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The Mad King may bring more dynastic disputes and dotty despots to the RSC – but a ‘mayhap’ or a riddling aphorism does not a Shakespeare play make

As a latecomer to Game of Thrones, I am struck by how many people tell me it is “very Shakespearean”. It is as if they need to justify its heady escapism and heavy reliance on bonking and brutality. But its debt to the Bard – apart from the rivalry between the houses of Lannister and Stark – rests mainly on the casting. Watching the first 11 episodes, I noticed four Lears past and to come (Julian Glover, David Bradley, Oliver Ford-Davies and Roger Allam), a Macbeth (Sean Bean), a Hamlet and Henry V (Iain Glen) and a Cassius (Michelle Fairley) among many others.

Because it is presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and staged by Dominic Cooke, who memorably directed The Hollow Crown on television, we shall doubtless hear the same arguments about Game of Thrones: The Mad King at Stratford. But, although there are frequent nods to Shakespeare, they totally lack the resonance of the original. Our first sight of Michael Shaeffer’s King Aerys with a white beard, a leafy crown and no shoes almost screams “Lear on the heath”. But where Lear gradually declines into insanity (“O fool I shall go mad”) and comes out the other side, Shaeffer’s Aerys is a dotty despot from start to finish. The use of tournaments to settle dynastic disputes also reminds us of the opening of Richard II – but where that event is aborted and ultimately causes the king’s downfall, here the image of embattled jousters is endlessly repeated.

Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers all depict geniuses aware of their waning acclaim and terrified it will end

Entertainment culture is so preoccupied with nowness that last month we were inundated with speculation about how directors under 30 topping the box office would change the industry. The flipside of a youth obsession is the conviction that age will increase irrelevance, and this is something that a new crop of films about ageing artists is zeroing in on. Specifically, Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers are films in which artists – all male – indulge in selfishness, vanity and spite, and egotistical behaviour and a loss of creative (and masculine) virility are part of the same phenomenon. None of them is dislikable – they might be catty, pathetic or abrasive, but they’re always entertaining – but they all bend to the ego whispering in their ear, believing it will shield them from the pain of their fading art.

It’s no surprise to discover that an artist is an egotist: in fact encountering a narcissistic creative type may be joyless in the moment but it’s also an affirming – if petty – way of feeling better about ourselves. Plenty of classic films give us a close-up view into what makes an egotist artist tick or self-destruct. But decades on from Sunset Boulevard, 8½ and All About Eve, a sadder, bitterer crop of films has emerged in which self-absorption flourishes to protect an ageing male artist from self-sabotaging fears of his mortality and legacy.

Devons Road estate residents describe months-long ordeal of not being able to wash, clean or cook for much of the day

• Hundreds in London flats left without regular running water since last year

Christmas Day in east London. Beatrice Asante empties a bag of potatoes into her kitchen sink and turns on the tap. Nothing. She turns it off and on again. Still nothing. What now?

Asante rushes out to the only shop that is open, the local Nisa convenience store. She buys several big plastic bottles of water. Enough, she thinks, to make dinner and to last until the taps start running again.

Supply in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets affected with some residents suspecting nearby building developments

• They cannot even flush their toilets: life in east London blocks where taps often run dry

Hundreds of residents in blocks of flats in east London have been left without regular running water for more than seven months after development in the area may have left it without an adequate supply.

Taps have been running dry in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets, where residents have been forced to use bottled water while their landlord, the housing association Poplar Harca, delayed works to solve the problem.

Parent-carers of disabled children are exposed to chronic levels of extreme stress and often reach crisis point before help is available – then they face a ‘fight for basic support’, experts say. This is Matilda Davis’s story

Two days before she died, Matilda Davis issued a plea on Facebook. Sharing a study that found more than 40% of parent-carers had considered suicide, she called for “greater awareness, action and change” in Britain’s broken social care system. “This speaks the words I can’t,” she wrote.

Matilda, known as Tilly to her family and friends, had spent years battling for support in a regime that close observers and those who rely on it often say is increasingly confusing, fragmented and difficult to navigate.

Flooding already reported in some districts of Chinese capital and rains are expected to get worse overnight

Typhoon Dolphin hit China’s capital on Tuesday as the storm caused flooding in parts of Beijing’s Shunyi district. Rains are forecast to intensify overnight.

Although the storm has been downgraded to a tropical depression, several districts in Beijing activated the highest level of emergency flood responses as the city braced for one-third of its annual rainfall, which is expected over the next 24 hours.

A network of cameras helped guide a group of space enthusiasts to New Zealand’s 11th confirmed meteorite

Days after a massive fireball flashed through New Zealand’s skies last month, Steve Wyn-Harris spotted a small, black stone on the bare ground. The citizen astronomer was on the hunt for debris from the meteor that had flown over the North Island. He bagged the rock but wasn’t too confident, as he says most finds turn out to be “meteor-wrongs”.

But when he held the thumb-sized rock next to a fridge magnet, to detect iron and nickel in meteorites, it clicked. Wyn-Harris did the test on a video call with other citizen scientists and geologists and after the click “we were all yelling”.

In a widely expected decision, the Reserve Bank of Australia holds interest rate after three hikes earlier this year

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The Reserve Bank of Australia has held the official cash rate at 4.35% but warned higher interest rates are “quite possible” even if house prices keep falling.

Tuesday’s decision to hold was predicted by economists and financial markets, after three rate rises this year hit property values across the capital cities.

Former 2GB and 2UE radio host, now 85, has pleaded not guilty to 22 charges of indecent assault and sexual touching

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An alleged victim of Alan Jones told his older brother, after the broadcaster was arrested, that his indecent assaults were “nothing too bad” but involved Jones grabbing his penis, a Sydney court has heard.

The witness on Tuesday was asked by the trial prosecutor Georgina Wright to describe what his younger brother, known as complainant J, told him during a meeting at a McDonald’s.

В этой части мы начнём с тупика, в который приводит голый цикл FMOPA; затем покажем, какую часть GEMM BLIS уже построил за нас; после этого разберём пять циклов BLIS и место микроядра внутри них. Финал главы должен сделать дальнейший план конкретным: что именно нужно добавить для Apple SME, а что уже относится к готовой «мебели» фреймворка.

На днях внезапно обнаружил, что с домашнего компа мой сайт https://wenda.rip стал выдавать ответ 403.

Lord mayor says Town Hall square will be ‘fantastic’ – but business advocate says project’s scale of demolition presents ‘unwanted disruption’

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Sydneysiders have been given a first glimpse of a new public square set to “unify” the CBD, more 40 years after the project was initially conceived.

The City of Sydney on Tuesday released new renders of a plaza that will be built opposite Sydney town hall after the council began finalising discussions with the owners of the last of seven buildings that need to be acquired and bulldozed for the project.

Voters disillusioned by Brexit should have more options than Nigel Farage or the novelty candidate Count Binface

The UK could be forgiven if, like Brenda from Bristol, it feels it has had too much politics of late. The long death rattle of the Starmer government against a backdrop of relentless excitement from the White House has left everyone suffering a severe case of overwhelm. We all deserve a holiday – even Andy Burnham, exhausted after a few weeks in the job.

So the political and media class may think they are doing us a favour by turning the forthcoming byelection prompted by the resignation of the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, into a joke. But it is not very fair on the people of Clacton, who are being told they face a binary choice on 13 August, between Farage and the novelty candidate Count Binface.

Simon Nixon is a journalist and economics commentator

Год назад я рассказал, как из боли «песни разбросаны по чатам» вырос сервис для команд прославления: PHP на дешёвом хостинге, React, деплой по FTP руками. В конце той статьи было три обещания одним абзацем — сделаю стемы, синхронизирую сцену, перееду с shared-хостинга. Все три оказались на порядок сложнее, чем звучали.

Эта статья — про то, что было дальше. Честно, с провалами. Про то, где я бился неделями, где всё падало и где приходилось заходить по пять-семь раз, прежде чем получилось.

Сразу оговорюсь: сами нейросети для разделения на дорожки и распознавания аккордов — не мои. Я использую API Moises. Всё остальное — доставка, движок, синхрон, продукт — моё, и об этом ниже.

With its marching bands, billowing flags and precision drills, the Tattoo has never exactly been cutting edge. But now an experimental theatre-maker has been let loose on it …

Dusk has settled on Edinburgh Castle and now a laser beam is scribbling a route across its ramparts and high into the sky. The voice of actor Richard Rankin is talking solemnly about lonely soldiers answering a call, while a ferocious light rises in the gatehouse. Out of it emerge scores of drummers and pipers, their sound both melodic and awe-inspiring. They crisscross the esplanade to the stirring lament of The Skye Boat Song.

This is the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an event often overlooked amid the festival cacophony – and yet its popularity eclipses any other event in the city. Last year, it played to 230,000 and raised £1.5m for charity. Like an outsize variety show, it is a formidable spectacle: fireworks, projections, flags dragged over the audience and a soundtrack that ranges from Carmen to Star Wars.

In the five years since the Taliban’s return to power, the walls have been closing in on the women and girls of Afghanistan.

As the regime has tightened its grip, it has banned girls from education after the age of 12, ejected many women from the workplace and created legal frameworks for child marriage and husbands beating their wives. Taliban rule has ushered in a new era of women being whipped for minor infractions and constant inspections by ‘vice and morality’ officials, with men compelled to become enforcers in their own homes. Even the borders of the online world have been creeping inward, with a new spate of smartphone bans and internet restrictions.

Marking the grim anniversary, a dozen women and girls have, at great risk to their safety, documented their lives for the world to see

Herat province
Every day, I wake up to the silence of dawn. I feel as though I am still holding my weapon. I lie on my bed for a few moments, taking deep breaths. With every awakening, I make a promise to myself: if my husband manages to return home safely today, I will thank God even more.

The author of Kitchen Confidential has inspired a new movie, Tony, about his days as a dishwasher. But do today’s chefs still admire his self-sabotaging rock’n’roll spirit – or have they outgrown it?

The trope of the Angry Young Man was not born in a kitchen, but Anthony Bourdain’s particular myth-making created what might be the prototype for fin de (20th) siècle masculinity. As the director of Tony, the new biopic of Bourdain focusing on his first job, has said, the film is about “a magical world where nothing can go wrong and a young man who’s angry about it”.

Bourdain arrived in that job, as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, aged 19. He was hellbent on a life of formless, self-sabotaging rebellion, and found his tribe. But when he published his book Kitchen Confidential in 2000, a quarter of a century later, he set the ethos of that kitchen tribe in stone, and attracted an ever-replenishing pool of chefs who, if they weren’t already just like him, were prepared to die trying.

Given the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they?

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During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers. At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out: “Where is everybody?” – or, as another participant remembered it, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them?

The episode has become famous, marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem. For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible. By the 1950s, those limits no longer seemed so fixed. In addition to space flight, researchers were developing tools to detect the radio signals that reach us from stars many light years away. These developments were still in their infancy, but it was already clear that humanity was no longer bound to Earth the way it always had been.

Search teams and civilians picked through the remains of destroyed buildings in the country's third-largest city, Cali, passing large pieces of concrete and rubble down a long line of volunteers.

(Image credit: Santiago Saldarriaga)

Hundreds gathered in Nonthaburi province to remember Naphat Chaimar, the youngest victim of last week’s school mass shooting, including the shooter’s father

When the mother and father of the youngest victim of last week’s school mass shooting arrived at the temple north of Bangkok, teary-eyed parents came up to quietly offer condolences before the prayers began in front of the 12-year-old girl’s casket.

Then, in a moment, the tone changed.

Elaborate ruse was used to transport president to military flight from Air Force One in July

Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse – prompted by an Iranian assassination threat – that involved hiding the president in an airport catering container, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The operation took place when Trump was in Ankara for a Nato summit with world leaders, according to the Post. The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post.

Elaborate ruse was used to transport president to military flight from Air Force One in July

Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse – prompted by an Iranian assassination threat – that involved hiding the president in an airport catering container, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The operation took place when Trump was in Ankara for a Nato summit with world leaders, according to the Post. The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post.

• US president backs ‘fantastic’ Infantino in Truth Social post

• Infantino under pressure following doomed World Cup sell-off plan

US president Donald Trump has warned Fifa would be making a “terrible mistake” if they get rid of Gianni Infantino as the head of world football’s governing body.

Infantino has come under pressure following his doomed plan to sell off stakes in the men’s World Cup to private investors.

Jennifer Balkcom to face Democrat Jamie Ager in race to represent North Carolina’s 11th congressional district

North Carolina Republicans on Monday chose state lawmaker Jennifer Balkcom to replace Chuck Edwards, the incumbent congressman who earlier this month dropped his re-election bid after a US House investigation determined his conduct towards to young female staffers likely amounted to sexual harassment.

Balkcom will face off against the Democratic nominee, Jamie Ager, in the November midterm elections to represent the 11th congressional district in western North Carolina. Though Donald Trump won the district by 10 percentage points two years ago, Democrats believe Ager may have a shot at winning amid the president’s low approval ratings and frustration over the pace of recovery from Hurricane Helene, which devastated the region in 2024.

Federal government also hopes to vaccinate some wild birds but admits catching them once, let alone twice for both doses, is ‘difficult’

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Vaccinations against H5 bird flu will be rolled out for Australian native bird species in captivity as the deadly virus continues to spread across the country.

The federal agriculture minister, Julie Collins, said on Tuesday that target native species in captivity would be prioritised with the first vaccinations to commence “in the coming days and weeks”.