Tate Britain, London
This big, insightful show celebrates the pioneering American who was torn between painting beauty for beauty’s sake – and cutting through the glitz

It’s an odd, ungainly, unforgettable portrait. Anna McNeill Whistler’s face is rigid, lightless and cold as she poses for her son. She’s like a carving from a medieval tomb sutured to an aesthete’s dream. Starbursts of silver dance on the curtain in front of her while she sits as grim as death. Yet by painting her in silhouette, absorbing her black dress into his personal vision, Whistler turns her into a symbol of art for art’s sake.

At least that’s one way of seeing the masterpiece lent by the Musée d’Orsay that stars in Tate Britain’s luscious, seductive blockbuster dedicated to the American painter who delighted and scandalised late Victorian Britain. He competed with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde for leadership of the Aesthetic Movement which dared to say that art has no responsibility to depict real life or serve a moral purpose. The cosmic curtain and carefully composed pattern of Whistler’s Mother add up to the movement’s earliest manifesto: to ram the point home, he called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. Even when I’m painting my mum, says Whistler, I “arrange” her.

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Tadeo Pestaña Caro’s debut feature trails a young man’s compulsive screen time and his panic when faced with real intimacy

In the age of online hookups, signals of attraction – once felt in a significant look or a brush of the hand – are now transmitted by way of screens. Laying bare the gamification of dating, Tadeo Pestaña Caro’s probing debut follows 20-year-old slacker Santiago (Max Suen), lost in a cycle of thwarted desire in Buenos Aires. Whether at his dead-end job at a call centre or lying awake in bed, he is glued to his phone, hungrily swiping through various dating app profiles. A sea of naked torsos and bulging crotches surge across his screen, each promising a passionate encounter and perhaps something more.

Caro’s film captures this obsession with striking psychological precision. There’s a paradox to Santiago’s compulsive behaviour, which is at once all-consuming and distracting. Faced with the illusion of choice, he can’t help swiping even when he’s on a night out with his coworker Karen (Jazmín Carballo), who plays a big-sister role to the restless young man. Santiago’s real-life conversations are punctuated with the constant pings of new messages, offering dopamine rushes that leave him wanting more.

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Sharp’s deadpan debut reads like a gen Z update on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playfully skewering modern literary tropes

The unnamed 28-year-old narrator of Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel teaches literature at a girls’ boarding school in the US, and is not OK. She has lost touch with her friends, is hooked on prescription stimulants and cries too easily. She is also sexually uptight, which she attributes to childhood trauma, and weirdly obsessed with Joseph Stalin (“his brutality, and his paranoia, reminded me very much of my mother”).

The pupils at the school are brittle and entitled. One of them opines: “This guy Kafka kept acting like everything was out of his control … I thought, why don’t you take a little initiative, buddy?” Another “let her head drop back against the window, exhausted from the effort of speech” after uttering three sentences in a class discussion. They’re not terribly keen on reading – “due to the devastating psychic effects of daily technological overstimulation” – so she assigns them Charles Dickens’s 900-page novel, Bleak House.

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The US president said he called off a planned attack on Iran on Tuesday so that peace talks could continue

• Full report: Trump claims planned attack on Iran postponed after Tehran makes new proposal to end war

As we have been reporting, Tehran wants Washington to pressure Israel into stopping its war on Lebanon as part of a deal to end the US-Israeli war on Iran.

But the US has so far seemed reluctant to exert any real pressure on Israel to stop its continued attacks on southern Lebanon despite a recently extended ceasefire and with Lebanon and Israel set to resume diplomatic talks at the beginning of June.

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Meeting also comes amid recent brutal Russian attacks and Putin’s visit to China

The UN security council is meeting to discuss the situation in Ukraine today in response to recent brutal Russian attacks on the country and joint nuclear weapons drills starting in Russia and Belarus.

The meeting – called by Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, and UK – is expected to cover the latest on “peace and security” situation in Ukraine.

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Pay growth eases to 3.4% as businesses face pressure from soaring energy costs

• Analysis: No feelgood factor for Reeves

• Business live – latest updates

Unemployment in the UK has unexpectedly risen to 5% while wage growth has slowed, according to official figures, in the first snapshot of how companies are reacting to the impact of the Iran war.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the rate of unemployment was up in the three months to March, from 4.9% in February, a rate that City economists had expected to hold steady.

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Chandler Elena has added a photo to the pool:

Rhododendrons blooming at Hoshinohana Park in Yame

Nederlandse supporters die komende zomer naar de Verenigde Staten reizen voor het WK voetbal, moeten rekening houden met strenge grenscontroles en de gevolgen daarvan.

Wie bij aankomst apart wordt genomen door de Amerikaanse douane voor een extra controle, loopt namelijk het risico aansluitende vluchten, hotelovernachtingen en zelfs wedstrijden mis te lopen; zonder recht op compensatie.

De sigaar

Vooral fans met strakke overstaptijden of volledig geboekte arrangementen zijn mogelijk de sigaar. De schade kan oplopen tot duizenden euro’s.

Normaal gesproken zijn vliegtuigpassagiers binnen Europa beschermd via Europese regels bij vertragingen of annuleringen. Maar zodra reizigers bij de Amerikaanse grenscontrole staan, vervalt die bescherming grotendeels. De luchtvaartmaatschappij heeft de vlucht dan juridisch gezien correct uitgevoerd.

Buitengewone omstandigheid

Een extra controle door de Amerikaanse douane, de U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), geldt als een ‘buitengewone omstandigheid’. Daardoor hoeven airlines geen nieuwe vlucht, hotel of maaltijd te regelen als reizigers vertraging oplopen door een controle.

Ook verzekeringen bieden meestal geen redding. Veel reis- en annuleringspolissen sluiten problemen door overheidsingrijpen expliciet uit. Wie door de douane wordt opgehouden en daardoor een vlucht of wedstrijd mist, draait vaak zelf op voor de kosten.

Minutieus controleren

Volgens schadeverzekeringsexpert Jeremy Broekman kunnen die bedragen fors oplopen. “Tickets voor wedstrijden kosten, afhankelijk van de speelronden, tussen de 86 en 5584 euro. Daarbovenop komen de kosten voor een gemiste binnenlandse vlucht van 40 euro tot 370 euro en een eventuele extra hotelovernachting. Supporters met korte overstaptijden of vooraf geboekte arrangementen lopen het meeste risico”, zegt hij tegen Metronieuws.

Zijn advies: controleer alle reisdocumenten tot in detail. “De ESTA- of visumgegevens moeten exact overeenkomen met het paspoort. Eén verkeerd cijfer in een paspoortnummer kan al tot uitgebreide controle leiden.”

Bron: Metronieuws

Choughs reappear at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall after decades of absence. Choughs are considered Cornwall's national bird and feature in its coat of arms but vanished as a resident from the far south-west of the UK in the early 1970s, largely because of the decline of their grazed clifftop habitat. Their disappearance was keenly felt across Cornwall but particularly, perhaps, in and around Tintagel because of the bird's connections to the legend of King Arthur. (Cornwall, South West England)

Bijna een jaar na haar plotselinge ontslag vecht oud-directeur Birgit Donker van het Nederlands Fotomuseum deze aan in de rechtbank. Er zijn dikke dossiers, maar het bewijs waar iedereen benieuwd naar is, ontbreekt. „U roept van alles zonder dat er stukken ter onderbouwing zijn.”