President Donald Trump's healthcare proposal to send money directly to people for health insurance could push millions into expensive, high-deductible plans.
Democrat-run cities like New York and San Francisco rank among America's most expensive, while Republican-led areas maintain lower living costs. That is very telling about "affordability."
How Israel's role in the Western alliance has evolved to become indispensable for America's strategic interests against authoritarian threats worldwide.
Deputy prime minster says investigators are looking at a device found near the blast site
Last night, tens of thousands of Slovaks protested against the country’s populist and pro-Russian prime minister Robert Fico, marking the 36th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution which had ended the communist rule in the country in 1989, but which his government has recently removed from the list of national holidays.
Despite torrential rain, protesters gathered across the country, including the capital, Bratislava, and the eastern city of Košice.
As Reform announces what it claims are £25bn in savings through cuts, Labour says ‘Farage’s fantasy numbers don’t add up’
Alf Dubs, the Labour peer and former MP who came to the UK on Kindertransport in 1939 and who campaigns on behalf of migrants, told the Today programme this morning that he was “depressed” by the asylum politicies announced by the government yesterday. He explained:
I find it upsetting that we’ve got to adopt such a hard line – what we need is a bit of compassion in our politics, and I think that some of the measures were going in the wrong direction, they won’t help.
The hard line approach will not, in fact, deter people from coming here – at least on the basis of people I spoke to in Calais, for example – I don’t think it will deter them.
I think there is a proper case for children, there’s a proper case for family reunion – when there are children who are on their own and who’ve got family in this country, then I think the right thing to do is to have family reunion and bringing children over here.
But to use children as a weapon, as the home secretary is doing, I think is a shabby thing – I’m lost for words, frankly, because my concern was that if we remove people who come here, what happens if they’ve had children in the meantime?
Shipped out of Dallas and dropped into Hollywood, Dončić has responded with a leaner body, a louder voice and a growing command of the Lakers’ post-LeBron future
It’s been nine and a half months since the trade that rocked the sports world was broken via a Shams Charania tweet that prompted the majority of the basketball news-breaker’s followers to assume he’d been hacked. Fresh off of a trip to the NBA finals, the young Slovenian superstar Luka Dončić was shipped off in the middle of the night to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, and the NBA as we know it was changed forever. The fallout from one of the most shocking trades in sports history is still evolving in real-time: disgraced Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison, who spearheaded the transaction, was let go by the team last week, in a move Mavericks fans have been loudly clamoring for since news broke that their homegrown franchise player was being abruptly cast to sea. But on the other side of the coin was a mixed blessing and a new beginning. But on the other side of the coin was a mixed blessing and a new beginning: Dončić, who had imagined spending his entire career in Dallas like mentor Dirk Nowitzki, suddenly found himself recast as the face of the NBA’s most iconic franchise under the bright lights of Hollywood. And, as it turns out, the future is now.
While Dončić’s breakup with the Mavericks was both very public and very messy (the team was not shy about vocalizing its reasoning for the move, and painting the 26-year-old in quite an unflattering light in the process), the silver linings showed themselves quickly. He might not have considered himself suited for the Los Angeles spotlight, but with his flair for the dramatic and a feel for the sport’s theater, playing for such a high-profile franchise proved an unexpectedly good fit. And it couldn’t have worked out better for the Lakers: the team had been staring down the barrel of an uncertain future, with the retirement of 40-year-old LeBron James looming, and Anthony Davis’ injury history creating a cloud of doubt around his ability to be the No 1 option in the eventual aftermath. Enter stage right: a ticket to franchise salvation, equipped with the newfound motivation that can only be borne from being publicly and mercilessly dragged through the mud.
Gen Z actors such as Millie Bobby Brown and Jenna Ortega are refusing to do what is expected of ‘the talent’
Last week, I saw a clip that made me want to stand up and cheer. It was of the actor Millie Bobby Brown talking back to a photographer on a red carpet. The paparazzi had been yelling at her to smile, and Brown retorted: “Smile? You smile,” before walking off. She refused to do what was expected of her.
It’s a similar story with the star of the recent TV series Alien: Earth, Sydney Chandler. The actor did not appear on the cover of Variety magazine alongside the show’s creator and one of her co-stars, after she said she didn’t want to take part in a video interview for a regular series called How Well Do They Know Each Other?. The interviewer spent the first half of the resulting cover story explaining the situation in a bemused, tut-tutting tone, noting all the stars who had been willing to take part in the franchise.
Priya Elan writes about the arts, music and fashion
An affectionate biography of the polymath includes details of never-produced gems such as Monty Python’s Third World War
Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children’s author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his own real-ale brewery and was even once a columnist for this newspaper, beginning one piece in 2011 like this: “In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare.” He even used to write jokes for Cliff Richard.
It would be tempting in view of all this to call him a renaissance man, except that Jones rather despised the highfalutin Renaissance, preferring the earthiness of medieval times: his first published book was a scholarly reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, arguing that the hero’s fighting and pillaging was being presented satirically by the poet as something deplorable. Later he raided the Norse myth-kitty for the beloved children’s book (and, later, film) The Saga of Erik the Viking. His illustrator told him that Vikings didn’t really wear those massive helmets with horns sticking out at the sides, but Terry insisted on them. Historical accuracy could only get you so far.
Sundar Pichai says artificial intelligence models are ‘prone to some errors’ and warns of impact if AI bubble bursts
The head of Google’s parent company has said people should not “blindly trust” everything artificial intelligence tools tell them.
In an interview with the BBC, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, said AI models were “prone to errors” and urged people to use them alongside other tools.
Lobbyists representing industry responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions participated in key talks at the UN climate summit
More than 300 industrial agriculture lobbyists have participated at this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation, a new investigation has found.
The number of lobbyists representing the interests of industrial cattle farming, commodity grains and pesticides is up 14% on last year’s summit in Baku – and larger than the delegation of the world’s 10th largest economy, Canada, which brought 220 delegates to Cop30 in Belém, according to the joint investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian.
The cosy cabins, bike rides and serenity of De Alde Feanen national park make it the perfect place to switch off and unwind in winter
If there are times when the sights, smells and sounds of a new destination are best downed in a single, heady, flaming sambuca of a weekend, there are others when a more slow-drip pace is called for. Such is the case with De Alde Feanen, in Friesland. One of the most peaceful national parks in the Netherlands, this 4,000-hectare wetland slows down naturally after the summer season. Its waterways shrug off their summer flocks of kayakers, paddleboarders, boat trippers and terrace diners. Museums and galleries close. The local tourist office winds down. Even the park’s population of nesting storks fly south.
A 20-minute drive south-east of Leeuwarden, in the country’s north-east, the lakes, ponds, ditches and canals of “The Old Fens” are the remains of the peat-cutting that began there in the middle ages. Now awash with reeds, rushes and sedges, its watery habitats are richly biodiverse, home to more than 100 bird species as well as otters, pine martens, roe deer and dragonflies. Hay meadows and wetland forest add marsh thistle, reed orchids, alders and willows to the list. Ribboned with well-marked hiking and cycling trails, the proximity to nature draws spring and summer tourists but treasures can be found there in autumn and winter too; among them thousands of ducks and geese, and some of the starriest skies in the Netherlands.
Edna O’Brien on her sofa, Joseph O’Connor in his garden, Seamus Heaney surrounded by books … British photographer Steve Pyke on capturing the greats of Irish literature
A photographer’s road trip into the Californian desert takes an unexpected turn in director Joshua Erkman’s interesting feature debut
Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions. At the same time, it feels like a weird dodge into borderline-abstraction and unknowable mystery that drains all the realism away, making this a mannered film-making exercise. But there’s no denying the level of craft on show, or the original way Erkman throws together practitioners of highfalutin art-world discourse and skeevy low-lifes, with bloody results. In generic terms, it definitely feels of a piece with other recent highbrow-meets-lowbrow scare-’em-ups, the kind of grad-school horror you might see in the queer-eyed I Saw the TV Glow, David Lowery’s stripped-down A Ghost Story, or director Ari Aster’s Hereditary. In other words: interesting for sure, but perhaps a bit pretentious for hardcore gorehounds.
In A Desert, we first meet photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) as he drives around the desiccated terrain of California’s Yucca Valley, listening to smooth contemporary jazz on his fancy SUV’s sound system and pulling over to take pictures of abandoned buildings. He shoots his images on a fancy 8x10 inch apparatus that uses photographic plates that need to be exposed for 10 second intervals. His subjects include disused cinemas and the ghost town remains of abandoned military bases – although in a voicemail he leaves for his wife Sam (Sarah Lind) he suggests he might shift over into portraits for a while. Clearly, he’s not especially interested in the people who live here, although when the trailer-trash-style couple (Zachary Ray Sherman and Ashley Smith) in the motel room next door come a-knocking, offering turpentine-tasting hooch and a chance to party, Alex is too polite/weak to resist.
North Carolina governor says immigration crackdown ‘stoking fear’ as officials say at least 130 people detained
Aggressive arrests by federal immigration agents continued in Charlotte on Monday after a weekend sweep in which authorities said they detained a total of at least 130 people in North Carolina’s largest city, as protests picked up.
North Carolina’s governor, Josh Stein, on Monday warned that the crackdown was simply “stoking fear” and resulting in severe disruption.
Decision seen by some as ‘blatant whitewashing’ but many Gen Z have responded with indifference and even nostalgia
To some Indonesians he is the antithesis of a hero – a former dictator accused of human rights abuses who once held the disreputable title of one of the world’s most corrupt leaders.
So when the world’s third-largest democracy announced this month that its late strongman leader Suharto would be named a national hero, activists and survivors were outraged.
Connexion
