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      Amid air raids and electricity shortages, a Ukrainian artist paints the Russian invasion

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone

    To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.

    Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of the country on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”

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      Opening of Europe’s longest hyperloop track rekindles hype over futuristic trains

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    Operators hope Dutch test track will help prove feasibility of high-speed tube transport system

    The longest hyperloop test track in Europe has opened, raising faint hopes once more that the maglev meets vacuum tube transport technology could be the future.

    Operators said the facility would help prove the hyperloop’s feasibility, saying it could allow a 10,000km (6,200-mile) network of high-speed tubes to be in place around the continent by 2050.

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      The Origin of Evil review – classy comedy-thriller with shades of Succession and Knives Out

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024 • 1 minute

    Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy stars as a scheming factory worker with designs on a mega-rich fortune in this classy feast of backstabbing, double cross and venal greed

    Succession meets Knives Out in this comedy-thriller directed by Sébastien Marnier in what is an extremely French comic style: tongue-in-cheek, a little frothy, tiptoeing close to camp. It stars Call My Agent’s brilliant Laure Calamy as a scheming factory worker who wheedles her way into a dysfunctional mega-rich family. Calamy is often cast as likable, relatable women but here she does a very convincing Isabelle Huppert (circa her Claude Chabrol years); there’s something a bit off about her character from the start, possibly even unhinged.

    Calamy is Stéphane – at least that’s what she calls herself. Bored of her job on the production line at a fish factory, and broke, out of the blue she calls her father, a self-made hotel and restaurant tycoon. (They’ve never met; she is the result of one of his many affairs.) This is Serge (Jacques Weber), an ageing lion of a man, with a mane of white hair, frail after a stroke but still dangerous. Some of the funniest scenes are at his villa, garishly filled with taxidermy and ghastly furniture. Serge introduces Stéphane to his wife Louise (Dominique Blanc), a frivolous compulsive shopper with a bitchy streak, and their glossy adult daughter George (Doria Tillier), who drops her mask of impassive disdain to shoot Stéphane dagger stares. In the double crossing and backstabbing that follows, no one is blameless. Serge is a monster of Logan Roy proportions. George is trying to seize control of the family business, and have her dad declared incompetent by a judge.

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      Several killed in coach crash near Leipzig, say German police

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    Five reported killed and numerous others injured after FlixBus carrying 55 people overturned on A9 motorway

    Multiple people were killed and more injured in a coach crash on a motorway near the eastern German city of Leipzig on Wednesday, police said.

    “Several people were fatally injured in the serious accident on the A9 motorway. There are numerous casualties,” said Saxony police in a statement on X.

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      Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia launches fresh drone attack on Ukraine

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024 • 2 minutes

    Head of Ukrainian air force says they were able to shoot down 10 out of 13 drones launched overnight by Moscow’s forces

    The Crocus City Hall attackers attempted to flee to Belarus, according to Alexander Lukashenko .

    The Belarus president’s comments, reported by Belarus news agency Belta, undermine Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine was involved in the attack and the terrorists tried to flee there.

    Ukraine’s navy claims it has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war. Dmytro Pletenchuk from the navy said the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky , which was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was Ukrainian before being captured by Russia in 2014.

    Pletenchuk previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship. He said the weekend attack, using Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot . “Our ultimate goal is complete absence of military ships of the so-called Russian Federation in the Azov and Black Sea regions,” Pletenchuk said.

    Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy , has replaced the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, Oleksiy Danilov, with Oleksandr Lytvynenko, 51, head of the foreign intelligence service . Danilov had been secretary of the council since October 2019. Zelenskiy said Danilov was being transferred to new duties, with details to be made public later. “The strengthening of Ukraine and the renewal of our state system in all sectors will continue.”

    Ukraine has staged further air attacks on Belgorod, just over the border inside Russia . The regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported damage on the ground and claimed air defence engaged 18 incoming targets.

    Nato is considering shooting down Russian missiles that stray too close to its borders, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Andrzej Szejna , has told Polish media outlet RMF24 . “[Russia] knew that if the missile moved further into Poland, it would be shot down. There would be a counterattack.” Poland’s armed forces said Russia violated Poland’s airspace on Sunday morning with a cruise missile launched at targets in western Ukraine.

    And away from the war there was some good news for Ukraine on the football pitch with their team qualifying for Euro 2024 following a 2-1 defeat of Iceland at a match played at Poland’s Wroclaw stadium on Tuesday night. As Jonathan Liew writes in our match report, for the thousands of Ukrainian fans who witnessed them qualifying for their first major tournament since the start of the conflict:

    In times like these even to shout the name of Ukraine is to partake in a kind of resistance.

    You can read his full report here .

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      The Zone of Interest is a portrait of guilt. No wonder it has divided opinion in Germany | Fatma Aydemir

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024 • 1 minute

    Most Germans insist their ancestors weren’t Nazis. Jonathan Glazer’s film pries away at the cracks in this narrative

    There is something unsettling about sitting in a German theatre laughing at Nazis. How unsettling depends on the type of humour that prompts the laughter. Is it meant to set the audience apart from the stage action, or does the laughter stem from the discomfort of proximity? When I saw the satire Nachtland staged recently at Berlin’s prestigious Schaubühne (a production also runs in an English translation at the Young Vic in London until 20 April), I perceived the ripples of laughter filling the room as a sort of embarrassed self-awareness. Like a tense moment of getting caught – a feeling that every storyteller ultimately longs to evoke.

    In the play, which has a present-day setting, two siblings find a painting signed by “A. Hitler” in their dead father’s house. Once they realise that the kitschy artwork is worth more than €100,000 if they can credibly authenticate the artist as Hitler, the siblings start recasting their entire family history in a different light. While the previous narrative had insisted that “our family had nothing to do with the Nazis” (the dominant account in most German households), now suddenly the late grandmother is not only found to be a comitted follower of Nazi ideology, but to have had a love affair with Hitler’s secretary. As the new family history pragmatically, and profitably, unfolds, it becomes much more realistic, ironically, than the hitherto official version.

    Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based Guardian Europe columnist

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      ‘Pushed to the limit’: the tiny Greek island in people smugglers’ sights

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    Fears of a new migration route grow as more than 800 people land on Gavdos, population fewer than 70, in a few months

    Even by the standards of small Greek islands, Gavdos is tiny. In a population of fewer than 70 people, there are just two families with four children. The rest “are all old people mostly living alone”, its mayor, Lilian Stefanaki, explains.

    It is a micro-world that in the depths of winter is served by a single school, a bakery, two mini-markets and four kafeneia cum tavernas. The remote island – separated from the coast of Crete by frequently unpredictable waters in the Libyan Sea – is watched over by Efsevios Daskalakis, who for much of the year is its sole police officer.

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      ‘People don’t believe they can win’: apathy abounds ahead of Istanbul’s mayoral election

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    Ekrem Imamoğlu’s 2019 victory was a big moment for Turkey’s opposition – but five turbulent years as Erdoğan’s enemy have taken their toll

    On the banks of Istanbul’s Golden Horn, the Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu, rallied a crowd for his re-election campaign as banners advertising his opponent flapped in the breeze on a nearby bridge.

    “We brought prosperity to Istanbul,” he proclaimed, drawing cautious applause.

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      Ukraine war briefing: ‘Third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sunk or crippled’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 March, 2024

    Poland warns Russian missiles coming too close may be shot down; how Ukraine has ramped up making its own weapons. What we know on day 763

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