US president spent months waging campaign against Fed’s leaders, which has raised questions over its independence

• US politics live – latest updates

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump over his “unprecedented and illegal attempt” to fire her, calling it an attempt to undermine the central bank’s independence.

The lawsuit – filed by Cook in federal court in Washington on Thursday – sets the stage for a legal battle over the US president’s extraordinary bid for greater control of the central bank.

A fresh US assault is aimed at Europe’s right to regulate tech. It’s an outrage – and we must resist it

• Thierry Breton is the former EU commissioner for digital affairs

Fresh threats of sanctions have just emerged from across the Atlantic, targeting Europe and any official who dares to enforce the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s flagship law regulating tech platforms and digital operations. These sanctions come with new trade barriers and unprecedented export restrictions.

How long are we, citizens of the EU, going to tolerate these threats? Submit to those who want to impose their rules, their laws, their deadlines on us? Surrender to those who now presume to dictate our fundamental democratic and moral principles, our rules for how we live together and even how we protect our own children online? Why and in whose name would we agree to cast aside our twin digital regulations, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament? (It is worth recalling that MEPs voted for the DMA by 588 votes to 11, with 31 abstentions, and for the DSA by 539 votes to 54, with 30 abstentions.)

Thierry Breton was the European commissioner for the internal market and digital affairs until September 2024 and is a former minister for the economy and finance in France

Venice film festival
Jesse Plemons delivers an efficient punch as the fanatical Teddy who abducts Stone’s dead-eyed corporate ice queen in Lanthimos’s Korean remake

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

Added to which, there is the question of whether this bizarre if sometimes heavy-handed black comedy has fully earned its eventual pivot to serious tragic issues in the ending. Does the globally traumatised finale succeed in retrospectively upgrading the significance of what has preceded it? Do these avowedly important images and moods quite match up with the single-joke-single-punchline movie with all its violent slapstick grotesquerie that went before?

Ministers should find out what the regulator says before signing away a further £1.8bn of public money

There is already a scandal of bad accounting at Drax, one could say mischievously. It’s the one that maintains that transporting wood pellets from North America to burn in North Yorkshire is a “carbon neutral” activity because replacement trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. You don’t have to be a green lobbyist to think there’s something wrong there. As the research group Ember regularly reminds us, Drax is the UK’s biggest emitter yet qualifies for renewables subsidies.

That weirdness in the methodology is one for the government to justify. The Financial Conduct Authority’s investigation is into the grittier issue of Drax’s “historical statements” about its sourcing of wood pellets. Three sets of annual accounts – 2021, 2022 and 2023 – are in the spotlight for adherence to listing rules for quoted companies and transparency disclosures.

(Hyperion)
The harpsichordist describes Bach’s Preludes and Fugues as a ‘challenge and a homecoming’. His thoughtful new recording has a sense of the work’s drama but is never wilful nor perverse

Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has been working his way steadily through JS Bach’s keyboard works for Hyperion and has arrived at one of the great monuments of western music. Like so many players, Esfahani has lived with Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues, the Well-Tempered Clavier, for more than half his life, so that returning to it now, he says, “with decades of performance and scholarship behind me, has been both a challenge and a homecoming’.

Typically, Esfahani comes now to these pieces with his own very personal ideas on how they should be presented and performed – “This is a perfectly crafted piece of theatre,” he has said – and there is a real sense in his performances of each prelude and fugue defining its own dramatic space. The tuning of his harpsichord – a modern copy of an early 18th-century two-manual instrument of a kind that Bach is known to have played – is designed to give a specific colour to each key, for, as Esfahani points out, the “well-tempered” of the work’s title, does not indicate, as so often assumed, a work composed to demonstrate the advantages of equal temperament, but conversely the way in which just tuning may be adapted to suit the demands of each of the major and minor scales.

• WSL champions want to add a winger for title defence

• Thompson made USA debut at 17 and may cost record fee

Chelsea have made a move for the Angel City winger Alyssa Thompson, with the Women’s Super League club hoping to reach a deal before the transfer window closes next Thursday.

The WSL champions are understood to have been aiming to add a world-class winger to their ranks and the USA international is widely regarded as one of the best young talents in the game. The 20-year-old has eight goal involvements in her 16 NWSL appearances so far this season.