The actor, long open about his struggle with sobriety, was also ordered to undergo drug testing and pay $100,000 bond

Shia LaBeouf on Thursday was ordered to enroll in substance abuse treatment, undergo a drug testing program and pay a $100,000 bond as conditions of his release from custody after the actor allegedly battered and hurled homophobic slurs at two men at a New Orleans bar.

The requirements imposed on LaBeouf, 39, by New Orleans judge Simone Levine came after the Transformer film franchise star was initially allowed to leave jail without being required to pay a bond in the hours after his 17 February arrest on two counts of misdemeanor battery.

Hosting an audience-friendly festival in a highly political capital city has always been a challenge. If Berlinale’s organisers push out Tricia Tuttle over the latest Gaza row, they may as well give up trying

Berlin is a difficult place to hold a major international film festival. Perhaps, as the events of the last two weeks have shown, an impossible one. The main cause of this difficulty is that Berlin, unlike all of its major competitors, is a national capital. Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance are all hosted in locations far removed from political centres of gravity. In Berlin, world events are for ever on the cinema doorstep and keep on spilling inside.

The event has long embraced its geographic fate: unlike Cannes and Venice, it is not simply an industry-facing launching pad for new films but also a public-facing festival selling tickets to new films to ordinary Berliners, and the world’s largest of its kind. But that openness also has downsides: the corridors of the Berlinale Palast are teeming with locally based film critics who are quick to perceive a drop in quality on screen or glamour on the red carpet as a reflection of their own diminished standing. The press conferences are rammed with political journalists who struggle with film-makers that find it tough to give unequivocal answers compared with lawmakers in the Bundestag down the road. (The video journalist who pressed jury president Wim Wenders on the festival’s stance on Gaza usually grills spokespeople at government press conferences.) And the closing gala is attended by politicians who constantly feel they must position themselves for or against whatever is happening on the stage. To make all this worse, the Berlinale takes place in what are usually the last weeks of the city’s interminably grey winter, when everyone is in a bad mood and impatient for the first blossoms of the spring.

Mette Frederiksen hopes to profit from her stand against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim the Arctic territory

Denmark’s prime minister has called an early election to take advantage of a “Greenland bounce” after Donald Trump’s threats to invade the Arctic territory.

Mette Frederiksen, who has been in office since 2019, is required by Danish law to call an election by 31 October. Setting a date with eight months to go appears to be an attempt to ride improved poll ratings after disastrous local elections in November that saw her Social Democrats lose control of Copenhagen for the first time in a century.

Treating the underlying acne can help. But stress relief measures like meditation can too – and may depend on the severity

Hi Ugly,

I tend to get pimples, especially around my period. This is fine and normal. What’s not fine is that I cannot stop picking at them, making my skin irritated and red.

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done

I want to ignore beauty culture. But I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t look a certain way

Tea App Green Flags, a service that claims it can “protect your digital reputation,” will remove negative posts about men from private online groups where women share “red flags” about men they’ve dated in order to help other women. 

The service is another escalation in the age of online dating, women attempting to protect each other from other men in the dating pool, and instances of men fighting against those efforts. It also shows how some of these allegedly private women’s groups, especially the Tea app, are regularly infiltrated and manipulated by men. 

When I reached out to an email listed on Tea App Green Flags’s site, I got a call from a man behind the operation who identified only as Jay. He said he started the service about two years ago, and that he initially focused on the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. For the past year, he’s been offering services specifically for the Tea app, a “dating safety” app for women that suffered a devastating breach last year, and which my investigation revealed, was founded by a man who wanted to monetize the Are We Dating the Same guy phenomenon. The site also claims it can remove posts from Tea app copycat for men TeaOnHer, as well as posts on Instagram.

Jay declined to say how much revenue the site generates, but claims he gets about 50 to 60 calls a day and currently has six employees. On its website, Tea App Green Flags claims it has removed more than 2,500 posts on the Tea app for 759 clients. Jay said that most of his clients are men, but that some are women who are trying to take down posts about their husbands or boyfriends. 

Potential clients can pay $1.99 to report one account and up to $79.99 to report 25 accounts.

“We just want to take down posts about people who are being defamed,” Jay told me. “And when I say defamed, it means like, ‘this guy has a small penis,’ or ‘this guy smells.’ That doesn't fit the mission statement of what the Tea app was for, which is to warn women against people who are harmful, who are abusive, who are cheaters. We've noticed that a lot of the individuals that come to us, almost all of them, come to us for little stupid things.”

Clients interested in Tea App Green Flags’s services go to the site and fill out a form with their information and information about the posts they want removed. The company reviews the case and then starts the “takedown process,” which can take between 21-30 days. Tea App Green Flags says it will then continue to monitor posts about the client and remove them for three months.

When I asked Jay how this “takedown process” works he said “I can’t give that info. That’s the business.”

Jay told me that he would not work with clients who have been accused of sexual assault by multiple people on the Tea app, or by one person in one of the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups who used their real name and face in a profile picture. 

“Sometimes we find along the process that there are pedophiles or people who actually did what they did, and they're very bad,” Jay said. “So we say, we're not doing this. We can't take a rap for that. We're ethical. We just want to take down people who are being defamed.”

Jay told me he understands why Facebook groups like Are We Dating the Same Guy are necessary and thinks they are a good idea, but the anonymous nature of the Tea app "causes a cesspool of defamation.” 

When I asked Jay what he thinks about the fact that some women don’t feel safe sharing information about some dangerous men unless they can do so anonymously, he said it would be better if women showed their face, or if the Tea app at least gave women that option. 

“I have a Tea app account. I'm a dude. All my reps have Tea app accounts. They're men,” Jay said. “How much can you trust these people and what they're doing?”

One reason the Tea app hack was so dangerous is because the app used to ask women to upload a picture of their face in order to verify that they are women. Those images were posted all over the internet because of the hack, putting those women at risk and leading to more harassment. 

Tea App Green Flags is far from the first attempt from men trying to fight back against these types of groups. In 2024, for example, we wrote about a man who tried to sue women who posted about him in Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. His first case was dismissed, and he refiled days later as a class action lawsuit; later that year, he was sent to prison for tax fraud.

Tea did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

​De 27-jarige Sjors kwam deze week ‘s avonds thuis na een lange werkdag en vertelde zijn vriendin wel iets héél liefs: hij had ‘bijna zomaar’ bloemen voor haar meegenomen.

"Ja, ik fietste terug van werk en moest toch nog even langs de Jumbo voor wat groentebouillonblokjes. Toen liep ik langs de bloemenafdeling waar nog een laatste paar rozen en een paar van die gele bloemen stonden. Even dacht ik, oh, misschien leuk voor Eva.” Helaas slaagde Sjors er niet in om de daad bij het woord te voegen.

"Maar nee, uiteindelijk niet gedaan. Ze waren acht euro en de randjes van sommige blaadjes zagen er al een beetje verlept uit. Dus ik vond het ook wel een beetje zonde. Als ik iets doe wil ik het ook gewoon echt goed doen, snap je? Ja, en bloemen zijn natuurlijk ook niet top voor het milieu." Sjors vertelt dat het wel goed voelde dat hij ‘erover nadacht’.

Sjors zijn vriendin smolt van het idee. “Ahhhh, hij is echt zó lief", kierde ze toen hij het verhaal bij thuiskomst vertelde. “Dat dat gewoon zo in hem opkomt, zonder dat er een enkele aanleiding voor is, zegt echt heel veel. Ik bedoel, ik ben helemaal niet jarig of zo en toch denkt hij er dus aan.”

Dus: is Sjors het perfecte vriendje? Wij denken haast van wel!

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