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Unclear how encounter between Britain’s shortest-serving PM and US president was initiated and how long it lasted
After spending time and resources crisscrossing the Atlantic to cultivate the support of the Maga faithful, Liz Truss has finally got the prize she apparently craved: a photo with Donald Trump.
Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister tweeted a photo on Sunday showing her in the company of the US president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Continue reading...Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning lead a starry cast in this clumsy satire that provides little fascination in a wealthy family’s suffocating lives
Since Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, wealthy, spoilt, dysfunctional siblings are the new rock’n’roll, and now here is a film from Greek screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (co-author of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps and Dogtooth) and directed by Karim Aïnouz. It is a weird-wave contrivance concerning a messed-up US plutocrat clan living in Spain, freely remade from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 film Fists in the Pocket. Their bizarre and cartoony secrets, involving sex abuse, manipulation and self-harm, are satirically symptomatic of capitalism and the patriarchy, and how the rich, however entrepreneurial and smart, create a next-gen class of useless drones, on whose behalf all this wealth has supposedly been accumulated. I have to admit to finding it heavy-handed and clumsy more often than not, although there are some good performances, notably from Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning.
A strange extended family lives in a luxurious modernist house; the father (Tracy Letts) is a blind widower haunted by the memories of his late wife (Pamela Anderson) who was savaged by wolves in a nearby forest. His grownup children, infantilised by wealth, all live there: highly strung Robert (Lukas Gage) has epilepsy, and is entrusted with supervising his father’s horse riding; Anna (Riley Keough) is a talentless singer-songwriter; and Ed (Callum Turner) is a would-be fashionista. First among equals is Jack (Jamie Bell), who has the intimate honour of helping his father with his nightly teeth-cleaning; their mother’s teeth were always dazzlingly white.
Continue reading...It has been a testing few months for the man who scored the winner for Crystal Palace in last season’s FA Cup final. But after being hooked at half-time during the disappointing draw with Brentford on Thursday when Mikel Arteta said he is still adapting to life in north London, perhaps this competition could help breathe new life into Eberechi Eze’s Arsenal career.
As well as providing assists for Noni Madueke and Gabriel Martinelli’s opening goals – albeit against a poor Wigan side who are languishing in League One’s relegation zone – the England midfielder’s swagger was back for the first time since he scored a hat-trick in the north London derby in November.
Continue reading...Dutch star’s years of dominance culminates in gold
Jutta Leerdam wins silver in Dutch one-two
USA’s Erin Jackson misses out on retaining title
Speed skater Femke Kok had admitted that anything but gold in her signature 500m race would be a disappointment after opening her Olympic account last Monday with silver in a Dutch one-two alongside Jutta Leerdam in the 1000m. On Sunday evening, she performed like an athlete insistent on leaving no room for doubt.
Kok leveraged two years of total sprint dominance into the first Olympic gold medal of her career. She blew away the field in the women’s 500m in an Olympic-record time of 36.49sec with the kind of controlled, furious circuit that has made her a three-time world champion at the distance at 25 years old.
Continue reading...This proved the game of Scotland’s top-flight season. The seriousness given to it by Rangers, plus their scale of full-time celebration, said much about the progress of their opposition. Hearts’ lead at the summit has been cut to two after the Edinburgh side lost out by two goals. As the scoreline suggests, this was pulsating stuff.
Youssef Chermiti was once ridiculed in these parts. His £8m arrival for Everton was used as a stick with which to beat Kevin Thelwell, the now departed sporting director. Chermiti’s hat-trick against Hearts, added to a recent double at Celtic Park, means he at least has a useful knack of standing up on the big occasion. Rangers’ next task is simple; to build on recent progress and overhaul Hearts.
Continue reading...Dark forces give new parents more than they bargained with in this unsubtle Finnish horror from Hanna Bergholm
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm made a witty and unnerving baby-body-horror movie with her 2022 debut Hatching about a creepy giant egg, a complex, psychologically plausible study of family dysfunction in which the idea of fertility plays an important part. And now … she has given these ideas a retread with this programmatic and unsubtly acted film, a scary movie about a monstrous newborn that is very much less interesting and original than Hatching; the paganism is cliched and the element of black comedy – so often the alibi for not being scary in films like this – is really not all that funny. The face and body of the screeching VFX model devil-baby itself is mostly never shown to the audience, an omission that does not seem disturbing but rather an admission that this prop wouldn’t look convincing in plain sight.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her stolid British husband Jon (Rupert Grint) have come to live in Saga’s dilapidated family home in the remote Finnish forest, planning to fix it up so that it can be a lovely place to bring up what they hope will be a big family. (Fixing up this place would in the real world take a couple of years while they lived somewhere else, but they more or less manage it unaided in about two weeks.) Saga is obscurely moved and excited by the vital subterranean forces throbbing in the dark depths of the forest that surrounds the house. They have passionate sex there but the resulting baby is a brutal, hirsute, bloodsucking troll that destroys Saga’s marriage and happiness.
Continue reading...Ofelia Torres, 16, spotlighted her dad Ruben’s illegal detention last fall during Trump’s crackdown in Chicago
A Chicago teenager, whose father was detained by immigration authorities while she navigated cancer, died on Friday, a family spokesperson said.
Ofelia Torres, a 16-year-old in Chicago, had been undergoing treatment for an aggressive and rare form of cancer since late 2024. As she and her family struggled with the medical procedures, her father, Ruben Torres Maldonado, was detained by immigration authorities while at a Home Depot in October, leading to a contentious and public case that highlighted the human effects of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
Continue reading...Over smaak valt niet te twisten. Maar: metal-opera’s zijn vet. Geen kwestie van smaak, gewoon, feit. Ahum, hoe dan ook: wij in Nederland hebben Ayreon, die jullie natuurlijk kennen, maar onze oosterburen hebben Avantasia. Ook leuk, luister zelf!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
