Non-Americans have been sharing their biggest ‘WTF’ moments when they first visited the US and it’s a proper eye-opener. It all began when Redditor AppleberryJames asked this. ‘Europeans who’ve visited the US, what made you go “WTF”?’ And it prompted no end of replies – more than 33,000 of them – and we’ve read them […] The post Visitors to America shared the biggest ‘WTFs’ when they went to the US for the first time – 27 stateside eye-openers appeared first on The Poke .

• The Poke
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 33 dakika

It is understood an investigation will look at whether Paul Bean of Durham council breached civil service code A local councillor for Reform UK who works for the Home Office processing asylum and immigration claims has been suspended from his job while an investigation is carried out, the Guardian has learned. Paul Bean , who serves as a councillor for Crook ward at Durham county council, declared his day job as a civil servant at the Home Office in his register of interests. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 33 dakika

Luis Guzmán at the premiere of Wednesday season two Luis Guzmán was not exactly channeling the smooth-talking Gomez Addams when asked about working with Jennifer Lopez . The stars of the Netflix hit Wednesday appeared on Monday’s episode of Hot Ones Versus, in which each cast member takes turns asking their co-stars probing questions, and if they mess up, they have to consume an incredibly spicy chicken wing. Nearly 10 minutes into the episode, Luis was asked to describe some of the A-list celebrities he’s worked with throughout his impressive 40-year acting career in just one word. The first up was Adam Sandler, who worked with Luis in 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love and 2003’s Anger Management, and earned the moniker “amazing”. Next up was Catherine Zeta-Jones, who currently plays Gomez’s wife, Morticia Addams, in Wednesday. “Belíssima,” Luis said of the Welsh performer, with whom he previously appeared in Traffic. Then, he was asked about Jennifer Lopez, who worked with him in 1998’s Out Of Sight. “OK,” Luis smirked — causing many of his co-stars’ jaws to drop. Luis Guzmán's take on working with Jennifer Lopez, center, left his co-star Joy Sunday, right, floored in a recent "Hot Ones" episode. The same year Jen starred in Out Of Sight, she also shared her own unfiltered opinions about other celebrities in an interview with Movieline . “I swear to God, I don’t remember anything she was in,” she said of Gwyneth Paltrow , who would go on to win Best Actress the next year at the Oscars. In the same interview, J-Lo called Cameron Diaz a “lucky model”, claimed she was “never a big fan” of Winona Ryder, though she praised both women’s looks, and she said that she and Salma Hayek were “in two different realms”. When Vanity Fair confronted Lopez in 2011 about trash-talking other actors to Movieline, the Hustlers star said she had been “misquoted”. “I was so misquoted and so taken out of context, and it’s a sore subject for me,” she insisted. “I don’t like to hurt anybody. I don’t like to hurt their feelings. I like to joke, so I do that sometimes. “What they wrote in that article hurt people. [After reading it,] I just sat down and cried for hours.” Watch Luis Guzmán’s evaluation of his past co-stars below:

• The Huffington Post
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 34 dakika

The Bermuda Triangle has been the site of shipwrecks, plane crashes, and paranormal sightings for over 500 years - but now a scientist claims to have finally solved the mystery

• Birmingham Live
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 35 dakika

A Dirty Soul headlines a great line-up of local bands in aid of the Old Library Campaign… Be there!

• Newbury Today
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 36 dakika

It's perfect for curious, bug-obsessed kiddos and "so much better than smushing." View Entire Post ›

• BuzzFeed News
• 2 gün, 3 saat, 38 dakika

Fans of the singer have been swift to express their excitement over the engagement and shoppers can emulate her ring-style with these dazzling options

• The Mirror
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

​In this week’s newsletter: T​he platform has shaped how music is consumed ​a​nd how it is valued. But recent controversies suggest the bargain may no longer feel worth it At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood. A noticeable trickle, like a leak from the upstairs bathroom dribbling down the living room wall, but nothing existential yet . The five notable bands who have left Spotify in the past month – shoegazers Hotline TNT last week , joining Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – are well liked in indie circles, but aren’t the sorts to rack up billions of listens. Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn’t really supposed to happen any more. Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity. But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model. That realisation was best summed up by the Black Keys, a legitimately big rock band at the time of Spotify’s emergence who refused to put the albums they released around then – 2011’s El Camino and 2014’s Turn Blue – on the platform. They relented two years later and say now that “taking a stand definitely hurt us in the long run”. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

Fears of disease as more than 1,400 villages under water after three large rivers overflow their banks Iman Salim is used to seeing flood waters in the field of lush lilypads next to her home in the village of Kamanwala. But nothing prepared her for this week, when torrential monsoon rains that broke a 49-year record lashed the area, flooding her house with water that rose above her chest. “The whole house has drowned. The water left nothing,” the 24-year-old said. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

From Jesus in the wilderness and Moses at Mount Sinai to Claude, DeepSeek and Llama, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 Whose only non-US concerts were three dates in Canada in 1957? 2 What country was home to the Western Desert art movement? 3 Which brother and sister have both played football for England? 4 Mom & Me & Mom is the seventh and final volume of whose autobiography? 5 Lyndhurst is known as the “capital” of which national park? 6 Which banker recently left the Daily Telegraph after 33 years? 7 What Ford model is the UK’s bestselling current car? 8 What name is shared by a Hebridean island and a French department? What links: 9 Cleopatra and Mark Antony; Mary Stuart and Lord Darnley; Ygritte and Jon Snow; Carol Ferris and Hal Jordan? 10 Caracas; Hanoi; Port Vila? 11 Rain causing a flood; Moses’ visits to Mount Sinai; Jesus in the wilderness? 12 Bowman’s capsule; glomerulus; loop of Henle? 13 First (20.00-24.00); morning (04.00-08.00); first dog (16.00-18.00)? 14 Claude; DeepSeek; Gemini, Grok; Llama; Magistral; Sora? 15 Equestrian statue of Louis XV; guillotine; obelisk and two fountains? Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

When Kathleen Richards rented a room at 25 Cromwell Street, she quickly realised the couple who owned it had a dark side. But even after their arrest, there was something about her 15 months at the house that she could never tell anyone – until now Kathleen Richards knows how lucky she is to be alive. In 1979, she woke up in bed to find the serial killer Fred West on top of her. It was by no means the first time West had assaulted the 17-year-old, but it was the last. This time, she managed to escape from the room she was renting at 25 Cromwell Street, perhaps Britain’s most notorious address, where Fred and Rose West raped, tortured and murdered so many girls and young women. Fred West took his own life in January 1995 while on remand, charged with 12 murders. Rose West was convicted of 10 murders later that year and is serving a whole-life sentence . In her own way, Richards has also been serving a life sentence. Today, she is a youthful, likable and traumatised 65-year-old. How could she not be damaged by all she experienced? Although she gave vital evidence at Rose West’s trial that helped get her convicted, she never told the police what Fred had subjected her to. Nor did she tell her nearest and dearest. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how to. Now, almost half a century later, she has written a memoir, Under Their Roof, that does so much more than chronicle her time living with the Wests. It’s a desperately sad insight into what makes someone vulnerable to abusers, and why victims are often abused multiple times by different people. But ultimately, this is a book about the triumph – however painful and even fluky – of good over evil. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

The group’s campaigning single Free Satpal Ram, about a south Asian man jailed for murder after an alleged racist attack, led me to become an activist – with their lead singer as my mentor It wasn’t New Labour, my politics A-level or the Tipp-Exed Woody Guthrie slogan “this machine kills fascists” on my friend Simon’s bag that set me on the path to activism. It was a CD single I found in a west London record shop, which I only picked up because it was by a bunch of brown guys. It was the summer of 1998, and I was 17 years old and browsing records in the Harrow Virgin Megastore, when I came across Free Satpal Ram by jungle-punk-rap band Asian Dub Foundation – a buzzing, brilliant, ramshackle protest song about a south Asian man who had been sent to jail after defending himself in an alleged racist attack in 1986. While at an Indian restaurant, Satpal Ram was stabbed with a broken bottle, and retaliated by stabbing his attacker with a penknife; the man later died. Ram was convicted of murder the following year. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

Anyone who has met refugees sees the ordinariness of their hopes and dreams. If we reject their humanity, how can we be proud of ourselves? No one in their right mind thinks accommodating asylum seekers in hotels is a good idea. No one in their right mind thinks we should just live with undocumented, life-threatening migration routes into the UK. And no one in their right mind thinks the experiences endured by most migrants could be a rational choice for anyone. Forget for a moment the ludicrous, inflammatory posturing of many who should know better; we ought to be able to begin from these shared acknowledgments. Using hotels for housing vulnerable migrants is the equivalent of what prison reform campaigners have long called warehousing – make sure a problematic group is simply corralled somewhere more or less secure, and hope their issues will somehow sort themselves out. The chaos and under-resourcing of the legal processes involved and the shocking levels of delay mean that the conditions are created for maximal insecurity and rootlessness – at worst, resentment and criminality. And we have to face the fact that, so long as safe and legal routes for asylum seekers are inadequate, we are colluding in the flourishing industry of lethal and illegal systems whose effect is to create communities for whose safety and integration government is unable to plan, and who are trapped in a situation both dehumanising for them and challenging for localities where they are placed. Rowan Williams is a former archbishop of Canterbury Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

A handful of returning locals and adventurous tourists are breathing new life into Nyksund, a remote coastal outpost in Norway’s wild northwest We land on a white sand beach under jagged black mountains. A sea eagle, surprised to see humans, flaps away over the only house with a roof on it – the rest are in ruins. “Hundreds of people used to live here,” says Vidar. “In the days when you had to sail or row, it was important to be near the fishing grounds. Now there’s just one summer cabin.” Jumping out of the boat, we walk along the beach. My daughter, Maddy, points out some animal tracks. “The fresh marks are wild reindeer,” says Vidar. “The older ones could be moose – they come along here too.” Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

NHS vouchers and employer subsidies are available for some, while online retailers offer great value for money At the age of 39, I’ve been told I should start wearing glasses when working or driving. On finding out, I suddenly faced a world of decisions – and they all involved a cost. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika

Choice of finish can cause headaches down the road, with a huge difference in repair costs and resale value Black means safety, blue is calming and red equals strength – the colour you pick for your new car is supposed to be a reflection of who you are . But it could cost you more than you expect. UK “75” number plates are being rolled out from Monday and “new reg day” is traditionally a busy time for car dealers. Depending on the make and model you are buying, picking a blue paint job rather than red or a matt instead of a metallic finish could add thousands to the cost of a new vehicle. Continue reading...

• The Guardian
• 1 gün, 23 saat, 38 dakika