
Dread the thought of party chat? This selection of cultural keypoints will put some fizz in your conversation
It seemed Trump had finally dealt with domestic terrorist Jimmy Kimmel after his chat show was briefly cancelled, but now it’s back on air. So should we expect more censorship? Surely South Park is skating on thin ice by mocking the president and his allegedly inadequate penis? Maybe the president will throw a curveball and declare a nature show about squirrels to be a secret antifa recruitment operation? Or perhaps he will simply cut the niceties and just put Oprah Winfrey up on Showtrial (“Ratings like you’ve never seen before!”)?
Continue reading...Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills
‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.”
It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chatting until dawn. The talk laid the ground for what would eventually become Before Sunrise, a star-crossed romance that channelled an off-screen bromance as it sent Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around mid-90s Vienna, walking and talking and stopping to kiss. “Yeah, that was the moment. That set the tone,” says Linklater, remembering. “Meeting Ethan backstage, then flying out to Vienna.”
Continue reading...Paul Brown looks back at his career reporting on the climate crisis, failed summit and nuclear power – and how to do it well
Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005 and has written many columns since. He submitted his last column last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. From his hospital bed in Luton, Paul offers his reflections on 45 years writing for the Guardian.
We, in the climate business, all owe a great deal to Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Her politics were anathema to me and to many Guardian readers. But she prided herself on being a scientist before she was a politician.
Continue reading...Even though he’s partial to hideous noise, free jazz is mostly unknown to the Guardian’s pop critic. A new guidebook from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore may change his mind
In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more.
The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”
Continue reading...How will new tax rates and measures affect pensions, savings, car tax and more? We look into some individual queries
From new tax rates on savings, to a pay-per-mile scheme for electric vehicles, via changes to pension contribution rules – this week’s budget included measures that will have an impact on household finances.
Here are some of the questions people wanted the Guardian to answer after Rachel Reeves sat down:
Continue reading...In the face of multiple crises, disruptive technology and populism, making Britain orderly again is an impossible goal
This Labour government loves rules. Fiscal rules, stability rules, investment rules, immigration rules and rules restricting protests: this government’s first impulse, when faced with the fluidity and chaos of the modern world, is to put in boundaries and try to police them. Keir Starmer, a methodical person as well as a former director of public prosecutions, is so keen on orderliness that in 2022 his close colleague Lisa Nandy called him “Mr Rules”.
There are things to be said for this approach. Many voters have been saying for at least a decade that they want politicians to exert more control over Britain’s erratic trajectory. Meanwhile the recent catastrophic administration of Boris Johnson, with its vast carelessness about Covid deaths, Brexit and immigration, still looms over our politics as a demonstration of what happens when governments have little interest in rules. As tech oligarchs, bond traders, international criminals, and digital and physical viruses increasingly prey on vulnerable people, it can be argued that a libertarian or fiscally loose government is a luxury most Britons can’t afford.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Expert advisers likely to recommend only a few thousand men with genetic variant should be eligible for tests
Prostate cancer screening will not be made routinely available for the vast majority of men across the UK, according to the expected recommendations from a panel of expert government health advisers.
The UK national screening committee is expected to only recommend screening for men with the genetic variants BRCA1 and BRCA2 who are between the ages of 45 and 61.
Continue reading...Downing Street brushes off claims that the chancellor misled voters about the state of the public finances ahead of the budget
The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was not at risk of breaking her fiscal rules because of its productivity forecast downgrade.
In a highly unusual move, Richard Hughes, chair of the OBR, has sent a letter to the Commons Treasury committee, giving details of the five assessments it sent to the Treasury ahead of the budget estimating whether or not the fiscal rules would be met.
Before any policy measures, Rachel Reeves was forecast to be running a small current budget surplus in her key year of 2029–30 and therefore meeting her fiscal rules. No fiscal repair job needed. Even after accounting for the U-turns on winter fuel payments and disability benefits since the spring, she was running only a very small deficit.
Continue reading...Far-right minister defends killing of two men who appeared to have given themselves up, saying ‘terrorists must die’
Video of an Israeli military raid in the West Bank shows soldiers summarily executing two Palestinians they had detained seconds earlier.
The shooting on Thursday evening, which was also witnessed by journalists close to the scene, is under justice ministry review, but has already been defended by Israel’s far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared that “terrorists must die”.
Continue reading...Investigators focus attention on to Andriy Yermak as part of inquiry into nuclear energy kickback scandal
Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies have said they are conducting searches at the home of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s powerful chief aide and lead negotiator in the latest round of peace talks, Andriy Yermak.
Journalists filmed about 10 investigators entering Kyiv’s government quarter in a widening of the investigation into a nuclear energy kickback scandal allegedly run by an associate of the Ukrainian president who has fled the country.
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