An enraged behemoth breaks free from a government black site bent on revenge, but there is not much here aside from some monster action

‘We’re going to need more wallpaper” turns out to be the Nordic answer to “We’re going to need a bigger boat”, after a 50-metre troll has just swept a leg through someone’s soon-to-be-renovated house. When the quips revolve around interior design, you know Norwegian big-budget film-making is taking a softer path than its raucous American inspirations.

This is a Netflix sequel to Norwegian horror comedy Troll with the original director Roar Uthaug returning, and home is clearly a theme dear to the franchise’s heart. The first film’s Scandi-kaiju was returning to its roots, on a mission to trash Oslo. But the new “megatroll” – looking like Danny McBride in the throes of a full-body fungal infection – is headed for Trondheim, bent on revenging itself on the nation’s founding father and chief troll-scourge, King Olaf. Trollogist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) and ministerial adviser Andreas (Kim Falck) return, again trying to hold the authorities back from simply lighting up the enraged behemoth after it escapes from a government black site.

US group Dekleptocracy identifies chemicals used for military vehicles’ lubricants and tyres as potential vulnerabilities

A US group has identified several obscure but potentially key sanctions it says could seriously disrupt Russia’s war effort in Ukraine after last month’s targeting of the Kremlin’s biggest oil firms.

Previous rounds of sanctions have been applied to Russian energy companies, banks, military suppliers and the “shadow fleet” of ships carrying Russian oil.

Leo is fulfilling a trip the late Pope Francis planned to make

Vatican says ‘demanding’ six-day mission will be packed with meetings with political and religious leaders

Pope Leo will make his debut overseas trip as leader of the Catholic church on Thursday, travelling on a six-day mission of peace and unity to Turkey and Lebanon in what the Vatican said was expected to be a “demanding” schedule packed with meetings with political and religious leaders amid heightened Middle East tensions.

In Turkey, a country with a Muslim majority and home to an estimated 36,000 Catholics, the Chicago-born pontiff, who was elected in May, will first meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara.

The leftist party exploded out of Spain’s anti-austerity protests in 2011 and upended Spain’s entrenched two-party system. I was instantly captivated – and for the next decade, I worked for the party. But I ended up quitting politics in disappointment. What happened?

• This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art

I never expected to retire in my 30s, but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible: what it promises, what it extracts. A decade at the heart of Spain’s boldest modern political experiment aged me in ways I’ve only just begun to fathom.

In May 2014, just four months after it was founded, the leftwing Spanish party Podemos (“We Can”) won five seats in the European parliament. As a recent university graduate who had been part of a local Podemos group (or círculo, as they were known) in Paris, I was hired to work for these MEPs. We arrived in Brussels as complete tyros and had to learn everything on the job. But we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call “real politics” – that is to say, not the internal power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement (which were always abundant), but the actual issues, such as gender discrimination and unemployment.

L’atterrissage d’urgence d’un Boeing 737 aux États-Unis après l’impact d’un objet inconnu en octobre 2025 relance les questions sur la menace des débris spatiaux pour l’aviation. Alors que des milliers de satellites sont déjà en orbite et que leur nombre devrait exploser dans les prochaines années, les études se multiplient pour quantifier le risque que des collisions catastrophiques ne se produisent.

BREMEN, Germany –  As the 23 member states of the European Space Agency meet this week to decide its budget for the next three years, its three major contributors – Germany, France and Italy – are signaling they will heavily support the agency. Yet even as ESA leaders push for unity, officials from those countries […]

The post Diverging priorities shape opening day of ESA Ministerial 2025 appeared first on SpaceNews.