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Lawmakers sound the alarm on Trump’s ‘most dangerous’ Cabinet pick

Bill Pulte’s temporary role as intelligence director is just long enough to disrupt midterm elections, Democrats fear

FBI fires several analysts tied to disputed ‘Catholic ideology’ memo

Firings are part of a broader personnel purge under under the leadership of director Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired on Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel. The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment. Continue reading...

The Marriage of Figaro review – Danielle de Niese’s slick direction weds finery with fun

Wild Arts Summer Opera festival, Layer Marney Tower, Essex A touring show was quite a challenge for the opera star’s first directorial gig, but dynamic singing, charismatic orchestral play and clever stage jokes pull it off brilliantly ‘Four boxes, six screens, four chairs and a tree”: the sum total of scenery for Wild Arts’ new English-language production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is modest by operatic standards. This staging needs to travel light, since it’s destined for performances in more than 20 arts centres, theatres, churches and gardens across the UK over the next three months. But leave pondering the logistics to the professionals – the miraculous thing about this bare-essentials Figaro is how well it works in situ. Particularly given that its director is entirely new to the role. Danielle de Niese is not just any first-timer, of course. The Australian-born, Glyndebourne-dwelling star soprano made her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera aged 19 as Barbarina in Mozart’s opera, and in the decades since has sung the role of Susanna all over the world. Few directorial newbies could match such inside-out knowledge of this work and its characters. Continue reading...

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Milo Rau turned tribunals into theatre. Now his own moral judgement is on trial

The Swiss director has staged court cases against Pussy Riot, mining companies in Congo and Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers. But after his invitation to Palantir founder Peter Thiel caused a row in Vienna, is Rau’s method eating itself? Milo Rau, once the enfant terrible of continental European theatre, is a little less buoyant these days. The Swiss theatre-maker has done something he says he explicitly hates: he has cancelled a guest. “Yes, we hit a wall,” he says. “But at least it made the wall visible.” In his capacity as the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen theatre festival, Rau, at the end of last month, first invited, then disinvited, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The Austrian weekly Falter called it a fiasco. Continue reading...

YouTubers take over Hollywood: Smash film Backrooms by 'loner' director, 20, is latest low-budget project to top Box Office

While most 16-year-old boys were worrying about passing their driving tests, Kane Parsons was holed up in his bedroom creating a terrifying nine-minute film about a man trapped in a nightmarish labyrinth

Former Guardian editor branded 'right old Leftie' tipped to be BBC's next head of news

The Mail on Sunday understands that Ian Katz - currently head of content at Channel 4 - has been interviewed for the top job by new director-general Matt Brittin.

Uncomfortable young students watch drag show as school board director who owns a sex shop is accused of running 'all ages' workshops for children

Washington School Board Director Jenn Mason was accused of hosting sex education classes for children as young as nine, while a video circulated of a drag show at her school.

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Steven Spielberg makes surprise appearance at London pub quiz

The Oscar-winning US director has been in London to promote his latest film, Disclosure Day.

David Sullivan steps down at West Ham to fight claims about private life

Joint-chair and director of relegated club to tackle ‘false allegations’ ‘I am absolutely not the person the media has decided to paint me as’ David Sullivan has announced his resignation as a joint-chair and director of West Ham with immediate effect in a statement. Sullivan and his legal representatives published his intention to stand down on the club’s website on Saturday “for the benefit of transparency”. It read: “I have recently become aware that factually incorrect and entirely false, decades-old allegations concerning my personal life are due to be broadcast and published. Continue reading...

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West Ham co-chair David Sullivan steps down after 'serious historic allegations'

West Ham United co-owner David Sullivan is stepping down from his position as joint chairman and director of the club with immediate effect "having been made aware of the impending publication of serious historic allegations".

Memo orders ICE to stop reporting deaths of newly released detainees

Acting director David Venturella rescinds Biden-era policy that required agency to report and investigate such deaths A memo issued by acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director David Venturella has ordered the federal agency to cease reporting the deaths of newly released detainees, in a change that could obscure the full human cost of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration mass detention policies. The move, first reported by the Washington Post, rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release. Continue reading...

Senate blocks surveillance bill in dispute over Trump’s intelligence pick

Seven Republican senators joined Democrats to block Fisa extension amid disquiet over nomination of Bill Pulte US politics live – latest updates Seven Republican senators joined Democrats early on Friday to block the extension of a powerful government surveillance program, a rebuke to Donald Trump for choosing an inexperienced ally as the country’s top intelligence official. The renewal had been in question amid bipartisan concern over the US president’s appointment of Bill Pulte, a major Republican donor and heir to a home construction fortune, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Continue reading...

Are You Watching? review – unflinching, fury-filled interrogation of the vile side of the web

Royal Court, London Teenage girls discuss the horrors they have seen via their phones as Georgie Dettmer’s reckoning with internet culture is brutally realised by director Jess Edwards Georgie Dettmer’s gaze is unflinching. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her fury-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we watch them both through a screen. This bluntness can feel unsubtle, but it’s also admirably unafraid. Two teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) perch on a bunk bed, talking about the worst things they’ve ever seen. Across the rest of the traverse stage, those stories are smashed into sharp, rapid-fire scenes, flicked between as if scrolled through on a phone. Under Jess Edwards’ direction, the depths of the internet are hurled across the stage (by an excellent multi-rolling cast including Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon), while the two girls watch from the safety of their duvets. Continue reading...

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice review – mindboggling bag of tricks will make you believe in magic

Buxton Opera House Villages appear out of thin air, broomsticks take flight and owls turn into people in a truly enchanting showcase of theatrical storytelling If you catch a young audience member at just the right moment, when they are old enough to be fully engaged but not so old that the sharp edges of teenage cynicism have begun to slink into view, you can make them truly believe in the magic of theatre. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the kind of show that will make them – and possibly some adults – believe in magic. To begin by praising the lighting design may seem odd, but this is one of the most effectively lit pieces of theatre you might see. Lighting designer Simon Bond’s barn doors, gels and gobos are integral to creating the many illusions on the stage. Director Paul Bosco McEneaney was a magician before turning his hand to theatre directing and he empties out a bag of tricks on to the stage of the jewel-like Buxton Opera House. Continue reading...

Being Towards Death review – Chinese hospital comedy drama uses plucky patients to ask big questions

A debt-laden caregiver attempting suicide is the catalyst for him finding new meaning to life from a ward of terminally ill patients in touching ensemble drama ‘You know the law of entropy? Life is a process of constant decay,” ssays a doctor in this Chinese hospital comedy drama – but not that you’d know it from the gabbling, frenetic first half-hour of director Chen Sicheng’s death-fixated film. Being Towards Death kicks off with caregiver Xiaobing (Jiang Long) about to throw himself off the roof because, after a scheme to flog his superiors care robots fails, he’s in hock to triad loan sharks. Thankfully the film later settles into an intermittently touching ensemble drama with a meta tint; albeit one that doesn’t fully grasp the profundities it’s aiming for. Hauled back from the ledge, Xiaobing is talked by the hospital director into leading a project studying mental health interventions in terminal cancer care. So he finds himself among the “Ward 10 Fearless Squad”, a group of patients whose outlook is as plucky as their diagnoses are grim. Before long, he has co-opted film director Dao (Wang Zichuan) to make a documentary about his roomies, including bullish property mogul Mau (Cai Ming), browbeaten first son Bowen (Huang Yi) and fib-spinning poppet, Xiaobing (Ye Quanxi) – nicknamed Little Bing. Continue reading...

‘Peaky Blinders is our Nutcracker’: how Rambert are dragging dance into the present – and their message for Timothée Chalamet

How does a 100-year-old dance company face the 21st century? For Rambert’s Benoit Swan Pouffer the answer is combining innovation with popular adaptations such as the Brummie crime saga On 15 June 1926, the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith played host to “an engaging little ballet” called A Tragedy of Fashion, a “chic trifle” according to the press, that had been first concocted round a west London dinner table. Yet it turned out to be a momentous moment in the course of British dance. The show was produced by Marie Rambert, a Polish émigré who had performed with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and it was the beginnings of a dance company that’s still going strong 100 years later. Marie Rambert was a force of nature. She has been called “an inspired talent spotter and legendary bully”, with “wit, taste and a sharp instinct for trends”, and with her nascent company (first known as the Marie Rambert Dancers, then Ballet Club, then Ballet Rambert), she kindled the talents of Britain’s most influential choreographers of the age, including Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor. “This woman was a pioneer,” says the company’s current artistic director, Benoit Swan Pouffer. “She was really ahead of her time.” Nonetheless, fast-forward 100 years and Marie Rambert wouldn’t recognise the company that still bears her name, written in capitals down the side of a sleek building just behind the National Theatre, on London’s South Bank. Continue reading...

Sex, austerity and mugs of vodka: how the Greek myth Iphigenia became a Welsh-language film sensation

The movie adaptation of Gary Owen’s acclaimed play Iphigenia in Splott, Effi o Blaenau, is released this month. Here, its director and crew explain why they relocated the film to a post-industrial mining town – and refused to make it in English The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.” One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales. “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on stage is really powerful.” Continue reading...

Trump claims Bill Pulte will investigate ‘rigged elections’ in temporary intelligence role

Pulte, who is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is a staunch loyalist of the president Donald Trump has suggested his controversial ally Bill Pulte will investigate “rigged elections” while serving as the country’s top intelligence official, as the US president continues to make unfounded allegations about voting. But Pulte, whom Trump appointed as acting director of national intelligence earlier this week, will only serve in the role temporarily, the president claimed on Thursday. Continue reading...