Reddit users and industry experts say Las Vegas has shifted its strategy intentionally to appeal to affluent visitors rather than budget-conscious travelers.
Utah college student Tyler Robinson allegedly killed conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in a politically motivated shooting at Utah Valley University.
Political commentator and journalist Cameron Higby launched free speech campus tour to honor Charlie Kirk's legacy after his killing, despite facing pushback.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was highly critical of a new U.N. report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, warning that those involved could face sanctions.
Country singer Gavin Adcock honors Charlie Kirk after the conservative activist's assassination in Utah, telling critics their efforts have awakened millions more supporters.
On the first full day of his state visit to the UK, the US president will attend various events in Windsor before a state banquet
Lucy Powell has hit out at the “sexist” framing of her deputy Labour leadership campaign, with people claiming she and her rival, Bridget Phillipson, are standing as “proxies” for two men, Aletha Adu reports.
Most of Donald Trump’s policies horrify progressives and leftwingers in Britain, including Labour party members and supporters, but Keir Starmer has said almost nothing critical about the Trump administration because he has taken a view that maintaining good relations with the White House is in the national interest.
I understand the UK government’s position of being pragmatic on the international stage and wanting to maintain a good relationship with the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Faced with a revanchist Russia, Europe’s security feels less certain now than at any time since the second world war. And the threat of even higher US tariffs is ever present.
But it’s also important to ensure our special relationship includes being open and honest with each other. At times, this means being a critical friend and speaking truth to power – and being clear that we reject the politics of fear and division. Showing President Trump why he must back Ukraine, not Putin. Making the case for taking the climate emergency seriously. Urging the president to stop the tariff wars that are tearing global trade apart. And putting pressure on him to do much more to end Israel’s horrific onslaught on Gaza, as only he has the power to bring Israel’s brazen and repeated violations of international law to an end.
Men’s 1500m: And later today, GB’s Josh Kerr will be hoping to defend his 1500m title – a title he is confident is his.
I’ve done it before. I know how to do it. I’m in a better place. I’m more excited. I’ve already got one of those gold medals in my safe. When I say easier, I’m not saying the race is going to be easier. I’m not saying the competition is worse. I’m saying that I know how to do it.
This training camp has been pretty hard. I’m so excited to go out and race those guys over 1500m. It’s probably going to be the easiest thing I’ve done over the last six weeks.
Following a summer of horrific crimes — a fatal domestic assault in the street by a man on release, the stabbing of a grandmother in front of a grocery store, the execution of a loving father in front of his children during a break-in, to name a few — the Liberals want you to know that they’ve got a plan for justice reform. Read More
As the recent military parade and meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Beijing demonstrated, the global power structure is unravelling. The magnetic pull of the western alliance is cracking while that of our authoritarian adversaries is intensifying. In the words of the Wall Street Journal's Yaroslav Trofimov, the image of China’s Xi Jinping, flanked by leaders of fellow nuclear powers Russia and North Korea, as ICBMs rolled through flag-waving crowds in Tiananmen Square, “marked a new phase in the redrawing of the international order." Read More
As the Herald’s incomparable Don Braid reported on Friday, there was an extraordinary moment of ecumenical outreach in Alberta last week, as Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, leader of the resurgent Parti Québécois, visited Calgary and pressed the flesh with some Alberta separatists. Plamondon was invited for a “fireside chat” by the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and rehearsed familiar arguments for Quebec separatism. Quebec never asked for the constitutional settlement of 1982, or for that matter the one of 1867; the French language is, as ever, in precipitous decline on this continent; the federal government, unhealthily dependent on ethnic clientele-building, makes lunatic policy decisions and implements them crookedly, etc., etc. Read More
Teen romance and paranoid surveillance collide to dysfunctional effect in Neo Sora’s beguiling debut future set in an oppressive near-future
Neo Sora is a Japanese film-maker who directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a documentary about his father, the renowned composer. Now he has made his feature debut with this complex, beguiling and often brilliant movie, co-produced by Anthony Chen; it manages to be part futurist satire, part coming-of-age dramedy, part high school dystopia. It combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If.… and there might even be a trace memory of Paul Schrader’s Mishima, only without the seppuku.
In a high school in Kobe in the future, students are oppressed by the reactionary xenophobia of their elders; periodic earthquake warnings, and actual earthquakes themselves, create a widespread air of suppressed panic which the authorities believe justifies a perpetual clampdown. The prime minister has taken to claiming that undesirable elements are taking advantage of the earthquakes to indulge in lawlessness. In the school, there is an almost unconcealed racist disdain for students who are not fully ethnic Japanese as well as those who have unorthodox or rebellious views.
As the US president comes to the UK, let’s give credit where it’s due: he wasn’t lying when he said smart people don’t like him
Channel 4 will be marking Donald Trump’s visit to the UK with what it describes as “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television”. It will play more than 100 of Trump’s lies or misleading statements in a segment called Trump v The Truth. All his greatest hits, from false claims about the price of eggs to disgusting lies about the US spending millions on condoms for Hamas, packaged together.
Obviously we’ve got to be fair and balanced here, though, haven’t we? Gotta show both sides. So I think it’s only right that Channel 4 also broadcast a 10-second segment covering all of the truthful and astute things the president has said. It’s not just lies, lies, lies: occasionally the man can be surprisingly wise. Only this week, for example, a video circulated online of Trump telling attendees of a gala at one of his golf clubs: “Smart people don’t like me, you know?” He added: “And they don’t like what we talk about.” No lies detected there.
Health Canada has launched its third legislative review of the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act (TVPA), which is the perfect opportunity to rethink the country's failing approach to nicotine regulation. Read More
Yulia Navalnaya says that two separate tests show that Russian opposition figure was poisoned in jail as she blames Putin for his death
Official Britain is laying out the red carpet for Donald Trump today.
It is the first full day of his unprecedented state visit, and he will spend it with King Charles at Windsor Castle enjoying the finest pageantry the nation can lay on.
Keir Starmer’s returns deal with France will go ahead, a cabinet minister has insisted, despite a high court ruling that temporarily blocked the deportation of an Eritrean man.
Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, said the last-minute injunction stopping the 25-year-old from being flown to Paris would not scupper the “one in, one out” scheme for ever.
Veteran journalist played by Redford in 1976 film version of the Watergate exposé that brought down the Nixon presidency pays tribute to a ‘fiery’ friend
Bob Woodward, the journalist played by Robert Redford in the 1976 corruption exposé All the President’s Men, has paid tribute to the actor who died on Tuesday, saying he was “a noble and principled force for good”.
In a statement posted on social media, Woodward said that Redford and he had been friends for 50 years and that he “admired him – for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others”.
Yet, as Chevron executives celebrated joining Exxon and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) as in producing Guyana’s daily oil output of 650,000 barrels, the response from the Guyanese government, opposition leaders and environmentalists was muted.
The latest craze for the kidult market is small stuffed toys you attach to your clothes. But can you look cool – or even just socially acceptable – while wearing them?
There was a time when adults who owned collections of stuffed toys were relatively uncommon, weird even. All that has changed recently: the rise in popularity of toys such as Squishmallows and Jellycat Amuseables has been linked to the growing “kidult” market (adults buying toys for themselves) which accounted for almost 30% of toy sales last year. On the whole, cuddly toys are something people keep at home, on their beds or on display shelves. But that’s changing too – plush toy keyrings such as Labubus are now everywhere. And some “Disney adults” (self-professed grown up Disney fans who might, for example, go to the theme parks without taking children with them) have gone one step further: attaching toys not just to their bags, but to themselves.
“Shoulder pals” (variously known as “shoulder plushies”, “shoulder toys” and “shoulder sitters”) are small toys made in the likeness of Disney characters. They have magnetic bases and come with a flat metal plate designed to be placed under your shirt, so the toy perches on your shoulder. Since the first one, baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, was brought out in 2018, these toys have become a common accessory at the Disney theme parks. There are multiple Reddit threads and TikTok videos about how to track down the latest ones (some are sold at the Disney store, but others are only available at specific locations within the parks). There will apparently be 45 official Disney shoulder pals on offer by the end of next year, with characters ranging from Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell to Anxiety from Inside Out 2. That’s not to mention the many, many knockoffs available online, as well as those sold by Primark, or the DIY pals that some creative TikTok users have been making.
A pop icon and a musical legend meet on the Mull of Kintyre in 1981 and dress up as sheep in Jim Hosking’s daft, deadpan offering
Jim Hosking is the wacky deadpan surrealist of indie cinema who has now created another bizarre stoner comedy, a two-hander and a bit lower budget than his earlier works such as The Greasy Strangler and An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn. It is like an epic-length Mitchell and Webb sketch in fact, the kind of film you find yourself laughing along to, just a bit, in a spirit of throwing in the towel – a spirit of not quite being able to believe that two actors, mugging and gurning at each other, really are saying these same lines to one other, over and over again.
The setting is Mull of Kintyre in 1981, and a pop star called Paul, with a strangely familiar but also entirely ersatz Liverpool accent, is welcoming a visitor, who arrives implausibly by rowing boat through the choppy grey sea. This is a blind Black pop legend called Stevie, who appears nonetheless to be able to see (and derisively imitate) Paul’s quirkiest mannerism whenever he gives it: a perky thumbs-up. (They are played, respectively, by Hosking’s regulars Sky Elobar and Gil Gex.)
This deeply comforting tale of record collecting, magical creatures and a lovingly knitted cardigan rambles across England
Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn’t begin with technologies of harm, such as flints and spears, but with items of collection and care, such as the wicker basket or, nowadays, the carrier bag. And so, if we make them that way, novels can be gatherings rather than battles.
Tom Cox’s third novel fashions an escape from the dangerous outside world into something soft, comforting and unfashionable. It might once have been a Neanderthal’s armpit, but now it’s more likely to be a cosy cardigan. Or a deeply comforting story.
Tom Athron says stricter rules on country of origin and end of ‘de minimis’ exemptions are up and sales down
The boss of upmarket retailer Fortnum & Mason has said Donald Trump’s trade war has hit sales of its luxury tea exports to the US and forced up prices.
Tom Athron, the London-based retailer’s chief executive, said Trump’s stricter country of origin rules and the end of the “de minimis” cost exemption for parcels worth less than $800 (£587) had hit customers across the Atlantic.
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