Trump lijkt het Midden-Oosten door hoogmoed, verblinding en misrekening in een uitzichtloze oorlog te hebben gestort. Jos de Mul onderzoekt wat dit betekent voor Europeanen en trekt parallellen met de klassieke oudheid.

Is nostalgie escapisme? Er wordt in de cultuur opvallend veel teruggegrepen, met sequels en herhalingen. Tessa Sparreboom denkt dat er misschien een andere verklaring is voor de golf van nostalgie die ons overspoelt.

De radicaal-rechtse partij van Nigel Farage staat op een grote voorsprong in de eerste resultaten van de lokale verkiezingen. De definitieve uitslag volgt pas in de loop van vrijdagmiddag.

LONDEN (ANP) - Bij de donderdag gehouden gemeenteraadsverkiezingen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk lijkt Labour, de partij van premier Keir Starmer, op een groot verlies af te stevenen. Winst is er, zoals verwacht, voor Reform UK, de anti-immigratiepartij van Nigel Farage.

Rond 05.00 uur lokale Britse tijd waren de resultaten bekend van 21 van de totaal 136 lokale volksvertegenwoordigingen. Op dat moment had Labour 186 zetels verloren en Reform UK er 255 gewonnen. In totaal zijn er zo'n 5000 zetels te verdelen. Het merendeel van de uitslagen komt in de loop van vrijdag.

Bij de verkiezingen werd gestemd voor lokale overheden in Engeland en in Wales en Schotland vonden parlementsverkiezingen plaats. Er werd al rekening gehouden met een flink verlies voor Labour. Mogelijk wacht Starmers partij een recordverlies.

Reform runaway winners in north-east, likely pushing Labour into opposition in Hartlepool, with other losses for Starmer in Chorley, Wigan, Redditch and Tamworth

• Election 2026 live: latest news updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

The scale of the electoral challenge facing Labour was laid bare overnight as the party haemorrhaged councillors at the local elections and Reform made significant gains.

Keir Starmer’s party went into Thursday’s local elections expected to lose up to 1,850 councillors, with senior figures describing the contest as “tough”.

Continue reading...

Their microtonal rock has been a huge viral hit – but are they really 333-year-old aliens inspired by Borneo monkeys? The Quebecois duo tell all

Recently, Angine de Poitrine had to get new heads. The alien-looking rock duo were not in fact born with the monochrome polka-dotted complexions and extruded faces that millions of listeners have obsessed over since they went viral this spring. Guitarist Khn has a long, twangable nose and double-necked guitar/bass; drummer Klek’s dangly proboscis bounces along to his stone-cold playing. Both are apparently 333-year-old time travellers primarily inspired by a solemn musical quartet of monkeys from Borneo. Over months of hard gigging, their handmade papier-mache masks had gone soggy from the musicians’ laboured breathing. “When I looked at mine, I was like: Jesus Christ, did I really play that much with this?” says Klek. “It was falling apart. It was like putting a Christmas box outside when it’s raining.”

But when the masks disintegrated, it was important that their more robust replacements still looked lived-in. “People have fallen in love with the band as it’s always been,” says Khn. “So we’re not gonna change everything [because] we have a bigger budget now. We’re emotionally attached to our old beaten-up costumes that have been in car accidents and are full of snot. We think people love the fact that you can feel they have lived.”

Continue reading...

Some people wear elaborate clothes and spin their sabers like in the movies, but if you fight theatrically you’ll lose

I grew up in the suburbs around Paris and started fencing when I was five. I kept it up until I was about 22, but then began looking for something else. I started running marathons instead. The good thing about running is that you can go whenever you want – but that also means you can put it off all the time. I wanted a sport that had more structure.

I considered options like the canne de combat, a martial art in which people fight each other with a wooden cane. But then I listened to a podcast that mentioned plans to create a fighting sport using lightsabers. I thought: I’m a geek. I like Star Wars. I’ve done fencing. Let’s try it.

Continue reading...

A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

Continue reading...

Exclusive: Until now nothing was known about ‘Jersey’, depicted with naval officer, but research raises hopes he may have won freedom

For hundreds of years, he was known only as “Jersey”, an enslaved boy of about 11 rendered in oil on canvas by the great 18th-century portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

But now the life of the youngster, believed to be Reynolds’ earliest depiction of a person of colour, has begun to emerge, thanks to a research project.

Continue reading...

Jonathan Freedland speaks to the law professor and author Leah Litman about the conservative-leaning court’s decisions this legislative session, cases to come and why some are arguing it is now a political institution, not a legal one

Archive: AP

Continue reading...