challenge requires a recognition that good care for the elderly and vulnerable is not only important but nothing less than a defining characteristic of our society,” he said.

In the face of anxiety about the “current instability in economic prospects and in the effectiveness of political structures”, people should “strive for truth, respect, compassion and forgiveness,” he said.

Earlier this week, the Prince of Wales also warned about disturbing trends in 2016. “We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive to those who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s,” Prince Charles said on the Radio 4 Today programme’s Thought for the Day slot.

“That nearly 70 years later we should still be seeing such evil persecution is to me beyond all belief,” he said. “We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.”

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News: Germany moves to atone for 'forgotten genocide' in Namibia

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This article titled “Germany moves to atone for ‘forgotten genocide’ in Namibia” was written by Jason Burke Africa correspondent, and Philip Oltermann in Berlin, for theguardian.com on Sunday 25th December 2016 06.00 UTC

It has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century: tens of thousands of men, women and children shot, starved, and tortured to death by German troops as they put down rebellious tribes in what is now Namibia. For more than a century the atrocities have been largely forgotten in Europe, and often in much of Africa too.

Now a series of events – and a policy U-turn by Berlin – is raising the international profile of the massacre of Herero and Namaqua peoples and bringing justice for their descendants a little closer. Negotiations between the German and Namibian governments over possible reparation payments are expected to be completed and result in an official apology before next June.

In Berlin a major new exhibition about the country’s bloody colonial history opened earlier this winter. It features letters from missionaries expressing their concerns about concentration camps and killings in Germany’s south-west African colony.

In the US activists have hired lawyers to pressure the United Nations. Elsewhere there are plays exploring the tragic story and displays of photography at high-profile contemporary art fairs.

In 1884, as European powers scrambled to carve up Africa, Berlin moved to annex a new colony on the south-west coast of the continent. Land was confiscated, livestock plundered and native people subjected to racially motivated violence, rape and murder. In January 1904, the Herero people – also called the Ovaherero – rebelled. More than a hundred German civilians were killed. The smaller Nama tribe joined the uprising the following year.

Troops in German south-west Africa (now Namibia) at the time of the Herero revolt of 1904. Photograph: Three Lions/Getty Images

Colonial rulers responded without mercy. Tens of thousands of Herero were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut. Gen Lothar von Trotha, sent to quell the revolt, ordered his men to shoot “any Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle”.

“I do not accept women or children either: drive them back to their people or shoot them,” he told his troops. The order was rescinded but other measures were employed that were equally lethal.

Those who had survived were rounded up and placed in concentration camps, where they were beaten and worked to death in squalid conditions. Half of the total Nama population were also killed, dying in disease-ridden death camps such the infamous site on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz. By 1908, only 16,000 remained, historians say.

I do not accept women or children either: drive them back to their people or shoot them

General Lothar von Trotha

As many as 3,000 Herero skulls were sent to Berlin for German scientists to examine for signs that they were of racially inferior peoples.

“We are talking now about the lives that were lost, the land that was taken, the cattle that was killed, the rape, the lost dignity, the culture that was destroyed. We cannot even speak our language,” said Esther Muinjangue, a Herero activist and social worker at the University of Namibia, in Windhoek, the capital.

Thousands of women were systematically raped, often taken as “wives” by settlers. “My great-great-grandfather was German. This relationship was not of love, but a product of force,” Muinjangue added.

Ongoing struggle

The issue has long caused tensions in Namibia, where farmers descended from the original German settlers still own land seized from local people. The Herero, who make up about 10% of Namibia’s population of 2.3 million, say they never regained a fraction of their former prosperity.

“We live in overcrowded, overgrazed and overpopulated reserves – modern-day concentration camps – while our fertile grazing areas are occupied by the descendants of the perpetrators of the genocide against our ancestors. If Germany pays reparation then the Ovaherero can buy back the land that was illegally confiscated from us through the force of arms,” said Veraa Katuuo, a US-based activist.

Resentment has been rising for years. Earlier this year red paint was poured over a German colonial monument in the town of Swakopmund.

Map

 

Germany was forced out of the colony in 1915, but the killings there and in its territories on the east coast of the continent are seen by some historians as important steps towards the Holocaust in Europe during the second world war.

In Germany, debate around the country’s colonial project has long been overshadowed by the crimes of the National Socialist era. While most German cities commemorate the victims of the Nazi period, there are no significant monuments to the victims of German colonialism.

Other than a memorial stone in a cemetery in Berlin’s Neukölln district and a statue of an elephant in Bremen, no permanent display currently bears testament to the genocide of the Herero.

German officials rejected the use of the word “genocide” to describe the killings of the Herero and Namaqua until July 2015, when the Social Democrat foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, issued a “political guideline” indicating that the massacre should be referred to as “a war crime and a genocide”.

But there are still strict limits. German chief negotiator Ruprecht Polenz told The Guardian that personal reparations to relatives of Herero and Namaqua victims were “out of the question”. His position has angered senior Herero and Nama leaders, and a meeting in Windhoek in November ended with representatives of the Nama genocide committee storming out of the German embassy after Polenz said that massacre in south-west Africa was “incomparable” to the Holocaust.

“We understand that the German government is proposing an apology without reparations. If that is the case, it would constitute a phenomenal insult to the intelligence not only of Namibians and the descendants of the victim communities, but Africans in general, and in fact to humanity … It would represent the most insensitive political statement ever to have been made by an aggressor nation to the victims of its genocide,” said Vekuii Rukoro, the paramount chief of the Herero.

Visitors look at a wall of postcards that form part of the the exhibition, German Colonialism: Fragments of its History and Present, at the German Historical Museum. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

Instead of direct payments, German negotiators have proposed setting up a foundation for youth exchanges with Namibia and funding various infrastructure projects, such as vocational training centres, housing developments and solar power stations. But this means bilateral discussions between the Namibian government and Berlin, without Herero or Namaqua participation. Herero representatives say they are being marginalised.

“Development aid never goes to the Herero or Namaqua areas,” said Festus Muundjua, secretary for foreign affairs of the Ovaherero Traditional Authority.

Another key issue is the return of human remains stolen by the Germans. Twenty skulls were returned in 2011 to be welcomed by warriors on horseback, ululations and tears. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, remained.

‘Uncomfortable thesis’

Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian at Hamburg University and consultant to the new exhibition, argued that “colonial amnesia” had created a warped perspective on later German crimes in the 20th century.

“If you focus only on the 30 years of imperial Germany’s excursions into Africa, then of course the story pales in comparison to the colonial histories of other European nations, such as Britain or Belgium,” Zimmerer said.

“But it’s important to see Germany’s history in Africa as continuous with its better-known dark chapters in the 30s and 40s. In Africa, Germany experimented with the criminal methods it later applied during the Third Reich, for example through … the colonisation of eastern and central Europe … There is a trend among the public to view the Nazi period as an aberration of an otherwise enlightened history. But engaging with our colonial history confronts us with a more uncomfortable thesis.”

Recent historical works have highlighted the links between the fate of the Herero and Nama, and that of European Jews. Ideas and techniques that would play a key role in the Holocaust have some of their roots in German atrocities in colonial Africa, researchers argue.

Other former colonial powers have been deeply reluctant to acknowledge the violence associated with their imperial history. Belgium has never officially recognised the cost of its invasion and exploitation of Congo, where about 10 million people – roughly half the country’s population – are thought to have died during its rule.

The Hereros and the Namas of Namibia will never … declare ceasefire with generations of German governments to come

Vekuii Rukoro

In 2013 the UK government reluctantly offered “sincere regret” and £2,600 each to about 5,000 Kenyans imprisoned and tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion in the former colony in the 1950s.

A video of Indian politician Shashi Tharoor demanding a token £1 reparation to India from the UK at the Oxford Union attracted more than 3m views on YouTube last year, and earned an endorsement from Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister.

“Reparations payments to Namibia could set a precedent for Belgium and the Congo, France and Algeria or Great Britain and the history of the slave trade. Descendants of the Herero know that too,” Zimmerer, the historian, said. Some experts have argued reparations would be impractical.

Rukoro, the Herero chief, rejected what he called Germany’s “chequebook diplomacy” and bilateral dealings with the Namibian government. “Guess what: the Hereros and the Namas of Namibia will never … declare ceasefire with generations of German governments to come. Our war will continue,” he said.

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