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One of the six original characters of the board game Cluedo, Mrs White, has been killed off by game makers Hasbro.

The long-time housekeeper is being replaced by Dr Orchid, who has a PhD in plant toxicology and was home-schooled by Mrs White herself.

The game sees players work out which of the characters has committed a murder at Tudor Mansion, in which room and with what weapon.

It is the first time Hasbro has killed off a Cluedo character since 1949.

The Dr Orchid character is said to have been privately educated in Switzerland “until her expulsion following a near-fatal daffodil poisoning incident”.

Image copyright PA

She is also the adoptive daughter of Samuel Black, who owns the mansion where the murderous events take place.

Craig Wilkins, marketing director for Hasbro in the UK and Ireland, said: “It was a difficult decision to say goodbye to Mrs White, but after 70 years of suspicious activity we decided that one of the characters had to go.

“Dr Orchid is a brilliant new character with a rich back story and links to the Black fortune.”

The game’s six characters are Miss Scarlett, Professor Plum, Mrs Peacock, the Reverend Green, Colonel Mustard and the new Dr Orchid.

All the existing characters have been recently revamped, apart from Colonel Mustard.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36714720

For $7.50 a bowl, the brands new cereal cafe is a last-ditch attempt to milk whats left of the millennial trend that epitomizes gentrification and consumer culture

Monday was a big day for America. Not only did the country celebrate its 240th year of independence but Kelloggs launched an all-day cereal cafe in New York. Its called wait for it Kelloggs New York. Its based in Times Square and a bowl of cereal will set you back $7.50. Yep, thats right. $7.50. For cereal.

Ah, but you see, its not just cereal. Kellogs has teamed up with a couple of culinary heavyweights Christina Tosi, founder of Momofuku Milk Bar, and Anthony Rudolf of famed New York Restaurant Per Se to add a twist to the traditional cereal experience. One of the milk-based creations on offer, for example, is Berry Me in Green Tea; a combination of Kelloggs Rice Krispies, strawberries and green tea powder. Youre basically paying 50 cents for cereal and $7 for a mediocre pun.

Kelloggs New York isnt just an attempt at milking free PR from what is essentially an advertisement with a five-year lease. (Although, since the cafe has been covered by everyone from the New York Times to Al Arabiya it has certainly delivered on that front.) Rather it is a reaction to a major sales decline. Over the last decade cereal has lost its hallowed place at the breakfast table as healthier, more convenient, morning food options grow in popularity particularly among younger generations. According to Mintel, nearly 40% of millennials think cereal is inconvenient for breakfast because it requires too much cleanup. That whole washing a bowl in the morning thing? The struggle is ce-real. (Sorry.)

While millennials might not be breakfasting on cereal with as much gusto as previous generations, theyre not eschewing it altogether. According to Kelloggs, one-third of cereal consumption happens outside breakfast hours. And cereal hasnt just become a snack, it has become the ultimate hipster snack; representing a sort of prepackaged, nostalgia-laden ennui. The consummate expression of cereal as counterculture is, of course, the ironic cereal cafe; variations of which have been popping up in rapidly gentrifying areas around the world. The Kelloggs-branded Times Square cafe marks the inevitable corporate appropriation, and thus probable culmination, of this trend.

Kelloggs New York is also just the latest evolution of cereals shifting role in western culture. When cereal was first created, towards the end of the 19th century, it was promoted as part of a temperate Christian lifestyle. A bland diet was thought to keep both body and mind healthy, subduing sinful sexual urges. Dr John Harvey Kellogg who, alongside his brother Will, invented Corn Flakes, extolled cereal as a means to curb masturbation about which he had very severe views.

But market forces soon tempered cereals puritanical bent. Cereal was a high-margin business with low barriers to entry. The Kelloggs brothers quickly found themselves in a crowded market, surrounded by competitors. Because the cereal category was so easily commoditized, advertising became essential. Over the next few decades, cereal manufacturers pioneered innovative marketing techniques through which they could insinuate their product into popular culture and the family breakfast table. In 1971, for example, Post Cereals introduced two bestselling cereals Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles Cereal, that were based on the Flintstones TV cartoon. These were among the first brands created entirely around a media property.

The 70s, 80s and 90s were the golden area of pop culture cereal tie-ins. There was Pac-Man cereal, Ghostbusters cereal, Cabbage Patch Kids cereal. Pretty much every TV show, game or movie had a cereal that went along with it or a toy that you could find at the bottom of the packet. When you understand the extent to which cereal threaded its marketing tentacles throughout popular culture, the nostalgic hold that it exerts within a certain privileged counterculture starts to make more sense. Cereal isnt just something Gen Xers and older millennials ate as kids, it was ingrained in the whole experience of childhood; inextricably connected with Saturday-morning cartoons and family fun.

As kids of the 70s and 80s became adults, cereal became a sort of Peter Pan food for those who didnt really want to grow up. Snacking on cereal became synonymous with a rejection of a certain sort of corporate, adult values. It was populist protest in its most facile form. A guy with long hair eating cereal for dinner became shorthand for slacker in many a 90s movie.

The 90s slacker, of course, was the forebear of the 2000s hipster. They were characterized by the same cynicism and rejection of ostentatious materialism. But while slackers were marked by a studied apathy, hipsters were driven by a serious case of early-onset nostalgia combined with a neurotic need for individual self-expression. Like riding a fixie or drinking out of a mason jar, eating cereal as a snack became self-conscious, considered performance. You can see this play out in the 2007 cereal-core classic Flakes (now playing on Netflix), in which a struggling musician manages a cereal cafe and spends his days debating the ideal milk-to-flake ratio with his regulars.

I havent actually seen Flakes myself I think only about five people in the world have. Two of those five are Alan and Gary Keery, a pair of bearded Irish identical twins. The film was apparently inspired their decision to start Londons famous Cereal Killer Cafe in 2014. That a failed film starring Zooey Deschanel inspired an ironic business is maybe one of the most hipster things to ever have happened.

The Cereal Killer Cafe opened in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London, where there were already tensions simmering about the effects of rapid gentrification on a historically poor area, in September 2015. The exorbitantly priced bowls of cereal (around $4.50 a bowl) were controversial, particularly after one of the brothers told a journalist he thought the prices were cheap for the area.

Indeed the Cereal Killer Cafe has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with hipster-led gentrification and was targeted in anti-capitalist riots last year. Nevertheless, the cereal cafe concept continued to grow in popularity, with version popping up around the world from Paris to Australia. Last year New York got its first cereal bar when streetwear brand KITH opened up KITH Treats in its flagship store in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

While cereal cafes may have become a catalyst for gentrification the irony is that, with the advent of the Kelloggs cafe, they have now themselves been entirely gentrified. This of course is a familiar cycle and the inevitable progress of all trends: a reaction to mainstream consumer culture becomes a counterculture which is gradually appropriated by corporations to become mainstream consumer culture. Indeed, Im willing to bet that, in a corporate boardroom somewhere, a Wonder Bread executive is drawing up plans for New Yorks first Artisanal Jam Toast Cafe. And if theyre not, well, you can berry me in green tea.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/05/kelloggs-cereal-cafe-hipster-breakfast-trend

La Fageda is one of Spains most successful dairy farms. Its also a co-operative which employs mentally ill people. Giles Tremlett meets its inspirational but ageing founder as his vulnerable workers wonder what will happen once he retires

In 1984 a disillusioned Spanish psychologist named Cristbal Coln drove his Citron 2CV through a high-canopied Catalan forest called La Fageda den Jord. Coln had walked through this airy, enchanted forest with his Bouvier des Flandres cattle dogs many times, but now he was on his way to buy a farm. The bearded, earnest 34-year-old had embraced the ideas of both Marx and Freud during the heady years of Spains transition to democracy in the 1970s. But he was shattered by his experiences in Spains mental asylums, where the misfits of society were parked by a country that believed giving them bed and board was the limit of its responsibility. Some were mentally ill, but others were simply those who society had deemed strange, he said.

Coln, whose name translates into English as Christopher Columbus, had recently moved to the nearby town of Olot and had an unlikely idea. Hed decided that the patients in the local asylum in Girona needed jobs. He no longer believed people who did not fit into society should be defined via the 2,500 mental illnesses catalogued by psychiatrists. The one thing they have in common is the idea that we are what our brain is. But we are much more than that, said Coln.

Nor did he want patients simply to be doing things to occupy their time. Instead, he believed they could be an effective part of the local economy, and that this would allow them to be valued as contributing members of society. I wanted them to recover their dignity and their freedom. The asylum took that away. When people reach into their pockets to buy something, they are automatically giving value to the work that has gone into making it.

Since nobody was going to hire his sometimes fragile, often eccentric band of workers, Coln decided he needed to become a businessman. As someone who had been an apprentice tailor at the age of 14 (before turning to psychology), he was a practical man, but he had no expertise in entrepreneurship. He also wanted his company to be based in a place of great natural beauty. I knew that would be good for me, he said. So why wouldnt it be good for others?

The Garrotxa region, deep in the heartland of Catalonia, seemed perfect. His work in Girona meant he already had contacts and potential workers in the area. Some locals, however, wondered whether he himself had escaped from an asylum. I told people that my name was Christopher Columbus, that I came from the asylum and wanted to set up a business in the middle of the countryside, he said. With a name and a project like that, some people thought I was the madman.

His special workers co-operative, which he named La Fageda, after the forest, began by providing manual labour from its base at an old convent building shared with the fire brigade. But Coln wanted a farm. I wanted us to produce something of value, not to provide cheap labour to others, he said. When the Els Casals farm came up for sale its farmhouse crumbling after years of neglect, but with space for a small dairy herd he saw fate at work. The place sat in dramatically beautiful surroundings right beside the forest. He sweet-talked local banks into lending him part of the 90,000 euros (72,000) needed to buy it. But could this company, owned by a workforce deemed to be mentally ill, compete in the raw world of 20th-century capitalism? Many suspected not.

Thirty-five years later Coln runs a business with 256 employees and annual sales of 16m euros. La Fageda, which makes high-quality yogurts, jams and ice cream, has been studied at business schools as far away as Harvard. More importantly, it has fulfilled its aim of giving employment to almost the entire population of work-capable mentally ill people in La Garrotxa.

There have been many ups and downs. Attempts to set up as a carpentry workshop, paint shop and a compost supplier all failed dramatically. A successful milk business was ruined by entry into the EU with its milk lakes and enforced quotas. That forced La Fageda to turn the milk provided by 350 Friesian cows into yogurt. The farms forestry nursery which had been one of the biggest of its kind in Spain ran out of work after the economy nose-dived in 2008. Fortunately at that point, La Fagedas brand was successful enough for it to add jam-making to its activities. We have made many mistakes, said Coln. But we know there are many things we dont know, so we ask people. And that is our strength.

La Fageda ran on enthusiasm for many years, its staff and workers giving up weekends to tour towns with cuddly calves and samples of their yogurts. Those in charge sometimes found themselves working late into the night in order to fulfil orders on time. Finally the creamy, full-fat yogurts made from La Fagedas own milk became a runaway success. Fifteen years ago Coln began to hire a professional management team, though he remained the boss his voice carrying the day at co-operativists assemblies where only some understood what was being said and everyone was happy to follow his lead.

It soon became obvious that the La Fageda project radically improved the lives of its worker-owners. People who had repeatedly tried to kill themselves stopped doing so. Those who took a monthly salary home found they were no longer a family burden. For others, La Fagedas residential units in Olot also provided a solution to their needs outside work. That explains why La Fageda is attracting international attention. Anna Thomson is a filmmaker who is using Kickstarter to crowdfund Yoghurt Utopia, a documentary on La Fageda. She says its inspirational nature has now reached people all over the world, from mental health advocates in Turkey to social entrepreneurs and celebrities, such as Michel Roux and Maureen Lipman.

Mara Portas was one of the first who made the journey through La Fagedas woods with Coln in the mid-1980s. The only daughter of a poor peasant family, she had been left looking after her elderly mother before having a breakdown, being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to the asylum. As a young girl she was, as she put it, tricked by a young man and, as a single mother, had joined a category of social outcasts in Francos Spain. The baby boy, however, was beautiful and she stopped her parents from handing him over for adoption. He was so lovely, she said. Having a child is the best thing that can happen to you. But little Miquel died of cancer, aged just four. Maria never fully recovered.

Now aged 77, she still comes to the farm every day, to a pensioners club that is part of La Fagedas social support services. I feel secure here, she explained. She was happiest in the forestry nursery and is proud of what they have achieved. Work remains important, though there is little for her to do. It is something we find with the older people, said one of the careworkers, Violete Bulbena. They really, really want to work. Some of the younger generation are not so keen.

Among the more remarkable stories is that of 57-year-old Luis Martnez, whose mother Margarita heard about La Fageda from her home city of Mendoza, Argentina. Luis had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I just think he is different, with a different way of looking at the world, said Margarita, now aged 87. Eight years ago she decided they should emigrate to Spain where her parents came from and rented an apartment in Olot. One day she appeared at La Fageda in a taxi with Luis. Now I see that he is happy, she explained. He likes to work. When you see him so joyful with his compaeros you realise that these people have an angel inside.

La Fageda is divided into three categories: the clients who come to the occupational therapy facilities, the workers, and the so-called professionals. The latter are mostly management, therapists and care workers. We like to say there are people here who have certificates saying they have a degree of disability and there are others of us who dont yet have them, said Albert Riera, who became communications chief a dozen years ago. Colns daughter Maria, who is one of La Fagedas psychologists, said they do not need doctors on site. An unobtrusive form of supervision allows them to tailor tasks to individuals while keeping an eye on their health. We can usually spot when something is beginning to go wrong and call in medical help, she explained.

Just as La Fageda looks after its people, so it looks after its cows. The herd is farmed in large open stalls. A few weeks ago they were nibbling on hay while baroque chamber music was piped to them from loudspeakers. This is also marketing. La Fageda has a sponsorship deal with Barcelonas most important concert hall the spectacular, modernist Palau de la Msica.

La Fageda has never sold itself as a social cause. We want to compete like any other brand, said Coln. Our message had to be that, even though we had people with disabilities, we were perfectly capable of doing things well. The farm has a visitors centre which attracts 55,000 people a year. That is the best marketing we have, said Coln. People go away not just liking the yogurt but also after seeing the forest, the cows listening to their music and the workers doing their jobs as apostles. That means La Fageda has found the holy grail of marketing by engaging peoples emotions. It also works for locals. We have helped put Garrotxa on the map, and the people here now proudly claim La Fageda as part of their world.

Like any business La Fageda has to take tough decisions and suppliers have been forced to comply with its standards. Coln is invited to lecture at some of the worlds top business schools, but the companys objective remains to provide work for, and look after, the mentally ill of the Garrotxa region. Coln is happy for it to remain a Catalan brand. We dont need to accumulate wealth, he said. But the world of business is a marvellous place to inhabit and to develop your dignity.

Coln himself is now 67 and aware that he cannot keep running the company much longer. Last year it changed from a workers co- operative to a non-profit foundation. A young team of executives mostly women has been hired. The aim is to professionalise the management and the foundations board and prepare for a handover before I die or get Alzheimers.

For people like Luis Martinez, La Fageda is a guarantee not just of work but also of future care. For his mother Margarita, it solved the problem that most worries every elderly parent of a dependent child. He was going to end up alone when I died, but he is special and needs someone to guide him, she said. Margarita will not be the first person to die without that concern hanging over her. In 2007 local hairdresser Paquita Casas, whose son Miquel was one of the early co-operativists, held on in hospital until he was installed in La Fagedas residence. A few days later she died. I know you will look after him, she had told Coln.

To support the upcoming documentary about La Fageda, Yoghurt Utopia, go to kickstarter.com

This article was amended on 3 July to correct the name of the documentarys director, Anna Thomson. Her co-director is David Baksh

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/03/cultivating-a-workers-paradise-la-fageda-mental-illness-spain