World News – Page 6

Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, made her fictional debut in Patricia Cornwell’s first crime novel, Postmortem, published in 1990. Cornwell had been both a police reporter and a morgue assistant. And her character was inspired by a real medical examiner she worked with.

Postmortem won a slew of crime fiction awards, including an Edgar and the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure. It was a riveting read – if you surfed the questionable prose style. I applauded the arrival of a female forensic specialist.

Two years after her debut, in 1992, I saw Cornwell in Melbourne where she was promoting the third Scarpetta book, All That Remains. Blonde and blue-eyed, barely over five foot three, she was the spitting image of her protagonist, as described in the books – and just as frosty.

Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta with Jamie Lee Curtis as her sister, Dorothy.

Amazon Prime

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She had stopped over in Los Angeles on her way to Australia, and told us she was being courted by all the major film studios, who wanted to option the books – and being ardently pursued by actors, including Demi Moore, desperate to play Scarpetta. Later, Angelina Jolie would also try to land the role.

Now, more than 35 years (and millions of copies sold) since her debut, Scarpetta is finally on screen, as an Amazon Prime streaming series – and apparently Cornwell is very happy about Nicole Kidman’s central casting as the older Scarpetta.

Not the Scarpetta I imagined

Postmortem, the novel, establishes Scarpetta as a brilliant forensic specialist, hunting a serial killer she nicknames Mr Nobody.

He’s leaving a glittery residue on his victims’ bodies – and a bad smell behind him. With the aid of all the latest technology, from computerised note-taking to DNA testing (then in its infancy), Scarpetta inevitably gets her man, despite being up against a hostile male establishment.

The series is set over two time frames – 1998, which follows the plot of the original (1990) novel, and the present, drawing on elements of her 2020 novel Autopsy. Two sets of characters play younger and older versions of the Scarpetta ensemble.

According to the new series, Scarpetta got the wrong man in the original: this discovery and attempt to fix it is what drives the plot. But I’m puzzled as to why, 29 books later, we have returned to the scene of the original crime, to undermine the initial success that hooked readers.

Given the difference in height between the five-foot-11 Kidman and the short Scarpetta of the books, I find myself sympathising with those readers who were bemused by the casting of her ex-husband Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s six-foot-five man mountain Jack Reacher in 2012.

Kidman is not the Scarpetta I imagined – but that’s the least of the show’s problems. It’s also completely predictable as a crime narrative. I spotted the killer in the first episode.

Serial killer culture

Cornwell has talked about “terrible fear” dominating her childhood – and influencing her interest in writing psychopaths. Aged five, as a neglected child with a mentally unwell single mother, she was abused by a security guard and had to testify in court. Later, she was bullied in the foster system.

In the wake of the #MeToo era and the very real problem of domestic violence, women now know it is not the creepy stranger they need to fear most, but the man in the bed beside them. But the original book, Postmortem, was very much of its time.

It tapped into a burgeoning interest in the figure of the serial killer as the evil we feared the most. In 1991, Jonathan Demme’s film version of Thomas Harris’ thriller Silence of the Lambs acquainted us with Hannibal Lecter, embodied by Anthony Hopkins – who won an Oscar for his performance. On British TV, Helen Mirren starred as detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.

Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs

Wikipedia

By the turn of the millennium, the brilliant forensic examiner on the trail of the serial killer, not to mention the FBI-trained profiler, were already overworked in fiction and on screen. This was when I bailed on the Scarpetta series, after reading the truly awful Blow Fly (her 12th novel) in 2003.

With Scarpetta largely absent, this book spends a lot time in the head of “wolfman” serial killer Jean-Baptiste Chardonne, even as he squats on a toilet fantasising about biting beautiful women to death. It was slow, it was muddled, it was unremittingly dark – and Cornwell has never been that good with words. Her real strength lies in her ability to grab the reader’s shocked attention.

‘I never really warmed to Scarpetta’

To be fair, I never really warmed to Scarpetta. Cornwell routinely spends much of her time impressing the reader with Scarpetta’s mastery of all things technological, her material possessions and her prowess in the kitchen.

Relatedly, I once owned a copy of Cornwell’s 1998 cookbook, Scarpetta’s Winter Table, disguised as a novella with Christmas recipes and photographs. Its instructions on how to prepare Scarpetta’s Key Lime Pie begin: “Without fresh limes, don’t bother. Scarpetta was a hanging judge on this matter”.

I’ve missed out on about 16 Scarpetta outings since Blow Fly. So I bought the latest, last year’s Sharp Force, which sees Scarpetta on the trail of a serial killer who stalks his victims as a hologram. I wanted to see if her books had improved.

Sadly, they haven’t. Take this set of awkward similes, all in one sentence:

“The wind moans round the house like a horror movie, remnants of a bad dream deconstructing like clouds as I reach for my phone vibrating on the nightstand.”

And then there’s sex with her husband, former FBI profiler Benton Wesley (played by Simon Baker as permanently pained in the new series) who initiates it by offering her an early Christmas present:

“Depends on what present you’re talking about.” I move closer, feeling him in firelight.

Was that a liver?

There was a public outcry when Mirren’s Tennison confronted the naked, brutalised female victims in Prime Suspect in the 1990s. But in Scarpetta now, the in-your-face crime scenes and autopsies are even more confronting. Nothing is hidden from view, including the pubic hair. We watch Kidman cut into a victim’s rib cage with garden shears. We hear the snap. And was that a liver she just held up?

As Scarpetta remarks of the killer when contemplating the first mutilated body, “he went to great pains to present [his victim] to an audience”. Great pains have also been taken in this adaptation, which has Cornwell’s blessing. But does it work?

Kidman as Scarpetta does a fine job of embodying an unlikeable character, though she is largely overshadowed by Jamie Lee Curtis, chewing up the scenery (which seems to be her thing now) as her equally unlikeable older sister Dorothy. Meanwhile, the excellent younger cast takes us back to the 1990s – the era Postmortem, Scarpetta and the serial killer really belong to.

Sue Turnbull is Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 5, 2026

The Swedish concept of döstädning is about more than just getting rid of things

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Swedish painter Margareta Magnusson died on March 12 aged 92. She became famous in 2017 for coining the smart and humorous concept of döstädning in a book known in English as The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The book was rapidly translated into an impressive number of languages, exporting the notion of death cleaning internationally.

Death cleaning is a decluttering practice where you go through what you own and get rid of things so that, when you die, the process of sorting your affairs is easier on your loved ones.

The year the book was published, the concept found its way into the Swedish Language Council’s annual list of new words. These annual lists feature new expressions that, the council hopes, say “something about today’s society and the year that has passed”. This undoubtedly holds true for death cleaning.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning has even spawned a TV show.

supplied

While döstädning quickly became part of everyday Swedish language, the habit of cleaning out belongings before dying was not entirely new. It is, however, no coincidence that the concept appeared when it did rather than, say, in the 1950s when ordinary homes were not yet so crowded with things. The increasing need for death cleaning has to do with living in a consumer society amid an accelerating overflow of possessions.

In earlier times, the importance of setting matters right before death was more concerned with relations: with God, relatives, friends, enemies, neighbours and so forth. In a Christian context, this last rite is known as Commendation of the Dying, known also as death bed rites.

In 1734, the establishment of an estate inventory, or bouppteckning, (a comprehensive list of a deceased person’s assets, property and debts at the time of death) became mandatory in Sweden by law. Although the law was not strictly enforced in its first decades, the inventories that do exist from this time are fascinating.

These early inventories belong to a range of people, from wealthy noblemen to widows of limited means with no more possessions than a set of clothing and few kitchen utensils. Many things listed were manufactured at home, and the few items that were purchased were highly valued. In a society like this, there was no need for death cleaning in the sense of clearing out. On the contrary, objects were passed on between generations or sold at well-attended local auctions.

Death cleaning is a form creating order and tidiness, which have often come with moral narratives closely tied with them. In this, the role of death cleaning now and in the past does have something in common.

In both cases, a person’s posthumous reputation is at stake, and leaving behind an untidy home or unsolved personal matter tells an unwanted story to the living of the person who has passed. Different stories can be crafted by getting rid of belongings or leaving them in good condition to pass on. What a person’s death cleaning looks like is a matter shaped by time and culture.

In memories collected by The Folk Life Archives at Lund University of the decades around 1900, people stress the importance of well-filled cabinets and cupboards as part of an impressive estate inventory. Such bounty was also meant to elicit admiration among visitors at the local auction. At that time, it was important to demonstrate good housekeeping by displaying your possessions, the more the better. Reading The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, talking to people engaged in death cleaning and in my general work, I have seen how, nowadays, the same effect is achieved by leaving behind a minimum of things.

This change in cultural preferences naturally reflects changes in material conditions. In societies where goods are relatively easy to acquire – both in terms of cost and availability – we all have a lot more. As such, death cleaning has become a good deed. Not burdening surviving relatives with sorting through unwanted items has become an act of love and care. However, it is worth noting that the idea of death cleaning is an ideal not everybody can live up to. Many people still find it difficult to part with their belongings.

The international fascination with the Swedish art of death cleaning invites reflection on widespread fantasies of the Nordic region. Media representations of Scandinavia frequently emphasise tropes of minimalism and emotional restraint. Such framing may contribute to the global appeal of döstädning, yet risks obscuring the more complex and culturally grounded logic underpinning the practice.

Positioned within Swedish everyday life, death cleaning is less an exotic cultural curiosity and more a meaningful negotiation of material abundance, kinship responsibilities and existential reflection.

Lynn Akesson is Professor Emerita of Ethnology in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

Iran searches for downed US jet crew, claims second plane hit

Source: Radio New Zealand

By AFP teams in Tehran, Jerusalem, Washington, Beirut, Dubai and Sanaa

This video grab taken on April 3, 2026, from undated UGC images shared on social media on April 1, 2026, shows thick plumes of smoke rising following airstrikes in Baharestan, in Iran’s central Isfahan province. AFP

Iranian and American forces were racing each other early Saturday to recover the crew of the first US fighter jet to go down inside Iran since the start of the war.

Tehran said it had shot down the F-15 warplane, while US media reported American special forces had rescued one of two crew members.

Iran’s military also said it downed a US A-10 ground attack aircraft in the Gulf, with US media saying the pilot was rescued.

The war erupted more than a month ago with US-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei, triggering retaliation that spread the conflict throughout the Middle East, convulsing the global economy and impacting millions of people worldwide.

US Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the loss of the F-15, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The president has been briefed.”

President Donald Trump told NBC the F-15 loss would not affect negotiations with Iran, saying: “No, not at all. No, it’s war.”

‘Valuable reward’

A spokesperson for the Iranian military’s central operational command said “an American hostile fighter jet in central Iranian airspace was struck and destroyed by the IRGC Aerospace Force’s advanced air defence system”.

“The jet was completely obliterated, and further searches are ongoing.”

An Iranian television reporter on a local official channel said anyone who captured a crew member alive would “receive a valuable reward”.

The US military has announced the loss of several aircraft during Iran operations, including one tanker that crashed in Iraq and three F-15s shot down by Kuwaiti friendly fire.

Fresh strikes meanwhile hit Israel, Iran, Lebanon and Gulf countries – and large blasts rocked northern Tehran, an AFP journalist said. Israel said it had launched a wave of strikes in the Iranian capital, alongside parallel attacks in Beirut.

Blown-out windows

Earlier, Israel’s military reported a new missile salvo from Iran, activating its air defences.

Strikes by all sides have increasingly targeted economic and industrial sites, raising fears of wider disruption to global energy supplies.

In the area around a bridge west of Tehran that was targeted by the United States, an AFP reporter saw a villa and residential buildings with blown-out windows – but no military installations.

According to the martyrs foundation of Alborz province, cited by the official IRNA agency, the attack killed 13 civilians and wounded dozens.

In Abu Dhabi, Iran’s neighbour across the Gulf, metal giant Emirates Global Aluminium meanwhile said it could take up to a year before it can resume full production, after its site was damaged by Iranian strikes.

Ex-FM urges deal

Writing in the US journal Foreign Affairs, Iran’s former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said Tehran should make a deal with Washington to end the war by offering to curb its nuclear programme and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran has virtually blocked the key waterway since the war began, where one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas normally passes.

Of the few ships that have managed to cross, most have had links to Iran, with 60 percent of commodity-bearing ships crossing the strait either coming from Iran or heading there, an AFP analysis of maritime data showed.

In the first known transit by a major European shipping group since 1 March, the Maltese-flagged Kribi, belonging to the French maritime transport group CMA CGM, crossed the strait to exit the Gulf on Thursday, according to Marine Traffic data analysed by AFP.

Three other ships, including one co-owned by a Japanese company, crossed Thursday.

Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned that Iran would increase its own attacks on energy sites in the region in response to threats from Trump of attacks on infrastructure.

A drone attack on a refinery owned by Kuwait’s national oil company on Friday sparked fires at several of its units, state media said.

Later, an Iranian attack damaged a power and desalination complex, Kuwait’s water and electricity ministry said.

In Abu Dhabi, a gas complex shut after a fire broke out, following an attack that resulted in “falling debris” upon interception, the government media office said.

Bridge destroyed In Lebanon

The Israeli military said Friday it had struck more than 3500 targets across Lebanon in the month since fighting with Iran-backed Hezbollah began.

It added that it would attack two bridges in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region “in order to prevent the transfer of reinforcements and military equipment”.

Lebanese state media later reported that Israel destroyed one bridge in the region.

Lebanon’s health ministry said Thursday that 1345 people had been killed – and 4040 wounded – since the start of the war.

Hezbollah has so far not announced its losses.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon peacekeeping force said a blast of unknown origin wounded three peacekeepers Friday, the third such incident in a week.

– AFP

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

Todd Blanche takes over US Justice Department, where there’s no escaping the Epstein files shadow

Source: Radio New Zealand

By Holmes Lybrand, Evan Perez, Katelyn Polantz, Kara Scannell, CNN

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks during the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, on March 26, 2026. Daniel Cole/Reuters via CNN Newsource

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who President Donald Trump tapped to serve as the interim head of the Justice Department, managed the day-to-day operations of the department over the past year, often taking a more public-facing role when Pam Bondi was in hot water with White House officials.

Early in the administration, in fact, the White House told the now-former attorney general she could not appear on Fox News for a time amid fallout over the Justice Department’s handling of making parts of the documents related to Jeffrey Epstein public. Blanche appeared in her absence, helming the administration’s defense over the drawn-out Epstein debacle.

Blanche was Trump’s defense attorney across several criminal cases the then-former president faced following his first term in office, one of several members of Trump’s legal team given key DOJ or judiciary posts.

When Blanche took the deputy attorney general position, his experience as a former prosecutor and as a lawyer at a large law firm in New York was seen by career officials as an encouraging sign that the department’s institutional norms would be protected, something that did not bear out.

Swaths of DOJ and FBI officials who worked on 6 January or Trump-related cases have been removed, attempts have been made to prosecute the president’s political enemies, and the cloud of the Epstein files continues to hang over the department.

As deputy attorney general, and while he has served in parrying attacks related to Epstein and beyond, Blanche faced blistering criticism after his interview last year with Epstein’s co-conspirator and business partner Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her role trafficking girls for Epstein, was upgraded to a minimum-security prison camp. In December, Blanche said the Bureau of Prisons made the decision to move Maxwell, adding that “she was suffering numerous and numerous threats against her life.”

Blanche also came under criticism because he hadn’t asked about documents congressional Democrats had subpoenaed from the Epstein estate.

“When I interviewed Maxwell, law enforcement didn’t have the materials Epstein’s estate hid for years and only just provided to Congress,” Blanche said in a post on X, responding to Trump critic George Conway.

Thursday (all times local), Blanche on Fox News said Epstein didn’t have anything to do with Bondi’s removal and also sought to bat down conspiracy theories around Epstein – including the idea that he was a spy – marking his continued desire to move past the issue.

“I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward,” Blanche said.

“I’m not sure you totally get what people feel about that,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said later on Blanche’s responses to Epstein-related questions.

Fighting Trump’s perceived political enemies

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, Blanche boasted about what he saw as one major success of the past year: ousting political enemies from the department.

Every DOJ employee – including FBI agents – who worked on investigations or cases around Trump following his first term had been fired, resigned, or took early retirement, Blanche said, adding that the number amounted to “over 200” people.

“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” Blanche said.

Blanche’s continued work as Trump’s personal attorney also translated into adopting some of the language of the president’s MAGA allies and publicly clashing with Trump critics.

Blanche defended Bondi after she was fired Thursday.

“As President Trump said today, the attorney general made our country safe again,” Blanche said on Fox News, hours after the announcement. “And she is a friend, and she did a great job in the first year of this administration.”

The new head of the Justice Department said he understood the frustration and desire to go after Trump’s political enemies when pressed on the issue and the failure to prosecute those individuals. Blanche noted that he was Trump’s defense attorney in multiple criminal cases following Trump’s first term.

“I had a firsthand accounting of what happened,” Blanche said. “Yes, I understand it. The American people understand it, and I know that the American people expect that it will never happen again, and we take that seriously.”

Blanche in meetings flashes a dry sense of humor but is also known to quickly lash out in anger when his frustrations boil over, associates say. At the Justice Department, he often led meetings, even those that the attorney general was supposed to be in charge of, an indication that he wielded the day-to-day power at the department.

Trump is considering replacing Bondi with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, according to sources, though others may also be on the short list. The former congressman could face harsh probing from senators over his very limited legal experience as well as his defense of Trump during his first impeachment hearings in late 2019.

In the trenches with Trump

Blanche was one of Trump’s lawyers for the New York hush-money case as well as the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith over Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified material after leaving office.

He is the only administration official who sat beside and guided Trump while his freedom was on the line during the criminal trial involving hush money payments in New York. While Trump was convicted, Blanche’s legal maneuvering resulted in Trump’s sentencing being postponed until after the election, all but ensuring that Trump would avoid serving any prison time.

The Trump defense team also won at the Supreme Court expanded protections from criminal prosecution for the president, in the 6 January case, just before Trump retook the presidency. He and his team also convinced a Trump-appointed judge in Florida to throw out the classified documents charges.

More recently, the Justice Department supported the same judge, Aileen Cannon, burying part of the special counsel’s final report on that investigation into Trump and others.

Beyond Epstein, Blanche has also faced criticism over public comments he made regarding the wrongfully deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, comments that led to Blanche nearly having to testify about his oversight of the case in Tennessee against Abrego Garcia.

During his confirmation hearing last year for deputy attorney general, Blanche declined to say if he would recuse himself from Justice Department efforts to re-examine the prior work of federal prosecutors on the Trump cases – cases in which Blanche represented Trump.

Blanche responded to questions about conflicts of interest by saying he would not violate his ethical obligations.

Previous Justice Departments attempted to maintain distance from political winds and the president’s direct wishes, and recusals were common when a department lawyer had previously been on the defense side of an investigation. That wall was most evident when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation around Trump’s 2016 political campaign.

Yet Blanche has continued to attack the prosecutions of Trump, now from inside the Department.

“Jack Smith is a proven liar, consistent with these fake accusations from his failed vendetta against the President,” Blanche wrote on social media last week regarding the former Justice Department special counsel who had secured two indictments against Trump in 2023. Both were dismissed before trial.

“There is absolutely zero proof of wrongdoing,” Blanche added, echoing the same position he had taken in court while opposite the Justice Department.

– CNN

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

Iran searches for downed US jet crew, US media reports one rescued

Source: Radio New Zealand

By AFP teams in Tehran, Jerusalem, Washington, Beirut, Dubai and Sanaa

Iran launched a hunt for the US crew whose jet Iranian media said had been shot down by the Islamic republic’s air defence systems Friday, deploying troops and offering a bounty.

US media reported US special forces had rescued one of the two crew members, and a local official television station in southwestern Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province aired footage of what it said was wreckage of the downed plane.

The war started more than a month ago with US-Israeli strikes on Iran, triggering retaliation that spread the conflict throughout the Middle East, convulsing the global economy and impacting millions of people worldwide.

US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for military operations in the Middle East, did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment on what would be the first known loss of a jet inside Iran since Trump ordered the war.

“Dear and honourable people of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, if you capture the enemy pilot or pilots alive and hand them over to the police and military forces, you will receive a valuable reward and bonus,” said an Iranian television reporter on the official local channel.

The report of the downed jet came as fresh strikes hit Israel, Iran, Lebanon and Gulf countries.

Meanhwile, large blasts rocked northern Tehran, an AFP journalist said. Israel said it had launched a wave of strikes in the Iranian capital, alongside parallel attacks in Beirut.

Blown-out windows

Earlier, Israel’s military reported a new missile salvo from Iran, activating its air defences.

Strikes by all sides have increasingly targeted economic and industrial sites, raising fears of wider disruption to global energy supplies.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the US military “hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!”, after US strikes damaged Iran’s tallest bridge.

In the area around the bridge, in Karaj, west of Tehran, an AFP reporter saw a villa and residential buildings with blown-out windows – but no military installations.

According to the deputy governor of Alborz province, the attack killed eight civilians and wounded 95 others.

About 70 percent of Iran’s steel production capacity has been taken out, Israel said Friday.

Ex-FM urges peace deal

Writing in the US journal Foreign Affairs, Iran’s former top diplomat said that Tehran should make a deal with the United States to end the war by offering to curb its nuclear programme and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran has virtually blocked the key waterway since the war began, where in peace time one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas passes through.

Of the few ships that have managed to cross, most have had links to Iran, with sixty percent of commodity-bearing ships crossing the strait either coming from Iran or heading there, an AFP analysis of maritime data showed.

Firefighters attempt to extinguish a fire following a projectile impact on a refinery in Israel’s northern city of Haifa on March 30, 2026. Israel and Iran exchanged more missile fire on March 30 as concerns that the US might escalate the Middle East conflict by launching ground raids against the Islamic republic’s Gulf islands sent oil prices soaring. JACK GUEZ / AFP

Three other ships, including one co-owned by a Japanese company, crossed Thursday, as commodities carriers see a 94 percent drop in traffic compared to peace time, according to data from business analysts Kpler.

Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned that, in response to Trump’s threats to attack infrastructure, Iran would increase its own attacks on energy sites in the region.

A drone attack on a refinery owned by Kuwait’s national oil company on Friday sparked fires at several of its units, state media said.

Later, an Iranian attack damaged a power and desalination complex, Kuwait’s water and electricity ministry said.

In Abu Dhabi, a gas complex shut after a fire broke out, following an attack that resulted in “falling debris” upon interception, the government media office said.

Trump wants bigger defence budget

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Friday it had struck more than 3500 targets across Lebanon in the month since fighting with Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.

It added it would attack two bridges in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region “in order to prevent the transfer of reinforcements and military equipment”.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday that 1345 people had been killed – and 4040 wounded – since the start of the war, including 1129 men, 91 women and 125 children. Among those are 53 healthcare workers.

Hezbollah has so far not announced its losses.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon said a blast wounded three peacekeepers, the third such incident in a week.

A UNIFIL spokesperson said the origin of the explosion was unknown.

The war’s economic impact is rippling far beyond the Middle East, as energy and oil costs surge.

At a protest in Lahore, Pakistan, over fuel price hikes, Naveed Ahmed, 39, told AFP: “The government, overnight, has dropped a ‘petrol bomb’ on its people.”

Meanwhile, the White House on Friday sent a spending proposal to lawmakers calling for a massive hike to the US defence budget.

It remains to be seen what Congress will ultimately approve, but US media reported the $1.5 trillion budget request – a 42 percent hike – would be the largest year-on-year increase in Pentagon spending since World War II.

– AFP

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

Nvidia’s new AI tool is giving female game characters a makeover – and gamers are pushing back

Source: Radio New Zealand

Last week, leading chipmaker Nvidia announced DLSS-5 (Deep Learning Super Sampling), a new artificial intelligence (AI) rendering tool it describes as a “breakthrough in visual fidelity for games”.

The software takes low-resolution images and uses AI to upscale them, adding what Nvidia calls “photoreal lighting and materials”.

The tool is designed to make video games look more photorealistic, but the examples Nvidia chose to show off the technology revealed something unexpected: the AI doesn’t just make images sharper and glossier, it also makes characters significantly more conventionally attractive.

Some gamers were furious at the muscular depiction of Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part 2.

Naughty Dog

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The growing backlash is about more than makeup. It points to a broader anxiety about what happens when AI is given control over creative decisions – and whose idea of “better” gets encoded in the algorithms.

A ‘beauty filter’ for games?

Nvidia showcased the technology using Grace Ashcroft, the protagonist of the recently released Resident Evil Requiem.

Before-and-after comparisons showed the software changing her hair colour, adding defined eyebrows, lip tint, and facial contouring. Some gamers quickly labelled it a “beauty filter”, criticising the way it applies what looks like heavy makeup and reshapes her face to be more conventionally attractive.

The choice of Grace to showcase the technology is worth examining. Resident Evil Requiem features all kinds of monsters and gritty characters, and Nvidia could have used any of them.

The decision to highlight a young, conventionally attractive female character and then make her more glamorous feels pointed. Representation of women in games has been a flashpoint issue for years.

Female characters in games are poorly treated

Historically, female characters in games were depicted as either helpless and weak or as sexualised objects secondary to a male lead.

The 2000s brought more varied female characters, but attempts at greater diversity triggered a fierce backlash in 2014 during the Gamergate harassment campaign. Women and minorities in and around gaming were targeted with abuse, doxxing, and threats of rape and death.

The debate has continued since. Some players were furious at the muscular depiction of Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part 2, claiming her physique was unrealistic and demanding she be made more conventionally attractive.

DLSS-5 adds a new dimension to this debate. Rather than designers making deliberate choices about how characters look, an algorithm can quietly override those choices in a particular direction.

Looksmaxxing game characters

The specific changes DLSS-5 made to Grace’s face also echo the manosphere’s looksmaxxing trend.

Originating in incel communities, looksmaxxing is built on the idea that certain facial features are biologically more sexually desirable to women, prompting some men to pursue techniques that alter their own faces to increase their “sexual market value”. Seeing a piece of software automatically apply similar logic to a female game character raises uncomfortable questions.

A satirical image showing the hypothetical effect of applying the ‘beauty filter’ of DLSS-5 to the warrior Kratos from the game God of War.

PurpleDurian7220 / Reddit

Gamers have noticed, and many are responding with humour. The software has been mocked as “yassifying” characters, with one widely shared meme applying the same treatment to God of War’s hulking protagonist Kratos, complete with blue eyeshadow, pink blush, and plump lips. The joke lands because it makes the gendered absurdity obvious.

This reaction mirrors how some gamers once responded to criticism of Aloy, the protagonist of 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn. After complaints that Aloy was “woke” for not wearing heavy makeup or conforming to conventional beauty standards, some gamers sarcastically created “unwokified” versions of the character to make the same point in reverse.

Bad news for game designers, too

A second, distinct complaint about DLSS-5 is that it undermines the artistic choices of developers.

Rather than simply sharpening what is already there, the software uses algorithms to alter textures and lighting. The results can have that familiar AI aesthetic: glossy, smooth, bright and generic.

A dark, gritty game like Resident Evil Requiem can end up looking like a luxury skincare ad. In at least one case, in EA Sports FC, the filter changed a real-life player’s likeness so dramatically they became completely unrecognisable.

The future of game visuals – and who controls it

It is worth noting that DLSS-5 can genuinely improve visual quality in many games, enriching environments and bringing older character models to life.

Nvidia has also pushed back against critics, with chief executive Jensen Huang insisting DLSS-5 is not a filter and that developers retain control over how it is applied.

But the backlash reveals a real tension. Many players objected to Nvidia selecting a young female character and using AI to make her more conventionally attractive and sexualised. Many others objected to AI overriding the deliberate creative choices of game developers.

Both concerns push against the same force: tech companies’ drive to deploy AI as broadly as possible, and to define “better” visuals on their own terms.

Sian Tomkinson is a Media and Communication Scholar at Edith Cowan University.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

A brief history of mulled wine – from health tonic to festive treat

Source: Radio New Zealand

When frost sparkles in the morning and our breath is visible as we venture outside, thoughts turn to winter warming treats like mulled wine – a drink full of ingredients that have become synonymous with Christmas.

Mulled wine is made by adding spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace and nutmeg to sweetened red wine, which is then warmed gently. Across Europe and Scandinavia, it can be purchased in many pubs, bars and festive markets – while supermarket shelves groan with bottles of readymade mulled wines for you to heat at home.

There are many different English recipes out there, including some dating back to the 14th century – from a collection of manuscripts that later became known as The Forme of Cury. The beverage made by following this recipe would certainly have packed a punch, as it contains several spices from the ginger family including galangal, in addition to the more familiar ones.

Unsplash

And before wine was known as mulled, drinking wine flavoured with spices has a long history. There is a mention of drinking spiced wine in the biblical poem the Song of Solomon, which states: “I would give you spiced wine to drink.”

It is thought that spice-infused wine was introduced to Britain by the Romans. An older name for it was “hippocras”, although this was mainly taken as a health tonic – made from spice-infused red or white wine and taken hot or cold.

In The Merchant’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), the wealthy, elderly knight January takes “ypocras, clarre, and vernage / Of spices hote, to encrese his corrage” (hypocras, clary, and vernage / of spices hot to increase his courage). January sups these three types of spiced wine to boost his virility on his wedding night for his young bride, May.

Diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys also mentions taking “half-a-pint of mulled sack” – a sweetened Spanish wine – in an almost medicinal way to comfort himself in the middle of a working morning in March 1668, when things had been going wrong for him.

The name mulled wine comes from the Old English mulse – an archaic name for any drink made of honey mixed with water or wine, derived from the Latin word for honey (mel) and still used in modern Welsh as mêl. From mulse we get “musled”, which was used to describe anything that has been “mingled with honey”.

Before the growth of the global sugar trade, honey was the main way that food and drink was sweetened. Vin chaud, the French equivalent of mulled wine, is traditionally sweetened with honey. England imported spiced wine from Montpellier in large quantities from the 13th century, but only those of social status, like Chaucer’s knight January, would have been able to indulge in those days.

Warm sweet and spiced wine continued to be drunk for health and enjoyment throughout the centuries. But in the 18th century, mulled wine evolved again, as reflected in a recipe in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769) for a warm drink thickened with egg yolks:

Grate half a nutmeg into a pint of wine and sweeten to your taste with loaf sugar. Set it over the fire. When it boils, take it off to cool.

Beat the yolks of four eggs exceeding well, add to them a little cold wine, then mix them carefully with your hot wine a little at a time. Pour this backwards and forwards several times till it looks fine and bright.

Set it on the fire and heat a little at a time till it is quite hot and pretty thick, and pour it backwards and forwards several times.

Send it in chocolate cups and serve it up with dry toast, cut in long narrow pieces.

The result of this method is a frothy, velvety smooth confection, enjoyed with dipping toast or biscuits.

Our ancestors didn’t associate mulled wines with Christmas, so it seems likely that the pairing was popularised by Charles Dicken’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol – like so much of what we now regard as a traditional Christmas.

After Mr Scrooge has seen the error of his miserly ways, he says to Bob Cratchit: “We will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!” Smoking Bishop is a recipe for mulled wine that combines port in the wine and uses dried oranges for an added flavour note. The smoke refers to the steam rising from this hot drink.

So this year, as you cup your hands around the warm mug and inhale the fragrant steam coming off your mulled wine, think of the long history you are a part of.

Sara Read is a Lecturer in English, Loughborough University.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 4, 2026

Iranian media says US jet shot down, bounty offered for pilot

Source: Radio New Zealand

By AFP teams in Tehran, Jerusalem, Washington, Beirut, Dubai and Sanaa

Iran deployed troops and offered a bounty as it launched a hunt for a US pilot whose jet Iranian media said had been downed by the Islamic republic’s air defence systems Friday (all times local).

US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for military operations in the Middle East, did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment on the first such report in the war engulfing the region.

“Military forces have launched a search operation to find the American fighter pilot who was hit earlier today,” Iran’s Fars news agency said.

The report of the downed jet came as fresh strikes hit Israel, Iran and Gulf countries. Large blasts rocked northern Tehran Friday afternoon, an AFP journalist said. It was not immediately clear what was hit.

Earlier, Israel’s military reported a new missile salvo from Iran, activating its air defences.

Strikes by all sides have increasingly targeted economic and industrial sites, raising fears of wider disruption to global energy supplies and deepening the conflict’s impact beyond the battlefield.

The Iranian fire came as Trump said the US military “hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” on his Truth Social platform, after the United States struck Iran’s tallest bridge.

About 70 percent of Iran’s steel production capacity, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday, after Iran’s two largest steel plants earlier this week said they were forced out of action by several waves of US and Israeli air attacks.

Ex-FM urges peace deal

Tehran could “declare victory and make a deal that both ends this conflict and prevents the next one,” wrote Mohammad Javad Zarif, foreign minister from 2013 to 2021.

Iran has virtually blocked the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, where in peace time one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas passes through. As a result, fuel prices have skyrocketed worldwide.

Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned that in response to Trump’s threats to attack infrastructure, Iran would increase its own attacks on energy sites in the region.

A drone attack on a refinery owned by Kuwait’s national oil company on Friday sparked fires at several of its units, state media said.

Later, an Iranian attack damaged a power and desalination complex, Kuwait’s water and electricity ministry said.

In Abu Dhabi, a gas complex shut after a fire broke out, following an attack that resulted in “falling debris” upon interception, the government media office said.

Trump wants bigger defence budget

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Friday it had struck more than 3500 targets across Lebanon in the month since fighting with Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.

It added that it would attack two bridges in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region “in order to prevent the transfer of reinforcements and military equipment”.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday that 1345 people had been killed and 4040 wounded since the start of the war, including 1129 men, 91 women and 125 children.

The ministry said the toll also included 53 healthcare workers.

Hezbollah has so far not announced its losses.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon said a blast hit one of its positions and wounded three peacekeepers, the third such incident in a week.

A UNIFIL spokesperson said the origin of the explosion was unknown.

The war’s economic impact is rippling far beyond the Middle East, as energy and oil costs surge.

Analysts said Trump’s recent address to the nation failed to provide clarity on an exit strategy from the war.

Meanwhile, the White House on Friday sent a spending proposal to lawmakers calling for a massive hike to the US defence budget.

It remains to be seen what Congress will ultimately approve, but US media reported the $1.5 billion budget request — a 42 percent hike — would be the largest year-on-year increase in Pentagon spending since World War II.

As energy costs skyrocket worldwide, Egypt has ordered shops, restaurants and shopping malls to close from 9:00 pm on weekdays.

Dozens participated in a protest in the Pakistani city of Lahore, calling on the government to reverse fuel price hikes.

“The government, overnight, has dropped a ‘petrol bomb’ on its people,” Naveed Ahmed, a 39-year-old protestor, told AFP.

– AFP

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 3, 2026

Sex Pistols at 50: how punk’s most notorious band became part of the mainstream

Source: Radio New Zealand

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” John Lydon’s closing words before stalking off stage at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January 1978, concluding the Sex Pistols’ US tour, have echoed ever since.

They’re a bitter bookend to a fractious spell in the limelight. Barely three years had passed since the band’s first gig and less than two since they exploded into the national consciousness.

Lydon’s words marked an ending, but the start was almost as combustible. Fifty years ago, on March 30 1976, the Sex Pistols played a pivotal gig at London’s 100 Club. Photographer P.T. Madden recalled the small, but select, crowd and the sense of momentum:

This video is hosted on Youtube.

. It is not like any other gig I have ever been to. It has an atmosphere of expectation which is totally exciting. This means something and there is no one here.”

A venue and a moment

The Sex Pistols as they are about to be moved by a policeman as they sign a copy of their new recording contract with A & M Records outside Buckingham Palace. (From far left to right are John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Sid Vicious.)

Bettmann

The 100 Club, a basement venue on Oxford Street with a history stretching back to the 1940s, had already hosted generations of musical growth in jazz and rhythm and blues. In 1976 it became a focal point for a new, abrasive sensibility. Alongside key gigs at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall and Kensington’s Nashville Rooms, it helped crystallise what punk looked, sounded and felt like.

In September, the two-day 100 Club Punk Special brought together emerging acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash and The Damned, consolidating a scene that was coalescing around an aesthetic of nihilistic confrontation and musical minimalism. The Pistols were not alone in this but became its most visible face.

Their rise was swift. The band was signed to EMI by October 1976, only to be dropped within months amid controversy stoked by the band and their manager Malcom McLaren. A key flash-point was the furore surrounding an expletive-laden chat show interview with Bill Grundy.

Their debut single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, released the following month, was a blunt declaration of intent. A rapid sequence of label changes followed, culminating in the 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, anchored by the incendiary single ‘God Save the Queen’. It was banned by the BBC and independent radio stations during the Silver Jubilee.

The Pistols’ opening salvo flared brightly and briefly, its intensity bound up with the conditions that produced it.

A soundtrack for disaffection

The Sex Pistols performing in Amsterdam in January 1977. Left to right: Paul Cook, original bass player Glen Matlock, Johnny Rotten, and Steve Jones.

Creative Commons

The optimism of the 1960s had curdled. Economic decline, an oil price shock, rising inflation and industrial unrest led to the three-day week of 1974 (in which commercial electricity use was restricted to three consecutive days per week), presaging 1978-79’s “winter of discontent”.

The 1976 sterling crisis saw chancellor Denis Healey turn cap-in-hand to the International Monetary Fund for a loan to stabilise the UK economy. This underscored a sense of the post-war economic consensus running aground. Rising youth unemployment deepened a pervasive feeling of stagnation and exclusion.

The Sex Pistols became the most recognisable expression of this broader cultural mood: caustic, disillusioned and sceptical of authority. Their salience was amplified by media outrage, oscillating between fascination and moral panic. Contemporary reports of local authority venues banning punk acts reinforced the perception of a movement defined by exclusion and resistance.

The roots of this approach were not exclusively British. Across the Atlantic, bands like the Ramones had begun stripping rock music back to its raw essentials in the early 1970s. Clubs like New York’s CBGB saw a defiant, unpolished aesthetic take shape. The Pistols and their peers translated and intensified this within a distinctly British landscape.

Cultural theorist Dick Hebdige framed punk as “homology”: the different elements of a sub-culture – clothing, art, and music – resonating with one another. Torn clothing, safety pins and aggressive performance articulated a confrontational, knowingly chaotic stance. The Pistols did not just express disaffection, they gave it visible and audible form.

From rupture to routine

Revolutions often reproduce what they set out to overthrow. Pete Townshend – once a critic of the old order, later a “rock dinosaur” target of punk – described apparent change leaving underlying power structures intact: “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

The Pistols’ implosion seemed to confirm this pattern of established practices reasserting themselves. But what followed was less disappearance than transformation into a different kind of cultural object – not a unified movement, but a musical style absorbed into mainstream culture.

Photo taken in 1977 of the Sex Pistols, Britain’s punk rock band. (L to R) drummer Paul Cook, bass player Sid Vicious, singer Johnny Rotten, and guitar player Steve Jones.

AFP FILES

After Winterland, the band’s remnants were repurposed through a mixture of opportunism and myth-making. Sid Vicious’s notoriety was a factor. The Virgin-produced, McLaren-narrated film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle also offered a fictionalised, satirical account of their rise and fall, blurring the line between history and performance.

Thereafter, the Sex Pistols’ trajectory resembled that of many rock acts they had ostensibly sought to disrupt. Lawsuits, reunions and reissues followed. Lydon’s legal battles with McLaren, and later with bandmates underscored the tensions between artistic expression and commercial control. Reunion tours, documentaries such as The Filth and the Fury, and ongoing commemorations (like this) have all contributed to their canonisation.

What began as a rupture in popular music culture became incorporated into its institutional frameworks. The Pistols’ career has been endlessly revisited and repackaged.

Even institutions that once recoiled from punk have, over time, folded it into their own symbolic repertoire. In 2016, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight closed with the ‘God Save the Queen‘ in deadpan response to a Conservative MP’s call for the national anthem to mark Britain’s departure from the EU. What was once treated as cultural contagion became pressed into service as establishment punctuation.

But this should not obscure the force of the original moment. In 1976, the Sex Pistols did more than generate headlines. They captured a particular moment of social disaffection and cultural experimentation that remains emblematic of how music, style and social context aligned to produce something both fleeting and enduring.

If their later career followed familiar patterns, that raw, disruptive and unresolved moment continues to resonate – long after Lydon’s final, sardonic question at Winterland.

Adam Behr is reader in music, politics and society at Newcastle University.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

April 2, 2026

Unethical brain rot: why are millions watching AI fruits have affairs on TikTok?

Source: Radio New Zealand

If you’ve spent much time on TikTok recently, you may have noticed a strange new type of AI brain rot taking over: fruit dramas.

These AI-generated short dramas feature odd-looking anthropomorphic fruit characters engaging in a range of ethically problematic behaviours. Many storylines, for instance, are based around affairs, racist attitudes, and the sexual assault of women characters.

At face value, the videos come across as so bizarre and grotesque they can be hard to take seriously. That is until you realise they’re amassing hundreds of millions of views. One account called ai.cinema021, which has launched a parody series called Fruit Love Island, has more than 3 million followers.

AI GENERATED: At face value, the videos come across as so bizarre and grotesque they can be hard to take seriously.

Supplied

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This content is, at best, a water-guzzling affront to the art of animation and, at worst, actively helping to normalise racism and misogyny. So why does it have so many fans?

Tapping into the brain’s reward system

These videos exploit core features of human psychology. Combined with addictive platform features (such as infinite scroll), the result is an endless stream of content that keeps us engaged – even if the message is immoral, or simply ridiculous.

Short-form video feeds such as TikTok and Instagram reels operate on similar principles to those used in gambling systems. The human brain is highly sensitive to novelty and unpredictability, both of which are linked to dopamine signalling in reward learning.

When rewards are delivered unpredictably, behaviour becomes more persistent. This pattern, known as “variable reinforcement”, has long been shown to sustain repeated actions, even when rewards are inconsistent.

AI slop videos offer rapid visual novelty and unexpected emotional turns. You don’t know whether the next one will be absurd, funny, tragic, or strangely compelling.

The videos also compress big emotional experiences. A single clip may move from betrayal, to sadness, to revenge, to humour in seconds. This creates emotional volatility, which increases arousal and sustains attention.

Research shows emotionally charged content, especially when it is negative or surprising, is more likely than neutral material to get our attention.

The pull of things that feel ‘kinda wrong’

Many viewers describe a sense that these videos feel “off”. The characters are expressive, but often not fully coherent. The narratives resemble human drama, but lack internal logic.

This relates to the idea of the uncanny valley, where near-human representations produce discomfort. Importantly, these videos rarely become disturbing enough to trigger avoidance. Instead they sit in a middle zone. They are strange enough to provoke curiosity, but not uncomfortable enough to make you stop watching.

This creates cognitive tension. According to cognitive dissonance theory, people are motivated to resolve such inconsistencies. And the way to resolve tension in this case is to keep watching, in search of closure. The mind keeps asking: what is this and where is it going?

We’re also more likely to ignore the unethical messaging because of the format. The characters are highly synthetic. This makes the scenarios feel fictional – even when they reflect real social behaviours.

Research on moral disengagement shows people are more likely to relax ethical judgement when the harm appears abstract or indirect. Fruit videos with themes of betrayal, humiliation or assault can be consumed without the discomfort that would arise if real people were involved.

Influence through many minor interactions

Much like AI slop, social media algorithms don’t prioritise meaning or quality. They prioritise content that captures our attention.

Recommendation systems are driven by metrics such as “watch time”, “completion rate” and “interaction”. High engagement leads to greater visibility, which encourages the production of more similar content, creating a feedback loop.

From an AI governance perspective, these videos highlight an often overlooked risk. That is: generative systems don’t just produce content; they can gradually shape our behaviours – often without us realising. This aligns with broader concerns in AI ethics about behavioural influence and manipulative design working on a large scale.

Reclaiming your time and attention

Avoiding social media entirely is not realistic for many people. But small changes can reduce the pull of AI-generated brain rot.

One approach is to introduce a pause before scrolling to the next video. Even a brief interruption will weaken the reward loop in your brain, and make it easier to put your phone down. When you notice yourself thinking “this feels pointless” or “this is strange”, that’s the best time to stop. In some cases a digital detox might be helpful.

You can also retrain your algorithm. Quickly skip or select “not interested” on videos you don’t want to see – and replace passive scrolling with intentional viewing by seeking out specific content.

Finally, create friction. This might involve disabling automatic playback, or limiting your access to a feed, by disabling the app notification, or removing the app from your home screen.

AI fruit videos may seem trivial and absurd, but they reveal something important about the digital environment. As generative systems scale up, they will only get better at capturing and directing our attention. Understanding the psychology behind this is the first step to resisting it.

Niusha Shafiabady is Professor in Computational Intelligence, Australian Catholic University. Theresa Dicke Professor, Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Category: World News

I love crime heroines – but Kay Scarpetta leaves me cold

The Swedish concept of döstädning is about more than just getting rid of things

Iran searches for downed US jet crew, claims second plane hit

‘Valuable reward’

Blown-out windows

Ex-FM urges deal

Bridge destroyed In Lebanon

Todd Blanche takes over US Justice Department, where there’s no escaping the Epstein files shadow

Fighting Trump’s perceived political enemies

In the trenches with Trump

Iran searches for downed US jet crew, US media reports one rescued

Blown-out windows

Ex-FM urges peace deal

Trump wants bigger defence budget

Nvidia’s new AI tool is giving female game characters a makeover – and gamers are pushing back

A brief history of mulled wine – from health tonic to festive treat

Ditching the traditional Christmas tree

Iranian media says US jet shot down, bounty offered for pilot

Ex-FM urges peace deal

Trump wants bigger defence budget

Sex Pistols at 50: how punk’s most notorious band became part of the mainstream

Unethical brain rot: why are millions watching AI fruits have affairs on TikTok?