Kamala Harris commends 'the President' in Middle East statement, but omits Trump's name
Ukrainian leader expresses hope for progress amid Trump’s Gaza deal, saying ‘it brings more hope for peace in other regions’
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Tuesday it had opened a criminal case against exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, accusing him of creating a “terrorist organisation” and of plotting to violently seize power.
According to Reutes, the FSB said it was investigating more than 20 other people as part of the same case, including prominent dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, ex-prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and leading economists Sergei Aleksashenko and Sergei Guriev.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
In the 1870s, a civil engineer devised early handheld cameras able to capture scenes with more detail than ever. He used the technology to document people on New York streets, from musicians to beggars to paperboys. The work of the innovator, often referred to as the ‘father of instantaneous photography’, has been compiled into a book by Erik Hesselberg called Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd, out on 21 October
Continue reading...© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum
© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum
© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum
It’s actually a euphorbia, and some careful pruning will solve your problem – and result in a more attractive plant
What’s the problem?
I’ve had this cactus for many years, but it keeps getting taller and soon it will hit the ceiling. How can I stop the plant growing without doing it harm?
Diagnosis
The plant in question isn’t a true cactus at all, but a succulent called Euphorbia trigona, also known as the African milk tree. Like many columnar euphorbias, it can shoot up rapidly indoors if it’s happy, often outgrowing its space. Luckily, the plant responds well to pruning if done carefully.
© Photograph: Gynelle Leon
© Photograph: Gynelle Leon
© Photograph: Gynelle Leon
Drug traffickers gaining influence by stepping in and offering donations after Milei’s sweeping social cuts
In a small colourful room tucked away in the south of Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, four women are making bread and pizza bases, the bright spring sun shining strong outside the windows, which are covered in black metal mesh.
Inside, the radio blast upbeat tunes, but the mood is grim: the neighbourhood has been shaken by the livestreamed torture and murder of two young women and a girl allegedly at the hands of a drug trafficker who lived just a few blocks away.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
As they flew above Yu Suzuki’s innovative, psychedelic 3D landscapes combating space dragons and alien rock monsters, the moving arcade cabinet would fling players around and physically involve them in the action
During our family’s holidays in the 1980s, most of which were spent at classic English seaside resorts, I spent all my time and pocket money trawling the arcades. From Shanklin to Blackpool, I played them all, attracted by those vast bulb-lit frontages, the enticing names (Fantasy Land! Treasure Island!), and of course by the bleeping, flashing video machines within. And while I spent many hours on the staple classics – Pac-Man, Galaxian, Kung Fu Master – there was one particular game I always looked out for. A weird, thrilling design classic. A total experience, operating somewhere between a traditional arcade game, a flight sim and a rollercoaster. At the time, it seemed impossibly futuristic. Now, it is 40 years old.
Released by Sega in 1985, Space Harrier is a 3D space shooter in which you control a jetpack super soldier named Harrier, who flies into the screen blasting surreal alien enemies above a psychedelic landscape. When designer Yu Suzuki was first tasked with overseeing its development, the game had been conceived as an authentic military flight shooter, but the graphical limitations of the day made that impossible – there was too much complex animation. So Suzuki, inspired by the flying sequences in the fantasy movie The NeverEnding Story, envisaged something different and more surreal, with a flying character rather than a fighter plane and aliens resembling stone giants and dragons. It was colourful and crazy, like a Roger Dean painting brought to life by the Memphis Group.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames
© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames
© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames
Firms too scared to take a chance on youngsters when taxes and minimum wages are higher, expert says
So much about the UK jobs market is influenced by Rachel Reeves. Without overdoing the blame, say many experts, the chancellor’s tough budget last year and the likelihood of a repeat next month hangs over employers and how they recruit and pay staff.
The latest official figures show a rising number of young people out of work in the three months to August. More broadly, unemployment rose to a four-year high and the number of vacancies fell. And then there was the stubborn increase in the public sector wage bill, which outpaced the much more modest increase in private sector wages.
Continue reading...© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters
© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters
© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters
Reeves paid tribute to Keaton, his co-star in the 2003 romcom Something’s Gotta Give
The actor Keanu Reeves has paid tribute to Diane Keaton following her death in California on Saturday aged 79.
Speaking on the red carpet at a screening in New York of his latest film, Good Fortune, Reeves told E! News: “She was very nice to me. [A] generous, generous artist and a very special, unique person.”
Continue reading...© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
Clambering up bell towers, dancing the night away and falling in love – how ‘saint’ Malala forged a new identity
Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,” she writes in her new memoir.
Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb
© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb
© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb
Activists call for fresh demonstrations this weekend with three people killed and more than 500 reportedly arrested since unrest started in late September
Ayoub Oubalat shares a picture of what he says is his younger brother covered with a white blanket. The man’s eyes are closed and his left eye is bruised blue. At the crown of his head a hole is visible within his dark curly hair, the entry point where the bullet pierced, now shaved and stitched with blue and black thread.
A recently graduated film-maker, Abdessamade, 24, and two others were allegedly killed on 1 October when security forces opened fire on protesters in the town of Lqliâa, near the Atlantic coastal town of Agadir.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP
© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP
© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP
There are plenty of laughs and a fair bit of trauma to process when a depressed man takes a monkey woman across country
It is perhaps an unexpected development that one of the most erotic moments in cinema this year is a frottage scene involving a woman half-dressed as a monkey. By this point in comedian Nina Conti’s directorial debut, there is already a heady backlog of sexual tension inside a camper van between suicidal radio host Roy (Shenoah Allen) and the monkey (Nina Conti) who saved him from stringing himself up in a New Mexico motel room. He’s understandably curious to find out who’s underneath the get-up and the persona that comes with it – a profane blowhard who holds forth on everything around them in the stuffy middle-England tones of Anne Robinson.
The simian lets some stuff slip about her inner human: she used to be Jane, who worked as nightclub mascot for her abusive stepfather Wade (Bill Wise) and began to associate too much with her costume. After her mother’s death from cancer, she then self-destructively shacked up with Wade; having decided to flee his clutches, she insists Roy take her to a Colorado lake where she plans to set up a banana pontoon business. He has his own reckoning planned: going to the graveyard and digging up his hated father to recover a luxury watch with which he will finance her lake-leisure dreams.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image