Massive sewage spill dumps hundreds of millions of gallons into Potomac River near D.C. Trump calls in FEMA while local Democratic leaders stay silent.
Researchers found a respiratory bacterium in retinal tissue of Alzheimer’s patients, suggesting that infection-driven inflammation may speed cognitive decline.
Figure skater Alyssa Liu and her father were allegedly targeted by Chinese spies before the 2022 Beijing Olympics due to his involvement in Tiananmen Square protests.
American figure skater Amber Glenn had a tough short program routine at the Winter Olympics on Tuesday as she bailed out of a move during the performance.
JD Vance, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama were among the prominent figures who issued remarks pertaining to Reverend Jesse Jackson following his death on Tuesday.
Federal courts throw out Trump DOJ lawsuits seeking voter registration data from blue states, as Congress advances SAVE Act with national photo ID requirements.
FAA regulations forced an American Airlines flight to be delayed for departure due to missing "no smoking" signs. An aviation expert explained why airlines must comply.
Former body positivity influencer Gabriella Lascano described to The New York Times how she went from "championing" the community to becoming a "pariah."
House Oversight Committee staff will travel to Ohio to depose billionaire Les Wexner, who was named as a Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator in a 2019 FBI document.
Women’s aerials: the qualifying rounds of accelerating down a ramp and flying through the air. Hanna Huskova, gold medallist in 2018, does a triple somersault, or the “the kiss arse blaster” in the commentator’s words, but it is only enough to leave her seventh.
Women’s curling: Back to the brushes, where Rebecca Morrison posts the final stone of the sixth end into perfect position, Team GB take two and go into a 4-3 lead against the USA with four ends left.
The Wicked star plays all 23 characters in a hi-tech London staging of Bram Stoker’s novel by Kip Williams. Here’s a bite-sized look at the critics’ verdicts
Dracula, the Ur-vampire and ultimate outsider of the literary canon, is played by Cynthia Erivo, along with every other character, in this deliciously wicked tale of the blood-sucking count. Except it’s not deliciously wicked in adapter-director Kip Williams’ stage reinvention. Williams has proven himself a Midas-touched spinner of old stories to new. His one-woman version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was deliriously original. His take on Jean Genet’s The Maids was punk inspired. What has happened here?
As in the Australian director’s hit adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (immaculately interpreted by the Succession star Sarah Snook), the stage is sometimes so crowded with camera operators and stage crew that it’s not always easy to see Erivo. The shallow rake in the stalls makes this theatre a less than ideal setting for Marg Horwell’s handsome scenic design: I spent at least half the evening watching the action on the large screen hanging overhead. Yet it becomes a hallucinatory experience all the same.
Erivo dons wigs and skirts and recalibrates her voice to play Harker’s fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy; then spectacles to play psychiatrist Dr Seward and comic Saruman tresses for a guttural Van Helsing. It’s to her credit, and Williams’, that one sometimes loses track of which character is being broadcast live and which is recorded. The integration is mostly seamless. Personifications of Irish and American characters are knowingly ridiculous, but Dracula always had a vein of camp.
It’s refreshing to see Erivo get to own her queerness on stage, licking her lips lasciviously as a lace-decked Lucy who’s in sexual thrall to an androgynous Dracula – or strutting confidently in a masculine vest with silver chains (a welcome escape from her feminine get-ups in Wicked). She unleashes her ethereal voice to haunting, vulpine effect in the final scenes, where she finally gets to embody Dracula’s power on a bare stage, unobscured by tech and crowds.
The multi-faceted approach speaks to the way that Stoker cut between first-person perspectives using a document-sharing and epistolary form. Equally, Williams’ boundary-breaking artistic toolkit brings out the thematic heart of the matter; it emphasises the way in which the predatory count stokes fears but also embodies deep-rooted desires.
Erivo seems ill at ease with the material. There’s a hesitancy about her performance, as if she were wrong-footed by the technology that surrounds her. A scattering of arch, self-conscious moments and sly humour are part of the deal in Williams’ interpretation, but nothing feels truly felt and, as she switches between characters, the individual voices are not always properly differentiated. The overall effect is slightly ramshackle, sluggish and, in the end, frustratingly short on dash and drama.
Erivo’s range is remarkable – alternately placid, pert, prowling and predatory. A Tony award-winning star of musical theatre in The Color Purple, she despatches one melancholy torch song by Clemence Williams with wistful nonchalance. Otherwise, her athletic efforts are magnified by a filmic soundtrack encompassing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Chopin, Björk and even a bit of electro-trance music. For truly this is a mind-bogglingly complex show, which goes beyond the kitchen sink in its attempts to create an audio-visual hallucination.
The effects, with Craig Wilkinson as video designer, are impressive: a vampire flying by, Dracula crawling down the wall. The camera operators, wig providers, stage managers and props assistants are all assiduous and wonderfully efficient. Marg Horwell’s design is effectively flexible, Nick Schlieper’s lighting and the sound design by Jessica Dunn suitably dramatic, though Clemence Williams’ score becomes increasingly over-emphatic.
Despite stumbling over the odd line, Erivo is charismatic, game, and essentially does her best as a cog in Williams’ elaborate machine. But if you agree to tie your big comeback to a very specific directorial vision, there’s not much even a superstar actor can do if that vision is faulty.
News agencies, citing officials, are reporting that the latest peace talks – held in Geneva – have now ended
The Russian state-owned news agency Ria Novosti has reported some comments by Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky after today’s meeting ended.
“The negotiations lasted two days: a very long time yesterday in various formats, and about two hours today. They were difficult, but businesslike,” he was quoted as saying.
A former probation officer has been jailed after CCTV exposed her secret fling with a convicted murderer when she was caught on camera kissing him during a prison visit.
GMB union tells Labour delaying or halting equalisation to adult rates would be unacceptable
The US state department has confirmed that it still backs Britain’s deal with Mauritius handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, in return for an agreement allowing the UK and the US to carry on using the Diego Garcia airbase for at least another 99 years. Last month Donald Trump described the deal, which he had previously backed, as “an act of great stupidity”. But yesterday a state department spokesperson said:
The United States supports the decision of the United Kingdom to proceed with its agreement with Mauritius concerning the Chagos archipelago.
Starmer must urgently clarify whether the UK will be represented at these US-Mauritius discussions and if not, tell us why. It is vital for our defence and security interests that the US Government does not conclude any agreement about British territory without our input. The Conservatives have led the charge against the Chagos Surrender and we will continue to fight it every step of the way.
The prime minister reiterated his condemnation of Putin’s barbaric attacks on innocent civilians in Ukraine, and the leaders discussed the ongoing negotiations to deliver a just and lasting peace.
Turning to the situation in Gaza, the prime minister reflected on the current situation in the region and the importance of securing further access for humanitarian aid. He set out his support for the ongoing work to deliver the US-led peace plan.
A new exhibition brings together new dye-transfer prints of the classically American photographer’s work
As a small child, Winston Eggleston was only vaguely aware that his father, William Eggleston, was a famous photographer. For all he knew other children also had parents who were friends with Dennis Hopper, or who spent hours tinkering on a piano between occasional, fevered photography sprees, or who had taken the world’s most iconic picture of a red ceiling.
“It’s all normal to you, because you don’t know anything different,” Winston recently recalled. “Looking back, I was lucky.”
The Canadians began the Milano Cortina Games with a cheating scandal and a gold drought. In the second week of action, it’s woe Canada no more
Through the first 10 days of the Olympics, Canada had more memes than medals. More gaffes than golds. More “oh no” than “O Canada.”
Canada didn’t win their first gold medal of the Games until the ninth day of full competition. Meanwhile, the narrative centered on the Great Curling Kerfuffle of 2026 and its accompanying viral online content.
Rio de Janeiro’s carnival is full of contrasts: wealth brushes up against poverty, joyful abandon unfolds alongside hard labour. Its visual expression also explores notions of power. In a country with the largest Catholic population in the world, racy nun costumes are everywhere during the festival. Along with revellers dressing up in sexy police costumes, the Catholic cosplay reveals an element of carnival’s underlying subversive nature: authority figures softened, flipped, and reconsidered through street theatre and play
Mandelson, Trump, Send, political leadership: all need explanation with thought and clarity. We must end this obsession with ‘hot takes’
Roger Mosey is a former head of BBC TV News
Almost everybody, including Keir Starmer, can see that the Peter Mandelson affair provoked a genuine political crisis. The media were right to make it headline news. But it also shows the febrile atmosphere in which politicians and the media conspire to turn every incident into an issue of confidence in leadership, and we are becoming a country where it is impossible to focus on the long term. Hyped-up hot takes are far more loved in Westminster than bringing the nation the sustained change that it needs.
There is nothing new in the obsession with political process. I was guilty of it myself when I was editor of the Today programme during John Major’s attempt to ratify the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. We gleefully put on air rebels and loyalists as the government battled for survival, and our listeners had a far better briefing on the meltdown within the Conservative party than they did on what was in the treaty. This was part of a pattern in which, for decades, EU affairs were seen through a British party prism rather than explaining what was going on in Europe.
Five countries responsible for 75% of world’s coffee supply record average of 57 extra days of coffee-harming heat a year
In Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, more than 4m households rely on coffee as their primary source of income. It contributes almost a third of the country’s export earnings, but for how much longer is uncertain.
“Coffee farmers in Ethiopia are already seeing the impact of extreme heat,” said Dejene Dadi, the general manager of Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union (OCFCU), a smallholder cooperative.
It used to be fairly easy to get work that paid at or around the minimum wage. But with a shrinking number of positions come ever more hoops to jump through, from personality tests, to trial shifts, to towers constructed of marshmallows
It is 10.30am, and Zahra is sitting in a business centre in Preston, attaching marshmallows to sticks of uncooked spaghetti. There are 30 interview candidates in the grey-carpeted room, split into groups of five, competing to build food towers. Already today they have had to solve anagrams, complete quizzes and rank the importance of various kitchen items. Just to be shortlisted for this two-hour interview round, Zahra had to write an online application consisting of 10 paragraphs about her work experience. As she builds her spaghetti and marshmallow tower, she thinks: “What am I actually doing here? This doesn’t relate to the job at all.”
The job in question is not what Zahra, 20, plans to do for ever. It is as a crew member for Wingstop, a chicken shop chain, with a salary of £10.80 an hour – 80p an hour above minimum wage for her age range. During the interview, she says, “a woman with a notepad was staring at us, and all the shift managers were watching. It was so awkward.” A week or so later, Zahra received a short rejection email. “It felt like a waste of time,” she says. “What a joke.”
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