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The actress Noma Dumezweni, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, says women need to learn how to be angry. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2QurIqM

A selection of the best photos from across Africa this week. from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2E4SoZx

Shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he gave a combative press conference at which he was asked by a reporter, “I was just hoping that we could get a yes-or-no answer on these questions involving Russia. Can you say if you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?” In reply, he lied to the American public. “Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia,” he said. “...I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.” That he lied has long been clear —all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians. But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday during an appearance in federal court by his former attorney Michael Cohen, who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that ...

If Elon Musk wants to launch American astronauts to space, he can’t smoke weed and drink whiskey on a podcast again. That’s a message from Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, to the founder of SpaceX, which, along with Boeing, is developing transportation systems that would allow the United States to fly NASA astronauts from American soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. “I will tell you that was not helpful, and that did not inspire confidence, and the leaders of these organizations need to take that as an example of what to do when you lead an organization that’s going to launch American astronauts,” Bridenstine said Thursday at a meeting of reporters at NASA ’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The warning comes about a week after The Washington Post broke the news that NASA would conduct reviews of workplace culture at both SpaceX and Boeing, reportedly in response to Musk’s actions on The Joe Rogan Experience in September. At the time, ...

In a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timing of his negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow in 2016, and about how often he discussed the deal with Trump during the campaign. The guilty plea is the first Mueller has secured that is related directly to Trump’s business dealings—and may be just the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing investigation of business deals involving the Trump Organization and Russian financiers, inside and outside the Kremlin.   With Trump now at war with someone who for years was his most loyal lieutenant and fixer, Cohen’s court appearance underscored the peril he presents for the president, who is unsettled by dramatic Democratic gains in the midterms and facing the prospect of unending offshoot probes by newly emboldened Democratic committee chairmen. The plea includes evidence, for the first time, that could show how Trump was compromise...

Michael Cohen’s decision to plead guilty to lying to Congress on Thursday was remarkable for three reasons. The first was that Cohen walked into a Manhattan federal courtroom unannounced. He did it by surprise. We live in a political environment characterized by constant leaks, each choreographed more carefully than a public announcement. The drama of learning what’s going to happen at an event, rather than before the event, has mostly disappeared. But Cohen’s plea, a momentous development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, happened with no warning. That reflects admirable discipline in Mueller’s office. The second remarkable thing was that the plea happened at all. Cohen already pleaded guilty in August to eight federal felonies, including tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations. That plea already ended his career and exposed him to at least several years in federal prison . By contrast, Cohen’s new plea is to a lone count of lying to Congress in v...

Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis and Maude Plante-Husaruk, both filmmakers, were researching their upcoming trip to Central Asia when they first heard a man named Raïmberdi talk about plants. “We stumbled upon a French TV program about [Tajikistan] where Raïmberdi had briefly appeared, and we immediately thought he was a very interesting man and that there was definitely more to his story,” Lacoste-Lebuis told The Atlantic . Months later, the pair arrived in Tajikistan through the deserted region of the Pamir Mountains. “We started inquiring about the old Kyrgyz man who had built his own hydroelectric power station,” Lacoste-Lebuis said. They didn’t know his name, or even whether he was still living. But they got lucky: A German researcher happened to be traveling through the remote area at the same time. He pointed the filmmakers in the right direction. Lacoste-Lebuis and Plante-Husaruk’s short documentary, The Botanist , is an elegant, meditative portrait of Raïmberdi, his culture, and his...

This morning it was “ probably ” on. Now it appears it’s off: President Trump said Thursday he was canceling his bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the seizure by Russia of three Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of Crimea. “Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” Trump said on Twitter. “I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!” [ Read: Ukraine is ground zero for the crisis between Russia and the West ] The president’s remarks are a striking reversal from his position earlier this week when he appeared to blame both Ukraine and Russia for the clash, saying : “We do not like what’s happening either way.” But the comments are also a walk back from those he made earlier on Thursday when he said he “probably will be meet...

The famously inscrutable Jeff Tweedy has at last clarified his opinion on American interventionism. Kinda, maybe. “All my life I’ve played a part in the bombs above the ones you love,” the Wilco front man sings over hesitant guitar twang in the opening moments of his first album of solo originals, Warm . “I’m taking a moment to apologize. I should have done more to stop the war.” In the next verse he sings of having left “behind a trail of songs from the darkest gloom to the brightest sun,” but “it’s hard to say” that what he’s “been through should matter to you.” Then, an anecdote: A drunk man once took him by the hand and told him that “suffering is the same for everyone.” Tweedy reflects, with his voice cracking, that “he was right, but I was wrong to agree.” As a listener, I felt I understood the meaning immediately. Tweedy is waking up to the puny scale of his problems. He sings sad songs about emotions, while his country manufactures payloads that kill children in Yemen. The d...

Native to most of South America, the capybara is the largest rodent on Earth. Capybaras can grow to be two feet tall (61 cm) and weigh as much as 175 pounds (79 kg). They are social animals by nature, and they have gained a level of fame worldwide for their seeming ability to make individuals from other species feel at ease in their presence. Collected here: images of capybaras young and old, in the wilds of South America, in safari parks in Europe, hot springs in Japan, and elsewhere, often pictured with a companion or two. from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2DS1pUT

From the start, Zhanqi Chen realized that something was odd about the spiders. He had first spotted the species, known as Toxeus magnus , in a park in Singapore, and whenever he’d peer into their silken nests, he’d usually find a centimeter-long adult female surrounded by several smaller youngsters. That was weird. Most spiders are solitary, and even cannibalistic toward their own kind. There are a few kinds of sociable spiders that live in colonies , but Toxeus magnus shouldn’t have been one of them. It’s a jumping spider, a group generally known for being loners. And yet, there it was, apparently living in family groups, where the mothers cared for their young—another rarity among spiders. The mystery deepened when Chen collected several of the spiders and reared them in his lab at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. He noticed that after hatching, the spiderlings would stay in their home nests for at least three weeks. During that time, they never left, and their mother...

Kids like weird things: Yellow sponge-boys, talking doe-eyed ponies, ruddy-cheeked rodents that say only “pika pika,” and, especially in the past few years, unboxing videos. Kids’ unboxing videos are YouTube series in which children, or in some cases just disembodied hands , take toys out of their packaging and play with them as uplifting music plays in the background. One particularly popular video shows a small boy unwrapping and then assembling a child-size electric car, using plastic tools that would surely fall apart in less practiced hands. He then drives the car down the sidewalk through an eerily empty neighborhood to a playground that is also completely empty, where he plays by himself, presumably because all the other neighborhood children are busy watching YouTube. The video has 267 million views. [ Read: Raised by YouTube ] Toy makers, who are experts at capitalizing on children’s weird interests, have now figured out how to make a toy that replicates what kids like abo...

There’s an especially gruesome clue in a notorious international murder case. The killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the widespread suspicion that the Saudi crown prince himself directed it, have roiled U.S.-Saudi relations and politics in the United States, where the Senate is challenging the Trump administration to take stronger measures against the Saudis. And the hit was, reportedly, all caught on tape. By President Donald Trump’s account , the tape records a “very violent, very vicious, and very terrible” incident—and it’s one the president told Fox News he hasn’t heard and doesn’t want to hear. His national-security adviser, John Bolton, echoed that this week, prompting bafflement at a press briefing where journalists pressed him on why he wouldn’t want to hear the raw intelligence about one of the major national-security issues confronting the United States. But why should he? It’s not necessarily typical for the president or the national-security adviser to consum...

Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on November 29, 2018 The president of the United States is threatening to close the border with Mexico to prevent the entry of Central Americans seeking asylum. He is also threatening to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t finance his border wall. All this in the same week that he intends to sign a new, revised North American Free Trade Agreement, rebranded as the USMCA. It’s a confusing juxtaposition for Mexicans tired of President Donald Trump’s bombastic rhetoric as well as for ardent Trump supporters and Fox News viewers who must wonder why the U.S. would ever enter into a free-trade agreement with that country. The situation may yet become more confusing, and surreal, after Andrés Manuel López Obrador is sworn in as the new president of Mexico on Saturday. Although it’s not popular to point this out south of the border, AMLO , as he’s known, shares a few traits with Trump, including disdain for deeper economic integration with the outside world...

Andy Serkis is, by acclimation, the greatest motion-capture actor ever. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but in this CGI-dappled, fantasy-dominated century of cinema, it’s an estimable title. As Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Serkis found new and innovative ways to emote through layers of technology and make otherworldly characters feel tangible. So it makes some sort of sense that he’d be tasked with bringing a story like Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book to life. As the director of Mowgli , debuting on Netflix December 7 after a limited theatrical run, Serkis has to draw out compelling performances from a tiger, a panther, and a pack of wolves—all of them computer-generated. Mowgli, which is being promoted with the unnecessary subtitle Legend of the Jungle , has had a strange route to the screen. Filmed in 2015 , it languished in post-production for nearly three years; last July , Netflix acquired the distribution rights from Warner Bros. That means ...

When leaders of the Group of 20 nations meet Friday in Argentina, they will discuss the global economy, climate and energy, and efforts to fight corruption. One item that will almost certainly not be on their agenda—despite the presence in their midst of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—is the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad. And Saudi Arabia is not alone in the G20 for its casual attitude toward human rights. Turkey, the leading critic of the Saudi investigation into Khashoggi’s killing, has more journalists in jail than any other country and can hardly be taken seriously as a defender of the free press or human rights. China imprisons its dissidents and has interned its Uighur Muslim population in camps. Russia uses assassination as a technique to rid itself of dissidents. All three are members of the G20, as are others with human-rights concerns. Put another way, the G20 is not the Group of Eight, which suspended Russia after its invasion and a...