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      ‘Should we grieve, rejoice or cry?’: Palestinians in Gaza react to ceasefire

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    Celebrations break out across the territory but many are worried ceasefire will break down and war will resume

    Palestinians in Gaza celebrated the ceasefire that came into effect at 9.15am GMT on Sunday, describing “the most beautiful joy in the world” after 15 months of devastating war that has killed tens of thousands there and laid waste to swaths of the territory.

    “I feel very beautiful. We hope that God will complete this joy and that we return to our homes and lands safely. This is the most beautiful joy in the world, thank God,” said Moaz Qirqiz, 46.

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      ‘The discourse is chilling’: aid groups on US-Mexico border prepare for Trump

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    Volunteers who leave water in the desert describe rising fears of vigilantes and climate peril

    It was a blustery day in the Sonoran desert as a group of humanitarian aid volunteers hiked through a vast dusty canyon to leave gallons of bottled water and canned beans in locations where exhausted migrants could find them.

    Empty plastic bottles, rusty cans and footprints heading north were among the signs of human activity strewn between the towering saguaro and senita cacti, in an isolated section of the Organ Pipe Cactus national monument – about 20 miles (32km) north of the US-Mexico border .

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      Joe Biden had one job. And he failed | Mehdi Hasan

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    The president was supposed to defeat Donald Trump and end the threat he posed to our democracy. Yet, here we are

    “You had one job.”

    As we bid farewell to the 46th president of the United States, I can’t get that Ocean’s 11-inspired internet meme out of my head.

    Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of the media company Zeteo

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      Lights, camera, concrete! How Hollywood is playing a part in brutalism’s redemption

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    Oscar-tipped film The Brutalist is the latest stage in the cultural rehabilitation of what was once architecture’s most reviled style but is now winning a new generation of admirers

    This week an Oscar-tipped film, The Brutalist , opens in Britain. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-plus saga in which Adrien Brody plays the brilliant but tormented fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor struggling to make a life in the postwar US. He’s a singular, solitary, single-minded genius, always working alone, in the mould of Gary Cooper in the 1949 film of Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead and Adam Driver in last year’s Megalopolis . Tóth is, like them, forever fighting the misunderstanding and spite of mean-spirited adversaries. He would rather shovel coal (as Cooper’s Howard Roark drilled stone in a quarry) than compromise his principles.

    The film’s title is a dramatic stage on the redemption arc of what was architecture’s most reviled style. Its makers evidently felt that the word would attract and intrigue audiences (while also carrying some ambiguity – there being a question in the film as to who is brutalising whom) and would be a fitting epithet for a man who, while complex and flawed, is a hero. To get an idea of how improbable this might once have seemed, imagine a film called The Former Post Office Chief Executive and Ordained Priest. There was a time, in the 1980s, when a writer in a national newspaper demanded that practitioners of brutalism be “taken out and shot”.

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      Luca is the progenitor of all life on Earth. But its genesis has implications far beyond our planet

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    New research into the single-celled organism is providing clues about what the early planet looked like – and raising the prospect that we may not be alone in the universe

    For scientists, our earliest ancestor wasn’t Adam or Eve but Luca. Luca didn’t look anything like us – it was a single-celled bacterium-like organism. A recent study by a team of scientists based in the UK has delivered rather shocking news about this illustrious forebear. Despite having lived almost as far back as seems possible, Luca was surprisingly similar to modern bacteria – and what’s more, it apparently lived in a thriving community of other organisms that have left no trace on Earth today.

    Luca – short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth – seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago. Back then our planet was no Eden but something of a hell on Earth: a seething mass of volcanoes pummelled by giant meteorites, and having recovered from a cosmic collision that blasted the world apart and created the moon from some of the fragments. There is good reason why the geological aeon before 4bn years ago is called the Hadean, after the Greek god of the underworld Hades.

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      UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    Imaginations of science fiction community used to help policymakers prepare for potential crises in Britain

    It’s a scenario that would make Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, shudder: a future where self-driving cars are the norm but a catastrophic electronic breakdown traps thousands of people inside them.

    This dystopian vision of the future was one sketched out by science fiction writers at an event this week where experts were asked to prepare Britain for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.

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      Emmanuelle review – dismal remake of 1974 French erotic film

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    Noémie Merlant and Will Sharpe star in Audrey Diwan’s life-sapping romp

    The original Emmanuelle , a tale of a young woman’s erotic adventures in Bangkok, was a tawdry, trashy romp, a French-sploitation sexcapade that should have been filed away in a drawer marked: “It was different in the 70s, honestly.” Instead – inexplicably – it has been disinterred by director Audrey Diwan (quite the change of pace after her harrowing Venice prize-winning abortion drama Happening ). Diwan relocates the action to Hong Kong and remakes Emmanuelle as a glossy but dispiriting treatise on the emptiness of the corporate world, punctuated by lots of panting, lip-chewing abandon.

    Noémie Merlant ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) plays Emmanuelle, whose job seems to entail being bitchy in various luxury hotels. Her taste for the high life is only matched by her appetite for anonymous carnal activities. But what Emmanuelle craves most is the one thing she can’t have: enigmatic flood defences engineer (no, really) Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe, wearing the pained expression of someone who has just found an errant toenail clipping in his Egyptian cotton hotel bed linen). Beyond ill-advised.

    In UK and Irish cinemas

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      Speak up, man: how talking circles are supporting a healthier masculinity

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025 • 1 minute

    Across the UK, men are gathering in small groups to share how they really feel. It’s personal, non- judgmental – and potentially life-changing

    I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides. I’d like to do this very much, but sitting opposite me is a man – sitting all around me are men – and it is his turn to talk. He has eight minutes to tell us – all men, all strangers – what has been bothering him lately, or this week, or today, or for his entire lifetime, and right now he is on a roll.

    Here in Men’s Circle , if you go over your allotted eight minutes, the facilitator of the group is meant to give a polite little “wrap it up now, mate” cough, so everyone can have a fair turn, but nobody wants to do that with this particular man: after a slow, shy start he’s on a tear and words and feelings and secrets I’m not even sure he knew he was going to say are tumbling out, and it feels rude (and possibly destructive) to do anything to stop him. So I’m just going to keep my legs tucked up until he runs out of breath.

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      How will the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal work?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 19 January, 2025

    Many details of the three-phase agreement between Israel and Hamas remain hazy and a difficult path lies ahead

    A ceasefire in the war in Gaza and a hostage release deal in exchange for Palestinians in Israeli jails began at 11.15am local time on Sunday (9.15am GMT).

    The three-phrase agreement is designed to broker a permanent end to the war after 15 months of fighting that has killed nearly 47,000 Palestinians and led the international court of justice to consider genocide claims against Israel.

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