45 h. ago Two dead in shooting targeting Israeli embassy staffers outside Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.

At least one person is dead and another critically injured after a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC.

Events

65 h. ago Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy review – brilliant primer on leftwing economics

From Marx to Piketty, a sprawling but marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s naysayersCapitalism has a way of confounding its critics. Like one of those fairground punching bags, it pops right back up every time a crisis knocks it down. Friedrich Engels learned this the hard way. “The American crash is superb,” he enthused in a letter to Karl Marx in 1857: this was communism’s big chance. Well, not quite. The US Treasury stepped in, recapitalising banks with its gold reserves; in Britain the Bank Charter Act was suspended to enable the printing of money. The rulebook was torn up and capitalism saved.So it has always been. Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is “managed capitalism” and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned exp...

Politics

3 d. ago The Secret Agent review – brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s

Cannes film festivalKleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low placesDirector Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new film is set in the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s and its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special. It’s about the everyday nastiness of political tyranny, high- and low-level, and with its subject matter and present-day perspective, could be compared with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. Yet this is more ambitious, more totally complex and elusive. As the movie progressed, I found myself comparing it to Sergio Leone, to Antonioni’s The Passenger in its unhurried progress to some terrible violent denouement, to Elmore Leonard via Quentin Tarantino, to Meirelles and Lund’s City of God and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a man on the run, or prepar...

Events

5 d. ago Pillion review – 50 shades of BDSM Wallace and Gromit in brilliant Bromley biker romance

Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling play unlikely lovers in this sweet and extremely revealing first time drama from Harry Lighton, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ Box HillHere to prove there’s nothing gentle about true love is an intensely English story of romance, devotion and loss from first-time feature director Harry Lighton, who has created something funny and touching and alarming – like a cross between Alan Bennett and Tom of Finland with perhaps a tiny smidgen of what could be called a BDSM Wallace and Gromit. It’s basically what Fifty Shades of Grey should have been. Pillion is adapted from the 2020 novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones: a shy traffic enforcement officer falls for the ultimate dominant alpha male – an impossibly handsome, strong, emotionally impassive biker who casually demands complete domestic obedience in exchange for the privilege of being reamed with athletic vigour and thrilling lack of sensitivity, often in a specially modified wrestling outfit. Harry M...

Politics

8 d. ago US poised to dial back bank rules imposed in wake of 2008 crisis

Regulators preparing to cut capital requirements that are the target of vigorous criticism from Wall Street

Events

3 w. ago The Pretender by Jo Harkin review – a bold and brilliant comedy of royal intrigue

This fantasia on the life of Lambert Simnel, who finds himself a claimant to the English throne, is a romp through late-medieval identity and historical uncertaintyOne day in 1484, strange men arrive at the Oxfordshire farm where 10-year-old John Collan lives. They’ve come to carry him away to a new life, for he is not, after all, the farmer’s son; in fact, he’s Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, spirited away in infancy to keep him safe ahead of the day he might return to claim the throne of England. That day is now in sight. He can’t call himself John any more, but he can’t yet be announced as Edward, Earl of Warwick. In the meantime he’ll be given a third name: Lambert Simnel.Over the course of this fantastically accomplished novel, the many-named boy will travel from Oxford to Burgundy then Ireland, and at last into the paranoid and double-crossing heart of Henry VII’s court. The tail end of the Wars of the Roses – with Richard III’s crown snatched from the...

Politics

3 w. ago Activist pastor who has criticized Trump arrested while praying inside Capitol

William Barber, leader of ‘Moral Monday’ progressive movement, was arrested Monday by Capitol Police officers along with two others

Politics