The White Lotus actor Aimee Lou Wood, Marina Hyde on Daddy Musk, and are we over-diagnosing illness? – podcast

With the mothers of Elon’s kids begging for his attention on social media, he makes much of ‘pronatalism’ – but is that just a fancy word for bad parenting? ‘I don’t know whether I’d describe it as fun,’ says Aimee Lou Wood on the intensity of making The White Lotus. And are ordinary life experiences, bodily imperfections and normal differences being unnecessarily pathologised? Neurologist and author Suzanne O’Sullivan argues just that

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Continue ReadingThe White Lotus actor Aimee Lou Wood, Marina Hyde on Daddy Musk, and are we over-diagnosing illness? – podcast

Gunshots and a surge of panic: footage shows last moments of boy, 12, killed in the West Bank

Two children a week are killed in the West Bank. Two cameras recorded the circumstances of one such death

The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week.

None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests.

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Continue ReadingGunshots and a surge of panic: footage shows last moments of boy, 12, killed in the West Bank

‘A spectacle to horrify the world’: what the papers say about Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy

The shocking and unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominate UK front pages today, with the papers united in horror

The unprecedented scenes in the Oval Office dominated the front pages on Saturday, with the papers united in their horror. Adjectives including disastrous and vile were used to describe the meeting in which Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance openly berated the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Guardian leads with a quote from Donald Trump: “You are gambling with world war three”, characterising the meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents as “disastrous”. In a separate sketch of the furious row, David Smith wrote that “Trump on Friday presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history.”

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Continue Reading‘A spectacle to horrify the world’: what the papers say about Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy

Innocence review – monumental achievement shows how essential opera can be

Adelaide festival
Finnish opera of staggering depth by Kaija Saariaho and directed by Simon Stone, set in the aftermath of a school shooting

It’s a cliche as regular as clockwork in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy: “That was the day we lost our innocence”. But do we really start from a place of innocence or are we always somehow complicit in acts of violence? Do perpetrators attack from without, or are they an expression of something abominable within the community, its monstrous id? These questions haunt the halls of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s extraordinary contemporary opera as surely as they’ll disturb the dreams of its audience.

Innocence opens with a deeply ominous series of chords from the lowest keys on the piano, as swirling strings and smirking bassoons mix with the trills and runs from the higher woodwinds, punctuated by the occasional crash of percussion. Atmospheric doesn’t begin to cover it. The music has shades of Bartók and Górecki, with more than a little of that master of dread, György Ligeti. The singers slink on as the curtain rises, explaining that they “can’t go to work any more”, that they “can’t have my back to the door”. Trauma animates every flinch; these people have clearly been exposed to unspeakable horror.

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Continue ReadingInnocence review – monumental achievement shows how essential opera can be