QuoteOn Monday, US President Donald Trump shared multiple photos from a VIP-filled screening of his wife's movie Melania, declaring the feature-length documentary is "a MUST WATCH" and claiming tickets are "selling out, FAST!".
While that might be true in certain areas, the UK response to director Brett Ratner's affectionate cinematic tribute to the First Lady has been distinctly lukewarm. Cinema chain Vue premiered Melania at its flagship Islington location in London at 3.10pm on Friday, attracting just a single ticket buyer.
The subsequent 6pm showing performed marginally better, drawing two attendees.
...
Amazon MGM Studios reportedly invested $40 million (£29m) for the polished documentary, accompanied by a marketing budget of approximately $35million (£25m).
Quote from: Tamas on Today at 04:10:16 AMYeah, AI is a worry (in Hungary, Fidesz is making heavy use of it already, although only in mocking videos I don't think they expect even their followers to truly believe authentic), but hopefully it will ultimately swing the pendulum back in the sense that it will make people seek out trustworthy, larger organisations (newspapers and such) as sources of news rather than relying on ChadAlpha69 on Twitter for their news updates.Maybe - I think there'll be a reaction against it to some extent. But I also worry the opposite is happening and worry that we're heading into a more oral, post-literate world of rumour and anecdote and re-enchantment and "seems like".
Quote from: Tamas on Today at 04:00:05 PMI have noticed that often what the Guardian call an "expert" is just a person committed enough to an idea or course of action to join/form a lobbying group for it.And also a fair bit of bias in how they are covered. The way the Guardian frames someone speaking from a right wing think tank or pressure group v a left wing is very blatant

In part because he was an elderly reactionary Cambridge don (he was so old he'd been a tutor for John Cleese
), but his argument was largely because it broadened the definition of a "charitable purpose" that charities could be set up to advance. I think it has basically become a bit of a middle-class graduate make-work scheme (and route into politics). So he moaned a lot about I think a homelessness charity that was basically raising lots of money on its reputation for helping the homelessness but was spending most of that money on public policy - so coming up with and lobbying for policy ideas on how to address homelessness. 

QuoteEngland planning proposals fail to mention safety of women and girls, say critics
Draft proposals likely to 'embed risk and inequality', campaigners and urban planners say
Alexandra Topping Political correspondent
Wed 28 Jan 2026 13.00 GMT
Government proposals to overhaul England's planning system fail to mention women or girls and ignore official recommendations to keep women safe made after the death of Sarah Everard, experts have told the Guardian.
Draft planning proposals – published two days before the government's strategy to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) – are likely to "embed risk and inequality" despite the strategy's insistence that "design and planning are critical tools" in keeping women safe, MPs campaigners and urban planners have said.
The VAWG strategy and part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, commissioned after the murder of Everard – both published in the same month as the planning proposals – call for women's safety to be embedded into the planning of public spaces.
But the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which sets out the government's intent to massively increase housebuilding, has "no references whatsoever to women, girls, gendered safety, or violence against women in the built environment", the Liberal Democrat MPs Anna Sabine and Gideon Amos said.
In a letter to the housing minister Matthew Pennycook and the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, as first reported in the Planner, they wrote: "Planning policy is one of the most powerful structural tools the state has to prevent harm before it occurs. If the NPPF is silent on gendered safety, we embed risk and inequality into the fabric of every new development."
When contacted by the Guardian about the letter, a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) spokesperson said: "The NPPF is a planning document. It sets out guidelines for housebuilding and planning in England. The VAWG strategy is about protecting women and girls from violence and misogyny."
They said it was "unclear as to why anyone would expect the two things to be combined" and therefore it was difficult to respond to the criticism. It is understood the ministers have not yet formally responded.
It was, said Sabine, an "incredibly arrogant" response. "If you don't understand how women's safety ties in with how we design new spaces, you shouldn't be working at MHCLG," she said.
Susannah Walker, a gender planning consultant who noticed the omission, said the proposals ignored the VAWG strategy and the second part of the report by Dame Elish Angiolini, commissioned after the murder of Everard four years ago. Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021 after being abducted off a London street while walking home.
Angiolini said promises of sweeping changes to make women safer as they walk the streets had been hampered by a "paralysis", and officers tasked with "designing out" crime, which exist in every police force, were sometimes ignored and had not all "been tasked with focusing on preventing violence against women and girls".
The VAWG strategy states that: "Women and girls must both feel safe and be safe in every aspect of public life [...] Well-lit streets, accessible transport, and thoughtful urban design can deter violence, reduce opportunities for harm, and send a clear message that public spaces belong to everyone."
Phillips has long-argued that in order to achieve the government's stated ambition of halving VAWG in a decade, all government departments had to play a part.
If councils were not specifically instructed to consider women and girls' safety, they would not do so, said Walker. "Councils are underfunded, so if it doesn't go in the NPPF, then it just gets left out because it's not mandatory," she said. "Coming after two high-level government reports which both talk about designing space to keep women safe, this is the most extraordinary omission."
Sabine told the Guardian she did not doubt Phillips's commitment to get cross-departmental buy-in on ending violence against women and girls, and asked her to "march into" Pennycook's office to change the draft framework.
"We have a world that's largely designed by and for men," she said. "But if you take into account women and girls' safety, you can make very practical decisions that will really benefit women and girls' lives."
).Quote from: Jacob on Today at 02:54:36 PMThe Russian Navy has 66 submarines?
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