Katie Zacharia faces mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam
Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary says it is “unknown” how much she will engage with the press, amid mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
In a brief interview with the Guardian, Katie Zacharia detailed the whirlwind sprint to replace her predecessor Karoline Leavitt as the US president’s chief spokesperson.
Former QB says he is looking ‘for next landing spot’
Aikman and Buck said to have argued over contracts
Longtime Monday Night Football announcer Troy Aikman said he is looking for his “next landing spot” with his ESPN contract set to expire after February’s Super Bowl.
“I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” Aikman said in a radio interview with KTCK of Dallas on Thursday morning.
The broadcaster has bullet-proof confidence as he departs the BBC. But his first YouTube show with Gareth Southgate is nowhere near as radical as you’d expect – and he sounds like yet another tech guru
Whatever you think of Amol Rajan, he can’t be accused of not dreaming big. In the clip trailing the launch of his YouTube project The Amol Rajan Connection, he acknowledges the seismic volatility of our times but locates himself firmly at the heart of them. “We are about to get 100 years of change in a single decade,” he says. “And that’s scary. But maybe I can help.” Big talk for someone who somehow managed the singular feat of being outlasted by Richard E Grant in The Celebrity Traitors. But joking aside, Rajan’s bulletproof self-confidence remains titanium-tough.
The branding of The Amol Rajan Connection features a mock-up of the poster from The Harder They Come, a Jamaican film about a renegade insurgent whose reckless defiance of the establishment’s rules culminates in him dying in a hail of bullets. But however he might see himself, it’s impossible to regard Rajan as an outsider. From his editorship of a national newspaper, via University Challenge and Today, he has shown an uncanny facility for arriving, briskly, at the very heart of one national institution after another. The sponsors of this show are two world-bestriding tech corporations, one of Britain’s largest banks and an upmarket supermarket chain. He soft-launched with an appearance on former Tory chancellor George Osborne’s podcast. Rajan’s connections are clearly being worked very efficiently.
Disney+ was criticised after opening round this season
Alex Scott, the former Football Focus host, has left her role as a presenter of the Women’s Champions League coverage on Disney+.
It is understood it was Scott’s decision to walk away and focus on other projects, including her new show, One More Word WSL, with her fellow former England internationals Anita Asante and Fara Williams.
Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood’s documentary recalls the fight against racism in 1980s Britain – even if its account of solidarity has a notable omission
This fierce film from socialist film-makers Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood gives us the story and the context of the Bradford 12. Twelve south Asian members of the United Black Youth League in 1981 were arrested on a charge of conspiracy to cause explosions for possessing dozens of molotov cocktails – milk bottles filled with petrol, with a rag through the lid – allegedly for throwing at the police. To the intense irritation of the British authorities, a mixed-race jury acquitted them, accepting their argument that it was in self-defence (and that the items themselves were closer to fireworks than bombs), because black and Asian communities were routinely and systematically attacked by skinheads and racists whose activities were shrugged at by the powers that be.
It is a reminder of a particularly ugly, squalid, bigoted and mediocre era in British public life, when Margaret Thatcher, just before becoming prime minister, tried to siphon off some of the far-right National Front’s political energy by declaring that people felt “swamped” by immigrants, the most earsplittingly loud dog whistle in Tory history. It was also the era when anti-racist protester Blair Peach was killed by the Met’s yet-to-be-disbanded special patrol group, when the still-unsolved New Cross fire in London took the lives of 13 young black people, when the south Asian woman Anwar Ditta was subject to a spitefully obstructive move from the Home Office to prevent her bringing her children into the UK – supposedly because they weren’t really hers, though a DNA test finally proved her right. Perhaps most of all, it was an era when the witness-box testimony of uniformed police officers was increasingly seen as almost valueless in these cases; the film also reminds us how culpably lackadaisical and incompetent the Yorkshire police were in catching the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.
The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script
For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”
In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.
2026 is an especially weird year for watching the NBA.
With the demise of regional FanDuel Sports Networks, and the league’s long-planned national streaming service at least a year away, many teams were suddenly in need of temporary plans for this season. The result is a patchwork of standalone streaming services, free over-the-air broadcasts, and traditional TV options that vary based on where you live.
You might think the NBA would try to help, perhaps with a single page that helps fans sort through all the viewing options, but no. Its website offers “how to watch” pages for only a small handful of teams, and most of those pages carry incomplete information.
So once again, I will do what the league doesn’t, and put all your NBA viewing options in one place.
Watching your local NBA team
If you live in the same market as your favorite NBA team, and want to watch games that are not nationally televised, you have a few possible options:
Subscribe to a standalone streaming service for local in-market games.
Get local games through a pay TV package that carries them.
Watch local games for free with an antenna, if your team is broadcasting them over the air.
Here’s a chart showing how those options shake out by market:
Compared to previous seasons, the most notable new entrant in 2026-2027 is DAZN, which has swept in to replace FanDuel Sports Network for 10 NBA teams. If you already subscribe to DAZN for combat sports or international basketball, note that the NBA subscriptions are separate.
Some NBA teams are also turning to free, over-the-air TV for in-market games, either instead of or in addition to standalone streaming options. Consider using an antenna to watch these games instead of getting yet another streaming subscription.
One more note: Several teams still haven’t announced distribution through cable, satellite, or live TV streaming providers. We’ll likely see a few more announcements around the start of the season on October 20, and I’ll update this post accordingly.
Out-of-market NBA games
The situation is much simpler if your team plays in a different market. As in previous years, NBA League Pass lets you watch all out-of-market games for $17 per month or $110 for the season. (The ad-free “Premium” tier, which also supports up to three concurrent streams, costs $25 per month or $160 per season.)
Note that if your out-of-market team is playing against the local team in your area—whether at home or on the road—those games will be blacked out. League Pass also excludes nationally televised games, which I’ll cover below.
Nationally televised games
If you subscribe to a service for local or out-of-market NBA games, it still won’t carry games that air on national television. Those include 100 games across NBC and Peacock/NBCSN, 80 games on ESPN and ABC, and 66 games on Amazon Prime Video.
Figuring out the best way to get both local and nationally televised games is where things get tricky:
Standalone services with nationally televised NBA coverage:
ESPN Unlimited is $30 per month and also includes ABC’s sports coverage.
Amazon Prime is $139 per year or $15 per month. You can also get just Prime Video for $9 per month.
Pay TV packages with nationally televised NBA coverage:
YouTube TV carries ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN, both in its $83 per month base plan and $65 per month Sports plan.
Fubo carries ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN, both in its base plan ($89 per month, plus regional sports fees) and Sports plan ($65 per month).
Hulu + Live TV offers ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN in its $100 per month base plan.
DirecTV carries ABC, ESPN, NBC in its Signature packages (starting at $95 per month) and MySports plan ($65 per month), but does not include NBCSN, so you miss Peacock’s Monday night games.
Sling Essentials includes ESPN for $20 per month. It also carries local channels (including NBC) in certain markets at a higher price.
Ultimately, you’ll have to decide whether to piece together a few different streaming services or try to get most of your coverage through one pay TV bundle. The best option for you will depend on where you live, your willingness to hop between different apps, and how many games you’ll realistically end up watching. Hopefully, all this information will make those decisions a bit easier.
Animation studio narrows annual loss to £1.1m amid ‘challenging market’ in children’s content
Don’t break out the celebratory Wensleydale just yet. Aardman, the British animation studio behind the cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his beloved dog Gromit, has fallen short of a target to get back in the black, its accounts show.
The employee-owned business was aiming to record a small profit in 2025 after two years of consecutive losses but was hit by production delays and a “challenging market” in children’s content.
Ben Norris says cost-cutting measure that means show will be recorded outside its home city risks ‘extraordinary burden’ for crew
A cast member of The Archers has said its actors have been angered by the BBC’s decision to axe the show’s new studio, in a move that could lead to it being recorded away from its home in Birmingham.
Ben Norris, who plays Ben Archer in the world’s longest-running soap opera, said the decision risked having a real impact on the quality of the show and placing an “extraordinary burden” on its crew.
Phillips sought to buck up his fellow London bureau colleagues during a contentious staff meeting on Tuesday
The veteran British broadcaster Sir Trevor Phillips had some strong words of advice for his CBS News colleagues when facing off against critics who question the editorial integrity of the network: “Why don’t you just fuck off and let us do our jobs?”
Phillips made his blunt suggestion during a contentious meeting of the network’s London bureau on Tuesday, during which the foreign editor, Shayndi Raice, went on a lengthy tirade criticizing unnamed staffers for suggesting that editorial oversight amounted to “interference” and informing colleagues that disobeying editors would be insubordination and “legal grounds for firing”.
Video posted online shows men entering home through unlocked door and claiming to be looking for paperwork
A Home Office accommodation provider has launched an investigation after “English nationalist” content creators posing as contractors filmed themselves entering a property housing asylum seekers.
The video, titled “HMO Hunting in Leicestershire”, was posted to the Truthhurts101UK YouTube account, which describes itself as being run by an “English nationalist citizen journalist” and claims to cover “immigration, demographic change, policing and stories others overlook”. The footage was also posted to the associated TH101UK’s X account, where is has been viewed more than 300,000 times.
Jean-Noël Barrot criticises X owner in speech attacking foreign efforts to destabilise France before 2027 election
France’s foreign minister has accused Elon Musk of using his social media platform to orchestrate “massive online harassment campaigns” against European leaders as he took aim at foreign efforts to destabilise the country before next year’s presidential election.
Speaking at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference on Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot pointed to the role that social media had come to play in the global battle over democracy. “The forces seeking to undermine democracy now dominate the information landscape, where they employ tactics designed to polarise public debate,” he said.
The pair’s first feature-length adventure stars Jemaine Clement and Olivia Tennet, has a dreamy soundtrack and beautiful stop-motion visuals – fantastic family fun
Kiri is a lively yellow dinosaur, Lou is an amiable purple palorchecie (a fictional beast, vaguely resembling a palorchestes, which in turn vaguely resembles a giant tapir) – and if you’ve been watching their CBeebies show, which hails from New Zealand and consists of 5-minute episodes, you’ll know they’re the best of friends despite their ingrained temperamental differences. But how did they become friends in the first place? For the uninitiated, Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! functions as an introduction to the characters and their world, while for fans it’s a delightful origin story.
At only one hour long, the runtime is toddler-friendly – and to be honest, there are plenty of films marketed at adults that could learn a lesson from writer-director Harry Sinclair’s economical storytelling. (Sinclair is also the writer of the TV series, alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing alum Rebecca Kirshner.) With the voice acting talents of Olivia Tennet (Freda in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) and Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), plus dreamy songs from Don McGlashan (Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn), Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! would arguably work superbly as an audiobook or radio show – except the visuals are a treat too.
District court judge Timothy Kelly was ruling after the Trump administration blocked access to the three outlets in September
A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.
Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.
Gavin Guffey was 17 when he was targeted by a ‘sextortionist’ on Instagram. His father Brandon has spent four years fighting for justice, and for social media companies to do more to safeguard young users
What were the last words Brandon Guffey said to his son Gavin? Four years on, he still struggles with this question. “That last exchange, it bothers me constantly,” he says. “I think I said, ‘Goodnight, buddy. I love you,’ and he said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ I sincerely hope that’s what I said. The truth is, I’ll never know for certain.”
The exchange happened in 2022, on a hot July in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where, just weeks before, Guffey had won the Republican ticket to stand for the state’s House of Representatives. The election was three months away, Guffey’s head was buzzing with politics, and he’d spent that evening at a local event.
Rights groups warn of Tehran regime’s increasing use of executions to suppress dissent, with at least 600 this year
Human rights groups have raised the alarm over the growing number of death sentences and executions in Iran, after reports that a 23-year-old woman, Najmeh Amini, has been sentenced to death for blasphemy over a social-media post.
Amini, an accounting student, is being held in Vakilabad prison in the north-east city of Mashhad. She has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and death in separate cases heard by a revolutionary and a criminal court.
BBC asks US federal judge to compel Trump’s lawyers to schedule deposition after his team canceled initial session
The BBC is asking a federal judge in Florida to force Donald Trump to sit for a deposition as part of the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.
According to a Tuesday filing, the BBC and Trump’s legal team had agreed for him to be deposed on Friday. The BBC’s lawyers wrote to the judge that they had spent months trying to secure a location for the deposition from Trump’s team.
I was seduced by creators hawking passive income hustles. Like the language used in MLMs, it seemed too good to be true
A very specific kind of content began taking over my social media feeds at the end of last year.
I had just finished a short-term contract and returned, with some reluctance, to the financial masochism of freelancing. As I mourned the end of steady paychecks and paid days off – as well as finally having enough money for regular haircuts – I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the glow of the screen.
Amid worries about children’s relationship to tech, the solution is often spending more time talking openly with each other
We have become obsessed with the idea that screens are destroying human connection.
The evidence seems to be everywhere. Each week headlines warn of teenagers addicted to phones, a lonelinessepidemic and the dangersof AI. The release of The Social Reckoning leads us to ask, “How bad were those guys at Meta?” and then ultimately wonder, “How bad am I if I still use Instagram?” In our day-to-day, we observe workers eating lunch alone while scrolling and friends choosing online games over offline gatherings.
Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to return to the success of The Social Network is a strangely dated and incomplete look at a world that needs a sharper eye
In retrospect, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before the film was released, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his mastery of, nevermind obsession with, the technical sphere, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin may well have converted Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could better understand – namely, a motormouthed wiseass who deep down wants to impress a smart, serious-minded girl – he and Fincher also made one of the first internet-centric movies to treat online life as a natural extension of IRL dynamics, rather than the otherworldly tech portal seen in so many 90s internet movies.
Granted, that’s the whole deal with Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandpas and coworkers everywhere could understand it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for example, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking an alarmist approach to the internet as a haven for adults seeking an affair, teenagers nursing porn addictions and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, on the other hand, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, rooting its nascent flaws in the human weaknesses that birthed it. In retrospect, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s grasping for power and the potential for grim carelessness that his online kingdom was built on.
Farage was its champion, now it’s Badenoch – and the aim is the PM’s defeat at all costs
While the merits of a so-called Britannia shield to protect Britain from missiles and drones are debatable, the Conservatives’ proposal did achieve one thing last week: the very idea of the shield was used to anoint a political leader.
In a significant development, little observed amid the hullaballoo of news events, Kemi Badenoch’s uncosted, pie-in-the-sky plans to build a £10bn anti-missile system were enthusiastically heralded by the rightwing press. It was not just a matter of the plans themselves being lauded, even by outlets that must know them to be ridiculous. More significant is what it said about the champion chosen by these media organisations in their offensive against the Labour government and Andy Burnham.
Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity
Some of Britain’s wealthiest financiers, including Sir Paul Marshall, have given a platform to critical coverage or are linked to its leading opponent
“This is virtue signalling,” said Nigel Biggar. “These are elites who are trying to demonstrate that they are being progressive.”
The target of his scorn was one that has obsessed him for years: the movement to pay reparations for the slave trade, and specifically the Church of England’s plan to spend £100m atoning for its involvement.
Estimates suggest the eco satire starring Tom Cruise could join the list of top turkeys, including Cutthroat Island and The Marvels
Digger, the ambitious eco-fable starring Tom Cruise and directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, is heading for an even worse financial outcome than previously thought, with reports suggesting it will lose around $245m (£185m), placing it among the biggest disasters in movie history.
According to a report in Variety, Digger’s estimated second weekend revenue in North America of $3.2m is a 60% drop on its opening weekend figure of $8m, meaning its current domestic gross is $14.4m, for a global total of $35.3m, with a projected final box office total of around $50m worldwide.
When influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King visits Copenhagen all the trips to trendy shops and fancy restaurants soon take a turn for the worse
British influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of herself, in this quease-inducing thriller exercise. The ick gets generated not necessarily by the eventual gore that erupts in the last reel, but by the tacky weirdness of the way the film apes the mannerisms of social media reels and streaming nonsense to both satirise the ugly side of the business but also exploit and profit off it at the same time. On one level, it’s an eerily clever exercise in bad faith, like a poor Michael Haneke film (think Funny Games) for gen-Z kicks; on another, maybe it’s just a crappy ripoff of online tropes that have been way overexposed already. Or both.
Anyway, here’s what happens: influencer Chiara gets invited to visit Copenhagen by a tourist organisation, a deal set up by her avaricious manager Alice (Jazmine Summer). Of course, this means practically every moment of her time awake in the city will be filmed, both by Chiara herself on her trusty smartphone, or a camera crew led by director Mike (played by Mike Nybroe, who is also director of The Influencer Project, ha ha); Mike is supported by sound man Daniel (Daniel Parmo) and cameraman Victor (Luca Storm). The early sections turn in all the influence-slop you would expect, with shopping trips to trendy merch vendors such as Baum und Pferdgarten, and meals at fancy local restaurants, and then a livestreamed visit to a “haunted house,” which is the big thing on Instagram and TikTok these days.
Bethany Antonia wore a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Protect the Dolls’ in rehearsals, but the words were edited out on Saturday’s show
The BBC has defended its decision to edit out a transgender rights slogan from a T-shirt worn by a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing, stating it was standard practice to avoid “overt branding or slogans”.
The actor Bethany Antonia was filmed wearing the T-shirt, which bore the slogan “Protect the Dolls”, during rehearsals before her live performance on Saturday night.
Jay-Z in 8, the rap mogul’s HBO docuseries, covers his life and career in effort to mend his image – with no pushback. Why is he so fixated on the court of public opinion?
During the finale of Jay-Z’s Jay-Z in 8, the recent eight-part HBO documentary series on his life and career, the billionaire rap mogul talked with record producer Rick Rubin about the song Family Feud from his 4:44 album. He clarified one of its lyrics, “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?”, in which he chided Sharpton, the civil rights leader, and Cosby, the disgraced actor-comedian, for constantlycriticizingrapmusic. He called Sharpton an “extortionist” who goes “from place to place” demanding: “You want our support … give us the money.” Listening to him chastise Sharpton, I pondered how he doesn’t see himself as a similar figure.
Starting in 2019, Jay-Z partneredwith the NFL in 2019 as entertainment director, deciding the Super Bowl half-time performers and working with the league on other community endeavors. Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, has recently alleged that the deal came after NFL owners decided they needed a “Black face” to help them quell outrage from Black people after Kaepernick wasblackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthems as a form of protest against police brutality. Jay-Z was lambasted for undercutting Kaepernick’s cause for personal gain, marring his reputation with many fans who came to view him as the same counterinsurgent figure he criticized in the documentary.
Photojournalist whose arresting images captured human disaster from Vietnam to Aberfan, and most notably in apartheid South Africa
On 21 March 1960, a crowd gathered outside a police station in a Transvaal township, part of a nationwide protest against apartheid pass laws used to control where black South Africans could live, work and travel. A young British photojournalist pushed his way to the front and took a few pictures of police across the fence who were standing atop their armoured personnel carriers. With nothing much happening, he turned back and headed for his car. Then – without warning – there was the sound of heavy gunfire.
The photographer, Ian Berry, who has died aged 92, captured images of the carnage, which soon became known around the world as the Sharpeville massacre. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured in what turned out to be a turning point in the country’s history.
From the destruction of Gaza to climate breakdown, satellite imagery has become an indispensable reporting tool. But as a recent Guardian investigation illustrates, a lot of work goes into ensuring its veracity and keeping the focus on the people affected on the ground
How to bear witness when you can’t physically go there? Journalists have always grappled with this. Whether it’s because of armed conflict, repressive regimes or prohibitive terrain, some places remain too dangerous or difficult for reporters to access.
Enter low-orbit satellites. As the technology has evolved and proliferated, satellite imagery has become increasingly indispensable. But as with all reporting tools, it requires professional judgment and painstaking work to verify things.
Jeremy Strong in “The Social Reckoning,” Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network” and the real Meta executive are all playing parts. But only one has changed his approach.
Rachel Jupp takes role as corporation grapples with digital transformation, a cash crisis and its public service role
With looming job cuts and an ongoing pay dispute, there has not been much to smile about for BBC journalists working in “the pit” – their pet name for the newsroom deep in the belly of New Broadcasting House.
On Monday afternoon, however, they were greeted by a grinning figure conducting a tour of the news floor. She was Rachel Jupp, the BBC’s newly appointed director of news and current affairs. Jupp engaged in a series of polite if brief conversations with her new troops.
Investigation launched after five broadcasters last month ceased presidential coverage after CNN, MS Now and Politico were barred from White House
The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the decision of the White House television press pool to halt coverage of the US president, Donald Trump, last month violated antitrust law, an agency spokesperson said Saturday.
A spokesperson for the department said group boycotts among business competitors might violate US law. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws,” they said.
Major TV networks were notified on Friday that the department was examining whether they violated antitrust laws when they suspended pool coverage of President Trump.
As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge
Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.
The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
The model, actor and influencer is known for making her own frozen yoghurt, bubblegum or even toothpaste while dressed in immaculate haute couture. But she insists she is not who the internet thinks she is
Nara Smith is not a tradwife, she wants you to know that. Nor is she an ex-tradwife – pace the New York Times who included her in a feature on how ex-tradwives are as popular a movement now as the tradwives were in the first place. Nor was she peddling a tradwife-adjacent lifestyle choice by marrying at 18, having four children by 24, and devoting hours to cooking and documenting it online. Nor is she Mormon, by the way. Although, yes, her husband, the model and former teen heart‑throb Lucky Blue Smith, was raised Mormon, but we’ll get to that. Nor was she telegraphing subliminal religious messages in her content: “There is no secret agenda.” Nor was she abandoning her biracial heritage by wearing her hair in a sleek little bob. Nor was she leaning into a 1950s housewife archetype – even when dressed in a pink and red polka-dot minidress to batch-cook sourdough.
Smith wants you to scrap everything you think you know about her and start again. She also doesn’t care if you don’t.As with her content:“Those that get it, get it. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’s totally fine. I tell people: ‘If you don’t like my content, I won’t see you scroll past me.’ ‘If you need to block me for your own sanity, please do. I promise I won’t know.’ And if you want to stick around, that is beautiful, I’m grateful, welcome.”
Exclusive: German media group Axel Springer said to be planning between 50 and 100 editorial redundancies
The new owner of the Telegraph is preparing to make significant job cuts to its newsroom, just months after stating it would invest in the title to make it the “leading centre-right media outlet in the English-speaking world”.
Axel Springer, the German media company overseen by its billionaire chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, is understood to be examining proposals that would make between 50 and 100 journalists redundant.
Tom Watson, of Worcester, alleged to be behind Big Time Charlie X account that created so-called Traitorbase
The owner of a recruitment firm has been accused of being at the centre of a so-called “doxxing” campaign against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), anti-racism activists and business executives who recruit black, Asian and minority ethnic workers.
Tom Watson, from Worcester, is alleged to be behind an X account calling itself “Big Time Charlie”, which was deactivated shortly after he was named by the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
Readers gasp at the news that their beloved columnist is leaving the Guardian after 25 years
How could you let this happen (It’s true: this is my final column. You have exactly 24 hours to complain before my inbox self-destructs, 2 October)? You have some truly great writers, and for them I will continue to support the Guardian, but it’s Marina Hyde’s column that many of us look forward to most. She is uniquely and reliably smart, funny and spot-on. Is it money? Like Nye Bevan with consultants, fill her mouth with gold if you have to; you can clean it up afterwards. But I fear I’m too late, and all that’s left to say is: Thank you, Marina, for brightening so many of our days, and for putting our thoughts so brilliantly into words. And thank you, Guardian, for giving her the space to do so. Richard O’Brien Highbridge, Somerset
• The honour is all ours, Marina. It’s devastating news to know that I can no longer laugh, cry, squirm, gasp, disagree and love your columns. I have looked forward to reading your words for the last 25 years and you will be very much missed. Thank you, and go well. Gill Empson Aston-on-Trent, Derbyshire
Director general called for ‘a little less conversation, a little more action’ – but from what other songs could he draw inspiration?
The BBC director general, Matt Brittin, has started the job at a time of huge crisis. Money is short, jobs are being cut and it’s likely entire channels will be culled to stem the tide. This is a moment that requires great motivational charisma, which is why, in a recent all-staff call, he urged BBC employees to be “a bit more Elvis – a little less conversation, a little more action”.
Clearly, this isn’t great. But maybe this is how things are now. Perhaps, if you really want to unite a flagging workforce against a vast and inevitable decline, you need to start quoting song lyrics at them. With that in mind, here are some more that Brittin could use in his next call.
Commercials once launched careers from Ridley Scott to Guy Ritchie, now automated production is cutting costs – and the chance to learn by doing
When Ridley Scott was awarded the UK’s highest accolade for a glittering career directing films from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and The Martian, he reminded those attending the Bafta event eight years ago that making commercials had been his “film school”.
The advertising industry has long been a breeding ground for British film and TV talent who have gone on to make the jump to Hollywood productions, including Guy Ritchie, who started out making music videos and commercials, and Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson, whose credits include a number of John Lewis’s famous Christmas ads.
Founder of influential Rybar blog detained after warnings of attempts to destabilise Balkan country, officials say
A leading pro-Kremlin Russian military blogger with reported ties to Russia’s intelligence services has been arrested in Montenegro, after warnings of attempts to destabilise the Balkan country, officials have said.
Mikhail Zvinchuk, the founder of the influential Rybar war blog, was detained on Friday alongside his wife and three other Russians by police and security agents in the Adriatic resort town of Risan, on suspicion of spreading Russian influence, local media reported.
Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning shows how public opinion has changed around billionaire CEOs since The Social Network’s release
When The Social Network came out, Mark Zuckerberg organised a staff viewing of a film he described as “fun”.
A group corporate outing to the sequel is unlikely.
Skits and parodies making fun of the trillion-dollar industry have taken over social media, racking up millions of views
Johnny Hilbrant Partridge kept getting stuck next to the same kind of finance guy at weddings – the one bragging about his family’s full-time nanny and lavish vacations whilename-dropping elite club memberships and private schools.
To Partridge, a former fitness instructor, their shameless knack for self-promotion felt ripe for comedy. Using a filter that puts an exaggerated sneer on his face, Partridge donned a puffer vest and created “The PE Guy”, a caricature of the men who work in the private equity industry.
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