Medicines are exempt from embargo but my husband died after DHL returned my package, says Kathryn RileyMy late husband, Roberto Molina Rivero, was a choreographer and dance poet. He was a dual national and type 1 diabetic. He died in Havana in February.In January, I attempted to send insulin to Cuba because of the shortage of insulin. DHL failed to deliver this package, returning it with the words “US sanctions on Cuba” scrawled on the label. This matter is under investigation by the Department for International Trade. Medicines are exempt from the embargo. However, companies are reluctant to take medical goods to Cuba. Continue reading...
Public health bodies issue warning to use sun screen as mercury hits year-high of 31.6C at HeathrowChildren have been treated in hospital for extreme sunburn as Britain experienced the hottest weekend of the year.Temperatures reached 31.6C at Heathrow and 30.2C in Cardiff on Sunday, making it the hottest day of the year, as an area of high pressure over the UK maintained warm conditions. Continue reading...
Operation Brock restarted to handle anticipated queues as travel industry questions government decisionEmergency road measures to handle post-Brexit queues in Kent have been restarted by the government to cope with potential holiday traffic – despite Friday’s decision to further restrict cross-Channel travel to France.Barriers on the M20 were erected over the weekend for Operation Brock, a decision taken on Thursday “in anticipation of increased international travel by car drivers from Monday”, according to Highways England. Continue reading...
Plans for chartered plane to Zimbabwe risks delivering activists to political persecution, say campaignersPlans for the UK Home Office’s first mass deportation flight to Zimbabwe have been criticised as “a grubby operation” that risks “delivering democracy activists to political persecution”.For decades, the Zimabwe government has not accepted people being forcibly returned from the UK, meaning Zimbabweans who sought asylum in Britain were left for decades, starting families and having children. Continue reading...
CDU leader Armin Laschet caught laughing on camera as president delivered solemn addressMore flash-floods have devastated towns in Austria, Bavaria and eastern Germany, as the frontrunner to replace the chancellor, Angela Merkel, was forced to apologise after seeming to make light of a catastrophic situation that has claimed the lives of more than 150 people.The Alpine district of Berchtesgadener Land declared a state of emergency on Saturday evening after heavy rainfall led to flooded streets and landslides, leaving at least one person dead. Continue reading...
Friendships can be difficult, and lockdowns have made them even harder to maintain. But we should cherish themAlmost every day for the past few months, I’ve told my husband I am lonely. Obviously I’m glad that he’s around. What I miss are my friends. In the first lockdown, we stayed in touch with Zoom dates, which were awkward, often drunk and occasionally very joyful. Those days are long gone. I’ve returned to texting, and though I’m often deep in four or five conversations at once, it isn’t the same as being together.In the past year, there was a difficult bereavement in my family, and work has been harder than normal. None of these things are unique or insurmountable but the isolation has left me feeling almost capsized by anxiety and paranoia. Continue reading...
Fears Turkey’s ‘culture centre’ plan for Diyarbakır military prison could whitewash historyAltan Tan was 24 when Diyarbakır’s notorious Military Prison No 5 was built, just before Turkey’s 1980 military coup. Not long after that, his father was thrown inside, never to emerge.“He was only there for a few weeks before he was tortured to death. I never had the chance to go inside and visit him,” the Kurdish politician and writer said. “There are no Kurds, no families who don’t have memories associated with this building.” Continue reading...
Julia Ducournau’s serial killer film Titane scoops top award, while best actor and actress go to Caleb Landry Jones and Renate ReinsveThe Palme d’Or, the most prestigious of cinema festival prizes, has gone to Titane, an unconventional and violent film directed by the 37-year-old French director Julia Ducournau.Related: Cannes 2021: Titane didn’t deserve the Palme, but it had guts, drive – and an anthro-automotive hybrid devil child Continue reading...
From Jane Austen’s Persuasion to sci-fi comedies and action thrillers, Nikki Amuka-Bird is driven by strong characters. The actor talks about mourning her mum, colour-blind casting and being inspired by Helen McCroryWhen Nikki Amuka-Bird started work on Old, the latest film from Hollywood supernatural-loving director M Night Shyamalan, she knew it was going to be special. It was the summer of 2020, and production on films and television had tentatively started up again. She flew to the Dominican Republic with an international cast, during hurricane season, to shoot the story of a group of people on holiday on a secluded island, who suddenly start to age at a rapid rate. I was not able to see it before we met, but it turns out that Amuka-Bird hasn’t watched it yet, either. The director of The Sixth Sense and Signs – Night, as she calls him, fondly – works on his films right up until the last minute and the mystery is all part of the fun. What she can tell me, though, is that it turned out to be far more than a run-of-the-mill acting job.“It was the most incredible experience,” Amuka-Bird says, “on many levels.” She is on a break from filming the Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and at home, briefly, in her flat near Westbourne Grove in London. She has lived in the area on and off since she was five. Her old primary school is just around the corner. Things feel familiar, “even though it’s changed quite a lot over the years, obviously – it used to have a bit of West Indian community.” Continue reading...
Tory councillors are accused of censorship over installation on atom bomb tests in Australia in a Southend parkAn Australian artist has accused a group of Conservative councillors of using “bullying strategies” to silence and censor her work after an installation she created to highlight Britain’s “identity as a colonial nuclear state” was removed from a park in Essex.The councillors threatened to “take action against the work” if it was not removed, according to Metal, the arts organisation that commissioned and then removed the installation from Gunners Park in Southend. Continue reading...
Julia Ducournau’s bizarre Titane sent punters over the edge, while films such as Asghar Fahadi’s A Hero offered more subtle rewardsThe pandemic hits Cannes in the form of a movie that plays near the beach, buffeted by strong winds. On screen, the people are sickening by degrees. They’re coughing on commuter buses and sidestreets and in the musty, book-lined aisles down at the local library. They’re seeing mad visions of motherships in the sky. The madness is contagious; the city’s in meltdown. “Don’t worry,” says the doctor, “it’s just an outbreak of the flu.”The film in question is Petrov’s Flu, directed by the dissident Russian film-maker Kirill Serebrennikov, who’s laying the chaos on thick and fast. I’m liking the movie but many others are not. They keep breaking for the exit, pushing the back door to escape. They think the whole thing’s too fevered; too malarial to make sense. Or maybe it’s that Serebrennikov’s story lands a little too close to home. Continue reading...
John Boyne talks about the online backlash to his recent YA book and how it inspired his new novel about social mediaFrom the table in the garden where we sit chatting, I have a good view of John Boyne’s “ego room” – the light-filled, pale green annexe to which he comes, at 8.30 every morning, seven days a week, to write, and which is filled with global editions of the 21 books he has produced over the last two decades. Both the space and the name he’s given it are instructive, revealing: the tag humorously self-deprecating, the shelves a proud reminder of the work he’s created; at once sanctuary and display. And his backlist, which includes the bestselling YA novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, will soon be joined by a new novel for adults, The Echo Chamber.At the beginning of 2019, the house, in a quiet suburb of south Dublin, won Ireland’s Celebrity Home of the Year; his “proudest achievement to date”, he jokes. A few months later, when he published his YA novel My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, seen through the eyes of a boy experiencing his sibling’s transition, his life took a different, significantly less pleasurable, direction. The online furore – which accused Boyne of misgendering and decentring the novel’s trans character, and of writing too far beyond his own experience – snowballed into newspaper commentary and calls for a boycott. Even more alarmingly, it also led to online harassment, in the form of a man who, over the course of 15 months, tweeted relentlessly and mendaciously about Boyne, publishing closeup pictures of his house and prompting the writer both to involve solicitors and to renew his home security. Continue reading...
The singer-songwriter on blanking on live TV, breaking up during Covid and the closest he’s come to deathBorn in Arizona, Jake Shears, 42, fronted the band Scissor Sisters. Their 2004 debut album went to No 1 in the UK and the following year they won three Brit awards. Shears’ latest solo single, Do The Television, is out now. He lives in New Orleans.What is your greatest fear?
Discovering new recipes and getting the children on board helped us break old habits and eat better for the planet and our healthLike many families, we’ve discussed the environmental and animal-welfare impact of the meat we eat and resolved we should do better. I wouldn’t say we are massive meat-eaters – especially since cookbooks by the Guardian’s own Anna Jones and Meera Sodha entered our lives. But a packet of minced beef, a few chicken thighs and some sausages or bacon often make it into our supermarket trolley, because, frankly, they’re things everyone in our family will eat.Also, having been raised an omnivore, my default recipes when feeling tired or uninspired are still chilli con carne, spaghetti bolognese, or something that involves chunks of chicken. Continue reading...
The podcaster talks to the online satirist about the joys of rhyming, the limits of macho culture and mocking Matt HancockGeorge the Poet first met Munya Chawawa when he was invited on the latter’s Reprezent 107.3 FM radio show to talk about his single, Follow the Leader, and recently launched podcast. Some three years on, and the careers of both men are transformed: George has left his label to become a spoken-word artist, activist and PhD student. His Have You Heard George’s Podcast? has also reached Peabody award-winning heights, with a new series introducing his expansive theory about Black music’s untapped socio-economic potential. Meanwhile, Chawawa has become Britain’s foremost social-media satirist, laying into government corruption and grime beefs with equal alacrity, and earning a major label record deal in the guise of posh drill rapper, Unknown P. His latest viral video, the Matt Hancock-inspired Shaggy parody It Was Me, has 2.5m views on Twitter and counting.Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips Continue reading...
The Cameroonians, who had ‘no idea’ they had jumped into the demilitarised area, have been trapped for almost two monthsA few months after Grace Ngo flew into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus from her native Cameroon, she decided to head “for the west”. Smugglers pointed the student in the direction of the Venetian walls that cut through the heart of Nicosia, Europe’s last divided capital.A little before midnight on 24 May,Ngo leapt from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot republic into what she hoped would be the war-divided island’s internationally recognised Greek south. Continue reading...
Organisers in Japan confirm that a visitor from abroad who is involved in organising the Games has tested positiveA person has tested positive for Covid-19 at the Tokyo Olympics athletes’ village, organisers said, adding to concerns about infections at the Games which begin next week.Related: Thomas Bach promises ‘safe and secure’ Olympics as Tokyo Covid cases soar Continue reading...
When she lands in Tokyo, Sky Brown will become one of the UK’s first Olympic skateboarders – and, at 13, the team’s youngest ever member. Will her next trick be a gold medal?The sun is setting on another hazy summer evening in Oceanside, California, a city 35 miles north of San Diego, and a tiny figure is flying through the sky. She bends her knees, clutches the end of her skateboard and comes gliding down an enormous ramp, her sun-bleached surfer hair bouncing in the wind.“That was sick!” Sky Brown shouts, as she makes an immaculate landing. The skateboarder is ranked third in the world and on 4 August will take to her board to represent Team GB at the postponed Tokyo Olympics. When she competes in the women’s park event, she won’t just be one of the UK’s first ever Olympic skateboarders, she will also be Team GB’s youngest ever summer Olympian. Aged 13 years and 23 days, she will surpass Margery Hinton, who was 13 years and 44 days when she swam at Amsterdam in 1928. Continue reading...
Tourists are fuelling record bookings but severe staff shortages due to Brexit and workers self-isolating have kept many hospitality firms closedThe log cabins are gleaming, the tipis look tip-top and the champagne is on ice. Pinewood Park will host its first wedding in 22 months on Saturday as 120 guests descend on the popular glamping site near Scarborough, Yorkshire. Continue reading...
Hip-hop star known for his personality, beatboxing and freestyle skills scored his biggest hit in 1989Biz Markie, the New York rapper, beatboxer and producer, has died at age 57.Markie’s representative, Jenni Izumi, said the rapper and DJ died peacefully Friday evening with his wife by his side. The cause of death has not been released. Continue reading...
Kinaua Biribo says she wants to empower women in the Pacific island nation, where almost 60% of men have perpetrated intimate partner violenceKinaua Biribo is unlikely to win an Olympic medal. When the elimination rounds of her judo category begin later this month, the 27-year-old will be a firm underdog; she has been knocked out in the first round of both of her international competition appearances to date.But Kinaua, whom the Guardian is referring to by her first name as is culturally appropriate, has ambitions far grander than any Olympic medal. She wants to inspire the women of her Pacific homeland and combat the scourge of domestic violence. Continue reading...
In the first of Guardian Australia’s new Saturday quiz series, MasterChef expert Clem Bastow tests your knowledge of the season that just wrapped upDo you miss this season’s contestants like they were treasured personal friends? Do you find yourself whistling the inspirational music stings that accompanied a nailed brief? Have you, too, tried to “MasterChef up” your nightly meals of microwaved leftovers by sprinkling them with finger lime and red salt?Test your knowledge of this season’s rollercoaster ride before the memories fade like the hopes of a contestant who only has 35 seconds left to plate up. Share your score – or own up to it in the comments. Continue reading...
Pros at dealing with long-term Covid restrictions, Melbourne residents share their advice for those in SydneyWe may have escaped the ravages of Covid that have maimed nations elsewhere, but Australians have still endured its consequences through lengthy, disruptive lockdowns.Nowhere is this as intimately understood than in Melbourne, which is now in its fifth lockdown. And as our fellows in Sydney stare down a potentially long road stuck at home, we thought it useful this week to invite Melburnians to offer tips on how best to cope. Continue reading...
by Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá and Tom Phillips on (#5M9KJ)
Authorities are still struggling to understand the motives and masterminds behind the first killing of a Haitian president since 1915Giovanna Romero remembers her husband, Mauricio, as a caring father who called home every night when he was out of the country on work. He did so as usual on the night of 6 July – from where, exactly, she isn’t sure – to remind her and their children he loved them and tell them to take care.“I’ll call again soon,” the retired Colombian soldier promised – a pledge he would be unable to keep. Continue reading...
by Courtney Tenz in Erftstadt and Philip Oltermann in on (#5M9HK)
Residents of Erftstadt struggle to comprehend how their familiar landscape became treacherous terrainAnatoli Neugebauer is standing just a hundred metres from his family home, at the edge of the Blessem district of Erftstadt, a commuter-belt town 12 miles (20km) south of Cologne. Even though flood waters from the Erft River had begun to recede by midday on Friday, he still had to wade through waist-high brown water just to get inside the stuccoed terrace house.“It’s completely indescribable,” says Neugebauer, 40. “A catastrophe.” Continue reading...
A tornado ripped through Barrie, Ontario in Canada on Thursday, injuring at least eight people and destroying about 25 buildings, CBC reported. Police in Barrie, a town 82km (50 miles) north of Toronto, said they were responding to multiple reports of damage in the south-eastern part of the city. At least four people were hospitalised, according to local authorities. Continue reading...
Scientists believe climate disruption will bring more extreme weather, and humans are making things worseAlmost certainly. Scientists have long predicted climate disruption will lead to more extreme weather, such as heatwaves, droughts and floods. Human emissions from engine exhaust fumes, forest burning and other activities are heating the planet. As the atmosphere gets warmer it holds more moisture which brings more rain. All the places that recently experienced flooding – Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, London, Edinburgh, Tokyo and elsewhere – might have had heavy summer rain even without the climate crisis, but the deluges were unlikely to have been as intense. Continue reading...
As a very strange edition of the festival draws to a close, our film critic predicts who will walk away with the Palme d’Or and other prizes – and awards his own alternative BraddiesSo it actually happened – the Cannes film festival defiantly took place in the era of Covid, and two months later than usual, in sweltering July. More tourists, but fewer actual festival-attenders from the media. Some streets were eerily quiet and the legendary bar, Le Petit Majestic, usually packed with movie-world people, getting drunk, exchanging cards and crowding densely out into the street every night until three in the morning, was doing hardly any business.Masks were worn throughout all films, though not on the hallowed red carpet, and every 48 hours we had to report to a special tent for Covid testing: it was not possible to enter the Palais without having the vital QR code for “Negatif” on your phone. The whole business was a bit laborious and discombobulating but this was a great logistical triumph for the festival. The only Covid casualty was the French star Léa Seydoux, who couldn’t come, having tested positive. Continue reading...
Farkhad Akhmedov had contested 2017 decision but has now reached an agreement over divorceAfter almost five years of fighting a high court ruling that awarded the UK’s largest ever divorce payout, a Russian billionaire has reached a settlement with his ex-wife.Farkhad Akhmedov and Tatiana Akhmedova have been embroiled in the most expensive family feud in history since a London high court judge awarded Akhmedova a £450m divorce payout in 2017. Continue reading...
Justin Kurzel shies away from depicting the Port Arthur massacre itself but outstanding performances mean it’s still a highly unsettling storyAustralian director Justin Kurzel has made his most purely disturbing film since his debut Snowtown in 2011. Like that film, Nitram is based on a real-life case of murder and family dysfunction (which incidentally also applies to Kurzel’s version of Macbeth). And he has four outstanding performances from Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia and Caleb Landry Jones.The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 was perpetrated by a violently disturbed young man, Martin Bryant, who shot and killed 35 people at a Tasmanian tourist site with a semi-automatic rifle bought legally; he was apparently inspired by the UK’s Dunblane massacre one month earlier. The Australian government took immediate steps to limit the sales of weaponry. Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant have dramatised Bryant’s own deeply disturbed home and family environment and the utterly bizarre twists that his life had taken in the time leading up to the shooting. His pre-murder existence has a stranger-than-fiction quality that would be worthy of feature film treatment, even if the killings had never happened. Continue reading...
Severe flooding has caused devastation in Germany and Belgium, where the death toll has risen to more than 120 as emergency services continued their search for many hundreds more still missing. No loss of life has been reported in Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, but flash floods swept through the Swiss villages of Schleitheim and Beggingen, several towns in the Grand Duchy were evacuated and thousands were told to leave their homes in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht
This Taiwanese sci-fi about an investigation in which the suspects’ minds are injected into a host body starts promisingly, but quickly ditches any complexityDabbling in a myriad of already weary tropes first pioneered by The Matrix trilogy, this Taiwanese sci-fi crime thriller Plurality could have put a fresh twist on big-budget Hollywood efforts, but falls flat on both the production design and the narrative front.The young son of a city councillor is the latest victim in a string of kidnappings targeting children with disabilities or facial disfigurements, and the police become convinced that the perpetrator is one of the five passengers who have died in a mysterious bus crash. Thanks to a new technology, they are able to use the vegetative body of a criminal on death row into which to inject the brain fluids of the suspects. (These include a shady businessman, a spoiled dropout, a reticent college student, a father estranged from his daughter, and the bus driver.) As the police try to extract information from these evasive subjects, the more gruelling the interrogation becomes, the more violently the five identities wrestle for control of their corporeal host, which leads to explosive revelations and bloodshed. Continue reading...
Cyril Ramaphosa says ‘good number’ of those who planned violence and looting had been identifiedThe wave of protest and looting that swept across much of South Africa over the past week was planned by enemies of democracy in a deliberate effort to sow chaos, the president has said.Speaking to reporters in some of the areas worst hit by the unrest, Cyril Ramaphosa said authorities had identified “a good number” of those who planned and coordinated the violence, the worst in South Africa since the end of the apartheid regime in 1994. Continue reading...
She has four films at Cannes film festival, but instead of strutting the Riviera red carpet the actor is isolating in Paris. She talks creativity, sex scenes and the joy of Bond stuntsLéa Seydoux is coming to Cannes. She’s starring in four pictures at this year’s film festival and our interview is booked for noon on Saturday, possibly on the beach. The beach is good for weird distractions and local colour. I once interviewed Juliette Binoche on the beach at Cannes while she was accosted by wandering vendors trying to sell her straw hats. “Non, merci,” she kept saying. She was very gracious about it.Seydoux is coming to Cannes and then all of a sudden she’s not. The 36-year-old actor has tested positive for Covid: the biggest casualty of an event marked by tight security, 48-hour spit tests and a constant background hum of tension. She was supposed to be on heavy red-carpet rotation. Instead, she has spent the festival isolating in Paris. Continue reading...
At least 110 people have died in devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium. Search and rescue operations are continuing with hundreds still unaccounted for