Comments signal president prepared to use dispute to push UK to raise defence spending and Nato contributions

Donald Trump has suggested he is reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, in a move likely to strain the “special relationship” between Washington and London.

“I always review every position – that’s just one of many,” the US president told reporters in the White House, in response to a question about whether he was reviewing the US’s position over the South Atlantic islands, an archipelago whose status has long been disputed by Argentina, which claims sovereignty.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

Plus, a conviction in the Tupac Shakur murder trial.

© Al Drago/The New York Times

Beckett’s masterpiece is given a postmodern cinema slant, with characters in different locations, music and humour in a free and fanciful interpretation

Remember remixes? Where you take a song and swap out parts of it with new or pre-existing material, changing it just enough to be still recognisable? Argentinean director Alejo Moguillansky applies this quintessentially postmodern aesthetic to film with a funky cinematic remix, or even series of remixes, of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie, AKA Endgame. The result feels a little retro and possibly a bit too pleased with its own cleverness, and the spoonerist title is juvenile. But in the end this really achieves something with both the source material and the remix that’s fresh, pleasingly provocative, and at times moving.

Beckett’s 1957 absurdist masterwork has just four characters on stage throughout, two of whom do most of the talking: cantankerous blind, disabled Hamm banters with his servant/slave Clov, while Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, live in dustbins upstage and talk rather less. There’s an air of apocalyptic doom, much talk of drugs, food and, above all, time running out.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image