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WATCH: Savannah Bananas debut first-ever song on the ESPYs stage
At least 2 dead in Central Texas flooding as torrential rain slams region
British Steel nationalistion 'will protect future generations'
Mother guilty of killing baby daughter with heat from hairdryer
Brazil calls Trump’s 25% tariff unjustifiable, vows to impose reciprocal tariffs
U.S. designates cartel on Texas border as foreign terrorist organization
Officials probe whether White House teleprompter operator profited off Trump's words
It's the first known instance of officials investigating suspected insider trading on a prediction market from inside the White House.
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan)
Dog walker killer also guilty of attempted murder
Escaped prisoner arrested and back in custody
Uber’s $14.8B Delivery Hero deal would nearly double its global footprint
Ava DuVernay to make Netflix documentary 14th on birthright citizenship
The film-maker behind Selma and 13th will focus on the 14th amendment for a new film out later this year as Donald Trump targets those protected by it
Ava DuVernay announced on Thursday that she has made a documentary for Netflix on the 14th amendment, which gave liberty and rights to formerly enslaved people following the civil war, and has come under legal attack from Donald Trump.
Netflix said on Thursday that it will release 14th later this year. The film will mark a return to nonfiction for DuVernay, the film-maker of Selma and Origin, and a follow-up to DuVernay’s 2016 film 13th, her examination of the legacy of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery.
Continue reading...Animal Farm review – Andy Serkis’ Orwell adaptation slaughters the classic farmyard satire with sugar
The passionate allegory on Stalinism is outrageously reduced to happy-ending panto in this defanged animation featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Laverne Cox and Glenn Close
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is not a sacred text. There’s no rule that says it can’t be changed in adaptation, especially if, say, you wanted to add some historical perspective from the world that came to exist after the book was published in 1945. But this unforgivably sugary animation from screenwriter Nicholas Stoller and director Andy Serkis, as well as having a pretty cheapo digital look, betrays Orwell by outrageously blandifying and defanging its classic allegory of Stalinism and failed revolution with a dumb happy ending in the Disney style.
The pivotal moment when the pigs and the humans look the same happens not at the end, but around the one-hour stage into a 94-minute film, signalling that a new third act is in the offing. I was initially intrigued, wondering if there would be some ingenious finale in which a wall on the farm is knocked down. But no. The evil pig Napoleon (voiced by Seth Rogen with many a yuk-yuk-yuk) has eliminated his rival Snowball (Laverne Cox), then gobbles up corrupt human money from a newly invented agribusiness corporate character from the human world called Pilkington (Glenn Close) and takes to addressing his followers with the aid of a Big Brother-style giant screen.
Continue reading...Marinakis, seafood and ‘sweet honey’ of Europe led Glasner to join Nottingham Forest
Owner ‘even more ambitious than I am’
Club pushing to sign Lucas Bergvall from Tottenham
Oliver Glasner said he wants to bring back the “sweet honey” of European football to Nottingham Forest and suggested the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, may be one of few people more ambitious than him.
Glasner revealed talks with Marinakis over a seafood platter in Athens convinced him to become Forest’s fifth head coach in less than 12 months, the Austrian signing a three-year contract after a fruitful two years at Crystal Palace.
Continue reading...Ava DuVernay to make Netflix documentary 14th on birthright citizenship
The film-maker behind Selma and 13th will focus on the 14th amendment for a new film out later this year as Donald Trump targets those protected by it
Ava DuVernay announced on Thursday that she has made a documentary for Netflix on the 14th amendment, which gave liberty and rights to formerly enslaved people following the civil war, and has come under legal attack from Donald Trump.
Netflix said on Thursday that it will release 14th later this year. The film will mark a return to nonfiction for DuVernay, the film-maker of Selma and Origin, and a follow-up to DuVernay’s 2016 film 13th, her examination of the legacy of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery.
Continue reading...WATCH: Jennifer Bos makes emotional opening statement about daughter's death in Blanche confirmation hearing
Climate extremes fuel explosive wildfires in Canada and western U.S.
Could a 50-Year-Old Case Thwart Trump’s Attacks on the News Media?
How the NYT Reported on Khamenei’s Funeral in Iran
Police arrest man who shouted racial slur at ‘TODAY’ co-anchor Craig Melvin
Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI
Trump administration races to rebuild US tariff wall knocked down by Supreme Court
Trump administration revives rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits
Claudia Winkleman quits her chatshow after seven episodes
Host of The Claudia Winkleman Show was ‘just too nervous to enjoy it’
When the BBC revealed Claudia Winkleman was to be given her own chatshow, she deployed her trademark self-deprecation to note that it “might be excruciating”. Yet after just one series, it is the presenter – rather than the audience or guests – that has found the show to be too much of an ordeal.
The all-conquering host of The Traitors and former Strictly Come Dancing presenter has quit The Claudia Winkleman Show after just one series, saying she was “too nervous to enjoy” the conversations with the great and the good who visited her sofa.
Continue reading...Mother's plea for greater online child safety as court orders new inquest into son's death
What to know about the SAVE America Act and Trump’s push for voting changes
Cool, calm and creepy-crawly: reporter unfazed by cockroach cameo on live TV
Rachel Menitoff praised for her professionalism as giant insect lands on her during on-camera report
Viewers of a now-viral video are sharing their amazement at a TV reporter who maintained her composure during a live broadcast after a huge flying cockroach unexpectedly landed on her mid-report.
Rachel Menitoff, a reporter for Los Angeles station KTLA News, was covering dangerous conditions caused by extreme heat from Sherman Oaks, California, on Wednesday during an evening live shot. Her report took an unexpected turn when a giant insect interrupted the segment.
Continue reading...Burnham’s ‘black box’ plans for cabinet send Westminster into hysteria
Few know who will get top jobs when new PM enters No 10 and the vacuum of information has its downsides
As Labour MPs filed out of Portcullis House on the last day before parliament rose – and Andy Burnham ascends – one said they were struggling with a metaphor for how concentrated Burnham’s power had become. Flailing for something that did not sound insulting, he gave up and likened Burnham’s absolute control to North Korea’s Kim dynasty.
It is a very congenial and receptive kind of dictatorship. But never in British politics has such power been concentrated in the hands of such a tiny number of individuals. Never in British politics have so many of Labour’s biggest beasts had so little influence or leverage.
Continue reading...England had Lionel Messi under control … until one decisive and subtle shift
It was a statistically weird game for Argentina’s talisman against England, full of outliers. It didn’t matter
Thomas Tuchel will have prepared for every eventuality before England’s match with Argentina. He will have considered how his team could prosper in attack while remaining solid in defence. What to change if they scored first or if the opening goal went against them and, like so many managers before him, he will have put plenty of thought into how best to deal with Lionel Messi.
For the first hour he was largely peripheral, with the data showing how England were limiting his involvement in dangerous areas. Messi’s only possession in the centre of the penalty area was snuffed out by an Elliot Anderson tackle shortly after Anthony Gordon had scored. The proportion of the distance he covered that was defined by Fifa as sprinting speed (at least 20km/h) was 4.3%, lower than against Switzerland (4.6%) or Egypt (5.4%) in the previous two rounds.
Continue reading...Former boss of Italian motorways sentenced to 12 years over Genoa bridge tragedy
Giovanni Castellucci among 32 people convicted over the 2018 Morandi Bridge collapse, which killed 43
Thirty-two people, including the former chief executive of Italy’s motorway operator, have been convicted over the 2018 collapse of a Genoa bridge in which 43 people died.
In a hushed courtroom on Thursday in the north-western Italian city, Giovanni Castellucci, a former boss of Autostrade per l’Italia, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the highest in the case.
Continue reading...Cool, calm and creepy-crawly: reporter unfazed by cockroach cameo on live TV
Rachel Menitoff praised for her professionalism as giant insect lands on her during on-camera report
Viewers of a now-viral video are sharing their amazement at a TV reporter who maintained her composure during a live broadcast after a huge flying cockroach unexpectedly landed on her mid-report.
Rachel Menitoff, a reporter for Los Angeles station KTLA News, was covering dangerous conditions caused by extreme heat from Sherman Oaks, California, on Wednesday during an evening live shot. Her report took an unexpected turn when a giant insect interrupted the segment.
Continue reading...Former boss of Italian motorways sentenced to 12 years over Genoa bridge tragedy
Giovanni Castellucci among 32 people convicted over the 2018 Morandi Bridge collapse, which killed 43
Thirty-two people, including the former chief executive of Italy’s motorway operator, have been convicted over the 2018 collapse of a Genoa bridge in which 43 people died.
In a hushed courtroom on Thursday in the north-western Italian city, Giovanni Castellucci, a former boss of Autostrade per l’Italia, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, the highest in the case.
Continue reading...Move over Soccerey Bally: how Striker the dog became a 1994 World Cup hero
The tournament’s mascot came to herald the ubiquitous, commercial aims of a growing international spectacle
Deep within a dark warehouse in Hillsborough, North Carolina, there sits a severed head. Encased in plastic, perfectly preserved and seemingly begging to be reanimated, it belongs to an American soccer legend.
For a seismic summer 32 years ago, Striker the dog was more ubiquitous than any of World Cup 94’s players, plastered all over billboards, Coke cans, key chains, caps and hundreds of other items. Kids carried around Striker dolls. Grown men played Striker-themed pinball machines and Super Nintendo games and posed for photos with the pup in stadiums.
Continue reading...Opinion | Is South Korea Hostile to U.S. Businesses?
Two Dead and Scores Rescued as Flooding Engulfs Central Texas
British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply
WATCH: Tillis says he won't vote to confirm Blanche unless nominee meets with Epstein survivors
Former Italian motorway boss sentenced over Genoa bridge tragedy
Trump immediately fires the new court-appointed top prosecutor in Seattle
Under-16s to be banned from buying energy drinks
X cracks down on creators who steal content
Sadiq Khan among 26 new peers to enter the Lords
FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill
The Emerging Link Between Microplastics and Heart Disease
The tiny pieces of plastic that flake off of water bottles; rinse out of polyester blouses; and chip off of cutting boards, coffee pods, and myriad other objects don’t just build up in the environment. Scientific evidence is suggesting that microplastics also accumulate in our bodies—and they might not be harmless. A 2024 study found that microplastics had made their way into arterial plaques, which are fatty deposits inside people’s blood vessels. What’s more, people whose plaques contained plastic particles were more likely to suffer heart attacks or strokes or to die from other causes in the following years than people without plastic detected in these plaques.
Now, in a new study published in the European Heart Journal designed to shed light on the relationship between plastic pollution and the heart, researchers sampled the blood flowing around 61 people’s hearts. They found that 84% of the people who had a heart attack had plastics in their blood, compared to only 40% of people with less severe heart disease and 32% of control patients with normal arteries. The results provide further evidence that heart-disease risk may be linked to plastic exposure.
Does plastic in the environment damage the heart?
The mainstays of protecting the heart remain lowering levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, controlling blood pressure, and quitting smoking.
“But it has become increasingly clear that where and how people live—the pollutants they are exposed to—leaves a real mark on the heart, and we wanted to understand that better rather than treat it as background noise,” wrote two co-authors of the new study, Dr. Emanuele Barbato of the Sant’Andrea University Hospital in Rome and Dr. Pasquale Paolisso of Sapienza University of Rome, in an email.
The study collaborators, who are both cardiologists, were part of the team behind the 2024 study of more than 300 patients that found a link between microplastics in people’s arterial plaques and an increased risk of serious cardiovascular events. They then wondered whether levels of micro- and nanoplastics were higher in the blood of people with heart disease.
So, for this new work, they and their colleagues sampled blood from 61 patients—some of whom were receiving emergency treatment for a heart attack with arterial blockage, some of whom had chronic coronary syndromes, and some of whom had normal coronary arteries.
Not only were the heart-attack patients far more likely to have plastics in the blood running through their coronary arteries than the other groups, but they also had higher concentrations and a wider variety of plastics. In these patients, the highest levels of plastics were in blood drawn from the blocked artery itself, at the site of the blockage. Their arteries also had elevated levels of inflammatory markers, confirming previous research linking plastic exposure with inflammation.
The potential importance of other environmental exposures
The researchers also looked at air pollution where patients lived and recorded whether they were smokers. Living with higher pollution levels and a smoking habit made patients much more likely to have plastics in their blood, and the researchers speculate that smoking might be part of how plastics arrive there.
“When we looked at patients who both smoked and lived with higher levels of air pollution, every single one of them had detectable microplastics—100%—whereas among those who neither smoked nor were heavily exposed, only about one in eight did,” Barbato and Paolisso wrote by email. “We were somewhat surprised that of all the variables we examined, smoking emerged as an independent predictor of carrying plastics—pointing to cigarette smoke as not just a source of chemical toxins but a carrier that helps plastic particles into the body.”
“It’s very important work,” says Dr. Rocco Montone, an interventional cardiologist at Fondazione Policlinico Gemelli in Rome who was not involved in the study. “We have improved the management of coronary artery disease, reducing traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension. But heart attacks still occur, because there is something else. There is something beyond the traditional risk factors.”
As research continues to explore how plastics may be one of those risk factors, an important next step will be establishing an accessible way to test for these substances. “At the moment, we cannot measure our exposure to plastics,” he says, beyond tests used in labs for research purposes.
Might it ever be possible to remove the plastic from our bodies? That seems unlikely, says Montone, as studies suggest that plastics are nestled within our own cells.
Instead, “we have to measure our exposure and try to reduce the exposure by limiting the use of plastics,” he says. At the moment, plastic production is projected to continue to grow over the next 20 years. “We have to reverse this process,” he says. “We are increasing our knowledge in this field, and we have to ask politicians to help us in our daily habits to reduce the exposure to this known risk factor.”
Inquest reopened into death of 14-year-old boy after ‘TikTok blackout challenge’
Landmark high court ruling calls for fresh inquiry into Jools Sweeney’s death to allow for previously omitted social media evidence
The inquest into the death of a 14-year-old boy, whose mother believes he died after a TikTok challenge gone wrong, is to be reopened in a landmark ruling by the high court.
Jools Sweeney, a schoolboy from Gloucestershire, died in April 2022. His parents, Ellen Roome and Matt Sweeney, believed social media played a role in his death, pointing to the popularity of the “blackout challenge” online at the time.
Continue reading...Trump made $1.4bn from crypto in one year. Is Justin Sun the man who helped him do it?
The entrepreneur is known in Washington as the financial power behind the president’s crypto fortune. How did Sun’s business love-in with the Trump family spiral into dueling lawsuits?
The most infamous financial scandal in US presidential history – the 1920s Teapot Dome affair – involved then president Warren G Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, taking roughly $400,000 in bribes. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $6m today. Last year, Donald Trump made at least $2.2bn; his single year of income is on the order of 200 to 300 times larger than the bribe that defined “presidential corruption” in the American imagination for a century.
It’s taken for granted that Trump flogs items like Bibles and gold sneakers as a way to wring more money from his loyal base. But of the president’s $2.2bn, at least $1.4bn came from his crypto businesses. That’s an extraordinary achievement, even for an unscrupulous sitting president. How exactly did he do it without any prior background in crypto?
Continue reading...Inquest reopened into death of 14-year-old boy after ‘TikTok blackout challenge’
Landmark high court ruling calls for fresh inquiry into Jools Sweeney’s death to allow for previously omitted social media evidence
The inquest into the death of a 14-year-old boy, whose mother believes he died after a TikTok challenge gone wrong, is to be reopened in a landmark ruling by the high court.
Jools Sweeney, a schoolboy from Gloucestershire, died in April 2022. His parents, Ellen Roome and Matt Sweeney, believed social media played a role in his death, pointing to the popularity of the “blackout challenge” online at the time.
Continue reading...La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina review – 17th-century rarity is fun when it forgets to be earnest
Buxton festival
Francesca Caccini’s 1625 work – the earliest surviving opera by a woman – is wildly imaginative, even without the original horse ballet
There is magic in the air at this year’s Buxton festival – and it’s not just the hops from the local brewery. Wizards, sorceresses and fairies curse and charm their way through a trio of operas from three different centuries. Handel and Pauline Viardot take care of the 18th and 19th respectively, but setting the cauldron bubbling is Francesca Caccini’s 1625 La Liberazione di Ruggiero – the earliest surviving opera by a woman.
Premiered at the Medici court – then under the rule of regent Maria Maddalena of Austria – it is no coincidence that the work’s take on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is more girl-power than most. Warrior Ruggiero has been reduced to a lovesick captive, while sorceresses Alcina (wicked) and Melissa (good) do battle over him. Add in a chorus of Alcina’s former lovers (now transformed into plants and shrubs) and you have a deliciously semi-serious, mythical romp whose premiere apparently ended with a horse ballet.
Continue reading...At least one dead as life-threatening flash floods and storms hit central Texas
Flash flood emergencies were issued on Thursday for parts of Kerr and Uvalde counties and Texas Hill Country
At least one person has died during rescue operations as “life threatening” flooding takes hold in south-central Texas, where up to 20in of rain have already fallen in some areas – just one year after the same region endured catastrophic flooding that killed more than 100 people.
Flash flood emergencies were issued on Thursday for parts of Kerr and Uvalde counties, where emergency crews performed water rescues, as well as areas around the Guadalupe River and the Pedernales River, according to morning updates from the National Weather Service (NWS).
Continue reading...