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De nieuwste ProPallie-publiciteitsstunt is weer mislukt. Of geslaagd, het is maar hoe je het bekijkt natuurlijk. In ieder geval wilden de ProPallies van de Global Sumud Flotilla joemanieterrian eed, zo zegt ProPallie-figuur Jesse van Schaik in goed Nederlands, richting Gaza brengen, en dat staat Israël al 100 jaar (oké, iets korter) niet toe. Dus doen de ProPallies dat lekker toch om heel Instagram vol te rammen met filmpjes over hoe spannend het allemaal is om iets te doen wat verboden is. En dan vooral denken daarmee iets goeds te hebben gedaan voor de mensen in Gaza. Telkens weer stuit zo'n zogenoemde Gaza Flotilla, bekend van Metoo-toestanden, dan op de IDF. Zo ook deze keer. Israël zegt daarbij ongeveer 175 ProPallies te hebben opgepakt en 20 boten te hebben gestopt. Onder hen ook vier Nederlanders, zo weet Carel Brendel. Niet alle 'Kaza'-zeggers zijn overigens opgepakt want bijvoorbeeld Jesse van Schaik (van hierboven dus) is nog in afwachting van een Israëlische interventie. Bij ome Carel meer belangwekkends over deze Gazavloot en de opvarenden, die nu even aan het ontspannen zijn (zie na de klik) na hun zware strijd tegen de genocide. Misschien de volgende keer toch eens een nieuwe route proberen, zeg door - we noemen maar wat - de Straat van Hormuz?

Gezellig uitje VOOR GAZA

Elke scheet uiteraard gefilmd VOOR GAZA

Gazavloot is meer een codoom- en drugsvloot volgens Israël

Debra Granik’s five-hour documentary shows a former drug dealer turned entrepreneur striving to beat a system that continues to punish those that have served time

Over a decade ago, in a more affordable though no less cutthroat era of New York City, the film-maker Debra Granik met Coss Marte at a diner in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Granik, a chronicler of rugged self-reliance in the features Leave No Trace and Winter’s Bone, was interested in making a drama on recalibrating to life after prison. Marte, a former drug dealer incarcerated for seven years by the time he was 27, was an expert. After developing his own workout while serving five years in prison, he had come up with a business plan for a gym run entirely by fellow returning citizens. “I lost over 70lbs in six months in a prison cell, and now I’m hiring people coming out of the prison system to teach fitness classes,” he would say, joking that his six by nine cell for solitary confinement was a similar size to some New York apartments.

Granik was fascinated. “He was defying all the odds,” the film-maker told me on a Zoom call this April. That Marte was set on becoming a successful entrepreneur by employing people almost entirely out of the carceral system was near unprecedented. “Coss was like, ‘I don’t know where my destiny will lead me, but I am using all my energy to not get re-ensnared in the criminal justice system.’” Granik recalled. So she started filming a documentary. “From there, we just never stopped recording,” Marte told me.

Her new film, Apex, may not be Citizen Kane, but how refreshing to see a middle-aged actor as a female action hero – and looking the part too

If you are in your 50s, 40s or even late 30s and feel as though things are rapidly heading south, might I point you in the direction of Apex, the 95-minute action movie that launched last week on Netflix and is currently parked at No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. You may think Apex, which has almost no dialogue, a paper-thin script and plot holes the size of the Australian outback in which it was filmed, is not for you, but you would be wrong. Next time you make a noise when you get up from the sofa, you can visualise Charlize Theron free-climbing a cliff face in peak middle age and remind yourself these things are still possible.

What’s startling about this is that Theron, at 50, appears to have successfully outrun the Hollywood dead end that greets women on their 34th birthday. She could be unrecognisable from surgery while clinging to the reboot of some earlier role. She could be trapped in Yorgos Lanthimos-style whimsy, because what could be more whimsical and grotesque than an ageing female actor? She could be playing someone’s mother – specifically, the mother of a male actor some five years her junior. Instead, Theron has been everywhere in the past fortnight, dominating the social-media feeds, crowding out the increasingly desperate-looking publicity push from the cast of The Devil Wears Prada 2, and shinning up a wall in Times Square in New York to promote a film that is basically an instructional climbing video with a serial killer subplot.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Before her first Miami Grand Prix in charge, Nowak opens up on F1’s boom time in the US and flying the flag for women in the sport

There is an air of buoyant confidence about Katharina Nowak that is striking but also understandable given the robust state of Formula One in the United States and at the Miami Grand Prix, where the 29-year-old who is at the helm of the race believes the sport only has more to come.

“F1 is at its strongest right now that we’ve seen, the interest in F1 is still going up and will go further,” she says in the buildup to this weekend’s meeting in Florida. “From my seat at the table, we are seeing the interest continue to grow.

The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision has essentially destroyed the law

Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that sense, the answer is no: though it has been a republic since its founding, America has only rarely been a true democracy, one where all citizens have the full right to vote and to have that vote counted.

Political scientists such as the University of Notre Dame’s Christine Wolbrecht have argued that America wasn’t really a democracy, not in the meaningful sense of the term, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law that formed the signature achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to end racial barriers to voting across the south when it was passed in 1965. If you accept that premise, you could say that the era of American democracy officially ended on Wednesday, when the supreme court finished its project of dismantling the VRA in its 6-3 decision in Louisiana v Callais. Whatever this country has become now, “democracy” does not describe it.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Jitu Munda says he was refused access to money in case highlighting ‘lack of humanity’ in Indian bureaucracy

The sight of a man bringing the remains of his dead sister to a bank in India after officials had refused to let him withdraw money without proof of her death has caused shock in India.

Jitu Munda, 52, from the Indian state of Odisha, was captured on video carrying the remains of his recently deceased sister through the streets of Keonjhar and placing them outside the local bank.

KYIV (ANP/RTR) - De Oekraïense topgeneraal Oleksandr Syrsky heeft opdracht gegeven om vooruitgeschoven soldaten aan het front nog hooguit twee maanden achter elkaar op hun post te laten. Hij probeert daarmee een antwoord te bieden op zorgen over het welzijn van de militairen, die soms maandenlang onafgebroken onder vuur liggen in de oorlog met Rusland.

Volgens Syrsky heeft de centrale rol van drones aan het front grote gevolgen voor het slagveld. Militairen moeten geregeld grote afstanden afleggen om bij het front te komen. Onderweg kunnen ze bovendien onder vuur komen te liggen. Dat heeft ertoe geleid dat militairen soms ongewenst lang op hun post moeten blijven.

Naast de limiet van twee maanden heeft de topgeneraal ook opdracht gegeven om militairen medisch beter in de gaten te houden. Ook moeten de leveringen van voedsel en munitie verbeterd worden.

Onlangs ontstond in Oekraïne ophef over beelden van frontsoldaten die familieleden hadden verspreid. De militairen oogden daarop uitgemergeld.