permanent

Manchester United midfielder Toby Collyer is in talks with West Bromwich Albion about returning to The Hawthorns on a permanent basis.

Collyer has been part of Michael Carrick’s squad during pre-season and featured in the second half of last week’s draw with Leeds United at Croke Park as Mason Mount was unavailable because of injury.

However, it had been anticipated all summer that Collyer would eventually leave Old Trafford.

Talks are said to be at an early stage.

Collyer joined West Brom on loan last summer but returned to United in January after making 12 appearances including three starts.

The 22-year-old then joined Hull City after recovering from a calf injury, but only made five appearances after suffering more fitness issues.

Hull were thought to be keen on bringing Collyer back to the club following their promotion to the Premier League but a deal is yet to materialise.

Duvetyne, or in this case the alternative spelling Duvateen, is a twill fabric with a matt finish that makes it ideal for blocking out light.

In its black fire-retardant form, it has widespread use in the film industry to ensure the right controlling effect.

In the first season of the ­original Star Trek for instance, exterior shots of space, “the final frontier”, were created by gluing glitter to it.

As you’ll discover, it was also used by The Afghan Whigs’ frontman Greg Dulli — and now it’s the name of a pivotal song on the band’s tenth studio album, Soft Control.

It is 40 years since he formed the Whigs in Cincinnati, Ohio, later moving to Seattle to become Sub Pop label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

But Soft Control, their first LP in four years, has to be one of their most urgent, textured and captivating efforts yet.

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When he calls from America’s West Coast, it’s the first time I’ve spoken to Dulli since 2008.

He was in London then during an extended Whigs’ hiatus, promoting The Gutter Twins’ album Saturnalia, made with the late Mark Lanegan, one of the grunge movement’s defining singers both with the Screaming Trees and as a solo artist.

Lanegan died aged 57 in 2022, a year after battling a severe case of Covid at his adopted home of Killarney, Ireland. “Mark is someone I miss . . . every day,” Dulli tells me.

He returns to the subject in hand and provides a fulsome explanation of his song Duvateen.

“There was a time in my life when I put it on all my windows,” he admits. “I kept my house in permanent night, living the vampire life.

“I had a friend in the movie business so I went with her to get some. I saw what it could do for me.”

So, what DID it do for you? I venture with a degree of trepidation.

“It was decades ago and I just didn’t have any use for sunlight or for being outside,” replies Dulli, before adding with a knowing sigh, “It was clearly not a healthy time for me.”

By calling the piano-led song Duvateen, Dulli, who delivers the lyrics with white-knuckle intensity, is using it as a metaphor for the infinite void — or, if you like, ­mortality.

He admits: “The symbolic nature of it is not lost on me.”

With lyrics that span his childhood, “teacher gonna chase us down the hall”, to the grave, “dig somebody’s hole”, it encapsulates the circle of life and serves as the album’s heartbeat.

Its sound is in stark contrast to the more rock-heavy numbers, drawing this response from Dulli: “When I get a piano song like that, it’s an exciting moment in my life.

“It’s the sort of thing I could play to my mom.” As for the idea that Duvateen is the album’s centrepiece, he says: “You write songs and, as some emerge, they state their alpha-ness.

“Duvateen got my attention very quickly. It started out differently — a bit like Honky Tonk Women for a minute — but I completely changed it.

“It was one of those songs when you feel as if your hand is being guided from beyond.”

I suggest to Dulli that listening to Soft Control’s ten tracks “feels like an emotional rollercoaster”.

“Well, life in general is an emotional rollercoaster for me,” he replies. “It would stand to reason that any art I put forth would be a similar thing.”

Next the single-minded singer describes his path to the album: “We did a Covid record that came out in ’22, then we toured it for a year.

“Then I took some time off and travelled. I didn’t start working on a new record until ’25.

“But once I began writing songs again, they were happening fast and furious. I did 20, 22. Cut them down to ten. And here’s the ten.”

The result is a concise, dynamic punch of an album. “I like 40 minutes or less and I like ten as a round number,” says Dulli. “I’ve been landing on it for the past four or five records.

“They’re like a little family and sometimes they waiting for a little brother or sister to show up. I wrote the final song, Loose Talk, earlier this year.”

The album comes bursting out of the blocks with taut Jungle Roux and riff-heavy House Of I.

Elsewhere, My Lover leans into the band’s R&B credentials while stately The Deepest Part Of The Darkest Shadow serves as a companion piece to Duvateen.

There’s a song called Memphis, Texas, not as strange as you think because there is such place, along with the famous Memphis in ­Tennessee where Elvis made his name.

The album ends with A Simulation, 70 seconds of ambient beauty segueing into one of Dulli’s most tender vocals and a gorgeous string arrangement.

He calls it one of his “most existential songs”. “I get overwhelmed by injustice, sadness, and people and animals being hurt. I know I’m not the only one wondering, ‘What the f*** are we doing here?’”

But now, before we go any further, it’s time to tell Dulli’s story beginning with his teenage dream of fronting a band, inspired by a legendary psychedelic soul band.

He recalls: “I went to see The 5th Dimension. When (singer) Billy Davis Jr. took off at the end of Let the Sunshine In, it was the most electrifying thing I’d ever seen. I knew I wanted to be a lead singer.”

Having dropped out of studying film at the University Of Cincinnati and flirted with the idea of becoming an actor, Dulli formed his first band, The Black Republicans, in the mid-Eighties.

Did they find it hard to get noticed at first? I ask. “When you’re 20 years old, nothing’s hard, man,” he answers. “You’re literally immortal.

“We all had regular jobs. I drove a taxi. I cooked in a restaurant. I painted houses, put roofs on houses. I was a roadie-type guy at the big theatre in town.”

Crucial to Dulli’s trajectory was the recruitment to The Black Republicans of bassist John Curley, the only Whigs founder member still by his side today.

He says: “We would see this bearded dude at our shows. We all thought he was about 40.

“Then one night after the show, he walked up and introduced himself to me, saying, ‘I’m better than your bass player.’ John came by our rehearsal place and played his way into the band.”

Dulli describes what happened next: “I moved to Arizona for six months and wrote a bunch of songs.

“Then I came back to Cincinnati and started the Whigs with John, Rick McCollum (guitar) and Steve Earle (drums).”

He remembers the Midwestern city on the Ohio River being a “great jumping-off point” because so many towns “weren’t that far away from us”.

Dulli rattles off the places in the manner of Johnny Cash singing I’ve Been Everywhere — “Louisville, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Athens, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh.”

But most inspirational to Dulli was a venue in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, The Jockey Club.

“Back in the day, the jazz dudes Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. played there,” he says.

“Then it fell into disrepair before opening again as a punk rock club. When I got to college, my roommates were deep in that scene and that’s how I got into The Jockey Club.

“I saw The Damned, Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Violent Femmes, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Killing Joke, so many great people.

“And everybody in the area cut their teeth there. If you were in a band, you played The Jockey Club and you played it multiple times a month.”

In 1989, the Whigs self-released debut album Big Top Halloween caught the attention of Seattle-based Sub Pop’s boss, Jonathan Poneman, who offered them a contract.

Suddenly, they were label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana and Mudhoney — but they were a very different beast.

Dulli says: “We were outsiders in more ways than one. We were from Cincinnati and we weren’t from the Northwest.

“Our covers were R&B covers instead of Stooges’. I love The Stooges but we had bonded over The Temptations. At our first rehearsal, we played Psychedelic Shack.

“We formed in October, 1986, and played our first gig in January the following year — and I guarantee you we played Psychedelic Shack at that show.”

Dulli was also infatuated with a Midwestern powerhouse in the shape of genre-defying Minneapolis-based Prince.

“We weren’t trying to sound like Prince,” he says. “But you could grab elements of him and stick them in your quiver.”

So what was it like heading to Seattle and mixing with Kurt Cobain and Co?

“It was like seeing people our age doing cool things,” says Dulli. “When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off No.1 on Billboard, I thought, ‘Wow! One of our own is at the top’.

“It was an exciting time, certainly in Seattle, where we had a front-row seat to it all.

“We loved all those guys and we loved those bands, played with everybody, and got to know everybody.”

When it came to meeting his biggest buddy from the scene, Mark Lanegan, it was via a different route.

“I met Mark in Boston when the Screaming Trees, Primus and the Whigs were on the same bill but we didn’t start hanging out until around 2000.”

The Whigs enjoyed a stellar Nineties, navigating their way through the music industry “machine” on various labels but coming up with at least three first-rate albums, Congregation (1992), Gentlemen (1993) and 1965 (1998).

In 2001, frazzled Dulli decided to take a step back and the Whigs disbanded. Aside from a brief recording reunion in 2006, the ­hiatus lasted ten years.

He says: “I had absolutely no intention of being in the Whigs ever again. In my creative life, I’m so proud of the things I did during that time — The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins.

“But when the door opened to the Whigs again, I was a different person and ready to step through it.”

Dulli remembers the times he would pass through his home town of Cincinnati where bassist Curley and his wife were raising their two daughters. “We were all pretty cooked from the Whigs experience but John would come to the shows and would get up on stage and play with either one of my bands — and everybody loved it.”

In 2010, when Dulli was on a solo tour, Curley did his usual thing but was then persuaded to do the next night in Chicago, a five-hour drive away.

He says: “It was the first time in 11 years that anyone had seen John Curley and I on stage together outside of Cincinnati.

“When I introduced him, the ovation was so unexpectedly loud and long. That, effectively, was the catalyst for the Whigs reforming.”

Since getting back together, they have made four studio albums, Do To The Beast (2014), In Spades (2017), How Do You Burn? and the imminent Soft Control.

The current line-up is Dulli, Curley, multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, Christopher Thorn (guitars) and Bryan Lee Brown (drummer who recently replaced Patrick Keeler who tours with Jack White).

Forty years on since the Whigs formed, Dulli says: “I’m still smiling at my good fortune. Still putting out music, playing live, the whole works. I’m a lucky fella.”

He accepts that he used to be “an angry young man” but, at 61, he has found a degree of peace.

“I had an imaginary chip on my shoulder that I needed to get rid of,” he says.

“You can tame yourself but you can always go back to the wild side — just in case you need to explore.”

It’s fair to say that The Afghan Whigs’ latest album is one of his walks on the wild side.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS

Soft Control

★★★★☆

WASHINGTON — The Senate unanimously approved a measure Tuesday that would make daylight saving time permanent across the United States next year.

The bipartisan bill, named the Sunshine Protection Act, would ensure Americans would no longer have to change their clocks twice a year. But the bill still needs approval from the House, and the signature of President Biden, to become law.

“No more switching clocks, more daylight hours to spend outside after school and after work, and more smiles — that is what we get with permanent daylight saving time,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the original co-sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement.

Markey was joined on the chamber floor by senators from both parties as they made the case for how making daylight saving time permanent would have positive effects on public health and the economy and even cut energy consumption.

“Changing the clock twice a year is outdated and unnecessary,”said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Americans want more sunshine and less depression — people in this country, all the way from Seattle to Miami, want the Sunshine Protection Act,” added Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

Nearly a dozen states across the U.S. have already standardized daylight saving time.

Daylight saving time is defined as a period between spring and fall when clocks in most parts of the country are set one hour ahead of standard time. Americans last changed their clocks on Sunday. Standard time lasts for roughly four months in most of the country.

Members of Congress have long been interested in the potential benefits and costs of daylight saving time since it was first adopted as a wartime measure in 1942. The proposal will now go to the House, where the Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing to discuss possible legislation last week.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), the chairman of the committee, agreed in his opening statement at the hearing that it is “time we stop changing our clocks.” But he said he was undecided about whether daylight saving time or standard time is the way to go.

Markey said Tuesday: “Now, I call on my colleagues in the House of Representatives to lighten up and swiftly pass the Sunshine Protection Act.”

A proposal to make daylight saving time the year-round default nationwide is once again coming before Congress.

And, as in the past in both California and nationally, proponents and opponents of the switch cite the potential effects (good or bad) on health, business and agriculture as reasons to support or oppose the plan.

The House is expected to vote on the Sunshine Protection Act this week, according to the office of Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), the bill’s author.

The Senate version of the bill, SB 29, is sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). In a statement last year he said, “More daylight after work means more business and more active, safer California communities.”

Most of the U.S. went on daylight saving time in the spring, moving clocks one hour ahead of standard time. The bill would end the “fall back” to standard time that typically takes place in November. The change would mean darker mornings and later sunsets. President Trump has indicated that he supports the plan.

It won’t be the first time the debate over timekeeping has made its way to Capitol Hill. In 2022, a bill to make daylight saving time permanent was approved by the Senate, but the effort stalled in the House.

“It’s clear that year-round daylight saving time is a popular, commonsense reform that will improve everyday life for millions of Americans,” Buchanan said in a statement to The Times. “Passing my bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act will bring us one step closer to ending the outdated and unpopular practice of changing our clocks twice a year.”

Areas that already do not observe daylight saving time would be able to stay on permanent standard time, according to the bill text. For example, Arizona and Hawaii do not move their clocks forward or backward.

Lawmakers in California and other states could opt out making daylight saving time permanent, but would need to decide before the law takes effect, Josh Gregory, a senior advisor to Buchanan, said in an email.

The effort has drawn support from both sides of the aisle. In California, Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), Ken Calvert (R-Corona) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) are cosponsors of H.R. 139.

The proposal also has bipartisan opposition.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has also been a vocal opponent of permanent daylight saving time. In a speech last year, Cotton argued that while year-round daylight saving time might benefit some activities and areas — such as golfing in Florida and Alabama — residents of northern states and on the western sides of time zones might not see the sun rise until 9 a.m. in the winter.

Cotton raised concerns that students would need to walk to school in the dark and risk being struck by drivers, as was the case in 1974 when the U.S. briefly adopted year-round daylight saving time to combat an energy crisis.

“The darkness of permanent daylight saving time would be especially harmful for schoolchildren and working Americans,” Cotton said.

Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro) told The Times in a statement that she plans to vote against the bill because “medical experts have warned that permanent daylight saving time is bad for our health.”

She supports a different proposal, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, which seeks to make permanent standard time the default nationwide but gives states the option to opt out. The bill, HR 9638, has been endorsed by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Stanford professor Jamie Zeitzer, a physiologist who studies circadian cycles and how humans respond to light, supports ending the twice-a-year time changes.

The “spring forward” shift results in a loss of sleep and has been associated with a number of negative health effects, he said. The spring clock change has also been linked to more car accidents and cardiovascular incidents, he added.

Zeitzer’s research found that the darker mornings and brighter evenings of permanent daylight saving time weaken the circadian clock for many people.

“The abundance of biological evidence is clear that permanent standard time is a better solution,” Zeitzer said. “When you have a more robust light signal early in the morning, that will help keep your internal circadian system synchronized to the day.”

A 2025 AP-NORC survey found that the current system of changing the clocks twice a year is unpopular. According to the poll of nearly 1,300 U.S. adults, only 12% of respondents favored the current system, while 47% were opposed and 40% were neutral.

In the business world, there’s no consensus on making daylight saving time permanent. Many chambers of commerce and businesses that want to lure customers later in the day generally support it, while agricultural interests and some industries oppose it.

As for making standard time permanent, that faces opposition too. Among the opponents: golf course owners.

Jay Karen, the chief executive officer of the National Golf Course Owners Assn., testified at a congressional hearing in November that losing extra evening daylight could cost the industry $1.6 billion in green fees alone because so many Americans tend to golf in the afternoon or evening.

Buchanan’s office said in a statement that the “well-documented benefits of having more sunshine later in the day after school and after work will be beneficial for millions of Americans’ health and well-being.”

There have been previous attempts to put an end to the twice-annual clock adjustments in California.

In 2018, California voters approved Proposition 7, which was supposed to give the Legislature the authority to impose year-round daylight saving time — but only if the federal government allowed states to do so. It has not yet led to any meaningful change.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks) introduced SB 1197, which seeks to “ditch the switch” by moving the state to permanent standard time.

A spokesperson for Niello’s office said that because his previous efforts failed to gain traction, his current proposal includes a provision requiring California to conform if the federal government adopts permanent daylight saving time.

The US and Israel have signed a deal allocating land for a permanent US embassy in West Jerusalem, years after a temporary one was established during Trump’s first term in office. The move is yet another blow to the hopes of a future Palestinian capital.

June 4 (UPI) — Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, whose new assignment has drawn bipartisan criticism, won’t be the “permanent” choice for the job, President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Trump, speaking to reporters Thursday the White House, said Pulte’s role as acting director of DNI to replace Tulsi Gabbard, which began Tuesday, would not be “permanent.”

Rather, the president said Pulte will be “very good” as he takes the job on for a “little while,” while also asserting he will be able to “figure it out quickly.”

Gabbard announced her resignation in May, saying she will step down June 30, and Trump’s pick of Pulte to replace her two days ago ignited a backlash among lawmakers of both parties.

A former housing developer and currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte — a staunch Trump loyalist — has no experience in foreign intelligence work, a fact that has sparked criticism from both sides of the political aisle.

Sen. Thom Tillis., R-N.C., on Wednesday blasted Pulte as an “incendiary attack dog” for Trump who likely wouldn’t pass Senate muster for confirmation.

“I don’t think he has a prayer” of becoming the permanent DNI, Tillis told CNBC, adding that Pulte’s presence could hurt the GOP congressional majority’s efforts to reauthorize the part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governing warrantless surveillance.

Similarly, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a long-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decried the choice of Pulte for DNI director, saying Trump is “appointing his top political henchman to one of the most important positions for protecting the safety of Americans and preventing terrorist attacks like September 11th.”

Pulte, he said, “appears to be unscathed by intelligence or any semblance of ethics,” noting he has already used his post at a housing agency “to persecute Trump’s political opponents, including Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Leticia James and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.”

Pulte has alleged fraud against several of Trump’s foes in their mortgage applications, including Cook for claiming two different homes as her primary residence. She has appealed her firing by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court.