From an analytical standpoint President Trump has been on an absolute terror these past two weeks. Here's a closer look at the White House's winning streak.
A deal between Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz over how states can regulate artificial intelligence has been pulled from President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" bill.
The victim was reportedly critical of his girlfriend's 41-year-old son for being unemployed and still living with his mother at his age, witnesses said.
A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed
In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”
Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.
Serkan Nihat’s story follows a group of Turkish fugitives, but it bites off rather more than it can chew
The cinematic response to populism and incipient fascism worldwide over the last decade hasn’t fully mobilised – but this broadside on the authoritarian leanings of Erdoğan’s Turkey doesn’t pull its punches. (Unsurprisingly, it’s produced by a UK-based team.) It’s a shame then that, lambasting the effects on education, policing, freedom of expression and the demonisation of minorities, director Serkan Nihat is wedded to a hectoring, didactic method that dulls the audience’s engagement, instead of firing us up.
Nihat opts for the fragmented, multi-character narrative beloved of big-picture global film-makers in the 00s (think 21 Grams or Babel). Academic Hakan (Denis Ostier) becomes a fugitive after his pro-democracy lecture is invaded by regime goons. Hakan is later assaulted by vengeful cop Yilmaz (Murat Zeynilli), his one-time school bully, and then hooks up with another policeman, Mehmet (Umit Ulgen), also on the lam after a crisis of conscience about the politicisation of his work. The pair hole up in a safehouse full of migrants being chivvied to Greece by people-smuggler Sahab (Doga Celik). Meanwhile, Hakan and Mehmet’s wives find themselves targeted by the security forces in a clampdown.
‘No resorts, no tourist traps and no fancy restaurants’ – the friends behind the Kids of the Colony YouTube channel go in search of real connections in their countries of origin
‘Kayum was my friend for years,” recalls Abubakar Finiin. “But when I met his grandad in Bangladesh, it just felt like I understood his whole story. I knew so much more about him as a person.”
This moment of connection captures the essence of Kids of the Colony, a grassroots travel series on YouTube created by three childhood friends from Islington: Abubakar, Kayum Miah and Zakariya Hajjaj, all 23. In a series of chatty vlogs that thrive on their offbeat humour and close friendship, the trio provide a rich travelogue of culture and identity as they explore the countries of their parents’ birth.
The idea came to Abubakar while contemplating his next steps after graduating from Oxford University in 2023. “I just thought about the places that we came from,” he says, reflecting on the layered identity of growing up in London with ties elsewhere. Abubakar is Somali, Kayum is Bengali and Zakariya is of Moroccan and English descent.
An easy midweek meal that’s packed with flavour and texture
Crab deserves to be celebrated, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a super-fancy, laborious meal. Crab midweek? Yes, please, and fried rice is my fallback whenever I am in a dinner pickle. That’s not to belittle its deliciousness, complexity or elegance, though, because this spiced crab version can be as fancy as you like. That said, the speed and ease with which I can create a meal that I know everyone will love is the winning factor. Plus, I often have leftover cooked, chilled rice in the fridge, anyway, which is always the clincher (cooked rice has a better texture for frying once chilled).
Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.
The proposals were made at a meeting of more than two dozen tech companies in London last month, chaired by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, minutes seen by the Guardian show. Amid an acute shortage of prison places and probation officers under severe strain, ministers told the companies they wanted ideas for using wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a “prison outside of prison”.
Asset manager Aberdeen’s surprise cut to funding research into inequality has left those that used its grants for good works reeling
The axe fell with shocking suddenness. On Thursday Aberdeen Group plc terminated its Financial Fairness Trust without notice and sacked the CEO, Mubin Haq, the chair and all the trustees, leaving eight staff dangling. The company tells me it plans to move in a different direction. That dreaded phrase marks the end of 16 remarkable years, during which the trust sponsored some of the most influential research into inequality and its financial causes.
Aberdeen is a wealth management and investment company. I admired its willingness to fund research not in its own immediate interest, but for the sake of social improvement, as a sign that decent capitalism was possible. Now that’s over. The mood has changed. Wildfires started by President Trump are engulfing global companies as his administration attempts to bar asset and retirement plan managers from considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions and targets private sector diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives with executive orders. Companies doing good are at risk. I ask Aberdeen if that’s why it has shut down the trust. It denies it strongly, saying it is just a “natural evolution”.
Leonardo goal sets up quarter-final against Fluminense
What a last-16 tie, what a triumph for Al-Hilal, what crushing disappointment for Manchester City who, as the contest aged, gradually lost shape and tempo and crumpled in this shock of the Club World Cup.
The killer blow of a breathless extra-time featuring three goals was administered by Marcos Leonardo in the 112th minute. Along the left, Renan Lodi curved a cross in, Sergej Milinković-Savić rose and headed, Ederson palmed out, and the Brazilian struck his second of the contest. Leonardo headed for a corner flag to begin the Al-Hilal party and the camera panned to Phil Foden who eight minutes before seemed to have saved City.
Fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May say Geldoff told Mercury: ‘Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes’
Freddie Mercury’s performance with Queen at Live Aid in 1985 is often seen as the crowning glory of one of the greatest showmen the world has ever seen.
But he still needed some very clear instructions from Bob Geldof, the festival’s organiser, before going out on stage. “Don’t get clever,” the Boomtown Rats frontman told him, according to fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. “Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes.”
In an interview last weekend, Iran’s ambassador to the UN said his country’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’ because it is permitted for ‘peaceful energy’ purposes. It is the latest development in an escalation of tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, which erupted when Israel targeted the country’s nuclear facilities in June. To understand why enrichment is so important, Madeleine Finlay talks to Robin Grimes, professor of materials physics at Imperial College London. He explains what goes into creating a nuclear weapon, and why getting to the stage of weaponisation is so difficult
Twenty years on, this heart-racing four-part series reconstructs the terror attacks and the vast investigation that followed, without losing sight of the survivors. The detail about the bathtub is astonishing
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here.
Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.
Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.
Tesla CEO also threatened forming an ‘America Party’ if the bill, which would increase US deficit by $3.3tn, is passed
Elon Musk has vowed to unseat lawmakers who support Donald Trump’s sweeping budget bill, which he has criticized because it would increase the country’s deficit by $3.3tn.
“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he wrote on his social media platform, X.
Prime Minister Mark Carney will meet his pledge to eliminate the country’s internal trade barriers by July 1. But economists say it’s not a substitute for lost U.S. trade.
Trump warns of "largest tax increase in history" if Senate fails to pass his comprehensive bill that includes tax cuts and border security while facing bipartisan resistance.
New, younger fans of the Britpop legends are discovering their much-maligned latter-day catalogue without the context of the times. It’s time the band’s older, more cynical observers follow their lead, says Hamish MacBain
By trying to play things safe with its Kneecap coverage – and getting it very wrong with Bob Vylan… – the corporation has failed to represent the reality of public sentiment about Palestine, says its former newsreader Krishma Patel
Bryan Kohberger has agreed to plead guilty to murdering four University of Idaho students as part of a deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty
As Steven Spielberg’s classic celebrates its 50th anniversary, Olivia Petter examines the impact its villainous 25-foot great white has had on shark conservation, and misconceptions around these so-called beasts of the sea
Netflix’s documentary marks 20 years since the suicide bombings on the capital’s transport network that killed 52 and injured almost 800. Four of those caught up in the atrocity talk to Gabriel Tate about their experiences and their enduring legacy
A viral marketing campaign urging employers to ‘stop hiring humans’ has successfully captured our attention – but rage-baiting workers about the very thing we’re most afraid of seems a bizarre strategy, argues Helen Coffey
Connexion
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