Beloved US country music icon Dolly Parton dies at 80

Yang has taken more than 500,000 photographs since he first moved to Sydney in the late 1960s and now devotes most of his time to untangling the past As a young adult, William Yang discovered that his family’s story was actually a murder mystery. His uncle, William Fang Yuen, was killed by an employee on the family’s farm in far north Queensland in 1922, but his mother refused to tell him the full story. In 1990, he travelled to Innisfail in search of the truth. One aunt told Yang that his uncle and the worker had got into a fight over a gambling debt, and the worker had stabbed him to death with a spear. A cousin said a gang was involved. A local woman, who had been a child at the time, remembered it as a card game gone wrong...

Beneath the wig and rhinestones, Parton was the genius behind strings of classic songs from Jolene to I Will Always Love You that continue to inspire new artists Dolly Parton, US country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80 Dolly Parton dies aged 80 – latest updates Share your tributes and memories of Dolly Parton In December 1977, Dolly Parton submitted to an interview with ABC Television’s Barbara Walters, much against her friends’ advice. Walters was not noted for her deep love and understanding of country music. She was a notoriously tough cookie, a Boston-born, Sarah Lawrence-educated journalist who had battled scarcely believable sexism to become the first female co-host of an American news programme. The month before she met Parton, she had interviewed Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin while they were working out the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. It was all a very long way from Parton’s world, and the interview has something of the anthropological exercise about it. Walters looks aghast as Parton shows her around her tour bus, her collection of wigs and her “hand-washable and wrinkle-free” stage outfits (“you really like this? To me, it seems like horror”), and sits impassively as Parton sings Coat of Many Colours to her: an impressive feat, given the song’s saga of rural poverty and homespun wisdom is the mother of all tearjerkers from an artist never averse to yanking at her audience’s heartstrings. She asks Parton if people from “where I come from” would call her a hillbilly; regards the singer’s outfit with a jaundiced eye and tells her “you don’t have to look like this”. And, most infamously, she enquires: “Do you ever feel that you’re a joke?”..

Channel 4’s programme wastes a chance to ask important questions about how ADHD is diagnosed and treated, instead indulging in unscientific methods and conspiracy theories Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University When Channel 4 announced that it would air a documentary titled The Great ADHD Myth?, an outpouring of fury followed. Despite this, I set out to approach it as a scientist – not just as a scientist whose own work has dealt with developmental disorders, but as someone who has enormous respect for the scientific process and for the importance of evidence-led debate. Channel 4’s press release claimed the documentary sought to determine whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was a “genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct”. At one level this is a brave enterprise. ADHD is recognised worldwide as a disorder, by the World Health Organization and our own NHS among others. Estimates suggest ADHD affects roughly 8% of children and adolescents and about 3% of adults worldwide. To overturn this consensus would require robust, reproducible findings capable of explaining away decades of genetic, developmental and clinical research. The press release described the documentary as “science-led”, which hinted at just such an enterprise. Was it really science-led? Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, and the author of the books The Gendered Brain and The Lost Girls of Autism Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please..