Mubeen Blogs

The script is thick with jokes, Simon Bird and co are a joy to behold and scenes just zip along. This take on an ultra-conservative church is reinvigorating old-school comedy How do you make the old-school sitcom – with its improbable plotlines, cartoonish characters and gimmicky setting – feel fresh and relevant in 21st-century Britain? Apparently, the answer is to shun the modern world altogether. Following the devout Lewis family, Everyone Else Burns pitches up in a Manchester-based evangelical church (and doomsday cult) where misogyny, homophobia and a shockingly dated sense of community are all alive and well. It’s deliberately unrelatable material presented in doggedly artificial, stupid hairdo-heavy style. As a contemporary comedy it shouldn’t work, but – by God – it really does. The brilliance of Everyone Else Burns – now returning for a second series – is partly the result of a script thick with quirky jokes, but mainly down to a cast who are simply a joy to behold. As patho

Rifle association workers wrote letter warning that inaction against Doug Hamlin will ‘destroy’ NRA’s comeback chances The board of the National Rifle Association ( NRA ) is facing pressure to suspend the gun rights group’s chief executive Douglas Hamlin following revelations that Hamlin was involved in the sadistic murder of a cat . The news broke as Donald Trump cancelled a planned appearance with Hamlin next week in Savannah, Georgia, where the Republican nominee for president was meant to give a keynote address to an NRA convention . Organizers said Trump had a scheduling conflict. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/OG8LUVh

Goal seems to be for people ‘to lose confidence in the system’, says head of industry body after devices found in Birmingham and Leipzig If Russia is proved to be behind an incendiary device plot that caused fires at two parcels warehouses in July, it will be evidence that Moscow is aiming to disrupt western confidence, an expert has said. The dangerous packages, which caught light at DHL sites in Birmingham and Leipzig, are not thought to have been sophisticated but in both cases appear to have evaded security checks . German authorities warned this week that a plane could have been downed if the devices, which were both sent by air, had ignited in flight. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/HGS6ZPU

With its futuristic panels, airy tunnels and elegantly unified design, the 73-mile addition to the tube is a worthy winner of the prestigious Stirling prize – and puts the rest of the creaking, sooty network to shame With the longest platforms, the biggest tunnels and the fastest trains on the entire London underground, the Elizabeth line boasts a dizzying list of superlatives, carrying more people a day than any other train line in the country. It is now deemed to have the best design, too – being named as the winner of the 2024 RIBA Stirling prize for the finest architecture in the UK. The competition was stiff : from the National Portrait Gallery in London to the renovation of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, from a Dorset dairy farm conversion to a street of social housing in Hackney and the 67-acre regeneration of King’s Cross. The Lizzie line is a worthy winner, providing a dazzling demonstration that, for all chaos surrounding HS2 , Britain is still capable of pulling off ga

Highway patrol says carpool lanes are for ridesharing for living humans, not lifeless bony impostors Drivers looking to beat California’s endless traffic can use designated carpool lanes, provided they have others in their car. But there’s one pesky requirement: those other people have to be alive. That was not the case for a driver stopped this weekend near San Jose for using a fake companion , police say. Riding in the passenger seat was a plastic skeleton. In an apparent effort to add to the illusion, the skeleton was wearing a mask with a giant mouth, reminiscent of the Scream films. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/7mHpoL2

London film festival Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie form the unlikely trio who doggedly, quietly and courageously made the discovery that would change lives around the world There is sympathy, warmth and directness – though perhaps not much in the way of explicit joy – in this intensely English true story that made headlines and changed lives around the world. Screenwriters Jack Thorne, Emma Gordon and Rachel Mason, and director Ben Taylor, dramatise the heartache and strain and triumph that led to the first ever birth of what the press with a mixture of hostility and awe called “a test-tube baby” – that is, a baby conceived through in vitro fertilisation – on 25 July 1978: a little girl called Louise Brown (middle name Joy). Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/XZIenWY

In often-combative conversation with Bloomberg editor in Chicago, Trump says ‘tariff’ is his favorite word Donald Trump doubled down on his promise to levy tariffs on all imports in a bid to boost American manufacturing, a proposal that economists say would probably mean higher prices for consumers while angering US allies. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariffs’,” Trump said in an often-combative conversation with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday. “It’s my favorite word.” Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/HytNFxn