politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: The Guardian

Saturday, 30 April 2022

The Guardian

Colorado inmate becomes first person in US to test positive for bird flu
Homes ‘completely blown away’ as tornado rips through Kansas
Jupiter and Venus will seem to nearly collide in rare celestial spectacle
The price of free speech: why Elon Musk’s $44bn vision for Twitter could fall apart
Blind date: ‘I wish I hadn’t gone into so much detail about my star sign chart’
Arcade Fire: ‘America is rotten, but there are beautiful things about it’
Ian Fleming’s lost James Bond screenplay reveals a very different 007
What links Julia Fox and Kanye West to a notorious collection of 90s clothes?
Olivia Williams: ‘I have unattractive knees. They have taken offence at my scathing remarks and decided to stop functioning’
Original Observer Photography

Colorado inmate becomes first person in US to test positive for bird flu

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 06:32 AM PDT

Infection comes amid worst outbreak of the virus in seven years but CDC says health risk to general public remains low

An inmate in Colorado has become the first human in the US to test positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu, amid the worst outbreak of the virus in seven years and a cull of millions of poultry in dozens of states.

The unnamed prisoner contracted the infection during a work release assignment at a farm in Montrose county where workers were euthanising an infected flock, the Colorado department of public health and environment said.

Homes ‘completely blown away’ as tornado rips through Kansas

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 04:30 AM PDT

Thousands are without power after a suspected twister tore through parts of the state on Friday evening

A suspected tornado that barrelled through parts of Kansas damaged multiple buildings, injured several people and left more than 6,500 people without power, officials said.

Officials said the suspected twister moved though parts of south-east Wichita and Andover on Friday evening. Andover fire chief, Chad Russell, said during a news conference on Saturday morning that 50 to 100 buildings were damaged in Sedgwick County, though it was not immediately known how many buildings were damaged in Andover.

Jupiter and Venus will seem to nearly collide in rare celestial spectacle

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 03:55 AM PDT

Stargazers will have to wait years for repeat performance with four planets also appearing in straight line

Jupiter and Venus, two of the solar system's brightest planets, will appear to almost touch in a rare celestial spectacle this weekend.

Although in reality they will be millions of miles apart, for stargazers on Earth they will appear to be close enough to almost collide in a planetary conjunction that occurs once a year.

The price of free speech: why Elon Musk’s $44bn vision for Twitter could fall apart

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 06:00 AM PDT

The controversial billionaire may find that buying the platform exposes him to a whole new world of legal problems

Contained within 95 pages of dense legal jargon, the warning from Twitter to Elon Musk was clear: don't use your considerable power on the social media platform to attack the company.

The world's richest man and owner-in-waiting of Twitter signed an agreement for the planned $44bn (£35bn) takeover last week confirming that he could tweet about the deal so long as "such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives".

Blind date: ‘I wish I hadn’t gone into so much detail about my star sign chart’

Posted: 29 Apr 2022 10:00 PM PDT

Josie, 28, civil servant, meets Ruth, 26, community development lead

Josie on Ruth

What were you hoping for?
Anything even marginally better than the dating apps. Good food and company would be a great bonus.

Arcade Fire: ‘America is rotten, but there are beautiful things about it’

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:00 AM PDT

After the high-concept hijinks around their last record turned off fans, the indie troubadours have gone back to basics with a rousing new album about Trump and togetherness

Listen to an audio version of this article

Mid-morning in New Orleans, and outside an Uptown coffee shop, Win Butler is talking of life in his adopted city – the basketball, brass bands, and the poisonous caterpillars of the buck moth that, in late spring, fall from the city's trees on to unsuspecting passersby beneath. He surveys the mighty oaks across the street, broad-branched and strung with moss. "Trees run this city," Butler says. "They've definitely seen some shit, those trees."

With his wife, Régine Chassagne, Butler is best known for fronting Arcade Fire. The band formed in Montreal at the turn of the millennium, quickly gained a reputation as one of the world's finest live acts, and over the course of five albums became indie music aristocracy. They were anointed by Davids Bowie and Byrne; they won a Grammy, a Juno and a Brit; they played Obama's inauguration; and frequently used their platform for political activism, promoting healthcare nonprofits, indigenous protesters and a number of Haitian charities (Chassagne is of Haitian descent). More recently, the band raised $100,000 for the Ukraine Relief Fund by playing a series of small club shows across the US, including cult New York venue the Bowery ballroom.

Ian Fleming’s lost James Bond screenplay reveals a very different 007

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:00 AM PDT

With no Moneypenny and no M, a previously unpublished script reveals the author's original ideas for Moonraker

In the action-packed film Moonraker, James Bond escapes from Jaws, the metal-toothed villain, on a hang-glider that ejects from a speedboat just as he drives over the precipice of a waterfall. It is one of numerous outlandish scenes in the film that Ian Fleming never wrote in his original 007 novel. And it could not be more different to the author's own version of the film, according to a previously unpublished script.

In 1956, a year after the Moonraker novel was published, Fleming wrote his own 150-page film treatment with a plot that is as serious as the 1979 film is lightweight, despite Roger Moore's charm as the fictional spy.

What links Julia Fox and Kanye West to a notorious collection of 90s clothes?

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:00 AM PDT

This rabbit hole leads from Manhattan to Chicago, following Chloë Sevigny, Sonic Youth and the late Virgil Abloh

Julia Fox broke big in late 2019 with the intense Uncut Gems (5 stars!). In the actor's telling, she was writer/director Josh Safdie's muse, and her pronunciation of the film title comes with a rather looser use of vowels and consonants ("Awncuht Jahms"). A role in Steven Soderbergh's enjoyable No Sudden Move followed but mainly she has become a permanent, if confusing, fixture in memes and minds.

Olivia Williams: ‘I have unattractive knees. They have taken offence at my scathing remarks and decided to stop functioning’

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 01:30 AM PDT

The actor on early ambitions in tractor driving, wardrobe mishaps and the body parts taking revenge

Born in London, Olivia Williams, 53, studied at Cambridge University and Bristol Old Vic Theatre school before joining the RSC. Her movies include The Postman, The Sixth Sense, Rushmore and The Father, and her TV work includes Friends, the British remake of Call My Agent! and The Crown. She is in Marys Seacole at the Donmar Warehouse in London until 4 June. She has two daughters with her husband, the actor Rhashan Stone, and lives in London.

When were you happiest?
People are often traumatised by the sleeplessness in the first years of their children's lives, but I was insanely happy to be married and have two children. The only dark cloud was how much we were loathed for having babies who slept through the night.

Original Observer Photography

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 03:00 AM PDT

From a Rhode Island Beach to the Parisian streets – the best original photographs from the Observer commissioned in April 2022