George MacKay and Léa Seydoux star in a epoch-traversing sci-fi romance, while the latest Star Wars spin-off has a mystery-thriller twist

The Beast
Out now
Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Colour) and George MacKay (Femme) star as the couple at the heart of this arthouse sci-fi epic, loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle and spanning three time periods, from director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance).

Enlarge (credit: Future Publishing / Contributor | Future Publishing)

TikTok is now disputing a Reuters report that claims the short-video app is cloning its algorithm to potentially offer a different version of the app, which might degrade over time, just for US users.

Sources "with direct knowledge" of the project—granted anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year. They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

As these sources reported, TikTok's tremendous undertaking could potentially help prepare its China-based owner ByteDance to appease US lawmakers who passed a law in April forcing TikTok to sell its US-based operations by January 19 or face a ban. But TikTok has maintained that the "qualified divestiture" required by the law would be impossible, and on Thursday, TikTok denied the accuracy of Reuters' report while reiterating its stance that a sale is not in the cards.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Figures show statistics, computing, physics and maths have risen in popularity and languages bouncing back

Fewer pupils in England are studying drama, media and performing arts at GCSE and A-level, while the popularity of statistics, computing, physics and maths has gone up.

Provisional figures for exam entries in England this summer, published by the exams regulator Ofqual on Thursday, also reveal a growing enthusiasm for modern foreign languages, which had been in long-term decline.

An in-the-round production at the Royal Albert Hall in London features more than 100 performers – including 60 dancing swans. Tristram Kenton went into the rehearsals

In her fortnightly review of fitness and wellbeing activities, comedian Jennifer Wong overcomes her apprehension of ‘whorish vagina dancing’ – and then the gloves come off

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

“Ever since we invented clothes, we’ve been looking for sexy ways to take them off,” Evana De Lune says. It’s Sunday morning and about 20 of us have risen early for De Lune’s burlesque 101.

We’re all here for different reasons. A few women in their 50s want to step out of their comfort zone and rediscover who they are. “I just want to reclaim my confidence again as a woman because I’ve really lost that,” one says. A woman in her 30s says she was inspired by the Christina Aguilera movie Burlesque, and a beginner pole dancer wants to learn what to do with her hands.

Behind the painted curtains of BRB’s The Sleeping Beauty lies a universe teeming with whimsy, dedication and a dash of eccentricity

As I step through the stage door, Tom Rogers, a former soloist turned creative digital producer, becomes my guide through this theatrical labyrinth.

“This half is like where we live, and the other half is the theatre,” Rogers says, a grin lighting up his face as we navigate the corridors, which start to feel like a maze. “Try and remember this bit of the journey in case you need to come back to the office.”

All of a dancer’s possessions are stored in a single box on tour

We look at whether the Conservative pledge for a ‘triple lock plus’ can really be paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance

The Conservatives have announced plans to boost pensioners’ income with a “triple lock plus”. It is a pitch to a group who, according to many polls, are the most likely to support the Tories, and is seen as a measure designed to shore up the party’s core vote.

It's as weird as it sounds: a young Jeff Jarrett and Dirty Dutch Mantell battle it out in the ring while in the background Walter Mays conducts a live orchestra performing his original composition, "War Games for Ten Percussionists and Two Wrestlers, " for broadcast on PBS of all channels. The actual match is pretty basic with a standard "heel dominates, babyface gets some hope spots, and finally makes a comeback" format - at one point Mantell attacks a plant in the orchestra after trying to take a drum; otherwise it's pretty by-the-numbers - which was probably a wise choice to give an audience likely largely composed of non-wrestling fans something easy to follow. (In a then-rare kayfabe-breaking moment, the extra Mantell attacks - played by Memphis wrestler Marc "The Beast" Guleen - is listed as a third wrestler in the program's end credits.) It's interesting to see this sort of high-concept wrestling content as early as 1989, as this seems more like something you'd see tried nowadays - and maybe somebody should try doing it again. While the in-ring action is simply adequate, the idea behind it gets it an extra point for creativity in my book.

She has danced pregnant, in bondage gear, and drenched in what looks like menstrual blood – all to unleash the monsters lurking within her and all of us. We meet the unstoppable performer rocking the flamenco world

‘Since I was little, I’ve always been told that I am the weird one,” says Rocío Molina. “Like an alien,” she adds, speaking through a translator over video call from Spain. Weird in the world of flamenco, she means, where Molina is, at 39, now one of the art form’s major international stars.

She started dancing aged three in Málaga. “I was different physically,” she says. “I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t slim. I wasn’t flamenca enough, you know? I didn’t have a Gypsy face.” But even as a child she decided she didn’t care about that, and put all her focus into dance. “For me it was difficult to live in the world the way it was presented to me. And dancing was a way to escape. I felt like I was running away constantly, and my way of doing that was through dance.”

Norwich Theatre Royal
Brew revisits the car crash at the beginning of his ballet career that killed his three companions and left him paraplegic

Not quite dance, not quite theatre, An Accident/A Life is more like a multimedia, queasily hallucinatory staging of a story that puts the body of a dancer at its centre. That dancer is Marc Brew, and the story revisits the traumatic turning point in his life when, at the beginning of his ballet career, the car he was in was hit by a drunk driver. All three of his companions died; Brew survived but was left paraplegic, aged 20. The story he tells is harrowing, touching, brutal and tender, but what makes this feel like a work of almost classical tragedy – you will absolutely experience fear, pity and catharsis – is its notably unclassical treatment of the staging, the body and its voice.

The set is simple, symmetrical, and devastatingly effective: two screens flank a car that first sits impassively on the ground and is later hoisted up to hang perilously above the stage, like a traumatic memory that defines everything around it. Two figures in crash dummy costumes serve both as supplementary characters (clinicians, nurses, even alter egos of Brew’s fragmented self) and as stagehands, moving around bits of set, or using hand-held cameras to relay scenes on to the screens.

Sadler’s Wells, London
The French choreographer’s 1981 interpretation of the playwright’s world rewards patience with its magic and precision

A silent dance based on the writings of Samuel Beckett doesn’t exactly set the heart racing. Cue gloom and despair, without even Beckett’s words to enliven it. And when the 10 dancers of the French Compagnie Maguy Marin are revealed in crepuscular darkness, clothes white, faces plastered in white clay, feet dragging across a chalk-covered floor, I feared the worst.

But May B is a magical piece, both tribute and elaboration. Marin, now 72, made it in 1981, when Beckett was still alive. That early section, all shuffling, grunting and dry humping, sets the absurdist tone as the dancers move in a precisely modulated group, occasionally delivering a line from Endgame (in French): “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.”

The Mad Max: Fury Road heroine gets an origin story, while Channel 4’s Muslim female punk band returns for a second gig

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Out now
One of the year’s most anticipated movies sees director George Miller return to the post-apocalyptic world he and Byron Kennedy first created in 1979 with Mad Max. Both spin-off and prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, this new adventure unveils the origins of Imperator Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role.

• "Giri Giri" Special Choreography Video
• MANINGEN (Choreography Video Drone ver.)
• 青春を切り裂く波動 (Official Choreography Video)
• Suki Lie (Choreography Video Suki ver.)

• Toryanse
• Tokyo Calling
• Free Your Mind
• Pineapple Kryptonite
• OTONABLUE / THE FIRST TAKE

The EPA has issued an enforcement alert, outlining the steps needed to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The post EPA Issues Alert After Finding Critical Vulnerabilities in Drinking Water Systems appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Cannes film festival
Seven world leaders – including Charles Dance’s dozy US president – are trapped in a forest in this amusing but bizarre apocalyptic comedy

Cate Blanchett has supplied the strangest moment of this year’s Cannes film festival; for Brits of a certain age, anyway. Her character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, Labour grandee and former chancellor of both the exchequer and Oxford University. Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor called Hilda Ortmann who mentions Jenkins as the first president of the European Commission allowed to attend a G7 summit (which, as political trivia connoisseurs would say, is “one for the heads”.) Perhaps in her next film Blanchett can do a big speech about Peter Shore.

Rumours is an amusing drawing-room absurdist comedy, co-written and directed by Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title is inspired by the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, because of the emotional crises that are said to have accompanied its recording. The setting is a forest in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony where a fictional G7 summit is taking place. Seven government heads have gathered to discuss an unspecified (but apparently ecological) crisis and to draft a lengthy and fantastically unhelpful communique which, as Hilda murmurs to her French counterpart, President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), should be worded vaguely enough so they are not committed to any specific action.

The US president Edison Wolcott is ageing and somnolent; he is played by Charles Dance, confusingly with his own English voice, and the script has a joke about Dance being apparently unwilling (but surely not unable) to do an American accent. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stressed because she had an affair at the last G7 summit with troubled Canadian premier and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries a torch for European Commission secretary-general Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda. Rolando Ravello plays the nervy Italian PM Antonio Lamorte and Takehiro Hira plays Tatsuro Iwesaki, the modest, shy Japanese premier.

When she first went moshing, Rachel Ní Bhraonáin couldn’t stop giggling. Now she has made a dance show about the ‘gorgeous community’ she encountered

Walking into a basement club in Camden, the sound of the guitar hits you in the gut, along with the singer’s full-throated, death-metal growl. In the middle of the crowd is a circle of thrashing bodies, hair flying, limbs everywhere, bouncing off each other. The mosh pit. “I got flung about five feet earlier tonight but people pick you back up,” one of them, Jake, tells me. “It’s a good way to get out the stress of the week.”

“Friendly violence,” is how gig-goers James and Angelina describe the energy of the pit. “Achy feet, chafing, people’s sweat dripping from the ceiling,” adds their friend Sam wryly. “It’s not altogether pleasant, but it’s just what you’re compelled to do when you hear the music.”

Mosh is at Epic Studios, Norwich, 23-25 May. Norfolk & Norwich festival runs until 26 May.

The case of a German ballet director who attacked a critic with faeces has loosely inspired a satire about the relationships between creators and critics

Among the spikier offerings at this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual festival of drama in Berlin, is a play whose dramatis personae may ring familiar. There is an angry ballet director, a female reviewer who gives his show a critical mauling and an adjacent dachshund. Their paths converge in the same lurid way as happened in real life last year, when the head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, Marco Goecke, attacked dance critic Wiebke Hüster with dog excrement in response to a negative review.

Die Hundekot-Attacke (“the dog poop attack”) is conceived by Dutch company Wunderbaum and devised by an actors’ collective from Jena. The play has a plot that features a group of actors from Jena devising a provocative play based on a real-life hundekot-attacke, in a desperate bid to draw critics to their provincial theatre – a big idea from a small-town ensemble.

John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds go family-friendly in their new imaginary-friends comedy, while the singer swaps introspection for lust on her long-awaited new album

If
Out now
In what has to be one of the more enviable showbiz lives, John Krasinski has played Jim in The Office, married Emily Blunt, and written and directed acclaimed horror franchise A Quiet Place. Now he turns his hand to family entertainment, writing and directing this part-animated fantasy about imaginary friends made visible with a little help from Ryan Reynolds and Steve Carell.

In the digital realm, security is paramount, especially when it comes to the applications we use daily. Recently, concerns have surfaced regarding vulnerabilities in popular Android applications available on the Google Play Store. Revelations by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team have unearthed a WPS Office exploit dubbed the Dirty Stream attack, casting a spotlight on […]

The post Xiaomi and WPS Vulnerabilities: File Overwrite Risks Alert appeared first on TuxCare.

The post Xiaomi and WPS Vulnerabilities: File Overwrite Risks Alert appeared first on Security Boulevard.

CISA, FBI, and DHS Collaborate to Support Cybersecurity for Civil Society

Aiming for Better Protection Against Cyber Threats

PAFACA SueTok: U.S. Courts “likely” to rule whether new law is constitutional—or even practical.

The post TikTok Ban — ByteDance Sues US to Kill Bill appeared first on Security Boulevard.

CISA and the FBI warn of threat actors abusing path traversal software vulnerabilities in attacks targeting critical infrastructure.

The post CISA, FBI Urge Organizations to Eliminate Path Traversal Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The US Senate has approved a bill that would effectively ban TikTok from the US unless Chinese owner ByteDance gives up its share of the immensely popular app.

Social video platform TikTok has experienced explosive growth since it first appeared in 2017, and is now said to have well over 1.5 billion users, with an estimated 170 million of them in the US.

Essentially, the bill says that TikTok has to find a new owner that is not based in a foreign adversarial country within the next 180 days or face a ban until it does comply. President Biden has committed to sign it into law as soon as it reaches his desk.

Since 2020, several governments and organizations have banned, or considered banning, TikTok from their staff’s devices, but a complete ban of an internet app would be a first in the US.

For a long time now, TikTok has been battling to convince politicians that it operates independently of ByteDance, which allegedly has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For example, TikTok has repeatedly claimed the Chinese government has never demanded access to US data and that TikTok would not comply if it did.

While ByteDance denies any direct links to the Chinese Communist Party, a former executive at TikTok’s parent company claimed in court documents that the CCP had access to TikTok data, despite US storage of the data. The allegations came up in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed in May of 2023 in the San Francisco Superior Court.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in the US, says it opposes this bill, mainly because it is afraid that TikTok will not be the last app to face this type of ban.

TikTok also encouraged its users and creators to express their opposition to the bill. Last week, the social media company said the bill would:

“Trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate seven million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the US economy, annually.”

Chinese officials reportedly said the government would “firmly oppose” any forced sale of TikTok because it would “seriously undermine the confidence of investors from various countries, including China, to invest in the United States.”

Check your digital footprint

Malwarebytes has a new free tool for you to check how much of your personal data has been exposed online. Submit your email address (it’s best to give the one you most frequently use) to our free Digital Footprint scan and we’ll give you a report and recommendations.