Director Daniel Roher tells of panic after team recorded Alexei Navalny pranking one of his Russian poisoners into confessingA documentary film about Alexei Navalny, who narrowly survived an apparent poisoning attempt with novichok, has premiered at the Sundance film festival.The 90-minute film, simply titled Navalny, features fly-on-the-wall footage of the Russian opposition leader, filmed during the several months he spent in Germany in late 2020 as he recovered from the poisoning. There are interviews with Navalny, his wife, Yulia, and his closest team. Continue reading...
Joplin, Missouri, was left unrecognizable after the 2011 disaster. Its recovery offers lessons for other communitiesThe tornado struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 with such fury that afterward, even those who had lived here their entire lives struggled to recognize it.The nearly mile-wide storm wiped away entire neighborhoods and killed 161 people in less than an hour. It felled trees, leveled buildings and flung power lines and vehicles all over the roads with winds of more than 200mph. Continue reading...
Lauren Malt died in hospital on Sunday after being hit by a car in the West Winch areaA man has been charged with the murder of his 19-year-old daughter.Nigel Malt, 44, will appear at King’s Lynn magistrates court on Wednesday accused of the murder of Lauren Malt. Continue reading...
49-year-old woman arrested on suspicion of murder was known to dead boy, say policeA woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder by police investigating the death of a five-year-old boy in Coventry.The boy was found with serious injuries at an address in Poplar Road, Earlsdon, just after 5.55pm today. He was confirmed dead at the scene. A 49-year-old woman, who is understood to be known to the child, has been arrested and taken into custody for questioning, police said. Continue reading...
Shooting of pair on Caribbean coast allegedly linked to ‘transnational illegal activities that the victims participated in’The killing of two Canadians at a resort on Mexico’s Caribbean coast last week was motivated by debts between international gangs apparently dedicated to drug and weapons trafficking, according to a senior Mexican prosecutor.“The investigations indicate that this attack was motivated by debts that arose from transnational illegal activities that the victims participated in,” said Oscar Montes, the chief prosecutor of the Quintana Roo state, on Tuesday. “The information [is] that they were involved in weapons and drug trafficking, among other crimes.” Continue reading...
by Daniel Boffey in Brussels and Vincent Ni on (#5VDB9)
Analysis: minister has been attacked in Chinese media, but Maroš Šefčovič’s warm remarks could be of more concernIt was only a few months ago that Liz Truss, perhaps best known until recently for her strong feelings about the “disgrace” that is imported cheese, was appointed foreign secretary.Some had questioned Truss’s suitability for the role given a patchy record in the cabinet, but the liberty-loving minister has seemingly already made a mark on the global stage. Continue reading...
Wednesday: Paralympian and disability advocate Dylan Alcott named Australian of the Year. Plus: Guardian Australia readers’ favourite public toiletsGood morning! Australia Day honours have been handed out to a record number of women, including Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, a decision likely to spark controversy. Tennis champion, Paralympian and disability advocate Dylan Alcott has been named the 2022 Australian of the Year, the first person with a disability to receive the top gong. Australia Day and Invasion Day rallies are expected across the country, and today also marks the 50th anniversary of the Tent Embassy. Mununjali and South Sea Islander woman Chelsea Watego reminds us that for First Nations people 26 January “is a day that tells a story of a violent and heartless nation that insists upon our forgetting”.An aged care provider says it has “no faith” in the commonwealth’s supply of rapid antigen tests after a delivery failed to show for almost three weeks after an outbreak of Covid. When it did arrive, the delivery contained less than half of the order. Supply at St Basil’s Homes in South Australia is so precarious that the provider wrote to residents and their families warning the tests were “like liquid gold”. The facility had ordered 1,300 rapid tests from the national stockpile three weeks ago, but received just 600 on Friday. Continue reading...
by Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent on (#5VDFY)
Analysis: Cressida Dick has had ringside seat for some of Met’s past painful encounters with politiciansThe 48 hours before Cressida Dick’s bombshell announcement of a criminal investigation into “partygate” was intense, busy and momentous for the leadership of the Metropolitan police.It was only on Sunday that the Met decided it had enough evidence to merit a criminal investigation into claims of parties in Downing Street and Whitehall, attended by those who made the onerous lockdown rules. Continue reading...
A gig worker turns to credit card fraud in a tense debut feature with an electrifying central performanceIt’s hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but stress. A seemingly inescapable student loan is gathering interest by the day. A couple of minor, years-back criminal charges have closed off a world of employment. It’s a familiar predicament that plagues many in America and even though first-time writer-director John Patton Ford might only show it in the broadest of strokes, it’s an effectively infuriating set-up.When Emily is offered an opportunity for an extra income, she nervously inches down the rabbit hole. It starts off simple. She’s given a cloned credit card and has to buy a TV. She then takes it to her new bosses and gets paid $200. It’s easier than she anticipated and soon she’s doing it on the regular, edging closer to taskmaster Youcef (Theo Rossi) who slowly becomes more than her mentor. But how far is she willing to go?Emily the Criminal is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced Continue reading...
MPs and experts demand immediate action after shock resignation of minister over £4.3bn Covid loans fraud billMPs and anti-corruption experts have warned that the UK government must not delay long-awaited measures to tackle economic crime, after a minister resigned over the government’s failure to prevent more than £4.3bn in fraudulent claims for Covid business loans.Lord Agnew dramatically quit on Monday as a minister at the Treasury and Cabinet Office with oversight of fraud prevention, in another blow to the embattled prime minister. In a resignation letter to Boris Johnson, published on Tuesday, Agnew revealed that in a decision apparently taken last week, a key piece of legislation, the economic crime bill, had been rejected for consideration during the next parliamentary year. He described the decision as “foolish”. Continue reading...
Campaigners say comments during Konstancja Duff’s strip-search show sexism ‘deeply embedded’ in the police forceWomen’s rights groups have called for a statutory inquiry into misogyny in the Metropolitan police after derogatory comments by officers about an academic while she was strip-searched showed how “deeply embedded” sexism is in the force.In CCTV footage published by the Guardian, police officers made disparaging remarks about Konstancja Duff while she was strip-searched at Stoke Newington police station. Continue reading...
Boris Johnson’s day goes from bad to worse, with only a hardcore of loyalists left defending himBig Dog was having a bad morning. Normally he could rely on Grant Shapps to put up a spirited defence of any government lie, which is why he had been sent out to do the morning media round.But not even the transport secretary had been bothered to put a positive spin on the latest birthday party revelations. He had even made the schoolboy error of calling a party a party, when everyone knew that word was a no-no inside No 10. Continue reading...
Christopher Jotischky, a Briton of Ukrainian descent, former MEP Veronica Hardstaff and former army officer Simon Diggins respond to Simon Jenkins’ articles on what Britain should do about the dispute between Russia and its neighbourSimon Jenkins (Britain should stay well out of Russia’s border dispute with Ukraine, 20 January) claims that Russia’s “border disputes” with Ukraine have “nothing whatsoever to do with Britain” – but it has everything to do with the more than 20,000 diaspora Ukrainians and Britons of Ukrainian descent who live in the UK, of whom I am one.Mr Jenkins appears to be of the opinion that Ukrainian sovereignty is less important than the desire of those who govern Russia not to be humiliated on the international stage. This is incorrect. Ukraine is not and has never been an integral part of Russia: it is an independent nation with a separate language, history and religious and political traditions. It was, for centuries, under the colonial rule of Tsarist Russia (or the Habsburg empire, depending on the region) and then of the Soviet Union, suffered unspeakably at the hands of the Soviet government in the 1930s and was subjected to extreme cultural suppression in the 19th century. Continue reading...
Salomé Jashi’s film follows the journey of hundreds of mature trees as they are uprooted across Georgia to populate a rich man’s gardenLike a sad, greedy king in some fairytale or parable, the Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili set out, six years ago, to buy and uproot hundreds of magnificent mature trees and transport them at colossal expense and difficulty across Georgia to be transplanted in his own huge private garden. It sometimes involves taking a tree by water, along the Black Sea coast – a truly surreal image.Salomé Jashi’s fascinating and deadpan film shows, in a series of tableau-type shots, the effect that these purchases are having up and down the land. Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated. (Surely at least some of these trees will have died en route, although this is not revealed.) Continue reading...
Items have been in storage since 1946, when Umberto II was banished as Italians voted to abolish monarchyDescendants of the last king of Italy have made their first formal request to reclaim the crown jewels, which for almost 76 years have been stashed in a treasure chest in a safety deposit box at the Bank of Italy amid a long-running mystery over their ownership.The bank took delivery of the jewels, comprising more than 6,000 diamonds and 2,000 pearls mounted on brooches and necklaces worn by various queens and princesses, on 5 June 1946, three days after Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and nine days before King Umberto II, who ruled for just 34 days, was banished into exile along with his male heirs. Continue reading...
Lisa Smith ‘enveloped’ herself in the ‘black flag of IS’ in Syria, prosecutor saysA former Irish soldier accused of joining Islamic State was prepared to die a martyr, a court in Dublin has heard.Lisa Smith, 39, from Dundalk, County Louth, has pleaded not guilty to being a member of the terrorist organisation between October 2015 and December 2019. Continue reading...
Move comes despite European court of human rights injunction saying that it should be postponedSerbian authorities have extradited a Bahraini dissident in cooperation with Interpol despite an injunction by the European court of human rights, in the first test for the international policing organisation under the presidency of a top Emirati security official.Authorities in Belgrade approved the extradition of Ahmed Jaafar Mohamed Ali to Bahrain earlier this week. Days earlier the ECHR had issued an injunction saying the extradition should be postponed until after 25 February to allow Serbian authorities time to provide more information to the court, which was responding to a request by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights to consider Ali’s case. Continue reading...
by Josh Halliday North of England correspondent on (#5VD2F)
Teenager flown to hospital after allegedly being attacked by 16-year-old fellow pupilA 15-year-old boy has been flown to hospital after being stabbed multiple times at school, allegedly by a fellow pupil.Police were called to Walney school in Cumbria after the knife attack at about 10am on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Hendrix and Janis Joplin warned her off drugs, she sang for James Brown and Salvador Dalí offered to paint her. Janis Ian’s confessional folk-pop is still sensational – so why is she retiring from recording?‘I learned the truth at 17 / That love was meant for beauty queens / And high school girls with clear-eyed smiles / Who married young and then retired.” Janis Ian’s At Seventeen is an indelible portrait of life from the perspective of a socially awkward unattractive teen, inspired by a newspaper article that the singer-songwriter read about a young woman who thought her life would be perfect. “I learned the truth at 18,” the girl told the journalist. Ian changed her age and spent three months working on the intimate and confessional lyrics.“You couldn’t write a song like that without having gone through it,” Ian says, video-calling from her home in New Jersey. Now 70, her hair is short and white, no longer the dark curls she sported on her album covers during the 60s and 70s. “The first time I sang At Seventeen in public I did it with my eyes closed. I felt like I was naked and I was sure the audience was going to be laughing.” Continue reading...
Move to outlaw procedures to reconstruct the hymen welcomed by campaigners and survivors of ‘honour’-based abuse“Virginity repair” surgery known as hymenoplasty has no place in the medical world, British healthcare professionals were warned today, as legislation to criminalise the practice was introduced by the government.An amendment added to the health and care bill on Monday will make it illegal to perform any procedure that aims to reconstruct the hymen, with or without consent. Continue reading...
Haute couture show in Paris starts with Charlotte Casiraghi on horseback in honour of maison’s founderThe best outfit in which to weather a pandemic? Try a bouclé suit, two-tone kitten heels and a chain-strap handbag with a double C logo.In defiance of all business forecasts, Chanel is emerging from two challenging years for retail virtually unscathed. Revenues at the luxury brand grew by double digits in the first six months of 2021, the most recent period for which earnings have been published, and the house expects soon to return to 2019 levels of profitability. Strong demand has led to eye-watering price hikes, with some classic handbag styles now priced at 40% more than in the first months of 2020. In anxious times, it seems a Chanel handbag is the gold bullion of fashion. Continue reading...
From London to North Carolina, Guardian readers share their tributes to and memories of the singer and actorMy parents had just split up, and my mum, caring for two young daughters, took us to Bournemouth for a few days to get away. It was the year Jurassic Park came out and she would have been about 36, a few years older than I am now. She found a tape of Bat Out of Hell in a bargain bin at a service station on the drive there and the second she put it into the tape player in the car and heard the opening track, she was hooked. As kids, we loved it too – it was so fun, theatrical and a bit naughty. We played that tape over and over on our car journeys. I saw how his music empowered my mum and made her feel good at a very vulnerable and painful time. He has brought her pure joy since she found that tape and his songs remind me of the close bond my mum, sister and I share. Vicky, 33, editor, London Continue reading...
Actor who has a form of dwarfism says the studio’s pride in casting a Latina Snow White is undercut by stereotypes retained elsewhereGame of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage has taken aim at Disney for what he called its “fucking backwards” forthcoming live action adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.Dinklage, who stars in Joe Wright’s new film, Cyrano, accused the studio of double standards by attending to racial diversity in its cast but falling back on other damaging stereotypes. Continue reading...
Vrije Universiteit will also return €250,000-plus it received in 2021 for rights centre that denied forced labour camps exist in XinjiangA decision by a leading Dutch university to refuse all further Chinese funding for a controversial study centre has sparked fresh concern about Beijing’s apparent attempts to influence debate at European educational institutions.Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit (VU), the fourth largest university in the Netherlands, has said it will accept no further money from the Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing and repay sums it recently received. Continue reading...
Canadian photographer Simone Engels was stunned to spot a huge white structure apparently floating far from any ice sheetClear winter skies and the promise of a recent evening’s beautiful sunset led photographer Simone Engels to a nearby park on Vancouver Island. But as she trained her lens on the pinkish hue of the landscape of the Pacific coast, she was shocked to see a large, iceberg-like shape on the horizon.“It was this huge, shiny, three-dimensional tubular structure,” she said. “It looked so real.” Continue reading...
by Cait Kelly in Melbourne and Caitlin Cassidy in Syd on (#5VCPM)
Grace Tame, assault survivor who helped change law, called ‘childish’ and told she should return Australian of the year awardA sexual assault survivor who sparked a national conversation about the treatment of women and sexual assault in Australia has found herself at the centre of another fiery debate over expectations on women to smile in public.Grace Tame won last year’s Australian of the year prize after her advocacy was instrumental in overturning a Tasmanian law preventing survivors from speaking publicly about their assault. Continue reading...
This chilly Tunisian debut follows young a female killer who traps her victims by pretending to need a voice app to speakHere is a stylised and self-aware serial killer drama in black-and-white, broken down into nine “nights”. A young woman called Nada (Nour Hajri) picks up men in bars, playing on their protective gallantry or predatory instinct for weakness, by pretending to be vocally impaired and needing a voice app on her phone to speak. She goes home with them after a few drinks and horror ensues. But Nada finds herself vulnerable in falling for a young woman at her workplace, Noura (Rym Hayouni), who herself begins to realise what is happening in Nada’s after-hours existence.Black Medusa comes from first-time Tunisian film-makers Youssef Chebbi and Ismaël, who may conceivably be fans of Ana Lily Amirpour’s cult monochrome vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. There is a scene when Nada is walking one of her victims back to his apartment and a couple of cats wander into view that reminded me of Amirpour’s very cat-friendly movie. And Nada’s deadpan and implacable avenger might put you in mind of Carey Mulligan’s assailant in Promising Young Woman. Continue reading...
‘Accumulation of errors’ resulted in death of 28-year-old Johann Ofner during filming for Bliss N Eso hip-hop videoA stuntman filming an underground poker game scene for a hip-hop music video was shot dead in 2017 with a sawn-off firearm that should never have been on set, a Brisbane coroner has found.“An accumulation of errors” resulted in the death of Johann Ofner, coroner Donald MacKenzie said in inquest findings handed down in Brisbane on Tuesday. Continue reading...
The Blur and Gorillaz frontman apologised to Swift, claiming that a ‘conversation about songwriting’ in the LA Times was ‘reduced to clickbait’Taylor Swift has called out Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur and later of Gorillaz, on Twitter after the British musician told the LA Times she “doesn’t write her own songs”.“I was such a big fan of yours until I saw this,” the American singer, 32, tweeted at Albarn. “I write ALL of my own songs. Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really fucked up to try and discredit my writing. WOW.” Continue reading...
Up to 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries lack basic reading skills, with learning losses seen from US to EthiopiaThe scale of the number of children who have lost out on their schooling during the pandemic is “nearly insurmountable”, according to UN data.Up to 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read or understand a simple text, up from 53% pre-Covid, the research suggested. Continue reading...
The country’s golden beaches have turned black as debris released from a sunken ship continues to wreak environmental and economic havocWhen Adnan Sheikh took his family on holiday to Sri Lanka last October, he booked them into a hotel for two weeks in Sarakkuwa beach, just off the coast from where the X-Press Pearl cargo ship caught fire and sank five months previously.Sheikh had been charmed by the online pictures of golden sandy beaches. But when the family arrived, it was a different story. Continue reading...
by Caitlin Cassidy (now) and Matilda Boseley (earlier on (#5VC50)
Labor leader outlines election priorities; nation records 76 Covid deaths; Peter Dutton warns against Russia invasion of Ukraine; giant ram survives 4.7 magnitude earthquake in WA. Follow all the latest news
The multi-hyphenate talks about the rerelease of his groundbreaking drama Shortbus and the changes in how we view sex in the past 15 yearsIt’s a little more than 15 years since John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus exploded – interpret that verb as lewdly as you like – into cinemas, and in a sense, it feels a whole lot longer. Which is not to say that Mitchell’s brazenly queer, joyously sex-positive comedy, about a female sex therapist pursuing the orgasm she’s never experienced at New York’s raunchiest underground club, is outdated. Rewatched today, as it enjoys a rerelease in US cinemas, it veritably hums with erotic vigour and philosophical playfulness, a presciently liberated film with its eye on the future of sexual connection, in all its poly, nonbinary possibilities.It’s just that it’s hard to imagine film-making this proudly and playfully carnal coming out of the American indie scene now: we’re living through a remarkably chaste period of cinema, perhaps marked by post-MeToo caution and responsibility, as film-makers reconsider the boundary between exuberance and exploitation. With its copious unsimulated sex scenes, Shortbus certainly raised some eyebrows in 2006 – but it could well be a lightning rod today, throwing a wrench into debates over who is allowed to depict what on screen. Continue reading...
Among the manifold complexities of the global supply chain, a simple principle holds: corporations will always go where their costs – and their responsibilities – can be kept to an absolute minimum‘It’s like a little Puerto Rico – we’re basically run by the US,” said Allan, as we drove around San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and the country’s largest manufacturing centre one day. “Here there is more ‘freedom’,” he added, doing air quotes. Allan had spent most of his adult life working as a production manager for companies such as Gildan and Hanes, making socks and underwear for American bargain shoppers. All of this garment manufacture now takes place behind the gates of Honduras’s export processing zones.When export processing zones (EPZs) proliferated in the 1980s and 90s, their boosters claimed that the employment opportunities inside them would lift up local economies. Allan’s story showed the holes in that argument. After all, he wasn’t just a low-paid garment worker: he was management. He had done everything right. And now, he said, he was moving to Canada. Continue reading...
‘They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,’ writes musician in an open letter to his management that has since been taken down from his websiteNeil Young has demanded that his music be removed from Spotify due to vaccine misinformation spread by podcaster Joe Rogan on the streaming service, saying: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”In an open letter to his manager and record label that was posted to his website and later taken down, Young wrote: “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.” Continue reading...
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