Actor to follow Oscar-nominated role in Emilia Pérez with Italian drama described as ‘perturbing, livid and hypnotic’, co-starring Vincent Gallo
Karla Sofía Gascón, the actor who made history earlier this year as the first trans performer to be nominated for an acting Oscar, has signalled her next project.
Gascón, whose hopes of securing the leading actress award (which eventually went to Anora’s Mikey Madison) were dashed after offensive social media posts were unearthed, will star as a psychiatrist who “embodies God and the devil” in Italian drama The Life Lift, reports Variety.
From bloomer-adjacent designs to full-on flounce, you’ll find this subversive undergarment everywhere this spring
We’ve had exposed thongs, pants as pants and boxer shorts as shorts. But now there is a new, arguably even more unexpected underwear as outerwear trend. Welcome to the spring of big, frilly bloomers.
The 19th century undergarment has been thrust into the 21st century spotlight with a string of celebrities and influencers channelling their inner Folie Bergere dancer - including the actor Lily James, Alexa Chung and Camille Charrière. Social media is peppered with gen Z and millennials styling Victorian bloomers, found on vintage sites or on the high street with band T-shirts, crop tops and cardigans. Free People’s £88 “forever young pants”, which come in six different colours and are bedecked in a dramatic lace trim, are proving particularly popular.
French weekly published pictures of Pelicot with a man, described as her ‘companion’, walking in the street
Gisèle Pelicot, who survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, will sue Paris Match magazine for invasion of privacy, her lawyers said on Thursday.
In its latest edition, Paris Match published seven pictures of Pelicot accompanied by a man described as her companion walking in the streets in her new home town.
Elected leaders from across Europe should join us on the streets. It is critical to democracy – in Hungary, and the EU as a whole
Hungary’s parliament has given Viktor Orbán the tools to do what he has long threatened: ban Pride, silence dissent and strip political critics of their citizenship. A constitutional amendment passed on 14 April allows the government to label LGBTQ+ gatherings a threat to children and to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals deemed a risk to “national sovereignty”.
This is a purge disguised as law – another step in Orbán’s dismantling of democracy, where the constitution is degraded to a propaganda instrument. He calls it a “spring clean-up” to root out “bugs”, targeting LGBTQ+ people, journalists, critics, civil society and now, dual nationals. As one myself, I could be among the targets.
Katalin Cseh is a member of the Hungarian national assembly for the Momentum Movement and a former MEP
Cory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.
Booker’s trip to the Central American country would come after the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled there this week to meet with his constituent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian national deported last month in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an “administrative error”. Despite a supreme court ruling saying his administration must “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return, Trump has refused to take steps to do so, and El Salvador’s government on Wednesday denied Van Hollen a meeting with the deportee.
Why is the great performance artist making pianist Levit play a Satie piece 840 times? And does he really have a screen to go behind should nature call? We enter another level of time and consciousness
Amid the experiments and cross-genre collaborations in this year’s Multitudes festival is one event that will challenge its performer as much as its audience – and the only one where specially appointed brow-moppers will be on hand. At 10am on 24 April in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, pianist Igor Levit will begin a performance of a single piece, Erik Satie’s Vexations, in a concert that will last at least 16 hours.
A few tickets (for the full duration or one-hour slots) are still available for this extreme pianist endurance event. What should the audience expect to get out of it? “I’d never tell an audience what they should experience,” says Levit. “But I would encourage people to just literally let it go. There is no agenda in this piece. There is no meaning to it. It’s just empty space, so just dive into that and let go. That would be the dream.”
Move paves the way for Moscow to normalise ties with leadership of Afghanistan
Russia has suspended its ban on the Taliban, which it had designated for more than two decades as a terrorist organisation, in a move that paves the way for Moscow to normalise ties with the leadership of Afghanistan.
No country currently recognises the Taliban government that seized power in August 2021 as US-led forces staged a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of war. But Russia has been gradually building ties with the movement, which Vladimir Putin said last year was now an ally in fighting terrorism.
The wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s attempt to smear his character, saying a temporary restraining order against him was “out of caution” and that “he is a loving partner and father” who is being denied justice.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura said she “acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar” when she got the civil protective order in 2021, according to a statement emailed to the Baltimore Sun.
Many of the sister relationships I have witnessed balance extreme loyalty and care with a unique ability to press each other’s buttons
One thing about living this crazy little thing we call life is that even though you might be a haggard lesbian in her 40s, you can still learn things about yourself. I was recently having a conversation with friends about the family dynamics of people we’ve dated, and all of a sudden a very clear pattern emerged that I’d never noticed before. Every single person I have ever dated, casually or seriously, has had one sister and no other siblings.
Even though I’m aware this could sound like some strange special interest of mine, it’s not deliberate. I’ve actually never narrowed down prospective romantic interests based on siblings, but I did find this sister realisation notable. Is there something about me that queer people with sisters are attracted to? Is there something about having one sister that informs the kind of personalities I am drawn to? Did our separate placements in our families become part of our identity, as some people claim can happen, causing us to be compatible?
Many great directors have been attracted to war movies – or, as is the case with Australian auteur Justin Kurzel, a war-themed series, adapting Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Film-makers of a certain calibre seem to view this genre as a rite of passage. Some productions – including the recent Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air – have a retrograde flavour, painting war (perhaps problematically) as a great big adventure. Many lean into spectacle, attempting to recreate the smoke and fury of battle, but in the process running the risk of celebrating or ennobling war. “Every film about war,” declared François Truffaut, “ends up being pro-war.”
My husband completely covered up the fact that he retired two years ago and has been pretending to go to work ever since. He made up stories about work events. I only found out by seeing the pension payments into our joint account. He is 68 and has reapplied on spec to his old company. He hasn’t had any response but continues to wait for one.
When asked about what he does, he says he sits in cafes and does crossword puzzles. He is always on his phone. He delays and denies talking about being on the pension and any activities such as volunteering, doing courses etc. How can I reboot open communication?
Eleanor says: Oh this makes me sad for you both. It reminds me of people in the Depression who got laid off and didn’t tell their families, just took their lunch in the paper bag and sat on a park bench.
Event was meant to kick off 30 May to follow failed 2017 event that led to Billy McFarland’s wire fraud conviction
Fyre festival 2 has been “postponed”, according to messages sent to ticket holders, just weeks before it was scheduled to start.
The event, advertised as a luxury music festival, was supposed to take place in Mexico from 30 May to 2 June. It was intended as an improved followup to the failed Fyre festival in 2017, which experienced problems with security, food, accommodation, medical services and artist relations, resulting in the festival being indefinitely postponed and eventually cancelled.
Several international students who have had their visas revoked in recent weeks have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, arguing the government denied them due process when it suddenly took away their permission to be in the US.
The actions by the federal government to terminate students’ legal status have left hundreds of scholars at risk of detention and deportation. Their schools range from private universities such as Harvard and Stanford to large public institutions such as the University of Maryland and Ohio State University and to some small liberal arts colleges.
Carlo Ancelotti’s pleas went unanswered with his side’s limp exit a damning indictment of collective failings this season
Jude Bellingham saw the videos, listened to the stories and heard the word remontada “a million times”, but it was easier said than done. “There is no magic,” Carlo Ancelotti warned. In the end there was nothing really, just another glimpse of reality, the true story of their season: a chronicle of a death foretold. No epic, no comeback, not even much mystique, and certainly not much football. This time, Real Madrid could not escape themselves.
“This is the other side of football,” Ancelotti said after the match. “There’s a happy part, which we have experienced many times, and a sad part which is today. We have to accept it, and the ‘sticks’, the criticisms, that will come. Over the two games Arsenal were better than us.”
The son of Coach Prime has the production, pedigree and poise to lead a franchise. But he challenges the prototype of what an NFL quarterback is supposed to look and act like
NFL scouting is broken, and Shedeur Sanders is the proof. Everything about him screams future star quarterback, and yet teams would sooner assume the worst.
Make no mistake: there is no prospect in this year’s draft who is better equipped to turn around a struggling franchise than the 23-year-old Texan, a savior to not one but two college fanbases. The last four years saw him restore the proud football tradition at Jackson State and put Colorado back on the college football map. Sanders did this despite skeptics casting doubt on his ability to make the jump up from competing against small historically Black schools to playing against major college powers in the Pac 12 and Big 12 conferences. Last year he led a 9-4 turnaround at Colorado, the school’s first winning season in seven years, while snapping a four-year drought of postseason bowl appearances.
The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump noted that the European Central Bank (ECB) was poised on Thursday to lower interest rates again, without mentioning that the body has been responding to the chaos caused by Trump’s initiatives on tariffs.
Brazil is the biggest exporter of beef in the world, and more than 40% of its vast 240m-cattle herd is raised in the Amazon region. As a result, swathes of the nature-rich rainforest are being cleared and burned to create pasture.
This is pushing Amazon destruction close to a point of no return, prompting environmentalists and consumer groups to demand deforestation-free meat products. Governments, meat suppliers and retailers have promised to clean up their act, but one of the biggest hurdles is a complex and obscure supply chain that can hide the origins of meat products.
Fire Island director Andrew Ahn’s update of Ang Lee’s seminal 1993 film works hard to differentiate itself but it’s awkwardly stuck between serious and silly
Many remakes are utterly pointless, whether they’re disregarding what made a movie good or interesting in the first place, or paying such slavish homage that a second version becomes redundant, rather than a worthy variation. If nothing else, the contemporary reconfiguration of The Wedding Banquet passes the remake test handily. Ang Lee’s original 1993 film is about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant, living happily with his male partner, who hastily arranges a lavish (and, emotionally speaking, fake) wedding to a woman to please his visiting parents; director/co-writer Andrew Ahn, who shares screenplay credit with original co-writer James Schamus, relocates the story from 1993 Manhattan to 2025 Seattle, and contends with a whole different set of social rules and actual laws in the process.
Ahn is so acutely aware of how times have changed, in fact, that he seems reluctant to mine the new situation for comedy. Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) are unmarried but committed lesbians about to go through their second expensive round of IVF. They can afford to live in the Seattle area largely because Lee has inherited her family home, where she yearns to start a family of her own; the couple also rents out a converted garage to Angela’s longtime bestie Chris (Bowen Yang) and his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan). Min, who comes from money, has been in the US on a student visa that’s about to expire, and his grandparents want him to return to Korea and help run the family business. A green card is just a marriage proposal away, but commitment-resistant Chris is hesitant to marry, especially for convenience. So Min makes a counter-proposal: he’ll secure some of his family money to pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF, and in exchange, Min will marry Angela, for a green card and for familial show.
To celebrate the Oscar-winning actor’s birthday this week, we look back at the highlights of a six-decade career, from early classics such as Doctor Zhivago and Billy Liar to later roles in Finding Neverland and Away From Her.
There are many things wrong with Kenneth Branagh’s galumphing slab of actor-manager Shakespeare, but Christie as Gertrude is not one of them. Her casting might have been conducive to the Oedipal side of the Danish prince’s feelings towards his mother – if only the director’s bombastic performance had allowed room for it.
Moscow and Minsk ambassadors excluded over concerns they could ‘exploit’ event for anti-Ukraine propaganda
The ambassadors of Russia and Belarus will not be invited to the German parliament’s commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the second world war’s end over concerns they could “exploit” the event for anti-Ukraine propaganda.
The ceremony in the Bundestag lower house on 8 May marking the allies’ defeat of Nazi Germany will include several representatives of the diplomatic corps in Berlin but bar the envoys from Moscow and Minsk based on “the government’s assessment on the invitation of representatives”, a parliament spokesperson said.
Giorgia Meloni will attempt to burnish her credentials as a possible bridge between the EU and the US during a high-stakes summit with Donald Trump in the White House on Thursday, the first European leader to meet the US president since he announced and then paused some of his planned trade tariff hikes.
Italy’s far-right prime minister, who has nurtured friendly relations with Trump, arrived in Washington on Wednesday night. The pair will have lunch at 12pm local time before the meeting in the Oval Office, which will be attended by a pool of White House reporters and Italian journalists.
Most of 51 brands tested, including those for children, contained dangerous heavy metal
Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows.
Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children, or marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
Orforglipron also reduced blood sugar levels in participants with type 2 diabetes
A significant trial of a daily weight-loss pill has found that it helped people to shed the pounds and reduce their blood sugar levels, making it a contender to join the new wave of drugs that combat obesity and diabetes.
People who took a 36mg pill of orforglipron lost an average of 7.3kg (16lbs) over nine months, according to results from a phase 3 clinical trial reported by the drug’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly, on Thursday.
United Arab Emirates says Sudan ‘misusing’ world court in proceedings relating to African nation’s civil war
The international court of justice will rule in the next few weeks on whether the United Arab Emirates can be plausibly found “complicit in the commission of genocide” by arming the Rapid Support Forces militia in Sudan’s civil war.
The case was brought by Sudan, whose acting justice minister, Muawia Osman, told the world court in The Hague last week that the country’s “ongoing genocide would not be possible without the complicity of the UAE, including the shipment of arms to the RSF”. Sudan wants ICJ judges to force the UAE to stop its alleged support for the RSF and make “full reparations”, including compensation to victims of the war.
Growth in international hotels coincides with government effort to push region as a tourism destination
Almost 200 international hotels are operating or planning to open in Xinjiang, despite calls from human rights groups for global corporations not to help “sanitise” the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, a report has said.
The report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) identified 115 operational hotels which the organisation said “benefit from a presence in the Uyghur region”. At least another 74 were in various stages of construction or planning, the report said. The UHRP said some of the hotels also had exposure or links of concern to forced labour and labour transfer programmes.
Campaigners say authorities should be doing more to clean up waters around city of nearly 5 million people
On a clear summer’s day in Cape Town, the Milnerton Lagoon was serene, reflecting the bright blue sky and Table Mountain. But there was an unmistakable stench, and up close, the water was murky.
A few hundred metres away, adults and children played in the water as it flowed into Table Bay. On the boardwalk, a sign read: “Polluted water: for health reasons, swimming and recreational activities are at your own risk.”
The singer-songwriter answers your questions about 90s gigs with Tori Amos, her ‘humbling’ run in Hadestown and keeping hope alive in the Trump era
Please talk about growing up in Buffalo, New York – the music scene there, and becoming an emancipated adult at 15. AugustoM As a child, I befriended Michael Meldrum, a local troubadour. He brought me around to his gigs and coffee houses. That was a cool, unique way to grow up, beside this alcoholic artist who hopped from girlfriend to girlfriend’s house. He he was smart and so well informed when it came to music.
I was his shadow between the ages of nine and 13 or 14 or so. Beyond that, we parted ways. So when I was an emancipated minor at 15 and going into the adult world, it was with no protector by my side. I was out there in bars, on my own, running the open mic, playing gigs. I had an after-school job – I was trying to finish high school. I never managed to grow a thick skin; I’m still very open and porous. Somehow I survived all those years without cutting myself off.
Too often, healthcare ignores our pain and fails to value our lives. But communities are banding together to meet our needs
Maternal deaths have recently dropped in the US – that is, unless you’re Black.
Black women continue to face the highest rates of maternal mortality in our country. To be Black, pregnant and hopeful in the US is to hold on to life with a fierce and unyielding grip against devastating odds.
Venice Haynes is a social and behavioral scientist with more than 17 years of public health experience. She is the senior director of research and community engagement for United States of Care
Dayton will host the alliance’s parliamentary assembly 30 years after the Bosnian peace accords were signed there
When hundreds of Nato delegates and thousands of ancillaries, protesters and security forces descend on Dayton, Ohio, next month, the visitors will see a town that’s clawed its way back from the brink.
White flight in the late 20th century and the 2008 Great Recession saw thousands of jobs and residents leave. More recently, the pandemic forced many downtown businesses to allow staffers to work from home, erasing a key daytime customer base for cafes and restaurants.
PSG player on her reinvention in midfield, Euro 2025 confidence and how she embraces her role-model status
Sakina Karchaoui is one of the most popular players in the France team. Perhaps the most popular. But when she joins us at 9am at Clairefontaine, the national centre of French football, Les Bleues’ No 7 appears quite shy. Wearing a blue tracksuit emblazoned with the French rooster, she smiles for the first time when Kenza Dali teases her: “Interview for the Guardian … in English please, Saki!”
Spring has finally sprung in the French capital and for the native of Salon-de-Provence, in southern France, the prospect of training in the sunshine is another reason to smile. “We are almost ready for the Euros,” Karchaoui says as she looks at the training ground below. “We work a lot tactically with the coach, we work technically, physically, all aspects of football. I think we can win many things together; we’ve got so much talent. And if everyone brings their own little madness, their own experience and their own qualities to the group, that’s what will make us win.”
Lawsuit focuses on day-one executive order claiming to ‘unleash American energy’ by boosting oil industry
Conservationists on Wednesday sued the Trump administration over its attempts to boost the oil industry by rolling back green policies.
Filed by the environmental non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, the litigation focuses on Trump’s day-one “unleashing American energy” executive order. In an effort to boost already booming US energy production, the emergency declaration directed federal agencies to identify all policies and regulations that “unduly” burden fuel producers and create “action plans” to weaken or remove them.
The chief executive of the American chip maker Nvidia visited Beijing on Thursday, days after the US issued fresh restrictions on sales of the only AI chip it was still allowed to sell to China.
Jensen Huang’s surprise visit was on the invitation of a trade organisation, according to a social media account affiliated with state media.
Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Nicky Bandini and Philippe Auclair as Arsenal win 2-1 in Madrid to knock the holders out of the Champions League
On the podcast today: a brilliant performance from Arsenal at the Bernabéu, winning 2-1 in Madrid and 5-1 across the tie, they were close to perfection with Declan Rice probably the standout performer in a team of standout performers.
Illegally diverted rivers, seawater and poorly managed building projects have polluted the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. But the Unesco site has a vital role to play in fighting climate change
From the porch of her family home in Nueva Venecia, Magdalena, Yeidis Rodríguez Suárez watches the sunset. The view takes in the still waters of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta wetlands. Pelicans dip their beaks into the lagoon, ripples breaking the glassy surface. Distant mangroves turn from green to deep purple in the dying light.
The 428,000-hectare (1,600 sq mile) expanse of lagoons, mangroves and marshes in Colombia has been a Unesco biosphere reserve since 2000. Yet, for Rodríguez, 27, the natural abundance is little more than an illusion.
These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know
Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?
This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.
(Matador) The two deep south songwriters ditch country’s rhinestones for a personal, defiant reframing of the genre’s tropes
The origins of Send a Prayer My Way stretch back nearly a decade. The partnership between US singer-songwriters Mackenzie “Torres” Scott and Julien Baker germinated in 2016, when the pair performed together in Chicago. Scott subsequently suggested, in a text sent during the pandemic, that they make a country album. Accusations that the pair are jumping on an ongoing trend for high-profile pivots towards a Nashville-oriented sound – which has so far involved the likes of Beyoncé, Post Malone, Zayn Malik, Chappell Roan and Lana Del Rey – are thus diffused.
Nevertheless, it still feels telling that Send a Prayer My Way arrives now. Baker has spent much of the 2020s as one-third of Boygenius, a collaboration with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers that made her far more famous than her previous solo albums. It spiralled into something that resembled a genuine pop phenomenon, laden with awards and headlining Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl.
The world’s largest meat company, JBS, looks set to break its Amazon rainforest protection promises again, according to frontline workers.
Beef production is the primary driver of deforestation, as trees are cleared to raise cattle, and scientists warn this is pushing the Amazon close to a tipping point that would accelerate its shift from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter. JBS, the Brazil-headquartered multinational that dominates the Brazilian cattle market, promised to address this with a commitment to clean up its beef supply chain in the region by the end of 2025.
French president welcomes US representatives as meeting to discuss Ukraine gets under way at Élysée palace in Paris
As we await further updates from the talks taking place at the Élysée, let me bring you some other stories from around Europe.
Meanwhile, Russia’s top economic negotiator claimed that some countries were trying to “derail” Moscow’s talks with the United States, as the two sides work towards normalising ties.
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