The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump’s first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. “A lot of makeup, a lot of hair,” she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and “heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches”, although she didn’t have an Ivana-esque wardrobe – “Am I gen Z or a millennial?” asks the 28-year-old. Either way, “We wear a lot of baggy clothes”, so she chose her most skintight outfit.

She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, “about people growing up in post-communist countries – because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria – which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories.”

Ivana had been a competitive skier, with a place on the national junior team that allowed her to compete outside communist Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. By the mid-90s, when Bakalova was born, Bulgaria was no longer a socialist republic but, for most people, travel outside the country was still rare. As a child, Bakalova, a competitive singer, got to travel to competitions all around Europe. It opened her eyes and instilled a sense of independence.

This is Bakalova’s highest profile role since her big break in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2020 mockumentary sequel about the Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev. She played Borat’s daughter, Tutar, in a performance so cringingly brilliant it got her an Oscar nomination. Despite this early success, Bakalova says her agents warned her not to get her hopes up about the role of Ivana – higher profile US actors were also in the running. “What I think is important is that [Abbasi] gave a chance to an eastern European to compete,” she says. “To have the opportunity, rather than just playing a prostitute or a crazy Russian scientist or a mobster or somebody that is just in the background with a few lines.”

It was six months before she found out that she’d got the role, followed by a tortuous journey to get the film made and released. In a Vanity Fair piece, the film’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed the various obstacles – actors who didn’t want to “humanise” Trump, Hollywood studios and streamers who wouldn’t finance it, Trump’s Muslim travel ban that made it difficult for Abbasi, who is Iranian and based in Denmark, to work in the US (as well as the actors’ strikes and a global pandemic). The Apprentice’s largest investor, a film-making son-in-law of a billionaire and prominent Trump donor, reportedly threatened to sink the film once he’d seen it, because of a scene in which the Trump character appears to rape his wife. Ivana alleged Trump raped her in her divorce deposition, but later retracted. Trump’s lawyers sent the film-makers cease-and-desist letters and the big American distributors wouldn’t touch it. “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers,” wrote Sherman, “but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency.”

“We’ve been facing a bit of difficulty to release it,” says Bakalova, with comic understatement.

In the film, Trump (played by a toupeed Sebastian Stan) is ambitious but slightly awkward and in the shadow of his father, then mentored and moulded by nefarious lawyer Roy Cohn (played, typically magnificently, by Succession’s Jeremy Strong). A cinephile, Bakalova was desperate to work with Abbasi – she was a huge fan of his work, including Holy Spider, the Iranian serial killer film. She wanted, she says, to be involved in his “dive into the underbelly of the American empire”. The more she researched Trump’s first wife – and the mother of three of his children – the more she found herself fascinated by how much Ivana achieved on her own. “She wanted to be Donald’s partner,” she says. Ivana is credited with promoting the couple’s 80s glitz, she was involved in running part of his businesses and managed New York’s Plaza hotel. “I think she was the reason he achieved so much early because she was very smart, very ambitious.”

In the film, the power balance between Ivana and Donald is in her favour at the start of their relationship; Ivana is horrified at the idea of a prenup, and the measly amount it would give her in the event of a separation, and negotiates a better deal. “I saw an interview with her after the divorce, saying she didn’t know anything about prenups, and why do you need to have them? But if you’re going to play this game that way, if that’s going to be the picture of our marriage, OK, I’m going to play the same way.”

How did she feel about the inclusion of the alleged rape in the film? Trump has always denied the allegations, since retracted by Ivana, who died in 2022. Bakalova says she trusted Sherman. “Do I think it’s important to have it out there?” she says. “Do I think it’s a crucial scene for both of the characters? It is, because we see somebody completely dismissing the person who built him in a lot of ways, who gave birth to his children. Not only physically, but verbally as well.”

She says she doesn’t think it matters if the film “humanises” Trump (reviews have said it lacks bite). “When you dive deeper into a human being, there’s always good and bad sides, and there are always decisions that you make based on circumstances, people you surround yourself with, that change your point of view … I think we should step away from the idea of demonising people or creating idols, because people are complex.” That said, she also describes Trump as “one of the most vicious people of our century”.

The Borat sequel was released less than two weeks before the 2020 US election, with the words “now vote” flashed up at the end. The Apprentice is also coming out around election time. Is it intended to have any influence? No, says Bakalova – it’s been too long in the making for any kind of intentional timing. “This is not a political film, this is not a hit piece,” she says. Although there are clear echoes, deafening in parts, of who the Trump character will later become. “Will it change opinions? I don’t know. But I feel like the biggest privilege that we have living in a democracy is to share our voices and to have an opinion, one way or another.”

Bakalova grew up in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea coast. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a chemist; she is an only child. They were considered middle-class, she says, but she remembers as a child that nobody in Bulgaria had much.

“Because of communism and because of inflation, because of a lot of things. I remember back in the 90s, chewing gum going from 100 bucks to 10 bucks to one penny.” They were comfortable, financially, she says, “but it’s not so easy that you can allow yourself to just rest and wait for something to happen. You know that you have to do something if you’re going to succeed.”

Her love of the arts started with music. Her father would play the guitar at home, and she grew up listening to rock music and wanting to emulate those musicians. “Unfortunately, again, growing up in Bulgaria and in a place that still has some kind of patriarchy mindset, playing guitar is a little bit too masculine.” Instead, she became a flautist and was also singing in the choirs that would take her around Europe to various competitions.

When she was 12, she damaged her voice and stopped singing for several months to rest it. “I started reading a lot of books and imagining that I’m in different places, I want to be like these characters. How can you somehow escape real life and imagine that you’re somebody else? That was the starting point of me falling in love with acting.” Later, Bakalova would study at Sofia’s National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts.

She loves theatre and arthouse cinema, but she laughs and says “I’m not going to hide that I was always dreaming about Hollywood and America and cinema.” She remembers drawing the Hollywood sign in an exercise book at school, and writing that she was going to be “a great movie star someday. But of course, my last name finishes with ‘o-v-a’, and I didn’t see that in a lot of credits at the end of films.” One teacher told her that if she wanted to expand beyond Bulgarian film, she should try to get involved in the types of films shown on the European festival circuit.

Bakalova discovered the Danish avant garde Dogme 95 movement and, during her final year of university, used some of her scholarship money to buy flights to Copenhagen for her and her parents. She had an ambitious plan to march into the offices of Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa. “I was, like, ‘I’m going there, and I’m going to say, ‘I am willing to work here for free, to study, to learn how you guys do all of these incredible movies.’” She laughs, remembering her and her mother in the rain, Googling the office address. (They were kind, but sent her away, saying she would have to be fluent in Danish, which she then vowed to study.)

Not long afterwards, Bakalova was shooting a Bulgarian French film, Women Do Cry, in which she played a young woman with HIV, when she heard through a friend about a project, which she would later find out was Borat, which required an eastern European actor. So secretive was the process that she feared she was being conned into human trafficking, but she was also tempted by the chance to audition in the UK – she thought she might get a chance, somehow, to meet the British director Andrea Arnold.

In Borat, her character Tutar dreams of becoming like “Princess Melania” and becomes the “gift” Borat is supposed to deliver to one of Trump’s men, first the vice-president Mike Pence, and then Rudy Giuliani, to strengthen relations between their countries. Bakalova was a revelation in the film, infusing her character with a life-changing feminist trajectory while also having to pull off some excruciating scenes with “real” people, including leading an anti-abortion campaigner at a clinic to believe she was pregnant with her father’s baby and describing, to a group of women at a Republican conference, having just masturbated for the first time in the loos.

“I don’t know how I did it,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I will I ever be able to do it again. It’s so strange, and I think that is why Sacha’s work is so brilliant. He challenges people, he does these movies that are like a social experiment of how far can you go?” It was “definitely difficult” she says. With only one shot, did it feel like a lot of pressure not to mess it up, or come out of character? “Sacha was so gracious, he was holding my hand every step of the way and guiding me, and I trusted him.”

There is a scene with Giuliani, which created a lot of attention. Tutar, by now a reporter for a rightwing news channel, is conducting a fawning interview with the former New York mayor and attorney to Trump in a hotel suite, before suggesting they go to the bedroom. Giuliani is filmed lying back on the bed with his hands down the front of his trousers (later, he claimed he was rearranging his clothes after removing a microphone). Was it the plan to get him in the bedroom? “You can only plan so much, but it’s about real people, real places, real situations. You can have goals that you want to achieve, but it depends on the moment. It was ideal to see how far things can get.” Was she nervous? “It was nerve-racking, because you don’t know how these things are going to turn. We worked with a great team of people. We had a great security team, we had a great stunt team. We had a lot of people that made sure we were all safe.”

It helps, she says, having female producers – Monica Levinson on Borat, and Amy Baer on The Apprentice. “It’s important to have a female perspective behind the scenes, [and] if you’re doing such challenging roles, both as Ivana or Tutar, having a female there looking after you, looking after the story.”

Bakalova has voiced a character in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (Cosmo the Spacedog), was in the dark comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies and has just finished shooting a family drama, Learning to Breathe Underwater – but in Borat and The Apprentice, her two standout films are about Trump. It is strange, she admits, but adds: “I think Borat is not about Trump. I do find a few similarities between the movies because they explore the American empire, and that land that we all have heard is the place you can feel freedom and opportunity. But both movies show there is always a dark side to it.”

The Apprentice is released in cinemas on 18 October.

A five-person team of expert shooters will soon target feral cats in New South Wales national parks as the state steps up efforts to control the pest animals.

The intensive ground operation is being deployed in response to increased cat numbers, according to National Parks and Wildlife Service deputy secretary, Atticus Fleming.

“Intensive, well-targeted ground shooting operations will now be part of an enhanced strategy including trials of cat baits, deployment of innovative cat traps, establishing large feral-cat free areas and exploring genetic controls,” he said in a statement.

Jack Gough, advocacy director at the Invasive Species Council, welcomed the “modest investment” in improved feral cat management. He said he hoped it would involve long-term funding for the positions, and be part of a broader plan for controlling both feral and roaming pet cats.

“Every day, 5 million native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs are killed by feral and roaming pet cats in Australia,” he said.

“Feral cats have sent at least 25 of our native species extinct since they were introduced by Europeans over 200 years ago,” Gough said. “Large numbers of our native species are at direct risk of going extinct because of the impacts of feral cats and because they are such effective hunters and killers.”

Populations of feral cats, deer, pigs and invasive weeds often increased in response to rainfall and seasonal conditions, Gough explained.

Feral cats “breed up very fast”, he said. “We’ve had a couple of really good seasons in terms of rainfall, and that means that the level of feed, the level of prey, has gone up.”

“It’s not unexpected that the numbers [of feral cats] have increased. And when the numbers increase, the pressure on our native species increases as well.”

In September, the federal government announced funding for 55 feral cat control projects, and said it would release an updated national threat abatement plan later this year.

Containing the problem would require significant ongoing effort and funding from both national and state governments, Gough said, as well as the full range of tools, including ground shooting, trapping, baiting and new artificial intelligence tools.

“On top of this, we really need Premier Minns to move on the issue of bringing in clear rules about cat containment,” he said. This would bring NSW into line with the majority of other states, enabling councils to stop “roaming pets killing our neighbourhood wildlife and sending our suburbs silent”.

Some animal rights groups have opposed the use of lethal control methods for non-native species.

The Animal Justice party said while it recognised the environmental impact of non-native species, including cats, it objected to the term “feral” and supported research and policy that focused on non-lethal methods of control.

It advocated “responsible animal guardianship”, which includes keeping companion animals safe in their homes to prevent accidental breeding and abandonment.

In the Australian Capital Territory, all cats born after July 2022 must be contained on a person’s premises, with several suburbs declared cat containment areas for nature conservation reasons – meaning no cat of any age can roam further afield.

They’re Australia’s own underwater punks in leopard print.

Spotted handfish are an endangered species of fish that prefer to “walk” instead of swim, thanks to their unusual pectoral and pelvic fins; have a fluffy dorsal fin on their head that looks almost like a mohawk; and live in the waters off south-east Tasmania.

Now CSIRO scientists have sequenced the first full genome of the critically endangered species, a step that could aid monitoring, captive breeding and conservation efforts.

Dr Tom Walsh, co-lead of CSIRO’s applied genomics initiative, said the genome was like a “blueprint” for the handfish, providing a better understanding of the species.

“What we don’t want is for all our endangered species to only exist as genomes,” he said. “The conservation has to happen on the ground. What the genome can do is provide more information to those people making those decisions.”

Fewer than 2,000 individual spotted handfish remain in the wild. Walsh said the genome could help scientists monitor its presence using sophisticated methods such as eDNA (environmental DNA) – testing water samples for DNA that matches a reference – that support other traditional approaches, such as surveys involving scuba divers.

The CSIRO initiative has produced genomes for a host of rare species, including night parrots, but the chance to produce a handfish blueprint arose opportunistically, Walsh said. When a spotted handfish died in Tasmania, it was preserved, frozen and shipped to CSIRO in Canberra where its raw data – DNA – was extracted.

CSIRO scientists have been watching the species since 1997, observing nine localised populations in the Derwent Estuary.

The principal investigator Carlie Devine, who specialises in spotted handfish conservation, said the genome’s “rich genetic information” would inform long-term management strategy.

A multidisciplinary approach – with genetics alongside ecology – was “essential for effective conservation of threatened species”, Devine said.

Dr Jemina Stuart-Smith, who researches handfish at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and was not involved in the genome sequencing work, said it could inform understanding of genetic diversity, as well as captive breeding and translocation.

“This information can also feed into identification of adaptive traits including disease resistance, and can therefore be extremely beneficial in guiding these breeding programs,” she said.

Stuart-Smith said many species of handfish were endangered due to their small size, low reproductive capacity, limited range and fragmented populations and habitats.

Conservation efforts remained largely focused on two species of handfish, she said: the spotted handfish and the red handfish.

Though these species are the most well-studied, Stuart-Smith said many questions about their breeding, biology and general ecology remained.

Walsh noted it was still early days but the reference genome data was now available to handfish researchers: “It really is the plan, the blueprint of the organism that allows all sorts of different work to be done.”

A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.

The suspect, identified as Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before the rally began, police said Sunday.

“We probably stopped another assassination attempt,” Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said, adding that Miller was plotting to kill Trump.

Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.

He holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.

Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.

“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release.

Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.

The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was appraised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”

Sheriff Bianco told the outlet he had not expected a third attempt on Trump’s life, coming after a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July when Trump was grazed with an assassin’s bullet, and the arrest of man with a rifle hiding in the bushes near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course in September.

“I thought it’s not going to happen in Riverside county,” Bianco said. “We don’t have the same sicko issues and violent protests like they have in Los Angeles. We’re better than that. Go figure.”

Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.

Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.

Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.

It was precisely what Lee Carsley needed. After the mayhem of the Wembley defeat against Greece on Thursday night and all of the fallout, chiefly the uncertainty around his longer‑term role within the England setup, this was a return to the tranquil progress of his first camp in September.

It was a stroll against a limited Finland team, the whipping boys of this Nations League group, England not exactly wowing but doing more than enough to position the Greece defeat a little further back in the rearview mirror. It is now three wins out of four for Carsley, after those against Republic of Ireland in Dublin and Finland at Wembley.

The standout moment came when Trent Alexander-Arnold bent home a sumptuous free-kick from a position to the left of centre, wafting his right foot like a wand to make it 2-0. England had given up chances in the first half and a big one after the break, Finland wasting them, and there was always the sense that Carsley’s team had higher gears to find if needed. They were not.

For Jack Grealish, this was his third start under Carsley and he opened the scoring with a cool finish after a lovely flick from Angel Gomes. Declan Rice got the third from a cross by Ollie Watkins, on as a substitute, and Finland’s late consolation, Arttu Hoskonen running free to head home from a corner, was little more than a minor irritation for England.

The Carsley Question was a major theme – in terms of where he will go at the end of his interim tenure in November. Answer: back to his old job with the under-21s. It is absolutely the most likely outcome. The other big subject had concerned the style of his team. The botched all‑out attack against Greece had given the red tops the dream headline – “KamiCarsley” – and it was always going to be more conventional here, not only because Harry Kane was back from injury to play as the No 9.

England had dominated against Finland at Wembley in Carsley’s second game, creating so many chances, and it was a night when control was the theme. The idea was for more of the same; hence the recall for Gomes alongside Rice in midfield.

It was Gomes who picked the lock for the breakthrough goal, who found a way through Finland’s compact 5-4-1 system. It had all been a little too mannered at the outset, England measured in terms of tempo. They had all of the ball; it was patience over passion.

Grealish injected the urgency, surging off the left to find Alexander-Arnold and dart for the area. What a lovely assist it was from Gomes. He knew where Grealish was and when he accepted the ball from Alexander-Arnold in between the lines, he turned it neatly through for Grealish, who had only Lukas Hradecky to beat.

The Finland goalkeeper had been a titan at Wembley. Grealish simply opened up his body for the sidefoot finish and the sucking-thumb celebration for his recently born baby girl. He looked determined to embrace a more familiar role on the left wing, having previously been played by Carsley in more central areas.

There were imperfections from England in the first half, including when they attempted to build from the back; a few loose passes. Gomes was guilty of one in the early running at 0-0, giving the ball away and watching Finland work it to Benjamin Källman, John Stones jumping into an important block when he shot. On the rebound, Topi Keskinen dragged wide.

Twice before the interval, Stones went stride-for-stride with first Keskinen and then Källman and on both occasions the Finland player was able to unload. Dean Henderson, making his full England debut, saved easily. There was also a worry about Finland getting in on the blindside of Alexander-Arnold, who Carsley played at left-back. When Nikolai Alho did so in the 38th minute, he headed square for Fredrik Jensen, who got a break past Alexander‑Arnold before lashing off-target.

Rice had the sniff of a chance for 2-0 on 34 minutes when he took a decent first touch in the area from a floated Jude Bellingham pass and saw Matti Peltola miss his kick. Just as quickly as the close-range shooting opportunity presented itself, Robert Ivanov got back to shut the door.

Marc Guéhi slid over from left centre-half to make a back three when Alexander-Arnold sortied into midfield. But a word for Guéhi’s defending: commanding. He won a clutch of duels in the first half, and always looked like doing so.

It was a worry when Stones was one-on-one with his man. When Finland moved the ball left for Keskinen in the 57th minute, Stones could not prevent the low cross. It ran all the way through for Jensen, who lifted high from point-blank range. It was an almighty let-off.

It felt like a slog at times for England in creative terms. Bellingham was often frustrated in his attempts to use his twinkle toes to jink through. While Cole Palmer got little, Bellingham is not the type of guy to hide. Bellingham continued to demand the ball, to try his moves and when he hoodwinked the Finland substitute Leo Walta into stretching in for a tackle, he felt the contact and went down for the free‑kick. Grealish told Alexander‑Arnold he would give him £500 if he scored. The goal felt priceless to Carsley.

One person was killed and nine others wounded in a shootout amid a crowd near a university in Tennessee Saturday afternoon, police said.

A crowd that gathered earlier in the day for homecoming events at Tennessee State University was beginning to thin out when the gunfire erupted between two groups around 5pm, said Nashville police spokesperson Don Aaron. He said shell casings indicate that gunfire was exchanged across a street near campus between the groups.

The Nashville police commander Anthony McClain said the gunfire didn’t appear to be directly related to Tennessee State University events that had included a parade and other festivities earlier in the day. The football game was taking place in another part of town when the gunfire happened.

“It’s unfortunate that a few folks ruined it for everybody,” McClain said. “We have to come to a point to stop this violence.”

A police statement on social media said a 24-year-old man died. The victims included two 12-year-olds and a 14-year-old with non-critical injuries, Aaron said.

Police spokesperson Brooke Reese said that at least some of the wounded appear to have been involved in the exchange of gunfire.

Police and firefighters who had been present for the day’s activities were able to quickly respond to the shooting, authorities said. Fire department spokesperson Kendra Loney said some firefighters used belts as tourniquets.

Witness Jashawna Rucker told the television news station WTVF that chaos ensued after people heard the shots, and she saw people crying as they ran for safety.

“I am thankful I didn’t lose my life or get shot,” Rucker said.

Rauf Muhammad told the Tennessean newspaper that he was selling food from a tent along the street when he heard the gunfire and dropped to the ground.

“Everybody having fun, music playing or whatnot. Then all of a sudden, you just hear like you off in a war somewhere,” Muhammad told the newspaper.

Earlier Saturday in Oklahoma City, 13 people were shot – including one fatally – during a party. That case as well as the one in Nashville helped bring the number of mass shootings reported in the US so far this year to more than 415, according to statistics from the Gun Violence Archive.

The non-partisan archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.

Constant mass shootings in the US have prompted many in the country to plead for federal lawmakers to provide more substantial gun control, but Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to heed those calls.

SpaceX launched its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday on its boldest test flight yet, catching the returning booster back at the pad with mechanical arms.

Towering almost 121 metres (400ft), the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico, like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. The last one, in June, was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.

This time, the SpaceX founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, upped the challenge and risk. The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 71-metre booster.

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX’s Dan Huot observed with excitement from near the launch site. “I am shaking right now.”

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice from its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the Gulf of Mexico like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.

Once free of the booster, the retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world, targeting a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The June flight came up short at the end after pieces of it came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.

SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads – not on them.

Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for the Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone. Nasa has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use the Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.

One of the world’s largest music companies has been accused of depriving “potentially hundreds” of artists and bands of their royalties by the 90s nu-metal band Limp Bizkit.

Three decades after it rose to prominence, the band and its founder, Fred Durst, alleges that Universal Music Group (UMG) owes more than $200m after fraudulently concealing royalties from the band.

In a lawsuit filed in California, attorneys representing Durst, Limp Bizkit and Flawless Records accused UMG of using software “deliberately designed to conceal artists’ (including Plaintiffs’) royalties” so it can pocket the profits.

UMG is one of the most powerful forces in the global music industry, with a roster spanning from Taylor Swift and Neil Diamond to Dr Dre and Renee Rapp. The company did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.

Limp Bizkit claims it was not paid “a single cent by UMG in any royalties” until taking legal action, despite a “tremendous” resurgence in popularity in recent years, with its songs played hundreds of millions of times on streaming platforms in 2024 alone.

The lawsuit, filed in California federal court, claims that many more bands and acts might also be getting shortchanged. Attorneys for Durst, Limp Bizkit and Flawless Records go so far as to suggest that a pre-trial discovery process – in which both sides of a case exchange information – will “show that potentially hundreds of other artists have likewise been wrongfully defrauded regarding their royalties, showing that the system was intentionally designed to commit fraud on Plaintiffs and other artists”.

“These accusations are massive,” said Jay Gilbert, a music industry consultant and former executive at UMG and Warner Music Group. He is skeptical.

“My gut tells me that this isn’t a systematic scheme to withhold royalties. It’s more of an accounting issue that’s blown up,” Gilbert said. “It sounded pretty damning and pretty heavy-handed, but in my experience, I think it’s something less dramatic.”

This lawsuit was “the nuclear option”, added Mark Tavern, who previously worked at record companies including UMG and Sony Music. “I think it’s designed to force a settlement, and make it happen quickly.”

“It’s a bit over the top,” said Tavern, who now lectures on the music industry at the University of New Haven. “It can probably be easily explained by bureaucracy, or incompetence,” or the sheer volume of payments processed by a music firm as large as UMG, he said.

Durst claims he was told by UMG that he had not received any royalty statements because his account was still so far from recoupment, with executives at the firm suggesting it had paid Limp Bizkit some $43m in advances over the years, according to the lawsuit.

When representatives of Durst and Limp Bizkit gained access to UMG’s portal for royalty statements in April, however, they claim to have noticed balances that indicated it owed more than $1m.

In August, UMG paid just over $1m to Limp Bizkit and $2.3m to Flawless Records, according to the lawsuit, which says executives blamed the failure to pay sooner on an error with new software.

Questions over royalty payments arise “all the time”, according to Gilbert, but rarely explode into the open. “This sort of dirty laundry is not aired commonly,” he said, with issues typically resolved through audits “behind the scenes”.

The global music industry has been rapidly transformed over recent decades, first by the rise of downloads, and then by streaming. Finding and listening to songs has never been easier, thanks to hundreds of millions of tracks that stack the libraries of platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

Take Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit. It was first released in May 2000, but you might hear it in passing while watching TV, scrolling through social media, or playing a video game. Gone are the days when you would visit a local record store, go through the racks, find the album, and ultimately listen back to the song. It’s just a few taps away.

Even Limp Bizkit’s attorneys acknowledged that the band – which split up in 2006, and reformed in 2009 – had a “relatively quiet period” in the early 2010s. In the lawsuit, however, they claim that interest in the band began to increase “exponentially” around 2017, leading it to sell out arenas and headline festivals.

“There is a big pop-punk revival going on,” observed Tavern. “The current generation [of fans] is looking back 20 or 25 years.”

Such “heritage” acts and artists, as they are referred to by music industry executives, are prized by record labels.

UMG sought Durst’s approval to reissue Limp Bizkit’s 2000 album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water on vinyl last year, according to the lawsuit, and “repeatedly asked” him to get involved with an anniversary rerelease of Significant Other, another of its albums. To Durst, it seemed like a “money grab”.

The complaint alleges that the plaintiffs are still owed much more than they have been paid. Durst, Limp Bizkit and Flawless Records are demanding a jury trial. Their case is already making waves.

​“Everyone is talking about it,” observed Tavern, who noted the complicated nature of calculating music royalties in the streaming era had led to widespread confusion – and, sometimes, suspicion of the industry’s dominant firms. ​

“The way the money gets paid is totally different now, and much more convoluted,” he said. “You can point to 450 million streams, but that is not the same as 450 million records.”

Gilbert said: “I think cooler heads will prevail,” suggesting that attorneys for either side would probably meet privately to examine the facts. “This thing will be resolved,” he said. “I think it’s going to go away.”

‘Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.” So proclaimed France’s pre-eminent liberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy as Israeli tanks drove across the border and its war planes bombed villages in the south and residential districts in Beirut. “There are moments in history,” he exulted, when “ ‘escalation’ becomes a necessity and a virtue.” For Lévy, it is not just Lebanon that Israel is liberating, but much of the Middle East, too.

Lévy is not alone in rejoicing at Israel’s spreading military offensive. For many, Israel is waging war, not merely in “self-defence” but, in the words of president Isaac Herzog, “to save western civilisation, to save the values of western civilisation”, a claim echoed by many of its supporters. And the destruction of Gaza, of its hospitals and universities, and the killing of 40,000 people? And the 2,000 people killed in Lebanon in a fortnight, and the fifth of its population displaced? Collateral damage en route to saving civilisation.

I should not need to say this but, as it has become commonplace to portray anyone criticising Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon as supporting Hamas or Hezbollah or celebrating the slaughter on 7 October last year, let me say that what Hamas did was barbarous, and that, as I wrote at the time, “Hamas represents a betrayal of Palestinian hopes as well as a threat to Jews”. The same can be said of Hezbollah.

And yet, until 7 October 2023, the prime minister of Israel, and much of his government, was far more supportive of Hamas than I was or would ever wish to be. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a Likud meeting in 2019. “To prevent the option of two states,” observed former Israeli general Gershon Hacohen, who for years backed Netanyahu’s policy, “he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly, Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Israel’s support for Hamas goes back decades, an “attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative”, as a senior CIA agent told UPI more than 20 years ago. So successful was this strategy that Hamas swept to power in Gaza in 2006, and the Palestinian Authority was cut in two, with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.

In recent years, the Times of Israel observed, “Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018”, while practically turning “a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza”. On 7 October, it added on the day after the slaughter: “The concept of indirectly strengthening Hamas went up in smoke.”

Hamas was responsible for the butchery of 7 October. But Israel had helped nurture it for the explicit aim of denying Palestinians a state. And now, in the attempt to undo its previous work, it has laid Gaza to waste. Israel has to enforce “another Nakba [catastrophe]”, Hacohen insists. “The Gazans have to be expelled from their homes for good.”

Yet, however cynical it may have been, there was nothing exceptional about Israel’s strategy. For decades, western governments sought to exploit Islam to help pursue their political ends, from the funding of international jihadists to drive out the Red Army in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of 1979 to secular France encouraging the building of prayer rooms in factories, regarding Islam, in the words of Paul Dijoud, immigration minister in Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s government, as a “stabilising factor which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency, or membership of unions or revolutionary parties”. Such policies often created a space in which more radical Islamist movements could flourish. We are still living with the blowback from this strategy.

Netanyahu’s aim in expanding Israel’s wars, and in threatening to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, is not to “liberate” anything or anyone but to maintain control, internally and externally. The lessons of previous invasions of Lebanon – in 1978, 1982 and 2006 – should be clear enough. On the first two occasions, Israel invaded to confront the Palestine Liberation Organisation, on the third to try to eliminate Hezbollah, which had emerged, with Iranian backing, in response to the 1982 invasion and occupation. Each invasion was marked by considerable bloodshed – including, in 1982, the massacre of up to 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shia in two Beirut refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, by Israel’s allies the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia – and nothing that anyone could call “liberation”.

There is a deeper issue here, too. In modernity, the historian Ronald Schechter wrote, “Jews became good to think [with]”, a comment echoed by David Nirenberg who, in his classic history of “Anti-Judaism”, similarly observed that “modernity thinks with Judaism”. What they meant was that the symbolic roles imposed on Jews became a means of addressing wider social issues. “The ‘Jewish Question’ ”, Nirenberg wrote, is not “simply an attitude towards Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging with the world”.

This use of “the Jew” as a means of making sense of the world is most true, of course, of antisemitism. For antisemites, belief in mythical Jewish power explains the evils of the world. It is true also of many strands of philosemitism, a term coined originally by antisemites but which has come to be used more widely to describe the views of those who have particular admiration for the Jewish presence in the world.

And, increasingly, it has become true of perceptions of Israel, which, too, has acquired a symbolic status on both sides of the debate. For many of those hostile to Israel, the state has become totemic of many of the ills of the modern world. For supporters of the Jewish state, it is an especially moral nation, carrying the burden of defending civilisation against barbarism. The one view leads to the celebration of Hamas’s murderous assault on 7 October as “resistance”, the other to viewing the destruction of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon as a necessary defence of western values and of “civilisation”.

If 7 October was an act of “resistance”, and if the destruction of Gaza and the brutalisation of Lebanon can be dismissed as essential steps towards a more civilised world, then I suggest we need to rethink what we mean by “resistance” and “civilisation”.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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