82 m. ago ‘They first come for great acts of culture’: Cate Blanchett sets up grant for displaced film

Actor and UN refugee ambassador gives warning about authoritarian regimes at launch of film fundAuthoritarian regimes “first come for great acts of culture” when they start to curtail civil liberties, Cate Blanchett warned as she launched a new grant for displaced film-makers.The two-time Oscar winner and goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), has teamed up with the international film festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Hubert Bals Fund to set up the Displacement Film Fund, which will support displaced film-makers or those with experience in refugee storytelling. Continue reading...

Culture

92 m. ago India and Pakistan extend airspace ban after worst violence in decades

Delhi and Islamabad continue airspace ban for each other’s flights a month after the deadly Kashmir attack

Events

2 h. ago My cultural awakening: a punk band told me quit drinking. So I did

As a teen, I was surrounded by binge culture. But then a band called Minor Threat taught me it was radical to be sober – and it changed my lifeI started drinking when I was 14. It was how we’d have fun as kids in Aberdeen – I didn’t come across any youth clubs or anything particularly productive. You drank beer or alcopops in some shady lane, and you drank so quickly that you’d get drunk but then be sober enough to get home at 11pm so your parents wouldn’t notice anything. It wasn’t drinking for pleasure: binge drinking was just what everyone – regardless of social groups – seemed to be doing.During my teenage years I worked at a newsagent and I would read Kerrang! every week, which was extremely formative for me in discovering music. It’s incredible how many new bands I was introduced to, and just how my music taste evolved – from nu-metal bands such as Korn to Rage Against the Machine and, most influentially, Fugazi. Continue reading...

Culture

2 h. ago The Rehearsal: Nathan Fielder makes genius appointment TV that may spoil you forever

In his twisted and often horrifying reality show, Fielder piles ethical grey areas on top of each other like problematic pancakes. Get stuck in!Schopenhauer defined genius as someone who aims at a target the rest of us can’t see. Which raises a philosophical paradox – how do we know they’ve hit it? I was moved to such musings while watching this week’s pick, a singular piece of art that functions unlike anything else on TV, and calls the medium itself into question. No, it’s not Police Interceptors.In The Rehearsal (Monday, 10pm, Sky Comedy), comedian Nathan Fielder blends documentary, social experiment, performance art and absurdist satire in a devised method all his own. He has ordinary people tackle emotionally fraught situations from their lives, by role-playing them with hired actors in meticulously recreated sets that mirror significant personal locations. It’s arch, but the stakes are real. The first series opened with a man who wanted to apologise to his pub quiz teamma...

Politics

2 h. ago ‘Something has gone very wrong’: how the carers scandal was exposed

A Guardian investigation revealed how hundreds of thousands of people were plunged into debt – and some criminalised – for looking after their loved onesOne February afternoon in 2016, Sir Robert Devereux, at the time the most powerful official in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was stopped by a junior colleague as he walked through the car park of a civil service office in Preston, Lancashire. Was he aware, the worker asked, about the problems with carer’s allowance?Devereux, on a flying visit to the DWP outpost, asked for details and promised to look into it. A few days later, Devereux’s office received a long and detailed note, complete with 80 anonymised case studies, setting out how years of shortcomings in the administration of the carer’s allowance benefit had wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and inflicted untold hardship and misery on thousands of unpaid carers. Continue reading...

Politics

3 h. ago Six great reads: Sam Altman’s spectacular comeback, British preppers, and fear and loathing in Starbase, Texas

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days Continue reading...

Politics

3 h. ago Tim Dowling: let my tortoise’s humiliating mishap be a lesson to him

A freak thunderstorm soaks the middle one on his way to our house (he’s come to raid the fridge), but the real drama is the toppled tortoise After an hour’s work on a hot morning I leave my office shed and return to the kitchen for a coffee. Halfway there I find the tortoise lying on his back on the path. He can’t have been there for more than an hour, as he wasn’t there when I came out.“What happened to you?” I say, setting him on his feet. But it’s pretty obvious what happened: he tried to exit the garden bed by climbing over the border of diagonally laid bricks and overbalanced. It’s an obstacle he surmounts without difficulty between five and 10 times a day in the warmer months, but occasionally – perhaps once every four years – he puts a foot wrong. So far, I have always been there to turn him back over. Continue reading...

Politics

3 h. ago ‘We trusted them’: East End fishmongers take on the City to save ancient markets

Campaigners say permanent closure of Smithfield and Billingsgate will affect livelihoods and limit access to quality produceIt is a mismatched contest: a handful of east London fishmongers taking on the phenomenally wealthy City of London Corporation.But the market traders and a food poverty charity have teamed up to battle City of London Corporation over its plans to close the capital’s ancient fish and meat markets for good. Continue reading...

Politics

3 h. ago Disabled campaigners watching ‘in horror’ as trans people face toilet segregation

Disabled activists say supreme court ruling has left trans community at similar risk of exclusion from public spacesDisabled rights campaigners say they are watching “in horror” as the UK’s trans community faces similar toilet segregation and exclusion from public spaces that they do.The aftermath of the supreme court ruling on biological sex has led to organisations banning trans people from using the toilets of the gender they live as, with accessible facilities frequently promoted as a solution. Continue reading...

Events

3 h. ago ‘Fiddler on the Roof is in my DNA’: how the West End revival dances on the edge of tradition

After winning five-star reviews and 13 Olivier nominations, Jordan Fein’s earthy take on the 1964 musical is transferring to the Barbican ahead of a UK tour. Alice Saville speaks with the director and the cast about transplanting their Jewish shtetl

Politics

3 h. ago Ange and Brendan can raise two fingers as well as trophies to Celtic scoffers but Treble is no formality – Chris Sutton

Chris was delighted to see the Aussie silence the snipers with Europe League triumph as he draws parallels with current Hoops boss

Politics

3 h. ago Lizzo continues to show off her extreme weight loss in two tiny bikinis

Lizzo was active on Instagram Friday, sharing new bikini-clad content with her 11 million followers.

Politics

4 h. ago From matcha lattes to Dubai chocolate – how supermarkets fight to cope with TikTok trends

Food fads were once dictated by restaurants, now it is viral videos influencing stores what to stock and quicklyTikTok’s algorithm is one of the great mysteries of the modern age. What it deems to be interesting is fed to millions of users, giving it huge cultural sway, from fashion to music and politics. It is also increasingly influencing what we eat.Supermarkets were once the trendsetters, studying popular items on restaurant menus and recreating them on their shelves. Now the big shops are the ones being influenced, says Zoe Simons, a brand development chef at Waitrose. Continue reading...

Politics

4 h. ago ‘Alarming’ rise in regional internet censorship in China, study finds

Tens of millions of internet users in China’s Henan denied access to five times more websites than usualChina’s authorities appear to have implemented an enhanced version of the country’s internet censorship regime in the central province of Henan, subjecting tens of millions of residents to even stricter controls on access to information than people in the rest of the country.A research paper published this month by Great Firewall Report, an internet censorship monitoring platform, found that internet users in Henan, one of China’s most populous provinces, were, on average, denied access to five times more websites than a typical Chinese internet user between November 2023 and March 2025. Continue reading...

Events

4 h. ago Germany trumpets its reckoning with its Nazi past – except when it’s inconvenient | Hanno Hauenstein

From a media prize with a dubious pedigree to the horrors of Gaza, the establishment forgets and remembers what suits it bestGrowing up in Germany, we were taught to believe we had done better. Better than our grandparents’ generation, who swept their complicity under a thick rug of silence. Better even than our parents, whose revolts in the late 1960s rarely led to any serious reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust.Born in the late 1980s, my generation learned about Auschwitz early on. We visited former concentration camps and studied the Nazi regime not as an alien aberration, but as a warning: this is how democracies die. Today, with the far-right AfD and ethno-chauvinism on the rise, that warning has never felt more urgent.Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics Continue reading...

Politics

4 h. ago Scots dad makes desperate attempts to save home from devastating fire

"It's unsafe, the roof can fall in any time, you can see inside the house now, and there are tiles hanging on by a thread."

Events

6 h. ago Pete Hegseth, beset by leaks, clamps down on press inside Pentagon

Defense secretary’s move outlined in memo seemingly punishes media for reporting on leaks inside departmentDefense secretary Pete Hegseth moved on Friday to dramatically curtail press access inside the Pentagon, seemingly punishing the news media for reporting on leaks of classified and unclassified information in recent weeks.The changes, announced in a two-page memo issued by Hegseth, effectively boxed credentialed reporters into one corner on one floor of the building that houses the press office and spaces used by news organizations. Continue reading...

Politics

7 h. ago ANDREW NEIL: In 55 years of covering politics, I've never accused any UK government of routinely telling untruths. But Starmer & Co have taken lying and gaslighting to a deplorable level

How can you tell when politicians are lying? Their lips are moving. It's a hoary old joke but it can still be guaranteed to raise a rueful chuckle among British voters disillusioned with the political process.

Politics

7 h. ago Rust armorer released after completing prison sentence in fatal film set shooting

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed paroled after 18 months from facility in New Mexico to her home in Bullhead City, ArizonaThe armorer convicted in the fatal 2021 shooting involving Alec Baldwin on the set of the film Rust was released Friday from a New Mexico prison.Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was paroled to her home in Bullhead City, Arizona. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in March 2024 for the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed when Baldwin discharged a prop gun loaded with a live round during a rehearsal. Director Joel Souza was also injured. Continue reading...

Events

8 h. ago Is the inquest into the Bondi Junction murders further stigmatising schizophrenia?

Sandy Jeffs, first diagnosed in 1976, says ‘I just don’t know how we’re going to come back from this’Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastWhen Sandy Jeffs was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, “it was an absolute death sentence because schizophrenia and recovery weren’t spoken of in the same sentence back in those days”.“To have your future taken away from you like that, at 23 years of age, was just awful,” she says, “and I bought into the pessimism of my diagnosis because that’s what I was told by all those clinicians.”Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Events