Kirill Serebrennikov’s prescient and audacious but oppressive drama is set in a post-Soviet Russia in the grip of a flu epidemicKirill Serebrennikov is the Russian theatre and film director whose work now makes its second appearance in the Cannes competition, and who, for the second time, has been effectively forbidden from coming in person, owing to his status as a courageous anti-government protester. For his previous film, Leto, he was under house arrest, and he now has a suspended sentence for charges that are clearly politically motivated. He is a remarkable figure, and it would have been agreeable to give a warm greeting to this already much admired, frenetically energetic new film, based on a novel by Russian author Alexei Salnikov, The Petrovs in and Around the Flu.It is set in a post-Soviet Russia in the grip of a flu epidemic and complete social breakdown, with people muttering how things were better before the country was ruined by “Gorby” and then finished off by Yeltsin. The narrative motif of a flu epidemic is shrewd and prescient, and the “flu symptom hallucination” imagery is fierce. Continue reading...

Victoria to go into hard lockdown as outbreak grows to 18 cases; NSW premier warns of higher case numbers on Friday. This blog is now closed

Over the past year, many of us have suffered from physical and emotional exhaustion. It is no surprise that people have turned to food for comfortNaomi Boles hit a wall last October. “I wasn’t sleeping at all and I felt like I couldn’t keep going,” she recalls. “I was so stressed, and even when I was in bed my brain was constantly racing as I was worrying so much about my health, about my income, about my children. When I went to the doctor, it was like I’d reached a point where I couldn’t carry on any more.”Nine months on, she is still recovering from that burnout. “I am finally getting to the point where I can be a bit easier on myself and not constantly be in this fight-or-flight mode,” she says. Continue reading...

Survivors’ groups say Thomas Bach should stay away, accusing him of using site to ‘justify holding of the Olympics by force’ despite pandemic

The pop star tells a Los Angeles hearing: ‘They were always trying to make me feel like I’m crazy’ as she gives shocking details

Cameras have been allowed in a Sydney hospital's Covid-19 intensive care unit, showing the struggle of one patient on a ventilator. The 53-year-old Covid patient from NSW is only able to take shallow breaths of air through the ventilator. His medical teams, dressed in full PPE, adjusts his ventilator tubes and monitor his oxygen levels. The patient has given his consent for his images to be published► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

Citizens warned not to take law into own hands to protect property, as government plans to deploy 25,000 more troopsSenior officials in South Africa have appealed to ordinary citizens not to take the law into their own hands as vigilante groups form following days of unchecked looting and violent protests across a swath of the country.Thousands of soldiers have been deployed to help police on the streets, but law enforcement agencies still appear unable to stem ongoing attacks by crowds on warehouses, supermarkets, shopping malls, clinics and factories. Continue reading...

Thursday: A growing Covid outbreak in Victoria prompts indoor mask mandate. Plus: Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in hospital for hiccupsGood morning. Victorians face Covid restrictions again as case numbers grow, South Africa continues to suffer significant violence and unrest, and the mourning family of Frank “Gud” Coleman call out a lack of respect from corrective services following his passing.A former member of the Morrison government’s immunisation advisory body has hit back at the prime minister’s criticism of the group, calling Scott Morrison’s comments “unfair” and “disappointing”. Morrison blamed Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations (Atagi) on 2GB radio on Wednesday for being “overly cautious” about the AstraZeneca jab, suggesting this had slowed the Covid vaccine rollout. Former member, Debra Petrys, said Atagi had been “unfairly put in the spotlight”, while public health expert Bill Bowtell also claimed the federal government’s failure to diversify its vaccine supply was the most critical setback for the vaccine rollout, not the advice of Atagi. Continue reading...

Gen Mark Milley drew comparison to Nazi Germany as Trump tried to overturn election defeat, new book I Alone Can Fix This saysShortly before the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, told aides the US was facing a “Reichstag moment” because Donald Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer”, according to an eagerly awaited book about Trump’s last year in office.Related: Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book says Continue reading...

Proposals to end prosecutions relating to Troubles before 1998 opposed by Irish governmentAll criminal prosecutions relating to the Troubles and future attempts to take civil actions would be blocked under UK government plans that have united Northern Ireland’s parties in opposition.The proposals, which are also opposed by the Irish government, were announced by Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, who told MPs it was a “painful truth” that criminal investigations were unlikely to deliver successful outcomes. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson has come under fresh pressure from metro mayors to change tack and keep mask wearing compulsory on public transport in England from Monday. At a news conference on Wednesday six Labour metro mayors said they would all be doing everything they could to require passengers to keep wearing masks. But the mayors have different powers in different places, and mostly their powers over transport are very limited. Continue reading...

Change means some people will have to quarantine when arriving in England from Monday, as red and green lists also updated

Despair and frustration have exploded into unrest. Demonstrators should be heard, not exploitedThe crackdown is well under way. On Sunday, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in cities across the country, impelled by food shortages, high prices and other anti-government grievances. These were the biggest protests in decades. Over 140 activists, demonstrators and journalists are believed to have been detained or disappeared, and one man has died. A few hundred more protested on Monday, but – while internet shutdowns make it harder to follow events – the unrest appears to have ebbed for now. The discontent has not.Though the speed and scale of the demonstrations took everyone by surprise, and owe much to the advent of social media, the pressure has long been building. Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the “special period” of the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union, its patron, collapsed. The government’s long-term failings, including foot-dragging on reform, have been matched by the impact of the American embargo. Hopes aroused by Barack Obama’s restoration of relations and loosened restrictions were cruelly dashed when Donald Trump reclassified the country as a state sponsor of terrorism and imposed new sanctions barring travel to the country from the US and, crucially, remittances: a key source of income. Washington’s claim that Havana is failing to meet people’s most basic needs is undeniable. But the US has ensured this is the case. Mr Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, reportedly told diplomats that the aim of the tightened sanctions was to “starve” the island to bring down the regime. Continue reading...

Historically musicians steered clear of addressing political topics that risk reprisals at home but Sunday’s explosion changed thatHigh-profile Cuban musicians from salsa band Los Van Van and jazz pianist Chucho Valdés to pop star Leoni Torres have offered rare public support to protesters and criticized Communist authorities’ handling of the worst unrest in decades.Thousands of Cubans joined rare protests nationwide on Sunday over shortages, Covid-19 and political rights. The government blamed US-financed “counter-revolutionaries” exploiting economic hardship caused by US sanctions. Continue reading...

Met commissioner’s conduct was criticised in report into police corruption after 1987 unsolved murderTwo police watchdogs are considering launching a formal investigation into Dame Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, following the report on police corruption that shielded the killers of Daniel Morgan.Since the publication of the Morgan report, which directly criticised Dick for hampering the government sponsored inquiry, the Independent Office for Police Conduct has been considering whether she, and other past and present officers that were criticised, should face action. Continue reading...

Frank Coleman was the ninth Aboriginal person to die in custody this year. His family first heard he’d been found ‘unresponsive’ via FacebookThe family of an Aboriginal man who died in a New South Wales prison says it took authorities six hours to notify them, and the news came several hours after they received a message from a relative on Facebook.Frank “Gud” Coleman, a 43-year-old Ngemba man, was found dead in his Long Bay cell early on Thursday 8 July. Continue reading...

Bellos, a policeman, made the Facebook posts in 2017 in relation to an off-air exchange between two presentersThe endorsed Queensland Liberal National party candidate, policeman Jim Bellos, has apologised for social media posts referring to a female journalist as a “cow” and a “stupid sour bitch”. .The Facebook posts by Bellos, a former Queenslander of the Year who is running at a state by-election in the south Brisbane seat of Stretton, have emerged amid a crackdown on officers’ offensive private social media activity by the Queensland police. Continue reading...

European court of justice had demanded suspension of Polish reforms that could lift judges’ immunityPoland’s top court has ruled that measures imposed by the European court of justice against the country’s controversial judicial reforms are unconstitutional, in a decision that could have far-reaching implications for the bloc’s legal order.Judge Stanislaw Piotrowicz said on Wednesday that Poland’s constitutional court had reached a majority verdict that EU measures regarding the “system, principles and procedures” of Polish courts were “not in line” with the Polish constitution. Continue reading...

EU member states will face tougher targets and goals to increase renewable energyIn 2019 the European parliament declared a “climate and environmental emergency”. In 2020 EU leaders pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by the end of this decade. Now comes the hard part: turning promises into policies to curb dangerous global heating. Continue reading...

Crucial period in climate and biodiversity crises flagged at European Commission as sweeping legal targets announcedThe EU executive has unveiled sweeping proposals to tackle global heating, warning of “a make-or-break decade” in the fight against the climate and nature crises.The dozen draft laws, spanning tighter curbs on industrial pollution, higher renewable energy targets, and the goal of planting 3bn trees, are intended to ensure the EU cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared with the levels in 1990. Continue reading...

Relatives express anger at what they say is an effective amnesty for perpetrators of atrocitiesRelatives of people killed during the Northern Ireland Troubles have condemned the government’s plan to end all criminal prosecutions as a death-knell to their hopes for justice and accountability.Families from all sides of the conflict expressed anger and hurt on Wednesday at what they said was an effective amnesty for perpetrators. Continue reading...

Jean Dujardin is charming, sad, scary and hilarious as a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with a leather jacket that sends him on a killing spreeWhen you hear someone say that such-and-such a movie could only have come from the French film industry, that tends to mean some impossibly sophisticated metropolitan comedy of intellectuals having dinner parties and extramarital sex. It doesn’t usually mean a macabre story about a middle-aged man suffering a midlife breakdown resulting in a psychotic obsession with his new deerskin jacket, which he thinks is talking to him and basically encouraging him to kill people. But this is the case with this entirely bizarre, uncompromisingly silly and intensely French horror-comedy from film-maker Quentin Dupieux, who is a DJ known as Mr Oizo and had a huge hit in 1999 with Flat Beat. He also has form with creating weirdo films about inanimate objects attaining strange significance: Rubber, from 2010, was about a rubber tyre that comes to life and (inevitably) kills people.

South African anti-apartheid activist who went into exile after prison and torture but returned to help the new ANC governmentNorman Levy, who has died aged 91, was an anti-apartheid activist who suffered arrest, torture and imprisonment in South Africa before two decades of exile in Britain and a return to his homeland after the end of minority rule. Back in South Africa he served on government commissions that concentrated on transforming the civil service and putting documents from the apartheid era into the public domain.As one of the few white South Africans who sacrificed their economic and political privileges by joining the liberation movement, Levy was dubbed, rather clunkily, “a struggle icon” by the post-apartheid media. Pallo Jordan, a minister in Nelson Mandela’s first majority-rule government, described him as one of those who “rather than betray their basic principles threw themselves body and soul into the freedom struggle to strive for a non-racial democratic order”, adding that “there was a high price attached”. Continue reading...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelityRyûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed. Continue reading...

Several airlines have said passengers must still wear masks, while rules will remain on London transportSeveral airlines have said they will continue to require passengers to wear face coverings, while rail, bus and coach operators will not require it after 19 July when the UK government relaxes the rules in England.Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said on Wednesday that he always “expected and indeed wanted” some train, bus and rail companies to insist on mask-wearing on their services. Continue reading...

Thousands of troops march in a Paris parade, warplanes roar overhead and traditional parties take place around the country as France celebrates its national day after last year’s events were scaled back because of the pandemic Continue reading...

Former US president says west’s withdrawal is a mistake and could cause ‘unspeakable harm’The former US president George W Bush has criticised the western withdrawal from Afghanistan in an interview with a German broadcaster, saying he fears Afghan women and girls will “suffer unspeakable harm”.Asked in an interview with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) whether the withdrawal was a mistake, Bush replied: “You know, I think it is, because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad.” Continue reading...

Scott Morrison says authorities are ‘very wary’ of the ship, which is monitoring the Talisman Sabre war games between Australia and US

Politicians express solidarity after Arooj Shah, the town’s first female Muslim leader, is targetedThe new leader of Oldham council has had her car firebombed in an “appalling” arson attack.Arooj Shah, the town’s first female Muslim leader, had previously spoken about the many battles she has faced with misogyny and racism, online trolls and opposition from traditionalists in her own community. Continue reading...

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to John le Carré, the novelist recommends reading about a vast, anguished legacyAll the courses I chose for my history degree related to empire. The first was a whistle-stop tour, one empire a week, starting with the Portuguese. A later course on decolonisation was so unpopular, the lectures were attended only by Prince Edward, his bodyguards and me. Studying the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya made the deepest impression. It all proved immensely useful background to draw on during my years as a Guardian columnist. In the 2011 Arab spring when I wrote about Bahrain, a reader emailed to point out that the police chief regarded as central in the suppression of Mau Mau went on to work for the Bahraini police.Related: Ceremony of Innocence by Madeleine Bunting review – on the make in the Middle East Continue reading...

I spent 30 years as a journalist before deciding to become a secondary school teacher. While a complete career change is rare, it is one of the best moves I ever madeI had my first midlife crisis in 2006. It started at 7am on a cold January morning when my mother got out of bed, made herself a cup of tea, had an aneurysm and died.I was a 46-year-old married newspaper columnist with four children, who appeared to be living a more than satisfactory life. But as the sudden axe of grief fell, I looked at my career, which was going better than I’d ever thought possible, and thought: I don’t want this any more. Continue reading...

Online retailer strikes deal with Kuwait’s Alshaya Group to launch in franchise stores and onlineThe online fashion retailer Boohoo has struck a deal with Kuwait’s Alshaya Group to sell its brands in franchised Debenhams stores and online in the Middle East.Alshaya, which already holds the franchise to operate Debenhams stores in the region, will have exclusive rights to operate its shops and websites in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Oman and Qatar. Continue reading...

Grant Shapps supports use of masks despite government removing legal requirement

Gladys Berejiklian extends shutdown; seven more cases in Victoria; WA set to lock out NSW travellers for another two months

Brandon Lewis to outline approach amid criticism that move amounts to amnesty for army veterans and paramilitariesMinisters are expected to introduce a statute of limitations to end all prosecutions related to the Troubles before 1998 to stop Northern Ireland being “hamstrung by its past”.Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, will outline the approach in the Commons on Wednesday as government sources rejected claims it would amount to an amnesty for army veterans and paramilitaries. Continue reading...

Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United Word Schools, which has opened schools in the country.All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS*All girls’ names have been changed Continue reading...

Bourbon smugglers, ‘sex energy’ and a $100m robbery inspired by CSI … three audacious cons are examined in Netflix’s fun, trashy and titillating true-crime showHeist (Netflix) is a wildly entertaining collection of true-crime stories that falls firmly into “you couldn’t make it up” territory. In forensic detail, this debut season recalls three audacious robberies, using recreations, interviews with key players on both sides of the law and archive news footage. Each tale is split over two episodes, with one building up to the crime and the second detailing the sometimes painfully slow downfall of those involved. It is occasionally trashy – the first, in particular, goes to town on the reconstructions – sometimes funny, tense and exciting. In terms of taking sides, it can be playfully, cheekily on-the-fence. Crime never pays, it argues. Or does it?The first instalment, Sex Magick Money Murder, is as outrageous and lurid as the title suggests. In the early 1990s, a young woman named Heather Tallchief is working as a nursing assistant, caring for young patients who are critically ill with Aids. Tallchief is from a tough background and develops a drug problem, going into what she refers to as “a downward spiral” at just 21. Enter a charismatic older man who promises to love her and take all her troubles away. Roberto Solis is a career criminal who operates under a raft of aliases. He is a poet with an interest in mysticism, the tarot and the power of harnessing sex energy, all of which leads him towards that ultimate spiritual goal of stealing a truckload of cash. Continue reading...

Desperation grows for those unable to access subsidised food, as worst hunger in two decades reportedWhen India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 struck in April, Nazia Habib Khan’s second marriage abruptly came to an end after a year of beatings and abuse. The 28-year-old daughter of migrants from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh returned to live with her mother, brothers and a sister-in-law in Mumbai.Their 40 sq metre (400 sq ft) home in Kurla East stands huddled among the 800 or so brick, tin sheet and tarpaulin houses of Qureshi Nagar, the entire shanty town trembling when a train roars past on a nearby railway line. Continue reading...

Protestors marched in a symbolic funeral procession with empty coffins to symbolise people killed in Lebanon blastLebanese riot police have fired teargas and scuffled with protesters and relatives of those who died in last year’s Beirut port blast amid growing anger at what they call the obstruction of an investigation into one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.The unrest took place on Tuesday after hundreds of protesters gathered outside the home of Lebanon’s caretaker interior minister, Mohamed Fehmi, weeks away from the first anniversary of the Beirut explosion approaches. Continue reading...

The New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced that the greater Sydney Covid-19 lockdown will be extended. 'It always hurts to say this, but we need to extend the lockdown for at least another two weeks. That includes home learning', the state's premier said. 'We will assess the situation at the end of those two weeks and provide information beyond that'

UK reports 50 further deaths amid over 36,000 new cases; German chancellor says Germany wants to promote jabs, not mandate them

Wednesday: NSW faces months of Covid restrictions without a tougher approach, experts say. Plus: Australia’s role in promoting the ‘Wuhan lab leak theory’Good morning. There are calls for tougher restrictions for Sydney residents stuck in lockdown, with predictions it could drag on for a while yet. Find all the latest Covid news here in your morning mail, plus stories about the oldie-but-goodie Knightriders, and a new graphic novel to take your mind off it all.NSW Covid restrictions will last months under a “soft lockdown” approach that relies on people doing the right thing without clear guidance, a top epidemiologist says. Prof Tony Blakely says the state needs to tighten its definition of essential workers and prioritise vaccinating those people if it wants to contain the Delta variant outbreak within weeks rather than months. “With the current measures, case numbers will keep bubbling along and NSW will be in a soft lockdown until vaccination numbers get high enough to upset the balance, but that could be months away,” Blakely said. Continue reading...

More than three months after the first vaccine was administered, less than 0.6% of the population have received their first doseThree months since Papua New Guinea launched its Covid vaccine rollout, just 60,000 people – or 0.6% of the population – have received their first dose, with many people hesitant due to misinformation and fears around the vaccine.Despite a recent surge in cases that has overwhelmed the already rickety health system, just over 2,800 people have received their second dose. Continue reading...

The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star has made a superbly low-key film about the ill-fated flirtations a teenager and older womanNoémie Merlant is the French acting star who two years ago helped make Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire a colossal critical hit at Cannes. Now she provides one of the festival’s incidental pleasures with her engaging if flawed directorial feature debut, presented here as a special screening. She has written it with her co-star, the emerging Romany actor Gimi-Nicolae Novaci, whom she discovered and cast as a nonprofessional in Shakira, the short film she directed in 2019 about gypsy communities in Paris. There is a definite screen chemistry between them here, and at times Mi Iubita (Romany for “my love”) Mon Amour almost comes across like a straight Call Me By Your Name.Related: The Souvenir Part II review – a flood of austere sunlight in Joanna Hogg’s superb sequel Continue reading...

Community comes together to back England footballer and oppose racism after mural was defaced“We’re going to take the knee like the footballers do,” said Nahella Ashraf, leading a crowd of at least 300 people in performing the anti-racism gesture in front of the freshly repainted mural of Marcus Rashford on Tuesday evening.Ashraf, a member of Manchester Stand Up to Racism, said she aimed to show “we are the majority” after the mural was defaced in the wake of England’s Euro 2020 final defeat. Continue reading...

Some argue delaying reopening would make little difference while other say government taking big risk

Original scroll of The 120 Days of Sodom, written while the writer was jailed in the Bastille, has been bought as an ‘emblem of artistic freedom’The manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s infamous erotic tale The 120 Days of Sodom has been acquired by the French government for €4.55m, following a campaign to keep it in the country. Continue reading...

Guo Gangtang finally reunited with his son, Guo Xinzhen, who was snatched by human traffickers when he was twoA Chinese father has been reunited with his son 24 years after he was abducted by human traffickers in front of their home in Shandong at the age of two in 1997.Guo Gangtang spent 24 years crisscrossing the country, travelling more than 300,000 miles on a motorbike, with two banners each showing a photo of his son, Guo Xinzhen. Continue reading...

Born in the gay clubs of LA, the craze was popularised by John Travolta, Donna Summer and the TV show Soul Train. Now it’s an LGBTQ+ hit in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and beyondWhen Cheryl Song stepped on to the all-black set of Soul Train in 1976, she was met with a deathly silence that was followed by a few threats, then a woman snarling: “Who does that high yellow bitch think she is?” Two friends from school had brought Song along to Don Cornelius’s groundbreaking TV show as something of a practical joke, assuming that she wouldn’t be selected because of her Asian heritage. But Song – “the Asian girl with the long hair” – went on to dance on the show for 14 years. “No matter what colour you are,” she says, “you’re just there to dance and have fun.”In those early days on Soul Train, waacking – an improvised dance done to the beat of disco that incorporated martial arts elements, rapid arm movements, poses and a celebrated attitude – was starting to go mainstream. As a straight Asian woman, Song had little in common with waacking’s LGBTQ+ origins, it being an unapologetic dance born from oppression. But she loved it nonetheless. “It was direct, it was a strong movement and it was dramatic,” she says. Continue reading...