Another comfortable Red Roses win is expected against a Samoa side for whom the hosts’ Abi Burton was full of praise

Samoa have described Saturday’s Rugby World Cup match against England, the hosts and favourites, as “mission impossible”; it would rank as one of the biggest ever upsets should they somehow manage to beat the Red Roses.

Samoa are 14 places below England in the world rankings and, while the Red Roses have been fully professional for more than five years, Samoa are yet to introduce full-time contracts. In their opening matches of this tournament England beat the USA 69-7, while Samoa lost 73-0 to Australia.

Venice film festival
Luca Guadagnino’s latest – also starring Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield – is clenched in its own sense of relevance, as a desire to find complexity in a scandal at Yale becomes a noncommittal jumble of ideas

Luca Guadagnino misfires with this bafflingly overlong, overwrought #MeToo campus accusation drama from screenwriter Nora Garrett, broadly in the tradition of David Mamet’s Oleanna or Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. It is worryingly muddled and contrived, perhaps in need of further script drafts to excavate a clearer and more satisfying drama inside.

Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri star, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg in supporting roles; they are all doing their considerable best, each frankly hampered by the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material itself, which, by the time it finally reaches its coda-finale of confrontation, is almost bizarrely inert, anticlimactic and incoherent. The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness. One particularly weird and unearned mannerism is periodically introducing a pointlessly loud timebomb-style ticking on the soundtrack, something brought out in lieu of actual suspense but which never leads to anything as clear or interesting as an explosion.

Reports of incident were denied by Florida and Ice officials as detainees say they were beat and teargas was fired

Guards at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail deployed teargas and engaged in a mass beating of detainees to quell a mini-uprising, it was reported on Friday.

The allegations, made by at least three detainees in phone calls to Miami’s Spanish language news channel Noticias 23, come as authorities race to empty the camp in compliance with a judge’s order to close the remote tented camp in the Everglades wetlands.

The US president’s move against Lisa Cook shows his despotic bent, but the Fed was never democracy’s guardian. It’s time to rethink who really controls money

Donald Trump’s attempt to sack the Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, is the familiar authoritarian trick of bending institutions to serve the leader’s immediate ends. The widespread condemnation is deserved. This is not some daring experiment in popular control of monetary policy. Yet what should follow censure is reflection. For the furore over Ms Cook has revealed a peculiar reflex: to defend the Fed’s independence as though it were synonymous with democracy itself.

But is independence of the Fed, or central banks generally, really that? Eric Levitz at Vox thinks so, or at least that it is close enough. He argues that Congress sets the Fed’s objectives; independence applies only to the means. Without independence, politicians would be free to game rates for votes – as Richard Nixon did in 1972, leaning on the Fed to juice growth before the election. On this view, independence is not anti-democratic but prudent delegation.

Trump’s dictator-like behaviour is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. But now it’s time to call it what it is

If this were happening somewhere else – in Latin America, say – how might it be reported? Having secured his grip on the capital, the president is now set to send troops to several rebel-held cities, claiming he is wanted there to restore order. The move follows raids on the homes of leading dissidents and comes as armed men seen as loyal to the president, many of them masked, continue to pluck people off the streets …

Except this is happening in the United States of America and so we don’t quite talk about it that way. That’s not the only reason. It’s also because Donald Trump’s march towards authoritarianism is so steady, taking another step or two every day, that it’s easy to become inured to it: you can’t be in a state of shock permanently. And, besides, sober-minded people are wary of sounding hyperbolic or hysterical: their instinct is to play down rather than scream at the top of their voice.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist