De band gaat steeds harder spelen maar kan het gekrijs van de vrouw op de grond niet overstemmen. ‘Ga weg! Ga weg!’ schreeuwt ze en haar handen maken wegwerpgebaren. Ze ligt midden tussen de andere gelovigen, omgevallen na een simpele aanraking van gebedsgenezer Jelthe Kloens.

The Irishman seems a dead cert for his performance as Ian Charleson in Elsinore. And his ability to avoid being pigeonholed while embracing queer stories, from Pride to All of Us Strangers, is a remarkable achievement

This Sunday, the curtain falls on the Toronto film festival, the last of the three big autumn showcases – alongside Venice and Telluride – that are launchpads for award campaigns. And as the dust settles on the red carpets, one name rises above the others as destined for sure-fire glory: Andrew Scott.

The Irish actor, 50 next month, is now not only considered a lock for a leading actor Oscar nomination but almost certain to take the prize next spring. Should he win, he will become the first out gay actor to do so in the Academy’s almost 100-year history.

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Exclusive: Survivors say luxury store’s attempt to recoup money is at odds with its public acceptance of responsibility

Harrods is seeking to recover the cost of the compensation paid to hundreds of women allegedly sexually abused by Mohamed Al Fayed from his estate, the Guardian understands.

The luxury department store is seeking full indemnity from the late billionaire’s estate for any settlements it is required to pay, according to evidence seen by the Guardian.

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Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

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From Alpine Rams and Rhein Fire to Giandujot and SuperCrema, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 10,935 metres is the answer to which question, posed by an Irving Berlin song?
2 Which empire had its capital at Cusco?
3 Who released her bestselling Workout fitness video in 1982?
4 In which sport does Rhein Fire play the Alpine Rams?
5 Greater mouse-eared is the UK’s largest and rarest species of which mammal?
6 The David Bowie Centre is part of which museum?
7 Giandujot and SuperCrema are the predecessors of which spread?
8 Richard Moth was appointed to which religious post last year?
What links:
9 Cricket; crow; cuckoo; dik-dik; gecko; owl?
10 Richmond and Charleston (Tudor); Raleigh and Columbia (Stuart); Atlanta (Hanover)?
11 Chan; kun; sama; san; senpai; sensei; shi?
12 Ninoy Aquino assassination; Brink’s-Mat robbery; Entebbe raid; Rudolf Nureyev defection?
13 Tu Youyou, 2015; Alphonse Laveran, 1907; Ronald Ross, 1902?
14 Benjamin Franklin Z Grill; Inverted Jenny; Treskilling Yellow; Tyrian Plum?
15 Australian and US TV; Jackson 5; Martin Fry; Poirot case?

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The perils of ageing and the horrors of finding post-divorce romance are laid bare in the new show from the creator of Motherland. It’s humungously funny, and so acutely observed it’s painful

Ageing has changed, hasn’t it? There’s a generation of middle-aged and perimenopausal elder millennials and xennials who refuse to do it. We’re young enough to be part of an online world that puts a premium on appearance, too old for such narcissistic self-branding to be achieved without unsustainable effort. Dating apps and social media connect people across generations, so it’s easy to become confused about how old we actually are. Here’s a tip: ask your knees.

This brings us to Youth (from Monday 21 Sepptember, HBO Max), Sharon Horgan’s dramedy about being 50. That perky title is a quip about the decade being known as “the youth of old age”. Horgan is Alex, a divorcee in her sandwich years, caring for teenage son Ruarí and ageing parents. There’s a lot going on in her life, and some doom. She’s falling forwards in a semi-successful career as a literary agent, getting back into dating under pressure. She needs someone to fall in love with her immediately, as she points out to her best friend. Not for romantic myth-making, but “so there’s a bit of time with the present version of me, before the ‘old me’ is here”.

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In this week’s newsletter: From HBO’s incredible divorce drama War to the hilarious return of The Paper, there’s too much TV to choose from even for a confirmed addict like me

For those of us who like to stay indoors, it has been a bad summer. The World Cup ate up all traditional television scheduling, and the streamers apparently declined to counterprogramme. The Bear came and went before anybody noticed, and House of the Dragon conclusively disappeared up its own bottom.

If you’re anything like me then you clung to the good stuff (basically Disney’s Furious and nothing else) like a life raft, eking out new episodes like someone in a desert sucking condensation off the underside of a tarpaulin. But forget summer. It is now autumn, and television is back. In fact, I can’t remember a time when television has come roaring back with quite the same ferocity as it has this month.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image,
writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core.


But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation."

[Two Webb telescope surveys of distant objects included little red dots] for hours at a time. They tabulated precisely what shades of light were coming from each dot, and how bright the shades were... The bombshell discovery in the little red dot spectra was that the colors of hydrogen were smeared out across multiple shades. Usually, seeing such an effect means you're looking straight at an exposed black hole. Black holes whip hydrogen clouds around them at furious rates, with the clouds emitting slightly different colors depending on their speed...

Then, in the spring of 2025, [two of the paper's astronomers] de Graaff and Naidu's teams unveiled the two strangest dots yet... The new little red dots couldn't literally be stars — they were way too bright. And they didn't look much like black holes either. Black holes have an assortment of ringlike structures of different temperatures... Naidu and de Graaff concluded that they were[ looking at the first examples of something combining the vigor of a black hole with the outward appearance of a star: a black hole star... This black hole would pull gas around it, dramatically heating it and pushing light and energy outward, which would keep the outer layers of hydrogen from collapsing inward. In this way, the black hole would form the "engine" of the star, analogous to the fusion-powered core of our sun... "We are seeing the seed," Naidu said. "This is the birth of potentially every massive black hole in the universe."


"Astronomers have spent the last year in a lively debate about what's really going on," Quanta adds. And this week simulations using the Japanese Supercomputer ATERUI III "have explained the nature of the Little Red Dots without requiring any exotic assumptions," writes Phys.org — by conducting the most detailed cosmological simulations yet of conditions in the early universe:




The simulations show that the Little Red Dots are black holes growing at a rate that would be impossible today because of conditions in the early universe. The simulations show that in the early universe, intense far-ultraviolet (FUV) radiation from nearby galaxies suppresses star formation in gas clouds, so rather than forming many small stars, the gas can form a single supermassive star, which then collapses into a black hole seed.

The simulations show that, once formed, these black hole seeds are surrounded by dense gas disks. This environment traps radiation, enabling the black holes to grow at rates dozens of times faster than would be possible in the modern universe. The simulated properties of these rapidly growing black holes provide a good match to the Little Red Dots (LRDs) observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From writer and host Cassie Workman and producer Lily Wachowski, it's the first episode of Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF, a new Youtube series in which Cassie discusses the history of occultism. In this episode she (along with some infernal assistance) discusses Aliester Crowley, focusing on his time at the repeatedly burned-to-the-ground Boleskine House and drawing comparisons to a more modern child of privilege.