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Callum Wilson has dealt with uncertainty for most of his career. The Biarritz Olympique centre and former England sevens player knows the life of a sportsman can change with the stroke of a pen on a contract without much notice. He once found out he was leaving a club over the loudspeakers of a stadium when the president addressed the fans after the final match of the season to tell them which players would be departing that summer. The coronavirus crisis has brought a different kind of uncertainty. The 29-year-old is currently locked down in his apartment aware that he may be out of contract by the end of the year.

Wilson is unable to leave his home in Bayonne without a note and can only exercise within one kilometre of the apartment. Every morning, he and his girlfriend prepare a detailed to-do list and work through it. His list contains exercises to keep his body in shape for the rigours of rugby and study for his preparations for life after rugby. His contract is winding down and Wilson is now unable to showcase his talent to interested clubs.

I dont know where Im playing rugby next year. Even with that hanging over me, Ive never been more productive. I want to play for at least another three years, but this period has forced me to think deeply about life after rugby and what I want to do with my life. Its a worrying time for so many people in sport and across the world, but I am trying to control what I can, which is preparing for my future.

Wilson is researching a career in executive coaching. He has an an eclectic rugby career, sharing changing rooms with players from all over the world, learning different languages and experiencing a variety of cultures. He has spent the last three years in France, initially at Soyaux Angouleme before stints with Bayonne and now Biarritz. He has grown to love life in France, but cautions against the rose-tinted vision that he is playing champagne rugby on sun-kissed turf.

When I arrived in Angouleme, I stood waiting for 45 minutes in the rain and eventually was taken to this little studio flat overlooking a prison. I live a simple life, so knew I would just have to get on with it. I didnt have a car, so even things like getting a bank account was a disaster. I had to walk 2km to the nearest bank and then I found out they werent open on Monday and didnt even have cash available if you didnt have a bank card. The simple things seemed impossible. I just needed to take any emotion out of it and seek the positive.

On his first morning at the club, he was told to strip down to his underwear for a fat test in front of the team as they enjoyed their breakfast. It was an unconventional induction but he gained respect for having learnt a modicum of French. I knew that language was going to be so crucial in how I settled in France. I had done around eight hours of private tuition before I arrived, but was keen to do more. The club helped me, of course, but I gained a higher level by getting to know some Mormons from Salt Lake City who were doing their mission here. I learned with them. They knew that I am not religious and didnt try to convert me. Helping me to learn French just gave them something to do. I recommend going to them to players in Biarritz now and I still visit them to practice.

During his time with the England sevens team, Wilson became accustomed to a structured approach to rugby. In France, he swapped the intricate gameplans that have made English rugby a muscular chessboard for the off-the-cuff game he had fallen in love with as a boy.

Many players come to France and they think its all jouez, jouez and a lighter training schedule. I had experienced the incredibly intensive cardio work with England sevens training, and I have never been run so hard in France. There wasnt the same scientific approach that I was used to in England. We were encouraged to play on instinct, which often made the game a lot more enjoyable, and you had to be ready to react to whatever happened and not just go to the pre-programmed gameplan.

Wilson became a crowd favourite in Angouleme, a town that has two great loves: comic books and rugby. He was asked for selfies in the local bakery and was pulled over by the police, not for speeding, but so they could ask him how his season was going. Wilson had played in front of 500 people on a good day in the Championship in England and was now entertaining crowds of 8,000 complete with brass bands, pyrotechnics and cheerleaders.

At home, every game is treated the same. In France, the home game takes a far greater significance. Believe it or not, some of this comes down to wine. Theres great pride in the quality of each regions soil and its ability to produce a specific type of wine. This gives a real connection to the terre, the earth. They want to defend the town at all costs and rugby allows these small communities to do that against big towns, or powerhouses. In England, rugby can have a reputation of being an upper-class game. In the south of France, its the peoples game no matter what background you come from you will support the local team.

Wilson understands that passion and his extremely aggressive brand of rugby suits it, yet his calm demeanour initially confused his coaches. At my first home games coaches were bollocking me for smiling in the changing room before we went out. I have always played my best rugby when I am enjoying myself and I like to be very calm before a game. Before home games, we would sit there for hours in silence, no talking, just getting up for the game. It means so much to them to win that game at home.

Wilson signed for Biarritz last year but has not been given as much time on the field as he would like. The restrictions on foreign players have been tightened and he has found his opportunities limited. Now that coronavirus has decimated the rugby season, he does not have a suitable shop window to show off his talents.

I believe that if youre in a situation of uncertainty, you have to grab control. Whatever control you can grasp, you have to do it. So what can I control? I can ensure that I eat healthily. I can ensure that I do as much exercise to keep my body ready and finally, I can be proactive and see what opportunities are out there for me. Im one of these people that is only happy when Ive given everything, as you get older winning and losing is part of life, its the effort that youve put in that counts in life.

Jonathan Drennan is on Twitter and you can read his interviews here.

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The English rugby player locked down in France near the end of his contract - The Guardian

Netflix and Stan could be forced to spend a share of their revenue on Australian content, under a proposal being considered by the recently installed minister for communications, Paul Fletcher.

On Wednesday Fletcher announced extra funding for regional news media to help it survive the coronavirus crisis emergency-inspired measures which may be too little too late, given that the virus disruption has already pushed teetering businesses over the edge.

But at the same time, Fletcher released an options paper examining the future of the screen industry, and that is a longer-term game.

While the release was given extra piquancy by the fact so many Australians are presently slumped in front of the box, it is a welcome sign that Fletcher, who replaced Mitch Fifield in the portfolio in May last year, is thinking strategically about longer-term media policy.

The options paper forms part of the governments response to the ACCC digital platforms inquiry report released last year and addresses one aspect of the legacy of decades in which Australia has not really had a media policy worthy of the name.

Successive governments have instead focused mostly on internet and telecommunications, while reacting knee-jerk to the shouts of media barons or freezing on the spot when those barons could not agree.

This options paper gives some cause for hope that those days may be over.

In a nutshell, the traditional free-to-air broadcasters are in decline, with revenue, influence and viewer numbers bleeding to new platforms. Streaming services the international behemoth Netflix and the locally owned Stan are increasingly dominating viewing habits.

Yet the traditional television broadcasters are loaded up with obligations, justified in previous times by the fact that they use a public asset, the broadcasting spectrum. These requirements have been out of date for at least a decade.

Specifically, traditional broadcasters must make and screen minimum amounts of Australian content, with additional quotas for local drama, documentary and childrens content. Netflix, Stan and the other streamers have no such obligations.

Its clearly unfair, and as the options paper spells out, is now so burdensome that it threatens the future of Australian stories which reflect who we are as a nation to ourselves and to the world ... The cultural significance of Australian content is not easily quantifiable, but it is highly recognisable. Three-quarters of Australians favour the government providing support to the Australian screen production industry, the paper says.

Australian screen content also contributes $5.34bn to the economy, and has knock-on positive effects on tourism and exports.

On the other side of the ledger, the government has traditionally provided both direct funding for Australian content and tax breaks for production.

Netflix and Stan have invested in Australian productions but not much and not many. Only 1.7% of Netflixs catalogue is Australian content, and even Stans offering is only 9% Australian.

Drama, documentary and childrens programming is cheap to buy overseas old foreign content can be imported for as little as $1,000 an hour, whereas making fresh programs costs between $500,000 to more than $1m an hour.

The options paper makes it clear that if the market was allowed to rip without government-set local content obligations, we would see next to no Australian drama and no Australian childrens content.

The options paper lays out four possible models and invites comment.

The first option is to do nothing.

Option two is to make minimal changes and seek to persuade streaming services to make Australian content on a voluntary basis (good luck with that), with some fine tuning to the existing regulations and some extra pressure on the ABC and SBS.

The third option and the one that seems to me best suited for the times is to put Netflix and Stan on the same footing as the traditional broadcasters.

All providers would be obliged to invest a percentage of their Australian revenue into new Australian content. This could be done either by making their own content or through contributions to an Australian production fund to be overseen by the existing federal government funding agency, Screen Australia.

There might also be extra tax breaks for childrens content and feature films, with a points system weighted to encourage local production and use of Australian talent.

There are some wriggles in here and some unanswered questions. For example, the ABC and SBS would be made to allocate funding specifically for Australian childrens programming. But the options paper doesnt say whether this would be additional funding or whether the ABC would have to find it from its already challenged budget.

So far, Fletcher has not addressed ABC funding a bitterly contested matter given how much some of his colleagues hate the national broadcaster. He has not responded to pleas for cuts to be reversed, reflecting the extra costs the ABC faced during the bushfire emergencies. Instead, he has encouraged the ABC to sell its Ultimo offices.

As it stands, if the ABC was faced with extra obligations for Australian childrens content, it would mean money would be bled from other areas, and would also represent a reduction in ABC independence and control over its own budget not good, at a time when journalism is so desperately challenged, as Fletchers support for regional journalism acknowledges.

The paper also doesnt address the issue of how Netflixs Australian revenue would be determined. As has been reported elsewhere, Netflix likes to pretend that its Australian operations dont really exist, thus avoiding tax.

Finally, the last option in the paper is complete deregulation, which as the paper makes clear would spell the near death of Australian stories on our screen. It seems this is not the favoured path.

Its a long way from an options paper to a media policy, but the evidence of strategic thought is welcome. What remains to be seen is how Fletcher will deal with the inevitable backlash, which this time will come not so much from the old media barons but from the new.

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Real long-term thinking on TV would mean Netflix and Stan are treated the same as free-to-air - The Guardian

With the worlds attention on the Coronavirus pandemic, Indias Government is introducing more draconian measures to advance its nationalist aims.

Its easy to forget in the fog of chaos and confusion around COVID-19 that the threat of a nuclear armed war remains ever present, with tensions continuing to simmer in the worlds hottest flash points a reality brought full-frontal when North Korea fired a test missile into the Sea of Japan on Tuesday.

A cruise missile landing harmlessly in an empty body of water is one thing, but Indian military aggression along Kashmirs Line of Control, which pits two nuclear armed forces within shouting distance of one another, is something entirely different and constitutes an alarming threat.

On 8 April, videos emerged on social media showing Indian forces moving heavy artillery into the village of Panzgam in Kupwara district to use the area as a base from which to target Pakistani military positions on the other side of the border, despite such a move constituting a war crime. But then the Indian military has a long history of using Kashmiri civilians as human shields to blunt retaliatory attacks.

On Sunday, the two armies traded heavy fire, just as the Indian Army had hoped and initiated, leaving three civilians dead, including a woman and a child. A statement given by an Indian military spokesperson in the aftermath of the engagement typifies New Delhis sinister and duplicitous actions in the occupied territory.

Pakistan today at 5:00pm(local time) initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation in Keran sector, said Rajesh Kaila, an Indian Army spokesman in Srinagar,in a statement. Pakistan now targeting civilian population in Kupwara sector near the LoC [Line of Control] resulting in killing three innocent civilians including one woman and a child.

It takes a special kind of bravado to mobilise your military and then move units into a civilian neighborhood before shelling opposition forces, only to later claim that you were the victim of an unprovoked attack while using human shields along the way. But human rights groups have spent more than three decades documenting how India uses terror as an instrument of control in Kashmir.

If we knew they would one day enter this area also and make us all human shields we would not have invested our lives into these houses, a resident of Panzgam told Middle East Eye. We are crying with fear.Our children and elders are panicking.

At the same time as the world is battling the Coronavirus, Indias right-wing Government is seeking to capitalise on the pandemic on multiple fronts.

At home, the Narendra Modi regime is giving life to conspiracies that blame Muslims for spreading the virus as a means to bolster the Governmentsdivide-and-rule strategy. In Kashmir, it seeks to further its aim of subjugating the territorys eight million Muslims to Hindu minority rule.

With little fanfare and next to zero international media attention, Indias Ministry of Home Affairs made a stunning declaration when it announced that Kashmir would now be subjected to a new domicile law, granting any individual who has resided in Indian-Administered Kashmir for 15 years or longer the right to own property. By individual the Government actually means any military or Government official.

When New Delhi scrapped Kashmirs semi-autonomous status on 5 August last year, it marked the Governments first step in transforming the occupied territory into a Hindu nationalist settler colonial project. In granting property rights to Indian Government and military officials, it has now moved onto stage two.

It should be no secret to anyone by now that the Government of the Bharatiya Janata Party wishes to do to Kashmir what Israel has done to the Palestinian territories, Mr Shifat, a school teacher in Srinagar who wished only to be identified by his first name out of fear of Indian military reprisal, told me by phone.Giving land, homes and jobs to Indian soldiers and their families is how India will try to change the demographics here no different to what Israel has done with its settlers in the West Bank.

His sentiments were echoed by Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan, who condemned the new domicile law as an illegal action and accused New Delhi of exploiting the international focus on COVID-19 pandemic to push BJPs Hindutva supremacist agenda.

The Indian Government is also using the Coronavirus crisis as a pretext to implement even more draconian measures against Kashmirs eight million Muslims. On 10 March, the Government set up a 247 control room with heat maps and phone trackers to locate people. While such mass surveillance laws are ordinarily deemed unconstitutional and thus unlawful in India, they are being carried out in the name of fighting the pandemic.

Naturally, every resident of Indian-Administered Kashmir worries that these hi-tech surveillance measures will become a permanent feature, invoking fears that Indian security forces will monitor and control every aspect of their daily lives mirroring the way Beijing rules over 13 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

All this comes on the back of a lockdown and a communications blackout that has been enforced in the territory by the Indian military to varying degrees since 5 August last year.

If weaponising the COVID-19 pandemic to further repress 200 million Muslims in India and ethnically cleanse eight million more in Kashmir while putting the region on the brink of nuclear war does not make India a rogue or threatening state, what will?

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The Coronavirus Crisis: India is Using COVID-19 to Advance its Hindu Settler Colonial Enterprise in Kashmir - Byline Times

What stage do you think North America is in right now?

Gurnani: North America is in the oh my god is this going to be a Lord of the Flies situation stage. On the verge of the maybe I should have joined that underground bunker cult stage. But things are going to get better. Itll just take some time for society as a whole to get on the same page, accept where we are and settle in until things settle down. The level of uncertainty isnt changing for any of us across the world, but the level of acceptance does change.

Pearce: It was frightening and fascinating at the same time. We were working in China in December so started hearing about it from January, all the way up to now where a number of markets we operate in are within lockdowns. Communicationwas key, both with team members and client partners.

Gurnani: You start to see the patterns, and you start to see where people will go, what people will feel next. Leading creative work for these different markets reminds us that there is a tomorrow.

Pearce: This situation for many people and businesses is pushing them to a place they should have been going to anyway, just much faster than they may have chosen themselves. It has and will force businesses and marketers to stand up and be brave, both through the COVID period and into the new normal. Be more like Ryan Reynolds: bold, quick, calculated and always entertaining.

Gurnani: If there was ever a time to be escapist, silly, hopeful, joyful or purely entertaining, now is it.

Pearce: Full-time doesnt have to be five days a week. You dont have to sit in a major city to be good at your job. Digital make-up and virtual fashion make getting ready to work-from-home much quicker, and better for the environment. Borderless working encourages and creates true diversity of thinking. Creatives are going to want to move west to east, rather than historically east to west.

Gurnani: I believe many more creative leaders will learn to have greater trust in the creatives who work for them. At the end of this, more of us executive creative directors and chief creative officers will be in control of our need for control. Its harder now for us to give clear feedback. Its harder now to help our teams concept. Its harder now for us to jump in and fill the gaps. Were all going to come out of this with a little more let it go in our step.

Thats kind of a nice thing, yeah?

Sir Martin Sorrelljoined Ad Age Senior editor Jeanine Poggi on an episode of Virtual Pages to discuss how S4 Capital is weathering the global crisis. During the conversation, the media mogultells Poggi that he recently discussedwith Cannes Lions organizersthe possibility of the event going virtual. Parentcompany Ascential made the recent decision to cancel outright the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity afterholding companies and agencies cut award show costs and began pulling attendance and submissions for the Lions as financial pressures mounted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sorrell, who built and formerlyled conglomerate WPP, also offered his opinion of how holding companies are handling the pandemic, namely on their decisions to reduce staff. Sorrell says,"to fire 10 percent of your workforce, or whatever it is, is not the answer." He says holding companies that are cutting staff are"taking out the people on the front line, who interface with clients, are good with clients," and that's only going to cause more problems going forward.

The ANDY Awards, hosted by the AD Club, has decided to keep chugging along, virtually. The Ad Club says it will still be judging standout work from the past year, with jurors doing so remotely. It also introduced a new category, the "Pop Choice" award, which will be decided by the general public via Instagram. Beginning April 24, anyone can vote for their favorite work through Instagram Stories. That voting period will remain open for 24 hours. All ANDYs winners will be announced during a live virtual event on April 27.

Creative agency Arnold and Havas Mediaannounced a new integrated leadership team in Boston. Comprised of talent across both creative and media, the Havas-owned agencies say they will create a unified strategic offering and share resources for clients going forward. As part of this, Scott Stedman, former MDC Media Partners chief marketing officer, will join Arnold + Havas Media Boston as chief growth and product officer. The following executives were promoted under the new agency: Gabrielle Rossetti, executive VP of strategy at Havas Media has become chief strategy officer; Vallerie Bettini, executive VP and marketing director, is now chief client officer; Julianna Akuamoah, senior VP of human resources, was named chief talent officer; and Cass Taylor, executive VP and client lead, has become chief operating officer. Rounding out the leadership team for Arnold + Havas Media Boston (pictured below) are CEO George Sargent, Chief Creative Officer Sean McBride, and Chief Financial Officer Lucia Ferrante.

The core of this Arnold + Havas Media Boston leadership team has been winning with our clients for years. We already know each other well, and our shorthand allows us to be tightly focused on executing on our shared vision of integrated thinking for all clients, Sargent says.

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Agency brief: Vice, Virtue APAC bosses share experiences of leading regional offices through the pandemic - AdAge.com

Coppins: Yeah, exactly. Thats whats actually interesting about this particular playbook, because if you talk to scholars who study propaganda and disinformation, what theyll say is that up until pretty recently, most autocratic regimes or even just kind of illiberal political leaders would try to censor dissenting voices and inconvenient information. They would shut down opposition newspapers and throw journalists and political dissidents in jail. Thats how they kind of maintained control and power.

What youve seen in the last 10 or 20 years is that a lot of the illiberal regimes around the world have realized that in this era of whats called information abundance, where everybody has the internet, everyone has social media, everyone has TV and radio and books, its very hard to fully contain the spread of information. Its much more effective to flood the zone with lots and lots and lots of content and propaganda and disinformation and noise. And what this is called is censorship through noise. Basically, youre drowning out the dissenting voices rather than throwing them in jail.

Wells: I remember one time I had a conversation with someone who grew up in China, and we were talking about the misinformation in Chinese media and state-controlled media and things like that. And I was like, Oh, that seems so disorienting. And I remember she said, Well, in China, we just know not to trust it. But in the U.S., you still actually believe the things you hear.

Coppins: Yeah. Thats such a good insight and an important point. I do think that that is a major problem in our society, and its born out of something good, which is that, compared to a lot of other parts of the world, were actually not used to our own government waging coordinated disinformation campaigns against us.

If you compare us as a people to, for example, people in Eastern Europe or the Baltic countries, who have spent generations dealing with Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda, youll find that they are a lot more savvy about it, and frankly a lot more cynical. We also have this fundamental belief, which I think is generally good, in free speech. We really believe that dissenting voices and opinions shouldnt be censored. And we kind of instinctively push back against any effort to censor speech.

Wells: But that is, like, a sort of ethic that comes from a time when the tool of control was censorship rather than flooding.

Coppins: Exactly. And you read like all the famous novels that are about future dystopiatheyre all very concerned with censorship, like the state coming in and burning books or sticking old newspaper articles down the memory hole. That idea colors so much of the literature about authoritarianism. But in this modern era, thats really not how it works, at least not in most democratic or ostensibly democratic countries.

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Social Distance: Are These Tweets Real? - The Atlantic