Alexandre Padilha’s father fled dictatorship for the US – now the health chief’s family is a target of Trump’s bully tactics
When Alexandre Padilha’s father most needed help, the United States took him in.
It was 1971, the height of Brazil’s brutal two-decade dictatorship, and Anivaldo Padilha, a young Methodist activist, had been forced to flee his homeland after spending 11 months in one of São Paulo’s most notorious torture centres.
Labour MPs talking openly about replacing PM as poll suggests just 26% of Labour members have favourable view of him as party leader
Google has said it will invest £5bn in the UK in the next two years to help meet growing demand for artificial intelligence services, in a boost for the government, PA Media reports.
Back to the Survationpolling of Labour members, and it includes responses to various questions about the Labour deputy leadership. They all suggest Lucy Powell, the former leader of the Commons, should beat Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary.
Sanctions and security guarantees for Ukraine are among the ‘missing pieces’ Ukrainian president says are necessary for peace ahead of Trump’s state visit to UK
Summing up his speech, Draghi says that “in substance, the more reforms, and this is a point I made some times, the more we push [for] reforms, the more private capital will step up and the less public money we will need.”
“Of course, this path will break longstanding taboos, but the rest of the world has already broken theirs. For Europe’s survival, we must do what has not been done before, and refuse to be held back by self imposed limits,” he says.
“European citizens are asking that their leaders raise their eyes from their daily concerns towards their common European destiny and grasp the scale of the challenge.
Only unity of intent and urgency of response will show that they are ready to meet extraordinary times with extraordinary action.”
The internationally feted choreographer has worked with pop megastars, a sculptor and the monks of the Shaolin Temple. Now he is tackling the cultural divisions and colonial legacy of his homeland
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is almost offended when I suggest he’s a busy man. “When people tell me, ‘You do so much,’ I cringe,” says the artistic director of the Grand Théâtre de Genève – the largest stage in Switzerland, with its ballet and opera companies – who runs his own company Eastman in his native city of Antwerp. He is also the creator of contemporary dance-theatre productions and a choreographer for film (Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina and Cyrano), musicals (Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill), pop (Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Madonna) and plenty more.
This autumn alone, nine different works of Cherkaoui’s are being performed around the world, including An Accident/A Life, a collaboration with performer Marc Brew, about the car accident that left Brew paralysed from the neck down – “It’s maybe the piece I’m most proud of,” Cherkaoui says – and the UK premiere of Vlaemsch (Chez Moi), both in London.
Jaguar Land Rover has extended its shutdown on car production, as Britain’s biggest carmaker grapples with the aftermath of a cyber-attack.
JLR said on Tuesday it would freeze production until at least next Wednesday, 24 September, as it continues its investigations into the hack, which first emerged earlier this month.
A strange, not entirely convincing attempt to add conceptual depth sees an animator forced to erase his own mildly annoying cartoon creations
We’re in familiar children’s entertainment territory at the start of this family animation featuring a tiny little sincere dinosaur: mildly annoying lead character, mildly annoying would-be wizard sidekick delivering all the requisite snarky asides, plus mildly annoying assorted other critters. But in an unlikely swerve, this Czech/Polish/Slovakian production (dubbed into English for this release) turns out to honour the more formally and conceptually interesting heritage of east European animation. A couple of beats into the story, we suddenly find ourselves in a live-action environment, with a real human sitting in a dark basement studio, working away, drawing cartoons – the self-same cartoon, in fact, that we’ve just been watching.
The artist is then interrupted by an extremely grating woman – think Joan Cusack’s deranged hyper-girly Debbie Jellinsky in Addams Family Values – who demands that he erase his existing creations and create something marketable and “cute”. And so the erasure of the insufficiently cute begins, with devastating effect. Diplo the dinosaur loses his parents, and somewhat irritating though he is, it’s a little bit heartbreaking that he believes the destruction of everyone and everything he has ever known to be his fault.
The TV star and his co-author make a compelling argument for properly addressing the legacies of slavery
When slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833, it was thought only reasonable that slave-owners should be recompensed for the loss of their property: the British government had to borrow the equivalent of £17bn at current values to do this and that loan was not completely paid off until 2015. Meanwhile, the slaves themselves never received a penny in compensation.
There have always been dedicated Black campaigners for reparations, but it is only recently that their demands have gained momentum. Furthermore, it is impossible to talk about reparations without talking about race and migration – and these are issues at the top of the political agenda internationally. All this makes Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder’s new book both timely and vital.
Visit comes at sensitive time for UK government, which is laying on display of royal and military pageantry
Donald Trump arrives in the UK on Tuesday for a historic second state visit. His trip comes at a tricky time for Keir Starmer, who is facing growing discontent from his own MPs and is in the middle of preparations for what could be a make-or-break party conference speech.
The government is hoping to wow the US president with a show of royal and military pageantry, while keeping him away from sensitive places such as central London – and sensitive topics such as immigration and free speech.
Cincinnati have dazzled with their weapons but failed at the one job that matters most: protecting their franchise quarterback
It sounds obvious, you don’t build an actual NFL roster like it’s a fantasy football team. It’s not enough to pack your squad with flashy weapons and hope you dazzle your way to the Super Bowl. You have to focus on more and different dimensions – roster depth, how players fit into coaching schemes, how they work together, and how even the “unsexy” positions are addressed at a high level.
And yet that is generally not how the Cincinnati Bengals have built their teams over the years. And once again, they’re paying for it in the worst possible way – with an injury to their star quarterback, Joe Burrow, that will severely affect their season. In the Bengals’ 31-27 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, Burrow suffered a turf toe injury as he was being sacked by defensive lineman Arik Armstead; it’s estimated that Burrow will be out at least three months. It’s the third time in six seasons that Burrow’s underwhelming offensive line – the line that is supposed to protect him from this sort of stuff – has helped shorten his season.
At 88, she has won a Munch award for artistic freedom – despite her pioneering work being cancelled by the US university she studied at. She talks protest, polarisation and propaganda
It’s a miracle I get out of my interview with Palestinian artist Samia Halaby alive. Not just because the creaky wooden stairs to her second-floor Tribeca, New York live-work space are alarmingly steep, but because certain people view the 88-year-old acclaimed abstract artist, a pioneer of digital art, as a dangerous security threat.
In December 2023, Indiana University, Halaby’s alma mater, cancelled what was due to be the first American retrospective exhibition of Halaby’s work at the university’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. The exhibition had been three years in the making but Halaby was informed she was no longer welcome in a terse two-sentence letter from the museum’s director, citing vague security concerns. The real reason, she suspects, was the museum’s wish to distance itself from anything supportive of Palestine in the wake of 7 October. Almost a year later, says Halaby, Michigan State University abruptly cancelled the opening party for her solo retrospective and removed a painting whose title, Six Golden Heroes, referred to the escape of Palestinian political prisoners.
Athletic Club’s goalkeeper on hosting Arsenal in the Champions League and the magic of San Mamés
“Sometimes you need some luck; that was mine,” Unai Simón says. “What I thought might happen in five, six, seven years happened in 19 days.”
It was August 2018, Simón was 21 and although he had been training at Athletic Club for a decade, and with the first team for three years, the son of police officers from Vitoria didn’t think there was a chance of playing in Bilbao any time soon, if at all. It was all he wanted but he didn’t even live there any more, moving 800km in search of an opportunity with second division Elche. Which is when weird things started to happen.
My husband and I still have sex – but something’s missing. Is stress the culprit?
I’m a woman in my 50s and have been with my husband for decades. We have always had a wonderful sex life and I used to be able to climax vaginally very easily, often without clitoral stimulation. During an eventful time for the familya couple of years ago, my libido and ability to climax disappeared, though they did eventually return. A few months ago, I had a health crisis, which has slightly impaired my coordination on one side. Although I have recovered very well, I am again experiencing a loss of libido and sexual sensation.
We continue to have sex regularly and I enjoy the intimacy. I can climax with clitoral stimulation but it takes a long time and can be almost physically painful. I really miss vaginal orgasms and the release they brought. Although I am of perimenopausal age, I have no obvious symptoms and a hormone test came back normal.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.
If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
Artificial intelligence will replace creativity with something closer to magical wishing. The challenge for future generations will be dealing with the feeling of emptiness that leaves us with
In the German fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife, an old man one day catches a strange fish: a talking flounder. It turns out that an enchanted prince is trapped inside this fish and that it can therefore grant any wish. The man’s wife, Ilsebill, is delighted and wishes for increasingly excessive things. She turns their miserable hut into a castle, but that is not enough; eventually she wants to become the pope and, finally, God. This enrages the elements; the sea turns dark and she is transformed back into her original impoverished state. The moral of the story: don’t wish for anything you’re not entitled to.
Several variations of this classic fairytale motif are known. Sometimes, the wishes are not so much excessive or offensive to the divine order of the world, but simply clumsy or contradictory, such as in Charles Perrault’s The Ridiculous Wishes. Or, as in WW Jacobs’ 1902 horror story The Monkey’s Paw, their wishes unintentionally harm someone who is actually much closer to them than the object of their desire.
Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, has been told by medical sources that at least 38 Palestinian people, including women and children, have been killed by Israeli forces since dawn today.
As well as facing relentless bombardments, Gaza City, the biggest built-up area of the territory, is being gripped by a famine caused by Israel’s restrictions on aid.
Google has said it will invest £5bn in the UK in the next two years to help meet growing demand for artificial intelligence services, in a boost for the government.
The investment, which comes as Google opens its new datacentre in Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, is expected to contribute to the creation of thousands of jobs, the US tech company said.
Linklater’s ahead-of-the-curve adaptation of a 1999 play about an alleged rape is reconfigured to try and reflect current concerns
Richard Linklater’s 2001 movie Tape, and Stephen Belber’s 1999 play that preceded it, were ahead of the curve in their targeting of male sexual violence, blurred lines of consent, performative apologies and self-victimising aggressors. Now comes a remake from Hong Kong for the post-#MeToo era. It makes a few updates, such as situating the film in an Airbnb apartment (instead of a motel room), where two old high-school friends convene. But, somewhat too reverential towards the original, this new version from director Bizhan Tong doesn’t do enough either conceptually or aesthetically to dig down into today’s shifted gender battle lines.
In Tong’s scenario, flippant lifeguard and small-time drug-dealer Wing (Adam Pak) invites his straight-laced school buddy Chong (Kenny Kwan) over to shoot the breeze at his apartment. Initially they smoke spliffs and banter testily about their diverging life paths; the latter, now going by the anglicised name of Jon, has become a promising low-budget film-maker. But steering the conversation to a touchy subject – Wing’s former sweetheart Amy (Selena Lee), whom Jon later slept with – Wing goads his so-called friend into confessing he raped her. Then he delivers the coup de grace: the room has been sprinkled with webcams that have videoed their exchange.
A century from now, a literature scholar pieces together a picture of our times in a novel that quietly compels us to consider the moral consequences of global catastrophe
The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.
These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?
It was the place to be through the 1980s, a nightclub where Johnny Rotten and Kim Wilde rubbed shoulders with the Beastie Boys and, er, Mel Smith. David Koppel’s new book captures it all
A new wellbeing hotel on the tiny outpost of Styrsö in the Gothenburg archipelago is a perfect base for a relaxing, restorative break
If you came to stay on the tiny island of Styrsö (steer-shuh) in the Gothenburg archipelago in the late 19th or early 20th century, there was a good chance it was because you had tuberculosis. The island had already begun to appeal to city folk who came here for fresh air, sea baths and peace, but the sanatoriums set up by the renowned Dr Peter Silfverskiöld gained such a positive reputation that the isle became known as a health resort. Those glory days have long since faded but Kusthotellet, a new hotel dedicated to wellbeing, aims to tap back into the restorative vibe.
The conditions that first drew health-seekers to the island still pertain. It’s tucked away and protected from winds, but the lack of high ground nearby means the sun shines on its southern coast from dawn to dusk, and there’s no pollution. “This island is such a peaceful place – you can really relax and recharge your batteries,” Malin Lilton, manager of Kusthotellet, told my companion and me. “As soon as you get on the ferry your pulse rate goes down and you start breathing in the good air.”
Craig McLachlan has withdrawn from the Australian production of Cluedo after a backlash to his casting seven years after he was accused of, and denied, touching, kissing and groping his female co-stars without their permission.
Last Wednesday the show’s producers Crossroads Live announced that McLachlan had been cast as Colonel Mustard in a stage adaptation of the 1985 film Clue, based on the boardgame.
Westminster’s hardening attitudes to immigration are leading anti-racist campaigners to warn a far-right UK government no longer seems unthinkable
“I remember my father marching against the National Front in the 1970s. It felt like it was a minority. The majority of people are still decent. But now, the far right seems legitimised and popular,” Dabinderjit Singh, a retired senior civil servant said.
Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on storytelling, their strangest interactions with fans and bonding over The Lord of the Rings
How does one measure success? For Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the historians behind the hit podcast The Rest Is History, it could be the number of unexpected and overly familiar conversations with strangers. On a holiday high up in the mountains of Bulgaria, Holland was wandering around a secluded monastery when someone called out, “Love the podcast!”
Sandbrook, meanwhile, is used to getting weird looks from fans who find it hard to compute that the man in front of them is one half of the soundtrack to their dog walks and commutes. “The weirdest thing that people say – which I’ve heard more than once – is, ‘My wife and I listen to you in bed every night,’” he says, looking mildly appalled.
Knowsley is a Labour stronghold. But judging by the polls and the people I spoke to, the messages of the right are truly cutting through
At the weekend, I took the well-worn journey from London to Knowsley in Merseyside. I’ve made this trip so many times that I can execute it with military precision, arriving just in time before the train doors close, even with a toddler in tow this time around. My uncle picked us up from the station and as we turned on to the motorway, I saw St George’s flags hanging over us from the sides of bridges. Union jacks circled the roundabout just before we turned off to go to my auntie’s house. Knowsley is Labour’s fourth-safest seat in the UK, but it felt like a newly minted Reform constituency.
It was a Friday evening, so we opened a bottle of wine and put pizzas in the oven. I was updated on various family milestones – a house sale had gone through, a baby bump was starting to show, the poor dog was on its last legs. My daughter entertained everyone with an energetic rendition of Sleeping Bunnies. Behind her, the BBC News at Six played images of migrants huddled on inflatable boats sailing across the Channel.
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