Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Comedy films, Drama films, France, Comedy, Culture, Europe, World news
Title – Just an Illusion review – Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin sizzle as an 80s couple in crisis | Film | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/cathclarke
Link – Just an Illusion review – Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin sizzle as an 80s couple in crisis | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T12:00:03.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/08/just-an-illusion-review-louis-garrel-and-camille-cottin-sizzle-as-an-80s-couple-in-crisis

O livier Nakache and Éric Toledano are the French directors who created the uplifting mega-hit Intouchables , about a wealthy quadriplegic and his carer. Now the pair bring their brand of squishy heartwarming charm to the 1980s, with this nostalgic movie about a 13-year-old boy growing up in the Paris suburbs. It’s funny and sweet but I couldn’t help feeling the film-makers missed a trick; their coming-of-age plot is all very well, but Louis Garrel and Call My Agent! star Camille Cottin give such funny and charismatic performances as the boy’s bickering parents, a portrait of their marriage in crisis would have been 10 times more entertaining.

The film opens with Vincent (Simon Boublil) preparing for his barmitzvah against a fractious atmosphere at home. The country is gripped by recession and money is tight. His dad, Yves (Garrel) was laid off months ago, but every morning puts on a suit and pretends to go out to work; Garrel is terrific, likable but fundamentally unreliable. Vincent’s mum is a go-getting secretary, who can see that the future is technology and signs up for an IT course. At school, Vincent has a massive crush on a girl who cannot remember his name, or chooses not to – she calls him “Thingummy”.

The period details are fondly remembered; a massive IBM computer arrives at the family’s flat from Sandrine’s work. Meanwhile, Vincent gets into an assortment of harmless scrapes, like renting a soft porn movie from the video shop that ends up in the hands of the rabbi. But these moments feel a bit B-game next to the scenes of his parents’ marriage in crisis. In the 80s women were told they could be having it all. The reality, for many like Sandrine, was that they were doing it all, working then coming home to cook and clean, with no expectation men would lift a finger. But times are a-changing, and negotiating this, Cottin and Garrel sizzle together; they’d be the perfect pairing for a Woody Allen-ish relationship comedy.

Just an Illusion is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 September

Keyword – Food
Trefwoorden – Chefs, Food, Tomatoes, Sauces and gravies, Italian food and drink
Title – Why bother deseeding tomatoes? | Chefs | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/anna-berrill
Link – Why bother deseeding tomatoes? | Chefs | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T12:00:03.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/sep/08/why-deseed-tomatoes

Why do recipes often say to deseed tomatoes? Isn’t that where the flavour is, especially since the seeds don’t make much difference to a sauce’s texture? Catriona, by email “It all depends on the variety of tomato,” says the Guardian’s Rachel Roddy , “because some are much seedier than others. Sicilian varieties that require little watering, for example, have loads of little bitter seeds, which do need flicking or sieving out.” If, however, Catriona had some vesuvio tomatoes destined for a salad, Jay Patel, co-owner of Italian restaurant Legare in London, wouldn’t bother: “Those are generally pretty meaty and don’t have many seeds, so I’d just slice and dress them generously with olive oil and salt, and you’ll have something pretty special.” And that’s the crux of the matter: as well as the type of tomato, the answer hinges on what you’re planning to do with them, too. “If you’re making a salad with watery winter tomatoes, say, there’s a purpose for those seeds,” Patel adds, “because they provide a lovely pop as well as acidity.”

The most common deseeding scenario is for pasta sauces, but even that comes with a caveat, Patel says: “If I’m going for a slow-cooked sauce, it’s tinned chopped tomatoes, seeds and all. But if I’m after a lighter, fresher tomato sauce, I’ll quickly blanch, peel and deseed fresh tomatoes myself.” Nick Molyviatis of Zylia in London, meanwhile, scoops out the seeds with a teaspoon or he grates his tomatoes instead – “the skin acts as a protector, a glove” – while Roddy’s “best defence against seeds” is a food mill: “Seeds don’t contain flavour as such, but the fleshy gel around them does, which is why a food mill is great,” she explains. “It presses the flavour from that and the skin, while at the same time separating them from the sauce base.”

Mind you, that gel in which the seeds are suspended is watery, too, which is why Patel shuns it in the likes of tomato tarts: “You want to remove as much water as possible, because it will make the pastry soggy,” he says, so it’s best to deseed the tomatoes before slicing them uniformly. “Once baked, you get these lovely, almost semi-dried tomatoes.” And not a soggy bottom in sight.

But it’s not just about the seeds. “The texture of the skin also messes things up sometimes, and it’s not that pleasant to pick out of your teeth, either,” Molyviatis says. But again, Roddy notes, to peel or not to peel generally depends on the dish and, “more importantly”, on the variety of tomato: “Thin-skinned toms aren’t a worry,” she says, “but thicker skins are not only pesky to eat, they can also twist into scrolls during cooking, and are very annoying in some sauces.”

To peel her toms, Roddy plunges them first into boiling water and then into cold to loosen the skins; failing that, she passes them through – yes, you’ve guessed it – her trusty food mill. Patel, on the other hand, tends to rely more on a knife, especially if bull’s heart tomatoes are involved: “They’re so easy to peel with a serrated knife.” Sure, it’s a bit of a faff, but it’s worth the effort, he insists. “When you’ve paid good money for good ingredients, it’s always worth going the extra mile.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Music, Culture, Rap
Title – ‘Cantona’s a Kwengletarian!’ Inside the maximalist, magical mentality of rising London Irish rapper Kibo | Music | The Guardian
Author – Hugh Morris
Link – ‘Cantona’s a Kwengletarian!’ Inside the maximalist, magical mentality of rising London Irish rapper Kibo | Music | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T12:00:02.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/08/kibo-rapper-london-irish-kwengletaria-ragamyff

A few Guinnesses into an interview in his local Irish boozer, and 26-year-old Harrow rapper Kibo is cooking. We’re talking football. As a kid, he preferred playing Fifa Street – where ordinary players backflip off walls to score incomprehensible bicycle kicks – to regular realistic Fifa. “If I’m gonna play a video game, I want to do some shit I can’t do in real life,” he says. He’s drawn to similarly miraculous footballers: Balotelli , Drogba in his Chelsea days, Ronaldinho and his dad’s favourite, Eric Cantona: “Oh God, with his collar popped, looking like Kanye West?” Kibo then recites Cantona’s 2019 Uefa president’s award speech – a mash-up of King Lear and philosophical musings on war and science – to near perfection.

Magic is at the heart of Kwelengletarianism, “the idea of being in a place that’s very grey, and trying to find a prismatic iridescence in it”, that underpins Kibo’s sensational album Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. (Cantona? “He’s a Kwengletarian to the nth degree.”) During his long rise through London’s rap scene, canonised by co-signs from Skepta, JME and Dave, Kibo has become a rare MC from Harrow, the town that produced Kate Nash and Jai Paul but no rappers of note. “It’s awesome,” he says of its lack of rap tradition, “a complete blank slate” to be as imaginative as he wants. Kwengletaria finds the myth in the mundane: on the track Bakerloo Dragon, a normal tube journey becomes a cruising broken-beat roller aboard a fire-spitting Bakerloo line train. I tell him my train to Harrow was one of these flame-graffitied dragons. “But did you get any sparks?” he asks enthusiastically. “You get sparks after Stonebridge Park!”

We meet midweek, and Kibo tells me he’s heading to a wrestling match in Dublin at the weekend. I ask him who he’s watching. “No, I’m wrestling,” he fires back: he’s up against Irish rapper Lil Skag, “to see who really is ready to hold the responsibility of being the champion of Ireland”. Kibo is 6ft 4in tall, possessing Irish heritage, a goatee, a mane of hair straight from a fantasy film, and a sackful of devastatingly rude bars: “I’ll take your mum Butlin’s / And I ain’t fucking bluffing / You’re not a bad boy, you’re an Egg McMuffin.” You’d back him to win a match on aura alone.

Add in references to anime, Pokémon, chicken shops and X-wing fighters, combine it with 16 producers making beats spanning garage, R&B, donk, grime and jungle, and you get a sense of Kwengletaria: Ragamyff’s scale. “I’m quite a maximalist guy, and a lot of the artists that I gravitate towards – Ghostface Killah, MF Doom, Yung Lean – it’s all about asking, how much can you stuff into one thing?” he says.

The all-you-can-eat impulse comes from growing up online – “I was a kid with a million tabs open, trying to speak with a level of eloquence” – and the Kwelengletarianism concept stems from when Kibo’s schoolmates began trading pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. “They would slap even more glitter and shine on it, to make it look like it was the most valuable shit ever,” he says. “Like, I know this is fake, but this shit looks awesome. It’s the first thing I remember in my life where I was looking at something and knowing it was valuable.”

Kibo nods to his grime forebears on the album, sampling from Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner on closer Our War Game. “My absorption of grime was very retroactive,” he says. “Going back into Dizzee, Flirta D, Skepta, and D Double E … even though it was very local, it felt like discovering Three 6 Mafia, or old Memphis rap: like, this is awesome, but it’s not here .” Where those older acts felt remote to Kibo, Novelist, the Lewisham MC behind grime’s modern resurgence and Kwengletaria’s only guest, was “the first time I was able to tune into grime sets live and feel like I was present for this thing,” Kibo says. “It’s always felt like he was bringing grime back and pushing it forward.”

What’s impressive is how clear, satisfying and relentlessly funny Kibo’s path through the melee is. He shouts out Fiona Templeton, an academic at Brunel University (where he got a first in film, drama and media) for giving him a word for what he was doing: hyperdiction. “It was like someone showed me a brain scan,” he says. These collisions – of genres, references and words – create a new meta-language of smashed together non sequiturs in his work, such as “Courvoir-Sierra Leone”, or “Dimitar Burberrytov”. They’re also stamina-boosting power-ups. On Chancer, the album’s midpoint mellow grime flexer, Kibo’s criss-cross patterns unfold over three beat switches and five relentless verses.

On Bakerloo Dragon, Kibo says he gets the “charm from ma, and the swag from dad”. Eileen of Limerick fell swiftly in love with John, a drummer from Harrow, when he was over in Ireland for a holiday. They navigated a two-year long-distance relationship before she moved to England. “There was one phone box in her whole village, so it would be like, ‘You must be here at 7 o’clock.’ My dad used to work at the BT phone line so he was able to wrangle a few things.”

It made Kibo a true believer in romance. “It’s Kwengletarianism!” he says. “You’ve got to believe in something, you’ve got to believe there’s light at the end of the tunnel.” Kibo is a third generation member of Harrow’s Irish community, and there’s a distinctly Irish feeling to a project about belief, myths, good craic and finding the magic in ordinary objects.

Kwengletaria: Ragamyff is about celebrating where you’re from, but it’s also about feeling stuck in a place that, once the iridescent sheen has faded, is still grey and boring. Off the back of the album, and a medley of viral live clips, Kibo has his sights set beyond Harrow. “I feel like I finally got a grip of London. [The track] Red Starz is like, I’ve completed London, right? It’s almost like the post-credit scene is Ryanair: oh shit, there’s 200 other countries? Damn. There’s a crunch point there, between leaving home and returning. But if you find the magic and the pride in your base, you can always come back to that and recharge. Home is like your charging point.”

Kibo plays Bristol (28 October), London (30 Oct) and Manchester (1 November)

Keyword – US news
Trefwoorden – California, Museums, Fossils, Animals, San Diego, Life and style, Culture, West Coast, Education, US education, Science, US news
Title – Want to borrow a dinosaur fossil? Try California’s one-of-a-kind taxidermy lending library | California | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lois-beckett
Link – Want to borrow a dinosaur fossil? Try California’s one-of-a-kind taxidermy lending library | California | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T12:00:02.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/san-diego-taxidermy-museum

On a hot afternoon in August, I walked out of the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a whale rib, a leopard pelt, a taxidermized weasel and a small piece of fossilized dinosaur poop.

It felt like a heist. These were real specimens that belonged to the museum, not gift shop replicas. But for two weeks, they were mine to take home, display in my living room, even bring to events with my friends.

San Diego, California , has the only natural history museum in the US with a collection of nature specimens that they allow members of the general public to check out and take home, just like checking out books from a library.

Inside the museum, metal shelves of taxidermy fill the space floor to ceiling. Light glints off rows of plexiglass boxes: alert bobcats, their ears perked; birds posed on branches; a jackrabbit suspended in air as if in mid-leap. There are Riker cabinets filled with beetles and butterflies, shelves of pickled sea creatures and snakes in jars, and plastic bins of exotic animal pelts.

Haylie Priest, the loan program’s manager, guided me through the room’s wonders: 1,400 specimens in total, from a megalodon tooth fossil to a king cobra head in a jar.

“ We have birds of prey up front – large bones and fossils on the left – reptiles are all the way at the back,” she explained.

At the end of one aisle, on the lowest shelf, I found a small, stuffed alligator. “He’s missing a few toes,” Priest warned me.

The natural history museum’s taxidermy library grew out of a loan program that started in the 1920s, to bring “nature cabinets” to local schools around San Diego. Some of these old kits are still on display – like a wooden box filled with mineral samples, with a type-written guide inside that looks like it’s from the 1940s. Sometime in the early 2000s, the museum opened up the program so that anyone who was interested could borrow the museum’s collection of specimens.

While it’s common for American natural history museums to offer scientific kits for schoolteachers, having a specimen loan program open to the general public is unique, said Elizabeth Merritt, a trends expert at the American Alliance of Museums . The San Diego program appears to be the only one of its kind in the United States.

It would be easy for museums to offer a similar program, Merritt noted: “There are lots of kinds of natural history specimens that are incredibly common, and quite often natural history museums will have a bucket of them around.”

A spokesperson for the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, which has a collection of 145.8m specimens and objects, called the San Diego program “certainly intriguing”.

The “Nature to You” program does fit into a larger pattern, Merritt said: many American museums are trying to open their collections to the public in new and untraditional ways, she said, a trend she calls the “distributed museum”, which started around 2014, at the same time as the rise of the tech “sharing economy”.

The San Diego library’s customer experience is seamless: a cluster of sturdy plastic carts waits near the door, so that members can wheel them up and down the aisles, “grocery style”, as Priest put it, taking bats or bones or bobcats off the shelf and adding them to their cart. “And then we check you out,” she said. Priest readily identifies the predator mammals as the most coveted species: a large coyote is No 1, followed by bobcats and foxes, and then a stuffed sea otter reclining on her back with a sea urchin in her paws. “We call her Ophelia,” Priest said.

Like a parent, Priest does not like to pick her own personal favorites among her taxidermy children, though she is particularly fond of a stuffed kākāpō, a flightless nocturnal parrot from New Zealand.

She refused to identify any of the specimens as the “least popular”, even the dead snakes coiled in jars of formaldehyde.

“I feel like there’s a niche or a reason for someone to check out everything,” she said.

The specimens that are part of the “Nature to You” loan program are not in the same category as the museum’s 9m-specimen research collection. One of the biggest differences is that the specimens on loan have much less data associated with them. Their ages and origins, even their precise species, are sometimes unclear, making them much less valuable for science.

When children ask whether the museum killed the taxidermized animals, Priest reassures them the animals died of natural causes. “We like to say we gave them a second life,” she said. An animal in the wild might live only 10 or 20 years: “These animals have been educating kids like you for 80 to 100 years.”

While the library is open year-round, it has two major seasons, Priest told me: Halloween, when people turn to the library for holiday decor (“a lot of bats, ravens, skeletons, owls … spiders and scorpions”); and spring (“everyone wants life cycles, baby things, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds”).

In the past year, the library had 186 members, who borrowed a total of 3,807 specimens. Priest estimates that about 60% of the members are schoolteachers, and another 30% are educators who work for non-profits or community organizations. The last 10% are “private artists, families, and individuals who just have an interest”.

Specimens have been checked out as decor for a university theater production and models for sculpture classes. One woman who works from home visited the library every two weeks to get new taxidermy to put in the background of her video calls. “She was like: ‘It was so fun! Because my workers were always thinking, what is she going to pick out next?’” Priest said.

During my visit, I met a series of local park rangers, all in uniform, who borrow birds and small mammals for the local nature courses they teach.

“I was blown away with how many specimens that they offered to check out,” said Monica Demetry, a ranger who works at Mission Trails regional park. “I was like a kid in a candy store trying to pick out which ones.”

The taxidermy library is not a moneymaker for the museum, Priest and Eowyn Bates, a museum executive, told me. The museum fundraises to help expand the library collection: new taxidermy isn’t cheap – a coyote might cost $5,000. One of the most recent additions, a tiny raccoon, was roadkill meticulously staged by a local taxidermist.

The collection occasionally grows in other ways. People attempt to leave taxidermy to the museum in their wills, Bates said. Sometimes, people show up at the library, or even the front desk of the museum, with dead animals they think might be of use, forcing employees to politely tell them that the museum does not accept carcasses without prior arrangement.

Other times, Priest said, people call or email the loan library to say that a bird flew into their windows, and now they have its dead body in their freezer. Can the museum use it?

I was surprised to hear Priest say that she sometimes does accept offers like this, depending on the animal’s species and condition.

I kept delaying making my own taxidermy selection, because I did not want to leave. I definitely wanted a weasel, poised coyly on its toes. Priest told me it was most likely a specimen that had been on display in the museum sometime from the 1930s to the 1950s, when taxidermized animals had been displayed in large cabinets. I also wanted a modest fossil: the coprolite, millions-of-years-old dung.

As far as birds, I wanted something classy. There weren’t any pheasants, but a glass box of California quail caught my eye, which might help add a bit of “country estate” aesthetic to my minuscule California bedroom.

I grabbed a massive whale rib off the bone shelf – it looked sturdy – and then went with Priest to a back corner full of dull-looking plastic bins. These were the exotic animal pelts. The elephant skin was already checked out. I bypassed the python skin, which was terrifying-looking and smelly, and marveled at the African lioness pelt, but was sold on a juvenile leopard skin, which had a full three-dimensional head and glass eyes, its mouth open in a snarl. I had to have it.

Faced with my own overloaded cart, I realized I could not fit this quantity of taxidermy in my car. I decided to put back the quail. Who was I trying to impress? A duke?

After that, checkout was smooth. Priest handed me information on how to care for the specimens (don’t seatbelt them into your car, don’t Windex the plexiglass) and when they were due back. Though the library can charge $2 per day in taxidermy late fees, they’re generally flexible if members communicate why they’re behind. In her 21 years at the museum, Bates said, she could not remember a single theft.

Keyword – Science
Trefwoorden – Meteorology, Film, Met Office, Second world war, D-day, Culture, Andrew Scott, UK news, Science
Title – How meteorologists recreated weather that helped decide second world war | Meteorology | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/nicola-davis
Link – How meteorologists recreated weather that helped decide second world war | Meteorology | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:59:58.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/08/how-meteorologists-helped-recreate-one-of-historys-most-important-weather-forecasts

D ressed in a Royal Air Force uniform and sporting a trim moustache, Andrew Scott looks slightly queasy – as well he might. Behind him is a huge map of the Channel, and in front of him is Brendan Fraser, looming with a request: “I need a forecast,” he says.

Starring in the film Pressure, based on a true story, Scott plays the meteorologist Capt James Stagg – the man who must tell Gen Eisenhower – played by Fraser – whether conditions will be suitable for the D-day landings scheduled to take place on 5 June 1944. But a large storm is approaching the Normandy coast.

The film, showing in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 9 September unites two topics that ceaselessly fascinate the British: the second world war – and weather.

It is also a rare treat for, meteorologists, not hugely represented on the big screen, who are delighted to be portrayed as the heroes of a film.

Dr Stephen Burt of the University of Reading, an adviser for the film, said the challenge Stagg and his colleagues faced was enormous. “To do a forecast beyond 24 hours was, in the 1940s, like trying to land a man on the moon,” he said.

At the time, Burt explained, scientists had only recently started to use upper air data to predict the weather, and largely relied on surface measurements of pressure, temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, as well as experience-based intuition.

“Nowadays we have satellites and so on and we can see what’s coming, we have observations coming from the US,” he said. “But then there were … just a couple of ships, a couple of submarines maybe, and some aircraft observations. And that’s it.”

Crucially, said Burt, the week before D-day was the hottest May week on record – a high than was only broken this year. Then a huge storm blew up, with another major storm close behind.

Prof Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading, an expert in historical weather data collection and examination, including D-day, explains that there were three teams working on the D-day forecasts – although only two are depicted in the film – all feeding into Stagg. But they took different approaches and produced different forecasts.

It was up to Stagg to reconcile the results and present a recommendation to Eisenhower that would, ultimately, affect 160,000 Allied troops. “Stagg was in a very difficult position. He left his very pregnant wife to come and do this very important task,” Hawkins said.

The teams were split about the forecast for 5 June – with Stagg concluding the conditions would be too perilous. The landings were postponed. But by the evening of 4 June a consensus emerged: there appeared to be a small but suitable window on 6 June. The invasion was back on.

“They managed to do the forecast, and the invasion, and get away with it,” said Burt.

Burt and his colleagues agree that even modern systems based on artificial intelligence have struggled to accurately predict conditions for 6 June 1944 using data available from the time.

“[I’d] still have been chewing my fingernails on morning of the sixth,” said Burt.

Catherine Ross, a Met Office archivist, said that film-makers used exact replicas of records from June 1944. “We were able to provide images of every single weather chart that was being produced at the time. We had codes and examples of how the observations were sent in and all sorts of documentation,” she said.

She notes that even before modern technology, Allied forecasters, were on the front foot in terms of access to data. They already had data from the UK and across the Atlantic. “But because of Bletchley Park they had broken the Enigma code, so they had access to all of the German weather observations as well,” Ross said.

While the German forces may have been aware of the storms, they were not aware of a potential break in the weather. “Sometimes there’s no Atlantic on the [German] chart, which is where the weather was coming from in early June 1944,” she added.

Its no spoiler that D-day was a success for the British, but the film sheds new light on the drama that unfolded behind the scenes.

“It’s the most famous forecast ever made by the Met Office. It’s probably one of the most important weather forecasts in history,” said Ross.

Keyword – UK news
Trefwoorden – Prince Harry, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, Monarchy, King Charles III, UK news
Title – Harry and Meghan ‘surprised’ at king’s letter reiterating they are non-working royals | Prince Harry | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/carolinedavies
Link – Harry and Meghan ‘surprised’ at king’s letter reiterating they are non-working royals | Prince Harry | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:28:33.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/08/harry-meghan-surprised-king-charles-letter-non-working-royals

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were “surprised” at being given little notice of a formal letter sent to government departments and the military on behalf of King Charles reiterating their status as non-working royals.

Harry and Meghan, who returned to the UK from the US two weeks ago , had insufficient time to clarify any points before details were issued to the media, it is understood.

The letter, the first official public clarification of the couple’s status since their return, was issued by Buckingham Palace’s most senior officer, the lord chamberlain, Richard Benyon.

It was revealed to the media at 3.06pm on Monday. It is understood the contents were shared with Harry and Meghan’s team almost an hour before at 1.59pm, who sent a response back to Buckingham Palace at 2.19pm asking whether the guidance had already gone out, in the hope of letting the couple know before the media, and for the team to have the chance to clarify one or two points.

Harry was in a meeting and could not be contacted until 3.09pm. The Sussexes’ team received confirmation at 3.11pm it had already been sent to the media.

The letter was revealed before a reported meeting this week of the executive committee for the protection of royalty and public figures (Ravec), which is responsible for making decisions about royal security.

Harry is waiting to hear the conclusion of the risk management board’s threat assessment and Ravec is expected to decide at the meeting whether the Sussexes are entitled to taxpayer-funded security now they live in the UK. The Home Office does not comment on such decision making and would be unlikely to reveal the outcome of such a meeting.

Lord Benyon’s letter reiterates the couple’s “current” status as non-working royals. “This position, distinct from the state and royal duties undertaken by the working royal family, and with the personal latitude it brings the couple in respect of financial independence and protection of their privacy as they would wish, will continue to be fully respected.

“Their styles as His and Her Royal Highness remain in abeyance and are not used.

It says their charitable work “is a personal matter for them both and undertaken in their private capacity”.

“In short, their position is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”

The letter says questions from official and state organisations about the courtesies extended to the couple, “and particularly where recourse to public funds may be required”, should be directed to Buckingham Palace, adding: “Any operational security issues should continue to be directed to the relevant police authorities.”

The couple’s children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, are expected to be starting school in the UK near to the family’s reported countryside retreat.

The palace’s clarification came on the day Harry was revealed to have visited Tower Bridge Studios, a London filming and podcast studio, where shows such as the podcasts Diary of a CEO and Jimmy Carr’s The Big Pitch are recorded.

Keyword – Stage
Trefwoorden – Richard Alston, Dance, Rambert, UK news, Stage, Culture, Music, The Place, Akram Khan
Title – Richard Alston, trailblazer and guiding light of British dance, dies aged 77 | Richard Alston | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/chriswiegand
Link – Richard Alston, trailblazer and guiding light of British dance, dies aged 77 | Richard Alston | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:18:03.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/sep/08/richard-alston-pioneering-choreographer-dies

Sir Richard Alston, the British choreographer and teacher who took contemporary dance into new directions with his elegant and intelligent creations, has died at the age of 77. A former artistic director of Rambert and the Place, where he made more than 50 pieces for the Richard Alston Dance Company , he was celebrated for lucid, emotionally attuned work that was often as graceful as it was rigorous.

His death was announced on Monday by the Richard Alston Foundation , which was established in 2021 to promote contemporary dance and preserve his work. “It is with deep sadness that we have to report the death of Sir Richard Alston,” said the statement . “After a period of ill-health, and despite exceptional treatment at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead and the support of his closest friends, he passed away peacefully at his home on 7 September. While Richard is best known for his extraordinary career and contribution to contemporary dance, we will also remember him for his wit, warmth and generosity of spirit.”

Akram Khan was among those paying tribute to Alston. “Like so many of us, I grew to know Richard as a student, looking up to him as I began to find my own way in contemporary dance,” wrote Khan , who called him “a pioneer” and praised his kindness and encouragement. “It is now our collective responsibility to ensure that the legacy of these great leaders of British contemporary dance continues to inspire and is passed on.”

Alston’s eye for movement was matched by an ear for all kinds of music from around the world. “Why dance to Britten?” he wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2013, before his company’s performances with the Britten Sinfonia. “The simple answer is that his music breathes. It rises and falls, often with the voice, in lucid phrases that have a palpable sense of physical movement.” A statement from Rambert dance company praised his “extraordinary musicality” and said he had “shaped generations of dancers”. The Place’s tribute said his “lifelong conversation with music” shaped “every dance he ever made”. It continued: “His legacy cannot be measured by honours or dances alone. It lives in the dancers who still carry his movement in their bodies. In the students who continue to discover that music can be seen as well as heard. In the generations of artists who inherited from him an uncompromising belief in clarity, craftsmanship and beauty.”

Alston was born in Sussex in 1948 and educated at Eton. He left at 16 to study fine art and theatre design at Croydon School of Art. When he saw Frederick Ashton’s ballet La Fille Mal Gardée in the mid-60s he knew his future was in dance. He joined the nascent London School of Contemporary Dance (which became London Contemporary Dance School at the Place), choreographed his first work, Transit, in 1968 and formed a trailblazing experimental group, Strider, in 1972. That decade he also studied in New York under Merce Cunningham who would become a huge influence on him.

In 1980, Alston became resident choreographer at Ballet Rambert . He then ran the company as artistic director from 1986 to 1992 during which time it dropped the “ballet” from its name. He created 25 works for Rambert, which is marking its centenary this year. “Richard stands among the defining artists of our 100-year history,” said the company, calling him “an artist whose vision helped shape Rambert’s identity, its evolution and its future”.

In 1994, he launched Richard Alston Dance Company when he became artistic director of the Place in London. He received a knighthood for services to dance in 2019. The following year, his company closed due to funding difficulties and its farewell performances included a new work, Shine On, its title capturing the undimmed commitment of Alston, who mentored many in the dance community.

“I’ve never wanted to make loud statements,” he told the Guardian in 2008 . “What I believe in is the amazing power and complexity of the human body in steps, in rhythm and music. And that doesn’t change.”

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – France, Migration, Immigration and asylum, Paris, Europe, World news, UK news
Title – Fourteen men go on trial in Paris over deadliest small-boat Channel crossing | France | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/angeliquechrisafis
Link – Fourteen men go on trial in Paris over deadliest small-boat Channel crossing | France | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:02:31.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/08/paris-trial-deadliest-channel-small-boat-crossing

Fourteen men will go on trial in Paris on Tuesday over the deaths of at least 31 people in the worst mass drowning from a small-boat crossing in the Channel on record.

The accused men, alleged to be linked to people-smuggling networks, face charges including manslaughter and facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organised criminal group.

Twenty-seven people were confirmed dead when their inflatable dinghy sank in the early hours of 24 November 2021. Four people remain unaccounted for.

The victims were mostly Iraqi Kurds, but also included people who were Afghan, Ethiopian, Iranian, Somali, Vietnamese and Egyptian. The youngest known victim was a seven-year-old girl. The confirmed dead also included 15 men, seven women and two teenagers.

A team on a French fishing boat near British waters off Calais had raised the alarm when they saw several lifeless bodies floating in the water.

According to testimony from the two survivors, the flimsy boat which had attempted to cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – between the northern French coast and Kent in southern England – began to deflate and take on water after several hours at sea.

Passengers fell overboard and drowned one after another, despite making about a dozen desperate calls for help to French and British rescue services. Only two men survived the tragedy.

Investigators allege that Afghan and Iraqi-Kurdish smuggling networks ⁠organised the migrants’ passage to Britain from camps near Grande-Synthe and Calais in northern France . The defendants face charges including involuntary manslaughter, facilitating illegal immigration as part of ⁠an organised gang and criminal conspiracy.

Two of them, including an Afghan man, are the subject of arrest warrants and will be tried in absentia.

Among the defendants are alleged organisers, transporters and logistics coordinators connected to the ​smuggling groups. Prosecutors argue their actions helped create the conditions that led to the disaster, even if some were not physically present when the boat launched.

Prosecutors have accused the defendants of helping launch a “substandard small boat, uncertified, unfit for navigation on the open sea, overcrowded and lacking appropriate lifejackets”.

Liability has also been extended to those accused of transporting, housing or accompanying the victims, actions that formed part of a “chain of successive events” leading to the tragedy, according to investigators.

The defendants have denied being smugglers and disputed their responsibility, or have presented themselves as people who were seeking to make the journey themselves.

However, phone records and location tracking placed several of them near the departure site and linked them to organising crossings to Britain.

For the people onboard the sinking boat, despite several distress calls, it was nearly 12 hours after the first pleas for help before the dinghy was finally found by the French fishing vessel.

A separate investigation is ongoing in France into seven French military personnel – five members at a maritime rescue coordination centre, and two sailors onboard a patrol vessel – who have been under investigation since 2023 for failing to help a person in danger. They deny the allegations.

The UK’s Cranston inquiry , in its report released in February, found that systemic failings, missed opportunities and inadequate resourcing undermined the UK’s maritime search and rescue response on the night of the disaster. HM Coastguard was placed in an “intolerable position”, it said, with chronic staff shortages and limited operational capacity contributing directly to the failure to rescue people in the water.

It found the deaths would have been “avoidable” if British and French authorities had acted sooner to rescue those onboard.

Families ​of some of the victims will travel from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan to attend part of the trial, their lawyers said.

“Justice must hold accountable everyone who played a role in this tragedy,” the lawyers, Matthieu Chirez, Thomas Ricard and Camille Renouard, said in a statement.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

Keyword – Opinion
Trefwoorden – Donald Trump, US midterm elections 2026, US politics, Republicans, US news, US political financing, Super Pacs
Title – Donald Trump’s midterm strategy? Make it all about him | Robert Reich | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/robert-reich
Link – Donald Trump’s midterm strategy? Make it all about him | Robert Reich | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:00:02.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/trump-midterm-strategy

W ith the midterm races officially beginning this week, a big question hanging over the Republican party is how Trump will allocate his giant stash of Super Pac money. As of 31 July, Maga Inc had more than $400m on hand, larger than the cash reserves of any of the major party committees.

But he’s barely spent any of it yet. Why not?

Is he waiting to see where his stash can do the most good for Republicans during the peak campaign season, starting in a few weeks? On Friday, he said he would personally weigh where to direct support, including toward Republican candidates he believes can win competitive races.

But this seems doubtful. He’s already missed the chance to lock in airtime at lower, advance rates and define candidates before attitudes harden.

Is he using his stash as a means of silencing criticism in the Republican ranks, or holding back support until a candidate lavishes praise on him?

Also doubtful. Republican candidates who believe they need to criticize his war or his economic policies to stay viable won’t restrain themselves because of his possible campaign cash.

Maybe he’s conserving the money to discipline Republican candidates in the 2028 primaries and general election, when he’ll use the stash to penalize disloyalty and reward loyalty?

Possibly, but he’s already practically a lame duck.

Is he conserving the cash to pass it on to his chosen presidential successor – either Vance or Rubio or a third selection as yet unknown?

Probably not. That’s a long way off.

None of these theories holds water because they don’t figure in Trump’s giant, towering, malignant narcissism.

It seems he’ll be putting money behind his favorite politician – the person he most admires, who represents everything he believes in, who he considers the single most important and talented living person in the entire flaming firmament of the known universe.

Himself.

He’s going to use campaign cash to make himself look good, or at least far better than he looks now. Multiple polls show Trump’s approval rating now mired in the mid-30% range – at or near historic lows for a president facing a midterm election.

So he’ll launch a campaign to regain the adulation he’s lost, to recast himself as the hero he believes he is, to reclaim the mantle of savior to which he thinks he’s entitled.

In other words, it will be a campaign to promote, glorify and exalt Donald J Trump.

The non-profit arm of Trump’s political operation, Securing American Greatness, has already spent about $1m on its first midterm ads set to air nationwide, featuring video clips of Trump talking about tax breaks in his domestic spending legislation and lower prices for eggs and prescription drugs.

In early August, according to the Atlantic, Trump told advisers that they should follow the same strategy as the Democrats: making the election about him.

But as Karl Rove, who was senior adviser and deputy chief of staff for George W Bush, notes in the Wall Street Journal, given Trump’s unpopularity, making the election even more about him only helps the Democrats.

Trump also plans to travel all over the country, holding rallies like he did during his presidential elections. As Rove notes, Fox News’s senior White House correspondent, Peter Doocy, reports hearing “whispers of a ton of Trump travel in October, possibly as much as a Trump rally a day” in competitive states and districts.

But Rove also warns: “Trump is never disciplined. He’ll have no script, saying whatever comes to mind. His crazy comments will dominate the news, locally and nationally. Republican candidates will constantly have to fend off questions about whether they agree with his latest insult or half-baked idea. The narrative won’t be on anything positive about them or the GOP.”

Presumably this is why some battleground Republicans told Trump’s staff that they would prefer he not visit their districts ahead of November, according to four Republican operatives involved in the conversations, as reported by Politico . Meanwhile, Republican pollsters have told candidates in tight races to limit their references to him.

“We’ve told them he cannot come,” one senior Republican, involved in a district where Trump won by double digits in the last election, told Politico. “Candidly, he would not be helpful here … I do not believe they would send him without our OK. And if they did, we probably wouldn’t campaign with him.”

Rove and other Republican functionaries are urging Trump to “act more presidential” by using his Super Pacs’ $403m to support Republican candidates rather than support a campaign about himself.

But they’re yelling into the wind of Trump’s ballroom-sized ego.

The truth is, Trump doesn’t give a damn about the midterm elections except insofar as Republican losses make him look bad. He probably figures if he backs a candidate with his Pac money and they lose, he’ll look even worse.

So better to spend it on boosting himself.

As almost everyone in the world knows by now, Trump cares only about himself. That’s been his MO for ever.

Bad news for Republicans in the midterms and good news for Democrats.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com . His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – Fifa, Gianni Infantino, Donald Trump, Football politics, Football, Sport
Title – More than 100,000 people add names to complaint against Gianni Infantino | Fifa | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/paulmacinnes
Link – More than 100,000 people add names to complaint against Gianni Infantino | Fifa | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T11:00:02.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/08/gianni-infantino-fifa-complaint-donald-trump-folarin-balogun

More than 100,000 people have added their names to a complaint against Gianni Infantino , alleging the Fifa president has “at a minimum, abused his power, violated his duty of political neutrality, and violated his duty of loyalty” through his interactions with Donald Trump.

The Reboot Fifa campaign was launched before the World Cup with the aim of delivering “the biggest complaint Fifa has ever received” over the organisation’s alleged failings of governance. The campaign has since extended the scope of its accusations to include the reversal of the ban for Folarin Balogun at the tournament and the aborted Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) scheme .

The complaint was submitted on Tuesday to Fifa’s ethics committee and in a supporting letter the organisers of Reboot Fifa , the advocacy group Fair Square, call on the committee to take action. An original complaint, submitted in December of last year, failed to receive a response from the committee but has gained the backing of the Norwegian football federation and 50 European parliamentarians.

“The fact that 100,000 individuals added their names to this call for accountability is clear evidence of mounting public concern,” the Fair Square letter said. “As the independent judicial body tasked with the critical task of upholding the ‘integrity and reputation of football’, the ethics committee must not only act, it must be seen to act with appropriate haste, transparency and rigour.”

The letter lists eight incidents that form the basis of the Reboot Fifa complaint, which Fair Square alleges “provide compelling evidence that the Fifa president has, at a minimum, abused his power, violated his duty of political neutrality, and violated his duty of loyalty in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the US president.”

. The incidents include the Balogun affair – where Trump admitted he asked Fifa to review the US striker’s red card – and the FFE scandal. They also cite the awarding of the Fifa peace prize to Trump , Infantino’s involvement in Trump’s Board of Peace in the Middle East and the Fifa president’s promise to work with Trump to “make not only America great again but also the entire world”, an act Fair Square suggests shows a failure to remain politically neutral.

Fifa, when approached for comment, pointed to a statement first published a month ago. “It is increasingly evident that there is a concerted and ongoing effort by some to undermine Fifa and its president,” the statement said.

“Those who do not have the support of Fifa’s member associations should not seek to achieve through allegation, insinuation or misinformation what they cannot achieve through Fifa’s established democratic processes.”

Fifa confirmed on Sunday that Infantino would be seeking re-election for a fourth and final term next year despite pressure from Uefa and criticism from within the Asian confederation and Concacaf (the North and Central American and Caribbean confederation). Uefa has called on Infantino to stand down and recently announced its intention to pursue criminal claims in the US over the FFE plans.