Ban this foreign filth! Can cinema really threaten national security?

The US president’s plan for Hollywood is full of plot holes. But when it comes to the hidden propaganda baked into movies, he may have a point

As always with pronouncements by President Trump, once you had peeled away the xenophobia, removed the stew of resentment, ignored the sheer idiocy and asterisked the possible illegality, there was a small kernel of truth to his posting on Truth Social last Sunday. “The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, pointing to the nefarious tax breaks other countries gave film-makers as “a National Security threat” and proposing an 100% tariff on films made oversees. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA AGAIN!”

How would a 100% tariff on films made oversees work? Just movies shot overseas? What about movies set overseas? And who would pay? How do you impose tariffs on goods without a port of entry? “Commerce is figuring it out,” said a White House official. In fact, movies are listed as an exception to presidential authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president authority to address national security threats, so it is likely the lawyers would end up figuring it out, if Trump’s plan went ahead. But, many executives in Hollywood are quietly nodding agreement. It is true that Los Angeles has seen feature movie shoot days plummet from 3,901 in 2017 to just 2,403 in 2024, a 38% drop. Many major franchises such as Avatar and Mission: Impossible are shot mostly overseas, where the lure of lucrative tax breaks offset such minor inconveniences as the incursion of some Derbyshire sheep into one of Tom Cruise’s paragliding set-pieces.

Published: May 9, 2025, 4:00 am

‘An optimal state of consciousness’: is flow the secret to happiness?

It can happen when doing ‘just about anything’ – experts share how to get ‘in the zone’, and what can pull you out

What is the secret to happiness? In a 2004 Ted Talk, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi boldly claimed to have the answer: flow.

Flow is the experience of being completely absorbed in a particular task. Sometimes we call it being “in the zone”. Csikszentmihalyi described it in his Ted Talk as an “effortless, spontaneous feeling” and an “ecstatic state”.

An intense focus that “leads to a sense of ecstasy”

Knowing exactly what you want from one moment to the next

Getting immediate feedback on what you are doing

Knowing your goal is achievable, even if it is difficult

Losing track of time

Forgetting yourself – you are so focused on your task that any self-consciousness disappears

Feeling part of something bigger than yourself

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:00 pm

What will the new Pope be like? He’s chosen to be called Leo: that’s no accident | Catherine Pepinster

Popes who take that name tend to be progressive reformers. If Trump and JD Vance think they have an ally in the Vatican, I think not

• Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of The Tablet
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

What’s in a name? When it comes to a pope – everything. The white smoke from the Sistine Chapel earlier this evening told the world that a new pope to succeed Francis had been elected – and for the first time the pontiff is from the US.

But if Donald Trump and his Catholic convert Veep, JD Vance, are ready to cheer, then they should think again. Cardinal Robert Prevost has chosen the name Leo XIV – and if you’re a papal Leo, you tend to be a reformer at the progressive end of Catholicism. That Prevost has decided to become Leo XIV will make Catholics think immediately of the last Leo – Leo XIII – and his 1891 encyclical or teaching document, Rerum Novarum, which outlined workers’ rights to a fair wage, safe working conditions and the rights of workers to belong to trade unions. If Pope Francis was the People’s Pope, then Leo XIV is all set to be the Workers’ Pope.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:12 pm

Surgery, real sex and water sports: Louise Weard on her four-hour camcorder trans film Castration Movie Part One

The Canadian director set out to make a 90-minute snapshot of the trans experience before it ballooned in length and scope. Nevertheless, the film’s writer, director and star is confident of reaching the mainstream

When Louise Weard began shooting her debut film in 2023, she envisaged it as a snappy, 90-minute portrait of a group of queer and transgender friends in Vancouver. Now, Castration Movie, a crowdfunded camcorder epic made for less than C$60,000 (£33,000), runs four-and-a-half hours. And that’s just part one. When the entire magnum opus is finished later this year, Weard estimates it will clock in at more than 12 hours. Take that, Béla Tarr. Watch your back, Rivette.

Not that anyone could mistake Castration Movie for slow cinema. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to watch farmers in a field for 20 minutes,” says the 31-year-old director over coffee in an east London cafe. Indeed not: the first hour-and-a-half follows a budding “incel” as he sinks deeper into the manosphere. The narrative focus then switches abruptly to a trans sex worker, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, played by Weard. Michaela’s abrasive exterior conceals a yearning for motherhood and intimacy; she may have the tongue of Joan Rivers and the decorum of Divine, but she’s as fragile as Edith Piaf. “People are always relieved when they find out I’m nothing like Michaela,” says Weard, whose background is in Canadian underground horror. “She’s the nightmare version of me.”

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:14 pm

From Brunson to Ant-Man: the players who have defined a wild, brilliant NBA postseason

The NBA was under attack from critics during the regular season. But the playoffs so far have contained shocks, upsets and moments of pure joy

Welcome to Act III of the 2024-25 NBA season. It was a rough start for the league this year. People came out of the woodwork to criticize it, offering wild solutions, and pointing out the low early season TV ratings. But then the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers and things got real interesting in Act II.

Now, though, we’re in the third portion of the season and it couldn’t be more exciting. Indeed, we seem far away from those calls for sweeping change. Let’s look at five players who have wowed us and taken us to the edge of our seats in this third act.

Published: May 8, 2025, 12:01 pm

Djo review – Joe Keery mixes genres in an endearing, if uneven, Brooklyn set

Brooklyn Steel, New York

Stranger Things actor’s musical project has now gone from bedroom to the big stage and, while not all of it works, there’s energy to spare

By now, Djo is not a secret. The psychedelic electro-pop project led by Joe Keery, once an IYKYK solo bedroom-production artist, has reached the mainstream, making the festival circuit at Laneway, Coachella and Glastonbury. And Keery, an actor best known for playing foppish, helplessly winsome Steve Harrington on Stranger Things, has stepped out from the shadows of a persona initially meant to disguise his famous name; gone are the Scooby-Doo Shaggy-style wigs and costumes from Djo’s early performances, meant to dissociate any notion of the Upside Down from Keery’s longstanding interest in making music.

It worked, though in a manner befitting a preternaturally charming and thoughtful celebrity who seemingly courts good fortune: by accident. Djo, pronounced like his first name, blew up not because he was “the guy from Stranger Things”, but because he inadvertently caught a rogue wave of virality. End of Beginning, a synth-y, nostalgic ode to a past version of oneself, became a TikTok track, a million videos soundtracked to Keery’s wistful “and when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it”, largely without knowledge of the name. The song racked up more than 1.4bn streams in 2024, two years after its release on Djo’s second album, Decide.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:30 pm

Pope Leo XIV to hold his first mass as pontiff as Catholics around the world celebrate – live

Pope will hold private mass in the Sistine Chapel at 0900 GMT, during which he will give his first papal homily

• Robert Francis Prevost: the moderate, good humoured first US pope
• Pope Leo’s in-tray: pontiff has many urgent issues to address
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

Here is the video from yesterday, when Pope Leo XIV was applauded by cardinals in the Sistine Chapel and prayed alone after being elected as the new leader of the Catholic church. He will hold a mass there later this morning.

US media has reacted to the news that there is to be an American pope for the first time. The New York Times said the decision defied “a longstanding belief that church leaders would never select a pope from a global superpower that already has considerable influence in world affairs.”

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:51 am

‘Deep dish eucharist’: internet reacts to US pope with jokes and Chicago pride

Some users wonder whether new pope has had Chicago’s favorite liqueur Malört while others reference The Bear

• Pope Leo XIV – live updates

The internet exploded with humor and Chicago pride on Thursday following the historic announcement that Robert Francis Prevost, a 69-year-old American clergyman from Chicago, has been named the new pope.

Now known as Pope Leo XIV, Prevost has become the first clergyman from the United States to lead the Roman Catholic church, ending the Vatican’s longstanding opposition to the idea of a US pontiff.

Published: May 8, 2025, 8:49 pm

Chicago reacts to hometown Pope Leo: ‘Like the Cubs winning the World Series’

Residents – Catholic and non-Catholic – celebrate a ‘moment of joy’ as native son Robert Prevost becomes new pontiff

As white smoke billowed from the Vatican in Rome, yellow papal flags whipped in the crisp Lake Michigan breeze in front of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy on Chicago’s North Side.

Screams of “Habemus Papam!” echoed throughout the cafeteria at the Catholic school on Thursday afternoon, when news broke that Chicago’s Robert Prevost had become Pope Leo XIV.

Published: May 9, 2025, 1:19 am

Robert Francis Prevost: the moderate, good-humoured first US pope

Colleagues recall a calm and grounded leader capable of moderating between factions, with a strong connection to his predecessor

• New pope chosen: latest updates
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

Robert Francis Prevost – who has chosen the papal name Leo XIV – may not be the Latin American Jesuit wildcard that his predecessor, Pope Francis, was, but his election is similarly historic.

In the figure of the 69-year-old former head of the Augustinian order, the Roman Catholic church has its very first US leader. Until Thursday evening, the idea of the fisherman’s ring being slipped on to a North American hand was seen as a fairly distant possibility. The Vatican’s longstanding opposition to a US pope stemmed largely from the optics of having a pontiff from a political superpower and a country with such a hegemonic cultural and secular global influence.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:47 pm

‘The pope is Peruvian’: elation in country where pontiff served as bishop

Leo XIV celebrated as second Latin American pope having spent many years in Peru’s church

• Pope Leo XIV – live updates

The election of Pope Leo XIV has been celebrated across Latin America, where many hailed him as the second pontiff from the region, after his Argentinian predecessor, Francis.

The news prompted particular elation in Peru, where he lived and worked for more than 20 years and was granted citizenship in 2015. In the capital, Lima, the bells of the cathedral rang in celebration.

In his first appearance from the Vatican balcony, Leo XIV briefly switched from Italian to Spanish to address the faithful “from my beloved diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru”, where he served as bishop for more than a decade.

Published: May 8, 2025, 9:42 pm

Trump names Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as top DC federal prosecutor

Move comes after US president withdraws nomination of Ed Martin, GOP loyalist who supported January 6 pardons

Donald Trump said on Thursday he would name Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host and former state-level prosecutor, to be the interim US attorney for the District of Columbia after a key Republican senator said he would not support the loyalist initially selected for the job.

Pirro, a former district attorney of Westchester county, New York, is a diehard Trump supporter whose false claim that the 2020 election was rigged by Dominion Voting Systems was used against Fox in court.

Published: May 9, 2025, 12:24 am

China exports beat expectations despite slump in trade with US

April trade data comes the day before representatives from Washington and Beijing were set to meet to discuss Trump’s tariffs

Chinese trade with the United States slumped in April even as its total exports beat forecasts, official figures show, as trade representatives from both nations prepared to meet this weekend in the midst of a gruelling trade war between the superpower rivals.

Exports to the United States – one of China’s top trading partners – fell 17.6% in April, data showed. Against that backdrop, analysts polled by Bloomberg had expected exports to rise just 2% year-on-year last month. However they beat expectations, coming in at 8.1%.

Published: May 9, 2025, 5:05 am

Federal prosecutors open criminal investigation into New York attorney general

Exclusive: Prosecutors impanel federal grand jury in Virginia to hear evidence after Trump official’s referral against Letitia James

• US politics live – latest updates

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, after the Trump administration alleged last month in a referral that she may have falsified paperwork for properties she owns in Virginia and New York, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation marks a swift and notable escalation against James, a major political enemy of Donald Trump, who was ordered to pay more than $450m in penalties as a result of a lawsuit brought by James’s office that accused him of inflating his net worth to secure financial benefits.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:14 pm

Vance says US won’t intervene in India-Pakistan conflict: ‘None of our business’

Vice-president says US will seek to de-escalate but cannot force either nuclear power to ‘lay down their arms’

JD Vance has said that the US will not intervene in the conflict between Pakistan and India, calling fighting between the two nuclear powers “fundamentally none of our business”.

The remarks came during an interview with Fox News, where the US vice-president said that the US would seek to de-escalate the conflict but could force neither side to “lay down their arms”.

Published: May 8, 2025, 10:22 pm

US to begin immediate removal of up to 1,000 trans military members

Pentagon will give other trans service members 30 days to self-identify while it enforces recently approved ban

The Pentagon is removing the 1,000 members of the military who openly identify as trans, and giving those who have yet to openly-identify as transgender 30 days to remove themselves, according to a new directive issued Thursday.

The memo is fueled by Tuesday’s supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on trans military members. The defense department has said it will follow up by going through medical records to identify others who haven’t come forward.

Published: May 9, 2025, 1:39 am

Revealed: Autopsy suggests South Carolina botched firing squad execution

Records obtained by the Guardian indicate shooters did not hit Mikal Mahdi according to protocol, which lawyers say caused prolonged suffering

A South Carolina firing squad botched the execution of Mikal Mahdi last month, with shooters missing the target area on the man’s heart, causing him to suffer a prolonged death, according to autopsy records and his attorneys.

Mahdi, 42, was shot dead by corrections employees last month in the second firing squad execution this year in South Carolina. The state has aggressively revived capital punishment over the last seven months and brought back the controversial firearm method that has rarely been used in the modern death penalty era.

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:27 pm

China and Russia pledge to deepen ties as they criticise US on Victory Day

In joint statement, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin accuse ‘certain countries’ of trying to ‘tamper with the results of the victory of the second world war’

China and Russia pledged to further deepen their already “no limits” partnership in a joint statement published ahead of Russia’s military parade on Friday, as the two sides stressed the importance of maintaining the “correct view” of second world war history.

In a lengthy statement published during Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow for the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, which Russia celebrates on 9 May as Victory Day, Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said “certain countries … are attempting to tamper with the results of the victory of the second world war”.

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:13 am

New film claims to identify Israeli killer of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

In Who Killed Shireen?, IDF soldier Alon Scagio is named as shooter of the Palestinian-American in Jenin in 2022

A new US-made documentary has produced evidence pointing to the identity of an Israeli soldier who shot dead the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022.

The documentary, Who Killed Shireen?, concludes that a member of the Duvdevan Israeli special forces unit shot Abu Akleh while she was reporting for Al Jazeera in Jenin, on the West Bank.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:37 pm

Trump administration invokes state secrets privilege in Kilmar Ábrego García case

Lawyers say they’re ‘still in dark’ about government’s efforts to free the man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador

The Trump administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege ” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis disclosed the government’s position in a two-page order on Wednesday. She set a Monday deadline for attorneys to file briefs on the issue and how it could affect Ábrego García’s case. Xinis also scheduled a 16 May hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland, to address the matter.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:52 pm

Trump and Starmer confirm ‘breakthrough’ US-UK trade deal

Announcement makes UK the first country to agree deal with US since Trump imposed sweeping tariffs in April

• Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce share prices soar as manufacturers welcome US tariff cuts
• Analysis: new UK/US trade deal is a relief for Starmer but doubts, and tariffs, remain
• US politics live – latest updates

The UK and US have agreed a “breakthrough” trade deal slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel and that the prime minister said would save thousands of British jobs.

Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month.

Published: May 8, 2025, 11:06 pm

Les Misérables actors to boycott Kennedy Center performance over Trump attendance

At least 10 of musical’s cast members will not participate in June show the president is expected to attend

At least 10 cast members from the current North American touring production of Les Misérables are choosing not to participate in an upcoming performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, in order to boycott the anticipated attendance of Donald Trump, according to CNN.

Cast members were reportedly given the option to opt out of the 11 June show. The production has not publicly identified which individuals will not be performing.

Published: May 8, 2025, 3:14 pm

West Point professor resigns over education shift under Trump

Graham Parsons criticizes military institution in NYT essay for ‘failing to provide an adequate education’

A West Point philosophy professor has announced his resignation after 13 years on the faculty, citing the academy’s rapid shift away from its core educational principles under the Trump administration in an essay for the New York Times.

Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy at the US Military Academy at West Point, criticized the institution for “failing to provide an adequate education for the cadets” under the new administration.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:45 pm

Trump news at a glance: military to immediately remove trans troops and use medical records to oust more

Buoyed by supreme court ruling, Pentagon will remove as many as 1,000 service members. Key US politics stories from Thursday 8 May at a glance

“No More Trans @ DoD,” Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, posted after the supreme court allowed the Trump administration’s ousting of transgender troops to go forward. As of Thursday, the orders have been issued to identify and involuntarily force trans people out of service.

Department officials have said it is difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show symptoms or are being treated. Those troops would then be forced out.

Published: May 9, 2025, 1:40 am

The desperate search for a father disappeared by Trump to El Salvador: ‘We don’t know anything’

Jerce Barrios told his family he might be transferred from a California detention center – no one’s heard from him since

The last time Joregelis Barrios heard from her brother Jerce, the call had lasted just one minute.

Immigration officials had moved Jerce from the detention center in southern California where he had been for six months to another one in Texas. He sounded worried, as if he had been crying. He told his sister he might be transferred somewhere else soon.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:44 pm

Ukraine war briefing: Trump calls for ‘ideally a 30-day ceasefire’ backed with sanctions

Ukrainians record 734 attacks despite Putin’s claim of three-day halt to fighting; Britain further targets Russian oil ‘shadow fleet’. What we know on day 1,171

Donald Trump after a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for “ideally, a 30-day unconditional ceasefire”. “If the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions,” Trump posted. Zelenskyy said after the call on Thursday that he told Trump that Ukraine was ready for talks on the war with Russia “in any format” but first “Russia must show that it is serious about ending the war, starting with a full and unconditional ceasefire”.

The call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday went “very well”, said a senior Ukrainian official. The conversation lasted about 20 minutes and focused on diplomacy and the genuine ceasefire that the US and Ukraine are trying to establish, while the presidents also discussed the Ukraine-US minerals deal, ratified on Thursday by the Ukrainian parliament.

Ukraine has accused Russia of violating Vladimir Putin’s self-declared ceasefire 734 times within its first 12 hours. Kyiv’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, called it a “farce”. The Russian president’s unagreed ceasefire aims to protect parades and other proceedings on Russia’s biggest secular holiday, the 80th anniversary of victory over Germany in the second world war.

In its opening hours, Russian bombs struck north-east Ukraine, killing at least one civilian, said Ukrainian officials who added that artillery assaults took place across the 1,000km (620 mile) frontline, although with less intensity than in the previous 24 hours. Russia carried out 63 assaults along the frontline. Attacks took place near Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region. Large-scale missile and drone attacks abated for a short time, the Ukrainian air force said. But Russian forces fired a missile in central Ukraine’s Poltava region, a top regional official said, damaging roofs of houses when air defences brought it down.

The Russian defence Ministry accused Ukrainian forces of attacking its positions and said Russian forces would continue to “mirror” Ukraine’s actions during the Kremlin’s ceasefire. The Russian regions of Belgorod, Lipetsk, Orenburg, Ryazan and Tambov issued drone alerts, but there were no reports of any drones being shot down or intercepted. Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia briefly imposed restrictions on flights to and from the airport in Nizhny Novgorod.

Reuters journalists with a Ukrainian drone unit near the front in eastern Ukraine said a Russian infantry raiding party tried to advance on Thursday, but was stopped by drones. “The infantry are still coming,” said one of the soldiers in the unit, a 33-year-old who identified himself by his callsign Mikha. A second person who identified himself as Nazar said in the six hours since the Russian ceasefire started there had been three strikes on his section of the front: “The facts speak for themselves.”

Germany said Trump voiced support for European efforts to end the Ukraine war in a first phone call with the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz. A German statement said: “Trump said he would strongly support Germany’s efforts, together with France, Great Britain, Poland and other European partners, to achieve lasting peace.” Merz assured Zelenskyy of his support and remained open to arming Ukraine with Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles, which the previous chancellor, Olaf Scholz, refused to do.

Britain has announced further sanctions targeting Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said his government was sanctioning up to 100 tankers responsible for carrying more than $24bn worth of cargo since the start of 2024. The UK also said the ships are damaging critical subsea cables in Europe.

Starmer is due to attend a meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) in Oslo on Friday where Ukraine and Arctic security are on the agenda. The British-led military alliance is expected to announce further support for Ukraine’s armed forces including intensive training exercises and efforts to counter disinformation. The JEF consists of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the UK.

Published: May 9, 2025, 1:08 am

‘Hollowing out’: New Zealand grapples with an uncertain future as record numbers leave

Surge of departures – mostly fleeing a weak economy - fuels concern over the longer-term impact on the country as some small towns scramble for survival

She considers herself a diehard South Island girl, but Harriet Baker, 33, won’t be raising her children in the city where she’s spent most of her life.

“When we bought our house I said, ‘You’ll be taking me out of here in a casket,” she says, of the Dunedin home she and husband Cameron Baker, 33, sold last month.

Published: May 9, 2025, 12:19 am

The world reacts to the new pope – in pictures

From the US to Costa Rica to St Peter’s Square, people cheered the election of Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV

Published: May 8, 2025, 8:03 pm

‘There’s a battle going on for the soul of America’: actor Lennie James on political turmoil, zombie terrors and being a black Brit in the US

As part of a Bafta TV special, the nominated actor and Walking Dead regular on bringing Bernardine Evaristo’s hit novel Mr Loverman to the small screen, and splitting his time between London and LA

He is almost 40 years into his career, but Lennie James is still keeping things fresh. The 59-year-old south Londoner has run the gauntlet of high-octane TV dramas, playing Morgan Jones for more than 10 years in the wildly successful apocalypse drama The Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead; bent copper DCI Tony Gates in Line of Duty; and the down-and-out philanderer Nelly Rowe in Sky’s Save Me. In person, though, James is the polar opposite of the characters he is best known for – considered, introspective and disarmingly earnest.

Last year, he took on a radically different role, as Barrington (below) in the BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman, a closeted Windrush-generation Caribbean man in a secret relationship with his best friend. Quietly moving, it is a drastic shift in tone for James, and has earned him his first solo Bafta TV nomination.

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:00 am

Poker Face season two review – Natasha Lyonne’s fun detective show is painfully close to being a classic

Our crime-solving heroine is utterly charming, it’s stuffed with A-list stars and some episodes are just great. If only the cases were a bit more clever

This tribute to case-of-the week crime dramas is so nearly a brilliant TV show. Starring Natasha Lyonne (Orange Is the New Black, Russian Doll) as Charlie Cale, a woman with a foolproof ability to tell truth from falsehood, the series follows in the footsteps of classic story-of-the-week crime dramas; each episode features a tranche of excellent guest stars and a freshly covered-up misdeed for our thoroughly charming citizen-detective to uncover. With her gravelly-chipmunk New York tones – or “voice like a rusty clarinet”, as one character has it – Lyonne ensures Cale is an idiosyncratically charismatic protagonist you can really get behind. She’s cool: her catchphrase is “bullshit” and her aesthetic is 1970s-hued indie sleaze; shades, spray-on jeans, biker boots, shrunken T-shirts, wild, matted hair. She’s chaotically good, too: mischievous enough to bend the rules but essentially golden-hearted, in possession of an old-timey garrulousness and an inability to let things lie. What’s not to love?

The mysteries themselves, mainly. Most episodes of Poker Face – which was created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson, although he is not a credited writer on this second season – involve a 10ish-minute Cale-free opening, during which the viewer bears witness to a crime, usually a murder. Afterwards, we discover how our hero came to be acquainted with both the perpetrators and victims. Since the end of the very first episode, Cale has been on the run: first from a shady casino boss who wanted her dead (she was involved in the destruction of his business and the suicide of his son); then, as of the start of this new season, another shady casino boss who wants to exploit her lie-detection skills. To evade capture, she zigzags across the States at random – and into the path of a host of inadvertent murderers.

Published: May 8, 2025, 9:00 pm

The heroic Guardian reporter who documented the rise of the Nazis - podcast

Eighty years after the end of the second world war, two former Berlin correspondents discuss how the Guardian covered the Nazis

Frederick Augustus Voigt was the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent between 1920 and 1932.

In this episode, two fellow former Berlin correspondents, Helen Pidd and Philip Oltermann, discuss Voigt’s incredible reporting on the rise of Nazi Germany.

Published: May 9, 2025, 2:00 am

Experience: I walked the length of the UK with a donkey

After a relationship breakup, rambling 700 miles from the Highlands to Dorset with Martin helped restore my faith in people

I’ve always had a keen sense of adventure. During the summer holidays, my parents would push me and my sister out of the front door and tell us only to come home to eat. I went from roaming the streets of Hackney in east London as a child, to trekking, wild camping and hitchhiking the length of the Americas in my late 20s.

After returning to my home in Liverpool, I worked as a photographer and got into a relationship. When we broke up years later, I was distraught – but it led me back to the life of exploration that I’d put on the back‑burner. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on a solo 1,000-mile (1,600km) route through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Not wanting to feel sealed off from the wondrous environments around me, I did the majority of it on foot.

Published: May 9, 2025, 4:00 am

Week in wildlife: A rare chameleon, friendly starlings and hot buffaloes

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:00 am

Who killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – and why? | Dion Nissenbaum

You may think you know the story of the US citizen killed by Israeli forces, but you probably don’t

You may think you know the story of the first Palestinian-American journalist to be killed by Israeli forces, but you probably don’t.

For much of the world, Shireen Abu Akleh was the voice of Palestine, a brave, seasoned Al Jazeera journalist who repeatedly put her life on the line to cover the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Dion Nissenbaum was a longtime Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem, Beirut, Kabul and Istanbul over the course of two decades. He is the executive producer of Who Killed Shireen? and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting

Published: May 8, 2025, 10:00 am

Britain hasn’t agreed a trade deal with the US – it’s ended a hostage negotiation | Gaby Hinsliff

There will be relief for carmakers but not much else to celebrate: Trump’s whims still hang over the UK – and the world – economy

Hang out the bunting and let the church bells ring. A VE Day trade deal with Donald Trump is done, and in the car plants of the West Midlands as much as in the backrooms of No 10, there will be understandable relief that, for now at least, America’s phoney war on them is over.

It’s true that the easing of arbitrary tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium that didn’t even exist until eight weeks ago falls far short of being an actual trade deal, not least because the president could rip it up again tomorrow if he felt like it. But the terms agreed between London and Washington could save thousands of jobs, which isn’t to be sniffed at, even if they’re jobs that need never have been at risk in the first place had Trump not suddenly chosen to threaten them. More surprisingly, Rachel Reeves seems to have managed to hang on to her digital services tax on (mostly US) tech companies, while for all the president’s bluster about “dramatic” new access for cattle ranchers to British markets it could have been infinitely worse for British farming: no chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-injected beef or flooding of the market with heavily subsidised US meat at prices British farmers just couldn’t afford to match.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: May 8, 2025, 6:12 pm

If illegal logging starts again, Liberia could lose more than its beloved pygmy hippos | Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

About 270,000 people died in Liberia’s timber trade-fuelled civil war. I helped to rebuild and protect its forests. Now Europe is threatening to undermine all our hard work

It is sad when a ruthless military dictator funds his government by destroying ecologically important rainforest, logging tropical trees and displacing and robbing the people who live in and depend on the forests for their livelihoods and culture.

This happened in my country, Liberia.

Published: May 9, 2025, 5:00 am

Amazon says it’s a ‘myth’ that robots kill jobs. Here’s the reality | Benjamin Y Fong

The company is sending more packages every year – but with fewer fulfillment center workers

Stefano La Rovere, director of global robotics, mechatronics and sustainable packaging at Amazon, has the unfortunate task of trying to convince the public that Amazon is not in fact automating away human labor with its robotics deployments.

“It is a myth that technology and robots take out jobs,” La Rovere told CNBC last year. He said robots assisted workers “by reducing walking distance between assignments, by taking away repetitive motions, or by helping them to lift heavy weights. In turn, our employees can learn new skills.”

Benjamin Y Fong is associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and keeps a newsletter on labor & logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:00 pm

Why is Trump considering raising taxes on millionaires? | Alex Bronzini-Vender

Tax-cutting once unified the Republicans. Now, that sacred cow might get killed

“I actually love the concept,” Donald Trump recently told Time magazine of a proposal circulating within his cabinet to raise taxes upon those earning over $1m. “I don’t want it to be used against me politically, because I’ve seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news.”

Few presidential administrations have killed sacred cows at a faster rate than that of Donald Trump. But this really is shocking: a sitting Republican president praising a proposal to raise taxes upon the wealthy, adding only the slight caveat that it would be adversely spun by those in “the fake news”. A tax increase, Trump apparently believes, would be tenable as policy but not as politics.

Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York

Published: May 8, 2025, 10:00 am

Mount’s fine double sweeps Manchester United past Athletic Bilbao into all-English final

The Mason Mount strike that sealed Manchester United’s Europa League final berth was as sublime as Ruben Amorim’s team were slipshod until the substitute took charge.

With 72 minutes gone, Leny Yoro prodded the ball to Mount who, with the sweetest touch of his right instep, swivelled, then bent the equaliser past the helpless Julen Agirrezabala.

Published: May 8, 2025, 9:01 pm

Champions League review: a journeyman hero, a crucial miss and a stone-cold classic

PSG and Inter will play for the crown at the end of the month but there were plenty of twists and turns before the finalists were decided

Inter

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:00 pm

Olympic great Sue Bird to direct US women’s basketball national team

• Bird named managing director of US women’s team
• Five-time Olympic champion to serve four-year term

Sue Bird is giving another assist to USA Basketball, becoming the managing director of the women’s national team.

The five-time Olympic champion was named to the newly created position Thursday and it marks a major change in the way the organization creates its roster and coaching staff.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:49 pm

LA to make Olympic history with two-venue opening ceremony in 2028

• Ceremony to be split between Coliseum, SoFi Stadium
• Two venues will host opening ceremony for first time
• Paralympics to follow with ceremonies at both stadiums

Los Angeles will make Olympic history in 2028 by staging the opening ceremony of the Summer Games across two venues: the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. LA28 organizers confirmed the unprecedented dual-venue format on Thursday, making Los Angeles the first city to open an Olympics at two stadiums simultaneously.

The 14 July ceremony will also mark a milestone for the Coliseum, which organizers say will become the first venue to host Olympic events at three separate Games, following 1932 and 1984. SoFi Stadium, the $5bn home of the NFL’s Rams and Chargers which opened in 2020, will make its Olympic debut.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:39 pm

USWNT star Mallory Swanson, husband Dansby expecting first child

• Mallory had been absent from Chicago Stars of NWSL
• Her first child with Chicago Cubs shortstop

Chicago sports power couple Mallory and Dansby Swanson are expecting their first child.

Mallory Swanson is a forward for the Chicago Stars of the National Women’s Soccer League and the US women’s national team; her husband is the All-Star shortstop for the Cubs.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:37 pm

Manny Pacquiao won’t fix the Hall of Fame’s blind spots. The process needs an overhaul | Thomas Hauser

Some figures have been immortalized for far less than what others have achieved. It’s time the International Boxing Hall of Fame reevaluates who truly deserves a place in Canastota

On 8 June, 14 men and women will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. Some, like Manny Pacquiao, clearly deserve the honor. Others – in my opinion – don’t. More egregiously, some fighters and other members of the boxing community who should be in the Hall of Fame have never even been on the ballot.

I’d like to highlight some of them. Let’s start with fighters and, for purposes of comparison, put their ring accomplishments side by side with those of one of the 2025 inductees: Vinny Pazienza.

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His next book – The Most Honest Sport: Two More Years Inside Boxing – will be published this month and is available for preorder. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor - induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Published: May 8, 2025, 8:30 am

Blinkered Arteta’s remarks are wrong but hurt can make Arsenal stronger | David Hytner

If manager gets the four players he needs this summer and squad learn from PSG setback they could scale the heights

Rage, anger, frustration. A bad feeling in the tummy. Mikel Arteta felt the emotions churn, these his words as he tried to process it all. And this was on Saturday night after his Arsenal team had lost 2-1 at home to Bournemouth in the Premier League.

The manager’s idea was to harness the pain, to have it inspire one of the most famous results in club history when they went to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday for the Champions League semi‑final second leg. In the end, after a tumultuous game, Arteta would be left with pretty much the same sense.

Published: May 8, 2025, 3:26 pm

Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend

There are high stakes at St James’ Park, City could yet nab second and will Forest cope with playing on the front foot?

Antonee Robinson has been one of the best full-backs in the league this season. He flies up and down the left flank, defends well and whips in crosses. However, the Fulham defender was not at his sharpest during his side’s defeat to Aston Villa last weekend. He found it difficult to contain Morgan Rogers and his crossing was not up to its usual high standards. The concern is whether Robinson, who had missed Fulham’s previous game, is in peak physical condition. It has been a long campaign but Marco Silva needs the USA international to be ready to go when Everton visit Craven Cottage on Saturday. Robinson’s raids are a key part of Fulham’s attacking set-up. Jacob Steinberg

Fulham v Everton, Saturday 3pm (all times BST)

Ipswich v Brentford, Saturday 3pm

Southampton v Manchester City, Saturday 3pm

Wolves v Brighton, Saturday 3pm

Bournemouth v Aston Villa, Saturday 5.30pm

Newcastle v Chelsea, Sunday 12pm

Published: May 8, 2025, 11:00 pm

At least 216 children died in first high severity US flu season in seven years, CDC says

Number of child deaths is highest in 15 years and cumulative hospitalization rate is highest since 2010-2011

At least 216 children have died of influenza in the US during the last flu season in what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said was classified as the first high severity season overall and for all age groups since 2017-2018.

That number marks the highest pediatric death toll in 15 years; the previous high reported for a regular (non-pandemic) season was 236 pediatric deaths in the 2009-2010 season, according to the CDC. More recently, 207 pediatric deaths were reported during the 2023-2024 season.

Published: May 8, 2025, 3:02 pm

Stockholm rejects ‘bizarre’ US letter urging city to scrap diversity initiatives

City official says it will not comply with request seeking to impose Donald Trump’s rollback of diversity measures

A city official in Stockholm has said the municipality has no plans to comply after one of its offices received a letter seeking to impose Donald Trump’s rollback of diversity measures, in what is believed to be the first such missive sent to a foreign government.

“It’s so bizarre,” said Jan Valeskog, Stockholm’s vice-mayor for planning. “It’s our political priorities that count, not the ones from this embassy or any other embassies.”

Published: May 8, 2025, 6:49 pm

Canada medical mystery takes twist as study finds no evidence of brain illness

Researchers link suspected cases in New Brunswick to known diseases, suggesting ‘misdiagnosis and misinformation’

A new peer-reviewed scientific study has found no evidence of a mystery brain disease in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, suggesting instead a troubling combination of “misdiagnosis and misinformation”.

The research comes as the Maritime province prepares its own assessment of more than 220 suspected cases in the hope of giving families some answers to a medical mystery that has gripped the region for years.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:44 pm

US House approves ‘dumb’ legislation renaming Gulf of Mexico ‘Gulf of America’

Measure passes nearly along party lines, with all Democrats opposed and almost every Republican voting in favor

Republicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to codify Donald Trump’s policy of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”.

The measure was sponsored by rightwing Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene and passed nearly along party lines, with all Democrats opposed and almost every Republican, with the exception of vulnerable Nebraska representative Don Bacon, voting in favor.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:30 pm

Noaa to stop tracking cost of climate crisis-fueled disasters: ‘Major loss’

US agency will no longer update major weather database in latest showing of Trump’s influence on climate resources

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.

Noaa falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:59 pm

April storms that killed 24 in US made more severe by burning fossil fuels – study

Study finds human-caused climate change made four-day rainfall across central Mississippi valley 40% more likely

The four-day historic storm that caused death and destruction across the central Mississippi valley in early April was made significantly more likely and more severe by burning fossil fuels, rapid analysis by a coalition of leading climate scientists has found.

Record quantities of rain were dumped across eight southern and midwestern states between 3 and 6 April, causing widespread catastrophic flooding that killed at least 15 people, inundated crops, wrecked homes, swept away vehicles and caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of households.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:00 am

‘Astonishing journeys’: online tool tracking migratory animals highlights challenge of protecting them

The University of Queensland system is intended to give policymakers idea of how species traverse the oceans and what it will take to save them

• Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email

Off the east coast of Florida, female loggerhead turtles swim more than 1,000km north, hugging the edge of the continental shelf to get to feeding grounds.

Humpback whales move through Moreton Bay off the Brisbane coast in Australia, on their way to feed around the Balleny Islands more than 4,000km away off the Antarctic coastline, where wandering albatross circle above, travelling 1,000km a day.

Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email

Published: May 8, 2025, 9:01 am

Scorpions ‘taking over’ Brazilian cities with reported stings rising 155%

Fast and unplanned growth of cities providing ideal conditions for the creatures to thrive, say researchers

Scorpions are “taking over” Brazilian cities, researchers have warned in a paper that said rapid urbanisation and climate breakdown were driving an increase in the number of people being stung.

More than 1.1m stings were reported between 2014 and 2023, according to data from the Brazilian notifiable diseases information system. There was a 155% increase in reports of stings from 2014 to 2023, according to research published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:00 am

Alex Mashinsky of cryptocurrency firm Celsius Network sentenced to 12 years

Founder and former CEO of bankruptcy lender pleaded guilty in December to securities and commodities fraud

Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former chief executive of bankruptcy cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, was sentenced on Thursday to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty in December to securities fraud and commodities fraud.

Mashinsky’s sentence was imposed by US District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan, and is among the longest in a criminal case arising from the 2022 meltdown in cryptocurrency markets.

Published: May 8, 2025, 11:49 pm

James Foley, director of Fifty Shades sequels and Glengarry Glen Ross, dies aged 71

The film-maker, whose credits also included many Madonna music videos, died of brain cancer

Director James Foley, whose credits included Glengarry Glen Ross and the Fifty Shades sequels, has died aged 71.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, his death was confirmed by his representative who said he died “peacefully in his sleep earlier this week following a years-long struggle with brain cancer”.

Published: May 8, 2025, 8:10 pm

Netherlands museum rethinks lending works to US amid Trump arts cuts

Mauritshuis in The Hague says guarantees would be needed of artworks’ safety amid uncertainty caused by US funding cuts

A leading museum in the Netherlands has said it is reconsidering lending works from its collection to museums in the US amid the uncertainty wreaked by Donald Trump’s funding cuts and ideological impositions.

Martine Gosselink, the director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, whose collection includes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, said the turmoil had left her team wary of lending pieces to the US.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:37 pm

Bernie Sanders partners with Run for Something to aid new progressive candidates

Vermont senator’s joint initiative aims to recruit and train those seeking public office, especially young people

Bernie Sanders is partnering with the group Run for Something to help support a new generation of progressive candidates interested in seeking public office.

Questions about the future of Sanders’ leftwing movement have followed his cross-country Fighting Oligarchy tour, where at each stop the Vermont senator encourages supporters to get involved and run for office. The initiative builds on those calls, Politico first reported, by teaming up with organizations that recruit and train candidates running for office, with an emphasis on young people.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:00 pm

Xi hails ‘confident’ China-Russia ties as Putin welcomes ‘dear friend’ to Kremlin

Chinese leader describes talks as ‘friendly and fruitful’ during visit for Victory Day commemorations

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exchanged warm words in the Kremlin on Thursday during a grand ceremony welcoming the Chinese leader for his 11th visit to Russia, ahead of a military parade to mark 80 years since the end of the second world war.

After nearly four hours of talks, Xi described his meeting with his Russian counterpart as “in-depth, friendly and fruitful”.

Published: May 8, 2025, 3:57 pm

UK must rebuild trade relationship with EU, says BoE boss; China-US shipments slump – business live

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• China exports beat expectations despite slump in trade with US

Yesterday, Donald Trump teased us by revealing that an unnamed UK company had bought $10bn of planes from Boeing.

And this morning, British Airways’ parent company has revealed itself as the buyer.

The Group has ordered 21 Airbus A330-900neo aircraft and 32 Boeing 787-10 aircraft for delivery from 2028 to 2033.

The aircraft are mainly for replacement, with around one third for growth in IAG’s core markets.

“This story on the front page of the Telegraph is complete nonsense. I mean, I’m at a bit of a loss as to know where it’s come from. I think it was a Conservative Party criticism.

“But as you said, we’ve not even published all of the documents yet, so I’m not quite sure how they were able to come up with that.

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:51 am

‘A future on our terms’: how community energy is lighting up Latin America

Small-scale schemes are replacing dirty diesel with clean electricity in remote areas – and ensuring a just transition

When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, Roxana Borda Mamani had to leave Mexico, where she was studying for her degree in rural development and food security, and return to her remote village in the Peruvian Amazon.

At the time, the Indigenous community in Alto Mishagua had neither an internet connection nor a reliable energy source. “How am I going to study?” Borda asked. “With energy from the sun,” replied her friend, a fellow member of the Latin American Observatory for Energy Geopolitics at the Brazil-based Federal University of Latin American Integration (Unila).

Published: May 8, 2025, 1:00 pm

Amsterdam: sound of children playing not a valid reason for complaint, say experts

Sports advisory group says outdoor activity is vital for health and calls for bylaws to be changed to silence moaning neighbours

Residents in one of Europe’s most densely populated cities who complain about the noise of children playing should be ignored, according to a sports advisory group which says outdoor activity is vital for their health.

In new outdoor play advice, Sportraad Amsterdam (Sports Council Amsterdam) said local bylaws should be changed so that the sound of children playing was no longer a valid reason for complaint by vexed neighbours.

Published: May 8, 2025, 12:36 pm

Nicolas Cage: ‘I don’t think a day goes by where I’m not mistaken for Nick Cave’

As psycho-thriller The Surfer is released, the actor answers your questions about eating rats, loving pickled eggs and scaring Terry Wogan

What do you remember of that appearance on Wogan? What was Terry like in real life? Have you still got that leather jacket, and the snakeskin jacket from Wild at Heart? johnnysmooth, EddieChorepost and BigAl65
I remember Terry Wogan was a very nice man and I enjoyed the interview with him, although I thought I was both obnoxious and somewhat wild. I guess it’s no secret that I was promoting a movie called Wild at Heart, so I was sort of play acting to that. I remember, as a child, I was in a car, a guy was walking down the street, and he had a leather jacket on and no shirt on underneath. I thought: “Well, that’s an interesting look.” I don’t know why that came back to me when I went on Terry’s show, but I thought: “I’m going to create that look again.” It was incredibly absurd and irreverent. I don’t have that leather jacket any more.

I found the snakeskin jacket in a secondhand store on Melrose in Los Angeles called Aaardvark’s – it reminded me of the jacket Brando wears in The Fugitive Kind – and I knew at some point I was gonna put it in a movie. I ended up giving it to Laura Dern because she was such a terrific actor, I enjoyed our time together on that movie with David Lynch, so I wanted her to have it.

Published: May 8, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘We’re not here to slander Sondheim!’ Inside the master’s wild final musical, completed at last

Here We Are, a satirical mashup of two surrealist movie masterpieces, was finished after musicals maestro Stephen Sondheim died – outraging some fans. As the show hits Britain, its stars and creators reveal their thrills and fears

There’s an edge of febrile hilarity in the National Theatre rehearsal room. The company of Here We Are, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, are off-book and getting the first act on its feet. But hitting your cues in a show as intricate as this is tough, whoever you are.

Jane Krakowski fluffs an entrance and tries not to corpse. Martha Plimpton raises a glass a second after everyone else, and a cast-mate blows a raspberry from the sidelines. Jesse Tyler Ferguson is convinced it’s not him who is a beat off. “Do it exactly like Rory does,” suggests director Joe Mantello, and Rory Kinnear responds mock-haughtily: “That’s just a general note.”

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:00 am

Forever review – an absolutely adorable TV take on Judy Blume’s banned teen sex classic

The 1975 novel might be barred from US schools and libraries, but it gets a hugely important telling here. It’s powerful, sweet – and with a cast as excellent as Heartstopper’s

A couple of years ago, Judy Blume noted that book banning was not only undergoing a resurgence in the US, but was at that point “much worse” than she had noticed during the 1980s. Blume is one to know: her 1975 novel Forever..., about teenage sex and desire, continues to be banned by school districts and libraries, as repression and censorship gallop on at a pace. This Netflix adaptation of Blume’s novel, which loses the ellipsis, is not only timely but important: through it, the story continues to be told, even if it is in a different medium.

This eight-part series, created by Girlfriends showrunner Mara Brock Akil, is sensitive and winningly sweet, while still managing to maintain its defiance and bite. It doesn’t so much update its source material as treat the novel as loose inspiration: details are shuffled around, extrapolated, nudged to the front and pushed to the back. But the spirit of it is intact. The central love story is now between two black students, Justin (Michael Cooper Jr) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) and set in Los Angeles, rather than New Jersey. It sets the action in 2018, neatly avoiding the enormously disruptive effects of the pandemic on teen life, while maintaining the dominance of smartphones, which it writes into the story with ease and authenticity.

Published: May 8, 2025, 12:35 pm

Shadow Force review – Kerry Washington overacts in low-rent action slop

Director Joe Carnahan’s limply made thriller about an estranged couple of elite operatives is a lazy grab bag of exhaustingly familiar cliches

Maybe the new action movie Shadow Force is just deserts for film fans who complain when seemingly surefire big-screen hits such as Another Simple Favor debut as streaming-only releases. Shadow Force has a premise almost comically adherent to the fixations of so many big-budget streaming movies: elite operatives Kyrah (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must fight for their lives and their family when they defy the rules of their, yes, shadowy employers by falling in love and having a child. It shares familiar components including charismatic stars, spy action, domestic strife and semi-slapstick violence with projects such as Back in Action (Netflix), Role Play (Prime Video) and Ghosted (Apple TV+), among others. With director Joe Carnahan, it even has a once edgy stylist who used to deal in gritty grain, blown-out color and quick-cut aesthetics, now following in the footsteps of fellow 2000s-era action directors such as McG and Antoine Fuqua by eliminating all traces of color from his work – another streaming trademark. Somehow, it is nonetheless premiering in movie theaters.

This change of venue should be doing Shadow Force a great service. No action picture worth its salt will play better on a smaller screen. But blown up to theater size, Shadow Force doesn’t look any more epic or exciting. It’s working from such a greyish and muted color palette that when enemy combatants throw smoke bombs in order to conceal their attacks, you might find yourself thinking: what’s the difference, really? The whole movie looks like it’s waiting for smoke to clear.

Published: May 9, 2025, 1:00 am

Clown in a Cornfield review – perky yet run-of-the-mill slasher fare

An adaptation of the 2020 YA horror sees an evil clown pick off local youths and while there are a handful of interesting ideas, this is pretty standard late night fodder

One would be forgiven for assuming there was a lot more to early summer slasher Clown in a Cornfield other than, well, a clown in a cornfield. Because ever since an inevitable premiere at SXSW in March, an impressively maintained buzz has followed – special drive-in screenings, an ambitiously wide release, the bullish positioning of a New Horror Icon – giving us enough naive hope that in an overcrowded genre (there’s estimated to be double the amount of wide release horrors this year compared to 2024), this one might be worthy of the hype.

But the film, which was picked up by ever-growing horror streamer Shudder at the end of last year, would have been a wiser choice for a small screen premiere, a late-night weekend couch watch that feels a little too modest for the multiplex. The expansive rollout will likely have been triggered by the surprise success of last year’s Art the Clown sequel Terrifier 3, which made a staggering $90m worldwide from a $2m budget (it was released the month before Clown in a Cornfield was purchased). As small and junky as those films might be, they’re distinguished by a throughline of ghoulishly inventive ultra-gore, a throwback to the kind of video nasty violence that would worry and repulse parents, the act of seeing the films then carrying with it an air of juvenile rebellion.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:04 pm

PinkPantheress: Fancy That review – sharp-minded bops hop across pop’s past and present

(Warner)
Denigrated by some as the epitome of attention-deficit youth, the English pop musician became huge nonetheless – and her latest has an inspiringly free-associative feel

There’s something telling about the fact that PinkPantheress launched the first single from her second mixtape with a video boasting that it was 2:57 long. “Ion [I don’t] wanna see no more song length jokes,” ran the caption accompanying a brief video of her dancing to Tonight, a track that throws together a mass of musical reference points: a sample from US emo-rockers Panic! at the Disco stitched to a speedy four-to-the-floor house beat, a candy-sweet pop melody, a hefty bassline that suggests the influence of UK garage or drum’n’bass and a lyric that alludes to both Avril Lavigne’s Complicated and Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire.

Since the English singer-songwriter-producer first came to public attention in 2021, by posting snippets of the tracks she had made on a laptop in her halls of residence to TikTok, brevity has been her calling card: most of the songs that caused her commercial breakthrough lasted barely 90 seconds; one, Attracted to You, was over and done in 67. They garnered hundreds of millions of streams. Moreover, they were the first steps on an impressive commercial ascent that’s involved a major label deal, a succession of gold and platinum awards, a place on the Barbie soundtrack and invitations from Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay to support them on tour. Perhaps inevitably, they also attracted criticism from people who viewed her less as a success story than a symptom: wilfully insubstantial, attention-deficit music befitting an era in which pop has lost its place as the basic substance of youth culture, an age when its primary function is just to burble briefly in the background of videos offering makeup tutorials and wellness tips.

Published: May 8, 2025, 11:15 am

Brahms: Complete Symphonies album review – period-instrument plushness with modern-instrument refinement

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Gardiner
(Deutsche Grammophon)
In recordings taken from live performances, John Eliot Gardiner conducts the RCO in taut and purposeful readings

Many years before he severed his connections with the period-instrumental ensembles and choir that he founded, John Eliot Gardiner had recorded the Brahms symphonies with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. In that Brahms Project in 2007 and 2008, he made a “reappraisal of Brahms’s sound world and ... the close link between the symphonies and Brahms’s choral works”. Returning to the works nearly two decades later in this new cycle, taken from concerts in which he conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in their Amsterdam home in 2021 to 2023, his priorities were different: “To build on that seminal earlier experience and to extend its finding and interpretations to/in working with a modern orchestra”.

Certainly the contrast of sound worlds between the period strings and wind on Gardiner’s old recording and the plush richness of the RCO, one of the world’s great ensembles, is marked, but in many respects the performances are similar; there’s a litheness to the approach, a refusal to get distracted by subsidiary detail from the essential symphonic argument, and a sense of always keeping the structure taut and purposeful. In these performances, Gardiner manages to have his period-instrument cake and enjoy his modern-instrument refinement in a way that is totally convincing.

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:37 pm

Gunk by Saba Sams review – boozy nights and baby love

The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family

To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.

At the heart of Gunk is a not-quite-love-not-quite-triangle between Jules, her feckless ex-husband Leon, nightclub owner and irredeemable waster, and the young, mysterious nim – that lower case “n” is all part of her vibe. Nim arrives one night at the club and captivates both Jules and Leon with her shaved head, her alluring mouth (“big and wet and laughing”), and the sense that she’s on the run from her old life. Much of the novel is told through flashback. Before we encounter nim at the club, we know that she has had a baby, left him with Jules, and vanished. Jules is alone trying to comfort a newborn that “knew by smell, by taste, that I was not his mother”. The main narrative consists of Jules telling us how this state of affairs came to pass.

Published: May 9, 2025, 6:00 am

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff audiobook review – a fugitive’s fight for survival

Actor January LaVoy narrates the visceral story of a girl on the run in a winter wilderness, in early 17th-century Virginia

At the start of The Vaster Wilds, we meet a servant girl, “bony and childish small”, on the run from a disease-ridden English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. The reason for her flight is not immediately disclosed, though her fingernails are tellingly bloody. Armed with a knife, a thick cloak stolen from her mistress and leather boots taken from a dead child, she heads out into the winter wilderness. There, in the face of ice storms, potentially hostile Powhatan villages and a soldier charged with task of capturing her “living or dead”, she must be fearless and resourceful to stay alive.

Lauren Groff’s vivid and visceral story of survival – think Man vs Wild meets The Revenant – is set in the early 17th century when smallpox and starvation pose the greatest threat to life. Our protagonist, formerly the child of a prostitute living in a London poorhouse, was given the name Lamentation as an infant but has spent most of her life known as “girl” – “Think not of it, girl,” she murmurs while contemplating the bleakness of her situation. We follow her as she builds fires, skins squirrels, forages for grubs and berries and sprints across frozen rivers, her plight set against the deprivation and patriarchal violence of the so-called new world.

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:00 pm

GTA6 gets it on: can the notoriously cynical action series finally find time for romance?

The newest trailer indicates Grand Theft Auto VI may have a soft centre, with its focus on outlaw lovers Lucia and Jason

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.

It’s now clear that the key protagonists of the latest gangland adventure are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, two twentysomething lovers from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s ex-army, now working for drug runners; she’s fresh out of jail, looking to make a better life for herself and her beloved mom. They fall for each other, hatch a plan to get out of Vice City, and then when their simple heist goes wrong, they find themselves at the sharp end of a state-wide conspiracy. You always knew that if Rockstar were going to tell a love story, it would involve a formidable cast of underworld kingpins, gang members, conspiracy nuts and corrupt politicians, and you were right.

Published: May 8, 2025, 8:00 am

The Who announce ‘bittersweet final tour’ of US and Canada

The Song Is Over tour will serve as ‘a truly grand finale of their illustrious six-decade career’, the rock band said

The Who have announced a final farewell tour of the US and Canada.

The British rock band, who played their first American concerts back in 1967, will kick off The Song Is Over tour in August in Florida. The tour will go on to include dates in locations including New York, Toronto and Seattle before ending in Las Vegas.

Published: May 8, 2025, 1:40 pm

The Last of Us mushroom coffee? Kevin Costner baked beans? TV merch to melt your mind

The tinned pulses based on cowboy drama Yellowstone might have been recalled on safety grounds, but fear not: you can always eat a tube of biscuits bearing Martin Clunes’ face…

First the bad news: this week the United States Food and Drug Administration recalled 4,515 cases of Yellowstone Brown Sugar Molasses Baked Beans after discovering that it did not disclose the presence of soy, an allergen that can have severe to fatal effects on sensitive consumers, in its ingredients. Shoppers from 23 US states are being urged to return their beans in exchange for a full refund.

But the good news is, you can get Yellowstone baked beans. How amazing is that? If you’re someone who enjoys watching Taylor Sheridan’s soapy western drama about the Dutton family enough to want to literally base all your meal times around it then, provided you don’t have a soy allergy, this is absolutely your lucky day. And the joy doesn’t stop there, because there’s also an entire website dedicated to selling various official Yellowstone food products.

Published: May 8, 2025, 2:50 pm

Brad Arnold, frontman with rock band 3 Doors Down, diagnosed with stage four cancer

Grammy-nominated and chart-topping singer says he has ‘no fear’ of illness in kidney and lung

Brad Arnold, the frontman with chart-topping US rock band 3 Doors Down, has been diagnosed with stage four cancer.

The singer said he has kidney cancer that has spread to his lungs. He discovered the illness after feeling unwell in recent weeks, “then I went to the hospital and got checked out and actually got the diagnosis that I had a renal carcinoma that had metastasised into my lung”.

Published: May 8, 2025, 9:12 am

Ready or not, here she comes: Lauryn Hill’s 20 best songs – ranked!

Ahead of her 50th birthday this month, we rate the best tracks of the multi-hyphenate talent who, with Fugees and as a solo artist, blended soul, hip-hop and reggae with raw emotion and charisma

The closest their debut album Blunted on Reality came to a crossover hit, Nappy Heads is almost unrecognisable as the work of Fugees, who went on to sell millions of records. But it’s an of-its-era joy nonetheless, with a boom-bap rhythm and horns sampled from jazzy 70s funk.

Published: May 8, 2025, 1:03 pm

Cringe! How millennials became uncool

They are mocked by gen Z for everything from their trainer socks to their mom jeans and selfie technique. A maligned millennial asks: how did we get here?

Her right to a naked ankle is, in the end, the hill Natalie Ormond is willing to die on. Ormond, a millennial, simply cannot – will not – get her head around gen Z’s fondness for a crew sock, pulled up over gym leggings or skimming bare legs, brazenly extending over the ankle towards the lower calf. “I stand by trainer socks and I won’t budge,” says the 43-year-old. “The more invisible the sock, the better.”

A proclivity for socks hidden within low-top trainers is just one reason why millennials – anyone born between 1981-1996 – are now considered achingly uncool by the generation that came next: gen Z, AKA the zoomers, or zillennials. According to countless TikTok videos, other sources of derision for the generation that first popularised social media, millennial pink, and pumpkin-spice lattes are their choice of jeans (skinny and mom jeans are out; baggy hipsters are in); an obsession with avocado on toast (gen Z’s green grub of choice is matcha); their excessive use of the crying laughing face emoji (for a zoomer, the skull emoji indicates humour, representing phrases such as “I’m dying with laughter”); and the “millennial pause”, a brief moment of silence at the start of a millennial’s video or voice note, thought to be because – and this really does make them sound ancient – they like to check the device they’re using is actually recording. Millennials, typically self-deprecating, tend to join in, poking fun at themselves under the hashtags like #millennialsoftiktok.

Published: May 8, 2025, 4:00 am

You be the judge: my dad wants to track my location on his phone. Should he leave me alone?

Martha says Dad doesn’t need to know her every move. Neil says following her on an app helps him feel connected. Who’s lost the plot? You decide

Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I like to keep Dad updated, but only for important things – and on my terms. I am 27!

Martha isn’t great at keeping in touch, so it’s nice to know she’s alive. It’s not stalking, it’s love

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:00 am

Rio’s record, giant dogs and a psychic crocodile – take the Thursday quiz

Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?

Last week in the comments one user suggested they were going to try to work the new Thursday quiz Minecraft movie-related catchphrase – “Chicken jockey your way out of that one, sunshine” – into a meeting at work, which is to be applauded, and hopefully will inspire more people to do so. But before going out to spread the message, you are faced with 15 questions, mixing up topical news, general knowledge and pop culture trivia in the usual fashion. Enjoy!

The Thursday quiz, No 209

Published: May 8, 2025, 10:00 am

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for asparagus, pea and rice soup-stew | A kitchen in Rome

Asparagus is an annual springtime ritual, and this soup is a thrifty and wholesome way to celebrate it

According to the Guinness World Record’s official website, 351.7cm was the length of the asparagus presented by Harry and Carson Willemse at the Port Elgin Pumpkinfest in Ontario, Canada, on 2 October 2004. Sadly, however, the Pumpkinfest’s own archives hold only the records of master growers and weigh-offs dating back to 2017, and are almost entirely pumpkin-related. Gardening websites and Pinterest, however, offer more insight into how asparagus, left unpicked, quite quickly reaches 6ft and develops branches and soft, feathery foliage. I assume Harry and Carson must have pulled away the ferns in order for their spears to grow to 3½m, which is a metre more than the average UK ceiling and almost the same length as a Mini Cooper, and the equivalent of 16-20 average-length spears laid across the kitchen floor.

Those average-length spears, however, are as much a sign of spring as blossom and barometric pressure-change lethargy (my tortoise and I are diametrically opposed for about 10 days every spring: him coming out of hibernation, me wishing I could enter it). Despite myself, we have been enjoying asparagus: boiled and covered with melted butter; rolled in salt and pepper, roasted on the griddle, then dressed with bitter orange; and turned into soup.

Published: May 8, 2025, 5:00 am

Plotting a comeback, Bolivia’s ex-leader defies arrest warrant in jungle hideout

Evo Morales is charged with statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl but still hopes to oust former ally Luis Arce as president

If it were not taking place in a small village deep within the Bolivian jungle, the scene could easily have been mistaken for a film set or live-action role-playing game: hundreds of people brandish wooden spears and improvised shields made from iron or plastic drums, some of which still bear the pictogram of the toxic products they once contained.

Behind them a wooden fort – with an elevated observation post where a man holds a bow and arrow – blocks the main path leading to a radio station, where Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, 65, has been entrenched for seven months, seeking to avoid arrest.

Published: May 8, 2025, 11:00 am

Trump fixates on US-Canada border – does he actually want to tear it up?

President eager to revisit 1908 boundary treaty, but experts suggest Trump using issue as bargaining chip

When Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, met with Donald Trump at the White House this week, the notoriously over-prepared former central banker was no doubt expecting to discuss tariffs, trade and defence policy.

But as he sat beside the president, he was instead treated to a discourse on one of Trump’s more recondite fixations: the centuries-old border between Canada and the United States.

Published: May 8, 2025, 10:00 am

Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

We’d like to hear your thoughts about the first clergyman from the US to lead the Roman Catholic church

Robert Francis Prevost, from Chicago, has become the first American pope to lead the Roman Catholic church.

The 69-year-old has taken the papal name Pope Leo XIV, a senior cardinal announced from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on Thursday evening. The announcement, which followed white smoke billowing from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, prompted raucous celebration among the 50,000 pilgrims and tourists in St Peter’s Square.

Published: May 8, 2025, 7:53 pm

The new pope, VE Day tributes and airstrikes: photos of the day – Thursday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Published: May 8, 2025, 12:40 pm