3 d. ago Atomic review – the intro is the most hardcore 37 seconds of TV this year

The suspense never ends in Alfie Allen and Samira Wiley’s uranium-smuggling thriller. If you can make it through the intense opening, you can make it through anythingYou know what they say. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the drug smuggling across the Sahara racket. Alas, these are wise words that young cartel driver Max (Alfie Allen, bringing exactly the reckless high energy the character and venture require) has failed to heed. We first meet him speeding across the Algerian portion of the north African desert with a companion called Carlos (Nezar Thalal) on their way to Beirut to exchange a great deal of cocaine for some antique statues, when bish, bash, wallop, what’s happening?! An ambush by a militant group armed with machine guns who kill Carlos and are about to kill Max? But then one of the group turns on the others and kills all of them stone dead instead, before flinging Max and the coke in the car and hightailing it out of there? That is what’s happening! Goodness ...

Politics

6 d. ago Porepunkah shooting: police hunt ‘dangerous’ suspect who fled into bush after allegedly killing two officers ‘in cold blood’

Victoria police believe alleged offender is heavily armed and urge local residents to stay indoorsVictoria police shooting live updatesWhat we know so far about the shooting in rural AustraliaA manhunt is under way after two Victorian police officers were “murdered in cold blood” and another wounded in a shooting at a rural property in the high country town of Porepunkah.The Victorian police commissioner, Mike Bush, said the suspect – believed to be “heavily armed” – was still at large. Bush urged the wider community to stay indoors and said a “full deployment” was under way on Tuesday evening to find the suspect, who he described as “obviously a very dangerous person”. Continue reading...

Events

6 d. ago ‘Dangerous’ suspect who allegedly killed two officers escaped into bush alone and is believed to be ‘heavily armed’ – as it happened

This blog has now closedPorepunkah shooting: two Victoria police officers dead, one injured in attack at rural propertyWhat we know so far about the shooting in rural AustraliaWangaratta police have confirmed there is still an “active incident” ongoing and are continuing to urge people to avoid the area.In a statement published to its social media page a moment ago, the local police service said Victoria police “continues to respond to an incident at a property in Porepunkah”.This is still an active incident and we will provide more information when it’s operationally safe to do so.We ask people avoid the area.Tonight’s Ordinary Council Meeting has also been postponed, and will be rescheduled for two weeks’ time. Further details will be provided at a later date.We thank you for your patience and understanding. Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago Trump rules out sending army to Ukraine and reveals what happens next for the country

US President Donald Trump has revealed all about the future Ukraine, less than 24 hours after suggesting American soldiers could be deployed to the frontline in the conflict

Politics

1 week ago Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion

A Cumbrian wind is the central character in this hugely ambitious, millennia-spanning novel, which was 20 years in the makingEven if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfort...

Politics

last month He worked with artificial limbs for decades. Then a lorry ripped off his right arm. What happened when the expert became the patient?

An experienced clinician in prosthetics, Jim Ashworth-Beaumont found himself the perfect guinea pig for a radical new option for amputeesWhen the air ambulance brought Jim Ashworth-Beaumont to King’s College hospital in south-east London, nobody thought he had a hope. He had been cycling home when a lorry driver failed to spot him alongside his trailer while turning left after a set of traffic lights. The vehicle’s wheels opened his torso like a sardine tin, puncturing his lungs and splitting his liver in two. They also tore off his right arm. Weeks after the accident, in July 2020, Ashworth-Beaumont would see a photo of the severed limb taken by a doctor while it lay beside him in hospital. He had asked to see the picture and says it helped him come to terms with his loss. “My hand didn’t look too bad,” he says. “It was as if it was waving goodbye to me.”Ashworth-Beaumont, a super-fit and sunny former Royal Marine from Edinburgh, would go on to spend six weeks in an induced coma as...

Science