Seth Meyers to Trump: ‘How hard is it to denounce bomb threats against schools?’

Late-night hosts talk Trump’s refusal to back down from false stories about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and JD Vance admitting to making up stories.Back from the Emmys in Los Angeles, Seth Meyers blasted Donald Trump for his refusal to condemn bomb threats in schools in Springfield, Ohio, after the ex-president falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in the town were eating residents’ pets. “How hard is it to denounce bomb threats against schools?” the Late Night host fumed.The story has been debunked by local officials and the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine. The mayor of Springfield, a Republican, blamed “all these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it”

Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll obituary

Invited to appear on Desert Island Discs in October 1991, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who has died aged 85, spoke with the cautious air of one picking her way across ice. Her choices of music were mostly the uninflammatory ones of a woman of culture – a Bach partita, a Beethoven piano sonata – as was that of her non-Bible book (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets). When the presenter, Sue Lawley, finally addressed the elephant in the room – the near civil war that had raged at the Victoria & Albert Museum following Esteve-Coll’s appointment as its director four years earlier – she deftly defused the question by broadening it.“The whole period was very difficult indeed for everybody within the museum,” Esteve-Coll allowed. Pressed as to how she herself had survived attacks that were both personal and vicious, she said: “I have a group of extremely supportive close friends, I have a small, tight, close family, and they closed ranks

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants: ‘A complete lie that he knows is a lie’

With other late-night hosts on holiday after the Emmys, Jimmy Kimmel talks Donald Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants and posting on Truth Social that he hates Taylor Swift.Jimmy Kimmel returned to his ABC stage the night after the Emmys, also known as “the old Tinseltown reach-around”, he quipped. The annual television awards were “not a good night” for Kimmel’s show, as he joked that his obvious victory in variety series was stolen by The Daily Show.“A few months ago, Jon Stewart wasn’t even the host of the Daily Show! They swapped him in illegally,” he continued with the bit. “My own network, ABC, rigged it against me

‘Flipped universe’ Ladies Lounge exhibit intended to expose gender inequality, Mona’s lawyer tells court

Men and women may be recognised as equal under Australian law, but women still suffer unequal opportunity on a daily basis, a lawyer for Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has told a court.Mona is appealing a tribunal decision that found the museum had engaged in gender discrimination by denying men entry to its Ladies Lounge installation, created by the artist Kirsha Kaechele, who is also the wife of the museum’s owner, David Walsh.The installation has been closed since Tasmania’s civil and administrative tribunal (Tascat) ordered in April that Mona must start admitting men after the New South Wales man Jason Lau complained when he wasn’t allowed in.The gallery’s lawyer Catherine Scott told the supreme court the lounge was designed to promote equal opportunity and give men an experience of ongoing discrimination.Women in Australia in 2024 were less valued and less powerful than men, less safe at home from gendered violence and paid less, she said

Trent Dalton’s Love Stories review – a stage adaptation that grabs you by the heart

Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), BrisbaneFrom the team that brought Boy Swallows Universe to the theatre comes a new work that tells a city’s worth of stories – and packs an emotional punchFor two months during the pandemic, the Australian author Trent Dalton lugged a sky blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter to a busy Brisbane street corner and invited strangers to tell him a love story. A sentimental, slightly absurd stunt – and one that could have gone very wrong. But Dalton, ever the charmer, has a way of finding the extraordinary in the everyday.The result was Love Stories, a book brimming with intimate confessions, grand gestures and all the messy business of being human. Now, in a stage adaptation for Queensland Performing Arts Centre, adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong, those stories don’t just leap from the page – they explode with theatrical spectacle

Intrigue, desire … and awful landlords: why queer authors are suddenly writing about houses

‘I think it’s an investigation of belonging – one that we didn’t have a literal space for before.”I’m on the phone with the novelist Yael van der Wouden, conferring with her about a recent trend in LGBTQ+ writing: a preoccupation with houses. I figured she would be a good person to talk to because her new novel The Safekeep centres on a lonely old house in the Dutch countryside that suddenly, one summer, is flooded with queer desire and intrigue. The problem is that the Booker-shortlisted author is talking to me in transit, touring Europe, at this moment on a train rattling across northern Italy. Reader, witness the irony of our discussing ideas of rootedness and belonging as Van der Wouden keeps getting ousted from her seat