French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, warned earlier this week of a ‘very high risk of public disorder’
Here are some of the latest images from around France:
In Paris, two separate marches planned by unions and gilets jaunes through the city centre have been banned. Instead, police have authorised a single march in the far south-east. An appeal by organisers against the decision to exclude them from the centre was rejected late on Friday night.
Continue reading...After canceling events in 2025, US cities including Henderson, Kentucky, are reviving public Day of the Dead events
Julia, a 19-year-old born in the US, and her parents, undocumented immigrants from Mexico, enjoyed attending the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration each year in Henderson, Kentucky, and selling aguas frescas, horchatas and a sweet bread traditionally eaten on the Mexican holiday.
Last year, her family also built an ofrenda, or altar, featuring flowers and a violin, to honor her grandfather, who played the instrument and died in 2023 in Mexico.
Continue reading...The first lady has been praised for ‘singlehandedly’ brokering a ceasefire in a Ukrainian city – though she might have had some help
Haters be damned: Donald Trump just keeps on winning. He won the inaugural Fifa peace prize last year and was presented with the completely real, totally not made-up “Man of the Century” award at a recent rally. The president has also spent the greater part of a decade claiming he was once crowned Michigan’s Man of the Year: a fantastic achievement considering there is no such award and Trump has never lived in Michigan.
But despite his many trophies, there is one honour that has proved elusive: the Nobel peace prize. Trump holds a bit of a grudge about that, recently terming Norway a “shithouse country” for passing him over for the award. In response, the country’s tourism board highlighted some of its nicest public lavatories with the tagline: “Norway makes shit houses great again!”
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Whether it’s immersive chiller Blackout or the campily scary 2:22: A Ghost Story, ‘tis the season to be scared witless at the theatre. But what’s the secret to making an audience gasp in terror?
It was 1am. Total darkness. Locking up a wedding venue, Sam Beech’s car sensor went off: there was something behind him. “It went on for half an hour,” the writer and director recalls, “on the front bumper, then round the back. But every time I looked, there was nothing.” It kept going, snuffling around the car. So he stopped looking. “I thought: ‘If I don’t look behind me, it won’t get me.’” Since then, Beech, the creator of one of a plethora of horror shows currently haunting the stage, admits, “I don’t like driving in the dark”.
Beech’s experience was eerily similar to a scene in Andy Nyman’s hit 2010 play Ghost Stories, which Beech had seen four times, so the gnarly end the character had met on stage filled his mind when the sensor went off in the dark. Now, the uncanny experience has fed into his own new horror show Blackout (touring the UK to 27 February), which uses everything that made him so scared that night: the quiet, the absence, the idea of something lurking in the shadows. “It’s the Jaws effect,” says Chris Fisher, the illusions designer behind the stage show of Paranormal Activity (at London Ambassador’s theatre to 27 February, and touring the UK), which had me sheepishly checking under my bed for several nights and stopped just short of nightmares. “It’s scarier to see the fin and hear the music,” Fisher says, “than it is to see the mechanical head of the shark.”
Continue reading...His dashing lead role in Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster didn’t hurt the actor’s pin-up status, but now, he protests, he’s 43 – and a dad
Aidan Turner has a tactical beard. For the last two decades or so, the actor has found himself in roles that have made him a smouldering pin-up. Audiences really love to look at him. You can buy mugs that say, “Today I don’t feel like doing anything … except Aidan Turner.” There are entire Reddit forums dedicated to sharing photographs of him looking hot. He knows this about himself, just like he knows that people want to ask him about it. “I do get asked these questions,” he says, a little wearily. “I do get the, you know, word ‘smoulder’ or ‘sexy’, and all that kind of shit.” So right now, he has a full beard, in the hope that he will not be accused of, for example, smouldering. “I thought it wouldn’t happen so much with the beard,” he sighs. “I thought I could get away with it. I was going for ‘dad’.”
The job of actors is to sell a story as well as they possibly can, and over the years plenty of the stories that Turner has sold have involved romance and sex. He appeared in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre in London this summer, and even the New Yorker noted how much he smoulders. In some ways, Turner is one of those male performers who is, well, a little bit objectified. The fact that he is a good actor, and also known for being sexy, places him in a peculiar bind. If he doesn’t gamely play along, if he points out that he’s getting a bit tired of it actually, then he risks being seen as a killjoy. Sure, there are worse burdens to bear, but at times the star of Poldark and Rivals finds himself in a curious position.
Continue reading...Almost 40% of British singles have used AI for romantic advice, from writing messages to assessing potential partners
After Sam’s ex joked that her sister found him ugly, he turned to AI. Google Gemini had a look at the photo and politely disagreed. AI has been his wingman ever since, aiding his dating life by giving pep talks and vetting his messages.
The 27-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent is not the only AI-assisted romantic – a survey of 3,000 British singles published this month by Match Group, the owner of the Tinder and Hinge platforms, found 39% had used AI in their dating lives.
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